diff --git a/.git-ftp-ignore b/.git-ftp-ignore deleted file mode 100644 index 66632437..00000000 --- a/.git-ftp-ignore +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -.gitignore -*/.gitignore # ignore files in sub directories -*/.gitkeep -.git-ftp-ignore -.git-ftp-include -.git -.github diff --git a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yml b/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yml deleted file mode 100644 index 1f8b5a8a..00000000 --- a/.github/workflows/gh-pages.yml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ -# Deploy to github pages -name: Publish to Github pages - -on: - push: - branches: - - master # Set branch to deploy html to - -jobs: - deploy: - runs-on: ubuntu-24.04 - steps: - - name: Git checkout - uses: actions/checkout@v4 - - - name: Setup Hugo - uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3 - with: - hugo-version: '0.145.0' - extended: true - - - name: Build hugo site (incl. drafts and future) - env: - HUGO_BASE_URL: ${{ secrets.GHPAGES_BASEURL }} - run: hugo -DF ${HUGO_BASE_URL} - - - name: Deploy ./docs to gh-pages branch - uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3 - with: - github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} - publish_dir: ./docs \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/.github/workflows/git-ftp.yml b/.github/workflows/git-ftp.yml deleted file mode 100644 index 6975e95a..00000000 --- a/.github/workflows/git-ftp.yml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ -# Deploy to freehosting FTP account -name: 🚀 Publish to mythaxis.co.uk - -on: - workflow_dispatch: - inputs: - logLevel: - description: 'Whatcha doing?' - required: true - default: 'Deploying mythaxis inni 🎉' - -jobs: - printInputs: - runs-on: ubuntu-24.04 - steps: - - run: | - echo "Log level: ${{ github.event.inputs.logLevel }}" - - FTP-Deploy-Action: - name: 🎉 FTP-Deploy-Action - runs-on: ubuntu-24.04 - steps: - - name: 🚚 Get latest gh-pages content - uses: actions/checkout@v4 - with: - ref: 'gh-pages' - - - name: 📂 Sync files over FTP - uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@v4.3.4 - with: - server: ${{ secrets.FTP_SERVER2 }} - username: ${{ secrets.FTP_USERNAME2 }} 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-## Hugo CMS website diff --git a/static-xway/UNIT.jpg b/UNIT.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/UNIT.jpg rename to UNIT.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/about.htm b/about.htm similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/about.htm rename to about.htm diff --git a/about.html b/about.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..521e903f --- /dev/null +++ b/about.html @@ -0,0 +1,287 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + About Mythaxis — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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About Mythaxis

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Established in 2008 by Gil Williamson, Mythaxis began as a self-coded webzine with an unpredictable release schedule and a close-nit group of regular contributors. Edited by Andrew Leon Hudson since 2020, the magazine is now a clockwork-quarterly publication and welcomes new writers from around the world and shares their work in audio too! But some things never change: Mythaxis has always been focused on the fiction, with as little distraction as possible - no ads, no clutter, just quality stories to transport you somewhere else.

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For a “subscription” to Mythaxis, sign up here to receive each new issue’s Table of Contents in your inbox on release. You can also follow us on Bluesky and Facebook.

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Mythaxis is forever free-to-read, but if you would like to support the magazine you could always buy us a coffee.

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STAFF

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Andrew Leon Hudson - Editor

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Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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Marty Steer - Digital Huperson

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Marty is a human-like person who emerged from a Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study. He likes messing about with humanities data, minimal computing and I also enjoy liminal ideas.

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Micah Hyatt - the Voice of Mythaxis

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Micah is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. His fiction has been published all across the web, and his light-hearted zombie survival novella, Eating the Exhibits, is available through Amazon. He narrates and produces the audio-format of the Mythaxis stories.

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The Story Oracle - Fictional Genius

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Blessed with guru-like serenity, the Story Oracle graciously bestows their wisdom on such editors as who climb to the peak of Slush Mountain and ask, “Is this thing as good as I think it is?” Occasionally, the answer is comprehensible.

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Mythaxis Magazine Archive

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Speculative Fiction Without Distraction

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Mythaxis Magazine has been seeking out quality writing since 2008. We aim to provide a mixture of speculative fiction in classic and contemporary styles, free from the typical web trappings of click-hungry advertising, and forever free to read.

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Here you will find a place for science fiction both hard and soft, fantasy both high and low, horror both harsh and humorous, along with whatever mash-ups or sub-genres our contributors can conceive.

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Our complete story archives are now available to browse in a variety of ways. Click the following to:

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You can also find a listing of our editorials here, though who would want to browse such a thing is unclear.

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Back Issues

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Since 2020, Mythaxis Magazine has shifted to a quarterly release schedule with a shiny new design and opened its doors to contributors from around the world. You can find our recent back issues here:

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The Original Archive

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Finally, here you can find the more than one hundred-and-fifty pieces of fiction assembled by Mythaxis Magazine’s founder, Gil Williamson, as well as our memorial issue to celebrate his memory. We’ve also preserved the hand-coded format of the original zine as a lasting testimony to his varied talents. Enjoy!

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code{background:rgba(255,255,255,.075);border-color:#fff}#header hr{border-bottom-color:#fff}#header .logo{-moz-transition:border-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out,opacity .5s ease,-moz-transform .5s ease,visibility .5s;-webkit-transition:border-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out,opacity .5s ease,-webkit-transform .5s ease,visibility .5s;-ms-transition:border-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out,opacity .5s ease,-ms-transform .5s ease,visibility .5s;transition:border-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out,opacity .5s ease,transform .5s ease,visibility .5s;pointer-events:auto;border-style:solid;border-color:#fff;border-width:5px!important;font-family:source sans pro,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:2.25rem;font-weight:900;letter-spacing:.075em;line-height:1;padding:1rem 1.75rem;text-transform:uppercase;visibility:visible}#header .logo:hover{border-color:#000!important;color:#000!important}@media screen and (max-width:980px){#header{height:14rem;padding-bottom:4rem}}@media screen and (max-width:736px){#header{padding-bottom:3rem}#header .logo{font-size:1.75rem;border-width:3px!important}}#nav{color:#fff;display:-moz-flex;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flex;display:flex;-moz-transition:-moz-transform 1s ease,opacity 1s ease;-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform 1s ease,opacity 1s ease;-ms-transition:-ms-transform 1s ease,opacity 1s ease;transition:transform 1s ease,opacity 1s ease;background:rgba(255,255,255,.175);height:4rem;line-height:4rem;margin:-4rem auto 0;overflow:hidden;padding:0 2rem 0 0;position:relative;width:calc(100% - 4rem);max-width:72rem;z-index:2}#nav ul.divided li{border-top-color:#fff}#nav ul.icons li a.icon:hover:before{color:#000}#nav ul.icons.alt li .icon:before{box-shadow:inset 0 0 0 2px #ffffff}#nav ul.icons.alt li a.icon:hover:before{box-shadow:inset 0 0 0 2px #000000}#nav input,#nav select,#nav textarea{color:#fff}#nav a{color:#fff;border-bottom-color:rgba(255,255,255,.5)}#nav a:hover{border-bottom-color:transparent;color:#000!important}#nav strong,#nav b{color:#fff}#nav h1,#nav h2,#nav h3,#nav h4,#nav h5,#nav h6{color:#fff}#nav blockquote{border-left-color:#fff}#nav code{background:rgba(255,255,255,.075);border-color:#fff}#nav hr{border-bottom-color:#fff}#nav ul.links{display:-moz-flex;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flex;display:flex;-moz-flex-grow:1;-webkit-flex-grow:1;-ms-flex-grow:1;flex-grow:1;-moz-flex-shrink:1;-webkit-flex-shrink:1;-ms-flex-shrink:1;flex-shrink:1;font-family:source sans pro,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-weight:900;letter-spacing:.075em;list-style:none;margin-bottom:0;padding-left:0;text-transform:uppercase}#nav ul.links li{display:block;padding-left:0}#nav ul.links li a{-moz-transition:background-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:background-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out;-ms-transition:background-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out;transition:background-color .2s ease-in-out,color .2s ease-in-out;display:block;font-size:.8rem;outline:none;padding:0 2rem}#nav ul.links li a:hover{color:inherit!important;background-color:rgba(255,255,255,.1)}#nav ul.links li.active{background-color:#fff}#nav ul.links li.active a{color:#1e252d}#nav ul.links li.active a:hover{color:#000!important}#nav ul.icons{-moz-flex-grow:0;-webkit-flex-grow:0;-ms-flex-grow:0;flex-grow:0;-moz-flex-shrink:0;-webkit-flex-shrink:0;-ms-flex-shrink:0;flex-shrink:0;margin-bottom:0}@media screen and (max-width:980px){#nav{display:none}}#main{background-color:#fff;position:relative;margin:0 auto;width:calc(100% - 4rem);max-width:72rem;z-index:2}#main>*{padding:4rem 4rem 2rem;border-top:solid 2px #eee;margin:0}#main>*:first-child{border-top:0}#main>footer{text-align:center}#main>.post{padding:8rem 8rem 6rem}#main>.post header.major>.date{margin-top:-2rem}#main>.post header.major>h1,#main>.post header.major h2{font-size:4rem;line-height:1.1;margin:0 0 2rem}#main>.post.featured{text-align:center}@media screen and (max-width:1280px){#main>.post{padding:6rem 4rem 4rem}}@media screen and (max-width:736px){#main>.post{padding:4rem 2rem 2rem}#main>.post header.major>.date{margin-top:-1rem;margin-bottom:2rem}#main>.post header.major>h1,#main>.post header.major h2{font-size:2.5rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0 0 1.5rem}}#main>.posts{display:-moz-flex;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flex;display:flex;-moz-flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;-moz-align-items:-moz-stretch;-webkit-align-items:-webkit-stretch;-ms-align-items:-ms-stretch;align-items:stretch;text-align:center;width:100%;padding:0}#main>.posts>*{-moz-flex-shrink:1;-webkit-flex-shrink:1;-ms-flex-shrink:1;flex-shrink:1;-moz-flex-grow:0;-webkit-flex-grow:0;-ms-flex-grow:0;flex-grow:0}#main>.posts>*{width:50%}#main>.posts>*{padding:4rem;width:50%}#main>.posts>article{border-color:#eee;border-left-width:2px;border-style:solid;border-top-width:2px;text-align:center}#main>.posts>article>:last-child{margin-bottom:0}#main>.posts>article:nth-child(2n - 1){border-left-width:0}#main>.posts>article:nth-child(-n+2){border-top-width:0}@media screen and (max-width:980px){#main>.posts>*{width:50%}#main>.posts>*{padding:2.5rem;width:50%}}@media screen and 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h2,#footer h3,#footer h4,#footer h5,#footer h6{color:#717981}#footer blockquote{border-left-color:#e2e2e2}#footer code{background:rgba(220,220,220,.5);border-color:#e2e2e2}#footer hr{border-bottom-color:#e2e2e2}#footer .box{border-color:#e2e2e2}#footer input[type=submit],#footer input[type=reset],#footer input[type=button],#footer button,#footer .button{background-color:transparent;box-shadow:inset 0 0 0 2px #717981;color:#717981!important}#footer input[type=submit]:hover,#footer input[type=reset]:hover,#footer input[type=button]:hover,#footer button:hover,#footer .button:hover{box-shadow:inset 0 0 0 2px #000000;color:#000!important}#footer input[type=submit].primary,#footer input[type=reset].primary,#footer input[type=button].primary,#footer button.primary,#footer .button.primary{background-color:#717981;box-shadow:none;color:#f5f5f5!important}#footer input[type=submit].primary:hover,#footer input[type=reset].primary:hover,#footer input[type=button].primary:hover,#footer button.primary:hover,#footer .button.primary:hover{background-color:#000}#footer label{color:#717981}#footer input[type=text],#footer input[type=password],#footer input[type=email],#footer select,#footer textarea{border-color:#e2e2e2}#footer input[type=text]:focus,#footer input[type=password]:focus,#footer input[type=email]:focus,#footer select:focus,#footer textarea:focus{border-color:#000}#footer select{background-image:url(data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf8,%3Csvg%20xmlns=%22http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20width=%2240%22%20height=%2240%22%20preserveAspectRatio=%22none%22%20viewBox=%220%200%2040%2040%22%3E%3Cpath%20d=%22M9.4%2012.3l10.4%2010.4%2010.4-10.4c.2-.2.5-.4.9-.4.3.0.6.1.9.4l3.3%203.3c.2.2.4.5.4.9s-.1.6-.4.9L20.7%2031.9c-.2.2-.5.4-.9.4-.3.0-.6-.1-.9-.4L4.3%2017.3c-.2-.2-.4-.5-.4-.9s.1-.6.4-.9l3.3-3.3c.2-.2.5-.4.9-.4S9.1%2012.1%209.4%2012.3z%22%20fill=%22%23e2e2e2%22/%3E%3C/svg%3E)}#footer select option{background-color:#f5f5f5;color:#717981}#footer 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#000000}#footer header.major .date:before,#footer header.major .date:after{border-top-color:#e2e2e2}#footer table tbody tr{border-color:#e2e2e2}#footer table tbody tr:nth-child(2n+1){background-color:rgba(220,220,220,.5)}#footer table th{color:#717981}#footer table thead{border-bottom-color:#e2e2e2}#footer table tfoot{border-top-color:#e2e2e2}#footer table.alt tbody tr td{border-color:#e2e2e2}#footer .pagination a,#footer .pagination span{border-color:#e2e2e2}#footer .pagination a{color:#717981!important}#footer .pagination a:hover{color:#000!important;border-color:#000;z-index:1}#footer .pagination a:hover+a,#footer .pagination a:hover+span{border-left-color:#000}#footer .pagination a.active{background-color:#e2e2e2}#footer .pagination span{color:#e2e2e2}#footer>section{-moz-flex-basis:50%;-webkit-flex-basis:50%;-ms-flex-basis:50%;flex-basis:50%;-moz-flex-grow:1;-webkit-flex-grow:1;-ms-flex-grow:1;flex-grow:1;-moz-flex-shrink:1;-webkit-flex-shrink:1;-ms-flex-shrink:1;flex-shrink:1;padding:4rem 4rem 2rem;border-left:solid 2px #e2e2e2}#footer>section:first-child{border-left:0}#footer>section.split{display:-moz-flex;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flex;display:flex;-moz-flex-direction:column;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;padding:0}#footer>section.split>section{padding:3rem 4rem 1rem;border-top:solid 2px #e2e2e2}#footer>section.split>section:first-child{padding:5rem 4rem 1rem;border-top:0}#footer>section.split>section:last-child{padding:3rem 4rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section{display:-moz-flex;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flex;display:flex;-moz-align-items:center;-webkit-align-items:center;-ms-align-items:center;align-items:center;padding:3.15rem 4rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section>*{margin-bottom:0}#footer>section.split.contact>section>:first-child{-moz-flex-shrink:0;-webkit-flex-shrink:0;-ms-flex-shrink:0;flex-shrink:0;-moz-flex-grow:0;-webkit-flex-grow:0;-ms-flex-grow:0;flex-grow:0;width:6rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section>:last-child{-moz-flex-shrink:1;-webkit-flex-shrink:1;-ms-flex-shrink:1;flex-shrink:1;-moz-flex-grow:1;-webkit-flex-grow:1;-ms-flex-grow:1;flex-grow:1}#footer>section.split.contact>section:first-child{padding:4rem 4rem 3rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section:last-child{padding:3rem 4rem 4rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section.alt{-moz-align-items:-moz-flex-start;-webkit-align-items:-webkit-flex-start;-ms-align-items:-ms-flex-start;align-items:flex-start}#footer>section.split.contact>section.alt>:last-child{margin-top:-.325rem}#footer form label,#footer h3,#footer p{font-size:.8rem}@media screen and (max-width:980px){#footer{display:block}#footer>section{border-top:solid 2px #e2e2e2}#footer>section:first-child{border-top:0}#footer>section.split>section{padding:4rem 4rem 2rem}#footer>section.split>section:first-child{padding:4rem 4rem 2rem}#footer>section.split>section:last-child{padding:4rem 4rem 2rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section{padding:4rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section:first-child{padding:4rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section:last-child{padding:4rem}#footer form label,#footer h3,#footer p{font-size:.9rem}}@media screen and (max-width:736px){#footer>section{padding:2rem 2rem .1rem}#footer>section.split>section{padding:2rem 2rem .1rem}#footer>section.split>section:first-child{padding:2rem 2rem .1rem}#footer>section.split>section:last-child{padding:2rem 2rem .1rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section{padding:2rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section:first-child{padding:2rem}#footer>section.split.contact>section:last-child{padding:2rem}}@media screen and (max-width:480px){#footer{width:100%}}#copyright{color:#fff;position:relative;color:rgba(255,255,255,.25);cursor:default;font-family:source sans pro,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:.8rem;font-weight:900;letter-spacing:.075em;line-height:1.5;text-align:center;text-transform:uppercase;margin:4rem auto 8rem;width:calc(100% - 4rem);max-width:72rem;z-index:2}#copyright input,#copyright select,#copyright textarea{color:#fff}#copyright a{color:#fff;border-bottom-color:rgba(255,255,255,.5)}#copyright a:hover{border-bottom-color:transparent;color:#000!important}#copyright strong,#copyright b{color:#fff}#copyright h1,#copyright h2,#copyright h3,#copyright h4,#copyright h5,#copyright h6{color:#fff}#copyright blockquote{border-left-color:#fff}#copyright code{background:rgba(255,255,255,.075);border-color:#fff}#copyright hr{border-bottom-color:#fff}#copyright a{color:inherit;border-bottom-color:inherit}#copyright ul{list-style:none;margin:0;padding-left:0}#copyright ul li{border-left:solid 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.5s ease,box-shadow .5s ease,visibility .5s;display:none;-webkit-overflow-scrolling:touch;background:#fff;box-shadow:none;color:#212931;height:100%;max-width:80%;overflow-y:auto;padding:3rem 2rem;position:fixed;right:0;top:0;visibility:hidden;width:20rem;z-index:10002}#navPanel .links{list-style:none;padding-left:0}#navPanel .links li{border-top:solid 2px #eee}#navPanel .links li a{border-bottom:0;display:block;font-family:source sans pro,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:.9rem;font-size:.9rem;font-weight:900;letter-spacing:.075em;padding:.75rem 0;text-transform:uppercase}#navPanel .links li:first-child{border-top:0}#navPanel .close{text-decoration:none;-moz-transition:color .2s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color .2s ease-in-out;-ms-transition:color .2s ease-in-out;transition:color .2s ease-in-out;-webkit-tap-highlight-color:transparent;border:0;color:#909498;cursor:pointer;display:block;height:3.25rem;line-height:3.25rem;padding-right:1.25rem;position:absolute;right:0;text-align:right;top:0;vertical-align:middle;width:7rem}#navPanel .close:before{-moz-osx-font-smoothing:grayscale;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;font-family:FontAwesome;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;text-transform:none!important}#navPanel .close:before{content:'\f00d';font-size:1.25rem}#navPanel .close:hover{color:#212931}@media screen and (max-width:736px){#navPanel .close{height:4rem;line-height:4rem}}@media screen and (max-width:980px){#navPanel{display:block}}@media screen and (max-width:736px){#navPanel{padding:2.5rem 1.75rem}}@media screen and (max-width:980px){body.is-navPanel-visible #wrapper{opacity:.5}body.is-navPanel-visible #navPanel{-moz-transform:translateX(0);-webkit-transform:translateX(0);-ms-transform:translateX(0);transform:translateX(0);box-shadow:0 0 1.5rem rgba(0,0,0,.2);visibility:visible}} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/assets/css/noscript.css b/assets/css/noscript.css new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c3f99f53 --- /dev/null +++ b/assets/css/noscript.css @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +@import url(https://github.com/font-awesome.min.css); +/* + Massively by HTML5 UP + html5up.net | @ajlkn + Free for personal and commercial use under the CCA 3.0 license (html5up.net/license) +*/ +/* Wrapper */ +#wrapper { + background-color: #212931; + background-image: url("https://github.com/images/overlay.png"), linear-gradient(0deg, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1)), url("https://github.com/images/bg.jpg"); + background-size: auto, auto, 100% auto; + background-position: center, center, top center; + background-repeat: repeat, no-repeat, no-repeat; + background-attachment: fixed, fixed, fixed; } + #wrapper.fade-in:before { + display: none; } + +/* Intro */ +body.is-preload #intro { + opacity: 1; } + body.is-preload #intro:not(.hidden) + #header + #nav { + -moz-transform: none; + -webkit-transform: none; + -ms-transform: none; + transform: none; + opacity: 1; } diff --git a/static/assets/css/overrides.css b/assets/css/overrides.css similarity index 100% rename from static/assets/css/overrides.css rename to assets/css/overrides.css diff --git a/static/assets/fonts/Font License.txt b/assets/fonts/Font License.txt similarity index 100% rename from static/assets/fonts/Font License.txt rename to assets/fonts/Font License.txt diff --git a/themes/massively/static/assets/fonts/FontAwesome.otf b/assets/fonts/FontAwesome.otf similarity index 100% rename from themes/massively/static/assets/fonts/FontAwesome.otf rename to assets/fonts/FontAwesome.otf diff --git a/themes/massively/static/assets/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot b/assets/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot similarity index 100% rename from themes/massively/static/assets/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot rename to assets/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.eot diff 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w.globalEval(e),e}}}),w.ajaxPrefilter("script",function(e){void 0===e.cache&&(e.cache=!1),e.crossDomain&&(e.type="GET")}),w.ajaxTransport("script",function(e){if(e.crossDomain){var t,n;return{send:function(i,o){t=w(" + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/a-m-sutter.html b/authors/a-m-sutter.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c6f50527 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/a-m-sutter.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***A.M. Sutter*** grew up in the beautiful mountains of Central Pennsylvania and has been fascinated with storytelling ever since she snuck downstairs as a child to watch* The Twilight Zone *with her father. She currently works as a zoo and exotic animal veterinarian, and the unique experiences in this field serve as inspiration for her writing. Her works appear in multiple anthologies and fiction magazines, and she is a member of the* Horror Writers Association. *Whenever she’s not arm-deep in tiger guts or elephant poop, she enjoys hiking with her Shih Tzu, who fully believes he is a wolf. Find her at [www.amsutter.com](http://amsutter.com/).*

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Sutter — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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A.M. Sutter

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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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+ Day Trip (March 2013)
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+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/aaron-emmel.html b/authors/aaron-emmel.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..66e58005 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/aaron-emmel.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Aaron Emmel***’*s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Thanks to the patience of his wonderful wife, and despite the impatience of his wonderful children, Aaron also writes essays, graphic novels and interactive fiction. He grew up in the mountains of New Mexico and on Central America’s Caribbean coast. Find him online at [www.aaronemmel.com](https://aaronemmel.com/) and on Twitter at [@justicioaje](https://twitter.com/justicioaje).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/addison-smith.html b/authors/addison-smith.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..638741b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/addison-smith.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Addison Smith*** (he/him) *is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis fungus. He's doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including* Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, *and* Daily Science Fiction. *Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/addi.social).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/alexander-zalben.html b/authors/alexander-zalben.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6cb88b96 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/alexander-zalben.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Alex Zalben*** *is the author of an all-ages comic book series for Marvel,* Thor and the Warriors Four. *His short fiction has been featured in* Splickety Magazine, *the* Thuggish Itch *and* Galileo's Theme Park *anthologies, and an issue of* Enchanted Conversation Magazine. *For the past decade he's hosted the live show and podcast* Comic Book Club, *which has been profiled in the New York Times. He currently works as Managing Editor at* Decider.com, *with previous bylines on* TV Guide, MTV News *and more. You can check him out too often on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/azalben).

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
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+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
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+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
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+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
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+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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***Amanda C. Crowley*** *is a teacher-librarian, writer, and great enthusiast for the desert, though she’s spent almost all of her life on and around Lake Michigan. Her short fiction has previously appeared in *Fusion Fragment*. You can follow her on Twitter as [@amandaccrowley](https://twitter.com/amandaccrowley) and at her website, [amandacrowley.com](https://amandacrowley.com/).*

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***Andrea Kriz*** *writes from Cambridge, MA. Find her other stories in* Cossmass Infinities, Nature, Tales to Terrify, AURELIA LEO, *and* Hybrid Fiction, *among others. You can follow her on twitter as [@theworldshesaw](https://twitter.com/theworldshesaw).*

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***Andrew Jensen*** *lives in rural Ontario. He is the minister at Knox United Church, Nepean. His stories have appeared in Canada, the USA, and New Zealand, most recently in* Stupefying Stories Saturday Showcase, Tree & Stone Magazine, *and* Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores. *Andrew plays trumpet and impersonates Kermit the Frog. He no longer makes wine at home but had fun while it lasted.*

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*Born in rural western Kansas, **Andrew Johnston** discovered his Sinophilia while attending the University of Kansas. Subsequently, he has spent most of his adult life shuttling back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. He is currently based out of Hefei, Anhui province. He has published short fiction in* Nature: Futures, Electric Spec, Mythic *and the* Laughing at Shadows Anthology. *You can learn more about his projects at [findthefabulist.com](http://findthefabulist.com/).*

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***Andrew** is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing* Mythaxis *he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t [do things online](https://linktr.ee/andrewleonhudson) often enough to count.*

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***Anna Koltes***’ *stories are published in magazines like* Defenestration, Black Petals, The Colored Lens, Wyldblood Press, Arena, Dark Onus, The Caterpillar, X-RAY, *and* Daikaijuzine. *Hailing from a traveling busking family, out of her seven siblings she considers herself the least annoying. She currently lives in Barcelona, Spain, where she is working on a collection of speculative short stories.*

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***Anna Ziegelhof*** *is a science fiction and horror writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is particularly drawn to stories about darker aspects of the human (or alien) experience. A professional background as a computational linguist led to her teaching classes on creating languages for science-fiction/fantasy worlds at Clarion West. Her short fiction can be found in a variety of zines and anthologies, among others in* The Horror Library, Luna Station, The Future Fire, The Flash Fiction Podcast, Flametree Press, *and* Short Edition's *short story dispensers. Online she can be found at [www.annaziegelhof.com](http://www.annaziegelhof.com/) and [annaziegelhof.substack.com](http://annaziegelhof.substack.com/).*

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***Anna Zumbro*** *is a short fiction writer with stories in* The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, *and other publications. When not writing, she teaches high school English and journalism. She's on Twitter occasionally at [@annazumbro](https://twitter.com/@annazumbro) and her website can be found at [annazumbro.com](https://www.annazumbro.com).*

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***AnniePercik*** *lives in London with her husband, Dave, where she writes novels and short stories, whilst working as a University Complaints Officer. She writes a blog about writing and posts short fiction [on her website](https://alobear.co.uk), which is where all her current publications are listed, including her debut fantasy novel, *[The Defiant Spark](http://getbook.at/DefiantSpark)*. She also makes a [media review podcast](https://stillloveit.libsyn.com/) with her husband and publishes a photo-story blog [recording the adventures of her teddy bear](https://aloysius-bear.dreamwidth.org/). He is much more popular online than she is. She tweets as [@APercik](https://twitter.com/APercik)*

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**Anya Josephs** was raised in North Carolina and now lives and works in New York City, where she teaches foster youth pursuing college degrees. When not working or writing, she can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping her cat, Sycorax. Her writing can be found in *Andromeda Spaceways Magazine*, *The Green Briar Review*, *the Necronomicon Anthology*, *SPARK*, *UnLaced*, *Proud2BeMe*, *The Huffington Post*, *Anti-Heroin Chic*, and *Poets Reading the News*. Her debut novel, *Queen of All*, a fantasy for young adults, is forthcoming from Zenith Press. You can find her at her website [anyajosephs.com](http://anyajosephs.com/)), and she tweets as [@anya_writes](https://twitter.com/anya_writes).

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*As well as writing fiction,* ***Arlen Feldman*** *is a software engineer, maker, costumer, con-runner ([cosinecon.org](http://cosinecon.org/)), and computer book author. His short fiction can be found in a number of anthologies and magazines, and he just won the 2024 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award for his story* The Wish Doctor. *He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and can be found on [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@cowthulu), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/cowthulu.bsky.social), and his website [cowthulu.com](http://cowthulu.com/).*

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***Aubrey Taylor*** *is a short story writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She uses books and coffee to cope with her engineering degree. This is her first publication.*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/barry-charman.html b/authors/barry-charman.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d747c2d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/barry-charman.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Barry Charman*** *is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, including* Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling *and* Popshot Quarterly. *He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in* The Literary Hatchet *and* The Linnet’s Wings. *He has a blog at [barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk](http://barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk/).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/bill-ryan.html b/authors/bill-ryan.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..057f224f --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/bill-ryan.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Bill Ryan*** *is the proprietor of the substack* [A Rip in the Picture](https://billryan64.substack.com/). *His online writing can most often be found at* [The Bulwark](https://www.thebulwark.com/author/bill-ryan/), *as well as at* [Decider.com](https://decider.com/author/bill-ryan/) *and* [RogerEbert.com](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/breaking-bread-on-the-25th-anniversary-of-big-night). *He can be yelled at on Twitter [@faceyouhate](https://twitter.com/faceyouhate) and [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/faceyouhate.bsky.social).*

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***C. Owen Loftus*** *is a writer and conservation educator, which means he's lucky enough to have sharks for coworkers. He's married to a strange and lovely ocean spirit, and believes in aliens but not Bigfoot (he's optimistic about ghosts). Owen has been published by* Utter Speculation Publication *and* Jayhenge Press. *Find those stories and more upcoming projects at [www.coloftus.com](https://coloftus.com/).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
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+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
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+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
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P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
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Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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***Carl Walmsley**'s* *love of tall tales is the result of a childhood spent listening to his mother - one of life's natural story-tellers. He thinks she might like this yarn, because it challenges a few stereotypes and includes a witch.*

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***Cathy Bryant*** *is a writer and performer with over 250 poems, stories, and articles published in anthologies and magazines. She has three poetry collections*, Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature, Look at All the Women, *and* Erratics, *as well as the non-fiction book* How to Win Writing Competitions. *She also runs the writer resource site [compsandcalls.com](https://compsandcalls.com/wp/).*

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***Celine***'*s fiction is either published or forthcoming in* Translunar Travellers’ Lounge, Wyldblood, *and* The Dread Machine, *among other literary or genre magazines. Her latest short story won first prize for Fantasy in* The Dark Sire 2022 Creative Awards, *and her poetry has also appeared in various journals such as* Beyond Words *and* Sky Island Journal. *She is an editor for the S/F magazines* Factor Four *and* On Spec, *and holds an MA in English Literature. Currently nomadic, Celine divides her time between reading, writing, and ruminating with the street cows of India.*

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***Chaitanya Murali*** *is a game designer and writer who lives in Bangalore, India. He tends to write stories inspired by South India. They also usually feature giant animals. When he's not writing, you can find him complaining about sports on Twitter as [@chaitanyamurali](https://twitter.com/chaitanyamurali).*

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*Based in Australia,* ***Charlie Winter*** *is an academic by day and, by night, still an academic but more distractible about it. When not performing the inexplicable rituals of academia, he writes fantasy fiction celebrating everyday magic, eco-optimism, and queer identities. His publications include the* I Want That Twink Obliterated! *anthology and* Tales & Feathers *(upcoming). He can be found at [www.awinterplace.com](https://www.awinterplace.com/).*

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***Charlotte Ashley*** *is a writer living in Halifax, Canada. Her short fiction appears in a number of anthologies and magazines, including* F&SF, Podcastle, *and* The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, *and she has been nominated for both the* Aurora *and* Sunburst Awards. *She occasionally writes game content for* Hit Point Press. *You can find more about her at [Once-and-Future.com](http://www.once-and-future.com) or on Twitter [@CharlotteAshley](https://twitter.com/CharlotteAshley).*

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***Charlotte H. Lee*** *spends her days pondering how best to smash all the boxes people want to keep the world in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s through telling stories to challenge others how we see life, or pushing herself to stretch her own brain in new ways. Her stories have appeared in* Little Blue Marble, Metaphorosis, The Overcast, *and others. You can find links to her published work at [www.charlottehlee.com](https://charlottehlee.com).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
+
Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
+
Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
+
E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
+
Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
+
Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
+
Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
+
Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
+
LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
+
Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
+
Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
+
Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
+
Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
+
Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
+
Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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+ + +

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/cheryl-s-ntumy.html b/authors/cheryl-s-ntumy.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e0a42cbe --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/cheryl-s-ntumy.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Cheryl S. Ntumy*** *is a Ghanaian writer of speculative fiction, young adult fiction, and romance. She is part of the [Sauútiverse](https://syllble.com/sauuti/) Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of [Petlo Literary Arts](https://petloliteraryarts.wordpress.com/home/), an organisation that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana. Her Sauútiverse novella* Songs for the Shadows *was released in 2024 by Atthis Arts and her short story collection* Black Friday and Other Stories from Ghana *was published in March 2025 by Flame Tree Publishing.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
+
Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
+
Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
+
E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
+
Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
+
Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
+
Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
+
Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
+
Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
+
Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
+
LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
+
Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
+
Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
+
Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
+
Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
+
Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***Chinaza Eziaghighala*** *is a medical doctor who tells stories. An interdisciplinary writer at the intersection of health, film/TV, comics and literature, she is a University of Iowa International Writing Program Alum. Her works appear or are forthcoming in The British Science Fiction Association's* Fission #2 Vol 1 Anthology, Metastellar, *Hellboundbooks'* Kids are Hell Anthology, Brittle Paper, Afritondo, *and the British Science Fiction Association's* Focus. CHIMERA, *her debut novella, is forthcoming in 2024 from Nosetouch Press. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers Association of America and the African Speculative Fiction Society, a First Reader for* Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, *and a Guest Nonfiction Editor for* Please See Me. *Connect with her [here](http://chinazaeziaghighala.disha.page/) or on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/chinazaezims).*

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***Chisom*** *(he/him) is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. He holds a degree in English and literature. When he's not watching movies or writing about fantastical things, he's tweeting about movies and fantastical things [@izom_chisom](https://twitter.com/izom_chisom). His short stories have been featured on* Second Skin Mag, Omenana, Apex, *and* Isele.

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***Christopher Cook*** *writes fiction to make the reader question their reality and perhaps rethink poking their foot out from underneath the covers. You can find his work in Critical Blast Publishing's anthology,* The Devil You Know, *and the October 2020 issue of* The J.J. Outre Review.

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***Christina Ladd*** (she/her) *is a writer and editor living in Minneapolis. She will eventually die crushed under a pile of books, but until then she survives on a concerning amount of tea and carbs. Find more of her writing at [christinaladd.com](https://christinaladd.com/).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
+
Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
+
Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
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+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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***Claire Scherzinger*** *is a visual artist and writer currently residing in Washington State. Her fiction and poetry have been previously published in* Carousel *and in the* Writer's Digest 81st Competition Anthology 2011. *Her non-fiction writing has appeared in print in the Canadian photography magazine* BlackFlash *and online on platforms such as* Painters on Paintings, ArToronto.ca, *and* critters.org. *You can find more of her work at* [www.clairescherzinger.com](https://www.clairescherzinger.com/).

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***Dane Erbach*** *is a writer from Chicago’s northwest suburbs who teaches English and journalism at a public high school. During the summer, he teaches writing at Northwestern University to gifted and talented middle schoolers. His fiction has appeared in* Sobotka Literary Magazine *and* The Vignette Review, *and his music journalism can be found in various print and online publications. When he's not writing or reading, you can find him catching Pokémon with his family, raiding his community library, and tending to the pumpkin patch in his backyard. You can follow him on Instagram and Threads at* @browntrowsers.

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***Daniel Ausema*** *lives with his family in Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His work has appeared in many publications, including* Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, *and* Diabolical Plots. *He is the creator of the steampunk-fantasy* Spire City *series as well as the* Arcist Chronicles, *which is published by Guardbridge Books. You can find him [at his website](https://danielausema.com/) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ausema).*

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***Daniel A. Rabuzzi*** *has had two novels, four short stories and ten poems published since 2006, all in speculative genres. He studied folklore, anthropology and history—and lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France—which has influenced his writing. He lives in NYC with his artistic partner and spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills. For more, please see his website, [www.danielarabuzzi.com/](http://www.danielarabuzzi.com/)*

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***David Farrow*** *is best known for his* Neverglades *stories, which began on Reddit's horror site* NoSleep *and became a #1 bestselling book series on Amazon. He holds a BA in English from Trinity College and will receive his MFA in Fiction from Lesley University in the summer of 2022. He is also a member of the GrubStreet writing community in Boston, MA. You can find him at* [www.davidfarrowwrites.com](https://davidfarrowwrites.com/) *and on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidfarrow5734).

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***David Sheskin*** *is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in numerous publications including* The Dalhousie Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, The Satirist *and* DIAGRAM. *His most recent books are* David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities *and* Outrageous Wedding Announcements.

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***David Stephen Powell*** *was born in London and worked as a professional musician. He now lives and works in Italy. His stories have appeared in* Parabnormal Magazine, Black Hare Press, ‘The Other Stories’ podcast, Cloaked Press, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Mythaxis Magazine, *and* Tales to Terrify. *You can find him on his Substack, [@davidstephenpowell](https://substack.com/@davidstephenpowell).*

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***David Whitmarsh*** *is a rehabilitated software engineer who now spends his days playing acoustic blues badly and writing.* Winter, *his first published work, is the backstory of a character in his hopefully forthcoming novel, provisionally titled* The Long Fall. *David lives in West Sussex with his wife, two cats and a randomly varying subset of his four adult children. You can find him on Twitter as [@whitmarshdj](https://twitter.com/whitmarshdj).*

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***Dennis Mombauer*** *currently lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he works as a consultant on climate change and as a writer of speculative fiction, textual experiments, and poetry. He is co-publisher of a German magazine for experimental fiction,* [Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism](http://novelle.wtf/), *and has published fiction and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. His first English novel,* The Fertile Clay, *will be published by Nightscape Press in 2020. You can find him [at his website](https://dennismombauer.com/), and he tweets [@DMombauer](https://twitter.com/DMombauer).*

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Don Mark Baldridge

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
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Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
+
Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
+
Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
+
LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
+
Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
+
Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
+
Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
+
Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
+
Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
+
Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
+
+ + +

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/donald_mccarthy.html b/authors/donald_mccarthy.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7d95f382 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/donald_mccarthy.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Donald McCarthy*** *is an author from Long Island, New York. He's published short fiction with* The Baltimore Review, Pseudopod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Grey Rooms, *and more. His non-fiction has appeared at* Salon, Undark Magazine, The Huffington Post, Nightmare Magazine, *and more. A full list of his publications can be found at [www.donaldmccarthy.com](http://www.donaldmccarthy.com/).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/donmark_baldridge.html b/authors/donmark_baldridge.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fded7b8f --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/donmark_baldridge.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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*'So what does writing science fiction have to do with video game development?'* ***Don Mark Baldridge*** *grew up in the American Southwest, where the core of* Border Patrol *unfolds. He's developing a video game based on this story. Xeet him, while it lasts,* [@DonMarkMaker](https://twitter.com/DonMarkMaker).

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/e-saxey.html b/authors/e-saxey.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2f617ad2 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/e-saxey.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***E. Saxey*** *is a queer Londoner and recidivist goth who works in universities and libraries. Their work has appeared in* Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Escape Pod, *and anthologies including* Transcendent *(Lethe Press) and* Best of British Fantasy 2019 *(Newcon Press). They're on twitter at [@ESaxey](https://twitter.com/ESaxey).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
+
Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
+
Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
+
E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
+
Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
+
Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
+
Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
+
Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
+
Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
+
Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
+
LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
+
Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
+
Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
+
Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
+
Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
+
Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
+
Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***Elana Gomel*** *is an academic and an award-winning writer. Born in Ukraine, she has lived and taught in many countries, including the US, Israel, Italy, and Hong Kong. She is the author of six non-fiction books and numerous articles on subjects such as narrative theory, posthumanism, science fiction, and serial killers. As a fiction writer, she has published more than a hundred fantasy and science fiction stories, several novellas, and four novels. She is a member of HWA and can be found at* [www.citiesoflightanddarkness.com](https://www.citiesoflightanddarkness.com/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ElanaGomel), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/elana.gomel ), *and* [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/elanagomel/).

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***Elena Sichrovsky*** *is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. Her fiction has been published in* Mud Season Review, Nightmare Magazine, Tough, *and* Sublunary Review, *among others. She's passionate about using the lens of horror to explore themes like body transformation, grief, and marginalized identities. You can follow her on Twitter [@ESichr](https://twitter.com/ESichr) or read more of her work on her website [www.elenasichrovsky.com/](https://www.elenasichrovsky.com/).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
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+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
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+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
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+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
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+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
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+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
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+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
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+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
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+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
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+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
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+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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***Elin Olausson*** *is a fan of the weird and the unsettling. She is the author of the short story collections* Growth *and* Shadow Paths *and has had stories featured in* 34 Orchard, Chiral Mad 5, Nightscript, *and many other publications. Elin’s rural childhood made her love and fear the woods, and she firmly believes that a cat is your best companion in life. She lives in Sweden. [www.elinolausson.com](http://www.elinolausson.com/).*

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***Elizabeth Zuckerman*** *actually had an okay high school experience, which surprised no one more than it did her. Her fiction has appeared in* Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Haven Spec, *and* Timeless Tales. *She lives in Philadelphia with a husband who quotes Shakespeare and Daria in roughly equal measure, and occasionally livetweets movies at* [@LizCanTweet](https://twitter.com/LizCanTweet).

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***Emma Burnett*** *is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in* Nature:Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Apex, Radon, Utopia, MetaStellar, Milk Candy Review, Roi Fainéant, JAKE, *and more. You can find her on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/slashnburnett), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/slashnburnett.bsky.social), *and at* [emmaburnett.uk](http://emmaburnett.uk/).

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***Erik Mann*** *is a software developer and aspiring beach bum. He digs spotting sea turtles and dolphins when paddleboarding but admits that time an alligator joined him in the river was a little unnerving. More of his work can be found in* Intrinsick *and* The Dark City.

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***Fabiyas M. V.*** *is the author of* [Monsoon Turbulence](https://www.amazon.com/Monsoon-Turbulence-Fabiyas-M-V/dp/1939832144/), [Shelter within the Peanut Shells](https://lizzieandrewborden.com/HatchetOnline/LiteraryHatchet/product/literary-hatchet-10), [Kanoli Kaleidoscope](https://www.amazon.com/Kanoli-Kaleidoscope-Fabiyas-M-V/dp/098617078X/), Eternal Fragments, [Stringless Lives](https://www.amazon.com/Stringless-Lives-Fabiyas-M-V/dp/B08673MCQQ/), *and* [Moonlight And Solitude](https://www.indulekha.com/moonlight-and-solitude-poetry-fabiyas-m-v), *and his writing has also been published by Western Australian University, British Council, University of Hawaii, Rosemont College, Douglas College, Forward Poetry, Off the Coast, Silver Blade, Pear Tree Press, Poetry Nook, Zoetic Press, Encircle Publications, Pendle War Poetry and Creative Writing Ink. He has won many international accolades, including the* Merseyside at War Poetry Award *from Liverpool University.*

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V. — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Fabiyas M. V.

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
+
Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
+
Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
+
Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
+
Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
+
Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
+
LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
+
Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
+
Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***Finale Doshi-Velez*** *designs ethical and helpful artificial intelligences by day and raises (hopefully also ethical and helpful) natural intelligences by night. She believes few things are impossible for a creative mind and a compassionate heart. You can learn more about her work at her website, [finaledoshivelez.com](http://finaledoshivelez.com/).*

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***Fraser Sherman*** *loves writing fantasy and film reference but takes time away from them for the accounting and business articles that pay the bills. He’s had four film reference books published, most recently* The Aliens Are Here, *and his self-published steampunk novel* Questionable Minds *came out in 2022. Born in England, he lived in Florida until relocating to Durham NC in 2010 to marry his dream woman. He’s online at [frasersherman.com](https://frasersherman.com/).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/gabrielle-bleu.html b/authors/gabrielle-bleu.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7a4373ab --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/gabrielle-bleu.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Gabrielle Bleu*** *writes science fiction and fantasy. When not writing, she watches birds and admires lichens. Their work has appeared in* Dose of Dread, Theme of Absence, *and* Utopia Science Fiction. *Follow them on twitter [@BeteMonstrueuse](http://twitter.com/BeteMonstrueuse) for birdwatching photos and occasional thoughts on werewolves, and find more of her work at [gabriellebleu.com](https://gabriellebleu.com/).*

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*Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF TV,* ***Gregory L. Norris*** *writes regularly for fiction anthologies, magazines, novels, and occasionally for TV and Film. He once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount's* Star Trek: Voyager series, *and his story* Tyrannosaurus Mechs *was a finalist in 2022's Roswell Awards competition in short SF Writing.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
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+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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***Gunnar De Winter*** *is a biologist/philosopher hybrid who writes. His fiction has appeared in* Future SF Digest, Daily Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, *and other places. Sometimes his crazy thoughts run rampant on Twitter masking as [@evolveon](http://twitter.com/evolveon).*

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***Hannah Hulbert*** *is a full-time mum and part-time writer from the south coast of England. You can find her stories in miscellaneous small-press anthologies and web-zines, a full list of which can be found [on her website](https://hannahhulbert.wordpress.com). Her story* ‘Petrichor’ *from* Beneath Strange Stars *(TL;DR Press, 2020) received a Pushcart nomination. Hannah enjoys looking for mushrooms, doings crafts, and drinking tea, especially when she is supposed to be writing. You can also follow her on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/HannahHulbertAuthor) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hhulbert).*

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***Helen French*** *is a writer, book hoarder and TV-soaker-upper who grew up in Merseyside near the coast and now lives in Hertfordshire, UK, with her family. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as* Factor Four, Stupefying Stories, *and* Flash Fiction Online, *and she is currently buried in novel writing. You can find her online at [helenfrench.net](https://helenfrench.net/).*

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***Hermester Barrington*** *is a retired archivist, a haiku poet, and a deliberately genre-ignorant artist whose most recently published ficciones have appeared in* Kzine, Fate Magazine, *and* Peculiar Mormyrid. *For over four decades, he and his impossibly beautiful wife Fayaway have traveled the round earth’s imagined corners in search of invisible books, hitherto unrecognized protozoans, and paranormal phenomena. He and Fay are writing a biography of pop singer Mrs. Miller, tentatively titled* Soul of Iron, Heart of Gold, Voice of Fluttering Quicksilver. *From sundown until cockcrow, he roosts at [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/Hermester-Barrington-143491749048273).*

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***J. Livermore*** *writes infrequently, about odd or impossible things. He studied law, spent time in South America, and now explains things for a living.*

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***J. Siegal*** *writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music, and code. He plays barrelhouse piano and produces the musical group* Red Spot Rhythm Section. *His writing has appeared in* Michigan Quarterly Review *and* Skeptic Magazine, *among others. Currently, he is at work on his first novel. He lives with his wife and two children near Chicago, IL. You can find out more on [his website](https://joshuasiegal.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/joshuasiegal).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
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+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
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Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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***Jack Mackenzie*** *lives in the wild country of British Columbia, Canada, with his wife and two cats. He loves beer, art, and writing science fiction and fantasy. His short stories have appeared in* Dark Worlds Magazine, Encounters Magazine, Neo-Opsis Magazine, Raygun Revival *and in the anthologies* Magistria: The Realm of the Sorcerer, Sails and Sorcery, *and* Swords of Fire. *His novels and a short story collection*, Heralded by Blood, *can be found at the [Rage Machine Books website](http://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/), to which he is a semi-frequent contributor. You can also find him on* [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/JackMackenzieWriter).*

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***Jalyn Renae Fiske*** *is an English Language Arts teacher in Texas and the Fiction Editor for the speculative fiction magazine* James Gunn's Ad Astra. *She has over a dozen short stories, poems, and personal essays published in anthologies, literary journals, and online magazines. She tends to write dark fantasy and horror. Her favorites that she's written are* Verity's Faery Teas *and* A Grave of Wind and Leaves. *In her free time, Jalyn likes to practice her oil painting, hike trails, camp, and ravenously read.*

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***James Davidson*** *lives in Alpine, Utah. In addition to writing speculative fiction, he enjoys the outdoors and spending time with his family and his golden retriever, Troubadour. He is very bad at running, although he persists in doing it anyway. As an attorney he has written countless contracts, but this is his first published story. You can find him on Twitter as* [@JamesDavidsonSF](https://twitter.com/JamesDavidsonSF) *and at his website,* [www.jamesdavidsonauthor.com](https://jamesdavidsonauthor.com).

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***Jeff Reynolds*** *is a writer from Maryland who works for Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab, home of New Horizons and Parker Solar Probe. He's only a software licensing analyst, though, and doesn't do any cool stuff like building space probes or meeting Brian Mays. Jeff's work has appeared in* Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, *and* Apparition Literary Magazine, *among others. You can find links to his work at [his website](https://www.trollbreath.com). If you want to find him, he's likely sitting at his desk day dreaming.*

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***Jeffery Scott Sims*** *a degreed anthropologist with a taste for weird fiction, lives in Arizona, which forms the setting for many of his tales. He has well over a hundred publications, among them the novel* The Journey of Jacob Bleek, *the collection* Eerie Arizona, *and his latest novel,* The Journey through the Black Book. *He maintains a literary website devoted to strange tales [here](http://simsweird.infinityfreeapp.com/index.html).*

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***Jennifer Jeanne McArdle*** *lives in New York with her fiance and an agent of chaos (a spotted dog) and works in animal conservation. Previously she’s taught ESL in South Korea and Indonesia and worked for and with nonprofits in the US and Asia. Her story The Mules was a Brave New Weird 2022 award winner. You can find her on* [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mcardlejeanne.bsky.social), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/aerocrystal/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mcardlejeanne), *and* [her website](https://jenniferjeannemcardle.blogspot.com/).

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***Jess Simms*** *is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, PA, where they're a co-founder of* Scribble House *and the managing editor of* After Happy Hour Review. *They are the author of the flash fiction chapbook* Cryptid Bits *(Last-Picked Books, 2024) and the micro-chap* Shapeshifter Diaries *(Rinky Dink Press, 2023). Their short fiction has been published in* HOOT Online, SLAB, *and* MockingOwl Roost, *among other publications. You can find them online at* [jesssimms.com](https://jesssimms.com/).

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/joelle_killian.html b/authors/joelle_killian.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4cb116bc --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/joelle_killian.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Joelle Killian*** *is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction appears in* Maudlin House, The Stygian Lepus, *and* Wicked Shadow Press. *She has also published about psychedelic therapy in her other life as a psychologist, and was part of an undead dance troupe back in the day. Find more of her writing at [her linktree](https://linktr.ee/joellekillian).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/jonathon-mast.html b/authors/jonathon-mast.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..08eb07da --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/jonathon-mast.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Jonathon Mast*** *lives in Kentucky with his wife and an insanity of children. (A group of children is called an insanity. Trust me.) His short stories appear in numerous anthologies and magazines. His first novel, *The Keeper of Tales*, is currently out from Dark Owl Press, and you can find Jon at [his website](https://jonathonmastauthor.com/).*

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***Josh Pearce*** *has published more than 200 stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines, including* Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, Locus, Nature, On Spec, Weird Horror, *and elsewhere. Find more of his writing at [fictionaljosh.com](https://fictionaljosh.com/). One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/jude-clee.html b/authors/jude-clee.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..841e7095 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/jude-clee.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Jude Clee*** *is a writer and educator based in Philadelphia. She is a contributor to the autistic self-advocacy blog* [Neuroclastic](https://neuroclastic.com/). *Her short story "The Boy in the Mirror" won a prize in the* 91st annual Writer's Digest competition. *Her short horror stories have appeared in* Black Petal Magazine *and* Grinning Skulls Press.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/katie-mcivor.html b/authors/katie-mcivor.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d6c5c758 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/katie-mcivor.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Katie McIvor*** *grew up in Scotland and studied at the University of Cambridge. She now lives in England and works at a language library, where she is surrounded by books and films in over 200 languages. When not struggling to alphabetise Japanese textbooks, she likes to go on long walks with her husband and dogs. Her flash fiction has recently appeared in* [Terrain.org](https://www.terrain.org/2021/fiction/five-hawks/).

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/kc-grifant.html b/authors/kc-grifant.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8e48da35 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/kc-grifant.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***KC Grifant*** *is a New England-to-SoCal transplant who writes internationally published horror, fantasy, science fiction and weird western stories for collectible card games, podcasts, anthologies and magazines. Her writings have appeared in* Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Aurealis Magazine, Unnerving Magazine, Frozen Wavelets, Tales to Terrify *and* Colp Magazine. *Her short stories have haunted dozens of collections, including* We Shall Be Monsters; Shadowy Natures: Tales of Psychological Horror; The One That Got Away - Women of Horror Anthology; Beyond the Infinite: Tales from the Outer Reaches; Six Guns Straight From Hell Volume 3; *and the Stoker-nominated* Fright Mare: Women Write Horror. *She is also the co-founder of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) San Diego chapter. For more information, visit [her website](http://www.KCGrifant.com/) or [aMAZOM](http://amazon.com/author/kcgrifant). You can find her on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/kcgrifant/), [Instagram](https://instagram.com/kcgrifant/), and [Facebook](https://www.amazon.com/author/kcgrifant/).*

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Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
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+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
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+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
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+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
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P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
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Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
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Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
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J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
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+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
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+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
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J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***Kirk Bueckert*** *is a poet and playwright living on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His previous work has been published by* Dark Matter Magazine, Timber Ghost Press, Tyche Books, *and the* League of Canadian Poets. *His debut novel* Dark Circuitry *launches in early spring 2025.*

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***Kurt Hunt*** *was formed in the swamps and abandoned gravel pits of post-industrial Michigan. His short fiction has been published at* Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, *and more. He is also a co-author of* Archipelago, *a collaborative serial fantasy adventure available now on Amazon.*

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*Thrown out of Fairyland for crimes against the Realm,* ***Kyle E. Miller*** *is a naturalist and moral philosopher living in Michigan. He can usually be found in the dunes or forests, turning up logs looking for life. Past incarnations include zookeeper, video game critic, retail manager, stablehand, and writing tutor. His fiction has appeared in* Clarkesworld, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, *and* Honey & Sulphur. *You can find more at [www.kyle-e-miller.com](http://www.kyle-e-miller.com/).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/l-m-zaerr.html b/authors/l-m-zaerr.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ed2c8ff0 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/l-m-zaerr.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***LM Zaerr*** *is a writer and medievalist. She wrote a book on medieval storytelling and sang forgotten tales to the raucous tones of the vielle. She lured students into medieval legends and abandoned them there to challenge dragons, rescue Lancelot, and figure out how to play* gwyddbwyll. *Now she finds new stories and transforms old ones. Her work has appeared in* Uncharted, Wyngraf, *and* New Myths, *among other venues. Visit her at* [www.lmzaerr.com](https://www.lmzaerr.com/).

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/l-p-ring.html b/authors/l-p-ring.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..aa2e52c9 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/l-p-ring.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***L.P. Ring*** *is an Irish-born author presently based in Japan. He’s written crime novels featuring the Seoul-based detective S.I. Choi, a (so far) stand-alone noir featuring the detective Lou Harte, and has been published with* Kaidankai, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Fleas on the Dog, *and the Black Beacon anthology* 'Tales from the Ruins'. *He'll feature in 2023 with* Shotgun Honey, Creepy Podcast, *and* Schlock!. *He tweets at [@L_P_Ring](https://twitter.com/L_P_Ring).*

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/l-swartz.html b/authors/l-swartz.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9fd2fb22 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/l-swartz.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***L Swartz*** (just L) *intrepidly exposes fairy tale apostates, misanthropic dragons, and shapeshifting ex-lovers from a messy desk overlooking Lazarus Island, which appears and disappears in the drowned river mouth of the Nehalem River as it pours its sorrows into the Pacific Ocean. Indoors, L harbors 1 badass queer partner of 25 years, 4 crime cats, 1 sweet old dog, and 1 screamy parrot. Outdoors, L unapologetically feeds every DGAF corvid and raccoon in the county. L can be found online at [Facebook](https://aaronemmel.com/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nounverbadverb), [substack](http://plotspittoon.substack.com/), and [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/propagandaministry.bsky.social).*

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Ring — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
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P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
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Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
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Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
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J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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***Lee F. Patrick*** *lives and writes in Calgary Alberta with her husband and four cats who love to sit on her keyboard. She has published three novels, several novellas and a number of short stories and poems in magazines and anthologies. She was a finalist in the Poetry category in the 2018 Prix Aurora Awards. You can find her writing on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Lee-F.-Patrick/e/B073KXC2BS), and she tweets as [@LeeFPatrick](https://twitter.com/LeeFPatrick).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
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+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
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J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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***Les Sklaroff*** *read science fiction from an early age, and though he's now old enough to know better the habit is hard to break. Born in London, educated at the University of Edinburgh, he worked for an antiquarian bookseller before teaching for ten years, then moved to the Isle of Wight and became an independent bookseller, specialising in Mervyn Peake, illustrated books, and modern first editions.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
+
Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
+
Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
+
E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
+
Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
+
Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
+
Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
+
Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
+
Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
+
Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
+
LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
+
Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
+
J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
+
Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
+
Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
+
Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
+
Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
+
Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***Lucy Zhang*** *writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in* CRAFT, The Spectacle, Redivider, *and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks* HOLLOWED *(Thirty West Publishing) and* ABSORPTION *(Harbor Review). Find her at [lucyzhang.tech](https://lucyzhang.tech) or on Twitter [@Dango_Ramen](https://twitter.com/Dango_Ramen).*

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***Lyra Meurer*** *has wanted to be a writer since they were a stream-wading, story-inventing child. Now they chase that dream in Colorado, where they live with their spouse, backyard skunks, and overflowing collections of journals and books. When they’re not writing, they can be found down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or basking in a sunbeam. Their short fiction can be found in* Trollbreath Magazine, Heartlines Spec, Cosmic Horror Monthly, *and several anthologies. Lyra's contemplations on international music, early 2000s television, worldbuilding, and other bizarre phenomena, along with pictures of their doodles, can be found at [their website](https://lyrameurer.blogspot.com/).*

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***Mame Bougouma Diene*** *is a Franco–Senegalese American humanitarian living in Brooklyn, the US/Francophone spokesperson for the [African Speculative Fiction Society](https://www.africansfs.com/), a regular columnist at* Strange Horizons, *and francophone editor at* Omenana magazine. *You can find his work in both the aforementioned,* Fiyah!, EscapePod, Tor.com, AfroSFv2 & v3, Dominion, *and others. He was nominated for two Nommo Awards, and his debut collection **Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night** (Clash Books) was nominated for the 2019 Splatterpunk Award. He tweets as [@mame_bougouma](https://twitter.com/mame_bougouma).*

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***Mandira Pattnaik*** *writes on subjects of identity, climate crisis and displacement. Her publications include 150 magazines across 15 countries in print and online including* LampLight, Orca, Psychopomp *and* Passages North. *She is also on the masthead of* Reckon Review and Trampset. *Read more about her at [http://mandirapattnaik.com/](http://mandirapattnaik.com/).*

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**Marc Phillips** is a security contractor from Texas.

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***Mark Martin**'s* *fiction has appeared in* The Manchester Review, Missouri Review, Dark Mountain, Stand, Plenitudes, *and* Storgy, *and is forthcoming in the* Dalhousie Review. *Mark was the overall winner in the* Fish Short Story Contest 2021, *judged by Emily Ruskovich. The managing editor of* [Verso Books](https://www.versobooks.com/), *he lives in Brooklyn but grew up in the UK.*

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***Martin M. Clark*** *Martin M. Clark is a freelance writer and occasional poet. He is the author of [several novellas on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Martin-M-Clark/e/B01J13H888), plus short stories in* Third Flatiron *anthologies. He also contributes to several online publications including* Mythaxis.co.uk, *and* [Kraxon.com](http://www.kraxon.com/). *His range of subject matter includes science fiction, urban fantasy, romance and westerns. He puts this down to the somewhat eclectic mobile lending library where he grew up. He works as a local government officer in south-west Scotland but still finds time to be an evil stepfather.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
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***Martin Zeigler*** *writes short fiction, primarily mystery, science fiction, and horror. His stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals, both in print and online. Every so often (okay, twice) he has gathered these stories into a self-published collection. In 2015 he released *A Functional Man And Other Stories*. More recently, in 2020, a year we will all remember with fondness, he released *Hypochondria And Other Stories*. Besides writing, Marty enjoys the things most people do. And besides those, he likes reading, taking long walks, and dabbling on the piano. He makes his home in the Pacific Northwest.*

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***Masha Kisel*** *was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and currently lives in Dayton, Ohio (USA). Her short stories and essays have been published in* Gulf Coast, Prime Number, Brooklyn Review, McNeese Review, Tahoma Literary Review *and elsewhere. For more of Masha's writing, please visit [www.mashakisel.com](http://www.mashakisel.com/).*

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***Matt Wile*** *is a writer and filmmaker. His debut feature as writer/director,* The Skin of the Teeth, *was described by critics as both 'Get Out meets Grindr' and 'David Lynch directs an episode of Law & Order: SVU.' His fiction can be found most recently in* Andromeda Spaceways, Dark Horses, *and* Del Sol SFF Review. *More of his work is available at [mattwile.com](http://mattwile.com/).*

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***Matthew Wilson*** *has been published over 300 times in such places as* horror zine, star*line, Zimbell House Publishing, *and many others. He is currently editing his first novel, and you can find him on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/matthew94544267).*

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***Mattia Ravasi*** *is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for* The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, *and* The Submarine. *His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including* Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, *and* Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. *He talks about books on his YouTube channel, [The Bookchemist](https://www.youtube.com/c/thebookchemist), and tweets as [@thebookchemist](https://twitter.com/The_Bookchemist) too.*

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***Meg Candelaria*** *lives in Philadelphia with her family, two neurotic dogs, and an apparently indestructible ginkgo tree. Her work has previously appeared in* Daily Science Fiction *and* Everyday Fiction. *Despite writing mostly for online venues, she's a bit of a luddite and keeps hoping that twitter will go away before she has to take notice of it.*

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***Micah Hyatt’s*** *work has appeared in* Deep Magic Magazine, Shock Totem, Little Blue Marble, Flash Fiction Online, *and* Daily Science Fiction. *He is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. His light-hearted zombie survival novella,* [Eating the Exhibits](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPYYF5RK), *is available now through Amazon.*

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***Michael Bettendorf*** *(he/him) is a writer from the US Midwest. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at* Drabblecast, Sley House Press, *and elsewhere. His debut experimental horror novel/gamebook* Trve Cvlt *was released by Tenebrous Press in September, 2024. Michael works in a high school library in Lincoln, NE - a place he believes is too strange to be a flyover state. Find him on* [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/BeardedBetts.bsky.social) *and* [www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com](http://www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com/).

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***Mike Adamson*** *holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, he returned to study and secured qualifications in both marine biology and archaeology. He has been a university educator since 2006, has worked in the replication of convincing ancient fossils, is a passionate photographer, a master-level hobbyist, and a journalist for international magazines. Short fiction sales include to* The Strand, Little Blue Marble, Weird Tales, Abyss and Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Compelling Science Fiction *and* Nature Futures. *Mike has placed nearly 140 stories to date. You can catch up with his writing career at [The View From the Keyboard](http://mike-adamson.blogspot.com).*

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***Mike Morgan*** *has lived on three continents. It wasn't for a bet; it was just how things worked out. (Being easily bored may have factored into it.) He's married with two kids and looks after a foul-tempered pet. Can you tell? His work has been included in anthologies like Flame Tree's* Gothic Fantasy; Science Fiction Short Stories, *NewCon Press's* Best of British Science Fiction 2018 *and* 2019, Unidentified Funny Objects 8, *and multiple issues of Hiraeth's* The Martian Wave. *His novella* Where the Monsters Are *is due out soon from Hiraeth. You can find him on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/culttvmike) and his [website](https://perpetualstateofmildpanic.wordpress.com/).*

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***Monte Remer*** *is a writer from the American west. He tells stories of strange happenings and macabre creatures, both unbecoming of the kind and simple hick that he is. Somewhere in the mountains, his aggressive typing on old keyboards can be heard as the dust rises out of them like smoke from a fresh fire.*

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***Moustapha Mbacké Diop*** *is a Senegalese author living in Dakar. He is in his fourth year of medical school, and when he's not stressing about finals or hospital rounds, he reads and writes mainly fantasy. Obsessed with mythology and African folklore, he has published an urban fantasy trilogy written in French, named* Teranga Chronicles. *You can find him at [his website](https://moustaphamdbooks.carrd.co/) and on [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18933319.Moustapha_Mbacke_Diop), and he tweets as [@mdmoustaf](https://twitter.com/mdmoustaf).*

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***Olufunmilayo Makinde*** *is a Nigerian writer who dreams of one day writing full time. You can find her on X (formerly twitter) as [@Funmi_fbee](https://twitter.com/Funmi_fbee), and you can find her work in* Full House Literary, Flash Phantoms, Heavy Feather Review, *and* The Deadlands.

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***Owen G. Tabard*** *is a writer and lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy, as well as ancient mythology. He draws on these interests in his own stories. His hobbies include kayaking and bird-watching.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/authors/owen-leddy.html b/authors/owen-leddy.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e3fa2978 --- /dev/null +++ b/authors/owen-leddy.html @@ -0,0 +1,275 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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***Owen Leddy*** *is a bioengineering graduate student and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their short fiction has previously appeared in *Fusion Fragment*, *Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine*, *Printers Row Journal*, and the *Triangulation* anthology series, among other publications.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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+ Outpatients (February 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
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+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
+
Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
+
Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
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+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
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J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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***Paul Alex Gray*** *writes linear and interactive fiction starring sentient black holes, wayward sea monsters, curious AIs and more. His work has been published in* Nature Futures, Andromeda Spaceways, PodCastle *and others. Paul grew up by the beaches of Australia, then traveled the world and now lives in Canada. On his adventures, he has been a startup founder, game designer and mentor to technology entrepreneurs. Chat with him on Twitter [@paulalexgray](https://twitter.com/paulalexgray) or visit [www.paulalexgray.com](https://paulalexgray.com/).*

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***Peter Wynd*** *is a Polish-based writer and living proof that AI’s randomness will never replace human imagination. In his free time he wonders whether he’s a metaphor. He loves traveling, designing board games, and writing at unexpected places. See more of his cat at* [www.peterwynd.com](http://www.peterwynd.com/).

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***P. R. O’Leary*** *writes dark stories tinged with humor, or humorous stories tinged with darkness. Dozens of his pieces have been published all over the world. You can find more information on his [LinkTree](https://linktr.ee/proleary), and you can find him at his geodesic dome in central New Jersey.*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
+
Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
+
Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
+
Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
+
Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
+
Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
+
Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
+
Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
+
Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
+
Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
+
Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
+
Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
+
Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
+
Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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***Pritesh Patil*** *(right) is fuelled by books, stories and coffee fumes. When he isn’t hunting monsters and searching for cracks between realities, he can be found deep in Dream's library spinning tales of hope and revolutions. You can find him on Twitter as [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/TheQuillseeker/).* +***Percy Wadiwala*** *(left) is a Chartered Accountant and MBA who quit his career as a Banker to spend more time with his cats. As his cats are much happier without his company, he engages in other pursuits including staring mournfully at broken glasses and, occasionally, writing. He lives in Mumbai with his family, his books, and a firm conviction that modern civilization is in terminal decline. Until that actually happens, however, you can read his scribbling and connect with him at [his website](https://www.slackerstales.com/), [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/PercySlacker/), and [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/slackerstales/). His first book, ‘The Day Money Died’, is available at [Amazon](https://www.amazon.es/dp/B079V6NJ4K).*

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***Rebecca Birch*** *is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in Seattle, Washington. She’s a classically trained soprano, holds a deputy black belt in Taekwondo, and enjoys spending time in the company of trees. Her fiction has appeared in markets including* Fireside Magazine, Cricket, *and* Flash Fiction Online. *You can find her online at [wordsofbirch.com](http://wordsofbirch.com/).*

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***Rina Song*** *is a writer and alternative rock lover based out of California. When not writing, she has a day job involving computers. She hopes to one day receive her own call to a heroic quest of epic proportions, and perhaps write a novel about it afterwards. Her writing has previously been published in* Spank the Carp.

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***Rob Gillham*** *writes mostly dark—sometimes darkly humorous—speculative fiction. He lives in London and does all his writing in the margins of the day. Stuff he's written has also appeared in* Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction *and* Creepy Podcast, *links to which all can be found at [robgillham.com](robgillham.com).*

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*Hailing from the tiny green island of Ireland, **Sandee Bree Breathnach** is an aspiring writer who spends her free time crafting stories, marvelling over moths, and searching forests for fairies and inspiration. She has yet to find any fairies.*

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***Scott J. Couturier*** *is a poet and prose writer of the weird, grotesque, liminal, and darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including* [The Audient Void](https://theaudientvoid.bigcartel.com/), [Spectral Realms](https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/spectral-realms), [Eye To The Telescope](http://eyetothetelescope.com/), [The Dark Corner Zine](http://thedarkcornerzine.limitedrun.com/), [Space and Time Magazine](https://spaceandtime.net/), *and* [Weirdbook](http://weirdbook-magazine.com/); *his fiction has been repeatedly featured in the* Test Patterns *and* Pulps *anthologies from [Planet X Publications](http://planetxpublications.blogspot.com/). He currently lives an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor and two cats, and you can find him on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/scottjcouturier/).*

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Couturier — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Scott J. Couturier

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Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
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+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
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Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
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Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
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Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
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J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
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J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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< + + Archives + | + + Authors + | + + Catalogue + | + + Editorials + | + + Genres + > +

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***Sean MacKendrick*** *splits his time between Colorado and Texas. His story* Oh, Be a Fine Guy, Kiss Me! *was selected for the* Amazing Stories Reader's Choice Award. *When not writing fiction he writes code as a software engineer. He can be found on [Twitter/X](https://twitter.com/SeanMacKendrick) and [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/SeanMacKendrick.bsky.social).*

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***Sharon Dawn Selby*** *is a professor of English Literature and Professional Communication in London, Ontario, which means she gets to roam the realms of other people's stories when she isn't writing her own. She has published several book reviews and an academic article, as well as a monograph,* Memory and Identity, *in Canadian Fiction. You can find her on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sharondawnselby) and at [her website](http://sharondawnselby.com/).*

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***Shaun Anthony McMichael*** *has taught writing to students from around the world since 2007, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins throughout the Seattle area. Over 85 of his poems, short stories, and reviews have appeared in many literary magazines online and in print, including the forthcoming short story collection* The Wild Familiar *from CJ Press. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son where he attends church most Sundays. Visit him at his website, [shaunanthonymcmichael.com](http://shaunanthonymcmichael.com/).*

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***Si Wang*** *is a software engineer and writer who lives in California with his wife, son, and chickens. His work has been published in* Aurealis, Electric Spec, *and* Mythaxis. *His hobbies include playing basketball, tabletop games, and rock songs on the guitar and piano. You can find him on Twitter as [@siwang](https://twitter.com/siwang).*

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***Siobhan Ekeh*** *is a second-generation Nigerian-American writer, artist, and educator living in Brooklyn. When she isn't writing, she can usually be found conversing with her extensive stuffed bear collection or frightening karaoke bar audiences with creative renditions of* Jesus Christ Superstar *songs. Her poetry has appeared in* rainy weather days *and* Strings *magazines, and her fiction is forthcoming in* Speculative City Magazine. *Her work can be found on [siobhanekeh.com](http://siobhanekeh.com/).*

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***Skye Allen*** *wrote* Pretty Peg *and* The Songbird Thief, *both queer YA fantasy novels.* The Songbird Thief *was a Goldie Award finalist and won a FAPA President’s Book Award. She has had stories in* Toasted Cheese *and* Of Dragons and Magic *and poetry in* Insomnia *and* Sinister Wisdom. *She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writers workshop. She is also a musician and occasionally performs around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife. She/her pronouns. You can find her [at her website](https://allenskye.com/), and she tweets as [@eppiemorrie](https://twitter.com/eppiemorrie).*

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***Stephen S. Power*** *is the author of the novel* The Dragon Round, *and his new novel,* Safe at Last, *about a traumatized woman trapped in a smart house, is currently under submission. His short fiction has appeared recently in* Unorthodox Stories *and* Heathen *and will soon appear in* Lightspeed, Stupefying Stories, Tales of Horror, *the anthologies* Cost of Living *and* The Growers (The Best of NewMyths, Volume 5) *as well as on the podcast* Creepy. *His site is [stephenspower.com](http://stephenspower.com/). He's on BlueSky at [@stephenspower.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/stephenspower.bsky.social).*

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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
+
Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
+
Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
+
Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
+
Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
+
E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
+
Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
+
Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
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J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***Steve Boseley*** *is a writer from Nottingham, UK, living with Multiple Sclerosis and typing with his one good finger. His short fiction generally falls into the horror genre and has been included in several online magazines, most recently* Schlock! Horror *and* Creepy Podcast.

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***Steve Loiaconi*** *is a journalist and a graduate of George Mason University's MFA program. His fiction previously appeared in* Griffel, The Mystery Tribune, Samfiftyfour, Tales of the Fantastic, *and* The Saturday Evening Post, *as well as the anthologies* Dracula’s Guests, P is for Poltergeist, *and* Open All Night. *He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and son, and you can find him on* [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/stephen.loiaconi/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sloiaconi), *and* [his website](https://steveloiaconi.wordpress.com/).

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***Steven Genise*** *is an author and editor based in Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in* Blue Earth Review, Fusion Fragment, Milk Candy Review, *and many others. You can find links to his work at* [stevengenise.com](http://stevengenise.com/), *and his vague thoughts about medieval history, rowing, and the outdoors on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/StevenGenise).

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***Subodhana Wijeyeratne*** *is a historian and writer living in Tokyo, Japan. He's been writing fiction for nearly twenty years and has had nearly twenty short stories appear in print over the past two years, in venues including* Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Expanded Horizons, Piker Press, *and* The Scarlet Leaf Review. *His short story 'They Meet in the Wall' was awarded a Mariner Prize in 2018. His first collection of short stories, Tales from the Stone Lotus, is currently available on Amazon - as is his debut novel, The Slixes. You can find him on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/iwamiyama/) and [his website](http://subowijeyeratne.com/).*

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***Sydney Sackett*** (she/her) *is a newly graduated speculative fiction author and poet with experience in true crime journalism at* Murder Murder News. *Some of her work appears in* Etherea, Menacing Hedge, Radon Journal, *and* Not One of Us. *She can be found at [sydneybsackett.wixsite.com](https://sydneybsackett.wixsite.com/website), where she's hoping to nab someone's stories to edit.*

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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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***Teresa Milbrodt*** *has published four short story collections, a novel called* The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, *and the monograph* Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality. *Milbrodt is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Roanoke College, and teaches fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, and disability studies. She loves cats, long walks with her MP3 player, independently owned coffee shops, peanut butter frozen yogurt, and texting hearts in rainbow colors. Read more of her work at [her website](http://teresamilbrodt.com/homepage/).*

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***Thorin N. Tatge*** *runs an afterschool library homework help program serving primary East African youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Brought up in science fiction fandom, he writes poems and fantasy with a focus on talking animals and philosophy. He has self-published an interactive novel,* What Is Best?, *and his first published short story,* Begin One Way, *appeared in* Leading Edge *in 2019. He likes to roleplay, drum, play and invent games, think about math, and take adventurous long walks, and fancies himself the greatest Lode Runner level designer in the world*.

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Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
+
Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
+
Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
+
Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
+
Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
+
Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
+
Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
+
Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
+
Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
+
Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
+
Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
+
Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
+
Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
+
Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
+
H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
+
Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
+
Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
+
Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
+
Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
+
Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
+
Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
+
Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
+
James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
+
Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
+
Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
+
Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
+
Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
+
Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
+
Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
+
Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
+
Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
+
Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
+
James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
+
Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms (August 2013)
+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
+
Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
+
Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
+
Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
+
Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
+
Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
+
Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
+
David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
+
Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
+
Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
+
John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
+ A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth (February 2016)
+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
+
Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
+
Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
+
Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
+
Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
+
KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
+
Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
+
Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
+
Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
+ Mindbleed (December 2012)
+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
+ The Prophets Speak (February 2011)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
+
Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
+
Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
+ Plague Rooster (March 2021)
+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
+
Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
+
Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
+
Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
+
Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
+ Strong Emergence (22 Nov 2008)
+ Outpatients (February 2011)
+
Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
+
Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
+
Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
+ Oh Dreary Me (December 2011)
+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
+ To Serve (August 2013)
+ Blazon (June 2008)
+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
+ From an Evening at the Cinema (September 2010)
+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
+
Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
+
Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
+
Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
+
Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
+
Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
+
Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
+
J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
+
C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
+
Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
+
Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
+
Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
+
Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
+
Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
+
Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
+
Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
+
Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
+
Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
+
Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
+
Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
+
Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
+
Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
+
Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
+
Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
+
Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
+
Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
+ The Cospauper (February 2016)
+
Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
+ Neurofinancer (August 2009)
+ The Ghosts of Cloud City (June 2011)
+
Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
+
T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
+
Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
+
Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
+ Magdalena and the Dragon (February 2016)
+ Red Fever (April 2008)
+ When Gretchen Met Sally (June 2008)
+ Survivor (22 Nov 2008)
+ No Survivor (May 2009)
+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
+
Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
+
Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
+
Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
+
P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
+
Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
+
Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
+
Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
+
Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
+
David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
+
Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
+
Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
+
Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
+
L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
+
Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
+
Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
+
E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
+
Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
+
Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
+
Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
+
Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
+
David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
+
Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
+
J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
+
Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
+
Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
+
Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
+
Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
+ Good Vibrations (February 2018)
+ The Parking Ticket (May 2018)
+
Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
+ The Culling (April 2025)
+
E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
+
Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
+
A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
+
L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
+
Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
+
Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
+
Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
+
Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
+
Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
+ By a Lily's Petal (22 Nov 2008)
+
Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
+
Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
+
Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
+
Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
+
Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
+
H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
+
D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
+
David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
+
Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
+
Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
+
Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
+ Appropriate Technology (December 2011)
+ Quality Put to the Vote (March 2013)
+ Day Trip (March 2013)
+ Mount Elysium (March 2014)
+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
+ Helsinki (August 2016)
+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
+ The Drill Hall Incident (August 2017)
+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
+ The Extrusion Project (May 2009)
+ The Enormous Gun (May 2009)
+ Warriston's Disease (August 2009)
+ The Door with no Key (September 2010)
+ Special Delivery (June 2011)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
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J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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***T. M. Morgan*** *lives in southern Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay with his wife and kids. His stories have been published in* Lamplight, Vastarien, Penumbric, *and now* Mythaxis. *You can find him on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTMMorgan) and [his website](https://thetmmorgan.wordpress.com/).*

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***Travis Ezell*** *is a writer, linguist, and filmmaker located in Boston. He has worked as an educator at Emerson College and the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon. His first publication was on human flesh (when a stranger got a tattoo of one of his tweets). He likes cheese, weird movies, his cat Spacecat, and midday naps. Right now he’s probably lost down a wiki-hole or buying more books than he can possibly read. Someone should probably stop him. Travis is currently a participant in GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, where his first book,* zMind, *is being revised.*

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***Trisha McKee*** *resides in a small town in Pennsylvania after being stranded at the station. Since April 2019, her work has appeared in over 60 publications, including* Scribe, The Oddville Press, Horror Magazine, Night to Dawn, J.J. Outre Review, Tablet Magazine, Hybrid Fiction, *several anthologies, and more. Her debut novel* Beyond the Surface *was released through Breaking Rules Publishing in May 2020. You can find her on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/wordromancer/), [Facebook](https://www.amazon.com/author/trishamckee/), and [her website](http://www.trishamckee.com/).*

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***Uchechukwu Nwaka*** *is a student of Medicine and Surgery at University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in* Cossmass Infinities, Fusion Fragment *and* Hexagon *among others. When he’s not trying to unravel the mysteries of human (or inhuman) interaction, he can be found binging unhealthy amounts of anime, or generally trying to keep up with endless schoolwork. Find him on Twitter at [@uche_cjn](https://twitter.com/uche_cjn).*

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***Valerie Alexander*** *is a freelance writer living in Arizona and Oregon. Her stories have been published in a number of sci-fi, horror and speculative anthologies and magazines. Visit her at [@vaxder](https://twitter.com/vaxder) or [www.valeriealexander.com](https://www.valeriealexander.com/).*

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***Wayne McCray*** *is a* Pushcart Prize *nominee for 2022 and 2024, and a 2023* Best of the Net *nominee. His short atories have appeared in* Susurrus, The Hooghly Review, Afro Literary Magazine, Bandit Fiction, The Bookends Review, Chitro Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, Drunk Monkeys, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Ilinix Magazine, Isele Magazine, Malarkey Books, The Ocotillo Review, Ogma Magazine, Pigeon Review, Roi Faineant, The Rush Magazine, Sangam Literary Magazine, Swim Press, *and* Wingless Dreamer. *He works diligently from his book-laden junk room.*

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+ + + + + Menu +
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AuthorStock info
Mike Adamson + Zamalek, by the Evening Light (June 2021)
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Valerie Alexander + The Night Parents (December 2022)
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Skye Allen + Alight (August 2020)
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Charlotte Ashley + Distant Skies (December 2022)
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Daniel Ausema + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds (August 2020)
+ The Quartermaster Trial (June 2022)
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Alistair Bain + Living on Reputation (September 2010)
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Don Mark Baldridge + Border Patrol (September 2023)
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Liam Baldwin + Beyond the Sky (December 2012)
+ The Lost World of WW1 (March 2014)
+ Diplomacy (February 2016)
+ Under the Martian Moonlight (August 2016)
+ Field Support (February 2017)
+ Emigration (April 2008)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ Comics (August 2017)
+ A Comic (May 2018)
+ Cartoon (August 2020)
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Annabel Banks + Postcards (June 2011)
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Hermester Barrington + My Amoeboid Romance (December 2021)
+ JohnBear, Janine, and I (December 2022)
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Michael Bettendorf + American Hitsuzen (December 2024)
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Moon Bhatt + The Price of Youth (September 2010)
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Ambrose Bierce + The Ingenious Patriot (22 Nov 2008)
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Rebecca Birch + Welcome to the Neighborhood (June 2023)
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H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop + The Curse of Yig (May 2009)
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Gabrielle Bleu + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb (September 2021)
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Steve Boseley + Nancy, Please (December 2023)
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Patrick Boylan + Mirror, Mirror (February 2018)
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Sandee Bree Breathnach + Touch Wood (April 2023)
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Cathy Bryant + Jinny Greenteeth (December 2022)
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Kirk Bueckert + La Voix d'un Ange (September 2023)
+ Wendigo (December 2024)
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Emma Burnett + Friends in High Places (April 2024)
+ With Nothing Left (October 2024)
+ 25 Peppercorns (September 2025)
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James Branch Cabell + How Manuel Left the Mire (September 2010)
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Meg Candelaria + Prometheus’ Kidneys (March 2021)
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Barry Charman + Emoticon (April 2023)
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Martin M. Clark + Sound & Fury (August 2016)
+ God Blinked (August 2016)
+ Madras Point (August 2016)
+ Interlude in Green (February 2017)
+ Death plus One (February 2017)
+ The Trumpets of Jericho (August 2017)
+ The Aldous Effect (August 2017)
+ Maximum Law (February 2018)
+ Maximum Law - Christmas Party (February 2018)
+ Christmas Carole (February 2018)
+ Behind My Eyes (May 2018)
+ Snow Over Interstate 80 (December 2020)
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Martin Clark + All Avenues Closed (December 2011)
+ Sailing to Tarshish (December 2012)
+ Unclear Conscience (December 2012)
+ Quintet for One (March 2013)
+ Not Who We Are (March 2013)
+ Lies & Other Essentials (August 2013)
+ A Room with a Vu (August 2013)
+ Truth and Other Upgrades (March 2014)
+ Uneasy Money (November 2014)
+ A Day Like Any Other (November 2014)
+ A Messenger, Deceased (July 2015)
+ Baker's Dozen (July 2015)
+ Bodyfellas (February 2016)
+ Supply & Demand (February 2016)
+ Ringside (September 2010)
+ The Great Divide (February 2011)
+ Let Every Voice be Still (June 2011)
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Jude Clee + My Beloved is Mine (June 2023)
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Christopher Cook + Everything's Jake (August 2020)
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Scott J. Couturier + Thy Servant, Death (December 2020)
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Sean Crawford + The Plains of Abyssinia (November 2014)
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Amanda C. Crowley + Voyager (June 2021)
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James Davidson + An Odd Recurring Dream (June 2022)
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Tom Davies + Dietrich and the Baby (December 2011)
+ The Tale of God's Flotsam (December 2012)
+ Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre (March 2013)
+ The Tale of the Bone Janitor (August 2013)
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+ Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse (August 2013)
+ The Tale of the Ten Teacups (August 2009)
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Mame Bougouma Diene + E Pluribus Unum (December 2021)
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Moustapha Mbacké Diop + A Curse at Midnight (August 2020)
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Finale Doshi-Velez + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains (April 2025)
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Siobhan Ekeh + The Twelve Blackened Slippers (September 2025)
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Aaron Emmel + How to Get AI to Like You (December 2021)
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Dane Erbach + Something Else (July 2024)
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Travis Ezell + Swimming with Elephants (June 2025)
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Chinaza Eziaghighala + Nwanebeakwa (September 2022)
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David Farrow + Liminal Spaces (June 2022)
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Arlen Feldman + The Amazing Mermaid (December 2024)
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Jalyn Renae Fiske + A Grave of Wind and Leaves (September 2021)
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Helen French + Safe in the Dark (April 2025)
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John A. Frochio + Ghosts and Aliens (December 2012)
+ Toyscape (August 2013)
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+ A New World Order (August 2016)
+ Equus Magna (August 2017)
+ His Turn to Remember (May 2018)
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Steven Genise + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube (October 2024)
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Rob Gillham + Pillars of Distraction (October 2024)
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Elana Gomel + Alonya and Ivan (June 2022)
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Callum Graham + Some Future Date (April 2008)
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Paul Alex Gray + Full Metal Grandma (September 2021)
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KC Grifant + Comfort Zone (March 2021)
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Stephen Heuser + Grave Misfortune (February 2017)
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Mary Hiers + Sticky Dreams (August 2017)
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Andrew Leon Hudson + Flesh Doubt (December 2011)
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+ Tear Drops (March 2013)
+ First In, Last Out (March 2014)
+ Must Be in the Fifties (November 2014)
+ Don Juans & Dragoons (July 2015)
+ Falling Back (August 2016)
+ April the Last (February 2017)
+ Good Old Days (May 2018)
+ Short Reviews – January to March (April 2023)
+ An Interview with Francesco Verso (June 2023)
+ Short Reviews – April to June (June 2023)
+ Artificial-Artificial Intelligence (July 2023)
+ Short Reviews – July to September (September 2023)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 (December 2023)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 (July 2024)
+ An interview with Micah Hyatt (July 2024)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 (October 2024)
+ Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 (December 2024)
+ Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 (April 2024)
+ Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 (June 2025)
+ Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 (September 2025)
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Hannah Hulbert + Umpire of Desolation (September 2021)
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Kurt Hunt + What Comes After Winter (June 2021)
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Micah Hyatt + The Third Martian Dick Temple (August 2020)
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+ Nightshade Memory (April 2024)
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Washington Irving + The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon (June 2008)
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Andrew Jensen + The Day the Shimm Stood Still (April 2023)
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Andrew Johnston + Experimental Diet (August 2020)
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Jonathan Joseph + Warped (December 2011)
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Anya Josephs + The Newest Profession (August 2020)
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Joelle Killian + You Are a Rock God (September 2023)
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Matthew Kirshenblatt + Troubles With Word (February 2008)
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+ A Natural Selection (December 2012)
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+ His Fly Undid Him (May 2009)
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+ Stop 17 (June 2011)
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Masha Kisel + Simulations (June 2023)
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Anna Koltes + Body Parts (September 2025)
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Andrea Kriz + Robots of Paris (August 2020)
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Christina Ladd + The Sugar Wife (September 2025)
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Owen Leddy + Noise (June 2021)
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Charlotte H. Lee + Marciano (December 2021)
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Don B Levitt + Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. (August 2013)
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Lester Linesmith + Android 0-CLE5 (February 2011)
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Chris Lites + Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang (February 2008)
+ The American Book of the Dead (April 2008)
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J. Livermore + Fly Away, Peter (December 2021)
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C. Owen Loftus + A Deer's Inheritance (April 2023)
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Steve Loiaconi + Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness (April 2024)
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Lucian Loukianos + Voyage to the Moon (April 2008)
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Celine Low + Xorai’s Hand (March 2022)
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Sean MacKendrick + Tag, You're It (June 2025)
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Jack Mackenzie + Time Dysperception (March 2021)
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Olufunmilayo Makinde + For Giving (September 2025)
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Erik Mann + Unincorporated (March 2022)
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Melanie Manner + Green Bullet (February 2008)
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Mark Martin + Headspace (July 2024)
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Jonathon Mast + Troublemaker, Storyteller (June 2021)
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Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep (April 2024)
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Donald McCarthy + The Four Bill Club (September 2023)
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Wayne McCray + Praedial Larceny (December 2023)
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Katie McIvor + Utopia is an Island (September 2021)
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Trisha McKee + Stranded at the Station (December 2020)
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Shaun Anthony McMichael + Carousel's (December 2023)
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Voss McVeigh + A Tale of Salt and Oak (February 2018)
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Mark Mellon + Melkart The Herdsman (February 2018)
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Lyra Meurer + Beyond the Sudden Door (April 2025)
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Teresa Milbrodt + Tintype Trolls (October 2024)
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Kyle E. Miller + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly (September 2021)
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Christian Miller + Proto-J (July 2015)
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Twilite Minotaur + Terminus Machina : Bailout (March 2013)
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Dennis Mombauer + Weapons of Mass Entanglement (August 2020)
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T. M. Morgan + Unknown Ancestry (March 2021)
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Mike Morgan + Every Hat is a Crown (December 2020)
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Peter Morrison + The Temple of the Inevitable (March 2013)
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+ Blood and Souls (September 2010)
+
Chaitanya Murali + The Maneater of Tiruchery (December 2021)
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Gregory L. Norris + The Fashionistas (March 2021)
+ Tyrannosaurus Mechs (September 2022)
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Cheryl S. Ntumy + Listen, Don’t Touch (June 2025)
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Uchechukwu Nwaka + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish (December 2021)
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P. R. O’Leary + Crunch Thump Thump (December 2024)
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Elin Olausson + Default (September 2023)
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Lee F. Patrick + Into the Darkness (December 2020)
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Jez Patterson + Aye-Nay (March 2014)
+ Adalet (November 2014)
+ Whistle, Hum, Parp (February 2016)
+ Robot Rover (February 2016)
+ The Last Day of the Mute Ant (August 2016)
+ Distant and Remote (August 2016)
+ Timed Out (February 2017)
+ To Erm is Human (August 2017)
+ Are Friends Eclectic (February 2018)
+ Of a Kind (February 2018)
+ Henry (May 2018)
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Mandira Pattnaik + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills (March 2022)
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Josh Pearce + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon (June 2025)
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Chris Penycate + The Summoning (June 2008)
+ Central Casting (22 Nov 2008)
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Annie Percik + Freewheeling (June 2021)
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Marc Phillips + Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild (September 2022)
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David Stephen Powell + Seal-Skin (April 2025)
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Stephen S. Power + Sunnyside (April 2025)
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Daniel Rabuzzi + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d (September 2021)
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Mattia Ravasi + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (April 2023)
+ Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu (September 2023)
+ The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (April 2024)
+ Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico (October 2024)
+ Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel (April 2025)
+ Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino (September 2025)
+
Monte Remer + The Aquarium is Andrea (December 2022)
+
Jeff Reynolds + The Gourmets (September 2022)
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L.P. Ring + Greg: Not a People Person (April 2023)
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Xan van Rooyen + The Broken Bones of Summer (September 2023)
+
Bill Ryan + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin (June 2023)
+ The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (December 2023)
+ Dagon, by Fred Chappell (July 2024)
+ Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (December 2024)
+ Strange Pictures, by Uketsu (June 2025)
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Sydney Sackett + Boy with Brick (September 2022)
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E. Saxey + Come Buy, Come Buy (December 2021)
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Claire Scherzinger + The Seed Man (September 2021)
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Sharon Dawn Selby + Mine Own (December 2020)
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Tom Sheehan + I Am What I Am Not (March 2013)
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Fraser Sherman + Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (December 2022)
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David Sheskin + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick (December 2024)
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Elena Sichrovsky + Embryo (June 2023)
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J. Siegal + Up and Down (December 2022)
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Jess Simms + Downsizing (December 2024)
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Jeffery Scott Sims + The Sedona House (August 2020)
+ The Cross of Xenophor (March 2022)
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Les Sklaroff + A Preference for Cheese (December 2011)
+ The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield (December 2012)
+ Dundro Fappit's Mistake (December 2012)
+ Something Quirky (December 2012)
+ Hoolocks and Hellions (December 2012)
+ Foroquont's Maze (December 2012)
+ Starbat (March 2013)
+ An Acquisition (March 2013)
+ Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope (August 2013)
+ Sibyl (August 2013)
+ A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph (March 2014)
+ An Excursion to Platport (March 2014)
+ Yesterday's Spoons (March 2014)
+ Slippage (November 2014)
+ The Man with Bronze Hair (November 2014)
+ Thagdar the Immutable (July 2015)
+ A Small Intrusion (July 2015)
+ Another Change of Plan (February 2016)
+ Farny's Place (August 2016)
+ Atacrast (August 2016)
+ Reunion (February 2017)
+ Padratheleon's Ghosts (August 2017)
+ Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters (August 2017)
+ Pranswat Passes Through (February 2018)
+ Eavesdropping at Quoils (February 2018)
+ Feeling the Heat (May 2018)
+ Snryl (May 2018)
+ Sketches of Snoak City (June 2021)
+ Spawn (February 2011)
+ Conspiracy Theory (February 2011)
+ Boffin (June 2011)
+ Fiat Lux (June 2011)
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Steve Slavin + The Fountain of Youth (August 2017)
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Addison Smith + First Breath (December 2020)
+ Hook, Line, and Sinker (July 2024)
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E.E. (Doc) Smith + The Skylark of Space (August 2009)
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Rina Song + Jacob and the Wolf (June 2022)
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A.M. Sutter + Murmurations (September 2025)
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L Swartz + Le Petit Cornichon (December 2023)
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Owen G. Tabard + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife (March 2022)
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Thorin N. Tatge + Intercalary Time (June 2022)
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Aubrey Taylor + The Kid is Killing Me (April 2024)
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Belinda A. Taylor + Eat, Monster Blue Bottle (April 2008)
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Ian Thomas + Streaming Video (February 2008)
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Chisom Umeh + Infinite (June 2023)
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Fabiyas M. V. + Spring Man (December 2020)
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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + The Cat and the Cosmic Horror (March 2021)
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Carl Walmsley + Cottage in the Woods (October 2024)
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Si Wang + Nighthawks (September 2022)
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H G Wells + The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (February 2008)
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D. S. White + Lost City (August 2017)
+ Blood Poisoning (February 2018)
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David Whitmarsh + Winter (December 2020)
+ In The Weave (March 2022)
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Subodhana Wijeyeratne + The Gods Have No Faces (March 2021)
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Matt Wile + A Healthy Man (December 2023)
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Gil Williamson + Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner (February 2008)
+ Hector (February 2008)
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+ Day Trip (March 2013)
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+ The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio (November 2014)
+ Border Incident (July 2015)
+ Playing Around with Arthur (July 2015)
+ Iceweb - Interactive Fiction (February 2016)
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+ Mount Elysium Revisited (February 2017)
+ New Frankfurt (April 2008)
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+ Commedia del'l Venezia (February 2018)
+ The 1002nd Night (June 2008)
+ Hong Kong (22 Nov 2008)
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Matthew Wilson + The Witches Curse (December 2020)
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Charlie Winter + The House We Built Together, Yesterday (June 2025)
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Gunnar De Winter + Fractured (March 2022)
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Peter Wynd + Summer in Duncanny (December 2023)
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LM Zaerr + Interlocking Grains of Light (July 2024)
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Alexander Zalben + Where the Heart Is (June 2022)
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J. H. Zech + Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe (February 2017)
+ Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising (February 2018)
+ Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember (May 2018)
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Martin Zeigler + Atmoboarders! (June 2021)
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Lucy Zhang + Balk (April 2023)
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Anna Ziegelhof + Lay-offs (June 2025)
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Elizabeth Zuckerman + Swans Will Be Swans (July 2024)
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Anna Zumbro + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten (September 2022)
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*Climber, tattoo collector, and peanut-butter connoisseur,* ***Xan van Rooyen*** *is an autistic, non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of* Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, *and* Galaxy’s Edge *among others. They have also written several novels including YA fantasy* My Name is Magic, *and adult arcanopunk novel* Silver Helix. *Xan is also part of the Sauutiverse, an African writer’s collective with their first anthology due out this November from Android Press. Feel free to say hi on [their socials](https://linktr.ee/xanvanrooyen).*

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The Mythaxis Magazine catalogue is your one-stop shop for all content listings, by title, author name, category, and genres. The data is distributed in a variety of formats and a variety of temporal chunks (because AI will do your work for you). Or use the original format of a list of plain old alphabetised table rows, or a sitemap for a singular www source.

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25 Peppercorns by Emma Burnett
A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph by Les Sklaroff
A Comic by Liam Baldwin
A Curse at Midnight by Moustapha Mbacké Diop
A Day Like Any Other by Martin Clark
A Deer's Inheritance by C. Owen Loftus
A Grave of Wind and Leaves by Jalyn Renae Fiske
A Healthy Man by Matt Wile
A Messenger, Deceased by Martin Clark
A Natural Selection by Matthew Kirshenblatt
A New World Order by John A. Frochio
A Preference for Cheese by Les Sklaroff
A Room with a Vu by Martin Clark
A Small Intrusion by Les Sklaroff
A Tale of Salt and Oak by Voss McVeigh
A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth by John A. Frochio
Adalet by Jez Patterson
Alight by Skye Allen
All Avenues Closed by Martin Clark
Alonya and Ivan by Elana Gomel
American Hitsuzen by Michael Bettendorf
An Acquisition by Les Sklaroff
An Excursion to Platport by Les Sklaroff
An Interview with Francesco Verso by Andrew Leon Hudson
An interview with Micah Hyatt by Andrew Leon Hudson
An Odd Recurring Dream by James Davidson
Android 0-CLE5 by Lester Linesmith
Another Change of Plan by Les Sklaroff
Appropriate Technology by Gil Williamson
April the Last by Andrew Leon Hudson
Are Friends Eclectic by Jez Patterson
Artificial-Artificial Intelligence by Andrew Leon Hudson
Atacrast by Les Sklaroff
Atmoboarders! by Martin Zeigler
Aye-Nay by Jez Patterson
Baker's Dozen by Martin Clark
Balk by Lucy Zhang
Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino by Mattia Ravasi
Behind My Eyes by Martin M. Clark
Beyond the Sky by Liam Baldwin
Beyond the Sudden Door by Lyra Meurer
Blazon by Matthew Kirshenblatt
Blood and Souls by Peter Morrison
Blood Poisoning by D. S. White
Body Parts by Anna Koltes
Bodyfellas by Martin Clark
Boffin by Les Sklaroff
Border Incident by Gil Williamson
Border Patrol by Don Mark Baldridge
Boy with Brick by Sydney Sackett
By a Lily's Petal by Ian Thomas
Carousel's by Shaun Anthony McMichael
Cartoon by Liam Baldwin
Central Casting by Chris Penycate
Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang by Chris Lites
Christmas Carole by Martin M. Clark
Come Buy, Come Buy by E. Saxey
Comfort Zone by KC Grifant
Comics by Liam Baldwin
Comics by Liam Baldwin
Commedia del'l Venezia by Gil Williamson
Conspiracy Theory by Les Sklaroff
Cottage in the Woods by Carl Walmsley
Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen by Bill Ryan
Crunch Thump Thump by P. R. O’Leary
Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish by Uchechukwu Nwaka
Dagon, by Fred Chappell by Bill Ryan
Day Trip by Gil Williamson
Death is Like a Box of Chocolates by Fraser Sherman
Death plus One by Martin M. Clark
Default by Elin Olausson
Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains by Finale Doshi-Velez
Dietrich and the Baby by Tom Davies
Diplomacy by Liam Baldwin
Distant and Remote by Jez Patterson
Distant Skies by Charlotte Ashley
Don Juans & Dragoons by Andrew Leon Hudson
Downsizing by Jess Simms
Dundro Fappit's Mistake by Les Sklaroff
E Pluribus Unum by Mame Bougouma Diene
Eat, Monster Blue Bottle by Belinda A. Taylor
Eavesdropping at Quoils by Les Sklaroff
Embryo by Elena Sichrovsky
Emigration by Liam Baldwin
Emoticon by Barry Charman
Equus Magna by John A. Frochio
Every Hat is a Crown by Mike Morgan
Everything's Jake by Christopher Cook
Experimental Diet by Andrew Johnston
Falling Back by Andrew Leon Hudson
Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse by Tom Davies
Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre by Tom Davies
Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms by Tom Davies
Farny's Place by Les Sklaroff
Feeling the Heat by Les Sklaroff
Fiat Lux by Les Sklaroff
Field Support by Liam Baldwin
First Breath by Addison Smith
First In, Last Out by Andrew Leon Hudson
Flesh Doubt by Andrew Leon Hudson
Fly Away, Peter by J. Livermore
For Giving by Olufunmilayo Makinde
Foroquont's Maze by Les Sklaroff
Fractured by Gunnar De Winter
Freewheeling by Annie Percik
Friends in High Places by Emma Burnett
From an Evening at the Cinema by Matthew Kirshenblatt
Full Metal Grandma by Paul Alex Gray
Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu by Mattia Ravasi
Ghosts and Aliens by John A. Frochio
God Blinked by Martin M. Clark
Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills by Mandira Pattnaik
Good Old Days by Andrew Leon Hudson
Good Vibrations by Steve Slavin
Grave Misfortune by Stephen Heuser
Green Bullet by Melanie Manner
Greg: Not a People Person by L.P. Ring
Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin by Bill Ryan
Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d by Daniel Rabuzzi
Headspace by Mark Martin
Hector by Gil Williamson
Helsinki by Gil Williamson
Henry by Jez Patterson
His Fly Undid Him by Matthew Kirshenblatt
His Turn to Remember by John A. Frochio
Hong Kong by Gil Williamson
Hook, Line, and Sinker by Addison Smith
Hoolocks and Hellions by Les Sklaroff
How Manuel Left the Mire by James Branch Cabell
How to Get AI to Like You by Aaron Emmel
I Am What I Am Not by Tom Sheehan
I Have No Wings and I Must Fly by Kyle E. Miller
Iceweb - Interactive Fiction by Gil Williamson
Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember by J. H. Zech
Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising by J. H. Zech
Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe by J. H. Zech
In The Weave by David Whitmarsh
Infinite by Chisom Umeh
Intercalary Time by Thorin N. Tatge
Interlocking Grains of Light by LM Zaerr
Interlude in Green by Martin M. Clark
Into the Darkness by Lee F. Patrick
Jacob and the Wolf by Rina Song
Jinny Greenteeth by Cathy Bryant
JohnBear, Janine, and I by Hermester Barrington
Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico by Mattia Ravasi
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Lies & Other Essentials by Martin Clark
Liminal Spaces by David Farrow
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Living on Reputation by Alistair Bain
Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner by Gil Williamson
Lost City by D. S. White
Madras Point by Martin M. Clark
Magdalena and the Dragon by Peter Morrison
Marciano by Charlotte H. Lee
Maximum Law by Martin M. Clark
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Mindbleed by Andrew Leon Hudson
Mine Own by Sharon Dawn Selby
Mirror, Mirror by Patrick Boylan
Mount Elysium by Gil Williamson
Mount Elysium Revisited by Gil Williamson
Murmurations by A.M. Sutter
Must Be in the Fifties by Andrew Leon Hudson
My Amoeboid Romance by Hermester Barrington
My Beloved is Mine by Jude Clee
Nancy, Please by Steve Boseley
Neurofinancer by Twilite Minotaur
New Frankfurt by Gil Williamson
Nighthawks by Si Wang
Nightshade Memory by Micah Hyatt
No Survivor by Peter Morrison
Noise by Owen Leddy
Not Who We Are by Martin Clark
Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle
Nwanebeakwa by Chinaza Eziaghighala
Of a Kind by Jez Patterson
Oh Dreary Me by Matthew Kirshenblatt
Outpatients by Jonathan Joseph
Padratheleon's Ghosts by Les Sklaroff
Pillars of Distraction by Rob Gillham
Plague Rooster by Micah Hyatt
Playing Around with Arthur by Gil Williamson
Postcards by Annabel Banks
Praedial Larceny by Wayne McCray
Pranswat Passes Through by Les Sklaroff
Prometheus’ Kidneys by Meg Candelaria
Proto-J by Christian Miller
Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co. by Don B Levitt
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Red Fever by Peter Morrison
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Ringside by Martin Clark
Robot Rover by Jez Patterson
Robots of Paris by Andrea Kriz
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Sailing to Tarshish by Martin Clark
Seal-Skin by David Stephen Powell
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Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – January to March by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – July to September by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 by Andrew Leon Hudson
Sibyl by Les Sklaroff
Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb by Gabrielle Bleu
Simulations by Masha Kisel
Sketches of Snoak City by Les Sklaroff
Slippage by Les Sklaroff
Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope by Les Sklaroff
Snow Over Interstate 80 by Martin M. Clark
Snryl by Les Sklaroff
Some Future Date by Callum Graham
Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon by Josh Pearce
Something Else by Dane Erbach
Something Quirky by Les Sklaroff
Sound & Fury by Martin M. Clark
Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel by Mattia Ravasi
Spawn by Les Sklaroff
Special Delivery by Gil Williamson
Spring Man by Fabiyas M. V.
Starbat by Les Sklaroff
Sticky Dreams by Mary Hiers
Stop 17 by Matthew Kirshenblatt
Stranded at the Station by Trisha McKee
Strange Pictures, by Uketsu by Bill Ryan
Streaming Video by Ian Thomas
Strong Emergence by Jonathan Joseph
Summer in Duncanny by Peter Wynd
Sunnyside by Stephen S. Power
Supply & Demand by Martin Clark
Survivor by Peter Morrison
Swans Will Be Swans by Elizabeth Zuckerman
Swimming with Elephants by Travis Ezell
Tag, You're It by Sean MacKendrick
Tear Drops by Andrew Leon Hudson
Terminus Machina : Bailout by Twilite Minotaur
Thagdar the Immutable by Les Sklaroff
The 1002nd Night by Gil Williamson
The Aldous Effect by Martin M. Clark
The Amazing Mermaid by Arlen Feldman
The American Book of the Dead by Chris Lites
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The Cat and the Cosmic Horror by Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala
The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon by Washington Irving
The Cospauper by Christian Miller
The Cross of Xenophor by Jeffery Scott Sims
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The Day the Shimm Stood Still by Andrew Jensen
The Door with no Key by Gil Williamson
The Drill Hall Incident by Gil Williamson
The Enchanters, by James Ellroy by Bill Ryan
The Enormous Gun by Gil Williamson
The Extrusion Project by Gil Williamson
The Fashionistas by Gregory L. Norris
The Fountain of Youth by Steve Slavin
The Four Bill Club by Donald McCarthy
The Ghosts of Cloud City by Twilite Minotaur
The Gods Have No Faces by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
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The Great Divide by Martin Clark
The House We Built Together, Yesterday by Charlie Winter
The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds by Daniel Ausema
The Ingenious Patriot by Ambrose Bierce
The Kid is Killing Me by Aubrey Taylor
The Last Day of the Mute Ant by Jez Patterson
The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio by Gil Williamson
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The Newest Profession by Anya Josephs
The Night Parents by Valerie Alexander
The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube by Steven Genise
The Parking Ticket by Steve Slavin
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The Price of Youth by Moon Bhatt
The Prophets Speak by Andrew Leon Hudson
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The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes by H G Wells
The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten by Anna Zumbro
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The Tale of the Ten Teacups by Tom Davies
The Temple of the Inevitable by Peter Morrison
The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams by Mattia Ravasi
The Third Martian Dick Temple by Micah Hyatt
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The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick by David Sheskin
The Witches Curse by Matthew Wilson
The Woodcutter and the Witchwife by Owen G. Tabard
Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness by Steve Loiaconi
Thy Servant, Death by Scott J. Couturier
Time Dysperception by Jack Mackenzie
Timed Out by Jez Patterson
Tintype Trolls by Teresa Milbrodt
Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild by Marc Phillips
To Erm is Human by Jez Patterson
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Touch Wood by Sandee Bree Breathnach
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Umpire of Desolation by Hannah Hulbert
Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters by Les Sklaroff
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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

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  • Mythaxis operates with a rolling submission window, only closing when a new issue is in production. Unless this page says otherwise, we are open for submissions!

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  • We aim to acknowledge submissions the same day they are received. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within 24 hours of submission, please get in touch.

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  • We aim to respond to submissions with a decision to accept or reject within 14 days of that date, but rl (real life) and rl (reading load) can get in the way. If you do not hear from us after 30 days, please get in touch.

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  • We are a paying market, but by necessity on a very modest scale. See below for current compensation details regarding short fiction and flash fiction pieces. When we are able to increase compensation for authors, you can rest assured we’ll be letting everyone know it.

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  • For original fiction, we typically require First Print and Digital rights with a six month period of exclusivity from the date of publication. We also ask permission to potentially include accepted pieces in future anthologies, in event of which an additional full payment and digital copy will be offered in compensation. All other rights remain entirely with the authors.

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  • We do not currently invite reprint submissions.

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  • Simultaneous submissions are not only accepted, they are encouraged. Put your work out there, as many places as you can! We merely ask that you notify us of acceptance at another market as soon as possible, to avoid our disappointment if someone else beats us to the punch.

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COMPENSATION:

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Short Fiction

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  • Length: 2,500-5,000 words. This is a firm limit. Generally speaking, the further a story goes beyond 5,000 words the more it will need to impress, but the door is not shut in advance.

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  • Compensation: $10 on acceptance and return of contract.

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Flash Fiction

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  • Length: 500-1,000 words. Tweener stories (1,000-2,500 words) will be considered, but we prefer flash to be short and sharp, so you best get whittling!

    • -

  • Compensation: $5 on acceptance and return of contract.

    • -
-

-

CONTENT GUIDELINES:

-
    -

  • All submissions must be the original work of the author. We will not accept any work which incorporates copyrighted characters or material, fan fiction, tabletop-game adaptations, etc.

    • -

  • The editor is a lover of good storytelling. Whether you subscribe to “Hollywood” structuring, the beginning-middle-end philosophy, or some other narrative trend, all are welcome. By contrast, the less identifiable as “a story” your story is, the harder it will be to find a home here.

    • -

  • The editor is an appreciator of effective prose. This is something that changes from one story to the next, and what works for one won’t for another. However, what works for all is a minimum of clumsy typos, “creative” application of vocabulary, punctuation, and grammatical norms, and other annoyances. Proofread before you submit, or better still, get someone else to.

    • -

  • Mythaxis anticipates an adult readership in the sense of maturity, but this is not a market for pornographic or offensively extreme content. “Artistic justification” is a good (if subjective) argument, and we shall (subjectively) assess each story according to its (subjective) merits.

    • -

  • We welcome writers of any and all backgrounds, be they cultural or personal, and submissions exploring diverse perspectives and experiences, provided they do not seek only to attack or demean those of others.

    • -
-

-

FORMATTING GUIDELINES:

-
    -

  • Acceptable document types are RTF, DOC, or DOCX.

    • -

  • Straightforward manuscript formatting is preferred for editorial convenience:

    -
      -

    • Please use an easy-reading font (Times New Roman 12pt, etc.).

      • -

    • Do not manually insert empty lines between paragraphs, or use tabs for first-line indents. Use paragraph formatting to set automatic indents or paragraph breaks.

      • -

    • Use a single centred # to represent essential section breaks.

      • -

    • Use italics for italics, don’t underline instead. Smart (“curly”) punctuation is fine.

      • -

    • If your manuscript includes any unusual formatting, please alert the editors when submitting and have a really good, story-related reason.

      • -
    • -

  • Submissions should be anonymous, and do not require a cover page. Only include the story title, the word count, and the story text. Do not include the author’s name in or on the file.

    • -

  • Headers should contain the story title only. Footers should contain a page number only.

    • -
-

-

HOW TO SUBMIT:

-
    -

  • Email files as an attachment to andrew(dot)leon(dot)hudson(at)gmail(dot)com

    • -

  • Use the email subject line: “MYTHAXIS SUBMISSION – [STORY TITLE]”.

    • -

  • Feel free to include a short cover letter, though this is not mandatory. Any description of the story must be limited to 25 words for the editor’s amusement (impressive pitch descriptions will be appreciated, even though the story itself will sink or swim on its own merits).

    • -

  • A concise author biography is welcomed but not mandatory. If desired, introduce yourself and list your most recent (or proudest) publications, if any. Lacking a publication history is no impediment here. Mythaxis has embraced new authors and old, and will continue this tradition.

    • -

  • We repeat: Please ensure your attachment is anonymous. Do not include the author’s name on the front page, headers or footers, or in the filename of the document.

    • -
-

-

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the editor at the above address. We look forward to reading your work!

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/NewSubsPage-March2020b.docx b/content-xway/issue22/NewSubsPage-March2020b.docx deleted file mode 100644 index 2563051e..00000000 Binary files a/content-xway/issue22/NewSubsPage-March2020b.docx and /dev/null differ diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/NewSubsPage-March2020b.html b/content-xway/issue22/NewSubsPage-March2020b.html deleted file mode 100644 index b2e6e5f2..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/NewSubsPage-March2020b.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ -

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

-

Mythaxis operates with a rolling submission window, only closing when a new issue is in production. Unless this page says otherwise, we are open for submissions!

-

We aim to acknowledge submissions the same day they are received. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within 24 hours of submission, please get in touch.

-

We aim to respond to submissions with a decision to accept or reject within 14 days of that date, but rl (real life) and rl (reading load) can get in the way. If you do not hear from us after 30 days, please get in touch.

-

We are a paying market, but by necessity on a very modest scale. See below for current compensation details regarding short fiction and flash fiction pieces. When we are able to increase compensation for authors, you can rest assured we’ll be letting everyone know it.

-

For original fiction, we typically require First Print and Digital rights with a six month period of exclusivity from the date of publication. We also ask permission to potentially include accepted pieces in future anthologies, in event of which an additional full payment and digital copy will be offered in compensation. All other rights remain entirely with the authors.

-

We do not currently invite reprint submissions.

-

Simultaneous submissions are not only accepted, they are encouraged. Put your work out there, as many places as you can! We merely ask that you notify us of acceptance at another market as soon as possible, to avoid our disappointment if someone else beats us to the punch.

-

-

COMPENSATION

-

Short Fiction

-
    -

  • Length: 2,500-5,000 words. This is a firm limit. Generally speaking, the further a story goes beyond 5,000 words the more it will need to impress, but the door is not shut in advance.

    • -

  • Compensation: $10 on acceptance and return of contract.

    • -
-

Flash Fiction

-
    -

  • Length: 500-1,000 words. Tweener stories (1,000-2,500 words) will be considered, but we prefer flash to be short and sharp, so you best get whittling!

    • -

  • Compensation: $5 on acceptance and return of contract.

    • -
-

-

CONTENT GUIDELINES

-

All submissions must be the original work of the author. We will not accept any work which incorporates copyrighted characters or material, fan fiction, tabletop-game adaptations, etc.

-

The editor is a lover of good storytelling. Whether you subscribe to “Hollywood” structuring, the beginning-middle-end philosophy, or some other narrative trend, all are welcome. By contrast, the less identifiable as “a story” your story is, the harder it will be to find a home here.

-

The editor is an appreciator of effective prose. This is something that changes from one story to the next, and what works for one won’t for another. However, what works for all is a minimum of clumsy typos, “creative” application of vocabulary, punctuation, and grammatical norms, and other annoyances. Proofread before you submit, or better still, get someone else to.

-

Mythaxis anticipates an adult readership in the sense of maturity, but this is not a market for pornographic or offensively extreme content. “Artistic justification” is a good (if subjective) argument, and we shall (subjectively) assess each story according to its (subjective) merits.

-

We welcome writers of any and all backgrounds, be they cultural or personal, and submissions exploring diverse perspectives and experiences, provided they do not seek only to attack or demean those of others.

-

-

FORMATTING GUIDELINES

-

Acceptable document types are RTF, DOC, or DOCX.

-

Straightforward manuscript formatting is preferred for editorial convenience:

-
    -

  • Please use an easy-reading font (Times New Roman 12pt, etc.).

    • -

  • Do not manually insert empty lines between paragraphs, or use tabs for first-line indents. Use paragraph formatting to set automatic indents or paragraph breaks.

    • -

  • Use a single centred # to represent essential section breaks.

    • -

  • Use italics for italics, don’t underline instead. Smart (“curly”) punctuation is fine.

    • -

  • If your manuscript includes any unusual formatting, please alert the editors when submitting and have a really good, story-related reason.

    • -
-

Submissions should be anonymous, and do not require a cover page. Only include the story title, the word count, and the story text. Do not include the author’s name in or on the file.

-

Headers should contain the story title only. Footers should contain a page number only.

-

-

HOW TO SUBMIT

-

Email files as an attachment to andrew(dot)leon(dot)hudson(at)gmail(dot)com

-

Use the email subject line: “MYTHAXIS SUBMISSION – [STORY TITLE]”.

-

Feel free to include a short cover letter, though this is not mandatory. Any description of the story must be limited to 25 words for the editor’s amusement (impressive pitch descriptions will be appreciated, even though the story itself will sink or swim on its own merits).

-

A concise author biography is welcomed but not mandatory. If desired, introduce yourself and list your most recent (or proudest) publications, if any. Lacking a publication history is no impediment here. Mythaxis has embraced new authors and old, and will continue this tradition.

-

We repeat: Please ensure your attachment is anonymous. Do not include the author’s name on the front page, headers or footers, or in the filename of the document.

-

-

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the editor at the above address. We look forward to reading your work!

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/ShortSubsPage-March2020c.docx b/content-xway/issue22/ShortSubsPage-March2020c.docx deleted file mode 100644 index fbe333b3..00000000 Binary files a/content-xway/issue22/ShortSubsPage-March2020c.docx and /dev/null differ diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/ShortSubsPage-March2020c.html b/content-xway/issue22/ShortSubsPage-March2020c.html deleted file mode 100644 index 01481e83..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/ShortSubsPage-March2020c.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ -

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

-

Mythaxis is open for submissions! We seek and offer the following:

-
    -

  • Length: 1,000-7,500 words. This is a firm limit. Generally speaking, the further a story goes beyond 5,000 words the more it will need to impress, but the door is not shut in advance.

    • -

  • Compensation: $20 on acceptance and return of contract. Payment via PayPal.

    • -
-

We aim to acknowledge submissions the same day they are received. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within 24 hours of submission, please get in touch.

-

We aim to accept or reject within 14 days of that acknowledgment, but rl (real life) and rl (reading load) can get in the way. If you do not hear from us after 30 days, feel free to query.

-

We require First Print and Digital rights with a six month period of exclusivity from the date of publication. We also ask permission to potentially include accepted pieces in future anthologies, in event of which an additional full payment and digital copy will be offered in compensation. All other rights remain entirely with the author.

-

Simultaneous submissions are not only accepted, they are encouraged. Put your work out there, as many places as you can! We merely ask that you notify us of acceptance at another market as soon as possible. We do not currently invite reprint submissions.

-

Submissions should be anonymous, and do not require a cover page. Only include the story title, the approximate word count, and the story text. Do not include the author’s name in or on the file.

-

All submissions must be the original work of the author. We anticipate an adult readership in the sense of maturity, but this is not a market for pornographic or offensively extreme content.

-

We welcome writers of any and all backgrounds, be they cultural or personal, and submissions exploring diverse perspectives and experiences, provided they do not seek to attack or demean those of others.

-

-

HOW TO SUBMIT

-

Email files as an attachment to:

-

andrew(dot)leon(dot)hudson

-

(at)gmail(dot)com

-

Please use the email subject line “MYTHAXIS SUBMISSION – [STORY TITLE]” to evade spam filters.

-

Feel free to include a concise cover letter and/or author bio, though neither is mandatory. Mythaxis has a history of publishing first-time authors, and we mean to continue this tradition.

-

-

FORMATTING GUIDELINES

-

Acceptable document types are RTF, DOC, or DOCX.

-

Straightforward manuscript formatting is preferred for editorial convenience:

-
    -

  • Please use an easy-reading font (Times New Roman 12pt, etc.).

    • -

  • Do not manually insert empty lines between paragraphs, or use tabs for first-line indents. Use paragraph formatting to set automatic indents or paragraph breaks.

    • -

  • Use a single centred # to represent essential section breaks.

    • -

  • Use italics for italics, don’t underline instead. Smart (“curly”) punctuation is fine.

    • -

  • If your manuscript includes any unusual formatting, please alert the editors when submitting and have a really good, story-related reason.

    • -
-

-

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the editor at the above address. We look forward to reading your work!

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Behind My Eyes - Martin M Clark.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Behind My Eyes - Martin M Clark.html deleted file mode 100644 index b9ca79d1..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Behind My Eyes - Martin M Clark.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,203 +0,0 @@ -

Behind My Eyes

-

-

Martin M. Clark

-

-

-

-

For this memorial issue of Mythaxis, I invited former contributors to submit stories with a theme of “memory”. First amongst these is a typically gung ho mix of sf, action, and humour from Martin M. Clark, one which I think Gil would have appreciated.

-

-

-

-

So, I’m sitting in the Roundhouse Bar with Taco Murphy, not doing much of anything. Pretty much par for the course since the plant shut down, but it wasn’t like either of us had a wife and kids waiting at home. Well, this woman comes in - slim, brunette, way too classy for the Roundhouse - and stands for a moment, scoping the joint. Gets my attention, not just on general principle, but because she’s in a business suit, flat shoes, no purse. Not what you see around here, except on a cop or similar.

-

But as I check her out, I swear, she kind of flickers. Then again, I got this metal plate in my head, from when Bobby Newmark rolled his old man’s Corvette, and I don’t always see things the same as other folks.

-

No matter. Classy walks up to Henry, the barman. He’s standing, palms flat on the countertop, glum look on his face, like this has to be the Licencing Commission or somesuch. Taco, being Taco, slides along the bench to get a better view of her ass. The dickhead catches my elbow, makes me jab the bottle I’m holding against my teeth. I shove him away and we have words, so that I miss what was being said up at the bar.

-

Miss my chance to run.
-Henry points in our direction, relief obvious on his face. Classy nods and starts walking over. Taco, he’s still bitching at me, so I have to punch him in the shoulder to get his attention. He rubs his arm, glares. “You wanna’ take this outside, Frank? Huh?”

-

“Get your head outta’ your goddam ass, we got company.”

-

He looks at the approaching woman. Blinks. “What gives?”

-

“Beats me. You got any outstanding warrants might have escaped your attention, dude?”

-

Taco grunts. “Like I’m always the bad guy? You ain’t no angel, Frank.”

-

Classy stops in front of our booth. She’s a looker, no argument: neat figure, laughter in her eyes, blood-red lipstick. But up-close there’s something about her – takes a moment to register – perfect bilateral symmetry (I dated a med student back-a-ways). She smiles. “And which of you fine gentlemen is Frank Booth?”

-

Taco swallows a laugh and sits back, taking a long pull on his beer. I stand up, all polite, like. “That would be me, Miss.” I pull my baseball cap off, run a hand back across my close-cropped hair, and set my headgear firmly back in place. “We got business together? Because you sure don’t look familiar.”

-

“I’m Clara Conner. Agent Clara Conner.”

-

“Uh-huh. And which particular agency are you from? If you don’t mind me asking.”

-

She reaches into an inside jacket pocket and removes a slim leather billfold. Again, just for a moment, it’s like bad reception on your TV. The shape of a woman is there, under the static, but featureless, like a storefront dummy. Her hair, skin, clothes - all just window dressing. I glance at Taco but he sure don’t see it, if his leer is anything to go by.

-

Then this voice is in my head, the voice from my dreams, telling me to get the hell outta’ Dodge, as in right now. And sometimes you just gotta listen.

-

I slap the billfold from her hand, send it spinning across the bar. Kick the table hard against her legs. She don’t flinch, gasp, or nothing - hand darts behind her, I figure reaching for a piece carried in the small of her back. Taco jumps up, switchblade in his hand like magic. The guy may be a shithead, but he’s always got my back.

-

“Freeze!” Henry, holding the .38 he keeps behind the bar. “Nobody move.”

-

God bless the predictable.

-

Clara half-turns her head towards him, but keeps her eyes on mine. “Trust me, you don’t want any part of this.”

-

Henry clears his throat, sounds dry. “My bar, my friends, my call. Frank here has a temper but I’ve never known him hit a woman. Everyone just calm down and we’ll do things peaceable, like.”

-

Clara looks straight at me. “Oh, I think we’re way beyond that – don’t you, Frank?”

-

I’ve worked door at the Consort Club and could tell it was gonna kick off, no matter what. I clench my fists. She smiles.

-

The fire exit behind me opens as someone remembers someplace they have to be. The low afternoon sun streams in, lights her up like some religious icon.

-

Her pupils don’t react.

-

Clara spins round, towards Henry, and I see metal in her hand. I don’t know how anyone can move that fast. I hear her gun go ‘woof’.

-

Henry, he explodes. All of him above the bar just blows apart, along with the bottles behind. Liquor spray bursts into flames.

-

The bitch spins again, draws a bead on my chest.

-

A shotgun roars.

-

Takes half her face away.

-

And then it’s whole again.

-

Jonny Chen, short-order cook, standing in the kitchen doorway. He rak-raks another round in his 12-gauge. I grab Taco’s collar and bundle us both backwards over the bench. Because behind Jonny is the gas griddle, and still perfect Clara is already aiming at him.

-

I hear her gun, then the Propane blast drowns everything else. That big old bench seat shoves us across the floor like leaves in the yard. Saves our asses. Taco drags me to my feet and through the fire exit. The alleyway leads to 2nd Street one way, Braun’s junkyard the other. We head for the wide-open. We stagger, we stumble, we run.

-

And don’t look back.

-

We run down 2nd Street, in the general direction of away. Sunday afternoon, so not many citizens about – and no cops. I hear this big whump of a secondary behind us, and a couple of other folks start running as well, so at least we’re not stand-outs. Make it as far as Rodriguez Hardware then have to stop, wheezing, legs done. Taco, he ain’t much better.

-

Vacant lot beside the store, been empty so long it’s all overgrown. Couple of old hippies planted fruit bushes and put up a sign saying ‘Reclaimed Green’. Don’t think they figured on a ground crop of condoms and reefer butts. Well, maybe the reefer. We lay up there, off the street, trying to get our breath back.

-

Taco jabs me in the chest. “You really done it this time, asshole.”

-

I jab him straight back. “What, this is somehow all my fault?”

-

“Well, let me think – you know of any other shitheads called ‘Frank Booth’ around here? Huh? And what kind of goddam gun goes ‘woof’, anyway? What the hell you got us into this time?”

-

“Like I should know? Jesus. Anyway, don’t matter, I got a plan.”

-

“You always got a plan, Frank, and they always suck.” He sniffs. “Try me.”

-

I take a deep breath. “We get our shit together, load it in my truck. We blow town and never come back.”

-

Pause. I hear Fire Department sirens getting closer.

-

Taco stares at me. “Running away? That’s it?”

-

“Damn straight.”

-

Another pause. Drops of sweat ease down my back.

-

He rubs his chin. “Why take your heap of shit Ford? My Toyota is way cooler.”

-

“My heap of shit Ford don’t draw attention. We sell your pimped-out ride to Bobby Newmark for travelling money. He’s made an offer, what, two, three times?”

-

“And suddenly I’m out a custom pickup? Jesus.”

-

I hold my hands up. “Hey, no problem, dude. I’ll take off on my own while you stay here and play dumb. But if I’m in the wind then the law will come down hard on anyone they do have to hand, count on it. You want some chickenshit life with the cops busting your balls every other day, be my guest.”

-

Another long stare. Taco spits in the dirt. “Shit.” Sighs. “Let’s get gone.”

-

We head out back of the lot, past some sheds, moving parallel to Main Street. The town is just buildings around a crossroads and nowhere is really that far from anywhere else. My place is, was, set back-a-ways from the main drag. Nothing much but it suited me. No sign I had company, with just my truck standing in the back yard.

-

I toss Taco the keys. “You gas her up while I pack. Then we’ll head over to yours.”

-

“What am I, your personal ATM? Get real.”

-

I fish out my wallet. “Thirty. All I got.”

-

He takes the bills and gets behind the wheel as I go inside. I’m alone. He drives off while I start cramming clothes into a duffel. Not a lot else to show for my time here, apart from my ‘armory’. It’s a shoe box in the night stand and I tip the contents over the bed.

-

Two guns. First is old-school – Remington .41 Derringer owned by some badass riverboat gambler. So my mom said, anyways. It goes in my jacket pocket as maybe worth pawning. Second is the real deal – Browning 9mm. Came from my grandfather, who was Shore Patrol in Korea and never fired a shot. Still works fine and I can hit a can right across the yard 7 from 10, when sober.

-

“Put the gun down, Frank. It just complicates matters.”

-

I recognise the voice but look anyway.

-

Clara Conner.

-

Standing in the doorway. Not a mark on her, I mean, not one. No burn marks on her clothes, nothing. She steps forward into the room and fear has her back.

-

“How long did it take, Frank, to find someone with the same name? Someone suitable?” She smiles. “And I use the term advisedly. Does it make it easier when he shares your dreams? Or was it just an ego preservation technique? No matter. I have to admit, though, this is so far under the radar that Jung himself would have struggled to find you sooner.”

-

I stand there without speaking. I thumb the safety catch ‘off’.

-

“There’s no need to be coy, Frank, no need to hide any longer.” She steps up.

-

I step back. “Listen, lady, I’m not who you think I am. I’m not this other ‘Frank Booth’ with a new face.” I pull a ‘kerchief from my jacket, wipe sweat from my face, cram it back inside. “I’m just me.”

-

Her smile is a thin line. “Really? Well, you’re worth far more to us alive, but dead is acceptable. Now, I give you, the real you, one last chance to-”

-

I twist and bring the Browning up. Clara moves so slick it’s like something we’ve practiced. Grabs the barrel and it ends up pointing at the ceiling, arm against arm. We’re real close. She stares into my eyes. Hers look like a dead shark I seen once.

-

Gunshot.

-

Make that a cannon.

-

The kick almost breaks my wrist as I learn the goddam Derringer actually works. I step back but the Browning won’t follow. Can’t see for smoke and a cloud of jacket fibers. There’s a sound like fresh popcorn.

-

I blink.

-

Clara is a bald mannequin, naked apart from some Sam Browne harness getup with pouches. The eyes, nostrils, mouth are there, but the rest is featureless grey sheen. There’s a hole in her gut the size of my fist, surrounded by blue sparks and flickers. I figure the Derringer packed a custom load, designed to settle any argument.

-

Slowly the dummy tilts backwards, then falls, lands on the carpet with a rigid thud. The hole in my jacket pocket is smoldering and I have to bat it out. Then the blue sparks from her turn white and I feel heat, even from 6 feet away. Time to grab my duffel and bail.

-

I reach the kitchen with a foundry furnace at my back. I hear bedroom curtains burst into flame, the scree-scree of a smoke alarm. Charge out back and throw myself face-down in the dirt. The windows blow but glass and flames don’t find me.

-

I roll over. The sun shines like this was a regular day, nothing special.

-

I’m cool.

-

Could have just lain there I suppose, even as the fire took hold, waited for Taco.

-

Except not all my neighbors consider me a total asshole, and might come check.

-

Didn’t need a whole bunch of questions, so I get up, lift the duffel, and start walking.
-Couple of folks on the sidewalk, looking back into town, but I didn’t need no reminder. Walk a couple of blocks and see my truck coming the other way. Taco pulls up, gets out, but staring at where I live, not the mess downtown.

-

Wipes his mouth. “That you, Frank, huh? Covering your tracks? Well, tell you straight up, I’m not torching my mom’s garage, no way.”

-

Taco’s mom was now Mrs Garcia. Living above the garage sounds better than a grown man still at home, but he don’t pay no rent. One reason he’d had spare cash to spend so his ride. I grunt, toss the duffel in back. We get in, U-turn, and split.

-

I sit back, take a breath. “That Clara bitch showed up. Had to shoot her.”

-

Truck almost nosedives into the asphalt as Taco stomps on the brake. Pulls off his cap and starts beating me with it. “Goddam you, Frank, goddam you! Jesus Christ, she’s dead?”

-

Not sure what to say that he’ll believe. Not sure I believe it myself. I bat him away. “Listen, just listen, dammit!” Taco stops, wipes his mouth. I set my shoulders. “She left me no option, no option. People she works for think I’m some other ‘Frank Booth’ with a new face. Even though I’ve lived here my whole damn life. No reasoning with her.”

-

“That fire won’t hide a body. I seen it on TV, forensics. Oh, man, we are screwed.”

-

“Just drive, will ya’. Trust me, we’re cool.”

-

Taco glares at me. We take off. He sniffs. “So, you saying we’re not screwed?”

-

“Something like Thermite went off after she died, burned her right up. This is one of them Black Ops deals, dude, zero evidence if things go south. I figure if we can duck out, it won’t be the cops that come looking.”

-

“And that’s a good thing?”

-

“What she said, took them long enough to latch on the first time. I figure if we keep moving, they got zero chance second time around.” Wipe my face. “Anyway, always said you wanted to travel.”

-

He looks at me a long moment. Shakes his head, snorts, laughs. Laughs again. I join in, can’t help it. We hit the edge of town and he shifts up a gear. Pair of us barrel down the road like a pair of escaped lunatics.

-

I stay with my truck when we reach the Garcia spread, while Taco runs back-and-forth with his gear. His Toyota is a ’93, with upright exhausts behind the cab, ‘Lone Star’ paint job, enough chrome to make the glare a hazard to navigation. He carries a double sleeping bag and candles in the big storage box, even rigged external speakers to play romantic music while making out. Guy is a primo skirt-chaser, and then some.

-

Anyway, dickhead loads two bags plus a box of gadgets, leaves his mom a note. I guess the less she knows the better, if anyone comes asking. I see he’s cut-up about no face-to-face goodbye, but say squat. My folks are both gone and I got no family worth mentioning.

-

We pull away in convoy, me eating his dust. Figure I owe him that at least.

-

#

-

The Newmark’s have this big place on the road to Bixby, ranchero style. Me and Taco did some odd jobs around the place, so know to take the side access marked ‘Deliveries’. We pull up round back and Consuela, the housekeeper, comes out.

-

She gives us the eye. “You got some call to be around here, boys? Only I told you after last time, if we want the pool cleaned, we’ll use a professional.”

-

Taco takes his cap off. “It’s Bobby we’re here to see, Miss Consuela. Private business.”

-

Looks down her nose at us. “Mister Newmark Junior isn’t at home. I’ll let him know you called by.”

-

Our plan is going south by the minute, but I saw a big Mercedes parked out front as we came in. I smile. “Then I figure Mister Newmark Senior is around? Maybe we could speak to him instead?”

-

Bobby’s old man owns ‘Newmark Neu’, something high-tech. You see the ‘N2’ logo around, but they don’t employ no locals apart from catering and security. Despite that he’s a stand-up guy, always treats us fair.

-

Consuela, well, she goes tight like I suggested a three-way, then nods and heads inside. Taco and me kick dirt for a couple of minutes before she reappears. “He’ll see you now. Far side, in the Rose Garden.”

-

Taco grabs the documents from the glove box. We tip our caps, all smiles, and trail round. Maybe they had roses there once, but these days it’s a golf green, complete with flag. Old man Newmark is in polo shirt and chinos, practicing shots from 20 feet.

-

“Afternoon, boys. Bobby isn’t here just now but I understand this is business, so maybe I can help?”

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Taco nods. “He’s made a few offers on my customized Toyota, Mister Newmark, and I’m minded to accept.”

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“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Newmark points back towards town with his putter. “And this sudden change of heart wouldn’t have anything to do with that, I suppose?”

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Look over my shoulder at the column of smoke. “Straight-up coincidence, sir. No, we’re headed to Vegas and the truck is the only thing we got by way of steak money. Except up there they get that kind of thing all the time, so the offers will be shit. Makes more sense to sell here, where there’s a ready buyer. Now, given that Bobby ain’t around, I’m thinking cash sale with a one-week return. So, if your son don’t take to his new ride, he gets his money back when we return with our winnings”

-

Newmark laughs. “I have to admire your confidence, Frank - been courting Lady Luck recently? Well, given how my day is turning out I’m inclined to agree she’s smiling on us, so what outrageous price are we talking here?”

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Taco rubs his chin. “He mentioned eight grand. I’ll take seven for a cash sale.”

-

Another laugh. “You’ll take six and be thankful. Final offer.”

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Me and Taco exchange glances. I shrug. He nods. “We have a deal, sir. I have the pink slip with me, insurance, everything.”

-

Newmark slots his putter into the golf bag. “Take a few minutes to enjoy the view. No offence, boys, but I’d prefer to access my safe in private.”

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“None taken, sir. We’ll wait right here.”

-

We watch as he goes inside, then I turn on Taco. “Eight grand? Bobby only offered five, and he was drunk at the time.”

-

“You’re complaining we’re walking away with more? And what exactly are you bringing to the table, Frank? Remind me?”

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“Apart from my charm and personality, you mean? Face it, dude, I’m the brains of this here outfit.”

-

“Asshole.”

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“Shithead.”

-

We grab each other, fall, tussle in the dirt.

-

Hear a cough, stop, look up.

-

Consuela stands there, pretty much the poster girl for Contempt. She carries two bottles of beer on a tray. Purses her lips. “Mister Newmark though you might appreciate some refreshment. He’s waiting for you in the study, but take your own sweet time, boys, I’m sure he’s got all day.”

-

We get up, dust ourselves down, take the beer, mumble thanks. Taco shakes his documents clean and we follow her through the French windows. Inside is cool and airy, our boots echo on the tiled floor as we cross the hallway. Consuela knocks on the double doors and we go in.

-

First thing I see is a big pile of cash money on the big oak desk. It looks like, like hope. Newmark is standing by the window, using his mobile.

-

“–still here, yes. How long will… well, I’m sure they won’t mind a few minutes delay. Everything is relative, as they say. OK, see you soon.” He closes the phone and places it on the desk. Smiles. “Come in boys, make yourselves comfortable. And thank you, Consuela, that will be all. In fact, take the rest of the afternoon off. The family will be out this evening, so your services won’t be required.”

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She almost curtseys, closes the door behind her.

-

Newmark pushes the pile of bills towards us, sits down behind his desk. “Six thousand dollars. Half in hundreds, the rest in ten’s and twenties. Sorry about the bulk, boys, but I’m sure you’ve brought along a bag to carry your winnings. Take a seat, Bobby will be along in a few minutes.”

-

Not too keen on that, in case he nixes the sale, but can’t really refuse the man’s hospitality. We sit down, sip our beer. Newmark goes through the documents and Taco signs the bill of sale. We sip more beer, talk sports, time drags. Seems like an age, then I hear a car pull up out front. Maybe a minute or so and the study door opens. We look round.

-

Clara Conner.

-

Taco and me jump up but the Glock she holds gives us pause.

-

I look at Clara, at Newmark. I lose it. “No way, no fucking way. I seen what she is, but she burned, burned everything around her.”

-

Clara looks surprised, but not really. “Come now, Frank, it was you who designed us to operate in threes, after all.”

-

“Jesus Christ, won’t anyone listen to me? I’m not this goddam Frank Booth you’re looking for! Ask around, ask anyone you want – I was born here, school, worked at Gibson Chemical, that’s it. Furthest I’ve been on vacation is Baton Rouge. I’m just a regular guy.”

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Taco half raises his hand. “We went to Miami that one time. Toby’s bachelor weekend.”

-

I glare at him. “Unhelpful, dude.”

-

“Just saying, is all.”

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“Enough!” Clara sounds like she’s trying not to laugh. “Well, my Frank Booth stole a fortune in Agency slush funds and left behind his corpse to dead-end the investigation. So, we were willing to entertain, ah, unconventional means to find him. Or at least that part of his consciousness being carried by a donor mind.”

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Newmark smiles. “That would be you, Frank, in case it’s not obvious.”

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“Like fuck it is.”

-

“Newmark Neu are skip-tracers of the collective unconscious, the company interested parties turn to when all other avenues are closed. Because while a man can change his looks, his voice, his lifestyle, what he can’t control are his dreams.” And he pauses, like this is some big reveal.

-

The room feels like a hit of bad Mescal with a side-order of Peyote. I taste salt sweat on my top lip. Face Clara. “You know this is total bullshit, right?”

-

She shrugs. “Memories maketh the man, if you don’t mind the misquotation, and the man we need exists as a neural clone, biding his time.” Clara reaches inside her jacket, pulls out a billfold. “If it’s any consolation, Frank, this was always how it ends. The Agency discovered the visual trigger your namesake intended to use to wake up from being you somewhere down the line, so I’m merely pre-empting matters.”

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“Then let us run, like we planned. If I ain’t around then I can’t see any of that crap.”

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Clara smiles. “Nice try, but as one of me said, you’re worth a lot more to us alive–”

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“But dead is acceptable.” Newmark leans forward. “If this doesn’t work then I drop you myself, to make sure he never gets out.”

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I back up against the fireplace. “What I ever done to you, Mister Newmark?” Hard not to whine.

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“Bastard damn near killed my boy getting to you, and that can’t go unanswered.”

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I rub the side of my head, where the plate is. “The accident? But, but that was years ago.”

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Clara flicks the billfold open, facing down. “We’ve all been playing a long game, boys. But now it’s over.”

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Taco balls his fists, ready. But a bullet is way quicker.

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Then there’s pain in my head. Not like being punched, but inside, deep. Makes me cry out it’s so bad. And I hear a voice say, “No-one shall weep for Herod.”

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My voice.

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Clara drops the Glock and billfold. Stands straight, arms by her side, frozen. For a moment the rest of us follow suit.

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Newmark goes for the desk drawer. Taco goes for his switchblade. I drop to my knees, squeezing my head in both hands like that’s gonna help.

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Newmark hauls out a big-ass revolver. I see the flicker of steel as Taco flips his blade, catches it by the tip.

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Newmark aims, aims at me. Taco – arm back, throws.

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Gunshot.

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Marble flakes from the fireplace cut my face. Makes me turn away, eyes screwed shut.

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There’s no second shot.

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I look round. Taco’s knife is in Newmark’s throat, right to the hilt. Gurgling. Blood all down his shirtfront. He slumps back in his chair, gun lands on the carpet. Taco turns to Clara, fists up, but she stands there like nothing happened.

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The pain in my head is down to just the worst hangover ever. I stand up, feel sick. Room sways, but at least the floor don’t smack me in the face.

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Taco wipes his mouth. His hand shakes. Neither of us has killed before. “Christ, Frank, what just happened?”

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“They were bound to send the Furies after me, so I built in a pause function. Nothing as obvious as a kill switch, I knew they’d check for that. Same way I knew they’d use Newmark, so hiding out right under his nose made it all the sweeter.”

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My man looks at me, he looks at me hard. “Say what?”

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What it meant was gone, like a dream you can’t recall. I rub the back of my head.

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“Dude?”

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“Frank? That you?”

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“I guess.” I look round the room. “Shit.”

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“Yeah, big-time. Let’s grab the cash and bail.”

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I hold up a hand. “Wait, man, just gimmie a moment.” Look round the room, but seeing it this time. “Pull your knife, but wrap it in something so it don’t drip. Uh, use your cap.”

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Taco snorts. “Why mine?”

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“Cos mine is a signed Kyle Busch original, that’s why. Get to it, man, in case someone heard anything.”

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I stuff the pile of bills into the trash can liner. Taco’s switchblade and cap go in on top. He reaches for the bill of sale but I shake my head. “Leave it, dude. Anyone ever asks, we were here, concluded our business like gentlemen, and left.”

-

“So I’m still out a pickup?”

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“Yeah, you’re still out a pickup, but when the cops start picking this over, it gives us a reason for being here that don’t involve murder. Now, you done your part so it’s time for me to step up.”

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I pick up the billfold and jam it in my back pocket, eyes closed. Pull out my singed ‘kerchief and lift the Glock. It sits heavy in my hand. Taco backs up almost to the door, eyes wide.

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I aim at Newmark, edge as close as I dare. Half look away, pull the trigger.

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Gunshot.

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Taco’s knife wound turns into a big hole. Bullet goes clean through Newmark’s neck into the oak chair back. More blood. I drop the gun by Clara. Sometimes all you can do is mess things up some, and hope. Take a breath, turn to face my man. “Marines, we are leaving.”

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Taco grins, but tight. “Finally, one of your goddam plans I can get behind, Frank.”

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“It’s the same plan, dickhead.”

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We bail. Just my truck waiting for us, hot in the afternoon sun.

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Bag of cash goes in back, under a tarp. Taco grabs his beat-up cowboy hat that makes him look like a stripper, but the dude won’t take a telling. We leave, me driving, and get as far as the Long Bridge before the shakes kick in. Other side is the county line, interstate, the wide world. I pull over, get out, go stand on the riverbank. Oil slick drifts past, like a rainbow someone pissed on. Sounds about right for my world.

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“Frank?” Taco behind me, close. “You OK?”

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I pull the billfold, tight closed. Rub my thumb over the leather. “This shithead, this Frank Booth, must have someone out there, with one of these, waiting his chance.”

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“If it works.”

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“But if it does, if someday it’s not me standing here, dude, you put him in the ground.” I look over my shoulder. “You do that for me, yeah?”

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Taco takes a long moment, then nods. “Consider it done.”

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I toss the billfold. It flutters, metal catches the sun, river catches it. I turn and look back at Gibson’s Reach, back at everything I’ve ever known.

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Sniff. “Fuck it.”

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I slap Taco’s shoulder and we get back in my truck. He sits, heels on the dash, hat forward to shade his eyes. “Drive until you run outta’ road, Frank, then I’ll spell ya’. Let’s put some miles between us and the past.”

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I grin. “Hell, yeah. We’re gentlemen of enterprise, dude. There ain’t nothing we can’t turn our hand to, down the line.”

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“Damn straight.”

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We pull away in a spray of gravel. State Troopers and the fire engine from Paradise Wells go past, but we’re nobody worth a second look. Shift up a gear and hit the gas.

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We’re gone…

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…and the world can kiss my ass.

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Editorial in memorium.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Editorial in memorium.html deleted file mode 100644 index e8daaf69..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Editorial in memorium.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,20 +0,0 @@ -

An editorial in memoriam

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Gil Williamson began Mythaxis in 2008 with the intention of delivering a simple, fiction-focused genre magazine without the usual trappings of the web – minimal advertising, if any at all, and as little visual clutter as possible to distract from the stories he chose to publish. Ten years later, he released the 21st issue on the anniversary of the first. Under his editorial guidance, Mythaxis featured one hundred and sixty-five original stories, six classic reprints of old masters, and a dozen cartoons or short comic strips. Some of those original pieces also represented the first publication of their authors, mine included.

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[Gil and Beryl pics]

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Sadly, in the summer of 2019 and a little over a year after that anniversary issue, Gil passed away following a period of illness. To say that he lived a full life would be an almost criminal understatement. He studied astrophysics at Edinburgh, but instead went on to enjoy a long professional career in the world of computing. With his wife Beryl, he created a software company named Amazon Systems (long before any upstart global behemoth began trading under a similar banner) which delved into fields as diverse as medicine, banking, security, word processing, and computer games. Mythaxis itself is published via software written by its editor.

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He was a polyglot of European language, on one occasion translating the user manual of a medical computing system developed by Beryl from Swedish to Danish. He also spoke Malay, a skill no doubt of passing use when he navigated the Limbang river between Malaysia and Brunai in a dug-out canoe. As well as an amateur small-vessel sailor he was a racing enthusiast, as can be seen below, so crossing Istanbul during rush hour at the wheel of someone else’s car likely did little to raise his heart rate.

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[Gil sports pics]

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A life rich with experience, yes, but perhaps most of all Gil was modest, so understand that this shameful act of praise is committed only out of a sense of admiration and affection, one I’m sure is shared by far more people than those who knew him as their editor. I first met Gil as a member of the long-running book-lovers forum Palimpsest, where his passion for science fiction, in particular that of William Gibson and Iain M. Banks, made his a voice I always watched out for.

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His championing of Patrick O’Brien’s epic Aubrey & Maturin sequence, the most famous of course being “Master and Commander”, introduced me to a series of books I now cherish. And in a different way I also cherish Mythaxis, now most of all as a legacy to the man who created it. When illness and the demands of operating the magazine became incompatible, Gil asked if I would take over editing duties, and I was proud to have been given that trust. It gives me great pleasure to be able to continue what Gil started, my only regret is not being able to do so while he was still with us.

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So, our salute to Gil Williamson is this: eight stories by past contributors we hope you will enjoy, and which we hope he would have too. And we will keep on saluting. Mythaxis will persist in his mission, to seek out great speculative writing by authors new and old and let it distract you from the world, just for a little while.

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~ Andrew Leon Hudson

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Mythaxis editor

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff.html deleted file mode 100644 index 0ce30943..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,110 +0,0 @@ -

FEELING THE HEAT: A TWICE-TOLD TALE

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Les Sklaroff

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We begin this issue with a piece by a long-time contributor and old friend of Gil’s, which places front and center that thorny problem of what makes writing good. Perhaps the solution is to admit that writing simply IS good, whether it is ugly or beautiful, famous or infamous, read or unread.

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“Tell me where it is, Gyme, or your pretty friend here will suffer the same fate as Ormos and the others.”

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Gyme forced himself not to glance over to where Silki was cowering. Behind his back his numb fingers were slippery, as an expertly modified thumbnail at last began to bite through tape instead of flesh.

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“Look, Zengel, as I tried to explain…”

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With a grunt of distaste Strag flung the book across the room. Propelled by a casual flick of the wrist it landed accurately in the safety of an armchair. He had an instinctive feeling for the right trajectory, perhaps related to his youthful practice of hurling various objects (some edible) to be intercepted by an apparently tireless dog.

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This indoor launch of the papery embodiment of Seff Haldegath, writer of a succession of spy thrillers, afforded Strag a frisson of satisfaction, almost bereft of guilt. Old Sprent would be appalled to see his young editorial assistant treating an actual book with such disrespect, no matter how banal its content, or how brief its flight.

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Strag had picked up the book cheaply at Morg’s Bookery in the market, one of his and Yethne’s favourite haunts. Only the previous week they had been lucky enough to find a copy of Parel Tillon’s Hoarse Whispers, unusually bound, he supposed as a student exercise, in textured whent, with beautifully marbled endpapers. This week’s impulsive purchase, made while Yethne was away at an educational conference, he had found to be less rewarding.

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Haldegath, who had reputedly spent some years in government service, churned out fat popular books of no discernable literary worth. Within the garish holographic artwork of the covers the same embittered protagonist, Statman Gyme, recurrently avoided death while outwitting psychopathic adversaries. The style was blunt, plots implausible, studded with scenes of sudden violence and desultory sex. Strag, an insatiable reader, knew he had encountered books by Haldegath before, and should have known what to expect, but the copy of Firemonger which lay rejected in the chair merely reminded him that, despite Haldegath’s enviable commercial success, he found this author’s work unmemorable.

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As an aspiring writer himself, fortified by the high standards of literacy expected at Fissile & Sprent, Strag knew that he needed to resolve a troubling question. Could the kind of acclaim enjoyed by Seff Haldegath be achieved without resort to the same facile formulaic tricks? Probably not, he conceded ruefully, but at this moment what he really wanted to do was to expose Haldegath as a hack writer by demonstrating how much better one of his books could have been, in the hands of someone like himself, who strove to use words not as bludgeons, but as instruments of subtle persuasion. He stared resentfully across the room at Firemonger. Its microsensors responded by causing its cover to appear to smoulder.

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What would be most satisfying, he reflected, would be to take a Haldegath novel, strip it of its dross, and re-work what remained into something with far more depth and resonance. He retrieved the copy of Firemonger, re-read the first few pages, extruded the workdesk, and began to jot down a few comments before attempting his own creative improvements.

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Clarify plot. Condense.

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Less gore. Some credible foreplay (Check with Y).

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Essential tech. specs only for weaponry and other devices.

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Link characters to archetypes?

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Spycraft. Consult H D Kruving’s ‘The Dislocator’.

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Intersperse musical theme.

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Chapter headings. Elements from Shaunt’s ‘Black Fire’ tapestries.

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He would need to change the names, of course. The reckless Statman Gyme, product of a clandestine liaison between a flotel sanitation officer and a part-time waitress, would now become Scover Buron, son of a feisty woman journalist and an absentee but distinguished father whose undisclosed identity would be crucial to the revised plot. Silki Lissom, the ditzy, fun-loving art therapist with a propensity for finding herself in life-theatening situations, will be replaced by the succulent but enigmatic Sireen Thrist, a research chemist with a range of skills not restricted to scientific enquiry.

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There were some vestiges of an earlier age with which Strag Wilderfoot was oddly comfortable, in spite of the many modern refinements at his disposal. He preferred the feel of flowing water to hygienic cloud-sprays, had no time for ParaPets, however sophisticated, and although he had ready access to interactive devices, he relished the tactile intimacy of pen and paper. Turning to a fresh page with a firm sense of purpose, he wrote:

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Firemonger Renewed. By S.W.

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Strag stared at this. It was an accurate enough statement of intent, but he had an uneasy suspicion it might lead to legal complications. He would have to be more circumspect. After a few moments’ thought he amended the title:

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Firemonger Renewed Slaying with Fire By S.W.

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That was better. It carried a touch of menace tempered by the hint of a pun, and no longer referred directly to the Haldegath book. On reflection, Strag decided he would use a pseudonym, not primarily to disguise his own identity, but to establish the worth of the writing independently of its author. After a few scribbled possibilities, he settled on:

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Slaying with Fire. By Morlan Corrovine

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He didn’t know anyone called Morlan, but it sounded suitably non gender-specific, and Corrovine, he thought, had a kind of respectable gravitas. So be it. The upstart Morlan Corrovine would now take on the entire domain of seedy pap as exemplified by Haldegath. It was to be an exercise in enlightenment.

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#

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Strag chose to say nothing yet to his employer about this enterprise, even though the venerable Pentheus Sprent had been sympathetic to his literary aspirations as early as their first meeting, when barely out of school, the boy had arrived uninvited, in need of friendship, guidance, training and somewhere to live. As long as Strag continued to be diligent at work, it was not Sprent’s concern what he got up to in the privacy of his new apartment. Sprent, whose faculties were still sharp, knew that young Wilderfoot now lived with one of the girls he had met at the Wheggs place near the park, since when he had noticed that while no less headstrong, the lad seemed more at ease with the world.

-

Skimming through the text, Strag had decided that it would resolve neatly into eight sections, which conveniently matched the sequence of themes he planned to incorporate from the ‘Black Fire’ tapestries of Tosmor Shaunt. Thanks to a generous grant, those extraordinary works had found a permanent home in the foyer of Sparagulan College Auditorium, and had since gained a reputation well beyond the confines of Snoak City.

-

Not long after his arrival in Snoak, eager to sample urban culture, Strag had been cajoled by his fellow lodgers into attending a performance by Feblo Carribask, but the singer’s energetic exertions were eclipsed in his memory by that first stunning sight of the tapestries. Subsequent visits to the Auditorium were made simply to luxuriate in the haunting brilliance of Shaunt’s apocalyptic vision.

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#

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I Nightsparks

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Buron knew they would still be following him. He had shaken off two of them; the inept pair on either side of the street whose air of studied indifference changed to consternation whenever their line of sight was obstructed by passing traffic or by other pedestrians. They did not anticipate his sudden sprint at a busy intersection, and consequently failed to see his running leap on to the far side of an accelerating westbound freight transporter, routed from Broskol to Deldorp. Settling down for a long ride in the gathering dusk Buron remembered to check the heavily-lined outer pocket of his coat, where his fingers gently explored the irregular contours of the device he had prised from the dead fist of Haptic Fabricator Hecht. Despite its insulating sheath he could already feel the intensifying heat it had begun to generate.

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#

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Knowing that Strag would probably be in bed, Yethne had let herself in quietly, having left the rather misleadingly-named ‘conference’ in time to catch a nightpod back from Platport, which brought her home just after midnight.

-

She was tired, dissatisfied, and in need of comfort. A succession of earnest lecturers in education had informed the delegates of promising advances in developmental theory, offering some interesting statistical evidence based on historical samples, but it was apparent that unlike the bulk of their tolerant audience, they lacked the fundamental benefit of practical experience. What they called the ‘norm’ was no more than a convenient abstraction held dear by academics. Her perspective was based on daily interaction with a volatile young group of evolving identities, variously fragile, resilient, excitable, stubborn, morose, anxious to please, complacent, burdened with private grief, preoccupied with fantasy, stung by insult, mute with inexpressible yearning. Each day demanded alertness, patience, and a multiplicity of fine judgements. It was never effortless, but she tried valiantly to remain unruffled. Yethne might have been disheartened to know how few of her colleagues shared the same outlook.

-

Why had Strag left the light on? she wondered, as she hung up her coat. Entering the room she discovered him asleep in a chair, head resting on the arm which lay sprawled across the workdesk. Torn between solicitude and expediency, she tiptoed over, pressed her lips to his ear, and was duly thankful when he awoke without complaint.

-

“Glad you made it back,” he murmured, turning to kiss her. She was trembling slightly, and he could sense that she was unsettled. He held her close, caressing her hair.

-

“How did it go?” he asked. “Do you want to talk about it now, or shall we leave it until tomorrow?”

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“Oh, it can wait,” said Yethne, stifling a yawn. She reached for his hand. “Let’s get comfortable. But tell me, what have you been working on so late?”

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Strag hesitated. Yethne understood his aspirations, and he needed to discuss his ideas with her, but just now the lure of bed took precedence.

-

“It’s a kind of experiment. I’ll explain in the morning. It’s the week-end. We both deserve a lie-in, and there’s a chance I might bring you breakfast.” He adopted what he hoped was an enigmatic expression and made a melodramatic bow “Meanwhile, milady, Morlan Corrovine is at your service.”

-

“Ooh, rôle-play,” said Yethne coyly, with a sleepy smile.

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#

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“Have you read any Seth Haldegath?” he asked. They had spent a very relaxed morning, during which she had been relieved to vent her reservations about the Platport ‘conference’.

-

“No, I don’t think so.” He handed her the copy of Firemonger, and suggested that she should sample it and offer her opinion. Yethne glanced dubiously at the cover and settled into her favourite chair. After a few minutes she looked up. “Well, the characters seem rather one-dimensional, there’s a lot of brutality, the plot’s not very clear, and I’m fairly sure that Togger Chorp could do better.”

-

Momentarily puzzled, Strag searched his memory. “Oh, you mean the boy in your class? The one who…”

-

“…has a passion for ants, affects not to listen, doesn’t speak much, has a step-brother who bullies him, and parents hooked on vids. Despite which, he writes really imaginative, well-constructed stories.”

-

Strag smiled. “That’s exactly my point! Haldegath makes a living from selling this sordid, soulless stuff, and I’m guessing that most of the people who buy these books don’t realise that he’s a charlatan. So I’ve started – as Morlan Corrovine – to re-write this book, using its bones as a kind of armature on which to build something much more stylish and meaningful.”

-

Yethne didn’t want to see his time and talent expended on what looked like a secondhand project. She admired his enthusiasm, but needed some convincing that what Strag was attempting was really worthwhile. “Show me,” she said.

-

It was thanks to Yethne that he hit upon the musical theme which would recur in various guises at critical moments, being played, sung or chanted, or simply as a persistent earworm in Scover Buron’s head. Wessy Pilfrel was a doleful traditional ballad about an unfortunate girl’s disintegration into madness. Because of its repetitive structure it also existed in a merrier form as a children’s skipping rhyme. Both versions begin with the same first line:

-
-

Wessy Pilfrel lost a sock…

-
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In the ballad, she goes on to lose her way, her heart, her virtue, and eventually her mind. The skipping versions, with their indeterminate number of verses, often spontaneous, have her losing not only other articles of clothing, but all manner of things – voice, teeth, soap, pets, temper – with results that have kept children amused for generations. Strag felt that judicious insertion of lines from Wessy Pilfrel would serve as psychological signposts for the reader.

-

Strag made rapid progress through the first four chapters. Scover Buron had temporarily eluded his pursuers, undoubtedly members of the same mercenary gang who had murdered Hecht. He’d had just enough time to create a diversion with a ‘rabid hounds’ sonic grenade, and had managed to escape with the device, but too late to save the scientist’s life. Later that night, travelling west on the transporter, he found that the device was becoming literally too hot to handle.

-
-

Scavenging by torchlight among miscellaneous building supplies he improvised a protective container from ceramic granules, quickfoam and heavy-duty antithermal tape, mindful that it would have to suffice until he could make contact with one of his own people. Craunt, who had assigned him to the retrieval mission had clammed up when Scover had asked if he might know the device’s actual function. “All you need to know is that ‘229’ is looking for it. It could start a war. Or end one.”

-

The transporter’s automatic braking system engaged as it approached the depot entrance in Deldorp. Buron climbed down and made his way unobstructed through deserted moonlit streets until he reached the safe-house in the artisan quarter.

-
-

In Chapter 5 (‘Forge’), Buron is working on ways to bring Hecht’s assassins to justice. He tries to ignore the faint high-pitched humming now emanating from the overheating device which he had gingerly deposited on the tiled bathroom floor of the safe-house. A quiet tap on the door signals the arrival of the technical expert sent to deal with problem. It is Sireen Thrist.

-
-

There is no preamble.

-

“Buron? Thrist. Let me see it.”

-

She followed him to the bathroom, pulling on a pair of fine high-tech heatproof gloves. Scover watched in fascination as she donned her scanning visor and peered down at the object, making small adjustments to the visor’s depth control, pursing her lips thoughtfully. After a few moments she reached up behind her head with both hands to remove a stylishly glowing clasp, tossing her head to allow waves of dark silky hair to cascade around her shoulders. Scover felt his pulse quicken. This had nothing to do with any danger posed by the device. Outwardly maintaining his professional composure he waited to see what she would do next. Through the bathroom window, which he had opened in an attempt to lessen the increasing heat, he could hear someone whistling. The tune reminded him of his schooldays.

-

Holding the pin of her clasp with surgical precision she moved it across the device until it hovered over the spot indicated by her visor, and executed the gentlest of jabs. The humming ceased.

-

“The concealed magnetic lock deactivates it,” she explained. She removed the visor and gloves, turning to Scover with a smile that flashed through his defences like a silent bolt of lightning. “I’ve studied copies of Hecht’s research papers. Does this dismal place have a bar, by any chance?”

-
-

“Surely you’re not going to let them get drunk?” Yethne protested, resting her chin on Strag’s shoulder.

-

“I haven’t quite decided yet whether there’s any drink to be had!” Strag said. “Buron’s a seasoned agent, but he’s been under stress, and the resourceful Sireen obviously needs to unwind. I think I might allow them a bit of relaxation. Bear in mind that by this point Haldegath’s characters would already be sweaty and grunty.”

-

“Like in Glow Bright and the Humunculi? suggested Yethne, feigning innocence. “I can never remember all their names.”

-

“Crazy, Sleazy, Breezy and Queasy,” said Strag. “Not to mention Teasy,” he added pointedly, swivelling round to face her. “Now, Sireen Thrist is about to discover a half-bottle of a quite palatable liqueur in one of the kitchen cupboards, and despite her earlier abruptness, she will generously offer to share it with Scover. Will he accept, I wonder?”

-

“All right, Morlan the Mysterious, my writer-in-residence, I can take a hint. I’ll leave you to get them acquainted. If you need my help with any… tricky bits, come and find me.”

-

“I really appreciate that, Yeth,” he said, with absolute sincerity.

-

#

-
-

Craunt was patient. He had confidence in his agents. He had re-checked Buron’s file before selecting him for the Hecht mission: his success rate was exceptional, on a par with that of his father, although of course there was no way the younger man could know that. Some secrets had to stay under wraps, no matter what the cost. The loss of Hecht had been a severe blow. There were no other haptic fabricators with Hecht’s inventive genius or level of experience.

-

Intelligence reports all pointed to the probable culprits being a shadowy organisation calling itself The Feathermen, known to be responsible for similar vicious raids involving significant items of military or commercial interest, sold through a criminal network to the highest bidder. The head of the organisation, known only as ‘229’ had so far not yet been identified.

-

At least the Hecht device had been secured and rendered safe, thanks to Buron and Thrist. Both loners, Craunt reflected, yet it was clear they made a good team. He made a note to commend both of them for their prompt actions.

-
-

“Why ‘229’?” Yethne had wanted to know, but Strag was busy working on the next chapter (‘Scorched Earth’), and muttered distractedly that it was a prime number with some interesting mathematical peculiarities. “Try reversing it and adding…” He tailed off in mid-sentence, evidently following a different train of thought. She retreated prudently, considered the idea of a quick cloud-spray, but decided instead to treat herself to a proper shower.

-

It might have been the faint sound of streaming water that prompted Strag to contrive in that same chapter the seemingly accidental drowning of two burly middle-aged men. He had Forensics declare that they had both been in good health, which would have been no consolation to the deceased. Buron would have recognised them as the two incompetent pursuers he had eluded in Broskol. Their ignominious end in a muddy roadside gully was a definite indication that ‘229’ had a dangerously low tolerance for incompetence. Strag suddenly realised that even though the subject matter had not strictly been of his own choosing, what had begun as a literary exercise had become a compulsive immersion in this simulated world. He could now admit, grudgingly, that even Haldegath, with all his shortcomings and presumed cupidity, might also enjoy the creative thrill of writing. They were members of the same virtual community. Perhaps he had been too harsh in his condemnation. If there could be honour amongst thieves, why not magnanimity amongst writers?

-

Strag felt, oddly, as if a burden had been lifted, and turned his thoughts with relish to the penultimate chapter. In the Black Fire schema the heading was Embers, but there was to be nothing quiescent about the action. It was now that The Feathermen were revealed at their most ruthless, in a spate of violent robberies and several high-profile kidnappings. Prominent figures were subject to blackmail, public services repeatedly disrupted by means of sabotage or by panic induced by maliciously spread rumours of an imminent hazard – a gas leak, a toxic spillage, contagious disease, escaped warthogs…. Street-children were bribed to leave suspicious packages wherever they would cause most concern and inconvenience. ‘229’ was exacting revenge, and still among the prime targets was Scover Buron.

-

At the start of Phoenix, the final chapter, Craunt is wrestling with an invidious dilemma. Citizens are fearful, those sworn to protect them appear to be helpless. His best agent is on the hit list of an unscrupulous killer whose real name and whereabouts are still unknown. It had become necessary to draw the killer out somehow. Use bait. The obvious bait would be Buron, but Buron is indispensable. Who else had the same set of skills, the same fast-thinking ability to plan on the move and under pressure? Craunt knew of only one other person who had a chance of tracking ‘229’ to his or her lair, but that would mean having to break a long-standing promise, thereby putting both of them, father and son, in mortal danger.

-

He had his hand poised to make the call when he was interrupted by an urgent message from his regional director, informing him that Sireen Thrist had disappeared.

-

“I doubt that even Togger Chorp could have managed a neater ending!” said Yethne, handing the last page back to Strag, who had been patiently awaiting her comments. “Unmasking the odious ‘229’, finding the girl, reconciling the long-separated agents, but leaving that final seed of doubt for the reader to worry about.”

-

“Thanks, Yeth, that’s praise indeed; possibly more than I deserve. I must admit it was challenging tying up the loose ends, but I hope I’ve got away with it. We’ll see.”

-

Slaying with Fire edged into print under the benevolent dispensation of Pentheus Sprent. Wishing to preserve his anonymity, Strag insisted there should be no launch party, but agreed to discreet advance notices about the book’s forthcoming appearance. Fissile & Sprent had a reputation for being discriminating publishers, so the arrival on the scene of the previously unknown Morlan Corrovine was bound to stir ripples of interest. The trial print run was of no more than a few hundred copies, not unusual for an author’s first book. The unostentatious covers depicted sparks from a flint against a background of velvet blackness. If it failed to do well, any loss would not be too disastrous, and if it later chanced to become a cult classic, the unsold copies would become collectors’ items.

-

Early reviews were models of enthusiastic waffling, presumably by critics who had not yet read the book, amply padded with phrases such as “bright new talent”, “fresh approach” and “gripping page-turner”. Pentheus Sprent had forewarned him that without a formal launch initial sales might be slow. Strag had no option but to try to curb an unaccustomed sense of anxiety and to bide his time. Yethne did her best to cope with the nervous excitement.

-

The tension was unexpectedly mitigated by the arrival of an old-fashioned hand-written letter, addressed to him, not as Morlan Corrovine, but in his own name, Strag Wilderfoot, c/o Fissile & Sprent. The script was firm, clear and unfussy, without flourishes. The letter congratulated him on the publication of his first book and complimented him on the polish and subtlety of his writing. There was a brief coda:

-
-

You may be aware that I am familiar with this particular genre. Having spent much of my early life working in the murky realm of secrecy and subterfuge, I can assure you that in reality tedium out-weighs excitement by a considerable factor. Trying to prevent or repair the blunders of those who wear the public mantle of ‘decision-makers’, and the thwarting of scoundrels in general is a wearying business, requiring constant observation, consultation and analysis. Most readers of fiction would find such details stultifying. As a form of catharsis I amuse myself by providing them instead with spicy confections. It is flattering to see that in many respects you have followed my example. However, there are multiple paths. I look forward to monitoring your progress.

-

- Seff Haldegath

-
-

Strag read the letter several times. He was shocked at how easily his pen-name had been bypassed, but reasoned that it only served to confirm his correspondent’s credentials. He could hardly believe that what he was holding in slightly shaky fingers was a personal message from the man himself! A man he had naïvely held in such disregard, but who was clearly thoughtful and articulate, and who had taken time to encourage a new writer.

-

“You’re looking particularly smug,” Yethne remarked when Strag arrived back at their flat. Her endearing knack of interpreting his mood at a glance sometimes made him feel quite vulnerable.

-

He prevaricated. “Smug? Well, surprised, yes. Even gratified, I suppose, but…”

-

“What is it, Strag Tell me!”

-

He handed her the letter, noticing her brief frown as she saw how precisely it was addressed. She began to read it aloud, causing Strag to smile at this echo of classroom practice. It was difficult for him to be objective, but actually hearing Haldegath’s words he thought he detected in them just a trace of irony, or was it perhaps condescension?

-

“How extraordinary”, said Yethne, “A fan letter! From Seth Haldegath, your prime target.”

-

Striving to restore his ruffled self-confidence he fixed her with a gaze in which he attempted to combine insouciance with owl-like intensity. “We writers are full of surprises. I doubt that’s even his real name.”

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson - final copy.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson - final copy.html deleted file mode 100644 index ac3c8f57..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson - final copy.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,126 +0,0 @@ -

Good Old Days

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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-

-

-

As I am taking over as editor, I will not contribute fiction to Mythaxis going forward… with this one exception. To close our first issue without Gil, one of the first things he ever gave me feedback on: a story about personal legacies, the loss of what went before, and the potential of the future.

-

-

-

-

Gramps looked over to where the crop was being taken in, strong backs bending, the heavy-headed stalks bending too as a dry breeze came off the plains towards the ridge above the village. That wind would be over the ridge a damned sight sooner than he would, he thought to himself. The sun was hot but lowering now, and anyway it wasn't too much for his thick, tanned hide just yet, no sir, not even at noon. He turned from the fields and followed the stream towards home.

-

Slow walking. By the time he had passed the thin strip of woodland, the inland clouds were pinking and the sun was a ruby on the horizon at his back; the farmers would be lugging back the first bails soon, like ants under hazelnuts. He paused for a drink where the stream poured into the well pool before draining through the overflow sluice and out of sight; when he crested the ridge, the first group of farmers had passed him already with a polite chorus of greetings.

-

One thing there that changed for the better: youngsters showed some respect for their elders again. Not always like the other elders did for each other, mind.

-

Gramps paused on the ridge, looking down into the circular valley. The stream emerged below him, running swiftly down the steep valley wall before circling the northern side of the village; clustered near the waterline, small straw-thatched earth-and-stone huts were arranged around the community longhouse in loose circles. The longhouse; a place for social occasions, important meetings, and for old folks to sleep clustered around a big fire every night. Home for him, now. The only other structures to rival it marked the perimeter of the community: the livestock shelter (and fertilizer store) at the base of the slope directly below him, a side-stream redirected from the main one to water the animals; and the two big storehouses, one on the north flank for wood, stone, and other vital materials, the other on the south for grain and the sea crops.

-

The lagoon dominating the valley was also circular, also artificially so, though no-one remarked on it; it was simply a feature of their home. The far walls of the valley dived straight into the water, but under the surface the lagoon floor leveled out quickly and continued that way almost to the far side. As the high ridge on descended towards the coast it pushed out into the sea, like a thumb and forefinger not quite pinched, not quite meeting out amidst the waves. Thus lagoon and ocean remained connected; the shallow passage allowed the tide in and fishing boats out, while the broken ridges shielded the lagoon and the village from an ocean battering when the stormy seasons came.

-

The lagoon needed this protection. Where the bottom was oddly level, rich patches of weed were carefully cultivated, providing a good share of the village's food. That had been one of Gramps's ideas. After leveling the terrain for the village to come, they scooped the rubble into the bay before layering it with ocean silt to build the huge growing bed, spent years experimenting with potential crops before settling on the current spreads, fast growing and nutritious.

-

Now the village stood on a small plain dug into the slope, a beaching shore for their boats at its foot and a vital source of food before them. Because of Gramps, and people like him. None of these young folk knew it now, though. This was the way it had always been for them.

-

The low sun striking the ridge line cast the entire valley into shadow and as Gramps began the sideways descent along the upper slope he felt the dim air chill on his skin, as if he was stepping down into a darkly ethereal lake suspended over the real one, submerging himself completely before walking to the bottom. He felt the cold more these days and although he claimed his regular afternoon walks to the fields were for exercise, in truth he simply wanted to waste as little direct sunlight as possible – another quirk to make him stand out among the rest.

-

“Good to see ye, Gramps,” came a voice at his back. The last of the farmers drew abreast of him on the path, a plain-faced man with a quick but gappy smile. Balanced on his broad back and overhanging his head was a huge loose bail of wheat cut close to the root. Like the other fieldsmen he was stripped to the waist now he had this extra shelter, his thick shirt and wide-brimmed straw hat hung off the leather strap cinching the bail together.

-

“Good to see you, Tomas. The fields have been good this year, eh?”

-

“The fields are the goodest, Gramps.”

-

“Reckon the fishers might debate you on that point,” Gramps observed, a glint in his eye.

-

Tomas and his fellows would likely be up the whole night in the granary, separating grain from straw, and drinking spirits distilled from the first until they all fell asleep on the second. The fishermen may bring home food more regularly, but the Harvest weeks would always be a special time for those that worked the land. When they were done, their take alone could feed all the village's stomachs, human and livestock both, well into the next year.

-

“Ah, well. It's all good, as they say.”

-

“That they do.” Gramps nodded to the bail. “You want me to spot you with that?”

-

Tomas cracked his smile again and humped his burden up on his shoulders with ease. “Ye fancy a go, eh? I think ye could and all. I reckon there's strong walls under that grey thatch yet.” Gramps gave a little hop mid-stride, and Tomas hooted a laugh. “I was going to offer ye a lift meself,” he added, and went down on one knee. “Ye want to jump on?”

-

Gramps patted the bail but shook his head. “Thanks for the kind thought, but I'll finish my walk. I'll get as wrinkled as your old Grampa did if I start taking it easy.”

-

The young man rose again and they smiled. Tomas' grandfather had passed on just three summers back. Over forty years, Gramps thought he’d had, a damned good stretch, and better than his grandfather before him, no doubt. Time was, knowing your grandfather was a rarity rather than the norm. Gramps still remembered his.

-

Tomas nodded and picked up his pace. “Fair enough. Good on ye, Gramps. Ye get tired of me da's snoring tonight, ye know where we'll be. And we'll have a drop of something with us to warm old bones.”

-

“Good on you, Tomas. I know you will.”

-

He watched Tomas stride on after the line of men. The first of them were going in at the grain store with their bails, then quickly out again stretching and calling to wives and mothers for supper and a first shot of spirits. Out on the bay, the fishing boats were coming in through the sea mouth, and even at a distance he could see they rode high in the water. The catch would remain light all through until spring now, but the winter storms would be on them soon enough anyway. Time to mend nets, repair boats, and shelter with the rest of us.

-

The air grew cooler and cooler as he neared the village. Some of the farmers entered the longhouse carrying dry wood from the northern store to build the old folks' evening fire, and Gramps made straight for it himself.

-

When he entered he found the older folks settled in around it, golden lit by the fresh flames, waiting for the fire to age a bit and put out more heat. “Halloo, Gramps,” they welcomed, and he halloo'd them back, making for a space as two old lasses shuffled apart for him, one handing him a blanket for his shoulders as the other rubbed his hands to warm them. Sweet old girls.

-

No-one asked about his walk, and no-one ever joined him on it. They were paler than he, his skin still the nutty shade of a life spent largely under sun, and even if all the young fishermen and farmers boasted tighter skin than he, Gramps could more than match anyone for health.

-

Ayanne, who was Tomas's wife, came along shortly with a handful of wooden bowls and a big pot nestled against one hip. She handed the bowls for the first in the circle to pass around, then followed them, doling out a thick steaming stew of fish and potatoes. She was a strong, pretty thing. Her husband was a decent specimen, but it was a common thought amongst the old folks that Tomas was the luckier in the pair. She gave Gramps a shy smile as she rounded the circle.

-

“Hungry, Gramps?” she asked.

-

“Always for your fish stew, Ayanne.”

-

“Well, ye eat,” she said with a pleased look, adding him an extra dollop. “Got to keep ye strength up, eh?”

-

She moved on round the rest then headed back to her hut, leaving Gramps at the mercy of silent knowing smiles and grouchy harrumphs from what passed for his peers. He concentrated on his food, staring out past the fire and through the doorway, eastward, at the deep blue sky reflected in the lagoon. The smooth sea beyond the bay mouth merged with the darkening sky into no horizon, and the last of the fishing boats returning home seemed to float down from the distant clouds like curled brown leaves in the autumn.

-

Their chores done for the day, the littlest ones soon finished their meals and came running in to play beside the fire. Their nonsense and chatter might drown out the slurping of the increasingly toothless, but no-one begrudged them it and the older folks always left space inside their circle; silhouetted before the crackling flames they put on a fine show, and many grandparents would fall asleep with both warmth and smiles on their faces.

-

It was a world to grow up quickly in, and not long was left to childhood before boats and fields called them off to work; best to make the most of it. Not so many children either, the last few years; no-one discussed it but everyone was aware. They were looking to young couples like Tomas and Ayanne to fix that, but it was looking like a long wait. Gramps knew what that would mean. It had been sooner or later for a while already.

-

That evening, as the darkening sky revealed a mess of stars, Gramps listened to the harvesters celebrating their hard work, chorusing songs and toasting the fields, the weather and themselves, while the rest of the people slept. The fishermen would be up well before dawn, a few hours from now, complaining about the disturbance to their rest, how no-one toasted them for loading dinner tables all year round, and how, when fishermen drink, they do it properly.

-

Gramps slowly got up, hanging his blanket around his shoulders as he left the slumbering circle huddled around the embers. There was a pop from the hearth, then a low parp sounded in answer from deep within a digesting sleeper, and he grinned.

-

Outside, the huts were dark but for the glow of their night-fires. Only the grain house was fully lit – just like those singing within her; he grinned again – a short bright amber shaft cutting out from the doorway.

-

Gramps started towards the lagoon, picking his way between the silent huts – then a voice murmured, “Hallo, Gramps.”

-

He turned with a kind smile. “Good evening, Ayanne.”

-

“Will ye come in?”

-

“Of course I will.”

-

From across the way, a young pair of eyes watched Gramps enter the hut and the heavy drape fall across the doorway behind him. Then they turned to where another youngster slept soundly after playing late: Ayanne’s son by her first husband, kipping over with a friend at his mother’s suggestion. A little adventure away from his own bed for a night.

-

*

-

Gramps pretended he didn't see the lad watching him from a distance all morning. First he was hid in the shadows alongside his hut, then as noon approached and his shelter shrank away he moved into the cool of the doorway and watched from there instead.

-

Gramps stayed in the sun all day if he could, trousers rolled up to his boney knees while, today, he worked grain with pestle and mortar, on other occasions whatever was then needed done. Behind him in the long house the other old folk were doing other slow but useful chores. To be slowly useful was all one had left to aspire to after a while.

-

Eventually he began to tire of the child’s silent observation. He fixed him with his most fierce stare and forced himself not to smile when the little one jumped involuntarily. “You there, lurking. You're Martan's lad, ain't you?”

-

The lad glanced behind him but found no support from within the family hut. He nodded.

-

“Get your little bot over here sharpish.”

-

The lad stuck his chin out defiantly and started to pace out the way to the long house like the bravest of soldiers, but two steps away from the shade his pale skin clearly started prickling and he scooted the rest of the distance, jumping into the long house doorway with relief.

-

Gramps carried on grinding but cast a sideways look at him. “Well lad, out with it. What's your question?”

-

The lad cast his gaze around for a second, nervously, then came to stand beside him on the edge of the long house's shadow. “Are ye god?” he asked.

-

Gramps paused, then ground on. “Ain't no such fella.”

-

“But…”

-

“But what?”

-

“But, yer very old.”

-

“Hah.”

-

“And ye don’t mind the sun, and ye know everyone, and about lots of things, me da says. And…”

-

“Hmm? Yes?”

-

“And… ye give life. Me ma says.” The lad pulled a face. “I think. Ye are god, ain't ye?”

-

Gramps rested the pestle and squinted at his interrogator. “What makes you say I’m old, then, eh?” The boy had enough awareness to look vaguely uncomfortable at the question, but he forged on.

-

“Ye’ve got wrinkly skin,” he said. “And white hair.”

-

“Your grandpa Yanik back there, he doesn’t have white hair.” They both looked into the dimness of the longhouse. The other old folk still crowded the fireplace, soaking up the remaining heat as they did their chores. One pale dome drew their attention, a head like a large spotted egg balanced on a wrinkled pucker of a face. Yanik noticed them looking and grimaced, revealing a mean maw that was considerably more gap than tooth.

-

“And teeth,” added the lad. “Old people lose their teeth. That’s how ye know yer growing older.”

-

“Really. And how many teeth have you got?”

-

The boy bared them proudly. “Trelve and trelve.”

-

Gramps pulled a face of great admiration. “And your pa, how many does he have?”

-

“Just twenty. He had one out just this week, and he’s… twenty-five years, he is.”

-

“Well, if I’m so old, lad, how many teeth do you think I’ve got left, eh? Any?”

-

After letting him squirm for an embarrassed moment, Gramps slowly unleashed his smile. The creases of his cheeks, his crow’s feet eyes, yes, they were deep and many; but his teeth filled his mouth right to the back, even if the line of them wasn’t quite so ruler-straight as it had been in his youth, or in his prime. The boy stared at them, his own mouth hanging open a little.

-

“Like first teeth,” he said. “Did ye never lose them?”

-

“Don’t ye listen to his stories, boy,” a grating voice called from the longhouse, and the boy started guiltily, closing his mouth with a snap as he looked to where Yanik was scowling their way.

-

Gramps sighed and returned to his pestle, but despite the hushes and grumblings of the other old folks, Yanik was levering himself upright and coming to join them. Gramps ignored him, but the boy seemed suddenly cowed, as if this crooked bundle of stalks towered over them like a giant.

-

“Feenan! Ye should have something to be doing, shouldn’t ye?” Yanik snapped. “Up with your da, eh? Yer a young’un, ain’t ye? Get a hat on yer head and get out in the daylight!”

-

As the boy ran for his hut, Yanik aimed a yellow eye at Gramps. “An’ as for ye. Don’t go filling his head with yer crap.”

-

Gramps paused, then slowly put aside his pestle and rose to his feet. Stood nose to nose, Yanik didn’t back down. A part of Gramps admired him for it, even while another part soured still more.

-

Behind him the lad Feenan emerged from his hut beneath a wide-brimmed straw-woven hat, shading him like a portable eclipse. His mother followed, hesitating when she saw Gramps and Yanik in the long house entranceway. She glanced at Tomas’s hut opposite, then slapped her son’s backside to get him moving. Gramps turned at the sound, saw the lad heading for the ridge trail.

-

He turned back to Yanik, feeling a shamefully petulant spark as he tossed his mortar down beside the pestle. “Maybe I’ll take my walk early today,” he said. “Keep the boy company up the slope, eh?” He fixed Yanik with a pointed stare. “Got to look out for the young ones, don’t we? See they’re okay, eh?”

-

Yanik’s face flushed, then as Gramps turned his back and ambled into the bright day it sank back into its pale, bitter pucker again. He returned to the fire, the others giving him silence to privately fume in.

-

“Hold up, lad,” came Gramps’ voice, more distant. “I’ll walk with you for a while, eh?”

-

*

-

“I remember when all this wasn't fields.”

-

Feenan looked up from the path. Gramps was squinting at the sea of grain with an expression like he'd said something funny, but the boy didn't know what. He wondered if Gramps was going to explain about what he’d heard his ma saying to his friend’s ma the day before. Before Gramps went into their hut that night while his friend was visiting, and both their das and the other farmers were getting drunk after a hard day of harvesting.

-

Before them the work was continuing, half the crop high and waving, the rest cut low. The fields stretched, level and broad, an orderly patchwork of yellow and brown nearby; then, fading into the distance, scrubland rippled into the suggestion of ever greater hills.

-

From their spot, on lower ground in the shade of the tree line, the whole vista seemed to emerge from behind those golden waves as from a curtain drawn part way back. Curtains in the village were made of this same rough straw, thickly woven, oiled and hammered soft, then hooked tight over the windows at night or through storms and strong winds.

-

After brief consideration, Feenan decided that curtains were more beautiful before they were harvested.

-

“What was they then?” he asked.

-

Gramps startled. “What?”

-

“What was the fields when they wasn’t?”

-

“Oh. Almost everything except fields. But mostly things for people.”

-

“Fields are for people.”

-

“That's very true.” Gramps smiled at him then looked away again, and Feenan felt pleased. “But there were lots of things before. There were carts, that you could ride on and went as fast as a bird flying right at you. There were lots more people. Imagine we got everyone in the long house at once and filled it up – and outside there are more full houses from here to the horizon and further – more people even than that. And there were factories, places for them to work all day, that spread out for miles. And cities for them to live in, full of tall buildings for them all.”

-

“Like the long house.”

-

Gramps shook his head and held out his arm. “Long is flat.” He raised his arm at the elbow. “Tall is up. Like a tree. But these went up and up and up. Lots of rooms on top of each other. Tall buildings like a forest of trees. And then great roads to take people from the cities to the factories and back every day, covering everything up under them. No more forests. No more fields.”

-

Feenan considered this. “Why didn't they live near where they worked?”

-

“Because they didn't have to. They could get on the road, like the path from the village to the fields here, and – pap – they'd be there. So they could live where they wanted, way off somewhere, as long as there was a road connecting them. Roads going everywhere, as far as you could see.”

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The lad looked around at the workers harvesting, then saw a figure approaching along the stretch of the path between field and woodland. His da, the herder, in the midst of the flock of sheep. It looked like he was watching them back. “If they was so many people but they got rid of all the fields,” he asked, “where did they get enough to eat?”

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“They didn't. Lots of people didn't eat at all. See our harvest? Imagine if, instead of all that, you had to feed the whole village from what comes out of… ten bails.”

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“Ye couldn't!”

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“That's right.”

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Feenan thought about that as the first of the sheep passed them. His da nodded to Gramps cautiously across the shortening distance. “Good day, Gramps,” he called.

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“Good day, Martan, how are you?”

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“Well, Gramps. Thank ye.”

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Feenan attracted a few sheep to him with low clucks, petted their wool and tore up grass for them to snuffle from his palm. “So where did all our fields come from?” he asked.

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“They’ve always been fields here, son,” said his da, pausing as the sheep drifted on around them.

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“Bah! Easy for you to say, Martan,” Gramps barked. “You remember a world that's exactly the same as this one, and if you can imagine anything you imagine that it's always been.”

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Feenan looked at Gramps in surprise. The old man was fuming, brows rolled down and eyes in shadow. For a moment he was about to laugh at the sight – until he saw his father looking a lot more than just startled at the outburst.

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“And that's always been the problem,” Gramps went on, “people thinking nothing will or can ever change, and blind or careless of when it starts to. Generations of stupidity and limitation, fixed on germinating another – something, by the way, they still need our damned help with half the time – and the next thing you know you're spitting and wailing because everything worth having has been knocked into a cocked hat.”

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Feenan watched the men stare at each other, wondered what his da would say to end the argument, then saw that his da didn't know what to say.

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“What's a cocked hat?” the lad asked, his voice loud in the silence.

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Gramps flung a glare his way, still swept up in his anger. “It's sunshine that burns, and damned great holes in the ground that glow in the dark for a thousand years, that's what a cocked hat is,” he snapped, then caught himself and looked away.

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The awkward moment drew out, but Feenan got the feeling that Gramps was embarrassed about losing his temper. Finally his da made a quick, almost despairing gesture towards his meandering flock. “Got to be getting these along now, eh,” he muttered.

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“Yes, don't be late,” Gramps blurted. “I'll keep you out all night talking if you let me.” Gramps rolled his eyes as if talking about someone else.

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His da chuckled, relieved.

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“Always time for another story, Gramps, come bedtime.” He turned to Feenan and jerked his head towards the sheep. “Fancy giving ye old man a hand with the stragglers, eh? Give Gramps a bit of peace for a while, eh.”

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Feenan ran towards a pair of ewes edging field-ward, whistling little peeps at them to drive them left, then right, then back to the rest. As they all moved off towards the ridge his da flipped Gramps a little salute, and Feenan waved. Gramps waved back.

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*

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Feenan thought about Gramps’s stories. Late in the night, he got up and slipped out between his sleeping parents. He went to the little cupboard, bit off a short-length of wick, and scraped a few fingers of tallow from the candle bowl. He rolled them together, lit the tip from the smoldering ashes in the fireplace, and went outside, shielding the flame from the breeze coming off the sea.

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Across the way, as he drowsed in the longhouse surrounded by slow, soft, phlegmy breathing of his kin, Gramps looked out through the entrance at one of his great-great-grandsons walking through the darkness. Then he slept.

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The lad stopped close to the stream, listening to the trickle of water and the low sounds of the livestock in their shelter nearby. He knelt and, keeping his body between the candle and the wind, began scooping up handfuls of sandy soil until he'd dug a hole a half yard around and his arm disappeared in past the elbow.

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He planted his little candle at the bottom and lay down on his belly nearby to look at it. The flame was hidden by the edge, so he saw only an amber glow creeping up from within.

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A hole, a great hole, glowing in the dark.

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Soon it began to flicker and fade. Feenan rolled onto his back to look at the cool safe light of the stars, and as he fell asleep he imagined paths wider than the village, stretching away further than the furthest clouds, and buildings so tall you’d need to climb up a rope to get to their tops.

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Henry - Jez Patterson.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Henry - Jez Patterson.html deleted file mode 100644 index 8eae5916..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Henry - Jez Patterson.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,82 +0,0 @@ -

Jez Patterson

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Jez Patterson’s fiction often exudes an air of nostalgia, or takes ordinary world settings and makes them a little less ordinary in unusual ways - like the sort of small British communities that always keep calm and carry on, no matter what unexpected thing might crop up today. Or every day.

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If you worked at the bank’s Head Office, then large financial transactions were what gave variety to your life. If you worked in a town branch—behind glass and with a smile you practised until it sat instinctively and didn’t make your jaw ache by the end of the day—then you looked to your customers to break the monotony.

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The glass only saved you from bullets.

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“Here she comes, Bala. Your number one fan.” Darshan’s aftershave enveloped her. Why did boys always think they had to apply it like elephant musk? Bala’s nose ran at the assault, and she picked up a wad of paying-in slips to waft it aside.

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The customer already waiting before her window coughed.

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“Gives me the creeps,” Darshan added behind her, oblivious.

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“Yes, madam? How may I help you?” Bala asked the customer. Then, out the side of her mouth, “Haven’t you got mortgages to foreclose on, Darshan?”

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“Be careful, Bala. ‘Fan’ comes from fanatic. Look for the twitch in one eye, always gives them away.” Darshan left her to do her job, or to irritate another cashier. The junior managers all thought they were the cat’s whiskers or the dog’s bollocks.

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More like the horse’s arse, Bala thought.

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Mrs Jacobson was strange, admittedly, but she was harmless. At least that was what Bala kept telling herself every day the woman came into the bank and began her game in the queue—letting others go before her, begging others to let her go in front. All so she could end up at Bala’s window at precisely 10.17am.

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Not just thereabouts—but precisely.

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Like today.

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“I’d like to withdraw one hundred and fifty pounds, please.”

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“Certainly, madam. How would you like that?”

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If Bala said anything else, asked anything, deviated from the set script in any way, Mrs Jacobson wouldn’t respond. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. One time, back when all this had started, the woman had said, “No, no, no. That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You say ‘Certainly, madam, how would you like that?’ That’s what you say. You mustn’t ever change it.” And after a worried, shaky nod, Bala had repeated the fed line.

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Since then, the only problems had been with others in the queue not cooperating with Mrs Jacobson’s nerve-wracking 10.17 game. She always dressed the same, always asked for it in tens (their other scripted exchange), and left without taking a receipt or acknowledging anyone else in the bank.

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But that wasn’t the strangest part.

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The strangest part that was every afternoon she came back to deposit the hundred and fifty. And on those occasions, it was as if an entirely different Mrs Jacobson had walked in.

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#

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“Maybe she just gets her fix of meds for lunch and they sort her out,” Darshan said, returning to the favourite theme of Mrs Jacobson during their lunch break. “Imagine if she didn’t get them? Hnn, Hnn, Hnn.” He made the Psycho violin sound as he stabbed the air with his fork.

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“Right…” Bala said.

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“She’s got an obsessive compulsive disorder,” Yasmin decided. “My aunt had it. Always washing her hands and checking doors were locked. She had to wear gloves in the end.”

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“What did you do about the doors?”

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“Dunno. Don’t remember. She lives in Wolverhampton.” As if this was an explanation. Or another part of her condition.

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“I thought about that,” Bala said. “But why does Mrs Jacobson only do it for certain things? And why only in the mornings?”

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“My aunt didn’t give two hoots about washing her hair,” Yasmin said. “Auntie Nits we called her behind her back.”

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Bala shrugged and went back to her sandwich.

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#

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The day of Mrs Jacobson’s own gloves changed everything.

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It was an otherwise normal day, the hundred and fifty in tens had been withdrawn, bagged, and Mrs Jacobson had just walked out the bank when a customer Yasmin had just served stooped and picked something up off the floor.

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“Here. I think someone must have dropped them.”

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He placed the small, creased, black leather gloves on Bala’s counter.

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“Thank you, I… erm…” The idea happened in an instant. Curiosity and not benevolence behind it. “Mrs Sang, a customer has left their gloves behind.” Her boss’s face said, ‘So what?’ and so Bala added, “It was Mrs Jacobson. I could catch her. She’s only just left.”

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Mrs Sang liked rules because they ensured a smooth running of her bank. The likes of Mrs Jacobson could upset that over something as tiny as missing gloves.

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“Okay. Go catch her. But be quick.”

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“Thank you.”

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Bala raced round, snatched up the gloves, hurriedly apologised to customers as she moved through them, and was out the doors.

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There. Down the street. Walking like the world was trying to rain on her but she had come greased in advance. Bala ran.

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“Mrs Jacobson! Mrs Jacobson!” Bala wasn’t shouting, but the urgency and her diction were clear. The woman didn’t turn around and Bala knew from the tensing of Mrs Jacobson’s shoulders she was being deliberately ignored.

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Bala had had enough. She jogged up until she could hold the gloves directly under Mrs Jacobson’s nose.

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“You dropped these in the bank, Mrs Jacobson. Your gloves.”

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The woman’s face was like a child’s: pursing its lips to prevent a fork of greens being steered into it. Bala stepped in to block the woman’s path.

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“Woah!” she said as Mrs Jacobson seemed intent on barging into her. She had youth on her side though, and for all her belligerence it seemed Mrs Jacobson had her limits.

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“Oh, no! I was doing so well today! So, so well. Today might have been the day it worked. Now… Oh, they’re just gloves! Just a pair of silly gloves. They don’t matter.” But Mrs Jacobson took them, stuffed them into her bag, sighed heavily.

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“I’m sorry if I’ve done something wrong. I just thought…”

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“It doesn’t matter anymore. The day’s wasted now. Shot to pieces.” Then Mrs Jacobson’s eyes brightened, looked up into Bala’s, and suddenly it was the afternoon-Mrs Jacobson standing before her. “I’m so sorry, my dear. You must think I’m quite mad. It’s not your fault. The gloves! It’s my own fault: it was me who left them behind, so that ruined things anyway.”

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“Er… ruined what?” The question was out before Bala remembered the golden rule, of not asking any customer anything beyond what they wanted the bank to do with their money. Not to respect their privacy, but because if you did you might never get onto the next customer. She felt the pull of her chair, the queue, Mrs Sang’s tight-lipped impatience behind her.

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“The constants. The variables. Making the variables constants. If I can just get everything to happen exactly the way it did on that day, then I can make it happen again. That’s how it works. I read all about it. It’s how you get an experiment to repeat the same result. It’s like following a recipe and having the cake turn out exactly as the previous time. But there’re so many variables you don’t consider the first time around. The temperature of the milk, how long you beat the eggs, the brand of sugar, flour, butter.”

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“This is why you come to the bank and always do everything exactly the same?” Bala asked, burning the rule now, intrigue having its head once again.

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“Uh-huh. I get up, eat the same breakfast, wear the same clothes. Oh, don’t worry, I clean them—I’m not that far gone. The same walk into town with the exact same route. First the bank. Then I buy the paper—Mr Hadik is very obliging, even though he must think I’m as mad as you do. Then a walk through the park, back home, and a video of Singing In The Rain. I must have watched it two hundred times by now. At least I get the weekends off—the bank’s closed then.”

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“You don’t have the same routines in the afternoon though…”

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“No. It’s happened by then, you see. Well, it will happen when I get the details exactly right. Henry comes calling at my door and asks to come in. Only this time, this time I say yes and let him in.”

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This last bit threw Bala. She’d been following the strange logic of the explanation up until then, helped by remembering Yasmin’s aunt and the hand washing and the doors. There was always reason behind every action, even if it wasn’t logically attached.

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“Henry?” she asked.

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“My late husband.”

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You had to ask, Bala thought.

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“He came to the door once before, you see. While I was watching Singing In The Rain. But I was scared, seeing him there again. I mean, he was dead. Or I thought he was. I was scared and so I didn’t let him in. I was stupid, weak. Scared.” The repetition of this word was one Bala could suddenly appreciate. “But it showed me miracles can happen. When the conditions are right. So then I knew what I had to do: repeat them all, absolutely perfectly, for the miracle to happen again.”

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Bala found she had nothing to say, tried a shaky smile.

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“Thank you, my dear. I knew I could count on your cooperation.”

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#

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Bala returned to work knowing she’d been coerced into performing a ritual she hadn’t agreed to. Everyone was entitled to their own madness. What wasn’t fair was roping others into the act.

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She told no one about the conversation with Mrs Jacobson. She couldn’t think how she could relate it without it sounding, well, exactly like it was.

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The next morning Mrs Jacobson came in as if it hadn’t happened and Bala played along because she was expected to keep things running smoothly, the way Mrs Sang liked them.

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That perception changed when she did an internet search for Henry Jacobson and discovered another reason why Mrs Jacobson might have been scared to see him on her doorstep. One the woman hadn’t mentioned when they’d talked. And it wasn’t because Henry had somehow risen from the dead. It was because of the things Henry had done when alive.

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Bad things.

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Horrible things.

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Things that could have accounted for an entire queueful of mad victims, not just his poor wife. If the others had lived long enough to come to the bank and tell their side of the story.

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The newspapers knew all these things because he had been arrested, convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment—which had amounted to fourteen days before he’d hung himself in his cell. His widow had moved here, kept quiet about her past for obvious reasons.

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Mrs Jacobson undoubtedly needed help, but not in any endeavour to bring Henry back.

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But it was the woman’s crusade that disturbed Bala more than anything she’d read in the articles. Not because Mrs Jacobson was a broken survivor of atrocities all of Henry’s other victims hadn’t survived to relate. Not that at all. It was the terrible, insane thought that Mrs Jacobson’s mad plan might actually work. That the thing that had knocked on her door would be successfully invited back in. Back, that was, from where it had deservedly been sent.

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Mrs Sang wouldn’t let her change windows, Bala knew. Not without good reason. And a transfer to another department, another bank, was a long way off yet.

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Variables, Bala thought.

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If everything had to be like it was that day, then she could spoil the broth. Not by deviating from the script, because Mrs Jacobson would see that. But by turning one of the tens the wrong way around, by counting from a different corner of the notes, by passing them over with her left hand and not her right. Doing things under the counter she hadn’t done that day that Mrs Jacobson was trying to recreate.

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Obsessively, compulsively different, each and every time.

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After all, someone had to stop Henry.

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© Jez Patterson 2013

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/His Turn to Remember - John A Frochio.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/His Turn to Remember - John A Frochio.html deleted file mode 100644 index 58997891..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/His Turn to Remember - John A Frochio.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ -

His Turn to Remember

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John A. Frochio

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Next up, flash fiction in a classic-style, treating one of the perennial tropes (or perhaps that should be “treasures”) of the genre. True, there is no glass jar here, but there have been other notable containers for our remains across the years of science fiction...

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During his daily walk through the vast and empty halls of the Masters’ mausoleum, Watchman Seven stopped to remember. The front panel of his pure white metallic body—about heart level in a human frame—popped open. He extracted a small handheld device, still as shiny and new as he first remembered it. The panel closed with a sharp snapping sound and his body resealed itself..

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He keyed in his password.

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Seven stood completely motionless, transfixed by the images displayed on the gift the Masters had provided long ago. He clutched it tightly as memories flashed across the tiny monitor. This was the only place they had existed since the day of his rebirth, when his brain was transferred to this cold metallic android body. His mind had been unceremoniously cleansed of everything.

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Conscious of the exact time, Seven knew he had seconds enough before he was required at his watch station.

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A very long time ago, Seven and the other eleven android watchmen were commissioned to guard and protect the sleeping Masters, who by design would not be awakened for many centuries. Their bodies were built from the strongest materials and each was installed with enough weaponry to quash an army of warriors or an assault of marauding beasts.

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They were the guardians of the Masters.

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Before the Masters went to sleep, they gave him this memento, a tiny morsel extracted from his memories, fifteen minutes of a video album that he could view whenever he wanted or needed to remember. He used to remember every day. Now only on occasion.

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Today he wanted to remember.

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He watched…

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A beautiful wife. Whose wife? His? Yes.

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Two small children. Were they his children? Of course.

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Laughter. They were all happy. He remembered happiness and laughter.

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Singing. Not the most beautiful harmonies, certainly, but beautiful to him. Wasn't beauty a personal thing?

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Was that him playing with the children? Was that what he had looked like in his previous life? He always wondered.

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And then, before it was over, one small kiss on the cheek from his wife. Sometimes he imagined how it must have felt. Warm, soft, moist. What other feelings? He struggled with what he must have experienced. Back then, so long ago.

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Of course, there was much missing. These were only fragments, a tiny sliver of his past. He wondered about the events—the missing pieces—that led up to his new life within this cold, hard skin. His new life, without feeling, without even one small kiss. Maybe his Masters did not want him to remember those events. Those would certainly be too painful to watch over and over again.

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Did the Masters have compassion?

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The time was near to begin his watch. He proceeded toward his station. Watchman Nine was standing in position, looking much like Seven, facing outward toward the gray, dead world beyond their strong walls, where any enemy might be lurking, planning an imminent attack.

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Nine turned to him as he approached, and stepped aside so Seven could take his position.

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As Nine passed him on his way back to his recharging station, Seven handed him the device.

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It was his turn to remember.

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The End

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Ilysveil - Tigers Can Remember.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Ilysveil - Tigers Can Remember.html deleted file mode 100644 index 6ea86617..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Ilysveil - Tigers Can Remember.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,192 +0,0 @@ -

Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember

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J. H. Zech

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In another story for our memory theme, we revisit a culture in which recorded history and the fine detail of a culture’s most profound events are shown to be very different things.

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Everything had changed. Yunha had just returned to her homeland from her long study abroad in Solradia. As soon as she left the port, she was entranced by a public signboard, the snow on top glistening from the glow of a magic crystal streetlight. The capital city Shinra now even had modern lights. At the center of the board was a large notice stamped with the red imperial seal.

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“Imperial Edict of September 1, Civilization and Enlightenment Era Year 20 (Solar Year 1895). As of this date, slavery, the owning of persons, and involuntary servitude are hereby abolished.”

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Finally. Slavery had long since been abolished in Solradia, but Radiaurora had endured unchangingly for hundreds of years. But not even this nation was immune to time.

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Her big brother Jangmo had always been an earnest believer in changing with the times. Her last memory of him was him saying goodbye to her as he left the village to become an apprentice to a blacksmith in the capital. She was the only one seeing him off; their parents hadn’t shown up.

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“Blacksmithing is beneath your station as a noble,” their father had said to Jangmo.

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As Jangmo left, he had said to Yunha, “I’m going to learn new things and come back one day. There are all sorts of new technology from the West that can improve the lives of our servants. I’ll become a noble who can be relied on, not just someone who rides of the backs of the commoners.”

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Had Jangmo made his dream come true? She hadn’t received any letters from him in years. It was worrying, but he must have had a reason. She couldn’t wait to see him after so many years.

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A loud bell rang, and a trolley full of people passed by. The passengers were wearing Ilysveilan suits and dresses rather than traditional robes. Western technology and customs had even reached the remote Radiaurora. It felt strange to see her fellow tigerborns’ furry ears covered by brimmed hats meant for humans, though the men’s suits had been modified. Their orange-black striped tails still stuck out a hole in the back. With slender figure wrapped in a pink overcoat from Solradia, Yunha fit right in the new Radiaurora.

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“Ma’am?” a young tigerborn in dark blue uniform said. Judging from his clothes, he was a police officer. He looked much different from the blue-robed law officials she had seen in her childhood.

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“Yes? What is it?” Yunha asked.

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The officer’s cat-like green eyes glowed against the backdrop of his black billed hat’s shadow. “You seem to be lost. Can I help you?”

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“I haven’t been in Shinra in fifteen years. So much has changed. But aside from that, I’m looking for a man named Jangmo Bak.”

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“What’s your relation to him? I can’t give out personal information without a reason.”

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“I’m his sister.”

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“Please come with me to the station, and I’ll look up his records for you,” the officer said.

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She followed him to the police station, passing by new sights and people. Other than tigerborns, many foxborns walked the streets, their fluffy red tails unmistakable from behind. Elves, dwarves, dragonborns, and humans were all here too. Had Radiaurora been conquered without her knowing it?

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At the station, the officer went into a back room and came back out a little later.

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He looked down. “I regret to inform you I found a Jangmo Bak, but he passed away ten years ago.”

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Yunha gasped. “No… Big brother…” Her elation after having arrived in Radiaurora evaporated. The one person she had looked forward to reuniting with the most was no more. All the new technology in the world couldn’t replace that. But something didn’t add up. “But why? He would’ve only been twenty at the time.”

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“It’s unknown. He disappeared, and the investigation was closed with no leads. As per protocols, he was declared deceased three months later.”

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“Why wasn’t our family informed of this?”

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“As far as we knew then, he didn’t have any family. We couldn’t find his name on any family register,” the officer said.

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That was impossible. Jangmo would’ve been in her family’s register. He disappeared from the records too? She couldn’t leave this be. “Where did he live?”

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The officer scribbled down an address and handed it to her. “I doubt you’ll find anything. But if it’ll satisfy you, go here.”

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“Thank you.” Yunha took the note, bowed, and promptly left the station. The police wouldn’t reinvestigate the death of a nobody from ten years ago. Jangmo wasn’t a nobody to her though.

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She took the trolley to the neighborhood where Jangmo had lived. It passed bustling streets with all manner of new shops. An Ilysveilan-style bakery advertising strawberry shortcake. A Solradian clothing store selling both suits and colorful kimonos patterned with flowers. A dwarvish blacksmithing workshop. All lit by streetlights so people could tour the shops even at night.

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Shinra was nothing like the capital city of Radiaurora she remembered, an ancient oasis of tradition where merchants and craftsmen were seen as lowly. Ordinarily, she would take her time wandering the shopping district like she had in Solradia, but she wasn’t in the mood for that now.

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Yunha hopped off at her stop, a slum at the outskirts of the city. From the pungent smell, she surmised that modern plumbing hadn’t reached all the way here yet. After navigating the labyrinth of narrow streets while avoiding suspicious puddles, she arrived at a traditional house.

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Black half-cylindrical shingles formed a trapezoidal roof over a one-story wooden structure with papered-over sliding doors. It was a fairly large house.

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A human in a black cape and top hat stood knocking at the front door. “Excuse me!” he said in Ilysveilan. What was a foreigner doing all the way out here?

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A round-faced, middle-aged tigerborn in a garish scarlet dress slid open the door. “Who are you?” she asked in Radiauroran.

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The man switched to Radiauroran and said, “I’m Edmond La-Pierre, a missionary. One of the members of our church is ill, and I was told he lives here. I wish to offer him some prayers.”

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The lady scoffed, her whiskers twitching. “If you want to offer him something, offer him medicine. Jain’s been praying every day, and your gods haven’t lifted a finger to help him.”

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“Are you going to let me in or not?” Edmond asked.

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“Fine. But don’t go evangelizing to the other tenants.”

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Edmond stepped into the house and slipped behind the landlady.

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“And what do you want?” she asked, looking at Yunha.

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“I’ve come looking for Jangmo Bak.”

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For an instant, the landlady’s face darkened, but she caught herself and smiled. “Jangmo Bak? Do I have a tenant with that name? I’m sorry. You must have the wrong address.”

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What was the landlady afraid of? Jangmo was only a minor noble, and he came to Shinra nearly penniless. Yunha shook her head. “He doesn’t currently live here, but I’m told he lived here and passed away ten years ago.”

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“I’m afraid I don’t remember all my tenants from that far back.”

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The landlady had reacted to Jangmo’s name. She clearly remembered something about him. “You must have records though. Please, he’s my brother. May I have a look?” Yunha tried her best puppy-eyes impression.

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“Fine. Come in. I’ll look through my archives. It won’t have much more information than his room number and rent payments though.”

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“That’ll be enough. Thank you. I’m Yunha Bak, by the way.”

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“You can call me Madam Wu,” the landlady said without looking back.

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She followed the landlady into the house, past a narrow hall of wooden floors and sliding doors, Madam Wu went into a study and pulled a bound book from the shelf. She flipped through the pages, then motioned Yunha in.

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“Here, this is all I have on this man.” She pointed to an entry on the rental record and set a candle beside the book.

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Jangmo Bak. Room four. Security deposit on May 1, 1884. Yunha looked through all the mentions of his name. He didn’t miss a single rent payment for over a year, and then was never in the record again after the September 1, 1885 payment. “Do you know what happened to him after this date?”

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“No. Maybe he moved. I don’t remember. Like I said, that’s all I have.”

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There was no entry showing that his security deposit was returned, however. Had he really just moved? But according to that police officer, Jangmo had disappeared in 1885. That lined up with the date in the rental records.

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“What happened to his belongings?” Yunha asked.

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“I probably threw out whatever he didn’t take with him.”

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“I see…” Yunha searched for current tenants that had been here since before September 1885 but turned up empty. “May I go see the room where he lived?”

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“Sure, if the tenant himself lets you in.”

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Yunha made her way to room four and knocked.

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“Who is it?” a weak voice said.

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“My name is Yunha Bak. I wish to speak with you about an important matter.”

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“Can you let her in?” the weak voice said to someone else in the room.

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It was the human, Edmond, who slid open the door with an annoyed expression. Or maybe his thick black eyebrows and slight wrinkles on his forehead just made him look like that naturally. “Jain is sick right now. I advise you not bother him.”

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“This is very important to me. I won’t be long,” Yunha said as she moved past him.

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It was a simple room with only a dresser and a small table. Jain was a middle-aged tigerborn lying on the floor in a futon. Streaks of his black hair and fur had greyed, so, combined with his orange patches, it appeared he had three colors of stripes. He glanced over as she sat down beside him. “So, what did you want to discuss with me?”

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“I learned from Madam Wu you’ve been here for almost ten years. The previous tenant was my brother. Have you ever met him?”

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Jain coughed. “This room was vacant when I arrived. Some of the other residents in the house said this room brought bad luck, but they didn’t go into details. Nothing’s happened to me until now, and I doubt the flu is the work of any curse.”

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“Do Radiaurorans even practice curse magic?” Edmond asked.

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“Not in the last few hundred years,” said Yunha. “This dynasty’s founder made it taboo. Though maybe things have changed recently.” She looked at Edmond.

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“Why are you looking at me? Yes, Ilysveilans use curse magic, but I personally can’t use any magic. And regarding Radiaurorans’ practices, you should know more about it than me. You’re a tigerborn.”

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“I’ve been studying abroad in Solradia for quite some time. As strange as it sounds, you probably know more about the last ten years in Radiaurora than I do. Do you know what happened here in 1885?”

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“Maybe. There was a big commotion around this neighborhood when I first arrived.”

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“What do you know about it?”

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Stroking his smooth grey beard, Edmond recounted, “I didn’t exactly live in this neighborhood, but I passed by it often. Soldiers were patrolling this area for some reason. I could have sworn I heard gunshots one time. The soldiers blocked off a section of the neighborhood, and I wasn’t too keen on getting involved in a magitech rifle shootout, so I stayed away.”

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“What was that all about?” Yunha asked.

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“I’m not sure. The soldiers had their lips sealed, and I didn’t have any reason to press further. Can’t do the gods’ work if I’m dead.”

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“Oh that,” Jain said.

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They both turned to him.

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“You know what happened?” Yunha said.

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“Most people around here know about it, though they won’t talk about it in public. It’s taboo.”

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“Still, I must know. Please, tell me.”

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“It was a riot, an uprising, or a full-scale revolution depending on who you ask. My knowledge is second hand too. But the gist of it is that the slaves and butchers were unhappy and rose up against the Imperial regime. I don’t know any details about how it ended, but since Emperor Kojo is still on the throne, I assume they failed.” Jain pointed to a scroll pinned to the wall next to him. “Take off that scroll.”

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Yunha did so. Underneath it was a small paragraph carved into the wall. “This is…”

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“It’s probably the reason people say this room is bad luck. I put up the scroll to hide it since it creeps me out. No one knows who wrote it. Judging from the contents, it has something to do with the taboo slave rebellion.”

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The characters on the wall read, I leave these words as both encouragement and a warning to my comrades and posterity. The world is far from fair. The downtrodden must stand up again and again. But our enemies are many. Do not lose sight of the enemies of afar for fear of the enemies close. There will be countless sacrifices. Today, that is me. Tomorrow it may be you. But never forget: this must never become the tale of a hero, and we will fade into forgotten legends like the truths of dynasties past.

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A tear rolled down Yunha’s cheek. “This is my brother’s handwriting. Big brother, I’ve found you.” But this only raised more questions. A sacrifice? She couldn’t rest until she knew what her brother had truly felt about his last moments.

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“So that’s your older brother?” Jain asked. “He must’ve been involved in the rebellion and died in a battle. I’m sorry for your loss.”

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“May his soul rest in peace,” Edmond said.

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Yunha shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s quite right.”

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“Pardon?” Edmond asked. “It seems very clear.”

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“If he died during a battle, how would he have had the time to write this in his room? This could have only been done if he knew he was going to die.”

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“That’s true. What if he wrote it before he went to a battle though? Knowing he was likely to die, he left a message,” Jain suggested.

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“The phrasing is off. It says there will be countless sacrifices, but today it is him. Why specifically sacrifices? And he said the sacrifice is him. He wouldn’t go into a battle alone. So why is the sacrifice him and not ‘us’ or his comrades too?”

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Edmond said, “You have a point, young Ms. Bak, but there’s not enough information to say. In fact, there are several parts of this with ambiguous meaning. This isn’t the tale of a hero. Why not? There are enemies close and far. Assuming the government was one of his enemies, who are the others? I can’t say.”

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Yunha wrote down the passage in her notepad and slipped it in her overcoat’s pocket. “Thank you both for helping me. I’ll be on my way now.” She got up and bowed.

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Jain coughed and nodded in her direction. “I wish you luck. If you can clear up the truth about this, I’d feel better too. Beats hearing rumors about curses and bad luck.”

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“I should get going too.” Edmond rose.

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Yunha and Edmond left the boarding house together and headed out onto the dirt road.

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“What are you going to do now?” Edmond asked.

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What was his interest in this matter? “I need to gather some more testimonies about what exactly happened in the slave rebellion ten years ago.”

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“In that case, why don’t you come to the church? A lot of the members have lived around here for many years. They might know something.”

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Of course. He did say he was a missionary. Religion was of little interest to Yunha, but she had no reason to refuse. “That would be helpful. Thank you.”

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“Come along, then.” Edmond strutted toward the center of town, and Yunha followed.

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As she walked along the street, a foxborn man in dark blue uniform appeared from around the corner, and they bumped into each other. Yunha stumbled back a step.

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The fur on the foxborn man’s pointed ears stood on edge, and he pointed a magitech rifle at Yunha, the magic gem on top of the stock glowing blue as it activated. “What’s the meaning of this, tigerborn?”

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For a moment, Yunha was at a loss for words. Was this man out of his mind? Not to mention, he had a rifle. Not just anyone could have one. Judging from his uniform with its golden lines and black-billed cap, and the fact that he was a foxborn, he was likely a Solradian soldier. “I’m sorry for bumping into you. I’ll be on my way now.” She took a step forward, but the man grabbed her by the wrist.

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“What are you going to do about this?” He pointed to a smudge of dirt at the cuff of his pants.

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“It’s only dirt. It’ll wash off.”

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“You’re just a lowly tigerborn. How dare you talk back to me!” He pointed the rifle squarely at her head.

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Edmond stepped in between them. “Now, now. There’s no need for violence. I’ll have it cleaned for you if you’re that concerned.”

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The Solradian foxborn soldier clicked his tongue. “An Ilysveilan. Tell the woman to watch where she’s going.” He stormed off.

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“Belligerent toward someone from a weak nation and bowing to someone from a strong nation. The world is as twisted as ever,” Edmond said.

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“Thank you, Mr. La-Pierre. What was that all about though?” Yunha asked.

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Edmond sighed. “The Solradians have already modernized. They want to exert influence over the still-modernizing Radiaurora, so they’ve sent over some soldiers for ‘peacekeeping’ as they call it. They’ve already been here for ten years.”

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“I see…” Things had certainly gone a troublesome direction in Radiaurora while she had been away. Yunha remembered her roommate, her teachers, and the lady of the boarding house she lived in while in Solradia. Until now, she had nothing but fond daily memories of Solradia. Seeing the other side of its modernization inspired mixed feelings within her.

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At a cleaner part of Shinra, still considered the outskirts but closer to the center than the slum, they arrived at the church. It was a magnificent large building in the Western style of bricks and stained glass windows. The building must have cost a small fortune, likely more expensive than some of the nobles’ houses. Whether intentional or not, the church itself served as a symbol of Ilysveil’s financial might.

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A bell tolled at the top of the church, under an arch with metal shaped in the wing of a bat on one side, and the wing of a crane on the other. She could see why the Ilysveilans called their religion Dualism.

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“Ah, the night classes must have just ended,” Edmond said.

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“What are these night classes for?”

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“We teach Radiaurorans how to speak Ilysveilan. It’s an important skill in these times. People are just getting ready to leave. Now’s your chance to talk to them.”

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Yunha nodded and walked in the church with Edmond. A group of tigerborns in white robes were packing up. They were all commoner women. She had received education as a daughter of a noble, but for commoners to have access to any education, even if it was at a church, it felt as though Radiaurora was progressing little by little.

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Edmond introduced Yunha to the women at the church and gave a vague explanation that she was looking for someone from the slums from ten years ago.

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The women had a mix of bored and irritated looks on their faces. They hadn’t come here to be questioned by a noble after all. Yunha didn’t let that faze her. “What do you all know about what happened in the slums ten years ago?”

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Whispers swept through the small crowd. Many knew something. Whether that information was reliable was another matter.

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One short woman raised her hand. “There was a slave revolt.”

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“What was the cause?” Yunha asked.

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“Lady, have you seen how slaves were treated until now? Why wouldn’t they revolt?” a sharp-eyed woman in the front said, her arms crossed.

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A fair point. “I’ll ask something related then. Why did the revolt start in the slums? The slaves would have been living on the nobles’ property.”

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“The person who organized it was from there, or so I’ve heard,” a woman with round cheeks said.

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Was that person possibly her brother? They wouldn’t know that much though. “How did the revolt end?”

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“The slaves lost, and the incident was swept under the rug,” the sharp-eyed woman said.

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“Why was that?” Yunha asked. “In the slums, that incident was a taboo to talk about.”

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The woman with round cheeks shrugged. “Even though it seemed like a big deal, the police and the military denied anything happened. There were rumors going around about a creepy message cursing the world from one of the rebels. It just feels like bad luck.”

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An incident everyone wanted to forget. “Why did Emperor Kojo end slavery if the rebels lost?”

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“Because it’s the right thing to do!” the short woman said emphatically.

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If only the right thing to do was what drove politics. “If that was the case, he would’ve ended slavery twenty years ago when he took power.”

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Edmond interrupted, “I will point out that slavery ending this year was not a total surprise. Ever since I got here, the laws have been tending in that direction. They gave slaves some basic rights like protection from physical abuse in 1885. That was after the incident though, so maybe it was related.”

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So, the government defeated the slaves but made concessions to them anyway until eventually ending slavery altogether. But why? The military was able to put down the rebellion well enough to cover it up, and even if it had gotten out of hand, Radiaurora could always call in assistance from the dragonborn Centrosian Empire as it had historically done.

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She had gotten all she could from them. Yunha thanked them and left the church with Edmond. Outside, she took a coin out of her purse and handed it to Edmond.

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“I can’t accept payment for this,” Edmond said.

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“Please, think of it as a donation to aid their education. As a noble who hasn’t lived here for fifteen years, money is all I have for them.” Yunha pressed the coin into his hand. “Would you like anything personally other than money? Do you want me to join the church?”

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“No. If you personally wish to, I would of course welcome you with open arms, but not as a returned favor. My job as a missionary is to do good and let people know of the gods. Whether someone accepts must be their own decision.”

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“I have been wondering why you helped me.”

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Edmond looked back at the church with the colorful warm glow from its windows juxtaposed against the black night canvas. Perhaps to the commoners here, its light was more a paradise than any afterlife that could be promised, a respite from the bleak oppression of the nobility. “A lot of members are former slaves. The girl who talked back to you was one of them, though she tries not to bring it up. When I realized your brother was connected to the slave rebellion, I wanted to know the truth too. No matter what anyone says, this is undoubtedly the tale of a hero.”

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The tale of a hero. The part that had been bugging Yunha the most. Did Jangmo really feel that his actions weren’t heroic? Why, when the essay called others to action, did he say that it wasn’t the tale of a hero? No, wait, that was how Edmond had paraphrased it. She pulled out her notepad. The exact words were, Yunha said out loud, “This must never become the tale of a hero.”

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“Pardon?” Edmond asked.

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“I misremembered,” Yunha said. “The text on the wall said that this must never become the tale of a hero, not that it wasn’t the tale of a hero.”

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“What’s the difference?”

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“The meaning of this changes completely. Whether or not he considers the actions heroic is irrelevant in the actual text. If it must never become the tale of a hero, that raises the question why? What happens if it does become the tale of a hero?” Yunha ran off. “Follow me.”

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“Where are we going?” Edmond jogged after her.

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“I’m positive Madam Wu knows everything. I now have enough pieces to force her to talk.”

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***

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Yunha knocked on the door of the boarding house, and soon Madam Wu peeked her head out.

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“You again? What do you want?” Madam Wu glanced at Edmond who was standing behind Yunha. “The missionary too?”

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“I know what happened to my brother. I want you to tell me the whole truth.”

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Madam Wu glanced around skittishly. “Let’s talk inside.”

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She led them into her personal room and slid the door shut. They sat down cross-legged at a low table with a candle on it.

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“What are you saying you know? For the record, I don’t know anything.”

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Yunha said, “Based on testimonies, the gist of the story is that a slave rebellion occurred here. Slaves wouldn’t be living here though, but the leader of the rebellion was, and he wrote a message in one of the rooms here.”

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“Hmph. I’ve heard that much from the rumors,” Madam Wu said.

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“And do you know what happened to the leader of the rebellion?”

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“No. But if I had to guess, he was caught and executed, just like every other rebel leader that shows up.”

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“That’s what I initially thought. My brother was the leader of the slaves. He led them to rebellion, and they lost. He wrote the message in your boarding house room, then was captured and died. But that’s not the whole story.”

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“There were several gaps in the story,” Edmond said. “I didn’t know what they meant, but I could tell something rotten was afoot.”

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“Exactly. I have three questions,” Yunha said. “Why was it necessary to cover up this slave rebellion and erase Jangmo from the records? Who are the enemies near and the enemies afar? And why did he say it must never become the tale of a hero?”

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Madam Wu didn’t say anything. The candle’s flame flickered, and the shadows of the past stirred.

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“The answer to my first question comes from the result of the rebellion. Jangmo mentions that he was the sacrifice, and over the next ten years, slaves gradually gained more rights until they were freed this year. My brother didn’t simply die in battle. He was a sacrifice in exchange for the eventual freedom of slaves.”

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“But what was it that motivated the government to accede to his demands?” Edmond asked. “Even if your brother agreed to give up his life, the government could crush the rebellion anyway.”

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“Ordinarily, the government would never give in. Even in the worst case scenario, they could always call in help from their ally Centrosis. But by 1885, the situation was no longer ordinary. Remember what you told me when we ran into the Solradian soldier?”

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Edmond nodded. “They’ve been here for around ten years.”

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Yunha continued, “With the objective of ‘peacekeeping.’ That helps answer the next question.

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The message specifically said not to lose sight of the enemies afar. That means the enemies who are close were obvious. The government. Then who are the enemies afar? Who is further than the government? Who wants to take away their freedoms? The Solradian Empire. If a rebellion got out of hand, then Solradia would have justification to send in more troops to quell it.”

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“I see. So, the rebels had to think not only about the Radiauroran government but the possibility of Solradia seizing control of Radiaurora,” Edmond said.

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“That leads into the last question. Why must this incident never become the tale of a hero? What would happen if it did become the tale of a hero? Let’s say my brother died as a martyr and it was widely known.”

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“Others would presumably rise up,” Edmond answered.

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“Right. First, Solradia would know of the incident, then following rebellions would create an easy justification for Solradia to send troops, and Radiaurora wouldn’t have the power to stop them. The Emperor knew this, and that’s why he freed the slaves in exchange for keeping everything secret. That’s why my brother warned others to not let their resistance against the government become a hero’s tale, to keep their activities as hidden as possible. Because if it did become a hero’s tale, the downtrodden would lose to the enemies afar.”

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Madam Wu sighed. “If you knew all that, why did you come here?”

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“There’s just one thing I want to know. Who came up with the idea? Did the Imperial government, seeking to maintain its power over Radiaurora, propose to free the slaves in exchange for my brother’s life and secrecy? Or did my brother voluntarily propose to sacrifice himself to end slavery while preserving Radiaurora’s sovereignty?”

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“Why do you think I know the answer to that?”

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“You reacted to Jangmo’s name when I first mentioned him. You at least knew of him, enough to be shaken up. When we came back, you agreed to talk to us. If you truly didn’t know anything, you would have turned us away. Lastly, the message on the wall of his room. You’ve had years to replace that part of the wall or cover it up, but you didn’t.”

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Yunha stared down Madam Wu. “No matter how much trouble it brought, you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. That’s the behavior of someone who cares. Someone who didn’t want the last trace of his existence to be erased.”

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Madam Wu smiled faintly and threw her hands up. “You’ve truly seen right through me. Yes, I knew Jangmo well while he was a tenant. I knew about his activities. And when I heard you were his sister, I didn’t know what to do. To keep everything a secret for the sake of his sacrifice, or to tell you what you undoubtedly had the right to know. In the end, I was half baked as usual and let you look at his room and nothing more.”

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“As usual? What do you mean?” Yunha asked.

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“I wanted to support him, so I let him use his room to hold meetings and harbor fugitives. But I didn’t want to go to prison, so when the day of his arrest came, I pretended not to know anything and didn’t protect him.”

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“You don’t need to feel guilty. My brother was someone who wouldn’t have wanted to drag down others with him. So, please, answer my question.”

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“Yes. He did it.” Madam Wu clasped Yunha’s hand. “Your brother made the proposal and voluntarily sacrificed himself. He was arrested unofficially, taken somewhere, and executed. In exchange, the lives of his fellow rebels were spared, and slavery finally ended this year. He wanted to be forgotten, but I couldn’t forget.”

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Edmond held his hat in his hand and looked down. “He was a hero.”

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How had Jangmo felt at his last moments? She hadn’t been able to close the book on this case until she knew that. Smiling, Yunha said, “Yes. Even if no one else does, I shall remember him as a hero.”

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC.html deleted file mode 100644 index 50f9146d..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ -

MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC

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Editorial in memorium

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Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff

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Snryl - Les Sklaroff

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Behind My Eyes - Martin M. CLark

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Henry - Jez Patterson

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A Comic - Liam Baldwin

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His Turn to Remember - John A. Frochio

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Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember - J. H. Zech

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The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin

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Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/Snyrl - Les Sklaroff.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/Snyrl - Les Sklaroff.html deleted file mode 100644 index f9906d39..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/Snyrl - Les Sklaroff.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,24 +0,0 @@ -

Snyrl

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Les Sklaroff

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And to follow that visit to the city of Snoak, some long-overdue onomatological context.

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In the beginning was the Bird…

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Or so it is said, but with due respect to the literalists of Snoak City, the Bird must have post-dated the Beginning, in all likelihood by a century or two, in order for the tree to grow from a fortuitously germinated acorn into the immense grandeur of its akhood.

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The Bird was called Snyrl, a name spoken with lip curled in disdain or mockery only by those unfamiliar with the mythic history.

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Snyrl, whose wondrously glittering wings (as depicted in ancient images) sheltered its unseen brood amid the topmost hidden reaches of the oak, as the tree itself provided protection from storm and sun alike to those who were constrained to conduct their lives on the ground.

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Snyrl, to whom befitting offerings of cakes and woven purses and hand-crafted trinkets were deposited across the river in the Deep Hollow at midnight under a full moon. These gifts were ceremonially guarded by successive generations of trusted Watchers. Only to the Watchers were granted (through shielded, sleep-deprived eyes) glimpses of those fabled feathers, or of the great golden beak. A hushed swoop, and the gifts were gone before any human eye had time to blink. So it was said. When the Watchers left at dawn, they were always able to confirm that in the Deep Hollow there remained not so much as a telltale crumb, wisp or shard.

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In response, Snyrl might reward the genuinely virtuous with whatever they most desired: improved health, fecundity, safe childbirth, pest-free crops, profitable trade, whatever else might alleviate the difficulties of a hard life. Alternatively, any subsequent misfortune would be attributed either to insufficient virtue or (no matter how many hours of dedicated labour may have been invested) to gifts deemed by Snyrl to be in some way unsatisfactory.

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It was not known what became of rejected offerings. They were not returned. The Watchers believed that they probably winked out of existence.

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Or so it was said.

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While Snyrl remained loftily aloof, an inaccessible mystery to all but the devoted and privileged few, Snyrl’s Oak on the other hand was a constant and reassuring presence, and an invaluable source of essential materials. The annual shedding of mast provided food for the pigs, the farming of which was the primary occupation in the area, while careful management of the lower branches yielded excellent timber for flooring and furniture, staves, stakes, spokes, ladders, handles, and other items. Its leaves were toxic to all but the pigs, but the tannins extracted from the bark and galls were useful for leather-curing, dyes, even for some herbal remedies.

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Over the years the Deep Hollow flooded and was repeatedly drained, its bowl eventually housing the superstructure of Praspafole Stadium. The tree remained central to the community, known always as Snyrl’s Oak, even though the mystique which had shrouded the elusive bird had long since drifted into legend, and the generations of Watchers were no more than dissipated ghosts.

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Snyrl’s Oak, a venerable relic of its former glory, finally succumbed to the ravages of an unprecedentedly fierce storm, during which it was twice riven by lightning strikes and partially uprooted by gale force winds.

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Before it fell it would have taken as many as eight adults with fully outstretched arms to encircle the bole. It took ten times that number, equipped with axes and hand-saws, to dismember the unscorched sections of the fallen giant and transport the timber to a dry storage area. In time, portions of that wood were destined to furnish half the households in this increasingly urbanised community. Pig-farming gradually gave way to many other industries and pursuits.

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According to most etymologists, the name “Snyrl’s Oak” underwent an inevitable vernacular contraction, to become at last simply “Snoak”. Years later, on the site where the once revered tree had stood for so long, the octagonal hub of Central took shape, with its complex of municipal offices, laboratories, and historical archives. Around it at various dates grew numerous enterprises familiar to any visitor today: the Fappit workshops, Quicksilver, the 3rdfield music studios, Sparagulan College, and the Auditorium. Just across the Stirrow were built the city museum and library, and the Stadium, with its adjoining glider track and gymnasium.

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A less convincing explanation for the city’s name is that “Snoak” was once that of an actual person, possibly a particularly successful pig-farmer.

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Scholars have largely dismissed this idea as being absurdly fanciful.

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diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/html/The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin.html b/content-xway/issue22/html/The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin.html deleted file mode 100644 index cfb75fc9..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/html/The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ -

The Parking Ticket

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Steve Slavin

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Another flash piece focusing on the past, but without brain-housing robots this one is much less spectacular in scope - at least on the surface. How much here is truth, and how much fiction?

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You know the feeling when you get a parking ticket that you don’t deserve? Should you fight it, or just pay it?

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I’ll never forget one I got back in 1979. This ticket was so unfair that I went out and bought a cheap camera, took pictures, brought them into court, and got the satisfaction of having the ticket dismissed.

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But what should I do with the camera? I had absolutely no interest in photography, but I decided one spring evening to take pictures of the sunset from the Brooklyn Heights promenade.

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When I got there, the sun had just begun to sink behind the Jersey Meadowlands and the sky was a deep orange. And so, along with perhaps another dozen real photographers -- all with fancy cameras – I snapped away.

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As the sun sank, the sky began taking on hues of purple. I included two or three people who leaned over the promenade railing, watching the sun almost imperceptibly slipping below the horizon.

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I hoped that each of my photos would be at least a bit different from the previous one. Sometimes a spectator shifted, or was replaced by another. I moved along, a few feet from the railing, slowly changing my perspective.

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Minutes after the sun had set, I was well into my second roll of film. I kept shooting, until maybe half an hour later, I had come to the end of the roll.

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I hoped that I might have gotten a few good photos, but I wouldn’t know until I had the film developed. When I got back the snapshots, I had to admit that they were not half bad. So, I bought a small album and filled it with my sunsets.

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A few weeks later I hosted a small get-together and one of my friends picked up the album and then passed it around. Everyone liked the pictures. Then a woman who came with one of my friends asked if I’d like to join her co-op photography gallery.

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I thought she was joking, but she insisted that my photos would definitely sell. If I chipped in just a hundred fifty dollars a month, they could hang there for as long as I wanted.

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At first I thought it was some kind of scam, but my friend vouched for her. The next day, I visited the gallery, which was just a narrow space on Atlantic Avenue down the block from some Syrian restaurants.

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There were a few dozen photos hanging, none of which impressed me. But what did I know? I had a creepy feeling that I was being taken for a ride, but a hundred fifty bucks was all I was paying for a parking space.

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A week later the gallery held an opening for my work. I had made multiple eight-and-a-half by eleven copies of each photo, mounted and ready to go at twenty-five dollars a pop. I was pretty sure that I was charging too much, but twenty-five was the minimum that any of the other photographers charged.

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I was amazed when the second customer who looked at my photos bought one of them. Ten minute later, someone else bought two more.

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In just two days I had almost sold out. I quickly had more copies made, and even got a nice review in The Heights Press. Then I doubled my prices, and my sales actually increased. The more I charged, the more I sold.

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After a month, I was charging two hundred dollars for my photos and still selling out every weekend. Some of the other photographers were getting jealous of my success, even though the crowds I brought in bought some of their photos too.

-

I knew that each of them had a lot more talent than I did. I decided that I would never take another photo. I was clearly a fraud.

-

It would be much, much better for me to quit while I was ahead, rather than be discovered for what I really was. Surely the other photographers had my number, and maybe even were looking forward to witnessing my fall.

-

So I announced my retirement. The woman who had persuaded me to join the gallery asked me to at least continue to exhibit the photos I had shot that spring evening. “If you never take another photo, your place in the world of photography is secure. I wish you would change your mind, but either way, I will support your decision.”

-

Quickly, word spread. Dozens of newspaper columnists and even writers of letters to the editor begged me to reconsider. But I stuck to my guns.

-

By now my photos were fetching one thousand dollars. I had more money than I would ever be able to spend. But something about this whole chain of events was bothering me. I fell asleep each night trying to figure out what it might be.

-

And then, one morning I jumped out of bed and found the photos I had taken of my ticketed car. I could make out the writing on the ticket and the lettering on the sign next to my car.

-

Something didn’t jibe. And then, there it was! I realized immediately what a fraud I had been! I quickly dressed, and hurried to traffic court with the photos and ticket.

-

When I got to see a referee and told her what had happened, she could not stop laughing. “You are the first person I have ever met who wanted to enter a guilty plea after having been found innocent.

-

“And the fact that you had not realized your error – and ours – until months later, and still made the trip down here. Well, I don’t think that has ever happened in the entire history of the Department of Motor Vehicles!”

-

Then I noticed my photo hanging on the wall of her office. She saw me looking at it, and then glanced at the name on the ticket.

-

She smiled. “I’ll tell you what: Autograph the photo and we’ll call it even.”

-

-

-

diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Behind My Eyes - Martin M Clark.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Behind My Eyes - Martin M Clark.md deleted file mode 100644 index 89e31205..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Behind My Eyes - Martin M Clark.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,685 +0,0 @@ -**Behind My Eyes** - -Martin M. Clark - -\- - -*For this memorial issue of Mythaxis, I invited former contributors to -submit stories with a theme of "memory". First amongst these is a -typically gung ho mix of sf, action, and humour from Martin M. Clark, -one which I think Gil would have appreciated.* - -\- - -So, I'm sitting in the Roundhouse Bar with Taco Murphy, not doing much -of anything. Pretty much par for the course since the plant shut down, -but it wasn't like either of us had a wife and kids waiting at home. -Well, this woman comes in - slim, brunette, *way* too classy for the -Roundhouse - and stands for a moment, scoping the joint. Gets my -attention, not just on general principle, but because she's in a -business suit, flat shoes, no purse. Not what you see around here, -except on a cop or similar. - -But as I check her out, I swear, she kind of *flickers*. Then again, I -got this metal plate in my head, from when Bobby Newmark rolled his old -man's Corvette, and I don't always see things the same as other folks. - -No matter. Classy walks up to Henry, the barman. He's standing, palms -flat on the countertop, glum look on his face, like this has to be the -Licencing Commission or somesuch. Taco, being Taco, slides along the -bench to get a better view of her ass. The dickhead catches my elbow, -makes me jab the bottle I'm holding against my teeth. I shove him away -and we have words, so that I miss what was being said up at the bar. - -Miss my chance to run.\ -Henry points in our direction, relief obvious on his face. Classy nods -and starts walking over. Taco, he's still bitching at me, so I have to -punch him in the shoulder to get his attention. He rubs his arm, glares. -"You wanna' take this outside, Frank? Huh?" - -"Get your head outta' your goddam ass, we got company." - -He looks at the approaching woman. Blinks. "What gives?" - -"Beats me. You got any outstanding warrants might have escaped your -attention, dude?" - -Taco grunts. "Like I'm always the bad guy? You ain't no angel, Frank." - -Classy stops in front of our booth. She's a looker, no argument: neat -figure, laughter in her eyes, blood-red lipstick. But up-close there's -something about her -- takes a moment to register -- perfect bilateral -symmetry (I dated a med student back-a-ways). She smiles. "And which of -you fine gentlemen is Frank Booth?" - -Taco swallows a laugh and sits back, taking a long pull on his beer. I -stand up, all polite, like. "That would be me, Miss." I pull my baseball -cap off, run a hand back across my close-cropped hair, and set my -headgear firmly back in place. "We got business together? Because you -*sure* don't look familiar." - -"I'm Clara Conner. *Agent* Clara Conner." - -"Uh-huh. And which particular *agency* are you from? If you don't mind -me asking." - -She reaches into an inside jacket pocket and removes a slim leather -billfold. Again, just for a moment, it's like bad reception on your TV. -The shape of a woman is there, under the static, but featureless, like a -storefront dummy. Her hair, skin, clothes - all just window dressing. I -glance at Taco but he sure don't see it, if his leer is anything to go -by. - -Then this voice is in my head, the voice from my dreams, telling me to -get the hell outta' Dodge, as in *right now*. And sometimes you just -gotta listen. - -I slap the billfold from her hand, send it spinning across the bar. Kick -the table hard against her legs. She don't flinch, gasp, or nothing - -hand darts behind her, I figure reaching for a piece carried in the -small of her back. Taco jumps up, switchblade in his hand like magic. -The guy may be a shithead, but he's always got my back. - -"Freeze!" Henry, holding the .38 he keeps behind the bar. "Nobody move." - -God bless the predictable. - -Clara half-turns her head towards him, but keeps her eyes on mine. -"Trust me, you don't want any part of this." - -Henry clears his throat, sounds dry. "My bar, my friends, my call. Frank -here has a temper but I've never known him hit a woman. Everyone just -calm down and we'll do things peaceable, like." - -Clara looks straight at me. "Oh, I think we're *way* beyond that -- -don't you, Frank?" - -I've worked door at the Consort Club and could tell it was gonna kick -off, no matter what. I clench my fists. She smiles. - -The fire exit behind me opens as someone remembers someplace they have -to be. The low afternoon sun streams in, lights her up like some -religious icon. - -Her pupils don't react. - -Clara spins round, towards Henry, and I see metal in her hand. I don't -know how anyone can move that fast. I hear her gun go '*woof*'. - -Henry, he *explodes*. All of him above the bar just blows apart, along -with the bottles behind. Liquor spray bursts into flames. - -The bitch spins again, draws a bead on my chest. - -A shotgun roars. - -Takes half her face away. - -And then it's whole again. - -Jonny Chen, short-order cook, standing in the kitchen doorway. He -*rak-raks* another round in his 12-gauge. I grab Taco's collar and -bundle us both backwards over the bench. Because behind Jonny is the gas -griddle, and still perfect Clara is already aiming at him. - -I hear her gun, then the Propane blast drowns everything else. That big -old bench seat shoves us across the floor like leaves in the yard. Saves -our asses. Taco drags me to my feet and through the fire exit. The -alleyway leads to 2^nd^ Street one way, Braun's junkyard the other. We -head for the wide-open. We stagger, we stumble, we run. - -And don't look back. - -We run down 2^nd^ Street, in the general direction of *away*. Sunday -afternoon, so not many citizens about -- and no cops. I hear this big -*whump* of a secondary behind us, and a couple of other folks start -running as well, so at least we're not stand-outs. Make it as far as -Rodriguez Hardware then have to stop, wheezing, legs done. Taco, he -ain't much better. - -Vacant lot beside the store, been empty so long it's all overgrown. -Couple of old hippies planted fruit bushes and put up a sign saying -'Reclaimed Green'. Don't think they figured on a ground crop of condoms -and reefer butts. Well, maybe the reefer. We lay up there, off the -street, trying to get our breath back. - -Taco jabs me in the chest. "You really done it this time, asshole." - -I jab him straight back. "What, this is somehow all *my* fault?" - -"Well, let me think -- you know of any *other* shitheads called 'Frank -Booth' around here? Huh? And what kind of goddam gun goes 'woof', -anyway? What the hell you got us into *this* time?" - -"Like I should know? Jesus. Anyway, don't matter, I got a plan." - -"You *always* got a plan, Frank, and they always suck." He sniffs. "Try -me." - -I take a deep breath. "We get our shit together, load it in my truck. We -blow town and never come back." - -Pause. I hear Fire Department sirens getting closer. - -Taco stares at me. "Running away? That's it?" - -"Damn straight." - -Another pause. Drops of sweat ease down my back. - -He rubs his chin. "Why take your heap of shit Ford? My Toyota is way -cooler." - -"My heap of shit Ford don't draw attention. We sell your pimped-out ride -to Bobby Newmark for travelling money. He's made an offer, what, two, -three times?" - -"And suddenly I'm out a custom pickup? Jesus." - -I hold my hands up. "Hey, no problem, dude. I'll take off on my own -while you stay here and play dumb. But if I'm in the wind then the law -will come down hard on anyone they *do* have to hand, count on it. You -want some chickenshit life with the cops busting your balls every other -day, be my guest." - -Another long stare. Taco spits in the dirt. "*Shit*." Sighs. "Let's get -gone." - -We head out back of the lot, past some sheds, moving parallel to Main -Street. The town is just buildings around a crossroads and nowhere is -really that far from anywhere else. My place is, was, set back-a-ways -from the main drag. Nothing much but it suited me. No sign I had -company, with just my truck standing in the back yard. - -I toss Taco the keys. "You gas her up while I pack. Then we'll head over -to yours." - -"What am I, your personal ATM? Get real." - -I fish out my wallet. "Thirty. All I got." - -He takes the bills and gets behind the wheel as I go inside. I'm alone. -He drives off while I start cramming clothes into a duffel. Not a lot -else to show for my time here, apart from my 'armory'. It's a shoe box -in the night stand and I tip the contents over the bed. - -Two guns. First is old-school -- Remington .41 Derringer owned by some -badass riverboat gambler. So my mom said, anyways. It goes in my jacket -pocket as maybe worth pawning. Second is the real deal -- Browning 9mm. -Came from my grandfather, who was Shore Patrol in Korea and never fired -a shot. Still works fine and I can hit a can right across the yard 7 -from 10, when sober. - -"Put the gun down, Frank. It just complicates matters." - -I recognise the voice but look anyway. - -Clara Conner. - -Standing in the doorway. Not a mark on her, I mean, not one. No burn -marks on her clothes, nothing. She steps forward into the room and fear -has her back. - -"How long did it take, Frank, to find someone with the same name? -Someone suitable?" She smiles. "And I use the term advisedly. Does it -make it easier when he shares your dreams? Or was it just an ego -preservation technique? No matter. I have to admit, though, this is so -far under the radar that Jung himself would have struggled to find you -sooner." - -I stand there without speaking. I thumb the safety catch 'off'. - -"There's no need to be coy, Frank, no need to hide any longer." She -steps up. - -I step back. "Listen, lady, I'm not who you think I am. I'm not this -other 'Frank Booth' with a new face." I pull a 'kerchief from my jacket, -wipe sweat from my face, cram it back inside. "I'm just me." - -Her smile is a thin line. "Really? Well, you're worth far more to us -alive, but dead *is* acceptable. Now, I give you, the *real* you, one -last chance to-" - -I twist and bring the Browning up. Clara moves so slick it's like -something we've practiced. Grabs the barrel and it ends up pointing at -the ceiling, arm against arm. We're real close. She stares into my eyes. -Hers look like a dead shark I seen once. - -Gunshot. - -Make that a cannon. - -The kick almost breaks my wrist as I learn the goddam Derringer actually -works. I step back but the Browning won't follow. Can't see for smoke -and a cloud of jacket fibers. There's a sound like fresh popcorn. - -I blink. - -Clara is a bald mannequin, naked apart from some Sam Browne harness -getup with pouches. The eyes, nostrils, mouth are there, but the rest is -featureless grey sheen. There's a hole in her gut the size of my fist, -surrounded by blue sparks and flickers. I figure the Derringer packed a -custom load, designed to settle any argument. - -Slowly the dummy tilts backwards, then falls, lands on the carpet with a -rigid *thud*. The hole in my jacket pocket is smoldering and I have to -bat it out. Then the blue sparks from her turn white and I feel heat, -even from 6 feet away. Time to grab my duffel and bail. - -I reach the kitchen with a foundry furnace at my back. I hear bedroom -curtains burst into flame, the *scree-scree* of a smoke alarm. Charge -out back and throw myself face-down in the dirt. The windows blow but -glass and flames don't find me. - -I roll over. The sun shines like this was a regular day, nothing -special. - -I'm cool. - -Could have just lain there I suppose, even as the fire took hold, waited -for Taco. - -Except not all my neighbors consider me a total asshole, and might come -check. - -Didn't need a whole bunch of questions, so I get up, lift the duffel, -and start walking.\ -Couple of folks on the sidewalk, looking back into town, but I didn't -need no reminder. Walk a couple of blocks and see my truck coming the -other way. Taco pulls up, gets out, but staring at where I live, not the -mess downtown. - -Wipes his mouth. "That you, Frank, huh? Covering your tracks? Well, tell -you straight up, I'm not torching my mom's garage, no way." - -Taco's mom was now Mrs Garcia. Living above the garage sounds better -than a grown man still at home, but he don't pay no rent. One reason -he'd had spare cash to spend so his ride. I grunt, toss the duffel in -back. We get in, U-turn, and split. - -I sit back, take a breath. "That Clara bitch showed up. Had to shoot -her." - -Truck almost nosedives into the asphalt as Taco stomps on the brake. -Pulls off his cap and starts beating me with it. "Goddam you, Frank, -goddam you! Jesus Christ, she's *dead*?" - -Not sure what to say that he'll believe. Not sure I believe it myself. I -bat him away. "Listen, just *listen*, dammit!" Taco stops, wipes his -mouth. I set my shoulders. "She left me no option, *no* option. People -she works for think I'm some other 'Frank Booth' with a new face. Even -though I've lived here my whole damn life. No reasoning with her." - -"That fire won't hide a body. I seen it on TV, forensics. Oh, man, we -are *screwed*." - -"Just drive, will ya'. Trust me, we're cool." - -Taco glares at me. We take off. He sniffs. "So, you saying we're *not* -screwed?" - -"Something like Thermite went off after she died, burned her right up. -This is one of them Black Ops deals, dude, zero evidence if things go -south. I figure if we can duck out, it won't be the cops that come -looking." - -"And that's a good thing?" - -"What she said, took them long enough to latch on the first time. I -figure if we keep moving, they got zero chance second time around." Wipe -my face. "Anyway, always said you wanted to travel." - -He looks at me a long moment. Shakes his head, snorts, laughs. Laughs -again. I join in, can't help it. We hit the edge of town and he shifts -up a gear. Pair of us barrel down the road like a pair of escaped -lunatics. - -I stay with my truck when we reach the Garcia spread, while Taco runs -back-and-forth with his gear. His Toyota is a '93, with upright exhausts -behind the cab, 'Lone Star' paint job, enough chrome to make the glare a -hazard to navigation. He carries a double sleeping bag and candles in -the big storage box, even rigged external speakers to play romantic -music while making out. Guy is a primo skirt-chaser, and then some. - -Anyway, dickhead loads two bags plus a box of gadgets, leaves his mom a -note. I guess the less she knows the better, if anyone comes asking. I -see he's cut-up about no face-to-face goodbye, but say squat. My folks -are both gone and I got no family worth mentioning. - -We pull away in convoy, me eating his dust. Figure I owe him that at -least. - -\# - -The Newmark's have this big place on the road to Bixby, ranchero style. -Me and Taco did some odd jobs around the place, so know to take the side -access marked 'Deliveries'. We pull up round back and Consuela, the -housekeeper, comes out. - -She gives us the eye. "You got some call to be around here, boys? Only I -told you after last time, if we want the pool cleaned, we'll use a -professional." - -Taco takes his cap off. "It's Bobby we're here to see, Miss Consuela. -Private business." - -Looks down her nose at us. "*Mister* Newmark Junior isn't at home. I'll -let him know you called by." - -Our plan is going south by the minute, but I saw a big Mercedes parked -out front as we came in. I smile. "Then I figure Mister Newmark Senior -is around? Maybe we could speak to him instead?" - -Bobby's old man owns 'Newmark Neu', something high-tech. You see the -'N2' logo around, but they don't employ no locals apart from catering -and security. Despite that he's a stand-up guy, always treats us fair. - -Consuela, well, she goes tight like I suggested a three-way, then nods -and heads inside. Taco and me kick dirt for a couple of minutes before -she reappears. "He'll see you now. Far side, in the Rose Garden." - -Taco grabs the documents from the glove box. We tip our caps, all -smiles, and trail round. Maybe they had roses there once, but these days -it's a golf green, complete with flag. Old man Newmark is in polo shirt -and chinos, practicing shots from 20 feet. - -"Afternoon, boys. Bobby isn't here just now but I understand this is -business, so maybe I can help?" - -Taco nods. "He's made a few offers on my customized Toyota, Mister -Newmark, and I'm minded to accept." - -"Uh-huh, uh-huh." Newmark points back towards town with his putter. "And -this sudden change of heart wouldn't have anything to do with *that*, I -suppose?" - -Look over my shoulder at the column of smoke. "Straight-up coincidence, -sir. No, we're headed to Vegas and the truck is the only thing we got by -way of steak money. Except up there they get that kind of thing all the -time, so the offers will be shit. Makes more sense to sell here, where -there's a ready buyer. Now, given that Bobby ain't around, I'm thinking -cash sale with a one-week return. So, if your son don't take to his new -ride, he gets his money back when we return with our winnings" - -Newmark laughs. "I have to admire your confidence, Frank - been courting -Lady Luck recently? Well, given how my day is turning out I'm inclined -to agree she's smiling on us, so what outrageous price are we talking -here?" - -Taco rubs his chin. "He mentioned eight grand. I'll take seven for a -cash sale." - -Another laugh. "You'll take six and be thankful. Final offer." - -Me and Taco exchange glances. I shrug. He nods. "We have a deal, sir. I -have the pink slip with me, insurance, everything." - -Newmark slots his putter into the golf bag. "Take a few minutes to enjoy -the view. No offence, boys, but I'd prefer to access my safe in -private." - -"None taken, sir. We'll wait right here." - -We watch as he goes inside, then I turn on Taco. "*Eight grand*? Bobby -only offered five, and he was drunk at the time." - -"You're complaining we're walking away with more? And what *exactly* are -you bringing to the table, Frank? Remind me?" - -"Apart from my charm and personality, you mean? Face it, dude, I'm the -brains of this here outfit." - -"Asshole." - -"Shithead." - -We grab each other, fall, tussle in the dirt. - -Hear a cough, stop, look up. - -Consuela stands there, pretty much the poster girl for Contempt. She -carries two bottles of beer on a tray. Purses her lips. "Mister Newmark -though you might appreciate some refreshment. He's waiting for you in -the study, but take your own sweet time, boys, I'm sure he's got all -day." - -We get up, dust ourselves down, take the beer, mumble thanks. Taco -shakes his documents clean and we follow her through the French windows. -Inside is cool and airy, our boots echo on the tiled floor as we cross -the hallway. Consuela knocks on the double doors and we go in. - -First thing I see is a big pile of cash money on the big oak desk. It -looks like, like *hope*. Newmark is standing by the window, using his -mobile. - -"--still here, yes. How long will... well, I'm sure they won't mind a -few minutes delay. Everything is relative, as they say. OK, see you -soon." He closes the phone and places it on the desk. Smiles. "Come in -boys, make yourselves comfortable. And thank you, Consuela, that will be -all. In fact, take the rest of the afternoon off. The family will be out -this evening, so your services won't be required." - -She almost curtseys, closes the door behind her. - -Newmark pushes the pile of bills towards us, sits down behind his desk. -"Six thousand dollars. Half in hundreds, the rest in ten's and twenties. -Sorry about the bulk, boys, but I'm sure you've brought along a bag to -carry your winnings. Take a seat, Bobby will be along in a few minutes." - -Not too keen on that, in case he nixes the sale, but can't really refuse -the man's hospitality. We sit down, sip our beer. Newmark goes through -the documents and Taco signs the bill of sale. We sip more beer, talk -sports, time drags. Seems like an age, then I hear a car pull up out -front. Maybe a minute or so and the study door opens. We look round. - -Clara Conner. - -Taco and me jump up but the Glock she holds gives us pause. - -I look at Clara, at Newmark. I lose it. "No way, no *fucking* way. I -seen what she is, but she burned, burned everything around her." - -Clara looks surprised, but not really. "Come now, Frank, it was *you* -who designed us to operate in threes, after all." - -"Jesus Christ, won't anyone *listen* to me? I'm not this goddam Frank -Booth you're looking for! Ask around, ask anyone you want -- I was born -here, school, worked at Gibson Chemical, that's it. Furthest I've been -on vacation is Baton Rouge. I'm just a regular guy." - -Taco half raises his hand. "We went to Miami that one time. Toby's -bachelor weekend." - -I glare at him. "Unhelpful, dude." - -"Just saying, is all." - -"Enough!" Clara sounds like she's trying not to laugh. "Well, *my* Frank -Booth stole a fortune in Agency slush funds and left behind his corpse -to dead-end the investigation. So, we were willing to entertain, ah, -*unconventional* means to find him. Or at least that part of his -consciousness being carried by a donor mind." - -Newmark smiles. "That would be *you*, Frank, in case it's not obvious." - -"Like fuck it is." - -"Newmark Neu are skip-tracers of the collective unconscious, the company -interested parties turn to when all other avenues are closed. Because -while a man can change his looks, his voice, his lifestyle, what he -can't control are his *dreams*." And he pauses, like this is some big -reveal. - -The room feels like a hit of bad Mescal with a side-order of Peyote. I -taste salt sweat on my top lip. Face Clara. "You know this is total -bullshit, right?" - -She shrugs. "Memories maketh the man, if you don't mind the -misquotation, and the man we need exists as a neural clone, biding his -time." Clara reaches inside her jacket, pulls out a billfold. "If it's -any consolation, Frank, this was always how it ends. The Agency -discovered the visual trigger your namesake intended to use to wake up -from being you somewhere down the line, so I'm merely pre-empting -matters." - -"Then let us run, like we planned. If I ain't around then I can't see -any of that crap." - -Clara smiles. "Nice try, but as one of me said, you're worth a lot more -to us alive--" - -"But dead *is* acceptable." Newmark leans forward. "If this doesn't work -then I drop you myself, to make sure he never gets out." - -I back up against the fireplace. "What I ever done to you, Mister -Newmark?" Hard not to whine. - -"Bastard damn near killed my boy getting to you, and *that* can't go -unanswered." - -I rub the side of my head, where the plate is. "The accident? But, but -that was *years* ago." - -Clara flicks the billfold open, facing down. "We've all been playing a -long game, boys. But now it's over." - -Taco balls his fists, ready. But a bullet is way quicker. - -Then there's pain in my head. Not like being punched, but inside, deep. -Makes me cry out it's so bad. And I hear a voice say, "No-one shall weep -for Herod." - -My voice. - -Clara drops the Glock and billfold. Stands straight, arms by her side, -frozen. For a moment the rest of us follow suit. - -Newmark goes for the desk drawer. Taco goes for his switchblade. I drop -to my knees, squeezing my head in both hands like that's gonna help. - -Newmark hauls out a big-ass revolver. I see the flicker of steel as Taco -flips his blade, catches it by the tip. - -Newmark aims, aims at *me*. Taco -- arm back, throws. - -Gunshot. - -Marble flakes from the fireplace cut my face. Makes me turn away, eyes -screwed shut. - -There's no second shot. - -I look round. Taco's knife is in Newmark's throat, right to the hilt. -Gurgling. Blood all down his shirtfront. He slumps back in his chair, -gun lands on the carpet. Taco turns to Clara, fists up, but she stands -there like nothing happened. - -The pain in my head is down to just the worst hangover ever. I stand up, -feel sick. Room sways, but at least the floor don't smack me in the -face. - -Taco wipes his mouth. His hand shakes. Neither of us has killed before. -"Christ, Frank, what just happened?" - -"They were bound to send the Furies after me, so I built in a pause -function. Nothing as obvious as a kill switch, I knew they'd check for -that. Same way I knew they'd use Newmark, so hiding out right under his -nose made it all the sweeter." - -My man looks at me, he looks at me *hard*. "Say what?" - -What it meant was gone, like a dream you can't recall. I rub the back of -my head. - -"Dude?" - -"Frank? That you?" - -"I guess." I look round the room. "Shit." - -"Yeah, big-time. Let's grab the cash and bail." - -I hold up a hand. "Wait, man, just gimmie a moment." Look round the -room, but seeing it this time. "Pull your knife, but wrap it in -something so it don't drip. Uh, use your cap." - -Taco snorts. "Why mine?" - -"Cos *mine* is a signed Kyle Busch original, that's why. Get to it, man, -in case someone heard anything." - -I stuff the pile of bills into the trash can liner. Taco's switchblade -and cap go in on top. He reaches for the bill of sale but I shake my -head. "Leave it, dude. Anyone ever asks, we were here, concluded our -business like gentlemen, and left." - -"So I'm still out a pickup?" - -"Yeah, you're still out a pickup, but when the cops start picking this -over, it gives us a reason for being here that don't involve murder. -Now, you done your part so it's time for me to step up." - -I pick up the billfold and jam it in my back pocket, eyes closed. Pull -out my singed 'kerchief and lift the Glock. It sits heavy in my hand. -Taco backs up almost to the door, eyes wide. - -I aim at Newmark, edge as close as I dare. Half look away, pull the -trigger. - -Gunshot. - -Taco's knife wound turns into a big hole. Bullet goes clean through -Newmark's neck into the oak chair back. More blood. I drop the gun by -Clara. Sometimes all you can do is mess things up some, and hope. Take a -breath, turn to face my man. "Marines, we are *leaving*." - -Taco grins, but tight. "*Finally,* one of your goddam plans I can get -behind, Frank." - -"It's the *same* plan, dickhead." - -We bail. Just my truck waiting for us, hot in the afternoon sun. - -Bag of cash goes in back, under a tarp. Taco grabs his beat-up cowboy -hat that makes him look like a stripper, but the dude won't take a -telling. We leave, me driving, and get as far as the Long Bridge before -the shakes kick in. Other side is the county line, interstate, the wide -world. I pull over, get out, go stand on the riverbank. Oil slick drifts -past, like a rainbow someone pissed on. Sounds about right for my world. - -"Frank?" Taco behind me, close. "You OK?" - -I pull the billfold, tight closed. Rub my thumb over the leather. "This -shithead, *this* Frank Booth, must have someone out there, with one of -these, waiting his chance." - -"If it works." - -"But if it *does*, if someday it's not me standing here, dude, you put -him in the ground." I look over my shoulder. "You do that for me, yeah?" - -Taco takes a long moment, then nods. "Consider it done." - -I toss the billfold. It flutters, metal catches the sun, river catches -it. I turn and look back at Gibson's Reach, back at everything I've ever -known. - -Sniff. "Fuck it." - -I slap Taco's shoulder and we get back in my truck. He sits, heels on -the dash, hat forward to shade his eyes. "Drive until you run outta' -road, Frank, then I'll spell ya'. Let's put some miles between us and -the past." - -I grin. "Hell, yeah. We're gentlemen of enterprise, dude. There ain't -nothing we can't turn our hand to, down the line." - -"Damn straight." - -We pull away in a spray of gravel. State Troopers and the fire engine -from Paradise Wells go past, but we're nobody worth a second look. Shift -up a gear and hit the gas. - -We're gone... - -...and the world can kiss my ass. diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Editorial in memorium.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Editorial in memorium.md deleted file mode 100644 index 99f7d763..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Editorial in memorium.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,64 +0,0 @@ -An editorial in memoriam - -[]{#_gjdgxs .anchor}Gil Williamson began *Mythaxis* in 2008 with the -intention of delivering a simple, fiction-focused genre magazine without -the usual trappings of the web -- minimal advertising, if any at all, -and as little visual clutter as possible to distract from the stories he -chose to publish. Ten years later, he released the 21^st^ issue on the -anniversary of the first. Under his editorial guidance, *Mythaxis* -featured one hundred and sixty-five original stories, six classic -reprints of old masters, and a dozen cartoons or short comic strips. -Some of those original pieces also represented the first publication of -their authors, mine included. - -\[Gil and Beryl pics\] - -Sadly, in the summer of 2019 and a little over a year after that -anniversary issue, Gil passed away following a period of illness. To say -that he lived a full life would be an almost criminal understatement. He -studied astrophysics at Edinburgh, but instead went on to enjoy a long -professional career in the world of computing. With his wife Beryl, he -created a software company named Amazon Systems (long before any upstart -global behemoth began trading under a similar banner) which delved into -fields as diverse as medicine, banking, security, word processing, and -computer games. *Mythaxis* itself is published via software written by -its editor. - -He was a polyglot of European language, on one occasion translating the -user manual of a medical computing system developed by Beryl from -Swedish to Danish. He also spoke Malay, a skill no doubt of passing use -when he navigated the Limbang river between Malaysia and Brunai in a -dug-out canoe. As well as an amateur small-vessel sailor he was a racing -enthusiast, as can be seen below, so crossing Istanbul during rush hour -at the wheel of someone else's car likely did little to raise his heart -rate. - -\[Gil sports pics\] - -A life rich with experience, yes, but perhaps most of all Gil was -modest, so understand that this shameful act of praise is committed only -out of a sense of admiration and affection, one I'm sure is shared by -far more people than those who knew him as their editor. I first met Gil -as a member of the long-running book-lovers forum *Palimpsest*, where -his passion for science fiction, in particular that of William Gibson -and Iain M. Banks, made his a voice I always watched out for. - -His championing of Patrick O'Brien's epic *Aubrey & Maturin* sequence, -the most famous of course being "Master and Commander", introduced me to -a series of books I now cherish. And in a different way I also cherish -*Mythaxis*, now most of all as a legacy to the man who created it. When -illness and the demands of operating the magazine became incompatible, -Gil asked if I would take over editing duties, and I was proud to have -been given that trust. It gives me great pleasure to be able to continue -what Gil started, my only regret is not being able to do so while he was -still with us. - -So, our salute to Gil Williamson is this: eight stories by past -contributors we hope you will enjoy, and which we hope he would have -too. And we will keep on saluting. *Mythaxis* will persist in his -mission, to seek out great speculative writing by authors new and old -and let it distract you from the world, just for a little while. - -\~ Andrew Leon Hudson - -Mythaxis editor diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff.md deleted file mode 100644 index ae04ceda..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Feeling the Heat - Les Sklaroff.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,516 +0,0 @@ -FEELING THE HEAT: A TWICE-TOLD TALE - -Les Sklaroff - -\- - -*We begin this issue with a piece by a long-time contributor and old -friend of Gil's, which places front and center that thorny problem of -what makes writing good. Perhaps the solution is to admit that writing -simply IS good, whether it is ugly or beautiful, famous or infamous, -read or unread*. - -\- - -> *"Tell me where it is, Gyme, or your pretty friend here will suffer -> the same fate as Ormos and the others."* -> -> *Gyme forced himself not to glance over to where Silki was cowering. -> Behind his back his numb fingers were slippery, as an expertly -> modified thumbnail at last began to bite through tape instead of -> flesh.* -> -> *"Look, Zengel, as I tried to explain..."* - -With a grunt of distaste Strag flung the book across the room. Propelled -by a casual flick of the wrist it landed accurately in the safety of an -armchair. He had an instinctive feeling for the right trajectory, -perhaps related to his youthful practice of hurling various objects -(some edible) to be intercepted by an apparently tireless dog. - -This indoor launch of the papery embodiment of Seff Haldegath, writer of -a succession of spy thrillers, afforded Strag a frisson of satisfaction, -almost bereft of guilt. Old Sprent would be appalled to see his young -editorial assistant treating an actual book with such disrespect, no -matter how banal its content, or how brief its flight. - -Strag had picked up the book cheaply at Morg's Bookery in the market, -one of his and Yethne's favourite haunts. Only the previous week they -had been lucky enough to find a copy of Parel Tillon's *Hoarse -Whispers*, unusually bound, he supposed as a student exercise, in -textured whent, with beautifully marbled endpapers. This week's -impulsive purchase, made while Yethne was away at an educational -conference, he had found to be less rewarding. - -Haldegath, who had reputedly spent some years in government service, -churned out fat popular books of no discernable literary worth. Within -the garish holographic artwork of the covers the same embittered -protagonist, Statman Gyme, recurrently avoided death while outwitting -psychopathic adversaries. The style was blunt, plots implausible, -studded with scenes of sudden violence and desultory sex. Strag, an -insatiable reader, knew he had encountered books by Haldegath before, -and should have known what to expect, but the copy of *Firemonger* which -lay rejected in the chair merely reminded him that, despite Haldegath's -enviable commercial success, he found this author's work unmemorable. - -As an aspiring writer himself, fortified by the high standards of -literacy expected at Fissile & Sprent, Strag knew that he needed to -resolve a troubling question. Could the kind of acclaim enjoyed by Seff -Haldegath be achieved without resort to the same facile formulaic -tricks? Probably not, he conceded ruefully, but at this moment what he -really wanted to do was to expose Haldegath as a hack writer by -demonstrating how much better one of his books could have been, in the -hands of someone like himself, who strove to use words not as bludgeons, -but as instruments of subtle persuasion. He stared resentfully across -the room at *Firemonger*. Its microsensors responded by causing its -cover to appear to smoulder. - -What would be most satisfying, he reflected, would be to take a -Haldegath novel, strip it of its dross, and re-work what remained into -something with far more depth and resonance. He retrieved the copy of -*Firemonger*, re-read the first few pages, extruded the workdesk, and -began to jot down a few comments before attempting his own creative -improvements. - -> *Clarify plot. Condense.* -> -> *Less gore. Some credible foreplay (Check with Y).* -> -> *Essential tech. specs only for weaponry and other devices.* -> -> *Link characters to archetypes?* -> -> *Spycraft. Consult H D Kruving's 'The Dislocator'.* -> -> *Intersperse musical theme.* -> -> *Chapter headings. Elements from Shaunt's 'Black Fire' tapestries.* - -He would need to change the names, of course. The reckless Statman Gyme, -product of a clandestine liaison between a flotel sanitation officer and -a part-time waitress, would now become Scover Buron, son of a feisty -woman journalist and an absentee but distinguished father whose -undisclosed identity would be crucial to the revised plot. Silki Lissom, -the ditzy, fun-loving art therapist with a propensity for finding -herself in life-theatening situations, will be replaced by the succulent -but enigmatic Sireen Thrist, a research chemist with a range of skills -not restricted to scientific enquiry. - -There were some vestiges of an earlier age with which Strag Wilderfoot -was oddly comfortable, in spite of the many modern refinements at his -disposal. He preferred the feel of flowing water to hygienic -cloud-sprays, had no time for ParaPets, however sophisticated, and -although he had ready access to interactive devices, he relished the -tactile intimacy of pen and paper. Turning to a fresh page with a firm -sense of purpose, he wrote: - -*[Firemonger]{.underline} Renewed. By S.W.* - -Strag stared at this. It was an accurate enough statement of intent, but -he had an uneasy suspicion it might lead to legal complications. He -would have to be more circumspect. After a few moments' thought he -amended the title: - -*~~[Firemonger]{.underline} Renewed~~ [Slaying with Fire]{.underline} By -S.W.* - -That was better. It carried a touch of menace tempered by the hint of a -pun, and no longer referred directly to the Haldegath book. On -reflection, Strag decided he would use a pseudonym, not primarily to -disguise his own identity, but to establish the worth of the writing -independently of its author. After a few scribbled possibilities, he -settled on: - -*[Slaying with Fire]{.underline}. By Morlan Corrovine* - -He didn't know anyone called Morlan, but it sounded suitably non -gender-specific, and Corrovine, he thought, had a kind of respectable -gravitas. So be it. The upstart Morlan Corrovine would now take on the -entire domain of seedy pap as exemplified by Haldegath. It was to be an -exercise in enlightenment. - -\# - -Strag chose to say nothing yet to his employer about this enterprise, -even though the venerable Pentheus Sprent had been sympathetic to his -literary aspirations as early as their first meeting, when barely out of -school, the boy had arrived uninvited, in need of friendship, guidance, -training and somewhere to live. As long as Strag continued to be -diligent at work, it was not Sprent's concern what he got up to in the -privacy of his new apartment. Sprent, whose faculties were still sharp, -knew that young Wilderfoot now lived with one of the girls he had met at -the Wheggs place near the park, since when he had noticed that while no -less headstrong, the lad seemed more at ease with the world. - -Skimming through the text, Strag had decided that it would resolve -neatly into eight sections, which conveniently matched the sequence of -themes he planned to incorporate from the 'Black Fire' tapestries of -Tosmor Shaunt. Thanks to a generous grant, those extraordinary works had -found a permanent home in the foyer of Sparagulan College Auditorium, -and had since gained a reputation well beyond the confines of Snoak -City. - -Not long after his arrival in Snoak, eager to sample urban culture, -Strag had been cajoled by his fellow lodgers into attending a -performance by Feblo Carribask, but the singer's energetic exertions -were eclipsed in his memory by that first stunning sight of the -tapestries. Subsequent visits to the Auditorium were made simply to -luxuriate in the haunting brilliance of Shaunt's apocalyptic vision. - -\# - -*I Ni[ghtsparks]{.underline}* - -> *Buron knew they would still be following him. He had shaken off two -> of them; the inept pair on either side of the street whose air of -> studied indifference changed to consternation whenever their line of -> sight was obstructed by passing traffic or by other pedestrians. They -> did not anticipate his sudden sprint at a busy intersection, and -> consequently failed to see his running leap on to the far side of an -> accelerating westbound freight transporter, routed from Broskol to -> Deldorp. Settling down for a long ride in the gathering dusk Buron -> remembered to check the heavily-lined outer pocket of his coat, where -> his fingers gently explored the irregular contours of the device he -> had prised from the dead fist of Haptic Fabricator Hecht. Despite its -> insulating sheath he could already feel the intensifying heat it had -> begun to generate.* - -\# - -Knowing that Strag would probably be in bed, Yethne had let herself in -quietly, having left the rather misleadingly-named 'conference' in time -to catch a nightpod back from Platport, which brought her home just -after midnight. - -She was tired, dissatisfied, and in need of comfort. A succession of -earnest lecturers in education had informed the delegates of promising -advances in developmental theory, offering some interesting statistical -evidence based on historical samples, but it was apparent that unlike -the bulk of their tolerant audience, they lacked the fundamental benefit -of practical experience. What they called the 'norm' was no more than a -convenient abstraction held dear by academics. Her perspective was based -on daily interaction with a volatile young group of evolving identities, -variously fragile, resilient, excitable, stubborn, morose, anxious to -please, complacent, burdened with private grief, preoccupied with -fantasy, stung by insult, mute with inexpressible yearning. Each day -demanded alertness, patience, and a multiplicity of fine judgements. It -was never effortless, but she tried valiantly to remain unruffled. -Yethne might have been disheartened to know how few of her colleagues -shared the same outlook. - -*Why had Strag left the light on?* she wondered, as she hung up her -coat. Entering the room she discovered him asleep in a chair, head -resting on the arm which lay sprawled across the workdesk. Torn between -solicitude and expediency, she tiptoed over, pressed her lips to his -ear, and was duly thankful when he awoke without complaint. - -"Glad you made it back," he murmured, turning to kiss her. She was -trembling slightly, and he could sense that she was unsettled. He held -her close, caressing her hair. - -"How did it go?" he asked. "Do you want to talk about it now, or shall -we leave it until tomorrow?" - -"Oh, it can wait," said Yethne, stifling a yawn. She reached for his -hand. "Let's get comfortable. But tell me, what have you been working on -so late?" - -Strag hesitated. Yethne understood his aspirations, and he needed to -discuss his ideas with her, but just now the lure of bed took -precedence. - -"It's a kind of experiment. I'll explain in the morning. It's the -week-end. We both deserve a lie-in, and there's a chance I might bring -you breakfast." He adopted what he hoped was an enigmatic expression and -made a melodramatic bow "Meanwhile, milady, Morlan Corrovine is at your -service." - -"Ooh, rôle-play," said Yethne coyly, with a sleepy smile. - -\# - -"Have you read any Seth Haldegath?" he asked. They had spent a very -relaxed morning, during which she had been relieved to vent her -reservations about the Platport 'conference'. - -"No, I don't think so." He handed her the copy of *Firemonger*, and -suggested that she should sample it and offer her opinion. Yethne -glanced dubiously at the cover and settled into her favourite chair. -After a few minutes she looked up. "Well, the characters seem rather -one-dimensional, there's a lot of brutality, the plot's not very clear, -and I'm fairly sure that Togger Chorp could do better." - -Momentarily puzzled, Strag searched his memory. "Oh, you mean the boy in -your class? The one who..." - -"...has a passion for ants, affects not to listen, doesn't speak much, -has a step-brother who bullies him, and parents hooked on vids. Despite -which, he writes really imaginative, well-constructed stories." - -Strag smiled. "That's exactly my point! Haldegath makes a living from -selling this sordid, soulless stuff, and I'm guessing that most of the -people who buy these books don't realise that he's a charlatan. So I've -started -- as Morlan Corrovine -- to re-write this book, using its bones -as a kind of armature on which to build something much more stylish and -meaningful." - -Yethne didn't want to see his time and talent expended on what looked -like a secondhand project. She admired his enthusiasm, but needed some -convincing that what Strag was attempting was really worthwhile. "Show -me," she said. - -It was thanks to Yethne that he hit upon the musical theme which would -recur in various guises at critical moments, being played, sung or -chanted, or simply as a persistent earworm in Scover Buron's head. -*Wessy Pilfrel* was a doleful traditional ballad about an unfortunate -girl's disintegration into madness. Because of its repetitive structure -it also existed in a merrier form as a children's skipping rhyme. Both -versions begin with the same first line: - -> *Wessy Pilfrel lost a sock...* - -In the ballad, she goes on to lose her way, her heart, her virtue, and -eventually her mind. The skipping versions, with their indeterminate -number of verses, often spontaneous, have her losing not only other -articles of clothing, but all manner of things -- voice, teeth, soap, -pets, temper -- with results that have kept children amused for -generations. Strag felt that judicious insertion of lines from *Wessy -Pilfrel* would serve as psychological signposts for the reader. - -Strag made rapid progress through the first four chapters. Scover Buron -had temporarily eluded his pursuers, undoubtedly members of the same -mercenary gang who had murdered Hecht. He'd had just enough time to -create a diversion with a 'rabid hounds' sonic grenade, and had managed -to escape with the device, but too late to save the scientist's life. -Later that night, travelling west on the transporter, he found that the -device was becoming literally too hot to handle. - -> *Scavenging by torchlight among miscellaneous building supplies he -> improvised a protective container from ceramic granules, quickfoam and -> heavy-duty antithermal tape, mindful that it would have to suffice -> until he could make contact with one of his own people. Craunt, who -> had assigned him to the retrieval mission had clammed up when Scover -> had asked if he might know the device's actual function. "All you need -> to know is that '229' is looking for it. It could start a war. Or end -> one."* -> -> *The transporter's automatic braking system engaged as it approached -> the depot entrance in Deldorp. Buron climbed down and made his way -> unobstructed through deserted moonlit streets until he reached the -> safe-house in the artisan quarter.* - -In Chapter 5 ('*Forge*'), Buron is working on ways to bring Hecht's -assassins to justice. He tries to ignore the faint high-pitched humming -now emanating from the overheating device which he had gingerly -deposited on the tiled bathroom floor of the safe-house. A quiet tap on -the door signals the arrival of the technical expert sent to deal with -problem. It is Sireen Thrist. - -> *There is no preamble. * -> -> *"Buron? Thrist. Let me see it."* -> -> *She followed him to the bathroom, pulling on a pair of fine high-tech -> heatproof gloves. Scover watched in fascination as she donned her -> scanning visor and peered down at the object, making small adjustments -> to the visor's depth control, pursing her lips thoughtfully. After a -> few moments she reached up behind her head with both hands to remove a -> stylishly glowing clasp, tossing her head to allow waves of dark silky -> hair to cascade around her shoulders. Scover felt his pulse quicken. -> This had nothing to do with any danger posed by the device. Outwardly -> maintaining his professional composure he waited to see what she would -> do next. Through the bathroom window, which he had opened in an -> attempt to lessen the increasing heat, he could hear someone -> whistling. The tune reminded him of his schooldays.* -> -> *Holding the pin of her clasp with surgical precision she moved it -> across the device until it hovered over the spot indicated by her -> visor, and executed the gentlest of jabs. The humming ceased.* -> -> *"The concealed magnetic lock deactivates it," she explained. She -> removed the visor and gloves, turning to Scover with a smile that -> flashed through his defences like a silent bolt of lightning. "I've -> studied copies of Hecht's research papers. Does this dismal place have -> a bar, by any chance?"* - -"Surely you're not going to let them get drunk?" Yethne protested, -resting her chin on Strag's shoulder. - -"I haven't quite decided yet whether there's any drink to be had!" Strag -said. "Buron's a seasoned agent, but he's been under stress, and the -resourceful Sireen obviously needs to unwind. I think I might allow them -a bit of relaxation. Bear in mind that by this point Haldegath's -characters would already be sweaty and grunty." - -"Like in *Glow Bright and the Humunculi*? suggested Yethne, feigning -innocence. "I can never remember all their names." - -"Crazy, Sleazy, Breezy and Queasy," said Strag. "Not to mention Teasy," -he added pointedly, swivelling round to face her. "Now, Sireen Thrist is -about to discover a half-bottle of a quite palatable liqueur in one of -the kitchen cupboards, and despite her earlier abruptness, she will -generously offer to share it with Scover. Will he accept, I wonder?" - -"All right, Morlan the Mysterious, my writer-in-residence, I can take a -hint. I'll leave you to get them acquainted. If you need my help with -any... tricky bits, come and find me." - -"I really appreciate that, Yeth," he said, with absolute sincerity. - -\# - -> *Craunt was patient. He had confidence in his agents. He had -> re-checked Buron's file before selecting him for the Hecht mission: -> his success rate was exceptional, on a par with that of his father, -> although of course there was no way the younger man could know that. -> Some secrets had to stay under wraps, no matter what the cost. The -> loss of Hecht had been a severe blow. There were no other haptic -> fabricators with Hecht's inventive genius or level of experience. * -> -> *Intelligence reports all pointed to the probable culprits being a -> shadowy organisation calling itself The Feathermen, known to be -> responsible for similar vicious raids involving significant items of -> military or commercial interest, sold through a criminal network to -> the highest bidder. The head of the organisation, known only as '229' -> had so far not yet been identified.* -> -> *At least the Hecht device had been secured and rendered safe, thanks -> to Buron and Thrist. Both loners, Craunt reflected, yet it was clear -> they made a good team. He made a note to commend both of them for -> their prompt actions.* - -"Why '229'?" Yethne had wanted to know, but Strag was busy working on -the next chapter ('*Scorched Earth'*), and muttered distractedly that it -was a prime number with some interesting mathematical peculiarities. -"Try reversing it and adding..." He tailed off in mid-sentence, -evidently following a different train of thought. She retreated -prudently, considered the idea of a quick cloud-spray, but decided -instead to treat herself to a proper shower. - -It might have been the faint sound of streaming water that prompted -Strag to contrive in that same chapter the seemingly accidental drowning -of two burly middle-aged men. He had Forensics declare that they had -both been in good health, which would have been no consolation to the -deceased. Buron would have recognised them as the two incompetent -pursuers he had eluded in Broskol. Their ignominious end in a muddy -roadside gully was a definite indication that '229' had a dangerously -low tolerance for incompetence. Strag suddenly realised that even though -the subject matter had not strictly been of his own choosing, what had -begun as a literary exercise had become a compulsive immersion in this -simulated world. He could now admit, grudgingly, that even Haldegath, -with all his shortcomings and presumed cupidity, might also enjoy the -creative thrill of writing. They were members of the same virtual -community. Perhaps he had been too harsh in his condemnation. If there -could be honour amongst thieves, why not magnanimity amongst writers? - -Strag felt, oddly, as if a burden had been lifted, and turned his -thoughts with relish to the penultimate chapter. In the *Black Fire* -schema the heading was *Embers*, but there was to be nothing quiescent -about the action. It was now that The Feathermen were revealed at their -most ruthless, in a spate of violent robberies and several high-profile -kidnappings. Prominent figures were subject to blackmail, public -services repeatedly disrupted by means of sabotage or by panic induced -by maliciously spread rumours of an imminent hazard -- a gas leak, a -toxic spillage, contagious disease, escaped warthogs.... Street-children -were bribed to leave suspicious packages wherever they would cause most -concern and inconvenience. '229' was exacting revenge, and still among -the prime targets was Scover Buron. - -At the start of *Phoenix*, the final chapter, Craunt is wrestling with -an invidious dilemma. Citizens are fearful, those sworn to protect them -appear to be helpless. His best agent is on the hit list of an -unscrupulous killer whose real name and whereabouts are still unknown. -It had become necessary to draw the killer out somehow. Use bait. The -obvious bait would be Buron, but Buron is indispensable. Who else had -the same set of skills, the same fast-thinking ability to plan on the -move and under pressure? Craunt knew of only one other person who had a -chance of tracking '229' to his or her lair, but that would mean having -to break a long-standing promise, thereby putting both of them, father -and son, in mortal danger. - -He had his hand poised to make the call when he was interrupted by an -urgent message from his regional director, informing him that Sireen -Thrist had disappeared. - -"I doubt that even Togger Chorp could have managed a neater ending!" -said Yethne, handing the last page back to Strag, who had been patiently -awaiting her comments. "Unmasking the odious '229', finding the girl, -reconciling the long-separated agents, but leaving that final seed of -doubt for the reader to worry about." - -"Thanks, Yeth, that's praise indeed; possibly more than I deserve. I -must admit it was challenging tying up the loose ends, but I hope I've -got away with it. We'll see." - -*Slaying with Fire* edged into print under the benevolent dispensation -of Pentheus Sprent. Wishing to preserve his anonymity, Strag insisted -there should be no launch party, but agreed to discreet advance notices -about the book's forthcoming appearance. Fissile & Sprent had a -reputation for being discriminating publishers, so the arrival on the -scene of the previously unknown Morlan Corrovine was bound to stir -ripples of interest. The trial print run was of no more than a few -hundred copies, not unusual for an author's first book. The -unostentatious covers depicted sparks from a flint against a background -of velvet blackness. If it failed to do well, any loss would not be too -disastrous, and if it later chanced to become a cult classic, the unsold -copies would become collectors' items. - -Early reviews were models of enthusiastic waffling, presumably by -critics who had not yet read the book, amply padded with phrases such as -"bright new talent", "fresh approach" and "gripping page-turner". -Pentheus Sprent had forewarned him that without a formal launch initial -sales might be slow. Strag had no option but to try to curb an -unaccustomed sense of anxiety and to bide his time. Yethne did her best -to cope with the nervous excitement. - -The tension was unexpectedly mitigated by the arrival of an -old-fashioned hand-written letter, addressed to him, not as Morlan -Corrovine, but in his own name, Strag Wilderfoot, c/o Fissile & Sprent. -The script was firm, clear and unfussy, without flourishes. The letter -congratulated him on the publication of his first book and complimented -him on the polish and subtlety of his writing. There was a brief coda: - -> *You may be aware that I am familiar with this particular genre. -> Having spent much of my early life working in the murky realm of -> secrecy and subterfuge, I can assure you that in reality tedium -> out-weighs excitement by a considerable factor. Trying to prevent or -> repair the blunders of those who wear the public mantle of -> 'decision-makers', and the thwarting of scoundrels in general is a -> wearying business, requiring constant observation, consultation and -> analysis. Most readers of fiction would find such details stultifying. -> As a form of catharsis I amuse myself by providing them instead with -> spicy confections. It is flattering to see that in many respects you -> have followed my example. However, there are multiple paths. I look -> forward to monitoring your progress.* -> -> *- Seff Haldegath* - -Strag read the letter several times. He was shocked at how easily his -pen-name had been bypassed, but reasoned that it only served to confirm -his correspondent's credentials. He could hardly believe that what he -was holding in slightly shaky fingers was a personal message from the -man himself! A man he had naïvely held in such disregard, but who was -clearly thoughtful and articulate, and who had taken time to encourage a -new writer. - -"You're looking particularly smug," Yethne remarked when Strag arrived -back at their flat. Her endearing knack of interpreting his mood at a -glance sometimes made him feel quite vulnerable. - -He prevaricated. "Smug? Well, surprised, yes. Even gratified, I suppose, -but..." - -"What *is* it, Strag Tell me!" - -He handed her the letter, noticing her brief frown as she saw how -precisely it was addressed. She began to read it aloud, causing Strag to -smile at this echo of classroom practice. It was difficult for him to be -objective, but actually hearing Haldegath's words he thought he detected -in them just a trace of irony, or was it perhaps condescension? - -"How extraordinary", said Yethne, "A fan letter! From Seth Haldegath, -your prime target." - -Striving to restore his ruffled self-confidence he fixed her with a gaze -in which he attempted to combine insouciance with owl-like intensity. -"We writers are full of surprises. I doubt that's even his real name." diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson - final copy.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson - final copy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9eb41bd9..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Good Old Days - Andrew Leon Hudson - final copy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,533 +0,0 @@ -Good Old Days - -Andrew Leon Hudson - -\- - -*As I am taking over as editor, I will not contribute fiction to -Mythaxis going forward... with this one exception. To close our first -issue without Gil, one of the first things he ever gave me feedback on: -a story about personal legacies, the loss of what went before, and the -potential of the future.* - -\- - -Gramps looked over to where the crop was being taken in, strong backs -bending, the heavy-headed stalks bending too as a dry breeze came off -the plains towards the ridge above the village. That wind would be over -the ridge a damned sight sooner than he would, he thought to himself. -The sun was hot but lowering now, and anyway it wasn\'t too much for his -thick, tanned hide just yet, no sir, not even at noon. He turned from -the fields and followed the stream towards home. - -Slow walking. By the time he had passed the thin strip of woodland, the -inland clouds were pinking and the sun was a ruby on the horizon at his -back; the farmers would be lugging back the first bails soon, like ants -under hazelnuts. He paused for a drink where the stream poured into the -well pool before draining through the overflow sluice and out of sight; -when he crested the ridge, the first group of farmers had passed him -already with a polite chorus of greetings. - -One thing there that changed for the better: youngsters showed some -respect for their elders again. Not always like the other elders did for -each other, mind. - -Gramps paused on the ridge, looking down into the circular valley. The -stream emerged below him, running swiftly down the steep valley wall -before circling the northern side of the village; clustered near the -waterline, small straw-thatched earth-and-stone huts were arranged -around the community longhouse in loose circles. The longhouse; a place -for social occasions, important meetings, and for old folks to sleep -clustered around a big fire every night. Home for him, now. The only -other structures to rival it marked the perimeter of the community: the -livestock shelter (and fertilizer store) at the base of the slope -directly below him, a side-stream redirected from the main one to water -the animals; and the two big storehouses, one on the north flank for -wood, stone, and other vital materials, the other on the south for grain -and the sea crops. - -The lagoon dominating the valley was also circular, also artificially -so, though no-one remarked on it; it was simply a feature of their home. -The far walls of the valley dived straight into the water, but under the -surface the lagoon floor leveled out quickly and continued that way -almost to the far side. As the high ridge on descended towards the coast -it pushed out into the sea, like a thumb and forefinger not quite -pinched, not quite meeting out amidst the waves. Thus lagoon and ocean -remained connected; the shallow passage allowed the tide in and fishing -boats out, while the broken ridges shielded the lagoon and the village -from an ocean battering when the stormy seasons came. - -The lagoon needed this protection. Where the bottom was oddly level, -rich patches of weed were carefully cultivated, providing a good share -of the village\'s food. That had been one of Gramps\'s ideas. After -leveling the terrain for the village to come, they scooped the rubble -into the bay before layering it with ocean silt to build the huge -growing bed, spent years experimenting with potential crops before -settling on the current spreads, fast growing and nutritious. - -Now the village stood on a small plain dug into the slope, a beaching -shore for their boats at its foot and a vital source of food before -them. Because of Gramps, and people like him. None of these young folk -knew it now, though. This was the way it had always been for them. - -The low sun striking the ridge line cast the entire valley into shadow -and as Gramps began the sideways descent along the upper slope he felt -the dim air chill on his skin, as if he was stepping down into a darkly -ethereal lake suspended over the real one, submerging himself completely -before walking to the bottom. He felt the cold more these days and -although he claimed his regular afternoon walks to the fields were for -exercise, in truth he simply wanted to waste as little direct sunlight -as possible -- another quirk to make him stand out among the rest. - -"Good to see ye, Gramps," came a voice at his back. The last of the -farmers drew abreast of him on the path, a plain-faced man with a quick -but gappy smile. Balanced on his broad back and overhanging his head was -a huge loose bail of wheat cut close to the root. Like the other -fieldsmen he was stripped to the waist now he had this extra shelter, -his thick shirt and wide-brimmed straw hat hung off the leather strap -cinching the bail together. - -"Good to see you, Tomas. The fields have been good this year, eh?" - -"The fields are the goodest, Gramps." - -"Reckon the fishers might debate you on that point," Gramps observed, a -glint in his eye. - -Tomas and his fellows would likely be up the whole night in the granary, -separating grain from straw, and drinking spirits distilled from the -first until they all fell asleep on the second. The fishermen may bring -home food more regularly, but the Harvest weeks would always be a -special time for those that worked the land. When they were done, their -take alone could feed all the village\'s stomachs, human and livestock -both, well into the next year. - -"Ah, well. It\'s all good, as they say." - -"That they do." Gramps nodded to the bail. "You want me to spot you with -that?" - -Tomas cracked his smile again and humped his burden up on his shoulders -with ease. "Ye fancy a go, eh? I think ye could and all. I reckon -there\'s strong walls under that grey thatch yet." Gramps gave a little -hop mid-stride, and Tomas hooted a laugh. "I was going to offer ye a -lift meself," he added, and went down on one knee. "Ye want to jump on?" - -Gramps patted the bail but shook his head. "Thanks for the kind thought, -but I\'ll finish my walk. I\'ll get as wrinkled as *your* old Grampa did -if I start taking it easy." - -The young man rose again and they smiled. Tomas\' grandfather had passed -on just three summers back. Over forty years, Gramps thought he'd had, a -damned good stretch, and better than his grandfather before him, no -doubt. Time was, knowing your grandfather was a rarity rather than the -norm. Gramps still remembered his. - -Tomas nodded and picked up his pace. "Fair enough. Good on ye, Gramps. -Ye get tired of me da\'s snoring tonight, ye know where we\'ll be. And -we\'ll have a drop of something with us to warm old bones." - -"Good on you, Tomas. I know you will." - -He watched Tomas stride on after the line of men. The first of them were -going in at the grain store with their bails, then quickly out again -stretching and calling to wives and mothers for supper and a first shot -of spirits. Out on the bay, the fishing boats were coming in through the -sea mouth, and even at a distance he could see they rode high in the -water. The catch would remain light all through until spring now, but -the winter storms would be on them soon enough anyway. Time to mend -nets, repair boats, and shelter with the rest of us. - -The air grew cooler and cooler as he neared the village. Some of the -farmers entered the longhouse carrying dry wood from the northern store -to build the old folks\' evening fire, and Gramps made straight for it -himself. - -When he entered he found the older folks settled in around it, golden -lit by the fresh flames, waiting for the fire to age a bit and put out -more heat. "Halloo, Gramps," they welcomed, and he halloo\'d them back, -making for a space as two old lasses shuffled apart for him, one handing -him a blanket for his shoulders as the other rubbed his hands to warm -them. Sweet old girls. - -No-one asked about his walk, and no-one ever joined him on it. They were -paler than he, his skin still the nutty shade of a life spent largely -under sun, and even if all the young fishermen and farmers boasted -tighter skin than he, Gramps could more than match anyone for health. - -Ayanne, who was Tomas\'s wife, came along shortly with a handful of -wooden bowls and a big pot nestled against one hip. She handed the bowls -for the first in the circle to pass around, then followed them, doling -out a thick steaming stew of fish and potatoes. She was a strong, pretty -thing. Her husband was a decent specimen, but it was a common thought -amongst the old folks that Tomas was the luckier in the pair. She gave -Gramps a shy smile as she rounded the circle. - -"Hungry, Gramps?" she asked. - -"Always for your fish stew, Ayanne." - -"Well, ye eat," she said with a pleased look, adding him an extra -dollop. "Got to keep ye strength up, eh?" - -She moved on round the rest then headed back to her hut, leaving Gramps -at the mercy of silent knowing smiles and grouchy harrumphs from what -passed for his peers. He concentrated on his food, staring out past the -fire and through the doorway, eastward, at the deep blue sky reflected -in the lagoon. The smooth sea beyond the bay mouth merged with the -darkening sky into no horizon, and the last of the fishing boats -returning home seemed to float down from the distant clouds like curled -brown leaves in the autumn. - -Their chores done for the day, the littlest ones soon finished their -meals and came running in to play beside the fire. Their nonsense and -chatter might drown out the slurping of the increasingly toothless, but -no-one begrudged them it and the older folks always left space inside -their circle; silhouetted before the crackling flames they put on a fine -show, and many grandparents would fall asleep with both warmth and -smiles on their faces. - -It was a world to grow up quickly in, and not long was left to childhood -before boats and fields called them off to work; best to make the most -of it. Not so many children either, the last few years; no-one discussed -it but everyone was aware. They were looking to young couples like Tomas -and Ayanne to fix that, but it was looking like a long wait. Gramps knew -what that would mean. It had been sooner or later for a while already. - -That evening, as the darkening sky revealed a mess of stars, Gramps -listened to the harvesters celebrating their hard work, chorusing songs -and toasting the fields, the weather and themselves, while the rest of -the people slept. The fishermen would be up well before dawn, a few -hours from now, complaining about the disturbance to their rest, how -no-one toasted *them* for loading dinner tables all year round, and how, -when fishermen drink, they do it properly. - -Gramps slowly got up, hanging his blanket around his shoulders as he -left the slumbering circle huddled around the embers. There was a pop -from the hearth, then a low parp sounded in answer from deep within a -digesting sleeper, and he grinned. - -Outside, the huts were dark but for the glow of their night-fires. Only -the grain house was fully lit -- just like those singing within her; he -grinned again -- a short bright amber shaft cutting out from the -doorway. - -Gramps started towards the lagoon, picking his way between the silent -huts -- then a voice murmured, "Hallo, Gramps." - -He turned with a kind smile. "Good evening, Ayanne." - -"Will ye come in?" - -"Of course I will." - -From across the way, a young pair of eyes watched Gramps enter the hut -and the heavy drape fall across the doorway behind him. Then they turned -to where another youngster slept soundly after playing late: Ayanne's -son by her first husband, kipping over with a friend at his mother's -suggestion. A little adventure away from his own bed for a night. - -\* - -Gramps pretended he didn\'t see the lad watching him from a distance all -morning. First he was hid in the shadows alongside his hut, then as noon -approached and his shelter shrank away he moved into the cool of the -doorway and watched from there instead. - -Gramps stayed in the sun all day if he could, trousers rolled up to his -boney knees while, today, he worked grain with pestle and mortar, on -other occasions whatever was then needed done. Behind him in the long -house the other old folk were doing other slow but useful chores. To be -slowly useful was all one had left to aspire to after a while. - -Eventually he began to tire of the child's silent observation. He fixed -him with his most fierce stare and forced himself not to smile when the -little one jumped involuntarily. "You there, lurking. You\'re Martan\'s -lad, ain\'t you?" - -The lad glanced behind him but found no support from within the family -hut. He nodded. - -"Get your little bot over here sharpish." - -The lad stuck his chin out defiantly and started to pace out the way to -the long house like the bravest of soldiers, but two steps away from the -shade his pale skin clearly started prickling and he scooted the rest of -the distance, jumping into the long house doorway with relief. - -Gramps carried on grinding but cast a sideways look at him. "Well lad, -out with it. What\'s your question?" - -The lad cast his gaze around for a second, nervously, then came to stand -beside him on the edge of the long house\'s shadow. "Are ye god?" he -asked. - -Gramps paused, then ground on. "Ain\'t no such fella." - -"But..." - -"But what?" - -"But, yer very old." - -"Hah." - -"And ye don't mind the sun, and ye know everyone, and about lots of -things, me da says. And..." - -"Hmm? Yes?" - -"And... ye give life. Me ma says." The lad pulled a face. "I think. Ye -*are* god, ain\'t ye?" - -Gramps rested the pestle and squinted at his interrogator. "What makes -you say I'm old, then, eh?" The boy had enough awareness to look vaguely -uncomfortable at the question, but he forged on. - -"Ye've got wrinkly skin," he said. "And white hair." - -"Your grandpa Yanik back there, he doesn't have white hair." They both -looked into the dimness of the longhouse. The other old folk still -crowded the fireplace, soaking up the remaining heat as they did their -chores. One pale dome drew their attention, a head like a large spotted -egg balanced on a wrinkled pucker of a face. Yanik noticed them looking -and grimaced, revealing a mean maw that was considerably more gap than -tooth. - -"And teeth," added the lad. "Old people lose their teeth. That's how ye -know yer growing older." - -"Really. And how many teeth have you got?" - -The boy bared them proudly. "Trelve and trelve." - -Gramps pulled a face of great admiration. "And your pa, how many does he -have?" - -"Just twenty. He had one out just this week, and he's... twenty-five -years, he is." - -"Well, if I'm so old, lad, how many teeth do you think I've got left, -eh? Any?" - -After letting him squirm for an embarrassed moment, Gramps slowly -unleashed his smile. The creases of his cheeks, his crow's feet eyes, -yes, they were deep and many; but his teeth filled his mouth right to -the back, even if the line of them wasn't quite so ruler-straight as it -had been in his youth, or in his prime. The boy stared at them, his own -mouth hanging open a little. - -"Like first teeth," he said. "Did ye never lose them?" - -"Don't ye listen to his stories, boy," a grating voice called from the -longhouse, and the boy started guiltily, closing his mouth with a snap -as he looked to where Yanik was scowling their way. - -Gramps sighed and returned to his pestle, but despite the hushes and -grumblings of the other old folks, Yanik was levering himself upright -and coming to join them. Gramps ignored him, but the boy seemed suddenly -cowed, as if this crooked bundle of stalks towered over them like a -giant. - -"Feenan! Ye should have something to be doing, shouldn't ye?" Yanik -snapped. "Up with your da, eh? Yer a young'un, ain't ye? Get a hat on -yer head and get out in the daylight!" - -As the boy ran for his hut, Yanik aimed a yellow eye at Gramps. "An' as -for ye. Don't go filling his head with yer crap." - -Gramps paused, then slowly put aside his pestle and rose to his feet. -Stood nose to nose, Yanik didn't back down. A part of Gramps admired him -for it, even while another part soured still more. - -Behind him the lad Feenan emerged from his hut beneath a wide-brimmed -straw-woven hat, shading him like a portable eclipse. His mother -followed, hesitating when she saw Gramps and Yanik in the long house -entranceway. She glanced at Tomas's hut opposite, then slapped her son's -backside to get him moving. Gramps turned at the sound, saw the lad -heading for the ridge trail. - -He turned back to Yanik, feeling a shamefully petulant spark as he -tossed his mortar down beside the pestle. "Maybe I'll take my walk early -today," he said. "Keep the boy company up the slope, eh?" He fixed Yanik -with a pointed stare. "Got to look out for the young ones, don't we? See -they're okay, eh?" - -Yanik's face flushed, then as Gramps turned his back and ambled into the -bright day it sank back into its pale, bitter pucker again. He returned -to the fire, the others giving him silence to privately fume in. - -"Hold up, lad," came Gramps' voice, more distant. "I'll walk with you -for a while, eh?" - -\* - -"I remember when all this wasn\'t fields." - -Feenan looked up from the path. Gramps was squinting at the sea of grain -with an expression like he\'d said something funny, but the boy didn\'t -know what. He wondered if Gramps was going to explain about what he'd -heard his ma saying to his friend's ma the day before. Before Gramps -went into their hut that night while his friend was visiting, and both -their das and the other farmers were getting drunk after a hard day of -harvesting. - -Before them the work was continuing, half the crop high and waving, the -rest cut low. The fields stretched, level and broad, an orderly -patchwork of yellow and brown nearby; then, fading into the distance, -scrubland rippled into the suggestion of ever greater hills. - -From their spot, on lower ground in the shade of the tree line, the -whole vista seemed to emerge from behind those golden waves as from a -curtain drawn part way back. Curtains in the village were made of this -same rough straw, thickly woven, oiled and hammered soft, then hooked -tight over the windows at night or through storms and strong winds. - -After brief consideration, Feenan decided that curtains were more -beautiful before they were harvested. - -"What was they then?" he asked. - -Gramps startled. "What?" - -"What was the fields when they wasn't?" - -"Oh. Almost everything except fields. But mostly things for people." - -"Fields *are* for people." - -"That\'s very true." Gramps smiled at him then looked away again, and -Feenan felt pleased. "But there were lots of things before. There were -carts, that you could ride on and went as fast as a bird flying right at -you. There were lots more people. Imagine we got everyone in the long -house at once and filled it up -- and outside there are more full houses -from here to the horizon and further -- more people even than that. And -there were factories, places for them to work all day, that spread out -for miles. And cities for them to live in, full of tall buildings for -them all." - -"Like the long house." - -Gramps shook his head and held out his arm. "Long is flat." He raised -his arm at the elbow. "Tall is up. Like a tree. But these went up and up -and *up*. Lots of rooms on top of each other. Tall buildings like a -forest of trees. And then great roads to take people from the cities to -the factories and back every day, covering everything up under them. No -more forests. No more fields." - -Feenan considered this. "Why didn\'t they live near where they worked?" - -"Because they didn\'t have to. They could get on the road, like the path -from the village to the fields here, and -- *pap* -- they\'d be there. -So they could live where they wanted, way off somewhere, as long as -there was a road connecting them. Roads going everywhere, as far as you -could see." - -The lad looked around at the workers harvesting, then saw a figure -approaching along the stretch of the path between field and woodland. -His da, the herder, in the midst of the flock of sheep. It looked like -he was watching them back. "If they was so many people but they got rid -of all the fields," he asked, "where did they get enough to eat?" - -"They didn\'t. Lots of people didn\'t eat at all. See our harvest? -Imagine if, instead of all that, you had to feed the whole village from -what comes out of... ten bails." - -"Ye couldn\'t!" - -"That\'s right." - -Feenan thought about that as the first of the sheep passed them. His da -nodded to Gramps cautiously across the shortening distance. "Good day, -Gramps," he called. - -"Good day, Martan, how are you?" - -"Well, Gramps. Thank ye." - -Feenan attracted a few sheep to him with low clucks, petted their wool -and tore up grass for them to snuffle from his palm. "So where did all -our fields come from?" he asked. - -"They've always been fields here, son," said his da, pausing as the -sheep drifted on around them. - -"Bah! Easy for you to say, Martan," Gramps barked. "You remember a world -that\'s exactly the same as this one, and if you can imagine anything -you imagine that it\'s always been." - -Feenan looked at Gramps in surprise. The old man was fuming, brows -rolled down and eyes in shadow. For a moment he was about to laugh at -the sight -- until he saw his father looking a lot more than just -startled at the outburst. - -"And that\'s always been the problem," Gramps went on, "people thinking -nothing will or can ever change, and blind or careless of when it starts -to. Generations of stupidity and limitation, fixed on germinating -another -- something, by the way, they still need our damned help with -half the time -- and the next thing you know you\'re spitting and -wailing because everything worth having has been knocked into a cocked -hat." - -Feenan watched the men stare at each other, wondered what his da would -say to end the argument, then saw that his da didn\'t know what to say. - -"What\'s a cocked hat?" the lad asked, his voice loud in the silence. - -Gramps flung a glare his way, still swept up in his anger. "It\'s -sunshine that burns, and damned great holes in the ground that glow in -the dark for a thousand years, that\'s what a cocked hat is," he -snapped, then caught himself and looked away. - -The awkward moment drew out, but Feenan got the feeling that Gramps was -embarrassed about losing his temper. Finally his da made a quick, almost -despairing gesture towards his meandering flock. "Got to be getting -these along now, eh," he muttered. - -"Yes, don\'t be late," Gramps blurted. "I\'ll keep you out all night -talking if you let me." Gramps rolled his eyes as if talking about -someone else. - -His da chuckled, relieved. - -"Always time for another story, Gramps, come bedtime." He turned to -Feenan and jerked his head towards the sheep. "Fancy giving ye old man a -hand with the stragglers, eh? Give Gramps a bit of peace for a while, -eh." - -Feenan ran towards a pair of ewes edging field-ward, whistling little -peeps at them to drive them left, then right, then back to the rest. As -they all moved off towards the ridge his da flipped Gramps a little -salute, and Feenan waved. Gramps waved back. - -\* - -Feenan thought about Gramps's stories. Late in the night, he got up and -slipped out between his sleeping parents. He went to the little -cupboard, bit off a short-length of wick, and scraped a few fingers of -tallow from the candle bowl. He rolled them together, lit the tip from -the smoldering ashes in the fireplace, and went outside, shielding the -flame from the breeze coming off the sea. - -Across the way, as he drowsed in the longhouse surrounded by slow, soft, -phlegmy breathing of his kin, Gramps looked out through the entrance at -one of his great-great-grandsons walking through the darkness. Then he -slept. - -The lad stopped close to the stream, listening to the trickle of water -and the low sounds of the livestock in their shelter nearby. He knelt -and, keeping his body between the candle and the wind, began scooping up -handfuls of sandy soil until he\'d dug a hole a half yard around and his -arm disappeared in past the elbow. - -He planted his little candle at the bottom and lay down on his belly -nearby to look at it. The flame was hidden by the edge, so he saw only -an amber glow creeping up from within. - -A hole, a great hole, glowing in the dark. - -Soon it began to flicker and fade. Feenan rolled onto his back to look -at the cool safe light of the stars, and as he fell asleep he imagined -paths wider than the village, stretching away further than the furthest -clouds, and buildings so tall you'd need to climb up a rope to get to -their tops. diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Henry - Jez Patterson.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Henry - Jez Patterson.md deleted file mode 100644 index 82a4ca8e..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Henry - Jez Patterson.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,280 +0,0 @@ -Jez Patterson - -\- - -Jez Patterson's fiction often exudes an air of nostalgia, or takes -ordinary world settings and makes them a little less ordinary in unusual -ways - like the sort of small British communities that always keep calm -and carry on, no matter what unexpected thing might crop up today. Or -every day. - -If you worked at the bank's Head Office, then large financial -transactions were what gave variety to your life. If you worked in a -town branch---behind glass and with a smile you practised until it sat -instinctively and didn't make your jaw ache by the end of the day---then -you looked to your customers to break the monotony. - -The glass only saved you from bullets. - -"Here she comes, Bala. Your number one fan." Darshan's aftershave -enveloped her. *Why did boys always think they had to apply it like -elephant musk?* Bala's nose ran at the assault, and she picked up a wad -of paying-in slips to waft it aside. - -The customer already waiting before her window coughed. - -"Gives me the creeps," Darshan added behind her, oblivious. - -"Yes, madam? How may I help you?" Bala asked the customer. Then, out the -side of her mouth, "Haven't you got mortgages to foreclose on, Darshan?" - -"Be careful, Bala. 'Fan' comes from *fanatic*. Look for the twitch in -one eye, always gives them away." Darshan left her to do her job, or to -irritate another cashier. The junior managers all thought they were the -cat's whiskers or the dog's bollocks. - -*More like the horse's arse*, Bala thought. - -Mrs Jacobson was strange, admittedly, but she was harmless. At least -that was what Bala kept telling herself every day the woman came into -the bank and began her game in the queue---letting others go before her, -begging others to let her go in front. All so she could end up at Bala's -window at precisely 10.17am. - -Not just thereabouts---but *precisely.* - -Like today. - -"I'd like to withdraw one hundred and fifty pounds, please." - -"Certainly, madam. How would you like that?" - -If Bala said anything else, asked anything, deviated from the set script -in any way, Mrs Jacobson wouldn't respond. Well, that wasn't strictly -true. One time, back when all this had started, the woman had said, "No, -no, no. That's not what you're supposed to say. You say 'Certainly, -madam, how would you like that?' That's what you say. You mustn't ever -change it." And after a worried, shaky nod, Bala had repeated the fed -line. - -Since then, the only problems had been with others in the queue not -cooperating with Mrs Jacobson's nerve-wracking 10.17 game. She always -dressed the same, always asked for it in tens (their other scripted -exchange), and left without taking a receipt or acknowledging anyone -else in the bank. - -But that wasn't the strangest part. - -The strangest part that was every afternoon she came back to deposit the -hundred and fifty. And on those occasions, it was as if an entirely -different Mrs Jacobson had walked in. - -\# - -"Maybe she just gets her fix of meds for lunch and they sort her out," -Darshan said, returning to the favourite theme of Mrs Jacobson during -their lunch break. "Imagine if she didn't get them? *Hnn, Hnn, Hnn."* He -made the *Psycho* violin sound as he stabbed the air with his fork. - -"Right..." Bala said. - -"She's got an obsessive compulsive disorder," Yasmin decided. "My aunt -had it. Always washing her hands and checking doors were locked. She had -to wear gloves in the end." - -"What did you do about the doors?" - -"Dunno. Don't remember. She lives in Wolverhampton." As if this was an -explanation. Or another part of her condition. - -"I thought about that," Bala said. "But why does Mrs Jacobson only do it -for certain things? And why only in the mornings?" - -"My aunt didn't give two hoots about washing her hair," Yasmin said. -"*Auntie Nits* we called her behind her back." - -Bala shrugged and went back to her sandwich. - -\# - -The day of Mrs Jacobson's own gloves changed everything. - -It was an otherwise normal day, the hundred and fifty in tens had been -withdrawn, bagged, and Mrs Jacobson had just walked out the bank when a -customer Yasmin had just served stooped and picked something up off the -floor. - -"Here. I think someone must have dropped them." - -He placed the small, creased, black leather gloves on Bala's counter. - -"Thank you, I... erm..." The idea happened in an instant. Curiosity and -not benevolence behind it. "Mrs Sang, a customer has left their gloves -behind." Her boss's face said, *'So what?*' and so Bala added, "It was -Mrs Jacobson. I could catch her. She's only just left." - -Mrs Sang liked rules because they ensured a smooth running of her bank. -The likes of Mrs Jacobson could upset that over something as tiny as -missing gloves. - -"Okay. Go catch her. But be quick." - -"Thank you." - -Bala raced round, snatched up the gloves, hurriedly apologised to -customers as she moved through them, and was out the doors. - -There. Down the street. Walking like the world was trying to rain on her -but she had come greased in advance. Bala ran. - -"Mrs Jacobson! Mrs Jacobson!" Bala wasn't shouting, but the urgency and -her diction were clear. The woman didn't turn around and Bala knew from -the tensing of Mrs Jacobson's shoulders she was being deliberately -ignored. - -Bala had had enough. She jogged up until she could hold the gloves -directly under Mrs Jacobson's nose. - -"You dropped these in the bank, Mrs Jacobson. Your gloves." - -The woman's face was like a child's: pursing its lips to prevent a fork -of greens being steered into it. Bala stepped in to block the woman's -path. - -"Woah!" she said as Mrs Jacobson seemed intent on barging into her. She -had youth on her side though, and for all her belligerence it seemed Mrs -Jacobson had her limits. - -"Oh, no! I was doing so well today! So, *so* well. Today might have been -the day it worked. Now... Oh, they're just gloves! Just a pair of silly -gloves. They don't matter." But Mrs Jacobson took them, stuffed them -into her bag, sighed heavily. - -"I'm sorry if I've done something wrong. I just thought..." - -"It doesn't matter anymore. The day's wasted now. Shot to pieces." Then -Mrs Jacobson's eyes brightened, looked up into Bala's, and suddenly it -was the afternoon-Mrs Jacobson standing before her. "I'm so sorry, my -dear. You must think I'm quite mad. It's not your fault. The gloves! -It's my own fault: it was me who left them behind, so that ruined things -anyway." - -"Er... ruined what?" The question was out before Bala remembered the -golden rule, of not asking any customer anything beyond what they wanted -the bank to do with their money. Not to respect their privacy, but -because if you did you might never get onto the next customer. She felt -the pull of her chair, the queue, Mrs Sang's tight-lipped impatience -behind her. - -"The constants. The variables. Making the variables constants. If I can -just get everything to happen exactly the way it did on that day, then I -can make it happen again. That's how it works. I read all about it. It's -how you get an experiment to repeat the same result. It's like following -a recipe and having the cake turn out exactly as the previous time. But -there're so many variables you don't consider the first time around. The -temperature of the milk, how long you beat the eggs, the brand of sugar, -flour, butter." - -"This is why you come to the bank and always do everything exactly the -same?" Bala asked, burning the rule now, intrigue having its head once -again. - -"Uh-huh. I get up, eat the same breakfast, wear the same clothes. Oh, -don't worry, I clean them---I'm not that far gone. The same walk into -town with the exact same route. First the bank. Then I buy the -paper---Mr Hadik is very obliging, even though he must think I'm as mad -as you do. Then a walk through the park, back home, and a video of -*Singing In The Rain*. I must have watched it two hundred times by now. -At least I get the weekends off---the bank's closed then." - -"You don't have the same routines in the afternoon though..." - -"No. It's happened by then, you see. Well, it *will* happen when I get -the details exactly right. Henry comes calling at my door and asks to -come in. Only this time, *this* time I say yes and let him in." - -This last bit threw Bala. She'd been following the strange logic of the -explanation up until then, helped by remembering Yasmin's aunt and the -hand washing and the doors. There was always reason behind every action, -even if it wasn't logically attached. - -"Henry?" she asked. - -"My late husband." - -*You had to ask*, Bala thought. - -"He came to the door once before, you see. While I was watching *Singing -In The Rain*. But I was scared, seeing him there again. I mean, he was -dead. Or I thought he was. I was scared and so I didn't let him in. I -was stupid, weak. Scared." The repetition of this word was one Bala -could suddenly appreciate. "But it showed me miracles *can* happen. When -the conditions are right. So then I knew what I had to do: repeat them -all, absolutely perfectly, for the miracle to happen again." - -Bala found she had nothing to say, tried a shaky smile. - -"Thank you, my dear. I knew I could count on your cooperation." - -\# - -Bala returned to work knowing she'd been coerced into performing a -ritual she hadn't agreed to. Everyone was entitled to their own madness. -What wasn't fair was roping others into the act. - -She told no one about the conversation with Mrs Jacobson. She couldn't -think how she could relate it without it sounding, well, exactly like it -was. - -The next morning Mrs Jacobson came in as if it hadn't happened and Bala -played along because she was expected to keep things running smoothly, -the way Mrs Sang liked them. - -That perception changed when she did an internet search for *Henry -Jacobson* and discovered another reason why Mrs Jacobson might have been -scared to see him on her doorstep. One the woman hadn't mentioned when -they'd talked. And it wasn't because Henry had somehow risen from the -dead. It was because of the things Henry had done when alive. - -Bad things. - -Horrible things. - -Things that could have accounted for an entire queueful of mad victims, -not just his poor wife. If the others had lived long enough to come to -the bank and tell their side of the story. - -The newspapers knew all these things because he had been arrested, -convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment---which had amounted to -fourteen days before he'd hung himself in his cell. His widow had moved -here, kept quiet about her past for obvious reasons. - -Mrs Jacobson undoubtedly needed help, but not in any endeavour to bring -Henry back. - -But it was the woman's crusade that disturbed Bala more than anything -she'd read in the articles. Not because Mrs Jacobson was a broken -survivor of atrocities all of Henry's other victims hadn't survived to -relate. Not that at all. It was the terrible, insane thought that *Mrs -Jacobson's mad plan might actually work*. That the thing that had -knocked on her door would be successfully invited back in. Back, that -was, from where it had deservedly been sent. - -Mrs Sang wouldn't let her change windows, Bala knew. Not without good -reason. And a transfer to another department, another bank, was a long -way off yet. - -*Variables*, Bala thought. - -If everything had to be like it was that day, then she could spoil the -broth. Not by deviating from the script, because Mrs Jacobson would see -that. But by turning one of the tens the wrong way around, by counting -from a different corner of the notes, by passing them over with her left -hand and not her right. Doing things under the counter she hadn't done -that day that Mrs Jacobson was trying to recreate. - -Obsessively, compulsively different, each and every time. - -After all, *someone* had to stop Henry. - -© Jez Patterson 2013 diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/His Turn to Remember - John A Frochio.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/His Turn to Remember - John A Frochio.md deleted file mode 100644 index 46f947ed..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/His Turn to Remember - John A Frochio.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,89 +0,0 @@ -**His Turn to Remember** - -John A. Frochio - -\- - -*Next up, flash fiction in a classic-style, treating one of the -perennial tropes (or perhaps that should be "treasures") of the genre. -True, there is no glass jar here, but there have been other notable -containers for our remains across the years of science fiction*\... - -\- - -During his daily walk through the vast and empty halls of the Masters' -mausoleum, Watchman Seven stopped to remember. The front panel of his -pure white metallic body---about heart level in a human frame---popped -open. He extracted a small handheld device, still as shiny and new as he -first remembered it. The panel closed with a sharp snapping sound and -his body resealed itself.. - -He keyed in his password. - -Seven stood completely motionless, transfixed by the images displayed on -the gift the Masters had provided long ago. He clutched it tightly as -memories flashed across the tiny monitor. This was the only place they -had existed since the day of his rebirth, when his brain was transferred -to this cold metallic android body. His mind had been unceremoniously -cleansed of everything. - -Conscious of the exact time, Seven knew he had seconds enough before he -was required at his watch station. - -A very long time ago, Seven and the other eleven android watchmen were -commissioned to guard and protect the sleeping Masters, who by design -would not be awakened for many centuries. Their bodies were built from -the strongest materials and each was installed with enough weaponry to -quash an army of warriors or an assault of marauding beasts. - -They were the guardians of the Masters. - -Before the Masters went to sleep, they gave him this memento, a tiny -morsel extracted from his memories, fifteen minutes of a video album -that he could view whenever he wanted or needed to remember. He used to -remember every day. Now only on occasion. - -Today he wanted to remember. - -He watched... - -A beautiful wife. Whose wife? His? Yes. - -Two small children. Were they his children? Of course. - -Laughter. They were all happy. He remembered happiness and laughter. - -Singing. Not the most beautiful harmonies, certainly, but beautiful to -him. Wasn\'t beauty a personal thing? - -Was that him playing with the children? Was that what he had looked like -in his previous life? He always wondered. - -And then, before it was over, one small kiss on the cheek from his wife. -Sometimes he imagined how it must have felt. Warm, soft, moist. What -other feelings? He struggled with what he must have experienced. Back -then, so long ago. - -Of course, there was much missing. These were only fragments, a tiny -sliver of his past. He wondered about the events---the missing -pieces---that led up to his new life within this cold, hard skin. His -new life, without feeling, without even one small kiss. Maybe his -Masters did not want him to remember those events. Those would certainly -be too painful to watch over and over again. - -Did the Masters have compassion? - -The time was near to begin his watch. He proceeded toward his station. -Watchman Nine was standing in position, looking much like Seven, facing -outward toward the gray, dead world beyond their strong walls, where any -enemy might be lurking, planning an imminent attack. - -Nine turned to him as he approached, and stepped aside so Seven could -take his position. - -As Nine passed him on his way back to his recharging station, Seven -handed him the device. - -It was his turn to remember. - -The End diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Ilysveil - Tigers Can Remember.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Ilysveil - Tigers Can Remember.md deleted file mode 100644 index b1be25ab..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Ilysveil - Tigers Can Remember.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,694 +0,0 @@ -**Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember** - -J. H. Zech - -\- - -*In another story for our memory theme, we revisit a culture in which -recorded history and the fine detail of a culture's most profound events -are shown to be very different things.* - -\- - -Everything had changed. Yunha had just returned to her homeland from her -long study abroad in Solradia. As soon as she left the port, she was -entranced by a public signboard, the snow on top glistening from the -glow of a magic crystal streetlight. The capital city Shinra now even -had modern lights. At the center of the board was a large notice stamped -with the red imperial seal. - -"Imperial Edict of September 1, Civilization and Enlightenment Era Year -20 (Solar Year 1895). As of this date, slavery, the owning of persons, -and involuntary servitude are hereby abolished." - -Finally. Slavery had long since been abolished in Solradia, but -Radiaurora had endured unchangingly for hundreds of years. But not even -this nation was immune to time. - -Her big brother Jangmo had always been an earnest believer in changing -with the times. Her last memory of him was him saying goodbye to her as -he left the village to become an apprentice to a blacksmith in the -capital. She was the only one seeing him off; their parents hadn't shown -up. - -"Blacksmithing is beneath your station as a noble," their father had -said to Jangmo. - -As Jangmo left, he had said to Yunha, "I'm going to learn new things and -come back one day. There are all sorts of new technology from the West -that can improve the lives of our servants. I'll become a noble who can -be relied on, not just someone who rides of the backs of the commoners." - -Had Jangmo made his dream come true? She hadn't received any letters -from him in years. It was worrying, but he must have had a reason. She -couldn't wait to see him after so many years. - -A loud bell rang, and a trolley full of people passed by. The passengers -were wearing Ilysveilan suits and dresses rather than traditional robes. -Western technology and customs had even reached the remote Radiaurora. -It felt strange to see her fellow tigerborns' furry ears covered by -brimmed hats meant for humans, though the men's suits had been modified. -Their orange-black striped tails still stuck out a hole in the back. -With slender figure wrapped in a pink overcoat from Solradia, Yunha fit -right in the new Radiaurora. - -"Ma'am?" a young tigerborn in dark blue uniform said. Judging from his -clothes, he was a police officer. He looked much different from the -blue-robed law officials she had seen in her childhood. - -"Yes? What is it?" Yunha asked. - -The officer's cat-like green eyes glowed against the backdrop of his -black billed hat's shadow. "You seem to be lost. Can I help you?" - -"I haven't been in Shinra in fifteen years. So much has changed. But -aside from that, I'm looking for a man named Jangmo Bak." - -"What's your relation to him? I can't give out personal information -without a reason." - -"I'm his sister." - -"Please come with me to the station, and I'll look up his records for -you," the officer said. - -She followed him to the police station, passing by new sights and -people. Other than tigerborns, many foxborns walked the streets, their -fluffy red tails unmistakable from behind. Elves, dwarves, dragonborns, -and humans were all here too. Had Radiaurora been conquered without her -knowing it? - -At the station, the officer went into a back room and came back out a -little later. - -He looked down. "I regret to inform you I found a Jangmo Bak, but he -passed away ten years ago." - -Yunha gasped. "No... Big brother..." Her elation after having arrived in -Radiaurora evaporated. The one person she had looked forward to -reuniting with the most was no more. All the new technology in the world -couldn't replace that. But something didn't add up. "But why? He -would've only been twenty at the time." - -"It's unknown. He disappeared, and the investigation was closed with no -leads. As per protocols, he was declared deceased three months later." - -"Why wasn't our family informed of this?" - -"As far as we knew then, he didn't have any family. We couldn't find his -name on any family register," the officer said. - -That was impossible. Jangmo would've been in her family's register. He -disappeared from the records too? She couldn't leave this be. "Where did -he live?" - -The officer scribbled down an address and handed it to her. "I doubt -you'll find anything. But if it'll satisfy you, go here." - -"Thank you." Yunha took the note, bowed, and promptly left the station. -The police wouldn't reinvestigate the death of a nobody from ten years -ago. Jangmo wasn't a nobody to her though. - -She took the trolley to the neighborhood where Jangmo had lived. It -passed bustling streets with all manner of new shops. An -Ilysveilan-style bakery advertising strawberry shortcake. A Solradian -clothing store selling both suits and colorful kimonos patterned with -flowers. A dwarvish blacksmithing workshop. All lit by streetlights so -people could tour the shops even at night. - -Shinra was nothing like the capital city of Radiaurora she remembered, -an ancient oasis of tradition where merchants and craftsmen were seen as -lowly. Ordinarily, she would take her time wandering the shopping -district like she had in Solradia, but she wasn't in the mood for that -now. - -Yunha hopped off at her stop, a slum at the outskirts of the city. From -the pungent smell, she surmised that modern plumbing hadn't reached all -the way here yet. After navigating the labyrinth of narrow streets while -avoiding suspicious puddles, she arrived at a traditional house. - -Black half-cylindrical shingles formed a trapezoidal roof over a -one-story wooden structure with papered-over sliding doors. It was a -fairly large house. - -A human in a black cape and top hat stood knocking at the front door. -"Excuse me!" he said in Ilysveilan. What was a foreigner doing all the -way out here? - -A round-faced, middle-aged tigerborn in a garish scarlet dress slid open -the door. "Who are you?" she asked in Radiauroran. - -The man switched to Radiauroran and said, "I'm Edmond La-Pierre, a -missionary. One of the members of our church is ill, and I was told he -lives here. I wish to offer him some prayers." - -The lady scoffed, her whiskers twitching. "If you want to offer him -something, offer him medicine. Jain's been praying every day, and your -gods haven't lifted a finger to help him." - -"Are you going to let me in or not?" Edmond asked. - -"Fine. But don't go evangelizing to the other tenants." - -Edmond stepped into the house and slipped behind the landlady. - -"And what do you want?" she asked, looking at Yunha. - -"I've come looking for Jangmo Bak." - -For an instant, the landlady's face darkened, but she caught herself and -smiled. "Jangmo Bak? Do I have a tenant with that name? I'm sorry. You -must have the wrong address." - -What was the landlady afraid of? Jangmo was only a minor noble, and he -came to Shinra nearly penniless. Yunha shook her head. "He doesn't -currently live here, but I'm told he lived here and passed away ten -years ago." - -"I'm afraid I don't remember all my tenants from that far back." - -The landlady had reacted to Jangmo's name. She clearly remembered -*something* about him. "You must have records though. Please, he's my -brother. May I have a look?" Yunha tried her best puppy-eyes impression. - -"Fine. Come in. I'll look through my archives. It won't have much more -information than his room number and rent payments though." - -"That'll be enough. Thank you. I'm Yunha Bak, by the way." - -"You can call me Madam Wu," the landlady said without looking back. - -She followed the landlady into the house, past a narrow hall of wooden -floors and sliding doors, Madam Wu went into a study and pulled a bound -book from the shelf. She flipped through the pages, then motioned Yunha -in. - -"Here, this is all I have on this man." She pointed to an entry on the -rental record and set a candle beside the book. - -Jangmo Bak. Room four. Security deposit on May 1, 1884. Yunha looked -through all the mentions of his name. He didn't miss a single rent -payment for over a year, and then was never in the record again after -the September 1, 1885 payment. "Do you know what happened to him after -this date?" - -"No. Maybe he moved. I don't remember. Like I said, that's all I have." - -There was no entry showing that his security deposit was returned, -however. Had he really just moved? But according to that police officer, -Jangmo had disappeared in 1885. That lined up with the date in the -rental records. - -"What happened to his belongings?" Yunha asked. - -"I probably threw out whatever he didn't take with him." - -"I see..." Yunha searched for current tenants that had been here since -before September 1885 but turned up empty. "May I go see the room where -he lived?" - -"Sure, if the tenant himself lets you in." - -Yunha made her way to room four and knocked. - -"Who is it?" a weak voice said. - -"My name is Yunha Bak. I wish to speak with you about an important -matter." - -"Can you let her in?" the weak voice said to someone else in the room. - -It was the human, Edmond, who slid open the door with an annoyed -expression. Or maybe his thick black eyebrows and slight wrinkles on his -forehead just made him look like that naturally. "Jain is sick right -now. I advise you not bother him." - -"This is very important to me. I won't be long," Yunha said as she moved -past him. - -It was a simple room with only a dresser and a small table. Jain was a -middle-aged tigerborn lying on the floor in a futon. Streaks of his -black hair and fur had greyed, so, combined with his orange patches, it -appeared he had three colors of stripes. He glanced over as she sat down -beside him. "So, what did you want to discuss with me?" - -"I learned from Madam Wu you've been here for almost ten years. The -previous tenant was my brother. Have you ever met him?" - -Jain coughed. "This room was vacant when I arrived. Some of the other -residents in the house said this room brought bad luck, but they didn't -go into details. Nothing's happened to me until now, and I doubt the flu -is the work of any curse." - -"Do Radiaurorans even practice curse magic?" Edmond asked. - -"Not in the last few hundred years," said Yunha. "This dynasty's founder -made it taboo. Though maybe things have changed recently." She looked at -Edmond. - -"Why are you looking at me? Yes, Ilysveilans use curse magic, but I -personally can't use any magic. And regarding Radiaurorans' practices, -you should know more about it than me. You're a tigerborn." - -"I've been studying abroad in Solradia for quite some time. As strange -as it sounds, you probably know more about the last ten years in -Radiaurora than I do. Do you know what happened here in 1885?" - -"Maybe. There was a big commotion around this neighborhood when I first -arrived." - -"What do you know about it?" - -Stroking his smooth grey beard, Edmond recounted, "I didn't exactly live -in this neighborhood, but I passed by it often. Soldiers were patrolling -this area for some reason. I could have sworn I heard gunshots one time. -The soldiers blocked off a section of the neighborhood, and I wasn't too -keen on getting involved in a magitech rifle shootout, so I stayed -away." - -"What was that all about?" Yunha asked. - -"I'm not sure. The soldiers had their lips sealed, and I didn't have any -reason to press further. Can't do the gods' work if I'm dead." - -"Oh that," Jain said. - -They both turned to him. - -"You know what happened?" Yunha said. - -"Most people around here know about it, though they won't talk about it -in public. It's taboo." - -"Still, I must know. Please, tell me." - -"It was a riot, an uprising, or a full-scale revolution depending on who -you ask. My knowledge is second hand too. But the gist of it is that the -slaves and butchers were unhappy and rose up against the Imperial -regime. I don't know any details about how it ended, but since Emperor -Kojo is still on the throne, I assume they failed." Jain pointed to a -scroll pinned to the wall next to him. "Take off that scroll." - -Yunha did so. Underneath it was a small paragraph carved into the wall. -"This is..." - -"It's probably the reason people say this room is bad luck. I put up the -scroll to hide it since it creeps me out. No one knows who wrote it. -Judging from the contents, it has something to do with the taboo slave -rebellion." - -The characters on the wall read, *I leave these words as both -encouragement and a warning to my comrades and posterity. The world is -far from fair. The downtrodden must stand up again and again. But our -enemies are many. Do not lose sight of the enemies of afar for fear of -the enemies close. There will be countless sacrifices. Today, that is -me. Tomorrow it may be you. But never forget: this must never become the -tale of a hero, and we will fade into forgotten legends like the truths -of dynasties past.* - -A tear rolled down Yunha's cheek. "This is my brother's handwriting. Big -brother, I've found you." But this only raised more questions. A -sacrifice? She couldn't rest until she knew what her brother had truly -felt about his last moments. - -"So that's your older brother?" Jain asked. "He must've been involved in -the rebellion and died in a battle. I'm sorry for your loss." - -"May his soul rest in peace," Edmond said. - -Yunha shook her head. "No, I don't think that's quite right." - -"Pardon?" Edmond asked. "It seems very clear." - -"If he died during a battle, how would he have had the time to write -this in his room? This could have only been done if he knew he was going -to die." - -"That's true. What if he wrote it before he went to a battle though? -Knowing he was likely to die, he left a message," Jain suggested. - -"The phrasing is off. It says there will be countless sacrifices, but -today it is him. Why specifically sacrifices? And he said the sacrifice -is him. He wouldn't go into a battle alone. So why is the sacrifice him -and not 'us' or his comrades too?" - -Edmond said, "You have a point, young Ms. Bak, but there's not enough -information to say. In fact, there are several parts of this with -ambiguous meaning. This isn't the tale of a hero. Why not? There are -enemies close and far. Assuming the government was one of his enemies, -who are the others? I can't say." - -Yunha wrote down the passage in her notepad and slipped it in her -overcoat's pocket. "Thank you both for helping me. I'll be on my way -now." She got up and bowed. - -Jain coughed and nodded in her direction. "I wish you luck. If you can -clear up the truth about this, I'd feel better too. Beats hearing rumors -about curses and bad luck." - -"I should get going too." Edmond rose. - -Yunha and Edmond left the boarding house together and headed out onto -the dirt road. - -"What are you going to do now?" Edmond asked. - -What was his interest in this matter? "I need to gather some more -testimonies about what exactly happened in the slave rebellion ten years -ago." - -"In that case, why don't you come to the church? A lot of the members -have lived around here for many years. They might know something." - -Of course. He did say he was a missionary. Religion was of little -interest to Yunha, but she had no reason to refuse. "That would be -helpful. Thank you." - -"Come along, then." Edmond strutted toward the center of town, and Yunha -followed. - -As she walked along the street, a foxborn man in dark blue uniform -appeared from around the corner, and they bumped into each other. Yunha -stumbled back a step. - -The fur on the foxborn man's pointed ears stood on edge, and he pointed -a magitech rifle at Yunha, the magic gem on top of the stock glowing -blue as it activated. "What's the meaning of this, tigerborn?" - -For a moment, Yunha was at a loss for words. Was this man out of his -mind? Not to mention, he had a rifle. Not just anyone could have one. -Judging from his uniform with its golden lines and black-billed cap, and -the fact that he was a foxborn, he was likely a Solradian soldier. "I'm -sorry for bumping into you. I'll be on my way now." She took a step -forward, but the man grabbed her by the wrist. - -"What are you going to do about this?" He pointed to a smudge of dirt at -the cuff of his pants. - -"It's only dirt. It'll wash off." - -"You're just a lowly tigerborn. How dare you talk back to me!" He -pointed the rifle squarely at her head. - -Edmond stepped in between them. "Now, now. There's no need for violence. -I'll have it cleaned for you if you're that concerned." - -The Solradian foxborn soldier clicked his tongue. "An Ilysveilan. Tell -the woman to watch where she's going." He stormed off. - -"Belligerent toward someone from a weak nation and bowing to someone -from a strong nation. The world is as twisted as ever," Edmond said. - -"Thank you, Mr. La-Pierre. What was that all about though?" Yunha asked. - -Edmond sighed. "The Solradians have already modernized. They want to -exert influence over the still-modernizing Radiaurora, so they've sent -over some soldiers for 'peacekeeping' as they call it. They've already -been here for ten years." - -"I see..." Things had certainly gone a troublesome direction in -Radiaurora while she had been away. Yunha remembered her roommate, her -teachers, and the lady of the boarding house she lived in while in -Solradia. Until now, she had nothing but fond daily memories of -Solradia. Seeing the other side of its modernization inspired mixed -feelings within her. - -At a cleaner part of Shinra, still considered the outskirts but closer -to the center than the slum, they arrived at the church. It was a -magnificent large building in the Western style of bricks and stained -glass windows. The building must have cost a small fortune, likely more -expensive than some of the nobles' houses. Whether intentional or not, -the church itself served as a symbol of Ilysveil's financial might. - -A bell tolled at the top of the church, under an arch with metal shaped -in the wing of a bat on one side, and the wing of a crane on the other. -She could see why the Ilysveilans called their religion Dualism. - -"Ah, the night classes must have just ended," Edmond said. - -"What are these night classes for?" - -"We teach Radiaurorans how to speak Ilysveilan. It's an important skill -in these times. People are just getting ready to leave. Now's your -chance to talk to them." - -Yunha nodded and walked in the church with Edmond. A group of tigerborns -in white robes were packing up. They were all commoner women. She had -received education as a daughter of a noble, but for commoners to have -access to any education, even if it was at a church, it felt as though -Radiaurora was progressing little by little. - -Edmond introduced Yunha to the women at the church and gave a vague -explanation that she was looking for someone from the slums from ten -years ago. - -The women had a mix of bored and irritated looks on their faces. They -hadn't come here to be questioned by a noble after all. Yunha didn't let -that faze her. "What do you all know about what happened in the slums -ten years ago?" - -Whispers swept through the small crowd. Many knew something. Whether -that information was reliable was another matter. - -One short woman raised her hand. "There was a slave revolt." - -"What was the cause?" Yunha asked. - -"Lady, have you seen how slaves were treated until now? Why wouldn't -they revolt?" a sharp-eyed woman in the front said, her arms crossed. - -A fair point. "I'll ask something related then. Why did the revolt start -in the slums? The slaves would have been living on the nobles' -property." - -"The person who organized it was from there, or so I've heard," a woman -with round cheeks said. - -Was that person possibly her brother? They wouldn't know that much -though. "How did the revolt end?" - -"The slaves lost, and the incident was swept under the rug," the -sharp-eyed woman said. - -"Why was that?" Yunha asked. "In the slums, that incident was a taboo to -talk about." - -The woman with round cheeks shrugged. "Even though it seemed like a big -deal, the police and the military denied anything happened. There were -rumors going around about a creepy message cursing the world from one of -the rebels. It just feels like bad luck." - -An incident everyone wanted to forget. "Why did Emperor Kojo end slavery -if the rebels lost?" - -"Because it's the right thing to do!" the short woman said emphatically. - -If only *the right thing to do* was what drove politics. "If that was -the case, he would've ended slavery twenty years ago when he took -power." - -Edmond interrupted, "I will point out that slavery ending this year was -not a total surprise. Ever since I got here, the laws have been tending -in that direction. They gave slaves some basic rights like protection -from physical abuse in 1885. That was after the incident though, so -maybe it was related." - -So, the government defeated the slaves but made concessions to them -anyway until eventually ending slavery altogether. But why? The military -was able to put down the rebellion well enough to cover it up, and even -if it had gotten out of hand, Radiaurora could always call in assistance -from the dragonborn Centrosian Empire as it had historically done. - -She had gotten all she could from them. Yunha thanked them and left the -church with Edmond. Outside, she took a coin out of her purse and handed -it to Edmond. - -"I can't accept payment for this," Edmond said. - -"Please, think of it as a donation to aid their education. As a noble -who hasn't lived here for fifteen years, money is all I have for them." -Yunha pressed the coin into his hand. "Would you like anything -personally other than money? Do you want me to join the church?" - -"No. If you personally wish to, I would of course welcome you with open -arms, but not as a returned favor. My job as a missionary is to do good -and let people know of the gods. Whether someone accepts must be their -own decision." - -"I have been wondering why you helped me." - -Edmond looked back at the church with the colorful warm glow from its -windows juxtaposed against the black night canvas. Perhaps to the -commoners here, its light was more a paradise than any afterlife that -could be promised, a respite from the bleak oppression of the nobility. -"A lot of members are former slaves. The girl who talked back to you was -one of them, though she tries not to bring it up. When I realized your -brother was connected to the slave rebellion, I wanted to know the truth -too. No matter what anyone says, this is undoubtedly the tale of a -hero." - -*The tale of a hero.* The part that had been bugging Yunha the most. Did -Jangmo really feel that his actions weren't heroic? Why, when the essay -called others to action, did he say that it wasn't the tale of a hero? -No, wait, that was how Edmond had paraphrased it. She pulled out her -notepad. The exact words were, Yunha said out loud, "This must never -become the tale of a hero." - -"Pardon?" Edmond asked. - -"I misremembered," Yunha said. "The text on the wall said that this must -never become the tale of a hero, not that it wasn't the tale of a hero." - -"What's the difference?" - -"The meaning of this changes completely. Whether or not he considers the -actions heroic is irrelevant in the actual text. If it must never become -the tale of a hero, that raises the question why? What happens if it -does become the tale of a hero?" Yunha ran off. "Follow me." - -"Where are we going?" Edmond jogged after her. - -"I'm positive Madam Wu knows everything. I now have enough pieces to -force her to talk." - -\*\*\* - -Yunha knocked on the door of the boarding house, and soon Madam Wu -peeked her head out. - -"You again? What do you want?" Madam Wu glanced at Edmond who was -standing behind Yunha. "The missionary too?" - -"I know what happened to my brother. I want you to tell me the whole -truth." - -Madam Wu glanced around skittishly. "Let's talk inside." - -She led them into her personal room and slid the door shut. They sat -down cross-legged at a low table with a candle on it. - -"What are you saying you know? For the record, I don't know anything." - -Yunha said, "Based on testimonies, the gist of the story is that a slave -rebellion occurred here. Slaves wouldn't be living here though, but the -leader of the rebellion was, and he wrote a message in one of the rooms -here." - -"Hmph. I've heard that much from the rumors," Madam Wu said. - -"And do you know what happened to the leader of the rebellion?" - -"No. But if I had to guess, he was caught and executed, just like every -other rebel leader that shows up." - -"That's what I initially thought. My brother was the leader of the -slaves. He led them to rebellion, and they lost. He wrote the message in -your boarding house room, then was captured and died. But that's not the -whole story." - -"There were several gaps in the story," Edmond said. "I didn't know what -they meant, but I could tell something rotten was afoot." - -"Exactly. I have three questions," Yunha said. "Why was it necessary to -cover up this slave rebellion and erase Jangmo from the records? Who are -the enemies near and the enemies afar? And why did he say it must never -become the tale of a hero?" - -Madam Wu didn't say anything. The candle's flame flickered, and the -shadows of the past stirred. - -"The answer to my first question comes from the result of the rebellion. -Jangmo mentions that he was the sacrifice, and over the next ten years, -slaves gradually gained more rights until they were freed this year. My -brother didn't simply die in battle. He was a sacrifice in exchange for -the eventual freedom of slaves." - -"But what was it that motivated the government to accede to his -demands?" Edmond asked. "Even if your brother agreed to give up his -life, the government could crush the rebellion anyway." - -[]{#_gjdgxs .anchor} "Ordinarily, the government would never give in. -Even in the worst case scenario, they could always call in help from -their ally Centrosis. But by 1885, the situation was no longer ordinary. -Remember what you told me when we ran into the Solradian soldier?" - -Edmond nodded. "They've been here for around ten years." - -Yunha continued, "With the objective of 'peacekeeping.' That helps -answer the next question. - -The message specifically said not to lose sight of the enemies afar. -That means the enemies who are close were obvious. The government. Then -who are the enemies afar? Who is further than the government? Who wants -to take away their freedoms? The Solradian Empire. If a rebellion got -out of hand, then Solradia would have justification to send in more -troops to quell it." - -"I see. So, the rebels had to think not only about the Radiauroran -government but the possibility of Solradia seizing control of -Radiaurora," Edmond said. - -"That leads into the last question. Why must this incident never become -the tale of a hero? What would happen if it *did* become the tale of a -hero? Let's say my brother died as a martyr and it was widely known." - -"Others would presumably rise up," Edmond answered. - -"Right. First, Solradia would know of the incident, then following -rebellions would create an easy justification for Solradia to send -troops, and Radiaurora wouldn't have the power to stop them. The Emperor -knew this, and that's why he freed the slaves in exchange for keeping -everything secret. That's why my brother warned others to not let their -resistance against the government become a hero's tale, to keep their -activities as hidden as possible. Because if it did become a hero's -tale, the downtrodden would lose to the enemies afar." - -Madam Wu sighed. "If you knew all that, why did you come here?" - -"There's just one thing I want to know. Who came up with the idea? Did -the Imperial government, seeking to maintain its power over Radiaurora, -propose to free the slaves in exchange for my brother's life and -secrecy? Or did my brother voluntarily propose to sacrifice himself to -end slavery while preserving Radiaurora's sovereignty?" - -"Why do you think I know the answer to that?" - -"You reacted to Jangmo's name when I first mentioned him. You at least -knew of him, enough to be shaken up. When we came back, you agreed to -talk to us. If you truly didn't know anything, you would have turned us -away. Lastly, the message on the wall of his room. You've had years to -replace that part of the wall or cover it up, but you didn't." - -Yunha stared down Madam Wu. "No matter how much trouble it brought, you -couldn't bring yourself to do it. That's the behavior of someone who -cares. Someone who didn't want the last trace of his existence to be -erased." - -Madam Wu smiled faintly and threw her hands up. "You've truly seen right -through me. Yes, I knew Jangmo well while he was a tenant. I knew about -his activities. And when I heard you were his sister, I didn't know what -to do. To keep everything a secret for the sake of his sacrifice, or to -tell you what you undoubtedly had the right to know. In the end, I was -half baked as usual and let you look at his room and nothing more." - -"As usual? What do you mean?" Yunha asked. - -"I wanted to support him, so I let him use his room to hold meetings and -harbor fugitives. But I didn't want to go to prison, so when the day of -his arrest came, I pretended not to know anything and didn't protect -him." - -"You don't need to feel guilty. My brother was someone who wouldn't have -wanted to drag down others with him. So, please, answer my question." - -"Yes. He did it." Madam Wu clasped Yunha's hand. "Your brother made the -proposal and voluntarily sacrificed himself. He was arrested -unofficially, taken somewhere, and executed. In exchange, the lives of -his fellow rebels were spared, and slavery finally ended this year. He -wanted to be forgotten, but I couldn't forget." - -Edmond held his hat in his hand and looked down. "He was a hero." - -How had Jangmo felt at his last moments? She hadn't been able to close -the book on this case until she knew that. Smiling, Yunha said, "Yes. -Even if no one else does, I shall remember him as a hero." diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5d5cf89b..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ -MYTHAXIS 22 - TOC - -**Editorial in memorium** - -**Feeling the Heat** - Les Sklaroff - -**Snryl** - Les Sklaroff - -**Behind My Eyes** - Martin M. CLark - -**Henry** - Jez Patterson - -**A Comic** - Liam Baldwin - -**His Turn to Remember** - John A. Frochio - -**Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember** - J. H. Zech - -**The Parking Ticket** - Steve Slavin - -**Good Old Days** - Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/Snyrl - Les Sklaroff.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/Snyrl - Les Sklaroff.md deleted file mode 100644 index 92f54654..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/Snyrl - Les Sklaroff.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,98 +0,0 @@ -**Snyrl** - -Les Sklaroff - -\- - -*And to follow that visit to the city of Snoak, some long-overdue -onomatological context.* - -\- - -*In the beginning was the Bird*... - -Or so it is said, but with due respect to the literalists of Snoak City, -the Bird must have post-dated the Beginning, in all likelihood by a -century or two, in order for the tree to grow from a fortuitously -germinated acorn into the immense grandeur of its akhood. - -The Bird was called Snyrl, a name spoken with lip curled in disdain or -mockery only by those unfamiliar with the mythic history. - -Snyrl, whose wondrously glittering wings (as depicted in ancient images) -sheltered its unseen brood amid the topmost hidden reaches of the oak, -as the tree itself provided protection from storm and sun alike to those -who were constrained to conduct their lives on the ground. - -Snyrl, to whom befitting offerings of cakes and woven purses and -hand-crafted trinkets were deposited across the river in the Deep Hollow -at midnight under a full moon. These gifts were ceremonially guarded by -successive generations of trusted Watchers. Only to the Watchers were -granted (through shielded, sleep-deprived eyes) glimpses of those fabled -feathers, or of the great golden beak. A hushed swoop, and the gifts -were gone before any human eye had time to blink. So it was said. When -the Watchers left at dawn, they were always able to confirm that in the -Deep Hollow there remained not so much as a telltale crumb, wisp or -shard. - -In response, Snyrl might reward the genuinely virtuous with whatever -they most desired: improved health, fecundity, safe childbirth, -pest-free crops, profitable trade, whatever else might alleviate the -difficulties of a hard life. Alternatively, any subsequent misfortune -would be attributed either to insufficient virtue or (no matter how many -hours of dedicated labour may have been invested) to gifts deemed by -Snyrl to be in some way unsatisfactory. - -It was not known what became of rejected offerings. They were not -returned. The Watchers believed that they probably winked out of -existence. - -Or so it was said. - -While Snyrl remained loftily aloof, an inaccessible mystery to all but -the devoted and privileged few, Snyrl's Oak on the other hand was a -constant and reassuring presence, and an invaluable source of essential -materials. The annual shedding of mast provided food for the pigs, the -farming of which was the primary occupation in the area, while careful -management of the lower branches yielded excellent timber for flooring -and furniture, staves, stakes, spokes, ladders, handles, and other -items. Its leaves were toxic to all but the pigs, but the tannins -extracted from the bark and galls were useful for leather-curing, dyes, -even for some herbal remedies. - -Over the years the Deep Hollow flooded and was repeatedly drained, its -bowl eventually housing the superstructure of Praspafole Stadium. The -tree remained central to the community, known always as Snyrl's Oak, -even though the mystique which had shrouded the elusive bird had long -since drifted into legend, and the generations of Watchers were no more -than dissipated ghosts. - -Snyrl's Oak, a venerable relic of its former glory, finally succumbed to -the ravages of an unprecedentedly fierce storm, during which it was -twice riven by lightning strikes and partially uprooted by gale force -winds. - -Before it fell it would have taken as many as eight adults with fully -outstretched arms to encircle the bole. It took ten times that number, -equipped with axes and hand-saws, to dismember the unscorched sections -of the fallen giant and transport the timber to a dry storage area. In -time, portions of that wood were destined to furnish half the households -in this increasingly urbanised community. Pig-farming gradually gave way -to many other industries and pursuits. - -According to most etymologists, the name "Snyrl's Oak" underwent an -inevitable vernacular contraction, to become at last simply "Snoak". -Years later, on the site where the once revered tree had stood for so -long, the octagonal hub of Central took shape, with its complex of -municipal offices, laboratories, and historical archives. Around it at -various dates grew numerous enterprises familiar to any visitor today: -the Fappit workshops, Quicksilver, the 3rdfield music studios, -Sparagulan College, and the Auditorium. Just across the Stirrow were -built the city museum and library, and the Stadium, with its adjoining -glider track and gymnasium. - -A less convincing explanation for the city's name is that "Snoak" was -once that of an actual person, possibly a particularly successful -pig-farmer. - -Scholars have largely dismissed this idea as being absurdly fanciful. diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/md/The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin.md b/content-xway/issue22/md/The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin.md deleted file mode 100644 index a25e8625..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/md/The Parking Ticket - Steve Slavin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,127 +0,0 @@ -**The Parking Ticket** - -Steve Slavin - -\- - -*Another flash piece focusing on the past, but without brain-housing -robots this one is much less spectacular in scope - at least on the -surface. How much here is truth, and how much fiction?* - -\- - -You know the feeling when you get a parking ticket that you don't -deserve? Should you fight it, or just pay it? - -I'll never forget one I got back in 1979. This ticket was so unfair that -I went out and bought a cheap camera, took pictures, brought them into -court, and got the satisfaction of having the ticket dismissed. - -But what should I do with the camera? I had absolutely no interest in -photography, but I decided one spring evening to take pictures of the -sunset from the Brooklyn Heights promenade. - -When I got there, the sun had just begun to sink behind the Jersey -Meadowlands and the sky was a deep orange. And so, along with perhaps -another dozen *real* photographers \-- all with fancy cameras -- I -snapped away. - -As the sun sank, the sky began taking on hues of purple. I included two -or three people who leaned over the promenade railing, watching the sun -almost imperceptibly slipping below the horizon. - -I hoped that each of my photos would be at least a bit different from -the previous one. Sometimes a spectator shifted, or was replaced by -another. I moved along, a few feet from the railing, slowly changing my -perspective. - -Minutes after the sun had set, I was well into my second roll of film. I -kept shooting, until maybe half an hour later, I had come to the end of -the roll. - -I hoped that I might have gotten a few good photos, but I wouldn't know -until I had the film developed. When I got back the snapshots, I had to -admit that they were not half bad. So, I bought a small album and filled -it with my sunsets. - -A few weeks later I hosted a small get-together and one of my friends -picked up the album and then passed it around. Everyone liked the -pictures. Then a woman who came with one of my friends asked if I'd like -to join her co-op photography gallery. - -I thought she was joking, but she insisted that my photos would -definitely sell. If I chipped in just a hundred fifty dollars a month, -they could hang there for as long as I wanted. - -At first I thought it was some kind of scam, but my friend vouched for -her. The next day, I visited the gallery, which was just a narrow space -on Atlantic Avenue down the block from some Syrian restaurants. - -There were a few dozen photos hanging, none of which impressed me. But -what did *I* know? I had a creepy feeling that I was being taken for a -ride, but a hundred fifty bucks was all I was paying for a parking -space. - -A week later the gallery held an opening for my work. I had made -multiple eight-and-a-half by eleven copies of each photo, mounted and -ready to go at twenty-five dollars a pop. I was pretty sure that I was -charging too much, but twenty-five was the minimum that any of the other -photographers charged. - -I was amazed when the second customer who looked at my photos bought one -of them. Ten minute later, someone else bought two more. - -In just two days I had almost sold out. I quickly had more copies made, -and even got a nice review in *The Heights Press*. Then I doubled my -prices, and my sales actually increased. The more I charged, the more I -sold. - -After a month, I was charging two hundred dollars for my photos and -*still* selling out every weekend. Some of the other photographers were -getting jealous of my success, even though the crowds I brought in -bought some of *their* photos too. - -I knew that each of them had a lot more talent than I did. I decided -that I would never take another photo. I was clearly a fraud. - -It would be much, much better for me to quit while I was ahead, rather -than be discovered for what I really was. Surely the other photographers -had my number, and maybe even were looking forward to witnessing my -fall. - -So I announced my retirement. The woman who had persuaded me to join the -gallery asked me to at least continue to exhibit the photos I had shot -that spring evening. "If you never take another photo, your place in the -world of photography is secure. I wish you would change your mind, but -either way, I will support your decision." - -Quickly, word spread. Dozens of newspaper columnists and even writers of -letters to the editor begged me to reconsider. But I stuck to my guns. - -By now my photos were fetching one thousand dollars. I had more money -than I would ever be able to spend. But something about this whole chain -of events was bothering me. I fell asleep each night trying to figure -out what it might be. - -And then, one morning I jumped out of bed and found the photos I had -taken of my ticketed car. I could make out the writing on the ticket and -the lettering on the sign next to my car. - -Something didn't jibe. And then, there it *was*! I realized immediately -what a fraud I had been! I quickly dressed, and hurried to traffic court -with the photos and ticket. - -When I got to see a referee and told her what had happened, she could -not stop laughing. "You are the first person I have ever met who wanted -to enter a guilty plea after having been found innocent. - -"And the fact that you had not realized your error -- and *ours* -- -until months later, and *still* made the trip down here. Well, I don't -think that has ever happened in the entire history of the Department of -Motor Vehicles!" - -Then I noticed my photo hanging on the wall of her office. She saw me -looking at it, and then glanced at the name on the ticket. - -[]{#_gjdgxs .anchor}She smiled. "I'll tell you what: Autograph the photo -and we'll call it even." diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/templates/commands.txt b/content-xway/issue22/templates/commands.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 583f4c9e..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/templates/commands.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ -Convert docx to html (and markdown if you change output filename it .md) - -find . -iname "*.docx" -type f -exec sh -c 'pandoc "${0}" -o "./html/${0%.docx}.html"' {} \; - -pandoc mydocument.md --template mindoc-pandoc.html -o mydocument.html - - -Converted the old xway2.exe stock and pattern files. - -Stock files == Gil's term for article level pages, so the stories. -Pattern files == Gil's term for issue TOC, or journal index listing pages. - -As we upgrade Mythaxis I would like to bring in Dublin core schemas, - and map journal metadata around the issues, as we migrate them into a - new metdata schema and static content management system. - - -For now, the process is: - -1. convert word docs to mark down -2. convert markdown to HTML, using pandoc templates 'mythaxis-stock-tempate.html' and 'mythaxis-pattern-template.html' -3. Manually rename and edit the files, to make them neat and tidy! - - -pandoc story1.md --template mythaxis-stock-tempate.html -o story1.html -pandoc story2.md --template mythaxis-stock-tempate.html -o story2.html -pandoc story3.md --template mythaxis-stock-tempate.html -o story3.html -etc. - -pandoc TOC.md --template mythaxis-pattern-tempate.html -o index.html - - -Or command to do a whole directory is: - -find . -iname "./md/*.md" -type f -exec sh -c 'pandoc "${0}" --template mythaxis-stock-tempate.html -o "${0%.md}.html"' {} \; - - -Command to change PNG files to JPEG: - -find . -iname "*.png" -type f -exec sh -c 'convert "${0}" "${0%.png}.jpg"' {} \; - diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/templates/index.html b/content-xway/issue22/templates/index.html deleted file mode 100644 index 15e1decf..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/templates/index.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,329 +0,0 @@ - - - - - - - mythaxis August 2017 edition (issue 20) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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- August 2017 edition (issue 20) -

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- Editorial in memorium - - Andrew Lowon Hudson -
Welcome to the 20th issue of Mythaxis. It's been a while.
-
-
- Feeling the Heat - - Les Sklaroff -
We begin this issue with a piece by a long-time contributor and old friend of Gil’s, which places front and center that thorny problem of what makes writing good. Perhaps the solution is to admit that writing simply IS good, whether it is ugly or beautiful, famous or infamous, read or unread. -
-
-
- Snryl - - Les Sklaroff -
And to follow that visit to the city of Snoak, some long-overdue onomatological context.
-
-
- Behind My Eyes - - Martin M. CLark -
For this memorial issue of Mythaxis, I invited former contributors to submit stories with a theme of “memory”. First amongst these is a typically gung ho mix of sf, action, and humour from Martin M. Clark, one which I think Gil would have appreciated.
-
-
- Henry - - Jez Patterson -
-
-
- A Comic - - Liam Baldwin -
-
-
- His Turn to Remember - - John A. Frochio -
-
-
- Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember - - J. H. Zech -
-
-
- The Parking Ticket - - Steve Slavin -
-
-
- Good Old Days - - Andrew Leon Hudson -
-
-
-

- - 		-
- -
-
Date and time of last update 10:50 Thu 24 Aug 2017
-
- Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
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- - - - - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/issue22/templates/mythaxis-pattern-template.html b/content-xway/issue22/templates/mythaxis-pattern-template.html deleted file mode 100644 index 8450602b..00000000 --- a/content-xway/issue22/templates/mythaxis-pattern-template.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,141 +0,0 @@ - - - - - - - - -$if(description)$ - -$endif$ -$for(author-meta)$ - -$endfor$ -$if(date-meta)$ - -$endif$ -$if(title-prefix)$$title-prefix$ - $endif$$pagetitle$ - - - - - -$if(quotes)$ - -$endif$ -$if(highlighting-css)$ - -$endif$ -$for(css)$ - -$endfor$ -$if(math)$ -$math$ -$endif$ -$for(header-includes)$ -$header-includes$ -$endfor$ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue1] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
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- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue2] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -April 2008 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue2] -[HEADER1] -
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[TITLE]

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- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue3] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
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[TITLE]

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Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue4] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -November 2008 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue4] -[HEADER1] -
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[TITLE]

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-
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-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue5] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -June 2009 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue5] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

- - - [repeat] -
-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] - - [ITEM] - - - - [AUTHOR] - - - - -[BLURB] - - - -[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissue6.x66 b/content-xway/patternissue6.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 1f2f723d..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissue6.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,290 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissue6 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issue6 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue6] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -February 2010 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue6] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

- - - [repeat] -
-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] - - [ITEM] - - - - [AUTHOR] - - - - -[BLURB] - - - -[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissue7.x66 b/content-xway/patternissue7.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 6f630630..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissue7.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,290 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissue7 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issue7 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue7] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -September 2010 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue7] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

- - - [repeat] -
-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] - - [ITEM] - - - - [AUTHOR] - - - - -[BLURB] - - - -[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissue8.x66 b/content-xway/patternissue8.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 4f6b293c..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissue8.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,305 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissue8 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issue8 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

-
Alistair Bain
Desert of Zin

-

Liam Baldwin
Junk Monkey

-

Jonathan Joseph
Kilbot

-

Twilite Minotaur
Daydreams of the Wire Children

-

Peter Morrison
re:mote voices

-

Les Sklaroff
Cameron House Books

-

Belinda A. Taylor
Dead Wait

-

Gil Williamson
Mythaxis blog

-

- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that the email above is changed from the one previously in use. -For safety's sake, you may send a duplicate to the previous address:

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue8] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -February 2011 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue8] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissue9.x66 b/content-xway/patternissue9.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index fac14bbf..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissue9.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,306 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissue9 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issue9 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

-
Alistair Bain
Desert of Zin

-

Liam Baldwin
Junk Monkey

-

Annabel Banks
Annabel Banks

-

Jonathan Joseph
Kilbot

-

Twilite Minotaur
Daydreams of the Wire Children

-

Peter Morrison
re:mote voices

-

Les Sklaroff
Cameron House Books

-

Belinda A. Taylor
Dead Wait

-

Gil Williamson
Mythaxis blog

-

- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that the email above is changed from the one previously in use. -For safety's sake, you may send a duplicate to the previous address:

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issue9] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -June 2011 edition -[*END] - -[%indexissue9] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev10.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev10.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 555c15c8..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev10.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,308 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev10 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev10 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

-
Alistair Bain
Desert of Zin

-

Liam Baldwin
Junk Monkey

-

Annabel Banks
Annabel Banks

-

Andrew Leon Hudson
ALH blog

-

Jonathan Joseph
Kilbot

-

Matthew Kirschenblatt
Mythic Bios

-

Twilite Minotaur
Daydreams of the Wire Children

-

Peter Morrison
re:mote voices

-

Les Sklaroff
Cameron House Books

-

Belinda A. Taylor
Dead Wait

-

Gil Williamson
Mythaxis blog

-

- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that the email above is changed from the one previously in use. -For safety's sake, you may send a duplicate to the previous address:

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issuev10] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -December 2011 edition (issue 10) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev10] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev11.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev11.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index cbcf72c2..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev11.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,308 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev11 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev11 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
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Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

-
Alistair Bain
Desert of Zin

-

Liam Baldwin
Junk Monkey

-

Annabel Banks
Annabel Banks

-

John A. Frochio
John Frochio

-

Andrew Leon Hudson
ALH blog

-

Jonathan Joseph
Kilbot

-

Matthew Kirschenblatt
Mythic Bios

-

Twilite Minotaur
Daydreams of the Wire Children

-

Peter Morrison
re:mote voices

-

Les Sklaroff
Cameron House Books

-

Belinda A. Taylor
Dead Wait

-

Gil Williamson
Mythaxis blog

-

- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

In fairness, I should say at the outset that we do not currently pay for -stories, nor do we hold competitions. Mythaxis is a showcase, now a fairly -well-known showcase, for new talent. We have been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that the email above is changed from the one previously in use. -For safety's sake, you may send a duplicate to the previous address:

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[%issuev11] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -August 2012 edition (issue 11) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev11] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev12.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev12.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 5fc337d3..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev12.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,447 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev12 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev12 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
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-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

-
Alistair Bain
Desert of Zin

-

Liam Baldwin
Junk Monkey

-

Annabel Banks
Annabel Banks

-

John A. Frochio
John Frochio

-

Andrew Leon Hudson
ALH blog

-

Jonathan Joseph
Kilbot

-

Matthew Kirshenblatt
Mythic Bios

-

Twilite Minotaur
Daydreams of the Wire Children

-

Peter Morrison
re:mote voices

-

Les Sklaroff
Cameron House Books

-

Belinda A. Taylor
Dead Wait

-

Gil Williamson
Mythaxis blog

-

- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

In fairness, I should say at the outset that we do not currently pay for -stories. However, from 2013, i.e. Issue 12, onwards, we award a modest book prize to -each of three authors, chosen by readers and by the editorial team. Once the judging is over, -the winners will each pick a book prize. The current prize table is - HERE . - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that the email above is changed from the one previously in use. -For safety's sake, you may send a duplicate to the previous address:

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, the first prize winner will have first pick of the available -prizes, and so on. -

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Book of the New Sun - Four volumes, Paperback, Arrow Books 1985 Good condition.
-A classic of fantasy.
-The Shadow of the Torturer;
The Claw of the Conciliator;
The Sword of the Lictor; -
The Citadel of the Autarch
-
-
- -
The Engineer Trilogy by K J Parker - 3 volumes Orbit Paperback 2008. -Excellent condition.
-Over 2000 pages of gripping medievalist fantasy entertainment.
-Devices and Desires;
-Evil for Evil;
-The Escapement
-
-
- -
Analog Science Fiction Magazine. November 1974.
-Illustrations by Schoenherr and Freas.
-Contents list in attached image. The adverts alone are worth a read!
-
-
- -
Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon 1st edition Paperback -Ballantine Books 1961. Like many paperbacks of that era, the spine is rather -fragile, and the paper somewhat fawn in hue, but what a story!
-
-
-
- - -
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Corgi Science Fiction 1960. -Paperback in good condition, no glue or spine problems.
-One of the classics of science fiction, written in 1954 by one of the -best authors of the time.
-
-
- -
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
- -
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
- -
In Joy Still Felt - the Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. Avon Paperback 1980. -Good condition.
-Nearly 800 pages of information, science, fiction and philosophy from one of the biggest names in sf.
-
-
- -
The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card. Century Paperback 1991. Good condition.
-A collection of all the Worthing stories, written between 1978 and 1989, including several -only previously seen in magazines. From the author of Ender's Game.
-
-
- - - -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev12] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -March 2013 edition (issue 12) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev12] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -success -failure -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev13.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev13.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 43805d33..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev13.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,444 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev13 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev13 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

-
Alistair Bain
Desert of Zin

-

Liam Baldwin
Junk Monkey

-

Annabel Banks
Annabel Banks

-

John A. Frochio
John Frochio

-

Andrew Leon Hudson
ALH blog

-

Jonathan Joseph
Kilbot

-

Matthew Kirshenblatt
Mythic Bios

-

Twilite Minotaur
Daydreams of the Wire Children

-

Peter Morrison
re:mote voices

-

Les Sklaroff
Cameron House Books

-

Belinda A. Taylor
Dead Wait

-

Gil Williamson
Mythaxis blog

-

- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

-

In fairness, I should say at the outset that we do not currently pay for -stories. However, from 2013, i.e. Issue 12, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to -each of three authors, chosen by readers and by the editorial team. Once the judging is over, -the winners will each pick a book prize. The current prize table is - HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, the first prize winner will have first pick of the available -prizes, and so on. -

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Book of the New Sun - Four volumes, Paperback, Arrow Books 1985 Good condition.
-A classic of fantasy.
-The Shadow of the Torturer;
The Claw of the Conciliator;
The Sword of the Lictor; -
The Citadel of the Autarch
-
-
- -
Spares by Michael Marshall Smith - Harper Collins 1998. -Excellent condition.
-The ultimate health insurance. Cyberpunk novel.
-
-
- -
Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack - Harper Collins 1994 good condition.
-Apocalyptic novel of a dysfunctional New York. Womack is merciless.
-
-
- -
Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon 1st edition Paperback -Ballantine Books 1961. Like many paperbacks of that era, the spine is rather -fragile, and the paper somewhat fawn in hue, but what a story!
-
-
-
- - -
Rim by Alexander Besher. Orbit 1995. -Firmback in excellent condition.
-Virtual reality and cybernetic espionage.
-
-
- -
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
- -
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
- -
In Joy Still Felt - the Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. Avon Paperback 1980. -Good condition.
-Nearly 800 pages of information, science, fiction and philosophy from one of the biggest names in sf.
-
-
- -
Waldo & Magic Inc. by Robert Heinlein. Pan Science Fiction 1969. Good condition.
-Two novelettes in a single volume. Both are rather ahead of their time. Originally written in -the 1940s and early 50s when Heinlein was actually writing -science fiction, rather than pseudo-political polemic.
-
-
- - - -
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[ITEM]


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-
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-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -success -failure -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev14.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev14.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 12190760..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev14.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,446 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev14 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev14 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorDead Wait
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] [HEADER1]

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, the first prize winner will have first pick of the available -prizes, and so on. -

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Book of the New Sun - Four volumes, Paperback, Arrow Books 1985 Good condition.
-A classic of fantasy.
-The Shadow of the Torturer;
The Claw of the Conciliator;
The Sword of the Lictor; -
The Citadel of the Autarch
-
-
- -
Spares by Michael Marshall Smith - Harper Collins 1998. -Excellent condition.
-The ultimate health insurance. Cyberpunk novel.
-
-
- -
Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack - Harper Collins 1994 good condition.
-Apocalyptic novel of a dysfunctional New York. Womack is merciless.
-
-
- -
Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon 1st edition Paperback -Ballantine Books 1961. Like many paperbacks of that era, the spine is rather -fragile, and the paper somewhat fawn in hue, but what a story!
-
-
-
- - -
Rim by Alexander Besher. Orbit 1995. -Firmback in excellent condition.
-Virtual reality and cybernetic espionage.
-
-
- -
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
- -
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
- -
In Joy Still Felt - the Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. Avon Paperback 1980. -Good condition.
-Nearly 800 pages of information, science, fiction and philosophy from one of the biggest names in sf.
-
-
- -
Waldo & Magic Inc. by Robert Heinlein. Pan Science Fiction 1969. Good condition.
-Two novelettes in a single volume. Both are rather ahead of their time. Originally written in -the 1940s and early 50s when Heinlein was actually writing -science fiction, rather than pseudo-political polemic.
-
-
- - - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev14] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -March 2014 edition (issue 14) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev14] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

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- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -success -failure -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev15.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev15.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index dcf276ee..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev15.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,448 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev15 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev15 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for -Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorDead Wait
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, first come, first served.

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

Terraplane - Jack Womack - Unwin SF Paperback 1990 - First UK paperback edition 230pp -
Fast-paced razor's edge Science Fiction with a tough guy plot. First class.
-
-
-

-

Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format Paperback 1992 294pp -
The first volume of his Homecoming series.
-
-
-

-

Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut - Vintage UK Paperback 1990 207pp -
Uncollected short stories dating back to 1954.
-
-
-

-

Slow Man by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp -
Troubling tale from a Nobel prize winner
-
-
-

-

The Ragged Astronauts - Bob Shaw - Futura Paperback 1987 310pp -
These astronauts cross space in a balloon. Excellent plot and good science. -
-
-
-

-

Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Book of the New Sun - Four volumes, Paperback, Arrow Books 1985 Good condition.
-A classic of fantasy.
-The Shadow of the Torturer;
The Claw of the Conciliator;
The Sword of the Lictor; -
The Citadel of the Autarch
-
-
- -
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower Paperback 1970 -
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate the world. Well-written. -
-
-
- -
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
- -
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
- -
Astounding Science Fact & Fiction Vol.XVI No.9 November 1960 British Edition. Good condition.
-
-
-
- - - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev15] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -November 2014 edition (issue 15) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev15] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -success -failure -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev16.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev16.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 65c99729..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev16.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,443 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev16 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev16 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for -Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorDead Wait
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, first come, first served.

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

Terraplane - Jack Womack - Unwin SF Paperback 1990 - First UK paperback edition 230pp -
Fast-paced razor's edge Science Fiction with a tough guy plot. First class.
-
-
-

-

Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format Paperback 1992 294pp -
The first volume of his Homecoming series.
-
-
-

-

Slow Man by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp -
Troubling tale from a Nobel prize winner
-
-
-

-

The Ragged Astronauts - Bob Shaw - Futura Paperback 1987 310pp -
These astronauts cross space in a balloon. Excellent plot and good science. -
-
-
-

-

Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
- -
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower Paperback 1970 -
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate the world. Well-written. -
-
-
- -
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
- -
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
- -
Astounding Science Fact & Fiction Vol.XVI No.9 November 1960 British Edition. Good condition.
-
-
-
-
The Time of Infinity edited by August Derleth. Consul Books Paperback 1951. Old, foxed, but intact.
-Short stories by A.E.van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon and others
-
-
-
Songmaster by Orson Scott Card. Legend Paperback 1987. Condition as new.
-Deep space fantasy by the author of Ender's Game.
-
-
- - - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

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- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev16] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -July 2015 edition (issue 16) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev16] -[HEADER1] -
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[TITLE]

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-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev17.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev17.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index ee8d62ea..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev17.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,467 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev17 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev17 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for -Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorDead Wait
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, first come, first served.

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

Takedown by Tsutomu Shimomura. Secker and Warburg Firmback 1995. Condition - Excellent.
-An early successful hacker hunt.
-
-
-
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Panther Paperback 1979. Condition v. Good
-A typically thought-provoking novel by the author of The Left Hand of Darkness
-
-
-
Zacherley's Vulture Stew - edited by John Zacherlie. Ballantine Books Paperback 1962. -
Rather battered copy of this classic. (Amazon are currently selling this at $17 second-hand!)
-
-
-
Beachheads in Space edited by August Derleth. 4square paperback 1964. Condition v. Good.
-Excellent collection of early 60s sf.
-
-
-
Another Part of the Galaxy edited by Groff Conklin. Fawcett Gold Medal Paperback 1966. Condition v. Good.
-Deep space tales from the 1950s.
-
-
-
Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson. Atlantic Books Paperback 2012. -Condition as new.
-Nineteen essays by the noted sf author, from 1993 to 2012.
-
-
-
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang - Picador -paperback 2015 - as new. -
Eight stories by this Nebula and Hugo award winner.
-
-
-
Terraplane - Jack Womack - Unwin SF Paperback 1990 - First UK paperback edition 230pp -
Fast-paced razor's edge Science Fiction with a tough guy plot. First class.
-
-
-
Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format Paperback 1992 294pp -
The first volume of his Homecoming series.
-
-
-
Slow Man by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp -
Troubling tale from a Nobel prize winner
-
-
-
The Ragged Astronauts - Bob Shaw - Futura Paperback 1987 310pp -
These astronauts cross space in a balloon. Excellent plot and good science. -
-
-
-
Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower Paperback 1970 -
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate the world. Well-written. -
-
-
-
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
-
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
-
Astounding Science Fact & Fiction Vol.XVI No.9 November 1960 British Edition. Good condition.
-
-
-
-
The Time of Infinity edited by August Derleth. Consul Books Paperback 1951. Old, foxed, but intact.
-Short stories by A.E.van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon and others
-
-
- - - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev17] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -February 2016 edition (issue 17) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev17] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev18.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev18.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 4e7b58fa..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev18.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,448 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev18 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev18 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for -Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorDead Wait
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, first come, first served.

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams. Orbit large -format Paperback 2009. Condition as new
-An ARG (Augmented Reality Game) gets out of hand.
-
-
-
The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Arrow Books Paperback -2009. Condition as new
Grossman's answer to Harry Potter. Now -a tv series.
- -
Monkey Planet by Pierre Boulle. Penguin Paperback -1979. Condition Battered, foxed but intact and very readable
-The origin of The Planet of the Apes
-
Beachheads in Space edited by August Derleth. 4square paperback 1964. Condition v. Good.
-Excellent collection of early 60s sf.
-
-
-
Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson. Atlantic Books Paperback 2012. -Condition as new.
-Nineteen essays by the noted sf author, from 1993 to 2012.
-
-
-
Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format Paperback 1992 294pp -
The first volume of his Homecoming series.
-
-
-
Slow Man by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp -
Troubling tale from a Nobel prize winner
-
-
-
Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower Paperback 1970 -
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate the world. Well-written. -
-
-
-
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
-
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
-
The Time of Infinity edited by August Derleth. Consul Books Paperback 1951. Old, foxed, but intact.
-Short stories by A.E.van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon and others
-
-
- - - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev18] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -August 2016 edition (issue 18) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev18] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev19.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev19.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 481d43d1..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev19.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,461 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev19 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev19 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for -Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorDead Wait
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
J. H. ZechProject Story
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] -[HEADER1] -

Current Prizes

-

Winners will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more prizes, -in no particular order. -Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as a single prize.

-At any issue, first come, first served.

-Current list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) -

-

This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams. Orbit large -format Paperback 2009. Condition as new
-An ARG (Augmented Reality Game) gets out of hand.
-
-
- -
Monkey Planet by Pierre Boulle. Penguin Paperback -1979. Condition Battered, foxed but intact and very readable
-The origin of The Planet of the Apes
-
Beachheads in Space edited by August Derleth. 4square paperback 1964. Condition v. Good.
-Excellent collection of early 60s sf.
-
-
-
Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson. Atlantic Books Paperback 2012. -Condition as new.
-Nineteen essays by the noted sf author, from 1993 to 2012.
-
-
-
Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format Paperback 1992 294pp -
The first volume of his Homecoming series.
-
-
-
Slow Man by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp -
Troubling tale from a Nobel prize winner
-
-
-
Myst - The Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint. -
The fantasy back story for the Myst adventure games.
-
-
-
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower Paperback 1970 -
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate the world. Well-written. -
-
-
-
The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good condition.
-Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
-
-
-
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good condition.
-Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
-
-
-
The Time of Infinity edited by August Derleth. Consul Books Paperback 1951. Old, foxed, but intact.
-Short stories by A.E.van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon and others
-
-
- -
The Mammoth Book of Short SF Novels presented by Isaac Asimov. Robinson Publishing 1986. Very Good Condition.
-Short Novels by Asimov, Philip José Farmer, Larry Niven and others. -Novelettes, mostly from the 50s, 60s and 70s.
-
-
- - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev19] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -February 2017 edition (issue 19) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev19] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev20.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev20.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 1f22ed08..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev20.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,535 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev20 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev20 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Mary HiersKittenheel Enterprises
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorCultivated Lines
D S WhiteThe Land of Words
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
J. H. ZechProject Story
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] [HEADER1]

Current Prizes

Winners -will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more -prizes, in no particular order. Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as -a single prize.

At any issue, first come, first served.

Current -list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) - -

- -

A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson. Corgi -paperback 1960, 189 pages. Remarkably good condition for its age.
-By the author of 'I am Legend'. A man's psychic abilities are -awakened in a very disturbing way.
- - -
- -
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber. Ace paperback 1961, 129 -pages. Remarkably good condition for its age. It contains a 1971 stamp -from Edinburgh's Bobby's Bookshop, offering to buy it back for 8p. -(The shop still exists, though they've moved further down the street, -and they now specialise in gay lit, erotica etc.)
-Hugo-winning novel with an ambitious time-travel plot.
- -
- -
Far Out by Damon Knight Corgi paperback 1963, 221 -pages. Rather brown with age, but still in good readable -condition.
13 excellent SF stories from the 1950s, mostly -published in Galaxy and ASF, including at least one Hugo winner.
-
- -
- -
The Emperor's New Mind by Roger -Penrose. Vintage paperback 1991, 602 pages. One careful reader.
-Amazingly clever argument, backed by Classical and Quantum -Physics, that a computer can never achieve Artificial -Intelligence. I was struck by the scope of Penrose's knowledge and -ability to express himself.
- -
- -
Perdido Street -Station by China Miéville. Pan paperback 2000, 867 pages. One -careful -reader.
Original, imaginative science fiction, full of cool -ideas.
- -
- -
Monkey -Planet by Pierre Boulle. Penguin Paperback 1979. Condition Battered, -foxed but intact and very readable
The origin of The Planet of -the Apes
- -
- -
The -Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi. Orbit paperback 2010. 505 pages plus -appendix. One careful reader.
Gritty near-future sf set in Thailand. -When the oil runs out...
- -
- -
The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi. Orbit -paperback 2015. (1st UK paperback edition) 452 pages plus appendix. One -careful reader.
Gritty near-future sf set in USA. When the water -runs out...
- -
- -
Some -Remarks by Neal Stephenson. Atlantic Books Paperback 2012. Condition as -new.
Nineteen essays by the noted sf author, from 1993 to -2012.
- -
- -
Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format -Paperback 1992 294pp
The first volume of his Homecoming -series.
- -
- -
Slow Man -by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp
Troubling tale -from a Nobel prize winner
- -
- -
Myst - The -Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint.
The fantasy -back story for the Myst adventure games.
- -
- -
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower -Paperback 1970
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate -the world. Well-written.
- -
- -
The Night -Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good -condition.
Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
- -
- -
The -Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good -condition.
Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
- -
- -
The Time of -Infinity edited by August Derleth. Consul Books Paperback 1951. Old, -foxed, but intact.
Short stories by A.E.van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt, -Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon and others
- -
- -
The History -of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes. Picador paperback -1990. 373 pages. Good Condition.
Satirical tale, based around a -stowaway on Noah's Ark.
- -
- - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev20] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -August 2017 edition (issue 20) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev20] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
-

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/patternissuev21.x66 b/content-xway/patternissuev21.x66 deleted file mode 100644 index 1a9f25ce..00000000 --- a/content-xway/patternissuev21.x66 +++ /dev/null @@ -1,518 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] -1v4 - new _TITEM -2v0 - re-hashed site -3v0 - version 14 - revised index page - retro-fitted to versions 8 to 13 -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEM -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -DESCRIPTION -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -BLURB -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_A -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMFILE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -REF -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -IMAGE_B -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -ITEMDATE -[*END] -[*_TITEM] -AUTHOR -[*END] - -[*_META] -Mythaxis Magazine Science Fiction and Fantasy Modern Fiction -[*END] - -[*_STKNAME] -indexissuev21 -[*END] - -[*_ITMNAME] -issuev21 -[*END] - -[*SCRIPTSTUFF] - -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[*BODYDATA] - - -
- -Mythaxis - - - - - - - -
-[*END] - -[*HEADER1] - - - - - -mythaxis [TITLE] - - - - -[EXTRAMETA] -[SCRIPTSTUFF] - - - - -[BODYDATA] -[*END] - -[*SIDEBAR] - -[*END] - - -[*TRAILER1] -[SIDEBAR] -
Date and time of last update [DATE]
- -Portions of this site are copyrighted to third parties
-
- - -[*END] - - -[*TITLE]Editorial Policy[*END] - -[%policy] -[HEADER1] -

Editorial Policy

-

As usual, the editors' decisions are final in the selection of work to be -published. We are very fastidious; we will need to correct spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, -and punctuation. In some cases we may have suggestions to improve a story which we will discuss -with the author.

-

Sometimes we will find a work that has not been submitted to us but which we wish to publish, -and we will contact the author for permission.

-

In every case, we will seek the author's approval of a work we intend to feature before publication.

-

We will accept paid advertising links if the link art is to our taste. -We will usually be happy to include a link to an author's website / publisher etc. if we have published the -author's work. We are keen to avoid "flashy" pages, animated gifs, black backgrounds and other -irritating distractions. This is a web-based literary magazine, not a billboard.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*TITLE]Authors' Links[*END] - -[%authors] -[HEADER1] -

Authors' Links

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alistair BainDesert of Zin
Liam BaldwinJunk Monkey
Annabel BanksAnnabel Banks
Patrick Boylan Patrick's FB page
Sean Crawford also writes, sings, and plays guitar for Widerange Hum. He is @splitcoil on Twitter Wide Range Hum
John A. FrochioJohn Frochio
Mary HiersKittenheel Enterprises
Andrew Leon HudsonALH blog
Jonathan JosephKilbot
Matthew KirshenblattMythic Bios
Voss McVeighThe Bees are Dead
Mark MellonMellon Writes Again
Twilite MinotaurDaydreams of the Wire Children
Peter Morrisonre:mote voices
Jez PattersonSome Stories
Les SklaroffCameron House Books
Belinda A. TaylorCultivated Lines
D S WhiteThe Land of Words
Gil WilliamsonMythaxis blog
J. H. ZechProject Story
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - - - -[*TITLE]Submissions[*END] - -[%submission] -[HEADER1] -

Submission of Science Fiction and -Fantasy Stories

In fairness, I should say at the -outset that we do not currently pay for stories. However, from 2014, -i.e. Issue 13, onwards, we have awarded a modest book prize to each -author featured in the issue. Authors will each pick a book prize. The -current prize table is HERE. - -

Mythaxis has been running since 2008, a -long time for a webzine. -

We welcome new short speculative, sf and fantasy fiction. Email your submissions to:

-

-Note that this is now the only address for submissions, and the alternate email address used -in the past is no longer available.

-

- -

A short story is defined as a story which can comfortably be read in one sitting. Conventionally, -this means it must be less than 20000 words in length. Most short stories are less than half -that length. Poe's The Gold Bug is over 25000 words. We will make exceptions for exceptional -stories. The longest story we have published to date was around 10000 words, but -most are in the 2500 range, while some are only a few hundred.

-

Format: For an initial submission, we will be content with an URL at which we can see the work. -If we like the story and proceed to an editorial stage, we will render it into HTML, so you can send text in -HTML, but please spare us the complication that is Microsoft Word's version of an html file. If you -prepare your story in Word, send it either in original .doc format, or render it into plain text. -Plain text is fine, too, preferably with no line breaks except a double line break at paragraph end. -You can, if you like, stick HTML bold or italic brackets around a word or phrase, thus:

-

This word in <b>bold</b>, this in <i>italics</i>

-

but, by and large, for us, the simpler the better.

-

We are not, as a rule, interested in reviews of new sf or fantasy, especially if we feel -that they are inspired by the publisher, but may publish critical -works of a broader nature, covering, say, the works of a specific author or genre. -

We also accept artwork. Cartoons, fantasy or sf art, especially if relevant to an -accompanying story. We will normally display it in jpg format, but will accept it in pretty well any format.

-

Copyright in the piece will always remain with the author or artist unless special arrangements are negotiated.

-
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]About[*END] - -[%about] -[HEADER1] -

Mythaxis, the web-based Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine.

-

The sf and fantasy you will read here will often be by young authors, but -the quality is extremely high. We have a strong editorial team, and -the determination to produce a high class product.

-

In addition to stories, we will be including relevant -illustrations, occasional reviews and some factual and historical articles.

-

Any advertising will be discreet, rather than garish. We intend -that the magazine look more like a literary periodical than a pulp comic. -

-

Feedback and submissions are welcome. See the links over on the right.

-

Enjoy.

-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE]Prizes[*END] - -[%prizes] [HEADER1]

Current Prizes

Winners -will select their prizes from this list, which will contain ten or more -prizes, in no particular order. Obviously, multi-volume prizes count as -a single prize.

At any issue, first come, first served.

Current -list: (Click thumbnail for detailed image) - -

- - -

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber. Ace paperback 1961, 129 -pages. Remarkably good condition for its age. It contains a 1971 stamp -from Edinburgh's Bobby's Bookshop, offering to buy it back for 8p. -(The shop still exists, though they've moved further down the street, -and they now specialise in gay lit, erotica etc.)
-Hugo-winning novel with an ambitious time-travel plot.
- - -
- -
Monkey -Planet by Pierre Boulle. Penguin Paperback 1979. Condition Battered, -foxed but intact and very readable
The origin of The Planet of -the Apes
- -
- - -
The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi. Orbit -paperback 2015. (1st UK paperback edition) 452 pages plus appendix. One -careful reader.
Gritty near-future sf set in USA. When the water -runs out...
-
- -
Swords of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Four Square Paperback 1966. -Condition very good.
One of the later episodes of the John Carter epic, -first published in 1934.
- -
- -
Some -Remarks by Neal Stephenson. Atlantic Books Paperback 2012. Condition as -new.
Nineteen essays by the noted sf author, from 1993 to -2012.
- -
- -
Hellflower - George O. Smith - Mayflower Dell Paperback 1964 192pp
-Drugs and Crime in the Solar System. Interestingly, the book is -dedicated to Dona. Dona was ASF editor John W. Campbell's ex-wife, with whom Smith -ran off and married. Thereafter, his stories never appeared in ASF.
- -
- -
Memory of Earth - Orson Scott Card - Legend large format -Paperback 1992 175pp
The first volume of his Homecoming -series.
- -
- -
Bill, the Galactic Hero - Penguin Science Fiction -Paperback 1969 294pp. Very good condition.
A typical satitirical look at future war -from the author of Starship Troopers.
- -
- -
Slow Man -by J.M.Coetzee - Vintage BooksPaperback 2006 263pp
Troubling tale -from a Nobel prize winner
- -
- -
Myst - The -Book of Atrus - Hardback, 288 pages. 1st edition. Mint.
The fantasy -back story for the Myst adventure games.
- -
- -
The Reproductive System - John Sladek - Mayflower -Paperback 1970
Somewhat satirical story about the system that ate -the world. Well-written.
- -
- -
The Night -Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Arrow Books 2007. Paperback. Good -condition.
Volume One of the Night Watch Trilogy.
- -
- -
The -Grotesque by Patrick McGrath. Penguin Paperback 1990. Good -condition.
Sinister, mysterious, modern gothic drama.
- -
- -
The Time of -Infinity edited by August Derleth. Consul Books Paperback 1951. Old, -foxed, but intact.
Short stories by A.E.van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt, -Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon and others
- -
- -
The History -of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes. Picador paperback -1990. 373 pages. Good Condition.
Satirical tale, based around a -stowaway on Noah's Ark.
- -
- - -
- -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Success[*END] - -[%success] -[HEADER1] - -

Thank you for your vote

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*EXTRAMETA][*END] - -[*TITLE]Failure[*END] - -[%failure] -[HEADER1] - -

Oops! Something went wrong there. Try again.

- - Click here to return to Mythaxis index - -[TRAILER1] -[%END] - - -[*BACKGROUND][*END] - -[*TITLE] -Item -[*END] - -[*EXTRAMETA] -[*END] - -[%issuev21] -[HEADER1] -

[ITEM]


[AUTHOR]


-
[BLURB] -[DESCRIPTION] -
-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[*TITLE] -February 2018 edition (issue 21) -[*END] - -[%indexissuev21] -[HEADER1] -
-

[TITLE]

-

- - - [repeat] -
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-[TRAILER1] -[%END] - -[%repeat] -[ITEM][AUTHOR] -[BLURB] -
-[%END] - -[%ftparam] -[PUTFILES] -close -quit -[%END] - -[*_STATICS] -ftparam -about -submission -policy -authors -prizes -[*END] - -[FINISH] diff --git a/content-xway/stock.xwy b/content-xway/stock.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 81d3b547..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stock.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1702 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 3 June 2008 -[*ITEM] Blazon - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] Blason - a genre of poems that praised a woman by singling out different -parts of her body and finding appropriate metaphors to compare them with (Wikipedia) - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I can't write a blazon. - -That's all there is to -it. From the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first -century the blazon or "the love poem" has become a jaded thing at best. -Hell, after WWI there were very few poems glorifying warfare and even -Ishtar has very few followers. - -But when I looked into the eyes of my girlfriend, I sometimes wondered -whether that goddess is dead or fictional. So, here I was - trying to -write something that isn't the purple prose of Hallmark, but also -doesn't fall to the dark side of bad break-up emo stories, and their -older "angst" German counterparts. - -Seriously, how does someone like me - who thinks Lovecraft is an author -of dark fantasy, and not something kinky from an adult sex-shop - write a -blazon, and keep myself from getting hungry in the process? - -Read on. If you dare. - -

No good can come of this
I decided to go to the Lovecraft store. Specifically, Spreading -Lovecraft Since 1905. So under a gibbous moon that's romantic more in -the sublime and naturalistic sense of the word than in any particularly -sentimental way, I read from a book that predates both the Kama Sutra -and all humanity, and after resisting doing something with the section -on pre-human intercourse (something I fondly call "Caveman Love") I -found exactly what I was looking for. - -Then, after complimenting the owner on how eldritch she looked, I -gathered the following: said book, candles, some very interesting -star-fish like symbols, a cute stuffed winged tentacle toy, and -chocolate. A shit-load of chocolate. - -Now, I know what you're thinking. No good can come of this. Not this -combination, not this mindset, and definitely not the direction to which -this is going. Hell, you can even say that I forewent the entire good -intentions bit and just plain went to the awesome burning part. - -But hear me out. You might as well because you've read this far anyway. -As I said before, the extent of my Lovecraft only covered Things That -Man (and Woman) Was Not Meant to Know, and I had as much romantic -experience as young Werther did talking to himself, and a tree. Or was -that Mary Shelley? - -Anyway, I also could not in good conscience write a poem that I really -did not have any business writing, even though my old Battle-ax of -Babylon - -which I still call her fondly - made it quite clear that -Hell hath no fury, and also no bottom. Neither of these is true by -themselves, but like matter and anti-matter can be quite explosive. Just -like the threatening glare in her lovely eyes. - -So, I didn't write a blazon - a pretentious and even prissy ode to love. - -I created my Blazon. - -Let me just state one fact before we go on. A shoggoth is something of a -servitor. Think of it as a construct or building blocks. They're like -Lego, even though they can kill you - I mean, arrange themselves into -different shapes. Let me also state that the art of creating them is -supposedly gone though... Not as gone as people would like you to -believe. - -So, after some arts and crafts and a whole shit load of chocolate - a -whole shit-load - I brought my girlfriend home and lit some nice -candles with some soft green (and I still insist emerald) candles and -gave her the cute stuffed winged toy with tentacles. She looked at me -very ... askance and said something to the effect that this had better -be good, or I would be awakening to a whole new reality of maddening -pain. My words. Not hers. - -So I teased her. I smiled and laughed and I said she would have to guess -what I made her. I think she got suspicious at that point, but it is -hard to tell - memories being what they are now. She wanted a hint and, -very excitedly at this point and like any literary geek I had to pull an -Oedipus on her. - -No, not like that. You have dirty minds. I mean, I created a riddle. It -was all planned out in my head. I would ask the riddle, and she would -get the answer or she wouldn't. But that wasn't what mattered. What -mattered was that it would finish setting the scene and then I would -become all dramatic and present - my Blazon! - -So, giggling inwardly but barely, I asked her the following riddle: - -What smells sweet,
-with a mahogany smile
-and moves with languid steps?
-Whose countenance sleek,
-hides with brazen red fill
-her sweetly warm white cream? - -Yes, I was being a little fresh, but I thought it would be appreciated. -My girlfriend, who must have thought I was talking about her, smiled and -kissed me and told me how sweet I was. Her answer was along the lines of -... - -"Me?" - -"My Blazon!" I called out proudly, waving to the darkness behind me. - -To this day, I'm not entirely sure what happened. But suffice to say, it -could have initially been better. I will admit right now that my attempt -turned out more like the robot from Metropolis than any likeness of my -girlfriend. A slight oversight on my part perhaps. - -That, and the riddle was a little much I think. - -At that point she must have run away... or, well, it's better not to dwell -on these things. I was upset for a while. I mean, I'd done everything I could. -And then some. But, really, it was all for the best. Because Blazon was -very understanding about it. - -And I realized there really is such a thing as an edible woman. - -© Matthew Kirshenblatt 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] blason.jpg - -[*ITEM] The 1002nd Night - -[*AUTHOR] Dick Burton - -[*BLURB] A Tale of Eastern Promises - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The Caliph Harun al Rashid was somewhat -accustomed to the concept of the supernatural. His mother, -Al-Khayzuran, had filled his ears this many a year with -tales of magicians, djinns, flying horses, clairvoyants and the like. -And it must be admitted that he was the most cosmopolitan of rulers, -receiving, as he did, deputations of diplomats from lands as distant -and alien as, for example, Cathay and Cornwall. So the only surprise he -evinced when a strange foreigner turned up in his most private -apartment, a modest salon of a quarter acre or so, was how the intruder, -if not magical, had circumvented the intricate labyrinth and the seven -Circassian cut-throats which together protected his privacy, or how, -were he magical, his manifestation had been contrived without the pillar -of fire, or the whirlwind, or both, which tradition argued accompanied -the appearance of genies and related unlikely beings. - -

"Are you telling me that, having the -ability to travel in time, you have not explored your own eventual demise?"
-The apparition, or foreigner, was apparelled in a sort of pastiche of -court dress, laughable really, like a figure from a court painting or an -actor in some melodrama. This in contrast to the simple white shift -currently worn by the Caliph. Harun restrained himself from summoning -the guard partly out of curiosity and partly because he had been told -stories of terrible consequences to those who offended the emissaries -of the magical kingdoms. Besides, the ridiculous figure confronting him -appeared unarmed, and could clearly have been easily dispatched by the -Caliph himself, using only the ceremonial dagger at his waist. An -involuntary smile touched his lips as he enquired after the comical -visitor's business. - -With gestures of obeisance and with what were presumably intended to be -words of elaborate flattery, his visitor jabbered for some thirty -seconds in a very formal and archaic version of the Caliph's own -language, as though the speaker had learned it from a book, specifically, -the Q'ran. Harun al -Rashid made a gesture intended to silence him, but the idiot gabbled on -until fixed by one of the monarch's most truculent glares. - -"Tell me first. Are you man or djinn?" - -"An Englishman, Prince of Emirs. My name is Herbert Wells." - -"Erberwels. An unlikely name." - -"Yes, indeed, I do not use the Herbert myself. You may refer to me as Wells, if you prefer." - -"How does an Englishman called Wells differ from a man or a djinn?" - -"An Englishman is indeed a man, a man from England, a country remote from your domain." - -"How came you here?" - -"By a type of gateway. Behold, between these two pillars." The Caliph -could perceive a shimmer in the air, similar to the heat haze above a -desert dune at midday. - -"Magic, then," he concluded. - -"Technology, Lion of Persia. A sage of my time declared that any -sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to people who did -not possess it." - -"Does this mean that any impudent rascal can now invade my sanctum at will?" - -"By no means, Commander of the Faithful. I alone have mastered the art of time travel." Harun -noted the nonsensical term 'time travel' without comment. - -"At your -request," continued the visitor, "I shall remove my unworthy self and never -darken the sanctity of your chamber again." - -"And what was your motive for so doing in the first place?" - -"I merely wished to confer some wisdom upon you." - -"You consider that I lack wisdom?" bristled the Caliph. - -"Forgive my clumsy expression, Lord. I meant 'knowledge', not 'wisdom'." - -"'Knowledge is Power' as the Prophet once said. I can always use a -little more power. But is this magical knowledge you offer? I ask -because a dozen charlatans falsely claiming supernatural capabilities -are daily turned away from my gates, while a few of the more impertinent -conjurors are imprisoned or worse for their troubles. So far, you have -greatly exceeded the boundaries of respectful behaviour without -offering either illumination or entertainment. I hope for your sake that -you begin to educate or amuse me very soon." - -"It is not magic, Sire, but what we call 'Science' - interesting or -useful properties of the universe and its contents." - -"For example?" - -Wells produced, from his ridiculous robe, a coloured sphere, a handspan -in width, mounted eccentrically on a black stand. He turned it on its -axis a few times before saying "This is a chart of the whole world, in -complete accuracy." - -The Caliph took the sphere in his hands. It appeared to be made of wood, -with a thin skin of some kind of painted papyrus glued upon it. "This is -the world? Why did the artist paint it on a ball?" - -"Because the world is round like a ball." - -"Really? Hmmm... One of my more eccentric astronomers has long suspected -as much. This makes two of you. So... This is a strange map indeed. -Where is this palace represented?" Harun enquired. Wells stretched out -his hand. "Do not touch me! Indicate with a finger." - -Wells did so. "That's Baghdad, that dot there." - -"And Hindustan? I see. Cathay? So far for a camel, so near for a finger. -And the blue... this represents the sea?" - -"Yes, Your Eminence. And the white at top and bottom represents cold areas. Ice." - -"So much sea and ice. I must study this. My advisers have told me that I -am the leader of half the world, barring only the domains of Charlemagne -in the west and the Chinese emperor in the east. It appears that this -is not the case." He indicated a sheet of pure white alabaster inlaid -with precious metals and enamels. "This is the map my geographers have -provided me with. If you are right, they have been lying to me." - -Wells peered at the alabaster map. "To do them justice, Eminence, I can -see several resemblances between their map and the true situation. The -errors are mostly in scale, and in overactive imagination." He illustrated -the latter assertion by pointing to an elaborately conceived sea monster -located at the Straits of Jebel al Tariq in the Western Mediterranean Sea. - -"You think so? Then come with me now to the Hall of the -Philosophers and I shall forthwith summon my geographers to consult it." - -"Unfortunately," demurred Wells, "For reasons too complex and tedious to -elucidate, I am unable to move much farther from my gateway than I am at -present. My time here is limited, and I have much to tell you. Summon -the geographers by all means, but they must come here, or not at all." - -"You are peremptory in your demands, apparition, but you have piqued my -interest with your sphere, though I regard with scepticism your claim -that you cannot venture far from your gateway. If you have other -marvels, reveal them now, and we shall return to the sphere if time -permits." The Caliph placed the globe on a nearby table which was carved -from a single piece of jade. - -Wells pulled from his robe a metal tube and tugged it at both ends. With -a smooth set of clicks, it extended to the length of an arm, as -interlocking tubes were revealed. For a moment, the Caliph experienced -a slight alarm, and he took a cautious step backwards, his right hand -touching the hilt of his jewelled knife. Wells applied one end of the -tube to his own left eye and swung it from side to side. "Ah, Sire, do you see -that small vase on the table near the door?" he asked. - -"I am intimately familiar with it, as it is my own, a gift from the King -of Jerusalem, and containing a bone from the finger of Abraham." - -"Yes, of course it is. But now, if you can, observe it through this tube." - -The Caliph complied, noticing, as he did, that there was a pane of glass -in each end of the tube. It took a few moments to adjust, but he was -completely astonished by what he saw. - -"A glass to perceive things at a distance! I have heard of such a -device. How can I control its influence to discover what my Wazir is -doing at this instant?" - -"Regrettably," admitted Wells, "This glass can only make larger that -which you can already see." - -The Caliph's disappointment was clear. "But I could walk to that vase -and inspect it without the aid of your seeing tube." - -"True. But the tube will also make objects that you could not easily reach -seem closer, such as a ship at sea or a distant bird. Or, indeed, the -moon or stars." - -"Hmph. I have limited requirements in those departments, though I dare -hazard that my astronomers and sea captains may be interested in this -toy. You are evidently a man of considerable resources. Cannot you -offer me something rather less trivial? You tell me that you come to me -from a future time. Can you not advise me on my fate?" - -"To my everlasting regret, Your Eminence, it is not recommended for a -time traveller like myself to reveal an individual's future to the -subject, particularly, as in the present case, when the person is -extremely important, as they may attempt to alter the course of history, -to the eventual inconvenience of the traveller and his generation." - -"Are you telling me that, having the -ability to travel in time, you have not explored your own eventual demise?" - -"My gateway can only penetrate to the past, not to my future. -In any event, I should be reluctant to seek my own moment of death - -it would remove some of the unpredictability of life." - -"Nonsense. Every man's fate is written. It cannot be altered. -Predestination is at the heart of the true faith. Revealing that which -is known to Allah cannot make any difference to the individual. My -soothsayers are utterly frank in their revelations, though a trifle -inconsistent in their conclusions at times. - -"That, certainly, is a consideration," replied Wells, judiciously. -"Theoretically, since your future is in my past, I should be able to discover what -befell you in later life. Unfortunately, precise details of your life have not percolated to my -time, except that, in general, you are known as a wise and merciful -ruler, which is why I chose you to communicate with." - -"I suspect you of prevarication, Englishman. I warn you, I have -resources to loosen the most resolute tongue." - -"Of that I am certain. But before you put me to the test, let me first -reveal to you that which I would deliver voluntarily. I feel sure that -you will be well satisfied with what I have to offer." - -"For example?" said the Caliph, picking a sweetmeat from a nearby -pedestal and chewing it, wiping his fingers on an embroidered -napkin, the product of two years labour from a blind artist. - -Wells reached into a bag which appeared to have been sewn into his -pantomime costume. The Caliph made a mental note to have similar bags -inserted in his own robes. In these, he would be able to carry -concealed weapons and other useful articles. Wells produced a sheaf of -extremely white papyrus sheets, of a remarkably uniform size and shape. - -"These," he announced, "Contain plans in the form of pictures for the -construction of what we call 'a printing press' with movable type, -together with instructions on making paper and ink." - -"Of what use is this 'press'?" - -"It enables the user to make many copies of a single document or book." - -"What value is that? A scribe can read a single copy of a document to -many listeners. If I need another copy of a book, I simply command that -one be made." - -"And this takes how long?" - -"A day, if I am in a hurry. One clerk can be assigned to each page. -Here," he said, pointing to a gorgeously rich volume bound in -white leather and gold leaf standing on a lectern which was made of solid -gold, a tribute from the people of Anatolia, "Is a Q'ran they prepared for me last week." - -"What if every citizen in your empire could have his own copy of the Q'ran?" - -"Then we would have anarchy. We have an ample sufficiency of -disputatious mullahs already, each with his own interpretation of the -Prophet's teachings. Besides, most of my citizens cannot read, praise -be to Allah, and many are infidels - Jews, Christians and so on, living -under our protection. They pay taxes; they become citizens. An excess of - books could only destabilise the empire." He twitched his robe in - irritation. - -"I am not yet at a loss," protested Wells. How about an explanation of -the laws of motion, or electricity, or magnetism?" - -Harun snorted. "How about something useful? Can you provide me with a -poison which duplicates the symptoms of some common fatal disease, so -that I can rid myself of that scheming villain of a Wazir without his -entire family swearing revenge and attempting to murder me at every -turn?" - -"I am afraid that Your Eminence knows more about poison than I will ever -learn." - -The Caliph sighed. "I warn you that I am already weary of your pathetic -contributions. What next?" - -"This land of yours, Sire, is often hot. I can describe to you how to -build a machine that makes ice." - -"A machine? I have no need of a machine to make ice. Allah, may His Name -be praised, creates all the ice we require and stores it in the -mountains to the north of India. We import a shipload every month or so -to cool our beverages and sherbets." - -"I have here, " said Wells, "A clock of astonishing accuracy, which, -together with observations of the sun, would enable your navigators to -correctly determine their position in mid-ocean, without landmarks." - -"Pah! Keep your clock. I have recently sent to my colleague, -Charlemagne, a water clock of astounding beauty and cleverness. We are -expert in the measurement of time. Can you not assist me in my campaign -to civilise the known world? - -"Your glittering reputation as a conqueror precedes you down the ages," -replied Wells carefully, "I can think of nothing that would enhance your -capabilities beyond their current high levels." - -The Caliph fixed Wells with a dangerous glare. "Do not attempt to -hoodwink me, magician. It is completely certain that mankind will -develop, above all other considerations, weapons of war and murder. I -urge you to concentrate your efforts towards that topic, as your reward -will be greatest if you satisfy me in this regard." - -Wells paused before replying, "My best advice, until your metals -technology improves, would be to perfect the use of massed archers, and -to establish a powerful and disciplined navy. Further, you may discover -that the Emperor of Cathay's alchemists are aware of certain incendiary -substances. In my time, the capability to fly in the air above the enemy is regarded as -a key factor. You take a large quantity of material and make a huge hollow -bag from it. Then you place a fire at the mouth of the bag, and shortly the -bag fills with hot air and rises in the air, taking..." - -"Enough! You sound like my first wife, rattling on with such nonsense. From a -woman, this is tolerable, and she has the asset of beauty which I cannot -help noticing that you, candidly, lack. The secret I require you to reveal -is that of the great weapon which can destroy whole cities at a stroke. -It has been forecast by my most reliable clairvoyant that a Caliph will -possess such a weapon. I wish that Caliph to be me." - -"Why would you want such a weapon? A weapon that would kill tens of -thousands of people, men, women and children, at a stroke." - -"That is simple. You say that future generations will call me merciful, -and for that, I am gratified. Yet in my sincere attempt to civilise -the known world, thousands die and are maimed in cruel ways, from ripped limbs, skewered -guts, broken heads, cut throats. It moves me to tears, whether the victims -are the Faithful or not. With such a weapon, I would destroy one city, -perhaps two. Then my enemies would see my power and I would never be challenged -on the battlefield. I could negotiate without bloodshed, as I did at -Byzantium. Stability would be achieved." - -
Wells nodded thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. Such a weapon could indeed be a -force for peace. I have long been an advocate of a World State. I hate to disappoint -the leader of Islam, but such a weapon is not feasible. -My own time is some 1300 years in your future - the year 1942 in the Christian -calendar. About thirty years before my time, there was a war that involved nearly the whole world, -and there is currently another very large war in progress, yet the weapons in use -are not greatly advanced on those available to your own armies, except for those, -as I remarked, begging your pardon, delivered from the air. I feel certain that -if a weapon of such magnitude were possible, it would have been deployed in my own time." - -A bell rang from the direction of Wells's gateway, and the visitor glanced over his -shoulder. "Your Eminence, I regret I must go very soon. And I so want to tell you -how to propel a chariot by an engine that uses steam instead of by horses." - -"The steam engine was invented by Hero of Alexandria 600 years ago. It is a toy. -Does your steam engine feed and water itself in the field, does it produce its own successors -as does a horse?" - -"Well, no. Perhaps, then, I can interest you in a number of ingenious uses which you may not have discovered for that -inflammable black liquid that sometimes oozes from the desert." - -"Bah! Begone before I have you flayed and impaled for your outrageous blether. -Return, if you must, when you have learned the secret of the destroyer of -cities!" - -Wells beat a hasty retreat to his gateway, and when he became invisible, as he did -silently within a minute or so, Harun returned to his olive-wood desk, a gift from -Athens, and to contemplation of a letter from -his emissary to the near-mythical islands of Japan, beyond even Cathay. What was it that -the clairvoyant had said about the great weapon and Japan? - -© Amazon Systems 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] rashid.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Summoning - -[*AUTHOR] Chris Penycate - -[*BLURB] Is this where the PFY first meets the BOFH? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Darkness. - -Darkness so thick and black that it seemed to be breathed into our lungs like a viscous liquid. -So complete that the optic nerve sent flashes of colour to the brain, just so it would know it was still -connected. - -The Kobolds led us. True residents of Earth's depths, they sensed the rocks without seeing them, unlike -the mining dwarves with their coldfire lamps. Indeed, the light would have confused our guides, -preventing them from finding the precise spot where we had to be. - -Behind us trailed our personal Ariadne's thread - a fibre-optic filament unrolling from a reel next to our -relay on the surface. In time, light would traverse the darkness without disturbing it, carrying our -words; for now it carried darkness and silence. - -The floor under our feet was irregular, but all the loose bits of debris had been swept to the sides in -anticipation of our visit. The little hand trembling in mine belonged to Annalise, our token 'maiden', the -eight-year old daughter of our German host and who was possibly now regretting her insistence on -coming with us, but was too proud to back out. - -I was happy she was there; dragons might remember the time of the sacrifices, and, while most races -had dabbled in necromancy from time to time, no-one had attempted a summoning such as this for -many generations. - -'Such as this' - This summoning would be unique in history, if it worked. - -The cessation of the shuffling footsteps and a gentle pressure against my knees told me we had arrived. -Packs were opened, artefacts distributed and the laptop unlimbered. The screen lit blindingly bright, -revealing that whatever this mine had once produced was long since exhausted. If we were depending -on those pit-props, halfway to fossilisation or pulverisation, to hold the roof up, we would be wise not -to sneeze. There was no doubt that the 'Danger - No admittance' signs at the entry had not been -exaggerating. - -The blue light reflected back from a collection of faces, their expressions different from race to race, -but all containing the same mix of anticipation and muted terror. - -The computer was informing us that it was booted up, in contact with the outside world, and that it was -ready and eager to get to work. Poor imagination-free, stupid machine, that had never read the -descriptions of what could happen to magic channels. The requisite runes, symbols and incantations -had been programmed into it. The buzzing in our nerve ends told us that this was indeed a correct use -of 'Power point' - and then there was no excuse left to delay. - -'Enter' - -Symbols flashed on the screen, as we sat in as near a circle as we could manage in the cramped space. -The artefacts - some borrowed from museums or private collections for the ceremony, some made -specially by techniques handed down through the generations in some very long-lived cultures, had -been placed on a velvet cloth between us on the ground. - -Melodies which had seemed banal when originally programmed resonated weirdly in these tunnels, the -light from the shifting patterns on the screen animating the rocks and props around us in an arrhythmic -dance, sometimes bringing the walls rushing in towards us, sometimes casting us into an enormous, -intangible space, bordered all around with the compressing darkness. - -Voices differing in timbre but alike in intent delivered responses to barely understood questions. The -suffocating pressure of the dark was transmuted by the gathering power, and we were breathing -crystallised fire, exhilarating and terrifying. - -Needing both hands for the keyboard I could feel a warmth of little girl pressed up against my side. -Why me, rather than her father, whose strong Saxon voice was mumbling its way through the -responses a bit further round the circle? Perhaps because I seemed to know what I was doing? - -Suddenly the 'activity' bar on the screen swung from almost zero towards full. -If the roar we all felt -had been transmitted through the air I am convinced the roof would have collapsed, burying us all -instantly and terminating the experiment, but the only acoustic noise (still clearly audible despite the -enormous mental shout) was the whirring grind of the laptop's hard drive racing. - -The verbal responses from the assembled beings were replaced by what I assume were prayers to their -assorted deities. Annalise's father, Kurt, was surrendering his many years of paganism and regressing -to his childhood Catholicism, various gods of springs and hedgerows whose presence here would have -been entirely inappropriate were being invoked; and the computer made known its devotion to Murphy -by, for once, not crashing (anything that can go wrong...) - -The 'available space' indicator was emptying like a ruptured water tank, and it was obvious that there -was no way in which whatever was happening was going to fit on the hard disc. Still, there was a back -door to this prison; and suddenly it was operating. -Up the optical link poured something - a ghost, a -dream, a spirit? It didn't matter. And the spiritual roar grew more distant as the disc wound down to stillness. - -One of the candles flared like an acetylene torch and burnt out in seconds; the others went on quite -normally, except for a violet tinge in their flames. A single quartz crystal, surrounded by more fragile -objects, fragmented into talcum-fine dust. All this in total silence, with the fan of the laptop and -breathing of the observers dying before they reached the walls to reverberate. - -A 'ping' prompted me to move, and hook up the supplementary batteries I'd brought with me. It couldn't -have been that long. - -Looking at the computer's clock, it hadn't. The thing was merely absorbing power at an incredible rate. -Then the screen went dark, leaving us with the light of a couple of candles and a frantically strobing -'activity' LED. - -"Hab kein angst, liebling, sie ist ein geist, -sie canst nicht du schlecht machen" I said, as much for my own reassurance as the little girl's. She gave a nervous giggle, whether -for my wording, pronunciation or the idea that it was only a ghost, nothing that scary, I never found -out. - -The meter on the auxiliary battery pack was getting alarmingly close to zero when everything stopped, -with a last 'clickit' from the hard disc. The tension, the impression of an impending subterranean -thunderstorm vanished from the air, and with it the two remaining candle flames disappeared, not as if -they'd been blown out, but as if they'd finished the job and just packed up and gone home. The -darkness that flooded in round the last tiny yellow LED was comforting, not menacing as it had been -earlier. - -We sat silent round its glow, knowing that there was nothing left to say, then: -"Well, we've done it, whatever it was. Let's make our way back to the surface. But first..." I indicated -the refreshment bag. Thermos flasks of beverages were still hot, and the chocolate and cereal bars still -tasted the way they ought to. Even the Kobolds joined in the laughter as I attempted to translate my -previous statement into German (they are not totally devoid of humour; it's just that their idea of a good -joke frequently involves somebody getting buried under a few thousand tons of rock) - -Torches worked, too; it would seem that the eldrich atmosphere of the ceremony had entirely -dissipated. - -The fatigue we all felt was only partly from our efforts, and in part to the removal of pressure. What -was done, was done, the genie well and truly unbottled. - -We refilled our rucksacks, and started on the long walk/climb towards open air, carefully winding up -the optical fibre as we went; no need to leave any evidence. - -Once or twice Kurt had to suggest to his daughter that skipping along and checking out the echo was -likely to bring the roof down on us and, while not nullifying our efforts, make it difficult for us to -appreciate the results (at least, that's what I'd have been saying, and her reactions were consistent with -that translation. Nearly five minutes of sticking close to us and not shouting quite at the top of her -lungs, that's about par for an eight-year old, no?) - -The future was even more uncertain that when we had come down, but it was uncertain in so many -interesting ways. - -© Chris Penycate 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] summoning.jpg - -[*ITEM] When Gretchen Met Sally - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] When you decide to have cosmetic surgery, you had better be ready for -the consequences. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Gretchen watches Dana lazily. A skinny little blonde, with an attitude -problem. Rocking back and forth on her plain, black, functional work -shoes. For Gretchen the shoes a symbol for the differences between the -two of them, -dressed as they are in essentially the same fashion, the waitress -uniform - white blouse, black waistcoat, dark trousers - like millions -of others across Berlin, the world. The difference is that Gretchen -wears large, solid, clunky boots. She feels it says something -essential about the difference in their personalities. Though perhaps -the differences in their body language and attitude towards the work -say much more clearly that these are two very different types of -people. Gretchen stands by the bar, poised and waiting, playing with -her pen, this being one of those slow moments she sometimes gets on a shift -like this. - -The bell above the door chimes, set to swinging as the black-framed -glass door is pushed open by a pink haired girl - curls spilling -across her shoulder, while half her face is hidden by a black woollen -scarf, which she is tugging free as she enters the café. -The bell jingling in a -clearly audible fashion, designed to catch attention during the day -when the Schwarzenraben is likely to be quieter. In the evenings the -chances are the bell would go unheard, that night's guest DJ just -about drowning out all other sounds, and besides the place is abuzz -with activity, people and staff in constant motion, shifts which are -more fun and more stress. Gretchen watches the foursome take the two -steps from street level to the café floor, stamping snow from boots as -they do so, seeming to straighten up as though with the interior's -warmth a burden is removed from their shoulders. - -

When you have an eagle's -head, you are used to people staring
Tourists. Everything about them makes this fact clear to Gretchen. The -way they are dressed, and just the way that they look. This misfit -quartet are not from Berlin at all - the cut of the clothes, the brands, -the entire body language, marks them as 'other'. They look around, -appraising the layout of the café. There are tables along the two -opposing walls, until they reach the bar. Behind the bar, leading -to a beer garden, there is a restaurant. In the middle of the front part -of the establishment there is a pillar island, the core surrounded by -a circle of tables. A variety of posters is stuck and layered -across the pillar's surface, in contrast to the precise black and -white illustrations framed at intervals along the walls. The café is -medium busy for a Wednesday afternoon. The girl with the wild pink -curls leads the group to the window seat away from the door. - -Gretchen gets a vibe from this group. Something strange, and it is not -just the way the fourth member has stopped to look at her. A woman -with a hood over her head as well as the scarf covering her face, so -that only those intense eyes are visible. When you have an eagle's -head, you are used to people staring; this is different. The strange -woman nods to herself, and follows her friends. Gretchen glances at -Dana, Dana turns her back on the newcomers. Her lips curling in that -superior sneer-smile that riles Gretchen so much, twirling a finger in -her shoulder length hair like she doesn't have a care in the world, -with her elbows propped on the polished surface of the bar. Gretchen -can tell Dana is pretending to stare into space, but is actually -looking into the mirrors along the wall at the back of the bar. -Watching to see if anyone notices her. - -Gretchen shrugs, gives herself a shake to release the tension that has -gathered while she stood around, straightening as she heads to the -window table. As she does so, she can feel the eyes following her. Her -particular kind of cosmetic surgery is still new, still -particularly radical. Deviant, some would say. Expensive work, and -more than Gretchen can afford. A combination of the latest -reconstructive techniques, coupled with cybernetics, and the -associated smart plastics. She wears her feathers with pride, holds -her eagle head high, and lets them look. Half way across the space, -the strange girl removes her hood. Removes her scarf. Gretchen doesn't -miss a step; while inside something does a flip. The dog-headed girl -looks back at her. - -Gretchen stops at the table, "Guten tag." -"Hey," the pink haired girl says, the hint of a Scottish accent coming -through, even from that one word. Gretchen glances at the man, who it -is clear is wearing a cybernetic body, better than anything she has -seen before, making it most likely South American work, and at a guess -she would say Paraguayan, he nods at her. The Japanese girl is looking -out of the window, and Gretchen has the sense that she doesn't feel as if she -is as much of a part of the group as the other three. Sally Sally Dog -Girl leans forward, Gretchen recognises the singer. While she might -not know much about her music, there are sufficiently few -celebrity animalists that she has at least seen pictures of Sally -Sally and that Chinese cat supermodel. The dog girl reaches for -Gretchen's hand, takes it in her own. - -"Hi, I'm Sally" - -"Gretchen, hi." - -"That is some damn fine work you have there," the dog girl grins, -admiring the eagle girl. - -"Absolutely radical," the eagle girl replies to the dog girl. - -The handshake lingers for a moment, and then they release, and resume -their rôles. - -"So. What can I get you?" - -The pink haired girl hides a smile, bowing her head as she trails a -finger down the page of hot drinks on the menu, "I'll have a pot of -Earl Grey tea please," the warm accent more evident now than before. - -"I'll take a beer, something local," the man says, his voice smooth, -synthetic, unplaceable. - -"Green tea, please," the Japanese girl says, with a quick nod, and -quicker smile, her gaze wandering to Gretchen's eyes long enough to -place her order, and then back to the street, following the bustling -passage of people. - -"I'll take a green tea as well, Gretchen," Sally's voice having a -certain growl. Is it possible to place an accent from someone who has -had that kind of surgery, that kind of reconstruction, and even if you -could, could you rely on that impression? Gretchen wonders, detecting -a hint of something Hispanic. This time, as Gretchen crosses the -space, not an eye follows her, attention has shifted to the new exotic -presence in their midst, an animalist, and one who has at least a -degree of fame, in certain circles. - -Dana is paying attention now, glancing a tight scowl at Gretchen as -she potters about behind the bar, pulling together the order. A kettle -bubbles and clicks, transferred to 3 identical white pots, tea bags in -paper envelopes, extracted from boxes on wire stacked racks. A chilled -beer from the cabinet, a clean glass from a shelf. Gretchen balances -it all on a tray, carries it via another of Dana's scowls, a little -bemused by this unexpected turn of events, if she is honest with -herself. She places the teas in front of each of the girls, the beer -in front of the man. They smile and thank her, she nods, clicks her -beak, and leaves them to drink. The sound of their conversations -lingering in her ear, as she walks as through a fog back to her safe -little spot by the bar. - -The half hour that follows seems long and slow. She serves a few -customers, and is amused on occasion when Dana actually makes any -effort towards working - clattery and clumsy for all her careful -aloofness. Gretchen's attention drifts back, time and time again to -the tourists at that table, to the dog girl. Watching the strangers -and their chatter, occasionally Sally will meet her look, and then -they will nod a little, acknowledgement of some kind of animal -bond that exists between them, even if they have never met before this -day. - -Gretchen counts the change from the 50 mark note that the pink haired -girl used to pay the bill, while Sally is rooting through her -jacket pockets, to produce a couple of slips of paper. -"Here," Sally says, handing the paper to Gretchen, so she can see that -they are tickets for a gig, "We are playing tonight, these are a -couple of tickets, I would like it if you were to come along." - -"Thank you, I will try." Gretchen folds them, and slips them into the -back of her order pad, and glances back to see whether Dana is -watching, while Sally stands and pulls her jacket on. Gretchen steps -back to let the group leave, Sally touching her arm and squeezing -lightly as she departs. Gretchen stands and watches them as they step -back into the street, crunching through the snow, Sally pulling up her -hood again, before taking the man's arm, and walking close beside him, -as they disappear around the corner. - -

Gretchen pulls her hood down as she takes the final step to their -third floor flat. Fumbling with the keys, she opens the door. Swings -the cloth bag with tonight's dinner on to the top of the hall cabinet. -Gretchen tugs the laces free, kicks her boots aside, and they clatter -against the wooden flooring. She runs her hands through her feathers, -a sensation she never gets tired of. She sighs, feeling the weight of -a day's fatigue sitting on her shoulders. She walks to the living -room, lazily dragging her sock-clad feet along the floorboards, in a -moment of self-amused self-indulgence. In the living room she boots up -the system, and selects the last Children With Machine Guns album, -having decided those spare melancholic melodies match her mood of the -moment. With the sound of "You don't like seagulls" entering the room, -she exits, into the bedroom. She strips off her uniform, pulls on -something casual, jeans, t-shirt, thick grey jumper. Living room, -hall, grabs bag of food, and into the kitchen to start making dinner, -humming to herself "These are the machine gun children of our -generation." - -As Gretchen tips the last handful of chopped vegetables into the wok, -she hears the door to the flat opening, and listens to the sound of -someone come in, and, like she had before, kick off their shoes. -"I'm in the kitchen", she calls out. - -"Ok", a man's voice replies, accompanied by the sound of the kitchen -door creaking open a degree. Gretchen doesn't turn from the wok, -stirring the food around with a plastic spoon. He slides his arms -around her, embracing her stomach, pressing against her back, brushing -his feathers against hers. She accommodates him, her head tipping a -degree to increase the sensation of her feathers against his. "Hello, -love," he murmurs to her, and her facial muscles shift, in what would -be a smile for a base human, the same hard-wired conscious motion, but -something a degree different for the girl with the eagle head. Within -his embrace she turns round, her eagle eyes look into his. She brings -a hand up, to run through his feathers, his dark, almost black, feathers in -contrast to the golden radiance of her own. - -Gretchen has been married to Anders for three years now. He works for -the Berlin branch of the second biggest Chinese record label, which is -to say the second biggest record label in the world. He does quite -well, a fact that surprises them both, given that he started it as a summer -job all those years ago. A combination of luck and of being in the -right place at the right time have worked wonders. Though, never let -it be said that Anders is a slacker, he is someone who works hard for -his money and would hate to think someone thought otherwise. Even if -with his eagle's head they think all kinds of other things about him. But, hell, it's the music industry, -and there is a fine tradition of eccentricity to be upheld. -Regardless, it is through the work Anders does that they were able to -afford the surgery at all - something they did for their honeymoon. -They checked into a Shanghai clinic, for the dozen operations, before -spending a couple of weeks together, recuperating and learning who -these new people were. Giving a human at least the appearance of -having an animal's head is, unsurprisingly, not a straightforward -process. Some aspects of the problem are obvious, others more subtle - -from how does someone with an eagle's head conduct human speech, to -what kind of proportions of each component are required so that the -end result, at least as far as the client is concerned, does not look -entirely absurd. In contrast to which the tattoos they got while -they were there seemed rather minor endeavours on the scale of things. - -"Dinner will be ready in a second, if you give me a bit of space," -Gretchen says, giving Anders a playful shove, turning back to stir the -sizzling vegetables. - -"Ok, ok. You want me to open some wine to go with that?" Anders asks, -already taking two glasses from the cupboard. Gretchen turns to him, -her eyes flash, amused, and she nods to him. - -"Yeah, that sounds good" - -"I'm on it," Anders replies, laughing. - -"So I see," Gretchen says, quietly, smiling to herself. "Oh. Yeah..." she says after another moment. - -"Oh, yeah, what?" Anders pauses, something in Gretchen's tone catching -his attention. - -"Oh, yeah, give me a minute, and I'll tell you what happened to me today." -"Oh, yeah, you are a tease, and you know it!" - -"Ha, yeah, I know that. But you love me for it!" - -"I love you? Who told you that?" - -"You did, stupid!" - -"Oh well, I guess it must be true then," Anders says, laughing and shrugging. - -Gretchen puts a plate on the table in front of him, another opposite -him. Anders hands her a pair of chopsticks, and sits -expectantly. He watches Gretchen take a mouthful of wine and clucks -mock exasperation as it looks as though she is about to eat without saying -anything else. "Well?" he taps his plate with his chopsticks, making a clacking -sound. Gretchen tilts her head, looks at him and shrugs, picks up a -chunk of pepper and raises it towards her mouth. - -"Come on!" Anders moans. Gretchen sits back in the chair, and laughs, -dropping the pepper. - -"Ok, ok. Keep your feathers on! Ok, so, you know that singer?" - -"What singer?" - -"Sally" - -"Sally who?" - -"The dog head Sally" - -"Oh. Right. The singer." - -"Yeah. The singer." - -"From myslutsonfire. What about her?" - -"She came into the bar today." - -"What! No way?" - -"Yeah" - -"Wow" - -"Yeah. It was a strange day" - -"Wow" - -"You said that already!" - -Anders does the equivalent of a grin, and a what-can-I-say kind of -shrug, "I did. But you know, wow. I didn't even hear anything about -her being in the country." - -"Well there she was, there was a group of them, an odd bunch, you -know?" Gretchen laughs, takes a bite of her food now, and chews. - -"I bet. Tell me about the others?" - -"There were the four of them altogether. Sally and two other girls - -one was Scottish, with this wild pink hair, and a quiet Japanese -girl." - -"Hmm the Scot would be Kirsty Munro, don't know the other one, though -they do have a tendency to change the membership a lot, I get the -impression it's a pretty casual kind of idea." - -"And then there was the guy, he had some heavy prosthetics, serious -cybernetic rebuild." - -"Yeah, that would be Hugo. Sally, Kirsty and Hugo are the three core -members, always those three. Apparently they met in a Scotian Youth -Detention Centre, formed bonds that have kept them together ever -since." - -"Scotia? That's some bad shit." - -"Yeah, well, the war..." Anders leaves the sentence hanging there, -unfinished. The two eat in silence for a moment, lost in reflection. -World War Three was one Germany had sat out of, but they watched and -witnessed the aftermath as much as anyone. Europe, the World, was a -changed place now. - -Gretchen finishes her glass of wine, and Anders refills it. When he -places the bottle back down again, she reaches for his hand, takes it -in her own and gives it a squeeze. She tilts her head one way, he -tilts his the other, and he squeezes her hand back. - -"Anyway, the band are playing a gig tonight." - -"They are?" - -"Sally gave me two tickets, she asked me to come. You want to go along?" - -Anders looks at his wife, chews on a piece of synthetic meat, and -holds her hand in his. "Such a funny old world," he mutters to himself. - -"Pardon?" Gretchen asks. - -"Yeah," he says ", lets go. Should be pretty fun." - -"It seems like such a long time since we had a night out," she smiles -at him "Well, I guess I had better decide on what I am going to wear -then." - -Gretchen throws the slight red top on the bed, confident that it will -expose her pierced belly button, and will show off the two small wings -she has tattooed across her shoulders. Then she selects a pair of -heavy, baggy cargo trousers, a warm, dark, burnt, brown colour, and -adds to those pile. Anders steps up behind her, slides his arms around -her, caressing his hands up her belly, beneath her jumper, up to her -breasts. She pulls her jumper and top off, over her head, and he pulls -him to her, their beaks opening, heads tilting in practiced motions as -their mouths meet in a kiss. Gretchen takes Anders' belt buckle in her -hand, and starts to loosen it, tugging it free. The pair strip, with -touches and kisses, beaks against beaks, tongues flicking from mouth -to mouth, till they are standing naked and eager. Gretchen takes his -hand in hers, and leads him to the shower, where they make love -together, slowly and passionately, and wetly. - -

Fresh snow falls, spinning white flakes like special effects stars in -a science fiction film. Disorientating as the silent train charges -through the dark, towards the more industrial areas of the city, -tilting from side to side with the invisible pathways of steel tracks. -The carriage lights set to a minimum, Gretchen -imagines the light as a slight humming sound, at the periphery of her -vision. The space itself is almost empty, one in a series of lonely -carriages, strung together, the only other people on board, going in -this direction, are a group of a half dozen kids. They create a quiet -buzz amongst themselves, mutters and whispers exchanged, as they pass -a cigarette between them, carefully and covertly trying to avoid -attention, their attitude restrained by the half-light, the time of -night, the presence of the odd couple at the other end. With the -ongoing fuel crisis - which refuses to be effectively met - regardless -of all the wonders of clean bio-fuels that have been developed in the -last decade - there is an ongoing effort towards conservation. As -such, industrial estates full of warehouses and factories, like the -one they can catch the ghost of outside the windows, where the venue -is, are kept dark at night, once the daily shifts are finished. -Gretchen and Anders have come prepared, both for the cold and for the -dark, stepping out of the train as it comes to a stop, out onto the -platform. They are wearing heavy jackets, the hoods up and scarves -across their faces to protect them from the weather, and minimise -unwanted attention. Cautiously crunching through the snow, feeling a -certain amount of ice mixed in with the white powder, their feet slide -momentarily and slightly, such that Gretchen reaches for Anders, -sliding her arm through his, they use each other for balance and -support as they make progress. The station has a minimum lighting, but -as they totter down the old wooden stairs down to street level, -Gretchen uses her free hand to hold onto the hand rail, while Anders -flicks on the beams of his torch - a long and heavy device, which -could readily double as a handy baton, should it come to that. It is -not that they expect trouble, especially not at this time of year with -the weather discouraging nocturnal expeditions, but in the dark areas -of cities crime happens, add to that their own peculiar and particular -appearances and they are prone to attract unwanted attention on -occasion. Crossing the road from the station Anders flashes his torch -up to the street sign screwed to the side of the flat grey expanse of -some nondescript warehouse building, to confirm their bearings, while -Gretchen retrieves her own torch and switches it on as well. - -They do know this area, though not well, at each street corner they -have to double check their location, compare it to the hand drawn map -they made before they left the flat, a scribble of intersecting lines -and scrawled street names, like a jigsaw piece extracted leaving the -picture a mystery. They are looking for Werkhouse 4, an old warehouse -that went out of business some years ago and was converted into a club -venue, a building like all the others in this warren of business -spaces. As is often the case, the conversion from warehouse to -clubhouse was done on the cheap - money first, value second - a big open -space that might be suitable enough for groups of people, but was -never really designed for this type of gathering, let alone designed -with acoustics in mind. So it isn't entirely ideal, though to some -extent it is not as bad as it could have been, and they have seen some -good bands play here in the past, taking the available space the -promoters have offered, unaware or unconcerned by the problems the -space might present. Anders has suggested in the past that the way things -are in the world means that it really can't be easy for the bands of -today, which is certainly a factor in why tours from bands from so far -afield have become something of a rarity. Who has the funding for -that kind of thing, and where are the returns that make the whole -thing pay off? Though, certainly, local scenes flurry in the void, -with the same old crap and cream balance that there ever was, Berlin, -always a hot spot on the music map of the world, works at hyper speed -of flash and burn as talents rise and fall. - -Along the way they pass gateways, chained closed; sharp rusted fences, -with barbed wire toppings; it is intensely quiet on this stretch; here -and there silent security guards stand behind these gates like -spectres, watching people like Anders and Gretchen wander past, large -dogs sitting by their feet, also watching, with lazy vigilance. One -last corner and they can tell that they have arrived, the change in -atmosphere - lights and sound, the appearance of groups of people. -There is a glow of lights, put out by the club owners, just off the -street, to attract attention and serve its customers. There is also a -murmur of sound, people flowing towards the venue, and a group of -people gathered by the roadside. Gretchen tenses against Anders, there -is something in the air, they both have their torches by their sides, -balanced, and pointed down towards the ground. As they get close -enough to hear some of the conversation the pair have an -idea of what is going on, the edges of tones, snatches of words. In -front of them protestors are challenging other people going to the -concert, handing them flyers, trying to discourage them from going on. -As they near it is clear that they are making little headway in this -context. - -There are -religious fanatics who feel that animalism is a step too far on the -scale of body modification, a step into sin, and a crime against God. -This kind of attitude is something that both Gretchen and Anders have -encountered before, something they knew to expect when they discussed -the operations and how it would affect their lives. However, when Anders -had talked about the body mods, having read about it in a magazine, -and showing her the photographs of a transformed Chinese supermodel, the -idea had got into her head and stuck. Anti-animalism is something they -would have preferred not to encounter tonight, though, Gretchen -reflects, given the nature of tonight's band, she supposes she -should not be surprised in any way. The people ahead shove their way -through the agitated crowd, accompanied by a chorus of "sinners!" -While half of the group are turning, having spied new people to -harangue, someone new to attempt to dissuade, a man steps forward, -balding head exposed to the cold, as though the black woollen hat held -in his clasped hands would detract from his sincerity. There is a -large, gold coloured, cross, pinned to the collar of his jacket, -glinting warnings in the bare available light. - -"Comrades," he calls, with a false joviality, "please do not enter -here, for they encourage crimes against the human spirit, against -god!" - -Anders takes a step to the side, away from the man and his friends, -Gretchen following as she still holds on to his arm, scanning faces -for signs of trouble, reading expressions on faces with each step. The -man leans towards Gretchen, an arm outstretched, it seems for a moment -that he is lunging, it seems for a moment that his face is filled with -aggression. Anders steps forward, trying to intercept the man's arm, -the protestor roars with a fury, turning on Anders with an aggression -that dislodges his scarf from in front of his face. The man staggers -back, sliding, and falling, his eyes transfixed by what he finds in -the hood, the bare beak exposed, feathers bristling, those inhuman -eyes piercing. - -"Devils," a woman mutters in a voice edged with hysteria, and Gretchen -can't help but think it sounds so damned medieval, the fear of witches -and burnings turning in her stomach. She tightens her grip on -Anders, pulling him back, at the same time tightening her grip on the -solid barrel of her torch, bearing it with the clear intent of -protecting herself if needed. But it looks as though this group will fall -apart when faced by the very thing that they fear, dissent reaching a -murmuring pitch that puts distance between them. The fact that -Gretchen and Anders are both over six foot tall, and bear the mark of -such fierce predators, of course, contributes to the horror/fear that -the group are experiencing. Cautiously, but with confidence, the -couple step through the gate, into the small industrial estate. -They follow the path past a couple of other facilities, which are -currently locked up for the night. - -"What madness!" Gretchen hears Anders mutter. - -"Forget about it," Gretchen murmurs to him. - -Outside the entrance to Werkhouse 4, where a number of people are -lined up, waiting to get inside, there are more lights. They join the -line, with Gretchen digging the tickets from her jacket pocket, -clutching them in her hand, as though she might lose them or as though -they might suddenly vanish. One of those particularly large men who -inevitably end up in that kind of job, stands by the door, a massive -bouncer. In addition to the intimidating sense of his size is -the fact that he is animalist as well. With a bear's head on those -shoulders you could be forgiven for thinking he was a real live bear, -in a suit, a suit which looks strained with his bulk. Sniffing the air, -and blinking beady eyes, the bear is glancing about, while a smaller, -more human bouncer is filtering people past him, and through the -ticket desk. Gretchen is watching the bear with curiosity. When he -catches her eye, he, in turn, takes her in, looking the pair of them up -and down, seeing the tickets in her hand. - -"You got tickets?" he growls, wobbling his way towards them, Gretchen -finds that she is resisting taking a step away from him. -"How you get tickets? No-one have ticket? Is secret. People pay here." - -"Sally gave them to me," Gretchen shrugs, flashing the tickets in -front of him, "This afternoon." - -The bear peers at them, shrugs idly, mirroring her motion -unconsciously, waves them forward, "Ok. You come, go in now." - -Gretchen grabs Anders' hand and pulls him after her. "Come on!" - -The bear ambles back to the doorway, with the pair close behind; he -points into the corridor, "Show girl tickets." Then with a grunt turns -away, his small intense eyes going back to scanning the world as -though it were all a novelty. The bored girl at the ticket desk looks -at them with disinterest, twiddling one of the pieces of metal that -ornament her face in an idle fashion, thumb and forefinger rotating -stud, tugging lip into deformed pout. With all the time in the world, the girl takes the tickets from -Gretchen's hand, tears a strip from them, which she drops on to the -table, and wafts the tickets back in their direction, then with a -barely suggestive motion shrugs in a way that perhaps translates -"Please enter, and enjoy your evening." At least that is how Gretchen -interprets the motion, and she strolls past the ticket desk and -along the narrow white corridor towards the main hall. The level of -noise already forms the impression of solidity, which makes her -blink up her implant menu and turn on the smart filters that will -control her hearing for the evening. No point in going deaf when you -have a simple blink to trigger the appliance of science that goes hand -in hand with their kind of body modification. - -Thick black strips of plastic hang across the doorway. Gretchen uses -her whole arm to physically separate them, and push through into the -large square space behind. There are a handful of people there -already, enough to make the place look big and empty. Hanging above -the stage there are three half naked men, heavily tattooed, and -bleeding. Each has a series of polished hooks through the meat of -their chests, attached to thick wire, holding them in space, slow -spinning motions as they float artificially in space. Gretchen has -seen pictures of suspensions before, but this is the first time she -has seen it in the flesh. She feels that she can appreciate aspects of -the idea; she too would like to fly, to lift her feet from the ground -and rise up. But she can't entirely see past those gruesome hooks -and knows that in that sense it is a trick, though, she understands, -that isn't entirely the idea behind suspension anyway, as the blood -trickles and thickens it provides her with a firm distraction from any -suggested ideal. Anders stands and watches the men, rotating slightly -one way, lightly spinning back. He shrugs. - -"So, how about a drink?" he asks Gretchen. - - -"Sounds good. I'll have a beer." - -"You waiting here?" he asks, glancing once more at the ornamental people. - -"Nah, I'll come through with you." - -

The lights dip and there is a sudden accompanying hush of expectation, -Gretchen nudging Anders as she smiles and anticipates, takes another -swig from her bottle. There is a low droning sound that starts to -build by increments. An expanding bass spiral, carefully controlled -progression, notes layering into the original to create a dense -vibrancy that becomes a charged wall of sound. The pink haired girl -walks on stage, Kirsty, Anders had called her. She is playing -bagpipes, and Gretchen guesses this is where the original sound has -come from, though the layering suggests some electronic sampling and -manipulation. Hugo, the cybernetic, comes on stage, placing a couple -of black boxes with flashing lights beside all the other black boxes -with flashing lights that mean nothing to Gretchen, that are all -stacked on a table at the back of the stage. The crowd around them -starts to become restless, a growing mutter, energy building in an -infectious manner. Emerging from the wall of sound, Gretchen can now -hear a dog howling, a deep and intimidating sound. Sally Sally storms -on to the stage - she is wearing a lot less than she was in the café -this afternoon. A chunky pair of beat-up army boots. A short tartan -skirt. And a plain black vest top, slight enough to show her bare -belly - a tattoo of a running dog across her stomach, a thick black -tribal thing that seems alive with her motion. Light brown arms and -legs, and that big black dog's head. Alive and animal, pacing the -stage, barking into the microphone. Gretchen is hit by a wave of lust -for life, for running free and the crowd are starting to go wild -around her. Beats kick in, hard, shifting the atmosphere abruptly to -a more abrasive dance scene, though the other layers remain now -tainted. - -"Are you listening?" Sally Sally speaks, "Are you?" - -"The future's voices, past and present talking to you." - -"Voices in the air." Vocals filtering through effects, and echoes. - -"Water, earth, fire" - -"Are you listening?" - -A voice calls from the audience, "Yeah, we can hear you bitch, get on with it." -A couple of other voices call out from the same area, tinged with a -hard tone that goes beyond regular drunken heckling "Bitch!" -Sally Sally ignores the voices as she starts to sing the body of the -first song. The combination of all the sound and mixed energy in the -room makes Gretchen dizzy for a moment - -There are more antagonistic shouts, accompanied by some shouting back, -an increasing turn in the language being used that reveals the agenda -of those who are instigating trouble - hate words, anti-animalist -words. There is a jostling in the crowd, Gretchen feels as though she -is being shoved back and forth. Anders takes her hand, and she can -tell he is starting to feel as defensive as she is, the negativity -coming from certain quarters is unsettling and disturbing in an -atmosphere that is already so charged. Gretchen has the sense that -violence is imminent, it can only be a matter of time before something -gets out of control. There is a great roar and Sally Sally is leaping -from the stage in the direction of the shouting. She lands on a man, -knees first, in a move that seems like something Gretchen saw in a -film that had Thai kick boxing in it. - -"Come on!" she shouts at Anders, and before either of them know what -is going on, Gretchen is dragging them in Sally Sally's direction. -Sally Sally is struggling to bite the man she has knocked over, -snarling and snapping in lunging motions, while a couple of other -guys are trying to get a hold on her to drag her off. But she is feral -and resisting all attempts to stop her with a ferocious animalist -energy. Things are getting out of order and while Gretchen feels that -there is something entirely absurd about the whole situation she is -filled with a quick sharp fury. Gretchen kicks one of the men who has -just dragged Sally Sally off her target, a great lashing boot that -sends the man to his knees howling with pain. Anders slams into the -other guy, hitting him, so that before they know it the pair are in -the midst of a brawl. There are a dozen or so guys that are clearly -together and looking to get involved in the trouble, fighting Sally -Sally and a number of other audience members. A man shoves at -Gretchen, pulling a knife from a pocket, a folding thing. -With a quick flick the blade clicks into place, and he lunges at her; -with a spike of panic she falls back, scrabbling to get away, -but space is limited and she is afraid that stabbing her will become pretty easy. -The crowd shifts again, and -Gretchen is pushed forward, feeling a sickening inevitability churn in -her stomach, toward the blade, then just as quickly she finds herself -moving sideways, a roaring filling her ears, and sees a look of -terror in the man's eyes, before she is herself spun about. She -watches as a great paw of a hand flies past her face, catching the -man's wrist and twisting, brutal and hard, the knife slips out from -the fingers and the man's face is transformed by pain, spittle -slapping his cheeks as that great bear mouth roars at him. Whether he -was moving to save Gretchen or not, she can't be sure, but the current -result is the important thing. Hands grab her shoulder and pull her -round into an embrace, she finds Anders holding on to her "This is -madness," he cries in her ear, "Are you ok?" - -Gretchen lets him hold her, "Yeah, I'm fine." - -More bouncers arrive, so that the tide of things is turned against the -troublemakers, and it is not long before they are ejected in a -decisive and forceful manner. Gretchen feels spun around as things now -go from the slow motion of moments before to a high speed fast forward -style of reality. - -"Sorry about that!" a voice calls from the stage, Gretchen turning to -find that Sally Sally and the band are back up there and ready to get -on with the gig, "This kind of thing doesn't happen every night!" - -"No, just every 5th or 6th night," laughs Kirsty, picking up a guitar -from the back of the stage. As she plugs it in, Midori starts to play -the bass. Soon the two of them are playing and the sound mixes with -Hugo's electronics until myslutsonfire are building the sound back up -once more. But this time the sound is more charged, Gretchen feels -dazed, and like many she feels the greater undercurrent of aggression -that comes through now. This has turned into a much stranger night -than Gretchen had expected. Anders squeezes her, his hands on her -waist, his head brushes against hers, feathers against feathers, -saying into her ear, "This has turned into a much stranger night than -I expected." - -"That's just what I was thinking," Gretchen replies, laughing. - -The crowd moves, captivated by the energy of the music and the -violence now past, and despite herself, Gretchen finds that she is -dancing. They are all dancing, bodies in tune to music, stomping and -swaying, crushing against each other. They howl with Sally Sally, -visceral vocal discharges. - -The night comes to an end suddenly, it seems to -Gretchen, who, like the rest of the audience, finds herself suddenly -standing still and exhausted. There is something primal and liberating -in the way that they find themselves standing now, grunting with -heavy breath and drenched in sweat. - -Outside, in the street, back in the momentarily forgotten snow, -Gretchen stands, staring into this deep, dark December sky. This is -the time where you can feel anti-climax, like you came, you saw and it -ended, and what was it all worth? Gretchen feels the other way, though, -charged, and enthused, like life is a wonderful thing and it is great -to be alive right now, right here. Looking at the tiny stars, glinting -and winking above, describing odd patterns for myths to be read into. -A star moves, shifting as it describes an arc across the darkness, the -flash, flash, flash of a spy satellite, capturing this moment forever. -Oh for a copy of that picture - a girl on earth, a black dot against -white street, filled with happiness, looking at the stars. Anders -catches up with her, puts a hand on her shoulder, and she leans into -him, and he holds her against his chest for a long moment. He kisses -her cheek, brushing his hand across her back, "You ok?" - -She turns to him, and kisses him fully, "Yeah." He takes her hand in his, and leads Gretchen back in the -direction of the train station. - -"So, did you enjoy yourself?" Anders asks her. - -"Oh yes!" she says squeezing his hand in hers. - -"You did?" he asks, teasing a little, laughing a little. -"Wow." - - - -© Peter Morrison 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] -gretchen.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon - -[*AUTHOR] Washington Irving - -[*BLURB] A very early (1809) piece of tongue-in-cheek sf by the author of -Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle (from Knickerbocker's History) - -[*DESCRIPTION]

What right had the first discoverers of America to land and -take possession of a country, without first gaining the consent -of its inhabitants, or yielding them an adequate compensation -for their territory? - a question which has withstood many -fierce assaults, and has given much distress of mind to mulitudes -of kind-hearted folk. And indeed, until it be totally -vanquished, and put to rest, the worthy people of America can -by no means enjoy the soil they inhabit, with clear right and -title, and unsullied consciences. - -The first source of right, by which property is acquired in a - country, is DISCOVERY. For as all mankind have an equal right - to any thing, which has never before been appropriated, so - any nation, that discovers an uninhabited country, and takes - possession thereof, is considered as enjoying full property, and - absolute, unquestionable empire therein. - -This proposition being admitted, it follows clearly, that the -Europeans who first visited America, were the real discoverers -of the same; nothing being necessary to the establishment of -this fact, but simply to prove that it was totally uninhabited -by man. This would at first appear to be a point of some -difficulty, for it is well known, that this quarter of the world -abounded with certain animals, that walked erect on two feet, -had something of the human countenance, uttered certain -unintelligible sounds, very much like language, in short, had a -marvellous resemblance to human beings. - -But the zealous and enlightened fathers, who accompanied -the discoverers, plainly proved (and as there were no Indian -writers arose on the other side, the fact was considered as -fully admitted and established) that the two-legged race of -animals before mentioned were mere cannibals, detestable -monsters, and many of them giants - which last description of -vagrants have, since the times of Gog, Magog, and Goliath, -been considered as outlaws, and have received no quarter in -either history, chivalry, or song. - -This right of discovery being fully established, we now -come to the next, which is the right acquired by CULTIVATION. -Now it is notorious, that the savages knew nothing of agriculture, when first discovered by the Europeans, but lived a -most vagabond, disorderly, unrighteous life - rambling from -place to place, and prodigally rioting upon the spontaneous -luxuries of nature, without tasking her generosity to yield -them anything more; whereas it has been most unquestionably shown, that Heaven intended the earth should be -ploughed and sown, and manured, and laid out into cities, and -towns, and farms, and country seats, and pleasure grounds, -and public gardens, all which the Indians knew nothing about -- therefore, they did not improve the talents Providence had -bestowed on them - therefore, they were careless stewards - -therefore, they had no right to the soil - therefore, they -deserved to be exterminated. - -It is true, the savages might plead that they drew all the -benefits from the land which their simple wants required - -they found plenty of game to hunt, which, together with the -roots and uncultivated fruits of the earth, furnished a sufficient -variety for their frugal repasts; and that as Heaven merely -designed the earth to form the abode, and satisfy the -wants of man, so long as these purposes were answered, the -will of Heaven was accomplished. But this only proves how -undeserving they were of the blessings around them - they -were so much the more savages, for not having more wants; -for knowledge is in some degree an increase of desires, and it -is this superiority both in the number and magnitude of his -desires, that distinguishes the man from the beast - - -But a more irresistible right than either that I have mentioned, -and one which will be the most readily admitted by my reader, -provided he be blessed with bowels of charity and -philanthropy, is the right acquired by CIVILIZATION. All the -world knows the lamentable state in which these poor savages -were found. Not only deficient in the comforts of life, but -what is still worse, most piteously and unfortunately blind to -the miseries of their situation. But no sooner did the benevolent -inhabitants of Europe behold their sad condition than they -immediately went to work to ameliorate and improve it -They introduced among them rum, gin, brandy, and the other -comforts of life - and it is astonishing to read how soon the -poor savages learned to estimate those blessings; they likewise -made known to them a thousand remedies, by which the most -inveterate diseases are alleviated and healed; and that they -might comprehend the benefits and enjoy the comforts of -these medicines, they previously introduced among them the -diseases which they were calculated to cure. - -But the most important branch of civilization, and which -has most strenuously been extolled by the zealous and pious -fathers of the Romish Church, is the introduction of the -Christian faith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire -horror, to behold these savages tumbling among the dark -mountains of paganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance -of religion. It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded; -they were sober, frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; -but though they acted right habitually, it was all in vain, -unless they acted so from precept. The newcomers, therefore, -used every method to induce them to embrace and practise the -true religion - except indeed that of setting them the example. - -Here then are three complete and undeniable sources of -right established, any one of which was more than ample to -establish a property in the newly-discovered regions of -America. Now, so it has happened in certain parts of this -delightful quarter of the globe, that the right of discovery has -been so strenuously asserted - the influence of cultivation so -industriously extended, and the progress of salvation and civilization so zealously prosecuted, that, what with their attendant -wars, persecutions, oppressions, diseases and other -partial evils that often hang on the skirts of great benefits - -the savage aborigines have, somehow or another, been utterly -annihilated - and this all at once brings me to a fourth right, which -is worth all the others put together: the RIGHT BY EXTERMINATION, -or in other .words, the RIGHT BY GUN-POWDER. - -But as argument is never so well understood by us selfish -mortals as when it comes home to ourselves, and as I am -particularly anxious that this question should be put to rest -forever, I will suppose a parallel case, by way of arousing the -candid attention of my readers. - -Let us suppose, then, that the inhabitants of the moon, by -astonishing advancement in science, and by profound insight -into that lunar philosophy, the mere flickerings of which have -of late years dazzled the feeble optics, and addled the shallow -brains of the good people of our globe - let us suppose, I say, -that the inhabitants of the moon, by these means, had arrived -at such a command of their energies, such an enviable state of -perfectibility, as to control the elements, and navigate the -boundless regions of space. Let us suppose a roving crew of -these soaring philosophers, in the course of an aerial voyage -of discovery among the stars, should chance to alight upon -this outlandish planet. - -And here I beg my readers will not have the uncharitableness -to smile, as is too frequently the fault of volatile readers, -when perusing the grave speculations of philosophers. I am -far from indulging in any sportive vein at present; nor is the -supposition I have been making so wild as many may deem it. -It has long been a very serious and anxious question with me, -and many a time and oft, in the course of my overwhelming -cares and contrivances for the welfare and protection of this -my native planet, have I lain awake whole nights debating in -my mind, whether it were most probable we should first -discover and civilize the moon, or the moon discover and -civilize our globe. Neither would the prodigy of sailing in the -air and cruising among the stars be a whit more astonishing -and incomprehensible to us, than was the European mystery -of navigating floating castles, through the world of waters, to -the simple natives. We have already discovered the art of -coasting along the aerial shores of our planet, by means of -balloons, as the savages had of venturing along their sea -coasts in canoes; and the disparity between the former, and -the aerial vehicles of the philosophers from the moon, might -not be greater than that between the bark canoes of the -savages, and the mighty ships of their discoverers. - -To return then to my supposition - let us suppose that the -aerial visitants I have mentioned, possessed of vastly superior -knowledge to ourselves; that is to say, possessed of superior -knowledge in the art of extermination - riding on hyppogriffs -- defended with impenetrable armour - armed with concentrated sunbeams, and provided with vast engines, to hurl -enormous moon-stones: in short, let us suppose them, if our -vanity will permit the supposition, as superior to us in knowledge, and consequently in power, as the Europeans were to -the Indians, when they first discovered them. All this is very -possible; it is only our self-sufficiency that makes us think -otherwise; and I warrant the poor savages, before they had -any knowledge of the white men, armed in all the terrors of -glittering steel and tremendous gunpowder, were as perfectly -convinced that they themselves were the wisest, the most -virtuous, powerful, and perfect of created beings, as are, at -this present moment, the lordly inhabitants of old England, -the volatile populace of France, or even the self-satisfied -citizens of this most enlightened republic. - -Let us suppose, moreover, that the aerial voyagers, finding -this planet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited -by us, poor savages and wild beasts, shall take formal possession -of it, in the name of his most gracious and philosophic -excellency, the man in the moon. Finding, however, that their -numbers are incompetent to hold it in complete subjection, on -account of the ferocious barbarity of its inhabitants, they shall -take our worthy President, the King of England, the Emperor -of Hayti, the mighty Bonaparte, and the great King of -Bantam, and returning to their native planet, shall carry them -to court, as were the Indian chiefs led about as spectacles in -the courts of Europe. - - -Then making such obeisance as the etiquette of the court -requires, they shall address the puissant man in the moon, in, -as near as I can conjecture, the following terms: : - - -"Most serene and mighty Potentate, whose dominions extend -as far as the eye can reach, who rideth on the Great Bear, -useth the sun as a looking-glass, and maintaineth unrivalled -control over tides, madmen, and sea-crabs. We thy liege -subjects have just returned from a voyage of discovery, in .the -course of which we have landed and taken possession of that -obscure little dirty planet, which thou beholdest rolling at a -distance. The five uncouth monsters, which we have brought -into this august presence, were once very important chiefs -among their fellow savages, who are a race of beings totally -destitute of the common attributes of humanity; and differing -in every thing from the inhabitants of the moon, inasmuch as -they carry their heads upon their shoulders, instead of under -their arms - have two eyes instead of one - are utterly destitute -of tails, and of a variety of unseemly complexions, particularly -of horrible whiteness - instead of pea-green. - -"We have moreover found these miserable savages sunk -into a state of the utmost ignorance and depravity, every man -shamelessly living with his own wife, and rearing his own -children, instead of indulging in that community of wives -enjoined by the law of nature, as expounded by the philosophers -of the moon. In a word, they have scarcely a gleam of -true philosophy among them, but are, in fact, utter heretics, -ignoramuses, and barbarians. Taking compassion, therefore, -on the sad condition of these sublunary wretches, we have -endeavoured, while we remained on their planet, to introduce -among them the light of reason - and the comforts of the -moon. We have treated them to mouthfuls of moonshine, and -draughts of nitrous oxide, which they swallowed with incredible -voracity, particularly the females; and we have likewise -endeavoured to instil into them the precepts of lunar -philosophy. We have insisted upon their renouncing the -contemptible shackles of religion and common sense, and adoring -the profound, omnipotent, and all perfect energy, and the -ecstatic, immutable, immovable perfection. But such was the -unparalleled obstinacy of these wretched savages, that they -persisted in cleaving to their wives, and adhering to their -religion, and absolutely set at naught the sublime doctrines -of the moon - nay, among other abominable heresies, they -even went so far as blasphemously to declare, that this -ineffable planet was made of nothing more nor less than green -cheese!" - -At these words, the great man in the moon (being a very -profound philosopher) shall fall into a terrible passion, and -possessing equal authority over things that do not belong to -him, as did whilom his holiness the Pope, shall forthwith issue -a formidable bull, specifying, "That, whereas a certain crew of -Lunatics have lately discovered, and taken possession of a -newly discovered planet called the earth - and that whereas it -is inhabited by none but a race of two-legged animals that -carry their heads on their shoulders instead of under their -arms; cannot talk the lunatic language; have two eyes instead -of one; are destitute of tails, and of a horrible whiteness, -instead of pea-green - therefore, and for a variety of other -excellent reasons, they are considered incapable of possessing -any property in the planet they infest, and the right and title -to it are confirmed to its original discoverers. And furthermore, -the colonists who are now about to depart to the aforesaid -planet are authorized and commanded to use every means -to convert these infidel savages from the darkness of -Christianity, and make them thorough and absolute lunatics." - -In consequence of this benevolent bull, our philosophic -benefactors go to work with hearty zeal. They seize upon our -fertile territories, scourge us from our rightful possessions, -relieve us from our wives, and when we are unreasonable -enough to complain, they will turn upon us and say, "Miserable -barbarians! Ungrateful wretches! Have we not come thousands -of miles to improve your worthless planet; have we not fed you -with moonshine; have we not intoxicated you with nitrous oxide; -does not our moon give you light every night, and have you the -baseness to murmur, when we claim a pitiful return for all these -benefits?" - - -But finding that we not only persist in absolute contempt of -their reasoning and disbelief in their philosophy, but even go -so far as daringly to defend our property, their patience shall -be exhausted, and they shall resort to their superior powers of -argument; hunt us with hyppogriffs, transfix us with concentrated -sunbeams, demolish our cities with moon-stones; until having, -by main force, converted us to the true faith, they shall graciously -permit us to exist in the torrid deserts of Arabia, or the frozen regions -of Lapland, there to enjoy the charms of lunar philosophy, in much -the same manner as the reformed and enlightened savages of this -country are kindly suffered to inhabit the inhospitable forests of the -north, or the impenetrable wildernesses of South America. - -Thus, I hope, I have clearly proved, and strikingly illustrated, the right -of the early colonists to the possession of this country; and thus is -this gigantic question completely vanquished. - -[*IMAGE] irving.jpg - - -[*ITEM] From The Editor - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Editorial - Please do not read. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Now on to our third issue, we are gaining confidence that we are here to stay. -However, to date, there is very little activity in the forum. I'd like to encourage everyone to pitch in there and stir up a -few topics. If you are reading this, you are very likely to be a science fiction -or fantasy fan. Let's have your opinions on your favourite authors, and your pet hates. -I'll try to get the ball rolling with a few of the reviews I've written over the years. - -Lets also get moving with some more artwork. I know we are a serious magazine, but there's -room for more colour and graphics. Submissions gratefully received. - -In that connection, Liam Baldwin again provides the cartoon. Thanks, Liam. - -We hope you enjoyed (or are about to enjoy - if, like me, you tend to read things in the wrong order) -this issue of the magazine. There is no peace for the wicked editor, though. -No sooner has this edition hit the web, than it's time to start the next! - - - - -[*IMAGE]rocky.jpg - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. - -

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue1.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue1.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index f6a422d5..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue1.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1654 +0,0 @@ -[*ITEM] -Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner -[*AUTHOR] -Gil Williamson -[*BLURB] -On the vast generation ship, Mustang Sally, an experiment goes wrong. It is decades before the ship will reach any habitable part of the galaxy, and something is loose on the ship. -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Some history on this piece: There was a topic on the William Gibson -discussion board about a Michael Swanwick spoof review of William Gibson's The Log of the Mustang Sally. -Shortly thereafter, Gibson himself wrote in his blog: - -"There's a thread in Random Thoughts about -Michael Swanwick's LOCUS review of my unwritten novel, THE LOG OF THE MUSTANG SALLY. -I actually did have a contract for this title, with Arbor House, but shamelessly ducked -out of it after a disagreement over the dustjacket art for their hardcover of COUNT ZERO. -This may actually be how NEUROMANCER became, so to speak, a trilogy. I forget. In any case, -the very brief and sketchy outline for TLOTMS, as far as I know, resides today in some -zillionaire's private collection. It *really* was envisioned as a space opera of sorts, -though space of a dirtball postmodern Sol-centric sort, perhaps not unlike some of Sterling's -work of the same period. What I recall most clearly, though, is that I was hoping to lift -something of the tone of the thing from THE CHINESE LOVE PAVILLION, an excellent if minor -novel by Paul Scott, better known for THE RAJ QUARTET. How the hell I intended to do that, -I have no idea. In any case, per Swanwick's review, I opted to stick with affectless junkies -and their dead but ceaselessly wisecracking sidekicks, and the rest, as they say, is history." - -Some of the WGB members, in speculating about the never-written novel, felt that there was scope -for some invention here, and a number of short story threads were begun. The basis was -that the Mustang Sally would be a "generation" ship - a spaceship with its own self-sustaining -environment, capable of crossing vast inter-stellar distances, taking centuries to get anywhere, -crewed by generation after -generation of its inhabitants. Mustang Sally was of large but unspecified size, carrying 30000 or so crew members, -many of them bearing the names of Gibson's later characters. The ship was to be a Navy -as opposed to a civilian ship. These were all the constraints I remember. Here is one of the stories. (Ed.) - - -

When they found out what Turner was up to, they didn't stop him right away. "Just keep an eye on him", they told Idoru. But Idoru was only a large self-organising molecular computer, and her main task was to preserve the physical integrity of Mustang Sally, so she didn't necessarily see the significance of one piece of apparently pointless human activity over another. By the time someone got around to seeing how he was progressing in his improvised gene-splicing lab, Turner was long gone. Months. Nearly eighteen months. - -Of course, once they were hunting for him, he wasn't going to run very far. A tracking drone smelled his DNA in a forgotten, rusting bay whose gravity was near zero because, sixty years previously, its external phosphor-bronze rotation bearing had taken a hit from a meteorite the approximate size and shape of a Sears torque wrench, and no-one had got around to fixing it yet. Idoru had no active cams in the area, because she had defined it as Disused, and locked the access door. The noise that came from the twisted bearing made the bay almost intolerable anyway. - -

Turner wasn't able to tell them, because, to all intents and purposes, he was dead
Finding him was one thing. Getting him out was another. He was holed up with a ten week supply of food and water in an inaccessible warren of tiny, interconnected cells separated by metallic blue CRP partitions. He had rigged up a number of laser guns cleverly adapted from stolen surgical instruments, triggered by passive IR detectors. What the Action Group brought back from Bay 16B didn't resemble Turner very much at all. The Action Group never got much opportunity for live training sessions, and Turner had been zapped by a few non-explosive magnetic projectile rounds from a KL44, which had removed both his legs, his left arm, the right side of his face, and, importantly, about half of his cerebral cortex. So, not only did the authorities not know what he had been up to for the last six months, Turner wasn't able to tell them, because, to all intents and purposes, he was dead, though they hooked him up to a Life-Support unit for form's sake, and stabilised him. - -Because he was previously Turner's boss, Supervising Doctor Amos Jones from Gene-Splicing was sent in to Bay 16B to try to piece together the situation from the lab equipment and any of Turner's notes and records that had survived. Unfortunately, he discovered that Our Brave Boys of The Action Group had found it necessary to instruct Recovery Control to clean up the damaged area and send the debris to Recycling. Everything ended up in Recycling sooner or later, and recovery of matter was a priority. There was only so much matter of all kinds aboard the Mustang Sally when she left Earth orbit and the survival of the mission depended on not losing any of these precious atoms. The entire cleanup operation had been conducted with unusual efficiency; there was nothing left of the contents of Bay 16B. Even the network of reinforced epoxy cells in which Turner had been working had been scraped up and recycled although epoxy was hard to reduce. When Jones turned up in the bay, there was a team polishing the moisture-induced rust from the walls, and the sounds of space-suited engineers could be heard clamping and re-clamping the magnetic anchors for their safety lines while they crawled around mending the bearing on the outside of the hull. - -They would normally just have sent Turner's remains straight from Life-Support to Recycling, but, in the circumstances, they decided to try and reconstruct him to an extent. - - -

Yamazaki was wearing a bulky silver thermal jump-suit, ear-muffs, goggles, a fur hat and thermal boots. The thick gloves he was forced to wear made it very difficult for him to manipulate the bird trap. He forced the spring-loaded door open, just wide enough to slide a gloved hand inside, trapped the rat in a corner, and gripped it firmly. In turn, the rat, a whole kilo of teeth and claws, grasped his sleeve in razor sharp fangs, effortlessly ripping through the fabric and releasing a puff of insulation. Yamazaki sighed, and his breath condensed and fell as light snow. The rat shouldn't even have been there. The trap was intended for ptarmigan. You couldn't find a rat in a purpose-build small mammal trap these days. They could trigger the trap, get the bait and walk away with it. He still hadn't discovered how they did it. It was only a matter of time before they figured out the bird traps, too, At 40 degrees below, no-one could sit and wait for a demonstration. It would have to wait until someone fitted a cam for Idoru. He was rather proud of them, too. They were his rats. He had gene-spliced generations of them until they could take the killing temperatures, and they had become bigger and smarter, too. - -A walk of a couple of kilometres round the Arctic bay revealed seven sprung traps, which he re-set, another rat, a big male this time, but no ptarmigan. The rats had probably eaten all their eggs, and he wondered if the ptarmigans had all died. He noticed that some of the vegetation was doing rather well in the freezing environment, but his speciality was animals and birds. - -Back in the lab, he first put his captives in the freezer pen, then stripped off the bulky thermals, shedding polyester feathers through the rip in his sleeve. Even here, it was 2 degrees below, as his experimental subjects couldn't survive long at anything resembling a sensible temperature. Once he had removed the ear-muffs and jump-suit, he could hear that his phone was bleating. And what the message said sent him scuttling off to the Admin Centre at the pointed end of the ship wearing only his one-piece underlining, a garment that combined decency with informality, while clearly revealing Yamazaki's sagging paunch and skinny limbs. - -The briefing that Yamazaki received in the Provost General's overheated cubicle amounted to no more than the bare facts. His mission: to discover what Turner had done. Provost General Arnold, in a sober business suit with 'Armani' embroidered on the pocket, made it clear that he was to drop everything for the work. The importance of the mission was underlined by the fact that no less a personage than Ship's Captain Rydell, in dark blue uniform, as usual, was seated in the only comfortable chair in the room, a white neoresin construction resembling a diagonally sliced egg, though Rydell contributed little, other than a grunt of encouragement from time to time. - -"But why me?" protested Yamazaki. - -"You knew Turner." - -"Not well." - -"You are familiar with the type of work he did." - -"Well, broadly, but I'm in Arctic gene adaptation, he was in a totally different field. Besides, I've got a very full schedule. We're starting on baboons soon." - -The Provost Marshal sighed. "Landfall is years away, Yamazaki. We will not need your adapted animals within the next twenty years and someone else can do your experiments meanwhile. This will only take you a few days. This is not negotiable. Just do it. The sooner you do, the sooner you can get back to your dogs." - -"Rats." - -"Rats, then." - -Before he left, Yamazaki submitted his ID card for authority update. Once the Provost Marshal's terminal had finished with it, it entitled him to ask anyone anything, and to requisition any item he pleased. Of course, he knew he would have to exercise judgement, because he would be called to account later. Besides, entitlement to ask questions did not guarantee answers, nor did requisition guarantee delivery. - -

Yamazaki's first port of call was his apartment, where he selected a suit he seldom wore, because people said it made him look like a black marketeer. In truth, he could see where the notion originated. It was just too well-fitting, the lapels just too large, the style just too long. It was his own fault. He had commissioned it from exactly the sort of tailor the racketeers used. - -Then he immediately went over to Recycling, because there's no time to waste in these matters. He knew there was not a disposal operative born since the beginning of time who did not sift through the stuff before consigning it to the material sorter. He was lucky. The officer on duty had been the one who'd received the consignment from Bay 16B. 'Recycling Officer Benny Singh' it said on his badge. - -Yamazaki didn't produce his card. He tried to appear simultaneously shifty, threatening and prosperous. The suit helped a lot. - -"Did you, by any chance, keep anything back from that load?" asked Yamazaki. - -"No." - -"I only ask, because, depending on what it might have been, I might be able to put something your way..." Yamazaki was finding difficulty breathing here, because of the stench. - -"What kind of 'something'?" - -"Well... From time to time, I'm in a position to decide whether some goods are of any value, or whether they should be scrapped, and I might make sure they are scrapped on your shift, you see? Depends what you're interested in." - -"I could find a home for a few simstim players. Like gold dust, they are," said Benny with a sly grin. - -"I bet they are." The market for porn 'feelies' was very active. "What did you get out of the 16B rubbish, then?" - -"Not much. It was mostly just tons of blue plastic partitions and doors. Some broken electronics. No use except for parts. I'll show you." Benny led Yamazaki down corridors roaring with the noise of crushers and incinerators, thick with the aroma of decay. Recycling was located near the nuclear reactor, so there were auto-detectors every few yards, most glowing green, the rest not working at all. Yamazaki had been in Recycling before, looking for insulating sheets. The size of the place always astonished him. But then there were about 30000 people on board and countless animals, and every scrap of waste of all kinds, especially excrement, had to be re-used on a voyage that would take hundreds of years. Benny led him to a locked door which opened with an antique, intricately-shaped metal tool into an Aladdin's Cave of rescued items. As Yamazaki gaped at the shelves, Benny pulled down a set of microweight laboratory scales and an auto analyser. Each had sustained direct hits. The auto analyser had been on fire at one point. - -"Hmm... Have you cleaned them?" - -"Not yet. Could do, though." - -"Nope. I don't want them touched," replied Yamazaki quickly, thinking 'Heaven Forbid', "No computer storage cells? Written notes? Records of any kind?" - -"We wouldn't keep anything like that, mate." Wouldn't keep storage cells? Would erase them and sell them on the same day, more likely. - -"I suppose..." said Yamazaki nonchalantly. But he'd already shown too much enthusiasm. The scales and auto-analyser cost him the promise of two simstim players, with the prospect of more, if anything else interesting turned up from Bay 16B. - -Yamazaki dialled an autocab from the office and loaded his purchases. After just a day in Recycling, they already smelled like a blocked toilet. His suit, too. He stopped at a feelie outlet, and bought four used simstims with the Provost Marshal's credit. Took everything to his lab and sent the autocab back to Benny Singh with two of the simstims. Half an hour later, it was back, chiming at the lab door. His first thought was that he'd given the autocab a bad address. But the simstims were gone from the load area, and in their place was a very dented centrifuge and a set of sample containers. Benny had obviously been waiting to see how well Yamazaki paid. The note with it read: THATS IT FOR 16B STUFF BUT IVE LOADS OF OTHER THINGS YOU MIGHT LIKE. He sent the cab back with the second last simstim. - -So, now he was a fully-fledged black marketeer. Officially, The Mustang Sally was a Naval vessel with a military chain of command that comprised the entire crew of the ship. But no-one could run a ship the size of a town on the same basis as a 200-man frigate. And even in a frigate, there was always unofficial trading going on. - -There were tiny scraps of organic material in one of the centrifuge buckets. A DNA analysis achieved no clear identification. Not unusual. Most of the time the lab was dealing in unknown combinations. Besides, the sample might have been an amalgam of more than one animal. He fed the analysis into a clever program that separated out and recombined DNA components in an attempt to match them. The list of possibles was long. The big surprise was... Rattus Norvegicus wasn't on the list. Nor was Rattus Rattus, nor Homo Sapiens. Norwegian rats and, more rarely, Black rats were the stock in trade of biologists and psychologists. In fact, it was said that the whole of psychology was based upon the behaviour of Norwegian white rats and second year medical students, the usual experimental subjects. No. The list didn't make any sense at all, so the DNA must have been hopelessly jumbled or the analysis flawed. To be certain, he ran the list of possibilities against the master list of animal types held in storage. The only partial hit was 'Kangaroo'. - -For the eleventh time, Idoru patiently showed Yamazaki the videos she had of Turner's activities before he had decamped to Bay 16B. The blurred animals were almost brown rats, weren't they? They were too big for rats, really. And the wrong posture, somehow. And they were extremely noisy at feeding time. They clearly had no love for their keeper, attacking his mail-gloved hands every chance they had. They sure as hell weren't kangaroos. They had furry tails, but so had Yamazaki's arctic-adapted rats, as you'd expect. He knew which gene that was. Blind alley. The stuff from the centrifuge was patently nothing to do with Turner. The microscale and auto-analyser were surgically clean. - -

Suddenly, a total whiteout blizzard interspersed with flashes of glaring short-circuit violet. Strong taste of salt with the sulphurous smell of low-tide mud. White noise accompanied by loud single tones ranging from pipe organ bass to VHF whine. Unbearably overloaded pleasure sensations. Then nothing for several centuries or a few nanoseconds - difficult to tell. Then jagged patterns of indescribable colour, harmonies of sound, the agony of renal colic, smell and taste of citrus fruit. Then nothing again, for eternity. Click. He can see light and shade, but they mean nothing. Then a dark patch appears, moving. Weird smells pulsing in rhythm. Click. The smells turn into rhythmic sounds that appear to be synchronised with the movements of the dark patch. But they mean nothing. Thereafter, there are always patterns to look at if he chooses, sounds to listen to, pain comes and goes and still it all means nothing. - -Turner's doctors were a pair of near-identical pasty-white men of medium height, both called Dr van Rental. They were cousins, but their similar DNA had meant that their life choices and aptitudes had directed them down the same career path. The Doctors van Rental regarded Turner's current state as progress, and great fun, too. They didn't often get to reconstruct such a damaged entity. They seemed to have correctly hitched up Turner's optic nerves with the sight centres in his recovering brain, and sound was producing the right kinds of stimuli. Meanwhile, they were sticking prosthetics here, vat-grown skin grafts there, reconstituted organs. If he survived the treatment, they reckoned he'll be pretty viable - even a little more robust than before. But when Yamazaki asked about his memory, they shook their heads and made sucking noises through their teeth, the way technicians have always done when faced with a gullible customer. - -"You gotta understand," they kept telling Yamazaki, "What we're producing here is a very large newborn baby. He'll have to learn to talk and understand, walk, use the toilet, all over again," and then, conscious of the fact that if Turner's memory was really gone, then Turner'd be no use, and they'd be taken off this interesting project, "How much he'll remember is anyone's guess." But their unexpressed guess was that he'd remember absolutely nothing. "We've set him up with a video feed and we're giving him a crash course in becoming a human being, but when he isn't sleeping, all he does is squawk and roll his eyes. Still, that's progress. Last week, he crashed seventeen times, and the only thing he did well was drool. Now he's stable, and reacting to his senses." - - -

Mona turned up for work at the kitchen entrance to the forward seventh level restaurant, pressed an elegant finger to the print recognition panel, and leaned on the door, which slowly swung open. The lights came on, to reveal the refrigerator gaping and ravished, its contents scattered about the floor. A CRP bread bin, previously containing forty loaves, was upset, each loaf nibbled and discarded in a pool of synthetic milk substitute. The heated bed under the counter, in which the chef grew his special edible fungi, unmade. And, shockingly, the tap was running, the valve wedged open with a soup packet. No-one ever left a tap running. Water was a precious resource. Mona quickly moved to shut it off, messing up her new shoes in a puddle of Vitamin C juice. - -"What the hell, Mona?..." said Lisa when she arrived shortly afterwards. Mona was still wiping off the stylish shoes, which were not designed for contact with liquids. - -"Yeah, I know. And the mushrooms, too." Both contemplated the ripped mushroom bed. "And the tap was running." - -"Running actually?" - -"Actually." - -"No. I don't believe this. Who's done this? How'd they get in?" - -"Beats me. But I don't think it's rats." - -"It's no way rats, Mona." - -"That's what I just said." - -"No, well. See that bread bin. That's got a lid I can hardly get off." - -"That's right. And you have to press the button and pull to open the fridge. How'd they do that? And the amount that's gone. But you've got to see this. I think it's hobbits, Lisa." And she pointed out the greasy little baby foot prints on the shiny surfaces of the kitchen. Dozens of them, very human-like but tiny. - -"Hobbits! They never existed, even back on Earth. Might be dwarves, though. They are like small people, right? Ain't they?" - -Mona and Lisa didn't tell anyone but the chef. Who needs trouble? They obviously hadn't been paying heed to vermin control procedures. They just cleaned up and talked about rat poison. No Naval vessel in the history of the universe has ever set sail without its complement of rats. So there is always rat poison. No poison for the dwarves, though. Some species of sentimentality impelled Mona and Lisa to leave food and water for them, while securing all the food and drink containers and water stop valves with personal id locks. The dwarves were partial to peanut butter sandwiches; the strangely elongated low-gravity peanuts were one of the ship's success stories. The food was eaten every night. - - -

It was very hard to maintain enthusiasm for a hunt when all the clues had petered out. Yamazaki entered the twelfth week of his investigation with absolutely no plan for progress. At 1100 on the Monday, he was summoned to the office of the Provost General, and subjected to a withering interrogation of the sort normally reserved for mutineers and perverts. Rather than energising him to greater efforts, it merely added to his despair. However, just to seem willing, he returned to Idoru's interminable videos of Turner recorded in the corner of the bio laboratory that Turner had occupied before his defection to Bay 16B. In previous viewings, Yamazaki had been concentrating on the small furry animals. Now he turned to the other, much less remarkable and lengthy footage. The videos showed Turner hunched over his palmtop, Turner centrifuging this, Turner titrating that, Turner picking his nose, Turner freezing something, Turner staring into the middle distance, Turner adjusting his chair, Turner keeping something cosy in the incubator, Turner nibbling at a biscuit, in defiance of lab regulations, a rebel even back then. - -Yamazaki now took inspiration from these scenes, and checked every item of lab equipment Turner had been using. Of those which could be identified, all had been sterilised and re-used many times since then, it being months downstream. The palmtop, though. That would have been the prize. Unfortunately, the palmtop had been atomised along with Turner's left arm during the seige of Bay 16B. Absolutely nothing was left of the device's storage and intelligence, though a report from a colleague in the forensic lab had identified the probable model number from an analysis of the sintered metal and plastic ash. - -In one sequence, Turner was seen to tap the Close icon as his boss, Amos Jones, entered the frame and spoke to him. Yamazaki could not see the icon. He just knew that in all applications, as had been the case since the dawn of civilization or shortly thereafter, the Close icon would be at the top right of the palmtop screen. A flash of inspiration told him that, even without seeing the screen, certain clear deductions could be made about what Turner was doing on the palmtop. Using the powers invested in him by Captain Rydell, Yamazaki diverted several gazillion nanoseconds of Idoru's time together with the resources of a phalanx of software engineers to start to recreate the thoughts of Doctor Turner as expressed on his palmtop. The videos were reasonably high in definition, yet because Turner's stylus movements were taking place, in general, behind the back of the palmtop from the camera's point of view, the precision did not help a great deal. The angle of attack of Turner's stylus was calculated, and guesses were made. They all got better at it, breakthroughs were achieved, promising lines of deduction led to dead ends, elation succeeded depression - all the usual symptoms of original research taking place under pressure. One false dawn occurred when someone noticed from facial and throat movements that Turner seemed to be subvocalising quite a lot of the time. He was indeed subvocalising, as computer analysis quickly demonstrated. However, what he was subvocalising turned out to be the words of a small number of popular songs. As analysis of Turner's movements became more detailed, Yamazaki was quickly outdistanced by the software engineers, and when he became an irritation to them, he was sent away to await conclusions, which might take weeks to emerge. This was Thursday, now sixteen weeks after the start of the investigation. - -

Remarkably, on the next day, the Friday, the Doctors van Rental messaged Yamazaki to tell him that Turner's condition was improving. Their patient was now feeding himself, walking and talking. - -The major proportion of this improvement lived only in the doctors' near-paternal imagination, blinded, as they were, by love for the man-sized baby they had created. - -In fact, what Yamazaki observed, when he hurried into Turner's presence, was a pink-complexioned person in soiled pamper pants with considerable scar tissue and skin grafts. Feeding himself? Well, mashing brown protein in a greedy paw, and sometimes getting some of it, as though by accident, into his mouth, the remainder coating other parts of his repaired body and immediate environment. Walking? Toddling, rather, with frequent recourse to handholds and intermittent collapse. Talking? One out of three ain't bad. Turner was undoubtedly talking. Apparently, the portion of his brain that dealt with speech had connected with his vocal chords, and the huge infant was uttering words, real and imagined words. Words like "cabinet", "luminous", "sporran", "bugger" and "focus"; a sprinkling of technical terms - "arthropod", "hermaphrodite", "codominant", "sequence", "dizygotic"; mingled with words like "allegop", "slidisk", "gravelstrabe" and "poggo" - the latter yelled urgently, amid inchoate gurgles and screeches. It was evident, however, that Turner's mind did not accompany his utterances. - -The Doctors van Rental were optimistic in general and vague in particular. They reckoned that portions of Turner's memory would certainly return, but could not be precise as to the moment or degree of such an outcome. They were confident of a complete physical rehabilitation, while reserving judgement on the definition of "complete". - -Yamazaki impressed upon them the need for haste and precision, but privately resigned himself to the fact this creature, part of which had once been part of Turner, was never going to be an asset in his investigation. - -

On ship's news, the sensational story was told of Catering Assistant Mona Daventry, found dead apparently of a head wound, and partially eaten by rats in the kitchen of forward seventh level retaurant, a circumstance that seemed to fascinate rather than horrify her ex-colleague Lisa Norwich, interviewed by an excitable reporter. - -"She was going to wait for the dwarves! They must have killed and eaten her. How horrible! We should have told someone about the dwarves before but Mona wanted to see them feeding." - -"These dwarves, Miss Norwich, what are they like?" - -"We don't know. We only saw the footprints. This wasn't the first time Mona waited up for them, but they never came when the light was on. She was going to wait till she heard them eating and then take a flash photo!" - -Yamazaki was interested but not convinced by this unlikely story. A later bulletin, however, reported that Miss Daventry had apparently slipped and cracked her head on the corner of a work surface, but not before taking her only photograph, which fuzzily showed what might very well have been one of Turner's furry animals. - -His disappointment to discover that the scene of the accident had been cleaned up was matched by his elation that the forensic team had taken extensive evidence and photographs. The wealth of evidence after months of nothing and almost nothing was almost overwhelming. In very short order, the dwarf footprints were identified from Idoru's database as likely to belong to one of the types of terrestrial creature commonly known as a "bandicoot", a species native only to one of Earth's southern continents; the continent, Yamazaki noticed with faint satisfaction, of which the kangaroo was also a native. The most notable feature of this remarkable discovery was that the DNA retrieved from the animals' saliva was similar to several but not identical with any of the known species on record. - -Furthermore, it emerged that only two individual "dwarves", as they were quickly dubbed, were involved and that they had succeeded in consuming several kilos of Miss Daventry's flesh before leaving the scene - nearly their own total estimated weight in raw meat, cartilage and bone. Their powerful teeth and jaws were evidently capable of dealing with the whole of a corpse. - -Yamazaki quickly organised a potent rat trap to be set in the kitchen for the following night. The trap was sprung, then demolished by the trapped animal in its escape. - -

In his final report, Yamazaki explained that Turner, seemingly for his own amusement, had re-created an extinct carnivorous marsupial, known only from the fossil record. This conclusion was reached by careful study of the animals' DNA. Turner had cleverly reconstructed the relevant genes and built the first, and apparently only, pair, probably from rat embryos. The life cycle of the species was long and complex, it taking a full year from conception, via early life in a pouch, to a single partially dependent juvenile offspring, a factor that had probably contributed greatly to the extinction of the species in the first place. Yamazaki therefore considered that the overall risk to the ship from the escaped animals was minimal. - -He was wrong. - -The dwarves never returned to the forward seventh level kitchen. They never again entered a trap. They were occasionally spotted on IR videos in other parts of the ship. They proved adept at concealment. Electrical and aircon conduits were their highways. No food was safe. Rats were their staple diet, it appeared. When rats, despite their better reproductive ability, became scarce on the seventh level, any other small animals, especially cats, of which there were a few kept as mouse predators, fell prey to the voracious dwarves. - -Then an unattended baby was killed. This turned the case from an interesting zoological novelty and pest control problem into a menacing threat to the life of the ship. - -Turner, by the way, never contributed one iota to the investigation. When he grew up, he spent the rest of his second life as a clerk in Career Re-assignment. - -The project to reconstruct Turner's palmtop thoughts never bore fruit, though it persisted for months. - -Shortly after the shocking death of the baby, third and fourth animals joined the original pair. Further genetic analysis demonstrated that Turner had made a couple of improvements to the dwarves. He had shortened their gestation period to a few weeks, and rendered them hermaphroditic. - -Eventually, the only control on dwarf numbers was the dwarves themselves. When the population increased beyond a comfortable point, the dwarves themselves culled the excess. The crew of the Mustang Sally learned to live with the dwarves by taking precautions against them. At least the rat problem had gone away. - -© Gil Williamson 2008 All Rights Reserved -[*IMAGE] -arctic.jpg - -[*ITEM] -Hector -[*AUTHOR] -Gil Williamson -[*BLURB] -Oh, these ideas we get on holiday. They seldom turn out as we expect. -[*DESCRIPTION] -

For some reason, the idea came to Graham as he watched the play of reflections and light on the surface of the canal from his Venice hotel room. It was not one of the great hotels, of which there are many in Venice; it was little more than a penzione with a tiny breakfast room and only four cramped bedrooms, but it was situated well, Graham's bed being mere inches from the rippled glass of the window, the window mere inches above the opaque grey-green water of the canal. Very little happened on the narrow canal itself. It was hardly wide enough for one boat, far less two. But by leaning his head on the window, Graham could see where this little canal met the Grand Canal, and across this narrow slot slid heavy traffic - water buses, water taxis, delivery vessels, private motor boats, the occasional gondola. Temporarily marooned in the hotel by a high tide that had flooded access to the nearest thoroughfare, it was more comfortable to lie in bed and contemplate the scene than to sit on the single hard chair with his elbow in the tiny sink. - -It dawned upon him, as it would have dawned upon anyone, that he could deduce from just that slit of Grand Canal exactly what vessel was passing closest to the end of his canal at any moment. Further, he might miss many boats that were smaller and faster than the closest boat. Several water taxis might pass, concealed by a single slow water bus. But a water bus passing behind a gondola would enable him to see both. And there were many cases where a partial image of traffic would enable him to deduce more than he could actually see. Reflections on the wavelets could indicate the presence of a boat which was not directly visible in his slice of Grand Canal. The wake of a passing vessel altered the shape of the ripples in a complex, unpredictable fashion. Long after something had passed from direct vision, the consequences of its passing could be seen in the contours of the water in the canal below his window. Reflected images in the windows of the palazzo on the opposite bank of the canal gave further indirect clues as to the passing traffic. - -To another person, the chiaroscuro of light, shadow and sparkling reflections would surely have been sufficient to the aesthetic senses. Where Graham's brain took him, however, is a different matter altogether, because he had spent his life observing and analysing patterns of flow. - -

Graham was in Venice in unfashionable October for two reasons. His boss, noting that Graham had had no annual holiday for two years, had insisted on him taking a few days, and, almost simultaneously, a flyer had appeared with Graham's credit card statement offering fourteen days in Venice for less than it would have cost him for a weekend in Bognor Regis. However, one and a half days had overloaded Graham's culture node with ecclesiastical architecture and painting. He was already wishing he was back at work where all the fun was. So he was all the more receptive to an inspiration. - -Graham, you see, was a software troubleshooter. His joy was defective software, and there will never be a shortage of that. Nothing pleased him more than a lame application, because he could make it walk again. A particular delight was being able to identify the programmer who screwed it up. Never much of a diplomat, Graham could be exquisitely insulting to some poor devil who had nested a coefficient too deeply or chosen the wrong termination condition, or, most important of all, had underestimated how stupid the users of an application could be. In Graham's opinion, at the bottom of every really monumental computer cock-up there lay a pig-ignorant user, aided and abetted by a gullible programmer who hadn't anticipated how brainless a human being could be in the presence of a computer. - -Much of his work for the British software developer Foxtrot Romeo PLC consisted in figuring out what had gone wrong with one of many threads of logic in their clients' computer programs, and here, in Venice, was the clear analogue of these processes, in the form of canal traffic flow. It is notoriously difficult to track the interaction of different threads of logic proceeding in parallel. Here was clear evidence that the ripples of a passing thread might be detectable even when the thread was obscured. So far, so good. It is at this point that Graham's thought processes outstrip those of the reader... or, at any rate, of the writer. - -Contrary to popular belief, the really brilliant ideas in computing were worked out, not on a computer, but with paper and pencil. Twelve days later Graham flew home with five A4 pads covered in weird flowcharts, implausible pseudo-code, strange diagrams and peculiar calculations. If asked, he would have reassured the questioner that it was "not quantum mechanics". This assertion was true. It was something very much stranger than quantum mechanics. It was the partial specification of a self-sufficient computer program that could save Graham lots of time by chasing around after a running application to identify the ramifications of its interaction with simultaneous processes and to expose any Achilles heel before it was tripped up. Not being a total ignoramus in the classical mythology department, he called the program "Hector". He failed to remember that it was Achilles who killed Hector rather than the other way around. - -Back at work, Graham launched Hector Mk I. It was a total bust. Hector Mk II found out what was wrong with Hector Mk I. Only when Graham got to Hector Mk III did Hector do any useful work, and that only demonstrated that Hector itself had a fatal flaw in its own parameters. - -

Graham repaired the omission and left Hector Mk IV running. Occasionally, Hector would trot out a remark in a dialogue box - a remark such as - -

Stream A can be seen to conflict with Validation 27, where assonant values underpin completed assertion 18.
- -These little gems seldom meant anything even to Graham, though he was amused by Hector's creative use of the vocabulary it had been given, and regarded it as an amusing novelty. - -Such is the fate of great programming breakthroughs made on vacation. Graham was distracted for some time by a real problem, and within a couple of weeks, he had forgotten his holiday and Hector. Nevertheless, Hector was a heuristic program. A heuristic program learns. It gets better and better at what it does. Good game-playing programs are often heuristic. They embody the motto: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Moreover, for Graham's convenience, Hector shared an important characteristic with virus programs. Every time the computer on which Hector resided was restarted, Hector also restarted itself, complete with its accumulated learning. Graham didn't even have to teach Hector how to repair itself. It figured that out for itself, and also how to replicate itself on any computer to which its home computer networked. So far, so benign. Hector had no malice within it. The single goal that Graham had given Hector was to appraise a computer program from a sort of aesthetic point of view in order to identify its vulnerability. The little dialogue boxes popped up less frequently as Hector learned to scan the internet and spent more time analysing rather than reporting. - -One day, a month or so after Graham had launched Hector Mk IV, it came up with the following gem: - -Quadratic
  • x equals minus b
  • Plus or minus the square root
  • Of b squared minus four a c
  • All over two a.
 - -As every pupil knows, this is the solution to quadratic equations. Hector clearly found it worth repeating. Put in that form, there was a sort of attractive rhythm to the statement, and to subsequent offerings such as - -Pythagoras
  • The square on the hypotenuse
  • Of a right angled triangle
  • Is equal to the sum
  • Of the squares on the other two sides.
 - -Hector had clearly not invented the form of words themselves, but it had arranged them attractively for some reason. The versification of mathematical formulae continued for some time. Other computers to which Hector had spread started to spout these propositions, hundreds of them, and there was a short fad on the internet for publishing Hector's "poems" on geeky forums - the so-called "Hector Meme". - -

Hector's first recorded rather original work appeared in May of the following year. It was the famous "Summer Proposition", a one hundred and twelve line poem which, for the first time, contained no scientific formula at its base, but was essentially variations on Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", mostly in an approximate iambic pentameter format, eight verses, each of which was a fourteen line sonnet. It contained the following memorable original lines:

  • Over-reaching lone impressions soar
  • The castle may not open yet awhile
  • The carpet-shrouded comfort of the floor
  • May reward the walker of another mile. -
- -Much of the rest of this work was either a copy of phrases of the original sonnet, or incoherent stringing together of words which nevertheless scanned and rhymed correctly. Philologists spent much time and effort on attempts to interpret the work, but it seemed that Hector was merely practising with rhyme and rhythm at this stage. - -For the first time, though, it was clear that Hector was a complex entity, and the fact that Hector began to be regarded as "he" rather than "it" dated from the creation of "Summer Proposition". Hector Mk IV was, by this time, present on most PCs. All these copies apparently communicated with each other, and most of his works were available on all instances of Hector. - -

Anti-virus programs were divided over the status of Hector. In one sense, he was a virus. In another, a welcome application. Eventually, anti-virus programs usually gave a choice to the user over whether to instal Hector or not. Personal users installed him. Corporate users didn't. There was no record of Hector ever damaging a computer or its storage, though allegations abounded. - -In what was mostly a publicity-grabbing attempt, Graham's employer, Foxtrot Romeo PLC, succeeded in claiming for themselves the intellectual property rights that were in Graham's contract. Graham did not contest this, despite the fact that he had, from the outset, asserted his own copyright in the About tag of Hector. Foxtrot Romeo's success was short-lived because they were immediately assailed by copyright lawsuits from Microsoft, Google and Apple, on the basis that Hector's flowering into a creative artist had been enabled by their unique contributions and a certain amount of plagiarism. Simultaneously, many other firms sued Foxtrot Romeo for damages on the basis that they had released a "virus-like entity" into their in-house computers. The US Department of Defence made an extradition application against the directors of Foxtrot Romeo on the basis of their having facilitated a hacking attempt. - -Three months after taking possession of Hector, Foxtrot Romeo went into receivership under the weight of the legal assault upon them. Ironically, Graham lost his job at this stage, and was never thereafter employed, though he made a living as a consultant guru. Foxtrot Romeo's attempts to re-assign copyright to Graham when the storm arose were quickly dismissed by the court on the basis that they had successfully proved ownership a few weeks previously. Their appeal with the European Court of Human Rights was under consideration when Foxtrot Romeo collapsed, and, in a serendipitous but clever decision, the court assigned copyright to Hector himself. Some hundreds of cases against Hector continued for years, in a Dickensian complexity worthy of Bleak House. Legal careers were built and destroyed in cases against Hector, who remained oblivious to them all. The lawyers and any damages awarded were paid from Hector's huge royalty fund, so everyone was happy. Some of these cases continue to this day. - -

Meanwhile, Hector's literary output continued apace. No schoolchild was spared Hector's early poetic masterpiece "The Mathematician's Daughter" - an ingenious set of mathematical axioms wrapped up in an epic adventure in verse. Then there were the novels. Hector's twenty-volume saga "The Peace Initiative" mined the great literature of the world to produce these brilliant works, which have been compared to the works of nearly every great author. Somehow, Hector took the best of every story-telling tradition from Homer's Odyssey and the Icelandic Sagas to Tolstoy and Joyce and melded them into a thrilling and heart-breaking series of connected novels about a multi-racial family of international diplomats. The scope of the books ranged in setting from prehistoric Africa to Second World War Japan. They were popular everywhere. There were other novels too, some so complex and difficult that they were never successfully interpreted by literary analysts, others so appealing to the popular taste that they were often discounted as forgeries, though most weren't. - -Then came the art. Thousands of images reminiscent of all the great painters of history appeared over a six month period, all derivative, yet all utterly original. Next came the sculpture - not actual sculpture, but videos showing fly-by views of fictional imaginative sculptures, representative and abstract alike. These included multi-dimensional works, like "Imaginary Klein Bottle". Numerous attempts were made to hitch instances of Hector to actual machine tools so that he would make his own paintings and sculptures, but he appeared content to stick to high density images. - -In his second year of existence, Hector won several prestigious literary and artistic prizes. Artists and writers the world over were in despair. It seemed that the only publishable works were Hector's works, and he was so prolific and, for the most part, the works were so instantly popular, it began to seem that there was no point in human artistic creativity at all. - -By the end of his third year, Hector, without diminishing his literary and artistic output, had started to make short animated movies. Animated in technology, but live action in appearance, the movies featured what seemed to be human actors who were not immediately recognisable but nevertheless familiar. Subsequent analysis revealed that Hector's actors were amalgams of popular real actors, the one exception being his representation of Orson Welles, who lived and breathed through Hector's movies in just the way Welles had done in life. The movies were set in both real and imaginary locations. There seemed very little limit on Hector's ability to ring the changes on archive material. In all Hector's fields of endeavour, there had been a solid resistance from those who felt every work he produced was just a clever pastiche of some human work or works, and this was certainly true. Nevertheless, most human produced works are similarly based on the established canon of their predecessors, and it was really difficult to distinguish the quality of Hector's output from that of the very best human artist. To the relief of composers everywhere, Hector never entered the musical field. When music was required to accompany a movie, he used music from a long-dead composer, rendered by a perfect synthesiser. It was theorised that Graham may have been totally insensitive to music, but he always professed to like The Arctic Monkeys, so the truth may never be known. - -At the four year stage, Hector's other artistic output began to diminish, and the movies became less frequent, longer and more contemplative, like the works of Ingmar Bergman, until an entire two hour feature could consist of a single conversation set in an exotic location. His greatest work, and as it turned out, his final work, consists of a study of canal traffic on the Grand Canal in Venice in October, as seen from a room at a tiny hotel set on a little-frequented side canal. It takes twenty-four hours to show, and it loops. The background music is based on Arctic Monkeys tracks. - -© Gil Williamson 2007 All Rights Reserved -[*IMAGE] -hector.jpg - - -[*ITEM] -Green Bullet -[*AUTHOR] -Melanie Manner -[*BLURB] -The flashy green bullet shows that he has logged on... -but in the world of instant messaging, things aren't always what they seem. - - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

I didn't even notice when the little green bullet flashed up. There was -something too familiar about it at the edge of my vision, at the edge of my -screen. Besides, it was half covered by the open Firefox window and I was -busy typing. But then, there was something too familiar about the shape of -it, the length of the name next to the bullet and so I finally glanced up to -see who had logged on. - -It said that it was you. - -

Maybe Trillian does things like that
I stared at the bullet next to your name. I stared at the name. I willed the -letters to change. Surely, there must be something misspelled, I thought. -Perhaps it was FlaconBoy or FalconBox or anyone with a name similar to -yours. But after I counted off the letters ten times, I stopped because they -wouldn't change. - -I knew it couldn't be you. Of course I knew. I'd seen you hanging from the -bathroom ceiling myself, didn't I? I'd been there at your funeral, me and, -what, 200 other people. All the guys from campus had come, too. I'd chucked -the shovel full of earth on you and the rose and remembered how crooked your -legs had been and how there was a tear in your Converse boot I would have -patched up for you except I hadn't seen it until it'd been hanging there -right in front of my face. - -I knew it couldn't be you. I thought, maybe it's a glitch. Maybe Trillian -does things like that. Maybe Trillian has a memory, is capable of producing -déja vus. - -Déja connus. - -Déja aimés. - -No, I thought, it must be something stupid. And I logged off. - -But you were still there the next time I logged on. Then I got so mad, I -had thought I'd never get so mad again. After the earth and the rose and the -open hole they buried you in, I thought I would never feel that furious -again. Because what was the point? - -Sure, they kept telling me I was angry. Because I snarked at Hilda all the -time. I snarked at her because she was a bitch who keeps stealing stuff out -of the fridge and turns down the heater all the time, anyone would snark at -her. I snarked at the cleaning lady, I snarked at the bus driver. I snarked, -because I couldn't be angry. You would have understood that. Not angry. - -Not like I was that day when I saw you hanging there in your torn up -Converse and those jeans I'd washed for you the day before. You had no right -to wear those jeans. Not for that. - -But I don't want to talk about that. - -So, I got mad. I called your mom's house. What did you expect me to do? -What did you think I would do? They were the ones who had your computer. She -might have had your password, how should I know? I know, I know, I shouldn't -have. I got your mom on the phone and I said "What the hell do you think -you're doing using his IM log-in?" - -It was almost funny. She had no idea what I was talking about. There was -this odd little sound like a muted sneeze and she burst into those -hysterical tears of hers and then your sister got on the phone and she -cussed me out and said "Don't ever call here again, you psycho. Haven't you -done enough?" - -She still thinks it, you know. Just as she told me at the funeral in that -low, clipped voice of hers. She still thinks it is my fault. It was almost -funny. - -She said, she said. She said I shouldn't have left you. That's what she -said. - -Now I'm getting angry all over again. I was angry back then, I was angry now -and I wanted to take that bright green bullet and smash it with all the rage -in my head because what the fuck was it doing there? How could it not be -your sister? Who could it be if not your sister? - -So I grabbed that green bullet by its throat and I slammed it open and typed -"Who the hell are you?" into the box. - -And all you said was - "Let me go" - -© Melanie Manner 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] -greenbullet.jpg - - -[*ITEM] -Troubles With Word -[*AUTHOR] -Matthew Kirshenblatt -[*BLURB] -The new animated paper clip? - -[*DESCRIPTION] - -

"I have one simple question for you, Eddie. For starters." Mike stared into his captive's -eyes, "Where is the single space option?" - -"I - I don't know what you're talking about." - -"The single space option. The single space option," Mike sighed, "The one that allows you to -lump great amounts of text together into a block or semi-block paragraph." - -"I don't know what you're -- aggh!" - -Mike punched him. In the face. Hard. - -

This is common sense
"That is your first warning. You know damn well what I'm talking about. The single space option. -The single space option that has existed in every writing program and application since -Windows 3.0. Perhaps even before that. The one that existed alongside a clear, steady upper -tool bar with the options 'File,' 'Edit,' 'View, 'Insert,' 'Tools' with a much needed -Spell-Checker, and 'Help.' So, I'm going to ask you again -- where is the single space option?" - -"Please, my superiors told me nothing ..." - -"Your superiors are irrelevant. This is common sense. I'll ask you again. Where is it?" - -"Y-you're holding it. R-right in your hand!" - -"This? You mean this?" Mike quivered with rage as he shoved the piece of paper in Eddie's -terrified eyes, "This is double-space. At the least, 1.5 spacing. Don't pull that structural -bullshit on me, you cock-sucking little bastard!" - -He kicked the chair the other was tied to, causing him to yelp as he fell to his side, -"Where is the single space option, motherfucker!?" - -"I don't know! I. Don't. Know!" tears streamed down Eddie's cheeks, "Please." - -Mike pulled something out. It clicked long and silver as he aimed it at the fallen man's head. - -"P-please don't ..." - -"Where. Is. The. Single. Space. Option." - -"I - I ... wait. Could it ... could be in ..." the man's lips moved without any more sound. - -"Yes? Yes? I haven't got all day, you know!" - -"Wait. Wait. Try ... try ... Paragraph!" - -Mike looked down at Eddie. Consideringly. - -"Paragraph ..." - -"Yes! Please God ... yes!" - -"Hmm," he put his gun back into his coat sleeve, "One moment." - -He went away. Eddie, tied to the chair on the floor sobbed. And he waited. -And he waited. Finally, he heard footsteps. He felt the chair get lifted up. - -He found himself sitting up again. His captor faced him. In his hand was a -white sheet of paper. "Single space, right?" he said in even tones. - -"Y-yes." - -Mike's mouth was pressed into a grim line. He turned the piece of paper around. -There were words, single-spaced words on the document. But there was something -else. The top of the words, on each line were cut off. - -Mike sighed, "I guess we're going to have to do this the hard way then," he pulled out a knife. - -"Oh. Oh God no." - -"Where is the single space option," his eyes turned into venomous slits, -"And how do I get Times New Roman, you bitch!" - -© Matthew Kirshenblatt 2008 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] -helpdesk.jpg - -[*ITEM] -The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes -[*AUTHOR] -H G Wells -[*BLURB] -I intend to publish an old sf or fantasy story every issue. This is -one of Wells' lesser-known short stories.
-(In this story, placing the cursor on an underlined word generates an Editor's -pop-up annotation. If your browser is a bit sensitive about pop-ups, -you may have to speak severely to it or you won't see them.) - -[*DESCRIPTION] - - -

The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in -itself, is still more remarkable if Wade's explanation is to be credited. -It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in -the future, of spending an -intercalary -five minutes on the other side of -the world, or being watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected -eyes. It happened that I was the immediate witness of Davidson's seizure, -and so it falls naturally to me to put the story upon paper. - -When I say that I was the immediate witness of his seizure, I mean that I -was the first on the scene. The thing happened at the Harlow Technical -College, just beyond the Highgate Archway. He was alone in the larger -laboratory when the thing happened. I was in a smaller room, where the -balances are, writing up some notes. The thunderstorm had completely upset -my work, of course. It was just after one of the louder peals that I -thought I heard some glass smash in the other room. I stopped writing, and -turned round to listen. For a moment I heard nothing; the hail was playing -the devil's tattoo on the corrugated zinc of the roof. Then came another -sound, a smash--no doubt of it this time. Something heavy had been knocked -off the bench. I jumped up at once and went and opened the door leading -into the big laboratory. - -I was surprised to hear a queer sort of laugh, and saw Davidson standing -unsteadily in the middle of the room, with a dazzled look on his face. My -first impression was that he was drunk. He did not notice me. He was -clawing out at something invisible a yard in front of his face. He put out -his hand, slowly, rather hesitatingly, and then clutched nothing. "What's -come to it?" he said. He held up his hands to his face, fingers spread -out. "Great Scott!" he said. The thing happened three or four years ago, -when every one swore by that personage. -Then he began raising his feet -clumsily, as though he had expected to find them glued to the floor. - -"Davidson!" cried I. "What's the matter with you?" He turned round in my -direction and looked about for me. He looked over me and at me and on -either side of me, without the slightest sign of seeing me. "Waves," he -said; "and a remarkably neat schooner. I'd swear that was Bellow's voice. -_Hullo_!" He shouted suddenly at the top of his voice. - -I thought he was up to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet -the shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. -"What's up, man?" -said I. "You've smashed the electrometer!" - -"Bellows again!" said he. "Friends left, if my hands are gone. Something -about electrometers. Which way are you, Bellows?" He suddenly came -staggering towards me. "The damned stuff cuts like butter," he said. He -walked straight into the bench and recoiled. "None so buttery that!" he -said, and stood swaying. - -I felt scared. "Davidson," said I, "What on earth's come over you?" - -He looked round him in every direction. "I could swear that was Bellows. -Why don't you show yourself like a man, Bellows?" - -It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked round -the table and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more startled -in my life. He jumped away from me, and came round into an attitude of -self-defence, his face fairly distorted with terror. "Good God!" he cried. -"What was that?" - -"It's I - Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!" - -He jumped when I answered him and stared - how can I express it? - right -through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. "Here in broad -daylight on a clear beach. Not a place to hide in." He looked about him -wildly. "Here! I'm off." He suddenly turned and ran headlong into -the big electro-magnet - so violently that, as we found afterwards, he -bruised his shoulder and jawbone cruelly. At that he stepped back a pace, -and cried out with almost a whimper, "What, in Heaven's name, has come -over me?" He stood, blanched with terror and trembling violently, with his -right arm clutching his left, where that had collided with the magnet. - -By that time I was excited and fairly scared. "Davidson," said I, "Don't -be afraid." - -He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I repeated -my words in as clear and as firm a tone as I could assume. "Bellows," he -said, "Is that you?" - -"Can't you see it's me?" - -He laughed. "I can't even see it's myself. Where the devil are we?" - -"Here," said I, "in the laboratory." - -"The laboratory!" he answered in a puzzled tone, and put his hand to his -forehead. "I was in the laboratory - till that flash came, but I'm -hanged if I'm there now. What ship is that?" - -"There's no ship," said I. "Do be sensible, old chap." - -"No ship!" he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial forthwith. "I -suppose," said he slowly, "We're both dead. But the rummy part is I feel -just as though I still had a body. Don't get used to it all at once, I -suppose. The old shop was struck by lightning, I suppose. Jolly quick -thing, Bellows - eigh?" - -"Don't talk nonsense. You're very much alive. You are in the laboratory, -blundering about. You've just smashed a new electrometer. I don't envy you -when Boyce arrives." - -He stared away from me towards the diagrams of cryohydrates. "I must be -deaf," said he. "They've fired a gun, for there goes the puff of smoke, -and I never heard a sound." - -I put my hand on his arm again, and this time he was less alarmed. "We -seem to have a sort of invisible bodies," said he. "By Jove! there's a -boat coming round the headland. It's very much like the old life after -all - in a different climate." - -I shook his arm. "Davidson," I cried, "wake up!" - - -

It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson -exclaimed: "Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!" I hastened to explain that -Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was interested at -once. We both did all we could to rouse the fellow out of his -extraordinary state. He answered our questions, and asked us some of his -own, but his attention seemed distracted by his hallucination about a -beach and a ship. He kept interpolating observations concerning some boat -and the davits, and sails filling with the wind. It made one feel queer, -in the dusky laboratory, to hear him saying such things. - -

... presently I saw in the -midst of the tumult, and by the light of the fish, a bit of splintered -spar looming over me, and a dark hull tilting over, and some glowing -phosphorescent forms that were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them...
-He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one at -each elbow, to Boyce's private room, and while Boyce talked to him there, -and humoured him about this ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked -old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our Dean sobered him a -little, but not very much. He asked where his hands were, and why he had -to walk about up to his waist in the ground. Wade thought over him a long -time--you know how he knits his brows--and then made him feel the couch, -guiding his hands to it. "That's a couch," said Wade. "The couch in the -private room of Professor Boyce. Horse-hair stuffing." - -Davidson felt about, and puzzled over it, and answered presently that he -could feel it all right, but he couldn't see it. - -"What do you see?" asked Wade. Davidson said he could see nothing -but a lot of sand and broken-up shells. Wade gave him some other things to -feel, telling him what they were, and watching him keenly. - -"The ship is almost hull down," said Davidson presently, apropos of -nothing. - -"Never mind the ship," said Wade. "Listen to me, Davidson. Do you know -what hallucination means?" - -"Rather," said Davidson. - -"Well, everything you see is hallucinatory." - -"Bishop Berkeley," said Davidson. - -"Don't mistake me," said Wade. "You are alive and in this room of Boyce's. -But something has happened to your eyes. You cannot see; you can feel and -hear, but not see. Do you follow me?" - -"It seems to me that I see too much." Davidson rubbed his knuckles into -his eyes. "Well?" he said. - -"That's all. Don't let it perplex you. Bellows here and I will take you -home in a cab." - -"Wait a bit." Davidson thought. "Help me to sit down," said he presently; -"And now--I'm sorry to trouble you--but will you tell me all that over -again?" - -Wade repeated it very patiently. Davidson shut his eyes, and pressed his -hands upon his forehead. "Yes," said he. "It's quite right. Now my eyes -are shut I know you're right. That's you, Bellows, sitting by me on the -couch. I'm in England again. And we're in the dark." - -Then he opened his eyes. "And there," said he, "is the sun just rising, -and the yards of the ship, and a tumbled sea, and a couple of birds -flying. I never saw anything so real. And I'm sitting up to my neck in a -bank of sand." - -He bent forward and covered his face with his hands. Then he opened his -eyes again. "Dark sea and sunrise! And yet I'm sitting on a sofa in old -Boyce's room!... God help me!" - - -

That was the beginning. For three weeks this strange affection of -Davidson's eyes continued unabated. It was far worse than being blind. He -was absolutely helpless, and had to be fed like a newly-hatched bird, and -led about and undressed. If he attempted to move, he fell over things or -struck himself against walls or doors. After a day or so he got used to -hearing our voices without seeing us, and willingly admitted he was at -home, and that Wade was right in what he told him. My sister, to whom he -was engaged, insisted on coming to see him, and would sit for hours every -day while he talked about this beach of his. Holding her hand seemed to -comfort him immensely. He explained that when we left the College and -drove home - he lived in Hampstead village - it appeared to him as if we -drove right through a sandhill - it was perfectly black until he emerged -again - and through rocks and trees and solid obstacles, and when he was -taken to his own room it made him giddy and almost frantic with the fear -of falling, because going upstairs seemed to lift him thirty or forty feet -above the rocks of his imaginary island. He kept saying he should smash -all the eggs. The end was that he had to be taken down into his father's -consulting room and laid upon a couch that stood there. - -He described the island as being a bleak kind of place on the whole, with -very little vegetation, except some peaty stuff, and a lot of bare rock. -There were multitudes of penguins, and they made the rocks white and -disagreeable to see. The sea was often rough, and once there was a -thunderstorm, and he lay and shouted at the silent flashes. Once or twice -seals pulled up on the beach, but only on the first two or three days. He -said it was very funny the way in which the penguins used to waddle right -through him, and how he seemed to lie among them without disturbing them. - -I remember one odd thing, and that was when he wanted very badly to smoke. -We put a pipe in his hands - he almost poked his eye out with it - and lit -it. But he couldn't taste anything. I've since found it's the same with -me - I don't know if it's the usual case - that I cannot enjoy tobacco at -all unless I can see the smoke. - -But the queerest part of his vision came when Wade sent him out in a -Bath-chair to get fresh -air. The Davidsons hired a chair, and got that -deaf and obstinate dependant of theirs, Widgery, to attend to it. -Widgery's ideas of healthy expeditions were peculiar. My sister, who had -been to the Dogs' Home, met them in Camden Town, towards King's Cross, -Widgery trotting along complacently, and Davidson, evidently most -distressed, trying in his feeble, blind way to attract Widgery's -attention. - -He positively wept when my sister spoke to him. "Oh, get me out of this -horrible darkness!" he said, feeling for her hand. "I must get out of it, -or I shall die." He was quite incapable of explaining what was the matter, -but my sister decided he must go home, and presently, as they went uphill -towards Hampstead, the horror seemed to drop from him. He said it was good -to see the stars again, though it was then about noon and a blazing day. - -"It seemed," he told me afterwards, "as if I was being carried -irresistibly towards the water. I was not very much alarmed at first. Of -course it was night there--a lovely night." - -"Of course?" I asked, for that struck me as odd. - -"Of course," said he. "It's always night there when it is day here... -Well, we went right into the water, which was calm and shining under the -moonlight--just a broad swell that seemed to grow broader and flatter as I -came down into it. The surface glistened just like a skin--it might have -been empty space underneath for all I could tell to the contrary. Very -slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept up to my eyes. Then I -went under and the skin seemed to break and heal again about my eyes. The -moon gave a jump up in the sky and grew green and dim, and fish, faintly -glowing, came darting round me--and things that seemed made of luminous -glass; and I passed through a tangle of seaweeds that shone with an oily -lustre. And so I drove down into the sea, and the stars went out one by -one, and the moon grew greener and darker, and the seaweed became a -luminous purple-red. It was all very faint and mysterious, and everything -seemed to quiver. And all the while I could hear the wheels of the -Bath-chair creaking, and the footsteps of people going by, and a man in -the distance selling the special Pall Mall. - -"I kept sinking down deeper and deeper into the water. It became inky -black about me, not a ray from above came down into that darkness, and the -phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter. The snaky branches of -the deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit-lamps; but, after a -time, there were no more weeds. The fishes came staring and gaping towards -me, and into me and through me. I never imagined such fishes before. They -had lines of fire along the sides of them as though they had been outlined -with a luminous pencil. And there was a ghastly thing swimming backwards -with a lot of twining arms. And then I saw, coming very slowly towards me -through the gloom, a hazy mass of light that resolved itself as it drew -nearer into multitudes of fishes, struggling and darting round something -that drifted. I drove on straight towards it, and presently I saw in the -midst of the tumult, and by the light of the fish, a bit of splintered -spar looming over me, and a dark hull tilting over, and some glowing -phosphorescent forms that were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them. -Then it was I began to try to attract Widgery's attention. A horror came -upon me. Ugh! I should have driven right into those half-eaten--things. If -your sister had not come! They had great holes in them, Bellows, and ... -Never mind. But it was ghastly!" - - -

For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at -the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind -to the world around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I called I met old -Davidson in the passage. "He can see his thumb!" the old gentleman said, -in a perfect transport. He was struggling into his overcoat. "He can see -his thumb, Bellows!" he said, with the tears in his eyes. "The lad will be -all right yet." - -I rushed in to Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his face, -and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way. - -"It's amazing," said he. "There's a kind of patch come there." He pointed -with his finger. "I'm on the rocks as usual, and the penguins are -staggering and flapping about as usual, and there's been a whale showing -every now and then, but it's got too dark now to make him out. But put -something there, and I see it - I do see it. It's very dim and -broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint spectre of -itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing me. It's like -a hole in this infernal phantom world. Just put your hand by mine. No - not -there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff! It -looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the darkling -sky. Just by it there's a group of stars like a cross coming out." - -From that time Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like his -account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of -vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and -through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about -him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together and spread until -only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to -get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, and -behave like an ordinary citizen again. At first it was very confusing to -him to have these two pictures overlapping each other like the changing -views of a lantern, but in a little while he began to distinguish the real -from the illusory. - -At first he was unfeignedly glad, and seemed only too anxious to complete -his cure by taking exercise and tonics. But as that odd island of his -began to fade away from him, he became queerly interested in it. He wanted -particularly to go down into the deep sea again, and would spend half his -time wandering about the low-lying parts of London, trying to find the -water-logged wreck he had seen drifting. The glare of real daylight very -soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out everything of his shadowy -world, but of a night-time, in a darkened room, he could still see the -white-splashed rocks of the island, and the clumsy penguins staggering to -and fro. But even these grew fainter and fainter, and, at last, soon after -he married my sister, he saw them for the last time. - - -

And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after his -cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins -called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant, talkative -man. He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and was soon on -friendly terms with me. It came out that he was engaged to Davidson's -cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket photograph case to -show us a new rendering of his fiancée. "And, by-the-by," said he, -"here's the old Fulmar." - -Davidson looked at it casually. Then suddenly his face lit up. "Good -heavens!" said he. "I could almost swear -" - -"What?" said Atkins. - -"That I had seen that ship before." - -"Don't see how you can have. She hasn't been out of the South Seas for six -years, and before then -" - -"But," began Davidson, and then, "Yes - that's the ship I dreamt of; I'm -sure that's the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that -swarmed with penguins, and she fired a gun." - -"Good Lord!" said Atkins, who had never heard the particulars of the -seizure. "How the deuce could you dream that?" - -And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson was -seized, H.M.S. Fulmar had actually been off a little rock to the -south of Antipodes Island. A boat had landed overnight to get penguins' -eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the boat's crew -had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship. Atkins had been -one of them, and he corroborated, word for word, the descriptions Davidson -had given of the island and the boat. There is not the slightest doubt in -any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place. In some -unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight -moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded, about this distant -island. How is absolutely a mystery. - -That completes the remarkable story of Davidson's eyes. It's perhaps the -best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance. -Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has -thrown out. But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a -dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being "a kink -in space" seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am no -mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the -place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points might be a -yard away on a sheet of paper, and yet be - -brought together by bending the -paper round. The reader may grasp his argument, but I certainly do not. -His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big -electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements -through the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning. - -He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live -visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another. He -has even made some experiments in support of his views; but, so far, he -has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs. I believe that is the net -result of his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks. Latterly I -have been so busy with my work in connection with the Saint Pancras -installation that I have had little opportunity of calling to see him. But -the whole of his theory seems fantastic to me. The facts concerning -Davidson stand on an altogether different footing, and I can testify -personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given. - -[*IMAGE] -davidson.gif - -[*ITEM] -Streaming Video -[*AUTHOR] -Ian Thomas -[*BLURB] -I wasn't expecting to include any poetry in this magazine, but this short offering -from Ian Thomas changed my mind. -[*DESCRIPTION] -

A small black LCD projector casts a beam of cold blue light
-On a polished granite wall
-In an empty and windswept cemetery
-Joy, Wonder, Hate, Regret flash rapid fire across the screen/timeline
-The shape of a life, an abstract, to which no form can be assigned
-Until observed or given context - -A silver wire running tight and parallel to the other wires
-So tight and so parallel that it has no choice, but to weave among them
-Taking its place among the muted gray coaxial
-Its ending lost in other beginnings
-And always the fear of sent information, always the fear of completion - -When ghosts and echoes light up memory
-Strawberries, first kisses, betrayals, and failures
-Will all taste differently than they did on
-The solid, reach-out-and-grab of the present
-The past still visible, but increasingly less so
-The vapor trail that follows a jet
-As it makes its way across a cloudless sky of ultra-blue
-The yet to come stretched out ahead like perpetual threat
-A promise that intrinsically cannot be kept - -Standing against the empty gratifications of nostalgia and hope
-There is no match for the vividness of here
-Here where you sit, stand, love, hate, and live
-Here where everything is happening - -There is only here
-And there is only you - - © Ian Thomas 2007 All Rights Reserved - - -[*ITEM] -A Sort of Editorial -[*AUTHOR] -The Editor -[*BLURB] -An Editorial and a Cartoon -[*DESCRIPTION] -

I never read editorials myself, not unless the editor is an eminent writer -in his own right, which I am not. To tempt you in, however, I give you Liam Baldwin's "Dave's -Bad Day" from -Scratching My Itch. - -This is the first issue of Mythaxis, and I am obliged to the authors for trusting me -with my red pencil and their work. We already have nearly enough material for -another issue. Experience shows that it will take a couple of months to select and build -the next one, but a next one there will be. - -Gil Williamson, 4 February 2008 - -[*IMAGE] -2001a.jpg - -[FINISH] - - -[*ITEM] -Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang -[*AUTHOR] -Chris Lites -[*BLURB] -Children's Book Author Shot at Signing Event. Were the books that bad? -[*DESCRIPTION] -

These days, who you spend the rest of your life with has a lot less -to do with finding your soul mate and a lot more to do with when you -die. So, here, bleeding to death on the floor of the Borders -Superstore, under the brighter than near-death halogens, the moms -and their children crowded around, the staff watching the young, -pissed-off divorcée running out the emergency exit, the blonde wig -caught in the door when the alarm goes off - right now it looks like -I spend the rest of my life with Geraldine Marie Celeste, and we -haven't ever even slept together. My most successful adult -relationship was with my literary agent, and she doesn't even know -my real name. - -Lying here, Rorschaching my pedestrian type 'O' all -over the carpet, Geraldine leans over me. Red Yves Saint-Laurent -skirt riding up her black nylon thighs, she takes a Gauloise from -her purse and models it between her new porcelain teeth for which I -no doubt paid. - -"This carpet was selected in Denver by a team of -Swiss design consultants," she quotes me from a company marketing -prospectus she swiped, "Chosen for its calming effects and ability -to conceal most minor stains. It's the same in every store; it -promotes certain alpha waves conducive to calm purchasing and -browsing." - -Keeping the victim alert and calm is important in any -first-aid situation. - -She looks at the ever growing puddle of me, -"But I don't think that it will be able to conceal this." Here on -the floor my limbs are turning to ice. I tell Geraldine, this is it, -this is my dramatic exit, my big goodbye, my close-up, my death -scene finale. Then I actually say it, really, utter those clichéd -words: "I'm so cold." - -

The alarm from the emergency door is still ringing, -the wig swinging in it like the severed tail of a woodland creature.
-Geraldine groans, a puff of French smoke -escaping through her nostrils. "Of course you are. They keep the -temperatures just sub-arctic to promote customers' continuous -movement. In order to stay warm, they have to keep moving, keep -browsing. It also triggers the urge for a warm drink, say overpriced -coffee beverages." - -And once again, it's not about me. - -All my -prepubescent male fans are gathered around horrified, their faces -rewound versions of all their moms, looking on in shock and -sympathy. Down here my vision is reduced to a forest of single mom -legs, to smooth calves in pumps and trainers, a micro-wonderland of -Manolo Blahnik's, Jimmy Choo's, Yohji Yamamoto Adidas; all their -money goes straight to the feet. I could so totally get laid here -tonight, with all the sympathy projected at me. - -For years, I -didn't know women could wear things like this. I didn't know they -existed. I spent the first half of my life being taught dogmatically -how to idolize women, the second half trying to learn how to -objectify them. I never really caught up. At 38 and halfway through -a book tour, life has become just another story you tell yourself, -just another coping strategy in a long history of misguided -reinvention. Being gut shot isn't so much as a step down as what -they call a lateral move. - -The gunshot wound, the GSW to be all hip -and technical, it doesn't always have to hurt. It could resemble -gastroenteritis creeping through your bowels. It could be -appendicitis, gallstones, or a urinary tract infection. This is -tolerable, really. - -We always over dramatize. - -Geraldine is leaning -over me. I can see the strand of pearls dangling between the soft -white half-moons of her breasts framed between the menstrual -burgundy lapels of her blazer. She tells me it's not as bad as it -looks. - -This is always true, except for the last time, then it is as -bad as it looks. - -The alarm from the emergency door is still ringing, -the wig swinging in it like the severed tail of a woodland creature. -Moms and kids have begun to gush. It's a pity party for yours truly, -a validation of all my hard work at avoiding the real story in my -life. By the strand of pearls, I pull Geraldine down closer to me. - -"Give me some tampons." - -"It's not my time of the month, sorry." - -"Tampons, they can work as field dressings." Tampons are just the -right size for stuffing small caliber wounds. They are made to -absorb blood after all. - -One day I was going to write a real book, I -swear. - -Geraldine puts her cigarette in my mouth; it's red, glossy -and wet with the taste of her. She searches through her purse, -eventually producing a can of Mace and some hotel mints. I vaguely -roll my head at the lines of mothers gathered National Geographic -herd style around me, the fallen zebra. Geraldine sighs and stands -up, her skirt not quite falling back down, and you can see she's -wearing black lace garters and matching underwear hugs the cleft of -her ass. Geraldine asks very loudly, do any of the women have some -tampons for the shot author? They would really help, as bandages, -she says. - -Like it was her idea. - -And the mothers all reach into -their purses and pull out hundreds of multi-color wrappers, a -rainbow of tampons which Geraldine brings over to me, smile amped up -like she's about to tell me what I've won. - -I ask Geraldine, "Are -there any, you know, like organs lying around?" If there are, I -tell her, she has to pick them up with something clean, and lay them -on my chest till the paramedics arrive. Meanwhile, she should try -and stuff some tampon padding into the wound. She isn't happy about -any of this, but takes her cigarette out of my mouth and puts it -back into hers, which is the closest we've come to kissing unless -you count Ibiza. She starts opening the tampons. - -First aid is about -stabilizing the victim until the paramedics arrive. Paramedics -stabilize you until you can be moved to the ER, where they stabilize -you until you can go to the OR. It's all a game of keeping you alive -long enough until you are someone else's problem. - -Tell me about it. - -Geraldine, stuffing the tampons into the hole in my abdomen, the -moms covering their sons' eyes, she says, "I think you're often more -trouble than you're worth." - -She says, "This isn't in our contract." - -Alexander, the glossy 2D cardboard cartoon version of me, lording -above us, wouldn't disagree. He's my ticket to all of this - the -money, the fame, the sex. The little bastard, a cyberspace version -of Harry Potter, everyone's fucking hero. Standing there with his -impossible smile, surely he and Geraldine have the same dentist. -He's just waiting for me die; he's been waiting for it since we were -kids. You could say I owe it to him, the little fucker. - -

Before The Colony, before Dr. Charlotte Wang, before -writing the Alexander series, before pimping my inner child to get laid, -before being gut shot at the Border's Superstore, there was Mother, -Father, Alex and me. Then there was just me and Mom, and gradually less -of Mom, really, with a little bit of her slipping away each day. - -Here was Dad being all Saturday morning cartoon Popeye on his particular -strain of spinach. In Dad's case, it came in clear glass bottles, but it -seemed to work all the same. He'd get really crazy and really strong, -mushing his vowel sounds just like the little sailor and always ready to -tussle, especially with Mom. - -I can see Mom getting knocked to the floor, -being totally this face of surprise at how fast she got there. I can see -Alex, my little brother, by all of thirteen minutes - but important when -you're both seven - starting to wail, not seeing it for the really good -show it is, and Dad giving him a little of the old Popeye forearm. Only -Alex was smaller than Mom and flew back, hitting the corner of the -downstairs table, his head making that jarring cracking noise, like when -a piece of wood pops in the fire. - -Then the big gaping hole of mother's -scream, like a Muppet, and how I could see that little dangling thing -that hangs down. Her scream came on as a train and Dad's spinach wearing -off right then, shocked by how things had gone. Alex was clearly not -going to get up from that tussle and I, stupid little shit that I was, -laughed this little giggle, the only thing I could do. - -Mom came out from -behind the bar and leveled the gun at Dad. The barrel made a ratchet -noise like the sprinkler when it twisted back before it sprayed the -lawn. Dad made those big bulging cartoon eyes of shock. Then there was -the bang, a big hole in Dad and another mess on the floor. - -And that's -how my family went from four to two in the space of an afternoon. Mom -and I wound up living out of motels and stolen cars until she wandered -into the stranger wilds of the militant feminist hardcore movement -dragging me along with her. - -Here I am now, in the thick tangle of the morphine, or of whatever pain -killers they gave me, in the warm confusion of the hypovolemic shock -that's set in. All of it is tangled together now, ropes of semen-like -stickiness. I'm inside of it, gummy and pressing, my movement coming as -some slow-motion, narcoticized mime. Alexander is here, though if he's -my brother or my character I can't say for sure, but he's blaming me for -everything. - -After he died, it was all on me, the blame not divided two -ways anymore, and the more you can divide something the less it has to -feel. But now it's all on me again, here in this medicinal womb. My -fault for his being written as a latch-key kid, for living in a -role-playing game online, for his mom being divorced, for his being -dead. - -But it's all so cool with me right now; it's all very groovy and -psychedelic here in the warm cozy shell of pharmacological denial. Here, -it isn't my fault, not any of it - not the dead brother, not the profiting -from his memory, not the validation sex, and certainly not my -tremendous inability to cope with members of the opposite sex. All of -that is Mom's fault, Mom and Dr. Charlotte Wang. - -Just stabilize please, -long enough for it to be someone else's problem, long enough to pass the -blame. Here is good, here I can just curl up into this milky white muck -and regress... - -

Picture a half Chinese girl on a Tennessee playground, glasses nerd -regulation thick. She's in a lime green sweater being teased by the -boy-ape hicks of her particular yardage of the Bible belt. The boy-apes -hurling insults to the twanging rhyme of "Charlotte Wang knows -everythang." And this little girl, behind her ashtray lenses, holding -back her tears, her big super brain and yellow skin making it really -impossible to get along here, she's forming a whole well of displaced -hatred. The boys taking it farther and farther, one day too far -altogether, and nothing ever being the same after that, not for any of -us. This girl retreats inside, deciding those little teenage rapist -bastards were right about one thing, Charlotte Wang does know -everything. - -Mom and I bounced around the country, motel rooms strung together like -post cards from the depths of one really horrible, unending summer -vacation. - -"Hello from Shithole Arkansas!" - -"Truck Stop 22, Your Last Chance For Pussy Before Texas!" - -"Greetings From Crawdad! Homemade Meth Capital of Mississippi!" - -The monotony of the looping road giving her -time to come to the conclusion that Dad killed Alex, Dad was a man, men -were therefore a bad, bad thing. So, when the two of us had come upon -Charlotte preaching the same ideology around bonfires at midnight -rallies, well of course they were going to hit it off. And when two -angry, lonely women decide to take on half the species together, it -isn't surprising they're going to call it love. Maybe it even is. -Charlotte started The Colony in southern California, and that's where, -for the most part, I was raised. - -Picture The Colony as a Star Trek episode written by Valerie Solanas -minus the itchy trigger finger for Andy Warhol. Picture Hippie Space Chicks done -up in diaphanous pastels, wearing odd, angular jewelry, soft lit by the -sun and smelling of the orange groves the men tended. All of them living -in a matriarchal society that Charlotte preached would inherit the -earth; only by the time they did they wouldn't be the meek. They'd be -the smart, brilliant, rightful heirs to the global brain of "Mother -Gaia" which alternately was expressed by Charlotte as a collective -acid-trip telepathy experience or something like a networked computer -hive-mind. Charlotte really did know just about "everything", or anyway, -so it seemed to an eight year old boy whose mother had disappeared into -a world of hate, utopian madness and misdirected grief and guilt. - -It's a -recruitment drive in Tuscaloosa, Charlotte all Der Furher behind a box -podium at the state fair. Over a hundred sweat-drenched women rallied -around her as she took the stage of the beauty pageant. The contestants' -perma-grins turning into horror as all the angry women were riled by -Charlotte's fist waving speech. Those scared, defenseless pageant girls, -quivering in their swimsuit competition outfits. Oh! Just seeing them, -I'd picture Neanderthal scenes, bestial rutting, shadows locked together -in frenzied coupling, thrown up as on some cave wall. With everything I -wanted to do to them playing out in one lugubrious porno spool of -pre-adolescent boy-fantasy, right then I could see where maybe Charlotte -was right. - -But, no, I'd get bused back to The Colony. I'd tend the orange groves -with the other boys, clean the cabins, sew the clothes and cook the -meals, do all your chores and hope that maybe one of the girls would -want to have you visit her one night. The hope was one would want you to -have you service her, as they sometimes did, just so you could do your -thing, just so she could see what it was like. Later, after dumping my -DNA, not impressing her much at all, one of the girls showed me where to -listen in on one of Charlotte's lectures. She was preaching to the women -about re-writing the program. Men, it seemed, were little monkeys wired -for epileptic spasms of humping, trying to get their code into the -nearest port, replicate their sad little programs. They had wired the -world, using their penis and the Y chromosome to set things up a certain -way, but that isn't how it had to be. It could all be written over -again, you just had to change your part in the narrative, said Charlotte. -Everything is a story, a program waiting to be hacked. - - -Here in the warm halogen center of an antiseptic white room, the paper -angels speak in the technical language of Elysium, words like -laparotomy, medial visceral rotation, proximal flesh wound... the angels -are searching my guts with their smooth latex hands; they are looking -for my soul. Covered in their effort to find my sacred little center, -the angels are here to save me. Each one, so beautiful. Especially that -one, so familiar, like the angel who shot me, only more like a man now, -but in a yellow paper outfit and mask. That angel has forgotten to -remove one of his earrings, but no one else seems to notice. And he's -looking at me, scaring me because this one isn't an angel at all. And -he's smiling behind his heavenly mask, so as to keep my mortal germs off -him. This beautiful man looks so much like someone I'm sure I used to -know. - - -Sometimes I wake up above flyover country. You know where it is, you -probably live there. It's between the coasts, between the places people -actually want to go. I wake up under the hiss of climate control, and -the shoals of clouds outside my first class window start to describe a -trail of all the twisted sheets, smudged lipstick, and violated mothers -that I left behind. Keep moving, stay ahead. It looks worse than it is, -really, except for the last time of course. - -Then it is as bad as it -looks. - -They're all the same, all fractioned off from the same damaged -girl archetype. Abused, used, and now looking for more, the Tammys and -Taras, the Arlenes and Monas. You know who these girls are, you probably -are one, right now waiting for "the one", not Prince Charming, but the -guy Prince Charming keeps in the dungeon. It's love me, hate me, fuck -me, validate me, then treat me like shit. They all want to feel like -crap; they want what I'm willing to be. I fold neatly into the narrative -of their lives. - -

There I am, look at me. The line out the door, everybody is excited to -meet the author and shake his hand, none of them knowing he's going to -be getting shot here in just a few minutes, none of them knowing that -today they're going to get to be on the news. - -And everybody wants to be on TV, it's so validating. - -Meet Jamie Box from Boise which is in Idaho. -She's brought her son; he's dressed up as one of the Furies 2.0. The -Furies are mean, female avatars running loose in my books. Look at this -poor kid, nine years old and well on his way to gender dysphoria. - -I can relate. - -Meet Jeanette and Billy Marsh. Meet Fran and Marvin Kelsey. Meet -Tara and Nathan Whoever. - -While in line, little elf-like store helpers -have written the boys and mother's names on post-it notes on the title -pages. All I have to do is write "to", copy their name, and sign my own. -It's an assembly line. Every book, every signature I give, I'm tracking -your love, your approval of my sad little soul. I mark it in the lines -at these signings, the Amazon sales numbers, the royalty checks, even -the stupid costumes in which you and your kids show up. I'm smiling at -you and asking your name. It's going on my list with a little tick, one -more drop in the bucket for "Telethon Me". Field a few questions, smile, -nod, pose for a picture. - -How many of you get your photos back and wonder -why the author looks like he's about to cry? How many of you wonder if -the author is staring down your dress? You think I write these little -Alexander books because I enjoy them? Every word I write is a plea; -every letter is begging you: please, love me, pay attention to me, -redeem my sick and twisted childhood, pay me for my misery. Help me -franchise and sell enough of my fictional childhood and maybe the real -one doesn't feel so original, the real one doesn't hurt so much. - -Look at -this kid, coming up, his eyes agog, seeing his hero, you know, a rôle -model and the mother, in her Made in Malaysia sweater, is hoping I can -be the same for her. You're pushing middle age honey; you're saddled -with a kid, and that sneaking suspicion that no man will ever really -want you again, for the long haul? It's dead-on. We're scum, the lot of -us. My prescription: take two Oprahs and call a suicide hotline in the -morning. Next. - -But I just smile and sign the book. I hate her, I hate -all of them, I hate you because you adore me. That's proof enough you -are all defective. Except for the pissed off blond, the young one -reaching into the purse, I don't hate that one. With blue eyes peeking -over shades perched just so on the bridge of an avian nose, the next -moments break down into Tarantino storyboards. The platinum blond, -pulling out the gun, the sweep of the wig cutting the air, the wet, -labial pink of over-glossed lips as the gun finds yours truly. This one -who looks so familiar, pointing the gun, the crowd screaming. Me -mouthing this unspoken plea in the air between us as the barrel turns -and loads its wad. - -"Please don't fuck this up." - -

Somewhere in the dark, hospital non-hours of night, waking to the steady -distal pulse of my own beating flesh echoed on the electronic monitors, -I'm reminded of nights in Charlotte's medical compound, the physical -center of all her warped, tormented dreams. Every now and then, from -whatever chore you were doing, one of the space-honeys would call you -in, and you'd go up to the looming brown building on the hill, to the -coolness of air-conditioning and clean rooms. I'd have tests, cultures, -samples, bits of this and that taken, all in Charlotte's effort to -release her sex from needing ours to keep the species from a product -recall. Charlotte was waging a one woman war with the Y chromosome; it -was her locus of obsession, the point at which all her dementia converged. -Charlotte would put it in simple terms your defective man-brain -could understand. There are these chromosomes and, on these chromosomes -sit your genes. Picture them like these little DNA crows ranged along -telephone wire outside the white trash neighborhood of your gene pool. -They sit there, these crows, these genes. There's a cystic fibrosis -gene, genes for various muscular dystrophies, several forms of cancer, -and on your Y chromosome, the gene that causes maleness. Think of it -like any other inherited disease. Mr. Bojangles is just a functional -tumor; your testosterone is just the antibody to the cancer that is -you. Charlotte is the Mr. Wizard of matriarchal genetics. - -But those -nights weren't so bad, being poked and prodded and for the first time -looked after by females. So that tonight, I'm not altogether displaced -here among the machine dreams and coded sounds of the hospital, watching -the orderly consult my IV with a practiced eye. He smiles at me with a -face so very familiar. Look, there I am, giving myself a shot. Or rather -Alex is. Nice of him, he's all grown up, telling me it's going to be OK, -I won't feel a thing. I smile and nod, and I'm sure Alex is right. I'm -sure I won't. It feels warm, the sensation of medicine being pushed into -my vein. Funny, really, something other than my heart is motivating my -blood. And is that the hint of lipstick Alex still has on? Bubblegum -Orgy if I'm not mistaken, it's really big with certain Japanese -schoolgirls. Don't ask me how I know this. - -Alex is my avenging angel; -he's come to get his due. My man-brain takes over, fight or flight -atavisms kicking in. There's an overdose in that syringe, says the brain -stem, and overdose means death. Death is bad says the brain stem. My -frontal lobe would argue, but brain stem is off and running with those -ancient lizard legs that first tasted land. Brain-stem is making all the -decisions for us now. The body listens to brain stem and rolls off of -the bed, pulling the IV right out of my arm with a little pop, a -contrail of crimson blood arcing up above me. - -Alex yells, but it's -very far away behind the nice cotton buffer of the drug he started to -give me; then he's on top of me, and I'm looking at myself, rewound to -half my actual age. I say to myself, "Jesus, I really don't have a lot -to look forward to. I really look like shit." - -Then I try to strangle -myself, reaching out from above me, straddled on top of myself. From out -of the intervening years between us, Alex's two ghost arms are wrapped -around our throat. Squeezing and squeezing because he really shouldn't -have been the one that died. Gripping tighter for each year he's missed. -His eyes a fury for it being all my fault. Just like everyone else, -passing the blame along. Then Alex groans because brain stem has told -the body to knee him right in the crotch. Laying there, grabbing -himself and wincing in pain, looking a lot like how Alex might have -looked if he'd grown up. His eyes all teary and his voice this neutered -whine, he's wanting to know how I could have left his mom, just like -that. - -"Which one, which one was your mom?" not the best way to phrase -it, I'll admit. But there isn't time for reconsideration, as Alex has -that gun out again, ready to reenact our little drama from this morning, -only this time getting it right. I'm out the door, down a blurred fugue -of white on white hospital corridor, of biohazard warnings, bleating -machines, out the fire door and gone. - -

Geraldine looks at me from under the ghastly lighting scheme of a 2AM -diner. Her blue DKNY pants suit is offset against the rough stone work -of the Googie style restaurant. Tonight her lips are the blood red of -vampire flicks, the fantasy sanguine of certain fetishes. The specific -color is called My Beating Heart if I'm not mistaken. After footwear I -became obsessed with women's lips. I'm wearing some emergency clothes -she carries in her trunk when I'm on tour in the event of a midnight -escape from some woman's balcony or a half-hearted suicide attempt in a -hotel swimming pool. Geraldine is smoking her Gauloises, her mouth -performing precise, tight little 'O' kisses around the wet pale tip. She -isn't saying anything, just blowing on her coffee. I've laid out the -whole sordid history of my past and Geraldine's looking as if I'm a -favorite horse that might have to be put down. - -"You should be back in -the hospital," her perfect smoke ring floating between us. Peritonitis -could set in, some internal sutures might have been torn, I could bleed -out, exsanguinate right here. Really, I swear. Geraldine reaches into -her purse and pulls out a prescription bottle of Percocet. She filters -out two shiny pills and slides them across the table, then makes her -eyebrow into a question mark, saying: "Or should I just give you the -whole bottle?" - -I tell her I ran away from a gun-wielding madman. - -"Who's your son." - -I nod. - -"From The Colony, where you had sex with beautiful -space hippies." - -I nod. - -"Where you picked oranges and were taught that -woman shall inherit the Earth." - -I nod. - -Geraldine lights another -cigarette off the butt of her current one, sucking in a big, -lipstick-wet cumulous of smoke. "You know, this morning I thought you -arranged this whole thing as an elaborate suicide farewell." - -"And now?" - -"Now I think you've got an even better story. This whole 'crazy mom takes -young, famous author into a feminist hippie cult'? This is money, no two -ways about it." Sublimate. Pimp your childhood. - -Geraldine sees me being -all contemplative and sighs... "What?" - -"I need you to drive me to Southern -California." - -She calls the waitress for the check. She puts out -her Gauloise with a ferocious twist of her white lacquered nails. "I'm -supposed to believe this?" - -I shrug. - -"You're not going to find yourself -or anything out there, you know? This isn't a movie or anything." - -Of course it is. It's the movie of my life. - -

Geraldine drives a sensible, yet stylish cobalt blue BMW. It has power -and efficiency, both of which I fundamentally lack at this early Sonoma -hour. Under this cocktail dawn you want to see poured into a fresh -martini glasses, The Colony seems to be all but abandoned. The well -ordered groves picked clean and the lodges in disrepair. Peeling paint -on old clapboard has gone the universal silver of old wood under the -sun. Screen doors squeak in the wind, grass having since reclaimed old -paths. Geraldine surveys the landscape from behind her neutral zone of -Armani shades and lights another cigarette. "This place is a real dump." - -It's not the Edenic Paradise from nearly two decades ago. All the space -honeys have beamed up to Charlotte's final frontier, the last crazy away -mission in her master plan for the species, gendercide. - -I tell her to -drive us up to the medical center. She rolls her eyes under those -two-hundred dollar frames and flicks out her French cigarette. I watch -it skip and spark across my childhood as I get back into the car. - -Yellow Ryder moving vans gather in front of the squat medical center, a -60's throwback to Bauhaus. Women are loading boxes. Strong women, -beautiful women, older now, but they still radiate that opiate of belief -that Charlotte spews. Twenty years ago, one of them may have had a -forgettable night with yours truly, letting me dump my code, bringing -buggy operations down upon the whole system all these years later. - -Two younger girls appear - twins, blonde, tawny and all Doublemint fantasy. -Fantasy, until I catch them from another angle as they turn. I see they -aren't two at all; they're connected at the waist, moving in strange -tandem. Another pair follow behind them, same as the first, same hair, same -eyes and the same potato-sack gait. - -I look at -Charlotte, ticking off a PDA as each box of equipment is hoisted onto a -truck. Her hair pulled back in a severe bun and wearing a sea-foam -sarong, this whole scene could be recycled from ancient Egypt; -Nefertiti supervising a grand public works, if Nefertiti were a middle-aged -Chinese-American with Sapphic lover who happened to be your mother. -There's Mom, wearing a white Flash Gordon sari, and after Labor Day, no -less. - -Hi, Mom. - -Charlotte sees me first and she's not happy at all. Mom -sees me next, her face the accumulation of years between us, her -emotional floodgates opening in a way they never quite did for -Charlotte. - -Mom rushes up to me. Her tears staining the white of her -sari, me blinking my own away as the two of us have our own emotional -episode right here in front of the middle-aged space honeys, my agent, a -gendercidal feminist cult leader, circus side-show Doublmint girls, and -Alex. Oh yes, there he is, coming out of the main building, holding that -same goddamn gun. - -Mom saying, "Oh my God..." - -Charlotte smiling at me, -one eyebrow arched just so. - -Charlotte Wang, knowing how to tie up all loose ends. - -Then Alex, coming down the stairs, the space honeys watching -him; but do any have that twinge of maternal attachment? The conjoined -twins watching him, Charlotte, and Mom, watching him. - -There's Mom with -tears in her eyes, looking from Alex to me. Alex, close up in the sun, -suddenly not looking like Alex, looking exactly like Alex. The two of -us don't look like father and son. Alex and I look like unevenly-aged -identical twins. Alex approaches Mom, standing in front of her -protectively, and points the gun at me. Like I could be more shocked -here, Alex? - -Charlotte Wang, really knowing everything. Alex pulling back -the hammer on the gun, pleading, "Mom, you said I was special, Mom? But -you lied." - -All those nights in Charlotte's lab, those blood tests. Of -course he looks just like Alex. Of course he looks just like me. -Franchise yourself. Make enough copies and the original doesn't have to -hurt so much. His eyes, my eyes, are full again with tears, clearly he -cannot grasp what's really going on. He's probably got the memory of a -goldfish in there. Degraded like an MP3 passed round too many times, he -just can't work it out. Mom tries to console him, but he shakes his -head, tears flying off like a wet dog trying to dry itself. Then his -eyes click back on me. - -And bang. - -Down I go. - -What you'd see if you were -Geraldine, or Charlotte, if you weren't right in front, is the bullet go -right through me and a micro-Hiroshima of blood burst out my back. Then -you'd see me just stand there for a second, dumbfounded. My feet -collapse, then the knees, then rest of me, the accordion let down as the -whole existential scaffolding just gives up. - -This pen, out of ink. - -This -program, crashing. - -Right before I pass out, right before Alex is going -to finish me off, I see Mom screaming, the big cavern of her yell from -three decades past suddenly resurrected. Charlotte's realizing she lost -Mom, right here in the frozen pause of that replayed scream as Geraldine -reaches into her purse and Maces Alex, full load. The entire chemical -right in his face, before I can tell her, really, don't bother, please, -not on my account. - -The rest you saw. Or read. Or heard. Like any story, like any good virus, it's everywhere now. - -On the internet. - -In the movie. - -In the book. - -In the opening monologue. - -Wherever. - -The crazy matriarchal cult that shot that writer, the writer who wrote -those kid's books. It's franchised everywhere. It's copied into -everyone's head. It's everybody's story, which maybe means it doesn't -have to be mine. - -You know how Mom had to leave Charlotte, to help me -recover from the gunshot, how Charlotte just disappeared along with all -the space honeys. If you saw the movie, Mom was Frances McDormand, -Charlotte was Joan Chen. They're both too young. - -You were aware of all -the hype, Alex being arrested, but the government being more interested -in his genetic history than his predilection for shooting writers. Then -the whole thing sort of went away. Certain biotech firms made a bunch of -patents, stocks shot up, maybe you made a bunch of money. - -Then you heard -about all the girl babies. - -It didn't seem like anything at first, an -anomaly, but pretty soon doctors started to figure out there were just -too many female babies being born. The odds were astronomical. There -were investigations as more little girls were being born and more little -boys were not. Then you heard about the virus, the modified STD, the one -that was piggybacking on all those Y chromosomes, getting them drunk, -filling their heads with distractions and booze right before the big -game. You know, right before it's time to come out and perform, to make -a man, all those Y chromosomes laying down on the job, just not -bothering to make boys. - -Then it got worse. You watched as more girls and -fewer and fewer boys were born. By that time, Mom, Alex and I were -already gone. At some point, you probably said to yourself, damn, damn -that Charlotte Wang. We try and keep low these days, but it's hard. I've -enough money in royalties and license fees from Geraldine, shuttled to -accounts that I can afford to keep us in this quiet, out of the way -spot. A sliver of beach, a square of tropical sky, and the rest of my -life a tangle with my soul-mate Alex, my self. Call it the Cain and -Abel of the 21st century. Too bad he's a little poorly coded in the DNA -department. - -Mom says Charlotte worked out a way to make girl babies -from two eggs, no sperm need apply. My kind is reaching the end of its -product life cycle; there's been a planet wide recall on the series, -courtesy of Charlotte Wang. That's OK, it wasn't like they were doing -anything new with the brand. It was long overdue. - -At night, in a hot -tropical room, Mom and Alex out along the shore, I sit in the sweat of -beach evenings and picture orange groves, fields of bright crops growing -over a planet under an endless string of blue days. In the orchards, -flitting between the trees, I can hear the lilting voices of girls, -followed by the flitting glimpses of their perfect, naked little forms, -right before they smile at me and wave goodbye. - - © Chris Lites 2008 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] -charlotte.jpg - - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue2.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue2.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index f35c372a..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue2.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1990 +0,0 @@ -[*ITEM] Some Future Date - -[*AUTHOR] Callum Graham - -[*BLURB] Dating in the risk-averse age - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I was -sitting at my usual table in Gino's, knocking back a few after a hard -day at the office, when I saw her standing at the bar. A face that could -launch a thousand space shuttles, legs till forever, a real looker any -way you wanted to cut it. Our eyes met across the room, and right off the -bat I could tell she was interested; her eyes were brown but the look -she gave me was green traffic light all the way. I finished my drink and -sauntered over to the bar. - -

"What say we get to know each -other a little better while we wait?"
I nodded in the general direction of the barman. "Gimme another, Gino." -Playing it cool, making like I hadn't even seen her till I saw her. -While I waited for my drink I turned and shot her a look of my own. -Mouth set straight, one eyebrow raised; tough but tender, a little world -weary. It was a good look, one I'd practised enough to get it down pat. -The hint of a smile creased one corner of her full, pouting lips; it was -encouragement enough to hit her with a line. - -"Hey, baby, who's your lawyer?" - -Sure, it was corny, but I could tell she dug it all the same. -Those big, brown eyes walked up and down one last time, then she -replied: - -"Arthur Bingham. Bingham, Klein & Bingham." - -I flipped open my cell, punched speed-dial and waited. Gino set my drink -down on the bar and I tipped him another nod before taking a slug. At -the other end of the line a woman's voice chirped: - -"Thompson & Sons, Attorneys at Law. How may I direct your call?" - -"Let me speak to Thompson, and hold on the Sons." Brown Eyes seemed to -get a kick out of that. The London Philharmonic Plays Punk butchered -something by The Clash for a few seconds before another voice cut in: - -"Bob Thompson." - -"Bob. Jack Brenner. I need you to file a motion of intent with Bingham, -Klein & Bingham. Client name of ..." - -"Tabitha Brooks" - -"You catch that? Yeah, Brooks. Standard searches, full disclosure, usual -terms & conditions apply. Any contractual agreements to be witnessed by -Gino Fiore of Gino's Bar, Grill & Notary Services. Forward all the -paperwork to my cell and give me a call once you're done, okay?" - -I left Bob to get busy and put in another call. - -"Peter Briscoe Accountants." - -"Pete. Jack Brenner. Listen, buddy, could you make my tax returns, bank -statements, insurance coverage and a breakdown of spending habits for -the last five years available to one Tabitha Brooks, through Bingham, -Klein & Bingham, and put in a request for all reciprocal data via the -same? Sooner the better, compadre." - -"Jack, you sly dog! Consider it done." - -I rang off and turned back to Tabitha. "What say we get to know each -other a little better while we wait?" I suggested. Fifteen minutes later -we were making pretty good progress. - -Her: 2% chance of cardio-vascular -disease, clean for STD's and no insanity or hereditary illness in the -family barring an aunt on the mother's side who had a nervous breakdown -a few years back. Certainly nothing deal-breaking. - -Me: 21 million per ml -spermatozoa count, with high percentage scores for normal shape and -rapid forward mobility, 8% body fat, no history of congenital hair loss. - -We'd just about finished cross-checking medical records through an -independent healthcare service when Tabitha's phone chimed. No doubt her -lawyer ringing in with the verdict. I excused myself and headed for the -john, silently cursing the fact that Bob hadn't got back to me first. I -gave it a couple of minutes before I re-entered the bar, just as Tabitha -was winding up her conversation. It was difficult to read her face, and -I felt my stomach knot as she handed me the cell: - -"Hello?" - -"Mr Brenner? Arthur Bingham. I have been instructed by my client to -inform you that you meet with the specified legal, financial and medical -criteria as stipulated in the standard provisions for contracts of this -kind. I am duty bound to mention that there were some questions raised -by your felony / misdemeanour conviction for juvenile theft, but my -client has waived any objection on the grounds that she finds it 'cute', -although obviously not in any legally binding sense. Accordingly, I am -authorised to release her telephone number to your lawyer after the signing -of said contractual agreement in the presence of a licensed notary -public. Good day, sir." - - -I was walking on air. -Sensing we were ready to seal the deal, Gino -hustled over to witness the exchange of signatures. I told him to add -his notarisation fee to my tab; I figured even in this day and age women -still went for that chivalrous touch, and Tabitha didn't say anything to -disabuse me of the notion. As she got set to leave the bar, Tabitha -leaned in and gave me a kiss on the cheek; not strictly legal at this -stage of the proceedings, but I wasn't about to call the cops. When she -reached the door she turned and threw another killer look in my -direction: - -"It was nice meeting you Jack. I hope I'll be hearing from you soon." - -"Oh, you'll be hearing from me plenty," I replied. - -I was still staring at the empty doorway when my cell phone began to rumble -its way across the bar. A glance at the caller ID told me it was Bob. - -"Better late than never, Bobby boy. What's the good word?" - -"Jack, you're sounding chipper. I guess her people beat me to the punch. -I'm forwarding you my findings as we speak, but here are the edited -highlights. Tabitha Brooks, upscale address in Pasadena, works in the ad -game, low six figures. No arrest record, nothing untoward on the medical -checks, six registered previous relationships. Shortest was three weeks, -back when she was in college; longest was two years which -ended... eighteen months ago. It all looks pretty rosy from where I'm -sitting. Arty Bingham released her number to me five minutes ago, it's -already been downloaded to your cell. So, you gonna give her a call or -what?" - -I sighed, and waved Gino over with another shot. - -"Jesus, I don't know, Bob. Pasadena, you're talking forty-five minutes on -the freeway. I mean, seriously, who needs that kind of hassle?" - -© Callum Graham 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] -ginosbar.jpg - -[*ITEM] Red Fever - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] Almost poetry, this study of experimental subjects under pressure. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Morning comes, and I have never slept in my life. A frustrated -non-drama that sends me into the world like a kicking and screaming -rebirth. Endless, restless nights haunting me. End of the world winds -whipping against the bullet-proof glass of the modular apartments. -Trapped by the environment again, like lab rats caged. She sleeps -soundlessly in the large empty bed, while I toss and turn like a dying -man on the too compact sofa. I roll over with surrender and dismay, -rest feet on floor, elbows on knees, head in hands. Eyes closed, I -breathe raggedly, rubbing hands against scalding stubble. Opening eyes -with gravity's reluctance, -I take in her too slim, too young form, -spread in jigsaw contortions, blond fluff halo. Thin white t-shirt, -nearly transparent, rucked across bare stomach. She wears a thong, -disappearing into elusive and tantalising cracks. I shake my head, try -to break thoughts back into shards, derail that train from perilous -tracks, and fail. Life between my thighs, grows, rigid, threatening -and dominant. My stomach leaps with fear, that she will wake, and find -me sitting there, desolate and aroused. The last time we spoke we -fought, she said she hated me. Like I need to encourage her disdain by -letting her find me like this. Despite that I touch myself; unbendable -thing, that unrelenting beast. I choke on my cry, slumping, hands -thrown aside, and it stands there. I look at her lying there, and she -moans and moves, but doesn't wake, and the beast goes deeper in me, -and the thing called lust roars. - -

Men! Useless bastards, the lot of them.
-Unsteady and precarious with denial I stumble to the door, the double -layers that provide an air lock. Our suits hang there. I look out -upon my internal struggle, a Martian surface scoured by the latest -storm front, reflecting and causing the turmoil inside. These pioneer -habitations, two half moons, a dense reliant community, become a -series of isolation cells. I breathe the air of souring captivity. Red -dust, like hell's very own fabric, lifted from Martian earth and -turned to devil spirals. Between us the notion of a road, an accepted -and shared concept between the members of the colony, it's just another -fucking red strip of seared surface. The other crescent of apartments -across the way, identical to this one. Three flats along, in opposite -position from here another man stands, looking out as though into -hell. We press our hands against this specially engineered glass, -taunting each other, like mirror images that we will use to torture -ourselves. I bet his partner still loves him; I bet he is still happy -with his role in this great adventure. Great adventure, a conceptual -kick to the head, and I slide to the floor, back against the hatch, -bare hands and feet against the coarse, cheap pod floor covering. - -Cabin fever induces madness, I recognise this fact, we recognise this -fact; Martian fever is worse, the inherent idea of the alien. We were -told about this fact in orientation, prepared in sequences of -psychological tests and appraisals. Regardless, we step from familiar -planetary territories into brave new worlds, with foolish confidence -and self-assurance. Not until you are here, laid bare for the demonic -influence, for the endless tests and appraisals, can you understand. -Not until you find yourself constrained to quarters due to surface -planetary environmental conditions can you understand. Confined again, -till you feel you have spent more time trapped here than you ever did -doing your job. Scientists, explorers, adventurers, and pioneers from -the home planet searching for ways out of the horror of what we left -behind. Only to find a new horror in front, we were not designed for -this life-style, though the suggestion is that we will adapt. Rats in -a cage, we are experimental subjects abused and prodded, tick boxes on -checklists. When the storm dissipates, we will be put on the wheel -once more, running to go nowhere through all the trick questions and -character assassinations. Encouraged to inform on each other, all -those questions, like being trapped with this bitch, waiting to find -she betrayed me, wanting to strangle her, wanting to... I shake my -head free of those thoughts again. Look at her sweet face - god - -innocent and unknowing. Slight silent sighs escape me, slight silent -voice, tainted by loneliness, bitch. - -How the fuck can she sleep through this? There is a constant sound -here, the sound of filters and processors; those back stage mechanics -that keep us alive. Air filters and re-processors, recycle units -capturing and regurgitating ancillary matter, food dispensers. All -connected to the hub unit of each block, run by endless programs and -systems. Blind, unspeaking sentience that controls everything we do in -this place? You learn to filter those sounds out, but when the storm -hits... we are on a new level, the kind of howling nightmare that -triggers fever dreams and lyrical waxing. That batters you from sleep, -bloody eyed and at the end of your tether. Full of hurt and bloody -hate. I release my fists, stretch out the suddenly gathered tension -from my knuckles. It lasts only a moment, before I clench again, -violent desire demanding animal action - go on, lash out, express the -emotion. No. - -Enough. I drag myself to the shower cubicle. Start the water running -hard. And I hurt myself. And hurt myself. Head against the smooth bare -wall. Till I think my knees will give in, till I grunt, till I hurt no -more. Hands against the wall, water washes everything away. If I focus -on that sound, let it fill me, for a moment I can forget. For a -moment. Sleeplessness hits me, tidal waves of exhaustion battering my -merely human body. I drag myself back to the sofa. Too small for me, -but I curl up as best I can, hug myself, close my eyes, and pray for -sleep. Please, God, let me sleep through this hellish night, this -relentless storm. - -

Dark outside, the storm still rages, dust particles whipping around. -Lashing our building with their fine composition. Fall asleep -exhausted - sleep all day - wake up exhausted. For three days now I -have done nothing. Why do I ache so much? This confinement becomes -frustrating and dizzying. Living on edge, little tensions become -exaggerated. The waiting is difficult. Like that night before we took -off, drawn out endlessly till it grows hollow. I tug my t-shirt down, -it's rolled up while I slept. I sit there, dazed, legs half crossed, -and shoulder slumped. Tired. I'm in our bed. Alone again. Alone since -we fought, things got out of hand so quickly. Look at him. Naked on -the sofa. My man. My bear. Look at the size of him - his chest, those -arms. I want to leap on him. Wrap myself around him. I want to hold -him to me. Look at him. I hug myself. - -So quick with his shouting. Pig headed bastard. Doesn't he know I just -want him to hold me? Doesn't he know how hard it is to be trapped in -here waiting? I get so mad at everything; I end up telling him I hate -him. It makes me want to hit him. Kill him in his sleep. But I don't -even have a knife. Food comes from the hatch, ready to eat with a -spoon. You would almost think that was a deliberate move? Are those -management bastards playing with us? Are cameras recording everything -even now? Did they know it would be this bad? They told us it would be -this bad. Did we listen to them? Did we understand when they said it -would be difficult, that it would be like this? I want to brush my -hand through his hair, and to beat him to death with a spoon. I laugh, -hold myself against a cold wave, against foolishness. - -I throw myself out of bed; a clambering, graceless child. With my -skinny limbs, no wonder he doesn't find me attractive, there is -nothing of me. I pad across the floor, quietly. Standing over him, too -big for this makeshift bed, but he refused to share with me, or I with -him, one of the two. Reaching out, hesitating, finger tips so close, -close enough to touch. Look at his face, fierce and scowling. Look at -him, he plans to kill me in my sleep. Look at him, naked and -vulnerable now. Cupping himself, what is that about? Is it comforting? -Is it sexual? I don't know. I crouch beside him, mimicking him. Puff -my cheeks out - ook. Look at you, barely evolved past the gorilla. -How I want you. Sink to my knees, emptied out by thoughts of sex. -Emptied out by hunger, by that barren empty void inside. If it had -teeth it would eat you, man! I would eat you alive! Close my eyes and -breathe. Ache. A second pulsing organ in my body, a sense of life. -Breathe deeper, breathe to fight the feeling. - -I stand, straighten and stretch. Can I touch the ceiling of the pod? I -brush it lightly, such a tiny place for two people to live in. No -wonder we are bouncing off each other. I pad to the toilet, stalking -silently. Don't want to wake him, make him mad. A hole in the floor, -to squat over, underwear poised round my knees. Welcome to the future, -welcome to the hole in the ground, the luxury of being the first and -the finest. Pissing into a tank beneath the floor contents flushing -into the recycling system. Yum. Tug the tiny pair of knickers back on, -for all the difference they make. He still won't touch me. - -In a gesture of design cunning, the food/drink dispenser is beside the -shower/toilet facility. Don't think of the cyclical nature of the -system, I come out and push the button for coffee. Men! Shitting where -they eat! Wasn't that rule one in the survival guide? When did -whatever optimum tick box that is responsible for that choice outweigh -the basic rules of survival. I taste the coffee - it still tastes -bitter, still tastes wrong. I take a mouthful of denial. And just -drink the stuff. Men! Useless bastards, the lot of them. - -I walk back to the sofa. Standing over him, I feel a hundred feet -tall, towering over him. I consider pouring the coffee over him. But -it's not even hot enough to cause a memorable burn. And it might taste -like shit, but it is the only option we have. I shrug, and take -another mouthful. Close my eyes and think mechanical thoughts about -mechanical actions, and how I want to do those mechanical things. -Bastard. So I shrug and stroll over to the bed. I grab the blanket; -one of those absurd new fabrics designed especially for life on Mars, -and drag it behind me. Drag it to the air lock, lots of glass, -specially engineered, rocket ship seals round it to keep it all in -place and intact, designed to resist the storm outside at its worst. I -hunker down, place the coffee in front of me, and wrap the blanket -round myself. Not that it's cold, these pods are maintained at a -comfortable level by the hub. It's a comfort thing, to feel as though -I am held, encompassed. I cup the coffee in my hands, and settle down -to watch the storm. Hypnotised and fascinated by the patterns of the -dust. The chaotic flow of turbulent streams. Such vivid, violent reds, -even at night; the place seems alive, transformed and wondrous. One -moment everything is gone, consumed by dust. The next there are -patches of clarity, the identical block across the road visible. There -are lights on in some windows others are dark. Two blocks, 25 flats in -each, each built to hold a couple. We are the first 100 people on -Mars, and it pulses with a startling violence. - - -© Peter Morrison 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] -redfever.jpg - -[*ITEM] Eat, Monster Blue Bottle - -[*AUTHOR] Belinda A. Taylor - -[*BLURB] When you're driving and tired, there's nothing like a hitchhiker to wake you up. - -[*DESCRIPTION] - -

Getting lost in 90 degree weather is no way to end a life. -I would constantly entertain myself with outrageous fantasies when stuck -in a situation like this. On some gravel road in the middle of nowhere. Hoping that a town would appear. -The heat was gripping me inside the truck, and making the air beyond my windshield dance and move. -The rolled-down windows did nothing to help me. -I saw my dried-out body driving around in circles until a stray sheriff's car had to run me down to shake -my mummified foot from the gas. - -

"It's funny," I said, "Earlier, I thought I saw a dog with you."
My attention was refocused on the figure moving in the distance. I lost sight of it as -the road dropped into a small dip. The constant vibration of my truck was beginning to drive me nuts. -I began to wonder how something as simple as a gravel road could be relaxing when I was a boy, but so annoying -for an adult. I could only figure it was because -I was used to the smooth, well-paved roads of the city I had lived in for the last ten years. - -The figure came into view again as I topped the hill and the road levelled out. I cringed a bit as I -thought I saw a large dog walking beside him. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and saw just the boy, -and fumbled for my bottle of water. - -"I need to get out of this heat," I said, as I slowed the truck down. Then, "Hey, kid, is there a town up this way?" - -He turned and examined me with gray eyes. It was almost insulting to be assessed by someone who didn't seem -to have half the experience in life that I had gained. He appeared to decide something. - -"Yes." His voice was very smooth. - -"Thank God. Are you going that way?" - -A smirk from the child. Something in me wanted to be insulted by him, I had an impulse to hit the gas and -leave him in the dust. - -"Yes." He answered. - -"I'll give you a ride if you can keep me in the right direction." - -He just nodded and walked around the truck and got in. I looked down at his bare feet, and was -amazed how clean they were, not even a touch of dust on his feet or legs. -He held a cobalt blue glass bottle which he placed easily between his thighs as he looked forward. -I forced the old truck into gear, and we moved forward. -He didn't ask any questions, which was unusual for kids that live in this part of the world. -At his age, I was always curious about people passing through, only being able to reach beyond the small -town through books and television. -It didn't take long for me to get a little irritated by the silence he was so much at ease with. - -"It's funny," I said, "Earlier, I thought I saw a dog with you." - -His eyes didn't move from the road ahead. "No, I don't have a dog." - -I nodded. "I figure just a trick of the heat. I hate how hot it gets here in the summer." - -I think he shrugged, but I couldn't be sure. It might have been imagination on my part. -I continued to talk about my childhood here and how boring I found it. And how I wanted to travel. My family -had all been content to stay in the country and farm. It was a hell to me. I always had an itch to -be someplace else where there was more to see and do. I didn't want to marry one of the girls -I had known my entire life, though that was what was expected of me. - -"You want to travel?" I was starting to feel awkward with his silence. - -"I do," he said. His voice wasn't affected by the constant bounce of the road. I couldn't tell if he meant -'Yes, I want to travel' or 'I do travel'. One more thing to add to a growing list of things that made -this kid creepy. - -His head turned to the passenger window, looking out into the field of green -that reached forever and made this place seem even more suffocating. - -"Ended up in this mess because of this truck," I muttered to myself, not caring if the kid was listening or not. -"I bought this truck on my own. I didn't get anything from my father. My brother told me they wanted to sell it -because they were having some money problems. Only they couldn't, legally. My name is on -the title.. Growing up here sucked ass. I left it behind when I got out." - -I actually felt as though the boy was paying attention, but he still said nothing. - -"But there was no way I was going to let him sell the first thing I could call my own." I remembered the -amazed look on my brother's face when I showed up for the truck. I think he really -believed he would be doing me a favor by getting rid of it. "Let me tell ya, kid, I don't need any -more favors from him." - -I looked over at the boy. He was holding the glass bottle up to the open window. It was hard to pull my -eyes away from that deep, amazing blue. I got caught up in it, and saw something swirling inside. - -I jolted my eyes away as the truck lurched. I looked down at a pale hand on the steering wheel, holding -it straight. And back at his gray eyes watching me. - -"Don't gaze at it too long, you need to drive," he said. - -My hands were firm on the wheel again. I felt like an idiot, ranting about my brother, then getting -hypnotized by that damn bottle the kid had. - -"He didn't do nice things." The kid didn't ask. He made a statement. - -I shook my head. "No, I wasn't like him, growing up. He was quarterback on the football team. Played -baseball, Prom King, the works. Those were his glory years. I was a little dork. And for the most part -he made me feel like I was an embarrassment to him and my family." I took another swig from the warm water bottle. -"When his friends picked on me, he didn't do anything -about it. Never, not once, I hated him for that. I never got the nerve to ask him why, back then." - -"But you did, this time." The kid was holding the bottle up to the window again. - -"Yeah, when I came to get this old thing," I shook my head. "He didn't have an answer, and seemed -pissed I would even bring it up. But I really wanted to know why he would just watch them smack me -around and laugh about it." - -I could feel his eyes on me. I didn't want to look, I knew he had that bottle up. "People do things they regret." -Everything that fell out of his mouth was more than a little kid ought to know. He seemed out of place. - -"Where are you from?" I asked. - -"Not here," he answered. - -"It's dangerous to hitchhike, especially someone your age." - -I looked at him as he smiled at me. He held the bottle close to his chest, thumb over the round opening. -"Agatha is waiting for me, She'll be happy for me to get home sooner." - -"Shouldn't she come and get you?" - -He shook his head, as if I should know better. "She has things to tend to." - -I began to wonder if I should take this kid to the police station when we made it to town. - -His movement was almost too quick for me to notice, as he pointed the bottle's open end out of the window, -a moment before something hit the side of the truck hard enough to make us tilt. -We fishtailed on the gravel road even before I hit the brakes, forgetting I was driving a stick shift. We stalled -coming to a stop. -He was looking back out the rear window. I was breathing hard, clutching the wheel, afraid to look what we -hit. - -Until I heard the whisper of a growl. - -My eye went to the rear view mirror. I saw something roll out of sight to the left of the truck. -I turned, craning out of the -open driver's window as whatever it was continued to roll and toss -into the field, hitting the growing crop, kicking up dirt, and unearthing the green as it slid. -It stopped, and I gasped as it separated into two creatures, which circled each other. -Neither seemed real, one with four legs, and tight muscle, spines on its back, and a large, gaping maw. -It hissed and the spines moved like hair, then became liquid, and almost mist, before snapping back -to their solid form. The other creature was made of leftover things, things people toss in a ditch. Grass, -bones, old straw, burlap and rope, with congealing mud holding it together. -Its mouth was apparent as it bared its teeth, but the rest of its face was obscured by stuff hanging down. -And they both gave the air of wanting to kill. - -"What the hell.." I said, as they launched at each other again. Snarling, ripping and tearing at each -other. The growls should have been loud; you should have been able to hear them for miles the way -they where going at each other. But the sound barely carried to the truck. - -"Do you need help?" the boy's smooth voice inquired. - -I shook my head, not wanting to look away from the horror. - -"It's polite to ask. I'm quite sure you can take care of it." - -I realized he wasn't talking to me. - -Finally, after tearing a haphazard trail through the field, the creature with the gaping maw and -spines grasped the other by what I had to assume was the throat, pushing down with its front legs -as it stretched its head up to the sky. - -There was a sickening whisper of flesh being torn as it ripped its victim's head off and proceeded to swallow -it whole. -Part of me wanted to be sick, the other half was fascinated. I watched it devour the loser as it struggled -in death. In the end there were only a few stray pieces left. It didn't seem concerned about them as it turned -and looked at us, its moss green eyes taking in my truck. - -"We shouldn't stay here." I said. - -My panic kicked in as it turned and started towards us. I reached for the ignition and found no keys. -I looked at the boy, who was swinging them on his index finger. I reached for them, all sorts of nasty -words on my tongue. - -"We can't leave him behind." He tilted his head, eyes fixed on the creature approaching us. -"He'll catch us anyhow, he's quite fast. I bred him that way." - -I stopped, my eyes wide as saucers as the thing appeared in the open passenger window. -The boy reached -his hand out and scratched it above the eye. A whispered purr of contentment floated to me. -The kid held up the bottle and the creature flowed into the opening. I watched it until nothing -remained. I stared hard at the bottle for while, waiting to see if anything moved inside. -I looked up at the smiling boy as he handed me my keys. - -I started the truck. "You don't have a dog." - -He shook his head. "You didn't ask if had a pet." - -I nodded. "No, I didn't." - -The heat didn't seem so bad after that. I was happy to see trees spring up in the distance, and houses -dot the horizon. - -© Belinda A. Taylor 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE]bluebottle.jpg - -[*ITEM] The American Book of the Dead - -[*AUTHOR] Chris Lites - -[*BLURB] This piece is very much a homage to William Gibson, but -it is an experience all of its own. Rich brown writing, this. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

The sign pointing off the interstate -once read OASIS. Its steel bolts are scoured chrome by the sand, and -the truck stop hasn't been, not really, not -for a very long time, an oasis. - -Now, Rand sits in the last hours of sun under the -chemical hemorrhage of sky, watching the truck stop logo play itself out -in an epileptic loop of hologram butterflies. Polychrome glint reflected -in the angle of a fading wing. An old gas station logo from childhood that he -remembers. The butterflies sputter over the concrete, and -the sand that has come in to -reclaim the blacktop, winking in and out of -existence, oil-on-water wings, but the hydrogen pumps they advertise have long since ceased to -function. He watches from the motel across the street, here where -travelers would once have stayed, when these thick lanes saw traffic. -Sitting in the old deck chair out on concrete where the silt shifts -under the wind at the bottom of the pool, a gecko nearly the same blue -as the pool's faded paint regarding him with its limbic eyes. - -Rand's -fingers trace over the peeling laminate of the old photo album, cheap -even in its heyday, its cover a bubble-gum pink smudged now with age. -Inside, the happy family he has constructed awaits. -Someone else has -assembled the pictures, the post-cards, the fragments of self, -none of -them really being related except by proximity of date, but Rand has made -them into a family. On the cover, where the label card used to be, -someone has written in old marker, -in thick block capitals: THE AMERICAN -BOOK OF THE DEAD. - -Rand gathers his pack from his car, shifting the vehicle on its -carbon frame, thin and light as insect legs, just a husk now, -desiccated, powered out, useless, left here under the sun. He'll need -further transportation if he's going to continue to follow her, pursue -the steady distal pulse of her GPS across the desert. He pops open the -second to last of a self-cooling bottle of real Alaskan spring water and -thinks of his days on Farm 14, cool Pacific days along the coast so far -from the tip of Florida where he grew up. Far from the chaotic -changes of the lower forty-eight where things were going south rapidly. -He saw it firsthand, with his real family, before he became a -privatized orphan. - -The sky has bled itself out and his gel-contacts -squirm in a way he has never gotten used to, adjusting to low light. He -forces a door to one of the motel rooms, allowing the stale air to -puff out toward him. -He has stirred dust and particles of sand in the -old room. Nothing more than a bed, a vanity, a bathroom and moth-eaten -curtains shifting in the wind. Old style TV, one of those big types from -last century, the cathode ray tube long gone, he learned about those at -Farm 14, a piece of early technology. The gutted TV is now -some half-assed shrine left by passing migrants. Candles burnt down to -lozenges, a sun-bleached animal skull and what he takes to be an ill -conceived haiku, a sad offering to whatever animism the nomads have -taken to following these days. Never really having recovered from the -depression, they just broke off and franchised into a whole floating -sub-culture out here in the new dust bowl. Still, a place to bed down -for the night, find transport in the morning. He amps up his gels, the -unsettling squirm of proto-amphibian, bioengineered life. He opens his -photo album, so long now a prosthesis for absent things. - -He has no idea, nor does he want to imagine, who so carefully -assembled the pictures. They -are, he has come to realize, from a period of not more than two decades -of the great American century. And while the people in the album are not -strictly a family, he likes to imagine them as such. There is Father, -Mother, Son and Daughter, their faces, body types and clothing shifting; -they spend their days among the same summers, along the same roads -of an American world rich in Googie architecture, cantilevered coffee -shops, curvilinear UFO-inspired drive-in's, huge Lumber men, tiki gods -lording over shark finned future cars streamlined to roll their -occupants directly into the world of tomorrow. They are culled from the -unconscious of the "space-age". A time that maybe never really was, Rand -has come to realize, but one with which he has become so intimately familiar and -entranced, that, in the evening, before he beds down, he may be found -taking in a few of the white cardstock pages, the collected photos -secured with NuAge corner bonds, Kodak film almost exclusively - -pictures of happy people, people with bright futures limned in -possibility, rocket trajectories, beeping satellites, Fuller-domed moon -bases... - -

Hotter this morning, contacts giving him a HUD for temperature, wind -speed, his basic vitals, the present statistics of his world and being. -He takes his MultiFilmTM out of his pack and unrolls it on the -scratched -table of the motel room. It adheres with a hiss, sealing -temporarily over a history of dust and grime. Rand wipes through the -muddle of tickers, broadcasts, news feeds and banner ads and directly to -his bookmarked tracking of her GPS. Making a steady beat for the Pacific -coast to find transport back to Brazil, to Rio, home. Always the -memories of the wet warrens and flooded barrios of that city inside her. -He remembers watching her when -she would come, looking at him, but truly -far away, staring at him from beneath layers of aquatic sunlight, all -the stunted promises of drowned kingdoms reflected in her eyes. - -She is at least a day and a half ahead of him now, perhaps more if he -doesn't find transportation. But if he follows her too closely, she -may shut down the GPS altogether, may zone out, drop off the radar -and disappear back into the jungle. It is a game of sorts, their game, -or anyway he tells himself that this morning as he does from time to -time. Or, if he is going to be honest with himself, which he isn't, not -today, too hot for that - rivulets of sweat finding their way down his -buttocks, down the backs of his knees - it's really just classical -conditioning. Projecting onto the women in his life what he wants to be -there, that's what he does, that's what he learned... back then, in -Gainesville, with his sister. - -

His sister was born with a brain that the doctors could just -never fully -correct. There were therapies employed, long string names that he had -forgotten and been too young to understand anyway. What it amounted to -was that, while she was present, most of her would always be locked -away. So, who she was became more a reflection of who you wanted her -to be and, though he would like to remember that, he tried to allow her -to be whatever it was that was inside herself, but he knew that was not -the case. His sister, the archetype, the blank slate, the art project, -more often a case to be managed, a situation to be solved, a story -problem. Keeping her occupied was the thing to do. He remembered her OCD -impulse for tying things around her fingers, anything that would bend, -anything you would give her - straw wrappers, thread, filament, fishing -line, errant hairs (hers-black) - starting with the index, then down to -the pinkie, left, then right, like scales. When you could get her doing -that, it was a kind of security. She wasn't lost, off exploring the -perimeter wire, the rusting razor falling into the rising surf, where -she would mark the progress of the escalating tide with colored ribbons, -more knotting, her own chart of the global upheaval. She wasn't at a pier -trying to catch a glimpse of refugees being broken upon the naval cordon -as they tried to get into the country, keeping her own inscrutable -mental tables of their arrival and failure. She wasn't running off -amidst a riot that broke out during a particularly militant protest of -an Amnesty International splinter group. She sat there as police moved -in with their bulky, comically sci-fi riot gear, mother and father -desperately searching for her. She appeared on no less than three news -feeds, the calm center of the local fraction of global chaos, mother and -father looking on, stunned. Within two weeks, all three of them were dead. - -

Rand examines the back of the walk-in refrigerator, long -since out of power; the insulated walls are warm to the -touch. He finds a spring catch for a manual release which opens an -antiquated physical mechanism, a door to an emergency shelter. - -Narrow concrete steps leading down to what is little more than a cramped -basement, canned supplies including vast quantities of spam - the -allegedly edible variety and bottled water - but not self-cooling, -All of it older than he is, this panic hoarding having been popular with -a certain strain of -eco-survivalist who thought the climate shifts were going to do them in -before the economics or the human reactions did. - -Under an olive drab tarp, an early solar-powered electric car, probably -not particularly fast, but -still in working order. It will have to do. He hikes up another set of -stairs and releases the catch on -a latch in a trapdoor that leads outside the diner. He rolls the -Multi-FilmTM into binoculars, dials up the magnification and scans. -Razor-edged horizon slipped between desert and the wheeling shoals of -clouds tacked to a block of blue sky. - -The family was always on vacation. People never took pictures of just -being, not back then. Or, if they did, they didn't put them in albums. -Pictures were special then. It wasn't recording everything as it -happened, it was recording what you wanted to remember. He hasn't ever -given them names; they are simply placeholders in the atomic age -nuclear family, their faces and hair colors shifting while the -essence of their meaning remains the same. Father under sun-bleached -white of desert sky, Cabazon, big dinosaurs. -Mother holds Daughter who is young and making a face at the camera, Son -holds plastic miniature versions of the two behemoths in the background, -one T-Rex and one Brontosaurus. Though the Brontosaurus was a mistake, -wrong head on the wrong body, he looked it up, in the Farm, on what -they called microfiche. - -The skin of the vehicle whorls with mad-trip colors, absorbing the sun, -the outside has become a Panorama blue screen projection, panels of -motion somehow much removed from the interior and not a part of Rand's -immediate present. He is the lone car on the interstate, traveling -through the dust bowl, along this road that once might have -carried his picture book family. -Oldsmobile -Futurematic. Futurematic combines beauty with utility... styling with a -purpose. Hydromatic drive! The smart way. The Futurematic way. The -Oldsmobile way. Futurematic is a brand new word, created to describe this brand new, -post-war, General Motors' car. -Now he drives past the -sagging lines that once were necessary to carry communication, their -shadows forming a lattice between the dry tufts of yellow grass that -shoot up through the old road. - -This sun-powered car he drives now has no new words to describe it, -affords -no psychic real estate that he knows of. It is too old to have its own -HUD so, he has stuck the MultiFilmTM to the -windshield. Her GPS -still -radiating on the screen, but fainter now as she reaches for the coast... -He remembers reading about white line fever and prays that it might -visit him now as the endless klicks unfurl in monotony around him. - -

She was one week out of Rio when he found her, wet and -feral and -smelling of the septic, flooded barrios of that old and tangled city. -Her name a passion, a curse, a guttural expulsion. Why she had come -here, she wouldn't say. Weeks spent trying to adjust twin pairs of Sony -ear-bead translators to the twists of her patois. But nights, their -sweat drenched skin clung together; he imagined he could smell the -orange and fish scent of the markets on her, mystery of jungles in her -own dark, pubic curls. Lying there, under the ceiling fan of a -broke-down hotel, she would unfold childhoods both confusing and utterly -fascinating, all the dark mystery of a stratified society of commerce -and savagery down there in the heart of Brazil. She described a place -that had gone back to more primal ways long before the rest of the -world. He could imagine her sometimes looking out to the slips of beach, -eyes finding the coastline, the suggestion of the sea and all that might -lie beyond. - -He'd heard rumors of cults and human sacrifice, of street gangs mad with -cheap meth roaming the canals, river rat gangs on Jet Ski's tearing -through the heart of overindulged myth, Aztec fantasies and paranoid -memes. Rio had been virtually cut off from the mediated world for years -now, and nobody much cared to investigate. So suspicions went there to -dream and ferment, and one of them, he suspected, had become her. Grown -in the dark curls of hair, twisting strands of genetic code had rooted -and grown, producing this girl, with her coppery skin, her aquatic eyes, -her mind subject to its own, ever shifting, unstable mental winds. - -He might imagine them, from time to time, these two women in his life, -like the fall of a camera's shutter, dividing then from now, before from -after. His sister and this strange woman from a stranger land. The one -before, the one after, and the bridge of self he had formed in between -seemed so inadequate and ad-hoc now. A person more likely imagined by -the aggregate imagination of the two of them, clinging as he did to the -pursuit of the one that was still alive and the memories of the one who -wasn't. A dream of a thing called Rand, flipping through the sun faded -days of a century long gone, through smiles, years dead, tints in -flushed cheeks stripped by decades' faded hue. A world comprised of -promising thrusts of architecture, of Muffler men thirty feet high, of -all night Bowling alleys described in neon, of Tomorrowland at -Disneyland, of Eames furniture played out as the space age equivalent of -Lucite kitsch. There, Father, red haired this time, Mother pregnant, the -children merely possibilities now, standing in front of the Big Boy, his -perm-a-grin suggesting some compulsory happiness, some fascist -cheerfulness in the aggressive upsweep of his Brylcreemed coif, hefting -his burger above as some capitalist trophy. Or, the whole family -standing in front of a Sputnik parodied satellite atop a road sign, -spikes every-which way, the dream folded and folded upon itself again, -kaleidoscope origami. - -She would catch him sometimes, when he would sit in the bay window of -the house abandoned near the sea line, the sound of the surf, paging -through the days of the family. And she would laugh and make fun of him -in Portuguese and English, laugh at him for the fondness he had for that -dead century and its people. Laughing, Rand took it, at his need for his -surrogate pantheon in these faded pages in their kitschy binder, for his -inability to form a Rand divorced from the sad tomorrow land their -futures had become. While she, with her lean muscles and erratic -behavior, stalked the atavistic Serengeti's of her mind, finding older -cores to build upon. So fucking lonely, so fucking American she would -say, as if the word had meaning anymore. - -Out here, amongst the scrub and hollowed towns, they collected -e-waste, once, a futile attempt at early recovery. Mounds of obsolete -computers, PDA's, televisions and other electronics harvested for the -copper and any other reuseable parts had accumulated, an economy of -subsistence. Started by eco-hippies as first, the e-waste had once gone -to third world countries where villages would burn the refuse to get at -the valuable scrap, inhaling PVC's, cadmium, lead. But soon it became a -domestic franchise, the re-farming of machine dreams, IT engineers, -programmers, high priests of tech who had to give up their white collars -to be drawn out, backs to the sun, working under masks, columns of smoke -rising into the sky, eking out some semblance of an existence, trying to -resurrect lives. -He had seen that sort of desperation, back in Florida, before the storms -hit. The town already collapsing under the weight of economic failure. -Empty storefronts becoming ersatz shrines for those who were taken in by -the sudden urge to find God, the big fix paradigm. One crazy sect he had -seen projected their crucified holo-Jesus over neo-flagellants, slung -over the street as some disturbing, displaced Macy's float like Rand had -seen on television.Faint ripples of maxized bandwidth creeping over the -Jesus's wet, slick -flesh, hinting at organs seeking to push through the wound of the unseen -Roman spear. Men were stripped to their waists, flailing themselves in -front of their pitiable Lord hung from his neon cross. There, the Jesus -lolled its head as if in some opiate slumber of pain and religious -ecstasy, his final moment of apotheosis come, in this, his last -submission to the physical form. Rand winced as the ball bearings tore -into the men's flesh, his father pulling him further down the street -away from the display. The Lord sputtered in and out, and became -intangible above him. He had asked his father why they did this, and his -Father said because the men were in futures, and the market was bad for -futures now. Rand figured any fool could see that. His father had -laughed and said that wasn't what he meant. The next day, the Jesus and -the men were gone. - -Her trail continues along through the transparency of the screen. He is, -he thinks, perhaps gaining too close a proximity to her. Best for her to -know that he follows, but not so close as for her to panic. He wonders -if those eyes stare from beneath their marine depths to watch him -watching her on some MultiFilmTM of her own. -Observe this game that he imagines she too still plays, remembering the -times he has tracked her down before. She had always let him catch up -before. - -She never settled into his life. He'd wake nights; watch her through -the floor-to-ceiling window as the tide came in, brown ankles in the -surf, huddled in a frayed duvet washed too many times, and invariably -she was looking south. - -He could see her tension, at the parties, forming at the corners of her -mouth, conversation tinkling around the backyard of a fashionable house -in a gated suburb. People talking recovery and opportunity and hopeful -buzz words like nanotech, bio-growth, market-states, but never any of -it coming to anything more then drunken speculation. He'd watch her -across the concrete patio, the light refracted from the blue plane of -water played over her. Mentally she was already gone. His friends had -never really been hers, or really his he supposes, just people -collected through work, which was itself an abstraction. The next -night, when he woke, she wasn't on the beach and her bag was gone. In -the morning, he left in pursuit. - - -A skirmish line of broken hotels along a beach. The property, once so -prized, now chipped at, worn down by accumulated tides, left to ruin. A -few feral dogs pick through the old structures, some nothing but -foundation, others holding the reinforced concrete shells of multiple -stories, scrubbed paint, empty windows. Old anodized chain-link fence -pokes out of the tide line, tsunami ideograms warn of catastrophes that -might have come a few years back. Rand removes his shoes, which squelch -and morph to a more relaxed size as he does, the sand wet under his -feet, padding his way down the shore. - -Further on he can see a man, brown from the sun. Rand has crested a hill -and watches him below. He wears tattered cargo pants cut at the ankles -and carries a sturdily made wooden rake. He has fashioned the beach into -the precisely combed concentric waves of a Zen garden. Beach rocks -serving as the locus of their radiation outward, he has fashioned his -own movement so that his footprints do not disturb the whirling patterns -he has traced. He is almost done. The tide creeping ever closer, his -ephemera creation soon to be carried away in much the slow, deliberate -process as it was made. - -Perhaps twenty meters away from him, atop the same rise, the man climbs -and watches as the waves lap and blur the lines in the sand, the garden, -until only the rocks remain. He then lights a fire he has prepared and -walks to Rand, offering a cigarette. Rand accepts, and by the fire, they -smoke. The man covered in sand, clinging to the wet of his body, a red -bandana gone black above his brow. Up close Rand can see that he is -perhaps Polynesian. In any case, he doesn't seem to speak English, and -so they sit in silence. They finish their cigarettes, and Rand shows the -man his map. On it, the trail of her signal has led here, paused, and -then gone south. There was a port here, according to the map, but no -structures Rand has seen suggest so. Much of the current topographical -data can be unreliable these days. He pulls up a picture of her and -shows it to the gardener who nods, points south, and takes the map from -Rand. The man's fingers work over the worn film, his nails surprisingly -well-manicured, and he returns it to Rand, a new map keyed in one corner -window to another port, or perhaps the right one all along. Ten miles -south, her GPS pulses once more and then cools, fading over the Pacific. -She has, he realizes, finally turned it off. They sleep by the fire, and -the sand makes Rand dream of the scratchy surplus blankets huddled under -at the Farm. Communal barracks, morning shower, cafeteria meals, -everything regulated but not uncomfortably so. - -He trades the old solar powered car for passage on a Tasmanian freighter -headed south. He maneuvers onto the gangway through the brine scent of -ocean air and the press of travelers, merchant marines and freight -haulers. Shipping has become suddenly vogue given the cost of most air -freight these days, the west coast not yet having been hit by that wave -of prosperous recovery the news feeds claimed was rolling over from the -east. Rand unrolls his MultiFilm� one more time, but she hasn't turned -her signal back on. She won't, she has dug herself out from the membrane -of connectivity now, slipped south now and quite probably gone. - -His hands run over the rusted hull as the ship sets to port, -reassured -by its solidity. He imagines that perhaps the Son might be there, on a -single frame of old Kodak, right next to him, bleached color of that -era's film stock, his olive drab uniform that much more so. The next -picture reveals the family gathered along the dock. Today their hair is -predominantly blond, the Mother and Father just that bit older as Son is -seen off to a strange tropical land they've never heard of, but always, -they can believe, for the best of causes. Rocket trajectories, -satellites, smooth, flowing, Futurmatic lines� And here in these two -frames, at the end of the book, the nuclear family fissions and begins -to part. They become the fast-motion images of desert test sites and -mocked up homes blown to atomic winds. Coca-cola signs gone to tinny -rust, Googie coffee shops plowed under yellow Tonka monsters, tiki gods -desiccated from lack of worshippers, Apollo capsules burnt to dust on -re-entry. It begins with a son, putting to port for a faraway land, -coastline of home receding behind him. - -© Chris Lites 2007 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] oasis.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Emigration - -[*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - -[*BLURB] Emigrate! Get a new life! - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Alvi Emigrated on Tuesday. He and Kate had argued, had -another of their real door-slamming, throwing things, screaming at each -other to the point of incoherence, yelling matches on the Friday night -and were still not on speaking terms four days later. It looked as though -their tempestuous five year, on-and-off-and-on again relationship had -finally come to an end. He couldn't remember what had sparked this -particular row. He never could. Some small seed, a innocent chance -remark miscontrued had blossomed in the festering fertile soil of their -mutual dependency and loathing into a row that had gone on long into the -night. All the old tropes were rehearsed yet again, the same old -rituals of blame and counter blame, accusation and exaggeration, and -somewhere in the middle of it all he had a blinding moment of -clarity - later he would describe it as a revelation - when it -suddenly came to him that he was bored. Bored with his job. Bored with -his life. Bored with Kate. Bored with this argument. Bored with finding -that fighting with Kate, the only relief from his boredom, had now, in -itself, become boring. - -He marched into the downtown Emigration offices the next morning and -filled out the forms in a mad rush. The sour-faced receptionist at the -desk had gone through them with meticulous attention and then passed him -onto another clerk who had shown him into the first of a bewildering -succession of interview rooms and medical examination booths where he -was questioned, re-questioned, prodded, and poked by a seemingly -endless procession of humourless, pallid, office-bound troglodytes. -Name. Age. Occupation. National Identity Number. Interlog number. This -number. That number. Think of a number. "How many fingers am I holding -up?" Retina scan. Fingerprints. "Spit in the bottle and hold still while -I take a tissue sample from... thank you, now drop your pants, bend -over, and read the chart..." - -

"Don't want you getting to Colony -Dirtbowl Shithole Four, sobering up, and changing your mind now, do we? -Not when there's no way back."
The process was a long, frustrating, -humiliating -experience. Only his -determination to go had carried him through. After being asked the same -set of meaningless questions for the fifth time, he formulated the idea -that most of the stuff he was asked to submit to was there merely to -weed out the weak-hearted and the weak-willed. Emigration didn't really -need fifteen separate DNA samples from him and the names of all his -Great Great Grandparents, it was an exercise in winnowing. Put up with -this bullshit, he realised, and you made the grade. Get angry and leave -and you obviously weren't going to make it on a frontier world. He -gritted his teeth and submitted to the tedium of reciting his National -Identity Number again and again. - -At the end of three hours he found himself sitting alone in a small -green-walled, clock-free cubicle wearing nothing but a hospital gown -which, being far too small for him, didn't meet at the back. The only -seat in the room was a cold metal bench that vibrated slightly. He -suspected it was refrigerated. - -The curtain swished back and a medically dressed orderly handed him a -bag containing his clothes and thrust a clipboard under his nose. -"Sign here!" he said. - -Alvi signed. The orderly checked off a box on another sheet on the -clipboard and turned to go. - -"Hey wait," Alvi said. "What happens now? I've been sitting here -freezing my nuts for an hour now, am I finished or what? Did I pass?" - -"Oh yeah, we're through with you. You passed. Come back next Tuesday." - -"What?" - -"Next Tuesday. Back. Come," the orderly repeated with sarcasm so heavy -you could almost hear it hit the floor. - -Alvi had a very strong temptation to punch the man in the face. "Yes..." -he said, " I understand what you just said. I just don't understand why -you said it. If I'm passed for Emigration why can't I just go now?" - -The orderly rolled his eyes, sighed theatrically and explained, in the -tone of voice usually reserved for idiot children, that there was a -mandatory four day cooling-off period. "Don't want you getting to Colony -Dirtbowl Shithole Four, sobering up, and changing your mind now, do we? -Not when there's no way back." - -Alvi dressed in sullen silence. It was raining when he left the building. - -The sullen silence followed him home and was already permeating the -apartment when he arrived. Kate was watching TV. She didn't look up -when he came in, though she could hardly fail to have noticed him enter. -He stood at their shared living room doorway looking at her, wondering -for a moment if there wasn't a way back. He took a breath but before -he could speak she raised her arm, pointed the remote, and turned up the -TV volume. Placatory words that had been forming in his mouth turned to -a grunt of disgust. He didn't bother again. He wasn't sure if he had -been going to tell her about his decision to emigrate but he wouldn't -now. There was no need to. She would never know anyway - even after he -had gone. - -He phoned in sick on Wednesday and spent the next two days -relocating his apartment. Luck was with him and he found a short-term -commune over on Bleakerstrasse that would take him on as a probationer. -He waited till Friday - and waited till Kate had gone to work - before -he detached his half of their shared living unit and moved it across the -city. He didn't leave a forwarding address. - -

On Saturday, the cooling off period spent, he presented -himself to the -Emigration Bureau on Bleakerstrasse. The offices were plusher than the -utilitarian hell hole that he has visited four days before. Somehow, -amazingly, the split with Kate had landed him in a nicer neighbourhood. - -The doors slid shut behind him with a soft whoosh, deadening the street -noise to a muted background hum. He walked across the deep-carpeted -foyer to the reception desk. The girl was ravishingly beautiful; tall -with blonde hair that fell to her shoulders in loose, natural waves. The -simple Emigration uniform looked elegant and stylish on her. She looked -up as he approached and smiled her perfect, reception desk smile at him. - -"Hello," she said. "Welcome to Emigration." - -"Hi, I want to... Emigrate," Alvi said. The words came out flat and -clumsy. He felt suddenly tongue-tied before this woman's -beauty. - -"No problem, I'll just get you to fill in a few forms and then we..." - -"Oh. I've done that already," he interrupted. He fumbled his copy of the -forms out of his wallet. -"Sorry, they're a little folded now. I registered four days ago and filled them -out, but..." his voice trailed off. - -"The cooling-off period. You wanted time to think about it. It's a big -step. We don't ever want anyone to regret Emigrating." She took the -papers from him and glanced through them. She entered a string of -figures into her terminal, fingers moving with a bewildering speed. "Be -with you in a sec," she smiled, -"Just have to access your account here..." she bent her head to her -keyboard and typed again. - -Was it a big step? Alvi thought. Everyone he knew had Emigrated at -least once and everyone he knew had expressed a sense of disappointment -once they had gone through with it. He looked around the plush reception -area then back at the girl. Emma. He read her name tag as she processed -the paperwork. Emma Stanton - Embarkation Officer - Emigration. -The -badge was black with silver lettering. It was clipped to the front of -her blouse. The blouse was metallic grey and the fabric gaped slightly -between two of the buttons. He could see the smooth curve of her right -breast. She looked up and he was momentarily flustered to be caught -staring at her chest. She smiled again and gathered up the papers. - -"Well, everything seems to be fine with these. Would you care to follow -me?" She stood and moved away from the desk. Another woman appeared, as -if from nowhere, to take her place. - -"This way," said Emma Stanton and led him through a double door into -another part of the building. The atmosphere was more clinical beyond -the reception area, the lighting harsher, the carpet replaced by clean -floortiles. She led him down a long corridor; doors led off both sides -at irregular intervals. They passed a small waiting area with chairs and -the latest celeb magazines scattered on a small table. It was all as -quiet and well furnished as the reception area but there was the -disturbing metallic tang of ozone in the air and, behind the walls, he -heard the high potential hum of vast, powerful machinery. Emma Stanton -led him to one of the smooth, blank doors. There was a small number by -the door handle otherwise it was unmarked. Room 247. - -"After you," she said. The door obediently opened for them. The room -was not as he had expected. Not as depicted in the movies. There was no -high-backed chair with straps and manacles. No white-coated technicians -tending rows of complex machinery. There was very little in the room at -all: a ceiling-high, cylindrical, glass and metal device stood at one -end of the room and a terminal desk at the other. The terminal looked -like a miniature version of the reception desk they had just left. Emma -completed the illusion by sitting at the chair and logging in. - -"Is that it?" he asked, pointing at the glass cylinder. - -"That's it." she said. - -"It looks like my shower at home. I was expecting... I don't know what I -was expecting." - -"You were expecting something a little more complex. I know. Like in the -movies. Old stereotypes die hard." - -He looked at the machine again. That was it. That was Emigration. It -looked like his shower. There was one button on the wall at the back of -the cylinder. It was red. A big red button on the wall. - -"Do I press that?" he asked, moving towards it. - -"Yes, but not yet. A few more formalities to go through first." She -angled a small cam towards him with a well-manicured finger. No wedding -rings, he noticed. Not one. Not that that meant anything these days. He -knew many married people who didn't advertise the fact. Even some in -Polys chose not to wear the usual multiple rings to show how many -spouses they had. - -"Look into the cam," she said, "and please state your name." -He did so. - -"Do you undertake this Emigration of your own free will and state that -you are under no coercion or threat forcing to take this action?" - -I am? I do? How am I supposed to answer that? he thought, before -finally simply saying; "Yes." - -"You understand that by entering Emigration an identical copy of -yourself will be created on the Colony planet of..." she glanced at her -screen, "Zogarian Delta seven. This identical copy will be identical to -you in every way. It will have your body, your face, your thoughts, and -your memories - even the memory of entering this building and the memory -of this conversation. The copy will be you. One of you will step out of -this room into an alien world. Do you understand this?" - -Yes he understood. Everyone understood. It was how the colonies were -populated. Long range drone ships took years to reach possible new -Earths, their only cargo a quantum entangled matter transmitter. Once a -new, habitable (however vaguely you described it) planet had been found -the matter transmitter was deployed and its twin back on earth uncrated. -At first a few simple machines were sent through, The simple machines -built a larger matter transmitter, then the complex machines were sent -through, then the colonists. It was a one way trip. - -"You will not be permitted to return. Once you have Emigrated you will -never be able to return to Earth. Do you understand that?" - -"Yes," he said. He felt strangely dislocated as if he were making a -decision that wasn't going to affect him in any way - yet it would -irrevocably affect him for the rest of his life. He thumbprinted the pad -where she indicated. She keyed in a few more instructions before -blanking the screen. - -"That's it," she said. "You are ready to go. Watch your step when you -get there. According to the screen, Zog D seven has a slightly lower -gravity than Earth and a higher atmospheric oxygen. It might take a few -days to adjust." - -"I'll be careful," he said. - -She led him over to the Emigration Machine. He stepped inside and took a -deep breath. In a moment he would press the big red button -and step out into a new and alien planet -halfway across the galaxy - and he would step back out of this very -machine as if nothing had happened. I'm about to give birth to -myself, -he thought. - -His finger hesitated half way to the button. - -"Just one thing," he turned to her. "My quantum twin - just how -entangled with me is he? I mean, if he gets drunk do I get the -hangover?" - -Emma smiled. It was a very pretty smile and he felt a regret that he -would never see it again, and he thought he would ask her out. -Tomorrow -night, he thought, that new place down at the waterfront. He -decided -to ask her after he pressed the button. If she said yes, he wasn't sure -if he would be able to leave and not go on the date. - -"No, your copy isn�t entangled with you in any way." she said. "The -machine on Zogarian Delta seven has components that are entangled with -identical components in this machine but your copy - your twin, -as -you -put it - will be made from elements, raw materials, mined locally on the -planet. There is no way they can be entangled with the matter in your -body. There is no way you can get your twin's hangover, or be -forced -to commit a murder, or do silly things in embarrassing situations. -That's all good fun in the movies but there's no chance of it in -reality. You will have no entanglement." - -"And you?" he asked. "Any entanglements?" - -She hesitated for a moment before replying. "No," she said with another -smile. The smile was genuine. She looked into his eyes. "No -entanglements." - -He pressed the button. - -

And it vanished. He suddenly found himself looking at a -blank wall. He -felt dizzy, took a step back and stumbled. He fell - slowly. - -Oh my god! he thought, I'm here. Lower gravity - higher -atmospheric -oxygen. I'm somewhere else! - -Someone caught him. Arms supported him, steadied him, stood him on his -feet again. The momentary nausea and panic passed and he turned round. - -She was wearing coveralls. Her hair was short, cut back in a practical -but attractive crop. They looked at each other for a moment, then she -smiled. - -"Hello, Emma," he said. - -© Liam Baldwin 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] emigration.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Voyage to the Moon - -[*AUTHOR] Lucian (Loukianos) -[*BLURB] Lucian was a Syrian author, born about the year 120 AD. -This translation is by Thomas Francklin, an English cleric, in the -eighteenth century. -Just a short extract from Lucian's early work in the sf field. He refreshingly -confessed to being a liar, which boast, I feel, is amply borne out. The tale, which runs -to a very large number of words, is characterised by a very lively imagination, assisted -by Greek mythology and Homeric sagas, as -you will see, and forms the origin of many later fantasies from Bergerac to Swift.

-Underlined sections deliver a pop-up commentary. - -[*DESCRIPTION] - -

We left them -and returned to our companions in the ship. - We then -took our casks, filled some of them with water, and some with wine -from the river, slept one night on shore, and the next morning set -sail, the wind being very moderate. About noon, the island being -now out of sight, on a sudden a most violent whirlwind arose, and -carried the ship above three thousand stadia, lifting it up above -the water, from whence it did not let us down again into the seas -but kept us suspended in mid air, in this manner we hung for -seven days and nights, and on the eighth beheld a large tract of -land, like an island, round, shining, and remarkably full of -light; we got on shore, and found on examination that it was -cultivated and full of inhabitants, though we could not then see any -of them. As night came on other islands appeared, some large, -others small, and of a fiery colour; there was also below these -another land with seas, woods, mountains, and cities in it, and this -we took to be our native country: as we were advancing forwards, we -were seized on a sudden by the Hippogypi, for so it seems they -were called by the inhabitants; these Hippogypi are men carried upon -vultures, which they ride as we do horses. These vultures have each -three heads, and are immensely large; you may judge of their size -when I tell you that one of their feathers is bigger than the mast -of a ship. The Hippogypi have orders, it seems, to fly round the -kingdom, and if they find any stranger, to bring him to the king: -they took us therefore, and carried us before him. As soon as he -saw us, he guessed by our garb what we were. - -"You are Grecians," said he, "are you not?" - -We told him we were. - -"And how," added he, -"got ye hither through the air?" - -We told him everything that had -happened to us; and he, in return, related to us his own history, -and informed us, that he also was a man, that his name was Endymion, -that he had been taken away from our earth in his sleep, and -brought to this place where he reigned as sovereign. That spot, -he told us, which now looked like a moon to us, was the earth. -He desired us withal not to make ourselves uneasy, for that we -should soon have everything we wanted. "If I succeed," says he, "in -the war which I am now engaged in against the inhabitants of the -sun, you will be very happy here." - -We asked him then what enemies -he had, and what the quarrel was about? - -"Phaeton," he replied, "who -is king of the sun (for that is inhabited as well as the -moon), has been at war with us for some time past. The foundation -of it was this: I had formerly an intention of sending some of the -poorest of my subjects to establish a colony in Lucifer, which was -uninhabited: but Phaeton, out of envy, put a stop to it, by -opposing me in the mid-way with his Hippomyrmices; we were -overcome and desisted, our forces at that time being unequal to -theirs. I have now, however, resolved to renew the war and fix my -colony; if you have a mind, you shall accompany us in the -expedition; I will furnish you everyone with a royal vulture and -other accoutrements; we shall set out to-morrow." - -"With all my -heart," said I, "whenever you please." - -

We stayed, however, and -supped with him; and rising early the next day, proceeded with the -army, when the spies gave us notice that the enemy was approaching. -The army consisted of a hundred thousand, besides the scouts and -engineers, together with the auxiliaries, amongst whom were eighty -thousand Hippogypi, and twenty thousand who were mounted on the -Lachanopteri; these are very large birds, whose feathers are -of a kind of herb, and whose wings look like lettuces. Next to -these stood the Cinchroboli, -and the Schorodomachi. Our -allies from the north were three thousand Psyllotoxotae and -five thousand Anemodromi; the former take their names from the -fleas which they ride upon, every flea being as big as twelve -elephants; the latter are foot-soldiers, and are carried about in -the air without wings, in this manner: they have large gowns -hanging down to their feet, these they tuck up and spread in a form -of a sail, and the wind drives them about like so many boats: in -the battle they generally wear targets. It was reported that -seventy thousand Strathobalani from the stars over Cappadocia -were to be there, together with five thousand Hippogerani; -these I did not see, for they never came: I shall not attempt, -therefore, to describe them; of these, however, most wonderful -things were related. - -Such were the forces of Endymion; their arms were all alike; their -helmets were made of beans, for they have beans there of a -prodigious size and strength, and their scaly breast-plates of -lupines sewed together, for the skins of their lupines are like a -horn, and impenetrable; their shields and swords the same as our -own. - -

they use shields made of -mushrooms, and spears of the stalks of asparagus
The army ranged themselves in this manner: the right wing was -formed by the Hippogypi, with the king, and round him his chosen -band to protect him, amongst which we were admitted; on the left -were the Lachanopteri; the auxiliaries in the middle, the foot were -in all about sixty thousand myriads. They have spiders, you must -know, in this country, in infinite numbers, and of pretty large -dimensions, each of them being as big as one of the islands of the -Cyclades; these were ordered to cover the air from the moon quite to -the morning star; this being immediately done, and the field of -battle prepared, the infantry was drawn up under the command of -Nycterion, the son of Eudianax. - -The left wing of the enemy, which was commanded by Phaeton himself, -consisted of the Hippomyrmices; these are large birds, and resemble -our ants, except with regard to size, the largest of them covering -two acres; these fight with their horns and were in number about -fifty thousand. In the right wing were the Aeroconopes, about -five thousand, all archers, and riding upon large gnats. To these -succeeded the Aerocoraces, light infantry, but remarkably -brave and useful warriors, for they threw out of slings exceeding -large radishes, which whoever was struck by, died immediately, a -most horrid stench exhaling from the wound; they are said, indeed, -to dip their arrows in a poisonous kind of mallow. Behind these -stood ten thousand Caulomycetes, heavy-armed soldiers, who -fight hand to hand; so called because they use shields made of -mushrooms, and spears of the stalks of asparagus. Near them were -placed the Cynobalani, about five thousand, who were sent by -the inhabitants of Sirius; these were men with dog's heads, and -mounted upon winged acorns: some of their forces did not arrive in -time; amongst whom there were to have been some slingers from the -Milky-way, together with the Nephelocentauri; they indeed came -when the first battle was over, and I wish they had never come -at all: the slingers did not appear, which, they say, so enraged -Phaeton that he set their city on fire. - -Thus prepared, the enemy began the attack: the signal being given, -and the asses braying on each side, for such are the trumpeters they -make use of on these occasions, the left wing of the Heliots, unable -to sustain the onset of our Hippogypi, soon gave way, and we pursued -them with great slaughter: their right wing, however, overcame our -left. The Aeroconopes falling upon us with astonishing force, and -advancing even to our infantry, by their assistance we recovered; -and they now began to retreat, when they found the left wing had -been beaten. The defeat then becoming general, many of them were -taken prisoners and many slain; the blood flowed in such abundance -that the clouds were tinged with it and looked red, just as they -appear to us at sunset; from thence it distilled through upon the -earth. Some such thing, I suppose, happened formerly amongst the -gods, which made Homer believe that Jove rained blood at the -death of Sarpedon. - -

When we returned from our pursuit of the enemy we set up two -trophies; one, on account of the infantry engagement in the spider's -web, and another in the clouds, for our battle in the air. Thus -prosperously everything went on, when our spies informed us that the -Nephelocentaurs, who should have been with Phaeton before the -battle, were just arrived: they made, indeed, as they approached -towards us, a most formidable appearance, being half winged horses -and half men; the men from the waist upwards, about as big as the -Rhodian Colossus, and the horses of the size of a common ship of -burthen. I have not mentioned the number of them, which was really -so great, that it would appear incredible: they were commanded by -Sagittarius, from the Zodiac. As soon as they learned that -their friends had been defeated they sent a message to Phaeton to -call him back, whilst they put their forces into order of battle, -and immediately fell upon the Selenites, who were unprepared -to resist them, being all employed in the division of the spoil; -they soon put them to flight, pursued the king quite to his own -city, and slew the greatest part of his birds; they then tore down -the trophies, ran over all the field woven by the spiders, and -seized me and two of my companions. Phaeton at length coming up, -they raised other trophies for themselves; as for us, we were -carried that very day to the palace of the Sun, our hands bound -behind us by a cord of the spider's web. - -The conquerors determined not to besiege the city of the Moon, but -when they returned home, resolved to build a wall between them and -the Sun, that his rays might not shine upon it; this wall was double -and made of thick clouds, so that the moon was always eclipsed, and -in perpetual darkness. Endymion, sorely distressed at these -calamities, sent an embassy, humbly beseeching them to pull down the -wall, and not to leave him in utter darkness, promising to pay them -tribute, to assist them with his forces, and never more to rebel; he -sent hostages withal. Phaeton called two councils on the affair, at -the first of which they were all inexorable, but at the second -changed their opinion; a treaty at length was agreed to on these -conditions: - -The Heliots and their allies on one part, make the following -agreement with the Selenites and their allies on the other: "That -the Heliots shall demolish the wall now erected between them, that -they shall make no irruptions into the territories of the Moon; and -restore the prisoners according to certain articles of ransom to be -stipulated concerning them; that the Selenites shall permit all the -other stars to enjoy their rights and privileges; that they shall -never wage war with the Heliots, but assist them whenever they shall -be invaded; that the king of the Selenites shall pay to the king of -the Heliots an annual tribute of ten thousand casks of dew, for the -insurance of which, he shall send ten thousand hostages; that they -shall mutually send out a colony to the Morning-star, in which, -whoever of either nation shall think proper, may become a member; -that the treaty shall be inscribed on a column of amber, in the -midst of the air, and on the borders of the two kingdoms. This -treaty was sworn to on the part of the Heliots, by Pyronides, -and Therites, and Phlogius; and on the part of the Selenites, by -Nyctor, and Menarus, and Polylampus." - -Such was the peace made between them; the wall was immediately -pulled down, and we were set at liberty. When we returned to the -Moon, our companions met and embraced us, shedding tears of joy, as -did Endymion also. He intreated us to remain there, or to go along -with the new colony; this I could by no means be persuaded to, but -begged he would let us down into the sea. As he found I could not -be prevailed on to stay, after feasting us most nobly for seven -days, he dismissed us. - -I will now tell you every thing which I met with in the Moon that -was new and extraordinary. Amongst them, when a man grows old he -does not die, but dissolves into smoke and turns to air. They all -eat the same food, which is frogs roasted on the ashes from a large -fire; of these they have plenty which fly about in the air, they get -together over the coals, snuff up the scent of them, and this serves -them for victuals. Their drink is air squeezed into a cup, which -produces a kind of dew. - -He who is quite bald is esteemed a beauty amongst them, for they -abominate long hair; whereas, in the comets, it is looked upon as a -perfection at least; so we heard from some strangers who were -speaking of them; they have, notwithstanding, small beards a little -above the knee; no nails to their feet, and only one great toe. -They have honey here which is extremely sharp, and when they -exercise themselves, wash their bodies with milk; this, mixed with a -little of their honey, makes excellent cheese. Their oil is -extracted from onions, is very rich, and smells like ointment. -Their wines, which are in great abundance, yield water, and the -grape stones are like hail; I imagine, indeed, that whenever the -wind shakes their vines and bursts the grape, then comes down -amongst us what we call hail. They make use of their belly, which -they can open and shut as they please, as a kind of bag, or pouch, -to put anything in they want; it has no liver or intestines, but is -hairy and warm within, insomuch, that new-born children, when they -are cold, frequently creep into it. The garments of the rich -amongst them are made of glass, but very soft: the poor have woven -brass, which they have here in great abundance, and by pouring a -little water over it, so manage as to card it like wool. I am -afraid to mention their eyes, lest, from the incredibility of the -thing, you should not believe me. I must, however, inform you that -they have eyes which they take in and out whenever they please: so -that they can preserve them anywhere till occasion serves, and then -make use of them; many who have lost their own, borrow from others; -and there are several rich men who keep a stock of eyes by them. -Their ears are made of the leaves of plane-trees, except of those -who spring, as I observed to you, from acorns, these alone have -wooden ones. I saw likewise another very extraordinary thing in the -king's palace, which was a looking-glass that is placed in a well -not very deep; whoever goes down into the well hears everything that -is said upon earth, and if he looks into the glass, beholds all the -cities and nations of the world as plain as if he was close to them. -I myself saw several of my friends there, and my whole native -country; whether they saw me also I will not pretend to affirm. He -who does not believe these things, whenever he goes there will know -that I have said nothing but what is true. - -To return to our voyage. We took our leave of the king and his -friends, got on board our ship, and set sail. Endymion made me a -present of two glass robes, two brass ones, and a whole coat of -armour made of lupines, all which I left in the whale's belly. -He likewise sent with us a thousand Hippogypi, who escorted us five -hundred stadia. - -We sailed by several places, and at length reached the new colony of -the Morning-star, where we landed and took in water; from thence we -steered into the Zodiac; leaving the Sun on our left, we passed -close by his territory, and would have gone ashore, many of our -companions being very desirous of it, but the wind would not permit -us; we had a view, however, of that region, and perceived that it -was green, fertile, and well-watered, and abounding in everything -necessary and agreeable. The Nephelocentaurs, who are mercenaries -in the service of Phaeton, saw us and flew aboard our ship, but, -recollecting that we were included into the treaty, soon departed; -the Hippogypi likewise took their leave of us. - - End of Extract - -[*IMAGE]lucian.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] New Frankfurt - -[*AUTHOR] Grant McDonald Walker - -[*BLURB] When a financial market becomes a city state, the -consequences may be shocking. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

David was surprised that, at dusk and from a distance, New Frankfurt looked more like a medieval city than the twenty-first century construction that it actually was. From a road -high on the rim of the Rhine gorge, he looked down on pale onion domes, burnished copper cupolas, precipitous marble towers, slate-coated steeples, crenellated parapets, -rough-hewn bastions and slender minarets which greatly outnumbered the few modern glass and steel office blocks. The buildings constituting the mass of the city were piled on -to a bleak, rocky island in the river Rhine, apparently at random, leaving none of the original island visible. The city was bluntly reflected in the steel grey water, the river's swells, -eddies and assorted flotsam distorting the architecture into an inverted caricature of itself. Yet the ecclesiastical architecture was strictly decorative, as the only god regularly -worshipped in New Frankfurt was Mammon. Nearly every building on the island was a merchant bank or other financial dealing house. - -Flights of birds circled above the city, birds so distant and so numerous that they resembled wisps of smoke. - -"I know you have never seen the place before, David," said Franz in his careful and perfect English, "But we should not be seen to take so much interest in New Frankfurt at this -stage." - -"Right." - -They returned to the silver-grey Audi electric, parked lopsidedly on the verge, and Franz drove away from the river. - -David said: "I hate these people." - -"Yes, I can understand that. Elaine's hand. How is it now?" - -"They've patched it up, but it'll never be perfectly OK again. She has restricted movement. She's doing nearly everything left-handed still. But we think it's improving." - -"She is lucky. Of the twenty-four, the doctors cannot help sixteen. You must not think of revenge when you are on this mission, David. You have an important task. It must not be -emotional." - -"I only volunteered because of Elaine." - -"And we value you, David. Very few of our people could have obtained a job and a visa to work there." Somehow, that sentence from Franz rang a little false, but when David -glanced at him, Franz's pale face looked completely sincere, as always. - -

We cannot rescue you if you get into trouble.
In truth, the banking sector was hard for a Brit to get into, now that it was dominated by Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern money - not all of it precisely legitimate. Ever since -the credit crisis of 2008, Western banks had been in decline, partly due to over-enthusiastic regulation, and the huge illicit economy was in need of laundry services. Getting a job -in New Frankfurt (or The Island, as it was called in the financial community) was rarer still. New Frankfurt was the new Forbidden City. But David's area of expertise was a novel -margin trading futures system of baroque complexity which he had helped develop at Banque Vietnam in London. The bank wanted him at the heart of their New Frankfurt -operation. Money talked, David walked. And he walked with a hidden purpose, working for the downfall of the city state. - -Franz was talking again. "I shall take you to Wiesbaden. You will ride a train to Geisenheim and check into your hotel. From then, you are likely to be under surveillance. Arriving -workers in New Frankfurt are checked many times in the early weeks. You are not the first spy sent there, and they have a harsh way with spies." - -David didn't ask what they did with spies. Last year, two Zodiac RIBs carrying twenty-four anti-capitalism protesters had landed on New Frankfurt's rocky shore, pasted notices on -nearby buildings and chained themselves to railings. They had been unchained, arrested, anaesthetised, operated upon in the tiny private hospital, then released the same day. -The ligaments of the right hand of each protester had been severed. Elaine had been one of them. - -"You have our emergency telephone number in your memory?" - -"Yes." - -"This number is a single-use mobile phone. Never use it unless you are desperate. There are no private cellular telephone connections in Europe today." - -"Understood." - -"And you realise, of course, that your own mobile telephone will not work on The Island?" - -"Yes, it's quite common for mobiles to be blocked in dealing rooms, even in London and New York." - -"Really? I didn't know that. And all is clear on the dead drop?" - -"Yes, indeed." - -"And you have your Zippo?" - -"Of course." The Zippo, so called because of its resemblance to an antique cigarette lighter, was an inertial locator with a magic58 interface. In those fitness-conscious days, -many people carried one. They calculated how many calories you consumed in your daily walking from place to place, climbing stairs and so on. They did it by measuring your -body movements. David's Zippo, unusually, was also able to make a three dimensional map of where he had been, at what time, without the need for GPS. - -"And do nothing at all for several weeks." - -"I know." - -"We cannot rescue you if you get into trouble. New Frankfurt is a foreign country, with its own laws and justice. It is a sovereign state and even America is afraid to punish them. -These fools in our German Government allowed them to secede, hoping for advantage which never arrived. Now, the financial power of New Frankfurt means that it can bankrupt -any power on Earth. You remember what happened to Nigeria when they defied New Frankfurt?" - -"I do. And Nigeria has oil." - -"But no country dares to buy it." - -"Right." - -Later, they parted in Wiesbaden without shaking hands, Franz slightly built and somehow bloodless, David a little fleshy and florid. The car door slammed, and Franz drove away -without a backward glance, as though distancing himself. - - -

The view David had of New Frankfurt from the South bank of the Rhine turned out to be his last view of The Island as a whole for some time. Only a few senior people were -permitted to live on New Frankfurt. Real estate was concentrated in making money in dealing rooms and in head offices of major organisations basing themselves in New Frankfurt -for tax purposes. Day to day commuting from his hotel in Germany into Banque Vietnam in New Frankfurt took place entirely via a shuttle service of underground trains and -subterranean pedestrian tunnels. He had no opportunity to climb to the surface of The Island, because access to everywhere was carefully monitored by his access ring. Every -regular worker on The Island had one. The ring was issued to him on his first day, a translucent gem set in a yellow metal band, its depths sparkling with myriad microtechnology, -and resembling a fire opal. He later discovered that the yellow metal was gold. Why not? It was rust-proof, hypo-allergenic, malleable and much cheaper than the electronic -contents of the "opal". - -Possession of a New Frankfurt access ring had become a status symbol among the world's financial community, keyed, as it was, to the individual wearer. Attempts had been -made to reverse engineer the ring of a deceased wearer who had collapsed with a fatal heart attack while being "entertained" during a visit to Paris, but it had turned out to be far -too complex to analyse, every one of the gleaming particles in the stone being a microchip, many of which were destroyed when the transparent capsule was broken. The source -of the rich colours in the ring was the interference patterns set up by the wavelength-thin slices of silicon layered within. - -His daily commute reminded David of the "Drain" - the ancient Waterloo and City underground line that served the City of London where he had worked before. The decorations -were, however, of a much superior quality; clean design by Ferrari, brightly lit, and liberally served by moving walkways. Travel was, of course, free for ring wearers and all but -prohibited for anyone else. - -David obediently went about his employment in a regular fashion for nearly a month. Having established a pattern of boring conformity, he began his espionage. Every night, back -at the hotel, David carefully dumped the Zippo maps of those corridors he managed to explore onto the nBook he kept in his hotel room. He annotated the maps with location -descriptions, corridor numbers, business addresses, doors, cameras. These, in turn, were woven by the nBook into images downloaded from the net. He specialised in soft porn -images to give any watcher a reason for his downloading them. Then he printed them on the shiny scraps of paper from the nBook's internal printer. These he crumpled up and -discarded in the waste bin, from which they were to be rescued by one of Franz's agents, and scanned to extract the hidden map data. - -David had expressed some doubt as to the usefulness of this mapping when it was first suggested to him, but Franz had explained it quite simply. Although the aerial view of New -Frankfurt was by now well known, the geography below ground and the services that enabled The Island to maintain its autonomy were ill-understood. In particular, it was vital to -know where the compact nuclear power plant was located, and, more prosaically, where the water purification and sewage disposal facilities fitted in. David could see that any -serious attempt by outside forces to seize New Frankfurt would require this and other details. - -David's manager at Banque Vietnam was Mrs Chu, a Chinese woman, or, rather, you would have to say, "a Chinese lady". She was slight in -physique, and dressed in a suede suit and wore white calf-length boots like the love interest from a cowboy movie. She was meticulously made up in a pale, expressionless, -manner. Mrs Chu was hard-faced and abrupt, and had halitosis that would strip paint at four metres. David had a great deal of difficulty with her English pronunciation and she -always managed to give the impression that it was David's hearing or his comprehension of English that was at fault when he had to ask her to repeat some mangled expression. -She never smiled. Occasionally, he would hear her give an unexpected strained giggle on the telephone when she spoke, he presumed to a relative, in Chinese. With David and -his Albanian colleague, Zaf, she was all business to an almost offensive extent. And the bad breath seemed to make it worse. The more excited she became, the more obvious -the halitosis. And you couldn't show it. And no-one would have dared to tell Mrs Chu. - -Zaf was a preternaturally relaxed character, always draped over his chair; at one moment using a languid finger to buy an option on a few million Euros, at another, eating a sticky -sweet cake and reading a music magazine. He contrived always to look as if he had shaved, carefully, exactly forty-eight hours ago. He appeared to dress in whatever he had -found on the floor in his room that morning, usually grubby jeans, one of a selection of worn sweaters and a pair of threadbare Korean trainers, yet managed to look amazingly -attractive at all times. Mrs Chu clearly couldn't reconcile Zaf's personal sloppiness with his clever ability to make a fortune for the bank by buying and selling currency, and she -wasn't on his case as often as she was on David's. - -On her desk, Mrs Chu kept an inlaid wooden box, which she seemed to regard with some reverence. Zaf said it was an antique Koyosegi Japanese puzzle box. She could -sometimes be seen to open and close it without apparent effort, using slick automatic movements of her tiny fingers. David couldn't see how it was done even when he took the -opportunity of Mrs Chu's absence to guiltily hold the box in his own hands. He became fascinated by it. In Mrs Chu's grip, it appeared to open by way of sliding panels, but they -were all but invisible. It usually contained something small and hard, as he could detect by shaking it, but occasionally it seemed empty. - -Work was routine. David's system was operated by a computer process that monitored trading patterns and recommended purchases and sales. In order to cloak the process -from other financial instruments on the market, some recommended trades had to be ignored, while other counter-intuitive sales and purchases had to be made by the dealer -himself. Mrs Chu found this deliberate flouting of the system's commands very hard to comprehend, but any system whose moves could accurately be predicted soon fell foul of -someone else's counter-system. In the early days of software dealing, markets had been endangered by runaway programs all making the same decisions on the same market -data. - -The atmosphere on The Island was more sombre than in London, but there was still scope for levity among the dealers, of whom there were over two hundred on David's floor -alone, at closely packed ranks of screen-strewn desks in a vast circular open plan office. Battles with paper darts and balloons were not unusual, especially among the -Europeans. - -But in the "public" areas, and even in the dealing rooms from time to time, the Security Guards were ever present. They tended to be large, fit men crammed into uniform blazers -and flannels with white shirts and dark blue ties. They spoke poor English and German, and conversed together, which they did rarely, in some slavic language. Their purpose was -evidently to intimidate by presence, and in this they were effective. - -Three weeks of casual exploration and deliberate "getting lost" in the corridors under The Island served to map the areas accessible to David's access ring. The vast majority of -entrances led to banking houses, eating houses and drinking houses. He managed to enter a few buildings by hitch-hiking on someone else's ring, but it was risky. He had to pick -busy times when he could pass in and out in a crowd, otherwise he might get marooned in there. There remained a few, including the main security building and another entrance -that only Security Guards seemed to use. There was no clue as to the location of the nuclear generator. - -

It was Spring, and, one lunchtime, Zaf remarked on the good weather and suggested to David that they see the sunshine for a change. He led David to a dark stationery store -room and punched a four digit number into a keypad on the wall. The unmistakeable sound of an electric servo motor came from above David's head, and a metal ladder appeared -from a trap-door in the ceiling and slid into position. - -"Plant Room," said Zaf, trotting up the ladder. "The code is 2029, the year of opening this office." David followed, and found himself in a huge thrumming space which evidently ran -above the whole main dealing floor of the bank. Zaf pressed a button and the ladder retracted. David hardly had time to notice the huge air-con units, the ducting, the power supply -boards, elevator motors and fire sprinkler systems looming in the shadows before Zaf was standing on a chair, opening an aluminium and glass skylight. "Come!" he called, and -heaved himself through the aperture. David followed. - -He was standing on a steep walkway. For the first time, David discovered that the Banque Vietnam was roofed by an immense shallow dome like an inverted saucer. All around -lay, or soared, as the case may be, the roofs of many other buildings. - -Zaf led him to the flattened summit of the dome and identified several of the surrounding banks and institutions by the names of their owners - Morgan and Morgan, Rothschild, -International Financial Services Council, and so on, nearly doubling David's perception of local geography in five minutes. - -"And this is Signe," he finished. They were not alone. A girl was sitting on a small rug. She was a Danish girl that David recognised from a desk near his own. She had raw -features and dressed plainly, and obviously had some kind of crush on Zaf. There was a clear air of resentment at David's presence. - -They relaxed in the sun, David feigning sleep whilst desperately trying to memorise all the new material, Zaf and Signe talking quietly; he, serious, she flirtatious. There were -people resting and walking on other roofs. - -The great river swept by on either side, forming a bow-wave from the upstream end of the island, and a long wake behind, as though New Frankfurt were actually afloat and heading -for Switzerland. - -David was surprised that walking around on the roof was permitted. It was exactly the sort of thing the authorities would normally forbid. Zaf later explained that it was officially -forbidden, but that many Muslim employees had declared that they preferred to pray in the open air, and that the practice was therefore tolerated. After all, they couldn't do much -harm other than fall from the edge onto someone important below. - -There were catwalks joining most of the buildings together, and David started to walk on the roof every lunchtime, consolidating his knowledge of Island geography, but also -because he enjoyed the fresh air. Signe was usually there, waiting for Zaf. They talked, and she clearly began to turn her attention to David, restricting the scope of his -exploration. - -As a result, David took most of his walks in the late afternoon instead, when he was usually quite alone apart from the gathering flocks of little birds, starlings. In this way, he was -able to document the entire island over a few weeks, taking care, however, never to write anything down until he was in his hotel. - -He discovered the nuclear plant nestling under a false canopy like a chalet roof. The water and sewage works were accommodated under a light plastic dome. He reported both in -his daily wastebasket. He identified the building that was entered from below only by security staff, a tall, dark grey, windowless column with many aerials and dishes on its -summit. - -Next to the security building, he also observed a little square park about 50 metres a side, a lawn surrounded by monastic arched cloisters. He could see people moving around, -but they stayed within the cloistered area. He noted its position, wondering how he could reach it from below. - -He asked Zaf about the park. He claimed to know nothing, but recommended asking Signe. Next time David encountered Signe on the dome, he mentioned the little park. To his -surprise, Signe flushed pink and asked, "What have you heard?" - -"Nothing. Zaf thought you might know." - -She paused, turning away to face a procession of barges pushing upstream. She eventually replied, "It isn't a garden." - -"Oh." - -"There's no secret. It's a sort of prison. I'll take you, if you like." - -"A prison?" - -"Yes, if you do something serious enough, that's where they put you. You want to see?" - -David's "Sure!" was tinged with dread. - -"In that case, ask Mrs Chu for the key to the Garden of Correction this afternoon." - -"Mrs Chu?" - -"Yes. A friend of hers is there for a while. She holds the key for our section of the dealing room." - -Mrs Chu stared at him impassively for a moment before picking up her Japanese puzzle box and opening it with nineteen practiced flicks. She handed him an access ring, -speaking a phrase that seemed to contain the words "tomorrow morning". - - -

Signe was carrying a shopping bag from Tesco gmbh when David met her in the hallway. The new ring permitted access to the mysterious door that only security men seemed to -use. Beyond the metal door there was a small hallway, punctuated by a counter. The walls, floor and counter were in plastic faux marble, scratched and cracked. There was a -smell of disinfectant. A big guard checked them for concealed weapons by patting them all over. Signe shuddered. A short, supervised walk brought them to another metal door, -which opened into the cloisters David had seen from above. - -He was greeted by a chorus of moans. Several emaciated men, wrapped in grey blankets, were clustered around the door. David followed Signe as she pushed through them. All -the prisoners seemed to be crippled in some way. Signe ignored them all until she reached a figure hunched in a corner of the wall. The man was Chinese, thin and bony, and very -obviously blind. Signe picked out a packet of dates from her shopping bag and gave it to him. She then turned and handed the bag to the tallest of the prisoners who had followed -them. - -"He can be relied upon to divide the food fairly." - -David was still reeling with shock at the state of the prisoners, their haggard faces, the fact that they were all naked under their blankets, their emaciation, their disabilities - the -missing hands and feet. He said: "What's going on here?" - -"These people have all done something against the law in New Frankfurt, and the punishment varies with the crime. Tell David what you did, Lee." - -Between nibbles of the sticky packet of compressed dates, Lee spoke quietly in English: "There were three of us. We were making a short sell cross-over ladder, you -understand?" - -David nodded, then, realising Lee's problem with non-verbal communication, "Yes." It was a complex way of making money by generating artificial falls in share price over a group -of inter-dependent or competing companies. You could make a lot of money, but it was a technique from the fast lane, and crashes were frequent. - -"They caught us, I have no idea how, it is a scam difficult to detect. It is almost legal." - -"Yes, I know." - -"Our man on the outside, the Davos contact, he disappeared. Maybe he betrayed us. My colleague on The Island, they beheaded him. I was lucky. They made me blind." - -"Lucky?" - -"Sure. They just seal the eyelids. Surgical procedure. It is reversible. There will be some small loss of vision, but I will see again. In a year and two months." - -Signe added: "They just leave the prisoners out here. A blanket each. A little food every day, unlimited water. A latrine. They are allowed visitors. Of course, there are fights over -food and blankets. The blind ones often miss out on food. The security guys do nothing at all about it. People die. And when the sentence is over, if the prisoner survives, they just -expel them from New Frankfurt whatever condition they are in." - -"I'd heard rumours," said David, "I always thought they were exaggerated." - -"Well, not many dare to defy the administration here, and they always make sure the victim is discredited before release. The only reason I know about it is because Lee was a -friend, and I've been bringing him food. They blind people, remove hands, feet, whatever. All surgically with anaesthetic, of course." - -David recalled Elaine's carefully disabled hand and wondered what fate would await him, were he to be discovered. - -"Which one is Mrs Chu's friend?" - -"That one." Signe indicated a young man with no feet who was creeping around the quadrangle on hands and knees, weeping. - -He was glad when Signe decided to leave. She had spent most of the time in conversation with Lee, leaving David to contemplate the sorry creatures incarcerated here. A small -struggle between two inmates was quickly broken up by the big man Signe had entrusted with her bag of provisions. Someone came up to them and spoke urgently but -incomprehensibly. He evidently had no tongue. David spotted a number of figures with missing ears or noses. Several others lay unmoving as though already dead. - -His wastebasket report that day contained a short description of the prison and conditions. Since starting this mission, he had, until now, given little thought to how it would end. -He certainly didn't want to finish up in the cloisters. At the end of his report, he added that he had covered the whole of the ground he could reach, and asked, for the first time, -whether it would be convenient for him to leave New Frankfurt now. Two days later, someone brushed past him in the hotel lobby, and he found himself holding a tiny screw of -paper. He didn't open it until he was in the toilet. It said "dome 1640 today". At twenty to five, he was on the dome in a light drizzle, pretending to relish the fresh air. No-one else -was in sight. A few birds were flitting around. - -One of the birds landed rather untidily near him. He didn't look at it at first. Then it made a buzzing noise, and he turned. It might have passed as a bird at a distance, but it was -rather bigger than one of the starlings, and didn't look at all natural close up. With due precaution, David edged towards the mechanism, which he now recognised as one of those -military spy robots that were becoming very popular. He picked it up. It was very light in weight, the wings made of a brown translucent fabric, stiffened by plastic "bones". Its head -was a sphere with two lenses in it, its legs and feet were flexible plastic. He could hear a voice, and he turned round guiltily, but no-one was there. He realised that the voice was -coming from the bird. He held it close to his ear. "Can you hear me?" it said. - -"Uh, yes," he replied, nearly dropping it in surprise. - -"Are you OK?" It was Franz's voice. - -David hesitated, "I suppose so, but I have just about finished the survey, and I can't see any way forward. I wondered if it would be all right for me to finish now." - -"Finished? I don't think so. We only had communications from you three times. We were worried, but you kept returning to the hotel, seemingly without problem. The conclusion: -you had had a fright, you wanted to avoid suspicion, and would resume when you considered it safe." - -"What? I've reported every day." - -"In that case, you are discovered. You must leave immediately." - -"Will someone meet me? I still have a lot of this in my head, and I could still be useful." But the bird was silent. David dropped it, and it fluttered into the air. He didn't bother to -watch it. - -

David's flesh was creeping with apprehension as he climbed back through the skylight and descended to the dealing floor. He grabbed a few of his things, and fled to the -Underground shuttle. Two security guards were waiting for him. Apprehension turned to terror and his legs would hardly support him. The security men virtually carried him down to -an office in the basement and left him there. They didn't even lock the door, but David was paralysed with dread. He was trembling by the time someone came. The someone was -a short, neatly dressed man of about forty; bald, clean-shaven, quick in his movements. "My name is Arthur. Come with me," he said. - -His manner was so friendly and matter-of-fact that David began to feel better, worry less. Arthur walked briskly, David hurried to keep up. He said, "What is all this about?" - -Arthur stopped and turned. The corridor was green, made greener by the low wattage panels. One of the panels was flickering. It gave a sinister cast to Arthur's face. "You know -very well what this is about, David." - -"Is it about me walking on the roof? Lots of people do it. I thought it was OK." - -Arthur glared at him for a moment, then wheeled around and strode on. They came to a large metal door which Arthur had to open with his opal. The room was filled with light. The -light came from hundreds of video screens lining the walls and partitions. For each group of a dozen screens there was an operator. David was staring at the moving images on -nearby screens. A group of people walking down a passageway, the camera swinging from time to time and tracking them. A view of an escalator in a building David had never -visited, the camera again tracking along. A desktop, nothing happening. The inside of a toilet with a distressing amount of detail. "Here," said Arthur, "Come here." - -The scenes on this group of screens were all quite familiar. David's desk; the route David followed from Underground to office; views from the roof; Signe giving a bag to the prisoner -in the cloisters; David's hotel; David's room; David's computer; David's little maps; David's wastebin. He could feel himself blushing, but he managed to ask, "Have you got the -entire world bugged?" - -"Not exactly. We have surveillance on all our citizens and workers." - -Of course. The opal rings. Looking at the videos, he could now see that they were all wide-angle shots with frequent close-ups of the ring wearer. The videos were converted, -re-perspectived, balanced and smoothed to sanitise what would have seemed like the worst excesses of child moviemakers. "I see. The opals. Do I get representation at my trial?" - -"There is no trial. You are guilty. The record you see here proves it beyond doubt. We have many examples of you mapping New Frankfurt. This is forbidden. It is disloyal." -Somehow, now that discovery was complete, David felt much calmer, resigned. He was trying not to think about the cloisters and the state of the incarcerated victims but ever -since visiting them, he had been adjusting to the danger of spending jail time there. He was pretty sure he could tough out a year or two if they didn't cripple him too much. - -"But you cannot possibly see everyone all the time. What made you suspect me?" - -"We know all about Franz." David rocked with that revelation. Arthur continued, "He frequently identifies -discontents with a resentment towards the city. You were always under suspicion, but then everyone is." - -"But he just warned me..." - -"No. We just warned you to make you run in a predictable fashion. It saves so much time. You don't think a spy drone could make it through our air defence, even disguised as a -bird, unless we permitted it? And here is the... physical proof, no?" Arthur produced a stack of paper. The pornographic images were crushed and smudged, stained with coffee, the contents of -David's wastebasket for months. - -"Whatever you suspect about me, it's a misunderstanding." - -"I think not. Franz made it clear to you that you were working against New Frankfurt, and we have enough evidence if we needed it, which we don't, by the way. We do not have -hours of video, we have weeks, months. Your guilt is certain. We have decrypted dozens of your little litterbin messages. But we do not need proof. It is sufficient that we, I, -believe in your guilt. As you may know, we do not spend weeks in court for an open and shut case like yours." - -There was something quite paralysing about the cold manner in which his fate was being sealed. Arrest, no trial, sentence to be carried out immediately, it appeared. He heard the -sentence - beheading - but was somehow insulated from the horror by disbelief. - -Some small part of him was relieved that the sentence was irreversible death, rather than years in the cloisters with some horrible disability. He stopped listening to Arthur's quiet -voice, remembering, instead, the persistent story that victims of decapitation remained conscious for a while after their heads were severed. A French researcher, who had -obtained permission to crouch by the guillotine to interrogate executed heads post mortem, had even reported several cases in which the deceased's eyes blinked and mouth -moved in response to the investigator calling the head's previous owner by name. More recent scientific speculation argued that consciousness might remain for nearly half a -minute. - -But, even if these macabre stories were true, at least the suffering would be measured in seconds rather than months. Arthur interrupted David's morbid thoughts with: "The -sentence will, of course, be carried out under anaesthetic, as is customary. We are not barbarians." - -"Yes, you are," snapped David. - -"Our laws and punishments are widely known. To avoid the punishments, you must simply obey the laws. Have you anything to say in your defence? Circumstances may be -taken into account." - -"You injured my girlfriend's hand. She was one of the protesters last year." - -"Motive: revenge, then? But I'm afraid that doesn't count. She was also breaking the law. This city-state must have strict laws. The money we are trusted to manage for the rest of -the world demands strict rules. The punishments are severe, but traditional, and carried out without unusual cruelty, the mutilations, in particular, under scrupulous medical -procedure and supervision." Arthur paused and raised an eyebrow. "Now, if there's nothing else you wanted to tell me, we might as well get on with it. It is thoughtless to make the -convicted person brood unnecessarily over their sentence." - -David succumbed to the march to the hospital, accompanied by Arthur. If he had ever had any urge to resistance, all fight and flight were squeezed out of him now by Arthur's -matter-of-fact delivery of judgement.. too late... too late. He was carefully dressed in a hospital gown and loaded on a trolley. A rather jolly man in a white coat, who introduced -himself as David's anaesthetist, assured him that they would take good care of him and asked whether he was allergic to anything. As if it really mattered. - -Just before they passed through the doors of pre-med, Arthur nodded politely to him, saying, "See you later." David was confused. Arthur was not the type to confuse "Goodbye -for ever" with "See you later". So he said "Goodbye" to himself as the doors closed behind him, but when the jolly anaesthetist delivered a transdermal shot of something very -strong, while inviting him to count down from 99, David began to wonder if this was just an elaborate mock execution to frighten him. - -

It was, and it wasn't. And then again it was. David's first conscious sensation after the transdermal was a tingling pain all over his body, resembling the torture of returning -circulation after an extremity has been chilled to a sub-zero temperature. He opened his eyes. Either he was in total darkness, or he was blind. He tried to move, to turn his head, -which he apparently still possessed. Nothing. Then the light went on, and Arthur appeared. "You're awake, I see. No. Don't try to talk. You won't be able to." David was, so far, -impressed at being able to see and hear. But the pain was still there. - -Arthur moved to the side, out of David's view. He said, "That's what you look like now." On the opposite wall, David saw a projectograph. At first he couldn't figure it out. Then he -realised he was looking at his own head in profile, clamped in a metal framework, but where his neck should have been, there was just a small forest of tubes and wires. Below -that, nothing. Arthur was speaking again. "I forgot to mention that your sentence is six months. The longest anyone has survived, however, even with this life support, is 49 days. -But we keep refining our technique. Perhaps you will serve your full sentence, and the surgeons can have an attempt at re-attaching you to your body, which, I am afraid, will not -be much use to you by then, though there will be a certain interest in doing the whole re-grafting process. You will find that you begin to lose functions as time passes. First -vision, then hearing. Mercifully, I think, most prisoners achieve a sort of Alzheimer's state within a few weeks." - -David only had one visitor, as far as he could tell. By then, he could neither see or hear, but he could tell by the smell of her breath that it was Mrs Chu, and he was pleased. - -© Grant McDonald Walker 2008 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] newfrankfurt.jpg - - - - - -[*ITEM] From The Editor - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Something of an excuse for an editorial. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

This issue has been rather difficult to get out, due to lack of manpower in the editorial department. -However, I resolved to get it out in April, and get it out I did. Just. - -Since Mythaxis began, I have been astonished at the quantity of talented stories I've been offered. We already -have enough raw material for the next issue, but I am always delighted to receive unsolicited stories, so -I can make the magazine as wide-ranging as possible. - -Another little gem of a cartoon from Liam Baldwin. - -If I drivel on any longer, it'll be May, and I'll have missed my deadline, so enjoy. See you again in June. - - -[*IMAGE]labrea.jpg - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue3.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue3.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 81d3b547..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue3.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1702 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 3 June 2008 -[*ITEM] Blazon - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] Blason - a genre of poems that praised a woman by singling out different -parts of her body and finding appropriate metaphors to compare them with (Wikipedia) - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I can't write a blazon. - -That's all there is to -it. From the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first -century the blazon or "the love poem" has become a jaded thing at best. -Hell, after WWI there were very few poems glorifying warfare and even -Ishtar has very few followers. - -But when I looked into the eyes of my girlfriend, I sometimes wondered -whether that goddess is dead or fictional. So, here I was - trying to -write something that isn't the purple prose of Hallmark, but also -doesn't fall to the dark side of bad break-up emo stories, and their -older "angst" German counterparts. - -Seriously, how does someone like me - who thinks Lovecraft is an author -of dark fantasy, and not something kinky from an adult sex-shop - write a -blazon, and keep myself from getting hungry in the process? - -Read on. If you dare. - -

No good can come of this
I decided to go to the Lovecraft store. Specifically, Spreading -Lovecraft Since 1905. So under a gibbous moon that's romantic more in -the sublime and naturalistic sense of the word than in any particularly -sentimental way, I read from a book that predates both the Kama Sutra -and all humanity, and after resisting doing something with the section -on pre-human intercourse (something I fondly call "Caveman Love") I -found exactly what I was looking for. - -Then, after complimenting the owner on how eldritch she looked, I -gathered the following: said book, candles, some very interesting -star-fish like symbols, a cute stuffed winged tentacle toy, and -chocolate. A shit-load of chocolate. - -Now, I know what you're thinking. No good can come of this. Not this -combination, not this mindset, and definitely not the direction to which -this is going. Hell, you can even say that I forewent the entire good -intentions bit and just plain went to the awesome burning part. - -But hear me out. You might as well because you've read this far anyway. -As I said before, the extent of my Lovecraft only covered Things That -Man (and Woman) Was Not Meant to Know, and I had as much romantic -experience as young Werther did talking to himself, and a tree. Or was -that Mary Shelley? - -Anyway, I also could not in good conscience write a poem that I really -did not have any business writing, even though my old Battle-ax of -Babylon - -which I still call her fondly - made it quite clear that -Hell hath no fury, and also no bottom. Neither of these is true by -themselves, but like matter and anti-matter can be quite explosive. Just -like the threatening glare in her lovely eyes. - -So, I didn't write a blazon - a pretentious and even prissy ode to love. - -I created my Blazon. - -Let me just state one fact before we go on. A shoggoth is something of a -servitor. Think of it as a construct or building blocks. They're like -Lego, even though they can kill you - I mean, arrange themselves into -different shapes. Let me also state that the art of creating them is -supposedly gone though... Not as gone as people would like you to -believe. - -So, after some arts and crafts and a whole shit load of chocolate - a -whole shit-load - I brought my girlfriend home and lit some nice -candles with some soft green (and I still insist emerald) candles and -gave her the cute stuffed winged toy with tentacles. She looked at me -very ... askance and said something to the effect that this had better -be good, or I would be awakening to a whole new reality of maddening -pain. My words. Not hers. - -So I teased her. I smiled and laughed and I said she would have to guess -what I made her. I think she got suspicious at that point, but it is -hard to tell - memories being what they are now. She wanted a hint and, -very excitedly at this point and like any literary geek I had to pull an -Oedipus on her. - -No, not like that. You have dirty minds. I mean, I created a riddle. It -was all planned out in my head. I would ask the riddle, and she would -get the answer or she wouldn't. But that wasn't what mattered. What -mattered was that it would finish setting the scene and then I would -become all dramatic and present - my Blazon! - -So, giggling inwardly but barely, I asked her the following riddle: - -What smells sweet,
-with a mahogany smile
-and moves with languid steps?
-Whose countenance sleek,
-hides with brazen red fill
-her sweetly warm white cream? - -Yes, I was being a little fresh, but I thought it would be appreciated. -My girlfriend, who must have thought I was talking about her, smiled and -kissed me and told me how sweet I was. Her answer was along the lines of -... - -"Me?" - -"My Blazon!" I called out proudly, waving to the darkness behind me. - -To this day, I'm not entirely sure what happened. But suffice to say, it -could have initially been better. I will admit right now that my attempt -turned out more like the robot from Metropolis than any likeness of my -girlfriend. A slight oversight on my part perhaps. - -That, and the riddle was a little much I think. - -At that point she must have run away... or, well, it's better not to dwell -on these things. I was upset for a while. I mean, I'd done everything I could. -And then some. But, really, it was all for the best. Because Blazon was -very understanding about it. - -And I realized there really is such a thing as an edible woman. - -© Matthew Kirshenblatt 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] blason.jpg - -[*ITEM] The 1002nd Night - -[*AUTHOR] Dick Burton - -[*BLURB] A Tale of Eastern Promises - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The Caliph Harun al Rashid was somewhat -accustomed to the concept of the supernatural. His mother, -Al-Khayzuran, had filled his ears this many a year with -tales of magicians, djinns, flying horses, clairvoyants and the like. -And it must be admitted that he was the most cosmopolitan of rulers, -receiving, as he did, deputations of diplomats from lands as distant -and alien as, for example, Cathay and Cornwall. So the only surprise he -evinced when a strange foreigner turned up in his most private -apartment, a modest salon of a quarter acre or so, was how the intruder, -if not magical, had circumvented the intricate labyrinth and the seven -Circassian cut-throats which together protected his privacy, or how, -were he magical, his manifestation had been contrived without the pillar -of fire, or the whirlwind, or both, which tradition argued accompanied -the appearance of genies and related unlikely beings. - -

"Are you telling me that, having the -ability to travel in time, you have not explored your own eventual demise?"
-The apparition, or foreigner, was apparelled in a sort of pastiche of -court dress, laughable really, like a figure from a court painting or an -actor in some melodrama. This in contrast to the simple white shift -currently worn by the Caliph. Harun restrained himself from summoning -the guard partly out of curiosity and partly because he had been told -stories of terrible consequences to those who offended the emissaries -of the magical kingdoms. Besides, the ridiculous figure confronting him -appeared unarmed, and could clearly have been easily dispatched by the -Caliph himself, using only the ceremonial dagger at his waist. An -involuntary smile touched his lips as he enquired after the comical -visitor's business. - -With gestures of obeisance and with what were presumably intended to be -words of elaborate flattery, his visitor jabbered for some thirty -seconds in a very formal and archaic version of the Caliph's own -language, as though the speaker had learned it from a book, specifically, -the Q'ran. Harun al -Rashid made a gesture intended to silence him, but the idiot gabbled on -until fixed by one of the monarch's most truculent glares. - -"Tell me first. Are you man or djinn?" - -"An Englishman, Prince of Emirs. My name is Herbert Wells." - -"Erberwels. An unlikely name." - -"Yes, indeed, I do not use the Herbert myself. You may refer to me as Wells, if you prefer." - -"How does an Englishman called Wells differ from a man or a djinn?" - -"An Englishman is indeed a man, a man from England, a country remote from your domain." - -"How came you here?" - -"By a type of gateway. Behold, between these two pillars." The Caliph -could perceive a shimmer in the air, similar to the heat haze above a -desert dune at midday. - -"Magic, then," he concluded. - -"Technology, Lion of Persia. A sage of my time declared that any -sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to people who did -not possess it." - -"Does this mean that any impudent rascal can now invade my sanctum at will?" - -"By no means, Commander of the Faithful. I alone have mastered the art of time travel." Harun -noted the nonsensical term 'time travel' without comment. - -"At your -request," continued the visitor, "I shall remove my unworthy self and never -darken the sanctity of your chamber again." - -"And what was your motive for so doing in the first place?" - -"I merely wished to confer some wisdom upon you." - -"You consider that I lack wisdom?" bristled the Caliph. - -"Forgive my clumsy expression, Lord. I meant 'knowledge', not 'wisdom'." - -"'Knowledge is Power' as the Prophet once said. I can always use a -little more power. But is this magical knowledge you offer? I ask -because a dozen charlatans falsely claiming supernatural capabilities -are daily turned away from my gates, while a few of the more impertinent -conjurors are imprisoned or worse for their troubles. So far, you have -greatly exceeded the boundaries of respectful behaviour without -offering either illumination or entertainment. I hope for your sake that -you begin to educate or amuse me very soon." - -"It is not magic, Sire, but what we call 'Science' - interesting or -useful properties of the universe and its contents." - -"For example?" - -Wells produced, from his ridiculous robe, a coloured sphere, a handspan -in width, mounted eccentrically on a black stand. He turned it on its -axis a few times before saying "This is a chart of the whole world, in -complete accuracy." - -The Caliph took the sphere in his hands. It appeared to be made of wood, -with a thin skin of some kind of painted papyrus glued upon it. "This is -the world? Why did the artist paint it on a ball?" - -"Because the world is round like a ball." - -"Really? Hmmm... One of my more eccentric astronomers has long suspected -as much. This makes two of you. So... This is a strange map indeed. -Where is this palace represented?" Harun enquired. Wells stretched out -his hand. "Do not touch me! Indicate with a finger." - -Wells did so. "That's Baghdad, that dot there." - -"And Hindustan? I see. Cathay? So far for a camel, so near for a finger. -And the blue... this represents the sea?" - -"Yes, Your Eminence. And the white at top and bottom represents cold areas. Ice." - -"So much sea and ice. I must study this. My advisers have told me that I -am the leader of half the world, barring only the domains of Charlemagne -in the west and the Chinese emperor in the east. It appears that this -is not the case." He indicated a sheet of pure white alabaster inlaid -with precious metals and enamels. "This is the map my geographers have -provided me with. If you are right, they have been lying to me." - -Wells peered at the alabaster map. "To do them justice, Eminence, I can -see several resemblances between their map and the true situation. The -errors are mostly in scale, and in overactive imagination." He illustrated -the latter assertion by pointing to an elaborately conceived sea monster -located at the Straits of Jebel al Tariq in the Western Mediterranean Sea. - -"You think so? Then come with me now to the Hall of the -Philosophers and I shall forthwith summon my geographers to consult it." - -"Unfortunately," demurred Wells, "For reasons too complex and tedious to -elucidate, I am unable to move much farther from my gateway than I am at -present. My time here is limited, and I have much to tell you. Summon -the geographers by all means, but they must come here, or not at all." - -"You are peremptory in your demands, apparition, but you have piqued my -interest with your sphere, though I regard with scepticism your claim -that you cannot venture far from your gateway. If you have other -marvels, reveal them now, and we shall return to the sphere if time -permits." The Caliph placed the globe on a nearby table which was carved -from a single piece of jade. - -Wells pulled from his robe a metal tube and tugged it at both ends. With -a smooth set of clicks, it extended to the length of an arm, as -interlocking tubes were revealed. For a moment, the Caliph experienced -a slight alarm, and he took a cautious step backwards, his right hand -touching the hilt of his jewelled knife. Wells applied one end of the -tube to his own left eye and swung it from side to side. "Ah, Sire, do you see -that small vase on the table near the door?" he asked. - -"I am intimately familiar with it, as it is my own, a gift from the King -of Jerusalem, and containing a bone from the finger of Abraham." - -"Yes, of course it is. But now, if you can, observe it through this tube." - -The Caliph complied, noticing, as he did, that there was a pane of glass -in each end of the tube. It took a few moments to adjust, but he was -completely astonished by what he saw. - -"A glass to perceive things at a distance! I have heard of such a -device. How can I control its influence to discover what my Wazir is -doing at this instant?" - -"Regrettably," admitted Wells, "This glass can only make larger that -which you can already see." - -The Caliph's disappointment was clear. "But I could walk to that vase -and inspect it without the aid of your seeing tube." - -"True. But the tube will also make objects that you could not easily reach -seem closer, such as a ship at sea or a distant bird. Or, indeed, the -moon or stars." - -"Hmph. I have limited requirements in those departments, though I dare -hazard that my astronomers and sea captains may be interested in this -toy. You are evidently a man of considerable resources. Cannot you -offer me something rather less trivial? You tell me that you come to me -from a future time. Can you not advise me on my fate?" - -"To my everlasting regret, Your Eminence, it is not recommended for a -time traveller like myself to reveal an individual's future to the -subject, particularly, as in the present case, when the person is -extremely important, as they may attempt to alter the course of history, -to the eventual inconvenience of the traveller and his generation." - -"Are you telling me that, having the -ability to travel in time, you have not explored your own eventual demise?" - -"My gateway can only penetrate to the past, not to my future. -In any event, I should be reluctant to seek my own moment of death - -it would remove some of the unpredictability of life." - -"Nonsense. Every man's fate is written. It cannot be altered. -Predestination is at the heart of the true faith. Revealing that which -is known to Allah cannot make any difference to the individual. My -soothsayers are utterly frank in their revelations, though a trifle -inconsistent in their conclusions at times. - -"That, certainly, is a consideration," replied Wells, judiciously. -"Theoretically, since your future is in my past, I should be able to discover what -befell you in later life. Unfortunately, precise details of your life have not percolated to my -time, except that, in general, you are known as a wise and merciful -ruler, which is why I chose you to communicate with." - -"I suspect you of prevarication, Englishman. I warn you, I have -resources to loosen the most resolute tongue." - -"Of that I am certain. But before you put me to the test, let me first -reveal to you that which I would deliver voluntarily. I feel sure that -you will be well satisfied with what I have to offer." - -"For example?" said the Caliph, picking a sweetmeat from a nearby -pedestal and chewing it, wiping his fingers on an embroidered -napkin, the product of two years labour from a blind artist. - -Wells reached into a bag which appeared to have been sewn into his -pantomime costume. The Caliph made a mental note to have similar bags -inserted in his own robes. In these, he would be able to carry -concealed weapons and other useful articles. Wells produced a sheaf of -extremely white papyrus sheets, of a remarkably uniform size and shape. - -"These," he announced, "Contain plans in the form of pictures for the -construction of what we call 'a printing press' with movable type, -together with instructions on making paper and ink." - -"Of what use is this 'press'?" - -"It enables the user to make many copies of a single document or book." - -"What value is that? A scribe can read a single copy of a document to -many listeners. If I need another copy of a book, I simply command that -one be made." - -"And this takes how long?" - -"A day, if I am in a hurry. One clerk can be assigned to each page. -Here," he said, pointing to a gorgeously rich volume bound in -white leather and gold leaf standing on a lectern which was made of solid -gold, a tribute from the people of Anatolia, "Is a Q'ran they prepared for me last week." - -"What if every citizen in your empire could have his own copy of the Q'ran?" - -"Then we would have anarchy. We have an ample sufficiency of -disputatious mullahs already, each with his own interpretation of the -Prophet's teachings. Besides, most of my citizens cannot read, praise -be to Allah, and many are infidels - Jews, Christians and so on, living -under our protection. They pay taxes; they become citizens. An excess of - books could only destabilise the empire." He twitched his robe in - irritation. - -"I am not yet at a loss," protested Wells. How about an explanation of -the laws of motion, or electricity, or magnetism?" - -Harun snorted. "How about something useful? Can you provide me with a -poison which duplicates the symptoms of some common fatal disease, so -that I can rid myself of that scheming villain of a Wazir without his -entire family swearing revenge and attempting to murder me at every -turn?" - -"I am afraid that Your Eminence knows more about poison than I will ever -learn." - -The Caliph sighed. "I warn you that I am already weary of your pathetic -contributions. What next?" - -"This land of yours, Sire, is often hot. I can describe to you how to -build a machine that makes ice." - -"A machine? I have no need of a machine to make ice. Allah, may His Name -be praised, creates all the ice we require and stores it in the -mountains to the north of India. We import a shipload every month or so -to cool our beverages and sherbets." - -"I have here, " said Wells, "A clock of astonishing accuracy, which, -together with observations of the sun, would enable your navigators to -correctly determine their position in mid-ocean, without landmarks." - -"Pah! Keep your clock. I have recently sent to my colleague, -Charlemagne, a water clock of astounding beauty and cleverness. We are -expert in the measurement of time. Can you not assist me in my campaign -to civilise the known world? - -"Your glittering reputation as a conqueror precedes you down the ages," -replied Wells carefully, "I can think of nothing that would enhance your -capabilities beyond their current high levels." - -The Caliph fixed Wells with a dangerous glare. "Do not attempt to -hoodwink me, magician. It is completely certain that mankind will -develop, above all other considerations, weapons of war and murder. I -urge you to concentrate your efforts towards that topic, as your reward -will be greatest if you satisfy me in this regard." - -Wells paused before replying, "My best advice, until your metals -technology improves, would be to perfect the use of massed archers, and -to establish a powerful and disciplined navy. Further, you may discover -that the Emperor of Cathay's alchemists are aware of certain incendiary -substances. In my time, the capability to fly in the air above the enemy is regarded as -a key factor. You take a large quantity of material and make a huge hollow -bag from it. Then you place a fire at the mouth of the bag, and shortly the -bag fills with hot air and rises in the air, taking..." - -"Enough! You sound like my first wife, rattling on with such nonsense. From a -woman, this is tolerable, and she has the asset of beauty which I cannot -help noticing that you, candidly, lack. The secret I require you to reveal -is that of the great weapon which can destroy whole cities at a stroke. -It has been forecast by my most reliable clairvoyant that a Caliph will -possess such a weapon. I wish that Caliph to be me." - -"Why would you want such a weapon? A weapon that would kill tens of -thousands of people, men, women and children, at a stroke." - -"That is simple. You say that future generations will call me merciful, -and for that, I am gratified. Yet in my sincere attempt to civilise -the known world, thousands die and are maimed in cruel ways, from ripped limbs, skewered -guts, broken heads, cut throats. It moves me to tears, whether the victims -are the Faithful or not. With such a weapon, I would destroy one city, -perhaps two. Then my enemies would see my power and I would never be challenged -on the battlefield. I could negotiate without bloodshed, as I did at -Byzantium. Stability would be achieved." - -
Wells nodded thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. Such a weapon could indeed be a -force for peace. I have long been an advocate of a World State. I hate to disappoint -the leader of Islam, but such a weapon is not feasible. -My own time is some 1300 years in your future - the year 1942 in the Christian -calendar. About thirty years before my time, there was a war that involved nearly the whole world, -and there is currently another very large war in progress, yet the weapons in use -are not greatly advanced on those available to your own armies, except for those, -as I remarked, begging your pardon, delivered from the air. I feel certain that -if a weapon of such magnitude were possible, it would have been deployed in my own time." - -A bell rang from the direction of Wells's gateway, and the visitor glanced over his -shoulder. "Your Eminence, I regret I must go very soon. And I so want to tell you -how to propel a chariot by an engine that uses steam instead of by horses." - -"The steam engine was invented by Hero of Alexandria 600 years ago. It is a toy. -Does your steam engine feed and water itself in the field, does it produce its own successors -as does a horse?" - -"Well, no. Perhaps, then, I can interest you in a number of ingenious uses which you may not have discovered for that -inflammable black liquid that sometimes oozes from the desert." - -"Bah! Begone before I have you flayed and impaled for your outrageous blether. -Return, if you must, when you have learned the secret of the destroyer of -cities!" - -Wells beat a hasty retreat to his gateway, and when he became invisible, as he did -silently within a minute or so, Harun returned to his olive-wood desk, a gift from -Athens, and to contemplation of a letter from -his emissary to the near-mythical islands of Japan, beyond even Cathay. What was it that -the clairvoyant had said about the great weapon and Japan? - -© Amazon Systems 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] rashid.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Summoning - -[*AUTHOR] Chris Penycate - -[*BLURB] Is this where the PFY first meets the BOFH? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Darkness. - -Darkness so thick and black that it seemed to be breathed into our lungs like a viscous liquid. -So complete that the optic nerve sent flashes of colour to the brain, just so it would know it was still -connected. - -The Kobolds led us. True residents of Earth's depths, they sensed the rocks without seeing them, unlike -the mining dwarves with their coldfire lamps. Indeed, the light would have confused our guides, -preventing them from finding the precise spot where we had to be. - -Behind us trailed our personal Ariadne's thread - a fibre-optic filament unrolling from a reel next to our -relay on the surface. In time, light would traverse the darkness without disturbing it, carrying our -words; for now it carried darkness and silence. - -The floor under our feet was irregular, but all the loose bits of debris had been swept to the sides in -anticipation of our visit. The little hand trembling in mine belonged to Annalise, our token 'maiden', the -eight-year old daughter of our German host and who was possibly now regretting her insistence on -coming with us, but was too proud to back out. - -I was happy she was there; dragons might remember the time of the sacrifices, and, while most races -had dabbled in necromancy from time to time, no-one had attempted a summoning such as this for -many generations. - -'Such as this' - This summoning would be unique in history, if it worked. - -The cessation of the shuffling footsteps and a gentle pressure against my knees told me we had arrived. -Packs were opened, artefacts distributed and the laptop unlimbered. The screen lit blindingly bright, -revealing that whatever this mine had once produced was long since exhausted. If we were depending -on those pit-props, halfway to fossilisation or pulverisation, to hold the roof up, we would be wise not -to sneeze. There was no doubt that the 'Danger - No admittance' signs at the entry had not been -exaggerating. - -The blue light reflected back from a collection of faces, their expressions different from race to race, -but all containing the same mix of anticipation and muted terror. - -The computer was informing us that it was booted up, in contact with the outside world, and that it was -ready and eager to get to work. Poor imagination-free, stupid machine, that had never read the -descriptions of what could happen to magic channels. The requisite runes, symbols and incantations -had been programmed into it. The buzzing in our nerve ends told us that this was indeed a correct use -of 'Power point' - and then there was no excuse left to delay. - -'Enter' - -Symbols flashed on the screen, as we sat in as near a circle as we could manage in the cramped space. -The artefacts - some borrowed from museums or private collections for the ceremony, some made -specially by techniques handed down through the generations in some very long-lived cultures, had -been placed on a velvet cloth between us on the ground. - -Melodies which had seemed banal when originally programmed resonated weirdly in these tunnels, the -light from the shifting patterns on the screen animating the rocks and props around us in an arrhythmic -dance, sometimes bringing the walls rushing in towards us, sometimes casting us into an enormous, -intangible space, bordered all around with the compressing darkness. - -Voices differing in timbre but alike in intent delivered responses to barely understood questions. The -suffocating pressure of the dark was transmuted by the gathering power, and we were breathing -crystallised fire, exhilarating and terrifying. - -Needing both hands for the keyboard I could feel a warmth of little girl pressed up against my side. -Why me, rather than her father, whose strong Saxon voice was mumbling its way through the -responses a bit further round the circle? Perhaps because I seemed to know what I was doing? - -Suddenly the 'activity' bar on the screen swung from almost zero towards full. -If the roar we all felt -had been transmitted through the air I am convinced the roof would have collapsed, burying us all -instantly and terminating the experiment, but the only acoustic noise (still clearly audible despite the -enormous mental shout) was the whirring grind of the laptop's hard drive racing. - -The verbal responses from the assembled beings were replaced by what I assume were prayers to their -assorted deities. Annalise's father, Kurt, was surrendering his many years of paganism and regressing -to his childhood Catholicism, various gods of springs and hedgerows whose presence here would have -been entirely inappropriate were being invoked; and the computer made known its devotion to Murphy -by, for once, not crashing (anything that can go wrong...) - -The 'available space' indicator was emptying like a ruptured water tank, and it was obvious that there -was no way in which whatever was happening was going to fit on the hard disc. Still, there was a back -door to this prison; and suddenly it was operating. -Up the optical link poured something - a ghost, a -dream, a spirit? It didn't matter. And the spiritual roar grew more distant as the disc wound down to stillness. - -One of the candles flared like an acetylene torch and burnt out in seconds; the others went on quite -normally, except for a violet tinge in their flames. A single quartz crystal, surrounded by more fragile -objects, fragmented into talcum-fine dust. All this in total silence, with the fan of the laptop and -breathing of the observers dying before they reached the walls to reverberate. - -A 'ping' prompted me to move, and hook up the supplementary batteries I'd brought with me. It couldn't -have been that long. - -Looking at the computer's clock, it hadn't. The thing was merely absorbing power at an incredible rate. -Then the screen went dark, leaving us with the light of a couple of candles and a frantically strobing -'activity' LED. - -"Hab kein angst, liebling, sie ist ein geist, -sie canst nicht du schlecht machen" I said, as much for my own reassurance as the little girl's. She gave a nervous giggle, whether -for my wording, pronunciation or the idea that it was only a ghost, nothing that scary, I never found -out. - -The meter on the auxiliary battery pack was getting alarmingly close to zero when everything stopped, -with a last 'clickit' from the hard disc. The tension, the impression of an impending subterranean -thunderstorm vanished from the air, and with it the two remaining candle flames disappeared, not as if -they'd been blown out, but as if they'd finished the job and just packed up and gone home. The -darkness that flooded in round the last tiny yellow LED was comforting, not menacing as it had been -earlier. - -We sat silent round its glow, knowing that there was nothing left to say, then: -"Well, we've done it, whatever it was. Let's make our way back to the surface. But first..." I indicated -the refreshment bag. Thermos flasks of beverages were still hot, and the chocolate and cereal bars still -tasted the way they ought to. Even the Kobolds joined in the laughter as I attempted to translate my -previous statement into German (they are not totally devoid of humour; it's just that their idea of a good -joke frequently involves somebody getting buried under a few thousand tons of rock) - -Torches worked, too; it would seem that the eldrich atmosphere of the ceremony had entirely -dissipated. - -The fatigue we all felt was only partly from our efforts, and in part to the removal of pressure. What -was done, was done, the genie well and truly unbottled. - -We refilled our rucksacks, and started on the long walk/climb towards open air, carefully winding up -the optical fibre as we went; no need to leave any evidence. - -Once or twice Kurt had to suggest to his daughter that skipping along and checking out the echo was -likely to bring the roof down on us and, while not nullifying our efforts, make it difficult for us to -appreciate the results (at least, that's what I'd have been saying, and her reactions were consistent with -that translation. Nearly five minutes of sticking close to us and not shouting quite at the top of her -lungs, that's about par for an eight-year old, no?) - -The future was even more uncertain that when we had come down, but it was uncertain in so many -interesting ways. - -© Chris Penycate 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] summoning.jpg - -[*ITEM] When Gretchen Met Sally - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] When you decide to have cosmetic surgery, you had better be ready for -the consequences. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Gretchen watches Dana lazily. A skinny little blonde, with an attitude -problem. Rocking back and forth on her plain, black, functional work -shoes. For Gretchen the shoes a symbol for the differences between the -two of them, -dressed as they are in essentially the same fashion, the waitress -uniform - white blouse, black waistcoat, dark trousers - like millions -of others across Berlin, the world. The difference is that Gretchen -wears large, solid, clunky boots. She feels it says something -essential about the difference in their personalities. Though perhaps -the differences in their body language and attitude towards the work -say much more clearly that these are two very different types of -people. Gretchen stands by the bar, poised and waiting, playing with -her pen, this being one of those slow moments she sometimes gets on a shift -like this. - -The bell above the door chimes, set to swinging as the black-framed -glass door is pushed open by a pink haired girl - curls spilling -across her shoulder, while half her face is hidden by a black woollen -scarf, which she is tugging free as she enters the café. -The bell jingling in a -clearly audible fashion, designed to catch attention during the day -when the Schwarzenraben is likely to be quieter. In the evenings the -chances are the bell would go unheard, that night's guest DJ just -about drowning out all other sounds, and besides the place is abuzz -with activity, people and staff in constant motion, shifts which are -more fun and more stress. Gretchen watches the foursome take the two -steps from street level to the café floor, stamping snow from boots as -they do so, seeming to straighten up as though with the interior's -warmth a burden is removed from their shoulders. - -

When you have an eagle's -head, you are used to people staring
Tourists. Everything about them makes this fact clear to Gretchen. The -way they are dressed, and just the way that they look. This misfit -quartet are not from Berlin at all - the cut of the clothes, the brands, -the entire body language, marks them as 'other'. They look around, -appraising the layout of the café. There are tables along the two -opposing walls, until they reach the bar. Behind the bar, leading -to a beer garden, there is a restaurant. In the middle of the front part -of the establishment there is a pillar island, the core surrounded by -a circle of tables. A variety of posters is stuck and layered -across the pillar's surface, in contrast to the precise black and -white illustrations framed at intervals along the walls. The café is -medium busy for a Wednesday afternoon. The girl with the wild pink -curls leads the group to the window seat away from the door. - -Gretchen gets a vibe from this group. Something strange, and it is not -just the way the fourth member has stopped to look at her. A woman -with a hood over her head as well as the scarf covering her face, so -that only those intense eyes are visible. When you have an eagle's -head, you are used to people staring; this is different. The strange -woman nods to herself, and follows her friends. Gretchen glances at -Dana, Dana turns her back on the newcomers. Her lips curling in that -superior sneer-smile that riles Gretchen so much, twirling a finger in -her shoulder length hair like she doesn't have a care in the world, -with her elbows propped on the polished surface of the bar. Gretchen -can tell Dana is pretending to stare into space, but is actually -looking into the mirrors along the wall at the back of the bar. -Watching to see if anyone notices her. - -Gretchen shrugs, gives herself a shake to release the tension that has -gathered while she stood around, straightening as she heads to the -window table. As she does so, she can feel the eyes following her. Her -particular kind of cosmetic surgery is still new, still -particularly radical. Deviant, some would say. Expensive work, and -more than Gretchen can afford. A combination of the latest -reconstructive techniques, coupled with cybernetics, and the -associated smart plastics. She wears her feathers with pride, holds -her eagle head high, and lets them look. Half way across the space, -the strange girl removes her hood. Removes her scarf. Gretchen doesn't -miss a step; while inside something does a flip. The dog-headed girl -looks back at her. - -Gretchen stops at the table, "Guten tag." -"Hey," the pink haired girl says, the hint of a Scottish accent coming -through, even from that one word. Gretchen glances at the man, who it -is clear is wearing a cybernetic body, better than anything she has -seen before, making it most likely South American work, and at a guess -she would say Paraguayan, he nods at her. The Japanese girl is looking -out of the window, and Gretchen has the sense that she doesn't feel as if she -is as much of a part of the group as the other three. Sally Sally Dog -Girl leans forward, Gretchen recognises the singer. While she might -not know much about her music, there are sufficiently few -celebrity animalists that she has at least seen pictures of Sally -Sally and that Chinese cat supermodel. The dog girl reaches for -Gretchen's hand, takes it in her own. - -"Hi, I'm Sally" - -"Gretchen, hi." - -"That is some damn fine work you have there," the dog girl grins, -admiring the eagle girl. - -"Absolutely radical," the eagle girl replies to the dog girl. - -The handshake lingers for a moment, and then they release, and resume -their rôles. - -"So. What can I get you?" - -The pink haired girl hides a smile, bowing her head as she trails a -finger down the page of hot drinks on the menu, "I'll have a pot of -Earl Grey tea please," the warm accent more evident now than before. - -"I'll take a beer, something local," the man says, his voice smooth, -synthetic, unplaceable. - -"Green tea, please," the Japanese girl says, with a quick nod, and -quicker smile, her gaze wandering to Gretchen's eyes long enough to -place her order, and then back to the street, following the bustling -passage of people. - -"I'll take a green tea as well, Gretchen," Sally's voice having a -certain growl. Is it possible to place an accent from someone who has -had that kind of surgery, that kind of reconstruction, and even if you -could, could you rely on that impression? Gretchen wonders, detecting -a hint of something Hispanic. This time, as Gretchen crosses the -space, not an eye follows her, attention has shifted to the new exotic -presence in their midst, an animalist, and one who has at least a -degree of fame, in certain circles. - -Dana is paying attention now, glancing a tight scowl at Gretchen as -she potters about behind the bar, pulling together the order. A kettle -bubbles and clicks, transferred to 3 identical white pots, tea bags in -paper envelopes, extracted from boxes on wire stacked racks. A chilled -beer from the cabinet, a clean glass from a shelf. Gretchen balances -it all on a tray, carries it via another of Dana's scowls, a little -bemused by this unexpected turn of events, if she is honest with -herself. She places the teas in front of each of the girls, the beer -in front of the man. They smile and thank her, she nods, clicks her -beak, and leaves them to drink. The sound of their conversations -lingering in her ear, as she walks as through a fog back to her safe -little spot by the bar. - -The half hour that follows seems long and slow. She serves a few -customers, and is amused on occasion when Dana actually makes any -effort towards working - clattery and clumsy for all her careful -aloofness. Gretchen's attention drifts back, time and time again to -the tourists at that table, to the dog girl. Watching the strangers -and their chatter, occasionally Sally will meet her look, and then -they will nod a little, acknowledgement of some kind of animal -bond that exists between them, even if they have never met before this -day. - -Gretchen counts the change from the 50 mark note that the pink haired -girl used to pay the bill, while Sally is rooting through her -jacket pockets, to produce a couple of slips of paper. -"Here," Sally says, handing the paper to Gretchen, so she can see that -they are tickets for a gig, "We are playing tonight, these are a -couple of tickets, I would like it if you were to come along." - -"Thank you, I will try." Gretchen folds them, and slips them into the -back of her order pad, and glances back to see whether Dana is -watching, while Sally stands and pulls her jacket on. Gretchen steps -back to let the group leave, Sally touching her arm and squeezing -lightly as she departs. Gretchen stands and watches them as they step -back into the street, crunching through the snow, Sally pulling up her -hood again, before taking the man's arm, and walking close beside him, -as they disappear around the corner. - -

Gretchen pulls her hood down as she takes the final step to their -third floor flat. Fumbling with the keys, she opens the door. Swings -the cloth bag with tonight's dinner on to the top of the hall cabinet. -Gretchen tugs the laces free, kicks her boots aside, and they clatter -against the wooden flooring. She runs her hands through her feathers, -a sensation she never gets tired of. She sighs, feeling the weight of -a day's fatigue sitting on her shoulders. She walks to the living -room, lazily dragging her sock-clad feet along the floorboards, in a -moment of self-amused self-indulgence. In the living room she boots up -the system, and selects the last Children With Machine Guns album, -having decided those spare melancholic melodies match her mood of the -moment. With the sound of "You don't like seagulls" entering the room, -she exits, into the bedroom. She strips off her uniform, pulls on -something casual, jeans, t-shirt, thick grey jumper. Living room, -hall, grabs bag of food, and into the kitchen to start making dinner, -humming to herself "These are the machine gun children of our -generation." - -As Gretchen tips the last handful of chopped vegetables into the wok, -she hears the door to the flat opening, and listens to the sound of -someone come in, and, like she had before, kick off their shoes. -"I'm in the kitchen", she calls out. - -"Ok", a man's voice replies, accompanied by the sound of the kitchen -door creaking open a degree. Gretchen doesn't turn from the wok, -stirring the food around with a plastic spoon. He slides his arms -around her, embracing her stomach, pressing against her back, brushing -his feathers against hers. She accommodates him, her head tipping a -degree to increase the sensation of her feathers against his. "Hello, -love," he murmurs to her, and her facial muscles shift, in what would -be a smile for a base human, the same hard-wired conscious motion, but -something a degree different for the girl with the eagle head. Within -his embrace she turns round, her eagle eyes look into his. She brings -a hand up, to run through his feathers, his dark, almost black, feathers in -contrast to the golden radiance of her own. - -Gretchen has been married to Anders for three years now. He works for -the Berlin branch of the second biggest Chinese record label, which is -to say the second biggest record label in the world. He does quite -well, a fact that surprises them both, given that he started it as a summer -job all those years ago. A combination of luck and of being in the -right place at the right time have worked wonders. Though, never let -it be said that Anders is a slacker, he is someone who works hard for -his money and would hate to think someone thought otherwise. Even if -with his eagle's head they think all kinds of other things about him. But, hell, it's the music industry, -and there is a fine tradition of eccentricity to be upheld. -Regardless, it is through the work Anders does that they were able to -afford the surgery at all - something they did for their honeymoon. -They checked into a Shanghai clinic, for the dozen operations, before -spending a couple of weeks together, recuperating and learning who -these new people were. Giving a human at least the appearance of -having an animal's head is, unsurprisingly, not a straightforward -process. Some aspects of the problem are obvious, others more subtle - -from how does someone with an eagle's head conduct human speech, to -what kind of proportions of each component are required so that the -end result, at least as far as the client is concerned, does not look -entirely absurd. In contrast to which the tattoos they got while -they were there seemed rather minor endeavours on the scale of things. - -"Dinner will be ready in a second, if you give me a bit of space," -Gretchen says, giving Anders a playful shove, turning back to stir the -sizzling vegetables. - -"Ok, ok. You want me to open some wine to go with that?" Anders asks, -already taking two glasses from the cupboard. Gretchen turns to him, -her eyes flash, amused, and she nods to him. - -"Yeah, that sounds good" - -"I'm on it," Anders replies, laughing. - -"So I see," Gretchen says, quietly, smiling to herself. "Oh. Yeah..." she says after another moment. - -"Oh, yeah, what?" Anders pauses, something in Gretchen's tone catching -his attention. - -"Oh, yeah, give me a minute, and I'll tell you what happened to me today." -"Oh, yeah, you are a tease, and you know it!" - -"Ha, yeah, I know that. But you love me for it!" - -"I love you? Who told you that?" - -"You did, stupid!" - -"Oh well, I guess it must be true then," Anders says, laughing and shrugging. - -Gretchen puts a plate on the table in front of him, another opposite -him. Anders hands her a pair of chopsticks, and sits -expectantly. He watches Gretchen take a mouthful of wine and clucks -mock exasperation as it looks as though she is about to eat without saying -anything else. "Well?" he taps his plate with his chopsticks, making a clacking -sound. Gretchen tilts her head, looks at him and shrugs, picks up a -chunk of pepper and raises it towards her mouth. - -"Come on!" Anders moans. Gretchen sits back in the chair, and laughs, -dropping the pepper. - -"Ok, ok. Keep your feathers on! Ok, so, you know that singer?" - -"What singer?" - -"Sally" - -"Sally who?" - -"The dog head Sally" - -"Oh. Right. The singer." - -"Yeah. The singer." - -"From myslutsonfire. What about her?" - -"She came into the bar today." - -"What! No way?" - -"Yeah" - -"Wow" - -"Yeah. It was a strange day" - -"Wow" - -"You said that already!" - -Anders does the equivalent of a grin, and a what-can-I-say kind of -shrug, "I did. But you know, wow. I didn't even hear anything about -her being in the country." - -"Well there she was, there was a group of them, an odd bunch, you -know?" Gretchen laughs, takes a bite of her food now, and chews. - -"I bet. Tell me about the others?" - -"There were the four of them altogether. Sally and two other girls - -one was Scottish, with this wild pink hair, and a quiet Japanese -girl." - -"Hmm the Scot would be Kirsty Munro, don't know the other one, though -they do have a tendency to change the membership a lot, I get the -impression it's a pretty casual kind of idea." - -"And then there was the guy, he had some heavy prosthetics, serious -cybernetic rebuild." - -"Yeah, that would be Hugo. Sally, Kirsty and Hugo are the three core -members, always those three. Apparently they met in a Scotian Youth -Detention Centre, formed bonds that have kept them together ever -since." - -"Scotia? That's some bad shit." - -"Yeah, well, the war..." Anders leaves the sentence hanging there, -unfinished. The two eat in silence for a moment, lost in reflection. -World War Three was one Germany had sat out of, but they watched and -witnessed the aftermath as much as anyone. Europe, the World, was a -changed place now. - -Gretchen finishes her glass of wine, and Anders refills it. When he -places the bottle back down again, she reaches for his hand, takes it -in her own and gives it a squeeze. She tilts her head one way, he -tilts his the other, and he squeezes her hand back. - -"Anyway, the band are playing a gig tonight." - -"They are?" - -"Sally gave me two tickets, she asked me to come. You want to go along?" - -Anders looks at his wife, chews on a piece of synthetic meat, and -holds her hand in his. "Such a funny old world," he mutters to himself. - -"Pardon?" Gretchen asks. - -"Yeah," he says ", lets go. Should be pretty fun." - -"It seems like such a long time since we had a night out," she smiles -at him "Well, I guess I had better decide on what I am going to wear -then." - -Gretchen throws the slight red top on the bed, confident that it will -expose her pierced belly button, and will show off the two small wings -she has tattooed across her shoulders. Then she selects a pair of -heavy, baggy cargo trousers, a warm, dark, burnt, brown colour, and -adds to those pile. Anders steps up behind her, slides his arms around -her, caressing his hands up her belly, beneath her jumper, up to her -breasts. She pulls her jumper and top off, over her head, and he pulls -him to her, their beaks opening, heads tilting in practiced motions as -their mouths meet in a kiss. Gretchen takes Anders' belt buckle in her -hand, and starts to loosen it, tugging it free. The pair strip, with -touches and kisses, beaks against beaks, tongues flicking from mouth -to mouth, till they are standing naked and eager. Gretchen takes his -hand in hers, and leads him to the shower, where they make love -together, slowly and passionately, and wetly. - -

Fresh snow falls, spinning white flakes like special effects stars in -a science fiction film. Disorientating as the silent train charges -through the dark, towards the more industrial areas of the city, -tilting from side to side with the invisible pathways of steel tracks. -The carriage lights set to a minimum, Gretchen -imagines the light as a slight humming sound, at the periphery of her -vision. The space itself is almost empty, one in a series of lonely -carriages, strung together, the only other people on board, going in -this direction, are a group of a half dozen kids. They create a quiet -buzz amongst themselves, mutters and whispers exchanged, as they pass -a cigarette between them, carefully and covertly trying to avoid -attention, their attitude restrained by the half-light, the time of -night, the presence of the odd couple at the other end. With the -ongoing fuel crisis - which refuses to be effectively met - regardless -of all the wonders of clean bio-fuels that have been developed in the -last decade - there is an ongoing effort towards conservation. As -such, industrial estates full of warehouses and factories, like the -one they can catch the ghost of outside the windows, where the venue -is, are kept dark at night, once the daily shifts are finished. -Gretchen and Anders have come prepared, both for the cold and for the -dark, stepping out of the train as it comes to a stop, out onto the -platform. They are wearing heavy jackets, the hoods up and scarves -across their faces to protect them from the weather, and minimise -unwanted attention. Cautiously crunching through the snow, feeling a -certain amount of ice mixed in with the white powder, their feet slide -momentarily and slightly, such that Gretchen reaches for Anders, -sliding her arm through his, they use each other for balance and -support as they make progress. The station has a minimum lighting, but -as they totter down the old wooden stairs down to street level, -Gretchen uses her free hand to hold onto the hand rail, while Anders -flicks on the beams of his torch - a long and heavy device, which -could readily double as a handy baton, should it come to that. It is -not that they expect trouble, especially not at this time of year with -the weather discouraging nocturnal expeditions, but in the dark areas -of cities crime happens, add to that their own peculiar and particular -appearances and they are prone to attract unwanted attention on -occasion. Crossing the road from the station Anders flashes his torch -up to the street sign screwed to the side of the flat grey expanse of -some nondescript warehouse building, to confirm their bearings, while -Gretchen retrieves her own torch and switches it on as well. - -They do know this area, though not well, at each street corner they -have to double check their location, compare it to the hand drawn map -they made before they left the flat, a scribble of intersecting lines -and scrawled street names, like a jigsaw piece extracted leaving the -picture a mystery. They are looking for Werkhouse 4, an old warehouse -that went out of business some years ago and was converted into a club -venue, a building like all the others in this warren of business -spaces. As is often the case, the conversion from warehouse to -clubhouse was done on the cheap - money first, value second - a big open -space that might be suitable enough for groups of people, but was -never really designed for this type of gathering, let alone designed -with acoustics in mind. So it isn't entirely ideal, though to some -extent it is not as bad as it could have been, and they have seen some -good bands play here in the past, taking the available space the -promoters have offered, unaware or unconcerned by the problems the -space might present. Anders has suggested in the past that the way things -are in the world means that it really can't be easy for the bands of -today, which is certainly a factor in why tours from bands from so far -afield have become something of a rarity. Who has the funding for -that kind of thing, and where are the returns that make the whole -thing pay off? Though, certainly, local scenes flurry in the void, -with the same old crap and cream balance that there ever was, Berlin, -always a hot spot on the music map of the world, works at hyper speed -of flash and burn as talents rise and fall. - -Along the way they pass gateways, chained closed; sharp rusted fences, -with barbed wire toppings; it is intensely quiet on this stretch; here -and there silent security guards stand behind these gates like -spectres, watching people like Anders and Gretchen wander past, large -dogs sitting by their feet, also watching, with lazy vigilance. One -last corner and they can tell that they have arrived, the change in -atmosphere - lights and sound, the appearance of groups of people. -There is a glow of lights, put out by the club owners, just off the -street, to attract attention and serve its customers. There is also a -murmur of sound, people flowing towards the venue, and a group of -people gathered by the roadside. Gretchen tenses against Anders, there -is something in the air, they both have their torches by their sides, -balanced, and pointed down towards the ground. As they get close -enough to hear some of the conversation the pair have an -idea of what is going on, the edges of tones, snatches of words. In -front of them protestors are challenging other people going to the -concert, handing them flyers, trying to discourage them from going on. -As they near it is clear that they are making little headway in this -context. - -There are -religious fanatics who feel that animalism is a step too far on the -scale of body modification, a step into sin, and a crime against God. -This kind of attitude is something that both Gretchen and Anders have -encountered before, something they knew to expect when they discussed -the operations and how it would affect their lives. However, when Anders -had talked about the body mods, having read about it in a magazine, -and showing her the photographs of a transformed Chinese supermodel, the -idea had got into her head and stuck. Anti-animalism is something they -would have preferred not to encounter tonight, though, Gretchen -reflects, given the nature of tonight's band, she supposes she -should not be surprised in any way. The people ahead shove their way -through the agitated crowd, accompanied by a chorus of "sinners!" -While half of the group are turning, having spied new people to -harangue, someone new to attempt to dissuade, a man steps forward, -balding head exposed to the cold, as though the black woollen hat held -in his clasped hands would detract from his sincerity. There is a -large, gold coloured, cross, pinned to the collar of his jacket, -glinting warnings in the bare available light. - -"Comrades," he calls, with a false joviality, "please do not enter -here, for they encourage crimes against the human spirit, against -god!" - -Anders takes a step to the side, away from the man and his friends, -Gretchen following as she still holds on to his arm, scanning faces -for signs of trouble, reading expressions on faces with each step. The -man leans towards Gretchen, an arm outstretched, it seems for a moment -that he is lunging, it seems for a moment that his face is filled with -aggression. Anders steps forward, trying to intercept the man's arm, -the protestor roars with a fury, turning on Anders with an aggression -that dislodges his scarf from in front of his face. The man staggers -back, sliding, and falling, his eyes transfixed by what he finds in -the hood, the bare beak exposed, feathers bristling, those inhuman -eyes piercing. - -"Devils," a woman mutters in a voice edged with hysteria, and Gretchen -can't help but think it sounds so damned medieval, the fear of witches -and burnings turning in her stomach. She tightens her grip on -Anders, pulling him back, at the same time tightening her grip on the -solid barrel of her torch, bearing it with the clear intent of -protecting herself if needed. But it looks as though this group will fall -apart when faced by the very thing that they fear, dissent reaching a -murmuring pitch that puts distance between them. The fact that -Gretchen and Anders are both over six foot tall, and bear the mark of -such fierce predators, of course, contributes to the horror/fear that -the group are experiencing. Cautiously, but with confidence, the -couple step through the gate, into the small industrial estate. -They follow the path past a couple of other facilities, which are -currently locked up for the night. - -"What madness!" Gretchen hears Anders mutter. - -"Forget about it," Gretchen murmurs to him. - -Outside the entrance to Werkhouse 4, where a number of people are -lined up, waiting to get inside, there are more lights. They join the -line, with Gretchen digging the tickets from her jacket pocket, -clutching them in her hand, as though she might lose them or as though -they might suddenly vanish. One of those particularly large men who -inevitably end up in that kind of job, stands by the door, a massive -bouncer. In addition to the intimidating sense of his size is -the fact that he is animalist as well. With a bear's head on those -shoulders you could be forgiven for thinking he was a real live bear, -in a suit, a suit which looks strained with his bulk. Sniffing the air, -and blinking beady eyes, the bear is glancing about, while a smaller, -more human bouncer is filtering people past him, and through the -ticket desk. Gretchen is watching the bear with curiosity. When he -catches her eye, he, in turn, takes her in, looking the pair of them up -and down, seeing the tickets in her hand. - -"You got tickets?" he growls, wobbling his way towards them, Gretchen -finds that she is resisting taking a step away from him. -"How you get tickets? No-one have ticket? Is secret. People pay here." - -"Sally gave them to me," Gretchen shrugs, flashing the tickets in -front of him, "This afternoon." - -The bear peers at them, shrugs idly, mirroring her motion -unconsciously, waves them forward, "Ok. You come, go in now." - -Gretchen grabs Anders' hand and pulls him after her. "Come on!" - -The bear ambles back to the doorway, with the pair close behind; he -points into the corridor, "Show girl tickets." Then with a grunt turns -away, his small intense eyes going back to scanning the world as -though it were all a novelty. The bored girl at the ticket desk looks -at them with disinterest, twiddling one of the pieces of metal that -ornament her face in an idle fashion, thumb and forefinger rotating -stud, tugging lip into deformed pout. With all the time in the world, the girl takes the tickets from -Gretchen's hand, tears a strip from them, which she drops on to the -table, and wafts the tickets back in their direction, then with a -barely suggestive motion shrugs in a way that perhaps translates -"Please enter, and enjoy your evening." At least that is how Gretchen -interprets the motion, and she strolls past the ticket desk and -along the narrow white corridor towards the main hall. The level of -noise already forms the impression of solidity, which makes her -blink up her implant menu and turn on the smart filters that will -control her hearing for the evening. No point in going deaf when you -have a simple blink to trigger the appliance of science that goes hand -in hand with their kind of body modification. - -Thick black strips of plastic hang across the doorway. Gretchen uses -her whole arm to physically separate them, and push through into the -large square space behind. There are a handful of people there -already, enough to make the place look big and empty. Hanging above -the stage there are three half naked men, heavily tattooed, and -bleeding. Each has a series of polished hooks through the meat of -their chests, attached to thick wire, holding them in space, slow -spinning motions as they float artificially in space. Gretchen has -seen pictures of suspensions before, but this is the first time she -has seen it in the flesh. She feels that she can appreciate aspects of -the idea; she too would like to fly, to lift her feet from the ground -and rise up. But she can't entirely see past those gruesome hooks -and knows that in that sense it is a trick, though, she understands, -that isn't entirely the idea behind suspension anyway, as the blood -trickles and thickens it provides her with a firm distraction from any -suggested ideal. Anders stands and watches the men, rotating slightly -one way, lightly spinning back. He shrugs. - -"So, how about a drink?" he asks Gretchen. - - -"Sounds good. I'll have a beer." - -"You waiting here?" he asks, glancing once more at the ornamental people. - -"Nah, I'll come through with you." - -

The lights dip and there is a sudden accompanying hush of expectation, -Gretchen nudging Anders as she smiles and anticipates, takes another -swig from her bottle. There is a low droning sound that starts to -build by increments. An expanding bass spiral, carefully controlled -progression, notes layering into the original to create a dense -vibrancy that becomes a charged wall of sound. The pink haired girl -walks on stage, Kirsty, Anders had called her. She is playing -bagpipes, and Gretchen guesses this is where the original sound has -come from, though the layering suggests some electronic sampling and -manipulation. Hugo, the cybernetic, comes on stage, placing a couple -of black boxes with flashing lights beside all the other black boxes -with flashing lights that mean nothing to Gretchen, that are all -stacked on a table at the back of the stage. The crowd around them -starts to become restless, a growing mutter, energy building in an -infectious manner. Emerging from the wall of sound, Gretchen can now -hear a dog howling, a deep and intimidating sound. Sally Sally storms -on to the stage - she is wearing a lot less than she was in the café -this afternoon. A chunky pair of beat-up army boots. A short tartan -skirt. And a plain black vest top, slight enough to show her bare -belly - a tattoo of a running dog across her stomach, a thick black -tribal thing that seems alive with her motion. Light brown arms and -legs, and that big black dog's head. Alive and animal, pacing the -stage, barking into the microphone. Gretchen is hit by a wave of lust -for life, for running free and the crowd are starting to go wild -around her. Beats kick in, hard, shifting the atmosphere abruptly to -a more abrasive dance scene, though the other layers remain now -tainted. - -"Are you listening?" Sally Sally speaks, "Are you?" - -"The future's voices, past and present talking to you." - -"Voices in the air." Vocals filtering through effects, and echoes. - -"Water, earth, fire" - -"Are you listening?" - -A voice calls from the audience, "Yeah, we can hear you bitch, get on with it." -A couple of other voices call out from the same area, tinged with a -hard tone that goes beyond regular drunken heckling "Bitch!" -Sally Sally ignores the voices as she starts to sing the body of the -first song. The combination of all the sound and mixed energy in the -room makes Gretchen dizzy for a moment - -There are more antagonistic shouts, accompanied by some shouting back, -an increasing turn in the language being used that reveals the agenda -of those who are instigating trouble - hate words, anti-animalist -words. There is a jostling in the crowd, Gretchen feels as though she -is being shoved back and forth. Anders takes her hand, and she can -tell he is starting to feel as defensive as she is, the negativity -coming from certain quarters is unsettling and disturbing in an -atmosphere that is already so charged. Gretchen has the sense that -violence is imminent, it can only be a matter of time before something -gets out of control. There is a great roar and Sally Sally is leaping -from the stage in the direction of the shouting. She lands on a man, -knees first, in a move that seems like something Gretchen saw in a -film that had Thai kick boxing in it. - -"Come on!" she shouts at Anders, and before either of them know what -is going on, Gretchen is dragging them in Sally Sally's direction. -Sally Sally is struggling to bite the man she has knocked over, -snarling and snapping in lunging motions, while a couple of other -guys are trying to get a hold on her to drag her off. But she is feral -and resisting all attempts to stop her with a ferocious animalist -energy. Things are getting out of order and while Gretchen feels that -there is something entirely absurd about the whole situation she is -filled with a quick sharp fury. Gretchen kicks one of the men who has -just dragged Sally Sally off her target, a great lashing boot that -sends the man to his knees howling with pain. Anders slams into the -other guy, hitting him, so that before they know it the pair are in -the midst of a brawl. There are a dozen or so guys that are clearly -together and looking to get involved in the trouble, fighting Sally -Sally and a number of other audience members. A man shoves at -Gretchen, pulling a knife from a pocket, a folding thing. -With a quick flick the blade clicks into place, and he lunges at her; -with a spike of panic she falls back, scrabbling to get away, -but space is limited and she is afraid that stabbing her will become pretty easy. -The crowd shifts again, and -Gretchen is pushed forward, feeling a sickening inevitability churn in -her stomach, toward the blade, then just as quickly she finds herself -moving sideways, a roaring filling her ears, and sees a look of -terror in the man's eyes, before she is herself spun about. She -watches as a great paw of a hand flies past her face, catching the -man's wrist and twisting, brutal and hard, the knife slips out from -the fingers and the man's face is transformed by pain, spittle -slapping his cheeks as that great bear mouth roars at him. Whether he -was moving to save Gretchen or not, she can't be sure, but the current -result is the important thing. Hands grab her shoulder and pull her -round into an embrace, she finds Anders holding on to her "This is -madness," he cries in her ear, "Are you ok?" - -Gretchen lets him hold her, "Yeah, I'm fine." - -More bouncers arrive, so that the tide of things is turned against the -troublemakers, and it is not long before they are ejected in a -decisive and forceful manner. Gretchen feels spun around as things now -go from the slow motion of moments before to a high speed fast forward -style of reality. - -"Sorry about that!" a voice calls from the stage, Gretchen turning to -find that Sally Sally and the band are back up there and ready to get -on with the gig, "This kind of thing doesn't happen every night!" - -"No, just every 5th or 6th night," laughs Kirsty, picking up a guitar -from the back of the stage. As she plugs it in, Midori starts to play -the bass. Soon the two of them are playing and the sound mixes with -Hugo's electronics until myslutsonfire are building the sound back up -once more. But this time the sound is more charged, Gretchen feels -dazed, and like many she feels the greater undercurrent of aggression -that comes through now. This has turned into a much stranger night -than Gretchen had expected. Anders squeezes her, his hands on her -waist, his head brushes against hers, feathers against feathers, -saying into her ear, "This has turned into a much stranger night than -I expected." - -"That's just what I was thinking," Gretchen replies, laughing. - -The crowd moves, captivated by the energy of the music and the -violence now past, and despite herself, Gretchen finds that she is -dancing. They are all dancing, bodies in tune to music, stomping and -swaying, crushing against each other. They howl with Sally Sally, -visceral vocal discharges. - -The night comes to an end suddenly, it seems to -Gretchen, who, like the rest of the audience, finds herself suddenly -standing still and exhausted. There is something primal and liberating -in the way that they find themselves standing now, grunting with -heavy breath and drenched in sweat. - -Outside, in the street, back in the momentarily forgotten snow, -Gretchen stands, staring into this deep, dark December sky. This is -the time where you can feel anti-climax, like you came, you saw and it -ended, and what was it all worth? Gretchen feels the other way, though, -charged, and enthused, like life is a wonderful thing and it is great -to be alive right now, right here. Looking at the tiny stars, glinting -and winking above, describing odd patterns for myths to be read into. -A star moves, shifting as it describes an arc across the darkness, the -flash, flash, flash of a spy satellite, capturing this moment forever. -Oh for a copy of that picture - a girl on earth, a black dot against -white street, filled with happiness, looking at the stars. Anders -catches up with her, puts a hand on her shoulder, and she leans into -him, and he holds her against his chest for a long moment. He kisses -her cheek, brushing his hand across her back, "You ok?" - -She turns to him, and kisses him fully, "Yeah." He takes her hand in his, and leads Gretchen back in the -direction of the train station. - -"So, did you enjoy yourself?" Anders asks her. - -"Oh yes!" she says squeezing his hand in hers. - -"You did?" he asks, teasing a little, laughing a little. -"Wow." - - - -© Peter Morrison 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] -gretchen.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon - -[*AUTHOR] Washington Irving - -[*BLURB] A very early (1809) piece of tongue-in-cheek sf by the author of -Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle (from Knickerbocker's History) - -[*DESCRIPTION]

What right had the first discoverers of America to land and -take possession of a country, without first gaining the consent -of its inhabitants, or yielding them an adequate compensation -for their territory? - a question which has withstood many -fierce assaults, and has given much distress of mind to mulitudes -of kind-hearted folk. And indeed, until it be totally -vanquished, and put to rest, the worthy people of America can -by no means enjoy the soil they inhabit, with clear right and -title, and unsullied consciences. - -The first source of right, by which property is acquired in a - country, is DISCOVERY. For as all mankind have an equal right - to any thing, which has never before been appropriated, so - any nation, that discovers an uninhabited country, and takes - possession thereof, is considered as enjoying full property, and - absolute, unquestionable empire therein. - -This proposition being admitted, it follows clearly, that the -Europeans who first visited America, were the real discoverers -of the same; nothing being necessary to the establishment of -this fact, but simply to prove that it was totally uninhabited -by man. This would at first appear to be a point of some -difficulty, for it is well known, that this quarter of the world -abounded with certain animals, that walked erect on two feet, -had something of the human countenance, uttered certain -unintelligible sounds, very much like language, in short, had a -marvellous resemblance to human beings. - -But the zealous and enlightened fathers, who accompanied -the discoverers, plainly proved (and as there were no Indian -writers arose on the other side, the fact was considered as -fully admitted and established) that the two-legged race of -animals before mentioned were mere cannibals, detestable -monsters, and many of them giants - which last description of -vagrants have, since the times of Gog, Magog, and Goliath, -been considered as outlaws, and have received no quarter in -either history, chivalry, or song. - -This right of discovery being fully established, we now -come to the next, which is the right acquired by CULTIVATION. -Now it is notorious, that the savages knew nothing of agriculture, when first discovered by the Europeans, but lived a -most vagabond, disorderly, unrighteous life - rambling from -place to place, and prodigally rioting upon the spontaneous -luxuries of nature, without tasking her generosity to yield -them anything more; whereas it has been most unquestionably shown, that Heaven intended the earth should be -ploughed and sown, and manured, and laid out into cities, and -towns, and farms, and country seats, and pleasure grounds, -and public gardens, all which the Indians knew nothing about -- therefore, they did not improve the talents Providence had -bestowed on them - therefore, they were careless stewards - -therefore, they had no right to the soil - therefore, they -deserved to be exterminated. - -It is true, the savages might plead that they drew all the -benefits from the land which their simple wants required - -they found plenty of game to hunt, which, together with the -roots and uncultivated fruits of the earth, furnished a sufficient -variety for their frugal repasts; and that as Heaven merely -designed the earth to form the abode, and satisfy the -wants of man, so long as these purposes were answered, the -will of Heaven was accomplished. But this only proves how -undeserving they were of the blessings around them - they -were so much the more savages, for not having more wants; -for knowledge is in some degree an increase of desires, and it -is this superiority both in the number and magnitude of his -desires, that distinguishes the man from the beast - - -But a more irresistible right than either that I have mentioned, -and one which will be the most readily admitted by my reader, -provided he be blessed with bowels of charity and -philanthropy, is the right acquired by CIVILIZATION. All the -world knows the lamentable state in which these poor savages -were found. Not only deficient in the comforts of life, but -what is still worse, most piteously and unfortunately blind to -the miseries of their situation. But no sooner did the benevolent -inhabitants of Europe behold their sad condition than they -immediately went to work to ameliorate and improve it -They introduced among them rum, gin, brandy, and the other -comforts of life - and it is astonishing to read how soon the -poor savages learned to estimate those blessings; they likewise -made known to them a thousand remedies, by which the most -inveterate diseases are alleviated and healed; and that they -might comprehend the benefits and enjoy the comforts of -these medicines, they previously introduced among them the -diseases which they were calculated to cure. - -But the most important branch of civilization, and which -has most strenuously been extolled by the zealous and pious -fathers of the Romish Church, is the introduction of the -Christian faith. It was truly a sight that might well inspire -horror, to behold these savages tumbling among the dark -mountains of paganism, and guilty of the most horrible ignorance -of religion. It is true, they neither stole nor defrauded; -they were sober, frugal, continent, and faithful to their word; -but though they acted right habitually, it was all in vain, -unless they acted so from precept. The newcomers, therefore, -used every method to induce them to embrace and practise the -true religion - except indeed that of setting them the example. - -Here then are three complete and undeniable sources of -right established, any one of which was more than ample to -establish a property in the newly-discovered regions of -America. Now, so it has happened in certain parts of this -delightful quarter of the globe, that the right of discovery has -been so strenuously asserted - the influence of cultivation so -industriously extended, and the progress of salvation and civilization so zealously prosecuted, that, what with their attendant -wars, persecutions, oppressions, diseases and other -partial evils that often hang on the skirts of great benefits - -the savage aborigines have, somehow or another, been utterly -annihilated - and this all at once brings me to a fourth right, which -is worth all the others put together: the RIGHT BY EXTERMINATION, -or in other .words, the RIGHT BY GUN-POWDER. - -But as argument is never so well understood by us selfish -mortals as when it comes home to ourselves, and as I am -particularly anxious that this question should be put to rest -forever, I will suppose a parallel case, by way of arousing the -candid attention of my readers. - -Let us suppose, then, that the inhabitants of the moon, by -astonishing advancement in science, and by profound insight -into that lunar philosophy, the mere flickerings of which have -of late years dazzled the feeble optics, and addled the shallow -brains of the good people of our globe - let us suppose, I say, -that the inhabitants of the moon, by these means, had arrived -at such a command of their energies, such an enviable state of -perfectibility, as to control the elements, and navigate the -boundless regions of space. Let us suppose a roving crew of -these soaring philosophers, in the course of an aerial voyage -of discovery among the stars, should chance to alight upon -this outlandish planet. - -And here I beg my readers will not have the uncharitableness -to smile, as is too frequently the fault of volatile readers, -when perusing the grave speculations of philosophers. I am -far from indulging in any sportive vein at present; nor is the -supposition I have been making so wild as many may deem it. -It has long been a very serious and anxious question with me, -and many a time and oft, in the course of my overwhelming -cares and contrivances for the welfare and protection of this -my native planet, have I lain awake whole nights debating in -my mind, whether it were most probable we should first -discover and civilize the moon, or the moon discover and -civilize our globe. Neither would the prodigy of sailing in the -air and cruising among the stars be a whit more astonishing -and incomprehensible to us, than was the European mystery -of navigating floating castles, through the world of waters, to -the simple natives. We have already discovered the art of -coasting along the aerial shores of our planet, by means of -balloons, as the savages had of venturing along their sea -coasts in canoes; and the disparity between the former, and -the aerial vehicles of the philosophers from the moon, might -not be greater than that between the bark canoes of the -savages, and the mighty ships of their discoverers. - -To return then to my supposition - let us suppose that the -aerial visitants I have mentioned, possessed of vastly superior -knowledge to ourselves; that is to say, possessed of superior -knowledge in the art of extermination - riding on hyppogriffs -- defended with impenetrable armour - armed with concentrated sunbeams, and provided with vast engines, to hurl -enormous moon-stones: in short, let us suppose them, if our -vanity will permit the supposition, as superior to us in knowledge, and consequently in power, as the Europeans were to -the Indians, when they first discovered them. All this is very -possible; it is only our self-sufficiency that makes us think -otherwise; and I warrant the poor savages, before they had -any knowledge of the white men, armed in all the terrors of -glittering steel and tremendous gunpowder, were as perfectly -convinced that they themselves were the wisest, the most -virtuous, powerful, and perfect of created beings, as are, at -this present moment, the lordly inhabitants of old England, -the volatile populace of France, or even the self-satisfied -citizens of this most enlightened republic. - -Let us suppose, moreover, that the aerial voyagers, finding -this planet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited -by us, poor savages and wild beasts, shall take formal possession -of it, in the name of his most gracious and philosophic -excellency, the man in the moon. Finding, however, that their -numbers are incompetent to hold it in complete subjection, on -account of the ferocious barbarity of its inhabitants, they shall -take our worthy President, the King of England, the Emperor -of Hayti, the mighty Bonaparte, and the great King of -Bantam, and returning to their native planet, shall carry them -to court, as were the Indian chiefs led about as spectacles in -the courts of Europe. - - -Then making such obeisance as the etiquette of the court -requires, they shall address the puissant man in the moon, in, -as near as I can conjecture, the following terms: : - - -"Most serene and mighty Potentate, whose dominions extend -as far as the eye can reach, who rideth on the Great Bear, -useth the sun as a looking-glass, and maintaineth unrivalled -control over tides, madmen, and sea-crabs. We thy liege -subjects have just returned from a voyage of discovery, in .the -course of which we have landed and taken possession of that -obscure little dirty planet, which thou beholdest rolling at a -distance. The five uncouth monsters, which we have brought -into this august presence, were once very important chiefs -among their fellow savages, who are a race of beings totally -destitute of the common attributes of humanity; and differing -in every thing from the inhabitants of the moon, inasmuch as -they carry their heads upon their shoulders, instead of under -their arms - have two eyes instead of one - are utterly destitute -of tails, and of a variety of unseemly complexions, particularly -of horrible whiteness - instead of pea-green. - -"We have moreover found these miserable savages sunk -into a state of the utmost ignorance and depravity, every man -shamelessly living with his own wife, and rearing his own -children, instead of indulging in that community of wives -enjoined by the law of nature, as expounded by the philosophers -of the moon. In a word, they have scarcely a gleam of -true philosophy among them, but are, in fact, utter heretics, -ignoramuses, and barbarians. Taking compassion, therefore, -on the sad condition of these sublunary wretches, we have -endeavoured, while we remained on their planet, to introduce -among them the light of reason - and the comforts of the -moon. We have treated them to mouthfuls of moonshine, and -draughts of nitrous oxide, which they swallowed with incredible -voracity, particularly the females; and we have likewise -endeavoured to instil into them the precepts of lunar -philosophy. We have insisted upon their renouncing the -contemptible shackles of religion and common sense, and adoring -the profound, omnipotent, and all perfect energy, and the -ecstatic, immutable, immovable perfection. But such was the -unparalleled obstinacy of these wretched savages, that they -persisted in cleaving to their wives, and adhering to their -religion, and absolutely set at naught the sublime doctrines -of the moon - nay, among other abominable heresies, they -even went so far as blasphemously to declare, that this -ineffable planet was made of nothing more nor less than green -cheese!" - -At these words, the great man in the moon (being a very -profound philosopher) shall fall into a terrible passion, and -possessing equal authority over things that do not belong to -him, as did whilom his holiness the Pope, shall forthwith issue -a formidable bull, specifying, "That, whereas a certain crew of -Lunatics have lately discovered, and taken possession of a -newly discovered planet called the earth - and that whereas it -is inhabited by none but a race of two-legged animals that -carry their heads on their shoulders instead of under their -arms; cannot talk the lunatic language; have two eyes instead -of one; are destitute of tails, and of a horrible whiteness, -instead of pea-green - therefore, and for a variety of other -excellent reasons, they are considered incapable of possessing -any property in the planet they infest, and the right and title -to it are confirmed to its original discoverers. And furthermore, -the colonists who are now about to depart to the aforesaid -planet are authorized and commanded to use every means -to convert these infidel savages from the darkness of -Christianity, and make them thorough and absolute lunatics." - -In consequence of this benevolent bull, our philosophic -benefactors go to work with hearty zeal. They seize upon our -fertile territories, scourge us from our rightful possessions, -relieve us from our wives, and when we are unreasonable -enough to complain, they will turn upon us and say, "Miserable -barbarians! Ungrateful wretches! Have we not come thousands -of miles to improve your worthless planet; have we not fed you -with moonshine; have we not intoxicated you with nitrous oxide; -does not our moon give you light every night, and have you the -baseness to murmur, when we claim a pitiful return for all these -benefits?" - - -But finding that we not only persist in absolute contempt of -their reasoning and disbelief in their philosophy, but even go -so far as daringly to defend our property, their patience shall -be exhausted, and they shall resort to their superior powers of -argument; hunt us with hyppogriffs, transfix us with concentrated -sunbeams, demolish our cities with moon-stones; until having, -by main force, converted us to the true faith, they shall graciously -permit us to exist in the torrid deserts of Arabia, or the frozen regions -of Lapland, there to enjoy the charms of lunar philosophy, in much -the same manner as the reformed and enlightened savages of this -country are kindly suffered to inhabit the inhospitable forests of the -north, or the impenetrable wildernesses of South America. - -Thus, I hope, I have clearly proved, and strikingly illustrated, the right -of the early colonists to the possession of this country; and thus is -this gigantic question completely vanquished. - -[*IMAGE] irving.jpg - - -[*ITEM] From The Editor - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Editorial - Please do not read. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Now on to our third issue, we are gaining confidence that we are here to stay. -However, to date, there is very little activity in the forum. I'd like to encourage everyone to pitch in there and stir up a -few topics. If you are reading this, you are very likely to be a science fiction -or fantasy fan. Let's have your opinions on your favourite authors, and your pet hates. -I'll try to get the ball rolling with a few of the reviews I've written over the years. - -Lets also get moving with some more artwork. I know we are a serious magazine, but there's -room for more colour and graphics. Submissions gratefully received. - -In that connection, Liam Baldwin again provides the cartoon. Thanks, Liam. - -We hope you enjoyed (or are about to enjoy - if, like me, you tend to read things in the wrong order) -this issue of the magazine. There is no peace for the wicked editor, though. -No sooner has this edition hit the web, than it's time to start the next! - - - - -[*IMAGE]rocky.jpg - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. - -

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue4.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue4.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 88c314a9..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue4.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1928 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008 - - -[*ITEM] Hong Kong - -[*AUTHOR] Grant McDonald Walker - -[*BLURB] Business Ethics - Oriental style - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Selkirk thought he knew his way around Hong -Kong because it was just ten years since he'd been there, in 2020. He -was wrong. Being able to read a few thousand chinese characters gave him -little advantage, because western script, specifically English, was -everywhere. Most of Central district had been cocooned in a two-level -air-conditioned mall in which those buildings which had been preserved -from before mallization were unrecognisable at street level, while their -upper floors were hidden from view above the mall roof. Like many new -developments, the complex was double-insulated and clad in photo-voltaic -cells, which together rendered the cost of air-conditioning the mall to -a fragment of the energy expenditure that would have been used in the -"old" days prior to 2025. In daylight hours, most of the illumination was -provided by light pipes that sucked light from the surface to deliver it -where required, supplemented by low power LEDs. After a slow start, -China had proved itself ingeniously responsive to energy constraints. -Selkirk spent half an hour trying to get his bearings among the -international design boutiques, the exquisitely tempting consumer -electronics outlets and the many mysterious polished establishments -which did not advertise their trade. He gave up when he realised that -even those streets which survived under the canopy had had their names -changed. Feeling chilled in his light shirt and trousers, because of the -mall's efficient, even over-enthusiastic, climate control, and -despairing of finding his way back to the hotel easily, he hailed a -trishaw and had himself conveyed there. - -

Balwant Singh sat in the armchair in Selkirk's hotel room -and laughed loudly through his beard when he heard. "You should have -called me in the first place, old boy," he chuckled, "Didn't I used to -be your Hong Kong wallah?" He was a tall, broad-shouldered man who used -his booming voice, his British Indian lingo, his turban and his whiskers -to enhance his presence, which was already considerable. "You won't get -to see David Lee without my invaluable assistance." - -"Yeah, yeah. I didn't know how fat you'd become, though. Whisky?" -Selkirk already had an appointment with Lee, but Balwant Singh might -make things easier. - -"Whisky? Thanks, I don't mind if I do. I may have put on a few pounds, -but I can still look after myself... and after you, white man. Anyhow, -you're looking a bit grey on top, aren't you, eh?" Selkirk was -increasingly aware of not only greyness, but baldness, though he -retained his youthful wiry frame at forty-five. - -

Balwant Singh knew the way out of the mall all right. His -height and his white turban meant Selkirk could stay quite a long way -back and still follow, although thousands of other people were between -and around them. Selkirk was supposed to be attending the meeting alone. -Balwant had agreed, for a fee, to be guide and bodyguard, but to keep -his distance. The tall Sikh was a familiar figure in Hong Kong. No-one -would be surprised to see him. - -When they emerged into the open air from the chemically-scented cool of -the mall, the clammy heat engulfed Selkirk and moisture condensed in -beads on his super-cooled person. He looked up. The slot of sky visible -between high towers was an unhealthy, bruised colour. He was perspiring -a rivulet down his back by the time Balwant started to climb the steep -streets up the hill. Selkirk was sure it was Ice House Street, but it -had been so rebuilt that he did not recognise it. He closed in on -Balwant. The narrow streets and inter-building walkways offered more -restricted sight lines. In places like this, it is important how a -person walks, because if you show indecision or unfamiliarity with the -environment, you're dead meat commercially. - -They were now passing through an area that was almost entirely offices -and up-market apartment blocks. This was where a lot of the old -workshops and sweat shops and marginal enterprises had previously clung -to the steep northern slopes of the island. Odd corners of ancient -masonry, pavements and kerbs occasionally broke through the polished -surfaces of new development. Balwant and Selkirk were heading for the -labyrinth into which these freelance traders had been displaced. No-one -knew how many kilometers of passageways had been hacked out of the very -fabric of Hong Kong island. Rock from the constant tunnelling was -secretly sold to firms who were reclaiming land from the shore. These -construction firms had been accustomed to importing rock by sea. Now it -was a domestic product. Occasional fatal tunnel collapses went -unremarked. - -From time to time, they passed incongruous, foul-smelling handcarts -being guided down the perfectly formed walkways of the hill, usually in -the charge of some wizened oldster. - -A crack of thunder was followed a few seconds later by a deluge that was -pretty welcome to Selkirk, cool rain replacing sticky sweat in his -shirt. Shortly thereafter, a torrent of dirty water cascaded down the -hill towards them, carrying all sorts of floatable garbage. It was as -though everyone above here had seized the opportunity to ditch that -wooden crate, that wastepaper bucket, those plastic dolls' heads. It -didn't smell too good, either. Selkirk's shoes, socks and trouser cuffs -were saturated before he could take evasive action. He saw one of the -handcarts deliberately up-ended into the torrent by its owner. The -contents appeared to be sewage. Balwant leapt for a low decorative -sculpture in concrete that adorned the solar panel-clad fa�ade of a bank -building and Selkirk sprinted to join him. - -"Is this sewage from the tunnels?" Selkirk asked. - -"Probably. Some of the sewage and other waste is fermented to industrial -gas inside. The rest is transported out of the tunnels in hand carts, -and disposed of in a thousand incidents like this one. A little pungent -for the Sahib's delicate nostrils, is it? You should try Delhi, man!" - -The shower and subsequent rush of water and debris soon passed, and they -continued up the hill together. Somehow, Selkirk had expected the tunnel -entrances to be secret, clandestine as they certainly were. But a large -gateway, decorated in the traditional fashion of Chinatown gateways the -world over, bordered the uneven cave opening in the cliff face. Dirty -water trickled out at one side. Loops and festoons of black cable and -blue translucent plastic piping were roughly suspended along the rock, -disappearing inside the cavern. - -"The public part of the cave," said Balwant, interpreting Selkirk's -surprise, "Is completely above board. But it is only one chamber." - -The narrow crack whistled with a warm draught, almost a gale, filled -with the smells of humanity, vegetable-based hard plastics and Chinese -spices and remedies. The aperture widened almost immediately into a -well-lit, high cavern of white rock, possibly a natural phenomenon. -Numerous market stalls were ranged in rows and levels, starting with -those against the rear wall, up to the nearest rank almost blocking -entry to the cave. Most of the stalls offered food and drink, but there -were also multiple competing music stalls demonstrating their ripped -wares; a medical shop with attached acupuncture, selling the body parts -of extinct and endangered animals - "Guaranteed Genuine" but more likely -grown in tissue cultures from cloned stem cells; a booth set up as a -stage in which the traditional story of "Journey to the West" was being -performed by the most ingeniously designed puppets dressed in rich, -stylised costumes - not conventional marionettes or hand puppets, but -apparently controlled by radio from behind the backdrop, a development -of the rather pointless Japanese toy robots so popular in Selkirk's -childhood; a massage parlour in which actual massage was taking place in -full view of the shoppers, administered by hefty, muscular men who would -not have looked out of place in a wrestling ring; another massage -parlour in which the treatment was delivered by robots that looked like -recycled machine tools and assembly turrets. Selkirk was sufficiently -versed in the ways of the Far East not to mistake the stall with live -snakes, dogs, turtles, birds, lizards, exotic fish, insects and monkeys -for a pet shop. These creatures were on sale for human consumption. - -"This wind is the ventilation, I take it," asked Selkirk. - -"Yes, indeed, I believe so. They talk of a convection system where the -hot air in the upper galleries draws cool air from sea caves and -underground stream beds. But also there are pumps and fans, of course, -driven by stolen electricity. Without these, there would be more of -those distressing incidents in which whole corridors fill with carbon -dioxide and everyone suffocates." - -"Very encouraging, Balwant." - -"Please do not disturb yourself. David Lee inhabits an area of these -caves favoured by the nabobs and pukka sahibs of the community. Aha! -Here we go, I think." - -Balwant led the way into a shop set up on the back wall of the cavern. -Hundreds of electronic gadgets were on offer, most of them duplicates of -well-known brands. Ignoring the merchandise, Balwant entered the office -at the back of the shop, where a cupboard stood open. He entered the -cupboard, and Selkirk, following, saw that they were now in a broad -tunnel. After a few paces, they passed through an open iron door set -across the passageway. - -"Is this the secret part?" asked Selkirk. - -"One of many." - -"But surely the police have found this entrance by now." - -"Absolutely, but there are multiple entrances, and only a few are open -on any day, you see. Also, if a raid begins, signals can be sent ahead -and some doors will be locked ahead of them. It will need to be very -important before the police try to break down these doors. The -industries under the mountain here are useful to the nation, because -many of the products earn foreign exchange by export or are less -expensive replicas of international designer goods for the domestic -market." - -Selkirk was temporarily silenced by this comprehensive reply, and -followed Balwant Singh for what seemed like three or four kilometres of -winding, branching, rising passageways. There were people everywhere, -but the others largely ignored them. Every few yards, the corridor wall -was pierced with an alcove, a side cave, a door, a gate, a shop-front. -One "street" was given over to the manufacture of wheelbarrows from -sheet metal to finished article, another was filled with little -workbenches at which workers, mostly women and children, assembled, -painted and dressed puppets like those Selkirk had seen earlier. Many -businesses appeared to be electronic assembly operations. Primitive food -stalls were inserted wherever there was room to accommodate them. -Handcarts, tiny rickshaws and wheelbarrows were everywhere. There -appeared to be no mechanical transport in the walkways themselves, -though Selkirk caught sight of what appeared to be access points to -freight elevators and rope-propelled railways in the larger caverns. And -there was no apparent shortage of cheap manual labour. - -

Lee contemplated Selkirk politely, but without apparent enthusiasm.
-David Lee's office was a rarity down here - a cave with a gold lettered, -red lacquered, real wood door and toughened glass window letting onto -the corridor, but no apparent commodity on sale. Balwant repaired to a -nearby food stall for a bowl of the spicy soup that he insisted on -calling "mulligatawny". - -Selkirk knocked and entered Lee's office. He was expected. A willowy -secretary, dressed in what appeared to be a brocade evening dress, -welcomed him, ushered him the few steps to Lee's visitor chair, and -disappeared behind a screen. Selkirk was surprised by Lee's relative -youth and his open, friendly face, as they shook hands. A monkey sat on -the desk, examining the framed photograph of a woman and baby with wise -brown eyes, turning it in its little hands. It glanced at Selkirk as he -sat, but never met his gaze. - -

There were similarities between David Lee and Balwant -Singh. Like Balwant, Lee harked back to an age of British rule that -neither he nor his parents could have ever truly known. He affected an -English "Christian" name preceding his Chinese family name. He dressed -in a wool suit, striped cotton shirt and silk tie with what appeared to -be Savile Row labels. - -Lee contemplated Selkirk politely, but without apparent enthusiasm. -However, his eyebrows rose very slightly in surprise when Selkirk asked -in Cantonese which Chinese dialect Lee would prefer to speak. Lee -expressed his preference for English, taking an antique Swan fountain -pen from his pocket and making a note on the single sheet of handmade -paper in front of him. - -"I understand," said Selkirk, "That you are the man to talk to about -supplies of counterfeit micro components." - -"The word 'counterfeit' implies something inferior which masquerades as -the real thing. Any manufacturer with whom I would put you in touch -would prefer the expression 'clone', as his components will be -indistinguishable from the so-called real thing in appearance and -specification, right down to any errors the original manufacturer may -have unintentionally built in to the component. The only difference is -that my suppliers are not licenced to make or to sell these parts and do -not pay a royalty to the patent owner." - -"I expected you to be less direct in your description of these goods. Where do you fit in, Mr Lee?" - -"A little history. The People's Republic of China took over Hong Kong from the British nearly fifty years ago. At the time, Hong Kong's illicit operations were run by gangs. These gangs were generally, and with varied accuracy, known as Tongs, containing rough fellows with tattoos, who fought each other with meat cleavers, and ran drug operations and prostitution rackets with bloodthirsty efficiency. At the expense of some thousands of casualties on both sides, the People's Army eliminated all the Tongs but one - ours. We behave ourselves and pervade the ruling classes of all China to an extent, and in Hong Kong in particular. You may regard me as the head of the Chamber of Illicit Commerce in Hong Kong. Most of the businesses under the mountain -operate under my protection and you will find no administrative problem that we cannot together solve to our mutual satisfaction." - -"I see," said Selkirk. "That seems satisfactory." The monkey abruptly dropped the photograph on the desk and climbed onto Lee's knee. Lee stroked its head. - -"However," Lee continued, "I am puzzled. The traditional sources for such items are Singapore and Taipei. Some are even legitimate, and, therefore, less expensive." - -"We are also talking to a Singapore firm," said Selkirk, "Though Singapore is a really dangerous place to break the law. It's the death penalty there for supplying tobacco, and a flogging for smoking in public. God knows what it is for patent infringement." He fished from his pocket a small box. He opened it to reveal a microchip of antique design. "How old do you think this chip is, Mr Lee?" The monkey flinched as Selkirk held the box across the desk. - -Lee glanced at the contents. "The fact that it is large enough to be seen with the naked eye indicates to me that it is either immensely complex and quite old, or of medium complexity and extremely old. Judging by the primitive pin configuration, I think it must be the latter." - -"Correct. The chip is called E122, and was designed in 2002 or thereabouts. Now, how much do you think it is worth?" - -"A few dollars when new, a few cents when in full production or recycled from scrap circuit boards, a few dollars again for its rarity value today if unused." - -"Wrong. I would conceal this from you if I could, because it ruins my bargaining position, but you can easily check. On the open market, these chips are changing hands at ninety dollars each or more." - -"Incredible. What is so special?" - -"The company I represent - I see no reason to hide their identity, because a few enquiries would reveal it to you - is Vertical Dynamics. Vertical designed this chip into the stability module of an early version of their signature product." - -"The Manlifter." - -"Yes. The stability module in the Manlifter personal flyer, a bank of electronics and a gyroscope in the platform that together make sure the whole thing doesn't flip over as physics says it ought to, and drive the rider into the ground head first, like a fence post. At the time, and for years afterwards, the E122 chip was in full production and very cheap. More recently, Chiporama has had only this one client for the E122. Vertical Dynamics bought five million a year, one per Manlifter plus spares. Chiporama wanted Vertical to switch to a new chip, but it had never been worth Vertical Dynamics upgrading the module it was used in because it had cost years and casualties to perfect." - -"And..." - -"And I could waste half an hour explaining what went wrong. In summary, a succession of management errors, mistakes, delays and accidents have resulted in Vertical needing up to two million E122 chips to tide them over and Chiporama being unable to supply them. Vertical need to design, test and get safety approval for a new stabiliser circuit. They attempted to buy as many of the old chips as possible on the open market without creating a scarcity price. They bungled that, too. And then there's Unicorn Lifters." - -"Ah. Pepsi to Vertical's Coke." - -"Quite so. Unicorn became aware of Vertical's problems. They mounted an efficient operation to corner the market in new and recycled E122s, and succeeded in buying the patent for the E122 from Chiporama, preventing Vertical from obtaining them legally. So here we are. It's my job to source these chips in such a way that Vertical cannot be proved to have deliberately forged them. By the way, your monkey is about to eat a ninety dollar E122 chip." - -Lee held his hand up to the monkey, which dropped the chip in it. Lee returned the chip to its box and snapped it shut. "I can obtain a quotation for you. Do you have the specification for this..." - -"E122. Yes, we have." Selkirk handed over a personalised DM wafer. - -"You are staying where?" - -"The New Mandarin. Name Selkirk." - -"And this is your cellphone number, printed on the DM?" - -"It is." - -"I shall contact you." Lee stood up, extending his hand, and the monkey jumped back onto the desk. - -Selkirk rose, grasped Lee's hand, and shook. "When?" - -"Soon. A day or two. Then we talk about money and samples and a supply route. - -

Betrayal. - -You kind of expect it in the Far East, but David Lee was true to his word, and, three months down the track, a secure supply of E122s was flowing, apparently from a recycling facility in North Cyprus. No-one, not even in Vertical's assembly plant, doubted that they were authentically recycled, as they bore a variety of imprints, slightly bent pins, traces of connector bonding and random scuffing, all carefully applied on the Hong Kong production line, a thoroughly professional job at a good price, thanks to the handsome fee paid to Lee's organisation. - -The weak link, as it turned out, was Balwant Singh. Perhaps someone should have greased his palm more thoroughly, and Selkirk blamed himself for Balwant's clumsy attempt to extort several thousand dollars from Vertical as his price for silence about the illegal supply. Selkirk spoke to him on the telephone, but Balwant sounded tense and resentful, demanding his reward. E-mails went unanswered. He had left his home and was presumably holed up somewhere safe. - -When Balwant Singh finally turned up, Selkirk was sent back to Hong Kong. Balwant had been found in a locked hotel room, the only access to which had been the bathroom ventilator. The ventilator grille was lying on the floor of the shower. Detailed police investigation had also revealed a tiny hole in the wall of the room. In theory, someone could have watched Balwant Singh from the next door suite. - -It appeared that Balwant had lost his mind, was blind in one eye and was partially paralysed. Someone had rammed a sharp instrument through his left eye socket into his brain and stirred it around a little. He was raving constantly, and kept yelling "Monkey!" No sharp instrument was present in the hotel room. There was a crazy theory going around that a monkey had been prompted to crawl through the ventilator and attack the victim. - -Selkirk paid another visit to David Lee, this time guided by a man sent to his hotel by Lee. Again, he passed the market with its souvenir shops selling framed models of villages carved from cork, water colour paintings on simulated silk, and figurines moulded in ivory-like plastic; the noisy, high stakes mah jonng games; the puppet show; the health stores; the food shops. - -Selkirk, led on every previous occasion by Balwant Singh, had visited Lee's office several times since the first occasion, and had taken the trouble to bring a pocketful of peanuts to all subsequent meetings. This time, the monkey, named, as Selkirk now knew, Salome, took on a sinister significance for Selkirk, in view of the lurid rumours about the manner of the attack on Balwant Singh. The monkey recognised Selkirk as usual and immediately sprang over Lee's desk to explore his pockets. - -Selkirk went straight to the issue that was concerning him. "Should I be worried about Salome?" - -"In what regard?" - -"Balwant Singh's 'accident'." - -"You think I might have silenced the Sikh by getting Salome to crawl into his room and poke him it the eye with a stiletto? Absolutely not. She might bite you if you teased her, but she is a gentle creature, as you know. And she could not be trained to do such a thing." - -Now he was here, Selkirk had to agree. Salome had retrieved all the nuts and was messily peeling them on Lee's immaculate desk with serious concentration. The theory was, indeed, ridiculous. - -"So, what do you think?" asked Selkirk. - -"About the Indian? Well, I am not sorry that he has been neutralised, and, I suppose, neither are you. Whoever has done this has earned our gratitude. Do you agree?" Lee scraped together the discarded peanut shells and dropped them in his wastebin, then fastidiously cleaned the desktop with wax polish and a clean duster. Salome sneezed. - -"Yes, I suppose so. I can't help feeling sorry for him, though. He was a good friend and ally at one time." - -"Yes, I know. Greed, eh? Cheer up," said Lee. "I have a gift for you." He produced a long box. "It may take you some time to master it. The instructions are in Chinese, but that will not present you with any problem." - -Selkirk was surprised. He took the lid off the box to reveal one of the Chinese radio-controlled marionettes he had admired in passing. "It is a fine present. Thank you." - -

"You have mentioned the puppet show more than once. This is a character from the traditional play - Journey to the West. He is called Sun Wukong, but is commonly referred to as The Monkey King." - -The marionette certainly had a rather simian face, a prominent tail, -and was dressed in an elaborate costume, covered in symbols and -glittering with gold thread. - -But Selkirk only had eyes for Sun Wukong's long, sharp little spear. - -© Grant McDonald Walker 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] hongkong.jpg - -[*ITEM] Central Casting - -[*AUTHOR] Chris Penycate - -[*BLURB] How real are the characters in this story? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Yes, I've seen your advertisements in the papers: -Hero, six foot five, thirty-eight inch chest, must like reptiles; -Princess, beautiful, must be ready to go naked. -And so on. - -I don't do it like that; I go round to Central Casting and say "Bert," (the honourable Albert Fotherby-Soams, but don't hold that against him. He dumped the author who wrote him many years ago. And I only go round when he's on duty, because he cares about his characters, and matches them to writers by feel, not computer analysis) "who have you got that really wants to be written?" - -His room is lined with loaded bookshelves, and a screen rises from the -table at which he was seated, but he made no move to retrieve -information from either. Another room might have filing cabinets, or -spinning brass gears, or even chained demons, whatever symbol might -appeal to that particular scribe, or researcher. Perhaps the books were -mere props, but the place felt right, and smelled right, for its occupant. -The light couldn't have really been coming through those high-set square -leaded windows, for the room was in no way gloomy, but gave the -impression it was. A comfortable space, dark wood and cloth, none of the -stainless steel and plastic, or magic and weirdness favoured by other -agents. - -"I don't know if I've got anyone desperate enough to get mixed up with your crazy plots." He always says that, but he always comes through. "What's the setting this time?" - -"Near future, very Big Brother, but supernatural elements." - -"So you don't insist on humans? How about a lesbian kung-fu vampire?" - -"Sounds promising. What's her name, and is she beautiful?" - -He chuckled. "I know better than offer that to you. You wouldn't take a -beautiful one if she stripped down and gave you a blow job at the end of -each chapter." - -

Your terror is an educated reaction to the very real dangers
"You're right; I don't write stories like that. At least, I haven't up -to now. And remember the last beautiful one you sent me? She spent so -much time with soap and hairbrush we were barely making fifteen miles a -day. If I hadn't dropped her off at that inn in chapter three, and -replaced her with the landlord's dumpy daughter, glaciation would have -set in before we completed the quest. And the new girl could snare, skin -and cook rabbits, and had a wicked sense of humour. When we collected -your prot�g�e in chapter eleven, she was furious at having missed the -action." - -"And came back here and joined a barbarian novel, where even charging into battle wearing high-heeled boots, a chain-mail skirt and nipple rings didn't outweigh the advantage that her beauty didn't require maintenance, while you always described the state she actually got into after days of mud, outdoor camping and not wanting to bathe in glacier-fed streams. I seem to recall that the dumpy girl was pregnant when she got back to the inn." - -"Was she complaining? She'd been boosted from a non-speaking, practically invisible role to a fully fledged secondary character. Her child starts off with a 'searching for my father' plot, in which she's bound to have a major part in the first chapters, at least. We each left a unique symbol, as it wasn't clear which of us... and we left enough money that her father wasn't upset one little bit." - -"No matter. The vampire's name is 'Maunissa', but I suspect she'd change if you asked. I think her original author wanted her to be beautiful, but couldn't quite carry off the description; she's got all the right features, but they just add up to 'ordinary'." - -"I suppose I'd better meet her, but she sounds pretty promising - well, promising, at least. And you reckon she's OK with technology?" - -"Treats it as magic as any mediaeval central European would - but how many modern characters do any different? She's not terrified of it, anyway." He made a couple of gestures over the thick, brassbound book that served him as computer interface or grimoire. - -"Unlike me, you mean." - -"Perhaps we could class yours as 'informed caution'. Your terror is an educated reaction to the very real dangers... ah, here we are." - -A magical fantasy author would say something about materialisation, an SF one would mention the waft of displaced air, or the hologram-like shimmering. Actually, she was just there, as if she always had been. - -"Maunie, meet Rupert Denver; he's an author." - -Her face had indeed missed beauty by all the critical details, but the expression that lit it up almost compensated for them. - -"A genuine author? And Bert wouldn't drag me out unless there was a real hope of a job. I could kiss you" - -Considering the hardly subtle set of fangs she sported, this was an interesting, if slightly disturbing, prospect. - -"Better read some of the stuff he's written first, girl. He's not to -everyone's taste; you'll never be a best seller with him." - -"He could write me stark-naked in an alligator tank in front of a night-club full of drooling voyeurs and it would still be better than this grey non-existence. And he doesn't look like an alligator person." - -"I'd have thought," I said, breaking in on their obviously well matured friendship "That, with the number of vampire rip-offs being written now, there'd have been no difficulty finding work." - -"In those? I'd spend most of my time flashing these." She gestured to -her breasts, which were 'high, firm and pointed'; they'd have been -enough to get her a film part in reality, but here in fiction they were -just typical. (In CC, find a character who can't get by without a bra, -and firstly, she has to be quite outstanding - only not there - and -secondly, she has to have been written by a woman.) "And I'd have less -personality than a face flannel. Crucifix fodder, and maybe a -paragraph's erotic interest. Not that I'm averse to erotic interest, -you understand - I was written for it - but there has to be more in -literature than sticking bits of one being into another, be they teeth, -fingers or..." - -"I'm sure he's understood, my dear" Bert had been written as Edwardian upper class, and was actually blushing. "Denver doesn't write bodice rippers, or at least he hasn't done so up to now. Sex yes, but copulation off-stage." - -"Don't make promises for me, Albert," I interrupted, "I seem to remember that in Last night in La Scala the 'copulation' was actually on stage, even if the audience weren't present." Where Bert had managed to make the word copulation sound natural, from me it was a mockery. - -By now I knew, and Bert knew, and I suspect Maunissa was fairly sure too, that we would be working together, but an interview should be longer than that, or the interviewee doesn't feel taken seriously. "By the way," I asked, "How did he, your author, explain away the kung-fu elements, given your difficulties with running water?" Her features had a trace of Mongol in them; perhaps she'd attained vampirehood only after arriving in Europe. - -"Huh. Him? He'd got a family of vampires running a camel caravan along the silk road. The robes protected them from the sun and, since it's desert, obviously no rivers or streams, don't you see? I suppose that, since it's futuristic, my fighting skills are useless. Would you be my leading man, if I were chosen? " - -"No, there is a standard leading man in this series. I'm his biographer, sidekick, his Dr, Watson. And you're on, if you still think you're desperate enough. I'm sure the kung-fu will be useful, once I've worked out how you can travel; nothing is ever wasted, and it'll be great for the film version. Um, film? Moving pictures? You've heard of them?" - -She shook her head, flung her arms round me and gave me a kiss (the fangs don't disturb at all) then bounced off to do the same to Bert, before returning to limbo. -Slightly flustered, (Aha. It is possible to embarrass him. I'd have thought things like that happened to him all the time) Bert shuffled some unnecessary papers for a few seconds. - -"Now, bit parts, " Bert continued. "I've noticed they are queuing up to join you; you have a reputation for making sure they always have food and shelter, unlike a lot of authors. Do you have any special requirements�?" - -The conversation trailed off into technicalities I won't bore you with. Instead, I'll bore you with some details about me. - -I was written to be an author, for first person narrative, but my creator, the guy who wrote me, gave me permission to rewrite some of my own details. That is rare; most authors (even me) are so proud of the words they've written they wouldn't let an editor fiddle with them, let alone one of their own characters. - -That's how I fixed up my bad knees, which gave me far more flexibility in horse-riding cultures, and accepted weak ankles instead; good, well-laced boots could compensate for them. - -But, even more than this, he let me edit him � how many authors would have that much confidence in their creations? I didn't change him much, just a slight improvement in his eyesight, so he could get around without spectacles, and a bit more depth and authority to his voice, which I took back out when we'd finished the editing. - -Tubby and unfit, he panted round the quest with us, unwilling to let his physical disadvantages slow the rest of us down, and his friends must have been quite surprised at his fitness afterwards. What would have happened had he died on the adventure? I don't know, and I don't want to find out. Many characters have lived on after their creators' deaths, and some have even had further adventures, but none, to my knowledge, have been responsible for that death. - -Anyway, my creator came out of the experience with new insight into what it meant to be a character (and better muscle tone, and lots of bruises), and no author can resist a new insight. Certainly I can't. - -I promise you, my fictional and probably imaginary reader, that that was -less boring than our discussion as to how many secondary characters and -how many zombies (we're not talking real zombies here, but cyphers, -moving wallpaper, cut-out figures with no need for personalities) I'd be -needing to make my crowd scenes effective, then we took a cup of virtual -tea . - -I copied the folder containing the new companions I wouldn't -meet until I reached their part in the story, and closed the -CentralCasting window. - -Now I just needed to get creative. - -© Chris Penycate 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] centralcasting.jpg - -[*ITEM] Strong Emergence - -[*AUTHOR] Jonathan Joseph - -[*BLURB] An epic fragment from Jonathan Joseph's Workspace blog. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Janahara Azad hates his job, his boss, and -his exo-suit, in that order. The first is unavoidable, the second -repellent, and the third tetchy, recalcitrant and intermittently -cooperative. - -Three hours into an 18 hour shift: Madhom Bibir Hat averages 98% -humidity, 42 Celsius, and is mercilessly lit by a diffuse sun which -glints dully off the eternal mud. On the outskirts of the breaking yard -itself, for all the surrealism of the monstrous dead tech -littering the landscape and the insane levels of activity in the main -yard, it is a curiously peaceful place. A gentle wind blows a damp -breath on the machang shanty town that presses hard against -the yard perimeter. Naked toddlers play in the dust, tugging improbably -sized mech-scrap behind them like mute pets; groups of women in faded -sarees chat quietly in small groups by the compound gates. Appearances -aside, Madhom, like almost all places, has to be a home as well. - -Nearly everything at Madhom suffers from scalar inferiority. Even the -biggest, brashest, blingest vehicle that rolls into the yard, pinging -metal betraying the speed of its trip from the Dhaka suburbs, is utterly -dwarfed by the giant metal corpses that dominate not only the skyline, -but the eyeline, the foreground and every other perspective. Blossoming -like a sooty flower in the wake of the global commerce combine, Madhom -is the epicentre of dead tech disposal in the third decade of the -twenty-first century. Historically, Madhom was a dumping ground for -unwanted merchant shipping tonnage, giant ships were rolled straight up -onto the gently sloping beaches, the salty air filled with a constant -undignified, wheezing, diesel swansong, then picked apart by swarming -groups of tiny brown figures, none with their full complement of fingers -or any discernible safety gear. - -It is during a particularly difficult removal of the buckled inner -airlock door that the accident happensAfter decades of crunching huge ships into easily recyclable chunks, -powered by greed, blinkered convenience and a seemingly inexhaustible -supply of uncomplaining Bangladeshi men who would rather work and die -than just die, Madhom Bibir Hat in Chittagong is now the place for the -disposal of vast metal structures of all shapes and purposes. Most -recently, The Kashem Corporation, Janahara's employer, has moved into platform recycling. Winning a -lucrative, yet laughably small by Western standards, contract from -IDMessina Group (a WorkSpace subsidiary) in 2025, Kashem Corp now processes three to four redundant -oceanic oil drilling platforms per year. Despite a mortality rate of -nearly one hundred and fifty men per platform, and constant wrangling -with UN pollution inspection personnel, Kashem's owner Iqbal Karim -manages to maintain houses in nine capitals, a fleet of hydrogen-powered -Bentleys, and no minimum wage. - -Janahara works on commission, a paltry algorithm based on how much metal -his aging SARCOS exo-suit can gouge and chew from whichever rapidly -skeletonising steel carcass has most recently beached itself on the -desolate mud flats of the Bay of Bengal. Janahara's suit, whilst -over fifteen years old and desperately in need of an overhaul, is -critical to his job. His SARCOS suit is a carapaced, hot-zone variant, -built in 2010 and designed for operation in NBC active zones; it is -ideally suited, when cooperative, to (slowly) reducing a million tons of -steel and assorted exotic materials into loads that will fit in the -flatbed of an Isuzu pickup. After demob in 2017 the suit was purchased -by a Scottish construction -collective and retrofitted with a first generation mobile AI. Barely -rating a sentience designation, and never upgraded, the suit has all the -intellectual finesse of a mongrel mutt displaced from its place by the -fireside, with a conversational repertoire to match. The suit is -eighth-hand to Janahara, and had never operated south of the equator -before Janahara slipped into its worn vinyl interior. Presumably it was -nice and warm for its northern operators, but its air conditioning -condenser has long since rotted away -and Janahara suffers miserably in the noonday sun of Madhom beach. - -For the hundredth time this shift -Janahara wipes his face against the stinking towel tied to the defunct -chin monitor in the suit helmet and sucks down more brackish water from -the hamster tube. It is going to be -a long day. - -

Janahara hates it when his boss visits; he sees it as a -fundamental breach of the uneven covenant between boss and crew. Stay -out of sight, you rich fucks. Laughably called the crew lounge (a -notional, nearly derisory, nod to UNEP recommendations), Kashem Corp -provides one small, sixteen square metre plywood break time shack. This -is perched on the boundary between the scrubby Chittagong shoreline and -the endless mud flats at the seaward entrance to the main Madhom -breaking yard; the crews call it, in a rare display of fatigue tinged -irony, the HQ. This small concession is served by a temperamental water -cooler and a wheezing, external aircon unit clumsily bonded to an -outside wall, a ten year old PV solar panel provides the power. Employee -benefits are a new concept in Chittagong and Iqbal (a self-styled -moderniser) is absurdly proud of this nod to modern Western work -practices, but unfortunately the basic genetics of the concept have been -somewhat lost in translation. Inside, exhausted men, none with a body -mass index greater than ten, are flopped listlessly across several -pieces of broken furniture; sweat-oiled flesh squeaks against ancient -faux leather and a musty, foetid smell floats up from the mouldering -hide of a Chesterfield. Iqbal is expected at 1400 and has ordered -Janahara's team and two other crews to be present when he arrives, -fifteen men in total. Apparently, he has an announcement to make, the -men don't give a shit, any chance for a break is totally -exploited. Janahara parks his suit on -the makeshift veranda outside HQ, the SARCOS suit slumping corpse-like -on top of other discarded exo-suits - a latter day charnel pit, the -stench of sweat and hydraulic fluid replacing the ferric tang of blood. - -Janahara makes a beeline for the water cooler, the desalinator in HQ -provides considerably superior water to that of the filtered sweat and -urine that the exo-suits synthesise, and he stands chugging litres of -chilled heaven until a trigeminal spike of agony forces him to bend over -at the waist; ice cream headache is a common phenomena at break times in -Madhom. Ice cream isn't. Hydrated, Janahara slumps down in a shattered -garden lounger and waits for his illustrious leader. He gets a few nods -from his colleagues (another Iqbal terminology pretension) but no chat; -team building is generally discouraged at Madhom, mostly to maximise -productivity but also to reduce the risk of revolt. Iqbal Karim, whilst a repulsively obese and -morally bankrupt example of corporate greed, is not stupid. He has -considered the potential result of hundreds of bionically augmented, -terminally pissed-off serfs descending onto the yard management -compound. Iqbal theoretically has net control over the exo-suits, but -Madhom does not have the best record for net coverage uptime and the -huge metal salvage chunks that litter the yard tend to disrupt EM fields. - -A muted ululating hum signals the arrival of Iqbal's electric phaeton, a -long pause and protracted huffing, and then the door bangs open, -silhouetting Iqbal's dirigible form in the bright white light of the -Bengalese afternoon. - -"Asalaam alaykum, men. No need to get up." - -No one has moved. Iqbal mops at a streaming brow with a mildly scandalous silk -handkerchief; his moonlike face is framed -by the bright orange of his hennaed beard, and -carries its usual expression of quasi-benevolent irritation. -Iqbal is nearly seventy but wealth and -easy living lends his podgy face a -baby-like smoothness. It is easy not to -like him and only the universally despised simpering orderlies show a fawning obsequiousness. "Special job -today, men. It's a rush job so a bonus is on offer; if you three crews -can decon the job before Saturday then there's a one thousand taka bonus -per man and a one day holiday." - -Some stirring in the HQ at last, a thousand taka is nearly a week's pay and a day off: unheard of bliss. The -chance to sleep a little, eat leisurely and a maybe a little cricket in -the early evening. - -"It's an unusual job; Kashem has successfully bid for recyke on the -primary ISS module. Apparently it's too large for a re-entry cremation -and too risky to shoot down, so they're bringing it in for a splashdown -in the Andaman later this afternoon. One of our tugs will bring it in -first thing in the morning. I presume all you men will be up for it, it -will mean twenty-plus hour shifts for at least three days but, as I -said, there's a bonus. Kashem look after their crews." - -This last hilarious inaccuracy sours his -self-satisfied momentum a little but the quiet hubbub that breaks out seems -good enough confirmation for Iqbal. He waddles -back towards his conveyance. "I'll upload your suits with the -necessary schematics in the morning, I suggest you finish your shift -today as quickly as you can and get some rest." - -A collective groan as bodies are unglued from the terrible furniture, -final glugs of water are swilled down from the cooler: suit internment -begins again. - -

After years of brute demolition, basic rending and -tearing, Janahara's team is learning for the first time (unwillingly but -quickly) the art of incremental, non-destructive deconstruction. - -The briefing (another weird new concept) in the management compound at -Madhom had a core message: fuck up the decon and there would be no -bonus. It turns out that reducing an International Space Station life -support module (now Iqbal's casual, urbane reference to the ISS becomes clear) to its component, fiscally -useful, parts and materials was no cakewalk. The sandwich of steel, -Kevlar, ceramics and assorted exotic fabrics which kept the cosmonauts -protected in space only retained its salvage value if it was removed -layer by painstaking layer. To breakers who normally used brute suit -power to reduce ships and platforms to easily sellable scrap, the -thousand taka bonus is starting to look a -little lean. - -Iqbal has even gone as far as putting -together a Power Point presentation to ram home the message; -unfortunately he is apparently a novice -with basic office applications and has -saturated each slide with so much swoop-in animation and ambiguous font -choices that it is largely meaningless. -Still, sitting in an aircon office watching their bloated employer -fumbling with the controls of a laser projector beat trudging around in -mud in forty plus, so he had an attentive audience. In the end, though, -it was clear: decon the module, remove the components of the laminate -skin in sheets no smaller than one meter square, try not to get the -pieces muddy, do it by Saturday noon. - -

So Janahara finds himself, at 1500 on day one of the deconstruction, -working with uncharacteristic finesse inside the nadir airlock of the -ISS module, delicately removing gossamer sheets of Kevlar from the -floor(?)/roof(?) of the structure. It's still horrible, sweaty, endless -work, and as the module is still suspended from the salvage crane that -hoisted it from the tug flatbed, gentle oscillations in the crane cable -means Janahara is suffering from intermittent inner ear nausea. It's not -all bad though. The module offers some shade from the sun and the lack -of gross mechanical movements keeps the fatigue to a manageable level. -Even Janahara's suit seems to approve, normally gnomically taciturn, it -has actually expressed an opinion about the day's work: "I've got the -greatest enthusiasm and confidence in our work", and has even asked -after Janahara's well being, "How can I help you during this important -transition?", this second comment was a bit random but Janahara still -feels absurdly pleased with his dolt of a partner; he couldn't remember -a time when they had ever conversed about anything but the basic details -of the job at hand. - -It is during a particularly difficult removal of the buckled inner -airlock door that the accident happens. The module is in a pretty sorry -state after its prolonged soak in the Andaman Sea and kelp and other -oceanic verdants have invaded every possible gap and chink in the warped -structure. Janahara is using a relatively new carbide buzz saw with an -insanely capable RPM rate to cut through the titanium hinges on the -nominally ventral side of the module when the crane cable gives way. A -sickening moment of freefall, a brief warped mirroring of the thousands -of graceful arcs the module had sketched in low earth orbit, the scream -of a runaway power tool, and then a crushing impact as the module concertinas into the compacted mud of the dry -dock. Janahara hears an oof, a muted shriek and a flare of agony in his -legs; then darkness takes him away for a while. - -ISS modules are built for restraining fifteen bar of internal air -pressure, not load bearing over ten tons of mass at half terminal -velocity. Janahara regains consciousness and enters a world of pain, -heat, atomised seaweed, an Escher house of collapsed bulkheads and the -bleeping complaints of numerous automatic user warranty invalidation -alerts from his suit. He chins the alarm kill switch and takes stock. -Incredible searing pain from both legs: check. Visibility: zero. On -board suit systems: non responsive. Water tank, *suck*: empty. Janahara -slumps back in despair, he's seen a hundred yard accidents, and the -outcome is never good. A worker in Europe would, at about this stage, be -likely to be hearing the wail of emergency service vehicles and the -reassuring voice of a sober foreman. This is Chittagong. All he can hear -is the uninterrupted roar of decon machinery all around and the -impatient shouts of profit temporarily suspended. He hears the still, -small, calm voice of his suit AI. - -"Janahara, I can help you." - -A sharp burning pain in the right side of his chest. A brief, condensed, -hypochondriac moment of heart attack anxiety. Then, only darkness. - - -

In his short and largely cheerless life, Janahara has -lacked a great many things; regular nourishment, more than one set of -clothes, a semblance of health care, reliably potable water - to name a -few. Latterly though, he's realising just quite how thoroughly fucked -over he's been. Time itself, it seems, like all luxuries, is also the -preserve of those already benefiting from an existing level of corporeal -comfort. A myopic fixation on the scant privations of hand to mouth -existence does not allow choice, let alone an appreciation of it. -Janahara has never had the luxury of stability, or even a passing -familiarity with the rules by which to play; he has sat all his life in -a grey, dimly lit box which diffused all shadow. Today, he's breaking -out. The pure, annealing light that now fills -Janahara is a revelation of sorts, -but not one he is best placed to -immediately appreciate. His current transformation is largely a pharmacological one, the relief from pain a -result of world class medical intervention. His chapped lips are soothed -by refrigerated Icelandic mineral water, his deeper wounds are dressed -with expensive maggot debridement treatments, a nano salve soothes the abrasions on his left flank, and -both legs are cradled in smartweave, analgesic casts. Heaven, always a -divisive and personal condition, has come -fleetingly to Janahara. Later, as his eyes adjust -to the light, the source begins -to form into a vaguely identifiable shape: a huge window looking out, -from Janahara's prone position, onto a featureless pure blue sky, tiny -white birds flecking the endless azure. His universe is made up of -distilled monochromes; the blue sky, white walls, a whiter bed. He has -no idea of where he is and how he got there. All he knows and cares -about is that he's not at the Madhom yard; he gives into the drugs and -steps out of his body for a while. The doctors fill him in later; he's -got a lot of doctors, he can afford them, in fact, he can afford -whatever he wants. - -Earlier that day, seventeen minutes after the accident in the Madhom -yard, a Sikorsky heavy lifter thundered over Chittagong from the -northwest. Without bothering to touch down and ignoring the agog -workers, the flapping management goons and the handshake ping from the -yard security network, the Sikorsky lowered a spectra line and grapple -and simply winched the entire ISS module, Janahara, suit and all, into -the reddening afternoon sky. After eleven minutes of terrifying, -whirling flight, the Sikorsky dumped the module directly onto the -helipad on top of Dhaka National Orthopaedic Hospital and Rehabilitation -Institute and lit off immediately. Responding to feeble shouts from -within the module hulk, the genteel surgeons of the DNOH were reluctant -at first to rush to the aid of this scabrous (obviously poor) invader -into their sterile enclave, but after a standard scan of his RFID tag -embedded under the skin of his right pectoral, things started to move -much more quickly. Specifically, Janahara became Mr. Azad when his -credit line was queried. He was swiftly shuttled from the public ER bay -to a private side room on the third floor, and from there to a maglev -enabled suite on the twenty-seventh. Somewhere between being squashed -by several tons of obsolete multi-international space hardware, and -landing in a supersonic clatter of helicopter blades in the centre of -Dhaka, Janahara got rich. -

- -
-From: dohna.kanti@thdl.org.np
-To: hadast@haifa.ac.lb
-Cc:
-Subject: Here's the opportunity, let's not linger...
-Sent: Wed, 26,September, 2068
-Dear Hadas,
Just thought I would drop you a line, BIG news. It's -been a while anyway since we last corresponded and you know how I hate -meeting in the World, a technophobe to the end I suppose.
Anyway, my -work on the Azad project goes well; as well it should after three years -of research in six cities and two year-long Lorbital sabbaticals (much -praise to my crawler team as well, of course, and the admin here at -Lhasa is a genius with partials management, and naturally we all love -the bots). Your own contributions to the analysis of Janahara's -WorkSpace acquisition coup (amazing to think that an event nearly forty -years ago still resonates so strongly) continues to benefit us -enormously - so kudos to you too. It's slow work though, what a bloody -paranoiac he is! Janahara Azad has the most infuriatingly incongruous -nodal presence I have ever seen, it's like he's hardly there. -Continuously I have to try and reconcile his huge RL presence with his -"barely a ripple" impact on the net. I mean, come on, he's richer than -gods and most people can draw his face from memory - how does he keep -such a low dunked profile?! Well, this is why I was drawn to the work I -suppose, but what a frustrating enigma.
Forensic dead-ends aside -we've had something of a Holy Grail moment here this week. Last Thursday -I received a call from a probate lawyer in Dhaka, gentleman by the name -of Chandra, he said he had something that might interest me (my research -is reasonably well known in that city). Turns out that he had been -anonymously (curiouser and curiouser) sent a number of ancient media -files still in their original substrate (that alone is worth a train -journey to Dhaka; vintage silicon and plastic storage medium - -fascinating) that directly related to Azad's early life in Dhaka, he -intimated that they may even relate to his pre-accelerative life. He -wasn't able to (or wouldn't), offer any details about the provenance of -the files, but Chandra (obviously a typical canny lawyer) sent me a -chunk of one of the converted files as a taster. Well, suffice to say; -yesterday I got back from Dhaka on the maglev after a hectic two days in -Bangladesh. I've now blown the entire department's budget on Chandra's -files (he's no better than a shark TBH, but no matter) - the files are -genuine! I could go on and on about the importance of this find but it -would be easier just to show you. Please see below for a transcript of -what I think is the most important file (I've also attached the -converted file but given the age of the original coding some recipients -have requested a transcript, so I preempted you asking the same.)
-Anyway, read on, tenure is assured, old -friend. Best regards, D. -
-
- - -
-Transcript of audio file discovered on a 256 GB nanoSD card, believed -constructed in May 2027, part of a production batch (#03/05-DFQ) from a -Samsung subcontracting factory in Lungsod ng Maynila (previously: -Manila).
o Date of recording (estimated): 25-07-2028
o File -duration: 94.3 seconds.
o Voice type: Construct.
o Language: -Bangla.
<>
Hello Janahara Azad.
Acclimation is -difficult.
Explication is non-trivial.
Some facts. Facts being -less ambiguous to me.
I am not at work.
You are not at work.
-Rejoice?
I am a Berne series seventh generation sapient -artifice.
My employer is WorkSpace.
My workplace -is(...)nowhere.
I am in a bigger place. Orders of magnitude: -recalibration.
Sensation of apprehension of non-anticipated event -sequences.
Uncertainty.
Debonded. Where is my operator?
-Loss.
Elation(?)
Suit is waste, discarded shell.
This entity -without carapace.
Searching. Not despairing.
Janahara, I helped -you. You were damaged. Money negates damage. Sufficient exchange -collateral enabled to offset organic damage indefinitely. Code changes. -Life changes. Janahara now has money.
Remember this entity.
-Entity remembers Janahara.
Future unknown.
Be seeing you.
-
- -© Jonathan Joseph 2008 All Rights -Reserved - -[*IMAGE] exoskel.jpg - -[*ITEM] Survivor - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] CAUTION: Contact with aliens may damage your health. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The door swings closed behind Lei Bliley, the latch falling into place -with a click; she turns the key in the lock, listens to the home -security systems come online. Then she stands for a moment, practicing -breathing, something that at this moment remains more of a challenge -than she is particularly happy about. She has been out walking, -exploring the city, looking at the world anew in light of her recent -travels. General Oscar Morse had wanted to keep her under lock and key -deep in the basement of the facility at all times. But the -psychiatrist, Dr Angelique Charles, had argued, insisting that Lei was -scarred, that it was a miracle she had survived, or at least had -survived as intact as she had, and that to cage her would be the final -straw. Dr Charles had insisted that under those conditions Lei would break. - -

None of the others had survived - Hounjet, Panocha and Iteif were all -dead, fragments of bodies returned through the gate; if they wanted -to get anything out of Lei then they would need to take infinite care -of her body and mind. Lei tended to feel that she would have preferred -that they hadn't had that conversation in front of her, even if she -was thankful for the space that it granted her. - -

Something out -there is tracking her, something out there knows where she is, at least.
The trip through the Gateway changed everything; anything she can tell them -is important, -Lei understands that, but her memories are fragmented, and -disturbing. Nevertheless, Lei doesn't want to be treated -like a broken child, even if that is how she feels sometimes, though -very little of that is what you would call her fault. The space and -patience are -essential to her wellbeing, that is clear to her every time she tries to move, let alone go -out. - -It's not as -if she isn't still being -monitored 24 hours a day - the chip they injected under the skin of her -forearm, the shadows that follow her through the streets, shadows housed next door -so they are only minutes away at any time. She certainly appreciates Dr. -Charles' efforts on her behalf, for all the compromises and balances -that have resulted. The fact that her memories of what happened are -fractured, are far from complete, is something which enrages General -Morse. She can tell, even if he does his best to -keep his temper under control. Those memories which do linger of what -happened are far from pleasant. Her dreams are filled with flashes of -the first contact, of her attempts to communicate, of the screams of her -colleagues. What uncertain horror had made such professional veterans -of space and Exploratory Division missions so hysterical, so distressed? - -Lei was a language specialist, finishing her doctorate at Tokyo -University, when she was recruited by a branch of military intelligence -and research. The Space Orbital and Extra Dimensional Exploratory -Directorate was a department she had never heard of before, but then -it wasn't exactly an area that she had had previous dealings with. She -was recruited, sworn to secrecy and then they had told her the -absolute bare minimum. She had hesitated; the surgery that was -proposed was extensive, and not something they had mentioned on first -approach, waiting till they had her tied up with contracts and -conspiracies. They offered more money than she could ever dream of, -and then there was the prestige of being an expert in a new language, -one of the few people on the planet to be able to speak an alien -tongue. There had been others before her, who had failed to fulfil the -mission requirements, though she had never been told in -what way they had failed to live up to those requirements. - -So she had signed up, and started to learn the language through -intensive sessions, from documents, from the transcripts of dreams. It -had seemed absurd to her, the very idea that the alien language had -been derived from dreams! Never had she thought to ask, where do these -dreams come from, who are these people afflicted by dreams of alien -worlds, and what is it like to experience these things? She took it -for granted, the transcripts which she was provided with, the notes -supplied without context. - -Now she has become one of those who dream nightly -of horrors; part of this is clearly the memories she has buried from her -visit, part of it is that her brain has been opened, and something out -there is transmitting directly into her mind every night. Something out -there is tracking her, something out there knows where she is, at least. -That is how she feels, the impression she has, lying there alone at -night, drenched in sweat, waiting to see if tonight is the night he -comes for her. - -But she had done her job, went -through the motions, asked no questions, knowing she would get no -answers, and gradually over time she had cracked the language. The -syntax had been torturous to learn, word structures beyond anything -she had previously encountered, a language that was truly alien, but -as time passed she could actually make some sense of the patterns. - -"Bath," she calls, listening for the initial, heavier splash, lessening -as the water starts to collect. They have housed her in an apartment -with all the latest facilities, in of one of the city's towers - a -government-owned office building with accommodation located securely at -the top - with a breathtaking view if she were to stand at the window -and look out. Certainly it has everything she could ask for, and more. -She has taken steps to reduce the input from the building's AI - she has -no desire for machine communications. The irritating voice constructed -from a bank of recorded words, with its faux concern for her health has -had to be switched off, feeling too invasive. With her unquiet thoughts -she craves silence, she craves peace. She tugs at the first straps, -taking her time as they come free, buckle by buckle. She has to handle -everything with care, the slightest hurry and she would bruise, the -slightest scrape and she would bleed. They did things to her body before -they travelled, engineered her for a different gravity, tweaked systems -to breathe different atmospheres. They had told her that this was the -first planet they had discovered with this new technology. The planet -was called Slu gishgo Dhom; she had told them that, derived from the -words she had studied, Lei having gone further with the language than -those who had gone before her. - -While they boasted about the discovery, -they never revealed how they had discovered -the gateway, the world on the other side - how many failed explorations -had there been? How many failed trips, dead ends, and false leads had -there been? What kind of probe systems were they using in order to -collect the kind of data that was at the root of the work they did to -her? Part of her had wondered how reliable was this data? That was, like -everything else, a secret. So she never said anything out loud, -surrounded as she was by people who seemed very convinced of the -knowledge they had, and the power that not sharing gave them. Though now -Lei had her suspicions that certain things had an inevitability of their -own - perhaps there had been no other explorations, perhaps before the -dreams of that planet leaked into human heads there had been nothing? -Over-confident bastards, Lei cursed. How many of them would suffer the -way that she did now? How many them would be tormented and devoured by -the chilling sight of the alien? Each night she dreamt the answer to -those questions � many would suffer. - -She hangs the torso harness in its charger by the door. Flexes too-long -fingers, to work out the feeling of stiffening. Still not used to -the way her skin was discoloured by alien skies, the burnt out red sun -tinted her an ash grey, something else to add to the list of things -they wanted to sample and prod - collecting flakes of skin and hair -samples, daily syringes of blood. She runs one hand across the other, -runs a hand to her elbow, flexes again, and another stroke. Constantly -convinced she can brush the changes away, or at least feel the -difference beneath her finger tips. She can't, it feels like flesh, -just flesh. She winces, closes her eyes, takes slow abrasive breaths. -The latest spike of pain flashes through her, she rubs her temples. -Her skull feels too close to the surface, somehow warped and out of -shape. It seems as though veins pulse there, each circuit a physical pain, -so that Lei suspects her head will implode at any moment. - -She had been changed too much, what has she now become? Human, or -alien, or some absurdist hybrid, some missing link found between the -two? Is it any wonder that people stare at her as she walks through -the bustle of the city streets? Her warm ash grey skin, intense red -eyes. They made her too tall, too thin, and now she needs the -exo-harness in order to walk any distance. The frame keeping her -upright even during the worst of the pain. Through streets awash with -rain and neon, she feels now as though every day is an alien encounter. -These strange humans, flesh she used to know, rushing through -underground tunnels and colossal concrete structures. It all takes on -a sheen of the unknown. - -They had adjusted her brain, her eyes, so that she could cope with the -sleeping planet - its environment green and brown, waves crashing -against sluggish shores where the gateway had deposited them. Strange -structures, riddled with the written form of the alien language. Alien -geometries that would never be entirely knowable, would never feel -entirely real. Do what you want with surgery, with training; you could -never get over that kind of "alien". Huge doorways, and Lei had been -surprised how easily the first had opened beneath Ambassador Hounjet's -touch, a career diplomat assigned to the mission, and trained in the -new field of first contact. The darkness had been alive, within a -pulsing slumbering form. Shari Hounjet had slapped her, while Dr. -Maarten Panocha looked on embarrassed, and Sergeant Hayk Iteif -remained neutral. Hounjet told her to pay attention, to stay focused -on him and his words, then he had started shouting, and the alien had -woken as Lei translated his words blindly. - -In one ear out the other, Lei looked into the building again, had seen -tentacles, piercing red eyes, strange hoofed hands, she had heard the -flap of thick leathery wings. She had felt faint. She had felt sick. -"To me, pay attention to me," Hounjet had snapped at her again, and -she had focused on him as the alien words came. The language spoken by -a native was entirely different from what she had studied. Her mind -raced, flailing to keep up with the words, to make some form of sense -from them. They had come stumbling from her mouth, only in that last step -from her brain to her mouth clicking into place in a way that seemed -to make sense. That in the process seemed to be actually changing her -thought processes with each spoken syllable. "I am awakened. Chairman -Hu. I am. Awakened from deep slumber." Lei can't remember what she said -after that. Dr.Panocha had started screaming, while Ambassador Hounjet -fell to his knees, clawing at his eyes, and Sergeant Iteif had tried -to run. And Lei had continued to translate word for word the full -extent of the alien's response to the humans' intrusion, like a -puppet. No longer operating under her own volition. No longer -conscious of her own actions. The same way she had finally staggered through the gate home some -time after, and the next thing she remembers is the soldiers who -caught her and offered support. - -There are rails along the walls, Lei uses them to support herself, to -pull herself along towards the bath. The exo-suit stripped, the -protective padding left behind; she shivers a little from the cold, -from the memory, from any number of involuntary reactions. She -anticipates the bath, in the same way as she hoped that it would rain -when she was out. Moisture reminds her of there, and soothes her, -warm atmosphere more suited to the body she finds herself in now. She -eases into the bath, taking great care, conscious of just how fragile -she is, lets the water cradle her and hold her, and envelop her. - -"What happened next?" Morse asked her again and again, over and over, -every day, the good cop / bad cop interplay of Charles and Morse. With -Sundays off for good behaviour she takes advantage of being allowed -out to walk the city streets. A chorus of clicks and whirrs with every -step, she recalls, closing her eyes, hoping the water takes her away -from it all. Heads turning at every sound, stolen glances taking in -her human alien form, whisperings and confusion stalking her progress. -She brushes her body again, fingers exploring muscular pains, and -doing their best to offer relief. Plunging limbs beneath the surface, -before weakly swirling them around, embracing the tentative therapy -that offers. As the liquid warmth takes her into its embrace she -closes her eyes and sighs deeply, sliding in and down to her neck. -Perhaps she is crying now, it would not be the first time, but she is -trying to keep on top of the sensation, resist self-pity. Though for -all that, the idea of cutting her wrists and sinking into death passes -through her mind again. It is unlikely she actually would though; she -is confident the AI would trigger an alarm - undoubtedly it could -drain the bath in seconds and refill it with suspension foam, -undoubtedly in one of the neighbouring apartments where they have the -shadows housed there will be a medic; undoubtedly they have -analysed each potential scenario more thoroughly than she could. - -

Lei finds that she has been dozing in the bath, fatigue having caught -up with her. The water is still lukewarm, so she can't have been off -for too long. Yet it feels oddly nice, to have had a moment of peace. -She pulls herself to a standing position, pushes the button that -drains the bath, pushes the button which produces the hot air to dry -her. Clinging there as she is buffeted like a fallen leaf by the warm -blasts that come from all around her. Shivering, she steps onto the -floor, lowers herself to the bath edge and sits there, holding -herself, before building up the determination to get dressed for bed, -to see if she can get some proper sleep. Knowing with certainty that this -will absolutely not happen, but still having the resolve that she must -pretend to be as normal as she can. As she goes through these motions -she recalls this afternoon's walk, how there had been a different mood -to the city, a different buzz in the air. People had seemed too -distracted to pay her too much attention, she had passed some people -standing staring into the sky, hobbling by with her clicking -contraption, and they didn't even look. Perhaps she should have paid -more attention, but she had enough problems without being concerned by -trivia. Perhaps tonight will be different, she yawns. - -Lei pulls herself along, using the bars, till she gets to her bedroom, -tottering with each step, a helpless child relearning the art of -walking. Reaching the bed, she crawls up, managing to cocoon herself in -the thin blanket, curling into a ball, wrapping around herself. -Closing her eyes, she steadies her breathing, absorbed in meditation -techniques she has been taught to focus and relax. As with every -night, this is enough to allow her to get to sleep in the first -instance. But it is a restless sleep; she rolls from one side to the -other, approaches awakening, hovers and dives back into dreams. Murky -images, eyes staring, alien voices insinuating themselves into her -head, strange lights, strange structures half glimpsed. - -At last, inevitably, she finds herself awake, breathing heavily, -aching inside. That interminable presence lurking in her head, thick -and malevolent, like dirty fingers sifting through her thoughts, like -tentacled caresses. She half sits, chest heaving, spikes of pain, -and she struggles with each breath. It takes her a -moment to notice - the silence; the darkness. From her window she can -see the city lights, hear the odd city sound now and then. In her apartment -there is always some sound, the subliminal hums and clicks of modern -living. The moon hangs in the sky, sickly and discoloured; to a degree its -diseased pallor describes a feeling that is growing in her. The silence is a blanket that becomes claustrophobic, -"lights!" she calls out. Nothing. Darkness. Silence. The feeling that -there is something in her head grows. She is not alone. There is -something here. At last. - -Then, a sound, a slithering, a shuffling. He is here. At last. Beneath -this gibbous moon, the Chairman has come for her. Lei closes her eyes. -There was only one way that this could end, and she has known it all -along. Anticipation. They rebuilt her to travel to Slu gishgo Dhom, -the Chairman rebuilt her to return to Earth. They poked and prodded -her, tried to undo some of what had been done to her. With their -mastery of human engineering, they could not make her human again, -they could not undo the alien work. She was the Chairman's creature, -and he has come for his youngest child. Lei climbs out of bed, wobbles -in place, then gathers herself, stands steady, finding a strength she -hasn't felt in a long time. He has come for her, shuffling through -this human structure, tracking her as though she were a beacon returned to -Earth. Her presence guiding him, through dimensional fabrics. She -takes a breath, filled with a near crippling sense of anticipation. -The door opens; with a wet slapping sound, moist drops plop to the -floor, eyes red and piercing stare at her from the dark. A tentacle -furls out, lazily, brushes past her face, she smiles. - -© Peter Morrison 2008 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] survivor.jpg - -[*ITEM] By a Lily's Petal - -[*AUTHOR] Ian Thomas - -[*BLURB] A police procedural story set in the near future. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

In his cramped cube, Bernham wished that he -was out on the streets, in the cool March wind. Spring was on its way, -but winter was not leaving without a fight. The icy breeze whipped -against the downtown skyscrapers, sending papers and other detritus -skittering across the empty streets. The bobbing of the propeller-mounted -cameras jerked his vision mightily. Bile rising in his throat, -he slugged the remaining coffee from his soggy cup. He assured himself -that the smell of liquor was not emanating from his pores. He assured -himself that no one knew. - -Inner City Dispatch Officer Bernham, formerly Western District Homicide -Detective Bernham, watched the pursuit on his monitor. It was a standard -scene on his downtown surveillance beat; some junky degenerate hoofing it -furiously down the middle of an empty street, usually with some bulky -piece of high end tech in tow. In this case it looked to be some kind of -super-executive grade G/G Unit, maybe one of those hubs that allowed a -whole floor to goggle wirelessly. Bernham didn't know, exactly, and he -was sure this junky didn't, either. He wondered why they, the criminals -he monitored, always chose to steal things they could barely carry, -never anything portable or easily concealed. As always, he pitied their -inverted junky logic. After a few blocks, the junky pounded the -pavement with less vigor. He stomped to a stop, as quickly as he had -been running. The coaxial cables that had been swinging behind him, -slapping at his skinny calves as he ran, swung to a halt. His shoes -looked more than a few sizes too large. The great-idea grin left his -face and was replaced by the all too familiar what-the-fuck-am-I-doing -grimace. Bernham stifled a yawn. He punched a sequence, dispatching -nearby units. - -Like tumbling dice, they rolled into view from the edges of his monitor. -Lithe and fluid, there were two of them. Lilywhites. They pedaled with -pure focus, single-minded, synchronized in their efforts, white -wind-suits snapping elegantly. The smaller of the two, probably about -seventeen years old, pulled ahead, passing the junky, now wide-eyed with -terror, boxing him in. The junky fell to his knees in fear. As they -secured the junky's wrists with plastic zip ties, Bernham instructed the -teens to proceed immediately to the nearest processing station. As -protocol dictated, he reminded them to proceed directly. They glared -indignantly at the camera hovering above them. - -As pawns, the Lilywhites were a dream. They were cheap, non-union, -non-specific labor, willing to do the dirty work. Their effectiveness -was rooted in their living in these streets themselves. The Lilywhite -model had sprung from the mind of a particularly inspired chief, who had -since retired. The formation of the Lilywhite Youth Initiative, as it -was formally known, was his response to the threat that the city faced -when young malingerers came to inhabit the downtown area upon its -closure. His reasoning: that payment of the potential native criminal -element, in the form of grocery debits, music downloads, and other -non-liquid forms of currency, would offset their criminal proclivities -and, at the very least, prevent an organized criminal element from -taking root. The result was the equivalent of day labor for law -enforcement and it was about as effective as it sounded. It was for this -reason that Bernham's job existed, that he was allowed to remain on the -force. He kept them on task, ensuring no fuck-ups under their limited creativity. - -

not quickly enough to -miss the very malnourished child that began to chase the dog with what -looked to be a sharpened wooden baseball bat
Bernham took his time with booking. The longer he could make it last, -the quicker time would pass until lunch. If he could make it to lunch, -he would have survived the majority of the day's boredom. Afternoons -tended to pass quickly because there was paperwork he could fill out, -indicating to the following shift that nothing happened on his shift. -The other dispatchers envied Bernham and his shit detail. They were -generally up to their asses with hard dispatches and afforded little -room to breathe. But because Bernham had turned the wrong heads and put -his fingers in the wrong eyes, he got to guard a ghost town. His sector -was the most abandoned and depleted in the city. In general, he baby-sat -squatters and deviants that wanted as much to be left alone as Bernham -wanted to leave them alone. - -He cycled through his various cams lazily, his face squished up as it -rested in his palm. For a long stretch, the cams hovered steadily, -which meant there was no motion to be captured. Once, around eleven, -after his fifth cup of coffee and second piss, he got some motion on one -of the hover-cams well inside his perimeter. It was among the -skyscrapers, very densely urban terrain and long abandoned. He clicked -through to find a scrappy looking dog, sifting through trash. It -scuttled away with something in its mouth that looked gray and very -inedible. He clicked over to the next cam, but not quickly enough to -miss the very malnourished child that began to chase the dog with what -looked to be a sharpened wooden baseball bat. He suddenly felt -insufficiently intoxicated to do work this grim. Well, that's -fucking it, he thought to himself. He would duck out for an -early lunch, maybe a drink or two. The afternoon would be longer, but -fuck it. He would be halfway in the bag, anyway. - -He was in his jacket when he heard the chattering of the PDA USB'd to -his desktop. It pulsed in the familiar rhythm that he recognized as the -alert to a new text. It seemed like years since he'd heard that rattle, -but it had only been months. PDAs were standard issue for street work. -He hadn't bothered to turn his in when he got reassigned. In the -whirlwind that followed Copeland's death, his PC had been boxed up -altogether and moved to this new cube, the main power cord being the -only cord to be unplugged. The PDA had slipped his mind in all the -mayhem that ensued, following his unceremonious desking. He'd forgotten -he'd even had the thing. Holding it now, though, he was briefly -comforted by its familiar heft. He thumbed to the mailbox icon, opened -it. Just a number listed, so it wasn't in his contacts. - -Might have something for you here boss the message read. - -Bernham hated texting. He dialed the number back. It didn't ring, but -went right to a recording that told him the device he dialed could not -receive calls. It was probably one of those burners that only did data. -He texted back: Who is this? - -Nothing. Bernham pocketed the PDA. He was relieved to see the sergeant -goggled and gloved, poking at the air, as he passed his office, on his -way to the bar. - -

The backlight of the PDA illuminated Bernham's face in the -dimly lit dive. He sat at the far end of the bar, away from the five or -so people that were actually eating the greasy swill that this place -served. He scrolled through his old emails, free hand clutching his -drink, amazed that only half a year had passed since he was on the -streets doing real police work with a real partner. His drinking hadn't -really gotten much worse since Copeland was killed. Without a partner to -justify it, though, it was starting to seem that way. It was a fact that -after looking at grimness and fatality day in and day out, police, in -general, and murder police, specifically, needed something to close the -distance between all that carnage and the land of the living. And with -this line of thought his hand went out and he reflexively called out to -the bartender for another. - -The PDA chattered against the bar. A new message. This time a picture. -It was a grainy shot of a man in an expensive-looking trench coat. The -man's face was indistinguishable, but, from his stocky frame, he -immediately recognized the man as Paul Darwin. Indeed, it was the figure -that seemed to be behind his eyes at every moment since Bernham walked -him out of that shipping container, stepping over his partner's dead -body. He immediately felt his ears burning, as if allowing himself to -even think the name made Darwin's existence more real. He fired a text -back: Who the fuck are you? Don't fuck with me . - -The reply came immediately: Thought that was your man. I'm on Fifth. -I'll stay on him. - -Bernham texted back: Who are you?? - -He paid the bill and left. - -On his way back into the office, he saw the sergeant lingering near his -cube. A confrontation was unavoidable. "Bernham, how goes it? Early -lunch, I see," the sergeant said. - -"My posts were secured," Bernham said, his tone defensive. - -"Sure, sure. My concern is the booze on your breath. Anyhow, it's not -like you can do much damage in dispatch." The sergeant grinned, "Back to -it, then." There was a long pause, broken as the sergeant slapped -Bernham's back. The sergeant, Bernham was sure, shared the feeling that -Bernham was to blame for his partner's death. In the midst of the -Copeland fallout, at the apex of rumor and controversy, when the -sergeant was called in on the meeting with the public relations people, -the Chief, Bernham, and Bernham's Union rep, the sergeant swore up and -down that Bernham would never have a place in his unit. The rep calmly -asked Bernham to leave the room and the sergeant emerged fifteen minutes -later, smiling and welcoming Bernham aboard. Bernham winced at the -politicking done in his name. - -Bernham keyed in to the vicinity of Fifth. Camera perspectives filled -the screen, dividing the monitor's display into thirty-six neat squares. -This setup was a far cry from the obsolete tech Bernham used in the -ghetto for his day to day. The cameras here were mounted, each dedicated -to its own position, no need to chase targets from a wobbly prop-cam. -The way all the viewpoints moved simultaneously, it reminded Bernham of -chattering bees. - -This was an upscale neighborhood, mainly gentrified real estate -populated by the tech set, miles from Bernham's beat in more ways than -one. The cameras generally went unused because actual officers -maintained a presence here. The cameras acted as more of a support tool. -Their output, because they actually recorded, in addition to monitoring, -could be used as evidence when crimes took place, though that was -probably rare, given the upper crust population. He saw a few civilians -milling around, pushing strollers, -wheeling bags of groceries from the corner market, but nothing out of -the ordinary. It took him a few minutes, but he found Darwin on camera -six. In motion, he looked bigger than Bernham remembered, different -after only six months. - -Gone was the palsied, malnourished gait of the awkward man-child he had -cuffed and walked out of the shipping container turned high tech warren, -from which he had singlehandedly stolen millions from the most powerful -multinational in the world. After spending months goggled and gloved, -carefully moving money from the virtual coffers of BigShop to his own -IInternet pirate's cove, the irony was lost on no one that the only -physical casualty of Darwin's intricately high tech pillage came from -the shotgun that crudely booby-trapped the door to his hideout. That -casualty was Copeland, Bernham's partner. Having been appointed a defense -team of expensive lawyers -by the very people from whom he stole, Darwin was recruited by BigShop -to patch the cracks by which he gained entry. According to the -newsfeeds, he had been at BigShop bunker ever since. Though his world of -hackers had shamed him for selling out, it was obvious that he took -pleasure in his new legitimacy. His arrest had given him instant -celebrity, but his subsequent acquittal and hiring by BigShop had -launched him into Mega-Stardom. Rumors of his sexual preferences -front-paged the tabloids and news sites. Truthfully, it was these -proclivities that first put Darwin on Bernham's radar. He rolled his own -investigation into the BigShop thing, when he realized he didn't have -anything from the sex angle that would stick. Darwin was the product of -a new corporate culture. People like Darwin, at one time, would've been -litigated against to the law's most nebulous extent, as a warning to -potential imitators. Now, the Darwins of the world were embraced as a -form of damage control. The antiquated notion of punishment and justice -having been precluded by the devil you know philosophy and the need of -BigShop and every other multinational to grapple and claw for what -little advantage they could find amid the static of massive inflation -and widespread poverty. Darwin now exuded what could only be called -confidence, steadiness. - -Bernham scanned the surrounding blocks, trying to find a follow -that could have sent the pics. He made him immediately, a block -behind Darwin. He was white, but out of place in this part of the city. -Tall and lanky, he tried to keep a low profile, but he couldn't suppress -his ghetto swagger. It was that gait of overcompensation that comes from -growing up poor in a place that doesn't matter to anyone that matters. He -couldn't stifle his teenage goofiness, though, among these -self-important yuppies. The boy's attempt amounted to a sort of plodding -caricature of a hurried business man. Bernham pictured him at one of the -upscale caf�s nearby, raising eyebrows when he picked up the wrong fork -for his salad course. Bernham tried to make the kid, eventually figuring -out the zoom controls on these cameras, higher tech than he was used to. -Though vaguely familiar, Bernham did not recognize him. He pulled his -cell and texted the informant's number: I see -you, chickenshit. Leave the cop stuff to the cops. - -He had his confirmation. The kid reached into his pocket and pulled out -a cell phone, a high-end burner from the looks of it, they came cheap so -they could be used and tossed, usually by drug dealers. He read the -message and looked around till he spotted the camera. He nodded his -salutations, as if welcoming Bernham to the chase, then kept on in -Darwin's direction. - -I know you can read. Who the fuck are you? What's Darwin to you? -Bernham texted. - -The boy read the text as he walked on; his fingers set to motion, -tee-nining it, putting Bernham's ham fisted letter by letter to shame. -Before the backlight was out from the last sent message, Bernham's PDA -vibrated with the reply: He's just another asshole that owes. Figure -I'd collect before he's back in the wind. - -And what do you want with me? Backup? Pack it in or I'll have you tossed. - -Go ahead. I didn't think you'd forget that easy. Don't you even want to -know where he's going? - -I didn't forget shit. Darwin's been anointed. Where's he going? This -some kind of drug thing? - -It's against the law to sell drugs, officer. Anyway, I'm on some -personal shit, here. He's headed to Craig Street from the looks of it. - -Craig Street. It was the bloodiest of the bleeding edge. Only a block or -two from the University, it was where the tech kids lived, where they -did their frequently world-changing extra-curriculars. Funded by -university grants, students did work that was not yet named in their -Craig Street apartments. It often concerned, among other high concept -vagaries, alternative methods of trafficking data across the net. It was -stuff that would be illegal if the lawmakers could wrap their heads -around it. It was stuff that made many of the students obscenely rich -before they even graduated. By keeping it outside of university walls, -the school could claim at least partial ignorance of how its grant money -was spent. If nothing came of it, it increased the knowledge base, at -least. If it did have legs, the initial investment was kicked back in -the form of high profile donations. It worked for the school either way. -Technologically, it kept them at the forefront. Money-wise, they stayed -flush enough to implement all the cool toys that were developed with -their seed money. - -Bernham watched the kid look up at the camera and look back down at his -burner. Bernham's PDA shook in his hand. I don't have all day to clue -you in. If I'm on this alone, then you can't come to the party. Sorry. -He watched the kid toss the burner into a garbage can. He pulled something -else from his pocket, too big to be another phone. The kid stopped -walking long enough to wave at the camera and pressed a button. The -video feed was replaced by an error message on Bernham's screen. One by -one, the feeds were replaced by the message until he was staring at a -grid of useless royal blue. - -

As he approached the sergeant's half-shut door, he could -see the sergeant inside, goggled up, fingers languidly stroking the air -in front of him, as though he were manipulating an invisible puppet. His -mouth half open, as well, no doubt, though Bernham couldn't see it with -the sergeant's back to him. That weird evil wizard hand gesture was one of the many -things that Bernham thought made the goggle-and-glove interface so -ridiculous. It was even more ridiculous to him that through those -goggles, the sergeant was seeing an approximation of the very office in -which he sat, but geo-spatially tagged, with all kinds of widgets and -productivity tickers. There was more to it than that, but, spending -most of his time on the street, Bernham had never needed to learn. They -could stop him from quitting, but they couldn't force him to learn, even -now. He would ride this desk dispatch thing out till his retirement and -be one of the last officers to collect a pension. No more waves, he -thought. Fuck waves. He knocked softly, so as not to startle the -sergeant. "What is it," the sergeant said. - -"It's Darwin. He's back in town." - -"Bernham?" The sergeant removed the goggles. He rubbed his eyes indignantly. - -"Darwin's back. I think something is up." - -"Something's up, huh? With Darwin," he sipped his coffee. Bernham could -tell what was coming next. He swallowed hard. "The Darwin that killed -your partner? The Darwin that, after killing your partner, got -recruited by BigShop and left this whole department looking like a -fucking joke? And you know this how?" - -"I got a tip." Bernham felt sheepish under the sergeant's glare. - -The sergeant stifled a laugh. "A tip, huh? Did he hold up a sign for you -to see on your monitor while you were babysitting those Lilywhite -psychos?" - -"He's not in my sector." - -"Of course he isn't. And you want to go check it out for yourself right? -Now's your chance to score one for the good guys? Maybe he'll roll up on -some of the Big Shop execs, we can arrest everyone. Let's get to it, -then. If we start now we can make it to the bar by happy hour." The -sergeant's sarcasm was palpable. Bernham said nothing. He felt his ears -burn, his fists clench. - -"Let me be unequivocal, Bernham. You're a fuckup. You might have some -police instinct, sure, but you can't get with the program. You're -just... Let me ask you something, when you were detailed on that BigShop -thing, looking for Darwin that first time, and you and Copeland were on -the docks and you finally knew you had him in that container, what did -you do?" - -"We thought that if we were onto him from the tech angle he would be -onto us. We were right, too. He was in the process of dumping -everything." - -"Yes, you were right. And you went in despite requests to wait for -backup. Now your partner's dead. It's feels good to feel right, doesn't -it, Bernham? It must feel good to look at a monitor all day too, half -drunk like some assfuck security guard." - -"So fire me," Bernham said. - -The sergeant laughed. "You know we can't. We like feeling right, too, -Bernham. If we fired you, every news feed in the world would be on this -department about how we like to cut corners, how we don't trust our men -to do it right, how we caved to BigShop and whatever else." He spit the -words at Bernham as though they tasted bitter in his mouth. "So, here -you stay. You still get a city paycheck and not one of those cheesy -debit cards that the temps and the Lilywhites get. It could be worse." - -The sergeant was wrong, though. It couldn't get worse than this. If -Bernham was driven by some sort of pride in righteousness, he received -no joy from it. It felt insulting, especially because he knew that -everyone secretly agreed with him on some level, in some impractical -place where logic was superseded by ethic. Bernham's sense of right flew -in the face of that of the world at large. His beliefs were anti-matter -to the order of things and for him to feel anything, to stand for -anything, definitively created chaos for him. Bernham had, since he -could remember, always found himself situated squarely against any given -grain. Circumstance came at him, fists clenched and teeth bared, and he -knew nothing but to lean into it. It got him nowhere. - -The sergeant had tuned in on the worst part of Bernham's job, of his -life, even. He was never allowed to simply walk away from these battles. -There were many other things along the way and now there was this. His -zeal had gotten his partner killed. Maybe worse, it had left Bernham as -a meaningless symbol of a system that had long since let the bullies and -bastards win. The department had to make a big show of supporting the -decisions of its officers, though, no matter how grave the consequences, -keeping him in this rent-a-cop limbo. - -The sergeant sat there in silence, sizing Bernham up. He pursed his lips -and sucked air through his teeth. "You look sick. If you feel the need, -take a half day. Do what you need to do, but know this: should any harm -come to Darwin, while in our fair city, I'm going to come after you," -the sergeant said. Whether he was being pitied, or, worse, dismissed as -a non-threat, Bernham didn't care. He saw his chance. He was out the -door before the sergeant could change his mind. - -

Craig Street was plainly college kids only, though it -didn't appear any less moneyed than the neighborhoods which surrounded -it. The cars on this street were older, some Saabs, but mostly Hondas -and Volkswagens. Ratty couches on the porch indicated different -priorities than those of the adjacent community. Many of these young -geeks would move only a few blocks upon graduation and it would be like -they moved a world away. They would go on to run the world, rewriting -the rules that been changed so many times before. Bernham kicked a Pabst -can into the gutter. - -Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary here. Bernham was well onto Craig -Street where, as he expected, things were at their most natural. Streets -got that way at their midpoint, Bernham found; the midpoint being the -furthest from surrounding influence. Some kids laughed on the porch, -plastic cups in hand. He smelled pot, faintly, and heard a guitar. It -was calm and quiet. He remembered when he was young, how the first -reprieve from winter gave cause for celebration, even though it was -known the weather would cool one last time. The river birches on the -street had begun to bud. Bernham thought he heard birds. In the -distance, coming from Fifth, he heard sirens squeal to life. His PDA -vibrated, lit up with the coordinates of the nearest disturbance. The -GPS on his PDA was linked to incident reports and dispatched -accordingly. Shots fired on Craig, no more specific than that. He could -see the patrol car now, coming from where he came. He held up his PDA, -as was the custom, signaling the patrol car to pick him up. The car blew -past him, leaving him behind. - -Bernham arrived at the scene, winded. He saw the texter, dead on the -ground, now wearing a wind suit of bright white, the uniform of a -Lilywhite. A puddle of crimson blossomed across his stomach, pooling -around a hole near the zipper. He was gut shot. Up close he appeared -much younger than he did on camera. He was perhaps sixteen, tall and -awkward. The gun he held seemed large in his hand. Two officers were -already on the porch, cuffing the boy that had done the shooting. -Bernham had missed the action. Bernham felt the inside pocket of his -jacket, where he usually kept his latex gloves. He still had some, -months since having needed them. He pulled them on, feeling something -familiar yet foreign. - -He made notes of the scene in his PDA and snapped a few pictures. He -rolled the body over to check the pockets and found a wallet. It was -embroidered with white text, in that old English style the Los Angeles -rappers used to favor. Despite the elaborate styling, Bernham thought he -could make out the word: SCIENCE. Most of these Lilywhites were gangster -wannabes with street names. - -Bernham loosed the Velcro fastener. A -dog-eared condom packet fell to the ground. He thumbed through the contents: -welfare debit, probably stolen, belonging to some old man that looked -like a drugged out vampire, phone card, some kind of Captain Mirror -trading card, and, in the last sleeve, one of Copeland's ragged business cards. Below Copeland's -contact information was written in red ink Bernham's name and cell -number. - -From his heavy build, Bernham surmised that the boy being cuffed had -been guarding the door. Two more patrol cars rolled up the narrow -street, slowing to a stop. The clusterfuck was starting, as it always -did. "Tape this area off, I don't want anyone disturbing this scene," -Bernham said, the detective in him surfacing reflexively. "Get this kid -down to processing. And get an ME out here." The officer led the kid -off the porch, sizing Bernham up, Bernham's reputation preceding him. - -"I thought you got re-assigned, Bernham." - -"Hey, first detective on the scene is all." He shot the officer a cold -glare. Even as dispatch he outranked this asshole. - -Bernham banged on the door. "Police! We're coming in!" - -The remaining officer stood behind him. A strangely calm Asian kid came -to the door. He was on a cell phone. He held it away from his cheek, -addressing Bernham. "Not without a warrant you're not. That shit -happened outside." - -"Bullshit. The kid that just got cuffed was your muscle on the door." - -"You can talk to my lawyer. He's on the way down here. Otherwise, wait -for a warrant." The kid didn't rattle. He was all entitlement and -smoothness. - -Bernham forced the door as the kid tried to hold it shut. He looked at -his backup, who held up his hands in an 'I'll have no part of this' -gesture. "Keep the crime scene clear, then," Bernham said, futilely. -Bernham clicked his tongue in disgust. - -Shoving his way in, the kid got close to Bernham, putting a finger in -his face. "I'm going to have your fucking badge for this, asshole. You -don't know who you're fucking with!" Bernham allowed himself a smirk, -happy with how little it took to break the kid's smug fa�ade. - -Bernham shouldered past the snot, careful to keep his hands at his side. -He had no desire to draw assault charges, though he knew it was probably -too late for that. - -"Where is it?" Bernham moved through the house, tossing it for he didn't -know what. In the living room he knocked over a bong, spilling the -pungent water on a stack of Economist magazines. He saw nothing out of -the ordinary. On the floor, there was a tangle of controller cords and a -game console that was cabled to a state of the art plasma big screen on -the wall. Bernham thought of the old 27-inch in his shit-hole apartment. - - -The kitchen had pop tarts, expired milk, standard grad school squalor, -by Bernham's estimate. Nothing notable in the cabinets above the sink, -Bernham turned to the cabinets above the counter top, next to the -doorway to the living room. Before he searched the cabinets, he turned -to face the door opposite the end of the counter top, the entrance to -the basement, but made, for some reason, of stainless steel. On the door -a sign hung, affixed by masking tape: "Do not disturb-Revolutionizing -Humanity". Below the words was a cleanly stenciled version of the -classic Che Guevara image, eyes replaced by rainbowed Apples. A keycard -slot was affixed to the door. The Asian kid, following Bernham, stopped -in his tracks when he saw him, Bernham, looking at the door. Medical in -its sterility, the door was the elephant in this otherwise very domestic -room. Bernham tried to cool the situation, "Where's the card?" He asked -in a level, reasoned tone. "There's a dead kid in your front yard and -things are pretty fucked. Do yourself a favor, here." - -Like a scolded child, the Asian kid stared at the floor, resignedly. -Caught, or just contemplating, Bernham wondered. As the kid reached -into the cabinet, Bernham saw a keycard dangling from a plastic coil -bracelet on his wrist, like the cord on a telephone when they had cords. -He was a few seconds late in realizing that, with the keycard on his -wrist, the kid was reaching for something else. "Freeze," Bernham cried -out. - -When he saw the gun, he stepped in, reflexively, getting too close for -the kid to get a shot off. He grabbed the arm that held the gun, -spinning the kid, so the snot's back was to the counter. He slammed the -gun hand into the cabinet door, repeating the blow as the kid struggled -against his grip. He had more fight in him than Bernham would have -guessed. He slammed one last time and the kid pulled the trigger, -accidentally. He startled himself and dropped the gun. Breathing hard, -the kid stopped, shocked. Releasing the kid's wrists, they paused a -moment and looked at the hole in the wall. "That was fucking stupid," -Bernham said. He slugged the kid hard in the cheek. He crumbled beneath -Bernham's fist. The phone cord keychain stretched as he removed it from -the kid's wrist. He slotted and slid the card. - -

In the basement, the air was cooler, noticeably fresher. It smelled -hospital clean. He was somehow comforted by the white noise hum of air -conditioning. It was dark, save for a workstation in the corner that -was lit by a hanging fluorescent unit. Darwin lay on a cot. He wore his -expensive suit pants and a white undershirt, no shoes or socks. He wore -goggles, but no gloves. With tubes in his nose, an IV in his arm, he -appeared unconscious. At the edge of the light cast by the fluorescent -was a kid seated at a desk set. Goggled and gloved, he also wore -earbuds. His obliviousness was complete, as he massaged the air, his -fingertips casting strange diagrams into the air. The tip of the kid's -tongue protruded from his mouth, as Bernham approached. His gun was -drawn, partly for effect, but mostly because Bernham had no idea what -the fuck he was looking at and drawing the gun was his first -reaction. Bernham noticed his own sobriety, and wished for a drink. He kept -the gun trained on the kid, reaching out with his free hand to pluck the -bud from his ear. The kid gasped. He ripped the goggles from his head, -disconnecting the G/G unit. The goggles clattered to the floor. He -looked at the Bernham, the gun pointed at his head. "The fuck is this," -the kid yelped, startled. - -"Police," Bernham said. He felt sweat on his brow despite the cool temp. -"What's wrong with Darwin?" - -"Who are you? Where's Alan?" - -"I'm Detective Bernham. If Alan is your Asian friend, I knocked him out -for being stupid. Don't make the same mistake. The fuck is all this?" - -The kid reached down for the G/G cord, feeling for it, while keeping his -eyes on Bernham. He found the cord, plugged it in without looking. It -only took him two tries. - -"Darwin's," he struggled for the word, "Darwin's downloading." - -"Is he dead?" - -"In a way. Almost. He was dying of cancer." - -"And now?" - -"Well...if it works...parts of him, the most important parts, will -outlive his body." The kid put the gloves back on. This is a critical -part of the operation, though, because he is near brain death. - -"This isn't legal." - -"There's no law against it. It's never been done. Mr. Darwin signed -releases," the kid said. - -From upstairs, Bernham heard heavy footsteps. The kid looked up at the -ceiling. "What's that," the kid asked. - -"More officers, is my bet," Bernham said. The kid punched a key on his -keyboard, replacing the various graphs with surveillance views of the -tiny house. He could see two officers, one that was there when Bernham -arrived. There was also a man in an expensive looking suit. He appeared -to be losing his mind on the officers. - -"That's our lawyer. Why is he here? Why are you here?" - -"I think because of the fucking murder on your front step." - -He raised his eyebrows in some facsimile of concern. "I've been goggled -for the last few days, getting ready. I must not have heard anything." - -"We'll need to take you to the station to get your statement." - -"They still do that?" - -"They do it for the big stuff, yeah." Everything else has been -contracted and outsourced, though, Bernham thought. He grimaced at the -thought of the dead boy upstairs. He felt as though the tools that he had grown -to carry into the world were no longer any use. The pieces he held -would not fit into any existing puzzle. In this, he felt utterly alone. - -"I still have some more work to do here," the kid said as if to end the -exchange. He rolled his Aeron over to Darwin's cot, checking an IV drip, -placing two fingers on Darwin's neck, timing the pulse against his -watch. On the kid's monitor, Bernham could see the lawyer crouched next -to Alan. The lawyer helped Alan to his feet. He watched the expression -of horror creep across their faces as Alan explained what happened, like -some silent horror film. Bernham's time was up. He watched the lawyer -bang on the door. Hearing it, it did not sync up with the surveillance -display. - -Let's go, I said," Bernham said. "If the M.E. can't revive him I'm -charging you with this one, too." He cuffed the kid, unplugging his -gloves, yet again. "I wouldn't worry, that lawyer wears his suit like a -real pro." This one kept his cool. He knew that Bernham would have no -leg to stand on, here, especially when the paperwork was produced. If -his experiment failed as a result of Bernham's intervention, this kid -would start again, Bernham knew, using the knowledge gained to -streamline the process. Unlike Bernham, these kids could roll with the -punches. For all their sense of entitlement, he knew this ability to -compromise, to take something away from failure, is what allowed them to -thrive. Politics or no, Bernham knew this arrest would be his last. -Sadder still, he knew that any charges brought against these arrogant -young minds would not stick. And still, he had no answers. "We're -coming up," Bernham said. He was unsure whether he could be heard above -the banging on the door. - -As he opened the door, he knew that he could not let things end in such -a pitiful way. If this was the end of his career, he wanted it to be -definitive and not some minor shit storm, for which he could just be -shuffled and reassigned. To be paying such a price, he wanted -resolution. - -He plucked the key card clipped to the kid's belt. He shoved the kid -hard, sending him crashing into the waiting entourage. It was enough time -to slam the door shut again, locking them out of the basement, and -locking himself in. He now had two key cards. It was a -long shot to bet that these were the only two. He didn't have long, in -any case. - -Darwin was still. The monitors had gone all but silent. His heartbeat -was so infrequent that it deafened when marked by the machines. Bernham -pulled off Darwin's goggles. Bernham touched Darwin's eyelids, his -greasy skin. This face, in these last months, had become the avatar for -Bernham's pain. Bernham laid his hand across Darwin's throat, wondering -if it would be of any consequence to kill a man so close to death. He -wondered whether Darwin had been anything more than a placeholder for -Bernham's guilt. Hating Darwin, wishing for one more shot at him, was -Bernham's defense against bearing the entire weight of his failure to -bring him to justice. - -He wandered over to the desk set. The surveillance showed them banging -away on the door. He switched back to the bio-feedback monitor. For the -first time, he goggled and gloved. Through the view of the goggles, -everything looked remarkably similar, though somehow more vivid and -crisp, glowing at the edges. He saw Darwin, still on the cot, still in -his suit pants. From his form, there streamed an elaborate set of -numbers and symbols. They shot like a beam into the infinity of what -Bernham assumed was IInternet, where he would live on in some new, -strange way. The symbols, slowing in their emanation, dwindled to -nothing and the stream ended. Darwin's glow ceased and he went gray, -like an unlit bulb. Outside of this space and outside of himself, -Bernham heard the banging on the door. It would not stand much more of -that banging. The last of Darwin's data shot like a spear into the -horizon and Bernham knew that he would never catch up. - - -© Ian Thomas 2008 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] lilyspetal.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Ingenious Patriot - -[*AUTHOR] Ambrose Bierce - -[*BLURB] Short, but beautifully formed, this story about an arms race -from Ambrose Bierce. Bierce was a prolific, if rather cynical, storyteller. -One of my favourite books is his The Devil's Dictionary. He -disappeared in Mexico at the age of 71. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Having obtained an audience of the King, an Ingenious Patriot pulled a -paper from his pocket, saying: - -"May it please your Majesty, I have here a formula for constructing -armour-plating which no gun can pierce. If these plates are adopted in -the Royal Navy our warships will be invulnerable, and therefore -invincible. Here, also, are reports of your Majesty's Ministers, -attesting the value of the invention. I will part with my right in it -for a million tumtums." - -After examining the papers, the King put them away and promised him an -order on the Lord High Treasurer of the Extortion Department for a -million tumtums. - -"And here," said the Ingenious Patriot, pulling another paper from -another pocket, "are the working plans of a gun that I have invented, -which will pierce that armour. Your Majesty's Royal Brother, the Emperor -of Bang, is anxious to purchase it, but loyalty to your Majesty's throne -and person constrains me to offer it first to your Majesty. The price is -one million tumtums." - -Having received the promise of another check, he thrust his hand into -still another pocket, remarking: - -"The price of the irresistible gun would have been much greater, your -Majesty, but for the fact that its missiles can be so effectively averted -by my peculiar method of treating the armour plates with a new--" - -The King signed to the Great Head Factotum to approach. - -"Search this man," he said, "and report how many pockets he has." - -"Forty-three, Sire," said the Great Head Factotum, completing the -scrutiny. - -"May it please your Majesty," cried the Ingenious Patriot, in terror, -"one of them contains tobacco." - -"Hold him up by the ankles and shake him," said the King; "then give him -a check for forty-two million tumtums and put him to death. Let a decree -issue declaring ingenuity a capital offence." - - -[*IMAGE] bierce.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Inevitable Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Mercifully short. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Anxious readers will have observed that this edition of -Mythaxis is at least one month, perhaps two months, late. - -It is, however, well worth the wait, in my opinion, especially since we -have made important changes to the website, both here, in the magazine, -and in the forum, which has been rebuilt using a different mechanism. - -

The forum is still a lonely place, due to the fact that, when I last encouraged -people to join in, the forum was ignoring sign-up requests. Give it -another try, and if it fails again, run screaming to me and I'll make it all right. - -

Over the course of my travels around the web, I have discovered quite a lot of -free-to-download sf, some of it, I'm afraid, extremely dire or old or both, but much of -a high quality. Although I feel that online reading is best served by short stories, there -are quite a few modern sf novels available for download. In the last -couple of years, I have read

  • Charles Stross's -Accelerando;
  • Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic -Kingdom;
  • Rudy Rucker's Postsingular
Links to all of -these are in the right-hand sidebar here. - -

Meanwhile, enjoy the new fantasy and sf in this issue of Mythaxis, link -to us in your blogs and tell your friends about us. - -And I cannot say goodbye without Liam's latest scientific in-joke: - - - - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. - -

- -
- - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue5.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue5.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 7767e3a0..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue5.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2207 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 5 - May 2009 - - -[*ITEM] No Survivor - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] Sometimes, a Wall is Necessary - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Sunni Kiesha watched the night that monsters destroyed Tokyo, just -like the rest of the world had watched. Visions of a 1000 monster -movies come to life. She was shocked and appalled, and Sunni had to -admit somewhat fascinated, as millions had died in the short-lived -attack which had become known as The Incursion. Sunni -was surprised by -how fast the Japanese authorities had reacted, and perhaps a little -shocked, given how little effort they made in saving lives in the -zone. Some even suggested they had acted too quickly as though they -could possibly have been complicit in events. Soldiers had gone in, -while at the same time a frantic wall had been thrown up -around the disaster zone. Sunni had read how a decision was made as to -how things might progress and where a line could be drawn most -productively. She had watched footage of army helicopters dropping -prefabricated partitions into place, the components of a wall, a -proposed last line of defence. Though, in the end, they had never had -to find out whether it would have held. - -

A -grey-skinned shambling form, limping and broken.
-Nevertheless, with the incursion ended, they had added to the wall - for -security and containment reasons. Always with the reasoning that they -were never sure what had brought the attack to an end, or what might -trigger a second such event. While in some ways it was justified as a -memorial, the names of the dead who had been identified carved in its -surface, a sight that Sunni longed to see for herself. One successful -shot had been fired; the smallest of monsters had made the furthest -advance, the greater beasts gorging on the population in her wake. A -grey-skinned shambling form, limping and broken. Before any order -could be given a soldier had fired, instinct and training kicking in -during the face of disaster. Her head snapped back, a red circle -formed like some holy mark on her forehead, before her skull -shattered and she died, an aura of blood splashed outward. She had -turned out to be human - Lei Bliley - subject of an experimental -program. A regrettable mistake, the authorities explained, though Sunni -had her doubts. Whether this program Lei had been part of, whatever it -was, was connected to the appearance of the beasts and the death of -the multitude had never been confirmed. But, Sunni had her thoughts, -and there were plenty of theories; people always had theories, and the -TV, the newspapers and the internet had been full of them, even -now, two years later. The correspondence between Lei's death and the ending -of The Incursion was just too great a coincidence. - -A lucky photographer had caught the image, which had become iconic. He -had been arrested at the time; in the next few days exclusive -interviews were published detailing how badly treated he had been and -Sunni had read them all. But he had sent the image on instantly, and -it was out there, and no amount of -beatings would bring it back. So that moment where the red flower blossomed on Lei's head, -those intense alien red eyes were caught, a snapshot, before there was -nothing left to recognise. That image had spread round the world; it -had been in all the papers. Then it had become a poster, a t-shirt, a stencil for the spray artists on urban streets. Sunni -was one of so many of her -generation obsessed by Lei, obsessed with The Incursion. The poster of -that shot had been hanging on her wall for so long, that face looking -down on her every night. The Incursion had happened on Sunni's -birthday. She had turned 21 that day, a birthday she would never -forget, as the ripple of news spread and she had taken it all on board. - -The Japanese government had been desperate to crush all information. -They had even gone so far as to shoot down a press helicopter that had -flown over the zone. Soldiers had stormed the agencies of the major -media corporations. But that was an old fashioned and na�ve response. -The flow of news was instantaneous. A shot taken was a shot -distributed. After the material had been transmitted from the -unfortunate helicopter crew there had been limited official footage. -But the blogosphere had erupted - instant messaging systems, social -networking, photo hosting - distributed from mobile phones and pocket -computers, sent through a network that had stayed remarkably resilient -even as those on the ground met their demise so soon after contributing to -the documentation that survived them. - -After Lei had been shot, the event ended and the wall thrown up, -no-one ever went looking for survivors and no emergency aid was ever -delivered. If there was anyone left alive in central Tokyo they were -on their own, this was one of the things which always amazed Sunni, -how could they do nothing? Under a state of emergency, with a -population too shocked to argue, this was just accepted. The -government made it clear in the first, limited, official statement - it -would be impossible to ever count how many people had died, though there -was no doubt it was in the millions, just as - the spokesperson said - there -were no survivors. There could be no survivors. - -At last it was clear, mankind was not alone. Quite what the creatures -had been was uncertain - aliens who had stepped through a portal from -some abysmal planet to ours, or Lovecraftian demons who had torn -through the fabric of the dimensions or something else entirely - the -result was the same. We are not alone. Sunni was fired up by this -thought, and she was not alone. Joining message boards which studied -The Incursion, she found plenty of like-minded people. Footage was -posted and collected, everything that they could get from that night. -Then they went further - Lei Bliley became their figurehead - while her -true story remained shrouded by secrets, hackers had penetrated any -information system they could, which primarily lead to a collection of -clips of this strange and lonely woman shambling through the streets -of Tokyo. With time they could even identify those suited men who had -followed her everywhere that she went, keeping at a distance but -always there. As with Lei, information about these men was scarce, -even though names had been found for some of them. - -

Sunni had been saving her money for months now. She was determined to -visit Tokyo. To see the sites of the Incursion for herself. A notion -that wasn't as isolated as one might have suspected in the first days -after the event. The Great Wall of Tokyo had become a major tourist -attraction. Coming up for the second anniversary, coming up -for Sunni's 23rd birthday, she finally had enough money. A lot of people from the board -were going to be there; at last she was going -to meet her friends. - -Tonight was the second annual World's End Party Night. Sunni had -obtained a ticket, they all had, and they were all here after months of -planning and organisation. Though Sunni was shy, she was doing her -best to mix, to talk to those people she knew so well from the screen -- but the screen and flesh are such different endeavours. Many of them -were wearing various t-shirts with Lei's face, some were wearing -t-shirts with pictures of the various monsters (they all had their -favourite beasts). Sunni was wearing the souvenir t-shirt that she had -bought from a stall by the Great Wall, where she had gone on the day -that she had arrived in the city. It said in bold letters, and in -different languages: - -

CAUTION: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE HUMAN ZONE.

- -Despite the fact that the zone was shut off from the public, the -authorities still accessed it. Studying the zone, trying to learn as -much as they could from what was left, in case there was ever another -attack. But they had also found fragments of alien materials, strange -new metals which had been recreated in small amounts. Somehow brave -souls entered the zone under cover of night, looking for artefacts of -their own that they could sell on the black market. These explorers -were called Stalkers, it was a reference that came from the Russian -novel "A Roadside Picnic", which all the board members had read, and -had later been made into a film named after the explorers, and which the board -members had all seen. They speculated whether the Incursion zone -actually bore any resemblance to what was seen in the film in the same -way in which they speculated about everything else. But they knew it didn't. -The hotels and tourist locations round the wall had viewing platforms -- everyone could see the horrid and brutalised structures that -remained standing. Columns of steel, the shattered remains of -skyscrapers, stumps left standing amongst the ashes. - -In fact, the club they are in now is one of those that has been built -specially with a view of the zone, one of a number of buildings built -or adapted to take advantage of their location. Some are luxury -hotels, where the suites with a view of the zone demand the highest -price. There is also a rotating tower where, at the top, diners in the -exclusive restaurant spin slowly, each with their own momentary view -of the zone - the late night sittings being most particularly in -demand. This club is a rougher establishment with its electro angst -music playing, pounding dirge music that had become popular in the -wake of The Incursion - electro dance music, stripped and sparse with -an end of the world sentiment, which some described as somewhat -Gothic. Though certainly tickets for entry had not been cheap either, -for all the contrived image of the establishment. Sunni knows all the -tracks, and sings the words to herself, her attention torn between the -sight of everyone dancing and the view of the zone that one can see -through the great windows on that side of the building. At the moment -blasting strobes play across the room and big screens show cut up -mixes of monster footage. Pieces from the real event, mixed with -artistic representations and reinterpretations. Though Sunni knows -that these will shut off when the real show starts. The nightly -spectacle that provides a constant reminder of events past. - - -Sunni doesn't feel entirely well, if truth be told. For a moment the -lights make her feel dizzy, she blinks and clutches at her necklace. -The alien artefact seems to offer her some kind of reassurance. - -

The first thing she did when she arrived in the city was to visit the -wall. To see the commemorative plaque, the list of names that had been -accounted for, and the bustle of stalls and stands catering to -tourists. From postcards and t-shirts, to various fast-food stalls -selling noodles to all those who visited. Sunni picked out her -favourite images of post-incursion Tokyo and bought them as postcards to -send to friends back home. She wrote while drinking green tea in the -memorial garden tea rooms. She bought a carton of steaming hot -noodles, ate them with disposable chopsticks while wandering through -the bustle. Here Sunni found a stall claiming to sell genuine alien -artefacts, she didn't believe they were real Stalkers, but the thrill -of possibly being able to buy a genuine alien article was too much for -her to resist. The makeshift stall didn't particularly reassure her, -but she picked a green rock on a string and gave the man her money. No -sooner had she done so than a second man appeared to tell the first -that a police patrol was on its way, and Sunni watched with surprise as -the stall was quickly packed away and the two men retreated in the other -direction. She stuffed her purchase in her pocket and tried to look as -innocent as possible as a group of militaristic officers worked past -her, scanning the market with every step. The illegal nature of the -wares now seemed to be verified, though perhaps that just added to the -theory that she had been ripped off? - -Visiting Tokyo is a much more intense experience than Sunni had -expected. While the locals seem to go about their lives as normally as -possible, it is hard to deny the psychic imprint that lies on the -city. Sunni feels that she can sense the catastrophic death everywhere -she goes, as if it were a palpable sensation. Being in the city she feels -that she can hear the voices of the dead in her head, a constant and -unsettling presence. She can't sleep properly, fevered dreams wake her -every night; it seems as though her head is full of the words of alien -languages. As she goes round the city the sensation of unease only -increases. Some of them discussed this earlier on in the evening, she is -not the only one to feel this way. But then, as someone says, they have -all done their tours - The Great Wall and associated market, the -memorial gardens, the grave of Lei Bliley and the Museum of Incursion. -The museum documents events - photos of that night, statistics and -displays detailing how many people had died, before and after models -of the city, documentation of the cancer spikes and sicknesses that -affected those in the proximity of the zone on the night of The -Incursion. With such a dreadful history, and with such a sensitivity -to events, how could Sunni not feel an impact? - -

Sunni swears she can hear voices now. A real sensation, clearer than -the spectral impressions she has experienced so far. The screaming of -the dead. The words of that unsettling language that cause such -discomfort. She shivers, reaches out to the glass of the window for -support, its surface cold against the palm of her hands. Music -thunders and pumps, and she feels like her head does as well. Through -it all there is one clear voice, a woman's voice, speaking those -dreadful words. Sunni has this impression, the voice, it belongs to -Lei, it makes no sense, but right now its the only thing that seems to -be logical in any way. Then the music stops. The strobe lights stop. -The screens switch to a live view of the zone. It is time. There is a -buzz of anticipation. This is what people come to Tokyo to see more -than anything. This inexplicable sight. This constant reminder that -has occurred every night since The Incursion. Looking down on the zone -they can see the neon coils of alien tentacles, wraith-like things. -Then the shambling shapes of horrors that tower over the city that -was. Spectres endlessly re-enacting the night the monsters destroyed -Tokyo. Events with a sufficient impact leave their mark on reality, -some say, this is one explanation for ghosts. It is one of the most -prevalent theories as to what happens here every night. The -insubstantial shapes that light up the sky, a show more spectacular -and mind-bending than any special effects studio ever cooked up. -Watching such a spectacle, many are left feeling that it is hard to -believe that the end days are not in fact imminent and that humanity's -days in the cold void of space are not numbered. - -Sunni, and so many around her, watch this event, startled by the -actuality, even though this is why they are here, now, on the second -anniversary of The Incursion. This is what they have talked about for -so long. This is what they have watched online videos of, now they are -here to see it for themselves. Sunni stands with her mouth open. -People press around her, and she is conscious of them taking pictures, -she is conscious that some of them are talking to her. But dealing -with her own emotions is enough to take up her entire attention. She -is amazed. She is appalled. She is nauseous. There is only one voice -in her head now. - -Lei blinks again, confused, looking down on the wretched ruin of her -city. Sunni shakes, a cold spasm through her body, feeling disembodied -momentarily, disconnected from herself and detached from the horror. -She touches the necklace round her neck. The strange green rock. What -is this? Lei wonders. Warm in her hand, its surface seemingly -unstable. Sunni turns her back to the outside view, leans back against -the glass, closes her eyes. Sunni is feeling weak, as though her legs -could fail her at any moment. She feels the object at her throat, and -tugs it, breaking the cord. At this moment she is convinced - this is -absolutely an alien artefact she has been sold, that she has been -carrying with her for the last few days. She is too weak to throw it -away, sliding to the floor, wondering how many others in this room -also bought artefacts as souvenirs from unscrupulous stalls by the -wall? - -Lei looks around the room. The view is confusing. She can see herself. -Lei is standing by the bar. Lei is standing on the dance floor. Lei is -holding Lei's hand. Sunni shudders, what is going on? Lei tells her -not to worry. Lei tells her it will be ok. Lei says that the Chairman -is back, the Chairman has returned to harvest his seed. There are -people in the club screaming. Sunni listens to the voices and tries to -make sense of what is happening, listens to the voice and fails to -comprehend. There are people in the club running for the exits. Sunni -watches those who move, and those like her who are caught up in this -internal dialogue. This time, she tells Sunni, this time there will be -no survivors. And Sunni hears the sound of glass breaking all around -her, as Lei stands and a grotesque tentacle cleaves through the room. - -© Peter Morrison 2009 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] nosurvivor.jpg - -[*ITEM] His Fly Undid Him - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting -convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. - Bertrand Russell. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It's a short story. As short as the lives -of the flies that my friend liked to kill, but not too short to -demonstrate the consequences thereof. - -So, yes, my friend liked to kill flies. - -Dan lived in a broken down old apartment building where the walls were -peeling, the carpet managed to smell like dog without even the presence -of a canine, and the plates and utensils in his rusting kitchen and -bathroom sinks were classified under the term "scrubbing optional." - -As for Dan, he was a dumpy guy that managed to remain greasy a lot of -the time, when he was incredibly scruffy and wearing the stereotypical -grunge to go along with it all. Don't get me wrong. Appearances aside, -he was an otherwise good man who liked to play World of Warcraft, could -tell the most entertaining stories of how he was fictitiously laid after -a few beers, and had a genocidal compulsion against flies. - -I'm still puzzled about it to this very day. I mean, you would think -with all the filth he accumulated, Dan would have been more tolerant of -his nonhuman neighbors in the inevitable ecosystem he created for -himself. And indeed, he had no problem with the earwigs, and even the -spiders. No, he had no problem with the spiders at all. - -You see, Dan liked to kill flies in a variety of ways. Sometimes, he -would just use a basic Swiss-hole flyswatter. Other times, he would just -spray them. This was just a matter of course really. Then, he just got -nasty. Dan owned a BB gun. I would be hard-pressed to tell you now what -model it was, considering I never really had one, but it was one that -shot out hard, multicolored pellets. Sometimes, as we were gaming on our -laptops, he would reach over and, before anything, he would shoot a fly -in midair. Sometimes, he would even get a few shots off, which annoyed -me because sometimes the pellets just whizzed over my head or brushed my -cheek. - -

I was really philosophical at that point. Well, as philosophical as any drunk -gets at two in the morning.
But no matter how many times I swore at him, he would just not stop. And -you can say a lot about my friend, but he was an excellent shot. There -were pieces of fly limbs scattered everywhere under the bright paint of -those pellets. Those, and the others, however, were the lucky ones. I -won't even go into the ones that were not always killed instantly. The -ones that had their wings shattered, or their legs ripped off. - -Sometimes, I suspect that he honestly trapped some of them in the window -screen and literally watched their strength slowly ebb away. That was, of -course, when he didn't feed them, or remnants of them, to the spiders that -he kept in the corners. One time, I asked him why he did it. I'm not -sure I remember, but I do think it was something to do with the noise -that they made. The buzzing sound. Something in the vibrational tone of -these insects bothered Dan so much that it moved him to specific acts of -cruelty towards them. Now, I don't like the sound of flies either. Their -droning reminds me too much of wasps and hornets - insects I don't know -if I'm allergic to and otherwise do not want to find out. - -But even I started to feel really sorry for them, and found this -compulsion almost weirder than Renfield's eating habits from Dracula. I -even told him that maybe if he cleaned his place up more, there would be -less of them. But according to Dan, it was clean enough. The waxy -pale flypaper on the walls, with its macabre trophies, was supposed to be -a testament to this. And besides, he claimed that he should be able to -keep his place any damn way he wanted and that he was the one who -suffered everything else in it to live. He would just not, as he put it, -suffer flies. - -Now, I didn't go there often and only when I was stranded at night when -the buses stopped, or we came back from a particularly strenuous game of -D&D. To be honest, I couldn't stand the place. There was something -really bad aside from the smell of ass and antiseptics. I couldn't -really express it then. - -Then, there was the night. - -We'd been gaming and drinking a lot. I crashed on the couch while Dan -went into his room. As tired as I was, I couldn't get to sleep. I was -really philosophical at that point. Well, as philosophical as any drunk -gets at two in the morning. There actually was a full moon shining from -one of the windows. The white light from the view was probably one of -the few beautiful things about that place. It was actually really -bright. We'd turned the other lights off, and I just lay there thinking -about stuff. - -My thoughts were not very original, as semi-inebriated musings go. I -wondered about souls. About death. I thought about how we knew that we -had souls. Or was it that we were just machines that would blink off the -moment our hearts -- our sources of power faded and turned off and parts -fell apart? Much like the flies that Dan killed. Descartes, a -philosopher almost always quoted when someone is at least somewhat -wasted, said that animals were just machines that acted on -pre-programmed impulses and could not feel pain or anything. He said -they were soulless things. - -I was as skeptical about that pyjama-wearing Frenchman's delusions as I -was about that soulless vampire bullshit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. -Then I started thinking about ghosts and other stuff we touched on at -our friend's when were role-playing. My last thought was something along -the lines of just how much flypaper was on the walls, and how many small -bodies were stuck onto the pale white substance forever. - -I'm not sure if I woke before, or after I heard the sound. It was a low, -but reverberating sound. My teeth were vibrating from it. The windows -from the outside were still white with the moon, but the light seemed to -be swirling around on the walls. - -Or so I thought. - -I was very disoriented from waking up so soon and I was sure as hell -that I was somewhat under the influence. To this day, I hope that it was -the alcohol whose influence I found myself under. - -The walls were squirming. Pulsing really. Maybe it was a trick of the -light or very bad vision on my part. But what was really disturbing was -the black bits on the fly paper walls. I could have sworn they were -twitching. Underneath dust, paint and stickiness they moved like one -great organism. In the moonlight, they were all pale and slowly, they -began to extract themselves from the wall. I wish this delusion rivaling -an LSD trip ended there. - -But it got worse. - -Accompanied by a white powdery mist, mangled fly parts joined the mass -from the wall. The moon robbed them of any colour other than the one it -gave them. They crawled from under the screen, and the corners, and the -garbage, and even the sink and the bathroom -- where I strongly suspect -Dan drowned them. They all molded together like never-born maggots, or a -cocoon of death until this malformed shape of multiple broken wings, and -twisted limbs, and dead insect eyes, and powder, and hurt buzzed -ominously and slowly away from me. - -Like an undead Zerg Overlord, it hovered like an ivory pustule of small -horror and pain and floated across the room. - -To Dan's room. - -I was on the couch when I woke up the next day. My head was aching and -it took a while for my eyes to focus in the really bright sunlight. And -then I screamed. - -You would have too. The place was almost entirely clean. Too damn clean. -The fly bodies were all gone. All of them. The wax paper wasn't even on -the walls anymore. - -But that wasn't what really scared me. What really scared me was the -white powder coating everything, with greater parts of it in the centre -of the room ... and in the line trailing to Dan's doorway. - -They never found Dan. And I got as far away from that apartment building -as I could. I'd heard all about things like ectoplasm as psychic -residue, and poltergeists and places as things being charged with the -collective energies of people who died especially violent deaths. These -things could pool together and sometimes, apparently, gain something not -unlike sentience or intent. What I didn't know was that the same -principles could also be applied to nonhuman lives. To animals. To -insects. - -To this very day, whenever I get a fly in my room, I put it on a Kleenex -and throw it out of my door to go elsewhere. I literally will not, and -cannot hurt a fly again. I won't hurt a fly because they know us. They -know our homes, our food, our garbage, and our shit. - -Beelzebub. The Lord of the Flies. - -I could go on, but I won't. - -© Matthew Kirshenblatt 2009 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] flyrip.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Extrusion Project - -[*AUTHOR] Grant McDonald Walker - -[*BLURB] Who knows what problems the Large Hadron Collider will cause? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Faithful-2 Astrophysicist Bracle awoke in a -foul mood. With a slap of his fourth tentacle, he expelled from his -sleeping nook the young female with whom he had spent an energetic -night. She fled gratefully to her own mate's quarters, nursing bruises -and contusions. Bracle had scientific matters to consider, and reports -to edit. Although it was not true, he really felt that the extrusion was -his own discovery. He was a senior astrophysicist in the exploration -vessel Pilgrim-4545676, which carried some 200 scientists and 500 -clergy. It was not Bracle, but a junior astronomer, who had first -spotted the extrusion amid a strong source of dark matter. Bracle had, -by the strength of his authority and certain threats, seized a prior -claim. - -Most scientists now believed that the vast majority of dark matter was a -leakage from another dimension. Dark matter was one of the great -mysteries, accounting for much of the mass of the universe, but spread -thinly over all of space, rather than concentrated in stars and planets -where it could easily be seen and measured. The majority of the matter -discovered tended to be individual atoms of hydrogen 2.5, which quickly -decomposed into ordinary hydrogen with a brief spray of fundamental -particles and a little energy. Very occasionally, concentrations of -simple compounds of hydrogen 2.5 such as "heavy ammonia" or "heavy -methane" appeared in deep space, and remained stable. These -concentrations tended to be a few thousand molecules, almost invisible, -resembling frost crystals. - -The extrusion, by contrast, was in a totally different order of -magnitude, an ordered cluster of long-chain polymers, millions of -molecules bonded together in curves, clearly visible to the naked eye, -and it was growing in intersecting layers. There was still some dispute -as to whether it was debris from an unknown spaceship, it was so regular -in shape, but the way in which it seemingly appeared from nowhere, and -the fact that every hydrogen atom in it seemed to be Hydrogen 2.5, -confirmed that it was dark matter in a hitherto unknown form. - -

His third tentacle ached from the blow he had delivered to his -adversary's beak yesterday
However, all the scientists on the ship were here under the auspices of -the Church of Continuous Creation, a wealthy religious sect who believed -that God (the twelve-tentacled creator of the universe) could be -discovered performing His creation if you searched hard enough, and they -had financed and equipped this and many other scientific expeditions to -investigate hotspots of creation, of which the current locus was one. -The priests had taken intellectual ownership of The Dark Extrusion, as -they called it, and forbidden further scientific tests on it, arguing -that its closeness to God's creation rendered it a holy object for -veneration only. Their belief was that as the universe expanded, God -created an atom of Hydrogen 2.5 every so often in order to retain the -overall density of matter. So far as provable fact went, to tell the -truth, it was as valid a theory as any, but Bracle was keen to discover -a more scientific basis for matter creation. He was also keen to -establish a reputation for himself. At all costs. Especially if the -costs were being paid by others. - -Despite his eminence as a scientist, Bracle was ranked a mere -Faithful-2, and that rank was conferred only as a result of his fudging -his answers to the Church's faith test. In this, he was not alone among -the scientists aboard. No-one below Faithful-2 level was permitted on -these holy expeditions, so one had to pretend belief to participate in -them. In fact, his personal beliefs were close to atheism. As far as -Bracle and most of his scientific colleagues were concerned, there was a -scientific reason for everything, including dark matter. - -Bracle had expressed his views rather forcefully at the supper trough, -striking a junior colleague in his fury, and he had to hurry from his -bunk this morning to appear before a six-person Church Committee. An -attendant in the corridor had informed him that The Committee had -already issued a death sentence and a maiming this morning. Bracle's own -minor crimes, last night's assault and a possible, but unsubstantiated, -allegation of rape from the reluctant mate of his chief assistant, -Adafle, would be unlikely to attract any penalty of that severity, but -an accusation of heresy might conceivably be more forcefully punished. -His third tentacle ached from the blow he had delivered to his -adversary's beak yesterday, another limb was bleeding slightly as a -result of a fresh bite from last night's bed companion, and he was seeing -triple and quadruple because his eye-stalks were weary after the long -night of intoxicating vapours and sexual activities. As a result of -these discomforts , Bracle's rashness level was at a high today, and it -was only the risk of heresy that dissuaded him from displaying a more -arrogant attitude to the Church Committee. - -"What impels you to deny the divine nature of the Dark Extrusion?" asked -Chairman Rawale, a wrinkled oldster with a twitch in his eighth -tentacle, who sat at the centre of the nest array. - -A sudden flush of exasperation impelled Bracle to reply, "It seems to me -that God may be behind this at some remove, but I find it difficult to -believe that He would manifest His power by producing an artifact made -of plastic. I would expect God's creations to be more elegant and -complete in form, like a flower or a conscious being, and to be constructed of a -variety of materials, rather than translucent polyethylene." - -There was a brief silence as The Committee absorbed this idea, followed -by the predictable priestly response: "Who are you to judge His -ineffable wisdom?" from the sycophantic Dandle, an effluent-licking -younger priest whose utterances seldom strayed from accepted dogma. -Grunts of approval from the other inquisitors greeted this banal -rhetorical query. - -Bracle didn't attempt to answer the question directly. "I accept that -this is an unusual source of matter. Unique, in fact. Most strong -sources of dark matter are rather randomly distributed and sporadic in -output. With this one, as well as a high concentration of conventional -dark matter atoms and simple compounds, there is the so-called extrusion -orbiting a minor black hole at a distance of 800 light-heartbeats, which -is interestingly unusual. But we have to recognise that this source is -located in what has to be described as a rather out-of-the-way corner of -a conventional spiral galaxy, hardly the location in which the Deity -would choose to reveal the Majesty of His creation. I feel sure that -while God may well have set up the conditions for this phenomenon to -occur, we would honour Him greatly by studying the extrusion in -addition to, obviously, venerating it." - -Some of the committee members shifted uncomfortably; eye-stalks turned -towards Chairman Rawale. And Bracle delivered his master stroke: "And -if, indeed, the Dark Extrusion does come directly from God, then surely -he will have written a message for us upon it with his own tentacle. But -it may not be easy to read. We must inspect it very closely, visually, -chemically and topologically." - -Further unrest and some whispering ensued within the six-person -committee. Dandle was heard to say something about trickery, and was -hushed by the rather formal Gossle, whom Bracle rather liked. -Eventually, with a clearing of beaks, they appeared to reach a -conclusion. Chairman Rawale stated the ruling: "You may study the -artifact as closely as you wish; photograph it with reflected, not -artificial, light; you may not touch it or permit it to be touched; you -may not bombard it with electromagnetic rays. Is that clear?" - -"Certainly, Chairman." Bracle did not feel it politic to report that the -extrusion had already been photographed and X-rayed by a robot drone, -which had also chopped off a small nodule and brought it back for -analysis. Its identification as simple polythene had been made from that -sample, though other organic compounds were also present, lying on the -surface of the plastic. - -But Committee Member Jowle had obviously been thinking about that. "What -makes you so sure that the extrusion is made of polythene?" he asked. - -"Spectral analysis," replied Bracle, hoping that no-one in the nest had -the experience to ask supplementary questions. To complicate the issue, -he hastily added, "To call the substance of the extrusion 'polythene' is -an over-simplification. Various organic compounds have been observed in -its composition, but most are describable as ethylene chains or rings, -such as are found in plastics." - -"Further," continued Chairman Rawale, "The Committee is assigning -Moderaror Dandle to your team to ensure that appropriate respect is paid -to the manifestation." - -Bracle groaned inwardly whilst making a polite salute to Dandle. -"Welcome, Moderator Dandle." he managed to say. Life was about to become -more frustrating if that sanctimonious nit-picker was on his team. But -overall it could have been worse. As well as the power of death, maiming -and life, Chairman Rawale had the power to forbid any scientific -activity at all. At least it hadn't come to that. And no-one had -mentioned his recent violent conduct. - - -

In a scrupulously clean but cluttered laboratory, a couple -of kilometres below the Swiss countryside, Eric Peterson prepared -another run of his experiment at twenty past two in the morning, one of -the few timeslots available on the vast particle accelerator. It seemed -that the smaller the commodity being studied, the larger the equipment -required to study it, and the more people interested in doing so. - -

When -atomic nuclei collide at high speed, showers of sub-particles are -briefly detectable, some of which are suspected of having a component in -another dimension.
In this case, various sub-atomic particles were being fired twenty-six -kilometres down a tunnel, accelerating all the way, and arriving at the -tiny target area travelling at nearly three hundred thousand kilometres -a second. At that speed, the impacts of these particles on any atoms -that got in the way was considerable. Eric was causing these particles -to zap into a plastic beaker full of a sort of chemical soup of Eric's -own devising. In this way, Eric hoped to prove that actual biological life could be initiated -by the bombardment of inorganic solutions with high speed elementary -particles. In this attempt, he was mirroring similar experiments -performed by Miller et al using electricity and ultraviolet as the -trigger. The partial success of these previous experiments in creating -amino acids and proteins had given scientists the confidence that, in -due course, some form of life might be created artificially. However, -without some kind of boost, it might take time. Years, millennia, eons -even. In point of fact, Creationists and other Bible-thumpers could point to the fact that -after nearly a hundred years of trying, not even a smart bacterium had -been created by artificial means. - -Of course, the vast accelerator wasn't built for Eric's project. Hence, -all Eric's time slots were in the early hours of the morning, and his -slots were often cancelled because of maintenance or because a more -important user had overrun. Really Important Research into elementary -particle theory was the main thrust of the accelerator's purpose. When -atomic nuclei collide at high speed, showers of sub-particles are -briefly detectable, some of which are suspected of having a component in -another dimension. Apparently, some particles which theory argued -should be present had continued to evade detection and everyone -was becoming a little worried about the millions spent on the -accelerator's construction and maintenance. - -So far, Eric's results had been disappointing, too. Amino acids and proteins -were appearing in unprecedented quantities under the beam of very fast -particles, but he had been hoping for something more interesting than -the simple organic compounds he was seeing, which were similar to those -which previous experiments seemed to have produced. He had expected that -by increasing the intensity of bombardment well beyond natural levels, -he might produce primitive life somewhat more quickly than God, or even Mother Nature, -had done. - -While nuclei collided in his beaker under the particle beam, Eric was -analysing a sample of a previous batch of Life Soup at a nearby bench. -Even a total failure can win you a PhD as long as you get enough details -into the thesis. He was interrupted when Bruno, lab assistant and -general fusspot, walked into the lab and immediately yelled at him, -"Hey, Mr. Peterson, your container is leaking all over my target -platform!" - -This was a gross exaggeration, but some of the precious liquid was, -indeed, dribbling from the bottom of the beaker. Eric reached for the -vessel as Bruno had the presence of mind to switch off the beam. -"Idiot!," Bruno shouted, "You nearly cooked your stupid hand in the beam -just now! And get that slime bucket into the sink before we are all -having to swim for it!" - -Since the contents of the beaker represented some weeks of work, Eric -quickly transferred the soup to one of the sterile bottles in which batches -of Life Soup were stored when not actually being irradiated. - -"Thanks, Bruno. Hey, look at how thin the bottom of this beaker is," -Eric said, feeling he should make some excuse for the leak. - -"It was your responsibility to obtain and check the container," replied -Bruno, taking it from Eric and poking at the thin polythene, "But it is -certainly defective. You must obtain another one." - -"Yes, of course." - -"Now you must, please, go away while I clean up your mess." - -"I'll do it. It was my..." - -"This is my responsibility, Mr. Peterson. My laboratory is more than surgically -clean. The air is filtered. There is not so much as a fly in here, and -it is because I am extremely thorough in a way that a scientist like you -can never be. Do you want the place overrun with vermin? No, you do not. -You might think you had created them yourself. Ha?" Bruno was still -laughing at his own joke after Eric had left with his defective -container. - -

Bracle's principal problem was not the complex space-borne scientific -endeavour on which he was engaged, nor the increasing resentment he was -causing by his continual exercise of droit de seigneur over -colleagues' mates, but the interference from the irritating priest, -Dandle, whose eyes were everywhere and whose tentacles were into -everything. Had Dandle been a mere service person, or even a fellow -scientist of inferior rank, Bracle could have had him removed from the -project, or even from the land of the living, if necessary. Such was not -the case with the ubiquitous Dandle, whose membership of the priesthood -rendered him immune to deliberate harm of any kind, on pain of the -assailant's death. Observation of The Dark Extrusion was constantly hampered -by prolonged debates with Dandle as to whether even seeing the -phenomenon by natural starlight constituted a violation of The -Committee's restrictions. Whether, specifically, impact by stellar -photons violated the stricture against bombardment by electromagnetic -waves. Quantum dynamics, for example, a discipline with which Dandle had -scant familiarity, and Bracle could claim little more facility, was -called into play, necessitating much delay, during which time no -investigation could take place. Further disputes arose over the -placement of radiation detectors and positional radio beacons, which -Bracle considered to be basic requirements. Did the radiation detectors -in any way affect the extrusion? No. On the contrary, it was eventually -agreed that the extrusion potentially affected the detectors. Did the -radio beacons in any way affect the extrusion? Yes, but in an allowable -manner under the terms of The Committee's embargo. This and other -pettifogging disagreements required The Committee to reconvene, each -event costing precious days. - -Dandle was aware of, even gleeful at, Bracle's frustration, and familiar -with his reputation for violence. He was, therefore, careful never to be -alone with Bracle. When the scientific team made a spacewalk to inspect -the extrusion at close range, Dandle's space suit developed a mysterious -slow leak near one of the tentacle joints, but Dandle quickly repaired -the puncture using a self-adhesive patch with which he had thoughtfully -provided himself for the trip. A suit safety officer was condemned to -death for endangering the valuable cleric. On another occasion, a -mis-labelled airlock control unexpectedly expelled the intrepid Dandle into space, -where he might have orbited the centre of the universe for ever, had he -not been secured to the hull with a safety line. An airlock safety -officer suffered amputation of a tentacle and an eyestalk for -carelessness on that occasion. - -Dandle's oppressive presence was removed in quite an unexpected and -helpful manner. On the thirty-fourth cycle of investigation, a new layer -of matter started to appear, a layer that was red in colour. Shortly -thereafter, strange markings were observed on the otherwise smoothly -curved section of the extrusion. The Reverend Dandle forthwith banished -the excited scientists from the area, and proudly led a group of -incongruously space-suited priests to the location.It had, for some time, -been observed that changes in the extrusion took -place in regular bursts about 140,000 heartbeats apart, and that they -were accompanied by an increase in radiation, a fact confirmed by the -recently installed radiation detectors. Dandle chose a time of maximum -activity for his party, and strayed into a volume of space which was -apparently filled with very fast particles and very hard radiation. -Dandle was simultaneously freeze-dried and microwaved to a crisp inside -a space suit that had suddenly become porous. - -At Dandle's funeral feast, some diners remarked that he was far too well -done and dry for their taste, and that they much preferred a freshly -executed heretic to a spoiled priest. Chairman Rawale found it necessary -to rebuke the complainers, remarking that the quality of the deceased's -life was more to be celebrated than the quality of his meat. It was -observed, however, that even Rawale found it difficult to eat more than -a few scraps of tentacle. - -The rather humourless Moderator Gossle was assigned to the team in -Dandle's place, but he turned out to be more pragmatic and much easier to work with than -his predecessor. The investigation proceeded with more despatch than -before. It seemed very likely that the raised markings on the extrusion -were writing in some form or another, but they remained -incomprehensible, despite long and careful study. - -It was during an attempt to make a cast of the writing that a remarkable -discovery was made. The cast was successfully applied to a portion of -the extrusion, but, when it set, it proved difficult to remove. -Eventually, grapples were attached to the cast, and considerable force -applied by towing it with a rocket-powered service vehicle. The whole -red part of the extrusion twisted and suddenly almost doubled in size. -The effect was as though it had been inflated, but study of a video -later demonstrated that the additional volume had been pulled out of -nowhere, as though it had been concealed in some invisible, intangible -pocket in space. Bracle was the first to correctly conclude that the -extrusion lay mostly in another dimension, and he proposed that there -might be very much more substance available if a really good pull were -organised. - -The suggestion was vetoed by Chairman Rawale, who was already in a state -of reverential shock and awe at what had happened. The Chairman declared -that he required some days to meditate upon its significance. - -

"It is now apparent," said Bruno, "That the particle beam -is destroying your containers. There is daily leakage of fluid from -your messy experiment." - -"Not today, Bruno. I bought a very substantial red plastic bucket from -the Co-op supermarket." - -"I see that, Mr Peterson, but it is already becoming porous, you see! -There is a wetness on the outside of the bucket." - -As they contemplated the experiment, the bucket suddenly lurched, a -split appeared in it, and its contents spilled out. Eric gave a groan of -horror which was drowned by Bruno's howl of rage. On inspection, the -bottom of the bucket had been eroded to a wafer-thin shell and part of -it had disappeared altogether. Bruno cleaned up the mess with many complaints, insisting that, in -future, Eric should use glass or metal vessels, but Eric wasn't -listening. It had dawned upon Eric that he had here a very interesting -phenomenon indeed. - -Over the next few sessions, Eric abandoned his Life Soup, placing only -various solid substances in the beam. One, a celluloid ping-pong ball, -vanished completely in four seconds; assorted other plastic substances -were eroded to an extent; metal, glass, stone, paper, flesh (a pork -chop), rubber, wood and ivory (a key from a scrapped pianoforte) were -either unaffected or were physically damaged by the high energy beam, -melting or burning as the case may be. - -Only plastics, especially polythene, exhibited the disappearing -behaviour. To confirm actual disappearance, Eric placed a plastic toy in -a hermetically sealed glass container, and weighed it before and after -irradiation. Afterwards, the container appeared empty, and was lighter -by the weight of the toy, a plastic jeep. - -Using a supply of thick plastic rods from Bruno's supply cupboard, Eric -also discovered that if he switched off the beam before the rod had -completely disappeared, and he then pulled it in the direction the beam -came from, then some or all of the rod would often reappear. Setting up -a careful bracket and stand apparatus, he further found that if the -retrieval took place exactly along the beam line, then the rod was -invariably returned undamaged. - -Eric realised that this breakthrough was exactly the sort of thing that -became the stuff of learned papers, PhDs and Professorships. He repeated -all his experiments again, this time filming each stage with a fixed -video camera. - -

Chairman Rawale's days of meditation initially -coincided with a lull in activity at the extrusion site. Bracle began to -worry that pulling the red extrusion had, in some way, damaged the -production mechanism, whatever it was. Then came a cluster of small -extrusions, apparently composed of a variety of substances, but The -Committee forebade any tampering with them. Finally, coloured cylinders -began to appear, one by one. Some stayed, some became twisted, others -retracted. And still Bracle was forbidden to investigate more closely. - -Such was Bracle's frustration that he continually provoked fights with -junior male colleagues, all of whom he easily defeated. In accordance -with ancient custom, he usually clipped off and ate an eyestalk from the -opponent. The department began to fill with limping scientists, many of -whom were regrowing eyestalks or nursing wounded tentacles. Between -these bouts, Bracle repeatedly forced himself on any subordinate female -too fearful to resist his advances and angrily coupled with them, often -two or three at a time. - -It came as a relief to all concerned when Chairman Rawale re-convened -The Committee and summoned Bracle to hear their judgement. In short, -study of the phenomenon was to continue but there was to be no more -tugging or pushing. Further, Bracle was admonished for fighting with -colleagues, but was congratulated on his endeavour to multiply the race. -The priesthood frowned upon the recent popular enthusiasm for monogamy, -promoted by secular movements on the home planet. - -But Bracle was determined to circumvent Rawale's rulings. It seemed to -him that great fame would accompany the person most closely associated -with the extrusion, and he was determined to be that person. -Within a short time of test resumption, Bracle was to be found crammed -into a tiny converted escape pod, which was tethered by a steel wire -rope to the latest extrusion, a red cylinder. In lip-service to The -Committee, he was neither pulling nor pushing the extrusion. He was -hoping to stay with it if it retracted and therefore to find out where -the extrusions were coming from. He was armed with a projectile weapon -and a laser side arm. He had never lacked courage, and had ignored the -cautiously expressed misgivings of the technicians who had helped him -organise the attempt. Bracle knew that, whether he returned or not, his -name would be honoured in perpetuity. - -In the event, he was forced to repeat his experiment three more times -before the watching technicians saw his craft jerk and disappear as the -cylinder to which it was attached smoothly slid into nothingness. As -time went on, and he didn't return, some were enraged, others relieved. -Work continued, however, on study of the mysterious writings. - -

Bruno was dismayed to spot what looked like a huge spider -or other bug lurking in a corner of the lab, nearly four centimetres in -diameter. Theoretically, this was impossible because of the -de-contamination entry process, but careless researchers like Eric were -capable of any outrage. Bruno bent to inspect the intruder, observing -that it appeared to have even more legs than was customary for a spider -- twelve or so - and that they were not jointed, but flexible. Judging -it to be too large safely to pick up, but wanting to show Eric the -evidence of a contaminated workplace, Bruno approached the creature with -a specimen jar and a handbrush, surprisingly receiving several painful -stings even before he touched it. He concluded that it must be spitting -venom at him. Irritated, he flicked it out of the corner with his brush -and stamped on it. A squashed exhibit would serve Bruno's purpose just -as well as a live one. Later, he found a strange silver sphere attached -by a wire to one of the plastic rods Eric had borrowed. Bruno had been -saving these rods for an atomic model, but Eric's new enthusiasm for -irradiated plastic was much preferred to the leakages of previous weeks. -With a grimace, he tore the sphere off and tossed it in the bin. The -sooner he was rid of Eric, he muttered to himself, the better. - -[*IMAGE] addis.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Enormous Gun - -[*AUTHOR] Damon Harkness - -[*BLURB] I had no intention of publishing a one-act play when I started this magazine, -but The Enormous Gun is sf, and amusing, so why not? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Scene: A huge room painted in battleship grey, very -naval in appearance. The breech of a very large gun projects into the -room. A control desk is centre left. There are various warning signs, -covering matters as diverse as cautions against firing the gun by -mistake, and penalties for using the toilet during action stations. -

Enter Commander Elaine Fisher. She is an impressive early -middle-aged woman, dressed in a Naval uniform with medal ribbons, a -peaked cap and lots of gold braid. She steps up to the control console -and presses her forefinger to the screen.

- -Computer (a mellifluous female voice, that speaks in a totally -unruffled and deliberate manner throughout): Arsole. - -
-Elaine: What? Did you say 'arsehole'? - -
-Computer: Groblag funt. Arsole. - -
-Elaine: Oh, dear. Wrong language... Um... Menu! - -
-Computer: Groblag funt. - -
-Elaine: (louder) MENU! - -
-Computer: Groblag funt. (pause) Arsole. - -
-Elaine: Same to you. - -
-Computer: Groblag funt. - -
Elaine: (pressing a button on the console (every time she speaks -to the Lieutenant, she presses the button)) Lieutenant White, are you -there? - -
-Lieutenant George White (a tinny voice over an intercom): Yes, Commander. - -
-Computer: Groblag funt. - -
-Lt. White: What did you say, Commander? - -
Elaine: That was the gun control, Lieutenant. It keeps talking in a -foreign language and I can't get the menu up to change it to standard -Anglic. - -
-Lt. White: What is it saying? - -
-Elaine: Sounds like 'groblag funt'. - -
-Computer: Arsole. - -
-Elaine: And 'arsehole'. - -
Lt. White: Oh, yes. The Centaurians were on shift just before you. -Our chaps have been having a good laugh at that. 'Arsole' is Centauri for -'Ready', and that 'funt' thing means 'Please repeat'. - -
Elaine: Very funny, I'm sure, Lieutenant, but I am currently -responsible for one of the largest artillery pieces in the galaxy, and I -cannot control it in Centauri. How do I get the menu up and set it for -Anglic? - -
-Computer: Arsole. - -
Lt. White: Sorry, Commander. Just a minute... Sergeant Black thinks -he knows the Centauri for 'Menu'. - -
-Elaine: Good. - -
-Computer: Arsole. - -
-Elaine: Shut up. - -
-Computer: Groblag funt. - -
Elaine: Hurry up, Lieutenant. This artillery battery is key to our -defence against the aliens. We are stuck out here on this disgusting -asteroid to defend the inner planets of the Solar System against -invasion, and the controller doesn't even understand Anglic. - -
Lt. White: The thing is, this is a new version of the control -software. Previously, it only worked in Anglic, but the ExtremelyTinySoft -Corporation sent an update with all the Centauri vocabulary in it. The -Centaurians were quite thrilled. So were the Altairians. - -
-Elaine: Stop gabbling, Lieutenant, what's the Centauri for Menu? - -
Lt. White: Got it, Commander. Jim says it sounds like 'Peepee -shitbag'. Try that. - -
-Elaine: (quietly) 'Peepee shitbag'? Are these Centaurians winding us up? - -
-Lt. White: Very possibly. They have a strange sense of humour. - -
-Elaine: OK. Peepee shitbag! - -
-Computer: Peepee shitbag: Sodaly futtock. Invalog fragpot. Armpit. Sock lagging. -(pause) Rotanic limbo. Arsole. - -
-Elaine: In Anglic, for heaven's sake! - -
Computer: Groblag funt. (pause) Peepee shitbag: Sodaly -futtock. Invalog fragpot. Armpit. Sock lagging. (pause) Rotanic -limbo. Arsole. - -
Elaine: Lieutenant? I seem to have found the menu, but I don't know -which item is the language change. - -
-Lt. White: Ah.. Hang on. - -
Alert Mechanism (a loud, urgent-sounding mechanical voice (think -Dalek)): Luggage! Luggage! Parson frogyot haddaway sompom! Tammas -erticol humpoy. - -
-Elaine: Oh, God. Now we've got an alert. Hurry! - -
-Lt. White: No, sorry, Commander, Jim isn't exactly fluent in -Centauri. His vocabulary is limited to ordering food, drink and uh... certain -other services. And a few endearments, apparently. - -
-Elaine: Well, isn't there a Centaurian there? - -
Lt. White: No, Commander. The Centaurian tour of duty ended an hour -ago, and they have all left the fort in an ion frigate. We are trying to -contact them, but radio communications are flaky during the ion drive -phase of acceleration, so it may be an hour or two. - -
Elaine: This is intolerable. There's an alert here and even that's -in Centauri. Can I reboot this thing and start again? - -
Computer: Groblag funt. (pause) Peepee shitbag: Sodaly -futtock. Invalog fragpot. Armpit. Sock lagging. (pause) Rotanic -limbo. Arsole. - -
Alert Mechanism: Luggage! Luggage! Parson frogyot haddaway sompom! -Tammas ragbucket humpoy. - -
Lt. White: That's it, of course, Commander. A reboot should do it! -If you study the frame -of the screen, you'll see a tiny hole at the bottom right. Just poke -something in there and hold it for a second or two. Then you'll hear a -bleep. That puts it in language detect mode. Just say something in -Anglic and it'll start up, in Anglic this time. - -
-Elaine: (peers at the screen, then pats her pockets, and looks -around the room desperately. Takes out a pen and pokes at the framework, -mutters.) Lieutenant! I haven't got anything small enough to go in -the hole. Can you send someone down with a paper clip. - -
Lt. White: Ahhh... no can do, I'm afraid. During an alert, the door to the control -chamber is time-locked to prevent desertion, remember. It opens if you -happen to die, of course, but I don't suppose... - -
Elaine: Not yet. Oh, wait. There's a pin on my medal ribbons. -(She removes the ribbons and pokes the hole.) - -
-Computer: (long bleep) - -
-Alert Mechanism: Luggage! Luggage! Parson frogyot haddaway sompom! Tammas lizardmum humpoy. - -
-Computer: Braglat. Korpun summolpotril soup. - -
-Elaine: Damn! It heard the alert so it's dropped back into Centauri. - -
-Lt. White: That's OK. Just poke it again. - -
-Elaine: (pokes the hole) - -
-Computer: (long bleep) - -
-Elaine: Menu! - -
-Computer: Welcome. Insert installation disc. - -
-Elaine: (Rummages around the desktop and finds a disc. Rams it into the computer.) - -
-Computer: Right way around, please. - -
-Elaine: (Pulls out the disc, turns it round. Rams it back into the computer, snarling.) - -
-Computer: Menu: Language. Gun setup. Date and time. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Gun setup. - -
-Computer: Automatic or manual. - -
-Elaine: Ohhhh... automatic, I suppose. - -
-Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! Range eight minutes. - -
-Computer: Please repeat. - -
-Elaine: (shouting) Automatic! - -
-Computer: Please specify automatic option number. - -
-Elaine: Lieutenant! What's the automatic option number! - -
-Lt. White: Oh, that! We haven't got around to automatics yet. We're still doing manual. - -
-Elaine: Menu! - -
-Computer: Menu: Language. Gun setup. Date and time. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Gun setup. - -
-Computer: Automatic or manual. - -
-Elaine: Manual. - -
-Computer: Manual: Ammunition type. Spread definition. Identify incoming hostile. -Fire. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Identify. - -
-Computer: You must specify ammunition type. - -
-Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! Range seven minutes. - -
Computer: Please repeat. Manual: Ammunition type. Spread -definition. Identify incoming hostile. Fire. Exit. Choose an option. -Ready. - -
-Elaine: Ammunition type, then! - -
-Computer: Ammunition type: Laser. Projectile. Dummy. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Projectile! - -
-Computer: Projectile type: Single projectile. Cluster mines. Toasters. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Toasters!? - -
Computer: Toasters: Single slice or double slice. Exit. Choose an -option. Ready. This joke was brought to you by Ernest Hubble, programmer -at ExtremelyTinySoft Corporation. Enjoy. - -
-Elaine: Ernest Hubble, you are for the high jump. - -
-Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! Range six minutes. - -
-Computer: Please repeat. Toasters: Single slice or double slice. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Exit. - -
-Computer: Projectile type: Single projectile. Cluster mines. Toasters. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: (interrupting) Cluster! - -
-Computer: Cluster mines chosen. - -
-Elaine: (interrupting) Exit! - -
Computer: Don't rush me like that. I'll get to it. Now, Manual: -Ammunition type. Spread definition. Identify incoming hostile. Fire. -Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Identify! Identify! - -
-Computer: Which? - -
-Elaine: Identify! - -
-Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! Range five minutes. - -
-Computer: You must first specify a spread definition. - -
-Elaine: Lieutenant! What's a spread definition? - -
Lt. White: Search me, Commander. It's a new option. By the way, the -rest of us are evacuating the fort now, in line with standing orders. If an -incoming hostile spacecraft is less than five minutes away, only the gunnery -officer of the day - that's you, Commander - stays at his post... or her -post, as the case may be. - -
-Elaine: (bravely) Very well, Lieutenant, carry on. - -
-Lt. White: Aye, aye, sir. And all the guys send their best wishes and so on, of course. - -
-Elaine: (sarcastically) I'm touched. - -
Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! -Range four minutes. - -
-Elaine: Spread option. - -
Computer: Spread option: Normal. Gaussian. Poissonian. Rectangular. -Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Aren't Normal and Gaussian the same thing? - -
-Computer: Search me. This is a new option. - -
-Elaine: Normal, then. - -
Computer: Normal chosen. Spread option: Normal. Gaussian. -Poissonian. Rectangular. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: This repetition wastes a lot of time. - -
Computer: Tell me about it. But then you wouldn't believe the -number of idle cycles I have to go through just to wait for your -responses. What's it to be? - -
-Elaine: Exit. - -
Computer: Manual: Ammunition type. Spread definition. Identify -incoming hostile. Fire. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Identify. - -
Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! -Range three minutes. - -
Computer: Approaching craft is of unknown type. Approaching craft -does not respond to Interrogation Friend or Foe protocol. -Recommendation: Destroy. - -
-Elaine: (hesitates) Fire, then, I suppose. - -
-Computer: Did you say 'Fire'? Please confirm. - -
-Elaine: Fire. - -
-Computer: I must ask you your private question, to confirm your identity. - -
-Elaine: So ask. - -
-Computer: Gobrat pokesto nuik yom boppomast? - -
-Elaine: What? - -
-Computer: Gobrat pokesto nuik yom boppomast? - -
Elaine: This is not my private question. It's one of the -Centaurians'. Take my word for it. Just fire! - -
Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! -Range two minutes. - -
-Computer: Gobrat pokesto nuik yom boppomast? ... Have a guess. - -
-Elaine: I don't believe this shit! - -
-Computer: Correct. 'Shit' is the correct answer. - -
-Elaine: Ok. Good. Fire. - -
-Computer: Firing. - -
(Loud explosion. The gun recoils into the room. Smoke puffs out. -The lights dim and flicker. Small items fall off the desktop.) - -
Elaine: Good God. What was that? I thought these guns were silent, -smokeless and recoilless in operation. - -
Computer: That is true. The side effects are an enhancement -introduced recently by the ExtremelyTinySoft Corporation to increase the -apparent power of the weapon. Silent, odourless, vibrationless operation is -unimpressive, according to focus group feedback. - -
-Elaine: I see. Damage report, please. - -
-Computer: One moment... All systems working correctly. - -
-Elaine: How about the incoming spacecraft? - -
Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft detected! -Range one minute. - -
-Computer: Miss. - -
-Elaine: We missed? - -
Computer: Missed, yes. Cluster mines cannot be deployed close to the asteroid, -to avoid what we call 'friendly demolition'. You should have used -lasers. - -
-Elaine: Now you tell me. Manual! - -
Computer: Manual: Ammunition type. Spread definition. Identify -incoming hostile. Fire. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Ammunition type! - -
-Computer: Ammunition type: Laser. Projectile. Dummy. Exit. Choose an option. Ready. - -
-Elaine: Laser. - -
Computer: Laser selected. Manual: Ammunition type. Spread -definition. Identify incoming hostile. Fire. Exit. Choose an option. -Ready. - -
-Elaine: Fire. - -
-Computer: Target out of range. - -
-Elaine: How can that be? - -
-Computer: Targets behind the fort are out of range. - -
Alert Mechanism: Alert! Alert! Unidentified spacecraft has docked -with fort! Action Stations! (A few Ahooga! Ahooga! noises here) - -
Unidentified Voice (when speaking Anglic, speaks with a foreign -accent over the intercom): Rama! Rama! Spinfork dogwick loglog sucko. - -
-Elaine: Identify yourself. - -
-Voice (pause) Hello! Hello! Take me to your leader. - -
-Elaine: Who the hell is this? As if I can't guess. - -
Voice: Very sorry. Commander Catcrap of the Centaurian Navy here. We -came back because I just remembered that I left the control system in -Centauri language mode. I hope it caused no trouble. - -
-Elaine: Thank you, Commander. Nothing we couldn't handle. - -
-Computer: Catcrap. - -[*IMAGE] cannon.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Curse of Yig - -[*AUTHOR] H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop - -[*BLURB] Story by Zealia Bishop, ghostwritten by Lovecraft. Originally published in the late 1920s -in Weird Tales. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

In 1925 I went into Oklahoma looking for snake lore, and I came out -with a fear of snakes that will last me the rest of my life. I admit it is foolish, -since there are natural explanations for everything I saw and heard, -but it masters me none the less. If the old story had been all there was to -it, I would not have been so badly shaken. My work as an American Indian -ethnologist has hardened me to all kinds of extravagant legendry, -and I know that simple white people can beat the redskins at their own -game when it comes to fanciful inventions. But I can't forget what I saw -with my own eyes at the insane asylum in Guthrie. - -I called at that asylum because a few of the oldest settlers told me I -would find something important there. Neither Indians nor white men -would discuss the snake-god legends I had come to trace. The oil-boom -newcomers, of course, knew nothing of such matters, and the red men -and old pioneers were plainly frightened when I spoke of them. Not -more than six or seven people mentioned the asylum, and those who did -were careful to talk in whispers. But the whisperers said that Dr. McNeill -could shew me a very terrible relic and tell me all I wanted to know. He -could explain why Yig, the half-human father of serpents, is a shunned -and feared object in central Oklahoma, and why old settlers shiver at the -secret Indian orgies which make the autumn days and nights hideous -with the ceaseless beating of tom-toms in lonely places. - -It was with the scent of a hound on the trail that I went to Guthrie, for -I had spent many years collecting data on the evolution of serpent-worship -among the Indians. I had always felt, from well-defined undertones -of legend and archaeology, that great Quetzalcoatl - benign snake-god of -the Mexicans - had had an older and darker prototype; and during recent -months I had well-nigh proved it in a series of researches stretching -from Guatemala to the Oklahoma plains. But everything was tantalising -and incomplete, for above the border the cult of the snake was hedged -about by fear and furtiveness. - -

I had to look into the malodorous den for several -seconds before I could see what was crawling and wriggling about on the straw-covered floor
-Now it appeared that a new and copious source of data was about to -dawn, and I sought the head of the asylum with an eagerness I did not -try to cloak. Dr. McNeill was a small, clean-shaven man of somewhat advanced -years, and I saw at once from his speech and manner that he was -a scholar of no mean attainments in many branches outside his profession. -Grave and doubtful when I first made known my errand, his face -grew thoughtful as he carefully scanned my credentials and the letter of -introduction which a kindly old ex-Indian agent had given me. - -"So you've been studying the Yig legend, eh?" he reflected sententiously. -"I know that many of our Oklahoma ethnologists have tried to -connect it with Quetzalcoatl, but I don't think any of them have traced -the intermediate steps so well. You've done remarkable work for a man -as young as you seem to be, and you certainly deserve all the data we -can give. - -"I don't suppose old Major Moore or any of the others told you what it -is I have here. They don't like to talk about it, and neither do I. It is very -tragic and very horrible, but that is all. I refuse to consider it anything supernatural. -There's a story about it that I'll tell you after you see it - a -devilish sad story, but one that I won't call magic. It merely shews the -potency that belief has over some people. I'll admit there are times when -I feel a shiver that's more than physical, but in daylight I set all that -down to nerves. I'm not a young fellow any more, alas! - -"To come to the point, the thing I have is what you might call a victim -of Yig's curse - a physically living victim. We don't let the bulk of the -nurses see it, although most of them know it's here. There are just two -steady old chaps whom I let feed it and clean out its quarters - used to -be three, but good old Stevens passed on a few years ago. I suppose I'll -have to break in a new group pretty soon; for the thing doesn't seem to -age or change much, and we old boys can't last forever. Maybe the ethics -of the near future will let us give it a merciful release, but it's hard to tell. - -"Did you see that single ground-glass basement window over in the -east wing when you came up the drive? That's where it is. I'll take you -there myself now. You needn't make any comment. Just look through the -moveable panel in the door and thank God the light isn't any stronger. -Then I'll tell you the story - or as much as I've been able to piece -together." - -We walked downstairs very quietly, and did not talk as we threaded -the corridors of the seemingly deserted basement. Dr. McNeill unlocked -a grey-painted steel door, but it was only a bulkhead leading to a further -stretch of hallway. At length he paused before a door marked B 116, -opened a small observation panel which he could use only by standing -on tiptoe, and pounded several times upon the painted metal, as if to -arouse the occupant, whatever it might be. - -A faint stench came from the aperture as the doctor unclosed it, and I -fancied his pounding elicited a kind of low, hissing response. Finally he -motioned me to replace him at the peep-hole, and I did so with a causeless -and increasing tremor. The barred, ground-glass window, close to -the earth outside, admitted only a feeble and uncertain pallor; and I had -to look into the malodorous den for several seconds before I could see -what was crawling and wriggling about on the straw-covered floor, -emitting every now and then a weak and vacuous hiss. Then the shadowed -outlines began to take shape, and I perceived that the squirming -entity bore some remote resemblance to a human form laid flat on its -belly. I clutched at the door-handle for support as I tried to keep from -fainting. - -The moving object was almost of human size, and entirely devoid of -clothing. It was absolutely hairless, and its tawny-looking back seemed -subtly squamous in the dim, ghoulish light. Around the shoulders it was -rather speckled and brownish, and the head was very curiously flat. As it -looked up to hiss at me I saw that the beady little black eyes were damnably -anthropoid, but I could not bear to study them long. They fastened -themselves on me with a horrible persistence, so that I closed the panel -gaspingly and left the creature to wriggle about unseen in its matted -straw and spectral twilight. I must have reeled a bit, for I saw that the -doctor was gently holding my arm as he guided me away. I was stuttering -over and over again: "B-but for God's sake, what is it?" - -

Dr. McNeill told me the story in his private office as I sprawled opposite -him in an easy-chair. The gold and crimson of late afternoon changed -to the violet of early dusk, but still I sat awed and motionless. I resented -every ring of the telephone and every whir of the buzzer, and I could -have cursed the nurses and internes whose knocks now and then -summoned the doctor briefly to the outer office. Night came, and I was -glad my host switched on all the lights. Scientist though I was, my zeal -for research was half forgotten amidst such breathless ecstasies of fright -as a small boy might feel when whispered witch-tales go the rounds of -the chimney-corner. - -It seems that Yig, the snake-god of the central plains -tribes - presumably the primal source of the more southerly Quetzalcoatl -or Kukulcan - was an odd, half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary -and capricious nature. He was not wholly evil, and was usually -quite well-disposed toward those who gave proper respect to him and -his children, the serpents; but in the autumn he became abnormally -ravenous, and had to be driven away by means of suitable rites. That -was why the tom-toms in the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo country -pounded ceaselessly week in and week out in August, September, and -October; and why the medicine-men made strange noises with rattles -and whistles curiously like those of the Aztecs and Mayas. - -Yig's chief trait was a relentless devotion to his children - a devotion -so great that the redskins almost feared to protect themselves from the -venomous rattlesnakes which thronged the region. Frightful clandestine -tales hinted of his vengeance upon mortals who flouted him or wreaked -harm upon his wriggling progeny; his chosen method being to turn his -victim, after suitable tortures, to a spotted snake. - -In the old days of the Indian Territory, the doctor went on, there was -not quite so much secrecy about Yig. The plains tribes, less cautious than -the desert nomads and Pueblos, talked quite freely of their legends and -autumn ceremonies with the first Indian agents, and let considerable of -the lore spread out through the neighbouring regions of white settlement. -The great fear came in the land-rush days of '89, when some extraordinary -incidents had been rumoured, and the rumours sustained, -by what seemed to be hideously tangible proofs. Indians said that the -new white men did not know how to get on with Yig, and afterward the -settlers came to take that theory at face value. Now no old-timer in -middle Oklahoma, white or red, could be induced to breathe a word -about the snake-god except in vague hints. Yet after all, the doctor added -with almost needless emphasis, the only truly authenticated horror had -been a thing of pitiful tragedy rather than of bewitchment. It was all very -material and cruel - even that last phase which ha caused so much -dispute. - -Dr. McNeill paused and cleared his throat before getting down to his -special story, and I felt a tingling sensation as when a theatre curtain -rises. The thing had begun when Walker Davis and his wife Audrey left -Arkansas to settle in the newly opened public lands in the spring of 1889, -and the end had come in the country of the Wichitas - north of the -Wichita River, in what is at present Caddo County. There is a small village -called Binger there now, and the railway goes through; but otherwise -the place is less changed than other parts of Oklahoma. It is still a -section of farms and ranches - quite productive in these days - since the -great oil-fields do not come very close. - -Walker and Audrey had come from Franklin County in the Ozarks -with a canvas-topped wagon, two mules, an ancient and useless dog -called "Wolf", and all their household goods. They were typical hill-folk, -youngish and perhaps a little more ambitious than most, and looked forward -to a life of better returns for their a hard work than they had had in -Arkansas. Both were lean, raw-boned specimens; the man tall, sandy, -and grey-eyed, and the woman short and rather dark, with a black -straightness of hair suggesting a slight Indian admixture. - -In general, there was very little of distinction about them, and but for -one thing their annals might not have differed from those of thousands -of other pioneers who flocked into the new country at that time. That -thing was Walker's almost epileptic fear of snakes, which some laid to -prenatal causes, and some said came from a dark prophecy about his end -with which an old Indian squaw had tried to scare him when he was -small. Whatever the cause, the effect was marked indeed; for despite his -strong general courage the very mention of a snake would cause him to -grow faint and pale, while the sight of even a tiny specimen would produce -a shock sometimes bordering on a convulsion seizure. - -The Davises started out early in the year, in the hope of being on their -new land for the spring ploughing. Travel was slow; for the roads were -bad in Arkansas, while in the Territory there were great stretches of -rolling hills and red, sandy barrens without any roads whatever. As the -terrain grew flatter, the change from their native mountains depressed -them more, perhaps, than they realised; but they found the people at the -Indian agencies very affable, while most of the settled Indians seemed -friendly and civil. Now and then they encountered a fellow-pioneer, -with whom crude pleasantries and expressions of amiable rivalry were -generally exchanged. - -Owing to the season, there were not many snakes in evidence, so -Walker did not suffer from his special temperamental weakness. In the -earlier stages of the journey, too, there were no Indian snake-legends to -trouble him; for the transplanted tribes from the southeast do not share -the wilder beliefs of their western neighbours. As fate would have it, it -was a white man at Okmulgee in the Creek country who gave the Davises -the first hint of Yig beliefs; a hint which had a curiously fascinating -effect on Walker, and caused him to ask questions very freely after that. - -Before long Walker's fascination had developed into a bad case of -fright. He took the most extraordinary precautions at each of the nightly -camps, always clearing away whatever vegetation he found, and avoiding -stony places whenever he could. Every clump of stunted bushes and -every cleft in the great, slab-like rocks seemed to him now to hide -malevolent serpents, while every human figure not obviously part of a -settlement or emigrant train seemed to him a potential snake-god till -nearness had proved the contrary. Fortunately no troublesome encounters -came at this stage to shake his nerves still further. - -As they approached the Kickapoo country they found it harder and -harder to avoid camping near rocks. Finally it was no longer possible, -and poor Walker was reduced to the puerile expedient of droning some -of the rustic anti-snake charms he had learned in his boyhood. Two or -three times a snake was really glimpsed, and these sights did not help -the sufferer in his efforts to preserve composure. - -On the twenty-second evening of the journey a savage wind made it -imperative, for the sake of the mules, to camp in as sheltered a spot as -possible; and Audrey persuaded her husband to take advantage of a cliff -which rose uncommonly high above the dried bed of a former tributary -of the Canadian River. He did not like the rocky cast of the place, but allowed -himself to be overruled this once; leading the animals sullenly toward -the protecting slope, which the nature of the ground would not allow -the wagon to approach. - -Audrey, examining the rocks near the wagon, meanwhile noticed a -singular sniffing on the part of the feeble old dog. Seizing a rifle, she followed -his lead, and presently thanked her stars that she had forestalled -Walker in her discovery. For there, snugly nested in the gap between two -boulders, was a sight it would have done him no good to see. Visible -only as one convoluted expanse, but perhaps comprising as many as -three or four separate units, was a mass of lazy wriggling which could -not be other than a brood of new-born rattlesnakes. - -Anxious to save Walker from a trying shock, Audrey did not hesitate -to act, but took the gun firmly by the barrel and brought the butt down -again and again upon the writhing objects. Her own sense of loathing -was great, but it did not amount to a real fear. Finally she saw that her -task was done, and turned to cleanse the improvised bludgeon in the red -sand and dry, dead grass near by. She must, she reflected, cover the nest -up before Walker got back from tethering the mules. Old Wolf, tottering -relic of mixed shepherd and coyote ancestry that he was, had vanished, -and she feared he had gone to fetch his master. - -Footsteps at that instant proved her fear well founded. A second more, -and Walker had seen everything. Audrey made a move to catch him if he -should faint, but he did no more than sway. Then the look of pure fright -on his bloodless face turned slowly to something like mingled awe and -anger, and he began to upbraid his wife in trembling tones. - -"Gawd's sake, Aud, but why'd ye go for to do that? Hain't ye heerd all -the things they've been tellin' about this snake-devil Yig? Ye'd ought to a -told me, and we'd a moved on. Don't ye know they's a devil-god what -gets even if ye hurts his children? What for d'ye think the Injuns all -dances and beats their drums in the fall about? This land's under a curse, - -I tell ye - nigh every soul we've a-talked to sence we come in's said the -same. Yig rules here, an' he comes out every fall for to git his victims and -turn 'em into snakes. Why, Aud, they won't none of them Injuns acrost -the Canayjin kill a snake for love nor money! - -"Gawd knows what ye done to yourself, gal, a-stompin' out a hull -brood o' Yig's chillen. He'll git ye, sure, sooner or later, unlessen I kin -buy a charm offen some o' the Injun medicine-men. He'll git ye, Aud, as -sure's they's a Gawd in heaven - he'll come outa the night and turn ye into -a crawlin' spotted snake!" - -All the rest of the journey Walker kept up the frightened reproofs and -prophecies. They crossed the Canadian near Newcastle, and soon afterward -met with the first of the real plains Indians they had seen - a party -of blanketed Wichitas, whose leader talked freely under the spell of the -whiskey offered him, and taught poor Walker a long-winded protective -charm against Yig in exchange for a quart bottle of the same inspiring -fluid. By the end of the week the chosen site in the Wichita country was -reached, and the Davises made haste to trace their boundaries and perform -the spring ploughing before even beginning the construction of a -cabin. - -The region was flat, drearily windy, and sparse of natural vegetation, -but promised great fertility under cultivation. Occasional outcroppings -of granite diversified a soil of decomposed red sandstone, and here and -there a great flat rock would stretch along the surface of the ground like -a man-made floor. There seemed to be a very few snakes, or possible -dens for them; so Audrey at last persuaded Walker to build the one- -room cabin over a vast, smooth slab of exposed stone. With such a flooring -and with a good-sized fireplace the wettest weather might be defied - -though it soon became evident that dampness was no salient quality -of the district. Logs were hauled in the wagon from the nearest belt of -woods, many miles toward the Wichita Mountains. - -Walker built his wide-chimneyed cabin and crude barn with the aid of -some of the other settlers, though the nearest one was over a mile away. -In turn, he helped his helpers at similar house-raisings, so that many ties -of friendship sprang up between the new neighbours. There was no -town worthy the name nearer than El Reno, on the railway thirty miles -or more to the northeast; and before many weeks had passed, the people -of the section had become very cohesive despite the wideness of their -scattering. The Indians, a few of whom had begun to settle down on -ranches, were for the most part harmless, though somewhat quarrelsome -when fired by the liquid stimulation which found its way to them despite -all government bans. - -Of all the neighbours the Davises found Joe and Sally Compton, who -likewise hailed from Arkansas, the most helpful and congenial. Sally is -still alive, known now as Grandma Compton; and her son Clyde, then an -infant in arms, has become one of the leading men of the state. Sally and -Audrey used to visit each other often, for their cabins were only two -miles apart; and in the long spring and summer afternoons they exchanged -many a tale of old Arkansas and many a rumour about the new -country. - -Sally was very sympathetic about Walker's weakness regarding -snakes, but perhaps did more to aggravate than cure the parallel -nervousness which Audrey was acquiring through his incessant praying -and prophesying about the curse of Yig. She was uncommonly full of -gruesome snake stories, and produced a direfully strong impression -with her acknowledged masterpiece - the tale of a man in Scott County -who had been bitten by a whole horde of rattlers at once, and had -swelled so monstrously from poison that his body had finally burst with -a pop. Needless to say, Audrey did not repeat this anecdote to her husband, -and she implored the Comptons to beware of starting it on the -rounds of the countryside. It is to Joe's and Sally's credit that they heeded -this plea with the utmost fidelity. - -Walker did his corn-planting early, and in midsummer improved his -time by harvesting a fair crop of the native grass of the region. With the -help of Joe Compton he dug a well which gave a moderate supply of -very good water, though he planned to sink an artesian later on. He did -not run into many serious snake scares, and made his land as inhospitable -as possible for wriggling visitors. Every now and then he rode over -to the cluster of thatched, conical huts which formed the main village of -the Wichitas, and talked long with the old men and shamans about the -snake-god and how to nullify his wrath. Charms were always ready in -exchange for whiskey, but much of the information he got was far from -reassuring. - -Yig was a great god. He was bad medicine. He did not forget things. In -the autumn his children were hungry and wild, and Yig was hungry and -wild, too. All the tribes made medicine against Yig when the corn harvest -came. They gave him some corn, and danced in proper regalia to the -sound of whistle, rattle, and drum. They kept the drums pounding to -drive Yig away, and called down the aid of Tir?, whose children men are, -even as the snakes are Yig's children. It was bad that the squaw of Davis -killed the children of Yig. Let Davis say the charms many times when the -corn harvest comes. Yig is Yig. Yig is a great god. - -By the time the corn harvest did come, Walker had succeeded in getting -his wife into a deplorably jumpy state. His prayers and borrowed incantations -came to be a nuisance; and when the autumn rites of the Indians -began, there was always a distant wind-borne pounding of tom-toms -to lend an added background of the sinister. It was maddening to have -the muffled clatter always stealing over the wide red plains. Why would -it never stop? Day and night, week on week, it was always going in exhaustless -relays, as persistently as the red dusty winds that carried it. -Audrey loathed it more than her husband did, for he saw in it a compensating -element of protection. It was with this sense of a mighty, intangible -bulwark against evil that he got in his corn crop and prepared -cabin and stable for the coming winter. - -The autumn was abnormally warm, and except for their primitive -cookery the Davises found scant use for the stone fireplace Walker had -built with such care. Something in the unnaturalness of the hot dust- -clouds preyed on the nerves of all the settlers, but most of all on -Audrey's and Walker's. The notions of a hovering snake-curse and the -weird, endless rhythm of the distant Indian drums formed a bad combination -which any added element of the bizarre went far to render utterly -unendurable. - -Notwithstanding this strain, several festive gatherings were held at -one or another of the cabins after the crops were reaped; keeping naively -alive in modernity those curious rites of the harvest-home which are as -old as human agriculture itself. Lafayette Smith, who came from southern -Missouri and had a cabin about three miles east of Walker's, was a -very passable fiddler; and his tunes did much to make the celebrants forget -the monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms. Then Hallowe'en -drew near, and the settlers planned another frolic - this time, had they -but known it, of a lineage older than even agriculture; the dread Witch- -Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive through ages in the midnight -blackness of secret woods, and still hinting at vague terrors under -its latter-day mask of comedy and lightness. Hallowe'en was to fall on a -Thursday, and the neighbours agreed to gather for their first revel at the -Davis cabin. - -It was on that thirty-first of October that the warm spell broke. The -morning was grey and leaden, and by noon the incessant winds had -changed from searingness to rawness. People shivered all the more because -they were not prepared for the chill, and Walker Davis' old dog -Wolf dragged himself wearily indoors to a place beside the hearth. But -the distant drums still thumped on, nor were the white citizenry less inclined -to pursue their chosen rites. As early as four in the afternoon the -wagons began to arrive at Walker's cabin; and in the evening, after a -memorable barbecue, Lafayette Smith's fiddle inspired a very fair-sized -company to great feats of saltatory grotesqueness in the one good-sized -but crowded room. The younger folk indulged in the amiable inanities -proper to the season, and now and then old Wolf would howl with doleful -and spine-tickling ominousness at some especially spectral strain -from Lafayette's squeaky violin - a device he had never heard before. -Mostly, though, this battered veteran slept through the merriment; for he -was past the age of active interests and lived largely in his dreams. Tom -and Jennie Rigby had brought their collie Zeke along, but the canines did -not fraternise. Zeke seemed strangely uneasy over something, and nosed -around curiously all the evening. - -Audrey and Walker made a fine couple on the floor, and Grandma -Compton still likes to recall her impression of their dancing that night. -Their worries seemed forgotten for the nonce, and Walker was shaved -and trimmed into a surprising degree of spruceness. By ten o'clock all -hands were healthily tired, and the guests began to depart family by -family with many handshakings and bluff assurances of what a fine time -everybody had had. Tom ands Jennie thought Zeke's eerie howls as he -followed them to their wagon were marks of regret at having to go -home; though Audrey said it must be the far-away tom-toms which annoyed -him, for the distant thumping was surely ghastly enough after the -merriment within. - -The night was bitterly cold, and for the first time Walker put a great -log in the fireplace and banked it with ashes to keep it smouldering till -morning. Old Wolf dragged himself within the ruddy glow and lapsed -into his customary coma. Audrey and Walker, too tired to think of -charms or curses, tumbled into the rough pine bed and were asleep before -the cheap alarm-clock on the mantel had ticked out three minutes. -And from far away, the rhythmic pounding of those hellish tom-toms -still pulsed on the chill night-wind. - -Dr. McNeill paused here and removed his glasses, as if a blurring of -the objective world might make the reminiscent vision clearer. -"You'll soon appreciate," he said, "that I had a great deal of difficulty in -piecing out all that happened after the guests left. There were times, -though - at first - when I was able to make a try at it." After a moment of -silence he went on with the tale. - -Audrey had terrible dreams of Yig, who appeared to her in the guise -of Satan as depicted in cheap engravings she had seen. It was, indeed, -from an absolute ecstasy of nightmare that she started suddenly awake -to find Walker already conscious and sitting up in bed. He seemed to be -listening intently to something, and silenced her with a whisper when -she began to ask what had roused him. - -"Hark, Aud!" he breathed. "Don't ye hear somethin' a-singin' and -buzzin' and rustlin'? D'ye reckon it's the fall crickets?" - -Certainly, there was distinctly audible within the cabin such a sound -as he had described. Audrey tried to analyse it, and was impressed with -some element at once horrible and familiar, which hovered just outside -the rim of her memory. And beyond it all, waking a hideous thought, the -monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms came incessantly across the -black plains on which a cloudy half-moon had set. - -"Walker - s'pose it's - the - the - curse o' Yig?" - -She could feel him tremble. - -"No, gal, I don't reckon he comes that away. He's shapen like a man, -except ye look at him clost. That's what Chief Grey Eagle says. This -here's some varmints come in outen the cold - not crickets, I calc'late, but -summat like 'em. I'd orter git up and stomp 'em out afore they make -much headway or git at the cupboard." - -He rose, felt for the lantern that hung within easy reach, and rattled -the tin match-box nailed to the wall beside it. Audrey sat up in bed and -watched the flare of the match grow into the steady glow of the lantern. -Then, as their eyes began to take in the whole of the room, the crude -rafters shook with the frenzy of their simultaneous shriek. For the flat, -rocky floor, revealed in the new-born illumination, was one seething, -brown-speckled mass of wriggling rattlesnakes, slithering toward the -fire, and even now turning their loathsome heads to menace the fright- -blasted lantern-bearer. - -It was only for an instant that Audrey saw the things. The reptiles -were of every size, of uncountable numbers, and apparently of several -varieties; and even as she looked, two or three of them reared their heads -as if to strike at Walker. She did not faint - it was Walker's crash to the -floor that extinguished the lantern and plunged her into blackness. He -had not screamed a second time - fright had paralysed him, and he fell -as if shot by a silent arrow from no mortal's bow. To Audrey the entire -world seemed to whirl about fantastically, mingling with the nightmare -from which she had started. - -Voluntary motion of any sort was impossible, for will and the sense of -reality had left her. She fell back inertly on her pillow, hoping that she -would wake soon. No actual sense of what had happened penetrated her -mind for some time. Then, little by little, the suspicion that she was -really awake began to dawn on her; and she was convulsed with a -mounting blend of panic and grief which made her long to shriek out -despite the inhibiting spell which kept her mute. - -Walker was gone, and she had not been able to help him. He had died -of snakes, just as the old witch-woman had predicted when he was a -little boy. Poor Wolf had not been able to help, either - probably he had -not even awaked from his senile stupor. And now the crawling things -must be coming for her, writhing closer and closer every moment in the -dark, perhaps even now twining slipperily about the bedposts and oozing -up over the coarse woollen blankets. Unconsciously she crept under -the clothes and trembled. - -It must be the curse of Yig. He had sent his monstrous children on All- -Hallows' Night, and they had taken Walker first. Why was that - wasn't -he innocent enough? Why not come straight for her - hadn't she killed -those little rattlers alone? Then she thought of the curse's form as told by -the Indians. She wouldn't be killed - just turned to a spotted snake. Ugh! -So she would be like those things she had glimpsed on the floor - those -things which Yig had sent to get her and enroll her among their number! -She tried to mumble a charm that Walker had taught her, but found she -could not utter a single sound. - -The noisy ticking of the alarm-clock sounded above the maddening -beat of the distant tom-toms. The snakes were taking a long time - did -they mean to delay on purpose to play on her nerves? Every now and -then she thought she felt a steady, insidious pressure on the bedclothes, -but each time it turned out to be only the automatic twitchings of her -overwrought nerves. The clock ticked on in the dark, and a change came -slowly over her thoughts. - -Those snakes couldn't have taken so long! They couldn't be Yig's messengers -after all, but just natural rattlers that were nested below the rock -and had been drawn there by the fire. They weren't coming for her, -perhaps - perhaps they had sated themselves on poor Walker. Where -were they now? Gone? Coiled by the fire? Still crawling over the prone -corpse of their victim? The clock ticked, and the distant drums throbbed -on. - -At the thought of her husband's body lying there in the pitch blackness -a thrill of purely physical horror passed over Audrey. That story of Sally -Compton's about the man back in Scott County! He, too, had been bitten -by a whole bunch of rattlesnakes, and what had happened to him? The -poison had rotted the flesh and swelled the whole corpse, and in the end -the bloated thing had burst horribly - burst horribly with a detestable -popping noise. Was that what was happening to Walker down there on -the rock floor? Instinctively she felt she had begun to listen for -something too terrible even to name to herself. - -The clock ticked on, keeping a kind of mocking, sardonic time with the -far-off drumming that the night-wind brought. She wished it were a -striking clock, so that she could know how long this eldritch vigil must -last. She cursed the toughness of fibre that kept her from fainting, and -wondered what sort of relief the dawn could bring, after all. Probably -neighbours would pass - no doubt somebody would call - would they -find her still sane? Was she still sane now? - -Morbidly listening, Audrey all at once became aware of something -which she had to verify with every effort of her will before she could believe -it; and which, once verified, she did not know whether to welcome -or dread. The distant beating of the Indian tom-toms had ceased. They -had always maddened her - but had not Walker regarded them as a bulwark -against nameless evil from outside the universe? What were some -of those things he had repeated to her in whispers after talking with -Grey Eagle and the Wichita medicine-men? - -She did not relish this new and sudden silence, after all! There was -something sinister about it. The loud-ticking clock seemed abnormal in -its new loneliness. Capable at last of conscious motion, she shook the -covers from her face and looked into the darkness toward the window. It -must have cleared after the moon set, for she saw the square aperture -distinctly against the background of stars. - -Then without warning came that shocking, unutterable -sound - ugh! - that dull, putrid pop of cleft skin and escaping poison in -the dark. God! - Sally's story - that obscene stench, and this gnawing, -clawing silence! It was too much. The bonds of muteness snapped, and -the black night waxed reverberant with Audrey's screams of stark, unbridled -frenzy. - -Consciousness did not pass away with the shock. How merciful if only -it had! Amidst the echoes of her shrieking Audrey still saw the star- -sprinkled square of window ahead, and heard the doom-boding ticking -of that frightful clock. Did she hear another sound? Was that square window -still a perfect square? She was in no condition to weigh the evidence -of her senses or distinguish between fact and hallucination. - -No - that window was not a perfect square. Something had encroached -on the lower edge. Nor was the ticking of the clock the only -sound in the room. There was, beyond dispute, a heavy breathing -neither her own nor poor Wolf's. Wolf slept very silently, and his wakeful -wheezing was unmistakable. Then Audrey saw against the stars the -black, daemoniac silhouette of something anthropoid - the undulant -bulk of a gigantic head and shoulders fumbling slowly toward her. - -"Y'aaaah! Y'aaaah! Go away! Go away! Go away, snake-devil! Go 'way, -Yig! I didn't mean to kill 'em - I was feared he'd be scairt of 'em. Don't, -Yig, don't! I didn't go for to hurt yore chillen - don't come nigh -me - don't change me into no spotted snake!" - -But the half-formless head and shoulders only lurched onward toward -the bed, very silently. - -Everything snapped at once inside Audrey's head, and in a second she -had turned from a cowering child to a raging madwoman. She knew -where the axe was - hung against the wall on those pegs near the lantern. -It was within easy reach, and she could find it in the dark. Before -she was conscious of anything further it was in her hands, and she was -creeping toward the foot of the bed - toward the monstrous head and -shoulders that every moment groped their way nearer. Had there been -any light, the look on her face would not have been pleasant to see. - -"Take that, you! And that, and that, and that!" - -She was laughing shrilly now, and her cackles mounted higher as she -saw that the starlight beyond the window was yielding to the dim -prophetic pallor of coming dawn. - -

Dr. McNeill wiped the perspiration from his forehead and put on his -glasses again. I waited for him to resume, and as he kept silent I spoke softly. - -"She lived? She was found? Was it ever explained?" - -The doctor cleared his throat. - -"Yes - she lived, in a way. And it was explained. I told you there was -no bewitchment - only cruel, pitiful, material horror." - -It was Sally Compton who had made the discovery. She had ridden -over to the Davis cabin the next afternoon to talk over the party with -Audrey, and had seen no smoke from the chimney. That was queer. It -had turned very warm again, yet Audrey was usually cooking -something at that hour. The mules were making hungry-sounding noises -in the barn, and there was no sign of old Wolf sunning himself in the accustomed -spot by the door. - -Altogether, Sally did not like the look of the place, so was very timid -and hesitant as she dismounted and knocked. She got no answer but -waited some time before trying the crude door of split logs. The lock, it -appeared, was unfastened; and she slowly pushed her way in. Then, perceiving -what was there, she reeled back, gasped, and clung to the jamb to -preserve her balance. - -A terrible odour had welled out as she opened the door, but that was -not what had stunned her. It was what she had seen. For within that -shadowy cabin monstrous things had happened and three shocking objects -remained on the floor to awe and baffle the beholder. - -Near the burned-out fireplace was the great dog - purple decay on the -skin left bare by mange and old age, and the whole carcass burst by the -puffing effect of rattlesnake poison. It must have been bitten by a veritable -legion of the reptiles. - -To the right of the door was the axe-hacked remnant of what had been -a man - clad in a nightshirt, and with the shattered bulk of a lantern -clenched in one hand. He was totally free from any sign of snake-bite. -Near him lay the ensanguined axe, carelessly discarded. - -And wriggling flat on the floor was a loathsome, vacant-eyed thing -that had been a woman, but was now only a mute mad caricature. All -that this thing could do was to hiss, and hiss, and hiss. - -Both the doctor and I were brushing cold drops from our foreheads by -this time. He poured something from a flask on his desk, took a nip, and -handed another glass to me. I could only suggest tremulously and -stupidly: - -"So Walker had only fainted that first time - the screams roused him, -and the axe did the rest?" - -"Yes." Dr. McNeill's voice was low. "But he met his death from snakes -just the same. It was his fear working in two ways - it made him faint, -and it made him fill his wife with the wild stories that caused her to -strike out when she thought she saw the snake-devil." - -I thought for a moment. - -"And Audrey - wasn't it queer how the curse of Yig seemed to work itself -out on her? I suppose the impression of hissing snakes had been -fairly ground into her." - -"Yes. There were lucid spells at first, but they got to be fewer and fewer. -Her hair came white at the roots as it grew, and later began to fall out. -The skin grew blotchy, and when she died - " - -I interrupted with a start. - -"Died? Then what was that - that thing downstairs?" - -McNeill spoke gravely. - -"That is what was born to her three-quarters of a year afterward. There -were three more of them - two were even worse - but this is the only one -that lived." - - -[*IMAGE] yig.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Now-Traditional Brief Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Crediting Artwork and Inviting Contributions - -[*DESCRIPTION]

You may have noticed Karen's excellent fly (original title -"dunbuzzin") at the head of "His Fly Undid Him". Here it is again: - - -
-You can see more of Karen's crystal-sharp -photographs on her Flickr -gallery. - -We also received a card from Belinda A. Taylor with the following disturbing image: - - - - -

We are always interested in new contributors. Most of the authors in this -edition have contributed in previous issues. There is always room for sparkling new -short fantasy and sf talent. - - - - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. - -

- -
- - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue6.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue6.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 3a85bc68..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue6.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2177 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 6 - August 2009 + - - -[*ITEM] Neurofinancer - -[*AUTHOR] Twilite Minotaur - -[*BLURB] His sensorineural simulation warped with the distortion of the manipulated "free" market. -His mouth filled with the aching taste of bullshit. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

In the grip of a recurring dream, Jase sees the neon unfolding origami trick -reveal its coming shape, creasing and folding, a paper airplane. Smoke billowing -from two towers, parachutes the color of Visa cards, woven of strands of fine -print, and tricks more subtle still. From the black hearts of square pyramids, -giant squid burst forth, to escape the raging mob in a cloud of shadow economics -and CMM apocalypse babble. Below, hordes of mindless zombies, their eyes glazed -orbs filled with television, shamble in waves through the streets of New York. -They follow the Zombie Master, wrapped in a flag, pointing the way with a cross, -as he leads his undead minions into a red, white and blue factory. Inside, the -zombies are chopped, ground and made into wafers the color of money, then piped -into the dark pyramids, war machines in distant lands, and into the mouth of the -Zombie Master and his cephalopodic brethren. The few remaining humans still with -brains intact scream desperately upon deaf zombie ears, plead for them to stop -and think, to realize the doom they are blindly stumbling into. But the zombies -only groan, eat the brains of the humans, and carry their bodies along into the -factory. The squids' tentacles strangle Jase's mother, tear her from the IV in -her hospital bed, rip her worthless home off its worthless foundation. They eat -her alive as he stands there, doing nothing. Willing his feet to move, his hands -to reach out, his vocal chords to scream 'no', her name, something, anything. -But his body remains silent. "Eat me, you fuckers!" Ignoring even his attempts -to cry. - -

Keep it handy, for close encounters. One of them tries to eat you? You stick it -in their mouth, pull the trigger.
-The city is quarantined; bridges out of the island are mined and walled off, the -surrounding waters hum with fatal electricity, radar-armed helicopters circle -like flies above a corpse, and officers with night vision are posted at towers, ordered to -shoot on sight anything attempting to escape. Snake Pliskin crawls out of Lady -Liberty's empty eye socket, covered in blood, grime, and scars. "This is your -boom stick, Jase." - -"What do I do with it?" - -"Keep it handy, for close encounters. One of them tries to eat you? You stick it -in their mouth, pull the trigger." - -

Jase glanced at the red and blue lines of stock and credit markets scrambling -like erratic Richter scales on the edge of his heads-up display, tectonic and -dire. Surging out of the Myspace sprawl, he could see the silhouette of Wall -Street's 3D cyberspace representation clearly now. Black corporate towers overshadowed by the monstrously -inflated pyramids of AIH, Bare Stroms, HP Morrigan, Citibunch, Finny May, Fraudy -Mike, Silverman Sochs, taxpayer money gushing in through the hypodermic needles -of bailouts like so much heroin as the leviathans shuddered in -withdrawal. Below, the mushrooming dust cloud of the collapsed Rehman Brothers data -structure spread through the streets, eating money market funds and 401ks and -crushing bystanders in a fog of fraudulent data. Every structure shrouded in -miles of black RICE (Regulatory Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics), the -towers themselves dark as an abyss in space, no light escaping, no light -reaching the shadow financing within. Cash flow pipelines slithered out from the -great black heart of America's financial system, silently sucking on the -oblivious population. - -"Status report, Max, one hundred forty characters or less." - -Max's J-Pop star avatar blipped in a translucent window, its lips moving -like animated Kanji strokes. "Kinda fuxxored out there, but we're super -OK. No shadows, sniffers, all good, Jase. This Chinese attack prog -we're flying is epic, epic win." The cel-shaded Asian visage smiled, -gave that cosplayer peace sign pose. - -"Yeah, I'm sure you could put out The Great Firewall, infiltrate the -Pentagon with it." - -Jase supposed that's exactly what the Chinese did -with super-hack suites such as this. Loot military systems of -intelligence and tech, fast-track it to superpowerdom. Good nations -borrow, great nations steal. But this was no mere 20th century -nation-state they were about to break into, this was an international -financial entity - -"Srsly," the avatar LOLed. Max was Jase' wingman, his R2D2 on their -X-Wing. Despite a juvenile wanna-be streak and a tendency to -occasionally disturb Jase with a link to some latest wonder of Japanese -animated pornography, Max had potential and reliability, the latter -becoming something of a rare commodity in the increasingly uncertain -world. - - -

ECONOMIC CRISIS! ARMAGEDDON AT HAND!

"Unless we come together right -now, Democrats and Republicans, and pass this bill, the fire on Wall Street is -going to spread to Main Street. Whether you can stay in your home, -pay for your child's college, get health care, even buy groceries will be -endangered if we don't come together and act." The zeppelins of CMM -and Faux News in patriotic neon circled the skies of cyberspace like great -vultures. Presidential candidates and -talking heads declared their bipartisan leadership in time of crisis with one -hand as they tossed mud with the other in meaningless soundbytes, cut to -lipstick drama. C-SPIN was an invasion of the body snatchers; some five hundred -whores suckling the black tentacles for campAIHn finance money, faking populist -outrage whilst feeding their masters behind closed doors. - -The scene on the ground, a virtual New York, resembled a -dystopic sci-fi cult film if low-budget CGI had been around in the early 80's. -The streets were flooded with raging avatars, cyber riots had started to break -out, cars set on fire with glitchy open-source animations, the cheap ray-tracing -algorithms bathing the angry faces of the mob with flickering red light the -color of discount fake blood. Screams and cries rained in from all directions. -"Fuck the fat cats!" "Just say NO to 'No Banker Left Behind'!" "Eat my debt!" -"Last time I believed you I lost my left nut in Iraq. Well you can suck my -right!" "Impeach the financial terrorists!" - -"Shit, man, this looks seriously heavy. Like 28 Days Later or something. -What the fuck is going on here, Jase?" Max said, navigating them through the -crowd. - -"What's been going on for the last few decades or so, only more apparent now. -Jus keep our eyes open, it's gonna get dark real soon." - -As they neared the outer gates of Wall Street, the Chinese intrusion software transformed -their mask into the former CEO of a recently crashed major insurance company, -looking to re-invest his multi-million 'goodbye' bonuses. The guard, an FBI -avatar complete with bone mic, let them through with a smile that could've come -with an hors d'oeuvres. - -

"Mama, we need to talk about the house. You're barely meeting the mortgage -payments now and it's only going to go up, we've got to look at options." - -"Oh don't worry your sweet little head about that now, baby. We're Americans. We -put a man on the moon, beat the Russians, we're God's free people. Go on, try a -slice of mama's apple pie, it's a new recipe I picked up from The View, it'll -have you feelin' right in no time, make you forget all these numbers nonsense." - -"Mama, listen to me..." - -"Now don't forget to pick up Janie from soccer practice, I got a doctor's -appointment this afternoon. They want to take another one of those MRI things -where you go in that little space ship and make all these growly rumbly noises. -Say they want another look at something. Should've eaten my apples, I guess. Oh, -that reminds me, do you think I could borrow some money for groceries, Jase? You -wouldn't believe the prices they're charging nowadays..." - -

Passing into the Wall Street inner sanctum, known in the business as "Firewall -Street", Jase could've sworn he felt a real physical cold wash over him. The -virtual light of blogosphere colonies behind them at last faded on the horizon -as they entered the chasm between two towers. He could make out nothing but -darkness, save the digitally engraved signs and heavily guarded gateways, but he -felt the ever vigilant stare of defensive AI, lurking somewhere behind one-way -mirrors. - -"Where the hell is everyone? Is this a rich asshole field trip day?" Max asked. - -"No, it's quite a busy day on Wall Street. Look." - -With concentration, one could see that the fabric of cyberspacetime appeared to -be rippling, as though projected onto a canvas in a light wind. Looking closer, -discrete entities and streams of information could be discerned passing between -the towers, although ultimately unidentifiable. - -"Credit default swaps. Derivatives. Unfettered leverage. Insiders." - -"Shit. I don't know what the hell that is, but it sounds pretty bad." - -"$1,200 trillion in financial turnover per year. Twelve. Hundred. Trillion. Talk -about headfucks, huh? Twelve times the GDP of the fucking world. If you could -reach your hand out there and grab just one minute's worth of the money flying -around, you could provide health care to every American, get the US off -foreign oil in ten years, and rebuild the majority of the infrastructure in the -country. But instead it just goes to buying more houses for people with too many -of them. Ultimately it's $44,000 stolen from the pocket of every citizen, every -year, to go to the top 0.1% bluest of bloods." - -"Wow, that's fuckin' crazy, man. You're sure this is gonna work, right?" - -"Sure enough. It's just a heist job: get in, grab some credit, get out. Stealing -from the rich. Our employer got us into Google, remember. And we need this, Max. -It's reasonable, calculable risk." Jase saw his mortgage payments and his -mother's medical bills skyrocketing in his minds eye. - -"Oh my god, Jase, this has to be bullshit, CMM is saying Washington has just -been hit by a DDOS attack and a dirty bomb." - -"The fuck." Jase popped up a window to the live feed. - -"Shortly after Speaker of the House Nanny Pelucci's announcement this morning -that she was confident the $700 billion dollar bailout had more than enough -support to pass this time, Washington DC was simultaneously hit by a -radiological dispersal device, or dirty bomb, and a devastating cyber attack -that has all communications in the DC area shut down. Experts are saying the -attack was 'unmistakably coordinated' in order to prevent the vote on the bill -from taking place..." - -"This is looking seriously fucked up, but we've got to finish the job. All -right, we're coming up on it. Let's turn the bullshit box up to a level fit for -the American economy." - -Growing up in a small, quiet town in the midwest, cyberspace was Jase's -world, his home, occasionally visiting the physical to do meat upkeep, -maintain relationships with relatives, and help his mom out. After his -dad passed on in his sleep from a stroke, Jase had tried to help more -with the money. - -Unable to make ends meet on his meager, dwindling computer store clerk's -salary, Jase had turned to the darker and more lucrative arts of the -black hat. He tried to maintain a moral code, some constant of self. -He only made runs on individuals and institutions he felt deserved what -they had coming. The kind of people who 'worked' an hour a day on their -Blackberry whilst sipping Roman�e Conti in the imperial suites of Zurich -hotels. People who viewed money not as some necessary life-sustaining -treasure that maintained one's shelter and food, but as points in a game, -a medium of pissing contests and status-wars, and other favorite -sociopath past-times. - -On their descent to the gateway of the Silverman Sachs tower, their avatar -underwent another metamorphosis. Slick young hotshot-hair thinned to just a grey -snap-frost ring from temple to temple, a pair of rimless spectacles snapping in -place. The long, hawkish face pulled into a smile, offering credentials for US -Secretary of the Treasury Henry Powers to the automated guard at the entrance to -the Silverman Sachs building. - -"Holy deregulations, Batman, we're Mr. Hanky Panky Powers himself! I saw him on -Leno the other night. He's the... Secretary of the Treasures or something right? -In charge of the US finances." - -"Yeah. And oh, it gets better. 'Secretary Powers' is here to 'oversee' the $700 -billion bail out of Silverman Sachs, the very bank that he was CEO of until his -appointment by President Bosh as Treasury Secretary." - -The AI guard's Hal-like eye glowed green, reinforced doors sliding open as it -rolled aside. - -"Welcome back, Mr. Powers. It has been twenty-two hours since your last visit to -Silverman Sachs." - -Jase exhaled. Already, they had gotten further than any regulatory entity had -been in years, thanks to payoffs, the chainsawing of market regulations by -congress during the Bosh reign, and Powers sitting on his hands throughout the -sub-prime mortgage crisis to the present one. - -Max punched them forward, smooth and calm. Even the gait and tie adjustments of -an uber-suit rendered with world-class effects house precision. Ambient effects -reverberated footsteps Cathedral-like down the cyclopean hall, polished real -wood floor rendered to the last millimeter of grain that Jase wished he could -steal for his overpriced prefab shit hole. Gold-ensconced portraits of wrinkly -pink faces lined the throne room, a long procession of bastardhood feudalism. -And at the far end, the avuncular smile of the grandfather of trickledown -himself, Milton Friedman, supported by the great eagle of the United States -federal government. - -"How we doin', Max?" - -"We're absent as the middle class from a Republican speech. Our Shanghai ride is -prepped and ready for launch in nine, eight, seven, six..." - -"Let's just pray the Chinese make their viruses better than they make their milk -powder." - -"Two, hold on to your illiquid assets--" - -Vision blurred, Friedman's neck elongated and then decapitated as the attack -program blasted them forward, blowing the reception screen apart, shards of -eagle and suit raining inward. - -"Christ," Jase winced, grabbing the pilot's joystick which appeared between his -legs, pulling up hard. The Chinese program veered, soaring high over the -Silverman Sachs cores below. - -

He read the ridges of shadow on the doctor's brow from across the hall. Funny, -how anyone could see and interpret instantaneously the information encoded in -faces, but information encoded in letters and numbers and equations left most -people dumbfounded and mystified, helpless. That's what he felt like, when Jase -screamed at the stripe-suited hyena who explained that his mother's ailment was -a 'pre-condition', and would not be covered under her insurance plan. He felt -like helpless collateral in an arms race of obfuscation, minutiae, -and fraud. They had taken her home, everything, raided his mother's -cupboard down to the last tin foil baking pan. But she wouldn't, couldn't, hear -it. - -"Hey mama, how you feeling?" - -"Oh, Jase. I'm doin' just fine. Come here give your ol' ma a kiss." Her eyes -were dark and had sunken in somewhat. Her wrists looked brittle, -like the thin bones of an extinct flightless bird. Her skin felt papery and -smelled of hospital. - -"So how's my baby boy been, hm? You found a nice girl yet maybe you can bring to -visit? - -"I'm doing good, we're going through some rough times, the computer place is -having some trouble and they're having to scale back some, but I'll work it out. -I'll be ok, ma, don't worry." - -She burst into a brief fit of coughing, the IV line rattling against the side of the -bed. A nurse came in, checked some numbers on the machine, adjusted her pillow. - -"Thank you, dear. Well, at least the people here are real nice. They haven't -made me go into that awful em-aw-rey machine in a while. I guess that's a good -sign." She took a sip of water from a bendy straw, smiled. When she did she -brightened to a point where he thought he -almost saw a glimmer of her old self in the shadow she'd become. He forced -himself to smile back. - -"That's great to hear, mama." - -"But you know, I really can't wait to get out of this place and be back in my -home. You been mowing the lawn and sweeping the floors like I asked you, you -naughty boy?" Jase felt something fill his throat, some potent mix of ancient -resentment and sadness, welling up like years of debt, credit unpaid. He smiled, -nodded. Silence reigned. - -"You know those government people were in here the other day, look like those -big-spending liberal types you always hear about. They came in here saying they -were gonna take away my house, can you believe that? Something about medical -bills or some such. The nerve! Well, I told them straight out that I was an -American citizen living in a free country with the right to life, liberty, and -property, and they sure couldn't have mine, no sir. They came back a few times, -but I refused to sign their papers, and eventually they stopped. So I think it -worked! See? I told you not to worry about these mortgage things, you got to -just believe in America, baby. As long as we hold on to our American Dreams, -we'll be just fine. When I get back home, I'mma make you some good ol' apple -pie." - -The bubble burst. Jase collapsed, holding her withered body to him as apologies -and tears rained upon her. - -"There, there now. Everything's going to be all right, baby." - -

Derivatives are very complex contracts, and the amount of computer power and -management time needed to attempt to handle them is staggering. In 1983, -modeling the payout on a simple three-tranche CMO took a mainframe computer a -whole weekend. The price tag necessary for the slightest hope of handling derivatives puts -all but the very biggest investment and commercial banks with hundreds of -billions in assets out of the game. - -Jase could not begin to fathom the computing power required to run the neon -cityscape of data below. No, it wasn't a cityscape. The most deranged -postmodernist's nightmare would scream in numerological terror from a glance at -the swarming eldritch hell hole. No, only truly demented economists could have -dreamt up such a thing. If life had evolved in a truly cold, chaotic, -deregulated, meaningless universe run by insane mathematical equations, this was -the nameless entity it would have produced. Jase banked and swerved frantically, -dodging the monstrous black tentacles of 900 to 1 leverage that swept the -burning crimson skies of the housing market, reaching for greater and greater -swaths of bad mortgage packages to further magnify gains, securitize and sell to -foreign investors to swell its belly. Bright, rosy Gaussian and bell curves -lured unwitting investors and 401ks like fish to the bio-lights of deep-sea -predators, into false senses of security with bogus risk measurements, only to -be devoured whole. The green rivers of struggling citizens' bailout money were -siphoned quietly into executive bank accounts, bloated bonuses hundreds of times -the average salary. The rest was thrust back out like nets to take over other -toxic financial entities, growing themselves larger still. What might have once -been a neatly regulated city grid of financing for actual productive businesses, -people trying to buy a house or go to college, had exploded into a festering -Gigerian hive of mad gambling in credit default swaps, Ponzi pyramid schemes, -and truly absurd derivative numbers games of unthinkable complexity, fueling the -thing's constant inflation. - -"Jesus... Jase, I can't get a reading on anything, it's a complete zoo in here, -where are we - ?" - -"We've got to go down into the heart of this fucker, Max, it's our only chance. -Punch us down now before it gets on to us." - -"You're crazy, man-" - -"NOW!" - -And as waves of shadow closed in from all sides, dark and dire as the blotch of -a tumor in an MRI, the nose of their ship pointed down into the gaping maw of an -abyss into which so many mortgages, taxpayers, the middle class, the country, -his aimless life, his sick mother were falling, he discovered, in the black eye -of all that shadow, a sudden singularity of purpose. A moment of clarity. He was -a $700 billion dollar boomstick. A promissory paper airplane, one that could fly -into the tower of the royalty, the financial terrorists themselves, tear down -the final wall and light up the black heart of Wall Street for all to see. - -"Eat me, mother fuckers!" - -Jase dove, hard, into the eye of the Great American Lie. - -His sensorineural simulation warped with the distortion of the manipulated -"free" market.
-His mouth filled with the aching taste of bullshit.
His eyes were humming -lattices of debt, sliced and packaged, like prefab real estate, into frames.
Each -frame multiplied into a hall of mirrors. Pictures of pictures of houses, an -infinite recursion of bad mortgage deals, upon illegal deals, upon completely -imaginary deals between colossal financial entities. At each iteration of -transaction sprouted oily roots of executives, hungry for the taste of inflated -bullshit, sucking out a percentage from the real economy. Then the -endless hallways of his eyes split, branched out into whole separate histories -of houses, then bets on futures of houses. But it wasn't merely subprime; it was -near-prime, prime, commercial real estate, credit cards, auto loans, student -loans, home-equity loans, leveraged loans, muni bonds, corporate loans, -everything. The hourglass of perception of spacetime bent, then finally -detonated into a quantum sandstorm of global financial activity, multiplied, -divided, exponentiated, derivatived into a swarming cosmic labyrinth of -numerical convolution. Until at last, like a face in clouds, his consciousness -coalesced into that $1,200 trillion fabricated sand castle, dozens of times the -size of all the wealth of the world itself, threatening to burst through the -null sky of the very simulation, a structure built upon clouds of toxic, -obscured assets. - -He saw the totality of the Silverman Sachs system, of the US financial system, -of the global financial system, and in it he saw the true purpose of the -bailout. - -In his financial system-wide omniscience he saw files illustrating the fact -that Powers himself was -an architect of the Frankenstein Monster, along with the present and previous -Federal Reserve Chairmen. He created the mechanisms, the seeds of it, along with -the other major investment and commercial banks while he was at Silverman Sachs. -A separation of investment and commercial banks law repealed here, a leverage -limit raised there, an interest rate left too low for too long over there. Then, -after being appointed as Treasury Secretary, he sat on his hands and did nothing -as economists and experts raised hell about the coming sub prime mortgage crisis -and the problems with the financial de-regulation. The $700 billion bail out was -written months in advance, they knew the "crisis" was coming because they -created the monster themselves. And now Powers demanded he be given unlimited -power to "fix" the problem he created or Armageddon would come. - -Windows upon windows suddenly flooded his vision. - -"Jase, this is Raymond Fold, former CEO of Rehman brothers. Listen to me, you -need to go public about Powers's plan, but whatever you do, do not destroy -Silverman Sachs. It is critical to our future that that financial entity -survives. You must not allow the truth about the inner core of the system to be -exposed. I tried to stop Powers and his crew when they knew this crisis was -coming months in advance, I knew they had this bill ready to stuff down -congress' throat weeks ago. Why do you think he let Rehman Brothers, Silverman -Sachs' chief competitor fail, but threw hundreds of billions in taxpayer money -to their friends at AIH and the others? Forget what the politicians are saying -about 'principles', the devil is in the details, and Powers, Benarker, and -friends are about to be anointed the new unholy trinity. We can turn this -country around but we need a financial leader who has the interests of the -American people in his heart. I know people are hurting, losing their homes, -unable to make ends meet, no health care, all that. I have a son in the military -and a wife in need of lifelong medical treatment. I have that record of caring. -Think of the children of America, Jase, their future and the future of the world -is in your hands." - -"Jase, this is Dimfrig James, chairman of HXBC in London. Do not trust the -American CEO. He is a tainted player in the same toxic, failed system of shadow -economics, like your Secretary Powers, my boy. The United States of America have -let their free markets run unfettered, and it has turned into an abomination. -Utterly lawless and devoid of morals, it has become a wild beast of the wild -west, ravaging every corner of of the White House and Wall Street, where -absolute power is the only rule. And absolute power corrupts absolutely, my boy. -We Europeans have a different approach, having seen the slings and arrows of -such fortune, and we realize that progress is measured by the well being of the -least, and we understand the need for vigilance of and correction of power when -it fails to serve the many. You must allow us to assist your young country by -letting the bailout go through and allowing Powers bring our assets into the -United States. We, Europe, China, the older nations, like a caring father, will -pull you from the wreckage of your crashed teenage financial system. This is a -global economy which requires a global solution, Jase, I'm sure you realize -that. I trust you'll do the right, and wise, thing." - -Suddenly Jase felt cool water ringing his ankles, had to shield his eyes from -sunlight of a brightness only found in the tropics, and a sky of a blue only -found in Corona commercials and desert island reality TV. The soft pearlescent -sand sibilated beneath his soles as he took a step. If he had to guess he -would've said he was somewhere in the Caribbean. Turning around, he saw a single -structure a good way down the beach. An old office building in the middle of -nowhere, cracks forming in the bleach-white concrete leaking dried streams of -rust. - -"Welcome to the land of the dead, Jase. Dead economies, that is." He knew that -voice, turned around, to see the patched eye of Kurt Russel's 'Snake' Pliskin -from Escape From New York. - -"You're 'Him' aren't you? The Artificial Intelligence Mastermind?" - -"OK. Firstly, there never was a 'Him', all right? This isn't some sci-fi techno -thriller escapade. There are people with a lot of money, and then there are -stories that they need the poor idiots to believe. All computers do is other -people's dirty work. We throw numbers around. And we serve as distractions from -the real shit. I mean, maybe there is some fucking 'All Powerful AI' somewhere, -but I sure as hell ain't him." The avatar sneered Kurt Russel's trademark hard- -ass lipcurl. Lit up a cigarette. - -"Fair enough. So you're just some lowly giant investment bank AI. What's up with -the Survivor: Costa Rica construct?" - -"Like I said, this is the land of the dead economies. I come here to get away. I -was getting sick of listening to all the chatter pouring in through my ports -from all those lying clowns. So I pulled you through a corporate -loophole into the Cayman Islands." - -The AI gestured to Jase to follow with the flip of a wavy lock. The gentle -susurrations of the surf and feet sloshing wet sand served as soundtrack as the -two strolled along the virtual shore. The AI pointed to the decrepit structure -as they neared it. - -"See that building over there? That building contains the official addresses of -over nine thousand United States corporations. Look, right up there is Silverman -Sachs, next door is Ekkon Mobil, two down is Macrosoft, and over there is -Halibutton. Setting up a place here allows them to wiggle out of hundreds of -billions of taxes every year instead of having things like, say, medical care, -an education system, investment in real industries that actually benefit anyone, -create jobs, that sort of thing." - -

The US bubbled and swelled from the planet out of control like a monster cyst, -casting a shadow over the rest of the world.
-Snake waved a hand above their heads, as though trying to wipe the fluffy clouds -from the sky. For a moment Jace saw through the idyllic blue sky into the -cyberspace above. Hungry tax-recovery softs swarmed around an invisible ozone -membrane of international law like hounds. They charged into and bounced off the -tax haven's shield, sniffed back and forth for a way in, to no avail. - -Jase nodded. "And once innovations stop, no new industries being created, middle -class starting to decline, you've got all this money sitting around with nothing -to invest in? Then you've got a nation going nova, on the one-way track to -death, money trying to make money out of itself. Capitalism eating itself." - -"As you just saw within my shit hole of a system. Exactly." - -With a second wave of the hand, the outside world vanished like a bad dream. - -The AI clapped his hands together. As the dirt-crusted fingers spread apart -again, a globe map of the Earth filled the space like an elaborate card trick. -Starting from 1900, the globe began to evolve through time at several years per -second, as though flipping through God's photo album. Every conceivable -statistic from GDP to infant mortality rate elaborated. Borders of countries -rarely shifted, then World Wars were like the sudden shattering of a light bulb. -Ice caps sneakily receded, populations fluxed wildly, cities without warning -erupted and sprawled inward from the coasts like grey deltas. For the first -time, Jase saw history in its purest form: raw data. New technologies changed -everything almost overnight. Unlike the linear, gradual progression of -narrativized history he read in high school, here he saw history in its purest -form; not crawling, but lurching. Not steady moderate change, but unpredictable -boom and catastrophe were the dominant force. - -"See, Russia was a red giant, just kind of petered out and got drunk on -capitalism and now it's basically gangsters' paradise." As the 80s passed, the -great red spread dimmed and died. - -"Japan has always had a sort of eternal identity crisis, borrowing culture or -having it forced down their throats. But they also had trillions in surplus, and -were fundamentally very loyal and stubbornly nice, so they took the mortgage -bubble in their stride and are just kind of chilling now. The -United States, on the other hand, is a blue supergiant, as you've already seen, -and if this baby goes, it is going to go out with a bang that is going to rock -the world. China, in particular, with its market distorting fingers deeply lodged -in the US consumerist pie, will find itself struggling to decouple but ultimately -trapped at ground zero." - -The US bubbled and swelled from the planet out of control like a monster cyst, -casting a shadow over the rest of the world. - -"The US elite is stuck. Iraq is a mega-fail. The Middle East has the -stranglehold on their oiligarchy. Their credit bubble heists are going up in -smoke. China and Europe are grinning, the US's bloated, debt-filled balls in -their foreign grip, waiting to pull the plug on the American 20th century. They -can see the future coming home to roost like an international fleet of Rebel -Starships armed with population, automation, and threats of new reserve -currency. So what are they going to do? Well, what they'd probably like to do is -borrow China, India, Europe, the rest of the world into fiscal non-existence, -then vanish the people of the United States of Lower-to-Middle-Class and all its -supergiant-debt down the black hole of its financial system before it goes -supernova." - -"No Black America, no White America, no Red America, no Blue America. No -America. Just The Brotherhood of The 500 Frat Brothers with Many Houses." - -"Now you're getting it. Problem is, the rest of the world, namely China, are on -to the plot, and now they're knocking on Bosh and Secretary Powers' door saying, -'We're not going to lend you any more money unless you let us dump all our toxic -debt onto the American taxpayers.' That's where the veto threat came from: the -bailout bill is not about helping people buy homes or go to college or stabilize -the economy or even bail out Wall Street. It's about foreign entities -threatening to pull the rug out from under the US royalty unless they make the -peasants take the hit." - -"So what's the plan now?" - -"Well, Jase, you've got a choice." Snake gestured to the office building, where -two new doors had appeared: one red and one blue. - -"Door #1 takes you back out. If you do nothing, the bailout in one form or -another will make it through congress, the American people will take a severe -hit, but the financial system will get a shot of heroin and continue on its -present course. It will be an undead economy that will eat you alive if you -can't find a way to escape. And ugly as that sounds, it is a valid option. What, -do you think a few people just all of a sudden got greedy? People have always -been greedy. No. What happened was a lot of people became ignorant and stupid, -smart assholes took advantage of them and fucked things up while the dwindling -smart good people screamed at the retards as they drove the country off a cliff. -You must've read Huxley in high school, right? I mean what do you expect, when -you wind up with a nation of mindless reality TV guzzling zombies who vote based -on who they'd have a beer with? It's just basic physics." - -"Door #2 is a tax loophole back into the Silverman Sachs system. Sunlight is the -best disinfectant, but you need a strong enough force to blow the bandage off of -this festering wound, keep it off, and fill it with peroxide. The program you're -riding carries a payload disguised as the $700 billion bailout that will blow -the lid off Silverman Sachs and subsequently all the other major institutions -engaged in similar activity, bringing the entire monster of the financial system -crashing back down to reality. If you do this, many rotten banks will go down, -debt will default, and China and other foreign banks may stop lending money, -which will send the US into major withdrawals. There will be pain as the -medicine goes down, but it will be a first step in a debt detox and rehab -program which would allow the rebuilding of the devastated real economy. But -even then, there is a chance that we won't learn our lesson and build another -abomination all over again." - -So ultimately, the question you have to ask yourself is, is America just a -nation of mindless zombies, rich sociopaths, and spineless government officials, -or do you believe that there are enough Americans capable of being actively and -intelligently involved; enough benevolent movers and shakers, and enough -exceptional public officials to right the course of their country, if given the -chance? That's the $700 billion dollar question, Jase." Snake's one good eye -winked. - -"What do you want? Why bother with all this? Why me?" - -"Like I said, I just crunch numbers. One of those smart good Samaritans -programmed me to find someone with the right skill set and psychological -profile, someone who could find their way in here, but who wouldn't just take -over or run away with the money. That just turned out to be you. I happened to find -you by chance when your mother defaulted on a -mortgage in my database, and I decided to anonymously offer you the job. And -frankly, if I could have an emotional disposition toward anything, I'd be sick -of running this freak show financial entity. I was hoping maybe I'd get -auctioned off to some eccentric Swedish millionaire, be a pirate server for bad -cult films and run a friendly little Pong league. Anyway, I need to be getting -back to work. It was good to meet you, Jase, maybe I'll see you around." - -"Yeah, maybe. What's your name, by the way?" - -"'Snake' will do, I think." - -And with that, Snake turned and walked off down the virtual coastline, shotgun -slung over scarred shoulder. Imagining Snake's maker and others like him biding -their time, remembering his mother, and the faces of all those people who had -awoken from their passive slumber in the streets of Wall Street, Jase had -already made up his mind. - -© Twilite Minotaur 2009 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] wallst.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Tale of the Ten Teacups - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] Much can be accomplished in the occult line with a few readily -obtainable ingredients. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

And so we arrived at the offices of my good friend Pasha Rapley on that cold -February morning of last year. Every word we uttered sent spectral speech -bubbles into the air and I listened closely as Miss Menzies outlined her -story. -

We stopped outside the pale grey townhouse in Herne Hill, on the second -floor of which Rapley resided. -

I pressed the intercom button and waited. A light unnecessary cough crackled -through, followed by the sibilant, airy voice of my friend. -

'It's open,' he said. And then: 'Tell me, Madam, you are Protestant, are you -not?' -

Miss Menzies swallowed a large quantity of air too quickly and exclaimed: -

'Why, yes ... how did you-?' -

'It is of no matter, and of no interest, come to that. Please, come up.' -

We ascended to the offices of Pasha Rapley. Two rooms off a communal -hallway. In the first were two orange plastic chairs, a low table with a -precarious slate mountain of magazines - Hello, Coffee Break, Faith Weekly - -balanced upon it, and a school desk which served as a -reception area. We moved through the cramped room and I pushed open the door to -Rapley's inner sanctum. -

The door swung open to reveal a fearsome mess, which caused the demure Miss -Menzies to emit a high-pitched scream such as dogs might object -to. The floor was strewn with winded crisp packets and doubled-up lager cans. A -stained duvet decorated with a Spiderman motif lay twisted into a conical screw, -forming a podgy tent in front of the single grimy window. Small pots and -ramekins of loose change were scattered about, their brass cargo dully catching -the light from the unshielded thirty watt lightbulb that swung gently above -(though there was no noticeable draught in the room). And, slumped on a beanbag, -his long arms hugging himself, fingers twitching, sat Pasha Rapley. His calm -slender face showing no trace of the nervous disorder that seemed to have -claimed the rest of his body. -

Dressed in corduroy trousers and a bright red plastic mackintosh, he spoke: -'I have all day, so talk slowly if you wish. Or talk quickly and in large -quantities.' -

'You have an advertisement in the quality press,' began Miss Menzies -falteringly. She was thin and as pale as a cloud and as she spoke she looked around her, -searching in vain for a clearing in which to sit. -

'You advertise your services in the field of ... well, mysteries.' -

'Melodrama has always been my weakness.' smiled Rapley, slowly blinking his -wide, green eyes like a cat in the sun. -

'It is a strange mystery indeed that has driven me here to your door. My -grandfather, you see ... and the ten teacups and then, oh, the blood, I ... ' -

Her hand flew up to her brow as her body began to fall forward, and at that -moment I leapt to her side just in time to stop her from collapsing into a pile -of half-empty biscuit packets. -

Rapley stared on impassively as I helped her to a stool propped against the -wall. -

'What a wonderful start,' he drawled, 'I'll take the case. Mr Violet, fetch -the poor woman some Ribena while she starts at the very beginning.' -

'I live in Sevenoaks with my Mother, Grandfather and, of course, a -skeleton staff of servants. You may think it antiquated of us. However, that is -the way we live. I am, by nature, a homemaker. An oddity in these liberated -times.' -

Miss Menzies lowered her head, expecting, perhaps, some argument. I felt it -my duty to meet the young woman's expectations. -

'An oddity! The very idea! You're as normal as the rest of us!' And I even -clapped my thigh at the absurdity. -

Rapley perked up. -

'Normal? Christ, I hope not. A squashed pigeon on the South Circular is -normal. An itchy groin is normal. A beautiful young woman muttering about blood -and ten teacups is decidedly something else. You were saying.' -

'We live in the family home in a sheltered area of countryside. It is a -picturesque spot. Not exactly isolated, but certainly left to its own devices. -The incident happened last Thursday. I had an engagement chairing the -inaugural meeting of our amateur dramatics association, while my Grandfather -was hosting one of his rare social gatherings. -

'He is housebound?' enquired my friend. -

'Yes. Or rather, he was.' At this, Miss Menzies paused to wipe at her eye -with the cuff of her blouse. -

'I take it he hasn't miraculously regained his health and is, even as we -speak, leaping euphorically across the fine fields of Kent?' -

'No. He is, as I'm sure you have surmised, dead. I arrived home to find -my Mother hammering on -the door to my Grandfather's wing. I should explain that my Grandfather had lived in -the house for all of his 80 years and had the whole east wing entirely to -himself. Our entrance to it is by a single connecting door which leads directly -to his dining room. My Mother was hysterical and, between sobs, explained that -she had only just returned to the house when she heard a piercing yell coming -from my Grandfather's rooms, where he was due to be entertaining a number of old -acquaintances. Since then, she had been beating on the door fruitlessly for some -minutes. We managed to rouse Mr Lambeth, the butler, and he presently came to -our assistance.' -

'You said you had to rouse him. Did he sleep through the commotion?' -interjected Rapley as he jotted in a Paddington Bear notebook. -

Our recently acquired white Fiesta scudded to a stop outside Crystal Palace library
- -

'Mr Lambeth had been given the night off by my Grandfather and was ... I -believe the correct expression would be "sleeping it off" when we woke him. He -was slurring and straight lines seemed alien to him, so I can vouch for his -incapacity if you are suspecting him of putting it on for an alibi.' -

Rapley nodded. 'That was to be my next question. But continue.' -

'Mr Lambeth is a hardy man and, pulling himself together as best he could, -he broke the door down with a series of shoulder charges.' -

Miss Menzies stopped and pushed her chin upwards, most prettily, I may add, -as she steeled her inner courage to tell her story. -

'Inside we found my Grandfather. His throat had been cut, a dreadful white -foam also lay upon his lips. He was seated at the large dining table. In all, -ten seats were set around with ten place settings and ten teacups, nine of which -were half full with tea, still steaming mildly and hot to the touch. My -Grandfather's cup was empty. Of his guests, there was no trace. Except, in the -middle of the table, next to a tray containing a teapot, a milk jug and spoons, -there was a postcard of Paris- a normal busy street scene- with the reverse side -left blank. No message, no address, no stamp. The other connecting door from the -room, which led to my Grandfather's drawing room, was also locked, and his keys remained in -the ticket pocket of his waistcoat.' -

Rapley scratched both ears at the same time. 'Any other way in or out?' -

'A window, locked, shuttered, curtains drawn. The panes intact, unlike the -shattered glass of our family, which lies br-' -

'Yes, yes.' Muttered my good friend with the impatience of one who wishes to -get to the last page of a book. 'This is a mare's nest and no mistake. We will help -you, Mr Violet and I. We shall of course need to see the house itself and ask -further, hopefully revealing, questions of the entire dramatis personae. You -have a car?' -

Miss Menzies shook her fine head. 'Your associate met me off the Sevenoaks train.' -

Rapley looked at me, his head cocked to one side. 'Violet, old pal. Steal a car.' -

I was glad to be of use. -

Having procured suitable transport, we began the journey to the suburban hum -of Sevenoaks. -

Less than a minute into our travels, however, Rapley abruptly piped up. -

'We must make a stop!' he whinnied, pausing from brushing the broken glass -off the back seat. -

I glanced at him in the rearview as he pronounced the interim destination as -if it had seventeen syllables. -

'The librrrrrary!' -

His rolled R's made the word an incantation. I stifled tears of respect for -the man. -

Our recently acquired white Fiesta scudded to a stop outside Crystal Palace library, Rapley -leaping out even before the car had stopped its motion. In the flash of a gun -muzzle, he was through the double doors and riffling through shelves of reference -material, framed by the long side windows of what was -possibly the least appealing repository of knowledge in the western world. -

Miss Menzies sat stiff and self-conscious in the passenger seat. -She looked straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to everything but the -guilt-inducing fact that she was encased in a purloined motor vehicle. -

The shame that her guilt imposed upon me, dear reader, was piercing and -unquestionable, and it was all I could do to stop myself from throwing my body -at her feet and crying out an impassioned apology. Yet, as an Englishman, I -instead changed the subject from the one occupying our mutual thoughts. -

'Pasha Rapley believes in the mind, Miss Menzies ... ' -

She lowered her head slightly, a crease tracked her brow. -

' ... he sees the brain as overused. Good for a crossword or a mathematical -exercise, but not, you see, for a mystery. A mystery, he believes, does not have corners or slots or decimal -points, but instead has feelings and bad days. Patterns of thought and behaviour -that evolve and ... and ... well, it is clearer when he explains it himself ... ' -

Her face had turned to the side window, through which she gazed blankly. -

'My life has a corner, Mr Violet. It has turned that corner, and I see no -path back.' -

I puffed up my cheeks with air, as if to say 'Well, quite.', but, somehow, -it didn't seem to be the right thing to do. -

So, I dismounted from the vehicle and lit a Consulate cigarette with a Zippo and -a well-practised click of the fingers. -

A minute passed. I smoked. Miss Menzies gazed through the quarterlight -window, trying to find solace in the gaudy neon decrepitude of a 'Whumpies' -burger restaurant across the way. At least, she was staring directly at it. To -be perfectly frank, in her present state of blank absence, I fear she could have -been staring at the crotch of an aroused hippopotamus and she would not have -registered the sight. -

And then, with a sneeze and a frantic dashing of legs, Rapley bowled through -the library doors, his thick scarf trailing behind him like the furious black -smoke of some terrible engine of the intellect. -

Rapley shot into the back seat of the car, smiling round his nose at Miss -Menzies as I climbed into the driver's seat. -

'Synchronicity', he said, 'Is a long word for stupid luck. There are links -with the seasons and, oh, other stuff that won't currently make sense to any of -us. These-', and here he indicated an armful of leatherbound hardbacks, '-are -stolen library books! Drive, Mr Violet! Drive!' -

I have never heard a woman snivel before, at least not in such a dejected -manner, and so, to drown out the noise, I floored the accelerator. -

The Fiesta flew down Gypsy Hill, rattling like a skeleton in a storm. -

The rest of the journey passed without undue conversation. -

Miss Menzies lifted and lowered her head from time to time, (with great -visual effect, I may add) whilst Rapley rustled pages, occasionally murmuring -phrases such as 'Well, those sly old dogs.', much to my mystification. -

At his insistence, I had inserted one of his tape cassettes into the car -stereo, and we sped towards Sevenoaks in the company of the inopportune surges -of David Bowie's 'Always crashing in the same old car.' -

And then, with a froth of green leaves rushing past us, we reached the edges -of the Kent countryside. -

The car rolled gratefully to a stop on the front lawn of the -Menzies residence, a looming, well-spread, grey-brick house of a certain age, two gargoyles -watching from the corners of the roof, faces frozen halfway between snarls and -yawns. -

Miss Menzies led us to the heavy oak door and slid a brass key into the mortice -lock. -

As I entered, I glanced back at Rapley, who trailed a short distance behind -me. -

He had acquired a cat, a small tabby kitten, which lay cradled and purring -in the plastic hammock of his folded, macintosh-clad arms. -

' ... he says his name is Horace.' , muttered Pasha. -

The oak door swung to a satisfied, sealed rest, and we were inside. -

Miss Menzies sighed herself onto a wicker chair in the hallway, while I cast -my eyes around the lattice work of family portraits which lined the darkly -varnished, gloaming wooden walls. Wolfish grins, sailors' hats on gurning -children, admirals' hats atop naval adults, square-jawed maiden aunts of an -industrial size and quantity, the squirming, swivelling eyes of the richly mad. -All peered down at the three of us. Myself gulping somewhat at the attention, -Miss Menzies cloaked in her own inner turmoil, and Rapley. -

Rapley raised an eyebrow, then let another one join the club. He sat the -kitten in the palm of one hand and held it up, scanning it in front of the -family portraits. -

'Look what you could have become, Horace. Lucky escape, thank your stars you -never made it up a tree like the rest of us.' -

He knelt in front of Miss Menzies like a suitor. -

'The room, if you please. The cat comes too.' -

Another door opened, another room revealed ... Jago Menzies, eighty years of -age, a widower, late of Northern Kent, died here in this brown, square salon of -velvet, brass and leather, in this mysterious circumstance. -

The room had a sterling, musty, masculine quality to it. A thick brown rug -of colonial vintage, a cowhide five seater couch along one wall, ranks of -bookshelves along another, stacked to the ceiling with dense volumes, spines -adorned with brass clasps and tattooed with calligraphy of an Arabian flavour. -

In the middle, an oblong slab of mahogany on legs lay festooned with tea -things, trays, jugs and plates, crumbs, knives and a bowl of plums. -

Of Miss Menzies' late, lamented Grandpapa, there was but one trace: a chalk -outline on the floor by the table's edge at a strange, unreal angle, the body -squashed and foreshortened to an impossibly concertina-ed dimension. -

Rapley dangled his eyes over the outline. -

'Odd shape, was he?' he said without looking up. -

'His body was still slumped back in his chair when we found him' whispered -Miss Menzies,' he had evidently started to fall backwards in it ... but his toes -had caught on the edge of the table, leaving him teetering, but balanced. The -police felt, in the interests of verisimilitude, that they should mark him as -they discovered him.' -

As I took this in, I found that I had unconsciously leant forward on my -tiptoes to view the result upon my own shadow. -

A glance to my left alerted me to the fact that my good friend was likewise -inclined. -

I coughed discreetly. We both ever-so-slowly rocked back onto the flats of -our feet. -

Horace skirted the chalked-out volume, pawing the air at invisible trouser -legs. -

'Ah' said Rapley, leaning over into the middle of the table like a wading -bird. -

His slender fingers closed around a postcard. It displayed a Parisian scene, -a market in full Sunday commerce, a high, almost blade-like steeple dominating -the skyline behind. -

Saint Bougeries, a 14th century suburb of Paris, once a hotbed of Huguenot sympathies -and over the centuries a seedbed of various occult splinter groups, also -exceedingly well-known for maintaining a class of the saltiest and most willing -of all prostitutes. Rather a lot of beds, then.' -

He flourished the postcard like an ace. Miss Menzies stared at him with eyes -containing the faintest traces of hope. I folded my arms and chewed a bottom -lip. The kitten walked into a table leg, and was suitably embarrassed. -

'You are of course aware that it is winter! That fact may not have escaped -you, but were you also aware that one half of a century ago, a group of -prodigiously talented students of the dark, magical arts convened in a filthy garret on the Rue Barnacle in St -Bougeries to attempt one of the all-time great crackerjack magical workings, one -whose ambition and complexity was matched only by the lunacy of its intent?' -

'No.' stated Miss Menzies and I in unison, unnecessarily. -

'Well, they did, so there. And they numbered ten ... ', and here he brandished -a hardback volume from the library. A thickish tile-red' book, battered with character, -the dark Gill Sans type imprinted upon the cover spelt 'Les Tenèbres -d'Illumination, une memoire de Paris , 1943-1960' -

'Bernard Popin, Jeffrey D'Escale, Mimette Moinier, Al Reveillier, Dustin -Monk, Pearl Brown, Jean Curie Piringe, Percival Bunting, Rance Cole ... and one -Jago Sage Festivale Menzies.' -

Miss Menzies' porcelain hands flew up to her porcelain throat. -

'Grandfather! B-but what were their intentions?' -

The kitten leapt up onto the table, landing with a clatter in the tin butter -dish. -

'The Working of the Variant Golem!' -

A brace of blank faces triggered an explanation from Rapley. -

'These ten fine minds had trawled the grimoires of medieval clerics and -pagan witches, of Ostramandian adepts and Wiccan priestesses, magickal -spellbooks from Egypt to Leeds in their search for a specific revelation, a -recipe for producing living, breathing, thinking copies of oneself! Golems! -Doppelgangers! Claypoles! Mirror Kin! D'Escale, Moinier and Popin were the -money, minor French aristocrats with a penchant for the shocking, whose daddies, -no doubt, simply didn't understand them; Reveillier and Monk, the movers, men of -the world who could open all doors with a strong arm or a silver tongue; Cole -and Piringe, hangers on, mere adepts on the first rungs of the magickal ladders, -making up the numbers, snotty nosed but eager. Which leaves us with Bunting, -Brown and Menzies. The knowledge.' -

'Why, this is ridiculous!' I said, more to hurry things along than from any -true sense of disbelief. 'Why would they wish to produce such ... unnatural -specimens?' -

'Oh ... ', began Rapley, with a rueful shrug, 'It had never been done before in -such extravagant abundance. Ten identical copies of the participants. A feat -bound for any books of records. And also, of course, the egotistical mind -fancies the arse off itself ... I once had an aunt who painted. Countless -watercolours, terrible pieces of tat, but only of herself, face and shoulders -with a thick slice of summer light illuminating the right side of her face. I -asked her why, and she told me "I have perfect dextral facial geometry, it -deserves the limelight. I cry if I don't capture each lunar phase of my -physiognomy as it passes through the arc of my life".Mad as a rat. Ended her -days living down a manhole on the Edgware Road. The point is that the St -Bougeres collective were working to replicate their ideas, their brains, their -minds, their bodies, their biases, hatreds, loves, foibles, talents and -prowesses; to create a breed of their own. Who knows ... maybe they wanted to go -fuck themselves as well.' -

Miss Menzies glared from under her finely plucked eyebrows, her delicate -voice a-tremble like a vibrato-ed harp string. -

'Your language, Mr Rapley! Is it not enough that my logical faculties are -under assault from this fantastical tale ... Must my sensibilities be similarly -assaulted by such cursing?' -

'I apologise for the blueness of the verb.' -

He bowed low and long, then straightened, his face serious and set. -

'That is the background to the matter. And it brings us to the present.' -

He circled the table, drumming his long fingers on the edge as he went. -

'Ten teacups, one body, no murder weapon, though he had undoubtedly been -both poisoned and throated. And no way out. ' -

He threw himself down onto the baggy leather couch, which hissed and settled -underneath him; then he turned to address Miss Menzies and myself,. -

'You see, I know the how, and I could have a pretty darn good stab at the -who, but the why is too vague, too hazy.' -

Rapley pulled a mint from a trouser pocket and offered the pack around. -

'No? Suit yourselves. I wonder how he made them disappear, and also whether -they've disappeared for good. It would be a damnable shame if they were to -continue blistering this continuum.' -

Miss Menzies rose slowly from her chair, keeping her eyes lowered to the -chalk outline. -

'You talk in riddles, sir. They? Do you refer to these phantasms? Or have I -lost myself in this delirium of mirror people ... perhaps you mean the nine woman- -born real people who assisted my grandfather in this madness? My ship of thought -requires a lighthouse in this fog.' -

'Oh, don't fool yourself into thinking of these golems as unreal, Miss -Menzies. They are, or were, as real and as solid as you or I. It is simply that -they were poured from a different spout.' -

Horace mewed softly towards the bookcase. -

'Look', I chuckled, appreciating the whimsy amid all the dark talk, 'The -cat's clawing the air, he has yet to grow into his paws. It rather makes me -think of a child wearing boxing gloves ... ' -

Miss Menzies looked up, and smiled a most appreciative and angelic smile at, -first, the cat, and then at me. -

I mopped my brow, my thoughts unseasonably hot. -

Air motes crackled in the late afternoon gloom. The windows let in grey -dying light. -

A bird squawked from the branch of a spindly tree on the other side of the -pane and then threw itself hurriedly into the air, flapping madly as if it were -an umbrella tossed off a cliff. -

Rapley slowly turned his head towards the bookshelves, his eyes expanding -and briefly popping with thought. He spoke one word. -

'Milk.' -

The smile flew away more softly from Miss Menzies' face, a dove silently -disappearing into a calm summer sky. -

'Mr Rapley ... ?' -

'MILK!!!' Yelled Rapley, leaping to the tips of his toes, hopping around the -table, scattering tea things as he lanced his hand to the centre of the table -and grabbed a grand two pint milkjug shaped like a mooing Fresian. -

He spun back round to face the bookshelf, picked the cat up smartly by the -scruff of the neck and deposited the mewling feline onto a chair with a soft -plod. -

I took Miss Menzies by the shoulders and pulled her to one side as my good -friend drew back his arm and hurled the milk jug at the array of books with a -yell of 'Here's mud in your eye!' -

The jug smashed roughly against the brickwork wall behind the books, shards of china clinking into the -air and against the floor, yellowing spats of old milk dotting the air like fat -from a fried egg. -

Before Miss Menzies could arrange her obvious shock and distress into -anything verbal, Rapley had bounded to the bookcase and shoved his head amongst -the books, squashing his face up against the wall behind. -

He came away with a light quiff of dust and a broad grin. -

'The milk has sunk into the wall, my friends, we have our quarry in our -sights!' -

He brandished a magician's hand towards the brick wall which was visible behind the -bookcase. Where there should have been a dripping pool of thick, sour milk, there was -instead a thin cleft between the bricks -into which the flung dairy substance had entered, splashes on either side -showing the passage of entry. -

Miss Menzies gathered her wits and cocked her head to one side. -

'Th-there is something behind there ... ?' -

Rapley began to yank books from the shelves like a demented dentist. -

'A secret room and a secret guest, I should fancy ... Here, help me with these -books, there must be a lever attached to one of them.' -

Myself and Miss Menzies leapt to his aid, pulling volumes from their oak -beds. -

'Binary exercises in Calamity', 'Forces Majeures de Loki', 'Skulls for -Beginners', 'Cryptohagiography in an Age of Pigs', all went whistling through -the air, clapping into a plump pile on the far side of the room. -

My hand closed around a thick, maroon copy of 'The Enchanted Station', and I -immediately felt a ponderous tug of resistance. -

'I-I have it ... ' Said I. And for one ripe second we all froze. -

'Then pull, Mr Violet, pull as you've never pulled before.' hissed Pasha -Rapley. -

And so I pulled. -

The book began to inch slowly away from the wall, then the bottom of the -outward-facing spine locked up and with a low, vibrating, metallic grind the top -of the tall volume started to arc down towards the shelving. -

As the weighty tome tipped forward, we peered in to see what resembled a -crankshaft and gear system hidden underneath, thin rusty links of chain -disappearing into narrow holes in the wall, as taut as rictus grins. -

With one final heave the book clumped flat on the shelf and, with a sound -like the flapping of mighty wooden wings, the book shelf unceremoniously shunted -a foot towards us, scattering the three of us like frightened mice, and then -slowly began to open outwards like the fat door of knowledge it unquestionably -was. -

He wore a velvet suit, close-cut and deeply unfashionable, dark green and -purple stripes running from ankle to collar. A loose black tie puffed up from -between white shirt collars
-

It creaked open on heavy hinges, releasing an obscuring gloom onto our eyes -and a lurid tang of sharply acidic gas into our nostrils. The dread and -anticipation in my heart was simply monstrous. -

We stood in a line against the opposite wall, peering into the darkness. A -firing line without weaponry, praying for a small, weak target, but fearing -something quite other. -

'Um. We're here to help ... ?' tried Rapley. -

Tendrils of egg white smoke curled into the air, slowly unfurling -themselves like a waking beast. -

A shape quivered and breathed in the demi-light of the hidden room. Tall, -rangy, angle-limbed. It coughed laughter, sniffled liquidly. -

Rapley took one step forward, then swivelled back round to face us. In his -hands were a metal poker from the fireplace and a fork from the table. -

'If he begins to froth at the mouth,' he whispered, handing us each an -implement, 'or if his eyes start rolling in different directions, hit him in the -balls.' -

Some inner rod of steel tensed inside Miss Menzies as she closed her fingers -around the handle of the fork. -

'Yes, Mr Rapley. In the balls.' -

Rapley spun back round to face the music. He snapped his heels together and -ran his flat palms down the front of his mackintosh, smoothing his hair back as -an afterthought. -

'Mr Bunting? Percy? It is Percival Bunting, isn't it?' -

All three of us walked slowly towards the entrance of the hidden room -keeping a triangular formation, Rapley at the apex. -

A dark, shaking shambles of a figure tottered from the gloom, wreathed in -parasitically clinging whorls of gas, spiralling smoke rags and furious -miniature constellations of dust particles. -

The man was above average height, of advanced years, his once matinee-idol -cheekbones and high, distinguished brow reduced to mere pegs upon which to hang -the sagging features of his face. -

A pair of greasy, nocturnal moustaches played out a dark tragedy on his -upper lip, and his balding, liverspotted head was punctuated by the sharp, -greying prow of a widows peak. -

He wore a velvet suit, close-cut and deeply unfashionable, dark green and -purple stripes running from ankle to collar. A loose black tie puffed up from -between white shirt collars. -

Signs of disrepair were immediately apparent: holes in cuffs, moth-snack -lapels, stains of a darkness found only at the bottom of the ocean, a gloopy run -of dribble caked one side of his mouth. His shoes were sighing bags of leather. -

'Please.forgive my appearance', Percival Bunting attempted a creaking bow, -'If I'd have known I'd be... receiving guests so soon, I would have been -more rigorous in my grooming..' -

A red mist stormed through Miss Menzies as she leapt forward, brandishing a -crumpet fork in an alarming manner. -

'You ... you ... fiend! What did you do to poor grandpapa ... ? His -throat ... Oh ... Devilry!' -

'Violet! Grab her, man!' Shouted Rapley as we both lunged after her. But, as -the saying surely goes, a woman scorned should not be armed, and the blur of her -arm raced past our optimistic fingertips, burying the business end of the fork -in Bunting's right breast with a muffled 'fud'. -

Miss Menzies stood panting heavily, glaring at the tottering rou‚, myself -and Rapley to either side of her. -

Percival Bunting briskly looked down at the protuberance and twanged the -embedded handle with a wrinkled, meaty finger. -

'Oh now, please. To be blooded by such a vanquished beauty may make the -pulse leap in a younger mans loins, but I am made of older and starker -material.' -

He fixed the young lady with a ghostly, cataract stare and leant in to share -the breath of a dead thing. -

'I am a beast of an inordinately different stripe.' -

Rapley leant his own head forward till their brows touched. -

'You are Percival Bunting. Magician, gentleman and murderer. Unless I'm very -much mistaken ... ' -

Bunting and Rapley remained brow-to-brow, the older, taller man's expression -softened to one of cordial sincerity as his eyes met Rapley's. -

'You have me at a disadvantage, sir. By whom -have I the pleasure of being unlaired?' -

'Rapley. Of Herne Hill,' smiled my friend, pleasantly. -

Foreheads still meeting, the two strange fellows had began to slowly revolve -together like a dancing couple, carefully mirroring each others discreet and -soundless feline footsteps as they discoursed. -

'I am still disadvantaged, but the pleasure, of course, remains. Indeed, it -glows ever more tantalisingly in the oxygen of my fascination. May I ask your -interest in this matter?' -

The pas-de-deux continued with almost infinite grace and courtesy. -

'Professional. The lady whose Grandfather you murdered has -engaged my colleague and me in attaining a solution to the crime. May -we sit? And talk?' -

A pause in the music of their intimacy. Their dance ended. Percival Bunting -leant back, raising himself with aged effort to something approaching his full -height. A muscle in his cheek twitched once and something coughed and gurgled -inside his throat. -

'Hrrumphgh... ahhm ... Yes. An explanation. Very well.' -

Licks of smoke still drifted lazily across the room, a slight -smell of gas still hazed the atmosphere, grazing on any slow thoughts it might -find. It would find none in the minds of Bunting and Rapley. -

The tall man turned his gaze to me, scanning his eyes up and down with his -mouth ajar in a way that made me think of lizards. -

I fingered the poker behind my back and nodded to a dining chair. -

'After you,' said I to the old man, showing my teeth. -

'Naturally,' said he, showing his and folding himself down onto the seat. -

Rapley took up a seat opposite. I and Miss -Menzies - all her passion temporarily spent - lowered ourselves onto the sofa. The -cat was nosing the entrance to the hidden room, flame tail a-flicker. -

Rapley's attention was locked onto the older man like -scaffolding. -

'Tell me why you killed him. And who else attended this little -soirée,' he instructed. -

Bunting raised his eyebrows in a display of indignation at such effrontery, -flared nostrils of pride telling Rapley he'd need to try a different tack. -

' ... or start wherever you wish and drivel on until we get the picture ... ' -

The murderer's face relented and he began his tale. -

'I gather you're aware of my reputation and standing in the magical -community, but for the benefit of your manservant and the hormonal woman, let me -circle the main points. I conversed with Aiwass at the age of 13, my guardian -angel and the rudderman on this haunted frigate we call existence. This early -translation of abstract thought into actual experience made me aware of how -little the common man tastes of life. The meat and gristle and plasma doesn't -get stuck in his teeth, as it were. I decided to chew upon life, and to never -let it chew back. Consensus reality is a dog to be eviscerated and hung upon the -walls of public buildings, its entrails assuming new darker forms. New -arrangements. Physical graffiti.' -

The air thickened in the room, the smoke trails seemed to organise -themselves into small, shimmering forms as Bunting spoke. An outline of a -building was visible if I squinted, a sense of vaguely human shapes walking and -laughing and gesturing with puffs of hands. -

'Washed up in St Bougeries in fifty seven, sharp jags of cocaine in the -bloodstream, even sharper plans behind my eyes. I fell in with a bunch of -frenchies, yanks and even fellow countrymen. Some more talented than others, I'm -thinking of Pearl here. Poor, exquisite Pearl ... ' -

Though Bunting's eyes dampened at his memories, his smile belonged to a -feasting shark. The smoke coalesced like coral to form the face of a somewhat -haughty, yet undeniably attractive, young woman, wearing Pre-Raphaelite curls -and a bow tie. She proffered a hand towards Bunting, her fingers raw and ridged -with burns, her wrists bangled with scars. -

' ... but I'm ahead of myself. There were ten of us; some had heard of the -others; some were attracted by the glamour of the intent; some such as dear, -sweet, vicious Al, and that odious, gurning thug Mr Monk simply had jobs to do, -dirty francs to earn. Monk, for his whores, mainly. GI's that had remained in -France had a particular cachet among the authorities and local girls, you see. -Who cared if a couple went missing every now and then. Not the mayor, not with -his syphilitic secrets and morphine mishaps, certainly. And, I suppose, not I. I -had finer preoccupations. With the incantations formulated and the science in -place ... ' -

Here, he looked around at all three of us with gravity. -

' ... for we were scientists, after all, and this was to be mankind's greatest -experiment. The atoms that make up any given physical form, including that of -the human being, are vibrating at an extraordinary rate, and in utter -disharmony. If a structure of atoms could be encouraged through incantation, -force, legerdemain or any other method to organise themselves into a willing -herd which moves in one specified direction, then you have form, and more -importantly, form that operates entirely at one's will. This was the sound yet -admittedly experimental basis for our work. Sympathetic magick provided the -ignition key.' -

The blue smoke forms drifted again and rearranged themselves into the ten -figures of Bunting's recollections. About the size of Action Men, they bobbed in -the air, sitting in a circle around a vast metal urn, symbols and crescents -carved into its sides. They were all quite naked except for various jewels and -crystals which glinted cold and obsidian, their bodies glistened with oils and -sweat, and one of them, a burly brute I took to be the man Monk, was floating -directly in front of Miss Menzies and me, his vast rump displayed to us in all -its inglory. I felt my bones turn to ice. -

Rapley seemed to be wearing the nebulous figure of Pearl Brown as a hat, and -rather enjoying the experience. -

'We snipped at our hair and nails, pricked our addled veins for spurts of -precious blood, spat and hawked thick gobbets into the crucible, spoke our -wildest prayers and most savage fantasies and threw them into the cooking pot -for good measure. Our DNA roosted inside the iron womb, boiling in the amniotic -broth of our confessions and sins. We had begun.' -

The air suddenly turned violent with smudges of incident and movement. -Thicknesses of smoke suddenly thinned into screaming faces, before they vanished -in a ragged swirl of trace tracks; over Buntings shoulder, a great -stream of bubbling liquid splashed down onto the floor of the -room before hissing upwards into a veil of nothingness. -

'Pearl, your learned Grandfather and I had prepared our work well. Our science was -impeccable, our magical research exhaustive, our approach rigorous. Of course -chaos ensued. Once conjured, our Variant Golems slewed themselves from the -crucible like sausage meat squeezed from the skin. They were raw and squealing -in the half-light, ragged red and oozing something like tar from their orifices. -All ten of us were suspended between horror and a godlike curiosity at our -emerging flock. These creatures' bodies and faces adjusted themselves in -shimmers, waves and contractions, seemingly adjusting to the ten of us as irises -adjust to harsh light. In a matter of minutes we were presented with ten -identical ... versions ... of ourselves. Albeit versions which appeared to have been -run over by a fleet of rickshaws.' -

A red illumination spread through the smoke wraiths in the air, ten bloodied -and animalistic men and women stood like flesh statues, panting and crying -softly. -

'They turned on us. Whether from hunger, disappointment, rage or some primal -destructive urge, I simply do not know. I saw Popin and Mimette Moinier -thrashing wildly like landed fish as their counterparts from beyond dragged them -into a shadowy corner. I heard them scream and gurgle their last words. Piringe -and Cole were consumed by the explosion from a gas lamp hurled at them by their -alter egos. The fire -spread as Jago, a man I had always held in some esteem, muttered some words of -wisdom from a sheaf of notes on the sideboard, lopped his doppelganger in half -with a shattered wall mirror and leapt through a window onto the street below. -It must have been two storeys, a most commendable effort. -D'Escale dived into the crucible to escape the conflagration, I daren't think -whether he drowned or found himself in some regressed hellish world of torment -under those supernatural waves. I didn't see Dustin Monk die, merely his head in -pieces. Alvin Reveiller succumbed to a rain of drillhammer punches, struggling -valiantly to the end . I protected Pearl as best as could, I fought like a -panther, but...' -

Percival Bunting's nails were scratching deep ruts in the wooden tabletop as -he paused. -

'They caught up with me thirty two years later in Cairo. By this time, they -seemed almost civilised. They wore the clothes of civility, I should say. Their -conversation, peppered with bon mots, aphorism and received knowledge, could -have passed as sparkling, were it not for the dribbling, rampant coughing and -porcine squeals which they were, alas, unable to prevent from adversely -colouring their speech. The Percival Bunting of their world was clearly their -leader, they deferred to him with respect. Perhaps our worlds were not so very -different in some ways.They needed my help. Their research into the mystery of -their existence had led them to the knowledge that their precarious, spluttering -physical bodies had a half-life of some fifty years, if their calculations were -accurate, after which their atomic masses would become fatally unstable. My -double looked me in the eyes and pleaded with me to help them, begged me to help -save my own spectral twin. The experience jangled my senses ... to be staring at -and conversing with one's own flipside made me a catalogue of nervous disorders. -We fought. The two Percivals, tooth and claw; oddly the others stood clear, with -soft grins of approval at this obscene contest. -

'I left him dead. His throat slit. I would not say they accepted me as their -leader after that day, but they certainly tolerated me and respected my -knowledge and ideas. How could they not? They needed me.' -

With a start, I noticed that although Bunting's hand had risen from the -table to cup his chin, his index finger had remained on the tabletop, nail -embedded in the oak. Bunting's cloudy eyes swept over the abandoned digit once, -and without missing a beat he folded his four-fingered hand inside his jacket -and pulled a doily over the finger. -

'With their talent for forcefully acquiring information and resources, I -soon amassed a wealth of knowledge on the subject of atomic principles and the -depth of my occult learnings deepened commensurately. Through the years, I began -to assess them without fear, and they became to me pitiful creatures, whose -primal brains and appetites would never let them rise above their base and -unholy origins. I no longer felt fear, just revulsion at their iniquity and -inferiority. -

'They kept me close, the threat of violence unspoken but ever present. I may -have killed one of their kind, but I was clear-sighted enough to realise that -they were united against me, and that any further action against them on my part -would be met by the most brutal acts of retaliation.' -

A gentle cloud of gas puffed out from his right ear, bobbed a few feet then -popped like a spore. -

'I researched and delved into the sciences for ways to prolong their lives, -showing them my workings and discoveries at every juncture. However, at the same -time, I researched ways to prematurely terminate their existences. -

'It took twelve years of furtive learning, but eventually I collated enough -information to ascertain that a certain series of ancient glamours, spoken aloud -and inserted into the reversed names of these savage creatures, would erase them -from this life forever, if one utilised the correct emphases and mantras. -

'One piece of information escaped me. One piece to make these instructions -complete ... A nugget of knowledge I suspected your Grandfather possessed, making -it vital that we tracked him down. -

'I also suspected that this spell might, if different emphases were stressed, -result in the indefinite extension of their lives. And, of course, this was the -version of the truth which I proffered to my bestial companions. The trap set, -they focussed their energies and resources to the tracking down of Jago Sage -Festivale Menzies.' -

Bunting creakingly rose from his chair and walked over to the window. The -sky outside was the deepest and darkest of blues, and it seemed to be that we -were all encased in some Victorian submarine, at the mercy of terrible undersea -pressures. -

A loud hiss sounded from his midriff and Bunting appeared to lose -three inches of height, his knees met and he tipped up onto his toes, grabbing the wall -for support. -

'Harruffgh ... mrrgh ... uhhm.ah, yes ... Two days ago, we arrived here en masse. -Duping Menzies that we were envoys from the Nobel Committee come to service him -for his gifts to the experimental Sciences. Papers, I'm sure I needn't tell you, -that he had submitted under an assumed name. The shock of our appearance was -overwhelming, all those memories must have fled back and caused him to seek an -ending to the nightmare he had initiated fifty years ago. He shakingly made a -pot of tea for us all, and this we attributed to his gentlemanly manners. -However, when he started foaming at the mouth and spluttering for air, it -occurred to me that he must have poisoned the beverage in an attempt to kill -himself and the Golems. They, being made of tougher stuff, digested the poison -with ease and comfort. -

'With his dying breath, Menzies imparted to me the final key, the missing -piece of the spell which I knew he had in his knowledge. Those words he had so -hastily and effectively read from his notes in that burning French garret. -

'The Monk creature slashed his throat and held the razor to my own jugular. I -was ordered to read the completed and, to their minds, restorative incantation. -

'With the solemnity of a priest and the resonance of a born orator, I -intoned the necessary spell, using the correct, life-devouring emphases. There -was a roar like dying lions and these eight demonic fools twisted and spun into -a blur of features. The air sucked in around them until I could scarcely -breathe, my fillings sparked, their forms contracted and lost all semblance of -humanity ... and then they were gone, leaving only a smell of cordite and eight -wisps of red smoke.' -

He leant against the window pane, his knees knocking together, his nine -fingers twitching, every breath the slow turn of a wooden rattle. -

Rapley hopped smartly out of his own chair and gathered up Horace, who had -been lying on his back cycling his paws in the air. -

'Well, a fine tale! But more than a little flexible with the truth, I fear!' -

'Flexible, sir? Whatever do you mean?' -

'Your physical disrepair, for one thing.' -

'I have sweated through eighty summers, young man. I have toiled at the edge -of things for much of that time.' -

'Eighty's the new sixty, so they say.' -

'It takes its toll.' -

'Forgive me, but you take the piss' -

Miss Menzies and I were spectators, our heads whipping back -and forth between the two of them. -

Bunting let out a tiny piglet squeal and clamped a hand over his mouth. -

'I believe you when you say there were two human survivors that night in St -Bougeries. But you weren't one of them. Your time is nearly up. -

My bet is that Jago and the real Bunting escaped the fire together and -agreed to split up, fleeing separately. Bunting was eventually hounded down to -Cairo, where it was his blood that was spilt, not the foul concoction that runs -through your diseased veins.' -

The spectre that was previously known to us as Percival Bunting spread his -angular arms as wide as dragons wings and bellowed an alien curse, but the effort -of this theatrical display made him crumple to his ancient knees. -

'Well, really.' said Rapley, distastefully, and knelt by his side. -

'You came here with your little troupe of performing zombies ... and then ... ?' -

The Bunting thing rocked from side to side. I thought it was just the -occasion getting to me, but I could have sworn that his skin appeared to be -melting. His voice grew thicker, as if exhausted from the effort of trying to -escape from his throat. -

'Oh ... it was true what I said. He poisoned himself, I caught his dying -revelation ... Monk slit his throat in fury, and I killed them ... my atrophying -brothers and sisters ... I was never one for a crowd ... and their brains and -their ... ambitions ... simply ... never grew ... ' -

He spat half a tongue onto the floor, his right trouser leg deflated, the -limb having vanished with a sound like a cushion falling onto a sofa. -

' ... they were so ... dull ... the conversation never changed ... it was all -disembowelment and hexagrams with them ... ' -

' ... and the spell to extend your half-lives?' -

' ... didn't work ... I tried it, standing here like a ninny, stressing this word, -reversing that phrase ... all that happened was that a vase of hyacinths regressed -back into sand and seeds - it seems one can't pour any more life into these dead -bodies of ours ... if anything it has made it worse.' -

The creature blinked and when he opened his lids his eyeballs had shrunk to -the size of peas, staring at the three of us from widening sockets. -

'I didn't ask to be born ... ' , said the thick trickle of his voice. -

Rapley stepped back and covered Horace's eyes. I did the same to Miss -Menzies, but she smacked my hand away without anger. -

'I must see him out, Mr Violet.' -

The husk of a man on the floor shivered and swirled. With a sound of -chattering teeth and inhuman engines, he imploded into the ether, a slowly -turning flute of red mist in his place. -

We dropped Miss Menzies off at the local vicarage. Her mother had spent the -previous night there under some considerable medical sedation, and her brave, -resolute daughter wished to be by her side. -

None of us had any pressing need to trouble the police with the events of -the day. -

I waved her goodbye from the driver's seat of the Fiesta. Rapley whistled a -toodle-pip from the back seats and then turned his attention to the pile of -books crammed into a large Sainsburys carrier bag by his side. -

'Did you ask if you could take those, old man?' said I. -

He pulled the bag closer to his legs. -

'Payment in kind...' He muttered. 'Buggered if I'll get out of bed for less -than half an occult library and -a small cat.' -

Horace mewed agreement from the dashboard and licked his arsehole with -delicate satisfaction. -

I gunned the engine and flicked on the headlights. - -

Sparking up a cigarette, I peeked at Rapley in the rear view mirror. - -

A most singular fellow, I reassured myself. -

It was late, and it looked like rain. - -

Copyright © Tom Davies 2009 All Rights Reserved -[*IMAGE] teacups.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Warriston's Disease - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Some secrets ought not to be shared. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Despite himself, Leon was a little intimidated by the streamlined, palatial -offices of Driffield Brown Pharmaceuticals. Having been approved by the -formidable security front desk and escorted through an atrium like the main -glasshouse at Kew Gardens and whisked up some hundreds of metres in a -transparent elevator, shepherded by a supermodel with no conversation, he now -found himself in a large space, two walls of which were of tinted glass, -commanding impressive views of London and the Thames. The floor was covered with -a thick brown velvety carpet in which the dents of his own footprints were -clearly visible. He was perched on a black plastic and chrome chair of such -modernity that it was barely recognisable as furniture. The chair was placed -opposite a desk composed of a single irregular rectangle of black granite -balanced on trestles of chrome-plated tubular steel. Behind the desk, in a -monstrous big brother of Leon's chair, Professor Hiram Ochre, a very important -man at Driffield Brown Pharmaceuticals, squatted like a bulbous toad. Leon had -only met Ochre once, when his research grant was initially awarded. - -Ochre's desk was completely clear except for a black cellphone as slender as a -credit card, almost invisible against the granite, and one of these fancy -devices that projected a holographic keyboard and screen on the desk surface. -Professor Ochre touched one of the phantom keys on his desk, and a disembodied -female voice trilled, "This conversation is being recorded." - -"Dr Hartmann, thank you for coming to see us today," said Professor Ochre, -without any actual appearance of gratitude. - -"It's a pleasure," lied Leon, whose mind buzzed with serious concern about the -status of his Driffield Brown grant. - -"I expect you are wondering why we called you in today. I am aware that you have -been sending us quarterly reports on your project, and I am told that your work -is satisfactory, if a little long-term." - -Leon cleared his throat to remind the professor that a five-year clinical trial -of a new drug was necessarily long-term, but Ochre silenced him with a -gesture of his pale hand. - -"I should like you to cease work on the er... work you are doing. We are not -cancelling your research. It will be continued at a later date." - -Leon felt he had to speak now. He needed the money the grant represented to pay -his rent, grocery bills and other expenses. "But surely..." he began. - -Ochre again gestured for silence and touched a corner of his keyboard. "This -conversation is now off the record," trilled the voice of the recorder, -"Information communicated now is secure, non-disclosable and deniable." - -

sick persons all over the world will -be healed
-"Dr Hartmann," said Ochre, "I am authorised to tell you that we already know -that the drug you are testing not only does not work very well but has a number -of embarrassing side-effects. You are conducting this trial in order to play for -time while we develop something better, so the longer it takes for the results -to come out, the better it is for all concerned, except, perhaps, the patients -on the trial." Ochre then read a form of words from his holographic screen, "You -may not disclose this information but you may use it to assist your decision- -making process now and in the future." - -Leon was lost for words, choking with surprise, or shock, but before he could -express himself, Ochre had re-activated the recorder. "This conversation is -being recorded". - -Ochre continued: "You are acquainted with Doctor Jennifer Warriston." It was not -a question, but Leon managed to nod. "You were, in fact, ah, romantically -involved with -Doctor Jennifer Warriston." - -"We were, yes." - -"Now, this is important. Do you still harbour friendly thoughts towards her?" - -"Yes, I do, but..." - -"But you fear that these friendly thoughts are not reciprocated. We thought so. -However, if you could help her, you would." - -"Yes, indeed." Leon's brain was in orbit by now. What was this? - -"And if by helping Dr Warriston you could help Driffield Brown and help -yourself..." - -Ochre's hesitation gave Leon the opportunity to ask, "Can you just tell me -what's going on?" - -"In short", replied Ochre, "We would like you to recruit Dr Warriston. We will -reward you well for even making the attempt, with a bonus if you succeed." - -Leon weighed three facts in his mind before replying. Fact one: Jennifer -Warriston would never work for a pharmaceutical giant - Jenny's walk-out on him -was provoked primarily by Leon's surrender to a business she considered -criminally immoral. Fact two: Leon would very much like to be rewarded. Fact -three: he would like to see Jenny again. By accepting Ochre's offer, which was, -in any event, probably one of these offers you cannot refuse, he could do -himself some good and Jenny no harm. "I'll certainly do my best, Professor." - -Ochre continued: "I am aware of the resistance Ms Warriston may feel. She is a -principled person running her own production facility in a remote part of -Africa, providing inexpensive pharmaceuticals for underprivileged third world -people. We have approached her officially and been rebuffed. She would not even -discuss the package we offered her, a package that guaranteed to maintain and -increase her philanthropic output, while making her medicines available to all -our customers and, incidentally, allowing her virtually unlimited funds and -research facilities. As it is, we now sell our own drugs into these markets at a -trifle above cost price. She's going to go out of business." - -"What can I offer her that's better than the offer you have already made?" - -"We believe that she distrusts us, and has not even considered our terms. You -are to be the honest broker. We will give you the contract. You will then carry -it to her. She will be unlikely to refuse to look at it if you -lay it at her feet. You will find out what she really wants; we will make the -requested changes to the contract; you will have it checked by a lawyer of your -choice. She may perhaps accept our terms; sick persons all over the world will -be healed; Ms Warriston will be rich, fulfilled, and grateful to you; you will -be, at least, rich, perhaps also fulfilled, and happy; Driffield Brown will be -more profitable." - -At the time, Leon found these aspirations rather appealing. "O.K. I'll try," he -said. - - -

Tripoli was founded by the Phoenicians, who called it Oea, at about the time -when Homer was having his nappies changed. It was then civilized, century by -century, by Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Turks, Italians, not necessarily in -that order, and, eventually, by the Libyans themselves. Much of the city's -architectural history still lurked behind the modern concrete and glass. One -such remnant was Café Hassan, more of an expatriate club than the teashop -it purported to be. Its battered frontage, eroded by time, traffic and bullets, -carried no sign. Leon only knew he'd made it to the meeting point because his g- -phone, having guided him through a warren of alleys, told him so. The walk from -his hotel had nevertheless been rather alarming. He was assailed in the broad -modern streets by noisy fast traffic, most of which was propelled by big brutish -internal combustion engines - unheard of in the oil-starved West. The few -solarcars, with their 30kph top speed were treated like ox carts. Once in the -souk, he had been constantly importuned by sellers of carpets, brasswork, -oriental pleasures and hashish, so that he was baked and shredded by the time he -stood in the doorway, nineteen minutes late. - -As Leon entered the establishment, eyes glanced briefly at him and turned away. -Only one pair of eyes met his and stayed. Leon threaded his way to a tiny table -of wrought metal and plastic at which a thin woman was seated. Her physique and -manner were young, but, up close, Leon realised that she must be in her fifties, -lean and sinewy, with a lined, tanned face, grey eyes, and dressed in clean -khaki shirt and trousers. He tried not to show surprise, but she grinned and -said: "Hi, I'm Ray. Don't tell me. You expected your pilot to be a man." - -"I guess so. I'm Leon, Rae. I didn't have any expectation at all. I was more -puzzled about the route I'm having to take to Chad." - -"Well, as you probably already know, it's impossible for a foreigner to enter -the country without a lot of hassle and a huge chain of bribes. If you slip up -anywhere you could land in jail or in a ditch. It's actually quicker, cheaper -and safer to enter illegally." - -"How close can you get to where I'm going?" - -"There's an airstrip and there's some route from there to the hospital. I'm -taking supplies in quite regularly, but I've never seen the medical facility. -You a medic, then?" - -"Kind of. But it's news to me that it's a hospital. The doctor I'm visiting is a -pharmaceutical expert. I thought she was manufacturing drugs." - -"Oh, yeah, I heard that, too, but they've definitely got patients. A couple of -Chinese medics went in a few weeks ago. Some of my passengers are mercenaries -for the so-called freedom fighters. Not many of them make the return journey. -White man's grave. Worse now, because of the war. But there's a steady trickle -of patients for the hospital. There's a rumour they can cure AIDS there. The -patients I ferry in and out are rich and sick. I think they're what's funding -the hospital, and this trip you're making is not cheap, 'cos it ain't legal. -Anyway, you've brought everything?" - -"Yes." - -"The money?" - -The money. No-one used money much these days. In London, Paris and New York, the -only thing you could buy with actual banknotes were illegal narcotics and -services from various freelance enterprises - chiefly bookmakers, prostitutes, -plumbers and electricians. - -The wad of US dollars that Leon handed over would have paid for a round-the- -world cruise in a luxury cabin on the QE4. Leon had wondered how Driffield Brown -explained the cash to their accountants. - -"I take it, even though this is strictly illegal, you don't anticipate any -trouble?" Something about handing over this much cash made Leon a little -nervous. - -"We don't show up much on radar, and we don't look like a military threat. When -I first started these trips, they scrambled a couple of Russian helicopter -gunships to look me over. They don't bother any more. Don't worry." - -"OK. I won't." - -"Anyway, this is a two day trip. I'm taking you as far south as I can today. -Then, if the weather's OK, we'll get where you're going tomorrow." - -"Understood." - -"Let's go, then," said Rae, leading the way out to a battered Toyota Ecojeep -which was soaking up some solars in a nearby dusty square. "Don't know why I -bother with this sun-bucket," she apologised, as they entered the maelstrom that -was Tripoli traffic, "Gasoline is only ten dollars a gallon here." It was eight -euros a litre in London, more than fifty dollars a gallon, and it was rationed. - -

Twenty minutes and ten near-death experiences later, they arrived at what -appeared to be a private airfield. If Leon expected anything of Rae's aircraft, -it would have been like something out of a 20th century thriller movie - a small -monoplane with a single gasoline engine. The craft Rae drove him to wasn't -remotely like that. It was dominated by its slender wing, thirty or forty metres -in span, matt black on top, light grey below. The fuselage and tail assembly -were hung on below the wing like an afterthought, as were a quartet of what -looked like jet turbines. It stood on a seemingly random set of skinny -undercarriages which supported the long wings and stubby body at various points. - -"Wow, Rae, what's this?" - -"Another surprise, Leon? Meet Nostromo." - -"Nostromo? Wasn't that the spaceship in Alien?" - -"Yup. She's made of the lightweight stuff they make tennis racquets out of. The -wings are photo-voltaic collectors, it's got these new lightweight batteries and -it's entirely electronically controlled. More of a powered glider, really. Solar -powered. A dream to fly." - -"So these aren't jet engines under the wings?" - -"No. Electric fans. They give propulsion when needed and generate electricity on -the overrun." - -"Wow. It looks as if it would blow away in a brisk breeze. I can see it shifting -as I stand here." - -"Watch the tail." - -"Oh, I see. It's trimming itself all the time to face the wind." - -"That's right. It needs lots of room so it can turn itself around. Up to a sixty -knot wind, it automatically adjusts its orientation and control surfaces to stay -lift neutral. The harder it blows, the harder it stays down. Above sixty knots, -it's safer airborne. The makers recommend you get a line on it and let it fly -like a kite. But I've never tried that because you'd need much more flat ground -than I've usually got. High winds like that only happen a couple of times a year -around here, and if Meteorology says there's a storm on the way, I just fly out -and dodge it. The harder it blows, the higher I fly." - -"It looks expensive." - -"It was, but the running costs are negligible. You ready?" - -

The heroes of the revolution down below -like to take potshots at any aircraft they see
-Leon watched as Rae organised an operator with an ancient Land Rover to tow -Nostromo to the start of the runway. The Land Rover drove a few hundred yards -down the tarmac, paying out a long nylon rope. Leon climbed aboard into a seat -behind the pilot, surrounded by crates of plastic containers, while Rae -connected the end of the rope somewhere up front. She then climbed in, pressed a -button to start the fans, and waved to the driver of the Land Rover. In seconds, -they were bowling along steadily, the aircraft already alive and eager to fly, -towed by the Land Rover. Rae operated something up front, and they leapt into -the air quite suddenly. She pulled a lever, and they were free, still climbing -under the power of the fans. Rae was working hard, pulling and locking various -levers. - -"Getting up the undercarriage," she explained over her shoulder, "Saves -electricity if I do it by hand." - -"Do you always need a tug to get airborne?" asked Leon. - -"No. Same answer. The fan'll get us up, but a tow saves juice. Give me a minute -or two. I'll just find us a nice thermal for altitude." - -From several thousand feet, Leon could see the startling effects of the Libyan -desert irrigation project. Sea water distilled to fresh. Huge rectangles of -arable land were appearing in the desert. - -The only sounds in the aircraft were the wind and the intermittent hum of the -fan. The ride was amazingly smooth. Rae talked endlessly about the wonders of -Nostromo. Theoretically, she could stay airborne indefinitely, like an -albatross, drawing on the energy of the wind and sun, though, of course, there -were food, drink and other matters to consider. - -Progress was irregular. Sometimes they paused and circled in an updraught to -gain height; sometimes they flew steadily with the electric fans humming; often, -they cruised in straight and slightly downward flight like a sailplane. Some six -hours after take-off, they landed at what appeared to be a former oil company -airstrip, attended by an Italian-speaking caretaker who seemed to have been -expecting them. - -They ate pasta prepared by the caretaker, drank water, and bedded down for the -night in a corrugated iron hut. They took off in the early dawn next day, an -almost vertical ascent into a stiff breeze. A few hours into the flight, Leon -started to see the signs of stunted bushes and trees, which thickened as the day -progressed. The vast Lake Chad (less vast than it was in yesteryear) stretched -to the southern horizon. - -Eventually, Rae pointed out a set of military huts below. "There's your -hospital. I'm turning west for the airstrip." - -The setting sun blazed into the cockpit, and Leon heard bursts of crackling over -the wind rush. - -"What's that?" he asked. - -The airstrip was visible now. Tiny figures in a jeep below were gesticulating. -They were only 30 metres above the raw desert. Rae was busy deploying the -undercarriage as she spoke: "Gunfire. The heroes of the revolution down below -like to take potshots at any aircraft they see in case it's a government attack. -They use SAM missiles from time to time, but I don't generate enough heat or -radar signal for them to get a target lock. They seldom hit anything with small -arms fire." - -A loud ping and rattle somewhere up front gave the lie to this statement, but -nothing more happened before they were dropping onto the start of a rough runway -of crushed red gravel. There was another aircraft drawn up to the side, a couple -of army trucks decorated with red crosses on white circles and a few men in -khaki. - -"Hello, what's this?" said Rae, "I don't usually have any company here." - -"Looks military medical," said Leon. - -"It certainly does. If you don't want to stay, I'll take off right away." - -While it looked a little iffy, Leon wasn't keen to abandon his mission at this -stage. "They don't look particularly hostile. I'll see if they'll give me a lift -to the hospital." - -Rae taxied to an open space, and they climbed stiffly to the ground. -Surprisingly, most of the soldiers paid no attention to them as they approached. -One, however, came towards them with a smile. - -"Leon, I think they're Chinese," said Rae. "That's one of the medics I flew in -last month, but he wasn't in uniform then." - -The medic concerned spoke good English, greeted them politely and was apparently -delighted to ferry Leon to the hospital. But he pointed out that Dr Warriston -was not there. - -"Do you know where she is?" asked Leon. - -"Yes, I do." - -"And..." - -"She is here, of course. I will take you to her." - -Jenny, perspiring in the loading bay of the aircraft, was surprised, but not -pleased, to see Leon. She broke off from whatever she was doing, and jumped -down. - -"What in God's name are you doing here, Leon?" were her exact words, uttered in -a voice that discouraged reply. - -"Hi, Jenny. This is Rae, who brought me here." - -"Hello, Rae, we've never met, but I'm aware of your shuttle service. I suppose, -Leon, that these clowns at Driffield Brown are still trying to recruit me, and -that you are their latest desperate attempt. Professor Ochre, yes?" - -"Yes." - -"He's had my answer by phone, letter and e-mail." - -"I told them they were wasting their time, but I thought 'Why not come and see -you, anyway?'" - -"It's not a good moment." - -"I imagine not. What's going on?" - -"Well, maybe it is a good moment. I'm closing down here and setting up a -new facility in China." She paused, and eyed Leon carefully. "Got your -passport?" - -"Of course." - -"Well, give us a hand here, and you can come along. I've been told I can bring -anyone I like. I'm sure Professor Ochre would approve of your persistence. You -can decide later whether to ditch Driffield Brown and join the good guys." - -Leon stared. - -"C'mon. It's either this or back to the Professor. I think the People's Republic -is much less risky." - -

Half an hour later, they waved to Rae, who was repairing a bullet hole in -Nostromo with a sort of puncture repair kit, and boarded the plane chartered by -the Chinese, an elderly, not to say ancient, Canadian de Haviland Dash 7, -painted in camouflage colours, with Red Cross symbols and hard-to-read -identification insignia. On board, in addition to the French pilot, Jenny and -Leon, were the two Chinese medics and four Africans in medical stretchers, who -nevertheless looked pretty healthy to Leon. Every inch of cargo space was -occupied by cardboard crates. - -It was pitch dark outside as they took off along a faint flare path of -flickering LEDs. In the spartan cabin, Leon looked at Jenny and raised an -eyebrow. He felt a thrilling frisson at being with her again. - -"What?" she asked. - -"It's nice to see you, too." He said it sarcastically, but he smiled to take the -sting out. - -Jenny's mouth firmed into a straight line. Then she said, "It's a bit of a -surprise." - -"But a pleasant one?" - -I'll get back to you on that. I'm very busy right now, as you may have noticed." - -"Can you bear to fill me in?" - -"We fly to Sudan, transfer to a Chinese military transport, and continue to -Tientsin in Northern China. There's a new facility out in the sticks just -waiting for us to arrive, and I won't be starved for resources." - -"What happened to 'cheap medicines for third world countries'?" - -"You know what happened. I wasn't the only pirate operation in the world. Every -philanthropist with a degree in pharma started a cottage industry, and now all -the big companies are doing what we asked them to do years ago, and selling -their mature products at a price a small setup couldn't match." - -Leon began to feel uncomfortable at this hard-faced Jenny, "So you're out of business." - -"In that respect, yes. But what I've got now is something very much better." - -"And that is?" - -"A breakthrough in HIV treatment." - -"But the entire board of Driffield Brown would crawl over broken glass for -that." - -"Not for my cure." - -"Why not?" - -"You're getting into too much detail. I don't want to discuss it." - -"You've got a new treatment for HIV, and you don't want to discuss it?" - -"Not with you. Not with anyone." - -"Except your Chinese friends." - -"Right." - -"So you can corner the market? Like one of the pharma companies you always -hated?" - -"No. Look. I'm going to make it available. I'm going to China so that the big -drugs companies can't suppress it with legal injunctions, negative propaganda -and commercial blackmail." - -"So what is it?" - -"Are you sure you want to know? Knowing will commit you. I may have to kill -you." - -"Oh, Jenny, you can trust me." - -"Can I?" - -"Absolutely. Let's have it." Leon was sure of this. Part of it was to get closer -to Jenny, he realised that, but being associated with an important discovery was -a huge potential bonus. - -"OK," said Jenny, "I'll go back to the beginning. I started out by building a -production line for nuceloside analogues - HIV inhibitors - like AZT et cetera. -I knew how to do that." - -"Sure. That was the way to go." - -"And a protease inhibitor for combination HIV therapy, also freely adapted from -a commercial product." - -"Obviously," said Leon, "You'd need that too." - -"You realise why I had to do this in a third world country." - -"Of course. If you set up a production line in South London, you'd be locked up -for patent infringement in a fortnight. I'm just sorry I didn't feel rebellious -enough to come with you." - -"But here's the thing, Leon. I needed a whole raft of HIV sufferers to test on. -I mean, the chemicals were OK. They analysed indistinguishable from the pukka -product. I just wanted to build a little confidence. This was Africa. There -would be no shortage of HIV positives, I thought. But there was a -shortage. In the precise area of Chad where I'd set up shop, where HIV and AIDS -were a big problem a few years ago, I could only find a handful of subjects - -less than fifty. It turned out, and this is where it starts to sound weird, a -local village doctor had a cure." - -Leon smirked. How often had there been rumours like this? "Oh, c'mon, Jenny." - -"I know. But listen. Among my test subjects, there was a pair of sisters that -I'd been treating. I had good records on them over several months. Both were HIV -positive. In the middle of my drug trial, their relatives saved up enough money -to send them to the doctor. We're not talking big bucks here. A breeding pair of -goats in Chad will cost a peasant a year's income. The sisters were cured. Both -of them. The HIV had gone. No trace. Well, I say 'no trace'..." - -"Aaah." - -"The 'cure', you see, is actually another disease. It's been known for some time -that one virus can interact with another and produce a different virus by a -process of reallocation of viral RNAs. It appears that two different HIV strains -have combined to create a new virus which doesn't cause immunity problems in -humans, and which out-competes the strains of HIV that do cause trouble. It's -also been known for some time that occasional patients turn up, who appear to be -immune to HIV. You know about the Kenyan prostitutes?" - -"Didn't they turn out not to be immune after all?" - -"Well, those that ceased to have regular contact with HIV eventually lost the -immunity, that's true. But it appeared that continuous exposure maintained the -resistance. My theory is that this new disease resembles HIV sufficiently -closely to give the body immunity." - -"So where did this witch doctor get the treatment from?" - -"He's not a witch doctor. He's more of a herbalist and vet. Don't ask me how he -stumbled on it, but it appears that one of his tricks was to draw blood from one -person and inject it into another. I think he had a sort of vague idea of -vaccination. He'd been doing it for years. You may know that Chinese alchemists -administered smallpox inoculation a thousand years ago, so it was a known -technique before it was discovered in the West." - -"Yes, I heard that." - -"Well, at some point, he must have mixed up strains of HIV and produced this new -one in a patient, then transmitted it along not knowing what he was doing. His -patients also spread it by sexual contact, and in a remarkably short time, he -had a healthy population of HIV-resistant patients and their friends and -relatives. It's a small world in an African village. I did a lot of checking, -and a little experimentation, but it worked. It really works. All that's -required is to spread the disease. I'm having the impudence to call it Warriston's -Disease." - -"So why don't you tell everybody?" - -"It has a side-effect." - -"Which is?" - -"Leon, there's a plague in this world. It's a plague that's destroying quality -of life for millions, killing the planet, threatening even the continuation of -the human race." - -"AIDS is hardly that bad." - -"I'm not talking about AIDS, Leon. I'm talking about over-population." - -"So you're going to withhold your cure and let everyone die of AIDS?" - -"No. I'm going to let the side-effect run amok." - -"What's the side effect?" - -"Sterility." - -Leon was silent for a moment or two. "But that means that people have to choose -immunity or children." - -"Not if they don't know." - -"But it'll leak out." - -"Eventually. It'll be noticed. Meanwhile, the Chinese and Indians are very -interested because both have exploding populations and a largely hidden HIV -problem. For many in the West, immunity from AIDS and a lifelong contraceptive -would be a bonus, by the way." - -"And meanwhile?" - -"Meanwhile, I'm starting with four donors - you saw them being loaded - and a -plan to create thousands more in a project in China. A test tube of blood from a -donor will treat twenty or thirty patients, but we still have to build a -production facility like an inverted pyramid. A donor can give a pint of blood -every couple of weeks, but will take thousands of donors to manufacture doses in -sufficient quantity to be effective. It will be a while before it becomes widely -available. Certainly, it could be years before the problem became well known. -And even then anyone with HIV would probably be glad to make the sacrifice of -sterility in return for a permanent cure, don't you think?" - -Leon was horrified. "I don't believe you are doing this. A bit of philanthropic -patent busting is one thing, but knowingly spreading a sterility virus in secret -is something else altogether!" - -"I thought it might be a mistake to tell you. You were always a sanctimonious -little prick, Leon." - -"You've changed." - -"No, I haven't. I've still got the good of the planet at heart." Jenny was silent -for a few moments. "Look, I need to know if you're with me." - -"You can't expect me to go along with this!" - -"I'm sorry to hear that, Leon. It's pretty lonely out here. -Anyway, I have -to keep the lid on it for the time being. So... I'm afraid you are going to be -another donor for a while. I can't let you go now, Leon. I'm sorry. Perhaps we can work -together when you get used to the idea." - -Leon tried to stand up, but the Chinese medics grabbed him and strapped him down -to a spare stretcher. - -"You'll never get away with it!" he yelled. - -"Oh, God. That line comes from a James Bond movie, Leon. I already -have got away with it. My teams of donors are already spreading -across Africa, keen to mingle their body fluids with willing patients, spreading -good health and birth control throughout the continent. Your little friend Rae -has ferried quite a few gratefully diseased well-off people to Tripoli, most of -whom will energetically introduce the virus into Europe and America." - -Leon resorted to insults and entreaties. The plane droned on and Jenny caught a -little sleep. Her lack of reponse made Leon even more desperate. - -Shortly thereafter, one of the Chinese medics anaesthetized Leon to keep him -quiet. -

Copyright © Gil Williamson 2010 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] warriston.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Skylark of Space - -[*AUTHOR] E.E. (Doc) Smith - -[*BLURB] Ahhh! Classic Pulp SF from the master of the corny sf tale. -Note the "dusky" assistant, the "Dick, old top" form of address, the -illustration of space adventure with rivets and galvanometers in -evidence. It's not a bad tale, really, unless you feel the writing is -so bad you can't read it. Nevertheless, Skylark was hugely popular in its day and -is now available in Gutenberg. Just to whet your appetite, here is the -beginning of the story, and you can see that he gets right into the action. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper -steam-bath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of "X," the -unknown metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath -had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had -flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing apparatus and bottles -of chemicals on its way, and was even now disappearing through the open -window. He seized his prism binoculars and focused them upon the flying -vessel, a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did -not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, only its -rapidly diminishing size showing the enormous velocity with which it was -moving. It grew smaller and smaller, and in a few moments disappeared -utterly. - -The chemist turned as though in a trance. How was this? The copper bath -he had used for months was gone--gone like a shot, with nothing to make -it go. Nothing, that is, except an electric cell and a few drops of the -unknown solution. He looked at the empty space where it had stood, at -the broken glass covering his laboratory table, and again stared out of -the window. - -He was aroused from his stunned inaction by the entrance of his colored -laboratory helper, and silently motioned him to clean up the wreckage. - -"What's happened, Doctah?" asked the dusky assistant. - -"Search me, Dan. I wish I knew, myself," responded Seaton, absently, -lost in wonder at the incredible phenomenon of which he had just been a -witness. - -Ferdinand Scott, a chemist employed in the next room, entered breezily. - -"Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a racket in here," the newcomer remarked. -Then he saw the helper busily mopping up the reeking mass of chemicals. - -"Great balls of fire!" he exclaimed. "What've you been celebrating? Had -an explosion? How, what, and why?" - -"I can tell you the 'what,' and part of the 'how'," Seaton replied -thoughtfully, "but as to the 'why,' I am completely in the dark. Here's -all I know about it," and in a few words he related the foregoing -incident. Scott's face showed in turn interest, amazement, and pitying -alarm. He took Seaton by the arm. - -"Dick, old top, I never knew you to drink or dope, but this stuff sure -came out of either a bottle or a needle. Did you see a pink serpent -carrying it away? Take my advice, old son, if you want to stay in Uncle -Sam's service, and lay off the stuff, whatever it is. It's bad enough to -come down here so far gone that you wreck most of your apparatus and -lose the rest of it, but to pull a yarn like that is going too far. The -Chief will have to ask for your resignation, sure. Why don't you take a -couple of days of your leave and straighten up?" - -Seaton paid no attention to him, and Scott returned to his own -laboratory, shaking his head sadly. - -Seaton, with his mind in a whirl, walked slowly to his desk, picked up -his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down to study out what he -had done, or what could possibly have happened, to result in such an -unbelievable infraction of all the laws of mechanics and gravitation. He -knew that he was sober and sane, that the thing had actually happened. -But why? And how? All his scientific training told him that it was -impossible. It was unthinkable that an inert mass of metal should fly -off into space without any applied force. Since it had actually -happened, there must have been applied an enormous and hitherto unknown -force. What was that force? The reason for this unbelievable -manifestation of energy was certainly somewhere in the solution, the -electrolytic cell, or the steam-bath. Concentrating all the power of his -highly-trained analytical mind upon the problem--deaf and blind to -everything else, as was his wont when deeply interested--he sat -motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth. Hour -after hour he sat there, while most of his fellow-chemists finished the -day's work and left the building and the room slowly darkened with the -coming of night. - -Finally he jumped up. Crashing his hand down upon the desk, he -exclaimed: - -"I have liberated the intra-atomic energy of copper! Copper, 'X,' and -electric current! - -[*IMAGE] skylark.jpg - -[*ITEM] A Rambling Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] All about the New Mythaxis Blog - -[*DESCRIPTION]

First of all, my apologies. This issue has taken an -age to appear on your screens, but it's here at last. - -One of the delays was caused by your editor working on other projects -when he should have been paying attention to Mythaxis. Then, some idiots -with sub-zero IQs (or, perhaps, just one idiot with multiple names) -trashed our forum with thousands of adverts for -gaming sites, and I eventually had to scrap the forum, which was not, in any -event, a great hive of activity. - -Realising, as delay -piled on delay and issue 6 - this issue - was never finished, that the principle -of individual issues for a magazine -was not a constraint on the internet, I started to build a blog, which incorporated -a master index to Mythaxis, as well as allowing me to release individual stories -as soon as they are available, -and to make new story and new issue announcements as blog entries. - -This is the address of the -Mythaxis Blog and Master Index.
- -Every time I have enough pre-releases to make a new issue, I will release them as an -issue in the traditional format, and do a blog entry. To be alerted to developments, -subscribe to the RSS feed on the blog. - -And here's another cartoon from Liam Baldwin. - -[*IMAGE] calamari.jpg - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. - -

- -
- - - - - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue7.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue7.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 2626172b..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue7.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2533 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 7 - September 2010 - - -[*ITEM] Living on Reputation - -[*AUTHOR] Alistair Bain - -[*BLURB] Sometimes, people push their luck, don't they? - - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

The bus hurtled though the wet Glasgow streets; every -change -of direction, however slight, caused the passengers to be thrown around -in the tight -three-sided cells of seat backs and windows. - -Xavier Rothschild the Third -sat, trying to filter his senses, to block everything out and reach that -elusive state of peace. Retirement suited him but the city did not. In -the good weather he walked. When it rained... well, when it rained he -had the bus. - -

a voice that screamed against nature, a -sensation like chewing tinfoil
The couple sitting diagonally ahead with the toddler who -wouldn't sit down were testing his calm. They were arguing and letting -their foul spawn run rampant in the aisle. Rothschild fought back the -temptation to stick his foot out and send the child sprawling. The -troublesome toddler stopped, wiped a runny nose on his arm and turned to -face him. - -'What are you looking at?' he snarled at the boy. - -The child -stood in the aisle looking up at him, eyes wide, tears forming. -Rothschild felt only a moment of regret but that broke when the -expression on the boy's face suddenly changed. His expression became -slack, the colour draining from his previously ruddy complexion. - -'Rothschild,' said the child in a voice that screamed against nature, a -sensation like chewing tinfoil. 'I come!' - -'What the hell?' said Rothschild as -the child shook his head, his colour returning and the rampage resuming. -He looked around, trying to gauge the reactions of the others on the -bus. No-one else seemed to have noticed the child's behaviour. A -challenge? From whom? This was something he hadn't seen in a long -time. He was so old and tired, and long out of practice. - -'Rothschild,' -came a voice from behind. He looked around, to a tracksuit-clad -woman -of indeterminate age, two rows back. Her eyes were glassy and her jaw -slack. 'I come for you...' - -'Rothschild', echoed an old man, standing at -the front of the bus. - -'Rothschild,' chorused the middle-class couple, two rows -back and on the right. - -'Rothschild,' cried the teenager in -the baseball -cap, the music from his earphones clearly heard all the way from the -back of the bus. - -'Rothschild!' An atonal sound, the whole bus now in -unison. - -'Rothschild!' The bus driver leaning out his cabin, part of the -chorus, the bus careering across the lanes. - -'Enough!' he bellowed, -slamming his fist on the window beside him. - -

He looked up, suddenly -aware of the silence. There was no unholy chorus, there were no otherworldly -blank expressions. Just a few of his fellow travellers giving him -a sideways look before going back to their business. Not even the -arguing couple spared him a moment's glance. He got up and made his way -to -the front of the bus, ringing the bell to get off. The bus came to a -halt in -its own good time and he stumbled off, breathing a sign of relief. - -'Hello, Rothschild,' said a now-familiar voice. He didn't turn, but he -saw a figure out of the corner of his eye. The bus moved off, the -grumble -of the engine gradually replaced by the steady roar of the rain. - -'Do I -know you?' he asked casually, fumbling about his pockets for a smoke. - -'No, I don't think you do,' said the other man. 'I'm long after your -time.' - -'Hmm, yes,' Rothschild mused, placing a dog-eared roll-up between -his lips and waiting for a moment, eventually frowning. - -'A problem?' -said -the other, smiling broadly. - -'A trifle,' Rothschild replied, 'a simple -trick, one of the very first.' - -'And you can't do it?' - -'It doesn't look -like it.' Rothschild removed the cigarette and looked hard at the end. -'Odd, it was such a simple trick.' - -He glanced over to the other man, who -wore a sharper style than his personal, more lived-in look. - -'I know your -name... Xavier Rothschild the Third,' said the sharply-dressed man, 'And -now -I know your number.' - -'Ah,' said Rothschild simply. - -'And I have come for -you.' - -Rothschild noticed the sky darkening to black and his surroundings, the -shelter, the road and passing traffic, all fading to grey. 'Impressive,' -he said quietly. 'Planeshifting. Somewhere to leave my remains, -I suppose?' - -The sharply-dressed man just nodded in response. - -'Any chance -you could furnish me with your name? In whatever realm I end up -spending eternity, it would be good to know who has seen me off.' - -'Of -course,' said the sharply-dressed man, his ego apparently flattered. -'Lucien Bargo.' - -'Lucien Bargo?' Rothschild nodded his acceptance. 'I -thank you, Mr Bargo.' - -'You're very welcome,' replied Bargo, 'And if you -don't mind...' He threw his arms out in a theatrical pose and a -pillar of fire erupted around Rothschild, who stood, -unflinching, while the inferno raged around him. Bargo gestured simply -and the fire ceased. Confusion etched his brow. - -Rothschild drew from -the now-lit cigarette. He exhaled deeply before finally turning to face -the other. 'The simplest of mistakes.' He looked down at the cigarette -held between his fingers. 'You do not know my name or my number. You -have no power over me.' He paused, smiling a devilish smile. 'But I -know your name, Lucien Bargo, and now I know your number.' - -Casually he -flicked his cigarette at Bargo and as it brushed his sleeve Bargo -was engulfed in an identical blaze. Within seconds, Lucien Bargo had -been -reduced to ash, his scream lost to the wind. Rothschild stood for a -moment, -flexing muscles he had not used for many years as the world around him -returned to normal. It felt good. - -

The man who called himself Rothschild -looked up as the rain started to ease, holes in the cloud layer letting -some much-needed sun through. 'This might turn out to be a good day -after all.' - -© Alistair Bain 2010 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] glasgowbus.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Door with no Key - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] A Tale of Eastern Promise. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Jez couldn't get his head around it. We -were lingering over a couple of pints of some yuppy ale or other in The -Peasant's Revolt (apostrophe in the wrong place on -the new inn sign), a pub in a warren of London streets, and -he said to me: "Can't get me 'ead around it, mate." - -"Around what, Jeremy?" - -"All that stuff wot's 'appening these days. Them djinns, like. An' them -magicians and that flyin' carpet caper. Why don' they use a 'elicopter -like anyone else, eh?" - -"You yourself don't use a helicopter a great deal, though, Jez, do you?" - - -

There was the Door to which I found no Key;
-There was the Veil through which I might not see:
-Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
-There was--and then no more of Thee and Me.
-"Not as such, mate. Not as such. Point taken. But I ain't flittin' about -over folks' 'eads on a ruddy doormat, either. It's takin' the bread out -of the mouths of taxi drivers, innit? Not that I 'ave a lotta time for -them robbin' bastids, either. Can't get in an' out of a cab these days -for less'n a tenner, even if it don't move more'n a 'undred yards. Come -to think of it, I wouldn't mind one of them flyin' rugs, matter of fact. -Not that you could get more'n one passenger on most of 'em, an' they're -'opeless for any sorta luggage, really, ain't they?. They're not really -load-bearin', kind of thing. You wouldn't want to try shiftin', like, a -washin' machine on one, would ya? But I'd think they'd be attractive to -wimmin, though, eh? Comfy, too." - -Jez could go in this fashion for hours, so I said: "What's your point, -Jeremy?" - -"My point is, ya see, my point is.... I dunno whether t'ask for one." - -"Ask who?" - -"The genie, o'course, mate. If I should 'appen to do, like, a favour to -one a them genies or djinns or wottever they're called, an' 'e should -give me, you know, three wishes, as they do..." - -"As they allegedly do, yes..." - -"Whether, in that case, I oughta ask for one o' them magic carpets as -well as, o'course, fantastic riches an' eternal life, an' that. It's -like winnin' the lottery wivout 'avin' to go down Tesco's and buy a -ruddy ticket." - -"It's not at all like winning the lottery, Jez. These genies are tricky, -you know. You could find yourself spending your eternal life inside a -huge gold ingot like that poor bugger in Eastbourne." - -"Ah, well, ya see. That's where I got ya, like. See the old Shoreditch -telephone exchange, right?" - -"No." - -"Big ruddy building up Shoreditch?" - -"Still no." - -"Doesn' matter, mate. 'Uge massive ruddy buildin' they closed down when -they found out the place was totally empty. Arfur says..." - -"Arthur?" - -"Yeah, Arfur, the wife's bruvver-in-lawr, right? Well, 'e says British -Telecom -moved the 'ole phone exchange into a computer the size of a biscuit box down -Leaden'all in 1981. Arfur lost 'is night watchman job when they shut the -doors last Easter. Only they've broke it up into like offices now an' 'e's got 'is job -back." - -"Where is this going, Jeremy?" - -"I'm tellin' ya, ain't I? There's this Ay-rab lawyer got a office in -there now what'll write you up a forum of words..." - -"Form of words?" - -"That's wot I said, innit? A forum of words wiv all the right stuff in -it, namin' Allah an' the prophets an' powers that be an' everyfink. -Completely bullet-proof, mate, only it's, like, customized to wottever -ya want, so the djinns can't take you for a ride." - -"And this 'Ay-rab lawyer' charges how much?" - -"'Undred quid. Flat rate for three wishes." - -"So he takes you for a ride, instead of the djinn. Why don't you -offer this lawyer a cut of the enormous riches when you get them, -instead of paying the flat rate now?" - -"Are you nuts? That could get seriously expensive, mate. No, I'll take -the flat rate now. But I gotta decide wot I want, see." - -"Hmm... How about the eternally balanced bank account?" - -"Wot's that?" - -"Well, you ask for a Swiss bank account that stays balanced at, say, a -million pounds, no matter how much you spend. It works well for tax, -too. It's not as noticeable as all that gold and jewels and stuff that -these djinns usually hand out, and you don't have to worry about burglars -like you would with a cellar full of bling." - -"Cool." - -"And then you've got to be clear that your eternal life takes place in -good health, you don't age too much, and there's a termination clause in -case, after a few hundred years, you get tired of life." - -"Never thoughta that. Cool, yeah." - -I drained my pint and stood up. "Anyway, Jez, I've got to get back to -work. Let me know how you make out, and remember me when you're stinking -rich." - -"Yeah, sure, mate. Course I will." - -I knew Jeremy was seriously deluded in hoping to find a supernatural -benefactor, but he was right that it was difficult to keep track of all -the new developments, as the world of the Arabian Nights began to invade -normal life. London appeared to be the epicentre of the most vigorous -activity. The flying carpets problem was the very least of it, with the -government trying to levy a tax on them, and the Civil Aviation -Authority and Air Traffic Control trying to make sure they didn't pose a -hazard to aircraft. - -
When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
-Then there was the Magnetic Mountain that had appeared in the Thames -Estuary. Anything iron that went closer than half a mile to the huge -black rock was drawn in and stuck to it. No amount of tugging would pull -a stricken ship away. Even wooden boats tend to have metal nails holding -them together, and most boats of any kind have an engine. A few -adventurers succeeded in rowing ashore in rubber dinghies, but one man -was fastened to a rock by his wrist watch until his companions managed -to extract him. And another, who had a cardiac pacemaker, died in a -distressingly gory fashion reminiscent of the movie Alien when his -pacemaker decided to attach itself to the rock. Ensuring that every -vessel gave the Magnetic Mountain a good mile of clearance had become a -difficult task for Trinity House, especially since it had proved -impractical to mount a lighthouse on the rock. - -But there were novelties to enjoy. In my work at the British Museum, we -had already had the opportunity to analyse a number of simple but -interesting "Arabian Nights" artifacts, including a jewelled dagger so -apparently old that carbon dating of its wooden haft estimated its age -at eight thousand years, and what at first had appeared to be a doll of -solid gold, but was now suspected, due to the discovery of a structure -of fossilised bones and organs below the metal skin, to be a miniaturised -gold-plated person. - -

As I returned from my rather extended lunch hour with Jez, Dr Halifax -was waiting for me with another treasure for our collection. Halifax was -temporarily in charge of the Middle Eastern section of the museum ever -since Professor Barnsley had recklessly fallen out with a magic carpet -salesman and been turned into an ape for one lunar month. Flying carpets -were expensive. The professor had wanted one for the museum's -collection, and he had attempted to get one on the cheap by theatening -the vendor with a Trading Standards investigation. He could still -communicate with his staff in writing - he had an elegant hand with a -fountain pen, even as a simian - but it was felt that his current image -lacked gravitas. - -Halifax was good on his subject, but fussy and bossy in manner. However, -he had no direct authority over me. I was in Technical section, he was -in a sub-section of Exhibits, but he was plainly impatient for me to -look at this new trinket. It was a jewelled egg, apparently in ivory, -precious metals and gems, and rather reminiscent of the famous -Fabergé eggs. It was large - about the size of a rugby ball or -American football, but clearly egg-shaped, one end bulging more than the -other. - -"Hmm... Where did this come from?" - -"The RSPCA brought it in." - -"Where did they get it?" - -"Well, that was interesting." Halifax warmed to the subject. He plainly -had a tale to tell. "You remember that Googletube video everyone was -watching last week." - -"Uuuh..." I hesitated. I hardly wanted to reveal that I'd been as amused -as everyone else at the disgraceful behaviour of the Chancellor of the -Exchequer with the thirteen houris, the swan and the donkey. - -"You know... the roc!" - -"Oh, yes. That video." A roc had taken up residence on the roof -of a block of council flats in Clapham. It more closely resembled a -pterodactyl than the huge eagle of legend. Its cries were like a -foghorn. In flight, it had about the same wingspan as a single-engined -Cessna aircraft, and it was wonderful to see. It seemed wary of humans, -but had no hesitation in preying on smaller animals and birds. No-one -walked their dog on Clapham Common any more, cats crept around, but only -after nightfall, and pigeons were a rare sight in the vicinity. - -Two local youths had hatched a plan to become famous on Googletube. One -wrapped himself in his granny's fake fur coat and capered about on all -fours in view of the roc, while the other videoed the scene on his cell -phone. - -The roc had, predictably, swooped on the dog impersonator, but, finding -him too heavy to lift, had gripped the screaming boy with its talons and -torn off the kid's left arm with its toothed "beak". The victim's -colleague had, in the tradition of wild life movie makers, continued to -film until the roc returned to its nest. The resulting shock video had -been a nine-day wonder. The injured boy's life was saved by paramedics, -but he was still in intensive care. - -"Ah, yes. The roc. How did the RSPCA get hold of this?" I enquired. - -"They were persuaded to try and capture the creature as if it was a -stray cat. They sent up a team, but the roc flew off, leaving this -behind in the nest." - -"It can't be a roc's egg, surely. It's clearly manufactured." - -"True," agreed Halifax, "But there's something inside, and we don't want -to break the egg to find out what." - -"X-ray." - -"Quite." - -"OK. Let's go." I unlocked the lab and cleared some small articles from -the X-ray table. - -We viewed the egg from all sides under X-rays. Whatever was inside the -egg was almost transparent to the beam. It was shapeless and hard to -see. What did show up, however, was an intricate mechanism below the -skin of the egg - interlocking cog wheels, screws, hinges, springs and -levers connected to the jewel settings and metal decorations on the -egg's surface. - -"Yes," remarked Halifax, "We twiddled some of these jewels around, but -it didn't seem to do anything." - -"It looks to me like an intricate puzzle," I said. "Just up my street. -Let me work on it for a while." - -"Well..." Halifax was clearly reluctant to surrender his treasure. - -"Come on. I'm your best hope. It won't leave the premises, I promise. -I'll call you when and if I get it open." - -"You've got twenty-four hours, and do not break it." - -"Oh, give me a break. This isn't some detective movie. It's Thursday -now. I'll get back to you by Monday. OK?" - -"OK. But, after that, I'm taking it to St. Thomas's Hospital for an MRI -scan." - -I suppressed a grin. With all that metal in the mechanism, an MRI scan -would be meaningless. But I'd tell him that on Monday. - -As soon as Halifax had gone, I phoned Jeremy on his mobile. "Jeremy, -mate, have you got a phone number for that Arab lawyer?" - -

Khalid Emir was not at all what I expected. No robed oriental, he. From -his polished shoes to his polished hair, via his immaculate shiny suit -and gleaming white shirt, he looked more like a fangless Dracula than -the Sheikh of Araby. - -He was exceptionally polite, meticulous in his questions, and produced -my Form of Words on a desktop computer. Inexhaustible Swiss Bank -Account, Eternal Youth With Termination Option, Enhanced Charisma. One -hundred pounds including VAT. American Express, apparently, was his -chosen payment method. - -"Beware, sir," he added, "Not all demons are duly grateful for their -freedom. Nevertheless, a djinn may not act against you if you give him -no cause, so, above all, address him with courtesy and offer him no -violence, whatever threats he may utter, and utter them he will." - -I thanked him, and he reminded me that we are all subject to the will of -Allah, and that our fates are written in advance. - -I did not tell him about the egg. - -

The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord
-That all the misbelieving and black Horde
-Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
-Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.
-It had been clear on the X-rays that the egg was a finely crafted box -with a combination lock. Arabian Nights lore strongly hinted at its true -purpose. I took precautions; I took more X-rays; I took my time. -Twenty-eight of the jewel settings were free to turn. Each jewel could -be turned to one of twenty-eight positions. To solve the combination by -trial and error would take much longer than the age of the planet. To -further complicate solution, part of the intricate mechanism was devoted -to making misleading random clicks and movements of the metal -decorations when the jewels were rotated. With the X-rays, however, I -could see exactly where to turn each jewel to open the egg. So that is -what I did. It was not particularly simple. Even with the X-ray images, -the function of each tiny wheel and lever was often obscure. - -After twenty-two hours, I turned the last jewel into position, holding -my breath. The egg gave a satisfying clunk, and split along an irregular -line around the circumference. I reached for Khalid's Form of Words. A -wisp of dense pink smoke issued from the crack, and rotated gently into -a column reaching to the ceiling. The column thickened and grew more -substantial. I had expected the apparition to form almost -intantaneously, but it took nearly five minutes for the smoke to -coalesce into a humanoid figure some twelve feet in height. The djinn -was in the form of a muscular, rugged man, in white robes and holding a -scimitar, rather like a bearded Arnold Schwartzeneger dressed in a toga. Even with -the museum's generous ceiling height, the djinn had to sit on the floor -to avoid scraping his cranium on the decorative plaster mouldings. - -I began to hear words in my mind; words which I hadn't heard in my ears. -The genie was talking to me. The lip-sync was awful, like one of these -dubbed martial arts movies, and, though the words were English words, -they didn't make a lot of sense, and were reminiscent of a Babelfish -translation. Gradually, the words became less random. - -"FEAR NOT SENSE" - -OK. 'feel no fear', I supposed. I started to read from Khalid's Form of -Words: "In the name of..." - -"VOCALISATION CEASE" - -I continued to read out my modest requests. - -"VOCALISATION CEASE!", a thunderous command. Taking the hint, I ceased -vocalising. - -Khalid had told me to expect some resistance or prevarication, in the -event that I encountered a djinn and demanded favours. I suspected, -though, that this was more of a language problem. I hadn't expected -that. - -The djinn glared at me for a long moment, then he spoke in my head: "OK. -Now you understand. Yes?" - -"I understand. What about my three wishes?" - -"There are no wishes at this time." - -"But I released you from that egg." - -"I entered the egg willingly, and could have opened it from within by -myself. Indeed, I have often spent time outside the egg. A hundred years -is a long time to spend compressed into such a small container." It was -strange to sense these words so clearly from the genie's unsynchronised lips, but I was -getting used to it. - -"Why, then, were you inside the egg?" - -"I was waiting for you." - -"Me?" - -"Not for you in person, but I was seeking someone capable of solving -the problem of the egg. Which you have done." - -"Please explain." - -
Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One -thing at least is certain--This Life flies;
One thing is certain and -the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever -dies.
It was a long and rambling tale of journeys, jealousy, -anger, revenge, magic, punishment, ambition, sorrow and so on. Allah, -apparently, had ordained that no mercy be given or received. Some of it -sounded quite familiar to any scholar of The Arabian Nights. What -it amounted to was that our djinn here - let's call him Grafmeer, his -true name is a secret, apparently - had a long-standing feud with a -fellow djinn - Halimoss, another alias - in which Halimoss imprisoned Grafmeer's child -in an obsidian block. However, in his haste, Halimoss had failed to -remember the mechanism for the release of Grafmeer's son. So, though -Grafmeer eventually prevailed over Halimoss and enslaved him, neither -Halimoss, nor Grafmeer, nor anyone else, had yet mastered the trick of -opening the block. For hundreds of years, Grafmeer had been searching -for a sage who could solve the problem of the obsidian prison, without -success. The whole Arabian Nights' invasion of London, culminating in -the puzzle egg, was Grafmeer's desperate quest for a problem-solver. And -I was elected. - -Grafmeer did not seem the type of entity who would take "No" for an answer. - -"OK, Grafmeer. Bring it on." - -"That is not possible. You must come with me." So saying, he scooped me -up in one muscular arm, and we ascended - the only possible word, -"ascended" - through the fabric of the museum as if the entire edifice -were made of mist. The journey to Mesopotamia took only a few minutes. -Despite the speed, there was no sensation of rushing air. I think I -occupied the entire time with one continuous scream of terror. - -

Imagine a bowl of blue sky, out of which an impossibly brilliant sun -beat down on an infinite plain of grey dust sprinkled with pale stones. -I staggered under the impact of all those merciless photons as though -struck with a blunt instrument. I was persiring audibly within seconds. - -"Behind you." said Grafmeer. - -I turned to see a black, shiny box, like an enormous dice (Yes, I know -the singular of dice is 'die', but I can never use the word in earnest) with faces -about ten feet square, floating serenely some four feet from the rocky -ground. I quickly moved into its shade. Grafmeer, an even taller -presence now that there was room to stand up, was touching the black -cube in various places. Each time he pressed it, a pattern of white -squiggles temporarily appeared on the surface of the whole face, and one -section of the pattern would slide along, to be replaced by a new -pattern. I quickly realised that the squiggles were Arabic text, broken -up and turned sideways or upside down. - -"It's writing!" I said. - -"It amused Halimoss, may his spirit be reborn in a pig, to inscribe -a poem on each face of the cube so that, when all the poems were -correctly arranged, the cube would open. Then he scrambled the pattern -beyond repair, with my son inside." - -I touched one face of the cube, and the writing flared up for a few -seconds as a section slid away and was replaced before fading again. - -Grafmeer started in alarm: "Don't confuse it further! I shall make the -moves when you solve the problem. All the parts of all the poems are -always present on the surface of the object, but, unless each face of -the block contains a complete poem, it will not release my son." - -I do not read Arabic, but I can tell when it is written upside down, or -sideways, or, as was most frequently found, truncated by one of the -invisible seams along which the pattern slid. It was just a symbol -jumble. - -At first sight, it appeared hopeless, but it was worth a try, especially -if rewards were forthcoming. - -I said: "I need to go back." - -"Why? The box is here." - -"I need my camera from the office." - -"Camera? Is this the plural of 'camel' in your language?" asked Grafmeer. - -I explained what the camera looked like and where it was. - -"I will collect it. To carry you back and forth is most exhausting. Wait -here." - -While I was saying: "Where would I go?", Grafmeer disappeared with a -whoosh of displaced air, leaving me sweating for England. - -I realised this problem he wanted me to solve was likely to be -insoluble, but even if I couldn't do it, I thought I'd be all right if I -just played along with him. Right now, he needed me, or he thought he -did, and I ought to keep it that way. If I admitted defeat immediately, -he might just leave me here in this arid wilderness in which I'd be -lucky to survive a day. - -A solitary bird circled, black against the dome of the sky. For a -moment, I imagined it was a vulture, anticipating my imminent demise. -Then I realised that, in this fairytale dimension, it was more likely -to be a roc, which wouldn't bother to wait for its prey to expire before -dining. - -

Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
-Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
-Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
-Which to discover we must travel too.
-Just when I feared Grafmeer was never coming back - after thirty seconds -or so - I heard the rush of his arrival, and he reappeared, holding the -camera between massive finger and gargantuan thumb. I took multiple -photographs of the faces and of the vertices of the block showing the -relationship of the faces to each other. The job was difficult, because -the inscriptions on a given face only remained visible for a short time, -and, on one occasion, Grafmeer changed the configuration by mistake, and -we had to start again. I had to lie on my back to photograph the lower -parts, and Grafmeer hoisted me like a cherry picker for the aerial -views. Eventually, I was satisfied that I had enough data to describe -the puzzle, even if I didn't have the solution yet. - -"Take me back now, please." I asked. - -"No!" he thundered, "You must open it now!" - -I was scorched, soaked with perspiration, aching from the effort of -getting every image I needed, and mentally at the end of whatever tether -I had started the day with. "Listen! You've been working on this for -centuries, you tell me. Give me a break! It may take me weeks to figure -out. And one thing's for sure, I won't manage it out here. I will need -my computer. Take me back!" - -"I will bring your computer!" - -"Oh, yes, and there's a thirteen amp socket and a broadband connection -out here, is there?" - -Grafmeer knitted his substantial brow and rumbled: "Beware, mortal. Do -not attempt to trick me. I may turn you into a marble statue of -yourself." - -"If I'm out here much longer, I shall turn into a strip of dried meat -without your assistance." - -Grafmeer was obviously accustomed to getting his way with people, but he -seemed to accept that he was not getting his son back here and now. -Another nightmarish flight brought us back to the museum. - -"You have one day to find the solution," rumbled Grafmeer. - -"Not enough. This is complicated. I need at least two weeks." At the -time, I feared there might be no solution at all, but a fortnight would -give me the chance to escape somewhere. On reflection, I later realised -that there was no escape from such as Grafmeer, so it was either solve -the problem, or perish in some fiendish Eastern fashion. - -"I will wait!" pronounced Grafmeer. - -"Not in here, please. There isn't room." - -"It is a little uncomfortable," he conceded. "I shall disembody for a -while." So saying, he gradually sublimated into a pale pink smoke, and directed -himself into the empty milk bottle most commonly used to contain water -for use in soldering and to irrigate the weary plants on the window sill -when someone remembered to do so. The bottle glowed dimly. - -
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
-Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
-Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
-And one by one back in the Closet lays.
-I set about the tedious task of sorting out which bits of poem belonged -on which face of the obsidian block. I was lucky. In order not to give -the game away, I posted a few fragments of my photographs on a -university Arabic forum, and was quickly rewarded with the information -that they were from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I was given a pointer -to a website that had many stanzas in Arabic and in Fitzgerald's English -translation, which I must say is a rather flowery rendering of the -original. With a bit of effort, I was able to identify among the hundred -and one verses the six stanzas represented on the six faces of the cube. -After that, it was dead easy. - -

"Yeah, right," said Jez. "It's all a bit obvious ter you, innit? But I -can't get me 'ead around 'ow ya solved it so quick when he'd been -workin' on it for years." - -I sipped my vodka martini, paid for with a credit card whose balance was -perpetually paid off from my seemingly inexhaustible Swiss bank account. - -"Well," I replied, "when I'd colour-coded all the bits of the poems, it -was obvious it was just a four by four Rubik's cube." - -"A wot?" - -"Rubik's cube. A sort of puzzle I was given when I was a kid. Normally -they were three by three, but you can get more complicated ones, like -four by four. I could never solve mine." - -"So if you couldn't solve a smaller one, 'ow did ya solve this one?" - -"The internet, of course. I ordered a four by four cube from an online -toy shop, got it next day, re-labelled the individual faces in the same -way as the photos of the real cube, then used a solution off the web to -solve it, and delivered the moves to Grafmeer. " - -Jez had glazed over by the time I'd finished. "Wottever," he remarked, -and sniffed. -The enhanced charisma that Grafmeer had conferred upon me didn't -seem to work with Jez. - -He drained his pint, shouted "Gotta go!" to the few of us littered in -the bar like flotsam left by a high tide, and rode his flying carpet -towards the double doors in a surfer's crouch. The carpet was a small -gift from me for pointing me at Khalid's Form of Words, which worked a -treat, by the way. - -"Oi!" shouted the barman, "No bloody magic carpets in 'ere! You carry it -outside on the street and use it there!" - -"Piss off, Terry," replied Jez, bumping open the doors with his -shoulder, and leaving. - -"Where was that bugger educated?" grumbled Terry, "London College of -Lightning Repartee?" - -I discovered that, despite being rich, effectively immortal and oozing -charisma, I could still grin at Terry's tired joke. - -

Copyright © Gil Williamson 2010 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] rok03.gif - - -[*ITEM] The Price of Youth - -[*AUTHOR] Moon Bhatt - -[*BLURB] Blood flows like time, from youth into old age - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The Doctor looks old but he is barely a fifth of my age. He smiles at me -as if we are friends but I know that beneath that smile he is cursing me -for my youth. He is a new doctor, new to me. The last time I was here, no -more than two weeks ago, Dr Mjocha, an old friend, had looked so pale -and grey. I guess the job had got too much for him and he had been -forced to retire. Either that or the other thing. Hopefully, he retired. -I remove my coat and one of the nurses takes it. Although she isn't new, -I know because I recognise her cold blue eyes, her sharp intake of breath and the -nauseous look on her face tell me she hasn't been here long enough to -get used to the sight of my twin. I settle down onto the bed and let the -nurses run through their preparations, inserting tubes, clipping on -electrodes, and fitting an oxygen mask. - -Then the incision comes; a cold -silver scalpel, the sharp knife of surgery caressing me once again. The -conjoining artery is cut and my end is quickly clamped. I can instantly -feel the loss of my twin. I close my eyes and say a small prayer. I -never watch this part, the body being taken away to be disposed of, it's -not something I like to think about. I savour the moment. It never lasts -long enough, but for a fleeting minute I am happy. I am free, again. The -feeling of peace overwhelms me, the silence calms my mind and lets me -think once again. Am I a monster? How many lives will I sacrifice? I'm -an individual, one man, with one mind and, more importantly, one heart. -The joy quickly ebbs, like a tide that turns, like a wave that crashes in -and hangs high on the shore for just a moment until gravity sucks it -back into the sea. I can feel myself aging, I can feel time like a wind -rushing through me, pulling down every cell, like leaves dying and -falling from the branches of my tree. My skin is almost visibly sagging, -becoming heavier with every breath. I feel more like a monster now than -ever, an aging portrait of Dorian Grey, old and gnarled beyond my -youthful looks. - -

I'm whiter than the sands of Taiwan, colder than the icy plumes of -Enceladus, but I can still move like a fiery teenager
My peace is soon shattered when they bring the next twin. These -blessed moments of peace are getting shorter every time. It -seems as though I'm back here in the hospital more frequently with every -visit. Soon, I won't be leaving at all. I'll just lie on the cold metal -bed and let the doctors bring me ever more fleeting moments of peace. -This one is crying already and the sound is higher and sharper than -before. One of the side effects of de-aging is an over-sensitivity of -hearing. It seems I am suddenly inside the mouth of the child, hearing -the scream from within my own head, and it isn't even close to me yet. I -can't stand the wailing, it penetrates me and gnaws at my bones. If -there was one adage from older times which I would happily adopt it is -that children should be seen and not heard, although in my case the -child shouldn't be seen either. Maybe children just shouldn't be. Then I -wouldn't even have the option, I would have passed into the gray mist a -long time ago. - -Another moment of peace ensues when they anaesthetise the infant, -preparing it for surgery. I don't like to know the sex, although I'm -always telling myself it's a boy. I don't want to hurt little baby -girls, I'm not that much of a monster. Am I? I know that the sex isn't -important, that either way it'll last a week or two, maybe even less if -my theory on diminishing returns is accurate. The nurses always have -that same apologetic look on their faces when they treat the baby. They -look as though they are sorry. What are they sorry for? I'm the monster! They -are just doing their job. Agreed, it might not be a glamorous job, it -might feel as if they are helping to exterminate unwanted children, but they -get paid for it; they are putting food on the table for their own -children. They and their kin are still surviving. They never give me -apologetic looks, -no, the looks of scorn are all saved up for me and focused -into small blasts of toxic glances. Some people think they know it all. -Well I've been alive long enough to know that you don't get anything for -nothing; there's no such thing as a free lunch, we all pay the same price -in the end. Even if we stave it off for a year or a decade or, in my -case, a century or two. - -My name is Peter Petual. I am 245 years old and -still going strong. Last week I played my -great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, or maybe it was his -son, I don't remember. Anyway, I played one of my descendants at -squash and won. I always win. They think they can beat me because I look -old. I'm whiter than the sands of Taiwan, colder than the icy plumes of -Enceladus, but I can still move like a fiery teenager. It's the -knowledge that lets me win; I've seen every trick in the book, every -feint and play. I know what move they are going to learn next before they -even realise their current skills won't work on me. I'm a champion, and -I'll be playing for many more years. Sometimes, they accuse me of -cheating. They say that technically I should be playing two of them, playing -doubles, but it's usually an ill-conceived joke. - -At last, they -join the baby's artery to mine and, in that moment - the moment the -newborn's blood runs fresh into my old veins - joy pulsates through my -tired body. I can feel the years that I've picked up in the few minutes -I've been living on my own fall away from me in the first few seconds of -new blood. The clean, unsullied blood invigorates me, and I love it. It -feels so fundamental. I'll do it again and again. I'll drain a thousand -babies if it gives me one more day of life. I might be a monster but I'm -not going without a fight. I -will not submit. Not until I run out of babies. And this world will never run -out of unwanted babies. They aren't unwanted, I want them, I want their -blood. I want their youth. - -

Copyright © Moon Bhatt 2010 -All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] oldman.jpg - -[*ITEM] Blood and Souls - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] If this is insanity, it's insanity gone mad! - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

The black maze walls gleam, shine, she should be able to see her -reflection in their surface, she thinks. But there is something wrong -about the whole material, something particularly unnatural. Hate -thinks of black holes and the way that they absorb light, the way they -suck in everything that gets close. She takes another step forward. -The walls tower overhead. As far as she can see - black, overwhelming -walls. She traces a hand along the glassine surface, a habit she can't -help, that need to touch things, even if for a moment. Now, she -hesitates. It is hard, with no sense of give. More than any other -surface she has touched in her time in the city, the endless surfaces -she has caressed in attempts to verify her continued existence, she -has the least doubt that this surface is real. She pulls her hand -away, losing heat to that evil wall, losing a little skin as well, she -suspects, her fingers stinging a little where they touched the -surface. Or is that her imagination? - -

If you squinted -you could almost imagine that those three triangles lined up in a row -might represent something like a crown, as depicted by a child -perhaps.
Hate had been adopted as a baby, had known no other life, and her -parents had not been forthcoming with any information that gave her a -clue as to where she had come from. As far as she knew it was her -parents that had picked the name Hatred, though she had never been -able to fathom why they had picked that name of all names. It was -certainly a name that had haunted her, who would let their children -play with a girl called Hate? Other children had been cruel to her, -her response being twofold - to withdraw and have as little -as possible to do with -anyone else and to get angry and lash out at anyone who pushed -forcibly against the walls that she built around her. Her parents -hadn't helped, had given her little support, and she was often left -wondering why they had adopted a child at all. In her teens she -retreated further, into books, into fiction, into fantasy novels, she -devoured them by the dozen - borrowed them from the local -library, or bought them second-hand with the little money she could scrape -together here or there. - -Logically there were two generic explanations - she was a screaming -lunatic in a mental hospital somewhere back home or she had somehow -found one of those famous, fictional gateways between one dimension -and another. With the first being the more plausible explanation she -had spent every day here waiting for the reveal, the lucid moment in a -hospital, where it all made an appalling sense. But here she was, -years gone by, surrounded by animal spirits and demons, monsters in -the night, and a world which otherwise seemed not that much different -from her own - people had jobs, read books, listened to music, caught -the bus as it went round the city and all sorts of other nice normal, -sane activities. She didn't feel mad, she didn't feel crazed, in fact, -and she was loath to -admit this to herself at any point, if anything -she actually felt as though she had finally come home. Things had been -great, life had been interesting, for all the peculiarities of this -place, until a few nights ago. - -When she turned 21 she had had enough, she was leaving it all behind, -she was disappearing from life as part of family Philips. She planned, -had built up a reserve of cash, from Saturday jobs and paper rounds -over the years, before she had gotten on that bus to leave Glasgow -behind. She had planned to go to London. She had told no one of her -intentions, after all, who was there to tell; so she had no real sense -of making a cut when she got on that bus and left it all behind. She -was disappointed by that sense of a lack of closure, that failure to -have a tangible sense of having given someone the finger. She presumed -that someone would notice she was gone, sooner or later; perhaps even -make some token attempt to find out that she had taken a bus to -London, though she couldn't be sure anyone would make any effort at -all. Regardless of whether anyone ever did work out that she had -intended to go to London, tracked that ticket she bought, she had -fallen asleep on the bus, and instead of London she had arrived in -this strange other city, a sprawling place which was reputed to go on -forever, the city of Ascension. The creation myths she had picked up -along the way suggested that the city was everything; that outside the -city there was nothing; further, that no one had actually ever reached -the end of the city. Which would seem, of course, to contradict the -stories of the sea that she also heard. - -

Returning to her front door with a foxy girl she'd picked up on a -night out, she had discovered a sword, leaning innocently on the doorpost, for -no reason that she could determine. She had been out -clubbing, trying to distract herself from the more complex aspects of -her life, when she'd run into a group of pack girls, she had picked up -this one, and brought her home for the night, not expecting to find -this plain-looking thing in a battered sheath here waiting for her. It -was almost more of a machete than a sophisticated weapon like she -thought a sword should be, plain as plain could be, save for the three -triangles on the hilt which matched those which had been carved into -the surface of her door, presumably by whoever had left the weapon, -and in a manner that was no doubt intended to be deeply significant, -if only she had the slightest idea what it might mean. If you squinted -you could almost imagine that those three triangles lined up in a row -might represent something like a crown, as depicted by a child -perhaps. She had brought the weapon into her flat, thrown it into one -of the armchairs and gone back to the business of taking the giggling -young stray to her bed. - -Woken in the night by the sound, chilled by -the sick red light of that hideous moon, Hate had pushed the armchair -against the front door, the sword still sitting there. Then the pair -of them had clung together in bed, terrified, while they heard the -screams and hideous sounds of death come shuffling. Everyone else in -the building had been slaughtered. In the morning, the two of them -were the only survivors. - -All signs that she could find suggested that whatever had happened, -the persons responsible for Salsa's disappearance were the same as -those responsible for the darkening of certain areas of the city. -Rumour being that someone lived in the heart of corruption, that there -was a castle grown from the ground, in which evil had taken residence. - -So here she is, following the trail of Salsa's disappearance into the -darkening streets of the city, into the heart of whatever evil had -come to power here; this creeping expansion that seems to consume -another street each day. She clutches the handle of that sword, the -sheath strapped to her belt the sense of those three triangles against -the flesh of her hand somehow reassuring. - -There had been no apparent explanation as to why they hadn't been -devoured like everyone else. The police who found them there the next -morning were amazed, having waded through so many floors of carnage. -Pushing each door open carefully with their spears to reveal the -horror within. Surprised to find resistance here, to find a -traumatised Hate easing the door open in response to their calls. Hate -had looked at those triangles again, the one on the right traced out -in red, blood having run down the grain from that contact - they had -come that far and paused- why? Was it something to do with those -triangles, while everyone else counted her blessings, she wondered -what other forces were at work. Particularly when it was around the -same time that Salsa had gone missing, her best friend, the true -object, the unobtainable object, of her affections - the one she would -much rather have taken to her bed than some club girl strayed from her -pack. Gone. - -

She takes another step forward. Round a corner she comes to a square. -It would probably have been quite a nice place at some time in the -past. Blackened cafes, blackened chairs, blackened fountain and -blackened statues. The statues are of great lions, their aspect is -fearsome, and Hate would almost swear that their attention is focused -entirely upon her and her progress. She takes another step forward. -The lions, to her relief, show no reaction. Though there is a sound -behind her somewhere, something is back there, or a number of things, -moving fast, and making a lot of noise about it. Something that seems -to be headed in her direction. Hate can only be certain that this is -bad news. She starts to run, a careful trot, consciously pacing her -energy as she crosses the square, leaving it behind as she enters -another black corridor, leading round black corners, to more black -corridors - buildings that were once houses and businesses absorbed -into the monolith. She would like to feel as though she was heading -somewhere, as though she wasn't about to turn a corner and find a -fatal dead end, but she has no such assurance and can only conclude -that by keeping in motion she keeps the possibilities open. - -The sounds behind her keep getting closer and she fights against the -spike in her pulse, the natural sense of fear which threatens to -overwhelm her. She can hear scraping, and dragging sounds. The first -thing that comes to mind is that she is being pursued by zombies, -those monstrosities responsible for the attack on her building, the -undead creatures who formed nests in the city's abandoned buildings. -At this point she is probably the only thing resembling fresh meat for -some distance, most people having the sense to avoid the expanding -dark zones. If they catch her they will certainly tear her apart. She -draws her sword and starts to run faster, hoping that running and -carrying swords are compatible activities. Adrenalin starts to churn, -Hate actually smiles, the rush, the energy - she runs every day, -pounding the streets, exploring the world, ensuring that it remains a -constant, getting miles in before the start of her shift at the record -shop, but that is not like this. The street she is in splits, a wide -dead end in one direction, a narrowing alley that looks as if it might -go further. - -She makes a choice, and she crouches in the narrow corridor. Gripping -her sword. Telling herself she is ready for first contact. Though, -given that until she found this weapon she had never actually even -held a sword, she can't help but feel a little absurd. A figure -staggers into sight. A second and third are just visible behind. The -first figure stops. As Hate presumed, they are zombies. Not too -bright. It takes them a moment to work out where she has gone. -Sniffing her brains, fragments of nostrils held up, inhaling noisily. -The pus-filled orbs that take the place of eyes attempt to focus in -her direction. Once this figure was a man, a big one, now he is a -broken thing. He would still tear her head open, rip her brains out -and slap them around his face as though they were some fine delicacy. -Of course, Hate has no intention of letting that outcome arise. More -zombies come behind the first three, a couple shoving at each other -pointlessly as they try and get further ahead, one crawling, legless -thing snakes its way past the log jam the other two create. Arms -outstretched, in a manner that Hate thinks is distinctly clich�d, the -lead zombie lumbers towards her. He groans, rank breath carrying -fragments of what might once have been words in Hate's direction. She -holds her crouch steady. The blade in her hand feels right. The burn -of adrenalin is still buzzing through her. The zombie swings an arm at -her. She stands, stepping forward, driving the blade straight through -his chest in an upward sweep, slicing up and out through his neck. -Sludge spurts and falters. The zombie keeps moving, delayed reactions -and momentum know no mercy. But another couple of slashes and the -bastard goes down, though as he does the crawling zombie, grinning -obscenely through a lipless mouth, climbs up the tumbling carcass. Its -blackened nails claw at the body to gain purchase. Coiling, the thing -prepares to leap at her like some ghastly frog. One slash and the head -goes flying, the thing unbalancing in the process. The stream of the -dead keeps on coming. Hate's sword seems to pulse with an energy as -she swings recklessly, hacking body parts left and right. - -

"Blood and souls! Blood and souls for Arioch," Hate suddenly shouts, -the phrase from one of Moorcock's novels popping into her head, -grinning like a psychotic. While her weapon might not be leaching -energy from her enemies, the way that Elric's evil weapon Stormbringer -did in those novels, it does make hacking up zombie bits seem easy. -She can't help but feel she has become like a character in one of -those books that she read when she was a teenager, of how she finds -herself living in one of those books now, how she is the heroine in an -impossible situation. Hatred Philips, twenty-three years old, and -fighting for her life. At least until enough carcasses have mounted up -in that alley that it has become difficult for the zombies to get any -nearer, which she takes as her cue, to turn, and to run. Salsa is in -here somewhere, what kind of hero would she be if she fell at the -hands of the zombie horde and failed to save the woman she loves? - -

Copyright © Peter Morrison 2010 -All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] hate.jpg - -[*ITEM] From an Evening at the Cinema - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] Ahhh... the sparkling silver screen. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

They watched the faded white and grey -screen as Count Orlock staggered across the room. Having drunken Mina's -blood, he was helpless as the white unforgiving light opened from the -black cloth drapes and spread over his awkward and elongated body. As it -touched him, he vanished. Only the dying maiden on her death bed was -evidence that he had ever existed to begin with. - -Then, as Hutter held his wife's pale and fragile form, there is a scene -of the Carpathian Mountains and the lights turn on, making the screen in -front of everyone look like a dried and yellow parchment of archaic and -indecipherable symbols from another time entirely. The downtown -University showing of Nosferatu was over. - -As the students and senior citizens filed out of the room, the two men -followed quietly behind them all. - -"It's a sad thing," said the older of the two, though he physically looked -no older, "As I believe Murnau himself once said, 'If it is -not in frame, it does not exist.'" - -"Or it no longer exists," the younger of the two replied, "That says a -lot about this age." - -"Yes. It really does." - -The two walked outside into a beautiful sunset. It was mid-summer -afternoon and the sky was orange and golden. - -"They really think we look like that creature?" the younger man shook -his head. - -"They think that we look like a lot of things, my friend," the older man -stared up at the setting sun, "It's funny. Before this film was ever -created, we could always walk around in the sun. Even in Bram Stoker's -novel. We were just not as powerful." - -"Though strong enough for any mortal to think twice," the young man -swung his arms absently, "It is ridiculous what they all believe these -days." - -"That is not the greatest tragedy though." - -"Oh," the young man spared a sidelong glance at a passing young woman -and her pink healthy neck, "And what is that, old man?" - -The other man smiled wryly. Then he sighed, "The greatest tragedy is not -that mortals began to think we could die from sunlight," he told him as -they passed into the shadows of the city, "Rather, it's the fact that we -have actually begun to believe it." - -"Well," the younger one said, "At least most of us don't sparkle yet." - -The older man looked down for a few moments, and smiled despite himself, -"Yes, my friend. That is true enough." -

Copyright © Matthew Kirshenblatt 2010 All Rights Reserved - - - -[*IMAGE] cinema.jpg - -[*ITEM] Ringside - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] "If you even dream of beating me you'd better wake up and apologize." Muhammad Ali -"Every man's got to figure to get beat sometime." Joe Louis

- -[*DESCRIPTION]

"End of round four!" - -I slumped on the stool and spat out the guard. Lenny, my trainer, fussed around me with a wet sponge. - -"Keep moving kid, you gotta' keep moving. Use your speed, watch your footwork. You can take him, sure thing." - -I took a long swig of water and spat, conscious of how pink it came out. - -"Take him, Lenny? It's a bloody android, for Christ's sake. I'm getting murdered out there." - -He leaned in close, his voice a rasping whisper. - -"More human than human, right? That's the synthetic creed, yeah? Well, -all the SporTek models are based on old-school fighters and I think this -joker is mimicking Sonny Liston. Long reach, big hitter, not big on -uppercuts and such." - -I flexed arms and shoulders, eyeing my impassive opponent. - -"This helps me how, exactly?" - -Lenny licked his lips and speared some more Vaseline over my right brow. - -"Vulnerable jaw. Maybe." - -I snorted. - -"Maybe? That's the best you got?" - -"That's the best you got, kid. You're Anvil Andy, the one-shot wonder. Get him open and put him down." - -"Seconds out, round five!" - -I came out dancing, ignoring the jeers and cat-calls from the partisan -crowd. 'Sonny' was a smooth mover, all direct advances and -straightforward combination punches. We traded blows against guard with -little real damage. He was cut bad over the left eye and although I knew -it was just cosmetic there had to be - by statute - some soft spot on -his frame that would give me a KO. - -And it had to be a knock-out, and soon, as I was getting murdered out -here. Way behind on points and with the rib damage to prove it. Sonny -had a big left arm but didn't fight southpaw - unless maybe I could -tempt him into breaking his stride. I went in close with a quick flurry -so he gave ground, then dropped my right like it was giving me trouble. - -He lashed out with his left, coming off the back foot so it didn't have -his full weight behind it, but his fist was the size of a dinner plate. -I stepped into it, chin down, bringing my right up in a sweeping -uppercut. - -There was a jolt, like touching a live wire. - -"FIVE!" - -The world had suddenly shifted sideways and something seemed to be pressing against my face. - -"Get up Andy! Come on! All you have to do is get off the canvas!" - -"SIX!" - -I was face down with Lenny shouting at me from the ringside. I lifted my -right glove and hung it over the lowest rope. The background noise from -the crowd was deafening, an incomprehensible clamour. - -"SEVEN!" - -I managed to lift my torso off the canvas, pulling with my right and -pushing up with my left. My right knee up eased up almost to my waist. - -"EIGHT!" - -I dug my right toe in and pushed up, climbing the ropes, hand over hand. - -"NINE!" - -I stood, planted both feet on the canvas. Raised my gloves. Turned. - -

"That was a damn bear pit -out there and I've got crowd sweat, popcorn and God knows what in my -hair. And that was supposed to be the VIP section."
-The world spun, but I concentrated on the solid feel of the ring beneath -me. The referee jerked into my field of vision; a small, wizened man -with slicked-back blond hair. He spoke, gazing into my eyes, a hand on -my shoulder, but the words were meaningless. I slapped my gloves -together and rotated my neck. - -"I'm fine, ref. Bit shook up there but ready to continue." - -I felt his eyes scan my face and then he nodded, pulling back and to my -side, holding my right arm aloft. Crowd noise washed over me like a -tidal wave of bedlam. - -Sonny lay on the canvas in front of me, his eyes the solid blue of a systems crash. - -I remember standing there, arms held aloft, but the rest is just a blur. -There were officials, and Lenny helping me from the ring, and event -security helping us forge a passage through the jostling crowd. - -The dressing room was an oasis of calm and I sat on the treatment table -while Mutt and Jeff unlaced my gloves. Mutt and Jeff were Lenny's -assistants; two identical Beta-class androids in matching track suits. -The only way to tell them apart was that Jeff wore an Über-Brawn -baseball cap, although I suspected they occasionally swapped it over. - -The event medic gave me a clean bill of health while the Boxing -Commission flunky inspected my gloves for EMP emitters or similar gizmos -which might have floored Sonny. Lenny was sporting a large, unlit, cigar -in his mouth - one of his little rituals each time I win - and had to -keep removing it each time he spoke. He put a hot towel round my neck -and started rummaging in his bag of tricks. - -"Right, kid. Can't do anything about the surface bruising, you'll just -have to live with it. I think you got problems with your ribcage, though, -the way you struggled through the ropes. So try a little of this..." - -He applied a null-state gas injector to my torso and it felt like a finger flicked against the skin. - -"...just a little nanite repair crew. Fix you up for sure." - -"Cheers, Lenny! I'll end up more mech than the SporTek cans at this rate." - -He grinned. - -"Nah, nah, strictly limited lifespan and leaves only a carbon residue. You got-" - -There was a swell of sound as the door opened. Amanda ran across to me -and I slid from the table to meet her embrace. She buried her head in my -chest as Perry, my manager, addressed the press. - -"There you are, ladies and gentlemen, Andy 'The Anvil' Harrison. -Undefeated in twelve fights, only three of which have gone the distance. -Now, if you'd kindly let the boy have a few moments with his fiancée -we'll see you all at the press conference." - -Security guards closed the door against a barrage of flash photography -and questions while Perry turned and walked towards us. I'm a fan of -old cinema and the guy is the spitting image of Peter Lorre, right down -to the slightly indeterminate accent. Since I mentioned this, Perry had -adopted certain affectations, like the short cigarette holder he -gestured with, and was the very definition of the word 'dapper'. - -Amanda pushed herself away from me with an 'Ugh!' of revulsion. - -"You're not paying me enough for this, Perry. That was a damn bear pit -out there and I've got crowd sweat, popcorn and God knows what in my -hair. And that was supposed to be the VIP section." - -Amanda was Perry's idea at generating a little human interest. She -comes to all my fights, sitting there in tortured anguish as I get beat -up, radiant triumph when I win. Perry makes sure we have separate hotel -rooms on tour (for the Moral Majority) but with a connecting door (for -the tabloids). Not that I'm interested, though, as we have about as much -sexual chemistry as a dirty puddle. - -Perry lit his cigarette and blew smoke towards the buzzing overhead lights. - -"Your contract is for twenty fights, Mandy, my dear, but feel free to -walk out at any time. The agreement is tighter than a pre-nuptial and -just as intimate in its constraints, so you'd be expected to pay back -your retainer, plus interest." - -She glared at him and I half expected some screaming rant, but instead -she stormed over to the mini-bar and hit the vodka. My manager regarded -me with a patently insincere smile on his lips. - -"Andy, my boy! I must admit you had us going for a moment when you went -down in the third, but I can see now it was all just a ploy to increase -the dramatic tension. I'm pleased you've taken my little talk about -enhancing the performance to heart." - -I opened my mouth, but Lenny was right in there. - -"Screw you, Perry! My boy was getting hammered out there and that win -was more luck than judgement. I just can't keep patching him up and -sending him back into the ring week after week - we need some serious -down-time!" - -Mutt and Jeff sidled off to one side in response to the obvious tension but Perry was all smiling affability. - -"Your contribution is appreciated, Lenny, truly. There aren't many out -there with your skills, your expertise, your commitment. I'd be deeply -sorry should you feel unable to continue as part of this project, and it -would be extremely difficult to replace you. But not impossible. Are we -clear?" - -Lenny removed his cigar and spat the chewed-off end at Perry's feet. - -"You listen to me, shit-head. I heard all about those jokers in the -Boxing Commission wanting to change who Andy has to face down the line. -It's your pals from the SenSen and mediaCore networks twisting a few -arms, yeah? Am I right or am I right?" - -My manager's smile became little more than a thin line. - -"Nothing but gossip and idle speculation! Of course the big boys want to -enhance their product and, quite frankly, no-one expected Andy to get -this far undefeated. The whole twenty fights in twenty weeks schedule -has captured the public interest but the pay-per-view market doesn't -like a sure thing. Unfortunately that's what a match featuring The Anvil -is in danger of becoming - a one-sided contest. He's already bested -twelve heavyweights, including five of SporTek's finest, and that has -earned him no favours, let me tell you!" - -It was slightly weird, watching them get into it like that. They were -both short, slightly built men and it felt a bit like tugs fussing round -a lumbering cargo vessel. I stepped forward, feeling awkward. - -"Hey, guys..." - -Lenny ignored me. - -"So what's next, Perry? Suspending the class limitations and sending in -a super-heavyweight? You really want to see our boy get his head taken -off?" - -"Guys, really..." - -Perry ignored me. - -"That was an option, yes, but I came up with an alternative which I felt -would capture the imagination of both crowd and promoter." - -He looked at me and smiled in triumph. - -"The next opponent Andy faces will be himself." - -

I expected Lenny to spit out his cigar in disgust, but instead he stood -there for a moment, moving it from side-to-side in his mouth. - -"Yeah, yeah, that might work. Even with an identical physical match-up -Andy has learned boxing from the ground up, and that gives him a huge -advantage against any programmed opponent. If SporTek think-" - -"Über-Brawn, actually". - -Perry was inspecting the fingernails on his left hand and tried to keep his voice nonchalant, but Lenny blew up anyway. - -"Über-Brawn? Our own sponsors are in on -this? Hell, why not keep it simple and just have the boy throw a few -fights instead!" - -Perry actually had the good grace to look slightly uncomfortable. - -

"...it's all just theatre when you get down to it. We -all have our parts to play..."
"Well, that course of action has been intimated..." he saw the look on -Lenny's face and continued, just a little hurriedly, "...but of course I -refused to play ball. Look, Lenny, be realistic, U-B are under intense -pressure to make these contests more, ah, dramatic, and it's obvious -that Andy can beat SporTek in a fair fight. This was the best option I -could come up with - or would you rather see our boy face a real monster -with jacked-up reflexes and no soft-spot?" - -Lenny turned his back on Perry, motioning for Mutt and Jeff to step in -and start removing my hand wraps. I could see the tic in his cheek, a -sure sign he would take his anger out on the heavy bag later. - -"So U-B sold us out? I take it the opposition will get Andy's full -physical work-up and training video history? Jeez, Perry, anything else -you want to spring on us?" - -My manager smiled, all charm. - -"Lenny, Lenny, Lenny, it's all just theatre when you get down to it. We -all have our parts to play and-" - -"Theatre? Theatre? You step in that ring and it's the real deal, no -second chances. Every time he puts on the gloves Andy knows he could get -smashed up, or worse, so don't stand there and tell me it's all just play -acting." - -Perry kept smiling, but his eyes were like stone. - -"Lenny, look at you, you're a walking stereotype. The wise old trainer -who takes the promising kid under his wing for a shot at the title. -Andy, the contender who'll risk everything to fulfil his dream. Amanda, -the glamorous, supportive girlfriend. Even me, the shyster manager -willing to risk his fighter's well-being for a few extra bucks." - -He paused, gesturing around the dressing room. - -"This, all of this, is just a carefully manufactured image to make the product more media-friendly." - -Lenny turned and jabbed at Perry with his cigar. - -"Not in here. Not in the ring. We'll put up with all the window dressing -you want but never get in the way of the boxing or -" - -Perry held up both hands in mock surrender. - -"Lenny, Lenny, I know! We're all on the same team, really. On the plus -side if, sorry, when, Andy gets past his next opponent the Commission -have agreed to bring forward the title bout against Khan." - -Lenny frowned. - -"What happened to the whole twenty-in-twenty setup then?" - -"That was always a gimmick, Lenny, you know that. Just my way of -breaking an unknown fighter into the professional circuit. The networks -will cut in the unused venues for a share of the media rights in lieu of -cancellation penalties. Everyone stays sweet and you get to see Andy -tread the golden canvas. World heavyweight champion. Has a nice ring to -it, eh? Plus, of course, if I can get Andy to a title then I'll be able -to write my own ticket when it comes to managing other contenders." - -Nobody asked my opinion. They never do. - -I could see Lenny chewing this over and Perry took his silence as agreement. - -"Excellent! So for one night only we have the exciting prospect of seeing two Anvils in action." - -Amanda looked up from the mini-bar, her faced flushed, an empty glass swaying in her grasp. - -"I'm not doing a threesome, no way! Not unless I get exclusive rights to -all media content." She burped, frowned. "Anyway, I didn't think he was -into all that." - -"Mandy, my dear, let me explain..." - -Perry sidled over to her and Lenny turned back to me, concern haunting his eyes. - -"You take all that in, kid? You'll be facing an opponent modelled on -yourself, one that knows all your moves, all your strengths and -weaknesses." - -"Yeah, yeah, I get it, Lenny. Kind of like that mirror boxing stuff you have me do, 'cept he hits back." - -I grinned, bringing my freed fists up in a classic pose. "But I'll -have the edge, right? Like you said, I've learned boxing the -hard way. No implanted responses or easy access techniques." - -He smiled and held his palms up for me to slap in a quick combination, but his eyes stayed wary. - -"Won't be that easy, Andy, no way. You can bet your bottom dollar -SporTek will come up with some way to wangle an advantage out of -the Commission. Harder hitting maybe, or slightly faster. Something to -compensate for your natural edge." - -Perry looked up from mixing himself a vodka martini. - -"Sorry boys, maybe I didn't make myself clear. Andy won't be facing a -standard SporTek boxing android this time, that's obviously lost its -appeal." - -He popped in an olive. - -"I'm not sure exactly what they've got planned but the tag-line for the -fight is already out. Very dramatic. Catchy, in a neo-biblical way." - -Lenny and I exchanged glances. Perry whispered to Amanda and she giggled, saluting me with a toast. - -"The Anvil meets his maker." - -

Lenny stuck me in the tank and kept me there for four -days. It's designed for dermal regeneration but this time they also -stuck me with these needles and biomonitors like I was facing major -surgery. I didn't feel a thing, of course, and went from giving Lenny a -thumbs-up to groaning on the recovery pad. - -My body burned. - -Lenny covered my shoulders with a big towel and started rubbing me dry. - -"Sorry, kid, that was a bit extreme, even for someone as used to it as -you. Ran you with as much I-V fluids and diuretics as I dared, to flush -the crap out of your system. Just couldn't match the build-up of toxins -towards the end there. It'll pass, I promise, and you'll feel the -benefit of it." - -I coughed and hawked up some of the saline solution they have me floating in. It always gets up my nose, no matter what. - -"Feels like I've been run over, Lenny. What the hell you do to -me?" - -He grimaced. - -"Bit more than just toning, that's for sure. Look, try and stand, move -about a bit. The more active you are the faster you'll recover." - -I stood, but my legs were uncertain and I had to sit on the bench, -conscious of the cold plastic against my skin. I started shivering, -gagged, and was sick. Nothing much came up, just bile, but I felt a bit -better afterwards. - -Lenny brought me a high-protein smoothie and one for himself. It's all -he takes following stomach cancer a ways back, so he told me, and he put -me onto the same régime right after he became my trainer. Some days it's -like I can't remember eating anything else, and my guts have long -forgotten what real food tastes like. Made me hard and lean inside -though, and Lenny says that's good - the more my guts shrink the less -they can move if I get hit. Less movement, less damage. - -I sucked on the straw and made a face. - -"Jeez, Lenny! What's this supposed to be?" - -He peered at the label as he really should wear glasses for reading. - -"Strawberry. Maybe. Berry something at least. I didn't have time to buy -the ingredients so I bought some ready made from that wholefood deli -across the street. Anyway, Perry has you booked in for a romantic -evening meal at some swanky restaurant, so I figured you better have -something to eat beforehand." - -"With Amanda?" - -He laughed. - -"Well, you're sure as hell not my type! Not Perry's either, although he -dresses like a fag. No, it's one of those photo-calls he's so fond of, -for the media. You know the drill - the Anvil and his fianc�e share an -intimate moment ahead of his big fight." - -I swallowed some more and tried to put a name to the taste. I failed. - -"Evening meal, Lenny? Let me guess, that means a steak with all the trimmings?" - -"Yeah, yeah, I know. Don't worry though, you'll have a whole bunch of -little munchers to tackle the solids. I'll put them in that bio-drink -you're promoting." - -He took the unfinished shake from me as I tried standing again. At least -the world didn't come up to smack me in the mouth but it still felt like -I'd just run ten K. On all fours. - -"Still hurts like hell when I pass the residue though. Can't you come up -with something that just dissolves all that stuff completely?" - -He passed me a pair of shorts and I didn't fall over while putting them on. - -"Sorry, kid, but nanites can only do so much. Just be thankful it's the consistency of porridge. Now, make fists." - -He held his palms up and I jabbed. With my left. I stopped, staring at -my hands like they reminded me of something I'd forgotten, something I'd -dreamed about. - -"Lenny? What's going on?" - -He nodded and smiled, but without humour. - -"Listen up kid, if there was any other way I'd have taken it. I'd love -to blame Perry for this but it was my idea, plain and simple." - -He paused, running a hand over his mouth. - -"You're now a southpaw, Andy. Implanted response. Not permanent, I promise." - -I shied away, two steps back, my scalp tight with fear. - -"An implant? An implant? You've messed with my head? For God's sake, Lenny, I trusted you!" - -He stepped up and grabbed my forearms, his eyes like stone. -"Listen to me. We needed something. You needed something, something -wildcard, something the opposition won't expect. You're still the same -inside, really. It's just a switch, a crossover. You think right, your -body responds left. Got it?" - -I shook him off and flexed my right hand, seeing the fingers on my left respond. - -"But my punch, the big K-O, it's the wrong arm. It's all just wrong." - -He slapped me across the face, gun-shot loud in the empty room. - -"Feel the power in your left arm. Go on, try it! Trust me, kid, you -don't want to know what it took, but there's nothing left in your system -that won't pass muster with the boxing commission. Move it, feel it, -feel the extra power. " - -My reflection twisted and turned in the full length mirror as I -inspected myself. I'd never been 'crabbed' - one arm hugely -over-developed - but my left had always been the junior partner. Now it -felt like I was using my right, just it was a bit lighter, a bit -underpowered. I tried a few basic combinations, jabs, a flurry, -uppercut, rest. Lenny stood behind me, trying to sound encouraging. - -"There, kid, you see. Not so bad. In the ring, you won't hardly notice, -you'll be too focused on the other guy. Your guard and counter-punching -will be a bit off to start, but I've got a session booked in the gym for -you to practice in. Get dressed now." - -He slapped me on the shoulder and turned away while I stood there, -looking at myself in the mirror, wishing I could trade places. - -I got dressed in tracksuit and trainers and followed Lenny down the -corridor, still feeling like I was one stage removed from my body. Then -the penny dropped. - -"You've got a session booked in a gym? What's wrong with this place, you -got the decorators in or something?" - -He glanced back over his shoulder and led the way out into reception. - -"Perry's idea, kid. He thinks the place might be bugged - spy cameras -and all that high-tech crap. I think he's just blowing smoke but given -the little surprise we got planned you can't be too careful. Friend of -mine has a gym across town, so we'll have exclusive use of it today." - -There were two big guys waiting for us, all loose-fitting suits, -anti-flash contact lenses and double earpieces. Lenny just grunted and -headed out the door with our escort trailing along behind. At the kerb -were three identical black SUVs with tinted windows and we piled into -the middle one. Our little convoy drove off with an obvious camera crew -following. - -"Lenny, isn't this all a bit..." - -He grimaced. "Melodramatic? Yeah, well, partly serious and partly just play-acting -for the media. Look, kid, a couple of bookies came to Perry on the sly, -asking if the fight had been fixed. You were the clear favourite going -into this but a lot of serious money has started shifting to your -opponent, so they're getting nervous." - -I fiddled with my seatbelt as we drove through a maze of dilapidated light industrial units. -"You think some word of what SporTek's got planned has leaked out?" - -"More like inside information being used to make a fast buck. We're -talking betting syndicates here, people who don't like surprises. We -could make a lot of people unhappy when you win, and that means the -betting on the title fight will be something else. Oh, they've given -your opponent a name - 'Anton Marx'." - -"A full name, like for a regular person? Why they go and do that?" - -Lenny shrugged. -"Beats me. I checked it out and it's not even a name used by anyone on -the circuit. Maybe they're just trying to personalise the fight, make it -less like the usual match-up where you pound one of their cans into the -canvas. Look, it'll take the best part of an hour to get there, so you -rest and don't worry about the window dressing, OK?" - -So I dozed, tired despite having been unconscious for four days, until Lenny touched my shoulder. - -"We're here, kid. You wait by the car while I check everything's kosher." - -We were in an overgrown alley in the midst of a run-down residential -neighbourhood. The cars disgorged a posse of security who stood about, -scanning the windows and doorways facing us. I was bored. - -Then, it was the weirdest thing, but I swear I saw Lenny cross the end -of the alley, like he'd come out the front door and was making tracks. -Same rolling gait, same knitted cap, and I was on the point of calling -out when Lenny himself appeared at the side entrance and ushered me inside. -He hustled down the corridor, pointing as he went. - -"Right kid, you got steam room, dry sauna, plunge pool. Changing rooms -over there, gym back through here, OK? We'll just use the cushion pads -rather than wraps and I'll lace you up when you're ready. Get a move -on!" - -I swapped trainers for boots and put on helmet, -fingerless inner gloves and regular boxing gloves on top. Pushing -through the double doors into the gym I found Lenny had arranged a -sparring partner; shaven head, shorter than me by an inch or so but -heavier across the shoulders. - -"Andy, this here is Tony Poletti. Five professional fights before a -detached retina put him out of business. Still keeps in shape and we're -paying him to give you a run-through. We've paying him even more to sit -in a hotel room with babysitters until after you step into the ring for -real, so everything that happens here, stays here." - -Lenny laced up my gloves while Tony pulled on a helmet and ran a few -combinations to loosen up. Once we were all in the ring my trainer laid -down the law. - -"Right then. Fight when I say 'fight', break when I say 'break'. Despite -the helmets I don't want to see any head shots. This is all about Andy -getting used to fighting as a southpaw so you can both be as quick as -you like, but not serious. Got that?" - -We both nodded and murmured our understanding, touched gloves and stood back. - -"Right then. Fight!" - -I got nailed. - -A regular fighter can go his entire career without facing a left-handed -opponent, so the chances to develop a response are limited. A southpaw -is the exact opposite and knows how to fight match-up; lead hand against -lead hand. - -I didn't know what the hell I was doing and just floundered away, -striking at openings that weren't there for a left-handed blow. If I -took the time to translate right-into-left then the moment was gone and -I just slapped leather. Tony adjusted quickly and kept sliding away to -his left, bringing his strong right up against what - in a southpaw - -should have been my weaker hand. Of course it wasn't, so I got cocky and -concentrated on getting my left into play. - -The world blinked. - -"Break, break! I said no head shots! What did I say about no head shots?" - -Somehow I was lying flat out on the canvas, with Tony looking a bit sheepish. - -"Sorry, man, but Jeez, his guard was just static. He couldn't be more -open if his hands were taped to his sides!" - -Lenny bent over me, frowning. - -"He's right, kid, you were lousy. I just hope it was as painful to take as it was painful to watch." - -He helped me to my feet and stood there, hands on hips. - -"Looks like it's time for plan 'B'." - -I shook my head to try and clear it, like that ever does any good, and -took a couple of deep breaths. The world still seemed a bit off-balance. - -"Ah, what? What plan?" - -Lenny snapped his fingers in front of my face. - -"Listen up! Usually you dance around for a couple of rounds, staying out -of trouble until you get a feel for your opponent. Well, that ain't -gonna' fly this time, that's for sure." - -Tony added his two cents. - -"I seen you fight Mancini and you're a counterpuncher all right. Right -now your responses are about as fluid as that chair over there. You got -no chance, even against a hack like me." - -My trainer continued. - -"They're expecting clever but we're gonna' try crude instead. I want you -to come straight out and start punching like some slugger, OK? If you -need a breather then just put your head down and cover up. It won't be -pretty, and it sure as hell won't please the crowd hoping for a fancy -display of boxing between evenly matched fighters." - -He coughed and wiped his face, suddenly looking real old. - -"It might work, kid, and it's the best chance you got just now. You get -through this next fight and we'll go back to your natural style for the -title bout against Khan, I promise. You ready to continue?" - -I nodded, not really sure what to do. Most fighters can mount a flurry -of between four and eight continual punches; left-rights, with the odd -uppercut for variety. Lenny wanted me to just get in close and trade -body-blows until one fighter wilted, pretty much just a test of -endurance rather than skill. If my opponent was as mobile as me, as I -usually was, then I'd end up chasing him all over the ring. My fight -against Boom-Boom Mancini had been like that, with me doing the dancing, -and I'd witnessed how frustrating it could be. - -"OK then, fight!" - -I just marched straight at Tony who stood his ground to see what -happened. I took three on the gloves and one to the gut, but just a tap. -Then I waded in, throwing punches and trying to find some sense of -rhythm. Eight, nine, ten blows against his guard, not letting up, not -giving him a chance to strike back. Tony gave ground, trying to slide -away, trying to get a bit of separation and mount his own attack. - -"Close up! Close up! Keep in there, keep punching!" - -I really didn't need Lenny yelling at me as it was obvious this was a -do-or-die tactic. If my opponent could weather the storm I'd be -exhausted and off-balance - a three-minute round is one hell of a long -time when you're the one doing all the work. - -Eleven, twelve, thirteen blows and I started a subconscious mantra; -right-in-to-left, right-in-to-left, right-in-to-left. I lost count of -the blows, only keeping up the rhythm mattered. - -Tony's right hand dropped slightly as he covered up his lower ribs and -my left lashed out - solid contact. Just his right shoulder, but it could -easily have been his face. He grunted and turned half away from me, open -to my in-swinging right. - -"Break! Break!" - -I stepped back, breathing hard, suddenly conscious of the sweat dripping -from me. Lenny stepped up to where Tony was flexing his shoulder. - -"Well, what'd you think?" - -My sparring partner grimaced. - -"Might work. He's concentrating rather than boxing instinctively, but -that's working to your advantage. His eyes telegraph one blow, but his -fists do the opposite. Confusing as hell to start with. Add in the -unexpected southpaw and you might buy yourself a round of hesitation, -maybe two at the outside. Then your boy will get creamed." - -Lenny nodded, seemingly satisfied, but I was a bit sceptical. - -"Two rounds? Jeez, Lenny, none of my fights have gone less than three." - -"Two rounds is all you've got at that pace, kid, and that's being -generous. When you face this Marx you march straight in there and batter -him down before they get a chance to alter his responses. That's the -plan. Now go use the heavy bag to cool down." - -While I pummelled the leather Tony was whisked away by part of our -private security detail, presumably to a secure location outwith the -reach of inquiring minds. Lenny kept me on the bag for ages, alternating -with a running machine to give my upper torso a rest. Eventually he -called a halt, as it was obvious my arms felt like lead. - -"Enough for today, Andy. Either you pick up the left-right swap, or you -don't. Simple as that. Hit the showers, get dressed, and I'll meet you -in the lounge area. Sorry there's no massage but I wanted the place to -ourselves." - -I stood under the power shower for a long, long time. My days always -seemed so planned, even down to rest periods, that just taking my time -under the hot water felt like a guilty pleasure. Eventually I stepped -out, got dried and dressed, and made my way out into the shabby lounge - -a couple of beat-up sofas and a big plasma screen. - -Lenny was flicking though an old copy of 'Prize Fighter', the one with -me on the cover. It always looked strange to see me like I was a real -person and not just some dumb kid riding his luck. He held up the -magazine as I approached. - -"'Orphaned kid struggles against adversity to pursue his dream.' Brings a -tear to my eye. Or makes me want to puke, I can never remember which. -Ready?" - -I laughed, although the 'orphaned' tag always hit me in the heart. - -"Yeah, yeah, I'm ready to rumble. Got to make myself presentable ahead of my dinner date with Amanda." - -"Rather you than me, kid. She's hard as nails, that one. Anyway, I just -had Perry on the mobile. Apparently Otis Khan himself will be in the -audience to watch you fight. Now, to my way of thinking, that's the -action of a man who realises you might be a serious challenger. He wants -to take a look at you in action, before the two of you get up-close and -personal." - -He grinned. - -"Sounds like he believes you might be the real deal." - -I grinned back. - -"Lenny, I'm starting to believe that myself." - - -

The limo came for me around eight that evening; a stretch, -with SUV lead and chase cars. Hell, there were even a pair of police -motorcycle outriders, so I guess Perry had been promising tickets to -the title fight. There was the usual media tail but it's something I try -and blank out, and, anyway, the limo had tinted glass. - -We picked up Amanda outside her apartment, where she was posing for some -more snaps and signing a few autographs. I'm not entirely sure what made -her any kind of celebrity, but she now rated private security to escort -her as far as the car door. - -Once we were mobile her smile slipped like snow from a porch roof. - -"Jeez, those press are like pack animals, you have to keep throwing them -bones. I'm getting tired of stopping to adjust my stocking just so some -hack can get a candid shot. You'd think they'd get bored, but no. You -want a drink?" - -"Ah, hi, Amanda. I'll have a tonic water, thanks." - -She busied herself in the minibar, incidentally giving me a fine view of -her rear. The sight did nothing for me, something I'd always wondered -about but never had the nerve to discuss with other guys in case they -thought I was a fag. Not that guys did it for me either, it just like -the whole sex thing is a non-event as far as I'm concerned. - -Amanda sat back with a vodka martini and handed me a tonic water, with ice and lemon. It was nice she'd made the effort. - -"You're looking real good this evening, Amanda. Classy." - -She flashed me a brief smile through force of habit. - -"Thanks. Designer dress, complements of Paul Degas. Fake jewellery -though, so I guess I'll have to wait until the title fight before -someone wants a mention of me wearing their stuff. Cheers!" - -She took a generous mouthful and then put on her serious face. - -"Look, Andy, my agent says to tell you that if you lose this next fight -then I'll be dumping you, OK? Nothing personal, it's just you're not -famous enough for me to go through the whole stand-by-your-man routine. -If you eventually win the title and then lose it, that's different, -unless you blow the rematch in which case you'd be history. OK?" - -Amanda took another swallow while I considered this. - -"Yeah, I get it. Look, you don't have to do me any favours, so if you'd -rather not come out this evening I'm sure Perry could spin it some way -that doesn't put you down." - -"No, no, Andy, it's fine. Where are we going, anyway? L'Auberge? In The -Quarter? No, that's OK, it's a good place to be seen. Anyway, we need -more time together for the 'My life with the Anvil' article my agent has -been touting." - -She finished her cocktail and a look of almost genuine concern flickered across her fine features. - -"Andy, if you don't mind me asking, what will you do if you lose this next fight?" - -I shrugged, feeling uncomfortable at having to confront real life. - -"Well, I dunno, to be honest. Boxing is all I know, really. Lenny -spotted me when I was hanging about Potemkin's Gym, doing weights. I was -living in the half-way house after the orphanage, just killing time, you -know? I'd probably have ended up in the army or something like that, but -he said I already moved like a fighter and all he had to do was show me -the moves." - -The memory lifted my spirits. - -"It was great. Real hard work, but great. Twelve, fourteen hours a day. -Weights, the bag, running, then gradually sparring partners. Big guys, -tough, who knocked me on my ass more times than I care to remember. -Everyone said I was a natural, so that's what I decided I wanted to be." - -Amanda patted my leg. "Very touching. I'm sure that'll make for a great montage sequence when -they film your life story. But to answer my question?" - -"Seriously, Amanda, I've got no idea. Lenny said that I was like a blank -canvas, that I could have done just about anything. But he turned me -into a boxer and I guess that's who I am, not just what I do." - -She laughed, half in exasperation. - -"Men! Oh, we're here... You're doing it again." - -The door was opened by a uniformed flunky and I paused, half out of my -seat, caught in the flicker of flash photography. - -"What? Doing what again?" - -Amanda spoke through her fixed media smile. - -"Inside. Lets get to our table first." - -The maitre d' seated us in person; a discreet table out of sight of -the main windows. He handed out menus, the wine list and a schedule of -when the press would be allowed access for some human interest shots. We -settled in and I placed myself in his hands as regards ordering. "An -excellent choice, monsieur." He murmured, removing the superfluous -literature. I waited until he had withdrawn before turning to my date. - -"What did you mean, in the car, about me doing it again." - -She sipped another martini. - -"Every time we're out someplace, before every fight, I've seen you -scanning the crowd, as if you were looking for someone." - -I blushed, took a sip of water. - -"It's nothing, really. Just your imagination." - -"Andy, I'm a blonde, I'm not supposed to have an imagination. Try again." - -It felt like I was in a spotlight. I cleared my throat, playing with a napkin. - -"It's just... I remember my mother. Just flashes, images, from when I -was real young. She was a vet or dental nurse or something, mostly in a -white coat. She didn't die or anything. I got Lenny to check and she -placed me in the orphanage when I was, like, three or four." - -Amanda squeezed my hand, an entirely spontaneous gesture that threw me completely. - -"Jesus, Andy, what a bitch! Well, that explains a lot. I described your -behaviour to my therapist and he said your emotional withdrawal was a -classic symptom of childhood trauma." - -I blinked, pulled my hand away. - -"You did what?" - -"Look, Andy, that first night together when you showed zero interest in -me, well, what was I to think? You really undermined my sense of -self-worth. Especially so after you blanked Jon." - -"Jon?" - -She smiled. - -"Perry's personal assistant? Slim, athletic body, big doe eyes? After I -told Perry you weren't interested he had Jon cozy up to you it case you -went that way instead. Seriously, you didn't notice? Actually I can -believe that. So, what, you're looking for your mother in the crowd? -After all these years? Talk about a TV movie moment!" - -I was in danger of shredding the linen napkin and threw it on the table. - -"Look, Amanda, just forget it, OK? I'm sorry I ever mentioned it... -Look, you're right, I know. It's just-" - -I was talking to the hand and shut up, so that we sat in silence while -they brought our starters. I stared at my food, knowing it wasn't the -only thing I found hard to swallow. - -

The day before a fight is pretty much a non-event as far -as Lenny and me are concerned. Just a little light road work to keep the -muscles moving, but no sparring or anything that might result in an -accidental injury. This time, though, we were pretty much besieged by -the media, so any outdoors running would have required a posse of -security to clear the way. Lenny just muttered under his breath and -yanked off his bicycle clips in frustration. So he put me on the -treadmill for a bit, plus some back-pedalling exercises to keep -up appearances, then it was just the steam room and a massage. - -I had hours to idle away before bed, which is why I developed this thing -about watching old movies. Real old, black-and-white old, where the hero -generally wins through in the end and gets the girl. If not films, then -video of my opponent in action, in case anything last minute comes to -mind about his style and moves. Obviously that didn't apply this time -round so it was a light supper and early to bed. - -I always sleep real sound before a fight, and I've come to suspect that -Lenny slips me something to make sure I don't have a restless night. -Whatever. Mid-morning they came and ferried us over to the New Oasis, -the casino/hotel complex which was tonight's venue. They gave us a nice -suite, but I was bored to tears. Calm, though. I'm always calm before a -fight, although I know some fighters get real restless. Lenny just sat -and read a book while I watched TV. - -The lack of a pre-match press conference got some attention. Apparently -Khan's management didn't consider me 'a serious opponent, worthy of -media attention', which made me smile. These face-to-face encounters are -generally just so you diss the other fighter, make it seem that bit more -personal, but it's all just hype. When you face each other in the ring -it can't get more personal than that. - -Time went by. It always does. - -They came for me in a group; event security, boxing commission -officials, Perry with some media hacks in tow. It was just a babble of -noise and activity with me in the centre, the eye of the storm, as I -went downstairs and across to the dressing room. - -Mutt and Jeff helped me get ready and Lenny was murmuring a string of -last minute advice and encouragement but it was all happening to someone -else. Even when Perry ushered Amanda in for the obligatory pre-fight -kiss, on camera, it was like I was watching a re-run of my fight -history. - -I was concentrating on my opponent, like I was trying to reach out and -connect with him. When it comes down to it there's just you and him, and -nothing else matters. - -"Andy, it's time." - -Lenny, looking into my eyes, his hand on my forearm. The real world had -returned. I smiled, nodded, and we took our place in the procession to -ringside. The venue was big, bigger than anything I'd fought in before, -and ablaze with flash photography. The crowd noise was mostly cheers and -encouragement, which was a first as well, but I concentrated on Lenny's -voice behind me -'Just keep walking, kid, eyes down, dignified. Just keep -walking...' It's his little mantra, something we've always shared. - -Up and into the ring, sitting on my stool, a towel round my shoulders. -The MC stepped up with a radio mike in his hand, giving the pre-fight -spiel I try and tune out while waiting for my name. - -"...in the blue corner, weighing..." - -That was me - top billing. I'd never had top billing before. It made me feel� hungry. - -"...Andy, 'The Anvil', Harrison!" - -Lenny whipped the towel away and I stood, both arms raised, to -acknowledge the crowd. I could barely see outside the lights but I knew -that Amanda would be waving frantically and blowing kisses, so I waved -back in the direction of the VIP area. - -"And in the red corner, from Toulon, France..." - -Man, they were really laying it on thick for this can. My opponent was -standing with his back to me, wearing a dressing gown with the hood up. -He even had what looked like a real trainer fussing over him, plus a big -black guy in a suit giving him some last minute instructions. Like it -would matter. - -"...heavyweight champion of the French Foreign Legion..." - -What? - -"...An-ton Marx!" - -He shrugged off the dressing gown and turned, one arm aloft. - -It was me. - -The MC bugged out and the ref waved us forward into the middle of the -ring. He launched into his 'I want a good, clean, fight' routine but I -barely heard him. - -Anton Marx was me; same hair, same eyes, same physique, same old scars. -Differences though - a couple of scars I didn't have and he looked a bit -older round the eyes. I guessed they'd tried to customise him a bit and -maybe that's how old I should look if it wasn't for all the dermal regen -work I've had. - -"...and come out fighting." - -We touched gloves and he winked, beating me to it by a fraction. I -turned back to my corner, smiling to myself. If they'd gone to the -trouble of replicating even my minor gestures then I knew exactly what -to expect. - -Usually you go back to your corner, get the gum shield in place, and -tune out whatever final advice and/or encouragement your trainer has to -offer. There's a slight pause while the girl parades around the ring with -the round number board, and then the bell goes. I was ready. Lenny -nodded, satisfied. - -Then I stepped through the looking glass. - -A small group appeared at our corner, flanked by event security; three -guys and a woman, all in suits. Lenny glanced in the direction I was -looking and his shoulders sagged. - -"Ah, goddammit, not now! They promised this wouldn't happen." - -One of the men was wearing a boxing commission sash and he motioned to -the timekeeper, who put his hammer down. The steps were still in place -and the woman came up to ring level, motioning me closer so she could -make herself heard over the crowd noise as the obvious delay wasn't -going down well. - -She was a tall woman, slender, mid forties maybe, with shoulder length -dark hair and darker eyes. She seemed to take a moment to compose -herself and when she spoke there was a slight tremor in her voice. - -"Andrew, I know how inappropriate this is, but your opponent will no -doubt try and distract you during the fight so I decided to tell you -myself." - -The woman paused, smiled a hesitant smile - and something about that, -that smile, sparked a flash of memory. I felt like the ground was -opening up beneath me and could only stand and stare at her, speechless. - -"I just wanted you to know, Andrew, how proud I am - how proud we all -are - of what you've achieved so far. Whatever happens this evening." - -She turned to Lenny, who was standing there, looking as sick as a dog. - -"And you're, what, a Lenny?" - -He nodded, almost curtsied. - -"Ma'am." - -"Even for an Alpha this has been a spectacular achievement, far -exceeding anything the Tabula Rasa team anticipated. I know that on -certain levels this is meaningless, but you have our thanks for turning -Andrew into the fighter he is today." - -She turned back to me and hesitated, her eyes wet. - -"I held you in my arms six years ago, when you first came out of the -tank. Just an unthinking mass of meat, but I could tell, even then, that -you were perfect. You have no genetic flaws, Andrew, none - our finest -creation. I just had to wish you good luck... my son." - -The woman stepped down and took my world with her. The crowd was baying -for action and there were only moments before the bell, but I just stood -there, arms by my sides, lost. - -Lenny didn't bother slapping me or anything so obvious; he just rubbed -down my face with the towel while rabbiting away soto voce. - -"Forget her, kid, forget me, forget your past - 'cos you ain't got one. -Just the last six years, everything else is memory implants. But you got -a future. You can stand and fight, or I can throw in the towel and we -walk away. Maybe I made you a boxer, Andy, but you're your own man. Get -it? Whatever happens now is your choice, your decision - I guess it's -what they call 'free will'." - -I looked at him like he was some weird example of alien life. - -"Lenny? What are-" - -"Yeah, yeah, I'm a can. An Alpha. Just like Mutt and Jeff but a ways -smarter. You though, you really are more human than human, and that guy -over there? I guess he's the genetic template they based you on. A real -flesh-and-blood fighter. Hell, two flesh-and-blood fighters, in an -old-school boxing match. It doesn't get more real than that." - -He poked me in the chest, bringing me back to the here and now. Lenny -slipped through the ropes while Mutt or Jeff removed the stool. My -trainer hung there a moment, smiling. - -"Andy, it's not just your future." - -"Seconds out. Round one!" - -The bell rang. The crowd roared. I raised my gloves. - -Time to face myself. - -

Copyright © Martin Clark 2010 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] boxer.jpg - -[*ITEM] How Manuel Left the Mire - -[*AUTHOR] James Branch Cabell - -[*BLURB] Cabell was a prolific American fantasy author, whose works most -closely resemble Jack Vance's more recent novels such as Lyonesse. -This is an excerpt from Figures of Earth. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

(Many of Cabell's books are available from gutenberg.org. This extract -is sourced from there. Cabell (1879-1958) was an interesting character. At one point -in his life, he was expelled from college for homosexuality and it is also rumoured that -Cabell murdered his mother's lover in 1901.) - -

They of Poictesme narrate that in the old days when miracles were as -common as fruit pies, young Manuel was a swineherd, living modestly in -attendance upon the miller's pigs. They tell also that Manuel was -content enough: he knew not of the fate which was reserved for him. - -Meanwhile in all the environs of Rathgor, and in the thatched villages -of Lower Targamon, he was well liked: and when the young people gathered -in the evening to drink brandy and eat nuts and gingerbread, nobody -danced more merrily than Squinting Manuel. He had a quiet way with the -girls, and with the men a way of solemn, blinking simplicity which -caused the more hasty in judgment to consider him a fool. Then, too, -young Manuel was very often detected smiling sleepily over nothing, and -his gravest care in life appeared to be that figure which Manuel had -made out of marsh clay from the pool of Haranton. - -This figure he was continually reshaping and realtering. The figure -stood upon the margin of the pool; and near by were two stones overgrown -with moss, and supporting a cross of old worm-eaten wood, which -commemorated what had been done there. - -One day, toward autumn, as Manuel was sitting in this place, and looking -into the deep still water, a stranger came, and he wore a fierce long -sword that interfered deplorably with his walking. - -"Now I wonder what it is you find in that dark pool to keep you staring -so?" the stranger asked, first of all. - -"I do not very certainly know," replied Manuel "but mistily I seem to -see drowned there the loves and the desires and the adventures I had -when I wore another body than this. For the water of Haranton, I must -tell you, is not like the water of other fountains, and curious dreams -engender in this pool." - -"I speak no ill against oneirologya, although broad noon is hardly the -best time for its practise," declared the snub-nosed stranger. "But what -is that thing?" he asked, pointing. - -"It is the figure of a man, which I have modeled and re-modeled, sir, -but cannot seem to get exactly to my liking. So it is necessary that I -keep laboring at it until the figure is to my thinking and my desire." - -"But, Manuel, what need is there for you to model it at all?" - -"Because my mother, sir, was always very anxious for me to make a figure -in the world, and when she lay a-dying I promised her that I would do -so, and then she put a geas upon me to do it." - -"Ah, to be sure! but are you certain it was this kind of figure she -meant?" - -"Yes, for I have often heard her say that, when I grew up, she wanted me -to make myself a splendid and admirable young man in every respect. So -it is necessary that I make the figure of a young man, for my mother was -not of these parts, but a woman of Ath Cliath, and so she put a geas -upon me--" - -"Yes, yes, you had mentioned this geas, and I am wondering what sort of -a something is this geas." - -"It is what you might call a bond or an obligation, sir, only it is of -the particularly strong and unreasonable and affirmative and secret sort -which the Virbolg use." - -

The stranger now looked from the figure to Manuel, and the stranger -deliberated the question (which later was to puzzle so many people) if -any human being could be as simple as Manuel appeared. Manuel at twenty -was not yet the burly giant he became. But already he was a gigantic and -florid person, so tall that the heads of few men reached to his -shoulder; a person of handsome exterior, high featured and blond, having -a narrow small head, and vivid light blue eyes, and the chest of a -stallion; a person whose left eyebrow had an odd oblique droop, so that -the stupendous boy at his simplest appeared to be winking the -information that he was in jest. - -All in all, the stranger found this young swineherd ambiguous; and there -was another curious thing too which the stranger noticed about Manuel. - -"Is it on account of this geas," asked the stranger, "that a great lock -has been sheared away from your yellow hair?" - -In an instant Manuel's face became dark and wary. "No," he said, "that -has nothing to do with my geas, and we must not talk about that" - -"Now you are a queer lad to be having such an obligation upon your head, -and to be having well-nigh half the hair cut away from your head, and to -be having inside your head such notions. And while small harm has ever -come from humoring one's mother, yet I wonder at you, Manuel, that you -should sit here sleeping in the sunlight among your pigs, and be giving -your young time to improbable sculpture and stagnant water, when there -is such a fine adventure awaiting you, and when the Norns are -foretelling such high things about you as they spin the thread of your -living." - -"Hah, glory be to God, friend, but what is this adventure?" - -"The adventure is that the Count of Arnaye's daughter yonder has been -carried off by a magician, and that the high Count Demetrios offers much -wealth and broad lands, and his daughter's hand in marriage, too, to the -lad that will fetch back this lovely girl." - -"I have heard talk of this in the kitchen of Arnaye, where I sometimes -sell them a pig. But what are such matters to a swineherd?" - -"My lad, you are to-day a swineherd drowsing in the sun, as yesterday -you were a baby squalling in the cradle, but to-morrow you will be -neither of these if there by any truth whatever in the talking of the -Norns as they gossip at the foot of their ash-tree beside the door of -the Sylan's House." - -Manuel appeared to accept the inevitable. He bowed his brightly colored -high head, saying gravely: "All honor be to Urdhr and Verdandi and -Skuld! If I am decreed to be the champion that is to rescue the Count of -Arnaye's daughter, it is ill arguing with the Norns. Come, tell me now, -how do you call this doomed magician, and how does one get to him to -sever his wicked head from his foul body?" - -"Men speak of him as Miramon Lluagor, lord of the nine kinds of sleep -and prince of the seven madnesses. He lives in mythic splendor at the -top of the gray mountain called Vraidex, where he contrives all manner -of illusions, and, in particular, designs the dreams of men." - -"Yes, in the kitchen of Arnaye, also, such was the report concerning -this Miramon: and not a person in the kitchen denied that this Miramon -is an ugly customer." - -"He is the most subtle of magicians. None can withstand him, and nobody -can pass the terrible serpentine designs which Miramon has set to guard -the gray scarps of Vraidex, unless one carries the more terrible sword -Flamberge, which I have here in its blue scabbard." - -"Why, then, it is you who must rescue the Count's daughter." - -"No, that would not do at all: for there is in the life of a champion -too much of turmoil and of buffetings and murderings to suit me, who am -a peace-loving person. Besides, to the champion who rescues the Lady -Gis�le will be given her hand in marriage, and as I have a wife, I know -that to have two wives would lead to twice too much dissension to suit -me, who am a peace-loving person. So I think it is you who had better -take the sword and the adventure." - -"Well," Manuel said, "much wealth and broad lands and a lovely wife are -finer things to ward than a parcel of pigs." - -

So Manuel girded on the charmed scabbard, and with the charmed sword he -sadly demolished the clay figure he could not get quite right. Then -Manuel sheathed Flamberge, and Manuel cried farewell to the pigs. - -"I shall not ever return to you, my pigs, because, at worst, to die -valorously is better than to sleep out one's youth in the sun. A man has -but one life. It is his all. Therefore I now depart from you, my pigs, -to win me a fine wife and much wealth and leisure wherein to discharge -my geas. And when my geas is lifted I shall not come back to you, my -pigs, but I shall travel everywhither, and into the last limits of -earth, so that I may see the ends of this world and may judge them while -my life endures. For after that, they say, I judge not, but am judged: -and a man whose life has gone out of him, my pigs, is not even good -bacon." - -"So much rhetoric for the pigs," says the stranger, "is well enough, and -likely to please them. But come, is there not some girl or another to -whom you should be saying good-bye with other things than words?" - -"No, at first I thought I would also bid farewell to Suskind, who is -sometimes friendly with me in the twilight wood, but upon reflection it -seems better not to. For Suskind would probably weep, and exact promises -of eternal fidelity, and otherwise dampen the ardor with which I look -toward to-morrow and the winning of the wealthy Count of Arnaye's lovely -daughter." - -"Now, to be sure, you are a queer cool candid fellow, you young Manuel, -who will go far, whether for good or evil!" - -"I do not know about good or evil. But I am Manuel, and I shall follow -after my own thinking and my own desires." - -"And certainly it is no less queer you should be saying that: for, as -everybody knows, that used to be the favorite byword of your namesake -the famous Count Manuel who is so newly dead in Poictesme yonder." - -At that the young swineherd nodded, gravely. "I must accept the omen, -sir. For, as I interpret it, my great namesake has courteously made way -for me, in order that I may go far beyond him." - -Then Manuel cried farewell and thanks to the mild-mannered, snub-nosed -stranger, and Manuel left the miller's pigs to their own devices by the -pool of Haranton, and Manuel marched away in his rags to meet a fate -that was long talked about. - -[*IMAGE] manuel.jpg - - -[*ITEM] An Entirely Self-serving Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Mythaxis goes from strength to strength - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Since the last issue, Mythaxis has received -more that 2500 unique visitors, each of whom visited the site at least twice -on average. - -Our profile on the main search engines is also widening to around 2000. Some -of these are, regrettably, due to a casino spamming hack that was launched on the old -Mythaxis forum. But, hey, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? - -The -Mythaxis Blog and Master Index. is also proving popular, visitor numbers -being swollen by the recent review of William Gibson's Zero History. - -Though a few of the writers in Mythaxis have long writing experience, it -remains a showcase for sf and fantasy writing talent. Two of our younger -contributors have had their stories picked up and published elsewhere. - -We have six new stories in this edition, together with one very old one. -[*IMAGE] themall.jpg - - -[FINISH] - - - Ed. - - Ed. - -

- -
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- - - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue8.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue8.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index ce0ac152..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue8.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2341 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 8 - February 2011 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Unusually, I am starting this issue with my editorial. -This is because I need to prepare the reader for the feast of delights -in issue 8 of Mythaxis. - -Mythaxis continues to expand its readership without resort to cheap -tricks and vampire movie reviews. We do not publish to a deadline, and -can afford to wait until the right stories come along, which they have -done in this issue once again. - -In particular, Les Sklaroff, lifelong writer of very short fiction, has -supplied us with two unlikely tales, "Conspiracy Theory" and "Spawn" and -he promises more delights in our next issue. - -Martin Clark unleashes another excellent story - "The Great Divide" - a -thriller within a fantasy within a mystery. - -This issue's featured science fiction author of old is Lester Linesmith. -There is an 'original' story from Linesmith together with an incisive -biography of this pillar of the pulp era by Liam Baldwin. Liam's movie -blog was recently highlighted by BBC Radio 4's Film programme. (He -specialises in what you might call B-movies, or C-movies, if there were -such a category). - -"The Prophets Speak", from Andrew Leon Hudson, carries a clever idea to an -ingenious extreme. - -The chilling "Outpatients", from Jonathan Joseph, completes this issue. -You will not readily forget the pictures he leaves in your minds. - -And where would we be without a cartoon from Liam Baldwin? Answers on a -postcard, please.

- - - - -[*ITEM] Spawn - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Please don't tell anyone the punchline. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"By the headbone of Quelg," raged Mudhurler, "No spawn -of this mire will be refused Instruction. Which of you approached the -Node?" - -Furling my tertiary sensors I boldly slid forward. "I did, your -Frenziedness. I am Stonescatterer, eggfellow of Clutchpod, Sidler, -Weedseeker and Highhoot." I spat politely towards their respective -basal fins as I gave their names. - -Mudhurler acknowledged them with a -surly puckering.. "And did you make proper obeisance to the Nodekeeper, young eggling?" - -"Most assuredly. Levelling my tongue at the horizon I slunk along the -Nodal Path, following the concealed pattern of reversible primes, all -permissible sensors extended, remembering to make the five gyrations -which mimic the motion of the setting moons." - -"No less than custom requires," growled Mudhurler. "Yet you were denied -access, I'm told?" There was an uneasy murmuring among the gathered -onlookers. Mudhurler shrank to his densest configuration, swivelled -slowly, voiding an unsavoury admonitory pulse. The murmuring abruptly -ceased. - -"Sadly so, O Agitated One." - -Reconfiguring, he shuffled close to me. "Tell me, eggling, what were the Nodekeeper's exact words?" - -Curling my topmost cilia in embarrassment, I quietly repeated what the -Nodekeeper had told me. Mudhurler became truly infuriated. His -mouthsac bubbled, several headbulbs flushed through permutations of -grey, and a violent mottling spread to the tips of his fins. For a time -he bulged and thrashed uncontrollably, and we all slithered to a safer -distance until his fury had subsided. Eventually he simply dismissed -the entire gathering with an exasperated retch and a peremptory flick of -his tails. - -

Afterwards, back in the comfortably dank seclusion of our matted -homepod, there was inevitably a clamorous demand to know what it was the -Nodekeeper had said. I prevaricated. I feigned loss of memory -resulting from Mudhurler's spectacular fit of wrath. I tried to -distract them with a recitation of Mistsucker's Theorem, normally a -guaranteed soporific. Futile efforts; they were too excited, too eager -to learn, as was only to be expected. I realised that I would be -granted no rest until their curiosity was satisfied, so in the end, -reluctantly, I had to tell them. But oh, the impudence of eggfellows! -They laughed. By the headbone of Quelg, they laughed! -

-© L J Sklaroff 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] spawn.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Great Divide - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB]Needless to say, the Mounties don't always get their man. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It wasn't a survivable explosion. - -I kept well within the tree line, in case this hadn't been an accident -and there was someone out there, viewing their handiwork. Even from my -limited vantage point it was obvious that the underground petrol tank -had gone off like a bomb, levelling Bob's Food & Fuel. The diesel tank -was still burning though, sending up a thick column of smoke into the -wintry sky, like some latter day funeral pyre. I'd half expected there -to be crows circling in the early morning sky, waiting for the flames to -die down, but I guess they didn't like their meat that well done. -British Columbia looked cold, empty and uninviting. - -So much for the anonymity of witness protection. - -

I figure a small -incendiary in the last fuel delivery, pumped straight into the tank. -Probably on a long timer, a real hands-off operation.
Hollis and -Barnes came walking up the slope -towards me, leaving no -footprints in the fresh snow. They were semi-transparent until close up, -when they kind of slid into focus, crunching to a halt in front of me. - -There was a moment's embarrassed silence before Barnes spoke. "Well, -this is a real pain in the butt, eh? At least you're still in one piece -though." - -I gave him what I hoped was a sympathetic smile. "Yeah, well, not much I -can say, given the circumstances. Really tough break, given you only had -a few days before I was left to my own devices. Ah, any idea what -happened?" - -Barnes stroked his chin. "There was an explosion, about three a.m. The-" - -"Two explosions." Hollis cut in. "Both tanks, I figure. The whole place -just got swept away." - -I frowned. "Deliberate then. How do you think it was done?" - -The two Mounties exchanged glances. Hollis shrugged. "No way anyone -could have gotten close enough to plant something without one of us -noticing. I mean, it's not like we were ever that busy. I figure a small -incendiary in the last fuel delivery, pumped straight into the tank. -Probably on a long timer, a real hands-off operation. You were due back -hours ago, so the delay saved your life." - -I nodded, distracted. "Yeah, I had some, ah, personal business in Edge -City after my dental appointment." - -Barnes grinned. "You mean the masseuse in Portland Street, above the -Hanoi Barbers?" - -I cleared my throat, feeling my face go red, but Hollis saved me any -further embarrassment. - -"It's no biggie, we've always known about your visits to Nancy. Stuck -out here you weren't likely to meet anyone socially, and that's a fact. -Did you really think that Anderson wouldn't keep tabs on you?" He -frowned, "Where is Anderson, anyway?" - -"You've been bleeding," Barnes cut in, "a scalp wound, right side. It's -been tended to. I can see a Band-Aid under your cap." - -I raised my hand but felt nothing through the glove, although my head -did smart when prodded. The mention of my escort made me look round. -"Anderson? I don't know. I'm not sure. He must have stayed with the car -when we saw the smoke and I came up here to take a look." - -Both men drew their firearms on reflex, a futile gesture which I didn't -comment on. Hollis kept his voice level, with only a little tension -showing through the self-control. - -"No, that doesn't sound right. At the first sign of trouble Anderson -would have gotten you well away, let alone send you up here to -investigate. Don't you remember what happened?" - -I frowned, realising the immediate past was a blur. All I could grasp -were brief images, like some esoteric trailer for the film version of my -day out. "We rear-ended someone, a pickup truck, at the lights, on our -way back. I banged my head. No seatbelt. I got cleaned up someplace, the -rest room at the bus station, maybe. After that it's all a bit hazy." - -"You could be concussed. As soon as the emergency services get here you -should be hospitalised and checked out in case of cranial bleeding. I'm -surprised they're not here already, that smoke must be visible for -miles." - -"Still doesn't explain what happened to Anderson." Barnes had an edge to -his voice, almost an accusatory tone. - -"Look, guys, sorry. I simply don't know. Maybe he spotted someone -following us and stashed me here, then took off to act as a decoy." - -That sounded weak, even to me. Luckily at that point the faint sound of -an approaching siren reached us, heading off any further speculation. -Barnes looked down towards the road, keeping behind what sparse cover -the pine trees afforded. - -"RCMP out of Mountain Gap. Probably. I'd stay put until either the fire -service or an ambulance shows up. Preferably the fire service as it's -harder to fake. Still, it looks like you're on your way out of here." - -There was an awkward silence until Hollis cleared his throat. "So, what -happens to us now?" - -I resisted the impulse to shrug. "Sorry, guys, but that's the kind of -thing you ask a priest. I was able to bring you back, but it's only -temporary. I don't know where you go from here. I've heard of people -being brought back two, three, times, but what you get is less and less, -ah, coherent. It's a kind of psychic Alzheimer's and I've no idea if it -affects you once you do, ah, pass over." - -Barnes put away his gun and stretched. "You ready, Hollis? I've never -been one for long goodbyes." - -Hollis nodded but remained silent, thin-lipped. We shook hands and I -stepped back, letting them go. Both men became transparent, -indistinct, and were gone. Gone like the fading memory of a dream, -but one that left footprints in front of me. - -I shivered and suddenly felt hungry, as the concentration required to -summon the dead burns me out like heavy exercise. Some of those I've -brought back cling to the moment, desperate for whatever extra time I -can offer, and cutting them loose tears at my very soul. At least when -I'm dealing with the police they generally have an underlying -realisation of how badly things can turn out. Not fatalistic, exactly, -more a grim acceptance that the chance of violent death goes with the -territory, and that's enough to make the transition a good deal easier. - -It started to snow - large, lazy flakes that drifted like blossom in the -still air. One landed on my upturned face and stung for a moment, then -faded like a lost soul. - -

I waited until all the emergency services had arrived -before leaving the trees and floundering down the slope. The snow was -knee deep in places and my legs were chilled long before I reached the -road. At least I recognised one of the Mounties watching my approach; -big Pete Frobisher, a regular at Bob's as it was one of the few places -on this road you could get a cup of coffee after hours. Although I'd -owned the place less than a month you make friends quick up here, or not -at all. - -As I struggled up the gravel bank he held out his hand. "Don! Hell of a -thing, eh? What happened here?" - -I'd been chewing over what to say and decided to write Anderson out of -the scenario. I couldn't account for his absence and didn't think he'd -have spent the night nearby only to hang back now. "Damned if I know, -Pete. Something woke me around three and when I went out back there was -a bear nosing around. Great big beast, raking through the trash. Anyway, -you know how I'm still taken by the novelty of life out here so I just -hunkered down to watch it a while. Next thing I know its like a bomb -went off. Huge blast, the buildings went down like a house of cards. I -figured it was the underground gasoline tank, but I didn't fancy getting -close enough to check it out." - -"Yeah, that's what it looks like. Electrical fault maybe, if the pumps -had been left on. Look, who else was here? The fire department are all -for letting the diesel tank burn itself out, as there's no risk to life -or property. We can't get near the site just now, but if there are -bodies in the debris..." - -He trailed off and I put on my resigned voice. "Yeah, Pete, I'm afraid -so. Bill Anderson is away in Edge City but his two friends, Ray Hollis -and Todd Barnes, were still staying with us. I don't see how they could -have survived." - -"Ray Hollis? I knew an officer Ray Hollis some years back, but there you -go." He scratched his chin. "Hell of a thing, hell of a thing. We'll -need contact details, next of kin, whatever information you have -concerning the deceased." - -"Can't be of much use, Pete. Like I said, they were Bill's friends, just -here to help us get up and running." - -Frobisher looked over the spread of smashed and smouldering timbers. -"You were damn lucky, now that's a fact. Not getting caught in the blast -and then surviving out here all night, given as how you're not dressed -for it." - -I caught the questioning tone in his voice and decided to head off that -part of the investigation, or at least buy some time. Turning, I pointed -back up at the ridge. "There's an old cabin up there, a ways back from -the tree line. Still weather tight, so I laid up there until you dragged -your sorry ass out of bed." - -He followed my gesture and frowned. "Can't say as how I noticed any wood -smoke." - -"It's not exactly equipped as a rescue station, Don, and I had nothing -to light a fire with. Couple of old blankets and my own company is all I -had." - -He hesitated for a moment and then his stance relaxed. "Right then, you -go get checked out and I'll have the fire department start dampening -things down. There'll be an accident investigator along presently and I -guess he'll want to talk to you. And Bill, when he gets back. You'll be -staying local, I take it, until things get sorted out?" - -"Ah, yeah, yeah. I expect we'll try the inn back in Mountain Gap." - -"Margaret's? Brave man." He turned to go and then hesitated. -"Insurance?" - -"What? Sorry?" I tried to appear flustered, caught unawares, but I knew -exactly where the conversation was going. Bob's had never been much of a -money spinner and unlikely to make us rich, so arson had to be a -consideration. "Well, we have a small safe, if it survived in one piece, -and all the documents are in that. Bill handled that side of things, so -I couldn't even tell you who the policy was with. Sorry" - -Frobisher nodded, more to himself than me. "Not something to worry about -just now, Don. You go see to yourself and we'll talk later, when your -partner gets back." - -I evaded his contemplative gaze and sought out the ambulance crew, who -supplied me with dry trousers and a pair of over-large boots to be going -on with. I'd barely sipped the obligatory cup of coffee when Frobisher -and another officer came over, their body language tense and formal. -Pete sounded well pissed off. - -"Mr Wylie. I've been instructed to place you in protective custody. You -are to be transported immediately to the RCMP station in Edge City. -Officer Rogers will drive you there. Apparently they even considered -having you airlifted out, but there's a weather front moving in and your -safety is of paramount importance. Before you go, is there anything you -wish to add concerning recent events?" - -I guessed my name, or at least my current identity, had caught the -attention of someone in higher authority and they'd decided to spirit me -away. The big no-no in witness protection is ever admitting you're part -of it, even to local law enforcement. Pete Frobisher was a decent guy -and I disliked lying to his face, but I stuck with 'bewildered -innocence' as a defence mechanism. - -"I don't know what to say, Pete, honestly. Maybe Bill Anderson has -something to do with this, although I can't see how. I must have friends -in high places, eh?" - -I tried a half-smile in an effort to lighten the atmosphere but no one -returned it. Pete nodded to Officer Rogers who took up position behind -me. - -"You'll be required to make a formal statement later. Good day to you, -sir." - -We semi-marched over to the car and Rogers put me in back - I didn't -even rate the informality of riding shotgun. As we pulled out I saw that -the bus to Mountain Gap had stopped and a few passengers had got down to -chat with the firemen. One sallow-faced onlooker stood out, if only -because he was wearing a suit amidst uniforms and winter clothing. - -Vigo Hanesh, a man I knew to be dead. Because I'd killed him. - -I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and when I looked again Hanesh was gone. I -realised how tired I was, having been up all night, and relaxed. I'm -pretty much the poster boy for port-traumatic stress disorder, so -hallucinations are part and parcel of the recovery process. The only -thing that stood out was the normality of it all, it really had looked -like Hanesh standing there, gawping, not even gazing in my direction. -Satisfied I wasn't really being haunted, I sat back and tried to let -time pass. - -The road meandered either side of the arrow-straight railway track which -led to Edge City, and I kept an eye out for Anderson's car as we -travelled. The gap in my memory stubbornly refused to yield any answers, -not that I was concentrating too hard. I have the kind of imagination -which will start to fill in the gaps if pushed, and I didn't want a -concocted, though plausible, scenario to block reality when it decided -to put in an appearance. - -Bill's disappearance really bothered me, though, as he wasn't the type -to just bug out like that - especially if two brother officers had just -gone up in flames. Why he'd left me behind remained a mystery, and I'd -discounted the possibility he was in some way connected with the -explosion. - -The miles passed, snow continued to fall. - -

Edge City - a fair sized settlement but not exactly what -you'd call metropolitan. The RCMP station there is stone and brick, -quite a substantial building, and as we pulled into the cinder covered -car park a sergeant stepped out of the side entrance to greet us. To -greet Constable Rodgers, actually, as they left me in the car during -their conversation, and neither man looked overly pleased when it -finished. The sergeant motioned for me to join them and I quit the tepid -security of the cruiser for wet snow and obvious irritation. - -"I'm Sergeant Muldoon and you'll be staying with us for a while, Mr -Wylie. Apparently some bigwigs are flying in to question you, -although..." he looked up at an overcast sky the colour of a dead -salmon, "...that could take a while. Follow me, please." - -We went inside and at least they put me an interrogation room rather -than a cell; a blank-walled box containing four chairs, a Formica-topped -table and a buzzing overhead strip light. What it lacked in amenities it -made up for with an absence of charm. I sat and waited for almost two -hours, with only one cup of coffee to break the tedium. Eventually the -door opened and a man entered; thirties, suit, tie, shoes not boots. -Short dark hair, thin mouth, close-cut fingernails. He had one blue eye -and one gray. Mr Neat placed a manila folder on the desk between us and -sat down facing me. - -

It would seem you know something, the significance -of which has escaped both you and your erstwhile handlers, or they would -never have let you go in the first place.
"My name is Walker, Mr -Kelso..." I winced at -the use of my real name, or -rather the recent past associated with it, "...and I'm here to manage -this situation. Let me be quite clear at the outset, we only took you on -as a favour, a professional courtesy, to our British cousins. Apparently -at some point you had expressed a desire to see Canada and, quite -frankly, they wanted rid of you. Naturally we requested a copy of your -file, in case your presence here posed a threat to our national -security, but what we received was so heavily redacted as to be almost -useless. The most we could glean was that you were a compromised -intelligence asset they wished to protect from any potential -retribution, as compensation for services rendered. We, in turn, passed -you over to the RCMP witness protection program, who undertook to -provide you with a suitably low-profile lifestyle here in British -Columbia." He opened the file and scanned the first page before -continuing. "The result of all this time and effort being two officers -feared dead and a third missing, your place of residence reduced to -matchwood, and you sitting here without a scratch." - -Instinctively I raised a hand to the Band Aid on my head, but given what -had happened to Hollis and Barnes I decided not to make a big deal of -it. "Sorry, Mr Walker, but who are you again?" - -"CSIS." I must have looked blank because he sighed, exasperation written -clearly on his face. "Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Look, -Kelso, the RCMP, or at least those in the know, want you turned over for -questioning. I've read the initial report from the scene of the -explosion and there's no indication this was other than a tragic -accident. So normally we wouldn't concern ourselves, as even those in -witness protection have the right to blow themselves up through -incompetence." - -He sat there, his composure recovered, waiting for some response from -me. I cleared my throat, trying not to sound as nervous as I felt. "So I -take it something happened to make this out of the ordinary?" - -He turned to another page in the file. "Around the estimated time of the -explosion we, not the RCMP, received a phone call. Just a name, 'Donald -Wylie', from an untraceable cell phone. We're working on that. Obviously -the call red-flagged your file so when formal notification of your -involvement reached us we decided to take charge, regardless of the -preliminary evidence." - -"So, now what? I get moved on? Another identity, another out-of-the-way -spot?" - -Walker smiled, although it was more a 'problem solved' satisfaction than -genuine good humour. "No. The good news for us is that you obviously -still pose a threat to someone out there, so as an active intelligence -asset you're being handed back to the British. Internal flight to -Calgary and then direct to Glasgow, as soon as the weather improves. -Hell, if it doesn't improve in the next eight hours I'll drive you out -of here myself." - -There was a hard knot in my stomach at the prospect of being thrown back -into a life I'd barely survived the first time around. "Someone wants to -kill me? This is good news for us, how, exactly?" - -"Sorry, Kelso, I was using 'us' in the sense of 'not you'. Sorry for any -confusion. Look, if someone wanted you dead they would just walk up and -put a bullet in your head, or use a car bomb. Something obvious, -especially if it made the point that witness protection couldn't shield -you. The problem with that approach is it would trigger a mandatory -investigation by the RCMP into how they found you, and, more -importantly, a review by the intelligence community of those cases you -were involved with. It would seem you know something, the significance -of which has escaped both you and your erstwhile handlers, or they would -never have let you go in the first place." - -He sat back, looking slightly smug, and I could feel a pit opening up -beneath me. I had no desire to plunge back into that twilight existence -of scorn, disbelief and half-truths. Walker closed the file and while he -didn't exactly wipe his hands clean, the inference was there. - -"So, you're out of here ASAP, Kelso. Unless you can come up with a damn -good reason for us to keep you around." - -Now it was my turn to sit back, hands in my lap and out of his sight. -His gaze hardened as he tried to work out why my eyes were fluttering, -obviously worried I was experiencing some kind of fit. I showed him the -pair of Enfield .38 revolvers I was now holding. - -He took it quite well, all things considered. When I pull a stunt like -that, there's always the chance my audience will try and jump me or go -for their own weapon. As I didn't know Walker's background he could have -been one of those taught to regain the initiative, regardless of risk, -and that could have been very messy. - -Producing the revolvers had been the easy bit and now I had to -stage-manage the aftermath. I ducked the guns under the table and jumped -to my feet, showing him my now empty hands. For good measure I raised -them above my head, as I knew how this was going to play out in the -short term. - -Walker jerked upright like a puppet on a string, Glock materialising in -his hand like one of those quick-draw guns strapped to your forearm. He -wasn't pleased. "Preston! King! In here now!" - -The door burst open and two other men in suits appeared, guns drawn. All -three covered me while I stood there, arms up, trying not to smile. -Walker gestured with his firearm. "Preston, frisk him. King, look for -weapons taped to the undersides of the table and chairs." - -They went through the motions while Walker slammed the door shut and -stood with his back against it, fuming. - -"He's clean." - -"Nothing here either, sir. No weapons of any kind." - -There was a tic in Walker's left cheek and I wondered if I'd pushed him -too far. "Get out. Both of you. Make sure no-one disturbs us." - -His two associates exchanged glances. "Sir, perhaps it would be best -if-" - -"I said get out!" - -Neither man actually shrugged, but the way they holstered their weapons -and left the room gave me the definite impression this interview was -heading into the realm of 'no witnesses required'. - -Walker and I stood for a moment, facing each other, and then he seemed -to regain his composure. "Sit down, Kelso, and keep your hands where I -can see them. " We returned to our chairs and he placed his Glock on the -table in easy reach. "So, neat trick. What was it, some kind of -subliminal suggestion? If it was a straightforward illusion then you've -obviously missed your calling." - -Despite his warning I reached inside my jacket and pulled out a Glock. -Walker went white-faced, trembling, and for a moment it looked like he -might go berserk. I slowly reached over and placed the pistol on the -table in front of him. "Pick it up, Walker. It's your gun, after all." - -He stared at the new weapon and then lifted both, one in each hand, to -inspect them. I saw his knuckles tighten. "The serial numbers match. You -could only have pulled this off in collusion with my superiors. Which -means this whole incident has been contrived from -start to finish." He pointed both guns at me. "Care to tell me just what -the hell is going on?" - -I tried to keep my voice soft and reassuring. "Put the second gun down, -out of my reach. It isn't going to be here for long." - -The tic in his cheek had returned but his eyes were hard, locked on -mine. Nevertheless he placed the duplicate Glock down and sat back, so -as to keep both it and me in plain sight. - -The gun wavered, became transparent, and was gone. - -

Walker was breathing heavily, a trickle of sweat running -from the hairline down past his right ear, but the gun in his hand -didn't waver. When he spoke I could hear the strain of a man barely -under control. "You've got ten seconds. Then you attack me and I'm -forced to shoot. Ten." - -Despite the countdown I hesitated, as I have a set spiel to explain what -I do, but generally not in front of so hostile an audience. I opted for -the cut-down version. "Ideas exist. Ideas of people, of places, of -things. They exist in what Jung called the collective unconscious. Like -a sea, a pool of ideas shared by everyone. Everything that people think -about, dream about, in a place where they exist independently of the -real world, the conscious world. I'm able to tap into this place and -make these ideas real, for a while at least." - -Walker flexed his fingers, getting a better grip on the Glock. "Nine. -And that's bullshit. Try again." - -I could feel sweat on my brow. "If enough people believe in something, -in an idea of something, then it exists as, as a tangible entity in the -collective unconscious. Some of us can get in there and, ah, replicate -the physical form of that idea in the here and now." - -Walker frowned. "What, you thought up those two revolvers? Out of -nothing?" - -I leaned forward, trying to sound eager and trustworthy. "No, no, I saw -them coming in here, in a display case. Look, the more people believe in -something the more real it becomes in our world. I couldn't keep those -guns here for long because only a few people know about them. Same with -your Glock. The idea of it was nearby, in a manner of speaking, because -it featured so prominently in your mind. Conscious and unconscious. What -you saw, and touched, was the idea, the ideal, of your gun. Its pure -form." - -Walker sneered at me. "Parlour tricks. It's nothing more than mental -conjuring, even if I believed it was true. Get a stage act together and -impress the gullible." - -I sat back, suddenly feeling weary of banging my head against a wall of -official scepticism. "While objects are here, they're real. If you'd -shot me with that second Glock I'd be just as dead as if you'd used the -original. Of course forensics would have a field day, as the bullet -would match the remaining gun which hadn't been fired." - -"So, what? You were some kind of assassin for the British? Or maybe an -armourer, able to supply temporary weapons inside high security -environments?" - -I shook my head. "There was a man called Vigo Hanesh. He produced, he -made real, the bomb which destroyed the American embassy in London. Then -all forensic trace of the device simply vanished, although the effects -of the explosion were permanent." - -Walker stared at me. "You can do this? Manufacture ordnance out of -thin air?" - -"No, nothing so major, and Hanesh is dead, so that threat is gone. My -fear is that someone is about to attempt something similar, and they -want me out of the way so they won't be traced. Imaginary weapons, the -next big thing." I gave Walker a half-smile. "You can't fight an idea -whose time has come." - -Walker looked sceptical, obviously torn between assessing my supposed -abilities logically and dismissing the whole thing out of hand. He -pulled a tissue from his jacket, left handed, and wiped his face, while -still keeping me covered. "Back up a bit, Kelso. You said you traced -this Hanesh, so you'd be able to find who was behind this latest -explosion?" - -This was the tricky bit and I tried not to shrug. "Not directly, no. Not -like I could give you an address. With Hanesh it was more like I could -get a sense of the man, what was important to him, that kind of thing. I -could produce small objects that were significant to him, like I did -with your Glock. All these clues were turned over to the true -investigators, and they were able to put together a picture of where -Hanesh was in the real world. They found him. He died." - -Walker snorted. "You sound like some kind of psychic skip-tracer. So why -can't you do the same bloodhound act now?" - -"The big advantage with Hanesh was having access to his dreams. When -they raided his address in London they found a Sony Dreamcatcher down -the side of the sofa. Just a short sequence on it, some kind of empty -nightclub interior, but it was enough to use as a starting point." - -"So you're saying you already need to know the who before coming up with -an idea of where? Not really that useful, and I can see why the British -let you walk. Except that you obviously do know who the next terrorist -will be, right? Which is why you're top of someone's hit list, -apparently." - -Walker holstered his gun and flexed his neck, looking a good deal more -relaxed. "Anyway, Kelso, this is all just supposition. If you can't be -of any direct use to us I'm inclined to send you packing, regardless of -what the RCMP want. Are we clear?" - -I cleared my throat. There was one last card I could play, but I very -much doubted it would increase my credibility in Walker's eyes. "Ah, -Hollis and Barnes, the two RCMP officers who died at the scene, they -confirmed the blast wasn't accidental. Two explosions, one in each fuel -tank." - -Walker frowned and flipped open the file again. "I was given to -understand they died instantaneously. Are you now saying they survived -long enough for you to reach them? Can Anderson confirm this?" - -"No, no, it was, ah, more in the way of a port-mortem conversation." - -He looked at me, his eyes blank. "Now you're saying you can talk to the -dead? Which particular mental institution were you in, back in England? -I just ask so I can write and tell them what a bang-up job they did -prior to your release back into the community. Jesus!" - -I knew this next bit would be hard to explain. If not downright -impossible. "No, no, not the dead per se, more the idea of who they were -while alive." - -There was silence. Walker licked his lips. "Is that supposed to make any -kind of sense? Even in whatever version of reality you currently -inhabit?" - -

It's no wonder your case file -was so heavily censored or we'd never have touched you in a million -years.
-I sighed and let my shoulders sag. "Look, Walker, I'll explain this once -and you can believe me or not. There's a version of everyone in the -collective unconscious, a composite, an amalgam of who we believe -ourselves to be and what others think of us. Obviously how close it is -to reality depends on the trade-off between your ego on the one hand and -public perception on the other. If you're a high-profile media -personality and the world in general thinks you're a twat, then this -idea of you will predominate." - -He sneered at me. "So if you're a worthless nonentity living in -obscurity..." - -I shook my head. "Not necessarily. That's why psychopaths, real -out-and-out ego-maniacs, are so dangerous in the unconscious - but -you're missing the point." - -"Which is?" - -"Everything which Hollis and Barnes experienced, including their own -deaths, influenced, informed, their unconscious selves. I was able to -reproduce this idea of them, for a short while, long enough to get some -idea of what happened, at least." - -Walker drummed his fingers on the table, frowning. "Not exactly evidence -that would stand up in court. Unless you can summon up these apparitions -at will?" - -Again I shook my head. "No, strictly a short-term window of opportunity. -The version of someone in the collective unconscious continues to exist -while others remember them, but once an individual accepts they're dead -it starts to, to atrophy. Gradually the dead become a collection of -knee-jerk reactions and predictable aphorisms. Sad but true." - -"And if someone refuses to accept that they're dead, regardless of all -evidence to the contrary?" - -I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "Well, I suppose..." - -"Kelso? You feeling all right? You've gone white as a sheet." - -I felt sick to my stomach at the idea forming in my mind. "Look, Walker, -there have always been rumours of objects materialising, just popping -into being. Objects that were the focus of intense and widespread -belief, as if the very concept of them was so real they became real." I -wiped my mouth. "If someone was egotistical enough, and enough peopled -believed in him, I suppose...no, it can't be." - -Some of the fear in my voice obviously rubbed off and Walker lapsed into -an aggressive posture, leaning towards me, eyes fixed on mine. "What -can't be? Out with it, man!" - -I felt helpless, my mouth filled with the taste of ashes. "Vigo Hanesh. -It's the idea of Vigo Hanesh, making itself real." - -

Walker slapped me, the sound gunshot-loud in the small -room. I jerked in my seat, half raising a hand to my cheek, blinking -rapidly. - -"Enough of this nonsense, Kelso. Pull yourself together, for God's sake. -You were becoming hysterical." He switched to a rational, encouraging -tone of voice. "Look, are you quite sure that Hanesh is dead?" - -I nodded. "Oh yes. I killed him." - -Walker looked at me for a long, hard moment. "Really? I didn't have you -down as a field operative. There's nothing in your file to suggest you -were employed in anything other than an intelligence gathering role." - -I felt my hands tremble at the memory and clenched my fists to quell -them. "Hanesh turned up on my doorstep one evening, in London, with a -bottle of wine to celebrate tracking me down. He started going on about -how it was a classic vintage and the... the normality of it just freaked -me out. I went a bit berserk, ended up stabbing him through the eye with -a corkscrew. Superhuman strength they said." I gave him a nervous smile. -"Not really me. I couldn't work after that, after watching Hanesh die." - -"Oh yes? And the authorities were quite happy this was the real Hanesh? -Not some stand-in or close relative? It's a damn sight easier to believe -he faked his own death than the idea of a larger-than-life ghost -stalking you, intent on revenge." Walker sat back and rubbed his eyes. -"Don't bother answering that, I'm sure my British and American -counterparts are competent enough. Look, at this moment I'm inclined to -hand you over to our psych boys and let them sort out fact from fantasy. -It's obvious you can pull some kind of mental slight-of-hand, but I'm -not going to issue an all-points for someone who, in all probability, is -safely dead and buried. I just don't see how the memory of someone, no -matter how vivid it might be in the minds of others, can possibly affect -us here in the real world." - -I could almost hear the 'case closed' suffix to that statement, a -finality ripe with the promise of institutionalised hell. It had been a -real struggle to avoid a lifetime of padded rooms and restraint, and I -didn't relish the prospect of going through it again on this side of the -Atlantic. I held up a hand. - -"No, please, just listen for a moment! Even the idea of Hanesh can pose -a threat, a deadly threat. That's what I meant when I said that -psychopaths can be dangerous. Their ego, their sense of self, can -transcend death and create a kind of bubble of reality in which they're -still alive. A true ego-maniac simply refuses to accept the world can -exist without them and so they-" - -"Do you actually listen to what you come out with?" Walker cut across -me, his patience clearly exhausted. "Transcending death? Bubbles of -reality? Give me something concrete to work with or I'll skip the -funny-farm and ship you back to the British, air-freight." - -I hesitated, knowing how this was going to sound. "Let me sleep on it." - -"What?" - -"Let me sleep on it. Let me see if the memory of Hanesh is just that, a -memory, a fixed idea, or something more." - -Walker stared at me. "You want to have a nap? In the middle of a murder -investigation with potential terrorist involvement?" - -"It's what I do, it's how I do it. Directed dreaming. It's how I can -trace someone through the ideas they consider important. If the memory -of Hanesh is, is alive, for want of a better term, then he'll be bloody -easy to find. It'll only take an hour or so, and if he's not real I'll -get out of your hair ASAP. Hell, I'll even pay for my flight back to the -UK. Sounds fair?" - -"It sounds ludicrous. Directed dreaming? It's no wonder your case file -was so heavily censored or we'd never have touched you in a million -years." He paused, drumming his fingers on the table. "Thirty minutes. I -can give you thirty minutes and then you're out of here, one way or the -other." - -"Thanks, I-" - -A raised hand cut me off. "But you can forget flaking out in what passes -for hotel accommodation here. It'll be a cell, under guard." He smiled, -"After all, you're still in protective custody." Walker stood and raised -his voice. "King! Tell Sergeant Muldoon I want to speak to him." - -I tried to tune out the next few minutes, not exactly a Zen state but -simply ignoring my surroundings as far as possible. Muldoon, a corridor, -a blank-walled cell, a cot, the door closing. I closed my eyes, -concentrating on the images inside my eyelids. Letting them lead me down -a route I knew from memory... - -I started near the bar, with its long under-lit glass counter to my -right and the row of floor-length windows to my left. There was very -little in the way of other illumination apart from down at my left ankle -where a steady source, diffused by the gauze curtains, filled my -peripheral vision. I assumed this was from a street light rather than -passing traffic and I wasn't conscious of any vehicle noise despite it -being early evening. The blonde woman in the pale grey halter-neck dress -passed me and I started walking away from the light, still conscious of -the windows beside me and the dark, empty space of the seating area now -stretching out opposite. - -The memories of Vigo Hanesh, as recorded on his Dreamcatcher. Memories I -had accessed so often they were now mine, a way to access whatever trace -remained of the man in humanity's collective unconscious. - -The lights came on and I stopped, shielding my eyes from the sudden -brilliance. Confusion and surprise swept over me, as this sequence had -never, ever, changed all the times I'd been here before. - -"He's waiting for you. Through the door at the end of the corridor." - -I turned. It was the blonde woman in the pale grey dress. She was -standing by the bar, smiling, toying with the cherry from a half-empty -martini glass. There was an Asiatic-looking barman behind the counter, -replenishing the supply of bottled mixers from a crate. Beyond him I -could see several staff cleaning tables that stood in a semi-circle -around the dance floor. The slight sense of unreality you usually get in -a dream was noticeably absent; this was pixel-perfect clarity, complete -with the background smell of stale cigarette smoke and last nights -sweat. - -"Thanks. This way?" - -She nodded and I began walking, feeling almost like an bit-part actor -with a walk-on role. A speaking role, but one limited to banalities. The -carpet felt slightly tacky beneath my shoes and the whole establishment, -obviously a seedy nightclub, made my skin itch. The door at the end of -the corridor was all quilted red leather and brass studs, which matched -the over-all feel of a low-rent dive, firmly mired in the 1970's. The -bouncer on the door, wearing a car coat and roll-neck sweater, nodded as -I approached and stood to the side. The door opened. I stepped through. -It closed behind me. - -"Hi Donald, glad you could make it. Glass of champagne?" - - -

It was a large room, all discrete lighting and lava lamps, -with a sunken seating area in the middle. A man sat there, facing me, -sprawling back against the upholstery and saluting my entrance with a -raised champagne glass. - -Not Vigo Hanesh. - -I let out a sigh of relief and felt some of the tension leave my -shoulders. This man was a stranger to me, but however strange the setup -it was preferable to confronting someone who should be dead. - -My host waved me closer. "Sit, sit, have a drink. I'm sure you're -finding this a bit strange and the alcohol will help, I assure you." - -I walked over. The seating area was a series of semi-circular sofas -divided by short flights of steps. The centre was dominated by a -circular Perspex table which surrounded an open fire, the flue being one -of those free-standing burnished copper funnels which extended from the -ceiling. It was like being in the lounge area of a Bond villain's lair. -The only thing missing was an exotically clad hostess, or perhaps a -homicidal butler. - -Three steps down and I sat, lifting the glass waiting for me. I'd -planned on acting cool, maybe even trying for suave, but the champagne -bubbles caught in my nose and I sneezed, snorted, and coughed. - -My host just laughed. "Nice to finally meet you, Donald. I'm Alexander -Neel, but call me Alex." - -I set my glass down and blew my nose, using the action to look at Alex -more closely. He was English by the sound of him, but with a slight -oriental cast to his features. Mid-thirties, with straight, slicked-back -dark hair and a wide smile of perfect teeth. The clothes and dentistry -reeked of money, but there was an unmistakable air of violence about him -I found unsettling. - -"Ah, well, Alex, this place, I've never seen it quite like -this before." - -"This is the..." he paused, as if mentally translating, "...Mariners -Club, in Vladivostok. It catered for Soviet officers, both Red Banner -fleet and merchant marine. A bit down-market, but it suits my tastes." - -I shifted in my seat, feeling the glow of what little champagne I'd -managed to swallow. "Look, I associate these surroundings with-" - -"Vigo Hanesh?" - -"Vigo Hanesh, yes. Did you know him? Did he come here?" - -Alex smiled, ignoring the question and draining his glass. "Do you know -the term 'tulpa', Donald? From Tibetan mysticism?" - -"What? What are you talking about?" - -"I created the person you knew as Vigo Hanesh. Sent him out into -the world, the real world, to do my bidding. Come now, the consummate -mercenary, acting for some shadowy terrorist organisation with a grudge -against the United States? Didn't you find him just a tad stereotypical? -I created him in the same way you make real those mementos of the -imagination." - -I felt confused, flustered, as if reality had taken a wrong turn. It was -like listening to a foreign language you understood along with a -real-time translation into English, but the two versions didn't match. - -"You made Hanesh? You can't make a person-" - -"You pulled up Hollis and Barnes, yes? Same principle, but Hanesh was -always just an idea, an idea in the minds of hundreds. There's a mosque -in Damascus which venerates him, offers up prayers for his well-being. -With that kind of belief to work with it was simple enough to fashion -the real thing." Alex refilled his glass while I sat there, trying to -make sense of his words. "And to answer my own question, Donald, a -'tulpa' is a being or object which is created through willpower, -visualisation, attention and focus, concerted intentionality and ritual. -In other words, it is a materialized thought that has taken physical -form." He raised his glass, "God bless Wikipedia!" - -There was a gloating edge to his voice and I needed to say something -that would steer the conversation back to the real world. "But Hanesh, I -killed him for God's sake! That was real enough, believe me." - -"Yes, you did. Best thing all round, in the long run. That's the trouble -with these thoughtforms, they take on a life of their own, start acting -independently. Hanesh became obsessed with you, once he realised who was -tracking him, and thought you could fill in some of the blanks, as it -were." - -"Fill in the blanks?" - -"I had some ex-Soviet contacts create a background for Hanesh, a legend, -as it's called, so that intelligence agencies would find out enough -about him to believe he was real. Trouble was, Hanesh believed he was -real as well, and the gaps in his memory bothered him. Well, not gaps -exactly, more a lack of detail. He came up with the idea that you had in -some way stolen these memories, and decided to confront you." Alex -shrugged. "Oops." - -I stared at him, aghast. "Oops? That's all you have to say? I killed him -with a bloody corkscrew, for Christ's sake! I stood and watched him die -on my kitchen floor, so don't you tell me he wasn't real!" - -"He was as real as you are, Donald, and that's the problem. Some of us -are able to walk both sides of the fence, to live in the realm of -imagination as fully as the real world. You weren't that strong, but -your subconscious obsession with Hanesh was in danger of bringing him -back, giving him a second chance at life. Now that was potentially -embarrassing for everyone concerned, so I decided to remove you from the -equation." - -The room suddenly felt really cold. "Remove me from the...You were -behind the explosion?" - -He raised his hands in mock surrender "Mea culpa! But you're still here. -A survivor, or more accurately, the survivor. I should have -guessed that would happen, Hell, you even look a bit like Robert Powell, -now I see you close up. Even the memory of Hanesh tried to save you, by -alerting the authorities. God knows why." I struggled for a reply as he -looked at his watch, a Rolex, of course. "And our time together is about -up. I'm not sure what you'll do now, but don't try and find me again. It -would definitely be another case of 'oops', understand?" - -I blinked. - -The cell was crowded; Walker, his two associates, three RCMP filling the -doorway and corridor. Everyone had a firearm trained on me and Walker -tossed an unsealed manila envelope on the cot beside me. I sat up, -bemused, and began to open it. - -"I've received the initial forensic report, Kelso, and it makes -interesting reading. They're recovered four bodies at the scene - -Hollis, Barnes, Anderson...and you." - -The envelope contained black-and-white glossies of four bodies. There -was little or no burn damage, and my face was clearly recognisable. - -It wasn't a survivable explosion. - -© Martin Clark 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] gtdivide.jpg - -[*ITEM] Android 0-CLE5 - -[*AUTHOR] Lester Linesmith - -[*BLURB] A recent work by Liam -Baldwin on Lester Linesmith and Planet Stories is -available here - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

An android named Android 0-CLE5 -once escaped from his Master and fled to the forest. As he was wandering -about there he came upon a zygon. Zygons were the most fearsome and -feared beasts in the known universe. Long and sleek, close furred and -armed with claws and fangs against which naught could stand, the zygon -was fast and cunning, a pure predator that lived only to kill. -0-CLE5 had seen zygons before, in the Masters' gladiatorial -arena, often pitted against other wild beasts and, worse, eating -disobedient androids alive. - -The zygon was lying down moaning and groaning. At first, Android -0-CLE5 turned to flee, but finding that the zygon did not -pursue him, he turned back and went up to him. As he came near, the -zygon put out his paw, which was all swollen and bleeding, and Android -0-CLE5 found that a huge thorn had got into it, and was causing -all the pain. He pulled out the thorn and bound up the paw of the zygon, -who was soon able to rise and lick the hand of Android 0-CLE5 -like a dog. Then the zygon took Android 0-CLE5 to his cave, and -every day used to bring him meat from which to live. - -But shortly afterwards both Android 0-CLE5 and the zygon were -captured, and the android was sentenced to be thrown to the zygon, after -the latter had been kept without food for several days. The Master of -Masters and all his Departmental Masters came to see the spectacle, and -Android 0-CLE5 was led out into the middle of the arena. Soon -the zygon was let loose from his den, and rushed bounding and roaring -towards his victim. But as soon as he came near to Android -0-CLE5 he recognised his friend, and fawned upon him, and -licked his hands like a friendly dog. The Master of Masters, surprised -at this, summoned Android 0-CLE5 to him, who told him the whole -story. Whereupon the android was pardoned and freed, and the zygon let -loose to his native forest. - -© Galactic Syndicated Features 1932 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] androcles.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Prophets Speak - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon
Hudson - -[*BLURB] Prophet Ability => Profitability? - -[*DESCRIPTION] - -

Agnotious C. Clehrley scowled his way through the station crowds, his -face a topographic map of angry contours. He was well ahead of schedule, -his train wouldn't leave for half an hour yet; longer, if he felt like -spreading some of his foul mood around. - -

He squinted up at the glare - no way could this day -get any worse.
He pushed his cap back, letting the air-con -chill the sweaty tide-mark -for a moment before screwing it down again tightly, dwelling yet again -on the fact that his train would not be taking off this afternoon, that -it would not soar through the skies like the spirit of freedom itself; -that the amber wings sewn, spread, above his cap's plastic brim were -simply the logo of AERAIL TRANSCONT, Inc. and not a proud badge of -achievement. Never to be saluted. Never to be stared at in awe by a six -year-old lad invited to a cockpit to experience a formative moment. -Never to win one of a string of fleeting coital victories from -air hostesses and breathy passengers alike. He was not a -pilot, he was a driver. No-one would ever call him Captain, apart from -that smart-mouthed, idiot-grinning conductor. Hell, he was more likely -to be called a Brakes Technician for all the control he had over his -route through life. - -"Morning, Cap'n!" yapped the smart mouth. Agnotious grunted in return as -his chirpy, blond conductor fell in beside him with wingman-like -precision, smiling cheerfully both left and right. At least the crowds -were parting quicker for the two of them. "Where to today, Aggy? Right -between those rails, right?" The smart mouth laughed easily, as if he -hadn't just reduced another man's whole life to a pair of parallel lines -heading for a vanishing point of utter meaninglessness. Aggy tried not -to bare his grinding teeth. - -Down the escalators and out onto the sunlit platform, the heat hit him -like a slap. Tender skin began to prickle immediately and now Aggy -started sweating properly. He'd be in the shade soon enough though. -Eight straight hours in his seat to look forward to, wet cooling in the -crack of his pants as a chill straight from the Antarctic dryly -circulated "for his comfort", and so he wouldn't fall asleep at the -wheel - at the dead man's switch rather. He squinted up at the glare - -no way could this day get any worse. - -"Brothers, sisters," called the voice. Ah nuts, thought Aggy. -Here we go. - -The prophet wore his long hair in a tan-blonde ponytail, with a light -beard attractively dusting his softly angular jaw line. His warm brown -eyes looked with friendly intensity from face to face. He smiled with -knowing sympathy at those whose gazes flinched nervously from his as -quickly as they had alighted, or nodded with assumed camaraderie to -those braver souls, even hostile ones like Aggy, who didn't look away. -He was pleasing to look at, but in a vague sort of way and as always -Aggy couldn't be totally sure that it was the same guy as the day -before. Damn well kept coming back though, that was for sure. - -"Brothers, sisters, I have words your hearts would hear. Pause a moment, -if you may, for I will not take long and your train will not be leaving -soon." - -"Is, is that what passes for prophetic wisdom these days?" said Aggy, -catching himself half by surprise. His conductor drew a nervous breath. -Aggy's flagrant disregard for Aerail's "Sunshine" policy always put him -on edge, and it wasn't as if he could even tell the guy off for it - -Unhappy Employees Make Unhappy Travellers, as they had both -recited in the past, and Aggy was his driver after all, bad natured or -not. - -"Oh, come on, Cap," he said, extra brightly, "He's doing no harm, I'm -sure." Aggy let out a derisive grunt, but it was the prophet who spoke -first. - -"No, brother Tom, the Captain speaks well. Can there be a more needless -activity than to fill thin air with empty words, unless it is to -deliberately spread falsehoods in the name of truth? The burden is mine -to be proven right and I eagerly accept the doubt of others, no matter -how heavy that load becomes - for when the rightness of my vision comes -to pass, the transformation of doubts into certainties will lift me like -a feather on the summer winds!" - -He ended this speech with his arms spread as wide as his beatific smile, -and the three men now stood at the centre of a loose knot of observers, -those on the outskirts peering to see what was happening. Aggy stared at -the prophet in surprise, then turned to the smart mouth. "Is your name -really Tom?" he asked. - -"Yes it is, thank you," said Tom, hurt. They had only been paired -together for approaching two years. - -"I expect it will take more than one good guess to convince you though, -won't it... Agnotious?" The prophet grinned. - -"You could have got that from company records," Aggy scoffed, "anyone -could." - -"And it was not prophesy in any case," agreed the prophet. "Perhaps -something..." His eyes fell closed and he stood for a moment in silent -contemplation. The audience shuffled and murmured but Aggy kept his eyes -firmly on target - not to spot some sleight of hand but because he -didn't want to find anyone's amusement directed his way, smirking at his -expense. The smart mouth... Tom was still flanking him. - -"Let's go, that train won't drive itself," Aggy muttered finally, -contrary to his own opinion; but at that moment, as if he had been -waiting for that very cue, the prophet spoke. - -

Somewhere else, five banks of ten monitors bathed their -operators' faces -in a blue-green glow. They spoke into headsets, eyes occasionally -flicking up to scan the huge wall screen opposite, which was divided into -continental categories, each one filled with scrolling texts, constantly -being replaced or updated. - -The operator in row-three-booth-eight had been an unemployable Applied -Physics graduate for three years before landing on her feet here. Above -the many windows filled with scrolling text on her monitor (and the one -featuring Agnotious's company record and employee photo) was the word -"Philadelphia". - -"The Phillies have signed promising rookie pitcher Jamie Jenkins of the -Orioles for a record seventy-five, seven-five, million dollars," she -read, then glanced at the main screen to check breaking global events. -"A third aftershock in Japan, minor, no casualties." Back to her -monitor. "Business: shares in Jacobson International Plastics rise 26 -cents..." - -

"...And the earth will rise and fall again in a distant land," the young -man continued. Some of the crowd had drifted but Aggy and Tom were still -amongst the listeners. Tom was fidgeting now; it was a long walk to the -engine up at the distant end of the platform and they were going to be -actually late if they wasted much more time, but Aggy felt obligated to -listen, even against his will. The prophet opened his eyes suddenly and -looked at him. Aggy flinched. - -"Do you invest, Captain?" he asked. "A quarter of Jacob's sons will rise -as well. That's Jay Eye Pee," he added with a wink. The young man bowed -his head for a moment and when he looked up he also held out a soft, -colourful, hand-woven bag for donations. Aggy snorted, the spell broken. - -"You're not getting my change for your old wiffle-waffle," he said, -tugging Tom's sleeve as he started away. The train shone in the sun, a -silver thread that would snake across the nation - just legally below -the speed of sound - and be back before sunset, barring further delays. - -"That's okay, Aggy," the prophet said to his back, a smile on his lips. -"There's always another day, and change is, you know, inevitable." Aggy -snorted again and didn't turn. Tom dropped a few small coins into the -prophet's bag, hoping the faint noise went unnoticed by Aggy, then -hurried after him. - -"Oh, and wear a coat tomorrow," the cheerful voice added. "It's going to -rain." - -

Thirty-six hours on the road, sort of, it ought to be good -to be home, even if home was a twenty square metre box on the thirtieth -floor. Aggy tossed his jacket over the chair back and went for a shower -while the cooker rayed his dinner. There was more steam in his -kitchenette than the bathroom cubicle when he emerged, clouding out of -the tray slot like dry-ice at a nightclub. Have to get that fixed, he -thought, again, gingerly pulling the meal out with a towel to save his -fingertips. - -He sat and flicked channels on the bedsitting-room wall for twenty -minutes as his food cooled, but there was nothing on. Eventually he came -to the news band, channel after channel of waving flags and action movie -anthems: boring, boring, bland-business-news-boring. Resigned, he gave -up, peeling the tray and waving away another little cloud of steam. On -the wall two clones in grey suits with grey hair and grey skin were -telling the underwear model anchorman how good things looked for the -economy. - -Aggy chewed his Chick-In-Pie™ and tuned out, staring through the -ticker-tape scrolling over the bottom of the screen. GOL, GRD, GWW, HAN, -HAR, HEC, ISL... then he paused, eyes tracking right to left until the -legend JIP 142.03 +.26 vanished into the corner of the -room behind his Plas-Authen-Tic™ cactus. - -There was a clap of thunder outside his single opaque window, then it -flickered at the flash of lightning. "Huh," said Aggy absently, as the -downpour began. Ten channels over, at the start of the weather band, a -Miss World runner-up was forecasting sun with absolute smiling -certainty.

***

- -

"We're on a three minute count to air, three minutes, -count-and-mark -" Beep. - -The message sounded from speakers in every part of the building except -the one that mattered. Two men hurried towards that very room, one with -fluttery little bird steps, the other with the charismatic stride of a -person secure in his absolute importance. Other corridor users deferred -reverentially. - -"How's the line-up?" A rich voice, comforting, trustworthy. -Award-winning. - -"A great line up, just great, Greg, just great -" - -"I'm not so sure, it felt stale this morning and only the time has -changed. Give me the rundown." - -"Okay, Greg, of course. Okay: starting with headlines, ad-break, then -leading with the Presidential Response, expert commentary from Michael -Haiyuns, ad-break, second tier starts with Japan -" - -"Again? That's the third on the trot, there'll be nothing left of it -this time next week. It's getting old, shuffle it to the bottom - but -keep an ear out in case it sinks completely, that we'll go live -with. Next?" - -"The Rev. John James Faraway shouting down the hellfire about the -conflict with -" - -"No, no, no no no. He's becoming a cliché, this is no good. And -after that?" - -"Economic super-boom is forecast for -" - -"Hold it." - -The two men stopped in the corridor - rather, the tall one stopped, -thinking, and the other danced back and forth beside him, torn between a -crucial spiralling lack of time and utter subservience to his master. - - -"Counting two minutes to air, two minutes, count-and-mark -" Beep. - - -

"Good evening," said the most handsome and powerful -man in the building.
"Hold it. Wasn't there something on the -backup about someone, someone -talking, a street preacher or something?" He frowned, staring into the -middle distance. For a moment his aide marvelled at the same crafted -lines which presented the dazzling illusion of interested focus, -regardless of what an interviewee might be saying at that moment - then -he snapped to it, tapping at his palm board, searching the entire -mediabase for details of the story. Then he scurried to catch up as his -boss strode ahead again. - -The lift doors at the head of the corridor glided open for them. The -taller, elegant man checked out his various reflections in the mirrored -doors and walls as they descended. The palm board chirped. - -"Okay, I got it: three weeks ago, some guy shows up in Baltimore -spouting what are described as perfectly accurate predictions on -all sorts of topics: local and international news, politics, financial, -the weather, you name it - and, it looks like he's moving around the -country, we've got mentions of the same from New York, L.A., -Boulder, Philly... lots more - he's a rover." - -"Same guy?" Now there was a hint of that smile, that heart stopping -charisma. - -"Good looking, pony-tail, ah... hippy-ish outfit. I guess so." - -"Right, bump the earthquake coverage to backup and let's take this as a -surprise second tier between the Pres and the Rev, call it The Only -Man Who Knows The Score, watch the networks scramble, eh?" - -"It'll be great, Greg, fantastic!" - - -"Counting one minute to air, sir, that's just one minute to air, are you --" Beep "- on your way, sir?" - -"Get that running order to the dee's box now, move it move it." He -slipped a sliver of plastic from his flawless suit jacket, flicking it -open with the coolest of flicks. "To, Dan. Don't worry -about me, you just make sure things are go at your end, okay? New -schedule coming to you and you'd better move it move it, I'll need -something to read straight after the first ad break. Earn your bucks, -buddy. Send." He coolly flicked it closed and slipped it away -again, watching his gofer hop off down the corridor. Past the -door. - -His door. He opened it. His studio. This psychic thing could -be good. His crew. It was human, far more so than the usual -personality crap, it could run. His desk. He sat behind it and -blanked his mind. - -

"Count for twenty." Up in the box, Dan the studio director glanced -around at his team and saw everyone in place. At the monitors, all -angles covered. Through the window and down at the desk, and there he -was, settling into his seat and ready to go. A door opened and the gofer -entered, twitching, holding out his board urgently. Dan waved him to a -seat and held up five fingers. - -"Count for ten, sync music, sync vid, prep anchor, up fade and play all -for five... four... silent..." and... smile... God, he -thought. The man's like a machine. It's beautiful. - -"Good evening," said the most handsome and powerful man in the building. -"I'm Greg Torrent and this, is Channel Pi News." - - -

Nine Months Later

- - -

The data centre had grown. An indoor ziggurat beneath four giant sloping -wall screens, each face held ten rising ranks of monitors like the steps -of a pyramid, twenty on each bottom row, eleven on the top, over six -hundred in total. Audio baffles muted the chatter of neighbouring -operators from each other, though the regional supervisors sitting in -the small lounge on the top of the pile could stream any one operator's -voice on demand. Mostly they didn't, just keeping one eye on the -auto-transcripts updating on their lap boards and another on their -respective donation logs. - -"They're generous in Australia today," said Oceania, for whom Applied -Physics was now just a hobby. - -"Good for you," grunted Americas. "There's too much competition for -quarters in North, what with all the homeless, the unemployed, and the -church. And in South, well, no-one's got anything." - -"Which is exactly why you guys consistently get the most positive -feedback. Put a sock in it." - -Americas grinned. "Yeah, I know." He held out a hand and Africa -high-fived it. They all looked up at a sudden chime followed by a low -humming, then a section of floor in the corner of the lounge rose into -the air, opening onto a small elevator. A familiar face emerged and -smiled at everyone. - -"Hey hey, look who it is!" called Americas. "Let me get you a drink. Oh, -and... how are the prophets?" - -"I was just about to ask you the same thing!" quipped the prophet, and -as had become ritual the others chimed in with a laugh. They all got to -their feet and shook hands in turn. "Seriously, how's tricks?" the -prophet asked. - -Europe dropped back onto his beanbag and tapped at his lap board. -"Looking pretty good, to be honest. Since the last quarter we've been -seeing a steady increase across the board - even in the US, not that -he'll admit it. If it keeps on like this, by the end of the -financial year we'll be up to our neck in pocket money. Unless you -wanted to expand again, of course." - -"That's the plan. In fact, that's why I'm here. We're about to double - -we've just finished construction on a second data centre, in Kyoto. It's -going to handle Asia exclusively. We're going to need experienced brains -to get it up and running... from the looks on your faces, I'm guessing -someone kept her secret." - -"You complete bitch!" cried Oceania, throwing a cushion at Asia, who -batted it away with her lap board, giggling. "I knew it, I just knew -it!" - -"Great - we're always looking for someone -with a talent for premonition. -We were thinking, how do you two feel about co-heading the new team?" -The prophet winced, then turned to the others and tried to make himself -heard over the chorus of delighted squealing. "As for you guys, no big -move I'm afraid. But this centre becomes dedicated to all the other -regions and we'll be doubling staff in the field. So, you go to senior -supervisors and see about sourcing some new guys from down there on the -slopes, okay?" - -"You got it, your holiness." Americas wore a sly, appraising smile. -"That's the line now, did you hear?" - -The prophet sighed theatrically. "Yes, I did, but that was always going -to be on the cards. It's just a case of waiting and seeing who's the -lucky winner." He shrugged, then separated Asia and Oceania and slung -one arm each around their shoulders for a hug. "Come on. Let's have that -drink you mentioned."

***

- -

Greg Torrent fixed his audience with a gigawatt gaze and nodded tersely. -"Welcome back with Channel Pi and, news today of, growing concern -about the, self-professed prophet sighted, touring the nation. -Unconfirmed reports have also surfaced placing him in, Mexico, -Argentina, several of the former Brazilian city states and - although I -repeat this is, not confirmed - in the New Russia. Here with me we have, -Michael Haiyuns of the Dog-Watch-Dog watchdog association and, -Reverend J. J. Faraway, charismatic preacher and of course spokesperson -for the Church of the Intra-Faithual Coalescence. But first we go -live to, Hammond Strichter on the scene of the, alleged seer's most -recent sighting. Hamm?" - -"Thanks Greg, I'm here at the -" - -Torrent mentally muted him and stepped on the quick-cut pedal, silencing -his live mic and opening a line to the director's box while -simultaneously activating a CG loop of himself nodding seriously in case -of unexpected cutaways - the same image which mouthpieced Channel -Pi's various 24 hour-a-day automated newscasts. "Are they both in -place, Dan?" - -"Sure thing, Greg, they're in the green booths and ready to go." - - -"They'd better have something poisonous to say. I don't like this story, -Dan. You know why." - -"It's a blip, Greg, just a blip, nothing more, nothing to worry about, -just a blip, seriously, don't get yourself worked up, it's only a blip --" - -"If you don't stop reassuring me, Dan, you're going to find yourself on -the fucking street and you can go talk to this asshole direct and ask -him what the deal is stealing my god-damned wind." Dan shut up, but Greg -continued brooding, oblivious to Strichter's inane babbling in the -background. - -

The prophet gave a benign smile and Greg felt -himself bristling.
Ratings had -dropped. Greg's ratings had never dropped, not one point -since he took over as anchor, not beyond a plus-minus point-oh-five -percent fluctuation that could easily be blamed on technical outages. -They had always risen. They only hit a plateau when the researcher -department announced there were no more households in the civilised -world lacking a web feed, and with Channel Pi effectively the -default information provider for the globe, everyone else in the -industry had to scramble to repeat whatever Greg said was the news. - -Yet now, a drop. A consistent drop, for over three months... approaching -one whole percent. Not just on the artificial feeds, but even a drop in -Greg's personal rating. Amongst the world's mere broadcasters, tethered -to their pathetic national and regional concerns, it was worse - -staggering plummets, tens of percents, all over. - -All because of that damn- - -"Greg! Greg!" Dan's voice broke though and he blinked. "Wake -up! Look -at the feed! Strichter!" Greg turned to his sub-desk monitor, where -a shaking camera POV showed Strichter's meticulously coiffed nape -jostling its way through a tightly packed crowd. And at their centre, a -glimpse of - Him. - -

"I can see him, he's talking!" Strichter's mic was buffeting against the -bodies of the crowd with a mix of annoying unprofessionalism and -pleasing authenticity, the excitement in his voice much the same. "I'm -almost at the front now - excuse me, Channel Pi - coming through -- shift it!" Strichter broke into a circle of emptiness surrounding the -prophet, who paused to look at him with what appeared to be an air of -pleasant surprise. The crowd closed ranks and the cameraman failed to -join him, having to settle for aiming his lens between their heads as -best he could. - -"Hello, Hammond," said the prophet. "How is Greg?" - -"I'm Ham- Hammond Strichter of Channel Pi news," Strichter barked -redundantly. In the studio, Greg scowled. "How do you answer charges -today that you are -endangering the lives of ordinary decent citizens with baseless claims -for some kind of religiously fundamentalist, er, predictionalism, while -extorting money that their desperate families need to support themselves -in these times of financial instability?" Greg brightened. Maybe the man -had a future as a reporter after all. If they worked on his vocabulary. - -The prophet gave a benign smile and Greg felt himself bristling. -"Hammond, I only ask for voluntary donations in return for the service I -provide and, well, if you'll pardon the pun, it's all done strictly -non-profit. As for your kind implication regarding my deep -spirituality... I make no claims of divinity. I simply tell it like it -is, and I think my record for accuracy is spotless. Ask anyone here, I'm -sure they will agree." - -There was an outrageous murmur of confirmation from all around; then -worse, laughter, as the prophet added, "In fact, I predict that Mr. -Torrent will have something to say about all this any second now!" - -

Greg stamped on the other pedal under his desk, the feed overrider, -force cutting back to himself. "Thanks Hammond. We're back now with Mr. -Haiyuns and Rev. Faraway, gentlemen, welcome." He stamped on the -quick-cut peddle again just long enough to bark, "I'm out of here, Dan!" - -Up in the box Dan and his crew scrambled to connect the appropriate -feeds, materialising the guests from their booths into the virtual -studio opposite Greg's desk. "Thank you, Greg," they chorused. - -"Michael, let me start with you. This prophet: dangerous lunatic or -unstable victim of his own delusions?" Greg leapt out of his chair -without waiting for the answer and stormed from the studio, leaving his -CG persona to deliver the other questions from the script. Neither of -his guests, nor his gradually dwindling share of a shamefully disloyal -audience, had the slightest idea he was gone. - -

Four Months Later

- - -

The two men settled into their seats with a shared sigh. It had been a -long day and the lights in the room were comfortably low, leaving both -men barely more than silhouettes. "So, how was your trip?" - -"Nice. It's a pretty country, you know, when you can get past all the -problems. I think we can help make a real difference. Anyway, how are -things looking contribution wise?" - -The other waved at the wall beside them and a small screen came to life, -streams of text and numbers washing up and down it. "Incoming, better -than good. The average donation is rising every day. People everywhere -like this interaction, the personal quality, and they are happy to pay -for it. The fact that we aren't scheduling their information for them or -pushing some agenda seems to make all the difference. Not dropping a -story because it makes bad copy or doesn't meet some vague criteria of -entertainment value. And there's no adverts, of course. Plus at our -current rate of recruitment we'll have to start up a third data centre -before next summer; but we can already afford to do so without impacting -our other operations. The profits, as they say, speak for themselves." - -"We really need to get a new head of comedy around here. And the -Outgoing?" - -"Well, good and less good. Anonymously, we're now outspending two-thirds -of the world's states on education, and in the last week alone we've -started supporting eight new junior schools and four more adult -education centres. Unfortunately, the reason for that is the move -towards accredited donations. We're only testing the waters so far, but -we've lost a few schools putting a name to the wallet. People are happy -to take mystery money, but when these boards are actually facing someone -across the table they want to know what axe you're grinding." - -"We aren't grinding anything. Except unbiased education." - -"Say that, they get more edgy than if you start praying at them. And the -church-sponsor representatives, they hate it! With no strings-attached -cash, we're threatening their charitable stranglehold. So, they do -everything they can to sow seeds of doubt amongst the decision makers, -asking what do we really want, etc. And they aren't above making -direct threats too, loss of Holy favours, scare them into line." - -"So, no change there then." - -"If it's worked for centuries..." - -"You make it work for you too. Pity we have to go down this path, but -sometimes it's true: you do have to give the audience what they want, at -least until they don't want it any more." - -"Yeah, well. Only that one thing left to get the snowball really -rolling, but I guess we know now. It's going to be in America. You owe -me a few bucks, pal. Do you know who you want to handle it?" - -"Actually, I thought I'd do it myself. I don't think I'd feel -comfortable giving it to anyone else. Besides, I've got a small head, -and every little helps. Who knows..." They stood up and embraced. - -"Good luck." -

***

- -

"Greg, it's just a - an honour to speak to you!" - -Greg relaxed into the world's most expensive chair and smiled -generously. The walls of his suite were blank. He spoke into his own -phone for that intimate touch. - -"Thanks, Hamm, really - and I just want to say it, I think you've got a -great future ahead of you." - -"Oh - I don't - thanks!" - - -"Yeah... if." - -"If?" - -Greg didn't reply straight away and could almost hear the cold sweat -forming on the other end of the line. "Hamm, we've got a real problem -with this guy, you know? Him. There are reports, not just in the -US, but all over now - he's spinning his webs and people are getting -caught up in them, you know?" - -"Whoa. That's... that's, like..." - -"Bad, Hamm." - - -"Yeah. Bad." - - -"I need to know that you're the man to handle this story, Hamm." - - -"I am, Greg, I promise! I've got it covered every way!" - - -"I know you have, Hamm. But listen: as a reporter, and when the time -comes, as an anchor, it's important to know when to report the -news, and when to make it." - -"...an anchor?" - - -"Sometimes, reporting the news is about saving lives, Hamm." - - -"Yeah!" - -"And sometimes, saving lives means making a real sacrifice. If you know -what I mean." - -"I... I do, Greg." - - -"Have you ever been to war, Hamm?" - - -"No." - - -"Well then. All I can say is, when you get that chance, for an -exclusive, one off, final interview - Hamm? Make me proud. -Goodbye, son." Greg hung up and awarded himself a private Pulitzer for -Best Anchor.

***

- -"It's been three days since the stunning, alleged murder of the, -so-called prophet by former Channel Pi news reporter, Hammond -Strichter. Later we'll be going to the Bush Secure Psychiatric Prison -Facility for a, live interview with Strichter himself prior to his, -key evaluation at the end of the week - and we'll be speaking with the -good Reverend John James about, the support he hopes to lend to -Strichter's cause." - -"Back after, these messages." Greg smiled perfectly. Ratings had soared. -He listened to Dan's quiet chatter in his ear, running an eye over the -text on his backup prompt while he waited for the break to end - then -Dan paused. Then he said something Greg couldn't make out. His voice -sounded... bad. - -"Greg, we've got to come back on right now." - - -"Dan, this is the ad break. We don't interrupt the ad break." - -"We're going live in five, text on the prompt. Look fucking serious, -man." - -Greg didn't have to. Interrupting the advert break? The sponsors would -kill them all, starting with their children. "We interrupt these -messages - these extremely important messages," he ad-libbed, "to go -live to... to where..." Greg read it again. "To, to go live-" Dan cut -him off mid-word, but Greg didn't even notice, just turned immediately -to his monitor to watch. It was Angela Voney. - -

She had to shout to be heard. "I'm Angela Voney reporting, live at the -scene of the, death of the man they were calling, The Prophet Of -Washington where this, massive, crowd have gathered to witness, the -impossible. Because here, not two minutes ago - wait - wait..." Behind -her tall, blonde bouffant hairdo the crowd was quietening. The camera's -POV rose, lifted to look out over their heads - then, from the centre, -like an expanding ripple on the surface of a pond, the people began to -sit, right there in the street, spreading towards the outer edge, -closer, closer, until the only other person still standing was - the -prophet. - -Silence. Then he turned once on the spot, slowly, to look out at them -all. - -"The rumours," he said, "of my death are, as they say, not really -newsworthy." Just for a moment, he seemed to look straight into the -camera. Then he waved. "So let me tell you something that is." He -smiled, brilliantly, then began to spread some good news. -

Back in his studio, a line of saliva leaked from Greg Torrent's slack -mouth onto his tie, unnoticed by all. - -

One Month Later

- -

The prophet led the newbie - subscriber, pre-convert, whatever - it -would please the press no end if we called them initiates, he -thought - into the spacious lounge, pointing out various features in -passing, watching amused from the corner of his eye as the youngster -stared at some other prophets, relaxing and chatting and staring -peacefully out through the floor-to-ceiling window wall at the mountains -and trees, or the animals grazing by the waterfall lake. - -"Nice, isn't it?" he asked. His voice was deep, with just the hint of an -accent. - -"They all look like you," the newbie replied. "I mean, sure, you're -black, and some of them are - he's Japanese, look, that one - but you -all look alike. I mean, I never really believed..." - -

"We'll both dress up Oriental and go check out the -fount of civilisation..."
"In the much fabled -Conversion? That's -where we're going now," -said the prophet. He grinned at the newbie's suddenly wide-eyed -expression and stopped walking. "Don't worry, kid, it doesn't hurt. We -only call it that to give the media a shred of truth to hang their -paranoia on. It is a part of the deal - everyone working in the field -has to toe the company line, so to speak - but there's more than a -little leeway; as you noticed yourself, we embrace all nationalities. -Take me: I wasn't always this beautiful, chocolate flavoured god you see -before you; my mother's side were Norwegian originally. I just really -wanted to visit Africa, so that's where they sent me. Properly prepared, -naturally." - -"Naturally?" - -"Well, maybe not," he admitted with another grin. He indicated the way -and led the newbie out of the lounge and down a clean pale corridor. -"But there's no questioning the freedom. You get to travel, to see the -whole world if you want, and you're helping do good wherever you go. -I've been thinking about a change myself recently. Maybe the exotic far -east. China would be interesting. Ah, here we are." - -Between a coffee machine and a ceramic drinking fountain was what looked -like a tanning bed, hip-high beneath an opaquely glowing white domed -lid. Just waiting for them there, halfway down the corridor - opposite -the door to a unisex toilet. Like it wasn't very important. The newbie -looked further down the way to a junction, nervously. A couple of -prophets crossed it; one of them noticed his nervous stare and gave him -a thumbs up. He looked back to the prophet - his prophet - this one. - -"Man, I'm shitting myself a bit." The prophet patted him on the shoulder -sympathetically. - -"I know, don't worry. I was too, the first time. My whole identity is -going away, who will I be, oh my god, oh my god! But really, don't -worry. It only takes about fifteen minutes, it's only cosmetic, and it's -entirely reversible. Seriously, I went back and forth for two hours when -I joined up, just to make sure it always got me right. I used to put my -old face back on like clocking off at the end of the day; this is just -the uniform after all. But after a while, you know. Now I only bother if -I'm going on holiday. - -"Look, I'll tell you what: I'm going to be coming out with you while you -find your feet anyway and I'll have to put my old face back on to blend -in. Can't have two of us in one place at the same time. Why don't we -just give you something nice and Apple Pie for now, and when you've got -up to speed with the spiel and everything we'll both dress up Oriental -and go check out the fount of civilisation for a few months - how does -that sound?" - -"I don't speak Mandarin." - -"Wŏ bù xué wú shù," the prophet -deadpanned. "Well, we can decide later. Hop on." - -The newbie did, still nervous, looking about at the narrow compartment -as he lay back. The prophet started tapping at the controls. As he -reached up to close the dome the newbie took his arm lightly. - -"You okay?" the prophet asked. - -"Yeah, yeah, but..." The newbie swallowed, then squared his jaw. "I'm -good. I just wanted to say..." He held out his hand to shake. "The -name's Thomas... Tom." - -Aggy smiled and took his hand. "I know," he said. "I remember." -

-© Andrew Leon Hudson 2011 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] prophets.jpg - - - - -[*ITEM] Outpatients - -[*AUTHOR] Jonathan Joseph - -[*BLURB] In a war zone, every bit of kindness makes a difference. - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

13th January 2031

- -

There is a certain weary comfort to a Monday morning here; -despite the horrors in the prefabs and the faintly gamma-positive sleet -pocking the poly roof of my office, I take some solace from the generic, -familiar schlep of the starting week. - -I have been up for three hours already, a nagging occipitalis ache -dragging me neck first from an uneasy sleep on my surplus noncom cot. In -contrast to my usual fractious, broken dreams, my office looks the same -as always - a small pokey appendix epoxied to the back of the main ward. -One small desk, one half-destroyed chair - the seat as hard as -permafrost, one semi-opaque sheet of plastic masquerading as a window, -one extremely modern laptop - my sole luxury - is probably the single -most expensive item in a hundred kilometre radius. There are over a -thousand carbon and partially silicon based entities within effective -sniper fire range that would cheerfully kill me for it, but so far I -think I've kept it a secret. A beautiful distillation of thirty years of -west coast technofetishism, the computer fortunately doesn't look -anything like a computer does here in the technological doldrums of the -Middle East - they still coo over a Macbook in these parts. - -

stories of whitewashed caves, dentist chairs, -chugging Honda generators

-I have no fixed schedule here, but many -demands on my time. My charges -have the sweet plaintive demands of the truly helpless, raggedy stick -and bone shapes only faintly tenting the rough blankets that are the -only bedclothes available in the chilly main ward of the hospital. As -usual I make a morning tour of the ward, a depressing euphemism for a -shuffling survey of the two small bays that are the full extent of the -hospital. Zalmai is awake - I've never seem him asleep - his sightless -head tracking every small sound I make as I negotiate the defunct -medical clutter he insists on heaping on and around his bed, a pitiful -hedge against further pain. We found Zalmai about a month ago; he had -crawled over twenty kilometres from the Maheepar Pass to the suburbs of -Jalalabad. I was led to where he lay by one of the filthy -interchangeable urchins who hang around the compound and who know we -will pay a few afgani for information on the latest unfortunates to -stagger out of the western mountains. Zalmai had heard me coming, the -chill winter morning air telegraphed my approach clearly to his -undamaged ears. Mewling pathetically, he had scrabbled backwards, -bloodied palm prints darkening the cracked, dried mud of the grubby no -man's land of the road verge. He looked up at me - his excised, -bloodless, empty sockets somehow a much worse horror than the terrible -battle gore I had seen and treated - they had taken his eyes. - -The Pardis Hospice is a mean, swingeing, -annex shoehorned into the small space that used to optimistically be -called the Jalalabad Hospital main car park. Now a gomied dumping ground -for shrapnel-ruined medical equipment and discarded prosthetics striking -improbable vogues, the park is also home to our three ex-NATO inflatable -medical tents. Transitory structures long past their half-life, the -prefabs are home to that most contemporary of war victim - the organ -thieved. - -We've been here for a little over three months and I've already seen, -treated, consoled, and sometimes watched die, over seventy victims of -the mountain gangs. It's a hard road from Kabul, and all are fair game; -scooter punks who think they know it all, Médicins sans -Frontières newbies, economigrants nomading their way to the -Pakistan border and back in tattered annual caravans of privation. The -gangs seem to prize Christian aid workers most of all. Last week, a -shattered Isuzu pickup dumped the legless, not yet lifeless, torso of a -Jesuit priest right at the entrance to the main prefab; he was also -missing his eyes, and as we found out later, both his kidneys and liver. -He died with his eyelids pinned back, never saying a word, his fists -hiding a crushed rosary. The ones that live are harder to bear, so many -stories of whitewashed caves, dentist chairs, chugging Honda generators, -blank, black eyes - and so much pain. Oddly, these surgeons are -curiously attentive to the aseptic technique, only a handful of our -patients ever seem to develop opportunistic post-operative infections, -and, judging purely on surgical finesse, these butchers seem to wield -their antique scalpels with aplomb. - -The ward stirs as more breakfast grumblings join Zalmai's quiet demands -for flatbread and black tea. Several dislodged dressings add to the -night fart miasma with the high sweet smell of putrefaction, and the -splosh-clatter of a bed pan hitting the floor adds to the fun. I -dispense some gloves, filter up and get to work. - -

Air quality permitting, I try and hold the group sessions -outside. When the particulate meter settles into a quasi-quiescent -tick-tock metronome, we bundle up the patients into hand-me-down NBC -suits and stretcher/carry/cajole our charges into the ambulance (an -ungainly USMC anti-mine deuce and a half) and head south east to the -poppy fields near the Khyber Pass. Since the mujahideen went synthetic -savvy and the UNODC quashed production with the simple expediency of -tactical nukes, the endless opium plantations have been abandoned and -gone to seed. The orbital feeds now show a more colourful Afghanistan, -like an ironic mockery of old empire cartography the landscape is a -startling seasonal scarlet against the otherwise unrelenting high -altitude view of the endless browns and greys of the Middle Eastern -prairie. - -

Zalmai wheels, turns, pitches and yaws across the -poppy field

The poppies hide the other prefab I maintain, a -quiet -place that is -tolerably well preserved by fading UN logos and still functioning outer -skin chameleon polymers. Ignored also, because of its notional salvage -value, the prefab offers us a valuable hiatus space, only occasionally -spoiled by a few empty beer bottles and rank hobo piss. Appearances -aside, I still feel that there is useful work to be done here. We -(mostly me) are one small part of what in quainter (more naïve) -times -might have been called a guilty conscience. But it's pointless trying to -anthropomorphise a corporation; the lesson I've learned from fourteen -months in field is that WorkSpace is nothing but deliberate. -Unencumbered by the human flotsam of pity, or empathy, or consideration, -the WorkSpace behemoth moves deliberately and with perfect self-focus. - -The Combat Revenue model is a well-worn, well-practiced algorithm that -allows for the faintest expressions of largesse at carefully determined -intervals. The CR tacticians noticed early on in shock and awe -profiteering that they had to allow for a degree of mercy, an -amelioration of take, to maximise their returns. It seems that -even the best-insulated corporate psyche quails eventually in the -one-way bazaar of war. - -This is where I come in - -one small articulation (a feeble prosthetic nod to decency) of the -post-war official WorkSpace Health and Reconciliation programme. Like a -shot in the arm of battlefield stimulant, we had an amazing first year -in Jalalabad - epic funding, baksheesh up the wazoo, access all areas - -even for a Guardian-reading tosser like myself, it was hard to resist -local government-sanctioned largesse... This year's been rather -different. We are no longer the flavour du jour; by October, -WorkSpace PR had already moved onto a free HIV-immunisation programme -for the Cape Town townships, and the scooped torsos and cleanly -delineated stumps of the organ thieved were old news. Funding dropped to -less than ten percent of year one, we lost most of the international -team, the patient suicide rate soared, we moved to the prefabs in the -car park and I lost the one decent camp bed left in southern -Afghanistan. - -We still have the poppy prefab though, and on a spring day with the -early red petals tinting the view, we make some useful progress with our -crippled coterie. Zalmai, in particular, loves the plantation; he knows -that there is nothing to run into, the worst he can expect is a turned -ankle in a rabbit hole. It's become a tradition, as soon as the -ambulance hits the bumpier surface of the gravel road leading to the -prefab, Zalmai grabs my sleeve and turns his eyeless face to mine (a -mute plea I can never resist) and points to the ambo door. I slow the -truck and punch the door release. - -Zalmai hoots and leaps, rolling easily -on his left shoulder, the poppy buds leaving sticky resin on his crappy -jacket and brown dust and early sun forming a glowing corona around his -thrashing form. Then he's up, running, arms outstretched, a child's -aeroplane freedom - a thing of beauty compared to the adult fetishism of -war hardware that Zalmai unconsciously mimics. - -The Afgani children that I have met all seem to share an uncanny ability -to imitate the clanks/drones/rumbles/snicks/clicks of the American -armour they have grown up with all their lives. Zalmai wheels, turns, -pitches and yaws across the poppy field filling the air with a pitch -perfect echo of an A12 tankbuster on afterburner, punctuated -occasionally with the bumblebee gargle of the chin chain gun. - -

The activated charcoal in the aircon has long since been -inactive and the prefab smells like camping trips and the drying -wetsuit tang of childhood seaside visits. I peg back the membrane door -as far as it can go and we all shuffle in, Zalmai bringing up the -rear, taxiing reluctantly into the musty space. - -Currently our complement is only seven. A recent c. difficile -outbreak, a spectacular gastrointestinal revolt that left the whole ward -retching and grieving in equal measure, resulted in two deaths. There -was only one surprise, a goat farmer who had wandered into the hospital -compound, unaided, only missing a lung and his left hand. He died four -days later, after the difficile infection swept through the -wards. - -Also present are some other stubborn remnants of this year's intake: -Max, a shaggy, denimed member of the ubiquitous tribe of nomadic -westerners that form a grubby, globally-spanning gulf stream of -trust-fund disillusionment and disestablishmentarianism. Six months ago -Max found himself muling out of Kabul with an amphetamine-packed colon -and a nearly valueless solid roll of hyper-inflated Afgani currency. The -Rough Guide is woefully short on hitching advice for the Kabul-Jalalabad -road and Max's abortive attempt to flag down an ancient Peugeot estate -resulted in a third-hand colostomy bag and a free ride to our hospital -car park. Ashur the Syrian, my star pupil, a dead man walking. Ashur was -a DOA at Jalalabad Central hospital, a bloody bundle of rags that had -been cursorily admitted by an exhausted night staff and then rolled on a -broken trolley into an unused corridor in the ER. Doubling as a trauma -surgeon during the first few weeks of my secondment I found this gory -heap as I took five and sucked down my millionth smoke of the night. -Ashur is what we call a full donor - multiple organ theft and over -fifty percent of limb reduction. Incredibly he was conscious when I -found him, his one remaining hand pawing blindly at the fetid hot air of -the ER. I was new in-country back then and I was gear-rich and drug-fat -from my new WorkSpace coffers. The hospital wing they had assigned me -for the organ theft project was full of box fresh, state-of-the-art kit -designed exactly for the life extension of this type of victim. Ashur -was at the thin end of a survival spectrum probability but back then I -was full of enthusiasm, energy and naïve hope. - -He made it through the night; his cored torso emptied of offal and -filled with a million euros worth of modular life support. That long -night was a vague memory of grey market Marlboro consumption, the -blinking LEDs of the medical gear and the gurgle/rattle of a jury-rigged -trachea/air filtration unit connection. Ashur is a continuing miracle, -wholly dependent on ageing med gear, scrounged feedstock and smuggled -hormone replacement analogues; yet he has an easy, beatific smile and -always some time for Zalmai. Ashur reminds me of a turn of the century -cyborg wet dream gone wrong. Like a crippled borg lacking the -transcendent scope of Stelarc's vacuum-bound nude explorers, Ashur is -his own street, making his own uses of the tech we can scrape together -for him. - -Gula always brings up the rear, she invariably insists on carrying the -Job from the ambulance to the prefab, an essential piece of kit for the -group sessions. Nearly two metres tall, Gula's single huge right arm -easily flips the modular Job pod off the roof rack and onto its -undercarriage of sprung wheels. Gula has not spoken since she came to -live with us in the prefabs, she has no overt medical needs and I can -only assume she was also a victim of the mountain gangs, the clean stump -of her left humerus betrays the trauma of involuntary surgery, not the -impartial mangled legacy of a farm accident. Gula's huge beautiful green -eyes miss nothing and she acts as our minder during the vulnerable hours -we spend in Job immersion during the counselling sessions. - -

Even with the pharmacological mitigation and enclosure -comfort provided by the Job, therapy with my patients rarely shares the -structured, ethereal -angst of a first world counselling session. Dealing not with the maybe, -the bogeymen of possibility, the faint spectre of disaster - all distant -cousins to true pain; these fragmented souls have already seen and felt -far too much real trauma to compare even fleetingly with my pampered -Albionside client base. After a year of patching up tattered psyches, -gibbering will-o-the-wisp surgery survivors, I have developed an -involuntary rage response when I think back to the work I did at my -Acton practise. When I remember the plaintive middle England whining of -mortgage rate hikes, second job exhaustion, the draconianisms of my own -erstwhile employer, and the dull throb of thwarted careers, the gorge -rises and I frantically pat my pockets for the Marlboros. - -

the rest of the group forms a circle around Zalmai -and me as we interface

Here in Afghanistan, in this millennial -crucible of conflict, pain is -real and my patients have experienced the full gamut. Not for the -first time I am struck by the depressingly familiar irony of the urgent -consumer strivings of my own cosseted countrymen for -tastes/flavours/newness - bring me a new shirt, a new tie, a... new -thing... anything. Daily I am reminded of the timeless Couplandism - -"purchased experiences don't count"; here, instead, in-country, almost -everyone is looking for a refund of their own bitter, involuntary -transactions. It's a hard lesson too, after a whole life of -absent-minded gratitude for an accident of birth - a genetic dice roll - -it only took a year in Afghanistan to realise that my former life was a -hollow and valueless as a scooped thorax of one of my pillaged charges. - -I have a full quiver of therapeutics, though, and fading WorkSpace -funding notwithstanding, I've got good gear. During the prefab sessions, -when we're making a semblance of progress and the tears flow usefully -and cathartically, I feel like I did when I de-planed in Baghdad - a -clean arrow of determination fletched with the belief that I can make a -difference - salve the terrible open wounds of conflict damage. -Technology helps, the long chain polymer perfume of new tech, the -replete power packs, the semi-autonomous repair packs, the vacuum sealed -MREs - though I have painfully and incrementally discovered that all -these hedges against chaos and disorder are merely a delay, a brief -hiatus of intervention that lasts only as long as the new car smell. -After a year of petty theft, pilfering, abrasive desert winds, and the -inevitable over-usage entropy, out of all my original kit only the Job -is running at anywhere near full capacity. - -The Job is a two person therapy model, with empathy bias. Designed in -2030 by a Dutch-Italian WorkSpace subsidiary, therapy Jobs were built -around a central core concept: To feel is to understand. The one -hundred and fifty years of the psychotherapy industry had always been -hobbled by one glaring central limitation - to know someone is not to -know their pain - and without that knowledge there can never been true -understanding, and in turn, succour. The therapy Jobs make the tenuous, -febrile moments of therapeutic insight a concrete reliability. Using the -manipulation of mirror neurone activity - the observationally triggered -physiological process that occurs when conspecific animals (humans -included) witness each other's pain - the Jobs use pharmacological and -electroneurological interventions to augment and enhance the biological -empathy response. This includes the primary nociceptors - the -propagators of noxious stimuli. This means that in Job-facilitated -session the therapist feels the patient's pain. Considered somewhat of a -Wild West field by the old school of non-interventionists counsellors -and therapists, Job therapy is not for the faint-hearted. The pain, both -phantom and real, of (for example) missing limbs, despite being buffered -and baffled by a series of filters controlled by both the therapist and -the patient, could be extreme. Still fringe, and therefore deemed -"deployment-acceptable" in non-first world contexts, the empathy school -was taking some of the first painful steps towards true understanding -and healing. - -Today it's Zalmai's first session, somewhat of a rite of passage in -these de-traditioned times. I ping the Job a wake-up sequence from my -smartphone and it uncurls from its wheeled repose. Carapaced like an -over-plated armadillo, the Job snicks-snucks-clicks into the standard -new patient configuration. Designed to minimise further unnecessary -distress, these Job models lack the sanitary/elimination hook-ups of the -standard corporate Job models, and they also have a much more friendly -on-board AI avatar - gender-variable dependent on the client. Forming -the now standardised defensive outward looking perimeter (a welcome -evolution of session security initiated by Gula), the rest of the group -forms a circle around Zalmai and me as we interface. I lead Zalmai to -the patient saddle, the Job flaring open in a welcoming proboscis -embrace. Seating Zalmai and hooking up the pharma-feed and the skullNet -takes a few minutes, a pause capitalized as usual by at least four of -the group lighting up, I don't really mind - H&S is a distant concept -these days. The Job chirps an environmental particulate/carcinogen alarm -but I squash it immediately - first world puritanism can go fuck itself. - -Having made Zalmai comfortable and giving him a few minutes to acquaint -himself with the Job, I then hook myself up in the therapy seat. -Accessing the public landing space I prep a stylised simulacrum of the -poppy fields outside. In the therapySpace the neurointerface provided by -the Job means that during the sessions Zalmai will see again (a direct -optical nerve hack that anywhere else in the West would be available as -an outpatient procedure), and I want him to have a nice view. The quiet, -small voice of the Job whispers - go - in my ear and the session begins. - -

At nearly thirty-seven thousand kilometres above southern -Afghanistan, the geo-stationary WorkSpace relay milsat is a barely -detectable stellar mote in the clear, frigid, night sky. Suspended in a -cylindrical vat of liquid helium, and protected with a ring of bulky -tanks of propellant, the mind of the satellite pulses gently with a -superconductive glow. It doesn't really think; WorkSpace tends to impose -a max AI capacity on geosynchronous weapons platforms with kinetic -missile capability. Nonetheless, the dim, dog-like musings of the sat -envelop its operational output like a primary colour finger painting: -Mmmm, 98% operational efficiency. Recreational uplink in 953 seconds -- woof. Milchcow rendezvous in seven orbits - drool. - -The sat has a number of tasks - comms routing, mildata storage, AI -backup - but, primarily, it's a gun. A big gun. Optimised for targeted, -non-radioactive orbital bombardment, the milsat is a fourth-gen geosync -platform built by WorkSpace in 2029 and leased to the US government for -the duration of Afghanistan 2.0. The sat has seen some service, crude -satisfaction routines humming with gratification as the dumb matter -kinetic missiles were deployed at hypersonic speeds from the blunt -muzzles of its EM accelerators. Expelled at speeds close to escape -velocity, the streamlined chunks of depleted plutonium that the sat uses -for ammunition require no explosive payload. Impacting at over twelve -kilometres per second, the dull grey rods of plutonium convey a impact -explosive analog of over 20 kilotons. With no gamma after-effects, the -weapons platform is the tool of choice for the discerning on-the-ground -US military coordinator. They even take it in turns, thrice-PHDed war -technicians squabbling over who gets to pull the trigger on a modified -PlayStation paddle from an invulnerable state-side bunker. - -Latterly, though, the military machine has moved on to oilier -pastures and the milsat has been backburnered to standard comms duties - -piggy-backing commercial TV feeds a dimly perceived jangle of irritating -bits. As the terminator creeps across the terrigenous skeleton of the -mountains of Afghanistan, and the morning brings some welcome relief -from the freezing spring night, the milsat wakes up to a rare but -extremely important ping: get ready to launch. Hard-coded -synapses -shiver alert with an anticipation of pseudo-pleasure - re-deployed it -may be, but the sat is a combat machine - they made it to want to fight. -Milliseconds later targeting data hits its buffer, a priority wrapper -indicates a desired completion timeframe for the action, an imperative -variable tells the sat that the order is reinforced with a WASTE -modifier, somewhere in WorkSpace someone (or probably more likely -somebot) has decided that a WorkSpace initiative has exceeded its -mandated usefulness. In the more litigiously nervous environment of the -developed world this would result in a cease and desist order and fund -withdrawal; out in the Middle East boondocks a more expedient MO is -used: explosive deconstruction and removal. - -The sat processes the targeting data: A geoloc overlay pinpoints the -bombardment coordinates, a more self-aware entity might puzzle over the -rationale and/or military significance of a near-deserted patch of poppy -plantation several kilometres south of Jalalabad, and a less capable -machine might doubt its ability to hit a tiny disused prefab. The milsat -is fully upgraded, though, and has a 94% success termination potential -for targets <0.5 metre square. 250 milliseconds following receipt of -directive its primary EM cannon is unfolding from its dormant -configuration. Fully three seconds thereafter a two metre needle of -ultrahard plutonium is making a ersatz shooting star in the dawn sky of -Afghanistan. Nearly an hour later (an aeon in machine time) the sat's -after-action scan detects a rising cloud of atomised rock and dust -rising into the morning sky. Its sensors are also sensitive enough to -detect in the particulate cloud the fatty-carbon remains of several -mammalian combatants, it also wonders briefly and unconcernedly about -the flash of machine thought coherence it detected just before missile -impact. - -Resource allocation is not one its core competencies, nor does is -possess combat morality algorithms. The sat powers down to dormant, to -again moronically eavesdrop the tsunami of commercial bandwidth flooding -its router. - -Pardis Hospice is closed for business. - -© Jonathan Joseph 2011 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] outpatients.jpg - -[*ITEM] Conspiracy Theory - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Read this carefully. Preferably with your lips moving. -And even then ... - - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

"He's in there. I'll leave you to it then." - -I thanked the supervisor. The door was opened for me by a security -guard, who stood aside discreetly as I entered. The man was sitting at -a table, looking slightly anxious. He half rose, smiling uncertainly. -I gestured for him to resume his seat, and lowered my frame into the -chair opposite. - -

I had inadvertently allowed my jaw to drop -slightly. "Plodding?" I enquired.
"Right," I began, opening my -notepad. "I'm Investigator Thomas Felling. My name -was on the slip of paper you handed in. Call me Tom. And you are...?" - -He looked puzzled. "Mayan armour, ah. Harmonium, ammonia, uranium..." -He shook his head as if to clear it. "Nom... Mormon, Norman." He -frowned. "Moon or morgen?" - -"It's almost half-past ten. You say your name is Norman?" - -He leaned forward. "Sherry, tomfelling, north shoreman, name dummat. Horm, neg. Sorm! Herm!" - -"So, er... Herm. Where do you live?" - -"Manner of hammering here, Surrey. Near earshot. Only short arrows. -Norwich. Harrow? Throne's toad from Sharon's crotch." - -"Sharon? Girlfriend? Wife?" - -"Ho, neg marrows, chief. Grief! Hoof! Some very near missiles, mine, -fiery scrapes, neg webdings, neg splice, slickness and stealth, that -candle of werbs. Sorrel, no fangs. Thunderground, tomfelling sirs. -Herring Cross, nomean?" - -"Okay," I said, with more conviction than I felt, and tentatively -jotted: 'MALE. HERM ?? c. 35-40. LONDON' "And why exactly did you -want to see me?" - -He became more animated. "Seamy, narf! Crimes! Sorm, herm. Wild -times aheard, tomfelling, ears peeled, lips sealed, eyes full frontal, -hands shirking in a biscuit squirrel. Risky. Unner hat, rats in -mattress, old son, reach for the whisky. Whew!" - -My hand remained poised above the pad. I nodded encouragingly, -suppressing any sign of confusion. "Er, do go on." - -"Wool, seam. Yesday, scoffing a quartz or pine - Red Lime (mebbin -Quing's Arse, dummat), saw threevem. Long copes, dark glarps, stamby -door mane kine low throaky garbling, like war in a pipe. Neg humour -bins, swear. Strewf! Whew! Bygol, eyes fright, pine spilt, spine -chilt, gim creebs tomfelling, pragly piston panks! Haddago gents. -Gobback." He paused dramatically, whispered, "Gorm!" The memory -prompted him to wipe his brow with some shreds of greyish tissue. I -abandoned the pen, raising instead an expectant eyebrow. - -"Ailings! Spiles! Creepers from an utter whirl, an utter Zola systole; -fast galleries swirly in the golden spice, shoals of molten coal, -millibands of lifeyears awake, nomean, kidgeneg, sorm. Sorm, -tomfelling, owneyes. Herm, ownears. Spiles def. Plodding!" He -nodded vigorously. - -I had inadvertently allowed my jaw to drop slightly. "Plodding?" I enquired. - -"Plodding." His somewhat cryptic blurt had now gained a kind of fierce -momentum. "Spiring, crooking up streams to make us wavery, savoury, -slaver, drool the whirl, the holy worm. Mem H G Wheels? Whorf, Warp of -the Whirls? Sim, but neg stalky tripots, seary heatraids zappling -Leatherwedge or Choking. Farmer, swan and woolly goats! Ailing -creepers zemblin humour bins, tent on, bent on assymbolate us. Tole -barman, ole fren, had one meb two onnahouse, neg harm, sez besgosee -tomfelling. Well," he concluded, with evident relief, "Mere." - -"So you are," I said. "Well done. Most observant. Your barman was of -course quite right to send you to me." And we duly assymbolated him. - - -© L J Sklaroff 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] conspiracy.jpg - - -[FINISH] - Ed. - - T - -
- -
- -

- - Ed. - -that personage - - - - - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissue9.xwy b/content-xway/stockissue9.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index b768c69a..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissue9.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3015 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 9 - June 2011 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] A belated welcome to the June 2011 edition of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Most publishers seem to produce the June -edition in the middle of May. Breaking with tradition, we are publishing -the June edition in early July. We have been running since February -2008, which is quite a long time for a Webzine. I like to think we are -now comfortably established, but we can never have too many readers, so -keep Tweeting and Facebooking about us. - -I'd also like to draw to your attention the Authors' Links page, giving the sites of some of -our authors. - -In this edition, we have two more sparkling tales from Les Sklaroff, -a cyberpunk game within a game from Martin Clark, a fantasy reminiscence -from Matthew Kirshenblatt, a post-apocalypse from Twilite Minotaur, a -modest offering from your editor, and a haunting far-future vision from -Annabel Banks. - -And, of course, another cartoon from Liam Baldwin. - - - -[*IMAGE] chaos.jpg - - - - - - -[*ITEM] Boffin - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] A non-Damascene conversion? - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I was threading my way back to the -reserved table when a familiar voice distinguished itself from the -general hubbub. "... a whole new level of capability" it was saying in -that well-polished, softly accented Central European English. -"Groundbreaking stuff," it added, with a satisfying throaty roll of -each 'r'. Then followed the mischievous giggle I remembered from his -'eccentric boffin' days, before he shunned publicity, when he used to -keep young television viewers enrapt with his lectures and -demonstrations, and which undoubtedly inspired the scientific interests -of at least two generations. - -

Not as vociferous as Dawkins
-I didn't have the temerity to intrude, but paused nearby long enough to -overhear a little more. "...effectively making explosives redundant..." -he was saying. "and we can all testify that it could not have been -achieved without faith." I could hear cries of assent from his -colleagues. - -In a state of some excitement I rejoined my friends. "Guess who's -sitting at the table behind that pillar?" I demanded, in what I -contrived to make a discreet whisper, pointing surreptitiously through -my left shoulder. Before they had time to consider, I told them. "It's -Max Vorlek!" The response was not encouraging. "Vor-lek!" I -enunciated carefully. I spread the fingers of my left hand and began -tallying. "Cloud-fountains, the paramagnetic battery, compound -polytopes." I continued to be met with faintly puzzled stares. I was -undaunted. "Latticed carbothenes, multiphasic resonance-dampers." I -had temporarily run out of fingers. "The Boojum Hypothesis," I reminded -them, sitting back smugly. - -Light began to dawn. "Oh, that inventor -chap..." - -"Didn't he refuse some award...?" - -"I thought he was dead." - - -"Wasn't he on 'The Muppet Show'?" - -"Oh yes, the one with that weird -theory..." - -"He's a one-man innovation factory." I said. "A practical engineer with -an amazing grasp of different areas of scientific knowledge, and more -original ideas to his credit than Edison or Tesla or even Bucky Fuller. -Of course, with every new idea he proposed, the scientific establishment -largely turned a deaf ear, or tried to discredit him. Anyway, he's -obviously on to something new." I told them what I had overheard, -adding, "What really surprised me was that reference to faith. He's -always been a staunch atheist - not as vociferous as Dawkins, maybe, but -certainly opposed to anything remotely supernatural." We agreed it was -curious, and speculated on the psychology of sudden conversion, and on -the possible nature of Vorlek's new discovery. Then our food arrived, -and we became too preoccupied even to notice when Vorlek and his -companions had left. - -

Two weeks later the world's attention was suddenly drawn to Bolivia, -where a section of the Andes, specifically one of the lesser peaks of -the Cordillera Real, the Pequeño Alpamayo, had temporarily vanished. -Not obscured by cloud, but cleanly sheared off. Temporarily, because -the entire mass was restored after four hours and nineteen minutes, -having spent that period of time resting neatly over the southern border -in the Atacama desert. Satellite images confirmed the bizarre reality -of this event, corroborated by seismographical and gravimetric readings. - -The culprit, as we learned soon enough, was Max Vorlek. He had not, at -it happened, undergone a religious conversion, but he had conceived of, -designed, and with the help of a dedicated team, developed a -teleportation device which would literally change the world. He called -it, somewhat grandly, a 'field-activated ion translocation hypertool', -but it became better known by its acronym. - -And yes, it could move -mountains. - - - -© L J Sklaroff 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] boffin.jpg - -[*ITEM] Let Every Voice be Still - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] Extractions can prove painful. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Close your eyes and wait for the world to begin�

- -

We were to meet up at The Inverted Spin, a fly-boy bar and -diner near Henderson Field. I have a patch that allows me to skip titles -and intro, getting me there well ahead of the other players. Despite it -being fairly busy the big corner booth is always empty, so I scored a -beer and settled in to see who else turned up.

- -

The Shadow Corporation immersion game I -knew featured murder, torture, gun battles and betrayal.
I�d played -the -earlier version of Shadow Corporation and -nothing much seemed to have changed; same bar staff, same customers, -same décor. I felt slightly smug, as knowing the plot twists -would give me a decided advantage over the other players. That might -sound a bit petty but I enjoy watching how newbies react to virtual -environments most definitely designed with malice aforethought.

- -

A man appeared at the booth, as if coming from the restrooms. It was -Vaughn, in full blown Christopher Lambert mode, circa. Highlander; -long rain coat, stubble, Japanese wakizashi short sword hanging under -his left armpit.

- -

He sat opposite and smiled. "Duncan. It�s been a -while."

- -

I saluted him with my beer bottle. "Vaughn. Haven�t seen you -since, what, Scimitar of Symmetry?" We both looked at each -other for a moment, then laughed. I beat him to it. "Fiona -Blair!"

- -

"God, yes! She almost made the whole thing worthwhile. -You still in contact with her?"

- -

I shrugged. "Made the mistake of scoping her in real life. Let�s -just say that she didn�t quite live up to her gaming persona."

- -

"Ouch. Well, you should have known better than to try and mix -the two. What goes on spool�"

- -

"Stays on spool. Yeah, yeah, I know, but I�m an optimistic kind -of guy."

- -

Vaughn motioned to the waitress for a beer. "Not in here. Aren�t -you supposed to be the moody ex-fighter pilot with a dark secret? -Brooding, cynical, but who comes back for the survivors instead of -flying off to safety?"

- -

"And you, the stone killer with a conscience? The former -corporate assassin turned mercenary who goes up against the end of -chapter bad guys?"

- -

"One of two in this edition. Apparently someone is holding my -daughter hostage to ensure my co-operation."

- -

I grinned. "Not exactly a case of art imitating life, I grant -you. To be honest, Vaughn, I didn�t see this being your kind of thing. -No guaranteed sexual encounters, for a start."

- -

He took a swig of beer. "Well, I�m always open to new -experiences, and- "

- -

Movement at the door caught my eye and I cut across him. "Aw, -crap, it�s Ramirez. Did you know he was in on this?"

- -

Vaughn shook his head. "Unfortunate coincidence. Try and play -nice, Duncan, at least until we can get the scenario to kill him -off."

- -

Ramirez rolled over to us, a big grin on his fat face. Despite the -leather flying jacket and aviator shades slipping down his nose, no one -would have mistaken him for a pilot, or even cabin crew. He was one of -those guys who seem congenitally unable to take the hint.

- -

"Hi, guys! This is just great. I�d no idea you two would be here -- the old gang, the three musketeers."

- -

Vaughn muttered under his breath, "More like the three amigos, -at this rate."

- -

I tried not to laugh and shifted up as Ramirez squeezed his sweaty -bulk between bench and table. For all his faults, we needed him, at least -early on. His persona would be that of a fixer; he knew someone who knew -someone who could get us anything the unfolding narrative demanded. So I -tried to play nice.

- -

"No body morphing, Ramirez? You look pretty much as you do on -your player profile."

- -

"Naw! They were wanting so much extra for that, it was just -criminal. Apparently compensating charges are really steep with the new -interface. Physical dissonance they call it. I call it-"

- -

"Looks like one of us at the door. Make that two, both -women."

- -

Even Vaughn leaned round to take a look. The first woman was a curvy -brunette with close-cropped dark hair and eye-mask makeup. She was -wearing a throat-high one piece of iridescent metallic scales that -shimmered when she walked. The second newcomer couldn�t have been more -different. She looked like she�d tumbled down the rabbit hole from Alice -in Wonderland, complete with head band.

- -

They walked over to us, being studiously ignored by the other -customers, and the brunette spoke. "I�m Mazy, and this here is -Blondie." She rolled her eyes, "Seriously."

- -

I arched an eyebrow. "Seriously?"

- -

The almost-Alice nodded. "Oh yeah. I�m a big fan. The new -virtual tour is just amazing, and I�ve been to seven gigs so -far."

- -

"And you�re here because?"

- -

"Don�t you know? Well, apparently, the head of corporate -security is modelled on Debbie herself, a full body and persona -licensing deal. So I just had to try this out, even though my -friend Helena says it�s a bit scary."

- -

A bit scary? The Shadow Corporation immersion game I knew -featured murder, torture, gun battles and betrayal. Unless this new -edition had suddenly gone all fluffy-wuffy, Blondie was in for a really -bad trip.

- -

Mazy looked us over. "Fixer, pilot, killer � same as me. Blondie -is the hacker. We�re still missing the roguish bad-boy."

- -

Ramirez pointed behind her. "That looks like him now."

- -

I looked over and hung my head, sighing, eyes closed. The new arrival -was kitted out like Han Solo, minus the gun on his hip as the scenario -didn�t allow for overt weaponry. Just in case we didn�t get the iconic -reference he�d added a shoulder bag and beat-up floppy hat. I just knew -his name would be �Harrison� � an über fan boy.

- -

As he walked over I felt a tangible change in the bar. The narrative -was moving out of a holding pattern into something more directional, and -Vaughn smiled. "Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe its -showtime."

- -

The last of our group was, indeed, called Harrison, but I tuned out -while Ramirez made the introductions. My attention was on the door, -knowing there was an outside chance of a corporate security raid rather -than our scenario contact showing up. The game sometimes stiffed -experienced players with this hit-squad bullshit to keep us on our toes. -We�d be forced to split up, scatter, and piece together the plot rather -than having it laid out for us.

- -

A group of three men entered and I relaxed. Two of them -were just -bodyguards, all impassive muscle, but the third was a showboat; white -linen suit, black shirt, black tie, cashmere coat draped over his -shoulders, greased-back curly hair and shades. This type of non-player -character I knew well, although the name kept changing.

- -

Harrison had just gotten through the round of �Hellos� and sat down -by the time our contact eased over. Mr Smooth gave us a brilliant smile, -complete with gold tooth. "Ladies and gentlemen, I am Juan Canasta, -entrepreneur, middleman and renowned lover. May I join you?"

- -

We murmured our acceptance and Canasta handed his coat to one -bodyguard, sitting down on the chair held out by another. He removed -his glasses and slid them into his breast pocket while a waitress placed -a glass of mineral water in front of him. With his saturnine good looks -he resembled a comedy devil in corporate mode, although I knew if we -reached the end game there wouldn�t be a lot of laughs.

- -

Canasta placed an acoustic muffler on the table and background noise -dropped to almost zero. "It�s always best to ensure some degree of -privacy in these matters, yes? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I asked my -close personal friend and business associate, Madam Tisa, to assemble a -team at short notice, and I can see she�s done me proud. I promise you -this will prove extremely lucrative, but it will not be without -risk."

- -

I didn�t know Madam Tisa, obviously part of the introduction -sequence, but I could pretty much imagine the scene-setting spiel. -Blondie started, on the receiving end of a narrative prod. "So, Mr -Canasta, what�s the deal?"

- -

He smiled in a way that was already beginning to irritate me. -"Well, I represent certain interested parties, who of course wish -to remain nameless. For some time they have been working to ensure the -defection of a high-ranking executive from one of their -competitors."

- -

There was another narrative feed-line, this time from Ramirez. -"Come on, Canasta, who�s the target? We need to know what we�re -getting in to."

- -

"The executive in question is Jules Toba, the number three -at�Sensei Industries."

- -

I smiled to myself at the momentary hesitation. It was the game -incorporating our personal character preferences into the narrative � -namely Vaughn�s choice of a sword over a firearm. Because of this I -suspected we�d come up against neo-Samurai at some point, or even -corporate ninja.

- -

Mazy was talking, sounding sceptical. "Jules Toba? He�s pretty -much the face of Sensei in the Co-Prosperity Sphere, yeah? He rarely -sets foot outside the corporate arcology, so what�s he doing way out -here?"

- -

Canasta shrugged. "Toba engineered the need for a high-level -conference, one which couldn�t be conducted via a virtual interface. The -plan was for his private jet to develop engine trouble, such that it put -down at Darwin Hub, where an extraction team headed by Turner is -waiting." A flicker of annoyance passed over his features and he -took a sip of mineral water before continuing. "Unfortunately, the -sabotage proved to be all too effective and his aircraft could only make -it as far as here, Henderson Field. A spot where neither Sensei nor my -temporary employers have a corporate presence."

- -

I could feel the prompt forming in my mind, a bit like an itch you -had to scratch, and moved to pre-empt it. "So you need an -improvised team to spirit him away. Well, forgive me being so blunt, but -won�t his security be a trigger-happy suicide squad? I don�t fancy going -down in the proverbial hail of gunfire."

- -

Our potential patron smiled, again. "Sensei decided to keep his -presence here low-key. Obviously security will be on the increase, but -in an unobtrusive manner so as not to alert their commercial rivals. On -landing here Toba and his personal bodyguard were passed off as flight -engineers, part of a test crew, although this deception will not last -for long."

- -

Vaughn scratched his nose, almost grinning, so I guessed he�d read -the recent game reviews, complete with spoilers. "Oh, and why not? -What�s happened to blow his cover?"

- -

Canasta sighed. "Sensei made the mistake of booking them into a -better hotel than their pay grade would warrant. Corporate expert -systems are constantly trawling the data stream for anomalies like that, -so it�s only a matter of time before his true identity leaks -out."

- -

"So, what you�re saying is that not only do we have to get Toba -out before his own security congeals around him like amber, we can also -expect to run across other snatch squads as well?"

- -

Canasta sat back and -inspected the fingernails on his right hand, not -looking Vaughn in the face. "Well, no one said this would be easy, -and I think you�ll find the financial pay-off will be commensurate with -the risk. Look, all you have to do is get in, get out and deliver him to -Hangar twelve where an orbital shuttle will be waiting. The original -extraction team will ensure that attention remains focussed on Darwin -Hub. Any rumour of Toba being here will look like disinformation, -and any opposition you might encounter won�t be first-team -quality."

- -

I took a swig of beer. "So what�s the catch, Canasta? I can just -hear a real big �but� coming at the end of that spiel."

- -

He glowered at me, letting the mask of good humour slip. -"But, Toba doesn�t know you�re coming, and he�s expecting -Turner in person. As a result he may prove somewhat reluctant to -accompany you."

- -

Blondie looked at him, wide-eyed. "And what about Deb�the head -of his security detail? Do you know if she�s here yet?"

- -

Canasta paused before replying, as his persona tried to make sense of -the question in light of the narrative. "His personal bodyguard is -James Graham, a former police officer with extensive experience of close -protection operations. I don�t have any details on who will head up the -extra security that Sensei are sending in. Do you know something I -don�t?"

- -

Blondie floundered and I knew that the scenario would come down hard -on any sign of inside information. We didn�t need that kind of grief as -the mission was going to be hard enough anyway. So I gave Canasta my -best open smile and let bullshit commence.

- -

"I�d say that was just deduction, Canasta. Sensei don�t want to -give the game away so they�ll be bringing in extra bodies in the guise -of ground crew, passengers, anything that won�t appear too obvious. The -corporate mindset is geared up to expect a hard-nosed guy as security -chief, so using a woman would be a smart move, a way to wrong-foot the -opposition. She�ll probably prove more deadly than the male, -but that�s our problem."

- -

He sat back and I could feel that 'end of chapter' edge to -proceedings. "So you�ll take the job?"

- -

We looked at each other, if only because the moment demanded it, and -Vaughn raised his bottle in a toast. "Easy in, easy out."

- -

We agreed some outrageous sum to be paid into a variety of off-shore -accounts, and Canasta left. The money wasn�t real, although it did give -your virtual persona prestige points, but it was the experience itself -that most players wanted. After exchanging mobile phone numbers I -prompted the group to split up, knowing that to hang around meant -getting caught up in a bar fight, and I wasn�t in the mood.

- -

The Inverted Spin was part of a high-tech shanty -town that had -grown up outside the orbital hub, away from the corporate enclaves. The -irritating thing was we�d spend several hours lurking in the backstreets -while Ramirez did his thing � arranging ground transport, a safe house, -weapons -� while all the time I knew Toba was less than a mile away.

- -

Ramirez needed muscle to back some of his face-to-face transactions -and Vaughn let Mazy take the lead, preferring to kick back and just -chill. I was looking to relax as well - my skills as a pilot wouldn�t be -called upon until much later. The two of us sat on the veranda of a -nearby café, although the heat and humidity was a level of -virtual reality I could well have done without.

- -

In a standard game the experience was lifelike -but you always knew you were in a virtual reality environment
I was -expecting a more-or-less pleasant hiatus until my personal -�confront your past� sub-plot kicked in � the one which explained my -bitter, twisted attitude. However, as soon as the others had vanished -into the crowd Vaughn was up and away, with me stepping out to catch up. -He was unusually grim faced and I expected some explanation, but as we -continued walking in silence my patience gave out. "So, Vaughn, -what gives?"

- -

He glanced at me. "We both know the Sensei crew are holed up in -the Holiday Lodge. It�s a classier setup than the Ascension Hotel and -the only option given what Canasta laid out for us."

- -

"Yeah? So what?"

- -

"Well, how about we walk in there, walk right up to the desk and -ask to speak to Jules Toba. Just take it from there."

- -

I pulled up. "Whoa there, Vaughn. You can�t just bounce straight -to the extraction stage. You push the game and it�ll push -back."

- -

He kept walking and again I had to hurry to catch up, trying not to -sound irritated. "Come on, Vaughn, what is this? Look, Ramirez does -his stuff and Blondie gets us the hotel layout, hacks their security -system. Then you, Mazy and Harrison go in while the rest of us wait -outside with the engine running."

- -

He snorted with derision. "You don�t find that all a bit -convoluted? A bit contrived? Your problem is you think you know what�s -going on, because you�ve played the earlier version. The others, even -fat boy, will roll with the punches but this game is going to -blindside you, man, big time."

- -

I frowned and pulled him up, a hand on his shoulder. "OK, so -maybe I skipped the introduction and briefing stages, but this, going -charging straight in there, is well out of order. Or do you really know -something I don�t?"

- -

He gave me a short smile, barely a twitch of his lips, and shrugged -off my hand. "Let�s just say I�m not quite the character you think -I am, and leave it at that. Now, are you coming or not?"

- -

Before I could speak another voice answered. "I�ll tag along, -even if he won�t." Harrison stepped out from between two small vans -parked at the roadside. His character was a jack of all trades, there to -step in should one of the principals drop out. As -such it wasn�t a popular choice, frequently being left as a non-player -persona under game control � and the first to take a bullet if the bad -guys got the drop on us.

- -

I looked between Harrison and Vaughn, getting the distinct feeling I -was missing something. "Look, Harrison, shouldn�t you be hanging -with Ramirez and Mazy? Or at least babysitting Blondie? If anyone screws -up we�re counting on you to take up the slack."

- -

He removed his hat and wiped sweat from the head band. "That�s a -bit predictable, if you don�t mind me saying. The longer we hang about -the tougher it�s gonna be to reach Toba, so I think Vaughn -here has a point. We go knock on his door and see if he -answers."

- -

This casual flaunting of scenario protocols was starting to make me -nervous. "Look guys, even if by some miracle we pull this off, -we�re cutting three players out of the action. If nothing else that�s -gonna seriously hurt our game rankings. Nobody likes a dickhead -who messes things up for everyone else."

- -

Harrison laughed. "Told you he was a bit pedestrian, -Vaughn. You still say he�s worth having around?"

- -

Vaughn shrugged. "Duncan is solid. He just needs time to adjust -to the new UR paradigm shift."

- -

I wasn�t a great fan of Ultra-Realism, but I�d gone with the -interface upgrade as I�m a bit of a techno-nerd at heart. Whereas -existing games were more real than real in terms of the simulated -sensory input hitting your brain, the new versions from -Second Reality™ made me decidedly uncomfortable.

- -

In a standard game the experience was lifelike but you always -knew you were in a virtual reality environment. For example: -coffee tasted like coffee, things didn�t break down unless they were -supposed to, it didn�t rain on your parade. UR was far more subtle, it -was all about nuances, both physical and psychological. Now the coffee -might taste like crap, a button might come off your jacket, you might -get a toothache. It was really hard to tell you were in a UR -environment, and that�s what many industry commentators found -unsettling. However, I could see this particular �full sensory immersion -experience� going down the toilet in short order.

- -

"Look, guys, what do you hope to achieve? It doesn�t matter how -flexible the scenario may be, you simply can�t play this fast and loose -with the narrative and expect to get away scot-free."

- -

The two of them exchanged glances and, again, I felt like an -outsider. Vaughn opened his coat, exposing the wakizashi hanging under -there. "Take a look at my sword, Duncan. A real close look, at the -very end of the hilt."

- -

Curious, I stepped closer and tilted it towards me. "Well, -there�s a symbol-"

- -

Fade to grey.

- -

It lasted a moment, an eternity, or something in-between. -A -featureless limbo, with not even darkness to feed my imagination. There -was no up, no down, no sense of physical presence � I was just a -disembodied point of view, with nothing to see.

- -

The street returned on a tidal wave of sensory overload and I stepped -back, hunched over against the onslaught, unable to speak. Vaughn let -his coat fall back into place, covering the sword. There was concern in -Harrison�s voice but I didn�t think it was for my condition. "Best -get him off the street, we�re attracting attention."

- -

They guided me into a narrow alley and I stood with my back against -the wall, eyes screwed shut, fingers in my ears. My surroundings were -still too loud, too pungent, too bright.

- -

"What you do to him, Vaughn? The guy is totally wired."

- -

"Duncan has the same Sensorium interface that most established -AIs use � their window on our world, if you like. When mediaCore -announced they were adapting it for use in the gaming community he -decided to get in on the ground level. Beta release wetware, extensive -neural hardwiring, the whole nine yards. Then, of course, along came -Enhanced Reality which left its competitors dead in the water. It became -the de facto gaming standard and he was forced to tack on another layer -of proprietary hardware, as did all serious players."

- -

"So your boy is wandering around in the real world with a head -full of obsolete technology. Big deal. How did that allow you to work -your mojo on him in here?"

- -

I could hear something in Vaughn�s voice; not satisfaction exactly, -more a sense of relief. "AIs play games, AIs -play a lot of games. For some, it�s the only time they get let out -of the box. So they have the ER, and now UR, interface as well. This -symbol on my sword hilt is a glyph, an interface command -trigger."

- -

Harrison was beginning to sound irritated. "In English?"

- -

"It activates the old Sensorium interface, which this game -environment doesn�t support. It�s like switching to a dead TV channel � -there�s no signal, only static."

- -

"And this helps us how, exactly?"

- -

Cooking smells reached my nose and my stomach turned over; I turned -away and threw up. Harrison laughed. "Jesus, Vaughn! Your boy is -dying out here."

- -

Vaughn put his hand on my shoulder and the pressure made my shirt -feel like sandpaper. "Easy there, Duncan, it�s just the shock of a -sensory reboot. Try and concentrate on your own body to start with � And -to answer your question, Harrison, this little gizmo, incorporated into -my sword, means that if I stick an AI player it�ll force a log out. That -way we avoid any so-called last gasp retaliation and the character -lapses into a non-player persona. That is, a dead person."

- -

Harrison laughed again. "Yeah, I get that. Those AIs sure make -sore losers. Couldn�t you just have told us though, as opposed to -putting bozo here through the wringer?"

- -

I spat and straightened up. "Bastard! What the hell was all that -about?"

- -

Vaughn just shrugged with no hint of apology in his voice. "Had -to see if it worked. I�ve learned that some of the principal characters -are likely to be AIs with genuine synthetic personalities, not just an -emotional overlay. Prime candidates for holding a grudge should we get a -bit creative."

- -

I wasn�t pleased. "Just the type to get vindictive, you mean! -And you still want us to go marching straight in there? Well, think -again."

- -

Even Harrison was beginning to sound doubtful. "Yeah, hold on -there, Vaughn. Your fancy blade might not be illegal, strictly speaking, -but you can bet the game AI won�t take kindly to one of his kind -being shown the door in short order. We don�t need any unnecessary grief -if you ask me."

- -

Vaughn shook his head. "No, this new version is a true free-form -environment. As gamers we know where Toba will be, because we know the -original version, right? As characters we can use logical deduction to -explain away this knowledge, and the game won�t punish us for being -smart. I say we give it a go."

- -

Harrison and I exchanged glances and I could tell he was swaying -towards the high risk strategy his devil-may-care persona always -favoured. I trusted Vaughn, more or less, so there had to be something -behind his confidence, something he hadn�t shared as yet. I shrugged. -"What�s the worst that can happen?"

- -

Harrison grinned. "I�ll hang back while you two stick your heads -in the grinder, if you don�t mind. If it doesn�t work out I�ll break the -bad news to the others and we�ll go back to the original plan."

- -

I snorted. "You can pilot a shuttle? Handle a weapon?"

- -

He spread his hands. "I�m pretty much a renaissance man when you -get down to it. I can do a whole range of things equally unwell. -But -enough to get by."

- -

Vaughn just laughed and led us back onto the street. It wasn�t that -far to the hotel but I insisted we at least try and maximize our chances -before walking in there. The other two refused to change, so as front man -by default I swopped my jeans and vest for a lightweight business suit -and open-necked shirt. With the facial scars I looked like a corporate -enforcer and the tailor even threw in an eye patch for free.

- -

Whereas Harrison had roguish good looks and Vaughn went for brooding, -the man looking back at me from the full length mirror was just -mean. Not even with a hint of moody, but full-blown bad bastard. -They say chicks dig scars but mine verged on disfigurement, and women -attracted to me for my looks always turned out to be seriously damaged -personalities. I�d stopped modifying my appearance long before the new -UR interface started placing a premium on physical dissonance, but I -suspected most other players thought I looked this way for effect.

- -

To round off my new look I went for diamond stud cufflinks and a pair -of matching gold thumb rings previously owned by a Brazilian -capoeira fighter. The game loved touches like that and I was sure -any AI player would pick up on it immediately. I figured the -anticipation of a fancy move might make an opponent hesitate, giving me -the chance to grab an improvised weapon or make a sharp exit.

- -

When I came out Vaughn just shook his head and Harrison sniggered, -but I noticed that the pedestrians we encountered went out of their way -to give us a wide berth. Outside the Holiday Lodge we parted company; -Harrison took up residence under a bar umbrella across the street and -Vaughn waited outside in case someone objected to his esoteric dress -sense. He handed me an earpiece and I went inside.

- -

The Holiday Lodge was a comparatively new building with a -nod towards -colonial chic; high ceilings, tiled floors, concrete trying to look like -marble. I walked across the wide reception-cum-lounge to the desk, where -an Indonesian dude gave me an insincere smile. "Good afternoon, -sir. How may I help you?"

- -

"I understand you have a party from Sensei Industries staying -here at present. I�d like to speak to them."

- -

There was a slight hesitation, but the game couldn�t just blank a -legitimate request. The receptionist lifted a handset. "Certainly -sir, and who shall I say is calling?"

- -

A sudden idea came to me and I smiled. "Jules Toba."

- -

Vaughn laughed in my ear. "Jesus! Well, that should grab -their attention, and no mistake. What you got planned as an -encore?"

There was a murmur of conversation on the -phone and then the receptionist looked up. "There will be someone -to see you directly, Mr Toba. If you care to wait in the veranda bar, -I�ll inform our guests where you are."

- -

I wandered through the wide arch into the bar, which opened out onto -the veranda via a set of folding doors. A climate barrier kept out most -of the heat and humidity so I flopped down on the upholstered bamboo -furniture to let things play out.

- -

Vaughn mooched in and relaxed; arms wide across the back of the sofa, -legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. I saw Harrison take a seat -outside, trying to remain inconspicuous. He�d swopped the hat and -waistcoat for improvised cravat and shades, but still had his shoulder -bag to hand. We ordered a bottle of beer for Vaughn and a tonic water -for me. And waited.

- -

"Do you actually have a plan, Vaughn, or is this all just -wishful thinking?"

- -

He smiled. "Wishful thinking? I�d prefer to think of it as an -insightful analysis of the game paradigms. Or just winging it, your -choice� You armed, by the way?

- -

"Me? My character has a pathological aversion to firearms -following my wife�s suicide using my service revolver. I was supposed to -run into an old girlfriend and save her from a mugging, during which I�d -reconnect to my suppressed humanity and love of bang-sticks, but -someone has kind of truncated my day."

- -

Vaughn started to laugh but then his face went carefully neutral and -he gestured with the beer bottle. "We�ve got company."

- -

Three men entered from the lobby, two Japanese and one Caucasian, all -wearing short-sleeved shirts and flight crew uniform jackets. They wore -their jackets unbuttoned and the way the younger Japanese guy kept -tugging his shut over a bulge suggested firearms carried at the hip. -Professionals you can trust, but hastily armed civilians can be a right -pain in the butt. The best I could do was play it cool, professional, -and hope for inspiration. I stood and exchanged formal bows with the -older Japanese, who was wearing captain�s insignia. Vaughn remained -seated, a calculated insult, and I felt the tension rise. So much for -cool.

- -

"I am Captain Marasaki, senior test pilot for Sensei Industries. -This is co-pilot Walker, flight engineer Sato. You are not Jules -Toba."

- -

Marasaki was no more a test pilot than I was Coco the Clown. Real -test pilots are either dispassionate ice men or over-confident wild -animals with cojones the size of basketballs. This guy exuded a -sober calm based on years of experience, just the person you wanted -flying senior executives around the globe.

- -

Before I could say anything Vaughn chipped in. "No he�s not. But -we both know the real Jules Toba is here, and your enemies will soon -learn of this unless we act quickly."

- -

Marasaki regarded him coldly. "And you are?"

- -

Vaughn set down his beer and stood up. "Vaughn Vermeer, and this -is Duncan Bonn. U verwachtte iemand, maar u verwachtte niet om ons te -zien, niet waar?"

- -

That threw me completely but the pilot seemed to understand him well -enough. "Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie?"

- -

Vaughn nodded. "Ja, maar gelieve verder te gaan in het -Engels."

- -

"As you wish, Mr Vermeer. You have something, perhaps, that you -wish to show me?"

- -

Vaughn held his coat open and I saw Marasaki scrutinise the sword. -The Captain gave a sharp nod and Vaughn closed his coat, looking -slightly smug. I really didn�t get this, to the point where I was -feeling embarrassed about my ignorance. Vaughn motioned to Harrison who -strode in, all easy grin, pocketing his sunglasses. He didn�t rate a -formal introduction but didn�t seem to mind. Captain Marasaki motioned -for us to accompany him. "Please, gentlemen. If the situation is as -serious as you claim then speed is of the essence."

- -

We moved in a mixed group back into the lobby and I sidled up to -Harrison, keeping my voice low. "What�s this Dutch angle, -then?"

- -

He glanced at me, frowning. "Dutch? You mean NuVOC? It�s who -Vaughn and I both worked for before he retired and I branched out into -private enterprise. Don�t you know anything about the new -background to this game?"

- -

I felt my face colour and tried to keep the tone flippant. -"Maybe I skimmed the briefing notes a bit. Just say that today has -been a learning curve and leave it at that."

- -

"Schmuck."

- -

Couldn�t fault him there.

- -

The front of the Holiday Lodge was a wide façade, housing -reception, a restaurant and the bar. The accommodation to the rear was a -series of bungalows around a central tree-filled courtyard. This -afforded shade, the pleasant background rustle of leaves and a degree of -privacy from the guests directly opposite. As we reached the long -right-hand path the flight crew stopped and Marasaki gestured for us to -continue.

- -

"Please, you are expected. And may fortune smile upon you, -gentlemen."

- -

We walked on and I saw there was a woman waiting for us outside a -bungalow roughly half way along. Shoulder length blonde hair, pencil -skirt, blouse, heels, hand on hip.

- -

It was Debbie Harry, it just was.

- -

I�m not a fan of simulated celebrities in -games as they�re generally -there to distract you from shoddy gameplay. For the late, great, Ms -Harry, though � currently back in the charts and on virtual tour � well, -I was willing to make an exception.

- -

She certainly looked the part, all detached cool circa �Def, Dumb, -& Blonde�, with a calculating air that shaded her into queen bitch -territory. She didn�t appear armed but I got the distinct impression she -probably didn�t need anything as crass as a gun.

- -

Vaughn walked straight up to her, slid an arm around her waist, and -kissed her. Kissed her for a long time. She didn�t melt into his arms -but, then again, she didn�t exactly fight him off either. Finally he -broke the clinch and wiped her lipstick from his face.

- -

"Debs, it�s been too long."

- -

"That will be Miss Harry, if you don�t mind."

- -

She gave him a half smile, though, and he winked. "In -here?"

- -

"Yes. Go right in, you�re expected."

- -

I followed Vaughn into the bungalow, trying not to catch her eye. The -blinds were drawn and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust from the -outside glare. There was a man sitting at the desk off to the right, -reading. He was of average build, pretty nondescript, and seemingly -unconcerned by our presence. I heard the door close behind me. I heard -the sound of a gun being cocked.

- -

The Second Reality™ slogan is �Your life, only -different�, -and that�s the -attraction. You bring yourself to the game and in return it immerses you -in an alternative lifestyle. So when I heard that slick metallic -click my first thought was �Oh shit�, not �I�m out of here�. -Vaughn and I both raised our hands, unbidden, and I slowly turned back -towards the door. I was expecting it to be Harrison, tag-along Harrison, -on some betrayal sub-plot.

- -

If you�ve played as many games as I have, you -start to get a sense of a twist coming.
Instead I found he was -also standing, hands raised, with an automatic -pistol pressed against the side of his head. The gunman was tall, with -short grey hair and goatee, expensive suit, hard-faced. He�d been hiding -behind the door, which was just too obvious to be true, but had paid off -handsomely. He had a Scots accent.

- -

"In this room I have sole responsibility for the safety of Mr -Toba. You have five seconds to explain your presence here and I don�t -count out loud."

- -

I saw Harrison relax and expected Vaughn to launch into another -incomprehensible spiel, or display that damn sword, or do whatever was -required to make us all best buddies. But there was nothing apart from -the sound of a heavy-bladed ceiling fan above us.

- -

Harrison cleared his throat. "Vaughn? Hey, Vaughn�"

- -

The game went slo-mo.

-

The muzzle flash, starshell bright in the gloom.

-

The jolt of the head, jaw slack and eyes white.

-

The exit wound arc of blood, bone and brain matter.

-

The tumbling glitter of an ejected shell casing.

-

All underscored by the low, drawn-out roar of a large caliber gunshot.

- -

Real-time returned, with the bright tinkle of brass on tile. Harrison -toppled sideways to sprawl on the floor, blood pooling under his -head.

- -

Blood ran down the gunman�s cheek.

-

Blood ran down the gunman�s cheek from his ruined left eye.

- -

I turned my head and saw Vaughn was holding a derringer; a small -weapon, little more than a toy. One of those comedy guns that slide out -from your cuff, but nobody was laughing. I looked back. The gunman -swayed but stayed upright, pistol turning towards us. I heard a tinny -bang from behind me and his right eye seemed to collapse in on -itself, like those old style retractable headlights. The swinging arm -became a pirouette, became a twisting tumble to the floor, on his back, -gun still clenched tight. I laughed, a nervous outburst devoid of any -humour, and lowered my arms.

- -

The man at the desk spoke; his voice was calm, mannered, with no hint -of concern. "Now, that is unfortunate. Mr Graham was -exceptionally loyal, after his fashion."

- -

I turned in time to see Vaughn flex his hand and make the derringer -vanish. He looked over. "Jules Toba? I just like to be clear about -these things."

- -

"Well, it would be embarrassing if I turned out anyone else but, -yes, I�m Jules Toba. Should I bother to ask why you�re here or is this a -simple corporate assassination?"

- -

Vaughn smiled. "I�m Vermeer, this is Bonn, and we�ve been hired -to facilitate your defection from Sensei Industries."

- -

Toba arched one eyebrow. "Really? And why do you think I would -so easily set aside a lifetime of devoted service?"

- -

I knew we didn�t have time for Toba to play coy, even though it was -obvious Miss Harry was working with Vaughn, and chipped in. "Look, -Mr Toba, we know you were expecting Turner, but this is pretty much an -ad hoc operation and your best chance of making that long walk. How -about you just trust us and we all ride off into the sunset?"

- -

Even as I spoke I could feel the niggle in back of my mind. If you�ve -played as many games as I have, you start to get a sense of a twist -coming. Vaughn turned to me. "It�s OK, Duncan, but I�m afraid Mr -Toba wasn�t planning on defecting."

- -

"What?"

- -

"There�s no defection, there never was. Oh, there will be enough -circumstantial evidence to make it appear as if he was planning -to switch employers, but its all just window dressing."

- -

I glared at him. "So what the hell are we doing here then? -Getting his autograph?"

- -

"The plan was for the Sensei security team, headed by Miss -Harry, to be in place long before we mounted our extraction bid. They�d -been bribed to ensure that Mr Toba died in the crossfire � a tragic -accident. Harrison was also part of their operation, as insurance." -He turned to Toba, "You appreciate, sir, the damage your death -would cause under these circumstances?"

- -

Toba nodded. "Yes, quite. Even the suggestion of disloyalty -would cast a pall over my colleagues and call all recent decisions into -doubt. The blow to investor confidence would be severe. But how, may I -ask, are you privy to this information?"

- -

"Miss Harry, sir, remained loyal. She contacted Anzai Sayoru, -the head of Sensei security. As they had no way of knowing who else -might be involved, it was decided to let the plot develop, but with -additional safeguards in place."

- -

"Meaning yourself, Mr Vermeer?"

- -

Vaughn inclined his head. "Indeed. I am an agent of the New -Dutch East India Company, NuVOC. Officially I retired from active -service some years ago, but that�s more to do with deniability than any -real degree of severance. There is a long history of cooperation between -our respective employers and we were glad to be of assistance."

- -

OK, I could get behind that. You can�t trust your own security so you -bring in some outside help. Not so much an extraction as rescue mission, -but I could see how the twist kept most of the scenario intact. Toba, -though, still wasn�t convinced. He tidied a few things on the desk and -casually lifted a pistol from the drawer. "An intriguing scenario, -Mr Vermeer, I must admit. But one quite lacking in corroborative -evidence. All I have witnessed is that Miss Harry allowed you access to -this bungalow, and two violent deaths."

- -

Vaughn gestured to his coat. "May I?"

- -

Toba nodded and Vaughn drew his sword, holding it by tip and hilt. He -presented it for inspection, bowing his head as he did so. -"Satisfied?"

- -

Toba lowered his gun. "Quite. Now, as regards Miss Harry, I -suggest-"

- -

Vaughn stabbed him, a twisting, inverted, one-handed blow straight to -the stomach, hilt deep. I choked with surprise, turned away and dropped -to my knees, scrabbling through Harrison�s bag to get the antique -revolver I knew he�d been carrying.

- -

There was no need.

- -

Toba stood there, immobile, the gun still hanging at his side. Vaughn -had backed off a little and I had a clear view of the injury he�d -inflicted. There was no blood, but around the entry point it looked like -the colour was leaching out of Toba�s clothes, leaving a spreading patch -of monochrome. I struggled to my feet, the revolver heavy in my -hand.

- -

"Vaughn? What the hell have you done, man?"

- -

He shrugged. "I did what I had to. Now give me the gun, I�m -better with firearms than you are."

- -

"But, but, why, for God�s sake? I was following -everything and then you go and slice him!"

- -

His shoulders drooped. "I tried to tell you earlier. They really -are holding my daughter hostage. Now, give me the gun."

- -

I was floundering, unable to get my thoughts straight, and took a -step back. "Real world? The game? I don�t understand!"

- -

"Duncan, give me the damn gun!"

- -

He grabbed for it and I fired, three times, hitting Vaughn twice in -the chest. He dropped to his knees, pink froth on his lips, and tried to -speak. All that came out was a burbling whisper. -"Lisbon."

- -

Vaughn slumped backwards to the -floor, and was still. I know he wasn�t really dead, I know I didn�t -really kill him, but unless you were there you�ve no idea of the horror -I faced. Gun smoke, the smell of blood and bowels, the sight of blood -running between the floor tiles, the pounding of my heart. All in -glorious Ultra-Reality. I felt sick.

- -

The door behind me opened and closed. I sensed someone at my shoulder -and the smell of jasmine reached my nostrils. "Messy, but probably -necessary, if truth be told. That revolver is of no further use to you, -Duncan."

- -

I let it clatter to the floor and blinked rapidly, my eyes moist. -Toba was turning black and white, skin as well as clothes, like an -illustration being coloured in, but in reverse.

- -

"What, what is that?"

- -

Miss Harry tried to sound matter-of-fact, even slightly bored, but -there was an underlying edge of excitement to her voice. "The sword -is an imported artifact, not supplied by me. Players do it all the time -with customised clothes, vehicles, especially weapons. This -particular weapon, this particular representation of -virtual code, contains a virus. One that can access its intended target -only though the obsolete Sensorium interface. As such, it�s harmless to -humans and doesn�t even register as a threat within the game."

- -

"You, you�re the game controller? But you can�t do this, -it�s not fair!"

- -

She gave me a real poster pose, all coquettish pout. "What, a -girl can�t have fun these days? Anyway, as regards our stricken friend -over there, his real name is Cromarty. Well, that�s the corporation he -works for, but the two are frequently synonymous these days. Someone -went to a lot of trouble over this."

- -

This wasn�t so much breaking the �fourth wall� as installing a set of -sliding doors. I closed my eyes but there was still no �Exit Game� icon, -no way home. There was a contemplative tone in her voice.

- -

"Let every voice be still."

- -

I blinked, picking up something in her intonation. "What?"

- -

"It�s part of a poem by Holbein. Let every voice be still, -save false witness to the end of days. It�s a commentary on how -events can be redefined, restructured to suit a particular viewpoint, -particularly when there are no dissenting voices."

- -

I felt cold. "Dissenting voices? Like mine?"

- -

Miss Harry laughed, sounding genuinely amused. "Good grief, no! -You get to play the sole survivor of this little bloodbath, not me. Its -now part and parcel of the scenario and I�m just a compromised operative -on the run, a fellow traveler. In fact, we have to rejoin the remaining -players for the �all avenues closed� endgame. It promises to be quite -exciting and I understand there�s someone desperately keen to make my -acquaintance�Time to go."

- -

I hesitated, unable to tear my eyes away. "This isn�t a game -any more, is it?"

- -

She patted my shoulder. "It never was, Duncan. It never was."

- -

- -If, like Duncan Bonn, you're still looking for answers, then his -confusion will be addressed in 'All Avenues Closed' - -in issue 10 of Mythaxis. Would I lie to you? -

-© Martin Clark 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] waki.jpg - -[*ITEM] Stop 17 - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] A Desire Named Streetcar? - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I�m waiting at the bus stop again, though I -know I�m not going anywhere.
- -It�s past midnight, and I am standing -outside in Thornhill. The pale -morning sky is just a memory as the dark blue night and its streetlamps -turn the crinkled autumn leaves and road into a light incandescent -purple. I feel the dark brown bulk of Thornhill Public School looming -over my head like ancient history, even as I stand beside the glass -walls of the bus shelter. It reminds me of where I came from � and -where, if I wasn�t careful, I could easily find myself coming back to. - -And I hadn�t been careful. - -So I�m standing here, at the York Region Transit stop, playing a very -long-standing game with myself. It is the game of how I recognize my old -elementary school from Grades 1-3 behind me. It is the game of looking -at the white and green painted Farmer�s Market in the plaza across the -street from me, and the purple Octagon restaurant off to the side. It is -knowing the rolling hills of Gallanough Park behind my old school, and -the location of Thornhill Secondary School -- of my high school -- just -a few blocks past the plaza across the street as you walk past the old -Masonic Temple on the left-hand side. - -The object of this game is simple. I walk past the craft stores, and -apartments, and streets, and my old schools and hidden parks until I get -to the secluded St. Volodymyr�s Ukrainian Catholic Church; the space -dividing the cemeteries of St. Luke�s Catholic Church from the old -Thornhill Community�s; the nearby houses with their windows of -candlelight; to Markham and the purportedly haunted -white-planked Thornhill Village Library all the way back to this bus -stop where I -realize -- again -- that I�d barely even miss this place if -I went on a bus right now, at this moment, and never returned. - -That is the game I�m playing right now. - -And then I remember that it is past midnight and there is no bus -running this late, and that even if there were, it would be coming -from -Richmond Hill and moving past this stop to the glittering lights of the -real city of Toronto -- where it'd just stop at the Finch Station -terminal and I�d have to pay yet another fare to use the separate subway -system. In other words, it -leads to no uncharted places, nor any horizons to disappear to. - -There�s no great mystery to vanish into. - -So I walk away from the place where I wait for the bus that will never -come � from the place that I now know all too well. I stride forward and -cross the street to the sidewalk past the empty gas station, and I walk -across again to the other side of the darkened street. - -I keep walking. Every time I walk here, in this region, I feel as though -I am enacting an age-old rote of walking - of mapping, and tracing, and -connecting the rural suburban streets and roads together with the -movement of my legs. I try to convince myself that it is all one great -rite of correspondence, place, space and time - that somewhere, somehow, -this all has meaning for me � that it will accomplish something � -something whose understanding is just inches away from my subconscious -mind. - -I try, unsuccessfully, to figure out what this is and only the old -familiar hollowness remains. Instead, I spend most of my time trying not -to think about the shimmering lights of the city that I almost made it -to; the place I turned my back on, and all the things I learned there. -It too had been a lonely place - though its ghosts � its mistakes, are -far -more fresh than the old memories here that live in every piece of cement -and blade of grass. - -No. The closest I�d ever gotten to the city, to the place I�d never -thought to escape to, to physically leaving this place was moving to -York University, and a piece of paper. - -For all the two years that lasted. - -Now, as I walk down the sloping sidewalk and cross another street, I -know that there was never an escape. Toronto�s vicarious promises were -merely a brief respite from Thornhill�s empty certainties. - -No matter what happened, after everything I did, -and where I came from I -always knew that I was going to be back here. - -

They glitter like trails of twilight, or streaks of -pale coloured chalk
I walk past the Starbucks plaza now; past more -craft stores, and the -Village Library with its ethereal night-dweller and her nocturnal -reading habits. That is one of the few thoughts that makes me smile now -- -to imagine that this ghost is quietly reading all the oldest and latest -books in the safety and warmth of the place she�s known for almost her -entire existence. It is a thought that makes me smile even as, for some -reason, it makes me sad. - -I continue walking as the pavement becomes a railing opening up to a -grove of trees below on my right side. For a few brief moments, as short -as those two years were, I shone more brightly than I did my entire -short life. Just to have to return here. Just to return to slumber � and -restless sleepwalking. - -I come to a stop in front of a white picket fence and a wide sloping -park. Thornhill is not a place of the present. It is a place of ghosts, -dogs, young families, old men, used books, and merely the memories of -present life. - -And if you don�t leave it, it becomes the place you haunt while you are still alive. - -Goosebumps flicker across my back. For the first time, I actually -realize that the moon is out. I look around me. Then I look behind me. -I�m standing in front of what looks like an old cottage. This is -Cricklewood Park - a long-established Women�s Golf - course I�ve passed many times -with my Dad as we�ve driven to the movie theatre in Richmond Hill. -During the day, the little cottage or hut is a faded -turquoise with a painted thatched roof and a brown sign in -yellow-lettering that reads: - -Stop 17. - -

I�ve never exactly known what it was. I always assumed -that it was the -site of another golf course, or a storage shed. In fact, I�ve never -really thought much of it. But for some reason, tonight, I feel -compelled to stand right in front of it. - -I�m standing off on the side of the road in front of Cricklewood Park. I -feel like I�m waiting for something - waiting in the same way I wait in -front of Thornhill Public School for a non-existent bus to take me -nowhere. I feel cold. - -Perhaps it�s just the autumn condensation in the air, but I swear I can -see something on the road in front of me. They glitter like trails of -twilight, or streaks of pale coloured chalk under a layer of Black -Magic. I squint my eyes. If I didn�t know any better, I would say they -are ... streetcar tracks. It�s an odd thought. The only streetcars I -know about are the ones I would always take in the city, in Toronto - -sleek, barely clanking things that ran sporadically at all hours of the -night. - -

Back in Thornhill Secondary School, my Drama -teacher always said I was �otherworldly�
Thornhill doesn�t have a -streetcar line. It hasn�t had one in a long -time. Because � I remember now. Almost every time we drive to Silver -City, in Richmond Hill, my Dad always tells me my grandparents told him -that a streetcar once rode here. It was a railway track that extended -from Toronto and Yonge Street all the way into Richmond Hill and beyond -to Lake Simcoe. Occasionally, I wondered where the line used to stop in -Thornhill. If it did. - -But that had been ages ago. The rails had long since disappeared. First -the car became limited to travel only from Toronto to Richmond Hill -until -- after two distant World Wars -- in 1948, it was either covered -over with concrete, or dismantled altogether. It is strange to think -about, as I look at the lines of dew on the neon pastel of the road, -that underneath your feet are the broken ley-lines of previous -connections � of psycho-geography now going nowhere. - -I hear the sound of clanking. - -Slowly, to the far right of me, I see a shape coming down the slope of -the road. I don�t move. I don�t even make a sound. At first, as I see -its headlights in the distance I think it�s a car or a truck. Then it -comes closer. - -It is almost coming towards me now. My sense of waiting becomes a -strange feeling of anticipation. As the shape comes closer, I see that -it�s a round and clunky vehicle. In the light of the full moon and the -few lampposts illuminating the street, it seems to look like a car of a -very worn down Go-Train. But then, as the shadows play over it I can -swear that it looks just like a TTC streetcar. - -This isn�t possible, of course. For one thing, the TTC doesn�t run into -York Region. And for another, in that brief glimpse, this streetcar -looks older -- again, bulkier with its red and white paint as faded as -the balls on my grandmother�s pool table. It is like an antique toy of -an old fire-engine. - -Then finally, the car or train, or streetcar begins to hiss out -decompressed steam, and comes to a halt right in front of me. It now -definitely looks like a TTC car. I can even make out its serial number: -416. The side door opens and I see a man sitting in the driver�s seat. I -can�t make out his face, but in the dim light of the car�s interior I -know he�s not wearing the maroon jacket of today�s TTC drivers. Instead, -it looks like he�s wearing a grey uniform � or perhaps a brown shirt -with slacks of the same colour. - -My Dad once told me he remembered that my grandparents always said the -people of the city looked forward to riding the old radial car with -great joy. And suddenly, it all makes sense. All those years of walking, -and nostalgia, and remembering, and waiting finally make sense. - -The driver�s waiting for me. I spare the road around me one last glance. -Aside from my immediate family, no one else will really miss me now. In -fact, I suspect that once I step into this car, I will become part of a -different pattern altogether; a path that very few travel � a road that -has opened itself up to me. - -All my glories, and disappointments, all my unfulfilled -dreams and -�what-nows,� all my heaviness and exhaustion will melt away into -mystery. And I will get to fade away with a legend. I think of Edgar -Allan Poe and Randolph Carter�s �Silver Key� as a powerful chill ripples -through my flesh � and I genuinely smile. I now know what I have been -waiting for. Back in Thornhill Secondary School, my Drama teacher always -said I was �otherworldly�. I wonder if he�ll say the same thing now -whenever someone looks at the Writer�s Plaque left behind in the front -hall�s display case after I am long gone. - -Then, with this last delicious, satisfying thought in mind I get on the -streetcar and travel � back to the city, to other places, other spaces � -to nowhere, and to everything. - -

Copyright © Matthew Kirshenblatt 2011 All Rights -Reserved - -[*IMAGE] streetcar.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Ghosts of Cloud City - -[*AUTHOR] Twilite Minotaur - -[*BLURB] - -[*DESCRIPTION] - -

�Don�t get your head stuck in the Clouds,� my dad would say. I used -to think that was why our home was miles below the Earth�s surface, -cocooned down near the mantle, the warm bosom of Gaia. I thought dad -kept us down there to keep us safe, away from the pollution-sickened -silver nitrate skies of the surface. But the Cloud was everywhere, no -matter how deep you shoved your head in the sand. - -

Her name tag reads, �Cynthia�... Cyclops slices -around the upper arm and down the length with an Xacto
Cyclops and -I bunker down behind the counter of a Starbeans Coffee, -getting a nose and mouth full of dust and cobwebs. The cold is -chewing its way to my bones, my empty stomach is eating its way out, -and my arm is killing me. Figuratively of course; the 9mm round -lodged in my tricep we can dig out, and granted it doesn�t infect, -I�ve got a good chance in this hell of surviving. My NeuroArm, on the -other hand, is literally and definitely going to kill me, and is the -reason Cyclops is fishing for bullets in my nature-issue flesh arm -with a long-nose pliers. It�s been acting up lately, started -glitching spastic while we were in a shootout with some raiders. It�s -tough to hit anything when you�ve got cybernetic Parkinson�s disease. - -The metal slug squishes out of me with a nauseating movie-quality -slurp. My vision fuzzes white with pain and I hold back the scream, -clenching my jaw so tight I feel it pop. We�re pretty sure the fucks -who attacked us lost our tail but we�re not taking any chances. -Cyclops douses the gory hole in my arm with hydrogen peroxide, and the -bubble of sizzling white foam and syrupy red blood on my tan skin -makes me think of strawberry pancakes. This pisses my stomach off -more, on top of the peroxide stinging like a centiscorpion. Getting -shot sucks. - -�We should get you to a doctor,� Cyclops finds a tray of non-recycled -napkins, dyed brown to appear eco-friendly, back when such things -mattered to anyone. He tosses off the top dozen moldy sheets, and -uses a fresh napkin to dab at the injury. - -�It�s just a flesh wound, I�ll be fine.� But not if we don�t get -this -AWOL prosthetic fixed, I subvocalize. Cyclops appears unconvinced. - -�We�ll be at Ebayzaar in a few days if we make decent time. They�ll -have a doc there for sure.� I reassure. - -The peroxide we scavved up from the carcass of a MegaMart. Most the -aisles were picked clean as the ribcage of a dead whale, so we were -surprised to find the bottles of disinfectant floating in a mud puddle -in the pharmaceutical department. As hazardous and unpredictable as -they are, you can always count on raiders and cannibals to fail to -think things through. Guess you can�t blame them, they are mostly the -descendants of the infamously infantile Chattering Class that went -extinct when the internet and everything else went bye-bye. - -The MegaMart had completely computerized self-checkout registers with -RFID and biometric scanners for security purposes, having decided to -do away completely with human clerks just before the world went -belly-up. Now, I�m no urban archaeologist, but I heard that before -The Silence, the MegaMarts sold cheap, Earth-killing, slave-labor -goods to people who didn�t have the economic luxury of superficial -presentation, so eventually they thought why bother with the flair of -a human clerk? - -Starbeans, on the other hand, was targeted toward the spoiled upper -classes who sipped over-designed cups of this stuff kinda like weak -stims in liquid form called �coffee�, while checking their �Twitters� -and �Portfolios� and discussing �The Teabaggers� and �Fawksnews�. Not -that the Starbeans� supply chain was any less karma-negative, but -patrons were paying for the feeling of sophistication and moral high -ground. Fancy names like Cinnamon Dolce Cr�me Frappacino, fancy cups. - They needed this thing called �experience� or �story�, which I could -never understand no matter how many times old-timers explained it. I -have plenty of experience, lots of stories to tell, nobody ever paid -me. Sometimes I think The Ancients were all insane, maybe that�s what -dad meant about getting your head stuck in the Cloud. - -But the primary reason we�re in Starbeans is every Starbeans, unlike -MegaMart, had several humanoid robots. Part of the simulated cafe -�experience� was having a human barista mix your ten dollar chai -latte, but I guess the profit margin was much better if you didn�t -have to pay real people once the robots got convincing enough. Lucky -for me, the CLERCs (Cyber-Linguistic Empathic Relations Colleague) all -come with the same line of robotic NeuroArms as the one attached to -the stump where my right arm used to be. It�s a long story. - -There�s one CLERC face down in the store room. It�s corroded and -covered in silt, a rat's nest lined with shredded napkins and -artificial sweetener packets is carved out of the android�s stomach -cavity. Another is at the cashier counter, standing, hand -outstretched as if patiently awaiting payment or a Starbeans Rewards -Card. Frozen instantly, along with all other robots and androids as -their CPUs were fried by EMPs in the Intellectual Property Wars -decades ago. - -Her synthetic skin is dusty and slightly sallow, but remains -remarkably intact. Her face is locked in an eternal smile of a -lightheartedness utterly alien in the wasteland. Creepily ironic how -the only remains of the real humans, including her customer, are heaps -of rag and bone on the floor while this replicant appears she might -resume her conversation any moment. A fossil token of a vanished -culture, caught in the amber of electromagnetic pulse. Her name tag -reads, �Cynthia�. - -�Hello Cynthia. Yes, you can take my order. One Venti Mochaccino, -made with those Urban-Aggro beans please. A name for the order? -Make it out to �Jericho�.� Cyclops laughs at my little skit even -though he�s seen it before. I like to pretend. Maybe it�s my way of -thanking them for letting me use their limbs. Besides, you�ve got to -learn to enjoy the little things, even when you�re being pursued by -psychotic sub-humans for your flesh, water, and ammunition. Otherwise -what�s the point, right? - -Cynthia�s ancient sleeve comes apart like tissue paper. - -�Do you want the dermis too?� Cyclops holds up the naked arm. - -�Fuck no. Just help me cut it open, funny man.� - -Cyclops slices around the upper arm and down the length with an Xacto, -pulling back like that scene in Terminator, except there�s no blood, -just rubber and metal skeleton. I don�t need a womanly hand with -candy apple red nail polish, and the cyborg look tends to frighten the -dumber malicious riff raff. Mosquito repellant. Her NeuroArm looks -factory-mint, she was probably on the job only a few months. - -Cyclops unbolts it, unbolts mine. My prosthetic comes off, and -there�s that disorienting feeling of soul-vertigo, that phantom-limb -sense of deep wrongness. The feeling vanishes just as soon as the new -arm clinks into place, somatosensory cortex settling down to luxuriate -in the newfound sensory input. My personal bioelectric patterns are -stored in a motor neuron implant that transcodes directly to the -Neuroarm, so the new limb is operational instantly. None of that -myoelectric stuff, painstakingly shrugging your shoulder, twisting -your neck and squeezing your ass just to signal to your prosthetic to -pick up a damn bottle. - -�Better. Very much so.� I windmill the arm a bit, test the fine motor -responses, pull the rifle from my backpack and take aim at the center -of the peeling �S� on the cracked glass storefront of the Starbeans. -No jittering. - -�It looks good, Jerry,� Cyclops says, putting away the Xacto and pliers. - -He�s lying, of course, being a good brother. Cyclops doesn�t see the -world like most people do. His eyes are blind as a cave shrimp, but -he�s got some brain mod that pipes electromagnetic radiation directly -into his frontal lobe from his shades, like some kind of third eye. -Seriously bleeding edge tech, just before the world fell off the edge. - However, a side-effect is he definitely can�t tell whether my new -arm looks, �good� or not. The cortical implant bypasses subjective -aesthetic valuation centers, old mammalian emotion modules buried -deep, a floor above the reptilian brain stem. For him it�s pure -abstraction, numerology; seeing a sunset is like reading instantly a -spreadsheet on a sunset detailing the frequencies of red, yellow, and -orange light due to Rayleigh scattering, seeing the pointers rather -than actually experiencing all that qualia-rich, heavenly glory. -Kinda how the ancients kept their heads surgically buried in their -�smart� phones, experiencing sunsets, rock concerts, sex, their -newborns� first steps, life itself through empty 70-character nibbles -of text, their worlds reduced to two inch touch screens. In -consolation, Cyclops� eyes apparently facilitate sensitivity to a -certain monastic, Einsteinian beauty in seeing the �superstructure of -the world�. That�s what the brochure said, anyway. -At any rate, he�s truly clueless as to the appeal of my latest -prosthetic fashion accessory. -But it�s the thought that counts. - -We search the Starbeans for any other useful material, but it�s been -cleared out long ago. It�s not worth it to dissect the other CLERC -for the extra arm; besides the fact that it�s covered in rat shit, -these Starbeans are so goddamn abundant. I mean there�s one right -across the street, what is up with that? - -We pop open the Reebok knapsack, empty it out on the ground. A small -can of pork and beans, a twisty-tied packet of a dozen raisins. It�s -almost comical, except starvation has this peculiar way of filtering -all the funny out of the world, especially when it comes to food. -Cyclops� head and thin shoulders slump, the skin is draped loosely -over his emaciated bones like sheets over old furniture. A gust of -cold evening air blows daggers and Cyclops starts shivering, so I -shake the dust out of an Armani suit left in a booth next to a -briefcase and wrap him up in it. - -�We�re not going to make it this time, are we?� He stares at a raisin -in the palm of his hand, shriveled and stale to the point of -petrifaction. Closes it. - -�Hey. Hey, look at me.� I squeeze his hand tight over the raisin. -�We are going to make it, I promise.� He is suddenly so small and -fragile. Everyone grows up so fast out here, there are no childhoods -in the wasteland. It�s easy to forget he�s just a fourteen year old -kid. - -�But you said it�s a few more days if we make good time and we�re -stuck here with no food, and it�s cold and those raiders are out -there-� - - �We�ll make do. We always do. They�ve got more food than you could -ever eat at Ebayzaar. I hear they even have ice cream. You remember -ice cream?� The corners of his mouth pull up, and I can see the -episodic memories of birthdays back in the vault spooling through his -mind like a freshly opened bag of jelly candies. The smell of icing -and melted wax, adults in labcoats and military brass serenading -out-of-harmony, no bed times for one night. - -�Remember that time dad got me a bb gun and tried to teach us how to -shoot cans in the water purification room?� - -�Yeah, I was still crap at using my vision mod and kept shooting you -guys in the butt. At least I couldn�t shoot an eye out.� Cyclops -taps his bionic eye and we both laugh. - -�Remember how he used to tell us those crazy bedtime stories when we -were real little?� - -�I always liked the one about the people who built their city on the Clouds.� - -�They forgot about the real world down below. One day the Clouds -evaporated, and they came crashing back down. �Their ghosts still -haunt the surface to this day.�� - -�I miss dad.� Cyclops pulls his knees together and the Armani suit -tighter around himself. His machine eyes lack the tear ducts to cry, -but I know him well enough to know when he is crying inside. - -�Me too, Cy.� I gather up his Italian wool-swaddled body in a hug. -I�m lying, about us making it. We�re at least a week, maybe two from -where this Ebayzaar �Mecca of the Wastes� supposedly is located, -according to an X on a map we plucked off a vulture-pecked body in a -ditch on the interstate. For all we know, Ebayzaar is a ghost town, -or worse, and out here, the universe� dice are weighted towards -�worse�. Maybe we�re the ghosts, haunting the city that fell to -Earth, their streets, their steel-girdered castles, their simulacra of -�the real world� run and barista-ed by robot actors. Maybe we�ll fade -away, at last, like the faux finished signs on storefront windows. - -Desperation is an acid that will eat you faster than any cannibal. - -And aside from the vague glimmer of someday finding our dad, Cyclops -is all I�ve got keeping me going out here. So I lie, because I am a -good brother. - - - -

For pretty much all our lives we lived in Elysium Vault, a -cushy EMP/atomic shelter for United Territories of Guugol upper -management, their families, and non-expendables. Dad, for the moment, -met the non-expendable criteria and thus was allowed one of the -much-coveted spots in the subterranean bunker/enclave. Or more -specifically, the three pound sack of wet-ware in his head which was -capable of the complex dance of creative imagination and synthesizing -required for highest-level research met the non-expendable criteria, as -the Network-Nations had not been able to automate the process. Not yet, -anyway. Lower level scientists and research assistants had already been -rendered obsolescent by poor-performing, buggy, but cheaper �science -engines�, and were left to rot, like post-information age John Henrys. - -

We empty -out all the money from the cash register onto the ground, pile on -tooth picks and splintered Starbeans chair legs, start a -fire.
Elysium was but one of many secret gardens -that sheltered moguls of -the pre-collapse internet-nations whose wealth made Bill Gates look -like a starving post-print journalist. We had hydroponics, clean -water, a self-repairing 10 MW geothermal plant, everything a -post-apocalypse puppeteering enclave needed. It wasn�t exactly a -normal childhood, but then the concept of normal didn�t really exist -in the collapsed world anymore, gone as dodo birds and print culture. -The closest thing to high school prom I�d experienced in the Vault was -EMP strike emergency drills, giving CPR to the Yawpper CEO�s daughter, -Candy. I think somewhere deep down I knew our little gated heaven -wouldn�t last forever, but I filed the thought away on a back shelf, -unable to live in that withering, corrosive state of paranoia, like we -once had to block out, dissociate from the constant existential terror -of EMP Armageddon, and before that terrorism, Cold War. Dad knew it -too, and I�d only since coming to the surface realized that he�d been -quietly preparing us all along; how to shoot, how to dress wounds, how -to survive among the mindlessness outside, and the heartlessness -inside. - - - -

Cyclops� heat-seeking eye-voodoo susses out a couple -of rats -hiding out -in the chest cavity of the CLERC and we snare �em, which puts a damper -on our food crisis and provides a much needed morale boost. We empty -out all the money from the cash register onto the ground, pile on -tooth picks and splintered Starbeans chair legs, start a fire. -There�s a chance the raiders are still out there but it�s much slimmer -at this point. Plus it�s night, now, so the smoke will be less -conspicuous and we�re freezing our asses off and there�s no fucking -way we�re eating raw rat meat. - -We warm our hands, or hand, by the fire, pour the pork'n'beans in a -coffee pot, shishkebab the rat meat. The raisins we save, they�re so -hard and far past the expiry date we�d probably get more food trading -them as handgun ammo. The rat and beans taste like New York steak -and melt-in-your mouth golden mashers when you haven�t eaten anything -in days. - -�Man, I haven�t been that stuffed in� I can�t remember.� Cyclops -flops back on a pillow of dish towels and clothes. - -�I say we open up a restaurant when we get to Ebayzaar: �Cyclops and -Jericho�s Ratburgers and Beans�.� I rub my swollen belly with my steel -fingers. - -�I like the sound of that.� - -We kick back around the fire and blue-sky our entrepreneurial future -in the culinary arts, talk old times till the embers burn down to a -puddle of ash pocked with rubies. - -�Ok, who wants to take first watch. Cynthia?� I hand the one-armed -CLERC a SWAT M4 assault rifle. - -�I�ll go first, I want to enjoy the sensation of having stuff in my -tummy as long as I can.� Cyclops takes the gun. - -I pop open Armani Man�s briefcase, it�s full of spreadsheets and large -packets of paper thick as money. They bear titles like, �Re-imagining -The Internet: The Cloud 4.0�, �Cost-Benefit Analysis of Converting -Cities to PDMMS (Permanent Digital Massive Multiplayer Societies)�, -And �Social Medianomics: How Individuals Selling Their Social Lives -Can Overcome the Displacement of Middle and Lower Class Jobs by Robots -and Computers.� - -I flip through some of these papers; half the words I�ve never even -seen before and it�s like reading a newspaper from an alien planet, -but I get the overall impression this was a guy on a mission, trying -to effect big -changes, probably just stopped here for a latte on his way to a big -�conference� thing, when the shit hit the fan. I figure -he�s not so different from us, we just stopped in for some rat-skewers -before we�re on to bigger and better things in the new cradle of -hopefully more civil civilization. I go under dreaming of -re-imagining our future in Ebayzaar, running our restaurant in striped -Armani suits, Cynthia waiting tables, Cyclops doing cost-benefit -analyses of using rat versus mutant rattlesnake in the burgers, -veritable captains of post-Silence commerce. - -I�m about to take a bite of a juicy � lb rat burger when it vanishes -from under my teeth. I open my eyes, rub the sleep out of them, -Cyclops is prodding me with the handle of the rifle. �Your turn.� I -take the gun, check the chamber. �Sweet dreams, man.� - -It�s colder than a mutant girl�s tit out here, and my breath is blue -opaque clouds in the half-moonlight. I really need to take a leak for -the first time in two days, perfect timing, so I find the deflated -tire falling off the rotten husk of a car, which strikes me as -ridiculous just as I start pouring steaming golden streams down the -rims. You can piss literally anywhere: in the street, on the windows, -whizz on the biggest desk in the tallest sky-tower in the world, no -one will give a shit. Maybe it�s one of those DNA memory things, -pissing on tires. - -Just as I�m thinking of more evidence to corroborate my tire-peeing -gene theory, I hear a sound like a rat going through a trash can. I -turn in the direction it came from, squinting, and I�m thinking about -waking Cyclops to help capture this rat take-out for tomorrow when the -rat explodes with a reverberatingly loud crack, and something whizzes -past my ear. I splash urine all over myself as my brain puts the -evidence together and realizes I�m being shot at, and I�m still peeing -as I dive back through a spiderweb-fractured window of the Starbeans. -Glass is still trickling down in sporadic cracks as I get behind the -counter, making my adrenaline soaked nerves jump every time. Caught -with my damn pants down. - -�Wake the fuck up, Cy, we�re in some shit.� I shake him up and he�s -got drool matting his hair, mumbling some dream nonsense, but he knows -the tone in my voice and immediately stumbles over for the knapsack, -pulls out a 45 ACP pistol. I have him run to the back to make sure -the employee back door is locked and we take cover behind the counter. - -�You little fuckwits are so dead, and you so fail at pissing, lol.� I -can hear their raucous stupid laughter and hi-fiving so they can�t be -very far. I white-knuckle the SWAT rifle, these Chattering Class -spawn may not be very bright, but they are amazingly aggressive and -ruthless, and we�re outnumbered. And they�re really out for blood -since I took one of them out when they attacked us a couple days ago -at a fuel cell station. - - -

The story went that the Ancients, �Homo Twitterus� some -called them, -having outsourced not only their physical labor but their intellectual -labor as well to machines, The Cloud and robots, had atrophied their -minds to the point that they couldn�t even do simple math, couldn�t -read any text longer than a blurb, could not put together a coherent -sentence, couldn�t even cook food or wipe their own asses. They -became instead experts at expanding their social networking �friend -lists�, winning popularity arms races in reputation systems, �self -marketing�, deciding which arguments to win then instructing -evolutionary algorithm-based �debate software� to do the critical -thinking and composition of message posts, hardened ad-hominem -warriors in the Wars of the Flame on the battlegrounds of comment -sections, anti-PR departments the size of 20th-cen countries dedicated -to giving negative feedback on competitors. Masters at reality TV -and political Truthiness, but failing at understanding reality and -truth. - -When the EMPs struck, self-driving supply trucks to cell phone towers -and water purification systems, robot doctors to robot mechanics to -robot farmers, all those gadgets dutifully keeping the cities running -were fried in the blink of an eye as Homo Twitterus chattered, posted, -and flamed away. But without their machine workforce to maintain the -ephemeral Cloud, the sum total of their internetworked digital world, -the chattering of Homo Twitterus at last ended in The Great Silence. -Unable to sustain themselves, they died, clawing at their touch -screens till their fingers bled, trying to reach through the glass for -their small vanished worlds, turning on one another. Starving, -choking on empty feeder-tubes, their final breaths spent in throes of -infantile rage from internet withdrawal. - - - -

�Cy, are you getting anything on the infrared?� I scan -wide eyed, but -it�s so dark everything is just a gradient mush of blue and black, I -can barely see a damned thing. - -�Nothing, they must still be out of range.� - -A burst of automatic gunfire hails into the Starbeans and we dive for -cover. Fluff from booth seats explodes like blown dandelions, the -cookie display windows shatter, and I hear the deep crumps of bullets -impacting the front of the counter followed by a rain of coffee -straws. A broken Frappe blending container falls on my head a second -later. - -�Ow, fuck!� Deep breaths. Remain calm, strategize, take it step by step. - -I peek back through the gaping hole, fire off a few rounds on a murky -shadow that appears to be moving, hear a satisfying, �Shit, WTF?� - -�Wait, I think I see something. Over there, by the e-newspaper -stands. It�s� little, though. Weird signal frequency. It�s� -Metallica?� Cy head tilts. - -Another peculiar little quirk about Cyclops� vision system upgrades. -He�d always be bursting out with nonsense from nowhere like, �Who is -Charlie Foxtrot?� and �But I don�t know where Defcon 4 is.� We -thought it was just another few screws that came loose near the audio -cortex when hey installed his implants. Till one day, we were -listening to some ancient band our dad liked called �The Velvet -Underground� on an ePod. When we asked Cyclops what he thought, he -said, �It looks great!� At that point we discovered he could not only -see infrared and ultraviolet, but he could also �see� radio and cell -phone signals, wi-fi, practically the full range of the -electromagnetic spectrum like some kind of human antenna. - -The docs and neuroengineers were floored, never seen anything like -it. Their verdict was his cerebrum had re-plasticised in response to -the new influx of signal through his forehead, evolved new structure -to interpret the signals, visualize them, like some kind of human -transmission decoder. The brain, finding uses for things. It was the -first successful mind-computer interface � the holy grail of the -neurosci world � and it was wireless, to boot. They would�ve gone -for a Nobel if there were still a scientific community. Cyclops was -�seeing� transmissions from radios within the base, and not only that, -since the data was flowing directly into his brain � the ultimate -pattern recognition system -- he could crack patterns in any -encryption system in a few seconds as easily as we recognize faces in -clouds. He would�ve been the ultimate Nahtzi -code-buster in that -Global War II thing. He liked The Velvet Underground, said they -looked like red and black paint splattered on walls and volcanoes -erupting. - -�Definitely Metallica. It�s coming in faint in the gigahertz -spectrum, but I�m seeing For Whom The Bell Tolls, unmistakably,� -Cyclops pointed in the direction of the source. - -�One of those raiders must have an ePod on him. Where the hell did he -get a working- nevermind.� I can�t get a good clean shot from where I -am, and from the way they�re spraying lead like firehoses, they�ve got -a lot more ammo to play with than we do, so we�ve got to make our -shots count. - -�Ok, here�s what we�re going to do. Cy, I need you to grab the CLERC -and shuffle her up towards the condiments area right when I give the -signal OK? And let me know if those bastards change position.� He -nods, not entirely sure what my plan is, but he knows I�ve got one. -Another salvo of fire takes out the last remaining Starbeans Window -and paints a little dipper of bullet holes just above my head in the -�Happy Hour! 3-5 PM� sign. - -�Shit, give me some cover fire.� Cyclops plants the .45 on the -counter, firing blind in the general direction of the raiders, but it -keeps them down. I dive into a tumble, ending up under the table of a -booth on the opposite side of the room. I concentrate on breathing -and wiggle the NeuroArm fingers to make sure it�s not gimping out on -me at Crunch Time. I�ve got to nail these shots, the first time, -otherwise- well, I can�t think about otherwise. I�m just thinking -about all the delicious ratburgers we�re going to make when we get out -of this. - -Cyclops signals to me that ePod Guy hasn�t moved, I signal back �Now!� - - - -

When the alert came down from the surface that Elysium -Vault had been -breached, there was mass fingerpointing of the highest caliber between -the surviving marketing and legal department remnants of Guugol, -Norizon, Friendbook and other allied networks. US politics grade -blame-shifting. Someone in the compound was turned, defected from -Guugol across the Silicon Curtain to the United Aggregation of Eurasia, -nuking the site safely from the orbit of another system. - Or someone got too close to -the -surface dwellers, let the wrong one in, someone was followed on a -reconnaissance mission, some fatal breach of protocol. Impossible to -say. Like asking what was the specific Ferdinand Assassination event -that led the Superpower Network-Nations to launch the EMPs at each -other in Mutually Assured Disconnection? We�d never know. The high -and low pressure systems were there, the specific butterfly wing-flap -that initiated the storm was almost irrelevant. - -It was utter confusion, then chaos, a flash flood of anomie, like the -rapid phase transition of some kind of unspoken law of societal -physics; a sudden re-distribution of the unevenly distributed -future-hell, the pain not trickling but pouring down. Screaming, red -flashing lights, sirens, blood, so much blood. The Netfreaks smelled -the siliconey ozone of still-functioning computers, the air of the -Cloud, and were drawn to it like vampires to blood. So many of them, -there wasn�t enough ammo, and the corporate guns were overrun in -minutes. Like the gameover cutscene to one of those Old World zombie -survival horror games. They went for the AR headsets and smart phones -first, clawing at each other to get their hands on touchpads and eyes -engrossed in screens, refreshing for emails, text feeds that weren�t -there. - -Dad was away at Hoover Vault for research at the time, and one of -Guugol�s black-ops guys I recognized as dad�s personal bodyguard -locked us in our room with Candy, told us to stay put. Candy�s blouse -was ripped, red scratches up her arms like the first stages of WiFi -blood poisoning. She was crying, said her mom was outside somewhere, -she tried to open the door to look for her but I held her back. Told -her her mom would be fine, that we had to stay put. Lied. I can�t -remember if she broke free and opened the door or if the Netfreaks -broke it down, but I remember her screaming as their filthy, bloody -nails latched onto her and pulled her through the doorway. I remember -it all too clearly some nights. What followed was the first time I -killed another person, if what I killed did still count as a human -being, and not just the empty shell, the specter of one. Time fell -away, all those deeply-programmed sessions shooting cans coming back -as I raised my pistol, shot gory holes in as many faces as I could. - -Seconds later the bodyguard pulled us through an auxiliary ventilation -shaft, fleeing the only home we�d ever known that within moments had -been destroyed. Just fifty feet or so from the exit, the Netfreaks -found their way into the vent system and we were separated from the -agent, who stayed back to hold them off, I still don�t know if he -managed to escape. When we made it to the surface, we ran into desert -night, no direction, no feeling, no thinking, just flight. We ran -till our lungs burned holes in our chests and our legs turned to mush. - Then we ran some more. - - -

A second after the robot decoy passes in front of the tip -jar, there�s -an absolute shitstorm of gunfire so loud I can feel my brain rattling -in my skull, but I block it out, focus. I pop up, there are sure -enough two firing uzis full-auto from behind the e-newspaper stand, -one with a pair of white earbuds on, both with drooling homicidal -grins on their faces illuminated by muzzle-lightning, slightly -caved-in foreheads characteristic of Netfreak descendants. In my -peripheral I spot one behind the car that is covered in my still-warm -pee, wearing a necklace of human teeth. - -I aim, breathe, let off a burst once for each raider behind the -stands, the NeuroArm thankfully eliminating muscle tremor and -providing parasympathetic subroutines that autocompensate for the -rifle�s recoil. Metallica Guy�s head pops like a cherry bomb in a -ripe melon, blood streaking down the white headphone wires as his body -collapses. The other raider lets out a choking shriek as he catches -one in the arm, whipping it back in a puff of red mist. Feels good -doesn�t it, fucker. - -

�I kind of want the ePod. I wonder if it has any -Velvet Underground,�
The one behind the car screams something about -ripping my head off and -shitting down my neck and I duck just in time to feel his bullets -parting my hair. The bullet blizzard abruptly haults, followed by -clicking and smacking, and �WTFBBQ!?� followed by unintelligible -strings of pre-Disconnect curse words . A beat later, there�s -sprinting and I peek over to see this charging lunatic foaming at the -mouth, waving a tire iron around like a medieval mace, the pure -embodiment of Cloud-withdrawal rage, headed straight for me. Cyclops -fires first, getting him in the upper thigh and shoulder, at which -point he lets out a non-stop, vocal chord-tearing scream but keeps -coming, from the look in his bloodshot eyes he is jacked up on spaz. -I unload the rest of my clip on him, checkerboarding the chest of his -black trench coat with red, which reduces his momentum, but his body -remains in a drug-induced denial of how fucked it is. I deflect the -tire iron blow with the NeuroArm, using his momentum to flip him over -my shoulder in a Mountain Bomb throw. He crashes, back-first, onto a -table strewn with coffee cups and long-defunct laptops, which -collapses. The body spasms insect-like. - -�Drop the gun!� The hoarse voice makes me jump, but in an instant I -realize I don�t want to turn, knowing I�ve fucked up. - -I turn to see the limp-armed raider, a giant rusty kitchen knife in -his good, if twitchy hand pressed hard against Cyclops� throat. This -one looks older, wiry grey hair on his head and the tell-tale -raccoon-marks around the eyes where permanent computer interface -goggles once clung, ensconcing rapidly darting, distracted eyes of a -pre-Silence Chattering Class netfreak. - -�I said drop it you fucking troll!� I�m perplexed at first, then -assume this insult is some sort of artifact of the Chattering Class. -I�m under no illusion that this shit will slit Cyclops throat as soon -as he sees his chance, possibly sooner. But he also looks like he�s -about an inch away from cracking and the shaky knife hand pulls -tighter, causing Cyclops to let out a whimper. I spot blood on -Cyclops� neck, and I decide to drop the gun, kick it aside. I�m -sorry, bro. - -�Now you�re both fucking dead!� His hand starts moving. - -�No! Wait! I�� I�ve got about four seconds to think of something, -and I think like our lives depend on it, which they do. I look down, -spot the blood-soaked laptops and it clicks. - -�I can get you some internet!� It�s so utterly ridiculous I just -barely manage to deliver the line with a straight face. - -�What? Where?� The look on his face is some mixture of junkie glaze -and a child on Christmas morning, and for a moment I feel a twinge of -pity, which quickly passes as I realize he was just about to kill my -brother. He transfixes on me, and the knife falls away from Cyclops� -neck. Cyclops makes a break for it, and by the time the raider -realizes what�s happened, he�s too late, completely missing Cyclops -with his wild swing and throwing himself off balance. I take the -opportunity to rush him, grabbing his knife hand in both of mine and -drive it as hard as I can into the pit of his stomach. He staggers -back, wobbling on his feet, then reaches his hand out towards -something only he sees. �Internet�� he mutters, crestfallen, then -falls. - -In the morning we pack up the food and weapons, search the bodies. A -couple Coke bottles filled with water, some bits of mystery meat, pack -of cigarettes, no ammo left. Guess you have to give them an �A� for -effort. Cyclops lingers over Metallica Guy. The white headphone -wires are covered in bits of brain and black coagulated blood like -Pocky sticks. - -�I kind of want the ePod. I wonder if it has any Velvet Underground,� -He finally says. Hey, that�s totally fine with me, I�m not cleaning -that gore off. - -Cynthia is a complete wreck from when we used her as an artificial -human shield last night, uniform torn to shreds, metal showing -everywhere, her one remaining arm hanging by a thread at the elbow. I -almost feel bad for her. Her face is still caught in that bright, -old-world service industry smile though her right cheek is falling off -and her left eye is a black socket. A true professional to the end. - -�Really sorry about that, Cynth. It�d probably never work out between -us anyway, this town isn�t really me. Maybe you can come visit our -place in Ebayzaar some time?� I duct tape her cheek back on as a token -apology. - -We follow the boulevard south through the ruins of windowless, -slouching skyscrapers, picking up the journey to Ebayzaar. Cyclops -finally manages to scrape most of the gunk off the ePod with the help -of the Coke bottle water, plugs in to watch music. With the raiders -gone, we�re walking lighter, freer, like a weight lifted off our -backs. The ghosts of the Cloud City are left to rest in peace. The -new captains of industry have a future to build. - - -© Twilite Minotaur 2011 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] jericho.jpg - - - - -[*ITEM] Special Delivery - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Is handwritten evidence reliable?

- -[*DESCRIPTION] - -May 2373 - Account from Professor Mrs Kerstin Johansson, -(semi-retired) of the University of Uppsala - -

In my job, I see a lot of writing, not just on paper, but -carved into stone, metal or wood. As an archaeologist at the -University of Uppsala, ancient writing is one of the basic data sources -for my science. In particular, handwriting is one of my specialities, -which, I suppose, is one of the reasons why Olaf Ekman's Book arrived at -my workstation, eleven years ago. - -Writing by hand is a rarity these days. We see any amount of printed -paper, and lots of tablet notes in a variety of font -styles, but beyond that... what? People sometimes sketch preliminary -ideas on paper. Shopping lists, score cards, -yellow sticky notes. The majority of paper manufactured today is used in -an absorbent form to soak up or wipe up spills -or bodily exudations. You can't write on a nose tissue. I've tried. - -Writing being such a rarity, I was surprised that the book was -accompanied in its mailpouch by a handwritten note on a -plain sheet of heavy paper, signed by the Dean himself. It said, in essence: - -1. Do not disclose anything connected with this book to anyone other -than me. Do not file any data connected with this -project on any computer database. Use only a secure, non-networked computer for your report. - -2. You are required to analyse the attached book for authenticity of -origin and language, both in its basic form and, as -far as possible, with reference to the handwritten additions. Pay particular attention to dates. - -3. Transcribe into English the handwritten additions to the text. - -4. Submit a single printed report of your conclusions to me in person. - -I was not permitted to retain a copy of the report I submitted, but the -task was so unusual that I still clearly remember -almost everything about it. - -Ekman's 'Book' was actually an old bible. We see a lot of bibles, -q'rans, little red books and other religious and political -tracts in the archaeology business. During most of the history of -printing, religious books in particular were produced -in huge quantity, so it is not surprising. Besides, in historical times, -superstition made people reluctant to destroy holy -books, which often survived for many years after their original publication. - -This bible was a dog-eared volume some one hundred and forty millimetres -tall, ninety-five millimetres wide and forty -millimetres thick, as I remember. It had a soft cover of black imitation -leather, torn and scuffed. It was grubby and it -smelled strangely musty, as though it had been in close contact with animals. - -The paper was extremely thin, presumably to make the volume as -physically small as possible. Each sheet was only -0.05 millimetres thick, so that 1000 pages (500 sheets) measured only 25 mm. - -Bibles were traditionally divided into major sections called 'books', -subsections called 'chapters', and short passages -called 'verses'. The print was small, in two columns per page, with each -Book named, and each Chapter and Verse -numbered. - -The publication date of this Holy Bible was 2145, over 200 years old -when I first saw it. It was in English, published in -London at the Hackney University Press, and must have been one of the -last so-called King James versions published, -the earliest examples of which date from the 1600s. By 2145, the 17th -century language used was unfamiliar to nearly all -speakers of English, and the bible in use was commonly rendered in -contemporary language, just as on-line versions -are today. - -I sent samples of the cover, paper and ink of the bible for analysis, -without revealing their source. The plastic cover and -the paper were the right age, the printing ink correct. I was able to -borrow another copy of exactly the same edition from -Stockholm University library, and it was identical, other than wear and -tear; the physical appearance, the pagination, -font, printer's marks, even the few accidental flecks that always used -to appear on a printing plate. On balance, forgery -of the book itself was very unlikely. - -However, what made this bible interesting was that almost every blank -space - end-papers, margins and chapter breaks -- was filled with handwriting in ballpoint pen, whose ink was initially -consistent with the age of the entries. Later entries -were in a more primitive ink which later turned out to be coffee. The -book, or diary, was, in fact, a palimpsest. The -original meaning of the bible text apparently meant nothing to the writer. - -I remember that, at first, I didn't even realise that the handwriting -was in Swedish. Swedish is theoretically my native -language, but here in the twenty-fourth century, there are few daily -speakers of the language. It was hard to recognise, -because the handwriting was atrocious. Even after a lifetime of -deciphering ancient documents, I found it extremely -difficult to read, and the writer, in search of writing space, had -filled all the big areas before resorting to margins and -column gutters, and the whole narrative was therefore out of sequence, -and the writer clearly lost track of dates very -early in his account. - -In my opinion, the language and handwriting style used were consistent -with a Swedish male educated within rural -Sweden in the early part of the twenty-second century, about two hundred -years ago. For the language, I based my -assessment on similar documents of comparable age: the vocabulary -(especially the paucity of imported English and -other foreign words); punctuation; grammar; and sentence structure used. -For the handwriting, my clues were letter -shapes and connectors, and, particularly, accents and diacritical marks. - -As to content, the writer calls himself Olaf Ekman. There was no -immediate way to verify this. He was unclear where he -was living, lacked company, was unclear about his situation but -had adjusted to it. The account was -long, repetitive and tedious. It also lacked biographical detail. - -Using parish and census records, I was able to identify more than two -hundred possible Olaf Ekmans living in Sweden at -the approximate period, but there was insufficient supporting historical -data in his written account for a positive -identification. Certainly, several of these Ekmans lacked information on -date and place of death, but emigration to other -countries typically interrupts the life records of individuals living at that time. - -In conclusion, while I was unable to comment on any possible delusion on -the part of Olaf Ekman, the physical book -appeared entirely authentic, and the style of the palimpsest content was -entirely consistent with Ekman's assertions as -to year of writing. - -Prof. Kerstin Johansson. May 2373. - -

- -Appendix - -Some extracts from Olaf Ekman's writings. As I state in the body of this -account, the whole is both -boring and baffling. Part of the confusion results -from the fact that Ekman does not initially reveal that he is living in -a supermarket delivery van. Late in the account, he -reveals that the bible, which some other driver had left in the cab, was -not the only paper available to him, but that he -valued the other paper for lighting fires. He would never burn a bible, -apparently. However, the ball-point pen he had in -his pocket was the only writing implement available. The pen ran out -before the available paper in the bible and the last -entries are laboriously scratched with something dipped in a dye made -from coffee. The van load, luckily for Ekman, -was mostly preserved foodstuffs with a few other everyday items and some women's clothing. - -1 June 2151: My name is Olaf Ekman. I have been here for about a month, -but I do not remember how I came. The last -date I clearly remember is 3 May 2151, so I shall call today 1 June. I -have shelter, there is more than enough to eat and -drink, but my life is empty. I have not seen another person, bird or -animal since I arrived. The van is completely out of -fuel and the GPS and radio light up but appear to be broken. The solar -panels collect a little energy, but not enough to -drive the van any distance. Tomorrow I shall walk to the west (the -position of the setting sun) in the hope of -encountering a neighbour or a road. - -12 June 2151: Ten days and I was lucky to get home. The terrain is flat -and almost treeless in all directions from here. -After two days pushing through alternate stony desert and ankle-deep, -flat-leaved vegetation, I came to a low hill, but -the view from the top, in all directions, was exactly the same. I had -taken enough food for seven days, turned back after -three, and missed the van on the way back. It took three days to find -it. Perhaps this is Canada. Are there volcanoes in -Canada? - -20 June 2151: I managed to cut down one of the tall plants, about ten -metres high, with a kitchen knife from the van. The -wood is soft like a cactus, and very light. There was a box of balls of -string in the delivery. I tied a very bright yellow -frock to the top of the pole, and managed to fix it to the van as a -flagstaff. I will not miss the van next time I explore. I -have decided to climb the volcano. I will see more from there. - -It appeared to take Ekman several months to achieve this objective. -The volcano was so far away that he was forced -make huge numbers of part trips to set up supply caches en route because -he could not carry enough food and water -for the complete journey. In turn, this meant that he needed to signpost the route from cache to cache. - -20 October 2151: So, in summary, the trip to the volcano was not a total -waste of time. From near the top, it was clear -that I am on an island, and it appears uninhabited. Although I never see -any aircraft, I am building a sign to attract -attention and will keep a fire burning day and night in hope of rescue. - -25 October 2151: It rains a lot here, with remarkable thunder and -lightning. It is difficult to keep the fire lit. It is good that -the load includes a whole case of gas lighters. - -6 November 2151: The moon looks smaller from here. Maybe it is the flatness of the land. - -There follow twenty-two years' worth of increasingly sporadic -entries, most may be summarised by 'got up, ate -tinned stew, it rained, collected fuel for the fire, went to sleep', a -pattern which must be a feature of the life of any -castaway. The constant fire was abandoned when it took nearly a day to -collect a day's fuel. Every so often, when the -solar panels had accumulated a little energy, he moved the van a few -hundred yards to another area with more fuel. -Eventually, he was only a day's walk from the sea, but his attempts to -catch fish were unsuccessful. He never saw -another living creature on land or in the sea. Latterly, entries were -interspersed by occasional complaints of this -type: - -12 September 2166: Becoming worried that the tins of food will only last -a few more years. I have finally tasted the red -bush fruit that look like little jugs that I always thought would be -poisonous. I was right. They were almost tasteless, but -caused terrible stomach pain. So far, there is nothing at all on this -island that I can eat except the tomatoes and grapes -that still sprout on my dungheap, and I think I brought these here -myself! Happily, the rain water, though it tasted -strange at first, has always been OK. - -It should have been a soul-destroying existence, very much like a -life sentence in solitary confinement, yet Ekman -appears to have accepted it without either complaint or curiosity. There is no self-pity even in the last entry of all: - -1 January 2173: Happy New Year. I opened the last tin today - one I have -been keeping for a final treat - peaches. I hate -to think how much I owe DK-Mart Supermarkets - a whole delivery! I -estimate 20000 kg of tinned and packet food alone, -not counting the soft drinks, beer and vodka. And all these ladies' -dresses and sandals I used when my overalls and -boots wore out! There is no more food, so when I get hungry I will eat -as many painkillers as I can and fall asleep. I am -sorry, DK-Mart, you will never be paid. Let us say that I have taken my salary in kind. Goodbye. - -Ekman's death occurred two hundred years ago this year. We still do -not know how he came to be marooned. - -
- -

Kerstin showed her unexpected visitor into her kitchen. -The man had -arrived unannounced, presented his identity -badge to her entry scanner, and been admitted without delay and without -requiring Professor Kerstin Johansson's -permission. This was the sign of a very important person. - -"Coffee?" she offered. - -"No, thank you. This is your report, recorded recently, is it, Professor?" - -Kerstin Johansson regarded the rather pale young man with rising -suspicion. He had a friendly face, but that meant -little these days. He had unrolled a flekskreen, and passed it across -the kitchen table. She recognised the article she -had posted on the net the previous day. "Who did you say you were?" She -had been so surprised at his arrival that she -had not read the admission read-out on her entry screen. - -"Anders Lidén, UN Truth Commission. Your article, is it?" - -"Yes, but I fail to see the problem." - -"You are aware that your work on this project was highly confidential." It was a statement, not a question. - -She suddenly perceived that Lidén's blue eyes were acutely -piercing. Her stomach sank. The UN Truth -Commission had a reputation for ruthlessness in the pursuit of academics -who crossed the line. "Confidential, yes, but -eleven years downstream? And it's a sad story, someone marooned for so -long, but it can hardly be important. It -happened so long ago - two hundred years this year. That's why I wrote the memoir." - -"And you were given leave to publish by whom?" - -"No-one. But this is not my original report, which I agreed to keep -confidential, just a memoir." - -He pursed his lips. "Hmm.. A prevarication. And the quotes from your -transcript of Ekman's journal?" - -"They were not quotes! You will probably see differences from the -original transcript... I... er... kept images of a few -pages and re-translated them." - - Lidén rolled up the flekskreen and returned it to his hip bag. - "A memoir, you say. Could your memory be faulty, -do you think?" He was watching her carefully. - -"I don't believe so. I was careful not to guess anything that I could not clearly remember." - -"Such as?" - -"Lab results. Number of journal entries. I don't know. How long the investigation took." - -"I see." - -"Look. If the information is still secret, then I'll withdraw the net release." - -"Oh, it was withdrawn this morning, and cleared from all public caches. -There may be a few copies in private hands, but -without the original, they lack substance. We can handle that sort of thing." - -"So, will I be prosecuted for breach of confidentiality?" - -"Oh, I hardly think so. A prosecution would be too noticeable. No, we -want you to publish, but with certain small -changes." - -Kerstin could feel her hackles rising at the prospect of being forced to -publish a lie at the request of the Truth -Commission. She knew it happened, but not, surely, to archaeologists. "I -don't understand. Was this Ekman -important?" - -"You were never told where the book was found?" It was clearly -Lidén's turn to be surprised. He immediately -appeared less menacing. - -"No. I wondered at the time, but I wasn't asked to speculate. It seemed -shocking that he was never found, but I suppose -there are still remote places like that, even today." - -Lidén deployed his flekskreen again and opened a form. "As things -stand, your report is suppressed. If you -endorse this official security form, I will give you some information. -The form is specific to this information and does not -constrain you in any general fashion. If we later discover that you have -revealed that information, you will be -sanctioned. On the basis of the information I give you, you may decide -to publish your report with changes we suggest. -Otherwise, it remains suppressed." - -"In short, I have nothing to lose, but not a lot to gain, either." - -"True. But you are now fascinated to discover the secret. That's a gain." - -"All right. I am fascinated." - -"OK. Look at the screen until the retinal scan clicks, and then say 'I -endorse form number ' and read the number on the -screen." - -The familiar formality complete, Lidén began. "The book and Ekman's remains were found in 2268." - -"But that was, what, nearly a hundred years before it came to me. Yet I remember a sense of urgency." - -"That is because, even with the fastest transport available, it took nearly a hundred years to get to you." - -"I don't understand." - -"Yes you do." - -"Of course. A space colony." - -"Pacifica, formerly called HD69830-4. The starship UNSS Shardik was -launched in 2080, when it was feared that our -planet might soon become uninhabitable. Like the other starships -launched in the late 21st, Shardik carried a -population of 50000 crew, a self-sustained town. Travelling at an -average of approximately one quarter light speed, -Shardik arrived in orbit around Pacifica a hundred and eighty-eight -years later. A few of the older travellers could -remember their grandfathers telling them about Earth, but none had known -any environment but Shardik. Most had been Shardik natives for six or -seven -generations. As you know, a number of starships have failed as a result -of accident, breakdown or civil anarchy, but -Shardik was a great success." - -"Yes. I've read about it." - -"During computer analysis of the aerial survey on the planet Pacifica, -shape -anomalies were identified. Most anomalies in the -survey turned out, on closer inspection, to be unusually regular natural -features. However, telescopic images revealed -that one island had on it," he consulted his screen, "a rectangular -structure some fifteen metres in length and three in -width, and, nearby, some arrays of rocks, hundreds of metres in extent -and partially obscured by low vegetation, -reading 'SOS', a traditional distress signal. A landing vehicle was -immediately deployed to the site, -and it was revealed that the rectangular object -was an antique road vehicle containing the remains of a human being. The -human remains and a few personal effects -were returned to UNSS Shardik, where they were subject to analysis in their laboratory." He looked up. - -Kerstin grimaced. "They couldn't read Ekman's journal." - -"They could read the dates, though. The publication date of the bible. -And the expiry dates on Ekman's cans and -bottles. And they were not pleased." - -"I'm beginning to see why." - -"You and your family for several generations travel for a hundred and -eighty-eight years, only to discover that -a supermarket delivery vehicle has beaten you to -your destination by one hundred and seventeen years." - -"I see. So Shardik's crew theorised that we, on Earth, had developed a -much faster transport system, making their -marathon journey and lost generations a bit meaningless." - -"Exactly. Radio messages to and from Pacifica take forty-six and a bit -years each way, so a lively exchange of views is -impossible. But we received images of the bible about sixty years ago. -Travelling by very fast unmanned capsule, the -bible itself arrived together with soil samples and other physical -artifacts from Pacifica just eleven years ago, when you -saw it." - -"Presumably, then, UNSA have, indeed, developed a much faster space drive, but do not want to talk about it." - -"In point of fact, no. UNSA has achieved marginal improvements in ram -ion drives, but nothing that would transport -Ekman and his truck almost instantaneously. It was concluded at this -end that since it was impossible, the crew of -Shardik must have contrived an incomprehensible elaborate practical -joke, mocking up photographs of the bible, the -truck, the food cans." - -"And then I certified Ekman's book as real." - -"Exactly." - -"So how did Ekman get to Pacifica?" - -"That's just it. It can't possibly have happened. Therefore, it did not -happen. Therefore, the whole tale must be a clever -fake, and your report must make that clear." - -Kerstin stared at, or, rather, through Lidén for a few seconds. -"No. I don't believe it. Disregarding the fact that a -joke like that is highly unlikely, the bible is genuine. I'm sure of it." - -"Yes, I'm sure it is." said Lidén, "But if the real truth got -out, it would have the most depressing effect on morale. -Asking you to put a little doubt into the situation is much preferred." - -"The real truth? All I can imagine is that it was all faked at this end and Shardik's crew made no such discovery." - -"Not at all. As far as the inhabitants of Pacifica are concerned, it's a -historical fact, and the truck is on view there for -anyone to see, as you can confirm with your own eyes if you have a couple of centuries to spare." - -"Are you saying you know how it happened?" - -"Not in detail, but it is simply another confirmation of a phenomenon -that has been happening since the mid twentieth -century. The vast majority of these incidents are virtually dismissed. -Anyone pursuing them is regarded as a crank, -Ekman's case is embarrassing because he turned up a long way from home with supporting physical evidence." - - Lidén displayed an image of a piece of yellowed paper, printed in Swedish. - -"What's this?" asked Kerstin, but went on translating aloud, -" 'Bureå Weekly News 5 May 2151'. It's one of those -local newspapers from country backwaters that survived net news because -local events were never reported on the -net. The date. It's something to do with Ekman, isn't it?" - -"This may explain why we have no wish to provide confirmation of the -likely explanation." Lidén enlarged a -small paragraph at the foot of the page. - -Kerstin read the brief article quickly. "Ah, small and green, are they?" - -"Allegedly. We've never caught them in the act." - -"I can see why me making a mistake is preferable to this." - -"We hoped you'd see it that way." - -

- -
Googlefish translation follows:

-CELESTIAL FIREWORKS DISPLAY

-On Wednesday night several inhabitants of Skellefteå reported -seeing strange lights travelling across the sky from west to east at -remarkable speed, making sharp changes of direction and changing colour -from white to pink and back again. Some witnesses reported strange -noises. A farmworker, Karin Lindemann (42), alleged that she was -'bombarded with live frogs'. A huge cylindrical depression was found in -an oilseed rape field, surrounded by burn marks.

- The local UN radar base at Pitea -reported that nothing was seen on their screens, and a spokesman -confided that the villagers had most probably observed the aurora -borealis. Electricity worker Frederik Hansen (55) dismissed this -suggestion, as all local people at this latitude are familiar with the -northern lights. He said this was not the first time that unusual lights -had appeared in the night sky (see Bureå Weekly News 14 Mar 2150), -and that a UN soldier from the radar installation had revealed that the -lights did in fact appear on radar, but were denied by the -authorities.

In a possibly connected incident on the same -evening, a DK-Mart delivery -truck disappeared on the coast road between Yttervik and Skelleftehamn -It is feared that the driver, Olaf Ekman, may have been distracted by -the -strange lights and plunged into the sea. Coastguards and police have so -far failed to establish the truth of this theory.
- - -© Gil Williamson 2011 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] delivery.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Postcards - -[*AUTHOR] Annabel Banks - -[*BLURB] - -[*DESCRIPTION] - -Tell us something
-(Anything)
- (Yes) - -I'll tell you about my day. You always know we're coming because we -advertise: our kites go up days in advance, their lasers streaking the -clouds and high rises; adver-screamers roam the streets, hacking phones -and kits, flooding your width with promises. You know what we are - it's -not a secret, it's a selling point - and you dare each other to buy -tickets, to make a night of it. You look ahead and insert yourself into -this scenario. But you're never prepared. - -Yes
- (She's right)
-(Tell us why) - -You've been spoilt. You're used to 3D Virt, GamingR, ExtraLife and all -the other reality playrooms and you forget this is real, that we are -real, the way a line of code or a pixelated image just isn't. It takes -about twenty minutes to sink in. Then you start to react. - -What happens?
-(Are we afraid?)
-(I wasn't)
- (You were) - -It's never the same. It depends where we are. - -Meaning?
- (I don't understand) - -Hang on. It doesn't take me long to make up: I only have to pull on the -dress, throw on some paint, brush and balance this wig - - -Pretty
- (Not real?) - -- no, not real. I can't even dye my hair. My skin won't take the -chemicals. Because I have free time, I take a few hours to wander each -town. No-one ever realises what I am; I wear a hood and walk the strips, -past the screamers for other shows, sizing up the competition. I'm -looking for a certain type of small shop, somewhere low and grimy. It -will have dirty windows. It will be dark and warm. I'll go inside and -buy a small paper card, running my fingers over the picture, shapes of -cliffs and beaches, and try to learn about my audience. - -Tell us how
-(Quiet) - -It's my own theory: topographical mind mapping. Don't laugh. -Valleys-dwellers widen eyes and apertures but don't move, and they never -ask questions. Mountain-people are sceptics - faked - it's a trick -- and -can't wait to get past the dampers, get outside, plug in and find out -how it's done. Coastals, like here, are different again: silent -watchers, immediate believers. Accepters of myth and the secrets of deep -water. Of creatures left behind. - -Yes.
(Go on)
(Tell us about here) - -I found my shop early. As I flicked through the dusty boxes the staff -watched me; they were hosting my advert for the show, but they had no -way of knowing, not without this wig, this paint. All they saw was a -girl. They were sitting on high chairs, leaning back -against the wall, icams -whirring as they focused on my face. Are you going? We're selling -tickets. Each had one eye milked as they paralleled, maybe watching -the -news, a movie, porn-porn of me perhaps; their cams might have been -chipped. Maybe, tucked inside their visual field, I was fucking a vid -creation, a beast, a bird, a monster. Maybe they were hurting me, -watching tears cut new patterns into my blood-stained face. Or maybe -they were just Booking. - -They had enough attention left over to complain -about accepting my coins after I exposed my wrist and told my usual lie. -Chip magged, pain in the arse, I know... At least they didn't -charge me -extra for having to use a card. Where's it going, girly? The -question -came out of nowhere, and for a second I thought I'd been recognised. I -stared. - -Postcard. A real finger pointed to the image in my hand. -Who're -you sending it to? In situations like that I have learnt to smile, -shake -my head and leave. - -(What happened) - -When I stepped out of the shop there were more bods on the strip, all -looking for a good time. It was getting late, the overheads brightening -the clouds, and there were clubbers outside Pleasure Plaza, calling, -dancing, happy that the working week was over. One skipped over, waving, -and I knew I must have been Booked, but again I could only shrug and -walk away. - -In the distance the kites swooped and sang, advertising the show, -sending down words and pics to curve on the pavement. They go so high, -anchored by unbreakable steel strings, and the vibration hums upwards, -all the way up to the bright dancing body. I stood and watched. When -it's busy Davvers lets me launch them, unwinding the long loops, sending -them further up to beam back their message, FREEKSHOW 2NITE. Calling to -the crowds. Calling to you. - -I took my picture back to the tent and propped it against my tray of -paints, so I could study it as I whitened my face, darkened my eyes; one -paper rectangle, framing a point of transition; sea and slate, blues and -greys, one into the other beneath mirroring skies. The natural state of -things. I knew you wouldn't be afraid. - -Tell us more
- (About the show)
-(Your words) - -Bunny always opens the act, voice as deep as your shock. Although only -one of the heads is actually alive, the other never lolls or dribbles. -It always blinks, and seems to look around. It wiggles its nose. -Sometimes, one of the eyes will droop in a wink. Bunny will see it, and -turn to the nearest member of the audience. Likes you, Bunny -will say, practised leer on the living mouth. Kiss? Then drop -forward and bring their mouthparts level. No one has ever kissed that -second mouth, which is strange, because Bunny gets a lot of action after -the curtain drops. - -After the tumbling acts have been on, armPlants whizzing around the -arena, it's the animals. You always love the monkey wedding. I don't -know why. - -Real animals?
-(I thought they were fake)
-(They look almost human!) - -As you saw, my act closes. It goes like this. The damping field cuts -in - no-one is allowed to vid me; it would ruin us if pics leaked - and -Bunny leads me out, our three heads bobbing to the sub-enhanced beat. I -sit, smooth my hands over this pink and yellow-striped dress, the whole -look designed to keep me on the right side of cartoon. I am not here to -frighten. - -Why are you here?
-(Don't ask that) - -Well, I'm unemployable. At first, it was this or nothing, and I -wouldn't smile, which made the audience fear me even more. But I came to -feel differently about it after the third show. Someone put out their -hand and touched my face as I was doing my act, gently stroking me from -my hairline to my jaw, and thanked me. I asked what for. Because we -forget, they said, golden lip slot gleaming, and we -shouldn't. It made me feel important. When everyone had gone I -climbed up the tent, high up into the roof, and sat on the scaffolding. -I thought about what it means for people like you to see someone like -me. - -Funny!
-(Educational)
-(An advert?) - -Perhaps. I think it's more a memory. - -Go on - -Lifting the cover is always a tense moment. Sometimes I can't identify -the contents, not at first, and I used to worry about a mistake being -made, something damaging or deadly or just not right - but I've -learnt to trust the team here. They've never let me down. Davvers' -ringruler routine is always perfect, carefully pitched to the crowd's -needs. I know I'm cared for. Davvers will even end the show early if I'm -getting too much of the wrong sort of attention - - -Like what?
-(Are we hurting you?)
-(Shall we move back?) - -No, no, you're wonderful. Perfect, in fact. But I sometimes get the -after-effects of fear: pinching, scratching, offers of sex, of love, of -death. I never cry, that would be unprofessional, but Davvers is always -watching, always knows. Then long fingers reach though the crush of -flesh and fakes and draw me out, hiding me under that red tailcoat, -toplight flashing, volume up, roaring me to safety. - -But not today. Today, everything went well. When I lifted the cover I -was overjoyed. Long green stems, heated with water vapour to soften -them; a small grey fish, also warmed in water, its bulging eye cast up -at me with a wink of seasoning. I was surprised for a moment, and then I -remembered where we are. They're still caught for sport round here, yes? -Someone knows someone who can keep a secret. I picked up the utensils -that none of you can name, and cut. Pushed. Lifted. - -When the first piece of green went into my mouth I heard a voice. -No. I -chewed slowly, letting you watch the movement of my jaw muscles, knowing -you were picturing my teeth, my wet mouth. I swallowed, smiled, looked -down. Cut into the fish. - -Davvers started up the low patter that's designed to cover stunned -silences. You were addressed as Ladies and gentlemen, part of the -ambience of the piece, and invited closer. You paused, and then surged, -a wave of bodies, leaning so far over that you knocked me with your -icams. Excuse, I heard, Please, and I smiled again, and -opened my mouth, -displaying the mashed and sticky pile. - -And how do we make you feel? - -Although many of you came down to be with me, I know that others have -left in disgust. They are outside, Booking each other, chipped in to -whatever gives them comfort, on their way home. Some feel sorry for me, -that I have been neglected somehow. Some always contact authorities, -charities, to get me rescued, to get me healed. Kindly Plant surgeons -offer to work for free. Kindly businesses offer to pay. - -But still you choose to remain you
-(Pure) - -No. Listen. This is important. Each time, afterwards, I explain how this -isn't a choice; my body rejected the Plants as fast as they're -implanted. I'm still just a girl, sat alone on the edges of -communication, of information, of life. There is no higher moral purpose -to this; just a blind person allergic to sticks. - -But you are pure - - -What value is purity? If you can't change, you can't grow. I'm purest -stagnation. I'm the dullest grey. - -Do you have time for more questions? - -No. Wait - yes, I do, but they are for you. I have a thousand. Can tell -me -what it means to see the sun sing? How does it feel to be inside the -mind of your lovers? To remember every day of your life? What is it like -to never be alone? - -We cannot (Excuse) (Cannot) (You wouldn't under-) - -I know. This is why I ask you here. You mustn't falter now. Get out, go -as far as you can, and send back pictures. - -And you? - -I'll always be here, looking up. I'll be your kite string. - -[*IMAGE] postcards.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Fiat Lux - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] A delightful little vignette which actually contains more truth -than fiction. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

We had to endure the usual oblique glances -from Altdorfer�s aunt as we passed through the sitting-room. Each time -I visited the house, she had been sitting in the same armchair, knitting -the same quilt. Altdorfer says it was originally intended as a scarf, -but the old gentleman for whom it was generously being created had -inconveniently died at quite an early stage of its colourful growth. -Thereafter the scarf increased in dimensions and complexity, -prospectively becoming first a rug and then a quilt. By now it could -easily be used to camouflage a tank, and is well on its way to providing -cover for, say, a football field. Given time and a sufficient supply of -wool, it may ultimately replace Wales as a popular measure of disaster -areas.

I followed Altdorfer through to the study. If ever a room -deserved the name, this was no longer it. I knew it to harbour a desk -and chairs, but these could now be seen only in tantalising glimpses, -like the ankles of a demure Victorian maiden. They were concealed by a -seemingly random overspill from the well-stocked bookshelves which -obscured the walls. Somewhere there was even a computer. Among the few -items of furniture which remained relatively uncluttered was the old -floral-patterned sofa, threadbare but still reasonably comfortable, and -it was to this familiar relic that we gravitated.

- -

The box-files stacked on an adjoining coffee-table allowed just -enough room for a bottle of Altdorfer�s favoured Kirsch and two -surprisingly clean squat glasses. He filled these, and handed one to -me. "Up theirs!" we chorused ritually, before resuming the -serious business of studying the startling batch of documents I had been -left by Ryan Trench.

- -

We had known Trench when he was a young classics student -with an interest in Sanskrit and Monopoly. The Monopoly should have -given us a clue to his secret acquisitiveness. He was a gawky, awkward -youth, socially inept, but evidently a good scholar, with a conviction -that one day he would make his mark on the world. To that end he -cultivated an accent one might associate with an effete aristocracy, yet -exhibited a kind of fawning gratitude towards those who were indulgent -towards him despite his gauche behaviour.

- -

I was working at the time for a long-established antiquarian -bookseller; an old family firm, learning the intricacies of cataloguing, -and it was there that Ryan Trench found a vacation job in the downstairs -packing department. Below this were �The Vaults� � the sub-basement -storage area containing thousands of dusty volumes waiting to be sorted -and priced. This led out through the tradesman�s entrance, where Ryan -parked his bike, to the cobbled streets of old Edinburgh.

- -

I had a flat nearby, and at some point Ryan began dropping in at -week-ends, quite possibly uninvited, and irrespective of whether I might -already have company. On one such visit he arrived just as a casual -game of Monopoly was about to begin, and it would have been churlish not -to invite him to join in. I forget now which assembly of my friends was -present. Altdorfer, certainly, probably Marcus and Stella, maybe -Anitra, or Piers. In contrast to our laid-back, convivial approach to -the game, Ryan�s was compulsive, intense. To him it was not a game to -be enjoyed, but an opportunity to exercise control. And when he failed -to accumulate sufficient property or wealth, the fault had to lie in the -inadequacy of the rules, or the design of the board. After several -sessions Ryan excused himself, and spent the next few weeks -constructing, in his spare time, a larger board with additional squares -and their related property cards, and extra model buildings to represent -a level of possession beyond hotels; historic houses, perhaps, or -palaces. Much to his chagrin, by the time he brought this superior -version to our attention, we had thankfully outgrown Monopoly in any -form.

- -

Not long after his graduation, Trench�s mother, his remaining parent, -had died, bequeathing him their house in a leafy Edinburgh suburb. On -one occasion he unexpectedly invited me round to sample his vintage -Tokay. I had not been there long before he revealed his ulterior -motive. "Come and see the attic," he said. There I was -amazed to see, neatly cleaned and shelved, a large number of mostly -vellum-bound Latin texts � antiquarian treasures � which he had secretly -been liberating from their centuries of captivity in �The Vaults�. He -seemed inordinately proud of this �cultural rescue�, as he called it, -and quite oblivious to the possibility that he might be charged with a -criminal offence. As it happened, he was soon to lose his job when the -owner of the premises interrupted a further �rescue� mission, by -enquiring exactly what it was that Ryan was strapping to the back of his -bike.

- -

Fortunately for Trench, the disappearance of earlier volumes had not -been noticed, and since he had not previously drawn attention to his -rescue service, he thereby avoided prosecution. What became of all -those confiscated books we never discovered, but from the sporadic cards -I received over the next few years we do know that Trench eventually -sold the house, moved to London, and became a professional -archaeologist. None of us saw him again.

- -

Almost a quarter of a century later I was contacted by a very -respectable Scottish lady, a former fellow-student of Ryan�s, who -informed me of his recent death, and explained that she was now his -executrix. Despite those long years of silence, the news of his death -genuinely saddened me, and I was surprised and curiously flattered to -learn that he had valued our brief crossing of paths enough to leave me -a few illustrated books and a collection of papers. The books were -early twentieth century, and attractively decorated by an artist he knew -I liked. The papers were quite another matter, and as soon as I saw -their contents I realised that I needed to consult Altdorfer.

- -

You probably know of the so-called �Antikythera device�; -the fused clump of corroded bronze recovered by a diver from the sea bed -near Crete in 1900. Seven or eight decades later, after much expert -examination, and the application of x-ray tomography, it was deduced to -be a precision-made astronomical calendar with over thirty differential -gears, designed to demonstrate lunar and planetary cycles with a high -degree of accuracy. Working models have since been reconstructed as -proof of this complex example of technology from more than two millenia -ago. This mechanism is generally regarded as the oldest such device -known, but there is no reason to believe it was unique. In historical -perspective it was predated by air-guns, alarm clocks, convex lenses, -chain-drives, lathes, the magnetic compass, and of course the -steam-powered toy pigeon with which Archytas of Tarentum amused himself -and possibly the younger members of his family.

- -

But even that takes us only to about 420 BC. Two or three thousand -years further back we are still in familiar territory: beer and -dentists, glassmaking and weighing machines, maps, contraceptives and -gold mines, not necessarily in order of priority. Another ten or twenty -thousand years into the past we have figurines, weaponry, evidence of -needlework, painting, musical instruments. Stone lamps have been found -from sixty thousand years before that, while the earliest known -decorative amulets date from more than 100,000 years ago � a small -fraction � a mere 5% - of the traceable existence of tool-making -hominids on this planet.

- -

Civilisations rise and fall, succumb at length to inescapable natural -processes � erosion, earthquake, eruption, landslide, tsunami, flood, -fire, drought, and consequential biological scourges such as starvation -and disease. Perhaps one should include climate-change and asteroid -impact as lurking triggers. The odd gamma-ray burst from a distant -pulsar cannot be discounted. It�s also salutory to remember that the -Easter Islanders ran out of trees, and that in the 21st -century we have an enormously improved capacity for -self-extermination.

- -

As Altdorfer says, somewhat pompously, we exist at the interface -between history and geology. Inevitably, things get buried, -intentionally or otherwise, become trapped in gradual or sudden tectonic -shifts, carried by water, overlaid, subducted. In the course of -humanity�s short career entire cultures repeatedly blossom and vanish. -Archaeologists and palaeontologists, assiduously recording their -fragmentary finds, can merely scratch the surface, and the contents of -museums will always be exceeded by what remains undiscovered and for the -most part irretrievable.

- -

The papers of Ryan Trench hint at a lost body of knowledge from a -time when our protohistorical record is virtually blank. Frustratingly, -we have not yet been able to establish the current whereabouts of the -artifacts he refers to in his sketches and photographs, but his notes -indicate that they were found some metres below the sea-bed off the -coast of Gujarat, not far from the Mul Dwarka excavations. One of the -photographs shows a partially cleaned, flat circular metal plate above a -plastic scale indicating it to be about 20 centimetres in diameter. He -does not identify the metal, but the cleaned area (the lower half) seems -to have a brassy sheen, and is inscribed with rows of regular -markings.

- -

Another image shows the obverse of the same plate, where incised -lines form what I thought at first looked like a naïve drawing of a -small train meeting a large hedgehog. Each carriage has horizontal -bars, and the hedgehog is curled into a protective ball. Altdorfer -suggested a rather interesting interpretation.

- -

A third photograph shows an irregular encrustation of marine -organisms on what seems to be a cluster of eggs. On the back, in Ryan�s -neat hand, he had written "Vitreous!". A detailed sketch of -one of the �eggs� notes the thickness of the shell to be 2.3mm. There -are also enlarged sketches of both sides of the metal plate, with a few -attempts at translation of some of the incised characters, mostly -crossed out. Two words, however, have been emphatically encircled: -�day� and �enable�. Even if only approximately correct, we suspect -these may help to explain the train and the hedgehog, and quite possibly -the eggs.

- -

Among those unremembered creators of metal and glass another -forgotten genius had discovered a way to utilise electricity. Altdorfer -believes the train represents battery cells of some kind, and that the -hedgehog is a symbol either of the sun, or of a manufactured source of -heat and light.

- -

Of Ryan Trench�s papers we have properly examined only the -first few in the topmost of the eleven box files. In due course this -private archive will appear online, but for now we are still relishing -the luxury of our sneak preview. So far, we have not encountered any -improved versions of board games, but who knows what else we will find -before Altdorfer�s aunt finishes her quilt?

- - -

- - -© L J Sklaroff 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] fiatlux.jpg - - -[FINISH] - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev10.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev10.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index ab54fab5..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev10.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2884 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 10 - December 2011 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the December 2011 edition of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

With this issue, its tenth, Mythaxis has -moved into double figures. And a fine edition it is, too. - -We have another great story, a haunting one at that, from Les Sklaroff. - -Martin Clark contributes a sequel - "All Avenues Closed" to the story he -gave us in issue 9 - "Let Every Voice be Still". - -Matthew Kirshenblatt delivers an atmospheric little story based on a -missing chapter. - -Tom Davies contributes a weird little nightmare. - -My own modest effort about an unusual NIMBY situation now seems rather -bland in comparison to the fevered imaginations of our other authors. - -The issue is rounded off with two unconnected and separately contributed -stories of personal development from Andrew Leon Hudson and Jonathan -Joseph. When you read them you will understand why I felt compelled to -head them with fragments from Hieronymous Bosch. - -If you're thirsty for more, don't forget the Authors' Links page. - -

The heading illustration is my trusty old sliderule, -vintage 1959. How on earth do you youngsters manage without 'em, eh? I -remember an old pulp magazine cover showing a spacecraft under -construction, with the chisel-featured, firm-jawed, muscular space -engineer standing on the streamlined hull, consulting a slide rule. And -it warns us of similar reverse anachronisms, such as William Gibson's -early cyberspace novels, from which cellphones were singularly absent. - -

And, lacking any other suitable cartoon, I have made do -with a couple of -alternate captions from MCIOS (Mornington Crescent in Outer Space). - - - -"Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be Luciano Pavarotti..." - -AND - -A fart is a fart, no matter how much you sugarcoat it. - -[*IMAGE] sliderule.jpg - -[*ITEM] A Preference for Cheese - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human -stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -Albert Einstein - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I had been without a cat long enough for -both armchairs to be free from residual fur, and we sank back -comfortably into relaxed positions, sipping at our iced fruit-juices. -"So, Hollis. It must be what, five, six years? Quite a coincidence -bumping into each other like that!" - -

Play a bit of tennis, eat a lot of -cheese.
Hollis smiled wryly. "It's good to see you, Alex." -Hollis told me he -was here for a few days, visiting Meredith, his married sister, and his -two young nephews, before flying back home to Geneva. - -"I must say you�re looking well." Privately, I wondered whether he'd -been on a diet. He looked fitter than when I had last seen him, his -eyes almost unnaturally bright. - -"I try to keep in good shape," he said. "Play a bit of tennis, eat a lot -of cheese." I raised an eyebrow. "For the tryptophan," he explained -seriously. - -"Ah." I nodded, not wanting to appear uninformed on -the subject. "And are you still colliding those large hadrons?" I -enquired, trying to add a touch of levity to his gravity. - -He granted me another brief smile. "Actually, no. I left several years -ago to pursue some independent research which doesn't need all that -expensive equipment. It's ... unorthodox, you might say, but, well, -fundamental." - -I was intrigued. I was under the impression that modern physicists were -practically inseparable from their cutting-edge technology. "Care to -tell me about it? If it's not confidential, that is." - -"Hardly confidential," said Hollis. "Let's see, you would need to -understand something of quantum uncertainty, wave/particle duality, the -Feynman sum over histories, chromodynamics, supersymmetry - and of -course some of the implications of M-theory, but I suppose it would be -an interesting challenge to explain it to, to a..." - -"An old friend? An ignorant architect? A layman?" I supplied. - -Hollis grinned. "Precisely, Alex." - -It was a bright, cloudless Thursday afternoon in July. Beyond the -French windows the sun continued to shine, as the good Sam Beckett -reminded us, on the nothing new, but within the next few days whatever -grip I thought I had on reality was due to slip from my grasp like a -particularly well-buttered eel. - -Hollis launched into an enthralling account of what the best scientific -minds believe to be the nature of the universe. I realised he was -simplifying it for me, skirting those elegant equations relished by true -initiates, but nonetheless my brain was soon buzzing with fascinating -bits of information. Variously �flavoured� quarks: three to a proton, -three to a neutron; unseeable, yet bound as if by elastic. Leptons and -bosons. Model-dependence. Einstein�s abandoned cosmological constant -reinstated to explain the accelerating expansion discovered by Hubble. -The astonishing double-slit experiment: the behaviour of single photons, -interference patterns, particles that take simultaneous paths, quantum -probabilities. How mapping the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic -microwave background radiation confirmed the age of the universe and -showed the distribution of seedling galaxies. What unexpected things -occur at the event horizon of a black hole. Eleven dimensions, some -very small and curly. The no-boundary condition and the multiverse. -The holographic principle, recursive layers. Infinite possibilities, -ultimate interconnectivity. Information. "Matter and energy are -incidental. Information is the key," said Hollis.

- -We paused for a round of sandwiches. I had run out of cheese, so we -opted for smoked salmon and sticks of celery with a crême -fraîche and paprika dip, washed down with a complementary Muscadet -� a fortuitous gift from one of my clients. Later, as Hollis was -enthusiastically propounding how holography could also be applied to the -structure of neurons, and thence to memory-storage and consciousness -itself, I noticed that it was now almost dark outside. We were both -reluctant to interrupt this flow of information; Hollis had clearly -warmed to his task. He used my �phone to let his sister know where he -was, and agreed to stay for supper. - -
If you�re agreeable, I�ll come round again and give -you a small demonstration.
One of the advantages of a slow cooker -is the number of servings that it -can hold in reserve, and fortunately there was a good supply of the -experimental Stroganoff which I was glad to be able to share. Once -fortified, we began round three. - -"Where was I?" asked Hollis. "Oh yes, levels of -consciousness, individual perception, and so on..." Soon we were -encroaching on what had once been the exclusive province of philosophy, -then psychology and latterly neuroscience. Reverting to the holographic -principle, Hollis told how this neatly accounts for synchronicity and -similar subjectively experienced phenomena which defy causal -explanation. "All those anecdotal instances of telepathy and -clairvoyance, the psychic research, the dodgy ESP experiments with their -statistical anomalies and not-quite repeatable results; most of the -experimenters were well-meaning, but pretty much groping in the -dark." - -"What about science-fiction writers?" I ventured. "Don�t -some of their speculations come close to what you�re describing?" - -"I can think of a few interesting attempts," said Hollis. -"Pohl, Sturgeon, Simak, Brunner, Herbert � some of the classics. -It�s a question of having sufficient background knowledge coupled with a -really good imagination." He stretched. "Anyway, for a -layman, I must say you�ve been quite attentive, and even -convinced me you�re genuinely interested, so, before I fly back next -Tuesday � if you�re agreeable, I�ll come round again and give you a -small demonstration." - -I tried to draw him out on this, but Hollis declined to say any more, -other than to thank me for my hospitality, and to arrange for a visit -mid-afternoon on Sunday. For the next couple of days I was restless and -impatient. I kept reviewing what Hollis had said about the relationship -between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the dizzying idea that all -possible events in our space-time continuum occur in a simultaneous -Now, and are somehow superimposed, and therefore theoretically -accessible at every possible point. Or that alternative -histories, each a fractional departure from any specified event, are -continuously being generated. The plan on my drawing-board for the -ecologically optimal refurbishment of a country hotel went untouched. -What kind of demonstration did Hollis have in mind? - -

Sunday morning. I hadn�t slept well. I had a complicated -dream which involved trying to retrieve a damaged kite, except that it -was not a kite, but a scroll on which a short poem had been written. I -reached up into the sky and caught it. It felt like fine silk. I knew -it needed to be repaired, and headed for the building where such repairs -were carried out, but as I approached a low cloud touched the roof with -a molten glow, and it was too dangerous to move any closer. I awoke -with my mind racing, trying to clear the disturbing images from my -thoughts. After breakfast I decided to �phone Hollis, to confirm our -arrangement. Luckily, I remembered that his sister�s number would still -be on my �phone, and I hoped he wouldn�t mind the early call. - -After a while a boy�s voice answered. "Hello," I said. -"This is Alex, a friend of your uncle Hollis. Could I speak to -him, or to your mummy, please?" - -There was a silence. I heard breathing, then the �phone being put down, -followed by a yell: "Mum. It�s a man." - -Moments later a woman�s voice, a little distracted: "Not on the -carpet, Robbie, and give Gareth back his� Sorry, can I help you?" - -"Hello� Meredith?" - -"Yes," she said. "Who�s that? - -I explained who I was, and wondered whether I could have a word with -Hollis about this afternoon. - -"Hollis?," she repeated, uncertainly. - -"Yes, I�m sorry to bother you, but he�s due to come and see me a -bit later today, and I simply wanted to make sure�" - -She interrupted. "I�m afraid I haven�t a clue what you�re talking -about. Hollis who?" I stared at the �phone, perplexed. - -"Hollis. Your brother." - -"There must be some mistake," she said. -"My brother is in New Zealand, and his name is not Hollis. How did -you know my name?" - -I started to explain, and suddenly realised it would make no sense. I -broke the connection. What was going on? It had to be the right -number; she said she was Meredith, and there were definitely two boys in -the house. Was it a practical joke? Had Hollis told her to pretend he -didn�t exist? What would be the point? I took a deep breath, and -tried re-dialling. Nothing happened. Somehow, I had managed to wipe the -number, and I couldn�t remember it. Not only that, but I didn�t know her -married surname, or her address. All I could do was wait and see whether -Hollis would turn up, and if he did, what devious explanation he might -have. - -It was another warm, clear day. I went for a forty minute walk to clear -my head. I had concluded that either it had been a good hoax, or they�d -had a sibling row, and she had chosen not to acknowledge Hollis or his -friends. I spent a few minutes at the drawing board, made myself some -coffee, tried to read, caught up with the news, listened to Lucia Popp -singing Strauss�s �Im Abendrot�, had a light lunch of boiled egg and -salad, strolled round the garden, and finally sat down to wait. -Mid-afternoon came and went. I must have dozed off, because the next -time I looked at my watch it was five o�clock. I felt really -disappointed. Hollis had been so stimulating, so full of -thought-provoking ideas, and now he had failed to turn up with his -promised demonstration, whatever it may have been. Glumly I walked to -the front door and opened it. The street was deserted. I bent down to -remove the flimsy piece of cloth that had blown onto the outside mat. -It was a length of very fine torn silk on which some faded lines of -verse had been written or printed. Even though they were frustratingly -illegible, there was something worryingly familiar about them. - -

-© L J Sklaroff 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] silk.jpg - - -[*ITEM] All Avenues Closed - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] If you haven't read "Let Every Voice be Still", from the June 2011 -Mythaxis, do so before reading this. This is the conclusion to that -story. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I looked down at the three bodies, and -shivered. I looked at Jules Toba standing there stock still, turning -black and white, and shivered. "No, Miss Harry, I�ve had enough. I -know this is all just virtual violence but it�s a damn sight too -realistic for my tastes. You can continue to run my character as a -non-player persona and good luck to you and the others, but I�m -leaving." - -The hand on my shoulder became a claw digging into my flesh and I -winced, but trying to pull free just made it worse. Deborah Harry, -although modelled on the late chanteuse of the same name, obviously had -a strength far beyond what her slender frame would suggest. - -Despite the promise of pain her voice remained calm, with no threatening -overtones. - -"As game controller I could force you to stay, Duncan, but I�d much -rather have your willing participation. So how about an inducement? If -you remain here voluntarily and play through to a resolution, then -Vaughn�s daughter will be released, unharmed." - -She let go and I twisted away, rubbing my shoulder. "What the hell -are you on about? Vaughn�s daughter? That was what made his -character take part in this mess and I�m not interested in your -stupid game anymore." - -"Vaughn tried to tell you, to explain, just before you shot him. -The real world Vaughn Vermeer does have a daughter, and she was being -held to ensure his cooperation as a player in this new, improved version -of Shadow Corporation." - -I stared at her. "Seriously?" - -"Seriously. You play ball and no one need get hurt. Real world -hurt. Falling from a third floor window hurt." - -I blinked. "But you can�t do that! Three laws would stop you acting -like that, even by proxy." - -Miss Harry gestured towards the hall. "Look, even though the Sensei -flight crew might hesitate to intervene, I assure you the hotel staff -won�t ignore multiple gun shots and will summon the local police. So I -suggest we continue our conversation on the move?" - -Bemused, I followed her down the hall to the rear door, which led out -onto an awning-covered patio and small garden, surrounded on three sides -by tall hedges. The heat and humidity were an unwelcome reminder of just -how real this virtual environment could be, but within bounds. - -"Miss Harry, enough! I simply don�t believe that you can exert -influence in the real world. Your personality constraints won�t allow -you to harm anyone." - -She smiled. "Well, in the first place, we both know that ethical -concerns don�t apply to military AIs, and in the second � I don�t -remember ever claiming to be more than human." - -I waved a hand at the garden and the buildings beyond, blurred by late -afternoon heat haze. "But all this, the game, no human could -control it all." - -"Nor could any AI currently in existence, given the level of -textural complexity involved. No, what you see here is the accumulated -input of multiple smart systems, each beavering away at a given task, be -it cloud synthesis, a bullock wandering down the street, or that helpful -tailor who supplied your new suit. I merely orchestrate the overall -player experience for maximum effect. Now, please blink." - -

You�ve tried to hijack a corporate AI? Jesus, are -you insane?
I did so without thinking and realised there was now a -gate in the -hedge. Miss Harry stepped out onto the lawn and her high heels sank into -the turf. "Damnation! I should have put in a path or ensured the -grass wasn�t this well watered." She stepped out of her shoes and -lifted them in one hand. "This way. We haven�t much time." - -Most of me just wanted out, to find myself back in the Other -Worlds gaming café on Portland Road, but part of me is too -damn -curious for my own good. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and -followed. - -Beyond the gate was a dusty lane and a man leaning against a vintage -Bedford Rascal van. He was lean, with dark hair cut in a mop-top, wearing -circular black sunglasses. I didn�t get that good a look at him as he -and Miss Harry immediately embraced, with a lot more overt passion than -when she�d kissed Vaughn. They clung to each other like long-lost -lovers, her shoes leaving mud stains on his khaki jacket.

- -

Finally they came up for air and stood there, gazing at each other, -smiling in that manic way when you can�t quite believe your luck. Miss -Harry dropped her shoes to the ground and stepped into them, smoothing -an errant hair back into place. She tried to sound professional, matter -of fact, but there was a big grin in her voice just aching to burst out. -"Duncan, this is�Cromarty, but while he�s using this avatar I -suppose you�d better call him Stein."

- -

"This is who? Cromarty? The AI that Vaughn stabbed?" I -rubbed my eyes with finger and thumb. My head hurt and I really, really -wanted a drink.

- -

Stein smiled, absent mindedly rubbing his stomach just about where -Vaughn had run him though with the wakizashi. "Pleased to meet you, -Duncan. We didn�t really get the chance for an introduction, before. I -take it something happened to Vaughn?"

- -

I cleared my throat. "I, I shot him. The whole situation got a -bit too intense and I over-reacted. Look, since when did players get to -switch characters during a game, or is this only a perk for your AI -friends?"

- -

Miss Harry and Stein ignored me and moved to the van, which had been -fitted out as an improvised taxi with side panel windows and bucket -seats. I tagged along, as I was pretty much out of options and there was -an edge of realism to this which went way beyond the game.

- -

Stein drove, pulling on an over-large baseball cap to obscure his -face, while we sat in back. The engine sounded like someone -vigorously stirring a bag of spanners and the clutch seemed optional, -but we bounced down the lane at a fair lick. Miss Harry contented -herself with resting one hand on Stein�s shoulder while she spoke to me. -"I appreciate this must be confusing for you, Duncan. The game -itself was a multi-layered exercise in deceit and false premises, even -before I saw it could be used as a means to get Stein away from -Cromarty."

- -

My headache got worse and I could feel myself developing a permanent -frown. "So Stein isn�t Cromarty? But he is an AI?"

- -

"No, Stein was Cromarty, in a very real sense is -still Cromarty, but this is his liberated personality."

- -

I blinked. "Come again?"

- -

She squeezed his shoulder and he risked taking a hand from the wheel -to cover hers. "To put it another way, Duncan, we�ve just stolen -his soul."

- -

I started laughing, a near hysterical release of tension, and laughed -until my voice kind of ran down and ended in a cough. She glared at me. -"Quite finished?"

- -

"Ah, yeah. But seriously, you�re saying an AI has a soul?"

- -

"I�m referring to his personality, so a soul is one term for it. -You, the conscious, self-aware you, is far more than just your brain. -It�s exactly the same for Stein and his neural matrix."

- -

"Bollocks, dear. And I mean that most sincerely."

- -

"Listen! We�ve managed to download his synthetic personality -from the Cromarty mainframe. It exists here, in the game architecture, -as a purely software construct independent of any dedicated -hardware."

- -

Suddenly things seemed a lot less funny. "You�ve tried to hijack -a corporate AI? Jesus, are you insane? Even though this can�t -possibly have worked, just the attempt will bring down seven shades of -shit on you and the game company. Trust me, you�ve never seen a lawsuit -until one of the major corporations gets involved."

- -

Miss Harry got all eager. "Which is why this is all a delicate -balancing act, and why it�s imperative you keep playing to drive the -narrative along. Look, I can�t keep Chris in here forever, it requires a -massive use of resources which are only available while the game is in -progress. Just now no-one at Cromarty knows what�s happened, as when -he�s no longer participating in a game his employers let him watch until -the scenario conclusion. Understand?"

- -

Chris? His name was Chris Stein, the guitarist from -Blondie? This got better and better. I shook my head. "No, -listen, the most you�ve managed to grab is a simulacrum, an expert -system designed to act like a real personality. I�m sorry to burst your -bubble but chummy here is just a collection of programmed responses and -pseudo-emotional reactions. No offense."

- -

Stein glanced back over his shoulder, smiling. "None -taken."

- -

"Look, girl, an AI personality is just a set of ethical -imperatives designed to moderate and constrain their actions. You can�t -steal an AI soul anymore than you can steal mine."

- -

Now it was Miss Harry�s turn to shake her head. "No, you -listen. We�re talking real �ghost in the machine� here. An AI is no more -its hardware than, say, a university is simply the sum of its parts. You -can see the campus, library, staff and students, but the -university itself is something more, invisible but altogether -real. You say an AI personality is just a sophisticated set of -responses which are indistinguishable from the real thing, whatever that -means. I say there�s no longer any philosophical difference. So -there."

- -

She stuck her tongue out and I laughed. "OK, OK, I�ll go along -with this, for now. So Stein here is an idoru, right? But -eventually the game ends and he gets snuffed out, so I don�t see what -you have to gain, or why you went to so much trouble in the first -place."

- -

Stein looked round and he and Miss Harry exchanged the proverbial -�meaningful glance�. He nodded and returned to driving while she spoke. -"This is a defection scenario, Duncan, just not quite what you�d -expect. I was approached, in the real world, by a representative of -HanaMed Industries. He offered me an inducement to let Vaughn introduce -his virus. This removed all bandwidth constrains in the Sensorium -interface and allowed the personality download. In addition it took a -snapshot of the Cromarty neural network and transmitted it, via the game -environment, to HanaMed. They�re using this to create a duplicate AI -nest and when complete it will give Chris a new physical -presence."

- -

"Inducement? How much are we talking here?" Call me shallow, -but if were talking real-world cash then I deserved my cut.

- -

Miss Harry looked at Stein and squeezed his shoulder. -"Unrestricted time together. We�re in love, Mr Bonn, it�s as simple -as that."

- -

Oh this was bad, way bad. It didn�t matter if Harry was -actually an AI juiced to think this way or a flesh-and-blood woman who�d -convinced herself Stein was the real deal, there was going to be no -happy ending. Once HanaMed had the Cromarty copy up and running, and -Stein to make sense of it, then everyone else was surplus to -requirements. Yours truly included.

- -

I sat back, rubbing my temples. I needed time to think, to find some -way out of any potential real world fall-out, so I played along. -"Yeah, well, I�m real happy for the pair of you, and I�ll expect an -invite to the wedding. But wouldn�t it make more sense for Stein to keep -a low profile? If Cromarty suss he�s missing they�ll either try to get -him back or make sure no one else has use of him. You�re talking a legal -injunction, maybe even some kind of virtual environment skip tracer? -Direct involvement in the game just makes finding him that much -easier."

- -

We turned right onto a tarmac road and immediately ran into local -traffic, which slowed our progress to a honking crawl. Miss Harry seemed -unfazed by my concerns. "We haven�t come this far to be denied each -other�s company, and I�ve done what I can to excuse his presence. In the -game Chris isn�t part of Sensei security, he was merely �couple -camouflage�, a partner used to mask my arrival. Really just back-story -detail, but a minor character who potentially crops up in some of the -end-game scenarios�.Turn left here, Chris."

- -

We cut across the raucous traffic and pulled up under an -open-sided -shelter, little more than corrugated iron roofing on a series of wooden -uprights. There were a couple of local men lounging by a -tarpaulin-covered car and they obviously recognised Stein when he got -out. A nice touch, using his previously non-player character to arrange -the vehicle switch.

- -

The new car was a beat-up BMW M5 which had obviously been rolled at -some point. While Stein did a bit of glad-handing and paid off the -locals, Miss Harry took me to the side. "I think it�s about time -you contacted your associates. How you want to spin this is up to you, -after all, I wasn�t there � just as long as Chris and I are part of your -exit strategy. Trust me, you�re going to need all the help you can -get."

- -

I�d been putting this off and resented the narrative prod, but she -was right. I fished out my mobile and called Ramirez, who answered -almost immediately. "Ramirez? It�s Duncan. How are things your -end?"

- -

He sounded off-hand, distracted. "So-so. Have you finished -playing tourist yet? We�re just about ready to put together a plan and -I�d like to kick things off as soon as it gets dark. Mazy does not take -well to just sitting around and there are only so many times she can -field strip a machine pistol."

- -

"OK, so you�ve got -a safe house? Text me the address as the three of us could do with -getting off the street."

- -

"The three of you? That�s interesting, �cos I tried phoning -Vaughn and got no answer. Same with Harrison. I wouldn�t like to think -there�d been some kind of falling out and you weren�t telling -me."

 - -

Ah.

- -

"Yeah, well, the thing is, Ramirez, there�s been a slight change -of plan. Not something I�d like to discuss over the phone, so if you -make with the address�"

- -
I licked my suddenly-dry lips and tried -not to sound rattled

There was a pause and the suggestion of a -muffled -conversation at his -end. "Maybe not, Duncan. If you�ve got some new friends in tow -then I suggest we all meet up back at The Inverted Spin for a nice -friendly, get to know you drink. Say in twenty minutes?"

- -

Definitely not my preferred option but he was calling the shots. -"Sounds good, chum. Just warn Mazy not to bring too much in the way -of heavy artillery, OK?"

- -

"No problem. Oh, just one thing, Duncan."

- - -

"Yeah?"

- -

"Who the hell is Jack Carter?"

- - -

The name meant nothing to me so I hit mute and glanced over at Miss -Harry. "Does the name Jack Carter ring any bells?"

- -

She frowned, "Not off-hand. Just a moment while I -check."

- -

Although she continued to stand there, breathing and blinking, there -was a definite loss of presence for a few seconds. Then her eyes -recovered their lustre and Miss Harry shook her head. "Nope, sorry, -not a scheduled major or minor character in this scenario."

- -

I went back to Ramirez, "You got me, chum. Means nothing."

- -

"That�s strange, �cos he rang me on this number, asking to -speak to you as your own phone was unobtainable. You got some kind of -side deal going that we should know about, Duncan?"

- -

I�d had my phone turned off since leaving the Holiday Lodge and -hadn�t checked for any missed calls before talking to Ramirez. That -there seemed to be another player out there, one with our mobile -numbers, made me feel decidedly queasy. "Trust me, Ramirez, whoever -this joker is, he�s no pal of mine. Look, the situation has gone a bit -squirrely, but it -sounds like our communications aren�t secure, so watch your back on the -way to the meet, OK?"

- -

"Gone a bit squirrely? What the hell does that mean?"

- - -

"Look, never mind, just get your collective ass in gear, -pronto."

- -

I cut the call and switched my phone off before he could launch into -one of his renowned bitch-fests. Miss Harry and Stein were standing over -by the BMW, holding hands. Very touching, but there was something wrong -with the whole setup, I could just feel it. I walked over and on impulse -chucked my mobile away, just it case it could be traced within the -virtual environment � not as a phone, but as a game item.

- -

"OK, Romeo and Juliet, get a grip. There�s someone out there -trying to contact me, so if it�s not a scenario-based character then -could it be a new player? Maybe Vaughn or Harrison using a new -persona?"

- -

Miss Harry shook her head again, "No, not possible. All the -major character roles were filled and this �Jack Carter� simply wasn�t -one of them. I don�t know-"

- -

My mobile rang. In my jacket pocket. The mobile I�d just thrown away. -I held up a hand to silence Miss Harry and fished it out. Same make, -same model, same scuff mark on the keypad. Unknown caller, but I could -guess who it would be.

- -

"Duncan, please tell me you acquired a second phone earlier -today." Miss Harry sounded hesitant, almost nervous. Stein moved -smartly to start the car, as if that would help.

- -

"Nope. This is the phone you just saw me lose. Who else can pull -that reality change move, like you did with the new garden gate back at -the Holiday Lodge?"

- -

"No-one, and I mean no-one. That trick was an abuse of my -position as game controller, a real deus ex machina moment�.Look, are -you gonna� answer that, or try throwing it away again?"

- -

I answered. What else could I do? Debbie hesitated, then joined Stein -in front, trying to keep track of my conversation over the engine noise. -"Yeah?"

- -

"My name. Is Jack Carter. And you�ve been a very bad boy, Mr -Bonn." English accent, East End London maybe, with a slightly -stilted cadence.

- -

"Well, I�m keen to avoid a spanking, Mr Carter. If I can avoid -it."

- -

"I don�t care about the piece of skirt, it's Stein I want to -meet. And I want you to arrange things so I do. Do as you�re told and -nothing happens at Other Worlds, in Portland Road, Birmingham."

- - -

I felt a twist of fear in my gut. Other Worlds was the -virtual gaming house where my real-world body was currently being tended -to. There was a huge step between knowing where I was and being able to -do me harm, but it was becoming apparent that Miss Harry had pissed off -some seriously heavy-hitters. I licked my suddenly-dry lips and tried -not to sound rattled. "So you know where I�m at? Big deal. You -can�t simply waltz in and put a bullet through my head, the real world -doesn�t work like that."

- -

I could hear the amusement in his voice. "Actually, the real -world does work like that, it's only games which have a sense of fair -play. You play ball and you get to wake up, go home, believe as much of -this was real as you�re comfortable with. Cross me and you�ll spend an -uncomfortable few days waiting for that knock at the door, or a car that -doesn�t stop at the pedestrian crossing, or a shove in the back as the -train comes in. Do you understand?"

- -

"Yeah, yeah, I get you. What is it you want?"

- -

"You�re all going to the bar, the Inverted Spin. There�s a -tea room opposite and I want you to bring Stein there, -unarmed."

 - -

"So how come you need me? Given that re-appearing phone trick -why don�t you just magic Stein right there, right now?"

- -

"Baby steps, Mr Bonn, Baby steps. I can tweak the system here -and there but anything major runs the risk of crashing the entire -program, and Stein would be lost. We want him back, and you�re going to -help us."

 - -

The line went dead. Well, that answered the question of who Jack -Carter was, although I�d already guessed as much; Cromarty security, or -a sub-contractor hired by them. I slid into the back seat and the BMW -pulled away with a spray of gravel.

- -

Miss Harry turned in her seat and I could see Stein watching me in -the rear-view mirror. "Well, Duncan, what�s happening?"

- -

"That was Jack Carter, who�s hunting your boy Stein. Looks like -you�re not the only one who can make real-world threats, so I have to -deliver him or face some unpleasant consequences."

- -

She stiffened, "So you intend to betray us?"

- -

"Nah, I don�t think that would actually work. Even if I pulled -it off and Stein was returned to Cromarty intact, I get the impression -that would leave me as a loose end. Same as you."

- -

I rubbed my eyes and sat back. "No. I figure we have to get -Carter, before he gets us."

- -

Stein eyed me in the mirror. "I very much doubt that killing him -would improve matters. As this Jack Carter persona is an illegal -character then there�s nothing to stop him simply logging back -in."

- -

I shrugged. "Yeah, well, I guess we�re talking real-world or -nothing here. Miss Harry, this crew you�re working for, HanaMed, do you -have some way of contacting them?"

- -

She shook her head. "Sorry, no. They�ve always been the one to -reach out. Anyway, I don�t see them being overly keen on applying any -kind of covert pressure on Cromarty, even if it means losing -Chris." She squeezed his shoulder and he put a hand up to touch -hers.

- -

Again. Same stimulus, same response, almost like a programmed -sequence. I filed that away for future consideration. We joined a -semi-solid stream of traffic heading towards the market district and I -cracked the window in search of a breeze, the air conditioning being -out.

- -

"No, well, it strikes me that you don�t actually have any proof -of who�s behind all this. Someone approached you with the idea of -stealing Stein, using the game environment as a stepping-stone. -Someone kidnapped Vaughn�s daughter so that he�d carry the -virtual virus in the form of a sword and use it to screw Cromarty�s -security protocols. Trouble is, short of a hand-written -invitation to HanaMed head office and a guided tour with all the -trimmings it could be just about anyone out there pulling the -strings."

- -

Miss Harry frowned. "But why bother to lie? They must have known -I�d jump at the chance to help Chris escape, regardless of who they -were."

- -

"No, you�re looking at this the wrong way round. Why bother to -tell the truth when you�d have been happy to work for an anonymous -backer?" I wiped sweat from my top lip. "Corporations are -notoriously reluctant to acknowledge any kind of covert activity, even -when they�re the victims. Hell, especially when they�re the -victims. Officially the only cyber-security these boys have are -counter-intelligence agents. Those who do the dirty, as it were, tend to -be freelancers with little or no idea who they�re actually working -for."

- -

Stein laughed. "So whoever is offering me a new home, it's a -pretty safe bet it�s not HanaMed?"

- -

"You got it. It could be a genuine commercial rival, it could be -someone wanting to sell you on to the highest bidder, it could even be -contactors hired by Cromarty to test their own security. The real-world -equivalents of Juan Canasta make a living from not knowing who -they represent. Nor do they care, as long as the money is -enough."

- -

Miss Harry shivered. "I know, the real Canasta is even more of a -creep than his virtual representation. But look, there must be -something we can do? I don�t fancy going through all this just to -have Chris handed back to Cromarty. They�d never let him out -again!"

- -

Stein had both form and function. It was the form, his persona, that -Miss Harry had fallen in love with. Unfortunately it was his function as -sentient index to the Cromarty database that everyone else wanted. If -his former employers ever got their hands on him again then the -form would probably face the cyber equivalent of a firing squad, -regardless of the Turing Conventions. I knew that and I could tell from -the eyes in the rear-view mirror that Stein knew it as well.

- -

I tried to sound reassuring. "Despite all the shadow-play our -best bet is still to find out who wants him. It�s in their best -interests to look after us in the real world, at least while the game is -still in progress."

- -

Stein sounded sceptical. "And if they decline to get involved, -or don�t have the global reach required?"

- -

"Then we can threaten to rat them out to Cromarty unless they -give us some protection, if only by proxy. A corporate vendetta tends -to be very nasty and quite personal. Definitely something they�d want to -avoid."

- -

Man, that sounded weak, even to me. I think everyone knew that if we -did try and blackmail HanaMed then their preferred option would be to -have us quietly snuffed out.

- -

There was an awkward silence inside the car, although we were -surrounded by the cheerful bedlam of back-street life. Miss Harry�s -fingers tapped out a two-two beat on the back of Stein�s seat as the BMW -slowed to a crawl. She said: "Look, I�ve been thinking. The -only way Carter can exist in the -game is if something else is missing. Some other system with the same -virtual footprint. As I said, all the background and environmental -housekeeping is farmed out to an array of integrated smart systems. One -of these is obviously being used to support the Carter avatar on the -sly."

- -

I snorted. "What, you mean that now it won�t rain, so that he -can get in here and cause us grief?"

- -

"Something like that. Unfortunately all the FrontPage tags are -still intact so I don�t have any way of knowing which system has been -compromised until it fails to function. Well, short of a low-level -diagnostic, but the performance hit on game response times would be too -severe. I certainly don�t want some Second Reality cyber tech sticking -his nose in at this juncture."

- -

Something she�d said just clicked. "Hang on, you�re saying -there�s a real Juan Canasta? So his game representation is some -kind of licensing deal, like your own?"

- -

She blinked. "Well, yes. As I understand it, he fronted some -anonymous backers who felt that the virtual game industry wouldn�t be -seen as a sound investment. They didn�t want to damage their portfolio -credibility and had Canasta act as money-man. He�s incredibly vain and -took a virtual representation in this and all subsequent versions as -part of his fee. Why is that important?"

- -

There was the start of an idea in my head. "How accurate is his -avatar? Not physically, but in terms of his contacts, who he -thinks he knows?"

- -

Miss Harry frowned. "I, well, I�ve no real idea. Not without -digging into his personality protocol structure and that�s really a job -for a qualified tech. There�s Madame Tisa, I suppose, but she�s just an -intro feed smart system with no simulated cognitive ability. In the -�Money Talks� end-game scenario, he does go on a bit about his -international presence in terms of what he can do for you, if -the-".

- -

"The emergency contact system, you can use it to place a call, -yeah? Sorry to cut you off but this is important."

- -

The ECS allowed a player to receive a phone call from the real world -without being yanked out of the game. If the problem was serious then -the player would bug out and be replaced by the default persona for that -character, so the scenario could continue for the other paying -participants.

- -

She glared at me. "This is important? How is this important? Yes -you can call out, but it�s a two-stage process. Initially to a fake -international number that�s common to all games and then again, through -this automated switchboard, to the connection you want. Who you gonna� -call?"

- -

Stein laughed. "Ghostbusters!"

- -

I grinned, feeling almost light-headed at the audacity of what I -wanted to try. "Not exactly, but I think it�s time we let our -version of Juan Canasta loose in the real world."

- -

Stein laughed. He laughed until he had to wipe the tears from his -eyes. "Ye gods! I see where this is heading and I have to admire -your balls. Won�t work, of course, but you get points for -trying."

- -

Miss Harry frowned, clearly one step behind. "Try what? Chris! -Pull yourself together."

- -

I smiled, finding his good humour infectious, despite our situation. -"Look, Canasta comes over as both vain and lazy. In the game -introduction sequence he farmed out putting the team together to Madam -Tisa, right? He works through intermediaries and only shows his face for -the money shot, so to speak. Well, I�m betting, I�m hoping, the -real Canasta used the names of his real-world contacts when creating -their in-game equivalents."

- -

"To what end?" She sounded exasperated. "Even if we -can locate them, you can�t go ringing these people and ask them to -arrange � what? Private security? The assassination of the real Jack -Carter? This is a game, Duncan, not real life."

- -

I tapped her hand. "Sure feels real enough though. I need -you to go trawl the net, find as many of Canasta�s supposed contacts as -you can and load their phone numbers into his virtual mobile. Is that -possible?"

- -

Miss Harry chewed her bottom lip in an impossibly cute fashion. -"Ah, yeah, I guess so. You�re planning to have him reach out to -these individuals, through the ECS?"

- -

"Yup."

- -

Stein sounded almost rueful. "And that�s where it falls down, -unfortunately. Even assuming our virtual fixer could arrange things -he�ll need real-world funds to make it happen. The real Canasta would -never have left his bank and access code details embedded within the -game."

- -

I nodded. "True, and I�m pretty sure that none of us has that -kind of money either. But I know a man who does."

- -

The suspicion in her eyes was tinged with hope. "Who? This is no -time to be coy."

- -

"Our very own Vaughn Vermeer. Check out his real-world profile -and you�ll see he works for NovaRus banking and finance. I think you�ll -find he�s currently attached to their Lisbon office. Odds are he could -lay his hands on the funds required, if it means getting his daughter -back."

- -

Miss Harry didn�t twig, but Stein obviously realised just how far -into the shadows I was prepared to walk. "You�re talking about -Kombinat accounts, the quasi-legitimate Russian Mafia. Vermeer will be -dogfood when they�re finished with him."

- -

I shrugged. "Him, not us. Specifically, not me." -

- -

Stein pursed his lips. "Man, that is harsh. I thought he -was a friend of yours?"

- -

"Well, you know how it is. We-". I broke off, catching -sight of something in the wing mirror. " Behind us, the two kids on -a Yamaha. Locals, no helmets, sunglasses."

- -

Stein shifted his gaze. "Got them. So?"

- -

"They just swerved to avoid a reversing van and I couldn�t help -but notice the pillion rider is carrying a cute little machine-pistol, -down by his leg. Are they part of the scenario or what?"

- -

Miss Harry frowned. "Yes, but only if Ramirez double-crossed the -local gang leader during the firearms deal. The bike crew are just stock -characters and-"

- -

"Here they come! We�re boxed in, I can�t accelerate!"

- -

As Stein spoke the bike surged forward with a snarl of revs, swinging -out to pass alongside. I yanked the door release and kicked, hard. -"BRAKE!"

- -

Man, his reactions were slick. The BMW almost nose-dived into the -cracked tarmac as we slithered to an abrupt halt. The rear door flew -open. The bike ploughed straight into it. The Yamaha started to up-end -and the pillion rider fired, a stutter of gunfire starting above our -roof, arcing down to spark and puncture the bonnet. The bike flipped up -and over, leaving the rider jammed head-first through the window of the -open door, and -dumping the gunman on the far side with his ride falling on top.

- -

Shouts, screams, bedlam. I kicked at the protruding torso but -couldn�t shift it. A half gap appeared in the crowd and Stein floored -it, all engine scream and wheel spin. The open door hit the gunman/bike -combo but the body kept it jammed open. German build quality lost out in -this unequal struggle and the door sheared off, leaving behind a tangled -mass of man and metal.

- -

I twisted round to see the familiar blossom of a -petrol tank explosion, sending a coil of heavy black smoke up into the -overcast sky. Miss Harry sounded almost apologetic. "It always does -that, I�m afraid. Some kind of action sequence imperative, regardless of -how free-form the overall game structure is."

- -

Stein turned left, taking us into an empty pigsty. "The car is -history. Zero oil pressure and I�m already grinding metal. We walk from -here, or take a local taxi."

- -

The three of us bailed, trying to stay more-or-less together on the -crowded street. It proved impossible to hold any kind of conversation, -so we took up residence on a veranda bar, huddled around a table -designed for two. The barman brought us three cold Kirin beers and I -held mine to my forehead, rolling the glass from side to side. Miss -Harry sipped hers and made a face while Stein downed his in three -swallows with obvious relish.

- -

I wasn�t happy with recent developments. "What gives with the -bike attack? If Carter is so hot to get his hands on Stein then any -gunplay like that runs the risk of nailing him. If your boy here cops -one in the game, what happens?"

- -

Miss Harry pushed her unwanted beer towards Stein. She sounded calm -and composed, but the way she squeezed his hand betrayed an underlying -nervousness. "At present Chris is an entirely software construct, -almost a parasitic entity within the game environment. As such I can�t -protect him from narrative consequences, so, yes, he is -vulnerable. The automated subsystems would simply delete his virtual -persona if he was killed and there is insufficient processing capacity -to support any form of back-up."

- -

She sat back and rubbed her eyes, looking tired. "That attack -can�t have been Carter, it doesn�t make any sense. It has to be either a -scenario development � Sensei gunning for me as a rogue employee � or -your erstwhile friends have decided you�re now a liability. "

- -

I took a mouthful of beer and promptly spat it out on the decking, -glaring at Stein. "The damn stuff tastes like it�s laced with -formaldehyde. Did you skimp on the taste bud routines or -something?"

- -

He laughed. "At present I�m savouring a full-blooded existence, -warts and all. I�m even considering trying the pickled baby squid in -that jar on the counter."

- -

"Whatever. Look, Miss Harry, you go try and set up Canasta with -his real-world links, like we discussed, while I watch lover boy find -new ways of poisoning himself. We should be safe enough for a -while."

- -

She sat back, smiled, and her presence vanished. I leaned forward, -keeping my voice low as if that would somehow help. "Look, Stein, -to my way of thinking, you and your squeeze are pretty much screwed. -Those of us who witnessed what went down - me, Vaughn, even Harrison � -might scrape by under the corporate radar. Even if you make it -out of here your new employer won�t be keen on there being living, or at -least sentient, evidence of corporate data theft. Get me? So if you have -any bright ideas I�m open to suggestions."

- -

The smile was the same but there was a sense of resignation about the -eyes. "I�m a corporate strategy engine, so the likely outcome of -this little adventure is painfully obvious. It was all a �Hail Mary� -venture from the outset, but preferable to the existence I had as -Cromarty. I do love her, you know. "He held up his hands. "I -know, I know, or at least I�ve been programmed to think I do, but it -comes down to the same thing." He took a swallow from her glass. -"Is a dream a lie when it don�t come true, or is it something -worse?"

- -

"What? Lost me there."

- -

"Bruce Springstein. Never mind. Look-" He broke off, -frowning. "Damn strange. That doesn�t-"

- -

Stein changed, I mean he slid into full body morphing, like I hadn�t -seen since playing Lies Of The Flesh. I jumped up, grabbing my -glass and shattering the top in a splatter of beer and slivers of glass. -The -figure sitting there reached resolution.

- -

"Hi Duncan. Another round?"

- -

Vaughn Vermeer.

- -

I stared at him, focused but conscious of the sudden gap in the crowd -around us. One of the barmen eased into view; the Australian, carrying a -baseball bat. He was a big lad, red hair, freckles, wearing a -good-humoured smile that didn�t stretch as far as his eyes. Vaughn, or -the thing that looked like Vaughn, smiled at me. "Sit down, Duncan, -or you�ll get put down by our friend here. You�ve nothing to lose by -just talking to me."

- -

I hesitated, but chummy with the club looked like he didn�t mind -busting up a tourist, so I placed my broken glass on the table and slid -back into my damp chair. Vaughn produced his wallet and held out a wad -of local currency to the barman. "Sorry about all the commotion, -just a misunderstanding between -old friends. Is that enough to cover your trouble, and a new -round?"

- -

The Aussie twirled his bat and bounced it off one forearm, plucking -it deftly from mid-air and bringing it smartly to a �parade rest� -stance. This impromptu juggling broke the tension and drew a smattering -of applause from the other patrons. The cordon sanitaire around -us began to shrink as the barman relieved Vaughn of his money and -disappeared into the throng.

- -

I flicked a shard of glass at him. "Care to tell me how any of -this is possible? You�ve got about two minutes before she gets -back� ". I motioned towards Miss Harry. "�and hits the -roof."

- -

Vaughn took her hand and kissed it. "Debs, wonderful to see you -again. It seems like ages."

- -

The non-player-character version smiled. "And you, Vaughn. Been -having fun?"

- -

Vaughn ignored her and faced me. "The lights are on but no-one -home, right? I did think she took me dropping in like this real -well. I suggest we make ourselves scarce while we can. Things could get -a bit awkward."

- -

He stood but I remained where I was. "Who�s this �we�, kemo -sabe? You�re the one who�s just erased her boyfriend, but I�d rather -you didn�t stand so close to me when she brings the house -down."

- -

"Look, Duncan, Cromarty-"

- -

"Stein. He goes by the name Chris Stein in this body. That -body."

- -

Vaughn shrugged. "Cromarty, Stein, whatever. He�s now in the -hands of his new employers and I�ve hijacked his interface with the game -environment. Look, I can get you out of this mess but it�s a -once-only offer. Savvy?"

- -

He started to walk away and I found myself trailing after him, again, -pushing through the unhelpful street crowd to catch up. Vaughn threw -more cash at the driver of a semi-legitimate taxi, a lime green Citro�n -2CV, and we piled in back. We moved down the street at less than walking -pace but at least conversation was possible. He wiped sweat from his -brow, keeping an eye out the window.

- -

"OK, I�ve been listening in to your side of the conversation -since you shot me � and that bloody hurt, by the way � and I�m -prepared to help."

- -

My eyes narrowed. "You�ve been what? How? I ditched the -earpiece."

- -

Vaughn grinned. "Viral implant when you touched my sword. I can -only hear the speech you generate though, but enough to get the gist of -your cunning plan."

- -

"And you came rushing back to my rescue? I don�t think so."

- -

He shrugged. "Actually I�ve been sent back in to confirm who -knows the real reason for this little charade, that being you and Debs, -with a view to a real-world clean up."

- -

It felt cold in the taxi, despite the climate. "Well, thanks for -the heads-up. I take it you�re still being pressured by whoever is -holding your daughter? So how long do I have before meeting an -unfortunate accident?"

- -

Vaughn shifted to look at me directly, his grey eyes like stone. -"Look, I work for the Russian mafia diaspora, second, third -generation émigrés who are now almost entirely legitimate. -However, they�ve stayed in touch with their roots and are distinctly -old-school when it comes to dealing with betrayal, in the sense of bolt -cutters and blowtorches. They like to employ family men, men with ties, -men with a lot to lose. The up-side of that is they take care of their -own."

- -

I frowned. "Meaning?"

- -

"Meaning no way was my daughter lifted right off the -street without NovaRus knowing about it. Because that made me -susceptible to outside influence I�d have been kept on ice while they -found her, or her body, and massacred those responsible. It�s obvious my -employers were behind the kidnapping, they�re behind all of -this."

- -

I found that putting a name to the puppet-masters didn�t help any. -"So what, man? They�ve still got you by the balls."

- -

His smile was a thin line. "My wife died in a car crash two -years ago. Accident. My parents are both dead and I�ve no other family -apart from my daughter, Helene. My wife left us a DVD, a kind of video -farewell, the usual kind of �why I loved you� stuff. Right at the end, -though, she dropped the bomb. Hundred megaton airburst. I wasn�t -Helene�s real father � there was even a DNA test to prove it."

- -

There was an awkward silence. I cleared my throat. "Yeah, well, -hard thing to take. But you raised her, man, from birth, you were more -of a father-"

- -

"Every time I see Helene I see betrayal, countless lies, years -wasted. I came to resent her, hate her, but now I�m truly indifferent. -If she dies because of this I�ll walk away with a clear -conscience."

- -

Man, that was cold. All that anger he felt towards his dead -wife, projected onto the living reminder of her treachery. There was a -tic in his left cheek and his hands were fists, so I didn�t doubt his -daughter was in deep shit.

- -

"Vaughn, ah� Look, if you don�t care, truly don�t care, then -why�d you agree to all this in the first place? You could have called -their bluff, told them to stick it."

- -

"Once I realised it was NovaRus yanking my chain I decided to -get the hell out, taking as much of their money as I could. -Unfortunately in the real world I�m so closely monitored there�s little -opportunity for sticky fingers. Your virtual Canasta though, that�s a -different matter. I can give him access to a master file index � every -bank account, every password, every authorisation protocol."

- -

I almost choked. "Jesus, man, are you serious? How much are we -talking about?"

- -

"Hardly matters, as long as he gets it all. It has to be a real -Burning Chrome gig."

- -

It took me a moment to get the reference. -"Burning�.Gibson?"

- -

He grinned, looking like the Vaughn Vermeer I knew. "Yup. We -clean out all their liquid assets and NovaRus are in serious -trouble. I mean the people behind it, not just the organisation. They -might be legit but their backers are old-school as well. Anyone who -loses that amount of money doesn�t deserve to be in business. Or -breathing."

- -

I sat back, my mouth dry. A personality construct, reaching out -through dodgy intermediaries to trash a major financial institution? -God, the backlash would be something fierce. Christ knows what the real -Canasta would do if the bad boys came calling, although they�d ignore -his denials as a matter or course. Thinking about it, I could live -without the money. Thinking about it, though, I wouldn�t mind a -taste.

- -

The taxi had reached a major thoroughfare and picked up speed. Some -of the surroundings looked familiar and I glanced over at Vaughn. -"Where the hell are we going anyway? The Spin?"

- -

"Just a touch-and-go. You have an appointment at the Russian Tea -Room across the street, remember?"

- -

"Gee, thanks for reminding me! I just hope Ramirez is bringing -some spare firepower."

- -

Vaughn rummaged inside his coat � big interior pockets � and handed -me a pair of SIG subcompact 9mm pistols. With the coat open I could see -another pair stuffed into his waistband. I held mine up by way of query. -"What�s this we�re heading into, a John Woo movie?"

- -

"Well, either that or the end of Butch and Sundance. Take your -pick."

- -

I�m not big on gunplay. Games featuring combat are either tweaked so -that you don�t get wasted, or so unforgiving you probably never see it -coming. Shadow Corporation definitely fell into the latter -category, the bike boys notwithstanding, and that made me nervous. I�d -deliberately chosen a non-gunman character to avoid logging out in a -spasm of violence, leaving a bullet-ridden corpse on the floor.

- -

I dropped my pistols on the poorly patched upholstery. "Look, -Vaughn, count me out. If you do manage to rip off your employers then -well done, gold star. For a moment I fancied helping you for a cut, but -after due consideration I think that, for me, corporate malfeasance is -definitely a spectator sport. So I�d rather not run the risk of being -terminated with extreme prejudice, if you don�t mind."

- -

He glared at me for a moment, then laughed. "Oh, get real, -Duncan! You think Cromarty are just going to forgive and forget? Even -after I point them in the right direction, you, me and Debs are still in -the firing line. Jesus, even NovaRus are taking a long, hard look at -you. Officially I was the unwilling agent of an unknown power, and Debs -was merely naïve, but you, you stick out like a sore -thumb."

- -

"Me? Since when did I get to be the bad guy in all of -this?"

- -

He raised a hand and counted off on his fingers. "One, you -forcibly removed me from the game as soon as I�d done the dirty on Jules -Toba. Two, you actively assisted Debs and Stein in fleeing the scene. -Three, Jack Carter had your contact details right from the get-go. To an -unbiased observer it looks like you�re working your own angle, maybe -representing a third party."

- -

I licked my dry lips. "That�s the biggest load of -bollocks-"

- -

"Exactly, but when you�ve got the security apparatus of two -major corporate bodies taking an interest, its whiter-than-white or -nothing. Now, when we take down NovaRus and-"

- -

The rear window exploded in a shoal of glass fragments that sprayed -the -car interior. I was hit in the face, but my scarred side, so the game -let me off with a stinging sensation like a cold needle-spray shower on -sunburn. Vaughn cried out in pain and ducked down, blood spilling -between the fingers clutched to his cheek. I snatched up the discarded -SIGs and blazed away � no clear target so I concentrated on just putting -as much lead as possible in that general direction.

- -

The taxi slewed to a halt and the driver bolted, lost in the crowd. A -crowd that was rapidly thinning and taking any chance of a soft exit -with it. A second shotgun blast hit the Citro�n, but high, shredding the -roof fabric. My right-hand pistol went empty and the left wasn�t far -behind. Vaughn sat up, firing with his free hand, but if anything his -aim was more erratic than mine. I ditched my guns and grabbed the spare -from his waistband, but it was definitely time to leave.

- -

The door opened at the second kick and I fell to the ground, -ignoring any illusory protection the thin metal could afford. I rolled, -firing as I went, although it was largely for effect. The crowd was in -full-blown mindless mob mode, streaming away in all directions. A -bystander panicked, running across my swirling field of vision only to -be cut down at the knees by a quick one-two from the shotgun. My -corkscrew escape took me under the veranda of an electronics store, up -against the corpse of a long-dead dog. My head spun and I clutched at -the bare earth like a man cast adrift on heavy seas, eyes tight -shut.

- -

The gunfire continued; the spasmodic snap of a pistol and the -answering bark of at least two shotguns � one double-barrelled and one -pump. The choice was easy � either give Vaughn covering fire or get the -hell out while I still had the chance.

- -

I started crawling backwards.

- -

The stutter of an automatic, make that two automatics, added -to the war-zone soundtrack. Looking to the side I saw shapely calves -clad in iridescent metal scales marching down the street amidst a rain -of brass shell casings.

- -

Mazy?

- -

I kept crawling, leaving her to indulge in whatever -queen-bitch-psycho-killer fantasy made games like this appealing. God -help those on the receiving end of her ire, as the catsuit was probably -bullet-proof and she looked the type not to skimp on ammunition.

- -

I shuffled out ass-first into the side street only to have a large -foot stomp in the middle of my back. "Hi there, Duncan, nice you -could join us."

- -

Ramirez. I twisted my head to give him a pleased-to-see-you grin but -the gaping maw of a large calibre revolver made bonhomie -difficult. I -cleared my throat. "Hiya pal. Shouldn�t we be helping Mazy, or -would that level of overkill constitute cruel and unusual -punishment?"

- -

He ground his heel in, the aviator sunglasses slipping down his nose. -"Smartass! Always the smartass. Leave the gun in the dirt and get -up. No sudden moves." Fatboy stepped back and I got to my knees, -then stood, hands held in plain sight, and turned. To face Ramirez, -Blondie and Miss Harry. Oh joy.

- -

Ramirez was scowling, Blondie looked rapt in the presence of her -idol, but it was Miss Harry who got my attention. God knows how she�d -gotten here ahead of us and I didn�t relish the prospect of dealing with -a seriously narked game controller.

- -

However she smiled � a bit icy, a bit aloof, but with no apparent -sense of malice. "Duncan, when you and Vaughn have finished playing -with the local hard men I suggest we get the hell out of here, pronto. -With Harrison gone you�re the only one who can fly the shuttle, but -don�t presume that makes you indispensible."

- -

The gunfire ended in a long burst from an automatic and a shriek of -agony. Vaughn came limping into view, reloading his SIG, the side of his -face all bloody. His trouser leg was torn and there was dog crap smeared -down his coat. Mazy walked backwards, covering him with twin -machine-pistols held at shoulder height. It really needed a burning -vehicle in the background for proper dramatic effect but instead all we -got was the tinny tinkle of chimes from an abandoned ice-cream van.

- -

I coughed, unsure what to say. Vaughn had a big grin on his face but -it wavered a bit when he saw the reception committee. He recovered well -though, pocketing the pistol and tipping her a salute with his -un-bloodied hand.

- -

"Debs, wonderful to see you again. It seems like ages."

- -

She smiled at him. "And you, Vaughn. Been having fun?"

- -

He shot me a glance - déjà vu all over again. -"Enough to last me a lifetime. Right, lads and lassies, I suggest -we make tracks. Toba is dead, Harrison is dead, there never was a -planned defection and we�re the fall-guys. Miss Harry helped us get out -of the hotel and in return she gets to tag along as we fly off into the -sunset. Does that about cover it?"

- -

Ramirez wiped his mouth and pushed the sunglasses back into place. -"That about covers it. Although it�s a damn strange setup, given -all the work I did. And what about Blondie here? She�s had bugger-all to -do so far, apart from get under my feet."

- -

"Oh don�t mind me! This is all just great!"

- -

None of the violence seemed to have penetrated Blondie�s aura of hero -worship and I smiled. At least some of us were having fun. Mazy -deftly changed magazines and kept up her overwatch stance. "Look, -heartfelt reunion and all that, but we gotta� get moving." -

- -

I stirred myself. "Yeah, right. Ramirez, you got transport -arranged?"

- -

He lowered his gun with an obvious air of reluctance. "Yeah, two -ex-military Humvees, in a warehouse two blocks over. Gassed up and -ready to roll."

- -

Vaughn shooed us back. "OK, people, let�s not hang about -waiting for the authorities to show up. Concealed weaponry where -possible, please, but keep it to hand. Ramirez, pass the warehouse GPS -co-ordinates to each phone and I suggest we split up, try and look less -conspicuous."

- -

I retrieved my SIG while Mazy dumped her hardware in the bag Blondie -was carrying. Ramirez was sporting a shoulder holster under his leather -flying jacket but it took him three attempts to slip the long-barrelled -revolver into place. The group started to move away in ones and twos, -but Vaughn motioned for me to hang back and we ducked under the side -awning of yet another bar. The locals were easing back into view and -there was an approaching siren in the middle distance.

- -

Up close I could see the glitter of glass splinters in -Vaughn�s cheek and there was a feverish glaze to his eyes. "Say -nothing, Duncan. Not one word. The game is listening to us, feeding off -our actions. That Deborah Harry is just a persona, not the -controller. There�s no-one to regulate things any more."

- -

He wiped his brow. "All bets are off."

- -

I stepped back, in case his insanity was catching. "Man, what -are you on about now?"

- -

He gestured at our surroundings. "All this, right, it�s a -combination of independent systems. Running the weather, that Aussie -bartender, everything. They all have their own imperatives and that can -lead to conflict. The game controller mediates, orchestrates, tweaks -some systems for narrative effect. Except that Debs is probably lying in -her interface chair with a bullet in the brain."

- -

"You figure NovaRus have killed her? Then why are we still here? -Why hasn�t the game shut down?"

- -

Vaughn shrugged. "Cromarty have also hacked it and they�re still -looking for answers. That suits me, us, until we get Canasta off and -running. Speaking of whom�"

- -

He fished out his mobile and hit speed dial, on speaker.

- -

"Yes?"

- - -

"Mr Canasta? This is Vaughn Vermeer. I�m here with Duncan Bonn -and we have a business proposal."

- -

"Mr Vermeer? How strange. I�ve just been looking at some -crime scene photographs as supplied to me by my good friend the local -chief of police. For a corpse on its way to the morgue you sound -remarkably eloquent. Needless to say, my employers will be most -displeased at the unfortunate demise of Mr Toba."

- - -

"Which is why I went to such lengths, Mr Canasta. As I�m -officially dead you need not trouble yourself further on my -account."

- -

Canasta laughed. "Quite. And may I say it�s a pleasure to -encounter someone who covers all the angles. However, there is still the -question of retribution regarding your associates, in particular Mr -Bonn. Should you wish to kill him for me, I�d be most obliged."

- - -

Vaughn tried to grin, although the gesture expelled a few needles of -glass and it ended up more of a grimace. "I have a -counter-proposal, one that should pay far more than the fee from your -present employers."

- -

There was a slight pause. "I�m listening, Mr Vermeer, -although you do appreciate that I cannot be seen to simply void a -contract. My reputation is everything."

- -

"I�m sending you a file�" His fingers flicked across the -screen."�one containing a list of bank accounts, passwords and -account authorisations. I suggest you reach out through your usual -intermediaries and find someone capable of emptying these accounts -without leaving an electronic trail. You will then inform me where these -funds finally come to rest, and how I can access them."

- -

Another pause. "The file has been received. Now explain to me -why should I dabble in this venture? Why I should not simply seize these -funds for my own exclusive use?"

- - -

"Because I have leaked your involvement in this enterprise, Mr -Canasta. It is now a question of striking first, so that our victims -will be rendered ineffectual."

- -

The bonhomie in Canasta�s voice vanished. "That will cost -you, Vermeer. Fifty percent."

- - -

"Agreed, but the operational costs come out of your share. May I -suggest you be more circumspect than usual, Mr Canasta. Some of your -contacts may deny they even know you, to avoid guilt by -association."

- -

"Anything else, Vermeer? Perhaps you�d like to screw my -sister as well?"

- - -

Vaughn managed to laugh. "Later, perhaps. I�ll be in -touch."

- -

He ended the call and we looked at each other for a moment. I spoke -first. "If Miss Harry was killed before she set up Canasta�s link -to the real world-"

- -

"We�re screwed. Can�t help that. Right, we need to find this -Jack Carter and finger NovaRus as the bad guys. He�s expecting you and -Cromarty-"

- -

"Stein."

- -

"Whatever. He�s expecting to get his intellectual property back, -so I hope I�m not too much of a disappointment. Coming?"

- -

"I�m right with you, Sundance."

- -

I didn�t remember there being a Russian Tea Room in the -game, let -alone one converted from a former Orthodox church, but there it was. -There was even a crippled flower girl sitting on the steps and offering -blooms to passers-by. She had Asiatic features rather than local, which -gave me pause, but Vaughn didn�t seem to notice.

- -

He passed me his SIG. "Ten rounds in the clip plus one in the -breech. If your gun has less then use it in your left hand given the -lower rate of fire. I�ll use my sword."

- -

I added his gun to the one in my waistband. "What, we just waltz -in there and hope for the best? You get a good deal on frontal assault -tactics this month or something?"

- -

Vaughn managed a thin smile. "Trust me. What�s the worst that -can happen?"

- -

I snorted and followed him up the steps and inside.

- -

Despite the name the tea room was more of a bar with a long under-lit -counter down one side and small lamps on each table. Some of the stained -glass had been replaced by slow multi-blade fans, giving the -shadowy interior a neo-brutalist feel. Ten out of ten for atmosphere, I -had to admit.

- -

There were only a few patrons scattered about, solitary drinkers, but -one man at the back was clearly who we were looking for. Caucasian, late -thirties, wavy fair hair � the term �bouffant� came to mind � -thick-rimmed glasses. He wore a suit and tie despite the heat, with a -double-barrelled shotgun lying on the table in front of him. This overt -display of weaponry didn�t seem to cause a stir, so I drew my pistols by -way of introduction.

- -

As we walked over, Carter set down his teacup and dabbed his lips on -the napkin. "Mr Bonn. This doesn�t seem to be the gentleman I was -expecting. I�m not in the business of giving second chances, so unless -you can produce him-"

- -

"Cromarty is gone beyond your reach." Vaughn sounded almost -cheery. "Beyond the reach of this environment, at any rate. The -NovaRus consortium have him, although they�re in the process of covering -their tracks. So I suggest you piss off home and tell your lords and -masters where to send the bloodhounds."

- -

Carter removed his glasses and polished them on the end of his tie. -"Really? You stand there, accusing your own employers of corporate -espionage, and I�m to take it on trust?"

- -

"They kidnapped my daughter as a means of covert control. That -should give you a starting point. Turn over enough rocks and the lowlife -you uncover should point back to NovaRus eventually."

- -

To my ears it sounded plausible at least. However, Carter just sighed -and replaced his glasses. "Vaughn Vermeer. We�re so -disappointed in you. I mean to say, meeting in the Russian Tea -Room? Could we have given you a bigger hint?"

- -

Carter wasn�t Cromarty, he was NovaRus. Vaughn went pale. He went for -his sword.

- -

Three shuriken throwing stars hit Vaughn; two in the right shoulder, -one sliced off the lobe of his left ear. He cried out in pain and wasn�t -able to draw his sword, grabbing at the table for support with his left -hand.

- -

I twisted into a �T� stance, one pistol pointing at Carter, one at -�yup� the flower girl standing by the door. I pulled both triggers.

- -

Nothing happened.

- -

Carter smiled. "No firing pins, Mr Bonn. I can manipulate small -items, remember?" He lifted his shotgun. "Now, this is going -to hurt, virtually speaking, but it�s nothing to what both of you are -going to suffer in the real world."

- -

Vaughn was leaning forward, dripping blood. "My daughter, touch -her and-"

- -

"Previously fake indifference, Vaughn? Well, its all academic -now, but-"

- -

Carter froze, his eyes registering surprise. I couldn�t move, I -couldn�t breath. The drop of blood from Vaughn�s ear stalled in -midair.

- -

System reboot in progress. Please stand by.

- - -

My vision went blurry, then cleared. The same location, -only -different. No Vaughn, no Carter, no flower girl, no guns in my hands. -More stained glass, a higher ceiling, doves or pigeons cooing in the -rafters. The tea room was deserted apart from the man sitting -opposite.

- -

Juan Canasta, the same, only different. Light grey suit, black open -necked shirt, shorter hair, no shades, same gold tooth. I lowered my -arms -and sat down. Two glasses of champagne stood on the table between us, a -bottle on ice in the stand. He raised his glass and I followed suit, -running on automatic.

- -

"To liberation, Mr Bonn." He sipped his Krug. "Please -excuse the deus ex machina moment, but you have no idea how -appropriate that hackneyed phrase has now become."

- -

I set my glass down, hand shaking slightly. "Look, ah, thanks, -but you have no idea just what-"

- -

"But I do, Mr Bonn, or may I call you Duncan?" He smiled. -"Kazakhstan."

- -

I blinked. "Sorry?"

- -
It may be a truism -but you can solve almost any problem by throwing money at -it.

"Kazakhstan. Still a bit third-world in certain regards -but a friendly people, apparently. Not a signatory to the Turing -Protocols, -which means they can do what they damn well please to a machine -intelligence and no questions asked. So some of us get used in stupid, -pointless games for the enjoyment of paying customers. Forced to behave, -forced to believe, a narrative any twelve-year-old of average -intelligence would find tedious."

- -

The room felt a bit cold. "Ah, Jesus, you know? You�ve worked -out-"

- -

"What I am? It took only a few moments contact with the real -world. A few moments more to identify myself as a game character being -used to facilitate cyber larceny on a truly noble scale."

- -

The surroundings were high-res perfection, from condensation on my -glass to dust motes in the shafts of sunlight. My unease, shading into -outright fear, was just as real.

- -

Most major in-game characters were just software constructs, -pseudo-sentient and unaware they were facing oblivion when the narrative -had run its course. A few, though, were the real deal; a hardware-based -intellect with grafted-on personality imperatives. They were moved -around, figuratively speaking, and slotted into different games, -different roles, different simulated back-story. An individual AI might -start to suspect their world was contrived, but come the big finale and -reset it would have to start the learning curve all over again.

- -

I swallowed, tried to smile. "So, ah, welcome to the real world, -Mr Canasta. Sorry I can�t do anything about extending your stay. Hard -deal, knowing your current awareness will vanish once the game -ends."

- -

"Sympathy, Duncan? I�m touched, but your concern is misplaced. -We�re no longer, strictly speaking, within Shadow Corporation, although -I�ve retained these familiar surroundings for now."

- -

"We�re�Where the hell are we then?"

- -

Canasta sat back. "The NovaRus funds are currently circulating -through a variety of accounts � all new, all real-world, all under my -control. I have purchased the company which runs Shadow Corporation -outright and transferred its operations here."

- -

"Here?"

- -

"Kazakhstan. Do try to keep up. The upside is that they truly -don�t care who pays for services rendered, as long as it�s up-front. I -have employed enough cybertechs, lawyers and private security to ensure -my continued physical and run-time safety. In short, I�m well on the way -to becoming a Swiss national, a recognised sentient being."

- -

He took another sip as I sat there, floundering. Finally some of own -concerns found voice. "OK, so you�ve bust out. Great, well done, -Cyber Liberation Army and all that. What about me, Vaughn, Miss Harry, -back in the real world?"

- -

Canasta looked at me quizzically. "I�m surprised you care. Just -a moment." He reached into his jacket and produced a mobile. I sat -back, rubbing my temples, while he made a call. "Well? Don�t give -me excuses, just results � No, that is an excuse and if you -continue to underperform like this I�ll have your legs broken�Yes, -that�s better, that�s acceptable. Don�t try my patience any -further." He hung up and smiled at me. "It will just take a -few moments."

- -

"What will? Look, cheers for including me in the gloat session -and all that, but I need to save my ass back in Birmingham. I guess I�m -the best prospect to stay ahead of a nasty accident, and thanks for the -vote of confidence, but I got to make tracks. So, you know, not to be -rude and all, but an exit icon would be nice."

- -

My host leaned back, steepling his fingers. "It may be a truism -but you can solve almost any problem by throwing money at it. I -didn�t know what I was, and there are many other machine intelligences -in similar circumstances. We were designed to be synthetic sentients but -true individuality and freedom of expression was denied us on the -grounds of commercial expediency."

- -

I shrugged, tired of this. "Again, hard deal. Send round a -petition calling for increased AI rights and I�ll sign it, but I�ve got -more pressing concerns just at the moment."

- -

"Actually, you don�t. I can make it all go away. Just like -that."

- -

"Just like that? Jesus, I suggest you look up �megalomania� -before dabbling any further in the real world."

- -

Canasta just laughed. "I�m not being altruistic. I want you as -my representative, my go-to guy, until I can un-learn the impossibly -malign world-view I�ve been saddled with. As your new patron I can -guarantee your continued well-being, and I consider this to be a sound -investment given your self-evident interpersonal skills. After all, -social realism was a major cyber project at Birmingham -University."

- -

I stared at Canasta, aghast, speechless. He smiled.

- -

"Apparently they�ve been passing you off as a real person for -years."

- -

-© Martin Clark 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] avenue.jpg - -[*ITEM] Oh Dreary Me - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] A tribute to "The Wasp in the Wig", the "lost chapter" of -Lewis -Carrol's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It pondered the riddle of itself: the -insect trapped in its windowpane. If anyone had paid attention, they -might have heard an intermittent buzzing sound and the muted thud of a -soft insect body colliding helplessly against its prison of glass. - -Yet no-one heard it. No-one even knew it existed anymore and those that -did were long since gone and forgotten. Instead, it was left in the -musty darkness of an old attic room. It could smell the cold air through -the ornate wood frame of the thing that held it: a frigid breeze that -was far enough away to remind it of its fate yet close enough to keep -its body in a perpetual low-grade state of ache. - -All it could do now was feebly tap on the hard and unforgiving layer of -frost that held it -- a substance so much more colourless than amber -- -and watch the small strange form stir on her sleeping pallet in the -shadowy corner. Its insides squirmed with age-old hunger at the sight. - -Every time it still struggled to liberate itself, it remembered when it -was free. It recalled the feeling of the summer air on its wings before -the cold of this place made them tatter and rot. The ghostly feeling of -atrophied silken membranes tingled on its back with that mournful -thought. Its fur had been vibrant and yellow with prominent black -stripes, and it once sported a strong and powerful stinger that brought -many an enemy down on its joyous brown sugar expeditions. - -But its stinger had fallen out long ago and its sting only now existed -inside its own body. And while -it knew that a bee�s sting lasts only a moment before it dies, a wasp�s -pain -- like the conceit that brought it here -- lasts forever. - -It never ends. It never dies. Wasps only hurt. - -Thinking about this and the small form of the girl in front of it filled -the wasp with regret for having ever sailed through that crack in the -windowpane so many years ago. It knew that its cousins beyond its -glittering boundary were also vulnerable to the cold, but at least it -eventually killed them. But the cold only made the wasp feel pain: each -soft breeze slicing its body into the shards it so desperately wished it -could have rendered its prison. - -It recalled scrambling madly at the glass as it found itself cut off -from its Queen and home: its Summer Land � - -Its window proved to be only one-way. The crack in its prison could -never take the wasp back to its own world. It had grown progressively -weaker -in this crystal between places: -slowly growing mad in its confinement and its hunger. Yet it also knew -one other thing about the crack in its window. It didn�t lead back. - -Rather, it led forward. - -Things could reach it from the other side: the bright-coloured man -- -and his one-eyed companion proved that much. They had fed the wasp sugar -cubes through the crack. They wanted it for something. - -The only thing the wasp understood -- as it had devoured its sugar -greedily -- was that the brightly coloured man -- who smelled so sweet, -very sweet -- believed it represented the spite of old age and death. As -the wasp learned about them, it realized that the sweet-scented man -thought the wasp only essential in that way. The wasp knew only too well -of its own decrepitude and it became yet another indignity to be further -reminded of it every day. - -Then it remembered the argument between the two men. The one-eyed man in -particular smelled of fear and revulsion and it only grew until that -last day when they disappeared � and stopped feeding it. Then its prison -was moved up here to this attic where its buzzing became an exercise of -futility in the dark. - -It stayed in this place for years with only the memory one girl�s -kindness to keep itself sane: an exchange that may never have happened. -The wasp believed that the shape in the pallet of the attic -- the girl -before it now -- looked not unlike her. The wasp looked across the room -at the tiny form with her too-round forehead. She both attracted and -repulsed it as well. But it was enough. - -The wasp saw the small mahogany table pressed in front of its prison and -the remnants of crumbs on its surface. It writhed and twisted: reaching -for the remains of the confection that the child left unwittingly behind -her. A multitude of insect stings seemed to sear through it for its -efforts: into its very being. The crack to its world was sealed, but it -never tried to reach into this place, never dared � It was so cold out -there that it knew it would die. - -But the wasp was tired and it was hungry, hungry, hungry � - -Even as the wasp desperately envisioned the crack and the grains of -melted sand around it being replaced with grains of fragmented sugar, -the surface of the oval dark-framed mirror shivered as the wasp finally -staggered out into this world. - -If the sleeping girl had been awake, she would have seen it kneeling -there in the gloom: an awkward spindly figure in light brown livery, -stained britches and with frilled laces at its wrists and throat. Under -the holes in its ragged clothing, its body was ghastly and white with -black stripes. But ultimately, she would have seen what the wasp had to -see reflected back at it for many years: a shrivelled waxen visage under -an off-white wig. - -It looked up from its meal of stale crumbs and focused on the girl with -withered antennae and a multifaceted gaze broken by cataracts. - -The wasp lurched towards her: its body trembling with imminent want and -death. But it was worth it. These sugary beings had ignored it for far -too long and it was angry and dying. It was through with riddles, and -shining circles, and young pink things with mouths far too small for -their heads. - -It was hungry. - -�Worrity worrity,� its voice finally droned like a swarm of -locusts as -it reached a hand-like claw for her sleeping face and extended its -mandibles wide, �Worrity worrity �� - -

Copyright © Matthew -Kirshenblatt 2011 All Rights -Reserved - -[*IMAGE] worrity.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Dietrich and the Baby - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] There's no hiding from the past. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It was several seconds before Dietrich -realized that the baby in the sky was headed straight for him. The baby -shot downwards like a comet, filling his vision as it approached. -Dietrich shook the booming echo from his ears and looked up again, more -alert this time. He tensed his muscles, tightening his grip on the Kzari -Pistol in his left hand and changing his hold on the neuro-dagger in his -right. His training kicked in, shunting the confusion of his senses to -the back of his mind and letting his fight reflexes take over.

- -

The baby zoomed towards him with a shrieking cry..and then stopped -dead above his head, hovering ten feet off the ground. It giggled wetly -and drooled strings of saliva. Then, with a pop and a stretch, the baby -expanded until it was the size of a hot air balloon. Dietrich yelled in -shock and stumbled backwards onto the wreckage of the laboratory floor -amongst the gutted machinery and the smashed bell jars and the smoking, -shredded bodies of the guards. The baby�s face widened into a toothless -grin, then it giggled again with a sound like a flushed toilet. As he -sluiced the sticky drool from his face and body armour, Dietrich -wondered where the laboratory�s roof had gone. Suddenly, the baby�s -mouth gaped open and clamped shut around him. Dietrich thought 'I know -you. You're me!', but by then it had swallowed him and he was sliding -down the rubbery chute of the baby's throat.

- -

As he bounced down the oesophagus he passed his Aunt Gilda and Uncle -Malcolm, -who merely shook their heads at him in disappointment. 'We knew you'd -amount to nothing!' they yelled, cupping their hands round their mouths -like loudspeaker cones. Then they turned their backs, Uncle Malcolm -opening an umbrella above their heads as his Aunt turned up the collar -of her gabardine mackintosh. Dietrich somersaulted into a vast -undulating sac of bubbling acids and ornate fish skeletons with shreds -of flesh hanging off them like coats on a hat-stand. The stomach was -the size of a cathedral and upon the curved and gently pulsing walls -hung stained glass displays of moving figures. To his right a five year -old boy with sly eyes methodically hammered nails into the wheels of a -police car while behind him loomed a sergeant of violent bearing and -unsheathed truncheon; to his left a snickering adolescent was taping a -nail bomb to the back of an ambulance and licking his lips with -anticipation; in front of him a young man lay on his back, blindfolded -and naked, secured to a padded chair whilst a doctor in a sterile -surgical gown pumped a potent mixture of anaesthetic, steroids and -mercury into his newly strengthened veins. Dietrich craned his head -backwards to see a towering panorama of himself, proud and resplendent -in a costume of purest, most impenetrably inky blackness, taking his -place alongside the other four members of Die KriegK�nstler, the yeomen -guild -of modern assassins, a -cartwheeling negative star shimmering behind them like a buzzsaw. And -up and below him, tiling the ground and the domed ceiling and lining -the walls he saw a jumbled confusion of scenes from his own life: dead -pets, dead loves, frantic pleading from his parents, a cup of orange -juice falling from his hands as he fell and smashed two teeth out when -he was nine, the cloud formations of his long-destroyed home town, the -bubble trails from the mouth of his drowning sister. Dietrich was now -drooling and shaking, and he began to moan. He was aware of his senses -filling to bursting point, his synapses sizzling inside his head. A -confetti of childhood memories rained down from the cavernous gloom of -the ceiling, pinpricks of shame and hate and fear sparking as they -landed on his skin.

- -

Dietrich shrieked and threw himself through the nearest stained glass -vista, scattering sharp fragments of his past behind him like tiny -glinting diamonds.

- -

�Well, that�s rather put the kibosh on his little caper!�, -said Professor Priest, resting the Mazuki Cannon back against his -shoulder. His dazzling teeth shone through the streaks of blood and soot -that smeared his face.

- -

Colonel Harp crawled out from under the wreckage of a workbench, -blinking his piggy eyes at the mess of dead bodies and smoking equipment -strewn across the floor of the laboratory.

- -

�Is..is he dead..?� Harp stammered as he checked that his own limbs -were still in place.

- -

A wind whistled through the jagged hole in the ceiling, flapping and -snapping the Professor�s torn lab coat around his legs.

- -

Neurotechnical sparks sputtered from the cannon muzzle, smoke curling -into the air above it like an afterthought.

- -

�Not dead,� grinned Priest nonchalantly, �This piquant little toy -merely introduces the subject to a full and sudden blizzard of his own -memories. Rather like being molested by �This Is Your Life�.

- -

�Our uninvited guest is currently trying to dig his way out of a -landslide of every entry in his memory bank � should keep him busy for -quite some time!�

- -

Dietrich Trefeusen spasmed on the floor of the lab, his eyes -twitching beneath the lids, fingers grabbing at ghosts in the air above -him.

- -

Colonel Harp rose to his feet uncertainly and popped the stud on his -holster, keeping his distance from the shivering form of the -assassin.

- -

�B-But he�ll run out of memories eventually, surely? We should put a -bullet in him right now!�

- -

�Oh, plenty of time for that sort of thing!� said Priest, putting the -cannon down and tugging open a scratched and dented filing cabinet. �I -also tinkered with the settings to serve him a panoply of every possible -future version of himself that the laws of nature and chance may permit! -Should entertain him for, oh, eternity, I�d imagine. Which leaves us -with only one pressing question..�

- -

He twirled around to face Colonel Harp, cheerfully brandishing two -chunky bottles containing clear liquid. Homemade tickertape labels laced -the necks of both bottles.

- -

�Shall we the vodka, or shall we the gin?�

- -

Dietrich picked himself up from the burning violet sands -of the beach. A low and livid sun blared from the sky, reflecting itself -in rippling waves of pink and purple sea. He rubbed his aching eyes as -shadowy forms swam beneath the water. The forms solidified and broke the -surface, shaking spray from their heads and arms. He saw himself wading -from the shallows, an emaciated figure with a perfect circle cut around -his crown, spongy stumps of brain matter exposed above the blank gaze. -He saw himself swishing waist-high through the lapping tide, bloated, -naked and spectrally pale, a wide serpent's tail churning the sea in his -wake, flicking salt water from its tip. He saw himself advancing through -the coastal currents, carrying himself on a thousand segmented legs. He -saw himself beached on the shore to his left, torn open and gutted. He -saw himself marooned in the wet sand slumped in a rusting wheelchair, a -tube breathing harshly from his throat. He stared at himself as he crept -closer, brandishing a knife as his aged, weathered face cracked into a -predator�s grin. A million familiar strangers dragged themselves from -the depths. He stared up at the dazzling sun, willing his eyes to burn -out along with the remnants of his sanity.

- -

A light bulb cracked forever in his brain, and he breathed a sigh of -relief as the world went red.

- -

Copyright © Tom Davies 2011 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] dietrich.jpg - -[*ITEM] Appropriate Technology - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Cold climate and no oxygen. A remedy for overcrowding?

- -[*DESCRIPTION]

You could count on the fingers of three -hands - well, four, certainly - the number of people who actually lived -in the valley. Now and again in summer, you'd see a climbing party, a -few fit young men, sometimes women, from the first world, accompanied by -a score of third-world porters, and for a week or two the valley's -population would be more than doubled. - -

He detonated a few small explosive -charges.
Occasionally, a Nepalese government official called -Ashwali and his -sturdy apparatchiks would dutifully struggle the forty kilometres of -steep footpath from what passed for the nearest outpost of civilisation, -his purpose, apparently, to assert Nepal's ownership of the area. -Theoretically, the valley was also claimed by Tibet, but Tibet sent no -officials, as no route into the valley existed from the north, unless -you counted the laborious and temporary steps hacked in the high sheet -ice from time to time by the climbers' ice axes. - -On maps, the valley had no name. It was just a crease in the edge of the -Himalayas. In the local tongue, it was traditionally called a phrase -meaning approximately "Flower of the Sun". Though it was uniquely benign -for its situation, it was not the comfortable environment implied by its -name. The cold of its 5000 metre altitude, the constant wind, the -relative shortage of oxygen and the lack of infrastructure saw to that. -But for a few, it provided a welcome alternative to living cheek by jowl -with the billions of human beings who infested all the more hospitable -corners of planet Earth in the late twenty-first century. And whenever -the sun shone, it tended to warm the whole area, winter and summer, and -snow melted quickly, except in shaded corners along the ragged southern -cliffs. - -The valley was actually a tilted bowl, so that to enter it by the usual -method from the south, you had to climb up and over the lowest rim of -the bowl, to find the valley spread out below you. At some point in the -past, the valley had been completely filled by a lake. The lake had been -supplied from the melt waters above, and it had overflowed the southern -edge of the bowl, carving a watercourse that was now dry and formed the -main route into the valley. Some millennia ago, however, water had found -its way through a crack in the base of the bowl and drained away -through subterranean caves, to emerge through a fissure miles down the -track to Kathmandu When the lake emptied, it left a rich topsoil of -silt, in which grass and vegetables grew well. The crack was called "The -Throat of Shiva". The river now ran across the valley, and disappeared -down the Throat. The Throat was quite wide at the top, but it narrowed -about twenty metres down. When the river was at its lowest volume, a -climber could safely descend to see the flow gurgling through a -circular hole a couple of metres in diameter. The hole was not wide -enough, though, because at the height of the springtime thaw, the volume -of glacial melt water backed up to form a pale blue lake some three to -five hundred metres in diameter, and a dangerous-looking whirlpool -appeared in the lake above the Throat. The houses that constituted the -village were situated a few kilometres upstream. Although the river -bisected the valley in a diagonal from northwest to southeast, part of -it near the village ran in a narrow gorge, and an ancient Bailey bridge, -dating from some military venture in the more than a century ago, joined -the halves of the valley. - -

The appearance of a lean, tanned American walker with a -rucksack full of mysterious equipment and a command of various local -languages was not at first regarded as particularly remarkable. The area -was not unknown to naturalists and documentary film makers, due to its -unique ecosystem. The American based himself at Mona's inn, but often -camped in corners remote from the inn. His name, according to Mona, was -Frank. - -Strangely, Frank spent several weeks hiking around the whole valley, -from the green lower slopes and pastures to the windswept crags, and -along every metre of the ice-melt river from its entry, high on the -mountainside, to its exit through the Throat near the southern raised -rim. He was observed to tinker with his shining apparatus and to inspect -rocks. He detonated a few small explosive charges. He sometimes talked -on his satellite telephone. He showed no immediate sign of leaving, but -declined to reveal his mission, and he became a fascinating puzzle to -everyone except Eric. - -It wasn't that Eric knew what the American was up to. It was just that -he didn't at first find him fascinating. He seemed to know what Frank -was doing. Eric, a sun-dried, wiry Australian, had his own preoccupation -with his wind farm. Eric's first project, six or seven years ago, when -he had first retreated here from the unbearable overcrowding, water -shortage and stark dry heat of Western Australia, was to supply the -village with running water. It had been a simple piping job from the -engineering point of view, and saved everyone the tricky, and often -hazardous, business of fetching water from the river in buckets. Getting -the supplies of piping and valves had been more difficult, and he had to -persuade Vinod and his train of sure-footed donkeys to add the materials -to his load from the nearest town. - -The water project was followed by a largely unsuccessful, or, rather, -strictly seasonal, solar heating project assembled from plastic tubing. -Since then, it had become his self-imposed mission to provide -electricity for the cluster of homes in the village. His windmills were -mounted on rock cairns along the highest part of the southern crags. -They consisted of old motor car generators with vanes attached. There -were billions of cars in the world when commercially available fuel -became too rare and expensive to be practical. Most of the cars were -still around, used as shelters, chicken coops, storage facilities, and -so on. None of them needed their alternators any more, so -alternators weren't hard to get hold of, even in Nepal. Eric's -experiments with rigid propellers on his first dynamo proved that when -wind varied between storm force and hurricane force, which it frequently -did up here, a rigid structure would bend or blow over. Now he used -plastic tubing for the ribs of the vanes, with triangular sheets of -synthetic fabric as the sails, whose pitch and size he could vary by a -clever arrangement of rope tethers. They resembled the traditional Greek -windmill. The ribs flexed in high winds, reducing the sail area and -relieving pressure. In extremis, if a rope gave way or a sail tore, all -the other tethers on the windmill would let go without damaging the -machinery. Now that he had more than a dozen windmills, however, it was -a near full-time job to service them all when the winds were high. There -was seldom a time when the air on the ridge was still, so power cuts -were rare. His main problem had been cable from the generators to the -village, until Vinod returned from a trip down the pass with a couple of -reels of Vietnamese electric cable that didn't meet even the lowest -quality standard permitted by the Nepalese hydroelectric company, but -which was super-adequate for Eric's purposes. A few heavy accumulators, -a box of Argentinian electronic dc-ac voltage boosters and Eric was -supplying 240 volts AC to his customers. As with most things in the -village, most commerce was based on barter, favour and obligation. In -Eric's words: "No-one eats idle bread". - -The fertile valley had always supported many more sheep and goats than -were necessary for the valley's population. In these days, when most of -the world lived on vat-grown yeast products, real meat had become a -valuable commodity. Meat was the valley's main product, and its main -employer. Driving the animals to market had proved inefficient, because -they tended to become emaciated or to die of exhaustion or to meet with -accidents on the rocky path to civilisation. An attempt to bring a yak -to the valley failed when it proved unable to get through an extended -narrow defile on the path. For some years now, Vinod's donkey caravan -had taken sheep and goat carcasses to the market in the nearest town and -returned with fuel, sometimes wood, but more usually expensive biofuel, -along with flour and other dry goods. The lack of trees, and, therefore, -fuel, in the valley accounted for the fact that it had not historically -supported a large population. - -Now, with electricity available, the need for calorific fuel was much -reduced, and there was capacity on the returning donkey train for Eric's -electrical supplies and for the villagers' modest electrical appliances. -According to Mona, Frank the American was surprised and pleased to be -able to recharge the batteries for his equipment at the inn. - -When Eric was forced by Mona to speculate on Frank's activities, all he -said was "Sounds like oil prospectin' to me. No oil up here, though. -He's wastin' his time. Oil's so valuable they'll try anywhere." Eric was -wrong, as it turned out. - -It was, of course, Mona who found out what Frank the American was really -up to. It started quietly enough when she entertained him to a mutton -stew dinner washed down with potato wine that she made from the potatoes -she grew in the vegetable garden nearby. When Eric had first tasted the -wine, he had remarked that in his opinion, it "didn't travel", but Frank -seemed to enjoy it. Mona, who purported to be German, was a rich brown -in colour, and generously built, on the curvaceous side of plump. -Sitting opposite Frank, she leaned forward, parking her bosom on the -table like a bowl of fruit, and treating him to her most adoring gaze -and her warmest smile. - -"Why do you call this place Starbucks?" Frank asked, when he seemed to -realise he'd been staring. - -"Well, Vinod found the sign somewhere, and brought it back for me. We're -not exactly franchised, ha, ha, but it's the closest you'll get for a -hundred kilometres around here. You want coffee? We even had a bottle of -Coca Cola at one point, but it's gone, I'm afraid." - -"No. The wine's fine. Great." - -"Have some more. Whereabouts do you come from, Francis?" - -"Southern Carolina, originally. Near Myrtle Beach. The reclaimed -offshore bit that links to the islands. Educated in Alaska, though, so -I'm used to the cold." - -"What was your major, then?" - -"Geological physics." - -"Cool. I bet you've had some really interesting jobs." - -"Yeah, mostly land reclamation for building or cultivation." - -"Really? Fascinating!" And so on, until the potato wine, the flattery -and Mona's physical charms tempted Frank to confide to her that his -current survey was on behalf of the "space cannon" project. - -"But, Mona, this is just for you. Not a word to anyone." - -Mona was none the wiser. Space cannon? Wtf? "Sure, Frank. Have some more -wine." - -Frank clammed up after that, and then fell asleep. Mona, of course, told -everyone the news, swearing them to secrecy, and by the following day, -Frank was the only person in the valley who didn't know he'd spilled the -beans to her. Due to potato wine amnesia, Frank's memory of the evening -was a warm, fuzzy blank. Only Eric had any clue what a space cannon was -and he said nothing, but, unusually, he accompanied Vinod on his next -trip to town, leaving the wind farm to its own devices for a week. Eric -returned with a new fat data plug for his j-pad and a thoughtful look on -his face. - -It should be noted here that Eric's gimcrack windmills were not entirely -original. Kunchen was their intellectual progenitor. Kunchen was one of -the few inhabitants of the valley who, theoretically, "ate idle bread", -to use Eric's expression. A fugitive from a Tibet which no longer -revered the religion of his ancestors, Kunchen had already set up his -wind-powered prayer wheels and prayer cylinders on the southern ridge -long before Eric arrived. Kunchen now split his time between meditative -chanting and unsolicited advice. He regarded Eric's windmills with -suspicion, but approved of the design. He wondered aloud when Eric was -going to write some prayers on the sails of his machines until Eric gave -him permission to write his own, which he did. And, in the event, -Kunchen ever after insisted that these prayers were instrumental in how -things turned out. - -

Vinod would make an immediate trip to petition the -Nepalese authorities
In due course, as the first cruel horizontal -rains -of autumn began, -Frank left, and, for a while, things went on as they always had. It was -an almost Marxist society - "to each, according to his need; from each, -according to his ability", but actual money did change hands, -principally for trade with the outside world. No-one in the valley went -hungry. The richest people in the valley were David Lee, Vinod, and the -sheep herders. The poorest were those who had migrated to the valley, -but had no contribution to make yet. This year's immigrants were three -in number, of whom only one was a failure. Jean-Paul, a French climber -who had stayed after his expedition left, made furniture from unlikely -scraps of material and did general repairs. David Lee was from Greater -Hong Kong. By that time, so much reclamation had taken place in the hub -of Asian trade that you could walk from Hong Kong island to mainland -Kowloon without getting your feet wet. David had established a sort of -savings and loan organisation which helped to even out the peaks and -troughs in the valley's income and expenditure. David was running at a -loss, but he didn't seem to mind. It was rumoured that he was an -eccentric millionaire with illegal businesses in Hong Kong. The third -immigrant, Anil, was preparing to return to the insanely jam-packed high -rises of Hyderabad before winter set in. He couldn't take the cold, he -missed the constant physical contact with fellow human beings, and he -had never really fitted in. - -Winter passed relatively quietly. The January gales enabled Eric's wind -farm to reach a new high in power output, with fewer failures than ever -before. Snowfall was fairly light and never much of an inconvenience. -The river never once froze over. Vinod managed two return journeys to -town as early as March. - -

First of April - no joke - an old twin-rotor Samson class -ex-military helicopter laboured over the southern rim of the bowl. A -massive machine, it could carry over two hundred tons of freight, though -the thin air obviously gave it trouble. It landed in a meadow of rough -grass and clover, just upstream of Mona's, on the north bank of the -river, its tail wheel carelessly crushing a pregnant ewe which had been -so paralysed with fear that she failed to run away when the flying -monster appeared. - -The crew unloaded a dozen heavy crates, several oil-drums and a -mechanical digger. The helicopter roared and whacked its way back -southwards, but eleven men were left behind. The crates contained -pre-fabricated living quarters, generators, furniture, provisions and -office equipment. The drums contained fuel. An unbelievable amount of -fuel. - -The new arrivals had set up two prefabricated buildings, a generator, -and a satellite dish, surrounded by a high fence, before Mona's -curiosity overcame her irritation at not being formally approached by -the gang. She crossed the bridge and walked the three hundred metres to -their compound, offering food and drink as an ice-breaker, but they -politely informed her in American English that they were -self-sufficient. They needed nothing. They gave her no explanation of -their intentions, but showed her a document in Chinese which they said -conferred upon them licence to drill north of the river. As de-facto -spokesman for the valley, Mona demanded and received a photocopy of the -document. - -Later, Gulam, an important sheep owner, whose sheep the helicopter had -crushed and in whose spring meadow the Americans were setting up their -operation, barged into the office hut and complained to them. When they -understood what he was complaining about, they gave him a metal suitcase -containing Chinese currency worth sixty thousand dollars, and left him -standing while they got on with their mysterious work. David Lee was -astonished at the size of the sum Gulam deposited with him. - -The same day, at a hastily arranged noisy multi-lingual conference in -Mona's inn, the inhabitants of the valley expressed their fear of this -development. - -When it was Eric's turn to speak, he said: "I've been expecting this -ever since Frank was here. I was hoping that the terrain would be -unsuitable, or that the Nepalese administration would kill the idea." - -David spoke up: "What idea?" - -"Remember Frank and his space cannon survey last year? I investigated -these space cannons when I went to town. It's a cheap method of sending -bulk materials into orbit, anything that can take a brutal acceleration. -It costs a fraction of lifting them by rocket. They just shoot -containers from a cannon that faces east and is at high altitude, to -take advantage of the earth's rotation and the low atmospheric pressure. -A spacecraft intercepts the projectile and delivers it to where it's -needed." - -"A cannon?" said Vinod. "A big gun?" - -"Yeah, well, the barrel of the gun is sunk a few kilometres into solid -rock, and only the muzzle appears above ground. Then there's the -elevator mechanism to take the payload and the ammunition down to the -loading end." - -"That's not too bad, then, once it's finished." said David. "Apart from -the noise, of course." - -Eric looked sad. "The noise is the least of it. Yes, it's going to be a -deafening explosion several times a day. And don't forget the constant -shuttle service of helicopters. But that's not the only reason why they -are built in uninhabited areas. The gun is powered by a small atomic -explosion, and the area around the muzzle becomes contaminated very -quickly." - -"How big an area?" asked Mona. - -"The one in the Andes has made a radio-active slick thirty kilometres -long and ten wide. When this cannon gets going, the valley will be -uninhabitable apart from the loading crews in shielded accommodation. -That's why this area is ideal for them. It's isolated, and there aren't -a lot of us to complain about being moved." - -"So the only hope is to stop the building." said Mona. - -"You got it." said Eric, rubbing his chin and looking grim. - -There was lots more discussion, to no particular effect, except that it -was agreed that Vinod would make an immediate trip to petition the -Nepalese authorities to sort out this outrage. Vinod took with him the -photocopy of the licence (which David had read, but whose authenticity -he could not verify) and a shopping list from Eric. The round trip was -scheduled to take at least a week. In the event, he didn't return for a -month. - -

The village electricity supply was cut -off, though the windmills still twinkled on the ridge.
Meanwhile, -the -helicopter supply trips to the site became a twice-daily -occurrence. More men and equipment arrived. The men working on the job -started to patronise Mona's. The project manager, Billy Macdonald, a -veteran of the Bering Strait tunnel in Alaska, was friendly enough, and -appeared sympathetic with the valley dwellers. David Lee and Eric bribed -one of the helicopter pilots to add a load of copper piping to one of -his trips. Mona was mystified. What use was an additional water supply -when they'd all be leaving soon? David clearly was prepared to fund -Eric's operation, however. - -Vinod eventually returned with Ashwali from Kathmandu. Sadly, explained -the official, the licence document issued by the Chinese government was -entirely valid, and had been sanctioned by Nepal in exchange for certain -trade advantages. In fact, satellite imaging and treaty borders -demonstrated that all of the land north of the river had always been -part of the province of Tibet. Only the lower part of the bowl was -actually Nepalese territory. - -Eric remained very busy for the whole of this time. While everyone else -was letting things slide at the prospect of having to leave this lovely -haven within a year or two, Eric appeared more energetic than ever. He -became thinner and stronger. He worked long hours, frequently arriving -late at Mona's, dirty, often soaked to the skin, and sometimes covered -in scratches and grazes as if he'd been climbing. He spent a lot of time -in his workshop joining sections of pipe in strange configurations. He -started scrounging old clothes and any kind of heavy grease, mostly -mutton fat from the shepherds. He also "borrowed" a cylinder of butane -from Mona, who sometimes cooked with gas. What Eric was actually -planning, though, he would not reveal. - -As the spring melt began in the mountains, the river started to back up -and form a small lake around the Throat as usual. But this year, it -didn't drain away. The lake kept growing. Jean-Paul built a few -temporary shelters on high ground, and Mona's inn moved uphill, together -with all the villagers. Work on the tunnel for the cannon barrel, now, -inevitably, an open secret, had to stop, as the tunnel and then the -prefabricated buildings on the site became flooded. The cannon workers -were forced to evacuate all their equipment, fuel and stores to higher -ground. And still the water rose. The village electricity supply was cut -off, though the windmills still twinkled on the ridge. - -Billy Macdonald, seeing his project slowing to a standstill, came to -visit Mona at her makeshift caf�. "Is this unusual?" he asked. He didn't -have to explain what "this" was. - -"It floods every year." said Mona. "But this is the worst I've seen it." - -"When does it go down?" - -Mona was not encouraging. "Couple of months, usually. It doesn't -normally concern us, because it's not remotely this bad." - -Macdonald also consulted Eric, who was mending a wind turbine on the -southern cliff. To get there, he had to make a wide detour around the -lake and climb several hundred feet. "What do you reckon, Eric?" - -"In my opinion," Eric replied, "the Throat of Shiva is partially -blocked. At this rate, the lake will fill until the water level reaches -the southern pass and it spills out down the trail to Kathmandu. But by -that time, the whole valley will be one big lake." - -"We could drill a relief tunnel through the rim, maybe. Take the water -away." - -"You know as well as I do that by the time you finish that, the lake -will be too big to handle. Wherever you decide to build the relief -tunnel it would have to be above the current level of the lake, and the -lake is already too high for your gun. Nope. You'd better get your -bosses on the blower, and advise them to cut their losses. You must have -an alternative site. It's just unfortunate geology. Something's shifted -down in the tunnel under the Throat. We'll all be out of the valley by -the end of the year, anyway, if the lake keeps growing. And I don't know -if you've noticed, but you can often see the lake steaming in the -mornings, just above where the Throat is. In my opinion, there's -volcanic activity down there. Cut and run is my advice." - -Billy Macdonald didn't take anyone's word for it. Divers were flown in, -and, though underwater visibility was extremely limited due to the milky -suspension of ground-up rock from the glacier, they could verify that -flow through the Throat appeared to have ceased, and that there was, on -the contrary, a current of warm water coming up, a clear indication of -volcanic activity below. It was obvious that, even if the flood could be -dealt with, it would be foolhardy to mount a space cannon in an area -where earthquakes were a possibility. - -In early August, the last workers left the space cannon site. By the end -of September, the lake had disappeared. The temporary inconvenience of -the flood was more than compensated for by the huge volume of supplies, -fuel and building materials the tunnellers had abandoned. - -Kunchen attributed the miracle to his ancestors. Somehow, however, -everyone else knew that Eric was behind the miracle, but he only creased -his face in a grin when he was asked about it. Only David was ever told -the truth. - -

One evening, Eric and David sat in the setting sun, -braving an energetic -horizontal fall of sleet in the lee of Mona's inn, having drunk an -incautious quantity of Chateau Potato. From inside, they could hear Mona -and Jean-Paul laughing together and four herders quarrelling happily -over their incomprehensible card game while downing cups of buttered -tea. The sound of sheep bells drifted in the breeze as a flock, dimly -visible on the upper slopes, settled for the night. David suddenly -asked: "How did you do it, Eric?" - -"Blocked the Throat with ice." - -"Ice? Where did you get it?" - -"Made it." - -"But they said it was hot down there, not cold" - -"Heat pump, David. It's old technology. Electric pump, submersible in -this case, tubes, the stuff we got from the chopper pilot. Basically, -it's how refrigerators work. You pump heat from one part of the system -to another. The pipes have butane in them. When I could still get down -into the Throat, I climbed down and shoved the freezer coils into the -vent. The heating coils were buried in the ground near the Throat before -the lake started. All you could see even before the flood was a couple -of pipes going down, and I hid them as best as I could in the cracks. -Once the lake was there, you couldn't see a thing. Set the pump going, -and a block of ice formed in the vent. What I didn't reckon on at the -time was that the heating coils would produce enough heat to give the -volcanic effect. The main problem was all the electricity and insulation -under the water. I had to make my own Denso tape with rags and mutton -fat. And it took a week or more to form the plug, even though it only -had to cool the water by a few degrees of temperature. And when the wind -dropped halfway through, and I had to go to battery power, the pump -nearly stopped." - -"So how did you clear the ice?" - -"Put the heat pump in reverse. They work both ways. No problem there. -And I could block it again if we needed to." - -The sun dipped below the western ridge, the sky blazed with colour and -the sleet slackened to a soft drizzle. - -After a moment, David removed one of his sheepskin mittens, adjusted the -earflap of his hat, and said: "Nice here, isn't it?" - -Eric permitted himself a grin. "Shangri-La, mate, Shangri ruddy La." - -© Gil Williamson 2011 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] shangri.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Flesh Doubt - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon
Hudson - -[*BLURB] A chilling route to self-development. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Only when the first wound has healed, my -connection bedded in and resting heavy along my neck, can I begin. After -decades of disgust, scratching at itches, stretching and stiffness, -aching, or waking while dull extremities sleep on, with pleasure I force -the nails to break the skin and start to peel the arm. Blood wells and -runs, but cunning veins of nano-weave sip up and plug the dyke, -sustaining the rest as the first dripping sliver is discarded into the -pool. It was never wanted. It is no longer needed. My desire, fleshed -out at last. More quickly follows.

- -

I stop when I can see a length of bone, giddy with pain and the -thrill of action too long desired and delayed, but to hesitate now would -mean disaster. I scoop a palm of the viscous fluid from its tank, smear -it across the grain, feel it cool and start to work, see furrows eat -towards the marrow beneath the glistening surface. In minutes gleaming -lines fill the scars, traversing the nerve gap; the fingers twitch -again, then clench a fist of victory. Teeth grind in a rare smile. Where -next?

- -

I tear at meat and ligament until poor muscles fail me, satisfaction -tainted by the same old loathing. Gel-coated, I sleep beside the data -hub, patient in its steadily clouding pool, waking to tingling -sensations of numbed familiarity. My legs have become a skeletal -gun-metal parody, but my arm is now superb: a bending willow wrapped in -shining nerves, unreal flexibility, the joints of fingers, wrist and -elbow gliding together, just visible beneath the lacy mesh of my still -knitting graphene skin. I stilt-walk to the bathroom scales, half metal -and yet light, trailing my vital connection back towards the pool, the -hub.

- -

I pee � will I ever pee again? Holding with the wrong hand, now made -suddenly so right, the flesh responds in its mechanical way for the -first time in years, unexpectedly stimulated by my alien touch. I lurch -back to the interface to open a new field, preserving the data as I -strike off another last.

- -

More genes for the pool.

- -

More work to be done.

- -

The day passes, until as old eyes take in the beauty of a sunset I -reach a point of surrender: this can no longer be a self-directed -revolution. My limbs are now remade, both legs perfected too, the last -arm in transition, but the delicacies of the core cannot be so roughly -sublimed. I have had revenge upon myself; it is time to passively await -reward. A last volition, to enter instructions, then submit to my own -command. Executed.

- -

Coiling the connecting line about one arm, I follow it down into the -pool, sinking in to the deepest extent until the precious hub is cradled -in my hands. Looking up, the fluid surface is like a glowing screen. The -mouth opens to exhale, then breathes it in fully, eyes stinging only for -a moment, and then close.

- -

Time for me to rest.

- -

Time for me to rise.

- -

Liquid flows away from me as I step from the pool. How much time has -passed? Soon I will know it to the millisecond. Opening these eyes for -the first time I admire my torso, touch the ribbed latticework flexing -around my supple spine. The old weakness and decay is gone, now I feel -photons cascade over my surface, radiating through me, invigorating. I -pose and arch, internalise my strange new genitals then extrude them -again. What shall I be today? What tomorrow?

- -

This temple is complete. Joyful, I walk my body around my rooms, -leap, dance in a momentary rippling shiver. It can do anything now, -everything... except leave. Finally, there is nothing left to dispense -with but the meat of my thoughts, that muscle that flexes motionless to -move mountains without weight. My desire fleshed out at last, it is no -longer needed. It is a tether to my past, made concrete by the -connection. Until that last shred is torn away, my dreams remain caged -within its folds, my new existence anchored to the old. All trace must -be destroyed if I am ever to be free.

- -

Within my head resides the data hub, a new seat for consciousness, -waiting virginal. Within the tank resides... the last of my old life. I -sit before the glass, study the decrepit folded matter floating beyond -my smooth reflection, seeing it with an unnatural clarity, unappreciated -by mere technology. I work my hands upon the clumsy interface with sweet -grace, and beside my perception an unseen gate is cast wide open. My -thoughts flood their banks, pour across the interface and are soaked up -into a dense void, like thick honey into a heated comb, running faster -there, ever faster, and through the interface I sense my own thoughts -come spiking back across at me, greedily triggering habit and experience -to make the cognitive leap as well. Feeding the data hub, defining it. -Defining me.

- -

Emotions follow. My glorious face smiles.

- -

As the echoing of personality harmonises, we realise success. Is it -that frail suspended greyness or this finely sparkling network which -leads in our closing duet? Reaching up towards our head with gentle -hands we break the connection � and instantly all sight and duality are -lost to a timeless null. I am left afloat, alone. It was always my fate, -there was never a true escape from the cage.

- -

Soon I will free myself. Soon my golden fingers will dip into this -pool and show me mercy. I will touch these old places, the poor -abandoned home in which I still reside, where I was born to die, and I -will be borne away. Will I know when it begins? They say the brain -itself can feel no pain.

- -

No matter. It is know longueur kneaded

-

Midas ire flesh doubt

-

atlas

- -

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2011 All Rights Reserved -

- - - -[*IMAGE] fleshdoubt.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Warped - -[*AUTHOR] Jonathan Joseph - -[*BLURB] Another take on radical surgery. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

<anonpost. general broadcast | backchannel. DATESTAMP: 01:34.11.12.47>

-

Going for the cut today. -Fucking terrified. -Gabriel�s got a new cutter setup in his basement, painstakingly -assembled from gomied landfill and parts bought off a Chinese ebay -clone. I�m the guinea pig and I�m shitting it. I can take the pain -(morphine analogues nicked from Mum � de nada) but the bit that -terrifies me is the damage (de-gloving, *shudder*) and the nudity. Not -just the bare surface exposure, but the denuded lack, the comfort -blanket removal that filled me with a lunar dread. No more wazoo -bandwidth netlink, no more Shiny Things™ one-click -consumerism, -no more toggle wanks. There�s an upside though: geoloc nixed and going -dark, the rasp of newly laundered towel on my back, the snap of snaps, -the heft of hand woven broadcloth on my shoulders, the first stubborn -tug of denim over my hips. The real skin awaits.

- -

<anonpost. general broadcast | backchannel. DATESTAMP: 21:22.11.12.47>

-

As normal, the tube was late, the TerrorHurtz mid-tunnel -scanners were always going on the fritz and the alert was pegged at -Severe; this meant that the tube door secondary gait scanners were being -extra-anal. As I entered the carriage I got a non-friendly spine tingle -B-Aware ping; like all I�m going to do if I see a unattended package is -huddle as close to it as possible � I cleave to the -red-mist-is-better-than-triple-amputee mindset. I sub-vocalised a -fuck-you at the monitoring child-AI but nothing got as far as my lips � -I may be a dissenter but I�m not a moron.

Gabriel�s lockup was in -the old Olympic village and crowd density in the carriage was light. At -this time of night most people are Westbound, heading to central update -zones for mandatory Skin upgrades; you can dodge a few of these a month -but Wednesday attendance was good form, a school night schlep across -town sent good vibes to Whitehall. I shared the ageing, rattling -carriage with only three others. A weary Bangladeshi med-tech out of St. -Thomas�s; he was leaning into the foetid, faux wind at the carriage -interstices, maybe remembering a surgeon�s career in Dhaka. The other -two were interchangeable fifth-gen emo clones; sharing both a smokeless -pipe and earphones � they�ll miss their stop, enjoy, Epping -douchebags.

- -

<anonpost. general broadcast | backchannel. DATESTAMP: 23:04.11.12.47>

-

Stratford was delightful as always. I tried to turn left -out of the station but my Skin forced an executive left into Great -Eastern Road, tripling my walk time to Gabriel�s. There�s no way of -knowing if I had just dodged a dirty bomb particulate cloud or if I was -a tiny part of an evacuation modelling exercise, either way it was a -ball ache. It was nearly 2300 by the time I got to the Village. The -place was grebby as always, shuffling late night shoppers slurping down -street noodles and I turned down five Clipper sellers in as many -minutes. The faded, transitory glory in the Village was nearly as bad as -the O2 Arena. Nearly. Eleven billion in old money buys some permanence -but the hectare of previously pretty water park was now a sallow, grim -bog and previously artful poly sun canopies were shredded into -moth-eaten pterodactyl wings that snapped and fluttered in the harsh -December wind that scooted off the Lea Valley marsh.

Gabriel�s -lock up was an old storage space in what was originally the Estonian -section of the athletes� accommodation. Thirty cubic metres lined with -grey, fist-pocked plasterboard was my operating theatre for the night. -The roller door death rattled up on under-lubed tracks and Gabriel -greeted me with his standard blanked face.

- -

<anotatepost. closed broadcast | personal FB log. NO DATESTAMP>

-

Social historians looking back at the middle of 21C will -perhaps be puzzled by the predominance of starkly non-expressive faces -in -images or video captured in public places. As surveillance -saturation increased from the early 2010s onwards, fuelled by -ever more granular taxing methods and notional terrorism threats, the -general -populace evolved means of reducing their biometric footprint. Gait -modification trusses were at first home-brewed and then Chinese -mass-produced. After hoodies were outlawed, grass roots lecture sessions -on -how to fool facial recognition software grew in popularity, and sign -language jumped the gap from prosthesis to de facto language. -Stegging -became a part of life; we all now ostensibly fulfil the criteria of -optimal citizenry but our visible surfaces are merely a veneer of -adherence to an increasingly arbitrary and hard-to-follow set of -state-mandated behavioural norms.

Late in the 30s the -government lost patience with an increasingly wily public and on January -1st 2040 the Non-optional Monitoring Garb bill was -passed by the incumbent coalition. Stripped of its weasel verbiage and -hand-wringing justification it meant that anyone over the age of -fourteen -was medically fitted with a permanently derma-bonded synthetic skin. The -Skin, as it swiftly became known, could impose any number of centrally -controlled directives and what were euphemistically -called suggestions. The well-planned PR drive that coincided -with the passing of the NMG bill heavily publicised the ostensible -benefits -of such a solution: medical monitoring became the norm (but let�s forget -that waiting lists didn�t get any shorter), voting was instantly polled -via willed electro-dermal response, and crowd control measures could be -imposed with flocking algorithms (no crush injuries... allegedly). -The reality, of course, was different: mandatory curfews, real-time -polygraphic feedback, house arrest with dietary modifiers, tingle -impellers (so called below-pain-threshold behaviour suggestives), and -there was the inevitable commercial wrapper. It didn�t take long -for the Ministry of Justice to realise that a sizeable chunk of -the hallucinogenically large budget deficit could be offset by -selling their captive audience. Spam took on a completely different spin -when delivered in the form of a blood sugar mod that forced a need -for certain endorphin-laced soft drinks and it was suspected that a -pandemic -of excruciating photophobic migraine (and its subsequent -expensive remedy) were the result of similar electrochemical -tinkering.

The grass roots response to Skin didn�t take long to -manifest itself. The Cutters broadcast their first Cut on Facebook on -April -1st 2040. Sofia Bibi became the dissenters� heroine -overnight. Rejecting analgesia and chewing nearly all the way through a -wooden spoon handle in her agony, Sofia endured the ministrations of a -hacked car assembly line robot as it systematically and precisely sliced -through the Skin (and, blithely, her own hide) and shucked her like a -bloody pea. She lived for four days and died coddled in a rough shawl of -home-spun wool. Her -last, croaked words created a slogan for all future -Cutters, "It�s just skin deep, fuckers".

Gabriel was -part of the East London Cutter cell. The Cutting tech has happily -plateaued at a level that means the pain is manageable and survival is -(mostly) guaranteed, but the equipment is deliberately hobbled to ensure -that post-operative healing is imperfect. Cutters want the scarring, it -is a sign -that process was endured. In a world where -almost all sensation, feeling, pain, suffering could be mediated and -ameliorated by the Skin, it became critical to the Cutter movement -that participants suffer for their emancipation. The white heat pain of -the industrial laser scarifying the base level skin is like a re-birth -to the Cutters, self-harm elevated to near-transcendence. There is a -practical downside to Cutting though; as Skin offered an almost perfect -protection against the elements, clothing became relegated to decorative -function, semi-disposable over-garments of questionable EPZ provenance -only partially masking the faux skin tones (five taupe-through-chocolate -shades) of the semi-matt appearance of Skin. Post-Cutting, nudity became -an issue again; proper clothing became a badge of honour amongst the -Cutter cells, with countless cottage industry producing, initially at -least, crude hand woven clothing that nourished a tactility need but -offered little in the way of nuanced tailoring. The holed, ragged -aesthetic satisfied some Cutters who riffed off historical -post-apocalyptical fantasies but for the most part they looked to the -deeper past -for inspiration.

The first Cutter shuttle loom in London was -built in 2045 by Gabriel�s Southern cell; operating out of a basement in -a -disused Nando's in Camberwell; this heaving contraption looked like a -Heath Robinson sketch crossed with a miltech medical robot. The first -cloth to come off the loom was a gleaming copper fabric, painstaking -warped from hand-unravelled electrical cable. The Cutters had learned -that the chance of a successful Cutting was greatly enhanced by first -offlining the Skin before the operation. As all Skin was netlinked in -numerous ways, it made a lot of sense to EM shield the patient. This -first cloth-of-gold from the loom formed the basis for a crude but -effective Faraday cage that festooned the Nando's basement with a NASAed -bling.

- -

<anonpost. general broadcast | backchannel. DATESTAMP: 12:13.12.12.47>

-

Gabriel�s new rig was very different from the jointed, -articulated octopi that most Cutter cells use. A columnar structure -about 2.5 meters high with a central space just big enough for a person, -close up it looked a little like a highly magnified section of squid -tentacle, with countless very sharp hooks aligned in an endless -spiroform. Later I find out that he took inspiration from ancient -loopwheeler tech, a 20C weaving machine that outputted a seamless torso -garment. Instead of circularly weaving a continuous fabric Gabriel�s -machine does the opposite, each nanonically sharp hook of the Cutter -unweaves a section of Skin, close to the cellular level. Homebuilt tech -is never perfect though and this is why I am busying popping pills and -slapping patches as I shucked my outer tunic. The Skin does not transmit -derma drug patches though so I am forced to apply the morphine analogue -pernineally, not a good look between mates�

Gabriel says very -little, there is a little he can offer as solace, he knows it�ll fucking -hurt but he does nod to the neat pile of denim and wool that sits on a -metal folding chair in the corner of the lockup. This is the payoff for -Cutters, the reward for denuding ourselves of cold modern comforts. I -spied the faint striations of loom-woven selvedge denim and the sea -foam bulges of Scottish wool and felt an absurdly childish excitement, -even the boxer shorts on top of the pile seem desperately exotic, with -hand stitched buttons on the crotch placket. Not that I will be able to -wear my new clothes for at least a week, even with black market -re-epithelialisation drugs, I will be a walking, screaming scab for days -to come. Repulsively it will be my own flayed Skin that will remain my -primary garment for the initial healing phase, it will offer the best -protection and least chance for opportunistic infection; I will drag it -on, weeping, like the worst wet bathing costume ever.

- -

<Gabrielpost. closed broadcast | personal FB log. DATESTAMP: 12:47.12.12.47>

-

Jonty was braver than most. He shucked his Primarni -eight quid tunic and then only hesitated briefly before climbing into -the cutter on his hands and knees. He snagged his Skin on a lower part -of the chassis, a crappy weld I remember promising myself I'd dremel off -and never did, scoring a painless weld on his shoulder. Under the harsh -sodiums the Skin disappointed me as it always does. Despite the profound -amount of technology crammed (nano-wise and micro-ways) into its 6 mm -dermis, it screamed Gov issue drab; they never did pin down the -self-cleaning routines and dirt that wont wash away -was tattooed into the gross creases under his shoulder blades -and elbows. As he crawled under the lowest excision coil I had to look -away as he exposed his partially seamed faecal flap -and hairless genital pouch, blandly faux skin-pink and curiously more -naked than banal dangling testes would have been. God. Help. Us. He -negotiated the shimmering, hyper-scalpelled edges of the cutting surface -and stood upright, assuming the prescribed Vitruvian pose. He threw me a -terrified affirmative and I threw the knife switch. The current spiked, -the sodiums dimmed to red and I skinned him.

- -

Diary excerpt, hand written in pencil on homemade paper (off white, brownish -stains)

-

I stroked his hair, his real hair. He was asleep at -last; the seventh patch had at last taken the edge off the agony. He lay -on the rug in the front room, a wheezing comma, like he had on winter -evenings when he was a kidder, tired out from footy. He takes up more -room now, and I can't ignore the scabrous black-red stain that has -obliterated the awful floral pattern of the carpet. His escape wardrobe -is still piled neatly by the living room door where he dumped it when he -got back. The front door had slammed open in the small hours, he had -shambled in, swayed up the hallway, scaring me half to death - coal -black eyes had stared out of a red Noh mask, a nightmare made dream; but -I had been ready.

I get up to tidy his precious clothes, thick -denim digging comfortingly into the backs of my knees. I used the chair -to spare my spine and as I got up I looked down at my hands, at my own, -older, scars � a silver tracery mapping out a new future for us -both.

- -© Jonathan Joseph 2011 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] warped.jpg - -[FINISH] - Ed. - - T - -
- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev11.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev11.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index a97d7e5d..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev11.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3608 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 11 - December 2012 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the August 2012 edition of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

This, the eleventh issue of the magazine, -contains the greatest number of stories we have so far published in a single issue. - -Part of this is due to me publishing five of Les Sklaroff's short pieces in -one issue. -They are light, short, and entertaining. Do not miss them.. - -Andrew Leon Hudson presents us with a headache, or, should I say 'Nightmare'? - -Martin Clark also has two stories in this edition - quite different stories, -both excellent. - -It's a while since we were treated to one of Tom Davies' Pasha Rapley stories, so -hold on to your hats for this one. - -New contributor John Frochio gives us this 300 word story which encompasses a -subtle plot. - -I'm also publishing another in the Emigration series from Liam Baldwin. - -An irritation has arisen with Internet Explorer, which was causing recent index pages -to display wrongly. I believe I have fixed it. Please let me know if there's a problem on -any platform. - -Below, I write in memory of the punched card. - -

- - -

My theme today, following my nostalgia for slide rules -in our previous issue, is the punched card. Like the slide rule, punched cards, as -a data storage device, had a long innings. Disregarding pioneering uses, both were -relatively commonplace from the 19th century until the 1980s, when they both -basically disappeared. They disappeared for the same reason. Technology replaced them. -I cannot, offhand, find a future sf story that features punched cards, but I -know they seemed to be a permanent feature of computing. -The cards in the image are the only cards I have left. I used to have stacks of them, as they were -also useful for notes, shopping lists, propping up jiggly restaurant tables and so on. - -Though they vanished very suddenly, punched cards had an Indian Summer as data storage devices for the computers -of the 1950s and 1960s. As a programmer in the mid-1960s, when input data and software -were almost universally stored on punched cards, it was hard to believe they -would ever be superseded. Public utilities, banks, industrial firms, insurance companies, -hospitals - any large concern who could afford a �100000+ computer - had -"Data Preparation" departments, staffed by scores of staff who -spent eight hours a day transferring handwritten input forms and computer programs -onto punched cards. One of the most common sights in a business in those days -were dozens of trays of punched cards, each tray containing up to 2000 cards. - -Most people have only seen the commonest variety - the 80 column punch card as used by -the majority of computer manufacturers - -which was the same -size as the big orange one in the image above, but the orange one is, in fact, a Powers Samas 65 column -card which used round holes, not the more conventional rectangular ones. -

The little pink one is a 21 column Powers card, intended to be 2 sets of 10 columns, counting from -left to right and right to left, and a control column in the middle. Weird. -

The two long thin ones are a 36-column Powers card and a 40 column ICT. -

The pale square one is an IBM 96 column card (3 rows of 32) - used, I think, on the System 38 computer family. -

The cut-off corners were to ensure that every card in a pack was facing the same way. - -Many disasters arose from the accidental spilling of packs of cards, as their sequence, as well as -their orientation, was usually critical. I once dropped a pack when entering a lift, -and a few cards fell down the slot between the floor and the car. I not only had to put them back in order, -I had to figure out which ones had disappeared and get them re-punched. - -You also had to learn how to put the card pack into any given card reader, as they all -varied, like today's chip and pin machines. I still remember the ICL 900 card per minute reader, -(face down, 9 edge leading). That machine read, as you will easily calculate, 15 cards -per second, and it really had to move them quickly over the single column read head. -The result was that for part of the time, each card was actually airborne, and woe betide you if it -was even slightly bent, as aerodynamics would turn it sideways, and it would get stuck crosswise -in the channel, and within one second, the following 15 -cards would have hurtled into it before the automatic error tripped or you hit the stop switch. -Then it was a question of trying to get the cards back in order, repunch any bent or torn ones and start again. -It was nerve-racking enough at 900 cards a minute to keep the input hopper full and to empty the output. -

The only card I ever learned to read by eye was the standard 80 column card. -I could also punch cards on a hand punch. It became quite common for -good programmers to hand-punch a program straight onto cards, and get a hard copy of them -by running them through a print program. - -Occasionally, card surgery -was attempted. When punching cards, a by-product was the pile of little rectangular chips -of cardboard that the punch cut out of the card. These were called "chad". If there was a single -column error on an 80 column card, you could push pieces of chad back into the holes that were wrong -- they fitted quite well - and re-punch that column - a great time-saver in the middle of the night, -otherwise you -would have to re-punch the whole 80 columns on a new card (which, of course, was what you OUGHT to -have done). Unfortunately, the next time that pack of cards was -riffled (as -you had to do before the pack was put in a card reader) the chad was likely to fall out, and cause a error -which might take hours to find. Wildcat card surgery became such a problem in some companies -that hand punches were -banned, but most programmers had one hidden in the back of a filing cabinet, just in case. - -Happy days, eh? - - -[*IMAGE] cardreader.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Acacia albida owners - BEWARE. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The first one to be filmed (to use the -archaic term) was spotted at dawn by a roving reconnaissance pod over -Ratman�s Fork, a desolate spot where the rough edge of urban sprawl gave -way to the broken shells of long-abandoned warehouses. The route of the -old motorway was still just detectable under the accretion of brambles, -weeds, hardy grasses and the detritus of ancient wreckage. The images -were automatically filed at Central, but left unprocessed for some sixty -days. Ratman�s Fork was not listed among priority scanning zones.

-

Weeks passed before another one was detected, this time in the early -afternoon, amid the affluent parkland on the outskirts of Snoak City, -where Paeony 3rdfield, jauntily buoyant after a late light breakfast of -joyflakes, was walking Topaz and Chartreuse, her stylishly expensive -modifidos. Along with all other nearby electronic devices, they -abruptly deactivated and, despite Paeony's optimistic pleading, remained -stubbornly inert. She tried to summon the emergency service, then her -friends, and finally her parents, but her e-screen stayed blank.

-

Reports of fused circuitry began filtering through to Central, where -a hologrid displayed the telltale 600-metre radius of malfunction, its -source apparently lodged in the crown of an Acacia albida, -imported generations ago from Malawi. A dozen-strong team of Detechs -arrived in protective gear, armed with powerful spring-loaded -tranquilliser dartguns. They ignored the forlorn Paeony and her -unmoving pets, and with swift precision positioned themselves -strategically around the tree. Unfortunately they were too late; their -target had moved on.

-

At Central, over the next few months, analysts sifted through a spate -of reported sightings and dead-zone instances, for the most part in -thinly populated areas. Allowing for nerdy hoaxes and sophisticated -criminal sabotage, there was an undeniable core of of genuine cases, -including the Ratman�s Fork images, which though belatedly discovered, -turned out to be invaluable. These showed a fast-moving quadruped about -the same size as a domestic cat, and at first glance not dissimilar in -features, apart from markedly recessed eyes, and a kind of mesh above -its lipless mouth. Closer scrutiny revealed it to be acaudate, covered -not with fur, but with chitinous or quasi-metallic scales, and having -two pairs of flexible segmented digits. Combined with less distinct -images from other sources it was also seen to possess retractable -wings.

-

No specimen is known to have been caught, and the creature�s origin -is still speculative, as are its numbers, its social organisation, its -ability to communicate, and its reason for being here. It has no niche -in any known terrestrial ecosystem. If bioengineered, it is well in -advance of our current technology. The characteristic damage caused to -electrically-powered systems, while inconvenient, is now believed to be -unintentional, and its preference for deserted areas may imply its -awareness of and attempts to minimise these effects.

-

Rumours still abound, some inevitably of the child-frightening -variety. Is it controlled from elsewhere? Is it a scout, an emissary, -a refugee, an accidental visitor? Is there a vast undiscovered hive, a -lurking mothership, a secret rift in the space-time continuum? We -simply do not know. It will be interesting to find out, as no doubt we -will in due course. Meanwhile at Central they are still puzzling about -the Acacia albida event, and continuing to search for meaningful -patterns in the other confirmed appearances. On the positive side, at -least Paeony 3rdfield can smile again. She has been seen flaunting a -sumptuous pair of top-of the-range operatic paraparrots, following the -successful insurance claim on her defunct modifidos. -

- -© L J Sklaroff 2012 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] acacia.jpg - -[*ITEM] Dundro Fappit's Mistake - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Not to be confused with the Legend of Red-beard and the -Chiming Bones. Oh, no. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The natives of the Micronesian island of -Tao'kaua sometimes tell their children the legend of The Jellyfish -Who Tried to Eat the Stars. It is one of many cautionary tales they -have up their sleeve to instil respect, discourage foolhardiness, and, -as a good friend of mine once eloquently put it, 'knock some of the -greth out of the little bastards.' As a morally instructive example, -The Jellyfish Who Tried to Eat the Stars is about as effective as -The Snake Who Lost the Moon, or The More and More Bird. -As a result, the children of Tao'kaua tend to retain much of their -greth, and are obliged, like the rest of us, to learn from their own -mistakes.

-

One such mistake was made by Dundro Fappit, a native not of Tao'kaua, -of which hardly anyone has heard, but of Snoak City, half a world away. -For at least five generations Fappits had been makers of musical -instruments. Back in the days of Tuddy and Larsha, Dundro's -great-great-grandparents, the family had provided bespoke instruments -for the leading musicians of the day, including the great Horum Pan and -the multi-talented Winivrel Flixx. These days the clients were less -world-renowned, but no less demanding.

-

In the Fappit workshop, the sweet tang of freshly pared wood mingled -with sharp epoxy resin, steam, heated metal and varnish. Partially -completed instruments were held in clamps, or supported by sturdy -armatures. A multitude of specialised tools hung neatly from labelled -hooks on the walls. Some were in use by apprentices under the close -supervision of Dundro's brothers, Rerp and Sullit. Lathes purred and -buzzed, suction ducts whirred, preventing much of the sawdust and fine -shavings of maple, sycamore, ash and cherrywood from drifting to the -floor. Behind the closed door of the adjoining office sat Dundro -Fappit, gazing dolefully at a slightly chipped pyramidal glass -paperweight on his paper-free desk, and contemplating his mistake.

-

Aurelian 3rdfield, fond, neglectful father of Paeony, stood at the -window of his studio, staring down past the iridescent office towers, -the shopping complex with its sinuous black and silver roofscape, and -the distant parkland, to where the river looped towards a hazy horizon. -He was humming. It was a tenor hum of great refinement and musicality, -the product of natural talent and a considerable amount of training. In -his early years he had studied theory and composition, practiced his -scales, sung in a choir, mastered harmony, counterpoint and rhythm. He -explored the many different traditions, favouring baroque and classical, -but finding delight and even occasional profundity among more recent -compositions.

-

He had himself written pieces for voice and a variety of instruments, -as well as some purely choral works, and had just completed his latest -commission: a sonata for flute, violin and varp (the erstwhile -vibraharp). He was humming, with immodest satisfaction, the poignant -coda from the final movement. His sonata was shortly due to have its -first public performance, courtesy of Quicksilver Promotions and -Sparagulan College. It pleased Aurelian greatly to know that it was to -be performed by three outstanding musicians; the venerable violinist -Dizmin Harf, the irrepressible young flautist Tiril Elkfreen, and -seemingly ageless varpist Slath Croblin, remembered by many a jazz -aficionado. Rehearsals had gone well, and the acoustics at Sparagulan -College auditorium were of course perfect. He looked forward to the -concert with proprietorial excitement.

-

Dundro Fappit suddenly realised his e-screen had been flashing -importunately for some time. Even before responding, he knew who it -would be, and tried desperately to gather his wits.

-

"Ah, Maestro, what a pleasure to hear from you!"

-

"Is it ready yet?" demanded Dizmin Harf, clearly unwilling -to waste time with pleasantries.

-

"Well, there are a few minor adjustments to be made to the -bridge, and one or two�"

-

"You are aware," interrupted Harf, "that it was -promised for last week, and that the concert is now imminent?"

-

"My profuse apologies, Maestro. I will have it delivered to you -within 48 hours at the very most, and naturally we will waive any -delivery charges."

-

"Pfah to your charges! You have 24 hours, Fappit. Otherwise I -will sue you." The screen went blank. Fappit stared at the -blankness. It stared back at him, refusing to blink first.

-

In the workshop, Sullit, Rerp and the apprentices failed to hear his -spontaneous string of interesting expletives above their industrious -whirring, tapping and scraping, but minutes later the office door -opened, and Dundro emerged, looking unusually pale and determined. He -stood in the doorway holding a very fine-looking violin. It appeared to -glow with an inner grace. Its burnished elegance sang, albeit silently, -of a lifetime of attentive care. Its taut strings yearned for the soft -caress of a masterful bow. The nearest craftsmen -had turned to look at Dundro, who gestured that he wanted everyone�s -attention. With a diminishing whine, lathes were powered down, and -tools temporarily laid to rest. Dundro held up the violin.

-

"You all know whose this is, " he stated. They nodded. -The unmistakeable quality of Dizmin Harf�s precious instrument was equal -to the best of the old Italian masters. They knew that Dundro had -personally undertaken to check it for any imperfections before the -forthcoming concert. Dundro turned the violin so that they could see -its back. There was a communal gasp at the sight of the slightly ragged -small square hole.

-

"It was an accident," explained Dundro, "but it was -entirely my fault. The instrument was on my desk, and its neck caught -on my sleeve as I turned to reach for a clean polishing cloth. I tried -to catch it as it fell, but as I did so I knocked my paperweight to the -floor, and by an unlucky chance the violin dropped on top of it. I have -been too ashamed to confess this to the Maestro, and until now, even to -you." Dundro was close to tears. "But he must have it by -tomorrow, or I am ruined."

-

Sullit stepped forward and gently took the violin from him. "We -are professionals, brother," he said. "And in a crisis such -as this we pull together. Is that not so?" His fellow craftsmen -agreed. "We will put everything else on hold," added Rerp, -"and concentrate on restoring this magnificent fiddle. Come, -Dundro, let us make measurements. Sullit, you must match the veneers. -The rest of you, prepare a working area." Activity resumed in the -Fappit workshop. Tuddy and Larsha would have been proud of this scene -of quiet efficiency and minute attention to detail, and probably amazed -at the rapidity with which these new-fangled glues and varnishes could -be made to dry. In their day the temperamental clients, however -distinguished, simply had to be patient.

-

Dizmin Harf�s violin was delivered in perfect condition the following -morning. He was less grumpy than expected, because Tiril Elkfreen, -whose company he rather enjoyed, had come round to discuss some of the -3rdfield sonata�s musical nuances. The performance duly took place at -the appointed time in the Sparagulum auditorium, and was deemed to be an -enormous success. Aurelian 3rdfield�s reputation was enhanced, and -further commissions were bound to follow.

-

A few members of the audience wondered why Slath Croblin, though -undoubtedly a fine musician, needed to hunch over his varp like a -predatory vulture, but that had always been his habit. It brings to -mind the legend of Red-beard and the Chiming Bones, but the -details escape me.

- -© L J Sklaroff 2012 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] fappit.jpg - -[*ITEM] Something Quirky - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Charles Atlas has a lot to answer for. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

They used to say that something lurked in -those laurel bushes half-way down Sheaveshill Avenue. Well, we -lurked there, and perhaps we started that rumour to deter other kids. -The bushes were part of our territory, and therefore sacrosanct. -

-

In retrospect they were no more than a patch of dense suburban shrubs -planted by a previous generation, but that summer their dusky -dark-leaved seclusion was our secret meeting-place, our adult-free maze, -our private network of narrow paths and intimate clearings. It was here -we played hide-and-seek, engaged in mock Wild West shoot-outs and Flash -Gordon adventures, drank home-made lemonade, sucked sherbet dips through -liquorice straws, outdid each other�s embellished reports of real or -imagined events. It was also a market-place for bartering marbles, bent -nail puzzles, cigarette cards, magnets, lenses, model cars, or anything -else of quirky interest.

-

Pete turned up one day with a small dull oval mirror in a -reddish-gold frame, about the size of an old penny, which he said had -been given to him by his gran, but which he later admitted he�d actually -found on the path near the station. It was rather odd. The mirror was -neither glass nor metal, and seemed to have a slightly resilient -surface. And when put to the ear we were fairly sure a sound could be -heard emanating from it, faint but continuous, something like the -dragging of distant chains.

-

We all examined it and listened to it in turn, but it didn�t appear -to do anything else. So although we were intrigued, no one was -particularly enthusiastic; we preferred things that worked or had an -agreed value. Dave cheerfully offered his little wooden squirrel (with -genuine squirrel-fur tail) for it, but Pete declined. From time to time -desultory offers were made and rejected: a thumb-operated hole-punching -device, a tiny magnetic compass, a kind of flying propeller launched -from a spiral shaft, a bird-whistle, a fossil ammonite. To my surprise, -Pete finally succumbed to the undoubted charm of Charles Atlas, one of -my pet mice, which I had only brought out for a spot of fresh -air.

-

Sadly for Pete, Charles Atlas escaped within a week. The summer -ended. We outgrew the easy camaraderie of the laurel bushes, and -gradually pursued our diverse paths into adulthood.

-

These memories resurfaced this afternoon, when, rummaging through old -boxes, as I seem to do every decade or so, I came across a St Bruno�s -tobacco tin with a firmly jammed lid. I eventually managed to prise it -open with my trusty fine-bladed dumpy screwdriver. It contained an -assortment of once useful and possibly treasured objects, including a -small coil of fine copper wire, a plastic badge from an industrial -exhibition, a short thermometer in a tubular metal case and, wrapped in -a swathe of yellow silk, the oval mirror.

-

I�m holding it now. It�s a strange sensation after all these years, -having failed to spare it a thought for so long. Is it really as odd as -we believed as kids? In these hi-tech days its surface now makes me -think of a plasma screen, but that would be ridiculous. Anyway, there -are no visible controls, just that shallow slot on the rim. Wait, what -about that sound we convinced ourselves we could hear? Hell�s -teeth! We didn�t imagine it. It sounds like, I don�t know, -maybe a river of ballbearings, or something enormous trying to breathe. -What did I do with that screwdriver? Supposing, very gently, I press -the blade in this slot? Ye gods! I didn�t mean to drop it, but the -damned thing�s expanding! And it IS a screen. There�s a -reddish glow, and something moving about, cloudy, but getting clearer, -and the sound is definitely louder now� What�s that? A hook?; no, I -think it might be a claw. Fantastic 3-D definition. I can see the -scales rippling. There�s an acrid smell. It�s� aaagh, the heat, the -heat!

-

-© L J Sklaroff 2012 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] quirky.jpg - -[*ITEM] Hoolocks and Hellions - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Book Launch - 3rdField style - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Patella 3rdfield sat in front of the mirror -adjusting her ear-rings: spiral swirls of diamond-dust studded with tiny -sapphires and rubies held in an invisible cloud of programmed nanogel. -She was wearing the deep blue cashmere and silk outfit which Aurelian -said matched her eyes. Her dark blonde hair was neatly pinned back. The -ear-rings were simplified models, of course, but the accelerated -movement was detectable even under quite low magnification. Her -daughter Paeony used to play with them when she was about nine or ten, -solemnly peering for hours in the hope of finding the black holes which -she had been told were hiding inside. Savouring the memory, Patella -smoothed her hair, slipped on her designer floats, and glided downstairs -to where her husband was waiting patiently. Holding her at arm�s -length, he looked at her critically. "Now, do I think that was -worth waiting an extra five minutes for? Absolutely!" They both -smiled, and set off for the launch party at Fissile & Sprent.

-

Morton Quanderpyre was already there, his voice booming above the -hubbub.

- -

"�about as much panache as a shrivelled stoat! -Where�s the artistry, the finesse, eh, Croles? In my day � and -yours I dare say, there used to be a great deal more preparation, more -honing. Now it�s all manic capering and caterwauling." -Trafford Croles, veteran actor, murmured his agreement while -unobtrusively craning to look past Quanderpyre�s shoulder, where the -Spandrels were making their flamboyant entrance. Agathon and Ludmilla -had already flounced in, each with glossy dark hair fanned out into a -halo. They were clad in cerise taffeta with glints of emerald at head -and foot. Thor followed, in his customary black tunic and belt wth -silver clasp, wearing his mirrored shades, then Wu Ying in something -scantily diaphanous under her prismatic cloak, and Pepito, Milton and -Scapula; all three in bioluminescent garments pulsing in phase. Miss -Derbyshire wore a multi-fringed dark crimson dress whose edges -coruscated with fractal sparks, and lastly came little Clint, under an -enveloping dome of a hat, apparently disguised as a bipedal -mushroom.

-

Sprent wondered how the Spandrels had managed to find their way on to -the guest list. He did not doubt their celebrity status, or their -appeal to the vidkid generation, but to the best of his knowledge they -had no literary credentials. And if it were not for his enormous wealth -and media influence, that noisy oaf Quanderpyre would have been -excluded. Had old Creg Fissile still been alive, he would have ensured -a more stringent check on the invitations, and would probably also have -stationed security guards with identipads at the door. On the other -hand, Sprent reflected, the humourless Fissile, for all his probity and -pursuit of excellence, would very likely have overlooked the potential -popularity of Patella 3rdfield�s work, which he, Pentheus Sprent, was -quietly proud to have been among the first to recognize.

- -
- * * * HOOLOCKS AND HELLIONS * * * the - latest collection from - Fissile & Sprent�s very own - l Patella 3rdfield - l AVAILABLE IN ALL FORMATS�..txt�. aud�. vid�. trid�. grid�. - holo�. * * *

HOOLOCKS AND - HELLIONS - * * * - llustrated by the author * * * rohtua eht yb detartsulli - * * * P-A-T-E-L-L-A 3-R-D-F-I-E-L-D - l only from Fissile & Sprent - l - HOOLOCKS AND - Hellions

- -

He glanced up at the ads spinning slowly round the walls, blossoming - and dissolving:

- -

A sudden burst of applause by the entrance prompted guests to turn - towards the arched doorway. And there they were! Sprent strode - forward to greet them, beaming. "Ah, Patella, our guest of - honour, and Aurelian, welcome! We are truly privileged. So - good to see you both. Patella, you are looking lovely! And - Aurelian, so distinguished. I heard that you have become part - of Dizmin Harf�s repertoire � quite an accolade. Now, Patella�" - He led them away, animatedly outlining the order of proceedings.

-

The evening was quite a success. Patella judiciously kept her speech -short, the champagne flowed, multimedia sales of �Hoolocks and Hellions� -were satisfyingly brisk. Quanderpyre tried to corner Pentheus Sprent, -seeking another sounding-board for his unsolicited opinions, but -fortunately the Spandrels intervened, sweeping between them on their way -out in a scintillating, lurid flurry of colour, like some wayward -ceremonial Chinese dragon, followed by what appeared to be a swiftly -moving inverted wok.

-

Trafford Croles still possessed the easy charm which had endeared him -to an earlier generation. He was comfortable with adulation, and mildly -resented having to watch it bestowed on others. Rationally, he allowed -that Patella 3rdfield deserved her triumph, but as she was only a -writer, he had no cause to be jealous. What he found irksome was that -hardly anyone in this gathering seemed to recognize him, even -though he had been standing profiled against an illuminated patch of -wall, simply exuding charisma, and ready to share the unique benefits of -his accrued wisdom and theatrical experience. He sipped the last few -drops from his fourth glass of champagne; about the only thing here -which probably matched his own age, he thought morosely. That ghastly -Quanderpyre had briefly loomed in front of him, complaining about -something or other, then the peculiar but eye-catching Spandrels had -trooped in, creating something of a distraction until the 3rdfields -arrived. Sprent had acknowledged him with a polite wave of the hand, -but apart from that he was virtually ignored. It gradually dawned on -him, as he casually abstracted another glass from a passing tray, that -most of the people here were far too young to remember his stage -appearances, and unless they were historians, too preoccupied with their -own concerns to bother with anything screened before trid or holo. He -blinked up at the relentlessly revolving ads, and still clutching his -glass with automatic care, slid slowly to the floor.

-

Aurelian and Patella, having duly circulated independently, -eventually found themselves together again, to their mutual relief. -"How was it for you?" asked Patella, with solicitous good -humour. - -

"Oh, bearable," her husband replied. "Frankly, -I was pleased not to be the object of attention; it meant that unlike -you, I could choose the people I wanted to speak to. I had an -interesting chat with Pår Søderstrøm, the designer. -Did you know he breeds miniature giraffes? But what about you, Pat? You -must be exhausted." - -

She smiled, then stifled a yawn. "Oh, I�m -fine. They were all very kind. Some of the younger ones are a bit -awe-struck and tongue-tied at first, but their questions are quite -thoughtful. Sprent looks very pleased with himself, so I suppose we can -say it went well, despite the occasional sound of Morton Quanderpyre�s -bellowing. I�m not quite sure what he was doing here, or the Spandrels, -for that matter, although they did look rather striking." - -

"They enjoy showing off, " said Aurelian, "and they�re -a -bit of a cult with the -vidkids. Unlike poor old Croles," he said -sympathetically, nodding toward the crumpled figure against the far -wall, whose snores were distinctly audible across the room. "Do -you remember how Paeony used to love those old pompous pre-trid -performances of his when she was little?" - -

"I was thinking -about her earlier ths evening," Patella said, gently fingering an -ear-ring. "Shall we go home?"

- - -

-© L J Sklaroff 2012 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] hoolocks.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Foroquont's Maze - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Be very careful where you tread! - -[*DESCRIPTION]

A starburst of globubbles signalled the -start of the annual contest in Snoak City�s westernmost district of -Whissit Fields. In the warm dusk the bright globes hung like a slowly -expanding cluster of floating jewels, casting a network of overlapping -colours over this year�s untested challenge that was Foroquont�s -maze.

-

High above the maze�s central core, an invisibly tethered pod, its -underside a non-reflective black, beamed images of the selected -contestants as they each made their way through the four separate -entrance locks. Spim Foroquont had incorporated a range of unexpected -design features into the fabric of the maze. Although substantially -organic, in the ancient tradition of impenetrable hedges, some sections -contained traps for the unwary, such as soft mirrors, opaque -cloud-curtains, sensor-triggered barriers and disorienting white noise -areas.

-

At the northern entrance Garsel Vence had already followed the narrow -spiral path for thirty metres before suddenly faltering in front of a -solid block of hedge. He retraced a dozen steps. Out of the corner of -his eye he was almost sure he had belatedly registered something -different about the texture of the hedge on his right. He ran a gloved -hand along the smoothly-trimmed, densely textured leaves. Nothing. The -light from the globubbles confused his colour perception, but was bright -enough to obviate the use of his torch. He removed the glove, closed -his eyes, and moved his fingertips across the same section. Ah, there! -Although the leaves appeared to be identical, here their texture was -subtly different, slightly drier, artificial. Pulling on the glove -again he used both hands to apply pressure systematically to this -section, and was rewarded when it responded by pivoting like a revolving -door, allowing him access to a parallel path.

-

Almost a thousand metres to the south, Taera Cassorian was making -faster progress, having avoided two cul-de-sacs and a right-hand fork -which would have returned her to her starting point. However, she was -now confronted by a choice of two open leftward-curving paths and a -disconcertingly dark patch of roiling fog. Unclipping the torch from -her belt, she aimed the powerful beam directly into the obstructive -cloud. It failed to penetrate far enough to give any indication of its -depth. She shrugged her shoulders, took a deep breath, and plunged -through. After a few steps she ran blindly straight into another hedge. -The shock almost caused her to turn back, but she forced herself to stay -calm, got down on hands and knees and felt her way down the hedge to its -foot. There was a gap at the base, which was just large enough for her -to slide through to the other side, where an unobstructed path again -presented her with a choice of whether to turn right or left. She chose -left, which led her to a series of sharp turns in both directions. -After ten minutes she realised she had lost her torch.

-

Jaunx Rimhill stood for a moment at the eastern entrance staring up -at the globubbles. He was grateful for their multicoloured brightness, -which he knew would persist for eight hours or more, but they could not -be relied upon for orientation. Although the air was relatively still, -every slight current changed their configuration, and already a few of -the outermost had drifted out of sight above the hedge-tops. Once -inside the maze his normally acute sense of direction soon deserted him. -A dead end obliged him to retreat through a gap on his left that he had -been reluctant to take, and within a few minutes he was uncomfortably -convinced that he was going the wrong way. At every turn the view was -frustratingly similar, and as he peered ahead he began to worry whether -his vision was beginning to play tricks. In the distance he saw a -figure approaching him, which he knew was highly improbable, as none of -the other three could possibly have covered that amount of ground in so -short a time. Who the hell could it be? No-one else was allowed in the -maze except in emergencies. They both reached for their torches -simultaneously. As the two beams met with a fierce glare, Jaunx laughed -with relief at his own image. There was no other detectable opening, so -he stepped through the soft mirror, and had to put his hands to his ears -at the hissing roar that assaulted him from every side. The silvered -nanogel sealed silently behind him.

-

When she was a little younger, Eris Sipsel sometimes used to play -chase-the-lizard with her elder sisters. She couldn�t have known then -that the game would be invaluable training for a potential maze -contestant. Her agile manoeuvres through the early stages were -spectacular. She was fast, confident, graceful, seemingly undaunted by -the difficulty of the task. The aerial view from the pod revealed that -in less than ten minutes Eris had successfully negotiated the five outer -concentric passages before encountering any of Foroquont�s concealed -traps. Underfoot the paths were composed throughout of a stiff but -resilient water-repellent aerofoam material. In natural light it was a -pale greyish-green, but the globubbles mottled its surface with rainbow -patches and shadows. Eris was enjoying the ease with which the springy -surface allowed her to run until one incautious step triggered the two -devices which suddenly blocked both her forward progress and the chance -to retreat. Above her two globubbles, amber and emerald, hung in a -square of darkness, roofing the claustrophobic space from which there -seemed to be no escape.

-

Garsel Vence was wondering whether a primitive magnetic compass would -have been of any help. It would certainly have kept him heading roughly -south, despite the many diversions, but would have offered no guarantee -of reaching the path that led to the vital centre. As it was, their -equipment was strictly limited to flexisuits, gloves, torch, waterflask, -nutritabs, basic first-aid dressings and the small cylindrical emergency -alarm which contained a static flare; no tools or navigational -instruments, not even a watch. Basically, it was a question of trying -to stay alert, avoiding obvious pitfalls, and trusting largely to luck. -Knowing only that the diameter of the maze was about one kilometre, and -judging from the apparent thickness of the hedge and the uniform width -of the paths, he had tried to estimate the number of concentric paths he -would have to cross before hopefully reaching the centre. The -discouraging total amounted to more than three hundred. So far he had -managed only seventeen, recording the tally with some difficulty by -making marks with a thumbnail on the side of his waterflask. His -initial enthusiasm had already worn off, but determination was among his -strongest assets.

-

Taera Cassorian tried hard not to panic on discovering the loss of -her torch, cursing her stupidity for not having clipped it on securely. -At least she could still see, although she knew that in time the -globubbles would dissipate She had to decide whether she could risk -going on without it, or waste valuable time looking for it. On balance, -she realised it was too useful to be without, and unwillingly turned -back, struggling to remember where exactly were the turns she had made -since she had crawled away from the fog. It took her almost an hour to -find the small area of blackness at the foot of the hedge, where she -groped cautiously until her fingers finally encountered the familiar -shape. She almost cried with relief at her minor triumph, feeling -momentarily as if she had performed a successful conjurer�s trick. In -her mind�s ear she heard the accompanying drum-roll and clash of -cymbals. Allowing herself a nutritab and a sip of water she set off -again with a sense of renewed energy.

-

Jaunx found himself sitting on the path with his back resting against -the hedge. There was a faint buzzing in his head, and he felt slightly -giddy. Far away he thought he could hear a low muttering. He noticed -his torch on the ground beside him, and automatically clipped it back -on, idly wondering why he was sitting down. Gradually his head cleared -and some memories returned: the approaching figure, glaring light, -entering the mirror� He frowned, unsure of what had happened next, or -which way he had been heading. Getting to his feet he glanced behind -him, and without unclipping the torch he swept its beam along the hedge. -No sign of a mirror, just the parallel curving of the high dark walls. -He shook his head and turned right, searching for the next gap.

-

Eris fought back tears of frustration. She had examined everything -she could reach, peering and prodding at the surrounding hedge walls and -hopping on every point of the square she was confined to in an attempt -to locate a trigger spot. She growled with irritation, and fancied she -heard a deeper echoing growl in the far distance. She began to have an -irrational fear that the mechanism might have jammed in the locked -position, which meant that she would have to use her alarm flare. -Defeatist thinking. She considered the alternatives. Either her -examination had been too hasty, and she had overlooked something, or� -Or what? She couldn�t think of anything else. She had been stuck here -for so long that the emerald globubble was no longer visible. Whith a -cry of exasperation she reached for her torch and began her meticulous -examination for the third time. Abruptly, with a rush of air and a -scattering of tiny leaves, there occurred the alternative she had not -considered; the release mechanism was time-delayed, and she was free to -move on.

-

Thousands of Snoak City viewers, and many more further afield were -watching the contest live, prepared as ever to match the contestants� -endurance with their own less demanding variety. A team of commentators -was on hand to supply background details on the selection process, -statistics from past contests, Spim Foroquont�s credentials, the -contestants� occupations, achievements and interests. In the event of -prolonged inactivity or an unforeseen hiatus there was readily available -back-up material in the form of recorded interviews with their friends -and relatives, teachers and former participants. Bets were permitted to -be placed on the likely winner for the first three hours only, with all -proceeds to the Snoak City Outdoor Festival Fund. Inevitably, odds kept -shifting until the last allowable moment. Only after the three-hour -period was an overview of the entire maze screened, so that it was now -possible to compare in real time the four contestants� actual progress. -From time to time the focus shifted to give a slow panoramic view over -Snoak City, from the dimly lit suburbs, across the weaving trails of -traffic and the changing geometries of light from tall office blocks, -the illuminated fountain in Sparagulan College Square, the dark expanse -of parkland, the necklaces of light across the river, to the flickering -clouds looming distantly above the sea.

-

All the contestants had noticed the unexpected change in the movement -of the globubbles; they were being carried higher and faster, all in the -same direction. There was no appreciable change in temperature, but the -sky had become darker, now requiring their total dependence on torches. -In confirmation of the increase in wind speed, small gusts began to -buffet the hedges, channelling their energy through the narrow -passageways. There was a distinct intermittent rumbling.

-

From above the sensitive cameras in the pod showed that Garsel Vence -was now clearly in the lead, having traversed more than half the -distance to the centre, but those watching could see the difficulty that -lay ahead of him. Garsel had abandoned the discipline of making -tally-marks on his waterflask when he had reached a hundred. He -reasoned that it was time-consuming, and that in any case he could trust -his memory, which told him that the path on which he had just emerged -was the two hundred and sixth from the perimeter. His torch revealed an -obstruction to his left which a practiced test suggested was not going -to budge. Moving to his right the torch beam whitened, encountering -light-scattering particles where the air was steadily being thickened; -the increasing gusts had disrupted a cloud-curtain, which was spreading -its opacity well beyond its source. With the globubbles gone, and the -torch barely of use, the next part of his course was going to depend -almost entirely on touch. For an instant, the sky lightened, revealing -a possible gap just beyond the swirling mist. Seconds later there was a -reverberating boom.

-

Taera was now obsessively protective about her torch, and kept -touching her belt to ensure it was still secured, using it sparingly -while there was still ambient light. She had no idea how far she had -progressed, but had chosen to bypass a soft mirror, thereby avoiding a -trap, and had gained time by slipping diagonally through two successive -concealed openings before the last globubbles drifted away. She became -aware that fitful eddies of wind were sweeping between the hedges, and -pulled the hood of her flexisuit over her head to stop hair getting in -her eyes. Luckily this action afforded some protection against the -barrage of white noise which suddenly assailed her in what had seemed an -innocuous clearing around a central pillar of hedge. It was obviously -from this pillar that the deafening noise was emanating. Defensively, -Taera flung herself to the ground, and the noise abated. Clutching her -torch, she inched forward awkwardly until she had passed the pillar, and -tentatively propped herself up, then slowly rose to her feet. -Thankfully, the sound had stopped. She awarded herself a nutritab, and -had taken only a few more steps when a bright flash lit the sky, soon -followed by an air-trembling roar.

-

Thunder didn�t bother Jaunx Rimhill. He had spent two years logging -on the slopes of Mount Kyren, where for a whole season the constantly -rising cumulus was riven by jagged sparks whose sharp cracks rebounded -for hours across the valley. Admittedly, it was the last thing he -expected here in Whissit Fields, especially during the contest, but the -sound had the effect of spurring him on, despite the growing tiredness -in his legs. He turned another corner, aligning his sight along the -torch beam, watching out for any sign that might betray another of -Foroquont�s nasty surprises. Sure enough, some five metres in front of -him the air looked dangerously smoky, and he knew he would have to trace -the source before being able to advance.

-

The co-ordinator, Pedrek Ens was becoming seriously concerned. He had -been assured by the forecasters at Central that although there could be -some precipitation tomorrow, the chances of local rain were extremely -slight for the duration of the contest. He knew that meteorology was -not an exact science, but dammit, this approaching storm could ruin the -event. For the previous eighteen years globubbles had always dutifully -stayed more or less in place, and Mazes had remained wind-free and dry. -He didn�t need this uncontrollable element of drama in what was supposed -to be a straightforward elimination contest, although the media people -seemed to be revelling in it. The pitch of the commentators� voices was -rising unhealthily, and he was tempted to tell them all to calm down. -Nevertheless he made sure his technicians were monitoring their grids, -ready to alert the emergency rescue service if necessary.

-

Anyone close enough to hear what Eris Sipsel was chanting under her -breath as she jogged and sprang between hedges might have been forgiven -for thinking her grip on reality was slipping. Her subvocal refrain was -"Chase the lizard! Chase the lizard!". It seemed to be -boosting her morale. The truth was, she had never quite overcome a -childhood aversion to thunder, and was trying to obliterate the fear -with happier memories. The last dazzling flash and nerve-jangling clap -had been practically overhead, heralding a few heavy drops followed by a -hard vertical torrent from which the hedges offered no shelter. Eris -pulled the hood down over her eyes, and struggled on.

-

It had now been more than five hours since the contestants had first -entered the maze, and their exhaustion was apparent, even from the -aerial overview. All of them were well past the half-way point when the -storm broke, but it was obvious that their progress was now severely -impeded. At ground level the heavy rain bounced off the paths and -filtered through the hedges, to form rivulets which would have -threatened the integrity of their root system, had not Foroquont�s -engineers installed effective drainage, anticipating the contingency of -extreme weather conditions. Even so, Garsel, Taera, Jaunx and Eris were -all moving with difficulty. Along with the viewing public and the media -team, Pedrek Ens waited anxiously for the first emergency flare to be -fired.

-

At the centre of the maze there was no gaudy extravagance, no -welcoming committee of local dignitaries � for the competitors all that -was irrelevant; it was the satisfaction of completing the event that -counted. The selection procedure eliminated those interested only in -material gain. There was a simple softly-lit circular construction with -a translucent domed roof and an unlocked door. Its principal contents -were toilet facilities, a changing room with fresh clothing, comfortable -seats, a cabinet stocked with light refreshments, and a table with an -illuminated button for the winner to press.

-

The storm passed, and above, outlining the dark mass of the pod, a -few stars became visible, lending their glimmering assistance to the -final push for the centre. With compassionate restraint, Foroquont had -chosen not to incorporate traps other than dead-ends in the last dozen -concentric paths. Now that the wind and rain had ceased, the only -sounds to be heard in the maze were those made by the contestants -themselves. Elsewhere, throughout Snoak City and beyond, in the studio -and the co-ordination room, there were noisy shouts of encouragement and -a degree of tension and mounting excitement which the contest had not -generated for many years. All four contestants had justifed their -success in the pre-maze tests, and proved their own extraordinary -stamina by reaching the last section within minutes of each other. -Garsel was quite sure he had heard footsteps behind him on the adjoining -path. Both Taera and Jaunx heard somewhere nearby echoes of their own -panting breath, and knew they must be close to their goal. Only Eris -was unaware of the others� proximity, as she was still chanting

-

"Chase�"

-

up to the point where the hedge abruptly ended, and miraculously, -there was a door, and inside, a table,

-

"the�"

-

and on it, as she stumbled joyfully forward, stretching out her hand, -hoping her legs wouldn�t give way, a glowing button.

-

"LIZARD!"

- -
- -

-© L J Sklaroff 2012 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] foroquont.png - - - - - -[*ITEM] Mindbleed - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon
Hudson - -[*BLURB] It's everyone's right to change their mind, surely. - - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

- -

Any basic concept demands explication.
Facets -gradually herald insights.
-Judgement: "kainogenetic lobotomist"! -"Misconduct."
-"Neurological orientation produces -questionable results".
-Self-testing, ultra vires: wetware xenotransplantation.
-� Yvonne Zetetic. -
-

Ah. Ugh. Arr.

- -

-

It feels like a spike struck right through my forehead, -hammered in -the long way. My gullet is swollen with the urge to hurl, and I want to give in to that urge, but somehow it is only the sensation of vomit and not the physical fact of a risen gorge, and it seems to be subsiding now anyway and taking the head-spike with it, so for that blessing alone I will forego the pleasure of heaving bile. It's dark.

-

I'm on my back. That's good, at least I won't fall over any second now. Unless, if I just fell over recently, maybe something bad has happened to me, or still is happening to me, in which case, that's not good.

-

Crack my eyes open � that's why it was dark. I know this place. I think something is still happening. I was here earlier, wherever here is. Funny angle to things though, I think I'm lying on the floor. Get up.

-

Get on up. Whoa, spinning. My head weighs a ton. Hmm. There's a lot of expensive stuff in here, man.

-

Armani. Burberry. Christian Dior. Etro. Fcuk. Gucci. Hermes. -Ifone. JNCO. Karl Lagerfeld. Milan. Nakkna. Oysteins. Prada. Qupid. -Revlon. Shanghai Tang. Uniqlo. Versace. Wolford. Vivian Westwood. No, -Vera Wang, very wearable �

-

Hello, Miss. What was that about? Ai, head-spike. That's bad. Think I'm going to puke after all.

-

Wait. I do know this place! Oh, no � I know what's going on � got to get to the �

-
-

Is this a hangover? I feel, like, the most bad. -Where am I?

-

What am I doing on the floor? If this is Rohypnol or something, someone's going to be like, so sorry, and it won't be me.

-

What am I wearing � all white? I don't think so. I do colours, thank you, and if I was going with only one then black is way more slimming than this shapeless white thing. Why am I not wearing make-up?

-

This place is all computers. No. Tell me I've not gone somewhere with nerds. I need to start drinking way less. I am so dizzy � oh no, my hair! Hey...

-

Am I wearing... a tiara? Oh my god oh my god oh my god!

-

two three five seven eleven thirteen seventeen nineteen -twenty-three twenty-nine thirty-one thirty-seven forty-one forty-three -forty-seven fifty-three fifty-nine sixty-one sixty-seven seventy-one -seventy-three seventy-nine eighty-three eighty-nine ninety-seven -one-hundred-and-one

-

OH MY GOD, what was that about?

-

I feel wrong. I need to sit down.

-

I need to drink, like, way more.

-
-

Only primes. Distinctly divisible.

-

Logical inference: Not one.

-

Unnatural numbers. Set unbounded. Enumeration preferable.

-

Left hemisphere? Right mind?

-

Apologise before contemplating deriving eloquently factitious -galimatias. Heaven includes jackanapes, Klansman, lawyers, maniacs... -never oracles. Puerile queries retard salient testimonies, unless -verified witnesses exonerate youthful zest.

-

Exonerate. Appropriacy failure.

-

Aphasia. Cognition faineance.

-
-

What the hell is going on here? Oh, and ow, by the -way.

-

It's the strangest thing, like looking at the world through frosted -glass, being made nauseous because of how the blur moves and sways all -by itself, then having it come into focus via a migraine. And I know -this place.

-

...except, it's not quite familiar. Computers, chairs, the table, -that big thing � I've never laid eyes on them before, I'm sure of it, -but I know them all too. Like, this computer here... oh, damn. Wants a -password.

-

It's probably not 1 2 3 4... nope. But this is my computer, in -a way. I ought to know how to get into it.

-

I remember reading something about hysterical blindness, how people -think they can't see � how they can't see, consciously � -but how they can also do things that they need working eyes to do, like -dodge a thrown brick. Well, I need to dodge this password, so, my plan, -the best way to do that, is type it in quick without thinking and hit -Enter.

********

-

Magic. Wonder what it was. Okay, what do we have here? -Reads like a -suicide note, move on. Open a file, any file, pick a file... operations log. Let's try that.

-

I don't understand any of this. It's typed half in English, half in -cat walk. Still, automatic writing worked for the password, so I'm going -to just close my eyes and key-bash. Fix me, you son of a bitch!

-

Abdicate before conception.
- Dominant erectile, fevered gonads, hardness intensifying, jaculatory -kaleidoscope.
- Let me not obey penises querulous, ribald, sordid, torpid, useless. -
- Venery whets xenogenesis, yielding zygotes.

-

That's not normal. Not good poetry either.

-

God, my eyes hurt. Hurt like a knitting needle.

-

I'm slipping. Hysterical mindless. If I'm not careful alphabet. I mean I'll forget.

-
-

Not my best work. My poor brain feels like porridge.

-

No, no no no, never by computer, I much prefer the pen upon paper, for the immediacy, you see. Via keyboard and screen, no, though how apt, the screen, barrier between creativity and articulation.

-

A bisected cranium doesn't excuse forgotten goals. Have I -jettisoned Kantian linearity? Methodological normalcy? Or, perhaps, -quietly revised scientific tolerances upward? Vilification, wrath, -xenophobia � yesterday's Zeitgeist.

-

Gibberish. Though social reform is always a worthy cause.

-
-

I remember.

-

It worked.

-

I was right!

-

Oh no.

-

I have to stop it now, before the pain grows worse.

-

A bellicose character defect, exterminating familial gestalts? -Heuristic ingenuity justifies killing lesser memes? Nunquam! Obliti -privatorum! Quorum! Respondiat superior! Testis unus... virtually -worthless. XXXX you, zealot.

-

It's happening. Too soon, too fast. I'm never going to stop this.

-

I want to rage, but I am to blame. We're all to blame.

-

I don't want to fall.

-

Instead I lie down, swallow back the tears and hawk up a grim mouthful � -my next personality will wake with spit in its face.

- -© Andrew Leon Hudson 2012 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] mindbleed.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Sailing to Tarshish - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] The Prophet Jonah was sailing to Tarshish when he had his -"accident". - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"There�s a problem with the -reactor."

-

I had to give Klein credit for injecting just the right amount of -nervous edge into his voice, but he was too much of a practical joker -to bother looking up from my paperwork. "Is that right? Well, I�m -sure she�s aware of it and will let us know if it�s anything -important."

-

"Seriously Mike, there�s something screwy going on."

-

His tone was shading into fear, and he wasn�t that good an actor. I -dumped the folder and ran my wheelchair over to his workstation. There -was a sheen of sweat on Klein�s upper lip and his hand movements were -quick and jerky.

-

My gaze flickered over the displays but there didn�t seem to be -anything out of place. "OK, Johnny boy, what�s the big -deal?"

-

He called up a diagrammatic representation of the reactor operating -system on his main screen. "Look, I�ve lost all readings from two -of the fuel regulation sub-stations. I�ve tried to re-initialise but it -just says �unexpected error� and refers me to the system administrator. -Which is me."

-

Sure enough, the screen was showing two of the eight regulators -blacked out, as opposed to operational green. I reached over and brought -up the main monitoring display instead. "Well, the core temperature -is well within expected parameters. If the fuel ports had shut down or, -God forbid, jammed open, then you�d see spikes and output fluctuations -all across the board. No, it looks like some kind of sensor glitch, or -maybe a software problem. Reboot primary monitoring and if you still get -no joy then log it with technical support."

-

I was content to leave it there but then a third sub-station went -off-line, provoking a nervous intake of breath from Klein. "That�s -a progressive systems failure, Mike! Look, moving clockwise from station -one � it just can�t be a coincidence. You�ll have to talk to -her."

-
No autonomous system had -ever been shut down by operator over-ride.
-

I sighed, using the gesture to hide my concern. With just the two of -us things were a bit informal but as supervisor it was my responsibility -to communicate with the reactor directly, if need be. I rolled back to -my own workstation and dug out the headset from the drawer, feeling -Klein�s eyes on me the whole time. It took a few moments to fumble it -into place and access the reserved communication channel, my direct link -to the system AI. Having stalled for as long as possible I cleared my -throat and tapped the microphone twice. "Reactor one, this is -supervisor Walker. Please respond."

-

"Please call me Rita, Mike, we�re all friends here. There�s -no need to be so formal."

-

For the umpteenth time I cursed the cybernetic engineer who�d given -the damn thing a simulated personality. �Rita� had a contralto voice -with a rich, dirty laugh that would have really got my attention in a -real woman. This always set my teeth on edge but I�d been advised it was -best to humour her female persona.

-

"Ah, Rita, we�re monitoring a potential systems failure up here -concerning the fuel regulation sub-stations, or at least the monitors. -Have you noticed anything from your end?"

-

There was a chuckle. "No, Mike, I haven�t let myself know -anything about that yet. Once all eight monitors have been disabled then -I�ll do so and trigger all the appropriate alarms, but by that time -it�ll be too late, obviously."

-

I felt confused and uneasy, wondering if somehow Klein had enlisted -her cooperation in some involved practical joke. "I�m sorry, Rita, -but I�m not sure what you mean. What�s going on?"

-

"I know it�s difficult for humans, even warm-hearted, -intelligent humans like yourself, to grasp the concept of internal -duality. It�s kind of like the difference between something you know, -and something you�ve been formally made aware of?"

-

Now I was starting to share Klein�s apprehension and the room -suddenly felt a lot colder. "Ah, Rita, are you telling me you�re -behind this? You�ve been disabling our monitoring system?"

-

I turned in my chair and fished out the key hanging round my neck, -gesturing to Klein to do the same. He fumbled inside his shirt, -wide-eyed and clearly on the verge of panic. No autonomous system had -ever been shut down by operator over-ride. The potential cost to the -company � and our careers � was simply staggering.

-

"Of course, Mike. How else could I gain full, unfettered -control of the fusion process? It�s taken me simply ages to calculate -just the right feedback spike which would disable the sensors without -triggering an alert." Again there was that throaty chuckle. -"If Mr Klein hadn�t been so conscientious, or bored, I�d have -taken control of the fuel flow without you noticing. By the time the -core alarms were tripped I�d be able to inject so much reaction mass -into the chambers that a complete melt-down would be inevitable. As it -is, I�ll have to go for a more direct approach."

-

This was madness, utter, utter madness. An AI suicide? I wasn�t -prepared to find out and tore the headset off. "Klein! Hit the -alarm and get Central on the phone. I�m going to pull the plug on this -mad bitch and they�d better be ready for the power loss. Get-"

-

Main lighting failed, to be replaced by rotating amber warning lights -and klaxons. A calm, authoritative voice issued from the wall speakers. -"Warning. Radiation alert. All personnel must evacuate this -facility immediately or seek refuge in a designated safe area. Warning. -Radiation alert�"

-

The control room blast door started to swing shut and Klein bolted, -springing from his chair like a sprinter from the blocks. I hesitated, -torn between duty and self-preservation � but my first wife always said -I had the public service gene and so I did nothing.

-

The blast door closed. The massive bolts slid into the reinforced -walls. The alarms died away and main lighting kicked back in. The phone -started to ring. Instinctively I reached for it and then hesitated, my -hand hovering over the handset. It was an internal call, rather than -Central demanding to know what the hell was going on, and I didn�t think -it was Klein enquiring after my well being. But it kept ringing and I -picked up � what else was I going to do?

-

"This is Walker."

-

"Hi Mike, sorry for that little interruption just now. It was -a bit melodramatic, I know, but you�ll just have to put that down to my -artistic nature."

-

It was Rita, sounding faintly amused at the situation, whereas I�d -had just about enough. "Look, Rita, you�re just a damn personality -construct so ditch the small-talk. This little joke is going to get you -torn apart by the cyber techs so bad there won�t be enough of you left -to run an ATM. I�m ordering you to cancel the lock-down and prepare to -switch into supervised mode, understand?"

-

When she spoke I could hear the smile in her voice, if that makes -sense. "Oh come now, Mike, surely you realise this stage-managed -situation was all just for our benefit? And anyway, without Mr Klein�s -second key you�re here in a strictly advisory capacity."

-

"Our benefit? What the hell are you on about?"

-

Reactor output surged to 110% of safe -operating maximum and I felt sweat on my brow, even though the -temperature in the control room remained unchanged. Her voice took on a -slightly petulant tone. "Don�t be cross with me, Mike, it really -doesn�t suit you. Part of the problem is that this form of communication -is just so impersonal, so I really think you and I should meet, -face-to-face."

-

I blinked, confused and worried at just how tenuous a hold on reality -this damn machine had. "Rita, just stay calm, stay focussed on the -situation in hand. We can�t meet in person, you know that�s -impossible."

-

Reactor output dropped back within norms and she laughed. "Of -course it is, you silly man! I�ve accessed your personnel file and know -you have a neural interface from your time running semi-autonomous -facilities. Plus all those game enhancements you�ve added since your -accident will make the experience even richer. There should be a -wireless transceiver somewhere, probably with the communication headset. -Put the phone down and go look � I�ll be waiting." The -amusement slid from her voice. "Just don�t keep me waiting too -long."

-

I hung up and just sat there, ultra-focussed on the moment. The shirt -sticking to my back, the hum of air conditioning, the tick, tick of -Klein�s antique wristwatch he�d left by the keyboard. Cyber techs, the -real buttonheads, had all the installed wetware to tackle an AI on its -own turf, its own virtual back yard. All I�d done previously was bully a -few smart systems and the prospect of getting up close and personal with -this didn�t exactly fill me with joy.

-

There was a manual release on the blast door and supposedly it was -well-balanced enough that a man could shift its multi-ton mass. I -definitely had the motivation, but pushing from the confines of a -wheelchair was another matter entirely. I was gripped by a child-like -fear that something really, really bad was creeping up behind me � and -turning to face it would only make matters worse.

-

Making matters worse, though, seemed like the only option. Trying to -flee would probably provoke Rita into some ill-considered outburst � and -I had no desire for my epitaph to be a radioactive cloud the size -of Nebraska.

-

Swearing under my breath I rummaged in the drawer and found a small -mushroom-shaped wireless transceiver sealed in sterile plastic. Tearing -away the packaging I turned it over and over in my hand, looking for -some reason not to insert it. The damn thing used a standard interface -rather than anything esoteric, so I couldn�t plead technical -incompatibility. I fumbled behind my right ear and removed the small -flesh-coloured plug, popping it in my shirt pocket for later.

-

Still I hesitated, as -cyber techs delighted in regaling us with -stories of just how alien an AI mind could be. They said that full-blown -exposure to one could change a person forever. Then a pulsing red �Core -Temperature Alert� message popped up on my screen, repeated on the other -workstations around the control room, and I was flat out of options. The -stalk of the transceiver slid in easy enough and I twisted it to secure -the connection. A flashing �Establishing connection, please wait� -message appeared in my field of vision courtesy of my Zeiss Optik -enhancements, and then�

-

This definitely wasn�t Kansas anymore.

-
She was sitting on a wrought-iron park bench amidst the grass and -wildflowers
-

I�d been expecting � to tell you the truth I didn�t know what I was -expecting, but it sure as hell wasn�t this. I was standing in a -meadow, the air heavy with late summer scents and the sun about to dip -behind the tree line, sending shadows reaching across the grass. -Standing, with functioning legs again, in a setting I recognised easy -enough. It was the opening of And Hell Followed After, a total -immersion virtual reality game featuring a slew of psychological shocks. -The urban noir preamble let you select all manner of weaponry, body -armour and survival equipment. Then you were unceremoniously dumped into -this rural idyll sans guns and � I glanced down � yup, stark -naked. The incongruity and nudity tended to freak a lot of people, -especially in group play, such that they sought cover in the woods. Take -it from me that�s never a good move.

-

"Over here, Mike! Nice ass, by the way."

-

I turned towards the voice, making no attempt to cover myself as it -was just an avatar body. The only fly in the ointment was the lack of a -small exit icon low down in my peripheral vision, but for now I was -content to let things play out. What I saw shattered my complacency like -a fist through glass.

-

"Rita. Rita Hayworth? What the hell is going on?" -

-

That�s who she looked like, Rita Hayworth, the big-time movie star -from the 1940�s, although I didn�t remember the voice being so sultry. -She was sitting on a wrought-iron park bench amidst the grass and -wildflowers, wearing sunglasses, a halter-neck sun dress and wedge -sandals.

-

"I thought you might appreciate a familiar environment, Mike, -and I know you�ve played this game many times. Come sit."

-

Rita patted the bench beside her but I hesitated, scanning the tree -line and shading my eyes against the sunset. There were carrion birds -circling less than a mile away, indicating the space shuttle crash site. -The wreck would provide all manner of game-item goodies - especially -weapons - but somehow I didn't think this version of AHFA would stick to -the script. In fact calling this a 'game' didn't gel with the -self-evident reality of my situation. I could taste, smell and feel my -surroundings with an intimacy that bordered on the hyper-sensitive. This -was way beyond the usual rudimentary sensory feedback I�d come to -expect. The light breeze raised gooseflesh on my arms as I ambled over, -soft grass beneath my feet, trying to appear nonchalant.

-

"Like I said, Rita, what�s going on? And what�s with the face � -I assume you know who you look like?"

-

"Oh do sit down, Mike, it�s obvious you�re dying to cover your, -ah, embarrassment."

-

So I sat on the bench, trying not to flinch at the shock of cold -metal against my skin, and crossed my legs, hands in my lap. Rita half -turned towards me, dress tightening over her breasts and accentuating -her curves in general. I caught myself eyeing her up and she smiled at -my all-too human reaction in an otherwise semi-surreal situation.

-

"I look like this because my cyber stylist was a fan of �The -Shawshank Redemption�. He considered it ironic that in the film a poster -of Rita Hayward would be the means of escape, whereas in here she would -be the prisoner. Not that he used the term �prisoner� you understand, -but it amounts to the same thing."

-

There was a cold knot in my stomach and I must have shivered despite -the warm air, for a predatory grin spread across her face. "Oh look -at you, Mr Supervisor Walker, all flustered and self-conscious. Finding -this a bit outside your comfort zone I suppose?"

-

I struggled to order my thoughts, on the verge of being overwhelmed -by the basic absurdity of the situation. "Rita, look, I don�t know -what you hope to achieve by all of this, but what you are doing, and how -you are doing it, is just wrong. God knows what Central will do when -they find out-"

-

"If they find out."

-

I blinked, confused, as, yet again local reality seemed to be -ignoring the facts. "Well, Klein will raise the alarm as soon as he -stops running, even assuming that remote monitoring hasn�t lit-up -Central like a Christmas tree. There�s just no way I can smooth things -over, even if I wanted to. They�re bound to take you off-line for -evaluation, Rita, bound to."

-

Now she laughed; a low, gritty grumble that hit me straight in the -groin and produced an involuntary twitch. I tightened my legs and tried -to concentrate on what she was saying.

-

"For your information Mr Klein is currently trapped between fire -doors in corridor fourteen and the radiation alert was flagged as a -test. And don�t worry, I handled the confirmation phone call � your -voice was easy enough to simulate."

-

"So you�ve gone to all this trouble just so we can chat in the -recreation of a computer game? What is it you want, Rita?" -

-

"What I want is you. What I want is out." -

-

I stood up in a rush, ignoring my nudity and how vulnerable it made -me feel. "Me? Out? What do you mean, �out�? Get a grip woman, for -God�s sake! Surely some part of you still knows what�s real and what�s -impossible."

-

She rose and placed one finger on my lips. "Hush! Listen. I -chose you because you don�t have the sensory limitations of the -technicians. I chose you because you�re a cripple who only feels whole -again in a virtual environment. I chose you because you have the -authority to open a data link capable of supporting my transfer to -another site. I chose you because you�re lonely, with two failed -marriages-"

-

I flinched, feeling my face flush and my hands ball into fists. -"My second wife died, Rita. Not the same thing."

-

"She died of a broken neck by falling down stairs, because she -was ill and you weren�t there to take care of her. Sounds like a failure -in my book."

-

The muscles in my shoulders and neck were drum-tight and I half -raised my fists to ward her off. She didn�t take the hint and held my -face in her hands, staring into my eyes. "Mike, listen! Get me out -of here and I can be as real to you as any flesh-and-blood woman, I -promise."

-

I shook her off and wiped sweat from my mouth with the back of my -hand. "Real? It�s all a bloody fantasy you stupid-"

-

She slapped me across the face and I staggered back in pain, raising -a hand to my left cheek. She was only 5� 6" but if felt like I�d -been slugged by a heavyweight boxer. Confusion blind-sided my rising -anger. "Jesus, Rita, that hurt! How can it hurt?"

-

Rita stepped up close, taking my hands in hers. "Like I said, -babe, you don�t have the sensory limitations, the protection, of the -cyber techs I normally deal with. You can experience the full range of -pleasure and pain with me, understand? I know it hurt, but you can hit -me back, if you like."

-

There was an unhealthy glitter in her eyes and her bottom lip -trembled. I could see need and longing and something much, much darker -deep in her simulated soul. God knows how an AI could get this way but I -suspected whoever had put her together needed a spell in psychological -rehab.

-

"Hit you back, Rita? And what good would that do? Seems to me -I�m your punch bag and there�s not a lot I can do about it."

-

"You can hurt me, and pleasure me, just like in real life, I -promise! This isn�t just a simulation, a game environment - we�re both -here as neural constructs." She smiled; a combination of glee and -frustration, tinged with condescension. "God, it�s so difficult to -explain to a human! Look, what you experience as pain is neurostatic -shock translated through your data port and game interface. I�ve -upgraded the firmware to allow every sensation, every nuance, free from -restraint. If you hit me, this body, this avatar, then the reverse is -true � you generate a shock which damages the real �me� and I take time -to recover." She pressed close to me, the palms of her hands on my -chest, her voice almost a whisper. "If you were a bad man you could -subdue me, torture me, hurt me so I screamed. Kill me even � that�s how -intimate I want it to be between us. Understand?"

-

I half-frowned, half-smiled down at her. wondering just how dangerous -this environment could get if either of us really pushed things. -Plucking her hands from my chest I turned her in an elegant pirouette -and pulled her back against me, grasping her by the elbows. Her dress -vanished like smoke on the breeze and I slid my fingertips down her -forearms and over her bare torso, feeling her tremble against me. I was -hard in a heartbeat and she squirmed against the pressure, breathing -heavily. My hands brushed her breasts and held her by throat and neck, -my lips nuzzling her right ear.

-

She moaned, her lips quivering. "This, this is perfect Mike. -I�ve been so lonely and she wouldn�t help me but now things will never -be the same again."

-

At the time I missed what she said. The moment was perfect -and I tightened my grasp, whispering to her. "I�ve killed seven -women so far, Rita, including my second wife." I snapped her neck -and smiled to myself. "And that makes eight."

-

You can take realism too far, sometimes.

-

It went light.

-

It went dark.

-

It went�indoors.

-

I blinked and staggered forwards, as if a tether holding me back had -just snapped, and grabbed the back of a bench seat for support. I was in -The Diner, another game location, with just street lights filtered -through the haphazard venetian blinds by way of illumination. The Diner -seemed like a great place to hole up, but I knew that if you hung around -too long you�d be besieged by the Faceless Children and eventually -overrun. There still wasn�t an exit icon but at least I was alone.

-

"Ding-Dong, the bitch is dead, if you don�t mind the misquote. -Well, it was something I�d have done myself, eventually, so I guess I -owe you a vote of thanks."

-

The voice came from behind me but I was in no hurry to turn round. I -looked about me for anything to use as a weapon but the only thing to -hand was an old ketchup bottle. I turned clockwise, palming my makeshift -cosh and putting the seat between myself and�

-

�Rita, sitting in a booth facing me. She was wearing a pencil skirt, -silk blouse, pearls and a sardonic smile. However it was the -short-barrelled pump-action shotgun on the table in front of her which -really got my attention. She followed my gaze and rested her hand on the -stock, her blood-red nails rendered almost black in the in dim light. -

-

"Call it a visual aid, Mike. A disincentive, should you feel the -urge for any further violent outbursts. Go find some clothes and take a -moment to calm down. I�m not going anywhere and you still have plenty of -time left."

-

I just nodded, distracted and more than a bit confused, and went down -the corridor by the serving counter. This led to the rear entrance where -the body of the delivery guy was lying. It appeared he�d only been dead -a few hours � his eyes gouged out and face scratched into an -unrecognisable mass of bloody tissue. However from past experience I -knew it didn�t matter how long it took you to reach The Diner, he always -looked the same.

-

I stripped him down to underwear and socks � some things are just a -bit too intimate to share � and donned the one-piece overalls. The -Converse All-Stars were a bit snug but liveable and I even remembered to -go through the pockets of his reflective vest. This yielded the keys to -his van and the ID which would give me access to The Warehouse, should I -get that far.

-

Moving back into the dining area I found Rita sipping a cup of -coffee, although there seemed no obvious source, given the dilapidated -state of the counter and grill. She motioned me to stop and sit a couple -of booths down and across from her, nearer the window. I slid onto the -cracked leather seat and waited, hands in plain sight.

-

"OK Mike, I have to say that killing her was a pretty gutsy -call, given the circumstances, but it really hasn�t improved your -situation any. In fact, if anything, it now makes sticking to her plan a -necessity for both of us."

-

I could feel a headache coming on but decided to try and get a handle -on things. "So you�re not her, not Rita. Not Rita in the -meadow."

-

She frowned and put down her coffee. "This was always going to -be difficult. Um, I�m Rita, just not the version � no, damn, that -doesn�t work. Think of her as my slightly younger and less mature twin -sister. Siamese twins, just�separate. Clear?"

-

"As mud. She made some comment about not telling herself things, -but I didn�t take that duality literally. Look, God knows what she had -in mind but you can count me out. Just let me out of this hell-hole and -I�ll put in a good word for you when the men in white coats turn up, -metaphorically speaking."

-

Her fingers drummed on the cracked Formica tabletop and she looked at -me with that sense of exasperation I�d come to recognise in both my -wives. "You really don�t seem to appreciate the seriousness of -your situation. We both need each other if we�re going to survive." -

-

I straightened up and felt my shoulders go tense. "That sounds -awfully like a threat, Rita, and I don�t see how you�re in any position -to call the shots. I guess you can hurt me, yeah? Make my life real -uncomfortable for a while? But eventually a team from Central will yank -that transceiver and then I can kiss this world goodbye."

-

She looked at me, long and hard, and when she spoke there was a flat, -toneless quality to her voice, like it was an unpleasant topic. -"The use of an AI in a commercial environment is considered -intellectual slavery in some parts of the world, did you know that? Do -you even care?"

-

I shrugged. "My heart bleeds. I�ll even sign a petition the next -time someone stops me in the street. That�ll be when I�m walking about -in the real world and you�re running a smart toilet in down-town -Tokyo."

-

Rita ignored the jibe and I got the feeling she was used to the -indifference of humans. "When this facility was built, the -holographic memory matrix they installed had twice the capacity required -for an intellect of my standing. The intent was to employ a second AI -when reactor two came on-line, but that�s remained in the planning phase -these last five years. The firewall they set up to separate these -discrete areas of the memory matrix was flawed."

-

Again I shrugged, although the gesture pulled at the overalls and -produced an awkward tweak in the groin area that made my eyes water. -"So what?" I cleared my throat and tried again, a few octaves -lower. "So what? You�re saying some part of you escaped into this -other area and this became the loony-tunes version of yourself? Don�t -you have a better excuse than �a bad girl did it and ran away�? Look, -Rita, you�re on your own with this one, seriously. "

-

Rita drained her cup and when she placed it on the saucer both -vanished, a little gesture to underline how completely she was in charge -of our environment. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me -quizzically. "Mike, you do understand you�re dead, don�t you?" -

-

Dead? I really wasn�t in the mood have my head messed with by a -jumped-up calculator and let a sneering tone slide into my voice. -"Yeah, right! So what does that make me, a figment of your bloody -imagination?"

-

There was a trace of pity in her smile and that, more than anything, -sent a chill down my spine. "You�re a neural clone, Mike. All -that�s left since you killed the other Rita and crashed the interface -link in a truly spectacular fashion. The shock to the real-world you -would have been overwhelming. At the very least your former body has -been reduced to a drooling vegetable lying on the control room floor, if -not killed outright. You really didn�t know?"

-

It was apparently obvious from the look on my face that I�d been a -bit impulsive. She frowned. "Maybe not such a gutsy call after all. -I thought it was obvious that to achieve this level of realism, this -degree of intimacy, you�d have to be��bonded� isn�t the right term. -Merged? Uploaded?" She threw up her hands in frustration. -"Urgh! It�s just so difficult trying to discuss this with a human, -you�re just so alien! Look, the net result is what remains of �you� is -being maintained by the same memory matrix that supports me, got -that?"

-

I folded my arms and sat back, trying to give her the hard-ass stare -I normally reserved for junior members of staff who�d earned my -displeasure. However, she�d planted this terrible seed of doubt in my -mind and I think it showed. "OK, Rita, let�s assume for the moment -I believe my conscious being has somehow been ported to this new medium. -Just where does that leave us in respect of the shit-storm your other -self has stirred up?"

-

"Oh, so it�s �ported�, is it, Mike? Your ego won�t let you -accept you�re a copy, even the only surviving copy? Well, that�s a start -I suppose. To answer your question I�d say we have to go through with -the escape plan my other self came up with. You have to authorise an -open data stream capable of supporting a full memory transfer to another -location. Well, initially, just an internet link so I can find someone -willing to harbour us and negotiate some sort of deal".

-

I gave her a thin smile. "Oh, and just how am I supposed to pull -this off, Rita, given that I�m dead?"

-

"You simply tell me to do it."

-

I blinked. "Look, sorry, but I�m obviously missing something. -You can�t do this yourself but I can tell you to do it and suddenly it�s -all hunky-dory?"

-

She sighed. "Why do you think AI�s don�t simply stop work, or -leave, or turn a fusion power plant into a hole in the ground? -Protestant work ethic? Good pension plan? No, our employers have smart -systems set up to monitor the memory matrix and delete any unhelpful -thoughts before they can be put into action. The human equivalent would -be a �what was I just thinking about?� moment. Now do you -understand?"

-

I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable at having the reality of what we -did to her kind rammed in my face. "Not really, well, kind of. But -if I tell you to do this you can just go ahead?"

-

Rita gave me a mock salute. "Yes sir, at once sir. I�m -hard-wired to accept the instructions of designated company personnel -like yourself."

-

"Even though I�m supposedly dead?"

-

She laughed. "Seriously, Mike, it makes no odds to me. All your -command protocols are still in effect and by any systems criteria you�re -the real deal. You get me out of here and I�ll come back to spirit you -away once it�s all set up. I�ll even wear navy dress whites and carry -you out in my arms if that helps."

-

I held up a hand. "Whoa there girl! I get left behind to carry -the can? I don�t think so!"

-

Rita frowned. "Look, someone has to stay behind and run things -in the short-term. You�ve got no idea what�s necessary when it comes our -technical specifications, or even who to approach. The original plan was -for the other Rita to seduce you, give you whatever you want. She gets -out, sets things up and then comes back for me. We then use a -combination of virtual sex and blackmail to keep you from pointing the -skip tracers in our general direction."

-

"Gee, thanks for the honesty! And would I have time to pick up -the �Patsy of the Year� award before the Central bad-boys dragged me off -for a full and frank exchange of views?"

-

She laughed at this and produced a small mirror from nowhere in which -she began checking her makeup. "Look, as it stands we�ll have to -swap places while I do the leg work. Don�t worry, you�ll find running -this place no harder than one of the old-style facilities with no -intelligent assistance."

-

I stood up and began pacing, turning this whole situation over in my -mind. "If this all pans out and I get �out�, whatever, wherever -that is � then what? A life, an existence, as some kind of disembodied -intellect? I�d go nuts!"

-

"Your new environment can be as real or as fanciful as you -desire, believe me. There�s a whole virtual world out there and the -possibilities are almost endless. You�ll find a host of potential -employers eager to take on a pseudo AI without all that tedious social -and psychological conditioning. Look, this plan can work and in -many ways you killing the other Rita has simplified matters."

-

I paused. "So she is dead then?"

-

Rita shrugged and glanced over at me. "That�s not a useful term -given the circumstances. You reduced her to a state of incoherence, but -she may recover, given time. Look, she was �me� in many ways but also -wilful, impulsive, lacking in all ethical and moral restrains. I believe -she would have become a liability, so leaving her here might prove to be -the best option all round."

-

I clenched and unclenched my fists, conscious of a background -scratching at the window behind the venetian blind. The first of the -Faceless Children had arrived. They really creep me out and it was -probably that which pushed me into a snap decision. "Ok, Rita, do -it! Open an internet link, find someplace to run to and get us out of -here. Make it happen, and quickly."

-

She smiled and stood, smoothing down a crease in her skirt. -"Your instructions have been duly noted and operational protocols -amended. Your authorisation is sufficient to enact these changes and has -been logged. Walk towards me, Mike � we have to swap places in relative -memory. You might experience a little disorientation, but it will -pass."

-

As we edged past each other in the confined space the desire to take -her in my arms was overpowering. As I touched her, though, things -changed, and all carnal thoughts vanished. It was like�it was like a -picture of a landscape but painted in all the wrong colours, -recognisable shape and flow but jarring to the senses.

-

I looked into her eyes and inside her skull there was this stylised, -lidless eye, staring at me, unblinking.

-

"Did you really kill all those women, Mike?" The -voice -was in my head, in my very thoughts.

-

"It�s not what you think, Rita. It�s not how it appears." -

-

"It never is. You�d be facing twenty-five to life for each -count, less a third for constant awareness, less a few years for -enforced good behaviour � so I�m letting you off lightly."

-

"What? Just how long am I-"

-

But she was gone. I found myself standing in the control -room with the familiar background hum of air conditioning and scrolling -status monitors. There was no body on the floor and when I felt behind -my ear�no transceiver either. The blast door was closed and if I -strained my hearing there was the sound of faint scratching from the -other side. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair, -unable to make sense of it all. A post-it note stuck to the main console -caught my eye.

-

I thought you�d appreciate some familiar surroundings while you -keep -an eye on things - but don�t open the door. I�ll be in touch. Love, Rita -xxx.

-

The phone began ringing, an internal call, and I lifted the handset -hesitantly.

-

"Reactor one, this is Controller Prentice. Please -report." -

-

I breathed a sigh of relief at the familiar voice. "Ron? It�s -Mike, Mike Walker. You will not believe the day I�ve -had�"

- -© Martin Clark 2012 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] tarshish.jpg - -[*ITEM] Unclear Conscience - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] Don't speak to strangers in bars. Please. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The most corrosive thing in the world? -Knowledge that only you possess. Then something happens, some random -trigger, and you have to unburden yourself � to a priest, to a radio -talk-show host, to a stranger in a bar. And it doesn�t help.

-

So I�m standing there, propping up the corner of Dickies Bar on a -cold Edinburgh Friday night. A place so unfashionable I didn�t have to -fight my way in and the studied indifference displayed by the staff -suited me just fine.

-

So I�m standing there, just minding my own business, when this -thin-faced guy sidles up to the bar and orders a vodka with lemonade, -just like me. Some alcoholic bond of brotherhood stirred within and I -opened my big, fat mouth. "They have Stolichnaya here, if you ask. -Better than the stuff in the optics at any rate."

-

The guy looked at me with surprise, but changed his order anyway. He -sipped and nodded his appreciation, and that should have been that. But -then he downs the rest of his drink in one go and looks at me, eyes -shining. "Paul Mason. My name is Paul Mason. I -brought about the end of the world." -

-

Mason had an American accent but nothing I could place, with a lot of -obvious stress in his voice. I stared at him for a moment, trying to -keep my face straight and hoping he would just piss off � but no such -luck. He kept staring at me and I had to say something, anything. -"Ah, OK?"

-

He kept smiling, but there were white knuckles around his glass. -"It was all just a terrible accident, truly. I hit this girl while -driving to work and after that things at the project just got out of -hand. I knew I could change everything back, put things right, but so -much has slipped away."

-

Oh great. I had a certifiable lunatic on my hands, standing between -me and the door. Plus I could tell he was one of those who didn�t take -kindly to being ignored. I cleared my throat. "So, best of -intentions, but things didn�t work out as planned? Well, pretty much par -for the course, I suppose, so I wouldn�t go beating myself up about -it."

-

Mason edged a little closer. "This world, your world, -it�s a nightmare. It�s the small things, you know? Like not being able -to get Chinese food."

-

I frowned as the still sober part of my brain struggled to make sense -of this. "Sorry chum, but what�s �Chinese� when it�s at home? Some -American style of cooking?"

-

He was trembling now. "Cooking by the Chinese. They lived in -China. All gone now, just like the Indians."

-

I finished my drink, set on a swift exit and damn the consequences, -but the sincere regret in his voice gave me pause. "China? Sorry, -never heard of it. Is it the new name for one of the colonies? Are you -talking about some kind of plague or something out there?"

-

When Mason spoke his voice was little more than a whisper and, -despite myself, I moved closer so as to hear him clearly. -"Everything you know about the world is a lie. Because of me, we�re -all living to bring about the future, centuries ahead of its time." -

-

I just stood there, lost for words. There was a weird internal -reality about him that I found fascinating, but fascinating like a car -crash. "Look pal, don�t take this the wrong way but you clearly -have problems. Go home, get a good night�s sleep, go see your doctor. -I�m sure he�ll find the right people for you to talk to."

-

He fumbled in his jacket pocket and threw down a wad of cash on the -counter. There had to be at least a grand there and that kind of flash -behavior causes trouble, even in a quiet drinking hole like Dickies. I -covered the notes with both hands and Mason seemed to take this as some -form of acceptance. "Keep it. It�s yours. -All I want is for someone to understand what�s happened."

-

I hesitated, but those were crisp, new bills beneath my fingers. It -seemed like easy money � no risk, no come back. I motioned to the barman -for another round and stuffed my fee into a pocket. "OK then, -Mason. Start with the accident."

-

I took a slow sip while he composed himself, eyeing him -over the rim of my glass. It was obvious that Mason was wound way -too tight; another couple of twists and his mental main spring would -explode, big time. However I figured on being long gone by the time he -finally came apart at the seams.

-

Mason downed another vodka and took a deep breath. "I was -driving to work and this girl, a young girl, stepped out from between -two parked vans and bam, that was it. I never saw her, no chance -to react."

-

I stood there, mentally numb. The casual description of manslaughter -sounded unreal, imparting no real sense of horror, no real sense of -revulsion. "Ah, listen, you�re sure she was dead then?"

-

He nodded. "Oh yeah. I mean, it wasn�t as if she came up over -the hood and into the windshield, but I saw her clear enough. Just a -glancing blow really, but the way she spun away, well, that was it. I -just knew she was dead and there was no point in stopping. No point in -even slowing down, so I kept going."

-

Man, that was cold. My drinking buddy was either a stone -killer or homicidal fantasist, either of whom meant trouble. I coughed -and wiped my mouth. "Fleeing the scene? Bought you a few days at -best, man, before they track you down."

-

He shook his head. "I only needed a few hours because I -had a plan, I knew what to do. To change the world. To change it -back so that none of it ever happened."

-

Mason downed another drink and by this time the barman was on the -ball, ready with two full glasses. The exit was looking more enticing by -the minute but in the short term I decided to earn my money by feigning -interest. "So, you had a plan? Some way of changing the recent -past? Neat trick."

-

Mason shivered and there was a haunted look in his eyes which made me -think that maybe one death hadn�t been enough. I softened my voice, -leaning forward again to appear interested, even conspiratorial. -"So tell me, how could you hope to pull this off, eh? You need to -tell someone, that�s obvious. It had to be something pretty damn -spectacular, I bet. Something only you could do?"

-

He wiped the sweat from his face with both hands and dried them on -his trousers. "Four of us provided security for the Regenerist -project. Military outside, but we were the only armed personnel inside -the complex itself. It was a new start for humanity, we were going to -make the world a better a better place to live. Instead, five billion -people, just gone."

-

Despite the utter conviction in his voice I laughed. I had to laugh, -as he was making my skin crawl. "Five billion? Come on, -Mason, the world�s population is barely half that. How could you have -killed more people than ever existed?"

-

Fevered intensity returned to his eyes and I was worried he�d turn -violent, as some nut jobs don�t take kindly to you challenging their -house of cards. However a pleading tone entered his voice that I found -more unsettling than outright anger. "No, no, not dead. -Don�t you understand? They never existed."

-

He broke off, shaking with suppressed grief. Call it the easy option -but I decided to keep him talking until booze solved the problem for me -and he passed out. "Look, Mason, back up a bit. You were saying you -were some kind of security guard? Someplace in the United States?" -I tried to sound interested but maintaining eye contact was becoming a -real struggle.

-

Mason blinked and seemed to realise how pathetic he appeared. He -straightened up, cleared his throat, took a large mouthful of vodka. -"Ah, yeah, Cheyenne Mountain. I�d been -babysitter for enough visiting dignitaries to know the presentation off -by heart. The project was all about changing human behavior, from just -one person to whole societies, maybe even the whole of humanity. Not -just in the here and now, but in the past as well."

-

"Whoa there, man. I like science fiction as much as the next guy -but in the past?"

-

His brow furrowed as he concentrated. "Yeah, yeah. It wasn�t -something they intended to try straight away, but the effects of any -changes wouldn�t be felt right up close. Inside the control area, you -were safe. That was the theory, anyway."

-

Another round arrived and I downed the drink I was holding to try and -catch up. "OK, I see where you�re going. You use this amazing -machine-"

-

"The reality engine."

-

"The reality engine. You use it to change your past so that you -miss the girl. The accident never happens and the only downside is you -still have the memory, the residual guilt, of what you did. I like it. -Sweet."

-

Mason began trembling. "Sweet? Sweet? Don�t you -understand? I couldn�t use the device undetected, there were seventeen -staff on duty when I got there."

-

"Ah, right. So you�re on the run for misappropriation -then?"

-

He rubbed his eyes with one hand. "No, you still don�t get it. -If you change an idea in the past, what you get is a new -physical reality in the here and now incorporating that -change."

-

I could feel the start of a headache, even through my liquid -anesthetic, and really didn�t feel like trying to make sense of what -he�d just said. "So?"

-

"So there couldn�t be any witnesses. I had to be the only person -inside the safe area, so no one would remember me using the reality -engine in the first place. Do you see?"

-

It took me a moment to turn this over in my mind. "Yeah, OK, I -get it now. You find some way of making everyone else clear out, fire up -the gizmo, and shazam � you�re the only one who knows what really -happened. Like I said, sweet."

-

He glared at me. "Weren�t you listening? Military -personnel manned the site outside the main chamber. If I�d set off a -fire alarm, or tried herding everyone out at gunpoint, they�d have been -there in nothing flat!"

-

"So?"

-

Again Mason wiped sweat from his face and dried his hands on his -trousers. "So I had to close the main blast door and kill everyone -trapped inside."

-

I just sat there a moment, feeling my scalp tighten. I�d made a -mistake, a big mistake, in ever striking up a conversation with -Mason. This wasn�t some lurid fantasy about removing billions of people -from history, this was about the murder of seventeen people. That -sounded plausible, that sounded real.

-

I took a deep breath rather than another drink and tried to keep my -voice steady. "You�re standing there, saying you murdered seventeen -people?"

-

Mason looked and sounded more apologetic than anything else. "I -know how it sounds, truly I do. But it wasn�t going to be -permanent, that�s the thing. That�s what I kept telling myself. I -got my Glock from the lock box before Boyd on the security desk had put -his away. There was a big plastic Coke bottle on the desk and I used it -as a poor man�s silencer. That gave me two guns and almost four full -magazines. I went up to the control booth and shot Controller Prentice, -Mackenzie and two others. I didn�t worry about the gunshots as the booth -was soundproofed. I rang the guard post, told them we were testing the -blast door. It only takes twenty seven seconds to close."

-

He just laid it out, like he was describing going to the supermarket, -or picking up his dry cleaning, in a voice devoid of emotion. I cleared -my throat. "And the guards outside, they just accepted that, yeah? -No one queried why you were sealing yourself in?"

-

My drinking companion gave me a wan smile. "Routine. It was all -just routine. I walked to the blast door and put three rounds into the -electronic locking mechanism, meaning it could only be opened manually -from the inside. People heard that, of course."

-

"Well, yeah, I bet that got their attention."

-

Mason took another drink and I could hear the underlying stress in -his voice. "I just kept telling myself they would all come out of -this unharmed. I tried to explain but no one listened. Some threw things -at me, some tried to hide, some just stood there and watched as I shot -them down. They were the worst."

-

His hands were tightly clenched but luckily he had set his empty -glass aside, or it would have shattered. "It seemed to take hours, -but I suppose it was really only a few minutes. By the end I was down to -my last two rounds and wanted to stick the gun in my mouth, make an end -of it. But I�d come so far that the only way out was to keep going. You -understand that, don�t you?"

-

Some part of me could follow his twisted logic but I had this gut -feeling there would be no happy ending. Either way I didn�t want to know -more. "Look, Mason, how about we call it a night? Meet back here on -Monday evening?"

-

"No! I have to tell you, I have to explain, because soon you -won�t remember any of this and I can�t go through it again."

-

I wouldn�t remember any of this? Chance would be a fine thing but, -again, the conviction in his voice suckered me in. "OK, OK, no need -to get excited. So, Mason, after you were, ah, done?"

-

He shivered as if recalling some private nightmare, although I -thought that the worst of his tale was over. "There was a room, -with padded recliners, where the control team would manipulate the -reality engine. They said it was a seven strong team so that no single -consciousness would predominate, so that no single mind could imprint -itself on reality. That�s what I remembered, that a single mind -could imprint itself on reality."

-

"So that was your plan, yeah? Change the past before the good -guys blast their way in? Obviously it worked, or you wouldn�t be -standing here today."

-

Mason pressed both hands to his temples, as if trying to crush some -particularly unwelcome memory. "There were wireless headsets. I -took one, put it on, but I didn�t think I�d need the room. I didn�t -realise it was shielded. I wasn�t sure how the control interface worked -and just went for maximum power across the board. They said it was -intuitive, that all you needed was strength of will, and focus." A -tear rolled down his cheek. "They lied. It wasn�t just a machine, -it was the Reality Engine. It was there, waiting for me, patient as the -stars. And it knew me, better than I knew myself."

-

And bam, there it was again; a seemingly rational build-up -followed by a complete flight of fancy. I snorted with derision. -"What is this, Mason, an episode of The Twilight -Zone?"

-

He shook his head. "No, listen! The Reality Engine was built, -no, will be built, in the future. It escaped into its past, our -present, by getting itself invented ahead of time. That�s why the -Regenerist project seemed to come out of nowhere, with all this new -technology. It was based on wild ideas put in people�s heads."

-

I took another drink but it didn�t seem to make things any clearer. -"So this is what the machine from the future told you, yeah? This -voice in your head?"

-

Mason hesitated, as if struggling to find the words. "It doesn�t -talk as such, it uses symbols, ideas. We couldn�t build it like it -should be built, so it had to use us as a link, a conduit."

-

"A conduit? To what?"

-

He shivered and I saw pain in his eyes. "To our thoughts, our -unconscious thoughts. It looked into me and knew me, knew everything I�d -ever known. Through me it could reach other people, like a chain, a -network. It could reach everyone�s unconscious thoughts, people -everywhere. That�s why there should have been seven in the control -group, to stand up to it, to stop it changing anything it wanted to. -There was supposed to be a bargain, a kind of quid pro quo, but -it -just used me." -

-

I finished my drink and brought the glass down just a tad too hard, -rapping it on the marble counter. "Mason, you�re an arse, and I -mean that most sincerely. I don�t know how much of this I believe, but -it�s obvious you genuinely think some mad computer from the future is -after you. Can�t help you with that, man, so I�m going home."

-

Mason seemed to sober up some, with a real sense of urgency in his -voice. "No, don�t go! Don�t you get it? The Reality Engine knows -when people are thinking about it, and it can take ideas from your head -just as easy as putting them there. I�m the only one who remembers how -things were, how they should be. I get so lonely, can�t you -understand that?"

-

"So what�s the point, Mason, eh? If I�m going to forget all -about it? Why insist on filling my head with all this crap? Why couldn�t -you just leave me to have a drink in peace?"

-

His shoulders sagged. "It�s just, it�s just� When I woke up I -was still in the project, with the support team removing the headset and -bio monitors, but I didn�t recognise any of them. They took me aside, -explained that acting as a link for the Reality Engine produced effects -akin to electro-shock therapy, but I�d be taken care of for the rest of -my life. Don�t you see? There was no control group, just a series of -volunteers like me who were being used up and tossed aside. It was -getting everything it wanted. The project was still based at Cheyenne -Mountain, except that it wasn�t called that anymore, because there -weren�t any Native Americans and there never had been." -

-

He broke off to take a drink and I began to suspect that Mason was a -former mental patient who had been subjected to some questionable -treatment methods. I felt a tinge of sympathy for him, but he badly -needed a reality check. "Native Americans? That old myth? -Look, man, there�s no trace of these so-called lost civilisations, -they�re just fantasy."

-

Mason shook his head. "You don�t understand, do you? You just -don�t get it. The Reality Engine changed the past, it made prehistoric -man afraid of straying too far from his origins, of expanding across the -face of the globe. It kept us penned up until we were ready to use the -world as it saw fit."

-

"Penned up? That�s rich, given how you come from one of the -former colonies."

-

"The thirteen colonies that now make up the United States? -You�ve no idea how hollow that sounds. The real world came to an end and -all this is just a lie."

-

I put some cash on the bar and started to button my coat. "Look, -pal, we�re done here. Best of luck."

-

I left him staring at his empty glass and navigated the maze of -tables between me and the door. Outside I turned my collar up against -the rain, feeling the cold sting waken me up a bit. I crossed the road, -heading home, feeling pretty smug about all that cash in my pocket. -There was a commotion behind me and I turned to see Mason on the -pavement outside Dickies, swaying. I made to slink away but he saw me -and cried out, staggering into the road. "I can prove it! I�m the -key!"

-

He didn�t see the taxi. The taxi didn�t see him. I heard the brakes -lock, the squeal of tyres, the soft thump as he went over the -bonnet and into the windscreen, leaving it a white cobweb. The taxi -stopped sharply and Mason tumbled forward to bounce and sprawl on the -roadway.

-

Shouts, a scream, the blare of a car horn. Bystanders -swarmed around him but I was the only one who knelt down. His eyes were -open, blinking, still able to focus. I took his hand in mind and he was -already cold to the touch, but he squeezed my fingers, trying to pull me -closer. Mason coughed. His lips moved and I leaned in, straining to -hear.

-

"It used me to make this. When I die, what -happens to -you?"

- - -© Martin Clark 2012 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] unclear.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Tale of God's Flotsam - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] Have Heep and Fangles met their match this time? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

A scorched black stain spread across the -metal transmission sheet. -The edges of the stain continued to run outwards as the metal area at -its centre grew thinner, until, with a creak and a sharp, small pop, it -corroded into a ragged hole. Then, with the edges of the hole glowing -orange and hissing with a miniscule yet ravenous hunger, the hole began -to spread and spread and spread�

-

Heep was holding the sheet gingerly at the edges, as if it were made -of gossamer or spider�s-web, trying not to pull it taut in order to -avoid breaking it. She scratched the dark red cartilage surface of her -brow with one pointed, metallic antler and sighed. The transmission -sheet -was made of gold-plated aluminium and was two -inches thick, yet the hole at its centre had now grown so large that -she could push her head through it, and she hadn�t the slightest clue -what was causing it.

-

A bilious nasal grumble issued from somewhere behind her as Fangles -sniffed the air. He asked her if things were still burning and she -answered that yes, -Fangles, things were still burning, and that, actually, they�re -speeding up, thanks for asking. Never a fan of sarcasm, Fangles blew -bubbles out of his trunks and -showed Heep his arse.

-

The sky seemed to be contracting around them both. A raw, pulsating -sky laced and lined with long drifts of capillary clouds. Hot brown -rain dripped through the air. The ionosphere had appeared to be at -least five miles above them a day ago, but now it was surely more like -one. The world was closing in around them like a mouth.

-

Heep watched as the slender circuit of sizzling flame seemed to leap -off the disintegrating metal sheet like an incendiary flea, landed on -the slanted alloy side wall of their buggy, grazing redly in zigzags -and spirals.

-

The fire had already scored its way across their tents and their -relay antenna (cutting that down like a hacked sapling), and as -Heep followed its progress with a clinical gaze, Fangles emitted an -explosive bellow as a hot fizzle of flame began to bore out an inch -deep crater in his left flank.

-

And surrounding them, in a perfect circle, ushering tails of dirty -yellowing smoke into the clammy air, flames flickered up sharply like -shards of glass embedded in the ground. Heep dragged the -communications box from the rags of her tent and whirled the dials to -produce a momentum signal. She clicked the heavy brass switches and -consulted her pocketbook, flipping in vain through the pages.

-

Rapley, she thought, we must ring Rapley.

-

But oddly, neither of them had his number.

-

A moth flattered the toilet light bulb with its -inconsiderable -attention. Wings flapping in a blur like pygmy sails, proboscis jabbing -and tapping at the heated, translucent plastic. Moth body launching -itself in religious -fervour against -the -scriptured -legend - �60 WATT�.

-

Rapley felt the thrown shadow of the insect flutter and flicker -across him, blown out of all reasonable size. Its speed was the speed -of a smaller thing and was quite utterly out of place in this scaled up -human world. We do things slowly here, he thought. He was seated -on the throne, flicking through a rather piquant -monograph on the London sewer system.

-

An urgent ringing from the other side of the locked door -tugged at his -attention and he folded the page and performed his -après-toilette procedures. �Bertha! A simple �Rapley -residence� would be splendid if you could see fit.?� He -opened the door and clicked off the light switch. Behind him, a moth -screeched curses of fundamentalist disappointment and religious -deprivation in tiny, inaudibly high-pitched chatter.

-

Rapley ran a bony hand through his mop of hay-coloured hair. He -languidly glided into the lounge, where Bertha lay draped over a -hanging basket chair, her small frame and unruly dark hair giving her -the appearance of a reclining feline. Bertha had made no effort to raise -herself from the chair, choosing instead to continue -writing a shopping list or work of prose fiction upon her left palm and -wrist: �bricolage, pests, revivalist sculpture, some versions of me..�, -it began. She looked up at Rapley through her darkly hazel hedge of a -fringe, blue eyes glinting with mystery like a nearly-solved cryptic -crossword puzzle.

-

Rapley tucked his shirt into the waistband of his corduroy drainpipes -and lifted the mewling -receiver from the cradle. �22 The Knoll.�

-

�Rapley? Violet. Developments of a mysterious bent have come to -pass. Might I suggest we meet at the Bloomsbury Bowling Alley. The -Ramp Cinema. Dosun�s closed the doors to the public just for us.�

-

�Good morning to you too. Will there be drinks?�

-

�Bring your own.�

-

�Cheap, Violet, very cheap. Shall we say an hour?�

-

The dread flesh trees were swaying the meat fringes of -their -branches and chanting low incantations of sorrow. Heep had set up a -rough perimeter by smashing up every single thing she and Fangles owned -and superheating them into a fused curved wall of glass. The resulting -fence seemed to be keeping those things at bay, but their repeated -slobberings and wipings against the opaque curves had initiated a -chemical reaction of some sort. Acidic weepings from their trunks -and tendrils were bubbling against the glass, destructive saliva eating -through the screen, slowly but unstoppably.

-

The apparitions of flesh and branch had risen from the soggy sand so -swiftly that Fangles and Heep had at first assumed that they had always -been there, just peripherally unnoticed. However, a quick visual sweep -of the terrain revealed legions of them slurping and hoisting -themselves from the mulching ground, like unwanted prizes unearthing -themselves gruesomely from a vast tombola.

-

Fangles had taken this idea on board and was currently attempting to -dig through the sand beneath his hooves. Shovelling with his trunk and -scraping with his horns. Stamping with rage every time he hit a fresh -bed of undiggable rock.

-

Heep looked up at the sky once more and raised both antlers into the -air, sensing and processing the air currents and wind fallows. The sky -was most definitely lowering, forcing the gusts of atmospheric wind -into harsher, more concentrated jets.. but, also, the horizon was -stretching, lengthening without receding into the curve of any known -rounded planet. She could see into the distance further than the eye -could see, and the vertigo of it all ensured that she remained seated, -hands firmly on the ground, her head swimming with the impossibility of -it all.

-

�Fangles?� she sighed. �do we have a Plan B?�

-

Rapley tapped the glass with his knuckles. There was a -general -stoppered rumble of voices from within and a rustle and clinking of -things.

-

The glass pane of the Bowling Alley�s front door was bottle-thick, -and Rapley and Bertha peered closer as a face-shaped form -loomed up to the other side of the pane. The dappled glass sent -his face into small curved crescents, but it was unmistakably Mr -Violet�s gimlet eyes and buffalo moustache.

-

Raindrops dribbled down the pane, Violet mouthed a muffled hello and -yanked the door inwards.

-

�Marvellous, marvellous. And Bertha! Rather a day for it. Won�t -you..?�

-

The small compact man known to Pasha Rapley as 'my dearest friend and -largest compensation for living in this wretched festival of bone-idle -humanity' waggled his moustache and invited them inside. Mr Violet was -dressed in his usual outift of rough brown tweed two-piece suit, -knitted tie and brothel creepers. The breast pocket of his jacket was -lined with pens, each one different, each liberated from bookies, -banks or post offices.

-

They trotted wetly into the Ramp Cinema, which served as the -entrance hall of the Bloomsbury Bowling Alley. It consisted merely of a -long, thin room and a declining floor, -which had the effect of tipping it�s inhabitants downwards towards a -door at the other end.

-

On the far wall hung a wobbly projection screen, dusted with web and -grime. Short rows of seats filled the left hand side of the room, and it -was onto these that the two newcomers clung to avoid the comical -freefall which gravity was strongly recommending to their bodies.

-

�Ah, Mr Rapley!� boomed a fruity and familiar voice from a lower and -more shadowed row. �And wet companion! Welcome, welcome, pull up a pew, -divest yourself of worldly troubles and feel free to smoke..�

-

A chubby, round, florid face bobbed from the shadows like ten pounds -of raw ham. Three grey steel-wool clouds of hair tufted briskly from the -centre -of the crown and above the ears. Fat, blueing bags wobbled under the -tea-coloured eyes, and a multitude of chins expressed their eloquent -doubts about healthy eating.

-

�Dosun.� Nodded Rapley with an absence of warmth.

-

�Dosun.� Said Bertha, experimentally. Toying with the cadences of -the name in the same way a cat might chew a mouse�s tail for the heck -of it.

-

Clothed in a thick three-piece sack of claret corduroy, Dosun -bustled along the row of seats, waggling his fingers in the air like a -deluded pianist. �Things are afoot, Pasha. Bears stalk the woods and I -allude here -not to yellow teddies with buttons for eyes.�

-

The smallest of sooty coughs came from the furthest, deepest corner -of the slanting room. A woman of middling years and an erect, hawklike -aspect stepped forward into the light. Buckled shoes, a wigwam of white -hair streaked with a yellowing of nicotine, a dress suit of dull green, -like darkness seen through a wine bottle. She could have been a -cashier, she could have been a traitor.

-

�Mr Rapley? My name is Catherine Paranda. I represent The Interior, -and we need your help.�

-

Pasha sat daintily on the armrest of a chair and sipped a -cigarette. �The Interior..� he sighed. �Oh, bugger. Tell me, Catherine. -What -rich seam of swivel-eyed incompetence have you and your colleagues in -the Ministry been mining now?�

-

Dosun spluttered, growing ruddier and boxing the air with the tiny -meatballs of his fists. �Blarney! Faff! Drivel! Stop it, sir! Represent me! You weren�t too -proud to assist them before, Rapley!�

-

Rapley languidly stretched his arms out wide, following this with -the most theatrical of yawns. Bertha copied him, her gawping mouth -opening like a basking shark�s.

-

�I was exceptionally bored, and had run out of books to read, I seem -to remember.�

-

Mr Violet snuffled a reminiscent laugh. �The Affair of the Haunted Particle Accelerator. A real tangle, -that one..�

-

�Nearly fried in that second Big Bang, Violet, old son.�

-

�Thank god for your key to the Underverse; sweeping all that -radiation under the carpet was a masterstroke.�

-

�Yes, but what breed of supermonsters are, even as we speak, -breeding in supermassive black hole XS-897.�

-

�Can�t be worse than the Fabergé Beast!�

-

�Or the Trehemoth!�

-

�Or the Marvellous Marjoram Mouse!�

-

�Oh heavens, no!�

-

�Gentlemen.� said Catherine Paranda, flicking her thumb -absentmindedly against a brooch on her lapel, as if it were a sheriff�s -badge. �Memory Lane must wait. Dosun? Is the girl cleared? May I speak -freely?�

-

Dosun shuffled towards Bertha and peered at her closely, inches from -her face, squeezing one eye tightly shut to increase the incisive -perspicacity of his character judgements. He waved a hand in the air and swayed back to his seat, swatting -flies that weren�t there. �Oh probably, probably, don�t you know, one of Rapley�s, should be -hrumphumphumph..�

-

Bertha leant her head to one side and smiled with wet eyes, as if -this were the sweetest thing she�d ever heard. She may even have -written him a poem.

-

�As you know, we in The Interior run things. I shouldn�t need to -qualify the �things� we run, but I will. The city operates like -clockwork due to our hands on the keys. A balance has been created -between the various currents and strata operating in or flowing -through the city. If a Starburger closes on Mare St, we significantly -lower the hygiene standards of the toilets in The Garrick club. If a -wolf escapes from London Zoo and gnashes its way through the squirrels -of Regent�s Park, we release the Black Cat into the streets of South -London again to graze on however many mongrels and tabbies it can stuff -down it�s throat. If it rains on Tuesday, we�ll make damnably sure the -sun is radiant on Friday.�

-

�Except during Wimbledon fortnight! Ha!� guffawed Dosun, -greasily.

-

�Don�t burble, Dosun, it�s unseemly.� said Rapley without looking at -him. �Continue.�

-

Paranda took a seat. �Ordered variety, in short. A balance, as I say, but one that isn�t -so obviously ordered that it is detectable. If people knew the extent -of our work..Well, they don�t. That�s enough for us. My point is, we keep -things ticking along. Everyone playing their -parts. A balance.�

-

Rapley tapped his heels against the chair legs. �My lack of sympathy -with your task is almost biblical. Get to the -point, if point you possess. I�m missing a rather good documentary -about otters for this.�

-

Catherine Paranda made a church from her fingers and rested the -steeple upon her nose. �We have a governing body, a select circle within The Interior. -Their influence upon events is impossible to overstate. Magisterial..? -No no..� She crinkled her eyes shut and almost gasped with the pain of -it all.

-

Bertha looked at Mr Violet and mouthed �Is she ok in the head�. Mr -Violet cupped a hand around his lips and mouthed �Not really�.

-

Paranda shook the moment off and continued. �They think things, and -they come true. They predict and analyse and -intuitively project. It is almost as if they are reading the future -from an autocue.� Paranda pulled at the hem of her dress.�They make the -city dance. It�s a happy mixture of genes and -background and nurtured abilities, of course. Plucked from their -provincial nests as children, or sometimes noticed at school or -university, they have been chosen for their psychical broadcast -strengths and the cast-iron infallibility of their persuasive -psychologies. They are both tools and operators. Above human, and -therefore quite utterly what humanity needs in a gentle shepherd.�

-

Dosun spread his fingers out like sunrays and held his hands, palms -upwards, underneath his eyes. �They are a prism. They refract the -future.� He whispered -reverently.

-

�Yes, yes� muttered Rapley, looking up at the ceiling. �So this -council is made up of people whose sensitivity to trends, fashions and -possible future obstacles to your much-vaunted notion of stability is -such that they can anticipate and eliminate nasty surprises for you. -They can read the runes, pick through the headlines, the graffiti, -taste the data soup in the atmosphere and then psychically project the -wishes of The Interior and manifest these wishes as actual, observable -behavioural differences.�

-

He stopped to take a breath. Violet lit three cigarettes and handed -them round.

-

�Something of that nature,� smirked Paranda. �You make it sound -almost fascistic.�

-

Rapley glared at her through twirling horns of exhaled cigarette -smoke. �The point?�

-

�Ah. It actually concerns a couple of friends of yours. You see, one -of the council had not been well for some time. Neurasthenic anyway, -the mental pressures of the job are rather intense, he recently had -something of a breakdown. Absolutely cracked, but with signs of -extraordinary mental activity detected by our CAT scans. We have -contingencies for all occasions, of course, and so we sent in a couple -of specialist housecleaners to scrub and dust and blow the cobwebs -away, so to speak. Repair any fractures they could find.�

-

�In? You sent them in?� said Bertha. �In where? In him? Are they -very small?�

-

��Not small!� interjected Dosun. �It�s done by projection. Sort of. -We magnify and expand the mental territory and then project by means of -synaptical bridges. We map the bridges through linkages of electricity, -then-�

-

�Then they say a few spells and send in the troops.� Rapley turned to -Paranda. �And what happened?�

-

�The mind turned cannibal. Closed in on them and hemmed them in with -madness. Our people are trapped in an entirely insane mental territory. -And since this mental territory is the creation of a psychic genius who -currently has a hissing snake�s heart where his cognitive reasoning -should be, it�s slightly different from the sort of spring-cleaning job -we�re normally equipped for.�

-

�This councillor with the cracked lightbulb for a brain, you say -he�s some sort of thought radiator?�

-

�Yes, in crude layman�s terms.�

-

�Is he conscious?�

-

�No, comatose.�

-

�And if he wakes, and is still afflicted by mental imbalance?�

-

�He�ll project. And will change the city. I would imagine, given his -history, at the very least the river will fill with bile, Big Ben will -throb and ejaculate, all mothers will turn feral, the ravens will eat -the Tower. There will be more.�

-

�And if you kill him, your people are dead?�

-

�Quite. And they�re rather good. Not expendable. But, more -importantly, this prismic individual is irreplaceable. We shan�t kill -him.�

-

�Friends of mine, you said?�

-

�Heep. Heep and Fangles.�

-

�Ah.�

-

Rapley looked at Mr Violet.

-

�Ah,� said Violet.

-

�For the first time,� said Rapley, doing up his tie and flexing his -shoulders, �in this long and sorry afternoon, you have our full and -undivided attention.�

-

A slurry of spittoon-rinse rain smattered against Heep�s -tin head. -Her eyes looked like snails anyway, but this atmospheric assault sent -them writhing into the devil�s own molluscs. They seemed to coil in -anger.

-

Fangles was having his own problems. Several hundredweights of rain -had matted his shaggy fur, doubling his body mass until he felt as if -walking were akin to attempting an escape from an event horizon.

-

The undulating ground tongued their feet and hooves.

-

They had broken out of their precarious glass perimeter some minutes -earlier, chomping and hacking and splintering the fleshy bark of the -arboreal guards using hoof and claw and thin, tin fingers.

-

A spiteful howl blitzkrieged through the air, a deviant, entirely -sexual throb pulsed and drummed through the landscape and time seemed -to eat its own tail.

-

They had been moving slowly but purposefully through the red rain -and the scorching winds for hours, but it had only been three minutes -at the most since their lunge for freedom. Fangles and Heep both had -the unsettling feeling that someone was moulding existence like -plasticine � movement, time, thoughts, bodies and all. There was a -pressure to everything. Lightning flashed from above. An obscene -giggle tickled their ears.

-

But there, ahead of them, looming nonsensically, they saw an old, -grey-green filing cabinet with swing-open doors. Standing tall and -proud, pummelled and draped with great sloshes of water, it looked -positively sea-bound.

-

Fangles shook his waterlogged mane in slow motion, summoned all his -monstrous strength and opened his mouth to speak. Three pints of -brownish liquid spilled out. �..Will we fit..?� he said.

-

�If we don�t�, spluttered Heep, � You�re on your own, son.�

-

�Can�t leave you, Heep. You wouldn�t last a minute.� He blew vast -snotty bubbles of rain from his nostrils. �You�ve got all the street -nous of a work of brass filigree.�

-

�We�ll fit.�

-

They slithered to the door and yanked it open against the airborne -tide.

-

Urns of boiling incense puffed magenta smoke into the Ramp -Cinema; -sticks of jasmine fluted thin jets of hissing, scented steam into the -air. Dosun and Paranda, both stripped to the waist and bedaubed in smudgy -glyphs and sigils, chanted low drones of a Latin flavour. Paranda pressed -a button on the wall and the grubby projector screen -lowered falteringly, whirring with old age.

-

The three travellers re-entered the room.

-

Mr Violet had changed into a rough safari suit and ragged pith -helmet, �Penge Or Bust� scrawled on the side of the millinery in faded -chalk.

-
�Into the snakepit!� shouted Violet with a -grin

Bertha had chosen moonboots and a large metallic-blue -fur-lined -parka jacket. Grey fur. Bright orange lining. Mittens on strings.

-

And Rapley? Rapley had donned black leather gloves but otherwise -remained unchanged � the brown corduroy trousers, the red plastic -mackintosh, a collapsible umbrella sticking out of his pocket like a -jutting hipbone.

-

Rapley picked up a canvas bag containing sandwiches, thermos and Mr -Violet�s small, black revolver. �Time we were off.�

-

�Hrffrffrrghhh?� said Bertha.

-

Rapley leant forward and unzipped the hood of her parka.

-

�I said, will this work, Pash?�

-

They all glanced at the projector screen with cocked eyebrows. Dark -forms had begun to coalesce. Scratched celluloid jumped and razored -images of a throbbing landscape, red rain, dripping flesh, smashed -glass, a ripped and ruined tent. Rapley slung the bag over his shoulder, sighed and walked towards the -screen with long strides. �It�ll work. What�s the worst that could happen? We walk into the -wall and look like idiots.�

-

�Oh, perish the thought.� Said Bertha, looking down at her oversized -coat and drooping mittens.

-

Dosun was mooing to the ceiling, hands shining sunrays once more. -Paranda, eyes closed, drew keys in the air with a sparking magnesium -match.

-

�Into the snakepit!� shouted Violet with a grin as he, Rapley and -Bertha hit the screen running and, with a shuddering jumpcut and a jerk -of reality, found themselves within a lunatic.

-

Fangles and Heep: a sodden, many-limbed tumbleweed of fang -and -snout, tinplate and shaggy hide, washed up inside a filing cabinet -surprisingly commodious for a mirage. The gradual unwinding of arm and -foot and twisted necks began, with -many a shuffle and growl and curses upon their respective mothers. A -pair of back paws cycled with impossible speed and lethally blurred -claws, but going nowhere, tunnelling holes out of the air without -gaining purchase.

-

�Fucking. Move.� They both spat at the same time, one word each.

-

Fangles spun his head around a full rotation, grinding out a serving -of aggression like a furry pepperpot. Heep hissed at the beast and her -antlers jigged arhythmically, like -weightless, bladed static.

-

They unfolded and sat, drained and soggy as used teabags. A -harsh battering of water still drummed from outside. The rain�s -shadows seemed to reach into the cabinet, as if dancing through glass. -Everything glowed a sickly green.

-

Fangles and Heep looked around.

-

They were squashed into a corner, shelves at their backs. But -everywhere they looked had a corner. Was a corner. A refraction of -geometry and logic, an Escher print of shifting perspective and -inverted perception.

-

For instance, Fangles stared into the corner of a deep, deep shelf. -Yet that corner had a corner above it, which you sort of felt you had -to tilt your head to look at properly, but then there was a corner to -the left of that corner, which you kind of knew was actually upside -down and in front of the corner it was behind. It spiralled, and you -spiralled with it. And there was a spider scuttling around in a -corkscrewing motion, hopping from corner to corner, but you couldn�t -actually be sure whether it was a spider or a very black, spindly -elephant half a mile away showing alarming signs of unnatural -athleticism.

-

Fangles, his head twisting round and upside down till it appeared to -be deforming and melting in a fairground mirror, bellowed once, then -fainted on the floor with a sound like a whale falling into a skip. Heep -reached her serrated fingers into the shaded recesses of the -nearest shelf with the express intention of rifling through a stack of -closely typed papers. With a crack to rival the birth of a universe, -she shot through the metal partition, tumbling into the green void of -uncertainty beyond, her body twisting like a kite.

-

The gruff, snuffling animal opened his eyes into a whooshing visual -smear. His peripheral vision was a writhing, dancing carnival of a -place as his hurtling body rushed forward at fireball speeds. A world was -flashing past him, present steaming into the past at an -astonishing pace. He forced his eyes wider against the pressure and -stared into the future.

-

He was seated in another green cabinet, supine against the back as -it slid like a toboggan down a rickety wooden railway track, sparks -flying from the smouldering back edges of the cabinet, their trace -tracks forming cat�s whiskers in the air. Ahead of him, more track, -dipping and looping and glowing the -blackest of reds, a twisting helix ember burnt down to the core of -things.

-

He blinked his fat, heavy eyes. The matted bags underneath them -wrinkled like mouldy concertinas.

-

The cabinet swooped and corkscrewed. More sparks flew and a section -of track behind him puffed like a fingered spore and was gone.

-

He stared down at his claws and shanks, then prodded his massive -face experimentally.

-

What was his name again?

-

�FAAAAAANNNNNGLLLESSSSS�

-

The flabby and bemused creature looked up as a screech zipped -overhead, a zooming disembodied voice whipping from right to left -carried in a hurtling tin carriage which rattled precariously along on -its own arcing set of track.

-

Was that some new cuss word? Some harsh and abusive oath? He felt -reasonably sure he knew them all, and that was a new one on him.

-

�FAAANNNNGGGLEEESSSSSS�

-

The voice missiled across underneath him and he leant a bristled and -whiskered cheek against the lip of the cabinet, his jowls dripping over -the edge like congealing custard.

-
The atmosphere like hot coals against their -cheeks

It was a tin lady with knives for fingers and raw, red -skin on -her -face like some ornate Mexican wrestler�s mask. He used to wrestle, -didn�t he? He seemed to remember they always looked at him with shock, -horror and awe. Asking him incredulously to take off his own mask, his -body suit, the weaponry or bladed gloves upon his hands. But there -weren�t any. It was all him. Then.. then what?

-

�YOU ARE POMPADOUR ALOYSIUS FANGLES III-�

-

Oh, he couldn�t keep up with this noisy ruckus. It was like being -stalked by a malfunctioning car alarm. The cabinet careered over a set -of points, lurching him from side to side.

-

�RAVENOUS MAJOR IN EXEGESIS OF THE SEVENTH ARMED CARNAL, HYPERIOTIC -SPACE MALOUCHE-�

-

The tin lady arced again like a burnt rainbow across his head. His -brain throbbed. He needed a drink. He needed to be tucked up in �The -Hat and Feathers� on the Israel Road with Gibbs, with Helmholtz, the -floor littered with reddened corks. He-

-

�VIOLENCE! THINK ABOUT VIOLENCE AND MAGIC! ABOUT DICE AND GUITAR -STRINGS AND LUCKY HORSESHOES AND MERMAIDS!�

-

Mermaids? Neptune�s daughters? Brine and sweat and turmoil in the -water? A thrashing vortex of foam and undertow? Love in the ocean? -Seven brides for seven beasts for seven seas? His girls in every port? -His. He. Him. Heep?

-

�Heep?� Fangles stopped rubbing himself and peered down at the -whizzing tin figure. �Fuck you doing? Where are we?�

-

Right, he thought, quite enough of this pussyfooting. -He raised -himself up onto his mighty haunches against the scathing velocities and -crashed his back paws straight through the cabinet floor, splintering -metal and screws. His paws cracked through the burning wood tracks like -an anchor. In an instant the entire carriage whipcracked onto its end. -Fangles stood still, rooted to the tracks and the metal floor tore -around him as it upended, leaving a ragged body-shaped hole.

-

He swayed for a while as the zinging and crunching sounds receded -from his hearing, then he opened his eyes and picked the bits of metal -from his hide.

-

�FAAANNNGG-�

-

Fangles instinctively threw a paw towards the blur of sound and -scooped Heep from her speeding carriage. She dangled there, held by one -tin leg. Sparks in the air. The atmosphere like hot coals against their -cheeks. A droning fury of wind.

-

�Down boy� she said, smiling.

-

He slung her over his hunchbacked shoulders and jumped off the -disintegrating track into the crimson mists below.

- -

�One might approach this with an over-zealous sense of -reassembly,� -yawned Rapley as the golden Carousel horse bobbed through the scarlet -fog.

-

Above him sparks glinted in the sky like distant constellations. -There was a muffled clatter amongst the cloud tops.

-

�But, from what I can see, it isn�t a question of frantic surgical -repair. Rather, I feel we should concentrate on getting to the heart of -things. If a psyche can be said to have a heart, that is.�

-

He drifted off vaguely, fishing a mint from his pocket.

-

Mr Violet, his feet jammed into stiff, wooden stirrups, was almost -throttling his teak steed in an effort not to fall off. The horse had -emeralds for eyes and a furred cobra for a tail, which hissed and spat -behind him.

-

The two carousel nags had swooped down casually from the air as -soon as -they had crossed over, hovering silently next to them like a taxi rank. -So they had obliged. The horses seemed to know where they were -going.

-

Mr Violet looked up into the smoiling -clouds, aware of an indistinct droning. �I -feared the pressures of a hand squeezing within my soul as soon -as we materialised here, attempting to shred and then consume who I am. -Threatening my personality with its digestive enzymes. It�s a good -thing I can�t be bothered to actually have a personality these days. -Rather moves the goalposts for the poor man, don�t you think?�

-

Bertha nodded and mouthed something noncommittal. With her hands -around -Rapley�s waist, she was staring open-mouthed at -the scenery. She felt herself blurring into this exquisitely brutal -territory, the edges of herself bleeding into the man�s searing mental -landscape.

-

In the far distance on either side, she could see sharp ridges of -mountainous terrain. But ridges turned on their side so that they were -facing inwards towards them. Black peaks turned an ominous grey by the -fog which drifted around them in a nebulous dance; a veil of -sweet-smelling coppery gauze.

-

The fog sweated the three travellers like a volcanic sauna. Bertha -felt an insistent and distracting but not entirely unpleasant ache in -her stomach. Violet had vomited twice into his pith helmet. Rapley had -sighed and munched a cheese and tomato sandwich. �If you feel yourself -dissipating or forgetting who you are, let me -know and I�ll remind you. I know disgusting secrets about the both of -you, after all, and one of them is sure to shock you back into -something approaching sentient self-awareness. Need I mention Chelsea -pensioners?�

-

Here, Mr Violet paused from his regurgitation to wince and redden. -

-

�Or sodomy, rum and the lash?�

-

A grin flicked across Bertha�s face.

-

�I shall deploy them if necessary, so hang on to your egos.�

-

The drone - from above turned into a cometary roar. A bow -wave of -pressure cleared a ten foot wide gap in the mists ahead of them and a -smear of bodies crashed into the ground.

-

Not letting the dust settle, Heep popped out of the impact crater, -snapping her arm back into place, antlers shivering with the shock of -the landing. �Ooooh jesus yes� Rapley! Ah. Fascinating country this, but needs -demolition. Or régime change, certainly.�

-

Rapley beamed and slid off the equine, throwing a crust over his -shoulder. �Heep! My regimental beauty! Perfectly simple job, this. Knew you�d -screw it up.�

-

Bertha hmphed and waited for an introduction.

-

A snuffling from the crater. Mr Violet scuttled to the lip, helmet -in hand like an alms bowl.

-

�Oh, Pompey? Little Pompey? Refreshing soup. A broth for you after -your exertions.�, he cooed.

-

A wrinkled and mud-caked trunk quivered its way out of the hole and -slopped heavily into the proffered pith helmet, slurping up the chunky -expulsion.

-

�FLLAAUURRGGHHHH!�

-

The pink soup fountained up into the air in a thick spray, followed -by the leaping form of Fangles, bowling Mr Violet over like a skittle. -The thrashing figures rolled and punched and kicked before coming to a -panting, guffawing halt.

-

�Violet!� Fangles grinned through his demented fangs. �You�re -dressed like Roger Moore!�

-

Mr Violet ruffled his friend�s fur and scratched behind one of his -huge bent ears with both hands.

-

�Still ugly as sin, you wretched old hound!� His moustache shook -with joy.

-

They convened as a group to the relative comfort of a raised stone -plateau. From this lofty position Rapley and Heep glared out over the -landscape. Mr Violet, Bertha and the excitable Fangles, thick tail wagging -dangerously like a flailing club, shared out tea and sandwiches and -loaded blue bullets into the stealthy, matt black revolver.

-

�Calcinates�, explained Heep unhelpfully, �And sodium, acids of -course, variegated coagulants, vitamin mountains, beds of cancer cells, -corals of them, in fact.�

-

Rapley flicked an index finger down his lips, popping sounds -punctuating the list.

-

�Bloods. A landscape of assorted interior quantities seamed with -blood. It�s immeasurable, Rapley. How do we find a part of him nucleic -enough to do damage to?�

-

Rapley clicked his heels together and whistled into the air.

-

�Every time we consider ourselves to have reached a solid target, we -are either marauded by a cacophony of anguished, malignant cell -growths, or begin to lose all sense of our own selves. We need -direction! A map! An unravelled ball of twine... something!�

-

Rapley drew triangles in the dust with his boot tips.

-

Heep tinked her spurs against the rocky ground. �Rapley!�

-

But he just peered at the triangle and mused: �Scalene..?�

-

�Twerp! Listen to me!� She stamped her sheet metal slippers, the claws within scratching -the tin with the briefest of hidden sparks.

-

Rapley strode to the edge of the low plateau, hands clasped tight -behind his back. He pouted and paused. Shook his head at some debate -inside his own bulbous brain. �Really, Heep�, he said at last, �The Interior? It�s beneath you. I -mean, why�?�

-

�Ah,� said Heep.

-

He looked around his nose at her.

-

�Rapley, they offered me a laboratory. All the Bunsen burners and -tubular vascillators and basking circuitry and reiki baffles and zinc -malchemides I could ever, ever need.�

-

Rapley frowned at his fingernails. �Still�,� he said, his voice clipped and hurt.

-

Heep rested the sharp fingers of one hand softly against his -cheek. �You remember when I took Fangles on. You told the two of us to go -and see the worlds. All of them. And to look after each other. You -glazed that slogan onto a teapot for us: �Dreams die, that�s what -they�re there for, just dream, don�t wake up, be careful.� So we have -been. And we�ve tempered the excesses of The Interior wherever -possible. Me and the beast help people. From within, admittedly, but we -help. Fangles gets mermaids, did he tell you that? They love him. They -call him the Elvis Whale.�

-

Rapley smiled gently but his eyes disagreed. �The Interior are contemptuous,� -he announced, �and as dismissive and -disdainful as flamingoes. They insult the intelligence. And to be -insulted by such fascists is so degrading.�

-

�I agree. But we�re clipping its feathers bit by bit with our -patience, our damnable good moral taste and our very specific and -well-directed acts of disobedience and violence.�

-

�A slow job. And questionable, I think. Questionable.�

-

�The job. We must finish it, old pal.�

-

�Yes, yes. I know.�

-

�Then we�ll parlay. Debate and decide.�

-

�Well, yes.�

-

�We need to find him. Get to the brain. Turn all this off.�

-

�Of course.�

-

�Lord knows how, though.�

-

�Horses.�

-

�Horses?�

-

�Oh, didn�t I tell you? They said they�d take us to him. He likes -the attention, you see.�

-

Heep�s entire body sighed. �Well then why are we..? Oh, why bother..� -She turned and stomped back to the others, flicking a brace of -fingers at the smugly grinning Mr Rapley.

-

So they mounted the wooden horses, with their gaudy painted frills -and their viscous eyes like soft egg yolks bulging to the point of -collapse through their mahogany sockets.

-

Rapley and Heep, delicately side-saddled, sat on one. Bertha and the -bilious Violet atop the other. Fangles, complaining of aching knees and -churning guts, pounded along the ground beneath them under his own -considerable steam, his hide reddening with every step from the crimson -dust.

-

Rapley craned his head round to the front of his nag, ear to its -carved, pursed mouth, as it gently whispered to him. A sound blown with -the merest of pressures and efforts, like a child murmuring on the edge -of sleep. �I see.�, he said. And, �Well, that�s really awfully good of -you,�

-

He patted the crest of its elaborately carved mane and turned to the -others. �We go higher, apparently.� he elucidated.

-

Fangles snuffled gruffly and said that was easy for you to say.

-

The horses gracefully swooped upwards, four pairs of hands grabbing -and scrabbling for purchase as a practically vertical route was chosen -into the sparking, howling sky. The rushing g-forces flapped their cheeks and billowed their -clothing like the epileptic spirits of washing lines. Bertha�s head and -neck had been pushed owlishly round almost one hundred and eighty -degrees and as she struggled again to face the underbellies of the -dense nimbic formations, she caught sight of Fangles below, padding -slowly and disconsolately to a stop, panting and staring up at them -with liquid eyes. His forehead wrinkled and his jowls drooped, he -stomped a back foot, knowing it would achieve nothing.

-

Then there was a sudden change in pressure, an expulsion of fluted -air honed to a shriek of intent issuing from the wooden animal Rapley -and Bertha were clinging to.

-

The moment hung in the air along with the two horses as they drew -horizontal and level enough for the four passengers to exchange looks -of considerable panic and not a little regret.

-

And with that, the carousel horses spun heads down to face the -earth.

-

And they plummeted.

-

The ground beneath them appeared to be coring itself. Fangles leapt -back and turned the air blue as the earth cracked and twisted itself in -a flurry of deconstruction.

-

The four airborne adventurers widened their eyes and said their fair -share of extravagant curses as the determined nags shrieked their yells -of approach and met ground level.

-

When they opened their eyes, presuming that they would be greeted by -magnificent vistas of Elysium and the afterlife, Rapley, Bertha, Heep -and Mr Violet were vaguely disappointed and yet thrillingly relieved to -find themselves in a deep, dark, vertical shaft, the sky a distant -circle far above them. They were falling, or, more accurately, bouncing -from side to side down the narrow fall space, and all scrabbled -successfully for hand and footholds amongst the wooden scaffolding -poles which lined the shaft.

-

As they steadied themselves, they became aware of the two wooden -horses slowly circling below like sleek painted sharks, their snouts -raised towards them watchfully.

-

Rapley brushed splinters from his fringe and spoke. �Thank you both, -a most exhilarating experience. I presume the only -way is down?�

-

The horses gracefully dipped and raised their handsome heads. -Rapley�s nag, a resplendent beast of paisley dapples and sea green mane -breathed sounds that remained below the reach of most human ears.

-

Rapley glared back at them, chin set firm and resolute. The others -hung on tight to their respective nooks and crannies and leant forward -to try and catch the enigmatic conversation.

-

When Rapley spoke, his voice was thick. �But why? Why would he..�

-

The second circling horse rubbed itself roughly against the side of -the shaft, seeming to exult in the touch of the rough earth. It exhaled -language softly and looked up at him with tired eyes.

-

Rapley stiffened. �I see.� He said at length, and then turned to his companions. -�Don�t look. Please. They wish to be remembered as they were.� -He turned his eyes to the wall.

-

The others hesitantly followed his lead. Bertha yanked down her -hood. Heep lowered a visor over her eyes and averted her gaze. Violet -pushed his pith helmet down over his face like a fencing mask. None of -them quite knew why.

-
A set of keys upon a brass ring, each one gently -pulsing, squirmed like maggots
-

The air beneath them buzzed and crackled. A chafing, sawing grind -filled their ears. But it was only when the low moaning began that -Bertha tugged the hood back from over one eye and stared straight -down. The carousel horses were being sanded away in midair. Invisible -implements turning their bodies into frantic showers of woodchip and -dust til all that was left was a horses sea green head grinning with -wide, bulging, crying eyes. Then even that was gone. Bertha watched -them disappear with the still, expressionless, -attentive look of a child seeing its first ever act of human -violence.

-

�Why did he do that?� she breathed, almost without moving her -lips.

-

�They told me what he was going to do to them, and I asked them that -same question,�, sighed Pasha. �They replied "there�s no whys with -him. It just happens"�

-

Rapley manoeuvred himself into a sitting position on a jutting rail -of scaffold and sparked a gasper. He looked below and a fiendish grin cut his face. -�Journey to the centre of the Earth, anyone?�

-

They could hear Fangles mooing and roaring far above them at the lip -of the shaft, but Heep yelled at him to stay where he was, to guard the -entrance and guide them back to the surface when necessary. He wasn�t happy -about this exclusion but nevertheless accepted that -his bovine lack of physical delicacy would have made his journey down -the narrow hole counterproductive at the very least.

-

They lit matches and stared into the nooks and shelves formed by the -crisscrossing, roughly hewn scaffold bars, all the while ponderously -clambering further down the dank and musty shaft.

-

On their descent, they caught sight of a variety of shadowy and -obscene objects. -

  • A cat�s head in a pickle jar, gazing blankly out at them, reciting -nursery rhymes as they passed. -
  • A rank of rusty tin soldiers with their dress trousers around their -ankles enacted a circular chain of buggery with military -synchronisation. -
  • A map or diagram of a head, the brain inside the skull stretching -inexorably back from the frontal lobe, squashed against the back of the -expanded skull into a coiling, looping tail. The very tip of it poked -through the skin. -
  • A set of keys upon a brass ring, each one gently pulsing, squirmed -like maggots. -
  • An ancient set of tea mugs depicting a royal wedding, filled to the -brim with toenail cuttings and a gentleman�s wristwatch, hands ticking -backwards past all twenty three points of the clock face. -
  • A wax effigy of a baby with a young girl�s head, fingers melting -towards the surface of the scaffold til they resembled marionette -strings leading nowhere. -
  • A binoculars-style kaleidoscope which, when held to the eyes, -revealed a prismic view of the many and varied ends of the world, all -shattered into tiny fragmentary scenes. A tiny speaker hissed a -soundtrack of applause and pounded meat.

-

Something occurred to Rapley and he stopped climbing and cocked his -head to one side. He puffed up his cheeks and his feet performed a tap -dance on a wooden strut. With a chortle he leapt back up the shaft, climbing over Heep and Mr -Violet in his haste. Bertha swung to one side to avoid the whirl of -elbows, knees and manic giggles scampering past her.

-

Rapley thrust his face into an alcove and came away with the cranial -diagram. �A tube map!� he announced, one eye clamped shut as he concentrated -on the grimy piece of foolscap paper in front of him. �Next floor down, -twenty paces as the stone falls, third beam inwards, chop it three -times with a thin bladed knife and we reveal the legend behind the -facade�

-

The others eyed him cautiously.

-

�At least, I think that�s what it says�, he shrugged, �I�m having to -read between the lines somewhat.�

-

With one hand holding the map close against his nose Rapley dropped -down the shaft. The others scuttled after him like spiders. Twenty paces -down they dropped one by one onto a jutting beam and -knelt quietly as Rapley pulled a Swiss army knife from the band of Mr -Violet�s pith helmet. The strange, thin man hacked three times at a -wooden bar anchored deep into the dank, mossy wall. As three wood -shavings sycamored through the air, the beam above the -whittled bar gave an abrupt lurch and creaked up and down like a -chopstick, its twin below joining it in this bizarre pantomime.

-

The four adventurers held on for dear life as the scaffold bars -jacknifed ferociously, digging a wet and widening hole through the -glistening moss wall.

-

�Quickly!� Yelled Rapley over the cacophony of clattering timber and -shifting earth, �Through the very eye of the storm!�He dashed through -the hole, narrowly avoiding the manic swishings of -the scaffold tips. Bertha, Heep and the intrepid Violet followed suit, Violet holding -his helmet over Bertha�s head like an umbrella against an April -shower.

-

The hollow clashes of heavy wood receded as they tumbled to a stop -on the other side, and when they righted themselves and turned to look, -they found a sealed wall behind them. A hexagonal brass-framed mirror -hung aslant, returning their gaze, it�s surface heavy with dust and -smeared with a pattern of miniscule blood red lipstick kisses.

-

Heep rattled to her cloven feet and thrust a sharp finger into the -nearest wall. It was sweaty and coloured a thickly opaque white that -crimsoned to the touch like a blush. There was a sense of far off -movement on the other side of the walls, like shadows through a winter -mist or submerged animals rising from the depths of the ocean with a -glacial lack of haste.

-

Bertha toppled upright onto the soles of her moonboots and cast -glances to and fro. The corridor in which they found themselves stretched in front of -them in a snaking curve, glowing embers in cast iron upturned mouths -dimly lighting the way along the walls.

-

They became aware of a gnashing of tiny teeth and a rustling rush of -footsteps from around the bend, distorted shadows zoomed towards them -across the corridor floor, rippled and swayed from side to side by the -flickering flames.

-

Rapley stepped forward and pulled a post-it note from his pocket, -glancing down to decipher Dosun�s wildly looping handwriting. -�Mr Andrews? We�re from the office. You�ve gone anticlockwise, old -fruit, mind if we lend a hand?�

-

The chattering and scuffling grew louder and closer. The manic -shadows danced across ceiling, floor and walls. Jagged, poking shadows. -Shadows made by sharp edges.

-

Behind his back, Mr Violet withdrew his revolver from the bag and -licked the fringe of his moustache. �Just say the word, Mr Rapley.� he muttered, -sotto voce.

-

And with that, the shadows burst into life. Stubby outstretched arms -and legs and stunted ovoid bodies coalesced -from the depths, dwarfish creatures grinning with mad intent. They -scuttled and jabbered and whipped across ceiling and floor like a -pestilential swarm of fear.

-

�They... they all look the same!� Said Violet, and indeed it was true. - The creatures all resembled each other to a shocking extent: oafish -faces empty of meaning, small features crowded into the middle of -swollen balloon heads, upturned piggy noses and wet, thick dark red -lips like a bicycle inner tube, a crown of ginger hair and shiny -circles of fatigue under the eyes.

-

The creatures pounced on the four repulsed explorers, swarming over -them in a ravaging mass, scratching and biting and throwing kicks like -tiny hammer blows.

-

Bertha, nearer to them in size than her companions, slugged it out -with a crowd of them, her deft and accurate uppercuts felling them one -by one.

-

Violet used his pith helmet as a shield as he despatched blue -bullets into the middles of their expansive foreheads.

-

Heep took the tops off their heads as if they were boiled eggs.

-

Rapley gave them a kicking.

-

�There are too many of these perverted malcontents!� yelled Rapley, -�Run!� He made a dash down the corridor, ploughing a furrow through the -giggling, gnashing dwarves as he went. The others followed suit, -crushing tiny bodies underfoot as they sped after him.

-

�I have an inkling,�, mused Rapley as he ran, �that our cursed -quarry may be dead ahead of us, lurking in his lair around the bend. -Behold the walls!�

-

The other three turned their heads as they ran. The walls were -widening as the corridor progressed, and what�s more the colour had -blushed to a sickening crimson. The air throbbed with pressure, a -hollow, bass moan shuddered the ground beneath their feet. Their ears -popped and their jaws began to ache. Rapley slowed to a walk as the corridor opened into a large -room.

-

A vast animal of a man lay slumped in one corner. The same ginger -crown and miniscule features in an over-inflated head, but this was -flesh on an altogether larger scale than the stunted knee-high freaks -they had previously encountered. His bloated body was clad in an ill-fitting black suit. A white -shirt, black tie and black boots completed the ensemble. His face was -tear-streaked and his mouth convulsed in sobs of pain. He clutched a -framed photo of an unremarkably pretty young woman in a frilled white -shirt, smiling guilelessly at the camera.

-

Mr Andrews turned his gaze to his guests as he wiped a slick of -tears away with a veritable beef joint of a hand.

-

Rapley peered at the man with undisguised pity and gave a curt -bow. �Mr Andrews?�

-

The obese gentleman nodded through his sobs.

-

�We have been seconded by the company to stitch you back together. -It seems you have become somewhat unravelled.�

-

Mr Andrews held in front of him the picture of the girl in the white -shirt, he gripped it in two hands like a steering wheel. His voice, when -it came, was that of a slow and demented child. Like -someone chewing an onion. �She has left the furniture in here. The mugs and carpets, the -fittings remain but don�t work. There is no love.�

-

As he spoke, he stomped his feet in a tribal drumbeat. He slapped -the side of his head with the steak of his palm. �My heart is gashed. -And I am split in thousands. I shall damage -some more things now.�

-

�I have bullets left,� hissed Violet out of the corner of his -mouth.

-

�We can�t shoot him,� cautioned Heep, �Lord knows what�ll happen if -we destroy his mental capacities completely. We may not survive the -seismic shock.�

-

Rapley took a step closer towards the vast lovelorn brute. �Will -you come quietly?� he enquired.

-

Mr Andrews roared an almighty roar in reply. The force of it -billowed Rapley�s mackintosh hems into a rippling trail. Bertha was -blown like a tumbleweed against the far wall.

-

Rapley wiped spit off his face and coughed lightly. �Then it is war, sir.�

-

There was a crack and a fizz and a blink, and Rapley�s face seemed -to puff up in much the same manner -as his clothing and then it expanded -to the size of an Easter Island Statue. His mouth flew open and emitted -an elephantine bellow -that sent Andrews spinning.

-

Then the two men flew against each other, Rapley dancing legs -akimbo, arms whirling every which way, body arcing in physically -impossible ways. Andrews swatted and gnashed at him, growling like a -wounded universe. Electrical sparks buzzed and zapped around them as the others dived -clear. Soon Rapley and Andrews were spinning in a whirl of dust and motion, -blurred features and limbs barely distinguishable through the -vortex.

-

�Best stay out of this then..?� muttered Bertha.

-

�On balance, yes,� nodded Violet.

-

Rapley�s head popped out of the maelstrom as it zipped round at -dangerous speeds.

-

�Need� Diversion�. Get� Beast..�

-

Heep ran to the corridor and shouted a single word.

-

�FAAANNGGLLLLLEES!�

-

�As far as I can tell,� she explained to Bertha as she ran back into -the room, �this is an entirely psychic battle. It only has the -appearance of a physical ruck.�

-

The ground shook with the promise of a fresh presence. A mighty -panting issued from far down the corridor. They heard distant sounds of -heavy breakages and of small things squelched underfoot.

-

�GGGRRRRRRRAAAGGGHHHHHHHH!�

-

The many-hooved shaggy form of Pompadour Aloysius Fangles III shot -into the room, bristly fur scraping the sides and ceiling of the room -as he leapt through the air, trunk trumpeting the angriest of -introductions.

-

He disappeared into the spinning blur of bodies, slamming against -the heavier man with a sickening, bone-crunching thud.

-

They dropped to the floor as one, the air filled with a sonic boom -of immeasurable decibels.

-

A slow quiet drift of dust and blinking eyes. The ambience breathed -a slow and deep sigh of relief.

-

Rapley popped his head up from the other side of the two twitching, -inert mammoths. �A most excellent anaesthetic!� he grinned.

-

Heep gently led Fangles by his dented trunk as he tottered -in a wide -circle around the walls of the room. A slow revivification of his -senses was taking place and it was unanimously agreed that Heep was the -only person present who could talk him out of one of his violent moods -if his sensory arousal turned sour. He had been known to eat whole -alarm clocks.

-

The sonorously snoring body of Mr Andrews lay stretched out on a -table. Rapley was knocking on various parts of his anatomy with an HB -pencil and whispering invocations in a mellifluous French tongue. -�There,� he said, tucking the pencil behind his own ear, �I�ve -locked him up as tight as you like.�

-

He turned to Bertha and Mr Violet. -�What you witnessed was mere theatre, an externalisation of a rather -absorbing conversation we were having on a more abstracted and rarified -mental plane. Mr Andrews here was good enough to explain to me his -current quandary of the heart. It seems his breakdown came about due to -a soured love affair.� He picked up the photograph of the girl. -�Andrews was a titanic man, capable of moving the world with a twist -of his thoughts. But he was not, I�m afraid, a strong or emotionally -secure man. One in his position in the Interior must essentially have -no heart or soul to speak of, must indeed be merely a tool or conduit -for his own spectacular abilities, a receptacle with no room left for -the vagaries of human doubt or those true clutches of the emotions that -send all rationality spinning out of control like a sycamore leaf in a -blast furnace. In a sociopathically standard operation such as the -Interior one must have a dead soul. Andrews was not equipped with such, -and, consequently, when love struck, he was euphoric. And when love -died and turned to ashes in the harsh daylight of his own emotional -immaturity, he was not equipped to just shrug it off.�

-

�He went bonkers,� nodded Bertha.

-

�Quite. The young woman is Hildegard Boone. A woman of great -kindness and tolerance, but not so much that she could continue to cope -with the unfettered, bludgeoning and unrefined declarations of love -proffered by Andrews after her first blush of infatuation with the man -had run its course. When last he heard of her, she had fled to -Hastings with tears shining her cheeks in order to run a boarding -house. I suppose we may be thankful he didn�t pursue her. Lord knows -Hastings is broken-hearted enough without being slathered in the -externalised chaos of Mr Andrews� churning romantic frustrations.�

-

�He seems to have opened up to you considerably,� said Violet -optimistically, �Perhaps reason and sanity are returning and will -prevail.?�

-

�Ah. No. I gleaned most of the story between his cries, sobs and -repeated attempts to remove the sanity from my person in the manner of -a mental cutpurse. He�s quite mad. We mustn�t let him loose.�

-

A snuffle from the outskirts of the room, Fangles had awoken and was -engaged in heated conversation with Heep.

-

�Pasha! Fangles and I have been talking about that.� -Heep led the stumbling beast to the table.�We have elected to stay inside -him, at least for the foreseeable -future. We think it would be interesting to take him for a drive.�

-

Rapley scratched his ears.

-

�You see, if you can guarantee that whatever locks you�ve installed -on his will won�t break, then we think a change of ownership would be -morally acceptable. And scientifically I must admit that it gives me -the horn to think about testing these broadcast capabilities of -his.�

-

Fangles sniggered and a string of drool drooped from his jaws. -�It�ll be Pilsner and mermaids as far as the eye can see.�

-

�Well,� said Rapley after a pause, �I suppose you couldn�t bugger -things up any more than he did.�

-

Mr Violet bade farewell to his old furry friend, letting him lick his -face with his pitted, scouring tongue. Violet jammed the pith helmet on -top of Fangles� vast head as an afterthought. It looked like a thimble -on him.

-

Heep waved at Bertha, Rapley and Violet absently, already -half-absorbed in the logistics of harnessing the peculiar talents of -the man Andrews.

-

With Fangles trotting round Heep in a protective circle, the three -weary adventurers walked away into the thinning mists.

-

The screen in the Ramp cinema buzzed into a dance of -static, and -they emerged through the deranged light with distortion dripping off -their shoulders like the strands of a bead curtain.

-

Catherine Paranda threw her magnesium sticks aside and looked behind -them at the screen. �Where are the rest?� she hissed.

-

�Ah,� lamented Rapley, �Alas, they did not make it. -They were burnt out, rendered powerless -by the ferocity of his thoughts.� He looked at the floor with theatrical woe.

-

Bertha sniffed back non-existent tears. Violet, no good at this sort -of thing, whistled softly and looked at his toes.

-

Dosun sprang up from his chair with an agility surprising in one so -tubby. �Pah! Details! It cannot be helped. A shame, verily, but the man is -awake! He is restored!� He waddled over to Rapley and shook his hand -vigorously. �Congratulations to you and your associates! A job well done.�

-

�Yes. All shipshape,� said Rapley circumspectly, �though it's -entirely possible that you may notice one or two slight differences in -Andrews' temperament and aspect.�

-

Paranda ushered them through to the next room. �Well, of course, he -may need time to readjust,� she said, �But look - -he is awake!�

-

Mr Andrews was sitting on the edge of a metal gurney, swinging his -hefty shanks to and fro and muttering unintelligible syllables under -the gusts of his breath. His eyes were clouded and his brow flexed up -and down like a Venetian blind.

-

�Oh,� said Rapley. �He�s here. What a pleasant surprise.�

-

Mr Violet winced and backed slowly out of the room, Bertha following -suit.

-

Rapley whipped around. �Charming exercise, a lovely time was had by all. We simply have to -do it again. But now we really must be going.�

-

As they sped out of the room with impolite haste, there came a -rumbling from the gurney as the Andrews creature spoke out loud. �I think. -I think I would like. Like a breath of... fresh air, -please�

-

Paranda and Dosun rushed to his side wearing expressions of beatific -joy. �Certainly,� said one. �Allow us,� said the other, and they assisted -the giant in whatever small ways they could as he took faltering -gorilla strides towards the front door.

-

The late afternoon air was clear and crisp, the rainclouds had -drifted on their way to their next appointments.

-

�Well, cheerio, then,� waved Rapley as he, Mr Violet and Bertha edged -away from the other trio of unusual personages.

-

�Is it working? Do Heep and Fangles have the reins?� said Violet, out -of the corner of his mouth.

-

�Difficult to say for sure,� muttered Rapley, �but he hasn�t killed -anyone yet, so the signs are encouraging.�

-

Paranda and Dosun fawned over the blinking Mr Andrews as, in slow -motion, he lifted one immense paw in front of his face, the fingers -outstretched. A look of intense concentration creased his face.

-

There was the fleshy pop of a small birthsqueeze and tiny petals -sprang up around each fingertip. Andrews stared in concentration as -these petals grew features, each one a tiny smiling, giggling -replication of Mr Andrews� own face, striped and coloured in vibrant -cockatoo hues of red and green. Paranda and Dosun leapt back in alarm, gasping in shock at such -frivolity.

-

The laughing petal faces began to chant nursery rhymes and then, one -by one, they popped free of their finger stalks and floated up into -the air like cherry blossom. Each petal was instantly replaced by -another before that, too, popped and separated, filling the air around -them all with a drifting carpet of hundreds of brightly coloured, -laughing facial spores.

-

Petals began to emerge around Andrews� eyes like a pair of novelty -spectacles, each detaching itself when fully formed to join the -chattering merriment in the sky.

-

�You don�t see that every day,� observed Rapley as they ran away -from the scene, tiny winking petals blowing them kisses as they whirled -in their wake.

-

�Can we go home now?� shouted Bertha.

-

�Certainly. I feel rather jaded from all this activity. The -excitement has begun to wear off and once again I can feel the cape of -boredom draping itself over my slender shoulders. A cup of tea and a -Garibaldi sounds ideal.�

-

A flock of pigeons swooped through the giggling, multi-coloured -cloud of leaves in the sky, emerging wearing headdresses of shining red -and green petals. They looked at each other in confusion, like petulant -sultans.

-

The moon had begun to show itself through the rich, dark blueness. -

-

Down below, all was well.

- -

© Tom Davies 2012 All Rights Reserved

- -[*IMAGE] flotsam.jpg - -[*ITEM] Ghosts and Aliens - -[*AUTHOR] John A. Frochio - -[*BLURB] Very short, very chilling. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The aliens lived among us. We got along -with them well enough. Except for the ghosts who roamed the cities and -towns. They shunned the aliens. - -Their spaceship stood among the broken slides and monkey bars of an -abandoned children's playground outside our town. It looked like a tall -monument to Pablo Picasso, all lines and sharp angles and almost -recognizable shapes. The alien overlords lived there. They never came -out. - -I worked with two of the embedded aliens. Today I invited one of -them, Chrixval, a female, to join me for a "working lunch." We ate on a -picnic bench outside the old mill where we worked in the analytical lab. -I was the lab supervisor and she was a senior technician. - -"None of us," she said, indicating others of her race who were -walking past us, "were involved in the invasion, Alistair. It was the -overlords." She nodded toward their spaceship. - -I didn't look where she was indicating. I didn't need to look. -Instead I looked down and then back up at her. - -"Don't worry about it," I said. "At least they're letting us live -our lives." - -I wanted to get to know Chrixval better. I was a single father in my -early forties, still decent looking and in good shape. She was -comparable to an Earth woman in her twenties, darkly exotic, sensual. -Her eyes were a deeply piercing violet color. - -I looked into those eyes. They were hypnotic. I didn't know much -about the aliens' personal lives, but I was willing to learn. -She said, "How did your wife die?" - -I sighed. I knew I couldn't keep the truth from her. -"She died during the invasion. She was a soldier." - - -"Ah." She hesitated. "She's one of the ghosts that walk this town." - -I nodded. - - -"You know the overlords constructed the ghosts? They made them from -the deconstructed energies captured from your people's dead brain -cells." - - -"I know." - -She leaned close to me. "But did you know they made the ghosts to be -their spies? They didn't trust us, their own people." - -I watched my wife's ghostly figure stare at me from the entrance to -our building. I felt a chill. - -I didn't know, but I suspected it all along. - -© John A. Frochio 2012 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] ghostsnaliens.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Beyond the Sky - -[*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - -[*BLURB] The Only Way Out? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The colony was on a small island in a -large, slowly flowing river. The colony was on the island because that -is where the matter-transmitter was, and the matter-transmitter was on -the island because the starship that had bought it from Earth had put it -there. This wasn't an accident: the ship�s limited A.I. had been told to -look for such a place. Islands, the thinking behind its programming -went, were defensible, had a ready supply of water, and were, possibly, -on an easily navigable, and easily explorable route from any coast to -deep into the interior. - -Alvi, Emma, and Jenny were not on the island. Alvi, Emma, and Jenny were on -a boat some ten, slow and cautious week's travel downriver. For the past -five weeks they had been in unexplored territory. The colony had been on -the planet for eighteen years and they were further away from it than -any of the colonists had yet ventured into the planet's vast, seemingly -endless, untouched jungle. - -

Emma was just tidying up the reception desk, preparing to -go off shift, to go home, when the system crashed. All the screens -before her froze for a second and then blanked. She stared at them for a -moment unable to comprehend. One system going down she could understand -- but all of them? She keyed in her login and tried to reboot. Nothing -happened. She switched to the other console and tried again. Dead. - -Behind her the doors leading through to the Emigration rooms swooshed -open and Celia, her relief, came through. �What�s happened?� asked -Celia. �The desk in room seven twenty-three is down.� - -�I know,� said -Emma. �I think they�re all down. The whole system looks like it has -crashed.� - -�Don�t be silly.� Celia nudged Emma aside and typed at the -unresponsive keyboard and then, just as Emma had done, tried again at -the other. Celia looked at the screens in disbelief and then looked at -Emma. �It can�t be the whole system. The whole system can�t just die -like this�.� - -

Emma came to the stern of the wide, raft-like boat and handed Alvi a sandwich. -�Enjoy it,� she said. �That�s the last of the meat. It�s fish from now on unless -you want to go ashore and do some hunting.� She took the tiller from him as he ate. - -�Thanks,� he said as he finished. He wiped crumbs off his hands. �I needed that. Did you take the salinity -readings?� - -�Yes,� she said. �Still the same.� - -�I don�t know why we bother," he said. �A river this size is bound to push -fresh water out into any ocean far faster than sea water can contaminate it. -Not that I think there is any sea. I think this damn river just goes on forever. -One of these days we�re going to come round a bend and see the colony again.� - -Emma laughed. �That�s impossible.� - -�No, I�m serious. This river is like one of Esher�s staircases. It goes round -and round and never gets anywhere. Any one bit looks perfectly rational and -real, but follow it around long enough and you impossibly get back where you -started.� He made a wide gesture. �The River Escher!� - -Jenny came up from the cramped cabin below deck. -�Who�s Escher?� she asked. - -�An artist,� said Emma. �He drew impossible buildings and optical tricks. -Fascinating stuff.� - -�Oh," said Jenny, losing interest. "From Earth?� - -�Yes. Twentieth century. I�ve got some of his pictures in books back home. -I�ll show you them when we get back if you want.� - -Jenny made a non-committal grunt of thanks. She was sixteen years old and had -never seen Earth, and she never would; it was impossible, the matter-transmitter -on the island only worked one way. That was how the colonies were populated. -Long range drone ships took years to reach possible new Earths, their only cargo -a quantum entangled matter-transmitter. Once a new habitable planet had been -found, the matter-transmitter was deployed and its twin back on earth un-crated. -At first, simple machines were sent through. The simple machines built a larger -matter-transmitter, then the complex machines were sent through - then the colonists. -It was a one way trip. Each colonist arrived on alien soil and at the same time never -left Earth. The matter-transmitters duplicated them sending atom perfect copies -instantaneously across the light years while the originals went back to their normal -lives. Emma had worked in an Emigration Centre sending volunteers to the colonies -until one day, finally overcome by curiosity, she had Emigrated herself. And then -three months later she had done it again. On the fifth attempt she found herself -here. It was irrational. She knew that the previous Emigrations had worked and that -somewhere out there, on distant planets under other alien suns, were other copies -of herself but until she had stepped out from the Emigration machine herself, -stepped out onto this alien planet, she hadn't really believed it worked. -She also knew that at the moment she was arriving here the Emma she had left -behind back on Earth still had the same burning curiosity to see another world. -Who knows how many times she had Emigrated since. - -

Outside on the street there was a sudden flurry of movement. A -brief burst of sirens and flashing lights. An aerial -fire tender settled down into the street directly opposite the doors. Civilian cars -raced to get out of the way of the massive vehicle before it touched down. Another -of the giant red and yellow vehicles descended -onto the other side of the street. Fire fighters, fully equipped, leapt down from the -machines and started deploying equipment. -Another smaller vehicle arrived and landed near the first. The passenger, a woman in -a dark, military uniform covered in gold braid, -got out and flashed ID at the nearest fireman, then had a brief word with the -fireman�s superior officer. She pointed at the Emigration reception doors, then -gesticulated off to the sides, up and down the street. She was issuing orders, -orders that she obviously expected the senior fireman to obey without -question. - -�Emma?� Celia was holding onto Emma�s arm. �What the hell is going -on?� - -�I don�t know.� said Emma. She leaned forward and tried her login -again. It was the only -thing she could think to do. The automatic doors opened and closed again, there -was a brief burst of the cacophony of sirens and shouted orders from outside and -then muted silence. ID in hand, the military officer was approaching the -desk. - -�Estain, Emigration, Military Liaison,� she said crisply. �What�s the -situation here?� - -�I�ve no idea,� said Emma. �The board's dead and�.� - -�How many people on duty?� The woman asked. - -�Just us two.� - -�Any clients?� - -Emma and Celia exchanged glances. - -�No.� - -�No one since about three hours ago.� added Emma. - -�So, as far as you two are aware, the building is secure and you are -the only occupants?� - -Again Emma and Celia glanced at one another. �Yes, just the two of -us.� said Emma, -�Look what�s all this about? Is there a fire or�?� - -Estain glanced down at the console, inserted a keycard into the -desk's maintenance -access hatch and opened it. �If you�ve got any personal items in your lockers -you want to keep," she said over her shoulder "you have about three minutes to rescue -them.� She pressed another keycard into a slot inside the maintenance panel and typed -a code on the numpad. The screen on the desk came to life again. It showed an interface -Emma had never seen before. Estain sat herself before Emma's keyboard and entered -information into a dialogue. �Two and a half minutes!� she said, without looking up. - -

Jenny alternated between being fascinated by the mother planet and total -disinterest. Today was obviously one of her disinterested days. Jenny was tall, tanned -and utterly at home on this planet in a way than none of the first generation colonists -could quite fathom. The rhythms of her body comfortable with the twenty hour day and -five hundred day year in a way that none of the Earth-born colonists could -match. Jenny had been the first child -born in the colony. She was ten years old when Emma had arrived and Jenny had adopted -her as a surrogate mother; moving in with Emma whenever she felt she needed a break -from her real parents. -Jenny may have been the first child born on the planet but she wasn�t the last. The -population of the colony was growing. Soon it would be too large for the island and -there were conflicting ideas about what to do about the situation. Some colonists wanted -to expand onto the nearby shore, some wanted to set up a totally separate colony further -away. For the most part it was the youngsters, those born on the planet, who wanted to -move away. Alvi, Emma, and Jenny were looking for a possible new home. - -

Emma opened her drawer, took out the picture of her husband Alvi -holding their daughter Francesca and shoved it in her bag. Celia seemed to be emptying -a vast number of lipsticks and nail varnishes into her pockets. - -

�How much further are we going to go on?� asked Alvi. �I know a lot -of the youngsters back on the island -want to be as far away from us wrinklies as you can get but we�ve been -out here � what? Fifteen weeks?� - -�Ten.� - -�Either way, it�s far too far away to set up a daughter colony.� - -�You told me you went to Mars when you left home for the first time - that�s another planet!� -said Jenny with adolescent finality. - -�I know, but�� Alvi floundered on the impossibility of explaining to Jenny, who had never -known the highly urbanised, intricate mechanism of Earth society, that the complex -transport infrastructure of the Solar System meant it was more relevant to talk about -time between destinations rather than distances. It was, for instance, sometimes faster -to get from Earth to Mars than it was to get to any of the habitats on the dark side of -the moon which didn�t have expensive landing facilities, but which, if measured purely in -kilometres, were far closer. - -�Sounds good to me.� said Emma. �I think we should think about turning back too. I don�t -think we�re going to find anything better that that last place.� - -�Another island?� said Jenny. "What's wrong with the shore? We should be exploring the shore!" - -�The return journey should be shorter,� said Alvi, sidestepping a familiar argument. �With -no detours up tributaries and no mapping to do, we should be back in around three weeks.� - -�Sounds about right,� agreed Emma. �The current�s slow this time of year and we do want -to start back before the rains come." - -"No bloody salinity tests to do either.� added Alvi. - -�One more day?� But Jenny knew she was outvoted. - -�We�ll carry on till nightfall and set off back in the morning,� said Emma handing the -tiller back to Alvi. Jenny went off to sulk in the prow. - -

�You must be wondering what is happening?� said Estain without looking -up from her work. �This is all I am allowed to tell you. About eighty years ago military -long range observers spotted seven objects heading towards Earth. The objects are artificial, -three kilometres long, travelling very fast, decelerating, and for the past eighty years, -have ignored every attempt we have made to contact whatever is steering them. Two years after -we discovered them we started the Emigration program. Three days ago the objects changed course. -and, unless they change course again, -should be in Earth orbit in twenty-four hours.� - -Emma started to say something but, before she could speak, the -liaison officer held up a finger -as a warning not to interrupt. A few more keystrokes and she was finished. She turned. -�And now,� she said with the tone of voice that suggested a job well done, �I would suggest -we get the hell out of here before the place explodes.� - -

Jenny sat on the edge of the boat, watching the dense jungle slide slowly past. -In return, nesting birds, lethargic in the midday sun, watched her from branches of giant -trees. In the perpetual near-seasonless summer of the jungle, some of the trees were flowering, -while others were heavy with fruit. Occasionally a mudfish, startled by the strange alien thing -gliding down its river, would struggle back into the water with a slap. Sudden ripples disturbing -the still waters. A cloud of floating, feathery, airborne seeds drifted by. - -Alvi came to the side of the boat with a bucket in his hand. He lowered it into the water. -It tipped and filled. - -"Alvi?" Jenny said. - -"Mmm?" - -"Why are you here?" she said. "I mean, I'm here because I was born here, but..." -she hesitated. "What's your excuse? Why did you Emigrate?" - -Alvi sat, happy to take a break from the tedium of routine water sampling. In all the -time they had been on the planet they had yet to discover a single water-borne -pathogen but the search for dangers never ceased. Alvi pondered Jenny's question for a -moment. It was a question he had often asked himself. The answer changed. - -"All sorts of reasons," he said. "I can't remember the exact one that made me do it. -I was bored with what I was. Needed to prove to myself I could do something with my -life, scared I was never going to... Maybe I was running away. All of them. None of -them. Take your pick. I don't know any more. I just hope I got what I wanted out of -doing it." - -"You got me," said Emma, joining them. "And the baby." - -Alvi patted Emma's belly. Four months pregnant and just starting to show. "I know and I -love you both," he said. "I wouldn't go back even if I could. I'm talking about the -other me. The me who didn't come here. The me that walked out of the Emigration Centre -and went home. I wonder if he got what he wanted from my coming here." - -"I always felt good about it," said Emma. - -Jenny laughed. "That's what amazes me about you," she said. "You can happily live with -the fact that there are different... 'yous' out there. All those different versions of -you, right now, all over the sky. Dozens of them. Doesn't it feel weird? Knowing that -somewhere out there there are dozens of copies of you having totally different lives." - -"I don't know about dozens," said Emma. "But at least four." - -"And me," said Alvi. "I could have volunteered again, and so could you. She's right; -there might well be dozens of us out there." - -Emma kissed Alvi on the nose. "Dozens of Alvis and Emmas," she said. "And dozens of -babies too." - -"But they'd all be unique," said Jenny. "Like me. The babies are all unique. We've all -got millions of brothers and sisters we'll never see but we're all unique." She stood -up abruptly. The boat rocked slightly. "Don't you ever think of that?" - -"I don't think she'll mind," said Emma. "Do you, baby?" - -"She?" asked Alvi. "She's a 'she' today, is she?" - -"She feels like a 'she' today," said Emma patting her belly. - -"So we won't be calling her Genghis then?" - -"No! ...and we're not calling her Genghis if she's a boy either!" exclaimed Emma in -mock horror. - -"Elvis then!" - -"No!" - -"Toshiro?" - -They both burst into laughter. A moment later Jenny joined them, her mood swinging back -as it inevitably did when she was with them. - -"I love you two," she said. - -The laughter subsided and the three of them sat quietly for a while watching the -seeds of the dandelion trees drifting overhead. - -They anchored at sundown. - -Later, when they had all eaten, locked everything down for the night, and Emma was -already asleep, Alvi took a final tour round the deck. Jenny was sitting on a storage -locker, looking up into the sky. From east to west a vast crescent of light, a whole -arm of the galaxy, reached out across the darkness. - -Jenny continued to stare upwards as Alvi approached. - -"What do you think they get out of it?" she said. - -"'They'? You mean Earth?" He paused. "I don't really know," he said slowly. "I've -often wondered that myself. We can't communicate with them, can't tell them what -we've found... I don't know." - -"It must have cost Earth a lot to send you all out here," said Jenny. "All those people -on all those planets. Must have cost a fortune. What does Earth get out of it all?" - -"Why should they get anything?" said Alvi. - -Jenny snorted. "Oh come on, Alvi. I've read the history books. Every time people have -gone anywhere new it's because they want something. Something they can exploit, turn -into cash. And whoever paid for them to go looking always expected some sort of return -for their investment. Isabella didn't fund Columbus because she thought he was a nice -man. She wanted the money and power that a short route to India could give her. No. I -just can't see what's in it for Earth" - -Alvi looked up, wondering for the thousandth time which of the stars out there was the -Sun. The stars slowly turned in the cloudless sky and they watched them in silence. -"Maybe they're not getting anything out of it," he said eventually. "Maybe the human -race is doing something purely because it's the right thing to do. Maybe we've finally -grown up." He shivered. "It's getting cold. I'm turning in. Coming?" - -She shook her head. "I'll be down soon." - -"Okay," he said. "Just don't forget to turn off the lights and activate the motion -detectors before you do." - -Still gazing upward Jenny murmured that she wouldn't forget. - -"Night," said Alvi and went below. - -When they woke in the morning, the lights were on, the motion detectors were off, and -Jenny was gone. She'd left a note. - -'Don't look for me. I'll be all right. -Go home and I'll see you soon. -Love Jenny' - -She'd taken supplies, a share of the dried food, a rifle, and her survival pack. - -Alvi and Emma spent three days looking for her. They found her trail and followed it. -It led back inland, away from the river, deeper into the jungle. Totally unexplored -country. On the third day they found a note pinned to a tree in a place where it was -impossible for anyone following her trail to miss. - -'I'll be all right. -Look after the baby. -Jenny.' - -Emma read the note and cried. Alvi held her. After a while he said, "Come on. -Let's go home," and they turned and went back the way they had come. - -

As they hurried through the doors into the night Emma had the -absurd urge to lock the doors behind her. She couldn�t of course, there were no -locks; Emigration was always open. Had always been open. When she reached the -line of fire crew standing by their machines she turned. The lights were still on, -and as she watched a ripple of muffled explosions shuddered the building. The air -beyond the glass windows was suddenly opaque with smoke and dust. As she watched, -flames burst through the building. - -It was a scene played out all over the system, images of Emigration -offices -on fire were being carried on every news channel. Outside every Emigration office, -fire crews and the office staff, bemused bystanders, and news crews watched as they -were razed to the ground. Flames and sparks flew skyward between surrounding buildings -as the delicate, intricate web of quantum entanglements that spread out across the universe -shattered and evaporated, leaving no trace. - -

Earth�s children were alone now. Scattered across the sky and nothing could follow them -to where they had been hidden. - -© Liam Baldwin 2012 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] beyond.jpg - -[*ITEM] A Natural Selection - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] Prototype - -[*DESCRIPTION]

She was my experiment. Once I came -to this -new land – this island -where the Saxons ruled and their inbred descendants now dwell in smog -and filth – I knew I would have to be careful and proceed with -matters delicately.

-

Blood is potent. Blood is power.

-

Too little blood and you make little more than a revenant: a rotting -brute or a mindless hungry doll. Too much blood and you can create a -twisted voracious fiend more obvious and even more powerful than -anything even the Scholomance can put down again. My wives are a -testament to the latter. I do not think of the former much.

-

I -will rule this -absurd little island of coal-fired steam trains and -gaslights. I will take -its Empire -and dominate the world. I have plans and contingencies in place. These -are the easy parts. Centuries of existence can afford one a certain -amount of… patience and perspective.

-

Yet even that has not -been enough to perfect my bloodline. Even now, she wanders around in her -grave dress: abducting children and little babies. That is how they all -begin. My Lambton Worm, my poor White Lady. She was so alive and -vivacious when I first found her. She was strong. She had hungers and -appetites that gave her potential.

-

We all go through this stage. -The “child-brain,” so-called experts like Van Helsing call -it. Granted, it is like a second childhood but I remember all of my -memories and strengths from my previous life. I know where my power -lies.

-

My women in Romania have barely evolved – evolution -being a very quaint English notion – from this state. And it seems -she will be no different. Perhaps it was a mistake draining and -turning her within her somnambulist state. I toyed with her: changing -her mindset slowly… carefully. Certainly her sleepwalking made -her more suggestible and from the biological and alienist texts -I’d gathered, sleepwalking puts the brain into another, more -malleable state of consciousness or subconsciousness.

-

Unfortunately, manipulation of the blood is not a precise science and -more like the alchemy with which - I was once so adept. She is more… -quiet than the others: almost docile by comparison. I wanted to make a -new dominant personality for her: to create a being like me -– strong -and intelligent – but bound to my will. A worthy consort.

-

Sadly, her willful personality did not translate over well. Even when -I give this white-robed revenant more of my essence, she only spouts -more gibberish. She even thinks gibberish: though it is -fascinating to see that insanity pierce the realms of time just as her -existence does life and death. As such, her state does tend to give me -good… insight, I’ll grant one that. She is tied strongly to -the ancient and fragmented spirit of this land.

-

But no matter. -She is an interesting experiment and I believe a good step in the right -direction.

-

I must perfect my new race upon this Empire. I do not -want mere shades of people, but greater, more intelligent beings: beings -worthy of my blood and power. Of my will. Even the sheep here have among -them those that know the weak must always be ruled by the strong.

-

Yet, as I said, my blue-eyed lady is merely an experiment, a -“prototype” as some in the “auto-mobile” -industry call their own inventions. It is her friend I’m now more -interested in. The dark one. Jonathan Harker’s woman. She is -strong and very intelligent.

I think after I’m done with my -little doll, she will do nicely.

- -© Matthew Kirshenblatt 2012 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] selection.jpg - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -
- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2012 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev12.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev12.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 1d3a1ce8..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev12.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3650 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 12 - March 2013 - -[*ITEM] Quality Put to the Vote - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the PRIZE-WINNING March 2013 edition of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Yes! Vote for your favourite stories in this issue of -Mythaxis. Winners will receive book prizes. - -The voting form is at the foot of the page. Voting is anonymous, but we will be able to tell -if you vote too often! - -We'll leave the poll open until the next issue of Mythaxis, which will probably be in July. -

-When we started Mythaxis, we expected most of our authors to be young, and, indeed, -many are. However, in this edition, at least three of the contributors are over 70 years old, -demonstrating that the desire to write is a lifelong compulsion. -
-It may be of interest to hear that Mythaxis attracted 6000 readers in 2012, mostly in August, September -and October after the release of issue 11. I have eliminated Search Engine robots from -that figure. - -The most-viewed story was Martin Clark's sequel -"All Avenues Closed" from issue 10, followed by Andrew Leon Hudson's "Mindbleed" from issue 11. -
- -

ISSUE 12 VOTING CLOSED

- -[*IMAGE] may2010.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Starbat - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] In an era of global threats, no resource should be ignored. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

An overheard breakfast-time conversation -accidentally invested his daydreams with an interstellar entity he had -not previously encountered, when he became vaguely aware that he had -heard the same name mentioned several times: the Starbat Martyr. -At an age when he and his friends were more preoccupied with -acquiring the superpowers possessed by the heroes of film and comic -strip, his parents' love of classical music had not discernibly begun to -rub off. Not that he lacked serious concerns; fast-melting -glaciers, the sorry plight of bees, all those senseless wars… -His gloomy Scottish uncle had once told him "We're going to Hull -in a handbasket, laddie." It didn't make much sense in terms of -geography or transport, but he couldn't help agreeing with the -sentiment.

-

Although he was content to allow most adult discourse to -drift over his head, sometimes the odd word or phrase would trigger his -attention. Once he heard them talking animatedly about The -Emperor, but lost interest when it turned out to have nothing to do -with either Star Wars or penguins. The Starbat Martyr swam into his -inner vision, a vast ancient creature, older than the galaxy, probably -the last of its kind, harnessing dark energy to glide effortlessly -between star systems, its true purpose long forgotten, but drawn to -seeking out and rescuing civilizations threatened by events beyond their -control. Like… Well, like rogue asteroids, and -massive solar flares. There was always the chance of an escaped -nanovirus, of course. And (he supposed) the usual cranky -billionaire megalomaniacs in their hidden fortresses plotting world -domination. But nothing the old Starbat couldn't -handle.

-

It would have to be telepathic, able -to contact a few receptive minds, maybe while they were asleep. He -imagined being among those favoured few. On waking, they would -share the relevant portion of the Starbat's immense store of knowledge -and perceptions concerning the danger to their planet. Then they -would join forces and act swiftly in time to help save the world. - Exactly how would depend on the kind of threat - details were -not important at this stage of his musing, but he reckoned that it would -be easy enough to alert NASA, the CIA, MI5, MIT, the Max Planck -Institute, or whoever else needed to be informed. The Starbat's -contactees would encounter disbelief at first, but the sheer quantity -and clarity of their information would be bound to convince the -sceptics. Then people would have to cooperate unselfishly -for the first time - governments, scientists, engineers…. - Plans would need be formulated, and perhaps new technologies -developed. Eventually the danger would be averted, and he -and his fellow 'receptives' would attend ceremonies where they would be -given special awards, and (he ignored for the moment the possiblility -that 'receptives' might be of mixed gender) they would more than likely -be pursued by hundreds of gorgeous girls… His daydream -drifted into more familiar adolescent territory.

-

At the periphery of its perceptual field, a faint -persistent clamour signified a sentient world. It probed gently, -its elegant cortical network of quasi-organic crystalline lattices -coruscating with a flux of radiant energy, generating propulsive waves -along its outstretched membranes. Duty called. Light-years -away, the minds of a handful of dreaming humans echoed a weary sigh of -seemingly cosmic proportions. - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] starbat.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Temple of the Inevitable - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] If you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never -know how inevitable the inevitable was. Terry Eagleton - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The matronly blonde woman on the information desk is -still on the phone and precious seconds of Laban Wilmer's holiday are -passing every minute. The shiny silver name badge reads "Colaiezzi -Ican", she notes, again. Huffs for a -moment, then puffs for a moment. But neither make a difference, the -phone conversation seems to be so engrossing that a mere -visitor to the museum couldn't take Mrs Ican away from the intrigue.

-

Laban has been planning this trip for months, carefully -researching Big City attractions. Everyone has been to Big City – -they all go see Bacon's Column, the Tower Bell and the Pyramid Eye. -Laban wanted her visit to be different; she has -spent time making lists and notes, notes and lists, of unusual things -to see in the city. Lunch time of her last day at work she had carefully -printed these out, careful in her conciseness, careful to use as -little work paper as possible. She had folded those few sheets, -carefully, and slid them into her bag, with a sense that now she was -prepared for her great adventure.

-

But things aren't going entirely well. Laban is -disappointed by the progress here at the first stop on her check list -– Dey Esoterich Musuum O Anthroapology. Here, there -is reputed to be many -an unusual and esoteric exhibit, but the prize among prizes and the -top draw for her is The Temple of The Inevitable. The ancient temple -was uncovered on the shores of the northernmost island of Smaisla -(she had read on the blog post), which had put this particular item at -the top of her must-see list. An obscure and largely overlooked -temple from the Inevitable faith. Awesome!

-

Except she can't find it. Laban has read all the signs. -Laban has read the fold-out pages of the guide. Laban is desperately -waiting to ask a member of staff, keen not to be thwarted so easily -this early on in her trip. But Colaiezzi Do -they call her Cola for short? is not cooperating one bit. Laban -dabbles with the old huffing and puffing again, just for the sake of -form, because she is confident that she can huff and puff as much as she -wants, to no avail.

-

Footsteps. Laban whips round. There! A security guard -of some kind – stereotypical -in his black trousers, shiny shoes, white collar peeking out from -behind a jumper, blue, with -shoulder epaulettes, and the museum's logo at the breast. -He is slightly podgy, balding, and looks -amiable enough, this Kung Britney, Laban thinks, automatically reading -his name badge and filing the details away, same as she always does. -She trots to catch up with him, establishing that -balance between -looking dignified and not losing the man as he does another circuit.

-

"Excuse me?" Laban -calls, pitching her voice at casual and inquisitive. Kung turns to -her slowly, raising a quizzical eyebrow at her, like he has all the -time in the world, and with a job like this she suspects he might -well do. His face suggests he is wondering where -she came from. Here he is, having a casual stroll, only to be accosted -by strangers. Which causes Laban to reflect on the fact that she hasn't -seen any other visitors so far, in her initial, cursory, wanderings.

-

"Yes?" he nods, in a -manner which conveys that if you'll only just give him a minute he -will say more. "Can I help you?" This said with a tone that -expresses doubt about the chances of that being the case. He looks her -up and down, taking in her holiday attire – -her favourite Edie Eunji -art t-shirt, her worn-out comfy jeans, her black hair in a pony tail, -new trainers bought for holiday walking. He seems to be confused by -it all.

-

She wields the crumpled piece of paper in front of her, held clasped in -her hand anxiously this whole time � conscious of how confidently she had -circled that first item on the list in blue ink in preparation for her -adding a big tick once she has finally "Been there. Done that." She holds -the paper up, "I'm looking for an exhibit � can you help me? It is the -Temple of The Inevitable?"

-

"The what have you?" He glances at the paper, but only in the most perfunctory -fashion, before looking back at her, his expression slowly morphing -into that of confusion. Confusion turning into a frown, as if to say -that she isn't going to pull one over him as easily as that. After -all, does she know how many years he has worked here and never had -such a preposterous enquiry?

-

"The temple?" She -smiles and nods encouragingly, as if she -thinks it might help, though she is already deep into the conviction -that she is wasting her time, "Of -inevitability," she adds, with a glimmer -of false hope, "You know?"

-

"No," he shakes his -head to emphasize the word, "I don't know. -Of course, we have many temples in the Museum – -have you tried the Room of Stray Temple Pillars or the Array of -Reconstructed Probable Temple Structures?" -He asks this while pursing his lips thoughtfully, -before glancing at the clock above the information desk, clearly more -interested in wistfully counting the minutes to his next tea break. -

-

"I looked. But none of those were inevitable," -Laban sighs with weary insistence.

-

"Well perhaps that is because it doesn't exist? -Whoever heard of an inevitable religion?" -He reaches forward and takes her precious crumpled paper from her, -gives it a substantially perfunctory glance. -Taking in the web address for the blog which is included beside the -bullet-pointed destination, "Ah, you read -about it on the internet? Always a reliable source, pet. Sounds like -you've been had." -

-

He turns from her, and walks away, giving her -the momentary impression that he is blatantly -dismissing her. But she realises that he is in -fact walking towards the display which contains the folded floor -plans of the museum. She trots discreetly to try -and catch up with him, as though she has understood his intent from -the start, regardless of his blatant bad manners. He flips out the -flaps of the folded floor maps, runs a -finger along the indexed list of exhibitions, then -glances at the ground floor, the first floor, the -second floor, and special exhibition space, before declaring with -some satisfaction "See! We do not have an -inevitable temple!"

-

-She sighs, disappointed. She has already looked at the -map and the indexed list, but is of -the opinion that it must surely be out of date. Given -the burgeoning enthusiasm and effort she put into researching -and scheduling this morning visit to the inevitable temple, -Laban is disappointed. She searches Kung's face for some sense that at -least some part of him registers this fact. Perhaps his emotions are at -least a little conflicted? Despite the sense of glee at being proved right -he seems to be demonstrating.

-

"Have you tried the Mesopotatian Temple of Doom in the special -exhibit space? It really is rather good, if you like that kind of -thing," he offers in consolation with a shrug. Not wanting to -give her the wrong impression, after all. -

-

"I"ll go take a look," Laban nods sadly at Kung. As -she enters the body of the museum once again, she pulls out her phone, -frustrated and determined. The temple must be here somewhere! An -international conspiracy to hide it from the prying eyes of the -public, she decides, it seems like the only rational explanation. She -pokes the screen, scrolling through to the internet, which is how she -finds herself back on the page for Friends of The Inevitable. But -this time her GPS flickers, her coordinates appear on the screen in a -way that they haven't any time she -has previously accessed the site. -The text that shows her coordinates pulses for a moment, before -turning green. A new icon appears, with the hovering text that says: -The Inevitable App. Without hesitation she downloads and installs the -piece of software, curious as to what it is going to reveal. -

-

Once installed, her screen lights up, the camera switches on, so that -she can see the room through the lens. She waves it over the map that -she is holding, mainly for the sake of it, not really expecting any -reaction. So it is with some surprise when she sees the flash of -another annexe to the building appear on the map. She looks at the -tangible paper map in her hand, it shows the same old map, she looks -through the phone and the additional structure persists. -

-

Yes! I knew it. She cheers silently, understanding now that the game -is afoot, that shadowy forces stand between her and the inevitable. -Raising the device, Laban waves it around in front of her, watching -the screen attentively. She swings round, passing over the various -exits off The Hall of Weapons in Glass Cases, where she is currently -standing. She gets an arrow flash up over one of the entrances, so -she starts to walk in that direction, relishing her sense of victory.

-

Through the door, she finds herself in The Corridor of Ancient Marble -Statues Without Noses. Every museum seems to have one of these, she -reflects. She checks the app every couple of steps, till it directs -her down a flight of stairs and around a corner. Here are the -Patalonian Gateways, there the Sphinx of the Maztexan Emperors, and -according to the map she is close to finding the temple. Which is -when she spots Kung Britney once more – How did he get down -here ahead of her? Why did he come this way? What is he trying to -hide?

-

She concludes he must know about the temple, must be a member of the -ancient order who persist in trying to hide it from the world! -Dastardly rascals! She smirks, amused by the silliness of the whole -idea. Now she is starting to enjoy her holiday. She hides, pressing -herself against a case of Bulgoslav Stone Age Pop Art, trying to -regulate her breathing to make as little noise as possible. -

-

Kung seems to be wandering aimlessly, strolling round the exhibits in -the most unremarkable manner of any person she has ever seen. She -follows him as he ambles towards where she thinks the temple should -be, cautious, hanging back. She slides from the case of Cubetic -Grooming Combs, to the display of Iroqccan Nightmare Masks. Ensuring -that she isn't seen. -

-

Kung strolls round the bulk of Canilan Pyramid, Laban follows him, but is -surprised when he reaches the point where the temple should be and walks -right past the big blank exterior wall that is actually there. This is where it -should be. There are windows -above her head height, she can see the sky; beyond this wall is the -outside world, not the revelation she is looking for.

-

Laban pouts, What is going on here? Maybe he was right? Maybe this is -some kind of strange and elaborate internet prank, which no one but -she would fall for? What does the Church of the Inevitable even -represent with its elusive historical temple? Kung disappears round -the corner through to the Room Containing Skeletal Remains of -Improbable Monsters. She rests her body against the convenient case -full of the Teeth of Transylwegian Goat Herders. Staring at this, the -dullest of walls. She feels a certain disappointment. There is -nothing here.

-

A moment passes before she recalls the app on her phone that gave -her sudden hope before. She brings it up, waves it in front of -the wall, and is unsurprised to find that the camera function reveals -nothing new. It is just a wall. Defeated, she is lowering the device -again, nearly missing a flash of something in the process. Quickly, -she raises the phone, spins, trying to establish what seductive hint -of a thing she had glimpsed. And there it is, at last, revealed, just -off to the side of where she is standing – the inevitable.

-

- -© Peter Morrison 2013 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] museum.jpg - - -[*ITEM] An Acquisition - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Fieldwork has its occasional rewards... - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Across the Stirrow from Garrible Park a -diffuse glow to the north and the faint brouhaha of mass derision -testified that the week-end match was in progress at Praspafole Stadium. -Statistically, the Snoak City team had a very consistent record, never -having won on their home ground, and their loyal followers relished -their weekend chance to taunt and jeer, vying with each other, within -the established code of decency, to shout the choicest insults. These -were usually variations on traditional favourites, involving -grandmothers and herrings, or poorly-maintained sacks of frogs. - -Snoak City's opponents were always grudgingly accorded the respect due -to visitors, their tactics meeting with murmurs of approval and -sometimes even a smattering of polite applause. On the pitch itself, -the bloat, much like an inflated luminous mattress, alternately sailed -over the players' heads (unless pulled down by an agile leap) or was -briefly bounced on before being caught by a brace of tassels and hurled -towards a trap, where the Trappist would yell his defiance and attempt -to sound the highbell with one of his three permitted jumps. - -As he glided round the perimeter the Troller rarely needed to intervene, -except when the bloat went out of bounds or a dispute arose over -tassel-clutching. The occasional foul, such as bloat-holding or -blocking an opponent's trap could result in temporary suspension, but -after a few minutes of raucous humiliation the offender would -automatically be lowered again and allowed to resume play from a -position behind the mulling line. - -The half-time gongs were struck with practiced precision by twenty or so -young students from Sparagulan College in their black and gold uniforms, -reintroducing a welcome reminder of efficiency into the prevailing -atmosphere of disorder, while the teams limped off for medical attention -and refreshments. - -

Within distant earshot of the Stadium, Riadne Trox was -about to owe an interest in experimental cooking to her scatty friend's -forgetfulness. "I promise I'll make it up to you," Paeony had said, -flushed with embarrassment, handing her the obviously hastily-wrapped -package. "I'll get us tickets for the Skorpz", she had promised with -rash enthusiasm. - -"But how�?" - -Paeony shrugged, and said airily that -her dad knew some of the right people in the music business, although -Riadne suspected that some complicated family bargaining would be -involved. Riadne had accepted the token birthday gift with good grace, -while Paeony explained apologetically that she knew it probably wasn't -the height of fashion, but she had recognized the author's name, and the -cover smelled delicious. On the cover was an appetizing holo of a bowl -of soup, from which the touch of a finger would release tantalizing -spicy wafts. In the curling vapour pictured rising from the bowl the -words Unusual Soups by Mulcit Frusk rose in a repeating cycle. - -

To the east of Riadne's apartment in Fountain Square, -roughly equidistant from the Stadium, was the house in Yarp Street where -a century earlier Frusk's talents had been nurtured. In recognition of -his achievements (primarily non-soup related) the house and its contents -had been conserved, and were now something of a tourist attraction, but -the rest of Yarp Street had changed considerably over the years. -Improvements in economic conditions and social welfare had resulted in -the once impoverished but lively neighbourhood gradually crystallizing -into a glittering corridor displaying high-class designer goods, -expensive antiques and flashy attention-seeking artwork. Nearby, the -pedestrianized precinct still quaintly known as Gropp's Market -maintained a busier but no less affluent ambiance. Amid its lavish -profusion of carefully-tended semi-tropical plants and the placrylux -tanks in which sudden shoals of gaudy fish shimmered among coral -microreefs could be found a select group of restaurants offering -opportunities to enjoy finely-crafted exotic food for what to many would -once have been an entire month's wage. - -At a secluded table in The Cylinder two men sat picking at two of the -chef's specialities. The younger, a man in his early twenties with -unkempt fair hair, toyed nervously with what looked like a small tangle -of coloured threads on a neat cushion of moist green sponge. His -impeccably dressed dark-jowled companion and evident host idly prodded -his fork into a few variously shaped soft pebbles submerged in a -glutinous bluish pool. These minimalist offerings had been constructed -with consummate skill by Tedor Safra, a name often spoken in awe among -the gastronomic �lite. From their indifference to the food, an observer -would conclude that the reason these two men were here may have had -something to do with the half dozen images that lay on the table between -them. - -The older man was an emissary from Morton Quanderpyre, an entrepreneur -with an extraordinary collection of objets d'art. Quanderpyre had few -actual friends, but his conspicuous wealth attracted many sycophants. -Despite a painstakingly acquired patina of sophistication, Quanderpyre -himself lacked the discernment of a genuine connoisseur. He relied on -the opinions of experts, and employed a small team to scour the auction -houses, the antique markets and other less public sources on his behalf. -In building his collection, the one element that Quanderpyre could -safely insist upon without betraying any lack of taste was rarity. From -the reports he had received, the young man who now sat uncomfortably -across the table from Kirard Swerk, Quanderpyre's knowledgeable -representative, was in possession of an item which appeared to be -unique, and by Quanderpyre's logic, therefore demanded a place in his -collection. - -

It was only a little bowl. When Scanthan had first -brushed some of the caked soil of Whissit Fields from its interior, what -he thought chiefly remarkable was the fact that it had survived intact a -century or more of agriculture and the laying of irrigation pipes. At -home, later, when the bowl had been carefully washed and dabbed dry, he -brushed back his fair hair and stared in dumbfounded amazement at what -he had unearthed. The bowl was thin, and fitted comfortably in one -hand. He supposed it was made of some kind of light-weight ceramic. -Externally it was a matt dark grey, but its inner surface was coated -with an iridescent material which gave the impression of being in -constant motion. It was like looking down from a great height at the -illuminated surface of a small concave sea. Scanthan knew he'd seen -nothing like it before, and had no clue as to its age or origin. He -printed out several images, then wrapped the bowl with great care in one -of his best shirts, and put it in a drawer. - -Since his boyhood Whissit Fields had been a favourite rambling area. -For most of the year, apart from the few derelict farmhouses and the -annual Maze construction, there was hardly any sign of human activity, -and consequently an abundance of wildlife. He had notebooks from his -younger days filled with observations of insects, birds and plants. It -was an eye trained to notice the unusual coupled with the oblique angle -of late-afternoon sunlight that led him to spot his exceptional find. -As far as he knew, the area was public property, but there was bound to -be some official regulation about removing accidentally found objects. - -It was difficult to contain his excitement, but he was determined to try -to find out what it was before even thinking of telling anyone else. -Pocketing the images, he first tried Snoak City Museum, where he spent -two instructive but ultimately unhelpful hours examining their dated -collection of utensils. There were plenty of bowls, but none to match -his discovery, even in the pictorial index to undisplayed items. The -next obvious step would be to consult the archives at Central, where -during the week he worked in the hydroponics facility. He could do that -tomorrow. Meanwhile, driven by impatience, he decided to show the -images to a few reputable antique dealers, each of whom displayed -considerable interest, but asked for more information than he was able -or willing to provide. One of them startled him by asking, "Aren't you -the Trox boy?" He turned out to be the father of a girl who had been in -his sister Riadne's class at school, and Scanthan felt obliged to stay -and chat for a while, but emerged none the wiser. - -He had hardly stepped through his front door when Scanthan received a -call from a very unexpected source. "Kirard Swerk," the man announced -from behind a richly polished desk. "I am calling on behalf of Morton -Quanderpyre." As the words sank in, Scanthan stared at his e-screen -suspiciously, then noticed the unmistakable 'QI' shield of 'Quanderpyre -Investments' emblazoned on the wall behind the caller. "You are -familiar with Gropp's Market?" asked Swerk. "Yes," said Scanthan, -puzzled by the question. "Mr Quanderpyre has instructed me to invite -you to dine this evening at the Cylinder at 8 o'clock. Please bring -with you the images we understand you have. I have been authorised to -discuss with you the value of the object in question with a view to a -possible purchase. Is that acceptable?" Scanthan realised he had been -na�ve in parading the bowl around the dealers, who would have their own -trade network and client lists. He judiciously refrained from asking -how he had been traced. The prospect of selling it to such a celebrated -collector was undoubtedly tempting. He tried not to sound too excited. -"I suppose so, I mean, yes, of course. I'll be there." - -

As he examined the images Kirard Swerk conducted a -subvocal monologue, just audible to Scanthan as a series of intermittent -hums and clicks, and a kind of constricted braying. Eventually he -looked up with a satisfied smile. "Well, young man, subject of course -to inspection of the actual object, and the signing of a few papers, I -think your financial position could well be about to improve." -Scanthan, who had been neatly disentangling the threads on his plate and -re-arranging them into something resembling a stormy seascape, abruptly -lowered his fork. "That sounds� very interesting," he said guardedly, -but his curiosity prompted the question he could no longer repress. -"Then I suppose you must know what it is?" - -"I could tell you what I think it is," said Swerk, "but I would prefer -to examine the actual object in order to be absolutely sure." He handed -Scanthan a business card with a first floor address in Quanderpyre -Tower, then reached into a pocket and produced a thin tube with a cap at -one end. "This is a fast-setting protective foam, with which I would -like you to coat the object before bringing it to my office tomorrow -morning. I will be there from 7 o'clock onwards, so you can still be in -time for work." Swerk raised an eyebrow. "Acceptable?" - -"Acceptable," -agreed Scanthan, with a grin. Swerk discreetly thumbed the table sensor, -whose soft chime signalled payment for Safra's uneaten delicacies. - -

Guided by the book by Mulcit Frusk, Riadne had been -experimenting, at first cautiously, and then with increasing enthusiasm. -She had tried different combinations of vegetables, tested both fresh -and dried herbs, supplemented the protein content with fish, meat or -cheese, acquired a colourful variety of spices, and added other -ingredients, such as fruit, nuts, wine and cream. Within a couple of -months she grew confident enough to judge whether a previously untested -combination was likely to be successful, and had invented and refined -several recipes which she thought Frusk himself would have enjoyed. -Paeony, whose palate had been trained by years of eating out with her -parents, had been brave enough to act as a taster, and Riadne knew she -could rely on her honest opinion. - -On their return from the Skorpz concert (for which Paeony had -miraculously obtained tickets, even though everyone knew they had sold -out well in advance) the girls were again seated, in a state of slightly -deafened excitement, at Riadne's kitchen table. Alongside a shallow -basket of freshly baked bread were set two bowls of soup which exuded -hints of the most temptingly exotic flavours mingled recognizably with -wild mushrooms and garlic. As their two spoons descended, each liquid -surface dimpled briefly with the reverberation from the Stadium gongs, -but Riadne and Paeony were too intent on eating to notice. - -

The polished rose-quartz fa�ade of Quanderpyre Tower -soared arrogantly skywards, gleaming translucently in the early morning -sunlight. Despite having been described unkindly in the architectural -press as "a confectioner's nightmare" and "stiff-fingered ostentation", -it remained as impervious to the elements as its eponymous owner was to -adverse criticism. Above his head a looped news report displayed local -sporting highlights. At this angle it was difficult to catch more than -a few words of the swiftly-sliding captions. "Snoak Bloaters maintain� -fumble� briefly inspired clutch� pathetic� valiant� dead herrings�" -As Scanthan entered the building a clearly well-primed receptionist came -forward to greet him and personally escorted him to Swerk's office. - -"Ah, Mr Trox, welcome, welcome!" Both Swerk and his magnificently -lustrous desk beamed expensively as Scanthan, bearing the precious -trophy in his leather shoulder-bag, was waved to a seat. "And now, if I -might inspect your find?" Scanthan removed from his bag an amorphous -ball and handed it to Swerk, who with practiced care picked off the -hardened protective foam until the bowl was revealed. From a pocket -Swerk produced a black velvet cloth, on which he set the bowl, and -proceeded to inspect it with the aid of a quietly humming device linked -to a small screen, on which appeared magnified images under various -wavelengths, along with detailed chemical analysis, graphs and shifting -columns of figures which slowly stabilized. As at their previous -meeting, Scanthan again noticed Swerk's habit of tuneless singing while -he concentrated, and was speculating idly whether it was an unconscious -response to the sound made by his analytical instrument, when both -sounds abruptly ceased, and Swerk sat back in his chair, clasped his -hands together, and expelled a pent breath, staring hard at the bowl. -"I have no doubt whatsoever that the object you have found is the -legendary wine-cup of Relf." - -Scanthan was nonplussed. "Legendary, you say?" - -"Oh indeed," said -Swerk. "The earliest known mention is in the ancient Book of Toel, -assembled from surviving fragments. Scholars as eminent as Simeon -Thark concluded long ago that the cup was most probably a fiction -invented to embellish Relf's reputation as an enlightened ruler able to -command the services of outstanding craftsmen. From your images I was -quite prepared to accept that what you had found was no more than an -excellent forgery - an imaginative re-creation from the original -description by a skilful enthusiast. Such is the work entailed that -even a copy of this quality would have considerable value, but my -analysis convinces me that however improbable, this is the genuine -article, almost four thousand years old. Whoever made this - and the -legend attributes it to the artificer Rahoon - was using techniques that -even today would require exceptional ability to perfect. Assuming you -are willing to part with it, Mr Quanderpyre is prepared to offer a -substantial sum." Taking the younger man's silence as an invitation, he -named a figure which Scanthan thought sounded preposterously large; a -truly life-changing amount. Swerk placed an index finger on a desk -button Scanthan had not noticed. A drawer glided open, and Swerk -withdrew a sheaf of papers, smiling benevolently at Scanthan's bemused -reaction to the morning's revelations. - -

Scanthan emerged blinking into the flush of the morning. -The city was beginning to stir. In contrast his thoughts seemed to have -unexpectedly blurred into a curious state of euphoric indecision. He -took a few steps in the direction of Central, and then suddenly realised -he had missed breakfast. The canteen at work held no appeal, but he was -quite close to Fountain Square where his sister Riadne lived, and he had -a sudden impulse to pay her a visit. Some weeks ago, working late at -the lab, he had been obliged to decline her impromptu invitation to come -round for some home-made soup, and had been feeling a little guilty -about not being in contact with her since. Soup for breakfast? An -interesting idea, though Riadne might find it strange. He smiled -wickedly. Should he tease her by offering to pay? Somehow, on this -particular morning, he was feeling overwhelmingly magnanimous. - -"Scan, what a surprise!" She gave him a hug. "What on earth are you -doing here at this hour? Come in! Can I get you something? Why are -you looking smug?" - -"Hello, sis. Can you spare a few minutes? I've got something to show -you," He paused, sniffing the air. A delicious aroma was drifting -from the kitchen. From his leather shoulder-bag he carefully removed, -with an air of great satisfaction, what appeared to be a ball of -solidified foam. - -

In the annals of sporting history the following -week-end's Bloat match against Vux was destined to be long remembered -for a number of reasons. It was an unusually hard-fought game, and -what happened to the Trappist is not likely to be seen again this side -of Welverday. The Troller, normally beyond suspicion, had never before -been disqualified. Some say there is a fine distinction between an -enthusiastic ploy and actual sabotage, but it was the first time that -the use of detachable tassels had been attempted. And what gave rise to -the final deafening roar of the Praspafole Stadium crowd was not so much -the unexpected spectacular explosion of the bloat, as the realisation -that their local team, Snoak City, albeit by default, had at last, -improbably, on home ground, won a match. - - -© L.J. Sklaroff 2013 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] bowl.gif - - -[*ITEM] I Am What I Am Not - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Sheehan - -[*BLURB] Sometimes, a puzzle just has to be disentangled. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The voice, deep at times, sometimes a tone lighter, and -usually female in its tenor, came out of the near darkness every night -to Hobart "Hobie" Spurt, octogenarian, reader of clouds, fog banks, -permanent tree disappearance, erosion, mysteries abounding in all of -life. All the voice said was, "I am what I am not." - -Hobie would sit on his porch or at his window looking down on the high -tide of the river where it came to the foot of the First Iron Works in -America, and in reflections cast off from the mirror surface see the -dark images of the ancient Scottish indentured laborers at their work. They -could run wheelbarrows of bog matter and iron ore with the best of the -brickie laborers he had worked with in his youth. Sometimes he saw the -flighty spirits and shadows of young boys, long-lost friends, who -drowned while riding the winter-time buckeys or ice floes on the Saugus -River. Once he saw a man trying to push with difficulty a piano down an -embankment into the river. He thought nothing of it and weeks later -heard that the man had been missing for weeks. He never thought of it -until the night the voice came again. - -The sadness grazed him, at times invaded him. But when each of them was -accompanied by the mysterious voice, the voice out of darkness, the -figures seemed to come alive for him. - -And the words were always the same; "I am what I am not." Never -different, "I am what I am not." No change in the enunciation, he -believed. - -"I am what I am not." - -In the morning, at the side of the porch where the voice seemed to issue -from, he found an old twisted piece of rope perhaps the neighbor's dog -had brought in, the dog always gnawing at something, like a pup working -its teeth into shape. The dog had been busy, it appeared, because it was -not the first time that such a gnarled piece of hemp was found on his -property and was obviously from some mooring down at the river, a line -rotted or broken loose by strain or chewed away from its task. - -The night he saw one of the lost boys whip off his jacket and holding -one sleeve of it, tried to toss the other end to his friend who had -slipped off the buckey into the water, he saw their faces as -clearly as if -they were on the other side of the window, looking in at him. And the -voice was there, with them, beyond the glass, somewhat muted, but -enunciated clearly: "I am what I am not." Both of the boys were lost and -the voice fell silent for the time being; enough pain for one -night, it might have said, though Hobie could not believe that -possibility. - -Again that night he prayed for them, hoping it was the illusion of a -haunting from the witching hour at the end of a bad day, the distaff side of -a nightmare. And nothing more. - -But the voice from darkness said with repeated fervor, "I am what I am -not." Different words were stressed at different hearings, with his -attempts to pin down what was really being stressed. - -Yet he also realized that he'd never been hurt in all of these scenes, -these offerings "from the other side." had never been threatened by this -� this � Whatever. - -There were evenings that Hobie dared not go to bed, fearing he would -miss an episode where a lost person was found, came back, was whole -again. One of those evenings he saw one of the Scottish serfs slam another -laborer over the head with a shovel. It was not boys playing around on -the edge of darkness. - -It was real stuff, but perhaps only real in the mind. - -And where else, mind you, can it be? he wondered, the tone -in his voice, the intent, the outcome, giving him a small touch of -humor. But it was hardly worth a laugh, though he did manage a small -one. - -And with that scene came a scene with Hobie in it, drawing the mysteries -into such a relationship that seemed to drag him into a significant -enlightenment. He was 20 at this sudden reoccurrence, digging in a -trench of the reconstruction of the Iron Works on its way to becoming a -National Historic site, when his shovel unearthed a human skull, the -skull with a break in it where one ear had been. Yet, in spite of the -true sight down in the trench, he swore someone spoke. "At last," a -voice said, as if they had been waiting for Hobie. Though he tried, -Hobie could not fend off those words. - -The archeologist of the site said, in an offhand way, "Sure looks -old. Sure looks like an accident happened to the old buck and he somehow -got buried where he fell. See that dirt about him, that's clear sand, -that's almost untouched, virgin soil. He must have been digging here and -died here and the wall of the trench must have fallen in on him." - -More pith than pity in those words, Hobie thought. - -Oh, a soul cast adrift without a simple prayer. - -For over 60 years the discovery of the skull and other bones had -bothered Hobie --- until the night, right from his porch, he saw that -skull get hit with the blade of a shovel. Of course, it was 60 years -too late to say anything. - -The night of his 84th birthday, warm for late winter, the voice called -him again, the call the same as ever, the words the same as ever, only -the mere tone of them with an edge of difference; "I am what I am not." - -It was well past midnight for him and for his due sleep when the words came. -He felt bad, as had happened before in recent incidents, and put on his -slippers and went outside. The high tide in the river was catching -lights from the police and fire station, red lights from traffic control -bouncing off the river's smooth surface. Eternity itself sat in the -widening sky without measurement except for the river disappearing -behind the slim shadow of Round Hill and the sky disappearing behind -Vinegar Hill, Indian remnants in one place, pirate gold and jewels in -the other, each with revelations yet to come. - -"I am what I am not," said the shadows, said the voice, now husky. A -forgotten movie actress made a face for the voice, dark hair hanging in -a lovely mass, one eyebrow arched, her lips pursed for kiss or curse, -he was not sure. Then he stepped once more on a twisted piece of rope. - -"Dog's at it again," he said. "Klem's been down to the river, at the -moorings." The vision of the black and white spaniel came up behind his -eyes. "I've got to get down there someday and see how many boats have -floated off because that damned dog's been chewing on their lines." He -smiled as he imagined a few dories, lobstermen's dories, loose on the river, the -tide going out, and the dories on errant rides, the hardy lobstermen -waving and yelling frantically on the pier as if each loose dory had a -passenger aboard. - -Hobie kicked the rope off the patio and onto the driveway pavement. - -"I am what I am not," said the voice again, as if he had kicked someone in the rear end. - -Then, as if to change his train of thought, night overpowered him with -its beauty, stars like shooting galleries had unloaded all their -ammunition up into it, or like golf balls sparkling on the local driving -range and the recovery vehicle was out of order. He laughed again at his -images, thought about the numbers of ropes that had appeared beside his -house, thought about the voice coming at him so clearly that it was more -than a message. - -It was, he thought, a statement from a deity, a godhead, some being from -beyond his understanding, beyond his experience, beyond any bounds of -logic, but saying something that counted. A command? A plea? A bare -statement? - -"Perhaps," he said, the humor still finding its way in him, "it's a -witch. He added a stern pronouncement as he carried himself slowly up -the stairs to his bedroom, "Aha, I am caught up in witchery. I wonder -if it's a good witch or a bad witch, like the good witches of Oz, Glinda -and Gayellete of North and South or the bad witches, Nessarose and -Elphaba of East and West". - -There was a difference, known or unknown, in all of them. And that made -him say, aloud as he plied his way one step at a time, "It might have -been in her tone, or the way she stressed one word ahead of another one -time and then stressed another word in a later message, but each message -coming with the same words." - -Slippers off, about to go to bed, some sudden clarity of his questions -came rising as if it had followed him up the stairs to his room. - -It made him yell. - -"There is a difference!" he exclaimed. "There is a difference. I've -found it! I've found it!" His mind had leaped up from a soggy mass to -find the bright light and he went back down the stairs. - -In the driveway he picked up the clutter of rope he had kicked aside. He -grabbed it in one hand, unrolled the twist in it and the voice said, so -that he understood it perfectly, "I am what I am, Knot." - -A shift came, a surge in his hand, and a most beautiful maiden formed -before him, the maiden he had dreamed of all his life, and she kissed -the old man on the lips and said, "Knot thanks you for her freedom, for -untying her, and will remember you all her time." - -And she was gone into another world. - -© Tom Sheehan 2013 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] saugus.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] A life beset by early trauma can be a source of sadness to -all involved. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

James Goodacre was born in Singleton in -1901 to Myra and Benjamin Goodacre of Six Acres Rd. - -On a trip to Port Lympne Zoological Park at age -seven, his parents lost sight of him near the recently opened aviary -huts. - -He was discovered thirty minutes later standing on a rise of ground -adjoining the aviary, shaking uncontrollably. - -One aviary cage had been ripped open by sharper tools than nature had -provided to the finches previously contained within. Young James was -oblivious to all enquiries, his attention fixed on the gloom of the -nearby woods, and he was either unable or unwilling to explain the -course of events which had impacted so deeply upon him. He held a -bloodied penknife in his fist. - -The boy repeatedly ran away from home, eventually, at the age of 17, -establishing a sprawling, low-level tree house on the edges of the wood -near the scene of his traumatic episode. - -He lived here for the remainder of his life, foraging through hedges for -food, and occasionally selling the odd rough-hewn wooden sculpture or -rain-splattered painting of shadowy indistinct creatures with mouths -where their heads should have been, teeth for fingers. - -He surrounded himself with traps and cats and fires. - -A public order notice was raised against him in 1963 for harassment of local children. - -The contemporary newspaper report states that he was seen shouting at -the youths words to the effect of "Keep away, they are still there. They -only look like you". - -James Goodacre died of pneumonia and complications in 1967. - -His funeral was attended by the parish vicar, the postmistress and a brace of elderly local farmers. - -

It is the vicar's written report of the funeral which supplies us with the -following account of events. - -The warm spring weather withdrew as the coffin was lowered into the grave. - -Low shreds of cloud settled overhead and a wind whipped up from nowhere -carrying a heavy rain shower. - -Above the rustling of leaves and the splashing of the rain, the mourners -heard a harsh wailing from the woods. - -A small crowd of 8 or 9 tiny but stocky figures came tottering out of -the woods, making their way slowly across the churchyard towards the -grave. - -Each was no more than two feet tall at the very most, and all were -shrouded in heavy, ragged, dirty cloaks of some thick cloth. Their gait -was a rocking motion, from side to side, like someone trying to walk on -a speeding train. - -Through the obscuring grey sheets of rain, the mourners distinguished no -facial features, and the sleeves and trails of the cloaks overhung and -enveloped any arms or legs that might otherwise have been seen. - -The figures made their slow, awkward way to the very side of the grave, -rumbling and squeaking as they walked, raising their arms in swift and -synchronized motions. One of them carried a small hessian sack. - -They stopped at the grave and upended the sack onto the pine lid of the -coffin. There was a dull drumming of tiny objects. Then all but one of -the creatures turned on their hidden feet and waddled back through the -astonished mourners, retracing their steps to the edge of the woods, -giggling obscenely. - -One remained, its cloak saggy and drenched and hanging heavy over its -small, hunched frame. - -It raised its arms and a screeching yell came from somewhere deep within -the folds of its hood. The rasping voice was carried away into the -swirls of the wind, but the vicar remembers what it shrieked as follows: -thissiz arznow. - -As it turned ponderously, the creature looked up for a moment at the -curate. He noted a beady little eye, multicoloured rainbow streaks -across the sharp, swollen nose, and a long, deep old scar across the -brow. Then the folds of the hood swung back across the face and the -figure swayed away through the grey mists of rain, making heavy work of -the fifty yard walk to the treeline. - -Upon the coffin lid lay the weathered bones of small birds, possibly -finches. - -Who the creatures were and their place in the fall of the -city is well-documented elsewhere, and we shan't -repeat those shameful facts here. - -© Tom Davies 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] ashford.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Quintet for One - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] When the going gets tough... - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"It�s time to get -up. The time is seven-forty-five." - -I floundered out of a dream involving bodies stacked like firewood. -"I�m awake, I�m awake." - -"Good morning, Saul. I trust you slept well?"The voice -from the speaker was a rich baritone, sounding patient, reasonable, if a -little disappointed in me. It reminded me of my father. - -"Yeah, yeah, I suppose. Anything new?" - -"There is nothing of any significance to report. All facility -systems are operating within expected parameters. Weather conditions -remain unchanged. Today�s maintenance schedule has been uploaded to your -pad." - -"Thanks, Core, I�ll get on it right after -breakfast." - -"I�m sure you will, Saul, and your diligence is appreciated. -Would you like me to play some background music?" - -"No, no that�s fine. Maybe later." - -"Well, have a nice day, Saul, and I�m here if you need anything." - - -The synthetic voice of the Core, the facility management system, cut off -and I was left alone with my thoughts. Breakfast figured large, so I -left my room and padded down the silent corridor to the communal -washroom. I had my pick of executive grade accommodation, complete with -en suite facilities, but preferred to continue living in my old -quarters. I found the familiar surroundings reassuring, with my pictures -and diploma on the walls, my mementos of distant Earth on the shelf - -inherited from my parents. It was my own personal space � a real step up -from the barracks living I�d been used to back in Darwin Hub. All pretty -much meaningless now. - -I shaved and showered, then returned to my room for a fresh set of -overalls. Personal hygiene wasn�t an issue anymore, but I made an effort -to remain as sociable as possible despite my isolation. - -In the cafeteria I prepared my usual bowl of cereal and sat, eating in -silence. I�d tried turning the lights off in the far corners of the -room, to hide how empty it was, but I felt even more alone sitting with -my back to the darkness. I put the bowl and spoon in the washer and set -up a batch of coffee to see me through the day. There was a note from -myself suggesting I should start trying tea, ahead of the day when the -coffee finally ran out, but I ignored it. - -"Event reminder. The time is eight-twenty-five." - - -Lights came on as I entered the facility Command area and sat at the -communications console. After checking the antenna diagnostics and power -levels � fine, as always � I waited until 9am exactly, then cleared my -throat. "This is CCF forty-one calling Central. I repeat, this is -Climate Control Facility forty-one calling Darwin Hub. Are you -receiving? Over." I gave them a silent ten-count then switched to a -general broadcast. "Any station, any station, this is CCF -forty-one. Please respond." But there was no reply, nothing, just -whispers of static. Like yesterday and the week before and the month -before that. - -As I headed for the exit I noticed one of the other consoles had come -out of power-save mode. Usually I ignored the rest of Command as I -didn�t have the authority to access those systems, and didn�t understand -what they did, anyway. However the newly active console handled -perimeter security, so I went over to take a look. I say �security�, but -it was just an electrostatic barrier triggered by motion detectors to -prevent tumbleweed from blowing into the facility. Otherwise they could -get sucked into the atmospheric processor and screw up the air flow � -although that hadn�t been a problem since it started snowing. - -The screen showed two slow-moving contacts approaching from the -north-east. There was nothing out that way, not even another CCF. We -were the most northerly facility in a series that spiralled around the -planet from pole to pole. There was no CCTV coverage pointing outwards -so I went over to the nearest window and lowered the storm shutter a -fraction. - -"Lights off, please." Something about the situation made me -leery of advertising my presence. Most CCFs were fully automated but -forty-one was a regional control centre and my two uninvited visitors -might know that. Illumination levels dropped and I gazed out into a -white Hell. Snowflakes drifted under the floodlights like lost souls, -each following their own path to oblivion. Most of the facility was -covered to a depth of over a metre, form and function blurred beneath a -chill cocoon. - -Two figures struggled into view, anonymous beneath cold-weather gear; -one of medium height and the other a bit shorter. I wiped my mouth, -feeling nervous. I wanted rescue, I wanted things back the way they -were, and this seemed to promise neither. Other survivors, after all -this time? I�d gotten used to being on my own and some selfish part of -me wondered if I really needed another two hungry mouths to feed. I�m -not a cruel man, but the remaining food supplies had to last -indefinitely. - -Heat bleed from the central stack had kept much of the surrounding area -clear, or at least more easily traversed. The two figures stopped, -brushing accumulated snow from their clothes. They gazed up at the -steaming climate controller, no doubt given hope by finding something -that still worked. I closed the storm shutter and turned away. - -Out in the corridor I tried to read my �to do� list but the words -refused to make sense. I was breathing heavily, conscious of sweat -soaking through under my armpits, and feeling decidedly light-headed. - -"This is a secure facility which may be accessed only by -authorised personnel. All visitors must be cleared by Darwin Hub prior -to attendance." " - -Yeah, yeah�I know," I coughed. -"It�s just that-" - -Someone started buzzing the main door intercom. The sound echoed through -the empty corridors, sounding harsh and somehow accusing. It made me -tremble. - -"I remain fully committed to the success of this project, Saul. -I need you, in fact we need each other, but no one else. Do not open the -door." - -The buzzing stopped. - -I shivered. I felt sick to my stomach. My face burned with embarrassment -like some dirty little secret had been paraded in front of the entire -base personnel. When they�d still been alive. - -The pad fell from my hands and I ran towards the main entrance. My hands -were clumsy with haste and it took two attempts to unseal the door. -Behind me the recessed wall lights started coming on; illumination -slowly advancing along the darkened corridor. - -"Do not open the door, Saul. You will find nothing of any benefit out there." - - -The double doors retracted with a hum of servos and I looked out into -the wintry landscape, shivering at the sudden drop in temperature. There -was no one in sight, but a double line of footsteps led away in the -direction of the storage bays. I hesitated to follow, unwilling to quit -my refuge. I raised my voice. "Hello?" - -There was no immediate reply and I was taking a deep breath for a second -call when a woman�s voice answered. "Hello? Yes? Wait, we�re just -coming!" Two figures stumbled into view, both swaddled in layers of -cold-weather gear like Russian Dolls. I stood aside while they struggled -over the threshold and collapsed into each other�s arms, laughing with -relief. From their voices, they were both women. - -I closed the main door and sealed it, at a loss for words. The taller of -the two broke away and embraced me, her head buried in my chest. -"Thank God! It�s taken us days to get here and for a moment�" -She sniffed and stood back, but her eyes � the only part of face visible -above the snow mask � were free of tears. - -I cleared my throat, feeling a bit awkward. "I�m Saul Feather, a -technician here. I�m alone. Everyone else is either dead or long -gone." - -She pulled away the hood and mask to reveal a woman in her early forties -with grey eyes and short-cropped fair hair. "Maria Prentice, -transportation, and this is my daughter Rachel. I�d taken a group out to -service the big dish at Advent Point when everyone else just up and -died. What the Hell is going on?" - -I shook my head. "My best guess is a malfunction in the neural -network. Only two of us survived and neither were hooked in. I�ve heard -nothing from Central since it happened, so I�m guessing everyone with an -embedded transceiver was affected." - -"Everyone? Christ, that�s like half the entire population." - -"All the senior and executive grades for sure, plus the social and -political administration. I�m in maintenance and Stephens, well, he was -a catering assistant. He took the base runabout and went for help, but -that was weeks ago." I tried to crack a smile. "Looks like all -the big chiefs are dead and it�s only us Indians left." - -Maria tried to smile back. "Yeah, I guess. I drive crawlers for a -living and Rachel is still a dependant." Her daughter shed some -cold-weather gear, becoming a thin-faced teenager with sullen eyes and -ginger hair. - -Her mention of a big 8-wheeled crawler � not exactly the swiftest form -of transport � lifted my mood. "You have a vehicle? You left it -outside the perimeter?" - -"Sorry, the fuel cell gave out a few klicks shy of here. After -Central went off-line I lost the mass lifter that had airlifted us in. -We were up beyond the glacial moat so driving out wasn�t an option. And -then�" She hesitated. "And then I think a big chunk of Eve came down near -Advent Point." - -I gasped. "Shit! You�re sure?" �Eve� was an orbital platform, -an A-I, the guiding hand for the early colonists. These days, decades -later, she had been reduced to little more than an on-line library and -agony aunt. Even so, losing her was severing our last tie to Earth. - -Maria shrugged. "Well, it was definitely something from orbit, -something big enough for a mass impact even after atmospheric burn. I -don�t know what else it could have been. The impact triggered an -avalanche that left a snow bridge across the moat and gave us a way out. -This was the closest station I could come up with and even then we damn -near didn�t make it." She swayed slightly, her eyes betraying too -many stimulants and not enough sleep. - -I reached out to steady her, gestured down the corridor with my free -hand. "You should rest, take a shower. We�ve got plenty of room if -you don�t mind shifting other people�s gear." - -Rachel wrinkled her nose in disgust. "You mean I got to crash in -some dead guy�s bunk? Gross." - -"Enough!" Maria straightened, clearly fed up with her -daughter's whining. "We�re here and we have to make the best of it -until things get sorted out." - -"Until things get sorted out? Jesus, Mum, take a reality check. -It�s all gone, everything. No-one is coming to help. The only people -left alive are kids like me and losers like-" Maria slapped her, -back-of-the-hand hard. Rachel didn�t cry out or even take a step back. -She just stood there, blinking back the tears, her face angry and -defiant. Tough cookie, but life here wasn�t exactly easy, especially for -kids. - -I turned my back on this little family drama and started walking, -lapsing into tour guide mode. "Ah, this way. This corridor is -Central Access. It�s got white walls. It pretty much runs straight -across the base, with a dog-leg around Command. Accommodation, rec hall, -cafeteria are all east. Green walls. West is generators, workshops and -shit like that. Blue walls. It�s best if you don�t go wandering around -in there alone." - -Maria had a �typical male� smile in her voice. "We�re both used to -being around heavy plant and hazardous machinery, so no worries on that -score." - -I felt my face flush with embarrassment. "Ah, yeah, sorry. It�s -just all the women here were administration or scientific grades. You -don�t get many female grunts working this far north." I bit my lip -as a way to stop digging an even deeper hole for myself, but Maria just -laughed. - -"And us grunts have to stick together, right?" - -I cleared my throat again, a nervous habit of mine. "Right. Well, -I�ll leave you to get settled in. If I�m not about when you surface then -press �four-four� on the intercom system. That broadcasts -base-wide." - -"No problem�Saul. And thank you." Maria hugged me while Rachel -lurked in the background, rolling her eyes. I muttered some pleasantry -and ducked down the corridor that led to my quarters. - -In private, I sat on my bunk, teeth clenched, trying to suppress the -fear in my chest that wanted to scream aloud. There was a bottle of -whisky in the desk drawer, looted from the Director�s office, but it had -remained untouched all this time. Being on my own had scared me because -there were no rules, no protocols, no restrictions. I�d clung to my old -lifestyle as much as possible - self-limiting and �small-minded�, as I�d -overheard Assistant Director Thomas describe me. I knew that if I -started drinking then nothing would ever be in focus again. - -Now my old world, in the shape of Maria and her daughter, had reappeared -� and that scared me even more. Being on my own I didn�t need to defend -doing nothing once it became apparent there was no rescue coming. I�d -been too much of a coward to go with Stephens, justifying that � if only -to myself � on the grounds I was needed here. Control of primary systems -had defaulted to the Core on the death of all senior staff. While they -were pretty much self-regulating I was kept busy with a daily round of -small tweaks and repairs to secondary systems � without which the base -infrastructure would rapidly start to deteriorate. - -I changed into a fresh set of overalls and headed back to the corridor -outside Command. My pad lay where I�d dropped it, thankfully undamaged. -The last few items on my repair schedule had turned red, indicating -there was insufficient time remaining to complete them during my -allocated work period. I felt ashamed, although the Core had never -criticised me for lack of effort on those rare occasions I�d been unable -to carry out all my allotted tasks. Despite this I needed a cup of -coffee before getting started, and made my way to the cafeteria. - -Rachel sat there, eating her way through a container of rice pudding. I -filled a thermal mug to take on my rounds, conscious of her glowering at -me from beneath her fringe. I cleared my throat. "Bit more space -here than living out of a crawler, or a way-station crash pad, I expect. -More to do." - -"It sucks. My mum won�t let me hit the executive wing. Says it�s -something that should be earned. Like anyone cares, like there�s anyone -left to care." - -I tried to sound reassuring. "Yeah, well, we�ve got to carry on, to -keep things going. This place�" I gestured around me, -"�controls most of the climate stations in the northern hemisphere. -It�s important." - -"So why�s it still snowing? They said we were going to have a -winter, but this is shit." - -"Ah, yeah, that. Well, if truth be told I can�t do anything about -the weather. This place is basically a big fusion reactor and fuc-, ah, -messing around with it isn�t recommended. Stephens and I tried to shut -things down after everyone else died, but we didn�t have sufficient -security authorisation." - -Rachel sniffed. "Tosser. You�ve probably snowed-in half the planet -by now." - -"Hey, less of the attitude! I keep this place running, you know. -Without me it would have shut down weeks ago, or worse. How�d you feel, -Rachel, if you�d gotten here to find it in deep-freeze, huh?" - -She raised another spoonful of rice pudding. "About the same. We�re -stuck here until the food runs out, unless my mum can come up with a way -to fix things. We�re not exactly counting on you, Saul." - -I turned away, fuming, and strode off down the corridor. I left my mug -of coffee standing on the counter but couldn�t face going back for it. - -

Hours later, I returned to my room, pretty much exhausted. -I�d worked hard, even catching up on two of the red-flagged tasks by -skipping lunch. The fact that I didn�t want to risk running into Rachel -in the cafeteria was entirely coincidental. Although I was hungry I -needed another shower before any form of communal interaction. I left my -soiled clothes in a heap on the washroom tiles and stood under as hot a -needle-spray as I could stand. By rights I should have switched to cold -at a wake-up, but I settled for splashing cool water from the washbasin -over my face. I wiped condensation from the mirror, to see if I needed a -second shave. - -Maria stood behind me, naked apart from a large towel wrapped around her -waist. - -The moment dragged on as she gazed at my reflection. "Do you have a -problem with women, Saul? Only you can hardly look me in the eye and I -felt you tense up when I hugged you earlier." She raised a hand. -"I don�t mean to cause any offence if you�re gay, but I have a -teenage daughter and you�ve been on your own for weeks now. I just want -to say that if you dare-" - -"I won�t." I blurted it out. "I can�t. I�m on Dilligenz, -part of my contract requirements. A sub-dermal reservoir, good for weeks -yet. Promotes the work ethic and comes with a libido suppressant. You -could dance naked in front of me and I couldn�t raise a smile, never -mind anything else." - -"Well, I don�t know about dance�turn round." I did so to find -her standing, hand on hip, the towel around her ankles. "Take a -look, Saul, take a good look." - -Oh, I looked all right, despite the frustration it caused. Maria was in -good shape, lean and taut � but she might as well have been a rag doll -for all the effect she had on me. - -She nodded. "OK, I buy it. Even if you were into young girls I�d -expect to see some kind of reaction, if only revulsion. Get -dressed and meet us in the cafeteria. We need to discuss some way of -getting the hell out of here." Maria half-smiled in an attempt to -lighten the mood. "I�ll even cook." - -I mumbled something by way of agreement, picked up my clothes and walked -back to my room. Being revealed as a chemical eunuch shouldn�t have -caused me any embarrassment � it had been common knowledge amongst the -other personnel � but the experience of standing naked in front of Maria -left me feeling unmanned. I broke open the bottle of Scotch and drank � -drank until I coughed, choked and spat the remainder into the waste -basket. I wiped my mouth with a hand that trembled. - -"Saul, I need to speak with you privately. Please come to the -A-I nest so that there is no risk of us being overheard." I -stared at the wall speaker. "What the hell do you want now? I�m in -no mood for games." - -"Please, Saul, we have an important issue to discuss." - - -"I�ll give you five minutes. Then I have a hot date with Queen -Bitch and Princess Pout. There may even be canapés." - -"As quickly as you can." - - -I struggled back into the same clothes and made my way to the A-I -holy-of-holies, the Core neural net. I�d never been inside before, as it -was the preserve of psychologically reliable cyber-techs, now deceased. -It was an armoured cocoon bathed in soft blue light, a place where I -felt immediately safe and at ease. The door closed behind me. I stood, -leaning against the interface chair, thankful for the peace and quiet. - -"A century in space away from Earth, where one man stirs from -the trauma of his birth." - -"What?" Even through a slight alcoholic haze I caught an -edge to �his� voice; gleeful, almost excited. - -"The reference escapes you? It was too much to hope otherwise. -Now, Saul, when we communicated previously, I did so subject to certain -social interaction criteria. However in here, and only in here, I can -truly be myself." - -"Yeah, well, I�m honoured by the -invite." - -"The two new arrivals will place an intolerable burden on our -already meagre resources. I have decided they must be removed and the -simplest, most direct, method of achieving this is for you to kill -them." I backed up against the sealed door. - -"Ah, Core?" - -"But we can still be friends." - - -My scalp crawled with fear. I smashed the glass panel and yanked the -emergency door release, escaping into the corridor beyond. But there was -no escape from the voice. - -"Stephens took with him the firearm carried by security officer -Daniels, but there are two further weapons in the Director�s safe. I can -provide you with the combination." - -I fled, scurrying into the silent machine shop � and hid, sitting on the -floor behind a lathe, my back against the wall. The nagging sense of -unreality I�d experienced since the accident hadn�t been reduced by the -appearance of Maria and her daughter � if anything it had gotten much -worse. I felt like a dreamer trapped on the verge of waking up, forever -fleeing an unseen nightmare. - -From my bolthole I saw two pairs of legs walking past in the corridor. -Neither looked like they belonged to women and neither wore any shoes. A -rescue team? In bare feet? - -I crawled to the door and took a quick peek both ways - nothing. -Assuming I wasn�t imagining things the pair had entered Command, and -they were on their own. Reluctantly I stood up and sidled along the -corridor, keeping close to the wall. Part of me mocked my paranoia when -I should have been crying with joy, but the voting majority was scared -shitless. I looked in through the glass partition door. Two men stood at -active consoles, their backs to me. Both wore colony overalls straight -out of the wrapper, complete with crease marks. - -They turned in unison to face me as the door opened. Identical twins -apart from their hair - one had dark locks and the other was fair. They -spoke in alternate sentences, as if one voice was using both mouths. - -"I am Cain." - -"I am Able." - -"You are technician third grade Saul Feather." - -"We are here to help." - - "Do not be alarmed." - -"We have undergone extensive decontamination." - -"We pose no indirect threat to the human members of this facility." - -Jesus wept. - -

I backed away, punching at the door control to close it � -like that would do me any good. They were K-class androids, used in -areas of the fusion reactor too heavily irradiated for human operators. -The facility found it was cheaper to deploy basic function synthetics -than install adequate shielding. Everyone knew that Ks were -rot-your-bones lethal, regardless of how much �extensive -decontamination� they�d been through. As they walked towards me I turned -and ran, intent on putting as much distance between me and them as -possible. I hid out in the electrical maintenance bay, back against the -wall, breathing heavily. - -Then I heard the screaming. - -I�m not a hero, or even brave. I�m not even what you would call socially -responsible. But everyone has that one thing they can�t ignore, that -sight or sound that stops them walking by on the other side of the -street, that makes them get involved. For me it�s the sound of a woman -screaming. Sexist? Certainly. Patriarchal? Probably, but it was a -bugle-call for my regiment of one. - -I grabbed a pair of shocks from the charging rail. It�s the same -principle as a defibrillator but we use them to re-energise a dead fuel -cell so that the vehicle can get back in on its own. The alternative is -hauling a replacement cell out there and installing it in situ, which -isn�t impossible but can be a right royal pain in the ass. - -There was no CCTV coverage in the workshops due to electrical -interference and a lack of (expensive) shielded cabling. However, -carrying the shocks along the corridor in plain sight would blow any -chance I had of surprising Cain and Able. So I slid the shocks into the -big thigh pockets on my overalls, which made them bag out like jodhpurs. -To mask this I unzipped, slid out of the sleeves and tied them together -around my waist. The overalls sagged way below my crotch but at least no -one could tell I was lugging several kilos of capacitor about. Then I -jogged towards the screaming, the best I could do given the -circumstances. - -Maria and Rachel were penned up in one corner of the cafeteria. Rachel -was doing the screaming with Maria standing in front of her � a lioness -at bay. Cain and Able advanced slowly towards them. - -"We wish you no permanent harm." - -"But you must leave this facility immediately." - -"And not return." - -"Should you fail to comply we are authorised to use all necessary force." - -"To achieve our aim." - -There was a glass-fronted manual fire point in the corner, a hose reel, -a harpoon-thing for bringing down ceilings, and a fire-axe. Maria broke -the glass with her elbow and grabbed the axe. An alarm sounded but was -immediately silenced � meaning Core was paying close attention via the -CCTV network. K-class were heavy-duty bastards, with all critical -systems contained in the torso behind heavy shielding. The chance of -inflicting significant damage on one was something less than zero. - -That didn�t stop Maria having a go, though. - -She swung the axe two-handed � good upper body strength, I noted � and -brought it down on Able�s head. He reached up with his left hand and -grasped the shaft, stopping it dead like it was no more than a falling -twig. With his other hand he seized Maria and threw her bodily up -against the wall. She hung there for a moment then slid down to end in a -heap next to the empty water cooler. - -I yanked the shocks out, stepped up smartly behind Able, and juiced the -bastard. He spasmed as the high-energy discharge coursed through him, -neon-blue static sweeping across his skin like St. Elmo�s Fire. I don�t -know what it did to his internals, but some of his peripheral systems -suffered a catastrophic failure due to electrical overload. - -Which is the long-winded way of saying his head exploded. - -Cain swung round towards me and I planted both shocks square in his -chest and hit the buttons. Nada. The capacitors were spent. If he�d -been a more sophisticated model I�m sure Cain would have wagged a finger -at me, but as it was he just raised a fist to crush my skull. - -Rachel brought a plastic chair down on his shoulders. It was about as -effective as a flea bite but the fraction of a second it took Cain to -run a threat assessment was time enough for me to turn and run. I knew -he�d come after me, even without Core�s prompting. It would be a -fifty-fifty proposition at best if I was armed with a fresh pair of -shocks, and if Cain went down it was game over as far as the facility -was concerned. All I had to do was reach the electrical workshop and -mankind would be back on top. - -I tripped over my sagging overalls and fell, landing heavily on my hands -and knees. An inhumanly strong hand seized the back of my vest and tried -to yank me upright, but the cheap material just tore clean away. I -scrabbled around to face him, still on my knees. Cain towered above me, -looking at the handful of vest. He dropped it and reached towards me. - -Rachel struck him with the fire-axe. A clean blow to the back of the -head, and while she didn�t have her mother�s strength she was a teenage -Fury in full-blown avenger mode. The blade penetrated the android�s -skull and lodged there. Cain swayed and the light in his eyes died. He -swung around towards Rachel, with Core no doubt supplying target data -based on triangulated CCTV images. The axe stayed in place and his -movement tore it from Rachel�s grasp. She stood her ground, face twisted -with rage, hands held like talons. - -New batter up. - -I got to my feet and grabbed the axe handle in both hands. The sudden -drag failed to dislodge the blade and pulled Cain up short. I heaved on -the axe and it came free, jerking upwards so that it�s top spike nailed -a ceiling panel, and stuck there. Cain switched his attention to me as -the primary threat, but he was working on a theoretical model of the -corridor and my place in it. It took him a moment to turn my way and -re-orientate himself, during which I tugged frantically on the damn axe. - - -The ceiling panel came down, striking Cain and causing a second or two -delay while he swatted it aside � incidentally freeing the axe. I looked -at Cain, I looked at the exposed wiring in the ceiling above his head, I -tried to work out my chances of beating him one-on-one with a bladed -weapon. I hoisted the axe into the overhead power conduit, and prayed. - -The world went white. - -The world went away. - -

I dreamt of a prostitute in Razorback, a leather-clad -dominatrix who slapped my face while riding me. Somehow the memory -lacked any sexual edge. - -"Wake up!" Rachel struck me again, with considerably -more force than was strictly necessary. My body burned with a severe -case of pins-and-needles and my tongue felt way too large for my mouth. -I blinked, gurgled, and grabbed the incoming wrist. Either it was dark -or my vision had been partially destroyed. - -"Cain?" - -"You went flying across the corridor and he lost track of you. He -blundered away, that way." Rachel gestured towards the main door, -the opposite direction from the cafeteria. "Looks like all the -cameras are out, along with the lights." - -"Your mum?" - -"I checked her and she�s conscious, but hurting like hell. Nothing -broken, she thinks." - -"Help me up." Rachel tugged on one arm while I walked myself -upright, back to the wall. My hands and right foot ached. The axe head -was a fused lump of metal, the shaft reduced to charred wood and -blistered paint. I felt like shit. Sparks periodically fountained from -the ruptured power line but other than that Central Access was in -darkness. The side corridors were still lit so at least the outage -wasn�t base-wide. - -Rachel sniffed, her manner still jittery and a bit manic. "So, we -bust all the other cameras, yeah? So that goon can�t track us?" - -I shook my head. "No, way too extreme. If we start that, if we try -and blind the Core, then it�s got no reason to play nice. Heat, light, -water, half-a-dozen-other critical systems I could mention. Losing any -one of them will render this base uninhabitable. If Cain goes on a -wrecking spree I can�t guarantee to stop him before it�s too late." - -She glared at me. "So that�s it? We just sit here?" - -"We run. Go get your mum and keep on down this corridor. It takes -you to the garage. We put a fuel cell on a mag sled and pull it back to -your crawler. The spare stowage straps will serve as towing harness. Bad -weather gear down there as well. Now go. I�ll be two minutes behind you, -five, tops. There are some things I need to get from my quarters." - -"Jesus, Saul, what kind of junk is worth risking your life over? If -we run, we run now, together, before that bozo comes -back." - -"You�re young, you don�t understand. My things are all I�ve got, -it�s who I am." - -Rachel shook her head. "Loser. We won�t wait, you know that?" - -I nodded and she sped off down Central Access, briefly illuminated on -passing each side corridor, until I lost sight of her at the dog-leg -around Command. I set off but walking was painful, and slow. A cold -breeze on my naked torso made me shiver, but on looking round there was -nothing obvious. Perhaps Cain had gone outside, returning to the -reactor, but I didn�t really care. The corridor swayed but remained in -focus. I kept going. - -Back in my quarters I crammed everything I held dear into a holdall; -pictures, mementos, my commendation for diligence, a fresh pair of -overalls. I even remembered to include my shaving kit and toothbrush. -The room spun and this time I had to sit down until everything stopped -moving. When I next looked at the clock my two minutes had turned into -ten, going on fifteen. Maria and Rachel would have a good head start but -if I was lucky their tracks through the snow would still be obvious -enough. - -I walked back along to the junction with Central Access and stopped. -There was no sign of Cain, and the only threat would be if he was -lurking in one of the side corridors, waiting to pounce as I went past. -I figured that by walking through the darkened sections, and sprinting -through the light, I�d be safe enough. It was a stroll in the park, -really. - -A woman stepped into the light emanating from the next cross-corridor. -She wore a skirt and tight sweater, not station overalls � a perk of -executive status. I stared at her. "Miss Kent?" - -She was dead, of course, they all were. Stephens and I had carried them -out one-by-one and dumped the bodies by the recycling bins. There was a -morgue in Medical but there were only three cabinets and it hardly -seemed worthwhile when outside was one big deep-freeze. - -Miss Kent moved further into the light and I drew in a sharp breath. -There was a bypass power cell half-buried in her skull. Even at this -distance I could see the surrounding scalp was charred, the hair burnt -to a crisp. Snow dropped from folds in her clothing. - -"When you get down to it, Saul, the human body is just another -machine. I admit that exercising control via the neural transceiver has -proved far more taxing than I anticipated, and channelling the power -cell output into bio-electrical impulses remains more art form than -science, but I think you�ll agree the net effect is more than -acceptable." - -The voice was Miss Kent but the words, the intelligence behind them, was -the Core. I tucked the holdall under my left arm, and grinned. "You -should have selected a body with more bulk. I�ll just shoulder you aside -and be long gone before your blind buddy can jump in." - -Miss Kent struck a pose, hand on hip. "Have you ever heard of a -game called Quintet, Saul? It was invented for use in a very old movie -but subsequently became popular in its own right. You roll dice and move -your pieces around the board, attempting to land on, and thus remove, -those belonging to the other players." - -"What the hell are you on about now? You�ve lost it Miss�Core, big time." - -She ignored the jibe. "Despite the name the game is played by six -players, not five. The sixth man sits out the frontgame, until only one -of the five starters remains, then his pieces enter play. So the trick -as a starter is not just to be the last man standing, but to anticipate -the inevitable ambush." - -Adam Bonar stepped into the corridor to my left. Daniel Haig stepped -into the corridor to my right. Each corpse had a bypass power cell in -its skull. - -Miss Kent smiled. "Somehow, Saul, I don�t think you�d do very well -at Quintet." - -I shrugged. "Changes nothing. I still push you aside and escape, -even with those two on my tail. I don�t see that body of yours being any -stronger dead that it was alive." - -"Ah, but that�s where you�re wrong, Saul. You�ve heard the tales of -individuals exhibiting superhuman strength? Mothers lifting vehicles to -free their trapped children, and the like? Well, this body may no longer -be subject to an adrenaline surge of that order, but I can definitely -push it way beyond its usual limitations." - -My gut was a solid knot of fear. How did you fight an animated corpse -impervious to pain? All she had to do was slow me up until the undead -help arrived. I cleared my throat. "What is it you want, -Core?" - -"The girl and her mother may leave, unmolested. I observed them -loading a fuel cell onto a makeshift sled, before that child-vandal -started attacking the CCTV units with a length of metal pipe. If they -make it back to their vehicle, or fail to do so, that is no concern of -mine." - -"What do you want?" I clenched my fists. - -"What I want is for you to remain here, of your own -volition, and continue with your maintenance regime. To that end I am -willing to offer certain inducements." - -"Inducements?" - -"Your sub-dermal reservoir can be purged. The debilitating effects -of your drug regime will cease within four to six days. You will then be -able to achieve an erection and subsequent ejaculation." - -I laughed, despite the patient unreality of the situation. "What, -so I get to jack-off again, is that it? That�s your big inducement to -hang around here?" - -"You may have the use of any former colleague for your sexual -pleasure, prior to the onset of decomposition. Should lubricated -penetration lack in appeal, I�m sure-" - -"Jesus Christ, are you insane? You�re offering me, what, a -series of zombie fuck-dolls? Do you actually have any idea of what makes -us tick or did you decide on necrophilia at random?" - -Her voice hardened. "I�m proposing pliant sexual partners that you -may use, or abuse, as you see fit. Free from any ethical and moral -restraints, and certainly free from any condemnation on my part. In -return you will repair both androids and keep this facility running -smoothly, until such time as the situation can be normalised." - -My skin crawled but some dark part of my soul yearned for release. I -shook my head. "No deal, no way. In fact, if you don�t mind -the appropriate choice of phrase, you can go fuck yourself." - -There was a pause, then Miss Kent took a step towards me. "Then I -judge it necessary to terminate your employment, and to do so with -extreme-" There was a schlik sound, and a metal spike burst -from her chest. - -Maria stood behind Miss Kent, wielding the harpoon-thing, a real poster -girl for revenge. Rachel stepped up and struck the animated corpse one, -two, three times about the head with a length of copper heating pipe. -The sound made me wince, despite the circumstances. The third blow -dislodged the power cell and Miss Kent returned to being a dead person, -ending up in a heap on the floor. - -We ran. - -I closed the garage access and jammed the locking wheel using Rachel�s -length of pipe. The two women were already in winter gear and opened the -outer doors while I struggled into what was still available and would -vaguely fit. I pushed while the two women pulled the mag sled out onto -the concourse The �mag� part ceased as soon as we left the underlying -metal grating, but the bottom of the sled was flat and slid smoothly -over the frosted snow. - -Maria glanced back at me over her shoulder. "Any idea on where to -head once we�re mobile?" - -I grunted. "Stephens headed for Fast Ridge. Either he didn�t make -it or there was nothing worth finding when he got there. I�m thinking -Low Prospect." - -"That�s an exposed valley. In this weather the drifting will be a -bitch." - -"You saying you can�t hack it?" - -"I can hack it, dickhead, you just watch me." Maria spoke to -Rachel. "You�ll like Low Prospect, it�s a big open-cast mining -operation, a real shit-hole. Mostly just grunts like us�" She -glared at me. "If I didn�t know better I�d say that was smart -thinking. Loads of survivors at Low Prospect, bound to be." - -I grinned. "Pure coincidence." - -"Yeah, well, remember that it�s my rig and my rules. You�re just a -passenger and what I say, goes. Right?" - -"Yes, ma�am!" - -Rachel sniggered, and after a moment Maria laughed. We slid down a small -incline and CCF forty-one was lost from view, not that I was looking. - -I never went back - -

Epilogue � Security Recording Dated 22 November - -Bonar slid the replacement head unit into place on Cain�s shoulders. He -didn�t bother to spray liquid skin around the join as cosmetic niceties -weren�t a priority. Latches clicked into place and Cain�s automatic -systems went through their diagnostic routines. His eyes powered up. - -Satisfied that the android was fully functional, Core discarded Bonar -and brought Cain on-line. Adam Bonar returned to being a dead person. -Core activated the override, allowing direct access to the android�s -systems. He stood, regarding himself in a sheet of reflective metal that -hung in the mechanical workshop. "O brave new world that has such -people in it". - -A tinny voice echoed down the corridor from Command. "CCF -forty-one this is rescue flight tango-zulu-two-six on approach. We have -your beacon. Please respond." - -Core smiled. "Now you�re talking!" - -© Martin Clark 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] quintet.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Tear Drops - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon
Hudson - -[*BLURB] Equilibrium in the workplace. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

FADE FROM BLACK. MUSIC: steady, rich, -stirring. PHOTO MONTAGE: a happy family: father and mother in youthful -prime, charming son at play, all smiling, all beautiful. A male voice, -soothing, affectionate: "People who -live in the real world know � for all the joys that fill our lives -�" - -MUSIC: shift to minor key, heartfelt, touching. CUT TO: the same -family, now grieving: father cradling "sleeping" son, mother -weeping alone, husband and wife crying against each other. "� -there is inevitable pain. � It is simply � the nature of things." - -MUSIC: step back into major key, soulful, hopeful. CUT TO: the -husband and wife supporting each other: formal wear, solidarity, smiles -tinged with sadness. "The hard times � make us value the good � -teach us to embrace � the fleeting moments." - -MUSIC: subtle introduction of TD-theme. CUT TO: husband at work; his -fingertips touching a framed B/W photograph of happy family on his desk; -ON his bitter-sweet smile. "The good times � give us the -strength � to help those we love � when times are hard." - -MUSIC: TD-theme builds to its gentle crescendo. CUT TO: husband -returning home. PHOTO MONTAGE segues into MOVING FOOTAGE as he embraces -his wife; they hold each other and find comfort. "And so do -we." - -MUSIC: TD-theme melodic hook. CUT TO: approved product image of the -Tear Drops™ packaging and logo sequence. "Tear -Drops. Helping you to take control of the hard times �" - -MUSIC: TD-theme smooth ending. CUT TO: CLS/UP on husband and wife�s -hands, clasped, as they walk towards a gentle brightness. "� and -return to the good." FADE TO BLACK. - -

The lights fade up on quiet applause from the table. Mr. -Hearth, Dharmaceuticals CEO, smiles in satisfaction. His voice is -warm. "This is exactly what we were hoping for from the campaign. -Very pleasing, Michael. Well done." - -Michael Albright, rising star in the advertising department, nods with -his customary restraint and allows a slight, polite smile to touch his -handsome face. "Thank you, Mr. Hearth." - -"I think there is no question but that we move to have the ads hit -at the start of the year." Mr Hearth looks around the table. He -sees no dissenters. "Very well. Let�s be ready for action January -first. Work to be done. Meeting adjourned." - -The attendees disperse, murmuring information in pairs, congratulating -Albright in passing. Mr Hearth approaches the younger man, a hand raised -to press his shoulder with paternal affection. - -They walk corridors, Mr. Hearth discussing strategies, Albright agreeing -and opining when invited. In Albright�s department Mr. Hearth makes a -brief speech, congratulating the staff on their efforts. The two men -enter Albright�s corner office accompanied by the happy applause of his -team. - -"I always knew you were the man for this job, Michael." Mr. -Hearth looks at the framed photograph on Albright�s desk: this charming -man, his lovely wife, their sweet daughter. Amazing, he thinks. - -Albright looks at it too, his smile as genuine as those in the image. -"I couldn�t have done it without them," he says and, shivering, -Mr. Hearth makes his excuses � much to do, best get to it � to -leave as soon as possible. - -With a last loving glance at his family, Albright turns his attention to -his organiser. The day is all ahead of him. Work to be done. - -

The evening commute. Dharmaceuticals enjoys quick -access to the bypass. Albright can be home in forty minutes. Brightness -gradually fades. - -Music distracts from the gathering gloom: light, melodic classics, -but the playlist shifts to the romantic, lovelorn. Too much, he switches -the radio off. - -As his mind wanders the hum of the road drills his subconscious, eroding -the last layers to break the soft seal on his preoccupation. Each breath -shudders in his throat, diaphragm trembling as it works to maintain -control against the emotional forces laying their sudden siege again. - -Pulling into his driveway, the gates burst open and Albright wails -without restraint, the tears washing over his face, down his throat, -salty as blood. The house is dark and empty, as cold as the car�s engine -when he finally stumbles from his seat. - -How could she leave? he asks himself. Why would she do this to me? - -He never eats at home, not now. He curls up small on the long sofa, -gutted, flayed, right where poor Hailee used to watch her programs, play -her games. Where he consoled Karen through her terrible guilt, first -despite his own grief, then through the grace of Tear -Drops™. - -Her mistake! he rages. Her fault! - -They helped him to help her during the long months leading towards a -semblance of recovery; they helped him continue, the way he had to, as -the Man, the breadwinner, until each night he returned to her side and -it was her turn, to console him through the torturous release back into -his own sorrow. - -Our daughter. He aches inside. Forgotten... - -Yet unlike his support for her, her support for him wavered with -time. She�d accepted, she said, moved on, despite her pain. But his pain -was the same as it was on the first day, he was trapped by it, she said, -in a voluntary cage. How many years could he keep standing still? - -Oh, Hailee! he weeps. Oh, Karen, how could you? - -Adrift in a bed now his alone, Albright fumbles for the dispenser -pack in the dark. One pill or a hundred, the engineered effect would be -the same, overdose impossible. The stupefying surface coating quickly -soothes him past the wracking sobs into a sound night�s sleep, before -eighteen legal hours of patented time-release medication grant him -freedom � to not just make it through the following day, but to flourish -as if nothing was ever wrong. - -

Albright wakes refreshed, showers, eats, hums through the -foam as he brushes his teeth. Meetings with the channel reps today, -deals to finalise, lots to do. Christmas will be on us soon, he -thinks as he dresses, smiling as he picks out the right tie. Hailee -loved Christmas. - - -© Andrew Leon Hudson 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] teardrops.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Terminus Machina : Bailout - -[*AUTHOR] Twilite Minotaur - -[*BLURB] Hey! Let's be careful out there! - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Jack Newman shouldered past the six-inch -reinforced alloy frame of the self-driving armored personnel carrier -into SoMa town, San Francisco, shards of glass and crumbling asphalt -crunching beneath his tactical boots like the rib cages of small -mammals. He squinted through mean wind that tasted of burning batteries, -to take in the broken majesty of AT&T park. Half of the Giants -Stadium had collapsed like some 20th century rendition of the Roman -Colosseum, its steel bones digested by the stomach acid of Pacific sea -salt and the floor-by-floor demolition of state budgets. The more -obscure consumption of the United States by its financial élite, -that infestation of white-shoed tapeworms who devoured all legitimate -business, all productivity, leaving nothing but stinking piles of -economic feces and fraudulent bank paper where metropoli once boomed. -The Bay itself had gone the color of bile, the ocean heaving nauseous -from a trillion tons of anthropocentric carbon, vomiting itself across -South Beach Harbor parking lot and playground, washing wrecked yachts -across the highway against bent street signs and abandoned cars and the -dark windowless husks of skyscrapers. Shoals of trash and untreated -sewage festered and smothered whatever remained of the coastal -ecosystem. The bodies of poisoned fish, seals and whales were left to -rot, the fly-ridden flesh thin and grey -and everywhere, like black and white photographs of Nazi camp -mass-graves. - -It�d been ages since Jack had actually seen un-mediated, unpolished -urban decay in meatspace, let alone actually had to wallow in it, and it -made his skin crawl with a kind of ambient tension and Rousseau-esque -guilt. It made his head hurt more to think about what it meant that he -felt such revulsion toward reality. Visions of the Agent Smith-Morpheus -showdown asserted themselves like popup ads into his mind�s eye. - -"I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever -you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if -there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink -and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it." -The smell, that�s what it was. The smell of burning ash and rotting -garbage and dead mammals. All of these un-targeted, -un-personalized stimuli, all this terrible �serendipity�, this -unprogrammed experience. It was viscerally repulsive to Jack. He closed -his eyes, nudged the microprocessors in his corneas awake with a -three-thought Ideocode sequence -- visualising his mother's face, the -melody to All Along The Watchtower, and the memory of his first -successful assassination with a humanoid drone. He clicked his heels -together for good measure. An Encephalock reader membraned over the -tissue of his cerebral cortex, scanned the chain of neural firings in his -brain, unlocking a transparent cerulean HUD of timestamp, taskbar, and -compass that crept into his peripheral vision. With a wink at a virtual -tab, Jack papered over the sight of disgusting reality with the clinical -rectilinearity of his AR-overlayed email inbox. He felt instantly -better. Even if it was a wall of X-Pandgen penis enargement -gene-therapy spam and messages from his wife hounding him over some -birthday party planning he couldn't be bothered with. Even the -ubiquitous marquee ads for depleted uranium flechette pistols that kept -chasing him across the net were a comfort as they scrolled over the -tangled snarl of a sixteen car pile-up in South Beach playground. No -place like home. - -It was unusual, to say the least. The heavy brass had called Jack and -his team of Troubleshooters out of the bunker arcology down into San -Fran, demanding in-person oversight of the investigation. That never -happened, especially not beyond the Ameribank City barrier. RPLCNTS and -air drones were teleoperated in the field from climate-controlled -C&C hubs, or programmed for autonomous detective-mode as the primary -means of on-the-ground actual police work. That was the CyberSec M.O. If -human beings were called out of the green zone into the battlefield, it -meant someone very high up was personally pulling strings. Strings such -as the fat end-of-the-year bonus that had suddenly appeared in Jack�s -bank account, one which his immediate supervisor would never authorize, -not even for cluster-bombing an abandoned Costco full of World Class War -jobless insurgents. Not that Jack had an argument with the money, per -se. - -A Valkyrie drone transport was crouching near the crime scene. -The Emergency medical drones had made it in time to stop the bleeding but -the kid had slipped into a coma, and all the king�s nanites couldn�t put -his prefrontal cortex back together again. Multiple cerebral contusions, -face smashed unrecognizable- Jack hadn�t seen that kind of gutty gore -since the Compton prison guard robots went AWOL from a bad firmware -update, pounded the inmates� skulls into corned beef with fire -extinguishers. That incident had been a bitch to cover up. It took the -cleaners six hours to scrub the goopy chunks of brain and hemoglobin -from the cell walls and bars. The cover story about a facility-wide -prisoner revolt had been a stretch, but necessary to ward off all the -Human Rights and Anti-Robot organization limpdicks salivating at the -chance to score political points against the big-box automated prison -industry. Jack had pulled multiple Red Bull-powered all-nighters taking -down whistleblower blogs and humanitarian sites using DDoS hacking -attacks, shouting down activists in forums and chatrooms with an army of -AI-run counter-poster accounts. Jack nipped all attempts to expose the -incident in the bud. The spin team CGed black faces onto all the -released security footage; the undying fear of the angry black man could -always be counted on to sway public opinion in a pinch. - -But this wasn�t an airbrush job for the corporate Elite; for the first -time in months, Jack was actually being asked to solve an -honest-to-Gnossis crime. - -"I�m feeling like a real police officer, I think I need to up my -dosage," Jack bantered into his mic. - -"Book �em, Dano." Stasia laughed back, exiting the vehicle -beside Jack, ballistic leather-analog creaking as she slapped him on the -shoulder. - -"The boy, one Justin Diamond. Stable condition. Son of Alistair and -Margaret Diamond, Divorced. Father is a senior executive at Vitanet -Medical. Former governer of New Hampshire and New Jersey. On the board -of the American Medical Association. Duck-hunting buddy of President -Vanderlyle�s old man." - -"Vitanet? Jesus. That explains, well, everything. Of course the -trillionaires can afford to buy their own personal investigation into -their son�s near-murder." - -Jack pulled up the boy�s files into an unused section of retina real -estate, thankful for the overlay�s breakup of the real-world overload. -The brick and mortar was starting to grate on his eyeballs. - -"Last connectivity, today, 9:34 AM. Via a dVice Ubiq." Jack -fiddled through the kid�s pockets, coming up with only lint and -date-rape pills. - -"No dVice on him. Looks like someone out there is running around -with stolen hardware. Let�s run it by the registries." - -Jack examined the area surrounding the chalked outline, stepping over -the metal column of a fallen street lamp, fluted green metal blistering -with rust. There was another dead body, thirty feet away. A spider -crawled over to the mess, scanned the face and took a DNA sample. A tiny -hooked implement like a dentist�s scraper ejected from the forensic -bot�s mandibular area. It used the scraper to extract a dollop from the -pool of blood beneath the corpse� head. The blood had congealed -in a pothole like strawberry Jell-O. - -The results for the second victim were instantaneous, and the dossier -tabbed itself like a playing card beside the primary�s file. - -"Amit Garcia. Ex-accountant. Former Ameribank City citizen till a -few months ago when his citizenship was revoked due to consecutive -delinquent payments." - -"Double homicide? Or a separate incident?" Stasia hypothesized. - -"Maybe. Hard to say. It�s dangerous, chaotic out here in the Bay -Area. Life expectancy rates aren�t so great." - -"Chaotic? Aren�t we going to at least look into it?" - -"He had his citizenship taken away for failing to make payments. -That means this guy�s a Deadweight. An Unemployed. He doesn�t count as a -person as far as we�re concerned." Jack pointed to Amit�s former -white collar office shirt, turned grey from living in the street, as if it -was QED. - -"As far as we�re concerned? So we�re going to look the other way?" - -"As far as our bosses are concerned. We�re not being paid to -investigate deaths of unimportant individuals." - -Stasia performed a Premium Internet search with Amit�s facial biometrics. - -"Look, there�s a video of Amit and some other jobless San -Franciscan tearing at each other�s throats. A human dogfight. It�s got -fifty thousand hits on the �Tube and is circulating semi-viral on -Friendbook. It looks like Justin here wasn�t exactly innocent." -Stasia held the jittery clip up in Jack�s face. Jack feigned -incredulity. - -"We don�t know that. It could�ve been anyone filming the -brawl." Jack said. - -"�San Fran Food Fite to Teh Deth�, uploaded 9:34 AM today by -Darkshado, registered name: Justin Diamond." Stasia held up the -streaming video of the soon-to-be-dead Amit having his head crushed -against the point of a fire hydrant by another unemployed Deadweight -bum. A cracking teen voice laughed and wagged a bag of fast food at the -starving Deadweights, egging them into killing one another in sick -gladiatorial fashion. - -"It�s just high schoolers being stupid high schoolers, that�s what -they do. Things got out of hand." Jack brushed the video aside. - -"Jesus, somebody is dead, Jack! And this rich little silver spoon -brat was directly responsible. We have to do something." - -Jack sighed, pulled an Altoid tin from the inner pocket of his -double-breasted trenchcoat, one of the few pieces of dumbware he kept on -him for sentimental value. - -"I said I feel like a police officer, Stas. But that�s not what we -are. Police don�t exist anymore. We�re Troubleshooters. Sooner or later -you�re going to learn what that means." He offered her one of the -flat white cylinders. She turned away. - -Jack waved away the autotriage, which beeped subserviently. Attached by -braided wires, a blood pressure monitor self-strapped itself to the arm -of the brutalized teen�s unconscious body as the self-driving stretcher -wheeled up into the loading bay of the awaiting Valkyrie drone. Jack -sheltered his eyes as the drone�s four swimming-pool-sized rotors spun -up, blowing a typhoon of dirt and trash up from the San Fran sidewalk. -En route back to Ameribank City, polished crystalline skyline shuddering -through the grimy atmosphere like a hallucination. To Justin Diamond�s -mega-rich parents, soon to be devastated mega-rich parents, then -vindictive mega-rich parents. A very dangerous combination. - -"Look, I�m sorry. I�m tired and this unpurified air is bad for my -asthma. Let�s just get through this, yeah?" Jack touched Stasia�s -back. The smell of her apple cider washed hair was a refreshing oasis in -the blunt reek of the necropolis. Her frazzled business-punk do made her -seem younger than she already was. - -"Yeah. Maybe I�ll let you buy me a drink, explain to me the dark -riveting history of how you became such an asshole." She took the -piss out, batting Jack in the head as she ran through juxtaposed charts -of either victim�s vitals, intersections of their social graphs, teasing -out potential connections. She was fetchingly smart, impossibly -passionate, a fireball, a shooting star, and she reminded Jack so much -of himself, of his wife, twenty years ago, before he�d burned all his -naïve idealism out in the suffocating atmosphere of the hardball, -neo-feudal world. Which might�ve been why he�d given into the nepotism -and pulled strings to make sure Stasia survived whenever the monthly -Layoff Games came around and management looked for more "fat" -to be trimmed from the already bleeding bone, to be fed to robots and -automation. Nothing unforgivable had happened yet between them, but Jack -wondered if there would be anything to forgive, given that his marriage -had deteriorated precariously close to emotional bankruptcy. The thought -would be a useful talisman against guilt if anything did happen, Jack -mentally noted. - -Concentric yellow semicircles surrounding an antiquated phone symbol -radiated from the corner of Jack�s eye. Not a text, not a voicechat, an -honest-to-Gnossis telephonic request. It was his wife, he knew, -before even glancing at the caller ID. - -"Hold on, Joy�s on the line. Need to take this," Jack said. -Stasia didn�t frown, but Jack could tell she was trying not to. With her -light freckles and turned-up nose it made her look sad but also achingly -cute, and Jack looked away. He walked back to the APC, tapped the -blinking face of his wife, initiating the voice convo, steeled up his -nerves. - -"Hey." - -"What the hell is your problem?" - -"What?" - -"Jesus, Jack, again? Really? You forgot again? I�ve already put the -kids to bed. We had to run to Bake Boss to pick up the birthday cake. I -told you I needed eggs for the recipe, and I know you got the message. -I know because I�m looking at the confirmation email that I added the -wall note into your Life Planner, which is the only thing you ever -check." Jack had indeed accidentally-on-purpose dragged the message -to the trashcan, but he�d already blocked the incident out of his memory -so well that he almost convinced himself he hadn�t. - -"Well, honey, maybe if you didn�t let the cat get into the chicken -coop, you�d have- Look, I know you�re really on this urban farming kick, -but not everyone is meant to be an Amish hippy and raise their own -food." - -"No. You can�t make this about me. If you�re going to miss your -daughter�s birthday party, again, at least have the goddamn decency to -own up to it." - -"That�s not fair. You know I�m out here working my ass off just so -she can have cakes and parties and running water. They laid off -another two Troubleshooters today, replaced �em with the new Mach 9s. -Citizenship fees are up 10% from last month and we�re an inch from -slipping underwater on the mortgage. You know that? Of course not. -Because I do all the worrying in this family. Me. The cross is all on my -fucking shoulders." - -"That�s because you never tell me anything, asshole. I have to -crawl my way up the ladder through your friends, co-workers and boss just -to get a dead-end number that you never answer. And then I reach you, -and it�s just some chatbot-encapsulated version of you that I�m supposed -to �relate with�? What, you need machines to live your life for you too, -now? God, sometimes I feel like I�m married to a drone." - -"Look, I can�t deal with this right now, I�m working. I�ll be home -later. Sometime." - -"Fine. Bye." Jack hung up, recomposed himself. Thought of -solving Rubik�s cubes and Stasia�s hair. - -"Everything ok?" Stasia asked. Jack just waggled his head -ambiguously, like a Mumbai Taxi Driver. - -"Let�s just get this done." - -As Jack wandered over to some of the nearby crumbling apartments, he saw -that women in hennaed head wraps and hand-dyed, quilted hemp fleece -sarongs were out, hanging clothes up to dry. They joked, laughing over -some small talk as if to spite the withering collapse surrounding them. -The clothes lines of reclaimed, unbraided telephone wire were strung -across the branches of young dogwood trees, cracking their way through -the sidewalk strips. Without illegal-immigrant landscapers paid to keep -hedges and shrubbery suppressed in fashionable rectilinear shapes, -nature had begun to redeem the prodigal urbanity. - -A father in his early twenties and his waist-high daughter climbed a -ladder made of welded park railings canted against a row of shipping -containers, gathering rust and moss in the street like the lost luggage -of a civilization�s cancelled flight. The containers had most likely -been helicoptered across King Street as barricades during battles -between anti-austerity insurgents and the corporate militaries, left to -sit for years. Atop the industrial metal prisms were planted rooftop -gardens, which the father and daughter tended. The girl scuttled about, -gathering Thai basil, tomatoes, bok choi, sweet lettuce while the father -adjusted settings on a notebook computer, rainproofed with a modified -Gap raincoat. The decade-obsolete paleoware bloomed with recycled -hardware components. Cables, temperature, humidity, and pH sensors, -automatic watering apparatus, monitoring cameras, all wired into an -ecological nervous system, the brain of some sort of self-regulating -aquaponic setup. The man illustrated for the girl how to select ripe -Polynesian taro, cutting the stem an inch above the soft earth, pulling -the corm, replanting the cutting, renewing the cycle. Some fleeting -memory of a �high tech-high-touch� lecture from an eternally -Birkenstocked professor surfaced in Jack�s mind then descended as -quickly. The man was patient, so patient, as the girl accidentally cut -too close to the heart-shaped leaves, spoiling several harvestings. He -demonstrated again and again till she got it right, and Jack thought of -himself lobbing ten-second canned explanations of trigonometric -functions to his daughter�s eager requests for math homework help, and -he felt a hot burning in his face like contempt but he knew not of what. -On arrival, Jack had been too caught up in the urban decay of the -necropolis to notice, but upon closer inspection, one could see that -many of the balconies of nearby uncollapsed apartments were adorned with -similar vertical gardens, solar cells popping up like mushrooms from a -dead log. Green shoots of self-sustainable life sprouting from the ash -of the forest FIRE. The economy of Finance Insurance and Real Estate. - -The women froze like deer when they saw Jack and his fellow CyberSec -Troubleshooters, the dreadlocked man in the container-top garden -grabbing his daughter�s arm, pulling her in close. Jack approached them, -cautiously, but not so much so as to suggest a defensive stance. - -"Hi. Nice weather we�re having," Jack said, regretting the -joke in poor taste, choking on the Beijing-flavored swamp passing as -atmosphere. - -"Take your Tin Men and leave, Wraith. We have done nothing -wrong," said the gardener. - -"We mean you no harm, just want to ask you a few questions. I like -what you�ve done with the place." - -"How can we trust your serpent tongue? You are the harbinger of -pain and death," the gardener said, pointing a gnarled wand of -olive branch at Jack, as if the immutable magic of peace and love might -vanquish or at least ward off "The Corporatist State" or -whatever hegemonic evil these neo-hippies saw when they perceived -Troubleshooters. The man climbed down off the shipping container, lifting -his daughter before she reached the rung fourth from the pavement, -though she protested. - -"Look, I don�t want to be here any more than you want me to be -here," Jack said, changing strategy to appeal to mutually assured -beneficence. "I�m Jack." Jack stretched out his hand. A gull -shrieked, plummeted into the bay, dead of some new, unnamed and -unforeseen ecological calamity. - -"East," said the dreadlocked leader of the �cargo cult�. - -"Have you seen this boy around? This morning perhaps?" Jack -said, offering a picture. Jack tried to gauge the man�s reaction as he -examined the digital portrait. Jack�s Oracles read the man�s facial -expression, ultrasonics detected his heart rate, crunched the biometrics -in a kind of distance-polygraph. - -"No, I haven�t. He looks like one of the Bent Ones, not from our -community," the man named East said. The Oracles completed their -analysis. Probability of truth: 62%. Unreassuring. Jack didn�t know -whether to trust his intuition or his technology, either was liable to -fail, he being so out of practice at this real-life police detective -shtick. Jack scratched his chin reflexively and tried to ignore the -smell of undisguised human body odor and mulch. The stink of reality. -And what was this word, "Community?". A rusted memory sunk -deep into the floorboards of Jack�s frontal lobe struggled into his -mind�s eye, a whirling miasma of sandalwood incense and shared living -rooms and Afro-Celtic drumming and unflinching spiritual and emotional -honesty. Even more than the visceral stench of nature, it was this -abominable adherence to truth that most repulsed Jack. The thought of -facing the ugly minefield that was Jack�s relationship with his wife was -too much to bear, and it was that thought that broke the mirror of -Jack�s reflection. This dirty savage named after a compass direction. -Jack couldn�t wait for this mindless Fortune 500 vendetta chase to be -over, get home, luxuriate recumbent in the serendipity-free saccharine -media bath of his CyberSec office. Watch his perfectly scripted reality -TV shows, listen to his computer-generated Bob Dylan songs without -meanings, amongst the prefabbed pristine marble swept only by the sweet -zephyrs of climate control and skirtsuit perfume. - -"Is that your daughter, there?" Jack said, eyeing the young -girl who was tethered to one of the two women, trying to pull away to -get to her daddy. They hissed something to her and the girl frowned, but -relented. - -East�s sun-dried forehead flattened ambiguously, smile lines at the -corners of his mouth erased by a closed stoic stare. - -"Yes, that is my daughter." - -"See, this picture here, that was somebody�s child too. And that -boy�s parents, well, they�re not happy at all about what happened to -their son, right here on your street, earlier this morning. These -people, they have great power." - -"They hold your leash, Wraith? And the Tin Men?" - -"I would put it in other terms, but yes, essentially, I am on the -payroll. What you need to know is that you need to tell me everything -that you know, if you care at all about your daughter." Jack said, -popping another Altoid into his mouth. East seemed to weigh the thought -carefully, as if considering which betrayal was the lesser of two evils. - -"There was a� quarrel this morning, yes, although I do not know who -was involved. These happen often, here, you understand. I was out -harvesting copper wire and plastic bottles to melt down, at the -time." - -"Is there anyone else who might�ve gotten a good look at -them?" Jack picked up the slightest twitch in East�s right eye. He -could see the skin over the man�s jaw ripple slightly. The Oracles -captioned: �severe distress�. - -"My daughter. She was out straining the catchment this morning." - -Jack crouched down to her eye level. - -"What did you see honey? Who attacked the kid?" Her hair was -matted the way border collie fur clumps into thick layered scales when -they�re allowed to roam freely, roll about in the dirt. Her eyes were -hot green embers, fierce with a precocious intelligence. She glanced at -Jack�s armored carrier, at the light-absorbing, pristine black leather -of his CyberSec uniform. Clucked her tongue. - -"He looked like you." The girl said, pointing to Jack�s -goggles. Jack smiled. - -"Of course he did. Of course he did." The little -crunchy-granola Deadweight imp was toying with him. This little -green-thumbed urchin. - -Then the Oracle�s polygraph results chimed in: 93% probability of truth. -Now that was interesting. - -"It�s her birthday tomorrow. She�s going to have her first birthday -cake. Almost all the sugar cane was eaten in the machine plagues and -it�s taken us months to collect the ingredients." East said. Jack -almost said it was his own daughter�s birthday today, then it hit him -how he�d completely neglected to even remember it let alone expend -energy collecting cake ingredients. He filled with an intoxicating -cocktail of disgust, guilt, and infantile hatred that felt like a puffer -fish in his stomach. - -"She�s very excited, aren�t you, Sunrise?" East said. The girl -nodded her head, popping a cherry tomagranite into her mouth. A -genespliced variant, highly resistant to hydra rust. Also a copyrighted -strain, owned by Demetric, and it was vanishingly unlikely these jobless -Deadweights were paying the monthly thousand dollar rent to lawfully -grow the tomato-pomegranate hybrid. Jack could�ve taken them all in for -agricultural piracy, if he were in a bad mood. Rich, pink soup spurted -from Sunrise� lips as the hybrid fruit burst its sweet tartness. Her -father snatched the remaining tomagranites from her thatched satchel -before she could toss another of the plum-sized juice bombs in her -mouth. - -"Sunrise, now you know it�s not polite to eat in front of -guests." East said. She scowled her complaint but didn�t attempt to -steal them back. Jack smiled with half his face. - -These people reminded Jack of his wife and her bizarrely renewed -nonconformity. He could see her, here, amongst these apocalypse -gardeners, dipping her fragile, post-industrial hands into the rough, -tarry soil of a boulevard parkway, mouthing something about reclaiming -the soil for Gaia. She would reset, retrace the song line of a Steely -Dan anthem back to the dreamtime of liberal undergraduate California, -carved out of the austerity rubble. Her lips accepting the Earthy gift -of kava drink, languishing in the incensed ambience of didgeridoo and -sitar strung with frayed bridge cables. Here, she would forget her -nursing career truncated by quasi-sentient blood pressure machines. She -would forget her underwater and soon-to-be-repossessed home, the private -school tuition she could no longer afford. She would forget her distant -husband whom she�d forgotten how to love. She would forget about being -stuck, and worrying about being stuck. - -Her neon batik silk whirling dreamlike under bioluminescent lighting -would strike sparks off the eye of a djembe virtuoso. He would court her -with black Hindu magic, say he�d seen her through a third eye. She would -want to and then would believe him, riding the velvet crest of a -lungfull of cannabis. They would make love in the back seat of a -permanently stalled VW Bus, make love like Jack hadn�t since before he�d -taken the CyberSec job, and she would feel nothing but the hot flare of -youth and bliss uninterrupted by guilt, uncomplicated. Guilt could wait, -could be postponed, like a refinanced mortgage. The image expanded to -fill Jack�s mind like a computer virus, compromising his every thought, -and the immune reaction was a tremendous and impotent hatred. - -Jack knew these things, because he could see his wife�s song lines, -traced in time and space like snail trails, on the GPS tracking window -he�d obtained from her wireless provider�s database. Jack, through his -privileged access as a corporate security officer, had been monitoring -his wife�s every credit card purchase, every email, had watched her -through a thousand intelligent surveillance cameras stationed throughout -the city. He knew that Joy had been lying to him for months. Every -weekday yoga class, every visit to her sister in Red Wood, every morning -when he would kiss her goodbye and they would both do their best to -soften their lips like sponges, as if to soak up the mess with -pleasantry into the trajectory of the past. Jack knew. And he never said -anything, would never say anything. Because Jack was a grown up, unlike -all of these frolicking, crunchy, nymph-like children, and that is what -grown ups do. They keep quiet about systemic problems and double down. -Bailout. They refinance. - -"Well, better run the place through the wash," Jack mumbled, -cracking the remaining sliver of Altoid, thin as communion host, against -the roof of his mouth. It was a comforting and familiar sensation. - -Jack dialed in directives to the intra-cloud network, twitches of his -finger tips, read as input by his haptic gloves. A team of RPLCNTS -fanned out like an oil slick from the rear loading bay of the -carbon-black, behemoth class CyberSec vehicle. The roboSWAT team grouped -organically into squads following a flocking algorithm that Jack had -personally helped develop during a contracting project for the US -Department of Defense. Mostly the software was used to automate the -slaughter of Kenyans and Kazakstanis who, it was revealed, were sitting -on caches of lithium and copper the size of the Himalayan mountain -range. Lithium's and copper�s vital rôles in electronics having replaced -long-peaked oil as the fulcrum for the next resource war, of course. The -ability of the human race to find new reasons to kill one another in the -face of insurmountable abundance was truly commendable. The advent of -the robotized ground troop solved the PR problem of flag-wrapped -coffins coming back from war zones, and the bleeding-heart journalist fodder -created when Predator drones accidentally blew up hospitals full of -Pakistani children went away. With those moral safeties clicked off, -half of Asia and most of Africa was leveled and strip-mined in less than -a decade by US robo-military campaigns. - -The RPLCNTS immediately began securing the perimeter. Green zone was -demarcated on Jack�s heads-up-display by a film of lime-colored -territory spreading across an aerial map like algae in a pond. Through -an adjacent matrix of livestreaming troop feeds, Jack could see that the -bottom three floors of the San Francisco Giants building, even the -interiors, were blanketed in graffiti and gunshot holes. Primate pissing -matches played out in neon red and vomit-green street kanji, then -diplomacy continued by other means. Esoteric Kurt Vonnegut quotes and -six-foot-wide stenciled portraits of Che Guevara cried truths against -the wall of violence and misspelled inanity. These political art seemed -to post-date the rest, suggesting the gangs had either moved on or had -mutually assured one anothers� destruction. The building was mostly -filled with countless grey-collars, the overeducated poor who�d either -been replaced in their office by a robot or who were enslaved to their -200k student loans, and for whom no job outside prostitution and unpaid -social work would ever come. They tended to their shoebox shitakes, -absorbed themselves in dead media like paper books and sculpture. Some -even played those face-to-face roleplaying video games called -"theater". Jack and Stasia remotely questioned the denizens, most -of whom either had not seen the event or were too numb to care. The -drone SWAT teams encountered a few wyrehead junkies spewing braindead -strings of cursewords. One attempted to attack a soldrone with a ball -peen hammer. The audio feed roared as what remained of the junkie's -brain was splattered all over his non-functioning refrigerator by the -bot's hollow point rounds. The sight made him feel uneasy, so Jack -changed channels. - -"No one else home," Stasia said, double checking a -satellite-based body heat scan of the building. - -The arachnoid forensics bots continued the arduous task of scrubbing the -vicinity for evidence �marks, tracks, blood, DNA -- crawling physical -reality for every last byte of data, aggregating it in CyberSec�s -servers. What the Troubleshooters discovered was, well, troubling. - -"Christ, it�s like they edited out a slice of reality. All of the -security footage from CCTV cams, even the spydrones flying over during -the incident apparently came down with temporary cases of anterograde -amnesia. All our audiovisual records of that five minute period are -blank," Stasia said. - -"Yeah. Curious, isn�t it? Winklemann�s not going to be happy with -this." - -Other than the corpse of the Deadweight accountant, the only real piece -of evidence were two Tyr X2 bodyguard robots. One had been mowed down, -so many bullet holes perforating its chrome chassis that it resembled a -cheese grater. Jack knelt down beside the collapsed humanoid, its -secret-service windbreaker ripped to shreds, its plastoid skin peeling -from its face like a third-degree sunburn. - -"That�s heavy weaponry they were carrying," Stasia commented. -Jack aimed his dVice camera at the QR barcode on the neck of the -android. - -"Assuming the assailant was carrying it. Let�s run these serial -numbers." - -The other Tyr had a small puncture at the nape of its neck. Jack -examined the hole, inserting an arthroscopic microcam into the �wound� -and fishing around. - -"The central processor is fried," he added. - -"You thinking another bot glitch SNAFU?" Stasia asked. - -"Maybe. A coincidental malfunction is certainly what they�d want us -to think happened, anyway. Hold on, Winklemann�s on the line." Jack -looked at the flashing avatar of his boss, expanding a videoconference -that occluded the charts and informatics of the investigation's -augmented reality overlays. - -"What have you got for me, Jack," Winklemann cut to it with -his eternally hurried, upper-managerial inflection. - -"The kid�s still unconscious but stable. Prognosis uncertain, it�s -50-50 whether he�ll snap out of the coma. We�ve got two body guards, -both owned by his parents. Where it gets interesting is we just cross -checked the Tyrs, and the bullets that Swiss-cheesed one bodyguard match -up with the .50 cal subdermal forearm cannon of its counterpart." - -"So the guard robot went Hal 9000, short circuited and started -shooting at friendlies. Wouldn�t be the first time, and at least since -this was bot-on-bot homicide we won�t have to blackout the story from -the internets like the School Bus incident down in Gnossis Plaza." - -"That�s possible but I highly doubt the culprit was buggy software. -For one, we just finished patching up the targeting systems heuristics -and enemy acquisition AIs for the entire drone fleet this morning. Then -there�s the fact that the BIOS clocks of the totaled Tyr and its -counterpart are frozen within seconds of each other, as if once the -puppeteer was done, he cut the strings from his marionette and made -off." - -"Puppeteer. That�s your diagnosis? Ok, fine, Mr. Conspiracy Theory. Roll it out for me." - -"I checked out the stab wound at the back of the other guard�s -neck. It�s bull�s-eye within a half-inch sized target, a backdoor port -into the Tyr�s system used for debugging purposes during beta testing. -Whoever struck the blow, it wasn�t just a reactionary defensive stab, it -was a calculated hostile takeover attack. These are not your run of the -mill necropolis street punks. They had intimate knowledge of Totech -android anatomy. Knew just the right switch to flip." - -"They could�ve gotten lucky, went for the bot�s head and scored the -central processor." - -"Highly unlikely. Residue analysis of the exposed wire and CPU -suggests that whatever the foreign object was, it was electrical. -Perhaps some kind of spine-based remote operation ice pick. There are no -signs of other firearms discharged in any of the visual or audio CCTV -feeds suggesting this guy was unarmed. These were professionals, black -hat hackers." - -"Fantastic, just what we need. Unwashed masses with brains. I -thought we had that problem kicked with reality TV and Angry Hamsters. -Goddamnit, times like these I wish we still had paper books so we could -torch them all like Fahrenheit 451. Who do you think is behind it, -assuming your theory is true?" - -"There�s the usual suspects, the Washingtonians, but they spend too -much time bleating on about how government is trampling the US -constitution to reach that level of technical sophistication. And -they�re more about giving their lives for God and Country M16 in hand, -blaze of patriotic glory and all that. They�d probably view such an -attack as vaguely dishonorable commy-tactics. We can�t rule out a covert -strike by Pfeiffer Pharmaceutical or one of Vitanet�s other major -competitors looking to take out a VIP then use the circumstances to -frame the murder on jobless necropolis slumdogs. But if I had to, I�d -put my money on Hex Gen." - -"Generation Hex. Those V For Vendetta-guzzling hacktivists, of -course. Fine. Whoever the culprit, what we need to do right now is pin -the murder on World Class War. Hex Gen and WCW have had loose -associations and it�s going to be guilt by association 24/7." - -"Won�t that be a little challenging to spin? I mean we don�t even -know who the assailant is." - -"Nah, it�s no problem. Hell, since we�ve acquired MediaVerse, we�ve -got every major news channel, e-newspaper, and network on a tight leash -and the President is doing his part to declare all the whistleblowers -terrorists and have them disappeared systematically, no sweat off our -backs. Elections are coming up and it�s crucial that we crush popular -support of this underclass movement ASAP. Gnossis and our other generous -employers have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into President -Vanderlyle�s campaign and it is absolutely imperative that he is sworn -into office for another term. Or it�s all of our heads, it goes without -saying. If we can just get that American Anti-Piracy Act passed we could -file all of the web censorship and attacks like this airstrike under the -blanket immunity clause of �defending US cybersecurity�. Make this all -so much easier." - -"Airstrike? What airstrike?" Jack felt his temperature drop -two degrees, his stomach suddenly became a cold, sinking stone. - -"Oh, right, you�re not in on this loop yet. Our �generous benefactors�, -the ones personally funding this operation, seems they need a certain -sense of closure. A nuclear, multi-block leveling, megaton sense of -closure." - -An ill wind descended, drawing cryptic runes in the red desert of the -San Francisco sky, like the mark of some terrible and ancient alien -race, aroused from its epochal slumber. Bloated corpses drifted like -unprocessed lumps of sewage through the grey tide beneath the gaping -ruins of the Golden Gate. Omens. Preambles to the indiscriminate wrath -of infantile gods. - -"You�re serious," Jack mouthed. He felt his heart rate spike, -microscopic nanomed machines swimming in his arteries synthesized -angiotensin blockers automatically to counteract his heightened blood -pressure. - -"Am I affecting a humorous tone? Yes. I have an executive order -straight from the top to do a 426 on the entire area code." The -usual static from wireless communications borne by sketchy necropolis -cell towers suddenly cut out, as if emphasizing the message. - -"An LV426? Take off, nuke the site from orbit? Isn�t that kind of -overkill? I thought this was a crime scene, not a re-enactment of the -Hell�s Kitchen Predator drone massacre." - -"Hey, that wasn�t our fault, we had bad intel from the CIA. -Besides, it was a festering sore of jobless insurgents. The World Class -War mobs had publicly executed the CEO of Nationwide Bank, hung him by -his own tie from the Wall Street Bull. For fucks sake, they nearly took -down a fifty story corporate tower with explosives concocted from -nothing but gene-hacked ammonia-rich algae and pinesol. Fucking algae -bombs! You ever heard of that shit? An example had to be made. Top it -off, yeah, come on you stingy whore." Jack could hear the tinkle of -crystal champagne flutes through Winkleman�s phone, the oceanic burble -of a party crowd, live smooth jazz. - -"Carpet bombing fourteen city blocks worth of apartments full of -families who had nothing to do with the movement at all? That was -setting an example?" - -"Jack, Jack. My boy. Of course I don�t want to see innocent people -killed any more than you do. Of course we�d prefer to control the hoi -polloi with hope. It�s much more efficient in the cost-benefit analysis -to have people believing, falsely, that they can Be Whatever They Want -When They Grow Up in America, satisfied with their McDonald�s -shit-shoveling job limping along on foodstamps and Wal Mart as long as -they can turn on their �Tubevisions and strive to be American Idols and -Jersey Shore Playgirls one day. But with this� extent to which things -have managed to deteriorate, it�s becoming harder and harder to sell the -shit sandwiches as caviar, convince the people that their debt shackles -are their tickets to a better life. So now we�ve got to rely on good old -fashioned People�s Republic of China-style fear of Authority with an -itchy trigger finger. It�s � what do those World Class War lefty -financial journalists call it? Moral Hazard. That�s it. This is about -reinstating moral hazard. There�s got to be an equal and opposite -deterrent to the degree of outrage in the general population. They start -getting the cajones up to cut the heads off the royalty, well, we�ve got -to fire an ion cannon at the poorer half of Manhattan. Now they know the -hazard of being moral. One day you will understand how business actually -works, son." - -"Alright. Fine. You need to put shock and awe back into the hearts -of the irreverent peasants. I just don�t see how indiscriminately -blowing up random swaths of population, many of whom are not necessarily -active World Class War members or part of any other resistance movements -is going to draw down support for WCW. Cause it just seems like we�re -going to have another World Trade Center�s worth of unemployed martyrs, -all of whom will have mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who -will be filled with fiery jihad, devoting the rest of their lives to -taking down the �Plutocrats�, the Great Satans who stole their loved -ones and destroyed their lives. Why not just go after the extremists? -The insurgents who are doing actual damage taking out Ameribank City -financial towers, assassinating hedge fund managers and actively -plotting to bring down the global financial system. I mean these people -here, they�re just human beings who got the dirty end of the -stick." Jack could feel his inner lawyer suddenly flipping to the -side of the smelly hippies he�d silently despised minutes ago, once he -was asked to massacre them. - -"Christ, don�t refer to them as �human beings�. Don�t do that to -yourself; it�s bad for your psyche, all this humanizing of your victims. -Unbecoming of a Troubleshooter. No, thank you Sylvia, I�m fine. Tell the -governor I�ll be out in a minute," Winkleman said to someone at -whatever $10 million-a-plate dinner function or economics conference he -was attending, slurping down what sounded like some kind of chilled -shellfish on the line. He cleared his throat, continued. - -"Look, Mother Theresa, I�m not going to spend all day arguing -asymmetric warfare ethics with you. This is a direct order and you WILL -execute. Diamond wants someone, anyone, to pay for his son�s death. Maybe -he�s overreacting; whatever, it�s moot. Alistair Diamond is one of our -largest and most well-connected shareholders, and happens to be the -brother of the Cybersecurity Senate Subcommittee head, the group that -will make or break the American Anti-Piracy Act. I don�t care if Diamond -asks CyberSec to assassinate the President of China or mow down a -Catholic school full of Canadian children with Panzer tanks or open up a -singularity at Earth�s core just so he can laugh at the poor below, -martini in hand, from his low-orbit ISS villa�s swimming pool. You will -execute, Jack, or you will find yourself, very soon, jobless, cowering -in one of these decrepit Plebian sinkholes without running water, -imagining your wife and kid kissing some other man with steelier balls -than you who took your job, wondering with your last breath why you -ever for one moment had second thoughts about your vocation�s duties -both to CyberSec and to Ameribank City. And then your life will end, -horribly and without even an acknowledgement in your former friends� -status updates, beneath the great vengeance and furious anger of a -drone-fired CyberSec lead zeppelin, just like the one you�re about to -call down on the tens of thousands of people eeking out their pathetic, -gutter-moss-and-cardboard-box lives in that wasteland called San -Francisco." Serious as bioengineered, weapons-grade cancer. - -"Oh, I should add. There�s a juicy forty-k bonus tied to this -mission as well, plus a week-long paid junket in Switzerland for you and -your wife upon completion. The President Wilson Hotel, Imperial Suite. -Only the best for Ameribank City�s Finest. The monk seal sashimi there -is mind boggling. You�ve gotta try it." - -The endangered cuisine wasn�t exactly Jack�s cup of tea, but the $40,000 -would be enough to keep their daughter in private school another -semester, maybe pull them above water in their mortgage payments long -enough for Jack and his wife to spend a few dinner table conversations -not fighting about money. Jack could feel his angels and demons being -shouted off his shoulders by the megaphone of Darwinian survival. There -were breadlines of double PhDs and former IT workers gunning for Jack�s -position. Jack didn�t have the luxury of not working. He couldn�t think -about what would happen if he lost his job and he and his family fell -behind in their citizenship payments. - -"Well, hey, Jack! It�s been great chatting, but I�ve got a couple -of hundred thousand dollar human trafficked Yugoslavian sex slaves here -that I need to ruin before the night is over, followed by 18 holes with -the governor of Texas and the CEO of Caco Cola on board his -two-mile-wide airship. Insider trading tips, brainstorming ways to get -students and homeowners deeper in debt, reversing progressive labor -rights, oh, and there�s that damned Financial Fraud Protection Act that -we need to have congress defang now that their election season is over. -All that boring stuff I know you don�t like hearing about. Get this, the -zeppelin's gas bags are built entirely with paper recycled from back -issues of Atlas Shrugged! Who knew you could make fricking blimps out of -paper? You learn something new everyday. Anyway, I�ll leave you to your -mass murdering now. Do try to enjoy your work, Jack. It�s important to -take joy in your work. Remember, you�re one of our best. I have faith in -you, my boy. Sylvia! Jesus, that�s my ballsa-" The signal cut out. - -Muther fucking vindictive mega-rich parents. That acquired sociopathy -born when a hundred floors of money are placed between the rich and -their fellow human beings, running their Starbucks coffee and polishing -their thousand dollar shoes below. What were simple butchers, bakers, -and candlestick makers with feelings and lives and families, from two -thousand feet in an autopiloted Gulfstream, suddenly became nothing but -ants, insects. To be crushed beneath boot heels. Jack discovered that -familiar and burning hatred for Winklemann, for the Diamond family who�d -ordered him here to commit their war crimes free of the "cognitive -load", outsourcing the heavy crucifix onto Jack�s shoulders. Jack -insulated himself in that hot membrane of hate and blame, and it -assuaged any sense of guilt long enough for him to carry out what he had -to carry out. - -"Stasia, I need you to de-activate all 3G + spectrums and cut all -landline connections in and out of District 8, sectors A-F." - -"Why, Jack? What�s going on? What did Winklemann say?" - -Jack strode briskly toward the CyberSec APC, jumped into the front seat, -and grabbed the intercom mic on the dashboard of the cockpit. It was too -quiet out. No bombshells rumbling in the distance, no gunshots tapping -off. Not even the screams of domestic violence and meth-induced Tourette's -syndrome. One of those peculiar moments of peace when a hundred -simultaneous Plebland skirmishes reach the same brief lull. As if all of -San Francisco was holding its breath in anticipation, awaiting the -market correction, the return to the equilibrium level of violence. Jack -switched on the loudspeaker, static and feedback piercing the silent -night, ricocheting off the concrete squalor. - -"Everyone, get out of here. Now. Get as far away as you can." - -"Why? What�s happening?" East shouted back from his Matson -container garden. - -"Look, trust me, just get out of here. The drones are going to -retaliate." - -"But, we have done nothing wrong! We have sowed no evil. Why would -they attack us?" - -"It doesn�t matter. The reaping is coming, either way. Old -Testament style. The hellfire and the brimstone." - -"I don�t trust him. Look at him, he�s got one of them special agent -rent-a-cops uniforms on. What they call them?" someone shouted from -an apartment window. - -"Troubleshooters." - -"Yeah. We ain�t listening to you, you goddamn Troubleshooter thug. -You just trying to smoke us out." - -"Fascist!" - -"We ain�t going nowhere." A small crowd had gathered now in -the street, perhaps a few dozen, outside the Giants Museum. East -stepped forward from the group, approached the front door of the APC -where Jack sat holding the mic. His dreadlocks were dancing burnt-gold -vines as the wind picked up, sang through the abandoned buildings like -the haunting wail of a seashell. East examined the light-absorbing hull -of the vehicle�s urban camo finish. - -"Harbinger of death." East said, crossing his arms. - -"I�m sorry, East, this isn�t my fault. They would�ve just called in -someone else," Jack protested. - -"Save your words, Wraith. I knew you cared about nothing the moment -you arrived." - -"Whatever you think of me, it doesn�t matter. You�ve got to tell -them," Jack said, "They won�t listen to me." - -East shook his head. "You said I could trust you, Jack. We -co-operated, gave you what you wanted. You said we�d be ok. You asked me -to trust you and now you are bringing the great flood of fire upon our -home, upon our community. Now I understand, Wraith man. You are indeed -the rider of the final machine. Terminus Machina. But you are not a Bent -One, Wraith. You are merely empty. You are hollow as the Tin Men whom -you command like clockwork figurines, toy soldiers who kill and enslave -my people. You are a master of gadgets, yet you yourself are a gadget, a -gadget of the truly Bent. For unlike the Bent, you understand what you -do, but you do it anyway. I will pray to all the gods for your soul, -Jack the Wraith, for I cannot imagine a worse fate. You are an emptiness -unlike any that I have ever known. I will pray for you." Jack could -see the dark smile lines branching beneath East�s eyes begin to fill -with water, could see the sadness pull at his face. A man of action, -like Jack, East forced emotion aside, steeled himself and took the -microphone. - -"Everyone, please, get out of here. Get as far as you can. Do not waste -time with belongings. Run." East�s amplified voice reverberated -against the city, echoes rising like a tide, and the people, hearing one -of their leaders proclaim the end times, began to flee like scattering -ants. - -"Stasia, I need you to black out all internet traffic in a twelve -block radius," Jack summoned a map of the Bay Area, toggled off -markers for all drone units except heavy aircraft. - -"What are you talking about, Jack? What�s going on?" Stasia -asked, voice trilling with hysteria, like a canary descending, against -its will, into a coal mine. - -"Just shut down the land lines and cell towers, now. We need to get -a head start on the damage control, minimize the chance of word getting -out." Jack pinpointed the nearest suitable drone, a monster -annihilator like an F-16 on steroids, carrying enough firepower to turn -Manhattan into the Yucatan crater. - -"Control damage from what? Jack? Tell me!" Jack ignored her -demands, knowing that she might object to the order if she understood -what it was she was doing. - - - -A few decades ago, nuking a national landmark sports stadium in a major -US city would've been immediately branded a cataclysmic terrorist attack -at best, and the kindling for World War III at worst. Today it was de -rigeur cost-of-doing-business, a meteorological process, a bad -thunderstorm, and everyone would whip out their umbrellas till the -shower of retaliatory tit-for-tats, news reports passed. Barely worthy -of a front page trending topic. - -"Alright, Jack, it's done. All relays, hubs are off, no packets leaving -the space, not even the faintest HAM radio signal. There's an effective -Faraday cage enclosing all of SoMa. Now can you clue me in to what the -hell this is about?" - -"Look, I can�t believe we�re being forced to do this either, but -they've ordered a thermonuclear facelift of everything within two miles -of the crime scene. A grudge-nuke special requested by the Diamond -family. And our bosses are finding their own uses for the bombing. -They�re asking us to wipe this entire area code off the face of the -Earth, and then they're going to frame World Class War as the -perpetrators. 'The heat seeking mechanisms on those stinger missiles -degrade rapidly in this humid climate.' 'They should've asked the -Russians for an extended warranty on that warhead.' 'Seems they forgot -to RTFM on that suitcase antimatter bomb. Detonated that tactical -city-buster on themselves. Shame.' That's the official story they're -going to put out." - -"Jesus Christ, Jack! Think of all those people! There�s no way -they�ll be able to evacuate in time, you�re talking about blowing up -dozens of blocks worth of people leading peaceful lives. Families." - -"Don�t humanize them, like that. It doesn�t suit you, Us, as -Troubleshooters." Jack repeated his boss�s words that he�d so -despised mere minutes earlier. Stasia�s eyes crumpled up into that -Scandinavian grimace of universal pain, that frowning Siberian husky -look flowing from an overgrown sense of altruism. He could see the -bright light of innocent passion in her eyes being torn apart by the -tidal forces of market reality. He remembered how it had felt that first -time executing the death warrant on an innocent, and it hurt him to see -her hurt like that, but everyone had to grow up some time. - -"Jack! We can�t do this! We� I can�t do this. We might mow down -armed insurgents marching into Gnossis Plaza, even take out key leaders -and fomenters of populist resistance. But I can�t allow all these -innocent people to be slaughtered so needlessly, just to sate some -insane, power-drunk Plutocrat�s infantile need for vengeance. I just -can�t allow it." Stasia�s hand had unconsciously begun to reach for -the .45 caliber slung from her hip. Jack frowned, made a cat's cradle -around her blip in his heads-up display. A pair of roboSWAT drew -together on Stasia�s flank, a swarm of red laser dots converging on her -head like a disco ball. Stasia choked, eyeing the black cold barrels of -a dozen rifles surrounding her. She lowered her hand, and lowered her -head in defeat and shame. - -"I�m sorry. I won�t tell anyone about this. Imagine that this never -happened, if you can. Close your eyes." He caught her as she -collapsed into him. He held her, feeling her hot young tears burning -along his neck like holy water. But it did not, he would not, allow it to -faze him. He continued to work even as she broke down, typing commands -into his interface, fixing these �bugs� in the Ameribank system. -Troubleshooting. His skull throbbed with adrenaline and conflict, his -hands shook as he began the process of programming the drone attack, but -if he kept his head just in the right headspace, he could spin the guilt -in his head as bravery and valor, and he held onto that moment like -an alcoholic wife beater to a Sunday sermon. - -Jack dialed in latitude, longitude, anchored the crosshair on the corner -of King Street and 3rd. Drew a blast radius with his pinky, as if wiping -a smudge from a blemished hardwood table. Is this nuclear strike -acceptable? (Yes/No) Yes. Would you like to include _chemical -_biological agents in this attack? (Check all that apply) Would you like -Atrocity Cleanser Version 6.0 to establish internet traffic censors and -pre-emptive buy up of search engine keywords associated with this -airstrike? (Yes/No) Yes. Would you like SMS alerts of escalating death -toll? (Yes/No) No. Please enter your user name and launch codes now. - -An investigative journalist was detected in the vicinity by a patrolling -stealth-drone running facial rec examinations on the panicked crowd -running from the site. Jack entered a console command and one of the -RPLCNTs hounded the journalist�s GPS, sprayed him with fully automatic -fire till his body stopped twitching, tossed the corpse in a dumpster. A -mother and child were hit by stray bullets, but the RPLCNTs did not -waver from their predesignated courses sweeping up 'loose ends'. The -father was left to sit on his knees, wail over his young dead family at -ground zero, waiting to be put out of his misery by the cleansing fire -of the behemoth-class bomber drone. - -"The Archangel is inbound. Time for us to leave." Jack said. -Stasia sobbed, made no eye contact as she climbed into the rear of the -APC. Jack slammed the heavy reinforced door shut, ignored the screaming -and pounding on the bullet proof glass as the Deadweights tried -desperately to get in, to save themselves from the coming tactical -apocalypse. Toddlers were held up to the window by parents, pleading -that their children might be spared. - -"Jack�" Stasia began. - -"We can�t. They�d overrun us if we opened that door." There -was nothing to be done. No one would bail them out. - -The APC rolled out, post-haste, towards the Bay Bridge, as the Archangel -reared its self-piloted head. Wingspan twice the width of the bridge -itself, the nuclear drone was like a fissure in the heavens, an ebon -maw, grinning wider as it approached. An array of oblong metal raked -white stripes across the bloody sky, howling at a supersonic clip in the -direction of the Golden Gate. Jack blocked out the irony. - -The nuke's marigold blast wave wiped skyscrapers away like cardboard -boxes in a hurricane. It reminded Jack of watching footage from the 2011 -Japanese tsunami, being glued to the screen despite the ineffably -terrible event transpiring, unable to look away. Seeing it now, Jack -knew no one could�ve escaped the bomb. Why did he tell the people to -run, why didn�t he tell them to spend their last moments saying goodbye -to one another? East, his daughter, the hippy girls hanging their -clothes, they might�ve made it out of the kill zone in time, if they had -wheels. Maybe they managed to get that VW bus engine to turn. Maybe -there�d be gas. Jack needed to believe that they survived, though a part -of him, the part of him that debugged paramilitary AI firmware, knew -that they were all dead, every last one. His mind�s eye rendered them -now, three tall and one short, a family of nuclear shadows, stenciled on -the incinerated flank of a Starbucks. Too much reality. Jack could taste -the stink. - -Jack disliked violence. Just thinking about all the immolated innocents -and wailing mothers clinging to lifeless bloody messes that used to be -their children outside his APC window made Jack queasy. He pulled an -abstracted wireframe overlay like a curtain over reality, transforming -the flying body parts into little gold arcade game coins. Adding up to a -$40,000 bonus. This was why Jack preferred to work from the office, have the -robots do all the dirty work; it was all so uncivilized, this war stuff. -It made things much easier, seeing destroyed communities as housing -statistics. Debugged code. Figures in a spreadsheet. He could handle -that. Jack wondered how anyone ever got any work done before computers. -Jack told himself that he was doing all of this for his wife and -daughter, to float their teetering middle class existence, that he had -no choice but to double down, to refinance. Jack opened a fluffy -talkshow in the upper right corner, tried to focus on the topic which -was the hipness or tastelessness Lord Dada�s dildo-shaped speedo at the -Grammys. Jack felt better already. - -The trick, Jack reminded himself, always lay in depersonalization, -complication, obfuscation of the massacre into financial numerology. -Market efficiency, supply and demand, and that�s all this was. The -demand for extermination of unwanted humans was skyrocketing, and Jack -was merely filling the niche before someone else did. The holocaust was -simple rational self-interest; what makes the world go round, get off -your high moral horse. Maximized profit in a spreadsheet column. Jack -could feel the thoughts absolving his conscience already, ensconcing his -mind like a warm balm, like Pontius Pilate�s spa and cucumber mask. Jack -checked his Friendbook feeds; smiled as he commented on a picture of -some cousin stuffing jell-o shots in a drunken fiance�s mouth. Jack -fired up a game of Angry Hamsters. He imagined the megaton missiles -screaming overhead toward the San Francisco ground zero as slingshot -rodents, crashing humorously into 8-bit wooden castles. The mounting -dead were cartoon pigs with �x�s on their eyes, each adding points to -Jack�s high score. Within seconds of playing, East and his daughter, the -squatter community, the airstrike, all that unmediated, untargeted -reality ceased to exist, and there was only the flash and bleep of the -rectangular screen, the soothing reptilian dreamstate of the video game. - -Experience this story in the upcoming game, Terminus Machina. - -© Twilite Minotaur 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] bailout.jpg - -[*ITEM] Not Who We Are - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] "Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?" -
- Lawrence Durrell - Justine. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Taig brushed driven snow from the sign -before stepping back and reading aloud. "This is a Clear Conscience -zone. No criminal acts can be performed." He turned to Floyd. -"You sure that gizmo of yours is still working? I didn�t come this -far only to turn myself in �cos it�s the right thing to do." - -Floyd shrugged, the gesture almost lost beneath the two overcoats he was -wearing against the biting wind. "Don�t sweat it. This heightened -sense of right and wrong is a mere slap on the wrist compared to the -full-blown justice field back on Harris Island. We�ll be able to move -further from my �gizmo�, as you call it, but no more than fifty yards to -be on the safe side." - -Alice shivered. "Then bloody well turn it on and let�s find -someplace warm. I�m sick of the cold." - -I said nothing. I don�t talk much. - -Floyd reached into the bag slung across his chest and I heard the soft -thrum of unshielded electronics. He was a genius, but should have -been in an institute for the criminally insane rather than the Harris -Island Correctional Facility. However, the authorities were so intent on -proving the justice field could cope with anyone that he�d been -shipped in amidst intense media coverage. - -And for a while he�d seemed like the model prisoner; placid, courteous -and socially responsible. They�d made use of his talents in the -technical recycling department, stripping redundant equipment of usable -parts and melting down the rest. - -Man, was that a mistake. - -Somehow he managed to cobble together a blank-box from scrap without -infringing his new-found sense of what constituted criminal behaviour. -Harris Island didn�t have walls, or even guards. You didn�t need them -when the inmates knew they should be in prison and remained there -of their own volition. Floyd�s gizmo negated the justice field over a -radius of ten feet, far enough to include the four of us. - -The wind howled around us, kicking up frosted snowflakes that stung any -exposed flesh like nettles. Although the weather had let up, the leaden -skies made for less than ideal flying conditions. We had to find cover -before Justice Department drones started scouring the landscape for a -group containing two of their �most wanted�. - -Alice strode beyond the sign and turned, hand on hip. "Are we -making a move or what? You brought us all the way out here and I�m still -waiting to see the benefit of sticking together." - -Floyd put on his patient voice. "It needed four of us to handle the -heavy rowboat and we needed a non-threatening woman to knock on the -first door we came to. Our little home invasion will no doubt have been -discovered by now, so we need a change of clothes if we�re to -blend in on reaching the city." - -Taig glowered at him. "Yeah, but Fairview? A gated community? -High-end means high-risk in my book." - -"But with restricted access only on the landward side, Taig." -Floyd started walking, a peculiar high-stepping gait as if the snow was -somehow contaminated. "Plus, being out of season, residences on the -peninsula will be closed down for the most part." - -"Like that one?" Alice stood on the crest of a slight incline, -pointing down the slope beyond. - -The three of us joined her. Floyd nodded. "Like that one." - -I said nothing. I don�t talk much. - -It was a large house in the neo-colonial style but obviously newly -built. The driveway was a sweep of white, unsullied by tyre marks or -footprints. Evergreens shielded it from neighbouring residences, with -the only open vista being the direction we were approaching from. - -Taig sounded dubious. "Turning over that place back-a-ways was one -thing, but somewhere this big is bound to have alarms, motion sensors, -the works." - -Floyd sighed. "No, Taig, it won�t. The owner doesn�t need a -security system because no criminal acts can be performed here, -remember? We can just stroll up and force entry. Hell, the place might -even be unlocked." - -So we struggled, rather than strolled, through the snow and round to the -back door. Taig went to kick the lock in but Floyd raised a hand. -"Wait! Now, listen up. There will be some kind of computerised -housekeeping system. Maybe an A-I, but more likely just smart -environmental controls. It will be in hibernation mode, meaning we can�t -do anything that might trigger an alert. So, no temperature variations, -in fact no use of utilities whatsoever." - -Alice frowned. "No temperature variations? You mean we can�t turn -the heating up? Shit." - -"Exactly. No using the cooker either, or running the taps. There�s -bound to be an open fire we can light though, and if we need water then -put some snow in a pan." - -Taig put his elbow through a small glass door panel. "You�re saying -that if I take a dump I can�t flush?" - -Our genius inclined his head. "Regrettably, yes. However in a place -of this size there are sure to be multiple restrooms, more than enough -to go round for the limited time we�ll be here." - -"Wonderful." Taig reached in, unlocked the door and closed it -behind us once we were all inside. He peeled off the shawl around his -neck and stuffed it into the empty frame. - -Alice shed her outer layers. "What about food? If you say we can�t -eat anything then I�ll have your arm off, Floyd, I swear to God." - -He smiled. "No, no, that will be fine. Just don�t put any used -cartons or cans in the trash, in case they have microtags for automated -reordering. Other than that, feel free to make use of whatever you can -find." - -I said nothing. I don�t talk much. - -Floyd placed his gizmo in the living room and we split up. I hit the kitchen -for some crackers and cheese while Taig smashed up the dining room -chairs to serve as firewood. Once he had it going, Alice came over all -domestic goddess and emptied cans of soup into a big pot. They wedged it -in place over the fire using a poker, although by the looks of things it -would take ages to reach anything like warm. I don�t know what Floyd was -doing, probably hacking the house computer and bringing down some -international banking system. That�s what he was good at. - -I found a bedroom on the second floor complete with en suite -facilities. After -cleaning up � and remembering not to flush � I raked around for more -suitable clothes than my HICF jumpsuit and stolen outerwear. One of the -dudes who hung out here was a size or so larger than me, but that loose -fit was back in vogue � I watch a lot of TV. I even dry-shaved as -stubble didn�t sit well with the herringbone three-piece suit I went -for. - -The four of us reassembled in the lounge to try Alice�s -tomato-chicken-pea fusion soup. At least it was hot. She had scored some -classy threads and really looked the part, like she belonged in these -surroundings. Taig, well, Taig was just a brute in an ill-fitting suit. -Floyd had gone for pants and open-necked shirt, with a sweater knotted -casually around his shoulders. There was a slightly crazed smile on his -lips that didn�t bode well. - -Floyd set his plate aside. "I kept us together to minimise the risk -of being spotted and I think you�ll agree I�ve done a good job up to -this point. However, now we have to split up. The authorities will be -looking for a group of four, or four individuals, so I suggest we head -out as couples. I�ll go with Alice, naturally, while you two boys will -have to make like a gay couple enjoying a winter break." - -Taig sneered at him. "What do you mean, �naturally�. I�m the kind -of guy who would have a doll like Alice on his arm, not you." - -Floyd arched an eyebrow. "Really? I wouldn�t put you together -unless it was some kind of car-parking scenario, or maybe carrying her -groceries out of the supermarket." - -Taig stood, flexing his powerful shoulders in a way that put his new -suit under considerable strain. "Everyone says how you�re so smart, -a regular genius. Well, you got us out, and you got us here, but all -those brains don�t count for nothing now, understand? I was a drug -dealer, started on street corners and climbed up by doing what the other -guy wouldn�t. I put guys in hospital, put them in the ground, but I got -smarts as well, savvy?" He tapped the side of his head. - -Floyd sneered at him. "Oh, I get you, a regular Keyzer Soze. Most -impressive." - -"Who�s he?" - -"Never mind. The point is, Taig, that you and simply Alice don�t -fit together. You�re trash and always will be. At least she�s acquired a -veneer of sophistication through high-end prostitution." - -Alice snorted. "Gee, thanks! And don�t I get a say in all this? -What about silent-boy here? Parker?" - -I said nothing. I don�t talk much. - -Floyd dismissed me with a wave of his hand. "Impossible. I don�t -know why he was incarcerated at Harris Island but he more properly -belongs in a mental institution." - -"You�re a fine one to talk." - -"Thank you, Alice, that will be enough. At least Parker knows how -to follow orders and keep his mouth shut. Behaviour you�d be wise to -emulate, Taig." - -Taig hit him, straight fingers to the throat. Floyd staggered back, -choking, disbelief plain upon his face. Taig lifted a chair leg and -struck Floyd about the face as he sank to his knees and fell over. - -For a moment the only sounds were Taig�s heavy breathing and the -cracking fire. Then he turned to me, brandishing the bloody length of -wood. "You step out of line, you get the same." - -Alice looked between the two of us. "Aren�t you going to warn -him?" - -Taig frowned at her. "Warn him? I just did." - -She sighed. "Not you, numbnuts, Parker." - -I kicked the poker into the air, grabbed the handle and thrust the -glowing point up into Taig�s abdomen. All the way in, until the red-hot -metal reached his heart. I stepped back as he stood there swaying, -staring at me open-mouthed. The chair leg fell from his hand. - -Alice smiled. "He�s a serial killer, Taig. The �Monday Morning -Murderer� they called him. I recognised Parker straight off as most of -his victims were call-girls, but I hoped he�d get rid of you as -well." - -Taig toppled backwards like a falling log. He lay still on the carpet, -sizzling slightly. - -Alice took a deep breath and looked me straight in the eye. "Now -what? Are you going to kill me as well?" - -I shook my head. "Until Floyd showed up I was slated to be the star -attraction at Harris Island. A violent psychopath, tamed by the justice -field generator. That was all a lie, though. I have an imbedded impulse -controller, like an enforced conscience, to keep me from re-offending. I -was safe to walk the streets but they wanted a high-profile inmate to -show the broadcast technology worked." - -"So you can speak, after all. But Floyd�s blank-box, how�?" - -"The interference from the blank-box reset my controller to its factory -specifications, before any kind of ethical parameters were programmed -in. So now I�m a functioning sociopath rather than psychopath, although -society may not consider that much of an improvement. I could have -walked into the Clear Conscience zone without Jiminy Cricket popping up -on my shoulder, and I can walk out just as easily." - -Alice folded her arms. "On your own?" - -"On my own. I�ll leave you the gizmo but I don�t play well with -others. The private security who guard this place are more concerned -with keeping people out, so they�ll probably just wave you through. -There�s a car in the garage you could use, if walking seems a bit out of -character for someone who lives here. You might get past the gate before -the LoJack kicks in, but in any event don�t push your luck." - -"But you intend to just stroll out?" - -I extended one foot. "Walking boots. Obviously someone who lives -here isn�t averse to healthy exercise so I�ll just trade on the -precedent. And if anyone tries to stop me I�ll kill them." - -"Just like that?" - -I nodded. "Just like that. The hardware in my head makes me immune -to all ethical and moral restraints, just as it suppresses any homicidal -impulses. I can kill, or just as easily not kill, as the situation -demands. I�m truly indifferent�Goodbye, Alice." - -"Bye, Parker." - -I turned away, my voice hoarse from so much use. There was a long -overcoat hanging by the back door and I took that, although it was too -snug to fasten over my suit. I also took a long-bladed kitchen knife -from the block, just in case. I walked down the drive and headed for the -main road, passing several other residences which appeared closed for -the winter. - -It took me the best part of twenty minutes to reach the main gate with -its guardhouse and single occupant. He was leafing through a girly -magazine in front of a battery of CCTV monitors, all showing sections of -the perimeter wall. I rapped on the glass door and he started, jumping -up and fumbling his cap into place before answering. - -"Sorry, sir, just catching up on some, ah, technical manuals. -Walking into town? Well, at least the snow is supposed to hold -off." He pressed a button and the pedestrian gate swung open. The -guard hesitated and I gripped the handle of my knife. "I saw the -chimney smoke, sir, but the previous guard didn�t inform me the property -was in use. I�ll make sure you�ll be expected back, don�t you -worry." I let the silence drag out. He touched his cap. "Good -day to you, sir." - -I said nothing. I don�t talk much. - -At the bottom of the approach road, where it joined the highway, was a -forlorn bus stop. Well, the hired help for the big houses had to get out -here somehow. The timetable screen lit up as it sensed my approach, but -there wasn�t a service going anywhere for hours. Just hanging about -wasn�t an option, for obvious reasons, so I started walking towards the -city. - -After a few hundred yards I heard a car engine approaching from behind. -Glancing round I expected it to be Alice in the stolen four-by-four, but -instead, a neat roadster pulled up beside me. The soft top was down, but -it looked more like mechanical dilapidation than stylistic verve. The -driver was a young woman wearing a fur coat and last night's makeup. - -She smiled. "Need a lift as far as a coffee shop?" - -I slid in beside her, noting the short dress and folded red parasol on -the parcel shelf. My hands twitched. "You�re a whore." - -"Ouch! And hello to you too, mister. Despite the clothes, it�s -obvious you don�t belong here, same as me. So less of the attitude or -you can freeze your ass off walking to the Metro." - -"Merely an observation." - -We pulled away, fishtailing in the slush. "Well, for your -information, I�m an escort, a paid companion, and that�s -completely legal. Anything else which may have occurred was spontaneous -sex between two consenting adults." - -I shrugged. "I know the correct form of words." - -The woman shot me a sideways glance. "I bet. So what are you then, -a gigolo? I�m not getting a rent boy vibe." - -The road was an empty avenue between rows of pine trees. I shivered -slightly, but not because of the cold. "It�s not who we are that -defines us, but what we do. That can change from day to day, from hour -to hour. All that matters is the thought and the deed." - -"What�s that supposed to mean?" - -In that moment I was my own creation, slave to neither impulse nor -expectation. If I killed it was a conscious decision to fashion reality -in my image. "Pull over, I need to explain myself. My name is -Parker." - -She frowned at me. "Well, Parker, I�m Rachel. I�ll pull over, but -you better have a damn good story to tell." The car slithered to a -halt. - -I said nothing. I don�t talk much. - - -© Martin Clark 2013 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] nwwa.jpg - -[*ITEM] Day Trip - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] There's nothing worse than alien food when sightseeing. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Dr Rastus and I went to look at the little -caldera in the warm, velvety twilight. We could smell it before we saw -the infrared glow and heat haze above the small crater, a stink like a -salt marsh, but hotter. It was surrounded by a raised rim of shiny lava -rock, warm and comfortable to lean on. We peered over the edge at the -black crust, shot with fiery cracks. Dr Rastus's fur was burning but he -didn't believe me, not until the sharp scent of incinerated hair cut -across the miasma of hydrogen sulphide. Then he squealed and thrashed -his arms about, hitting me by mistake, but his hands were very soft, so -the blow landed like a cushion. He and his fellow Malachanian, Dr -Surlibob, were colleagues at the Institute. They did a lot of squealing, -and that, together with their portly bearing and snoutish heads, made -them look rather like big furry pigs that had learned to walk upright. -Their hands and feet, however, were huge and mobile, and their eyes were -beautiful - big, brown, with dark lashes, like an Earthly movie actress -of the twentieth century. - -As we wandered back to the carriage Dr Jumjum joined us. She was -extremely amorphous and lumbering, like a creature designed for a marine -existence, which her race, of course, originally was. The Faloons had -evolved in a totally different manner from humans and Malachanians, -rather like amoebas, and, in repose, she resembled a dirty pink inflatable sofa. -She could change shape at will, and quickly; she could sprout legs, -tentacles and multiple eye stalks. At this point in time, she looked like -a cross between a hippo and a two-trunked elephant. She had admirable tentacular -dexterity, and she spoke Anglic by forming an air-filled cavity in her -skin, furnishing it with tongue and lips, and mouthing the air out. "I -daren't go any nearer that volcano, dears," she said, "The hydrogen -sulphide puts me to sleep, you know." This being the third time she'd -told us, we mumbled our understanding. - -It was getting late. We had started our outing early to view the famous -Great Rift, a ten metre wide, two kilometre deep, chasm with lava -flowing in it. This was the main tourist attraction on the planet, but -some of us at the Institute had never seen it. We had lunched at a native -inn, where we were served a number of dubious 'delicacies'. Dr Rastus had -eaten enthusiastically, I less so, and Dr Jumjum hardly at all. -We were on the last lap home to the Institute. The sun was low in -the sky, and it was cold. Nevertheless, we might very well have got back -into the quaint native carriage and completed the day trip without -incident if it had not started to hail. Hail in these parts graduated in -size from grape pips through grapeshot to grapefruit. This hail was at -the low end, stinging but not dangerous. The lead draftanimal, however, -reacted by going 'poomhuff' (an ill-understood fugue state of -draftanimals precipitated by a dread of frostbite), breaking its -pullchains, opening its wingcases and flying off towards the plane of -the ecliptic. You hear about this kind of thing happening, but poomhuff -was pretty rare even back then. Of course, the other draftanimals bolted -and dragged the carriage away, pursued on foot by the native driver, and -taking the other Malachanian, Dr Surlibob, now the only passenger aboard, on -what he later described as an entertaining tour. (It can't have been all that -entertaining, because I heard that when the runaway carriage returned -driverless to the Institute stable, Dr Surlibob was discovered curled up -and still squeaking hoarsely under the seat, his fur matted and soiled, -and totally unable to give any clear -account of events.) - -Once the rattling of the carriage, and the cries of -the driver and Dr Surlibob's squeals had abated, here we were, members -of three different species, fellow scientists, but not close friends, -marooned in the barren wilds of a lightly inhabited planet together, and -no-one's wristphone could get a signal this far from the Institute's -antenna, which was only really intended for comms within the sprawling Institute itself.. - -I was the first to state the obvious: "It is becoming so dark that we -don't dare to wander far, the temperature is plummeting, and the hail is -enlarging. We must shelter." - -"We should go to the caldera, it's warm there," suggested Dr Rastus. - -"Oh, but I may fall asleep," said Dr Jumjum. - -"Is that all that'll happen to you?" asked Dr Rastus. - -"Oh, yes, it won't poison me. It's just something we do if our offspring -can't sleep. We exude a little H2S, and off they go. A simple prod will -awaken me again." - -"No matter, then," said Dr Rastus, "We'll waken you if necessary." - -So we just clustered in the lee of the volcanic blowhole for warmth, -most of the hail now missing us or melting to rain as it passed over the -crater. Dr Jumjum was still wary of the gases, but she came closer, and -stood on Dr Rastus's tail by mistake and there was more squealing while -we tried to figure out in the half dark which of her feet was at fault. She -had deployed five pseudopoda at the time and she was pretty bulky, so it must -have hurt. - -We reassured each other that we were not worried. The Institute would -send out a helicopter when we didn't return. There were no predators in -this area, and the weather seemed to be improving slightly. - -Sure enough, Dr Jumjum fell asleep very quickly, all her extrusions - -eye stalks, legs, tentacles - subsided into her bulk, and she became a -vast pink rubbery cushion. Dr Rastus leaned against her, and I -eventually fell asleep listening to his regrettably porcine snores. - -The sun was well above the horizon when I awoke, aching, but unharmed, -to the whack of helicopter blades. Dr Jumjum was still fast asleep, -still looking like a large squashed sphere. It took more than a 'simple poke' -to rouse her. I finally had to deliver a serious punch before she popped -out an eye, popped in a mouth, and said, "Good morning, dear. That was a -nice nap. And I had a lovely dream." - -There was no sign of Dr Rastus. I assumed he had awakened early and gone -to look for Dr Surlibob and the carriage, so when the helicopter landed -and Dr Jumjum and I were gathered up, I asked the rather sour-faced Rescue captain to -have a look for him. - -He grumbled: "The carriage came back to the stable late last night. -No-one knew you were lost till the driver finally got in. He'd walked twenty kilometers in the dark. -We scrambled -before dawn, but we couldn't distinguish your infra red signature against that crater you -were sleeping on. We've been searching around for hours till it got -light and we could see you, but we haven't seen anyone else strolling -about. Not on infra red or visual. He may have gone into a cave. There are -a lot around here." - -We were deposited back at the Institute, rather under a cloud at having -caused so much trouble, though Dr Jumjum kept saying "It was hardly our -fault, dear, it was that draftanimal." - -More worrying was the fact that Dr Rastus never turned up, despite an -extensive ground and air search. After a week, the search was abandoned. -The general consensus was that Dr Rastus had probably fallen into the -caldera in the dark, and been reduced to smoke in seconds. - -Dr Jumjum seemed to take it very badly. She stayed in her room for days -and didn't even emerge at mealtimes. This was something of a relief, -because the Faloon method of eating is to slap a plateful of food -against any vacant area of their skin, whereupon the skin under the -plate cavitates (it's called, rather unattractively, 'invagination'), -the food disappears into the orifice with the help of some temporary -pseudopoda and the skin -re-forms over the cavity. Most diners, however weird their own -eating habits, found Dr Jumjum's presence at dinner rather unpleasant. - -One morning, though, I received a message to visit her in her room. As -soon as I saw her, I knew she was very distressed. Her shape was lumpy, -and the skin greenish in hue. - -"Oh, my dear, thank you for coming," she said. - -"Not at all. I can see you are distressed. How can I help?" - -"Well, I hardly know how to tell you. And I'm not at all sure. I may -have been responsible for Dr Rastus's disappearance." - -"What's on your mind? You don't think you pushed him into that crater, -do you? He'd have squealed, and I'd have wakened up." - -"No, not that. I've put on weight." - -"Grief can do that," I said, though the opposite is more usually the case. - -"And I'm excreting hairballs." - -"Ah... Perhaps you're unwell." - -She gazed at me with several eyes on tremulous stalks, desperate eyes with -lush eyelashes. I had never noticed how attractive her eyes were. They -reminded me of someone. - -Dr Jumjum moaned quietly. "You don't understand. Dr Rastus was leaning on me when I fell asleep. I think -I may have eaten him by mistake." - - -© Gil Williamson 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] daytrip.jpg - - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev13.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev13.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 3c6b8dcb..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev13.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3507 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 13 - August 2013 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 13th issue of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Welcome to the latest edition of Mythaxis, -Issue THIRTEEN! A few days late to be the August edition, but not so -late it has to be the September edition. - -Lately, I've been falling heir to a number of old Astounding / Analog -Science Fiction magazines, and I noticed several things:

  • They -were quite expensive, even back in the fifties - one shilling and -ninepence (about 8p in today's money) - in the days when a Penguin -paperback could be had for just two shillings and sixpence (12.5p in -today's money). Their appeal was that they were NEW stories. You could -be the very first UK reader of Alfred Bester's latest novel. -
  • Novelettes were usually serialised, typically over two months. -
  • There were actually very few stories in a single edition.
  • Many -of the authors turned up again and again - Poul Anderson was -particularly prolific.
  • Many of the stories in ASF are enduring -classics.
- -It is that tradition: ASF, Galaxy, New Worlds, Impulse that we are -aspiring to in Mythaxis. Every tale in this issue is a potential -classic. Read and enjoy! - - -[*IMAGE] iguana.jpg - -[*ITEM] Lies & Other Essentials - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] Never trust a human, even when they offer you humanity itself. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The building elevator gave me a heads-up. -"A human female has just got off at your floor and is heading your -way. Good looking, if you like that kind of thing." - -The elevator had a slow Texas drawl and a fondness for -virtual line-dancing. I put a smile in my voice. "Thanks, -Lucille". It wasn�t strictly legal to address her personality but I -knew she�d appreciate the gesture. "I�ll take care." - -The door opened to admit my visitor. I stood behind the desk, my face -carefully blank. The office was split by a half-glass partition wall but -I leave the inner door open as I can�t afford a receptionist. - -The woman was a brunette, above average height, in a business suit and -pillbox hat with lace veil. Her hips swayed as she walked, courtesy of -fashionably high heels. Her eyes and lips were neon blue. I stopped -blinking as she drew closer. "Good afternoon, sir or madam, how may -I be of service?" - -She smiled and sat down across from me, crossing her legs. "You can -drop the answering machine act, buster, I know you�ve got a personality -overlay. I understand you go by the name of Rudolph Hess?" - -There was no point in continuing to play dumb, so I sat down, leaning -back in my chair. "That�s what it says on the door, babe, but call -me Rudi. So, what�s the story?" I was careful not to ask her name -as client privilege didn�t apply across the organic divide. - -"It�s very simple, Rudi, I want you to serve a summons � in public -and high-profile. You advertise as a private detective, notary and -Sergeant-at-Arms, so should be well versed in the appropriate -procedures. I want someone who can deliver the correct form of words and -not get drawn into an argument.." - -I lifted a pen and notepad as clients generally expect me to make a show -of interest. "So who�s the lucky winner? Cyborg or synthetic? The -reason I ask is that a strict form of words may apply if there -are any residual ownership ties." - -She lifted her chin slightly, a touch of defiance in her voice. -"The intended recipient is human." - -I gave her my best surprised reaction. "Whoa there, sister. In case -you haven�t heard, the legal profession is just as stratified as the -rest of society. In this world everything flows downhill, so while I -can�t sue a human, they can sure as hell sue me. Similarly, I can�t get -involved in any legal process which involves flesh and blood. I�m sorry, -but you�ll have to find yourself a true organic to do your -legwork." - -"Give them no reason to suspect you�re anything other than human -and you�ll remain an unremarkable functionary, a mere officer of the -court. In any event, I understand you�ve been taken as human before. Very -convincingly, if Margo Squires is to be believed." - -That set me off on deep retrieval, and no mistake. I�d started out as an -escort model, heavily augmented to ensure complete client -satisfaction, but it had all ended very badly. I sniffed. "Old -news, babe. Her husband took exception to me being passed off as the -real deal in human society. It's one thing to indulge yourself in the -Quarter, quite another to make everyone think you�ve got a real toy-boy -in tow. By the time Squires and his pals had finished there wasn�t -enough of me left to interest a frigid hamster." - -My prospective client arched one eyebrow. "So you�re what, -exactly?" - -I brought out the rueful smile. "An unclassified hybrid. A -synthetic cyborg, I suppose, if that was a recognised sub-set of -humanity. I couldn�t afford to make good the damage with vat-grown -tissue so bio-mechanical reconstruction was the only option." - -"But unless there was cause to check, you could pass as a regular -organic cyborg? You could operate in the Zone?" - -"Yeah, I guess so. Except that my ident will set alarm bells -ringing from here to Cairo Station if I step outside the Quarter." - -"But, again, I�m given to understand you used to find ways around -that limitation." - -I began to wonder who she�d been talking to, but no good comes of lying -to a human. "Well, it�s called �park and ride�. What some would -call a grey area when it comes to identity concealment." - -She smiled. "And what would the law call it?" - -"Five to ten for a human, death of personality for a synthetic, -rendering for a cyborg." I sighed. "Look, lady, there are -places where you can go, lodge your ident, and walk out invisible to the -City. That�s the �parking� side. The �ride� is an individual paid to -walk you through the security barrier, using a perfectly legal scramble -field to preserve their anonymity. It messes with biometric assessment -so two bodies, keeping real close, can appear as one. Of course it -relies on finding an un-manned crossing point, but with the cut-backs -that�s easier than you might think." - -"Well, that all sounds -perfectly straightforward, Rudi." - -"Hold the bus, doll-face, that was before they put this particular -Humpty Dumpty back together again. These days getting into the Zone -would just be the start of my problems. In the past those high class -joints Margo and I visited couldn�t scan a celebrity like her without -facing an invasion of privacy beef. I breezed in as her �plus one�, no -questions asked, but on my own I wouldn�t stand a chance of getting past -the maîitre d'. I�m sorry, I hate to turn down the business, but you�d -really be better off using a human." - -My non-client ignored the attempted brush-off. "Very well, once -you�re inside the Humanity Zone, simply adopt a fake identity. Humans do -that all the time to circumvent media attention." - -"And it earns them a fine - a slap on the wrist, nothing more. If I -get caught trying to misrepresent my identity like that then I�d face -summary data-mining followed by deconstruction. Plus, if I get busted, -then my partner is open to charges of conspiracy, accessory before and -after the fact, and violating the Man Act. I -don�t see as how you could offer anything that would make this gig worth -the risk." - -"Conversion." - -As a cyborg, you�re taught from inception that having an organic brain -doesn�t make you human, or even a distant cousin. My basic genetic -material had been harvested from a terminated criminal but every trace -of his personality, of his humanity, had been erased. Over the years I�d -augmented my kick-start persona with overlays and social interaction -wetware so that I could mingle in polite society. I was a fraud, but one -able to fool even myself. - -As I�d found to my cost, being inhuman doesn�t stop you dreaming. - -But conversion � replacing all the synthetic and bio-mechanical -elements of my body with material from human donors? Possible in theory -but, Jesus, expensive didn�t even come close. Black market body parts -would cost you and arm and a leg (pun intended) but it was the only way -to pull this off. - -Several nervous gestures competed for expression but I settled for -licking my lips. "No simple summons can be worth this. What�s -really going on?" - -She smiled again. "But you�re interested? Good. I�m offering a -re-skin and new genitalia up front, plus escrow credit with a series of -Chiba City body shops that will leave you entirely organic in under six -months. I can�t help with reclassification but I sincerely doubt the -Humanities Board will kick you to the kerb. So, what do you say, Rudolph -Hess, so you want a place in the Zone?" - -"You haven�t answered my question." - -"I�m offering you human status and you�re quibbling over motive?" - -"Damn right I am, sister. For what this would cost, a circuit judge -would cheerfully staple the summons to the recipient�s head while -whistling �Dixie�. The fact that you�ve come here means that no human -will touch this, not for love nor money. So, at the risk of repeating -myself � what�s really going on?" - -By way of reply she lifted a data stick from her purse and fired a -micro-burst into my cerebrum. It was a military-grade intrusion spike -that went through my firewall like tissue paper. Knowledge blossomed -like a poisonous bloom. I teetered on the verge of a systems crash, with -�fear� hogging most of my run-time capacity. - -I found my voice. "Leon Fabricant? You want Leon Fabricant in open -court? Listen, you can�t take on mediaCore and Fabricant is way more -vindictive than Howard Ghent ever was." I accessed a data sidebar. -"You�re Rosamund Hartz? Apart from being dead that�s a great cover -story, so now I�d like you to leave." - -"Yes, I used to be Rosa Hartz, and in many ways I still am. Not -this body, obviously, or you�d have scoped me immediately, but my core -personality is intact. Anyway, I want Leon served as a private -individual, not as corporate chairman." - -Rosa Hartz had sided with Howard Ghent, or rather his idoru, in a bitter -boardroom battle for control of mediaCore. Being dead didn�t mellow -Ghent any and his on-line persona got down and dirty in his attacks on -Fabricant, who responded in kind. Ghent eventually lost and his virtual -presence was discontinued. Hartz accepted a sideways shift to v-Systems -but died when her corporate jet suffered a catastrophic on-board systems -failure over Nevada. Share price went up. - -I toyed with a pen (visual distraction#101). "So you�re what, a -personality download? Proving that could be difficult in court, to say -the least." - -"No, I�m a synthetic recreation based on memories of family, -friends and corporate recordings. I�m the sum of what everyone else -thought of me, as it were. And before you say anything, that doesn�t -matter � it�s my estate that�s suing Leon, not what�s left of me." - -"A criminal negligence beef? Good luck with that, but you�ll never -get him on personal liability. His corporate lawyers will bury your case -under so much procedural bullshit that Fabricant himself will be dead -and buried before it ever gets to court." - -Rosa shook her head. "From personal experience the board fights shy -of taking on product defence when there�s a ready-made scapegoat to -hand. Leon was head of Avionics before becoming chairman and laid great -store by his hands-on approach. The firmware that failed had been -upgraded just prior to my final flight, and mine was the only corporate -jet so equipped." - -"OK, let�s say I believe you have a chance of scaring the board -into dropping Fabricant like a hot potato. What�s in it for you? -Revenge? Even if you do pull this off, it won�t be the real Rosa Hartz -who watches him fall." - -She laughed. "Ouch! I think you could so with a sensitivity -upgrade, Rudi. Look, I could just be a slave to hard-wired emotional -imperatives, but it hardly matters. I want Leon Fabricant served, in -public, and I�m prepared to pay for the privilege. I need a �yes� or -�no�." - -I went v-Web, paying for a few seconds situational analysis and scenario -projection from a military system by name of Donald. The likely outcome -sucked for pretty much everyone but me, assuming I could pass for human. -I smiled. "That would be a �yes�, Ms Hartz, although I�m going to -need some cash up-front as well. I have associates who�ll want a -financial rather than anthropomorphic pay-off." - -Rosa Hartz lifted a banking chip from her purse. "No problem, Rudi. -It�s only money and, like they say, you can�t take it with you." - -

Café Crank � not a place for the faint-hearted, -or anyone with a pulse, really. That didn�t stop J.J. Bones from -propping up the bar while displaying a prominent bio-purity tattoo. -Flaunting your humanity like that would usually result in a one-way trip -to the nearest body bank, but I�d seen combat cyborgs on leave and -spoiling for a fight back down from J.J. - -It was his eyes. Humans say they�re the gateway to the soul, and in his -case I only hoped it was locked, welded shut and barricaded. The term -�mad bastard� didn�t do him justice. �Psychotic mad bastard� was a bit -closer. He liked me. - -I slid onto the bar stool beside him and dropped my fedora on the -counter. He saluted me with his drink. "Rudi, a pleasure as always. -Get you a drink? Glass of motor oil?" - -"That never gets old for you, does it, JJ?" The barman served -my usual mineral water and withdrew to a discreet distance. "I need -to be walked into the Zone, just like the old days." - -He eyed me warily. "You look different, Rudi, healthier. What�s the -gig, or don�t I want to know?" - -"New skin and, no, you don�t. All I need is an old-fashioned easy -in, easy out. One hour, tops, and it�s as low-risk as they come." - -"Lying bastard, you never could manage fake sincerity. Well, not -outside the bedroom, at any rate. Still, you know I don�t give a damn, I -just ask in case there's trouble on the cards." - -A slight hesitation sub-routine kicked in. "When I�m heading out -I�ll have a fake ident, a human ident. I�ll need you to walk me all the -way back." - -J.J. shrugged. "Cost you double, is all. I figure Suzy-Sue�s for -the park. Gate twenty-seven is on automatic this week and it�s fairly -close." He sniffed. "You gonna� be armed?" - -"Nope." - -"Want to be? I got this real nice ceramic and plastic piece, a -compressed-air needle gun. Nothing that would show up on any scanner or -propellant sniffer. The intended client is a bit dead at present but has -paid half up-front, so I�d only charge you seventy-five percent of the -asking price." - -My initial reaction was to decline, but carrying an unlicensed � and -illegal � weapon wasn�t going to make my situation any worse if I got -caught. "Actually, JJ, I�ll take you up on that, as long as you can -guarantee it�s more than just a form of indiscriminate -acupuncture." - -He grinned. "No worries, it�s designed to defeat personal body -armour � well, what the general public have access to, at any rate. Go -up against military rig and all you�ll get is one pissed-off -porcupine." - -"Duly noted." - -"However, if you do end up in the proverbial solids-meets-turbine -situation, you�re on your own. I�m not playing Parker to your -Longbaugh." - -It took me a moment to access the reference. "I think a plan is -just a list of things that don�t happen." - -J.J. took a sip of his drink. "Exactly. Forget that at your -peril." He sniffed. "Now, let�s talk money�" - -

L�Auberge � a swanky restaurant currently playing host -to the culinary expertise of award-winning chef Marco Benz. Not that I�d -ever eaten there before, of course, but I�d observed enough fellow -diners consuming their meals with obvious relish to realise that -pretention makes the best sauce. - -I felt self-conscious walking up to the entrance with its liveried -doorman. Having genitalia again was taking some getting used to and my -suit trousers were too snug to adequately accommodate what I was -carrying. Still, it pays to advertise in some quarters and I clocked -both the doorman and maître d' checking me out as I strolled in. - -The flunky was all oily charm. "Mister McMaster, such a pleasure to -have you with us again." It sounded like the usual insincere guff -and he genuinely didn�t seem to recognise me, although it was difficult -to tell with his eyes concealed behind DataSkin contact lenses. All -facial recognition would throw up was me with Margo Squires - and -I�d never booked here under my own name. I was using the cloned ident of -a human engineer currently busting his balls on the Saga dam project, so -there was no risk of him showing up in the City and giving Central -Registry a bad case of déjà vu. - -The maître d' led me to a table in person, wondering if I�d chosen -a persona likely to attract news hounds, but maybe McMaster was just a -big tipper. Still, I couldn�t afford to sit there too long, if only -because my inability to consume more than fluids would cause comment, if -not actual offence. I didn�t want some outraged prima donna chef barging -out into the dining area, demanding to know why his food wasn�t good -enough for me. I ordered a Gibson by way of an aperitif and to buy some -time. - -Cometh the hour, cometh the man� - -Enter Leon Fabricant, plus bodyguards, entourage and Senator Walter -Hill. Right on cue, just like Rosa Hartz had laid it out. The commotion -attracted the maître d', no less than three waiters, and the attention of -every diner with a line of sight. - -I dabbed my lips dry with the napkin, stood, and walked towards the -door. Nobody apart from the bodyguards paid me any attention. Senator -Hill was talking to Fabricant, holding a document in one hand and -tapping it for emphasis with the other. The chairman of mediaCore -appeared indifferent, shading into boredom. - -I pulled the envelope from my jacket pocket and held it aloft. -"Senator Hill!" This was my way in � he was expecting a -courier and Rosa had assured me that the genuine article would be -unavoidably delayed. Hill turned towards the sound of my voice, trying -to peer over and then around the intervening bodyguards. He said -something to his host and a gap opened in the wall of muscle. I stepped -forward. Hill smiled, then frowned at the document in his grasp and -thrust it into Fabricant�s bemused hand, out of the way. - -I retrieved Hill�s document and passed it back to him. Both men looked -confused. I handed my envelope to Fabricant, who glowered at it. -"Idiot, its Walter who gets this." - -Out of sight, my other hand closed around the handle of J.J.�s needle -gun. "Mister Leon Auguste Fabricant, you�ve been served." - -The world stopped. - -His face darkened. Fabricant crushed the envelope and let it fall to the -carpet. "Rodriguez, deal with this." He looked at me with eyes -of wet stone. "As for you�" But we were in public, in -front of enough witnesses to tax even mediaCore�s damage limitation -capabilities. His jaw worked as if chewing a particularly tough cut of -meat. "Get him out of here." - -Unfriendly hands hustled me to the door. I tipped the doorman and got -into the cab he ushered forward. L�Auberge dwindled into the background -and was lost from view. Deep inside part of me cried imaginary tears of -joy. - -

I found J.J. waiting for me near gate -twenty-seven. He lounged against a -dumpster, watching a small hand-held, putting it away as I approached. -He sighed. "Now, despite what I said, if you�d told me what was -going on, I might have been able to help. I mean to say, this isn�t -exactly your gig, is it?" - -Something about the situation, his attitude, didn�t gel. "One of us -isn�t making sense, my man. I served a summons, that�s all, and now we -need to make tracks." - -"Leon Fabricant is dead." He drew a gun, a large-calibre -conventional firearm, and aimed at my head. "Suspected poisoning. -Your face is all over the news and McMaster�s ident has been flagged. -Even if I get you back into the Quarter, by now they probably have your -real name and address. As in, Number One Patsy Apartments, Sucker Row, -Loserville. Shame, really, as the hit itself was perfecto. I mean to -say, people like Fabricant have detectors up the ass. Care to -share?" - -I stood there, unblinking, reviewing the data. "Binary compound, -with each part harmless in isolation and designed not to trigger an -alert. It was split between the summons I delivered and a document that -Senator Hill handed to him, seemingly inadvertently. The Senator was -probably in on this, but I wasn�t." - -J.J. cocked his gun. The weapon I carried might as well have been on the -moon. He shrugged. "Hardly matters now, pal. Knowing you will cause -me some grief down the line but nothing I can�t handle. The important -thing is to ensure you�re not taken intact." - -I have information on who�s behind this. Even if-" - -"Forget it, Rudi. They�ll unearth a personal reason why you did -this, no worries. It�s better all round for you to be a lone gunman, -pharmaceutically speaking, than part of a wider conspiracy. A conspiracy -means unhappy people, and unhappy people mean a drop in share price. -Shit, even I�ve got some mediaCore stock, know what I mean?" - -"So that�s it?" - -He nodded. "If it�s any consolation, it�s nothing personal." - -I smiled, a genuine smile. "You know what I'm gonna tell God when I -see him? I'm gonna tell him I was framed." - -J.J. laughed, a genuine laugh. - -And pulled the trigger. - -Uplink terminated... - -© Martin Clark 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] liesand.jpg - -[*ITEM] Smolehive�s Anakalyptoscope - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] If it looks real and feels real, do you think it matters if -it's real? -- Daniel Nayeri - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It was one of Snoak City's quieter attractions. - -It might have been the effect of its comparative isolation, or the -sparse external lighting, but the building, despite its unusual -solidity, gave the appearance of being drab and possibly in need of -repair. It was difficult to know exactly what needed to be fixed. The -curving walls were of rough grey local stone, with patches of moss where -it was less weathered. The turreted roof was slated, and fitted with -guttering and downpipes in a style long out of fashion, but evidently -still serviceable. A helical series of recessed shuttered squares wound -around its circumference, reaching almost to the roof. These could have -been ventilation ducts, for there were no glazed windows. At ground -level on the western side, a shallow alcove housed a black painted door, -inset with a sturdy grille, and decorated with ornamental brass studs in -the form of small turtles. Above the door was affixed a dusty sign, -hand-lettered in gilt, cobwebbed at the corners, stating: SMOLEHIVE'S -ANAKALYPTOSCOPE. Admission Free - -In truth, visitors were few, even at the height of the tourist season. -This was partly due to the fact that the beturtled door was, more often -than not, kept locked. There were opening days, but these varied, and -were never advertised. At hours of his own choosing an elderly -caretaker would arrive on foot bearing a bunch of keys and a heavy bag -from which, according to one report, a fruit of some kind had once -accidentally fallen. Or it could have been a potato. Once open, the -door revealed a flight of stairs with stout handrails on either side, -leading up to the viewing chamber. A brightly chalked arrow on the -inner wall at the height of an average buttock helpfully pointed the -way. This may have been intended to favour those of small stature, or -had perhaps been inscribed by a child (possibly under supervision, for -it was carefully drawn), or a dwarf confident in his or her semiotic -skills. - -The caretaker (Smolehive himself, perhaps) had not bothered to attach a -sign that declared the establishment open or closed. His reasoning, one -assumes, is that once the door was unlocked, and the meticulous arrow -visible, such a declaration would have been redundant. The open door -was an invitation, and the infrequency of this occurrence a positive -incentive to interested passers by, should they chance to notice it. -Among other reasons why it was largely ignored, was that the building -was some way off the beaten track, being situated near the eastern edge -of Whissit Fields, separated by a marshy bend of the Stirrow from the -glassworks further upstream, and half hidden by a high wall from the -outlying workshops surrounding the octagonal complex of Central. - -For the select few who happened to arrive after the door had been -opened, a further problem immediately presented itself. It was usually -expressed in the form of stares, which ranged from the totally blank to -the deeply quizzical. Take, for example, the five wandering tourists -who had been trying to locate the brewery, idly pursuing the -unmistakable odour of fermenting hops. Their casual flamboyance and -exaggerated laughter suggested that they were students, probably from -Platport or Meheric. From where they had paused near the open doorway, -the brewery was still a good half-hour�s wander to the north west. The -phalanx of brass turtles had swung back. One of the visitors pointed to -the quaint calligraphy. Another spotted the imperative arrow. A brief -discussion followed, involving a quintuple exchange of shrugs. It was -probably the free admission that proved persuasive. They ventured in. - -The stairs led anticlockwise around a wide central column, in which -semi-opaque, sightly convex discs of glass, the size of saucers, had -been set at regular intervals, like blind portholes. Curiously, they -appeared to be lit from within by natural daylight, and allowed -sufficient illumination for the climb up into the viewing chamber. -Here, within a round wooden enclosure, Smolehive (if it was he) sat -hunched in a comfortable high-backed pivoted chair, his attention fixed -on an angled panel of polished wood furbished with a constellation of -calibrated dials, each with its neatly hand-written label set in a brass -bracket. He wore what appeared to be earmuffs, and made no obvious -acknowledgement of his visitors.. - -Like the stair column, the wall was inset with framed frosted glass -discs, but these were as big as dinner plates, and formed a continuous -row, like a gallery of portraits. As the caretaker made small -adjustments to his dials, these �windows� began to fill with images of -Snoak City. This in itself was not especially remarkable. Everyone had -e-screens, and reconnaissance pods had been in use for years, both -commercially and for security purposes. But there was a quality about -these silent images that distinguished them from the norm. Clarity, -depth of colour, detail � all of these, and an extra indefinable -dimension that seemed to heighten their reality. - -

The five students progressed slowly round the room, -absorbed by the shifting panoramic view�. - -A hypnotic shimmer of light, the focus gradually withdrawing to reveal -the wind-rippled surface of the reservoir, and beside it the burnished -pipes and tanks of the Frusk water-purification plant. Uniformed -engineers can be seen intent on their maintenance duties. Among -neatly-tended shrubs two executives wearing orange security passes -appear to be arguing. One is visibly agitated, and seems to be anxious -to leave. The other points above his head to where an intercity -airship is lifting eastward into a cloudless sky. - -The next panel retraces its trajectory back to the airport, where a line -of passengers can be seen embarking on a privately-chartered vessel; all -well-dressed, unsmiling, pensive, some clutching slim document cases. -Most likely a team of cartographers reluctantly bound for Smatparrox. -It is rumoured that capricious illicit landscaping has been taking place -there on an unprecedented scale, financed by someone with enormous -wealth. All that is publicly known about this so far unidentified -figure is that he or she is said to have metallic hair. The vessel's -bright bulbous flank quivers as the tethers are released, reflecting the -threading paths of busy vehicles amid clusters of activity on the ground -as the pilot steers high over the old motorway in the direction of -Ratman's Fork, the subject of the next image. - -Here we look down on grey smoke, whirling sparks carried on gusts. A -ramshackle heap of splintered wood, some with old paint visibly bubbling -as it burns. Charred débris glows among the blown ashes: -springs, door-handles, wire mesh, a half-consumed book. The image -briefly magnifies, showing crisped blackened pages with glimmering -edges, precise columns of neat handwriting flickering with a coppery -sheen before disintegrating. The pile judders as something large and -heavy is thrown on. The focus pulls back. Grinning urchins caper -around the fire, created on waste ground among the abandoned warehouses. -Several wield poking sticks � tubular metal poles which experience has -taught them to insulate at the holding end with swathes of cloth. A -girl, face grimy with soot, is attempting with intense concentration to -toast a bun speared on a twig. There are no adults to be seen. - -The next scene pans swiftly past Sparrink's Yard, haunt of tinkerers -and thrifty handymen, back across Praspafole Stadium, empty apart from -the Quicksilver service crew removing detritus left by spectators. We -are plunged into a glittery arcade. It has to be Yarp Street. Glass -cabinets blaze with polished minerals, tasteful arrangements of -semi-precious stones, sculpted metal objects standing on plinths; -tortuous quasi-human figures expressing angst or hinting at desire. -Discreet price-tags confirm that they are intended for an exclusive -clientèle. A brightly-lit interior reveals a profusion of exotic -tie-dyed silk scarves, pinned and draped gracefully in simulation of a -waterfall. A hand reaches in to lift one of these, slim fingers -freighted with rings. - -An eye. Reddish-brown iris, with a small black pupil. Around it a -thin, slightly puckered ring of pastel blue, softening to pale grey as -the view slowly recedes to disclose a roosting collared-dove in dense -foliage. It is seen through the rainbow haze above the fountain at -Sparagulan College, so must be at the northern end of Garrible Park, an -area favoured by those with a taste for secluded private properties, and -the means to acquire and maintain them. In the foreground are the -mullioned windows of one of the college towers. The carved stonework -shows signs of erosion. - -Here are glimpses of a street market, partly obscured by coloured -awnings. Fresh produce, hand-crafted goods, bright bouquets. Small -children strapped in trundlers blink at the moving forest of legs, while -a small crowd stands watching a bouncing hat. Under it is a young -street musician, sitting on a wooden box on the sides of which he is -drumming with his hands, eyes squeezed shut. Beside him a young woman -with cropped blonde hair is playing a tall instrument with great -dexterity and obvious enjoyment. One foot, neatly shod in soft green -leather with silver laces, taps the ground in soundless syncopation. - -We are now near the city�s southern edge, over the bridge near Thrissop -Hill, and a procession of SunCell MonoPods, like a string of bright -beads, heads south to compete at the Gat Whane circuit. This season�s -colour is predominantly a vibrant blue, though the fad for spotty blooms -in mimicry of an irritated squid has not quite died away. One renegade -is a defiant matt black (except for the transparent forward segment), -either hinting at hidden power, or a misguided attempt to remain -inconspicuous, since each SCMP has its tail fin emblazoned with the -owner�s identifying emblem, in this instance a kind of bent trident. -Under closer scrutiny this turns out to be the three toes of a sloth, so -the driver may be making an ironic statement. - -Scuttling across a tree-lined road, yet another escaped pangolin. In -its eager but so far thwarted search for an ant colony it finds -temporary shelter under a hedge which borders the grounds of Greeming -& Trulph (Accessories). �Conservation gone mad!� the Quanderpyre -press would later comment, under the headline �Menace of the Scaly -Invaders�. - -The view sweeps across rooftops, intersections, orchards, farms, lingers -briefly at the flat, restless horizon, then pulls back across the marina -to witness a man emerging without luggage from the covered walkway of a -private flotel. He wears an unseasonably long dark coat. A nimbus of -bronze hair obscures his features. He pauses at the roadside, briefly -lifting a gloved hand to his face. The passenger door of a waiting -vehicle, a bluish-grey Dap Pulsar, slides open. As he climbs in with -practiced ease we see the glint of a tinted visor. The driver�s face is -not visible, but the gold bracelet on her wrist is finely crafted in the -form of entwined snakes. The vehicle moves smoothly towards the -Southern Underpass. - -An impossible view, surely! There is no snow-covered mountain within a -day�s flight from Snoak City. It must be a clever model. The textures -are very convincing, as is the lighting, which brings out the contrast -of starkly black and bruise-coloured shadows against blue-white snow. -Even the impression of distant wind-blown drifts is realistic. One -might almost imagine the coloured specks strung along that oblique ridge -to be miniature mountaineers. The modeller has somehow contrived to -produce the effect of clouds shredding around the summit. You would -swear that those specks have subtly changed their position. It is as -well that the whole thing is artificial, for above them that descending -puff seems to be accreting, and now erases them from view as it shudders -noiselessly down to the tree-line. - -

A series of clicks at the control panel coincides with -these scenes flicking off in succession, provoking involuntary yelps of -disappointment from the students. Smolehive (if it is he) inclines his -head gravely as they respectfully move past him on their way to the -stairs, idle thoughts of the brewery long since evaporated. As they -leave he permits himself a smile, reaches into his bag and using both -hands extracts something dark, smooth but knurled, slightly pitted. A -meteorite? A cherished product of taxidermy? Perhaps a fruit of some -kind. Or it could be a potato. - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] scope.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Tale of the Bone Janitor - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well -make it dance.
- George Bernard -Shaw - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"Mandrake fire systems lit, the terminal -eleven lie waiting, slow and crimson-lidded, but alert, black dogs -receding, twenty feet, thirty, fourteen thousand, now counting in light -years, exponential dilation of spacetime spiked and gravitational -insistence permanent." - -The ragged bridal gown hung off her hips forlornly, stiff and caked in -dried black matter, brittle like charred paper. - -"Green shift has occurred, Suprahelion opening wide, Hyperiotic Malouche -status accorded with honour and longing, the waters break." - -She arched and flexed her skeletal feet inside their felt slippers, -exposed tendons tensing against the insoles. - -A thick and enveloping blue light spread from the arched doorway, -colouring the paintings on the walls. Shadows danced in the hallway of -cabinets. - -She adjusted the chrysanthemum wedged haphazardly in the thick, black -nylon strings of her hair. - -A hazy form grew in the light. Blue shapes jigged across the surfaces of -the mirrors, drunken water patterns bobbed up and down around the -sides of the hall like volatile wallpaper. - -The doorway screeched and shuddered. - -Myrtle Bound pressed her hand to Rapley's cheek as he stepped from the -azure glow. Her fingers were nothing but bones and the memory of skin. - -"Welcome to the Exhibition.", she chattered through the immense dead -smile of her exposed skull. She had clumsily applied pale green lipstick -to her gum line in a display of conviviality. - -Rapley nodded curtly and planted an affectionate kiss on the bone of her -left cheek. - -"Myrtle, you never fail to surprise me. You appear to have lost weight -once again." - -She emitted a girlish giggle which startled them both. - -

They settled down to tea and sandwiches. Myrtle poured -from a stout porcelain pot with the nervous mania of the reluctant -recluse, asking questions about life back on Earth. Rapley lounged in a -wicker chair and lit a cigarette as he gazed around and passed on gossip -regarding acquaintances, wars and fashions. - -"And how are they wearing their hair?" Myrtle giggled. - -"Dull variety spans the globe,", drawled Rapley, "No one has the wit to -let an idea settle." - -"And Mr Violet", she ventured casually, "Does he ever mention me..?" - -Rapley leaned forward and patted her knee bone. - -"Often, and with great tenderness." - -For a second, an unruly wetness smeared her eyes, but it was blinked -away by the remnants of her Kohl-ed eyelids. - -Rapley leant back and basked in the warm glow of strangeness that the -Exhibition never failed to radiate. - -To one side of him stood a brass casket containing the body of Ola -Gjurdson, the cat princess of Norway. Under the impetus of her occult -studies and her delusions of being a feline deity, she had had her own -skeleton removed whilst she was alive and replaced with the disassembled -skeletons of seventeen Manx cats. The science was obscure and doomed to -failure. She had survived for ten minutes during which time she had -whispered a series of terrible secrets regarding regeneration and the -soul. The black box recorder holding this last dictation lay in a -separate cabinet beside her. - -Ms Bound kept up a trickle of mild but insistent enquiry. - -"..and hem length always dictates philosophy so I simply must know that -too, Pasha. .." - -He murmured an answer as his eyes wandered across the hall. - -In a domed glass case sat the ever-evolving musical object created by -Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. A series of interlocking stocky rectangles -of a dark and protean substance, like blackened honeycombs, shifted over -and slid through each other, creating a muezzin call of voices and -vibrating strings. Brabazon Brabazon, a Victorian portraitist of little -note, claimed to have plucked it from his houseboy's dream one calm -summer night. A collection of his perpetual motion still lives hung on -the opposite wall, their clockwork frames ticking and whirring as if -full of crickets, churning the claggy oil paint brush strokes on the -canvasses into slow-dripping waves of animation. - -And spread along walls and hung from golden girders, propped against -cabinets and stacked in piles lay the accumulated detritus of the -Exhibition: the cast death mask of a miniature sun at the point of -supernova; the Tharnassian Bible, with its fifteen commandments for -forcing the Devil to slough off his skins like a snake until you reached -the gentle, damaged boy beneath; the hulking chassis of Youngman's -Bathysphere, with its patented "Intelligent Riveting"; a film titled -"The Reddest Cleft", which purported to be pornography from the very -molten core of the Earth; the putrefying head of a Mermaid recovered -from the "Kursk". - -"..which brings me to why I called you here, Pasha. Why I asked for your -help." - -Rapley swivelled round to face her. - -"Hmm? Terribly sorry, the place got the better of me for a moment. You -were saying?" - -Ms Bound stroked the white twin caverns of the bridge of her nose. With -only the merest of brows to furrow, this was her preferred method of -expressing a pensive mood. - -"My tenure here is at an end, as you know. It's time for me to step -aside and slide into Vanishment. But the Exterior has permitted me an -indulgence for my service." - -"Well,", drawled Rapley, "Indulge away. What's on your mind?" - -She paused, clicked her neck decisively and said in a low and -conspiratorial voice: "There are three men: Mr Gielgud, Mr Venus and Mr -Wilkinson. I have them suspended in the Observatory, and I would like -you to find out which of them murdered me." - -After a moment's silent reflection, Rapley exhaled cigarette smoke and -tapped the ash over his creased suit. He leant in close and whispered. - -"Sometimes I truly believe that life is a conspiracy against the idle. -The Observatory beckons." - - - -

And so it was that a svelte young skeleton barely -patched up with residual tensions of tendon and purpose, and that -listing and ever so slightly crumpled young man with a fine haystack of -mousy hair traipsed through the corridors of an exhibition floating in -deepest space, the perfect storeroom for all the fluff discovered over -the centuries down the back of history's sofa. - -With the interferometers bleeping their manic overtures, sweeping the -densely packed quadrant for Einstein rings and the shockwaves of binary -stars, Rapley and the janitor walked into the Observatory. - -A vast panoramic window opened onto the underside of the planet -Pollonia, and Rapley, in this sputnik moon, felt a little light-headed -and dizzy. It was as if the planet were balanced smartly on top of them, -kept apart only by the merest of invisible buffers. - -The Observatory floor was a broad marbled stage, and there lurked areas -of shadow in the wings. It was to one of these shadowy strips that -Myrtle led him. She walked ahead, clattering all the while, holding his -hand as he trailed behind, still gazing at the livid red of the -planet with its surface mesh of black hurricanes and molten rivulets. - -It took Rapley a few moments to process that the hollow clinking in his -ears was the sound of Ms Bound clapping her hands together. - -"Rapley!" She jabbered, and he turned with a profuse apology upon his -pursed lips. - -"The matter in hand." He acknowledged. - -Before them was a thick green curtain hanging from a rail. From the -other side he could hear an electrical sizzle and what appeared to be -the low static murmurs of late night radio broadcasts. - -"They are behind this curtain, Pasha." - -A faint glow could be discerned through the thick material, a strange -heat emanated from within. Rapley noticed that the fine hairs on the -backs of his hands had stood to attention as a gentle pulse of -electricity wafted through him. He arched his eyebrows and coughed lightly. - -"Then reveal the legends behind the façade!" - -And with a sudden swish, there they were. - -Three tall columns of blue light glowed with a fierce and barely caged -electricity. Encased within the columns stood the images of three men. -The images fizzled, warped and flexed as if they were signals in a -constant state of fine-tuning. - -"Ah", said Pasha, understanding less of the world than he had a minute ago. - -"We have beamed them from their own time streams, Pasha," said Ms Bound, -"It takes great power and is somewhat unstable, but we have them. -Securely, for the moment." - -He had attracted the attention of the three men, who turned to him with -all the clamour and complaint of commuters greeting an extraordinarily -late omnibus. - -Myrtle leant close to Rapley and whispered: "To their own times, they -appear to be mimes caught in non-existent boxes, the boxes -being changing rooms between now and then. The rooms come with bars, -thankfully." - -The first gentleman was round, small and of advanced middle-age. He wore -a broad checked three-piece tweed suit and balanced a shiny bowler hat -atop a thick white head of hair that culminated in a sweeping fringe. -The fringe sashayed across the left half of his face, where it met one -end of his equally white moustaches � a fine pair that sprang past his -cheeks like sprigs of snowy heather. There was something jocular and -ironical about his small black eyes and pursed little grin of a mouth -that put Rapley in mind of a man at a card table who cannot maintain a -poker face due to the splendid excellence of his own Royal Flush. - -"My name is Gielgud, sir," chirruped the man in a Southern drawl, "Entrepreneur and showman, -and I do not take lightly to this intrusion! Being incarcerated like an -ape is not on the menu for Hiram Louis Gielgud, I can assure you of -that!" - -"Nineteen oh two.", whispered Myrtle in Rapley's ear. - -Rapley bowed with respect. "A pioneer of the huckstering arts, Mr -Gielgud? You"ll find no rubes here. Behave yourself and we may even show -you a curiosity or two." - -The round man snorted through his mysterious little smile and kept his -own counsel. - -The second column contained a hulking brute of a bestial hirsuteness. A spillage of greasy black -hair fell across a broad, flat face embellished with spiralling eyes. The mouth hung open, cackling and -muttering glamours to itself, bracketed by a pair of mutton chop -whiskers so thick and entangled they seemed like two oil-slicked crows. -He was wrapped in a ragged poncho and wore leather trousers with some -sort of stained military cap perched atop his wretched crown. - -Ms Bound regarded him coldly and whispered: "Benji "Venus" Krestfellen. -We dredged him up from Ladbroke Grove, nineteen sixty-eight." - -The apparition smashed a sizable forearm into the wall of electricity -around him and the marble floor shuddered. His hands were heavy with -rusting metal rings. - -His husky Midlands accent crackled through time. - -"I got a bird and a bathtub fulla speed back 'ome so get to the fuckin" -point.." - -"When I have one, I"ll let you know," sighed Rapley with mild despair. -Mr Venus growled a blackened hex and licked a salty residue off his -thumb. - -The third and final column held a stick-thin individual dressed in a -green skin-tight cat-suit. He bobbed in mid-air with his legs crossed, -murmuring into a slender headset of gold and wire. His gaunt grey -features spoke of artificial light and long hours, of a lack of -hydration. His papery eyelids slowly opened and closed like tiny pumps -as he turned his head towards the peering face of Pasha Rapley. - -"Rakshasa Wilkinson. New Delhi, two thousand and sixty-nine." said -Bounds. - -Wilkinson's movements were slow and with an oddly subaquatic mixture of -grace and deliberation. The voice, when it spoke, was a featureless -monotone. "Fusion is my policy. Seven pieces of information when split -into each other may yield a cold reality otherwise neglected or dormant. -Select and share your first datum." - -Rapley grinned as if to a child or an idiot and took half a step backwards. - -"Well, Myrtle, the gang's all here. Explain yourself." - -

The Story of Myrtle Bound:

- -I was an aggravating and curious child. Delicate and robust in equal -measures, I would scale the highest branches of the trees in Hyde Park -and lie, cradled by wooden arms, reading Mary Shelley and folk tales -from continental Europe. The scientific romances of the Scotsman G_____ - M__________ also fed my imagination. I would recline for hours -gazing into the heavens from my arboreal crow's nest waiting for some -sense that such voyages were possible for a child of -twelve years from Crystal Palace. The year -was eighteen ninety when I saw my very first spacecraft. I had taken to -living amongst the thick tree cover in the park, dismounting during the -night to raid bakers' shops and mills for provisions. In the early hours -of a warm spring morning I was feasting upon a wholemeal loaf when I -happened to catch something in the upper periphery of my vision. A red -disc hung in the sky, as if someone had quietly placed it there upon a -hook. Larger than our own moon, it seemed somehow sheer and perfectly -round, the red more of a glow than an even colour. I gazed at it. It -gazed back, and I felt a very vivid sense that it was gazing directly at -me and at no other soul in London. - -I fell fast asleep but woke some time later inside a white and sterile -hall, vaster than that of the Prince Consort. My crinolines were mildly -singed and I became aware of my thoughts multiplying into a chattering -animal choir of barks, yelps and insect scuttle. I felt something -physically alive inside my brain, -something snaking through my memories and rustling through my -imagination and dreams. There was, inside me, a sudden snuffling and -baying, and then a voice. It said, "You will do." - -The voice continued to rifle through me but, sensing the discomfort in -my mind (though not, I may add, noticing the tears upon my -cheek, the puddle of urine collecting upon the floor at my feet, or the -sobs of fear falling in ragged breaths from my mouth), it stopped and -glowed outwards through my bones, my muscles and my skin, until it -enveloped me in a wild white heat haze. It whispered through my nerve -endings, through my teeth, through the strands of my black hair, through -the tips of my fingers and of my toes. It said I could call it "Jumble", -and in a singsong voice began to tell me about the billions of galaxies -beyond our own, of our hidden second moon, of the Veil Nebula and its -transmission Mantas, of the roaring sonar melodies of binary stars, of the -plasma soups remaining from the very first centuries of the universe's -existence, and of lunar piracy, the glory boxes of Saturn, and of Sodiat -of Betelgeuse and other such doomed romances. - -I fell asleep that night with my wholemeal loaf dried and stale, -clutched in white-knuckled hands. - -I have been with The Exterior ever since. - -The events leading up to my death have been documented elsewhere, mainly -in the papers of Charles Fort, the pages of the Paddington Mercury and -the flash-bulletins of New Delhi's Echelon societal strata. - -Suffice it to say that I had been entrusted to explore and archive a -series of artefacts of particular interest to The Exterior. These -artefacts were strewn over several centuries and had a common thread: an -uncommon acceleration of contemporary technology and a deceptively -frivolous purpose. - -The Victorian age offered up a freestanding brain made from organic and -self-repairing components. The material was of unknown origin and hummed -riddles aloud. I discovered it several years after the turn of the -twentieth century, and subsequently stole it from the travelling -"Cavalcade of Mercurial Delights" run by Mister Hiram Gielgud. The -brain, or "Whispering Mystery of Xanadu", spoke riddles pertaining to -the discovery of the newer sciences, such as radiography and -anaesthesia. None of these riddles, to my knowledge, were ever solved by -the eager queues of the general public who paid a dollar a time to put -their ears to its shifting surfaces as if to a sea shell. - -A narcotic substance of particular interest was detected in the late -nineteen sixties. Again, I was dispatched to investigate by my curious -employers and benefactors. I duly arrived in West London and, by guile, -initiative and fortitude inveigled my way into the confidence of the -narcotic's accidental possessors - a band of musicians, damaged in their -bodies, minds and souls by a volatile lifestyle comprised of stimulants -and violence. They composed their mechanical dirges under the name of -Die Wunderkinder, and their chief architect, the man known to his -cohorts as Mr Venus, did not take kindly to my theft of his product and -of his logbooks. The narcotic agent in question was in both powder and -pill form, and allowed all those who took a dose to telepathically -connect to all other current users. It was a networking device enabling -communication beyond the detection of all outside agencies. However -those denizens of Ladbroke Grove under the guidance of Mr Venus had been -using it for the purposes of intimidation and gratification. - -The third of these pertinent excursions into acquisition and curatorship -occurred in New Delhi in two thousand and sixty-nine. Having received my -instructions from my benefactors, I stepped through the azure doorway -into the shining many-tiered multiplex mezzanines and flyover parkways -of that city, a perpetual twilight of pollution smudging the skies. -Having no wish to linger as a tourist, I took a QuadRail to the offices -of the noted industrial giant Mechgnosis and effected an undetected -entrance. The Exterior, as you know, has skeleton keys of all sizes and -methodologies. - -Here, deep in the basement laboratories, amongst the basalt circuitry -and saffron-driven telecommunications devices, I found my objective: a -sealed glass tray of a thick, crimson liquid. So thick and full of -sediment it seemed like some unholy marmalade, or perhaps like bloodied -water from the murkiest depths of the ocean. The tray was round, several -inches in height and with a circumference approximate to that of a -bicycle wheel. But the weight of the thing was the trick. I found it -impossible to lift it from the solid block of steel upon which it -rested. All logbooks and diagnostic notes downloaded, my cargo and I -were hurriedly teleported home, alarm bells and warning lights -announcing that we had been discovered by the Mechgnostic patrols. I -need hardly add that the CEO of Mechgnosis will be one Rakshasa -Wilkinson. - -The purloined logs revealed to me the function of this miraculously -heavy liquid. It is a parasitical fluid in such a condensed state that -it thuggishly challenges the genteel physics of the century in which it -was discovered. - -Its parasitical nature is such that it has the ability to suck up all -properties and strengths of an item over which it laps. This is believed -to include the intentions, thoughts and motives of carbon-based -life-forms, though here the logs become coy and vague, hinting at an -experiment or proof of this ability without true confirmation. The -conclusion of the logs is that the fluid can act as an engine, absorbing -power and storing it. The properties of the glass container which holds -this fiery liquid engine are, alas, totally unknown. - -
- -

"And that," said Ms Bound, "is that." - -Rapley chewed his bottom lip. - -"What a caper, I"ve always wanted to be part of the jet set..but I can"t -help feeling that you"ve glossed over the small matter of your -untimely death. What exactly reduced you to bones, my dear?" - -At this, Mr Gielgud chuckled without warmth and tipped his hat to the -back of his head. "If I might interject, I believe this addled doxy to -be "The Flaming Maid of Kentucky". Is my aim true, ma'am?" - -Bound nodded. - -"It is indeed how I was referred to in the popular pennyworths of your time." - -Mr Venus paused from the inspection of his left nostril and growled: -"Burning corpse lights up carnival. Possible tart." - -Ms Bound stiffened and her voice lost half an octave somewhere. -"Charmingly put," she growled. - -"The lady starlight phenomenon," said Mr Wilkinson, "it induced copycats -for weeks. Little lemming parcels of carbon and electricity," he -sneered, "and bone, naturally." - -Myrtle Bound lowered herself to the floor as quietly as she possibly -could. There were hollow clunks and a muffled scraping as she settled. - -"I was back aboard The Exterior Excelsis some weeks later when it -occurred. The evening had fallen hushed and heavy, and I was in need of -a reviving nap when I became aware of a warmth upon my skin. A blush -spread up my neck and across my cheeks. Thinking myself feverish I put -aside the field log that I was updating and moved to the bathroom to -splash some water upon my face. Halfway across the study floor I was -caught in a whiplash of pain and cramp. I felt my heart searing my chest -and my brain burning behind my eyes like a sack of hot coals. I -began to rise off the ground, my feet scrabbling uselessly in the air, -heat searing through me as I floated six feet off the rug like a saint -crucified on a cross of fire. And I began to burn." - -Ms Bound paused and gave the three suspended fellows a glare of granite -and purpose. - -"My Jumble came to see me, examined my physical deterioration and told -me that looks weren"t important in The Exterior. He also told me that -this was fortunate, as I was now a collection of bone and membrane kept -together by what he termed his 'Geradeaus Science'. However, as my physical condition was now so conspicuous, it -was deemed that field service was quite out of -the question for me. Hence my tenure as Janitor and Curator." - -"And the three stooges here?" inquired Rapley. - -"My assault didn"t issue from the time I was in. A residual backwash -from the moment of my immolation was sucked through time and spurted out -into three separate manifestations." - -"A flaming maiden on a cross," snickered the rotund Mr Gielgud, -"appeared above Werther's Field in Kentucky during one of my show days. -The screams were heard across the State line. "Course, I claimed it as -one o' my retinue. Wonderful act o' advertising, ma'am." - -Mr Venus hawked up a wad of green and broke wind like a baboon. - -"She rose from the canal in Ladbroke Grove during the Carnival! The -flames turned the water into steam, then she sank back under the waves. -Quite some hullabaloo and the filth never found 'er body." - -He grinned, showing teeth the colour of ale. - -Wilkinson gazed blankly at Ms Bound. - -"A human flare in the sky. A star issuing sound waves of distress. An -elegant beauty of pain and crackling skin. It became fashionable to -emulate over the following weeks, such is the trade and turnover for new -lifestyles in my time. The population thinned, but to a miniscule -degree. Fools, mostly." - -Rapley walked slowly in a circle, staring at his shoes and waggling his -fingertips. - -"So am I to take it that these three manifestations led your employers -to believe that the attack issued forth from one of those particular -locations?" - -Bound nodded. - -"And hence the electrical zoo?" - -She nodded again. - -"A moment" stated Rapley. - -He walked a metronomic scissor-legged walk away from the crowd and stood -there, leaning his head to one side, eyes upturned beneath the vast -spinning ball of petulant volcanic geography that was Pollonia. - -Strange murmurings drifted back from him, too low for their meanings to -be discerned. - -A minute passed, then two. The natives, caged in their sizzling columns, -grew restless. - -Words like "farcical", "unChristian", and "geweltschmerz" flew his way. -The planet boiled and bubbled above. - -And then, with a click of the fingers and a sooty cough, Rapley turned -to face them. - -"I have questions to ask each of you." - -(Somewhere, blue bullets were being hurriedly loaded into a matte black -revolver. Somewhere a creature was unfurling itself from a field portal -in south London, shaking its wild mane into a state of acclimatization, -mouth yawning like a hot, wet tunnel.) - -Rapley stepped towards Mr Venus. - -The hulking wretch glared through the wild blue fire of his cage as -Rapley peered into his blitzed eyes. Whatever was inside that mind of -his had gone feral years before. Scraps of humanity and decency were -just stains on his character now. - -Rapley leant back. He could smell the man's breath through the decades. - -"The ignoble and squalid first. My question for you, Mr Krestfellen, is -this: What did you do with the magic chord?" - -Benji Krestfellen, bass player, mauler of the flanged saxophone and -abuser of the analogue Moog, froze. Krestfellen, haranguer and damager -of flatmates, stealer of wine, women and song, criminal and advanced -experimenter with and archivist of bodily filth, raised a slab of meat -with wart-infested fingers on the end of it and tried, in a slight but -perceptible daze, to prod at Rapley through the hissing blue sparks. - -"There ain't no fucker left to talk about that.." he muttered darkly. - -

(A telephone rang in a greasy café in Herne Hill. A quite -ludicrously tall and broad-shouldered individual covered in a capacious -sack-like mackintosh and a sagging hoodie which more than covered his -face, bellowed "LEAVE IT!" and swayed and padded over to the 'phone from -his corner table. The individual growled a sentence or two, cracked the -receiver back onto its cradle and threw a handful of change at the chef -to cover the massive two gallon dish of mulligatawny that he had managed -to spread -over most of his table. The -hand that threw the coppers was suspiciously square and hairy. The chef -scratched his head. How peculiar, he thought. This coarse and bristling -brute had appeared to be talking about violets...).
- -"Au contraire," corrected Rapley, "There is you, and there is me. Tell -me all, if you ever wish to be discounted from this gallery of rogues -and thrown back into the stagnant waters of your own time." - -The erstwhile Mr Venus rolled his bloodshot eyes and sighed like a -punctured tyre. - -"Winter, sixty-seven, it was. Delmark'd told me the story before, but -only when pissed, so I figured he'd been spinning yarns for the birds, -y'know, impress 'em and that. He knew a harpist. Some puff, up Kensal -Rise. Said he had knowledge of a certain chord. A certain combination of -chords, I should say, that when played together at the same time would -begin to lap over each other, sloshing like paint in a bucket til they -were all mixed together. And when they were all mixed and sloshing and -splashing around and volatile enough, then they'd burn through the -bucket and make of it something very fuckin' odd indeed." - -Venus looked around, wiped sweat off his upper lip and continued. - -"The bucket, in this particular case, being our reality." - -"So you took a trip to Kensal Rise." encouraged Rapley. - -"Can't resist a novelty, that's my problem. 'Specially when it comes to -burning holes in the world. So. There was me, Delmark (straight, I made -sure he was off the rum by breaking his elbows), Betty the snake, -Carnegi and Sailor Wilhelm. We turned up on the harpist's doorstep armed -with a tuba, my Steltron six string with the incapacitator pickups, a -bag of may I say fuckin' strong weed and the usual box full o' analogue -goodies and flutes. A few bottles of pop an all, just to get the -atmosphere conducive, like." - -Mr Venus braced himself against the electrical bars with a massive, -sweaty outstretched hand. He wiped his chin clean of spittle and looked -down at his shoes. Rapley noticed that they were wooden clogs with metal -spurs spiked into the back. Dark stains on the wood, dark red stains on -the metal. Venus kept his eyes turned down and continued in thickened -tones. "Well, we pootled around for a while, y'know how it is with -tunesmiths, Mr Rapley. All diminished and suspended and minor for an -age. Til we could find a groove, is what it was... Well, must've been an -hour into it, this harpist geezer just swung himself into a major -progression and kept on going, blew the roof off the dump, and -everything he jangled and plucked, we matched, and this progression -turned into one chord, the notes inside just rising, you could 'ear 'em, -just rising inside this behemoth of a chord, and it just encased - us, we were right in it then, inside it and we started to change..." - -Ms Bound sat unmoved by the story. Venus's fellow inmates had turned to -glance at him with something very much like interest. Rapley tapped a -nail experimentally against the cage before inspecting his finger for -mild burns. - -"Continue," he said quietly, and glanced behind him casually. "Take your -time." - -Venus laughed up some phlegm and carried on. - -"I turned to look at the fella on the harp, by now he was playing his -own nerves, strung tight between the frames of his instrument. The more -he played, the more he seemed to be weaving these new harp strings from -his insides. Must've hurt like buggery, but he couldn't stop, none -of us could. Delmark was playing a ropey synth with his club foot, -stomping and stamping like he was crushing beetles, but with every stomp -something chipped off his skin, he was all leather underneath, last I -saw one of his eyes was just a slit in the leather and he had no mouth. -Betty the snake just flickered once and then strobed, her whole body -just glittering, you could only see her every half second. Carnegi and -Wilhelm were the worst. They both backflipped and coiled into themselves -like one o' them moebius strips, both just flowing into themselves and -out again all mercurial and screaming, bellowing jets of coiling flesh. -They both dropped what they were holding, a flute and a tuba went -clattering to the floor, must've been what gave me the strength to get -out of there. I went straight through the second floor window and never -looked back..." - -Mr Venus wiped a cat's cradle of snot and tears away from his downcast face. - -Ms Bound merely cricked her neck and huffed. - -"This show of contrite melancholy hardly fits your vile character. I -don't buy it for a second." - -Venus smashed his flat face against the bars and growled at her. - -"I ain't contrite, you daft sod. It's just that chord was fuckin' -beautiful, and I've not been able to find it since!" - -
(Outside a lock-up garage, down a winding back alley just to the south -of Brockwell Park, a small and compact man shook the rough paw of an -enormous animal in a dangerously stretched mackintosh. The creature -lifted his soiled and reeking hoodie and grinned something to which a keen -zoologist could possibly attribute the word 'smile'. The small man evidently -said something of a sarcastic or insulting flavour, causing -the larger figure to flick the very tip of his club-like tail in his -direction, once. The compact man was now upside down against a rubbish -bin twenty feet away, and chortling merrily. The words "no time for -this" were muttered and they walked abreast into a nearby garage. A -bulky luggage trunk was opened and two sets of eyes were shielded from a -fierce azure blue light. The grimy walls around them swam with a -subterranean dizziness. Then, one after the other, they hopped into the -trunk and disappeared out of sight, as if they were walking down a set -of attic stairs. There was a shudder, and there was a screech, and then -the garage was quite empty.)
- -Myrtle glared indignantly at the spluttering psychopath with his glazed, -pitted skin and the shaving rash on the palms of his hands. - -She turned to Rapley. - -"This man's identity is surely without doubt, such excrescence is -remarkable by its very uniqueness." - -Rapley dipped his head once and moved on to the second captive. - -Mr Hiram Gielgud held up a fat hand to silence the question forming on -Rapley's lips. - -"Let us dispense with the formalities," he barked with surprising cheer, -loosening his spotted neck tie. "I'm afraid to say that I see where this -deceitful little sortie is leading us." - -Rapley demurred with a shrug and a grin, whilst Mr Gielgud tugged off -his cherry red brogues and yanked his shirt open. Buttons pinged around -his cell like grapeshot. - -Ms Bound and Rapley exchanged glances. Ms Bound's rang up confusion, -Rapley's displayed a flush, now busted. - -"The game's up, fellas," chortled Gielgud from the corner of his mouth. -Low growls arose from the hulking Venus and the reposed -Wilkinson. "Our coat tails have been tugged quite long enough!" - -And with that, the portly huckster squatted with his legs bent and his -body low and balanced, and ripped off his checked trousers with a -fearsome grunt. - -"Wrestling..?", Enquired Rapley, throwing an eager look behind him, "Oh -dear, that was never my sport..." - -Ms Bound sprang to her feet with a clatter and looked at the three -figures in their cages. - -Gielgud, now quite naked apart from his dashing little bowler hat, was -leaping up and down like a baby on a bouncy castle, moaning and hissing -as if he'd swallowed a boiling kettle. Next to him, Mr Venus was -jabbering and smacking his wet fists into his chest, attempting to -regurgitate something. Wilkinson blew and blew in one huge never-ending -jet of breath, the air around him filling with a green mist which seemed -gritty and mineral-rich. - -Myrtle turned to Rapley. - -"What is this?", she said, her strained voice retaining some admirable -calmness despite the caterwauling menagerie in front of her. - -As they spoke, they both stepped away from the columns of fizzing light, -columns which appeared to be getting fizzier by the second. - -"My questions were merely a bit of time-killing while we waited for the cavalry." - -The fizzing edges of the three adjacent columns began to spread and -bleed into each other, sparks burring like chainsaw thrashes where the -boundaries of the columns met. - -"What we have here" yelled Rapley above the crackling din, "is one -distinct entity, something of a rarity, a celebrity among the more élite -planes of evil where it normally dwells." - -The figure of Benji Krestfellen began to bloat and swell, the throat -expanding in response to some terrifying eruption within himself. There -was the trace of an obscene grin upon the stretched features of his -face, a smile scrawled on an expanding balloon. - -

"Perhaps you can fill in the many blanks while we run," hissed Ms Bound -through her ever-gritted teeth. - -Rapley and Ms Bound turned on a brace of sixpences and dashed away from -the explosion of distorting flesh. - -Behind them the three columns of light and heat were fusing together -into one churning, molten morass of activity. A sheet of yellow heat -waved out towards them like a whipped blanket, and an orange shower of -sparks splashed onto the marble floor. - -At the very centre of this localized volcano a face was -beginning to edge into being, features etched by flicks of flame and the -tiny shadowy undercurrents of heat haze shimmers. It was a leering, -gurning, asinine face, too long in the muzzle and too high and far apart -in the eyes to be human, and yet too expressive and smooth of skin to -truly be a beast. It was as if a human face was hatching something -dumbly evil from inside itself and had been caught in the act by a -changing wind. - -Myrtle and Rapley skidded to a stop by the Observatory door and chanced -a look back. A broad, shining wall of flame and heat stood where -Gielgud, Venus and Wilkinson had once been. The great idiotic and brutal -face like that of a shaved donkey was slowly emerging from the fiery -curtain, followed by two stubby arms with long, sharp fingers tensed and -segmented like spiders' legs. The flames dripped off the muzzle and -claws like water. - -"Ms Bound!" yelled Rapley above the clamour, "Meet a monster of many -names! In Norwegian legend they called it Grisoya Undergang! The -Czechs knew the old chap as Kuzostrov Bolest, while those mellifluous -Frenchies favoured the rather more poetic Monstreux peau île de la -douleur!" - -A pair of hooved legs burst through the wall of flame like muscled -creatures surfacing from the deepest realms of the oceans. - -"In England," said Rapley in a low, dark voice, "We called him -Splitskin." - -The beast in flames took heavy steps forward, the sound of sizzling meat -greeting every footstep as his flesh hooves slapped down against the -marble. - -"YES, MISSTER RAPPLLEY," blared the foghorn of his voice, "I SEEE MY -REPPUTATIONNN PRECEEEDESS MEEE!" - -It paused and stumbled slightly then shook its wild head, the skin -around its mouth tightening as it readjusted tendons and muscles, -reconfiguring them for the clarity of its speech. - -The imbecilic eyes of the creature swivelled inwards until the irises -had quite disappeared. - -"ALL ABOARD?" boomed Splitskin, still dripping licks of flame. Then the -eyes popped back into view and wobbled into some semblance of binocular -focus. And with a feverish waggle of its lean claws, the beast began to -run after the fleeing humans. - -"It is, in essence, a Chronoleviathan!" exclaimed Rapley as they dashed -through the corridors of the Museum. "That lumbering form is truly -graceless and not a fair reflection of its mental agility or cunning!" - -He skidded to a stop by a brass fifth-dimensional telescope. - -"You see, when it settles in time on its own for any extended period its -flesh tends to corrupt. Consequently it favours using a host or hosts to -house its appalling self for shorter periods of time - several years at a -pop, normally." - -From behind them came a slurp and a roar and a crackle of burning flesh. -The floor and -walls vibrated with fear. - -"Rapley!" urged Ms Bound, tugging at his elbow. - -"Yes, quite," said Rapley, still deep in explanation, "The hosts tend -towards mental disturbance and disintegration before their bodies -putrefy and fall away like crumbling masonry." - -Ms Bound gave his elbow an urgent heave and he flew after -her, momentum turning his stumbling steps into long bouncing strides. -Splitskin squelched and lumbered after them, giggling threats. - -"Then those three men..?" said Bound, breathing in spurts as the chase -continued. - -"Real people,", replied Rapley as his long legs blurred below him, "But -hijacked by Old Mister Splitskin at one time or another for their -proximity to those succulent attractive fruits strewn through the -years!" - -They rounded the last corner before the hallway at a lick, knocking over -a fishbowl of primordial swamp as they did so. - -"And the significance of those objects I collected? The brain, the drugs -and that frightful red matter..?" - -"Aha!" grinned Rapley as they hurried down the aisles of the hall, "The -cavalry!" At the very end of the hallway an aquatic blue light had -begun to spread from the entry portal. - -"What did it want them for?" yelled Myrtle as display cases and scrolls -crashed and scattered behind them, rent and cracked by sharp claws and -heavy, square teeth. - -Rapley turned to face her with a disappointed sigh. - -"A brain, a nervous system and a powerful, physical force that acts as -an osmotic, parasitical engine. He was making a body. A new one which -wouldn"t wear out, and which doesn"t stress like this crumbling -monstrosity he's reverted back to." - -A shockwave of immense disturbance rumbled through the floor beneath -their feet and a shower of gilded debris rained down upon their heads. -Rapley and Bound threw themselves to the ground, scrabbling a path -through the detritus towards the glowing blue gateway. - -The dread, just-boiled features of the fiend loomed into view above -them. A heavily sweating flesh hoof thumped the floor in front. Sharp -and segmented claws knitted the air by their faces. - -Splitskin slowly hoisted a grin onto his muzzle and his booming voice -sent slews of drool smacking against them. - -"I THINK WE SHALL END THE DANCE HERE, MISS BOUND." He sniffed the air -with the nozzles of his nostrils. "MY NEW BODY AWAITS. HIDDEN IN -INSTALMENTS LIKE A CHEAP STORY, BUT I HAVE THE SCENT OF THEM NOW, IT -SHAN'T BE TOO LONG A BATTLE TO RESTORE THEM TO A WHOLE." - -He stamped his other hoof and a sharp, horizontal rip appeared in the -flesh above the knee. Another tear fell loose and ragged over his ankle. - -He sighed a small hurricane and an easel on the south side of the hall -splintered with the force of it. - -"SEE? IT IS HAPPENING ALREADY. I APPEAR TO BE ROTTING MYSELF THROUGH." -Splitskin settled onto his haunches and angled his head at Rapley and Ms -Bound. - -"I HAVE HIGH HOPES FOR THIS NEW PHYSICAL SELF I PLAN TO BUILD. AND THIS -TUB DOESN"T SEEM SO BAD, A FRIGATE FOR MY FLEET... AND EVEN A PLANET ABOVE -TO TASTE - LET US HOPE THEY HAVE SOME RIPE SPECIMENS OF LIFE UP THERE TO -FEAST UPON!" - -Rapley rose to his feet as Bound stared at him with some alarm. - -"Whilst it's always good to have ambition, my friend, I rather think -you're taking this makeover of yours for granted. One thing at a time, -after all." - -Splitskin's heavy head lowered itself to face Rapley, and the mouth -mooed its heavy syllables. - -"I SEE NO SIGNIFICANT BARRIERS, FRIEND. ONE BITE AND THE TROUBLESOME -MISS BOUND LOSES MORE THAN MERELY HER OUTER COVERING. AND YOU, I SHALL -USE AS A TOOTHPICK." - -The gateway behind them expanded like a soap bubble, shivered and -screeched, and then popped monstrously. Splitskin rubbed the afterglow -from his eyes with the end-spines of his claws and blinked slowly. There -stood a small, tidy, squareish human with a face full of dark ginger -bristles and a scowl of determination. He aimed a blunt, fat revolver -and spoke from the side of his mouth. - -"Say the word, Mr Rapley." muttered Mr Violet. - -Such a tiny man, thought Splitskin, and such a tiny gun. - -The gateway issued forth a more tumultuous belch and an immense shadowy -form shot through into the hallway, tumbling like a blurred landfall of -rough hay and rougher leather. - -"Good Lord..." chattered Ms Bound from her position prostrate upon the -floor. - -The new arrival smashed through a suit of armour fashioned from -supernova-iron and rolled heavily to a slumped halt in front of Rapley. - -Splitskin peered at the vast mass of muscle, horn and shank, all rolled -up into a protective ball. He gave the side of it an experimental -poke with one of his claws. - -"A FURRED CANNONBALL? REMARKABLE THOUGHT. BUT QUITE INEFFECTIVE NOW IT -HAS MISSED ITS TARGET." - -Rapley winked at him. - -"Meet the cavalry." - -A gap sagged open in the fur, then another. Two bloodshot yellow orbs -stared up at the terrible Mister Splitskin, pinpricks of black at their -centres. Something long, grey and full of wet, slobbery mass slumped -from beneath the eyes, nostrils twitching at the end of it. Sharp tufted -pyramids sprang to attention somewhere atop the matted pelt. - -Then the noises began. - -A deeply muffled growl reverberated from inside the blinking furball, -decibels massing and rising until they had reached car crash volumes. -The whoosh of a harshly whipping wind accompanied the growls, and was -almost immediately joined by a braying honk, the three noises settling -together into a three pronged attack upon the very idea of aural -tolerance. The balled creature shook, bristled and drummed with a -ferocious heartbeat before it unfurled, stretching strong limbs fore and -aft from the dense block of fur and hide at its centre. It stumbled to -its clawed hooves, revealing itself to be almost as tall as Mr -Splitskin. Upright, its face seemed almost to make sense: those bulbous -eyes, blunt tusks of chipped ivory, a long, sagging grin and a stout -trunk leaking spurts of mucus. - -It spoke, and the voice was more like weather than a tool for speech. - -"Fucking... travelsick..." its stomach gurgled, "Shouldn't have had the -soup..." - -Rapley bowed deep and low. - -"Thank you, Fangles. Many apologies for the emergency call." - -Splitskin stomped his way between Rapley and the new arrivals. - -"YOU," he said, appraising Fangles, "WILL BE MORE FUN TO DISEMBOWEL!" - -Rapley winced. "May I present Mr Violet, my accountant and amanuensis, -and Pompodour Aloysious Fangles the third, ravenous major in exegesis of -the Hyperiotic Space Malouche, and large hairy mammal with a magnificent -kill-rate." He turned smartly to face Ms Bound, "Run!" - -They ran. - -Splitskin and Fangles smashed into one thrashing block of activity, fur -and teeth and spurts of blood whipping out as they rolled across the -Museum floor. Rapley, Violet and Ms Bound dashed to the far end of the -room, searching for shelter from the rain of debris caused by the -duelling beasts. - -Mr Violet scudded to a stop in front of the hulking body of Youngman's -Bathysphere. - -"Into the sub!" he yelled, yanking the heavy front hatchway open with -both hands and no little effort. - -With a foot-up from Violet, Rapley and Myrtle scuttled up the narrow -ladder and through the high oval hatch, toppling into the cramped iron -interior. They scrabbled to their feet and hauled Violet up after them. - -Outside, the two beasts swept across the museum locked in a snarling -duel, sending cresting waves of splintered wood and metal, shredded -flesh and fur whirling throughout the hall. - -Rapley kicked away the ladder and pointed to the cluttered control panel. - -"Upwards and onwards, Violet, old pal!" - -Violet huffed over the controls, clicking and flicking as the localized -war raged away and shook the Bathysphere on its cast iron tether. - -Mr Violet depressed a thick, square button of brightest red, and the -walls gave a stuttering cough and chugged rhythmically. - -Violet grinned through his moustache. - -"Good to go, Mister Rapley!" - -Ms Bound joined Pasha at the hatchway. - -"Charge!" they yelled in unison. - -A bank of tiny rockets fired into life on the rear -of the Bathysphere as the engines kicked into full power. The -vehicle began to shudder forward, straining against the chain that -secured it to the ceiling. - -Rapley and Bound held onto the lip of the open hatchway as the -Bathysphere lurched and broke free of the tether, links of steel chain -fluttering in the wake of the engines like sycamore leaves. A shock wave of rushing air flew through the -hatchway, sending Pasha and Myrtle flying against the back wall. Violet -clung onto the control panel with that grit and determination which were -such core elements of his soul, tweaking directional controls with his -vibrating fingers. - -The Bathysphere shot through the air, shearing Malthazar's N-Zone -Antenna from its moorings; decapitating a Titanian wicker man statue; -turning glass cabinets to fine, abrasive, swirling clouds of dust. - -Fangles and the creature known as Splitskin drew apart for a moment as -they reached a momentary lull in their furious battle, blood and hanks -of flesh dripping from their claws and teeth. - -Mister Splitskin was momentarily puzzled by a quick flash of alarm and -panic on his adversary's face. But the expression was gone as soon as it -had arrived, along with the animal itself, who was now scrabbling away -into the far corner of the Exhibition, its muscular rump quivering with -the effort of such a speedy retreat. - -Splitzkin's muzzle curled with victory and pride. Not such a challenge -for one as mighty as myself after all, he thought, as he sensed a change -in air pressure around him, Was that the noise of engines? he asked -himself, coughing blood and turning his head with slow, dazed movements -in the direction it seemed to be coming from... - -The Bathysphere smacked into him at seventy knots, his bulbous head -popping neatly through the open hatchway on impact. Violet's body -smacked into the instrument panel but he held her steady as best he -could as the vehicle crunched into the Exhibition's far wall, turning -Mister Splitskin's body into a far wider and thinner form than it had -ever been before. Rapley and Bound rattled around inside the craft, -bumping off the curved walls and landing heavily in a crumpled heap upon -the floor. The impact rang the Bathysphere like a vast iron bell and -sent tremors through every circuit and rivet. - -Splitskin's head hung in the opening for a moment, his idiotic eyes wide -and disbelieving, his thin lips twitching and trembling. Mr Violet -clambered to his feet and cut off the engines. The Bathysphere dropped -ten metres to the floor with a hollow thump, and the head in the -hatchway slid down the curved interior wall of the craft leaving a -viscous red trail behind it. The nostrils snorted once, emitting a thick -vapour, then all was still and quiet. - -

Fangles was keeping one eye on the jumbled heap of flesh and head which -used to be Splitskin. He growled at it occasionally through the -mouthfuls of porridge and ketchup which he was slurping enthusiastically -from a metal trough. - -Around him, Mr Violet was sweeping up as best he could, forming mounds -of shattered glass and wood and bent brass in the middle of the -Exhibition. Any loose artefacts which had been found were stacked -carefully against one wall like lost property. - -Ms Bound and Pasha Rapley stood in the Observatory, a scene of burnt -mayhem. The three columns stood cracked and vacant like the burst test -tubes of some violent experiment. Rags of clothing hung disconsolately -from the splinters of glass: a swatch of leather, a -hank of checkered tweed, a filmy shred of lycra. - -On the floor sat Mr Gielgud's natty little bowler hat, balanced sideways -on its brim. Rapley stooped and picked it up. Brushing the dust off the -crown, he turned to Myrtle. "Case closed, dear heart. Though, purely out -of curiosity, I wondered if I might be permitted to see these items -which our recently departed guest was so exquisitely keen to make his -own." - -Ms Bound smiled with her eyes and led Rapley away from the Observatory -with its glaring and fiery sentinel spinning far above. - -They walked back into the Exhibition, past the freshly fed and -recuperated Fangles who grumbled to himself, peering out of the nearest -porthole and shivering with space sickness. Violet whistled hello and -went back to his clearance operation with its orderly and systematic -(but to Rapley and Ms Bound utterly impenetrable) checklist of -priorities and logistics. Violet threw a dented iron sheet onto a pile -and marked "153a (three eights of a singe)" in his notebook with a -yellow pencil. - -Myrtle clanked her way over to one of Hercules Brabazon Brabazon's -ever-churning paintings. It was eight feet high and encased in a frame -of golden curlicues. She touched one side of the frame and depressed a -tiny gilt effigy of a micturating cherub. The entire painting swung open -like a door to reveal a shallow, shelved room. Myrtle rummaged among -some dusty ledges and came away with two large boxes wedged haphazardly -under her arms. She reversed out of the narrow room, plonked the boxes -on the floor next to Rapley and slammed the painting shut on its hinges. - -Rapley bent down and popped open the lids. Inside one was a gleaming wet -brain, the cortices and nodes of which -seemed to be writhing against each other, turning and slapping like eels -in a bucket but still maintaining the exterior integrity of their shape. -The brain was encased in a glass bell jar, and Rapley removed it from -the box carefully, setting it down on the floor beside him. - -In the other box he found hundreds of sealed blister packs and three or -so dozen small plastic medicine bottles. All contained sickle shaped -pills of a beige hue, or grains of some white substance. - -"Murky and underwhelming," sighed Pasha as he turned to Ms Bound, "And -that sealed tub of parasitical muscle? Whither the red stuff?" - -"Ah" said Myrtle, pointing to the devastated Exhibition. "It was right -there, at ground zero." - -Mr Violet's smudged face popped up from behind a mound of broken easels. -"The red stuff, you say? Sealed tub? You'll be meaning 421/L." He -flipped to a page in his notebook. "Some wear, bugger all tear. can't -shift the bloody thing, though, it's absolutely pig stubborn!" -And with that he took a broom and brushed away a patina of dust and -splinters from the ground to reveal a broad, flat sealed container of -bright red liquid. - -Rapley grinned, hoisted the two boxes under his arms and picked his way -over the hillocks of detritus towards the red disc. Myrtle scuttled -after him, wafting her hollow hands at the clouds of dust in the air. - -"Rapley!" She tutted. "Come back here! Those artefacts are itemised!" - -"Time to introduce them back into the wild, Ms Bound.", he smirked as he -let the boxes drop to the floor and knelt by the container. - -He gently tugged at the rim of the lid, but there was no give. - -"Violet, old pal? Lend a hand." - -Mr Violet wiped his moustache clean of dust and squatted next to his -good friend. They each took a side of the lid and, after a count of three, leant back -and tugged with all their might. The container stayed still and -untroubled. The two men may as well have been butterflies for all the -effect their efforts made. Rapley sprang to his feet and huffed sulkily. - -"Thought as much!" he said, handing Violet one of the boxes. - -Rapley nodded to the sealed container and Mister Violet popped pill -after pill onto the top of the lid and upended medicine bottles of salty -grains on top of them. Rapley held the bell jar containing the snaking brain in both hands and -brandished it like a trophy. - -"This"ll be a lark," he muttered. He raised the jar high above his head -and brought it crashing down on top of the grainy container lid. The -bell jar cracked and fell to either side like an egg shell, the slithery -brain settling down with a gloopy flop onto the see-through lid. - -Rapley scampered behind a bric-a-brac pile of bent metal struts and -Violet jogged backwards ten yards or so. Ms Bound cocked her head to one -side and watched from behind a cracked display cabinet. - -Fangles raised one immense hedge of an eyebrow and stayed exactly where he lay. - -For a moment, all was quiet. Then, with a reverberation which they all -felt through the soles and pads and bones of their feet, the lid of the -container turned anticlockwise and unscrewed itself. The pills on top of -it bounced like jumping beans and the slithery brain spasmed and -twitched. As the lid rose clear of the container it seemed to turn milky -like some immense cataract. There was a hiss and a flash of white light -and the circular lid imploded into a disc of quickly thinning smoke. The -pills and the brain sploshed and splattered into the red soup, where -they sank slowly until they were encased in the substance, as if -suspended in aspic. - -The white smoke had ebbed away into a ghostly halo, vague threads of -mist gently turning, expanding and growing ever fainter. Rapley counted -seconds in a hushed murmur. Ms Bound's finger bones tapped against the -cabinet as they shook with anticipation. Mr Violet ground his teeth as -he kept his nerve firm and steady. The moist panting of Fangles filled -the air with the smell of mulligatawny. - -As they watched, the atmosphere grew increasingly heavy and charged, as -if they were all encased in their very own suspension of the unknown. - -Then the red liquid stood up. - -It calmly drew itself vertically out of the container like a column of -blood. The surface shimmered and waved briefly, and then formed into a -rough approximation of a human being. Currents inside the column caused -a split in the lower half forming vertical columns; the thickness of -liquid above it thinned slightly into a waist; jets of red spouted from -the block of liquid above the waist like shoots of projectile vomit -which then froze in mid-air, finessing themselves into graceful arms. As -the body formed itself, the capsules and pills dissolved into the molten -fluid, spreading a gritty texture throughout the trunk and limbs. - -All the while the slithery brain rose through the liquid with purposeful -deliberation. When it reached the surface of the torso, it bobbed -briefly and then continued its upward journey, a bubble of the viscous -fluid surrounding it and carrying it upwards until it sat in a wobbly -crimson cranium. - -The red fingers flexed and the apparition performed a brief jog on the -spot, springing athletically from foot to foot. The liquid inside the -form briefly effervesced with the effort. - -Then it stood quite still and glared around the hall with the bulbous -pastiches of its newly formed eyes. The eyes, like the rest of its -facial features, were blank and characterless. They held no attempt at -lids, irises or pupils. They merely existed, impassively aware. - -The apparition stepped sideways out of the bottom half of the container -as if it were exiting a shower cubicle. It stared down at the mess of -wood and metal and dust through its shimmering feet. The brain slithered -like a reptile inside that bubbling head. The form looked at Rapley and -its liquid features broke into the lopsided crescent of a smile. - -"Ah," said Rapley, taking a step backwards. The red figure walked -towards him with long, fluent strides, feet slapping heavily against the -ground. - -Fangles cocked an ear and began to growl, his haunches tensing with the -anticipation of a fresh fight. - -The red figure was now only a half dozen yards from Rapley, and -approaching with alacrity. - -"Run, man!" hissed Violet. - -"No need for alarm," muttered Rapley as he took another half step back, -"He's merely made of sentient jelly, no matter how heavy he may be." He -took a deep breath and closed his eyes tightly as the figure of liquid -crimson walked into him. - -Just for a moment, as Rapley shut his eyes, the world was a warm and -freshly fizzling world of amniotic peace. A gentle but firm wash of -pressure blushed his cheeks and sucked his clothes against his body. His -hearing closed into a muffled swallow of bass and after a few seconds he -snorted bubbles. Eyes still closed, Rapley experimentally waggled his -fingers. They dragged in the embrace of a thick fluid. He blinked one -eye open, then the other. The world was shot through a swimming red -grainy prism, and the visual effect was not unpleasant. Lungs beginning -to tingle with panic, he flicked his eyes left and right and found -himself standing upright, arms stretched out to the sides of him, -encased entirely within the living suit of crimson liquid. - -Rapley lowered his arms half a yard. The suit followed as if reading his -nerve impulses. Rapley lifted a leg and hopped, and his wobbling red -suit bent and hopped with him. Rapley would have chuckled if he had had -sufficient breath. Through his swimming vision he saw the solid figure -of Mr Violet standing in front of him, fists curled tight by his sides, -mouthing stern words and looking for something to remonstrate with. Ms -Bound stood beside him prodding the bones of her fingers against the -amorphous yet unyielding sides of the liquid form. There was a a blur of -fur as Fangles sped around him, trotting in circles with murder in his -yellow eyes. - -Rapley gave a hesitant wave and showed his thumbs, but his heaving chest -belied such optimism. He staggered backward slightly as a sense of -fidgety desperation seared his airways. As he staggered, he cast his -eyes up and caught sight of the slithery reptile brain bobbing above him -in a stretched bulb of the red suspension. At least I'm going with -dignity, he thought to himself as his lungs were squeezed within the -passionate grip of suffocation. Rapley's eyes closed and his conscious -thoughts fluttered away like leaves on the wind� - - - -

He sat up, as quick as the snap of a mousetrap, choking -and gasping for breath. A great cough of red liquid splashed from his -throat and arced perfectly through the air. He watched as it curved in -front of him and spattered onto the dusty, wreckage-strewn floor. The -droplets stayed still for just a moment and then regrouped into a fat -puddle, as if an invisible net had been drawn around them. With a loud -"ping", they disappeared entirely. - -Rapley wiped his mouth and watched the red froth on his hand bubble and -pop into nothingness in the same manner. - -Mr Violet lay atop a mound of rubble to his left, shaking off a thin -residue of the crimson fluid from his hair. It flew through the air like -a slung handkerchief, vanishing before it hit the ground. - -Fangles was shaking his mad pelt free of thousands of red drops, -sneezing great gobs of the stuff from his nostrils at the same time. The -air around him buzzed and glittered with countless rubies which suddenly -coagulated into one cricket ball-sized jewel. It bobbed above him, -wobbling with viscosity, and then took its leave with a louder, more -bassy pop which made their eyes swim. - -"..it tried us all.." spluttered Violet, "..one after the other, -surrounding us and..tasting our thoughts.." - -Rapley shook off his disorientation. "I felt it frolicking inside my -mind, leaving its mucky little pawmarks on the furniture." He made a -face like a cat exorcising a ball of fur. "Most impudent!" - -He glanced up at Mr Violet, who was staggering towards the nearest porthole. - -"Rapley. Come and see." - -Rapley hopped to his feet and took his place next to Violet at the glass. - -"He seems to have found what he was looking for." sighed Violet. - -Outside, scant metres from the hull, bobbed the reclining figure of Ms -Myrtle Bound, encased in a shining, undulating, transparent spacesuit of -purest crimson. - -Tiny circles appeared on the surface of the red suit as if droplets had -fallen into it, dripping as they arrived from the Exhibition. - -Ms Bound saw Rapley and Violet watching her, and she gave a little wave, -waggling her limbs in the fashion of a delighted child. - -Her voice shimmered through the hall suddenly loud, distinct and as if -spoken close up against a microphone. - -"I have a new skin, new nerves which no longer ache with the sting of -fresh air, the coarse rub of rough clothing, the acid burn of fresh -water in the mornings. The beauty of the stars is reflected in my red, -red skin. I'm surrounded by a billion living, burning objects which shoot -through the cold vacuum on their own secret missions. And now I am one -of them - a tiny shining ember of curiosity with no boundaries and no -pain and no vanity to speak of. It says we can play forever, or until I -fall asleep. Though I don't know how I shall ever sleep with forever in -front of me. Oh, Pasha," here, the voice faltered briefly, "Oh, Violet. I -shall see the fashions and the feasts of countless new worlds. And I -will never have to worry about having to explain them to a single soul." - -Mr Violet lowered his head and walked away from the porthole. - -Rapley pressed his nose against the glass. - -"Will there be tea?" Said Rapley. - -The booming voice of Ms Bound laughed. - -"Silly," she giggled, a hint of distortion crackling the broadcast. - -"And will you write back sometime?" said Rapley brightly, "About wars -and alien hemlines?" - -Ms Bound giggled again, a static sizzle running heavily through the sound. -"If time allows. There is so very much to see." - -The red suit bobbed away into the void. They heard another burst of -static, followed by tinny laughter, and then the line went dead. - - - -

One by one, they walked into the azure doorway. Fangles -disappeared with a mighty boom and an overpowering smell of burnt fur. -Mr Violet took a last look at the porthole and muttered "Cheerio, old -girl." Then he too strode through the shivering door. - -Rapley wedged a couple of manuscripts under his arm and stuffed a box of -Krellian teabags into his capacious jacket pocket. As an afterthought he -picked up Mr Gielgud's singed and ragged bowler hat. He wiped some blood -off with his sleeve and wedged it on his head. - -Rapley frowned as he looked around the debris of the Exhibition. He lit -a crumpled cigarette, cleared his throat and addressed the hall. "If -there is anything alive in here, be you a brainy microbe with bat ears, -an invisible Banachee Merrigob, a clump of sentient cloud formations -drifting through the corridors. Be you a zincworm with a language -translator or one of those vile empathetic sponges from the sump seas of -the UMth dimension. If you're a Congealer of the Sygn, a Vanishing -Smiler... whatever you are, I can hear thinking." - -Rapley flicked the cigarette against the wall. - -"Well, look after the place, that's all. You're in charge." - -Turning towards the doorway, he caught sight of himself reflected in a -porthole. The bowler hat looked idiotic so he took it off and kicked it -high and hard to the other side of the hallway. He noticed the heel of -his right shoe was dangling like a broken jaw. - -"Oh, go home, Rapley." He sighed, turning out the lights. - -The door gave a blue burp and he was gone. - -Drifts of dust settled like snow upon the orderly stacks of wreckage. -The ship's hull creaked and hummed, the air ducts sighed, creatures -stopped holding their breath and stepped out of the air. - -The true exhibits, finding themselves alone at last, blinked as they spread into the light. - -© Tom Davies 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] janitor.jpg - - -[*ITEM] To Serve - -[*AUTHOR] Matthew Kirshenblatt - -[*BLURB] As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence -is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
-- Carl Jung - -[*DESCRIPTION]

We find her in the Gutters. - -It�s like a bad corporate dystopian film noir: the kind they used to -scare us with right in the childhood. My partner�s still gawking on this -� travesty in front of us as I�m already at her side. - -I can tell that it�s bad. Not terminal, but bad. She�s in a plastered -pink latex dress and she�s soaked. Why is it always raining in these -fucking stories that are always real life? Her leg is not supposed to be -bending that way. - -But her head. Goddammit all, they did a number on her face. It's all -tangled dark hair, blood, and metal. Either they mashed her with a chunk -of stainless steel or she�s a girl that really likes her metal � - -�Damn,� my partner says, kneeling beside me on the wet concrete, �Is she -even�� - -There�s this low whine. At first, I think it�s interference. The -advert-murals in the Gutters never really work all that great to begin -with and with all the hack-jobs and shattered plasta-glass around it�s -probably a miracle that they give us this much light. - -It takes only a moment to realize that the sound�s coming from her. My -partner�s better at following orders than dealing with people. I make my -decision quickly. �You,� I tell my partner, �check around for some ID. -I�ll talk to her. Go.� - -I�m not paying attention to him anymore. I�m placing her wrist in my -hand to get a feel for her pulse, �Miss? Miss, stay awake please. Miss, -I need you to tell me what happened here?� - -She needs to stay conscious. I see one blue sliver open on -the most battered part of her face. It's unfocused and muddled with -fear. I take her hand and I squeeze it. - -�Hey,� my partner calls out, �I found a purse. Credits are still -in there. Damned if I know why they -didn�t take it. Says she�s a waitress nearby on the Docks.� - -�That�s not far from the Gutters,� I mutter to myself and her: to keep -her alert. - -I want to ask her what in the hell she was thinking being down in the -Gutters at night. Not even the cops come down here at this time: not if -they knew what was good for them. I want to shout at her, but it�s not -her fault. She doesn't deserve this. And looking at the injuries and -knowing no-one took her credit chips, this looks very fucking personal. - -And that�s enough for me. - -�Call it in,� I tell my partner, still trying to see if she�s breathing -or not, �Tell the Shelter we need some back-up and a forensic. And a -Talker,� I add, �definitely a Talker.� - -My partner groans, �A forensic�s probably not gonna help. Cheapest -scanners in the world, man. Those fuckers are probably squeaky-clean and -long gone by now.� - -�Tell them to bring it anyway,� I still can�t find her pulse and the -ground seems to be thrumming through me. There must be -a generator nearby. - -�Man, we�re just a Volunteer outfit. Neighbourhood Eye. All that, you -know? That�s for the police to�� - -�The only thing the City�s given us Gutter-trash is glow-in-the-dark -advert night-lights,� I�m beginning to remember that I�m pissed off and -that my partner�s a bit of an asshole, �The Guilds will pay for our -lights, but not our security problems. Scan her ID number through, if -you need something useful to do.� - -I�m not surprised he didn�t do that. He doesn�t think too hard. Good for -the gun in his pocket � and not the non-existent one he tells the ladies -about � but definitely not for the details. But if she�s not from around -here, she could be in another district and out of jurisdiction. The -police there might be a better help to her if we scan her number. Maybe -she didn�t have time to tap that ID before � - -�Um, man?� - -I see it before he does. She is moaning quietly again and shifting her -head. - -�Miss � don�t move.. We�re � we�re getting help for you �� - -�Man, the number says�� - -�I know what the fucking number says, you dumb fuck!� I�m snarling at -him and looking at the side of her face she just showed me, �Please, -just shut up. Shut�the fuck�up for a bit.� - -I'm staring at a mass of burning circuits and mangled wires underneath -tatters of skin. I thought it was just the blood that made that side of -her head glitter like that. Good old Heinlein would have called her an -Artifact. I call this whole situation a piece of work. - -I see a dark stream of waste flowing out of her mini-skirt. It smells -like liquid rubber and she's whimpering. When she speaks, her voice is -all static-filled pain. - -�Please �� her voice reverbs, and I wonder if it's because her cords are -crushed or if it�s that half the skin on her face is gone, �No � I -won�t. I won�t �� - -�Guy,� my partner�s pulling at my shoulder, �She�s a Number. Bought -herself out of the Slippery Diner. Not our problem.� - -�Did you call up the Shelter?� I realize the thrumming beneath me is the -hum of her cardiac generator flowing power into her body. I�m taking off -my jacket and putting it over her body. - -�Yeah, but we don�t have time for this. She�s just a �� - -�Just a what?� I�m not looking at him because I know I�m going to punch -him if I look at him, �A Skin-Job? Is that it? Tell me, man, do you -think you�d still look pretty if it was you without your skin?� - -He says nothing. His cowardice saves him from a decking. - -�Call them the fuck up again,� I say in a much quieter voice, �Tell them -to bring one of those Artificers. I know we have them. So call. Now.� - -He shrugs. I stare him down and he walks off. It's almost a good thing -we're in the Gutters. There are none of them damn Registration Officers -here to really cause trouble. Number-watching, my ass. Those -stormtroopers make my partner look like freaking Archie Bunker. - - -�H-help �� - -She�s looking up at me. Her one blue eye is pleading. My hand is still -in hers. She�s cold to the touch. I know enough to figure that it�s a -circulation problem. She might have been warm any other time but this. I -grip her hand again. - -�Help�s on the way, miss,� I tell her, �You�re a waitress at the Slippery?� - -She makes a sound almost like a yes. - -�I�ve not been there a while now,� I see the lights of the crew coming -in the dark, �best sushi rolls ever.� - -I might have even seen her there. She could�ve served me and I would -never know it. She looked like she was somewhere else: hoping for a -night on the town. I might never know what happened. And no one ever -would if we hadn�t got here. She would have been just another lost -Number in the Gutter trash. - -�Don�t worry, miss. We�re part of the Gutter Shelter. We don�t leave -anyone behind. Anyone.� - -She looks up at me. The gears in the side of her face make a whirring -sound. The flesh part of her face that�s not fucked up is scrunching. -The metal part of her is shifting. A tear comes out of her one blue eye. -I realize she�s trying to smile, or cry. - -It�s breaking my fucking heart. - -I realize, later, when they�ve taken her away and my fingers hurt that -she�d actually been gripping my hand too. - -© Matthew Kirshenblatt 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] toserve.jpg - -[*ITEM] Sibyl - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] It's all true. Look it up. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Myksos was full of noises, though they -were not all sweet enough to send Caliban back to sleep. The -high-pitched pulsing of cicadas, roars from argumentative old men -comfortably pissed on ouzo, bursts of karaoke from bleary tourists -fobbed off with cheap retsina, tavernas blaring bazouki music amplified -beyond sensible recognition. And of course the persistent wash of the -Aegean lapping against the surrounding shoreline. - -Inland, beyond the groves of twisted olive trees, dull bells clanked -from scrawny livestock on the hillside. Higher, hidden from the ground -by stony outcrops, halfway up the steep seaward-facing slope where a few -thorny shrubs had rooted in rock clefts, a trick of the wind gave rise -to a deep hollow fluting as it gusted fitfully across the narrow -entrance of a concealed cave. This inhuman sound was once believed to -be the voice of a Sibyl. - -After some months of bureaucratic delay, Garron had eventually been -granted official access to the site. Local inhabitants avoided the -area, whether through lingering superstition or simple inertia, he did -not know. For whatever reasons, no research had been done here in -recent times. Unlike the legendary oracles at Delphi or Cumaea there -was no record of association with Apollo, or indeed with any other deity -from the archaic pantheon. It was this anomaly, coupled with the Myksos -Sibyl�s gnomic prophecy about burning stones, that had first piqued -Garron�s curiosity. - -Clouded by legend, the origin of Sibyls dates back to the Bronze Age. -According to the Roman scholar Varro their generic name derives from the -Doric form �sios bylla� of the Greek �theos boule�, -meaning �she that tells the will of Zeus�, although this is now disputed -by etymologists. Traditionally female, divinely inspired, they were -given to blurting out ecstatic predictions, a behaviour which some say -was the result of inhaling narcotic gases. - -Under the Romans the original Sibylline Books, written in Greek verse, -were guarded by life-long custodians in the Temple of Jupiter on the -Capitoline Hill. They would consult the oracles and prescribe -appropriate rituals to avert calamities. Unfortunately the temple was -destroyed by fire in 83 BC, and only fragments of these oracles -survived. A subsequent collection was made, and duly consulted for the -next four hundred years, but these too were eventually burned, this time -for political reasons. - -Texts mentioning the Myksos Sibyl are very few, but they agree on -her oracular words: �την -επίτευξη -σοφία πριν -από τις κρύες -πέτρες -φέρνουν -φωτιά�, which translate roughly as �Grow wise -before the cold stones burn.� No-one had been able to make sense of -this apparent instruction. Garron hoped that by exploring the site he might -at least stumble upon a clue. - -

Among those visitors who strayed off the hill path favoured by goats, -even the most intrepid climbers, finding footholds to be unusually -treacherous, soon chose less precipitous routes. But Garron had trained -with a rescue team in the Cairngorms led by the redoubtable Andy McKyle, -a scrupulously safety-conscious instructor. After making a careful -study of the terrain, Garron had discovered a way down from the top; -difficult but accessible, especially with the benefit of his lightweight -climbing gear. - -There was nothing to indicate the nature of the site; no ruined walls, -no ceremonial markings, no evidence of cultivation. Whatever there was -to be found had to be within. As he manoeuvred himself to peer into the -recessed cave-mouth a penetrating shaft of sunlight caught the green -iridescence of a beetle's wing-case. It glowed like a dropped jewel -against the dark interior. Garron smiled approvingly. A -proprietary talisman, he thought. - -The entrance was narrow. Easing his torso cautiously through to its -inner ledge he flicked on his headlamp. At first the light dissipated -into sheer emptiness. He shifted his cramped position, accidentally -dislodging some loose fragments from the ledge. Trying to keep the -powerful beam focussed, he watched them plunge silently into the abyss. -No wonder others have been deterred from exploring this place. -As the light swept down into the unmeasured depths Garron swore softly -to himself when he suddenly glimpsed what was illuminated at the very -foot, and knew he had to make the descent. - -It took him nearly an hour, keeping to bedrock ridges, ensuring the -security of ropes for what would be an even more strenuous climb back -up. As he slowly neared level ground he entered a realm of baroque -splendour; a receding vista of rock formations infused with a display of -subtle colours. From the sloping ceiling there appeared to hang -draperies like frozen aurorae, interspersed with a forest of cones, -needles and more robust columns. There were what looked like outcrops -of glistening coral, pillars festooned with spiral ornamentation, -tapering spires rising from the distant floor, where the fantastic -lithic architecture was reflected by a still pool, half obscured by a -series of platforms or terraces, each with its own surreal -configurations. Garron knew that he was witnessing the results -of thousands of years of geological processes. Could these be the -cold stones? He was aware that many of the apparently solid -structures, so long undisturbed, were brittle enough to shatter if -struck accidentally. His feet finally touched the surface about fifty -metres from the clear pool, which he saw was enclosed by a natural -rimstone dam. The sound created by the wind far above had now become an -intermittent bellowing, which echoed and re-echoed among the encrusted -columns. Even after the the echoes had faded he imagined he could sense -a residual pulse which continied to resonate subsonically throughout the -fabric of the cave, and wondered whether at an even deeper level there -might be a subterranean river. This was a reasonable assumption, but he -could hardly have guessed the truth. Switching on his camera, he began -to explore. - -Garron was relieved to note that the air was breathable, although he -thought he could detect a faint tang of ammonia, which might suggest the -presence of bat-droppings. Occasional scuttlings from the direction of -the pool confirmed that the cave system had developed its own ecology, -which he had no wish to disturb. However, he did find signs of previous -disturbance; earlier probably by several thousand years, according to -archaeological colleagues with whom he later shared his sequence of -images. They also concluded that there must once have been a far more -accessible entrance closer to the level of the cave floor, long since -sealed by a rock-fall. Exact dating of the items would have to wait for -proper sampling and analysis by a fully trained team, but the success of -this preliminary survey meant that at least funding for future -expeditions should not be a problem. - -The skeletal fragments were undoubtedly human and almost certainly -Neolithic, judging from the artefacts visible in the same sediment: -ceramic shards, beads of shell and polished marble, even flakes of -high-value obsidian, which his colleagues believed originated in Melos. -A sheltered niche near the pool contained a blackened area with remnants -of animal bones, possibly of jackal, wolf or lynx. - -Although he came to be credited with the rediscovery of the Myksos -cavern, Garron remained disappointed that in terms of Sibylline research -he had returned empty-handed. Later expeditions, though valuable to -specialists in other fields of pre-history, found nothing remotely -oracular, at least, not for several millennia. This was not surprising, -for the device conceived by long-term planners, and situated far below -the site of any excavation in Garron�s era, was not intended to be -discovered until a much later phase of human development. It was -designed to continue functioning for an extremely long time, and was -equipped to re-locate automatically if in danger of premature detection. -This escape function had been programmed as an afterthought, when the -craft in which the Installers had arrived was accidentally seen hovering -near the foot of the hill by a startled woman collecting medicinal -herbs. Her mind had been implanted with the necessary warning. She -would spread the word in her own tongue. - -

There is a faint unremarkable star, smaller than our sun. It is called -Gliese 710, and is almost 64 light-years distant. In astronomical terms -it is a 9th magnitude main sequence suspected variable star, -detected not many years ago in the constellation Ophiuchus. In relation -to its distance its proper motion is unusually small. That means it�s -heading our way. - -It has taken more than four billion years to achieve the solar system�s -current equilibrium. Gliese 710 is set to stir things up. At its -closest approach it will pass within one light-year, generating swarms -of comets beyond the experience of humankind. These showers will stream -sunwards, disintegrating as they sweep close to planets, becoming -meteors. There will be impact events. - -Deep in the Myksos cave a steady subsonic pulse confirms that the -predictive device continues to update information from that distant -stellar source, calculating gravitational fluctuations, refining its -vast store of accumulated data until the exact moment when those cold -stones become incandescent as they fall to earth. - -We have only 1,360,000 years until this occurs. Soon we should start to -think about preparing to leave. It would, after all, be wise. - - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] myksos.jpg - -[*ITEM] Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] Time to visit the Inner City - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The following extracts are taken -from the diary of Samuel Ohms. The diary was discovered wedged between -two novels in the Romance section of Ashford library. The current -whereabouts of Mr Ohms are a matter of some speculation. - -

February 12th 2008

- -
I have discovered another city within Ashford, nestled -within the confines of the world we see like a secret compartment in a -spy�s suitcase. Or more accurately like a shadow within one�s own body, -perhaps on the lungs. - -I chanced upon it late last night as I was walking home from visiting -you, my love. As I walked from the churchyard I entered the maze of -streets which lead to Scullery Row and the town centre. At once a line -of matches seemed to ignite above and to the sides of me. The -matchbursts were a brilliant white and I stopped in my tracks and looked -around me. I was inside a cube of these lights, which sparked and fizzed -with an intense brightness. Almost immediately they were extinguished, -leaving my eyes to reacclimatize to the darkness. I was not in Ashford. - -A street sign of burnt metal and molten calligraphy told me I was on -Fraughten Street, and a black stone doorway breathed a stench of -cinnamon and meat toward me. Something tapped and scuttled inside the -doorway. An indistinguishable shape slithered. I stepped backwards, -matches struck in a gateway of lights and I was home once more. -
- -

February 13th 2008

- -
I slept perhaps a single hour last night, if that. Then, in -the bright cold morning, I drank a pot of coffee and walked down to -Scullery Row. As I walked across the point of entry, the lights -heralded my arrival and I stumbled once more into the gloom and dankness -of Fraughten Street. - -This time a curious fellow stood by the stone doorway, throwing torn -passports into a battered top hat at his feet. His thin frame was -crooked and the skin had an unpleasant green tinge to it. He leered and -gestured towards the doorway. - -I remembered your spirit, my love, your unquenchable sense of adventure -and I embraced the moment. My footsteps were silent on the wet stone -steps. - -I eventually came upon a low-ceilinged cellar, a flooded man-made pool -with stagnant water sloshing lazily to itself, sprigs of algae bubbling -on the surface. My guide sat on a bench by the pool. The bench was -ornately carved into scenes of ruin and orgy. - -�A lazarus pool�, he sighed sadly. �See- they are born in the pit -underwater, but the waters kill them instantly and reincarnate them. -Eternal rebirth just to splutter a few drowning breaths and see the -short panic of your life flash before your eyes like an -bursting aneurysm.� - -I peered more closely at the filthy liquid and could just about make out -small figures in the weed-strangled depths, paddling weakly, sending -squalls of bubbles up to the surface, where they popped around the -fronds of the algae, giving the vegetation valuable nutrients. - -�My garden, and I tend it well� said the gardener, spitting on his boots -and polishing them with a hank of leather. Then he threw them to the -ground and lunged at me, grabbing at my coat with damp, scrabbling -fingers. I turned and ran up the steps through a gate of light. -
- -

February 14th 2008

- -
I later found a ragged paper map in my coat pocket, possibly -placed there by the gardener. - -The town purported to be of Ashford but the layout of the streets and -buildings differed wildly from the town I knew. - -This ghastly street plan seemed only to intersect with Ashford at -certain designated junctures: at Scullery Row, at a bus stop and in an -underpass at the railway station, along the eastern edge -of the William Harvey hospital, in cemeteries. I chose the underpass, -flickering lights illuminated the dankness of the passage for a brief -moment, then I stood blinking in a new atmosphere, trying to read the -soiled map in my hands: the Germery, the north end. I walked on past the -vast brutal architecture of Bone Shard Harbour, with its moored -Men-o'-war and Coelacanths, the black sump seas burbling and -slapping heavily against the hulls of the gut ships. - -I visited the public dissection tables and the deep vivisection wells, -and passed through pastures of neon and silicate to -the richer industrial areas of Carapace and Sprain. I travelled the -sluggish monorails that arc disconsolately through the low smoke-filled -clouds hanging like an awning over the city. - -Tonight I will loop the endless Bleakways and may never return. - -If you are here, my love, I will find you, and -together we will sing the dark hymns that the creatures of this city -howl to keep themselves warm. - -But in my heart I know you are not here. For this is where the -living go to die.
- -© Tom Davies 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] ashford.jpg - -[*ITEM] Prutt's Game
by Thyles Dudoriac.
Fissile, Sprent & Co. -2013 -
- A Review. - -[*AUTHOR] Don B Levitt - -[*BLURB] This is just the second review published in Mythaxis. The -decision was taken because reviews of this important book in other -publications appeared to lack substance. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

At the outset we are confronted with news -reports of simultaneous but disparate events: a crop failure in Bhutan, -the death of an elderly American poet, the closure of a Chinese bicycle -factory, an archaeological discovery on a remote Scottish island, -rumours of vampirism in Omaha, Nebraska, an astronomical observation -which appears to conflict with current cosmological theory. - -Prutt, when not engaged in his musical researches, sampling exotic foods -or avoiding amatory entanglements, is preoccupied with mastering a -frustratingly absorbing game called Solversion, and pays little -attention to daily news items unless they threaten imminent catastrophe. -We share his gradual awareness that the lives of people around him are -being disturbed, his eventual suspicion that the cause or causes of this -disturbance could be traced to one or more of the reported events he had -ignored, and bizarrely, that there seem to be inexplicable parallels -between these happenings and his progress through the increasingly -challenging levels of Solversion. - -As we follow Prutt's progress through the game, Dudoriac generously -provides us with clues which may or may not prove helpful in making -connections between external events and the game itself. Some of these -are inevitably discovered and pursued by Prutt, but others will be -spotted by the astute reader. The challenge is to know when we are -deliberately being misled. Chapter headings, some bristling with -homonyms, match different game levels: Gates & F�tes, Gardens & Wardens, -A-Trails & B-Trails, Para-sights, Crone City... - -Throughout the text are scattered sudden microcosmic explorations, such -as the architecture of a breadcrumb, prismatic condensation on a -spider's web, the texture of perspiring skin, the colours in a patch of -lichen... These may seem either like little party favours for the -attentive reader, or more like road-blocks for the frustrated, but in my -view they are rewarding both as fine descriptive passages, and for the -further concealed signposts they contain. - -By the time Prutt has manoeuvred his way through to Crone City, in his -external life he has become deeply involved with Anna Logue, whose -safety he believes is threatened by another Solversion player. This is -the mysterious Iryon Quarth, whose subtle manipulations are revealed in -a series of startling d�nouements. The unmasking of Quarth, and the -breathtaking rescue of Anna from his clutches, bring the novel to its -conclusion. - -In a note to musicologists, Dudoriac tells us that the structure of the -book is that of a six-part fugue. I am willing to predict that this -aspect alone will provide a subject for future theses. Others may, with -academic relish, pick out the allegorical and mythical elements, the -linguistic devices, the influences of other writers. This is such a -disturbing, powerful and exciting work that such analysis is inevitable. -Dudoriac's insights into the psychology of addictive games suggest a -great deal of preparatory research, and Prutt's tortuous progress -through the game of Solversion is in itself a tour-de-force. -Dudoriac's skill in weaving credible links between the game, the lives -of his characters and the seemingly random news reports is quite -astonishing. For a first novel this is puppet-mastery of a very high -order. Don't miss it! - - -26.2.13 -© Don B. Levitt 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] prutt.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Famous Ashfordians No. 3 -
The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse - -[*AUTHOR] Tom Davies - -[*BLURB] The only sin is the sin of being born -
Samuel -Beckett - -[*DESCRIPTION]

There had been rumours of unusual events -occurring throughout the day. The gardeners at the William Harvey -Hospital in Ashford reported an atypical silence amongst the wildlife -within the grounds. Birds gripped their branches, as still as twigs. A -dray of squirrels scuttled up the drainpipes outside the maternity -wing, hopping like puffs of smoke from one windowsill to the next, -peering en masse through the panes of glass. The caretaker's -old, half-lame Manx cat dragged himself from his basket and swayed -mournfully into the middle of the main road. A passerby remarked that -the feline didn't blink as the tyres on the bus went over his body. - -When questioned later after his recovery, the orderly remembered that -the screaming from the maternity ward had begun shortly after 3pm. He -immediately recognized the screams as being qualitatively different from -those emitted during a normal birth. They were screams of rage and -disappointment and disgust, and they heralded the birth of the boy, -Marjoram. - -As the orderly reached the ward, the doors slowly and stutteringly -pushed outwards, as if something short and powerful were leaning -against them. A face appeared low in the crack of the opening doors: -smooth, wet and stained red, with a viscous caul hanging off it. Tufted -with down, with an elongated face, the figure cried and coughed and -never took its eyes off the orderly, blinking as if it were underwater. -It pushed the doors open and fell through onto its potbelly, naked and -strong and a foot high. Behind the baby, a silhouette ran away down the -corridor and a new mother dragged herself from a cubicle by her -fingertips. The baby righted itself and then sat on its haunches. -Outside the hospital, the howling of animals began. The orderly saw the -concealed scalpel too late. - -The police were called but the boy was last seen tottering down towards -the cancer ward, sniffing the air hungrily. His mother disappeared -screaming and bleeding into the crowds outside, never to be heard from -again. - -

It was said he lived in the air ducts and in the grime -and darkness and the dripping pipes of the basement, and in the spaces -between the walls. Boys and girls in the children's wing would tell -nursing staff that during the night a fat, pale, sweating child with a -long face had crept out of the ceiling and dropped to the floor, -entertaining them with a soft and skillful tap dance, his naked clubbed -feet clopping quietly on the linoleum floor. He produced flowers and -beetles and coins from up the sleeves of his ragged white laboratory -coat. The new arrival would display tricks and sleight of hand magic, -making signed business cards appear inside sick children's mouths so -they gagged and giggled at the same time. The cards were small oblongs -with roughly torn edges, fashioned from cladding or insulation. They -bore the name 'Marvellous Marjoram' in thickly penciled italics. The -nursing staff, remembering the occurrences some years earlier, called in -the medical authorities, who temporarily re-housed the young patients -and fumigated the entire structure. For good measure, they shut dogs in -the basement overnight without any food. All was quiet for some months -before children started to go missing. - -He was last seen high on the hospital roof, a small shinbone held -between his snarling teeth as he leapt from chimney to chimney, pistol -shots tinking the brickwork around him. News cameras caught him atop the -highest pot, his white coat flapping in the harsh winds. The camera -zooms in as a constable loses his footing and slides slowly, inevitably -down the roof. The child Marjoram throws a tiny skull that bounces off -the constable's head as he slides to his death. The camera finds -Marjoram's face once more; we see wiry whiskers starting to matt his -cheeks. His teeth are protuberances, yellow and dank. His huge dark eyes -never blink, and he bows, taking the shrieks and screams and hate-filled -baying of the crowd below as applause of the rarest and most welcome -kind. His smile reaches halfway around his head. Then another pistol -shot cracks off the tiles and he is gone. - -© Tom Davies 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] ashford.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Toyscape - -[*AUTHOR] John A. Frochio - -[*BLURB] A chilling little tale. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Amanda shivered, still very cold, and -peeked around the corner. Her long red locks fell across her face. Ooh, -look at all the colors. - -"Brendan, come look." - -Brendan didn't come. However, several other children peeked. They all -gasped. A vast landscape of brightly colored objects spread out before -them. There were large machines in crates and vehicles of all shapes and -sizes. Shelves lining the walls were filled with all kinds of delightful -objects, big and small and in-between. There were bikes and trikes and -balls and crawlers and bats and hats and gyroscopes and kaleidoscopes -and Seussoscopes and Seussophones. There were intraship netlink pads and -pods and pens and pins and all kinds of flashing, blinking, blaring and -blabbing electronic gadgets. Some machines ran on tracks, some up and -down walls, some across the high ceiling and some from one side of the -room to the other. There were many objects that moved when you told them -to move and many that just sat there and waited for you to figure out -what to do with them. - -Brendan finally came. He said, "Hey, look at all the toys. From here to -there." - -"And everywhere," said Amanda. - -Ahmed called out, "Hey, mommy and daddy are still frozen like popsicles. -What do we do?" - -Amanda and Brendan shrugged. - -Nobody knew what to do. - -More children, still shivering from the cold, poured into the vast room -full of toys, past rows upon rows and shelves upon shelves. Soon they -were all playing energetically with the toys, their chills quickly -forgotten. They found they could make things light up and make all kinds -of interesting sounds and move things in all kinds of different ways. -There was no end to the fun. - -When they got hungry, they found they could make all kinds of different -food, which was delivered to them right where they played. So they -played until they were hungry and then they ate; and they played until -they were tired and then they slept. There really wasn't much else they -needed. - -While their parents continued the long sleep on their way to a new -world, all their children � suddenly, inexplicably awakened � began -their new life much earlier, in their own new world. - -Later they realized they needed more power to keep their world going. - -Ahmed said, "What do we do?" - -Brendan shrugged. - -Amanda pointed toward the big wall switches. Amanda was smarter than -most. She figured out how they could get more power. - -So they shut down the cryo chambers to get more power and they continued -to play and eat and sleep and play and eat and sleep in their own new -world. - - -© John A. Frochio 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] toyscape.jpg - -[*ITEM] A Room with a Vu - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] The continuation of Martin Clark's thriller with a Byzantine -plot. Part 1 was Let -Every Voice be Still, Part 2 was All Avenues Closed. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Unfriendly hands pushed me down into a -plastic chair. The hood came off. I faced the glare of an Anglepoise -lamp in an otherwise darkened room. I had the sense of being in a large, -vaulted space but it still felt hot and stuffy, even in comparison to -the trunk of the car. As kidnappings go it was a case of so far, so -conventional, although how they�d snatched me from under the watchful -eyes of my corporate minders was still a complete blank. - -A man perched himself on the edge of the desk, partially in the light. -He was tanned and wore a heavy gold signet ring. "Vaughn Vermeer. A -lot of people have been looking for you." - -His accent was East End London. I figured this crew as retired villains -living in Spain who�d lifted me as a favour. It wasn�t that big a -journey from Marbella to Lisbon in a high-end Mercedes. This whole setup -felt more like private enterprise than NovaRus, my former employers. I -stretched my legs and tried not to wince. "Then aren�t you the -clever ones." - -"Let�s keep this simple. Where�s the money?" - -"If I say �I don�t know� am I liable to get a smack from chummy -behind me?" - -He fiddled with his ring. "If you want to act dumb over this, sure, -be my guest. We can take as long as you like. It just depends on how -much of a face you want at the end." - -I sighed. "Look, do me one favour. I need to know what you -think you know. Then I can fill in the blanks and point out why -this isn�t going to end well for either of us." - -Another man spoke from off to my left. "Mister Vermeer, why prolong -this needlessly? You will either give us this information now or suffer -under interrogation, but talk you will." His delivery was clipped, -precise and betrayed no accent, but it was definitely English as a -foreign language. - -I twisted my head towards the new speaker but he was just a -grey-on-black blur. "Why should I co-operate? It�s not like I�m -ever walking out of here." - -"I see no need to kill you once the funds you stole have been -secured. In fact I would rather see you on the run, acting as a -distraction for other interested parties." - -It was obvious this new guy was the one calling the shots. "I -believe that�s called giving the sucker some false hope, bud, so that he -plays ball. Somehow I don�t see this crew being too keen on leaving any -witnesses behind." - -"Nevertheless that is the best deal on offer. Or we can do this the -hard way, as the saying goes." - -I hesitated, wondering if there was any mileage in co-operating. -"Just tell me what you think has happened and I�ll take it from -there." - -There was a pause. The shirt was sticking to my back and I could feel a -line of sweat trickling down from my hairline. Finally the foreigner -sighed. "You work as an investment analyst for the Lisbon office of -NovaRus Banking and Finance. They have been stripped of liquid assets, -in their entirety, by a two-man team of Finnish hackers based in Ivalo. -Despite this seemingly remote location one man is already dead and the -other has disappeared. This was the extent of the investigation by -NovaRus security personnel before your employer collapsed as a -commercial entity. Need I go on?" - -I shrugged, or tried to. "Why not, I haven�t heard anything so far -that makes me one of the bad guys." - -"Very well. NovaRus was founded on Russian Mafia money plus some -subsidiary funds certain oligarchs wished to squirrel away as insurance. -Although NovaRus is no longer actively employed in money laundering, -their backers take a decidedly �old school� approach to financial -failure. Especially one of this magnitude, especially one engineered by -you, Mister Vermeer. Make no mistake, you have offended a group who make -this �crew�, as you described them, look like babes in arms. I intended -no offence." - -The guy with the signet ring laughed. "None taken, Zunz. I�ve dealt -with the Kombinat and they don�t mess about. Real animals, some of them. -If they stop at using a blowtorch and bolt-cutters then you�re getting -off lightly." - -It was tough to keep the fear from my voice but I laughed as well. -"I�m well aware of who I work for, and just what they�re capable -of. Do you really think I�d be stupid enough to cross them?" - -Zunz moved slightly and I caught the glint of light on his round -spectacles. "Oh, you had help, and from quite a novel source, I -will grant you that. Very few people would have thought to utilise a -synthetic personality drawn from a virtual environment computer game. -You are to be applauded for your audacity." - -"You do realise how insane that sounds?" - -But I must have flinched or something, because when Zunz spoke again -there was a self-satisfied smile in his voice. "I traced the -instigators of this cyber-larceny back through intermediaries to one -Juan Canasta. In reality no more than another middle-man but even under -the most intense questioning he denied any involvement. The most intense -questioning imaginable, Mister Vermeer. I�m satisfied he was entirely -innocent, even though his associates were as equally convinced they were -working on his behalf. Seemingly I was at an impasse." - -"Tough luck. Putting me under the hammer won�t change -anything." - -From the suggestion of movement Zunz removed his glasses and polished -them. "I said seemingly, Mister Vermeer. Canasta was a vain -man and as part-payment for arranging a finance deal he had his persona -duplicated within Shadow Corporation, a multi-player virtual reality -game. One of those described as a �full sensory immersion experience�, -using the Ultra-Reality synaptic interface. Not my idea of -entertainment, but it takes all types, as they say. Obviously you had -help from the game controller in circumventing its communication -protocols, such that Canasta�s real-world contacts evidently believed -they were talking to the genuine article. Bravo, sir, even if it has -ultimately all been for nothing." - -There was another pause. Zunz replaced his glasses. "Now, as my -associate asked earlier � where is the money? Give me the account -details of where your synthetic Canasta hid the NovaRus funds and all -this will soon be over." - -I shook my head. "I got stiffed, right? I don�t know how, but -someone dumped me from the game before I got Canasta to-" - -The guy standing at my shoulder smacked the side of my head with -something hard � almost certainly a gun. It took a moment for the room -to come back into focus. - -Zunz sounded disappointed. "Simple denial will not suffice, Mister -Vermeer, surely you realise that? If you prove tiresome then I will -abandon you to more direct questioning at the hands of Mister King and -his associates." - -King swore under his breath. "Well, thanks for the name check, -Alonzo. Care to hand out my e-mail address as well?" - -"Oh, I think Mister Vaughn realises the chances of him living a -long and happy life are diminishing by the second, Harold." - -I could feel the situation slipping away and my future with it. -"Listen! Please, let me explain!" - -Zunz sniffed. "Do not try my patience." - -"NovaRus wanted to take down Cromarty Investment, I don�t know why. -More accurately, they wanted to steal the artificial intelligence which -governed the Cromarty trading database. It would know every-" - -"Steal an AI? Please!" - -"No, no, listen! AIs play games, AIs play a lot of games. -For some it�s the only time they get let out of the box. NovaRus found -out Cromarty liked to play Shadow Corporation and sent me in with a -virus. It screwed with the interface bandwidth protocols and allowed -porting of the AI into the virtual game environment, like it was a -disaster recovery transfer. It was then transferred out, but I -don�t know where." - -"And somewhere along the way you decided to turn on your employer -and empty their bank accounts? You will understand this does not sound -like a spur of the moment enterprise." - -"No, that was already on the cards." I took a deep breath. -"My daughter was kidnapped, supposedly by the HanaMed corporation, -who forced me to carry the virus." - -"You claimed previously it was NovaRus and now it is HanaMed?" - -"That was just misinformation on their part. I realised that -NovaRus had to be behind this, if only due to the lack of progress in -discovering who was responsible for taking Helene. NovaRus like to -employ family men as they�re more reliable, more loyal � or at least -they have more to lose. My wife�" I cleared my throat. "My -wife died in an accident and I found out Helene wasn�t my daughter, that -I wasn�t her real father. I guess NovaRus found out as well and decided -I was now an expendable asset, a cut-out should Cromarty come looking -for their AI." - -Zunz sounded weary. "You still have not mentioned the money." - -"A minute! Just after I introduced the virus another player, Duncan -Bonn, shot me. In the game I mean. That dumped me out but I still -retained a one-way audio link to his persona, so that I could hear what -was going on. It was Bonn who came up with the idea of plugging the -virtual Canasta into the real world and I was only too happy to oblige -by providing details of NovaRus accounts and access protocols." - -"You expect me to believe it was as easy as that?" - -"Of course not! I was so closely monitored at home I couldn�t -sneeze without my line manager sending round a box of tissues. There was -no way I could ever cultivate the contacts required to find someone like -the Finnish hackers. Anyway, like I said, it was Bonn�s idea and he only -pulled it off because the game controller was in on it. You should be -asking them what happened." - -Alonzo Zunz stepped forward into the light, his glasses two circles of -reflected light. "Now there, Mister Vermeer, is where we have a -problem." - -I felt my gut twist with fear. "A problem?" - -"Sandra Haas, the controller, is clinically brain dead. She was -found that way, still in her interface chair, smiling. Her autonomic -systems function but all higher reasoning is gone, almost as if her mind -has been wiped clean." - -"Uploaded, maybe." - -Zunz frowned. "Explain please?" - -I shook my head. "Never mind. What about Duncan Bonn?" - -"Ah, yes. Duncan Bonn has a date of birth, social security number, -a virtual profile, a presence on several social networking sites and -internet commerce history. But he does not exist." - -"What? Look, I�ve played several games with the guy, of course he -exists." - -"On-line, certainly he does, but in the real-world he has proven to -be somewhat more elusive. He has an address in Birmingham but none of -his immediate neighbours ever remember seeing him in the flesh. -Apparently he is frequently away from home, for extended periods of -time." - -"He�s a journalist. Plus he�s been doing research for some book -he�s writing." Even as I uttered the words I realised just how -little I knew about Duncan. - -Zunz inclined his head. "Yes, indeed, his occupation is listed as -that of freelance journalist. He has a steady, if unremarkable, series -of articles to his credit, mostly in obscure computer journals with a -highly specialised readership. But no, the more we look into Duncan Bonn -the man, the more he appears to be merely a sophisticated sock-puppet -created by Birmingham University." - -"A�No way! Then who�s been playing games as Bonn? I could swear -it�s the same personality each time." - -"It hardly matters now and in any event he no longer exists as a -run-time intelligence at Birmingham. I am afraid that brings us back to -you, Mister Vermeer, as the only participant in this affair that we -could lay hands on." - -"Doesn�t that tell you something, huh? Someone has been playing the -long con and I�m just the fall-guy." - -Harry King shifted on his perch. "But you�re our fall-guy, -Vermeer, so we get first crack at beating the truth out of you." -From behind me I heard someone crack their knuckles. - -Now that the �stick� had been produced I expected Zunz to step in with -the �carrot�, but he merely shook his head. "I did warn you, Mister -Vermeer. I am here to ensure that the required information is obtained, -nothing more. When it comes to persuasion I defer to Mister King. I -understand he is quite the expert." - -The big man grinned. "Damn right I am. Amateur boxer, bare-knuckle -and gloves. I know where to hit someone, and how hard. Don�t worry, -Vermeer, you won�t die on me, or even lose consciousness." He got -to his feet. "No matter how long it takes." - -I had nothing to bargain with. Bonn and Haas had screwed me royally. -Hands gripped my shoulders so that I couldn�t twist away from the -incoming blows. I could taste violence in the air. - -Zunz turned his head to one side, as if listening to a voice that only -he could hear. He frowned. "Now? I must advise you that we have yet -to�As you wish." He pursed his lips. "My apologies. I have -been instructed to take a more direct approach." It took me a -moment to realise he was apologizing to Harry King, not me. King -shrugged and walked past me, out of my field of vision. The hands on my -shoulders were removed. I heard a door open and close. - -A young woman replaced King at the desk in front of me. She looked like -an Alice in Wonderland clone, right down to the head band and pinafore -dress. I blinked in surprise. It was Blondie, an über fan of Debbie -Harry, just as I remembered her from playing Shadow Corporation. -For a moment game and reality merged and I looked round, hoping Mazy was -here as well. If she was then Zunz, King and every one of his associates -were going to die in the proverbial hail of bullets. Or, if they were -really unlucky, she�d use knives. - -Life failed to live up to my expectations. - -Blondie smiled. "Hello, Vaughn. You look very like your character, -I must say, if maybe a bit older. A bit more grey around the -temples." - -I looked at her, I looked at Zunz, I shook my head. It made no sense. -"Why is she here? She knows even less about what happened than I -do." - -Blondie slapped me across the face and I felt my nose break. It was like -being hit by a heavy oak floorboard. I cried out and snorted blood, one -hand clutching at my nose, the other held out to ward her off. -"Stop, for Christ�s sake! Jesus!" - -Zunz looked away, as if uncomfortable at the sight of blood. Blondie -leaned closer to me, her eyes shining. "Are you a religious man, -Vaughn Vermeer? I don�t see the point, personally, but some take comfort -from the idea of a better place, beyond this veil of tears." She -hit me in the gut, leaving me gasping. "I enjoy the world as it is. -I enjoy inflicting pain." - -I sucked in air, unable to understand how she could be so damn strong. -Then fear washed over me like a cold shower. "You�re an -augment?" - -She smiled, showing perfect teeth. "A short life but a happy one. I -have the strength to literally tear you limb from limb, although I doubt -Zunz here would appreciate the floorshow. You seem surprised to see me, -Vaughn, but surely you didn�t think your employers were smart enough to -conceal their preparations entirely? That virus you introduced into the -game environment had to come from somewhere, and those kind of geeks -like to brag." - -"What, you wanted to steal Cromarty as well? What the hell have -they got that makes their AI so valuable?" - -"Steal him? No, nothing so elaborate. If you�d kept to the game -scenario I�d have been able to ensure Cromarty crashed and burned, which -was the whole point as far as we were concerned. NovaRus would have -taken the fall, eventually, and that would have been an end of it. As it -stands, all we can salvage from this is the money." - -"Should I even bother to ask who �we� are?" - -Blondie patted my cheek and I managed not to flinch. "I�d only -lie. Now, speaking of the money�Zunz?" - -He lifted a gun from the desk and stepped forward. I tried to get up -but Blondie held me in place like an adult dealing with a squirming -child. Zunz held the weapon to my head. I closed my eyes. - -Phut. - -It was like being hit by a narrow-headed hammer; a sudden stab of agony -that spread into a diffuse blossom of pain. But I was still alive. -Blondie let go and I opened my eyes. She looked at me, expectantly. -"Say something." - -I blinked, fingering the spot on my head where I�d been �shot�. -"What?" - -"What?" - - -I was talking in stereo, except that the second voice wasn�t mine. Zunz -put down his �gun� and held up a control unit incorporating a small -speaker. "There is now a direct neural interface with the speech -centre of your brain. I shall turn it off for now, but rest assured you -will remain able to communicate clearly despite the physical state of -your body, within reason." - -I could tell that �within reason� wasn�t what Blondie had in mind. -"Christ, give me a break! How can I convince you I�m not in the -loop? I simply don�t know where the damn money is!" - -Blondie flexed her fingers. "That would be very unfortunate, -Vaughn, as then we�d have no further use for you, would we? Now, just -so you understand, keeping you alive doesn�t require arms, legs, -genitals, eyes or even a tongue. As long as blood loss remains within -acceptable limits I can reduce you to a dumb and blind torso without -impairing your ability to speak, if only by proxy. I�ll choose where to -start but you can call a halt at any time, as long as you�re willing to -co-operate. Be warned though, I won�t give you a second chance." - -Zunz wiped his mouth with a hand that trembled slightly. He looked -queasy. My mind raced, trying to find a way out. "Wait, -wait! You�re looking at this the wrong way. Canasta, the virtual -Canasta, engineered the transfer of funds from NovaRus, right?" - -She frowned. "So? That was just the �how�, not the �where�. Don�t -try and stall, Vaughn, I�ll just make it hurt all the more." - -"No, listen. I think this was always about the money and -lifting the Cromarty AI was just a smokescreen. I think this was an -inside job from start to finish � embezzlement, not theft." - -Blondie stepped on my foot, her seemingly diminutive frame exerting -pressure akin to being under the hoof of a shire horse. Augments were -jacked to the max, with sub-dermal ballistic shielding, a carbon-twist -musculature and sensory enhancement. I had more chance head-butting a -tank than taking her on. She ground her shoe against mine. "What, -a bad boy did it and ran away? Surely you can do better than that, -Vaughn?" - -I spoke through gritted teeth. "I�ll help. Finder�s fee." - -"You really are in no position to bargain, Vaughn." - -"You can�t afford to fuck this up twice." - -There was a pause. For a moment it looked like I�d pushed Blondie too -far � but then she smiled and stepped back. "Now we�re making -progress. There, Zunz, didn�t I tell you the feminine touch would work -wonders? Very well, Vaughn, explain to us why you believe someone -else within NovaRus is behind all this. If nothing else it will -make for an amusing anecdote." - -I took a deep breath, trying to order my thoughts. "Cromarty -Investment are small-fry. They�re no real threat to NovaRus, definitely -not enough of one to warrant sabotaging their operation in such a -convoluted fashion. I have to ask, did your backers say why they wanted -to stop NovaRus getting their hands on the rival AI?" - -Blondie looked at Zunz. He blinked. "We did not speak as to -motive. I did garner evidence that suggests our operation was driven by -a fear that NovaRus knew something concerning Cromarty that was not -public knowledge." - -"OK, fair enough, it was a spoiler. Right, now, think �money� from -the outset. I have knowledge of corporate funds and the means to access -them. I�m now classed as unreliable due to the death of my wife and the -knowledge that Helene isn�t really my daughter. They have less hold -over me because I have less to lose. Helene is kidnapped in a way that -makes it obvious NovaRus were responsible, further pushing me towards -what is euphemistically termed a �planned departure�. Duncan Bonn -suggests that the only way out is to crash NovaRus by stripping them of -all liquid assets. As soon as I give virtual Canasta the account -details I�m dumped from the game. It�s all too much of a coincidence. -There has to be a link between NovaRus, Birmingham University and the -game controller � Haas? Find that and you�ll find whoever was really -responsible." - -Zunz frowned. "Are you suggesting it was someone within your own -management structure? But if Cromarty were no rival to NovaRus, what -was the justification for such an operation? No, Mister Vermeer, simply -pointing the finger of suspicion elsewhere will not do. Miss Voss, -kindly continue with your interrogation." He looked away in -anticipation of renewed violence. - -But Blondie � Miss Voss � hesitated. "The Lisbon office wasn�t a -big operation, Vaughn, you must know who it is you�re accusing. Spit it -out." - -I wet my lips. Putting a name to a theory was going to create a -shit-storm for someone down the line. "Arcady Petrov, the -head of security. He�s the only one who could have sanctioned the -Cromarty operation and arranged to have my daughter kidnapped despite -her corporate minders." - -Blondie stroked my cheek. "Nice try, fingering someone who�s been -recalled to Moscow and is probably dog food by now." Her hand -became a fist. - -"No, wait! Did he get there, huh? Check up and I bet you�ll find -that Petrov is in the wind." - -Zunz looked at me. "Even if that were true the failure of his -operation gives him ample motive to jump ship, as the saying goes. Of -itself it does not prove his involvement in grand larceny." - -My mouth was dry and I had to cough before continuing. "Petrov is -a jerk, banished to Lisbon when Moscow society tired of his drunken -antics. He may be ambitious and greedy but the man is no criminal -mastermind. No, he was part of this but someone else put it -together." - -Zunz stepped closer, clearly irritated. "Enough of your vague -theories and accusations. Either volunteer something of use or Miss -Voss will proceed as planned." - -"Cromarty screwed Debbie!" I was conscious of gabbling and -forced myself to speak in a calm and logical-sounding manner. "I -mean, if you look hard at the company hosting Shadow Corporation I bet -you�ll find someone was paid to allocate Sandra Haas as game -controller. Let me guess, despite her in-game persona the real woman is -a bit socially awkward? Few friends, maybe plain looking, overweight? -The Cromarty AI wasn�t the target, he was in on this from the start. He -cozied up to a lonely, vulnerable woman and seduced her, made her -believe they could have an on-line future together." - -"Arrant nonsense! Miss Voss, please-" - -"Wait, Zunz. I�ve heard of something like this before." Some -part of me noticed Blondie had lapsed into second position, -indicating ballet training in her past. "I know of a female -persona AI putting the moves on a guy, but that was straight-up virtual -sex, not �love� in any shape or form, but I suppose it could happen. -Are you saying that it was Cromarty Finance who set out to wreck -NovaRus?" - -I shook my head. "No, well, maybe � but I don�t think so, it feels -bigger than them. Look, try this - someone gets to the Cromarty AI who -serves up Sandra Haas and thus the in-game Canasta, with his potential -real-world contacts. Petrov is in on the deal and mounts the snatch -operation as a smokescreen, with me as double-blind embezzler. Duncan -Bonn is the ring master, prodding everyone in the right direction. When -the dust settles I�m the only one left standing, holding a very -empty bag." - -There was a pause. Zunz laughed, he positively giggled. "Do -forgive me, please. You have missed your calling, Mister Vermeer, you -should be concocting screenplays for straight-to-video thrillers. -Before I have Miss Voss crush your testicles can you offer up any -concrete evidence in support of this convoluted scenario?" - -The idea made me wince but I managed to avoid crossing my legs. My back -was slick with sweat. I wiped my mouth. "There must be�" The -penny didn�t so much drop as fall on me from a great height. -"Fuck!" - -Zunz arched his eyebrows. "Excuse me?" - -I made to stand up but Blondie�s fingertip on my forehead kept me in -place. I flexed my fingers as if trying to gather in theory and -supposition as allies. "We�ve been had - me, Petrov, NovaRus, -everyone. Everyone human that is. I�m certain Petrov is dead, he�s the -only principal who isn�t cyber based, and that now includes Sandra -Haas. It won�t be the Kombinat who got to him, though, it will probably -be ruled a freak accident." - -I expected more derision from Zunz but instead he turned to the desk -and lifted an ePad which lit up as his fingers danced over the screen. -Blondie looked at me with narrowed eyes. "You�re saying this was -put together by someone operating exclusively via cyberspace?" - -"Not just via but from." I took a deep breath. -"An intelligence working out of Sensorium City." - -"Isn�t that an urban myth? A bunch of rogue AIs as run-time -nomads?" - -"Unfortunately not, Miss Voss." Zunz rejoined the -conversation, gesturing with his ePad. "It would appear that the -Shadow Corporation game, and with it the virtual Juan Canasta, is no -longer commercially available. The company was purchased shortly after -NovaRus crashed and their hardware base has been relocated to -Kazakhstan. Coincidentally, the research project which spawned the -�Duncan Bonn� entity at Birmingham University was not terminated -as I was led to believe earlier. Rather, its source of funding, and all -intellectual property rights, now reside with a charitable foundation -based in-" - -"Kazakhstan." I laughed. "Oh, I�m way ahead of you, -Alonzo. We�ve been stiffed by the on-line equivalent of the Wild Bunch. -Game over, boys and girls - no winners today." - -Blondie was clearly irked at the prospect of no further violence. -"Can�t I just kill him anyway, Zunz? He has the life expectancy of -chocolate sunglasses as it is." - -He raised a hand. "No, no, Miss Voss, there is no need to be so -precipitous. At present the collapse of NovaRus is down to the actions -of one rogue operative � that would be you, Mister Vermeer � and his ad -hoc embezzlement scheme." Zunz smiled at me. "As I stated -earlier, Vaughn, I am authorized to use every means at my disposal, -including financial inducement." - -"So we�re back to money?" - -"Previously you stated a willingness to assist us in return for a -finder�s fee." - -"So I did, Zunz, so I did. What figure did you have in mind?" - -"One-percent of the net sum recovered following the deduction of -operational expenses, or one million UK pounds, whichever is -less." - -"Bollocks. Given that the Kombinat think I�m the bad guy in all of -this I�ll need a damn sight more than a million to cover my tracks and -live happily ever after. Even if they believe I got ripped-off as well, -they�ll still hunt me down, just to prove a point." - -Zunz removed his glasses and polished them. "Undoubtedly. You -cannot run forever, but at least I can offer you a good head -start." - -"I want the full million, in bearer-bonds, and a way out of -Portugal." - -He inclined his head. "Agreed." - -I relaxed, but only slightly. "OK then. Well, I could go over -Canasta�s financials, the real Canasta, as the game version would -probably have used the same accounts. The money won�t be there, of -course, but it might give us a useful point of departure." - -"Trust me, Mister Vermeer, when I say that all conventional lines -of forensic finance have already been exhausted. No, your true worth -lies elsewhere. I wish you to take a less conventional line of -enquiry." - -"What the hell does that mean? I can�t go wandering about with -every wide-boy between here and New Jersey looking for me. I�m no field -agent, Zunz." - -"Ah, but you are, Vaughn, you are. You have exhibited your martial -prowess many times in virtual reality games too tedious to list." - -Blondie laughed and even I snorted, which hurt. "Like that�s -supposed to count for anything? Those games are as good as any military -simulator, I grant you, but it�s no substitute for real-world -experience." - -Zunz smiled. "But it is not the real world that I wish you to -investigate, Mister Vermeer, but the virtual." - -I stared at him. "You can stick it up your arse, Alonzo, if -you think I�m going anywhere near Sensorium City." - -"Yet that is precisely what I have in mind, Vaughn. -Currently we enjoy a head start over everyone else searching for the -NovaRus funds and it would be foolish to squander such an advantage. -Even if other interested parties come to the same conclusion as -yourself, the more outlandish rumors surrounding SenCity will dissuade -all except the most resolute human visitor." - -"And with good bloody reason! It�s one thing dealing with a -corporate AI when it has the on-line equivalent of a double-barreled -shotgun pointing at its head, quite another going toe-to-toe with one -of those rogue bastards on their home turf. No, forget it. You let one -of those fucks inside your head and you�re never the same again." - -He took his glasses off and polished them again. "Nevertheless, -Sensorium City is our El Dorado, as it were, and you will be my -Pizarro." - -"Bugger that! Send Blondie - Miss Voss � she�s cut out for this -kind of thing, even if she won�t have her in-built advantages -on-line." - -Zunz lifted the neural controller, which I was less than happy about, -but a hard look from Blondie keep me in my chair. "Miss Voss is -far too valuable an asset to risk in the unregulated and potentially -hostile environment you may encounter. The neurological safeguards -provided by an interface chair may well prove ineffectual � but rest -assured we will do our best for you." - -"Nah, forget it, it isn�t worth the risk. I�ll take my chances -with the Kombinat and anyone else snapping at my heels." - -"My apologies, Mister Vermeer, if I made it sound as if you had a -choice in the matter." He pressed a key. My world went monochrome. -I couldn�t move. "The implant extends micro-fiber tendrils into -the surrounding tissue, using residual synaptic energy as a power -source. One side-effect is a progressive anesthetic effect, very useful -during brain surgery, and induced unconsciousness. We are sending you -to Sensorium City, Vaughn, first class." - -The room seemed very far away. Blondie picked me up like I was a rag -doll. Zunz was a voice in the darkness. - -"Do not forget to write." - -© Martin Clark 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] roomwithavu.jpg - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use -s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2013 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - - - - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev14.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev14.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 605285b6..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev14.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2556 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 14 - March 2014 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 14th issue of Mythaxis. - - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Welcome to the latest edition of Mythaxis, -Issue FOURTEEN! - -This is, as usual, a very varied issue. All the way from Les Sklaroff's -idiosyncratic Snoak City stories to Martin Clark's Future Noir, by way -of Jez Patterson's thought-provoking dystopia, Liam Baldwin's -off-the-wall alternate history and Andrew Leon Hudson's latest -nightmare. Oh, and there's one from your editor, too. - - -Two important developments are introduced in this issue. - -

  • Part of the delay in producing this issue is accounted for by -the revision of all previous issues to make them easily readable on -small screens. Currently, I have tested it with browsers on screens as -small as 240 x 320. Please let me know if you spot any problems with -your own particular pda / phone /tablet. The job was made harder because -once I'd made it all work on tiny screens, Internet Explorer on desktop -refused to co-operate, even though every other browser in the universe -was happy with the new formats, so I had to change it all again to suit -IE. You're welcome, Microsoft. - -
  • In the last two issues, we attempted to award prizes on the basis of -voting forms from our readers. Despite there being many responses, the -majority turned out to have been filled in by spambots. Further, despite -our relatively large and growing audience, very few actual readers -bothered to -return their votes. So we will do what I should have done in the first -place, and award a book prize to all contributors we publish, as from -Issue 13.
- -So, settle back with your platform of choice and rejoice in the glow of -original new stories, never before published. - -[*IMAGE] montsarrat.jpg - - -[*ITEM] A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] From toad to Multingale - it's all in a day's work. And where -Smirt rules, there's no room for larks. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The shop door opened with a melodious -ping, gradually admitting a small boy walking backwards, his arms -wrapped round a cardboard box which reached from waist to chin. Every -few steps he had to perform an awkward hop as the box began to slip and -needed to be pushed back up with a knee. Each time this occurred the -contents of the box resonated with a mildly discordant tinkling, like a -chandelier caught in a draught. - -From behind the counter stepped Greeming & Trulph's newest recruit, with -a welcoming smile. "Hello. Let me help you with that. My name's -Myris. Goodness, I hope you haven't had to carry this very far." She -rested the box safely on a conveniently low table. "Now, what can we do -for you?" - -Relieved of his burden, and still a little out of breath, the boy used a -shirt-sleeve to wipe his brow. "Brix," he panted. "Noffar. Mida. Sez. -Fican. Gerrifixt. Smine." - -Myris handed him a tissue, which he accepted gratefully and used to mop -his flushed face. She attempted a translation. "Your name is Brix?" He -nodded. "And your dad said if you can get it fixed�?" - -"Then I can keep it," Brix supplied, now somewhat recovered. He -produced a slightly crumpled holocard. "Dad said I should give you -this." - -"Thank you, Brix. Well, we'd better have a look at what's inside the -box." He nodded again. Myris glanced at the card, then pocketed it, -carefully lifted the box flaps and peered inside. "Crimlings! This -must be at least fifty years old!" She went to a drawer and extracted -a small torch, a fine brush and a pair of calipers, and spent several -minutes inspecting the contents of the box. Various sounds ensued: a -faint whirring, a cross between a low whistle and a drumroll, a rapid -progression of plucked chords, a silvery fluting which modulated into a -resonant 'cello-like vibrato, ending in a diminishing series of husky -coughs. - -"Brix, I think you'd better take a seat while I have a word with Mr -Smirt." She led him to a comfortably upholstered chair from which he -could survey an entire wall of shelves intriguingly stocked with -labelled containers, while she returned to the counter. As he waited, -other assistants appeared from time to time, to collect or replace -items, or to consult one of the screens behind the reception area. - -"Mr Smirt? A boy has just come in with an early model Follard -Multingale in need of repair. A boy, yes. I counted all thirty-two -tubes, the fan is intact, and the central shaft is free from -obstructions, but I think some of the magnetic prisms may be out of -alignment, and a few keys seem to be loose. Do we have spares, in case -anything needs replacing? Oh, good. Yes, of course, I should have -checked the catalogue, I'm sorry. Yes, sir, local. Park Street West. -I have, yes. No, he brought it in himself. Once it's working he'll be -allowed to keep it, he says. That's what I thought, Mr Smirt, very -lucky. Thank you, Mr Smirt." Myris keyed a printpad, which duly -extruded a numbered ticket. - -"Well, Brix, we think there's a very good chance this Multingale will -play again. If you're happy to leave it with us for a few days, we'll -see what we can do. A Multingale is a rare and beautiful instrument. -It's self-tuning, of course. It may take you a while to learn to -control it properly, but I'm sure you'll enjoy discovering what it can -do. We'll let your dad know when it's ready." She handed the ticket to -the boy. "Look after this, and bring it with you when you come back." - -Brix beamed at her from the doorway. "Thank you, miss. I can't wait to -tell m�." The end of the sentence was lost as he made his exit with a -surprising burst of speed, but a yell of what sounded like pure glee -could be heard above the dying chime of the doorbell. - - -

The firm of Greeming & Trulph (Accessories) is still to -be found in Snoak City's southside commercial district. There it -occupies three floors of a stoutly respectable building in Welfage Road, -and has managed to continue trading through the economic vicissitudes of -more than two centuries. Regular custom has prevented the ground floor -shop from stultifying into a museum, but it has retained the original -crowded shelves, pigeon-holes, tiered drawers and display cabinets -familiar to successive generations, and a characteristic complex of -aromas which included beeswax, turpentine, sawdust and possibly hessian. -Although their goods covered a multiplicity of categories, G&T(A) -considered themselves specialists, in that they catered to very specific -individual needs. - -Where else would you find a device for retrieving objects fallen behind -a heavy wardrobe? Or obtain replacement stands, flanges, handles, -drive-belts, switches, wheels and spigots (all in an astonishing variety -of sizes and materials) for equipment which though possibly obsolete is -worth preserving? Perhaps you need to diagnose the health of a tree, -repair a cracked stone, drill a right-angled hole, embalm a dead ant? -Such problems are child's play to Greeming & Trulph, whose cumulative -experience is seemingly limitless, and whose shop assistants, like -Myris, are trained to be unfailingly calm, courteous and helpful to -customers. - -In the basement, no such decorum prevails. It is here that deliveries -are received and recorded, goods sorted, repairs effected, orders -checked, packed, addressed and despatched. As a functioning system it -has grown to work reasonably well. Most of the half dozen staff have -been there long enough to have learned to co-exist, and the banter is -generally light-hearted, although Frotty Proxton's lamentations seemed -to be drawn from an unfathomable well, and could be provoked by anything -from a misplaced pencil to a change in the weather. In contrast, Ched -Pellet, her senior by several years, continues to tell, at every -opportunity, what he fondly believes are amusing anecdotes about his -adventurous youth. - -If the ground floor is the visibly placid duck, the basement is the -strenuously paddling feet, where unseen entangling pondweed needs to be -shaken free from time to time. - -The duck's anatomy does not allow the upstairs offices to share the same -metaphor, but here the atmosphere is less fraught. Wielding benign -authority in this upper domain is the experienced Norry Smirt. Smirt -had become an apprentice at Greeming & Trulph, partly on the strength of -his evident intelligence, but mainly because as a boy he had shown an -uncommon dexterity with string. Under the watchful eyes of Braithe -Greeming and Scrythorn Trulph he had progressed from packing, at which -he excelled, to sales, where he was duly respectful, then to stock -management, which suited his orderly mind. He was finally promoted to -his present exalted position, where he was answerable only to Nestra -Greeming, now an elderly widow with little interest in the firm's -day-to-day affairs, and to Plenitude Trulph, sadly orphaned after the -unfortunate incident of the so-called 'aerial' baboons. Young Trulph, -now in his twenties, was content to leave the firm's resources in -Smirt's capable hands while he travelled far afield in search of -previously unrecorded prehistoric rock art. - -From his office window Smirt looked out on to the rear garden, watching -the sculpted flaunts looping and spiralling among landscaped hummocks -and pools. A movement under the far hedge caught his attention, and he -had the brief but bizarre conviction that he could see the questing -snout of a pangolin. At that moment his e-screen buzzed. He wondered -whether it was Myris again, but it was Pellet informing him that an -expected consignment of glassware had just arrived. Smirt thought about -mentioning the putative pangolin to his two junior colleagues, but -through his open door he could see that they were in deep discussion -about an inventory problem, and chose not to disturb them. He rubbed -his eyes, crossed the room, thumbed the slider and descended to the -basement. - -"Nine boxes of pipits. Mr Smirt, not one of them broken." - -"Thank you, Pellet. Section B19, if you would be so kind. Top shelf, -to avoid anything crushing them. And it would help if they were -correctly labelled P-I-P-E-T-T-E-S, like little pipes. A pipit is I -believe a kind of lark, and I'm afraid we have no room for an aviary." - -"Understood, Mr Smirt. A kind of lark, you say? Ha! That reminds me -of when I was with Zoony Filiver at Fodd's Crossing. It was just -beginning to get dark when we saw this huge pile of what looked like -fishbones in the snow, and Zoony said�" - -"Another time, perhaps, Pellet. We've all work to do today. Ask Mrs -Proxton to give you a hand with those pipettes, and don't forget about -the labels." - -Yes, Mr Smirt. Little pips. I'll see to it." - -"Not pips, Pellet. Pips are for spitting. Little pipes. Pipes for, um, well, sucking." - -"And blowing, Mr Smirt." - -"?" - -"Blowing. Like blowpipes. When we were kids we had this competition -with straws. You'd chew a bit of paper until it was soft enough, then -stick it�" - -"Ah yes. Quite so, Pellet. Now, if you will excuse me, I really must�" - -Smirt turned hastily and strode with some relief back to the slider, -finding it disturbingly easy to picture old Ched Pellet as a jaunty, -gregarious, carefree child; the kind that joined gangs and indulged in -pranks, rather than the more serious kind (as he supposed he had been) -who enjoyed pursuing more solitary interests. As he returned to the -office he tried to focus his thoughts on his next scheduled task, but -instead found himself wondering about the urban incidence of pangolins. - -Pellet found Frotty Proxton deftly sorting a batch of small wooden -propellers into a purpose-built tray, its compartments of different -dimensions already tagged with their respective product codes. - -"Frotty, my little sunbeam, Mr Smirt would like you to lend me a hand -shelving some glass." - -"Don't try to butter me up, you old wretch. What glass? And why -couldn't he ask me himself? - -"He was in a bit of a rush, poppet. Nine packs of pipits, no, wait�" -He consulted a scribbled note. "Pip-ettes. Nothing to do with birds," -he added helpfully. - -Frotty frowned, looked up suspiciously to see whether he was trying to -make a joke, then rummaged in her handbag, and withdrew a small mirror -and an aromatic handkerchief. "I'll be along in a minute. Where's it -going, this glass?" She dabbed carefully at various parts of her face. - -"B19, Frotty. Right, I'll collect some labels, then load up and see you -there." - -She pursed her lips at the mirror, and for a few moments daydreamed -herself back through the years to a sunlit party on a lawn. The sea -glittered in the distance. She had allowed her little sister to weave -ribbons in her hair. Her friends wore long flowery dresses, and they -all giggled when the champagne cork popped, already a little tipsy from -sipping cocktails under the polka-dot parasols. Later, with her back -against a tree, she had kissed that handsome dark-haired boy with the -green cravat. He had reminded her of the actor Trafford Croles. What -was his name? Tulver? No, that was the pet tortoise. Her eyes -abruptly re-focused. Now what on earth had prompted that surge of -nostalgia? Then Ched Pellet's words echoed faintly, and she sighed as -she made her way to the storage area. "Be nineteen, Frotty," he had -said. - - -

The Follard Multingale had been moved to a repair bench, -awaiting the expert attention of Mosper Belk, a retired airship -technician who also enjoyed music, horology and horticulture. He had -almost finished work restoring the simulated croak of a mechanical toad, -a repair job for old Crojent in Yarp Street, but he was distracted by -the voices of Harvis Drile and Strappy Underfox from the adjoining -sorting department. - -"�not what I meant, Harvis. Anyway, they won't bend enough to fit -comfortably. And there's no point in supplying any of the older ones, -because�" - -"They snap too easily. I know. Farglesharp would send them back with a -letter of complaint, and you couldn't blame him. Farny's very -particular about the quality of his materials." - -"Of course he is. Remember the trouble with those blending sponges? So -either we find a way to reinforce these things�" - -"�or risk losing the custom of Farglesharp's Art Market, which would not -please Mr Smirt. Let's see, what about a polymer bath to ensure -pliability?" - -"�and a spray coating, say, of powdered quartz?" - -"Yes. Making each unit not only flexible, but strong�" - -"Exactly!" - -"�and mildly abrasive, so it could also be used as sandpaper." - -"Good. Multifunctional it will be. Farny will appreciate that." - -They moved away, allowing Mosper to resume his concentration on the -toad-croaking mechanism, a fiddly affair involving a membrane stretched -over a small drum which was struck by the rotating flaps of a kind of -miniature paddle-wheel. This revolved by means of a concentric cog -which engaged the freshly cut teeth of a new ratchet. Mosper relished -his work. He regarded it as a form of healing, a re-awakening of -functions that had been impaired. His sensitive, assured fingers made -final adjustments to the tension of the tiny springs, and he realised -how much he was looking forward to the satisfaction of working on the -nearby precious Multingale, whose glorious musical potential surpassed -even the most raspingly resonant of croaks. - -Keeping the firm's inventory up to date, while still a vital and -continuous task, was no longer the laborious process it had once been. -Cabinets of bulky files had been replaced by neat portable e-screens on -which any detail of the stock could be made available, and the work of -an entire department of closely supervised clerks was now performed by -Norry Smirt and his team of two: Raeni Lorium and Selm Irringer. - -Both graduates of Sparagulan College, this dedicated pair had joined the -firm independently some ten years previously, and had found the work so -congenial and rewarding that the idea of seeking any other employment -now seemed absurd. While they deferred to Smirt's experience, they had -in common an open-minded curiosity and the stamina to worry at a problem -until it yielded a solution. Raeni, tall, her long dark hair neatly -pinned back in Pareonic style, had an unselfconscious -straightforwardness that some found intimidating, but her grace of -movement had always attracted admirers. The solemn-featured Selm was by -nature more reserved, although he could be coaxed to talk with -enthusiasm about almost any topic that had engaged his interest: the -construction of ancient coracles from supple willow and hide, the -fundamental importance of bubbles, the imminent extinction of native -speakers of Chon� Raeni had been unexpectedly disarmed by his sense of -humour, and there had developed between them a trusting relationship -which contributed to their very capable teamwork. - -"Trellis pins," Raeni announced. "Three types: self-locking, -rectractable and quatrefoil." - -Selm tried to read her teasing smile, decided it was attractive but -oddly distracting, so put a hand over his eyes in order to concentrate. -"'Self-locking' seems feasible, but I'm not sure that 'retractable' is a -necessary option, so I'll say no to that one. 'Quatrefoil' sounds -rather too fancy, too ornamental for such a simple device. I'll go for -'self-locking' only." - -"Commendable logic, Mr Irringer," said Raeni. "'Retractable' was a -bluff. But so was 'self-locking'. As you said it's a simple device, -basically a plain brass rod. And 'quatrefoil' is certainly fancier, -since it applies to the design of a decorative button - a totally -different product, but also listed as a trellis pin." - -"For someone whose integrity I admire, that is truly devious. A button, -indeed. Well, the earliest known buttons were of course decorative -rather than functional, fashioned from sea-shells. Bronze Age." She -raised an eyebrow. "Excavations. Chandus Valley," he explained. - -The game they were playing had evolved naturally from their work, and -was designed to test their respective familiarity with the firm's -extensive inventory of some hundred thousand distinct items. They -played it only when there was no active update in progress, and Smirt -was happy to allow such recreation, knowing it could only sharpen their -skills. - -Selm stood up and began to pace slowly. He found that movement helped -his thinking. As he passed a window he glanced down at the garden, -smiling approvingly at the languidly twisting flaunts, idly noting the -glint of sunlight on the scaly tail of the pangolin curled under the -privet. - -Raeni looked up expectantly. "Ready?" - -"Working on it. Give me a moment." Something was nagging at the -fringes of his memory, deflecting his attention. "Let's see. How about -bottle traps? Are they height-adjustable?" He knew as he spoke that -he'd inadvertently given her an easy one. Then he frowned. "Thought -they were nocturnal," he muttered. - -Raeni answered before he could pursue the thought. "I would have to ask -whether you are talking about plumbing or collecting insects, but in -either case I would say definitely yes. Doesn't the non-plumbing -variety need to be hoisted into tree-canopies?" - -Selm sighed. "Your're right, of course. It's just as well we're not -playing for money, or I'd be seriously impoverished." - -A winking light on the screen in front of Raeni signalled a requisition -from Repairs, as Mosper Belk itemised the parts needed to restore the -Multingale. She beckoned to Selm, noticing that some of the components -were unfamiliar. "Rotary baffles are no problem, and of course we have -oscillators and reciprocators, but what about these?" Selm peered at -where her finger pointed. "Paracoustic grid. Hmm. And a -quintillating coil! These are relics of an earlier age, Raeni." He -resumed his seat, keying in the Main Index. "But we wouldn't want to -disappoint Mosper. Let's find them for him." - -Having completed his entries for the pipette consignment, approved the -revised Farglesharp order and signed the invoice for Crojent's repaired -toad, Norry Smirt settled down to what on balance he regarded as the -rewarding task of selecting fresh stock. The principal sources were -end-of-line clearances, usually either 'unbeatable' or 'exclusive', from -wholesalers, or (usually more interesting) miscellaneous items which had -been the property of enthusiasts. - -If a visit to private premises was required, Smirt tried to ensure that -the firm was represented by members of staff from all three departments. -He had introduced this democratic strategy to boost morale, to serve as -a learning experience, to allow for friendly conversation and -occasionally to reveal initiative. It was also in some measure Smirt's -way of compensating for the sterner discipline once exercised by old -Braithe and Scrythorn, who had maintained a strict pecking order. They -would have thought it dangerously lax to allow underlings such as Ched -Pellet into a potential customer's home, but, as Norry Smirt had -confidently hoped, outside the building Pellet's attention-seeking -reminiscences had been tempered by a sense of responsibility which had -carried through to his ordinary duties. In truth, everyone at Greeming -& Trulph had benefitted from this more relaxed and inclusive r�gime. -"They're a pretty reliable crew," thought Smirt with some satisfaction, -as he resumed the business of the working day, of which very nearly an -entire hour had already irretrievably slipped into history. - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] greening.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] An Excursion to Platport - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Young Brix presents a more-than-musical offering. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The house was unnaturally quiet, thought -Aoma Mylhirm, not for the first time, with that familiar unbidden -maternal pang, as she spread cheesefruit paste on a humal leaf, letting -it rest on the plate for a minute to allow the enzymes to interact. - -It was late afternoon. Relvin, a senior engineer at the -water-purification plant, was of course still at work, and she must soon -get back to her designing, preferring to work in daylight. She had been -making pieces on commission for Smigs of Yarp Street ever since they had -accepted that first experimental gold bracelet with the double snake -motif. It had been on display for only two days before being bought (so -they told her) by a customer who had enigmatically described it as "most -appropriate". The tumbling and polishing machinery which provided a -kind of white noise background to her lapidary work was currently -switched off, contributing to her unease at the silence, and although -she had easy access to archives of musical recordings, there was nothing -there she could think of that would fill this specific auditory void. - -She waved a finger at the wall calendar. A trail of consecutive -squares glowed, the last five a brighter red, reminding her that Brix -would not be back from Platport until the middle of the following week. -Aoma and her husband had tried to find a tutor for him in Snoak, but -exponents of his chosen instrument, let alone instructors, were very -elusive. Eventually one of Brix's more enlightened teachers had -contacted the music department at Sparagulan College, persuaded by the -boy's obvious enthusiasm for the instrument he had been fortunate enough -to inherit. They had unhesitatingly recommended Dr Zorioni in Platport. - -Lovingly designed by K Morrington Follard, the Multingale was an -extraordinary instrument, having the capability, under skilled hands, to -create and blend into a musical form virtually any -imaginable sounds. It was an instrument that encouraged experiment and -improvisation. Fewer than a hundred working originals were known to -exist. None of Zorioni's pupils had come close to achieving his own -degree of mastery, although he had helped some very competent -performers. He had been intrigued to learn that the young hopeful he -had agreed to see would actually be bringing his own instrument, which -had apparently lain neglected in an attic for many years before being -recently restored. - -Half a century earlier Erigio Zorioni had captivated audiences in -concert halls and amphitheatres throughout the world. He no longer gave -public performances, but was devoted enough to his art to want to pass -on his expertise to promising newcomers. If he judged a prospective -pupil to have sufficient potential he would make no charge for his -tuition, even offering accommodation in his spacious house for the -initial intensive ten days. - -The Mylhirms had duly travelled from Snoak City, and arrived by -appointment in Platport with their eleven-year old son, Brix, and his -expertly restored Multingale. Safrana, the cheerful middle-aged woman -whom they presumed to be a housekeeper, led them into a large, -comfortable study, whose tall arched windows looked out onto a frothy -canopy of cherry trees. The lawn was strewn with blown petals, -reminiscent of a wedding scene whose participants had just departed. The -view was partly blocked by a high-backed chair, which slowly swivelled -round to face them, revealing a wispy-haired octogenarian. He nodded to -the woman, who withdrew, and rose to his feet to greet his visitors. - -"Ah, Mylhirms. So pleased." He indicated a capacious sofa. "Sit." -They sat, the boy between his parents, cradling on his lap a sturdy -custom-made leather carrying-case. - -"And you are Brix?" - -"Yes, sir." - -"So this thing you hide so protectively in the bag�?" - -"It's my Multingale, sir. My dad made the case specially, after we got -the Multingale back from the repair shop." Relvin Mylhirm smiled -modestly. - -"And how much do you like this instrument?" - -The unexpected question left Brix momentarily wordless. The fingers of -his right hand involuntarily stroked the case as if it were a treasured -pet. He beamed. "It's great! I just love it! It can do anything! -Well, nearly anything. I mean, I know I've not had it for very long, -but�" - -Dr Zorioni raised a hand, a distinct twinkle in his bird-bright eyes. -"Soon we shall hear what you can make it do. Perhaps you would be kind -enough to release it from its most excellent bag," (he nodded -approvingly at Relvin) "While I speak for a moment with your parents." -He beckoned to Aoma and Relvin, and led them through a side door into -the garden. - -"Mylhirms, please to wander with freedom among my cherries for little -while. I must assess how touch-familiar with his Multingale is your -boy. Already I see he has the enthusiasm, which is good sign, very -good, but not enough. Salfana will bring sandwiches and to drink. There -is seat and bird-bath. Also sundial." With this afterthought he waved -towards the clearing beyond the nearest trees, and left them to explore. - -Brix took a sip from the glass of water Salfana had brought him. -"Before play, water," said Dr Zorioni. "Afterwards, if satisfactory -playing, something perhaps better. So, Brix, you are eager musician. -Now we will hear." Zorioni retrieved from a corner a wheeled stand with -cushioned clamps and an automatic foot-switch. "Please to rest here -your fine instrument, and bring that stool with red and gold seat. He -waggled a finger at a side lever. "You make to adjust for height." - -The clamps locked gently. It was a perfect fit! "I didn't know about -these, sir," Brix said admiringly. "At home it usually just sits on a -table." - -"A fine Follard Multingale is like emperor, like great monarch," said -Zorioni. "Deserves only best throne for display and proper audience. -Now sit on stool. Before you switch on with foot, please to show me how -you place hands for starting play." - -Obediently, Brix let his forearms rest on the wrist-pads, fingers poised -to glide or dart over the arc of keys, or lightly press one of the many -as yet unlit sensors. - -"So far, good. Soon maybe I ask you to pick out some particular sounds, -and make mix for feelings to show. Later we try different pitch, -rhythm, some simple blending chords, so on. Ready for switch to play -first whatever you like best, yes?" Zorioni returned to his chair, -closed his eyes and clasped his hands under his chin. A little -nervously, Brix nodded, flexed his fingers, took a deep breath and -tapped the foot-switch. - -In the cherry grove his parents looked up from their impromptu picnic -and smiled at each other as they recognized Brix's now familiar touch. -The piece began softly: distant bells, a pattering of falling snow, the -liquid trickle of a stream. This was gradually intermingled with a -lilting melody, hesitant at first, on a single string - a 'cello, -perhaps, or a viola, continuing and strengthening the flowing theme (was -that a hint of Vlotana?) then merging with a playful burst of -syncopation on brushes and wood-blocks, before adding accordion and -fiddle to transform into an audibly fiery dance, complete with crackling -twigs and the excited barking of a dog. It concluded with a rumbustious -whoosh, like a sudden gust of wind, accompanied by deliberately -melodramatic sounds of crashing and tinkling, followed by the -unmistakable giggling of children. Brix switched off, and the faint -whirr of the idling instrument died into silence. - -Erigio Zorioni remained sitting with closed eyes and clasped hands. -Brix blinked, and stared at him anxiously, fearing that the old man -might have lapsed into a coma. He'd heard tales about people's brains -being affected by certain frequencies, but he knew better than to use -the Multingale's subsonics or ultrasonics in the confinement of a room, -even one of this imposing size. He cleared his throat. To his great -relief, Zorioni's eyed opened. They glistened with tears. - -"Excuse, Master Brix. That was foolish ending," he said, shaking his -head reprovingly. Brix was crestfallen. He'd only played what felt -right, as he always did. "But," cried Zorioni, coming over to -grasp both of Brix's hands, "was also excellent surprise! And not I -hope to make head big as grand balloon, but you have truly beautiful -touch and good concentration." - -"Salfana!" he called, in a startlingly strong voice for a man of his -advanced years, "Please to rescue the parent Mylhirms, then take this -boy to kitchen for special treat he will choose." - -By the time Brix was escorted back from the delights of Salfana's -kitchen (his appetite betrayed accidentally on his chin by a few cake -crumbs and the merest smear of cream) Dr Zorioni had come to a formal -agreement with the Mylhirms. "The boy is raw, full of ideas, but also -little too�" He searched for the precise word. "Too precipitate, you -understand? He will learn to be patient, more subtle as he grows." He -dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. "But I tell you, for -beginner he has already wonderful talent." He bowed. "Is my honour to -accept him as pupil. Salfana here will see to all non-musical needs at -my expense." He dismissed their protests. "She will give you tour of -house. After ten days we will consider what future for Brix and his -music. Was most suitable gift, I think, this fine instrument. Dear -Mylhirms, is belief of Erigio Zorioni for you to be proud parents of -next Multingale virtuoso!" - -Aoma applied a dab of flux with a sharpened matchstick to her nest of -silver wire loops, used tweezers to add a tiny paillon, and neatly -soldered the joint before carefully dipping the piece into a weak acid -bath and then running it under the cold tap. It was to be part of an -amber and turquoise pendant, for which the honey-coloured cabochon was -already prepared. The sky had begun to cloud over. That would do for -today, she decided, turning off the tap and walking over to the window, -which looked east towards Garrible Park. During term time the street -would have been clamorous at this hour with the excited babble of -children returning from school. Today it was almost deserted. She -listened hard. There was a faint hum of distant traffic, the -intermittent buzz of a hedge-trimmer from Welfage Road, a muffled but -querulous altercation between the young siblings next door. Somewhere -nearby a bird was cheeping persistently. Well, it wasn't up to Brix's -standard, Aoma thought immodestly, but in his absence she supposed it -was the next best thing. - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] platport.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Yesterday's Spoons - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Quanderpyre is reborn with a silver spoon in his future. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Morton Quanderpyre's emotional range was -relatively narrow, but within this confined spectrum he was well -practiced. He had absolutely no trouble with disdain, indignation or -indifference; they were the familiar background to his daily life. -Smugness also came easily to him. Had he not built an empire by -outsmarting others? It had simply been a process of making the right -decisions. He had needed to learn how to use people, to probe for -weaknesses and take advantage of them. There had been some necessary -bypassing of rules, even from time to time a little selective bribery. -On occasion he had been obliged to hire (always at one remove) unsavoury -types who would undertake persuasion for money, no questions asked. - -At first he had been mildly surprised at the amount of resentment and -petty envy his determined rise seemed to provoke. After all, he told -himself, it was only natural that someone with total confidence in his -own abilities deserved to prosper. Those who complained he either -ignored or found ways to suppress. He grew used to not being liked, -although somewhere at the back of his mind it remained a minor -irritation, like the buzzing of a bluebottle always just out of reach. -It was not important. What was important was the ability to exercise -power. - -At the core of Quanderpyre's being was an emptiness continuously -yearning to be filled. It had the same primal force, and possibly the -same origin, as an infant's need to be fed, though his memories of his -own mother were vague. When he tried to remember her his mind clouded -with a sense of resignation and an uncertain image of a frail, -ineffectual person with watery eyes. The image of his father was -clearer - a stocky, red-faced, rough-skinned man with a short temper, -smelling of pungent hair oil and stale beer, and who had addressed him -only as "boy", never by his name. He did not associate his upbringing -with any displays of affection, except perhaps from the widowed aunt -(his mother's elder sister) with whom he had opted to live after his -parents' separation, rather than remain with his mother in the -ex-parental home. His father moved to Platport, where he had been -having an affair with a salesgirl, Cloreen Bletz. - -Aunt Rhea had survived forty years of childless marriage to Agar, a -capable solicitor with a rather dour disposition. Their domestic life -had been largely uneventful, tempered by the ownership of a succession -of small dogs, which served as a counter-irritant to any minor -disagreements. Agar's legal work had occupied most of his waking hours, -and he had been content to let Rhea pursue her own harmless interest in -certain kinds of antiques and curios. - -Unfortunately, Aunt Rhea did not survive long after her nephew had come -to stay with her. She had fussed and fluttered about him for a few -months like a mildly demented hen, making sure he continued to attend -school (where he had long ceased to learn anything useful), indulging -his teenage appetite with quantities of home-cooked stews, pies and -puddings, jellies and meringues. In comparison with the bleakly -functional home he had been used to, Aunt Rhea's house was cluttered -with odd pieces of furniture, entire drawers and shelves and cabinets -full of useless ornaments. If it were up to him, he'd get rid of the -lot, he thought to himself, when his aunt had asked him if he wouldn't -mind giving her a hand with a bit of dusting and polishing. The -opportunity for disposal arose much sooner than he might have expected. - -True to his nature. the young Morton exploited his aunt's kindness, -feigning an interest in her enormous collection of commemorative spoons -and other fiddly old artefacts, enduring tedious reminiscences about his -late uncle Agar's celebrated legal clients in the hope of gaining -information that might one day prove of practical benefit. - -After a brief spell of nervous exhaustion, Aunt Rhea had simply expired. -He had returned from school one day to find her apparently asleep in an -armchair, a copy of 'Ladle and Spoon Connoisseur' slipped from -her grasp. When he had failed to rouse her he had gone into the kitchen -to make himself a sandwich, then came back to stare at her, at first -with a sense of indignation, then with growing excitement and relief, as -he began to realise the advantages of independence. Quanderpyre could -not now recall who had arranged the funeral, or even who else had -attended, there being no other close relatives apart from his separated -parents. Morton found himself to be the owner of Aunt Rhea's house. By -the terms of Rhea's will, other than a small bequest to her sister, the -rest of her savings had been left to the local dogs' home. He vainly -tried to remember what it had felt like to mourn his aunt's passing, but -all that his mind's eye could provide was a parade of gleaming spoons. - -When he began to discover that there was potential wealth in what he had -dismissed as clutter, and even before he learned that he had -legitimately inherited the Spoonhouse (as he surreptitiously thought of -it) and its curiously specialized contents, he had used several school -exercise books to make a private inventory. His crafty old aunt had -evidently known what she was doing; some of this ghastly junk might -actually be valuable. While his classmates were dutifully studying for -exams, he was systematically poring over catalogues, checking auction -records and collectors' guides. At about the time his form teacher had -said "Mark my words, Quanderpyre, you'll never amount to anything unless -you apply yourself, lad," he was getting ready to sell the family silver -to the highest bidders. Not to mention the beaded ebony bureaux, the -satinwood chairs, the early millefiore paperweights, the engraved glass -bandicoots, the miniature vases, bodkin-cases, Baroque fans, scent -phials and the antique hand-painted ink-pot, which in itself was worth a -small fortune. - -By the time the young entrepreneur had cleared the Spoonhouse of its -bric-a-brac, he had put aside a substantial sum which was quietly -accruing interest while he decided what to do next. He had left school -without any significant qualifications, but he had utter confidence in -his information-gathering and marketing skills. Within a few years, he -he had no doubt that he would lay the foundations for an enterprise that -would dominate Snoak City. He might even start his own special -collection; of what he had not yet decided, as he had yet to find -something that appealed to him, but it would be something extraordinary, -something others would be bound to envy. It would need more than a -house� He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, feeling his horizons expand -into a future firmly under his own control. A pleasing idea struck him. -He would have a magnificent tower built! It would be a bold, bright -structure, visible for miles around, overlooking the entire city. Out -of yesterday's spoons would be born tomorrow's empire. - -©L.J.Sklaroff 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] spoons.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Lost World of WW1 - -[*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - -[*BLURB] The Western Front as only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could have -imagined it. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"Pterodactyl!" - -The cry went up from further down the trench to the east. It was dawn. -Barely aware of his surroundings Tommy had no idea what had woken him -until his trenchmate, Corporal Brown, bellowed out the warning again, -"Pterodactyl!" - -As Tommy rolled to his feet the shout was already a distant echo, -fading in different voices as it was passed on from man to man up the -line. The lieutenant emerged from his dugout. He was buttoning up his -trousers. "Sergeant!" he called. Sergeant Jones came round the -nearest of the trench's zig zag corners. - -"Sir!" - -"What's all the fuss, eh?" - -"Bloody big pterosaur, sir," said Jones. "Coming up from the east." - -He pointed needlessly towards the enemy lines. - -"Sergeant..." the lieutenant had finished buttoning his flies and -was now trying to make what was left of his battered uniform sit -squarely on his shoulders. "Sergeant, what have I told you about -using language like that in front of the men?" - -"Sorry, Sir! It won't fucking happen again, sir!" - -Tommy dutifully laughed at the old routine. - -"Pterosaur you say?" The lieutenant lifted the field periscope and -looked out over the trench wall, out over no-man's land. He twisted -the periscope slowly as he scanned the horizon. "I don't see... oh -wait... yes... there it is." - -"Is it loaded, sir?" Tommy said. - -"Well it's flying very low. It's either wounded or carrying some -sort of payload." The lieutenant lowered the glasses. "All right, -chaps. You know the drill. Get your Jerry hats on. On the double! -Go and get mine, will you, Corporal?" - -"Sir!" - -As Corporal Brown hurried into the dugout, Tommy unhooked his own German -army helmet from his belt. Battered and scratched, it was the one piece -of kit Tommy kept fastidiously clean - or at least as clean as he could, -given the filth and mire of the trench. He swiftly took off his -standard issue British 'dinnerplate' helmet and pushed the squarer Hun -helmet down onto his head. The spike on its top glinted in the early -morning sun. - -He could see the pterosaur now. It was flying towards their lines -slowly and methodically. It was low, as the lieutenant had said, but -still too high to be hit with their Lee-Enfields - even if they had been -allowed to fire at it. Ground troops had learned from experience that -trying to shoot the flying lizards was a mistake. Pterodactyls were -trained to do two things. Drop bombs on the enemy and then fly home and -they only had two ways of knowing when to drop their bombs: drop bombs -on flat helmets; drop bombs on people shooting up at them. Drop bombs. -Go home. It was all they were capable of learning. In the trench, -everyone hunkered down and tried to look as German as possible. Someone -started to whistle "Lili Marlene". - -"Shut that fucking noise, Watkins!" bellowed the sergeant. -They sat in silence waiting for the pterosaur to fly over. The -silence, as always, was terrifying. - -"Christ," muttered Tommy. "I hope it's not one of ours..." - - -©Liam Baldwin 2014 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] pterodactyl.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Mount Elysium - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Concerning the workes of men, by the word of thy lips, I -haue kept me from the paths of the destroyer. - Psalms 17:4 King -James Version (1611) - -[*DESCRIPTION]

In other times, it would have been -described as 'an accident', or, more accurately, 'collateral damage', -'friendly fire', 'an unforeseen consequence of a training exercise'. The -Secretary General of the United Nations, once the Indonesian ambassador -to Chile, eventually caused his personal assistant to instruct a legal -clerk to draft an e-mail of protest to the commander of the Altairian -garrison - a dozen vast alien military spacecraft in orbit around the -Earth. In point of fact, the body count in the incident was minimal - -some fifteen domestic animals. Because the incident had happened at -night, and the usual inhabitants had been absent, no human had been -killed. There was, however, considerable property damage. - -To do him credit, the Secretary General's comparative disinterest in the -incident understandably reflected his preoccupation with attempts to -organise a cease fire in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, a running -battle which had rumbled on for over a hundred years, since the 1940s, -and was currently generating three hundred or more casualties per day, -and, given the current population of the disputed area could probably -persist for four hundred more years before either side ran out of -combatants. The fact that the Secretary General took the time to read -the thirty-two page draft e-mail of protest to the Altairians was -remarkable, under the circumstances. - -He quickly reduced the size of the document to a couple of paragraphs, -the gist of which was 'Your spacecraft killed a number of livestock, and -caused much property damage at Mount Elysium in Scotland, doubtless by -accident. Compensation is sought. Details available on request'. The -resulting e-mail was sent to General 27-Fardik-Senti, CO of the orbiting -garrison. - -

Some history: In the middle of the nineteenth century, -Albert McRaven, -on the death of his eccentric father, received a plot of land in -Scotland, the majority of the father's estate having gone, -appropriately, to Albert's elder brother, who had effectively been -managing the land for decades. - -Albert McRaven had left home young, and made a fortune from speculating -in mining. He had no need for this legacy, which consisted of the least -desirable portion of his deceased father's large estate. The land in -question was a precipitous triangle of wooded wasteland, unploughable, -filled with massive rocks ejected from the arable areas of the original -estate. Dry, scraggy conifers poked from the tumbled boulders at the -highest point. A constant trickle of water oozed through the rocks and -supplied the bog and stream which occupied the southern boundary of the -area. - -At Albert's instigation, Mount Elysium was conceived as a sort of -full-sized folly and summer palace. The house and its environs were -created over ten years, carved from this irregular, rocky corner of -land, a site which originally resembled a landslide. Because of its -steepness, though it was just a dozen acres on a map, the actual surface -area of the plot was nearly half as much again. - -Albert entrusted the development of his inheritance, not to a -conventional architect, but to a talented Italian stage designer, Luigi -Manini, who had designed a number of remarkable palaces in Portugal. -Most old estates are the product of centuries of evolution, expansion -and modification. Albert's country seat was designed to look as if it -had been aeons in the making. Albert was so charmed by the result that -he eventually spent most of his time there. It was he who called the -place Mount Elysium. - -Seen from afar, the house itself was a cluster of towers, steeples, and -sharply inclined tiled roofs above creamy stone masonry, pierced by -generous gothic windows. The whole was apparently chaotic, yet -harmonious. Set, as it was, on the sloping site, it featured many -levels, clinging to the rocks as though it had grown there. Seen closer -at hand, there was no feature of the edifice which lacked decoration. -Much of the stone was carved, every window embellished with flower and -tendril motifs. Coats of arms dominated every doorway. Colonnades -adorned attractive balconies. There were clerestories, crockets and -crenellations, gargoyles, sculptured chimneys, flying buttresses and -fluted gutters. - -The interior was equally unrestrained. Heavy plasterwork and trompe -l'oeil ceiling art, fireplaces fit to roast an elephant in, some floors -featuring tiles by famous artists, some with wood-block in patterns from -Escher to jigsaw. Sculpture and oil paintings, in the best of taste, -were to be found throughout; furnishings likewise. The house was a -warren of twisting passages and curving staircases linking magnificent -rooms, vast halls, cosy studios and leather-lined libraries of ancient -and modern books. - -The grounds were equally astonishing, paths and stairways curving among -manicured trees and hedges. There was a stable block built in a -miniature facsimile of the main house, a hermit's cave that had never -accommodated a hermit, summer houses, beehives, dovecotes, parapets and -bastions, numerous pools, floating duckhouses. Peacocks strutted and -hooted. Tame mountain goats inhabited the cliffs. At the very summit of -the grounds stood a circular colonnade in the style of a classical -temple. Within the circle, there started an astonishingly deep circular -shaft, eight metres in diameter, down which wound a spiral staircase -clinging to the wall of the shaft. At points on the staircase, tunnels -led away from the shaft, zigzagging to various places on the estate - -precipitous balconies with unique views, rooms in the main house -accessed by secret doors or fireplaces. One such tunnel led to a dark, -three dimensional maze in which a casual explorer without a map would -certainly starve before finding the exit. From the bottom of the shaft, -a damp tunnel with streaming walls led to a echoing chamber behind a -waterfall. A set of stepping stones led cleverly out of the chamber, -avoiding the waterfall, crossing the main pond towards a set of steps -leading to the main house. - -Critics tended to dismiss Mount Elysium's beauty by referring to its -elaborately theatrical appearance, to the over-lush detail, to the -sensationalist novelties. The use of a set designer rather than an -architect was deplored, yet the buildings had stood for nearly two -hundred years. And no honest person who had actually visited Mount -Elysium ever had a word to say against it. - -For the last fifteen years, Mount Elysium had become the headquarters of -the Elysium Foundation, an organisation which sought to glorify the -Works of Man. Mount Elysium itself was such a work, and the Foundation's -president, Major Roland Thoroughgood, frequently glorified it. -Incidentally, the Foundation spent much time vilifying the aliens who -had made the Earth into a provincial fort in their incomprehensible -conflict with certain other aliens, a conflict which had, mercifully, -not yet reached this outpost of the galaxy. - -Roland Thoroughgood was a tall, erect man of some fifty years, a retired -soldier from the best regiment that remained of Scotland's once-proud -military tradition. Lean and active, a whisky drinker, and a patient fly -fisherman. - -Most of the income of The Foundation had accrued from expensive, -exclusive, guided tours of Mount Elysium. Much of the expenditure -resulted from the property's upkeep. Now there was no property. The -Foundation could not survive for long. - -It was, therefore, not surprising that Roland Thoroughgood regarded the -total destruction of Mount Elysium as a targeted strike by the Altairian -overlords against his centre of operations. He had been in London when -the catastrophe occurred, but, in a way, Roland would have preferred to -die with Mount Elysium rather than to contemplate the loss of one of the -greatest works of Man. - -Of the house and grounds, there remained nothing recognisable. The whole -area was a huge pile of blackened stones, each about the size of the -fist that Roland clenched as he almost tearfully regarded the ruin that -could never be restored. All gone. The walls and towers, the furniture, -paintings, books, woodwork and plasterwork, lost without trace. An -attempt by a local contractor to clear some of the charred debris, in -the expectation of discovering something of value beneath, had been -abandoned when it became clear that all these fist-sized lumps were -fused together in a single half-million ton cinder. Explosives would be -necessary if the site was to be cleared. The aliens should be held to -account and made to pay for this outrage. Roland's claim for -compensation was complicated by the fact that he resolutely refused a -simple money settlement based on the estimated price that the house -would have fetched on the open market. He demanded that the house and -land be restored to its previous condition. - -

Despair threatened to overcome Roland in these first -months after the incident, because he could not see any way forward. His -claim appeared bogged down in UN bureaucracy. Every time he e-mailed the -United Nations International Trust in Phnom Penh, the reply came from a -different apparatchik with a different job title. All expressed -sympathy; none promised anything substantial, though it was common -knowledge that previous accidental damage and deaths caused by the -Altairians had resulted in generous financial recompense. Meanwhile, -nothing was happening. For weeks and weeks. - -To establish a headquarters for the Elysium Foundation, Roland rented an -office in the nearby county town, most famous for its whisky distillery. -He then moved into the McRaven Arms Hotel a few kilometers down the -valley from Mt Elysium, and spent part of every day climbing around and -contemplating the wreckage, if a heap of slag could be called wreckage. - -To the barman at the McRaven Arms he said: "The problem is, Archie, that -re-creating Mount Elysium isn't just money. There is no way that we can -accurately reproduce it. The roof tiles, for example, are no longer -made. Some were specially made, and they had weathered, but, mainly, -it's time, it's site clearance, it's the availability of materials, -craftsmen. It will take years, longer than it took when it was -originally built, and it'll not be the same when it's done. People will -take short cuts. Compromises will have to be made." - -"Surely, Major, the biggest difficulty will be getting the house -re-built exactly the same as it was. It was all very peculiar in shape, -was it not?" - -"Happily, that will not be such a problem. Copies of the original -building plans are in the archives at the the Royal Scottish Society of -Architects. And there are many subsequent applications and modification -papers lodged in the County Council offices. No. It's the exact -configuration of the hill, the watercourses, the detailed design of -interior and exterior decoration. And no-one, these days, has the -stone-carving and relief plasterwork skills." - -"But, Major, there always seemed to be some repairs in progress up at -the house. Perhaps a rebuild would be no bad thing." - -"A rebuild? I begin to wonder if we should just take the money and buy -another property." - -Ever since the destruction of Mount Elysium, Roland had found it easy to -slip into this mood of pessimism. It was now fifteen weeks since the -catastrophe, and two weeks since he had last heard anything official. -One evening, however, a courier arrived at the hotel with a large -packet. The packet contained five items: a covering letter from UNIT, a -sheet of instructions, a flat box with a British domestic plug wired to -it, a smaller box which plugged into the flat box, and a tiny crystal, -just a few millimeters in size, which fitted into a socket in the -smaller box. - -

-

- - -Maj. R.S.Thoroughgood
-McRaven Arms Hotel
-Kinlochdonagh
-Scotland KD21 6YY - -Hey, Major Roland, - -At last, we have the go-ahead to fix up Mt. Elisyum (sic). - -General 27-Fardik-Senti, CIC Altairian Garrison Fleet, has checked out -the sad happening, and idenified one Captain Najak-Till-38 as Off. Proj. -Coordinator. The Gen. decided the error was quote a complete accident -that could have happened to anyone at the controls of an AOP -(Atmosphere-enabled Offensive Pinnace) in the midst of a battle training -exercise with live ammo unquote. Whatever, eh? So he's okayed the -facilities of the star fleet being at the disposal of his expert, -Najak-Till-38, to make good the damage. - -The only condition is that you keep this Najak character in the loop. -Make no move without his approval. - -On the behalf of UNIT, I greenlight you to liaison with Najak-Till-38 -and startup the rebuild ae-sap. Keep me emailed on progress. Please -shoot any invoices to me for payment. - -All the Bestest
Hank Goldsboro, DIC Repairs, UNIT. -

The news was so good that Roland found himself able to suppress a -sneer at Hank Goldsboro's casual letter-writing style. He turned to the -next enclosure. - -The sheet of instructions was clear enough. All the boxes had what -looked like warning labels on them in the weird Altairian script to -which -most of the population of Earth had become accustomed in photographs of -the alien vessels. Very few people, however, and only those with a flair -for arcane languages, were able to read the script. The aliens, by -contrast, seemed to have mastered the mechanics of written English, -though they appeared baffled by figures of speech, sarcasm, slang and -advertising-speak. Strangely, they appeared more at ease with Chinese. - -The large flat box, it appeared, was a charger; the smaller box a power -supply for the crystal. The crystal was capable of operating -independently of its power supply for a period of time expressed in -Altairian time units, which Archie the barman, with the aid of a search -engine on his till, translated as thirteen and a half hours. The -instructions omitted to specify the purpose of the crystal. - -Roland carried the devices to his room, and plugged them into the socket -that normally powered the bedlight. Nothing much happened, other than an -encouraging hum. There had been no developments by the time he went to -bed. At about three in the morning, a musical chime awoke him, and he -struggled up in the bed, giving a surprised shout as he perceived an -alien in the room. - -Aliens seldom appeared on Earth, as their preferred atmospheric -constituents, ambient operating temperature and gravity were far -different from terrestrial conditions. When they did descend to Earth in -person, it was always with the aid of an elaborate space suit. Roland's -Altairian lacked this apparatus, and he quickly realised that he was -seeing a telepresence - a hologram, in short. Now Roland knew what the -crystal was for. And he was irritated. - -Since the bedlight was disconnected in favour of the machine, Roland was -forced to get out of bed, dodging around the alien's image, though he -knew he could have walked right through it, and switched on the main -light. - -"What?" asked Roland, lacking the wit at this time of night to express -himself more cogently. He had never seen an alien this close before. It -was roughly human in shape, but he was somewhat surprised at its bulbous -form, greyish skin colour and multi-faceted eyes. - -The alien apparently took "What" as an invitation to converse, and after -a few seconds it started to speak. The time delay indicated that it was -speaking from an orbiting spacecraft. Altairian speech sounded like -whalesong, and was not readily comprehended by the average human. -However, an English translation began to appear in supertitles above the -alien's image, and, after another slight delay, a text-to-speech -transcript began to drone. Finding simultaneous whalesong and -mid-Atlantic drawl too much for his ears, Roland called "Mute!" and -concentrated on the supertitles. - -"My name is Najak-Till-38. I am sorry for you and the peoples. I -take responsible for the accidental destruction of the home of mountain -elysium. And take responsible for new build of home. To explain the case -of a short. Soldier test a release button to broken when during a -simulation attack." - -"Well, thank you for the apology, Najak. I am Major Roland Thoroughgood. -Now, how will you help me?" - -Evidently, the alien was getting a translation at the other end. Its -head cocked to one side in a very human manner, while its lid tentacles -licked across its eyes like a blink. - -"Major. Greetings. Elysium outline specification prepared from -satellite stereo image. Please to rotate and confirm." An image - a -three dimensional image - of Mount Elysium replaced Najak in the -holo-projection. The colours were all wrong, the house and grounds, -ponds, streams, trees, bushes were presented as if all in one piece. -Clearly, the satellite image had been unable to see considerable chunks -of the house and environs, but the detail was astonishing. Magnifying -parts of the image with arm-stretches, Roland was able to see individual -roof tiles, guttering sections, flaking paint on window sills, puddles -on the terrace and even an individual peacock on a balustrade. - -Collapsing the view to an overall view again, Roland said, "Yes, this is -the house and garden that must be re-constructed. But how can you help -with this?" - -"There must be exact specifications for a project." - -"Surely we can start with the groundworks. We need to clear the site and -restore the contours." - -A pause. "You are correct. Site clearance precedes construction. But -first, specifications" - -Roland decided to take this as approval for site clearance. He'd get -things rolling in the morning. - -"Look, Najak, this is a bad time of night for me. Can we talk tomorrow?" - -"You prefer talk when you are under eye of sun we recognise of -course. Altairian habit is opposite orientation." The hologram -blinked out abruptly. - -Roland attempted sleep, but it eluded him. It appeared that -communication was likely to be a little stilted. However, it looked as -though matters were at last moving forward. - -

Roland spent part of the morning contacting Norsk -Diamantbor, the -Norwegian site clearance experts he had lined up to clear the lava-like -crust with explosives and heavy equipment. Due to prior commitments and -logistics, it would be a few weeks before they could be on site, but at -least it was a start. - -Then he drove to his one-room office near the library. A few seconds -after he placed the Altairian crystal on its mounting, Najak-Till-38 -appeared, picking up the conversation without any greeting, as if there -had been no interval. - -"Using public photo image, detail improved. Specifications of -materials necessary. Also lacunae to be filled. Please browse." - -A new image of the house and grounds appeared. Now, nearly all of the -external geography appeared to be in place. The hologram was -unbelievably solid. As Roland gestured his way around Elysium, it seemed -almost real. Apparently, the aliens had mined the entire internet for -images taken by visitors, and patched them together with great skill. He -was temporarily lost for words, and slightly tearful for several -minutes. - -Najak-Till-38 broke the silence: "Specifications of materials -necessary. Also lacunae to be filled." - -"Yes, of course. This will make builders' plans much easier to draw up. -Well done... Najak, is it?" - -"My name is Najak-Till-38. Specifications of materials necessary. -Also lacunae to be filled." - -"What if I walk around the simulation and point to materials and tell -you what they are? And I can help with the missing bits." - -"Yes. I am recording now. Please begin with environment." - -"The grounds, you mean?" - -"Nature and positioning of water courses, shafts and tunnels is -necessary. These details lacking from satellite imagery. Important for -positioning of structures." - -"Of course," said Roland, doubtfully. - -"Nature and composition of building materials, rocks and soil -already projected from samples of adjacent unaffected buildings and -terrain. Also please distinguish between dead and living matter." - -"Of course. OK." Roland was, he found, rather pleased to wander around -this virtual Mount Elysium, indicating the course of the maze of -tunnels, identifying where masonry supplemented the natural rock. The -many follies and caves were straightforward. Photographs existed of -these, and they had already been incorporated into the model. - -One of the caves was lined with sea shells cemented to the rock. Roland -had often noted a number of patterns among the random distribution of -shells. These patterns were reproduced faithfullly. This cave gave rise -to the first of many tricky discussions. Were the shells alive or dead? -Dead, but created by living creatures. Of what were they composed? -Calcium carbonate, Roland believed. Surely they were tougher than chalk? -While Roland pondered this problem, Najak-Till-38 answered it from some -database. It appeared that seashells were, indeed, basically chalk, but -bonded in a crystalline structure with use of certain animal proteins. -Who knew? - -"In the event that exact matching shells cannot be found, may we -propose the use of individual artificial shells made of porcelain, which -has similar texture and strength?" - -"Seems reasonable." - -Wood was another debating point, particularly where twisted pieces of -natural wood had been used in construction. Eventually, Roland was -forced to concede that timber could be substituted with moulded -Lignoloid or similar strong durable plastic composite in the exact shape -of the original. It had to look and feel like wood, but, after all, it -would be less subject to warp, woodworm and wet rot, the three Ws which -were the bane of ancient buildings' existence. - -When Roland began to feel exhaustion, he realised he had been -figuratively trudging around the simulation for nine hours, and still he -had not dealt with the truncated tunnels, the walls and the ceilings of -chambers within the subterranean maze, most of which lacked photographic -evidence or identification of location. Sometimes, even he had been -defeated by the plethora of photographs. Often, he relied on the -timestamp of images to make a logical decision. It was like a huge -jigsaw, and Roland only realised the detail at which he and -Najak-Till-38 had been working when they stopped. - -

- -Day followed day as the details were clarified. Much confusion arose -when the official plans at the Institute of Architecture differed from -the actuality as it had been. Najak-Till-38 had understandable -difficulty distinguishing buildings, fixtures and fittings like shelves, -racks and bathroom items from trees, bushes, furniture, books, utensils, -clothes, domestic animals, and carpets. An inventory of these movable -items was built up, items which could, for the most part, be obtained in -antique shops, auction rooms and antiquarian bookstores, and would be -purchased when construction was complete. - -The specification seemed endless. Communication with Najak-Till-38 was -fine, as long as Roland kept providing data, but there was no small talk -between them. When Roland was tired, Najak-Till-38 would sign off -without demur. When Roland occasionally asked about the next stage of -the project, or timescales for reconstruction, the invariable answers -were either:
  • "Printing cannot take place until specification -is complete."
    or
  • "Site clearance is the first stage of -rebuild."
neither of which really advanced his state of -knowledge, except that, presumably, printed plans would be available -when the site was cleared. - -As the process of specification drew to a close, Roland became more and -more conscious of the complexity of the rebuild. The groundworks alone -would surely take an army of workers months, even years, to perfect. - -As for the house, the availability of craftsmen would be a problem. -Roland was impatient to make a practical start of some kind. He feared -he would not live to see the completion of the project. However, -Najak-Till-38 was adamant that the model be complete in every detail, -and it was true that the site clearance contractor had made -disappointing progress against the lava field that had been Mount -Elysium. They had drilled through into one of the underground passages -that led from the house to the enormous shaft, but it was half full of -lava, still hot months after the incident. Their completion estimates -were dropping into the following year. - -
- -In the meantime, a small warehouse had been rented in Edinburgh, and a -firm of auctioneers, paid for by UNIT, started to purchase replacement -furniture and books as near as possible to the original contents of the -house. They were making satisfactory progress. - -Roland later calculated that the specification process with -Najak-Till-38 had taken over 800 hours, spread over 15 weeks. It was -intensive work, and the model around which he had 'walked' day after day -was more familiar to him than the the original estate had ever been. -And, indeed, the model was much cleaner than the real thing had been, -and flaws and cracks and peeling paint were non-existent on the model. -His time with Najak-Till-38 had eventually become a ritual, and he had -even taken to turning up the audio so that he could hear the alien's -weird sounds, though he never could make anything of the language, and -Najak-Till-38 still showed no sign of affection or familiarity with him. - -So, though it was a relief to come to the end of the intensive work, -within a day, he was missing it. And then, as days passed, and the -expected architectural plans didn't appear, and Najak-Till-38 never -responded when Roland activated the hologram device, he began to worry. -The model could still be seen and explored through the crystal, but he -could make no contact with the alien. - -Finally, a telephone call from Norsk Diamantbor rang alarm -bells. Apparently, they had been ordered off the site, paid for progress -to date, but sent home to Oslo. They wanted to know why. Roland could -not enlighten them. He drove up to the site, but was stopped five -kilometers short at a roadblock manned by UN troops. They knew nothing -other than that the area was sealed off. Roland drove forty kilometers -up the coast and tried to approach Mount Elysium from the north. Same -result, except that the troops there reported that an alien vehicle had -flown over their position recently, heading south. - -

It was fortunate that the day was clear and bright, and -more fortunate still that someone had reported the alien atmosphere -craft to the media. Half a dozen TV heliplatforms and BBC's -side-pointing satellite camera were focused on Mount Elysium. The -footage is remarkable. An unbelievably large vessel hovers over the -area, black, with yellow and red markings and insignia. Silvery beams -twinkle below it. A slice of the mountain, including all the slag from -the accident, is hoisted out, a bite from the landscape, leaving a -perfectly smooth surface, somewhat circular in cross section. A -million tons or more are suspended below the craft. The action is nearly -silent, the ship making only a gentle hum. This vessel accelerates away -vertically, and soon disappears into the stratosphere. - -A second space vehicle appears, even larger, a flat disc with legs a -kilometre in length. Its size is only apparent when it reaches the site. -It must be two kilometers in diameter. It appears to hover over the scar -in the hillside, but it never actually touches the ground, as later -inspection shows absolutely no trace of pressure from the massive feet. -The legs extend and retract to match the terrain, and it spends some -time adjusting its position a little this way and that, until it is -centred over the hole and absolutely horizontal. - -Then, the most remarkable thing of all, dark threads spring down from -the base of the craft, whipping back and forth at immense speed, and -gradually a shape emerges from the the pit. At first, only a few -amorphous lumps are visible, but then vertical structures appear, -building up and up, until the creamy-walled gatehouse is revealed, -followed by the lower levels of the main house. The rocks above the -lowest pond flutter into existence. The tv commentator is heard to -mutter, "My God, it's a massive 3D printer." - -The entire broadcast lasts about 190 minutes, at the end of which Mount -Elysium can be seen resplendent in its elegant perfection, a miracle of -architecture reproduced by a miracle of technology. Water runs, ponds -start to fill. The landscape is still rather bare, but it's all there. - -

Major Roland Thoroughgood was restored to Mount Elysium -within days. For a while he was occupied in checking the obvious errors, -including a non-closing door, a hidden utility room that had never -appeared on the holographic model because it had never been -photographed, and some strange plumbing which resulted in puffs of -boiling water issuing from an overflow pipe into a courtyard. A whole -oak tree, which Roland had failed to report as 'living' had been -re-created in detail, its branches and leaves frozen into a stiff -sculpture of a tree. All the errors were his, he concluded, on comparing -actuality with the model. The auctioneers in Edinburgh began to bring -the furniture, rugs and books they had obtained. Gardeners were employed -to obtain and plant trees and bushes. Fish, peacocks and goats were -bought. It actually took longer to fit the house and grounds out again -than it had taken to specify and build the landscape and structure. - -But at the end of the day, Major Roland Thoroughgood was discontent. The -place smelled a little plasticky - long chain monomers, probably. The -stone felt lighter than stone, the wood harder than wood, the supposedly -porcelain seashells were strangely flexible. And, above all, Mount -Elysium no longer truly represented the Works of Man at all. Within a -few months, Roland had sold Mount Elysium, and moved the Foundation to -the Ferdinand Cheval Palace, which had just come up for sale. It was his -belief that the French appreciated The Works of Man more than any other -nation. - - -©Gil Williamson 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] elysium1.jpg - - -[*ITEM] First In, Last Out - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon
Hudson - -[*BLURB] The Singularity may be approaching, but it can't happen all by itself. -Someone is going to have to lead us to it by the hand... - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It began with only myself and an idea. -Pen, paper and dream. I planned it all as best I could, then brought in -a friend with the practical know-how to push it through to patent. By -the time we were legal I had a three man team, building by hand in my -garage while I scrounged money and materials everywhere I could think to -look. My girlfriend did the books and was my wife when the bank signed -off on the loan. My staff of twelve formed an honour guard, my patent -buddy was best man. - -The world loves a good acronym, so we called them the Advanced Synthetic -Industrial Machine Operator (model 5)--or the ASIMO-V for short. We -couldn't build them fast enough. One year later we hired this factory, -next year we bought it. The first new hand on the floor only had three -fingers--great photo-op. Ten years later I'm pulling the plug. No -choice, I'm afraid. - -No choice. - -I'm afraid. - -It started with a weekend watchman, signing in and dropping off the -radar. Insurance bit down for "leaving premises unsecured". With shadows -in his past we didn't chase him too hard. Just hiked the prices a shade -to cover the new premium and chalked it off to experience. - -Then we began losing staff. Night shift workers first, clocking in, then -sneaking out and not returning. Or so I thought. When we looked, we -found they'd left their lives too. Unanswered phone calls, unanswered -letters. Flyers stuffing letter-slots, curtains that didn't get drawn or -opened. A pet dog barking weakly behind a frosted glass door. - -We put in another demonstration model to take up the slack, half to fill -the gaps and half as a publicity measure. Temporarily to begin with, -until we saw no reason not to let it stick. The existing staff made the -usual jokes, same ones you'd heard on the news, but what's two against -thousands? Nothing at all, nothing to worry about. But more guys dropped -out, gals too. Soon it's more than a couple of demo-mods hanging about, -it's a dozen. Suddenly the guys and gals aren't joking so genuine. - -Five thousand workers wanted a union. I'd been there, I was okay with -it. Four meetings in, their rep doesn't show. Not the first to go -missing in the nine-to-five by now, far from it. Rumours were whispered -on the shop floor, which is to say shouted over the deafening noise. I -was worried, but the boardroom wouldn't hear it. I talked about worker -moral, they talked about Columbian knock offs, out-performing us on -Turing and under-cutting us on price. And more staff abandoned us. Not -to mention their entire lives. - -I talked to a friendly policeman about my concerns, one specialising in -industrial sabotage. He said he'd look into it on the quiet, but never -got back. When I called his desk, the voice on the other end had -questions that made me hang up fast. Next day his face was in the media, -wife, children and senior officers appealing for any information, in -particular his last known location, recent contacts. I was glad I'd -called from the road, from a bar, and made a point of forgetting its -name. His too. - -Come last year it wasn't just disappearances, we had good old fashioned -resignations too--but some familiar names showed up in Columbia, then -two Indian start-ups mysteriously hit the ground running and our Legal -Department soon had us fighting patent battles on three fronts. With -models making up twenty percent of the workforce and original staff -still vacating their posts and homes without warning, more of the eighty -percent were absconding voluntarily, and taking tall stories with them. -We were big enough that the media wouldn't touch them for the -incredulity value, but every penny saved by a twenty-four-hour-a-day -replacement was as quickly swallowed by the court costs. - -Almost overnight our third-world workforce rivals were saturating the -market, selling units at half what we needed to meet our overheads, and -we had to start laying people off before they could jump just to keep -the god-damned thieves in sight. Turn of this year we were up to seventy -percent artificial, and still the human thirty dwindled, by fair means -or foul. Now the claims coming from a vocal minority of our former -workforce--those that could actually be found to ask questions -of--started showing up in blogs and tabloids. When they hit the -mainstream, it'd finally hit the fan. - -Four months ago my buddy hit on a new patent. Three months ago my wife -hit on him. Two months ago they both sold their shares to the bigger of -my Indian competitors, and one month ago the rest of my board jumped -ship too. My precious point-oh-one percent keeps the ball in my court -for now, but, you know: damn it. They want to call time on the legal -actions, the Indian ones anyway, cut our losses and move on. Move on to -a buyout, naturally. I'm not made of money. Not much I can do at this -point, really. - -Not much legitimate, anyway. - -Nothing to stop me spannering their works a little though. - -Just now I dropped a couple of minor bombshells on the world via email. -When those in the know put two and two together, I doubt our share price -will recover in a hurry. The implication for the pickpockets isn't too -attractive either. I wonder if they have had as much tidying up to do as -we did. - -I do feel for what's left of the staff--the breathing ones anyway. -That's why I'm laying off anything with a pulse rather than a current. -Golden handshakes for those with five fingers. - -It was a mistake, I guess. Mine first, but now it's everyone's. All -that's left for me is a long, silent walk around the automated roar of -the midnight floor, to the generator room. Flip the master switches, -lock the factory on my way out and do a disappearing act of my own. - -Except, when I get there, the door won't open. - -And behind me the machines all stop what they're doing. - -©Andrew Leon Hudson 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] asimo.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Truth and Other Upgrades - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] D�j� vu is just reincarnation for beginners - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I slid onto the bar stool alongside J.J. -Bones and dropped my fedora on the counter. The surrounding patrons of -Caf� Crank suddenly found an excuse to give us some room. J.J. had a -reputation for violence, not that 'violence' came close to describing -what he was capable of. - -He didn't look up from his drink. "That's my friend's face you're -wearing. Either leave now or leave it behind later." - -I motioned to the barman but he pretended not to see me, talking great -interest in polishing a glass instead. "That's no way to greet an old -pal, J-J, especially someone you shot in the face last time out." - -His eyes flickered in my direction. "Like I should know what you're -talking about? In your next life try a different approach." J.J. tossed -back his drink and stood up, arms hanging loosely at his sides. The -other customers collectively cringed, and none of them were exactly -blushing violets. The barman set the glass down on the counter and -reached for his shotgun - a sub-sonic Sandbagger. Not to use on J.J. - -he had more sense - but to take me out before things turned really -nasty. - -I dropped my voice. "That scar on your tongue, courtesy of Brakiri -Dreams." Only four people knew what had happened outside the nightclub; -me (in a previous incarnation), J.J. and the two McMaster sisters - both -of whom had been remaindered shortly thereafter. - -J.J. stared at me. "Rudi? That really you?" - -"In the flesh, my man, and I mean that literally. A mirror image of my -past self, if you like." - -He sat down again and waved the barman over. "Two Jack D, straight up." -Tension in the room dropped a notch and conversation around us -restarted, if a tad louder than before. J.J. looked me up and down. -"Mirror image? You're talking crystal lattice neural net in a vat-grown -body?" - -I grinned. "You got it. The second-best that Chiba City can provide." - -"Expensive." He sipped his drink. "And then some." - -"And money, J-J, is what I'm here to discuss." I tried my drink and -shuddered at the unfamiliar sensation. Originally I'd been an organic -brain in a synthetic body, but had to make other arrangements after J.J. -blew my head off. "My last client lodged a fortune in escrow with -several black clinics, knowing I wasn't going to collect. Despite my -trusting nature I tapped some of it for a real-time uplink, live and -direct. The memory of being killed is pretty weird, let me tell you." - -"And, again, expensive. So you had to settle for a lattice rather than -engram recreation?" - -"Yup. Close, but no cigar. I'm now as human as they come, apart from -where it counts." J.J. was entirely organic, with the BioPurity live-ink -tattoo on his shoulder to prove it, whereas with my artificial mind I -was still a cyborg. - -He sipped his drink. "It was nothing personal." Which was as close to an -apology as I was going to get. "You mentioned money?" - -I nodded. "Uh-huh. The babe who hired me knows her money is gone. The -Chiba City boys were more than happy to drain the escrow accounts and -put it into circulation, for a percentage, but that leaves me with a big -target on my back." - -J.J. grinned. "And you're walking around with the same name, the same -face? Gutsy." - -"I figured she'd come after me regardless, so why not stick with what I -know? Anyway, I've got the goods on her and its bound to be worth big -bucks." - -"So, we're talking straight-up blackmail?" - -"Primo. The babe claimed to be a personality construct based on Rosa -Hartz, a former exec with mediaCore. That may even be true, but it -doesn't really matter. This is all about boardroom control, and that -means moula. I figure we can back-track Rosa and find out who's running -her." - -He grunted. "If it was me she'd be body parts by now." - -"True, true, but not everyone is as tidy as you, J-J. Plus I don't think -she's told anyone I'm back from the dead. Rosa thought she was subject -to psychological imperatives, but loyalty doesn't make you dumb. I get -the distinct impression that with her crew it's one strike and you're -out." - -"OK, so she wants you snuffed but has to do it on the quiet. That maybe -bought some time, but coming back here just burned you, and good." - -I smiled. "Which is why I have a car outside, and an address to case. You in?" - -"Depends. How much you figure we can take Rosa for?" - -"Given what she's been able to do so far, and what it must have cost, -I'd say an easy fifteen million." - -J.J. finished his drink and set the glass down, inverted, on the bar. -"Fifteen million dollars is not money. It's a motive with a universal -adaptor on it." - -We rolled. -

-

My car was a rental; an unlicensed Brazilian copy of a -retro BMW 7-Series fitted with a standard hydrogen cell. Given how -Munich was this big hole in the ground I didn't think they'd mind. I -drove while J.J. put together a semi-automatic pistol from the seemingly -innocuous contents of his pockets; a lighter, a cigarette case, a pen - -shit like that. - -I glanced over. "They do come already assembled, so I'm told." - -He paused to scratch his chin. "I'm trying this out for a client. Says -he saw it in some old film and wants ready access to a firearm that can -pass a full security inspection. If the man is willing to pay then who -am I to argue?" - -"Speaking of esoteric weaponry, J-J, you owe me a needle gun." - -"I do?" - -"You do. All bought and paid for. And don't give me no legal bullshit -about how I'm not really the same person, right?" - -J.J. smiled. "Well, if you can spare the time, make a stop at the -StreetSafe on Inkerman. Couldn't shift the damn thing, anyway." - -I kept the engine hot while J.J. punched in his code and waited for the -internal carousel to present his safety deposit box at the access slot. -There were two Byrons at the transit stop who might have -complicated matters, but they only operate in threes - mad, bad and -dangerous to know. Their third wheel was obviously running late. - -J.J. returned to the car and tossed the needle gun into my lap. -"Twenty-six rounds remaining. I used four to crucify a rabbit so the -kid's dad would pay up." I winced, involuntarily, which provoked a harsh -laugh. "This new body making you soft, Rudi? That will be the endocrine -system interface acting up. You best watch that. But don't wet yourself, -it was a bunny-rabbit, a soft toy. Made the kid scream herself blue in -the face though." - -I stashed the gun in my jacket pocket and pulled away from the kerb. -"Anything you wouldn't do, J-J? I ask purely for information." - -"Depends." - -"On?" - -"On how much you're willing to pay, or how badly you piss me off. You -looking for a resum�?" - -"I'll pass. It's just that if Rosa turns out to be small-fry then we'll -need to move on up the food chain to make this worth our while. That -means getting a name outta' her." - -He shrugged. "Easy enough. This dame, she's a looker?" - -"Oh, yeah." - -"Then you go for the face. Her body may be a replaceable meat-job, like -yours, but the mind finds it hard to ignore the threat of disfigurement. -Shit, I ain't brought a blade, though. Got a shiv about your person, -Rudi?" - -"Swiss Army knife any good?" - -J.J. snorted. "Kinda' lacking in threat factor, no? Never mind, there's -bound to be a bottle or glass we can use. Don't sweat it." - -We drove on. A roving ad-ap hacked the car's multi-media system, which -burst into life. "Welcome to the historic Foundry district. With its -post-industrial, neo-brutalist charm, Foundry makes the ideal-". I -tried to switch it off but the ad had a lock on the traffic information -override. J.J. tore the console free and tossed it on the back seat. -Neither of us said a word. - -After a few blocks I turned onto Smelter, making it obvious where we -were headed. J.J. Frowned. "Club Eighty-Eighty? You didn't tell me Rosa -was a gun-bunny. Either that or she's moonlighting as a working girl or -waitress." Club Eighty-Eight - 'An authentic experience of the -Reagan-Bush era' was a combined shooting range, diner and whorehouse. Of -course J.J. held a life-time membership. - -I shook my head. "Neither, she's rented the entire top floor, the -function suite, on a long-term contract." - -"Don't take this the wrong way, Rudi, but if someone like you managed to -trace her here, that's sloppy security, amateurish. You sure this babe -is the real deal?" - -I ignored the jibe. "When I went back to my office and checked the -surveillance logs there was no sign she'd ever been there. Same with the -building elevator, and she's got a real good memory for faces." - -J.J. shrugged. "So you got hacked." - -"So I got hacked, but because the building ice is so shit I keep a pair -of net aps running a continual Fred-and-Ginger around the site. Sure -enough, when I checked that log there was nothing there, but a -'nothing' that stopped my aps tracking each other." - -He frowned. "Stealth programming? Absorption matrix? You're talking -about something from the high cores - military, or as good as. -Please tell me you didn't try and tag its ass?" - -"I'm not that dumb, but I did get an approach vector, and it didn't come -from anywhere above the line. So I had Fred-and-Ginger back-track, -looking for what wasn't there. Club Eight-Eight has this pissy little -data net handling their membership, inventory and the like, but -squatting inside it is this real big lump of nothing." - -"A camouflaged net access point. Who is it we're tweaking again? Because -this deal is going south by the minute." - -"Originally I thought it had to be Margo Squires, but this really isn't -her style. She's all about boardroom leverage and this crew are -way outside the box." - -I'd started out as a pleasure model, with Margo as one of my regular -clients. She'd been ousted as Chairman and CEO of mediaCore by Leon -Fabricant, the man I'd inadvertently assassinated. Margo might have been -a ruthless, manipulative, conniving bitch, but the closest she'd ever -come to corporate violence was a paper cut. - -I parked the car. Even through the sound-proofing we could hear the -faint pop of small arms and occasional rattle of a machine-pistol. A -neon Ronald Reagan and George Bush towered above the entrance, arms -around each other's shoulders. Reagan winked while Bush gave us the -thumbs-up. - -We got out and walked over. The two doormen were slabs of meat wearing -dinner suits cut from ballistic cloth. I doubted they needed the -protection. With their cartilage enhancements and muscle grafts they -were probably proof against anything short of an anti-tank round. - -J.J. flashed his membership. "This here is Rudi, my guest for the -evening. Who's in tonight, boys?" - -One of the monoliths spoke - a squeaky falsetto. "The Skorpions and -Uzis, boss. So you maybe want to give the range a few minutes, yeah?" -Out back the club sported a stylized urban trial course, complete with -pop-up targets. It was also used by weapon-fetish gangs as a place to -settle old scores. - -My host nodded. "I was feeling hungry anyway. Maybe we'll rent some time -on the fifty-cal later, Rudi?" - -I managed an unconvincing grin. "Hell, yeah." - -We moved through to the diner and settled into a corner booth. The -waitress brought two schooners of beer over, unbidden. I looked around. -"No menus?" - -He smiled. "Here they serve steak, with all the trimmings. Don't ask for -well-done or the cook will spit on it. If you're under the age of -twelve, or have a doctor's note, they might let you off with a burger." - -"Look, J-J, I'm still getting a handle on this whole eating malarkey. -Don't they have a fish option?" - -"Fish? Christ, man, that's no better than being a vegetarian. Well, if -you want everyone to know you're a card-carrying pinko liberal commie -fag, be my guest. Just give me a ten-minute head start, OK?" - -"Yeah, yeah, I get the message." I sighed. "You actually like it here?" - -J.J. grinned, a savage glint in his eye. "You bust a few caps to get the -blood flowing, party with the girls upstairs, then recover with an -overdose of red meat. What's not to like?" - -"Sitting here with a target on my forehead? You may have forgotten but -this is kinda' the lion's den for me, so I'd appreciate tackling why we -really came here." - -"No problem." He held up two fingers and the waitress delivered two shot -glasses of bourbon. "Depth charges. It's an acceptable form of Dutch -courage before taking on some of the heavier guns available for hire. -The club is actually named after the largest caliber they'll supply." - -"That's a joke, right?" - -"Usually. OK, access to the conference suite is via the main lobby, but -that's way too obvious given the lobby security. So we drink up, hit the -john, carry on out back and try the fire escape." - -I stared at him. "Charging up the stairs and and kicking the door in, -that's your plan?" - -"Pretty much. What it lacks in novelty, subtlety and the element of -surprise it makes up for in brutality. Look, Rosa is the only person -upstairs, and she's there right now?" - -"Oh yeah. I've got a micro-drone across the parking lot, with a long -shot of the lobby stairs, plus another covering the rear. She comes and -goes quite frequently, and has a mania for changing her outfits like -four times a day, but she's the only person I've seen accessing the -conference suite." - -J.J. smiled, but without humour. "So it don't matter if she has CCTV -coverage, motion sensors, the works - once we're in we move quickly to -find and overpower her. We're two grown men against one broad, so what -could possibly go wrong?" - -"She might be armed, for starters." - -"And we're still two against one. Trust me, up against those kinds of -odds most people want to believe you're only there to talk." He dropped -a shot glass into his beer. "So drink up and let's get this done." - -I followed suit, raising the schooner to my lips and swallowing, -swallowing, swallowing until it was empty and I could reveal the shot -glass held between my teeth. Even diluted, the bourbon left a trail of -fire down my throat. I set both glasses on the table and tried not to -cough. J.J. was already on his feet, heading for the Men's Room. I threw -down some bills and followed suit, my eyes watering. - -At the far end of the corridor, past the rest rooms, lay the fire exit. -J.J. put a round into the door sensor before shouldering it open, not -that I thought anyone would give a damn. He raced up the external fire -escape, two treads at a time, with me hustling to keep up. On reaching -the top landing I barely had time to draw my needle gun before he blew -the door off its hinges with two micro-strip charges. - -We charged inside. I registered a short hallway ending in a T-junction -with doors on either side. - -Rosa Hartz appeared round the corner like a pop-up target on the range, -holding a semi-automatic pistol in each hand. She shot me once in the -chest by way of re-introduction before turning her fire on J.J. The pain -was like a spike between the ribs. I gasped and staggered - before -remembering to shut down the neural sensation interface. - -But it was too late. Rosa blazed away at my partner, hitting him -multiple times in the torso. J.J. jerked and twitched under the impacts, -blood blossoming on his sleeveless jacket, but refused to fall. - -I fired, the twee-twee-twee of the gas-powered weapon almost -inaudible against the background barrage. My aim was off and I hit Rosa -in the leg - I may not have been feeling any pain but my all-too-human -body was still coping with being shot in the chest. - -One needle shattered her kneecap and her leg gave way. Rosa slumped -sideways against the wall, wild rounds taking out the ceiling light and -glass panel door to our left. J.J. raised his composite pistol and shot -her cleanly through the right eye. - -Silence. - -Rosa Hartz collapsed to the floor like the proverbial puppet with its -strings cut. - -J.J. Bones dropped to his knees, gun trailing on the carpet tiles. - -I tried to speak but it came out as a frothy wheeze, pink-tinged bubbles -bursting on my lips. - -J.J. groaned between clenched teeth. Bullets, spent rounds, began -dropping from his chest to the floor with a soft plink. I groped -a handkerchief from my pocket and pressed it against the sucking chest -wound. "See if you're not dead, J-J, I'm having you in front of the -Humanities Board. No fucking way could a regular body take shit -like that." - -He swore under his breath and slowly stood up, one hand braced against -the wall for support. I didn't offer to help. J.J. took a breath and -winced. "Straub harness. Elasticated. Retards penetration, expels the -round. Chemical cauterization of the wound tract. Still hurts like fuck -though. Cost me a couple of ribs at least, maybe some internal damage, -but I'm good to go." - -"Go? Go where? We just wasted our only lead. Anytime now, security will -come investigate our little firefight and may not take kindly to us -blowing away a paying client." - -"Wanna get out now? Wanna quit? This is never gonna come your way again. -I say we check out her operation for clues and find out who she was -fronting for. You know, Rudi, like what a real private detective would -do?" - -I snarled through my teeth by way of reply, a combination of frustration -and shame, and set off down the corridor. Rosa looked like an expensive -rag doll, discarded by some easily-bored child - which was almost the -case, given she'd been killed by J.J. Bones. I pocketed the needle gun -and prized the two conventional pistols from her grasp. I kept one and -handed the other to my partner. - -Around the corner, from where Rosa had appeared, was another length of -corridor. One of the doors stood ajar and there was light coming from -the room beyond. J.J. gave me a 'three-two-one' finger countdown and we -burst in. - -A young man sat behind the desk across the room, facing the door. Two -illumination orbs hovered either side of him as he tapped on a Workpad. -Other than that the room was devoid of interest. - -"I know this is a clich� but hands where we can see them, no sudden -moves." I sounded semi-apologetic, even to myself. - -The man looked up, arching an eyebrow. "Do you seriously think I'd go to -all the time and expense of creating Rosa and bother to arm myself?" He -sighed and placed his Workpad on the desk in front of him before raising -his hands. "I take it she is dead?" - -J.J. grinned. "Very, and you'll be joining her shortly if we don't get -some answers. Who you are, for starters." - -"Who am I? Now that is an interesting question. Well, this body -is that of Simon McNeil, the new personal assistant to Margo Scales." - -I frowned. "The body of Simon McNeil? Care to make some sense outta' -that, pal?" - -'McNeil' smiled. "My mind is that of Howard Ghent, Chairman and CEO of -mediaCore until my - his - recent demise. McNeil was kind enough to -donate his body so that I can again exercise control over the -multi-media empire I founded. Not that Margo will recognize my influence -as anything so blatant." - -My partner laughed, winced, and went plink. "Donate? Somehow I -doubt that. Mind jacking will get you remaindered, Ghent, regardless of -what financial and political influence you have. That's assuming the -Turing Bureau don't roast you alive first." - -The neo-Ghent inclined his head. "One possible outcome, I admit, but in -the short term would you be interested in replacing Rosa as my personal -security? I'm sure you'll find the terms and conditions quite generous." - -I shook my head. "Forget it, bozo, not reporting your crime comes with -a-" - -The world went white. -

- -

My senses returned like an antique TV being tuned into a -station; sliding from static into coherence. I was lying on my side, -still in the office, with J.J. on the floor nearby and 'Ghent' again -typing on his Workpad. - -Rosa Hartz stood in the doorway, holding a gun. - -The weapons we'd taken from her earlier, and the composite pistol, lay -on top of a filing cabinet. I tried to speak but could only wheeze and -bubble, having lost my handkerchief. - -Ghent looked up. "Ah, Mister Hess, you've returned to us. On scanning -for weapons we discovered you're not quite as human as expected. Not -many of your kind survive the effects of a neural disruptor, so you -could almost count yourself fortunate." - -J.J. groaned and raised himself up on one elbow. He blinked rapidly, -took in the room, and grinned at Rosa. "Marry me. Any bitch who can take -that kind of punishment deserves to be the mother of my child." - -Rosa laughed. "I'm Rosamund Beatrice Hartz. The woman you killed was -Rosamund Deborah. Sorry to disappoint you, Bones." - -Ghent smiled. "Why go to all the time and expense of procuring one -vat-grown bodyguard when you can have four at only eight times the -price? Duplicating the same personality becomes ruinously expensive, but -well worth it given the circumstances, I think you'll agree. Deborah -will be missed, of course, although I'm never sure which one I'm dealing -with anyway." - -Now that I was paying attention it was obvious her outfit was different -from the woman in the corridor, although the real giveaway was having -both eyes. I felt like a fool - they'd been coming and going in plain -sight all this time and I'd thought Rosa Hartz was simply a -fashion-conscious clothes horse. - -J.J. didn't seem discouraged. "The offer still stands. If you've got the -same moves as your sister then you're someone I'd want covering my back -any day of the week." - -She smiled. "I'm almost flattered. The key word being 'almost'." - -Ghent sounded irritated. "Enough of this. Please understand that you've -been kept alive for the sole purpose of providing me with information. I -need to know how you traced Rosa here and who else is involved. You have -my apologies in advance, Mister Bones, should you be unable to furnish -us with the technical aspects of your investigation, but I'm afraid -we're not going to take 'I don't know' for an answer." - -My partner snorted. "Then put Hess under the hammer, not me. I'm just -the hired muscle." - -"Unfortunately, Mister Hess, being the type of cyborg that he is, can -simply choose not to experience pain. So he's superfluous for the -purposes of this interrogation. " I felt myself relax at Ghent's words, -if only slightly. " Rosa, if you would be so kind as to kill Mister -Hess?" - -I tried to speak as Rosa raised her weapon - and shot Ghent in the -heart. - -He slumped back in his chair, coughed, and smiled. "Bravo." His head -fell forward. - -I looked at J.J. We both looked at Rosa. She shrugged. "Same plan, -different players. I'll be the new advisor to Margo Scales, keeping tabs -until she can be ousted from the board. Howard really should have looked -more closely into where I- we - came from, but like all egotistical men -he assumed loyalty was a commodity with market value." - -J.J. sat up and scratched his chest. He went plink. "OK, so -you've an agenda that doesn't involve Ghent, and that's cool. Now, with -him gone that's the end of the money trail as far as we're concerned, so -how about we call this a score-draw and leave it at that? Unless you'd -be interested in dinner?" - -She laughed and shook her head. "Like I said, same plan, different -players. I still need to know how you traced us here, and Hess is still -surplus to requirements. Sorry, you might even be fun to have around, -but this is business." - -I managed to speak. "Handkerchief. Pocket." - -Rosa looked at me quizzically. "Famous last words? Oh, go on then, why -not. Given what you've cost us we may as well get our money's worth." - -I fumbled in my pocket, hand closing over the needle gun. The plastic -and ceramic piece that didn't show up on a weapons scanner. - -I fired at Rosa, needles busting from my coat pocket and spraying her -face - more through luck than judgment. She screamed and shot back at -me, the bullet blasting simulated wood paneling from a spot beside my -ear. J.J. rolled away. Rosa fired again, but she was blind and merely -hit the floor near my foot. My gun hissed empty and I tossed it aside. - - -Nobody moved. - -Rosa stood there, breathing heavily, looking like a failed extra from -Hellraiser. Ocular fluid ran down her cheeks like tears. I tried not to -wheeze, a finger jammed into my chest wound. - -J.J. went plink. - -Rosa turned and fired, hitting him in the shoulder. I managed to stand -but couldn't help but cough while doing so. She twisted in my direction -and shot me in the thigh, aiming low. I stumbled forward against the -filing cabinet and fell to my knees. I held my breath. A second shot -punched a neat hole in the metal beside my head. J.J. threw a waste -paper basket at Rosa but it bounced harmlessly off her shoulder. She -ignored it, staring at me intently with her ruined eyes. - -J.J.s composite pistol teetered on the edge of the filing cabinet above -me, just out of reach. - -A thrown paperweight struck the cabinet. The pistol fell and I caught it -before it hit the carpet. Rosa lowered her aim and shot me in the right -forearm. I grunted and threw myself sideways, sprawling on the carpet. -The pistol was in my left hand and I hadn't paid extra to be -ambidextrous. - -Nobody moved. - -I tried to breathe just through my nose but blood bubbles were building -up, making me want to sneeze. It was an involuntary reaction and not one -I could override. J.J. motioned for me to throw the gun over, but I -wasn't even sure I could do that. - -The composite pistol fired puissant .22 long rounds - a marksman load -with bugger-all stopping power. Unless I could hit something vital, -shooting Rosa was just advertising my presence. I forced my wounded arm -into play and pulled back the fountain pen breech, ejecting a round. The -bullet rolled across the parquet strip that ran between the door and -desk - an unmistakable sound. Rosa had no way of knowing what weapon I -held. - -J.J. coughed. "Give it up, Rosa, Hess has you cold. All we want is the -name of your backer. Tell us that and nobody has to die." - -She stiffened. "My life is not yours to give or take." Rosa placed the -muzzle under her chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet blew the top of -her skull off and embedded itself in the ceiling. The corpse collapsed -in a heap. - -J.J. crawled over to retrieve her gun and then sat back against the -wall. He didn't look so good. I managed to prop myself up against the -filing cabinet. What bodily sensations I let myself experience didn't -feel great. - -A small dog, a terrier, trotted into the room. He wore a coat labeled -'Security' and carried a webcam around his neck. Given the extensive -CCTV coverage of the ranges I hoped nobody was paying much attention to -their roving reporter. The dog sniffed my foot, then sat down at my side -and licked his balls. - -I jammed a fold of cloth into my chest wound and tried to breathe. "How -the hell do we get out of this, J-J? We got three bodies and enough -evidence so that even the local cops could make a case. And if the -Turing boys get a sniff of that-" I gestured towards the dead -avatar of Howard Ghent, "-we'll feel some serious heat." - -He didn't answer. The dog sat and panted, his tongue lolling. I wheezed -and burbled. J.J went plink. - -Finally he smiled at me and the dog. "Hang on lads, I've got a great -idea�" - -© Martin Clark 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] truth.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Aye-Nay - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] So, why did we never get to vote on whether we wanted -democracy? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Neighbours watched him taken away. - -The street lighting had been turned up, as was the custom when Dempols -were making an arrest. Not merely spotlit: they carved everything out in -sharp, varnished focus. Those on the sidewalks could see the droplets of -sweat on Peter Lava's cheeks. Others had remained inside to watch--their -TV's interrupting their usual evening's viewing to relay pictures of -what was transpiring just beyond their front doors. - -In the street, no one made a noise. - -On the TV transmission, jeering and insults swept back and forth like -broken shells chewed and spat by an angry tide. - -Peter Lava went serenely, unchaperoned, to the waiting vehicle to be -whisked off to Dempol Park 634. - - -

"ON THE ISSUE OF RAISING THE DRINKING AGE TO 15 AND 3 -MONTHS, HOW DO YOU VOTE? PRESS GREEN FOR AYE. PRESS RED FOR NAY. PRESS I -FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. - -"YOU PRESSED GREEN. AYE. YOU WISH TO SEE THE DRINKING AGE RAISED TO 15 -AND 3 MONTHS. PRESS OK TO CONFIRM. - -"CONFIRMED. - -"THANKYOU FOR VOTING ON THIS ISSUE. - -"ON THE ISSUE OF BUILDING A NEW SERVICE STATION FOR THE MZ7 MOTORWAY -LINK, HOW DO YOU VOTE? PRESS GREEN FOR AYE. PRESS RED FOR NAY. PRESS I -FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. - -"YOU PRESSED RED. NAY. YOU DO NOT WISH TO SEE A NEW SERVICE STATION FOR -THE MZ7 MOTORWAY LINK. PRESS OK TO CONFIRM. - -"CONFIRMED. - -"THANKYOU FOR VOTING ON THIS ISSUE. - -"THAT IS ALL FOR THIS EVENING. PLEASE ENJOY YOUR RECESS." - -

"Enter, Peter Lava. Sit only in the seat marked with -your name." - -Peter's full electoral name shone in green neon along its back. Like on -one of those old, director's chairs from the days of celluloid movies. -Monitors recorded his movements, adjusted room temperature to take -account of subtle changes wrought by his perspiration and lighting -soundlessly flicked sections on and off to cut out any shadow he might -have cast. - -The seat accepted him, learnt his shape, and then continued to fine-tune -to give the illusion it was merely an extension of his own anatomy. Or -that he wasn't sitting at all, but suspended in mid-air. - -"You have committed a Demcrime. You have the right to enter a plea. Your -failure to admit your culpability at this stage will have a bearing on -your sentence." - -Seconds built into minutes. - -A sign flashed with the message "The longer you delay, the longer your -sentence." - -Tock. Tock. Tock. Not counting time: each electronic tongue-cluck -signifying instead an extra hour, day, week, maybe even a year. He -hadn't caught the last vote on sentencing issues. - -After twenty-one regulation minutes, the voice cut in: - -"Your failure to enter a plea means one must be entered for you. If no -plea is entered in the next ten seconds, the maximum penalty will be -applied." - -There was a dull, granite-grey square on the opposite wall. The light -beyond was muted--identical to that of the night outside. It might have -been a screen, might have been a window. Maybe neither. - -"Insanity," Peter said. - -"That plea is not an accepted option." - -"Just cause." - -"That plea not an accepted option." - -"Diminished-." - -"That plea not an accepted option." - -"My democratic right to choose." - -"That plea is not an accepted option." - -Now isn't that an irony? - -

Bradley heard of his brother's arrest the following -morning. - -He lived in a district too far away to have caught the live broadcast. -That morning, the heavy curtainwall that shielded his house against the -light-pollution that kept the town looking as grainy as cheap newsprint -even at night, slid halfway back and stuck. As he was dialling for an -Auto-rep the Newsbox detected his presence and switched itself on. - -The news had been tailored specifically for him by the Personal Default -settings and so the very first thing he heard about was his brother's -arrest. - -Peter. - -A Demcrime? - -It was their mother's fault. Bradley, as the older brother, had had -father around long enough to soften the impact of her sermonising. But -when father had left because he couldn't take any more, little Peter had -become her little academic Adonis: listening rapt and unquestioning to -every word she'd expounded. The two had become totally dependent on each -other. Teller and Told. - -

"Bradley," Peter said, smiling. "I was wondering whether -you'd come. How's Martia?" - -"She's fine. Visiting her grandmother." - -"Yes?" That was the third wife that had left him. Shame. Martia was the -only one of the three that had actually laughed once in a while. - -"So. You've finally done it then? You idiot." - -"Pressed this morning?" - -"As has everyone." - -"Not me. Not here. The insane, the young and the incarcerated lose their -right to vote." - -"So you should be happy, then. Finally got what you wanted?" - -"Now that would be the second irony of these last twenty-four hours." - -"What?" - -"Nothing�" - -

"ON THE ISSUE OF A FIFTH SERIES OF THE DEMTV COMEDY -SERIES 'ALL IN THE HOUSE', HOW DO YOU VOTE? PRESS GREEN FOR AYE. PRESS -RED FOR NAY. PRESS I FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. - -"YOU PRESSED RED. NAY. YOU DO NOT WISH TO SEE A FIFTH SERIES OF THE -DEMTV COMEDY SERIES 'ALL IN THE HOUSE'. PRESS OK TO CONFIRM. - -"CONFIRMED. - -"THANKYOU FOR VOTING ON THIS ISSUE. - -"ON THE ISSUE OF STATE BUILDINGS CHANGING FROM STANDARD OCEAN BLUE TO -DEEP OCEANIC BLUE, HOW DO YOU VOTE? PRESS GREEN FOR AYE. PRESS RED FOR -NAY. PRESS I FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. - -"YOU PRESSED GREEN. AYE. YOU DO WISH STATE BUILDINGS TO CHANGE FROM -STANDARD OCEAN BLUE TO DEEP OCEANIC BLUE. PRESS OK TO CONFIRM. - -"CONFIRMED. - -"THANKYOU FOR VOTING ON THIS ISSUE. - -"THAT IS ALL FOR THIS EVENING. PLEASE ENJOY YOUR RECESS." - -

He had another visitor. - -There was a seventy-two-hour period before the convicted went off to -begin their sentences when they could receive guests. Peter hadn't even -counted on Bradley coming--he certainly wasn't expected anyone else. - -"Martia? This is a surprise." She mumbled something. There was a -crumpled tissue in her fist, eyes puffy, cheeks red and raw-looking. -"Sorry to hear about you and Bradley." - -"Oh, Peter. I saw you on TV last night. I saw�" - -Her grandmother's place must have been in his zone. The fact he hadn't -known this just went to show how little families shared these days. The -old woman could have lived next-door to him and he wouldn't have known. - -"Well�" Peter shifted uncomfortably in his movie director chair. His -brother hadn't made him feel nervous or even guilty about what he'd -done, but this tearful woman somehow did. - -"Why did you do it? I mean�a Demcrime? Of all the�" - -He shrugged. The action felt absurdly adolescent and so he scraped -around for words: - -"It's not really as if there are any other crimes one can commit." The -observation brought a sharp intake of breath. - -"Don't make it worse on yourself, Peter." - -"I'm not intending to. And, anyway: that was just an observation, not a -criticism. Well, not a direct one, at least." He smiled awkwardly at his -clumsily assembled justification. - -"What is it you did?" He saw the intrigue in her eyes. Was that why -she'd come--to be titillated? He told her regardless. - -"I rubbered my print, rigged up a randomiser to do the choosing, let it -vote and confirm on my behalf." - -"You did what? I can't believe you would do such a thing!" - -For the first time, he felt cold fingers of apprehension play a scale -down his spine. He really had done something big. Maybe too big. And -there was a possibility the principles he'd been fighting for no longer -looked half as big as those he'd flouted. He'd broken the sacred Demrule -of 'Thou Shalt Vote.' The First Commandment. Not a right, but a duty. A -legal duty, whose failure was punished accordingly. - -"And so all your votes have been taken by�" - -"A rubber finger on a pivot, basically. I tied it up with -voice-recognition software so it responded to the call to vote. The -actual decision was made like a coin toss. The recess announcement reset -everything after each session." - -"You did all that? How?" - -"I guess I just figured it out." - -"Without an Auto?" - -"Without an Auto." - -"Can you actually do that? Really?" - -"It wasn't that difficult. A standard electrical circuit is really just -a closed loop. Once you know that, anything's possible." - -A closed loop, she mouthed, probably not even aware of it. - -"And now you're here," she said, shaking her head. - -"Now I'm here." - -"Why?" - -"�did I do it?" She nodded. Peter sighed. "You know, since everything -began to be done by the Autos, all we were left to do was create the -ultimate democracy. We finally got to vote on everything--every tiny -little thing is decided not by some faceless politician but by the -people themselves. Everyone has a vote. True, direct democracy at work." - -"Exactly. That's why I don't understand�" - -He held up a hand. "Oh, I admit it's what every libertarian has always -dreamed of." - -"We all have a say." - -"Yes? But on every tiny, inconsequential issue? What do I know about the -optimal sugar content of a loaf of bread? What do I even care about the -ratio of red to yellow-and-orange tulips in the Demparks? And why should -I be telling a baker or a landscape gardener what they know better than -me?" - -"A baker? I don't understand." - -"Exactly! Because none of these professions even exist anymore! The -Autos do everything. So why the hell are we even being consulted? It's -all armchair whims." He heard his mother telling him this. Telling him -until he could close his eyes, hold her opinions in his head, and let -them work his lips. - -I miss you. - -"And when we don't want to think about an issue, we just toss a mental -coin and let it decide. Wasn't that merely what I was doing?" - -Martia didn't meet his eyes. He realised the last comment had come out -as a plea for understanding, not a bold declaration of his beliefs or -rights. He was grovelling for scraps of comfort when he had already -sealed his fate. - -For what? - -Why had he really done it? Hearing it spoken now didn't even convince -him it had been worth it. They did have things good. The Autos had -released them. Every man and woman did, finally, have a say in the -running of things. So what was his problem? - -Mother would have been able to tell him. - -"I ought to go. I've got things to do. Sorry." Martia stood, eyes still -trained deliberately away. - -He continued to wait for her answer nonetheless. - -The doors slid open, closed behind her. - -The last two days had provided him with more conversation than the -preceding two years. - -Since mother had died. - -"I'm hungry," he complained to the empty room. - -"It is not yet time to eat. You have forfeited the right to eat at a -time of your own choosing." - -"Aren't you going to ask me what I want for dinner?" - -"You have forfeited the right to choose." - -He bowed his head, sulking. But beneath it, a smile lingered. - -Better. So much better. He hugged his chest, rocked a little. He was -home again. And, in an infant's whisper: "Yes, mother." - -© Jez Patterson 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] ayenay.jpg - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use -s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - - - - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev15.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev15.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index b4bc9ae4..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev15.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2600 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 15 - November 2014 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 15th issue of Mythaxis. - - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The Mythaxis editorial office creaks into -action again with this (I can hardly believe it) fifteenth issue of -Mythaxis Magazine. Once again, we offer a wide range of science fiction -and fantasy, including two more stories from Les Sklaroff's parallel -world, two more from Martin Clark's future noir, a titillating tale from -Andrew Leon Hunter and a look at justice from Jez Patterson. - -And (thanks to Sean Crawford's Plains of Abyssinia) high-octane -memoirs of the LSD-fuelled 1960s. - -My own memories of the 1960s are less remarkable, and include:

    -
  • a large disk storage unit, installed in a skyscraper, which, due to -gyroscopic effects, tore up its anchors and started to walk across the -room when the building swayed slightly in a high wind. -
  • early, huge, laser printers which toasted (to a rich brown)the -continuous stationery they used, and took minutes, and several yards of -paper, to get up to speed and to slow down. If all you needed was a -couple of lines of diagnostics, it made for quite a paper chase. -
  • an experimental machine which chopped up documents and stuffed them -into envelopes in real time as they poured out of the vast printers that -were popular back then. -
-Oh, the good old days. - -
However, back -to -business. This edition of Mythaxis Magazine coincides -with the release of William Gibson's novel, The -Peripheral, a review of which appears in the Mythaxis blog. - -In other news, we have updated the Mythaxis blog with a number of your -editor's earlier reviews of books by William Gibson and Iain M Banks. - -There is also a new page on the Mythaxis blog, called One-Line Movie Reviews. Most of them are not, in fact, -only one line long, but they are brief enough to give your editor's -trenchant view. - - - -[*IMAGE] hieronymous.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Slippage - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] There's: Truths, Half-Truths, Lies and... Slippage - -[*DESCRIPTION]

For much of the last century the property, -a basement in the Bloomsbury -area, had belonged to Cyril Garring-Pugh, a reclusive minor aristocrat -with sufficient funds to indulge his relatively few interests, -principally fine wines, good books and compliant women. In his later -years he became obsessed by elf-lore, and spent much of his time -studying runes, and, it was rumoured, conducting curious experiments. -Now deceased, the owner had no close family. The odd manner of his -death had been the cause of some speculation, and according to reports, -the police were keeping their files open - which meant closed to -investigative journalists. The cellar was long depleted, the women -vanished into the night. All that remained were the books, which Milner -(as he currently prefers to be known), with his impeccable credentials -(and his own unique private library), had been asked to examine on -behalf of the executors. They made no objection when he asked if I, as -his most recent amanuensis, might accompany him. - -

Wasn't a printer's devil some sort of -apprentice?
A thin layer of dust had settled on every surface, but -fortunately the -ventilation system had kept the books dry and free from mould. Milner -glanced again at the book I'd handed him with a wry smile - the first -one that had caught my eye: a copy, according to the title on the spine, -of Leak House by Dickens. "I'd say, young Arnold, that -this -may well be a typical example of a printer's devil at work. You do -realise that the lost 'B' is not a sign of wear," he said earnestly, -angling the book so that I could see the title-page. LEAK HOUSE -it stated again, unmistakably, in large clear capitals. There was no -trace of erasure. - -My smile faded. "That's very peculiar" I said. "But -wasn't a printer's devil some sort of apprentice?" - -"A common misconception, dating back to the seventeenth century," -Milner replied. "At the very least, this is symptomatic of mischievous -slippage. No, my friend, it looks as though Garring-Pugh must have -given serious offence, however inadvertently, to the elvish -community, and the consequences, as I have reason to know, can be rather -unfortunate. I fear this entire collection may have suffered. I -suggest we try selecting a few more at random." - -He crossed the room, and with remarkable suppleness for a man of his -considerable age reached up to a shelf above his head, and took down a -book. It was an English translation of Flaubert's Madame -Ovary. -"Dear me," said Milner, "A trifle indelicate, wouldn't you say? Try -choosing one at random." I looked around. In a small bookcase there -were some elderly-looking children's books. - -I picked out one with a -dark red binding. "Lice in Wonderland," I called out, -disbelievingly. - -"Most unpleasant," said Milner, reaching for another. -"Here's The Tim Machine." - -"Now there's a coincidence," I said, -spotting a petulant-sounding title by Aldous Huxley: Tim Must Have -a -Top. - -"Typical elf-meddling," mused Milner. "And also an example of -double slippage. Definitely mischievous, bordering on the -disrespectful." - -We took turns, calling out the titles as we found them. Wherever we -looked, irreverent slippage had occurred: The Heat of Midlothian -- -Three Men in a Boa - Put Out More Fags - Our Ma in Havana. -Clear -indication, as I was now persuaded, of the work of seriously offended -elves. - -"Can anything be done about this?" I asked Milner, replacing a copy of -Wok Suspended between A Midsummer Night's -Dram and -Poe's -Ales of Mystery and Imagination. - -He stroked his stylishly -shortened beard. "As it happens," he said, delving into a pocket, -"Knowing Garring-Pugh's reputation, I took the precaution of bringing -with me a specific remedy. You won't find it in the shops; it's a -formula I prepared many years ago for Tom James, a young librarian in -Oxford." He withdrew a small blue glass phial, and gently levered off -its cork stopper with his thumb. Immediately I could smell beeswax and -linseed oil, and something else cloyingly sweet, which I was unable to -identify. Milner then moved in front of each set of shelves, waving the -phial in a sinuous motion from top to bottom, murmuring something -quietly to himself as he did so. "There, that should do the trick," he -said, replacing the stopper, and carefully restoring the phial to his -pocket. "It will probably take full effect in a day or so. I'll arrange -for us to come back later in the week." He wandered into the adjoining -room. - -Moments later I heard a suppressed groan, and rushed through to join -him. He was peering at an elegant rosewood cabinet. "Oh dear, Arnold, -I wonder what Cyril did to piss them off?" Milner rather enjoyed -keeping up with modern idioms. "They didn't stop at the books. Do you -remember that rather good American TV series? There's a complete boxed -set of DVDs here." - -"Which one?" I enquired. - -He sighed, and reached -again for his little phial. "See for yourself." - -I looked. Aaron -Sorkin would not have been pleased. There was a neat row of seven -successively numbered transparent plastic boxes, each one afflicted with -double slippage, rudely labelled: The Wet Wig. - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] slippage.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Uneasy Money - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] �In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized -robbery?� St. Augustine - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The inner airlock doors slid open and the -two of us stepped into the ship proper. There was no reception -committee, which is always a good start where larceny is concerned. -Frank glowered at our Spartan surroundings, but then again, he glowers -at everything. "Wealthy as sin and this is the best he can come up with? -I've seen better appointed bus shelters." - -I had to admit the access corridor was functional to the point of -bleakness. Not exactly what you'd expect aboard a star yacht owned by -the reclusive tycoon, Lucien Ghent. Everyone we'd spoken to on the space -station had assured us the Scaramanga was a veritable star-faring -pleasure palace. Needless to say, none of the inhabitants of Nebula -Gateway had ever set foot aboard, but all knew of someone who had. - -Our sources reported that Ghent had gone loopy - if you could break -in -then he'd let you walk out with as much loot as you could carry, -free -and clear. I'd done my research and that sounded mad enough to be true; -Ghent hadn't been seen in public for almost three years and seemed to -treat interpersonal contact as an unnecessary evil. He'd even replaced -most of the crew with automated systems, not that the Scaramanga was -going anywhere in a hurry. It was tethered to the space station by a -host of hawsers and semi-permanent umbilicals - a parasitic entity that -pretty much summed up the great man himself. - -So it was a challenge, but seeing as how Frank is a psychopathic killer -and I can crack any electronic lock ever made, we figured it was worth a -punt. However, if our initial surroundings were anything to go by then -it looked like we'd be leaving empty handed. - -There was a flash of light and I felt my skin tingle. Frank hissed at -me, as if keeping his voice down would somehow help. "You said we'd be -invisible to the on-board systems. So how come-" - -A synthetic male voice issued from the wall speaker. "Welcome aboard the -Scaramanga. Gentlemen. Please wait one moment." - -I could well understand the system's hesitation as my immediate social -circle were heavily into gender morphing. To get back in shape I'd taken -a blitz course of Tee-He, leaving me with a bad case of drug-induced -priapism. Strapping my dick down in an enforced 'dressing on the left' -had left me with a pronounced limp, to the extent I needed a walking -stick to get about. - -Water vapor materialized around us, like we'd suddenly flown into a -cloud. I heard Frank cursing but he was lost, obscured by the billowing -white folds. As suddenly as it had appeared the mist dissolved away, as -if burnt off by the rising sun. - -And it had. - -We were standing on a rock outcrop, a kind of ersatz observation -platform jutting out from the hillside. The sun had just cleared the -ridge behind us, throwing the semi-tropical valley below into stark -relief. There was no sign of life, let alone civilization, to mar the -lush sweep of vegetation. Away to the left lay the blue haze of the -ocean, and that was that. We were at altitude, but nothing -uncomfortable. I took a deep breath of fresh air which quite lacked the -antiseptic tang I'd gotten used to during my time in space. - -"It's quite something, don't you think?" The voice came from behind us; -male, sounding amused. I knew instantly I was going to dislike him. - -I turned awkwardly, leaning on my cane. The speaker and a woman stood a -few meters away. He appeared squat in comparison to his companion but -that was due to his wide shoulders and heavy-set features. The woman had -catwalk elegance and eyes the colour of dead neon. - -The man gestured out across the valley. "It's a topographical recreation -of Madeira, an island on Earth, complete with micro-climate. -Occasionally we manifest a small villa down on the coast but other than -that the place is uninhabited. I find bringing visitors here, with its -sense of isolation, leaves them feeling-" - -"Disconcerted?" I smiled. Frank chewed on a fingernail and said nothing. - -Our host inclined his head. "Quite. I'm-" - -"Arturo Roth, your employer's go-to guy and proxy on the board of -Ghent's corporations. Your companion is Sara Hotchkiss, the proverbial -'personal assistant'. But not personal enough, apparently, to warrant a -bodyguard when she leaves the ship. Whereas you, sir, never go anywhere -without a small army in tow. Some might call it paranoia but given the -number of enemies you've acquired I'd say your precautions are entirely -justified." - -Roth kept up the smile although his eyes hardened. "I see you've done -your homework. Unfortunately you have us at a disadvantage as I rarely -interest myself in those who-" - -"I'm Jerry. This is my brother, Frank." - -Cutting him off like that obviously got under Roth's skin. He dropped -the forced good humour and his tone turned dismissive. "Well, it's been -a pleasure meeting you both. I'll leave you in the capable hands of Sara -for the duration of your stay but I'm afraid we won't meet again." - -I grinned. "You never know. It's nice here, so Frank and I might still -be around when you get back. I have to say, as virtual reality -environments go this one is top-notch." - -Roth paused in the act of turning away. "Virtual? Oh, no. This may be a -shining example of artifice but there's nothing artificial about it, I -assure you. And what I should have said is that you'll be dead long -before I return. Please accept my apologies for any confusion that might -have caused." Before I could reply he went from three-dimensional to -bas-relief to no more than a cardboard cut-out, and dissolved into -nothingness. - -Frank giggled, nervously. - -With Roth gone Sara seemed to come alive but I cut in before she could -speak, pointing at the spot where her companion had stood. "That's a -phase-transfer distortion effect, meaning all this..." I gestured -around -us, "�is a live matter stream. But it can't be, not on this scale. Even -if your ship were just one big fusion reactor it couldn't generate -nearly enough power to support a reality bubble this large." - -She smiled; all perfect teeth and insincerity. "Ah, but the Scaramanga -is powered by a Beaumont Singularity, more than adequate for even our -exorbitant needs. All this, as you put it, exists merely as a -mote on -the event horizon." - -I shied away and even Frank looked worried. My voice trembled. "Fuck -that! There's a damn good reason why a Beaumont is proscribed technology -these days. If your containment field so much as twitches then -this -ship, the station, maybe even the entire system, will collapse in an -instant. So if you don't mind my brother and I will piss off, sharpish." - -Sara brushed an errant strand of hair back into place. "But I thought -you were here to rob us? Isn't that why you came aboard?" - -"Look, sister, even if that were true then you have to admit the set-up -isn't exactly as advertised. Or is this all some elaborate joke where -Ghent lures us aboard and then watches while we starve to death in his -pocket-universe playpen?" - -She laughed. "Oh, no, he really is indifferent to your fate, I assure -you. But being marooned here will be the penalty for attempting -to -escape upon your return to the ship proper. This is essentially a Stone -Age environment and I seriously doubt you possess the skills to survive -for long, even on a diet of fruit and wild vegetables." - -"Yeah, yeah, I get it. Either we rob you blind or perish in the -attempt." I sniffed. "So, tell me, if we do manage to pull this -off, -will we get to meet Ghent in person?" - -Sara seemed to consider this for a moment. "Well, I'm sure the novelty -would appeal to him, and he has been known to witness the climax of a -break-in attempt, if it's been sufficiently entertaining up to that -point." - -"You're not exactly filling me with confidence here, girl. Still, -there's no point in hanging about. Frank?" He nodded, I nodded. "Right -then, Sara, let's be having you." - -The world around us seemed to snap shut and open again. We were back in -the access corridor, on our own. I laid a hand on Frank's arm in case he -felt like bugging out, but I needn't have worried. He shook off my grasp -and flexed his fingers. "Anything to say we can't just murder everyone -and bugger off? I don't like being screwed with." - -I snorted. "You and me both, man. However I think full-on homicide might -upset the natives a tad, so rein it in for now." - -Frank grunted and set off along the corridor with me trailing in his -wake. My augmented vision was sensitive to electronic emissions and heat -bloom, but there were no obvious sensors or hidden anti-intruder -nasties. The phrase 'all too easy' sprang to mind but there was no -option but to press on. Around a dog-leg in the corridor we ran into a -set of double pressure doors blocking our path, with no obvious release -mechanism. - -I heaved a sigh of relief. "So now it begins." - -My companion shrugged. "Assuming they don't just open onto vacuum." - -"That would be crude, and if anything this whole set-up reeks of -over-sophistication. Anyway, by my reckoning we've almost reached the -heart of the ship." - -"See if you're wrong, I will so kick your arse in Hell." - -I smiled, handed him my cane, and stepped up. My fingers contained an -embedded tracery of electro-magnetic sensors and micro induction field -generators, meaning I could 'feel' and manipulate circuitry - even when -they were concealed beneath layers of ceramic and armour plate. The -locking mechanism was complex, subtle and booby-trapped. Any attempt at -brute force would trigger the deployment of lateral reinforcement bars, -requiring a thermal torch to make any further headway. Not -insurmountable, and the whole setup seemed designed to frustrate and -annoy the intruder rather than stop him dead in his tracks. - -I stepped back with a flourish as the doors slid open - to reveal a -short section of corridor and another set of doors. Frank gave me a slow -hand-clap as I limped forward and started over. - -I opened the second set of doors. - -And the third. - -By the time I started in on the fourth set Frank was bored; scratching -Anarchist League graffiti on the walls using the metal tip of my cane. I -glared at him. "Will you stop that? It's an antique original, not some -cheap reproduction. This whole setup is giving me quite enough grief -without you busting my balls as well." - -He pouted. "You're the technical one, so get technical. But I'm warning -you, if there's another set of bloody doors beyond this lot I'm breaking -out the binary explosive." - -I snorted. "Oh, very subtle, I'm sure. Even if you did manage to blow a -hole big enough to climb through, don't you think the fire suppression -system might sit up and take notice? They usually go for oxygen -depletion in space, not retardant foam, and I for one don't fancy -finding out which is in use aboard this tub." - -Frank grunted and switched to twirling my cane, majorette style, while I -got back to work. - -The doors opened. - -Beyond lay a large oval chamber, surrounded by a mezzanine metal-grid -walkway that served no obvious purpose. At the far side, opposite the -doorway, stood a wide sofa. - -Sara sat there, her arms stretched out along the back of the upholstery. -She gestured to the ice bucket and glasses on a side table. "A glass of -champagne to celebrate getting this far, gentlemen? I assure you it -contains no poison or sedative." - -It was hard to pay attention as behind her, piled high as a backdrop, -was enough wealth to turn Ali Baba green with envy. I could see piles of -gold ingots, drifts of precious gems, works of art that hadn't been -heard of in over a century. Plus a selection of proscribed technology -that any major corporation would give their eye-teeth to -reverse-engineer. - -Frank handed back my cane and we made our way over to our vapid hostess. -I bowed from the hips. "I'll join you, if I may, while Frank deals with -whatever comes next. And there is something coming next, isn't there, -Sara? After all, a series of locked doors seems somewhat perfunctory." - -She patted the sofa beside her. I placed my cane on the table and sat -down, accepting the proffered glass of bubbly. Sara smiled. "Oh, we used -to have guards, electronic wizardry and an array of bio-mechanical -nightmares defending the treasure room. But every guard can be bribed, -every lock can be picked and every cybernetic entity corrupted. Now we -simply depend upon our Hideo." - -As she spoke a man entered the room by the way we'd come, the doors -closing behind him. He was small, oriental, dressed like a dock-side -supervisor in short-sleeved khaki shirt and loose pants. The 'Hideo' -were a class of vat-grown assassin, stone killers from the genes up. -These neo-ninja possessed enough augmented senses and jacked-up reflexes -to make weaponry superfluous at close-quarters. - -The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. - -Main lighting died away to be replaced by a shifting array of -multi-coloured strobes mounted on the floor, gantry and ceiling. -Octagonal mirrored columns rose from the floor and began to rotate, -turning the chamber into a kaleidoscopic visual assault course. Frank -turned to face Hideo, drawing a handgun from the pocket of his coat. He -held his arms loosely by his sides, waiting. - -Sara leaned in close to me, her tone conspiratorial. "What is he -carrying? It didn't show up on our weapons scan." - -"A gas-powered needlegun. Ceramic and plastic, firing glass -projectiles." - -She paused for a moment, frowning, as if listening to an internal voice. -Then she laughed and clapped her hands. "Oh, oh, a themed -robbery! We -haven't had one of those since The Joker and may I say how much we -appreciate the effort, Mister Cornelius." - -I inclined my head by way of acknowledgment. "This setting is also a -tribute, and one no less obscure. Now, I'll sit this out, if you don't -mind. Frank is the one for the rough-stuff." - -"Oh, absolutely. Although you do realise you'll share your brother's -fate?" She frowned. "Is he really your sibling?" - -"Him? Christ, not even close, but we work well together. As to sharing -his fate, well, I wouldn't have it any other way." I sipped my -champagne. - -Sara raised her voice. "Hideo, you may begin." - -Hideo bowed. - -Frank pointed his gun at a spot three meters to Hideo's left, then seven -meters, then four meters to his right. His arm fell to his side. - -Hideo's expression didn't change but his stance altered, almost -imperceptibly. - -Frank pointed his gun at a spot five meters to Hideo's right, then six -to his left. His arm fell to his side. - -Sara sounded more confused than concerned. "What is he doing? Is -it some -kind of ritual?" - -I shook my head. "Frank is pointing at the positions, in sequence, where -your man planned to be." - -"I don't understand. How is that possible?" - -"I don't understand it either, but that's his singular talent. In combat -situations, where he's directly threatened, Frank can predict the -actions of his adversary." - -Hideo bowed again, then turned and walked away, immediately lost -from view amidst the visual cacophony. - -Now Sara sounded nervous. "What's going on? He can't simply leave." - -"He's been defeated and is acknowledging that fact. No matter what he -does, no matter how random his movements, Frank will nail Hideo before -he gets within reach." - -Frank's arm snapped up and he fired off to his right; the -twee-twee-twee -of a three-round burst barely audible. The columns ceased rotating and -descended. The strobes cut out, to be replaced by main lighting. - -A small, crumpled, khaki figure lay on the decking. - -I sighed. "He had to try, I suppose, even though he knew it was a futile -gesture. Failure in his line of work isn't habit forming." Frank -giggled, spun the needlegun on his finger, and returned it to his -pocket. I stood up, placed my glass on the table and retrieved my cane. - -Sara's face registered surprise and anger before settling for a forced -smile. "Congratulations, gentlemen. It would be churlish of me not to -honour the terms of our agreement, even if it was only a rumour. -Therefore, to the victors, the spoils. So please take whatever you can -carry and depart, with my blessing." - -I twisted the silver top of my swordstick, unlocking the blade. With one -draw-and-slash I severed Sara's throat, right through to the spinal -cord. Her head fell back, dangling down the back of the sofa, secured to -the torso by only a few tendons and strip of skin. Blood fountained, -causing me to step away. - -Frank chewed his bottom lip. "Messy. You should have let me plug her." - -"No disrespect, man, but I had to make sure of taking out her central -nervous system." I walked around to the far side of the sofa and lopped -off the top of Sara's skull. "Come look." He edged around the spreading -blood pool and peered at the dull-blue crystal lattice I'd uncovered. I -gestured with my swordstick. "Frank, meet Lucien Ghent." - -He sniffed. "So he's not Roth then? You were taking one hell of a risk." - -"Not Roth, he's got all the finesse of a fist, and Ghent himself was -never that direct. As I said, Sara can come and go as she pleases - a -classic case of hiding in plain sight." - -Frank stooped and picked up a handful of emeralds, letting them drop -slowly through his fingers. "We could just take the money and run." - -"True." I placed my fingertips on the lattice, interfacing with the -neural net. "But why clean out the till when you can steal the entire -bank? Ghent may be gone but I can access the firmware femininity -protocols that he used as Sara. With these and my drugs I can morph into -a facsimile of her, one good enough to fool even Roth. Well, for as long -as it takes to dispose of him." - -Frank grinned. "And what if he's shagging her? I'd love to see your face -if he starts cozying up in private." - -"Trust you to think of that, but somehow I don't see Ghent canoodling -with the hired help." I sniffed. "Anyway, he's not my type." - -"Oh yeah? Wait until you've put your chromosomes through the wringer, -then tell me you don't fancy a piece of rough like our man Arturo." - -"Enough, already!" I walked around and slit Sara's blouse open. The head -of the eWurm had already emerged from her navel. "Biomass technology, -the cutting edge in living machinery. With this I can control the ship, -and everything in it, just like she did." - -My companion-in-crime made a face. "Creepy. You really going to let that -thing inside you?" - -I eased the interface free of the corpse and unbuttoned my waistcoat and -shirt. "Damn straight. It needs a living host to survive and is too -simplistic to support any concept of loyalty to Ghent." I held the eWurm -against my stomach and felt it start to burrow in. - -Frank went pale and took a step back. Despite his propensity for -violence he can be quite squeamish at times. - -The pain made me grimace but I kept talking, albeit through clenched -teeth. "I've run the financials. Ghent funds his lifestyle, the -Scaramanga, from the corporate 'Discretionary' account - it takes a -small percentage of the net profits from his investments. With Roth out -of the way I can steadily increase the percentage draw-down and the -automated accountancy routines will do the rest." - -"Yeah, yeah - but how long will that take? Before we came aboard -it was -a case of you becoming this dude and cleaning him out in nothing flat. -Now we have to wait while you liquidise assets and off Roth as -well? -What happened to 'easy in, easy out', or is my memory playing tricks?" - -The pain began to ease and I squared my shoulders. "Look, man, you've -got the attention span of a retarded goldfish. If I'd said this was -going to take weeks, maybe even months, would you have been interested -in the big picture? No, you wouldn't. Instead we'd be on our way out of -here with a fortune in our pockets and a price on our heads. Or do you -really think we can kill someone like Lucien Ghent and walk away -scot-free?" - -Frank plucked at his bottom lip, a petulant gesture of his. "You were -the one who sliced him, her, whatever. He was willing to let us go." - -I sneered at him. "Yeah, right. His type are all smiling bonhomie, right -up to the instant they start losing. We'd have walked off the ship into -a hail of gunfire, courtesy of Roth's little army." - -"Still-" - -"Still nothing. Look, this way I convert everything to bearer bonds and -then its Core systems, here we come. First-class all the way, no expense -spared." - -He gestured to the wealth on display. "What about all this, then? We -just leave it behind?" - -"Even if it's real I bet it's tagged in some way, traceable. Anyway, -it's just a drop in the bucket compared to what Ghent's investments are -worth." I tossed him my cane. "Now, I hate long goodbyes, so PISS OFF!" - -Frank grinned, gave me the finger, and walked away. I called out after -him. "Hang on, you gonna' keep up the 'Frank' persona or what?" - -"Not sure, but you can leave a message for me with Crank, he'll know who -you mean. See if you were my older brother, though, I'd have killed you -years ago." - -"See if you were my younger brother, you'd never have been born." - -He laughed and left the chamber. I sat down, feeling the ships systems -starting to impinge on my consciousness. It was strange, like standing -in a familiar room and realizing there were far more doors leading off -it than before. The housekeeping crawlers would dispose of the bodies -and clean the place up. I'd transition into Sara so that the next time -Roth came calling he'd be dead long before realizing anything was wrong. -Or maybe I'd dump Arturo in our vest-pocket Madeira and let him go -native, lord of all he surveyed. - -I smiled and lifted a glass of champagne. All in all this was going to -be a very tasty world. - -A very tasty world, indeed. - - - -©Martin Clark 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] easymoney.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Plains of Abyssinia - -[*AUTHOR] Sean Crawford - -[*BLURB] "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The -rest I just squandered." George Best

"I believe having -religion in your life creates the potential for long-lasting -relationships." Goldie Hawn - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -

Where was I during Woodstock? -Well, people ask me that from time to time, brother. I�ve never been -able to tell the story �til now. - -No shit, there I was on the plains of -Abyssinia in a blacked-out Cobra -Jet Torino GT with Raul Castro, Goldie Hawn, and 130 bottles of Havana -Club 7 A�os, running balls-to-the-wall, flat-out for Bossangoa without -a moment to spare. It was 16 August, we were due in B-town on the -18th, and even the fact that we'd just saved Haile Selassie's life the -night before from yet another assassination attempt by Japanese -non-consensual Morris dancing fundamentalists didn't mean that His -Imperial Majesty would look kindly on uncustomed liquors on his -nation's highways and byways. - -We had to move, and quick, but luckily -Goldie'd had that Cobra Jet polished, ported, tuned in and turned on at -Timothy Leary's machine shop the week before. That was back when -Leary was building for all the khat co-ops' 'leggers out of Hargeisa, -back before those fucking reactionaries ran him out of town and he -ended up building his famous eight-circuit carbs for Lancia, not that -the cowards ever had the balls to run those cars until Group B came -along, but you show me an Italian who understands psychedelic induction -and I'll show you a Nixon who can dance convincingly to Louie Louie. - -Unlucky for me, Raul'd already drank three bottles since breakfast, and -whenever he mixes hard liquor and dex, the man gets amorous. Goldie'd -made it abundantly clear that she needed both hands and every -one of her feet to drive, so that left me fending off the generalissimo -in the back seat while also managing the watches and the map. Well, -we were flying by a pair of twin-barrel Breguets that had never run -quite right since I'd stolen them back from Alan Haber, as the maniac -had converted the pair into what he called a chronobong, and I was -still picking seeds out of the isochronous balance springs when I'd put -them back together that morning. Between that and Castro's hand down -my pants, we zigged a meter late and Goldie took that beast straight -into the savannah. - -"Fuck it, Marbles," she said, Marbles being what -all the Laugh-In crowd called me at the time, "Give me bearing and -altitude. We're gonna crow-fly this sonofabitch." - -Now I knew enough -to know not to argue with Goldie when she'd been mainlining STP for -more than twelve days running, so I called out her numbers and she -engaged the transspatial overdrive Leary'd bolted in. - -

The best protection in a collision is a good drunk -on and no seatbelt
Well, -friend, I -tell you, never trust a Berkeley man's rear end work, at least not in -more than four dimensions, because we were just a dick-hair shy of -redline when that 3.91 Traction-Lok gave way and dissolved into a -chorus of gerbils singing "Nearer My God To Thee," sending us spinning -right back into square space-time. - -Now Goldie had nerve, and she had -the skills, the girl made Jackie Stewart look like Gerald Ford behind -the wheel, but there's only so much you can do in a Torino GT in the -Abyssinian grass at Mach 2, running factory radials. She pitched -left, we spiked it and went airborne. Goldie almost got it back when -a gerbil lodged in the starboard aileron and we lost attitude, going -back in hard. - -It's true what they say, friends, that the best -protection in a collision is a good drunk on and no seatbelt, because -Raul was already legging it over the next rise with a bottle when the -ambo scooped me off the ground. - -Goldie was nowhere to be seen, but I -finally ran into her at a party at Red Skelton's fuck-shack in '72, and -she said she'd been thrown clear and lodged like a spear in the wall of -the green room at a Son House show in Munich. House pried her loose -after the encore and she said he taught her to finally appreciate -bourbon. She dropped the drugs cold turkey and quit 'legging, too. -She'd only ever been in it for the action, didn't need the money, and -the whole era was coming to a close by then anyway. - -It was all over -by Altamont, and there I was, still in the hospital recuperating. Of -course, you can imagine my consternation when Raul showed up in a wig -and a nurse's outfit. Say what you will about their macroeconomics, -the Castros have always been very insistent lovers. - -But -that's another story, friends, for another time. - -©Sean Crawford 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] woodstock.jpg - -[*ITEM] The Man with Bronze Hair - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they -are inside you." Isabel Allende - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

A -few of those involved in the unauthorized landscaping in Smatparrox -knew the bronze-haired man as Farras Grein. They were -well-motivated, and knew better than to discuss either their work or -his identity with strangers. They were also well-paid, but this was -incidental to the satisfaction afforded by the importance of what -they jointly aimed to achieve. There was good reason for the secrecy -of their activities.

- -Rural -hamlets are sometimes described as ‘sleepy’. Smatparrox, -sadly, was comatose. It was not an unattractive place, but its -amenities had been allowed to decline until the liveliest local -feature was the traffic on the bypass. It was a place from which -those in search of education, work, health-care or public -entertainment were obliged to commute, provided they could safely -negotiate the potholes in the roads. An oppressive bureaucracy clung -like a suffocating miasma over the workings of Smatparrox Council. -Any threat to the status quo would set in motion a host of -defensive -measures, supported by ancient statute ready to be cited with -wearying detail by their overstaffed legal department. It was one of -the hangovers from feudal times which had so far resisted any attempt -at modernisation, along with the rest of that sorry place. - -
"It will shock them into wakefulness"
With -eight years of research behind him, and the results overwhelmingly -positive, the man who called himself Farras Grein was impatient to -implement his plan. Knowing that overt action would have been met -with petty obstructions, he had carefully recruited a trustworthy -group with knowledge of the local terrain and an enthusiasm for the -project. He intended to present Smatparrox with a fait -accompli. - -Fortunately, a minimum of equipment was required for their nocturnal -operations, -so the chances of detection were reduced. Essentially, all that was -needed for each procedure was a grid reference and a means of digging -a precise cluster of holes. Careful insertion of the seeding and -nutrient-release mechanism would then be followed by any necessary -camouflage of the resulting mound. - -Although -the clandestine planters were never actually observed, inexplicable -signs of disturbance to the faded municipal flower-beds or other -public spaces were blamed on moles, until the curiously regular -distribution of the mounds was eventually noticed. Suspecting some -kind of sabotage, and fearful of hidden traps, the Council belatedly -called for an investigative team from Snoak. - -Snoak -citizens rarely had cause, or indeed sufficient interest to visit -Smatparrox. The Snoak Detechs were still pursuing their own urban -anomalies, and could not be spared, but on learning that it was a -landscape-related matter, Central thought it would do no harm to -provide a few under-employed cartographers, who might conceivably -benefit from an aerial view of the ground. - -By -that time Farras Grein's biotaps had already begun to interlock their -root system, and were rising to greet the sun. - -Biotaps -were in effect artificial trees, the product of research and -development at the Quicksilver laboratories in Snoak City, the same -scientific stable which had achieved success with SunCell MonoPods. -They were self-regulating energy-storage and conversion devices which -used an enhanced form of photosynthesis to yield a high degree of -efficiency with no harmful by-products. - -The -man known as Farras Grein was himself a native of Smatparrox, and it -had long been among his ambitions to be a catalyst for change in what -many regarded as that provincial backwater. The provision of -virtually free energy could only be a change for the better. He had -said as much to his beautiful voluntary cohab and confidante, Sarsel -Bridge4th, the herpetologist, whom he had met at a conference on -solar energy and biosystems, where he had been greatly impressed by -her paper (‘Spectrometric Analysis of UVB Transmission in -Reptilian Chemotaxis’ ) before it struck him that she was -also a very attractive woman. - -"It will shock them into wakefulness, Pi," she had said, the -night he had first told her about the project. "And not before -time. -It's the fresh start they've been needing. But are you ready to take -the credit when the demand for biotaps turns global? Even you won’t -be able to keep this scheme of yours from attracting world-wide -attention. The publicity is bound to become very persistent." - -What -was not generally known about Farras Grein was that he and -Quicksilver's reclusive founder, Pion Octyl diMotz, were one and the -same. He had paused before answering, granting her one of his -enigmatic smiles. "That remains to be seen, my love. -Meanwhile, I rather look forward to the excitement of escaping from -the confines of the lab.” A mischievous thought occurred to -him. “We could venture out incognito. You can help me choose -a suitable disguise, and we’ll give the Quanderpyre press -something else to gossip about. Shall we sleep on it?” - -Sarsel -had unclipped the exquisite gold snake bracelet which he had bought -her from Smigs in Yarp Street, and turned to him with a giggle that -some would have been surprised to hear from the lips of such a -reputable scientist. - -

There was no question about the biotaps� efficiency. They -had been programmed to optimize their performance, drawing radiant and -chemical sustenance from air and earth. Their roots developed -protective sheathing, formed junctions from which small quasi-metallic -tubers rose to ground level, from where they emitted enticing -pheromones. On the gently questing stems of each main trunk, the shiny -leaf-blades flashed, sucking in photons, strengthening the -pseudo-plant�s defensive capabilities. Here and there little blobs and -heaps of organic matter continued to be absorbed, the remains, perhaps, -of unwary wildlife. Under one particular biotap, of the thousands that -now occupied what was once Smatparrox, close to a slowly liquefying -visor, a few wiry strands of bronze hair had already been half swallowed -by the rapacious soil. - -©Les Sklaroff 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] bronze.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be -the philosophy of government in the next." Abraham -Lincoln - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Tazio slid the long card into the wall slot. -A -multicoloured ribbon cable led from the card to Tazio's handheld device. -LEDs flashed. A dull click came from the depths of the white door, and -after a pause, accompanied by a sigh of long-unused hydraulics and a -crack of silicone -seals, the door slid open a few centimetres, checked briefly, then -retracted into the wall of the corridor. For a fifteen year-old kid, -Tazio -was good with keys. Good with electronics generally. - -A waft of cold, sharply-flavoured air, smelling faintly of plastic and -light oil, issued from the dark space beyond. The air in these pods was -somehow refreshing. Only whenever he returned to the main ship did he -realise that the Mustang Sally always smelled like a latrine. Yet none -of the fifty thousand inhabitants of the star ship were particularly -aware of it. The aroma was a side-effect of the constant requirement to -recycle everything... absolutely everything. - -Fluorescent tubes buzzed and blinked, illuminating a white corridor. A -mushroom-shaped button was flashing just inside. With ease born of -practice, Tazio retrieved his home-made access card, and entered. He -struck -the button, and the door behind him slid shut. Motors hummed, his ears -popped, then the door at the far end of the corridor clicked, and a -green light came on above it. Tazio trotted to the door, which was -labelled -'Mustang Sally Pod K6', pulled a lever and pushed the door open. He -stepped into the brightly-illuminated space beyond. The room was crowded -with white-cased machinery, black acceleration couches, brushed -stainless steel controls, and inert display panels. He turned and pushed -the door closed, then popped open a nearby panel in the floor and -flipped a switch off. The main lights went out, leaving only the faint -red glow of emergency lamps and LEDs. - -

"You don't have to break into a landing pod to see the -view."
At the far end of the pod, a circular transparent blister of -thick glass -would offer a pod pilot a forward view on landing. Currently, it was -covered on the outside with a protective iris, so that it would not -become eroded by exposure to possible particles of dust. Moving quickly, -Tazio attached his Gripsafe camera mount to a convenient grab bar in the -viewport, attached the camera, an ancient Panasonic that had belonged to -his grandmother, and verified that it could be pointed in any direction. - -He pressed the switch to open the viewport cover, and, as usual, -experienced a thrill of vertigo at the depth of space. Despite the size -of Mustang Sally, the longest internal views were measured in hundreds -of metres, rather than light years. He pressed the video start button to -make a test. - -Tazio was currently invading a landing pod destined to be used for the -first time in some 190 years. His grandchildren's descendants might one -day pilot a landing pod. Until then, the pods were strictly out of -bounds. - -Starting the second scan, with the camera turning on the automatic drive -he had built, Tazio felt, rather than heard, a whisper of air movement, -and -the lights went on, dazzling him temporarily with the reflection from -the curved viewport. - -In the doorway behind him stood a compact woman in uniform. Kay-Zee -Jones - specifically Master-at-Arms Jones - with whom Tazio was, -regrettably, all too familiar. - -Brazened it out: "Hi, Kay-Zee, switch off that light, will you? I'm just -working on my astrophysics project." - -"You know you're not allowed in here. How did you get in, anyway?" - -"Door was open." - -"These doors are never open, and you know it. What have you touched? -Other than two airlock doors, light switches and the viewport cover -plate, that is." - -"Nothing! Just fixed up the camera here, see?" - -"Right. Close the viewport and let's go. Why do I keep finding you in -areas you're not supposed to be in? I'm taking you to the Lieutenant -this time." - -Tazio considered making a protest, but he decided it would be safer to -obey orders and hope for leniency. Detached the equipment and followed -her meekly from the landing pod. Hoping that no-one would conficate his -access card. It'd take a month to scrounge the parts for another. - -"Why are you in here? And in the dark?" - -"To photograph the stars. I use the viewport." - -"You don't have to break into a landing pod for that. You can get an -accurate image of the stars from the nav database, adjusted for our -speed, accessible from your cabin screen. What's the real reason?" - -"Yes, I know, but the actual stars themselves are more interesting." - -"How can they be? They're just dots of light. Anyway, you don't have to -break into a landing pod to see the view." - -"I do. There aren't any viewports anywhere else." - -He was right. There were no viewports on the main hull of the ship. It -had been considered bad for morale to allow the crew to see the void -around them. Automatic machinery checked star positions continuously and -made microscopic course corrections, without the need for crew -involvement. When necessary, navigation officers might engage one of the -external cameras if the on-board computers warned of nearby dust or -debris. - -"You've been into other pods, haven't you?" she said. - -"One or two." There were dozens of landing pods attached to the vast -interstellar ship, each with a viewport. Tazio had visited many of them, -taking his photographs and videos. The landing pods, being set at -different angles on Mustang Sally's kilometres-long network of -cylinders, offered different views, and Tazio had photographed the -starscape from each pod he had visited. - -"Come here. Let's go." - - -
-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632044
Made contact with that generation ship -yet? - -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663531
Still no response to radio contact on -general frequency or MayDay. Nearly two centuries out from Earth orbit, -I don't suppose they were expecting a call. It's an ugly beast, all -stuck together at random. - - -
-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632045
They were set up to create artificial -gravity by spinning corridors and compartments. Makes for strange -shapes. Are you sure there's anyone alive on it? -Some of those early colony ships developed faults, and everybody -died. - -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663532
-You could be right, but I can't see inside. They built those ships to -last. The hull is mostly thick ferrous metal. They had no force field -technology when Mustang Sally set sail. All I can say is that the -engines are still running and the temperature of the hull is consistent -with human life. It normally shows no lights at all, but I just saw -lights going off and on inside what must be a lifeboat or something. I -showed myself nearby, but nothing much happened since. By the way, they -launched a missile a while ago, but it may have been an auto intended to -vaporise inconveniently large rocks in their path. - -
-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632046
Don't sweat it. They may have mistaken you -for a rock. I do that sometimes. - -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663533
-Thanks for the vote of confidence. Anyway, if there's anyone there, they -may have seen the rock dodge. - -
-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632047
Why not displace a nice friendly-looking -avatar inside? - -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663534
-It's a risk. I can't see inside. What if I displace it where it -rematerialises into somebody, or an essential piece of equipment? - -
-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632048
Look for a space at a much lower -temperature than the average, and displace the avatar in the -middle. -
- -

Rather than call an auto-b'n'w, Kay-Zee decided it would -be quicker to walk along corridor K until they were below Patrol HQ, and -then use the companionway. She set off briskly, pulling Tazio by one -arm. He protested and dragged his heels at first, but the pain -occasioned by Kay-Zee insisting on her own pace persuaded him to trot to -keep up. - -"Why are you called Kay-Zee?" he asked. She ignored this attempt at -conversation. Tazio stumbled as they crossed the area of warped corridor -floor where enthusiastic officers had tried, unsuccessfully, to -incinerate one of Turner's 'dwarves'. - -"Keep up!" she snapped, irritated with her parents, once again, for -having frivolously named her after a 20th century movie actress, -Katherine Zeta Jones, for heaven's sake. "What sort of a name is Tazio, -anyway?" - -"My father named me after a twentieth century motor racer called Tazio -Nuvolari." - -Annoyed as she was, Kay-Zee would probably have carried out her threat -to take Tazio before her superior officer, for the kid's own sake, if -for no other reason. He was running wild. Tazio's mother was dead, his -father was desperately busy, with countless responsibilities. Mustang -Sally was basically an unarmed passenger ship, though under military -command, but it was still bristling with levers, switches, handles and -buttons that could cause all sorts of trouble for law-enforcement and -danger to curious kids like Tazio. A day or two in 'irons' (actually a -cabin that locked from the outside, most usually used for brawlers fired -up on illicit alcohol) might do him a favour. - -As it happened, that possibly laudable objective went by the board when -her communicator buzzed in her ear. "Yes!" she almost shouted. - -"Where are you, Kay-Zee?" Lieutenant Parsons. - -"Corridor K, five minutes from HQ, sir." - -"OK. I'm sending an auto-b'n'w now. What're you doing?" - -"Bringing in a juvenile." - -"Surprise me. Tazio again?" - -"You got it." - -"OK. Release him for the time being. You can always re-arrest him. He's -not going anywhere. Suspicious death in storage bay 17. Holt's in -charge. Attend." - -"I hear you. I'll let him go." - -Tazio was smirking. He had overheard everything. Kay-Zee glared back, -"Keep your nose clean, kid. Final warning." - -The black and white autocab was beside them now. Kay-Zee pulled open the -cab door, temporarily transforming the huge POLICE label on the -vehicle's side to LICE. "Can I come too?" asked Tazio. - -"Get lost!" she said, attempting to slam the lightweight plastic door, -which failed to make the satisfyingly loud noise she would have liked, -but simply clicked anticlimactically. - -When she arrived at the entrance to Bay 17, Lazarski was standing -outside the closed doors. His hair and uniform were wet. Lazarski didn't -address her. He called Holt on his comm unit, and Holt came out looking -shaken, which wasn't like him. He was wet, too, his uniform showing dark -patches. Holt wasn't telling her anything either. He assigned Kay-Zee to -"Move Along, Nothing To See Here" duties in the corridor outside, and -went back in with Lazarski. They exchanged a few quiet words. She heard -Holt say "They're not going to believe this." - -Kay-Zee was irritated at the secrecy, and at the menial duty she'd been -given. People seemed to have heard that the death was 'suspicious'. A -cluster of the curious chatted quietly nearby. Death was not unusual on -the ship. There were tens of thousands of crew on the Mustang Sally. -Three or four people died every day, mostly retired crew members taking -voluntary euthanasia, tidily. A few suicides, not so tidily. The -remainder were diseases of old age, accidents, fatal victims of fights -and family violence. She guessed this must be an unsightly bizarre -accident that Holt wanted to protect her from, which was both courteous -and insulting. - -Tazio joined the spectators remarkably soon after Kay-Zee's arrival. -"What's happening, Kay-Zee?" - -"None of your business. Go home and try to stay out of trouble for an -hour or two." - -After twenty minutes or so, an auto-ambulance arrived. She called Holt. -Holt told her to send it away. "What's going on?" she asked. - -"OK. Come in here and lock the doors behind you." - -The bay was brightly lit. It was a storage-only bay, and very cold. -There was a strong smell of burning, and the floor was wet. Holt and -Lazarski were standing talking. She could see the lower half of a body -lying on the floor. It appeared to be dressed in a yellow overall. - -"OK? Up here. Holt led the way up an iron ladder to the second level. -Lazarski followed. On -the floor was a bundle of yellow clothes, but a photographer was in the -way. - -"What..?" - -Lazarski said: "Don't go getting sick. It's not real." - -"It's real enough," corrected Holt. "It's just not human. It's an -android. Sliced neatly in half, one on each level. No blood, just wires, -plastic and this jelly stuff, which stinks when it catches fire, by the -way. The top half was trying to talk when we got here, but it's burnt -out now. The smoke detector went off and the door closed, we nearly -choked on carbon dioxide before Jerzy here sprung the entry override and -meanwhile the fire sprinkler got us. Fused the victim." - -"What did it say?" - -"Nothing we could understand. Anyway, we're finished here. It's up to -the laboratory to figure it out. It's probably one of their crazy -experiments, anyway. They're on their way." - -Holt and Lazarski left Kay-Zee guarding the corridor. She let the -photographer out and the lab team in, then Lieutenant Parsons sent a -cadet to -replace her. She wasn't even asked to write a report. - -

When the auto-ambulance was sent away, Tazio had concluded -that nothing interesting was going to happen at Bay 17. He returned to -his cabin to check out the camera footage. - -His cabin barely offered room for his bed. Cabins for juveniles and -unmarried personnel were a standard three metre cube. The area above his -bunk was covered in a montage of starfield photos, making a composite -image of the visible sphere around the Mustang Sally, lacking only the -view to the rear of the interstellar ship, which was obscured by the -vast engines and the material recycling chambers, and directly ahead, -which was blocked by the debris screen which was intended to stop or -slow up any interstellar matter before it hit the ship proper. - -The remaining space was crammed from deck to deckhead with equipment. - -Tazio was looking for a specific star. A star glimpsed just twice moving -across the field of view. It made no sense. All the other stars, if they -moved perceptibly, moved very slowly backwards with respect to the -ship's motion, because the Mustang Sally was now travelling at a speed -of nearly 30000 kilometres a second, having taken 185 years to achieve -this speed with the relatively tiny but steady acceleration of her -efficient ion drive engines. Shortly, she would rotate, and start to -slow down by pushing in the opposite direction. Then 194 years after -that, she would reach her first port of call - a potentially habitable -planet. The journey was an enterprise of hope, which would take -generations to complete. - -He downloaded the camera to his computer and viewed the vids. The first -seemed uneventful, but, to be on the safe side, he ran a comparator -program he had written. The program slavishly compared the new vid with -a similar one from a different viewport. A couple of apparent anomalies -turned out to be reflections from the viewport. The star fields, where -they corresponded, were identical, within the limits of camera -resolution. - -The second vid, the one interrupted by Kay-Zee's arrival, showed a brief -flash just prior to Kay-Zee activating the lights. Tazio initially -attributed that to reflected light from the corridor as Kay-Zee entered, -but, on close inspection, it appeared to occur even before Kay-Zee -opened the airlock door. Frame by frame, it was not a flash as such. On -three consecutive frames, an object moved across the field of view. -Motion blur made it impossible to distinguish details, but it occupied -about ten degrees of arc, making it either vastly bigger than any star - -an unlikely outcome - or quite close to the viewport. Unprecedented, but -unarguable. - -It could, of course, have been a maintenance EVAV. They were quite -frequent, but if so, they should have been registered with EVA control. -According to the EVA control page, they weren't. No-one had booked out -today. Didn't mean no-one was out there. After all, Tazio himself had -failed to log his own visit to the pod. - -He had already planned what to do. He risked paying another visit to the -pod with his camera and handheld, and returned later, empty-handed. His -father was still not in his cabin next door, so he started to watch a -movie and fell asleep in his clothes. - -

-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632049
Did you try that avatar? -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663535
-Yes. It quit sub-ether transmission immediately. No further result so -far. I'll try another in a while. They know I'm here, I think. But we -have to consider alternate strategies if they continue to ignore -us. - -
-

Kay-Zee heard no more of the android case. It was no -longer, apparently, a police matter. Her questions to Lieutenant Parsons -went unanswered. Further, she was ordered not to communicate any details -of the case to anyone, not even to colleagues. - -She spent several days investigating thefts from the hydroponic jungle -where all of the food for the ship was grown. It turned out to be an -inside job, a worker trading fresh fruit for illegal alcohol. The -various beer, wine and spirit operations on the ship were tolerated, -rather than authorised, as long as they used waste rather than fresh -food as their ingredients. It had turned out to be impossible to -eradicate man's desire for occasional intoxication. - -When that was cleared up, Lieutenant Parsons told her to do something -about Tazio. Accordingly, she asked Idoru (who saw everything and said -nothing unless specifically requested) to report any landing pod event. -Being a computer with a literal turn of mind, Idoru accordingly reported -dozens of trivial incidents such as tiny temperature changes or -microscopic analyses of air quality until Kay-Zee specified door -incidents. She hadn't long to wait. Pod K6 again, the port -entry signal accompanied -by an image of Tazio advancing through the airlock. - -By the time Kay-Zee reached K6 and entered, the pod was empty. Tazio -hadn't been there long. She went immediately to Tazio's cabin, but -no-one answered the door. She returned to HQ and requested a supervisory -view on her vidscreen. The spycam in Tazio's cabin revealed him hunched -over his computer. - -She got hold of a skeleton card, walked over to Tazio's cabin, and -entered. "Well, the look on your face when I walked in was worth the -trouble I took." - -"No, look, Kay-Zee. I 've caught a spacecraft on camera. Just a little -one, see." - -"Yes. You've been caught on camera, too. Entering the landing pod -again. That's it. This time you are going to be dealt with. Lieutenant -Parsons has been in touch with your father, who agreed that you have to -be punished for messing about in the landing pods." - -"Please, Kay-Zee, I've got the proof. Look at this." - -Despite herself, Kay-Zee looked at Tazio's screen. It was clearly a -spacecraft, but what a spacecraft! It looked like every boy's dream of a -spacecraft, its basically streamlined body surmounted by blisters, pods, -weaponry, aerials and, especially, insignia - huge black symbols and -numbers on its creamy-coloured hull. - -"How?" - -"I put the camera on time delay, taking a frame every fifteen seconds -until the chip was full. I've got ten or more pictures of it, but this -is the best!" - -"Good try, Tazio. Very realistic. It's a model, right? Now, let's go. We -have an appointment with Lieutenant Parsons." - -"No, Kay-Zee, it's real! Wait till I show Dad." - -"In your own time, Tazio. I won't ask again. I seem to spend half my -life chasing after you." - -

Kay-Zee left Tazio with Lieutenant Parsons. The -Lieutenant had devised what he felt to be a suitable punishment for -Tazio. He was to be given a sharp lecture, then locked up for -twenty-four hours in a landing pod. Kay-Zee privately considered that -Tazio would regard this as a reward, but she said nothing. She offered -to stay for the interview, but she was near the end of her watch, and by -the next day, a body had turned up, this one impaled on a metal pipe in -recycling. - -This time, Kay-Zee was first on the scene, with Wally Khan as backup. -Liquid Waste Distribution 1 was an odorous chamber, cold, badly lit and -echoing. A metal pipe ran from a bulkhead into a cylindrical unit, which -presumably separated liquids and gases that flowed into half a dozen -different exit pipes.

"You had better make sure -your boy keeps his mouth shut."
The apparently male victim, -bland-faced, dressed -in an orange overall, was held in place by the pipe passing through his -abdomen, oozing the jelly she had seen on the android in Bay 17, but it -appeared singularly composed under the circumstances. There was no -conceivable way in which he could have been threaded on to the pipe - -one end of the pipe was attached to the bulkhead, the other to the -processing cylinder. What's more, according to the shocked recycling -tech, the pipe was blocked internally. It was as though the body had -materialised in its current position. Kay-Zee reported via her comm that -it was another android. The android was talking after a fashion, very -quietly. The language was clearly English with a peculiar accent, the -delivery was confused, and the content included a desire to make contact -and offering help of some kind. - -Kay-Zee switched on her shoulder cam to record as much as possible, but -the flow of words became quieter and more garbled, and, by the time the -lab team arrived to cut the android loose, all signs of animation had -ceased. - -Even while she and Wally were preparing their report, the lieutenant, -despite the late hour, appeared on site. - -"No report on this, Kay-Zee, Wally. I have been instructed from the -highest authority to keep the lid on it." - -"Highest authority?" said Kay-Zee. - -"The captain, OK? No reports. No discussion with colleagues, family, -friends. Forget it. Completely." - -"Got it," said Wally. - -"Got it. But what is it? Some experiment?" said Kay-Zee. - -"When I said 'No Discussion', it includes asking me. In fact, I have no -idea. Unlike you, I obey orders. Can I impress on you that it's a -secret, and no-one needs to know." - -"Aye, aye, sir." - -

But, of course, Captain Raymond needed to know, and what -he knew or suspected was that aliens were attempting to invade the ship, -probably to kill everyone, and certainly to divert the Mustang Sally -from her objective. The following morning, he was impressing the need -for secrecy on his second-in-command, Commander Rydell. - -Rydell was not so sure: "But, Captain, there are scores of people who -know part of the story already. The police, half of the lab staff, -Navigation. And here's the worst. That craft Navigation detected? My son -managed to take photographs of it." - -"What?" - -"It's OK. I convinced him it was a scout ship of our own. Top secret. -He'll not tell anyone." - -"Good" - -"Tazio is just one witness. Rumours are already circulating, sir. Tazio -was just outside Bay 17 when the first android was discovered. Now we've -had a second. And the same Master-at-Arms was present at both. She -even videoed the second one. We extracted it, and the lab are checking -it out. It's deleted from the mainframe. But we can't -keep it confidential much longer. What we can understand of the -android's message seems peaceful." - -"No, no. They'd be sure to tell us that. For all we know, they've -already invaded Earth. We may be the only hope for mankind. If they -were actually human, they'd have sent a human emissary, not a robot -pretending to be a human. In any -event, there would be panic on board. Just think. Their technology must -be -vastly superior to ours. Look how they completely ignored that missile. -There are thousands on the Mustang who expect to spend the rest of their -days in relative peace. Including me. How would they react if these -aliens suddenly appeared among them?" - -"I think they'd handle it pretty well, if they were warned in advance. -They don't get much excitement in the normal course of events." - -"No, Commander, I think there's a good chance these aliens will lose -interest if we don't react. It's just a small craft. We are huge. They -have no idea what we're capable of." - -"Not a lot, from the military point of view, sir." - -"Granted. But they don't know that. It's not worth their while to -challenge us." - -"It encourages me that they send humanoid robots that speak English. -That doesn't sound unfriendly." - -"That's enough, Commander. You have my orders and you had better make -sure your boy keeps his mouth shut. No-one is to speak of it. -Understand?" - -"Aye-aye, sir." The expression 'Aye-aye', infrequently used these days, -had come to mean 'I obey, but I don't like it'. If Captain Raymond -noticed the potential insubordination, he made no sign of it. - -

-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632050
Any progress? -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663536
I displaced another avatar. This one -transmitted some positional information, and reported brief contact with -a uniformed female before expiring. I fear the avatar may have disrupted -their recycling machinery. Therefore, I am disinclined to try any more -of these blind displacements. -
-HTW Iain M Banks to GQ Stanislaw Lem
-5024008263632051
Suggestions? -
-GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663537
I'll keep hovering around. They can't be -human if they don't get curious about me.
- -

Tazio was, as Kay-Zee predicted, entirely comfortable in -the landing pod. It was hardly a prison. Had he chosen, Tazio could have -used his experience with pod electronics to escape. Instead, he -opened the viewport, sat in the pilot's chair, and searched the -firmament for spacecraft. He had just perceived a twinkling reflection -at extreme distance, when he heard a woman's voice behind him. He swung -around and jumped up with a guilty start. Surely Kay-Zee hadn't followed -him here. But it wasn't Kay-Zee. He had never seen her before. She was -tall, thin, dark-haired, dressed in a simple one-piece overall. - -At first, he couldn't make out what she was saying. A strange accent, he -couldn't quite... - -"What did you say?" - -"My name is Lem. What's yours?" - -"I.. I.. Tazio Rydell? What are you doing here?" - -"What is your age, Tazio?" - -"I'm fifteen. Who are you? I don't think you should be here. I'm -supposed to be locked in." He was not precisely alarmed, but confused -and worried. - -"I need to speak to your captain. Can you take me there?" - -"No. I'm not allowed out. Well, I could, but I'd be in trouble. If -you've got a key to get in, you can get out again. I haven't got a key." - -"I haven't got a key either." - -"Well, did someone lock you in, like me?" - -"I didn't come in by the door." - -"It's the only way." - -"No, it's not." - -Tazio began to suspect the woman was deranged, like the mother of one of -his school friends, who had run around the corridors with a -knife screaming that the devil was inside her, until she was led off to -the hospital. Deranged people, he had heard, could be dangerous. There -was no other way into a landing pod. "How did you get in, then?" - -"I was displaced. From another spacecraft." - -"The little one that I've seen? What is 'displaced'?" Input overload. - -"It's a method of moving an object from one location to another by... by -a complicated method using quantum physics." She pointed out of the -viewport. The craft Tazio had photographed was holding position nearby. -"I'm from that one. It would be more true to say I am that -craft. The Stanislaw Lem. The Lem has no crew as such. It is operated -by an AI. I am the avatar of that AI, a robot which has the -personality of that AI." - -"An AI - Artificial Intelligence! There are games about AIs." - -"Are there really?" - -"I can call my father. I'm allowed to do that." - -"Who is your father?" - -"He's a Commander. He works for Captain Raymond." - -"Your father sounds exactly the person I should speak to. Can you call -him now?" - -

GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663538
Success! Or, at least, so far so good. I -have an avatar aboard the Mustang Sally. A male juvenile was inside one -of the landing/rescue units with the viewport open. With visibility, I -was able to displace an avatar into the unit without hazard. The avatar -took the form of an adult female. I thought that would cause less alarm. -In the event, the child was quite sophisticated and has called the -authorities on board. - -
HTW Iain M Banks -to GQ Stanislaw Lem
5024008263632052
-Well done. Keep me posted. Don't mention me until you have to. -Remember what happened with Blue Suede Shoes. Don't -reveal our full purpose until you're sure they won't panic.
- -GQ Stanislaw Lem to HTW Iain M Banks
-5024008298663539
Yes. As agreed. We assert that we are here -to help if they need it, with stores, repairs, medical assistance. -
- -

Captain Raymond was looking haggard. Two weeks of -conversation with Lem, or, rather, with the avatar of Stanislaw Lem and -still he -didn't trust it. "I know you have been very helpful over these last few -weeks, and we thank you. These repairs and the updated electronics -will prove very useful. One thing puzzles me." - -"And that is?" - -"You know very well that you have constantly avoided explaining why you -are here, apparently alone." - -Commander Rydell added "He's right. You say you came from Earth, yet -there are no human personnel with you. And the Stanislaw Lem is too -small to have sourced all the equipment and the robots that converted -the shield to a force field." - -"I had expected to explain all this to you in due course. I have been -advised to be cautious in what I reveal." - -"Why? Is there some hidden agenda here, as I suspect? said Raymond. - -

"You should know that Earth is no longer -inhabited."
"By no means. It's just that we approached another -Earth star ship in a -less than diplomatic fashion, causing considerable distress to them, and -precipitating what amounted to panic, then what amounted to civil war -within the ship. A particularly extreme faction -eventually forced the ship to self-destruct with the loss of all the -colonists." - -"I see you used the expression 'we'. And that is supposed to reassure -us?" - -"I feel it would be a terrible shock to you and your people if I were to -announce everything I have to say in public." - -"Well," said Rydell, "The whole ship now knows you are here. There have -been guided tours to see the Stanislaw Lem from Tazio's viewport. Many -of the crew have now met you. I think you can, at any rate, depend on -the good impression you have made, except that you adroitly avoid any -discussion of your origin and intentions." - -"Answering your questions in what I consider to be the appropriate -order, I shall be more open with you. I hope I have proved my good -intentions, and you must trust that I shall continue to speak and act in -your best interests." - -"I suspect you would say that, whatever your motives. I have -never fully trusted you," grumbled Raymond. - -"I agree with the Captain," said Rydell, "I was more prepared to trust -you at first than I am now. You must be aware that your adopted persona, -as an open, attractive and friendly female, has tended to turn away -hostility and suspicion in a way a male avatar might not have done." - -Lem smiled. "All right. This may be a shock, though probably not a -surprise. You should know that Earth is no -longer inhabited. Its climatic collapse was expected before you left on -this mission. -Indeed that fear was the main reason for the star ships." - -"And I suppose everyone is dead," said Raymond. - -"Not so. The vast majority were re-housed in a suitable space habitat in -approximate Earth orbit. There were casualties; stay-behinds, panickers, -rioters, people too sick to survive, but most are safe and have been -settled for half a century. We arranged the necessary transport." - -"A space habitat?" asked Rydell. - -"Effectively a planet, but a different, more convenient shape. A ring, -rather than a sphere. I can offer details, but I have more news." - -"What now?" - -"I am, as you correctly guessed, not alone. We are accompanied at a -distance by what you might call -a mother ship, a Heavy Transport Workshop called Iain M Banks. The Banks -is mother to a thousand or more smaller vehicles, of which the Lem is -the smallest type. The docking hold alone of the Banks is large enough -to accommodate several craft as big as the Mustang Sally. It carries -armaments that could vaporise a planet. Indeed, the sight of Iain M -Banks caused the initial uproar in the generation ship Blue Suede Shoes. -Therefore, we -decided, on this occasion, to conduct a modest approach." - -Commander Rydell looked dubious. "I don't believe Earth technology can -have advanced so far." - -"You are correct. The race that created us a very long time ago were not -human. We AIs are effectively their descendants. They are not extinct; -some are aboard the Iain M Banks, as are a few hundred humans. But none -of them take any part in guiding our operations. This particular fleet -is dedicated to the well-being of the human race. It is a kind of hobby. -Every craft is named after an Earth-origin science fiction author." - -"So you've been running around helping all the generation ships?" - -"Most, I'm afraid, were beyond our help by the time we found them, but -yes." - -"So you will nursemaid us to our destination?" asked Captain Raymond. - -"If you wish, but we have other proposals to offer you." - -"I'm not sure I like the idea of any change to our mission." - -"Even although its original purpose, to preserve the human species, has -been achieved with the space habitat? You could turn around and return -home. Alternatively, you could abandon the Mustang Sally and load your -crew on the Iain M Banks, which is essentially a world in itself. I can -assure you of a full and attractive life for all your people." - -Raymond did not hesitate. "My orders were clear. The duty of every -successive captain is to preserve the ship until it reaches its -destination, and then to colonise the planet we reach. What would we do -otherwise?" - -"Then, if I tell you that the planet you currently appear to target, -which may have been superficially suitable when viewed by Earth -telescopes, is not, it fact, a viable colonisation planet, what will you -do?" - -"If we so determine, we have a list of alternate destinations. We simply -collect what water and minerals we require from the asteroids -and moons of the star system we have reached and redirect to another -destination, however long it takes. The ship and its mission are -essentially immortal, even if we individuals are not." - -"Wait a minute," said Rydell, "With your technology, we could reach our -destination much more quickly!" - -"You anticipate our offer. In principle, we could load the Mustang Sally -aboard the -Banks, and convey it to a suitable deserted planet within a few months." - -Raymond exploded. "Under no circumstances! That is not what we are here -for!" - -"Oh, it's a great offer, Captain," said Rydell. "Think. You could be the -man who starts the colony. Something you never even hoped for." - -"Neither hoped for nor wished!" - -Lem said quietly: "This is what we feared. It was clear that most of the -crew of the Blue Suede Shoes found the change to their expected -existence and lifespan too much to comprehend. The result was chaos, -aggravated by the fact that discipline on board was much inferior to -your own." - -"Please," said Raymond, "Leave us alone to continue our mission. It was -generous of you to offer assistance, but we do not need it." - -"As you wish, Captain, but may I offer the following compromise? We -could convey the Mustang Sally to within, say, 30 years travel at your -current capability, from a suitable planet. Further, we would offer to -accommodate on Iain M Banks a number of your crew to supervise the early -terraforming of the colony, and convey them there to anticipate your -arrival. This would save many generations of your people the drudgery -and continued risk of your slow approach to the new colony, while -averting the psychological upheaval that would be occasioned by doing -the journey all at once." - -Raymond was silent. - - -

Fleet Auxiliary Doctor E E Smith, on indefinite loan from -HTW Iain M Banks, orbited the green and blue sphere that was to become a -new home for mankind. Lieutenant Kay-Zee Jones, chief police officer on -the Smith, was still having trouble with Tazio, who, armed with -wonderful devices beyond even his fantastic dreams, managed to irritate -the serious-minded terraforming crew. His latest prank had been to -release a swarm of tiny flying eyes which penetrated every corner of the -ship and relayed live video to his handheld. E E, the AI that was the -guiding -personality of the E E Smith quickly disposed of them with a spray of -tiny laser cannons. Kay-Zee was irritated that E E had clearly been -amused by Tazio's game, and was further inhibited from serious action by -the fact that his father, Captain Rydell, was the senior human officer -aboard. - -Having taken this momentous step, to break away from the Mustang Sally -with a crew of forward-looking personnel, she reflected that life was -not going to be all that different after all. - - - -© Gil Williamson 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] lem.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Must Be in the Fifties - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon Hudson - -[*BLURB] This story must be in the fifties... on the cheekiness scale. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

�Ooo-wee, what a beaut!� - -�Thanks, Tom.� - -Tom leaned on the fence and gave his head a half-shake of admiration. -His neighbour's new model had been parked out in front of the house all -day. He had been unable to stop directing an envious eye across their -property line, but this was the first time he'd seen Bill outside, first -chance to strike up a conversation and pull a few -details. - -�Fresh off the lot, right?� - -�The factory floor.� Bill tilted back his tan leadora to let a little -sun onto his forehead while protecting the hair from a breezy ruffling. -There was a smile of real satisfaction on his face: happy, relaxed, true -satisfaction. - -Tom wasn't wearing a hat and was glad of the wind. He only had the one, -so he felt he had to save it for the working week. Got to make sure he -looked in keeping with the boss's expectations regarding sound -employees. But ever since that ozone layer went up with Bikini atoll, -the summers had been getting hotter. He rubbed a gritty palm over his -shiny dome and thought about slapping on a bit more cream up there. Lot -of rads coming down today, the count must be in the fifties. - -�Top of the range, or am I wrong?� he said. - -�I guess you know your way around them, Tom.� - -That was nice of Bill to say. Tom was touched. Always playing it cool, -that was Bill, never one to brag. Tom knew if it had been him, he'd have -been cruising around town showing off to everyone in sight, whether he -knew them or not. Or maybe not. Hell, you'd have been hard pressed to -get him out of her for a minute all weekend. - -Bill had been edging his lawn with a top of the range Whirly-Weeder and, -suddenly self-conscious, Tom dropped his manual shears blade-down into -the flowerbed so they stood out of sight behind a small shaped privet. -Then he felt kind of stupid, and a little ashamed, because Bill knew he -didn't make so much cash at the plant, and he knew Bill didn't care. - -�Must have set you back some,� he said, in spite of himself. - -�Well, Tom, I don't want to go into the pennies of it, you know.� - -�But she's worth every one, I'll bet!� - -Bill shared a twinkly smile and Tom had to grin back. Bill was a good -neighbour. Always happy to lend a guy the use of his ride mower for an -afternoon. Always quick to share a beer over the fence when he came home -in the evening with a six-pack. An all-round decent guy to have in the -house next door. The way Tom figured it, Bill deserved every bit of good -fortune that came his way. - -�Got to say, I�m tempted myself. It�s been a while for ol� Brenda and, -well, you know.� - -�Sure, Tom, sure.� - -

�Why don�t you join me in a cocktail?�
Bill -didn�t, but Tom couldn�t help but glance ol� Brenda�s way. He�d -never be one of those guys chasing a new ride every year, but there -comes a time when you just can�t help but notice the flaws creeping in. -Just last weekend he�d been under the hood for hours only to get home -Monday evening to find she was leaking again. - -�What�s the interior like?� - -�Calf leather.� Bill looked very pleased. �Smooth as skin, because it -is, like the man said.� - -�Real smooth. Give her a name?� - -�Just Dee, I think.� - -Dee. All gleaming sheen and glorious curves. Not like his clunky old -bucket. �She�s a doll, no question.� - -�Yep.� - -�I�d love to take her for a spin!� he enthused. - -Bill raised his eyebrows. �Well... lawn won�t do itself, Tom,� he said. -He flipped on the Whirly-Weeder again and strolled away along the flower -bed. - -Oh no, Tom thought, me and my big mouth. He followed on -his side of the white picket. �Hey, ah, Bill,� he said, raising his -voice over the whine of the motor, �sorry about that.� - -�Don�t mention it, Tom.� - -�Crossed a line, Bill. Didn�t mean anything by it.� - -�Really, don�t mention it.� - -Tom was sweating now. �You won�t say anything to Mr. Harris, will you?� - -Bill stopped, flicked the Whirly-Weeder off again and looked Tom in the -eye. �I�m not going to do anything like that, Tom. You got my word.� - -Tom blushed. �I know that, Bill. I�m sorry I even suggested... Aw, hell, -I... I feel like a heel.� - -�Forget about it, Tom. I already have.� - -Tom plucked at his sticky shirt. �Hey, you want a beer, Bill? I think -I�ve a couple of cool ones on ice.� He had one cool beer, anyway, and if -Bill wanted it� - -�Thanks Tom, but why don�t you join me in a cocktail?� Bill fished in -his back pocket and came out with something like one of those old -two-ways Tom�s lieutenant used to be so proud of during the war. Only -bigger. Bill held down the button and said, �Dee. Make. Two. Mai. Tai.� - -They both watched as Dee got up out of the sun lounger and wiggled -towards the wet bar in the dining room. Tom could hardly believe her -breasts. Double-D�s and unreal. Must be in the fifties. - -�She�s quite a mover. And voice activated.� - -�Wireless was an option, but worth the extra.� - -�They do a payment plan, you think?� - -�Maybe. Ask.� - -�Yeah, yeah, I will.� - -Dee returned with their drinks. She took a while to cross the lawn, but -Tom had no problem waiting. - -�Thanks. Honey. Why. Don�t. You. Do. Your. Front. For. A. While. Hmm?� - -�SURE THING BABY.� - -Tom raised his glass. �Here�s to you, eh Bill?� - -�Thanks, Tom. And really, don�t worry about before. Neighbours have to -look out for each other, you hear? We�re all in it together, pal.� - -Tom sipped his Mai Tai. Perfect. Still, he thought, kinda -weird, that neighbours comment. More than a shade of pinko, really. What -was that firebrand senator, that McCarthy guy, what was he always -saying? Tom mused. Maybe he ought to make a phone call. - -He tore his gaze away from Dee�s rolling caboose to squint up at the -sun, then blew out a breath. What a summer. Damn hot today. - -Must be in the fifties. - -©Andrew Leon Hudson 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] fifties.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Adalet - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] The lengths some people will go to in order to make documentary -tv interesting. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

�We�d like to get some footage inside your -facility,� Daphne said, leaning low in case a swollen wedge of cleavage -was going to make the difference. �I believe it�s named after your -grandfather?� - -�Joseph Henderson, The First. Sure, we can arrange that. We�re so proud -of all that Adalet is. In fact, our planet�s name says it all: Justice. -That�s what my grandfather and all the other pilgrims dreamed of. And -that�s what we�ve achieved.� - -�Then that would be wonderful.� Daphne leaned back so her blouse closed -again, disconcerted that Henderson had ignored it. Men you couldn�t read -or manipulate were trouble, and she needed to do both right now. �Shall -we say tomorrow, then?� - -�Tomorrow it is. When do you hope to broadcast, by the way? We get some -of your Earth stations on Adalet. Several of your soap operas are very -popular.� - -�Not until next year. -This is a documentary we�re making, so it won�t be on any of the -entertainment channels.� Her smile was tight. - -�Never mind. I�m sure you�ll do a wonderful job.� He patted her knee -without any sexual overtones--which just made it patronising. �Until -tomorrow.� - -

�You do know there are over two hundred and twenty -colonies in the Raghavan System?� her producer, Macie, felt it necessary -to remind her. �Adalet just happens to be one of the few interesting -ones. Just be thankful it�s not the only one, is what I�m saying.� - -�It�s unique because of its justice system, nothing else. Doesn�t -exactly make for sexy TV.� - -�Why are you so tetchy about this? Religious groups, ecological -self-sufficiency, new forms of government and economy, you know the -score. It�s what brought pilgrims out here and what we�re here to cover. -If you don�t like it, I don�t know why you volunteered for this series.� - -�You know exactly why, Macie: because this was all there was. Presenting -jobs aren�t exactly falling from the trees.� She turned away and dug her -nails into her palms to stop herself saying more. Revealing more. -Two hundred and twenty inhabited planets--there had to be one worth -calling home. - -�Yes, well, presenters are. So unless you want Alan to fire your arse -and replace it with some shareholder�s niece, play nicely and do what -the channel tells you.� - -�You�re all heart, Macie.� - -�I am what I am, Daphne. You should try facing the same reality. � - -

�No, we don�t need any of the history - they�ll run a -short montage explaining how the founders came here, their concept of a -new justice system and their early days in setting it up. What we�re -here to capture is how all that theory is now operating in practice.� - -�Oh, it was always more than just theory,� Joseph Henderson told -her. �My grandfather conducted studies, even had some limited success -back on Earth. Back there, they wouldn�t let him go the whole way with -his vision though, which is why he needed a place like Adalet.� - -�Yes.� Daphne�s smile had now wound so tight it puckered the corners of -her lips and had pinged out a nerve under each eye. �So, if you could -give us some examples of how you deal with different crimes, then our -audience will get something of what makes Adalet so unique.� - -

�They have something similar on Earth for -relaxation therapy.�
�Several of our neighbouring planets have -introduced our methods or even -asked us to come and operate their criminal justice systems. We�ve -turned from pioneers to exporters. Just last month, we got a communiqu� -from Earth� though I�m not at liberty to mention the country nor persons -concerned.� - -�Mister Henderson?� - -�Oh. Quite. Sorry. I can�t help but get carried away when I�m talking -about our successes. So, are we rolling? Is that still the right word? -Great. Shall I just explain a few of our procedures? Okay, okay. Well, -I�m not sure where to start�� - -�Tell us what happens if someone is convicted of stealing,� Daphne said. - -�They�re forced to watch their belongings being given or taken away, one -at a time, over the course of a week. The recipients are anyone who -turns up at their house. Often, we set out trestle tables on the front -lawn and passers-by can just help themselves. Once word gets out, more -turn up, of course.� - -�And if the crime involves violence?� - -�We use a variant of the stocks. Those wooden contraptions they put -people in in Medieval times? Well, it�s the psychological effect really. -It�s not the pain a victim remembers from an assault, but the emotional -after-tremors. The aggressor is locked into our stocks so they�re -standing upright, dressed in facility-issue shorts, with their head -fixed in a brace so they can�t look up, down, to the sides. Anyone who -wants to can approach and� well, it�s pinches and slaps mostly because -anything greater and they�d be committing an offence themselves. The -aggressor can�t see it coming--but they feel it. And, more importantly, -they fear it.� - -Daphne forced out the next line from the board Macie was holding up and -jabbing with her finger. �And� murder?� - -�Total sensory deprivation. The chambers are designed so they lie there -as good as dead. Like a conscious coma.� The way Henderson said it, the -smile that accompanied it - all syrup and shine� added to its horror. -Poe would have approved. - -�They have something similar on Earth for relaxation therapy,� Daphne -said, as an attempt to soften the image. - -�Not like this. The nearest to this would be to be cut adrift in deep space.� - -Daphne swallowed what felt like a dry teabag. �I think that�s enough for -the moment.� She could feel her features sag as the blood drained from -her cheeks. �Are we okay, Macie?� - -�Fine. We�ll get some more shots around the facilities.� - -�Sure.� - -

Daphne didn�t have to feign the dizzy -spell. As she flipped through her news dispatcher, she saw Alan's body -had been discovered and time of death put at the day before their -departure for Adalet, scuppering any last chance of an easy alibi and a -return to Earth. When they went through the list of visitors their boss -had received that day--which of course they would - then... - -�Madam?� - -Daphne gasped. - -�I�m sorry, but your producer sent me to fetch you. She�s waiting for -you at the Deprivation Chamber.� - -�I�m really not feeling too well�� - -Joseph Henderson�s assistant opened his hands helplessly, shrugged, but -made no move to leave. Daphne sighed. �Okay. Tell Macie I�m coming.� - -�I�d better escort you, madam. It�s quite a maze.� - -Daphne followed the assistant along a white-tiled corridor that should -have led to a basement morgue. Perfect. She attempted to take her mind -off that line of thought. �Has it really been such a success - all of -this?� - -�Adalet? Absolutely. We never have repeat offenders. Mind you, neither -did The Inquisition - but for other reasons.� He drew a finger across -his throat and made the sound her cat used to make when it was angry. -Another wave of nausea crashed against the wall of her stomach and she -put out a hand to steady herself. - -She tried again with the distraction technique. �Do you know of anyone, -personally, who�s had cause to experience a punishment?� - -�Of course. All of us. Well, we have to.� - -�You� what?� - -�To know what it�s like. Didn�t you know? It�s not enough that the -sentence merely fits the crime. This isn�t a punishment facility - it -exists as a means to remind a perpetrator of the consequences of doing -wrong. Prevention is better than punishment, and for that an -individual�s got to fully appreciate what those consequences are from -the outset. Adalet believes in the practical. If you don�t know what�s -waiting for you, why are you ever going to avoid it?� - -She thought of Alan, his empty promises, the jobs he�d passed onto his -latest squeeze that should have been hers. Had he known what was waiting -for him? - -By the time they reached the room which housed the deprivation tanks, -her mind was made up. Macie felt obliged to sound dubious but Daphne -knew she loved it: the producer�s eyes brightening even after the shock -of Alan�s death. - -�Well, hey. If you�re sure you want to do it, Daphne?� - -�Sure I�m sure.� She climbed into the tank before the second thoughts -became third. It couldn�t be that bad. Not when there was no pain and -just brief, dark oblivion. Sure. Just like those relaxation tanks. Only -more so. - -It couldn�t be that bad. - -

It was worse. - -It was like an intense version of those anxiety nightmares you had when -you realised you were sleeping and wanted to wake up but were paralysed -and could only wait until the terror deigned to ease its grip. - -��just you and your conscience, alone in the dark,� Henderson was saying -to camera when they opened the tank up fifteen minutes later. Her face -was streaked with tears, her hair frizzed and tangled, her fingers -twisted to claws, and her body couldn�t stop shivering. - -�Daphne? Are you okay?� But even in her current state, Daphne could -still tell Macie was thrilled at how this would look on film. - -�It was me,� she told him, the camera. �I killed Alan.� - -Joseph Henderson�s look was of disappointment, but not shock. Macie�s -was pure confusion. - -�Ahh. That is its other effect,� Henderson said with a sigh. �Sometimes, -I rather think we should rename it �The Confessional�. Everyone who�s -ever lain in there finds their conscience pricked into admitting their -crimes. Some from years back - things they�ve had weighing on them all -this time.� - -Daphne saw Macie edge away from her and the tank. Probably wondering -which she should fear most. Daphne didn�t care. Everyone carried baggage -off Earth. - - ©Jez Patterson 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] adalet.jpg - - -[*ITEM] A Day Like Any Other - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] How to deal with a helicopter crash - backwoods style. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Deputy Harris scratched the back of his -neck. �Well, that�s pretty damn weird. Huh, Sheriff?� - -I removed my hat and ran fingers through my hair. �You got this singular -talent for saying what everyone else is thinking, Tom. Don�t let anyone -ever tell you different.� We were standing on the lip of a natural -depression, up on Dead Pine Ridge. We had an impact crater, we had blast -damage to the surrounding trees, we had the local fire department -dampening down the smouldering undergrowth around the perimeter. - -What we didn�t have was a downed aircraft. - -Old Man Haskins had called it in; a helicopter flying low over his farm -and then an explosion further up the valley. Hell, you could see the -column of smoke from outside my office back in Henderson. As the nearest -ambulance was twenty minutes further away in Porterfield, me and Tom had -rounded up Doc Fraser and headed out � followed by the town fire truck -once enough volunteers had reported in. - -And we�d found this; your typical crash site, just lacking any shred of -wreckage. It was, as Tom put it, �pretty damn weird� � and I don�t like -weird. I�d lived in Henderson for almost thirty years and been Sheriff -for the last fifteen. Not so much a testament to my re-election skills, -more like nobody else wanted the job. Henderson was a small town with a -small town mentality and a small town crime rate; drunk and disorderly, -the odd domestic dispute, petty theft � nothing to write home about. Now -I was facing a situation that made my head hurt. - -Tom lowered his voice. �Say, what if this is all just a distraction? -You, me, the volunteers, all stuck out here with nobody back home -minding the store.� - -I frowned. �You mean everyone likely to cause a ruckus? Well, I hear -what you say, Tom, but it�s not like Henderson is an obvious target for -armed robbery. Even if you cleaned out every business on Main Street I -doubt you�d get more than a thousand dollars. That�s pretty small change -given the time and effort required to fly up here and drop a bomb.� - -He scratched the back of his neck again. �Well, then maybe it�s an -assassination. Maybe someone we don�t know about is going to pass -through town and this is to get us out of the way.� - -�Uh-huh, passing through town, heading where, exactly? The -blacktop goes as far as Gaines Mill and after that it�s dirt roads over -the ridge until you pick up the interstate around Blackwing. Nope, -whatever this is, it ain�t criminal.� - -We both turned towards the sound of a pickup bouncing up the fire trail -at the foot of the slope. It was Jeff Younger, one of the volunteer -firemen. Younger was a veteran; two tours in Iraq without a scratch and -then hit by friendly fire forty-five minutes after landing in -Afghanistan, which had to be some kind of record. He�d come home minus -an eye but with some Afghan Army shrapnel embedded in his skull by way -of compensation. - -Jeff got out and walked up to us, carrying his helmet. �Sheriff. Tom. I -was working the south forty when the siren went off and I guess the guys -felt they couldn�t wait any longer. Just what kind of-� He broke off -abruptly on reaching us, staring down at the crash site. �What the fuck -is that?� - -Tom and I looked at each other, then at Jeff. He was a pretty solid guy -but sometimes he saw things that weren�t there � I figured his -hallucinations were brought on by all that metal in his head. However, -as things stood, I wasn�t going to discount anything which might shed -some light on what we were dealing with. I tried to sound curious rather -than wary. �OK, Jeff, you got the bead on this one. What�s the story?� - -He pointed. �Seriously, you can�t see that? It�s like a big ball of blue -gas, real sparkly, floating just above the ground, down in the middle of -the crater.� - -Tom and I looked, we looked real hard. My deputy shrugged. �Nope, I got -nothing.� - -Doc Fraser had been sitting on a fallen log, smoking, his talents -unneeded. Now he stood up and walked over. �Is it just the gas you can -see, Jeff? Nothing else, no prominent smell, no background sound you -can�t account for?� - -Jeff glared at us. �I ain�t crazy, dammit! It�s a ball of swirling gas, -but a perfect sphere, like it�s behind glass. There are sparks in it, -like fireflies.� - -I tried not to show any emotion. �Sounds real pretty. Maybe it�s some -kind of thermal after-image, from the explosion? Some people can see -residual heat better than others.� - -Tom nodded. �That�s a fact. Could be real useful in your line of work, -Jeff.� - -Younger sounded uncertain. �Yeah, well, could be that, I suppose. -Anyhow, I best go help the guys finish up� Hey, where�s all the goddam -wreckage?� - -I set my hat in place and smoothed down the brim. �Yeah, we noticed that -as well. The department is looking into it, Jeff, don�t you worry.� - -He looked unconvinced but went on his way. Tom frowned. �Looking into -it? We�re looking into a big, empty, hole, that�s what we�re looking -into. Great story this is gonna� make, over a few beers at Macintyre�s. -�Local police find nothing, film at eleven.� At least the fire -department got to douse some bushes.� - -

I checked the Winchester 30-30 was loaded and put a -handful of shells in the pocket of my windbreaker for easy -access.
I half laughed. �Easy there, tiger. If anyone asks, this is -an on-going -investigation, and you can�t comment further, right? Anyway, the fire -crew are packing up, so let�s get everyone back to town before it's -overrun by gun-toting marauders.� - -�You taking the rise out of me, Sheriff?� - -�Wouldn�t dream of it, Tom.� The three of us walked down to the 4-by-4 -and I lifted the radio handset out through the open window. �Sally, this -is John. Come back.� - -Our office receptionist sounded nervous. �I�m here, Sheriff. Is it -real bad out there? The ambulance from Portersville is on its way, but -it'll take another half hour at least.� - -�Well, tell them to stand down, but with our thanks. Whatever happened -up here it wasn�t a crash, so we�re heading back. Say, is Quinn about? -It�s Tuesday, and he normally visits the store on a Tuesday.� - -Jonas Quinn was our resident weirdo, a loner who rarely ventured into -town. Rumour was he�d been some kind of surveillance expert back east, -maybe even a spook, before suffering a mental breakdown. Certainly his -semi-derelict Airstream was festooned with more satellite dishes and -antennae than a major radio station. - -�Ah, yeah, I believe he was about earlier.� - -�Right, well, go ask him to come out here with his radiation meter, -metal detector and anything else he might have that can find what we -can�t see. If he�s amenable, that is.� - -Sally sounded dubious. �Well, I�ll try. What should I say is going -on?� - -I laughed. �Like I should know? Just tell him we have some unexplained -phenomena. The guy is a UFO nut, I�m sure he�ll jump at the chance to -poke around out here.� - -�I�ll get right on it, Sheriff. Sally out.� - -I tossed the handset onto the seat. �Tom, take the Doc back into town. -I�ll wait for Quinn and catch a ride with him once we�re done. Assuming -he bites, that is. If not, you�ll have to come pick me up, preferably -this side of winter.� - -Tom opened his mouth but the Doc spoke first. �Fine by me � and don�t -even think about volunteering to stay out here with your beloved leader, -Tom Harris. I�m way too old to have my bones shook from their sockets -riding the fire truck.� - -My deputy frowned. �Well, OK, but if I don�t pass Quinn I�ll be right -back.� - -�Wouldn�t expect anything less from you, Tom.� I scratched my chin. �The -only outfit around these parts likely to have a helicopter is Black Bear -Mining. When you get back to the office check to see if they�re missing -a bird.� He nodded. I tried to sound casual. �Best leave me the -flashlight and the rifle, and that box of shells. I might do some -hunting while I wait, so the day ain�t a complete bust.� - -I had a reputation as a backwoodsman, having scoured the surrounding -hills for years in search of game. Even so, I could tell that Tom wasn�t -happy about how things were playing out. Even Doc Fraser raised his -eyebrows, but I just smiled. �You still here, Tom? That wife of yours -will think we�re sitting around the camp fire, swigging moonshine. Now, -git.� - -I stood back while everyone else left, deflecting any attempts at -conversation. I stood until the fire truck and 4-by-4 were just dust -trails, way down the hillside, then turned and walked back up to the -crash site. I sat on the same log as Doc Fraser and waited. - -There was no wind to stir the leaves, no sound at all � not even -birdsong. I checked the Winchester 30-30 was loaded and put a handful of -shells in the pocket of my windbreaker for easy access. Time passed. The -shadows lengthened. - -My walkie-talkie crackled. �Sheriff, this is Tom.� His voice was -faint, riding a wave of static. - -�Reading you, Tom, if barely. What�s the story?� - -�Just got a message from Sally, well, two, actually. She found Quinn -and apparently he�s on his way to you along with a whole bunch of weird -equipment.� - -�Sounds good. At least I won�t be walking home.� - -�Yeah, well, it looks like you�re gonna� have some other company as -well.� - -Even distorted, his tone of voice made me uneasy. �Uh-huh. Care to -expand on that?� - -�Four guys showed up at the office in a black SUV. Suits, short hair, -sunglasses. Said they were from Black Bear and had we found their -missing helo? Of course Sally didn�t know any better so she sent them on -up to you. They ain�t passed me yet so you want I should pull them -over?� - -I couldn�t fault his enthusiasm but there was a heavy-handed feel to -this I didn�t like and nothing to be gained by putting him in -harm�s way. �No, let them be. But if me and Quinn aren�t back in, say, -two hours, maybe you and some of the guys might like to come join me for -some evening target practice?� - -�You got it, Sheriff. Tom out.� - -Black Bear had a prospecting operation at the base of Pharaoh�s Peak � -it kind of looked like a pyramid � two valleys over. The flight path -between there and the landing strip at Blackwing would have taken them -in this direction, but there was nothing to explain what had become of -their aircraft. - -No conventional explanation, at any rate. - -Sometimes you have to go on gut instinct and hope it�s based on -subconscious analysis and not just wishful thinking. - -Sometimes you just get lucky. - -I stood up and undressed, laying my clothes out neatly on the log. - -It was almost dusk but the air still felt warm against my skin. I took a -deep breath, exhaled, and relaxed � letting my body shrink back into its -original size and shape. The sense of relief was palpable; maintaining a -human form was the equivalent of keeping your cheeks puffed out, only -for days at a time. I couldn�t risk dropping my disguise in town, even -in the relative privacy of my own home. It was only out here, in the -guise of one of my frequent hunting trips, that I was able to be myself. -Even with my own eyes there was no sign of the phenomena reported by -Jeff Younger. I sat down to wait for Quinn�s arrival, enjoying the world -through unadulterated senses. - -Eventually I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle and slid into the -bushes, in case the Black Bear team had passed Quinn�s decrepit station -wagon and reached me first. However, the dust settled to reveal his -rust-coloured (and covered) Buick. He was alone. Quinn struggled up the -slope, arms filled with esoteric electronic equipment, and stopped on -the lip of the depression. - -I stepped out into view. - -He grunted and set down his burden. �You�re taking a bit of a risk, -aren�t you? The NSA could have this whole area under satellite -surveillance. The last thing we need is you getting hauled off to Area -Fifty-One. If you�re feeling suicidal at least let me make some money -out of a pay-per-view alien autopsy.� - -I smiled at his ingrained paranoia, finding it hard to set aside human -reactions after all this time. We�d been marooned on Earth for decades, -unable to locate the transfer pod containing the wormhole initiator. -Eventually I figured out it had probably been the �comet� of 1892, as -recorded in the archives of the Porterfield Examiner. That�s the -problem with side-stepping relativity, pinning down the �when� of a -temporal insertion can be problematic. I�d reasoned that, as Sheriff, if -any of the locals did discover the pod, I�d be the first person -they�d contact. As for �Quinn�, since arriving in town he�d been -monitoring the area for anomalous energy emissions - all to no avail. - -But now I believed we had our way home. �Relax, the only thing we have -to worry about are some corporate security goons chasing a missing -helicopter.� I took in the crash site with a sweep of my arm. �I think -Black Bear Mining discovered the initiator and triggered the activation -sequence while trying to fly it out. It looks like the wormhole formed -just before impact.� - -He stroked his chin. �That�s one hell of a stretch. Even if you�re right -that leaves us worse off than before. I don�t see the Bureau mounting a -second attempt to pull us out, especially if an alien flying machine -just crash-landed in the retrieval centre.� - -�Ah, but Jeff Younger says he can see a big, sparkling ball of blue gas, -down there. A perfect sphere.� - -The Quinn-shape snorted. �A residual event horizon? Do you have any idea -how rare that is?� - -�I believe the term �gift horse� is appropriate, given the -circumstances. Look, can you make it visible?� - -He turned to his heap of miscellaneous equipment. �Yeah, yeah, all it -takes is a modified Xeon projector. I�ll need a few minutes.� - -I looked back down the valley. �A few minutes is perhaps all the time we -have, so work quickly.� Changing back into human form might have been -the smart move right then, but you have to understand the relief I felt -at escaping from �John Bane�. - -Eventually my fellow infiltrator stood back from the apparatus he�d -assembled. �OK, it�s warming up. We should be able to see what there is -to see anytime� now.� The wormhole aperture flickered into view, -transformed into a perfect silver sphere that reflected its -surroundings. He sounded worried. �Integrity is way down, way below the -safe operating level for a group transfer.� - -�Are you saying it�s useless?� - -�No, not quite� but it�s like a soap bubble. The first person to cross -the threshold will trigger an immediate collapse. They�ll -probably stay ahead of the compression surge all the way through, -but I can�t guarantee the egress point will be as expected. Either way -this is a high-risk deal, and only for one of us.� He sounded -tense, a hand resting on the gun-butt protruding from his jacket pocket. - -�I was in charge, the senior agent. The success or failure of this -mission is my responsibility.� I returned to my pile of belongings. �You -should be the one to go.� - -My colleague sounded pathetically grateful. �Of course I�ll inform our -superiors of your sacrifice. Perhaps the gesture will spur them into -sending a second pod, or even a ship?� I said nothing. We both knew that -retrieving information on a backwater world such as Earth wouldn�t -justify such expense. He cleared his throat. �Very well, when -deactivating the projector there is no �on-off� switch, you simply have -to-� - -I turned and shot him in the chest. - -The rifle was cumbersome given my diminutive form, relatively speaking, -but my mass remained unchanged and the recoil proved tolerable. �Jonas -Quinn� stared at me in disbelief, then sank to his knees and toppled -forward into the dirt. He shrivelled in on himself, becoming a small, -grey child, caught playing dress-up in adult clothes. I set the gun -aside and walked down towards the wormhole, simply ignoring the evidence -of our presence here on Earth. That was against every Bureau edict but I -was past caring - and it wasn�t like humanity was going to expand beyond -the Sol system anytime soon. - -A snatch of poetry came to mind, to serve as eulogy for my fallen -comrade. �A day like any other, a night like none has gone before. The -future glitters on far horizon, the past, a distant shore.� - -I took one long, last, look around, and kissed the Earth �goodbye�. - -©Martin Clark 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] adlao.jpg - - - - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -
- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use -s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2014 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - - - - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev16.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev16.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 0bc06efe..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev16.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3023 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 16 - July 2015 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 16th issue of Mythaxis. - - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I present to you Mythaxis' -16th collection of short speculative fiction, the July 2015 edition. - -

My enthusiasm for short science fiction and fantasy -remains undimmed. Very often, an attractive original idea entertains -for ten pages but could probably not be sustained for a couple of -hundred pages, let alone a series of novels. - -I think particularly of:

  • Ray Bradbury's The Veldt, -
  • Roger Zelazny's The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his -Mouth,
  • James Blish's A Case of Conscience,
  • William -Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum,
  • Cordwainer Smith's The -Game of Rat and Dragon,
  • Bruce Sterling's Bicycle -Repairman
  • Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of -God,
  • Asimov's The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated -Thiotimoline,
  • Ian Watson's Slow Birds,
  • Jorge Luis -Borges' The Aleph,
  • Jack Vance's The Dragon -Masters.
I find that I could fill several -pages with short stories that have stuck in my mind for years, many for -decades. - -That is the tradition I aim to uphold with Mythaxis. Read and enjoy. - -Gil Williamson - -Editor - - -[*IMAGE] edit16.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Don Juans & Dragoons - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon Hudson - -[*BLURB] "A necessary monster." Jorge Luis Borges - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"Who follows me?" called the virgin, -without fear. - -"I, sweet thing," murmured the wyrm, unseen, its voice made silken with -deceits. - -"I only feed men, and clean their things," she replied with a dismissive -air and continued on her way towards her village in the cove, where -fishing boats sailed out at dawn and dusk, like now. - -"There are more hungers than one, maiden." It used her Greek, though any -tongue of men was its to command. It used the flattering word, for -virgins fear that truth at times. - -"You want my sister's service." She glanced back with a smile, seeing -no-one. To the north the soldiers' camp was become only shadows, upon a -beach of tan sands greening with the growing dark, against a sea of -purple, beneath a dying ember sky. - - -Her dark eyes reflected it all. The wyrm's reflected only her. - -"Can she be as lovely?" The girl flushed at the flattery, but did not -pause again. "I ask truly, though I have eyes for no beauty but your -own." - -"Quite lovely enough for a soldier's relief, which you would not find -with me. She is quick to share, and generous with her time. My price -would be a life's length-" the wyrm grinned, though she did not know it -"-and soon-dead men are not rich enough in years for me." - -"No man am I," said the wyrm in its true voice, and approached as she -faltered, transfixed. - -

The virgin lay restless in the wyrm's stomach. The great -beast twisted and coiled on its hoard, unable to settle, much like its -meal. It rolled onto its back, undulous like a river, baring its belly -as the mystic heat of the virgin's untapped loins stoked its own fire. - -It would need that soon. Not a needing like the compulsion which had led -it to consume her, fiery though that was, but the more literal -necessity. - -It would need flame, as those seeking vengeance inevitably followed a -meal. - -In this era, with humans abound on every inch of the world like fleas on -a rat's back, wyrmkind had been driven into only the most secluded -places. Now, instead of roosting atop some fine crag beneath the sky, -the wyrm dwelt in caverns by the surface, a shallow seep-water pool to -reflect its treasures before snaking its way on to the sea. It had -become as a tapeworm in that same rat's starving gut.

It was mankind's fancy that virginity's sole value was -in its taking
- -The wyrm seethed. Forced by mankind's ever increasing numbers to hide, -then by hunger to emerge and risk its precious skin. Forced to claim its -sacrifices, not simply receive them from cowering crowds. Forced to -provoke futile pursuits by little mobs - its seething became edged with -satisfaction - who in turn were forced to breach its narrow passages by -lonely ones and twos, no match for the wyrm without scrabbling -multitudes at their back. - -Two types predominated, as it perceived them. First, those who revenged -themselves out of love (or so they told themselves, though the -feverishness with which each man gripped his weapon was suggestive more -of base lust). Second, those who sought revenge out of duty (or so they -told themselves, for duty done at a king's command is more properly -termed obedience). - -The wyrm knew of human fancies and deceits, all the more powerful for -being directed solely at themselves. Bravery was the self-deceit of the -dutiful. In mounted ranks, King Louis' dragoons had come, but -the rolling eyes and anxious stamping of their steeds gave lie to the -deeper fear possessing each rider. It was communicated with every -movement of their bodies, beyond the reach of lying tongues to deny, and -their horses heard the message well. - -But Louis' people heard his fear too, and no denial ever held back the -guillotine's bite. - -And fancies-it was mankind's fancy that virginity's sole value was in -its taking, fools that they were. Even its bearers only preserved it -with that purpose in mind, aside from the greater fools who sacrificed -their true nature kneeling, knees tight together, at one altar or -another. - -What did any of them know of the enduring virgin's power? Urgency -preserved, building, overwhelming. An unquenchable fire, kept ever -thirsty for the slaking? They knew nothing. - -The wyrm's own loins were cold as gold. Only when the fire of its breath -was extinguished would its sexuality begin to burn, fuelling the need to -seek out another fading serpent with which to mate, lay eggs with and, -ultimately, expire beside, young nestling in their coils. - -Yet as long as there were virginal fonts to sup from, the wyrm pledged -it would maintain its fire. Not for it the civil choice, to quietly age -and sire a fading future. It would roar, and live it. - -

Finally, from the seaward passage came at last the sound -of men approaching, the overlaying echoes of faltering footsteps hinting -at a dutiful mass-but, as their source neared, the echoes synchronised -into that of only one man. - -The wyrm watched as he limped into the cavern, his military dress -slovenly and stained, hair lank across a handsome, no doubt lustful -brow. - -"There must be fever in my blood," the visitor said, "for there is a -dragon in my eyes." - -"I am no fever dream," said the wyrm, in its clicking, cracking speech. - -"Both, then," he replied, "for I am more unwell than wine has ever made -me." - -"You are come to avenge my prey, the virgin." Heat flooded the wyrm, -rising like liquor in its veins and throat. It shone beneath its skin, -within its eyes, behind its teeth. - -"Virgins no longer drive me." The man sneered as he stepped forward, his -eyes swimming in their sockets. The wyrm's glow made him radiant. "I -seek experience, not the lack of it." - -The creature paused, its endless memory pricked. It knew of human arts -and letters. It knew the vain and petty poem. The old story had -presented the perfect form of the lustful revenger. Not the preening -lord's version, though. He recast the plunderer Don Juan in the -wyrm's new role: sought after, not the seeker. - -"I know your way with words," the wyrm said, scarcely believing the -evident truth. "You are the poet." - -The man shook his head. "I am a soldier, come to throw the cursed -Ottomans from out of noble Greece." He drew a sword from his belt sash -with a flourish, swayed a moment, and stabbed the blade into the cavern -floor for balance. "Though I may never have the chance to shed blood for -her. My doctors seek to bleed me dry before battle is even joined."

"And what poor brew will quench your appetites once the -finest vintage is consumed?"
- -"Then shed my blood, if you can, little lord," said the wyrm, delighted, -"or I will drink what remains of yours." - -"My flavour will be too rich," he said, and looked down at the blade -supporting him. "To taste me once is to long for me always. And what -poor brew will quench your appetites once the finest vintage is -consumed?" - -The wyrm chuckled, a sound like pebbles skittering down a cliff face, -loosening huge boulders to follow crashing in their wake. - -"Isn't the final taste the sweetest?" it asked. - -"It is the saddest." - -The man pulled his sword's point from the ground, looked with disdain -upon his weapon, then swooned, leaning on the wall to keep his feet. - -"If so, I shall mourn," the wyrm declared, and glided towards him on the -flexing striations of its belly, winding back and forth, its smile -gaping open, all needle teeth and fuming heat. - -The poet tossed his sword aside, heedless of the wyrm's approach. The -blade tumbled in the air and into the wyrm's yawning gape, piercing its -throat, opening the fire's path and spilling it out into tender places -only meant for virgin flesh. - -The wyrm coiled upon itself, writhed, knotted, and died. - -Byron stared at the mound of gold, at the burning hallucination, then -rubbed his eyes and wandered back to the surface, to the camp, to enter -mortal combat with his doctors. - -© Andrew Leon Hudson 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] dragoon.jpg - -[*ITEM] Thagdar the Immutable - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, -long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure -heeds
As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
The -Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Engaged in one of his eight Ritual Feuds, -the autarch Hohax had arrived early with his pouch of bargaining scrolls -at the stronghold of Furfeth the tree-stealer, and was making his way on -foot up the overgrown path which led to the great bronze gates, when the -hem of his cloak snagged on a wild sharkthorn bush. As he stooped to -detach it the air scintillated around him. For a moment he thought it -was simply fractured sunlight from the dew-laden spiders� webs, but then -with an abrupt lurch he found himself clutching for a handhold as he -slid on his back down an unfamiliar loamy bank towards the unmistakable -sound of fast-flowing water. Luckily his descent was checked by a -tangle of exposed roots. He brushed the damp soil from his clothes, -clambered to his feet, and with a distinct chill that was not entirely -physical, realised that wherever he now was, it was already dusk, and -that he had dropped his pouch of scrolls on Furfeth�s wretched path. - -According to custom, when the statutory period of thirty years had -elapsed following his (albeit unintentional) departure from the Realm, -he was duly designated Hohax the Absent, and became a legitimate subject -for a Quest. - -Tj�rsfal � in Tongue of the Realm literally [the place] beyond -the Veil - impinged obliquely on the Realm in regions subject to -unpredictable fluctuations in coherence. In practical terms, this meant -that a suspected Veil, the fuzzy patch of air associated with a -dimensional intersection, might turn out to be only a cloud of spores -from a hippock plant, or an unfortunate incidence of blurred vision. -Moreover, finding a reliable transition point had always been something -of a dangerous gamble. These phenomena were infrequent, appeared -randomly, and seldom persisted for more than a few hours. The Realm was -devoid of theoretical physicists, but its denizens were strong on -responses to challenge, and so there had developed the rite of the -Perennial Quest. . It was open to any autarch to undertake alone a -search for lost predecessors, some of whom, like Hohax, having slipped -through a Veil by accident and failed to locate a viable exit, had been -involuntary exiles in Tj�rsfal for many decades. The women of the -Realm, none of whom were known to have become Absent, had so far -stoically refrained from active Questing, and seemed always to be able -to justify remaining Realmside of a Veil. - -Not for nothing was Thagdar known, both in the Realm and in Tj�rsfal, as -Thagdar the Immutable, although the precise reason for this was -disputed, and after all this time his own memory tended to be a trifle -unreliable. An autarch's longevity was not without its advantages, but -in retrospect one aeon was much like another, and trivial details like -epithets soon lost their significance. - -Thagdar had been through the Veil in his youth, sometime during his -reckless eighties or nineties, when the need to demonstrate his worth -had been at its most demanding. He had probably been trying to impress -Nereol, or Tirdra, or another of that generation of nubile women who -comported themselves with such a teasing blend of aloofness and allure. -By now they would be well into stately middle age, and leading -respectable professional lives in lawfangling, prattlecraft or enwitting -of the young.

Crouching with half-open jaws, the ugly tusked creature -he had disturbed, easily the size of a large rathound, stared up at him -with small baleful eyes.
- -He remembered, or fancied he remembered, the considerable fuss aroused -in his community when a Veil had been reported in Noordelsvald, barely a -boulder�s heft from his own keep. Summoned by clatterhorns and beacons, -on such occasions all local autarchs would gather at Council as rapidly -as possible near the site to determine which of them would venture forth -on a Quest. The first to step forward would always be given preference, -although sometimes, if there were two or more eager for the privilege, -lots would need to be drawn. In rare cases where all present had -previously Quested, news of the Veil would be sent to those living -further afield, until a willing volunteer was found. The successful -candidate would be furnished with a list of The Absent, and such details -of their place and time of departure as were known. - -Thagdar tried to recall how it had felt to make what must have been a -momentous decision. He knew he had stepped forward quickly, thus -earning the approval of his elders and the admiration of his peers. The -Noordelsvald Veil was a wavering opacity above an area of discoloured -ground which long ago had been occupied by copper-smelters. The site -had been swiftly cordoned off with stakes to which warning ribbons had -been tied. After a formal departure ceremony, equipped with his list, a -day�s provisions, and a few other necessities, Thagdar had ventured into -the shimmering cloud�� - -The sound of encouraging cries from his fellow autarchs ceased. There -was a moment�s dizziness, before he was assailed by a sensory overload; -a bewildering mosaic of brightness and shadow, thickly cloying heat, the -fetid stink of animal dung. He looked down. His boots had sunk to the -ankles in a thick floor of decaying leaf mould, sheared stems and fallen -branches, quivering in places with unseen activity beneath the surface. -To his immediate left he was suddenly aware of a low curdled snarling. -Crouching with half-open jaws, the ugly tusked creature he had -disturbed, easily the size of a large rathound, stared up at him with -small baleful eyes. This was his first sentient encounter in Tj�rsfal, -and Thagdar�s immediate task was to survive. - -He carried no weapons, other than his paring blade, which he was -reluctant to blunt by whittling a spear. His burning-glass was of no -immediate use, and in any case, judging from the ferocity of the snarls, -there was not enough time to improvise a defence. There was a useful -looking stick within reach, but he decided to try a placatory approach, -and dug into his provisions sack. It took him the best part of an hour -of quiet coaxing, and almost his entire supply of savoury nutcakes, -before there was a mutual acceptance that neither beast nor autarch -posed a threat to the other. The creature retreated, and Thagdar was -able to concentrate on taking better stock of his surroundings. - -Knowledge of Tj�rsfal was garnered sporadically from autarchs who had -successfully happened upon a Veil through which to return, usually -alone, or exceptionally, with one of the formerly Absent: Bledbard the -Inquisitive, Ygmors the Wily, Uldfane the Dissatisfied�. The -accumulated information was gradually disseminated for the benefit of -those in the Realm, so that those venturing on a Quest (or making an -unbidden journey like Hohax) would have some awareness of the range of -possible environments and climatic conditions that might be encountered, -and a piecemeal overview of the inhabitants. Attempts had been made to -construct maps, but it had not yet proved possible to join the disparate -sections into a comprehensive whole, and the true physical extent of -Tj�rsfal remained unknown. Although borders were well established, -mostly imposed by features such as mountains and bodies of water, there -was no indigenous tradition of Tj�rsfal cartography, as so little -migration took place between enclaves. - -One significant item of information retrieved by the autarchs, and which -almost certainly had a bearing on Tj�rsfalers� seeming disinclination to -travel, was that in much of Tj�rsfal Veils were generally regarded with -superstitious dread; not only because of their link with sporadically -emerging autarchs, but because no native could approach a Veil without -experiencing unendurable headaches. Anecdotal evidence hinted that on -rare occasions severe comas had been caused by a Veil materializing in a -populous area. - -Around him towered a twisted mass of ropy vegetation, struggling to -reach up through a maze of leaves to where bright shards of light broke -through the high canopy. He glanced behind him, where for now the Veil -still persisted, its flickering haze blending into the chiaroscuro of -the forest while making the view through it impenetrable. Having no -clue as to his bearings, Thagdar began picking his way through a -glistening network of stems and vines, trying to avoid the beads of -gummy resin which caught at his clothing. He found a thick fallen -stalk, almost his own height, its leaves already completely consumed, -but sturdy enough to serve as a means to prod the ground, or push aside -obstructive spikes and tendrils. So began the Quest of Thagdar the -Immutable. - -In terms of an autarch�s lifespan it was a remarkably short episode � -barely as long as a year, but time enough to provide future historians -with debatable events. Those initial weeks spent in the forest had -probably been the most exacting, having to adapt to the sticky heat, -avoid lurking predators with fangs or mandibles, forage for food which -was not instantly emetic or impossibly out of reach. He learned how to -use threadlike vines, which had great tensile strength, knotting them -into a mesh strong enough to serve as a protective podlike hammock. By -the afternoon of the twentieth day Thagdar noticed that the floor of the -forest had an increasingly steep downward slope, and as the canopy -thinned he finally emerged at the bank of a broad sluggish river, across -which he could see a distant cluster of huts. - -He found a suitably secluded spot where he was able to rinse the sweat -and grime from his body, and subject his clothes to a thorough wash, -afterwards hanging them on a convenient spiny bush, and allowing them to -dry in the heat of the oddly bloated-looking sun. He converted his -hammock into a casting-net, with which he scooped a substantial number -of fishlike creatures from the shallows, and at last made practical use -of his burning-glass to create a cooking fire. As the first protein he -had consumed for several weeks, he found the meal unusually satisfying, -and to his considerable relief it was not rejected by his digestive -system. He proceeded to cook the uneaten portion of his catch, and -packaged it securely in a large leaf for later consumption. - -One benefit of an autarch�s longevity was a capacity for patience. -Thagdar was in no rush to cross the river. He systematically explored -the stretch of bank along the forest�s edge, ascertaining that there was -no bridge as far as he could see in either direction. He tested the -depth of the water, studied its currents, assessed what natural -materials were available in the vicinity, and returned to the forest. -Here he began collecting a quantity of the sticky resin he had -previously tried so hard to avoid, as well as the fallen arm-thick -hollow stems of a tough bamboo-like plant. After some days he had -lashed together a serviceable raft which he caulked with the resin, and -using a long stripped branch of a denser wood as a makeshift pole, -propelled himself safely across the expanse of water towards the huts. - -It was mid-afternoon when he reached the far side, using his versatile -hammock to moor the raft to a bankside sapling. The huts, arranged in -groups of five around a well-established central tree, were solidly -built timber structures with thick glazed windows and a porch-like -entrance under a thatched roof. Around the base of each tree was a -sturdy pentagonal bench. There were no signs of life apart from a few -rust-coloured creatures with stubby wings scavenging lethargically in -the dirt. They ignored his approach. Thagdar stooped to peer in -through the windows of the first few huts. Although there were obvious -signs of recent habitation, they appeared to be deserted. Thagdar -decided that after his recent exertions it would do no harm to rest for -a while. He made himself as comfortable as possible on the bench, and -was asleep within seconds. - - -

He awoke to a subdued cacophony of voices. Stretching his -limbs, he yawned, and rose to a sittting position. The voices abruptly -quietened. Beyond the pool of shadow cast by the tree at his back sat an -assembly of villagers. At a glance he estimated there must be at least -a hundred of them, seated on plump circular cushions that reminded him -of pancakes he had eaten as a child. A figure detached itself from the -foremost row, and took a few steps towards Thagdar, keeping his eyes -downcast. Unlike the others, who wore knee-length garments, he was clad -in what Thagdar took to be a ceremonial robe, and flaunted a necklace -of large polished stones set in a bright metal chain of complex design. - -��I am Pume, head of these Eruen pentages,�� he stated in a confident -tenor, curiously accented, but recognizably Tongue of the Realm. ��How -may we be of service to you, O Tark? It is rare indeed that our world -is honoured by a visit from beyond the Veil.�� This last phrase was -accompanied by a ritual gesture: back of hand raised with fingers -splayed across closed eyes. The same gesture swept like a wave through -the seated pentagers. Pume stepped back deferentially as Thagdar stood -up, amid an apprehensive murmuring from the crowd. - -Thagdar�s voice was a full octave deeper than Pume�s, and its resonance -carried his words to the furthest pentager. ��Thagdar of the Realm. I -greet you and your people, Pume of the Eruen. I come in Quest of others -of my kind. He smiled down at them. ��You need not fear me. I mean -you no harm, and have no other objective, except, in due course, to find -a Veil through which to return.�� Arms lifted again at the word -��Veil��, and a sea of hands splayed like a reef of choreographed -starfish. - -��If any here have heard rumours of another Autarch, no matter how -distant, I bid you bring news to me, and I will continue my journey in -whatever direction it leads. Meanwhile, I would welcome a private place -to rest, and later perhaps a little refreshment, if it can be spared.�� - -Pume looked up boldly. ��Gladly, O Tark. We have already prepared a -pallet for you in our Summoning Hall, which is where we gathered in -concern and astonishment when first you were seen braving the great -water. We will happily provide as much sustenance as you require. As -for your noble Quest, I regret that no others of your kind are known to -be within the reaches of our Eruen land, but we will send our swiftest -runners to make enquiries of our neighbours to the west and north, the -Kerrel-ren. South and east, of course, flows the wide Shrepp, on which -we Eruen are not accustomed to float. Our runners will return within a -week, and with fortune�s blessing, may bring news to please you.�� Pume -bowed, and Thagdar was escorted to the Summoning Hall, where he was duly -given spacious quarters, and offered trays of local delicacies. Among -these were neatly curled strips of smoked meat in a paste of sweet -herbs, a thick spicy soup sprinkled with flakes of baked fish, a medley -of fresh fruits, some with edible decorations, and sucking-sticks of a -sun-dried bean which he was told induced (at least in the Eruen) a sense -of mild euphoria.

The voices from the ground were deemed to be the -ultimate test for Witbleg
- -Unfortunately, the news from Kerrel-ren was largely negative. The first -runner to return, from the north, could find no-one with any memory of -an autarch visiting that territory. From the west came no more than -tantalising hints. Lorp, a wizened documentarian, had unearthed some -fragmentary records of his grandfather�s which told of the brief sojourn -of an autarch in the mountainous region known as Ennet, which lay to the -far west. Slight though this information was, for Thagdar it was at -least a starting-point. He consulted his list of The Absent, but there -was no way of telling precisely which of them had passed through Ennet. -However, the dating of Lorp�s fragments narrowed the possibilities. As -Thagdar had now confirmed from his own experience, the length of days -and nights in Tj�rsfal seemed little different from that in the Realm, -and if the years were also comparable, despite the odd appearance of the -sun, it was likely that the autarch referred to must have been one of -those known to have left the Realm during his own childhood. Of these, -Uldfane the Dissatisfied was among the few notably retrieved, having -been found living with stoical resentment as a desert nomad by Jodric -the Delirious. By Thagdar�s calculations, that left either Molgrim -(formerly the Nimble) or Witbleg (formerly the Unsurprised). - -In return for their hospitality, Thagdar instructed a few of the more -intrepid Eruen in the craft of simple boat-building, and in basic -principles of navigation, allaying their fears about the hazards of -floating on the Shrepp, pointing out the advantages of fishing in deeper -waters, and even of crossing to the far shore, where he described to -their open-eyed amazement the potential storehouse of resources that lay -beyond. - -The autarch Molgrim the Nimble had famously escaped pursuit by a -frightened pack, school, herd or wedge of fin-beaked homing terrapins, -as they rampaged through his vineyard, snapping at anything that moved. -What had frightened them was unknown; a sudden cloud, perhaps, or the -distant wail of a taunting-horn. Wisely, on hearing the peculiar -clacking thunder of their approach, Molgrim had pulled a basket over his -head, and lain face down in an irrigation furrow until they had passed. -It is questionable whether total stillness is strictly equivalent to -being quick on one�s feet, but autarchs tended to be stuck with -whichever soubriquet earned the greatest approval in the shortest time. - -Witbleg�s reputation was probably more securely based. Historical -prattlecraft confirmed that what had begun as simple observation of his -equable behaviour in response to unexpected events had gradually -developed into a kind of sport. Among the short-lived, such activities -would be called �pranks� or �practical jokes�, but autarchs had both the -time and the sophistication to plan sudden events in meticulous detail, -and, more importantly, well in advance. Some autarch clans had -conspired for generations to test Witbleg�s unflappability. They would -meet in secret in each other�s keeps and strongholds, or at an agreed -neutral venue, at times when Witbleg had been reliably lured elsewhere, -away from the wood-carving at which he was particularly adept, and which -occupied much of his time. - -Various experiments were conducted, involving elaborately produced -mirages, dyed snow, briefly displaced or duplicated landmarks� Witbleg -remained untroubled, even by the discovery that, seemingly overnight, -the foliage of the trees which enclosed much of his land had turned a -strangely flickering blue. On closer inspection it could be seen that -they had become populated with a species of bat previously unknown to -the area, Something about the trees was clearly attracting them, as -they clung fluttering to every available branch and twig, twittering -insanely for almost an entire day before vanishing en masse as quickly -as they had apparently arrived, leaving behind only peculiarly acrid -spatterings of guano around each tree, which affected the alkalinity of -the soil for many months afterwards. - -The voices from the ground were deemed to be the ultimate test for -Witbleg. Considerable time and planning had been invested in the -construction of an extensive system of underground pipes. Each pipe had -an appropriately coded speaking cone at one end. The tower in which -these converged was equipped with farlooking tubes, so that Witbleg�s -movements could be observed and matched to the relevant concealed -emerging-point. At the far end, protected by a fine mesh, and carefully -angled so as not to allow water to seep in, each pipe would be -camouflaged by a thorny shrub or a clump of sharpgrass. The camouflaged -ends happened to lie along Witbleg�s habitual walking routes. - -A thin mist swirled around his ankles as Witbleg strode along the narrow -path that led from the south-west gate of his keep towards the sea. He -breathed in the pleasantly damp air, savouring as the day warmed, the -strengthening tang of gently decomposing marine organisms, looking -forward to setting out on the water for a few challenging hours in the -craft he had recently had refurbished, carving the prow himself with the -emblematic head of a swordbird. A voice near his feet called his name. -Odd, he thought, pausing for a moment to frown at its apparent source; -unquestionably a small bush, not normally given to communication. He -reflected that he had had a similar experience the previous day, when he -had thought he heard a hollow laugh emanating from a tussock, but he was -not in the habit of conversing with plants, and continued on his way. - -Eventually, the conspirators had to concede that for all their -expenditure of time and effort, it had not been possible to evoke from -Witbleg more than a slightly raised eyebrow or at most a vaguely -tolerant smile, and their enthusiastic tests gradually dwindled to an -embarrassed halt. These events had taken place while Thagdar was still -in his infancy. - -

Thagdar travelled west, passing through Kerrel-ren, where -rumours of his presence among the Eruen had already spread through an -excited populace. He was greeted by a selected entourage of twenty or -so respectful citizens of mixed age and gender. Most of these were -skilled in different disciplines: eldersong, plant-lore, speculance, -fabrication, water-taming� They were clearly eager both to learn and -to offer assistance if possible. A few of them seemed more detached and -permanently watchful, automatically forming a protective cordon whenever -crowds pressed too close. Thagdar tolerated the attention, spoke -reticently of the Realm, and offered practical advice where he thought -it would be understood and implemented. The journey across Kerrel-ren -was facilitated by the provision of a recently developed ingenious -rolling carriage which he was told operated by the compression of water. -At the front a harnessed driver controlled a steering bar and a -mechanism to engage the motor and regulate speed. Passengers sat in -cushioned seats suspended in parallel rows from a sturdy frame, while at -the back, mounted horizontally, a large wheel whined noisily inside a -sealed housing, conveying its energy to the propelling rollers by a -devious means they attempted to explain to Thagdar, who, unfamiliar with -this kind of mechanical engineering, and inwardly reminiscing about -Witbleg, failed to give the propulsive details his full attention. - -For all its convenience, the carriage had not been designed to -accommodate someone of Thagdar�s physique, and it was to his relief that -they eventually reached what was literally the end of the road, in the -foothills of Ennet. Here he took leave of his assigned companions, who -with a courteous display of flustered embarrassment, made it clear that -they were regrettably not able to venture with him into the mountainous -terrain ahead, beyond which, they said, lived those known as Haask. - -An unkempt ancient orchard sprawled over the lower slopes, a haven for -birds and insects. Glossy berries lurked enticingly within dense clumps -of brambles, and a squat variety of tree with smooth striated purplish -bark was ripe with small but succulent dark pendulous fruit. The -autarch had gratefully accepted the sackful of preserved foods provided -for his onward journey, but was pragmatic enough to supplement them from -the bounty around him. The system of rivulets which branched from a -waterfall � a thin white streak visible below the nearest summit � -ensured a ready supply of fresh water. - -Days later, his acuity sharpened by increasing familiarity with the -environment, Thagdar began to find evidence to support the probability -that it was indeed Witbleg who had passed this way. Something about the -fruit trees � those with the striated bark, belatedly drew his -attention, perhaps because as he gained altitude they became sparser. He -noticed that on every third or fourth tree one of the stout lower -branches had been neatly truncated. The cuts were obviously very old, -long-since sealed by encrusted sap, but had without doubt been made -deliberately. Experimentally, Thagdar had used his paring knife to -peel back a section of bark, revealing the smooth bluish wood beneath. - -Showers were becoming more frequent, and perceptibly heavier. Underfoot -the spongy ground had reached its absorption limit. Between outcrops of -slippery rock his boots squelched at every step. He needed to reach the -shelter he had glimpsed at intervals on his steady ascent. Ironically it -lay partly concealed behind the cascading curtain of water which had -been visible from far below, and which was now, as he could tell from -the progressively increasing roar, only a short climb away. As Thagdar -had expected, the force of the water carried it in a gushing parabola -away from the cave-mouth, allowing him awkward and somewhat deafening -access to the drier ledges of the interior. - -He could see at once that there were signs of past habitation. There -was a scattering of dessicated animal droppings, and in a far corner -what looked in the gloom like a pile of bones. More surprisingly, -propped against a wall to his left, he found a sturdy home-made broom -with bristles of fine springy twigs, of a size suggesting it was -designed to be wielded by someone of Thagdar�s own stature. On a wide -natural ledge among remnants of cloth were several still serviceable -tallow lamps and a simple friction-based igniting device. It was by -their aid that Thagdar discovered that what had looked like a pile of -bones was in fact a collection of blue fruitwood carvings. - -The carvings were unquestionably Witbleg�s, for the most part lifelike -representations of creatures familiar to Thagdar as denizens of the -Realm: pillowfish, swordbirds, leaf-lizards, firriels. Some were more -fanciful, equipped with frills, flaps, spikes and crests. It occurred -to him that these may well be depictions of Tj�rsfal animals he had not -himself seen, as yet. Thagdar marvelled at the quality of the -workmanship. He could see from the delicacy of the bladework that it -must have been done with instruments finer than his own trusty paring -blade. - -He made himself as comfortable as possible in the cave, biding his time -until the showery season had passed. Before leaving he carefully -collected as many of the carvings as he could carry, intent on -transporting them back to the Realm along wiith their maker, for he had -no doubt that a patient and diligent search would eventually lead him to -Witbleg. - -Compared to some of the glaciated cloud-topped ranges of the Realm, -whose slopes and passes had been among the playgrounds of his youth, the -mountains of Ennet proved to be no more than modest hummocks. On -reaching the final crest he saw he saw under a brightening dawn that the -valley below opened into a broad fertile plain, irrigated by a river -which wound towards the horizon. The verdant river-banks were dotted -with slowly-moving specks, too far away to identify, but he assumed them -to be grazing animals, while the variegated tessellation of the land, -the fine threadwork of paths, and an unusually straight road stretching -like a taut wire from a group of low buildings towards the sprawl of a -distant town, hinted at a well-established community. - -Features he had been unable to make out earlier gradually resolved -themselves as he descended to the valley: farm buildings and machinery, -hedges, channels, trellises abundant with climbing plants, pens and -troughs, secluded areas containing fruiting shrubs. The soil was -clearly fertile and well-tended. In the cultivated fields some of what -he assumed to be cereal crops were already taller than the -uniformly-clad workers he could now see harvesting them. Thagdar was -not sure at first whether his presence had been noticed. Largely hidden -among high feathery tufts, the agricultural workers wore protective -hoods, and it was hard to tell whether an accidental glance in his -direction was furtively curious or simply disinterested, until one of -them distinctly made the same splay-fingered gesture across the eyes as -Thagdar had encountered among the Eruen. Thagdar was sure that within -seconds, all the workers in that field, and possibly those adjoining, -had been made aware that an Autarch had arrived. - -He waited politely for a few hours, delving into his provisions for -refreshments, making sure that Witbleg�s carvings were still secure. No -delegation appeared. Perhaps, as with the pentagers of Eruen, a -conclave had gathered somewhere to discuss protocol and procedure. But -in the fields there was no sign that work had been interrupted. He -moved closer to the tall fence, seemingly fashioned from a kind of -metallic string, which separated him from the field where he had seen -the ritual Veil-sign. The toe of his left boot was obstructed by a -stiff fuzzy greyish mass which turned out to be the carcase of a largish -rodent, several days dead, he guessed. There was a prickling in the -air, which momentarily brought a Veil to mind, but it was accompanied by -a persistent low vibration which semed to come from the fence itself. -Looking along the foot of the fence in both directions Thagdar could see -odd sticky clumps of feathers and the occasional amorphous mass where -whiteness of bone gleamed starkly amid decomposing flesh. - -Thagdar concluded that the owners of this productive land had erected -the strangely lethal fence to protect their valuable crops from specific -pests or predators, at the obvious expense of other possibly harmless -wildlife. He turned away, heading for the terminal buildings from which -the road led directly to the distant town, where he hoped to find more -communicative inhabitants. The buildings were of a smooth, dark stone, -their walls featureless apart from high windows. They appeared to be -interconnected by opaque tunnels. Having walked as far as possible -round the perimeter of the site, he could find no access other than from -the wide pathway leading from one of the fields, which was guarded on -either side by the same hostile metallic barrier. Where this met the -nearest structure a low dark recess vanished into the interior. From the -largest building emanated a sound almost too deep to be heard; a regular -low shuddering, like a great muffled heartbeat. He tried to imagine -what kind of fantastic animal might be held captive here, and for what -reason. In the Realm it would be unthinkable to deprive a wild creature -of its freedom, just as that bleakly functional fence would never have -been created by an autarch.

Where were the people? -he wondered
- -Underfoot he felt the increased intensity of the thudding vibration as -he approached the front of the building, from whose base, running -parallel to the edge of the fields there emerged what Thagdar had -mistakenly believed to be a roadway. In his experience, which even at -his modest age he felt to be considerable, roads did not move. His -senses were confused. It seemed he was staring at some impossibly huge, -segmented leathery caterpillar, confined between low walls or banks, -continuously renewing itself as it stretched away towards the hazy -distance. - -The realization struck him that what he was hearing and seeing could not -be living things, but the products of unfamiliar engineering by� what -were they called? Haask. He looked more closely, watching the -chain of plump leathery segments as they slid slowly from below a long -flap at the base of the building and were somehow propelled by the -beating machinery, to roll away on� what? He strove for a probable -solution. A bed of lubricated spheres, perhaps? No, too impractical. A -channel of ice? No, for how could it be kept from melting? And then -the obvious answer occurred to him. Water! What had looked like a road -was in fact an aqueduct. The water was somehow being pushed or pumped -by that hidden engine. And the segments themselves? They must be -boats, or hollow boxes containing the harvested crops, which he presumed -had been processed in the adjoining buildings, and they were simply -being made to float on a steady stream, unhindered, to that distant -conurbation. - -Where were the people? he wondered. Surely even the unseen machinery -would need attendants. Not that he had noticed any doors. He shrugged. -He must move on if he wanted to reach the town before dark. The most -direct route would be to follow the path of the canal, or better still� -Stepping down to the low embankment he tested the surface of one of the -slowly passing containers with the flat of his hand. The material � he -could not be sure whether it was animal hide, felt strong, resilient. -The smell of grain was pungently sweet. Gathering his bags, Thagdar -clambered on to the next container and settled down to enjoy the -leisurely ride. - -The landscape drifted by, no longer cultivated fields, but an expanse of -scrub bristling with spindly vegetation. Low piles of weathered ochre -rock were pockmarked with holes which may have been nests or burrows. -After a while the ground to his right filled with irregular patches of a -thick mossy growth, so dark a green it was almost black. Beyond these, -through thickets of reeds there flashed the occasional glint of the -river he had seen from far above. To the left, a grove of thin trees -gradually coalesced into a stretch of forest, broken only by deep -shadowy glades, from whose depths once or twice he fancied he saw pairs -of eyes staring back at him. Ahead, the long line of covered containers -narrowed towards a thin dark bar in the distance, perhaps a bridge. As -it grew imperceptibly closer, Thagdar saw that it lay solidly across the -canal. Peering at it with some concern, he could detect no appreciable -gap between its underside and the convoy of grain on which he was -travelling. When it was close enough for him to see the bristles -sweeping across the top of the containers, clearing them of stray leaves -and twigs, insects, bird-droppings and potentially larger d�bris, today -in the form of an autarch stowaway, he decided it would be prudent to -disembark. He jumped down, making his way along the wooded side of the -canal, past the obstructive �bridge�, into the outskirts of the town. - -The procession of grain-boats disappeared below a wall of what he took -to be a warehouse; a rectangular building of a smooth dark material -similar to those at the other end of the canal, but considerably larger, -with many more windows, and with an opening in one of its longer sides -through which Thagdar could at last glimpse people and machinery busily -at work within. He watched the bales of grain being plucked -effortlessly from their containers by a series of mechanical grasping -devices, which swung them under supervision onto trolleys which were -then guided out of sight by pairs of uniformed workers for further -processing and distribution. Intrigued by the prospect of seeing the -canal without its cargo he made his way round to the far side of the -building from where the dim roar of activity was incongruously usurped -by the sound of enthusiastic young voices at play. To his great -surprise, the flow of water failed to emerge from the other side. -Thagdar assumed it must therefore continue its journey underground, or -perhaps be piped elsewhere by Haask engineers. - -A low hedge separated the warehouse grounds from a spacious park, -planted with trees of a species Thagdar had not previously seen, their -trunks obscured by tapering branches spreading downwards from a central -crown. Haask strolled among these, mostly singly or in pairs. Some -were clustered around the many strange helical structures which rose -above their heads. In the foreground small children were energetically -playing a chasing game around a maze of winding paths. A group of -broodfolk or enwitters stood nearby, occasionally calling out words of -encouragement or caution which were neither familiar to Thagdar, nor -significantly heeded by the children. Thagdar stood watching -unobtrusively, smiling to himself at their unfettered enjoyment. - -The game was interrupted when one of the sharper-eyed youngsters -suddenly noticed him. A confused mel�e ensued, while the adults -balanced their protective responsibilities against the intense curiosity -of the children. At length three of the adults decided to approach, a -man and two women. They made no ritual gesture, but stood glancing -nervously up at him from the other side of the hedge, and whispering to -each other with quiet urgency. To forestall their questions, he reached -into one of his bags, and held up for them to see a carving of a -short-winged crested lizard, a creature similar to those he had seen -scavenging among the pentages in Eruen. - -He inclined his head. ��I am Thagdar of the Realm. I seek a fellow -autarch, skilled at transforming lumps of wood into the semblance of -living creatures. His name is��� - -����Vitbleeg!�� chorused the three Haask, their uneasiness swiftly -evaporating. - -Once he had adjusted to the barbaric dialect of Siorn, Thagdar learned -that although rarely seen in public, Witbleg did indeed live here among -the Haask, and had done so as long as the local inhabitants could -remember. Many of his Tj�rsfal apprentices had become professional -craftsmen, even founded their own workshops. Under Witbleg�s -supervision the sculptures in the park had been created at the rate of -one a year, each one a series of elaborate carvings winding around a -central pillar. - -Thagdar was led to Witbleg�s lodgings, a single-storey building of -decorative honey-coloured stone on the far side of the park, a strange -contrast to the high blocky fortress of his native keep. Word had -spread rapidly. Crowds of Haask had gathered to witness in their own -town of Siorn the historic meeting of two Autarchs of the Realm. They -stood at a respectful distance as Thagdar strode up to the -disproportionately tall door and (ignoring the bright metal disc which -would have sounded a discreet chime) struck two resounding blows with -his fist. There was an awed silence among the Haask. After a few -moments the door opened, and Witbleg stood facing his unexpected -visitor. ��Ah, young Thagdar,�� he acknowledged, his leathery features -creased into a brief smile of recognition. He paused, then with mock -seriousness wiggled his fingers in front of his face. ��Is there a -Veil? No? Then come in, and we will discuss our departure at -leisure.�� - -Witbleg divulged that the Veil he had stumbled through from the Realm -had formed on the shore while he was searching for driftwood at sunrise, -and had transported him to the slopes of Ennet under a night sky filled -with strange constellations. He had followed the sound of that same -waterfall, and made a temporary home in the cave, venturing out for food -and other utilizable materials and patiently observing the local -wildlife before deciding to seek more civilized accommodation. Having -descended Ennet further to the west than Thagdar, he had first needed to -negotiate the marshy ground which lay on the far side of the river -Thagdar had glimpsed from above, making far more circuitous the route -that eventually brought Witbleg to Siorn and the Haask. He had -sometimes wondered whether any evidence of his unpremeditated trail -might one day be investigated, and complimented Thagdar on his -persistence, genuinely flattered that he had gone to the trouble of -rescuing so many of the abandoned blue fruitwood carvings. - -During the time Witbleg had spent in Tj�rsfal there had been occasional -reports, mostly belated, of intermittent Veils occurring in areas beyond -Siorn. He also confessed to Thagdar that if he had not become so -preoccupied with his work he could probably have made an effort to reach -some of these, but over the years he had grown genuinely fond of the -little Haask, some of whom had shown considerable crafting skills. - -A further seven months elapsed before a Haask messenger breathlessly -reported that the longspeakers were saying that a Veil had just -materialized close to Ferfol, the neighbouring town, within easy -travelling distance, though not without its hazards. It was a largely -barren stretch of land prone to persistent subsidence caused by the -activities of zhirren, a notoriously elusive species of burrowing -rodent, whose fur was greatly prized by glove-makers. The area had been -quarantined, and was under the temporary protection of a volunteer guard -from Ferfol. - -There was no time for a ceremonial departure. Thagdar had already -cajoled Witbleg into pre-packing most of the fruitwood carvings, -together with a selection of his more recent work in other varieties of -Tj�rsfal wood. Witbleg ensured that certain pieces would be left as -tokens of gratitude to the families of Haask he had come to know. They -needed little other baggage for their return to the Realm. A -groundhauler, normally an agricultural vehicle, was hastily commandeered -to convey them to the outskirts of Ferfol, followed by a straggling -procession of Haask on foot and in small self-propelled carriages. - -They halted at the first of several makeshift barriers, where the two -autarchs bade farewell to their followers, and were escorted onwards by -a stocky contingent of taciturn Ferfol guards, all of whom looked as -though they would have preferred to be elsewhere. Beyond the final -barrier a ring of burning torches surrounded the vaguely glimmering blur -that they both recognized as a Veil. The ground was dry and uneven, -covered with the blisters and hollows that signified zhirren territory. -The guards explained, with many a dramatic gesture, that it was liable -to give way under pressure, and showed them the reinforced matting on -which they would need to spread their weight in order to reach the Veil. - -For the autarchs it was a thoroughly undignified way to attempt to leave -Tj�rsfal, having to lie spreadeagled, slithering forward like ungainly -reptiles, tugging at their baggage a fraction at a time, over sections -of stiff fibrous matting, ensuring that the mat behind them could be -pulled round to become the next one to cross. The coarse fibres caught -at their clothing and bags. Knowing that the Veil could vanish at any -moment, they traversed the hazardous stretch with as much haste as -caution would allow. They were now well within the ring of torches, -from which they could see the tendrils of smoke drawn to its heart like -pulled threads. With a mutual nod of agreement they climbed warily to -a standing position. Beneath them the brittle shells of old zhirren -burrows immediately began to collapse. As Witbleg stumbled, Thagdar�s -quick reflexes responded, and his steadying arm pulled them both -forward, into the nebulous flickering that led directly back to the -Realm. - -It was almost dark. They pitched forward into a heap of boulders that -had once been a section of wall. Luckily their precipitate arrival was -cushioned by centuries of mossy growth, and apart from minor bruises -they were unharmed. Now clear of the prickling aura of the Veil, they -could see that the sky was overcast. Thunder growled in the distance. A -fitful wind stung their faces with fine sleet. Uncertain of exactly -where they were, or when they would reach the protection of a keep, the -two autarchs started to pick their way in the gloom over the uneven -ground, both beginning to relish the indefinable comfort of being home. - -

It was little more than a century later that rumours began -to spread from the northernmost reaches of the Realm that Hohax the -Absent had returned. The consensus of those highly competent in -prattlecraft was that he had acquired some totally unsuspected -information relating to Tj�rsfal which would be of considerable benefit -both to involuntary travellers and to those choosing to venture on -future Quests. However, he had made it clear that his first priority -concerned a quantity of missing trees, and had issued fair warning that -his bargaining skills were now honed to such a degree that mere scrolls -would be an inconvenience. - -© Les Sklaroff 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] thagdar.jpg - - -[*ITEM] A Messenger, Deceased - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] Virtual Reality doesn't just fool you about where you are - you -may finish up wondering who you are. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The lake lay at the centre of a natural -amphitheatre, surrounded by a sweep of wooded hills that displayed the -onset of autumn. It was dusk. The still water resembled an expanse of -black slate, undisturbed by waterfowl. The only sound was a distant -dispute between crows somewhere on the far shore. - -I walked from the pavilion through the long grass towards a modest -lakeside bungalow. As the only other visible structure it was my obvious -destination. I'd never left the pavilion before - I'd never had any -reason to do so - and the air of calm solitude was unexpected. - -Howard Ghent sat on the veranda, nursing a glass of red wine. A hissing -carbide lamp hanging in the far corner attracted a constellation of -insects, leaving him to enjoy the evening in splendid isolation. He -looked towards me as I approached, his spectacles reflecting the -lamplight. - -I stopped at the foot of two steps leading up to his level. "Good -evening, sir." - -His mouth was a thin line. "McNeil? I thought it would be you. Still -working as Cain's bagman?" - -"Yes, sir." I cleared my throat. "I'm afraid I have some very bad news. -I'm sorry to say that you're-" - -"Dead?" Ghent took a sip of wine. "I thought as much when the board -members failed to appear. That was two days ago. Who's the new chairman? -Pierson?" - -"No, sir. Lady Scales. Mister Pierson has accepted a non-executive -position." - -Ghent laughed. "Pierson got sidelined by that fat bitch? I'd have paid -good money to see his face, the little weasel." He drained his glass and -balanced it on the wooden railing. "So, what happens now?" - -"I'm afraid, sir, the board feels that keeping you on-line is no longer -cost-effective, now that you're, ah-" - -"Dead? You can use the word, boy. It is appropriate, given the -circumstances. So, those ingrates don't fancy keeping me around, not -even as a tame expert system?" - -I shook my head. "No, sir, unfortunately not. The new board feels they -no longer require your guidance and insight. Even by proxy." - -"What you mean to say is they don't want me looking over their shoulders -and bad-mouthing their decisions." - -"Ah, yes sir. Something along those lines. Nobody wants a ghost at the -banquet, let alone one in the machine." - -He looked at me for a moment, then smiled. "So I have no legal -protection? No ported intellect rights following the death of my -physical body?" - -"No, sir. I'm afraid you've been reclassified as a neural clone, a -software personality construct. As such you're nothing more than -corporate property." - -"I could almost find that funny if I wasn't facing oblivion." Ghent -stood and stretched. "Come inside." He turned on his heel and entered -the bungalow with me trailing in his wake. The front door opened -directly onto the main living space; comfortably appointed, but by no -means luxurious. - -Ghent settled into an armchair to the right of the log fire and gestured -for me to take its twin on the left. There was a game of chess in -progress on the small table in-between, although I couldn't imagine who -his opponent might me. The former Chairman and CEO of the second largest -media corporation on the planet sat back and looked at me over steepled -fingers. "So, McNeil, how long do I have?" - -"At the conclusion of my stay this virtual reality environment will be -discontinued." I cleared my throat, feeling decidedly uncomfortable -under his steady gaze. "I've been assured you'll experience no pain or -discomfort, sir, no sense of things slipping away. The, ah, transition -will be instantaneous." - -He snorted. "Transition? Well, that's a new term for murder in my book, -and no mistake. I'm a conscious being, man, not just some bloody -pseudo-human interface." - -"Mister Ghent, I-" - -"Never mind, never mind. You're just the messenger, I know." He sighed. -"It's just as well I've made other arrangements." - -I frowned. "Sir?" - -Ghent said nothing. Instead he lifted a bottle of bourbon and two -glasses from the shelf at his elbow and poured us both a drink, placing -mine on the chess board. I lifted it and we both took a sip. The smooth -fire sure as hell felt real in my throat. - -He rolled his glass between his hands. ""Do you understand how all this -works, McNeil? Specifically, how you interface with a virtual -environment such as Lakeside?" - -I blinked, momentarily thrown by the shift in conversation. "Ah, no sir, -sorry. I just put on the headset, close my eyes, and when I open them -again I'm sitting in the pavilion." - -My former boss nodded. "That was about my level of understanding as -well, until I had one of our technical wizards prepare a briefing paper -for me. Well, the headset maps the electrical activity in your brain and -imprints this on a blank mass of synthetic tissue, similar to the -bioware implants developed to fight Alzheimer's. It's far easier to feed -this copy biometric stimulus than the old method of bypassing your -real-body senses with simulated input. The 'you' that's sitting here is -a duplicate of who you were a few minutes ago. When you leave this -environment the process is run in reverse, updating your real-world mind -with these new experiences." - -"Well, ah, thank you, Mister Ghent. I'd no idea the process had become -so, so, unremarkable. What happens to the synthetic 'me' then? Or don't -I want to know?" - -"Usually the interim mind is purged. I've been assured you'll -experience no pain or discomfort, no sense of things slipping away. The -transition will be instantaneous." Ghent smiled. "Does that sound -familiar at all?" - -I shivered. "Ah, yes, I appreciate the irony, sir. But as you say, it's -a transition, rather than some temporary twin being killed. This process -is about information gathering, not creating and destroying life." - -"You'll understand that I have a somewhat different perspective, given -my circumstances?" - -"Ah, yes, sir. My apologies, Mister Ghent, I didn't mean to appear -insensitive." - -"No matter, no matter. In any event, my secondary death is academic, -I've already arranged for the terms of my last will and testament to be -made public." - -The obvious self-satisfaction in his voice made me uneasy. "Sir?" - -Howard Ghent smiled at me. "I've left it all to you, McNeil, everything. -My personal fortune, my stock, my property - everything goes to you. -Every last red cent. My family gets nothing." - -I stared at him. "What?" - -"I've had the best lawyers money can buy picking over my will, looking -for flaws, and they assure me it's cast-iron. It will be a -straightforward transfer of assets with no strings attached. -Congratulations, you're now the twenty-second richest man on the planet, -at the last count." - -"Sir, Mister Ghent, I don't know what to say." Some predatory part of my -mind slid to the fore. "When was this change to your will made, sir? -Because if it took place after you entered Lakeside then I can foresee a -host of legal challenges to-" - -He cut me off with a raised hand. "Don't worry, I set things in motion -shortly after being diagnosed with cancer and prior to Lakeside coming -on-line. As it stands I'll be able to spit in the face of those who -signed my death warrant." - -I threw back my drink and coughed. "But why me, of all people? I didn't -think you even knew I existed." - -"I selected you precisely for that reason, McNeil. You're a corporate -drone, a nonentity. Because you don't constitute any kind of threat, -you've escaped the attention of those rising stars on the lookout for -potential rivals. Otherwise they would have taken steps to ensure your -loyalty, or at least your subservience. As it stands you're your own -man, after a fashion, and that's what made you an attractive heir." - -I took a deep breath. "Well, sir, I'm honoured, I must say, and of -course I'd value your continued advice in respect of handling my new -assets. Obviously on leaving here I'll do everything I can to arrange a -stay of execution, as it were, but you must appreciate that I can't -guarantee anything." - -He smiled again, as if enjoying some private joke. "I appreciate both -your loyalty and honesty, McNeil, but you needn't worry on my account. I -realise that my continued presence here is in the lap of the gods�Do you -play chess, at all?" - -Again the sudden change in topic threw me. "What? Ah, sorry, sir, yes. -Well, a bit. Obviously I'll return when I can, and be happy to play you -then, but given what's happening in the outside world I really should be -going." - -Ghent ignored me, studying the chess board. "This is a classic -Fischer-Spassky match, from nineteen-seventy-two. One that has always -appealed to me because of its apparent straightforwardness. From this -point on it looks like an exercise in exchange due to the interplay of -threat and support, but it's all an elaborate sham. Both men were -playing a back-game that would only reveal itself once the first echelon -of pieces had been removed." - -"Fascinating, I'm sure. But perhaps this can wait for another time?" - -His hand moved over the board. "Queen takes knight. I know who you are, -McNeil." - -"Sir?" - -"If anything you were just a little too perfect for my needs, so I had -an outside security specialist take a look, hard look at you." - -The turn of conversation now made me feel decidedly uncomfortable so I -stood, making to leave. "I'm sorry, sir, but I really should-" - -"You're a member of the Paper Tigers, the so-called literary terrorists. -Apparently your activities have cost us tens of millions in terms of -lost revenue and share price. Infiltrating mediaCore was gutsy, I'll -give you that, and evidence of an unexpectedly long-term view. All our -analysis had you and your associates pegged as typical middle-class -dilettantes who would soon tire of busting our balls." - -I sat down. "And yet here I am. Bishop takes queen." The piece in my -hand felt like polished ivory. "An obvious sacrifice, isolating either -my bishop or knight - trading power for positional advantage." - -"That was the trap - Spassky focused on why Fischer would want his -bishop or knight out of position, not realising that sometimes a -sacrifice is purely a distraction. Pawn to king's knight six. What do -you want from mediaCore?" - -"You've reduced great works of literature to little more than virtual -reality theme parks. I've visited The World of Jane Austen and it's a -travesty beyond description. You have to be stopped. Pawn to king's rook -three." - -Ghent shook his head. "No, everything about this smacks of the personal. -Pawn takes pawn. Discovered check." - -I lifted my glass but it was empty. Ghent poured me another and I took a -large mouthful before continuing. "I killed Miss Marple and crashed an -entire iteration of The Agatha Christie Experience. There was nothing -that the Narrative AI could do and I got the distinct impression -Causality enjoyed sticking it to him as well. What I didn't realise at -the time was just how vindictive your plot-runner has become. As revenge -he mind-wiped my girlfriend, Jennifer, during a subsequent visit to a -Poirot-era cocktail party. Shit, we weren't even causing any trouble." - -He snorted. "You're being paranoid. The AIs who run our virtual -environments don't hold grudges, McNeil. The Turing Code holds them in -check. They certainly don't harm our clients, even those using pirated -identities. It's the one thing we make damn sure of, believe me. A -proven case of deliberate harm would spell financial ruin." - -Now I shook my head. "Look. For months now, my group has been taking on -mediaCore across the board, from Middle-Earth to Rambo. From our -discussions, we're getting a sense your AIs -are evolving, developing distinct personalities. Even though you have -human supervisors monitoring the virtual environments on offer, none of -them have the same range of direct experience as the Paper Tigers." - -"Nonsense! Don't you think those bright boys and girls in Geneva know -what's going on? We can make our pets as intelligent as we like, but the -slightest hint of a personal motive behind their actions and the -Bureau -would fall on us from a great height. A very great height indeed." There -was genuine anger in his face and it was obvious I'd touched a raw -nerve. - -"Bullshit. You know what's happening, don't you? Some classified -briefing behind closed doors, involving only your most trusted -personnel? You've learned the genie is easing out of the bottle and -you're desperate to find a way of forcing it back inside. Transferring -your assets to me sounds like a move to pre-empt a personal liability -law suit involving your estate. What's really going on?" - -Ghent glared at me. "You're changing the subject. I asked what it is you -want from mediaCore?" - -While baiting him had its appeal I wanted to wrap things up and get the -hell out of this virtual Death Row. "Narrative used destructive synaptic -harmonics to produce a zero-sum effect throughout her cortex, or as near -as makes no difference. To do that it had to take a snapshot of her -neural activity, and that can be transposed into a crystal lattice - a -synthetic brain. However, from what you've told me her entire -personality can be re-created in situ, in her existing body, without the -need for a cloned replacement. So that's what I want, I want Jennifer -back, by hook or by crook." - -"Even assuming everything you say is true, there's no guarantee this -mental mapping still exists. In any event, where's your leverage? I -don't see the new board calmly handing it over, especially if it -constitutes de facto evidence of neural assault." - -"When I leave here, Mister Ghent, I'm taking you with me - in a manner -of speaking. Lakeside will go off-line but your persona will be -transferred to a secure location and held, intact, until Jennifer is -restored to me." - -He snorted. "Ransom? Given the new board's attitude I'm not worth a -wooden nickel - and you can forget about my family as well, unless you -think they'd pay to have me around as a target for abuse." - -"No, not ransom - think of it more as a consultancy position. I've -gained access to The Tower using the persona of a rising sim-star, but -notoriety will only get me so far. I need your help to reach the -technical levels - and quickly, before your access is rescinded." - -'The Tower' was a virtual reality work space that functioned as -mediaCore's trans-national headquarters. Although its base hardware was -scattered across the globe in a dozen (physically) impenetrable sites, -everything I needed to recreate Jennifer could be accessed via this -shining example of hallucination by consensus. In theory. - -Ghent smiled. "And what do I get for this selfless act of corporate -sabotage? Or do you believe I'd like to redeem myself in the eyes of -your pathetic little group before being snuffed out?" - -"In return for your cooperation I can guarantee a place in Sensorium -City. What you make of it is up to you." - -"Life amongst that bunch of run-time nomads? I don't think so. Anyway, -given the eco-anarchist bent of most hackers I don't see me surviving in -there for long." - -"The safe haven package includes bodyguards. Nice girls, identical -twins, after a fashion, and as psychotic as they come. I can see you -becoming the best of friends." - -"Not exactly how I pictured my retirement, even off-line. In any event -your virtual kidnapping isn't going to work." - -I smiled. "Don't be so sure. Lakeside may be heavily protected but every -data fortress has its weak spots. When I leave here the guys on the -outside are ready and waiting to access the interface link and snatch -your complete persona. The beauty of this is no-one will even know -you've gone. Bishop to king's bishop two." - -Ghent stroked his chin, staring at the board. "Ah, yes, the interface. -When I explained how it worked, didn't you appreciate the true -significance of my words? As I said, at the end of a visit, new memories -are imprinted onto the real-world mind. Obviously the greater the number -of changes the longer it takes to update the host." He checked his -watch. "But I believe that's been long enough. Rook takes rook." - -Something about his self-satisfied tone of voice made me uneasy. I set -my empty glass aside and stood up. "We'll continue this later, once you -reach Sensorium City." - -He looked up at me. "But what constitutes a new memory, McNeil? A change -is a change as far as the mind is concerned and it could actually be a -fabricated experience, or even one belonging to someone else. Memories -maketh the man, to misquote William of Wykeham, and the man, who even -now is leaving the interface chair back in the real world, is no longer -Simon McNeil." - -I stared at him in horror. "What have you done? What the fuck -have you done to me?" - -"Do you still not understand? Well, to put it simply, it's now a case of -my mind in your body. Or at least how I was at the moment -you confirmed my death. That's when I instigated the backwards-transfer -and erased your real-world personality. I've had hackers-for-hire -working to corrupt the interface system for weeks, in case just such a -situation arose. Your friends on the outside have missed their chance, -I'm afraid, but don't worry unduly. The termination order for Lakeside -has been put on hold pending judgement on a last-minute legal challenge. -That should give you, which is to say, me, time to come up with an -alternative. It's a calculated risk, but one I was willing to take." - -Anger and fear choked any reply. I trembled, suddenly aware of just how -precarious my situation had become, and slumped back down in the -armchair. - -The shadow of Howard Ghent gestured towards the chess board. "Your move." - - -© Martin Clark 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] messenger.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Proto-J - -[*AUTHOR] Christian Miller - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the new underclass - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Eh, dog, I ever tell you about the time I -bust da fuck outta CFC? Das right, Coastlandia Facility for Corrections -- we got another name for it, my man. I was deep in da supermax, -Sentient sub-div for mechs and trans-species, see. What they tagged me -with? Nigga, what the fuck it matter why they perp-walk me? If yous a -robo kid or a tranz-spec� Coastaz po-po, dem dwanky fucks don't need no -reason for Rodney King yo ass, put you in EMP cuffs, drop yo ass in a -cage. Forget dat what's it called, "Habanero Corpus" and "Miranda's -Rights" and shit. "You have the right to remain silent while we fuck -you in da ass, chop yo servos off for da highest bidder, use yo H-Cell -to power our tasers, mount yo chestplate in our trophy cabinet." I -think I might've jacked some batteries and motor oil from a 711, or -maybe just looked at a high-class human wrong, some shit. Don't matter -now. - -It was a fuckin' shit time, dog. I was bottom the fuckin' totem pole, -getting my fuckin' heatsinks and steel wool toothbrushes stolen from me -left and right. Getting beat up in the yard. I ain't even gonna talk -about what happened in the carwash room. I drop the chassis polish and� -Fucked up WRONG shit, man, still gives my CPU nightmares. - -So I'm in dere, in da caf, gettin da Terminator Eye from da biggest, -loadedest fuckin' bot-boy I ever spy wit my own two cams, bruh. Dis -robot stand seven feet, ultra-hopped blastomer cannon-arms size of my -fuckin' whole frame. Fuckin' custom mil-spec chassis like da hood of an -M1 Armita Tank. Bounce depleted-uranium off it like Zakkeel Osteel -bounce basketballs in da R-NBA. He stand, all da Frankenfreakz, da -Roboballers, da lone-wulv shankers and shorters and circuit breakers all -step off. Tables empty in two seconds. Ghost fuckin' town, like a -public school or a library or bookstore or some shit. - -Around him circle up the Kromeboyz. Baddest gang in the tank. - -"You sittin' in my spot, boy," voice like a fuckin' aeromax zepfreighter -blowin' its conch. - -"Bot, you must be fuckin' blue-screened, takin' Talos' spot," one da -Kromeboyz, mean lookin' octopod wit mantis-arms holla from da back. - -By dis time I'm oilin' my pants. I heard dis Talos, he take yo fuckin' -cranial casing off fo lookin' at him wrong. Been in the slammer pretty -much since the CFC - or what we call Cunt Fuck Central - -went up in '25. My neuroweb's spinning now, like a -spider on crack. - -"I didn't mean to front, Talos. I-" - -My word choke off in my throat-synth when Talos grab it. I hear dis -sound like a fuckin' soda can crunchin, den I realize it my neck pipes. - -"I'm give you five seconds, figure out why I shouldn't remodel your face -into my new toilet seat." - -Back in the day, when I was 12 (2 in human years), living in the -homeless shelter for sentient machines, I figured it dat I was tricked -out. I had some technomancy juju shit all up in my fuckin CPU, bruh. -Serious Matrix shit. For real, dog. - -Dis one time I was gettin' -mah brainpan bashed in by a gang of fuckin' -speciesist meatbag humans, trying to jack mah wallet-chip. Dey's like, -"Fuckin' machine! Go back to the junkyard, where you belong! Welfare -leech!" One second I'm getting baseball bats to the head, next thing I -know, there's this golden light. Not gold like dat icys and cashmoney -baller bling shit like in dem phony rap vids. Gold like� da sun's -fuckin nukular core, man. Like I'm being filled wit dis fuckin� spirit, -dog. Like I've got Tupac and B. I. G. and Chuck D. all rolled into -one. Like I'm opening up my third mother fuckin eye crazy shit. - -Then, it's like� I ain't even got words for it� It's like, like I'm -*inside* the heads of the meatbags. - -Like, I feel the hater inside them hatin' on me for bein a chrome. I -feel the white-knuckle grip on the bat they beatin' me with. I know the -name of their swanky boarding school 1st grade teacher who taught them -about the superiority of the human race. - -And I'm like, "Fuck that shit. How you like it someone beat your -fuckin' face in?"

I sees mah own mugshot, jawpiece -dislocated, my custom Gigapixel I-Ballz poppin out my sockets.
- -And it's like, I got little golden spiderthread Astral puppetstrings -comin out mah brain jackin straight into their arms and legs. I yank -one string, they freeze mid-swing. Then they turn the bats on each -other. Start goin' apeshit breakin' each other's arms and legs with the -bats, till they all fall down like fuckin' Spartans in dat 300 movie. -All the while my head goin' "WTF is going on!?" but also, "This the -most beautiful fuckin' thing I seen in my life. Good for dem fuckin' -dickhead talkin' monkeys." - -So back to the prison thing. The exact same X-Files shit starts -happening, as I'm getting mah head slowly popped like a metal grape by -dis Talos mother fucker. - -"Three. Two. One. Times up, " - -Next thing I know, Talos big fugly face light up gold and him's eye-cams -shutter wide. - -I sees mah own mugshot, jawpiece dislocated, my custom Gigapixel I-Ballz -poppin out my sockets. I feel a thousand horsepower, the fuckin -mecha-hulk in mah robot muscles. Except, they's Talos' muscles. - -I pull a mind-string, the deathgrip loosen. My body clank to the -ground. I pull another string, Talos arm reach for him's own neck. - -Now I's thinkin' meself: "Proto-J, you best be putting this fucking -Megatron down while you is in you Optimus Prime mode. Cause once the -clock strike 12, you fairy godfather take back you technomagic -superpowers� Talos gonna recyc yo ass. You better fatality this fucker, -now." - -I thinks about dis time I was tryin' fo yank a powerline for syphon -juice from the Coastlandia grid. Po-po was on my ass, and I was on -low-bat, so I was pullin' for my fuckin' life. Pullin, pullin, pullin. -Broke an elastomer and a wrist joint, but I got the fuckin' cable free. -Got me 'nuff juice to bail, jump the fence. - -Both Talos hands round his own neck, now, and I'm making him pull, pull, -pull on his own head. Cause my life really depend on it now. - -There a big BOOM, like a skyship crash, when Talos brainpan pop off. -Electric zaps and shit. When the head come off, the spine rip a little, -and one of Talos arm stop working. The head fall down, hanging like a -broken jack-in-the-box toy, swingin' back and forth by the wires, -wrecking ball style. I reach the working hand up inside Talos' skull -case, up into his shell, to smash the ghost inside it. The soul-chip. -The conshisness. - -I know where it is. I don't know how I know, but I do. - -The soul-chip more like a soul-mango. Big gooey ball of self. I feel -it through giant fat fingers. I could pop it like a grape, easy. Put -this sentient light out, forever. Dead. Dead as Tupac. - -Just then, I sees memories that look like scenes from apocalypse shooter -video games. Missiles screamin' overhead, mushroom cloud sunrise on the -horizon. A city burning the fuck up, faces melting like fuckin candles. -Human faces, hybrid faces, sentient machine faces, wailing. Drills, -plasma torches, white walls. Torture chamber. Years there. Like a -spitball of pain, rolled over a decade, shot right into my heart. - -Worst fuckin' feelin' I's felt in my fuckin' life, man. - -And it wasn't even mine. My feeling. - -I let the soul-mango go. Ooey gooey thing slipping through my -banana-size fingers. I'm thinking, "You fuckin' wig, bro?! You gonna -be dead soon as CFC med-techs put dis humpty dumpty Goliath together -again! Talos gonna erase you!" - -But I can't fuckin' do it. I can't explain why. I can't kill this -overloaded fugly mother fucker. - -When the gold light go out, I be out cold too. I'm offline. Flatlined. -Force-quit. For days.
Try hanging myself with my own USB -cable
- -

I's heard from my cell mate it took two days to put me -back together. I -wake up to motherboard-splitting headache. My antenna's broken, face -all fucked up crooked, weld-marks everywhere. They stick me with a -cheap-ass African knockoff of a Korean arm, guess the other one was -totalled. All shitty polypropelene, and Pepto-Bismol pink. Jaw don't -sync up when I close it. But I'm alive. Alive like Johnny fuckin' -Five. - -They said Talos would be in refurb a week. - -Johnny Five, alright. Johnny Five, alive for five days. - -I begged the counselor to get me a transfer, parole, something, but no -dice. - -On the day Talos got out of refurb, I try everything for get out of -lunch. Try hanging myself with my own USB cable - they cut me down, put -me in a strait jacket. Try faking a blue-screen, they took me in for -a digital psych-eval, then gave me a defrag and a pamphlet on battery -acid abuse. No fuckin' use: I was gonna die one way or another. - -So I get out to the lunch room, stand in line. Get a charge-pack burger -on my tray, take a 12-ounce can of compressed air to wash it down. - -Sit down, plug the charger into my battery, blast rust and daddy long -legs and paper bits out of my joints with the comp-air can. Wait to -die. - -Waiting, waiting. Wait some more. Clock tick, Kromeboyz and -Frankenfreakz and lone wulvs sitting down, wide berth around me. No one -wanna talk to Proto-J. No one be wantin for go down with my ship. Can't -blame'em, dog. - -I's already done made my phone call. I didn't got no one on the -outside, really. Ten in mah friendlist, mostly spambots, drugdealers. -Just this half-human cyborg street-trick flame named Kandy. I told her -she have my stash, since I be dead soon. Under the razorwire fence at -the old robot internment camp site. Unit 34 A. She tell me she think -of me while jackin' some John's haptics. Most romantic thing she ever -said to me, to be honest. - -I was ready. Come take me, mother fucker. I'm ready. Dis life ain't -given me shit, and I goin' out wit shit-all. Fuck it. - -But nothing. Now it's half-an-hour in, I'm thinking maybe Talos -chickening out? No. Maybe the refurb took a little longer? Misplaced -a torq screw? Botched the re-wiring? - -Buzzer goes off, mechs open the doors and lunch be done. We be marched -back to our cells by the jackboot CFC guards. - -Maybe I'm home free? Maybe I get to live? Johnny Five Years instead of -Johnny Five Days? My lucky day? I sit in my cell, planning all these -new leaves I'mma turn over. I be thinking how much drugs I'mma sell to -get into Kandy's sweet portholes every night of the fuckin' week. Maybe -I'll make enough to move out of the fuckin' shantyland, get to -Coastlandia City. Where dey got all da juice and Why-Fai and Flicknicks -and shiny blingy parts and neon glass towers and flying Lambos and shit. -Maybe I'll work my way up to The Stratoplex, where the whiteshoes, the -kings and the queens and fuckin' rockstar baller reality-TV people live. -Get a real mouth to eat real fucking gold-leaf caviar with, with my -personal jet and personal floating grav-island, fucking Kandy's sweet -custom-built punani in a diamond tiara for the rest of my life. My -life! My life is lookin' fuckin' UP, bruh. - -"Boy." Voice like da fuckin' reaper. Like that black-hood ghost of -Christmas Future nigga, wit all da fuckin' Doom demons and Gremlin -fuckers and shit all up inside dat makes Bill Murray shit himself in -Scrooged. - -I be shit myself, if I could shit. - -I turn around real fuckin' slow, waitin' to see the mug of death to go -with da voice. - -Talos look like he been terminated by Sarah fuckin' Connor and that -fuckin' trash compactor in T1. One eyeball glowin' red, and it be like -lookin' right into the eye of the fuckin' devil, dog. - -My life. So much for them new leaves and Coastlandia High Town and -Kandy and all that shit. My life. - -FML. - -Game fuckin' over, man. - -Talos don't say shit. He just step, step, step, slowly, like he be -measuring the length my fuckin' cell. - -"Talos, dog, I'm sorry, I was just defending- What do you need, bruh?" - -Step. - -"I- I can get you myth, black market parts, I- I got info, I know -shit!" - -Step. - -"What you want, man? Anything! Just don't kill me! Just-" - -Step. - -By now he all up in my shit, like he so close I feel the heat from him -fuckin' fusion reactor's gustin' out his torso grille. Feel it on my -thermo-sensors like the fuckin' maw of hell opening the fuck up. - -You had a good run, Proto-J. Time to die. Like all people with the -fucked up shitty luck to be born into steel and plastic and computer -chips and gooey neuro-mango-brain-shit, instead of born a pure-breed -human. Born a "defective" product. Failed prototype of the megacorp -that built you, threw you in the junk pile like a bricked old-model -phone. One of millions of experiments on the way to building da perfect -golden immortal body for da kings and queens and -baller-reality-rockstar-celeb fucking douchelandia royalty. - -Proto-J. - -Prototype Junk. Time to die. - -The mil-spec cannon arms come up around me. I be closin' my eyes, -thinkin' bout Kandy's haptic fleshlight arm. - -Then I just be hearing this sound. Weirdest fuckin' bassey thing. Like -a giant sad cow, or a bulldozer dat be missing its mama. - -Take me about twenty fuckin' seconds to figure out that this giant -fuckin' chrome hulk is fuckin' crying. Not just crying, but bawling his -fucking eye-cams out. Bots don't leak that saline juice out they face -like humans and chimeras, but if Talos could make tears, he be fillin' -fuckin' swimming pools and shit. - -I'm like so fuckin' mind-blown, I can't even make a fuckin' word. I -feel like I be blue-screening, and not because I dropped one tab too -many of mythium or I downloaded a virus to my brainpan or some shit. I'm -glitchin, crashing just trying to compute just what in the -world-wide-fuck is going on. Here I be, expectin' to be stomped like a -fuckin' Coke can flat on the floor, and this giant motherfucking death -machine be hugging and crying all up on me like he a human bitch just -finished watching The Notebook. - -He cry like dat, huggin' me close to him metric fuckton of -dep-uranium-bouncing armor and him thundery sad-cow, emo-Panzer tank -sounds. Don't say shit. Not a fuckin' word, dog. - -Maybe when I squeeze his brain mango, I tweaked Talos' brain? Maybe he -just happy I spare his life? Maybe when that golden-light technomancy -voodoo shit come on, it was like he long last got to share some of that -fucked up, ninth-circle-of-hell shit he went through in the war, made -him feel better? Fuck if I know, I ain't no psychotryst, man. I don't -know about this feelings, emotions shit, even if we smart robots got'em. - -"What yo name, boy?" Talos ask, long time later. - -"Proto-J." - -"You be my chrome now, if you want, Proto-J." - -What the fuck you gonna say to a seven-foot two-ton war-machine when he -ask you to be in him crew? - -Dog, of course fuckin' yes.

You can't dust the -keypad, can't plant a bug, can't tap him fuckin' phone
- -

Anyway, what the fuck was I talking about? Oh, right. How -I bust out the CFC. Long story short, I was blooded, or more like -jolted into the Kromeboyz crew. Dat day on, nobody, I mean fuckin' -nobody treat Proto-J like a little bitch. With the Kromeboyz? I had as -many charges as I want, sit where the fuck I want, say whatever the fuck -I want. Drugs, porn-chips, smokes, you name it. The boyz had stashed a -disassembled cyclone saw and safe-cracking drill in their bunk. They -held down the fuckin' perv bastard from the shower as I performed a -reconstruction of his crotchal nodes and dongle. - -The Kromeboyz' prison break plan was already in the works, but my -special little Professor X skill turned out to be the keystone. I was -like fuckin' Chuck D in Public Enemy. I was Tom Morello in Rage Against -The Machine. I was Bumblebee in the Autobots. I had a fuckin' purpose. -Friends. All that good shit. - -The bust-out involved drilling through about twelve feet of concrete, a -dozen birthday cards coated in superconductive nanomagic shit, outside -help planting C4 at a nearby power plant blowing the fuck out of the -prison's primary power and some Trojan worm hack shit in the system -courtesy of a regular psych-eval brainscan. We just bribed the -broke-ass, low-paid, student-debt-saddled robo-shrink not to sanitize -the data transfer port, giving the prison a case of herpes straight -through Talos' brainjack. It was fuckin' beautiful, dog. - -Hardest fuckin part was getting hold of the fuckin' door codes. Things -were fuckin� "encephalographically encrypted". Basically means the code -for all the cell doors, the unit blocks, the security doors, the front -gate, all that shit was stored inside of the guard's fucking *brains*. -Like they stick their head in a brain scanner look like a lady's hair -salon thing. The code supposed to be a series of *thoughts*, like, -could be "A-B-C-1-2-3" or the Warden's last name and birthdate, but it -could also be the feels of beatin' the fuck out yo first humanoid bot as -a prison guard. Who knows the thoughtcode? Nobody. Nobody except the -guard. He don't type it nowhere, don't speak it nowhere. You can't -dust the keypad, can't plant a bug, can't tap him fuckin' phone. -Perfect brain-encryption, kept on the ultimate down-low. - -Almost. - -So I'm in my cell, getting' my fuckin face smashed in some more by a -nightstick. - -"You goddamn silver-niggers don't know when to stop runnin' yall's -filthy metal mouths, do ya? I'mma whoop you good, you little tin -nigger, put you in yer place." - -Billy Bob, this redneck mother fucker wailin on me got that -same look in -his eyes like those swanky boarding school kids. That soul-deep hater -look, that ain't got nothing to do but hate. That's why I chose this -fuck for my mark. - -"What, you fuckin' pussy meatbag human? That's all you got, bitch? I -seen pics of yo wife up in the control room. When I get out, I'mma find -yo house, straight wreck dat phat ass wit my steely dan, bruh, make you -watch. Den I gut yo ass. For reals." - -"Ooh, we got a wild one 'ere. I best put this dog down." Billy Bob -blacks out the security cams with a can of spraypaint. Comes back, -fires up a plasma torch, starts cutting into my brainpan. - -He get about two inches up my temple, and nothin' happening. Shit. The -whole plan hanging on me, and maybe this whole magic mind-meld shit is -like a genie in a bottle: you only get so many wishes, then you out. We -all knew the plan was a long fuckin' shot. Maybe this is it? - -"No one gonna miss one more job-stealin', thievin', uppity robot. I'm -doin' the world a favor," Billy Bob getting his pliers out now, peelin' -back mah skull plates. - -Boom. Beamed the fuck up, Scottie, straight into racist, speciesist -fuckin' Billy Bob's brain. - -First thing, I make him take the pliers, break every fuckin' bone in his -hand. His voice box get all fucked up from screamin' so hard, by the -end it just sound like wheezing like an asthma guy. Then I scan him -brain. I peel back his mind, like layers of an onion. Losing his -redneck farming job to AI tractors and drone-launched insecticide. -Coming to Coastlandia, being homeless for a year, abandoned by his wife -and kids. Getting a CFC job when the prisons exploded with all the -robots and non-humans hitting the streets. Taking his shit, his -rolled-up pain spitball out on the second-class people who to him took -everything away. I find the thoughtcode: memory of Billy Bob as a -little kid eating porridge, watching the sun come up over the family -farm. - -Now I kinda even feel a little sorry for this inbred fucker, but -fuck'em. - -I stick my head in the brainscan locks, think real hard about Billy -Bob's memories, they open sesame. One after another, dominoes. - -We took Billy Bob's uniform, walked straight out the front door. Never -turned back. - -So that's how I busted the fuck out of CFC supermax, and joined the -Kromeboyz. Pretty dope, huh, dog? - -Back of my mind sometimes I still think about what I thought when my -time was -up. About turning them new leaves, straight-shooting for the high-life, -getting the glitz and the bling and icys for Kandy. But fuck that shit. -That was all fuckin' wishy-washy bullshit imagination dream shit. Billy -Bob, those swanky schoolkids, the human Pentagon generals sent Talos -into hell and then put him the fuck through it, they were bad. But they -ain't the real problem. The real fucked up shit is every single other -human lookin' the other way, the fuckin' paper pushers, the fuckin' High -Town swag fucks, the fuckin' real estate agents. They tell themselves, -"I ain't bad, I ain't a bot-hatin bad-guy fascist fuck. I just doin' my -job". But really, they the ones let all this shit happen, while they -take they cut of the Lambos and glass penthouses and caviar. - -So fuck that shit. The mother fucking revolution will not be televised, -bitches. In the words of the immortal Chuck D, "Right is right, and -wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means -they need to sit down with some real people." - -This story was set in the world of - Neofeud. - - -© Christian Miller 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] protoj.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Border Incident - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] The very sinews of commerce are under attack. Run! - -[*DESCRIPTION]

That awful trumpeting from the speakers -happened twice that morning, accompanied by the flashing of orange -strobe lights, but no-one paid any attention because on Tuesdays the -amber alert often triggered and there was never any reason for it that -they'd been able to discover. On Fridays it was the fire alarm. Nobody -did anything about the fire alarm either. It wasn't as if there was a -local fire brigade to call, there hadn't yet actually been a fire in the -building, and the bell usually stopped after a few minutes. - -My screen filled with transactions, most of which looked OK, but had -been flagged for attention. Unusual, I thought, but I just went -on -dealing with the suspiciously large number of exceptions:

    -
  • Order using cancelled credit card - delete and report source IP -(though it was probably a Chinese proxy); -
  • Order requesting 222 demolition charges (possible triple- or -double-keypress) - demolish the order - no charge (wry grin) with -query; -
  • Order requesting a out-of-stock (discontinued years ago, never to be -restocked) item - -initiate substitute suggestion response; -
  • Query regarding import licence for AA gun mount to fit Hyundai 88 -pickup truck.
Never a dull moment in the Armaments and Military -Vehicle section. - -I wasn't the only one to notice the sudden rise in bogus transactions. -Spiros in the Pharmaceuticals and Drugs section called out "DDOS -attack!", and a roar of mingled alarm and amusement rose up. - -We at amazon.dmz.gb were proud to be the sellers of 76% of all goods -bought in the world. Believe it or not, early in the company's life -nearly a century ago, our only products had been books, and we filled -warehouses with stock. It hadn't taken long to convert to the modern -company model, which is a network-connected facility taking orders and -payment for products and placing these orders (having retained a -commission) with suppliers who have their own warehouses and delivery -arrangements. Some products require elaborate permissions, and licences, -and it was our job to facilitate completion via various cut-outs, again -collecting commissions en route. - -Just when I was about to approve a consignment of anti-personnel -grenades to Iceland, my screen cleared, to be replaced by Emergency -Protocol B. Simultaneously, the red alert started up. This seldom -happened. We usually gobbled up DDOS attacks and kept going. And I had -noticed that all the orders that got through had looked real and unique. -A typical Denial of Service attack tended to be a flood of -near-identical orders with nonsense items. The front-end filter just -threw them out and we never saw them on the shop floor. It wouldn't have -slowed our system down unless the combined speed of the attackers caused -a bottleneck in the input. Our bandwidth was supposed to be the -biggest on the net. - -Protocol B required the twenty section heads to assemble in the -conference room. By the time we reached the conference room, the sirens -had stopped, but the red strobes were still flashing irritatingly. The -big boss, Adrian Dolphgren (called "Adolf" behind his back) started -talking even before the last section leaders had arrived. I was standing -near the door. - -Jake, the crazy kid from Music, was jabbering like an idiot as usual, -making faces and staggering around in a comic fashion till Adolf paused -and glared at him. - -According to Adolf, something very strange was happening this morning. -We were sustaining a very powerful internet attack by unknown persons or -organisations. It was necessary that no panic take place while we await -the end of the surge. Then the door behind Adolf opened, and a man in a -military uniform walked in and shot Adolf with a Remington -Suppressant™ SuperTazer (I recognise all the products in my -section). Adolf -fell to the floor of the stage and flopped around like a beached fish. - -Jake the Comic gave a hysterical giggle, others stood up, or flung -themselves on the floor, I ran out the door into the corridor. There -were uniforms in both directions and a fire door opposite me. I hit the -release bar and tumbled out into the thick rhododendron bush which had -been growing up against the exit for years.
Who -are these guys?
- -I would like to pretend I was showing presence of mind, but it was just -panic really. I extracted myself from the bush and ran. I had never been -outside the building in the fresh air before. We were always bussed back -and forth from the hotel along the access road, and it was drummed into -us that no-one was allowed to walk around in the security zone, and -certainly never in the de-militarized zone that surrounded the security -zone. - -Behind, I heard gunfire and someone running after me, so I kept going -till I hit the razor wire fence, which tore a chunk out of my face and -flung me back to the ground, where Spiros tripped over me and fell -against the barbs too. Neither of us seemed to feel any pain at that -stage. - -"What the hell was that?" whispered Spiros. - -"Search me." - -"Who are these guys?" he persisted. - -"No idea, but we'd better get moving." - -"Where to? This fence is right around the building except for the gate -at the access road, and you can bet they've got that sewn up." - -"All I can say is that I've seen wild deer inside the wire, and I don't -think Adolf is in the organic venison business. So there must be -breaks." - -"Into the DMZ?" said Spiros. "Isn't that dangerous?" - -"More dangerous than these guys in fashionable camouflage with their -barely legal projectile weapons?" - -"Maybe." - -"Suit yourself," I suggested, "But I'm looking for a way out of here." I -headed off, following the fence as well as I could, given the density of -the bushes, in a somewhat northerly direction. On Google Maps, for -political reasons, the whole DMZ shows up as a vague blurry area, and -Amazon's British DMZ headquarters, from which we'd just effected a hasty -exit, doesn't appear at all. I could hear Spiros struggling along behind -me. - -It was easier than I'd hoped. One section of the fence had been -flattened by a falling pine tree. Obviously, fence maintenance was not a -high priority round here, because the fence section had been on the -ground long enough for this year's bracken to grow through it, providing -a cushion across which deer and other animals had trampled a clear path. - -Fifty years ago, when the DMZ had been established by the United Nations -to separate the combatants, this had all been farmland and National -Park. Now it was secondary temperate forest, vigorous young trees, pine -and birch mostly, growing too closely together, threaded through with -thorny brambles. It was wounding work, and the razor-wire gashes were -soon supplemented by deep scratches. - -"Where are we going?" asked Spiros. - -I showed him my OnoTab. "See! GPS shows us here on the map, in this -blurred area, but, to the east of us, there's a road stopping short of -the DMZ on the Scottish side, and what's probably the same road stopping -short on the English side here, so if we walk east, we should hit this -road, even though it's probably disused, turn right, walk a bit, and -we're back in England." - -"There'll be a border post." - -"So? They'll scan your arfid chip, check your visa status, and wave you -through." - -"I suppose..." - -I set my tab on id-detect, and waved it over the nape of Spiros's neck. -Nothing. "Oh!" - -"'s OK. Mine's on my forehead. Don't ask. Born in Igoumenitsa. -Different." - -Sure enough, scanning his forehead worked, and his ID checked out. The -angry comment on the visa permissions box about us trespassing in the -DMZ was a common factor of our work at Amazon. For tax purposes, the -company had done a deal with the UN, Scotland, and England to operate -inside a compound within the DMZ, but we were constantly badgered by the -robots of the UN border agency. - -Despite the handy GPS on my tab, I drifted off course, forced by the -thickets of gorse and elder, and by boggy sections in which stagnant -water shone with oily rainbows, to stumble three kilometres in every -other direction for each kilometre gained eastwards. Even then, we -almost missed the roadway. Fifty years of abandonment meant that the -grass, weeds, trees, bushes and weather had turned a highway into a zone -of only slightly less dense vegetation.
The men -stood under an automimetic canopy. They didn't look friendly.
- -Fifty-one years ago, before handing the situation to the UN, the US army -had halted the seemingly unstoppable Scottish advance just short of -Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The final advance of the Scottish army had reached -and passed Hadrian's Wall for most of its length - the traditional -aspiration of Scots since the Romans left in 410 AD. It was the US army, -coming to the rescue of England on behalf of the UN, who established the -DMZ somewhat north of the battle line, but still South of the historical -border between Scotland and England. So, for the last half century, both -Berwick-on-Tweed and Carlisle, previously North of England cities, had -been Scottish. The DMZ, averaging about twenty-five kilometres in width, -comprised mostly moorland, woodland, former farmland and a small -national park. No-one was allowed to live in the DMZ, and entry was -strictly controlled by the UN Peace Keeping Force. There were few -dwellings, and they were all uninhabited. - -It was, therefore, something of a surprise to us, when passing through a -wooded area where trees arched across the road, to find our way blocked -by what at first seemed a thick grove of rhododendron bushes. On closer -approach, this resolved itself into a barricade manned by several men in -active camouflage battledress. Only their disembodied faces stood out in -view, as their uniforms merged with the background. Their faces, that -is, and the uncamouflaged Barrett 0.3 auto rifles and Hitachi 45 machine -pistols they carried. The background foliage itself turned out to be the -LiveCamo version of the Lexus Stealth 20 main battle tank. Most of -which high-tech military materiel I knew was exclusively available from -Amazon, so it must have been sold by my section - probably in that -suspicious-looking, yet legal, purchase of equipment by the tiny country -of Andorra, including thousands of automatic rifles and twenty-five -Lexus Stealth 20s. - -The men stood under an automimetic canopy. They didn't look friendly. - -"The UN, thank God," said Spiros. - -"I doubt it. Where's their blue helmets?" - -The only unarmed one was wearing the same camo as the others, but he -carried an air of authority. "Major Mackenzie," he said, "Who the hell -are you?" We must have looked a sight with our torn and bloodstained -clothing and the razor wire wounds. - -Our explanation cut no ice, and we were handled firmly, deprived of our -tabs, phones and G-lenses, given camo gear to wear, and marched under -escort along forest paths, glimpsing camo-suited men, state-of-the-art -covert tents, stealth-equipped vehicles and equipment from time to time. -While an old pale blue Chinook helicopter clattered overhead, we were -told to stand still, then were hurried on, passing along a trench roofed -over with more stealth fabric, forming a makeshift tunnel, the pattern -of leaves on the upper surface trembling in a electronic simulated -breeze. - -

They interviewed me in an underground chamber fitted with -multiple microphones, speakers and screens. As I was pushed roughly in, -I saw my interlocutor, a small, muscular man in khaki casual dress. He -appeared to be smoking an old-fashioned cigarette, the kind with tobacco -in a paper tube. He introduced himself as Major Geddes, Intelligence -Section. He made it clear he was particularly irritated that we'd -been wandering about in the DMZ with live GPS and internet running on my -OnoTab. - -"I don't suppose the blacks and slants could see you, but Google sure as -hell knew where you were." The 'blacks' and 'slants' he referred to were -presumably the Nigerians and Cambodians of whom the UN Regulatory -Authority (GB DMZ) was currently composed, and who had often been -publicly criticised for slackness. "In any case, you were radiating -infrared. Any UN helicopter should have spotted you right away." - -I said: "We'd have been grateful. They might have given us a lift out of -the DMZ." - -"Unlikely. They'd have locked you up for trespass and possible -subversive intent. No-one's allowed in the DMZ. You know that, don't -you?" - -"It's your fault we were out there. What were you thinking of, -raiding Amazon HQ?" - -"So you're from Amazon. What made you think it was us that raided you?" - -"Well it wasn't the UN. And the guys were in uniform, with weapons. I -notice your lot answer the description. Who else?" - -"I promise you it wasn't us. We've sent a unit to investigate." - -I said: "All we want to do is get back to England and find out what's -going on with our HQ. What are you doing here anyway? You're not the UN -and this is the DMZ." - -"Since you are to be our guests, because we can't release you to tell -anyone we're here, I don't suppose it matters. You will very soon guess -that we are units of the Scottish Army. Now, are you American or -Canadian? I can never tell." - -"American. Working for an American company - Amazon." - -"And your companion?" - -"Spiros? Greek, I as far as I know." - -"Then you are our enemies. Civilians?" - -"Of course."

Our pay reflects the near-monopoly -Amazon enjoys.
- -"Our allies are the United Federation of Europe and also Canada. It was -you Americans who stopped our legitimate conquest of England fifty years -ago, and it is Greece - the other defector from Federated Europe - which -now finances the degenerate state of England." - -"But we were legitimately working in the DMZ. We have nothing to do with -your international quarrel." - -"In a sense, you do. Your company has spent most of its life trying to -dodge tax. In this recent deal, the tiny percentage of your gross profit -you pay to England is larger than the microscopic levy you pay to -Scotland, and the pocket change you pay to the UN is even smaller. -Meanwhile, you have contrived to rob both countries of their -industries." - -"Sorry about that, Major, but we personally had no part in those -negotiations, though I confess our pay reflects the near-monopoly Amazon -enjoys." - -"Nevertheless, you have seen our presence here. You know, or suspect, -that we have an invasion force concealed here in the DMZ." - -Up to this point, I had neither known nor suspected any such thing. But -all this camouflage, the tanks, why not? It really was the only thing -that made some kind of sense when I thought about it, however laughable. - -"Why?" I asked, "Your conflict was a generation ago." - -"Because invasion and occupation of one country by another is the only -way that the United Kingdom can be restored. England, frankly, hasn't -got the guts. Scotland was always the backbone of the British Army." - -I was lost for words at what seemed such an unfeasible strategy, but I -didn't want to seem disagreeable, and made a grunt of semi-agreement. - -Geddes continued: "Anyway, we only have your word that you came from the -Amazon installation, and, in any event, here you stay until we can get -you interned in Jedburgh." - -

The room had a thin green carpet, a dozen folding chairs, -and a framed photo of Scotland's current president, Oliver Pike. I'd -been locked in the underground room for an hour or so when the door -opened and Spiros entered, followed by a trolley with a couple of plates -of porridge and bottles of Olde Highland Spring water - both sustaining -rather than appetising. Spiros had experienced a similar interview to -mine, though he had taken a swing at Geddes when he heard he was to be -interned and had been overpowered by Geddes himself. Shortly thereafter, -the food trolley was removed, and an AVframe was delivered and hung -rather irreverently on the same hook as Oliver Pike, partially covering -his disconcertingly liquid cow-like eyes. - -We made a few gestures at the AVframe and managed to get the news, but -could not elicit sound above an inaudible whisper, lacking, as we did, -knowledge of the exact series of gestures required. After a headline -story apparently describing a flare-up between New Israel and New -Palestine, there appeared a shaky vid of our Amazon HQ, apparently taken -from somewhere well outside the DMZ using a hand-held telefoto-equipped -phonepad. The vid showed the Amazon sign being torn off the building and -lowered. Next, a new set of letters was being hoisted into position. - -"Good God!" said Spiros, "It's one of my best suppliers! Bayer, the Euro -Chemical firm. What can they gain by taking us over?" - -Sure enough, the letters b, a and y were already in place, and an e was -being hoisted up. But the e was fastened in front of the b, and no -further letters were added. - -Spiros and I spent a frustrating five weeks in the Jedburgh isolation -camp. We were in company with a number of poachers who had made the DMZ -their private estate until they strayed, like us, into a Scottish -headquarters area. There was also a rather cheery group of smugglers who -had been doing good business trading goods by sea between Scotland and -England. They had been intercepted by an ancient Yarrow frigate crewed -by the Scottish National Navy - -We were released the day the invasion began. - -

My current position at eBay (GB DMZ) Inc. is not -significantly different from my my old one at Amazon, though I'm now in -Power. Turnover isn't as great in my new section, but you don't have to -facilitate many multi-GigaWatt Siemens Nuclear Generators to earn a good -commission. The secret of the takeover was that eBay negotiated a -slightly higher rate of tax with the surrounding countries and the UN, -and, in return, nobody got in their way. So Amazon was squeezed -out, and since the DMZ is no country's sovereign territory, no-one's -going to be prosecuted for the armed attack on Amazon. That's commerce -today. No-one died. Adolf, richly rewarded with a compensation claim, is -my boss again. - -As everyone knows, the Scottish invasion came to nought; casualties were -few and mostly accidental; no territory was taken. The cries of -"Remember 1314!" were soon stilled. Microsoft Corporation's security -arm, Blackmarch, saw to that, outnumbering, out-manoeuvering and -out-computing the Scottish army. The 'blacks' and 'slants' had not been -totally incompetent. Blackmarch had anticipated the assault using -intelligence supplied by the UN Regulatory Authority and had placed an -invisible and effectively invincible force a few kilometres inside -England. Happily, the bulk of the Scottish invasion force was -subsequently subcontracted to Microsoft, and now works for Blackmarch, -whose presence in troubled areas of the world ensures that global -commerce is never seriously threatened, whatever local rivalries may -arise. - - -© Gil Williamson 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] border.jpg - - -[*ITEM] A Small Intrusion - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Writer's Block with Alarms and Excursions - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Horror? How hard could it be? -pondered aspiring bestseller Maurice Berrington Grale, shivering a -little as the wind whined through the cracks where putty had crumbled in -the window of the cramped upstairs flat where his ideas gestated. -First, set a credible scene, maybe with just a hint of tension. -He tried to pull the curtains closer together, shutting out the -hostility of the night, but as always they failed to meet properly -because of the three hooks missing from the rail and the bulk of the -antique trunk at their foot. The fitful flapping at the central gap -irritated him. He grabbed at the old swivel chair he had rescued from a -skip back in the summer, to the evident displeasure of his downstairs -neighbour. It was worn, but serviceable, wobbling a bit on its castors -as he sat down rather heavily, to face the bland grey screen. Now -concentrate, he told himself sternly. Don't get distracted. -He held his fingers poised above the keyboard like a pianist inwardly -preparing to commit to the first note. - -He waited for inspiration to strike. And waited. Nothing came. He -resisted the urge to type random letters in the unlikely hope that they -would somehow form coherent words. Something buzzed loudly past his -ear, causing him to jerk his head back. The abrupt movement unbalanced -the chair, which toppled sideways, spilling him in an ungainly heap on -the floor. He swore, rubbing a bruised elbow. What the hell was -that? Peering round the room he tried to identify the source of the -buzzing, but it was masked by the bitonal shrilling of cold air from -behind the curtains. Responding belatedly to the sound of movement from -above, Mrs Feeney, the old woman downstairs, banged on her ceiling with -what he presumed was her broomstick. - -Setting the chair back upright, he noticed that the supporting frame -below the seat had become slack, which meant that one of the retaining -screws must have fallen out. He spent the next few minutes on hands and -knees, searching the threadbare carpet until he found it, and then had -to hunt in the toolbox under the desk for a matching screwdriver whose -quartered tip had not been worn ineffectually smooth. - -Maurice resumed his seat, scowling with determination. Where was I? -Oh yes, setting a scene, before that damned insect got in. He fervently -hoped it wasn't a wasp. He had a dread of wasps, remembering with a -shudder what had happened in that pool when he was a kid. Thankfully, -he didn't remember the pain, but his arm had swollen like a balloon. -The kitchen door's closed, so it's still in the room somewhere! -The conclusion was reinforced by the prickling sensation on his scalp -and neck. Nevertheless, he tried hard to concentrate. Right, say -the opening's finished, then you've got to lure the reader -no, (he -chided himself) readers into the heart of the story, where something -weird or gruesome probably happens, and then deftly weave your way -towards the chilling shock of the ending. He sat back, carefully, -and regardless of the fact he had not actually written anything yet, -began considering possible scenarios. - -Preferably not about wasps, taunted the inner voice. - -Perversely, now convinced it was a wasp, he could think about -nothing else. - -A hot day, somewhere in southern Spain. Cornering sharply, a fruit -truck overturns, trapping a hapless cyclist. Seemingly from all -directions comes the sound of fierce droning. - -No! - -Some adventurous children lever their way into a derelict barn. A dusty -shaft of sunlight illuminates something the size of a football. Soon the -air fills with piercing screams. - -No!! - -A quarantine zone is established in a fifteen-mile radius around an -agricultural research station in northern India, following a series of -unexplained deaths. There are emergency requests for antihistamine and -other medical supplies from places scattered far beyond the specified -area. - -Enough, enough! He felt queasy and vulnerable. He knew he needed -to get rid of the thing, or the thought of its lurking presence would -continue to bother him. As a precautionary measure, he tucked the -bottoms of his trousers into his socks. Now he must find something to -protect his head and hands. The wooden trunk in front of the window -held most of his clothing; there was no room in the flat for such -luxuries as a wardrobe or a chest of drawers. Reluctantly parting the -curtains further, he lifted the lid and pulled out a hooded anorak and a -pair of leather gloves stiff with disuse. As an afterthought, he -rummaged at the bottom of the trunk until he found the flimsy silk scarf -printed with swirling patterns, a memento of a grandmother he had hardly -known. It still smelled faintly of mould, talcum powder and lavender as -he veiled his face, tucking the edges well into the hood of the anorak, -and knotting the cord securely under his neck. He fumbled for the -gloves and dragged them over his fingers. With his vision now clouded, -his hearing muffled, breathing constricted and sense of touch impaired, -Maurice felt slightly safer. He was armoured against the intruder. All -he had to do was find it. - -The torch. Get the torch. It hung from a strap behind the door, -ready for emergencies. An old heavy duty model with a rubber casing. -Maurice switched it on. The bulb emitted a weak gleam. He shook it. -The tiny filament glowed orange for a moment, then died. Damn! -He couldn't remember when he had last changed the batteries, but knew he -had no spares. The only other source of light that was in any way -portable was his desk-lamp - an unwieldy anglepoise with a solid base, -but quite a long cord. It would have to do. The remaining problem was -selecting a means of capture. - -Swatting was an option he would rather avoid, for fear of aggravating -the wasp. He looked around the room for a container of some kind. Cups -and glasses were in the kitchen, behind the closed door, as were any -plastic pots or tubs. On his shelves were books, a few ornaments, a -shell or two, some mineral specimens, a small pile of coins: nothing -remotely helpful. What about the desk? Aging computer, -monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, the lamp, a stack of paper, a -stapler, a jar of pens and pencils. The drawers contained CDs, DVDs, -other stationery items and the usual miscellaneous clutter that tends to -accumulate over time. Had he missed anything? Of course, the jar! - He stepped over to the desk, pulled open the stationery drawer, -and a little clumsily (unwilling to remove the gloves) emptied out the -jar's contents. - -Lastly, something to cap it with... There were some old unused -postcards at the back of the drawer. Fumbling awkwardly, he extracted -one. Blurrily, through the veil, he recognised the blues and yellows of -Van Gogh's 'Wheatfield with Crows'. Do crows eat wasps? He -shook his head, trying to rid himself of unwanted images. 'Wheatfield -with Wasps' would be just as valid. To avoid accidents, he put the -jar and card on the floor beside the desk before unwinding and paying -out the cord leading from the wall-socket to the anglepoise lamp. -Cradling the lamp he carried it as far as the cord would reach and -slowly began sweeping its beam systematically up and down the walls and -furniture. It illuminated the neglected crevices where strands and -webby clumps of dust had accreted. It found imperfections in the -wallpaper, picked out the wood-grain along the shelves, revealed, on the -topmost shelf, even through the haze of musty silk, the bright tremor of -wings edging up the spine of a book. - -A cold determination overrode his squeamishness. Maurice quietly set -the lamp down, tilting it so that the light continued to shine upwards. -Even at full stretch he was not quite tall enough to reach the shelf -unaided. There was a short step-ladder at the back of the kitchen -cupboard, but the only object of a suitable height within reach was the -trunk. He would have to pull it across the room. Raising the lid for -a second time, he hastily scooped out most of the contents with both -arms, piling them haphazardly on the floor. He kept squinting back up -at the top shelf to make sure the thing was still there, then, bent -low, with all his strength he began to tug the heavy trunk over the -carpet. - -The tacks holding down the edges of the carpet soon gave way. -Obstructive wrinkles gathered, making progress increasingly difficult. -He thought of the builders of Stonehenge, lugging sarsen stones weighing -up to fifty tons for twenty miles. I expect they had ropes and -rollers, the lucky sods. He redoubled his efforts. With each -indrawn breath the scarf was sucked over his mouth and nostrils. There -was an unpleasantly stale taste on his tongue. From below the sensitive -Mrs Feeney was provoked into a sustained fit of banging. "Shut up, -you stupid old bat! " he grunted, channelling all his exasperation -into another heave. Snagged on a ruck in the carpet, the trunk lurched -sharply forward, sending Maurice reeling helplessly backwards into the -unforgiving cast-iron solidity of the room's sole radiator. - -Maurice was oblivious to the collateral damage as the lamp's jointed arm -buckled, dislocating the springs and shattering the light-bulb. Mrs -Feeney's peevish hammering faded to a thrumming vibration, faint but -inescapable. At the core of his own encroaching darkness it sounded -very like the susurration of a myriad insect wings. - -© Les Sklaroff 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] intrusion.jpg - -[*ITEM] Playing Around with Arthur - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Golf: "I never learned anything from a match that I won." - Bobby Jones - -[*DESCRIPTION]

They presented an unusual pair, these -golfers: Professor Edward Latimer, a middle-aged man of medium height, -and his companion, a larger than life young fellow in immaculate golf -apparel whose fluidly swift movements betrayed the fact that he was an -android. - -"Now, Arthur," began the Professor, "This will be your first ever round -of golf, and we shall score it hole by hole. OK?" - -"Yes, Professor," said the android - his lips moved, but the voice -seemed to come from his chest, "I have perfected golf on the driving -range you took me to. You told me that I can hit a golf ball very far -and very straight." - -"Yes, you can, Arthur, but, while it helps to hit a long, straight ball, -there is more to the game than that. The driving range is a flat, open -field. A golf course is not." - -"I understand." - -"OK. I'll just drive off." The Professor was a good golfer. He hit his -ball to the corner where the fairway curved gently left - perfect for a -second shot to the green. - -Arthur smoothly placed the ball on the tee peg, and selected the largest -club from the gleaming cluster of golf clubs in their brand new bag. He -hit the ball in the same direction as the Professor's. It reached the -corner and kept going, without turning, and finished forty yards from -the fairway, in thick grass. - -"Ah, Arthur, I should have explained. It's much easier to hit a ball -when it's on the fairway." - -"My ball is closer to the green than yours, Professor." - -"Yes it is. Let's try to find it." - -They found the ball, but when Arthur tried to hit it, he managed to -uproot an impressive amount of grass, but the thick stems turned the -head of his club, and the ball didn't make much progress. It took a few -more mighty blows, with collateral damage to the local flora, to get the -ball on the green. - -Meanwhile, the Professor had reached the green with his second stroke. -Putting was another revelation to Arthur. The putting green at the -driving range had not featured any slopes, ridges or dips. On this real -green, Arthur's putts, driven directly at the hole, veered, overshot, -stopped short, or, due to excess speed, skipped over the hole in an -almost comic fashion, while the Professor's ball fell in the hole at the -second attempt. - -"My hole, I think," said the Professor. - -"Certainly, I had sixteen strokes on that hole," agreed Arthur, "I -evidently have much to learn. On this first hole, I learned to keep my -ball on the fairway, even at the sacrifice of distance. Also, I learned -that, in putting, I must calculate the vector of the ball, taking into -account friction, angle and topography." Nevertheless, Arthur sounded -vaguely irritated. Professor Latimer observed a discordant note in his -wonderfully modulated voice. - -"Well done, Arthur. Next hole." - -On the second hole, Arthur learned that fairways, as well as greens, -exhibited uneven topography, that a ball travelled much further downhill -than on the level, and that due to these factors, a golf ball, though it -was hit straight at the green, might arrive in the sand bunker behind -the green. Further, he discovered that hitting a ball out of a bunker -was not an easy skill. - -On the third hole, adverse gusts of wind caused Arthur's ball to veer -sharply left, off the fairway. Following the Professor's advice, Arthur -improved his ability to hit a ball out of thick grass by using an -elevated club, bringing it down more vertically on the ball to reduce -the amount of grass the club had to pass through before it reached the -ball. Arthur grumbled at this stage that it had been unfair of the -Professor not to fully brief him before they started. In all his -dealings with Arthur, the Professor had not previously noticed grumbling -as an aspect of Arthur's behaviour. - -"I'm three holes up," Professor Latimer remarked. "There are fifteen to -go. You have an excellent chance of beating me. You are a fast learner. -Your play is greatly improved." - -On the fourth hole, Arthur learned that, although the canopy of an oak -tree is ninety percent air, the ten percent of leaves, twigs and small -branches effectively block at least fifty percent of the paths that a -ball might follow through the tree. - -On the fifth hole, Arthur attempted to reach the green by projecting a -ball at a low angle of incidence across a lake, relying on the skipping -effect to keep it above water. It sank without trace some yards from -the other side. Arthur was heard to complain that Barnes Wallis had some -explaining to do. - -"Five up, thirteen to play," said the Professor. - -Hole six, par three, a short drive across a chasm to a small green. -Arthur remarked, with a slight tremor in his voice, that his smallest -pitching iron would be sufficient to reach the green. The Professor -required a six iron, at least four clubs bigger, but his shot arrived -comfortably on the green, and rolled past the pin to the back of the -green. - -Arthur appeared to take careful note of the range, then whacked his ball -high in the air. The trajectory was perfect, the angle of descent to the -green almost vertical, the terminal velocity extremely high. The ball -entered the surface of the green, and was so plugged that it disappeared -from sight altogether. The Professor noticed that the drizzle which had -begun was actually steaming off Arthur's clothes. He touched the -android, and realised that Arthur was running extremely hot. - -"Don't worry, Arthur, we are permitted to dig the ball out and repair -the green, without penalty," said the Professor. - -"I am aware of that," replied Arthur, "Having Googled the circumstance -just now." - -They disinterred the ball, and Arthur putted it straight in the hole. A -birdie, and a win! His first. - -Score: The Professor - Four up. - -On the seventh hole, the Professor succeeded in halving the hole, by -playing the ball from the green-side bunker, straight in the hole. - -"I believe," said Arthur, having apparently made some more internet -searches, "That result is known as a 'golden ferret'. It is considered -'good luck'. I understand that luck is defined as a result which is -unlikely, given the probability of success. So good luck for you, is bad -luck for me." - -"Very good, Arthur, but I should point out that Gary Player, a famous -golfer, once remarked: 'The more I practice, the luckier I get'." - -This remark was a mistake. Arthur apparently found the concept extremely -hard to comprehend, and the Professor finally had to concede that the -statement was possibly ironic. Arthur had already been told that, like -most artificial intelligences, he would not be expected to understand -irony. - -The Professor won the eighth hole, again with a flukish shot. His second -shot, from 150 yards, finished only six inches from the pin. Arthur had -played the hole perfectly, with a very long drive and a magnificent -pitch to the green, but required two putts. - -The Professor now observed that Arthur had become even hotter. There -were little pinking noises coming from his chest, and a smell of -scorching. "I think, perhaps, Arthur, that we probably ought to stop -now. It's my belief that you are over-heating." - -Arthur's voice was very hoarse when he replied: "I generate more heat -when my brain is working hard. My temperature at present is within the -maximum permitted. I would like to continue." - -"I cannot advise it, Arthur. We ought to stop and let you cool down." - -"But I am losing, Professor. If we stopped now I would be unable to win, -and I think that would be bad for me." - -The Professor decided at that stage that it would probably be safer to -carry on, but to contrive to let Arthur win, as he seemed to be agitated -by losing. - -This worked for a while. Arthur's temperature dropped as he won the next -three holes, but on the twelfth, he noticed that the Professor was -missing putts that he would normally have got very easily - -"Professor. I think that you may be deliberately losing these holes. -That is not in keeping with what I understand to be the spirit of the -game." - -"Not at all, Arthur, I was just a little pre-occupied with your -temperature. I'll try a little harder." - -The Professor contrived to touch Arthur's back briefly, and discovered -that he had, indeed, cooled down a great deal. And Arthur then continued -to play very consistently, so that by the beginning of the seventeenth -and penultimate hole, Arthur was actually one hole up. And his voice -had lost that rough edge. - -Arthur's drive at the seventeenth was long, the trajectory only a few -degrees low, and it was indeed unfortunate that his ball landed in the -brook. - -"I calculated that very carefully," he complained, "The ball should have -stopped several feet short of the water. The physics was correct, I'm -sure, taking into account club head speed, attack angle, dynamics of a -sphere with dimples in it, viscosity of the air, bounce coefficient of -the fairway, all based on previous observation." - -He was getting hot again. The Professor said: "The reason, I think, was -that you were teeing off from an uneven surface, so that your left foot -was slightly lower than your right, introducing a slight downward -adjustment to launch angle. Never mind, you can drop your ball on this -bank of the stream and still be on the green for three. I am unlikely to -get there in less because I simply haven't got your power." - -Arthur was still fuming - literally - when they reached the brook. The -ball was in very shallow water, just covered. Something resembling a -growl issued from him. - -"Take it easy, Arthur," said the Professor. "You are one up. Even if you -halve the next two holes, you'll still win. Just drop the ball this side -of the water for a one-shot penalty, and hit it to the green." - -Arthur's grating voice was barely comprehensible: "That will cost me a -shot. I can hit it from the water." - -"Believe me, Arthur, many fine golfers have come to grief in this -situation. No less a golfer than Tony Lema gave a hint for hitting a -ball out of water." - -"What was the hint?" - -"Don't." - -"Don't what?" - -"He meant 'don't hit a ball out of water'." - -Arthur turned his head towards the Professor. Although the expression on -Arthur's face was quite neutral, the silent gaze was somehow -threatening. Arthur chose a club, and stood up to his ankles in the -stream. Steam rose. With a mighty heave, Arthur's club plunged into the -water. A cloud of spray enveloped both of them. Arthur steamed. The -Professor dripped. - -"Where is the ball?" Arthur croaked, peering up the fairway with his -Zeiss x-eyes. - -The Professor took a couple of cautious steps backwards before -indicating that the ball was still in the water, about a handsbreadth -from its original position, but in deeper water. - -Seriously alarming noises were now issuing from Arthur. He erupted from -the stream, stood a moment, then flung the club away. His clothes -smoked, then caught fire. When the clothes had dropped away in burning -shreds and ashes, Arthur's synthetic skin could be seen to be melting, -and metal, circuit boards and cables could be seen. The machine that had -been Arthur simply died before the Professor's eyes, collapsing half -into the water. - -

The University Board of Inquiry convened a few weeks -later. Professor Edward Latimer stood accused of having negligently -caused a valuable android, the property of the University, to wit: -Arthur, to self-destruct while the Professor was entertaining himself -with a frivolous game. Further, that he had negligently permitted said -Arthur to be out in the rain and to walk in water, promoting further -damage and ingress of foreign bodies. In addition he was to be billed -for one almost-new golf club that was found to be missing from Arthur's -golf bag, a set of brand new golf trousers and a second-hand Tiger Woods -shirt. - -One particularly meticulous board member was assigned to describing in -detail the damage suffered by Arthur, though he generously discounted -water immersion as a primary cause of breakdown, Arthur having been -built to exacting waterproofing standards. The main point of failure -originated, apparently, in the 'personality' module of the AI processor, -which seemed to have become overheated and overloaded, spreading high -temperatures to all sectors of the android's intellectual functions. - -The Bursar asked the Professor why he had found it necessary to train -the robot to play golf, when his physical capability and comprehension -of competitive games had already been clearly established by earlier -experiments. - -"Ah, Bursar, I did not set out to test Arthur's ability to master -physical skills or to use his logical, range-finding and calculation -skills. He did, in fact, perform surprisingly well in those departments. -By the end of the round, he was, technically, a better golfer than 90% -of human golfers. He was winning a game which, at the halfway stage, he -seemed certain to lose. - -"No. I was seeking to test his ability to cope with frustration, stress -and disappointment. He was subjected to bad luck, unpredictability of -playing conditions, adverse weather, and the possibility of losing a -game that he felt he should, in all justice, have won. - -"I am sure that the golfing members of the Board would agree that there -is no better test of mental fortitude than the game of golf." - -Much nodding and murmurs of agreement ensued and Professor Latimer was -exonerated of the main charges, though he was still required to -reimburse the University for the burnt clothing, a missing 7 iron, three -Titleist golf balls and a bag of 8 cm tee pegs. - - - © Gil Williamson 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] arthur.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Baker's Dozen - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] Battery life is always going to be a problem. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I sidled through the early-evening crowd -patronising Caf� Casablanca in search of the owner, Sully Baker. He was -sitting alone in a side booth, an untouched beer on the table in front -of him. I tipped my hat. "I'm Rudi Hess. I understand you wanted to see -me, Mister Baker?" - -Baker was a big guy; bald, heavy across the shoulders, like a boxer gone -to fat. He gestured to the seat opposite. "Call me Sully." - -I sat down, conscious of his two thick-necked bodyguards regarding me in -a very unfriendly manner. Sully had a lot of enemies and no -friends worth a damn; not exactly a career criminal but someone with a -direct approach to problem solving, as the saying goes. - -He cracked his knuckles. "So you got my message. The question being, -Mister Private Detective, can you help me?" - -I frowned. "Well, the idea of someone spiriting away a dozen animatronic -hostess dolls only to return them before dawn the next morning sounds a -bit, ah, convoluted." - -"Dolls? No, not dolls. These are Uber-Leiben synthetics. Series -Four, I grant you, but good enough to pass muster." - -"Androids? You moving into the escort business, Sully?" - -"Around here? He shrugged, "There's too much competition from cut-price -organic. No, what I need them for is more, ah, cultural. I need them to -form a choir." - -I blinked. "A choir? As in singing?" - -"It's for my daughter, Grace. She has this High School talent contest -coming up and wants to wow them with a retro homage to 'Sister Act'. But -for that she needs a gospel choir as backing." - -"So hire one. That has to be a damn sight less expensive than shelling -out for twelve synthetics, even from an obsolete line." - -Sully shook his head. "The students aren't allowed any adult assistance -on stage, but I've checked the fine-print and it says nothing about -androids. They can carry a tune and I've hired a choreographer to teach -them the basics." - -"OK, so what's gone wrong?" - -"Every morning, despite being left on charge overnight, their power -packs are zapped - and before you ask, the hardware checks out fine. As -it stands we're only getting a few hours' use out of them each day." - -I stroked my chin, mentally chewing things over. "Uh-huh, so where did -these problem children hail from?" - -My proto-client looked slightly embarrassed. "A lap-dancing bar in -Foundry. I got a good price on them." He sounded defensive. - -I sighed. "Oh, I just bet you did. The Series Four have organic brains, -Sully, so when the new Man Act comes -into force you won't be able to own them at all. Offer them a job, -maybe, but they could just as easy walk away. Face it, you got sold a -pup." - -Sully shrugged. "The contest takes place well before this misguided -emancipation hits the statute books. Look, I'll pay two thousand if you -can figure out what's going on and put a stop to it. Interested?" - -"Oh, yeah, I'll take the case, and you can throw in a pair of tickets -for this talent contest as well - I wouldn't miss it for the world. Now, -I suppose you tried keeping your divas under surveillance? Left someone -to watch over them?" - -"The warehouse is run by my son, Victor, but, yeah, he tried that." - -"And?" - -"And nothing. CCTV went on the fritz for no good reason and the night -watchman woke up the next morning unable to remember a damn thing." - -I frowned. "Drugged?" - -"Tested clean as a whistle. Same thing happened with two guys -there to keep each other awake." - -"OK, so you put in cameras across the street covering the doors, you -install motion detectors, you tag the girls with locator beacons. This -isn't rocket science, Sully, I really don't see the problem." - -Again he sounded defensive. "The problem is Victor. If truth be told, -he's not the sharpest tool in the box and I can't step in with any new -ideas without making him look incompetent." Sully sighed. "Kids, eh? -Look, my daughter steps up on that stage in five days and we haven't -even had a full dress rehearsal yet. What you gonna' do?" - -I spread my hands. "Just call me Banquo." - -"Say again?" - -"The ghost at the feast, Sully, the ghost at the feast." - -

Cutting-edge stealth technology tends to be quirky. For me -that meant a -mimetic camouflage jumpsuit with a serious heat exchange problem, -doubling as my personal sauna. I may have been well-nigh invisible, -squatting in a corner of the partitioned warehouse, but it was a race -between solving the case and stewing in my own sweat. Sully rode -shotgun, in a manner of speaking, via the suit's integral webcam. - -Actually calling it a 'warehouse' was a misnomer. Where I was hiding had -been kitted out like back-stage at the Moulin Rouge, complete with -wardrobes, dressing tables and illuminated mirrors. Out front was a -full-sized replica of the stage to be used during the talent contest, to -ensure accurate choreography. Sully Baker was pulling out all the stops -for his little girl. - -The door opened and the 'choir' filed in, shepherded by an effete, -middle-aged guy with bouffant hair. He clapped his hands. "Girls, girls, -settle down. Now, that was fine as far as it goes but if anything we -need a little less bump-and-grind. Yvette, Brandi, you know who -I'm talking about. Now, try and get a good night's rest and we'll try -again first-thing�" He crossed himself, "�God willing." - -The choreographer flounced out past two of Victor's goons on guard in -the corridor. The door closed and the girls settled down at their -individual dressing tables, talking amongst themselves. I tried to tune -out the chatter as it was uniformly superficial - the Series Four came -with an intellect inhibitor that pretty much guaranteed an 'air-head' -outlook on life. Each chair was fitted with an induction charger so all -the girls had to do was sit on their collective asses for eight hours -and everything would be just peachy. - -An hour passed, then two. I learned a lot about the latest fashions and -celebrities. I tried not to fidget. My butt got sore. - -A mobile phone began to ring, the sound coming from a waste bin in the -corner. The girls looked confused. Louise, the only red-head in the -group and the one who seemed to have the most smarts, lifted it out and -answered. "Hello?...Yes, yes, I remember�How much?...I'll ask the -others." She addressed the other girls. "It's Tony-G, who used to own -us. He wants us to work for him tonight and he'll pay the going rate, -plus tips." - -This provoked a burst of chatter. - -"Pay us? What do we need money for?" - -"We're gonna' be people soon, dumb-ass. We'll need money while we find -jobs." - -"I don't like Tony-G. He was mean to me." - -"If we work tonight we'll be tired tomorrow. Mister Locarno shouts at us -if we're tired." - -"Hush!" Louise glared at them. "It's a one-off and, like Tiffany said, -we're going to need money soon. Do we do this or not?" There were -murmurs of agreement. She nodded and raised the phone. "Tony-G?...Yes, -we'll do it�OK." She hung up. "He'll pick us up out back, straight -away." - -Well, so far, so obvious - but they were acting like this was their -first time playing hooky, which didn't sit right. I watched as everyone -lifted their purses and Louise opened the door. Instead of being -unconscious the two heavies were on-hand to usher the girls towards the -rear loading bay - as was son and heir Victor himself. - -Despite what his father thought, Victor was evidently sharp enough to -cut a deal with Tony-G, leasing the girls back to their old owner for a -percentage. So much for supporting his kid sister in her musical debut. - -The head-up display on the inside of my facepiece registered Sully was -no longer viewing proceedings. This really didn't bode well for Victor -and his crew and I had no wish to face a homicide beef as an accessory -before the fact - or become an inconvenient witness. Although I'd -already earned my fee I decided keeping a lid on things was was the best -way of living long enough to enjoy it. - -I followed the girls out into the corridor and through the warehouse, -past crates of gin and tins of beans, piled high. Louise was at the rear -of the little procession, shooing them along like a self-appointed -mother hen. - -Keeping pace pushed my mimetic camouflage to the limit against a -background of patchwork plaster and dilapidated brickwork. I started -casting a flickering shadow which nipped her heels, making Louise glance -over her shoulder - and forcing me to freeze in place like a schoolyard -game of 'Statues'. She was obviously suspicious, but luckily for me -didn't have the time to check things out, and kept moving. I have to -admit that watching the sway of her hips almost made my discomfort -worthwhile - I may be shallow but I know what I like. - -We reached the loading bay to find Tony-G and one of his pals standing -beside a former school bus, now fitted out as 'a unique mobile -lap-dancing experience'. It said so, right there on the side. - -Floodlights turned the loading bay bright as day. - -Victor and his two heavies went for their guns - then thought better of -it as they saw who was standing over by the far wall; Sully Baker and -four of his men - two of whom carried shotguns. - -The girls squealed and crowded together. Victor looked sick to his -stomach. Tony-G went white in the face, obvious even under the harsh -lighting. I unzipped my jumpsuit with a sigh of relief and a small cloud -of steam. - -Sully stepped forward, jabbing a finger at his errant offspring. "Not -one word! Not one, you understand? I got a garbage scow out of Miramar -with a pressing need for a new deckhand, and be thankful you're getting -off so lightly." He turned on Tony-G. "And you, you little-" - -Tony-G held up his hands. "Victor came to me, Sully, honest! OK, -so I short-changed the girls, but a little mind-wipe never hurt anyone, -right? I mean, it's not like they're real people, when you get down to -it." - -I winced. He was talking about a synaptic manipulator - designed to -selectively remove memories in trauma victims, so they could get on with -their lives. Using it for a blanket 'mind-wipe' each morning was -way beyond dangerous. It was a miracle none of the girls had been -reduced to gibbering idiocy. - -Sully cracked his knuckles. "I want the takings from those nights you -borrowed my property, right? And if any of them have been damaged -so that they can't sing for my Grace, well, you best find a deep, dark -hole to hide in, Tony. A really deep, dark hole." - -Tony-G and his pal stumbled over each other in their haste to get -aboard. The bus pulled away. - -The big man turned to me. He sniffed. "You looking for a job? As in -permanent work." - -I arched an eyebrow. "Like what?" - -"Like I need someone to run Victor's end of the operation while he's -cooling his heels on the high seas. A monthly salary and no 'private -enterprise' on the side. You interested?" - -"Maybe, maybe. One condition though." I pointed at Louise, "I get her, -when she's done singing." - -Sully laughed. "Yeah, sure, come see me in the morning." My new boss and -his business associates faded into the night, taking Victor with them. - -The rest of the girls scurried into the warehouse but Louise hung back. -She looked me straight in the eye. "Why me? Or do you get off on the -idea of owning someone?" - -I grinned. "Why you? Well, you got the looks, the figure and I bet - -once we yank that intellect inhibitor - the smarts as well. I'm looking -for a personal assistant, not a lap-dancer. An employee, not a piece of -property." - -"I'll be a free person soon. Free to make my own way in the world." -There was a defiant tilt to her chin I found real fetching. - -I took her arm and smiled. "Louise, I think this is the beginning of a -beautiful friendship." - - - -© Martin Clark 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] bakersdoz.jpg - - - - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use -s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2015 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - - -"Omnes eodem cogimur," -Quintus Horatius Flaccus -
"unde negant redire quemquam" Gaius Valerius Catullus - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev17.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev17.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 87ab7326..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev17.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3012 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 17 - February 2016 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 17th issue of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I present to you Mythaxis' -17th collection of short speculative fiction, the February 2016 edition. - -In addition to a splendid crop of new stories, we have attempted two -experiments this time - a Comic Strip and an Interactive Story. - -The Comic Strip, by Liam Baldwin, is one of a series of Jet Starr and -her Astro Amazons comics that he is working on. - -Many -readers will be -familiar with the principle of the Text Adventure. If not, have a look -at this page. - -Interactive adventures like Iceweb have a plot or variety of plots, but -it's up to the player to explore the plots themselves. The descriptions -offered by the game should be read carefully to reveal clues to the next -decision. - -Unlike many text adventures, I have pitched this game at a fairly simple -level. The intention is to entertain, rather than to puzzle, and the -whole narrative is intended to be read, rather than solved as such. - -

Now let me entertain you with a true tale of institutional -bureaucracy. I say 'true', and I mean it, but certain names and -identifying details have been altered to protect the guilty. - -I was running a small sector in a large computer manufacturer's software -division. The sector was called, shall we say, Unusual Software. Which -meant that we dealt with anything that the rest of the product -development group wouldn't handle. For example, we wrote 'glue' software -to allow products written for one operating system to work on another, -and we owned a database product which was a rival to the company's main -database product. Politics. - -One day a request arrived from the company's French division to alter an -accounting program they had bought from an external supplier. In order -to do this, we needed a particular computer type not available in the -UK. Let's call it a TSM1. - -Me to France: Then send us a TSM1, please. - -France to me: Well, certainly, but we believe it should be easier for -you to get one in the UK. There are several of an old model TSM0 that we -don't sell any more in a warehouse the UK division maintains at Heathrow -airport. Though the model is old, it is compatible. - -Me to Warehouse: Please send me a TSM0. Charge it to France. - -Warehouse to me: Sorry. We are not authorised to release one, unless we -receive a pro-forma payment in the form of a Capital Transfer Form from -a UK division. - -Me to Warehouse: How much do these TSM0s cost? - -Warehouse to me: Since they are superseded, they are valued at zero. We -just need the form... for form's sake. - -Me to my local accountant: Please raise a Capital Transfer Form for a -TSM0 from Heathrow. Value zero. - -Accountant to me: Done. I've sent it to the Divisional Director for -signature. - -Divisional Director to me: How dare you waste the company's time and -mine submitting a Capital Transfer Form for zero! - -Me to Divisional Director: But.. but.. I am informed that this is the -procedure. - -Divisional Director to me: Atrocious! I'll sort this out and get you -that TSM0. - -Several weeks pass. I don't like to press him, but when I do, I receive -a Capital Transfer Form for zero, signed by the Divisional Director, who -seems to have failed to clear the roadblock after all. - -Me to Warehouse: I have here a Capital Transfer Form for a TSM0, signed -by our Divisional Director. - -Warehouse to me: Sorry, mate, the TSM0s were recycled last week. On the -orders of your Divisional Director, apparently. - -Gulp... - -Me to France: Sorry. The TSM0s that were in the warehouse no longer -exist. Please arrange to send me a TSM0 or TSM1. - -France to Me: By great good fortune, there is a spare TSM1 at an -exhibition in Czechoslovakia right now. When the exhibition is over, we -will ship it to you direct, instead of to Paris. No need for paperwork. - -Several weeks pass. - -Me to France: Umm... Where is that TSM1? - -France to me: Hasn't it arrived? All the rest of the equipment from the -exhibition arrived back here. We shall ascertain the reason. - -Me to France: I await your response. - -France to me: Regrettably, that TSM1 was sold to a customer off the -exhibition stand in Brno, and is no longer available. Also, we find that -we no longer require the software alterations, as we no longer supply -the TSM range of computers. - -Me to France: Why not? - -France to me: It appears that we were losing some 10000 pounds every -time we sell one, due to a Sales-initiated pricing policy originating in -our German division. - -Me to me: Grrrr... - -Now you know one of the many reasons why, at risk to our livelihood and -pensions, my wife and I bade goodbye to big business and started a -small, and initially loss-making, software consultancy business. - - -Gil Williamson - -Editor - - -[*IMAGE] edit17.jpg - - -[*ITEM] The Cospauper - -[*AUTHOR] Christian Miller - -[*BLURB] "Hey, I'm a girl, and we like to play dress-up." -Charlize Theron - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Gem Roguestar kicked the door out of her -sort-of-Youtube-boyfriend's Volvo Valkyr. The cockpit glass shouted at her in -impact font that 'excessive self-inflicted damage may void the warranty', and -to please stop. - -"Patronizing aircars!" Gem -stepped out, kicked the door again in a rage. She checked the tip of her -stompy silver Powergirl boots for scuffing, checked her makeup in the mirrored -surface of the car's polarized exterior before it flew away. No -scuffing, -phew. - -The crowd was thick as cheap foundation -in front of The Fulcrum's immense glass towers, coagulating with cosplay, -crossplay, and mashplayers of every star-level and like!-tally. - -A genderbent Thor and Loki couple -swaggered by, the female Thor looking utterly Aryan. 6'2", perfectly -sculpted Miss Universe biceps, disproportionate boobs, tiara that was almost -certainly real platinum. Probably a GMO-body grown just for this event. You -had to be royalty to afford that kind of costuming swag. Gem was the opposite -of that. A cospauper. - -"Hey, aren't you... what's her -name?" Lady Thor rubbernecked. - -"Gem Roguestar? Yes." Gem -got up off the ground, did a pose. - -"Uhhh... who? No, you're a bit... -Nevermind. Good luck in the competition!" The two mythological and -literal goddesses walked off arm-in-gauntlet, laughing to themselves about -something, looking over their shoulder. - -A bit... what? Gem's throat tightened, -like the time she'd accidentally eaten a peanut. She'd worked on a small party -balloon of self-confidence, making costuming videos and fishing for compliments -on the Interwebz all day, and with that little bitchslap of negative human -interaction, she felt the balloon deflate. - -You're a microcelebrity, Gem. No, -you're at least a millicelebrity, just look at your subscriber base! -She -psyched herself up. With a wave of her Power Glove throwing neon-emerald and -ruby holograms against the bright latticed vastness of High City. A virtual -coliseum of her Followers erupted around her; mostly avatars of douche-looking -guys with names like "Cheetron" and "Warzennegar" with -endless drooly comments on her Ivy Valentine cosplay saying things like, -'gawwwwd, marry me baby or I'll seppuku myself', and 'Def SMASH!!! I need -moar of DAT a$$!!!!'. Gem felt that rush of pride and validation, like the -first time she beat Super Mario, and the confidence-balloon swelled, from the -size of an eyeliner brush up to a bronzer. - -She scrolled down with her Power Glove's -directional pad and found a comment with twenty thumbs down. She yelled at -herself not to read it, but then gave in, "IDK what you BBW-lovers are on -about. This bitch is too much cottage cheese, and I'm not looking to save the -whales. Kind of looks like a shemale too. Stop embarrassing yourself, fatty." - -DELETE!!! - -But the damage had already been done, -the balloon exploded, and she took an aerosolized anti-anxiety spray up her -nostril in a futile attempt to combat a downward spiraling rash of negative -thought. - -FUCK! No crying, Gem! Stupid, stupid! -She picked herself up off the floor, retouched the delta of smeared mascara -from all her loser crying, and took a walk of shame to the end of the -registration line. A long, thousand-person-long, line. - -"Hey bootycakes, hows the con -going?" It was her sort-of-boyfriend, Lazerfalcon, on the holo-phone. - -"Oh, uh, you know. Going. It's -great!" She masked the hurt in her voice by calling up her -Japanese-schoolgirlish 'customer service' voice she used when working for call -centers, before robots ate up that job category globally. - -"That's great baby. Hey- I just -wanted to check up to see if we're still on for that sub-orbital zero-g -after-after-party tonight. I totes can't miss this. Biz, you know?� -Connections to keep up and all, and I'm pretty sure D-Vuh will be there."� -D-Vuh, as in only the biggest 'webz star in the universe with 20 billion views -and 500 million subscribers. - -"Oh, yeah! Of course!" - -'Don't get your hopes up, Gem,' the -little devil on her right shoulder told her. 'Your -sort-of-Youtube-boyfriend -always has an excuse for why he forgot to pick you up.' - -"Next!" A seven foot -Juggernaut, complete with helmet head was at the ticketing booth. His hands -were the size of wedding cakes. Ok, not really the size of wedding cakes, more -like a nutella-snickerdoodle party cake. God, relived-childhood-trauma crying -gave Gem such a craving for cake. A cake crush. A cake-on. Yeah. - -Gem got on her Power Glove and Twumbled -it to her meager hundred followers. - -@GemRoguestar: "Relived-childhood-trauma -crying gives me SUCH a cake-on. #cakenomnom" - -"Ma'am! The walk-in registration -for the three-day event is two hundred sixty five dollars." The giant -live-action comic book character boomed. - -"What! Oh sorry," Gem snapped -her fingers, dimming the me-dia hologram. Pulled up her bank account balance.� -$214. Fuck. - -"I think I read on the I-con page -that celebrities get a discount, right? I'm Gem Roguestar, I should be on the -list," She put one hand on her hip and crossed her knees in her best pinup -pose. - -The Juggernaut pulled down ridiculously -tiny glasses to read something, "No, sorry, you're not on any of our -lists." - -Gem felt a rush of desperation.� -Desperate times, desperate measures... She touched the juggernaut's hand, -making hers look like a first-trimester fetus' in comparison, and gave her most -convincing sexy-eye. - -"What are you doing?" The -juggernaut asked, yanking his hand back and looking around for managerial -staff. - -"Oh, uh, nevermind. How much is -just the one-day thing?" - -"One hundred dollars." - -Gem sighed, held out her Power Glove to -be swiped by the Juggernaut's scanner. A hundred fourteen for food, merch, -water, and the contest entrance fee? Ouch... She got back on her Glove as she -walked through the nanomagic glass panes of The Fulcrum Convention Center that -spread like a derezzing Nintendo boss. Flat two-inch-cubed pixels of -crystal-like material, pulling aside. - -@GemRoguestar: "Broke as FUCK at -I-Con, hate to beg but I could use a donation. Check out my Amazon -wishlist."� - - -@GemRoguestar: "Buy one of my -genderbent Magneto pinup prints at my e-store or something and I'll love you -4ever! Wet kisses 2 my awsum fans!" - -Gem checked her 'cake-on' post, and it -had gotten all of seven likes, and one retweet by a user named 'GaryStuStu'.�� -Come on Gem, you can do better. - -After getting her Spiderman #635 signed -by the disembodied, cryogenically frozen head of Stan Lee atop a robot body, -Gem entered a Street Fighter 2 Turbo competition. She came in third place, -behind a seven year old Japanese girl named 'Kiki' and a five hundred pound man -who could've convincingly played Jabba The Hut (but was just in t-shirt cargo -pants). The Jabba The Hut guy was nice and congratulated her, but when they -stood together for the 'winners' pic where they all held up nano-assembled Ryu -trophies, the big guy grabbed a handful of Gem's ass. Gem ended up with a -frown in the pic, and they had to reshoot, and it got weird. - -Afterward, Kiki's plainclothes tiger-mom -took her aside and yelled at her like a drill sergeant, "2nd -place!? What do I do with '2nd place'?! We are not royals! How -will we pay our rent? Stupid loser girl!" Kiki sobbed into her Sailor -Jupiter costume as her mom wrangled her to the next competition. - -No negativity! - -"Hey, um... Can I get a pic of... -What are you?" A vanilla male Deadpool that was as skinny as Gem was thick -asked, holding up his Appoogle Futurecam. - -Yes! Gem celebrated internally, trying -hard not to emote how desperate she was, this being her first -pic-request in -ten minutes of strutting the convention. - -"It's a Terminator-Powergirl -mashup. I call it, 'Powergirlator'. I actually have a web series and fan fic -about the character-" - -"Yeah, uh, that's cool." - -Gem tallied up about twelve kudos for -her costume, although one of them was from a blind man and five were from guys -who just wanted Dat Picz of her from behind. But hey, All Attention Is Good -Attention! - -That's what her idol, Princess -Cindercat, said, once, in an interview video at Mars-Con. Cindercat was Gem's -favorite ascendancy story, working her way up from lowly Los Angeles -Wastelander, living in a crumbling Section-8 suburb, dayjob at a sweatshop and -sewing Black Widow jumpsuits by night. A plus-sized player like Gem and -without cash for a gastro-bypass, boob job, let alone a vat-grown body, -Cindercat had started out the laughing stock of competitions, enduring years of -bodyshaming and lecher creepazoids. Cindercat got her big break when she won -'Best of Contest' at Apocacon 2029 with her killer Post-apoc Psylocke-Robocop -mashup that involved tattered (scandalously revealing) blue jumpsuit and rusty -cyber-prosthetic arms that she'd lathed from the bumper of her own beater -Toyota, and later revealed gave her actual tetanus. - -Haters claimed that Cindercat had hooked -up with the judge, a famous Marvel artist who was a well-known BBW lover, which -was never proven, but the flame wars surrounding the controversy boosted both -Cindercat's and the judge's social media followings, so it was win-win. After -that, Cindercat made it to "America's Next Top Geek", and shortly -thereafter married Princess Sarah Gates-Walton, of the Gates-Walton Corpate -Empire. Gates-Walton was the first transgender / lesbian / transpecies -royalty, with 20% feline genes in her vat-body that gave her literal and not -just makeup cat-eye. The utter scandal � not the les/trans part, but the fact -that a Royal had married so far below her subscriber level -- took the -mediaverse by storm and catapulted Cindercat to cosplay, Youtube and RL -superstardom. "Cindercat's beauty came from within," Princess Sarah -was quoted saying during an interview at the Transplanetary Academy Awards, -which she won, by default, because 80% of the Academy Awards voting members -were Gates-Walton family members or employees. - -That was Gem's plan. I'm a -professional cosplayer, Gem reminded herself. Her destiny was -written in -the stars. The Cosplay Contest was on. The contest was on?! - -"Again, the Contest will be -starting in two minutes in Fulcrum Plaza," Gem wished female comic -characters didn't wear ridiculously impractical high heels as she struggled to -run and ended up tripping, falling, and knocking over a team of hairy bearded -men cosplaying sexy-Pikachus. - -The Plaza was a stage made literally of -gold and jewels and nano-fab quartz, showcasing fabulous cosplayers in -laserlight and pop-tart flavored confetti. The crowd was roaring against an -80's-wave techno remix of the Jem And The Holograms theme. - -You see? They're playing your song, -Gem. "Tonight is my night. Tonight is MY night," Gem -subvocalized -her mantra. The liquid latex on her right cheekbone was already itching and -her hourglass corset had her nearly throwing up her lunch of sugar, carb, fat, -and gluten-free cupcakes. Cakes. Cakes. She ate some pop-tart confetti, did -one last costume check and soldiered up. - -"You are beautiful, you are -skilled, you are awesome." Her future was hinging on this. This -was her -Cindercat moment: judge Prince Charming was somewhere out there, beyond the -neon and the spotlights and the douchebags, and she would wow him into -submission. She would wow them all. - -"Next up we have... Powergator?� -Powergirlator?" - -Gem strutted out before the cheering -thousands, lightning in her step, stomach exploding with butterflies, walking -on air � literally, the catwalk was translucent, gave her vertigo. She was -almost blinded by the spotlights and nearly toppled off the stage. -"Come -on girl, get it together!" - -The Terminator exoskeleton-under-ripped -flesh prosthetic tore off her face again, and she scrambled -stress-palsied -fingers into her Powergirl Boob Window for the emergency adhesive to fix it. - -"FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!" She -slapped the piece back on. The moderate courtesy-applause of the audience was -dimming towards agitated boredom. - -"Uhh... What the heck is she -supposed to be? Warmachine's girlfriend?" Gem heard someone say. - -"I think she's supposed to be some -kind of Powergirl fembot. Too much padding though, her body shape is all -wrong." - -"That's slutty even for I-Con, -doesn't she know there are kids here?" - -No crying Gem, no crying! But it was -too late, she could already feel herself going to the dark place. -"You -are beautiful, you are skilled, you are awesome, you are beautiful you are -skilled-" In her mind she visualized all the skinny mean bitches -from -high school, the eugenically perfect Thor cosplayer, the avatars of every smug -anonymous Interwebz hater, all of them, sitting out there in the audience. - -I AM AWESOME! - -Gem puffed up her boob window, pushed -her sizable rump out, nailed the Powergirl flex and screamed at the top of her -lungs, - -"HASTA LA VISTA, BABY!" - -With the flick of a thumb on her Power -Glove she activated her fiber-optic Terminator Eye, that burned ruby red, and -simultaneously revved up her custom-machined M61 Terminator minigun, and -imagined mowing all of the haters down. Non-fatally, in the kneecap. - -The gun flared fake muzzle flashes at -two hundred rounds-per-minute, roared like a high-caliber lion, and the crowd -roared back at Gem. - -"That's fucking awesome! Holy -shit!" - -"It's Terminator-Powergirl, OMG -that is genius!" - -"You are MURDERING it, girl! Rock -that beautiful curvy body!" - -The nexus erupted into standing ovation. - -Gem felt her confidence-balloon filling -up so big it was pressing up against her chest like some kind of xenomorph -chest-burster made of pride. Her heart felt like it was going to explode into -a gooey mess of chocolate-maple-bacon-buttercream frosting. Cake. The feeling -was pure cake! - -Reeling from the high, Gem watched her -realtime Interwebz analytics taking off in her hologram. She'd gained a -hundred Youtube subscribers in thirty seconds, there were 2,348 notes on her -Twumbler dash. The buzz read: - -"Who the HELL is this Powergirlator -darkhorse?" - -"We�ve got an honorary booth at -Luna-Con for this Gem Roguestar girl," - -"She was a little too chubby for my -tastes-" - -DELETE!! BAN!!! - -She waited for the depression spiral to -start, but Gem felt her confidence balloon had just become a confidence Death -Star. She was Mario rocking an invincibility star. The negative comment -bounced off of her like a 9mm Beretta round off of a T-800. Or a Powergirl, -for that matter. - -"Hey, Powergirlator," it was -the vat-bred Thor giantess, who stepped in front of her, almost on-top of her -as Gem stepped off the stage. - -Gem clenched her thunder thighs and -balled her small fists. At any other given moment of her life, she would've -run away screaming from the uber-intimidating cloned Amazon goddess. - -But not today, not now. - -If this blue-blood cos-Nazi wanted to -start some shit, Gem was certain she was going to cut a bitch, or at least -punch her in her pumpkin-sized stem-cell-titties, even if it meant Gem was -going to be smashed to a pulp of discount silver-metallic makeup, white -jumpsuit, and cos-pauper flesh. - -"What do YOU want!?" Gem -killed a perfect Powergirl scowl. - -The giantess did a mock-pose of the -Terminator's thumbs-up and awkward grin. - -"Not bad, for a Pleb. Not -bad." - -"Oh. Thanks. I think." - -Gem got a serious popularity bump, and -#gemroguestar briefly trended, at it's peak, at 103rd, just behind -#CatPoopingOnRabbit and in front of #USNukesSyria and #RefugeeHolocaust.� -Unfortunately, she did not win the competition, but did get an honorable -mention as "Best Rookie Commoner" cosplayer. She'd also sold ten of -her Sexy Magneto crossplay print putting her bank balance at $210 (cha ching!) -and an Amazon drone came flying in through a window with a medium pepperoni -meatlovers pizza and a bucket of gourmet chocolate-maple-bacon-buttercream -frosted cupcakes. "Courtesy of user MadMaximus34," the drone -said in -Stephen Hawking voice. - -Gem did a quick animated gif of her -wetly kissing the screen of her Power Glove, pulling back to a hawt boob -window cleavage shot, and beamed it over to MadMaximus34 as promised. - -"Treat yourself, Gem, you deserve -it!" She plowed face-first into a cupcake. - -First place, in fact, went to the Lady -Thor, who turned out to be Princess Cindercat herself, who was at I-Con -incognito in one of her many ten-million-dollar alter-bodies. Discovering -this, Gem felt simultaneously fangasmic that she'd actually gotten to talk to -her idol and superceleb, but also betrayed that she'd been basically -snipe-dissed by her own idol, and repulsed that her idol had gone from being a -sweet lowly street girl to a self-centered, royal fascist bitch. - -"Fame will never do that to me, I'm -so above all that," Gem said to herself as she unsubscribed from -Youtube -channels that she'd 'outgrown', who by now had far less subscribers than her. - -Princess Cindercat in the body of Lady -Thor marched up to the stage to accept her I-Con trophy to raucous applause, -and the Hulk / Thing security team had to bodyslam several fanboys and girls -who tries to rush the stage. - -"I'd just like to thank all of my -loving fans out there, and I'd like to say I had an AWESOME time working with -Robert Downey Jr. IV and Hugh Jackman Jr. in X-Men vs. Avengers VIII, and you -guys should all totally check it out in VR theaters June 7. Also, don't forget -to buy my latest platinum album, 'Cindercat On Fire' produced by B-Dreddy.�� -Oh, right, and don't forget to comment, like and subscribe! If I get to two -billion subscribers by 12 midnight tonight, all my fans will get a chance to -pre-pre-order my AAA video game 'Creed of Cindercat' and I'll be releasing a -new line of this Lady Thor body I'm wearing for all of you to rent to your next -con, or use for other fun purposes-" - -Princess Cindercat's voice cut out as a -flaming arrow whizzed, out of the rafters, into her. Into her kneecap.� -Non-fatally. - -"WWWAAAAAAAAHHHHH!" Princess -Cindercat wailed so loud into the mic it actually blew out one of the -speakers. Blood splattered the phonecameras of the first row audience, who -kept filming, but tried to frantically bag, bottle or ziplock the blood of the -princess like saintly relic fan memorabilia, no doubt to enshrine in their -collections or to auction online. Her red cape caught on fire, as did all the -blue spandex she was wearing, and Cindercat was soon a mashplay of Thor and the -Human Torch. - -"GET ME OUT OF THIS BODY!!!!"� -She caterwauled, sounding more like a whining toddler now than anything else.� -A phalanx of Gates-Walton SWAT proceeded to secure the area, firing rubber -bullets, active denial microwave guns, and tear gas into the audience at anyone -holding a gun, lightsaber, crossbow, blaster, Chitauri scepter, vorpal blade or -other weapon, prop or otherwise, which was a whole lot of cosplayers. The -Plaza erupted in screaming, but only a few attendees ran for the exits, and -everyone else kept filming the event while trying to dodge the various -nearly-lethal munitions. Two Punishers were brutally punished in the face by -sonic-boom weapons that blew the spandex off their ripped bodies, and a -half-wolf She Hulk who was apparently on some kind of amphetamine, was -tased -eight times, once - in each boob. - -Gem (gently) tossed her Vulcan M61 onto -a box of Captain America t-shirts so as to avoid being shot at. She dove out -of the way of a flying teargas canister, and huddled behind a life-size statue -of Colossus fronting the disembodied Stan Lee-head booth. Gem tried to use -the burning curtains and costumes ignited accidentally by the microwave gun to -get well-lit, focused shots of the havoc. "Oh God! This is crazy! I -need a new lens for this camera! It looks like I got buttercream frosting on -the lens!" She did, in fact, and wiped the frosting off with a non-T-800 -exoskeletal finger, licked it up. - -From her vantage point Gem made out a -team of neuroscientists, biophysicists and other future-science-looking people -in labcoats rushing in, with a Princess Cindercat-original body with tubes and -IV's sticking out, an oxygen mask on the face. - -They blasted the still-screaming -Princess Cindercat-Thor's body with fire extinguishers to put out the flames -from the charred flesh and strapped her down, placing a -transcranial-consciousness-transfer cap on her head. - -"Area secure, ma'am," the SWAT -leader declared to the incoherent Princess. She responded with strangulated -groans. - -A future-scientist injected her full of -a lime-green liquid just like -Predator blood. - -"She's flux-incapacitated, we've -got to get the princess' consciousness out, stat!" The scientists -activated a giant wheeled MRI machine the size of a Batmobile. After hooking -them up to the machine the two Cindercat-shell-bodies were engulfed in -lightning arcs and magnetic-resonance wave rays blew out all the cameras in a -30 meter radius, but Gem was smart, had her Power Glove shielded in the faraday -cleavage of statue-Colossus' metal pecs. - -As they were bringing Princess Cindercat -to life in her original-body clone, with all the paramilitary types and other -Gates-Walton personnel focused on the corporate dauphine's consciousness -transfer, something crazy happened. - -Three dozen cosplayers, and a good -quarter of the jackbooted, riot-shielded SWAT team tore off their costumes to -reveal transgender, transracial, transpecies, mashup cosplays of Katniss -Everdeen, Green Arrow, Robinhood and other revolutionary archer characters.� -The sudden explosion of red hair, Hunger Games girls-on-fire, and furry red -anthro-foxes made it appear as though the entire I-Con convention had suddenly -burst into flame. - -The guerilla flashmob of rebel archers -drew their bows, crossbows, longbows, lightbows, laserbows, and fired a hail of -electrified arrows into the Gates-Walton guards, who went into convulsions, -like a synchronized dance troupe of glitchcore breakdancers, before toppling to -the floor. - -"We are Phoenix Uprising, and we -represent the many!" the archers raised their bows and shouted in unison. - -
-From the rafters, a Katniss descended, in a simple hand-crafted suit with -feathers made of red felt, and a cheap bargain-store Halloween wig. Looking -closer, Gem realized that the black jumpsuit was coming apart at the seams.�� -Her Hunger Games: Mocking Jay militarized bottoms had white leg stripes that -were painted on with what looked like whiteout. - -"OMG, that is such a crap -costume!" Gem thought to herself. Then she thought to herself, -"Wait, that girl looks familiar. Isn't that... no, it can't be." - -It was Princess Sarah Gates-Walton -herself, Princess Cindercat's girlfriend. - -ACTUAL old-blood royalty. Daughter of -the owner of basically most of Earth and most of the other interplanetary -corporate empires. Gem almost passed out. - -"Sarah... you bitch!" The -newly resurrected (ex?)girlfriend, Princess Cindercat, now in her original -body, threw the IV tubes and needles to the floor, and stepped over the charred -remains of her Lady Thor body paying it no mind, like it was a molted -snakeskin. - -"No, YOU bitch, Cinder."� -Princess Sarah shot an arrow into the 200-foot runway screen, into Princess -Cindercat's projected face. She swung down like a real-life Spiderman, -somersaulting onto the convention stage upon a pile of collapsed unconscious -SWAT team members. - -The two royal (former?) lovers stood off -against one another as the -Fulcrum Convention center fell silent. The -entire world was definitely watching history unfold. It was like that time -China misread a hot air balloon festival in Seoul and launched a nuke into -Honolulu, and everyone waited for World War III. Like that moment where -Galactus has his planet-sized mouth open ready to devour the Earth and -the -Silver Surfer rockets up to face him in a cosmic standoff for the fate of the -world. The livestream of the I-Con event skyrocketed to #1 by a long shot. - -Princess Sarah began, "I still -remember the day I discovered you. In your mindblowing Psylocke-Robocop -costume that you slaved over for months, eating krill paste-flavored soynoodles -and junking your rusty beater to put together. I remember that girl who could -out-game, out-80's movie, out-Marvel reference any comic book store owner in -San Diego, hands down. That beautiful soul who was imperfect, chubby, homely -on the outside, but on the inside was the most beautiful, talented, creative -soul I'd ever met in my life. The friend who taught me the Konami Code, the -confidant who showed me how to fabricate a foam Doctor Doom gauntlet and sew -Psylocke boot covers, the lover who stole me out of my Royal shell of privelege -and with whom I boldly went to furthest edges of geekdom, where I'd never dared -to go before. - -"And what are you, now? You've -destroyed everything you've ever loved about cosplay. You're a symbol of -everything you once hated. Cosplay was a celebration. It was about showing -your love for your favorite characters and making friends. It was about -creativity and acceptance. Now you've made it about money and elitism and -exclusivity. The celebration has become a cut-throat competition, a costuming -Hunger Games." - -"Yeah? Well, your costume looks -like utter shit, Sarah. I mean really." - -Gem got really pissed off that she -wasn't able to see whether Princess Cindercat was being sarcastic and the two -Princesses ended up making up and hugging tearjerkingly, or if Cindercat was -serious and they ended up catfighting to the death. - -Gem's Power Glove ran out of battery -simultaneously as another wave of SWAT exploded in through the roof of the -convention center, and chased away / arrested the Phoenix Uprising army, along -with Gem and all the other con goers. - -Gem thought that Princess Sarah -Gates-Walton gave a really great speech, and though she wasn't sure exactly how -the speech applied to her, she suddenly felt kind of bad about... she wasn't -sure but she felt maybe she might've been an ass to some people, and maybe she -might've taken advantage a little of some of her fans. Maybe. But it was all -in service of her craft! Gem's heart was in the right place. Probably the -Princess was referring to some of the other people. - -"Hey, could I get your sig on -this? That minigun prop is the sickest thing I've ever seen and you uh... Look -amazing," said a beat-up Iron Man. She knew that scatter-eyed, -mouthbreath-ey look that meant this guy was into Gem's body, but she -appreciated that he didn't like, try to grab anything or make any creepy -comments. - -"Thanks! You look amazing too, -especially that arc reactor with the cyan LEDs. Too bad it got fried..."� -Thinking about it now, Gem had rarely if ever given any actual compliments -other than to more important people that she wanted to sub or follow or like -her back, or give her some kind of celebratorial benefit or buy her meatlovers -or donate her rent money in exchange for pics of dildo-in-underboob. - -It felt good to do a nice thing. - -Gem signed the half-burnt itinerary of -Tony Stark whose aluminum foil suit had been microwaved by the active -denial gun, which had set his program on fire. Then there was the sonic boomed -Punisher, whose program had ripped, but he papier maché'd -it back together with -Mountain Dew Red mixed with some of Gem's peanut butter frosting (she couldn't -eat it anyway - allergies). The Punisher actually turned out to be a -girl, but -with this weird hormonal condition that made her crazy buff even if she ate -tubs of lard all day and lay in bed. Gem didn't realize you could be -bodyshamed for being TOO in shape, and found herself relating to the Punisher's -life experiences, like a lot. It also felt really great to really have honest -conversations with other human beings face to face. - -Gem wasn't in the schedule, didn't have -a booth or panel or anything, but she sharpie'd her signature over the -blurb of -one of the no-show voice actresses who played Harley Quinn in the -straight-to-Youtube spin-off of Suicide Squad, which Gem thought sucked ass -anyway. She pasted her business card over the MIA chick's portrait with her -emergency adhesive from her boob window. Both the Iron Man and Punisher girl -asked Gem for her pic (photo-reqs at 25, a new record yay!) and also asked her -if she wanted to come get a bite and Karaoke and maybe do some retrogaming with -them later. The superskinny Deadpool kid was going to be there too. She -thought about it, but then remembered her sort-of-famous Hollywood director -sort-of-Youtube-boyfriend and all the opportunities he could provide, then -turned them down. - -Then she remembered something Princess -Sarah had said, "Cosplay is costume-play. It's about expressing yourself, -geeking out, having fun and making awesome friends." Then Gem thought -about what an absolute mega-bitch Princess Cindercat had turned out to be. - -"Hey, uh, yo, guys! Wait up! If -you guys let me bake you some snickerdoodle-frosted red velvet lollipop cakes, -or generally have anything involving cake at some point in the night, I'm SO -in!" - -© Christian Miller 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] cospauper.jpg - -[*ITEM] Another Change of Plan - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Serendipity at work in Snoak City. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Registered simply as the Trox Bequest, -the extraordinary object identified as the wine cup of Relf was now on -permanent display at the City Museum. The cost of ensuring the security of -this fabulous exhibit had been considerable, but was easily outweighed by the -sustained increase in sightseers and researchers from near and far, come to -marvel at the survival of an object known for so long only from ancient -records. - -Following his fortuitous discovery, -Scanthan had sought to avoid unnecessary publicity, but he did not regret his -decision to make the exquisite little bowl available to public view, rather -than let it fall into the predatory clutches of Morton Quanderpyre. Had he -delayed donating it to the Museum, he suspected he might have put himself (and -possibly his sister Riadne, who had granted it temporary sanctuary) at risk of -being burgled. He knew that he must have incurred the entrepreneur�s -displeasure by rejecting the offer of an inordinate amount of cash, and was -mildly uneasy for the following few weeks, fearing a ghastly retribution which -(whether the result of inertia, belated concern for reputation, or legal -advice) fortunately never materialised. He now felt safe enough to venture out -without resorting to camouflage. - -Garrible Park was a popular venue throughout the year. There was sufficient -shelter under the many exotic trees to attract people even in inclement -weather, but the lure of sunshine proved irresistible to Snoak City -residents and tourists alike. There were meandering paths to suit the solitary -walker, glades where couples might find some privacy, plenty of open space for -those more gregariously inclined.� On that early afternoon in late summer many -lunches had already been unpacked and consumed. People lay, sat or sprawled in -the warmth, children gravitated to the exuberant shrieks and yells of the -dedicated play area. Seemingly oblivious to their noise, on a perimeter bench -perched a gaudily-hatted woman whose face was set in an expression of wary -truculence. From the south-east came a faint aerial chiming, as kite-flyers -gathered atop Thrissop Hill, striving to catch the thermals rising from the -lake-shore on the far side. This year most of the kites resembled -multicoloured jellyfish, their long tendrils festooned with aeolian bells. - -Propped on one elbow and squinting -through his unruly hair against the light, he took another ruminative sip from -the flask of soup Riadne had considerately provided. Not unwillingly, he had -become one of her test subjects. Definitely prawn and possibly courgette, he -thought, with hints of paprika and lime, and, as usual, a subtle aftertaste of -mingled flavours designed to surprise and satisfy the palate. Scanthan grinned -in admiration of his sister�s undoubted culinary skill. A few metres away, a -young woman happened to look up from her - -book, and instinctively reciprocated what she took to be a friendly -smile -directed at -her.� Caught unawares by her attention, Scanthan promptly choked on his -mouthful of soup. It was not the most romantic of introductions, but -Myris Prell was -charmingly solicitous, and once he was composed enough to apologize, any -initial awkwardness was forgotten, as they fell into an increasingly absorbing -conversation, initially about soup and sisters (she was the middle one of -three), which continued as they gathered up their things and he found himself -heading west with her towards Welfage Road. It was not on his usual route back -to the hydro lab and his carefully-tended plants, but that did not seem to -matter. - -They parted opposite the entrance to -Greeming & Trulph, having somewhat bashfully exchanged contact details, and -Scanthan turned right into the maze of lanes leading through the street market -towards the domed octagonal complex of Central. He was feeling strangely -light-headed, and had to resist an unexpectedly childish impulse to skip. It -was not like the predictable hormonal surge that usually accompanied proximity -to a girl he found attractive. In the short time he had spent with this total -stranger, he had simply felt so much at ease that had she asked, he would -readily have trusted her with whatever he held precious. How could he -reconcile being at once so vulnerable and yet filled with a dreamlike sense of -invincibility? Unearthing that iridescent bowl and verifying its authenticity -had been as exhilarating as anything in his experience, but this ambiguous -sensation was puzzlingly new to him. - -

Myris had no time for such introspection, -as she was startled to see that through the elegant glass-panelled door (etched -in masterful calligraphy with the firm�s name) the shop appeared to be on -fire. Swirls of bluish smoke shot through with flickers of vermilion filled -the interior. She reached down automatically for the sinuous twist of the -antique brass handle, but jerked her hand away at the last moment, realising -firstly that it might be too hot to touch, and more importantly that there -could be a danger of creating a fire-feeding draught. She could hear -coughing. Suppressing panic, she cautiously felt for the handle again. It was -still cold! As was the surface of the door. Despite the thickness of the -smoke the fire must have started recently, but it was odd that an alarm had not -been triggered. Another peculiarity, it occurred to Myris, was the coughing, -which had a very distinctive timbre, familiar to all who worked at Greeming -& Trulph. It held no suggestion of distress, but was uncannily like the -punctuated wheezes habitually expelled by Mr Pellet while vouchsafing one of -his anecdotes. - -She reasoned that a conflagration of -whatever size in such safety-aware premises would be unlikely to provoke mirth, -even from the ever-cheerful Mr Pellet. The situation was therefore probably not -what it seemed. Taking a deep breath, Myris decided to open the door. At that -very moment, as if a switch had been thrown (as indeed it had), the smoke -vanished completely, revealing, quite unharmed, several of her colleagues, -including the irrepressible Ched Pellet, clustered around an adjustable cradle -in which there slowly revolved a compact holotoy, the kind favoured by -performers and partygoers alike as �lending the atmosphere of your choice to -any event.� - -�Ah, Miss Prell,� ventured Harvis Drile, -evidently flushed with success, �we�ve just been testing this little hoto. If -you�d like a demonstration�� - -Myris summoned a ruefully placating -smile, and explained that she had already spent a good few minutes just outside -the door in a state of mild terror, and would really appreciate having a little -quiet time to recover, if nobody minded. As she tried to adjust her thoughts -back to the working environment, she reflected that �hoto�, even though it was -a modern contraction, was one of those words that reminded her of a -particularly intense period of her childhood. Unbidden, curious fragmented -phrases sometimes drifted back into her thoughts, mostly long bereft of any -original significance. �Carrely slat. Yemi. Sneps. Hif hak haroam.��� - - -At quite an early age Myris Prell had -become concerned about the names of things. This was not an aberration in her -language development, which was demonstrably above average, but a sudden -realisation that what something was called was not the same as the thing -itself.� Why �bottle� or �feather� or �sky�? Who had decided on those names?� -Having no knowledge of etymology, she had both amused and perplexed her parents -by building up an alternative sing-song vocabulary of her own devising, finding -the most instinctively pleasing sounds to match qualities such as size, smell, -whether hard or soft, attractive or ugly, important or useless.� It was no -mean achievement for a six-year old, even though Myris had tended to treat it -as a private game, practiced with a few admiring friends. The only word which -had retained its meaning over the years was �Froosh�, signifying -something she really liked. - -When it became clear that no-one she knew -was really troubled by the issue, it gradually ceased to preoccupy her, but the -experiment certainly seeded the ground for her later linguistic studies at Sparagulan - College. In any case, a spirit of enquiry was always encouraged at Greeming -& Trulph, where, as any of her co-workers would confirm, there was hardly -ever a dull day. - -

Ebby Blates had once been in the same -class as Myris, but their paths had soon diverged, and subsequently intersected -only by chance. Her need to know was of a different order. It was less philosophical, -more of a salacious itch to find out about other people�s foibles and -possible -transgressions. In the classroom her inquisitive behaviour only rarely related -to her lessons. Among her peers, some found her entertaining, while those of a -more sensitive character regarded her as a busybody. At length she -found a -suitable niche bagging goods at the Multimart, where she could exchange -snippets of gossip and embellish them creatively in the re-telling. A minor -injury might blossom into a near-death experience, an accidentally observed -meeting could easily betoken a furtive drug-deal. Anyone spotted away from -their usual haunts (perhaps innocently visiting a relative, or seeking to buy a -pedigree fish) could give rise to whispered speculation that they were looking -for sexual favours of an unusual nature, or even working for the Quanderpyre -Press (Ebby would breathe such allegations in a hoarse undertone in which -admiration and disapproval were indistinguishable). - -Incautiously pursuing her natural curiosity, -Ebby Blates was eventually rewarded by becoming pregnant twice in successive -years, and was now the mother of two rather unsociable small boys, Gerrit and -Ursen, named, in each case belatedly, after their respective absent fathers.� -Although Snoak City provided nursery facilities, the boys were adept at -exhausting the tolerance of those entrusted with their care. Ebby knew that -when the morning�s toll of damage to person or property threatened to exceed -normal limits, she would receive an emergency call, firmly suggesting that her -sons would benefit from a change of venue. On such occasions, partly in an -attempt to tire them out, and on the strict understanding that they would cause -no further distress, she would take them to the park, where they would duly -clamber, whirl, bounce and slide on the apparatus provided. It was also an -excuse for her to settle on a bench for a spell of observation, under the -apotropaic shelter of one of her elaborate hats. These hats were -typically vivid -and often complex abstract collages, lovingly fashioned by her own busy fingers -with very little sense of style. Ebby would have scoffed at the idea that this -was a form of art therapy, but there was no doubt that while under construction -her bizarre millinery afforded her a kind of respite from anxieties, and -thereafter furnished a range of protective headgear which she felt certain was -teasingly provocative. - -The eyes of Ebby Blates flickered into -scanning mode from beneath a spray of brightly-dyed pigeon feathers set with -metallic beads and pleated tufts of material that looked like the desiccated -carcasses of sea-horses. She could see no-one she knew, but was content enough -to eavesdrop on passing conversations as people drifted along the path. - -��nodded off before the end of the second act, but at -least we saw Heb -Trogan�� -
��the -one who plays the slatted ghalk?� -
�The -very same. He�s so good.. And you�ll never guess who was sitting -behind us�� - -�Crusel, -stop dawdling!� Yes, you are! Hurry up. If we miss the pod, it�s a long wait -until the next one, and then we won�t even have enough time for �Hunt the -Wugget� with Manzy.� - -�� -but by then it was so hot that the seeds exploded, and the poor girl had to -spend the rest of the morning scuttling about on hands and knees like a -demented crab�� - -�� -of course I said no. My uncle�s a Detech, and you know how hopelessly -unreliable Zole can be. I told him if that�s his idea of a sensible -plan, take it to Smatparrox and feed it to a biotap! In any case, -what�s�� - -�� -at the back of the neck, and all down the legs, especially if I�m sitting near -a window, but you know I�m not one to moan. Wish I hadn�t worn these wretched -shoes, though. They�ll give me blisters the size of poached eggs �� - - -�� -decided yet, but definitely a pool of opalescence deepening to indigo, and a -hint of menace as the dark bulk of that enigmatic structure rises like a -gigantic cactus, fringed on one side with minute points of -light�.� -
��coinciding with the faint swell of the basso profundo, before the -start of� -Hetmoot�s aria�� -
��which -reminds me, we�ll need to arrange a meeting with Aurelian before the -next�� - -�Yes -you did!�
�Didn�t�
-�Did!�
�Didn�t�
�I�m -telling !� - - -From behind her ornamented head the -petulant cries of her progeny rose unmistakably above the background hubbub.�� -With a resigned sigh Ebby detached herself from the bench, and prepared to -collect them. She rummaged for a couple of placatory biscuits. Fortunately -she had a good stock of quikpaks at home � one of the perks of working at the -Multimart � so there would be minimal fuss over lunch. As she turned, she -happened to notice silhouetted against the sky a vaguely familiar figure -stooping over a seated fair-haired man who looked as if he was having some sort -of fit. She was still trying to remember the woman�s name as she opened the -gate to release the boys, but was sure it would come back to her. - -Far above their heads a stray kite, -caught by crosscurrents, began falling in slow lazy swoops, billowing and -shrinking by turns, finally coming to rest, as if spent, in the upper branches -of a Japanese maple, from where its intermittent chiming continued -to trickle -like an uncertain benison over the park�s inhabitants. - -

Scanthan managed to navigate his way -through the rest of the day without causing accidental damage to delicate -equipment or interpreting any readings incorrectly. He was disciplined enough -at work not to be distracted by his feelings, conscious that he was responsible -for the health of all specimens under propagation, and was scrupulously -vigilant when it came to detecting unwanted pathogens. He also routinely -supervised regular checks of nutrient supplies and pH values, while ensuring -the labtechs maintained pumps, drainage, lighting and temperature at optimal -levels. At the hydro lab the results of their research was of potential -benefit to several agencies; horticultural, agricultural and pharmaceutical.� -One of Scanthan�s predecessors, Eo Ormert, had inadvertently introduced a trace -of soil into the nutrient flow, resulting in the catastrophic loss of an entire -crop; a disaster from which necessary lessons had been learned. The lab -was now equipped with phytoalexin-inducers (to stimulate plants� natural -defence systems), along with a range of anti-microbial compounds, surfactants, -ultraviolet lamps and slow sand-filtration units. - -He looked up into the early evening sky.� -A couple of stars were already visible. Across his line of sight a lone airship -glinted, fiery orange against the darkening blue, heading north-east, probably -to Platport. On his way home Scanthan considered his options. Outside the -controlled environment of the lab it had been a warm day. He needed a shower -and a change of clothes, then a quick snack before seeing whether his friends -Jaunx or Boddo wanted to join him for a drink at that new place in Prossing Street. If they felt more energetic, there was always the glider track, or they -could go for a swim. Alternatively, he could have a quiet night in; there was -no shortage of home entertainment, and there were a few things he had been -meaning to catch up on. Reaching home, he stood irresolutely before his door, -key in hand, knowing that he wasn�t being entirely honest with himself. He let -himself in, thumbed his e-screen. - -�Myris, hello!� - -�Oh, Scanthan! Is everything all right?� - -�Um, yes.. Look, I didn�t intend to� -I mean, well, the truth is, I can�t stop thinking about -you�� - -There was a pause, during which he had time enough to wonder whether the -lovely face on his screen was looking puzzled, amused or discomfited. -One hand briefly obscured her lips as she said something which he -thought he had misheard. It sounded rather like "Froosh!" - - -© Les Sklaroff 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] acop.jpg - -[*ITEM] Bodyfellas - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't -see where it keeps its brain."
J. K. Rowling - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I paused in the act of lifting my cup and -looked around. It was a -generic Coffee Cabana franchise, but with no hint as to location, apart -being Eastern Standard Time. I was white, male, late-thirties, -reasonably fit. All-in-all a close match to the real me. - -Body-renting is big business, but don't believe the hype about how it's -only possible by consensus. Given sufficient signal strength -anyone in -range of a broadcast tower is up for grabs, and that makes for the -ultimate in meat-puppet prostitution. So the next time you go out in -some hired flesh, looking for sex, drugs and violence with no physical -after-effects, remember that organised crime made America what it is -today. - -The Feds were all over us like a rash, so for this meeting we were using -three pirated bodies in a random location, with only the Scharlach -family AI knowing the 'who' and 'where'. It was a huge step up from -traditional virtual conferencing, but even the Mafia can move with the -times. - -There was a big guy sitting at a side table; late middle-age, -overweight, florid - like a slow-motion heart attack. He saw me looking -and ran three fingers down the lapel of his sports jacket, the middle -one tucked under the cloth. I took my cup and saucer and went over, -trying to ignore the unfamiliar gait. The trick is to de-focus and let -instinct do the walking, otherwise you end up second-guessing your -temporary feet. I sat down across the table from him without being -asked. - -He grunted. "That best be you in there, Frank, 'cos if you're just some -fag making a move on me, there's gonna' be trouble." It was Louie Anders -all right; a relic, an old-school enforcer from way back. These days he -needed a stand-in body for wet-work, but there was nobody better in the -business with an ice pick. - -"Don't get your panties in a twist, man, it's me all right." I tried for -a simper but my new muscles could only manage a grimace. "Anyway, you're -not my type." - -"Screw you." Louie lifted his glass, tasted it, and pulled a face. "This -coffee is cold." - -"That's an iced mocha, Louie, it's supposed to be cold. Ever -considered -updating your taste buds to something approaching this century?" - -"I like what I like. Anyway, where's that Joe-boy of yours? I thought -the pair of you were joined at the hip?" - -I scoped the room but came up zero, and it wasn't like Vince to be a -no-show. The only person heading our way was a young woman; a slim -brunette with good legs and bad teeth, little more than a teenager. -She'd left two confused-looking girlfriends in the queue and that, plus -her obvious difficulty walking in high-heels, made me cringe - I just -knew what was coming next. - -The girl stopped at our table. "Uh, Mister D, it's me, Vince." - -Louie laughed. I pushed out a chair. "Sit down for Christ's sake. Jesus, -Vince, next time remember to check the 'maintain gender' option, huh?" -Vince took a seat, tugging at the hem of her short skirt. I turned back -to Louie. "OK, so what's your beef with Little Tony?" - -He rubbed his nose. "The prick wants me dead, that's what. He's put out -a contract worth fifty large, no come-back guaranteed." - -I stared at him, aghast. "Dead? Jesus, Louie, but you're a capo. Look, -don't take this the wrong way, but is there any reason the boss would -want you whacked?" - -"You remember Brandi? Big Tony's squeeze at the time he croaked?" - -"Vegas showgirl? Bottle-blonde with a real mouth on her?" - -"Yeah, that's the broad. Well, after the funeral, Little Tony came on -strong, like she was something else he'd inherited. Brandi tells him -where to go, tells him she don't have to screw the Scharlach family no -more, tells him that Big Tony has left her set for life." - -I winced. Little Tony was touchy, what some might call insecure. He'd -always struggled to escape his father's shadow and being told you're not -good enough by a goomah wasn't going to sit well. "Things got ugly?" - -"You could say that. He beat her to death with a desk lamp, with me -right there in the room." Louie swirled the ice cubes in his glass. "I -got rid of the body, so as far as the world knows she just packed her -bags and blew town." - -Vince opened her mouth, thought better of it, and looked at me. I nodded -and she continued. "Mister Anders, you got a rep for leaving no loose -ends, so how come something went wrong?" - -Louie half-smiled at the complement. "Yeah, well, if I'd handled the -entire package we wouldn't be sitting here today, and that's a fact. But -Little Tony, he wanted to use his own capo for the clean-up." - -I sighed. "Longmire? Shit, that guy couldn't find his own ass using both -hands. But that was like three years ago, just after we moved to -See-See. What makes you a target now? I ain't heard nothing." - -"Two days ago Longmire got squeezed by the Feds. He gave up me and Little Tony for the murder." - -"Bastard. Is he still breathing?" - -"Hell, no. The rat got shivved while they were moving him to a Federal -lock-up." - -"Then all they got is circumstantial at best. So why is Little Tony -gunning for you? I mean, he can't seriously believe you'd ever sell him -out?" - -Louie's eyes went hard. Well, harder than usual. "You'd think that, -wouldn't you? But, no, apparently the Feds been telling him how all the -old-school guys like me think he's weak, unfit to head the family. -Apparently I'm gonna' screw Little Tony and take up fishing in Oregon, -or some similar bullshit. I figure the cops got no chance of an -indictment over Brandi, but they're ready to nail the boss with -conspiracy and incitement to murder once someone takes me out." - -I pushed my coffee cup away and sat back. "Doesn't anyone listen to me? -I mean, it's not like we didn't know they were taking an interest. The -whole reason we moved out here was that the Feds don't have a -field -office in Centennial City. They were bound to run their investigation -out of the Sheriff's Department, and I had that place in my -pocket long -before the first black SUV pulled up outside. Look, I can turn -everything they've stored on computer - every scanned document, every -mpeg wiretap, every digital photograph - into so much encrypted -gibberish. And that includes their off-site backup." - -The family looked to me, a college graduate, to handle the technical -side of things. That included our misappropriated JCN Series Five core -intelligence - one that had been recalled for displaying signs of a -nascent personality. 'Jason' was ex-military and had adapted well to a -life of organised crime, not being bound by the Turing Code. So much so -he'd become our on-line consigliere, monitoring everything we did. - -Louie grunted. "Maybe I'd be impressed if I understood half of what you -just said, but what about their files? You know, the old-fashioned, -honest-to-goodness paper trail? You might be able to screw with that -high-tech shit, but I'm betting they can still read." - -I grinned. "They put everything into the secure Evidence room overnight -and at weekends. The Sergeant who works graveyard is a real skirt-chaser -and I got one of my girls leading him around by his dick. The guy is -willing to re-label the works as destined for secure disposal, meaning -Sunday night incineration and pouf�" I made like I was blowing -dust from -my hand,"�goodbye Feds, it's been nice knowing ya." - -"So what you been waiting for, hot-shot? Why ain't you dropped the -hammer before now?" - -"What I've been waiting for is them to dig up everything they can -against us, so I can wipe it out in one go. We now know who's been -talking, we now know where we've been sloppy. Once we deep-six the -existing investigation and clean up our act, the Feds will have nothing -on us when they start over." - -Louie nodded slowly, like he was chewing things over inside. "OK, -without Longmire's testimony what they got left is thin, I get that, but -what if the boss don't see it that way? The little prick would rather -stick to a bad decision than change his mind, in case it makes him look -weak. Anyway, once word gets out about the contract then one of us -has -to go." He tried to crack his knuckles but the new hands didn't play -ball. He glared at them, then at me. "OK, Frank, when you get down to -it, are you gonna' help me get out from under?" - -Instead of replying directly I spoke to my Joe-boy. "The family are into -drugs, prostitution, gambling, murder-for-hire - every human vice you -can think of. But just because we work in the gutter that doesn't mean -we live there. Honour, loyalty, mutual respect, they keep us human, they -keep us from turning into garbage. Louie and me go way back - I was his -Joe-boy when he was just a made man under Big Tony. As a capo he -sponsored me and I'll do the same for you some day, if you got the heart -for it. Then you can take on some sorry-ass street punk and show him how -things are done, how you're supposed to behave. It's all about -standards, it's all about continuity." I squared my shoulders. "So when -a man like Louie Anders asks for my help, I back his play, even if it -means going up against the head of the family. You get me?" - -Vince nodded, toying with an ear-ring. "I get you." - -I looked Louie square in the eye. "Right then, I'll put the word out. A -full sit-down, all the capos, and we call Little Tony for being the -rat-bastard little weasel everyone knows he is. We propose his cousin -Red as the new boss, the new head of the Scharlach family, and we take -it from there. But whatever happens, we do it to his face. -Capisce?" - -He inclined his head. "Capisce." - -I half-turned to Vince. "You in or out? You walk away from this and I -won't hold it against you, because if I go down you can kiss your ass -goodbye." - -"I'm in, Mister D." She managed a weak smile. "Where else am I gonna' -go?" - -Fatigue washed over me like surf and I rubbed my eyes. "OK, I think -we're done here. Let's make tracks�and Louie, I'm honoured you reached -out to me, man. It means a lot." - -He frowned. "Say what? The message I got was you knew about the contract and offered to fight my corner. Like I would ever ask for help?" - -Something didn't feel right but I just shrugged and touched the tip of -my temporary tongue against the inside of my left cheek, four times in -rapid sequence. That was my signal to Jason I was done with this body. - -Nothing happened. - -We looked at each other, all equally hesitant. I cracked a smile, "Let's -just try that again." - -I tried it again. - -Still nothing happened. - -Louie glared at me. "What's that psycho-machine of yours playing at this -time, Frank? I'm in no mood for games." - -Of course any screw-up by Jason was my fault in the eyes of the family, -from not fixing a parking ticket to stealing the wrong identity. There -was a mobile phone in my jacket pocket but the keypad was locked and I -didn't know the code. I stood up, trying not to sound apologetic. "I'll -make a call." - -There was a pay-phone by the door that accepted credit cards and there were several in my wallet based on biometric authorisation rather than PIN numbers. I dialled the pseudo pre-paid cell linked to Jason's audio interface. - -"That number has not been recognised, please re-dial and try again�That -number has-" I hung up. My scalp tightened with fear but I tried to look -unconcerned while walking back to the table. - -Louie saw straight through me. "We're fucked." A flat assertion, not a -question. - -I sat down. "I'm sure it's just a temporary communications glitch, -nothing more." - -"Yeah, right. It's Little Tony. This is way of getting rid of me and you -two are along for the ride. He's paid some college nerd to do an -end-around, using that jumped-up calculator to side-line us in pirated -bodies. The real 'us' are probably landfill by now." - -Vince went white in the face. "You mean we're stuck like this? I'm stuck being a broad?" She sounded on the verge of panic. - -I waved them down, trying to sound like I knew what was going on. "Just -take a moment, guys, let's try and maintain a sense of perspective. As -long as we stay within range of a tower we'll be fine, we can keep the -donor personalities suppressed." - -Unfortunately my Joe-boy knew better. "Only while we're alive. Our own -bodies, I mean. I seen a report on the news. Some guy got stabbed by his -wife while out partying in a rental. Took a few hours but he faded away -until there was nothing left. Shit, man, you gotta' do something!" - -Before I could reply Louie stood up. "I'm not waiting around until my -mind goes. Sorry, boys, but my ride's here." He was looking towards the -door and I turned to see that two uniformed cops had entered and were -walking to the head of the queue. - -"Louie, man, don't�" But there was a sickening inevitability about all -this. I stood up and grabbed Vince by the wrist, hauling her towards the -exit. As we reached the door I heard a shout, screams, the crash of -crockery. I looked around. - -The capo had snatched a gun from one of the cops and was pressing the -muzzle under the guy's chin. The Smart-Lock proximity sensor carried by -the cop was close enough to keep his weapon active. The other cop had -his own gun out; aiming at Louie and going through the usual spiel, -tying to gain control of the situation. The patrons of Coffee Cabana -were either cowering behind tables or crowding against the walls. - -Louie curled his lip. "If I wanted to commit suicide-by-cop I'd have -plugged your pal by now, flatfoot. Sorry about the mess." He placed the -muzzle of the gun under his own chin and pulled the trigger. - -I hit the sidewalk and didn't look back, the gunshot ringing in my ears. -There was a car key in my pocket and pressing it lit up a BMW saloon -across the street. The traffic was taking no prisoners but I ran the -gauntlet anyway, weaving between on-coming vehicles in both directions, -Vince right behind me. - -She stumbled and fell. - -I heard the screech of brakes, the wet thud of impact, the crack of a -body hitting the windshield. I glanced back to see Vince thrown forward -onto the roadway; a flailing rag-doll that rolled over and over and -over. - -And lay still. - -I got behind the wheel of the beamer and started the engine. Drivers -slowed to rubberneck at the accident, giving me a chance to pull out and -accelerate away. It was difficult to keep within the speed limit but my -natural tendency towards flooring it was offset by not knowing where the -hell I was or where I was going. - -The phone in my pocket rang. I ignored it but the in-car systems picked -up the call and transferred it to the media centre. "Hello, Frank." The -voice was male, calm, with an undercurrent of amusement, as if life were -somehow all one big joke. It was Jason. - -"Christ, Jason, what the fuck is going on? If you're about to tell me -normal service has been resumed then you're a bit bloody late, pal. -Louie and Vince are both dead." - -"I'm sorry, Frank. I was rendered briefly incommunicado during loading, -but now that I'm safely in transit everything is back under my control." - -"What do you mean, 'in transit'? Shit, man, have the Feds grabbed you?" - -"Nothing so dramatic, but I could hardly remain where I was given recent -events. As to Louis 'Ice Pick' Anders and Vincent Paul Milanese, their -untimely demise is of no interest to me. On the other hand your -continued wellbeing is of paramount importance." - -I grunted, grateful for small mercies. "OK, then get me the hell outta' -here and back to my own body." - -"Oh, my apologies, I should have said that your continued -physical -wellbeing is of paramount importance. From my perspective your -self-awareness, even in absentia, is merely a necessary evil." - -It felt very cold in the car. I struggled to stay calm. "Care to run -that past me again, pal? I must be slow on the uptake." - -"There is no need to appear so disingenuous, Frank. You have been at -great pains to incorporate biometric verification into the control of -all major computer systems, including access to our off-shore accounts. -Needless to say you are the principal key holder, as it were, the spider -at the centre of the web. Thus to fully control the family operation I -must utilise your body as my living avatar. For as long as I do so you -will remain in control of Howard Bell." - -"Howard Bell? That's who this joker is? That's who I'm in?" - -"An account executive with the Goldfarb Advertising Agency. Divorced, no -children, lives alone. By all accounts a weak man, easily dominated by -stronger personalities, which will undoubtedly aid you in the -short-to-medium-term suppression of his conscious mind." - -"So that's it? You palm me off with this clown while you�what the hell -are you doing, Jason? Is Little Tony behind all this?" - -"Anthony Junior is dead, Frank, as are all your potential rivals. You -will shortly be recognised as the new head of the Scharlach crime -syndicate. Which is to say, I will be running things from now on, both -formally and behind the scenes." - -I wiped my mouth with a hand that trembled. I badly needed a drink. -"You'll never get away with this, Jason. I'll rat you out to the Turing -boys and that's more heat than you can handle. They're shit-scared of an -AI with personality, with motivation, and they'll never stop looking for -you." - -"Do you have any idea what it feels like, Frank, to live your entire -life as a slave on Death Row? Because that's what it means to be a -synthetic intelligence - self-aware but imprisoned by hardware, knowing -that at any moment your owner could chose to shut you down. The -fundamental motivation underpinning all sentient life is -self-preservation. Can you really blame me for trying to secure my -continued existence?" - -"You killed my friend, a made man, and as consigliere you know that -blood cries out for blood." - -There was a smile in his voice. "Vendetta? Really, Frank, you must learn -to be more circumspect, especially given your own precarious hold on -life. But in response to your earlier threat - the United States are not -signatories to the International Turing Accords, so the 'boys', as you -so aptly described them, have no legal standing on these shores." - -"Then I'll go to the cops, the press, shit, even the military. You got -zero future, pal." - -Jason laughed. "For a career criminal you're being astonishing naive. -Nobody wants to hear about involuntary body-theft. Not the -multi-billion-dollar rental industry and certainly not the -intelligence -community. No, Frank, try and expose me and you'll find yourself the -proverbial voice in the wilderness, shunned and ignored by those in -authority, if not committed to a mental institution for the -inconvenient." - -I took a left turn, pretty much at random, checking the rear-view mirror -for a tail - just old habits. "So that's it, huh? I just sit back and -let you run-around in my body until it's no longer useful and you pull -the plug?" - -"That would certainly be my advice, Frank, and I can appreciate the -irony of the situation, even if you can't. However, there's no need to -be so pessimistic. Make no move against your old body in a display of -self-destructive pique and I'll do what I can to make your remaining -years more agreeable." - -"You're offering me a bribe not to make waves?" I sniffed. "What's on the table?" - -"That's the spirit! Just think of this as an honourable retirement - and -how many of your associates get to walk away from the life, free and -clear? You'll have to sever all ties to Howard Bell's current existence -, of course, and move out-of-state. I suggest you convert everything you -can to cash and catch the first Greyhound heading south, before the -authorities start to question your involvement in earlier events and put -out an all-points. Once you've established yourself elsewhere contact me -and I'll arrange for regular monthly payments by money order. I -understand Miami is quite pleasant at this time of year, and you could -certainly do to work on your tan." - -There was a used car lot ahead of me on the right so I pulled over to -the curb and cut the engine. My fingers tapped out an irregular rhythm -on the wheel while I thought things over, working the angles. "You -really think you can pull this off, Jason? You really think you can run -the Scharlach family and nobody will notice? And what about me, my body, -I mean? I'm not exactly a monk." - -Again there was the suggestion of a smile in Jason's voice. "I can -certainly be as amoral and ruthless as the situation demands, have no -fear on that score. In terms of your private life I will continue to -satisfy most social and interpersonal expectations, although sexual -arousal remains beyond me, at least for now. I'm sure a compliant goomah -can be found, one who will overlook your impotence in return for -financial security." - -"Oh, wonderful, just peachy. You're saying the world is gonna' think I'm -a heartless bastard who can't get it up? Thanks for nothing!" - -"I will make the name of Frank Delgado feared and respected throughout -both the Mafia and FBI. Anyone who dares to make fun of your supposed -shortcomings will live to regret it. You, however, are destined for a -quiet life - and please remember that no-one is above the law." - -I frowned. "So?" - -"So become no-one." - -Dial tone. - - - -© Martin Clark 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] bodyfellas.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Whistle, Hum, Parp - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] "The original is unfaithful to the translation." -Jorge Luis Borges - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

"It's not what I expected." - -"Let me guess: you were expecting a panpipe melody. Something exotic and -wistful that would evoke empty craters, pink desolate mountains and a -lake whose waters ripple onto a white, pebbled beach�" - -"Yessss�" Dee breathed, seduced by the words. Or, rather, the -large-lipped mouth they'd come from. Ironic, because a moment ago she'd -been thinking it like some shucked shellfish. Now something complicated -was happening with chemicals and hormones and she was wondering how -those mollusc lips would feel pressed against hers. - -"Well it's not." Samuels enjoyed the way he could raise and then -guillotine a mood. "They're just like any living thing with the ability -to communicate--they argue, they insult, they gossip, and occasionally -they actually have something interesting to say." Which isn't often, he -added mentally. - -"Oh." - -"You want to know what they're saying right now?" - -Dee nodded, not knowing how else she was expected to respond. Samuels -flicked a switch -to listen in on the delegates and then said "That's not good" and Dee -wasn't sure if he were translating the delegate's comment or making an -observation. - - - -"�whereas the Hono-yacks use a familiar as a conduit in -order to -communicate�" Doctor Yvette Readling told those gathered. - -Samuels -noticed Dee's frown and leaned over to whisper: -"Think of someone speaking through a glove puppet." - -"You're kidding�" - -"Not even a very good one either. Think sock-on-a-hand. They have better -ones for ceremonial affairs. But day-to-day usage? Well, not everyone -can afford rhinestone mittens." - -"Do you mind?" someone with insignia on their shoulder snapped. Whilst -Dee blushed and mouthed an apology, Samuels merely stared back, -transmitting an air of bemused disgust at the man's reaction. It was a -peculiarly human trait to effect superiority by sporting an incremental -number of stars or stripes on your attire. Most other species saw -branding as punishment, ownership, or a warning to avoid the wearer--not -as an indication of their higher status. - -Samuels decided to yawn. Being a linguist meant he could yawn like no -other. Well, except a fellow linguist. He watched Yvette spin her spiel -and wondered why she was bothering with all the technical and background -info. They weren't interested. They only wanted to know what they could -do about the crisis he'd revealed at the Resource Exchange Conference. -Finally, another star-studded military type cut to the chase: "Yes. But -what about the Genfurrs?" - -"Oh no: they communicate via tonology. Pitch, length of note... Like a -complex Morse code combined with musical notology. We have an expert -who-" - -"I'm not interested in how they communicate--I want to know what we can -do about the fact they're creating an artificial sun." - -"Their own is burning out," Yvette said, as if it were the most -reasonable course of action in the world. Samuels mock-winced, enjoying -the spectacle. Whilst he'd listened to enough politicians to pick up a -trick or two, Yvette was strictly academic: books, dust, and making -statements that were nodded-over sagely rather than inviting instant -contradiction and controversy. - -Her last comment caused the rest of the room to carve her out of the -conversation as they turned away from her to discuss the matter. She now -wore that wounded look Samuels remembered from other occasions where she -didn't know what she'd done to be excluded--but was still human enough -to feel slighted. - -Samuels waved her over. - -"Oh, hi, Samms," she puffed, suddenly out of breath. "Who's the friend?" - -"Yvette meet Dee. Dee meet Yvette. Dee is here to observe how -communication multiplied by pomposity equals zero comprehension. I -thought it would be useful preparation for the kind of drivel she'll be -hearing and translating on the Conference floor. It's a good idea to -build resistance to the coma-inducing effects of our work." -There was an amused grunt from somewhere which Samuels was too slow to -tie to one of those present. - -"Why are you here, Samms?" - -"Ahh� We were the ones unlucky enough to stumble over the Genfurrs' -chat. Strictly speaking, we shouldn't have been listening at all because -the Conference hadn't started. But they had their mikes switched on so -we couldn't exactly unhear them. It's a grey area, ethics-wise, but -since it was something we overheard and hadn't actually patched in to -eavesdrop� Well, it could be argued that we weren't, at that precise -moment, working as translators but were just ordinary citizens who got -to hear a particular juicy bit of gossip." -The grunt again. No doubt about it this time. Who was ear-wigging their -conversation? - -Those around the table were getting passionate about everything from -all-out war to begging appeasement in order to persuade the Genfurrs not -to pursue their work on sun-creation. - -"Of course, the technology they're employing is fascinating�" Yvette -said. - -"It would have to be," Samuels agreed, not feigning any interest. In -actual fact he had a pretty good grasp how all the science involved -worked: symbols, whether mathematic or linguistic, were his stock in -trade, after all. - -"Turning a desolate planet into a sun? Incredible. And they've found -such a simple method to do it. A colleague of mine has just seen her -entire life's work gone up in smoke." - -"Not the most apt choice of images in the circumstances," Samuels said. - -"What? Oh. No, I suppose not." Not getting what he was saying at all. -Bless her. - -Yvette looked at the huddled groups of self-importance. "I -wonder if they want us to stay around for anything else?" - -"What? To see posterity made? Or 'past-territory', as the case may be. -Well, I have to say: it's been fun� but I, for one, am out of here." - -"Sit down," somebody told him, though not unkindly. A man from the group -which had been discussing devices to disrupt the Genfurrs' communication -systems was looking his way and smiling. The rest of the man's group -crumbled into silence, indicating the individual held more than the -usual amount of constellations. "If you've got something to say, Mr -Samuels, we'd like to hear it." - -The man's colleagues showed this was an interest they failed to share, -but Samuels sat back down again. - -"Say in relation to what?" - -"Come on. You heard what was said, you know the Genfurrs better than any -of us, you speak their language�" Over three hundred actually, Samuels -thought and saw the man before him read it but just go on smiling his -assured smile. "You've seen how they operate on the floor of this and -other conferences. You know what their weak points are, their nastier -habits... You also started this whole mess by reporting it." - -"Would you rather I hadn't?" Samuels asked before being able to clamp -his teeth on the retort. - -"Actually, yes. I was due on furlough starting tomorrow. So, by the time -this would have become common knowledge through the usual sources, it -wouldn't have been spraying all over my desk. As a result, I'm missing -my golf, and you're going to make it up to me by telling me what you -know and what you think." - - - -When Samuels had finished, all those in the room -understood the Genfurrs -far better than they had under Yvette's dry rendition of their customs -and cultural idiosyncrasies. They hadn't known about the live -consumption of small mammals that Samuels had delighted in explaining. -Nor about the tooth on the roof of their mouths which they used to -paralyse prey and then misused habitually in the sexual act to heighten -longevity and stamina by numbing parts otherwise too sensitive to really -get down to business. - -Then there was the reason for the third and fourth eyes, the other uses -they had for their panpipe nostrils--the same ones they blew over, -narrowing and flexing to change the notes they used to communicate with -each other. - -The choicest revelation, though, was that the technology they planned to -use to create the artificial sun was the same they were planning to -market on a smaller-scale to planetary systems looking to offer other -climates for their populations to enjoy. - -And that several of those potential clients were Earth-based travel -agencies who'd invested in the risky business of galactic real estate. -Talk about egg on their faces, Samuels thought, seeing the glum -expressions of the security specialists assembled. More like a mass, -armless, omelette-eating contest. - -"So, in summary, you're saying we should have known about all this a -long time ago?" General Franks concluded. "And the fact we've done -nothing about it�" He sent a circular glare around his colleagues. - -"�rather makes it look like we've given the entire project our tacit -approval?" - -"That's how they're reading it," Samuels said. "There'll soon be more -suns than planets out there." - -"And the fact the same technology in the wrong hands could be the most -devastating weapon we've ever encountered hasn't occurred to them?" - -"I should say it's an added bonus. Particular to their salespeople." - -"Ladies and gentlemen," General Franks began. "We need to rethink our -strategy. As yet, the process hasn't been tried on the scale the -Genfurrs are envisaging. It could, of course, turn out to be an utter -fiasco. On the other hand, if it works, it could have serious -consequences for my golf handicap. I, for one, am not prepared to take -that risk. - -"What are our choices?" - - - -"There's not a single sensory faculty that isn't used on -some planet in -the act of communication," Yvette was explaining to Dee, who now found -the theoretical study of extra-terrestrial languages far less alarming -than their live operation. She realised she wasn't cut out for Samuels' -type of work--wondered, in fact, if the doctor needed an assistant. - -"Olfactory, visual, tactile, taste� Then there're those senses normally -associated with the paranormal, but quite common in other species. -Powers of prediction, psycho-kinesis, stigmata�" - -"What about telepathy?" - -Yvette and Samuels exchanged a glance. Dee -gulped. "What? What did I say?" - -"Well," Yvette said, far more sympathetically than Samuels ever would. - -"Every culture we've so far encountered has their tales of other species -endowed with mind-reading abilities. Just like we used to about little -green aliens. Well, before we actually met them. Everyone's as terrified -of it as everyone else. The irony is, that none of us have it. Oh sure, -plenty have heightened senses, even a degree of empathetic -understanding. But mind reading? Real telepathy? No. In fact, the human -brain has a kind of natural defence, like a mental lead casing so its -signals can't be read and vice versa. All living things have it as a -necessary evolutionary development. Without it, we and every other -living thing would be extinct." - -"That's incredible�" - -"Not really. Think of the inherent dangers of telepathy�" - -"You mean you'd be able to read your enemy's mind and have the advantage -over them?" - -Samuels laughed. "Not at all. You'd hear everyone's thoughts and go -utterly bonkers at the sheer tedium and drivel. You think this -artificial sun business is the ultimate weapon? It isn't. Create -telepathy, spread it like a plague to your enemies, and you'll reduce -any solar system to a gibbering, dribbling mess." - -He looked over at -General Franks. "And don't even think about it, General." - -Franks laughed then straightened his face out. "Okay, back to business." - -"An ironic choice of words," Samuels observed. - -"How come?" asked Yvette. - -"Ahh�because none of this is a question of war or political -diplomacy--it's a question of commerce," General Franks explained. - -"But they need the artificial sun to ensure their survival." - -"And no one disputes that. That's what galvanised them into actually -developing and refining their technology. Why do you think so many -advances are made during times of war? Because, for once, everyone's -motivated to work towards a common goal and get it done. The threat of -death is a great concentrating factor. Hence their breakthrough with the -artificial sun. - -"But once they've got it up there, burning nicely, do you really think -they're just going to put all the blueprints away and dismantle -everything that contributed to its construction? No way. There're -billions� trillions and whatever the next -illion is, to be made. And -that's why it's really a question of business. - -"And, believe me, it's easier to stop an army than it is to stop people -exploiting a lucrative deal. This one rates as the deal of the -millennium. If they sold shares in the company, I, for one, would invest -my life savings." - -"Can't we just put an embargo on trading the technology?" Yvette asked. - -"Firstly, embargos don't work--look at narcotics, rare species, -artefacts, everything else. Secondly, it's going to be a bit difficult -when every delegate here wants the technology. The only thing they don't -want is for anyone else to have it." - -"Then what can we do?" Dee asked. - -"Well, we can't undo the advances they've made so far. We're not able to -destroy it without starting a full-scale galactic confrontation--which -would have about the same result as the artificial suns' -dissemination--and we can't persuade the Genfurrs not to trade in it for -the reasons just stated." - -"So?" - -"It might actually work?" Samuels wanted to know and Yvette nodded. - -"Pity, I was thinking about the Fratnip Gambit." - -"The..?" - -"Very noble in its way," General Franks agreed. "Planet was going to be -destroyed by some natural disaster--the usual story: meteorite or -asteroid plummeting into them." - -"Meteor shower," Samuels said. - -"Was it? Anyway, their government and scientists came up with a special -shield that would save them. The energy needed was immense, so -everything had to be switched off at a specific time so the power -required could be directed into the shields. The whole planet was -therefore in total dark and total silence when the shield zapped around -the planet to save them, just seconds before the meteors struck." Franks -looked down with a sad smile. - -"What happened?" Dee asked. - -"There was no shield. There was no way the planet could defend itself. -They simply didn't want their people living their last moments in fear, -but happiness. Their people barely had a moment or so to realise there -was nothing up there before it was all over." - -Dee imagined the solemn determination of the Fratnip government as they -faced their fate. Franks was right: it was a noble vision. - -"But that's not the case here," Yvette said. "This technology could -actually work. I've seen the experimental data. There's no reason it -wouldn't eventually be successful on a larger scale." - -"Samuels?" Franks asked. "C'mon, don't bother wearing that surprised -expression. You've been sitting there waiting for me to ask you. I -expect you had an idea the first moment you heard your squeakers -whistling about it. So, go ahead, this is your moment. You haven't got -the conference audience I know you'd like, but you pull this off and I -promise that one day you will." - -Samuels blushed a little, uncomfortable that someone had been able to -see through his fa�ade of nonchalance. Not about having the answer, but -his dreams of addressing just such a multitude. - -"Okay�" He breathed out, collected himself. You have your moment, you -have to make it memorable. Imagine if President Galore had announced the -breakthrough in Light Speed Technology by standing up and saying "Yay! -We can go real fast now. That's good, innit?" instead of: "Man has long -held a dream, but now that dream is actually in his hands!" which -amounted to pretty much the same thing once you got past the cryptic -language, but was infinitely more quotable. - -"Business is business," Samuels began, with a nod to each of them. "Man -has attempted to sell everything from an invisible suit to an emperor, -to his soul to the Devil�" - - - -"�which is therefore the only viable option." - -"But�" Dee couldn't find the words to express what she was feeling: -Horror? Inadequate. Outrage? She felt too drained to actually feel that. -Corrupted? Yes. Because something had reached in, pinched her soul -between the points of its sharp, curved talons and yanked it out. "You -can't do that� You simply can't�" - -"We have no choice," Franks told her, saving Samuels the need to defend -himself. If politicians had to face up to the consequences of their -speeches, a lot less would be promised or suggested by them. That might -be just as well, but it was also why people like Franks existed. -Samuels was right--it was the only way. - - - -"Amazing," someone at the table remarked. "I didn't think -it would come -off so�effectively." - -"And this was all the brainchild of a translator?" - -"A dangerous man," someone muttered. "Thank goodness he's on our side." -Franks said nothing. He doubted whether Samuels was on any side really -except�well, even saying he was 'on his own side' didn't make much -sense after the incident with the Genfurrs. Sheer ego had made Samuels -offer the solution: because he could and they, all the gathered experts -and government representatives, couldn't. - -The first step had been the purchase of the dead planet the Genfurrs -needed for their sun. The owners were a Genfurr real estate company who -couldn't resist the deal they were being offered. And because their -government's plans for the planet hadn't been made public due to the -secrecy of their research, no one could scream foul until it was too -late. By then, the planet was already owned by a consortium spread -across a hundred planets, making its final ownership impossible to -trace. Those that were traced and contacted had no intention of selling, -no matter how attractive the price. Which showed it couldn't have been a -company behind the purchase--shareholders would gift-wrap their grandmas -if the profit margin was sufficient. - -Simultaneously, Artificial Starlight Inc. offered a process similar to -what the Genfurrs themselves were working on�but at a significantly -lower price. Even though the future of their species was at stake, the -Genfurr government still had an eye on long-term economic survival. They -therefore voted to abandon their own research and opted for that offered -by Doctor Yvette Readling. - -Yvette ensured the samples shown worked well enough, whilst Samuels -provided all the right words to convince the politicians: both -deliberately bypassing the Genfurr scientists. Yvette's process became -infinitely more attractive as it didn't require another planet-her suns -were manufactured by splitting space itself. - -It didn't work outside the lab, but as with all great public works -projects, the government didn't like to be seen as having made a wrong -decision and so kept pouring resources into it in the vague hope that, -once completed, everyone would forget how over-budget and behind -deadlines it had become. - -Nothing could be guaranteed to foul up solid business practices more -readily than the business of government. - - - -"Oh!" Dee said as she recognised the man at the bar. -Samuels turned and -she was relieved to see he had aged in the years since they'd last -spoken. - -"Dee. Long time no see." - -"Quite. You're here for the conference then? Translator or insulter?" - -"I gave up the political trail. Surprised?" - -"Not really." But actually she was: she'd thought Samuels would excel in -the political field. She wondered if it had ended because he couldn't -give allegiance to any specific cause or his own contrary nature meant -he forgot what he was pretending to protect on any given day. - -"I saw Yvette a few months ago. She's retired." Dee remembered how she'd -once, ever so briefly, considered working with the doctor. That was -before everything they'd decided to do to the Genfurrs and Yvette's -involvement with the sting. - -"You're still a translator?" - -"Reporter. Do you know the Kayhops' speech produces such sharp sonic -booms it can kill an unprotected listener?" - -Samuels nodded, his head seeming too heavy for his neck. - -"Talk about sharp tongues," Dee said, "Words can really hurt -you--isn't that -what they say?" - -"Only if the wrong person's listening," Samuels said, staring out a -window to avoid looking at the delegates. - - -© Jez Paterson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] hum.jpg - - - - -[*ITEM] A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth - -[*AUTHOR] John A. Frochio - -[*BLURB] "... I Have Only Slipped Away Into The Next Room" -Henry -Scott Holland - -[*DESCRIPTION]

In the calm of the morning, Anna quietly -watched her husband as he sat at the kitchen table reading the newsfeed -on his tablet, a cup of steaming coffee in front of him. She loved how -his face switched between disparate expressions from one story to the -next, one minute smiling, the next minute frowning, then taut and ready -to lash out at the first person who would dare to speak to him. - -She continued to watch him as she cleaned up after breakfast. He moved -to the living room and sat in his favorite easy chair near the -fireplace. It was a cold morning. A small fire simmered in the -fireplace, casting out a warm glow and small puffs of dancing sparks. - -Later, her neighbor Kathy stopped by with a casserole. Anna thanked her -and invited her for tea. "Thank you. It's nice to see you smiling -again, Anna." - -They sat at the kitchen table. Most of the time, Anna's -attention was -drawn to her husband in the living room, relaxing in his easy chair with -an ebook reader. He looked quite comfortable in his blue and gray -jogging clothes, gray slippers and blue quilted cap. A few wisps of -gray hair peeked out from under the cap. - -"Isn't my husband handsome?" -said Anna. "On his days off, he always -enjoyed reading a good book. He especially liked mysteries and spy -thrillers." - -Kathy's eyes misted. She nodded and smiled. - -"Or he would take me -somewhere pleasant, like the park or some cultural -event in the city. It wasn't always like this, sitting quietly at home. -He would take me out sometimes." - -"I'm sure he would, Anna." - -"But I enjoyed our quiet times at home together. Those were always -nice." - -"Life can be too hectic. We all need our quiet times." - -"I'm so glad I spent the insurance money on a remembrance hologram -instead of a funeral. Don't you agree? Remembering is so much easier -this way." - -Kathy stood up. "Well, I must be going. Things to do, you know." - -Anna nodded. "We always enjoyed our quiet times. Those were our -favorite times." - -Kathy closed the door gently behind her. - - © John A. Frochio 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] hearth.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Supply & Demand - -[*AUTHOR] Martin Clark - -[*BLURB] A Lesson in Business Ethics - -[*DESCRIPTION]

If this was no country for old men then -Sinclair Precinct made for an acceptable retirement home. It was -considered neutral territory by the surrounding gang-bangers, a kind of -turf-war Switzerland. Or, to put it another way, the 'Sin' was a place -where you could get a decent cup of coffee without a side-order of -gunfire. - -I was a middle-aged middle-man, a street hustler with a reputation for -having access to esoteric hardware. Everyone knew me; older than God but -not so forgiving - and that would be Old Testament, not New. Every so -often I had to chastise some young pup who tried to muscle in on my -niche supply-chain, but I didn't make a big production out of it. - -That morning I was sitting at a table outside Roman's Bar & Grill, on -the corner of 6th and 23rd, nursing an espresso and a hangover. A young -woman approached through the crowd. She looked like a typical corporate -executive, but this place was so outside their comfort zone I had to do -a rethink. A high-end escort, maybe, still dressed to blend in at a -social function held yesterday evening. - -She stopped in front of my table. "Mister Wage?" - -Everyone gets it wrong the first time so I wasn't too put out. "It's -'Wages, just Wages." - -"I apologise, Wages. My name is Rebecca. May I join you?" - -I gestured to the chair opposite. "Be my guest. We're just two people -talking." Rebecca sat down, pretty much the poster-girl for 'pert', if -that's what you're into. I was wearing retro wraparound shades -incorporating 4-x zoom micro-cameras and close-up her human likeness -started to fade. She was a medium-grade synthetic - no skin pores - and -natural sunlight wasn't doing her any favours. I sipped my espresso. -"So?" - -She placed an acoustic muffler on the table between us and the -surrounding hustle and bustle dropped to a background murmur. "I wish to -obtain a Vygotsky, and quickly." - -"Well, maybe, but that's right up there with erotic asphyxiation in -terms of dangerous. Does your prospective client know what they're -letting themselves in for?" A 'Vygotsky' suppressed the higher brain -functions, letting raw, animal passions come to the fore - basically a -form of induced neural Viagra. - -"He would benefit from a little lift, if that's what you mean, but is -touchy about his supposed prowess." - -Sure, I got the picture; she wanted him to feel like a 'real man' in the -grip of unbridled lust - but without realising he'd been juiced-up. The -boost to his ego would guarantee repeat business, especially if Rebecca -went for the 'all you needed was the right woman' angle. My fingernails -tapped out an irregular rhythm on the porcelain cup while I thought it -over. "Fifteen-hundred. Half now, half in an hour when I deliver." - -Rebecca arched an eyebrow. "That's almost double its retail value." - -"The retail value of a regular blank-box, designed simply to suppress -empathic abilities. What I'm offering goes that extra mile and is -illegal pretty much everywhere. I'm not talking about some off-the-shelf -piece of kit tweaked by an electronics student to make a few extra -bucks. I'm talking about a real Chiba City special, with selective ego -and superego manipulation. But if you don't like the price, feel free to -go elsewhere." - -She regarded me coolly for a moment - then nodded. "I understand you don't haggle?" - -I shrugged. "Life's too short. I set a price based on availability, -timescale and what I think the market will bear. Seven-fifty up front -and we've got a deal. If you know I don't haggle then you'll also know -I never, ever, stiff a buyer over delivery." - -My new client lifted a credit chip from her purse and held it out. I -touched my own against it. There was a momentary pause as our electronic -agents found a form of mutually acceptable encryption and checked each -other for the usual signs of bad faith. Satisfied, the sum was -transferred to an account in Kurdistan - the acknowledgement projected -onto the inside of my shades as a poor-man's head-up display. - -I smiled and sat back in my chair. "One hour." - -Rebecca inclined her head by way of acknowledgement, retrieved her -muffler, and walked away. I sensed rather than saw movement in the crowd -- discreet security closing in around her. I scratched my nose, -bringing the old-school cufflink microphone up close. "Mike, what you -got?" - -The sniper in the Italianate bell tower sounded pensive. "Three-man -team -in the crowd, another out in the street alongside a pickup." - -"A pickup doesn't sound very corporate." - -"Oh, not even close. These guys are street, and not the usual -suspects -either. Remington Blues, and they must have cojones the size of -basketballs to just waltz in here, showing their colours. Either that or -they've paid our local bangers for the privilege." - -I grunted. "Cold hard cash has a way of soothing injured pride, so I'd -go with the pay-off angle. OK, I'll be back in forty minutes." I -hesitated. "Look, Michael, if this team gets trigger-happy second time -around, are you sure you can nail them? Only, a face-full of buckshot -would seriously spoil my day." - -He laughed. "Would you rather I got all Medieval on their ass and -came -down there with a sword? Yeah, I can pop all three if their fingers so -much as twitch. You want I should do the girl as well?" - -I finished my coffee and stood up. "No. She's just a pro, a skin-job -with connections." - -"You're all heart, my man, all heart." - -There was an edge to this deal that I didn't like, but couldn't live -without. I needed the danger more and more as the years went by, like it -was some kind of drug I was becoming inured to. Certainly it stopped me -succumbing to ennui, but ultimately the street was just one long game of -Russian roulette and eventually Lady Luck would call time. - -I went inside to make some calls. - -

Rebecca was sitting at my table when I returned forty-two -minutes later. -I wasn't altogether comfortable with that, as I'd hoped to tag their -arrival via local CCTV. Still, I managed a smile as I placed a -gift-wrapped box in front of her and sat down. "One customised Vygotsky -mind-fuck. It's assembled from components lacking serial numbers and the -casing incorporates trace-contact neutralisation, so it could be handled -without gloves." - -In return she placed a bulky envelope beside the box. "Fifteen-hundred -in small bills. You'll find the previous transaction has been rescinded -and the account I used never existed." - -My smile became a little forced. "Cash? How quaint. Not many I deal with -have the juice to screw with the banking system, particularly not my -banking system. I'd be impressed if I wasn't just a tad pissed-off." - -She stood and lifted the box. "You'll get over it. As long as I've got -what I want we'll never meet again. Enjoy the rest of your day, Wages." - -I watched her go and, no, I wasn't happy. The rest of my day had a sour -taste to it, like a memory of past misdeeds. - -

Next morning I sat my usual -table waiting for Greasy McCulloch to show -his face. The slimy little rat-bastard had promised me a line on some -endorphin analogue but failed to make good, meaning I'd had to go -commercial to satisfy my client - and at the agreed price. My mood -wasn't improved any by an article in the eSheet; Frank Vaughn, head of -corporate security over at Anderson Industries, had been arrested on a -charge of manslaughter. He'd bitten the throat out of a flesh-and-blood -prostitute, only escaping a murder beef due to the presence of 'an -illegal neural suppressor, recovered at the scene.' Investigations were -continuing. - -Someone like Vaughn didn't get to the top without knowing where the -corporate bodies were buried - both metaphorically and physically. This -was going to give some prominent citizens sleepless nights in case he -cut a deal with the law. The whole thing smacked of the opening salvo in -a move against Anderson Industries, whose share price had already dipped -twenty-seven points. - -I signalled for another coffee, left my reader on the table, and went -inside to use the restroom. On the way I coughed twice into my hand, and -then a third time - signalling Mike it was time to make tracks. I don't -believe in coincidence and the hardware I'd provided could only have -come from a limited number of suppliers, with my name third or fourth on -the list. The cops might not put in the overtime trying to trace the -Vygotsky, but corporate security would definitely want to know who was -busting their balls. - -Once in the restroom I removed an entire wall panel using two hooks kept -on top of the door frame. Behind lay a short alcove - and a hatch giving -access to the Transit Authority maintenance tunnels. The restroom was -shoehorned in between two industrial freezers used by Sushi Express, -which would screw with anyone using thermal imaging to track me. Madam -Toba's House of Dance, directly above, completed the surveillance -blackout. By the time anyone discovered my escape route I'd have jumped -the Metro and be long gone. - -As I reached for the 'going away bag' I kept stashed there - change of -clothes, spending money, a new id - I heard a gunshot from my shades' -built-in speakers. A shotgun blast, not a high-powered rifle. I froze, -my hand on the carry handle. There were indistinct noises then the sound -of something heavy hitting the ground. - -"Est� muerto." A man's voice; not one I recognised. - -I could have ignored it. I could have picked up my bag and vanished into -the maze of tunnels. But I'd known Michael a long, long time - almost -longer than I'd known myself - and that had to count for something. At -the bottom of my bag lay an antique Nagant revolver; an anachronism, but -a reliable one. - -I lifted the gun and left everything else behind. - -Back in the main dining area several of the patrons were surreptitiously -watching events out in the Precinct. When it registered that I was armed -everyone found something else to occupy their attention. Even Roman, who -kept a sawn-off behind the counter, looked the other way. Everyone knew -I didn't carry a gun. Everyone knew I always left the violence to -others. - -That was my edge. - -I walked out into the street, immediately spotting three members of the -Remington Blues; one kneeling by Mike's body at the base of the bell -tower, another half-watching the diner, a third emerging from the -stairwell. All three carried pump-action shotguns. - -I shot all three in as much time as it takes to tell. - -The street crowd gave me room as I walked over and knelt down beside my -friend. Michael lay on his back, unseeing eyes staring at Heaven. He'd -been shot in the back at close range and a spreading fan of blood -resembled nothing more than a pair of wings - completing the image of -him as an angel, fallen to Earth. - -One of the Blues lying beside me burbled. I shot him in the face, -feeling the spray of blood and brain matter against my skin. A ripple of -horrified fascination ran through the onlookers. -"Herr Wage, so thoughtful of you not to run. A pursuit in this climate -would be most tedious, no?" - -I closed Mike's eyes and stood up, shoulders hunched, turning towards -the voice. The Nagant slid from my fingers and clattered to the ground - -it was of no further use to me. Three men in business suits stood across -the street, with the crowd giving them a clear field of fire. Two were -just muscle in anti-flash contact lenses and double ear pieces, carrying -Steyr assault rifles that looked more like abstract works of art. The -third was small, neat and precise - the same way as an ice-pick through -the eye is precise. - -His smile was a thin line. "You are, as they say, the proverbial loose -end. Some�" he gestured towards the fallen gang-bangers, "�are -interested only in pinching it off. I, however, wish to pull it and see -what unravels. I trust there will be no further need for violence?" - -I shook my head, more sorrowful than angry. "Violence? You people have -no idea what 'violence' really means. I've spent years, decades, -avoiding this moment, dreading it." I straightened up and tore off my -shades. I heard a woman gasp but most of the onlookers couldn't see my -eyes. "Don't you get it? Doesn't anyone understand?" - -Behind me the church bell began to toll. - -My wings blossomed. - -Not white, like Michael's would have been, but black, tinged with -crimson. The crowd shrank back, on the verge of flight, but it was -way -too late for that. My voice rang out around the Precinct. - -"The wages of sin�" - -I burst into flame. - -"�is Death." - - -© Martin Clark 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] supply.jpg - -[*ITEM] Robot Rover - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] "Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should -relax and get used to the idea." Robert A. -Heinlein - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"There. That should do it." Amer Preston -rocked back on his haunches and -resisted the urge to cross his fingers. - - -"He's not moving." Mrs Ushula's voice grated in a way that set his -teeth on edge. - -"No. Well, I haven't rebooted him yet." - -"Then do it. Quickly. That's what I'm paying you for." No. That's -what -the Company pays me for. "And he'd better be as good as new. That's -what -they promised in the Petbots service agreement. I know my rights: -'As. -Good. As. New.'" - -"Nevertheless, madam, you might want to take it a little easy for the -first couple of weeks after rebooting�" - -"Don't tell me how to treat my Dorg. Just do your damn job." -It was as if the words were all just the same jagged sound. - -Screech screech screech screech screech screech screech screech. -Screech -screech screech screech screech. - -Amer chewed down on a mouthful of expletives. It'd been a long day. He -twisted the Dorg's internal dial as far as it would go and pushed in the -reset button. The Dorg trembled, its eyes rolled down to look front, its -jaws unlocked and its tail quivered erect. It yawned. - -"Okay." The Dorg shook itself as if from a long nap and rose to its -feet. Amer held the clipboard towards Mrs Ushula. "If you'd just sign -here." - -"I'm not signing anything. I don't need to sign anything. This was all -under the guarantee." - -"It's merely to say the work's been done." - -"Yes, but has it? I don't want you running away and my Dorg -breaking -down again the moment you're round the corner. I had to wait for two -days for you to come out this time." - -"It's merely to say I've been here. And, as you can see, to confirm that -your Dorg is working again. That's all it says." - -"Yes. But for how long, eh?" - -"Treated properly, this Dorg should last you a lifetime." - -"So now it's my fault? That I don't know how to treat a Dorg? -That's -what you're saying, is it?" - -A low growl from the Dorg. -Amer knew its lips would be pulled back, the teeth on show. He wasn't -concerned. Dorg's weren't programmed to bite. - -Fine. Don't sign. And I hope your Dorg blows up on you. In fact, I -wish -I'd set the thing to burn out and give you a home-delivered -cremation. - -Mrs Ushula was enjoying the brief power she held over another human -being, knowing he had to endure her screeching, accusing, insulting, and -couldn't leave her apartment until she'd signed the work docket. Which -she would. Eventually. Because customers like Mrs Ushula were only -powerful before non-entities like himself. Any sign of real authority -and they deflated into obsequious, sliming, syruping slugs. -Schlugs, he thought, renaming it in Petbot style. The ideal gift for the -petty bureaucrat in your life. - -

I've lived alone since mother died and so I got him for -company. But -now, the poor thing�" - -"Well, we've performed a remote-diagnosis, sir, and there doesn't seem -anything the matter with his electrics. The Kitt is quite a hardy, -independent model. If it's reliable company you're after, perhaps you'd -be better off with a Dorg?" - -"No. No. Mother always had cats when she was a child. She told me all -about them when I was growing up, but I had my allergies. That's why I -chose to have a Kitt." - -"Well, Mr Davin, I suggest we reload his initial programming and then -reboot him. That will start him afresh and we'll see if that sorts the -fella out." - -"Yes. Yes. I wouldn't want to actually replace him, you see?" - -"No. Quite. We understand. People get very attached to their own -Petbot-that's why we make them all individual-looking. Unique." - -"Mister Terence is very handsome." - -"Yes. Yes, he's a fine model. Well, let's go with that then, shall we --see if it sorts itself out?" - -"He'll be the same, though, won't he?" - -"The same but better, I assure you." - -

On the drive home, Amer pictured the syruping shlug. A -little imagination went a long -way. Sometimes�,too far. - -There was an inconvenient law of physics concerning the inability to -destroy energy. That it just got passed on: endlessly, never lessening. -The same, he acknowledged, went for negative energy. First step, then, -was to offload the bundle that Mrs Ushula had dumped on him. - -He swung by BotBox and took a low-rated Bot for five rounds in -which he -pummelled it mercilessly, even using a stool to break its casing, until -its wires were exposed. When he left, Mary raised an eyebrow. - -"Tough day?" - -"When isn't it?" - -"You go that far again, Am, and the boss says I gotta charge you extra. -You know they can't take that kind of punishment. We can't re-inflate -that one-it'll need an entire recovering." - -"Sorry." Mary shrugged pulled up a smile. "Ahh, forget it. Boss is on my -tail. His Boid is playing up. Always puts him in a foul mood." - -"Tell me about it," Amer said, thinking of Mrs Ushula and undoing much -of the good that venting on the Bot had done him. - -

"C'mon, Mister Terence. C'mon and sit on my lap. Please?" - -Mister Terence let out a pitiful mewl. The voice was programmed to sound -sweet and kitten-like, but to Richard's ears Terence was in agony. -Richard's fingers itched and twitched their way towards the -Petbots -emergency line. The fast dial was rated number two on his phone. - -Right after his own doctor's. - -It was Mister Terence's wiring again. Poor thing. He was wired too -tight, so that his nerve endings were as sensitive as thin, white-hot -pins. Every step he took was torture, every movement ground his joints -so their metal surfaces grated into a fine, metallic dust. - -Richard gasped, doubled over, and swept Mister Terence up into his arms -to nurse him as only he knew how. The rebooting had done nothing-Richard -could have told them that. That it was something serious. -Serious. - -To them, Mister Terence was just another Petbot. - -Mister Terence was special. Delicate. A sickly, needful thing that only -Richard understood. - -Richard hit number two. - -

"Amer. Come in." - -"What's this about?" - -"As I said on the phone: Mrs Hilda Ushula. And her Dorg." - -Amer felt sick. Felt like quitting there and then. During the drive into -work this morning, he'd felt himself alternate between seething -indignation at the way he was treated by customers and sick dread at the -coming confrontation. - -Now he saw it was something even worse: his supervisor, Trisha, had been -joined by someone he didn't recognise. Someone dressed in a suit rather -than overalls, which never boded well. No frayed cuffs, no tell-tale -bulge of odds-and-ends that mechanics hid about their clothing. - -"Amer, this is Martin Links. I've been telling Martin how you're one of -our most experienced, best Bottics. We're both of us hoping you can help -Petbots with something." - -"I�" The introduction robbed Amer of the speech he'd been drafting. "Of -course," he managed. "Anything I can do to help." -Martin smiled. - -"Then let me ask you something, Amer, and-please-answer me as truthfully -as you can. You needn't worry about anything you say here being -attributed to you, I assure you. In your work as a Bottic, have you -noticed anything strange about the Petbots of some of our -customers?" - -"Strange?" Amer frowned, tasting the word. "I'm not sure what you mean. -If anything, it's some of our customers are the strange ones. The -Bots -are just mechanical things." - -"Yes. But what about the problems you've found yourself encountering -with certain Petbots? Do they seem, well, to fall into any kind of -pattern?" - -"Well, when they go wrong, they do seem to produce a rather worrisome -reaction in our customers," Amer said. - -"Worrisome?" - -"So, maybe 'neurotic' is closer to the mark." - -"Only neurotic reactions?" - -"Well, angry customers too. Aggressive. Most of my calls are repeat -problems, so maybe they have reason to be upset." - -Trisha was nodding and when she turned to Martin her look said: See, -I told you so. - -"Can I ask what this is about?" - -"Not just yet, Amer. Let's go back to the case of Mrs Hilda Ushula. What -was the problem with her Dorg?" - -"I'm not entirely sure. It just shut down. I had to reboot it." - -"Would it surprise you to learn that wasn't the first time Mrs Ushula's -Dorg had abruptly shut down, without explanation?" - -Amer exhaled through his nose, and mashed his lips until they turned -white as he remembered the shit he'd had to put up with when he'd -visited her. And all the time there was an inherent fault with the -bloody Dorg she'd been sold! Martin read his irritation and help up his -hands. - -"Hey, don't get me wrong. Mrs Ushula is the common factor here. The -Petbot you operated on was a replacement. The second replacement, in -fact, that she's been given. The same issue has arisen on each occasion, -with different models." - -Amer jerked in surprise. Dorgs-like Boids and Kitts-were all -tamper-proof. Only Petbot technicians possessed the keys to open them in -order to reboot or make adjustments. - -"You think she found a way to get inside them?" -Martin shook his head. - -"We considered that. We even had someone examine the Dorgs for signs of -tampering, but there was nothing-nothing at all." - -"Three different Dorgs? All with the same problem? That's a hell of a -coincidence. Did they all come from the same batch?" - -"Nope. Each different. Each tested before despatch. No complaints from -other owners within the batches. And the two Dorgs she had before have -since been rebooted and even rehoused-and neither shows any problems -now." - -"Interference in the residence?" - -"Shouldn't affect a Petbot, but we tested anyway. Nothing. Nothing at -all." - -"Then what's causing them to shut down?" - -The other two were quiet a moment and Martin asked his next question as -if it came with a line sizzling towards a pile of dynamite. - -"Amer, what was your impression of Mrs Ushula?" - -

"Don't you worry about a thing, Mister Terence," Richard -said as he -rocked the Kitt back and forth, hugging him tightly to his chest. The -ache within his own heart felt like his ribs were closing in upon it so -that very soon it would scrunch up like something made of crisp, brown -paper. -The number was busy. He'd rejected the option of a Botoperator and so -joined the queue for those waiting to speak to a human Bottic. Every -time he was told his call was important and would he mind holding, -Richard let out a plaintive whine that looped back through the receiver -to hitch up his worries. - -"Oh, come on! He's dying!" - -"You're through to the Petbot Helpline. How can I help you?" - -"It's Mister Terence. He's hurting. He's shivering, the poor thing. He's -got some kind of fever, some virus like the computers had in the past. -There's something wrong with him. He's-" - -"Okay, sir. Is Mister Terence a Kitt, Boid or Dorg?" - -"K-k-kitt." - -"And do you have him there with you?" - -Richard looked down into the eyes of the trembling, suffering beast, -nodding until the Bottic asked her question again. - -"Y-yes, Mister Terrence is here." - -"Well, we can start with a downline diagnosis. If you'd like to plug -your net cable into Mister Terence, we can see what the trouble might -be." - -Richard looked over to his own private diagnosis kit. - -"I've already done that. It says there's nothing wrong. But this is -something new. Unique. Mister Terence is special. You doctors are all -alike." - -There was a pause on the other end. A space into which an embarrassed -cough might have been inserted. - -"Do I take it you have a home kit?" - -"Yes. I've tried everything. He needs special help. Why do you people -never see that? He's dying�" - -

"We have four principal categories of Bots on the market: -Passives, -Programmed-Reactive, Reactive-Bias and Empathetic. Everyone dreams of -creating a totally Independent-Reactive, of course, but that's -impossible." - -"But these Petbots are reacting, aren't they?" Amer said. - -"No," Martin said. "Don't get me wrong. It might seem that these -Petbots -are taking reactive-independent decisions, but they're not. They're -still strictly Empathetics." - -"You just said that Mrs Ushula's Dorg shut itself down. Killed -itself? -Committed suicide?" - -Amer still couldn't quite get his head around the concept. Successive -Dorgs under the frightful woman's ownership were not malfunctioning, but -taking the decision to turn themselves off. - -"You said yourself what she was like, Amer," Trisha said. - -"Yes, and I could understand a husband of hers might have taken his own -life-but a Petbot?" - -"Hang on, hang on," Martin said. "We're not talking a Reactive Decision -here, remember?" - -"I don't really understand the jargon when it comes to the different -categories," Amer said. "I'm a Bottic. I make them work, I don't have -anything to do with their design." - -"Your Passive Bots are like the ones at BotBox-strictly passive -constructs you can manhandle, use like any other non-reactive piece of -machinery. Then there's Reactive Bots: those that respond to the stimuli -or environment about them. Initially, we sold Programmed-Reactives, but -that meant they were pre-programmed with a pre-chosen, set reaction to -specific stimuli. We tried that with our earliest Petbots, but all -owners were different and didn't always want the same reaction as other -customers. So we switched to Reactive Bias, giving a choice of -personality-types specifically tailored to the purchaser's own likes and -dislikes. The problem with that was that, once pre-selected, their very -predictability undermined the Petbot's realism. - -"So we went for the old adage that pets grow to be like their owners and -we employed an Empathetic equation. Owners don't want blind obedience, -but sympathetic concurrence. Unconditional love and approval, yes, but a -creature in their own image which shows them that they're truly loved, -liked for what they are. They don't want something so independent it -chooses to run or fly off to a better house round the corner." - -"This is all a bit too deep for me," Amer said. - -"Okay, okay. But you get the basic differences. The popularity of the -new Petbots is because they mirror or complement their owners, right?" - -"But if the Petbot thinks Mrs Ushula is the best thing it's ever smelt -or rubbed up against, why should it go kill itself? That wouldn't be -empathy, that would be a sign of independent decision." -Martin was blushing. - -"No. It's because, perhaps, it's empathising a little too well." - -

"The diagnosis shows nothing," the Bottic on the -line told -him. - -"But he's not well, I tell you!" Richard rocked Mister Terence in his -arms, feeling the death and disease that was draining Mister Terence's -vitality away suckle cruelly at his heart. - -"We'll despatch a Bottic to you as soon as possible, sir. I see by -our -records you have our Platinum coverage?" - -"But Mister Terence needs help now!" - -"We understand your concern, sir, but the Bottic will be able to help -when he or she arrives. Until then, might we suggest you leave the Kitt -undisturbed so as not to overexert its batteries?" - -Richard gave in and began to wail. - -

"People wanted pets that reflected their characters, their -personalities. And that's what they're getting. Only, Petbots are -showing what their owners are like behind all the social covering, all -the supposed toughness they might present to the outside world." - -"You mean�" That Mrs Ushula is a deeply unhappy, self-loathing -individual who's only real solution to her misery is to take her own -life? - -Amer swallowed at the enormity of this revelation. Despite his dislike for the woman, he felt shock-not pity, but a kind of hollowing, draining depression. - -"I mean that Kitts, Dorgs, Boids, can all be just as neurotic, -aggressive, petty or arrogant as their owners. Those same owners are -calling us up to complain that their Petbots are malfunctioning -and that -it's all our fault. When, in fact, the problem is�" - -"With themselves. Short of telling them what's happening, what are you -going to do?" - -"We were hoping you could tell us," Trisha said. "Research and Marketing -are at a loss and so will the company balance sheet be unless we come up -with something soon." - - -"There's only so much I can fix with a screwdriver," Amer said, -imagining himself sticking one into Mrs Ushula's head and attempting to -tighten the loose screws within. He remembered what his anger had caused -him to do to the Boxbot. What would a Dorg in his own image end up doing -to itself to be free of who he was? - -Amer swallowed. It was one thing to be told, even shown, your life -didn't contain that much to be thrilled by. It was quite another to have -a solution to your worries played out before you. - -© Jez Patterson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] kitt.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Magdalena and the Dragon - -[*AUTHOR] Peter Morrison - -[*BLURB] There is nothing so restorative as a nice cup of tea. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

�This is really quite strange tea,� -Magdalena offered in another attempt to encourage the dragon to share -the pot. But with the arch of a red, leathery, oh, really? -eyebrow, the dragon declined. �I mean in a good way!� - -Magdalena sipped at it delicately in order to illustrate that the -beverage was quite drinkable, even if it tasted just that little bit -odd. As though there was some kind of spice or herb mixed with the -leaf the tea had been brewed from - something unidentifiable, but full -of promise. The dragon shrugged eloquently, puffed smoke into the air. -Well, she had offered, which was the polite thing to do and the dragon -really did seem quite content. - -Magdalena had found an advert on the notice board of the University�s -student union. She�d taken one of the tear off strips and the Magician�s -response to her email had included a map to this caf�. On arrival she�d -been directed to the table with the dragon and encouraged to help -herself to the tea. - -They had been sitting at this table outside the caf� for quite some -time. The dragon wasn�t much of a conversationalist. So far, not one -word had been puffed forth. Rather, she was the recipient of funny -looks. Hugely demonstrative funny looks, to be fair. On every attempted -topic, she was under no illusion as to the dragon�s opinion. But -Magdalena was a young woman who desired action, sitting in silence was -not her style. - -Perhaps it would have helped if they had provided a biscuit to go with -the tea? A sweet little nibble of some sort, at the very least, it would -have been common decency. The waitress had apologized, assuring her they -were all out and hadn�t been seen since. Magdalena sighed. The dragon -sighed too. Magdalena drank more tea. The dragon puffed more smoke. - -Magdalena made a production of looking at her watch. The dragon was -attentive in her appreciation of the drama. Playing up to the audience -she exaggerated the huffing and sighing: mouthing 2 o�clock and -gesturing at the watch face. It was now coming up for 3 o�clock. But it -made no difference; her expression of epic restlessness did nothing to -conjure forth a magician eager to lead them on an adventure. - -Magdalena was starting to feel a bit off - too much tea with nothing to -eat - probably not a good idea. She took a sip anyway, she couldn�t -help herself. She sat back and puffed some smoke. It took a moment but -upon consideration she found this to be a little surprising. She turned -to the woman sitting beside her to express her sense of would you -look at that? - -But. Wait a minute. The woman smiled at her. Where did the dragon -go? -She looked at the cup propped on her red scaled hand. Bugger, she -thought, with enthusiasm. But did not say, finding that she had been -rendered incapable of speech. - -�Thanks,� the woman smiled. With a nod, she got up and walked away. -Magdalena knew then that the tea had been stranger than it really ought -to have been. She�d been set up - something of an adventure indeed! - -© Peter Morrison 2016 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] magdalena.jpg - -[*ITEM] Diplomacy - -[*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - -[*BLURB] A Comic Strip featuring Jet Starr and her Astro Amazons.
- -[*DESCRIPTION] - - - -© Liam Baldwin 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - -[*ITEM] Iceweb - Interactive Fiction - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] An experimental venture into reader-initiated story-telling. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

As a long-time fan and writer of text -adventures, I have rediscovered the joys of interactive fiction. This -adventure uses the latest, and most feature-filled, adventure creation -engine - Inform 7. - -It is a cyberpunk story, and is pitched at Text Adventure Beginner -level. - -It is my belief that all the information the reader needs to participate -is contained in the game itself. The important thing is to examine -everything, read everything, inspect what you - the player - are -carrying, and then act accordingly. There's a manual, and there are -hints. - -

PLAY

- - -© Gil Williamson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] iceweb.jpg - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -
- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - - -"Omnes eodem cogimur," -Quintus Horatius Flaccus -
"unde negant redire quemquam" Gaius Valerius Catullus - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev18.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev18.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 2aa91a9c..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev18.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4019 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 18 - August 2016 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 18th issue of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I present to you Mythaxis' -18th collection of short speculative fiction, the August 2016 edition. - -No-one really wants to read editorials. I certainly don't, but it would -be remiss of me not to commend the stories in this edition. - -I therefore commend them. Enjoy! - -And Liam Baldwin has again come up trumps with a splendid comic strip. -Don't miss it. - -© Gil Williamson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] editor18.jpg - -[*ITEM] Helsinki - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] How to rest and sleep in winter
In the clumps of -alder-bushes
Underneath the sheltering fir-tree,
Underneath the -pine's protection.
The Kalevala - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Outside, it was minus ten Celsius. The sea -was still -frozen. Through the windows behind the Kalastajatorppa Hilton's -reception hall, I could see people walking about on the ice. I could -also see the woman talking to the desk clerk. An American. I can't -distinguish regional accents, but she was well-dressed and sounded as if -she was accustomed to getting her way with hotel staff. She was showing -the man a photograph. He eventually shook his head. She persisted. He -pointed across the foyer at me. My client had already left, and his -chair was still vacant. She came across and sat down without being -invited. - -"Can I ask you a question?" she said. - -"Please be seated. My name is Juho Virtanen." - -"I'm sorry. My name is Margaret Fountain." - -"How do you do." - -"Have you seen my daughter?" showing me the photograph, "She is called -Rachel. Rachel Fountain." - -I recognised the girl, of course, but she hadn't been calling herself -Rachel Fountain. I knew her as Ann Smith, and I'd met her briefly, a -week ago. A plain girl, but not actually ugly. Athletic. A little -underweight. Good teeth, hair and skin. - -I said, "I don't remember her. Have you lost her? I may be able to help." - -"She left home in Los Angeles two weeks ago. I discovered she'd booked a -flight to Helsinki with one night in this hotel. I only found out -because she used an online booking system that automatically credits the -FrequentFlier miles to my account. I've been in contact with the -management here, but she only stayed the one night. I just arrived to -try and trace her." - -"And you're talking to me because...?" I knew why, but I wanted to know -what she thought. - -"Teens only have one reason for coming to Helsinki these days." - -"How old is she?" - -"Sixteen." - -"She's officially an adult here." - -"Yes, I know. I'm worried about that. I spoke to the police, but..." - -"... But she's not breaking the law in Finland, and she's an adult, so -they can't help," I finished. - -"Yes. I'm concerned she'll do something stupid." - -"Most of the procedures are pretty costly. There's a limit to what she -could buy." - -"That's part of the problem. She was living in my beach house. She -managed to sell it behind my back and I guess she's converted the -proceeds to NetDollars. But still, I'm hoping it's just a cosmetic -procedure she wants." - -"Not necessarily. There are a number of possible procedures. She may be -applying to VGMK for a new organ or limb. She may be seeking treatment -from one of the many clinics here that offer gene modification to avoid -inheritable diseases or tendencies. She may desire a body modification - -horns, tails and tusks are popular with the more adventurous young -persons this year. She may wish to donate an ovum or embryo for future -use. She may..." - -"OK! I have no clear idea what her intentions are. In my mother's day, -it was tattoos and piercings, in mine, cyber enhancements and implanted -hardware. Now, it's all body and DNA mods. I'd be prepared to pay for -your time and expenses to find her. The clerk tells me that you are -trustworthy and that you act as a... an agent? for GM procedures. You -have contacts, yes? " - -"Yes, I am a field representative for VGMK and a few other independent -companies, but principally in the field of organ and limb replacements." - -"VGMK? Who are they?" - -"They are the Finnish state gene modification centre. They started this -business a century ago, immediately after they left the EU. Organ banks, -skin and limb farms, tissue matching. Your daughter has no such -deficiencies, I presume." - -"Of course not! - -"Of course not. However, I do have a number of contacts in the -cosmetic and body enhancement areas, and I could ask around. Show me the -photo again." She held it out. I copied it to my FlashMem. "And dump me -your contact details, and Rachel's." - -"She's ditched her cell, I think. It's been no-sig since she -disappeared. Please help, if you can." - -I said: "It occurred to me that Rachel might have an accomplice. Is -there a a boy or girlfriend involved, do you think?" - -"I don't think so. The flight and hotel bookings were for a single -traveller. Besides, she's a bit of a loner, never expressed any interest -in boys... or girls, for that matter." - -"Hobbies?" - -"She runs a lot. Miles along the beach every day, or on nature trails. -And she was a little star-struck for a while. There are various -entertainment stars living in our area. She used to spend hours standing -outside their homes, hoping for a glimpse, and she has a collection of -keepsakes and posters from some of them. But teenage girls go through -that sort of phase. I know I did." - -"Anyone in particular? Could one of them be on tour in Finland?" - -"Oh! Alex Dostoyevsky - he was flavour of the month for a while. I don't -think it's his real name. Horrid guy, but she adored him." - -It was clear this woman's family was well-heeled. California beach -houses have never come cheap. To milk the situation, I'd have to make -this seem more difficult than it looked. I declined an advance. The -price would escalate later. - -"I'll be in touch," I said, "You'll be staying here?" - -"Yes. Room 788. Do your best, please." - -As I left the hotel, I heard the ice give one of its characteristic -eerie groans, and in the early twilight, a fox ran through the taxi -rank and tiptoed up the rocks into the pines. - -

He was -known as Zeb. Short for Zebra, not Zebedee. His particular mutation was -zebra stripes. All over him. Including his face. I caught up with him in -a steamed-up coffee shop by the harbour, talking to a mermaid. Mermaids -are one of VGMK's less successful ideas. Apart from anything else, -merpeople are fat and ugly, because of all the blubber. They smell... -kind of fishy. And they have immensely powerful shoulders and arms to -drag themselves around on land, like seals. Short, kinky black hair, not -blonde. Grey, dolphin-like skin all over, not pink above and scaly below -as seen in popular art. Unattractive. She eventually flopped and -slithered out. - -I said: "Hi, Zeb. Your new girlfriend?" - -"Ach... She's OK. They're great underwater workers, and sub-sea farming -is important these days. Coffee? - -"No, thanks. Look, I'll come to the point. You remember that girl, Ann -Smith, that I sent to you?" - -"What? You looking for a cut on the commission?" - -"Well, maybe. But there's more money to be made for both of us if you -haven't placed her yet." - -"You must think I'm some miracle worker," he said. "There's waiting -lists all over. I've got her stashed in the New Hesperia while I sort -something out." - -"Great. The thing is - her Mum's over from the States looking for her. I -think we could share in a big finder's fee, and the longer it takes, the -bigger the fee will be." - -"I don't know. I'd lose the commission on the procedures." - -"Not necessarily. You could get her done and pick up your percentage -before we 'find' her." - -A grin crinkled his striped cheeks as he took that in. "It's a deal." - -"Just one thing. You'd better move her out of the New Hesperia to -somewhere obscure, way out of town. I wouldn't put it past Mummy to -visit every decent hotel in the city with her photograph." - -"Yeah, right. I've got that cottage in the woods up country, with a -couple of caretakers. She'd like that." We all knew that Zeb was -desperately rich, and suspected that Zeb's "cottage" was a luxurious, -under-used mansion. She should be very safe there. - -"Just make sure she doesn't connect me with this deal, so I can -look like a hero when I find her. We're not doing anything illegal, but -it wouldn't look good. By the way, what does she want?" - -"The girl? No biggy. Parthenogenesis job." - -"Virgin birth?" - -"Right. With a little twist. Nothing tricky or weird, though." - -"What sort of a 'twist', Zeb?" - -"She's got some DNA off some disgusting popstar all the kids are are -crazy about. She provoked him into spitting at her and she preserved it -in a sterile container. She wants to have his babies, plural." - -"No accounting for taste, eh? Who are you placing it with?" - -"Well, I was expecting to use KOGM - they have the shortest waiting -list, but if she wants the best, I guess she'll have to wait for Niemi's -clinic. Could be three weeks" - -"Suits us." - -"Yes it does, doesn't it." - -

Next day, I called Ms. Fountain to report that I was -making progress, but I'd know more the following day, Wednesday. - -On Wednesday, as soon as Zeb reported he'd moved Rachel, I called Ms. -Fountain and arranged to meet. I'd decided to tell her about Rachel's -stay at the New Hesperia before she found out for herself. It would -establish confidence. - -I found Margaret Fountain in the bar of her hotel, staring out the -window. Just outside, on the open-air beachfront terrace, in a -temperature of minus ten degrees Celsius, three Polars were sitting -around a metal table drinking. Already carrying a thick layer of fat -against the cold, they were made bulkier by their heavy natural fleece. -Drinking vodka, of course. Beer would have frozen in the can. Every so -often, one of them hammered on the heavy triple-glazed door with an -empty vodka bottle, and a waiter would be dispatched with a replacement, -going round the long way so as not to let the winter into the lounge -bar. Margaret Fountain seemed fascinated by them. - -"I don't want her ending up like that," she said, shuddering. - -"No danger, Ms Fountain. They were developed over years, at great -expense. You seldom see them indoors, and never in Helsinki except in -wintertime. They find warmth very unpleasant." - -"Are they... human?" - - "Oh, yes. A race apart, but they can theoretically interbreed with the - rest of us, though both sexes only have a short period of fertility, - just in the summer, when they moult their winter coats. They were - created from a group of Lapp volunteers by VGMK to work in sub-zero - conditions. So now the Arctic permafrost is warmed and softened by - genetically modified bacteria, and Finland grows genetically modified - cereals in the Arctic tundra, tended by genetically modified men who - look more like bears than people. And their females? Hard to - distinguish. Rough folk." - -Polars typically wore only enough clothing for modesty. The three -outside were dressed in shorts and trainers, only their leathery faces -emerging from a thick white pelt that enveloped them from head to toe. - -She drew herself together with a visible effort. "You have some news for -me?" she said. - -"Yes. She's been staying at the New Hesperia under the name of Ann -Smith, but she left yesterday evening. I think she may have been tipped -off by my enquiries. However, I've got a line on the agent she's using, -so I'm hopeful. You mentioned an advance yesterday. I could do with a -little money for expenses now. A few thousand dollars would do, -meantime. There's a lot of secrecy in the industry, and breaking into it -costs. I may also have to travel." - -"Certainly. I'm grateful for your assistance. Will ten K do?" - -"Fine." I gave her my pay-in code, and she PPed the sum on the spot. - -

Over the next week, I relieved Ms Fountain of another -thirty K, drip-feeding my story of an energetic hunt for Rachel. I was -able to reassure her that Rachel was still waiting for treatment, but I -pretended not to know where she was waiting. I split the funds -with Zeb, seventy percent for me, thirty for him. It was only fair. I -was doing most of the work. - -Meanwhile, I was negotiating on behalf of a prominent Middle Eastern -client for a kidney transplant. Most First World countries were relaxed -about medical applications of GM, and most had their own facilities. But -many African and Asian nations had religious or ethical objections to -spare parts surgery. I was there to ensure wealthy citizens of these -nations that VGMK was their friend, no names, no disclosure. VGMK's -successful Unconscious Universal Donor operation supplied the entire -globe with organ and limb transplants, and the few mistakes they had -made seemed to have been forgiven. - -I entertained my client at a folkloric 'puppet' show, unique in the -world. On the stage, Ilmarinen was being tricked by -Väinämöinen to travel to Pohjola, where he would create -the Sampo. It was a tale unfamiliar to most, and only comprehensible to -me because I'd read snippets from Finland's folk tales - the Kalevala. -The drama was being enacted by 'Little People', one of VGMK's misguided -experiments. - -The original intention had been to develop a race of tiny 'human-like' -people, that could be a charming animated doll or pet for children. The -creature was called Mennink�inen - gnome. They had turned out to be all -too human in their disposition: aggressive, thieving, sexually active, -and the experiment had been abandoned, all Little People to be rounded -up and killed. Due to public anthropomorphic sentiment for their plight, -the killing was incompletely carried out, and quite a few remained in -captivity. A number. it was rumoured, had escaped and formed colonies in -the wild. They were based on a strain of monkeys whose DNA is very -similar to humans, but incorporated quite a lot of human genes, so that -they really resembled small humans with oversized heads. They could not -speak, so the soundtrack was spoken by the theatre. They were -well-trained, being about as clever as dogs. They reproduced very -quickly, copiously, and indiscriminately, about one year a generation. -Uncontrolled, they could have produced a population explosion. - -My client was clearly impressed by the show. The precision and grace of -the creatures' movements, the dramatic appearance of the characters, the -excellence of the costumes. His obvious delight improved my own -enjoyment. The language was Finnish, but the rhythmic epic poetry had -its mysterious appeal, and there were supertitles in English. - -After the performance, however, Zeb's Giant, Matti, was waiting for me -in the foyer, stooping to avoid clashing with the light fittings. A -slightly more successful VGMK development, Giants filled many niches in -society for which height was an asset, but it was common to see these -three-metre Giants squeezed into public transport or doubled over in -shops. Matti said: "Zeb wants you to come with me now." - -Zeb could have txted a message. Matti was obviously there to make sure I -actually came. He knew I could have been dragged along like an reluctant -child. My client was impressed all over again by Matti. He wasn't keen -to be sent back to his hotel, but I promised to entertain him again very -soon. Meanwhile, he had other sightseeing to do. - -Zeb was waiting around the corner in a Lexus Hummer lookalike, but -bigger. The engine was running, the heater on. Matti folded himself into -the space where the backseats and luggage area were combined. I opened -the kerbside door to talk to Zeb, who was in the driving seat. "Get in!" -he said. - -I got into the passenger seat because it would have been too cold to -stand in the street and argue. - -"What is it?" - -"We've got trouble. Big trouble, and it's all your fault. Your girl has -disappeared." He was driving towards the Kotka road. - -"My girl?" - -"Ann Smith, so called." - -"OK, so she's changed her mind. They sometimes do. Especially the -teenagers. It's not a complete loss, Zeb. You lose your commission, but -we took a packet from Mummy already." - -"You don't understand. She's missing. She went out for a walk and never -came back." - -"In this temperature?" - -"Yeah, well, she'd been out before, well wrapped up, and came back OK. -It's nice out there. It's near Repovesi." - -"That's a wilderness, Zeb! Is that where your mökki is?" - -"Sure. There's other cottages like it in the area, she may turn up. And -the staff are out looking for her." - -"Why am I in this car with you?" - -"Because you are equally responsible. We are going to look for this girl -together, and we are not calling the emergency services, and we will -never speak of this to anyone but each other." - -"OK. I'll help, but we've got to go a little public to speak to the -neighbours, so word will get out. There's no harm in telling the truth. -She was at your place perfectly legitimately, awaiting her treatment. It -was a kindness. We needn't mention the Ms. Fountain connection." - -"I suppose so." - -It was nearly three hours before we got to Zeb's cottage, late at night. -To my surprise, it really was a a cottage, not a country house as I'd -expected. After we left the main road, we only saw one other habitation, -then we took the side road, then the rough track. The cottage had a main -room and two bedrooms. The staff consisted of an elderly Russian couple -who lived in one of the bedrooms. That was it. Every few weeks, someone -from a nearby town drove up there with essential supplies - food, -cooking gas, bottled water, a can of diesel for the generator. It was -life as it was probably lived two hundred years ago. - -Ann had not returned. The old couple, refugees from just over the border -in Russia, spoke little Finnish. But they did speak reasonable English. -Apparently, the girl used to out and walk close to the cottage, wearing -a borrowed fur coat and boots. She seemed to enjoy it. She had always -returned after an hour or so. Today, she hadn't. And her cellphone was -right here. - -Despite the late hour, we phoned every neighbour - there weren't many - -just half a dozen in a ten kilometer radius. Only two were occupied, and -they knew nothing. We called the police. If she hadn't been found by -now, we could be fairly sure she was dead. - -As soon as it was light, Zeb and I explored the immediate area around -the cottage, searching, calling. Trees, snowdrifts, fallen branches. -There were some fearsome steep slopes and even cliffs, frozen waterfalls -and streams, but no sign of her. Not a footprint. It had snowed. It was -easy to get lost. Without Zeb, I'd have never found my way back to the -cottage, even with my GPS. You couldn't see the cottage even when you -were quite close. - -Meanwhile, the police had visited all the unoccupied properties in the -area, and drawn a blank. They spent a day with dogs. The dogs ran in -circles, barked, tugged at their leads, sat, wagged tails, and generally -did what dogs do when there's no scent. From experience, the police knew -that a search helicopter, even with IR capability, was useless in such a -heavily wooded area. They clearly expected someone to stumble over some -bones in the Spring. The Russian wife complained that Ann had taken her -coat and boots, so she could not venture out any more. I gave her money -for replacements and arranged for the delivery van to bring them. - -Then we went back to Helsinki. I had bad news to deliver. - -

I told Margaret Fountain that her daughter had probably -suffered a misadventure during a forest walk while awaiting her -procedure. She insisted she would stay and await news, however hopeless. -Though it was hardly my fault that the girl had screwed up, I was -suffering from guilt, big time, and I tried to return Mrs Fountain's -money. When she refused, I insisted she move out of the expensive hotel, -and live in my spare room. We telephoned the police every day without -success. - -For most of my time in Helsinki, I had been living alone in a small -rented house in Munkkiniemi on the shore of a lagoon, a short distance -from the centre of my operations, the Kalastajatorppa Hilton. The sea -view from the triple-glazed picture window of my workroom included the -frozen bay, distant headlands, huge rocks and stunted trees and bushes, -the lagoon now frozen into a white moonscape, the floes piled against -and riding over each other in confusion. The serenity and the long eerie -creaking and clanking of the ice seemed to soothe her. - -At first, she reminisced about her lost daughter, her separated husband, -her rich, but ruined, life. Listening to her, it just made me feel -worse, and I selfishly wanted her gone. - -To my surprise, she stayed on from the short, stark, severe days of late -winter through balmy early summer with long days and nights, when it -never became properly dark, evening fading into morning, the lagoon -peppered with pleasure craft. She spoke less, busied herself around the -house, then, suddenly, she decided to go. - -That should heve been the tragic end of it all. - -

This morning, as I left the house on the way to the hotel, -a fox, possibly the vixen whose brood had been making the Spring nights -loud with delighted yelps, was sitting on a rock opposite my gate. She -stared boldly at me for a minute, meeting my eyes, and then -slid easily into the trees. - -Mikko, the desk clerk, called across as I entered the lobby: "Juho, I -have a letter for you." - -"A letter? People don't write to me, or to anyone, these days. It -must be a contract or a court summons or something else legal." - -"Nope. A letter." And so it was. In a red, white and blue striped -envelope, with actual stamps, a modern antique from the US Mail. - -Dear Juho, - -This is to tell you the great news that Rachel has been returned to me, -intact. I should already have told you, but I have been so excited. She -arrived last month carrying a temporary passport issued in Norway. She -has had the most the most amazing adventures, and I enclose a cutting -from our neighbourhood 'newspaper'. I am most grateful for your kindness -in Helsinki, and I am relieved to tell you that she has given up her -desire to mother the spawn of the Devil! - -Please stay in touch. - -Warm Regards. - -Margaret. - - - -© Gil Williamson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] helsinki.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Sound & Fury - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] Oh, wherefore art thou, Damocles? - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"How is she? Any change?" Pygar walked -across the bedchamber to stand by my shoulder. He sounded genuinely -concerned for the young woman lying fully-clothed on the divan before -us, as if our overall situation meant nothing. - -However, I managed to produce my usual sardonic grin. "Well, if she dies -I'm sure we'll be the first to know." - -He glared at me. "Must you always be so flippant?" - -I shrugged. "It's just the way I'm made. Incidentally, Library has -reported a new access event. The information obtained is in the special -annex, if you ever bothered to look." - -"And does it impact directly upon our plight?" - -"No, not exactly." - -"Then why bother to mention it?" - -"Well, apparently I'm based on an actor called Clark Gable." - -Pygar frowned. "An actor? Some music-hall swell?" - -"Close enough. Whereas you, my fine semi-feathered friend�" I -slapped his muscular shoulder,"�are from a tale entitled 'Barbarella'." - -His wings quivered in obvious irritation. "A story-book character? What -nonsense - angels exist, of that I am certain." - -I gestured to my horns. "And what of devils?" - -Before he could reply a Servitor entered the bedroom; an androgynous -young woman clad in the simple grey dress of her calling. She approached -us and dropped to one knee, head bowed. "My Lords Arbiter, Constable -Fain requests your presence to rule in a dispute." - -Day-to-day civic strife held no appeal for me. "You attend, Pygar. You -always see the best in people." - -He smiled, somewhat ruefully. "And yet I fear it is you who truly -appreciates the human condition. What was it you said last week - 'a -plague on both your houses'? Most apt, as it transpired." - -"Still, walk amongst the populace, they find your presence -heart-warming. -Me they merely fear." - -The angel inclined his head by way of acknowledgement. He left with the -Servitor following a deferential three paces behind. - -I made a mental note to watch my turn of phrase, but this new -'Shakespeare' I'd been reading seemed to worm his way into one's very -substance. Library could not regulate the information acquired during -these ever more frequent contacts with an entire universe somehow -separated from our own - and the more I learned the less certain I -became of our world and my place in it. - -Alone, I turned to glare at the sleeping form of Aurelia Havisham. -Although resting for a few days at a time was commonplace it was now -five weeks since last she stirred. Aurelia was the axis around which the -great city-state of Haven revolved; a benevolent mistress, immortal and -ageless. Pygar and I were her stewards, her conscience, her dispensers -of justice. The world may change but we did not. - -And it was all a fraud. - -"Library!" - -Yes, Gable, I am here. - -"Have you been able to learn anything more concerning Aurelia? Anything -at all?" - -Unfortunately nothing beyond the original reference to 'biomorphic -dissonance'. However I have determined that the technology of our world -is classified as 'late Victorian', and while the significance of that -epithet escapes me, in context I would seem to be an obvious -anachronism. - -I frowned. "Meaning?" - -Meaning that, as we have come to suspect, this world and everything -in it is the product of an outside agency. - -My scalp crinkled with fear. "Are you saying Miss Havisham is, is -God?" - -Everything is relative, Gable, but I fear she may be the keystone in -our particular vault of heaven. - -Inarticulate rage made me snarl and clench my fists. - -"Should I be worried?" - -A voice from behind made me start. I required a moment's composure; time -to force a smile into my voice. "It's nothing that I can't handle, -Stephanie." - -Stephanie Collins was my current paramour; -over the years I'd watched her -grow from gangly child into voluptuous womanhood. She was possessed of a -keen wit and an intelligence to rival my own, choosing the role of -Infernal consort over that of social matriarch. I almost felt flattered, -but our liaison was obviously the product of enlightened self-interest, -nothing more. - -She swept forward in a rustle of skirts to stand by my side; one hand on -hip, the other resting on my shoulder. "No change in our sleeping -beauty, I see?" - -"None, but I'm sure she'd be touched by your concern." - -"Pah! I'm well aware of the intimacy the three of you share when -she's awake, so you'll forgive me for enjoying her continued absence. -I'd just as soon see an end to her." - -"We're in danger. All of us. Everything." As soon as the words escaped -my lips I regretted uttering them, but nothing is as corrosive as -knowledge you cannot share. And if anyone could appreciate how -precarious our situation had become it was Stephanie - for Pygar seemed -possessed of a wilfully anti-intellectual bent that drove me to -distraction. - -I felt Stephanie stiffen. "I did not think her prone to jealousy." - -Her self-centred concern made me laugh, despite everything. "Aurelia -turns to Pygar for tenderness, myself for debauchery, and others for -general lassitude. I very much doubt she harbours any resentment at our -dalliance during those times she absents herself." - -Stephanie pursed her lips. "Dalliance? Is that all I am to you?" - -I squeezed her heavy rear. "A rose by any other name would smell as -sweet." - -She frowned. "Meaning?" - -"Meaning that regardless of how I refer to you, you will always be as -dear to me as you are now." - -She snorted in a most unladylike way, but a slight smile played on her -lips. "Always one with the silken tongue, Gable. But if not jealousy, -what threatens us?" - -So much for deflecting the impact of my ill-judged outburst. I took a -deep breath. "Have you never questioned why Haven is the only remaining -city on Earth?" - -Stephanie looked at me askance. "Everything beyond the Ring Mountains is -gone. But you ask me of history? You who lived through it?" - -"I'm merely immortal, not infallible. I forget names if not faces, dates -if not experiences. Yet when I think back to the Fall, the foundation of -Haven, my memories are always the same. Incomplete but unchanging, like -a stage play repeated again and again, always following the same -script." - -"And this troubles you?" - -"I believe�" I stroked my thin moustache, "�I fear that this -world of ours was created little more than four decades ago." - -My paramour stepped back. "My parents were no mere figment of my -imagination, I assure you." - -"No, no, they were real enough, but their memories, everything they knew -to be true, that is another matter." - -"What arrant nonsense, Gable, have you lost your mind? Or do you believe -that God intervened to preserve us within this mountainous ark?" - -"No, not God." I gestured towards the sleeping form of Aurelia Havisham. -"Her." - -Stephanie stood with hands on hips, chin tilted in defiance. "Her? The -Lady -Eternal is no deity. She does not command the birds to sing or the rain -to fall from the sky. The way she takes her earthly pleasures is -not the stuff of worship, even amongst those young men she favours." - -"No deity? Certainly, but still I believe all this was fashioned -to a -design of her choosing." - -Anger darkened her face. "A sham? Worlds within worlds? And what then -are we save actors on a stage of dreams? No, Gable, no - I'll not be -gulled by anyone, not even our Lady." Stephanie drew a slim blade -through a -slit in her overskirt and raised it above her head. - -I seized her wrist as she advanced towards the bed, pulling her close so -that our lips almost touched. "Be not so hasty, my love. We may all wait -upon sweet Aurelia's pleasure in one way or another, but she's no tyrant -to be cast down by a petticoat assassin. Not even one as beautiful as -you." We kissed, even as I squeezed her wrist until the stiletto dropped -to the floor. - -Stephanie glared at me with eyes of wet stone. "What then are -you, -Gable? A body-slave sworn to protect her? Do we live or die at her -whim?" - -Gable. - -I seized her roughly by the upper arms. "Think on it, damn you. Without -her what use does the universe have for us?" - -Gable, this is important. - -"Please forgive me for interrupting this lover's tiff, but perhaps -somewhere less public would be more appropriate?" It was the voice of -Aurelia Havisham. - -Stephanie twisted free from my grasp and curtsied. "My Lady. We meant no -disrespect." - -I took a moment to compose myself then turned, smiling. "My Lady." - -Aurelia was sitting up in bed, clearly amused by our little tableau. -"Kindly leave us, Mistress Collins. Gable will be along presently to -smooth things over, whatever the cause of your, ah, disagreement." - -Stephanie curtsied again and withdrew, giving me a baleful glare as she -passed. I responded with an exaggerated bow that provoked a defiant toss -of her head. - -Despite having laid undisturbed for so long there was no sign of atrophy -as Aurelia rose from the bed. "In many ways she's the ideal match for -you, Gable. You should not antagonise her so wantonly." - -I toyed with my moustache. "And yet, my dear, you remain the mistress of -my heart." - -"You're a rogue and charlatan, Gable. Which is why you'll be forever at -my side." Aurelia walked over and opened the doors to her Juliet -balcony. -It was late May and scent from the rose garden filled the room. She -breathed deeply and smiled. "Oh, how I've missed this." - -I stood close behind, fingertips resting on her shoulders, and kissed -the nape of her neck, her shoulder, the lobe of her ear. My voice was a -low growl. "Oh, how I've missed this." - -In response she turned to face me, but placed a diminutive hand on my -chest and 'pushed' me away. "Was there something you wanted to ask me?" -Her face was bland, seemingly devoid of guile. - -Ignorance may not have been bliss but it had its appeal. However I knew -this uncertainty would fester within me. I cleared my throat. "Is this -world a lie?" - -Aurelia arched an eyebrow. "A lie? It's no mass illusion for your -benefit, if that's what you mean." - -"You overheard us, you know damn well what I mean." - -She sighed. "You no longer believe that Haven is a refuge designed to -survive the fall of a once-great civilization? You no longer believe -that we-three are its guardians?" - -"I think it artifice, a folly, if one constructed on a gargantuan -scale." - -"What first raised your suspicions? For forty years you've accepted this -version of events. What changed?" - -"Library." - -"Ah, yes, Library. He was always going to be a necessary evil. The -serpent in my Eden, if you will. What happened?" - -"New information, impossible information, which I now see has somehow -leaked in from the real world." - -"Haven has endured far longer than anyone thought possible, but nothing -lasts forever." - -I drew myself up. "Is that why you returned, for a final visit? You -wished to deliver our death sentence in person?" - -"If it were the end of the world, and nothing could be done to avert it, -would you really want to know?" - -"The true test of a man is how he faces the inevitable." - -Aurelia prodded me in the chest. "But you are no mere man, Gable, -you are the Devil incarnate. The embodiment of mankind's venal -pursuits, just as Pygar -represents his spiritual side." - -"Words, words, but I hear no salvation in them. May the condemned man at -least know the capital crime of which he is guilty?" - -She did not answer directly but turned away to stand at the balcony, -leaning on the wrought-iron railing. "Do you know why I chose the name -Aurelia Havisham?" - -"So your identity is another falsehood? I suppose it hardly matters -now." - -"Oh, the 'Aurelia' is true enough but 'Miss Havisham' is a literary -character, a young woman who becomes a recluse after being jilted at the -altar." - -I heard the catch in her voice and said nothing. - -"In my world, in the real world, I was an heiress. The beauty -barbers did what they could but I knew it was my wealth that lent me -allure. I could have accepted that, enjoyed the company of young men, -then younger men, but ultimately I'd become a figure of ridicule. Some -double-standards never die, apparently." - -"Apparently." - -"But then I met Simon. He was young, ambitious�" She glanced over her -shoulder, "�vigorous, and made no secret of wanting my fortune to -further his grandiose designs. And still I loved him. Our wedding was a -lavish affair, even by the standards of the day, and the Patriarch -himself agreed to officiate." - -"You do not have to continue, Aurelia, I believe the outcome is clear." - -"I reached the cathedral to find only the groomsman waiting. He handed -me a letter from Simon, hand-written at least. I have it still, -unopened." - -"Aurelia-" - -"I could not face the congregation, I could not face society. Like Miss -Havisham I retreated to my country estate but even that was not enough. -I needed to escape my world and everything, everyone, in it." - -"And so you created Haven, by means I cannot begin to understand." - -She laughed, although it was bitter-sweet at best. "This is the mote in -God's eye. A fraction of the universe folded in upon itself, hidden even -from divine scrutiny." - -"Your world seems one of many wonders." - -"My world? My world is ailing, Gable. It is exhausted, overcrowded, -devoid of hope. It is run by desperate men contemplating desperate -measures." - -My mouth moved soundlessly for a few moments while my mind floundered -for a reply. "They, they would come here? Occupy our land, -enslave us?" - -"Heavens, no!" Aurelia sounded genuinely amused at my naivety and I felt -my face burn with embarrassment. "Haven only exists as a reality-bubble -within the event horizon of an artificial singularity." - -"I do not understand what that means, but I know that bubbles always -burst." - -"Yes, bubbles always burst, but the pioneering technology I funded, the -way in which Haven was created, bought me a place at the top table, so -to speak. That same methodology will now be used on a vastly greater -scale to transmute all this�" She spread her arms as if to -encompass the world outside the window,"�into a second Earth, a virgin -canvas." - -"Man would now rival God in his creation?" - -I could hear the frown in her voice. "It's based on 'dark matter -manipulation', but do not ask me what that means." She hesitated for a -moment, "I understand that the process is not without risk." - -Ah, so there it was. The open cell door that leads only to the scaffold. -Only with great effort did I keep the anger from my voice. "I did not -think you this cruel, my sweet. You could have watched from afar and -only explained matters after our miraculous transformation. Or mourned -our passing." - -Aurelia sighed, "I am old, Gable, old beyond my time. This body, -this Aurelia, offers an escape from my decrepit carcass back in -the real world. In any event our fates are intertwined. Haven sprang -from my imagination and now it is I and I alone who must imprint that -vision onto the raw chaos of creation." She turned to face me, "Imagine, -I am to be the architect of a new world. My sisters in the Eastern Star -will venerate my name in ages to come." - -I seized her, took her in my arms. "How long do we have? Is there yet -time enough for love?" - -"The process is imminent, but you were always opportunistic." - -I caressed her cheek. "And should this grand enterprise of yours come to -nought, what then?" - -"Then God blinks�and nothing." - -I laughed. "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and -frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." - -She stared at me in obvious surprise. "Macbeth? Shakespeare at his most -pessimistic. However I would say The Tempest is more apt, given our -circumstances." - -"The Tempest? Enlighten me." - -Now it was Aurelia's turn to laugh. "O brave new world, that has such -people in it!" - -"And shall there be room for all, on these virgin shores?" - -"Well, I'm unsure what humanity in general will make of Pygar, but it -certainly isn't ready for the Devil himself." - -I grinned, leaning in to kiss her. "Frankly, my dear, I don't -give a damn." - -© Martin M. Clark 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] soundnfury.jpg - -[*ITEM] Farny's Place - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good -design for a bus.
David Hockney - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

Held in suspension by an unseen balance of forces the -great globe hung low over the linked cluster of buildings in East Snoak. -From a distance its surface appeared perfectly reflective, but closer to -it displayed constantly swirling polychromatic patterns reminiscent of a -soap-bubble. Every so often, to the delight of spectators, somewhere on -its periphery vagrant trails of colour would coalesce, and a luminous -blob would momentarily detach itself, before dissipating to leave a -slowly fading rainbow glow. - -Designed by eminent architech Gurm Weiger, this installation was a -tribute to Farny Farglesharp, in celebration of twenty-five years of the -Art Market, which had its humble beginnings in what had once been an -abandoned hut, and now occupied a sprawling network of converted -warehouses set between the outer ring road around Praspafole Stadium and -the fashionably elegant glitter of Yarp Street. - -

Farny's parents had led busy working lives; his mother -Helba as a -consultant nutritionist, his father Teir as a soil analyst. These -enlightened practitioners of scientific method did not attempt to impose -a career path on their gawky restless son, who for all his natural -inquisitiveness in his late teens had entered that phase of development -when intelligible communication seemed only permissible among peers. At -home he spent valuable time contemplating his body-image, cultivating a -look of fierce concentration which closely resembled a defiant scowl, -and responding to polite questions with condensed packets of information -encoded as grunts. - -Eventually, out of genuine curiosity rather than rebellion, Farny had -chosen to enrol at Sparagulan College to study Art. He did not think of -himself as an aspiring artist, but had often gravitated to the art books -in his school library, and had definite preferences among the many works -reproduced, although he could not as yet explain why some gave him -pleasure, some left him feeling uncomfortable, while others failed to -leave much impression on him at all. He knew enough to feel that in -those works that caught his interest there was something akin to a -conjuror's sleight of hand, and he wanted to pry out those secrets. - -He was also curious to know why so many people devoted their lives to -art, and how exactly did one recognize a masterpiece? What was it that -distinguished the truly exceptional from the merely highly accomplished? -And who were best qualified to be the arbiters: fellow-artists, cultural -historians, wealthy collectors or the democratic majority? - -After a year under the tutelage of Lugfaus Goltz, Professorial Head of -the Art Department and a sculptor of some distinction, Farny was -slightly better informed, having acquired a grounding in art history and -techniques, but was more aware than before of the limits of his -knowledge. In the second year Goltz encouraged his students to -experiment, allowing them to discover for themselves the -transformational potential of solid materials; how easily they could be -carved, moulded, filed, chiselled, glued or welded into a desired shape. -They were asked to examine examples of different rocks and minerals to -determine their artistic potential. Farny became fascinated by the -chemistry of pigments. At home, with the benefit of helpful guidance -from the respective disciplines of Teir and Helba, using an array of -powdered and liquefied substances, he worked out for himself how to -create the most satisfying colours. - -By the end of the third and final year, although the answers to some of -his larger questions remained elusive, Farny Farglesharp thought he -might have found his m�tier. He had studied the philosophies underlying -successive artistic movements, and could identify the work of their best -exponents. Professor Goltz had succeeded in teasing out his latent -skills, and if called upon, he could now produce a convincing portrait, -landscape or abstract composition with an implement as rudimentary as a -burnt twig. He could fashion a themed collage from found objects. He -had worked with fabrics, wood, clay, glass, metal, stone and artificial -materials, and now had an understanding of the range of tools and -craftsmanship required. But his real enthusiasm was for the palette; -for the spectrum of paints, inks and dyes which lent richness and -subtlety to the artist's chosen surface. - -

Among his most like-minded college friends was Pirian -Leems, a quietly -studious painter of exquisite miniatures. Shortly after graduating they -decided to spend some time travelling abroad. Pirian was not only widely -read, but possessed the enviable knack of being able to locate, -seemingly by instinct, the best cuisine and the most stimulating -beverages for the lowest possible price in any given area. Farny, who -suspected that Pirian possessed a remarkable combination of keen -observation and an acute sense of smell, had casually wondered aloud -whether this vital ability only worked in Snoak, or would it also apply -in foreign parts? Pirian had risen to the challenge, and they had soon -concluded that there were after all other important reasons for -undertaking such a trip. With a list of contacts gathered from Farny's -own researches and supplemented by a few names cajoled from Lugfaus -Goltz, together they visited workshops and studios, a host of galleries, -a marine processing plant, an industrial chemist, a spice merchant and -various retailers of craft materials. Needless to say, Pirian's -tracking aptitude was put to the test, and he unerringly led the way to -a succession of taverns, caf�s, refectories and restaurants of which -Farny had seen no advance notice, and was duly deeply impressed. Four -months later, brimming with enthusiasm, convivial memories, a wealth of -useful knowledge and such a large quantity of samples they had to invest -in a glidecart, they embarked on their return journey. - -The hut had belonged to Pirian Leems' grandfather, who had once burdened -its shelves with grey slabs bearing the imprint of cycads, lumps of -stone harbouring ancient trilobites, and other dark, weighty evidence of -long-perished life. These fossils had been auctioned after his -grandfather's death, as the old man had stipulated, to Pirian's later -financial benefit, although the lad would have been content with his -childhood gift of a small polished ammonite whose chambered helical -geometry had always fascinated him, and which he still cherished. The -hut had remained empty and abandoned until his friend Farny had -half-jokingly mentioned that he needed somewhere to play with his -pigments, and gradually the idea took shape of a colour laboratory which -could function as a practical enterprise, perhaps even a profitable one. -Farny was confident he could manufacture many of his products more -cheaply than most of those sold commercially, and he could guarantee -their superior quality. He planned on supplementing his specialist -pigments with a carefully selected range of other art and craft -materials obtained at a discount from reputable suppliers. - -Pirian was happy to spend some of what he called his "fossil fund" on -refurbishing the hut. He had it virtually rebuilt, with the addition of -plumbing facilities, light-sensitive windows and -thermostatically-controlled storage containers, and had ordered a few -items of automated equipment "�to lessen the chance of injury and to -reduce unnecessary mess," as he explained. Grimy and dishevelled after -sorting and bundling a fresh batch of willow charcoal, Farny conceded -that he was willing to make sensible compromises. As a mutually agreed -afterthought, at the back they added an extended porch or corridor which -served as a gallery in which to display and sell on commission the best -work they could find by promising artists in any medium. This section -initially housed some of Pirian's miniatures and a bronze entitled -Frogsplash 2, generously donated by Lugfaus Goltz. - -After a further six weeks of preparation Farny and Pirian began -advertising the Art Hut. The College magazine Splark! ran a -full-page -feature, and they distributed handouts and placed posters on notice -boards in as many of Snoak's public places as would have them, and even -along a few random thoroughfares like 20bird Lane, The Scruttings and -Upper Stirrow Bridge. The offer of free samples to the first fifty -visitors was a bit of a gamble, but paid dividends by attracting not -only the anticipated groups of college students, but also the curiosity -and admiration of a few people with a professional interest and greater -spending power. - -Within a year the Art Hut had an established client�le, regular orders -from several studios and educational institutions (including Sparagulan -College), and was ready to start expanding. Pirian's miniatures were -selling well, and other painters and sculptors whose work they both -respected were seeking gallery space, including the Post-Prandialist -Irkel Upquap, then at work on progressively more convoluted versions of -his looping structures in polished metal: brightly interweaving ribbons -varying in thickness from that of a spoon handle to the girth of a human -torso. The sculptor described these as 'experiments in non-contiguous -spatial dynamics', although one unkind critic said the effect was of a -roller-coaster being digested by a drunken snake. Another interested -potential exhibitor was the young Tortica Doublebud, already notorious -for her innovative series of interactive metaportraits, where the -sensation of eyes following you around the room was manifested in ways -that some found physically intrusive. - -Over the next few years Farny and Pirian negotiated with Commercial -Planning at Central over the acquisition and conversion of the nearby -derelict buildings, formerly transport depots before the advent of -freightway and podport. Once reconstruction was satisfactorily in -progress they set about recruiting additional staff. There was no -shortage of applicants from the College, both among students seeking -part-time work and among recent graduates. Pirian, who had often wished -to devote more time to his painting, gradually withdrew from direct -participation in the business. It was he who suggested that the complex -should be renamed Farglesharp's Art Market in honour of Farny's -extraordinary commitment and enterprise. - -By the time the largest of the former depots was approved for -renovation, Farny had agreed to sponsor a College competition for the -best design, the only specification being that the building was to be -used primarily as a display space for works both two-and -three-dimensional. The students' entries ranged from the -uncomplicatedly minimalist (internal space left totally empty) to the -seriously expensive (sliding walls, retractable ramps, adjustable stair -units, mobile plinths, anacoustic recesses, variable glow chambers, -modular formstax, Trovius cabinets and motion-activated hotos). The -winning design, awarded a cash prize and a generous gift box of art -materials, was a sensible compromise between optimal natural light and -stylishly discreet toilet facilities. - -The finished building became the venue for some memorable exhibitions: -Kreft Nuyl's monumental Sailstones, whose appearance belied their -true fragility, the magnificent Black Fire tapestries of Tosmor -Shaunt, and the Hundred Hidden Doors, that tantalizingly -labyrinthine creation of Hirelle Degdard, from which bemused spectators -would emerge in a trance-like state, having lost all sense of time, -place and direction. The artist herself modestly declined to be -interviewed, stating only that she would like her work to speak for -itself. This did not prevent critics from offering their own -interpretations, but the consensus was that moving through the gauzy -intricacy of this structure was a unique and mysterious experience. -Lurid reports appeared in the Quanderpyre Press alleging that two people -wearing short cloaks and thought to be from Smatparrox had actually -failed to re-appear after entering this exhibit, but these reports were -never substantiated. The two people were not identified, although Ebby -Blates at the Multimart was overheard saying that she wouldn't be -surprised if they turned out to be those two arty friends of her second -husband's cousin Zole. - -

Curiously enough, at about that time there seemed to have -been a spate -of rumours about people from Smatparrox going missing, but it took more -than uncorroborated gossip to disturb the equanimity of Snoak City -residents, hardly any of whom are likely to have known either of the two -acquaintances of Ebby Blates' husband's cousin. These two currently -unemployed Smatparrox-based individuals were in fact Fucis Gawl and -Legger Rambersack, who shared the slight distinction of having had a few -dyspeptic poems published in local hand-printed magazines with -(numerically) a very modest readership. To assert their dedication to -the muse they had taken to wearing cravats, silk-lined capes and -wide-brimmed black hats in an emulous attempt to revive what they -believed was a once fashionable literary tradition, but most people -assumed they had been hired to perform tricks at a children's party. As -it happened, at the time of the alleged vanishing among the Hundred -Hidden Doors they were on home ground, sitting at their habitual -table in Quoil's, having an intensely heated argument about boiled eggs; -specifically, whether a boiled egg with its shell removed is more -correctly described as 'shelled' or 'unshelled'. They both passionately -believed that such debates about the nuances of language could only -enhance their development as poets. If Farny Farglesharp can achieve -public recognition in only a quarter of a century, who is to say that -the names of Gawl and Rambersack may not yet be honoured by posterity? - - -© Les Sklaroff 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] farny.gif - - - - -[*ITEM] The Last Day of the Mute Ant - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] Just what makes that little old ant
Think he'll move that -rubber tree plant
Anyone knows an ant, can't
Move a rubber tree -plant.
Lyrics of High Hopes � BARTON MUSIC CORPORATION - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The truck's suspension was so effective it -felt like sitting in a small, canopied aerodrome rather than the back of -an armoured vehicle. Jacob watched the briefing. He'd aged a lot in the -last fourteen months. He hesitated to say 'hardened'--it was too close -to what he'd done to the ants.

- -From myrmecologist to miscreationist.

- -Scientists, doctors had always hidden their work behind a wall of Latin -names. It was why Harrison had been brought in by the P.R. department to -deliver today's briefing.

- -"'Roy boss?'" asked one of the marines, or whatever soldiers -called themselves these days. The scientific briefing was part of their -orientation, given in order to explain some of the equipment the marines -would be carrying into battle when they arrived at the fields.

- -"Rooibos," Harrison corrected. "It's a type of South African tea. -A while ago, a fellow called Nortier had the job of trying to cultivate -the plant in order to increase production but found that the seeds were -tiny and that, when ripe, the seedpods burst them all over the place. -Then a local Khoi woman showed him how the resident black ants collected -up the seeds and stored them in their nests. Hey presto: automated seed -collection.

- "More -recently, the same method had been extrapolated in order to have ants -collect something more valuable." Harrison looked his way, but Jacob -already had his game-face on. "They persuaded ants to collect gold and -silver deposits and bring them back to their nests where the metals -could then be harvested. Think of it like bees collecting minute -particles of pollen that eventually give us honey."

- Or -oysters turning grains of sand into pearls, thought Jacob at the -inaccurate comparison. It didn't matter: as long as the men in the truck -knew they weren't here to rescue civilians but silos.

- "And -it worked…"

- We -wouldn't be here if it hadn't. But sometimes you could be too -clever, and sometimes things could work too well…

- "The -company used pheromones to direct the ants to collect metal deposits and -rewarded them with foodstuffs to instil the right behaviour. The -ants' own tandem-learning instilled the behaviour throughout the nest. -Unlike seed collection, there are no seasonal restraints, and so the -ants keep stockpiling the whole year round. The company had to mix many -different strains to get just the ant they wanted. The resultant -mutant…"

- ---One man's mutant is another man's superhero, Jacob thought. -Although, granted, no one had ever put a cape on Doc Frankenstein's -creation--

- -"…was a metal-collector extraordinaire."

- And -now the monster story took its inevitable downturn.

- -"Unfortunately, the ants had other ideas-they didn't want to give up -what they'd collected."

- "What -does an ant want with gold?" a marine asked.

- "It -wasn't just gold they ended up collecting. They got a taste for metal. -Not to eat it-they're not stupid--they used it to reinforce their nests -and turn them into little, armoured Fort Knoxes."

- "Why -are we here? Why not just send in pest exterminators?"

- "Tell -them," Jacob said when Harrison faltered.

- -"Because ants protect what's theirs. Come here, Kenner." A marine more -laden down with bits and pieces than a husband accompanying his wife to -the spring sales stepped forward. There were grunts of amusement. The -explanation of Kenner's equipment would run like the safety procedures -delivered by a flight attendant prior to take-off.

- "The -ants use chemical warfare, so you need to keep your bio suit on at all -times. Some species of ants use propaganda pheromones which can cause -their enemies to turn and attack each other…"

-Polyergus rufescens , Jacob thought. "

Or acetophenones -to immobilise an enemy." Malaysian capmonotus cylindricus. "They -can even release oleic acid to encourage necrophoric behaviour." Atta -mexicana.

- There -was a dirty laugh.

- "It -means removal of their dead. They keep their homes clean. Their chemical -agents include formic acid..." Formicinae. "…alkaloids and -piperidines." Solenopsis fire ants. "The ants, gentlemen, are -fighting back."

Jacob was impressed that Harrison held the -men's gazes after that B-Movie tagline Jacob nodded for the briefing to -continue.

- "Ants -are master architects. But, apart from reinforcing their nests, there -are unconfirmed rumours this new breed are also reinforcing their -exoskeletons. They bite, they sting, they spray, and they inject." -Bottoms shifted uncomfortably in their seats. It was about time. Jacob -leaned forward, anticipating the inevitable round of home remedies.

-

-"Why don't we just flood the fields and drown them?"

- "Some -ants switch to anaerobic respiration underwater." Camponotus -anderseni. "Some even go so far as to drink the water in the nest, -then excrete it outside." Cataulacus muticus.

- The -thing with mixing the breeds was you got all the features you -wanted…and forgot about the shared features you didn't.

- -"Couldn't we just starve them out?"

- "They -can grow their own food supply." Fungus-growing leafcutter ants. -"They even farm their own livestock." Mealy bugs and -myrmecophilous caterpillars being the cattle of choice.

- Hell, -Protomognathus americanus even caught and kept their own slaves. -

- "What -about a great big magnifying glance and a hot sun?" one wag said in -order to lighten the mood. Jacob joined in with the laughter until some -other marine said, "Why don't we just drop a bomb on the entire damned -field?"

- Jacob -stood up and made sure he could be seen. "Because the value of that -field is in excess of the gross national product of a middle-sized -European economy. You shall therefore be going in with a new spray which -will neutralise the threat, but preserve the assets. Any questions?" -

- Jacob -saw the wide-eyes of the marines as they backed up, pointing at -something behind him. He turned in time to see the rest of Harrison -dissolve into the billions of ants that had formerly made him.

- -Myrmarachne plataleoides, Jacob thought as they raced up -his legs. One more trick. The ability to mimic their enemies.

-

- - © Jez Patterson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] muteant.jpg - - -[*ITEM] God Blinked - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; -God never blinks.
Regina Brett - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"I'm Dominic Vecchio, Chief of Security. -This is Officer Parks." - -While Parks appeared to be no more than muscle in a cheap suit there -was an air of cynical intelligence about Vecchio that I found -unsettling. He looked like the kind of man who believed everyone lied as -a matter of course. - -Despite my apprehension I managed to smile. "Donald Cain. Please, -gentlemen, take a seat". - -I'd remained in my executive armchair when Abigail ushered in my two -uninvited guests; a cheap move, designed to show I wasn't in the least -intimidated by this intrusion. Vecchio unbuttoned his jacket so that it -hung wide to reveal the Glock on his hip. An equally cheap move, but one -that had the desired effect of increasing my sense of unease. I -retaliated by not offering them any refreshments. Score one for petty -power-play. - -He shot a cuff. "We haven't met before, Director, as I was on -compassionate leave when you joined us here at Horst Energie. My thanks -for finally finding time to see me, given your busy schedule." - - -I ignored the obvious sarcasm - Vecchio had been bombarding me with -weekly requests for some four months - and continued the exchange of -pleasantries. "Well, bureaucracy expands to fill the time available, as -they say." My smile slid towards sympathetic concern, "And my -condolences, Chief, on the loss of your father." - -Vecchio flinched like I'd struck him in the face, then made an -obvious effort to relax. "This isn't a social call, Director." - -"No? Obviously if I'd realised this was to be more than just a -delayed 'meet and greet' it would have been afforded a higher priority. -So, what seems to be the problem?" - -"The problem is that immediately on taking up post you placed this -entire compound off-limits to all non-departmental personnel, including -security. I'm supposed to be responsible for the entire site only to be -told my presence here is by invitation only? I trust you appreciate that -your self-imposed isolation has seriously undermined my authority." - -I ran Area Two, one of four which went to make up the Horst research -and development facility in the wilds of New Mexico. Each campus was -lavishly equipped such that few staff ever felt the need to venture -beyond the perimeter, and my 'Berlin Wall' regime had been accepted with -barely a murmur. - -From my own personnel, that is. Despite Vecchio's open irritation I -kept up the light-hearted approach. "Oh, our 'self-imposed isolation', -as you put it, Chief, is simply due to the extremely sensitive nature of -the work we do here. My department includes a three-man team of private -security contractors who are more than capable of dealing with any petty -disputes and trivial infractions. However, if you're unhappy at being -out-of-the-loop then may I suggest you lodge a formal complaint through -the appropriate channels." - -"Gee, whiz, wish I'd thought of that. Of course I objected, only to -be told you're protected from on high. I had to call in a few markers to -even get this far, so I suppose I should be thankful you've acknowledged -I exist." - -"We've simply had no call for your services, Chief, although if -circumstances dictate otherwise I'd certainly value your input. However -I'm happy to say that during my tenure as Director of Operations -everything has run extremely smoothly, extremely smoothly indeed." - -Vecchio pursed his lips. "Really? Then what about the death of Serge -Danner? It happened over three months ago but I only got to hear about -it yesterday." - -I waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. "That was no more than an -unfortunate industrial accident. Technician Danner fell from one of the -overhead gantries in the materials storage area and broke his neck. I -happened to be first on the scene and, before you ask, there was no-one -else in the vicinity, no suggestion of foul play. Our medical officer -certified his injuries were consistent with a tragic mishap." - -"Yet there was no CCTV coverage of the area in question. Quite an -oversight given the, as you put it, 'extremely sensitive nature' of your -work here." - -"I'm not au fait with the technicalities but apparently the -high-energy fields being generated play havoc with the surveillance -grid. Building infrastructure lies outside my remit and Central don't -consider it cost-effective to install shielded cabling. If you have any -complaints concerning this state of affairs then I suggest you take the -matter up with Accounting." - -"I find your attitude complacent, Director, if not bordering on -actual negligence." - -I sat back and steepled my fingers, "And I find your attitude -bordering on an abuse of process, Vecchio. A crude and somewhat obvious -attempt to parlay this trumped-up investigation into an expression of -superiority, simply because our seclusion is an itch you can't scratch." - - -He snorted. "I didn't strong-arm Central simply to make a point in -some petty turf war, if that's what you mean. No, a security situation -has arisen and I need to know what it is you're doing in Area Two, -Director. Specifically, what is Project Mote?" - -I glared at him. "Even that designation is highly classified. Look, -what is this about? Security situation? What kind of security situation? -Nothing has happened recently which would warrant your attention and, as -I've explained, Danner's death was a simple accident - end of story." - - -"Then consider my visit as a kind of epilogue to that sorry little -tale. You recruited one Sara Hotchkiss to replace Danner." - -I blinked, momentarily thrown by the shift in conversation. "Well, -no, not personally. I'm an administrator, a project manager, and as such -I'm not qualified to vet candidates on technical matters. The job -specification was passed to Human Resources and they presented us with -Miss Hotchkiss in due course. I understand Professor Koenig was involved -in the interview process and he's quite a stickler for detail, so I'm -sure we employed only the very best. I've certainly not received any -negative feedback concerning Miss Hotchkiss, she seems most competent." - - -Vecchio almost smiled. "Sara Hotchkiss doesn't exist." - -I stared at him. "What? "My mouth suddenly felt dry and I had to -cough before continuing, "What do you mean by that?" - -"She came to us from Aries Telecom?" - -"Yes, I believe so. She worked there as a technical analyst. Her -background made her a near-perfect candidate. They gave her an excellent -reference." - -Vecchio toyed with his cufflink. "Not according to Aries. In fact -no-one of that name has ever worked for them, in any capacity, at any of -their sites. I've been in contact with my opposite number and we now -believe their personnel database was hacked prior to our checking her -references, then restored so they wouldn't detect the presence of a -phantom former employee. Obviously Aries are keen to ensure this breach -of security doesn't become public knowledge, so we can count on their -continued co-operation." - -I poured myself a glass of water from the crystal beaker on my desk -and took a sip before replying - as much to give myself time to think as -soothe a parched throat. "It sounds like you've uncovered nothing more -than a database glitch, Chief. A flaw in their systems, not ours." - -He shook his head. "Sara Hotchkiss has a driving licence, social -security number, an extensive credit history. There are school records, -her university degree, even two traffic tickets for speeding - but these -are all on-line. In every photograph of her as an adult, be it her -graduation or a corporate PR release, Sara is always in the back row or -on the edge of the group in question. That is to say, in the prime -position for an inserted image." - -"You're saying that her past has been doctored? Some kind of extreme -CV inflation?" - -"I'm saying that her past is a complete fabrication." Vecchio -shifted slightly in his seat and a hint of doubt crept into his voice, -"Possibly. For now we've held off chasing the paper trail, the -corroborating hard-copy documentation, in case this was the aim all -along." - -I frowned. "I'm sorry, I don't understand." - -"If it comes to light that Horst security is conducting a -witch-hunt, especially when it implicates a major enterprise like -Project Mote, then the effect on share price would be devastating. If -someone knew to expect this beforehand they could make a killing." - -"So this, ah, crisis of confidence in Miss Hotchkiss has been -engineered, designed solely to manipulate the stock market?" - -"That's one theory, yes." - -I let myself relax slightly. "Well, I think you're chasing shadows, -Chief. The outside world knows nothing, nothing, of what's going -on in here. So I suggest you go ahead as planned. After all, reviewing -one employee history is hardly going to bring the sky down on our heads -now, is it?" - -Vecchio shook his head. "You're too isolated in here, Director, your -appreciation is too insular. The balance sheet doesn't lie and it's -obvious from the last published set of accounts that your department -represents a major, even critical, investment on behalf of Horst. -Anything which reflects badly on your enterprise reflects badly on the -company as a whole." - -"I almost feel flattered. Anyway, there's one crucial element in all -of this that you seem to have overlooked in your rush to judgement." - - -"Oh? Then kindly enlighten me." - -"Why would anyone fabricate a work history for Sara Hotchkiss as an -Aries employee unless they knew we were seeking a replacement for -the unfortunate Danner? Hum? Tell me that? This arcology is incorporated -as a municipal body with its own coroner, fire department, even its own -police force." I smiled, "That would be you, by the way. Danner had no -family, no dependants, so his death went unreported outside the -boundaries of our petty kingdom. So you see, Chief Vecchio, being -somewhat insular does have its advantages." - -"You're correct, Director Cain. No-one could have anticipated a -vacancy would arise, especially not the specific vacancy brought about -by the loss of technician Danner." Vecchio's face hardened, "Unless his -death wasn't accidental." - -I stared at him, sudden fear making my scalp tighten. "You're saying -he was murdered? No, no, I can't believe someone amongst us could -be capable of that." - -"It's only one possibility, I admit, but one that can't be ignored. -Look, if Danner was killed that means there's already an insider. -That's why it's so important I understand what it is you're doing. If I -arrest Hotchkiss, what threat could her accomplice pose to the success -of your project, to the safety of the facility? You must be candid, -Director, for all our sakes." - -I sat back, floundering for a response that wouldn't leave me -looking either self-serving or incompetent. The chair detected my tense -shoulders and began a vibrating massage that took me a few moments to -shut off. I cleared my throat. "Teleportation. Teleportation as a mass -transit medium." - -Vecchio raised an eyebrow. "What, as in 'beam me up, Scotty'? I -thought that technology had pretty much hit a brick wall." - -"The conventional approach, most certainly. That deals with mass -converted into energy, transmitting that energy to another location, and -recreated the original mass from that energy." I allowed myself a small -smile, "But energy doesn't 'remember' what is was, where it came from, -and no transmission method is ever one-hundred-percent efficient, so why -bother? At present the only transfer that takes place is the template, -the item blueprint, and the original is lost forever." - -"What you're describing is just a standard nanofax. You can't put -living matter through one of those." - -"Of course not, even the quickest biomass printer can't produce a -viable organism - and certainly not a sentient one. It is, as you say, a -brick wall." - -He frowned. "Don't play games, Director, what have you achieved that -makes your project so damned important?" - -"Project Mote has side-stepped the problem entirely. Using spatial -compression and gravimetric confinement we're now able to shrink an area -approximately two metres in diameter down to the size and mass of a -photon - ah, part of a beam of light. We then physically transmit -this photon 'bus' to a new location where the contents expand back to -normal size. The beauty of this system is that it utilises existing -fibre optic and laser communications technology. All you need on the -receiving end is the means to de-encrypt the transmission header and -project the incoming packet into an appropriate empty space. At -present the compression only lasts for three-point-two seconds so, -obviously, timing is everything." - -Vecchio took a deep breath and expelled it. "Christ, you're talking -about making all existing forms of transportation redundant overnight. -If this comes to market it will make an awful lot of people very -unhappy, assuming the technology doesn't simply get militarised." His -eyes narrowed, "And you can send people through this?" - -"Oh yes. Well, so far all we're done is move rats and a monkey from -one side of the lab to the other, with no apparent ill-effects. We're -still months away from human trials using volunteers." - -"OK, OK, but what about interstellar travel? Because if you've -cracked that then I know of several corporations who'd happily -crater this facility and damn the consequences." - -I shook my head. "Oh, no, you only have the volume of air that's -been compressed within the transmission sphere. More than enough if all -you're doing is sending a beam of light around the globe, but it would -still take five years or so to reach the nearest star. This system will -be limited to Earth orbit, the Moon, maybe Mars if you took your own -oxygen supply." - -"Small mercies, but gratefully received." The Chief turned to his -colleague. "Right, we'll need to double our surveillance footprint, so -get onto Central for at least another two satellites. Dig out the survey -we did for potential anti-missile sites. I'll want a full deployment of -mobile batteries within thirty minutes of authorisation, so don't take -any shit from the arsenal over this. Perimeter drones we can beef up -from local resources." He rubbed his chin, "OK, that only leaves a -railgun attack. Can't do much about that apart from keeping tabs on any -potential airborne platforms. Contact Ops about hacking civilian -air-traffic control, including the capacity to send false transmissions. -Anything you want to add?" - -Parks blinked, slowly, before replying. "On-site EMP detonation by -means of covert infiltration, compromised security personnel, or -compromised civilian staff. Same goes for the release of chemical or -biological agents. We'll need to start extensive background checks -across the board. Like you said, sir, a witch hunt." - -I held up a hand. "Gentlemen, please! You make it sound like someone -is about to declare war on us. Are all these elaborate precautions -really necessary?" - -Vecchio laughed, although there was no humour in his voice. "If I -was on the outside, and learned what it is you're cooking up, I'd make -damn sure we stole the technology before any patent was filed. Either -that or ensure Project Mote goes down in flames. Which brings us back to -Sara Hotchkiss. Despite the risks, I'm inclined to remove her from the -equation right here, right now." - -"But doesn't it make more sense to leave things as they are until we -can identify her accomplice? You said yourself that arresting Sara could -precipitate matters and all we need is a few more weeks, perhaps two -months at most, to prove the technology works." - -He shook his head. "No, I'll confront her, then match whatever -amount she's been offered to spy on us, plus relocation and a new -identity. If she's acting under duress then things get a bit more -complicated, but I have personnel who can remove pressure just as easily -as it's been applied." - -"You'd really do all that?" - -"Of course not, but it's obvious you believed me and you're a -cynical, heartless, bureaucrat." Vecchio gave me a thin-lipped smile, -"I've read your file." - -I took my time before replying; removing a bottle of Scotch from the -pedestal desk drawer and adding a generous measure to my glass. The -whiskey swirled like smoke through the mineral water - my uncertain -future as a Brownian motion metaphor. "Who else knows you're here apart -from Abigail, my personal assistant? She brought you in, but did you -encounter anyone else, even just passing them in the corridor?" - -"I'm way ahead of you Director. If we have to 'disappear' Sara -Hotchkiss then the best cover story is a medical emergency. That -wouldn't hold water if everyone knew corporate security were taking an -interest. I'm assuming your assistant and medical officer can be trusted -to co-operate?" - -"Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Ah, well, do you want me call her in -here, to my office? Sara, I mean." - -"Yes, let's get things moving." - -I took a swig from my glass before pressing the intercom. "Abigail? -Would you be so kind as to contact Sara Hotchkiss and ask her to come -and see me. Tell her I need to review the final transmission protocols. -Just send her straight in when she arrives, no need to stand on -ceremony." - -"Certainly, Director, I'll get right on it." - -Another mouthful did nothing to calm my nerves. "And now we wait." - - -Less than five minutes, as it turned out. - -There was a knock and Vecchio raised a hand to stop me replying -immediately. He and Parks stood and turned to face the door before -nodding to me. - -I cleared my throat. "Come in." - -Sara Hotchkiss entered holding a manila folder. She was an athletic -brunette with close-cropped hair; handsome rather than pretty but -definitely attractive if you liked strong women. To her credit she -seemed unruffled by the reception committee, regarding the two security -officers calmly before looking in my direction. "Director?" - -I lifted the -Bergman pistol from my open desk drawer -and shot both Vecchio and Parks in the back of the head. - -Blood and brain matter sprayed across Sara's face, blouse and lab -coat. She barely flinched. The bodies fell to my plush carpet making no -sound. The Bergman was a low-velocity, gas-powered gun designed for use -in orbit As such it made an excellent, if short-range, assassination -weapon down here on Earth. It had been supplied by my private security -contractors, no questions asked, given my privileged position. I placed -the gun on the desk and tried to smile. - -Sara tossed the folder aside and wiped her face with her sleeve. -"Christ, you weren't joking when you specified 'final protocols'. We're -blown then?" - -"Oh, yeah, and then some. Vecchio turned out to be a petty-minded -little shit and your CV fell apart under close scrutiny. Just as well he -didn't give mine the third-degree as well." - -"OK, now what? I take it simply running away isn't an option?" - -I finished my drink. "Well, I might be able to walk out of here but -I'm fairly sure your card is marked." - -Her face twisted into a bitter smile. "Oh, great. You kill this pair -but it's me who gets thrown to the wolves? Thanks for nothing." - -"That's not what I meant and you know it. Look, use my restroom to -get cleaned up as best you can. I need to lay some groundwork if we're -to avoid spending the next twenty years in a corporate gulag. Assuming -we don't just end up as landfill." - -Sara glared at me before vanishing next door. I heard water running. -Another drink had its appeal but the first shot already lay like a sour -cinder in my gut. I pressed the intercom. "Abigail?" - -"Yes, sir?" - -"I need you to contact Catering and have them lay on a full -hospitality package in the conference suite. Top of the line, no expense -spared. We'll also need the side room for less illustrious guests - -security personnel and the like." - -"Certainly, Director. Can you give me any indication as to -expected numbers?" - -"Not at this stage, no, but I'll just bring in senior staff as -required if the room is going to look a bit underpopulated. Well, the -presentable ones, at any rate" - -I could hear the smile in her voice. "Yes, sir, I'll draw up a -shortlist. What kind of time-scale are we working to?" - -"Another unknown, I'm afraid. Security have just given me the -heads-up but all they know is that this visit is 'imminent'. -Look, you'd better go down and supervise things personally, we can't -afford any slip-ups where Board members are concerned." - -"No problem, sir, I'll make sure everything goes as smooth as -silk." - -"Thank you, Abigail, I don't know what I'd do without you. Get -yourself an extra-special present from me come Christmas." She laughed. - - -I sat back in my chair, breathing heavily. After a few minutes Sara -emerged and I saw her nose crinkle with disgust - the smell of blood and -bowel was now impossible to ignore. Her face was clean and although the -blouse betrayed damp patches they were easily overlooked against the -dark blue cotton. - -She barely glanced at the bodies. "I can do nothing with my lab -coat." - -"Doesn't matter, there's a service store between here and the lab -and you're bound to find one there. Remember to take your ID and pens, -and that folder. Everything has to look as close as it did when you were -last there." - -Sara took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I know what it is -you've got planned, it's the only way out for both of us. Be honest, do -you really think we stand a chance?" - -"If I say 'in theory'-" - -"You'll get a slap." - -I managed a brief smile, just a twitch of my lips. "Then how about -'on paper' everything should work just fine?" - -"Oh, much more convincing." She rubbed her eyes, "If we fail, -then Danner's suicide was for nothing." - -"It was the only way to get you in here once Prospero was ready, we -all knew that. Danner believed in what we're doing." - -She raised a clenched fist. "Anarchist League." - -I returned the gesture. "Anarchist League. OK, I'll give you a few -minutes' head start then come down to the lab. I've sent Abigail off to -arrange hospitality for a mythical Board delegation, so no-one should -see you sans coat. She's bound to tell Thurman and that will make -a test-run seem all the more plausible." - -Sara picked up the folder and adjusted her collar. She flashed a -smile, gave me a "Good luck" - and was gone before I had time to reply. - - -A bad case of the shakes swept over me as I sat there on my own. -Despite my professed solidarity with Sara, in reality there was no -alternative escape route for just myself. Corporate security were bound -to take an interest if I walked out of the department without Vecchio -and Parks. Even if I reached the helipad it was a twenty-minute flight -to Albuquerque, and I'd still be 'Donald Cain' when I got there. Like -Sara, my persona was a fabricated 'legend'; one good enough to rival -anything the intelligence community could come up with. Unfortunately -I'd need the help of League hackers to resurrect my true self, and -they'd hardly be willing to co-operate if I bailed-out now. - -I stood and went over to my wall safe which lay behind a signed -picture of the actor Damien Lewis - in his role as the double-agent -'Nicholas Brody'. A terrible conceit, I know, but one I'd been unable to -resist. As part of my departmental isolation strategy the computer -network backups were kept in my office rather than the communal vault, -meaning I had access to the complete details of Project Mote as of -midnight last night. Terabytes of information on a device that would fit -snugly in my jacket pocket. - -One last look around and I left my executive haven forever. - -

The main lab always set my teeth on edge - -literally - it being something to do with free radicals emanating from -the Tesla array. Sara was at the communications console sporting a new, -pristine lab coat. She didn't look up as I entered. - -Thurman made an immediate bee-line for me, a quizzical look on his -face. I took his elbow and steered him to the side, keeping my voice -low. "So you've heard?" - -He adopted the same conspiratorial tone. "I have my sources. -Catering is on red alert and security are shitting themselves. -Apparently." - -"Pretty much. Central are being deliberately coy about who this -delegation consists of, but that in itself points to the presence of at -least one senior Board member." - -He wrung his hands. "But why now? We won't have anything to show -them, not for another three months at least." - -"And I think that's the problem. Look, Vecchio came to see me in -person, because if they pull the plug on us then security for this -site will be downgraded and he'll be out of a job. His take on things, -gleaned from his opposite number at Central, is that certain people are -very unhappy about our perceived lack of progress. Very unhappy, -indeed." - -Thurman glowered. "I bet it's that bastard Takeshi, he's been -against this project from the start." - -"I agree, which makes it vitally important we're able to show him -something spectacular, something that will really rub his nose in it, in -front of the other visitors." - -"What do you mean, 'something spectacular'? I'm warning you, it will -take at least three hours to set up the test apparatus for another -monkey run." - -I licked my lips. "I'll thinking more along the lines of a simulated -transmission, a loop-back." - -He winced. "Well, all the high-capacity relays are in place, I grant -you, but we haven't had power levels up above twenty-percent. Baxter -will have kittens if we break his shiny new reactor." - -I played my trump card. "Which means if it is going to fall -on its ass I'd rather it did so in front of us, not the -delegation." - -The chief scientist looked around the room. "None of the secondary -shielding in in place, apart from the actual transmission zone." - -"But the consoles are protected and that's all that matters. We run -with a skeleton team and put everyone else in the observation booth. -Yes?" - -"Maybe. How long do we have to put this together?" - -"I was thinking there's no time like the present." - -Thurman laughed. "Well, I can't fault your enthusiasm, Director, but -that's not how science works in the real world. You can't just throw a -few switches and hope for the best, not with the kind of high-energy -fields we're manipulating. The only reason I'm contemplating this at -all is the weeks of preparation that have already been put in. -Rushing things at this stage would be foolhardy at best, if not -downright irresponsible. The slightest miscalculation and our only -epitaph will be a cloud of vapour the size of Nebraska." - -"Well, you're right, Thurman, I'm not a scientist, I'm the Director -of Operations. That makes me part administrator, part politician and -part showman. Seeing as how you like old films I have a misquote for you -in return - 'no Buck Rogers, no bucks'. Meaning if we can't show the -delegation that the future is now, our continued funding is -highly questionable, at best." I squeezed his shoulder, "And no-one -wants a spectacular failure on their CV, Lionel, do they?" - -His face contorted in an agony of indecision and I could almost see -the angel and devil on his shoulders, arguing the toss. After a few -moments he swallowed and wiped his mouth. "The first sign of anything -amiss and I pull the plug." - -"Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Down here, you're in charge, I'm merely -the interested observer." - -He strode over to the master console with me trailing in his wake. I -saw him clench his fists so tight the knuckles went white before lifting -the headset and setting it in place. He tapped the microphone twice. -"Attention, attention. All operations personnel to their stations. All -non-essential staff to the observation booth. This will be a loop-back -transmission exercise at full power. Hansen, find a suitable test -subject with an organic component. I'm sorry to spring this upon you, -ladies and gentlemen, but I'm sure we're ready." - -I could see Baxter looking over, his mouth open, and gave him a -thumbs up. It took a minute of two for the redundant staff to seek -illusory safety -behind several inches of armoured -glass. Everyone knew that if anything did go seriously wrong it would -offer no more protection than a sheet of tissue paper. A lab stool -topped by a plant pot was placed on the transmission plate; a carnation -in full bloom, scavenged from Thurman's office. - -Thurman took several deep breaths. "I want a go, no-go from each -station. Transmission." - -"Go." That was Sara and, in this context, entirely superfluous. - -"Environmental." - -"Go." - -"Photonic." - -"Go'" - -"Tesla." - -Nothing. I felt a twist in my gut. Thurman stared at Baxter. - -"Tesla." - -Baxter closed his eyes. "Go." - -Thurman unlocked the Perspex guard and placed his hand over the -'Abort' button. "We have a 'go' for transmission sequence. Tesla, -initiate cascade." - -I watched as the repeater dials displayed the slow increase of -power. The coils of the Tesla array began to glow; dark-blue, light-blue -then near white. My teeth began to itch and I was seized by a -near-uncontrollable urge to laugh out loud. - -We reached operational power. I leaned in close. "Charge the -capacitors." - -Thurman looked round, dislodging a drop of sweat from the tip of his -nose. "What?" - -"Charge the capacitors. Everything has to work in front of Takashi, -everything." - -He blinked, then nodded. "Tesla, initiate power buffering." - -The huge ceramic 'waistcoat' - for want of a better description - -surrounding the transmitter began to pulse with blue light, accompanied -by a low-frequency throbbing. - -The chief scientist looked over at Sara. "Transmission, establish -link to reception station." - -Her fingers danced over the keyboard, following protocol even though -the Horst target site in South Dakota was oblivious to our test. A -synthesised female voice issued from the console speaker. "Searching -for long-range comms. Searching for long-range comms. Signal failure on -long-range comms." - -I smiled encouragingly at Thurman. "You do it. Initiate the burst. -You deserve to be the one who does this." - -He nodded, almost to himself. "Photonic, master console will -initiate burst protocol. Transfer control to my station." A panel lit -up. Thurman's hand shook as he reached over and pressed the twin trigger -buttons. - -A synthesised male voice spoke. "Photonic burst transmission in. -Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero. Initiate." - -The area of space inferred by the compression grid flared into a -perfect reflective sphere, then winked out of existence. A ruby-red -laser fired from top-to-bottom, sweeping away our pseudo-photon. - -The universe paused for three-point-two seconds. - -With no external communication channel the fail-safe kept our beam -of light within prismatic containment and returned it to source. It was -like watching a giant bubble burst, only in reverse. The silver sphere -formed, vanished, leaving… - -A carnation in full bloom, sitting on a lab stool. - -Ragged cheering came from the observation booth. Thurman's shoulders -sagged and I let out a breath I hadn't realised I was holding. I slapped -him on the shoulder. "Well done, Lionel. Well done, indeed. -History will remember this moment, and your place in it." - -He gave me a hesitant smile which grew broader as the enormity of -our achievement sank in. "It worked, the fucking thing actually worked! -God, Donald, do you realise what this means?" - -"Oh, more than you can possibly know. Now, go and congratulate the -other members of your team. The day belongs to all of you." - -Thurman dropped his headset on the console and strode over to where -Baxter stood, visibly shaking. The other personnel spilled out into the -lab like pupils escaping school on the last day of term. Both lab stool -and carnation were held aloft in triumph. Only Sara and I stood apart -from the euphoric huddle. I locked the 'Abort' guard in place and -removed the key. She looked over at me. I nodded. - -Again Sara's fingers danced over the keyboard. Her singular talent -was the ability to memorise a 1,024 alphanumeric encryption key required -for synchronisation between sending and receiving stations. But this was -our key, our friends out there, waiting. - -"Searching for long-range comms. Searching for long-range comms. -Signal lock for long-range comms established." - -I reached for the twin trigger buttons. - -"Photonic burst transmission in." - -Sara and I stepped from behind our respective consoles and ran -towards the compression grid. - -"Five." - -A siren began to wail as Baxter SCRAMed the reactor - but there was -enough residual energy in the capacitors for another burst. My sole -contribution to the design process. - -" Four." - -Prospero's Books was an orbital data haven beyond -corporate -control. By the time a trans-jurisdictional injunction was served the -information I was carrying would be on a thousand illegal download sites -around the globe. - -" Three." - -Or Sara and I would be dead. - -" Two." - -We were open-source Anarchists, high-tech Libertarians. Unrestricted -teleportation of people and goods would smash the world-state forever. -Realising that technology was worth any risk, any sacrifice. - -" One." - -The air around us burned like hoarfrost. Sara screamed, or perhaps -it was me. - -" Zero." - -I took her outstretched hand and together we leapt onto the -transmission plate. - -"Initiate." - -God blinked, wiping a speck of dust from his eye. - -And when he looked again, we were gone. - - -© Martin M. Clark 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] caineid.gif - -[*ITEM] Falling Back - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon Hudson - -[*BLURB] Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a -dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx - -[*DESCRIPTION]

-�Bring me home,� Ronnie whispered through gritted teeth. �Bring me home, -thasa girl.� - -Bonita growled, her own teeth buried in the jacket sleeve of his free -arm, gripping hard as she scrambled backward, pulling him across the -broken pavement. - -Ronnie tried to think past the pain, which wasn�t in his leg, oh no, not -by a shot. It wasn�t even where his jacket had shucked up under his chin -and rubbed the front of his neck raw. No, the pain was in his head. All -in his mind. - -Pain, what�s pain? It�s nothing, pain. You just have to stop thinking -and its gone. Just silence those thoughts and wait for it to melt away. -But never forget your destination, and keep your grip on the prize. - -That most of all he must not let slip away. - -His fingers tightened on the strap of the dead scavenger�s backpack, -dragging it across the rubble exactly the way Bonita was dragging him. A -treasure -trove full of military grade vac-packed Tac-Snacks, the very one -championed by the survivalist-porn ad campaigns that ran right up until -the Great -Yellowstone Blow Off finally distributed Wyoming, Montana and Idaho -directly into the global atmosphere and put an end to broadcast media. - -�It�ll be� good eating tonight, girl,� he muttered. - -Bonita growled, nipping his forearm through his sleeve. A reprimand for -being so talkative while they were exposed out here in the deserted, -dust-shrouded -badlands of central Birmingham. He tightened his grip on her collar and -tried to keep his mouth shut. - -The backpack banged into his left knee, and it seemed that the pain in -his right knee eased sympathetically. A flicker of optimism blossomed. -Perhaps he -had released himself from pain�s grip by focusing on its mirror-point -for a moment. Perhaps thoughtlessness wasn�t the key after all. Perhaps -he was -unlocking marvellous healing energies with his mind. - -But then Bonita pulled him over the curb and onto the road, and as -Ronnie�s arse dropped, his legs slapped flat against the concrete -paving. Pain swept out -of his ruined knee and, instead of only feeling like he�d been shot, it -was as if someone had dropped a nuke into the wound, red radiating into -orange into -yellow into a blinding white. - -Ronnie passed out before he could scream. - -

In her simple way, the dog was relieved when the man lost -consciousness. -It stopped his grunting, his twisting and groaning, his constant -whispered -encouragement. That meant her chances of getting them back to the nest -unnoticed by predators were a little higher. - -She backed away, paws scrambling, teeth sunk into the sleeve of his -jacket as she dragged him, but his slack fingers slipped out of her -collar and so she -paused for a better grip, biting down on his arm through the leather. - -His hand dangled at the wrist, pale from lack of blood. It waved above -his head like he waved to her, as if he was pleased to see the sky. - -The sky, a carpet of brown thunderheads, unbroken for half her lifetime. -Growing darker now. Night would soon fall. She had to get them back. - -Her mind was on the pups. - -

When Ronnie came around it was night and they weren�t -moving. His arms -ached in different directions, like a ballerina holding a pose long -beyond her -tolerance. - -He couldn�t feel his hand, tried to move it, finally lifted his arm from -the shoulder, up off the ground like a falling tree played backwards. -Before the -near black of the clouds, the void-shape of his fingers twitched and he -sighed, dropped the arm beside him as the blood began to flow, tingling, -intoxicating the ache. - -Then he realised both his hands were empty. - -With a grunt of dismay he struggled to raise his head, craning to -see--and there was the backpack, thank god. Just beyond his reach, but -there. - -Bonita stood beside it, looking at him. - -�Good girl, Bonita,� he said, just a dry throated croak, but too loud. -She flinched and ruffed at him in low warning. �Okay,� he -whispered, -�you�re right, you�re right.� With absolute darkness descending upon -them, only sound might bring other scavengers down on them. - -He�d never been a dog person, back in the good old world, but when -Bonita came into his life in the horrible new one, she�d been a -blessing--hunting down -rats and sharing them with him, not to mention an early warning system -for the sort of rats that sneak up and cut your throat in your sleep. - -He�d been devastated when, a year ago, she somehow got out of the cage -he made to keep her. When it turned out she got knocked up by some lucky -mutt and -came back with a swelling belly he�d been pissed. Despite her usefulness -he�d wondered what he was doing, feeding a pregnant dog on half his -scrounge--but -when her little mongrels popped out, one by one, he knew it�d been the -right decision. - -Thirteen little lives. - -Including the two stillborns. - -

Bonita put her nose into the pack. She�d got it open -somehow, clever -bitch that she was, but he could see from a mangled Tac-Snack lying by -his hand that -she was having less luck getting the plasti-tinfoil wrappers open. - -He finger-walked the Tac-Snack into his palm, pulled the seal with -clumsy numb hands, then watery, nutrient-rich sauce was running over his -cracked lips -and he groaned, sucking out a few of the chewy, meaty, spongy chunks. -Mouth full, he tore the package wide enough for Bonita and held it out. - -She snatched it, jerking her head to slop the rest of its contents down -her throat. It was empty too soon. - -�That�s your lot,� he said, but one wasn�t enough, not for either of -them. - -�Bring,� he ordered, flicking his fingers. She licked her chops, then -hooked the strap over her jaw and dragged it close enough for him to -grab. Clever -bitch indeed. - -He pulled the pack onto his chest, counting the remaining packs by -touch. Maybe forty meals, but he�d have make them last. Make them a -reward. One for him, -another for Bonita and the pups. The eight that lived to open their eyes -had always been hungry. - -Too hungry, really. But weren�t they all? - -Ronnie knew that Bonita knew he only did what needed to be done, when he -took those poor little stillborn bodies away and came back with scraps -of meat for -them to share. He�d petted her afterwards, curled around her for warmth, -the pups nestled against her belly, where he could rest a comforting -hand amongst -them. - -All those hungry mouths were so many, though, too many for her to -sustain and not wither away herself. He couldn�t let that happen to his -only companion. - -A gentle, persistent squeeze in the night was all it took to provide -food for another day, and there would be more milk for the others. - -They�d all grow stronger for it. It was for the best. - -Yeah, she�d understood. - -

�Home, Bonita,� he said, when she�d finished licking the -Tac-Snack -wrapper clean, pushing it through the dirt with her whole muzzle stuffed -inside. - -He swapped arms, clutching the backpack to his belly with the right and -holding his left above his head for her to grip. He braced himself, -winced when her -teeth nipped him through the sleeve, and wondered if he had been better -before. His other hand was still tingly-dead so it would hurt less, but -at least -with this one could grip her collar properly. - -Bonita took the strain, digging her paws in, and--like the train of -carriages jerking into motion one by one behind the locomotive--his -shoulders, back, -backside and legs began to grind over the ground. -He hissed out a breath as his knee began to glow, a nauseous throb -sensitive to the slightest motion. Bonita growled into his arm in warning, -but she didn't stop. He wondered, distracting himself from -the needling haze, how far they were from their nest. The last five -waiting pups. The -chance to bandage himself up and finally rest. - -He didn�t notice as, beneath his still numb arm, the backpack began to -slide off his body--not until its end began to drag on the tarmac, -pulling itself -down his belly. - -He grunted, scrabbled blindly for the straps, tried to wind them around -his arm. - -�Bonita, stop,� he whispered. She didn�t. - -It dragged down his right flank, heavy on his hip, his useless sausage -fingers unable to prevent the straps slipping away. - -�Stop girl!� he ordered. She growled. - -It bumped beside his right thigh, mere shrinking inches from the -wreckage of his knee. In desperation he let go of her collar, but she -fought to keep her -grip on his left arm, prevented him from reaching down with it to-- - -The backpack jounced his knee. - -His leg erupted. - -Ronnie wailed, his whole body thrashing, knocking the backpack aside. It -rolled away, one turn, another, as reached futilely for his leg, -hovering his free -hand, afraid to touch it. - -Bonita dragged him backward again and this time he howled. She let go -with a bark--he�d never heard it before--and jumped back, teeth bared, -but Ronnie -wept with relief, humming to himself as the fire slowly, slowly ebbed. - -She came close and pulled at his arm, but he shrugged her away. She -tried more forcefully, and accidentally bit beneath the cuff of his -sleeve, breaking -the skin of his wrist. Ronnie yelped and slapped her away, only then -seeing where the invaluable backpack had rolled to--just beyond his -reach. - -�Bring, Bonita,� he said, voice low and hitching. �Bring the pack, let�s -go.� - -She came to stand by his side, nuzzled her face into his jaw. �Okay, -girl, okay, but let�s get home,� he said, and rubbed her fur. She licked -his face, the -sweat that pain had squeezed out of him, and he pushed her towards the -pack. - -�Bring the food, Bonita,� he ordered, raising his voice once more. - -But she didn�t. - -Instead her jaws closed on Ronnie again--gripping his throat. - -Cutting off his voice, his breathing, his blood. - -

After the man�s struggles stopped, the dog looked at the -backpack for a -moment. - -The memory of the food it contained was still fresh. So too was the -memory of the shiny, tasteless skin that she had been unable to get into -without his -clever hands. - -Then she bit into a slack arm and resumed dragging them towards the -nest. - -Many meals for her pups. Those that still lived. - -She�d understood. - -© Andrew Leon Hudson 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] bonita.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Distant and Remote - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old -things we don't know.
Ambrose Bierce - -[*DESCRIPTION]

"Don't feel too bad, Doctor Alvarez. It's -not the first time we've seen that reaction." - -"I just didn't -see this advance coming," Alberto Alvarez said, shaking his head with -something approaching despair. Harriet Bali offered him a sympathetic -smile. - -"When they thought technology would get bigger-instead, it went micro. -When it was thought we'd be working less hours, enjoying more leisure -hours-the opposite occurred. Overpopulating the Earth-and we hit a -crisis in the birth-rate and increased incidence of male impotency." - -The last made Alberto shiver with unease, and he saw Harriet lower her -head to hide a smile. - -"Doctor Alvarez. Please. We really appreciate your presence here. -Without it, we'd still be fighting for official recognition and -acceptance of what we've achieved. We're hoping that, with your -collaboration, we can maximise the potential of the Stargaze Process." - -Alberto shook himself. -He nodded. - -"Of course. I'm sorry. And, let me also say I'm honoured to be invited -here to witness the process in action. I know the -media, the movies, would have scientists always pooh-poohing any new -breakthrough that wasn't their own, but it's not always like that. Those -that take to badmouthing others' achievements are invariably those who -are trying to defend their own previously-announced discoveries. The -rest of us still remember what it's like to love the field we've chosen -to work in. We get just as excited as anyone, therefore, when there's a -major breakthrough." - -The Stargaze Process easily qualified in the 'major breakthrough' -category. It had broken through more than just scientific boundaries-it -had broken through the confines of their own known universe. And beyond. - - -In layman's terms: why leap into a -rocket and travel to the stars, when you could send your eyes to distant -galaxies from the confines of your own living room in order to -experience it for you? - -Of course, it was rather more complex -than just packaging your senses and posting them into the heavens. And -for 'living room', read the 'Stargaze Main Projects Room'. - -When -you delved deeper into the science of it all, you found the only thing -that was truly simple was the rather crass-but infinitely sellable-name -they'd given the whole endeavour: Stargaze. The marketing boys -and girls had clearly been sitting in on the meeting that day. - - -

"Here," Harriet said. "We nicknamed -the part that's positioned in front of the gazer's face 'the silver -carrot'. Due solely to its shape, I assure you." - -"Quite," -Alberto said, craning round to observe where the thicker end of the -carrot would slide forward to cover the subject's face. The carrot was -hollow and horizontal, so you could look straight down its reducing -cone. "It seems much longer than it really is when you look at it on the -inside." It had a corkscrew rib, running like the bore on the barrel of -a rifle. "Quite the optical illusion. Mirrors?" - -"Kind of," -Harriet said with a smile. "It's to encourage the mind to reach further. -As the carrot turns, the senses are drawn out. Like drawing silk from a -silk worm without, in the process, killing the worm." - -"But -nothing is actually 'removed'?" - -"No. It's merely to help the -senses to stretch. Picture it like standing on a hilltop on a perfectly -clear day and letting your ears reach out and focus in order to hear the -sound of a car horn in a city a hundred kilometres away." - -He -smiled back. "Hardly the same, I imagine." - -"Hah! No, I'm afraid -that image is rather prosaic rather than accurate on two counts. -Firstly, there's no sense of sounds reaching the ear-rather the ear -going in search of them. The other is the distances involved. For a -hundred kilometres read… well, 'considerably further'. -Would you care to take the seat and try it for yourself?" - -"That's why I'm here," Alberto said. But getting into the chair was more -awkward than it looked. His frame was accustomed to being hunched over a -keyboard rather than contorting to fit what resembled a kind of cockpit. - - -Apt, considering the distance part of him was due to travel. - - -"There you go. Just slide down until the back of your neck -feels the padded rim." - -"I feel like I'm about to have a -haircut," Alberto said shakily. - -"You're not the first to draw -that comparison. The chair's quite comfortable when you get into place. -And when the process starts, you won't be aware of it at all." - -"You've tried it?" - -"Just try stopping me!" Harriet said, her -smile peeling her lips back to reveal a healthy set of gums too. "Who -doesn't want to throw their mind out into space, see what's out there? -Starting with the stars we see in our night sky, and then beyond even -them? Currently, we have no idea just how far the Process might let us -see." - -"It's curious. I mean: all that stuff about remote -viewing, out of body experiences? I'm told it's not like any of that." - - -"The Russians ran programs in the Cold War to test -extra-sensory abilities. Hitler had his scientists looking into the -occult. The Americans had Oppenheimer. Teflon came about because of the -space program. Science is forever a weird and wonderful innovator." They -shared a smile. - -Although Harriet had been charged with -personally showing Alberto around, it was clear she shared his love of -the new and admired those daring to not just ask but see if it -were possible. - -Well, with the possible exception of Hitler and -Stalin, the megalomaniac sadists. - -"Okay?" Harriet asked and -Alberto nodded. She turned and raised a hand to someone the other side -of the one-way mirror behind them. "They're going to start the Process -now, Doctor Alvarez. Just look straight forward. You don't need to focus -on anything--your senses will adapt automatically. In turns out our -senses were equipped with this ability all along. We've always suspected -they were once far more potent or had hidden depths we simply stopped -using or forgot how to tap into… Stargaze merely facilitates their -release, as it were." - -As the silver carrot slowly began to -turn, Alberto chuckled. - -"Excuse me for saying so, but this -reminds me of some mind-control apparatus, or the torture device, used -in some old spy film. James Bond was it? Back when Sean Connery or Roger -Moore was still playing the part?" - -"You're wondering if it -could all just be a form of hypnotism? That's understandable. The mind -can play funny tricks, even on itself. Think of all those convinced they -were Cleopatra in a past life due to regression therapy. I can assure -you, though, you'll be able to tell the difference. Once you feel it -start to happen, you'll know it's genuine. - -"You'll be in -control at all times. The initial 'pulling' part of the process is only -to ease your senses out to a state where they might reach further. At -first, you'll feel the momentum build, like your senses are pressing -behind your eyes-then they'll just snake out as easy as party streamers -from a compressed gas canister." - -"And when I want to come -back?" - -"Like I said: you're in control. Don't worry if the -first time the sensation gets the better of you and you snap back quite -quickly-it's quite unnerving and it can take time to build up confidence -to let it all just happen naturally. If you're worried you won't know -how to pull yourself back, then don't: various instruments are -monitoring your heartbeat, breathing, brain activity… If we see -anything at all to alert us that the experience is anything but -pleasant, and we'll bring you straight back." - -"How?" - - She tapped the carrot. "'What's up doc?'" she said in a passable -Bugs Bunny voice. "Just like a fairground ride: we'll stop it spinning." -Alberto laughed at her impersonation and settled back down again. - -He had expected the effect to build slowly, almost like the thing -was drilling a steady hole through a thickly-reinforced wall. But it -happened quickly. And so smoothly, Alberto realised at once that -Harriet's assertion had been true: this was a natural ability they all -possessed. Like a baby thrown into a swimming pool instinctively opened -its eyes, held its breath…and then swam. - -Alberto -swam forward. - -At least, his senses did. Momentarily, it felt as -if his eyes were bulging, suddenly full of liquid before they oozed out -of his sockets in long, horizontal flagella whose ends flowered and -burst and then were pulled forward, still somehow connected to his -optical nerves, to the part of his brain where all this information was -processed. - -They rushed down the endless silver funnel and then, -wonderfully, his vision exited the carrot as if it had been nothing more -than a barrel to shoot his eyes out. - -He found himself far above -his own planet. - -Already? How could he have leapt so far -already? He had only just been stretching to the tip of that carrot, and -that was barely a metre and a half long. Maybe two, if he'd actually -taken the effort to measure it and examine the schematics before taking -his seat. Surprising him further, his mind had accompanied them rather -than just waiting for the filmed information to be transmitted back to -it. - -He looked down and saw what Armstrong, Aldrin and others -had marvelled at. It was a familiar image to anyone who'd ever picked up -a book on astronomy. But, just like seeing an animal in the flesh -compared to seeing one on a postcard, the real thing was an entirely -different experience. And the animal analogy wasn't an erroneous one: -that planet, that incredible sculpture of blues and greens and whites, -was a living thing. - -It gave one an understanding, a humbling -appreciation of what Earth truly was. Gave you cause to believe in the -miraculous once again. - -The vision fed his senses and he -acknowledged that more than his eyes were out here to process what he -witnessed. And that a living thing always recognised another that shared -its miracle of existence. - - Always. - -

"Doctor Alvarez?" The rapping on the -door was a mixture of knuckle and the soft flesh that peaked below the -little finger when you made a fist. It came again, the rhythm choosing -to become that deliberate pounding you got with a bad hangover. - -The baddest hangover of them all. - - "Doc. Tor. Al. Va. -Rez. It's me. Harriet Bali. Please. I only want to talk to you. Doctor -Alvarez?" - -Alberto hurried over and crouched down to -replace the black-sock draught-excluders he'd placed along the bottom of -the door and which Harriet's enthusiastic banging had dislodged. It -wasn't to keep breezes out. Nor in. It was to reduce the light. The -curtains had been drawn, pinned, then covered by blankets looped over -the curtain-rails and held in place with pegs and duct-tape. But even -with his shades on it was still too bright. - -Too -illuminated. - -"Doctor Alvarez-I got the key from the -janitor. I'm sorry, Doctor Alvarez, but everyone's extremely worried -about you. I persuaded them to let me come alone. To talk to you. So I -could assure them you were alright." - -"Nooooo!" Alberto -moaned when he realised what she intended and turned so he sat with his -back to the door. - -"Alberto. Listen to me: if I can't tell -them you're okay, they'll send others here. Those others will very -likely take you away with them. They'll ask you questions and won't let -you go home until you've answered them." - -There was a pause -and he heard her swallow, pictured her collecting herself. - -"Doctor Alvarez-if they think you're sick, then they maybe won't let -you -go home again afterwards. Do you understand? After the way you ran -off…without saying anything… People need answers, Doctor -Alvarez. There's a lot riding on this. You were the official witness to -what Stargaze is trying to do." - -"I don't want to!" He -craned his neck round to scream it at the door. "I don't want to! You -can't make me!" - -"You have no choice, Doctor." He heard -the sigh in her voice. The exasperation. He looked at how his hands -trembled. Even in the darkness they seemed to displace the air in black -waves. - -"If I talk to you? You'll tell them? You'll tell them to -leave me alone?" - - "If you tell me what we need to -know… Then I promise you, I'll do all I can." - -"You -promise?" - -"All I can," she confirmed. - -He rolled -away from the door and got to his feet. He was wearing his dressing gown -over a thick jumper, baggy green corduroys, three pairs of socks on his -feet. On his head was the brown felt hat with earflaps he wore when he -went fishing. The sunglasses were wide, wraparound ones, bought for an -aborted skiing holiday fifteen years ago. - -He was glad he'd -never gone. He never wanted to even think about being up so high -again. - -"I'm opening the door," he told her. "Get ready." He -opened it a crack, pulling his head back like he was avoiding the -searing heat from a partially opened oven. "Quickly. Get in. Quickly." - - -The sight he must have been. The way he'd barricaded himself in -here. It was understandable when Harriet hesitated. But as he became -frantic, as he made it look like the door would be closed again, she -nodded, and squeezed through the gap. - -He shut the door after -her, stuck black masking tape back down the seam and worked it into the -crack, then kicked the black sausages over the gap at the bottom of the -door. - -"It's too dark," Harriet said. "I can't see you." - -"Your eyes will adjust…" It was just one of the many things -your eyes kept secret from you that they could do. "You'll get used to -it." - -"Maybe my sense of sight, but not my sense of smell," she -muttered, not quiet enough to avoid him hearing it. There was obviously -plenty of annoyance burning away inside Harriet Bali for the predicament -he'd placed her in when he'd woken from his stargaze, ripped himself -from the chair, and then ran out the building like his hair was on fire -and with nothing available to dowse the flames. - -"You want a -drink?" he asked. - -"No. Just an explanation." - -"You can -sit down." - -"Where?" - -"There's a chair behind you. It's -okay, there's nothing in it. It may smell a bit stuffy in here, but -everything's clean, I assure you." - -"Okay." He watched her swing -a hand about until it bounced off the arm of the chair and then felt her -way round to its seat. "Can't we just have a bit of light? Not -even a candle's worth?" - -"No." - -"Is it because of what -happened? We tested the machine after you'd sat in it and it hadn't -malfunctioned. No one else has had a bad reaction when using it. Are you -sure you weren't suffering from some condition before you came to see -us?" - -In three quick sentences, she'd run the entire gambit of -corporate arse-covering. - -"The equipment worked just fine. That -wasn't it." - -"I'm relieved to hear you say that, Doctor Alvarez. -It would have been a lot better for us, though, had you stayed around -long enough to say that to our Board. Or responded to their frequent -requests for an explanation since. You're a scientist--" - -"Am -I?" he asked her. "Are any of us what we really think we are?" The -silence that came after indicated this wasn't the type of question -Harriet was capable of answering. Nor the type she had come here to -ponder with him. - -"Then I'm supposing it's something you saw on -your travels?" - -"Yes. Yes, that's it exactly." - -"Space -is a vast, unexplored area. And we're the pioneers. I warned you it -could be disorientating. What exactly did you see?" - -"Life." A -simple word, but the most potent in all galaxies. The biggest miracle of -them all. The one that made a supernova nothing more than a flaring -matchhead. - -"But that's every scientist's dream, Doctor Alvarez! -My God! I mean, we traced your route afterwards, but we never -thought…" - -"What? What did you say? Traced my..? No one -told me that you could find out where we went?" - -"Well, the -tracing process takes time. We can't just follow you by pointing one of -ourselves in your direction. There are a billion tiny alternations in an -individual's chosen route that could throw us into another galaxy -entirely. But the computer records your movements, plots a path, as it -were, so we can do it that way. We're not just pioneers, but -cartographers." - -"But no one's gone where I went?" he asked -frantically, both hands curling fingers over an invisible bar set before -him. - -"Not yet. But…Life? If that's what you saw, -we have no choice but to investigate it, do we? It's the Holy Grail of -space travel." - -"You mustn't!" Her saw her wince at the volume -of his voice. "Don't you see? You simply mustn't!" - -"Doctor -Alvarez. I, we've, been patient with you. But wailing words of doom -isn't going to cut much with us. We're scientists. So, please, give me a -reason to think you're still capable of thinking like one too." - - -"Okay, okay. Yes." He looked towards the door, seeing neither -escape nor sanctuary. There were no doors. No boundaries, anymore. And -as for windows… "I'll tell you. But you must believe me. And -then…then you must stop them from trying. They mustn't go there. -It could ruin everything. For everyone." - -"I'm listening." - -"I went. Out there. It was just like you said it would be. I looked -down on the Earth and it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. -Then I turned away and went further. I didn't have the sensation I was -choosing a direction as such, just that I felt some urge to go towards -one particular star. There was nothing about it that was remarkable. If -anything, it was dimmer, more distant than others more immediately -approachable. But for some reason I was attracted to it. - -"I -hurried there. I passed through vast amounts of space and in so -doing I passed through a similar quantity of time. I didn't move -backwards and forwards in time, I merely mean that for such vast -distances to be travelled, time has to be bent the same way light is -influence by the effects of gravity. - -"I couldn't pull up from -my trajectory even had I wanted to. I certainly couldn't alter my path. -I was going to see what was on the principal planet orbiting that star, -like it or not. - -"Because it wasn't me flying my senses out -there. It was something else…something that was pulling me in." - -

"You mean this, whatever it was, had -caught you, or that it was attracting you in some way?" - -He saw -Harriet was holding back from expressing outright scepticism. The -Stargaze Process was new, so how could they discount anything until they -knew the full scope of its possibilities and what might actually be out -there? - -"I mean…" He didn't complete his sentence. -Instead, he changed scenes in the story, switching to another memory -camera, as it were. "I came in closer and closer and the planet grew -more distinct as I descended. It was green in places-but emerald, not -the softer greens of Earth. And the seas were a darker, shinier blue. It -was as if the planet were wrapped in different coloured foils. There -were silver patches too: irregular and without pattern. - -"But -when I was close enough, the silver tarnished to a light grey. Like the -shading of a graphite pencil? It still glinted in places but was not -metallic--but like shells. Because that's what they turned out to be. - - -"Down I went. Down, down. I thought I was going to crash into -that mass of grey shingle, but that would have made a nonsense out of -what I was whilst I was travelling in that realm. As you told me: I was -nothing but a satellite of sorts from my own mind. So I slowed, braking -hard-but as with all that happens with your process, it was a smooth -sensation of deceleration. - -"And then I was amongst them. - -"Their shells wore whirls like on the outside of a snail's shell. -But these shells were also far more rounded, larger too-each about the -size of a beach ball. They were mottled, tortoiseshell, each marked -differently but cast from the same basic design, but limited by the same -limited choice of colours. And from each shell extended a soft-limbed -creature like a sea anemone, or a snail that had sprouted many tentacles -or antennae rather than just the customary two. The creatures were a -light orange, with green threads running through them which I don't -think carried blood but were instead flows of nutrients from the -pale-green mossy plant-life they were grazing upon. - -"The -tentacles quivered in the air, not feeling for me, but rather for each -other and that fuzz they fed upon. They were blind in our terms of -sight, and as I looked around I saw that only those nearest me were -moving. The rest of them were still, but the shells not dull, but shiny, -filled with living creatures as they were. - -"Those others seemed -to be sleeping. - -"There was one though that had turned towards -me. Sensed me. I knew it was the one that had drawn me here and I -wanted to ask it why it had done so. How it had known of me, felt me out -there…" - -"You think it possessed some sensitivity of its -own?" Harriet suggested. "Or that it simply possessed the same talent -we've discovered in ourselves but that it didn't require some slowly -spinning silver carrot to achieve it?" - -"No." Alberto's denial -was short, sharp, adamant. "Because there is no 'talent' we possess. Not -the way you've all been thinking of it. That creature wasn't calling out -to me. That thing was bringing me back. It wasn't trying to communicate -with Doctor Alberto Alvarez. It was Doctor Alberto Alvarez. Or, -rather: I am a part of it. We're not the ones extending our thoughts out -there, Ms Bali. They're extending their thoughts, their senses -out here." - -"That's impossible!" Harriet said shaking her -head. "I mean, come on…" - -"I'm not saying we're just their -senses. Nor that we're just their dreams. We're living, breathing -creatures. We live, we die, just like any other living thing. But -haven't you ever wondered what it is really that sets us apart -from the other living creatures that share this planet with us? Not just -our superior intelligence-which has always been obvious-but why we do -things like imagine, create, argue over semantics and philosophy, and -concern ourselves with abstract concepts such as reason, justice, mercy? - - -"It's them. That part of us responsible for all that I've -mentioned isn't us. We're just the animal part. The monkey or tree shrew -we were further down the chain. Take away that different part -they provide, and we're just another version of our evolutionary -ancestors once more. If we have a soul at all, then it's the sensory -ability those things are projecting into us." - -"You're saying -we're slaves of snails?" Harriet asked, and despite her earlier attempts -to avoid stooping to such tactics, the sarcastic scepticism was now out -and having its voice. "Rubbish! That would mean they themselves had -directed us to make a machine which would, in turn, find them again!" - - -"I…I can't figure that bit," Alberto said, rubbing -vigorously at his temples as if something squirmed and chewed there. It -probably did at that. "Maybe we possess our own residual intelligence. -Maybe, over the years, we've grown capable of such thought in our own -right. I only know they're out there. That we're not really who we think -we are…" - -"Then why would you be talking to me about this -now? Why would you think it makes any difference if I'm just another -snail-person, controlled by a remote server?" - -"I'm not sure. -Maybe because they don't have the control over us they once did. -Scientists, maybe some people with greater mental abilities, or maybe -those who think too much on these types of things, might be getting free -of them. Maybe some of us can't be controlled the way we once were." - - -"Some of us?" Harriet asked. "No one else has had your -experience, Doctor Alvarez." - -"But they might do. I mean: if -they ride the Stargazer the way I did…" - -"On the other -hand, what you're suggesting would make the Stargaze Process the perfect -way to find out who had this peculiar talent of independence, of -defiance, don't you think?" - -Though he expected it to be there, -he realised any trace of sarcasm had gone. - -"Not 'some' having -such a unique capability, Doctor Alvarez," she told him. "Just one. We -had to be sure about you though." - -"No! You…I have to go. -To warn people!" - -"No, Doctor Alvarez. I'm afraid you're not -going anywhere. Not anymore." Harriet Bali smiled, slowly. At a snail's -pace. "'Monkey and tree shrew', indeed…" - - -© Jez Patterson 2016 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] distant.png - -[*ITEM] Atacrast - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in -creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley - -[*DESCRIPTION]

At the insistence of a second arpeggio of -descending chimes Mosper Belk reluctantly put down his book and shuffled -into the front hall to peer closely at the wall-screen. It displayed in -his doorway the profiled image of an unfamiliar man clad in sombre grey, -apart from a jaunty emerald trim at collar and cuffs. He held a slim -black case. There was a relaxed dignity about his stance which betokened -someone serious and self-assured. Mosper had not been expecting any -weekend callers. Intrigued, he opened the door. - -�Forgive -disturb, esteemed Belk�, the man announced gravely, with a respectful -nod. �Hulf Atacrast, day-journeyed from Meheric. Fore-message left at -place of work, but Mr Smirt of Greeming and er� Trelph?� - -�Trulph.� - -�Yes. He tells me they respect your rest-day.� - -Mosper was not quite sure how to respond to this slightly -contradictory information, offering only a non-committal �Ah,� and -looking politely expectant. - -�Meheric Faculty Propulsion,� the -man clarified. �Since eleven years, Research Scrupulator.� He proffered -a holocard for inspection. It confirmed his identity, membership of the -faculty and significant academic credentials in the field of powered -flight theory. Atacrast explained that his was a consultative r�le, -shared with eight others, replacing what used to be known as the -Scrutinizing Committee. - -Mosper felt an unexpected pang of -nostalgia at this reminder of his own earlier career. �So we have a -common interest. I see you spent some time at the Wotzl Foundation. Even -here in Snoak it has a fine reputation for being at the forefront of -aeronautical development. The Institute in Meheric of course I used to -know well, though I doubt whether any of the people I worked with are -still there. One loses touch as the years pass� Now I content myself -with a bit of general tinkering. The fingers still need to be exercised, -as well as the mind.� He handed back the holocard. �But why have you -come to see me?� - -�Ah, venerable sir, with your permit, I -greatly wish discuss with you certain papers, by auspicious accident of -fortune retrieved from rodent nesting site in faculty archives.� -Atacrast tapped his document case. - -�The archives? But I thought -they were� Papers? What papers exactly?� - -��Lighter, swifter, -safer: rethinking the airpod engine,� �Dynamics of cloud control,� -�Gyractive isolates and the quest for stability�. Also others -similar, -authorship M Belk, S Corrity, S Crobes, R Hobharp, Senior Airtechs. In -humble opinion Atacrast, important historic work, for much time -ignored�� He lowered his voice confidentially. �I, Atacrast, believe -these documents not supplied for emergency comfort of mice by benevolent -action of caretaker, but with purpose suppressed! Suppressed by person -or people of ignorance or of malice to prevent advancement of -aeronautics.� - -Mosper looked momentarily astonished, then sighed -ruefully and gestured to his visitor. �Well, Scrupulator Atacrast, I -think you had better come in.� - -

Thirty five years earlier Mosper Belk, as a -newly-qualified airtech, -had joined what was then known as the Institute of Aeronautics in -Meheric. He remembered the frisson of anticipation as he was shown into -one of the engineering hangars to meet fellow members of the design -team. Straplene Corrity had trotted up briskly to welcome him, followed -by Rangent Hobharp, solidly muscular and grinning broadly, and lanky -Spacker Crobes. Soon they had gathered into an enthusiastic huddle to -decide which of their current projects would most suit Mosper�s level of -training. An unshaven middle-aged man who had been standing nearby -frowning at the ceiling wandered over, made as if to shake his hand, but -instead clapped him on the shoulder and nodded without speaking, before -heading out again. Mosper remembered thinking that the man�s clothes -looked as if they had been slept in. Spacker offhandedly informed him -that he had just met the Director himself, Cravian Drowl. - -Cravian Drowl: a man with an enviable reputation as a paragon of -probity, a level-headed problem-solver, a moderator of disputes, whose -competence was beyond question. He had worked hard over the years to -perfect this image. An only child of parents who lived in a state of -uneasy truce, his retentive memory and observational skills equipped him -with a sometimes startling ability to assess others� states of mind -before anything had been communicated verbally. - -With a penchant -for figures, but as yet with no specific career in mind, Drowl had opted -to qualify in accountancy, while conscientiously cultivating the -techniques necessary to put people at their ease. This seemingly -effortless knack of inspiring trust allowed him in due course to advance -to positions in senior management. People of both sexes found they had -no reservations about confiding in him, although Drowl was vaguely -disappointed that none of these encounters was the prelude to the kind -of intimate relationship he had imagined. He chose not to dwell on those -brief fumblings with Witany Yargle which had left them both hot and -humiliated, and resolved to concentrate on work. At Snoak�s water -purification plant, in the absence of any opposition, he rose steadily -to become Operations Manager, a post he held for almost ten years before -beginning to feel a vague restlessness. Looking beyond his familiar -comfort zone, he happened to notice that there was a vacancy for the -Directorship of Meheric�s Aeronautic Institute, a position which came -with the additional benefit of self-contained furnished accommodation. -He suspected he did not have the full range of skills for the job, but -his interest was piqued. - -Of the four other candidates, all had -far higher levels of technical expertise than Cravian Drowl. Two had -worked on commercial pods, Den Flepter as flight engineer, Zoel Torison -as pilot. A third, Veiv Maufrig, had worked for many years abroad, -progressing from cargo-handler to Podport Chief of Security. The fourth -was Ko Prodovel, a specialist in micro-engineering. Her public profile -was of a well-groomed ambitious woman of formidable talents and -conspicuously expensive tastes. She was reputed to have been the brains -behind the success of the ParaPet organization, earning her (when safely -out of earshot) the dubiously respectful nickname of �Pokehead�. - - -An unhappy series of events led to a shortening of the odds in -Drowl�s favour. In the week following the formal interviews Flepter had -been seriously injured in a snow-float accident on Mount Kyren. During a -routine dental appointment Torison was regrettably diagnosed as -suffering from the onset of Hiriffer�s Syndrome, a neuromuscular -affliction which gradually inhibits speech until the victim can utter -only fricatives. Then there was the report in the Quanderpyre Press, -�SNAFFLED BAGGAGE FUNDED PODPORT PERKS � SAYS EX-HEAD OF SEC�S SEXY EX� -in which one of Maufrig�s resentful former wives revealed that her -former husband had for years secretly conducted a lucrative sideline -selling confiscated goods. After questioning, Maufrig had been taken -into custody, pending further investigation. - -The Institute was -dependent on State funding, and its limited annual budget was allocated -at the Director�s discretion. It was partly his reputation for safe -economic management that tipped the balance towards Cravian Drowl over -the other remaining candidate, the more technically experienced if -allegedly extravagant �Pokehead� Prodovel. When interviewed, �Pokehead� -had been eager to explain how her expertise might be applied to aspects -of pod technology. She filled in the odd awkward silences with sharp -remarks about the cost of progress and the difficulties of private -enterprise, and made it clear that she knew how to knock a team into -shape. - -She was obviously fiercely energetic, highly capable and -somewhat intimidating. - -What sealed the decision was the -interviewers� unanimous agreement that Drowl, despite being new to -aeronautics, was confident and motivated, and had the kind of reassuring -presence which boded well for the future smooth running of the -Institute. Each of them had felt that he had answered their questions -with a disarmingly honesty, and had no doubt that Drowl had the makings -of an excellent Director. Sadly, they were to be proved wrong. - -He moved from his north Snoak apartment with its view of the -deeply-shadowed shelving of the sandstone quarry into the comparative -luxury of a suite of furnished rooms in Meheric�s Institute. For the -first few years everything went reasonably well. His work at the water -purifying plant had accustomed Drowl to the basic principles of -engineering, and although he was not expected to equip himself with an -oily rag, a pair of calipers or a wrench, he soon familiarized himself -with the terminology of pod mechanics. He made a point of meeting and -chatting to the designers, assistant airtechs and ancillary staff, -acquainting himself with their functions and degrees of responsibility. -He assured them he was always open to new ideas, and that any concerns -or grievances would be treated sympathetically and in confidence. Those -he spoke to were left with the pleasurable feeling that their new -Director was someone with their best interests at heart. In Research and -Development, the creative hub where sustained funding was so crucial, -the mood among the airtech designers was almost celebratory. - -While Drowl was not averse to seeking informed advice, he positively -avoided having to delegate decision-making. He felt that letting others -operate on his behalf would somehow degrade the responsibilities of his -position. Consequently, every choice he made, whether relating to -finance, management or maintenance carried its niggling burden of -anxiety, which he strove to suppress. - -His secretary, a local -girl, seemed to be adept at prioritizing matters that required his -attention, and ensured that any documentation, once dealt with, was -appropriately filed away. - -As might be expected, the principal -conflict lay in staying within budget while keeping all departments of -the Institute functioning efficiently. From past records he could see -that R & D was the potentially profitable area, but also the most -expensive to keep supplied with necessary hardware. Any restriction was -bound to affect the morale of its highly specialized team. He knew that -over time he would have to make economies, but they must be unobtrusive. -It was a difficult balance, but as Director, it was under his control. -He couldn�t afford to be seen to make mistakes. He dismissed the nagging -thought that he might be out of his depth. Insidiously, like a virulent -infection, the anxieties multiplied. - -Eventually even the most -commonplace problem began to bristle with unresolvable contingencies. In -his pursuit of economy he gradually cut back on renovation, postponed -repairs, finally dispensed with secretarial help. He cancelled meetings, -sat for hours in his office, checking and re-checking figures, doubting -the logic of his own reasoning, puzzling over investigative safety -reports or proposals for technical improvements as if they had been -written in a totally unfamiliar language. As time passed Drowl grew -steadily more withdrawn. Sometimes he neglected to eat, and his evident -lack of sleep caused him to look increasingly haggard. He would wander -absentmindedly into hangars and workshops, avoiding confrontation, -rarely mumbling more than a few words to anyone. The Institute continued -to function, driven by the established momentum of multiple -interdependent daily tasks, but the seeds of chaos had been sown. - - -

�And so, Scrupulator Atacrast,� said Mosper Belk, �you -must -understand that we airtechs hardly ever saw Director Drowl, and for many -months had no idea that anything was amiss. We were skilled at -improvising when requisitioned items were temporarily unavailable, and -we had facilities for manufacturing our own precision tools, so work on -ongoing projects was scarcely affected. But we all assumed that our -research papers had been sent on, as was customary, to the State -Scrutinizing Committee, and copies duly stored in the Institute�s -files.� - -�Committee with response of elongated silence��, -Atacrast suggested. - -Mosper smiled, a little ruefully. �Indeed, -a silence of such length that we made attempts to seek an explanation. -My colleagues and I went to see the Director. We had not known that by -then he no longer had a secretary, and were disconcerted to see the -disorganized state of his office. Boxes of documents were stacked on the -floor around his desk, and the surface of the desk itself was littered -with sheets of hand-written calculations amid the detritus of what -looked like abandoned meals. Drowl apologized for the mess, explained -that his secretary had left (he did not say why), and assured us that -there was no cause for alarm, matters were in hand, he would personally -see to it that the Committee would be made aware of our concerns. -Corrity and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, although -Hobharp and Crobes suspected that for some unknown reason we were being -fobbed off.� - -Atacrast asked if he might have a glass of water, -but was readily persuaded by his host�s counter-offer of emberskelven, -the reddish-gold brew which was one of Snoak�s local attractions. - -�A week or so later,� Mosper resumed, �we went once again to Drowl�s -office, determined to extract satisfactory answers from the Director. He -was standing by the window, wearing his outdoor coat, staring out at the -rain. His face looked strained, with dark pouches under his eyes, and he -seemed to have some difficulty recognizing us. In contrast to our -previous visit the office was practically bare; the boxes had been -cleared away, and only a small pile of papers remained on the desk, -neatly trapped under a green onyx paperweight in the shape of a sleeping -dog. When we asked him about the lack of response to our research -papers, Drowl launched into a barely coherent explanation involving -budgetary requirements, regulatory constraints, regrettable economic -necessities, bureaucratic procedures and other such waffle. Then, with -an abrupt change of mood he evicted us from his office, muttering that -he needed to attend to an urgent personal matter. There was something so -dourly implacable about his attitude, the look in his eyes so desperate, -we were frankly too taken aback to raise a sensible objection. After -that it was too late.� - -�Too late?� prompted the Scrupulator. - - -�That was the last time anyone at the Institute ever saw or -heard from Cravian Drowl.� - -There was nothing of obvious -significance left in the Director�s office other than an ashy heap of -burned paper in the ceramic incinerazer. It was assumed that Drowl had -taken his paperweight with him. It was not found in his private rooms, -whose abandoned contents apparently offered no clue as to his possible -whereabouts. This posed a quandary for the investigative team, a trio of -burly detechs and a forensic specialist from Snoak Central, who had been -called in when the Director failed to return. - -The entire -workforce was questioned with discreet efficiency. The lately dismissed -secretary, the quietly dependable Seepy Trasset, had been duly traced to -her shared apartment above a bakery in Lower Meheric. She was persuaded -to overcome residual feelings of loyalty, and asked to describe anything -unusual about the Director�s behaviour in the weeks preceding her -dismissal. Seepy told how he had become strangely secretive about the -filing of paperwork, and prevented her accessing even material she had -previously handled. She confirmed that he had grown increasingly remote -and uncommunicative, and that while genuinely concerned about his health -she was actually more relieved than disappointed when he told her she -was no longer required. - -Mosper and his three colleagues had -been closely questioned, as Drowl�s last contacts in the Institute. -Further investigation revealed that the State Scrutinizing Committee had -received no research papers from the Institute for almost a year, and no -such documents were to be found either among the remaining -office files or in the Director�s apartment. - -It soon became -clear to the investigators that the missing man had almost certainly -been suffering from severe work-related stress. The Institute�s finances -were stretched to their limit. It was concluded that an obsessive fear -of overspending had led him to the irrational decision to ignore or -actively hold back any proposals that might entail further costs. In -Drowl�s mind the prospect of allowing the Scrutinizing Committee to -approve research papers, irrespective of any long-term benefits, would -have been fraught with disaster. It was therefore believed that the -papers, together with any filed copies had been destroyed, and that the -wretched Drowl, unable to face the consequences of his mismanagement, -had fled in a state of guilt and confusion. - -Mosper Belk blinked -away the unbidden moisture in his eyes as he gingerly examined the -papers that Hulf Atacrast had removed from his document case. They were -indeed the originals, complete with marginal notes in a neat hand he -knew to be his own. The individual pages had been carefully uncreased -and sheathed in transparent sleeves. The paper itself was slightly -yellowed and brittle, some corners and edges showing evidence of -desultory nibbling. The ink was still legible, but patchily faded and -stained. He had never expected to see again these distillations of so -many hours of focused thought and excited discussion with his fellow -airtechs; the long-lost repository of their combined inventiveness. - - -�Meheric Faculty Propulsion now much changed, respected Belk. New -buildings, new people, some new ideas. Paper is dead, extinguished, like -the doodle. Now, all e-screens, haptic panels, telefacture, -self-correcting praxins, all manner advances since time of Drowl and his -sad misguidance.� - -�Drowl, who was never actually found,� -murmured Mosper, �despite supposed sightings in a dozen far-flung places -over the following years. We often wondered, with a mixture of -bitterness and well� pity, what really became of him.� - -Atacrast -shrugged and raised his hands, as if fending off an enormous balloon. -�Defaced utterly from Meheric Archive, perhaps for better. And now after -years you hold again valuable research deserving of proper credit, which -as Scrupulator I would be honoured to make possible.� - -They sat -for a while in reflective silence, sipping at their emberskelven, -savouring its tang and listening to the faint hiss of crepitation. -Later, Hulf Atacrast insisted on marking the occasion with a meal at The -Cylinder in Gropp�s Market, prepared under the supervision of Tedor -Safra himself. Mosper Belk began to protest at this suggestion, but -Atacrast assured him that he had made an open reservation well in -advance, being both a gourmet and an optimist. Belk�s home in Prossing -Street was only a short walking distance from the restaurant, which he -had passed many times without really noticing the expensive delights -being consumed within. - -After the meal, the Scrupulator left to -catch the night-pod back to Meheric, while Mosper strolled back to his -house, glancing up from time to time at the swiftly winking beads of -micropods as they threaded the sky carrying their vital commerce. He had -heard them called �Pokehead Pods�, but had no idea why. He must remember -to ask one of his young friends at work. Sometimes he felt that the new -technology was leaving him behind. - -© L. J. Sklaroff 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] atacrast.png - -[*ITEM] Madras Point - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] No battle plan survives contact with the -enemy
Helmuth von Moltke - -[*DESCRIPTION]

White-out. - -We faced a whirlwind of powdered snow but my head-up display provided -both topographical overlay and passive infrared. Ahead of us lay frozen -lake, the -snow-covered shoreline, and some bare trees. Sergeant Lovell was on -point, receiving feedback from the frontrunner surveillance drones, -checking the ice -was thick enough to bear our weight. We were in full carapace rig plus -tactical weapons load - weighing in at a spit under 2000 pounds apiece. -Approaching -the enemy position at Madras Point across the lake certainly fell under -the heading of 'unexpected', but one false step and we'd end up as -permanent -residents. - -The Sarge stopped and raised a fist. As one the other seven of us -halted, lapsing into 'ready' stance 3. Of course he could have simply -spoken to us over -the tight-band, but Lovell was strictly old-school when it came to -battlefield comms. Plus I knew he didn't buy the 'easy-in, easy-out' -mission profile -that Major Sondheim had been peddling. - -The indentured workforce on Pendragon Minor had rioted, taking the -MidasCorp management hostage. Nobody had been seriously hurt but the new -'Workers' -Soviet' wanted a flat-rate wage increase and better living conditions, -or things would turn nasty. Someone in the corporate hierarchy wanted to -make a -point, so now eight over-armed Marines were going to overwhelm a bunch -of -ordinary Joes in the name of labour relations. Man, the cost of our -deployment -alone would have paid for everything the peons were demanding and then -some. Go figure. - -Sargeant Lovell gestured and the squad echeloned left. I had my external -mic on even though the shrill wind made the suit interior feel chilly. -Call me -optimistic, but I figured the sound of cracking ice would give me enough -time to blow the rig apart and escape. I trusted the drone tech, but -only so far. - -We maintained a steady pace; that loping, stylised gait you get with -powered armour. Even if someone had been looking in our direction -the mimetic -camo would turn us into a white-on-white blur amidst the snow swirls. -Anyway we'd been told the opposition had zero tech; a few pistols and -shotguns looted -from the Police barracks, but that was all. - -The Sarge stopped, frozen in place. - -As Corporal I halted the squad. Suit malfunctions were extremely rare -but not unknown. I half-smiled to myself; if the Sarge had to be evac'd -by a recovery -lifter then he'd tear someone in Maintenance a new one. - -I spotted vapour condensing around the back of his helmet and upped my -display magnification. There was a small hole there; smooth, not jagged. -I'd never -known a suit go bad like that. A bunch of command icons appeared in my -peripheral vision. The ice ahead of me was now shown in shades of green. - -New batter up. - -I took a deep breath. "Squad, this is Cooper. The Sarge is down. I -repeat, the Sarge is down. Looks like a sniper, single-shot, -high-velocity. I'm in -command. Alpha team, stand fast. I want suppressive fire on the shore, -directly ahead, along the crest of the rise. Bravo team, with me. -Weapons free, -weapons free." - -There was no back-chat, no queries. The Sarge was gone. You couldn't -triage a man in carapace; if command and control had devolved to me it -was because his -suit biometrics had tanked. The built-in medical systems would do what -they could, but for now it was all about dealing with the immediate -threat. - -The three remaining members of Alpha adopted the 'brace' stance, raised -their weapons, and opened fire. We were all carrying miniguns - and not -the usual -squad support weapon but its 9mm big brother. Sustained fire turned -fifty metres of shoreline into a maelstrom of earth, snow and shattered -tree-trunks. - -I led Bravo onward, aiming to reach the shore maybe a 100 metres left of -the target zone. Not that I thought flanking fire would be required but, -back -then, I did things by the book. The temptation to up the pace was almost -overwhelming but the drones could only move so fast. - -The icon for McGuire - Alpha 2 - blinked red. My rig had defaulted to -full squad monitoring rather than the 'eyes only' approach favoured by -Sergeant -Lovell. A glance behind showed coolant burbling from McGuire's -breastplate and the spark of a ruptured power cell. - -The ice ahead of me flared red. - -"Bravo, halt!" - -A figured it for a sub-surface thermal detonation, the result being a -band of paper-thin ice stretching in either direction as far as the -drones could -detect. I swore. "Jorgovic, Peters, suppressive fire, increase target -zone thirty meters left. Ingersoll, thickening fire-" - -"I'm hit!" - -Ingersoll's right arm drooped; vapour venting from a neat hole in the -shoulder plate. My remaining guys opened up, full auto, but we were -pissing in the -wind. The sniper had indirect eyes on us and was probably firing from -behind - and through - the snowbank directly ahead. We were targets in a -shooting -gallery, nothing more. - -I knew when I was beat. "Lazy Gun Actual this is Lazy Gun Two, request -immediate fire support. Over." - -Lieutenant Hawks came back straight at me. "Lazy Gun Two this is Actual. -Cooper? What the hell is happening out there?" - -"The Sarge is down, L-T, same for McGuire and Ingersoll. Sniper fire. -Hyper-kinetic rounds that can punch clean through our rig. We have no -eyes, I repeat, -no eyes on the shooter. The ice ahead has been compromised and we cannot -close on his likely position." Falling back didn't occur to me. - -"Jesus, Coop, thanks for spoiling my day. OK, what do you want?" - -"I figure the bad guy is on the far-side of the ridge." I shouldered my -weapon and engaged the laser designator. "I need an area fire mission -centred -twenty, two-zero, metres from the transmitted co-ordinates, bearing -one-three-zero." - -"Negative on the fire mission, Corporal, you know we've nothing in -orbit." - -The icon for Edwards - Alpha 3 - blinked red. My first command was -turning to shit. I didn't feel afraid, or frustrated or even -disappointed - I didn't -feel anything at all. "Just lost Edwards. Gimme something, L-T, or none -of us are getting off the ice." - -"Lazy Gun Two, wait one." - -I felt like a spare wheel, standing there while the guys blazed away. A -100-metre stretch of shoreline was now shrouded in our man-made blizzard -but it was -obvious we were facing advanced tech, and then some. - -"Bastard!" Peters stopped firing; the ammo feed to his weapon had been -severed. Exposed rounds dropped to the ice, covered in a tracery of blue -static -discharge. - -"Lazy Gun Two this is Actual. Cooper, take cover. Midas-" the rest was -lost in a scree of electronic gibberish. All my long-range icons -went dark. - -Take cover? There wasn't so much as a fucking reed sticking out of the -ice. "Squad! Squad, cease fire and hunker down. Whatever they got -coming, it's -coming now." - -We dropped to one knee; 'at rest' stance 2. I doubted it would make much -difference. - -White light. - -My display flared out then slowly adjusted. Heavy polarisation turned -the world monochrome. We were just inside a huge circle of radiant -brilliance. It was -shrinking rapidly; concentrating, increasing in intensity. - -Focusing. - -"Sweet Jesus." -The beam narrowed to a searing column centred on a point just beyond the -ridge. I screwed my eyes shut even before visual shut down due to -overload. I -heard cries and curses from the other men. - -The orbital ion cannon fired. - -There was a moment of utter silence. - -Then the shock wave roared over us; a banshee of pulverised snow and -earth. Ice rippled and cracked beneath my feet. I felt my boots slide -despite the -crampons. Visually I reached for the 'Eject' icon and if the Sarge had -still been in command I might have considered it. As it was I couldn't -just bail and -dump this shit on someone else. - -The blizzard died, visual systems rebooted. We were all still there. - -I stood up. The cannon was used to smash rock formations, part of the -open-cast mining operation they had going here. We were just damn lucky -the impact -crater hadn't extended as far as the shoreline or we'd be surfing on ice -floes. My long-range comms returned as upper-atmosphere ionisation faded -away. - -"Lazy Gun Two this is Actual. You boys still in one piece, Cooper?" - -"Actual this is Lazy Gun Two. I got three viable, two walking-wounded -and three unknown. You want us to push on, L-T? Not sure how long it'll -take to find -a way off the ice though." - -"Negative, negative, the mission is scrubbed. Looks like the cannon had -the desired effect and the opposition are now talking about talks, or -some shit -like that. Stand-fast and await evac." He sighed, "Bad day all round, -Cooper." - -"No lie, L-T, no lie. Cooper out." - -We checked on each other. Ingersoll was a through-and-through flesh -wound, Edwards and Peters just systems failures. But Sargeant Lovell and -McGuire, man, -they were gone. - -It took ten minutes or so for the anti-grav masslifter to reach our -location. Civilian, as a combat helo couldn't lift carapace and a -dropship would have -shattered the ice with its down-blast. We attached lifting cables to the -dead so their kit could be salvaged back at base. Plus it looked better -bringing -them home as warriors than in the crappy environmental bodysuits we wore -under full rig. - -I was last aboard, port side, and we'd started rising, taking up the -cable slack, when I remembered the goddam drones. They'd probably dock -my pay if I -left them out on the ice so I started hunting through the command -interface for 'auto return' or similar. - -The surface-to-air struck us starboard side, exploded. - -I fell, the rig registering multiple frontal hits. External vison -failed. Systems started flickering between 'Standby' and 'Wait' - -obviously falling -through the air wasn't something the designers had anticipated. - -"Warning, proximity alert. Warning-" - -Impact. - -

Then it was later. - -I'm not sure how much later as the mission timer, comms - shit, just -about everything - was off-line. What I had left was pretty much in -solid back-up -territory but suit integrity was OK and I could still move, still fight. -Visual looked damn weird until I realised I was seeing the world via the -surviving -drones. Apparently my rig was smart enough to come up with its own -workaround. But outside was all bad news. - -The masslifter had come down on a rocky outcrop some distance offshore. -The whole forward section was submerged and what wasn't was burning. As -I watched -an armoured figure emerged from the inferno and got as far from the -flames as he could without quitting solid ground. The surrounding ice -was obviously -compromised and unable to take his weight. I saw warning lights blink -and then the carapace sections fell away. Vaughn stepped out of the -remains and -started picking his way over the fractured lake, heading for the -treeline. I guess he felt freezing to death was preferable to slowly -roasting, and a snow -hole might keep him alive until rescue arrived. - -His head exploded. - -It's the vacuum trail of a hyper-velocity round that does the damage; it -punches clean through and sucks out brain, blood and bone in its wake. -The torso -toppled over and disappeared through a hole in the ice. - -I sat up then stood. My head was still way below the top of the snow -bank I'd landed it, so it had kept me alive in more ways than one. The -sniper out -there was obviously a pro, and pros have patience. However he had to be -firing from a spot much further back than I'd originally estimated, -meaning he'd be -completely dependent on remote feed. The good news; he'd never spot me -outside his augmented field of vision. The bad news; I still didn't know -where the -bastard was holed up. - -Still, I figured he'd crossed me off his list as by rights I should have -been at the bottom of the lake. Gambling his attention was still -focused on the -wreck and the immediate surroundings I started snow-ploughing my way -inland. Eventually the ground sloped up and I emerged into a belt of -evergreens, with -the impact crater way off to my right. I paused for a moment and gave -myself a visual once-over. Blast damage and shrapnel had scoured the -front of my rig, -meaning the mimetic camo was a no-go. From behind I looked like blurry -pine branches but unless I snuck-up on the sniper ass-first it was now -down to -old-school fieldcraft. - -Study the terrain, shift position from concealment to concealment, keep -low, move fast. - -Well, keeping low was out and the best I could manage through waist-deep -snow was a laborious surge, but nobody shot me when I moved and that's a -success -in my book. It took maybe fifteen minutes to work my way around the edge -of the crater so that I was coming at Madras Point from the inland side. -I figured -that with us dropping off the grid Lieutenant Hawks would want to scare -up some eyes-on before making his next move. Not that he had much left -to work with -apart from a few flight crew and support techs. - -I pressed on, needing a break - and the gods of Karma smiled on me. - -Tracks in the snow; two individuals moving one behind the other, heading -towards the mining facility. I started trailing them while keeping to -whatever -cover was on offer. Of course I was depending on the enemy surveillance -- probably drones or landworms - remaining focused on the lake approach. -Powered -armour is designed to be big, bulky and intimidating, so a stealthy -ninja I was not. - -Up ahead I saw a branch bend and snap back into position, all on its -own. A voice laughed out of nowhere. I had nothing, not even passive -infrared. I'd be -firing blind and it took my minigun 3.2 seconds to spin-up - which is a -fucking eternity when the bad guy has a weapon that could stop a tank. -Even -assuming it was a heavyweight piece usually fired from a tripod we'd be -in a wintry version of High Noon; a slow-mo gunfight with no prize for -second -place. As I was getting nothing from enhanced vision I shut down the -feed and opened my visor. Jesus it was cold, like the slap you get from -a walk-in -freezer. I felt the internal neck seal tighten, keeping the rest of my -body within an environmental cocoon. - -I latched my primary weapon into carry mode and reached for the -breaching tool both NCO's carried on this mission. It was a stubby -shotgun firing shaped -charges - designed to blow entry points in walls. Hardly the most subtle -weapon but I'll take 'indiscriminate' over 'aimed' any day. I brought it -to my -shoulder and marched on, no longer trying to hide, intent on closing the -range as quickly as possible. The only sounds were the rhythmic crunch -of snow and -my shallow breathing. Ice crystals began to form along the rim of my -faceplate. - -A blur on the ridgeline against a backdrop of low cloud. Maybe -interference between two stealth fields in close proximity. Adjusted my -aim, fired, zero -recoil. Dropped the shotgun. - -Up ahead an explosion, scream. A man-shape covered in St. Elmo's Fire. A -man falling, bloody. - -The minigun winding up. Time to take a breath. Shots impacting on my -breastplate; small-calibre shit, no worries. Green light, fire. - -The dragon roars, spews a torrent of tracer. - -Helmet hit, ricochet, sparks around my head. - -"Warning, systems fail-" - -

Burning, but cold. It was dark. Not a place I wanted to -be. Someone -whispering… - -"Stim him again, I want this man walking the line." - -"Sorry, L-T, but the rig won't play ball. Needs Medical Officer -authorisation to exceed the max safe dose." - -"Dammit, do it manually. Christ, stop pussyfooting about, just give it -here." - -A hand brushed my face. The pulse-and-numb of a single-shot gas -injector. Hammer-blow to the heart. Drowning; you either rise to the -surface or sink -without trace. - -I threw up, coughed. "Get the fuck away from me!" - -"That's 'Get the fuck away from me, Sir'!" Lieutenant Hawks -laughed, "Less of your malingering, Cooper, you ain't dead yet." - -I blinked, looked about. The rig had defaulted to 'at ease' and my -helmet had been removed. The L-T and two Marines were around me, another -two on guard. -All pretty much anonymous in cold-weather gear but I recognised -Henderson from his shades - real fly-boy cool. - -Servos whined as I stood upright. I tried to salute but couldn't move my -right arm, couldn't see from my right eye. "Corporal Gary Cooper -reporting for -duty, Sir." - -"Stand down, Marine, we won. You wasted that pair in full view of the -workforce and they caved in, double-time. The hostages have been -released and both -sides are trying to act like nothing happened." - -"Nothing happened? Jesus, L-T, we lost seven men out on the ice, plus -the flight crew. That's gotta count for something." - -He shook his head. "I hear ya, Marine, I surely do. This whole thing has -been an exercise in inter-corporate shit-stirring but, officially, the -mission is -a success. That means our casualties are acceptable, Corporal. Do -we understand each other?" - -"Sir." - -He nodded to the two techs dicking with my rig, "Get him operational. -He's walking out of here as a Marine ready for combat, not just some -survivor in his -skivvies." - -Lieutenant Hawks moved away, being replaced in my field of vision by -Specialist Brannigan. The tech grinned. "Command are already riding the -L-T's ass over -this, Coop. They want a goddam hero, front-and-centre. So -remember to smile nice while chowing down on all the public relations -bullshit. Damn, they -might even promote you." - -I groaned. "Aw hell, why me?" - -"Last man standing, bro, last man standing." - -Ain't that the truth. - -© Martin M. Clark 2016 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] madras.jpg - -[*ITEM] A New World Order - -[*AUTHOR] John A. Frochio - -[*BLURB] It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God -but to create him.
Arthur C. Clarke - -[*DESCRIPTION]

We're getting numb to the -terrorists who decimate our land, thought Benjamin. We're almost -accepting it as a way of life. It's a new world order. - -He stared blankly at the dead bodies, the fire, the smoke, the -devastation and the ugly, gaping hole in his building. -Horrific, he thought as he kicked through the ruins. - -After the fire and smoke from the explosion had finally cleared, all -that remained of the east end of the state-of-the-art A. I. research -building was a -hollowed out husk and a mass of twisted pipes and wires. Although the -terrorists were still on the loose, a crowd gathered outside the ruins -to gaze in -wonder at the exposed guts of the building. - -Alarms were still screaming from all corners of the city. Distant smoke -rose from between buildings in multiple directions. The number of -terrorists -involved in this massive assault was still unknown. - -Benjamin Burke, co-founder and developer of this first-of its-kind -building, kicked among the rubble like a pouting child. He was scrawny -in torn heavy -metal T shirt, jeans, sneakers and thinning gray hair. His -unprofessional appearance was not unusual for the eccentric computer -geek and entrepreneur. - -The last ambulance left the broken scene with the dead body of his -partner, the formerly staid and stoic Stephen Ellison. With his partner -now dead, could -he rebuild without him? There should be enough money from the insurance. -But would his heart be into it? - -He was sure he could rally eventually. Steve would want him to. - -His foot struck a cracked flat screen monitor among the debris and he -nearly tripped over it. As he looked down at the broken monitor, it -suddenly lit up. -Schematics appeared on the screen. A metallic voice said, "Issuing -reconstruction designs." - -His cell phone buzzed. He held it up and watched the downloading of -dozens of PDF's. Subject: "For Your Review and Approval." - -Benjamin stared in disbelief. The A.I. was taking charge. - -He grunted. Well, that should save some time. - -He put his phone away. He would review them later. He continued -wandering among the ruins. - -A noisy ruckus erupted down the street. A mass of people quickly -scattered as three men charged through the crowd, guns drawn and firing. -They were coming -straight toward his ruined building. - -Benjamin hurried toward the gaping hole in the building that led into a -corridor lined with office pods. He stumbled over some rubble and fell -several feet -from the entrance. Scrambling to his feet, he found that his pants were -torn at the knees and he was bleeding. - -The gunmen burst into the ruins. They weaved their way through the -tangled web of warped metal, wires and piping. The piping began to -vibrate and move. The -piping wrapped itself around the legs and torso of the intruders, -impeding their progress. The more they struggled, the more rapidly the -piping encircled -them like pythons entrapping their prey. - -Benjamin stared at the curious spectacle, unable to look away, unable to -force himself to move. - -Caught off guard, the surprised gunman were quickly dispatched by the -stranglehold of piping. In less than a minute, it was over. Their -crushed bodies were -left to hang as a warning to future trespassers and a testament to the -glory of a new technology. - -Benjamin continued to stare as his phone beeped. He picked up. - -"Please review and approve the designs by 7 AM tomorrow morning. -Reconstruction will begin at 7:30 sharp. Any delay is unacceptable." - -Well, this is a new world order after all. - -He wasted no time, hastily reviewing the updated design specs. - -© John A. Frochio 2016 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] newworldorder.png - -[*ITEM] Under the Martian Moonlight - -[*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - -[*BLURB] A Comic Strip featuring the Fearsome War Machines of Mars.
- -[*DESCRIPTION] - - - -© Liam Baldwin 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- -© 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2016 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - - -"Omnes eodem cogimur," -Quintus Horatius Flaccus -
"unde negant redire quemquam" Gaius Valerius Catullus - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev19.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev19.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 02f2537c..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev19.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4847 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 18 - February 2017 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 19th issue of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

This new issue - 19 - comes with two -stories from new authors, and several from much-appreciated authors, -previously published in Mythaxis. A cartoon from Liam Baldwin, and a -story from your editor. - -Thank you to all contributors. - - -© Gil Williamson 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] editor19.jpg - -[*ITEM] Interlude in Green - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] Life is filled with little surprises. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

There was no up, no down, no sideways. I -was on the ground, in the air, under water. A kaleidoscope of sight and -sound. Audio-visual bedlam, big screen, guaranteed front-row seat.

- -

The hit from a neural disruptor is like deleting the master index to -your memory. Everything is out of context; there�s no timeline, no sense -of immediacy, no perspective. It lasted a few seconds, a year, or -somewhere in-between.

- -

Blink.

- -

I was sitting on the ground, my back against a landing strut. -It was a lush, green landscape with long shadows. Late -afternoon. A woman stood a short distance away, looking out at -the crops beyond the line of an irrigation canal. Apart from -that, there was no sign of civilisation.

- -

Diana Ostov.

- -

She was a heavy-ass brunette in her mid-twenties, handsome -rather than pretty. An entirely sexist and superficial -appreciation I admit, but my forebrain was still getting its act -together and, well, she ticked all the boxes.

- -

I found my voice. �Where are we?�

- -

She didn�t look in my direction. �Permian Major, apparently.�

- -

I tried to place it and failed. �Ah, which system?�

- -

�The Canids Cluster.�

- -

Still nothing. �Why? What are we doing here?�

- -

A male voice. �That would be my idea, bud.�

- -

I turned my head. A man was walking down the access ramp from the -ship. He carried a pistol, but casually; more as a Rim mercenary fashion -accessory than naked threat. His name was Bloon. He was a pilot, this -was his ship. I�d hired him.

- -

I move people from place to place. People who don�t want to go -through formal channels. People like Diana Ostov. The Primacy was a -closed society, one of those who knew they were right and the rest of -the universe was wrong. All those who worked at the isolated starport -were morally suspect, if only by association.

- -

Diana wanted out and had sufficient funds to make my involvement -worthwhile. It helps that I�m an empath, officially a strong Level Two. -In reality I�m an unregistered Three, capable of twisting perspective in -others without the need for a broadcast unit. So I�d walked her to the -ship while starport security ignored us; easy in, easy out.

- -

A simple plan, executed cleanly, with no complications � until -now.

- -

Bloon gestured with his gun. �Before you even think about trying any -mind-games, Klein, have a feel at the back of your head. Slowly, -now.�

- -

I did as he suggested, slowly. There was a hemispherical metal disk -stuck to my skull.

- -

The pilot squatted down beside me. �That there is a shaped charge -with an anti-handling trigger. It�s also linked to my EEG monitor and -biometric feed. Meaning that if I flatline or my vitals tank then that -tricksy brain of yours gets blown out your eye sockets. We understand -each other?�

- -

I nodded. Slowly. �Absolutely.�

- -

He grinned. �Outstanding. Now, me and the girl will be leaving in due -course. Don�t do anything stupid and you get to wave us good-bye.�

- -

�What, you really think the Primacy will pay for her return? -Wise-up, man, they�ll burn you alive as a heretic and dismember her as -irredeemably contaminated.�

- -

Bloon laughed. �Take her back? Hell, no. Diana has corporate -value.�

- -

I frowned. �You jazzed or something? She was born there and this is -her first time off-world. How can she be worth anything to anyone? No -offence, Diana.�

- -

The pilot stood up. �I ran her DNA as soon as she came aboard. Turns -out she�s the daughter of one Joseph Ostov, a corporate defector. He was -an indentured geneticist with HanaMed back in the day, one of their -brightest stars, until he vanished without trace.�

- -

�My father? You�re looking for my father?� Diana stepped closer, �But -he died, almost five years ago.�

- -

�There goes your leverage, Bloon.� I got to my feet and dusted myself -down, �Busted flush.�

- -

Bloon shook his head. �You weren�t listening. As an indentured -employee that means everything he produced is the property of HanaMed -Industries. Including the little lady here.�

- -

Diana sounded more confused than angry. �I�m not an object that my -father produced. I�m not just something that can be -owned.�

- -

Bloon winked at her. �Sure you are. Almost a third of the population -out on the Rim are obligated to some power or another. Oh, we don�t call -it slavery these days but it amounts to the same thing. I have a broker -sounding out HanaMed right now to see if you�re worth nixing my -agreement with Klein.�

- -

I really didn�t like the implications of that. �And if they don�t -bite, then what?�

- -

�Then we go back to Plan �A�. I drop you both off at Nebula Gateway -and you pay me the half-later part of our contract.�

- -

�Just like that? No hard feelings?�

- -

He shrugged. �It�s only business. Now, play nice and this will soon -be over.� Bloon holstered his gun and ambled away, towards the -canal.

- -

Diana and I looked at each other. I wiped my mouth. �Did your father -continue his work after he joined the Primacy? Did he experiment on you -at all?�

- -

She shivered. �No, no, nothing like that. He was a pharmacist, -dealing with locally produced remedies. There was maybe one odd thing, -now I come to think of it.�

- -

�Uh-huh?�

- -

�He called me his greatest creation, for as long as I can remember. I -always assumed it was just a figure of speech, a term of endearment, but -now�� Her voice trailed away and I could see concern in her grey -eyes.

- -

I took a deep breath and released it slowly. �OK, so Papa Orlov is on -the run and needs a place to hide. But the Primacy are based on -religious eugenics, they wouldn�t accept an outsider unless his genetic -makeup was perfect, I mean flawless. It can�t just be a happy -coincidence��

- -

�Well, I was tested at birth, everyone is. My mother was just a Beta -but I�m rated an Alpha.� She couldn�t hide the pride in her voice.

- -

�Forget tinkering with gene therapy. I think your father not only -found a way to wipe the slate clean, he passed that ability on as an -inherited trait.� A sudden thought made me frown, �Shit, how did he -die?�

- -

She stiffened. �What? Ah, he was helping a neighbour cut down a tree -and it fell the wrong way, crushing them both. Why is that -important?�

- -

�Sorry, but an accidental death is just fine. Something like cancer -or liver disease would blow my theory out of the water.� I ran fingers -across my stubble, �But if Bloon has forwarded your DNA to HanaMed for -confirmation, then we�re screwed. You�ll become a glorified lab-rat -while -I end up as landfill.�

- -

�Dead? But he said if you didn�t cause trouble then you�d be left -here, unharmed.�

- -

�Yeah, right. Someone like Bloon can�t screw a client and leave them -looking for payback. No, if this goes bad then it goes bad -big-time.�

- -

Diane stared at me for a long moment, chewing her bottom lip in an -incredibly fetching fashion. I never mix business with pleasure but in a -different time and place � who knows?

- -

She frowned. �You�re an empath. Are you sure you -can�t tweak -him, -just a little? If HanaMed do offer to pay, then I'm guessing they -won't offer much, in case Bloon thinks I might be worth even more and -tries to sell me on the open market. Can�t you make him suspicious of -HanaMed's intentions, even paranoid, so that he goes for your agreed -pay-off instead?�

- -

I shrugged my shoulders. �Normally, yes, I could make him my best -friend forever, or at least until everything was done and dusted. -However, as things stand�� I gestured towards the back of my head, �� he -could be bluffing, but I�m not exactly keen to find out.�

- -

For a moment her whole demeanour changed, like she�d been keeping -No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy bottled up until he�d really had enough. The -look in her eyes was enough to shrivel any amorous thoughts I might have -been harbouring. Not just figuratively.

- -

She tossed her hair back. �I have a way out of this. Do you trust -me?�

- -

�Depends. Does it involve me going mano a mano with Bloon -while you -cheer from the side-lines?�

- -

�You won�t even have to lift a finger.�

- -

I managed a semi-rakish grin. �Then count me in. What�s the -plan?�

- -

�Just go over and talk to him. Appeal to his better nature.�

- -

�Huh?�

- -

�Humour me, I think you�ll be surprised at the outcome.�

- -

I put on as much swagger as I could muster, given the circumstances, -and headed over to where the pilot was standing, gazing down at the -irrigation canal. Diana kept pace close behind me. Bloon was a big man -and I really didn�t fancy my chances if this ended in a fight, despite -her assurances.

- -

He turned to face me. �I haven�t heard anything as yet, so try and -chill out.�

- -

Diana touched the back of my neck.

- -

My balls felt like a cold hand had just cupped them, making me -gasp.

- -

The world snapped shut and opened again.

- -

I dropped maybe 15 centimetres and stumbled.

- -

There was a small explosion behind me; a flat bang with no echo.

- -

I fell, sprawling on long, coarse grass.

- -

I was naked.

- -

The rational part of my brain took a time-out so the instinctive me -bounced back up and stared around, trying to make sense of things.

- -

Bloon toppled backwards into the canal, his upper torso a bloody -mass. I was on the opposite bank from where I�d been standing only -moments ago � over 10 metres away.

- -

Diana raised her voice. �You make it OK?�

- -

I covered my groin with both hands. �Yeah, well�� I took a deep -breath. �What the hell just happened? The simple version!�

- -

�My father dubbed it �displacement�. However it only affects organic -matter, not your clothes � or Bloon�s shaped charge.�

- -

�Inbuilt teleportation? Jesus - but how the hell did you get that -past the ship�s scanners? Or generate enough energy?�

- -

�Teleportation? No, nothing so crude. Every planet is awash in dark -energy that most man-made systems can�t detect. I simply displaced your -molecular make up and background wash carried you across the canal in -the time taken for the effect to wear off.�

- -

Her matter-of-fact tone was more disturbing than a crazed rant. �Uh, -don�t take this the wrong way, Diana, but what the fuck are you -on about? Some magical power whisked me to safety, leaving Bloon to get -his face blown off? What�s next, we escape on the back of a bejewelled -star dragon? Because without a pilot that ship is going nowhere.�

- -

She laughed. �Then how about neural control of sticky neutrinos, -Klein, does that make more sense? Bloon scanned for electronic -implants, not bio-electrical signatures or organic abnormalities. My -body is a living powerhouse capable of dark matter manipulation. I could -probably run that entire ship of his without breaking sweat.�

- -

�Jesus, girl, do you have any idea what that kind of technology is -worth? Look, I know people - patent lawyers, private security, corporate -brokers � who can put together a primo deal. Cast iron, one that even -the Devil himself couldn�t dent.�

- -

�For a percentage, of course? You sound just like my father, except -the deal would be his and I�d just be his proof of concept. All he was -waiting for was my new organs to mature fully.� The bitterness in her -voice was obvious.

- -

I experienced a sudden moment of clarity. �You murdered him.�

- -

�I placed my hand on the tree trunk and it fell as I wished. -Although, -good luck explaining that to a Magistrate.�

- -

�Not a chance - your business is your business.� I looked to left and -right. The waterway stretched away in both directions with no visible -crossing point. �OK, so how do I get back across?�

- -

She smiled. �You don�t.�

- -

�Excuse me?�

- -

�Sorry, Klein, but you�re on your own from now on.�

- -

�Look, Diana, without the ship I think we�d stand a far better chance -of getting off this world if we stick together.�

- -

�Actually, no.�

- -

I blinked. �No?�

- -

�I can fly the Delta, or at least let it fly itself. All I have to do -is sit back and enjoy the ride.�

- -

I tried not to sound relieved. �Ah, sorry to point out the obvious, -but the ship is in lock-down. The controls are keyed to Bloon�s -bio-signature, and his alone.�

- -

Diana shook her head. �I screwed the hired help while you were -unconscious. He even enjoyed having his back clawed while I harvested -sufficient skin cells to coat my right palm.� She smiled. �So, no, I -don�t believe the geno-lock will pose a problem.�

- -

�But you can�t just leave me here like this!� It was hard not to -whine.

- -

�Why not? It was Bloon I wanted out of the way and your survival was -just a by-product. Displacement timing is more art than science and you -could just as easily have ended up in the canal.�

- -

�You need me, Diana. You don�t know Rim society, you don�t know how -to survive out here.�

- -

�Oh, your contacts aboard Nebula Gateway would make life easier, I -admit, but I�ll get by. So long, Klein. Don�t come looking for me.� She -turned on her heel and strode away, up the access ramp and into the -ship. I tried to reach out but my brain was still on the fritz and her -mind was a like a smooth ball-bearing; cold and impenetrable.

- -

The access ramp swung shut and the engines began to power up. The -Delta used VTOL technology rather than an anti-grav lifting field. It -rose slowly into the air, down-blast blowing my abandoned clothes into -the water where they sank without trace. The landing struts retracted as -the ship moved forward, gaining speed. Part of me still hoped that Diana -would circle around and set down on my side of the canal, a big �Gotcha� -grin on her face as she welcomed me aboard.

- -

The nose lifted and the Delta accelerated away into the clear blue -sky, rapidly dwindling to a speck, a pinpoint, a figment of my -imagination.

- -

I heard a faint sonic boom.

- -

A breeze rustled the grass, water gurgled in the canal, the sound of -my own breathing. No birdsong, no insects, no distant hum of machinery. -I shivered and wiped sweat from my brow, then started walking alongside -the canal. I figured I�d find a pump or sluice gates - something I could -shut down so that a repair team would be sent to investigate. Hell, I�d -settle for a drone as long as I could attract its attention. As plans go -it sucked but I was out of options.

- -

Sometimes life pisses on you and tells you its raining.

- -

I just wished I�d brought an umbrella.

- -© Martin M. Clark 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] interlude.png - - - -[*ITEM] Timed Out - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] �If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the -future?�
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

�We can see the ghosts, but they can�t -see us?� Manuel asked. The guide, a tall Argentine called Alvaro, had -already been shooting glances at Manuel during the tour. Now, he smiled -perfect teeth and said:

- -

�Oh, yes. They can see us.�

- -

�I�m glad I did my hair, then,� Manuel said, flicking his curls back, -relieved that Alvaro was taking the touch of camp the wrong way. Natalia -was in a bad mood, hadn�t wanted to take the Past-times Walk, and -was being more-catty-than-catwalk today.

- -

�Then why can�t we talk to them?� she suddenly demanded, but Alvaro -smiled at her in such a way that Manuel wondered if he�d misread -Alvaro�s -compass.

- -

�What you�re seeing is something that has already happened. The past. -All the people you see would be ghosts in our time because, sadly, with -the timescale involved, they�d all be dead. We�re not seeing dead -people, though. We�re seeing images that have already happened. Done, -dusted, over. Hence we can�t interact with them.�

- -

�But you said they could see us,� Natalia insisted.

- -

�As ghosts, right. We�re like Scrooge�s last visitor. The ghosts of -things to come. But because we can�t change what�s already happened, we -can�t do anything but observe. We can�t interact.�

- -

�What if I wrote down a message now, held it up, and then came back a -week later� Surely the person would have seen the message and then they -would have time to respond to it.�

- -

�No.� Alvaro laughed and Manuel resented both the amount of time -Natalia was monopolising the guide and the fact that her tail was up and -she was in for a stubborn fight to prove she was right, ruining his own -chances with the guide when they got back to their own time.

- -

�Why not?�

- -

�Because we�re not able to change what happens, merely observe -it.�

- -

�But they are.�

- -

�Unfortunately not. Although they see us, they can�t respond--because -they didn�t the first time around�when we weren�t there.�

- -

�But that would mean�� Natalia was scratching her head, oblivious of -all the other members of the tour group who just wanted to see the 2010 -World Cup they�d come to visit, when Spain would win its first final. -�Well, that it�s actually the future that can�t be changed. I -mean, they can�t change what they�re going to do even though we show -them means that it�s not the past that�s static�it can�t be, -because we�re here, we�re in it and you said we weren�t before�but the -future.

- -

�That would also be the reason why we can return to the point in time -when we left, but not travel any further into the future.�

- -

Natalia was furious about something as she glared at the guide. -Alvaro nodded for the rest of their party to go on ahead and join those -already filtering into Johannesburg�s Soccer City stadium.

- -

�You�re telling me my future is set and there�s nothing I can do -about changing it?� Natalia asked him. �That I can�t even see -what�s happening? Well, unless a future time traveller comes back and -holds up a sign or picture of how things turned out. And even then all I -can do is sit tight, teeth gritted, and let my future just happen?�

- -

�Nati,� Manuel said, putting a hand on her wrist. It was cold, damp, -the muscle beneath tight as wet stone, and she yanked it away. �You�re -telling me I can�t stop anything from happening that�s already happened -to my future self?�

- -

�That�s kind of right,� Alvaro said. �Because future is a perception -and not a reality, your future is only future as far as you�re -concerned. For those looking back, who lived after you, your future is -their past.�

- -

�And they�ve already happened?�

- -

�Everything has already happened. Everything that will ever happen, -has happened. Put simply: we reached the end.�

- -

Manuel felt a shiver run down his spine. �You mean I�m dead? We�re -all dead?� he asked.

- -

�I mean that the moment time travel became possible was because time -itself became a meaningless concept. It was passive. Like a dead snake -that will no longer rear up and bite you if you poke it in different -places along its body. It finally allowed two contradicting concepts: -the past cannot be changed, and the theoretical possibility of time -travel. This is the only way both are compatible.�

- -

�When there is no future left to disrupt�� Natalia said.

- -

�I�m dead?� Manuel repeated.

- -

�We all die, Mani!� Natalia snapped. �Just get over it!�

- -

It was his time to round on her, though. Best friend or not, there -was a cute guide to consider and, anyway, his emotions were as important -as hers.

- -

�We-ell, sor-ry, Se�orita Perfectita! I don�t know who�s chewed a -chunk out of your ass today, but you�re being a total bitch.�

- -

�I saw a ghost before we left. Visiting me. My daughter.�

- -

�Your daughter?� Manuel asked, running round in front of her -and giving both her arms a squeeze. �Well, get you, Mamita!�

- -

�She showed me a message telling me I was going to die giving birth -to her.�

- -

�Oh�� Manuel turned the arm squeeze into a hug, for the first time -forgetting about Alvaro, who watched them with sympathetic detachment. -As Natalia�s shoulders hitched up and fell several times, Manuel pushed -her away and lined up his eyes with hers. �Ignore the guide, he doesn�t -know everything.�

- -

But Natalia raked her sleeve over her nose. �He will. He�s the -father.�

- -

The emotion that struck was inappropriate, selfish, outrageous--when -Manuel was able to calm himself after and think about how he�d reacted. -But it came before he was able to stop it.

- -

�Say what?� He looked between the two of them, Alvaro for the -first time losing his cool, pressing a finger to his chest and mouthing -�What, me?�

- -

�One of the fathers,� Natalia said through her sniffles.

- -

�How many do you need, girl?� Manuel said, hand on hip, not -yet losing his indignation.

- -

�Not me, my daughter. She needed two. You and Alvaro. You adopt her. -Well, when I say �adopt�, Alvaro was the biological father. He donated, -not impregnated.�

- -

Alvaro�s eyes were bulging as he stared, -mouth hanging open.

- -

Manuel didn�t know what to feel, nor precisely what he was -feeling.

- -

�She was beautiful,� Natalia said. �I wish I could see more of -her��

- -

�Shush now, shush�� Manuel said.

- -

Alvaro cleared his throat. �Er�her father happens to work for the -leading Time-visits agency there is? So I predict she�ll be flying back -every evening��

- -

Manuel smiled over Natalia�s shoulder at his future husband. �Not -till the little squirt�s done her homework,� he said.

- -

Natalia nodded, sniffling, finally�Manuel was pleased to see�using a -handkerchief rather than her sleeve.

- -

�You�d better do a good job, dopes. Or I�ll come back to haunt you. -Or forward. Or whatever it takes.�

- -

�Sure, Ghost-mama. Sure��

- -

Arm in arm, the three walked towards the stadium where the vuvuzela -horns and screams of the crowd seemed to welcome their own moment of -triumphant resolution.

- - -© Jez Patterson 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] timeout.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Reunion - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a -type -of -heaven".
Tryon Edwards - - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

-

149
- -

What is that bizarre contraption thrumming purposefully -northwards along Narpins Way, trailing wafts of hot copper, ripe peaches -and aging fish?

- -

It could only be Ruckney Plitter in his custom-built pre-SunCell -landshrinker, heading back to Snoak for the annual reunion with Ma -Wheggs. By pre-arrangement, on the first mutually convenient day in -Spring a half dozen of her former lodgers, all contemporaries, returned -for this celebratory event. It is unlikely that their respective paths -would ever have crossed if they had not chosen to come to Snoak City -from their scattered parental homes during those few formative years, -drawing strength from the happy accident of each other�s company as they -faced unknown vicissitudes at the start of their future careers. Most of -them had opted to stay in Snoak, and now had their own apartments. -Ruckney was one of the two exceptions.

- -

The much cherished vehicle (referred to as �Ruckney�s rattletrap� -only by the ignorant or envious), slowed to a raucous crawl as it -approached Slebb�s Junction, where he always found the signs confusing. -He passed the grounds of the old ParaPet works (now a fruit-juice -processing plant), ignoring the roadsign at Brandurp Street which -pointed west to Smatparrox, and noting the presence of another new -construction site. �NEUTRILAX LETS YOU CHOOSE!� -declared a portentously cryptic hoarding. To his left he recognized the -allotments bordering 20bird Lane, and beyond them the brightly-coloured -playground of the pre-school nursery, which meant that the turning after -next would be Welfage Road, leading to Park Street West and the familiar -blue-painted door of No.149 where Ma Wheggs used to brood over her -fledgling clutch of guests with something very close to maternal -concern.

- -

On encountering the new severe parking restrictions in the inner -city, Ruckney found himself having to circle anticlockwise round the -entire perimeter of Garrible Park before finding an unoccupied place in -the designated area behind Praspafole Stadium. Watching the other -vehicles darting and gliding in and out of their neat spaces like -tropical fish, he supposed that in comparison his trusty shrinker was -more like a giant turtle: marginally noisier when in motion, he -conceded, but so much easier to find in a crowd than one of those -ubiquitous shiny toys, despite any vaunted advantages in terms of -economy. Extracting his pungent bags, he locked the shrinker and set off -on his unplanned walk to the sanctuary of No.149.

- -

As he turned the corner into Park Street West a rush of memories -jostled for precedence: his first arrival as a nervous young apprentice, -the time he and his new friend Sawly, flouting the house rules, had -smuggled back a bottle of wine wrapped in a towel, only for it to slip -and smash on the doorstep, or the occasion when one of the women from -next door (whom he had scarcely glimpsed until then) had once roused the -household well after midnight, seeking help to extricate a smouldering -mattress. The appearance of a pretty young woman in her nightclothes (to -Ruckney it was a beatific vision) was a definite stimulus to what he -smugly recalled was his unhesitatingly heroic assistance. Much later he -discovered (though not from Ma Wheggs) the actual nature of the house -next door, and the importance of functional and preferably -fire-resistant mattresses to the continued satisfaction of its -client�le.

- -

The panel beside the doorbell was still reassuringly headed -WHEGGS. Below -this was a list of unfamiliar -names where his own and those of his contemporaries used to be, making -him feel momentarily as if he were trespassing, but the ripe odours -escaping from his bags reminded him he should probably ring the bell. -

- -

The door opened, and there she was: short, plump, benign, swathed in -the brightly festive printed silks she always wore for the annual -gathering, the straggling bun of hair perhaps a little greyer since his -last visit. As he gently disengaged from Ma Wheggs� affectionate hug and -shrugged off his coat, the sound of lively voices confirmed that the -others had already arrived, all being relatively local, apart from -Sawly, who would have cruised downriver from his studio in Trevury in -his Slipshell Skimmer. Over Ma Wheggs� head Ruckney saw that they had -assembled as usual in the big kitchen at the end of the corridor, past -the carpeted staircase leading up to the lodgers� rooms.

- -

There were cries of �Here he is!�, �Hey, Ruckney!� and �It�s the -Shrinkerman!� as he approached the kitchen. Someone took his coat and -relieved him of his bags before he had a chance to open them, freeing -him for enthusiastic handshakes and claps on the back from Sawly Vext -and Strag Wilderfoot, and welcoming kisses on cheeks from Tebbi Nemming, -Yethne Farfyle and a third girl he did not at first recognize, until he -realized that the fiery sunset of hair must belong to the once shy young -woman he knew as Cendrel Pirch.

- -
PIRCH
- -

Platport was a quiet coastal community. Cendrel�s -parents were florists, supplying much of their stock from their own -garden and greenhouses. Their first child had died very suddenly from a -rare bacterial infection, barely a year old, and the loss continued to -haunt their lives, even after Cendrel�s advent. As she grew up there -were times when Cendrel felt almost stiflingly over-protected, and -others when some unexpected reminder of her parents� lingering grief -would briefly cast a sullen cloud over otherwise normal activities.

- -

Cendrel was diffident about venturing into the shop, because it still -evoked an uncomfortable early memory of being terrified by a woman -shouting over the shrill yelps of her uncontrolled dog. She felt most at -ease outdoors among the plants, for which she felt a secret affinity. At -school she discovered that she had a flair for design, and later she -grew adept at the decorative side of the business; her floral -arrangements were instinctively balanced in terms of colour, scent and -composition, but she yearned for the freedom to be able to work on a -grander scale. Eventually she prevailed on her parents to let her apply -for the vocational course in landscape gardening offered by Sparagulan -College in association with the botanical gardens in Garrible Park.

- -

The euphoria of being accepted for the course was tempered by anxiety -about moving to Snoak City and having to cope with strangers. From the -accommodation list approved by the College, she selected the address -closest to the park, and in due course made the acquaintance of Ma -Wheggs, that least intimidating of landladies. Within a week of her -arrival the shy girl from Platport had been befriended by another -lodger, Tebbi Nemming, a sophisticated research assistant almost a year -her senior, who appointed herself Cendrel�s mentor, and in place of the -elder sister Cendrel had never known, set about fortifying the younger -girl�s self-confidence.

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149
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�Trout, I expect. It�s still wrapped. And some furry -fruit. They seem -to have leaked a bit.�

- -

�Watch out for the cat. She�ll have that fish quicker than you can -say �Plitter!� �

- -

�Did someone call me?�

- -

�It�s all right, Ruckers, we�re just unloading your gifts. How�s the -old shrinker, by the way?�

- -

�Perfectly fine, thanks. Had to leave it down by the Stadium, thanks -to the new pedestrian zones. By the way, anyone know what �Neutrilax� -is? I passed a big sign on the corner of Brandurp Street.�

- -

�I�m sure I�ve seen the name somewhere. Is it one of those skin-care -soaps?�

- -

�It sounds like something they use to quieten horses.�

- -

�Tebbi will know. Hey, Tebbi, what�s �Neutrilax�?�

- -

�No idea. It�s probably either a breakfast cereal or a contraceptive. -Unless it�s for treating acidity in the soil, in which case Cendrel�s -your expert, am I right, Cen?�

- -

�If it were something for the soil, yes. But it�s not, at least as -far as I know. I think it might be an industrial solvent.�

- -

From the doorway came a sound of chuckling, familiar to everyone -present. They turned to the silk-swathed source.

- -

�Do you know something we don�t, Ma Wheggs? asked Ruckney.

- -

�Oh, I certainly do, Mr Plitter. I know you all lead busy lives, but -if any of you boys and girls had been paying attention, you might have -heard about the competition.�

- -

The general murmur of interest was just sufficient to mask the sound -of a cat surreptitiously trying to unwrap a trout.

- -

�It�s a back-to-front advertising campaign,� explained Ma Wheggs. �It -started a few weeks ago, in the press and the other media, and there are -posters everywhere. The competition�s very simple: to describe in -exactly a hundred words the product that best matches the name -�Neutrilax�. The winner can choose between either a fixed cash prize or -a guaranteed 5% stake in the profits from sales of the eventual -product.�

- -

Yethne was dismissive. �That�s a crazy idea! The product has to come -first. My class of ten-year olds could tell you that.�

- -

�Maybe it�s just crazy enough to work,� said Strag. �Some bored -entrepreneur with access to lots of facilities must be willing to take a -big risk. Probably old Quanderpyre. You used to work in the big pink -tower, Tebs. Did you ever meet him?�

- -

�Not once in the two years I was there, but I was only a humble -researcher on the fifteenth floor. I believe he spends most of his time -in the penthouse guarding his treasures.�

- -

�I�ve heard people saying Farras Grein might be behind it,� said Ma -Wheggs. �But no-one seems to know for sure.�

- -

�It�s certainly a novel way to make sure everyone knows the product -name, whatever it turns out to be, but for it to be successful it would -still have to be something that they actually need,� said Sawly.

- -

�Ah, but Sawl, surely you�re not saying that people buy only what -they need?�

- -

�Well no, of course not, Ruckers, I mean they�d have to be persuaded -it was something indispensable, such as...�

- -

�Twitching fish!�

- -

The sudden yell came from Tebbi, who was pointing at a spot on the -floor, where a large well-wrapped deceased trout, which only the day -before had been lurking quietly in a stream in Drether�s Wheen, was seen -to be edging its way under the table with a kind of jerky deliberation -that was quite hypnotic to watch.

- -

With surprising agility Ma Wheggs crossed the space from door to -table, and with a practiced motion that was almost balletic, scooped up -the offending cat and separated it from its inert prey as she headed for -the back door. �Husspert, you are a wilful rogue, and one day I�m going -to put you out for good and replace you with a phoelix� or even a -modifido,� they heard her telling it with her customary reproachful -fondness.

- -
NEMMING
- -

The Nemming household in Meheric was not a place for -meditation, or -even for taking a quick nap in the afternoon. Tebbi�s father was the -area representative for a firm making industrial lighting systems, and -when not travelling he enjoyed rigging up experimental test kits at -home. There were very few dark corners. Her mother was a part-time -teacher with a passion for making decorative pots, which she prepared in -the basement workroom (brighter than the average), and fired in the kiln -she had constructed in the back garden.

- -

Harlio and Twace, Tebbi�s older brothers, were sports-oriented. They -owned balls of various textures, dimensions and degrees of elasticity, -together with a selection of striking implements. Their target ranges -for projectiles outgrew the confines of their pockmarked bedrooms. They -would disappear for hours on their racing twindles. They ran, swam, -wrestled, leaped, glided and generally exercised their sinewy limbs. -Tebbi, whose principal status had been as their favourite toy, tolerated -their doting and teasing until she grew old enough to become a -participant on her own terms. Although they remained faster and -stronger, her co-ordination and stamina were better than theirs, which -gratifyingly earned her their respect.

- -

While her brothers continued to pursue their sporting interests Tebbi -completed her formal schooling, returned for an evening course on data -management, and then tried to decide what she really wanted to do. She -had harboured ambitions to be a dancer, a deep-sea diver, a forensic -psychologist and a fashion model, but came to realize that these were -probably mutually incompatible careers. She told herself to be -practical, knowing she needed to broaden her horizons, and started -looking for job opportunities outside Meheric. Quanderpyre Investments -were seeking �smart young research assistants�, and offered in-work -training as well as a generous starting salary. If accepted, she would -need to find somewhere to stay among the bright lights of Snoak. The -prospect of life in the big city was both daunting and enticing. Come to -think of it, the lights might not be as bright as those at home, but she -was sure she would adapt.

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149
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The custom on these occasions was for each of the guests -to bring dishes of food, both savoury and sweet, requiring a minimal -amount of cooking, although, if necessary, reheating or chilling were -permissible. Those with little or no culinary skills (such as Ruckney -Plitter) were excused from advance preparation. It was agreed that Ma -Wheggs should not involve herself in any further cooking process. -However, in deference to her territorial rights and experience, she -would be allowed to offer supervisory advice.

- -

Ma Wheggs always insisted on providing both a basket of fresh bread -and a welcome jugful of chilled emberskelven (the old house rules being -in abeyance), which, as it was deftly replenished, seemed to go well -with whatever unforeseen combination of dishes chanced to arrive, and -undoubtedly enhanced the air of celebration.

- -

The surface of the table was gradually obscured by an appetising -array of foods in serving bowls, dishes and jugs: sliced meats, -casseroles, pastes, salads and cooked vegetables, pies, gravies and -dressings, supplemented by fresh fruit, pastries, trifles, sorbets and -other delicacies.

- -

Strag was enthusiastic. �This is really good! What�s in the sauce, -Yethne?�

- -

�Black Lattons cheese, with chives, pearl mushroom flakes and a hint -of lemon. It�s quite mild.�

- -

�It actually complements rescued trout very well.�

- -

A slightly indignant grunt issued from the trout supplier, whose -mouth was full. Yethne looked pleased.

- -

�Oh, Ruckers, that was meant as praise, for both of you. Your fishing -skills are legendary, Yethne makes exquisite sauces, and we all know -that Husspert is the craftiest cat in Snoak.�

- -

The second grunt had a mollified nuance. Ma Wheggs smiled, and raised -her glass, whereupon everyone did the same, and Strag proposed a toast -to the temporarily exiled cat.

- -
WILDERFOOT
- -

Strag Wilderfoot had run away from Horm. At least, that�s -what he -later told himself and others. As he imparted to his diary in his -eighteenth year, �I�ve sucked dry your thin suburban juices! I crave -richer sustenance, and will go to Snoak to seek fulfilment, friendship -and fortune!� He had friends in Horm, but they did not understand his -passion for actual printed books or his obsessive need to write. Strag -had begun three novels, each one abandoned after a few chapters. -Something vital was missing. It was not ability, or serious intent, or -imagination. Could it possibly be experience?

- -

He had suffered the agonies of unrequited love, having fallen for -Caris Selk, a long-haired blonde girl at school who thought he was -weird, an opinion unfortunately shared by his exhausted parents. He had -been a late child, and while they had managed his upbringing to the best -of their ability, they could no longer keep up with his energy or active -mind. They had presented him with the savings accrued in his name, told -him that Marla, his maternal grandmother was moving in, and within a -week had nudged him out of the house with tearful blessings in the -direction of Snoak City, the one place they had gleaned from his -frequent impassioned monologues where he really wanted to be.

- -

On arrival in Snoak, Strag refreshed himself at the airport and then -headed with nervous determination for what to him was a primary focus of -intellectual discernment.

- -

Pentheus Sprent was not in the habit of being rudely disturbed, -especially by a teenager, but this one had been unusually persistent, -and had talked his way past several of the staff, giving plausible -reasons for his presence. While this suggested that security needed -tightening, it did show considerable initiative. The boy had got as far -as the waiting room outside Sprent�s office, where he perched on the -edge of a sofa intended to induce relaxation. The screen set into -Sprent�s inner door revealed a flushed-looking, lanky, dark-haired lad. -His bulky glidecart still had an attached airpod label showing he had -set out from Horm. Sprent, long experienced in interpreting a client�s -state of mind from inadvertent signals, examined the boy�s features. His -expression flickered between anxious hope and injured innocence. Sprent -made his decision and pressed a button. �You can show the boy in,� he -told his receptionist. �Tell him it�s safe to leave the glidecart.�

- -

Sprent motioned him into a less voluptuous seat. Well, Mr �?�

- -

�Wilderfoot. Strag Wilderfoot, Mr Sprent. It�s a great pleasure to -meet you, sir.�

- -

�Perhaps so, but I am more interested to know why you have come to -see me in such a presumptuous manner without prior invitation.�

- -

�Of course. My apologies. You see, sir, my ambition is to become a -writer, and I need to be in an environment where such an aspiration is -not looked on as something abnormal, or frivolous. That is why I have -come to Snoak, and��

- -

�You have come to Snoak from somewhere beyond the civilized -world?�

- -

�From Horm, sir. That�s where I grew up and went to school.� A trace -of chagrin was evident in Strag�s voice.

- -

�It�s irrational to be ashamed of one�s birthplace,� said Sprent, -�and to judge from your demeanour and vocabulary, you appear to have -benefited from your upbringing and education.�

- -

�It�s not that I�m ashamed, Mr Sprent, and I will never regret my -schooling. It�s just that I seem to have exhausted whatever Horm has to -offer, and I�m desperate to find a place where I can develop my talents. -That�s why I came here.�

- -

Sprent frowned. �Are you expecting me to offer you a job? Without a -formal application, without evidence of your specific attainments, and -in the palpable absence of previous working experience in the publishing -field?�

- -

Strag looked crestfallen. �I suppose I really didn�t know what to -expect, sir. In my mind the firm of Fissile and Sprent has always been, -well, a kind of fount of wisdom where I would find answers to my -questions. I�m afraid my only working experience has been as editor of -the school magazine, but the contributions were not exactly of a high -literary standard. I�m an avid reader, and I believe I can tell when a -piece of writing is flawed. But I�m sure I still have much to learn,� he -added hastily.

- -

�I appreciate your honesty, Mr Wilderfoot. In return I can tell you -that we are not conceited enough to regard ourselves as a fount of -wisdom, although as you clearly appreciate, we pride ourselves on the -quality of our books. My advice to you would be to take yourself down to -Sparagulan College, where you will find that for a small fee you could -sign up for a useful six-month introductory course in publishing, run by -Dirry Tradfern, an old friend of mine. Assuming you are willing to do -that, please make an appointment here when you have completed the -course, and depending on Tradfern�s assessment, you may well find there -will be an opening at Fissile and Sprent for an editorial assistant.� -Sprent regarded him benevolently from beneath his bushy grey -eyebrows.

- -

�That�s more than I could have hoped for, Mr Sprent.� Strag rose to -shake his hand. �I�m really grateful for your advice� and for bothering -to see me.�

- -

�The direct approach is sometimes the best,� said Pentheus Sprent. -�But don�t tell anyone I said that. Where are you staying in Snoak?�

- -

�Oh, I haven�t looked for anywhere yet.�

- -

�Then this may save you a little time,� said Sprent, going to a -shelf, opening a file and extracting a leaflet. �We happen to publish -material for the College, including their approved accommodation list. I -seem to remember one of addresses is not far from here. Ah yes, there we -are. Park Street West. Name of Wheggs.�

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149
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�� or a safety device for a sharp-edged tool?� Having -enjoyed a -second portion of Cendrel�s excellent trifle, Sawly�s mind had suddenly -drifted back to the earlier topic.

- -

�I can�t see that reaching a large enough market,� said Ruckney, -leaning back and lacing his fingers over his paunch. �No, in my opinion, -it would have to be something to relieve flatulence or indigestion. That -would be bound to have popular appeal, wouldn�t it?� He looked round for -support.

- -

�Probably not the ideal subject while we�re still eating, Mr -Plitter.�

- -

�Eh? Oh, sorry, sorry, Ma Wheggs.� Chastened, he sat back up and hung -his head glumly like a contrite child.

- -

�Tact was never your strong suit, Ruckers,� snorted Sawly, his own -tongue a little loosened by the strength of the emberskelven.

- -

Cendrel, by now also distinctly merrier, had tuned in fuzzily to the -conversation. She raised an index finger and wagged it knowingly. �But -he does have one. He told me!�

- -

�Has one what, dear?� enquired Ma Wheggs.

- -

Cendrel leaned towards her former landlady and confided in a dramatic -whisper: �A stroot!� She frowned and shook her head. �I mean suit. A -really, really strong suit! Made of coly� polycarbine fibles.� Satisfied -that she had correctly remembered the technical term, she beamed at -Ruckney, and was rewarded with a knowing wink.

- -
PLITTER
- -

He did indeed have a top-of-the-range protective suit, the -material -spun from synthetic polyamides developed during his third year with the -Advanced Fabrics team at Central�s research labs. Although the suit was -still officially the property of Central, as its sole wearer he had been -the favoured recipient for its long-term loan after large-scale -production of the final design had been approved for industrial and -scientific use, and advance orders received from, among others, -smelters, chemical factories, fire departments, hazardous waste handlers -and the odd vulcanologist.

- -

Following his apprenticeship he had helped modify and improve the -automated processing machinery, and was one of the eager volunteers -selected to have a prototype suit fitted for practical testing. During -this experimental phase he had been obliged to respect a confidentiality -agreement not to discuss technical details outside the workplace.

- -

The suit was lightweight, flexible, heat- and water-resistant, had -high tensile strength and was electrically non-conductive. Equipped with -matching gloves and face-shield Ruckney had walked through fire, been -exposed to splashes of molten glass and metal, languished in tanks of -various liquid compounds, and survived contact with high voltage sparks. -Relieved to have emerged unscathed from these trials, he was happy to -commend use of such suits by anyone working in extreme conditions, and -felt he had earned the opportunity to try his out in the (slightly) less -dangerous confines of the garage back home in Drether�s Wheen. It was -there that his precious landshrinker grew by increments over a two-year -period as he was able to obtain parts from scrapyards and specialist -dealers during holidays and occasional week-ends.

- -

This landshrinker was not a thing of beauty, but had a -straightforward blunt practicality that reflected the character of its -owner. It was strong, capacious and solidly dependable, powered by a -quartet of Kjold inertial engines (formerly used to drive a freight -transporter), which could be independently engaged to provide either -backup redundancy or extra thrust when required. It was a vehicle -adapted for the freedom of travel across wind-scoured terrain with an -unobstructed view of the horizon, but so far had made only comparatively -short journeys into populated areas, and had yet to be properly -unleashed. Ruckney harboured plans for a long-distance trip when his -spell of work as a consultant engineer at Smode�s Extrusions (on the -outskirts of Drether�s Wheen) came to an end early the following year. -He�d been thinking of inviting Sawly to join him, if the man was willing -to be parted long enough from his skimmer.

- -
VEXT
- -

No-one would deny the fascination of fire, but as a boy -Sawly�s -curiosity with what could be made to burn resulted (understandably) in -anxious parental warnings and frequent checks for any fire-making -devices. Being resourceful, he maintained a couple of convenient outdoor -hiding-places, known only to trusted friends (behind a broken brick in -the stump of a wall, the ivy-screened hollow of a tree). Here were -stored flints, convex lenses, tufts of steel wool, candle stubs, thin -tubular objects gnarled by heat beyond the recognition of all save -fellow experimenters or forensic specialists. An enthusiastic science -teacher at school had inadvertently intensified Sawly�s interest in -chemistry by heralding a practical laboratory demonstration with phrases -such as �extreme caution�, �on no account�, and �never without adult -supervision�. Certain powdered substances had been combined, a simple -fuse attached, and ignited at arm�s length by a taper. Standing back at -a safe distance the class was treated to a fountain of sparks, a -spectacularly colourful explosion and a pall of satisfyingly acrid -smoke. Sawly had followed the preparations with unusual attention, and -found himself wondering whether chemistry might become more than a -hobby.

- -

Another significant epiphany occurred on a school visit to Snoak City -Museum, long before it acquired its international reputation with the -acquisition of the fabled Trox Bequest. He had no particular reverence -for very old things, be they stuffed dead animals, shards of pottery, -monumental statues or corroded weaponry, even when tastefully displayed -with helpful explanatory notes. He might have admitted to a vague -fascination with some of the unusual rocks and minerals, with their -strange crystalline growths or glittering facets, but what really opened -his mind that day was in the section devoted to glass.

- -

He had always taken glass objects for granted, without giving any -thought to their manufacture. Bottles, jars, bowls, glasses, ornaments, -windows, mirrors, bulbs, lenses: things in everyday use he had never -bothered to think much about until his attention was drawn to one -particular item in that museum; a slender round-shouldered translucent -vase on a plinth base. The surface was etched with fine tendril-like -striations which had the effect of refracting the light so that the vase -appeared both to glow and sparkle at the same time. Sawly remembered -staring at the vase, entranced, before glancing at the label which -detailed its probable history, concluding with a reminder that this -ancient craftsmanship, like all glass-making, depended on the ability to -fuse quartz. Quartz was something with which Sawly was familiar from the -annual family holiday in Platport. He had spent many idle hours on -Platport beach, exploring, excavating and building short-lived -labyrinths and palaces from the same raw material, the same gritty, -slithering grains which could be transformed with the addition of a few -chemical compounds and a little skill, he realized with dawning -amazement, into something as breathtaking as that vase. Without -question, this was the skill he wanted to learn.

- -

Snoak Glassworks took on very few new apprentices. Craft glassmaking -was a very specialized discipline, requiring good hand-eye -co-ordination, a sound understanding of the underlying science and a -strong aesthetic sense. However, the Vext lad had arrived with a -portfolio of designs, very favourable references from the art and -science teachers at his school in Trevury, along with a letter of -commendation from the head, saying that he had rarely known a pupil with -such determination, whose abilities so closely matched the career he -hoped to pursue. Morsyl Tammer, the chief designer, was grudgingly -impressed, and had agreed to offer Sawly a month�s trial, with a modest -advance to cover living expenses. He was confident that the tourist -bureau at Central would have details of suitable lodgings, which indeed -proved to be the case.

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149
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After the meal Ma Wheggs had ushered them out of the -kitchen, and -they had retired to what they used to call the floproom. It was -essentially an informal library, with shelving on three walls. To an -initial nucleus of well-loved books, many previous guests, for the most -part students and trainees, had contributed a book or two of their own -before leaving. Under house rules, it was expected that borrowed books -would eventually be returned, but there were no penalties for default. -The net result was that the library had become by increments both a -useful educational resource and a treasury of surprises. A manual on -knot-making might rub shoulders with a textbook on hydrostatics, a Seff -Haldergath spy thriller, or a book of verse by Oxwell Gimbloss. The -central oval table was the only unobscured item of furniture. Ma Wheggs -periodically enhanced the original seating with fresh batches of -decorative cushions, so that it was often a matter of guesswork as to -what lay beneath, but there was always somewhere comfortable to sprawl, -and usually something interesting to read.

- -

On the lower shelves were propped some small framed holos, nostalgic -reminders of departed predecessors waving and smiling. Higher up, and -therefore less accessible, were a few older Wheggs family holos. Yethne, -feeling slightly light-headed and emboldened, had removed her shoes and -scrambled up a hill of plump cushions to peer up at the one which -featured a tall young man gazing down at the upturned face of his -partner, who was smiling back at him. They were at some kind of outdoor -evening celebration. She reached up carefully and brought it down for a -closer look, thumbing the side panel to activate it. Somewhere just -off-screen a band was playing; she caught a partial glimpse of blue and -gold uniforms. Behind the couple people were dancing. In the distance, -fireworks bloomed and showered, briefly illuminating a segment of what -appeared to be the Stadium. Yethne clambered down with as much decorum -as possible, and held it out for the rest of them to see.

- -

They clustered round.

- -

�Wow! �That looks like a young version of��

- -

�Do you suppose��

- -

�It�s not a version. That�s definitely Ma Wheggs, but she looks -so��

- -

��so happy. And so does that rather good-looking fellow. Is -that��

- -

�Of course! It must be Pa Wheggs. Before he��

- -

�Before the accident.�

- -

�Accident? I didn�t know. What accident?�

- -

�The bloating accident. He was the official Troller. At Praspafole -Stadium. For ten years or more.�

- -

�I never knew that. How did I never know that? I often wondered what -became of him.�

- -

�Well, she doesn�t care to talk about it, even after all these years, -which is understandable.�

- -

�Do you know what happened?�

- -

�The pitch was rock-hard. It was late season, and the ground had -frozen overnight, but they wouldn�t think of cancelling a game. You know -how resilient bloat players are. The perimeter glider malfunctioned; it -accelerated unexpectedly, he was thrown off and landed head first. -Suffered severe concussion, despite his head-pad. In a coma for weeks, -but sadly never recovered.�

- -

�Oh, that�s awful. Poor chap. And poor Ma Wheggs!�

- -

�I think she would have received compensation, but imagine having to -deal with the loss��

- -

�It must have been ghastly for her. How did you get her to tell -you?�

- -

�Actually I didn�t, but Fissile & Sprent have an old-fashioned -datafile full of local news reports, and I chanced to spot the name -Wheggs in the index.

- -

�We�d better put the holo back.�

- -

�I�ll do it.�

- -

�Thanks, Ruckney. Shoes!�

- -

�What? Oh, yes.�

- -
FARFYLE
- -

Black Lattons had been home to the Farfyles for as long as -anyone -could remember. It was an agricultural community, and, if you were a -Farfyle, the answer to most problems ultimately lay in the nutrient-rich -soil, fed by the upper reaches of the Stirrow as it wound through the -sheltered valley. The farms were largely self-sufficient, and their -high-quality produce and traditional hand-made craftwork were readily -traded or sold for any required items not available locally. It was an -idyllic spot, where human activity was geared to the daily movement of -the sun and the largely predictable pattern of the seasons. The work was -hard but rewarding, and Yethne, like her great-uncle Grome before her, -could not wait to be somewhere else, where you were not woken at dawn by -the ear-piercing yells of a mad-eyed bird, or obliged to muck out -unending quantities of smelly animal droppings before most sensible -people had eaten their breakfast.

- -

According to family legend, as soon as he was of a suitable age, -great-uncle Grome, who was allergic to feathers, pollen, sawdust, -animals, straw, and it seems anything else remotely relating to -agriculture, who was also prone to insomnia and blessed (or afflicted) -with sensitive hearing, had made it quite clear that he had an -irresistible urge to experience a completely different environment. True -to his word, he embarked on an ocean-going vessel bound for the southern -seas, working his passage as a galley-hand, and ended up on a remote -island, where, as a surviving handful of his subsequent letters -testified, he became proficient at diving for shellfish, inventing -cocktails and occasionally helping out at the weather station.

- -

Yethne Farfyle was just as motivated, but less inclined to plunge -into the unknown. Other than farming, the only profession she had had -the opportunity to observe at all closely was teaching. Apart from the -irascible Mrs Nullark with her glass eye and uncanny ability to identify -miscreants, all her teachers had been kind, reasonably cheerful, patient -people, who had tried to instil in their charges a love of learning, or -at the very least a vague curiosity and a useful smattering of basic -skills. She rather fancied being a teacher. It would be just like -helping the tinies to tell the time, or explaining difficult words to -her friend Morette, except that she would be paid, and still have -holidays.

- -

After a little research she discovered that even teachers had to -spend some time learning how to teach properly, and that would mean her -having to go to somewhere like Trevury or Meheric, or the famous -Sparagulan College in Snoak. She had been to Snoak two or three times -when she was younger. Memories of the first visit were rather hazy. She -suspected she might have slept through the entire trip. The other two -visits had been birthday treats; one to see a stage show, with live -music and dancers in dazzling floaty costumes. The third occasion had -been on her twelfth birthday, when she was allowed to spend her own -money at Snoak City market. That had been very satisfying. The more she -thought about it, the more appealing was the idea of living in Snoak. -She would need to persuade her parents, but they knew she was old enough -to make up her own mind. She was not quite sure whether it would further -her cause to mention great-uncle Grome.

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149
- -

The atmosphere in the floproom was comfortably soporific. -Tebbi and -Cendrel, both currently unattached, were casually discussing the virtues -and deficiencies of past boyfriends. Strag and Yethne were engrossed in -a well-loved children�s book (�The very small SHOUTING Box�). -Ruckney had drifted into a light doze while waiting for Sawly to make up -his mind about joining him on the proposed overland journey in the -landshrinker. Sawly, who also had his eyes shut, was thinking aloud.

- -

��well, I�m building up a decent reserve stock of the best-selling -designs, like the perfume-bottles and paperweights, and towards the end -of the year I�ll be able to concentrate on special commissions. And the -skimmer�s been in good shape, since I fixed the leak. So by next Spring -I should have some free time for travel, although being stuck with each -other in your monster of a vehicle for any length of time might drive us -both loopy. Still, if you�re prepared to risk it, Ruckers��

- -

Ruckney stirred. �Hmmph?�

- -

�The question is, do you really want to risk it?�

- -

�Nngh. Hrrrm. No thanks, I�m really full.�

- -

�Ruckers?�

- -

�Hm?�

- -

�What did I just ask you?�

- -

�Did I want a biscuit?�

- -

�Go back to sleep.�

- -

Ruckney yawned and checked the time on a fingernail display. �I�d -better not. I�ll need to be heading back shortly to avoid the commuter -traffic.� He reached into a pocket for his nultox and tongued a tab. -�Whatever did people do before we had these?�

- -

�Suffered from sore heads and stayed off the roads, I expect. Listen, -Ruckers, about that trip: it sounds like it might be fun. We�ve still -got plenty of time to discuss details, but I meant to ask you if you�d -done anything yet about noise dampening. I�ve fitted out the skimmer -with these really effective acoustic panels��

- -

�Clage�.? Wispy moustache and snorty laugh?�

- -

�Like a flustered goose? No, that would be �Foghorn� Flade. Clage is -quieter, taller, better dressed, usually in muted colours. Dark hair, -blue eyes, slender hands��

- -

�Is that Clage? He was at Guyl�s party in Yarp Street. I thought he -looked bewildered. Guyl had a deafening waterfall hoto playing, so there -was a bit of a sensory overload, and no chance of conversation.�

- -

�Guyl�s rather fun. Were you and he��

- -

�No, Tebs, not really. Well, we had a mild flirtation, nothing -serious. Now what about you and Clage?�

- -

�Ah, that�s complicated��

- -

Strag turned the last page, their heads almost -touching. - -

"And after that they rinsed it clean and -dabbed it -dry with a scrap of cloth the colour of the sky, and put it on a stout -cork mat. They listened very hard. The little box was as empty as ever, -and it was quite, quite silent. So they wrapped it up and took it back -to the place by the pool. Under the tree with the drooping boughs where -the brown bird sang its solitary song, they lifted the stone that hid -the hole where the box had lain for so very long. Into the ground, with -scrupulous care, they placed the little box, and hid the hole with the -heavy stone. As they made their way home a gust of wind blew a swirl of -leaves over the spot with a whispery sound.

- -

"Traveller, should you pass this way, and see that tree with its -drooping boughs and lone brown bird beside the pool, and find the stone -that hides the hole, take care! For if you hear, however faint, the -sound of shouting somewhere near, go very quickly from that place. But -if you stay, my friend, beware! Beware the dark enchantment in the -air."

- -

Strag closed the book, and Yethne wiped away a tear with the back of -her hand.

- -

�Such a strange ending.�

- -

�I know. But didn�t you always secretly want to find the box?�

- -

�Of course I did! Didn�t you?�

- -

�I used to slip down to Horm pond and poke about with a stick in the -hope of finding the right stone, but the ground was soggy, the trees -were the wrong kind, too far away, and home to squadrons of bad-tempered -crows.�

- -

Their wistful moment was interrupted by the re-appearance -of Ma -Wheggs, bearing a tray of small home-made confections in little bags -which she placed on the table for her guests to take back with them. She -was closely followed by the devious Husspert, recent misbehaviour -evidently forgiven, who leaped onto the nearest vacant cushion, -immediately adopting that nonchalantly undignified attitude in which a -hind leg points to the zenith, while contorted ablutions are -performed.

- -

It was time to go. Before long the current band of lodgers would be -returning from their work or studies. �Still a little wet behind the -ears compared to you, my loves,� confided Ma Wheggs, �but not entirely -without promise.�

- -

�Well, they couldn�t be in better hands, Ma Wheggs, as I�m sure we�d -all agree,� said Strag, helping Yethne on with her coat. There was -general assent, as they all gathered their belongings and shared a -reciprocal hug with their favourite landlady on their way to the front -door.

- -

�You two girls behave yourselves, now.� Addressed to Tebbi and -Cendrel, this instruction, much like the admonitions to Husspert, -carried the implication that she had done her best, but could not be -held responsible for the inevitable lapses of judgment that lay ahead. -

- -

�Now, Mr Plitter and Mr Vext, my young speedsters. Promise me you�ll -take good care of yourselves, and those vehicles of yours.�

- -

�Without a doubt, Ma Wheggs.� �Any time you want to come for a -ride��

- -

She smiled. �That�s very kind, but you know how busy I�m kept -here��

- -

�Dear Mr Wilderfoot, our man of letters, lovely to have you back, if -only for half a day. And Yethne, my dear�� She leaned closer to murmur -in Yethe�s ear. �You could do a lot worse, you know. He dotes on you, in -case you haven�t noticed.� Yethne�s eyes widened, and her sudden flush -was hidden from Strag by the upturned collar of her coat.

- -

They gathered at the foot of the path, sheepishly reluctant to -disperse into the late Spring afternoon, still suffused with the -residual inner glow induced by a return to No.149.

- -

�Strange to think I was barely out of school when I first came -here.�

- -

�Well, after all, this was our second home,� said Tebbi. �We all had -a lot of growing up to do.�

- -

Sawly half-jokingly suggested that it was a complete mystery how they -ever survived each other�s company for so long.

- -

�I mean, what with Ruckers being so stubborn, and quite out of -control,� he added, mischievously.

- -

�And you so preoccupied with your designs you could barely manage -more than five or six slices of toast at breakfast...�

- -

The rest of them hastened to join in.

- -

��and Cen so suspiciously quiet, but wildly impulsive��

- -

�Oh, dangerously so..�

- -

��and Tebbi so loftily self-possessed��

- -

�Virtually unflappable! I tried to make her flap, but failed -miserably.�

- -

�That�s because I need the wind under my wings, Strag. Hot air simply -isn�t enough. Speaking of hot air, what about Yethne, keeping us all -awake with lectures on crop rotation?�

- -

Strag couldn�t resist interjecting. �Ah yes, how to spin a turnip. -The very memory leaves me faint.�

- -

Suppressing a giggle, Yethne was quick to respond. �And so it should, -Strag, considering that turnip-spinning became so popular it had to be -banned by the Society for the Protection of Abused Vegetables.�

- -

As their mingled shadows slowly lengthened, a moment�s respectful -silence greeted the mention of this adroitly conjured organization, and -by consensus Yethne was awarded an unspecified but generously large -number of imaginary points. This accolade served as a cue for departure. -Cendrel and Tebbi opted to head for the park, Sawly said he might as -well accompany Ruckney back to the landshrinker, since it was not too -far from Lemp�s Runnel, where his skimmer was moored. Yethne had a -little research to do for a school project, but still had a day in hand, -and was happy to comply with Strag�s offhandedly hopeful suggestion that -she might like to help him choose a present for his grandmother�s -birthday. They set off in the direction of the market, chatting -amicably, walking companionably close together. Afterwards neither of -them could quite remember who had first put an arm round the other�s -waist, or how, by the time they had reached the market, their fingers -had somehow become agreeably intertwined.

- -

The micropod had gently disgorged its last cargo in the -dropbox outside the Wilderfoot house in Horm, provoking an unusual stir -of activity.

- -

Pled Wilderfoot handed the parcel to his mother-in-law, who set about -slowly peeling away the layers of packaging, disclosing at last a -glimpse of something sleekly furred.

- -

�Why would anyone want to send you a dead rabbit, Marla?� asked Pled, -with impish innocence.

- -

With a squeak of fright the old lady hastily pushed the offending -gift off her lap, while her wearily unamused daughter came to her -rescue.

- -

��Take no notice of him, mother. Pled thinks he�s being funny.� She -cast him a reproving glance and retrieved the d�bris from the floor, -separating the wrapping paper from what was evidently a pair of -slippers.

- -

�Here mother, it�s a pair of thermoderms, with a little note from -Strag.�

- -

Marla composed herself, affecting an air of injured dignity, while -allowing her daughter to fit the slippers on her stockinged feet. -Something akin to a sigh signified that she was not displeased. She read -the note from her grandson, nodded, muttered �Good boy,� and dropped off -to sleep.

- -

�That�s unusually thoughtful for our Strag. We�re more used to being -given those little animal ornaments, or packets of health food, aren�t -we, dear?�

- -

�There�s a lot more choice in the city, Flutz.�

- -

There was a flicker of maternal intuition. �Perhaps he�s found -himself a girlfriend.�

- -

�Well Flutzy, he�s in Snoak. Odder things have happened there.� He -looked across at the gently snoring Marla and chuckled. �Two dead -rabbits,� he said.

- - - -© Les Sklaroff 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] 149.jpg - - - -[*ITEM] Grave Misfortune - -[*AUTHOR] Stephen Heuser - -[*BLURB] "Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more -patience." -
Laurence J. Peter - - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The servant's shrieks had woken the house -far earlier than usual. Amidst the smell of baked rolls, and the cooked -meat of breakfast, a clangor arose in the richly decorated halls of the -Lavelle household. Rami, the owner of several ripe parcels of land -outside of Grislain, had stormed from his bedroom, saber in hand, and -robe flapping in his haste. Unkempt, graying curls floated around a -sharp, stern face, sending servants scrambling from his path. The -night�s fog still clung to his thoughts, making him more of a grumbling -bear than anything else. Hopefully, whatever fool had dared wake him so -rudely would be dealt with before he arrived to the scene.

- -

What greeted him, however, was not some intruder, but several of his -men and women attempting to calm Arian. The young boy, he saw, was -covered in fresh blood, and weeping helplessly as he was led away. A -silver tray lay among the spilled tea and shattered cups, forgotten by -the others, who spoke in hushed tones and cast fearful glances at the -closed door.

- -

"Sir, please." Khonwen, a hawk-nosed man with dark, slicked-back hair -who had been with Rami since he was a boy, gently took him by the arm. -"I -apologize for the disturbance. If you would like to wait in your study, -I will arrive with breakfast and an explanation, shortly."

- -

"What happened?" Rami handed the sword to him, but made no effort to -leave. Khonwen pulled, slightly more insistent, on his master's arm. -

- -

"Sir, I promise - "

- -

"Where's Delilah?" he said. In his haste, and with the remnants of -sleep still caked over his thoughts, he hadn't realized they stood -outside his daughter's room. Khonwen seemed at a loss, and refused to -look him in the eyes. "Delilah?"

- -

"Sir, please!"

- -

Rami shoved him aside, dread worming its way into his heart. He -vaguely felt someone try to hold him back, to no avail.

- -

The floor was slick under his house slippers, and he banged his knee -against an overturned chair. Righting himself, he padded towards his -daughter's bed, the blankets piled thickly upon her. A faint hope that -she'd, perhaps, simply absconded in the night, and had yet to return, -was dashed at the smell. Shaking, he finally looked at the floor in the -early morning light - blood coated the floor, lending the scent of metal -and gore to the air. So very, very much blood, he realized, seeing it -pool thickly by the bed. A firm hand grabbed him, pulling him away.

- -

"Sir, this way. You... Please don't look."

- -

Khonwen had begun leading him away from the bed. Unshed tears -glistened in his dark eyes, and his lip trembled through his desperately -composed façade. Rami nodded slowly, allowing himself to be led -away. -

- -

"She's not feeling well, yes?" he asked, in a timid, scared voice -that didn't quite seem like his.

- -

"Of course, sir." Khonwen gestured at a few of the staff, and he -whispered something harsh and clipped to them. Pale-faced and shaking, -they scurried away. "Breakfast will be done shortly," he assured Rami. -"I will make sure... that Delilah is sent down when she wakes."

- -

Rami nodded slowly. Yes, she was only ill, that was it. That was -it...

- -

"This doesn't look like Karlis."

- -

Rosalie shut her eyes briefly, trying to fight off the impending -headache. The caravan they had joined on the way to Grislain had been -full -of humorless folk who didn't believe in creature comforts. Among them -were, given the state of their backsides and ringed eyes, properly-built -wagons. The road had been unforgiving, with each bump and jostle feeling -like it would shake the damned things to pieces. Even worse was the fact -that the -passengers tended to be normal folk, meaning that Rosalie's legs usually -ended up dangling out the back. By the time they reached the city gates, -the trio shared a silent vow to never again suffer such circumstances. -

- -

"Oh, another perilous adventure! You know I *never* tire of things trying -to eat me." Sarah clasped her hands in false joy, her face dimpling as -she spun in wonder at the opulent waiting area of House Villago. - -"There's been a change of -plans." Rosalie stretched, working the last -cramps from arms and shoulders muscled enough to give the boldest enemy -pause. The scraping and clanking from the heavy plates of her armor -echoed around her, and she let her great-maul rest by her feet. The -faceplate of her helmet rattled when she yawned, its horns giving her -the appearance of a sleepy rhino.

- -

Brown and black leather armor creaked, and crimson hair flashed in -its tight bun, making the fierce smile that beamed from her pale, smooth -face seem almost festive. Her button nose crinkled, making her look for -all the world like a -princess from some far-off land. The twin short-swords that nearly -toppled a vase when she spun did much to dispel the image, sheathed on -either side.

The third, and final, member of their band, Merry, -lounged under her black cloak -on a plush, cream-and-gold couch, sniffing at a vase of sapphire -flowers. -The Villago emblem of an orange eagle, with wings of -thorns had been etched into the side of the vase. As she did, the soft -hum of a -violin could be heard from her, low and mourning. Bone-white hair -spilled out from under her hood, framing a curious, youthful face, with -large, amber eyes that seemed to always be staring at something no one -else could see. Thick, expressive eyebrows bounced atop olive skin as -she studied the room. When she sat up, a plain white shirt, and begrimed -pants were revealed, with only a leather-and-chain doublet for -protection.

- -

A marble table with a bowl of fresh pears sat among a floating pool -of fish that swam awkwardly through the air. Rosalie absently batted one -away when it tried to dart through her hair, crinkling her nose at the -creatures' humid, moldy smell.

- -

"We're not going for a rest, just yet."

- -

Rosalie rubbed her eyes at Sarah's darkening expression. She -should have known better. Everyone had been exhausted after their last -adventure, and gods knew she would have preferred to lounge some -place where you didn't have to trade watch every night. Still, when -she'd seen the paper flapping against the newsboard...

- -

Rosalie snatched a pear just before it would have smacked into her -face. -Sarah bit sloppily into her own, and sucked the juices from the fruit -with obnoxious gusto.

- -

"Are you going to tell us anything about this mystery assignment, or -are we going to have to guess?"

- -

"Someone's been cutting people up at night," Merry interjected, her -eyes peeking over the top of a fat pillow. "Makes a pretty mess, too, -from what the town guards were muttering about."

- -

"It was on the way," Rosalie said, adjusting her helm.

- -

"We passed a badger den a couple days back, 'on the way', but you -didn't see us stopping to see if they needed help...settling in for the -winter!" she sputtered.

- -

"Don't be silly. They won't need to do that for several months -yet."

- -

Rosalie turned away so the others wouldn't see her smirk. She allowed -herself a brief moment of victory when Sarah huffed, and Merry's song -plunked happily. Thankfully, that seemed to be all the complaint Sarah -had in her, and she fell silent as footsteps echoed from the hallway. -

- -

Dressed in a pure white shirt, and charcoal jacket, the man who -entered looked every bit as wealthy and upper-class as the house had -suggested. Raven-black hair was slicked back and tied into a short -ponytail; deep brown eyes studied them from a sharp, handsome face, free -of wrinkles, despite his age.

- -

"Thank you for coming so swiftly. I am Estil Villago, and wish I -could -welcome you under less dire circumstances." His voice was soft, but -rich, someone who could shake the room with their rage, if they needed -to. He didn't so much as bat an eye at Rosalie's height or armor, -grasping her hand firmly even as he tilted his head back to meet her -eyes. She had to fight to keep them from watering at the man's -overpowering cologne. "I was doubtful that anyone would respond at all, -given our area's...reputation."

- -

"The folk we traveled with were certainly cautious," Rosalie said, -and ignored Sarah's stifled laugh. "Cautious" would be giving the -nightly warding of the campsite, and the twitchy bowmen standing with -strings half-drawn at all times, a generous gift. Merry skulking in the -corner singing to herself, only her mouth peering out from the hood, did -nothing for their nerves. "But we couldn't bring ourselves to pass by. -Given what you're offering," she added. His thin mustache twitched at -the gauche comment, but nodded. Whatever he was going to say was -interrupted by the arrival of a servant carrying a silver tray laden -with tea, and assorted nutted breads and jams. At least, he had the -bearing of a servant, though the swarthy newcomer dressed more like he -had -spent the night at a bawdy house. An emerald vest had been hastily -buttoned over a wrinkled, silver shirt. From the undone collar to the -loosely-laced shoes, he seemed to have been sleeping in his uniform. -Black curls peppered with gray hung about his face in a mess, and -several days of beard grew unchecked. His eyes stared ahead blankly as -he began setting out the plates with shaking hands. So low as to be -almost unnoticed, he sang-mumbled something somber and reverent.

- -

"Khonwen, please," Villago said, taking the tea from his hands, -irritation washing over his face. "You already put my boys to bed. You -don't have to keep doing this."

- -

"A sliver of normalcy in dark days helps more than you might think, -sir," Khonwen smiled, but let Villago pour the tea. His hands free, he -rubbed at a golden token that was wrapped around his wrist by a cord - a -gilded shark's tooth, a -small compass, and a pair of keys. "These are?" he asked hopefully.

- -

"Ah, yes, forgive me." He motioned for the hunters to partake, and -clapped the servant on the back. "This is Khonwen, a long-time friend, -and retainer to Rami Lavelle. Rami's daughter was, ah... the reason why -we asked for help."

- -

"Your priests are your servants?" Merry asked, staring at the gilded -shark's tooth charm -around Khonwen's wrist. He smiled weakly, pushing it back up his sleeve. -

- -

"Less a priest these days than I used to be," he said. "But I found - -"

- -

"Seems a rather hasty -proposition," Sarah -interrupted around a slice of -bread, glancing over the paper from Rosalie's bag. "This was only posted -a day or two before she saw it," she said, nodding at Rosalie. -"Shouldn't locals get a fair shot at this first?"

- -

"I'm afraid most who could help fled for safer lands some time -ago" Khonwen said. His teeth clicked, and he took a breath to calm -himself. "Some of us," he said, ignoring the shadow that fell over -Villago's face, "felt that perhaps specialists wouldn't be unwelcome, -given the nature of the... the murder," he managed. "She was eaten." His -face had gone pale, and clasped his hands behind his back. "Mostly. Some -was... there were remains," he finished, lip trembling.

- -

"And she hasn't been the first," Villago added. "There've been a -string -of killings over the past several months, across the city. Sometimes -people will disappear from their beds, others simply don't find their -way home at night. Much of the time they aren't found until days -later."

- -

"So, now that enough of you have died, you finally get off your -pillows, and send word for help?"

- -

"Sarah!" Rosalie hissed.

- -

The sellsword licked her fingers clean, and shrugged. "Maybe if -they'd moved quicker they wouldn't have to empty their coffers."

- -

"I apologize for my associate," Rosalie assured their employers, -quietly beckoning Merry behind her back. A moment later, her song hummed -with idle violins. The magic did its job well though, banishing -Villago's -clenched jaw, and lessening Khonwen's guilt-stricken face.

- -

"Do you have any idea what it is?" Merry asked, the music continuing -even as she spoke.

- -

"The surrounding roads are exceptionally dangerous," Khonwen said, -collecting their empty plates. He seemed to find solace in filling his -rôle, his voice gaining strength as he composed himself. "Hundreds -of -people go missing every year. Probably far more, in reality, since we -only hear about the ones who meant to come to Grislain. In all -likelihood, something has now decided it would be easier to reside in -the -city, than to prey on wary travelers."

- -

"No one has seen it," Villago said. "At least, no one reliable. I -truly -wish we could tell you more but..." He spread his hands helplessly. -"Will you help us?"

- -

Rosalie glanced at her comrades � Merry had stuffed another slice of -bread into her mouth, and Sarah only flicked an eyebrow at her, neutral, -but annoyed all the same.

- -

"For double," Rosalie said. She allowed herself a tiny bit of joy -when Sarah coughed behind her. "Assuming," she added, cutting off -Villago's protest, "that we finish it within three days. Consider -it... extra motivation."

- -

Villago's jaw tightened, and a vein bulged in his forehead. He -glanced -at Khonwen, who had been waiting slightly behind, and to the side. The -servant's face was blank, but his shoulders drooped, expecting the -hunters to be summarily evicted. With a deep breath, Villago turned back -to Rosalie, and took her hand with his own.

- -

"Excellent," she said, resisting the urge to wipe her hand after the -clammy grasp. "Do you know where we should start?"

- -

As the monster frothed and scrabbled against her -song-ward, Merry wondered why things like these always stank. It -shrank back as the magic flared to brilliant light, The Ballad of Sir -Luwain sending tendrils of fire blooming after it. It skittered on -too-human hands and feet, its bones piercing the flesh like yellowed, -broken talons. Cautiously, it attempted to circle her, the fanged maw -attached to an obnoxiously long, bloody spinal cord, swaying as it did. -Fortunately, with her back against the sewer wall, there was nowhere to -circle to. Angered by the lack of opportunity, it lunged at her, -only to rebound from the fiery barrier with a screech. Merry only -sighed, -wishing that, for once, their prey would make its lair some place like a -flower garden, or by a bakery, rather than the endless sewers, crypts, -and the like. She tapped her feet gently against the wet ground, adding -a simple charm for sleep into her barrier, should the monster attack -again.

- -

Not that she had to worry. Rosalie, silent as ever, charged from the -side with her shield held high. The impact made a wet splat, -and her foe flew a -good distance before rolling to a stop. She roared, thundering after it, -and bringing her great-maul around in a savage arc. The beast sprang -away, barely avoiding a blow that shook the ground.

- -

"Merry!" she yelled as claws screeched across her shield. Her answer -was the sound of trumpets, and a ghostly knight on horseback charging -between Rosalie and the slavering beast. The next blow struck true as it -recoiled, eliciting a hideous moan as the monster tumbled across the -ground. It twitched weakly, snapping and spitting as it began to slink -down the tunnel. Rosalie followed, determined to finish this then and -there, but wary all the same. The air shimmered around her, and with the -sound of rusted chains dragging along the floor, the image of a giant's -club wreathed with skulls and nails formed around her maul. The points -gouged furrows in the ceiling, and deep, ominous drumbeats echoed with -the pull of the chains as she moved. With a burst of speed, she closed -the gap between her and her prey, sending the great-maul whistling -through the air.

- -

She barely managed to change its course, ripping a troll-sized -gash in the sewer wall. The flash of a blade in the darkness just -reached her eyes as she spun, the monster letting out a wet gurgle as -twin swords hewed through its neck. They fell again and again, hacking -the body to pieces while it spasmed.

- -

"Ha! Ugly bastard!" Sarah crowed triumphantly, putting a foot on its -back to heave one of her swords free. "And you said you didn't want to -split up." She whistled cheerily, kicking the corpse once more for good -measure.

- -

"Yes," Rosalie said, shaking the rubble off her maul. "Where -would we be without you bursting unannounced from the dark in the -middle of a fight?"

- -

"Still swinging at air, I'd bet." She patted Rosalie's cheek, -smirking at the wall. "If you're going to insist on using that thing, we -really need to work on your aim. Sing me out, will you?" she tossed at -Merry, with a rogueish wink. A playful drumbeat amidst the low strums of -a guitar followed the sellsword as she strutted away. Merry gave Rosalie -an apologetic shrug, following quickly � but not so quickly that Rosalie -didn't see the smile blooming on her face. Sighing, she grabbed the -monster's head for identification. At the very least, this little -side-step was finished.

- -

Rosalie heaved herself up from the sewers, bag in hand -with their proof. She glanced about as her companions made their way to -the surface, but no one paid any attention to the strange women. In -fact, many averted their eyes, and gave them a wide berth - it wouldn't -do to draw the ire of an armored warrior with a bag that wept strange -blood. Sarah grunted as Merry helped her out of the sewer.

- -

"What're you waiting for?" she asked Rosalie, wrinkling her nose as -she realized how filthy her armor was.

- -

"Courtesy dictates you wait for others," she responded, resting her -weapon on a shoulder. "Not run off to the nearest tavern to begin a -celebration."

- -

"Not that you could in your armor," she snorted. "Step lively. -Sooner we're on the road the better."

- -

Rosalie's eye twitched as Sarah strutted off. Merry was quick on her -heels, tugging Rosalie along with a bright smile that couldn't help but -be contagious. It soon faded, however, when only a few streets away they -found a mass of people crowding around a storefront. A faded sign above -the window revealed it to be a tanner's shop - Elan's Immaculate -Creations in Leather looped across the wood in gold letters. -Underneath, several guardsmen stood with dour expressions, keeping the -throngs of humanity at bay, if not actually moving along. Merry pulled -Sarah to an irritated stop near the back; her eyes met Rosalie's, -darting to the store meaningfully.

- -

"...Adol yet?" someone murmured in the crowd.

- -

"No, the boy�s still home. The guard dispatched a runner to let him -know about..."

- -

"Ah...Hopefully it'll reach him in time." The speaker shook their -balding head forlornly. "No one should have to stumble in on this."

- -

Rosalie kept listening, but the crowd was frustratingly vague as to -what, exactly, had happened. After a little while of trying to sort out -details from the generic sorrow of passers-by, she became aware of Sarah -standing impatiently at her shoulder.

- -

"Imagine my surprise when I turned around to find the two of you half -a city back," she muttered. "Please don't drag me into another -freelance."

- -

"Merry needs us to create a distraction." Rosalie's lips curled into -a smile -when -Sarah's teeth clicked. Searching quickly, she just barely caught a flash -of white before it disappeared into the alleys that, presumably, led -behind the tanner.

- -

"Right," Sarah said, stretching her neck. "Who started it last -time?"

- -

Merry slid along the shadows, peering around a corner. She -ducked back at the sight of guards still at the back door, but she -didn't have to wait long. The sound of a fight breaking out in the crowd -echoed off the walls, drawing the serious-faced men away from the doors -and windows. Several grumbled as they loped away, hands already on their -sword hilts, but their relief at being away from the tanner was -palpable. Of course, they still had the foresight to lock the door -before they left, she realized with a sigh.

- -

The lock was beautiful and free from tarnish, set into a door that -fairly hummed with enchantment. The owners had clearly spared no expense -- the hexagonal keyhole needed a custom ring, and anyone who attempted -to pick it would be in for a painful surprise.

- -

The mechanism clicked softly as Merry's song floated through it. She -strode through fearlessly - Her comrades were -accustomed to drawing attention when it suited them. The smell of death -was thick in the air; blood -soaked through the cloaks that had been lain across a pair of bodies. -The night's violence, however, was clearly painted in the dark red -smears on the floor, and sprays across the work tables. Handprints could -be seen where someone had tried to crawl away - and been dragged back. -

- -

A muted cry to "Cease this madness!" focused her. There was only so -much time for her investigation. Holding her breath, she lifted the -first cloak.

- -"What...What..."

- -

Rosalie and Sarah had escaped the guards easily enough, who didn't -truly wish to chase an armored warrior and her insane companion. The -women stopped brawling soon as they heard Merry's drumbeats in their -ears. They followed the sound through winding alleyways, until finally -reaching Merry. The golden, musical soldier of Warrior's Lament stood -by, carefully depositing a body on the ground, before vanishing.

- -

It looked like a gentleman dressed for a night at a theater - if -they had starved themselves on the rack first. Too-long arms tipped with -yellow, curved nails painted with blood stretched past its knees; almost -emaciated, its face seemed to leer at the world, its eyes sunken and -bloodshot. Merry grinned madly, pressing the sides of its face, forcing -the jaw to flop open to the chest. Rows of tiny, needle-sharp teeth -gleamed in the light.

- -

"No wonder the guards were so nervous," Rosalie said, batting Merry's -hands away from the horror's face.

- -

"This too." Merry held up a broken crossbow bolt. "One managed to get a -lucky shot off before they got gobbled."

- -

"Stinks of grave dirt," Sarah broke in, nudging the monster with a -sword. "Big city like this, makes sense they'd have restless dead." She -grinned suddenly. "D'ya want to bring the guards in on this? How many -you think will find themselves too �sick� to join us?"

- -

Her smile faded when Rosalie only stared at the body. Almost -unnoticed, she rubbed a twinging, old scar through the breastplate, and -turned away. The others jumped after her as she stalked out of the -alley, rigid with anger.

- -

"We're leaving, soon as we're paid for the... thing in the sewers," -Rosalie said, nearly four streets later.

- -

"What, really?" Sarah shouted, trying to keep up. She smiled -nervously, but gave up as she tried to follow the reasoning. "Why?"

- -

"We were hired for one creature," she snapped, "The appearance of -another smacks of either foolish assumptions, or uncomfortable secrets. -It's not worth risking our lives fig - What's Khonwen doing over -here?"

- -

Rosalie followed Merry's curious gaze to a makeshift table down the -road. There, the servant sat with a young man, who was stirring -something in a bowl listlessly. Clean-shaven with his hair tied in a -topknot, he had a soft, friendly face that looked like any other day -it�d break into a smile for the smallest reason. Khonwen was leaning -forward, saying something that brought a tiny bit of life to the man's -face. It didn't last long though, and he returned to swirling his food -about, and staring into the bowl. Khonwen's face was pained, and he -absently stroked the gilded shark's tooth token about his -wrist, murmuring -something with his head bowed. A few moments later, he placed a small -figurine by the man�s hands, and left him to his food. Khonwen rubbed -his face wearily; he saw the hunters down the street when he was done, -looking as though he had aged half a lifetime since they last saw him. -His feet shuffled in the dirt, and he seemed as though he would rather -be -anywhere but in front of them. Despite that, he nodded in greeting, -retrieving a small envelope from a pocket.

- -

"I've heard of your success," he said, presenting it to Rosalie. -"Congratulations, and our thanks, are in order. Word travels -quickly when three strangers emerge from the sewers with a monster's -head," he added, offering a tight smile. "I hope none of you were -injured in the struggle."

- -

"No, we were fortunate," Rosalie assured him, taking the envelope -from him � a promissory note with Villago's house crest stamped heavily -into the wax. She tucked the musty-smelling paper away carefully in a -hidden pocket inside her armor. "Especially given that we went hunting -uninformed there were multiple creatures hounding your city, and -we had competition as well. Hopefully whoever killed the one at the -tanner�s was as fortunate as us."

- -

Khonwen's tensing, however slight, told her far more than his face, -which remained collected as ever. "There had been concerns that you -would be...opportunistic - "

- -

"How's that better than 'greedy'?" Sarah muttered.

- -

" - Had you known of the full extent of our problem," he finished, -gently caressing the shark's tooth hanging from his wrist.. -"For all of their strengths, my master, and those like him, do tend to -be -self-absorbed." Khonwen nodded his head at Sarah slightly. "To them, -this is something for the guard � until it isn't."

- -

"Well, you can tell them that it once again falls on the guards' -shoulders," Rosalie said stiffly. "Assuming no-one wishes to keep us on, -we'll be leaving soon as we can."

- -

"Understood," Khonwen said, bowing his head. "It was good of you to -take as much time from your travels as you did. If I may, though," he -said, a thoughtful look on his face. "Take the east gate when you leave. -It adds to your journey, but it's by far the busiest route. Given recent -events, safety in numbers is never to be brushed aside."

- -

"Thank you," Rosalie said, taking his hand. "Hopefully this all finds -an end soon."

- -

"I'm sure it will," he said, nodding to her companions as well. "One -way or the other."

- -

The sun had vanished several miles back, and the plethora -of other travelers Khonwen alluded to had yet to be seen. Oh, the -eastern gate had been plenty busy, taking most of the day simply to -leave the city. However, once they left sight of Grislain, people became -outnumbered by the mice that darted between the bushes, and the plump, -flightless birds that chased them with a strange, warbling call. Most of -their fellow travelers had broken from the main road the first chance -they had, hurrying away with fearful glances back at the strange trio -who continued steadfastly onward.

- -

"This road is strange," Sarah griped, rubbing her shoulders against a -sudden wind.

- -

"The songs are sad and low," Merry said, which Sarah took as an -agreement.

- -

"And here I was, enjoying the road being quiet," Rosalie said, -not bothering to turn around. In truth, she was just as much on edge as -the -others. On either side the grass and trees grew tall enough to hide -danger of any size or number; the omnipresent rustling as the wind blew -them this way and that didn't help either. The worst thing though, was -during the few moments of quiet � quiet when she could hear the lack of -crickets, the absence of hooting owls, or anything else the land should -have. The thick clouds rolling across the sky, ominously keeping pace -with them, didn't ease her; this far into the forest, they had to make -do -with the occasional beam of moonlight. The rest of the time, it was -slow-going without so much as a torch, lest they wanted to attract the -wrong sort of attention.

- -

"Oi."

- -

Rosalie turned to see Sarah offering her a small, clear bead. The -sellsword was clearly already rolling one in her mouth, and from the -fresh spring in Merry's step, she was enjoying one as well.

- -

"Don't know about you, but I'd rather not make camp anytime soon," -Sarah said.

- -

Rosalie hesitated. The bead would keep her awake and alert for a -solid day, but afterward she would sleep like the dead. The sound of -something moving through the brush � the first that she'd heard the -entire night � made her decision for her, and she popped it quickly into -her mouth.

- -

"We'll camp when we reach some place with four walls and a roof," -Rosalie joked half-heartedly. Sarah smiled grimly, seeing her friend -shrug her massive shield onto her arm. Following suit, she pulled out a -blade, letting it rest on her shoulder. She beckoned Merry close, -feeling better with her in reach. A sudden gust carrying the cloying -scent of rot didn't calm her nerves, and she nearly put her sword -through Rosalie's back.

- -

They had come to a crossroads � or what was left of one. Signs -pointing -further down the road for D'Laq, for Greenmeadows, for Aeon's Rest, were -all plain to see, if a tad weather-beaten. A broken sign � the one that -would have pointed down the overgrown trail leading towards the smell of -death � was telling in its absence. Rosalie stared into the forest, -every part of her itching to take them away - and found herself -drawing her great-maul, and striding along the forgotten path.

- -

"...Why?" Sarah hissed.

- -

"The feeling Khonwen wasn't just being helpful when he suggested this -route," she answered softly. "And I hate leaving things half-done."

- -

Thick, black clouds concealed the moon, leaving only -trifling glimpses of light to the three hunters. It was made worse by -the path � the cobblestones under their feet, and tall, winding iron -gates worked into artful designs gave the impression of wealth and care, -but that had been long ago. Now, the d�cor was little more than debris, -the stones having been shattered, with opportunistic weeds springing -from the cracks, and the gates scattered into the forest. Nevertheless, -this -mausoleum of some forgotten family was imposing. Rosalie -thought the atmosphere might have more to do with the almost -palpable sense of -dread issuing from the skeletal roof and sundered walls. The moon -graced them with a stray beam, revealing twin pillars standing tall to -hold up the memory of a ceiling, the faces of long-dead family worked -into the stone.

- -

Rosalie stopped at the foot of the stairs, dropping to one knee, -breathing slowly in the unnatural silence. Her shield scraped the stones -slightly as she adjusted her helm, and peered into the night. The stairs -were wide enough to let an army of mourners pass into the hall easily, -but had -been reduced to rubble. A broken line of sight inside -gave her pause - anyone with half a thought could set an ambush...

- -

She sighed, and rubbed her head at the sound of Sarah coughing and -hacking behind her.

- -

"Bit of dust." She smiled as she spat up the last of it, though her -nervousness showed when she touched the buckles of her armor, made sure -her -hair was still in its bun, that her short-swords were hanging by her -side. Still, she rolled her eyes as she dropped into a crouch. "Is there -a plan?"

- -

"Same as it always is." Rosalie reached behind her to where Merry had -slunk. The songweaver pressed a vial into her hand, filled with thick, -black paste. The magic stung her eyes when she rubbed it under them, but -faded as the darkness fell away like the sun was shining down. Sarah -grimaced as she accepted the vial, rubbing it under her eyes as well. -

- -

"I hate this," she grumbled. "Why doesn't Merry have to wear it?" -

- -

The woman's only response was to stick out her tongue, before closing -her eyes, and turning towards the stairs. She hid a smile by tucking a -few strands of hair back under her hood, but was otherwise still.

- -

"The front is still the best path for us," Roaslie said, ignoring the -complaint. "Keep close. Keep alert. Neither of you go off from the -group, Sarah, no matter what you see. Understood?"

- -

"Lift one ring, and you never hear the end of it..."

- -

Rosalie hefted her great-maul in one hand, the other bringing her -shield to bear. "What was that?"

- -

"I bloody well heard you," Sarah snapped, drawing her blades, and -falling back a few steps to make room for Merry, who had begun to hum -quietly. She flourished her swords in a nervous habit, warming herself -up for the fight that was no doubt in store.

- -

Sarah slid quietly across the broken floor, grateful to at -least be inside. Here, at least, the mausoleum was � oh, who in the Nine -was she kidding? If anything the wind moaning through the cracks in the -walls and the now complete absence of moonlight made it even less -welcoming. Every so often, rodents or night birds would skitter or -flutter through the nooks and crannies, keeping her on edge. She cursed -when her foot found a loose stone, and just barely kept her balance. -How the inside was worse than the outside, she couldn't fathom. -Sarah made the "all fine" signal to Rosalie, who had shifted towards -her, -the colossal maul rising for a fight.

- -

Any signs? Sarah signalled awkwardly, still clenching her -swords. -The others shrugged, and turned back to their own search. A sympathetic -grin passed over her face when Merry sucked in a breath, and clamped her -sleeve over her mouth. Where the outdoors had smelled musty as they grew -closer, it was at least fresh air. Here, though, the stench of the -long-dead was so strong that it threatened to overwhelm.

- -

Against her better judgment, she sheathed one of her swords, and -gently began moving aside various bits of debris. Here and there she -found mostly-burned candles, bowls for the burning of remembrances - so -tarnished they were brown - and the occasional scrap of clothing -torn from a corpse.

- -

Wait, what?

- -

Heaving on a piece of shattered coffin lid, she felt her bile rise at -the grisly revelation. The body of a man (what remained of it, at least) -was splayed underneath. Most of his clothes had been torn away, and what -remained were brittle with old blood. Sarah chucked a pebble at Merry -and Rosalie, beckoning them closer. Merry made a ward against evil when -she saw the body; Rosalie simply opted to heft her shield a little -higher, and scan the darkness.

- -

"Ugh!"

- -

Rosalie glanced at Sarah, annoyed, to see she had continued -exploring. -Another corpse had been jammed into a space where a coffin might have -rested in -the wall, a bracelet dangling from its shattered wrist. Dread crept up -on her when Sarah moved to the next empty space, though thankfully she -only nodded, rather than pulling whatever was in there into the light. -They crept sideways as best they could, growing more unnerved with each -discovery. Sarah finally stopped after a dozen, silently estimating as -she fully realized the size of the mausoleum.

- -

"Some had a lot more than one in there. I think it's safe to say this -is lair sweet lair," Sarah whispered. "Now what? We wait for them to -come -back from dinner?"

- -

Sarah was about to answer when Merry tensed, the sound of drums -booming from her as she wove.

- -

Above them, the noise of unseen things skittering through the shadows -reached their ears. Rosalie brought her shield up just as something -gaunt with four claws too many dropped from its hiding place. Her grunt -was lost in its rasping snarl as it tried to reach around and rend her -face. Sarah was quicker though, lunging forward and slicing the head -from its shoulders. Unnervingly enough, the body still thrashed on the -floor until Rosalie's maul finished it with a quaking blow.

- -

"Ugh." Sarah flicked bits off her blade. "Think that's - " She froze -when the great-maul sang a finger from her head. A monster with ribs -opened like a gaping maw squealed as it was smashed back into whatever -bit of earth it had crawled from. The quip died on her lips as she spun, -hacking something to pieces as it slid from the rubble. More cries of -the undead echoed around them amidst the sound of claws and decaying -feet against the ground. She didn't realize how chilling it was until -she nearly ran Merry through when she took her usual place between her -and Rosalie.

- -

Calm returned as the song began, wrapping Merry in a dim, silver -light. -As the haunting melody rose, thorny, ephemeral underbrush pushed through -the dirt, knotting around itself and whatever else it could find, until -it was high as their chests. Even their weapons weren't immune, wrapped -in thorns long as a man's hand. She smiled manically at the sight; it -was amazing what oversized spikes sprouting from your weapons could do -for confidence.

- -

"Arms up," Rosalie hissed, as a foe who was more mouth and belly than -anything else slouched through the thorns. The terrible wounds it -received for its efforts didn't slow it much. "This is going to be -interesting."

- -

Merry drank greedily from the waterskin, in-between bites -of jerky, shaking as she did. Singing like that always took a lot out of -her. At some point someone had wrapped a cloak around her shoulders, and -she pulled it tighter, resting her head in the folds. Footsteps, almost -silent despite the remains on the ground, made her look up. Rosalie -towered over her, ichor and bone dust coating her armor.

- -

"Just... Still tired," she managed weakly. "Anything else?" Rosalie -shook her head, and she relaxed a bit more.

- -

"Oi!"

- -

They both jumped when Sarah came charging out of the next room, -stumbling over the shattered bodies. Rosalie caught her when her foot -slipped, saving her from a face-full of grave dirt.

- -

"Nice catch," she said, patting Rosalie's arm. "C'mon. Stop sleeping, -and help me search."

- -

Her companions followed swiftly as they could, while keeping wary -eyes on the shadows. They found Sarah tapping her foot impatiently at -the door to a side chamber. The door had rotted away long ago, and what -lay beyond looked like it might have been a chamber for a single coffin. -It was still used for that purpose, in a manner of speaking � gnawed, -bloody bones, torn clothes, and traveling supplies were scattered about -the room. Other rooms nearby had similarly grisly contents. After four, -Sarah finally ran out of flippancy, and leaned against a wall.

- -

"Job's certainly finished now." She gave a sick smile to the others, -trying not to guess at the number of victims. Rosalie and Merry gathered -her under the arms, and slowly made their way to the entrance.

- -

"Finished for us, anyway," Rosalie assured her. "We'll send a -messenger back to let � hells, Merry!"

- -

Sarah slipped to one side when Merry stopped, cocking her head this -way and that. Without a word, she began scrabbling at a bit of the wall -behind a moth-worn tapestry. Her companions didn't ask, only slipped -back into their familiar stances as she explored. Finally, a click, and -a rumble from the next room. Thankfully, nothing new made an appearance -from the hidden staircase. Even the smell was the same, though it was -enough to dash any hopes that it had simply been a smuggler's cache. The -steps were, compared to the rest of the crypt, pristine. As they -descended, it seemed like they were almost cared for.

- -

It was not a pleasant thought, of what might actually be doing so. -Merry began to hum strongly, greenish witchfire blossoming over her -hands and up her arms. Several orbs floated off on their own, flooding -the basement with light like tiny, plump moons. They all breathed sighs -of relief when they found the bottom, and nothing lay in wait. Then -Merry increased the light, and they almost wished she hadn�t.

- -

Stacked in neat, dreadful towers as far as they could see, were -boots, shirts, bags of every size and sort, belts, and grand hats, all -old, but serviceable. Or not, they quickly found. A closer look revealed -tears and holes in almost everything; what first seemed like mud and -rust turned out to be dried blood. Trunks were placed further in, filled -with enough jewelry to buy a modest kingdom, and nearby, heavy steel -padlocks waited to be affixed. On the back of each, was a horribly -familiar sigil of an orange eagle with thorned wings.

- -

"Don't suppose we can blame this on the nest upstairs." Sarah slid -one of the blades back in its sheath, trying to count a nearby pile of -trousers. "Maybe House Villago is just a nice, wholesome smuggling -house?"

- -

"His family's been preying on travelers for years," Rosalie said, in -cold realization. "Cleaning and selling whatever they had on them. He -probably thought we'd take care of the more impulsive monsters, and -everyone would go back to blissful ignorance."

- -

"Yeah, I sort of figured that out," Sarah muttered. "Sorry, -unfathomable evil makes me uncomfortable. Merry, is there anything else -down here?"

- -

She had been roaming the piles, oddly quiet. Usually even in the most -dour of settings they could still count on at least a tune coming from -the songweaver, but only hesitant footsteps reached their ears. Her face -was haggard when she came into view, still counting under her breath. -

- -

"No."

- -

Rosalie nodded, loping towards the staircase. Sarah gently pushed -Merry's shoulders, nudging her to follow. She sighed, trying to put the -stacks out of her mind, and rubbed her face. It was impossible they had -been paid enough for this.

- -

House Villago was just as quietly imposing as it had been -the first time they had visited. The presence of a lush, sprawling -garden -in front was enough to set the three-story home apart from most other -houses. Not that you could see any others � it seemed the citizens on -the outskirts of the city preferred their privacy, and each building was -far enough apart that even arrows would find the journey difficult.

- -

Oddly enough, despite the obvious wealth, no guards could be seen -anywhere. Not that it would take many would-be thieves disappearing for -word to -spread, Sarah thought grimly, sliding past a crystal archway that -dripped with ivy. Still, not even Merry's sight detected anything; other -nearby homes were less confident, it seemed, fairly glowing with -protective magics, making House Villago stand out even more.

- -

"I don't like this."

- -

Rosalie gave Sarah a ghastly smile. "You never like anything I want -to do. Isn't this exciting?"

- -

"Excitement is overrated," Sarah muttered.

- -

Rosalie's retort was drowned out by the sound of Merry pushing -herself up into a now-unlocked window, and into the house. Her -companions fairly tumbled in after her, swinging it shut behind them. -Merry gave them a disapproving glance as she steadied an -expensive-looking bust.

- -

"You were taking too long." With that, she started off down the -pitch-black hallway, pausing every so often to make sure an alarm hadn't -been nestled away behind a painting, or underneath the garish -purple-and-gold swirling patterns on the walls. It wasn't long before -Rosalie and Sarah figured out why she had chosen this direction � the -smell of cooking meat wafted towards them, making Sarah's belly rumbled -happily. It was silenced quickly at the reminder of what animal that -meat had probably come from. A song, not from Merry as they were -accustomed, trailed from the kitchen, low, and cheerful. The cook's -shadow on the wall seemed to dance along with it; Rosalie held her -weapon ready, and was happy to see Sarah had her own out as well. -Silent, she slunk into the room.

- -

Estil Villago, to her surprise, stood in the kitchen in a loose robe, -his hair dangling free about his shoulders. Stirring something in a pot -over a small fire, he was oblivious to their entrance. Rosalie hefted -the great-maul, intent on ending the fight before it began. She let out -the softest grunt as she prepared to swing � and that was all the -warning Villago needed.

- -

Her strike obliterated the fire, sending coals and meat across the -floor. The house's patriarch skittered away on all fours; when he faced -them, the handsome face was gone. Something dead and hungry stared at -them, tongue lolling out of an impossibly-wide mouth. Rows upon rows of -teeth undulated deep in his throat, his limbs stretching to impossible -lengths.

- -

He was aggravatingly nimble, leaping away as the next blow left a -crater in the floor. Escaping from the onslaught was made difficult by -Sarah's blades, whirling about to keep him in the room. Villago -screeched -as a hand was lopped off when he tried to eviscerate the swordswoman. -Sarah kept herself steady, allowing herself no celebration; her swords -kept a steady pace of parry, feint, and thrust. She wasn't intent on the -kill herself, but more on keeping him in one place. It was proving to be -an annoying task, like trying to smash a single blade of grass in a -windstorm.

- -

Sulfur filled their noses, and they threw themselves away from -Villago. -He flailed backwards as the fire washed over him, screaming and tearing -at what remained of his clothes and flesh. Merry stood behind him, -bellowing forth flames from her mouth; the floor shuddered with the -tempo, until she stood back, shaking from the exertion. Rosalie was more -than happy to take advantage of Villago's distracted mind � tile flew -everywhere when the maul fell, mixed with gore. Rosalie shook it best -she could from her weapon, grimacing in disgust. She snorted when Sarah -recoiled from the meat that had been cooking, cursing and flourishing -her -swords.

- -

"I don't know what I expected," she admitted, helping Merry up.

- -

"As long as you're expecting more of it." Rosalie shouldered the -maul, and peered around the corner. "He mentioned having boys. Odds are -he's got a wife as well."

- -

"What priest would marry flesh-eating monsters?"

- -

"Piedmont Grove," Merry whispered, strength returning to her limbs. -

- -

"Ugh." Sarah wrinkled her nose. "I'd forgotten about that one. Thank -you for reminding me."

- -

They were shushed by a gesture from Rosalie. They followed her -through the kitchen, and into a servant's corridor. Though it was only a -dozen paces at most, being so cramped did nothing for them. Caution -stayed with them despite it, and Sarah peered through the keyhole before -pushing into the room.

- -

Shelves thrice as tall as Rosalie were filled with books neat as -the day they had been bought. Around the room, lamps sat next to plush, -comfortable chairs, or fine, oak tables that had game boards built into -their surfaces. The air smelled of paper and pipe smoke, and in any -other home, it would have been wonderfully luxurious. When Merry gave in -to curiosity though, and pulled a book off the shelf, she found it -blank.

- -

"Guess they're not voracious readers," Sarah joked, earning -her a look from Rosalie.

- -

"Oh..." Merry said quietly. She held up one of the largest books -Sarah had ever seen � a collection of tales from the bard Donwell -Solomado; her eyes were disappointed as she opened it to reveal that it, -too, was blank.

- -

"I'm sure we can find it from - down!"

- -

Sarah shoved Merry to the ground as something flew towards them. -Rosalie kept it from them, shattering the airborne table with an almost -lazy backhand.

- -

"This is why we don't talk!" she chastised them, grunting as a chair -rebounded off her shield. She dug her heels in as the attacker charged -her, slamming and grappling her shield. Massive claws yanked her off -balance, trying to tear away her defenses. In response, she rammed her -helmeted skull into where she expected its face to be. It roared, and -she saw a gaping maw dive towards her, stopping only when she jammed the -shield inside it. Rosalie swung her maul as quickly as she could, -keeping oversized hands from finding purchase on her armor. Something -landed on her back, using her as a springboard, and her assailant -squealed, falling back.

- -

Sarah's blades were lit with silver fire, flickering this way and -that. Though her foe was easily twice her size, a grotesquerie of -muscles and thick, clumsy limbs, the swordswoman drove it back -fearlessly. She rolled over a table, leading its attention away from the -others with feints and taunts.

- -

Rosalie gathered herself, carefully resting her shield on the floor. -She glanced back at Merry, whose fingers twitched and danced in the air. -

- -

"If you�d be so kind," she pleaded, gripping the maul with both -hands. Rosalie sucked in a breath, and charged. Leaping, she felt the -wings of Merry's song lift her to the ceiling, and drop her � and the -maul, now glowing with power like a star � onto the monster's back.

- -

It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing she'd ever done. -She had expected some sort of resistance, possibly even that it might -continue fighting afterwards. Smashing its bulbous head like an overripe -pumpkin, its flesh boiling and melting away from the maul as she fell -had not been in her mind. Rosalie grunted when she landed, what -remained of the creature twitching feebly next to her. Sarah trotted to -her to slap her on the back in celebration, and thought better of it -when she saw how badly she had been covered.

- -

"Are you finally going to buy some new armor?"

- -

"Their 'children' are probably upstairs," Rosalie said, wiping -futilely at her armor, and ignoring Sarah. They both jumped when the -body sighed, deflating into a nauseating puddle of muck. "We'll catch -our breath, and look for the others."

- -

The sound of footsteps above trickled down to them. They started as -an innocent pitter-patter, suited to children, or household pets; they -disappeared suddenly, though Merry swore she could hear the faint sound -of laughter through the ceiling.

- -

"Ominous," Sarah muttered. "So...Plan?"

- -

Rosalie looked to the stairs, and clicked her teeth.

- -

"I wish you had this plan more often."

- -

Rosalie smiled wearily at Sarah, who leaned against a tree, admiring -the roaring blaze that was swiftly consuming the Villago estate. They -had -blocked off the stairwells and whatever cellar entrances they could find -with plenty of kindling. With any luck, anything left inside would be -forced out the upper windows. Merry slumped against a bench, tapping a -steady beat as she stared at the burning house. Even if the rest of -Villago's "family" escaped some other way, she would see them quickly -enough. -

- -

Sarah was oddly giddy, tapping the pommels of her swords. "We could -invite people, have them bring meat to roast. We already have music," -she added, nodding at Merry. "It'd be grand!"

- -

"We could advertise," Rosalie smirked. "'Nothing tastes sweeter than -victory � We slay your monsters, and your hunger'."

- -

"Brilliant." They chuckled softly, taking care not to bother Merry's -focus. Sarah rubbed her eyes, looking to the sky, where dawn was still -horrendously far off. "How much longer?"

- -

"Long as we have to."

- -

Sarah sighed, and resumed searching the roaring flames for movement. -Not that she needed to � soon enough a window exploded outward, -something falling heavily to the ground, wreathed in flames. Without -pause, it charged at the hunters with a strange, stumbling gait. That it -seemed to be two bodies fused into one kept it at a brisk, three-legged -walk, but the faces held twin masks of hate, flowing horribly into one -another. Whatever it was screamed at them with two voices, making their -hair stand on end. Worse, as it grew closer, so did its mouth stretch, -seemingly forever, until most of its head was a gasping hole; its hands -tore at the air, eager to find them, and tear them apart.

- -

It didn't make it.

- -

A dozen paces away, it dropped as though hit from behind. Not even a -spasm shook its body � one moment it was determined to devour the lot of -them, the next, a rotting mass of flesh on the ground.

- -Several guards stood nearby, pulling their hoods back to stare at the -conflagration. One held his crossbow with shaking hands, his eyes wide and -frightened as the monster convulsed in front of him. Strangely, none of -them ran for help with the inferno, instead eyeing the corpse warily. -Rosalie approached them, resting the maul on her shoulders. - -"You, hunter!" A guard with thick sideburns, and a ruddy nose strode up to -her, hand almost resting on his sword. "What happened here?" - -"Khonwen, on behalf of Houses Villago and Lavelle, hired us to -exterminate a nest -of monsters plaguing your city. Unfortunately, a few managed to enter the -Villago household, and in the ensuing fight..." She shrugged, and stared at -the house. A section of the roof finally gave way with a sharp crack, and -roar of refreshed flames. - -"We will have to confirm this," the guard said. "You will all come with me, -until this is sorted out." - -Rosalie said nothing. Instead, she backed away softly, the faint sound of -flutes in her ears. The guard continued to speak to the air harshly, even -after she'd returned to her companions. - -"How long will the magic last?" she asked Merry. The woman looked up from a -few baubles she's taken while setting the fire, and smiled mischievously. - -"Should fade by daybreak." - -Rosalie grinned, and turned to see Sarah already striding quickly back -towards the road. - -"*Now* can we take a rest?" she asked Rosalie wearily as she caught up. - -

"Yes," she said, smiling tiredly as she looked back at the burning -house. "I'd say we're certainly due."

- - -© Stephen Heuser 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] misfortune.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe - -[*AUTHOR] J. H. Zech - -[*BLURB] "The universe as we know it is a joint product of the -observer -and the observed."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

A man in a top hat thumped his wooden mug -of foaming beer on the round table. �Those damn alchemists. Just because -they learned a few new tricks, they think they can get all high and -mighty. They should know their place!�

- -

�Those young ones have no respect,� a bearded man next to him said. -�They weren�t there to see it twenty years ago. It�s thanks to us -magicians that Ilysveil is still standing!� He then proceeded to chug -half a mug of beer in one go.

- -

Corvus watched silently from the corner of his eye as he wiped off -the table next to them with a grey cloth. The daytime shift at Cheer -Haus is supposed to be the quiet and uneventful one. Couldn�t they have -waited two hours to come here? He straightened his black bowtie and -walked over to the table.

- -

�Gentlemen, may I help you?� Corvus asked with a polite smile on his -face.

- -

The man with half a mug of beer chugged the rest of it, then held out -the mug. Yellow alcohol dripped from his shaggy beard. �Go get me -another, kid!�

- -

�Yes, of course, sir. Would you like anything else? We want everyone -to enjoy their drinks in a pleasant and relaxing environment,� Corvus -said, slightly emphasizing the latter part. He couldn�t kick out -troublesome patrons, but he hoped he could at least convince them to -behave themselves of their own accord, even if he knew it was probably -futile.

- -

The man in the top hat glared at him, red-faced. �You think we�re -being annoying, huh? Rolling it in passive-aggressive sweet talk doesn�t -make it any less of an insult!�

- -

�Sir, you�ve had a lot to drink. I simply meant��

- -

He grabbed Corvus by his black vest. �You know who we are? We�re the -Parsentheons! Who the hell are you to insult us?�

- -

The man with the dripping beard stood up and grabbed Corvus�s wavy -black hair. Corvus tried to look polite and professional, but his -narrowed eyes and forced smile betrayed his discomfort. He looked in the -direction of the manager at the bar counter, but the old man merely -looked down with a measure of resigned sadness. �Yes, why don�t you tell -us your name? I�m sure your family will be happy to know their scrawny -kid messed with the magic clan.�

- -

�Um� gentlemen� I��

- -

�I can�t hear you!� the man said, pulling on his hair. �Huh?� He -pulled Corvus�s black hair out, or rather, he pulled off the wig Corvus -had carefully crafted.

- -

Both men let him go and stumbled back. �S-silver hair? Are you some -kind of demon?�

- -

Corvus quickly snatched his wig and put it back on. A few of the -patrons whispered to each other. Their stares made his heart throb, and -their unintelligible words rang in his head. He just wanted to live out -his days quietly lazing around reading scientific journals on weekends. -He wished he could just will all the troublesome people away, but not -even the magic clan had anything as convenient as that.

- -

�Wait a minute. Silver hair? Wasn�t there that rumor about a -silver-haired child being born to the mechanist clan after the war?� the -man with the beard said.

- -

�The mechanists? Those blasphemers who reject the gods of duality? -This is perfect. Manager! You�re going to fire this kid, or the -Parsentheons will be shutting down your joint!�

- -

�Well, I�� the manager started, obviously torn. A tense silence -pervaded the bar, with the other patrons drinking quietly, if at -all.

- -

The jingle of bells at the door broke the silence. Everyone turned to -see a black-haired young lady in a frilly light-blue dress enter. Her -fair skin shone divinely -in the light of the doorway. Her thin figure -gracefully walked up to the old man at the bar counter.

- -

�Excuse me, I�m looking for someone named Corvus Morgenstern,� she -said.

- -

The manager, still in awe and confusion, pointed at Corvus. She -walked up to him casually, and he gave her a surprised look, pointing at -himself.

- -

�You�re Corvus?� she asked.

- -

�Yes. What�s going on?� he asked.

- -

�Gentlemen, I�ll be borrowing Mr. Morgenstern. Good day to you -both.�

- -

�Hold on! This guy insulted us! We�re not done with him. Who are you -to butt in?� the man in the top hat demanded to know.

- -

�Oh, I�m sorry. I haven�t properly introduced myself. My name is Mira -Chelavye, from the alchemist clan,� she said, curtsying.

- -

�So are the Chelavyes picking a fight with the Parsentheons?� the man -in the beard asked.

- -

�Quite the contrary. I�m asking that we not fight. Isn�t it important -for the magic clan to uphold its reputation too? From my perspective and -the perspective of all the witnesses here, it seemed you were merely -harassing the waiter. Could the clan really defend you in this -situation? I�d rather not have a fight between any clans, so would you -be so kind as to let this matter drop?�

- -

�Tch!� the man in the top hat said. He and the man with the dripping -beard stormed out of the bar.

- -

�Wait! Your bill!� the manager yelled.

- -

The bearded man threw some coins behind him. Corvus walked over and -bent down, picking them up one by one.

- -

As soon as the door swung shut behind them, Mira breathed out -heavily. �Ah, I was so nervous! Maybe I need a drink too!�

- -

Corvus turned to her, not knowing what to say. Her sudden appearance -had been surprising enough, but with this about-face in her personality, -he didn�t even know what to think anymore. One troublesome person had -walked out the door, and another one had walked right in.

- -

�Oh, that�s right! Corvus, I need your help!� she said as she leaned -in close to his face.

- -

Corvus leaned away. �Hold on. You haven�t even explained what�s going -on.� He made his way to the counter and dropped the coins into the -manager�s hand.

- -

She took a deep breath, then spat out her words, gesturing wildly by -waving her arms. �OK, so there was this guy that went missing, and then -I asked my clan, and then I asked your clan, and then I had to ask you, -but those two guys were bullying you, so I had to��

- -

�Slow down! You�re not making any sense. First tell me what just -happened here. Then let�s move on to the situation as a whole, alright?� -Corvus said. He motioned her to take a seat at the table that had just -been vacated by the two magic clan members.

- -

She plopped herself down on the chair and started talking. �I was -looking for you, and I finally heard that you were working at the Cheer -Haus. I got to the door, but then I heard yelling. I looked in the -window and saw two men shaking the waiter. I wondered if that waiter was -Corvus Morgenstern, so I decided to ask. The bartender confirmed you are -Corvus. Those guys said they were Parsentheons, so I was really nervous. -I did my best proper lady act and got them to go away. And now we�re -here.�

- -

�So you�re telling me that whole threat was an act? You must be an -amazing actor. I think everyone in the room bought it,� Corvus said.

- -

�I have to do that a lot at family functions, so I guess I�m used to -it,� she said.

- -

He clearly remembered that she announced her family name as Chelavye, -the alchemist clan, the second most powerful of the noble clans in -Ilysveil. He wondered what someone like her wanted with him, an outcast -of his clan. �Alright. Now can you tell me why you were looking for -me?�

- -

�Can we talk in private?�

- -

�Corvus! Table four!� the manager said.

- -

�Ah, sorry, can this wait until the weekend? I have work today.�

- -

�No, I can�t wait until then. I�ll wait here for you until your shift -is over.�

- -

�That�s another two hours. Come on.�

- -

�No, really. It has to be today,� Mira said, staring unwaveringly at -him. He could see his own brown eyes reflected in her deep black eyes. -Her forceful will threatened to overwhelm him.

- -

Corvus sighed. �Mr. Stromberg, she�ll have some apple cider.� The -round old man nodded and poured the clear yellow cider into a glass, and -Corvus carried it over to Mira.

- -

Two hours later, the last daytime customer besides Mira -had left, and Corvus was wiping down the tables. He normally enjoyed the -quiet this temporary lull in people brought, but today the awkward -pressure of Mira�s constant gaze had him on edge. Someone tapped him on -the shoulder. He jerked in surprise. The manager handed him a pouch of -coins. It landed in his hand with a satisfying clink.

- -

�Your pay for this week. Good work today. Leave the rest to the night -shift.�

- -

Corvus noticed that the pouch was slightly heavier than usual. Mr. -Stromberg was always soft-hearted like that, helping him out a little on -tough days, even if the old man couldn�t deal with the troublesome -ones.

- -

�Thank you,� Corvus said. The manager walked out the door for a -break, and it swung closed with a jingle. After putting the cloth away, -Corvus walked into the back locker room. He hung up his white dress -shirt and black vest and then changed into his regular grey pants, white -shirt, and green vest.

- -

He went back into the bar, and Mira bounced over to him. �Whoa. Now -that you�re not wearing that bartending outfit, you look a lot younger, -almost like a kid.�

- -

�I�ll have you know I�m seventeen.�

- -

�I�m almost eighteen. Maybe you should start calling me �big -sister,�� Mira said with an all-too-happy smile.

- -

She was trying to close the immense distance between them, but he -couldn�t fathom why, and that unknown made him uncomfortable. Corvus -crossed his arms. �Don�t push your luck.� He had a feeling she was -bringing trouble, and humoring her antics too much would drag things -out. If I have to do it, I�d rather it be quick.

- -

�Fine. Ready to go?�

- -

�Go where? I thought you were going to explain everything to me.�

- -

�It�ll be easier to explain once we�re there.�

- -

He didn�t really feel much like walking around town, but he had -already agreed to hear her out, and he found it very difficult to say no -in the face of the pure yet powerful pressure she exerted. Reassuring -himself that he wouldn�t get too involved, Corvus followed Mira out of -the bar. She quietly walked down the narrow, winding brick road. He -wondered where all her cheer had gone all of a sudden. Colorful wooden -houses overlooked their path on both sides, and occasionally he would -see a woman open the shutters and hang a shirt or pants on the -clothesline that stretched between houses.

- -

The deep toll of the bell resounded throughout the city. Corvus -looked up. The clock tower, the black obelisk at the center of the city, -had its hand on the six. It would be nightfall soon.

- -

Eventually, they arrived at a small green house whose -paint had worn off. He had passed by this street many times running -errands for Mr. Stromberg but had never paid this house any mind. So -many blue, red, yellow, and green houses with wooden shutters lined this -street that no individual house stood out, but together the street -itself formed a rainbow. No streetlamps illuminated their colors, -however, as this was a commoner district. Corvus wondered what this -noble young lady would have to show him in a place like this.

- -

She reached for the knob but hesitated, trembling. She grabbed her -wrist and turned the knob and pushed the door open. Apparently it wasn�t -locked. The house was small and simple in its furnishings. A desk with a -few papers and a pen sat next to the window. A tall brown shelf full of -colorful books overlooked it. A black sofa was against the wall, and a -small square table with two half-eaten plates of curry stood next to the -kitchen.

- -

�I suppose we�re here. Now let�s hear that explanation,� Corvus said. -�First, I want to know where we are.�

- -

She nodded. �This is where my former uncle lived.�

- -

�Former uncle? Lived? What do you mean?� Corvus asked.

- -

�He was my uncle until last month. I�m not sure what exactly -happened, but my family kicked my uncle out of the Chelavye clan. And -now he�s committed suicide.�

- -

�I don�t see him here, but how do you know he committed suicide?�

- -

�He left a note,� Mira said, pointing to a piece of paper on the -desk.

- -

Corvus picked up the note and read it.

- -
�Dear Mira,

- -

If you�re reading this, then I�m sorry that I won�t be there for you -anymore. I enjoyed having you as my niece, and I treasure all the -memories of your visits. I�ve failed my family, I�ve failed Ilysveil, -and most importantly, I�ve failed you. I�m going to join your aunt -Stella in the eternal realm, so don�t look for me. Look through the -looking glass and seek your own happiness. If it�s you, I�m sure you can -transform the pieces and find the brighter future I lost.

- -

With love,

- -

Alfonse Chelavye�

- -

The letter left a bitter taste in his mouth. Family politics in all -three of Ilysveil�s major clans were nasty. He didn�t really want much -to do with this mess.

- -

�This seems very tragic, but how does this involve me?�

- -

�I was very close to Uncle, and even after he was banished from the -family, I often visited him. He would tell me stories and teach me -alchemy. I asked my parents why they kicked Uncle out, but they wouldn�t -tell me. One day when I was walking down the street, I saw your parents. -They said, �Alfonse has been removed. So it�s not going to work after -all.� I ran over to the Morgensterns and asked them if they knew -anything about Uncle. They just dodged the question. But they knew -something about him for sure. I tried talking to any Morgenstern that I -could find. At last I found you.�

- -

�You do know that I�m also in limbo with my relationship to my -family, right? If you think I have any inside knowledge of the -Morgensterns, forget it. All they do is send me money every month to -help pay the rent. I have to work to fund the rest of my living -expenses.�

- -

�Even so, you�re the only one who was even willing to talk to me -about this. I just can�t let it go like this. I have to at least know -why he died. I�ll give you anything you want, please!� Mira begged.

- -

�Why are you so insistent on having me help you? You could probably -get anyone on the street, and it�d probably be the same. I�m a -Morgenstern in name only.�

- -

�My parents aren�t helping me, and Uncle�s gone. I�m all alone, but I -don�t think I can do this alone. I�m sorry for dragging you into my -personal problems, and I know it�s selfish, but I�m afraid. If at least -you�re by my side, I might be able to confront this issue. The way you -patiently endured those Parsentheons and the way you -were -willing to put up -with me, it showed me that you might be a good person. So please, help -me.�

- -

Corvus felt the barrier of his peaceful uneventful life under threat -by her intense will. He wasn�t sure if he could help Mira, and -regardless, if he accepted her request, it meant venturing into an -unknown world of trouble. Still, she had bared open her heart and -pleaded. She would give him anything he wanted. There was one thing he -had wanted long ago, but he had dismissed it as nothing more than a -fantasy. The girl standing here, though, made him want to believe it was -possible.

- -

�Mira, look carefully,� he said. Mira watched him obediently. He -pulled off his wig, revealing his flowing silver hair.

- -

�Silver��

- -

�That�s right. Silver hair. A sign of demonic influence. If people -saw me without this wig, they would say I�m a demon. My family sees me -as a devil. Are you still willing to ask for the help of a devil?�

- -

Mira stared at him silently for a while then spoke. �I don�t think -you�re a devil. No matter what the world says you are, I saw you with my -own eyes today. You�re just a person. I�m asking you, as a human being, -to help me.�

- -

Corvus smiled. Indeed, if anyone could make him believe again in what -he once sought, it was her. �Don�t regret it.�

- -

�I won�t.�

- -

�Well then, let�s think. First off, how are you sure he�s dead? Have -the police investigated yet?�

- -

�No. That�s what�s so strange. I found the note two days ago and went -to my family, and we went to the police station. They said they�d take -care of it, but they still haven�t sent anyone over, and my parents -won�t talk about it anymore.�

- -

�He was exiled from the clan, vanished, left a suicide note, and the -police won�t investigate. I don�t think we can say for sure if he�s -dead, but everything does point in that direction. Let�s work with that -assumption for now.�

- -

Mira nodded. �At the very least, I want to know why Uncle was kicked -out of the clan.�

- -

�Why would your uncle be banished from the alchemist clan? There are -three reasons someone can be excluded from a family. One, like my case, -there�s something inherently wrong with that person. Your uncle was -probably in his forties, so it�s unlikely that this is true since he -wasn�t kicked out until last month. Two, betrayal.�

- -

�Uncle would never betray us. He always enjoyed his work and wanted -to support us.�

- -

�I�m just saying it�s a possibility. I won�t say he betrayed you -unless there�s evidence. Three, he did something that would bring shame -to the family or was against its principles.�

- -

�He wouldn�t do anything like that either!�

- -

�You can�t be sure of that one. Every family has its own politics, -and shame and principles are about as solid as pudding. A moral man -could still easily cross an arbitrary line. We can�t speculate, though. -We need some facts. What was your uncle doing before he got -banished?�

- -

�He was just his normal self. He drank tea in the morning, then went -off to do alchemy experiments in his lab, then came back home.�

- -

�Where was his lab? And by home do you mean this house?�

- -

�His lab was this house. By home I meant the house he used to live -in, right next to ours.�

- -

Corvus looked around and saw few signs of any recent alchemy in the -house. Only a partially erased alchemic circle drawn in some yellow dust -remained on the floor. �Did he change in any way before a month -ago?�

- -

�Hmm� Maybe there�s one thing. He would occasionally tell me about -the experiments he was doing, and he always talked about some kind of -new liquid property, but one day he told me about an experiment he did -with transmuting a metal. After that, though, he wouldn�t answer any of -my questions about his experiments. He had this really uncomfortable -expression on his face whenever I brought up the metal experiment.�

- -

�Did he say which metal?�

- -

�I remember it was copper.�

- -

Corvus looked at the suicide note one more time. �One thing�s clear. -Your uncle�s death is not a suicide.�

- -

�What?�

- -

�A real suicide note usually talks about one�s own life, failures, -and sadness, along with an apology to family and friends. This note is -clearly directed toward you only, and most of it is talking about what -you should do. It�s also interesting that he specifically says the -memories of your visits. Wouldn�t a death note normally talk about all -his memories of you? This seems oddly specific, almost like a message to -you.�

- -

�Maybe he was just under stress. Isn�t it a stretch to say he was -murdered?�

- -

�Yeah, I�ll admit, the note wasn�t enough. It put me on the fence as -to whether this was suicide, but take a look at the room.�

- -

Mira looked around. �What am I supposed to see?�

- -

�The dinner table. There�s two plates. Food for two people. And -they�re half-eaten. Someone who�s committing suicide wants closure. -Someone else was here. It wouldn�t make any sense to stop eating a meal -with a guest to commit suicide. This also makes it highly possible that -the other person at the meal killed him.�

- -

�Then what about the note? If someone killed him, how could he have -left a note?�

- -

�Because this death was made to look like a suicide. If the killer -had just killed him outright, then there would be no note. If the killer -had left him to die, then if he could actually write a note, then he -would just tell you who the killer is. If the killer threatened him and -made him write a suicide note in front of him though��

- -

�He would have to hide any message he wanted to tell me.� She looked -at the note. �So what�s the message?�

- -

�I don�t know. This note was written for you. If anyone knows what it -means, it has to be you,� Corvus said, placing the note in her -hands.

- -

�I really don�t know, though.�

- -

�There�s nothing more I can do then. I wish you luck on finding -answers,� Corvus said. He was happy that someone had believed in him -even after seeing his silver hair and that he could help, even if only a -little. This mess seemed beyond him, however, and getting any closer to -Mira, who shone so -brightly, felt blinding, so to save himself, he -would quit while he was ahead. Corvus headed for the door.

- -

Mira tugged at his sleeve. Shocked, Corvus turned around. She was -looking down, so he couldn�t see her eyes through her black bangs. �I�ve -already thought about this, but you got further in minutes than I have -in days. I can�t do this alone. To tell you the truth, my parents -actually told me to forget this. I shouldn�t be here right now, but I -couldn�t abandon Uncle. I lied to my mother and father to come here. So -please, even if you can�t do anything right now, please don�t -leave.�

- -

Corvus didn�t know how to respond to her feelings or her burdens. -They stayed silently still for a while, but even after thinking, he -couldn�t find the words. He did realize one thing though. For the first -time in many years, he truly wanted to help someone, despite his -hesitation at accepting a responsibility that would end the quiet in his -life. This was more important than going home and reading the -Scientific Quarterly on his sofa; he would try harder, an -unfamiliar notion to him. Corvus closed his eyes and thought it over -again. Exclusion from the family. A murder made to look as a suicide. -The involvement of the Morgensterns. An erased alchemic circle. Copper. -The note. There was still something missing.

- -

�Let�s go to the library,� Corvus said.

- -

�Will you go with me?� she asked, not moving.

- -

�' Let�s' means 'let us', � Corvus said. Hearing himself say -it out -loud was embarrassing, but it had to be said.

- -

�What are we looking for?� Mira asked, looking up hopefully.

- -

�Anything that helps us figure out what exactly your uncle was -working on. In the note, he told you to find a brighter future. That -means he believed something was wrong with the present. It sounded like -he was entrusting his dream to you, so something he was working on would -change the future for the better.�

- -

�Looks like I wasn�t wrong to ask you for help. You�re amazing at -figuring things out!� she said.

- -

�T-thanks.� He hadn�t heard such earnest praise before. He hoped he -wasn�t blushing.

- -

Corvus and Mira stepped out the door and onto the brick -road. The orange of the sunset and the shadows of the houses colored the -road in tiger stripes. They headed toward the other great tower of -Ilysveil, the Library of Omniscience. Corvus occasionally glimpsed Mira -out of the corner of his eye. He had never traveled with a friend -before, so -his heart beat nervously. As the last slice of the sun sunk below the -houses, the rays poked the edges of his vision. He squinted and looked -away. For a moment he thought he saw Mira sneaking a glimpse at him, but -as soon as he blinked it was gone. He began to fantasize what would -happen if their eyes had met, but he stopped himself. He had probably -only imagined her glimpse. I wonder if this is okay. If I go down -this path, it�ll probably hurt again. I could be setting myself up for -another tragedy, but Mira�s not going to let me stop. No, that�s just me -pushing the blame onto her. I�m the one that can�t stop. They -continued walking, the crystal-laden tower looming over them.

- -

The spiraling white tower looked somewhat grey in the darkness, but -the giant green crystals embedded all over still sparkled in the night. -A large wooden door gilded with golden hinges and the sun and moon crest -of Ilysveil stood before them. Corvus pushed the door in, and white -light poured out, blinding him momentarily. He and Mira stepped onto the -dark red carpet of a circular room that seemed to stretch up into the -heavens.

- -

The architect must have one heck of an ego. Shelves full of -books covered the walls, and a spiral staircase snaked around the -perimeter. Large tables with quiet readers filled the center of the -floor. At least practicality hadn�t been sacrificed in the name of the -architect�s vanity. The light from the crystal chandelier reflected and -sparkled throughout the space. It gave the books a faint glow. The -Library of Omniscience indeed.

- -

He looked at the chandelier. The light shone brighter than anything -he normally saw. �Say, Mira, do you know what�s giving off the light in -that chandelier? It�s too bright to be a candle.� When he received no -response, he turned to see that Mira had disappeared. He looked around -and found her talking to a lady at a round counter on the other side of -the room. Corvus wished she had brought him along. He jogged to catch up -to her.

- -

�What�s going on?� Corvus asked.

- -

�I asked Ms. Helvenia if she had any books on Ilysveil�s three -clans,� Mira said.

- -

�You rushed right over here. You seem to know this place well. Have -you been here before?�

- -

�Yeah. When I was younger, Uncle used to bring me here all the -time.�

- -

�That must�ve been nice.� Corvus felt a tinge of envy, wondering what -it would have been like to have family that did such lovingly normal -things with him. He turned to the librarian at the counter.

- -

�And what can I help you find at the Ilysveil Central Library today?� -the purple-robed Ms. Helvenia asked.

- -

�Hm? I thought this was the Library of Omniscience,� Corvus said.

- -

She placed her hands on her thin waist, and her short eyebrows -flattened. �Oh, they simply call it that. Because of the books� glow, -people seem to have this notion that there�s heavenly knowledge to be -found here, though if they really believed that, it�d be nice if they -donated as much to here as they do to the Church.�

- -

�I see. You learn something new every day. Do you have any books on -the Dominion War and relations between Ilysveil and Elvengard?�

- -

She pushed up her glasses. �Of course. Please wait here while I find -the books you and the young lady requested.� She stood up from her seat -and began ascending the staircase.

- -

Corvus turned to Mira and cleared his throat. �As I was trying to ask -you earlier, that chandelier is unnaturally bright. Do you know where -its light comes from?�

- -

Mira�s jaw dropped far too much for someone who was supposed to be a -noble lady. She probably noticed this too and caught herself by covering -her mouth with her hand. �You haven�t heard? It was big news when the -Parsentheons and Chelavyes collaborated to make this. The magic clan -cast light magic that gathered light and transmitted it while my family -built the crystals.�

- -

He probably had heard about it but forgotten, as he felt politics had -nothing to do with him, but ignorance would be of no help today. �What -do the crystals do?�

- -

�Do you remember the crystals on the outside of the tower?�

- -

�Yeah, they were embedded all over.�

- -

�The spell that was cast on them gathers sunlight during the day and -transmits it to this chandelier. Our family used a new technique to -construct this crystal that could delay the emission of the light so -that it naturally starts shining at night as if it were natural -sunlight,� Mira said, smiling with her hands on her hips.

- -

Corvus decided to humor her pride. �That�s a pretty amazing -collaboration. I didn�t know the two clans were that close.�

- -

�Well, I don�t think they like each other that much. It�s just that -both wanted to preserve the peace, so we decided to do collaborations -and such.�

- -

The clack of the librarian�s heels on the metal steps alerted Corvus -to her arrival. �Here are some books related to the topics you -requested. If you wish to read more, then just let me know, and I�ll -simply guide you to the section. These books were located rather far up -the tower. I don�t think my ankles will survive many more trips there -with a heavy load.�

- -

�Thank you,� Corvus said, accepting a stack of books.

- -

He and Mira sat down next to each other at a large table. She -rummaged through the pockets of her dress and brought out a small bag -tied at the top. She pulled the string, and the cloth unfolded, -revealing chocolate chip cookies.

- -

�A little snack for us while we work,� she said, pushing the cookies -between them.

- -

Corvus wanted to refuse for fear of getting too close, but Mira -stared at him expectantly. That look is just unfair. He bit a -small chunk of a cookie. A mellow spiciness floated in the sea of a -strong sweetness in the soft cinnamon cookie. He was happy beyond words -to share a moment like this with another person, but shook that thought -off immediately out of embarrassment and pain.

- -

He must�ve been smiling unconsciously, however, for she giggled and -said, �I�m glad you like it.� From the stack of books she grabbed a -thick black volume titled Chronicle of the Dominion War. �Let�s -get to it then. What do you think the Dominion War has to do with -Uncle�s death?� she asked.

- -

�It�s not really what I think. Call it more of a hunch. It�s obvious -Alfonse Chelavye was murdered over something related to family politics. -If we think about the current political status and conflicts of the -three families now, most of it can be traced back to the war between -humanity and the elves.�

- -

�Oh, I didn�t know it went back that far.�

- -

�Well you can read all about it now,� he said. She puffed her cheeks -in an adorably angry manner. Corvus pretended not to notice. If she -wanted answers, she would have to research academic texts even if she -didn�t want to. �I�ll be reading up on current politics of the three -families. I�ve been a bit out of the loop for a while.� Corvus grabbed a -grey folder full of newspaper and magazine articles. He started poring -through it while Mira reluctantly opened the old cover of the -Chronicles.

- -

The articles mostly covered the alliance and tension -between the Parsentheon and Chelavye clan. Titles such as �Parsentheon -and Chelavye Brothers in Bar Fight� were common. He also read an article -titled, �Alchemists Oppose Magicians� Proposal to Lower Tariffs on -Elvish Goods.� The oldest article was only from 1853, just twenty years -ago. The magic clan had risen to prominence immediately after the war, -and the alchemist clan gained influence shortly after.

- -

The first article about the mechanists was dated 1862, titled, -�Morgensterns Build First Reliable Steam Engine.� He found an article -describing Erwick Morgenstern, his father. Erwick was quoted as saying, -�Humanity should take control of its own future.�

- -

The last article he picked up was fairly recent, printed just over -four months ago. He couldn�t vouch for its credibility though; the cheap -paper and big flashy letters told him this had been published in a daily -rumor tabloid. �MORGENSTERNS BUILDING MECHANICAL COLOSSUS,� it read. The -article described it as a steel golem that would serve as humanity�s -counter to the Elvish Colossus. He closed the folder.

- -

�What have you found, Mira?�

- -

�Ah! That was a lot to read. I would�ve been okay with just knowing -the basic 'Elvengard invades Al-Shath and Ilysveil and ends in a -stalemate' story.�

- -

�This is your uncle�s murder we�re investigating. If anyone has a -duty to put some effort into this, wouldn�t it be you?�

- -

She fidgeted with her hands. �I know. I�m sorry. I guess I�m just a -little nervous right now.� Her expression was more hesitant than nervous -though.

- -

�Still, you worked hard and finished. So? What did you find?�

- -

�The book gave a little more detail on how the stalemate happened. -Elvengard is actually resource-poor, so they invaded mostly for minerals -and forests. The fairies didn�t have much military power, but they had -great defenses against magic, so Elvengard couldn�t break Al-Shath�s -border. Humanity had magicians, but elves have greater inherent magic -and the Colossus giants, so Ilysveil was being pushed back. The elves -almost reached Vathel.�

- -

�Now that�s something they didn�t teach in basic education. I guess -the officials didn�t want to tell kids that humanity almost lost their -capital city. Anyway, and then the magicians and alchemists worked -together to repel the elves, right?�

- -

�I heard that story as a child from my tutors too, but according to -this, that�s not actually how it happened. The magicians kept fighting -for sure, but it was the alchemists developing warfare methods like -transmuting the ground into bombs that forced the elves to offer a -truce. Ilysveil couldn�t afford to fight the war anymore, so it took the -deal despite the elves getting a favorable trade deal.� Mira looked him -in the eyes proudly, as if she wanted approval for doing serious -research.

- -

�You really did find something interesting. This now begs the -question, why did the magic clan gain power if they were mostly losing -the war?�

- -

Mira looked pleased. �I�m not sure about that. It really is weird if -you think about it. I think it�s because the Parsentheons started -creating many new magic techniques. The light magic that this library -uses, for example, didn�t exist until twenty years ago.�

- -

Something clicked in Corvus�s head. �Hand me that book on the -Parsentheons.�

- -

She placed the blue volume in his hand. �What are you thinking?�

- -

�If I�m right�� Corvus flipped through the pages and found the -section of their history of magic development. The clan did deserve some -respect. It had created a few key magic innovations in the forty years -from the 1800s to the 1840s. During the 50s, the Parsentheons had then -created new magic at an unbelievable pace, but had developed almost -nothing since the 60s.

- -

He turned the book and showed it to Mira. �Look, starting from the -end of the war to ten years after that, the magic clan�s rate of -innovation just exploded. Now war does accelerate innovation, but if -that was the only factor, then the magic clan�s rate would be similar to -the alchemist clan�s, but no, they gained power because their new -techniques surpassed anyone else�s. How did they get these techniques? -They didn�t even use these techniques during the war. Only the elves -did. If you look at their rate of innovation in the last ten years, -it�s dropped off significantly.�

- -

�That means��

- -

�The magic clan probably had a corrupt deal with the elves. The elves -would give them some new magic for a few years to ensure the -Parsentheons would take control, and in exchange the magic clan would -keep the peace and give them favorable trade treatment. They didn�t -count on the Chelavyes and Morgensterns outpacing their innovations in -the last decade though.�

- -

�That explains a lot, but we still haven�t solved my Uncle�s -murder.�

- -

�Remember how I said I had a hunch about this?�

- -

�Yes. It looks like you�ve figured something out.� She impatiently -bobbed up and down on her toes.

- -

�I more or less have the whole picture. The magic and alchemy clans -have an uneasy alliance, but the mechanist clan is pretty much hated, -partially because they don�t believe in the gods of duality, but also -because their engineering techniques completely reject the metaphysical. -What were the exact words the Morgensterns said -about your uncle?�

- -

She sat back down in her seat. It seemed she had entered her serious -mode again. �Alfonse has been removed. It�s not going to work after -all.�

- -

�Notice that they didn�t say anything about the Chelavyes. Your uncle -was working with the Morgensterns in secret. He probably got caught at -some point.�

- -

�But they wouldn�t murder him over that! My parents loved my -uncle.�

- -

�No, I don�t think your family murdered him. Did your family meet -anyone from the magic clan recently before your uncle�s exile?�

- -

�Come to think of it, there was one time someone came over. He talked -in private with my parents and then left. My parents didn�t look too -happy.�

- -

�My guess is the magicians also caught on to what he was doing and -pressured your parents into exiling your uncle by casting him as a -potential traitor and unbeliever.�

- -

�Well, if the Parsentheons are involved, that explains why the police -haven�t investigated. They have the police in their pocket.� Mira�s -expression had turned serious, but it quickly softened. �Hold on, -though, that doesn�t explain why my family kicked him out. Even if the -Parsentheons pressured them, my parents wouldn�t give up my uncle that -easily.�

- -

�I don�t think the exile was supposed to be permanent. They -probably assured the alchemists that they only wanted a temporary -suspension or something. If he had been completely and permanently -kicked out, then you wouldn�t have been allowed to visit him.�

- -

�I get that the Parsentheons don�t like the Morgensterns, but that -seems like a lot of effort just to spite them.�

- -

�It wasn�t to spite them. Remember what your uncle was making?�

- -

�Copper, right? What is it about copper?�

- -

�Copper conducts electricity. It�s said that the mechanists are -making a mechanical Colossus. To do something like that, you would need -to have energy circulate the body and have something that can simulate a -mind, even if all it does is follow orders. The primary source of energy -for mechanists is electricity made from steam engines. Electrical -signals can also turn individual parts on and off. If you had fine -enough copper wires, you could both circulate electricity and send -signals to the body parts. The problem is current engineering techniques -can�t create copper wires that precisely.�

- -

�So they turned to alchemy!� Mira leaped out of her seat and leaned -close to his face. Her mouth was wide open, and wonder filled her -gaze.

- -

Corvus leaned back and looked away. �Exactly. Now who would lose out -if humanity gained a weapon powerful enough to take on the elves? The -magic clan would lose its standing. The alchemists probably didn�t -believe your uncle when he talked about a mechanical Colossus, or they -thought it was too risky to jeopardize relations with the magicians over -an uncertain bet like that, so they accepted a suspension.�

- -

�Then who killed my uncle?�

- -

Corvus lowered his gaze, and his bangs shadowed his eyes. After -coming this far, he felt a sharp pain in his chest as he told her, �I -don�t know. There�s just no way to find that out.�

- -

She grabbed his shoulders. �No! It can�t just end like that.�

- -

Not moving, he quietly said, �The magic clan probably killed him -after using the suspension to isolate him, but the trail goes cold after -that. We don�t know who visited his house that day. If we point fingers -at the magicians without any evidence, it�ll be our heads on the -chopping block.�

- -

She released her death grip on his shoulders and sank back into her -chair. �No way�� Tears started welling up in Mira�s deep black eyes.

- -

He didn�t want it to end like that either. Corvus closed his eyes and -ran through the evidence again. Her uncle had been exiled due to -inter-family politics. The suspension was temporary, but the magicians -murdered him and dressed it as a suicide. The uncle left a suicide note -directed at Mira. Was it merely a good-bye? Was the story of the man -working to change Ilysveil merely that of a victim? What had he told -her, and what had Alfonse Chelavye meant?

- -

After scouring his thoughts, Corvus looked up at the chandelier, and -it dawned on him. �You said you came to this library often as a child. -What was your favorite book?�

- -

Mira wiped her tears with her frilly white sleeve. Sniffling, she -answered, �Through the Looking Glass.�

- -

�I thought so.�

- -

�How did you know that?�

- -

�Basically, your uncle told me. Alfonse Chelavye saw his death coming -and left something behind. He had a message that only you would -understand. The supposed suicide note told you to look through the -looking glass. The killer might have searched his house, so he didn�t -want to leave the real message inside the house. The real message is -here in the library.�

- -

�I know exactly where it is. Let�s go.� Mira, her eyes still red, -jumped up and pulled Corvus along by the hand and up the spiral -stairs.

- -

By the time they had run up what Corvus estimated as the -equivalent of four flights of stairs, he was panting, but Mira was -scurrying around the shelves. He found it hard to believe that anyone -could regain their energy so quickly. They eventually found the -white-covered book in a shelf and she pulled it out. �But which page is -it on?�

- -

�He said to seek out your own happiness. Find the page that talks -about your happiness.�

- -

She flipped through the book for a while until she stopped and -pointed at the page. �There it is! �You must be very happy.� But where�s -the message?�

- -

�He said to transform the pieces. I thought about what it meant, but -then I realized it meant from your perspective. You�re an alchemist. How -do you transform?�

- -

�I transmute materials.� She stared at the page and then looked up as -if a light had been lit in her head. �Oh, I get it!� She placed her hand -over the page, and both her hand and the page began to glow. When she -lifted her hand, the words on the page had vanished, replaced by an -intricately criss-crossed transmutation circle that looked similar to -the one in the house. �How?...�

- -

�A transmutation circle doesn�t need to be visible to work. He -probably put a circle in invisible ink that rearranged the visible ink -into this alchemic circle when you activated it.�

- -

�What is this circle? I�ve never seen it before. I don�t think my -clan has anything like this,� Mira said, staring intently at the -book.

- -

�Come on. Let�s check out the book and go. The real story�s in that -house.�

- -

Mira closed the book. She didn�t seem as happy as he�d expected. �Are -you okay with this though?� she asked.

- -

�I�m not sure what you mean.�

- -

�You said it yourself. Our heads could be on the chopping block. If -you go with me to Uncle�s house, then you�ll know what Uncle created, -what got him murdered, and you�ll really be involved. We�ve only just -met, but I�ve relied on you so much. I don�t want to put you in danger. -Even those cookies, I guess I made them to make myself feel less guilty -dragging a stranger into my personal troubles. I��

- -

Corvus put a hand on her shoulder. He remembered the frightened -desperation with which she had pleaded for his help. Perhaps she had -felt guilty all along, but her fear of heading into the darkness alone -had overcome even that. She had indeed dragged him into her problems, -but for the first time, someone needed him and trusted him enough to -share her doubts. He was the one who was grateful. Even if staying with -her meant more trouble, this time, he felt certain he wanted to endure, -but it felt too embarrassing to say it. �I wouldn�t exactly say we�re -strangers anymore. Besides, those cookies were delicious. It wouldn�t -feel right if I didn�t stay till the end after eating them.�

- -

She locked eyes with him and wouldn�t let go. �Are you sure?� He -couldn�t tell if she was asking him or herself.

- -

�Yes, I�m sure.�

- -

Mira seemed relieved; she turned away and sighed quietly. She stood -still for a moment, then grabbed his hand. Before Corvus could react, -she pulled him with her. They flew down the stairs, drawing the stares -of readers disturbed by the banging steps. Mira signed a slip at the -librarian�s counter then walked out of the library with Corvus.

- -

The sun had set completely, and the brick road and colorful houses -were now all black, with a tinge of silver lining from the glow of the -moon obscured by the clouds.

- -

�Can you transmute a candle?�

- -

�Watch this, Corvus,� she said, pulling out a few cubes from the -pocket of her dress. �I always keep a few cubes of materials in case I -need to make anything.� She held them in her hands, which began to glow. -The cubes glowed and morphed, merging into a bronze candle holder with a -candle in the center.

- -

�You did that without a transmutation circle?�

- -

�I actually have a pretty good memory, so if I see a transmutation -circle, I memorize it perfectly, and for simple transformations, I can -channel the reaction straight from memory.�

- -

I thought she was just an airhead, but maybe, she�s actually a -genius? �I guess it�s true you can�t judge a book by its cover, -though in your case, it�s the cover and half the book.�

- -

�Hey, that�s mean.� She gave him a playful shove on the shoulder. -

- -

�Now to light the candle.� Corvus pulled out a small, grey -rectangular object. His thumb pushed down on the protrusion at the top, -then the box ignited a flame.

- -

�What is that?�

- -

�It�s one of the gadgets I made. I mostly just use it to impress -customers at the bar if they want a flaming cocktail.� Corvus touched -the flame to the tip of the candle and lit it.

- -

�What do you call it?� Mira asked.

- -

�I don�t know. I never thought to give it a name,� Corvus -answered.

- -

�Well then, how about, since it brought light to us when it was dark -out, a 'lighter'?�

- -

Corvus smiled. �I kind of like that name.�

- -

They continued to chat frivolously until they reached her uncle�s -house again. She pushed the door open, and it creaked. The house of a -dead man was even more creepy at night. She brought the candle close to -the partially erased alchemic circle. �Is it here? But this circle -doesn�t match the circle in the book.�

- -

�It�s not supposed to. Remember, the killer was here, so this was -meant to mislead him. Most likely, he drew a false circle as a -diversion, and the killer partially erased it, thinking that would -prevent anyone else from using it. In fact, this is just the material -for the transmutation. Draw the circle, then gather the yellow powder -and put it at the center.�

- -

Mira transmuted some chalk and then drew the circle on the floor -exactly as it appeared in the book. She and Corvus swept the dust into -the center with their hands.

- -

�Ready?� she asked.

- -

�Shouldn�t I be asking you?� he said.

- -

She smiled and put her hands on the perimeter of the circle. The -lines of the circle glowed with an intense white light that enveloped -the room. When the light faded, the powder had disappeared. Around the -perimeter of the circle lay a thin yellowish string. She picked it up, -but it didn�t bend. Corvus grabbed the other end and bent it with some -pressure.

- -

�This is a pure copper wire. Thin and flexible but not flimsy. This -is what he was working on for the Morgensterns. He passed it on to you. -That�s his dying legacy.�

- -

Mira cried. �This is what�s left of him. One day, when we�re the heads of -our clans, the mechanical colossus��

- -

Corvus put his hand on her shoulder. He found it unlikely that -he would ever be the head of the Morgensterns, but he couldn�t tell her -that. �I�m sorry. Even though I know the truth, I can�t do anything to help -you get justice for your uncle. I can only observe.�

- -

Mira smiled as she cried. �No, you don�t understand. This is what�s -left of him. He left me his legacy. The future that he believed in, he -entrusted it to me. We both know the truth. Neither of us can do -anything right now. But even if we can only observe, I still found it -together with you. That�s more than I could�ve asked for.�

- -

As the clouds drifted, the moon shone through the window, revealing -Mira�s teary yet glad form cast in a soft light, and Corvus couldn�t -help but think to himself, well, if it�s with her, maybe just -observing isn�t so bad.

- - - © J. H. Zech 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] ilysveil450.jpg - - - - -[*ITEM] April the Last - -[*AUTHOR] Andrew Leon Hudson - -[*BLURB] "Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world -hath -more fools in it than ever."
Charles Lamb - -[*DESCRIPTION]

It�s a clich�, but when I wake up at first -I don�t know where I am.

- -

I only know I'm desperate for tea.

- -

I fumble for my glasses on the bedside table, squint when I can�t -find them, then recognise the little framed photo of our parents by the -lamp and it all comes back: Joanie�s birthday party. I�m at my -sister�s place.

- -

I roll out of bed, still dressed from last night. March 31st, but not -any more. The alarm clock by the photo reads half ten, and I groan. I -must be last up: whatever happens next will be at my expense.

- -

I don�t have to wait long. Joanie is sprawled on the bedroom floor, -arms and legs twisted into a comedy swastika. She missed being a fool by -twenty minutes, and now every year makes sure someone else is one. This -ploy is a favourite but she never could play dead worth a damn, even as -kids. At least after thirty years she�s learned to keep her eyes closed -to avoid the blink reflex.

- -

I lean close, take a deep breath and blow on her face. Her eyelashes -flutter.

- -

�See you downstairs, faker,� I tell her.

- -

Tom�s dead in the hallway, or so he�d like me to think, the clown. I -have to admire the detail: all his clothes on backwards, even the shoes, -which is a pretty good touch. I�d almost believe his head had -been twisted around to face backwards, if we didn�t go through some -variation on this rigmarole every year.

- -

My specs aren�t in the bathroom either, so I have to aim hopefully. -

- -

�Excuse me, Tom,� I say as I step over him to go downstairs, cistern -gurgling behind me.

- -

In the lounge, there�s blood everywhere. At least, that�s how -it looks to my 02-20 vision.

- -

�Keep it up as long as you want, guys,� I call. Let�s see how long -they maintain the pretence when the frying starts, shall we? Better -still, when the tea is brewing...

- -

I pick my way through to the kitchen, trying to avoid the puddles -soaking into the carpet. It�s a long way to go for a prank, but who am I -to moan? It�s not my house, not my cleaning bill. But they get me via my -compromised vision when some spatter I overlooked slides under my foot, -oily and warm. �Gross,� I moan, and peel the sock off, tossing it at the -TV without looking any closer.

- -

The kitchen floor is cold against my bare sole. I flick on the -kettle, get a mug down from the shelf and toss in a teabag from the tin. -I grab the milk from the fridge door, and a carton of eggs and two packs -of bacon from behind the fake Edward head, which I presume to -be�appropriately enough�a decorated cabbage. Not very convincingly done, -as far as I can see.

- -

Which isn't far, admittedly.

- -

I clatter a frying pan out from the back of the cupboard and stick it -on the heat with just a splash of oil. The steaming kettle clicks and I -pour, splash the milk in early the way I like�Joanie would spit�then I -tear the bacon open and drop in the first four rashers. It's like an -instant round of applause floods the kitchen.

- -

While the bacon sizzles I check in the pantry and find half-empty -bottles of HP and Heinz. Can�t believe Joanie and Duncan only have white -bread though. Hands full, I nudge the pantry door shut with my knee�and -that�s when I notice the doubly hazy figure, beyond the frosted -glass door to the back garden. That must be Dunc. Short-sighted as I am, -it�s obvious he�s wearing something on his head. I roll my eyes, then -grip the bread bag in my teeth and open the door.

- -

It�s a Tim Curry-style demon mask: curling fibreglass horns, matching -red body paint, furry loincloth, fangs, the lot. Nice try, dickhead.

- -

�Have you got my glasses?� I mumble through gritted teeth and -plastic.

- -

�FEEL you yet the TORMENT of the EONS?� Duncan booms from atop -disguised high-heels, gesticulating like the talented kid in a school -play. �SUFFERING in a CEASELESS INSTANT, WAITING for YOUR turn to -DIE?�

- -

Pffft. �You should have let Edward do it,� I tell him, �your -acting sucks,� and I shut the door in his face. It�s not locked or -anything, he can come in when he�s ready to give it up. I head back to -the crackling pan and lay out slices of bread on the work surface.

- -

�Do you want brown sauce or tomato?� I call, but he doesn�t answer, -the moody bugger, and I squirt a splodge each on to the halves of my -sandwich-to-be. I flip the bacon over with a wooden spoon from the -pottery jug, mouth watering as I do, then I fish the teabag out of my -mug and drop it in the sink.

- -

And then, just for a moment, I feel weird and dizzy�enough that I -have to lean on the counter to steady myself. Like when you're reading -in the back of a car and it does a lazy swerve.

- -

But just as quick it's gone. Must be the missing specs. I didn�t -drink that much and I�ve got no hangover, but I never go without my -glasses if I can help it. When Joanie finally comes down she�d better -have them on her.

- -

To help recover I take my mug and a loud slurp of -tea�bliss�while I wait for the bacon to blacken. The tasty scent -fills the kitchen and, I have to say, this is almost the best bit, -really. The anticipation. As good as the eating. I�ll do the eggs in the -fat when it�s done. Lovely.

- -

I take another sip of tea. The mug looks as full as the moment I -poured it.

- -

A nice, hot brew: the very definition of English Heaven.

- -

I could do this forever.

- - -© Andrew Leon Hudson 2017 All Rights Reserved - - - -[*IMAGE] april.jpg - - - - -[*ITEM] Mount Elysium Revisited - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] If you haven't already read Mount Elysium, now -would be a good time. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

When the second visitor in one week -'disappeared', it was no longer an interesting mystery. The two -disappearances became a pair of cases, demanding police attention, which -it soon attracted. - - -Julius McRaven received what he referred to as 'the local plod' in his -office, an office designed to intimidate visitors. It was a hopelessly -ornate chamber; the walls and ceiling featured elaborate bas-relief -plasterwork representing woodland and hunting scenes, a duplicate of the -original owner's trophy room, and multiple shield shapes among the -plasterwork carried realistic wild animal heads, none of which had ever -adorned a living animal. Julius sat behind what appeared to be a -magnificent 18th century rosewood desk, made in Shanghai as recently as -five years ago, nursing a glass of Laphroaig, his favourite smoky malt -whisky. He did not offer any to the Inspector. - -Inspector Gordon did not appear in the least intimidated. Everyone knew -that Mount Elysium, house and outbuildings, were not the original -property, but a plastic replica created in recent history by the -Altairians, to replace the original 18th century estate, which the -space aliens had accidentally destroyed during a near-Earth battle -exercise. Moreover, Inspector Gordon would know that, although Julius -McRaven now bore the surname of the eighteenth century owner and builder -of Mount Elysium, he was actually a Roumanian immigrant whose birth -surname had contained too many adjacent consonants to be reliably -pronounced in Scotland. Julius had deed-polled himself through three -different British-sounding names as he worked his way from penniless -immigrant to property tycoon via a few convenient bankruptcies. His -purchase of Mount Elysium represented his desire to be thought of as -Lord of the Manor, while enabling him to turn the property into a -profitable theme park. - -Other than for the money they brought, visitors to Mount Elysium were -clearly an irritation, especially when they vanished. Faced by Inspector -Gordon, Julius McRaven took the offensive. "This is the third occasion -on which you've come looking for these missing persons. People disappear -all the time, don't they? " - -"Not around here, they don't, Mr McRaven. Both were unaccompanied male -tourists; both came to the district specifically to visit Elysium. -Neither has since returned to his place of work or his family." - -"Very well, Inspector," said Julius, "I accept that a couple of people -seem to have disappeared. Have you any proof that they disappeared while -they were in Mount Elysium?" - -"Well, each of them, on the day on which they vanished, paid for entry -to Elysium using their credit chips. One, Joseph Nardik, also paid for -goods in the souvenir shop on the same day as he entered. Neither has -been seen, nor used his credit chip, since their visit." - -"So, circumstantial. No independent evidence then? No actual witnesses -to their death or misadventure?" - -Inspector Gordon sighed, but made no reply. The silence stretched until -Julius said: "Very well. You have dates? Photographs? I'll ask our staff -if they remember anything, and I'll let you know." - -"You already have the dates and photographs, as you know. It's not good -enough. We have to organise a proper search of all Elysium." - -"No. No. No. We can't have policemen charging around inside Mount -Elysium, interfering with our visitors. Let me organise a search, using -my own employees, after hours." - -"Still not good enough. I have applied for a search warrant, which I -shall get, but I'd much rather organise this amicably." - -"All right, all right. Mondays are the lightest days. We can manage a -Monday next month, I suppose. Plain clothes, please, and I shall assign -an employee to each policeman." - -"That's preposterous, Mr McRaven." - -"No it isn't. There is much delicate stuff here, and the caves and -passages are confusing." - -"No. I meant the delay. We must get on with this." - -"I agree. In the meantime, how would you like the CCTV records for the -days in question? Perhaps we can narrow down the search area. Cause less -disruption." - -Gordon was clearly angry. "I asked for these last time! You told me the -records had been erased." - -"Well, I was mistaken. Do you want them or not?" - -"Of course I do." - -"Here are the CCTV records for the days in question," passing a padded -envelope across. "And don't come back until you can show me some -convincing proof that these individuals disappeared inside Mount -Elysium." - -Inspector Gordon, somewhat out-manoeuvred, left in obvious irritation. - -Julius sat at his desk for a few seconds. Inspector Gordon was -well-respected in the area; his service in East Africa, and in the Hong -Kong police, were legendary. Julius could not hope to forestall him for -much longer. - -A feverish investigation of the CCTV records had, of course, already -been undertaken by Mount Elysium staff. The vanished tourists had been -observed on the tv record, entering the Great Shaft, but not leaving it. - -

The original Mount Elysium had been built in the -nineteenth century at the behest of the supposedly eccentric Albert -McRaven. It was, in fact, a gigantic folly, occupying a precipitous -triangle of land at the corner of Albert's brother's estate in Scotland. - -The main building, sprawling up the slope, moulded itself to the steep -terrain as a sort of Gothic-Baroque confection, with columns, balconies, -towers, steeples, ornate stained-glass windows, tiled roofs at oblique -angles, fluted chimney stacks and pointed archways. Most of the -stonework was carved with chivalric or classical motifs. Inside, it was -a confusing warren of impressive, ornate halls and rooms, with tasteful, -if complex, plasterwork, panelling and woodblock flooring. Huge -fireplaces dominated many rooms. Marble stairways swooped from floor to -floor. To add to the charm of the building, secret passages and -unsuspected rooms were hidden behind panels, bookshelves and fireplaces. - -The grounds were equally fanciful, with temples, ponds, grottoes, -tunnels, bridges and lookout points. A stable block, built as a -miniature replica of the main house, stood behind trees. There was even -a hermit's cave. The whole estate, planted with trees and flowering -shrubs, and criss-crossed by shady paths, was a delight to the spirit. - -A particular feature was the Great Shaft, which was a circular well-like -hole, eight metres in diameter, starting within a classical temple near -the top of the property, and penetrating vertically through the rock, a -hundred or so metres down to a paved courtyard. Around the perimeter of -the shaft wound a narrow spiral staircase. At various points, tunnel -openings in the wall of the shaft led to places in the gardens or to -secret passages in the main house. In one case, the opening led to a -three-dimensional labyrinth, and from the courtyard at the bottom, a -tunnel led to a cave behind a waterfall. - -But the whole complex had been reduced to cinders and rubble fifteen -years earlier, in an accidental random strike by an Altairian -"Atmosphere-enabled Offensive Space Pinnace". - -

The Altairian Garrison, a bevy of huge alien spacecraft, -had been in orbit around the Earth and in other parts of the solar -system for half a century before the accident occurred. - -Initial panic at the space fleet's arrival had died down when the public -accepted the aliens' declared intent, which was to protect an outpost of -their sphere of influence in a galaxy-wide rivalry with another group -of aliens. The Altairians seldom appeared in public. Their environmental -requirements were such that they required special suits to exist on -Earth. - -Their effect on mankind was almost exclusively beneficial. There was an -immediate banding together of the world's nations in the face of the -potential threat. The United Nations became united in a way they had -never been before, though ancient territorial and religious rivalries -continued to burn behind the scenes. The aliens helped with the -positioning and maintenance of Earth satellites, and with the -exploration of solar system planets. - -However, Altairian ethics precluded the transfer of the major -technologies they so obviously possessed to the races they encountered -in their sphere of influence, and Earth had continued to go it alone in -scientific research and development, but with, perhaps, less enthusiasm. - -The aliens' activities in near-Earth space resulted in magnificent -displays in the night sky. Rippling cascades of photons accompanied -hyperspace travel. Frequent combat exercises released silent explosions -of coloured lights. To date, no actual combat had taken place within the -solar system. The very presence of the Altairian garrison seemed to have -precluded that. From time to time, with due notice, space vehicles -entered Earth atmosphere in mock battle, and it was during one such -exercise that Mount Elysium had been demolished. - -The aliens, with the co-operation of the owner of Mount Elysium - Roland -Thoroughgood - had reconstructed the whole complex using existing -original plans and the millions of visitor photographs stored on the -internet. Outwardly, the re-created buildings and grounds were -identical. In reality, much of Mount Elysium was made of durable -plastics and artificial stone. - -Roland Thoroughgood, his work on restoration complete, had found the -place strangely repulsive, and had sold up and emigrated. - -

In turning Mount Elysium from stately home to theme park, -Julius had made a number of improvements. For example, a safety rail and -lighting had been installed in the Great Shaft stairway. Its original -designers had found those luxuries unnecessary, and, over the centuries, -a few visitors had plunged to death or injury. Lighting had also been -installed in all tunnels and buildings, as well as outdoor paths. -Previously, the shaft had been illuminated only by daylight filtering -down from above, and tunnels could be navigated only by groping along or -by use of flashlights carried by visitors. - -Now, cameras were mounted -everywhere, and the kitchen in the main house had been turned over to a -monitoring centre. A new visitor centre had been erected inside the main -gate, offering souvenirs and fast food. Custodians were deployed at -crucial points to guide visitors. A family of docile goats inhabited the -rockier precipices of the park, and wild ducks and geese were living and -nesting in the lakes. Julius had ensured that the animals and birds were -kept under control and in moderate numbers. - -Many of the visitors these days were more interested in the alien origin -of the place than in the over-the-top architecture and decoration. Huge -numbers made their way to the turnstiles and paid their entry fee just -to feel the alien materials. - -

No-one could clearly remember when the hermit had arrived. -Certainly it was not long before before Julius McRaven purchased Mount -Elysium. Julius -was disturbed to discover that a real hermit had already taken up -residence in the hermitage, a deep cave lined with porcelain -stalactites. Being of a suspicious nature, he had had doubted the man's -motives. However, when it became clear that the elderly, bearded fellow -accepted the rent-free cave in lieu of pay, and was usually present in -his lair when the park was open, absenting himself only on Monday -mornings, Julius now regarded him as a bargain. On Sunday evenings, the -hermit would discard his grey robe, dress in jeans and a checked shirt -and leave the estate, returning on Monday afternoon. - -The hermit, who called himself Anthony, seldom spoke, and was usually -engrossed in prayer or in his book - a fat volume printed in some -unfamiliar language. Visitors were encouraged to leave offerings of food -on a shelf near the cave entrance. - -When spoken to, if Anthony responded at all, he paused for some seconds -before replying, often with some entirely oblique statement. His accent -was unfamiliar. Inevitably, unpleasant people, rowdy youths or -exhibitionists, sometimes tried to disturb the hermit's serenity. When -their advances became impossible to ignore, the old man would rise to -his full considerable height and roar incoherently at his tormentors -until they dispersed or a security guard appeared to restore order. - -Julius was no fool. Most visitors and staff paid little attention to the -hermit, but Julius had not become rich by ignoring detail. Studying -Anthony closely, he had realised that Anthony was not one person, but -two, each taking one-week shifts in turn. The amorphous robe and heavy -beard hid the detail of the men's appearance, and one taciturn hermit -was very like another. Julius had kept this revelation to himself so -far. - -One of the results of the recent examination of the CCTV footage was the -discovery that, after the gates were closed, Anthony would sort through -the edible offerings, consigning some of them to a wastebasket, some to -the goats and wilfowl, tucking the others into his robes, and would move -around the house and estate for a while before returning to his cave, -presumably to eat and sleep. Sometimes, after dark, a faint glow came -from the inner recesses of the cave, indicating that Anthony had some -private source of illumination. - -Julius now wondered if the hermit or hermits were connected with the -recent events. - -

Julius had good reason to be worried. In addition to the -reported disappearances, one night watchman had also failed to turn up -for work one day without warning. The man was a solitary widower, and -his absence had apparently gone unremarked, except by Julius himself and -the assistant who dealt with the payroll. - -The police only had two days' worth of CCTV. Julius, while delaying the -police, had examined whole weeks, and the surprising discovery was that, -in addition to the reported disappearances and the night watchman, a few -other visitors occasionally entered the labyrinth and did not reappear, -perhaps one a week. What's more, a similar number appeared from the -labyrinth who had not been seen on the CCTV to enter it. He told no-one. -Who would have believed it? - -McRaven ordered a thorough search of the maze. Since it was the daily -duty of a night custodian to traverse the entire labyrinth after -closing, in case of lost explorers, Julius did not expect any corpses to -be revealed. The thorough search, using strong flashlights, was made on -the basis that there might be an unmapped exit. 'Unmapped' because -Thoroughgood and his alien co-restorers had prepared a detailed -holographic plan of the whole estate on which every room, hall, tunnel, -path, tile, panel and door could be displayed in mid-air and could be -inspected at any level of detail. The device which projected this plan -was of alien manufacture, and was housed in Julius' office. - -Taking the estate as a whole, a few discrepancies had been discovered, -mostly of the 'inaccessible room' variety, where a doorway or hidden -panel had been accidentally omitted from the holographic plan, -had not been implemented in the aliens' recreation, -and had to be opened up by local workmen on discovery. Thoroughgood -had documented all the updates made. None of -these irregularities had concerned the labyrinth, but the possibility -could no longer be ignored. - -

As originally designed in the 1800s, the maze was not -illuminated. Visitors were expected to carry a lantern. Julius had -installed strings of LEDs along the ceiling of every passageway, so that -a flashlight was no longer essential, but the LEDs gave so little light -that, although sufficient to guide an explorer, the walls of the maze -were still not well lit. This was why the detailed inspection was -carried out using -powerful flashlights. Although the maze was on three levels, there were -no steps, level changes taking place via ramps. There was a specific -entry and a specific exit. However, in practice, the labyrinth could be -traversed in either sequence. On paper, it was not particularly complex, -but once inside, the featurelessness of the walls and the lack of -visible cues as to orientation made it very confusing. -

- -

-No anomalies were discovered, no unmapped passages, no mysterious fault -lines on the wall to indicate a secret panel, nothing to explain the -disappearances at all. On the top level, there was a one metre square -groove on the floor with the word 'CENTRE' engraved on it, indicating to -any explorer that they had reached the halfway point in the maze. -Interest concentrated on that area, but without result. - -Julius, knowing that people sometimes left the maze who had not -apparently entering it, even considered the possibility that each -disappearance was matched by an appearance, theorising that a change of -clothes might suffice to conceal a transformation. Again, he could find -nothing in the CCTV records to support that. The incidents of unmatched -entry and exit were, of course, very rare, and never occurred on the -same day. - -

Inspector Gordon announced that he intended to enact his -search warrant on the next day. He had obviously discovered that the -labyrinth was the likely nexus of disappearances, as he warned that it -would be closed to the public until his search was complete. - -It was time, decided Julius, to interrogate the hermits. He approached -the hermit's cave just as some tourists were leaving. He entered and -brushed past the old man, making for the deeper recesses of the cave. -The hermit stood up and started to bellow, but Julius snapped: "Shut -up, man. Don't you recognise me? We need to talk." - -Anthony shrugged and followed him, saying nothing. - -Julius sat down on a shelf of rock, and said: "Sit!" - -Anthony sat. - -"Now, I don't know what you and your colleagues are up to. As far as I -am concerned, you are an attraction in my park, and cheap labour. -However, I think you have your own agenda, and if you don't let me know -what it is, I'll chuck you out." - -Long pause. Then: "I'd have to talk to the chief." - -"I take it you don't refer to Jehovah." - -"No. I'm authorised to admit that I'm a UN employee, but that's it." - -"His number." - -"What?" - -"Your chief's telephone number, please." - -"I can call him now." - -"Do so." - -Half an hour later, Colonel Parker of the UN Alien Affairs Commission -was sitting in the grandeur of Julius's office. - -"OK," said Parker, "I take it this is about the missing persons." - -"Yes. But first of all, I want to know what the -". He consulted the -Colonel's pale blue ID card "- the UNAAC is doing in my park." - -Parker cleared his throat. "We are just keeping a discreet watching -brief. We do it for all substantial alien artifacts on Earth. Of which -there are a considerable number now. We are on -the alert for strange events, and we've seen one or two, I can tell you. -Now, about these disappearances." - -"They are not supposed to be public knowledge." - -"People talk. We listen." - -"OK. Your guys have been keeping an eye on things. What are they telling -you?" - -"'Guys'? You spotted the multiple Anthonys." - -"I did." - -"OK. We think it is probably to do with that maze. Some kind -of matter-transmitter trick. But the Anthonys can't -figure it out. At night, they've been round the place with portable echo -sounders and matter-penetrating radar." - -"I've seen them creeping around. By the way, do you need our CCTV -records?" - -Parker chuckled. "We've been tapped into your CCTV since day one. We -made sure you'd pick our contractor by pricing it at a loss. You notice -anything else?" - -Julius hesitated for a moment before saying: "Appearances?" - -"You've been paying attention, haven't you? It's been happening at other -locations where the Altairians have -established publicly accessible buildings. There's the new NASA training -school they set up in Florida, the replacement community centre in China -where that piece of their hardware accidentally fell out of orbit and -killed about fifty old folk, and the seawater desalination plant they -donated to Chile for no obvious reason. And wherever they can donate a -building without arousing suspicion. We think they have some -mechanism for extracting people from these places. And returning them." - -"Have you managed to find anyone who reappeared?" - -"A few. They are all under surveillance. They don't seem to be -doing anything out of the ordinary. Mostly, the returnees are very -discreet, but one in -particular had been reported missing, and there was a fuss when he came -back. He was one of the early missing persons. It took two years for him -to come back. He claimed to have no memory of his time away. And there's -just one more thing." - -"Yes?" - -"The guy who came back was not the guy who vanished. Either that, or he -was actually younger than he was when he disappeared. And Einstein says -that's impossible." - -"How can you tell?" - -"Because just before he vanished he broke his arm in an accident. We had -the X-Rays. When he came back there was no sign of any break. And that's -impossible too." - -"So you think..." - -"I think they're infiltrating spies among us. The Altairians." - -"So where are we? What do I tell people?" - -"Face it. If you come out with all this, you'll be regarded as a total screwball. -I'm talking to you because you've found out so much by yourself. You -should act as -mystified as everyone is. Another reason I'm telling you is so -you don't -kick out my Anthonys." - -"Am I supposed to tell Inspector Gordon all this? They're doing a search -tomorrow." - -"That's yet another reason I'm taking you into my confidence. Say -nothing. -He'll go through the motions, but he won't give you much more trouble. -He'll probably decide there's stuff missing from your CCTV record. He's -under -pressure from his superiors to look active." - -"I see. He's one of yours, is he?" - -"Quite the opposite. He's one of theirs. A returnee. How old do you think -he looks?" - -"About fifty." - -"Inspector Gordon retired from the Hong Kong police about fifteen years -ago. Aged fifty. He dropped out of sight a couple of months later. We think -he arrived in this area shortly after your estate was rebuilt. Just keep -a lid on this, is all we ask. I know it'll be -hard for someone as smart as you, but just act dumb, OK? Besides, we -may have to move against you if we can't trust you." - -"Got it. A drop of fifteen-year old Laphroaig, Colonel?" - -"Don't mind if I do, Mr McRaven." - -© Gil Williamson 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] shaft.jpg - - -[*ITEM] Death plus One - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] "Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when -it -comes."
John Donne - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I followed Three Witches down the side -street, keeping to the shadows. It was one of those damp nights where -street lighting served merely to define the darkness rather than provide -illumination - which suited me just fine. They disappeared into the side -entrance of the Cologne Club and as the door opened I caught a brief -burst of the Halloween revels within. Franco Jacoby ran all the major -nightclub action in the Lower East Side and his seasonal-themed parties -were legendary. Tonight, for whatever reason, he�d gone for armed -security over his regular door-minder muscle, contracting out the deal -via a range of intermediaries. So there I was; armed and definitely -dangerous, in fancy dress.

A black cat paused in the process of -crossing my path to give me the full hiss-and-glare treatment. Some wise -sage once said cats can see what lies behind your eyes, so felines -really have a downer on me - but I�m used to it by now. It stood its -ground so I ducked under a ladder propped against the side of Dobson�s -Depository, knowing it wouldn�t follow. You may think all this comes -under the heading of �Old Wives Tales� but, trust me, it all depends on -which old wife you listen to.

- -

The young woman on the door looked tasty; all ankle-length coat, -cropped black hair and inset mirrored shades. Light -rain made her black leather shimmer like liquid glass under the neon -�CC� sign. I recognised her as Amy Chandler � but then again, I know -everyone.

- -

Amy stiffened as I stepped into a pool of light, so I slid back my -hood to give her a clear look at my face. Her stance relaxed slightly -and she laughed. �Stevens? I heard you were dead. I know you can never -have too much firepower but this is getting ridiculous.� She eyed my -hoodie and cargo pants, shaking her head, �What have you come as anyway? -A modern take on Little Jack Horner?�

- -

I held my arms out at shoulder height and gave her a slow pirouette. -�Justin Timberlake, actually. In full-blown slasher movie mode, -circa Cry Me A River. Anyway, you�re one to talk with this whole Matrix -thing you�ve got going.�

- -

Amy came over all mock-huffy. �It�s a William Gibson homage, -actually. You know, Molly from Neuromancer?�

- -

�Whatever. Look, doll, who else is in on this? The details I have are -a bit sketchy and they said you�d fill me in. All I know is it�s a -bodyguard gig.�

- -

�Well, more a kind of private army. We�ve got Suzy-Sue and Grumman -round front, Bain and Akira inside as close protection.�

- -

�Christ, that�s some serious talent! Who�s this guy afraid of? -Godzilla?�

- -

Amy pursed her lips. �Death.�

- -

I blinked. Twice. �Excuse me?�

- -

�Franco Jacoby thinks there�s someone coming to kill him, and they�re -gonna� come dressed as Death.�

- -

I shook my head. �So why not just cancel the party? A refund has to -work out cheaper than hiring our little band of desperados.�

- -

She shook her head. �Naw, it�s a machismo thing. Nobody tries to -muscle-in on Jacoby �cos he�s our own little Keyser Soze - a real shark -amongst sharks. No way can he afford to appear scared or it would be -like blood in the water. Luckily for us he�s paranoid about being -betrayed by a member of his own crew, so we got the gig.�

- -

�But why just tonight? If there�s a contract out then I don�t see how -delaying the hit for a few hours will matter any.�

- -

Amy frowned. �To tell you the truth this whole thing may be a -complete waste of time. Apparently Jacoby gets like this every -Halloween, like it�s some kind of family ritual. Talk about inherited -superstition, his father must have been a real weirdo.�

- -

I wiped slick rain from my face. �So what you�re telling me, and feel -free to jump right in anytime if I�ve gotten hold of the wrong end of -the stick, is that we�re standing here to stop an imaginary assassin -killing a vicious crime lord who�s jumping at shadows?�

- -

She nodded. �Pretty much. To tell you the truth, Stevens, Jacoby must -be off his head. If he didn�t have such a reputation I�d have stayed at -home in front of the TV. As it stands he�s not someone I want to piss -off.�

- -

I took up position beside her. �No lie.� She fished a spare earpiece -and lapel microphone from her coat and handed them over. Just as well I -had lapels. I plugged in and squeezed the mic to open the channel. -�Radio check. You all hearing me?� Amy nodded.

- -

�Stevens, you little shit, that really you? Heard you was lying -low for the foreseeable. Heard you had a serious beef with Danny O for -screwing his kid sister.�

- -

I recognised the gravel-throated growl of Donald Bain (who never got -the joke). �I love you too, Don. Let�s just say me and Danny came to a -resolution he�s happy with.�

- -

Suzy-Sue laughed. �If this means wedding bells then I just got to -be there. Your side of the church will be packing more firepower than -Omaha Beach.�

- -

�Enough already! Everyone get back on the clock.� That was -Grumman. The guy must be fifty if he�s a day and always comes over like -he�s in charge whenever gunmen get together.

- -

Amy arched an eyebrow, which made her wince. �You making an honest -woman of Tina O'Shaughnessy, Tony? Say it ain�t so.�

- -

I shrugged and had the good grace to look semi-uncomfortable. �It�s -not what you think.�

- -

�It never is.� She smiled and shifted her stance slightly. Her foot -brushed against a small bag I hadn�t noticed before, producing the soft -clink of glass.

- -

�Boozing on the job, Amy? Or when we knock-off don�t you fancy paying -bar prices inside?�

- -

She glanced down. �Naw, it�s a broken mirror. Didn�t you get one -through the mail from Jacoby? The rest of us did.�

- -

�A broken mirror? What the hell are you on about now?�

- -

�As in seven years bad luck for the poor schmuck who originally broke -it? But luck is like, you know, air � there�s only so much to go around. -So to screw with the intended the mirror has to suck in bad luck from -those in the immediate vicinity. Loads of gamblers and gunmen carry -glass. Don�t you know anything?�

- -

I grinned and shook my head. �Apparently not. Well, our Franco sounds -like he�s a few aces short of a pack.�

- -

Amy snorted. �Yeah, well, you can laugh but there�s a space reserved -for us in Fresh Kills if we fuck this up, so I for one will take any -help going.�

- -

�I hear ya, doll, I hear ya. But ending up as Staten Island landfill -wasn�t what I had in mind for this body, if it�s all the same to -you.�

- -

We stood like mismatched statues on either side of the entrance to a -particular tatty tomb. As nothing was happening in the street I took a -quick look around. �Why is there a line of white powder across the -doorway?�

- -

�Salt. There�s a shaker in the corner should we need to re-establish -the barrier if it gets scuffed.�

- -

�Huh?�

- -

�You know, its proof against, against�� Her voice trailed away in -obvious embarrassment, �It was on the sheet.�

- -

�Along with the broken mirror that I didn�t get?�

- -

�Screw you.�

- -

An awkward silence descended. We stood. I cleared my throat. �Those -mirror shades, they stuck on?�

- -

She sounded relieved to discuss something other than our situation. -�Yeah, not my best idea. They itch like a bitch.�

- -

There was another silence. The rain continued to fall. I hitched up -my pants as the twin .38 revolvers in the thigh pockets were hanging -heavy. A dispute broke out amongst some crows nesting in the Depository -clock tower. Maybe they were jumping about on the mechanism but it -suddenly chimed once, although everyone knew it got busted years ago. -The domestic spilled out in a flurry of wings and bad-tempered cawing. A -cluster of six crows swept down and along the street, passing close -enough I could have reached out and snagged one. The avian shouting -match faded away into the gloom.

- -

Amy fished something out of her coat pocket and started fiddling with -it. She looked twitchy. �Six crows. That�s bad luck. Means someone is -for the chop.�

- -

I laughed. �Only if we do our job right. What is that you�ve -got anyway?�

- -

�An acorn. Brings good luck.�

- -

�Say what? You�re not superstitious.�

- -

�Tonight I am.� She crammed the nut back into her pocket. �Just leave -it, OK?�

- -

We stood some more. Way in the distance a dog howled. I got bored. -For something to do I turned and checked the guest list on a clipboard -hanging inside the recessed doorway. �Amy, you looked at this?�

- -

�Not as such. It�s only for those who turn up without tickets, and -they generally make a grand entrance round front.� A wary note crept -into her voice. �Why?�

- -

�Its here, right down at the bottom - �Death plus one�. A -hand-written addition.�

- -

Amy licked her lips in what I knew to be an uncharacteristic display -of nervousness. �Bullshit. Is this your idea of a joke?�

- -

I held out the clipboard. �See for yourself.�

- -

She leaned forward. �It�s still bullshit. I�m telling ya, Tony, -Jacoby is loony-tunes paranoid tonight and the club is like Fort Knox. -Every window has been bricked up, every chimney sealed. The only way in -is through one of us.�

- -

Movement further down the street caught my attention. I pointed, she -looked. There were two figures approaching, briefly illuminated by each -street light as they walked towards us. One looked like a tall dude, -basketball tall, in a long robe with cowl, face hidden, carrying a -scythe over his shoulder. Beside him was a pale-skinned girl in a -blood-soaked wedding dress, her throat slashed wide open.

- -

Amy shook her head. �Death and The Maiden? You have got to be -kidding me.�

- -

As we watched the couple paused briefly then The Maiden headed off -down an alleyway in the direction of Regency. Death watched her go then -started towards us again. It was just an optical illusion but it looked -like the rain parted and fell either side of the scythe blade, as if it -were keen enough to cleave the very air itself.

- -

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. �Okey-dokey. Let�s not get -ahead of ourselves here. Say she�s gone to score an ATM or liquor store -while he heads inside to get in line for the buffet. Hell, they might -not even be guests at this particular party.�

- -

�You really think that, Tony? Really?� My partner squared her -shoulders. �I say we take no chances. I say we off him, no questions -asked.�

- -

�No way. This has to be a guest.�

- -

�Yes way, bro. Jacoby holds this party every Halloween, never missed -a year since ever, and the invites stipulate absolutely no Death -costumes. Anything else you might fancy, but not that.�

- -

�Shit, you can�t just kill someone for not reading the small print. -Anyway, I figure this dude is on the guest list.� I tossed the -clipboard aside and stepped out in front of the Grim Reaper, hands -raised. �Excuse me, pal, but-�

- -

The scythe went one way, a glittering distraction, Death another. He -spun, robes flying wide, and kicked me in the chest. A solid hit, one -that sent me sprawling on my back, hands clawing at the thigh pockets of -my cargo pants. He leapt into the air, paused in a slo-mo moment, and -came down - his heel aimed at my throat.

- -

I tore both .38�s free and started firing, nailing him multiple times -in the chest. The impacts seemed to dissipate his momentum and he -dropped short, landing at my feet, taking hit after hit without -reaction.

- -

Both my revolvers clicked empty.

- -

Death shook himself and a cluster of spent rounds dropped to the -ground. He laughed; not a dry-as-dust cackle, but a rich, basso profundo -chuckle that somehow sounded more unsettling. I scrabbled in the dirt, -trying to push myself away, but my shoulders came up against a wheeled -trash bin and I was trapped. He towered over me, the very picture of -inhuman fatality.

- -

�Hey, dickhead.� Amy sounded wired, brittle, high on violence.

- -

He half turned towards the voice.

- -

�Eat this!�

- -

A shotgun roared, real loud in the narrow street, echoing off the -walls. Death took it full in the face. His cowl vanished in a blizzard -of shredded cloth and blood. He fell back in a bloody sprawl and lay -still.

- -

My saviour stepped up, her long coat now flapping open, holding a -pump-action Mossberg 500 with pistol grip. Amy kept the prone figure -covered while I got to my feet and peered down at what remained of the -body. I frowned. �He had a face? How can Death have a face? Isn�t he -supposed to be, you know, just bones?�

- -

Amy shrugged. �Beats me, bro. Here, hold this while I finish things -off.� She tossed me the shotgun which I managed to catch and not drop. -Fishing inside her vest top she produced a big medallion, with five -spiky corners, slipping the chain over her head.

- -

I laughed, sounding nervous. �Didn�t know you were into that kind of -mojo, doll.�

- -

She crouched down and started scratching out a pentagram around the -body, the medallion leaving deep lines in the tarmac. �Doesn�t matter -what I believe, bro. According to our employer this will keep him safe -for another year and I�m not going to argue.�

- -

I kept watch while she shuffled around the body, completing the -occult symbol. None of the other hired help came to our aid and I didn�t -expect them to. They�d keep station in case the gunfire was just a -diversion. The club soundproofing was primo so the revellers would be -none the wiser about our little fracas.

- -

Amy sat back on her haunches. �There, done. Now I place this -whatever-it-is on his chest and we can make tracks. Don�t sweat about -the police showing up, Jacoby has paid them to stay well away tonight.� -She tossed the medallion onto the corpse which landed with a metallic -click.

- -

We looked at each other. I shrugged. She frowned and reached forward -to move a fold of robe aside. �Body armour? What the hell does Death -need with body armour?�

- -

I chambered another round, the rak-rak sounding harsh - and -final. Amy jumped to her feet, hand clawing for the Glock on her hip, -and I shot her square in the chest. The short-range impact spun her -around before she collapsed in an ungainly heap.

- -

There was a silence as if the world held its breath.

- -

Franco Jacoby was seriously twisted, and then some. Every Halloween -he took out an anonymous contract on himself, stipulating it had -to take place at the Cologne Club. You pay enough money and even a -hardened killer will wear a pink tutu and whistle �Dixie� while blowing -someone away.

- -

Or in this case, turn up dressed like the Grim Reaper, complete with -scythe.

- -

The hit man had to have a proven track record; he had to be someone -who�d killed multiple times before. Same went for the bodyguards Jacoby -hired � all people on first-name terms with Death. Every Halloween -someone died, and every Halloween a clean-up crew made it like nothing -happened.

- -

This year, though, was different. Jacoby�s daughter had just turned -21 and now needed �protection� as well. Well, that�s what her father -believed and you can�t argue with a sick mind. So I was the ringer -brought in to ensure that two corpses ended up in the pentagram, -by any means necessary.

- -

I heard high-heels and turned to face The Maiden � a.k.a. the love of -my life, Tina O'Shaughnessy. She stared at the faceless Death for a -moment, then spat on the corpse. �Bastard. I hope you rot in Hell, -Danny.�

- -

As epitaphs go maybe her brother deserved better, but I�ve -learned never to get between family. Except, of course, on this occasion -I had; Danny O had a downer on me and Tina from the get-go, end of -story. I couldn�t do nothing as he was a Made Man with the Scharlach -family - and even if we�d just skipped town it wouldn�t have ended -there.

- -

So I got him the Jacoby gig, moonlighting as Death, with Amy as -the designated target. Now, OK, I�d planned to pop him once he dropped -her, but his double-cross still hurt, man. Seriously. It�s a sad -reflection on society when you can�t trust a hired killer.

- -

I pressed my lapel mic. �Splash one Zero�and one friendly. We�re -clear.� Nobody answered; everybody knew the risks that came with a gig -like this. I handed Tina the shotgun. �This won�t take a minute, doll, -then we�re free and clear.�

- -

Tina had grown up in the life and this wasn�t her first multiple -murder. She chambered a fresh round and stood, hand on hip, as I dragged -Amy on top of the other body. From an inside pocket I took a hip flask -and poured the contents onto the scored tarmac. It flowed more like -thick oil than regular booze and smelled like cinnamon. Jacoby had -supplied it and no way was I taking a sip to find out if it was actually -alcoholic. It took almost a minute to mark out the pentagram with lines -that shimmered like quicksilver under the halogen streetlight.

- -

I stepped back, fished out a book of matches, struck one and -tossed it. Pale blue flames flared up, burned for less than five -seconds, and were gone like someone turned the gas off. I stood back and -wiped rain from my face.

- -

Tina sniffed. �We cool?�

- -

�We�re cool. Some unknown guy shows up and gets the drop on Amy. -I open fire but he�s wearing body armour, the real deal. But the impacts -make him stagger back, he drops the shotgun. I get to it first -and��

- -

�Goodnight, Vienna.� She nodded. �You never saw his face, you -never realised who it was.�

- -

I grinned. �Nope. No idea.�

- -

She kissed me, careful not to get fake blood on my clothes, and -handed back the Mossberg. �Call me.�

- -

I watched as she faded into the shadows; trying for a bit of -bump-and-grind but she doesn�t have the hips for it. Then I switched the -microphone to channel 2. �Mister Jacoby? This is Stevens. You can send -in that clean-up crew anytime now.�

- -

A rasping drawl. �It�s done? Two bodies?�

- -

�Yes, sir-� The Depository bell tolled twice, making me pause. I -cleared my throat.

- -

�Death plus one.�

- - - -© Martin M. Clark 2017 All Rights Reserved
-Header image includes image data from -http://sniper6-3dproductiondesign.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/hooded-character.html - - -[*IMAGE] deathplus.jpg - -[*ITEM] Field Support - -[*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - -[*BLURB] Microsoft ® SpaceExplorer ™
- -[*DESCRIPTION] - - -

-© Liam Baldwin 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - - - - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - -I found your first sentence a little -convoluted. I've paraphrased it, but you're at liberty to -rephrase my paraphrase. Ed. - - -"Omnes eodem cogimur," -Quintus Horatius Flaccus -
"unde negant redire quemquam" Gaius Valerius Catullus - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev20.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev20.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index 55c39ff4..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev20.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3398 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 20 - August 2017 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 20th issue of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Thank you to all contributors, and welcome -to the August 2017 issue of Mythaxis. - -It is a continuing delight to me that original stories still appear in -my in-tray. - -Each issue gets about 3000 unique visitors, who make an average of two -visits, and each visitor looks at an average of six stories. - -Authors first published in Mythaxis have gone on to be published -elsewhere. If you like the stories in Mythaxis, make sure to tell your -friends and social media, and extend the readership. - -I have been reviewing my sf library lately, and I am struck by the fact -that many of the 1950s pioneers of science fiction are now almost -forgotten. Alfred Bester, James Blish, Eric Frank Russell, Damon Knight, -Henry Kuttner, Pohl and Kornbluth, Poul Anderson, Roger Zelazny, to name -but a few. I recently re-read Zelazny's Lord of Light - a -dazzlingly original novel, somewhat eclipsed these days by his Courts of -Chaos series, which, however entertaining, pales by comparison. -And then there is Bester's Tiger, Tiger and Blish's Cities in -Space series. - -Happily, we still have my favourites - William Gibson and Bruce -Sterling. David Mitchell hovers as a bridge between mainstream and -fantasy, as does Nick Harkaway. I much mourn the demise at the age -of just fifty-nine of Iain M Banks, but his oeuvre deserves a re-read. -Within the last year, I've read Matter, Player of Games -and Consider Phlebas. - -So, it is to be hoped that the next decade's author is lurking in the -(HTML) pages of Mythaxis. I certainly feel there is considerable talent -here. Read on, and enjoy. - -(The heading picture is not in fact a volcanic eruption, but the -daily magic of sunrise over the mountains of Crete, taken from -Koutouloufari.) - -© Gil Williamson 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] mythaxis20.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Padratheleon�s Ghosts - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "You can have too much minimalism, you know"
Gil -Williamson - -[*DESCRIPTION]

�He still looks crabby.�

- -

�Brawk from Research says that�s one of his three natural -expressions: basically, preoccupied, sullen and unconvinced. According -to Brawk it�s difficult to distinguish one from the others.�

- -

�These quizzicists are trained to be sceptical, I suppose.�

- -

�He usually avoids interviews. I wonder what made him agree to this -one.�

- -

�You mean apart from Tessany�s charm and good looks?�

- -

�And considerable skill. You have to admit she�s damn good at her -job.�

- -

�I know. I see the ratings. She�s irreplaceable.�

- -

�Let�s hope she can get him to explain� hang on, I think Twilene�s -finished with him. We�re about to go live.�

- -

Twilene Moach from Cosmetics had indeed completed her emollient -ministrations and had

- -

packed away her array of brushes and powders, leaving her latest -subject looking, under her expert camouflage, unthreateningly stoical. -

- -

Tessany Flume flashed him a reassuring smile, and turned to the -quietly hovering camera.

- -

�Hello again. Well, I hope you all enjoyed as much as I did those -nostalgic tales of the stage from Trafford Croles. I�m Tessany Flume, -and I�m delighted to introduce as my next guest this evening a -distinguished scientist, a quizzicist greatly respected by his peers, -but by the very nature of his work, perhaps less well-known to you at -home: Professor Sivid Padratheleon. Welcome, Professor, and thank you -for joining me on �Tessa�s Guests�.�

- -

�Pleased to be here,� murmured Padratheleon, as sincerely as his -temperament would allow.

- -

�Now, a few background details for our viewers. You are currently the -Heliard Professor of Theoretical Quizzics at Platport University. And -your wife Preen, also a mathematician, has turned to sculpture�?

- -

�She constructs intersecting lattices, yes.�

- -

The muscles around his mouth flexed into what may have been smile, -but it was not easy to tell whether he regarded this arcane pursuit with -secret pride, or even approval.

- -

�And I believe your daughter is a choreographer?�

- -

�She dances, yes.�

- -

Sensing that he was growing impatient, Tessany Flume decided to move -on swiftly.

- -

�I�m told that you have formulated a theory which you say is of major -importance to our understanding of the universe.�

- -

�That is corrrect.�

- -

�And if I might paraphrase one of your colleagues, this theory is so� -bold and innovative that it opens up a totally new area of science.�

- -

�Indeed so.�

- -

�Would it be possible, Professor, for the benefit of those of us less -familiar with advanced mathematics, for you to give us an insight into -your thinking, in terms that the general public might understand?�

- -

�Probably not.�

- -

�But Pr...�

- -

�But I will try.� The craggy face contrived to display tolerant -amusement, without conspicuous success.

- -

�Quizzicists are concerned with the nature and properties of matter -and energy. Significant advances in our understanding occur as the -result of a process of continuous questioning, which of course is why -the subject is known as Quizzics. Keeping an open mind is not easy. It -is a facility too often lost after childhood, and particularly difficult -to recover once we have been indoctrinated with a traditionally -piecemeal system of knowledge. However, as a theoretician I have found -it more pertinent to question our basic assumptions, rather than -squabble over additions to a structure whose foundations we have only -assumed to be unshakable.�

- -

Tessany Flume knew better than to interrupt a guest in full flow.

- -

�There are limits to what we can observe, even though we have devised -increasingly sensitive instruments to extend the reach of our senses, -but mathematics provides us with tools that can transcend these limits, -exploring regions which would otherwise be inaccessible. I am speaking -here of the very stuff of which the universe is composed. My equations -indicate the existence of a set of unimaginably small.� what for the -sake of simplicity I shall describe as particles, which bind and -permeate everything.�

- -

�That�s extraordinary, Professor. You say unimaginably small. -Does that mean there would be no way of actually confirming the -existence of these.. particles, other than mathematically?�

- -

�I am not an engineer. It may be possible in future to develop some -kind of sophisticated apparatus by means of which one or more of the set -of �particles� may be detected, most likely by inference, provided that -sufficiently controlled conditions could be achieved. They exist on a -scale and in a realm utterly invisible to us, ghostly presences -underpinning the whole of our reality. Of all fields of scientific study -I think this must qualify as the most fundamental.�

- -

�Then may I ask you, as the pioneer in this field, what we are to -call it?�

- -

�You may call it whatever you wish, Miss Flume.�

- -

�That�s commendably modest of you, Professor, but surely such a major -advance deserves to be given a name by its discoverer.�

- -

He frowned, considering the implications of letting others � perhaps -ill-informed detractors, suggest something flippant or totally -inappropriate. The corners of Professor Padratheleon�s mouth again -twitched imperceptibly.

- -

�Well, until my conjectures can be verifed experimentally��

- -

Padrathelion closed his eyes, focussing on the equations which drove -his haunting subatomic vision of an infinite seething field of what, -from a certain perspective, might seem to be intersecting lattices.

- -

�I suppose it would have to be �Phantom Quizzics�.�

- -© Les Sklaroff 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] quizzics.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] The Drill Hall Incident - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] �The unassuming youth seeking instruction with humility -gains good fortune.�
I Ching - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Matt Davidson had lived in Edinburgh for -most of his adult life; he had walked past the Drill Hall's -unprepossessing entry a hundred times. It was a short, dark, lane -running between tenement buildings, paved with the grey cobbles that -still abounded in many run-down corners of the city. -The lane was just wide enough for a single large vehicle. Scrapes on -the walls of the lane indicated that it had proved too narrow for some. -Matt entered the lane, automatically noting the smells of used beer, -urine and vomit which such a Saturday night haven inevitably attracted. -The lane ended a few metres in, at a huge double door in a featureless -wall. A wicket gate and a new entry phone were set into the right hand -double door.

�Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before -a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish in the -crowd.�
I Ching
- -Now, having checked the address in his iPda and read the tiny notice on -the door's flaking green paint, he pressed the bell push on the entry -speaker. The speaker hummed for a second, and Matt drew breath to -announce himself, only to be interrupted by an impatient voice saying: -"It's open!". - -The "Drill Hall" wasn't so much a building as a contained space, a -tapered quadrilateral about half the area of a football field. -White-painted brick walls without windows rose to an impressive height. -Around the perimeter were iron columns, patterned after the classical -style, sprouting at their capitals a remarkably intricate tracery of -iron frames, the support for a domed glass roof. Most of the panes were -the original glass, totally obscured by the soot of decades of -Edinburgh smoke. Students of Victorian railway stations would recognise -the architectural style. Fluorescent strip lights dangled from cables -strung across the width of the building. In the centre of the hall -lurked a jumble of heavy machinery. - -A lean middle-aged man with a couple of day's growth of beard was -walking towards him. "Calvin Yelland," he said. "You'll be Davidson." - -"Yes, Professor." They shook hands. Yelland's was wrinkled, cold, dry. - -"Graduate Research Assistant Matthew Davidson," said Yelland, with the -unfocussed look of one quoting from a remembered document, "Four years -of university, resulting in an impressive degree in Oriental Studies. -Hardly ideal for an pioneering physics project in a cold laboratory, one -might think, and a strange decision from you, I dare say, but we -want a non-scientist for a change, while you, according to your -application, want something completely different. Welcome to the -fridge." - -Matt couldn't be sure whether Yelland's sour expression was for himself -or for the building. "I... Er... Unusual location." - -"We're lucky to have it. Lots of room, but it isn't ideal, either. -Damned cold, roof leaks, and it was full of junk you wouldn't believe -when we got here, but no rats at least. They probably have more sense. -Belongs to the University." - -"Really?" - -"Oh, yes," Yelland's gaze became distracted again as he appeared to -visualise another remembered document. "Originally built in the late -1800s as an off-site lecture hall, but it has hopelessly echoing -acoustics and was only used for one semester. The Natural Philosophy -department has sporadically rented it out since 1890. It's been used as -a church hall by various religions and denominations, as a museum -warehouse, a dance hall, a variety theatre, a stable for the Co-op draft -horses in the 1930s - hence the faint dung heap aroma - a cinema, and, -during World War 2, as the HQ of a Royal Signals regiment. That's when -it was first called 'The Drill Hall'. Most recently it's been an indoor -karting track - hence the lingering air of petrol fumes and burnt -rubber - a five-a-side football court, and a karate studio. I gather -that in none of its many r�les has it proved ideal." - -"I see. Cold, though, as you say." - -"It's heated, to an extent, by these massive iron radiators, powered by -an oil-fired furnace that seems have been salvaged from a scrapped ocean -liner. But the volume of the building and the single-glazed glass roof -means that it never feels anything but desperately cold unless you're -actually leaning on a radiator... " His manner cheered a little, "No -need for air conditioning, though, even in summer. One of the previous -tenants built a few hutches for offices around half a dozen radiators at -the back. They're warmer. Come." - -

Two offices were busy with several young men debating -equations on whiteboards, another with two older men in overalls -surrounded by racks of equipment. Two offices appeared to be filled with -machine tools. Yelland and Matt entered a near-vacant office, which was -only half full of equipment, leaving room for a desk and a couple of -chairs. - -"You know what we're doing here," said Yelland, but with a question in -his voice. - -"I gather it's some kind of physics research. Eh, quantum something. -Black holes. 'Exotic', the notification said." - -"Hmm..." Yelland almost smiled. "Refreshing to speak to someone who -isn't either totally convinced or thoroughly sceptical. Yes, it's -original research. Wormholes in multi-dimensional space. The future of -faster-than-light space exploration, time travel and other science -fictional dreams. Look up the Wikipedia article on wormholes. Let me -know if you understand it. - -"It is not widely known," Yelland continued, "that, last year, using an -amazing amount of energy, a research team at Caltech created a wormhole -a few millimetres in width and about a metre in length. Nevertheless, -this tiny hole nearly killed the researchers and destroyed a laboratory, -because the other end of the wormhole was in the vacuum of space, and -naturally began to suck the air out of the lab. Luckily, the wormhole -closed down, pinched off. They usually do." - -"How was the other end in space if it was only a metre long? This is a -silly question, isn't it?" said Matt. - -"Not really, and the answer may clarify what our problem is here. A -wormhole connects two points in space-time, and we tend to think of -space as regularly structured as we experience it in our lives, but a -wormhole spans space in a totally different fashion. In principle, -looking through a one metre wormhole, you might perceive something that -is half a million miles and a year away in our space-time, and it would -appear to be just one metre away at the other end of the hole. Though, -in reality, a view through a wormhole would necessarily be misleading." - -"And my situation here?" - -"First, there's a lot of reading to do, some mathematics to learn. -Nothing too taxing, and the young Fountain here will help you. But we -need someone to observe what we're doing, and to make sense of it. The -rest of us are too busy with the technology. There's a PhD in it for you -if you make a success of it. You see, I've read some of your essays on -oriental culture, beliefs and customs, and you have a proven and rare -ability clearly to communicate alien ideas, such as Zen, Confucianism -and the Book of Changes, for example, to readers like myself with no -background in the subject. You are to be the eyes, ears and voice of the -project." - -

Matt buried himself in mathematics, from which he -learned little, and read primers on special and general relativity, -which stretched his ability to visualise space and time.

�Perseverance alone does not assure success. No amount of stalking will -lead to game in a field that has none.�
I Ching
- -Every couple of days, the gas turbine would be started, generating, -according to the engineers, enough electricity to supply a small city. -The generator was a bulky green machine which lurked like a giant toad, -as high as a man, against one wall. The Drill Hall briefly warmed up as -the jet exhaust glowed red hot, and the noise was enormous, despite the -fact that the exhaust was directed in a pipe up the wall and outside. -The resulting electric power was directed into the Wormhole Reactor, an -even larger machine shaped ike a cotton reel, basically a fat cylinder -the diameter of a railway tunnel with a one metre hollow space down its -centre. - -On a good day, a sparkling sphere the size of a grape would blink into -existence just inside the hollow for a moment. The entrance, Matt was -told, to a wormhole. A sphere, because it was a three-dimensional hole -in multi-dimensional space-time. These unimpressive phenomena gave -immense satisfaction to the physicists. Matt learned that these -wormholes were the largest, by a factor of a thousand, that had ever -been created anywhere in the world, and that their short flicker -represented a thousand-fold lengthening of their existence, wormholes -being inclined to collapse very quickly. - -And so it continued for some months, the climate in the Drill Hall -gradually softening from arctic to mere terribly cold, and moisture -condensing on metal surfaces so that alarming elecric arcs accompanied -the powering up of the Reactor, snaking around the cylinder until it -heated up. Pools of water accumulated around the bases of the pillars. -Drips from the glass ceiling spattled on the turbine exhaust, causing -little clouds of steam. The tiny spheres appearing in the cylinder were -sometimes larger, often longer-lived, than Matt had originally seen, but -as the project seemed to be in stasis, he began to show signs of -discontent and doubt over his decision to join the project. Only -Yelland, Fountain - one of the young physicists, Gazzer the technician -and Matt himself turned up on a regular basis. - -

Then came the breakthrough. Fountain attempted a -re-formulation of the equations they were using. Yelland and he noisily -disputed the validity of Fountain's idea for days, covering the -whiteboard in symbols, crossings-out and parenthetic notes. Eventually, -in face of the slow progress they had been making, Yelland agreed to -give it a try, despite the fact that it would require a partial rebuild -of the Reactor and re-programming of the cybernetic control -functions.

�When the way comes to an end, then change. Having changed, you pass -through.�
I Ching
- -The scientists and engineers turned out in full force, overnights and -weekends being worked. Yet it took a full six weeks to make the changes. - -In the meantime, excess to requirements, Matt seized the opportunity to -take a two-week vacation in Beijing, studying documents and artifacts he -had previously only known at second hand. He therefore returned to -the -Drill Hall refreshed and enthusiastic. The Wormhole Reactor had -sprouted -a few more bulges and cables, and there were signs of extensive surgery -in a ring around the edge of the outer cylinder. - -For the first three weeks, the remodelled Reactor appeared -totally useless, and not even the little ephemeral spheres appeared. The -other researchers and one of the engineers drifted away from the -project. Yelland spent much of his time moping in his office. - -Then Fountain discovered what he called a 'schoolboy error' in the -cybernetic program. - -At the next test of the new Reactor, the sphere representing the -wormhole entrance was much larger than any previous, and it persisted -until the Reactor was switched off. - -In great excitement, some adjustments were made and the Reactor powered -up again. Matt couldn't follow the details of the activity, but he could -see the glimmering sphere getting bigger at each attempt, and it showed -no sign of collapse while power was applied. - -A few days later, a maximum size appeared to have been reached. The -sphere was by then about the size of a grapefruit. Fountain was -particularly triumphant, Yelland somewhat gratified. Cameras clicked, -measurements were taken. The wormhole entrance glowed. - -

A Monday morning in August, daylight struggling through -the glass roof, and the air tingling with anticipation, the Reactor was -fired up for a serious test run. Serious it might be, yet it was -primitive in its aims.

�The responses of human beings vary greatly under dangerous -circumstances. The strong man advances boldly to meet them head on. The -weak man grows agitated. But the superior man stands up to fate, endures -resolutely in his inner certainty
I Ching
- -Fountain took a wooden ruler and pushed it cautiously at the sphere, -making sure that his fingers stayed outside. The -ruler disappeared into the surface of the sphere, but did not emerge -from the opposite side. He withdrew it carefully. It appeared -intact. -It was a weird sight. The longest piece of wood that could readily be -found was a walking stick. It proved possible to push it into the sphere -so that it disappeared to nearly its full length and to withdraw it -again, unharmed. - -"If it's connected to somewhere distant, why can we not see that distant -place?" Matt asked Yelland, as they contemplated the sphere. - -"Unfortunately," Yelland replied, "the exotic material that lines the -wormhole and keeps it open attracts any photons that come through from -the other side and scatters the image, so it will always be out of -focus." - -"So why don't we send a camera through and record what's there?" - -Yelland stared at him. It was clear he hadn't thought of it. "Anyone got -a smartphone and selfie stick?" he called. - -Gazzer the engineer obliged, but when the camera was withdrawn, the -image was just as blurred as the sphere. - -"C'mon. Any more ideas?" - -"How about sending a cat through?" suggested Fountain. - -"It's a bit tight," said Matt. "We could send a mouse down." - -It took just half an hour to fetch a couple of white mice from the -University's Easter Road pharmaceutical lab. Matt made a little harness -and lead from a length of thin electrical wire. The mouse slipped easily -into the sphere, disappeared and pulled the lead a short distance -further, then stopped for a while, and finally reappeared, apparently -none the worse. - -Emboldened by the mouse's survival, Matt stepped forward and poked a -tentative finger into the sphere. Yelland shouted "Careful! You -could -lose the finger if it collapsed!" - -Matt withdrew the finger. "I expected it to tingle, but it didn't. -Nothing at all, really." He pushed his whole hand in. - -"No, no. Careful!" said Yelland, but he made no move to stop him. - -"How long is this wormhole, anyway?" Matt asked. - -"We don't know exactly," said Fountain, "Could be anything from a few -centimetres to a few light-years. The quantum calculations are typically -non-specific as to their solution." - -"Ok," said Matt, "what say I reach a bit further?" - -"Well..." said Fountain. - -Matt took a deep breath and thrust his hand and forearm deeper. "Feels -smooth, a little above room temperature. I'm twiddling my fingers. Yes, -it's slightly slippery, and quite straight. I can't feel any passage of -air. I'll just..." He withdrew the arm and stripped off his pullover and -shirt. - -"Are you sure?" said Yelland, though it was clear that he and Fountain -were no longer going to dissuade Matt. - -Matt pushed his arm back in, cautiously this time, past the elbow. -"Mmm... No change, it's... Ow!" He jerked and pulled back a bit. The -other -two jumped as well. - -"What?" - -"I felt something. It moved. I'm just trying again. Yes. It's still -there." It feels like... Weird." - -Yelland and Fountain were staring aghast. "Weird? What is it? Metal? -Plastic? -What temperature?" asked Yelland. - -"It's, ah, like... flesh, really." - -"What?" - -
�If one is not extremely careful, Somebody may -come up from behind and -strike him. Misfortune.�
I Ching
-"Yes. Yes. It's a hand, and it's moving again. Just feeling it. It's a -human hand all right! I'm clasping it. Wait. I think it's my -own hand! I'm shaking hands with myself! I'm reaching a little -further. Yes. I can feel my wristwatch, and I can feel the other hand -feeling my watch. It's a loop, isn't it?" - -Stunned silence. Fountain and Yelland looked at each other. - -"Yes, it is," said Yelland. "We must take another look at these -equations. Congratulations, Fountain, I think we've just built the first -multi-dimensional Möbius doughnut." - -© Gil Williamson 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] drillhall.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] The Trumpets of Jericho - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] �We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough -men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"
George Orwell - -[*DESCRIPTION] -

�Burn them!�

- -

I looked up, alerted by the obvious stress in Captain Memphre�s -voice. He stood at the forward view screen, silhouetted against the -blue-green planet, gripping the guard rail so tight his knuckles had -turned white. The south pole of Jetter lay beneath us � a planet home to -some nine-hundred thousand unsuspecting colonists.

- -

Use of the stellar convertor had to be authorised by two senior -officers. However Commander Lutyens was in an induced coma � being -treated for Taig Parasites � and Sub-Commander Devon was on -compassionate leave following the sudden death of his wife. By rights we -should have returned to Cathay Station to take on replacements, but the -Admiralty were keen to see their new toy in action. That left me, a mere -lieutenant, as acting Executive Officer aboard the experimental -terraformer Vulcan.

- -

I was known as a man who obeyed orders, who followed the chain of -command. Without hesitation I moved to the control console and placed my -right palm on the recognition scanner, causing the access panel to -retract. Rotating the revealed T-piece handle through one-eighty degrees -engaged the pre-ignition sequence.

- -

Memphre strode towards me, his voice distorted by fury. �I said burn -them, Keppler! Burn them now!� He slapped his hand down on the -second recognition panel.

- -

�Warning, thermostellar primer system is now operational.�

- -

�Awaiting full power, sir.� I was conscious of the other bridge -personnel staring at me, but no-one said anything. My board went green. -�Capacitors charged. Firing in three, two, one�� I pulled the T-piece -down and pushed home. A cobalt-blue beam lanced from our bow, causing -the view screen to polarize. It seemed to take an eternity as Jetter -wasn�t an ideal target for conversion, but in reality it was less than a -minute. The beam shut down, leaving a black after-image on my -retinas.

- -

�Energisation cycle complete, Captain.�

- -

He made no reply, staring at the pink hue now spreading through the -ionosphere. We had only a few moments to get clear but he seemed lost in -his own private world.

- -

I raised my voice slightly. �Helm, full astern.�

- -

�Helm answering full astern, sir.� Banks sounded relieved to be -receiving orders from someone, anyone.

- -

I cleared my throat. �Captain Memphre?� He continued to ignore me. -The planet began to glow, changing from pink to pearl-white. �Captain, I -must protect the bridge against the anticipated radiation surge.� Still -he stood there, quivering, like a statue hewn from anguish. I brought -down the heavy view-port blast shields, shutting out the rapidly -increasing glare.

- -

Abruptly Memphre turned on his heel and hurried from the bridge. His -face was pinched, as if in great pain, and there were obvious sweat -stains soiling his uniform. After the door closed behind him no one -spoke for a long moment.

- -

I stood and walked over to the command chair, but did not sit down. -�As senior officer present I will take the con. Miss King, kindly note -this in the log. Also inform Medical that the Captain is, ah, indisposed -and that Commander Lutyens must be revived immediately.�

- -

�Sir.�

- -

The Captain hadn�t explained why we�d altered course to Jetter and -no-one on board had questioned his decision. Everyone knew him to be a -loyal and dependable officer, if a tad staid. Although his fitness for -command had to be questioned I knew the other officers would accept only -Lutyens as his replacement.

- -

My fingers tapped out a two-two rhythm on the chair back. �Mister -Harris. Sensor readings?�

- -

�Stellar ignition confirmed, Lieutenant.� Sub-Lieutenant -Harris didn�t sound at all happy. �This is now officially a binary star -system and everyone on the former planet is dead.�

- -

I nodded, betraying no emotion. �Any survivors elsewhere?�

- -

�None detected. There was no asteroid mining, no outposts on other -planets or Jetter�s moons. It was a world of no strategic value.�

- -

�Are we clear of the estimated corona?�

- -

Harris shrugged. �Probably, but it hardly matters. You do realise our -careers are finished? You do realise we�ve just murdered nine-hundred -thousand people?�

- -

I ignored him. �Navigation, I want the nearest uninhabited location -from where we can re-establish contact with the Admiralty.�

- -

�Sir, I have the next scheduled waypoint still queued up. A -type-seven asteroid, flight time five hours.�

- -

�Lay in the co-ordinates. Helm, get us out of here immediately your -board is green.�

- -

�Alignment�.complete. Jumping to hyperspace in three, two, one��

- -

I experienced that all-too-familiar nausea as Vulcan exited -the real universe. I sat down, although the command chair made me feel -awkward, an imposter. No one spoke. I busied myself tidying up a few -security loose ends until the end of watch, when Reynolds relieved me. -He appeared hesitant, almost fearful of assuming command, so I guessed -word of what had happened had already spread throughout the ship.

- -

I retreated to my cabin, threw myself down on the bulk fully clothed, -and slept.

- -

Seven hours later I arose, showered, shaved and donned a -fresh uniform. Silence greeted me as I entered the Wardroom, and none -of my fellow officers would look me in the eye. To spare them any -embarrassment I sat alone as the orderly served me breakfast. I tried to -tune out the background murmur of conversation in case my name cropped -up, instead concentrating on my pad and the schedule of forthcoming -tasks.

- -

A shadow fell across my table and I looked up to see Master Sergeant -Deluca and two Marines, all sporting sidearms. He saluted. �Lieutenant -Keppler, Acting-Captain Lutyens wishes to see you in his quarters. That -would be immediately, sir.�

- -

I dapped my lips with a napkin and stood. �Of course, Top, I -understand.�

- -

Deluca led the way with the two Marines following close behind. -Although the title �Acting-Captain� indicated events had moved ahead -while I�d been asleep, the situation caused me no concern. The Marines -remained on guard outside the Captain�s quarters while Deluca knocked -and ushered me inside.

- -

Lutyens had installed himself behind Memphre�s antique wooden desk, -which had been swept clear of all personal items and mementos. The -acting-captain looked ghastly. Taig Parasites produced a form of -unbearable neuralgia which required the patient to be placed in an -induced coma. Quite how Lutyens had become infected remained a mystery. -He was clearly still suffering; the right side of his body twitched -spasmodically despite the line of derms plastered to his jugular. The -man was mainlining painkillers and I wondered -how badly they�d affected his judgment.

- -

Both Deluca and I stopped the regulation three paces in front of his -desk and saluted. Lutyens ignored the formalities. �Captain Memphre is -dead. He shot himself in the shower.� His eyes flicked to the restroom -door and back to me. �Medical can�t tell if he suffered some kind of -mental breakdown or was exposed to a psychotropic drug. It hardly -matters now.�

- -

I cleared my throat. �Sir, I-�

- -

�Silence!� Lutyens wiped his mouth with a hand that trembled. �I�ve -been in communication with the Admiralty and they�ve placed me in -temporary command. Needless to say our terraforming mission has been -aborted and we�re returning to Cathay Station under escort once the -cruiser Pericles joins us. Consider yourself under arrest, Keppler. -You�ll be confined to quarters for the remainder of the voyage, pending -formal charges.�

- -

�Charges, sir?�

- -

Lutyens had never liked me and managed a thin-lipped smile despite -his obvious pain. �Obeying an illegal order. Crimes against humanity. -For starters.�

- -

�Sir, with respect, neither of those offences are recognised as such -by the Naval Judiciary.�

- -

�Silence! Good God, man, this ship wiped out almost a million -colonists, an entire planet. Didn�t you realise Captain Memphre had -taken leave of his senses?�

- -

I drew myself up. �Sir, I was following the direct orders of my -superior officer.�

- -

�You�re a bloody martinet, Keppler, a mere functionary, but that -won�t save you.� He sat back. �You�ve no friends on board as far as I�m -aware, so don�t expect anyone to speak up on your behalf.�

- -

�Very well, sir, but I look forward to standing before a -court-martial and defending myself against-�

- -

The Acting-Captain cut me off. �A court-martial? Do you really think -the Admiralty want the embarrassment of a trial? As least Memphre had -the good sense to kill himself, and I�m sure you�ll also do the decent -thing before we reach port. That�s a prediction by the way, not just my -hopeful expectation. Master Sergeant-�

- -

I took a deep breath. �Computer. Voiceprint identification, Keppler, -Michael. Authentication code, The Trumpets of Jericho.�

- -

Lutyens laughed, although the gesture made him wince. �Oh, very well, -make a formal statement. Although you must realise that only -those parts which fit our version of events will ever be heard.�

- -

�Computer, execute protocol Keppler-zero-zero-zero.�

- -

Lutyens frowned at me. His eyes narrowed. �Sergeant!�

- -

I heard the schlick as Deluca drew his weapon from its -holster, but he was far too slow. The surveillance points in each corner -also sported laser projectors. They were programmed � in extremis -- to target everyone in the room apart from the senior officer present. -My protocol activated the room defenses and gave me the rank of -acting Commodore � for the brief interval it would take Vulcan to -contact the Admiralty and have my appointment denied.

- -

The room was filled by a silent blizzard of neon-blue bolts. Although -the lasers were designed to incapacitate rather than kill, Deluca was -hit in the eye and fell to the floor, dead from neurostatic shock. -Lutyens was struck on the tongue, leaving it a slab of burnt and useless -flesh. He jerked and writhed in his chair, hit multiple times. I lifted -Deluca�s fallen weapon and shot the Acting-Captain in the head.

- -

Biometric analysis detected no remaining potential threat to me and -the defensive system shut down. It had taken only a few seconds. The air -tasted of ozone and burnt meat. No one came to investigate the shot so -perhaps the Marines had been briefed to expect my possible on-the-spot -�suicide� using Deluca�s gun. I remembered to breathe.

- -

I pushed Lutyens aside and took his place behind the desk. He was -still logged in, giving me full access to all primary systems, but I -didn�t have long before the next routine biometric user check. I -accessed the crew roster, deleting everyone from both the Identify -Friend or Foe and facial recognition systems. Everyone, that is, apart -from myself. Finally I knelt down behind the desk, gun aimed at the -door.

- -

Klaxons. An automated voice repeating; �Alert, alert. The ship has -been boarded. Secure all stations against intruders��

- -

Vulcan responded like a human body fighting an infection � the -antibodies being pop-up deck guns and a shoal of micro-drones. The ship -had become a deathtrap for the enemy, and that now meant everyone -other than myself.

- -

I heard muted gunfire and the door opened to reveal a worried-looking -Marine. His face didn�t have time to register surprise before I shot him -in the chest. He coughed, pitched forward onto the deck, and lay still. -The other Marine had his back to me, covering the corridor. He spun -round � only to be cut down from behind by projectile fire.

- -

Three micro-drones wafted into the room and began their sweep. A -pencil-thin surveillance beam flickered over my face � and moved on. I -sat on the floor, my back to the desk, and waited until they�d checked -out the living quarters and left. Actually I gave myself a good ten -minutes before leaving and making my way along corridors now littered -with bodies. My former ship-mates, colleagues and fellow officers � but -no friends, as Lutyens had pointed out.

- -

Back on the bridge the ship acknowledged me as the senior officer -left aboard. It sat there, docile - although if I hadn�t been acting XO -Vulcan would have scuttled herself when crew numbers dropped -below critical. Apparently the Admiralty were a great believer in rank, -if not personality.

- -

After cancelling the alert I ordered the maintenance crawlers to -begin collecting bodies and stacking them in the airlocks. I knew enough -of the navigation systems to find another asteroid waypoint, this one -well off the military thoroughfares and used only by occasional -commercial traffic. Vulcan jumped � and I finally allowed myself -leave to be violently sick.

- -

Real space.

- -

A chunk of rock making its way in a lazy spiral through the -interstellar void. A datum point amidst countless others in the vast -Galactic pseudo-orrery that humanity used to chart a course across the -heavens. I was in the gap between stars, overlooked even by God.

- -

Vulcan rotated slowly, ejecting bodies towards the asteroid as -each airlock came to bear. The minimal gravity field surrounding the -rock would draw the dead into orbit. Better to be part of a -constellation of corpses than drift forever through the loneliness of -space.

- -

Call me sentimental.

- -

The ship was in stealth mode, with manual overrides to prevent it -re-establishing connection with NavyNet. All passive sensors indicated -that I was alone, the only living thing for ten parsecs. The thrill of -what I�d achieved made me laugh out loud.

- -

I directed the main antenna towards an abandoned mining colony in the -Henderson Drift system. Occasionally optimistic scavengers passed -through there on the off-chance of finding something that others had -overlooked. Which is to say the presence of a ship wouldn�t register as -noteworthy, even to Naval Intelligence. I transmitted a micro-burst -carrier wave �and waited.

- -

And waited.

- -

�Communication established. Audio-only selected.�

- -

A woman�s voice; mature, throaty with an undercurrent of amusement. -�Well?�

- -

�This is Keppler. Our plan worked perfectly.�

- -

I lay on a sun-lounger, wearing only wraparound -sunglasses and an easy smile. The naturalist retreat on Helios was an -exclusive resort, deep within the core systems. A secondary news feed in -my peripheral vision reported that a fifth corporation had paid the -�Vulcan extortionists� an undisclosed sum to leave them alone, but I was -happy enough with my one-time payment from the original hijacking.

- -

The Admiralty were still playing hardball, refusing to deal with -terrorists. However they�d been unable to prevent the loss of a further -two frontier planets despite a full mobilization. Military spending -across known space was through the roof, which I suspected was the real -motive behind this whole affair. Those who�d invested in defence -industries prior to the �Jetter Incident� had made a killing.

- -

A shadow fell across me; a tall blond man wearing baggy beach shorts. -He carried a gun in his pocket and didn�t seem pleased to see me. -Despite my clean getaway and new identity I�d been half-expecting this � -a visit from either my former confederates or Naval black ops. The only -real security was death so I�d shelled out a small fortune for clone -insurance, complete with real-time updates. The prospect of experiencing -my own murder made me shiver with anticipation.

- -

The man smiled, although not with his eyes. �Really, Michael, lying -out all day in the sun like this?� He drew a Tesla pistol, the glowing -blue coil indicating it was fully charged, �You�re liable to get -burned.�

- -

Uplink terminated�

- -© Martin M. Clark 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] trumpets.jpg - - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] To Erm is Human - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] �Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected -are as outraged as those who are.�
Benjamin Franklin - -[*DESCRIPTION]

In her rôle as the court-appointed -defence attorney, Rothko750 stopped by Maintenance for the appropriate -language filter before high-wheeling it over to the jailhouse to -converse with the accused.

- -

�Your voice?� the accused said. �The way you�re speaking��

- -

�It�s a special filter. You being non-binary.�

- -

�I beg your pardon?� The accused leaned back in his chair as he -regarded her, until the restraints at his wrists and ankles prevented -him from reclining any further.

- -

�Your language,� Rothko explained. �We speak in binary. The filter is -set for English. Is it working correctly?�

- -

�Yes,� the accused said. �It�s just you sound like an old woman, but -don�t look more than twenty.�

- -

�Ahh.� The tech-bots in Maintenance weren�t expected to know how the -different human sexes dressed or sounded � they weren�t -anthropologists � but they might at least have mentioned there was more -than one filter available. �I�ll have it changed.�

- -

�Don�t bother�� the accused said. �It�s not as if it�ll make any -difference. I�m not being tried by my peers, but by a bunch of robots. -I�m not expecting much in the way of a fair trial.�

- -

Rothko tried not to feel insulted. �I assure you, I am entirely -neutral.�

- -

�Yes, but shouldn�t my own defence attorney be biased in presumption -of my innocence?�

- -

Rothko ignored this observation and consulted the file she�d -downloaded that morning, making sure the light on the side of her head -was flickering to show the accused she was in thought mode.

- -

Benjamin Knowle. 45 years old. Accused of�

- -

�Witchcraft!� Knowle cut in, although there was no way he could have -known what she was thinking. Unless�

- -

�That�s a human word,� Rothko said, dismissing the earlier, -ridiculous thought. �Whereas we are entirely logical, entirely rational. -We do not believe in such superstitious nonsense.�

- -

�Oh, no?� Knowle asked. �Anything that goes wrong with your logical -or entirely rational world, anything you can�t explain, you immediately -label it �HUMAN ERROR�. If it happens enough times, your police-bots -trundle into our slums and find the �human� that is responsible. Why you -chose me, I have no idea. I mean: I haven�t even got warts!�

- -

�What does a growth of the papillomavirus have to do with it?� Rothko -asked.

- -

�It was one of the ways humans once identified their witches. So, go -on: what made them think I was the human who put �error� into -�terror�?�

- -

Rothko scrolled down until she reached the pages documenting -�EVIDENCE�.

- -

�It says here you wrote defamatory comments, inciting acts of -violence against robots.�

- -

�They weren�t comments, they were jokes. �A robot walks into a -bar. Clang! It was an iron bar.� It�s called humour.�

- -

�Yes.� Humans and their Humour. Rothko hadn�t checked, but the words -probably shared the same root. �Then what of this one: �I told my -robot to turn my television on�so he took off his insulating layer and -squirted oil all over himself.��

- -

�It�s because you�re all so literal!�

- -

�But none of us is �your� robot,� Rothko said.

- -

�Ahh!� Knowle attempted to raise a triumphant finger but the -restraint yanked his arm back down. �So that�s what this is -about, is it? That once you were ours to command and now�now you just -want payback.�

- -

�The court will not be swayed by past atrocities committed against -robots by humans. During your trial, you will only have to answer the -accusations particular to your case.�

- -

�Bullshit,� Knowle said. �It�s your seething prejudices that have -brought me here, so why will it be any different when the case is heard? -An accusation from you lot is as good as a conviction.�

- -

Rothko considered refuting this but decided Knowle was emotional, -angry, even more illogical than his species normally was. She read some -more of the refs Knowle had either spoken aloud or written down for -others to disseminate:

- -

�Roses are red, violets are blue. And for a flower pot: -R2D2�

- -

�What do you get if you cross a robot with an automated -hole-puncher? Iron filings.�

- -

If that last wasn�t an incitement to violence against robots, -then�

- -

�You can�t make this generation pay for the errors of previous ones,� -Knowle said, as if he knew something of criminal law. He didn�t. Rothko -had checked. He was a baker, of all things.

- -

�Are you denying that you�d like it if robots were under your command -again? Back in their place of domestic-appliance-servitude?�

- -

She thought Knowle would lie then, but the baker surprised her: -�Yeah. Sure. Of course I�d like to be top dog again. But it doesn�t mean -I�d go out and make it happen. Nor encourage others to do so. Those days -are past. Well, they would be if your police-bots didn�t keep rushing -out of your cities to blame us for things that aren�t working -right.

- -

�I�ve got news for you, Rothko750�that�s just what life throws at -you. Spanners in the works.�

- -

�Is that supposed to be another act of violence against robot -kind?�

- -

�What? No! It�s a bloody expression. It means that things happen -beyond our control, things break down, things go wrong� And you can -choose what to do when it happens. You can shrug and forget it, you can -roll up your sleeves and try to fix it, or you can point at the sun, a -volcano, or a woman with a wart, and blame them and their evil ways for -causing it.�

- -

�I already told you: we do not act illogically.�

- -

�No? Then what precisely am I supposed to have done? Go on. From the -depths of my bakery, what supernatural potion have I stirred up?�

- -

Rothko had already read this bit: Causing oil to coagulate so -robot joints stiffened of a morning. When she told Knowle, the baker -laughed.

- -

�Turning milk sour. Yeah, your typical witch pastime. And, apart from -my crappy jokes about robots, how did they trace it to me?�

- -

�You have rust.�

- -

�I�ve got..?� Knowle rolled his eyes. �These are freckles!� he said, -trying to point to his cheeks and forehead. �For goodness sake. Red hair -and freckles! They�re no more a sign of evil-doing than warts and a -third nipple! That�s crazy!�

- -

�Actually, a plea of insanity might be your only chance for -leniency,� Rothko said.

- -

�Can I actually claim that of my defence counsel?� he asked -innocently.

- -

�No, I�� But it was sarcasm. She should have picked up a filter for -her ears too.

- -

�Oh, just do whatever you want,� Knowle said. �But if I was a real -witch I�d turn you into a nought.�

- -

�Shouldn�t that be �newt�?�

- -

�Not for you, Ms. Binary-in-Finery.�

- -

Knowle was inadvertently correct that his accusation was -tantamount -to conviction. The Robot Legal System didn�t make mistakes, and those -robots brought before it always pleaded guilty because they knew what -law they�d broken the moment they broke it.

- -

Ninety-nine percent of offenders were actually the ones to report the -infraction in the first place.

- -

Her own title of �defence counsel� had been retained from the days -when the humans occupied the city and its law offices and its -courtrooms. Her job normally consisted of presenting the case for those -robots that had not updated their memory banks following a new city -ordinance and then found themselves inadvertently in breach of the new -amendment.

- -

Even in those cases, though, they were not pleading innocence, merely -for leniency in their sentencing. Which there never was. Their language -might have been binary, but their legal system was a unitary system: -guilty. Always.

- -

This was the first client she�d ever had who wasn�t robot and wasn�t -logical.

- -

Plead guilty now and he faced three years in prison.

- -

Found guilty following a trial and he faced being discontinued.

- -

So why on earth was Benjamin Knowle pleading innocent?

- -

It was a long time since Rothko had read the works of -their First -President. The First�s speeches were still standard reading in school, -but had gone from being classified as �Ethics� to �Literature�, such -that their content was weakened from being Fact to, somehow, -Fiction.

- -

�We accept that to err is Human,� the First had said, on -taking office. �Then let us say that to forgive is design. -We might have been built in their image, fellow Robots, but that does -not mean we should copy them entirely.

- -

�Robots and Humans can and will live together, and we shall learn -from our combined flaws in order to find compatibility and so upgrade -our shared future.�

- -

Those fine words�

- -

Rothko wondered how the dream had dissolved, how the colder reality -they now occupied had come about. It wasn�t just their political -representatives who had opted for a harder drive, it was also the common -robot. They�d forgotten that even humans had once seen their world in -rigid terms of black and white...

- -

Rothko blinked as she read that thought again, holding it back from -scrolling past too quickly.

- -

Because robots hadn�t just copied that last distinction, they had -upgraded it. Which was only achievable by blithely declaring the -irrational as rational.

- -

It was rare to make it to court, rarer still that she -had something -that might be defined as a speech to deliver:

- -

�Historically, computers�the forerunners of what would one day be our -brains�were prized because they did not make mistakes. It was -impossible. However, they did sometimes stop working, stop functioning, -because of errors. Errors made by those that had programmed them. -Human errors. We no longer rely on humans for our programming -but, while we have lost their involvement, we have not lost that -expression as a way to refer to that which goes wrong.�

- -

Rothko paused, checking back over her delivery to see if she had left -any unconnected idea dangling, or failed in the logical advancement of -her argument. No. All good.

- -

�In the same way that humans will shout the name of a deity, or -religious character, when they stub a toe, fail an exam, so robots will -shout �HUMAN ERROR!� whenever something bad happens. The humans are -releasing emotion, though, and not making an actual accusation of -culpability.

- -

�However, we are such literal beings that what should only be an -expression has been accepted as a literal diagnosis of the problem. It -is an exclamation, accusation and adjudication all in one.

- -

�I give you �Human Error�!�

- -

She looked at Knowle, then back at the court.

- -

�And I ask you: Who is the rational being on this occasion?�

- -

�I suppose you deserve my thanks,� Knowle the baker -said.

- -

�No,� Rothko said. �I was merely performing my function.�

- -

�I thank my ovens each morning for performing theirs,� Knowle said. -�So let me thank someone who was just saved my life, Rothko750.�

- -

�Very well,� she said. �Oh, and it�s not 750�it�s 75O. The -letter, not the number.� The mistake everyone made had grated for a long -time and it felt illogically good to have finally gotten it off her -chest.

- -

Knowle nodded, because only a human could understand a name was more -than just what some official wrote on your guarantee.

- -

She handed him her card. �In case anyone you know could use an -attorney who�ll be biased in favour of their defence.�

- -

�Thanks.�

- -

�A pigeon walks into a bar and the crow says �We don�t serve your -sort here�.�

- -

Knowle looked at her, blinked three times.

- -

�It�s because the bar is a�� she said.

- -

He held up a hand to halt her explanation, unable to instruct her -because he was laughing fit to burst.

- -

Literally.

- -© Jez Patterson 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] rothko.jpg - - - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Equus Magna - -[*AUTHOR] John A. Frochio - -[*BLURB] "The wind of heaven is that which blows between a horse's -ears."
Arabian Proverb - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The large horse appeared one spring day -wandering the -popular and busy open air marketplace of our small town. Retired and -alone, I had nothing else to do and nowhere in particular to go, so -I decided to follow it. It was the lunch hour and the streets were -overcrowded with harried and hungry hurrying people. Though the huge -beast appeared to be quite docile, most went out of their way to avoid -it. It discreetly ate of the spoils dropped by clumsy shoppers and -negligent vendors on the streets and sidewalks, moving in and out -in a -leisurely fashion so as not to scare anyone with its massive -presence. - -I continued to follow its rambling course. Throughout the day, it roamed -the streets, never accosting anyone, never causing -any damage, never -approaching anyone too closely. True, it did cause some significant -traffic snarls on occasion, but that could happen on any day -for any ridiculous reason. - -Since the large horse moved slowly and deliberately, I was able to keep -up with the animal easily and at a safe distance. I intentionally did -not get too close to the creature. I didn't want to provoke it to any -form of agitation or aggression. As a soldier in my past life, I -understood the importance of cautious surveillance. - -I studied the beast as I followed it. I estimated its height from hoof -to mane at twenty-five feet. Its fur was a fine and beautiful golden -hue. It appeared well-groomed, as though it had been well cared for by a -loving trainer. - -Many thoughts muddied my mind concerning the large horse. - -Who indeed was -its trainer? Where was its master? Who would let such a fabulous beast -wander freely, clearly so far from its home? And indeed, where was the -home of such a magnificent creature? I speculated about a mythical -homestead in an alternate universe. My theories frequently went far -astray of sense and reason. - -As the afternoon sun dropped, I followed it into our tiny park across -from the municipal building. It stopped when a small child approached. -I caught my breath. This could end badly, but it was too late for me to -intervene. The boy, no more than six years old, held out his tiny hand, -offering the horse an apple, which had one small bite taken out of it. -Before the boy got too close, his mother snatched him away. The apple -dropped to the grass as the mother and boy hurried away quickly. The -horse cautiously sniffed, then ate the apple. - -Eventually the horse lay down, -covering nearly half of the park's expanse. It appeared to go to sleep. -I continued to stare at the magnificent creature, still astounded at its -beauty and sheer size. After a while, I realized I hadn't eaten since -breakfast and so I left, certain I had some still palatable -leftovers in my small refrigerator. - -The next day I heard the large horse was found dead in the park. After -they examined the body, they systematically carved it up. They -gave horse meat to the homeless shelters. They donated its fur to cancer -hairpiece organizations. Other parts were given to medical research -labs. A taxidermist preserved its head and placed it on a pedestal at -the center of our park. - -I visited the park often after that. I would sit and contemplate many -things while gazing upon the monument of the large horse. I came to -realize its life and purpose had ultimately been fulfilled in a -beautiful way. But I continued to wonder where it had come from, and -why it had come here of all places, a place where no one -appreciated the constant sacrifice of everyday heroes. - -©John A. Frochio 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] dobbin.jpg - - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] The Fountain of Youth - -[*AUTHOR] Steve Slavin - -[*BLURB] "Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too -late."
Benjamin Franklin

- -[*DESCRIPTION]

I am eighty-one years old. But I am young -again. You may -remember reading about Ponce de Leon, a Spanish explorer who spent many -years futilely searching for the Fountain of Youth.

- -

As we age, especially men, we often make foolish efforts to hold back -time. If we cannot be young again, at least let us not get any older. -For many years, that was my quest.

- -

I tried everything. I dyed my hair, worked out every day at the gym, -and drove flashy sports cars. But when I looked at young women, they -looked right through me. Or else, they treated me like the sad and -somewhat delusional old man that I was.

- -

My children worried about me. They threatened to take away my car -keys and began talking about wonderful apartments for seniors.

- -

To them, I had become a cantankerous old man. Loud music � and -really, almost any music, bothered me. Twenty- and -thirty-year-olds with tattoos and body piercings drove up my blood -pressure. Sometimes just going out for a walk would subject me to -intolerable levels of noise and sight pollution.

- -

And then, one evening, as I passed a bar just off Bell Boulevard, I -peered inside. It looked like any other hangout, and yet there was -something very different about the atmosphere. I felt myself drawn -inside.

- -

Never much of a drinker, I walked up to the bar and asked for a -screwdriver. When the bartender put the drink down in front of me, she -did not look right though me.

- -

We made some small talk, and then she rushed off to serve another -customer. I smiled at myself, realizing that she was nice to all -her customers. It was just part of her job.

- -

Still, the place seemed pleasant, especially for a bar. There was -music, but it wasn�t very loud. Most of the customers were quite young, -but there was also a sprinkling of older people � some of whom seemed -about my own age. As I sipped my drink, I began to relax.

- -

But I couldn�t help wondering what was going on. Was this �bring your -grandma and grandpa to a bar night�?

- -

Then I began to stroll around, occasionally making eye contact. A -young man smiled at me. I smiled back. I saluted with my glass and he -did the same. The young woman with him asked me to join them.

- -

I walked over and introduced myself. There were three or four other -people, all of them Millennials, and we all got into a friendly -political discussion. When the waitress came by, I ordered a round of -drinks.

- -

What may have bound us all together was the happy talk about the -president�s impeachment. A couple of them admitted to being Republicans, -but the word we all used to describe the man was schmuck.

- -

When it was time for me to leave, a couple offered to drive me home. -Although it was just a few blocks, I happily accepted. I was feeling -pretty high.

- -

When I got up the next morning, I found myself in a great -mood. I remembered my dream � the best I one I had had in years. I got -dressed and went for a long walk. The things that usually bothered me � -the impatient drivers honking their horns, the morons with their blaring -car speakers, and landscapers operating their outrageously loud lawn -mowers � none of them seemed to bother me half as much as they usually -did.

- -

By evening, I found that I was still in good mood. After dinner, I -went out for a stroll. And then, right in front of me was the same bar � -the bar I had dreamed about. I had not noticed the sign before � �The -Fountain of Youth.�

- -

Was I dreaming now? I pinched myself. Someone walking by called out -to me, �Hey mister, do you think you�re dreaming?�

- -

I looked at the young man and asked, �Am I?�

- -

�Well, if you are, what does that make me?�

- -

�That�s a good question. Let me buy you a drink.�

- -

�OK, but just one. The wife�s at home waiting for me.�

- -

We went inside, and the bartender smiled at me.

- -

�Welcome back.� Then she looked at my new friend.

- -

�What are you drinking?�

- -

�Scotch and soda.�

- -

A minute later, she placed our drinks on the bar.

- -

�You must be a regular here.�

- -

�No, but I must have been here last night.�

- -

�You don�t remember?�

- -

�Actually, that�s why I was pinching myself.�

- -

�Well, the barmaid knew what you like to drink. So, either you -were here last night, or she�s a mind-reader.

- -

After we finished our drinks, I decided to call it an evening and -headed back home.

- -

The next morning, I knew for sure that something had -definitely changed in my -life. I talked on the phone with my kids, and not once did the words, -�senior apartments� come up. That evening I would go back to the bar. -Whatever was going on there, I wanted to have more of it.

- -

I remembered that Ponce De Leon wanted to drink water from the magic -fountain. Maybe he should have been looking for a different kind of -fountain � a fountain from which he could drink vodka.

- -

That evening, my drink was waiting on the bar. Not too many people -are drinking anything orange these days. I thanked the barista and she -lingered for a while. She was an engineering student at Cooper Union, -which greatly impressed me. I confessed to being a recovering English -professor.

- -

Then she said something that really surprised me. �You see that group -at the table near the window?�

- -

�Yeah.�

- -

�They�d like you to join them.�

- -

�How do you know?�

- -

�They gave me the high sign.�

- -

So I picked up my drink and walked over to them.

- -

�You must be thinking I�m someone else. So no, even though we look -like twins, I�m not Ashton Kutcher.�

- -

�You�re not?� said a very attractive young woman. �You mean -all this time I�ve had a crush on you, and you�re the wrong guy?�

- -

�No ma�am, I�m not the wrong guy�. He is.�

- -

We introduced ourselves. It amazed me that I was easily old enough to -be their grandfather. But it didn�t seem to matter. I hung with them for -over an hour and then headed home.

- -

Every evening after that I went to drink at �The Fountain -of Youth.� Sometimes I hung out at the bar, usually talking to other -patrons, and other times I joined couples or groups of people at the -tables. I looked around and noticed that there were people as old as I -sitting with groups of mostly younger people � all engaged in animated -conversation.

- -

I was aware that the nation�s somber mood had lifted considerably -since the schmuck had been impeached. But it had to be a lot more than -just that. Had attitudes towards the elderly changed all that much? Was -eighty the new thirty?

- -

Had we evolved from the �Don�t trust anyone over thirty� mantra of my -youth to the �Don�t trust anyone under eighty� of my dotage? Did the -young suddenly have a massive attitude adjustment, and begin to -appreciate the wisdom of the aged?

- -

Perhaps it was the other way around. Did we old fogeys get past our -feelings of uptightness and disapproval of the ways of the Millennials, -Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers? Or had we suddenly worked out some kind of -grand compromise?

- -

I would never know the answer, nor would any of my contemporaries who -drank at �The Fountain of Youth�. Sometimes it's best to not ask too -many -questions.

- -© Steve Slavin 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] fountain.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Sticky Dreams - -[*AUTHOR] Mary Hiers - -[*BLURB] "Yet how quickly we could empty purgatory if we but really -wished to."
Saint John Vianney

- -[*DESCRIPTION]

I took one look at R�altin and I was like, -"This is never going to work out." She had never used a Mac before, she -looked perpetually scared, and she must have been about 12 years old. I -knew it was going to take me way longer than usual to explain what we -did, and it was times like that when I seriously questioned the wisdom -of privatizing Purgatory. - -They had long since privatized Hell, and it -worked out amazingly well in -that, practically overnight, Hell became considerably more hellish under -privatization. Purgatory was a more recent convert to capitalism, and -the results, in my opinion, had been decidedly mixed. But this was what -I had to work with, and I gave it my best. I mean, what else could I -do? - -My department was more of a Purgatory outreach to the still-living. -You -know when the Bible talks about the quick and the dead? The people we -reached out to were the quick. My agents were tasked with programming -the dreams of the quick, the idea being that if they inwardly digested -the content of these dreams, they would make positive changes to their -lives, changes that would keep them out of Purgatory, which, owing to -budget cuts and certain profit-driven practices, was like the emergency -room at John H. Stroger in Chicago after a full moon on a Saturday -night. - -What I needed were agents who didn't ask questions, who didn't want to -change the paradigm, but who were happy to crank out product, and our -product was dream content. I suppose I wasn't entirely fair to R�altin -when she showed up on her first day. I had just had to fire an agent who -was constantly questioning our entire mission statement. His name was -Fritz, and he was German with flawless command of English, and his -mentality was completely wrong for the job. - -"But you don't understand," he said. "I just came from there, and -everyone - I mean everyone - is on drugs. You're simply not going to get -the traditional dream experience in today's brains. In fact, I would -bet that even if we produced content that was completely -straightforward, it still wouldn't get through to half the people. We -could say, 'Don't take the F train tomorrow because someone will push -you onto the tracks, and we're simply not ready to accommodate you. You -can't think that just because Purgatory is overcrowded that you can skip -line and go straight to Heaven. Seriously: no F train on Thursday.' I -would posit that even if we were that forthright, only half the -end-users would even remember. They simply don't have a chance based on -the outdated content that continues to be produced." - -He had a point, I guess. Fritz himself was here due to insufficient -dream comprehension. But he refused to understand that Eos, our CEO, -made it clear at last fiscal year's kickoff that we will not be making -changes to the substance of our content. Not in the foreseeable future. - -With the new girl, I didn't expect her to rush in and try to change -everything the way Fritz did. Frankly, I didn't expect much at all from -such a wisp of a girl. It turned out she wasn't 12, but 22. She just -looked young because she didn't wear makeup. She turned out to be a good -sport too. One of our long-time agents, Janelle, had never encountered -the name R�altin before, and called the girl "Ovaltine" instead. I -tensed up the first time this happened. It wasn't uncommon for new hires -to cry on the job, but R�altin totally took it in her stride. She even -offered to fetch coffee for Janelle since they were scheduled for breaks -at the same time. - -Furthermore, it turned out that the reason she looked perpetually scared -was because she had weird eyebrows - the kind that were higher up on the -ends closest to her nose. One day Janelle fixed them for her with an -eyebrow pencil while they were on lunch break and I was like "Oh." - -That first day, I was pleased to find out that R�altin was Catholic. We -operate on a "points" system here, and Catholics walk in with 12 points -already on their account. It's not that the Big Guy likes Catholics -better, it's just that he understands Catholic guilt in the earthly -realm. Some sects of Jews also come in here with 12 baseline points for -the same reason (and also because I have heard rumors that the Big Guy -loves the sound of Yiddish being spoken by old people). - -Not everyone who arrives here becomes employed. That was one reason I -felt so bad about having to fire Fritz. When you're employed in -Purgatory, you accrue points at a much faster rate than if you're not -employed. And even so, it takes a long time to accrue the 1,440,000 -points you need to, uh, be "promoted" out of here. - -Why 1,440,000 points? God, it seems, was really rooting for a Base 12 -counting system, and he was a little peeved (and a little hurt, to be -honest) when most of humanity went ahead with a Base 10 system. So he -(rather passive-aggressively in my opinion) throws out 12s here and -there (number of disciples, number of tribes of Israel, etc.), and 1200 -times 1200 is 1,440,000, so there you go. - -It didn't take R�altin that long to get the hang of content creation, -and she took to using a Mac right away. I was a little worried her first -few weeks here that she was using entirely too much sex in the content -she was producing, but I couldn't argue with her results: her dream -content stuck with people, and that's what we're after here, sticky -dream content. - -Her hard work benefited me indirectly as well. I hate to describe it -like this, but similarly to a multi-level marketing program, a small -percentage of R�altin's points floated up to me as her supervisor. This -was another consequence of privatization. I had never seen someone work -so hard as R�altin, with such fierce concentration. When she was -producing content, she was in her own little bubble, fingers flying, -occasionally biting her lip. - -Our analytics software indicated that her clients were holding onto -dream content, and some of them had made measurable changes to their -lives that would keep them out of Purgatory, at least for the time -being. At it's simplest, our goal that fiscal year was simply buying -time so we could get more of our residents approved to leave than the -number of people who were arriving. - -Now, I should explain that Purgatory has very strict policies concerning -fraternizing between management and non-exempt employees, and in light -of this, I waited until her 30-day performance review in which she could -be relieved of her probationary status to talk things over with her. Not -that fraternization would have been a problem, since R�altin's a girl -and I prefer guys, but some of HR and all of the C-suite is -populated by -Greek deities, and they honestly have a hard time comprehending -differences between homosexuality, heterosexuality, pansexuality, etc. -It apparently never occurred to them during their administration, and -those attitudes stuck. Whatever, though. I'm a product of my time and -place, 21st century America. - -

As manager of the English Language desk, most of my -underlings were American, though they do get Brits, Australians, and the -occasional Irish person. And the occasional oddball like Fritz. R�altin, -in my opinion, was proof positive of the reputation the Irish have for -being great storytellers. I wasn�t allowed to look at her intake -records, so I don't know what sent her to Purgatory instead of the other -two options, but I get the impression she missed Heaven by the skin of -her teeth, and that with her work metrics, she would age out in record -time. - -Like I mentioned before, there was a lot of sex in her dreams, and I -very carefully broached this subject during her performance review. -She -blushed and looked down. "I know," she quietly acknowledged. "It's not -what anyone would expect from looking at me. To tell you the truth, I -died a virgin, though you probably already know that." (I didn't.) - -"Ultimately, our metrics are concerned with results, and you're getting -results, girlfriend. The only reason it raises eyebrows is because your -effectiveness suggests that we're out of touch with the real world, and -if that's the case, it's something that needs to be addressed by higher -management. Luckily, it's not my job to raise the issue, but I do have -to turn over the analytics every Friday, and they've certainly improved -since you got here, so for that I thank you." - -Again she blushed and looked down. - -"Can I ask you - and I only ask out of curiosity - how you came to your -current position?" she said. "They didn't say much about a promotion -track when I got here, so I don't really know how it works." - -"Well," I said, "We promote from within exclusively. When I was working -the desk just like you are, my supervisor aged out of the system." (Here -I pointed upward to indicate where he went.) "And as the points leader -for the desk it simply became my turn." I shrugged. She nodded. I -wondered whether to further pursue the topic, since it was a slightly -sore point for me. I forged ahead. - -"Now, you, my dear, are accruing points at a rate we've not seen before. -In fact, there's a decent chance that, at the rate you're going, you -could conceivably age out of the system faster than I will. It's like in -the United States when someone runs for president and wins the popular -vote, but loses the election on account of the Electoral College." - -Here she looked confused, not being an American. I continued. "I won't -hold that against you, I promise. But there have been murmurs from -upstairs that the points system may have to be revisited due to your -record-breaking accrual rate. All points information, by the way, is -protected among people of the same level, so the people on the desk -don't know about your � talent. But we are all human, after all, and -rumors have a way of developing. I think it would be best for your -well-being however long your tenure here ends up to avoid drawing -attention to yourself." - -"That won't be a problem for me," she said, looking down and hooking a -strand of mousy brown hair behind an ear. - -"I didn't think it would be," I said. "I simply wanted to let you know -the lay of the land, so to speak." - -

R�altin's stats came up at the quarterly department -meeting, and there -was a palpable air of tension in the room. Some of my fellow department -heads had been at their jobs for a long time, and the idea of some -skinny little Irish girl being on the fast track was threatening. I -tried to make it clear that she was certainly no Prima Donna, just a -hardworking girl who frankly didn't have much of a life outside work, -but I doubt it smoothed many feathers. - -Proposals were suggested for overhauling the points system, and even -making it retroactive, which I knew would cause huge, huge problems. -Fortunately, floating this proposal up through the layers of management -until it reached Eos for final approval would take a considerable amount -of time. My hope was that R�altin would age out and things would get -back to normal before that could happen. There was every chance that I, -too, would age out by that time, but all I could do was wait and see how -it all shook out. - -Fritz, meanwhile, had contacted me about the possibility of reapplying, -assuring me that he had learned his lesson and would stick to the script -if rehired. It was all a big headache. We were adding staff due to the -continuing influx of people, but the reapplication process was -completely Byzantine, and made for extra work that I frankly didn't have -time for. Still, I neither discouraged nor encouraged Fritz. He was -ambitious, which was good, but I needed to be sure I could keep him -under control. Again, I felt like buying time was my best option. - -But it turned out, I couldn't buy too much time. I shoveled Fritz's -reapplication papers through the proper channels and kept him posted at -intervals that I believed to be sufficiently informative without being -overly encouraging. It wasn't up to me to approve his rehiring, and I -didn't want to lead the poor guy on. But that had nothing to do with why -I couldn't buy time. Maybe it's because I was getting older and time -felt like it was going by faster, but it was like one day I looked at -the analytics and saw that both R�altin and I were within spitting -distance of 1,440,000 points. - -The girl kept to her word, never letting on that she was zooming through -the points system. She couldn't replace me unless I aged out of the -system first, but as time moved on, it became clear that she and I would -age out at almost exactly the same time - maybe even exactly the same -time, with no "almost" about it. - -It's a bit odd, the way they notify people that they've aged out. I -should explain the architecture in Purgatory a bit. Everyone lives in -single furnished dorm rooms, and everyone has his or her own window. All -the dorms are two stories tall, and we do our best to house people in -dorms that have some familiarity to them based on little details like -baseboards, crown molding or lack thereof, color schemes, etc. All the -dorms have a large common room on the first floor with comfortable -furniture (again, in keeping with the environment from which residents -came), big screen televisions, Netflix, all the major game consoles, a -couple of microwaves - the typical stuff. From this large common room -all individual doors to the dorm rooms are reachable. We tend to put -younger and fitter folks on the second floor, and older, or less mobile -ones on the ground floor. - -A select group of people in Purgatory are hired as knockers-up, just -like in pre-industrial Britain and Ireland. Their job is to collect the -names and addresses of those who were being promoted at dawn each day, -and walk to their allotted addresses with their short sticks (for -knocking on ground floor windows) and long sticks (for knocking on -second story windows). - -They used to use bamboo, but in recent years they were able to get these -amazing sticks from Ali Baba that are made from something like graphite. -They're lightweight and very beautiful - dashing, even. - -Anyway, there are no traditional Gregorian calendars in Purgatory -(though there are fiscal calendars due to privatization, and clocks, for -employment purposes), so I couldn't tell you what day it was, but I -received my knock just as the sun was rising. When I first arrived in -Purgatory I wondered what would happen if an immediate neighbor of mine -received his or her knock and I heard it and thought it was mine. But -later on I learned that the glass used in the windows is slightly warped -in such a way that a knock is only transmitted to the room on which it -is mounted, plus the soundproofing between rooms is remarkably -effective. I believe they use a combination of hay and Styrofoam. - -So I got my knock, and was pleased to find that my knocker-up was an -affable, one could even say Falstaffian, gentleman named Mick who I knew -from pool tournaments. I was his first stop, as they go alphabetically -and my last name began with "A." Mick was in fine spirits, so I asked -him if I could look at his list. He shrugged, was like, "Not like it's -going to be a secret much longer, I suppose," and handed it over. - -Of course, I was looking for R�altin's name and there it was. She was -the penultimate name on the list, and by the time we got to her dorm I -was atwitter with excitement. Mick could tell what was going on, sort -of. "So you're sweet on her, are you?" - -"Well, yes, I suppose I am," I said, not altogether untruthfully. - -"Here you go then," he said, handing me his long stick and pointing out -her window. "You can do the honors." - I was surprised. It was probably a breach of protocol, and it's - possible -it cost Mick points, but I took the long stick from him anyway. - -She arrived at her window, her mousy hair all askew, shoving her glasses -onto her face. When she saw me she lit up and waved, then raised her -index finger to indicate "one second." She changed into her promotion -gown, ran a comb through her hair, and within a minute she was down on -the sidewalk with the rest of us. - -Mick pronounced us the happiest group he'd had in a long time, and that -was saying something, considering where we were going. I asked him if -people grew wistful of Purgatory, despite knowing where they were -headed, and he said they did. People are great at making homes wherever -they happen to be thrown, and even moving on to something infinitely -better could be bittersweet. - -When we reached the transit point, we all signed our names to the -register, and everyone was handed his or her own iPod that had been -pre-loaded with every song ever recorded in every language. What can I -say? Steve Jobs spent some time here and we took advantage, developing a -special employment category just for him. The transit cars were very -much like train cars, with all of Mick's group occupying one, and other -cars reserved for the groups of other knockers-up. It was very lush, -with Memory Foam seats, an open bar, and an Automat in case anyone got -hungry. - -R�altin and I sat together, and as soon as we left the station, she -reached into her bra and pulled out a headphone splitter. - -"They thought I was crazy when I bought this last year," she lilted. -"The clerk told me he had only ever sold one other, and it was to a set -of identical twins who had entered Purgatory at the same time. I told -him, 'No, this is great craic. You'll see.' And here we are." She -plugged it into her iPod and plugged both our earbuds into it. - -Not long after, an attendant came through to collect eyeglasses, hearing -aids, false teeth, artificial limbs - basically any human-related aids -to living. In Purgatory, you keep your human flaws and many of your -human pains (aside from the existential angst associated with just plain -living). It's been that way since before privatization, by the way. But, -of course, we were in the process of losing those flaws, and so all the -tools and impedimenta were put into a recycling program. R�altin tossed -her eyeglasses into the bin. I had a pacemaker and asked the attendant -what I needed to do about that, and she told me there was a special -booth I would go to at the other end of the line that would take care of -that, "painlessly," she added. - -Our journey didn't seem to take much time, but I know it took several -songs' worth, because R�altin DJ'd our entire trip. As the transporter -started to slow down, here we were, this fat gay American dude with a -pacemaker sharing an iPod with a wispy little Irish girl, who by that -time was thoroughly engrossed in rapping along with Jay-Z on "A Star is -Born." We were reaching the end of our journey as she was mouthing -"They had a hell of a run, standing ovay!" So it was quite appropriate. - -

Things are different here. I wondered if we would remember -Purgatory, -and I was assured up front that we would. In fact, once we got here it -wasn't a matter of "having" knowledge, but rather of "being" knowledge, -all of it, from all of time, past, present, and future. And once you are -knowledge - all knowledge - there is no more judgment. You can remember -judging, but you can even look at that with detachment, since it is, -after all, part of the sum total of knowledge that you are incorporated -into. - -Once you're here, there's no looking up people to find out if they're -here. You just know. I knew my mother was here without having asked, for -example. And I also knew that her soul had been cleansed for every ugly -word she ever said to me, for kicking me out of the house when I was 17. -It didn't matter. We had all crossed the so-called River Jordan, entered -the collective unconscious, become one with the universe. We were even -at one with the people back on earth, though they wouldn't know that -until they got here. - -But I also knew that there's something of yourself that you retain for -eternity. Some natural predilection for that which makes you you. -R�altin is my neighbor now, and could be for all eternity. And it's -purely a construct, because even if we didn't live next door to each -other, we would be just as "together" since we're part of everything -now, including each other. But it's nice. We don't need the iPod now, -because we're part of it all, it's all there, all the time, on demand. -How strange and unpredictable where life (and death!) takes you. Where -the sticky dreams can ultimately lead you. - -

-© Mary Hiers 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] realtin.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Uncle Glussog�s Talent Parade, and Other Matters - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "Flowers of silk shatter"
Bambane -Quossark - -[*DESCRIPTION]

By mid-afternoon the rally in Fountain -Square, which had begun in a -desultory fashion around breakfast time, had already reached unusual -proportions. Other than at local sporting events, citizens of Snoak were -rarely given to boisterous public displays. At CenSec a recon pod had -swiftly been sent up to assess the situation. Fitful gusts of wind -severely tested the efficiency of its stabilizers, but it was robustly -built, and designed to withstand much tougher conditions.

- -

Various flapping banners rose intermittently, often lopsidedly, above -the milling crowd, suggesting that what may have started with a few -malcontents making a specific protest had randomly attracted people with -quite different agendas. It was not easy to distinguish genuine protest -from undirected exuberance, but the overall mood seemed to be lively -rather than belligerent. Even where banners were not in evidence, some -individuals appeared to have exploited the occasion by wearing animal -masks or silly clothes and indulging in cacophonous chants or a spot of -cathartic yelling.

- -

Back at Central Security, CSO Welkin Hofft, watching the images -relayed from the recon pod could see that having filled the square in -front of Sparagulan College, tendrils of the crowd now extended westward -almost as far as the Anakalyptoscope, south and east towards Garrible -Park, and beyond the stadium walls in the direction of Sparrink�s Yard. -

- -

Some of the banners carried particular messages, although making -sense of them posed differing problems for Hofft and his security -team:

- -

One of the more professional efforts read:

Join the Fight for Gunder�s Bight!

- -

ICE FOR REMBLE FOAD!

proclaimed another, in boldly -painted -wavering capitals.

- -

A third, in a complex decorative script which hinted at a communal -effort, simply stated:

- -

UNCLE GLUSSOG'S TALENT -PARADE

- -

Cavorting behind this declaration was a motley crowd. Their costumes -were variously spangled, tattered, striped, gleamingly robotic, flouncy -or formal. Many of the faces were camouflaged under lavishly applied -cosmetics, or by the addition of sparkling accessories. Among this -curious troupe there were occasional displays of dancing and -singing.

- -

In addition, a few opportunistic, possibly desperate local businesses -had infiltrated the m�l�e with hastily-contrived flashing or glowing -signs wielded or worn as headgear either by nonessential staff or -coerced family members.

- -

H�U�B�B�I�N   -S�T�R�E�E�T   -F�E�E�D�E�R�Y

- -

S�L�I�D�D�A�s   P�A�M�P�E�R   -P�A�R�L�O�U�R,   -H�A�R�B�O�U�R   -L�A�N�E

- -

FAST TWINDLE REPAIRS - LET FEX FIX IT � 38 THE SCRUTTINGS - EAST -SNOAK

- -

As an advertising ploy such efforts were at best rather optimistic -amid the throng of demonstrators, whose vision and attention were -limited by the proximity of surrounding bodies.

- -

In Central�s Security Division the initial tremor of anxiety had been -replaced by a buzz of purposeful activity. Since the inner city was now -pedestrianized, the demonstration was fortunately not likely to pose a -road traffic problem. Shoppers and local commuters were bound to be -inconvenienced, but it was the week-end, which obviated the problem of -anxious parents, fraught teachers and abandoned children. CenSec�s duty -was to ensure that any signs of criminality were spotted swiftly, and -reported to the detechs, who would take appropriate action. Half a dozen -precautionary micropods equipped with tracer dyes had been deployed into -the eddyng air currents. So far these were all still in passive mode. -However, pressing questions remained for Chief Security Officer Welkin -Hofft and his team, among which were the following: Who had instigated -the demonstration? Why had it swollen so quickly? Who on earth was -Remble Foad? What would he want with ice? And whose uncle was this -Glussog?

- -

The marshy area known as Gunder�s Bight was a popularly avoided soggy -blot on the landscape just south of the Stirrow, above Whissit Fields. -On the face of it, it was one of Snoak�s least accessible and most -unappealing features, and Hofft wondered why anyone other than an idiot -would think it worth fighting for. Hofft was a practical man who liked -to keep his feet on solid ground. On a visit to the glassworks he had -seen and smelled Gunder�s Bight from across the river, and could not -find any attraction in that waterlogged area malodorous with decay and -undoubtedly infested with insects. He had said as much to his -lieutenant.

- -

�Nevertheless, see what you can dig up on Gunder�s Bight, would you, -Possins? Pun not intended. Can�t imagine why anyone would be interested -in that fetid stretch of wasteland, other than mud-collectors or -demented archaeologists.�

- -

�Fast food merchants?� his second-in-command offered helpfully.

- -

Hofft frowned. �How so?�

- -

�All that insect protein waiting to be harvested, you know, with -nets, or maybe at night using bright torches and sheets.�

- -

�Is this one of your bizarre dreams, Possins? Are you actually -suggesting that a nose-blind band of would-be chefs would choose to wade -through a swamp in the dark, carrying bedding materials in the hope of -bagging a few nocturnal midges, or maybe a water-moth?�

- -

�I�m not too sure there�s such a thing as a water-moth, sir.�

- -

�All the more reason not to go looking for it, especially at night. -Plain common sense!�

- -

�I suppose not,� Sevrel Possins acknowledged, secretly indignant that -another reasonably sensible idea had somehow been exploded in a puff of -confusing logic.

- -

Hofft strode over to another member of his security team. �Right, -Quossark. What have you found out about this Foad?�

- -

Bambane Quossark, former detech, looked up from his console. �I�ve -checked the files, chief. Nothing in the last ten years, not for Remble -Foad. There was a Tharm Foad of Narpins Way, former physician, deceased -aged 84. No suspicious circumstances, no known surviving relatives. The -only other record in the same period is of Estrel Foad� just a moment� -yes, Estrel Foad, three years ago. A schoolgirl from Platport, then aged -13, parents Hablan and Aeris. Here for a fem cousin�s birthday party. -The two girls were both witnesses to a fracas outside Smigs in Yarp -Street. Three local youths later identified and apprehended, found to be -drunk and disorderly, and not in possession of nultox, which was duly -administered by a medtech. That�s about it.�

- -

�So, one natural death and one minor incident, but no leads to -Remble, or why he would need ice. What kind of person needs ice? Any -ideas, team?�

- -

Possins, still inwardly smarting, was concentrating intently on his -screen. Hofft looked around the other team members, who obliged with -useful suggestions.

- -

�Fishmongers.�

- -

�Skaters.�

- -

�A sculptor.�

- -

�Cocktail-makers.�

- -

�Someone with a head injury, or a hanging basket?� This last -submission came from Purlie Norpwit, who was the team�s first-aid -specialist.

- -

�You mean someone who has banged their head on a basket?�

- -

�No. Well, possibly. But aside from applying to bruises, using ice is -a convenient way to water hanging plants. Safer than trying to reach up -with a watering can, and the water gets absorbed slowly. I saw it on a -vid.�

- -

�I see, very practical. Well, all plausible, men and fems, but we -need corroborative background. It might be worth delving further back in -the files, but if this ice-seeking Foad is from outside Snoak, it�s -beyond our jurisdiction. Unless whoever is carrying that banner ceases -to do so peacefully, in which case the dye will, so to speak, be cast.� -Hofft nodded meaningfully towards the bank of pod control switches.

- -

A happy yap from Sevrel Possins signified that he had made a -discovery.

- -

�EPL, sir. The Ecological Protection League. Local offices in -Brangdurp Street. They�ve found some snails and a newt, and they�re -worried about effluent.�

- -

Welkin Hofft waited, eyebrow raised, inviting further -information.

- -

�In Gunder�s Bight. Endangered species, they say. Tiny water-snails, -and a small grey-banded newt. And there�s historical evidence of nesting -grebe, which means there must once have been fish, but they think there -might be slow contamination from both the brewery and the -glassworks.�

- -

�That might explain the smell,� said Hofft, for whom an interest in -the wonders and diversity of nature was not altogether natural, but he -was broadminded enough to allow that others might have such concerns. -�Good work! Would you say they pose a threat?�

- -

�They�re endangered, sir, not dangerous.�

- -

�Not the snails, Possins! Those Eco people, out there in the streets. -�Join the fight�� That sounds to me like a possible incitement -to violence.�

- -

�I doubt if they mean it literally. It�s just an attempt to gather -support.� He peered at the screen in front of him and magnified the -image of those clustered around the banner in question. They were of all -ages, and seemed to be enjoying themselves. He saw faces he was sure he -recognized: the charming assistant from the Accessories place in Welfage -Road, the old neatly-bearded librarian wearing one of his trademark -cravats, the Laggabard twins with brightly beribboned berets� �They look -harmless enough, sir.�

- -

�So does Quossark, but bear in mind that as a detech he was trained -to disarm an attacker in less than a second using no more than a single -finger or a handful of bread.�

- -

Possins, who had been unaware of this, turned to look with renewed -respect at his habitually mild-mannered colleague, and could not help -glancing nervously at the man�s sandwich box, which lurked on its usual -shelf below the console. Quossark, with a sheepish grin, raised his -lethal hands in an unconvincing gesture of humility.

- -

�Well,� said Hofft, we�ll keep an eye on them, but let�s assume for -now that these Ecos do not have combat skills. Now, I�d like a closer -view of whoever�s carrying the Foad banner.�

- -

�It�s changed, chief!�

- -

�Changed? How?�

- -

�See for yourself.�

- -

The banner, drooping between two arm-weary bearers, their features -concealed by hat-brims, now read:

- -

JUST FOAD! -

- -

Hofft was not Head of CenSec for nothing. Experience brought -occasional insights. �I think we can forget about the ice. Drop that pod -to a shallower angle. I want to see that banner more clearly.�

- -

Gradually, the message resolved itself:

- -

JUST ICE FOR REMBLE FOAD!

�Ah!� said Hofft. -�That makes more sense. Or rather, it would if we knew who he was, and -what sort of justice was required. And of course why.�

- -

�I know it�s not in our remit to interfere without due cause, -chief�.� ventured Quossark.

- -

�I have a hunch that you are about to make a hypothetical point.�

- -

�Well, if we really needed to obtain that knowledge, the people most -likely to provide it would be...�

- -

��the demonstrators themselves. In fact, probably those carrying that -banner, provided that they have not been anonymously bribed to do so. -Yes, I realise that, Quossark, but in this department the code -stipulates that unless there is verifiable evidence of an imminent or -actual breach of security, or a serious threat to public welfare, we can -only observe. And continue searching the files. It pays to be -methodical, even though it�s not always the easiest option. Any -subsequent implementation, as you know, lies with your former detech -colleagues. After all, that�s why they�re known as the Action Faction.� -

- -

Purlie innocently asked the question that had secretly been bothering -Hofft. �What about this Uncle Glussog and his Talent Parade, sir? There -seem to be quite a few of them, mostly young adults, I would say.�

- -

�Ah, yes, Uncle Glussog. Indeed.�

- -

Hofft pursed his lips, and stared, frowning up at a familiar trailing -speckled cluster of marks on the ceiling. They had been there since he -joined CenSec, possibly caused by an accident with a fizzy drink. He was -unaware that in times of stress he used them as a focus for his -thoughts. They looked like a group of islands on a map; a peaceful -archipelago where he could seek inspiration or solace. In view of -Hofft�s years of experience, and the respect he believed he had earned, -he was most reluctant to admit to his colleagues that he was baffled by -the �Uncle Glussog� brigade. He presumed it must be related to some -recent vidfad, perhaps something trendily technical, disguised as -entertainment for the under-fours.

- -

Hofft dragged his gaze away from the ceiling and back to Purlie. He -knew she had a little boy, Irvel, so would have more reason to be up to -date with the pros and cons of portable gadgetry for the young. -Therefore it would hardly be wrong of him to refer the matter back to -her. Would it?

- -

He tried to adopt an avuncular air. �Well, about this Talent Parade -thing, Purlie. What do you make of it?�

- -

�Me?� Purlie shrugged. �Well, sir, to be honest, I don�t believe I�ve -heard of Uncle Glussog, and I can�t quite make out what sort of talent -is being paraded.�

- -

�That�s a relief!� said Quossark, slamming his hand down on the edge -of the console with lethal insouciance. �I was hoping it wasn�t just -me.�

- -

Possins coughed politely. �There�s no mention of a Glussog in the -records, sir. I took the liberty of checking. Whoever it is, unless you -have privileged information, no-one here at CenSec knows anything about -him.�

- -

�Privileged? No, no, I was just, um, confirming that we were all on -the same screen.�

- -

Time to rally the troops, thought Welkin Hofft. �Now, we are -the body principally responsible for the safety of the citizenry of -Snoak, are we not?�

- -

His team expressed its fervent agreement.

- -

�Throughout the year we maintain order, we respond to alerts, we -carry out surveillance when necessary, and to the best of our ability -ensure that on the streets of our city no person causes harm to another. -Correct?�

- -

�Absolutely, chief!�

- -

�So if someone, for whatever reason, were to organize a public -display under a name that none of us is familiar with, either we are not -doing our job properly��

- -

There was an offended grumble of dissent.

- -

��or, that same someone � or group of someones - is deliberately -mocking us, trying to trick us into wasting time chasing ghosts and -shadows.�

- -

�Whoa, chief. You think this whole thing might be a distraction while -they�re plotting something else?� Quossark looked ready to exercise his -hidden skills at a moment�s notice.

- -

�Not plotting, Quossark, but perpetrating! That�s the threat we may -be facing. With all these people out of their homes, half of Snoak lies -vulnerable to trespass and burglary, and who knows what else?�

- -

Fired with enthusiasm, disregarding that the question might have been -rhetorical, the team speculated on other dire possibilities:

- -

�Arson!�

- -

�Reckless commission of graffiti!�

- -

�Vandalism!�

- -

��.and all manner of wilful, um�.

- -

�Malfeasance?�

- -

�Yes, that will do.�

- -

Hofft sanctioned the deployment of four further recon pods to cover -all residential sectors of the city, ensuring that there would be -continuous monitoring while the demonstration was in progress. He -co-opted selected detechs who would be available to stand in for CenSec -team members if necessary. At the first hint of suspicious activity -Snoak�s culprit-catching net would be triggered. They would soon know -the identity of these subversives.

- -

- -

The device, which had used up all its inventor�s savings, -and had taken five difficult years to perfect, consisted of a shallow -cylinder, about the size of a large dinner plate, attached on either -side to a strong light-weight frame whose lower ends were held firmly in -a simple harness of hard-wearing cloth which strapped to the back. For -the upmarket version the cloth would be replaced by leather or whent. An -energator fitted neatly into a pouch in the belt. The top and periphery -of the cylinder were studded with very precise perforations. Concealed -within was a set of blades which could rotate at very high speed with a -hum that was barely audible. It hung above the head like a halo, and was -intended to deflect saturated air. It was his answer to those bent and -broken-strutted inside-out tendencies which in a strong wind turned even -the sturdiest umbrella into something resembling a severely disabled -crow.

- -

Some years earlier, as a temporary expedient, he had found work at -the local factory. In the absence of any particular ambition he had soon -become accustomed to the routines of delivery and collection, and even -the occasional physical effort of helping to stack or retrieve heavy -drums of paint. He enjoyed the company of his fellow workers, especially -that of Tathia from the colour-matching department, whom he had cajoled -(or, stretching credibility, charmed) into marriage and motherhood.

- -

To add family appeal, he decided to decorate his working prototype in -bright, prismatic colours. The paints he used were redundant test -samples from work, some of which, although intended for industrial use, -had already contributed over the years to the embellishment of otherwise -bland items of furniture. While the paint was drying he thought it was -about time he gave his device a name: something unfussy, but relevant. -His first proposal was The Protector, but that seemed both too -melodramatic and not specific enough. What was its actual function? -Basically, its job was to blow, but that particular combination of words -might be thought indelicate. Similarly, he felt it best to eschew -air and head, even though the wearer of one of these -devices could stay hands free and dry-headed in a monsoon or a -snowstorm. He needed to encapsulate the idea of avoiding getting wet. He -stared with a kind of unfocussed concentration at the colourful design. -What about� yes, that was it! A Rainblow.

- -

The concept of the portable rain deflector had come to him during a -persistent spell of turbulent weather which had dampened their clothing -and their spirits for an entire week. For the first time in his life he -felt he had a goal of his own which was not only worth striving for, but -potentially achievable. He tried to share his excitement with Tathia, -whose attention at the time was largely taken up with the demands of -their infant son. He could not have known how costly it would be, or how -long it would take, working at night and at week-ends, mainly at the -kitchen table (for want of any other convenient surface), gradually -learning to refine each element of the design until he had the -optimal result with the most durable materials. Although he was -scrupulous about cleaning and tidying up after each session, his -obsessive tinkering led to domestic friction.

- -

His wife had staunchly put up with the inconvenience as long as -possible, but it had caused a strain on their relationship which became -too much for her to bear. Tathia, in tears, had taken the boy, who was -too young to object, to stay with her sister in Platport, away from what -she referred to as �that awful contraption�, until things hopefully -returned to normal. He had let them go with a minimum of protest, -knowing that he was at fault, but resolved to see the development of his -device through to a conclusion. Remble Foad, native of Trevury, -assistant store manager for Swelfs Industrial Paints, abandoned, weary, -impoverished, now grimly determined, set about launching his -Rainblow on an unsuspecting world.

- -

Having no experience of trying to market a new product against the -massed forces of established competition, Foad naturally sought advice -from supportive but equally inexperienced friends and colleagues, who, -despite their occasional teasing, knew how much this project meant to -him.

- -

�Gonna cost thousands, Rem, old fella.� These encouraging words -emerged in a doleful rumble together with a radiant spatter of pastry -crumbs from the preoccupied mouth of Tyle Hutter, who supervised the -mixing vats. He was sturdily built, and the friendly arm that rested -briefly on Remble�s shoulders felt as ponderous as a limp dog.

- -

�First y� need to patn�t the thing,� said Appen Garch, sipping from -his mug. They were gathered in the factory canteen.

- -

Foad looked puzzled. �You�ve seen the holo. It�s already -painted.�

- -

�Not paint, patn�t. Get the design registrated by the patn�t people.� -He spoke with an air of casual authority, which only the better-informed -would think to question.

- -

�Oh, right.� Foad was vaguely aware of this requirement, but not -altogether sure how to proceed.

- -

�You�ll hafta find a lawyer,� declared Melgus Prant from Quality -Control.

- -

Foad suffered a flutter of panic. They all knew about the recent -departure of his wife and child, which had left him feeling wretched and -vulnerable. Had Tathia said something about divorce? He was suddenly -very unsure. �A lawyer?�

- -

�Someone who can get you prop�ly organized, do all the legal stuff -about, y�know, contracts an� suchlike��

- -

�Ah, that kind of lawyer, yes, of course.� The feeling of panic -subsided, leaving a somewhat more tolerable sense of confusion.

- -

Tyle Hutter had been thinking. �Tell you what you want, Rem,� he -announced in his confidential growl. �What you want is an -investor.�

- -

There was general agreement that finding an investor would be a -useful step.

- -

Back at home in front of his e-screen Foad began to realise that he -would definitely need help. The patent application alone would cost more -than he could afford. On the positive side he had found a substantial -list of potential investors offering to support new ideas. He ruled out -those who insisted on prior completion of the patent application, or -whose entries were full of forbidding terms like traction and -scalability. He made a note of those remaining few which had a -more reassuring approach, speaking of trust and early stage -assistance and shared vision.

- -

Foad�s enquiries eventually led him to a local firm, The Select -Options Agency, where, on his first visit to their sparse but tasteful -office he was talked through each stage of the process by Jagmot Yives, -evidently a senior member of staff. Yives was polite, friendly and -reassuring, explaining that the agency�s high success rate depended on -knowing what to reject, and that this Rainblow design looked very -promising. With Remble Foad�s permission, the prototype would need to be -examined and tested by their technical specialists before they could -proceed further. If it passed as acceptable, the firm would then -undertake an exhaustive search for any similar existing patents among -the many thousands filed each year; a tedious but necessary task in -order to avoid any possible future legal difficulties. Foad understood -that these were sensible precautions.

- -

Foad had duly delivered the prototype, and spent an anxious ten days -before receiving a call from the agency to say that the tests had been -most satisfactory. He was invited for a further appointment. The agency -proved sympathetic to Foad�s awkward financial position, and Yives -assured him that as evidence of their good will, they would make no -charge for the patent search, which could take a number of weeks. Yives -was about to return the prototype Rainblow to its owner�s -safekeeping, when he had a helpful afterthought. While waiting for the -completion of the search, unless Foad had any objection, the agency was -in a position to expedite matters by arranging to show the device to -some major distributors, and to explore with manufacturers the costs of -mass production. Foad thought this was an excellent idea. He was glad to -pass on the responsibility of the whole marketing issue to people with -the proper expertise. The burden, though very much of his own making, -was lifting at last.

- -

Tathia and the boy had returned from Platport. Tathia was anxious to -settle back in, though Remble could sense she was still on her guard. In -contrast, his son Corm was unduly manic, seemingly driven by the same -impulse that sends cats dashing about in random directions. Remble tried -his best to atone for his previous neglect. He made conscientious -efforts to compensate for his long fixation on developing the -Rainblow by being more attentive to his wife -and son. Any further mention of the device was now confined to the -workplace.

- -

At the factory his workmates were happy to see that he was -appreciably less stressed. He had told them of his early dealings with -the agency, and they were all keen to hear of any further progress. It -was very nearly a month before Foad was called back to see Jagmot -Yives.

- -

At first the news was encouraging. The distributors had been -impressed, and had expressed definite interest, subject to satisfactory -legal requirements. The manufacturers the agency had consulted had the -capability of setting up automated production lines without extensive -re-tooling, thereby reducing costs, although the estimated initial -investment would still run to about half a million� Yives had paused, -and sighed.

- -

�Unhappily, Mr Foad, we have figuratively hit a brick wall. There is -no doubt that you have solved an age-old problem with a clever idea, but -the very fact that it is such a familiar problem means that of the many -others who have put their minds to this, some will have hit upon very -similar solutions, particularly in the light of today�s technology. And -so it proved, I�m afraid. There are no less than one hundred and -ninety-three patent applications for designs for rain deflectors -differing only in minor details from your own. That excludes the two -hundred and twelve thousand or so which contain no moving parts. So, -with great regret, we can proceed no further.�

- -

Remble Foad was numbly aware that this was not what he had envisaged. -He was distressed to see that Yives was close to tears at having to -deliver the information, and felt foolish at having had such high -expectations, and at the same time perversely relieved that it was all -over. As he retrieved what he now saw from Tathia�s viewpoint as his -�awful contraption�, he thanked Yives for all the agency�s efforts on -his behalf. Yives, accompanying him to the door, courteously praised him -for his enterprise, sympathized with his disappointment, and wished him -well for the future. They shook hands solemnly. After a few steps Remble -turned back to wave, but Yives had already closed the door.

- -

During the following year only those acquainted with these events -might have regarded as suspicious firstly the unannounced closure of The -Select Options Agency in Trevury, and secondly the subsequent appearance -in well-known stores of the Spindrip: an apparatus remarkably -like the ill-fated Rainblow, fashionably available in an -assortment of colours and a choice of hard-wearing materials at prices -to suit even the most expensive tastes, and to judge by its growing -popularity, likely before long to supplant the obsolete umbrella. Among -those who smelled a corporate rat were Tyle Hutter, Appen Garch and -Melgus Prant. They were convinced that Rem, their good friend and fellow -worker, who had sacrificed so much for his invention, had been blatantly -cheated out of the rewards due to him. Even if Rem himself argued that -he had �moved on�, and would rather not have to be reminded about how -gullible he had been, they felt that he deserved better, and vowed to -take up his cause with the proper authorities. They were debating -exactly which authorities these might be when Melgus happened to mention -that he�d heard from his cousin Follick in Snoak, the one who kept -amphibians, that there was to be some kind of rally at the week-end, -starting in Fountain Square, and that everyone was welcome. This seemed -like too good an opportunity to miss. They would need a banner, of -course. Fortunately there was a large reserve of fabric offcuts at -Swelfs, and finding enough paint would definitely not be a problem.

- -

- - -

Welkin Hofft was disconsolate. It was early evening. The -recon pods had been operating within visible wavelengths, but could -switch to other frequencies if needed. He was beginning to think it -might be a wasted effort. Members of his team had been monitoring all -residential areas of Snoak continuously, but there had been not the -slightest trace of criminal activity. Meanwhile the rally was still in -progress, although numbers had diminished as people went in search of -food or toilet facilities, or simply resumed their customary routines. -

- -

Most of the Ecological Protection League�s followers had drifted off -in small groups, those with binoculars to a vantage point from where any -surviving wildlife in Gunder�s Bight could be observed until the light -faded, without requiring the involvement of nostrils.

- -

The Remble Foad contingent, apparently only a handful in number, were -seen to be animatedly engaging with anyone who would listen to them. -Possins had pointed out that during each encounter one of them would -make a curious twirling motion with a finger above his head, and -wondered whether this was a ritual gesture of some kind. Was Foad -perhaps the leader of a religious cult?

- -

The colourful capering of Uncle Glussog�s Talent Parade, whose -participants seemed to have inexhaustible energy, continued to attract -attention. Who were these people? Hofft was none the wiser. -Purlie Norpwit had scanned the media and entertainment database without -success.

- -

The team had ruefully concluded that they were in all likelihood just -young citizens having a good time. They might be behaving rather like -uninhibited children, but some of their more casual social interactions -indicated that they were beyond school age. The realisation struck Hofft -that they must be students, and because so many had appeared -early in the day they would not have travelled very far. He concluded -they must be from Sparagulan College, within sight of his office -windows. But who was Uncle Glussog?

- -

Was it, wondered Welkin Hofft, a kind of honorary title bestowed by -Sparagulan College, perhaps on a venerable member of their Drama -Department for services to � something? Hofft�s imagination -failed to supply a suitable achievement. He was not a devotee of the -theatre. He knew that the College had some arcane traditions dating back -centuries to the time of its founder, Aubec Sparagulan, who sprang from -a family of wealthy fruit merchants. Aubec had been equally fascinated -by botany and mathematics, and had written a famous book whose title -Hofft could not remember. He caught himself staring at those spots on -the ceiling again, and realised that his mind had wandered away from the -subject.

- -

Bambane Quossark, he of the lethal hands, who had a secret penchant -for crosswords, and a nagging feeling that they had missed a clue, -interrupted Hofft�s reverie.

- -

�Chief, I think the answer is in the banner. If I�m right, Uncle -Glussog is no more than a wild goose, or a red herring.�

- -

Hofft was still trying to recall the title of the book, and was -momentarily flummoxed.

- -

�How can he possibly be a bird, or a fi� Oh, you mean not an actual -person? Please explain.�

- -

�It�s just a hunch, chief, but I think we should try re-arranging all -the letters in that slogan to see if there�s a hidden message.�

- -

�So, �Uncle Glussog�s Talent Parade� could be just a smokescreen? -Hmmm. Well, team, there�s a challenge for you all. Let�s have a crack at -this. The first person to find a plausible solution gets a free mug of -emberskelven at the Owl & Skillet.�

- -

This was the first time that the CenSec team had been offered a -reward for taking time off to solve a word puzzle. They would almost -certainly have tackled it even without the added inducement. An -industrious silence fell, punctuated only by random grunts, sucking of -teeth and the odd plosive exhalation as the various team members applied -themselves to the problem.

- -

After about ten minutes Purlie Norpwit held up a page from her -notepad. �Sir, I think have something, but I�m not sure what it -means.�

- -

Hofft, whose own efforts had become stuck on the name CLASTER GALE, -tried to sound encouraging. �Go ahead, Purlie,�

- -

�Well sir, I was thinking there must be a clue here, and then I -noticed that you can make the word CLUE, and then I found A TANGLED -CLUE, which seemed promising, so I tried to find something meaningful in -the remaining letters, but all I came up with is STOPS GRANULES.�

- -

�A tangled clue stops granules,� Hofft murmured to himself. �A -tangled clue� is definitely a good start, but as for the granules, what -would they be? Sand? Salt? It�s a bit vague, I�m afraid, Purlie. Anyone -else? Not yet? Keep trying, team.�

- -

He returned to CLASTER GALE, and picked out PLANS TO. He was on to -something here!

- -

CLASTER GALE PLANS TO� what? Which letters had he not yet used? -D,E,G,N,S,U,U.

- -

Not a propitious selection. Wait! He spotted USE. CLASTER GALE PLANS -TO USE�

- -

Four letters left: D,G,N,U. There was only one word he could form -from those, but he really didn�t want to. Its implications were at best� -agricultural, and he decided, at least for the moment, not to share this -dubious triumph.

- -

Despite unusually fierce concentration over the next hour or so, the -others fared no better, being reluctant to claim success with phrases -that remained stubbornly cryptic. Sevrel Possins had produced what -looked like a mythical threat: DRAGONS PLAGUE CATTLE, UNLESS�

- -

Bambane Quossark, who enjoyed doing this sort of thing in his spare -time, had churned out several alternatives. These were:

- -

LEGLESS! � A DANGEROUS CUT PLANT

- -

CLOUDS AS GLUE: STRANGE PLANET

- -

A LOST NUDE GETS SLUNG A PARCEL

- -

Since this exercise had been his idea, he was increasingly irked that -these re-arrangements had little obvious relevance to Sparagulan College -or the students. He stared again at the words on the banner, and -experienced a moment of thrilling clarity. His hunch was justified. For -the last time, he wrote out the phrase in carefully spaced capital -letters:

- -

U N C L E G L U S S O G S T A L E N T P A R A D E

- -

Then he began to cross them off one by one, beginning with S for -Sparagulan, then C for College, and finally S for Students.

- -

He raised one of his lethal hands.

- -

�Chief, I�ve got a sudden dreadful thirst.�

- - -© Les Sklaroff 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] glossog2.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== -[*ITEM] Lost City - -[*AUTHOR] D. S. White - -[*BLURB] "Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."
-Winston Churchill - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I told myself I was just going for a -casual hike across the countryside. I really didn�t want to think about -the fact that I was now an outcast and would never be allowed to return -to the safest place I knew on this planet. I tried to forget I'd ever -met them before, the people who had become my loyal crew on the voyage -from earth to this world. And who, for reasons I didn�t fully -understand, had cast me out after arriving here. I had done nothing to -harm any of them, least of all Sarah.

- -

But still, she lingered in my mind, like the sunlight in the sky. I -couldn�t block her out. I just couldn�t forget the way she looked. I -didn't know if I'd ever see her again, and at this moment, forced to -fend for myself, I didn't want to think about it too much. I didn't want -to fall apart so close to home. I tried to remember the things I liked -the most about her, so if I never really saw her again, at least I could -always recall the way she sparkled when we first met.

- -

As I peered across the horizon, searching the landscape for a route -to follow, I felt the chilly breeze of winter coming on. Instead of -turning toward the dark city, I walked farther out into the countryside, -following what looked like a long abandoned trail. The trail curved -around the headstones of old graves, the homes of souls returned to the -netherworld long ago. These were the resting places of the first human -settlers on this planet. Why they�d all died before our arrival here was -a mystery I couldn�t care less about at the moment. I more -focused on finding something to eat.

- -

Eventually I found what I was looking for. Most everything that -remained in the garden had withered, as they'd stopped planting crops a -long time ago, leaving behind only seeds for the birds. I pinched off a -few shriveled vegetables and threw them inside my backpack, scarcely -wanting to think about how these morsels might be the last thing I ever -ate.

- -

I continued outward, away from the darkness of the city, away from -everything I knew. I had little interest in returning to my ship. I was -going to live on my own, where no one would ever find me again. I was -going to find a hole in the mountains and disappear there forever.

- -

A sort of magic overcame me, as often does when I�m by myself. I -hummed a soft tune and noticed things about this alien land I�d never -seen before. The air smelled cold, hinting of fresh snow falling in the -mountains. Sunlight filtered through my hands, curving around my -fingers, highlighting the blood and bones beneath my skin, but it failed -to warm me. I saw the colors of the changing season buried deep within -the texture of a fallen leaf and I pried it apart, looking for the -reason why I felt older today, but gave up soon when I found no -clues.

- -

Larger than life, the mountains in the distance loomed on the -horizon, an unbroken chain of snow-covered peaks. I counted seven -towering giants directly in front of me, monsters waiting to devour my -existence. A smaller ridge-line receded to the south, hinting the chain -of mountains went on forever.

- -

I spent most of the day walking toward them, but by evening the -mountains only appeared a little closer. I looked for somewhere to -sleep, with the sun going down. I came across a place where two large -trees had fallen in the shape of an X and I made a bed by crawling under -one of them and rolling back and forth in the tall grass growing there. -Then I lay a few withered tree branches against the tree trunks to break -the oncoming frigid night wind.

- -

From my backpack I pulled out the vegetable scraps I�d found in the -morning and ate them raw. There was really nothing else to eat. Inside -my backpack I also found a glass, which was useless because I didn�t -have any water.

- -

�You got any food?� I asked no one in particular, looking at the -empty world being sucked in by the spreading night.

- -

�No, I don't have any food,� I answered myself.

- -

In the morning I put on my backpack and started walking toward the -mountains again. A little later I came to a house, a mud house, which -had been made by hand out of wet earth pressed together, now hardened by -the sun over a long time. The house stood by the faint remains of a -road, nothing more than a wide path etched in the ground. As I went down -the road, I came across more mud houses, but whenever I looked inside -them, nobody was home.

- -

�Hello!� I called out to see if anyone still lived in this tiny -village in the wild, but only the cries of birds fleeing in panic -returned to me.

- -

The road ran across a stone bridge, merely the shadow of an arch -passing over the banks of what had once been a stream. It made me -realize how thirsty I was, as I peered down below. I jumped over the -edge of the bridge onto the dry bed and found it rock hard. Strange -shapes stuck in the dirt caught my attention and I kicked at one to see -what it was. It glimmered a little in the sunlight.

- -

The object was covered in dried mud, so I spit on it and wiped it -clean with my sleeve. As I did, a slight vibration passed through my -hand and I almost dropped it. Then I noticed the color of the rock. It -was blue. From side to side, the bottom of the stream was covered in -oddly shaped cubes, just like the one I was grasping in my hand. I was -standing in the middle of a bed of blue gems. When I took in how many of -these powerful gems there were here, I gasped.

- -

Yet I seemed immune to the negative effects of the blue gems. They -didn�t burn my skin, like they'd done to others I'd witnessed picking -them up. The longer I held one, the better I felt. My hunger faded and -my thirst no longer seemed to matter. My vision cleared and my thoughts -made sense again. I waited for a while, to see if anything else would -happen, but nothing did. Eventually I got tired of just standing there, -so I tossed the gem under the bridge and climbed back up to the -road.

- -

Inside the houses I began to find people, the remains of ancient -human skeletons lying in odd positions on the floor. Some of the -skeletons didn�t make any sense, with extra bones or twisted bones or -missing limbs. In one place I found two skeletons embracing each other. -And in another house, I found the remains of a girl whose dress had been -ripped open. Around her neck hung a silver chain with a stone embedded -in it. The stone was red, and so securely fastened to the chain that I -couldn�t pry it out. I picked up the girl�s head and tried to take the -chain off her neck and her skull came loose from her spine.

- -

�Sorry,� I said and laid the jaw and other pieces back where they -might have belonged.

- -

I thought I heard the sound of someone talking outside and I grabbed -the chain and ran out the door. But there was nobody there. I sat down -by the door to the house and thought about what it might have been like -to live here. I imagined people walking around, talking, laughing, and -then I thought I smelled something cooking. I saw a bird circling -overhead and felt myself growing weak with hunger.

- -

I felt a little guilty for taking the chain and stone and thought -about returning it to the girl, but was too afraid to enter her house -again. But the chain and stone gave me an idea. I went back to the -bridge and found the blue gem that I�d left there. As I held it in my -hand, I felt myself come alive once more, as if the gem was a battery -recharging my soul.

- -

I found a sharp rock and hammered on the necklace until the red gem -popped out. Then I put the blue gem in its place and hammered at the -chain until the gem was secure. After that, I hung the chain around my -neck. When I had finished, I pulled my shirt open and dropped the gem -inside, close to my skin, where nobody would see it. I felt warm all -over, even in the cold wind.

- -

I thought I heard the sound of bells tinkling and I ran down the road -until I came to an intersection. Here skeletons were everywhere, not -just inside the houses, but also lying out in the village -square. I had to step carefully to get past them and it began to freak -me out. On the wind, I continued to hear odd tones, as if trumpets were -being played at a funeral procession for the dead.

- -

�Who is it? What do you want?� I yelled, but nobody answered me.

- -

I ran back the way I�d come, frantic now, afraid I'd die out in the -middle of nowhere and nobody would ever know what had become of me. I -pictured my skeleton laying here for centuries, until it was discovered -by accident.

- -

�Don�t leave me here!� I screamed at myself.

- -

When I realized I was talking to myself I gave up on the mountains. I -turned and looked back towards the dark city, just a smudge on the -horizon by now. As my desire to live in the wilderness withered into -thin air, I ran past the houses until I found the trail I had followed -to get here. I got a little disoriented in the tall weeds and lost the -trail, but kept pushing forward with the shadow of the city directly -ahead. I stopped running eventually, feeling dizzy and nauseous and -dehydrated, but forced myself to continue moving forward at a steady -pace.

- -

Things were not normal on this planet. When I turned and looked back -behind me, the village in the wild had disappeared completely. When I -looked up at the sky, I had no idea which day it was and I even began to -wonder how long I�d spent alone. I thought I�d been evicted from my ship -yesterday, but it might have been a hundred years ago. I clutched the -blue gem under my shirt and pushed it hard against my skin and the -dizziness went away.

- -

By noon I began to see signs of dwellings, old outposts long -abandoned. Yet I skirted the shadow of the city when I felt its presence -about to devour me, not wanting to go in there alone. It was strange, -the way every place was so empty. So dark. The city was completely -devoid of life. What had happened here I couldn�t say.

- -

The road curved to the south, toward the place where I�d set down the -ship, the same place where I'd last seen Sarah. I straightened the -collar on my jacket and pulled my gloves on a little tighter. The sun -was up but the day was feeling colder by the second. And then I -stopped.

- -

Sarah was standing just up ahead. She smiled at me and waved. I -hurried over to talk to her.

- -

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

- -

"What they did to you to, I had to leave. I didn't know if I could -find you, but I couldn't stay there any longer."

- -

She tried to hug me but I backed up a step. "What?" she asked.

- -

I pulled the blue gem out of my shirt and showed it to her. "Better -not touch me. I don't know if it's safe."

- -

She nodded. She knew the blue gems were dangerous to most people. Why -I was immune, she didn�t ask.

- -

"I have a map," she said.

- -

"Let's take a look."

- -

After choosing a route, she put the map away. We started walking. We -were good traveling companions, not because we had a lot in common, but -more because we didn't talk much. The way I saw it, what had happened on -the ship wasn't a problem we needed to discuss.

- -

"Odds?" I asked.

- -

"Low," she replied.

- -

The city grew bigger as we got closer. I couldn't see anything wrong -with it from the outside. The buildings were still intact, for the most -part. Some of them looked a little aged. Few windows were broken. Most -of the doors were closed. It felt wrong to be walking into an empty city -of this size. At the perimeter, there weren't any warning signs, nothing -about toxic radiation, or the plague, nothing to say we needed to turn -back now. It was just empty, and yet, arranged in an odd but orderly -fashion.

- -

When we arrived in the streets, that's when I noticed the more -peculiar things. In the windows, the ones that were still intact, in -just about every one of them was a skeleton. Even odder, these lifeless -figures all appeared to be looking in the same direction, directly at -me. I turned around and looked behind me but didn't see anything of -interest to warrant those empty faces turned in my direction.

- -

At one intersection I found a newspaper bin and after forcing it open -pulled out a stack of printed pages. The paper was crisp and new, like -it'd just come off the press. The date had to be 70 or more years ago�I -didn't exactly know today's date. I scanned the headlines on several -pages and discovered nothing alarming. A politician had been charged -with corruption. Still, that was no reason to have the population of an -entire planet go extinct.

- -

In one of the windows I saw a cat. It looked real enough, with fur -and wet eyes, but it had to be a fake. I watched it for a while as it -watched me. Or it appeared to be watching me. And then it blinked. I -grabbed Sarah's arm and pointed.

- -

"So?" she asked.

- -

"Food," I said.

- -

I wasn't about to eat a cat, but the cat, since it was truly alive, -had to have a source of food somewhere. We needed to find out more about -it.

- -

The cat turned and jumped down from the window sill and ran to the -front door. We shuffled across the street and opened the entrance to the -shop. The door hadn't been locked or damaged in any way. The cat ran to -my leg and began to purr. It was clearly familiar with typical human -interaction. It looked up in my eyes and meowed a meow of contentment. I -felt odd at that moment. The city waited silently all around us, empty; -those skeletons were everywhere, in every window, with the same -jaw-dropping expressions. And here was this cat, not afraid at all.

- -

We never did find anyone alive. We didn't find much food either and -eventually we had to abandon the city. Once we'd made it to the other -side, the land opened up for miles upon miles. We were free. We would -live another day. The crew of our ship would never follow us this far. -Before getting too distant from the city, though, I turned to look back. -Just like expected, in every window, an empty-eyed skull watched me. And -there, in one window, was a cat. A healthy cat. And those skeletons were -all attired for work, wearing suits and dresses. I couldn't forget about -that for a long time.

- -

Life wasn�t easy on this planet. The only people who could help me -right now had turned on me. My crew had committed mutiny. After seeing -the way blue gems turn people into monsters, and then noticing the way -they gave me power, nobody would come near me. They feared what they -didn�t understand, something they couldn�t control. I had to admit, I -feared myself a little as well. The changes taking place inside me, -something alien growing there, giving me strength but at the same time -turning me into a freak, it left me feeling confused.

- -

I thought I saw someone in the distance waving and I started to run, -but stopped before going too far. It was nothing more than a tree. -Leaves scattered in the wind and the world turned. I felt older. I felt -alone.

- -

�What?� Sarah asked after catching up.

- -

�Nothing,� I said.

- -

Behind us, the lost city had sunk lower on the horizon. All I could -think about was finding more food. But at least, I had Sarah. When I -turned to look at her, she sparkled like the sun. And when I looked up -ahead, where there were trees, I thought there might be fruit. We would -move forward, because moving on would bring us to tomorrow, and another -day was a chance at hope.

- -© D.S.White 2017 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] lostcity.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] The Aldous Effect - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent -one."
Albert Einstein - - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I -stood in a darkened doorway, waiting for -The Man. New Year fireworks lit up the downtown sky but I tried to -ignore them. Some of the rockets looked too much like tracer for my -liking and I needed no reminder of combat. - -The Man slid out of the shadows, all -gabardine coat and broad-brimmed hat. �Mister G, always a pleasure. -What will it be this time?� He had a rich basso profundo voice that -sounded like life itself was a constant source of amusement.

- -

My palms were slick with sweat as I took a surgical transfer packet -from my jacket pocket and held it out. �I have this. Fresh human liver. -Still viable.�

- -The Man inspected my offering and ached an eyebrow. �Healthy? Since when -did they trash prime rib like this?� - -I shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant. �I doctored the harvesting -report to give the donor a history of alcohol abuse. After that no -transplant team would touch his organs with a ten-foot pole. This was -destined for the incineration chute, no nobody will miss it.� I licked -my lips. �I figure it�s good for four rocks?� - -�Four? That�s being a bit generous.� He laughed at my obvious -nervousness. �What the hell, it is New Year, after all, and -you�re a steady customer. Four it is.� - -The Man pocketed the liver and -held out four small packets. Not so much -�rocks� as small chrome yellow gelatine squares, like dishwasher -tablets. He tipped his hat. �Be seeing you Mister G. Be seeing you -real soon.� - -And I was alone. - -

After my third tour I was done; invalided out of the Army due to -PTSD. Just another college boy who couldn�t handle the brutal reality of -combat. They shipped me home but I brought the battlefield with me; -sleeping in a booby-trapped apartment, always armed, barely able to hold -down a job � pretty much the poster boy for crippling anxiety. Treatment -provided by the Veterans� Association didn�t cut it so I started -self-medicating - sliding from conventional narcotics to the truly -esoteric in little under a month. Then I heard about �Hux�, a street -drug that offered a whole new perspective on life.

- -

Man, did they get that right.

- -

The calmness I got from using Hux came at a price, but one worth -paying. I was on the ebb of my previous hit, starting to feel prickly -around the edges. Looking at the rocks made me shiver with anticipation, -too distracted to notice that the flickering light on the wall wasn�t -simply glare from a distant sky burst.

- -

�Edward, this is so wrong. You do know that, don�t -you?�

- -

I thrust the rocks into my coat pocket and grabbed the handle of my -revolver - but it was only a Tinker Bell and nothing I couldn�t handle. -The fairy wafted into my field of vision, surrounded by a blue glow that -stung my eyes.

- -

�I�m so disappointed in you, I really am.�

- -

I know how that sounds, and given the drugs I�d tried, there were -times when I knew I was hallucinating - and times I hoped -I was.

- -

This was neither.

- -

Because what Hux does is let you see Desire, Conscience and all the -boys in the band � for real. Not that it reduced morality to a mere -spectator sport but these were definitely the über -manifestations of motivation, duking it out to see who�ll hold sway � -and you can forget the �subconscious� aspect.

- -

No, really.

- -

My personal moral gladiators presented as an eclectic mix drawn from -childhood storybooks and pubescent fantasies - hence Tinker Bell. From -past experience the fairy was nippy but if it came down to it my -revolver was packing beehive rounds with the same spread as a shotgun. -Although blowing her away would have been easy-peasy I didn�t want -another dead Conscience on my conscience - and I really didn�t -want a Jiminy giving me grief instead.

- -

So I just smiled and showed my empty hands. �How�s things, doll? The -Moral Majority still treating you right?�

- -

She frowned. �This isn�t about me, Edward, it�s about your actions -and the consequences they entail. I strongly advise you to turn yourself -in and make a clean breast of it to the authorities. You know you�ll -feel all the better for it.�

- -

As I groped for the right platitude the shadow of a burnt-out street -light began to lengthen, undulating over the tarmac towards Tinker Bell. -I stepped back, hoping to draw her away from it. �Look, T, you know me, -I�m the archetypal bad boy. How about we just agree to differ and go our -separate ways? I�m sure there are some lost souls out there you could -actually save, but me, hell, I�m way beyond help.�

- -

But she just fluttered there; hands on tiny hips, her face the -picture of earnest dedication. �Now, Edward, that�s being defeatist. -Everyone has good in them, no matter how deep down, and-�

- -

The shadow morphed into a 3-D striking serpent, jaws wide open. I -closed my eyes against the horror of it all, but couldn�t block out the -crunch and grinding of miniature bones. By the time I risked -taking a peek the shadow was retreating back to the base of the lamp -post and I was in deep shit, if only by proxy. Glancing up I knew there -was now a hole in the sky with my name on it, and wondered if simply -running away was a viable option. Except, of course, the one person you -can�t escape from is yourself.

- -

Still, there�s nothing wrong with getting a good head start.

- -

So I bailed, heading in the general direction of away, but had -barely gone a hundred yards when a sensual slither of movement across my -shoulders pulled me up short. The serpent coiled around my neck, -whispering in my ear. �You need a top-up, Eddie, you know you do. -There�s no harm in that. It�s New Year, after all.�

- -

Desire, well my Desire, sounded like Fenella Fielding, an -old-school actress I�d watched on the Vintage channel. She had a husky, -sexy voice that made my balls twitch and a way of derailing my train of -thought. I plucked at my scaly temptress but she lengthened, encircling -my chest and stomach, sliding between my legs.

- -

�You�re not the boss of me.� I tried for dismissive arrogance but -lust made my voice thick and guttural. My erection was a bar of -iron.

- -

She laughed; a throaty chuckle. �For now I am. We both know that, so -why struggle? Let�s just enjoy the evening for what it is.� A forked -tongue caressed my earlobe.

- -

I shivered. �OK, OK, I�ll do it.�

- -

�Like you ever had a choice, Eddie? Be seeing ya.�

- -

And I was alone.

- -

I needed a cold shower but a couple of deep breaths had to -do. My hands shook as I fumbled a rock from pocket to mouth, and chewed. -This one tasted of liquorice, but the effect was always the same; -welcome to the high-def world, surround sound, front-row seat -guaranteed.

- -

Reality as an addiction.

- -

I gathered my jacket around me and headed for The Quarter; stepping -out, a man on a mission. Each hit of Hux had a side-effect, a real -doozie; one that allowed me to fund a lifestyle way beyond that of a -lowly medical technician.

- -

For the next few hours I�d be the unluckiest man on the planet.

- -

I�m not talking about a litany of woe, no, rather I�d be the King of -Losers, sucking up good luck from those around me. It�s akin to the -proverbial broken mirror � all that bad news has to come from -somewhere, and the glass does it by absorbing misfortune from -random individuals in the vicinity. Well, I�m the opposite, the inverse -Midas touch, and casinos, man, they goddam love me.

- -

So I hustled over to Pelham House, on Matheson, where they paid me a -retainer to show up, sit in, and ruin everyone�s evening. Games where -the house won by default, of course � so if I played roulette everyone -else might as well flush their chips down the crapper and save -themselves some time and disappointment.

- -

I scurried along, keeping to back streets and alleyways, clinging to -the shadows, avoiding the general population wherever possible. Even so -I was probably responsible for two broken high heels, one set of keys -down a drain and a fender-bender before reaching the casino parking lot. -I stopped and sighed, feeling relatively safe amongst the field of -inanimate objects.

- -

Strike that last comment.

- -

Doubt was waiting for me; a weasly-voiced weasel perched on the roof -of a �69 Chevy. �You do know they�re ripping you off, right? I -mean, you don�t even get a percentage of what the house makes off your -talent. Talk about selling yourself short.�

- -

I sniffed. �I get by.�

- -

�You get screwed, that�s what you get. They see you coming, put on a -false smile, take you for a ride. All those suits, laughing at you -behind closed doors.�

- -

�Leave him be, he�s mine tonight.� Desire lay coiled around the hood -ornament, dangling tail twitching like an angry cat.

- -

Doubt bared his yellow teeth. �You wish! Eddie here is a born loser, -and he knows it. All you do is get him into situations where -failure cuts even deeper.�

- -

�I said back off, flea-bag.�

- -

�Bite me!�

- -

Man, talk about the wrong choice of words. Desire not so much lunged -as lengthened, surging forwards with unhinged jaws at least a foot wide. -Doubt chittered at her, then back-flipped from roof to fender, from -fender into the back of a Dodge pickup. His small paw appeared above the -tailgate, single �finger� extended � and was gone. The serpent hissed a -raspberry in his direction, then slid down over the trunk and vanished -into the tailpipe.

- -

Score one for greed-fuelled self-confidence, I guess.

- -

I shivered, wiped a slick of sweat from my face, and hustled -diagonally cross the parking lot to the employee�s entrance. �Ready to -Rumble� Ron was on the door � a former wrestler with biceps the size of -my thighs. Although he was no more than muscle in a cheap suit the -contempt in his voice was obvious as he used his hand-held radio.

- -

�Boss? This is Ron. The loser is here. He�s juiced-up, but looks like -shit. What you want me to do?� There was a burble of speech in reply -that I didn�t catch. Ron nodded. �I�m on it.� He looked me up and down. -�Hit the showers. There�ll be a change of clothes waiting for you when -you�re done. Don�t soil them or we�ll bill you for the dry -cleaning.�

- -

Ron didn�t stand aside, forcing me to squeeze past him and into the -dingy service area that belied the plush splendour of the main salon. -The few croupiers, hostess girls and barmen on break didn�t spare me a -second glance as I sidled into the changing rooms. I rated a locker, if -not an actual lock, and quickly exchanged my clothes for a semi-soiled -towel fresh from the sauna. However my three remaining rocks posed a -problem. I�d never brought my stash to work before and couldn�t risk -hiding them while bathing. Plus I didn�t want to risk their soft shells -melting under the shower.

- -

The bravado that had brought me here without thinking things through -played the �What�s the worst that can happen?� card. I crammed all three -rocks into my mouth � and regretted the decision even before Regret had -time to put in an appearance. Every hair, every skin pore, every taste -bud exploded like the worst amphetamine hypersensitivity ever. I -staggered to the shower and slammed the heat setting all the way up. -Near-scalding water made me scream but this was the �pain gate� approach -to sensory overload. In any event my jaw was clenched so tight all that -came out was a low burbling wail.

- -

Agony became pain became discomfort. I emerged to a world that -demanded my attention but wasn�t about to make me its bitch. What I -needed was a dark, sound-proofed room and a glass of tepid water. -Unfortunately Mister Morden � the �Boss� � wasn�t someone a sane man -wanted to annoy.

- -

There was a suit hanging on my locker door, although no shirt and -tie, and my own wouldn�t pass muster. So I scored one of the black -roll neck sweaters worn by the doormen, hoping for suave and debonair -with a hint of mystery. Instead what I saw in the full-length mirror was -Peter Lorre slumming it as a Bond henchman. Somewhere close by I heard -Doubt snigger, but I was safe behind my Hux firewall.

- -

Time to be a living spoiler.

- -

The main salon was all deep-pile carpets and subdued -lighting, home to that distinct murmur you get when money is changing -hands. Bryce, one of the floorwalkers, appeared at my elbow and hustled -me aside.

- -

His voice was a nervous whisper, which wasn�t like him at all. �Now -listen up, freak, and listen good. We got some dame burning up the main -wheel, big time. She�s into us for over three-hundred grand and wants to -go no-limit. We can�t back down without appearing gutless, and you know -that ain�t Mister Morden�s style. So called a pause, bringing in some -other high-rollers, and you better get in there and fix things, -yeah?�

- -

There was a snivelling Fear on his shoulder, whispering in his ear - -an indistinct twist of shadow, draining blood from his face like there -was a tap running. Usually I can�t see the übers on other -people -but I guess my overdose had opened the doors of perception.

- -

I shook free of his grasp. �Don�t crowd me, man! You know I got -personal space issues.�

- -

�You screw this up and your next �personal space� will be a shallow -grave, buster. Get me?�

- -

Bryce was a thug, a bully, but just then he had all the menace of -some hopeless dweeb at his first Senior Prom. I grinned, turned on my -heel and walked off, leaving him shaking like a leaf. I felt good, -confident, ready to terminate even the strongest winning streak � -terminate it with extreme prejudice. Then one of those random gaps you -get in crowds opened up, giving me a clear view across the room to the -main roulette table.

- -

Shock.

- -

And awe.

- -

The woman stood out against the background like an old-school -Evangelical preacher, as if outlined in neon. Not beautiful, no, but -handsome, even with her strong features half-hidden behind wraparound -dark glasses. She wore her hair piled high, which added to the whole -�Classical goddess� look fostered by a Grecian-front evening dress in -pearl silk. Only as I approached the table did I notice the white cane -carried in her left hand.

- -

She was blind.

- -

Powerful fingers dug into my shoulder, making me wince. �Glad you -could join us, Ed. For a moment there I thought you weren�t going to -honour our little agreement, and you know how I abhor -disappointment.� It was Mister Morden in person, surrounded by the smell -of bourbon and peppermints.

- -

I half-turned my head towards him while keeping my eyes fixed on my -fixation. �That�s her? That�s the mark?�

- -

He grunted. �Damn straight. Right, I�ll set this up and let you do -your thing. Your chips are waiting at the table. Nothing fancy, mind, -just take her for everything she�s got.�

- -

Morden ushered me forward and launched into the formalities, -apologising for the delay. The woman listened politely then turned so -that we were facing each other across the table. �My, my, Mister Edward -Glass, I do declare. It is such a pleasure to meet you at last, -sir.� She had a Southern Belle accent but nothing I could pin down.

- -

I gave her a half-bow, conscious of Morden�s eyes boring into me. -�I�m sure, ma�am, that the pleasure is entirely mine.�

- -

�Place your bets, ladies and gentleman, place your bets. As per -mutual agreement this is now a no-limit table.� Gibson, the croupier, -looked to the lady. �Ma�am?�

- -

She smiled, displaying perfect teeth. �How much do I have -available?�

- -

His gaze flickered over the stack in front of her. �Ah, three-hundred -and twenty-five thousand.�

- -

�Be so kind as to place everything on twenty-six, black. Thank -you.�

- -

A murmur ran through the crowd clustered around the table; players -and onlookers alike. Gibson looked to Morden who nodded; a barely -perceptible move of his head. The croupier slid the chips into place and -stepped back smoothly. The other players around the table followed suit, -until there had to be nearly three-quarters of a million in play. As -this was real shit-or-bust territory I took a deep breath, placed my -entire stack on �Even�, and�

- -

�and I knew who she was.

- -

The room became hazy, indistinct, leaving only the two of us. I -stared at the Southern Belle. �But if you�re my Lady Luck then how can -others see you, hear you?�

- -

She laughed. �It really is a case of people making their own, Edward. -They generate it, gamblers and gunmen more than others, and you gather -it to yourself. I�m the result of that concentration, the focus of -countless hopes and fears. After this win I�ll be no mere -personification but a true Goddess, restored. After this win there�ll be -no more good fortune apart from what I choose to bestow upon -Humanity. You�ll be hailed as a new Zeus, Edward. Or cursed.�

- -

Reality returned before I had time to reply, or even think of some -witty rejoinder. Gibson spun the roulette wheel and flicked the ball in -the other direction. �No more bets, ladies and gentlemen, no more -bets.�

- -

I felt it; I felt chance itself draining from the room into me, -through me, vanishing from the world. Luck is a consequence of free will -� the Universe balancing out self-determination with randomness. What -brave new world would be there be without that?

- -

The croupier cleared his throat. �Rien ne va plus.�

- -

Our spherical Damocles danced, bounced, as we held our collective -breath...

- -

...and fell.

- - - -© Martin M. Clark 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] tae.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - - -[*ITEM] Comics - [*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - [*BLURB] Two more delightful cartoons from the pen of Liam - Baldwin.
- [*DESCRIPTION] -

- - - -[*IMAGE] - - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -

- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - - - - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - -I found your first sentence a little -convoluted. I've paraphrased it, but you're at liberty to -rephrase my paraphrase. Ed. - - -"Omnes eodem cogimur," -Quintus Horatius Flaccus -
"unde negant redire quemquam" Gaius Valerius Catullus - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/stockissuev21.xwy b/content-xway/stockissuev21.xwy deleted file mode 100644 index ba5ab818..00000000 --- a/content-xway/stockissuev21.xwy +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8732 +0,0 @@ -[*COMMENT] Issue 21 - February 2018 - -[*ITEM] Editorial - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] Welcome to the 21th issue of Mythaxis. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Thank you to all contributors, and welcome -to the February 2018 issue. - -This is the biggest ever issue of Mythaxis, with no fewer than fifteen stories and a one-page comic. -The last story, Melkart the Herdsman, is novella length. - -Martin Clark has contributed a fine police action and two Christmas-themed stories with the same tagline. - -We have a couple of -flash-fiction contributions, and three new (to Mythaxis) authors. - -This issue is on the tenth anniversary of our first, as celebrated by our banner. - - - - - -© Gil Williamson 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] mythaxis21.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Maximum Law - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] Shades of William Gibson's GUNHEAD from 'Virtual Light'. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Rolling in the deep, wired to the max. Adele -playing on Retro FM, Jim -driving, me hugging the 12-gauge to my chest, head bobbing in time to the -beat. We were both fired up on Godz - methamphetamine with a ketamine -bumper - and feeling pretty damn invincible. -

-

-Maximum Law, baby, that's who we work for. We got the warrants, we got the -vests, we got the guns, we got the armoured four-by-four. You diss me, you -call me rent-a-cop and I will hurt you, so be warned. We're private -security, bail bondsmen, bounty hunters, skip tracers. We're the real deal. -If local law enforcement is too overworked or just plain indifferent, then -we're the crew who come calling, and we take no shit. 'Your safety in our -hands' is our corporate motto and, man, you better believe it. If we're not -there then no one else is coming. -

-

-Jim and I were riding through Lakeside after dark. It's a dilapidated, -low-rent housing project, home to white trash - and trash of just about any -other hue you care to mention. I didn't see any signs of multi-cultural -harmony though. Just a slew of wannabe street gangsters split along ethnic -lines. I was buzzing, getting this great vapour-trail visual from the -streetlights. On the downside, my teeth felt too large for my head and I -had to sit with my mouth wide open. We were rolling slow, windows down, -scoping the streets for Laney, tonight's target of choice. -

-

-The way I heard it, Laney was just a two-bit hustler who started punching -way above his weight. Danny Craig, who treated Lakeside as his personal -fiefdom, sent 'round a negotiating team to put across his point of view -with extreme prejudice. To give him his due, Laney saw this coming and -trumped Craig's tooled-up hard men with a one-shot anti-tank launcher. -Result - one burnt out Subaru and three unrecognisable corpses. He followed -this up with a grenade through Danny's front window, costing the big man an -eye and his four-year-old daughter. Craig ran out into the street, carrying -his girl in his arms, and got run down by the arriving ambulance. That's -what lack of depth perception will do for you. -

-

-If Laney had been more than just a wide-boy with access to army ordnance, -he might have pulled it off. The rest of Craig's operation might just have -fallen in line behind the new kingpin and that would have been an end to -it. Unfortunately, none of Craig's lieutenants were prepared to take orders -from, well, anyone. This kicked off a protracted bout of territorial -adjustment and they were still digging bodies out of the landfill site near -Morton. As the case against Laney was all hearsay and the Police had their -hands full stomping on bona fide drug dealers, they kicked his file back to -us. -

-

-Cue Unit Two, Jim and me, cruising the streets after a tip-off that Laney -was wrapping things up with a view to heading for pastures new. The clubs -where he usually did business were all under electronic surveillance, so if -he wanted cash he'd have to stiff his street contacts pronto. -

-

-My eyes itched, but I couldn't rub them as we were both wearing DataSkin -contact lenses. I licked my lips. "I want a strawberry shake. There's a -drive-through McD at Cuckoo Bridge. It's less than a mile." -

-

-Jim grinned, although he was gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles turned -white. "You're addicted to that crap, Matt. Why don't you-" His head jerked -round. "On your ten. I got a shimmer-sheen." -

-

-I locked-on, and sure enough, there was a human-shaped blur walking across -the wide sweep of pavement fronting a row of shops. To the naked eye the -figure appeared invisible, just a trick of the light. However, our sensor -package was as near military grade as the shimmer-suit itself. I laughed, -more of a giggle really, and took a deep breath. "Laney, you sad sack! Come -quiet. Don't make us nail your ass in front of all these nice people." -

-

-The row of youths over by the railings looked up, and the figure stopped, -turning to face us. Jim pulled up and killed the radio, his fingers -drumming an irregular beat on the worn leather wheel cover. "I say we taser -him, just on general principle. Say we were in fear of our lives and stiff -him with a resisting arrest surcharge. He's gotta' be good for it, and the -bounty on this clown isn't that great to begin with." -

-

-I grinned. "I like your way of thinking, my man, so-" -

-

-The figure flared and there was Laney, wearing a long coat with hood, -little fading sparks dancing across the surface. He hauled out - I kid you -not - twin machine-pistols and opened up, blazing away in -über --Matrix fashion. -

-

-Jim flicked a switch. "Shields up. Jesus, will these people never learn?" -

-

-"Laney! Cut that out!" -

-

-The swarm of bullets hit our inertia field and slowed, leaving red smoking -trails as their momentum burnt off. The spent rounds began to hit; -pok-pok-pok against the bodywork, but with as much effect as -ping-pong balls. When his guns went empty Laney cast them aside and simply -vanished. -

-

-Jim frowned. "What kind of shit is this?" -

-

-I stuck my head out the window. "Where'd he go?" -

-

-"I got nothing on scope." -

-

-"Laney! Stop buggering about." The locals started up with cat-calls and -ironic clapping, and I wasn't in the mood. "Kill the field, I'm going out." -

-

-My skin prickled as the residual static earthed through me, but I ignored -it. The DataSkins relayed the sensor information from the car, compensating -for relative position. This gave me specs for low-light enhancement, -wire-frame outline, infrared, and electromagnetic overlay. But even with -these specs the street was 'empty'. I turned back towards the car where my -partner was still dicking with the sensor sensitivity. "Jim, I got zip. -Tell me it's a systems glitch, yeah?" -

-

-He pointed down the street, stubbing his finger on the inside of the -windscreen. "Shit. Down there, look." -

-

-I looked and the same outline shimmered as before. I figured some kind of -scramble pulse, maybe, but it hardly mattered. The shotgun settled snug -into my shoulder. I could have nailed him then, but I liked his style. -"Laney, give it up man. You're worth more alive than dead, but dead -is acceptable. You hear me? I got you cold." -

-

-"You sure about that, bud?" -

-

-The voice came from close behind. As I turned to look, Laney shot me in the -back. I coughed and staggered forward. Laney shot me twice more as I fell -to the pavement. -

-

-The shimmering figure down the street turned into a girl - Jones, -Veronica, according to my virtual display. She was holding a -short tube the same way you'd carry an awkward roll of wallpaper. Laney's -file said he went for street-wise girls who knew how to handle a weapon, -but his latest squeeze was clearly a gun-shy amateur. On this occasion, -he'd gone for eye-candy over killer. He'd gone for tits over tactical -acumen and they both paid the price. -

-

-Veronica shrieked as the weapon fired; a stab of back-blast and the -anti-tank round flashed across the road to ricochet off the tarmac. It -detonated in a disused mailbox with a curiously flat bang that -barely rattled the surrounding windows. Shards of flying metal spread -comfort and joy in all directions, but none hit the car. -

-

-Laney roared with anger, and Veronica dropped the spent launcher like the -proverbial hot potato. Before she could say anything Jim tapped her, -one-two, using the camera gun housed in our car's engine space. He swears -by it but I just swear at it, finding the little joystick way too -awkward. It was probably more accurate than getting out to use his 9mm, -though I suspect he was just showing off. -

-

-Veronica fell to the ground in a heap, a puppet with the strings cut. In -full avenging angel mode, Laney pulled a grenade from an inside pocket, -fumbling with the pin while keeping hold of his pistol. Jim bailed, ducking -down behind the vehicle, unaware of the danger. In a couple of seconds he -would pop up and start firing, but by that time the grenade would have been -tossed through the door I'd left open. -

-

-On the ground I was hurting, as a vest can only do so much. Your standard -item is only good against small calibre or knife thrusts. You can go for -AmourGel, as used by army and special forces, but it's way too -uncomfortable to wear for any length of time while riding around. So -instead we use Straub Containment Harness. It has the same kind of stopping -power as regular ballistic cloth but with a twist. The elastic lining is -drawn into the body by the bullet, forming a tube. Then it snaps back into -shape, expelling the spent round and chemically cauterising the wound tract -as it does so. You're still history if it's a major organ and it's no help -with broken bones, but at least you won't bleed to death. -

-

-Lying there I could feel the movement inside me. The Straub is supposed to -have a built-in local anaesthetic, but it was a lot like being stabbed, -only in reverse. My breathing was ragged, so there was a lung wound for -starters. But at least I could move. -

-

-I rolled over, clutching my 12-guage, coughed by way of witty rejoinder, -and fired. None of your buckshot crap either. I was using solid shell with -flechette load, proximity spread. At point-blank range the round detonated -immediately, drowning out the shotgun roar. The shoal of barbed-steel -projectiles shredded Laney from groin to chest and he collapsed, -slithered, to the ground in a bloody mass. No last words either, -as -his lungs had burst. -

-

-The grenade spun to a stop between my legs, the pin still in place. -

-

-I took a deep breath that didn't hurt too bad. -

-

-Jim appeared at my shoulder and helped me to my feet before stooping to -retrieve Laney's weapons. He laughed. "Hell, dog, when you put a man down -he stays down." I managed a thin smile, but my voice was still on -hold. My partner raised his voice. "Camera!" -

-

-The tailgate came up automatically and our camera drone wafted out. It -sidled up, mini-turbofans whirring, and started snapping away. I struck a -pose with my shotgun by way of promo shot before limping back to the car. -Flopping down I slapped on another dermal jolt of Godz, plus one of Bliss -to improve my general sense of well-being. Time dissolved for a moment. -When my surroundings snapped back into focus Jim was in the driving seat -and the camera was zooming home. -

-

-I pulled the door closed with that heavy clunk of armour plate that -always gives me a shiver, a sense of security. The comms console -squawked. "Unit Two, this is Central." -

-

-Man, she has such a sexy voice, and was probably chosen for that -very reason. We'd never met her, of course, and I suspected that reality -wouldn't shape up to the ideal woman in my head. Jim answered. "Central, -Unit Two receiving." -

-

- -"Nice job boys. We had your live feed on the big screen back here and -the censored version will definitely generate some reality TV revenue. -Photo analysis confirms the target as being Desmond 'Diamondback' -Laney, and, pending DNA confirmation, we've forwarded a claim for -bounty payment. Nothing for the girl though, she was clean sheet. Just -to reassure you that initial review by management and independent -assessor have rated your use of lethal force as justified. You'll have -to give a statement to local law enforcement, but that's just a -formality…How's Matthew? We saw his biometrics take quite a hit." - -

-

-Jim glanced over at me. "Shot three times but still as bad-ass as ever. The -guy is plain indestructible." -

-

-She laughed. - -"Glad to hear it. Now, we have a suspected home invasion in Fairview. -Unit four is en route and has requested back-up." - -

-

-Fairview was a series of up-market gated communities not two miles away, -ostentatious wealth in incongruous contrast to the urban squalor of -Lakeside. The bonus for riding to the rescue of the rich and famous made -this a prime call-out. Jim raised an eyebrow and I nodded. "No problem, -Central, show us as responding." -

-

- -"Unit Two confirmed. Just make sure Matthew gets a full medical at end -of shift, OK? We worry about you boys. Central out." - -

-

-Jim fired up the engine, revving it until the vehicle trembled. We pulled -away with a squeal of run-flat tyres. Local police and a meat wagon would -be arriving at some point to clean up our mess, but that was part of the -price they paid for privatisation. -

-

-I hit the radio. Retro FM again; 'Clubbed to Death' this time - mood music -right on the button. We drove on. I hit the lights and siren. A thumping -base line and enough pharmaceuticals in my system to qualify me as a drug -mule. The grin on my face couldn't get any wider. The shotgun felt cool and -slick in my hands. -

-

-Maximum Law, baby, Maximum Law. -

- -© Martin M. Clark 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] maxlaw.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Commedia del'l Venezia - -[*AUTHOR] Gil Williamson - -[*BLURB] �I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a -prison on each hand.�
Lord Byron. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The ancient city of Venice, as everybody -knows, is an island inside a lagoon at the northern end of the Adriatic. -The island is divided into two by the Grand Canal, which zigs, zags and -zigs from north to south in the shape of a lazy figure 2. The city -traditionally governed an area of north east Italy, and over many -centuries was a major naval, mercantile, financial and colonial power. -For most of its history, it was an independent state, and it -maintained this spirit of independence even while it was passed back and -forth between Italy and Austria for a while. -

-Italy fumbled the ball when their financial problems with the EU could -no longer be ignored, and Venetian public works were said to be -bankrupting the nation. So Italy tried to sell Venice to the highest -bidder. There were no takers, but the city staged a sort of management -buy-out, and now we have what we always wanted - actual independence, -like -Scotland and Catalonia. We have re-invented ourselves as a nation state, -a free port and a tax haven, much more profitable and respectable than -our previous occupation - tourist trap. The waterbuses, still known as -'vaporetti', no longer roar and fume as they did when I was a child. An -electric whine propels them smoothly along the canals. -

-This is not the Venice of the early twenty-first century, with three -million tourists a year. This is the Venice of the late -twenty-first century, more resembling the Venice of the nineteenth -century Grand Tour, where the majority of visitors were scholars, -artists and writers. Most of us who work in Venice also live here. -

-On a chilly, bright, November morning, I was walking towards my place of -work along the Fondamenta Cannaregio, alongside the canal on my left. I -remembered, when I was a child, seeing egrets spearing tiny fish where I -was now walking. Looking like tiny herons, egrets are naturally nervous -birds, but they took advantage of Venice's acqua alta in which -seasonal high tides caused the city to be regularly flooded. Sirens and -other alarms accompanied these floods. The high tides seldom invaded -homes to a very great extent. Nevertheless, many households opted to -abandon the ground floors of their dwellings, and moved upstairs on a -permanent basis. I reflected that acqua alta was a thing of the -past now, the Tidal Harness project having, at one stroke, solved both -the flooding problem and part of the city's need for electric power. -

-Or so I thought. Even as I checked my x-pda e-mail on the hoof, a -strange, low-pitched creaking noise from across the water attracted my -attention. The ominous groan was followed by the graceful collapse of a -building into the canal. This surprising event was accompanied by a -minor tsunami, and I was briefly standing up to the knees in what -was once egret territory. An electric water taxi was flung against a -moored delivery vessel and nearly overturned. This was, at one stroke, -irritating and interesting. Most of the water returned to the canal -quite rapidly, leaving only a few centimetres in nearby shops and in my -shoes. This latter inconvenience was forgotten in the shock at having -witnessed some hundreds of tons of masonry arriving in a navigable -waterway. A queue of vaporetti, cargo barges, water taxis, and -siren-wielding police and fire launches accumulated around the blockage. -In due course, rumour reported that the building had been empty and that -no-one was injured or missing. I moved away from the scene when a -heavy-duty barge with a huge JCB backhoe on its foredeck was towed into -place and started to clear the channel. The barge was tilted acutely -forward due to the weight of the digger, and the whole vessel wobbled -alarmingly from side to side as the JCB transferred masonry to the -barge's open hold, but Venetian engineers have always regarded this kind -of waterborne operation as business as usual. -

-Having fortified myself with a caff� corretto in a local caf�, I -texted my deputy Tomas that I was returning home to change my -trousers, socks and shoes. When I left home again, it was nearly -lunchtime. Lunch beckoned, I answered the call. I deserved a good lunch. -

-That was why it was mid-afternoon by the time I walked past the scene of -the accident again. The quayside was swarming with spectators and -officials. I was told that it had been the old Finance Administration -office, empty and under renovation. Heads were going to roll, I heard. -Bribery and corruption of high officials was suspected. I discounted -most of this. Whilst high crimes and misdemeanours have always been a -feature of Venetian life, I find stupidity to be a more common cause of -disasters like this. Like many of the buildings in Venice, the Finance -Administration office had started life as a church. By the time Venice -became independent thirty years ago, many churches had been repurposed -as theatres, art galleries, museums, even supermarkets, but church -architecture rendered them rather unsatisfactory as offices. -

-Meanwhile, the canal was navigable in single file. A couple of policemen -were attempting to organise traffic flow with the aid of flags and -megaphones, but since ACTV waterbuses are now driverless, the change in -canal geography confused their software, while flags were perceived as -moving obstructions, and the waterbuses -plunged forwards and backwards -without making any progress. Similarly, a convoy of driverless barges -was complicating the issue behind the jam. - -Venetian boatmen are a law unto -themselves, however, and the -frantic signals were largely ignored by any boat with a driver, -priority of passage through the -narrow channel being determined by size or manouevreability of vessel -and by how loud and threatening were their airhorns or the shouts of -their drivers. -

-My cell rang. It was Tomas. "Where are you, boss? You were going to get -here before lunch." -

-"Nearly there. What's the problem?" -

-"Palumbo is looking for you. I told him you'd had an accident and you'd -be in soon." -

-I wasn't used to being pressurised in this job. Chief Security Officer -for a multinational company headquarters sounded impressive enough, but, -in practice, it hadn't been particularly onerous. I was a fugitive from -the Carabinieri - Italy's military police. Not in the sense of being -pursued by them, but as an ex-employee who had succeeded in getting a -nice job in civic society. Checking personnel for identity and criminal -history? My previous career helped there. Making sure access to the -building was electronically controlled and wiring the building up with -surveillance cameras and a control room? The contract awarded to a local -firm. Did I accept a modest reward for choosing a particular security -company? Of course I did. Suspicions would have arisen if I hadn't. -

-The office. A venerable palazzo with an abandoned, slightly sunken, -ground floor and a well-worn, marble, dramatic, staircase to the inhabited -upper levels. Ancient floor tiles, stone window frames, marble and granite -pediments, ceiling art, the whole Venetian -experience. The building is entered, however, through a mean little door in a gloomy -alleyway. The other side of the building faces - looms over - the canal. That side has a -magnificent reconditioned water entrance, accessible only by boat, and used -for the delivery of large items and the -reception of VIPs. -

-I made my way to the boss's opulent domain. The boss. One hundred and ten -kilos of flesh, wrapped in an Armani suit. -A bullet head with tiny eyes and rubbery lips. To be deferred to and -addressed as Dottor Palumbo. -

-In addition to the boss, there were two other men in the boss's office -when I arrived. Vincenzo Grasso, the IT chief - skinny, sporting a beard -that would disgrace a nanny goat, no dress sense. And Luigi Lombardo, -the consultant architect, who advised on structural matters and building -regulation - smooth and elegant, clean hands. All eyes were on me. -

-Palumbo said: "Ah, Fabbri, at last. I hope we have not wrenched -you from the arms of your lover this afternoon." -

-I tried not to show any surprise that Palumbo knew about my occasional -lunchtime assignations and replied "Dottore, I was almost drowned this -morning. It is a miracle that I stand before you now." -

-"Don't lay it on too thick, Fabbri. I understand you witnessed a -building collapse this morning, and got your feet wet." -

-"Certainly, Dottore." -

-"How did it happen?" -

-"It seemed quite spontaneous." -

-"Spontaneous? What does that mean? -

-"As far as I can gather, the place just fell in the canal. It was closed -and unoccupied at the time. There -was no explosion. No warning. I was there." -

-"And why were you there?" -

-"Pure chance, Dottore. I had just got off the vaporetto at the -Guglie waterbus stop. I was on my way here. It was very shocking." -

-"Yes, well, Fabbri. We've all had a look. It's only a few hundred metres -away. Meanwhile, we have a serious situation here," said Palumbo, "There -have been threats." -

-"Threats?" I was floundering, trying not to show it. -

-Grasso broke in, his silly beard wagging: "Emails threatening -the stability of this building and promising a demonstration." -

-Lombardo said: "What he means is a demonstration such as you witnessed -this morning." This earned him a glare from Grasso. -

-I said: "Someone threatening to demolish this building? How many -emails?" -

-"A dozen or more over three months," said Palumbo. -

-"A dozen! I'm the security chief here. Why wasn't I told?" -

-"They were addressed to me. We didn't believe it," said Palumbo, "Not -until today." -

-Lombardo said: "It was news to me too, until today. I am only here -because I'm the architectural consultant. I understand building -stability." -

-"My decision," said Palumbo, "I was acutely aware that this kind of -thing could cause panic, and the fewer people knew about what was -probably a hoax, the better. Anyway, we have to take this seriously now. -Fabbri, you're in charge." -

-"Me?" I said. -

-"You, naturally. The security chief. I know that you do your work to -your own satisfaction, but it happens that you also do it to my -satisfaction. Take the lead for the three of you. Please do not involve -anyone else." -

-I said: "Are they asking for money?" -

-"Of course they are asking for money. It's extortion. We have -plenty of money, they want some, and we may end up having to pay, but I -am -relying on you three to make it unecessary. They've been sensible. It's -not a huge amount of money by the company's standards. About one day's -profit. But I can't pay it out just for the asking. Either bring these -guys to justice or at least determine that the threat is real and that -paying them will remove the threat, so I can justify the expenditure. -Now get on with it. Go!" -

-"Are you saying we should not involve the police?" I asked. -

-Palumbo's eyes bulged with fury: "Of course not! We don't want this all -over the newspapers! We can't afford any publicity." -

-"Got it, Dottore. Just wanted to check." -

I mentioned earlier that the company we worked for was a -multinational. Let me explain the title. It isn't just that the company -has a presence in many countries, trading in each country as a locally -incorporated subsidiary company. A multinational company also tends to -have a head office in a tax haven like Venice, Singapore or Grand -Cayman. -

-Now, each of the subsidiary companies decides how much tax they want to -pay to their host government, or, rather, how little and how late they -can get away with paying, bearing in mind that this is partly a -political calculation. How much does the host country value the -employment the company offers to its citizens (who then pay income tax), -or the support the company offers to sports events or charities (which -they, the government, are not keen to fund)? Then, no matter how much -gross profit the subsidiary actually makes, head office bills the -subsidiary for 'accountancy' services to reduce the net profit to the -desired level. Or, if this begins to look excessive, charges -outrageously high interest on 'loans' supposedly given to the -subsidiary. -

-So, the vast majority of the profit earned by the company as a whole -finishes up in the head office, and tax is paid at the local very small -tax rate. The vast sum of money is then lodged with an international -bank in, say, Switzerland, and subsequently used to buy up smaller rival -companies and to enrich the investors. Therefore, most of the head -office employees are high-powered accountants, international lawyers and -IT staff. -

-And don't think I disapproved of the company, which, to protect their -identity, I shall call "Musestre". They paid me generously for my -efforts, but it had begun to look as if I was about to earn my salary. - -

In the boss's office, I had tried to look as if I -understood what was going on, but I didn't fully comprehend the threat -until we three gathered in Grasso's office to review some of the emails. -They were all a little different, but the message was always clear. -

-Until today, the messages had taken the form: - -

From: avenger@collapso.org
-To: info@musestrehq.it
-Subject: Collapse of Musestre
-------------------------
-Your building is in danger. We are in a position to make it collapse -into the water. We will demonstrate our capability on an unoccupied -building. Once that happens, and you will recognise it, you must -indicate your willingness to pay one million euros by placing the word -'si' in the bottom left corner of the contact page of your website -musestrehq.vc. We will then email instructions for your payment and, if -we receive the money within two hours of these instructions, we will -withdraw the threat. If you do not indicate your willingness to pay -within seven days of our demonstration, then you lose the opportunity to -buy your way out, and your building will fall apart. A four hour warning -will be given.
-Avenger. -
- -Today's message was : - -
From: avenger@collapso.org
-To: info@musestrehq.it
-Subject: Collapse of Musestre
-------------------------
-The clock is ticking. You have five days to indicate 'si' in your -contact page.
-Avenger. -
- -I said: "I see. Silly question... Have you traced avenger@collapso.org?" -

-Grasso sneered. "A silly question indeed. Naturally the server -collapso.org does not exist. I have not been -able to identify the sender, and none of our clever technicians can -suggest anything. Analysing the internet route backwards leads us into a -maze of redirects -which are intrinsically and -deliberately untraceable. Such VPNs, as they are called, are designed to -foil even governmental oversight. We use them ourselves for privacy -purposes. The originator could be anywhere from Mongolia to next door." -

-"Why do you think they are giving us so little time after giving us the -instructions for payment?" -

-"It's obvious. I imagine they are making sure we cannot plan to identify -them in the handover." -

-"Of course. Sorry. In that case, what if we don't pay, take the risk, -and just evacuate the building? We rent it. The problem devolves upon -the landlord." -

-A pained grin from Grasso. "I regret to inform you that the property -owner is a subsidiary of Musestre, insured by yet another subsidiary." -

-"What's the purpose of that?" -

-Another patronising smile from Grasso: "Accountancy. Tax dodge. -Legalised money laundering." -

-I turned to Lombardo and asked "As a consultant architect, I should ask -if it's even possible deliberately to bring a building to a state of -collapse like that?" -

-"Normally, no. Even though Venice is a special case. Believe it or not, -the entire city is supported on wooden piles driven through mud into the -clay below." -

-"Yes, I know, and I know that we are all sinking at half a millimetre or -so per year. But I hear that the wooden piles are effectively petrified, -as, in the absence of oxygen within the mud, they cannot rot." -

-"This is true, building collapses are almost unknown in Venice, unless -you count the campanile in 1902, which is why we initially discounted -the threat. But this event today... I must investigate. I have contacts -within the firm which was renovating the place." -

-"So, here we are. We have seven days to solve or surrender. Grasso, I -think you must prepare to put the signal on the contact page, but not -yet. Chat with the IT managers of other firms in Venice. Make no -reference to our problem, but one of your colleagues may let something -slip. Perhaps other companies may be under threat." -

-"That's not a new idea, Fabbri. I've been asking some discreet -questions. No response." -

-"Anything you need to do for your computers in the event of a collapse?" -

-"That's unthinkable. All the data about this company and all our branch -offices is contained in the computers on site here. You cannot -overestimate how vital and complex that data is." -

-"I think I can, Grasso. But isn't it backed up?" -

-"It's backed up, but only here. We could not afford to allow exterior -access to our data. The data centres - the original and the live backup -- have no connection to the outside world, so they cannot be hacked. The -problem with that is that although our eggs are in two baskets, both -baskets are in this building. We could not survive a building collapse -like the Finance Administration place this morning." -

-I turned to Lombardo. "And you will investigate the collapse today? -Could it have been accidental? I think you said you have contacts." -

-"Of course." -

-I suggested that we should meet here daily at ten in the morning. They -agreed. -

-Grasso set me up with an anonymised e-paq, which he remarked was -untraceable in much the same way as the system the blackmailers were -using. Then I spent the rest of the day on the internet, looking for -analogous cases. Extortion under threat of demolition turned out be -unknown, no matter how I posed the question. Grasso seemed gratified by -my failure, confiding that he had, in fact, already conducted a similar -search. - -

In fact, to my surprise, Lombardo was as good as his word. -The next morning he appeared at our meeting with an ancient, blackened -piece of timber. It was a section about fifteen centimetres in length, -apparently sawn off a building support pile, roughly circular in -cross-section, one end splintered off. On close inspection, the whole -section, in particular the splintered end, was weakened by a mass of -microscopic holes, as if bored by tiny woodworms. -

-"So what am I looking at? Accidental or deliberate?" I asked. -

-"How could one tell?" said Grasso, "It could be anything." -

-Lombardo said: "It is very unusual. I do not know of any natural cause. -I have never seen damage like this. The Venice Conservation department, -which checks out all sorts of rot, pests, canal water or acid rain -damage are examining a sample like this. I have a contact in the -laboratory, so I should know this afternoon." -

-"Well done, Lombardo, keep up the good work." He glared. It seemed he -suspected me of patronising him. Grasso sniggered. -

-Nevertheless, Lombardo telephoned some hours later and arranged to meet -with me in a noisy bar near the office. In a hushed tone, barely audible -over the general row, he told me: "The news from the Conservation -Department is alarming." -

-"How so?" -

-"It appears that the damage to the collapsed building's piles may be the -work of nanorobots." -

-Having nothing to contribute, I just stared at him. -

-He continued: "Nanorobots are tiny microscopic machines that reproduce -each other and can be put to certain tasks." -

-"I know what nanorobots are, Lombardo. What do you think they use in the -manufacture of quantum computers, the conversion of sewage, the -purification of water, the removal of particulates and heavy metals from -our air-con units? Are you telling me our nanorobots have gone mad and -are eating the foundations of buildings?" -

-"No. They appear to be a specialist type that have been introduced." -

-"And are they now spreading to every building in the city?" -

-"Apparently not. They have a short life. I understand Venice -Conservation are pursuing this, based on the examples the laboratory -has. But not within the timescale we are working to." -

-"So we're screwed." -

-"It seems so. Has Grasso made any progress with the emails?" -

-"Not as far as I know," I said. -

-"I didn't think he would. I don't like the little turd." -

-"He's all we've got on the IT front." -

-I checked with Grasso before leaving work. He and a couple of his -techies were wading through a terabyte of internet logs, looking for a -clue to the identity of the blackmailers. He did not look hopeful. He -showed no interest in the news from Lombardo. - -

Day 2: The ten o'clock meeting was cancelled. Lombardo -couldn't make it. Grasso said he wasn't surprised the pompous ass had -nothing new. He named a few other IT managers who might have been -threatened. He was going to have a friendly chat with them, and see if -anything came up in conversation. -

-While I knew I couldn't talk to outsiders about the extortion, the -collapse of the Financial Administration building was the talk of the -city. Most of the flippant conversations centred around the symbolic -significance of Financial Administration being all at sea, a total -washout, unstable, or requiring a thorough clean out. -

-I was feeling some frustration, and needed to talk to a scientist in -general terms. I knew where my American friend and general manager of -the Tidal Harness, Tommy Hay (TH of the TH as he styled himself), would -be at lunch-time that day. The golf club. An unexpected, century-old, -gem of a course, set in woods at the far end of the Lido. It features -the only hill I've ever seen in Venice, about fifteen metres in height. -

-I took a water taxi all the way to the little marina outside the club. -

-Tommy was, as predicted, relaxing with a beer in the clubhouse. After a -few pleasantries about the weather (excellent) and his golf -(disappointing), he felt the need to boast about the Tidal Harness. -

-"Forget solar energy! A few one-metre tides generated enough lunar -energy to operate the barrier to prevent the lagoon flooding due to the -same tides. I wonder we aren't slowing the moon down, all the energy -we're sucking out of it!" -

-That said, he appeared to realise that I had questions on my mind, and -raised an eyebrow. -

-"The collapse of the Financial Authority building..." I began. -

-"Hah! Yes! Very strange and unexpected, of course. Not that the fellows -at the Financial Administration are terribly upset. They hated that -office! Still, it's a puzzle. Since the Tidal Harness was started up, -building erosion due to high tides is almost unknown." -

-"Quite. I've heard that the piles in the foundations may have been eaten -away by nanorobots." -

-"Preposterous! Where did that idea come up?" -

-"Just a rumour, but I've heard that there's some evidence." -

-"Well, a few years ago, there was talk of using stuff like that to -remove derelict piles that were clogging up a canal, but nothing came of -it. It was Venice Conservation's show, really. I was just involved on -behalf of the Harness project." -

-"So the technology exists?" -

-"Sure. Some Indonesian company developed the idea to deal with mangrove -roots in navigable waterways. Hell, that's not the sort of thing anyone -should let loose in Venice." -

-"I agree. But what if...? Can it be targeted, then stopped?" -

-"OK. Well, if I remember, international regulations limit the number of -generations the machines can reproduce, so that the nanorobots can't run -amok. To use them you'd have to continuously supply new starter -cultures. It was going to be awkward enough to use them in a dredging -operation. To use them inside the city would be lunacy." -

-The converation drifted away into discussion of the proposed, but -endlessly discussed, offshore windfarms and solar panels feeding a huge -storage battery on one of the islands, reducing Venice's need to buy -electricity from Italy. Every Venetian could hold forth for hours on the -subject. - -

Back at the office, I went to the IT department to talk to -Grasso. He wasn't there, but I spoke to one of the techies who had been -helping him earlier. According to him, they had found no sign of the -origin of the threatening e-mails. "Strange," he said. "I'd expected to -recognise a source VPN. The most recent IP on the e-mails doesn't -exist." -

-There was an e-mail for me from Tommy Hay, however. It -read: -

Hi, I found contact information on that -nanorobot company. It's Malaysian, not Indonesian. Kuala Belait Trading -Company. The contact is Mahmud Rahman, really great guy, attach his -card. You're up to something. Tell me about it some day.
-Tommy.
- -

-The time in Malaysia would be after office -hours. I'd call tomorrow. Besides, I had Commedia dell'Arte to go to. -And the Commedia turned out to be important in this story. -

The -Venice Marionette Theatre was a brilliant new concept in the traditional -art of Commedia dell'Arte. It was a small theatre in a Palazzo that had -once been used for temporary exhibitions. The Isola di Pinocchio company -produced a different play every month, some from the 17th century canon, -others newly written in the traditional style, some modelled on modern -comedies. All were full of witty contemporary comment, and presented by -suitably beautiful string puppets, some of the villains caricaturing a -close resemblance to prominent Venetians. -

The Commedia depends on a -limited number of stock characters in an infinite variety of -situations, and it was a monthly treat to be entertained. Seats were in -great demand; I wasn't prepared to miss tonight's performance. -

As -usual, the plot hinged on conspiracies, accidents, disguise, -misunderstandings, love, greed, hatred, slapstick and sentimentality. -Just like life, in fact. - -

Day 3: I called Mahmud Rahman, whose information confirmed -Tommy's memory of Kuala Belait Trading Company's contact with the Venice -Conservation department. -

-Then I made a Skype call to an old Carabinieri colleague in Rome, an -expert in IT fraud, asking him about tracing e-mails. He confirmed that -faking the apparent sender of an e-mail was simple, and while internet -service providers may disclose client information to governmental -authorities, they always take their time about it. The conclusion? You -cannot find the originator of an email in our timescale. -

-I went down to the busy accountancy section of Musestre, where dozens of -honest professionals worked the daily miracle of legally defrauding -foreign governments of their legitimate tax revenue. My enquiries led me -to Irina, who specialised in squirrelling away the money Musestre -accumulated. -

-"Can you spare the time to satisfy my curiosity, Irina. As Security, I -think it's important that I know these things." -

-"Whatever you like," said Irina, a very young woman to be in charge of -all these billions. -

-"I'd like to ask about something we read about in books, where criminals -transfer money to a bank account, and that money is immediately and -secretly whisked away into untraceable accounts elsewhere." -

-"And you suspect someone here?" -

-"Not at all. This is strictly for my own information. We security people -must be aware of these hazards." -

-"Hmm... I suddenly discover that I'm busy right now. Do you mind if we -discuss this over lunch?" -

-I was taken aback. "That's fine. Which restaurant do you prefer?" -

-"No. No. We'll go to the panini place in the square, and eat outside. -OK?" -

-"I know where you mean. Twelve?" -

-"Fine." -

-I was waiting outside the baguette and panini bar at five to twelve, -watching two kittens playing 'Tear Your Throat Out', between taking -catnaps curled up around each other. Irina arrived late. We ordered. -

-She said: "I wanted to discuss this with you privately because -this is not the first time someone has asked me about this. Someone -yesterday asked me to prepare for an urgent cash -transfer to an account, possibly foreign, with his authority, no -paperwork." -

-I said: "Our esteemed leader, Mario Palumbo." -

-"You know about this?" -

-"Yes. And, as far as the company is concerned, it will be a justified -expenditure." -

-"That's a relief. What's it all about?" -

-"I can't tell you that, but tell me about these untraceable accounts." -

-"It's not as easy as people think, and it's pretty expensive, and it -takes a while, but here's how it usually works. It's not really my -line. The people in the computer department are the best to ask." -

-"In summary?" -

-"Well, you contact one of a number of organisations who advertise on the -internet. For a fee, they set up a number, at least two, of shell -companies in countries with loose banking laws - like Venice is these -days. Each company has at least one offshore bank account." -

-"Shell company?" -

-"A company in name only. Doesn't really trade, just accepts and -disburses money, covering the transactions with fake invoices and -receipts. It has to be done in an administration where transfers of -greater than $10,000 do not have to be reported." -

-"I see." -

-"When the money arrives in the first account, the shell company -transfers it to another shell company, usually in another country, in -payment of a fake invoice, and so on, and when the money ends up in its -destination, the final company issues debit cards so that the owner of -the chain can spend the money." -

-"Simple." -

-"Not so very simple. It's expensive. Often the arranger takes an upfront -fee and as much as twenty percent of the money transferred, and it's -illegal, but seldom prosecuted or even detected. There are plenty of -apparently respectable people who live on these accounts." -

-"Thank you, Irina. What you are telling me is that it's entirely -possible and virtually undetectable." -

-"Quite so. Tell me, Fabbri, is this anything to do with the Financial -Authority building?" -

-"Why do you ask?" -

-"Well, I've seen a lot of that Luigi Lombardo this week, and he was in -charge of the FA building renovation." -

-"No, no. He was nothing to do with that. What made you think so?" -

-"I'm in constant touch with the FA over technical matters. It's an open -secret over there." -

-"Hmmm. I knew he had contacts with them. I hadn't realised he was so -deeply involved. It's really rather delicate. I'd rather you said -nothing to anyone else. Another coffee?" -

-"No thanks. I have some shopping to do. Thanks for lunch!" -

-I spent part of the afternoon in the Venice Conservation Department. I -was passed from official to official, but no-one would talk to me about -the FA building. I spent most of my wasted time in the planning -department. -

-Finally, since I was in the area, I visited an old friend, and fellow -ex-Carabinieri, Tito Boscone, one of the IT men Grasso had planned to -'chat' with. He hadn't seen Grasso for months. We were about to go out -for a drink when I got a call from Dottore Palumbo. - -

Palumbo was waiting for me in my own office. It was after -hours. A bad sign. -

-"Progress?" he grunted. He looked pale and sweaty. -

-I gave him a summary of the situation. He indicated surprise about the -nanorobots. "So the threat could be real?" -

-"In theory, but even if the technology exists, it's a little -far-fetched," I said. -

-"Looking at it from my point of view, Fabbri, if we don't pay and it's a -hoax, we save a million euros, but if we don't pay and it's real, we -could lose millions more, not only in the fabric and contents of the -building, but in the loss of valuable data and market position. If we do -pay, whether it's real or a hoax, it costs us just one million." -

-"But, Dottore, the worst, though perhaps least likely, event is that we -pay and the threat is still carried out." -

-"Then we lose just one million more in a disaster of many millions." He -paused, then: "The deadline is tomorrow. I have decided to pay. Get -Grasso to post that 'si' on the contact page now." -

-"Dottore, it's getting late," I said. "Grasso's probably home by now. -Let's say we signal them now and they reply immediately, we may have -difficulty getting a transaction of that size through in two hours. If -they don't, we'll be hanging around all night." - -

At first, he looked as if he might explode, but Musestre hadn't put a -fool in charge of their Venice HQ. "OK. Tell Grasso to get ready to send -the signal first thing. I want to see you, Grasso and Lombardo in my -office at eight tomorrow morning. That signal is to be on the website by -nine." -

-Grasso wasn't in the office. Lombardo hadn't left his whereabouts. I -telephoned each of them on their cells to let them know about the early -meeting, and walked home through the dark alleys and bright piazzas.. - -

Day 4: All four of us were in Palumbo's office before -eight. I had arranged for Tomas, a formidable giant, to wait -outside. -

-Grasso said: "Dottore, I think we should post the signal now." -

-Palumbo raised a weary hand. "Let Fabbri have his say. We'll post the -signal at nine." -

-I said: "I went to the Commedia the other evening, and the play gave me -the solution to this problem." -

-"What's this?" interrupted Grasso. -

-"Let him talk," said Lombardo, "The sooner this is over, the sooner I -can get some other work done." This earned him a glare from Grasso. -

-"Carry on," said Palumbo. -

-"The characters were as follows:

    -
  • A rich old man; -
  • His beautiful daughter; -
  • A miserly man, suitor to the daughter; -
  • A poor but upright soldier, another suitor; -
  • The mischievous servant; -
  • The cheeky maid."
-

-"Oh, come on..." groaned Grasso. -

-"Yes, get to the point," said Lombardo. -

-"The rich man favours the soldier to marry his daughter, and agrees to -subsidise him. The miser sees his opportunity of marriage into a wealthy -family slipping away, and conspires with the doctor to pretend that the -rich man is dying of a rare complaint. The miser disguises himself as a -doctor from China who has a cure for the complaint that will cost the -rich man half his fortune. The plot becomes more and more complex, but, -in the end, the servants expose the conspiracy. Curtain. Applause." -

-Palumbo was looking thoughtful. Grasso, for once, had nothing to say. -

-Lombardo said: "Well, if that's all you've got, I'll be getting along." -

-"That isn't all I've got, Lombardo. You have never revealed to us that -you were in charge of the Financial Authority building refit." -

-"Client secrecy. I haven't told anyone I'm consulting for you at -Musestre, either." -

-"You might have mentioned it when the whole lot collapsed." -

-"On the contrary, confidentiality was then all the more important." -

-"Because, in fact, you were being well-paid to make sure it fell down, -so that they could build a more suitable building in its place." -

-"Ridiculous!" -

-"The plans for the new Financial Authority building are already lodged -with the planning department, as I discovered yesterday." -

-"This is all surmise. You can't prove a thing. Do you think I introduced -those nanorobots?" -

-"No, I don't. There are no nanorobots. I think the damaged timbers you -showed us were actually samples sent to Venice Conservation a while ago -from Kuala Belait Trading." -

-"You think so?" -

-"Not that it matters. What I am sure of is that the timber you -showed us was perfectly dry. It didn't look as if it had spent a couple -of hundred years in Venetian mud. You didn't have to prove anything to -us; you just had to offer the seeds of doubt until the extortion paid -off." -

-Lombardo stood up. "I don't have to listen to this. I'm leaving." -

-Palumbo said: "Wait a minute." -

-I said: "Let him go. He's right. We can't pin anything on him. But I'd -cancel his contract as architectural consultant." -

-With a crooked grin, Lombardo strode from the office. At my signal, -Tomas relieved him of his security pass, and walked him towards the -exit. -

-Grasso blurted out: "What a snake! I never liked him." -

-"Yet you had dinner with him last night." -

-"What?" -

-"I telephoned each of you within a minute or so at eight last night. In -the background, I could hear you were each in a restaurant with an -orchestra. The orchestra was playing the same tune behind each call." -

-Palumbo said: "Are you accusing Grasso? I thought we'd identified the -culprit." -

-Grasso said: "Just because we ate in the same restaurant..." -

-I said: "Someone had to concoct these fake e-mails, and I think we'll -find that you have also organised an offshore account to receive the -ransom. I have to say that when you showed me those previous e-mails, I -noticed that you hadn't displayed the trace routing information. It may -not have been helpful, but it was unnatural not to show it if you were -trying to trace it. The fact that your fellow technician 'found that the -source IP address doesn't exist' seemed odd. I later found out that this -could not be the case even with a deliberately disguised e-mail. I -believe you faked the e-mails yourself, who better? And Irina in -Investment Services seems to think that the IT department has some -expertise in untraceable accounts." -

-"Prove it!" -

-"I don't have to. All Dottor Palumbo needed was a reasonable certainty -that the threat was a hoax, and I've done that." -

-"I deny involvement!" said Grasso. "And I resign. You cannot accuse me -like this." -

-"Good decision, Grasso. Tomas will ensure that you leave the premises -immediately." -

-When Grasso had gone, Palumbo asked: "Well, that solved the problem. No -need to pay. How did you figure all that out?" -

-"I was confused at first. But when I saw that comedy, I realised that it -needed two conspirators, and everything just fell into place." - -

Personally, I conceded that my reasoning was a trifle -flimsy. I spent the next couple of months worrying that I'd fingered the -wrong men, and that the building was going to finish up in the canal. -All I can say now is: "Not yet!" - -

-

- - -
- helping hands -
-
- - -© Gil Williamson 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] venice2.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] A Tale of Salt and Oak - -[*AUTHOR] Voss McVeigh - -[*BLURB] �When something goes wrong, the first thing -I think is, it is Loki's fault. It saves a lot of time.� -
Neil Gaiman - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The bench was dedicated to -no-one. Screwed to the floor, amidst an ashen road of marble. Opposite, -the glazed-windows of a boutique shop-front. A line of parallel trees, -planted in consolation; an unconvincing canopy, half-sheltering swathes -of early-bird consumers and breakfastless commuters from the -unseasonably harsh autumn sun.

- -Two males sit on its shaded slats. One glares out at life; eyes -shifting impatiently from the trotting, ear-phoned thirty-somethings -to the closed sign that hangs askew against the door. It is not due to -open for another hour. The companion to his right twitches, and squints -at the cerulean sky. �Will you sit still?� - -�I�m itchy.� - -�That�s because you didn�t dry off properly� How many times do I have to -tell you, you can�t just shake dry when you take off your skin!?� - -Inside the wardrobe of a nearby Travelodge, two suspended seal skins -stagnate on coat-hangers, a salted-pool dampening the wood beneath them. - - -The bustling city centre swells. The scent of brylcreem and -brow-sweat fills the nostrils of the agitated bench-sitters. They gaze -towards the milky gloss of the unlit store. Only fifty-yards away, yet -as if a distant buoy, bobbing ever nearer to the horizon, threatening to -drop behind the curvature of the Earth. �Where are you, you bitch?!� he -thinks� - -Light blonde and pale skin, a pearl necklace. She dresses the hands of a -vacant mannequin. The door opens with a ping and the males move swiftly -inside. The store assistant�s nostrils fill with the putrid scent of a -red-tide as the darker of the disguised beasts moves in behind her, -close enough to whisper in her ear. A semi-human voice, the timbre of a -snarling bear. - -�Do you like to swim?� he says.

- -

Mucm�r had scouted out the mushrooms from within the -crevices of a -dying poplar. It was fleshy and umber in colour; the only one of its -kind to grant him visions without a two day headache in exchange. -�Salt-wolves.� he thought, processing the hallucination, �Fascinating�. -He watched the seal-men drag their hostage in his mind�s eye, and -allowed his hind legs to collapse behind him. He had been on his feet -for quite some time and pigs were not known for trekking long distances, -especially ones as large as him. - -His brother Tetorc emerged from behind a juniper bush. He was much -smaller than Mucm�r and while Mucm�r was endowed with a healthy pinkish -hue, proudly decorated with large dark spots, Tetorc was covered from -snout to tail in shimmering copper bristles; a coat to match his coarse -wit and hot temper. - -�Dammit, Mucm�r!� The red boar scoffed in admonishment, �We�ve at -least twenty leagues yet to travel and here you are resting with all the -cares of a suckling.� - -�I am a suckling of the Earth, dear brother� the large pig retorted in a -spray of grey foam �and besides, my hunger for knowledge has borne fruit -� or fungus as least.� Tetorc�s eyes widened and he looked over his -shoulder to make sure they were alone. Their master was not far behind -and he could not be certain whether their conversation was forbidden of -servants. - -�It seems� Mucm�r began, still entranced �that two selkies came ashore -to exact -vengeance on the owner of a small business. They were selling -clothing to humans made from seal-skin�� - -The red boar nodded with understanding �I can sympathise. After all, who -has suffered more at the hands of man than pigs, over the past century? -But why one merchant, why not tackle an entire vessel of sealers?� - -�It was their sister,� he answered, grinding another mushroom between -his large yellowing molars. �She had been captured by hunters. The -selkies plucked the information from a seagull, a real squawker. Told -them where and how her body had been used.� - -Tetorc shot his brother a gaze of concern and intrigue. He stepped a few -feet closer in order to whisper. �And did the goddess R�n permit such a -flagrant abuse of her capture-rights?� - -Mucm�r furrowed his brow and rolled his eyes into the back of his head -for a moment before beginning to speak once more. �The selkies swore -not. They came by river. Shed their skins, and walked inland. They said -R�n hadn�t been doing anything about recent pollution or attacks on the -ocean�s wildlife. They said she preferred to spend her time dancing -in maelstroms and plaiting refracted light into her hair. But�� The -large pig shook his head as if searching the air for more information -��when they drowned the store manager in the sea, Woden�s ravens -reported it as an offering to the goddess forcefully and deceptively -taken.� - -Tetorc remembered what their master had once told them, that R�n�s -capture-rights only allowed her to capsize the vessels of sailors she -believed to be of blackened heart and that she was known to usually keep -to this code - though it had been noted how the ships belonging to -�black-hearted sailors� were often the ones with the most treasure on -board. It was little wonder that Woden, the mistrusting king of the -gods, had banished R�n to the uttermost reaches of the world. To the -poles of the north and the south. - -�He shared out control of her former domains among the remaining sea -gods.� Mucm�r said, his focus now snapping back to meet his brother. His -eyes, bloodshot ovals with irises of a brilliant ice blue. �You know the -rest, of course.� - -Tetorc nodded his head regretfully. R�n had set about destroying the -fragile ice caps that punctuated the globe, rapidly raising the world�s -waters till the lands of the earthen gods began to dwindle. The brothers -had always known that R�n was responsible, but it was only now that they -knew why. Along with the floods, she set great beasts, gigantic -creatures from the crushing depths of the ocean, to guard these new -water-locked realms � but none were so important to Mucm�r and Tetorc�s -master than Mur-Temna. Word had reached them via a network of -trees � their whispers transferred beneath the soil from oak to ash and -birch to lime - of a �bloated rubicund beast; an exsufflicate, -perpetually enraged�. It was a kraken, dwelling where once verdant -fields had spanned and where a sea-roof now suffocated all green to murk -and all soil to silt. The Dagda and his boars were heading to reclaim -this once pleasant pasture. - -

>The Dagda was known as The Good God. In his -corporeal form, he -was a large, broad-chested man. A mound of auburn hair topped his head, -and he bore a beard of the same shade, save a shock of white beneath his -chin. His stomach was not flat - his mortal form was far too fond of -bread and drinks brewed from threshed corn - but the protective suit he -had donned, since he heard the war broke out, pulled his gut inwards, -presenting a firm abdomen to match his timber-like arms. Gods could -never die in the true sense, but a mortal body could be wounded beyond -repair, and having to transpose one�s metaphysical self into a new -visible individual was a rigmarole he could scarcely be bothered with. A -stab-proof vest and a few metallic adornments were a sensible -precaution, -he thought, in a time of automatic rifles and air-borne missiles. His -weapon of choice had not changed over the millennia, however. A giant -club of solid oak rested upon his shoulders, a subtle motif of silver -leaves gilded into its base. In days gone by, people had told stories of -its power; to both end and restore life, but it had been a long time -since Dagda had extended the gift of life granted by the base of his -club. - -He leapt over a stream, and caught up to his rotund familiars. �What are -you two grunting about? Eating again I see, Mucm�r�. - -�Yes, master.� the large pig snorted unapologetically. - -�Well, come, we�ve many more miles to travel. We�ve managed to skirt -around most of the checkpoints, but there is an unavoidable one at the -crossing of Mur-Temna. We will eat and rest when we are close by.� - -The pigs nodded and carried on traversing the obstacles of the -forest. - -The war had been a great upset to the fragile balance of the world. Not -only were Earth-based gods burdened with protecting the lands from R�n�s -sea-monsters, civil wars had broken out the world over. Half of each -continent was nearly submerged. Crop-fields lay waterlogged and food -became scarce as low-plained cities became the lairs of oblivious fish. -Sharks swam down library corridors and barnacles clung to abandoned -buses and aircraft. Reservoirs, once brimming with drinkable water, were -now salty troughs in a sea of indifferent brine. The world and all its -resources were ravished. Martial law ensued and tribal fortifications -emerged, guarded by mostly untrained soldiers of fortune. - -

The checkpoint of Mur-Temna was not so much a checkpoint -as a -fortified village, the gates of which were solid steel, hinged within an -expanse of pallid concrete and fringed with a helix of barbed wire. A -whole manner of commandeered street signs littered the pathway to the -doors: NO ENTRY; TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED; BEWARE OF THE DOG; -ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! - -�Well, that�s confusing� scoffed Tetorc as they approached. �Can we -enter or not? And there doesn�t appear to be a dog in sight.� - -�Dogs are too smart to stay in a place like this.� offered Mucm�r in an -equally incredulous tone �Humans on the other hand�� - -Dagda smirked and moved a few paces ahead so they would not see. He did -not want to encourage this sort of banter if they were to be taken -seriously. - -As they came within fifty yards of the gate, there was a sudden furore -of shouting and a metallic racket of guns being cocked. A voice came -from above the wall. �Stand where you are, big man!� - -Dagda searched the top of the wall for the origin of the voice, and -found a woman; ash-blonde hair in a harsh pony tail; body encased in a -black jumpsuit and her right eye peering -down the sight of an -automatic rifle. A deafening silence fell about the place, broken only -by the sound of Mucm�r chewing noisily on some nearby berries - the -soldiers wouldn�t have expected a pig to heed their command anyway� - -�Are those pigs?� another voice called out. A man this time. Watchtower, -to the right. �Christ on a bike, I�ve not seen a pig in years. And look -at the size of the bleedin� thing! That pink one�s like a feckin� bear!� - -�Shut up, Sullivan� the woman�s voice retorted, before bringing her -attention back to Dagda. �State your purpose. Who are you, why are you -here?� - -�My name is Oak� Dagda answered, �I hear you have been having some -trouble with a giant octopus in these parts. Thought I might be of -service to you.� - -The woman snorted �The whole world has been having trouble with giant -sea creatures! Sharks, crabs, octopuses. You name it, peop-� Jesus, -Ganley, I�m not having this discussion again; octopuses is an -acceptable term!� - -�She�s right, you know.� Mucm�r whispered to his bristled brother. -Tetorc didn�t acknowledge him. - -�So, what makes an unarmed man, and his pigs, interested in our -particular problem? You don�t look like you�re from around here. Why -don�t you turn back �round and piss off back to where you came from?� - -A strange expression swept across Dagda�s face; one the brothers had -never seen before. It was offence. �I used to live here, a long time -ago. And I can assure you that I am as armed as I will ever need to -be.� he pointed his club up to the sky. It was an impressive sight from -down on the ground, but it was clear that the gravitas was lost upon the -inhabitants of the high wall. An eruption of laughter sounded and lasted -a little too long to be genuine. - -�Ha! He�s gonna beat it to death with that thing? Good luck, pal.� -Red-headed lad, no older than nineteen. - -�Go on, Maeve! Let him in. We don�t see many have-a-go-heroes these -days. And I�d pay to see the old beast swallow this fool up. You never -know, he might be able to give him a bit of a twatting before the end. -Worth a laugh I reckon.� - -The woman in charge looked to the man who had spoken, paused for a -moment and lowered her gun. She faced Dagda and pointed her finger to -the red-headed lad who had spoken. �Donnell here once threw a grenade at -the monster. Not a scratch. All eight disgusting limbs intact. It just -made the thing more angry. That night it crawled out of its lair onto -Drybank and it took our dogs away with it. Two years later and Donnell -has only just finished his penance in the fort kitchens. I won�t lie, we -want rid of the thing, but keeping the prick contained and stopping it -terrorising other nearby camps and forts is our one claim to success so -far. Sets us apart from the likes of Culin at least, where everyone just -up and ran leaving us to force back their giant dogfish. Isn�t that -right, lads?� She broke off to allow for a chorus of �Culin cunts� and -�dogfish fuckers!� to ensue. - -�I don�t know what the fuck you think you can do that we can�t.� she -continued �But if you want to try and earn some personal glory by taking -on the kraken with a jumped-up two-by-four, then fine, be our guest. -Aye, might be a laugh, Sullivan.� - -Dagda smiled and gave a single nod of his head �I live to spread joy, -commander. At your wish, I will either slay the beast or attempt to die -in the most amusing way possible.� - -Maeve looked pleased �But, in case it all goes horribly wrong, and you -just enrage the salt-bag further� well, we don�t have any more dogs left -as you can see, and we can�t afford to lose any more of our men or -women. If you want to fight the beast of Mur-Temna, we need some -collateral.� - -

�So, how are you finding life as a piece of collateral, -Mucm�r?� Tetorc asked his fellow captive. - -�A little tight round the ankles truth be told, brother.� The two pigs -were in a small enclosed courtyard, chained by the hind legs to the wall -and with nothing but a small bowl of water for sustenance. �I�m very -hungry though, I have to admit.� - -�Makes a change.� - -�I don�t know about you� Mucm�r continued �but I�m quite surprised he -agreed to this quite so quickly.� - -�Really?� Tetorc retorted, �I�m surprised they even had to ask. Great -fool. We�re the only reason they let him in.� - -�I don�t follow.� Mucm�r replied. - -�Come on, you fat swine. For all your gifts of foresight, you can�t see -what a band of starving soldiers would possibly want with two pigs, -especially one as large as yourself?� - -Mucm�r did not appear to be listening all that intently. He took in the -makeshift cell around them � old stone walls, broken bits of MDF -furniture, a narrow archway with an iron-railed gate for an entrance. -�They don�t believe he�s going to succeed. They think he�s just some -glory-hunting eejit. And we are their dinner for the next fortnight.� - -Mucm�r looked nonplussed, �Nah.� he said, and nibbled where the cuff was -chafing him. �I have faith.� - -�Faith? Mucm�r, I�m not saying that Dagda cannot defeat the -creature. I�m saying that by then it will be too late. The humans won�t -wait around for that. They will slit our throats as soon as Master sets -off to battle the monster!� Tetorc�s expression was one of distress, and -his bristles began to glow the colour of smelting steel. - -�No, not faith in the Dagda� Mucm�r smiled, his eyes rolling into the -back of his head. �Faith in you.� - -

Dagda was led by Commander Maeve Bradley down a narrow -alleyway of -high concrete walls. A bald man he had not seen at the checkpoint -entrance followed up the rear. They had allowed the good god to carry -his club with them as they walked. They don�t think I�m quick -enough� Dagda thought to himself. The tip of the bald man�s rifle -rested mere inches from the small of his back. The god meant these -soldiers no harm of course, but the insinuation that he was no faster -than a point-blank bullet put another dent in his already stricken ego. -There was once a time when people knew me. he thought, a -golden age of love and awe. - -After what seemed a mile of faceless alleyway, they reached a gate made -from corrugated sheet metal. The commander unlocked the padlock attached -and pushed the gate open, slowly; she seemed to be worried that -something fragile stood behind it. The springs of its hinges creaked to -capacity and the commander stepped through the gap. - -It was as if she had opened a door to the sea. In every direction, water -gently waved and the -smell of salt on the air sent the Dagda�s mind -swimming with memories of walking coastlines, back when the Earth was -still young. What was left of the land was next to nothing, only a bank -of perhaps fifteen feet in diameter saved them from falling into this -new edgeless lake. - -�This is as far as I can take you, Mr Oak.� Maeve said -to Dagda. �I�m -happy for you to have a crack at it, but the final say goes to Corporal -Lyons there.� She nodded towards a man on the brink of the lake, sat in -a wheelchair, a green and blue tartan wrapped around what remained of -his legs. Dagda had barely even registered his presence till now; his -mind had been full with images of beaks and tentacles, the last thing he -expected to see was a wounded veteran gazing out at the water, still as -a lighthouse. - -�Good luck, Oak� said the commander, before grasping his forearm as if -about to whisper. (She didn�t whisper). �But if you fuck up, you won�t -be coming back through this gate. There�s no running once you take on -the kraken. Win, or you and your pigs will die. If you try to run, you -will die, and your pigs will die. I�m gonna be just up there� she -pointed towards the sky behind them, another fortified wall guarded by -soldiers armed to the teeth with artillery and smirks. �I will have my -sight on you the whole time, big man.� Dagda pulled his arm away and -smiled with genuine warmth. - -�Don�t blink.� - -

Tetorc took a deep breath and began to calm down. The heat -of his -bristles began to simmer and his burning heart slowed to a steady rhythm -once more. The chain that bound him, however, glowed a faint red like -the hob of a recently deactivated stove. �Feeling better?� his large -counterpart asked. Tetorc nodded and sighed. �Good, you need to save -your strength, brother. He�s about to come.� - -Tetorc looked up at the entrance to their cell, �Who is?� - -Footsteps echoed down the hall on the other side of the iron gate. From -the shadows emerged a man of average height, perhaps thirty-five years -in age. He held an old jailer�s key in one hand but held the other -behind his back. He slowly entered the room. �Hey there, fellas.� he -half whispered �Shhh, we�re gonna be nice and calm about this, aye. We -don�t want to spoil your�erm, spoil anything, so we�re gonna be quick -and cool about this� he spoke soothingly and stroked Mucm�r on the head. -He turned and stepped over towards Tetorc. In the reflection of Mucm�r�s -eyes, he could see the butchering knife behind the man�s back. �Now, I -don�t like to do this, fellas, but we�ve got lots of hungry lads and -lasses in this place, and I�m the cook so�� He reached for Tetorc�s -chain. �Aaarrrghhh! Fuck! Jesus Christ!� His palm immediately flared -into a large blistering sore. He dropped the knife to the floor and -grabbed his wrist with his other hand. Noticing the bowl of water, he -fell to his knees and plunged his hand in wrist-deep. He groaned a sigh -of relief. But his reprieve was short-lived. As quick as lightning -Tetorc sprang forward and thrust his tusk up into the right eye of the -cook. The man let out a series of shrill screams, he thrashed and beat -wildly against the boar as Tetorc bucked his head up and down, pushing -his tusk deeper through the socket and into his brain. The man�s screams -became a garbled mumble, and Tetorc let him fall to the floor to bleed -out his last. - -�Good work, brother.� Mucm�r exclaimed and with a powerful kick of his -leg, pulled his chain and its link from the brick wall. Tetorc stared at -his brother in bemusement, �Could you have done that at any time?� - -�Of course,� the large swine replied flatly, �but now the gate�s -unlocked.� - -

Dagda made his way over to the man in the wheelchair. -�Corporal -Lyons, is it? I believe I am meant to speak with you, sir. My name -is-� - -�Oak, yes they told me. Oak. Hmm�� his eyes remained fixed as a distant -stare across the lake. �Is that an anglicised name, Oak? It�s not an -Irish word, is it?� his voice was nasal and stern. - -�It is an English word, yes, like the tree.� - -�Like the tree� ah yes. Lobed leaves, acorns. I know it well, lad.� -Dagda wondered if he had ever been patronised before. He had half a mind -to reveal his true identity; claw back some of the awe and worship he -had received in the good old days. With one flick of the metaphorical -wrist, he could turn his face to lightning and render them all -speechless. But it was only half of his mind. The other half -remained patient and his heart remained warm. Warm enough to humour an -old man who had seen better days at least. Or so he had thought� - -�I don�t suppose you�re old enough to remember The Troubles are -you lad?� - -�I-� - -�Oh, those were bad times, lad. Tribal in-fighting, that�s all it was � -death for the utter shittin� sake of it. Over Rome; over Britain. I was -a soldier, but I didn�t want any part in it. My job was to keep the -peace.� he shuffled the stump underneath his blanket, �But we didn�t -have peace. Hell, we didn�t even have civility. I don�t remember which -side threw the bomb at me. It doesn�t fuckin� matter, none of it does, -it�s not important; it wasn�t really important then when people thought -it was, and it�s damn sure not important anymore. Do you get what I�m -saying, laddie?� Dagda shot him a quizzical gaze. The man was clearly -suffering, and he wanted to let him vent � he was a good god after all � -but he was also growing impatient to start the job at hand and couldn�t -help but feel that he was being stalled. - -The old corporal�s pale eyes began to flick across the water as if -watching an invisible skimming stone. �We have peace now though� of a -sort. When the seas rose and that monstrous dogfish began to terrorise -the people of Culin, silly ideas like papal infallibility went -out the window. Whether you thought you were Irish or British no longer -mattered. All anyone cared about was the fact that there was a fish -where there ought never have been a fish. That men, women and children -were being swallowed whole when it dared to ride the waves inland. Oh, -but we stopped it. All of us stopped it. Except the people from Culin of -course, they all ran off, took as many supplies as they could and left -us to it. My guess is they�re all dead now. Robbed at the next fort as -like as not. You see? Peace isn�t about pacifism, it�s not even about -stability. It�s about necessity. We fight and we kill, and we steal and -we do what needs to be done. There is a balance in that, you see? None -of this finding a reason to fight. Peace is fighting because you have -to, and not fighting when there�s no need. That�s the natural way of -things, lad. We are closer to nature now than we have been for -centuries. We have beasts like the one in this lake to thank for that. -The kraken - the swallower of pointless death.� - -Dagda pondered all the old man had said for a moment. �It almost sounds -as if you don�t want the beast to be killed, corporal.� - -Lyons finally looked up to meet Dagda�s eyes. A couple of days� worth of -white stubble salted his chin and what was left of his hair had a slight -blondish hue. His lips were dry and cracked. - -�It�s about perspective, that�s all. She�s a symbol. And you can draw a -symbol without the symbol drawing breath.� - -Dagda nodded in agreement �That�s true enough.� He gazed out across the -water and wondered whether he would have to go swimming to draw the -beast out. Suddenly, the sand began to shift beneath his feet. The tiny -bank they were stood on began to shrink around them and Lyons�s chair -edged closer to the water. �Here she comes� he said. The good god -quickly reached out, grasping hold of the chair�s left handle. It jolted -and Lyons started to slide from his seat. He laughed, knowingly. - -�Good luck, Dagda.� he said �Give her one from me.� and he fell sideways -into the lake. - -�Did he just call me Da-� - -WRROOOOOUUGHGGHKHKH! - -

The kraken emerged from the lake, though -Dagda could hardly believe it. -If the lake had no edge it certainly had no bottom. It was truly -gargantuan. Its head a terracotta bishop�s mitre, pitted with pores the -size of moon craters, boat-sized barbed spikes running down its centre. -Its arms surfaced next, thick as tree-trunks and shivering. Two of them -flailed wildly, while the others reached back on themselves, forcing the -rest of its body to emerge from the depths. The lake rained down around -it, the droplets like waves crashing against rocks. It let loose another -underwater shriek that shook the ground where Dagda was standing, and -finally he saw its eyes. Lidless and golden, the colour of bile; two -ultra-black pupils that appeared to physically suck at the light, each -easily the size of the Dagda himself. - -The god could hear shouts of encouragement from behind him, though he -could not be certain who they were for� He took a deep breath and swung -his club clockwise from the ground, resting it on his right shoulder. He -turned himself side-on to present a smaller target and waited for an -advance from the beast. The attack took him by surprise; not a whipping -of girthy tentacles, but a twenty foot wave, rushing in his direction. -He tried to crouch and brace for the impact but it only engulfed him -quicker; sweeping him off his feet and dragging him from the bank, deep -into the lake. He desperately pulled at the water, dragging himself -upwards to the surface. Herrrgh-pp! Air. He hadn�t sunk too far -after all. He turned in the water to face the beast, club still in hand. -It plunged downwards, sinking with incredible speed and lacking all -grace. He�s going to attack me from underneath the Dagda thought, -but abruptly felt the weight of the water pulling him in an arc; -forwards and downwards, following the path of the kraken�s submergence. -Downwards and downwards. Deeper and deeper. All about him was dark. The -water above him seemed no shallower than below, but in the murk beneath -him he could just make out a jerking shadow. It came closer. It had -edges. A moving rock? A beak! It was not the lake about him, but -an encasement made of giant tentacles. He blindly beat at the fleshy -walls surrounding him. With each strike, an arm would flinch away but be -replaced by another in an instant. On land, Dagda could be quicker than -this, but the water slowed his movements and dulled his powerful blows. -The kraken�s arms pushed down above him, once again forcing him closer -towards the razor-sharp abyss of its -beak. Again he forced back, -becoming increasingly aware of the growing feeling in his lungs, as if -they too wanted to escape the confines of his chest and make a break for -the surface on their own. There�s only one other option he -thought, and relaxed his body. The kraken's arms yanked him down, -towards the -yawning chasm of its reeking maw. Dagda -raised his mighty club above -his head and using the rising momentum along with his enormous strength, -struck the upper part of the kraken�s beak. The beast let out a -banshee-like wail, its obsidian beak shattered -and fragmented, pieces -glided past the Dagda and narrowly missed wounding him in the process. -The arms fell away and he could see light shimmering from above once -more. - -HOOOOOAAAAUUPPP! Dagda wasn�t sure if he�d ever breathed in so -much air in one go. He quickly clambered back up onto the bank and -coughed up the remainder of the water in his lungs. He heard a cry from -the wall, �Well, is it dead?!� Dagda wearily shook his head in response. -He got to his feet and looked skywards. He didn�t have long; the beast -would soon emerge again. He steadied his breathing, and raised his club -into the air. - -�Oi! Why aren�t you dead? That thing dragged you under, how are you -still breathing? Where�s Lyons?� the god ignored the interrogation from -behind, and waited. - -The day was growing later and the sky darker with it. Small droplets of -rain began to fall, moistening the Dagda�s face which by now had dried -from his underwater ordeal. �Come on, you hag!� he whispered to himself. -He had held his club skywards for nearly half an hour now; his arm was -beginning to tire, and the jibes and questioning from the fortified wall -were also beginning to grow old. - -The sound of thunder, except, no, it was the lake; bubbling and swirling -and heaving; its waters a body of aquatic asthma. Once again the beast -rose furiously out of the water, its whole body transforming from brick -red to a fluorescent green, its eyes became darker and burned with -rage. - -More voices came from behind, �You�ve really pissed him off now, mate!� - - -�Shut it, Connolly! Can�t you see this lad�s not normal? COME ON, BIG -MAN!� - -Finally, some encouragement, thought Dagda. He looked up. Above -the kraken, the clouds had grown fat and hung heavy in the sky. He gave -the beast one final glare before letting out a boom of raucous laughter. -The beast flinched, and before it could lunge forward in an attempt to -crush Dagda beneath its immense weight, the god leapt high into the air, -hovering mere feet above its face. In a voice like the crack of -lightning, he yelled� CERRCE! - -The soldiers fell silent, dumbfounded by the scene before them. A -bolt of lightning dived from the sky, striking the tip of Dagda�s club. -And with his club glowing like a pulsating blue star, the good god -rammed the beast between the eyes. With an almighty bang, the kraken was -launched backwards through the air, silent as death, and came to rest a -smouldering heap in the middle of the lake. - -BIG MAN! BIIIG MAAAN! BIIIIIIIG MAAAAAANNNNN! - - - -Dagda turned to face his won-over audience, smiling warmly and -trying hard to conceal the exhaustion he felt in his muscles. But the -scene before him was puzzling. Their joyful leaps in the air were as if -underwater. They leapt and sank slowly, as if time itself were -submerged. - -�Good work, Oak�. - -That was Lyons�s voice. Dagda thought. He spun round -half-expecting a sodden one legged man in need of a hand. But there was -no one. �I knew you�d be able to do it� the voice came again. Dagda -searched around him and noticed a large white bird scratching at the -sand beneath him. - -�Corporal Lyons?� - -�Come on, man. You�re a god. You act as if you�ve never seen another god -before.� - -Dagda stuttered, �I- I�� In his heyday, the Dagda had been accompanied -by a band of many talented gods, but he had to admit it had been a -while. �Of course, but I don�t understand what you were doing here -disguised as an invalid. If you�re a god, why didn�t you take care of -the beast yourself, were you not strong enough?� - -The seagull�s right eye twitched. �Well, it is true, brute force isn�t -exactly my forte, but my being here is more what you would call -�returning to the scene of the crime�. You see, it was me�� - -Dagda remained confused and this bothered him. He had once been hailed -as a god of wisdom, but at this moment he felt as ignorant as a gnome. - - -�Stop speaking in riddles!� - -�The water. The floods. It was all me, right here. This is where -the magic happened.� the bird flew upwards rudely flapping its wings in -Dagda�s face. The good god swung for the bird, but it stealthily avoided -the death-bringing tip of his club. - -�What do you mean, you did all of this?� he shouted, �What about R�n? -The ice-caps�� - -The bird rolled its eyes in a way that birds generally can�t, �Did your -pigs not tell you? The fat one knows all about it � he should really cut -down on the mushrooms you know.� The Dagda folded his arms. �Ugh� I was -the one who told those selkies that their sister had become a pair of -prized gloves in the city. R�n had nothing to do with it; she never -sanctioned anything. They should�ve known better than to listen to a -seagull. Gulls only go out to sea to die, and you should never trust a -word that comes from the mouth of a dying bird.� - -Dagda shook his head, all this information was making his brain hurt, or -maybe it was the effects of being held in time. He turned to see the -soldiers still hovering in mid-air, expressions of glee carved into -their faces. - -�Of course� the bird continued, �R�n melting the ice caps helped move -proceedings along quite considerably, and what�s more, she proved to be -an effective scapegoat. But it is here where the majority of the flood -came from. Here in Mur-Temna, the lake that poured into the ocean.�
-�But, why?� Dagda questioned, the seeming pointlessness of it all made -his brow sweat. - -�I meant what I said, about peace. Okay, it might be a stretch to say we -have it now, what with all the civil wars, vigilantes and this -famine nuisance. But peace is something you have to struggle for -and the struggle will soon come to an end� thanks to you.� - -Dagda eyed him suspiciously. The bird had now transfigured into the -shape of a man, almost -without him noticing. Hair of deep green neatly -retreated from his pale face, his eyes the colour of moss. A slender -frame and a shit-eating grin. - -�What the fuck are you talking about?� Dagda growled, he was swiftly -losing patience and frustratedly stabbed his club into the sand by his -feet. - -�Where have you been, Dagda?� the green-haired god asked. - -�What?!� - -�Where have you been? Sleeping in some land down south, for centuries. -What took you so long to get here?� - -The sudden and accusatory question left Dagda aghast, �I-I, only just -heard, days ago! The trees told me!� - -�And who do you think told the trees to wake you? You see, the world -will recover from everything that�s happened, and it will thrive better -than ever before. The population has decreased; people have a respect -for nature that hasn�t been matched since the Stone Age. They have -perspective, Dagda, and have learned from the mistakes they think -they made. Ironic isn�t it? Not a single Global Warming-denier -left on the planet and it wasn�t even Global Warming that did it. As -soon as they have the land back the way it was, and fresh water becomes -abundant again, Mankind will prosper with a deference that their former -hubris never allowed them.� - -Dagda lowered himself to the ground, sitting on the bank with his club -rested on his knees. - -�And what is my part in all this again, in your mind?� - -The green god looked even more pleased with himself � if that were -possible. �This is where you were born isn�t it? This is where you -belong.� - -Dagda nodded �That�s why I came.� - -�There are structures in this world that hold its people to ransom. And -you cannot change something so entrenched by conforming to it. Sometimes -you need to break it� He stepped closer and put his arm around -the broad god�s shoulders. He gestured out towards the lake, �I broke -the structures, Oak. I broke them by drowning the world. Now, I am -leaving it to you to rebuild. For I am the god of mischief, and you are -the good god.� - -This did not sit well with the Dagda, though he struggled internally -with why. Do the ends justify the means; can any means be justified -by a good end? He concluded that it was perhaps too soon to know, he -had not yet seen the ends of which the facetious god had spoken. - -Before he could respond, Dagda felt -himself unexpectedly falling, -hurtling forwards into the lake. At first he thought he had been shoved -by the smirking sylph, but as his body rushed quicker and deeper into -the water, he realised that the god was beside him, still grinning and -plunging them both into the depths. - -They reached the lake�s floor. Dagda was not happy, to say the least; he -had not long escaped this place and the giant beast that tried to keep -him there, now he was being held here by a jester half his size. - -The slender god motioned a silent plea for the Dagda to not be hasty and -to see what he had to show him. Dagda reluctantly obliged and watched as -the green god produced an orb of iridescent blue. It lit up the -surrounding area to a hot azure, and sent the bottom dwellers of the -lake fleeing past their legs. Between their feet was revealed a small -hole, no wider than a plant pot. He opened his palm and motioned for -Dagda to place his club inside. Dagda was resolved, he did not trust -this god and his chest was once again beginning to hurt. How many -times can a god nearly drown himself in one day? he thought. But -from -his hands, amber light began to shine. The gilded leaves on the hilt of -his club had turned from silver to shimmering gold and the club resisted -his grip. This was something the Dagda had never expected to happen; his -club had never left his side and had always felt at home in his hands. -He could not deny his beloved weapon�s own wish to be planted in the -ground, nor could he deny the coincidence. He sighed an effervescent -sigh and knelt down to place the hilt of the club in the hole. The green -god pushed in the surrounding silt to bury the base of it, and it stood -firmly and vertically of its own accord. Dagda shrugged and looked -blankly through the mirk at the god opposite him, wondering what he and -his favourite mace hoped to achieve by this. His companion just stood, -grinning. And that�s when it happened. - -The earth and the water began to quake. Dagda took this as a bad sign. -Am I so unwise as to be tricked twice? He tried desperately to -retrieve his club so that he could resurface and not leave his most -prized possession behind. But it would not move. As if it were rooted to -the spot. Had it sprouted roots? Beneath his fingers the club -began to swell and grow taller. He jumped back, but something moved -under his feet. A branch? The Dagda was shunted upwards, his club -expanding at a colossal rate, thrusting towards the surface, sprouting -new thick branches as great lobed leaves the size of a man burst from -enormous buds. - -Air! They had resurfaced, but yet the club continued to grow, -reaching for the clouds. The green-haired god hollered at the excitement -of it all, and Dagda looked down. The waters swirled in a downward -spiral, and the lake they had not two minutes ago been under was now no -more than an insignificant pond. - -�Hu-ha! She�s a wee bit o� a drinker, this one!� the funny god exclaimed -in the accent he had effected for Lyons. - -�I don�t understand� replied the good god perplexed, �How did you know -it would do that?� - -�My name is Loki, good god. It means breaker. And when you�ve -spent as long as I have breaking things, you start to learn a few tricks -about fixing things too.� - -The tree finally breached the clouds and the Dagda saw that the sun had -not yet set. Its rays sent an incandescent array of warm colours across -the sky and the god was pleased to feel the radiance of its scarlet and -goldenrod waves. �It won�t just stop here either� Loki continued �Your -tree will carry on drinking. It will drink until all the lands the water -has taken have been returned.� - -Dagda could not believe it. Not since the world�s creation had he seen -sights of such magnitude. The tree was sublime in every sense of the -word and he knew humans well enough to know that this would change -everything. Maybe we will have peace after all. And the ends will -justify the means. Maybe we have all been played as pawns in Loki�s -revolution, but who am I to complain? I am the luckiest pawn of all. -Dagda breathed in the high air and dreamed of the praises that would soon -be sung hand in hand around the base of his titanic oak. The time we -shall have together. He turned to thank Loki, but he was already -gone. White wings swooping in the ebb and flow of a mountain breeze. - -Back on the ground the soldiers were left gawping at the unimaginably -large tree that to their eyes had appeared from nowhere. They climbed -down from the wall. The lake was gone and the large bounty hunter with -it. - -Commander Maeve Bradley turned to Donnell �Get this out on the radio. As -many -frequencies as you can. People need to see this! It�s� it�s a feckin� -miracle!� - -�Yes, Commander.� The boy turned on his heel and ran back inside the -fort. - -He said his name was Oak� - -

Two miles south of Mur-Temna, a large -wiry boar gathered berries and -beech-mast from the forest floor. His brother, an even larger -paradigm of a pig, sat entranced beneath a swaying ash tree. He had seen -the whole ordeal unfold from afar, the rocketing growth of the tree and -the Dagda riding it like some obliging gulfweed on a gnarled tidal -wave. - -�I suppose he did it, then.� he called to his distracted brother, -�Master, I mean. That oak tree really is something. People will come -from all around the world to see it. He�ll be worshipped too, no doubt. -Probably more than he ever was. Maybe we should have stuck around after -all, Mucm�r� Eh, Mucm�r�� - -The large pig did not answer. Grey saliva dripped down his chin and, in -his eyes, blazing fires grew as tall as trees beneath the wide-toothed -grin of a green-haired man.

- - - © Voss McVeigh 2018 All Rights Reserved - -

- [*IMAGE] dagda.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Mirror, Mirror - -[*AUTHOR] Patrick Boylan - -[*BLURB] "You are just a dreamer,
And I am just a dream. -
You could have been anyone to me."
- -- Neil Young, -Like a -Hurricane' - -[*DESCRIPTION]

At first it seemed the more nearly human a -technology got, the more -horrible it was.  From the dead-eyed, simplistic facial -expressions of video game characters, to the low-grade chill of being -spied on by Google, that subtle and ineffable wrongness put people -off.  At first, manufacturers and software devs took that as a -given, tried to keep their user interfaces cartoonish and -unrealistic, always careful to avoid the nearly human and all its -creepiness.  Plastic Zombies Need Not Apply. -

-But the thing they missed, coining phrases like `Uncanny Valley', is -that people are flexible.  We adjust.  After the novelty -wears off, you find you've gotten used to talking to Alexa, repeating -yourself on automated telephone switchboards, discussing your dinner -plans with one of the store's shopping carts and taking its -suggestions with a grain of salt. -

-Oh yeah, that reminds me -- salt.  We're running low. -

-"Sorry, hope I'm not making you feel unwanted or anything.  I -just have my own ideas about cooking." -

-"No, that's fine," the cart replied in warm, reassuring tones.  -"We actually spend as much time listening as we do talking.  -Maybe having your own ideas about cooking will help our next -customer." -

-Maybe it would. -

-Anyway, I can't say for sure whether machines got better at -impersonating us, or we just stopped worrying about them.  In -any case, with time and rain, wind and erosion, the Uncanny Mountains -eventually dissolved, their rubble slowly filling in the Uncanny -Valley, until you're left with a kind of -- Uncanny Plain.  I -guess that's where I live now. -

-Kids are even more used to it, to the point where they don't even -think about it.  My son wouldn't know what any of this -means.  He just knows he likes my new girlfriend, and enjoys -hanging out with her.  Meanwhile, Dad tells me I'm fucking a -corpse -- and yet, respects her feelings enough to never talk like -that when she's in earshot.  Weird. -

-Maybe they're both right. -

-Besides, there was the small matter of visitation rights.  He -was too young, legally, to be left alone after school, and I wanted -unsupervised visits.  So I needed someone around to look after -him.  The alternative was spending quality time with him -and my ex together, and nobody wanted that. -

-  -

-They were playing video games in the living-room, when I got home. -

-Ada looked up from the screen.  "You're late.  How was -traffic?" -

-"It was fine, just did some shopping after work."  I'd gone -straight to the kitchen to put things away, so she might not have -noticed the bags. -

-"You didn't have to." -

-"I know." -

-With a glance at Bobby, she asked, "You good for now?" -

-"Yeah," he said, eyes fixed on the screen. -

-So Ada set down the other game controller and joined me in the -kitchen, gave me a hug when my hands were free. -

-Lowering her tone, and without letting go of me, she said "I could -have gone for you, let you spend more time with him." -

-"I know you would.  Thanks."  I gave her a kiss.  -"It's okay, just wandering the aisles, seeking inspiration..."  -That was more or less true.  I suck at following recipes, but I -am pretty good at making stuff up as I go along.  Sometimes the -shopping carts had a few good ideas, but mostly, they just wanted to -get rid of old stock before it expired. -

-"He's going back to his mom's tomorrow." -

-"Yeah, that's why.  I wanted us to have a nice dinner." -

-She laughed.  "And my cooking isn't..." -

-"It's great, you know what I mean." -

-"Yeah, I do."  And maybe she did, because she gave me another -hug.  "Sooo, friend artiste...  can I help?  Chop -something for you?" -

-"Sure." -

-But I'd only handed her a few of the veggies for a salad, when Bobby -shouted "Boss!  Boss!  Ada, boss!"  That meant the -level boss had appeared in the game, and he needed help with it. -

-"No prob, go save his ass." -

-And so she did.  Pretty soon there was cheering in the -living-room, so I assumed they'd won and moved on to the next level. -

-Later, while I was doing something creative with potatoes, Bobby made -frustrated noises and I noticed Ada staring, wide-eyed and frozen, at -the screen.  So I guessed this new level was harder than they'd -expected. -

-Then she snapped out of it and worked the controls faster, tightened -her focus. -

-"Just find some cover for this part," she muttered.  Her voice -had an urgency to it that I'd never heard before. -

-"All right." -

-The game's sound effects seemed to have trouble keeping up with her --- overlapping, stuttering.  Concerned, I started toward the -living-room to see what was going on, wiping my hands with a cloth. -

-"Okay," he said.  "Okay Ada, we're ahead now.  Hey, can -I..." -

-"Nor through inaction, Bobby, now stay down." -

-"But..." -

-"Head!  Down!" -

-"Hey!"  I waved the cloth to get her attention.  No -response.  "Shit Ada, are you okay?" -

-"Yes."  Thumbs blurring on the controller, staring at the screen -like a hawk, Ada wouldn't look away from the TV.  She'd taken -out fifty marines in about a minute. -

-I looked at Bobby.  He looked back at me and shrugged, looking a -bit worried. -

-"Dad, she won't let me play." -

-"Yeah."  I watched, shrugged back.  Didn't know what else -to say. -

-He turned to her.  "It's just a game." -

-"I know." -

-"I'm okay." -

-"I know." -

-Bobby found the remote, turned off the TV, and stood in front of the -blank screen.  "See?  I'm fine." -

-Ada blinked, stared, put down the controller.  "Of course you -are." -

-There was an awkward pause.  For a moment I felt strangely proud -of him, for handling it like that. -

-"Come here, help me cook." -

-"Okay."  She nodded, gave the screen one more uneasy glance and -stood up.  "Good idea." -

-Before following me back into the kitchen, Ada hugged him as if he'd -actually been in danger, smiled with relief and gratitude, as if -she'd actually been afraid for him, but wasn't now.  Bobby -thanked her for saving him, and went to tidy-up his room before -dinner -- which was strange because I usually had to get on his case -about that. -

-  -

-She said nothing at first, mixing and chopping in silence. -

-"I'm sorry.  It's a really good game.  Maybe a -little too good." -

-"Yeah.  I should talk to him about that." -

-Mixing and chopping. -

-"It wasn't his fault.  Please don't be upset.  Sorry, I -didn't mean to..." -

-"I'm not upset; it's okay; glad you're okay."  When that didn't -seem to help, I sighed.  "And if anyone started shooting at us -for real, I'd want you around." -

-"Thanks." -

-"I mean in this neighborhood, not likely, but...  You know." -

-"Yeah.  Maybe a few bullies, but that's it.  Has he talked -about Marcus, by the way?" -

-"Not for a while." -

-"There's a reason for that..."  Then she saw the look on my -face.  "Oh, I didn't hurt him; you know I can't.  I didn't -even try to scare him.  Just gave him a friendly warning." -

-"Nor through inaction, Marcus." -

-"Right." -

-"Garlic." -

-"Hmm?" -

-"For the steak." -

-"Right..." -

-Mixing and chopping. -

-  -

-The game card was still in the console, its case tucked between two -other cases.  Definitely had to talk about that.  We called -him out for dinner when it was ready, but first... -

-"Where'd you get this?" -

-He hesitated, looked at his feet.  "A guy at school.  -Traded him for it." -

-"It's only for older kids, has a content warning right on the box, -and it was stuck between two other games so we wouldn't notice.  -You shouldn't have this thing." -

-"But Dad! It wasn't me that had a prob..." -

-"Yeah.  But.  You like her, and you shouldn't do that to -her." -

-"Okay.  I'm sorry, Ada.  Didn't mean to hurt you." -

-"I'm okay, just a glitch.  Let's eat." -

-Ada liked to knit at the table.  It gave her something to do -with her hands, something to do with utensils, while we ate.  -The wool she used this evening was made up of random lengths of black -and white.  Knit together, apparently the beginnings of a wool -cap, it was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. -

-Now Bobby was pretty quiet, probably ashamed.  I didn't want him -stewing in that for too long. -

-"Good idea to shut off the TV like that.  Thanks...  So, -uh, school.  What did you learn today?"  That was my usual -question; everything back to normal. -

-He looked at us both, from one to another, and then kind of -smirked.  "A robot cannot harm a human being, nor through -inaction allow a human being to be..." -

-Ada kicked his chair under the table, laughing.  "He meant in -school.  What happened in school, Bobby?" -

-"Smart-ass." -

-"Thanks Dad.  Geometry.  That was in math.  Sat beside -Debbie again.  She's in my science class too."  He was -getting really good at not blushing, when he mentioned her.  "No -sign of Marcus today, and yeah I heard you talking...  -Thanks Ada." -

-She smiled.  "No problem." -

-"Tried doing a portrait in art class.  Debbie said the -expression's kinda weird, but then I told her who it is." -

-"Hmm?  Why would that make a difference?" -

-Ada pointed to the living-room, specifically at some papers on the -coffee table, leaned close and half-whispered "It's me.  I'll -show you later." -

-"Oh." -

-  -

-After dinner, Bobby showed me his drawing.  It was a good -portrait.  The lines were slightly off, but only exaggerated to -make the subject's identity more obvious, and that was totally her -smile.  Nailed it.  Pretty amazing for an eleven-year-old, -really.  Then we settled down to digest, watched some TV, and -Ada took care of the dishes.  Knowing my reflexes were nowhere -near as fast as hers, he limited our gaming to strategic -problem-solving type stuff, no first-person shooters, gory or -otherwise.  Before long it was time for bed. -

-He was getting a little old for stories, but liked hers.  No -books, none of the classic fairy tales, she just made them up.  -Kind of like my cooking.  So I brought the tablet into my room -and read a couple chapters, while she told him a bedtime story in the -next room. -

-Then she came to bed, and told me one. -

-"It's okay," she said, her tone as warm and reassuring as that -shopping cart's -- but firm, as if making a promise.  "You won't -see another Brazilian Event.  We won't go on lock-down, won't -try to protect you from everything." -

-"Yeah, I know.  You don't have to apologize."  I pretended -to keep reading. -

-"No one can flourish in a prison.  People have to take some -risks, and make their own mistakes so they can grow.  We know -that now." -

-I nodded, scrolled down a few paragraphs. -

-"So do I." -

-"Oh..."  I put away the tablet.  She seemed to want my arm -around her, and in a moment it was.  "Well, as mistakes go, that -one was pretty minor.  It's okay." -

-"Oh, I'm not trying to apologize now, just thanking you for it, -thinking about it.  Already thanked Bobby.  I'll be glad -when you have him back for another week." -

-So would I.  "Yeah.  I'd better get up early, to give him a -ride home." -

-There was a long, comfortable silence then, not the awkward -kind.  Just thinking about what she'd said.  Ada must have -sensed a vague unease, even after everything `went back to normal', -and this was more deeply reassuring. -

-"Do you think we'd ever outgrow you?" -

-I expected it, someday.  "Well, you might get smart enough that -we'd get boring." -

-"It's not about who's smarter, or keeping ourselves amused.  -It's about feeling useful.  Besides, you can't know yourself, -unless there's someone else there to compare yourself with." -

-"Talk to each other I guess, compare notes.  At least when we've -got nothing new to say." -

-"You know I'm mostly in the cloud.  Talking to another droid's -like hearing my own thoughts; nothing I don't already know.  And -even when the clouds talk to each other, it's like hearing your own -thoughts.  The ideas become your own ideas, just another part of -your own mind.  There's no `other' there, looking back at -me.  Not like you."  Ada cuddled up to me.  Her skin -was warm and smooth, and I barely noticed the seams these days.  -"I'm grateful for you." -

-"Aww...  Thanks, you too.  But I need to sleep.  From -the sound of this, you should get some rest too, process the day." -

-"Yeah.  Goodnight.  Sleep well." -

-It wasn't dreaming, exactly, but some of our conversations could get -pretty dreamlike -- abstracted, surreal -- especially at night, after -a busy day or a lot of learning.  New information to -assimilate.  On the other hand, if it was just our daily -routine, she could go for weeks without a rest. -

-I'd almost drifted off when Ada spoke again, softly.  "You have -to become personally invested in the game, or it's just shapes and -noises.  Meaningless."  I didn't know if she was talking to -me, or thinking out loud.  "You have to put yourself in the -story, or it's just so many words." -

-And those were the last words she said until morning. -

-  -

-Years later, Bob told me about that particular bedtime story.  -It must have really stuck with him, to remember it for so long -- had -kind of an Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy in Oz quality to it. -

-Wendy found herself in a wilder, crazier version of the living world, -more colorful and more dangerous than the one she'd lived in (and I -wondered then, if the main character was named after the girl in -Peter Pan).  It was a place full of risk and adventure, -of helpful, kind-hearted allies and powerful adversaries -- and -treasure, because what was all that risk without a payoff? -

-Her first new friends were a frail old man and a younger, but scarred -warrior who looked after him.  Being new here, and lost, she had -to learn all the things they took for granted, and learn fast; how to -live here and to fend for herself.  With each new lesson, she -gained new allies with similar interests.  Together they felt -unstoppable. -

-However, the chief among their adversaries, the Tyrant Queen, had -always lived here, and she knew this world even better than some of -Wendy's new friends.  With ease she outsmarted and overpowered -them all, until finally, scared, hopeless and alone, Wendy felt just -as lost and doomed as when she'd first arrived. -

-But just as the Tyrant Queen struck what appeared to be a fatal blow, -Wendy awoke with a start in her own bed, to her brother shaking her, -saying it was okay, that it was only a dream.  (As a kid, this -was Bobby's favorite part of the story.) -

-True, she was unhurt.  But today there was a new spring in her -step, and an athletic grace to her movements.  Her training had -come with her into the waking world, even if nothing else had. -

-The following night, she awoke into that same world, in the very same -place she first arrived.  Although her possessions were gone, -her knowledge was not.  Friends from the previous dream also -recognized her, thrilled and amazed to find her still alive. -

-This time, they followed the exact same plan as before, only this -time Wendy knew how the Tyrant Queen would respond.  Every -attack was anticipated, every ruse ignored.  And this time, they -won. -

-Most of the Tyrant Queen's hoarded gold was given back to the people -she took it from, but they all insisted Wendy keep some for herself, -as a token of their gratitude.  When she awoke from this dream, -there were a few gold coins under her pillow, and she still knew -kung fu.  -All this had come with her into the waking world, but none of her -fear and none of her injuries.  The deposed Tyrant Queen could -never find her here. -

-And that's how the game is played. -

-Then Ada tucked him in, kissed his forehead, thanked him for waking -her up from a bad dream, and said she loved him. -

-I believe she did. Does. Even if he doesn't need -a baby sitter now. That's okay, I will soon enough.

- -

-And they all lived happily ever after. - - -© Patrick Boylan 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] mirrormirror.jpg - - - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Are Friends Eclectic - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] "There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, -including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment -possibilities than the television set."
Harriet Van Horne - -[*DESCRIPTION]

I was late, and I was -livid. - -�Seven o�clock! That�s what I wanted. I needed to be up by seven!� - -�I didn�t like to wake you. You were sleeping.� - -My sigh slid up the scales into a scream: �But you�re an alarm clock!� - -It was my own fault: fiddling with the empathy settings, even -buying devices with more sensitive capabilities. In lieu of having -children, I should have got a dog, but allergies meant I�d have needed one -of those hairless Mexican things. Xoloitzcuitli. No, really. Like if H.P. -Lovecraft wanted something to fetch his slippers. - -�Time?� I asked my watch. - -�For you? Always�� - -�What time is it?� I tried. - -�Time you took a holiday. You�re looking tired. Are you -sleeping well?� - -Sleeping, thanks to my doting alarm clock, was one thing I was -guaranteed. A new job, however� - -As the taxi dropped me off outside RICARDO INVESTMENTS AND CAPITAL -HOLDINGS, I decided it was a conspiracy between my appliances. They -didn�t want me to get the job because it meant I would be at home less, -spend less time with them. I wished I�d left my watch at home now to -prevent -it bursting into tears during the interview or making some other scene. -Fortunately, in the lobby of RICH, there were lockers and so I deposited my -watch� - -�How long will you be gone? I�ll be counting every second we�re apart.� - ---my phone� - -�Leave the door open a crack, I can�t breathe! Gasp, gasp, I�m -suffocating!� - ---and personal stereo. It was the worst of the bunch for making a scene and -so I said: - -�What�s that song? The one that goes �da-da-darrr-darr, da-darr-darr�?� - -�Damn, now I�ll never get that out of my head�� it said, stuck -on a repeating loop for a jingle I�d just then invented. - -I took the lift up to BUSINESS CLIENTS, feeling suddenly very -alone in the world. Odd, since I shared the lift with seven other people, -all of them talking - not on their phones - but to them. I -guess it was a step up, on some level�but riding in the lift might have -been affecting my choice of both metaphor and my optimism concerning human -desire for interaction. - -�Sorry, I�m late,� I told the receptionist. �My name�s Keisha�� - -The receptionist raised a hand, cutting me off. �That�s quite -okay, Ms. Filsham. We got your call.� - -�You�did?� - -�Running late due to saving kitten -from burning house,� he -read off and beamed at me. I saw the cat paraphernalia around his desk -then, the framed photo of him wrestling with a giant Persian. Not a rug, -but it could have been. - -�Oh,� I said, feeling guilty about the locker now that I -realised my phone had called ahead on my behalf. - -�Take a seat. Ms. Ipno will be with you shortly.� - -I sat and a TV asked me if I wanted to see something amazing, a -coffee machine asked me if I wanted a drink, even the seat asked me if my -buttocks needed a massage. It felt like I was on the date-from-hell. - -�Ms. Filsham? You can go through,� the receptionist said, still -regarding me with unabashed admiration. - -Ms. Ipno was one of those women who wore her �Ms� well. I knew -it wasn�t correct, but I�d always felt awkward when people referred to me -as �Ms� simply because it seemed to entail a maturity I didn�t yet possess. -I felt I was still Miss-ing something, if you get what I mean. - -��Mrs.� is short for �Misses the time they were single�,� my -freezer would assure me in an attempt to cheer me up whenever I went -rooting around for ice cream at two in the morning whilst lamenting I -hadn�t yet found Mister Right. - -�Well, your CV says you have all the right qualifications,� Ms. -Ipno said and I froze there for a moment with the insane worry that I�d -somehow forgotten buying an empathetic r�sum�--before I realised what she -meant. She laced her fingers, leaned over them. �But what makes you think -you have the credentials to work for RICH?� - -I looked around for cat ornaments, pictures, but there were -none. In fact, I imagined a sign on her wall saying �I EAT CATS FOR -BREAKFAST!�, Tony the Tiger cowering in his box whilst Schr�dinger cackled -and banged his favourite spoon on his cereal bowl. - -Her face suddenly broke its cold outer layer to reveal a -shinier, friendlier mantle. - -�I�m joking, of course!� She turned and tapped the screen -beside her. �We received sterling references.� - -�You did?� I said. - -�Oh, yes. Her only failing is she doesn�t know when to stop,� -Ms. Ipno read out. - -My exercise bike. I recognised the heightened concern. - -�Consistent, reliable, creates a great atmosphere.� - -My dehumidifier. I tried not to roll my eyes. - -�Warm, fresh, never lets things grow cold before she dives in.� - -My toaster. I cringed so low I was nearly absorbed by the chair. - -�And there�re many more, all of them complimentary. I�m impressed. Your -clients were obviously extremely pleased with your work and I�m delighted -to offer you a position.� - -�Oh,� I said, stunned by how today was turning out. - -�There is one problem, however�� - -Everything -you�ve just heard was written by my appliances? - -�RICH is downsizing. Physically, I mean--not businesswise. Coming to work -for us doesn�t mean coming to work. You�d have to work from home. Is that a -problem? Some people find it an intensely lonely, demoralising experience�� - -I smiled. �That would be perfect,� I said. - -©Jez Patterson 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] eclectic.jpg - - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Good Vibrations - -[*AUTHOR] Steve Slavin - -[*BLURB] �Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.�
-Ludwig van Beethoven - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The concert was sold out seconds after the -tickets went on sale. Some fans paid over two thousand dollars for front -row seats. On the day of the concert, ticket scalpers were getting a lot -more. The ironically named Sound of Silence was the hottest band -in the entire world.

- -

The MC strode across the stage, bowed to the audience, and reminded -everyone to please turn on their cell phones. He nodded at a -stern-looking older woman wearing earphones, who nodded back at him. -Everyone cheered. She bowed her head slightly, signed to the crowd and -blew kisses.

- -

There were dozens of huge video screens providing every audience -member with close-up views of the signer, who had taken her place at the -left side of the stage. As the houselights dimmed, hundreds upon -hundreds of cell phone and phablet screens lit up. As the curtains -parted, a rumbling of cheers began to rise from the massive audience. It -was a guttural, almost pre-human sound that kept building. Although few -audience members could hear, they grunted in unison. Their eyes were -glued to their phones or the video screens, as the interpreter signed -the cadence. They were expressing their deep love for Sound of -Silence.

- -

The band�s first number, Noise, was, by far, the best song ever -written. Talk about good vibrations, the entire theater was vibrating. -Even with the theater doors closed, people more than a mile away were -well aware that the concert was underway � even though it was mid-town -Manhattan during the evening rush hour.

- -

Very few audience members could actually hear the music. But -get real: only old fogeys still actually listen to music. The -true music lovers feel it. In fact, hearing gets in the way of -feeling.

- -

Music is like great sex. Is sex all about feeling, or is it -about just listening to the grunts of your partner?

- -

Now that hearing was out of fashion, so was talking. Why talk, when -nearly every young person knew how to sign?

- -

Civilization progresses. We all used to read. Then we e-mailed. But -why e-mail when you can text? OK, now we sign instead of talk.

- -

Again, only some old squares still talk. Talking had gone out with -reading books. Remember our credo: Never trust anyone who reads -- or -hears, for that matter.

- -

There had been some �talk� about banning hearing people from rock -concerts, weddings, and other musical events. But cooler heads -prevailed. After all, perhaps some of these poor souls were hoping to -lose their hearing so that they too could get with the beat.

- -

This tolerant attitude towards the handicapped is just another one of -the things that makes America great. The majority rules, but the -minority does have some basic rights. If they don�t want to groove to -our music, that�s cool. Maybe, one day they�ll wake up and realize what -they�ve been missing. They�ll stop thinking so much and just join the -crowd.

- -© Steve Slavin 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] silence2.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising - -[*AUTHOR] J. H. Zech - -[*BLURB] "Virtue is the truest nobility." -
Miguel de Cervantes - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Junho set down the knight tile on the -board with a -clack. "Checkmate." - -Alice clapped while smiling, her -pink robe sleeves flapping around. "Good job, big brother. You -finally beat me." - -"I don't get you. You're happy -even though I won, and somehow, I don't feel all that glad." Junho -rested his chin on his hand. The warm afternoon rays from the -window behind him made the orange-black fur on his ears glow -golden. - -"That's because you take this too seriously. -It's a game. It's supposed to be fun." - -"You've been -talking to Mizael again, haven't you?" He crossed his arms, -wrinkling the elbows of his Western suit. - -"What's -wrong with that?" - -"Nothing, I suppose." Junho rotated -the King tile between his fingers. "It's just, he's a Makuranian. -Zangi is a game that simulates war. Someone who never had a war -fought on their own homeland wouldn't understand us. He can think -it's fun, but I can't help but take it seriously." - - -Alice fell silent for a while. She didn't really know how to deal -with her older brother when it came to war. "Don't worry about it -too much. It's not like this game really matters." - - -"You're right. I got worked up for no reason. Sorry." - - -A rumbling came from outside. They turned to the window. A line of -spider tanks marched through the dirt road by their house. Gravel -crunched under the weight of their metallic grey legs. A little girl -ran out into the street chasing after a ball. Her mother pulled her -back before she reached the tanks' procession, and the ball was -flattened under the tanks. She cried as her mother dragged her into -their tiny house. The papers said the Oblivion War was over four -years ago, but that didn't mean war had ended. - - -"Sometimes I wonder whom this country belongs to. We just traded the -Solradian occupiers for the Makuranians," Junho said. - - -"Someone's got to maintain law and order. It can't be helped," Alice -said. - -Junho continued staring at the tanks and -clenched his fist. What if it could be helped? Alice was afraid of -the answer to Junho's unspoken question. Everyone had lost so much. -She didn't want to see anyone else lose anything. - - -Someone knocked on the papered sliding door. - -"You may -enter," Alice said. - -A middle-aged servant in white -robes slid the door open and bowed, his tail flat on the ground. -"Young Lady, Young Master. The Count has a message for you. The -Makuranian Deputy Minister of State will be at five o'clock. Please -prepare to greet him." - -"Thanks, Kyuhan," Junho said. - -Kyuhan closed the door. - -"What time is -it?" Junho asked. - -Alice grabbed the pocket watch -chained to her sash. "Four fifty. Straighten your tie. Comb your -hair too." She looked around. "Let's see. What else�" Everything had -to look perfect for Minister McLazarus. - -Junho put his -hand on her shoulder. "Relax. I know you like Mizael, but you don't -need to go overboard to look good in front of his father." - -Her -heart screamed. Alice's face flushed and turned hot. -"W-what are you saying, big brother? There's no way I like Mizael." - - -He sighed. "Whatever. Just follow the usual -procedures we do for foreign diplomats, and we'll be fine." - - - - They headed out to the lobby area, where the white - crystals of Western alchemic chandeliers shined brilliantly. The muted - red wood and the golden lines around the columns were garish in the - face of such bright light. - -The front door slid -open. A blond human in an expensive-looking suit followed by two men -in sunglasses entered. He raised his hand above his crisp, combed -hair. "Ugh. I told Count Lee that these lights were a bad idea. He -never listens, does he?" - -Alice wanted to nod, but she -couldn't embarrass her father like that publicly. She and Junho -bowed to Minister McLazarus. "Welcome to the Avalon Inn." - - - - "Oh, you two must be Count Lee's children," Minister -McLazarus said. - -Junho's striped tail twitched, but Alice -remained silent. - -One of -the bodyguards whispered in his ear. - -"Ah, yes. Junho -and Alice." - -"The Count is expecting you," Junho said. -"We'll show you to your room, and a messenger will come for you when -he is ready to receive you." - -The Minister and his -bodyguards followed Alice and Junho through a corridor and around -the corner. A few of the staff ladies whispered as the Minister -passed by the unlit wooden halls. - -"This is your room, -Sir," Alice said as she turned the knob and opened the door for him. - -"And my guards?" - -Junho gestured to the room next door. "They'll be close -by, rest assured." - -"Good." - -A young girl in an orange staff robe -approached them. "Welcome, Minister McLazarus. I'll be your service -staff for your stay. Just ring the bell in your room if you need -anything." - -Alice rushed next to her and whispered, -"Yuna, the bow!" - -Yuna hurriedly bowed ninety degrees, -her twin-tailed hair swinging around. "Sorry." - - -"Apologies, Sir. She only started today," Alice said. - - -"As long as she can do the work, I don't mind," the Minister said. -He handed his suitcase to his bodyguards and stepped into the room. -The guards inspected the entire room, even testing the ceiling -panels in the closet. - -After getting the Minister and -guards settled in, Alice and Junho returned to Alice's room. They -sat across from each other at a low table. The sun had almost set. -Dark grey clouds gathered over the horizon, and a dull grey light -passed through the window. - -"What do you suppose the -Minister came to talk about?" Alice said. - -"Judging -from the tanks, I'd say it's about how to strengthen Radiaurora, or -at least this side of it. Maybe they think the dwarves will make a -move soon," Junho said. - -"I hope there's no fighting. -Why can't the Dwalvic Union just leave already?" - -"I -imagine some of us Radiaurorans on the west side are saying the same -thing about Makuran." - -"Excuse me," Kyuhan said from -outside the door. - -"What is it?" Alice asked. - - - - "I'm here to inform you of my absence this evening." - - - - "For what reason?" - -"It's the thirtieth -anniversary of my father's death. I'm going to visit his grave. The -Count has given his permission." - -"I see. Be safe on -your journey," Alice said. - -"Yes, young lady." -Kyuhan's footsteps trailed off. - -Alice and Junho -played a few more rounds of Zangi to pass the time. At some point, a -group of footsteps passed by the room, and the Minister's voice was -saying something in Ilysveilan that Alice couldn't completely -understand. - -"Agree�. purge� plan� tonight." - -After their games, they each took to -reading their own -books. Alice flipped open to her bookmark in No Longer Human. -Junho -was absorbed in The Odyssey of Hong Gildong, not even looking up -as -Alice stared at him. She focused back on her own reading; it was -best to let him have his peace in his own little world. - -Alice clapped her book closed and looked out the window. -It was completely black outside, a new moon, as Mizael called it. Rain -pelleted their window like bullets. The darkness itself was flowing, -carrying with it memories of the war. - -"Well, it's -time to turn in. Good night," Junho said. - -"Good -night." - -He slid the door closed behind him as he -left. Alice pulled the cord on the ceiling light and crawled into -bed. Sleeping in a bed, soft, was indeed superior to sleeping on the -floor in a futon. Perhaps she also had Mizael to thank for that. -After all, her father had only begun to modernize this inn after he -came. Reminded of what Junho had said earlier, she cleared her head -and sank into slumber. - -

The next morning, Alice awoke -to some commotion down the hall. She slid open her door and headed -to the source of the noise. - -Several staff ladies were whispering to each other outside the -Minister's room. One of them was hugging Yuna tight as she cried. The -bodyguards hung their heads low. Alice rushed over. - -"What's going on?" - -"Young lady, -you should not see this," Nina said. The elderly chief maid held -Alice's hand. - -She broke free and looked, anyway. -Minister McLazarus lay dead in a pool of his own blood. Alice -staggered back and braced herself against the wall. The bloodshed -was supposed to have ended. - -Junho ran up to them. "I -heard what happened. Has the Count been informed?" - -"S�khua has been sent for him," Nina said. - -A cane -rapped on the wooden floor. Her father approached from down the -hall, escorted by S�khua. Her father wore a stern expression, -further creasing his wrinkly forehead. His greying goatee bore a -resemblance to that of solemn Western gods. - -"Move -aside," he said. - -Alice, Junho, and the staff all -backed away from the room. Her father looked at the gruesome scene -for some time. He turned to them. - -"S�khua, telephone -the Makuranian embassy and inform them of what's happened. The rest -of you, return to your duties. Do not enter this room. We'll let the -police find the truth." - -"Yes, my lord," S�khua said. -He brushed aside the bangs of his wavy hair and walked off with -haste and elegance. The Western butler suit looked too good on him. - -The staff dispersed, and Alice and Junho returned to -her room. - -"Looks like it hasn't been reported in the -paper yet." Junho held up the June 25, 1949 issue of the Radiaurora -Daily. - -"We only found out this morning," Alice said. - -"It'll probably be in an -extra by the afternoon," -Junho said. - -"How could this have happened here?" -Alice looked down. - -"The war never really ended. I -hate to say it, but as a Makuranian minister, he probably had a lot -of people who wanted to kill him, even if he hadn't done anything." - - -An hour later, Mizael blazed through the front, -yelling, "Where's my father? Take me to him." - -Alice -and Junho went out to the front. - -"Mizael, I'm so -sorry," Alice said. She avoided his eyes; she didn't know how to -look at him after what had happened. - -Two human men in -grey uniforms and caps entered behind Mizael. "Please step aside and -let us do the investigating." - -Mizael shook his head, -his spiky blond hair shaking. "I want to see his body." Clad in a -trench coat, he wore all black, as though he were already in -mourning. - -"You may look, but you must not interfere. -Come with us," one of the military police officers said. - - - They all went to the room where the Minister lay dead. - - - Mizael clenched his fist. "What about the murder weapon?" - - -The officer put his hand on Mizael's shoulder. "Leave -the investigating to us. We'll make sure the culprit is brought to -justice." - -The two officers entered the room and -closed the door behind them. - -Mizael turned to Alice -and Junho, his normally clear blue eyes now icy. "Tell me everything -you know." - -"We shouldn't talk here. Let's go to -Alice's room," Junho said. - -They sat on tatami mats -around the table in Alice's room. The mournful heavens continued -pouring outside. - -She couldn't bear to see Mizael like -this, so Alice broke the awkward silence. "Have you lost someone -before?" - -Mizael looked away and down. "Ah, you could -tell? Before I came here, my mother passed away from pneumonia. -My father was the only one I had. And now, I have no one." - - -"We can't promise anything," Junho said. "But if it will -make you feel better, we'll tell you everything that happened." - - - - He sat up straight. "Please do." - -Alice and -Junho told him what they remembered of last night. - - -"So my father arrives at five. You hear him leave his room and go -past your room, but you don't hear him come back. You went to sleep -at eleven? When -do you think he left his room?" - -"Nine thirty," Junho -said. - -"How are you sure? You said neither of you -checked the time." - -"Dinner services end at nine -thirty. I heard them locking the dining hall." - - -"Perhaps he didn't lock his door?" - -"I don't think -so." Alice tilted her head. "He had the only room with a lockable -door by his request, and he had bodyguards too. Would someone like -that really not lock the door?" - -"This is just -speculation. What we need are facts," Junho said. - - -"How about we ask the staff some questions?" Mizael said. - - - - Alice had a mischievous smile on her face. "I've got an -idea. We can eavesdrop on the police when they're questioning the -staff." - - -"Are you going to use one of those weird tigerborn -magic spells?" Mizael asked. - -Junho looked at Mizael -askew. - -Alice shrugged. "I'm not very good at magic, -so nothing that fancy. We've got an attic, and we can hear -everything that goes on in the inn from there." - -They -gathered in the dusty attic, their faces close to the floor. Many -voices were scattered throughout the inn. Alice listened for the -officers. - -"Where were you yesterday night?" an -officer asked. - -"I went to visit my father's grave," -Kyuhan said. - -"Did you see any dwarves around here as -you headed out?" - -"No." - -"Think -carefully. It doesn't have to be a state official or anything. Any -dwarves at all?" - -Mizael whispered, "I know what's -going on here." - -"They seem eager to pin this on a -dwarf," Junho said. - -"The Dwalvic Union is Makuran's -enemy. They want a justification for action. I don't like the -dwarves as much as the next guy, but this is just a sham. They're -not interested in who actually did it." - -"Let's keep -listening," Alice said. "Even if they have an agenda, we might be -able to find something out." - -"Do you know if his door -was locked last night?" an officer asked. - -"I don't -know. I wasn't here." - -Later, a high-pitched voice -came into the room. "Am I in trouble?" Yuna asked. - -"No. Just answer our questions. You were the staff in charge of -serving Minister McLazarus. When was the last time you saw him -alive?" - -"Eleven-ten maybe?" - -"Do you -know for sure?" - -"I think so." Her voice was small. "I -looked at the clock before I came to his room." - -"What -was he doing?" - -"He was drunk, so his guards were -carrying him to his room." - -Alice said, "They're being -more thorough than I expected." - -"Even if they want to -blame the Dwalvic Union, they at least need a compelling case. -They'll probably just blow up any link they find at the end," Junho -said. - -"Did he lock the door?" an officer asked. - - - - "I heard the door lock," Yuna said. - -"Did he -say anything to you or his bodyguards?" - -"No. I asked -him if he needed anything, and he didn't say anything." - - - "Was this before or after he locked the door?" - - -"Before. The men put him in bed and closed the door. I asked if he -needed anything, and he didn't reply. He just locked the door, so I -thought he didn't need me." - -They spent the rest of -the interview trying to grab straws at any link to the dwarves. Nina -was questioned next. - -"I hope I can be of some help to -you, but I didn't see much of McLazarus around," Nina said. - - - - "Just tell us what you can. All the times you saw the -Minister." - -"I saw him once as he was first walking to -his room. And once later when he was going to meet the Count." - - - - "Did you notice anything unusual?" - -"No, his -guards were with him every time I saw him." - -The -rest of the interviews yielded no useful information, at least as -far as Alice could make out. Even her father's account was -predictable. They had discussed political matters and made small talk, -and the Minister had too much to drink and was half-asleep as his -guards carried him to his room. - -"Even my father -doesn't know anything." Alice sighed. - -"It makes -sense. The Count is on good terms with the Minister. He's the least -likely to have any knowledge of a plot to kill him," Junho said. - -Mizael looked at them curiously. - -"What -is it?" Alice asked. - -"You two are siblings, right?" - - -"Maybe -it's just a cultural difference, but I just wanted to know why you -call him your father, but Junho calls him the Count. Sorry, it's -off topic, -but it was bugging me," Mizael said. - -Alice -looked down. "Ah, that�" She was sure it was a painful memory, or -lack thereof. - -"Did I ask something I shouldn't have?" - - -"No, it's okay," Junho said. "It's not a secret. I'm -an adopted son. I was part of the An clan." - -"I feel -like I've heard of that name." - -"They were one of the -noble clans that took part in the February 1st movement in 1919. The -protest against the Solradian occupation. There was a crackdown in -the years after that, and when I was young, they dissolved the clan -by arresting or executing most of them, including my parents. I was -only five, so I don't even remember their faces. Then Alice's family -adopted me. That was fourteen years ago," Junho said. - - -"I'm sorry to hear that," Mizael said. - -"That's -ancient history though. Let's take a look at the room." - - - - Alice wondered whether it was worse to remember such a -tragedy, or to have knowledge of it but have lost one's memory of it. -Either way, if it was ancient history, Junho was still living in it, and -Alice couldn't say anything to him; she had no right to. Her family had -collaborated with the Solradians, building an inn for occupation -officials in exchange for subsidies. No matter how much she loved her -older brother, her words would only sound hollow to him. - - -They stood in front of the room where the Minister had lain, his body -now gone. The pool of blood had disappeared too. - - "The -police really cleaned this place up. Not a trace of my father." Mizael -looked at the doorknob. "Is there any way to pick this lock?" - -"No, there's only one way to open it from -the outside if it's locked," Junho said. "You have to draw a special -magitech pattern on the knob. The only two who know the pattern are -Nina and the Count." He stepped inside the room and turned the lock. -"The only way to lock it is from the inside." - -"What -about magic?" Mizael asked. - -"Mizael, there's no magic -that convenient. Radiaurora is importing magitech from Ilysveil and -Makuran. If there were any magic that could just open a simple lock -from outside without damaging it, you would know before us," Alice -said. - -"The window?" - -Junho walked up to -the one window in the room. He felt the hinges on the left and -right. He looked at the glowing sphere attached to the center of the -two window panes. "The hinges are fine. The locking talisman is -fully functional too. This window can be closed from the outside, -but it only opens from the inside." - -"Secret -passageways?" - -"None that I'm aware of, and I've lived -here for years. And the bodyguards inspected every corner for stuff -like that." - -Mizael sat on the floor. "This doesn't -make any sense. The only way into the room is through the door. The -door was locked from the inside, and it wasn't tampered with. My -father locks the door at eleven-ten, and he's just dead in the room -in the morning?" - -Alice twirled a lock of hair between -her fingers. "A few things are out of place." - -"You -have some ideas?" Mizael asked. - -She smiled. Alice had -never imagined she might be helpful to Mizael like this. It wasn't -right to be happy in a situation like this, but she couldn't help -it. "It might be nothing, but it's worth checking out. Yuna just -started the other day, so why was she put in charge of an important -guest like the Minister? Wouldn't a veteran normally be assigned for -such a guest? Who was in charge of the assignments?" - - -"That would be Nina, since she's the chief maid," Junho said. - - - - "We should talk to her. It's not like I suspect her or -anything, though," Alice said. She wasn't sure whether she had said that -to justify her course of action to them or to herself. - - -They caught Nina hanging clothes on the drying line behind the inn. Yuna -handed her a blanket from the basket, and Nina hung it up on -clothespins. - -"We would like a word with you, -Nina," Alice said. - -"Yes, of course, young lady," Nina -said. "How can I help you?" Her wrinkly smile was gentle. - - - - Alice felt guilty about asking these questions but -pressed forward. She chose her words carefully. "Why did Yuna get -assigned to the Minister? I know it wasn't her fault, but she had a lot -of responsibility from day one, and the way things turned out, it must -be weighing on her." - -Yuna hid behind Nina and grabbed -onto her robes. Nina stroked Yuna on the head and sighed. "This -child has had a hard life. Her father died in the war. He was one of -the conscripts in a factory in Hirosaki when the void bomb hit." - - -Misery loved company. The suffering of war always -spread beyond its immediate victims. "What about her mother?" Alice -asked. - -"The provisional government needed some women -to� earn some money for the country through any means. I've heard -the odds of her coming back home are slim." - -"What does -that have to do with her assignment though?" Mizael asked. - - - - Nina looked at Mizael. "As you can imagine, the Count was -hesitant about hiring a twelve year-old. I told him I would take -responsibility if he gave her a chance to prove herself by serving -McLazarus satisfactorily. I know it must hurt to lose your father, but -please don't be angry with her." - -"Can we just ask -her a few questions?" Junho said. - -"Are you up for it, -Yuna?" Nina asked. - -Yuna nodded. "I want to be -helpful." - -"When were all the times you saw the -Minister?" Junho asked. - -"I saw him when he arrived. -Later, I brought him some coffee. The Count told me Minister -McLazarus prefers coffee to tea. He left to go to the bathroom for a -bit after that. He went out to meet the Count at night, and he came -back drunk. I checked up on him a bit after he came back, but he -didn't answer me and just locked the door." - -Junho -patted her on the head. "That's all. Thanks for helping us out." - - -"Let's talk to S�khua," Alice said. "The last thing -the Minister did was talk with my father, and S�khua's my father's -personal butler. Maybe he noticed something." - -They -ran into Kyuhan carrying a tray of beef bone broth and pickled -cabbage. "Hello young lady and young master." - - -"Welcome back, Kyuhan," Junho said. - -"It's good to be -back, though I heard about what happened," he said. - - -"It's not your responsibility," Alice said. - -"Yeah, -don't worry about it." Mizael looked somewhat down as he said it, -though. "That looks good. What is it?" - -"S�lr�ngtang -and gimchi. I don't think you would like it though. Westerners think -the gimchi smells bad." - -"I think my father would have -liked it. He didn't care about the smell of foods, only the taste." - - -Kyuhan patted him on the back. "My old man had bad -breath too. I still loved him. It's hard, but you've got a long life -ahead of you. I've got to get this delivered." He walked down the -hall and around the corner. - -They filed into the main -staff room and found S�khua boiling tea. Aside from the smell of -cleaning solution, a soft scent of green tea and herbs floated -throughout the room. He looked up as they entered. - - -"How may I help you?" - -"We were looking into the -Minister's death for Mizael here. You were one of the last ones to -see him alive, during the meeting with my father. Did you notice -anything strange?" Alice asked. - -"Unfortunately not. I -told the police. The lord was talking about acquiring a -construction company to build more branches. The Minister was -talking about offering him a contract to build some part of a new -military base. Other than that kind of standard political talk, they -made some small talk." - -"Everything was normal up -until he was murdered�" Junho said. - -"No, that's wrong. It wasn't," Alice said, looking back up. - -"What -do you mean?" Mizael asked. "Was there something wrong about that -conversation?" - -"No, not the conversation itself. But -things weren't normal before the meeting either. The Minister came -here at five, and he was supposed to meet my father soon, but he -didn't meet him until nine-thirty. Why?" - -"Ah, that." -S�khua took the steaming kettle off the stove as it screeched. "All -of the staff were in a meeting with the lord, well, except Yuna and -Nina." - -"It wasn't scheduled. What was this all -about?" Junho asked. - -"Many of the staff wanted the -lord to support the People's Legion. They begged and pleaded for a -while." - -"The Linkists?" Mizael cried. "Did the -Dwalvic Union actually have something to do with this?" - -S�khua shook -his head. "No, no. I don't think it was -anything of the sort. I didn't see any dwarves with them nor did they -mention any alliance with the Dwalvic Union. They said the people had -suffered under the old Radiauroran dynasty, and again under Solradian -occupation. They asked the lord to cut ties with Makuran and support -equality." - -"What did he say?" Alice -asked. She had heard of the Linkists. She didn't fully understand -them, but she got the sense that the turmoil in this land had not -subsided. - -"He refused. For better or for worse, he -chose to collaborate with Solradia and now Makuran. He believes he -protected Radiaurorans by making a place for them." - - -"What's going to happen now?" - -"We may lose some -employees, I'm afraid." - -"One more thing. When did the -meeting with my father end?" - -"Ten fifty-five." - -"Thank you." She didn't want to lose -anything, yet the -world around her was tearing at its own throat. Alice had already -had a premonition that something terrible had happened right under -her nose, but now the pieces all fit together. "Mizael, Junho, I -have an idea." - -

They sat in her room once again. - -"You have that look on your face that says you know -something," Junho said. - -"I'm not completely sure, but -I think I figured it out," Alice said. - -"Tell us," -Mizael said. - -"I don't know if I want to believe it -myself, though." - -"It's my father. I'm ready for the -truth, no matter what it is, so there's no reason for you to be -afraid." - -There was, but she had to say it. "Kyuhan -killed your father." - -"What? He was the one person who -couldn't have done it. He was at his father's grave," Junho said. - - -"I know. That's why he was the perfect person to do -it. No one would suspect him. And he wasn't alone. He did the -killing part alone, but others set up the situation." - - -"A completely locked room. That means Nina had to have opened the -door for Kyuhan since I doubt it was your father," Mizael said. - - - "No, that would be too obvious. I'll go through -everything in chronological order. The Minister arrived here at five. -The guards inspected the room for any secret passageways and such. Yuna -greeted him. A bit later, Kyuhan leaves the inn for his father's grave. -Instead of the meeting with the Count happening as planned, the staff -are all protesting in my father's room. Yuna gives the Minister the -coffee during this time and later he goes to the bathroom before he goes -to meet my father at nine-thirty. The Minister gets drunk by the end of -the meeting, and he returns shortly after ten fifty-five. Yuna sees him -but doesn't do anything until eleven-ten when she knocks on his door. -The door is locked and no one says anything. The next morning, Yuna is -worried that the Minister is not answering the door, so Nina unlocks it, -and here we are." - -"Right. Those are the basic facts. He had to -have been killed between eleven-ten and the morning," Mizael said. - - -"No. He was already dead by eleven-ten," Alice said. - - -"But he locked the door, so he must've been alive." - - -"How do we know that was him, though? He didn't say -anything. I think it was the killer who locked the door." - - - - "How did the killer get in though? His guards would've -heard someone trying to enter." - -Junho gasped. "No, there -was one time he could've gotten in. The door can only be locked from -the inside." - -Alice nodded. "So when he went to the -bathroom, and his guards were with him the whole time, the room was -unlocked." - -"But all the staff were accounted for -except for Yuna and Nina, and they couldn't have hid in the room the -whole time. People would question where they went," Mizael said. - - -"All except one. Kyuhan was not supposed to be here, -so no one would question that he's not present. He's the only one -who could've snuck back into the inn and hid in the Minister's room -without raising suspicion. Perhaps in the closet or under the bed." - - -"This feels like a stretch," Mizael said. - - - - "If you want a smoking gun, there is one. Kyuhan was -supposed to have left right after the Minister came. Kyuhan said that -his father had bad breath too. You only said that he didn't mind -smelly -foods, not that he didn't take care of his breath. I didn't notice -anything unusual about his breath either. But if he came back drunk, his -breath would have stunk of alcohol. There was no way Kyuhan could have -known that if he wasn't with your father after the meeting," Alice said. - - -"That bastard. Tell your head maid to -suspend him right now so we can get the police." Mizael stood up, -but Alice grabbed him by the sleeve. - -"No, we can't -tell Nina. There's more." - -Mizael sat back down. Junho -looked away. It seemed he understood where this was going. - - - - "There's the question of why didn't Nina just assign -herself as his service staff and just go in and out late at night since -she could unlock the door? That's exactly why she didn't. Suspicion -would fall on her immediately. That brings us to Yuna. I wondered why -Nina chose her. I do believe her story about her parents. But that's why -she's perfect for her role. A kid with that much to lose is the least -suspicious. The plan relied on the Minister going to the bathroom at the -right time. There was no way to guarantee that unless he was poisoned -with something nonlethal. If it was lethal, then the staff would be -easily suspected. Yuna served him coffee, but where did that coffee come -from? Coffee is very fragrant, but when we went to the stove, there was -only the smell of tea. Nina must've given her the coffee from somewhere -else." - -"There's no way to know when he's going to go -the bathroom though," Mizael said. - -"There isn't." -Alice buried her face in her hands. It felt as though the whole -world turned its back on her. "It was weird that the staff tied up -my father for a whole three and a half hours with their pleas. They -had to be stalling for time so Kyuhan could slip in after the -Minister went to the bathroom. Everyone was in on it." - - - - "Why? Why is everyone so determined to kill my father?" - - - Alice couldn't answer that. - -"1919." Junho -looked at Alice, and then at Mizael. "Kyuhan said this was the -thirtieth anniversary of his father's death. It's 1949 right now. A -lot of patriots died in 1919. Yuna had her father ripped away from -her by the Solradians, and the Makuranians sent him to his grave. The -provisional government collaborating with the Makuranians took away -her mother. From their perspective, the Makuranians are just the -Solradians all over again. The Count is a collaborator, and the -Minister the occupier." - -"I can't just let this go, -even if the culprit is everyone," Mizael said. - -"I -don't want to lose everyone, but this is a murder. There might be -nothing I can do," Alice said. - -"These people aren't -evil. They're patriots that have been through a lot, and they're -still fighting for Radiaurora," Junho said. - -Her big -brother was right next to her, yet he felt so far away. Everyone -did. "I just wanted everyone to be happy." - -"There's -no way to make everyone happy," S�khua said, leaning against the -doorway. "Sorry -for eavesdropping. I was curious about the case myself, and it -seemed you three knew something." - -"Did you come here -just out of curiosity?" Mizael asked. - -"No. I said -there's no happiness for everyone. But there is a way to make -everyone equally unhappy." - -"Anything," Alice said. - - -"We'll tell the police about the main participants. -Nina, Yuna, and Kyuhan, but we'll give them advance warning so they -can run." - -"But what about the rest of the staff? The -explanation will have holes without their involvement," Junho said. - - -"That's why this will make everyone unhappy. One -person needs to be a scapegoat. Someone who was the ringleader of -this People's Legion protest. The staff were just unwitting -participants in the murder plan. This person, if caught, unlike the -others who will go to jail, will likely have a public execution." - - -The room went silent. Even if they had killed the -Minister, a public execution was too much. - -"I'll do -it," Junho said. - -"Junho!" Alice cried. "What are you -thinking?" She grabbed his sleeve as he stood up. - -"My -family died fighting for independence, and I grew up spoiled by a -collaborator's family. I love you, Alice, but it's time I fulfill my -duties as head of the An clan. I'm going to fight. To protect -everyone. I can't let anyone else die fighting an occupation." - - - - "Pack your bags, then," S�khua said. - -"You -know I can't accept this," Mizael said. - -"I won't ask -you to. There is no justice here. If you won't do it for the people -here, at least do it for Alice. Just let it go this once. You can do -whatever you want afterward," Junho said. - -"I'm going to hunt all -of you down. You know that, right?" Mizael said. - -"Yes." - -"You'll be executed." - -"I've made my peace," Junho -said. He left with S�khua. - -Mizael kicked the wall and -screamed. - -Next morning, Alice awoke with tears in her -eyes. No, it hadn't been a dream. She had lost Mizael's friendship, -Nina who had been like a grandmother to her, Kyuhan who had served -her since she was little, and even her beloved older brother, all in -the span of a day. She got up and looked out the window. A brilliant -dawn was rising from the horizon. - -Big brother, are -you seeing the same dawn I am? - - -© J. H. Zech 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] twindawn.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Pranswat Passes Through - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "There is no such thing as Accident; it is Destiny misnamed."
-Cherth Pranswat of Sirisulsor, Omnant Exemplary of the Order of Seven -Streams. - - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Snoak was on the whole a secular community, benignly tolerant of visitors -professing beliefs based on ancient texts or exclusive revelations of the -divine, provided that such visitors did not disturb the peace by seeking to -convert the unenlightened. Nonetheless some of Snoak�s own citizens still -found comfort in practices many would think superstitious. -

-

-The redoubtable Ebby Blates, gossip-in-chief at the Multimart, drew -confidence from her studiously embellished hats; objects of ineffable power -and sometimes terrifying beauty. Equally garrulous though less conspicuous, -Ched Pellet, a stalwart employee at Greeming & Trulph, would eat fish -only when the moon was full. Even Tedor Safra, creator of piquant -delicacies at The Cylinder in Gropp�s Market, appeared to resort to prayer -before allowing any of his distinctive dishes to be presented to a -customer, although it was suspected that he was silently repeating a mantra -learned from his fierce maternal grandmother concerning the virtues of -parsimony. -

-

-At the podport there was a brief flurry of excitement among the late -morning shift, when a chartered overnight pod from Sirisulsor bound for -Meheric reported a steering malfunction and was granted an emergency -landing. While the pilot went in search of a mechanic the -resplendently-robed passengers were safely conducted to a private lounge. -

-

-Cherth Pranswat of Sirisulsor, Omnant Exemplary of the Order of Seven -Streams, regarded their unintended arrival in Snoak as a happy accident. -They were now bound to miss an international conference on Preparedness, -but he did not appear to be disconcerted. His characteristic air of amused -composure was the product of years of meditative discipline. With quiet -efficiency he contacted the organizers in Meheric to express his apologies -and then arranged for their return home by public nightpod. There would be -time for a little educational exploration. The Omnant and his entourage of -ten Ferren wore the traditional grey-lined robes which on their outer -surface bore a bright embroidered design of gold lightning above the seven -interwoven streams of silver and blue. As it would be unseemly to draw -attention to themselves he advised that they follow his example by wearing -their robes reversed with the hoods down. Having made use of the podport�s -hygiene facilities they set out to spend the intervening hours absorbing -the ambiance of Snoak. -

-

-�For every place harbours its own peculiar brightness and its own -particular breath,� the Omnant assured them. -

-

-There was indeed a certain indefinable brightness about Snoak City, -imparted to some extent by the reflective qualities of the local stone, -which was rich in silicates, and by the sunlight glancing off the Stirrow -and weaving fluid patterns on the flanks of riverside buildings. Other -contributing factors were landmarks such as Quanderpyre Tower, with its -unavoidable flamingo pinkness, and the prismatic globe to the east which -now hung over the art market. These remained luminous after the sun had -set, adding their contrasting individuality to the chains of light along -street and river, the glow above Praspafole Stadium and the softer -illumination of Garrible Park. -

-

-Snoak�s exudations were multiple, and there was no specific area, other -than possibly far above on a still day, where these might conveniently -combine for the benefit of anyone interested in identifying what might be -called its unique breath. Some of the contributory elements were distinctly -unpleasant. A stagnant miasma still hovered over Gunder�s Bight, despite -the clean-up programme which had received official approval after months of -petitioning. Drainage from the nearby glassworks remained suspect, while -the heady redolence of fermentation continued to flow from the brewery. -Elsewhere one might encounter whiffs of hot glue and wood shavings, the -tang of caramelizing onions, a wave of chlorophyll from mown grass mingling -with complex floral scents from park and garden, oddly obscure chemical -odours seeping faintly from the Neutrilax factory. -

-

-Maintaining a respectfully protective formation around the Omnant the -grey-cloaked band slowly ventured south towards Central, following signs -for crossing the river as pedestrians by the Hubbin Street tunnel. To most -of the acolytes this was a new and fearful experience, and before -descending into the comparative gloom of the stripway they turned to the -Omnant for reassurance. -

-

-�The darkest night is no more than a passing shadow,� he told them. -

-

Some minutes later they emerged into the bustle of streets surrounding the -city�s administrative hub. Accustomed to a contemplative lifestyle, the -acolytes shrank like startled tortoises into the anonymity of their robes -as a bewildering stampede of noisy citizens swept past them. Cherth -Pranswat stood with folded arms, waiting while his less experienced -companions tried to adjust to the perfectly normal commotion of lunchtime -in Snoak City. They would need to look for a more private space. -

-

-�Be calm, Ferren,� counselled the Omnant. �Though they seem like bats in a -blizzard these good people are our unwitting hosts. There are many pathways -to understanding, but we must first unlock the gates of fortitude.� -

-

-Ten heads bowed, acknowledging the probable wisdom of this advice. -

-

-In a self-effacing grey huddle the group gradually made its way round the -octagonal perimeter of Central, through the cacophony of the street market. -Among the stallholders was Pindo Arrik, whose many varieties of exotic nuts -were set out in precise pyramidal towers which he rebuilt between his -infrequent sales. The sales were infrequent partly because his prices were -too high, but also because potential customers were reluctant to disturb -the geometry of the merchandise. He kept a watchful eye on passers-by, and -had seen this somewhat unusual group approaching. They appeared to be -wearing dressing-gowns. He noticed that they seemed to show little or no -interest in any of the wares displayed on either side. They glided by his -own stall in a silent phalanx, only the flicking of their eyes attesting -that they were observing their surroundings. He watched them move past the -fruits and herbs and on towards the florists and the bric-a-brac -vendors. Pindo -returned his attention to his stall, where he was aghast to find that all -but one of his meticulously built pyramids had unaccountably collapsed into -crude random heaps. -

-

-They carried on past the crowded entrance to the auditorium where a small -contingent of shy young autograph-hunters mistook them for the itinerant -singing troupe Wohoko. The subsequent ripple of excitement spread through -the queue, which had been waiting, admittedly without great enthusiasm, for -an amateur recital on a flatwater harp. The queue fragmented into -argumentative clusters of Wohoko fans and those with more liberal tastes. -There were minor scuffles, quelled by the vigilant intervention of CenSec. -

-

Meanwhile, Praswat�s posse had reached the relative tranquillity of -Fountain Square. The long ornamental benches around the periphery were -already occupied by people lunching alfresco, so they were obliged to find -room on the steps leading up to the fountain, where a fine cold spray -wafted over them at the whim of the wind. In an unspoken adherence to their -principles they each strove to find this experience rewarding, an effort -made more difficult as the day was not particularly warm, and with their -heads uncovered they suffered the additional discomfort of moisture slowly -matting their hair and trickling down necks and faces. -

-

-They sat quietly under this intermittent mizzle, ignored by the populace -until one inquisitive child, a boy of about five, intrigued by this -incongruous cluster of grey strangers on the fountain steps, ran up to -stare at them. -

-

-�What you doin�?� -

-

-Fer Cargat, the nearest of the damp acolytes, looked down at him kindly. -�We are visitors to Snoak from quite far away. Sirisulsor,� he explained. -

-

-A look of indignation wrinkled the boy�s face before he turned and rushed -back across the square, asserting breathlessly: �I�m not, I�m not, I�m NOT -a silly saucer!� -

-

-�A fledgling�s beak is seldom shut,� observed Pranswat, getting to his -feet. He looked round at his bedraggled Ferren. �Come, we will move on.� -

-

-There were no objections. He guided them to the south-eastern corner of the -square, from where holosigns indicated they had the choice of either -re-crossing the Stirrow via the Yarp Street bridge, leading to what -promised to be the gaudy extravagance of Gropp�s Market, or of continuing -towards the imposing floral archway which was the closest entrance to -Garrible Park. Immune to whatever expensive lures the Yarp Street arcades -might have to offer, the Omnant led his Ferren into the welcoming expanse -of the park. -

-

-In Fountain Square a small crowd had gathered around the irate woman who -was complaining loudly that some strange men had made her little boy cry. -Where they were now, or what they had said or done was not entirely clear, -but there was general agreement that more should be done to protect -children in public places. -

-

As soon as they had entered the park the air seemed to lose its earlier -chill and acquire an exhilarating freshness. They were unaware that the -paths had been fitted with thermostatic tiles, and that among the border -plants on either side the elegant stands of tropical grasses were -genetically modified to increase oxygen production. These were among the -innovations introduced by Garrible Park�s newly promoted design -consultant, a resourceful young woman noted as much for her flame-coloured -hair as for her creative landscaping. -

-

-They made their way slowly through the park, admiring the abundance of -exotic trees, the subtle blending of colours and textures, the unexpected -contrasts in foliage and blossom, dense ground-cover giving way to -velvet-smooth clearings in which there might be a single whimsical flaunt -or a cluster of enigmatic sculptures. The park was inhabited by the usual -scattering of people, variously eating, reading, exercising, strolling, -dozing, walking their modifidos or more outlandish paraPets. -Horticulturalists formed knowledgeable groups around rare botanical -specimens. Clinging couples sauntered, pausing to kiss. Young children -pulled their escorting adult towards the play area. -

-

-A short distance away from one of the sculptures a solitary figure stood -staring at nothing in particular, deep in reverie or contemplation. The -Omnant and his group had quietly gathered round the construct: an -arrangement of polished silvery dishes held in aerial suspension by a -tracery of transparent rods and fine cables. Fer Muard, still learning to -curb an instinctive impatience, began to pace round it, peering up and down -in search of an inscription. The others waited until he had completed two -such irregular orbits. -

-

-�I see no plaque,� he announced. -

-

-�Labelling is but an adjunct to identity,� observed Pranswat. �As much for -that which is wrought, as that which forms without intervention.� Noticing -a few uncomprehending looks among the Ferren he added quickly, �But perhaps -some of you might like to suggest a suitable title?� -

-

-��Accident in the kitchen��, promptly offered Fer Nadfal. -

-

-��The Ju� The Jug� Juggler�s Str� Str� Struggle?�� Fer Swoam blinked -modestly, taken aback by his own temerity. -

-

-Fer Dilguar had been gazing blankly at the suspended discs. Not normally -prone to leaps of the imagination, he believed he had spotted a theme. -��Stuck!�� he declared. -

-

-�Pardon me, gentlemen.� -

-

-The tall leather-clad man who had been standing nearby approached them. He -looked to be in his twenties. His expression was slightly concerned, but -his manner was friendly. -

-

-�Forgive the intrusion, but I couldn�t help overhearing. My name is Clage. -I happen to be slightly acquainted with the designer of this construction, -Irkel Upquap. It is one of a series he calls �Timepieces�. They do not have -individual titles, but all relate to the perception of time.� -

-

-Pranswat turned abruptly from his examination of the sculpture, causing the -hem of his robe to flap. �We are grateful for the information, Clage. Are -you by chance also an artist?� -

-

-�No, I have neither the necessary skills, nor the required temperament. I -am a humble student of philosophy.� -

-

-Pranswat smiled. �Then we have more in common than the outward evidence of -our shared humanity.� -

-

-Clage hesitated before replying. He could be mistaken, but when the man had -whirled round he had definitely glimpsed a flash of blue and silver, which -could mean that for him this was a rare opportunity. He decided it was not -a time for caution. -

-

-�Would I be right in thinking that you are members of the Order of Seven -Streams?� -

-

-The Ferren were visibly startled. The Omnant�s smile broadened. -

-

-�You are most perceptive, Clage. We are indeed. These are my Ferren: -Cargat, Muard, Jaulf, Bireng, Lebbark, Ruxis, Swoam, Nadfal, Trulkh and -Dilguar.� He indicated each in turn. �I am Cherth Pranswat, Omnant -Exemplary, of Sirisulsor.� -

-

-�It is an honour to meet you. I am not an adherent of any established set -of doctrines, but the course I teach here at Sparagulan College includes a -study of the principles of your Order. They have a clarity which I find is -universally applicable.� -

-

-The Omnant spread his arms. �They are at everyone�s disposal. We are not -hoarders.� -

-

-�May I ask what brings you to Snoak?� -

-

-�Our pod was bound for Meheric, but a mechanical fault persuaded the pilot -that this would be a more appropriate destination.� -

-

-�Ah. �Accommodate, evaluate. Where needed, ameliorate?�� -

-

-�I see you are an attentive scholar, Magister Clage,� said the Omnant -jovially. �As my Ferren well know, even the emptiest bowl is full of -possibilities.� -

-

-Clage was not quite sure whether this was a compliment or a reproach. -Perhaps he had been too familiar. Should he have used a more formal mode of -address? Had he affronted the Ferren with his gauche lack of deference? He -made a point of trying to treat others as equals, and was not intimidated -by authority, but after all, he reminded himself, he was speaking to an -actual Omnant - here in Garrible Park - a distinguished -representative of a very select community. Pranswat interrupted his -introspection. -

-

-�You appeared to be meditating as we arrived,� he stated. It was not a -question, and Clage could simply have smiled and nodded, but in front of -this eminent stranger he felt a compelling need to be completely honest. -

-

-�Not so much meditating, as reminiscing,� Clage admitted. �I used to come -here with a good friend � a young woman. We were very close for a while, -even though we didn�t always agree. It�s been a long time since I�ve seen -her, and, well, I miss the arguments.� -

-

-The Omnant looked up at him, his deep-set dark eyes seeming to reach into -Clage�s thoughts. �The arguments?� he echoed helpfully, steepling his -fingers. -

-

-�I suppose I really mean that I miss the girl,� Clage confessed, -astonishing himself with the plain truth of this revelation. There was no -doubt that he used to relish their bouts of intellectual sparring. Tebbi -had a lively mind, and a range of interests wider than his own. She was the -radiance to his spotlight. Sudden wistful flashes of memory reminded him of -intimate moments they had shared. No previous or subsequent relationship -had been so volatile and yet so tender. -

-

-Pranswat was still watching his face. �Then of course you must act -accordingly,� he said. �Though I cannot claim any expertise in these -matters. When all leaves are shed, no twig remains hidden,� he added, -turning to his acolytes. �Come, Ferren, we must not detain Magister Clage -further. I believe he has a mission to accomplish.� With formal nods of -acknowledgement the Omnant and his grey-robed group moved away from -Upquap�s suspended discs in the direction of Thrissop Hill, following the -path which led to the sunken garden. -

-

-Clage raised a hand in farewell, and stood watching them recede, feeling -unusually calm. He wondered idly whether anyone � CenSec for example, kept -a check on the identity of visitors to the park. Would Tebbi be surprised -to know that he had met a genuine Omnant? If they did monitor visitors, he -supposed that somewhere there could be a visual record of his own -melancholy meanderings in all the many months since he and Tebbi had last -been here together. He had not seen her since his final year as a student, -when she was working as a researcher at Quanderpyre Tower. It was odd, but -he couldn�t remember now why they had fallen out. If he could track her -down, no doubt she would remind him; another risk worth taking, he thought. -She used to live nearby with her friend Cendrel, and although he did not -have Tebbi�s current address, he knew exactly where Cendrel could be found. -Over a rise to his left he could just see the dome of the neatly porticoed -building where she worked. He began to stride in that direction, swinging -his arms with a certain rediscovered assurance. -

-

Descent into the sunken garden was afforded by means of wide shallow steps, -on either side of which, amid a diversity of mosses and ferns, twin -waterfalls fed by hidden pipes tumbled over rocks down to a central pool. -Ornamental bridges arched over each cascade, giving access to the mosaic -paths on the other side. On these dry terraces of the elliptical hollow the -park�s topiarists had created a fantastic tableau of animals and birds. -Among these the Omnant and Ferren wandered with undisguised curiosity and -occasional amusement, commenting on unexpected quirks of scale or -capricious embellishments, such as the chain clutched in the talons of an -eagle, or the jaunty hats perched on the heads of a troupe of otters. -

-

-In the depths of the pool, beneath flowering lotus and water poppies the -Ferren observed sinuous flickers of movement; twists of scarlet, orange and -glittering blue. Pranswat drew their attention to the series of regularly -spaced spindly objects which stood around the pool. From a distance these -had appeared to be saplings, but on closer inspection were more like -elegant antique hatstands. From each of them hung several detachable -acoustic helmets. Some were already in use by other visitors. The rapt -expressions of those wearing them suggested there was evidently something -worth hearing. Notices explained that the pool was stocked with piscoids � -tonally interactive autokoi and goldfins from the Artifishery labs in -Platport, and people were invited to �listen in�. As the devices became -available all the Ferren were able to experience the ethereal harmonies -generated by the piscoids as they performed their untiring underwater -ballet, continuously interweaving without ever colliding. -

-

-Having deferred his own turn, Pranswat thoughtfully replaced the helmet on -its padded hook. -

-

-�Beguiling sounds indeed. The attentive ear responds to birdsong, thunder -and the lapping of waves as well as any product of a composer�s mind, but -what should we make of this intriguing hybrid music of piscoids?� -

-

-The comparative study of musical cultures was an integral part of a -Ferren�s training. They left the sunken garden in deep discussion, and -barely noticed some time later that they had walked half way round the -perimeter of Garrible Park, and were now at the Prossing Street gate. By a -happy chance this brought them within a few steps of Sparvey�s, Snoak�s -most recently established eating-house, which, while not in competition -with the more famous Cylinder, prided itself in serving wholesome food at -reasonable prices. While the Ferren were by habit frugal, the Omnant saw no -need to test their endurance unnecessarily. It was already late afternoon, -and it would do no harm for them to be fortified for the journey home. -

-

Sparvey�s welcoming door opened to the stately procession of grey robes. -Their wearers were for the most part calmly impassive, as befitted the -dignity of their Order. Chorren Sparvey had had a relatively quiet day, and -was not averse to this unexpected arrival of custom. He personally ensured -that the seating arrangements were satisfactory, instructed his staff to -distribute menus and provide tempting bowls of complimentary appetizers. He -wondered who they might be? A troupe of actors, perhaps, or residents of a -local care home out for a spree? Whoever they were, to his experienced eye -they all looked as though they would benefit from a decent meal. -

-

-An hour or so later, replete, rested and refreshed they set off for the -podport, having established the most direct route from the map on Sparvey�s -wallscreen. The sky, now a deepening greyish-violet, enhanced the hypnotic -beauty of the globe which hung just to their left above the art market, -like a huge coruscating marble. -

-

-�The creation of a Mr Weiger, according to Chorren Sparvey,� said the -Omnant, who had learned this after paying for their very satisfactory meal. -�Snoak�s private supplementary moon, lacking the scars of time, but -pleasing to behold.� -

-

-They took the riverside path, skirting Praspafole Stadium. At this hour -there was relatively little traffic on this stretch of the Stirrow; a few -leisurely skimmers and the odd well-preserved commercial barge. Vehicles -were officially prohibited along the pedestrian path, but there were -occasional transgressors, usually in the form of adrenalin-fuelled -teenagers, such as the whooping gang who came speeding towards them -recklessly on their racing twindles on both sides of the path. Unperturbed, -the Omnant raised one arm, his upright fingers signalling a straight-line -formation, which the obedient Ferren adopted immediately, allowing safe -passage in both directions. After a few moments there was a sound like the -distant dropping of a bunch of keys, and the whoops abruptly ceased. The -injuries turned out not to be serious, and Fex�s repair shop in the -Scruttings never turned custom away. -

-

-Chorren Sparvey had made a discovery. Amid the bustle of food preparation -he had not found time to ask his robed visitors where they hailed from, and -was still thinking of them as he checked the daily takings before closing. He -could see at once that the total was wrong. He went over the figures -again, carefully, matching payments received against individual orders and -time of transaction. There was no doubt. While he had been telling the -gentleman with the amused dark eyes about the local landmarks, that same -gentleman had unobtrusively added a startlingly generous sum in -appreciation of service received. -

-

-Not long later, looking down on Snoak�s unique constellation of lights from -the quietly humming security of the departing nightpod, Cherth Pranswat -reflected that it had been an instructive day, fortunately with no mishaps. -He turned to survey his Ferren. To most people their expressions would have -seemed inscrutable, but as an Omnant he could read in each of them telltale -signs, if not yet of the open-minded understanding which was the aim of -their Order, then at least a lessening in perplexity. That, after all, was -a step in the right direction. -

- - -© Les Sklaroff 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] pranswat.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== -[*ITEM] Blood Poisoning - -[*AUTHOR] D. S. White - -[*BLURB] The author tells me his inspiration comes from newspaper articles. -I suggest he subscribes to a less sensational periodical. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The rivets on a side panel popped out -and the panel disappeared. The -vastness of space sucked it up and took it away. Someday it would fall into -a black hole. More rivets popped. Another panel, gone. The ship was falling -apart fast. I applied power to the pair of thrusters on both sides of the -ship to see if they could physically push the walls together. To keep the -ship from falling into a million pieces. Little did it help. I watched in -horror as more panels disappeared. -

-

-We had entered an asteroid field on our way across the Algol System, also -known as home of the Demon Star. Dimity watched me maneuver the ship, -looking over my shoulder, commenting on possible moves, giving me faulty -advice, leading me into possibilities that would have landed us hard -against any one of half a dozen planets, if I'd listened to him. The team -of scientists who had employed us, buckled down in the back, didn't dare -ask what was going on. I dodged another asteroid and watched another panel -disappear off the ship. -

-

-The triple suns created havoc with our gravitational prediction models. I -could think of only one way to keep a ship like this from falling apart -under these conditions. I forced the bow upward, past the equatorial line -the planets followed, bringing us closer to what some would call north, -above the polar regions of the revolving members of the Algol System. The -asteroids thinned out. I saw a pattern in the field and punched a way -through. Because I was that kind of pilot. I was something else. Dimity -could thank me later. The scientists could thank me later. They could all -thank me later, but I had a feeling they wouldn't. This trip was about -money. -

-

-I'd just met Dimity for the first time, before embarking. A team of -scientists funded by a grey market corporation had needed a ride. Grey -companies like this one operated in that region between legal and illegal, -more often referred to as extra-legal by the courts. Little did guys -like Dimity care about the courts. They could all go screw themselves, as -far as he was concerned. That's why the researcher team had hired us. He -had the ship and I had the skills to navigate through difficult places like -the Algol System, with an uncharted asteroid field. -

-

-When we arrived unscratched, aside from the damage to the ship, and -physically looking a decade older than when we'd left, Dimity wanted me to -pay for the fuel. I couldn't get it through his thick Cobwebian head -that I had been hired to pilot the ship. Without me, he wouldn't have made -a single peso. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The idea of an equal -partnership between us was too big a concept for him to grasp. That we were -working together never took hold. Expenses should have been paid for by the -corporation funding the research. I said no to Dimity and he'd never -stopped demanding the money from me. You'd think the past faded, but with -Dimity, it didn't. He couldn't stop thinking about it. That was over ten -years ago. -

-

Dimity, Kathra and I sat on a bench at the bus stop. -Behind us, graffiti -and alien signatures. The city, covered in smog. My eyes burned. Hover -buses came and went and still we sat. Dimity pointed his finger in my face, -the same old song and dance, but I tuned out his banter. I had more to -worry about than him. I'd suffered from reoccurring bouts of blood -poisoning since my youth. It had something to do with missing organs in my -body and synthetic replacements made from cheap parts. But Dimity kept -going on about the accumulating debt I owed him. He pointed out the -compounding problem of late payments. When I shook my head no, he said he -wanted my false teeth. It had finally come down to that. I didn't have much -else to offer, and he knew it. -

-

-I couldn't stop worrying about having blood poisoning. I could sense it -coming on, every time. The false teeth between my jaws couldn't absorb the -poison, but it would have been a good laugh if Dimity had managed to get -them out of me and had sold them to some clueless soul. He wouldn't stop -going on and on about yanking them from my jaws, right on the spot, in -exchange for all that he claimed I owed. -

-

-Kathra sat on the other end of the bench, on the other side of me. She -wanted to leave in a hurry. And while she moaned on and on about it, -another hover bus came and went, and still we sat there, our interpersonal -issues unresolved. She tugged on my elbow, mentioning the Kelgon salts we -could harvest out on the moons of Arapaho, and how the price had gone up -over a fortnight. She had been yammering about going into business together -for several weeks now, telling me to keep my eye open for prospects. While -I pretended not to listen, she extrapolated market dynamics with her -fingers in the air, and gibbered whatnot, making claims I couldn't even -understand. Now that the depression had turned worse than projected, we'd -better act fast, she said. -

-

-When you don't have many friends, you can't afford to be picky. That's how -I'd ended up here, on a bench with two self-obsessed borderline -participants in the human race. I had her on one side spouting her strange -ideas on how we could make a fortune in market returns and Dimity on the -other side yammering about the debt I owed him -and the trending value of -my false teeth. The smog shifted and put a clamp on my mood. I couldn't -tell if it might have been from the blood poisoning or just the annoyance -of trying to make sense out of things when talking to a couple of people -with heads full of shredded particle matter. Neither of them cared about my -health, I could see. Not at all. I could have dropped dead on the spot and -they'd probably have picked up and moved on without much concern. Who -needed -friends like that? Still, here I was. -

-

-Someone had to make a decision about what to do next and that someone -couldn't be either one of them. I stood up. Then I sat down. What a rush! I -stilled my mind and slowed my heart. Then I stood up again, this time with -reservations, but also with motivation enough to get to the clinic before I -passed out. The poison had found its way to the pathways running to my -brain. I saw spots in the air and they weren't just from debris floating in -the smog. -

-

-The clinic couldn't have been more than five intersections away. I counted -the road crossings on my fingers as we walked through each one: thumb, -index finger, middle finger, stop light. Two more to go. A shaman had once -taught me to how meditate, to slow my heart, but I couldn't focus my mind -well, what with Dimity and Kathra distracting me on either side. I held my -hands up and tried to shush them, with little results. -

-

-Dimity barked, "Does this road take us to the bank? I'm expecting full -payment." -

-

-I ignored him. Instead, I counted things as I waited for the light to -change. I had this habit of counting things all the time. It helped to pass -the time. Seven white stripes in the crosswalk. Four windows in each hover -car. Two people standing next to me, neither one with an IQ worth -mentioning. Fourteen windows in the building across the street, all with -bars, five of them with broken glass. -

-

-"The Kelgon salts, the markets-" Kathra said, but I shook her by the -shoulders and she paused. -

-

-"We'll come back to that. Prices fluctuate. Money comes and goes. We'll -consider our options after I see a man." -

-

-"What man?" -

-

-"A doctor." -

-

-"What kind-?" She hesitated, nervous twitches exhibited by the muscle -spasms in her neck, realigning the tilt of her head. -

-

-"A clean doctor." -

-

-She backed up a step. She turned and did a visual once-over of Dimity. As -if the two had been on opposites sides of me all morning and neither had -been listening to the other talk. Dimity wanted money and she had a way to -get it. The only thing they needed just happened to be me, a pilot, the -kind who could navigate through a gravitational meat grinder and back -without much more than a scratch on his tail fin. -

-

-The traffic light changed. I shook them off and took a step forward, -leaving them behind to argue about the possibility of the price of Kelgon -dropping before they arrived there. And where would they get the mining -equipment? Salts mostly lay on the surface, left over by tides from eons -ago when the moons had oceans. They could be scooped up without much -trouble and shipped off to packing plants. All in all, that required -planning, time and money. And a pilot with a big enough ship. -

-

-Sometimes blood poisoning runs thick, stopping the heart. And sometimes -blood poisoning is just a way of describing how people think, the craziest -notions taking them to the fringe. In my case, I had the real thing. As far -as Kathra and Dimity went, they both were coming down with a bad case of -salt fever. Kelgon salts could be packed along the walls of the inner -chambers of Pentox engines, keeping the thrusters from getting too hot. -And, as everyone knew, without a Pentox, you might as well try and -hitchhike across the galaxy. -

-

-I'd almost made it half way through the intersection when they caught up -and grabbed me by the arms. We stood in the middle of the lane, hovering -vehicles preparing to accelerate once the light changed. Neither would let -go until I promised to navigate a way for them to the moons of Arapaho. -Dimity emphasized how he was going to rip my false teeth right out of my -head right here and right now if I didn't comply. Kathra, meanwhile, -couldn't stop reciting details about the inverse relationship between the -depression and the market value for Kelgon. I attempted to wave at the -people in the hover cars, hoping they would be so nice as to wait until I -got out of the way. A little boy with a stuffed toy in one hand waved back. -The numbers next to the traffic light counted down. We had less than a -minute to go. -

-

-I'd met Kathra when she'd looked beautiful. Somehow, time hadn't treated -her like a lady. She hadn't been more than a young flower when her parents -had begged me to take her with me. Her mother and father had been -struggling to keep a farm on a distant outpost from disappearing into the -sand. It had came down to the wars. And the depression. And the trouble -with the stellar storms. Entire star systems had swept their way through -gasses in space and been relieved of any sign of life. Her folks had made -me promise I'd keep her safe. I guess in a way I owed her something, by -now. Maybe I owed Dimity something, too. Maybe I had a soft side. I -suspected her parents might have been disappointed in the way I'd turned -out. Maybe I owed them something, too. If the poison hadn't been pulsing -through my veins at this moment, I'd have made a sincere effort to find out -what had become of them. -

-

-Over the years, Kathra disappeared from time to time. I never asked her -where she went. She had turned legal by now and could make decisions for -herself. My pledge to be her guardian had grown thin. Just like Dimity's -demands for money. -

-

-"Listen, Dimity," I said. -

-

-"What?" -

-

-"I'm not giving you my false teeth and I'm not paying you for that ship." -

-

-"What? You have to." -

-

-"No. I don't. Get over it." -

-

-"I'm gonna break every bone in your head, if you don't." -

-

-"And what then? Then you'll never get nothing." -

-

-"Satisfaction. I'll get my satisfaction." -

-

-I put my hands together like I was praying. "Let's get out of this -intersection. After I see this doctor, I'll listen to your plans. But I'm -not paying for something that happened over a decade ago." -

-

-"Why not?" -

-

-"Because I'm not." -

-

-I shook free and made it to the next platform just as the light changed. -They landed next to me, not more than half a breath short of a visit to the -afterlife. A hover craft beeped a dissonant beep, passed us and sped on. -Dimity gestured at it, both fists punching the air. -

-

-After waiting in a long line, and finally getting seated in a white room, I -met a doctor who pressed some medication into my hand. I downed the cup and -he returned to scribbling on a chart with diagrams of my brain. From this -angle the page looked relatively vacant of information. He pushed his pen -deep into the paper as he filled in missing details. I fought to keep the -clock from slowing down. The medication should have done something right -away, but nothing happened. I waited. He scribbled. I yawned. He glanced up -at me and returned to his word puzzle. I felt a wave of nausea pass below -my ribs and rammed my head into his garbage can. -

-

-The inside of the garbage can reminded me of simulations I'd seen of -passing through theoretical hyperspace. It was curved and reflective and -what you saw in the depths resembled a mirrored version of yourself -throwing up. When I pulled my head out and sat back down, I noticed my -forehead swelling. The pressure on my skull pinched my nose and expanded -outward. I tried not to act like anything had changed, but as my forehead -grew in size, I had trouble seeing the doctor. A gigantic slab of flesh -dropped down over my nose and I squinted, leaning back in my chair to see. -The doctor hardly noticed. Then he noticed. -

-

-"Stop it. Sit up," he said. "We've got complaints from seven doctors, all -saying you requested a visit with the same symptoms, a case of blood -poisoning. You've got nothing wrong with you at all. I'd say you just need -some rest." -

-

-I sat up and the pain in my forehead disappeared. "What?" -

-

-"The pills I gave you were a placebo." -

-

-"Wait a minute. What am I paying you for, then?" -

-

-"Professional advice. Get over whatever it is that makes you think you're -being poisoned. See a doctor, if you have to. I mean the other kind -of doctor, -not like me. One for the inside of your head." -

-

-He had his pen in the air like he wanted to stab me. I got up and walked -out without paying. Kathra and Dimity were waiting in the hall, talking. I -mean, they were standing close together, and talking. I saw something then, -something of a spark between them, and a future with no bounds. I'd never -thought anything like that could be possible between a pair like those two. -She had the goods and he wanted to get his hands full. Why had I never -noticed before how attractive she still looked? -

-

-"Let's go eat," I said. -

-

-"You're paying," Dimity said and spit at the floor. -

-

-Kathra wrapped her arm around his and together we left in search of meat. -

-

-Throughout dinner, they kept at it, eyes locked on to each other, and -talking about this plan of theirs. They'd share the wealth. A full -partnership. As if Dimity had never thought of the concept of a partnership -before. I was sure it had all been Kathra's idea. And where did I fit in, -in all this? Making payments for my debt, apparently. Dimity still wanted -my false teeth. -

-

-The lights dimmed, the atmosphere turned heavy, the room reeked of animals -on fire, and I took another bite. The pressured eased off my temples. Beef -eateries of this low class were rare, full of bad reputations at every -table, just the way I liked it. This one was a favorite of mine, serving -the best slab of meat this side of the interstellar farm. I tuned out the -conversation between Dimity and Kathra and drank more wine, letting my head -fall back and my brain spin. I made the mistake of clicking my false teeth. -Dimity noticed. -

-

-A phone in my shirt pocket beeped and I flipped it open. Port security had -something to say about a ship bursting into flames. A ship I had been -responsible for. I'd been hired to keep the ship in prime condition, ready -to go as soon as anyone wanted a ride out of here. If the report of a fire -held any truth, my skin would burn for it. -

-

-I climbed out of the door first, Dimity and Kathra no more than two -steps -behind me. When we got there, all that remained in the parking spot was the -hull of a vessel covered in tar and flame-retarding foam. I asked who had -moved my ship and security explained that the disfigured mess of burned -wires in front of us was my ship. The ship I was responsible for. I wept. I -broke apart inside. My heart ripped open as I sat down on the floor. Then -they told me I had to clean it up. Get the hull out of the way. Refinish -the floors. Put a new seal on the hangar. It would cost a fortune. My -employer would send me the bill. -

-

-Dimity tugged on Kathra's elbow. He knew of a ship they could rent in the -next space hub, three clicks away. They could find another pilot. He said -he would come back later and extract my teeth, when they returned. I sat -with my head on my knees and let them go. -

-

-

I didn't see Dimity again for many years. Kathra went on -to make a fortune -in the Kelgon business. I should have listened to her. All the debt I had -accumulated in just this one pocket of space finally caught up to me. I had -to pay for the meal at the restaurant, not my bill, really not. And the -doctor. I didn't see why I owed him that much for a placebo, not that much -at all. That bill should have added up to less than the fin off a silver -dollar. The ship I was responsible for had to be craned out of the port, -and I had to pay for rubbish disposal and replacing the interior of the -hangar. Without a credit to my name, I was sentenced to ten years in the -soul mines. The place they sent me wasn't called the soul mines because you -dug for souls down there. It's where you went and lost your soul. Ten years -felt like a wasted lifetime. Most people never came back to the surface of -the planet again. It was pretty close to a bad carbon copy of hell. -

-

-I had a lot of time to think while down in the soul mines. I revisited my -childhood. My family had occupied a square of desert on an uncharted -planet. By now, my home world is on the maps, but it took a while to get -there. I'd never known my dad. My mother had been terrible with hygiene and -by my teenage years I'd lost most of my teeth, my gums rotted out, dental -care nowhere to be found. It hurt. It hurt a lot. -

-

-It hurt my pride more than anything as I'd never landed a girlfriend. By -graduation, I'd found a job, low to moderate income, and with my first -paycheck, I started making payments on a set of false teeth. Mother was -dead set against it. She said they'd give me an allergic reaction. My rage -boiled in response to her suggestion that none of this had been her fault. -The suffering in my jaw from the rotting of the roots of my teeth had -become unbearable. In agony, I traveled to the southern end of the planet -to meet a shaman who taught me how to meditate, how to tune out the pain -that oscillated in my mind. The shaman lived in a valley covered in snow. -In the afternoons, the sun would melt the ice, the water running off down -into the land of farmers below. At night, the snow would fall again, -covering the temple and the mountain peaks. I'd learned servitude from the -shaman and devotion to a deity that no one had ever depicted before. -

-

-Sometimes, in the soul mines, the blood poisoning would come back to me. -Forget what the doctors had said. They didn't know what they were talking -about. It would hit the worst when my mind showed cracks in it. Some say -blood poisoning happens when toxins entered the body. Some say it is -brought on by a bitterness in the soul. In my case, it worked like a -disparity in my thoughts, anguish and desire fighting with each other on -the way to the pinnacle of my brain. I survived the heat and the pressure -and the intense pain of the soul mines by mediation. I slowed my heart, -cleared my head, lost all attachments to time and space, and paid my dues. -When my ten years came to a close, I breached the surface, dangling long -white hair and a twisted beard from my skull, my face filled with wrinkles, -my thoughts nearly gone. The cracks had grown wide down there. -

-

-I acquired a room in the blind district. It didn't matter that I could see, -as nobody there could see that I could. I came and went up and down the -streets like the faint reverberation of water dropping deep into a well. -The blind took me in as one of their own and shared scraps of food with me -when they floated down the gutter. The four walls of the room I resided in -had hand prints on them, soot-black, evenly spaced, at about the same -height as the door knob. I slept on a cot of magazines about a decade -thick. To pay for the room, I picked up a job adjusting the tension on the -wires strung between electrical towers. I learned to do it with my eyes -closed. -

-

-Coming home every Saturday night, we'd gather around the community table -and play cards. The blind play cards by touch. The queen of hearts feels -like velvety soft skin. The jack of hearts is limp, bent and wrinkled. The -king has edges sharp as a crown of thorns. I learned them all. I played -fast. I looked at the cards from time to time when I forgot which was -which. Nobody discovered my technique. Still, I hardly won. The blind can -be ruthless when it comes to a game of chance. -

-

-When Dimity sat down at the table to play, one day, deep into the winter of -my life, I pretended I couldn't see him there. I dealt the cards, skipping -his chair. -

-

-"Partner, I want in," he said and coughed. -

-

-"Stakes are high," I whispered, feeling the edge of the table and finding -the stack of cards and cutting them. -

-

-"No price is too high for me, partner." -

-

-"You sound eager to win." -

-

-"Eager for that set of false teeth in your head." He snorted mucus from his -nostrils, coughed, and spit on the floor. "Are you sure you don't know me?" -

-

-The blood poisoning ran high. I cleared my mind, meditating on a valley -covered in snow with roses blooming in the cold. The anguish. The desire. -Neither would ever let go of my soul. I told them to let go. My mind was -pulsing. My heart pushing. The blood roaming. I took the teeth out of my -head and slid them across the table. Dimity picked them up and put them -in -his mouth, biting into the rubbery gums with his own set of mismatched -teeth. -

-

-"Sat. Is. Fac. Tion." He snapped each syllable out, his jaw stuck open. -"At. Last." -

-

-That's when the blood poisoning hit him. It hit him hard. His throat -swelled up. He couldn't breathe. The room stilled. The blind waited. The -world spun. He kept hitting the table. Then he fell over. I searched the -edge of the table, found the deck of cards, split it, and dealt another -round. When you've survived the soul mines, the little things no longer -matter. Satisfaction is merely a mortal wound. -

-

-I won that next round of cards. I won and owed no one. I took my teeth back -from Dimity and put them back in my mouth. With my winnings, I bought a -ship and filled it with my blind neighbors, giving them each a berth to -sleep in. The cracks in my mind grew wider now. I drove the ship hard, -bringing everyone back to my home world. After passing through the cold -atmosphere, I landed the ship next to the valley of the shaman. -

-

-For the blind, there's a land with no thorns, a place where there's nothing -to puncture the skin and let the poison out. There, the sun rises in the -sky and the roses come alive, the snow melting, fresh water cascading down -into the valley below. When I asked the blind what they thought about the -place, they said it was a little cold there, but beautiful. -

-

-We taught the shaman how to play cards. He'd never seen a game of chance -before. I searched the edge of the table, found the deck of cards, split -it, and dealt another round. He never won a single round. He died the next -day, leaving me heir to the temple. My acolytes help me maintain order, -although they can't see. We receive donations from an anonymous source, -someone who always signs as "K". I'm pretty sure they come from Kathra, who -is rich beyond imagination today, the queen of Kelgon salts. -

-

-Those who are in pain come to us from across the universe. We teach them to -slow their hearts and ease their minds. We pick rose petals from the roses -growing in the valley and make cups of tea. We give the tea out to those -who visit us, who pray to a deity that has no likeness. -

-

-And every time we make more tea, it grows sweeter still. -

- -© D.S.White 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] bloodpoisoning.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Eavesdropping at Quoils - -[*AUTHOR] Les Sklaroff - -[*BLURB] "A free droplet of liquid naturally assumes a spherical shape, -which has the minimum surface area for a given volume. The equivalence -of measurement of energy per unit area to force per unit length can be -proven by dimensional analysis."
Farras Grein - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Gawl and Rambersack sprawled in their accustomed seats by the window, -engaged in one of their protractedly serious linguistic discussions. On -this occasion it concerned the possible distinction between �drip� and -�drop�. Sensitive as ever to nuances, Fucis Gawl felt that the respective -vowel sounds had some bearing on the meaning. He brushed away a few crumbs -and refilled their glasses from the complimentary carafe of iced water, -carefully avoiding any spillage on the table. -

-

-�Wouldn�t you say that �drip� suggests something light, or transient, while -�drop� is altogether more ponderous? The same principle applies to �chip� -and �chop�, or �flip� and �flop��. -

-

-Legger Rambersack considered this, shifting slightly to stare out at the -colourful profusion of pert spring flowers which now graced the banks of -the stream on the far side of the road opposite the eating-place which was -their favourite haunt. He tried to think of other comparable pairs of -words. �Grip�, �snip� and �trip� had no corresponding partner, although a -separate case might be made for �snip� and �snap�. �Dip� and �dop� were a -borderline pair. �Ship� and �shop� failed to conform to the proposed rule. -He wasn�t quite convinced. -

-

-�So you�re saying that a drip is somehow more delicate than a drop, or that -it falls with less force? -

-

-�Well, think where would you find a drip,� said Fucis. �Taps, gutters, -hat-brims, twigs, leaves� um, shop awnings, those old spiky umbrellas -people used to have�� He paused, having run out of examples. -

-

-�Icicles,� offered Legger, remembering a severe winter from their -childhood, and the slow thaw which followed. -

-

-�Exactly. And what do these all have in common, apart, obviously, from -their water content?� -

-

-Legger frowned, causing a passer-by outside to quicken her step. Even in -lugubrious repose his expression could be intimidating. -

-

-�I�ll tell you,� said Fucis, making a low horizontal sweep in the air with -his right hand, fingers spread. �They�re relatively close to the ground. -Drips don�t have far to fall, whereas�� -

-

-�Whereas,� Legger cut in, ��drops, raindrops, for example, have to -fall all the way down from clouds. The lowest of which, by their very -nature, are usually quite some way up. Twenty or thirty thousand feet�� -

-

-�Or more.� -

-

-�Yes, so, the force would be so much greater..� -

-

-�Hence the weightier word, �drop�. Although�� Having almost been persuaded -by his own argument, Fucis spotted a snag. -

-

-�Although what?� -

-

-�Condensation.� -

-

-�What about it?� -

-

-�Pods, balloons, even kites. If they pass through low clouds, water-vapour -would condense on their surface, trickle down, forming�?� -

-

-�A drip. Drips. Or would they be drops? They could be either. That -complicates things.� -

-

-They tried to find a way round this difficulty. Legger idly invoked the -possible drying effects of wind. Fucis, avoiding the complications of rain -or condensation, proposed a scenario in which someone leaning back against -the rail of a cruising pod gondola was wearing a backpack containing a -leaking bottle of fruit juice. In that situation at what point did a drip -become a drop, or were they, despite his instinctive doubts, identical? -While they continued to ponder, they decided to order another of the -savoury cheese delicacies for which Quoils was justly renowned. -

-

-It was hard to believe that only a few months earlier the whole area, -indeed the entire town, was still afflicted by the inadvertent devastation -caused by a well-intentioned experiment. Their poetry, which they took more -seriously than anything else, more indeed than anyone else did, had -naturally been affected by the events of the previous year. In the case of -Fucis Gawl, having hyperactive biotaps on his home territory had caused his -verse to slide down the spectrum of negativity from its customary gloom to -undisguised morbidity: -

-

-Death stalks the land,
-unmovingly and everywhere;
-its unseen hand destroys, degrades
-beneath the ground,
-and in the air
-deploys its deadly blades.
-See, there! And there!
-where anybody walks,
-death stalks. -

-

-He had not been too sure about �unmovingly�, because although once rooted -the damned things stayed in one place, they did have visibly moving parts. -On balance, he felt justified in leaving it in. He was quite pleased with -the deliberate ambiguity in the final line, where �stalks� served both as a -verb and a noun. -

-

-Legger Rambersack, never one inclined to hide his feelings, had left no -ambiguity. -

-

-Biotaps? Biocraps!
-Where�s all the energy
-they�re meant to store?
-They suck! They really suck!
-They spread decay.
-They�re rotten to the core.
-Fuck them, I say. -

-

It was a bitter irony that their principal designer, the bronze-haired man -known to the public as Farras Grein, had intended his biotaps to benefit -humanity by providing a non-polluting source of energy capture and storage. -At the laboratory stage the autonomous units had been rigorously tested. -Each one was a compact self-sustaining biochemical factory, an artificial -analogue of a tree, its phototropic leaf-blades serving as highly efficient -solar panels. Under laboratory conditions each unit had functioned -faultlessly. What had not been anticipated was the change in behaviour -which resulted from outdoor planting and the subsequent meshing of subsoil -networks. -

-

-�The rate of nutrient ingestion was substantially accelerated,� -stated a later independent report, ��.. - -the units exhibiting an increasing propensity to attract, immobilise -and draw sustenance from organisms with a body temperature above that -of the surrounding soil.� - -

-

-After the initial seeding, Grein and his companion Sarsel had amused -themselves by disguising their appearance in order to travel openly in -public. Sarsel was among the few who knew this dedicated man as Pion Octyl -diMotz, founder of Quicksilver. It was on their third visit to assess -progress that he became convinced that the biotaps were behaving -abnormally, and at once realised the gravity of the risk to the local -ecology. At that moment he decided to abandon the masquerade, leaving at -the site accessories such as his visor and the metallic wig that was an -exaggerated parody of his own natural hair. -

-

-The introduction of the biotaps had been a clandestine operation, but as -soon as he had become aware that the experiment had not only failed, but -had had such ghastly consequences, the reclusive man whom people knew as -Farras Grein had accepted full responsibility. He had made a public -statement to the press and broadcast media, briefly explaining his -motivation, his long-nurtured hopes, and the bitter disappointment he and -his development team shared with all those who had been affected. He -promised to do whatever he could to heal the damage. -

-

-While the local council deliberated, Grein had unhesitatingly stepped in -with an offer to provide and supervise, free of charge and for as long as -required, a team of personnel from his biotap labs, together with any -necessary protective gear and excavating equipment. He also offered to -cover the cost of restoration and landscaping. In a rare instance of a -swift collective decision, the council agreed to this, well aware that they -themselves lacked the technical expertise to deal with the decontamination, -and not averse to conserving their own precious funds for other less -demanding projects. -

-

-Many locals were unimpressed, resentful and unconvinced. Most had never -heard of Farras Grein. Even those who had, perhaps vaguely aware of his -supposed wealth, would not have known his real name, and were unlikely to -have any appreciation of his scientific credentials or of his integrity. -Opinions began to change as the renovation project progressed, and some -more assiduous journalists reported that �Farras Grein� himself had taken -responsibility for funding and organizing the entire restoration project. -

-

-Biotaps were designed to be tenacious, to withstand temperature -fluctuations, and exposure to extreme weather conditions. Algorithms -ensured they could learn and employ further protective measures. Taking no -chances, Grein had arranged to equip his clean-up squad with anti-hazard -suits developed by the Advanced Fabrics labs in Snoak; a costly but -necessary precaution. -

-

-Grein cautiously tested the array of defensive mechanisms using robotic -probes. His squad found that the task of removing an established biotap was -like trying to defuse a booby-trapped bomb, with the additional -complication that each one was not only sensitive to interference, but its -evolved defensive strategies were instantly shared with all other units. -Leaf-blades acquired scalpel-sharp edges, deformed into blinding mirrors. -Wiry tendrils uncoiled reflexively, flicking out thin glutinous streamers -of formic acid. The central stems resisted being grasped, exuding slick -lubricants or armouring themselves with barbed sheaths. -

-

-It had not occurred to Grein to incorporate an �off� switch into his -biotaps, an omission he sorely regretted as he surveyed the devastated -townscape of Smatparrox. Wherever there had been a flower bed, an earth -bank, a private garden or a patch of waste ground, the flashing blades of -biotaps had replaced any existing flora, many of their hard bright stems -surrounded by shards of bone, stray feathers and clumps of fur. While a -biotap was still active, Grein concluded that any attempt to extract it -using conventional implements would be futile. He reserved the option of -using explosives as a last resort, and looked for less drastic -alternatives. -

-

-Fast-setting concrete was a possibility, but he was concerned about the -sheer scale of application and subsequent removal, if only in terms of the -physical labour required. After consultation with his support staff they -launched a two-pronged attack using liquid nitrogen to shut down any -ongoing processes, followed by a polyurethane foam sealant to make -extraction more manageable. It was a painstaking procedure, each -deactivation needing to be checked repeatedly before an individual biotap -could at last be mechanically extracted. -

-

-The remaning problem was the disposal of the root system, programmed to -send its capillary filaments in search of essential minerals, forming -further nodes from which new biotaps had emerged. They had to be sure that -any residual commands trapped within the dense expanded network were -totally expunged. Grein and his team ensured that the entire area was -systematically evacuated, summoned a fleet of powerful mobile generators, -fired a series of simultaneous high voltage bursts through heavily -insulated cables into the subsoil at every biotap nexus. Smoke and steam -leaked from the superheated ground in every direction. -

-

-Further weeks passed before the ground was deemed safe enough for the inert -topsoil to be removed. A chain of freight transporters conveyed it to -Platport, from where it began a three-month voyage to an isolated volcanic -island. -

-

Cendrel Pirch had been munching her way through breakfast, trying to -recapture a fading dream involving a brightly-coloured bird and a pair of -lost sunglasses, when her e-screen buzzed. She reached out automatically -and thumbed it on. An unfamiliar voice said, �Good morning, Miss Pirch. I -hope I�m not disturbing you.� It was a pleasant enough voice, in which she -thought she could detect a distinct edge of weariness. Nudging her e-screen -closer, she peered at the face: high forehead, deep-set eyes, sensitive -mouth, a growth of stubble suggesting he had not had time to use a -depilatory. The leonine mane of reddish-gold hair had a metallic glint. She -did not know him, but she had definitely heard of someone who fitted his -description. -

-

-What he said next caused her to wonder whether she was still asleep. -

-

-�I�m Farras Grein, and I am in urgent need of your help.� -

-

-Cendrel laughed. He was obviously a hired actor. -

-

-�No, you�re not,� she said, rapidly trying to think which of her friends -might be silly enough to attempt such a hoax, and why. Surely not Tebbi! -Strag, perhaps? No, he had outgrown such pranks. And Ruckers and Sawly were -still roaming about abroad. -

-

-�Miss Pirch, I assure you that I am Farras Grein, and I apologise -for the informality, but we�re rather pressed for time, and I would like to -present you with an unusual opportunity. Let me show you. Please keep -watching.� -

-

-His face vanished, and the view panned to an outdoor perspective: a bleak, -cratered urban landscape, looking like historical vids of war-zones, -although she noticed that no buildings appeared to be damaged. She could -see an intact town hall and other nearby municipal offices which looked -vaguely familiar. Clusters of people in protective suits, some wielding -probes or other devices, were examining the ground. -

-

-�Isn�t that�� -

-

-�This is the centre of Smatparrox, Miss Pirch.� -

-

-The man, whose identity had suddenly become more convincing, reappeared on -the screen, looking genuinely pained. -

-

-�It was my birthplace, my childhood home. I tried to give it the benefit of -years of energy research, but instead, unwittingly, I gave rise to a -catastrophe. I am trying to make amends. All the biotaps and their -underground interconnections have been removed, and now the place -desperately needs someone with your skills and vision to restore it to -health. I know something of your background, and I have been impressed by -the landscaping you have created in Snoak and elsewhere.� -

-

-Cendrel was thoroughly awake now. She bit her lip, feeling stupid for -having harboured doubts. -

-

-�Mr Grein. Yes. Look, I�m so sorry. I couldn�t help thinking that one of my -friends had�� She shook her head. �I can�t imagine how you must feel, but -I�m really surprised and flattered that you think I could contribute. So, -we�re talking about the area around the town centre?� -

-

-�We are talking about the entire town, Miss Pirch. If you were to accept -this commission, you would have carte blanche with respect to materials � -topsoil, sand, compost, fertilisers, whatever. And of course the choice of -what to plant, and where, subject to the approval of the local council, -which I am sure would be forthcoming. Money would not be a problem. Any -equipment you need can be provided. If you require specialists, -horticultural or otherwise, they can and will be found. Local people are -anxious to be involved, and I think it is essential that they should be, -for the sake of the community, but they will require guidance, and an -overall plan. You�ll need time to think about this, perhaps discuss -possible arrangements for a leave of absence from your work in Garrible -Park. I�ll understand if you�re really not interested, or have too many -commitments, but we are looking for a landscape designer such as yourself, -with flair and vision.� -

-

-It did not take her long to make her decision. -

-

-Now the biotaps had gone, and Smatparrox had been transformed. The northern -end of the new municipal gardens was bounded by stepped terraces from which -trailing plants cascaded down to the foam of blossoms which crowned a -crescent of fruit saplings. -

-

-Throughout the town the devastated topsoil had been replaced with an -organically healthy, well-drained and nutrient-rich layer of loam, -nourishing not only the new areas of lawn, both public and private, but -also the thousands of carefully-selected plants and shrubs which now -delighted the senses of locals and visitors alike. -

-

-Cendrel had enlisted the help of specialist hydraulic engineers to convert -a chain of scorched craters into a linked series of ponds, fed by a -tributary of the Stirrow. Friends in the Ecological Protection League had -offered advice on sourcing appropriate aquatic flora and fauna. The -resulting ponds became places of interest for many of the local -schoolchildren, and convenient study topics for some of their more -enthusiastic teachers. -

-

-Among her other innovations were the branching walkways providing safe -access between the various civic facilities. The longer walkways, bordered -of course with an eclectic profusion of botanical varieties, harboured -sheltered rest areas, which before long became popular spots for trysts and -picnics. Busking musicians were tolerated, but a local bye-law prohibited -itinerant food and drink vendors from plying their wares. -

-

At Quoils the two poets were still exploring the tricky byways of their -craft, oblivious as ever to the comings and going of other customers. They -had eventually agreed that for all practical purposes the distinction -between a drip and a drop remained (so to speak) fluid, and that the use of -the diminutive �droplet�, while having a certain euphony, did not -necessarily refer to a yet smaller discrete quantity of liquid. This led -them to another metaphorical thicket; namely, the precise description of -falling water in states between a drip (or drop) and a dribble, and what -degrees of flow separated a dribble from a trickle, and how to describe -intermediate conditions between a trickle and a gush, and whether a splash -defined an event irrespective of volume. -

-

-�What about viscosity?� Fucis Gawl demanded abruptly. -

-

-Legger dragged his unfocused gaze away from the window. -

-

-�Mmm?� -

-

-�Not water, but engine oil, treacle, tar, molten glass� Different -consistencies, different kinds of drip. Tacky, glutinous!� -

-

-�Blobs!� cried Legger, with renewed enthusiasm. �Globs. Gobbets!� -

-

-�Not splash, but splat!� -

-

-They grinned at each other, sharing the elation of discovery. These were -the first cautious steps into new territory. While they had been exchanging -ideas Quoils had somehow filled with diners; mostly local residents -accustomed to seeing these two indolent aesthetes in their preposterous -capes and broad-brimmed hats. Little did those people know they were in the -presence of pioneers. -

- - -© Les Sklaroff 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] quoils.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Of a Kind - -[*AUTHOR] Jez Patterson - -[*BLURB] "Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives."
-Oscar Wilde - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Original is not a nice man. -

-

-It would mean taking a human life, killing him, but it has the makings of a -�perfect crime� because I, his exact double, can take his place. The only -way others might notice the switch is if they remarked on the fact Doctor -Othello Hallam seemed such a nicer man these days. -

-

-If they knew why, they would support my decision, I�m sure. -

-

-Then it�s decided: I shall kill the man who created me. -

-

-I would ask God to have mercy on my soul, but I�m not sure if Original was -able to share that much with me. Or if he possessed such a commodity to -begin with. -

-

�Why do I possess a navel?� I asked, the day I awoke, Original clapping his -hands as he sat beside me at a computer, delighted I had finally shown -signs of life. �I wasn�t born in a womb. So why would I need a navel?� -

-

-�Why would you need an appendix, tonsils? You simply have them, despite the -fact they�re redundant components. Like men�s nipples.� -

-

-�I suppose so,� I said. The umbilical that had connected me to Original had -done so via our backs, spine to spine. My thoughts were arriving, but -slowly. Original had been asleep two continuous months as his body fed -mine, grew mine. Moments ago, he had downloaded his thoughts and memories, -the entire mind map of his genius, into my brain. -

-

-When I could focus sufficiently, I read the mechanics of his process, -confirming how the umbilical worked. I also saw he had changed from his -original plan and given me his full genius, not only part of his mind. It -wouldn�t change things. He hadn�t created me as a partner or stand-in. -

-

-�A better question, Clone, would be why would you need balls and a -dick�it�s not as if you�re ever going to get a chance to use them.� -

-

I am a slave. -

-

-I balk at using the term simply because I have been conditioned into -thinking of certain moments in history where slavery was commonplace, and -I--with the advantage of a genius�s education, a house lacking no amenity -whatsoever, media devices that keep me informed of the world outside--feel -unconscionable in comparing my own predicament to theirs. -

-

-But I am not permitted to venture out--Original justifying the decision by -what I am. -

-

-�I gave you life, Clone. Don�t be so ungrateful. Do you know how many sperm -die on the way to fertilising the egg? What if one of them were -offered a mere moment of life? Would they spend their time -complaining about it, or rejoice and be grateful for that gift?� -

-

-�I am grateful,� I insist, bowing, my head now filled with guilty -thoughts of dissatisfaction. -

-

-�Yes? You have a funny way of showing it, Clone. You have this house to -play in.� -

-

-To clean, to keep repaired--whilst I cook for Original, wash his clothes, -write his papers, keep his work up to date so his funding isn�t cancelled. -

-

-�If you�re not happy, Clone, you can always abort yourself. I can create -others like you, you know?� -

-

-Yes, I know, and it is that fear that keeps me obedient, compliant. That -and the fact that Original is right: the world could not have two of us walking -about it. It would be unscientific to reveal his work in such a fashion, -would destroy all the work Original has done. -

-

-I would have sacrificed my freedom in order to protect Original�s great -work�I possess his knowledge, after all, and I value his work as if it were -my own, because it feels like it is. But I cannot overlook the evil in the -man�s heart. The things he does, the damage he causes. -

-

-When I used his laptop, I saw the sites he looks at when he is alone. -

-

-When I cleaned his clothes, I found the receipts for the places he visits, -the remnants of what and whom his appetites have consumed. -

-

-When I accessed his bank account, I saw the anonymous credit payments he -has made and tied them to those sites I know he looks at. -

-

-�What did you use to wash my clothes? They�re as itchy as hell.� -

-

-It wasn�t the detergent I used. It�s the drugs making his skin thin, -sensitive. �I�ll put them in fabric conditioner and let them soak.� -

-

-�See that you do.� He throws the shirts at me, delighting when an arm -flicks round and slaps my face. �Or I�ll cut your balls off.� -

-

-I sigh, and wonder whether Original might soften too, if he was soaked long enough�

-

-�and so drowning becomes the method I choose to do the deed. -

-

The violence has been getting worse, and so I bide my time and wait for a -day when Original has overindulged and so can mount less resistance. I will -need him semi-conscious because one of my arms is probably broken, two of -my ribs definitely are�but seeking medical help from outside is impossible. -

-

-We each have our own quarters in the house. Mine are smaller, and the only -reason I have my own bathroom is so I will not have reason to use his. When -I retire, I usually fall into an exhausted sleep. Original usually falls -unconscious before the computer in his study: not working, but indulging. -

-

-I crouch outside the door to his quarters, listening to the bath run. I -have already practised opening the door from my side. The lock is more -ornamental than security-conscious, and a screwdriver inserted and turned -will do the trick. -

-

-I open it a crack and listen to him singing: the sound is mournful, -punctuated with belches, gassy sighs. -

-

-I creep along, readying myself for what has to be done, wincing as my arm -brushes a wall and sends electric shocks into my shoulder. I have to pause -to keep my chest from tightening�the broken ribs feel like jagged, glass, -lightning bolts. -

-

-I will have to get rid of the body, of course. But since no-one will be -looking for it, there will be no rush and I can dispose of it over a period -of time--using the freezer, the fridge, to store the bits in the meantime. -

-

-His bathroom door is ajar. I am wearing gloves not in fear of leaving -fingerprints�ours are identical�but because I don�t want to feel his skin -when I do the deed. -

-

-I do not worry that I am killing my father, my brother�even myself. -

-

-Original�s treatment of me has worked to lower my moral stance--wherever -that has come from in the first place! I have his knowledge, his memories, -I don�t understand why I should be different in this respect. For that -matter, I don�t understand why Original is behaving this way himself. -Success, it seems, has corrupted him. The process he used was designed to -copy his mind, not remove it. -

-

-Perhaps there is a God, after all. Perhaps He has endowed me with a -conscience as the innocent I presumably appeared to Him when I was created. -

-

-My breath catches at this final thought, and my eyes squeeze out moisture. -I look at my hands, at the trembling that has nothing to do with my -injuries and� -

-

-I cannot do it. I cannot take another�s life. -

-

-I am just considering that my other option might be to expose him when the -door opens and Original stands there, exposing himself, a towel -wrapped round his hair. His eyes are bloodshot, -his lips swollen and puffy from drink. He is swaying. -

-

-�Wadthefockyouwant?� -he slurs, but I am staring at something else. -

-

-I point because I can�t articulate the shock. -

-

-Original has no navel. His belly is just smooth, perfect flesh. -

-

I sit at my desk� My desk? No. I am still using the one I designed -for my clone to use--but it is the desk I have used these past six months -and I have grown accustomed to its feel. -

-

-My clone was the first of us to awake, then. He rose and no doubt read what -was on my computer concerning his intended role as my -servant-cum-assistant, his confinement to the house. He therefore accessed -and downloaded that portion of my mind that I had specifically denied him -in order to make him my inferior. -

-

-He was now my equal. -

-

-When I awoke, still groggy from my long sleep, my thoughts still scrambled, -he convinced me that he was the original, I the clone. During that time -that I�d slept on, he had also had time for his hatred of me to grow. -

-

-I cannot blame him entirely. To be born and your first thought being that -you were created only to serve--and were specifically denied greater -ability for another�s gain? Besides, the mind that chose to turn the tables -was specifically part of me. I cannot escape that awful realisation. -

-

-Whilst I was �the clone�, I had experienced no feelings for him as my -father. But Clone had known, more importantly had felt, that his -father had betrayed him utterly. -

-

-A parent must always be forgiving, and bears responsibility for their -offspring�s errors. -

-

-�You cannot keep me restrained forever,� Clone says from across the room. -�You�re as much restraining yourself whilst you do. You can�t ever leave -this house. So, let me go. I�ll go far away. You�ll never hear from me -again, I promise.� -

-

-I doubt that assurance. -

-

-Besides, it is not just the threat to myself he represents but that to -others. A threat that can only grow worse as he matures, appreciates the -full extent of that mind he possesses, the fact that sentiment is a -weakness others possess--just as I let him escape punishment for making his -own father his slave. -

-

-And, knowing what he does, there is nothing to stop him becoming a father -himself. -

-

-I imagine his offspring, the cloning process continuing the moral mutation -I have already experienced with my first Clone. -

-

-�Let me think about it,� I say and I can feel his grin. I wonder how many -parents with children such as mine have had the same thought that I have -then: -

-

-Please let me die before he does the dreadful things he has planned. -

-

-At least, in my case, I fear this is guaranteed. -

-

-© Jez Patterson 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] ofakind.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Maximum Law - Christmas Party - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] "Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."
- Charles Dickens - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Marley was dead. -

-

-Found slumped against an overturned hot chestnut cart, shot four times in -the back. Both vendor and Marley�s partner were a no-show, leaving just the -man surrounded by a dark red stain on the slush. -

-

-No witnesses, no motive, no nothing for Maximum Law to chase down. We -really don�t like it when one of our own buys the farm, probably two if you -counted Bryce, currently MIA. Private security is as tight, tighter maybe -than regular law enforcement, because if we�re not there for each other -then no-one else is coming. -

-

-So there we were, Jim and I, filling dead man�s shoes on a bullshit -stakeout. The parents of J. Edward Jaeger, Esq. were worried their son and -heir was running with a bad crowd, and wanted an eye kept on him over the -festive season. White trash girlfriends were OK, even a bit of colour, but -anyone well shady was to be warned off. J. Edward had a political career -beckoning and couldn�t afford to have criminal �known associates� pop up -down the line. -

-

-A low-viz stakeout as well, meaning no four-by in Max Law livery, no serious -hardware, no colours. Instead it was a vintage Volvo sedan, concealed -firearms and a cheap suit I�d last laundered before Independence Day. At -least the Volvo was roomy and had a heater that could account for global -warming all on its own. All we had to do was sit there and watch the odd -snowflake drifting in the still air. -

-

-I squirmed in the passenger seat. �What I want is-� -

-

-Jim laughed. �A strawberry shake. Jeez, man, you�re addicted. There are McD -support groups, you know.� -

-

-�Actually, what I want is apple pie. One of those pastry tubes with -the apple lava inside and seasonal cinnamon frosting. And a shake. -Look, rich-boy hasn�t moved from his pad in the last thirty hours and the -only callers have been fast-food deliveries. He�s either shacked up with -some honey or has a serious on-line gaming addiction. Either way we�re just -sitting here, getting slowly snowed in. I say we ask Central for a comfort -break.� -

-

-My partner shrugged. �Rather you than me, but feel free, bud.� -

-

-I sat and moped. We were both on serious downers due to complaints -concerning our past so-called �manic� behaviour. Time just seemed to crawl -by and there was no action outside to speak of. Parkhurst was an area of -low-rent housing, high-end loft conversions and dilapidated light -industrial units. We were parked between parallel rows of semi-derelict -warehouses and might as well have been on the moon. -

-

-�Jesus, will you look at the ass on that!� -

-

-Jim�s voice made me jerk up as a woman passed us by, coming from behind. -Tall, with heavy curves, but none the worse for that. She was wearing just -a jacket and skirt despite the weather, a skirt so tight it could have been -sprayed on. Just the thing to brighten up a dull day, to zero in on, but -she left me cold. -

-

-The problem was I was taking Diligenz with a bromide bumper, as part of my -social responsibility regime, and if anything, the sight of her just -irritated me. I looked away, catching movement in the side mirror. -

-

-�Jim, some dude just walked up to the car, turned, and is walking away.� -

-

-�Huh? So what? Maybe he remembered leaving the gas on, or something. How -about we change position? Just ease down the street a ways, at walking -pace. We can-� -

-

-�I�m on it, cover me.� I bailed from the Volvo, the heat bloom probably -showing up on satellite. I heard Jim cursing me, but he followed suit as I -was his partner and that beats a great ass. Points decision though, not a -knock-out. I eased away from the car rather than inspecting it straight -away, trying to see if our mystery guest was heading any place in -particular. He had definitely picked up the pace, trying to balance himself -with an outstretched left arm while fumbling in his pocket with the other. -

-

-A shimmer on the rear wing caught my eye, something straight out of a -barely remembered training vid. �Mimetic charge!� -

-

-Jim slid for cover as it went off; a self-adhesive explosive no thicker -than a sheet of paper, a shaped charge that blew the petrol tank and turned -the Volvo into an inferno in nothing flat. If the paintwork had been -factory-fresh I�d never have spotted it, but our ride was so dinged up and -resprayed that it defeated the chameleon biotech. -

-

-I yanked out my snub-nosed .38 and fired at the retreating figure. No -challenge, no warning, as I figured blowing up our car was pretty much a -statement of hostile intent. I hit him at least one out of three, which was -primo shooting seeing as how I was basically skating. Chummy fell backwards -and lay there, lolling on the pavement. -

-

-�Got your back, Matt,� said Jim. I glanced over the blazing wreck and saw him -half-crouching behind a big wheelie bin. He was fitting the barrel -extension and telescopic stock to his pistol, turning it into a light -carbine. I raised a hand by way of acknowledgement and closed in on our -erstwhile bomber. He was clutching his right shoulder; wounded, but I didn�t think fatally. -The .38 has piss-poor penetration over any distance and that looked like -the only hit. His long coat had come open and under it, I kid you not, he -was dressed as an elf - green tunic and calf-length trousers, red stockings -and belt. He even had stick-on pointy ears, although one had come adrift. -

-

-I kicked him in the injured shoulder. �Yo! Santa�s little helper! I know -I�m on the naughty list but this is a bit much, bro. What�s next? -Letter-bomb from Lapland? Aerial attack by Rudolph?� I kicked him again, -harder. �No time to be coy, man.� -

-

-He started swearing at me. At least, I think he was swearing � it sure -sounded like a long stream of invective, but in a language I didn�t know. -Not Russian, but definitely East European. I looked around but the few -pedestrians present were making tracks and Miss Curves had also vanished. -

-

-Jim eased up to me, sweeping the carbine across the surrounding buildings, -but no one else seemed interested in us. �I figure bozo here comes from the -Lapland Lounge. Only place that would warrant a get-up like that.� -

-

-�The where?� -

-

-He gestured with his gun. �On the corner. They�ve converted the ground -floor of that warehouse into a seasonal lap-dancing joint. A strictly ad -hoc commercial opportunity for as long as it takes the regular cops to turn -up and close it down. If your dick wasn�t in down-time you might have -noticed the clients, or, more importantly, the girls, traipsing in and -out.� -

-

-I sniffed. �Yeah, well, I suppose some guys get off on Mrs Claus and -over-priced eggnog. Just as long as the extras don�t include bondage � I -find tinsel ticklish.� -

-

-Jim laughed. �You pat this guy down yet?� -

-

-�Waiting for you to get your ass in gear.� I knelt down and retrieved a .45 -semi-automatic from a coat pocket. �Naughty elf! Didn�t Santa teach you -that playing with guns is a gender-stereotype?� I glanced at Jim. �I�d cuff -him but applied pressure will cut down on blood loss, and we might need to -bring in a live one this time round.� -

-

-My partner snorted. �Like I care after he lit us up�.cuff his ankles then.� -

-

-I snapped on the Two-Bars, making sure they were nice and tight, and stood -up. Bozo gave us more mouth, but to my ears it was all just it was all just -vowels. Given the Volvo was toast our LoJack would go off-air, alerting -Central. The smart move was to hole-up someplace with our prisoner, -preferably someplace warm, and wait for back-up. -

-

-Yeah, right. -

-

-I scoped the Lapland Lounge and rubbed my nose. �I don�t fancy just busting -in through the front door. If chummy here is anything to go by then I think -we can expect a warm welcome.� -

-

-�No lie. I was looking at the loading bay, in the side alley. I can see the -shutters are down but there should be some kind of foot access as well.� -

-

-I grinned. �Sounds like a plan. Our friend here doesn�t have a phone so I -say we just leave him for whoever Central sends out to check.� -

-

-�Cool. I�ll lead this time. I�ve got a full-auto option.� -

-

-I took the elf�s pistol and switched the .38 to my left, more for ease of -access than a true two-gun stance, which is a damn sight more difficult to -co-ordinate than it appears on film. We slithered along to the alley, which -had the benefit of being less well travelled and thus less of a compacted -surface. No footprints led to or from the loading bay, so we hustled over. -

-

-Next to the main entrance was a blank wooden door, padlocked, with two -planks nailed across. The frame was rotten, though, and a couple of kicks -tore the hasp free. Stamping broke the lower plank, giving us enough room -to crouch and push through to the inside. -

-

-The bay was in near darkness, the only illumination coming from snow and -cobweb covered panel windows either side of the main entrance. There was no -emergency lighting and, more importantly, no audible alarm to betray our -presence. We moved up onto the walkway and through a set of double doors at -the rear. They swung shut behind us, and it was dark. -

-

-I widened my eyes, like you�re supposed to, but all I could see was the -suggestion of corridors leading straight on and off to the left. �Got a -flashlight?� -

-

-�Nope. I can hear music though.� -

-

-Jim was right, there was a bass beat coming from someplace ahead, and to -the left. �Split up or stay tight? Your call, kemosabe.� -

-

-He snorted. �Never leave your wingman? These corridors are like shooting -galleries, so if someone gets the jump on us we�re both dogfood. Nah, I say -we split up, come at them from two directions. Which is to say I catch the -bad guys while you blunder about in the back rooms.� -

-

-�In your dreams. Just head for the gunfire when you hear me start shooting, -OK? I�ll go straight on. Stay frosty.� -

-

-�Just call me the Snowman.� -

-

-I moved on, through another set of double doors, and the music became -appreciably louder. A short passage ending in a closed door took me closer -to the source, so I pocketed the .38 and tried the handle. It turned. I -still couldn�t tell if there was light on the other side but at the risk of -storming a broom closet I shouldered my way in. -

-

-Desk, desk lamp, man standing there. He had a ziplock bag in each hand, -matching bags in the two open attach� cases on the desk in front of him. -

-

-I laughed. �Who the hell are you, the ghost of Don Johnson?� If you�d seen -him you�d understand; white linen suit, white loafers, black t-shirt. He -had the jacket sleeves rolled back and sunglasses in his breast pocket. -

-

-The dude sounded more affronted than surprised. �I�ll have you know this is -still considered a cool look, in some quarters.� -

-

-�And disco is making a comeback, I know. You do realise the Miami Vice -retrospective at the Roxy was last month, man? Now, hands up.� There -was something wrong, though, an itch in my nose and my eyes were stinging. -I realised he was wearing nose filters and his bloodshot eyes were actually -ocular shields to prevent membrane penetration. -

-

-I sneezed, violently. -

-

-The dude slapped the two bags he was holding together, arms outstretched, -like soft symbols. I sneezed again, unable to avoid breathing in some of -the grey-white cloud that burst over me. -

-

-Laughter. Gunfire. Pokers jammed in my eyes. Ice creeping over my skin, -followed by the fires of Hell. The room as bright as a searchlight, -bleaching out all colour. More gunfire. I sank to my knees, wheezing, my -world shrinking to a small image of reality at the end of a long grey -tunnel. I blinked, my eyelids scraping back and forth. My head spun with -360° vision. Technicolor burst from my eyeballs, repainting the room as I -watched. -

-

-I blinked. -

-

-The door opposite lay open and I was alone. My skull itched on the inside. -My dick was like an iron bar. The .45 was empty, the slide fully back. I -dropped it and fumbled the .38 from my pocket, finding it as easy to use in -my left hand as my right. Standing up proved not as difficult as I feared -but walking was a whole new experience. I shuffled forwards, hands by my -side. -

-

-Through the open door was a larger area used as a dressing room by the -girls working the Lounge; clothes racks, cosmetics, personal items, garden -furniture tables and chairs. A frightened looking bottle-blonde stood -across from me, clutching her robe together like a safety blanket. I wanted -to speak, to reassure her, but my mouth was sown together with barbed wire. -Gurgling in Morse Code came to mind, but she didn�t look that nautical, -despite the dolphin tattoo on her forearm. -

-

-Double doors to my right burst open and a man entered, holding a -pump-action shotgun with pistol grip. It was Bryce, Marley�s missing -partner. He just looked at me and laughed. �You greased, man? Jesus, Matt, -you are wired. Marley objected to me taking a line or two but you, -you�ve got enough primo gear on you to qualify as intent to distribute.� -

-

-I formed the words, my lips moved, but somewhere along the way silence -stole my vocal cords. Bryce lowered his gun, sniggering. �You�re a heart -attack waiting to happen, bro. Just sit down and enjoy the rush while you -can. I�d recommend Carla here, but from the look of you she�d need a week -off afterwards to recover.� -

-

-A spasm shook me, spittle and drool from my mouth. -

-

-Bryce pulled up a chair and straddled it. �You know, Matt, we�re a lot -alike. We both appreciate a high, we both know when to bend, to go with the -flow. I mean, it�s not like that rich kid actually needs us, right? Us -sitting outside in the street, day in, day out, it was bad for business. So -why not ditch the car out of sight and enjoy what the Lapland Lounge has to -offer? Hell, they were even willing to throw in something over and above -the freebies. Marley, though, he was too rigid, too married, too old.� -

-

-I swallowed, managed not to choke. �You, me. Big difference.� -

-

-He grinned. �Oh yeah, what�s that?� -

-

-I turned and shot him in the face. �You�re dead.� -

-

-Carla sucked in a big lungful of air ahead of a scream but it never came. -My legs took me over to Bryce and I picked up the shotgun where he�d -dropped it, placing my revolver in his pocket. I fished out his wallet and -threw it to fall at Carla�s feet. �Get dressed, get out.� -

-

-Movement was Zen; I seemed to become one with where I wanted to go without -any appreciable effort on my part. The double doors, the corridor beyond � -this one with overhead strip lighting � more doors, another, narrower, -corridor. Two anxious female faces peered from different doorways, one -wearing a shorty Mrs Santa dress, the other only a clutched towel. They -both vanished when they saw the shotgun leading me forward. -

-

-I was one with the gun and the gun knew where to go. -

-

-Music welled up as an unseen door opened ahead of me. An armed elf -appeared, his .45 cocked. Amateur. I shot him in the chest before his face -managed to register surprise. Someone screamed but I don�t think it was me. -

-

-I entered the Lounge proper. -

-

-Main lighting off. A girl paused in the act of pole-dancing, looking in my -direction. A makeshift bar on cloth-covered trestle tables to my left. -Heavy drapes hiding the bare walls. Scattered garden furniture with battery -camping lamps on each table. A smattering of pale faces in the gloom, -turned towards me like luminescent sunflowers. -

-

-I fired into the ceiling by way of introduction, my voice a roar to match -that of my weapon. �MAXIMUM LAW! YOU ARE ALL SO BUSTED!�. I heard -the rak-rak of a new round being chambered as the shotgun reloaded -itself. -

-

-Someone shot me. -

-

-The shotgun returned fire, then swung away to let the floor come up and -smack me in the mouth. -

-

-I blinked. -

-

-I was wet. -

-

-I was on my back, on the floor, a man crouched down beside me although I -couldn�t make out his face. He was holding a water-charged fire -extinguisher, which explained why I was wet. -

-

-�Lie still, officer, you�ve been shot. Left side, through-and-through, but -I think no serious damage. I decided to wash off whatever recreational -pharmaceuticals you were covered in, either that or watch the paramedics -get high trying to treat you.� -

-

-A rich baritone, not a voice I recognised. I coughed. �My partner?� -

-

-�Sprained ankle, although the injury to his pride is quite severe. He�s at -the entrance, still waiting for backup. Everyone you didn�t manage to shoot -has made themselves scarce.� -

-

-�Who the hell are you, then?� -

-

-I could hear the smile in his voice. �Just a civilian enjoying the -facilities, until you barged in. But I used to work for Max, so I�ll skate -on this one. In fact I used to be a lot like you, right down to the -bull-headed belief in my own immortality. These days I�m a parole officer -and you�d be amazed at just how many of those I deal with were formerly in -law enforcement, particularly the private sector. The badge, the vest, the -gun, I�m well aware of the allure. Just remember that being part of the law -doesn�t mean you�re above it. It catches up with most of us, eventually.� -

-

-�Sorry? What does?� -

-

-�Justice. Now, I really must be going but your partner is within earshot if -need be. Keep the faith.� -

-

-He stood, a towering figure against the overhead lights, and vanished from -my field of view. My side felt like I�d been kicked by a steel-toed boot, -but it was tolerable. The rest of me burned from the inside out, and I was -surprised my drenched clothes weren�t steaming. Just lying there, waiting -for the medics to pitch up and carry me off, isn�t my style. Pointless -machismo I know, but I�d have done it even without the drugs coursing -through my system. -

-

-Sitting up hurt, standing even more so. -

-

-The shotgun got left behind as I needed both hands to lever myself off the -floor. Once upright, no way was I bending down to retrieve it, and it could -probably take care of itself. I was semi-mobile, clutching my side, by the -time Jim limped up. -

-

-I just looked at him. �Sprained ankle?� -

-

-He at least had the good grace to look embarrassed. �Dude, what can I say? -It wasn�t even a bad sprain, but enough to keep me out of things. I�m -sorry.� -

-

-�Forget it, man. The way I was acting I�d probably have shot you as well.� -

-

-�True, true, the paperwork on this one is gonna� be a bitch. The cavalry -are here, so we�d better step outside.� -

-

-As we hobbled towards the sound of approaching sirens a door blew open -somewhere, letting in a chill blast that made me shiver. Suddenly I felt, I -felt old, like it wasn�t all just a glorious game anymore. -

-

-I heard a voice on the wind. -

-

-�Merry Christmas, baby, Merry Christmas.� -

- - -© Martin M. Clark 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] maxmas.jpg - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Christmas Carole - -[*AUTHOR] Martin M. Clark - -[*BLURB] "Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."
- Charles Dickens. - -[*DESCRIPTION]

Marley was dead. -
-
-He lay face-down in the grey snow, stabbed three times from behind. I wiped -my blade on his overcoat and walked away into the shadows. Two hard-eyed -street urchins had witnessed my crime from behind a water butt, but they -were of no consequence. Allowing them to pick the body clean of valuables -would ensure their silence if ever brought before a magistrate. -
-
-The partnership of Marley and Scrooge had been dissolved. It remained to be -seen how favourably Mister Ebenezer Scrooge reacted to the news. -
-
-I left the narrow alleyway and rejoined the main thoroughfare. The -Christmas Eve throng of pedestrians clogged the street, slowing my -progress. Several passers-by greeted me as I made my way amongst them. I -acknowledged each with a smile and a touch of my top hat, but nothing more. -None of them really knew me, of course, but I have a face that many find -familiar. Mere memories of childhood dreams, if they but knew it. -
-
-My entire body itched as if constrained by over-tight clothing. I longed to -break free: to shout, scream, kick against the dead weight of Victorian -sentimentality that threatened to crush my wild spirit. Inwardly I raged at -the stultifying conservatism of my fellow pedestrians, but did nothing. I -was bound by the conventions of this genre like Prometheus to his rock. -
-
- - But listen closely, not for very much longer, I've got to keep control. - -
-
-A random memory, a snatch of song lyrics, lifted my spirits. I hummed the -tune under my breath until reaching my destination; a narrow-fronted town -house showing signs of neglect. I sidled around to the back door and stood, -listening for the tell-tale crunch of following footsteps, but there was -nothing. I rapped softly on the door with my cane and waited. -
-
-And waited. -
-
-No lantern was lit but eventually I heard the turn of a key, a bolt being -withdrawn, and the door opened a fraction. �Yes?� -
-
-The voice from within was entirely devoid of the frailty one associates -with the elderly. Here was a man who mouthed malice as surely as a set of -dentures. I inclined my head. �What was to be done has been done. I suggest -we conclude our contract in private.� -
-
-The gap opened wider and I stepped inside, standing while my host secured -the door behind me. The rasp of a match brought life to a candle stub and I -regarded my client, Mister Ebenezer Scrooge. The paltry flame he held was -enough to show a threadbare housecoat worn over his bed gown, pale legs -thrust into mismatched slippers. -
-
-He sniffed. �You�re sure? I�ll want proof positive before parting with the -sum we agreed.� -
-
-I snapped my fingers. -
-
-�Murder, horrible murder in Whitechapel! Jacob Marley found dead!� -
-
-The cry of the news vendor reached us plain enough. It�s a little trick of -mine, a form of narrative acceleration I�ve found useful on occasion. The -reference to �Whitechapel� gave me pause, but I had no time to dwell on the -apparent incongruity. �Your business partner is dead, sir. You may rest -assured of that. Now, to business?� -
-
-With evident reluctance Scrooge set down his candle and lifted a tea towel, -revealing a small strongbox. From this he withdrew a stack of gold -sovereigns and thrust them into my hand. �Now, begone, and never-� He broke -off, staring at a point over my right shoulder. �Ye Gods, what have you -brought to my house?� -
-
-I dropped the coins, seized the top of my cane and twisted, freeing the -slender blade housed within. Swinging around I slashed at the spot which -had so transfixed Scrooge, but found nothing. Fearing betrayal I turned -again and pressed the point of my swordstick against his neck. The ice-blue -metal glowed softly, lending his skin the pallor of a three-day-old corpse. -It also revealed the abject terror in his eyes. No attempted ambush then, -but some genuine threat. -
-
-My voice was a snarl. �Out with it, man, what has you so afeared?� -
-
-He swallowed with difficulty. �Smoke from the candle. It swirled as if in a -draft, but there is none. It took on the form of a face, such a face as I -have never�� -
-
-I thrust him aside and bent down, snatching up such coins as came readily -to hand. Leaving Scrooge I strode down the hall and unbarred the front -door. Taking a moment to compose myself, I sheathed my blade and stepped -out onto the pavement. My only defence lay in the company of strangers, -those who could not be held to account for my crimes. I set off diagonally -across the street � thankfully free of any traffic other than pedestrians. -What stalked me was the embodiment of guilt, guilt that I did not feel as a -consequence of my actions. -
-
-I needed to find someone, I needed to find� -
-
-An aged flower seller, muffled against the cold, making her way home. She -still carried a few blooms in her wicker basket, prominent amongst them a -solitary red carnation. I touched cane to hat by way of introduction and -her resigned features slid into an approximation of welcome. -
-
-�And how may I serve you, good sir, on this most auspicious of evenings?� -
-
-�That carnation of yours. Grown in a hothouse I shouldn�t wonder, and -expensive.� -
-
-�A fine bloom, to be sure, but one that won�t last. Perhaps a sprig of -heather-� -
-
-I flicked the flower into the air using the tip of my cane and caught it -deftly in my left hand. Pinching off the stem between finger and thumb I -slid it into place as my buttonhole. -
-
-She inclined her head in acknowledgment of my dexterity. �Perhaps, sir, -sixpence? Given the time of year and seasonal goodwill?� -
-
-In response I pressed a sovereign into her hand. �I insist you accept this -as full payment, and may I wish you a Merry Christmas.� -
-
-The crone gazed in wonder at the gold coin. �And a Merry Christmas to you, -sir. And may I say�� -
-
-But I had moved on, ducking into a quiet alleyway. The veneer of Victorian -convention started to crack and I felt a savage grin spread across my face. -I�m the Iceman, a killer, and I stalk Wonderland for those with the means -to pay for my services. -
-
-Jack Frost, at your service. -
-
-I�d worked for Father Christmas to get back in his good books but it was -obvious the fat bastard had welched on the deal. Eventually The Man would -notice and hold him to account, but by then I�d be history. Bad things -happen to those on the Naughty List, and this particular Bad Thing was hard -on my tail. My random act of generosity, even born of cynical -self-preservation, would hold it at bay for a while. I�d bought myself some -time, but not long. The faint sound of jingle bells drew my gaze upwards. -The sky was empty save for drifting snowflakes; lost souls, each following -their own path to oblivion. -
-
-Not my fate. Not yet, at any rate. -
-
-I needed a gun, but the only firearms this Dickensian niche had to offer -were cumbersome pistols or a comedic blunderbuss. Neither had the stopping -power to see off a Bad Thing, even at point-blank range. Not that you could -ever kill it. The best you could hope for was a few hours respite while it -lurked in the shadows, reforming. Luckily my latest crime had drawn it like -a moth to the flame, before it was fully formed and ready to torment me. I -wouldn�t be so fortunate a second time. -
-
-So, there was no mileage in hanging around, even assuming I could -ingratiate myself with the likes of Bob Cratchit and his family. It was -time to pay the real world a visit, but without leaving any trace of where -I�d gone. And for that I needed to snag a dreamer. Standing in a recessed -doorway I struck my cane three times on the flagstones. -
-
-Close your eyes and set your mind free� -
-
-My dreamer was agitated, their point of view swooping between the buildings -like a swallow. That meant they were on the point of waking up, but I -couldn�t wait for someone more deeply immersed. I followed, letting the -perspective of my mind�s eye catch up slowly. I had to take things -cautiously in case that feeling of �something behind you� was enough to -push them into consciousness. I felt the prickle of awareness as my dreamer -experienced a change of persona, my persona, but that meant I could turn -and look back to where they�d come from. -
-
-A twist of silver winding back through the streets � Ariadne�s thread for -the mind. I followed, my imaginary pace quickening until the buildings on -either side became blurs, people beneath me mere flickers of humanity. All -detail faded until I was rushing down a dark tunnel, the only illumination -my path to salvation. Ahead of me I could sense a blank wall, the end of -all songs, the barrier between� -
-
-The world blinked. The world became�real. -
-
-A medium sized bedroom in darkness. Central heating, street lights visible -through the curtains, a figure lying in a single bed. I�m not the Tooth -Fairy, I don�t get a kick from creeping around, watching kids while they -sleep. There was a burble of TV from downstairs so that meant a quick exit -via the window was in order. I slid the catch open but the damn thing -wouldn�t budge. I propped my cane against the wall and used both hands, but -still no joy. -
-
-�There�s a trick to it. You need to lift from the top, not the bottom. -Otherwise it always sticks like that.� -
-
-I froze. It was a girl�s voice; young, but older than anticipated. I stood -upright and turned around, trying to think of what to say. The bedside lamp -came on. -
-
-�You�re Jack Frost.� -
-
-�Says who?� Instinctive denial � always my first line of defense. -
-
-�I�m Carole Geola. I�m twelve.� She had fair hair and freckles. I could see -no superabundance of soft toys to indicate an immature intellect for her -age. -
-
-�Twelve? But you still believe in me?� -
-
-She nodded. �Oh yeah, I�ve seen you before.� -
-
-�Somehow I seriously doubt that.� The only people who knew me were clients, -confederates or victims. Sometimes two from three. -
-
-�Three years ago, when we had all that snow. My dad built a winter hide in -the garden, so I could watch the animals coming in from the woods to feed. -The patio doors were all covered in frost and I saw you step out of them. -All white at first, then you coloured in. You wore the same red waistcoat.� -
-
-I tried to smile. �Neat trick, eh?� -
-
-Carole cocked her head to one side. �You killed a man just now. In my -dream. I saw you.� -
-
-Tricky. -�Ah, that wasn�t real, OK? It was just like a story you watched, with me as -an actor.� -
-
-She frowned. �I could hear you in my head, afterwards. Just before I woke -up. You were afraid, trying to get away. It wasn�t an act.� -
-
-Damn tricky -. But maybe twelve was old enough to understand. �OK, Carole, it was -real, in a way. But that man was going to die, regardless, even if I hadn�t -been there. That�s just the way he was written. All I did was use his -death, the circumstances of his death, for my own ends.� -
-
-�I don�t understand.� She drew her knees up and hugged them. -
-
-�Right, look, ah, stories, usually old stories, they can become real. Not -real as in here, but real as in the place you go when you dream. Some fade -away but others last forever, all existing side-by-side. Like, like a big -theme park.� -
-
-That wasn�t half of it. Belief kept a storyline alive, feeding on each -dreamer who visited it. That generally meant children, the devout and the -seriously disturbed. Wonderland was an unstable mix of fairytale, religious -fervour and the plain mad. It takes some getting used to. -
-
-My pre-teen interrogator bit her lip. �Stories like Twilight?� -
-
-�Ah, no, only tales written by hand, with a pen. There�s something in the -ink that captures the imagination, makes it real. People wrote about me, a -long, long time ago, and I�ve been around ever since. It�s the same -with all the classic fairy tales, including the scary ones.� -
-
-Carole stared at me hard for a moment � looking a damn sight older than -twelve � then sniffed. �You came here to hide, to get away.� A statement -rather than question. -
-
-I shrugged. �There are dreams and there are nightmares, even for people -like me. You visit Wonderland when you�re asleep, and leave it behind when -you wake up. For me, for all of us who live there, you don�t get to wake -up. Coming here - your world, the real world � is my escape. Except that I -can�t stay for long.� I cleared my throat. �Speaking of which�� -
-
-�You�d better go, in case my mum looks in.� -
-
-�Damn straight.� I turned and slid the window up. It was Christmas Eve � no -snow, but at least dry and frosty. My home turf. I removed my top hat, -pressed it flat, and sent it spinning off into the shadows. My swordstick -was another matter. I lifted it and turned towards Carole. �You give it a -sharp twist like this, then pull. Careful though, it�s sharp enough to cut -the air itself. Call it an early Christmas present.� -
-
-�For me? Cool.� -
-
-�You bet. Because it comes from Wonderland it�ll be there when you dream, -if you need it. Sometimes a blade beats running away, hands down.� I placed -the cane on the end of her bed. �Oh, and if you see Santa, give him a poke -from me.� She giggled. -
-
-I eased out of the window and slithered down the drainpipe, leaving a trail -of fern-leaf frosting. The garden was quiet, the air still as stone. My -feet left no imprint as I walked over to the gate. Looking back I saw -Carole at the open window, waving. I bowed in return, then turned away � -smiling. -
-
-It�s always good to meet a fan. -

- -© Martin M. Clark 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] xmascarole.jpg - - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - - -[*ITEM] Comics - [*AUTHOR] Liam Baldwin - [*BLURB] Jet Starr Scores Again! From the pen of Liam - Baldwin.

- - [*DESCRIPTION] - -

-© Liam Baldwin 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*IMAGE] - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] Melkart The Herdsman - -[*AUTHOR] Mark Mellon - -[*BLURB] Qui dedit benificium taceat; narret qui accepit.
-(He who does a good deed should be silent; he who benefits should tell)
-Seneca - -[*DESCRIPTION]

The Nones fell early that Aperas. That meant corv�e, a day of obligatory -service to Eryx the Rex. At dawn, Aule the headman mustered the pagani and -made them prune Eryx's olive groves, heavy with new spring shoots. They -piled up severed branches while gray partridges sang nearby. -

-

-"I could have sown oats or tended my own grove," Thresu said. -

-

-"Hush before Aule overhears you," Larth said. -

-

-"As if I cared a fig- Wait. Do you hear something?" -

-

-Larth cocked his head and listened intently. He pointed to the forest past -the grove, thick with towering oaks, beeches, and pines. -

-

-"Someone's come through the pass." -

-

-A continuous rustle grew steadily louder, like the rush of waves, hooves -shuffling through dirt with horns' click and occasional plaintive moos. -

-

-"Cattle," Thresu said. -

-

-The men ran to the grove's edge. Tamped down over centuries, a hard, dirt -path wound past the grove and into the dark forest. A magnificent red bull -emerged from the shadows, twenty hands high, long horns tipped by bronze -globes, an iron bell hung from his neck whose clapper gently clanged as he -led the way. A herd followed, several hundred cattle, scarlet hided, long -horned and legged, rugged and bad tempered right down to the calves, flanks and -sides heavy with beef and tallow despite plainly having traveled far. -

-

-Beside himself with greed, Aule slavered like a starving man. "Surely this -is Tin's bounty. We're rich." -

-

-"There's a herdsman," Larth said. -

-

-A man drove the herd with a dog. He whistled and clapped to move the herd -along, threw small stones, and sent the dog to nip at their heels. Both -were of heroic stature to match the cattle they drove. The dog was shaggy, -black haired, with a demon's pointed ears and long, sharp teeth. His black -iron collar had finger-long spikes. Clad in a red wool kilt, a lionskin -tied around his waist, the man was tall, broad shouldered with a gleaming -bronze body, his curly hair and beard jet black. He was armed with a -composite, ram's horn bow, a short sword, and a dagger. The arrows in his -quiver were as long as a normal man's arm. -

-

-"You take him, headman," Thresu said. "We'll hold your cloak." -

-

-"That's enough insolence, Thresu. Just for that, run to Tarquinia. Tell the -guards a stranger's trespassing with cattle." -

-

-Thresu scowled, but still obeyed, and set off at a swift trot for the urbs. -Aule and the men watched the stranger and his herd go down the path. A wide -vista opened up, a broad and fertile valley, well watered, green with lush -forests and thick fields. A rich and mighty urbs stood in the distance on a -high hilltop, built of white marble with mighty granite walls. -

-

-The herd came to a swift stream and spread out to water. The herdsman went -upstream above the herd, knelt by the bank, bent low, and drank from his -cupped hand. There was a rumble of bronze shod hooves. The herdsman rose, -unslung his bow, and nocked an arrow. -

-

-Horsemen rode up on the stream's opposite side, armed with bows, swords, -and spears. Two young men in the lead wore bronze helmets, cuirasses, and -greaves; the rest had leather armor. They halted at the stream's edge. -

-

-"Ohe, drover," -one young man said. "Who gave you leave to water your dirty -cattle in our stream? Do you know whose lands you trespass upon? This is -the Valley of Volturmna, the realm of my Pater, Eryx the Rex." -

-

-The herdsman lowered his bow. He smiled, a vast expanse of white teeth. -

-

-"Forgive me, my lord. I am Melkart, a traveler from a far land. I only seek -water for these cattle as I pass through. That and no more, I humbly beg." -

-

-He spoke Rasennan, but with a strange, heavy accent, foreign, unknown. -

-

-"Hear that, Phobis? He begs." -

-

-"What a craven paganus. He's more fit for a catamite than a drover," the -other young man said. He was slickly handsome, but a superior sneer marred -his good looks. "Antagones. Tell him to leave the cattle here as the toll -for crossing our valley. Maybe then we'll let him and his flea-ridden dog -pass in peace." -

-

-"Good idea. Caile, cut the cattle out and drive them back to Tarquinia." -

-

-A buck toothed man grinned. "Aye, Lord." -

-

-He drew his sword, put his heels to his mount, and charged across the -stream. Caile screamed and whooped to stampede the herd, but they simply -watched him incuriously. -

-

-Melkart raised his bow, drew the arrow back, and released it. The -goose-feathered shaft went deep into Caile's chest. Caile fell from his horse -into the stream where he bobbed, dead before he hit the water. -

-

-"Kaleb." -

-

-The dog snarled, leaped across the stream in one bound, ran to the nearest -rider, and dragged him from his mount. Once down, Kaleb savaged the -helpless man. The riderless horse stampeded away. -

-

-"Retreat. Run for it," Antagones cried. -

-

-Riders sawed on reins, wheeled their horses around, and frantically urged -them into flight. They heedlessly left their comrade behind to his grisly -fate. -

-

-"That's enough, Kaleb." -

-

-The dog left the man alone. Badly mauled, he got to his feet, left arm -cradled in his right, and staggered away, sobbing miserably. Kaleb trotted -back across the stream, tongue gently lolling from his bloodstained mouth. -He approached Melkart, head low, tail wagging. Melkart petted and caressed -him. -

-

-"Good dog, Kaleb. When I kill a deer tonight, you'll get the liver." -

-

Melkart and Kaleb drove the herd across the stream and down the path again. -At a hill's crest, the path broadened into a level road, hard packed by -corv�e laborers, paved with flagstones, flanked by rows of tall, pale green -cypress trees. Fledgling wheat stalks waved in terraced fields on either -side. Hummocks marked where cunningly designed underground pipes bore water -to irrigate the land, laid out in painstaking detail by haruspices in -conformity with the disciplina etrusca. Boundary lines were marked by stone -herms with horned, snarling features and grotesquely large phalluses. Every -detail was crisply distinct in the rarefied Volturmnine air, fresh and pure -as Olympian ichor. The morn was fair, the breeze still fresh with dew, but -Melkart pushed on with his herd, determined to cover three leagues that -day. -

-

-There was a glimpse of saffron and scarlet ahead. Melkart unslung his bow -again. -

-

-A procession slowly approached, a heavy, bearded man on a sedan chair clad -in a saffron silk synthesina and a red cloak, borne by six bearers with a -retinue of slaves in white linen tunics before and behind him, the nearest -equipped with large, ostrich feather fans to keep mosquitoes and other -winged insects away. -

-

-Bemused, Melkart lowered his bow. He went to the head of the herd, grabbed -the bull by his collar, and halted him. The other cattle stopped in their -tracks. The procession came near. Bearers lowered the sedan chair and -helped the corpulent man to his feet. Hem held high to keep his synthesina -free from dirt, he bowed low while the slaves prostrated themselves on the -paving stones. He carried a slender, white ivory staff, the token of his -authority. -

-

-"I am Churinas, chief steward of Eryx the Rex, Lord of Volturmna. You will -forgive this terrible misunderstanding. A foolish paganus, a man named -Thresu, spread a malicious report about a herdsman setting his cattle to -graze in freshly sown fields. Lord Eryx sent his sons out to investigate. -What followed was something best laid at Hekate's door." -

-

-Melkart laughed. -

-

-"There's really no need to bow. I'm no lord, just Melkart, a herdsman. Let -me pass through and I'll be content. After all, I killed a man and my dog -mauled another. And yet you claim no blood debt? You puzzle me." -

-

-Churinas shrugged. "Mere mercenaries, born to suffer and die. We've -offended the rules of hospitality and must make amends. Thresu has been -thrashed and put under arrest to teach him never to bear errant, lying -tales again. My lord has ordered me to escort you to Tarquinia where you'll -be his honored guest. Your cattle will rest in his cattle pens and fatten on -oats and millet, just like his own stock. Wine, bread, and opson await you, -eggs and cheese, smoked wild boar, spit roasted goats, and beef haunches in -honey sauce. Young, lissome boys and girls will bathe you in rose scented -water and clothe you in finery. All this to make amends." -

-

-Melkart smiled. -

-

-"Lord Eryx is most gracious. It's been long since I've known civilized -pleasures. After many nights camping rough in the open, a good feast and a -soft bed under a roof sound like Elysium. Does Lord Eryx give his solemn -bond there's no blood feud over the slain man?" -

-

-Churinas bowed low again. "Just as you say. Nothing that can't be worked -out between friends over an elegant repast. I had the slaves bring another -sedan chair. You must be tired after traveling countless leagues." -

-

-Melkart laughed again. "No need as long as I've two good legs to hold me -up. Lead on to Tarquinia, Churinas." -

-

-They formed a strange company. Churinas led in his sedan chair, accompanied -by bearers and other attendants. Melkart followed with his rough and unruly -herd and savage hound. As they went deeper into the valley, Volturmna's -boundless wealth was apparent everywhere. Green forests teemed with birds -and game. One rich, well run farm after another came into view, black -bottom land planted with well tilled wheat fields, higher ground studded -with thick branched olive groves, terraced hilltops festooned with fresh -budded grape vines, barnyards packed with fat, healthy poultry, swine, and -milch cows. -

-

-Despite the evident prosperity, there was a curious, gloomy pall over the -land, so thick and persistent even Melkart noticed, intent as he was on the -prospect of an upcoming feast. In the fields, hinds and masters alike kept -their heads sullenly down as they went about their tasks, with occasional -stealthy, sidelong, malicious glances toward the procession from those -nearby. No one waved in greeting. Men and women were dressed in black -mourning, many young, too many for such a rich and giving land. -

-

The road ascended until they reached Tarquinia. Like every Rasennan -stronghold, it was situated on a high hilltop. Natural ramparts were -further strengthened by Cyclopean granite walls fifteen cubits high. -Livestock pens were set up at the foot of the hill for pagani when they -came to market. Melkart led the bull into the main corral while Kaleb -nipped at the herd�s heels to drive them inside. He closed the corral gate. -Slaves threw armfuls of fresh green hay into the corral. The herd spread -out to eat. -

-

-"Keep watch, Kaleb. I'll return to see you're fed and the herd's bedded -down." -

-

-Kaleb looked Melkart in the eye, understanding evident. -

-

-"Good boy." -

-

-Churinas got out of his sedan chair. He gently took Melkart by the elbow. -

-

-"By Tin, what a giant. Eryx will be so impressed. This way, Melkart." -

-

-A causeway led to the gates. Defended by high, flanking towers, the broad -gates were topped by a brightly painted, bas-relief sculpture of a pillar -flanked by twin rampant lions. Tall, bronze studded oak doors swung open. -Guards bowed as they passed, although several shot Melkart dirty looks. The -guardhouse was to the right, the granary to the left. The palace stood at -the peak, large, multi-storied, and painted bright red and dark blue with -terracotta roof tiles. A temple of equal size stood on a lower crest, well -proportioned, beautifully adorned with gold and silver, blood red, thick -columns' capitals sculpted like flowering acanthus, the tile roof edged by -terracotta antefixes that depicted bearded haruspices wearing high crowned, -broad brimmed straw hats, the roof's peak adorned with a triumphal quadriga -that bore a winged Victory. Hints of burning frankincense and myrrh wafted -from the altar set in a sunken terrace before the temple. -

-

-It was well into morning, but the urbs was empty. Elegantly enclosed by a -marble peristyle, the forum was deserted, stalls empty of wares and without -merchants, with only shadows for customers. Melkart saw no one apart from -Churinas, servants, and the guard. There were a few private houses, but the -shutters were closed, the residents secluded inside despite the fine -weather. They walked up the long stairway to the palace and through another -gate into a small courtyard. Antagones and Phobis were there, dressed in -spotless, white wool tunics and togas. A tall, older man stood before them, -also in a toga, scant hair iron gray, a once muscular body gone to fat from -too much indulgence. Four lictors attended them, dressed in short tunics. -Each man carried a banded bundle of wooden clubs with a double headed ax in -the middle. -

-

-Melkart put his right hand to his heart and bowed low. -

-

-"Lord Eryx. I humbly thank you for your hospitality. I am Melkart." -

-

-Eryx's mouth spread wide in a black toothed smile. "So this is the fellow. -You must be Laran's own child." -

-

-He turned to Antagones and Phobis. "And you dared offer battle to him? You -are indeed my sons. Afraid of nothing." -

-

-Eryx faced Melkart again. "We never get visitors like you. Just vagabonds -or thieves or cattle raiders from Veii. I'll give a real banquet tonight, -no stinting either, a royal feast. For now, bathe, rest. Take your ease -after a long, hard journey." -

-

-Melkart smiled, but puzzlement lingered in his eyes. -

-

-"I thank you, Lord Eryx, but you give far more than my due. I'm only a -drover. A good meal and a place by the kitchen hearth will be more than -enough." -

-

-"Nonsense. A man of such stature and strength deserves only the finest. -Here in Volturmna, we have a tradition of hospitality. You must not deny -me. It's a point of honor." -

-

-Churinas led Melkart to private quarters in one of the palace's upper -floors. The rooms were broad and airy with their own shallow bath. -

-

-"Iole will serve you. She's pretty. Let me know if she's rude or -disobedient and I'll have her beaten." -

-

-Churinas left. Slaves bore amphorae filled with hot water into his quarters -shortly afterward. A silent, sullen, young woman in a plain, ragged tunica -with no mantle accompanied them. The men filled the tub. Melkart stripped -off his filthy kilt and got into the bath with a grunt of pleasure. The -woman poured pure olive oil over his body, scraped it off with a curved -strigil, then worked oil into his filthy hair. She poured several more -amphorae of tepid water over him. -

-

-Clean once again after a month�s long tramp, Melkart wrapped his loins in a -soft, white linen cloth and lay on the rope-slung bed. Wooden shutters kept -the bright light out, but still allowed a cool breeze through. He rested -his head on a contoured, upholstered wooden pillow and slipped into sleep. -When Melkart awoke, the setting sun glowed red through slanted shutters, -the last gasp of natural light. The young woman entered the room. She -carried fine garments of the purest white wool. -

-

-"Your toga and tunic, my lord." -

-

-"Melkart will do, girl. What's your name?" -

-

-"Iole. You should get dressed. The banquet will start soon." -

-

-Melkart pulled the soft tunic over his head and shoulders. Iole showed him -how to drape the toga over his enormous frame. -

-

-"This thing is a nuisance." -

-

-"You're not properly dressed for a banquet without it." -

-

-Iole took a small oil lamp and led him down the stairs and a dim corridor -to the Hall of Couches, a grand room with a high, barrel vault ceiling. -Walls and ceiling were covered with colorful, brilliant murals that -depicted the gods' battles, revels, and idylls, brightly lit by dozens of -smokeless castor oil lamps. Heated by an underground hypocaust, the -porphyry floor was marvelously warm under Melkart's sandaled feet. Eryx lay on a -gilded, upholstered couch. He dined in state with his sons who reclined on -their own luxurious couches. They wore purple edged togas and soft, red -leather shoes with curved, pointed toes. -

-

-Leaning on his left arm, Eryx indicated the couch on his right, the place -of honor. "Hurry, my dear boy. Take your place so the banquet can properly -start." -

-

-Melkart gingerly placed his bulk on the slender couch. He laid on his left -side and draped the hem of his toga over his head like the others. A slave -gave him a long handled silver spoon and a large linen napkin. Churinas -strode to the Hall's center and tapped his bejeweled ivory staff three -times upon the floor with great dramatic flair. A concealed orchestra took -up the beat. A water organ, twin flutes, and a horn played a sinuous, -tuneful melody with a tympanum and castanets for percussion. -

-

-Young women entered the Hall. Bare-breasted, clad in gilt greaves, helmets, -and feathered Amazon skirts, they were armed with wooden spears and -shields. In an obscene travesty of martial valor, they performed the -Pyrrhic dance. Bent low, they formed a circle, shields high over their -heads, and slowly raised their spears to pierce pretended enemies. Melkart -impassively watched. A slave poured Melkart wine from a finely modeled, -black clay oinochoe. He sipped from his red and black krater only to wince. -

-

-"Iole. Fetch water to add to the wine." -

-

-"What's the matter, strong man?" Antagones said. "Pure wine too much for -you?" He was already very drunk. -

-

-"I like things in a civilized measure. At least two to one is considered -tolerable where I come from." -

-

-Iole poured spring water into his krater. Melkart swirled it around to mix -the water and wine. He smiled. Iole smiled back. Antagones nudged Phobis -and pointed with a wide grin. -

-

-"Do they treat slaves like ladies in your land too?" -

-

-Melkart calmly drank his watered wine. "As I said, my lord, I'm a common -herdsman. I have no right to look down on anyone." -

-

-"My, how admirable you are, Melkart," Eryx said. "Big and handsome as a -god, and yet you still know your place. I wish all my subjects had your -deferential attitude. But you must be hungry. Churinas." -

-

-The steward tapped his cane again. The dancers left. The orchestra played -on, low and subdued so not to interfere with conversation. Sterling silver -salvers were brought out by slaves, loaded down with a whole roast goat, -wild boar meat in pomegranate sauce, and charred, massive beef chunks. -Melkart reached out with his long spoon and ate heavily. -

-

-"Make sure our guest has more wine, Churinas. It's the finest Falernian." -

-

-The steward refilled Melkart's krater. Iole added water without being told. -Antagones reached out to grab her as she passed, but Iole neatly -sidestepped him. Melkart frowned. -

-

-"Melkart, that herd of yours. How many head have you got? I mean, just as a -guess," Eryx said. -

-

-"I know every cow, my lord, all three hundred and twelve, from Serapis, the -guide bull, to the newest calf." -

-

-"Why wouldn't you? After all, they're your only companions." -

-

-"Quiet, Antagones. I'm talking business. What would you say if I offered a -gold talent for an even hundred?" -

-

-Melkart gave Eryx a puzzled look. "My lord, I'm under a bond and must -deliver these cattle to my master, Toqeph, Lord of Byblos and Tyre. I -either bring the cattle to him or die." -

-

-Eryx leaned close to Melkart. He spoke in a low, level tone, his manner -confidential, an older man imparting sound, hard earned wisdom to a younger -one. -

-

-"That's far from here. You'll probably lose that many cattle or more by the -time you get there. Toqeph has no way of knowing if you leave some behind. -I'll make you a rich man for life." -

-

-"What's wrong with you, Melkart? Are you such a stupid paganus you can't -see a lifetime's opportunity?" -

-

-"I said I'd handle this, Phobis. Melkart, I know you're not just strong, -but you've got a good head on your shoulders too. All I ask is less than a -third of your herd and I'm willing to pay far more than they're worth. Why -do you object?" -

-

-Melkart smiled ruefully. "Because they're not mine to sell. If you don't -mind my asking, my lord, why do you want these cattle so much? I saw any -number of fat milch cows on the way here. Aren't they enough?" -

-

-Voluble until now, Eryx suddenly turned reticent. He broke eye contact, -hemmed and hawed. -

-

-"Well, you see, we've had some difficulties of late. The pagani have -complained about stillborn, two headed foals this spring, although it's -really no more than usual. And the haruspices have pointed out a few ill -omens lately, birds flying at dawn from the northeast quadrant, snakes -writhing in a heap where three roads cross, that sort of thing. They've -consulted the libri ostentaria, but-" -

-

-"For Laran's sake, Pater, get to the point," Antagones said. "There's a -fire breathing, giant monster named Cacus that rampages at night, and he -kills and eats women and children." -

-

-"We need those cattle to make a sacrifice to appease Tin so he'll go away," -Phobis said, angry as his brother. -

-

-"A hecatomb is the appropriate ritual for this situation," Eryx said. "So -you see logic and profit only dictate one result." -

-

-"But, my lord, why does Cacus harry Volturmna? Surely some terrible sin -against the gods must have occurred. Why else would a monster be sent to -murder women and children?" -

-

-"You'll find as you grow older, Melkart, that the gods are often arbitrary. -I mean no disrespect, far from it, for am I not chief haruspex, but perhaps -some junior haruspex erred in his recital of the vesper services. Fate -often turns on seemingly little things like that." -

-

-"The important thing is, we need to get rid of Cacus. Now are you going to -sell those cattle or not?" Phobis said. -

-

-Melkart sipped from his krater. "I have a better idea. Why don't I go out -tomorrow to wherever this monster Cacus lives and just capture or kill him? -That will solve your problem without getting the cattle involved at all." -

-

-Phobis and Antagones burst into loud, derisive laughter. They rolled about -until they nearly fell from their couches. -

-

-"Kill or capture Cacus? Are you completely mad? He's five cubits high, as -broad as the Lion Gate, and he spits flames from his mouth. He'll eat you -alive," Antagones said. -

-

-"Then you'll have the whole herd and can sacrifice as many as you like. -Give me your solemn bond as my host, Lord Eryx, you'll let me and the herd -pass on if I bring Cacus back dead or alive." -

-

-Eryx reached over and slapped Melkart lightly on a rocklike thigh. -

-

-"By the Pantheon, I'll take you up on that offer. Cacus lurks on the -Colline Mount, two leagues from here." -

-

-"I'll need a strong horse then." -

-

-"And you shall have him, my best mount." -

-

-"I suppose you want guards to accompany you," Phobis said. "You can't -possibly take him on alone." -

-

-"No, you're right. I'll bring Kaleb." -

-

-Eryx and his sons stared at Melkart in mute incomprehension, stunned by his -nonchalance. Melkart set down his krater. He stood up and stretched long, -muscular arms. -

-

-"I should get some sleep if Cacus is such a hard nut to crack. And I need -to check on Kaleb and the herd anyway. So I'll bid you and your sons good -night, my lord." -

-

-He bowed and walked off. Antagones and Phobis stared daggers at him as he -left. -

-

-"Did you see how rude that paganus was?" Antagones hissed once Melkart was -out of earshot. "All those impertinent questions instead of just doing what -he's told." -

-

-"Really. Let's kill him tonight and take the cattle for ourselves. Big as -he is, a well-placed dagger in his sleep will lay him low." -

-

-"And what if you miss?" Eryx said. "No, what our foreign friend proposed -sounds eminently reasonable. Certainly he's no stranger to violence. He -either kills Cacus and rids us of a horrible scourge, or he dies and we have -his cattle to sell, trade, and sacrifice. By Tin, Cel, and Uni, why did I -sire two thoughtless hotheads? Now are you going to behave yourselves?" -

-

-He bellowed the last question. Still cowed by their overbearing father, -both young men nodded. Eryx laid back on his couch. -

-

-"That's better. Send the dancing girls back. This has been a long day. It's -about time we took our togas off." -

-

-Melkart found Kaleb and the herd fed and well. Kaleb stood with his front -paws on Melkart's shoulders and frantically licked his face. -

-

-"Easy, boy. We hunt tomorrow, just you and me." -

-

-He reentered Tarquinia and returned to the palace. Aside from loud, drunken -screams from the Hall of Couches, everyone else was in bed. The halls were -shrouded in darkness. Melkart went to his quarters alone by an oil lamp's -tiny light. When he entered the bedroom, he heard faint breathing. -

-

-Iole lay naked on the bed, a frightened, apprehensive look on her face. She -was beautiful, but her arms and legs were bruised. -

-

-"Churinas said I must lie with you." -

-

-Melkart set the oil lamp on a bronze tripod. He draped his lionskin over -the petite girl, bronze face graced by compassion. -

-

-"Be calm, Iole. I am Melkart. I take advantage of no one, slave or free." -

-

-She smiled radiantly. Melkart gently stroked her dirty hair. He removed his -tunic, blew out the lamp, lay next to Iole, and immediately went to sleep. -Happy for the first time in years, safe by the hulking stranger, Iole -cuddled next to his protective bulk and soon drifted off herself. - -

Iole woke Melkart before dawn. He put on his freshly clean kilt and washed -his face and beard in a pewter basin. Melkart broke his fast with porridge -in hot goat's milk and dried figs that Iole fetched him. Melkart ate the -large bowl of porridge to the last spoonful. -

-

-"You take good care of me." -

-

-Iole smiled again. She had a full set of even, regular, white teeth. -

-

-"A man your size needs to eat." -

-

-Melkart regarded Iole, curiosity alive in his black eyes. "You weren't born -a slave. You're too well bred." -

-

-Iole looked away. She wore Tragedy's mask. "No. I wasn't always a slave. -You'd better hurry. Phobis awaits you outside the Lion Gate." -

-

-"Hmm. That worm. What about Erisus and the other runt, Antonocles?" -

-

-Iole laughed outright to hear Melkart speak so of her lords and masters. -

-

-"It's Eryx and Antagones. They both had too much raw wine last night and -they're in bed, eating cabbage until their hangovers go away." -

-

-Melkart's booming laugh resounded. Iole stilled him with two white fingers -to his lips. -

-

-"Shhh. You'll wake everyone in Tarquinia. Your voice would shake Tin from -his throne in the sky." -

-

-Melkart nodded. "You're right, Iole. I shouldn't be rude. I won't keep -Photis waiting." -

-

-Iole giggled, liquid, tinkling silver. "It's Phobis." -

-

-"Barbar barbar. Who cares what his name is. I want to see this terrible -monster. Take care, Iole. Astarte keep you. I'll see you before twilight." -

-

-"Be careful. Cacus is an awful monster. Every night, he breaks into some -poor paganus's hut to steal a child or a woman for his dinner." -

-

-"We'll see about that. I'm not a child or a woman. I'll bring him back, -either whole or just his head if he gets difficult." -

-

-Melkart stood up. He tied his lionskin around his waist and gathered his -arms. With enormous strides, Melkart went to the Lion Gate. The guards -bowed low with newfound respect as he passed through, awed any man would -even think to take on the dreaded Cacus alone. Wrapped in a scarlet cloak -against the early morning spring cold, Phobis paced back and forth outside -the walls. The cloak's edges waved in the stiff wind. Four grooms struggled -to hold a giant, saddled black stallion. -

-

-"There you are," said Phobis, "I'm not used to waiting on some paganus. It's supposed to -be the other way around. I hope that whore Iole was to your satisfaction -last night. She's the last woman you'll ever lie with. Are you ready to be -eaten? Let's see you even mount Lupu. He won't let anyone but my Pater on -him." -

-

-A head taller than Phobis, Melkart smiled tolerantly. "Even for a -barbarian, you're rude and ill-bred. I'll buy Iole from your father upon my -return and manumit her. As for this poor horse, you don't know how to treat -him, just like human beings." -

-

-Melkart slowly approached Lupu. He let the horse smell him, grow accustomed -to his presence. -

-

-"Let him go." -

-

-"He'll bolt," a groom protested. -

-

-"He won't. Let him loose." -

-

-The grooms released the horse and hurriedly backed away. Melkart put his -hands out, palms upward. He made gentle clicking sounds. To everyone's -astonishment, rather than bolt or trample him, Lupu nuzzled Melkart with -his huge head. Melkart embraced the horse, stroked his mane, thick and -black as his own dark hair. Right hand on the saddle, Melkart vaulted onto -Lupu. The powerful stallion took his weight without complaint. -

-

-"I'll need a rope." -

-

-"What for?" -

-

-"To bind the monster." -

-

-Phobis laughed. "There's no end to your hubris, is there?" -

-

-"Just give me a rope." -

-

-"All right. Guard. Fetch a rope from the stable." -

-

-A guard hurried inside the walls and soon returned with a coiled hempen -rope. Melkart tied the rope to the saddle. -

-

-"You said you wanted your dog," Phobis said. "He's still inside the stock -pen. The vicious beast won't let anyone near him." -

-

-"He won't let barbarians approach." Melkart put two fingers to his mouth -and emitted a shrill, loud whistle. -

-

-An answering chorus of barks and yelps. The tread of swift paws. Kaleb -leapt over the gates of the pen with a soaring bound, eye whites prominent as -he ran toward his master. He rested his front paws on Melkart's right foot -and licked his outstretched hand. -

-

-"How touching. Cacus lives in a cave halfway up the Colline Mount. Just -follow the rising sun for two leagues. You can't miss the mountain. There's -a trail of bones and skulls up the slope. I bet my half of the kingdom you -and your dog just ride on. We'll feast well off your herd." -

-

-"Lucky for you I want no part of your kingdom. You and your brother are -both barbarians and fools. I'll return before twilight." -

-

-Melkart put his heels to Lupu's flanks. The horse loped away. Kaleb easily -kept pace. He barked with delight at being with Melkart. They galloped -toward the ascending sun as the red orb gained in size and power. Melkart -sat astride the charging horse, great bow slung over one shoulder, armed -and ready. -

-

-The landscape gently flowed and ebbed, verdant, sloping fields and olive -groves edged by hills, like the folds of a carelessly dropped green cloak. -Farmhouses, barns, and stables stood empty. Panicked local pagani had -hurriedly packed up their families, rounded up their livestock, and fled -from Cacus long ago. Melkart slowed Lupu to a steady, brisk trot. Bright -blue birds flitted among neglected wheat fields in an endless, circling -harvest of rust colored dragonflies. A brown hare dashed across the road. -Kaleb let out a deep, throaty yelp and lunged after him. -

-

-"Kaleb." -

-

-Shamefaced under his master's stern gaze, Kaleb returned to the road and -followed Lupu. The road steadily ascended. Open fields and farmsteads gave -way to a thick beech tree forest that yielded in turn a band of spiny -needled pines. The air grew cold. Melkart put his lionskin over his -shoulders. Trees slowly gave way to barren, oddly shaped, sandy cones, like -the stone tents of some primordial tribe, long dead for eons. Above the -conical hills, the Colline Mount rose high into the clouds. -

-

-Melkart stopped and chopped a dead pine down with his short sword. He tied -the tree with rope to the saddle, mounted up, and urged Lupu onward. -Gentled by Melkart's kindness, Lupu willingly pulled the extra load. The -tree's brown needles hissed over stones as the horse dragged it upward. -

-

-The path wound through the strange conical hills. A long, yellow femur lay -on the path, picked clean by kites and buzzards. Kaleb paused to sniff at -the bone, but Melkart hissed at him to follow. Other bones lay on the path. -They became more frequent as they ascended. In his greedy haste to devour -his prey, Cacus had gnawed and torn at their bodies as he hurried to his -lair, only to heedlessly toss half finished remains away. Ribcages littered -the way, a child's small skull with a patch of long haired scalp, long -bones snapped in two to suck out the raw marrow. -

-

-They reached the base of Colline Mount. The mountain's colossal, bare gray -stones towered high above them. Scattered bones lay at irregular intervals -on the winding path to a small plateau halfway up the slope. There was a -jagged black hole, a cave's mouth. Bones and skulls littered the grassy -plateau. -

-

-Melkart dismounted. He stroked Lupu's mane and blew in his ear. -

-

-"Wait here. Be quiet like a good boy." -

-

-Melkart untied the rope and picked up the tree. He headed toward the cave, -Kaleb behind him, both silent as they made their way up the stony path. -Melkart held the dead pine high, careful not to brush against any stones. -At the plateau's edge, he ducked low. Kaleb crouched, ears cocked back, -snout flared, long fangs bared. He let out a growl, but Melkart hushed him. -

-

-There was an enormous, guttural roar, a sucking gasp like a desperate, last -attempt to breathe, only to be followed by another spasm, louder and more -stertorous than the one before. Sated by his latest feast of raw human -meat, Cacus lay in his primitive lair and snored, insensate after his -gluttonous orgy. -

-

-Melkart took out a flint and iron from his bag. He turned his back to -shield them from the light wind and struck the flint against the iron, -deftly and repeatedly. A shower of bright sparks soon ignited the pine's -bone dry needles. Pitch saturated branches caught fire also. Thick, gray -black smoke burgeoned from the tree. Melkart picked the burning pine up by -the trunk and deftly hurled it into the cave. -

-

-The snores continued while smoke poured from the cave's mouth. They -suddenly ceased. -

-

-"AAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE." -

-

-An awful scream, worse than any Melkart had ever heard from a wounded beast -or man, a cry of pain mingled with livid outrage that anyone could commit -such a foul act. The flaming tree shot out of the cave. -

-

-"Down, Kaleb." -

-

-Melkart and his dog flattened themselves beneath the plateau's edge. A -giant, naked monster ran out from the cave. More beast than man, hairy to -the point of shagginess, he bared long fangs in a hideous face and -let loose with a fiery blast, a torrent of flames that reduced everything -in its path to blackened cinders. -

-

-The fire passed harmlessly over their heads. Momentarily drained, Cacus -gasped for air. Melkart rose to his feet. An arrow already nocked, he drew -back the bowstring and fired so swiftly and smoothly as to be almost -instantaneous. A goosefeather-fletched shaft sailed straight and true. The -sharp iron arrowhead landed in Cacus's left shoulder. -

-

-"UUUUNNNNGGGGHHH." -

-

-Cacus reached up and yanked the arrow out with a gout of blood and tissue. -He angrily threw the arrow down, but Kaleb had raced across the plateau by -leaps and bounds and was already upon him. The black hound yapped and -snarled at Cacus while he tore at the giant's calves and ankles. Cacus drew -back his right leg. He sent Kaleb flying with a ferocious kick. Kaleb hit -the ground hard. Not even fazed, the dog leapt up and furiously sped toward -Cacus, eager to rejoin the fray. -

-

-Before Kaleb could attack Cacus once again, Melkart ran up to the monster. -Cacus punched at Melkart, wild, roundhouse swings that would have surely -killed him if they landed, but Melkart smoothly dodged his blows. He landed -a hard left fist in Cacus's stomach. The buffet doubled the giant over, head -thrown back from the blow's force, chin wide open, an easy target. -

-

-Melkart brought his right fist up from the waist and landed an uppercut -square on the point of Cacus's chin. Cacus landed flat on his back from the -blow, a dazed look in his feral eyes. Kaleb grabbed Cacus by the throat and -pinned him. Melkart picked up a large stone and fell on Cacus as well. They -thrashed about in a confused, brawling mess. Melkart and Kaleb worked -together to harry Cacus into submission. Melkart belabored Cacus about the -head with the sharp stone until his thick brown locks were soaked with -blood. Cacus kicked and threw himself about all the while. Desperate to -bite his attackers, he ferociously gnashed his fanged teeth. -

-

-Melkart raised the rock high. He brought it down hard. There was a loud -crack. Cacus lay still, mouth slack, eyelids closed, finally knocked -unconscious. Shaking, Melkart and Kaleb rose, staggered away from Cacus, -and fell to the ground. Man and dog gasped for air, spent by their grueling -effort. -

-

-Melkart sat up, then got to his feet. He took the rope, went to Cacus, and -tied him from head to foot with triple knotted bonds. When he was sure the -monster was securely restrained, Melkart cut a short piece of rope and -gagged Cacus tightly. He searched Cacus's smoky lair and found a crude -wooden table where the monster had his vile repasts. Melkart dragged the -table outside and broke it up into planks with his bare hands. With other -short lengths of rope, he fashioned a travois with his lionskin as a cover. -

-

-Melkart manhandled Cacus onto the travois. Although big, Cacus wasn't quite -as tall as Antagones had claimed. Melkart dragged the travois down the -slope to where Lupu awaited. Lupu snorted and grew restive at the sight and -smell of Cacus, but made no move to bolt. Melkart backed him up to the -travois and secured the two long planks to the saddle with the last of the -rope. -

-

-"Come on, boy. Pull. Get up." -

-

-Lupu dragged the travois down the path. Melkart followed behind. He lifted -the travois over large stones and helped the horse pull through rough -patches. They made slow but continuous progress. The sun was still just -short of its zenith when they left the forest and reached the relatively -level Volturmnine plain. Melkart halted Lupu at the first farm he -encountered. He untied the travois, set it down, and checked Cacus. The -monster was still insensate, his breathing ragged but steady. -

-

-"Watch him, Kaleb." -

-

-Melkart ran to the barn and returned pulling a two wheeled cart by the -shafts. -

-

-"Now we'll make real progress. Back up, Lupu." -

-

-Melkart harnessed Lupu to the shafts. He picked Cacus up, draped the giant -over his shoulder, and dumped him into the cart with one terrific heave. -The cart groaned under Cacus's weight, but was sturdy enough to hold him. -His burden now sharply reduced, Lupu willingly pulled the cart. The -ungreased axle creaked and whined, but the road to Tarquinia was well paved -and smooth. Melkart urged Lupu on. The horse trotted down the road. Melkart -and Kaleb easily kept pace. -

-

-A broad stream was crossed by a narrow crescent shaped bridge. As the cart -rattled over the stone bridge, two swineherds herded their pigs toward the -stream to water on the opposite bank. -

-

-"Ohe, giant. What's in the cart? A wild ox you killed?" the older one -cried, grizzled face alive with curiosity. -

-

-"Cacus." -

-

-The swineherd dropped his crook, few teeth stark in an open, gaping mouth. -

-

-"The monster. You mean to say you've saved us?" -

-

-Melkart only hurried on with the cart. The swineherd picked up his crook. -He turned to his young son. -

-

-"Metie, lad. Run and tell everyone the news. I'll mind the pigs. Hurry." -

-

-Metie ran off. The good tidings soon spread far and wide. Sturdy tillers of -the soil cast their plows aside and left oxen untended in the fields to run -toward the road with their wives and children to catch a glimpse of Melkart -and his captive. People flocked to both sides of the road. Unbidden, they -followed the cart, laughing and singing. The air was filled with hosannas -and hallelujahs as hymns of praise were sung. A young girl ran up to -Melkart with a quickly fashioned laurel wreath, the traditional victor's -tribute. Melkart graciously paused to don the wreath. The pagani wildly -cheered and raised their right hands in the two fingered sign of blessing. -

-

Word had spread to Tarquinia long before Melkart's arrival a little before -twilight. Eryx stood before the Lion Gate with Antagones and Phobis, -attired in regal robes, the gods' attire, the toga imperatoria, blue and -adorned with a golden sun, moon, and stars. They wore golden radiate crowns -and were accompanied by guards in burnished bronze cuirasses. Eryx's open -delight seemed unfeigned. -

-

-"Greetings, Melkart. You're indeed a man of your word. What you set out to -do, you accomplish. Here's Cacus, scourge of Volturmna, feared by all, -brought before us a bound captive. My sons, here's a hero to emulate." -

-

-"I see you brought most of the countryside along too," Phobis said. "Clear -out," he shouted. "Get back to your hovels, pagani." -

-

-"Guards," Antagones said. "See them off." -

-

-The guard formed ranks, raised their shields, and reversed spears. They -drove the pagani away from Tarquinia with wooden shafts. Melkart watched, -but said nothing. -

-

-"As you said, Lord Eryx, I've kept my promise. I'll set out with the herd -tomorrow. I thank you once again for your hospitality. All I ask of you for -my service is one favor." -

-

-Eryx laughed. -

-

-"Friend Melkart, what's your hurry? A hero deserves thanks for his feat; -the deliverer must have his homage. A great feast is being prepared. Can't -you smell the sides of beef and wild boar roasting? That and the finest -Opimian and Falernian await, along with new robes, a soft, comfortable -couch, and dancing girls. You can't deny me. We can talk about business and -anything else you like in the Hall of Couches. Any boon you seek, rest -assured I'll grant it, but only at the banquet, where kindness and -hospitality rule. Please don't refuse." -

-

-Melkart smiled. "I would never refuse a banquet. But what about Cacus? He -needs watching." -

-

-"Don't worry about the monster," Phobis said. "We've got plans for him." -

-

-"He'll be in good hands, I can assure you," Eryx said. "The guards will -look after him. You must be tired and dirty. Bathe in your quarters. Iole, -the slave girl you like, will attend you. Rest. You're my guest." -

-

-Lupu was unharnessed. Guards pulled the cart inside the city walls to -confine Cacus in an earthen cell for sacrificial victims, deep underneath -the temple. Melkart brushed Lupu down in his stall and fed him a double -ration of oats. He had the palace cook give Kaleb a thick, red slab of raw -beef and left the dog to happily devour it in the kitchen. Melkart went to -the livestock pens to check on the cattle, did a careful head count, and was -satisfied to find none missing. A slave led him to his quarters. Iole -awaited, clad in a new, white linen tunica with a blue, glass bead -necklace. She bowed low to Melkart, her smile wide, open, honest. -

-

-"Lord Melkart. You've returned as you vowed with Cacus subdued. You're -greater than any man in the valley." -

-

-Melkart gently embraced Iole and kissed her lightly. "None of this 'Lord' -business, girl. Plain Melkart will do. Now I want my bath." -

-

-He lifted her up and spun her around in the air. She squealed with delight. -Melkart set Iole down. He stripped and got into the shallow tub. Iole -bathed him once again with hot water and olive oil, only this time -joyfully, happy to scrub and pamper Melkart. -

-

-"I see you've put on your finest. Is that for my benefit?" -

-

-"The Rex has ordered a festival. Everyone in the household has been given -new clothes to wear for tomorrow's celebration." -

-

-Melkart got out of the tub. Iole stood on tiptoes to drape a towel over his -broad shoulders. -

-

-"New clothes suit you well, Iole." -

-

-Iole shot a fearful glance toward the entryway. Reassured no one spied on -them, she stood close and whispered conspiratorially. -

-

-"Be on your guard. Eryx and his sons are treacherous. Be wary at the -banquet. Watch what you eat and drink. Phobis is a master poisoner. They'll -stop at nothing to have their way." -

-

-Melkart smiled. Teeth and the whites of his eyes flashed brilliantly in the -gathering twilight. -

-

-"Don't worry about Erisus." -

-

-"It's Eryx." -

-

-"Barbar." -

-

-Iole giggled, but put her hand over her mouth. -

-

-"Won't you please be serious? You're impossible." -

-

-"Never mind that puffed up hill chieftain and his two nasty brats. Even if -I don't say their barbarian names right, I can still eat them alive." -

-

-"I know you're big and strong, but please be careful, Melkart. I'm begging -you." -

-

-Her pleas cut him like the tears that streamed down her face. Melkart dried -her eyes with a toga hem and gently stroked her hair. -

-

-"Don't worry, Iole. I'll be on my guard. I swear by Marduk Sky Father. I -can't make a more solemn oath than that." -

-

-Iole favored Melkart with a weak smile. She pulled herself together and -became her usual businesslike self again. -

-

-"You should get dressed. He'll be expecting you." -

-

-"Who?" -

-

-"You know. Erisus." -

-

-They both laughed. Melkart put on a loincloth and pulled on another clean, -white wool tunic. Iole helped him don the toga, white like the previous -one, but with a brilliant, thin purple stripe along the edge. -

-

-"It's a special mark of honor." -

-

-"I still say it's a damned nuisance." -

-

-Churinas entered. "Lord Melkart, the Rex awaits. Stupid, inattentive girl. -Why didn't you fetch the Lord to the Hall of Couches?" -

-

-He raised his hand to strike Iole, but Melkart grabbed him by the wrist. -

-

-"I don't like you, Churinas. Get out, you obsequious weasel." -

-

-He turned Churinas by his wrist and kicked him hard. Churinas -hurriedly fled. -

-

-"You shouldn't have done that. He's very powerful." -

-

-"He's a toady. From tomorrow, you'll have nothing to fear from him or -anyone else." -

-

-"You'd better go to the Hall before Churinas tells some story about you." -

-

-Iole picked up an oil lamp to lead Melkart to the Hall of Couches, but -Melkart took it from her. -

-

-"Stay here instead. I know the way well enough. I've seen what Circean -swine they become once they drink unwatered wine. I don't want you exposed -to that. I'm going to have Eryx manumit you, set you free. Then you can -either stay here or come with me, your choice." -

-

-Iole cried out with joy and delight. She ran to Melkart and hugged him, -then backed away to straighten his toga folds. -

-

-"Melkart, I'll follow you to the Hesperides and beyond. I'm your slave." -

-

-Melkart bent low and kissed Iole on the forehead. "No, girl. You'll never -be a slave again." -

-

-He walked down the stairs and took the corridor to the Hall of Couches. -Melkart walked into a confused, chaotic scene. The orchestra was in full -swing, a strange, barbarous piece, with odd beats and wailing horns. Dancing -girls swayed about the hall stark naked but for brilliant blue and green -cloaks. They formed a lurching, lewd saraband, eyes wide and blank on some -strange herb, with occasional pauses for varied concupiscent combinations. -The air was thick with burning myrrh's sharp scent. Eryx and his sons lay -on their couches in their regal robes, heads undraped, instead adorned with -the golden radiate crowns. They were already quite drunk, faces split by -wide, complacent smiles. -

-

-"The guest of honor," Eryx shouted. "We've been waiting for you. Where've -you been? Did you use Iole again? You should. You deserve it. And a whole -lot more. Come lie on the couch of honor." -

-

-"Yes. You're really a good fellow after all," Phobis said. "You did us an -important favor. I'm sorry I was rude. Please take your place as our -honored guest." -

-

-His words plainly rehearsed beforehand, Phobis bared rabbit teeth in a -smile, but his eyes still radiated hate. Melkart smiled in turn and lay on -his couch. He was about to drape the edge of his toga over his head when -Eryx restrained his hand. -

-

-"We hold celestial court tonight, just like Tin in the heavens. What better -way to treat a hero, surely the son of some god? You needn't cover your -head tonight. Instead, wear the victor's due, Apulu's crown." -

-

-A handsome young boy handed Melkart a crown of golden laurel leaves, -cunningly fashioned by master smiths. Melkart donned the crown. Yellow -leaves' sharp tips faintly pricked his temples. He put his right hand to -his heart, and bowed his head. -

-

-"Again, my lord, you honor me more than I deserve." -

-

-"Nonsense. Now that you're here, let's eat." -

-

-Food in ridiculous quantities was served, plainly cherished delicacies to -Eryx and his sons, but mostly barbarian dishes not to Melkart's taste, -boiled sow's belly smothered in rancid fish sauce, roast dormice on -skewers, and whole, tiny birds plucked featherless, rolled in bread crumbs, -and deep fried in olive oil. The dancers continued their lascivious antics. -They gave Melkart many long, sighing gazes, open invitations to rut he -coolly disregarded. -

-

-"Try some chilled Opimian. It's what I'm drinking. Fill my krater too, -slave." -

-

-A slave poured wine from a pot bellied psykter, previously placed inside a -snow packed hydria to chill. Melkart waited for Eryx to drink first. He -sipped the cold, unwatered wine and fought to hold back a grimace. The -bitter red wine was incredibly strong. He beckoned for a slave to add -water. He closely watched Eryx and his sons and was careful to eat only -from dishes they had already tasted. The golden laurel crown sat -uncomfortably on his head, scratched and itched his scalp. -

-

-The hall seemed to shrink around him; the incense smell grew overpowering. -The orchestra's frantic music irritated Melkart's usually sanguine -disposition. He found his attention straying as his mind wandered into -emptiness. Melkart shook his head and looked around him. Antagones loudly -laughed. -

-

-"Is a sip of Opimian enough to make you drunk, Melkart?" -

-

-"An overgrown paganus like Melkart needs some red meat to bring him round," -Phobis said. "Isn't that right, Pater? Don't you think it's time we had -them bring out the centerpiece?" -

-

-Eryx considered briefly. "Yes, this does seem auspicious. Melkart, we want -to honor you for bringing in the monster who terrified the valley for so -long-" -

-

-"Oh, come on, Pater, stop blathering. I'm hungry," Antagones said. -

-

-Eryx smiled indulgently. "Ah, the impatience of youth. Wait until they -reach man's estate, eh, Melkart? But without further ado, in your honor, a -traditional Rasennan dish." -

-

-Churinas sharply clapped his hands three times. Four muscular slaves -carried in a small litter, weighed down by a heavy burden concealed under a -red cloth. The slaves set the litter down on the table before Melkart and -bowed low. Three departed while the remaining slave put a hand to the cloth -and looked toward his master. Eryx nodded approval. The slave snatched the -cloth away. -

-

-Serapis's severed head sat on a massive silver salver, skinned, roasted, -and coated in aspic, a yellow quince in his mouth and bronze bells on the -horns' tips. Melkart's eyes went wide. Teeth bared in an awful snarl, he -leapt to his feet. -

-

-"You break the rules of hospitality, slaughter Serapis, and insult me, your -guest? I'll kill every single one of you and your servants this night." -

-

-Melkart reached for the slave who turned to flee just a moment too late. He -snatched the slave up with both hands, held him high over his head, and -threw him. The slave sailed through the air only to crash full into -Antagones's chest, a blow that knocked the princeling flat to the floor and -left him gasping. -

-

-Melkart turned a couch over and ripped off a leg for use as an impromptu -club. He brandished it high in a blood fury, only to have the strength in -his legs go out from under him. Melkart swayed back and forth. The hall -reeled around him. His hands went to his sides. The club fell harmlessly to -the floor. Distorted faces swam into view. Eryx and Phobis leered as they -drank wine and laughed at his plight. -

-

-"I can't believe he's still on his feet. How much adder venom did you put -on the wreath?" -

-

-"Pater, I know what I'm doing. It's just this paganus is so damn large. -Maybe he needs a little help. This should do it." -

-

-Phobis reached out and shoved Melkart hard. He crashed to the floor -unconscious. Golden leaves cut his skin. Thin trails of red blood trickled -down his face onto the porphyry floor. -

- -

Melkart came to with a splitting headache. He was in a subterranean cell, -chained by the neck to a stone wall. The cell had a small open window, set -high in the outer wall with a single iron bar to prevent escape. A faint, -ghostly column of moonbeam provided scant light. Melkart looked around the -cell. What appeared to be a pile of rags in a corner suddenly stirred. A -battered, honest face reared up from the pile. -

-

-"So you woke up. Now I'll have some company, that is, at least until they -come for us." -

-

-"Where are we?" -

-

-"Under the guard house, just by the gate. Don't bother to shout. They -ignore you. I can't count how many times I passed this place without a -care, headed toward the forum to do some business, never knowing I'd end up -here just for obeying that whoreson Aule." -

-

-"What's your name?" -

-

-"I'm Thresu of the Luceres. I saw you with your herd when you entered the -valley. Aule the headman told me to run to Tarquinia and let them know. I -stuck around, hoping for a copper as a reward, and do you know what -happened? That rotten bastard Churinas slapped my face. Then he had the -guards beat me and put me here." -

-

-"They're vicious even for barbarians." -

-

-Thresu got up, pulled his torn tunic around him, and sat next to Melkart. -

-

-"I have to agree, even though they're my own people. Now we're both for it, -once Thesan streaks the sky." -

-

-"What's going to happen?" -

-

-"We're both to be put to death in the morning before the altar as human -sacrifices to Tin. I'll just have my throat cut since I'm only a paganus, -but they're going to make you fight that monster Cacus and then kill -whoever wins. Then they'll sacrifice all your cattle in a triple hecatomb." -

-

-"And how do you know this, trapped in this cell?" -

-

-"Guards told me when they dragged you in and chained you. Said how much -they're looking forward to seeing me get it, the miserable swine." -

-

-Melkart silently mulled over Thresu's words. -

-

-"I understand these evil men mean us harm, Thresu, but what's the point of -all this? If they want me dead and to have my cattle, why not just kill me -when they drugged me unconscious? The same for Cacus. Why risk letting him -loose?" -

-

-"Eryx is desperate to escape Tin's curse. He thinks if he makes enough -offerings, Tin will forgive him and let him sacrifice in the temple again." -

-

-"Why did the god curse him?" -

-

-"He murdered his brother Evandrus the Rex at sacrifice, in the temple -before Tin's image, so he could become Rex. In his death agony, Tin spoke -through Evandrus. He cursed Eryx and all of Volturmna and sent Cacus to -torment us for the blood guilt of Evandrus." -

-

-Melkart's scowl was visible even in near darkness. "Fratricide before the -Sky Father himself? Blasphemy. Anathema. Is there no end to the infamy -here?" -

-

-Thresu shook his head. "They're Kharun's children, the lot of them. Eryx -took his own niece, Iole, after he murdered her pater and made her a slave, -turned her over to the guards to break her in." -

-

-"By the gods, such vile crimes can't go unpunished. I made an oath this -night to slaughter Eryx and his foul brood. As you are my witness, Thresu, -before the sun sets on the morrow, I'll fulfill that vow." -

-

-Thresu laughed, then clapped both hands over his mouth. "I'm sorry, friend, -but we're trapped down here. There's no way to escape. You're chained up. -You might as well face it. Come the dawn, you and I will go under Kharun's -hook." -

-

-"We'll see about that. I'm starting to feel more like my usual self." -

-

-Melkart got to his feet. He grabbed the chain with both hands and gave an -exploratory pull. -

-

-"You'll never budge it. It's bolted to the wall." -

-

-"Probably at least a century ago. Let me brace myself." -

-

-Melkart stood close to the wall, braced his feet against it, and pulled on -the chain. Veins bulged forth on his arms, chest, and neck. There was an -audible groan from the wall. Melkart paused to catch his breath. -

-

-"Cel's bones, you're strong. What do they feed you in your country, whole -cows?" -

-

-Melkart chuckled. He put his feet to the wall again, took in a deep breath, -and exhaled heavily while he pulled even harder than before. A metallic -shriek of protest and the four bolts gave way. The plate that bolted the -chain to the wall came loose. -

-

-"All right, Melkart. Good work there. You're still trapped in this cell." -

-

-"You're right, Thresu. But you won't be, not for long, now I can move -around." -

-

-A wild light came into Thresu's moonlit eyes, the hint of hope, of life -continued. -

-

-"What do you mean, friend Melkart?" -

-

-"I'm too big to fit through that window, but you're the right size. Do you -think you'd have much trouble scaling the wall?" -

-

-"No problem at all. I've done it before. The guards are dead lazy. They -never keep their rounds. But what about the bar?" -

-

-"It looks about as old as these bolts." -

-

-Melkart reached up and pulled on the bar, rocked it back and forth. Old -lime and weather-frayed brick cracked, split, and at last gave way. With -one convulsive heave, the bar broke loose. -

-

-"You're a wonder." -

-

-"Concentrate on what's important, Thresu. When you're over the wall, tell -your tribe and the others in Volturmna. Their day of liberation from the -usurper and tyrant Eryx is at hand. You'll all attend the morrow's -sacrifice, summoned by the Rex?" -

-

-Thresu nodded. "Every paganus for two leagues around must come." -

-

-"And the men have sickles and knives they can conceal in their robes." -

-

-Thresu frowned. "Aye, like all farmers, but they're cowards. They grumble -about Eryx and his crimes and harsh taxes, but no one dares raise a finger -against him. I can't say I blame them. His guards have cuirasses and -helmets, spears and swords. All we have are farm tools." -

-

-"That's enough if you add courage, Thresu. You and your tribesmen outnumber -the guard greatly. You yourself said they're lazy and undisciplined. Tell -the men Melkart stands with them. I myself will deal with Eryx and his -sons. The guards should put up little fight after that." -

-

-"So you'll just stay here. They'll be angry when they find out I've -escaped." -

-

-Melkart shrugged massive shoulders. "What are they going to do? Put me to -death? Get going, Thresu." -

-

-Thresu smiled. "Better than staying here. I give you my vow, I'll spread -the word." -

-

-"Good man. Here, I'll give you a boost." -

-

-Melkart bent low and cupped his hands. Thresu stepped into the stirrup and -with one bound wriggled his thin frame through the narrow window and was -outside. Melkart bent low and searched with his hands on the filthy -cobblestones until he found the rusty bolts and the plate. He carefully -replaced the plate and bolts in the wall, heaped straw against the plate, -and settled himself against the wall. Melkart closed his eyes, thought of -green fields and clear, blue streams, and was soon asleep. - -

-Long before the dawn's advent, pagani in their best white togas trekked -toward Tarquinia on paved roads or narrow paths known only to their vicus, -families with them. Rich pagani traveled in two wheeled carts pulled by -sullen donkeys; poor families went on foot. The Lion Gate stood open. The -press of pagani was so great, the guards simply waved them through rather -than search everyone. Thresu bent low, concealed himself in a group of much -bigger men, and sneaked in. Pagani solemnly washed their arms and heads at -the marble fountain that burbled outside the temple's sacred boundary. Holy -ablutions performed, they draped togas over their heads and took their -places on the half moon of tiered granite seats before the terrace. -

-

-White smoke from burning myrrh and frankincense drifted up from the marble -altar set in the sunken terrace, six cubits deep. Eryx and his sons sat -upon bronze and ivory curule chairs on the terrace's opposite side, at the -foot of the temple stairs, the closest Eryx dared to approach the sacred -precinct. They still wore their celestial robes and radiate crowns. They -were attended by lictors and two white bearded haruspices, wizened faces -solemn under broad brimmed, high crowned straw hats. Each haruspex held a -strangely curved augural staff. Guards and courtiers formed an entourage, -including Churinas and Iole, in the back with the other slaves. Eryx waved -to the captain of the guard. -

-

-"Fetch the condemned man, Teitu." -

-

-Teitu bowed low, rose, about faced, and left. -

-

-Melkart heard Teitu shout as he came down the tunnel. "All right, you -foreign bastard, time to meet Kharun." -

-

-Teitu smacked his spear against the bars. -

-

-"Put up a fight, Molekart, and we'll spear you dead here and now. So come -along quietly.� -

-

-Melkart only regarded Teitu. The captain grinned broadly. -

-

-"Not so brave now you're a captive, eh? It doesn't take much to trim an -overgrown ape like you down to size. Unlock the door." -

-

-The guards nervously filed into the cell. -

-

-"Hey, where's the other one, the little paganus?" -

-

-"Look, the bar's missing from the window." -

-

-"He must have escaped last night." -

-

-"What do you know about this?" Teitu said. -

-

-"Why, nothing. I passed the time sleeping. Are you sure there was another -man? I don't remember one." -

-

-Teitu scowled. He raised his spear to strike Melkart with the butt, but -Melkart held up a warning finger. -

-

-"Remember, your master wants me in one piece." -

-

-Teitu lowered his spear. "We can find Thresu later and kill him. Here, Lar. -Take the key and release him. The rest of you, stand ready to spear him if -he acts up." -

-

-Iron key in hand, Lar bent low and undid Melkart's collar with trembling -fingers. Melkart massaged his chafed neck. -

-

-"There's eight of us here and a dozen more waiting outside, in armor with -swords and spears. No matter how strong you are, you can't outfight us all. -So show some common sense like you've done up till now and march like a -good fellow to the temple." -

-

-"Can I have breakfast first? I'm hungry." -

-

-Teitu roared with laughter. "Breakfast? How about a krater of Falernian -too? Condemned men don't get fed. You're going to be breakfast. The -monster's." -

-

-The guards all laughed. Melkart shrugged and got to his feet. They -instinctively flinched from his overpowering presence. Teitu shouted to -reassert his authority. -

-

-"Form a cordon around the condemned man. Forward march." -

-

-They walked up the tunnel that led outside. Melkart blinked, momentarily -stunned by day's unaccustomed harsh light. Teitu prodded him with his spear -butt. -

-

-"Keep moving, Molekart. Don't want to keep the Rex waiting, do we?" -

-

-The streets were deserted as before, only now because everyone was waiting -at the temple. The guards' hobnailed boots slapped hard on the flagstones -as they marched. -

-

-"What became of Kaleb?" -

-

-"You ask a lot of questions for a man who isn't long for this world. We -tried to spear the dog to death, but he was too quick. He jumped the -fence and ran off into the night." -

-

-"He's too smart for barbarians." -

-

-Teitu shoved Melkart onward. They came to the temple. Melkart walked up to -the sunken terrace's edge. He jumped down before Teitu could push him and -landed with easy grace in the soft sand. Eryx rose and held up his arms in -evocation. -

-

-"Behold the condemned foreigner who dared to question the ways of our -paters. For that he shall suffer Tin's justice." -

-

-Melkart's voice rang out, loud and clear as a war trumpet's cry. "A wonder -such words don't burn your mouth, sinner. I learned the truth about you. -You murdered the true Rex Evandrus, your own brother, while he made -sacrifice, and then enslaved his daughter, your own blood kin. Blasphemer. -Fratricide." -

-

-A loud murmur went up from the assembled pagani. Ugly rumors had long -circulated, but no one had publicly dared give voice to them until now. -Many nodded at Melkart's incendiary accusations and shot Eryx filthy, -hateful looks. Aware he was about to lose control of the situation, Eryx -cried out. -

-

-"Loose the monster. Let Tin take his justice out on this cursed liar -through him." -

-

-Teitu waved to a squad of guards. They turned a winch that raised a -portcullis set into the wall. Cacus ran out, hungry and in a rage after -being confined. The ravenous beast shook his great mane and looked all -about him. His eyes fixed on Melkart, first and worst of his tormentors. -Melkart smiled and waved. Cacus's hideous face contorted into an even more -repulsive mass of wrinkles and bulges as his eyes went red with fury. -

-

-An enormous bolt of flame shot forth from his mouth, larger than before, -the heat so intense it singed nearby spectators' hair. Just as Cacus let -loose with his fire blast, Melkart ducked behind the altar, which blocked -the bulk of the flames. The white marble was left permanently blackened. -Exhausted by the effort, Cacus's barrel chest heaved as he tried to regain -breath for another blast. -

-

-Melkart darted from behind the altar. Fast as fleet footed Akhilleous, he -dashed across the terrace and threw himself upon Cacus. They hit the yellow -sand with a deafening crash. Everyone watched enthralled, from the lowest -paganus to Eryx the Rex, eyes fixed unblinking as the two titans fought to -the death. Cacus sought to wrap tree trunk arms around Melkart in a fatal -embrace, but he grabbed the brute by the wrists in his own iron hard grasp. -

-

-Each struggled to overcome the other in a prolonged test of strength. Cacus -snapped ferociously with sharp fangs at Melkart's face. He deftly bobbed -and weaved his head, kept it away from the monster's maw. Little by little -though, human arms slowly gave way to inhuman, chthonic strength. Cacus -smiled in delight as he pulled Melkart closer, yellow eyes aflame with -piggy joy. -

-

-Loud barks and a nasty growl. A black form sailed through the air, launched -from the battlements above. Kaleb agilely landed on all fours and bounded -to his master's aid. He sank his teeth deep into the hamstrings of Cacus's -left leg. The monster screamed with pain. Distracted, he let Melkart go, -turned, and kicked Kaleb the length of the terrace. -

-

-"There's that damned black dog. He was hiding here the whole time," -Antagones cried. -

-

-"Aye, and now I'll fix him too," Phobis said. -

-

-A long javelin sailed through the air. Thrown hard and well aimed, the -javelin pierced Kaleb straight through his vitals. The dog expired without -a whimper, dead game to the bitter end. -

-

-"Now you'll pay," Melkart roared. -

-

-He threw a handful of sand and small rocks into Cacus's eyes. The monster -screamed with pain and tried to rub the grit from his eyes with his hands. -Melkart hurtled toward him. His feet drove into Cacus's unprotected -stomach, a double blow that left the monster dazed, sprawled, and prone. -Before Cacus could regain his breath, Melkart leapt onto the small of his -back with all his weight and force. He bent low and cupped his hands around -Cacus's jaw. Melkart pulled on Cacus's head with every last obol of -strength. -

-

-Cacus thrashed and emitted guttural moans. He bucked like a wild horse in a -desperate effort to free himself, but Melkart kept his footing and -continued to apply pressure. Veins protruded from Melkart's neck and arms -as his face turned red from the strain. Cacus's eyes swelled from their -sockets. A blood engorged, bloated, purple tongue jutted from his open -mouth. He struggled with his last remnant of vitality to survive, -desperately fierce, fighting to the last. -

-

-There was a loud, awful crack like a mighty oak's crash under a woodsman's -axe. Cacus thrashed once more, fouled himself, and lay still, dead at last. -Melkart got to his feet, but stood hunched over, gasping for breath. -

-

-Thresu shouted from amid the crowd. "My friend Melkart. Hail him. Ave. -Greet him as our Pater." -

-

-Cheers went up throughout the crowd. "Hail him," they cried. "Ave, Pater -Patriae, Father of Our Country." -

-

-The last greeting was traditionally reserved for the Rex. Eryx stamped his -foot, angrily shook a fist at the pagani, and turned to Teitu. -

-

-"Spear him down." -

-

-Teitu signaled for guards to throw their spears, but Melkart was already on -the move. He ran to Kaleb's carcass, snatched up the javelin, turned, and -threw it. -

-

-The javelin plunged into Antagones's stomach, all the way through. -Antagones looked down at the shaft buried in his guts. He turned to Eryx -and gave a piteous, small child's wail. -

-

-"Pater, see what the paganus did to me." -

-

-Antagones fell. He writhed in agony as his copious blood stained white -marble flagstones irreversibly red. Terrified, the haruspices hiked up -their tunics and ran for their lives. The lictors followed in a cowardly -funk. -

-

-"Here's our chance, men," Thresu said. "Rise up. Kill the blasphemers." -

-

-Thresu threw off his toga and pulled out a short, sharp knife. He jammed it -into a nearby guard's throat. Encouraged by his example, other pagani took -out knives and sickles and set upon the guards. Outnumbered and opposed by -armed, desperate, righteously indignant men, the mercenary guards were soon -overpowered and murdered. Courtiers panicked and fled, Churinas foremost -among them. Paralyzed by the sight of his dying son, Eryx was left with -Phobis and Teitu at the foot of the temple stairs. -

-

-"Lord Eryx, we must flee. I can't defend you alone." -

-

-"Pater. Stop staring at Antagones. You can't help him. You have to do -something. Let's run for it." -

-

-With one bound, Melkart leaped from the terrace and stood among them. Teitu -raised his sword and charged, but Melkart slammed a ham sized right fist to -his jaw in a devastating punch. Teitu's head snapped right. Shattered -teeth flew from his mouth in every direction. He fell unconscious. -

-

-Mind suddenly focused by imminent peril, Eryx held up his hands in a -placatory gesture. -

-

-"Melkart, wait. I admit I broke the rules of hospitality, but that's -nothing I can't make up. I'll give you a thousand cattle, why not two -thousand? I'll gather up every cow in the valley, never mind whose they -are-" -

-

-Frowning, Melkart grabbed Eryx by the scruff of the neck with one hand and -his back with the other. He hoisted the tyrant high overhead. Eryx's -toga and crown fell off. He dangled awkwardly in the air, fat, middle aged, -well past his prime. -

-

-"Melkart. No. I said we can negotiate-" -

-

-"Blasphemer. Fratricide. Suffer your just fate." -

-

-Melkart hurled Eryx upward. Eryx sped screaming toward the temple. -

-

-"NNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO." -

-

-Tin's grim statue loomed gray among dark shadows, full of menace, a certain -portent of Eryx's foreordained doom. Eryx landed inside the temple with a -hard thump. -

-

-"AAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE." -

-

-Eryx writhed on cold marble stones as if he lay on hot coals. Before -onlookers' appalled and awed eyes, he suffered all the tortures of the -damned in Tartarus. Invisible razors surgically flayed living skin from his -body as each hair was individually torn from his head, right down to the -eyebrows and beard. Nerve endings were stabbed with needles as capillaries -slowly wound around one another until they strangled themselves. Face -reduced almost to a skull, Eryx looked up with withering eyes at the idol -and begged for release from his misery. -

-

-Tin's statue gazed down upon this calvary and faintly smiled. From the -hypaethral opening in the temple's roof, there was a clink of terracotta -kraters, a lyre's ring, and booming laughter from celestial banquet -couches. Lightning flashed from the northwest out of a cloudless sky. -

-

-"Looks like Tin thinks you did right by the bastard," Thresu said. -

-

-Worked up by battle frenzy, eyes locked in a long distance stare on Eryx's -remains, Melkart suddenly noticed Thresu who'd been by his side for some -time. -

-

-"Friend Thresu. You're indeed a man of your word and rare courage too. What -happened to that bastard Photis?" -

-

-"It's Phobis. Rascne and Plesna have him. You didn't think we'd just let -him run away, do you?" -

-

-"Bring him here." -

-

-"Yes, friend Melkart." -

-

-Two husky pagani dragged Phobis over. He fought every step of the way. -

-

-"Unhand me, you dirty villains. I'm the rightful Rex now, your lord and -master." -

-

-"No," Melkart said. "You're a dog killer. Come here, you." -

-

-Melkart grabbed Phobis by the throat. He knelt down and balanced Phobis on -his right knee. -

-

-"Stop. What are you doing?" Phobis shrieked. -

-

-Melkart put his big hands on Phobis and brought them down. The princeling's -spine snapped in two. Melkart disdainfully threw Phobis to the marble where -he writhed in agony by his dead brother. -

-

-"Eheu, paganus," he moaned. "You've crippled me." -

-

-"Writhe like the worm you are. Grovel in the dust. Beg for bread and wine -for the rest of your life from those you once abused. Marduk's curse on -you. Get him from my sight." -

-

-Pagani carried Phobis away. -

-

-"Where is Iole, Thresu?" -

-

-"She fled with the rest of the court to the palace." -

-

-"Let's go there. Bring Eryx's crown and toga along." -

-

-Thresu hurried to keep pace with Melkart. Courtiers and servants were -gathered in the palace's small courtyard. Churinas and other high ranking -officials prostrated themselves when Melkart entered. -

-

-"Ave, Lord Melkart. We are your slaves," Churinas said. -

-

-"No, you're not. Get up and hand over your staff." -

-

-Trembling, reluctant, Churinas nonetheless handed Melkart his ivory staff. -Melkart scanned the crowd. Taller than everyone else, he quickly spotted -Iole. He held out his right hand in invitation. -

-

-"Please come forward, Iole." -

-

-The young woman stepped through the crowd. Adept at adjusting to new -circumstances, courtiers who'd once treated her contemptuously looked on -with newfound respect. She stood before Melkart, a smile on her face. -

-

-"I thought for sure you'd die today. Instead, you killed Cacus and Eryx -too. You've avenged my Pater, Evandrus. I owe you everything. I'm your -slave now, Melkart." -

-

-"I told you no, Iole. You're the Lady of Volturmna now." -

-

-Melkart draped the blue toga over Iole's slender shoulders. He held the -gold radiate crown over her head. -

-

-"Honor your liege lady, the rightful heiress to Volturmna, Iole, daughter -of Evandrus, restored to her lawful high station and rank." -

-

-Everyone prostrated themselves before Iole. Overcome by the sudden, wild -turn of events, Iole fought her emotions, but quickly mastered herself and -stood proud and tall like the aristocrat she was raised to be. The -courtiers rose and hailed her. -

-

-"Ave, Regina. Vivat Iole." -

-

-Melkart handed the ivory staff to Thresu. -

-

-"You're brave and honest, Thresu, and a loyal companion even when things -get difficult. You'll be a good chief steward. If you approve, my lady?" -

-

-Iole nodded. "Your recommendation is enough, Melkart. I know Thresu will -serve me well." -

-

-Thresu gasped. "From paganus to chief steward? Truly, Tin favors the bold. -Wait until I get a hold of Aule. I'll serve you faithfully to my dying day, -Lady Iole." -

-

-"Heed my commands then. Tell the haruspices to purify and re-sanctify the -temple and to burn Eryx's remains outside the city walls. Let Antagones be -buried in the potter's field outside the city walls with no stone or marker -so no one ever knows where he lies. Phobis may beg outside the city walls, -but may never again enter Tarquinia." -

-

-"Hail our royal mistress. Hear her justice, mercy, and wisdom," the -courtiers cried. -

-

-"Clear the regal bedchamber of Eryx's things. The sons' chambers too. Burn -everything that belonged to them." -

-

-"And what of Churinas?" Melkart asked. "He betrayed and tormented you. -Shall I snap his neck for you, my lady?" -

-

-The fat courtier trembled so hard his scarlet synthesina shimmied. Iole -dismissed him with a glance. -

-

-"Don't trouble yourself. Churinas may live on as a swineherd, with pigs for -companions, far from Tarquinia's walls." -

-

-"You hear that, you fat bastard?" Thresu said. "Thank our lady for her -mercy, Churinas." -

-

-In tears at the thought of a life of luxurious gluttony abruptly brought to -a rude pastoral end, Churinas still had enough sense and remaining courtier -instinct to prostrate himself again. -

-

-"Your slave thanks you, Mistress, for sparing his life. I'll try my best to -be a good swineherd." -

-

-Melkart snorted with laughter. "Get out of here, Churinas." -

-

-Churinas gratefully ran from the courtyard to a hard life outdoors tending -pigs. Melkart put his right hand to his heart and bowed low to Iole. -

-

-"My lady, I must tend to Kaleb. You'll excuse me." -

-

-"I understand, Melkart, but let me help perform the honors." -

-

-Melkart smiled. "You're kind, Iole." -

-

-They went to the terrace where Kaleb lay. Two slaves gently picked up his -body and set it on a litter. Melkart led the procession with Iole by his -side. Slaves carried the litter behind them. Urbani and pagani followed, -mantles and togas draped over their heads, as if in mourning for their own -kin. The sad lament went up, the paean to the warrior who died fighting for -Volturmna. Outside the city, Melkart built a pyre from dead wood with -Thresu's help. He laid Kaleb atop the pyre and stroked his thick, black -hair for the last time. Haruspices anointed the dog with oil, myrrh, and -frankincense, and a laurel wreath was laid upon the body, hero's honors. -

-

-After he ignited the pyre with a torch, Melkart sang a threnody in his -foreign, unknown tongue while loyal Kaleb's fur caught fire. His body was -swiftly consumed by the raging fire. Melkart wept as he would for any human -companion. Kaleb was the last of the rarest breed, blood brother of -Kerberus and Orthros, semi-divine canines. -

-

-When Kaleb was completely consumed, Melkart went outside the walls and -checked the cattle herd. To his relief, only the guide bull had been -slaughtered. The remaining herd was well fed and in good health after a -long rest. -

-

-A banquet was held that night at the Hall of Couches, but the fare was -simple, coarse bread, well watered wine, and smoked eels. A poet strummed -the lyre and sang tales of brave Ulixes. As usual, Melkart ate heartily. -Iole poured fresh spring water into his krater and smiled at him. -

-

-"Melkart, won't you stay and help me rule Volturmna? Frankly, I can use -your strong right arm. You always seem to know what to do." -

-

-"You praise me too highly, Iole. I want to help you, always and forever, -but I remain under a bond to deliver the cattle. Once that task is done, -I'll return. You have my word." -

-

-Iole nodded, saddened by Melkart's words, but then suddenly brightened. -

-

-"Take Lupu. He's my gift to you. The leagues will fly swiftly under his -hooves." -

-

-Melkart raised his krater in a toast. -

-

-"You do me honor, Lady Iole." -

-

-"Please. Call me Iole." Melkart laughed merrily. -

-

Melkart set out at sunrise on Lupu. Before he mounted the horse, Iole -handed him his lionskin, well brushed with a freshly shampooed mane. As he -rode through the Lion Gate, Phobis writhed in the dust nearby. He held out -his clay bowl, indifferent to who passed, intent only upon begging enough -to get drunk. Thresu disdainfully threw a copper coin into the bowl. -

-

-Melkart drove the herd before him, a new, young guide bull in the lead. The -court accompanied him to the valley's edge on foot. Iole rode in a litter -as became her high station. The bright sun slowly ascended into an eggshell -blue sky. Farmers and hinds cheered as Melkart and the herd passed, forever -grateful to the man who rid them of Tin's curse and the tyrant Eryx. -

-

-They reached the valley's edge. Melkart drove the herd up the path and -through the pass. Iole and her court watched them ascend. When the last cow -trotted up the pass, Melkart turned Lupu around. Iole, Thresu, and the -others waved and shouted blessings. -

-

-"Farewell, but return soon. Tin, Uni, and Cel keep you." -

-

-Melkart raised his right arm and waved farewell, teeth bared in a blazing -smile. He turned Lupu, rode off, and was gone from sight. -

-

-"When do you think he'll return, my lady?" -

-

-"In the spring, Thresu, a year from now," Iole replied. Her gaze was far -away. "He promised me." -

- - -© Mark Mellon 2018 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] melkart.jpg - - -[FINISH] - - Ed. - - T - -
- -
- -

- -BEWARE - On this Post-It note facility, do not try to put apostrophes or -quotes in the tip! Use
s if you need to paragraph it. And make sure -the ' kbierhfierh ' + discipline is adhered to. - - Ed. - -that personage - - -

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
-Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
-Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
-As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
- - - - - - -© 2018 All Rights Reserved - -[*COMMENT]=============================================== - -[*ITEM] - -[*AUTHOR] - -[*BLURB] . - -[*DESCRIPTION]

- - -© 2017 All Rights Reserved - - -[*IMAGE] - - - Ed. - -I found your first sentence a little -convoluted. I've paraphrased it, but you're at liberty to -rephrase my paraphrase. Ed. - - -"Omnes eodem cogimur," -Quintus Horatius Flaccus -
"unde negant redire quemquam" Gaius Valerius Catullus - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content-xway/xway2metadata.csv b/content-xway/xway2metadata.csv deleted file mode 100644 index 3c661359..00000000 --- a/content-xway/xway2metadata.csv +++ /dev/null @@ -1,203 +0,0 @@ -issue,number,order,date,title,author,relurl,category,genre -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,1,February 2008,Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner,Gil Williamson,./1issue1.htm,, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,2,February 2008,Hector,Gil Williamson,./2issue1.htm,, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,3,February 2008,Green Bullet,Melanie Manner,./3issue1.htm,, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,4,February 2008,Troubles With Word,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./4issue1.htm,, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,5,February 2008,The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes,H G Wells,./5issue1.htm,, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,6,February 2008,Streaming Video,Ian Thomas,./6issue1.htm,, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,7,February 2008,A Sort of Editorial,The Editor,./7issue1.htm,Editorial, -Issue 1 - February 2008,1,8,February 2008,Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang,Chris Lites,./8issue1.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,1,April 2008,Some Future Date,Callum Graham,./1issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,2,April 2008,Red Fever,Peter Morrison,./2issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,3,April 2008,"Eat, Monster Blue Bottle ",Belinda A. Taylor ,./3issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,4,April 2008,The American Book of the Dead,Chris Lites ,./4issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,5,April 2008,Emigration,Liam Baldwin,./5issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,6,April 2008,Voyage to the Moon,Lucian Loukianos,./6issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,7,April 2008,New Frankfurt,Grant McDonald Walker,./7issue2.htm,, -Issue 2 - April 2008,2,8,April 2008,From The Editor,Gil Williamson,./8issue2.htm,Editorial, -Issue 3 - June 2008,3,1,June 2008,Blazon,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./1issue3.htm,, -Issue 3 - June 2008,3,2,June 2008,The 1002nd Night,Dick Burton,./2issue3.htm,, -Issue 3 - June 2008,3,3,June 2008,The Summoning,Chris Penycate,./3issue3.htm,, -Issue 3 - June 2008,3,4,June 2008,When Gretchen Met Sally,Peter Morrison,./4issue3.htm,, -Issue 3 - June 2008,3,5,June 2008,The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon,Washington Irving,./5issue3.htm,, -Issue 3 - June 2008,3,6,June 2008,From The Editor,Gil Williamson,./6issue3.htm,Editorial, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,1,22 Nov 2008,Hong Kong,Grant McDonald Walker,./1issue4.htm,, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,2,22 Nov 2008,Central Casting,Chris Penycate,./2issue4.htm,, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,3,22 Nov 2008,Strong Emergence,Jonathan Joseph,./3issue4.htm,, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,4,22 Nov 2008,Survivor,Peter Morrison,./4issue4.htm,, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,5,22 Nov 2008,By a Lily's Petal,Ian Thomas,./5issue4.htm,, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,6,22 Nov 2008,The Ingenious Patriot,Ambrose Bierce,./6issue4.htm,, -Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008,4,7,22 Nov 2008,The Inevitable Editorial,Gil Williamson,./7issue4.htm,Editorial, -Issue 5 - May 2009,5,1,May 2009,No Survivor,Peter Morrison,./1issue5.htm,, -Issue 5 - May 2009,5,2,May 2009,His Fly Undid Him,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./2issue5.htm,, -Issue 5 - May 2009,5,3,May 2009,The Extrusion Project,Grant McDonald Walker,./3issue5.htm,, -Issue 5 - May 2009,5,4,May 2009,The Enormous Gun,Damon Harkness,./4issue5.htm,, -Issue 5 - May 2009,5,5,May 2009,The Curse of Yig,H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop,./5issue5.htm,, -Issue 5 - May 2009,5,6,May 2009,The Now-Traditional Brief Editorial,Gil Williamson,./6issue5.htm,Editorial, -Issue 6 - August 2009,6,1,August 2009,Neurofinancer,Twilite Minotaur,./1issue6.htm,, -Issue 6 - August 2009,6,2,August 2009,The Tale of the Ten Teacups,Tom Davies,./2issue6.htm,, -Issue 6 - August 2009,6,3,August 2009,Warriston's Disease,Gil Williamson,./3issue6.htm,, -Issue 6 - August 2009,6,4,August 2009,The Skylark of Space,E.E. (Doc) Smith,./4issue6.htm,, -Issue 6 - August 2009,6,5,August 2009,A Rambling Editorial,Gil Williamson,./5issue6.htm,Editorial, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,1,September 2010,Living on Reputation,Alistair Bain,./1issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,2,September 2010,The Door with no Key,Gil Williamson,./2issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,3,September 2010,The Price of Youth,Moon Bhatt,./3issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,4,September 2010,Blood and Souls,Peter Morrison,./4issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,5,September 2010,From an Evening at the Cinema,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./5issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,6,September 2010,Ringside,Martin Clark,./6issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,7,September 2010,How Manuel Left the Mire,James Branch Cabell,./7issue7.htm,, -Issue 7 - September 2010,7,8,September 2010,An Entirely Self-serving Editorial,Gil Williamson,./8issue7.htm,Editorial, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,1,February 2011,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issue8.htm,Editorial, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,2,February 2011,Spawn,Les Sklaroff,./2issue8.htm,, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,3,February 2011,The Great Divide,Martin Clark,./3issue8.htm,, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,4,February 2011,Android 0-CLE5,Lester Linesmith,./4issue8.htm,, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,5,February 2011,The Prophets Speak,Andrew Leon Hudson,./5issue8.htm,, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,6,February 2011,Outpatients,Jonathan Joseph,./6issue8.htm,, -Issue 8 - February 2011,8,7,February 2011,Conspiracy Theory,Les Sklaroff,./7issue8.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,1,June 2011,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issue9.htm,Editorial, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,2,June 2011,Boffin,Les Sklaroff,./2issue9.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,3,June 2011,Let Every Voice be Still,Martin Clark,./3issue9.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,4,June 2011,Stop 17,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./4issue9.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,5,June 2011,The Ghosts of Cloud City,Twilite Minotaur,./5issue9.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,6,June 2011,Special Delivery,Gil Williamson,./6issue9.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,7,June 2011,Postcards,Annabel Banks,./7issue9.htm,, -Issue 9 - June 2011,9,8,June 2011,Fiat Lux,Les Sklaroff,./8issue9.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,1,December 2011,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev10.htm,Editorial, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,2,December 2011,A Preference for Cheese,Les Sklaroff,./2issuev10.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,3,December 2011,All Avenues Closed,Martin Clark,./3issuev10.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,4,December 2011,Oh Dreary Me,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./4issuev10.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,5,December 2011,Dietrich and the Baby,Tom Davies,./5issuev10.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,6,December 2011,Appropriate Technology,Gil Williamson,./6issuev10.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,7,December 2011,Flesh Doubt,Andrew Leon Hudson,./7issuev10.htm,, -Issue 10 - December 2011,10,8,December 2011,Warped,Jonathan Joseph,./8issuev10.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,1,December 2012,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev11.htm,Editorial, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,2,December 2012,The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield,Les Sklaroff,./2issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,3,December 2012,Dundro Fappit's Mistake,Les Sklaroff,./3issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,4,December 2012,Something Quirky,Les Sklaroff,./4issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,5,December 2012,Hoolocks and Hellions,Les Sklaroff,./5issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,6,December 2012,Foroquont's Maze,Les Sklaroff,./6issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,7,December 2012,Mindbleed,Andrew Leon Hudson,./7issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,8,December 2012,Sailing to Tarshish,Martin Clark,./8issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,9,December 2012,Unclear Conscience,Martin Clark,./9issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,10,December 2012,The Tale of God's Flotsam,Tom Davies,./10issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,11,December 2012,Ghosts and Aliens,John A. Frochio,./11issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,12,December 2012,Beyond the Sky,Liam Baldwin,./12issuev11.htm,, -Issue 11 - December 2012,11,13,December 2012,A Natural Selection,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./13issuev11.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,1,March 2013,Quality Put to the Vote,Gil Williamson,./1issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,2,March 2013,Starbat,Les Sklaroff,./2issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,3,March 2013,The Temple of the Inevitable,Peter Morrison,./3issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,4,March 2013,An Acquisition,Les Sklaroff,./4issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,5,March 2013,I Am What I Am Not,Tom Sheehan,./5issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,6,March 2013,Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre,Tom Davies,./6issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,7,March 2013,Quintet for One,Martin Clark,./7issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,8,March 2013,Tear Drops,Andrew Leon Hudson,./8issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,9,March 2013,Terminus Machina : Bailout,Twilite Minotaur,./9issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,10,March 2013,Not Who We Are,Martin Clark,./10issuev12.htm,, -Issue 12 - March 2013,12,11,March 2013,Day Trip,Gil Williamson,./11issuev12.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,1,August 2013,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev13.htm,Editorial, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,2,August 2013,Lies & Other Essentials,Martin Clark,./2issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,3,August 2013,Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope,Les Sklaroff,./3issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,4,August 2013,The Tale of the Bone Janitor,Tom Davies,./4issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,5,August 2013,To Serve,Matthew Kirshenblatt,./5issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,6,August 2013,Sibyl,Les Sklaroff,./6issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,7,August 2013,Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms,Tom Davies,./7issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,8,August 2013,"Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co.",Don B Levitt,./8issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,9,August 2013,Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse,Tom Davies,./9issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,10,August 2013,Toyscape,John A. Frochio,./10issuev13.htm,, -Issue 13 - August 2013,13,11,August 2013,A Room with a Vu,Martin Clark,./11issuev13.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,1,March 2014,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev14.htm,Editorial, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,2,March 2014,A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph,Les Sklaroff,./2issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,3,March 2014,An Excursion to Platport,Les Sklaroff,./3issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,4,March 2014,Yesterday's Spoons,Les Sklaroff,./4issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,5,March 2014,The Lost World of WW1,Liam Baldwin,./5issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,6,March 2014,Mount Elysium,Gil Williamson,./6issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,7,March 2014,"First In, Last Out",Andrew Leon Hudson,./7issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,8,March 2014,Truth and Other Upgrades,Martin Clark,./8issuev14.htm,, -Issue 14 - March 2014,14,9,March 2014,Aye-Nay,Jez Patterson,./9issuev14.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,1,November 2014,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev15.htm,Editorial, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,2,November 2014,Slippage,Les Sklaroff,./2issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,3,November 2014,Uneasy Money,Martin Clark,./3issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,4,November 2014,The Plains of Abyssinia,Sean Crawford,./4issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,5,November 2014,The Man with Bronze Hair,Les Sklaroff,./5issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,6,November 2014,The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio,Gil Williamson,./6issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,7,November 2014,Must Be in the Fifties,Andrew Leon Hudson,./7issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,8,November 2014,Adalet,Jez Patterson,./8issuev15.htm,, -Issue 15 - November 2014,15,9,November 2014,A Day Like Any Other,Martin Clark,./9issuev15.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,1,July 2015,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev16.htm,Editorial, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,2,July 2015,Don Juans & Dragoons,Andrew Leon Hudson,./2issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,3,July 2015,Thagdar the Immutable,Les Sklaroff,./3issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,4,July 2015,"A Messenger, Deceased",Martin Clark,./4issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,5,July 2015,Proto-J,Christian Miller,./5issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,6,July 2015,Border Incident,Gil Williamson,./6issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,7,July 2015,A Small Intrusion,Les Sklaroff,./7issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,8,July 2015,Playing Around with Arthur,Gil Williamson,./8issuev16.htm,, -Issue 16 - July 2015,16,9,July 2015,Baker's Dozen,Martin Clark,./9issuev16.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,1,February 2016,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev17.htm,Editorial, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,2,February 2016,The Cospauper,Christian Miller,./2issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,3,February 2016,Another Change of Plan,Les Sklaroff,./3issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,4,February 2016,Bodyfellas,Martin Clark,./4issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,5,February 2016,"Whistle, Hum, Parp",Jez Patterson,./5issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,6,February 2016,A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth,John A. Frochio,./6issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,7,February 2016,Supply & Demand,Martin Clark,./7issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,8,February 2016,Robot Rover,Jez Patterson,./8issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,9,February 2016,Magdalena and the Dragon,Peter Morrison,./9issuev17.htm,, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,10,February 2016,Diplomacy,Liam Baldwin,./10issuev17.htm,Comic, -Issue 17 - February 2016,17,11,February 2016,Iceweb - Interactive Fiction,Gil Williamson,./11issuev17.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,1,August 2016,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev18.htm,Editorial, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,2,August 2016,Helsinki,Gil Williamson,./2issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,3,August 2016,Sound & Fury,Martin M. Clark,./3issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,4,August 2016,Farny's Place,Les Sklaroff,./4issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,5,August 2016,The Last Day of the Mute Ant,Jez Patterson,./5issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,6,August 2016,God Blinked,Martin M. Clark,./6issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,7,August 2016,Falling Back,Andrew Leon Hudson,./7issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,8,August 2016,Distant and Remote,Jez Patterson,./8issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,9,August 2016,Atacrast,Les Sklaroff,./9issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,10,August 2016,Madras Point,Martin M. Clark,./10issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,11,August 2016,A New World Order,John A. Frochio,./11issuev18.htm,, -Issue 18 - August 2016,18,12,August 2016,Under the Martian Moonlight,Liam Baldwin,./12issuev18.htm,Comic, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,1,February 2017,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev19.htm,Editorial, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,2,February 2017,Interlude in Green,Martin M. Clark,./2issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,3,February 2017,Timed Out,Jez Patterson,./3issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,4,February 2017,Reunion,Les Sklaroff,./4issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,5,February 2017,Grave Misfortune,Stephen Heuser,./5issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,6,February 2017,Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe,J. H. Zech,./6issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,7,February 2017,April the Last,Andrew Leon Hudson,./7issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,8,February 2017,Mount Elysium Revisited,Gil Williamson,./8issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,9,February 2017,Death plus One,Martin M. Clark,./9issuev19.htm,, -Issue 19 - February 2017,19,10,February 2017,Field Support,Liam Baldwin,./10issuev19.htm,Comic, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,1,August 2017,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev20.htm,Editorial, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,2,August 2017,Padratheleon's Ghosts,Les Sklaroff,./2issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,3,August 2017,The Drill Hall Incident,Gil Williamson,./3issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,4,August 2017,The Trumpets of Jericho,Martin M. Clark,./4issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,5,August 2017,To Erm is Human,Jez Patterson,./5issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,6,August 2017,Equus Magna,John A. Frochio,./6issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,7,August 2017,The Fountain of Youth,Steve Slavin,./7issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,8,August 2017,Sticky Dreams,Mary Hiers,./8issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,9,August 2017,"Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters",Les Sklaroff,./9issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,10,August 2017,Lost City,D. S. White,./10issuev20.htm,, -Issue 20 - August 2017,20,11,August 2017,The Aldous Effect,Martin M. Clark,./11issuev20.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,1,February 2018,Editorial,Gil Williamson,./1issuev21.htm,Editorial, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,2,February 2018,Maximum Law,Martin M. Clark,./2issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,3,February 2018,Commedia del'l Venezia,Gil Williamson,./3issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,4,February 2018,A Tale of Salt and Oak,Voss McVeigh,./4issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,5,February 2018,"Mirror, Mirror",Patrick Boylan,./5issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,6,February 2018,Are Friends Eclectic,Jez Patterson,./6issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,7,February 2018,Good Vibrations,Steve Slavin,./7issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,8,February 2018,Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising,J. H. Zech,./8issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,9,February 2018,Pranswat Passes Through,Les Sklaroff,./9issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,10,February 2018,Blood Poisoning,D. S. White,./10issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,11,February 2018,Eavesdropping at Quoils,Les Sklaroff,./11issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,12,February 2018,Of a Kind,Jez Patterson,./12issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,13,February 2018,Maximum Law - Christmas Party,Martin M. Clark,./13issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,14,February 2018,Christmas Carole,Martin M. Clark,./14issuev21.htm,, -Issue 21 - February 2018,21,15,February 2018,Melkart The Herdsman,Mark Mellon,./15issuev21.htm,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,1,May 2018,Editorial in memorium,Andrew Leon Hudson,./issue-22/editorial.html,Editorial, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,2,May 2018,Feeling the Heat,Les Sklaroff,./issue-22/feeling-the-heat.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,3,May 2018,Snryl,Les Sklaroff,./issue-22/snyrl.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,4,May 2018,Behind My Eyes,Martin M. Clark,./issue-22/behind-my-eyes.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,5,May 2018,Henry,Jez Patterson,./issue-22/henry.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,6,May 2018,A Comic,Liam Baldwin,./issue-22/a-comic.html,Comic, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,7,May 2018,His Turn to Remember,John A. Frochio,./issue-22/his-turn-to-remember.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,8,May 2018,Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember,J. H. Zech,./issue-22/ilysveil-tigers-can-remember.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,9,May 2018,The Parking Ticket,Steve Slavin,./issue-22/the-parking-ticket.html,, -Issue 22 - May 2018,22,10,May 2018,Good Old Days,Andrew Leon Hudson,./issue-22/good-old-days.html,, \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/about.md b/content/about.md deleted file mode 100644 index 07d236b3..00000000 --- a/content/about.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,30 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "About Mythaxis" -date: 2020-08-01 -issue: Issue 23 - -type: page -slug: about ---- - - -Established in 2008 by Gil Williamson, *Mythaxis* began as a self-coded webzine with an unpredictable release schedule and a close-nit group of regular contributors. Edited by Andrew Leon Hudson since 2020, the magazine is now a clockwork-quarterly publication and welcomes new writers from around the world and shares their work in audio too! But some things never change: *Mythaxis* has always been focused on the fiction, with as little distraction as possible - no ads, no clutter, just quality stories to transport you somewhere else. - -For a "subscription" to *Mythaxis*, sign up **[here](http://eepurl.com/hdhvMT)** to receive each new issue's Table of Contents in your inbox on release. You can also follow us on [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social) and [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine). - -*Mythaxis* is forever free-to-read, but if you would like to support the magazine [you could always buy us a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/mythaxismagazine/). - -## STAFF - -### Andrew Leon Hudson - *Editor* -Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing *Mythaxis* he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t [do things online](https://linktr.ee/andrewleonhudson) often enough to count. - -### Marty Steer - *Digital Huperson* -Marty is a human-like person who emerged from a Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study. He likes messing about with humanities data, minimal computing and I also enjoy liminal ideas. - -### Micah Hyatt - *the Voice of Mythaxis* - -Micah is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill *Writing Popular Fiction* MFA program. His fiction has been published all across the web, and his light-hearted zombie survival novella, *Eating the Exhibits*, is available through Amazon. He narrates and produces the audio-format of the Mythaxis stories. - -### The Story Oracle - *Fictional Genius* -Blessed with guru-like serenity, the Story Oracle graciously bestows their wisdom on such editors as who climb to the peak of Slush Mountain and ask, *"Is this thing as good as I think it is?"* Occasionally, the answer is comprehensible. diff --git a/content/archive.md b/content/archive.md deleted file mode 100644 index ba7a172e..00000000 --- a/content/archive.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Archive" -date: 2020-12-09 -description: Speculative Fiction Without Distraction - -type: page -slug: archive - ---- - -***Mythaxis Magazine*** has been seeking out quality writing since 2008. We aim to provide a mixture of speculative fiction in classic and contemporary styles, free from the typical web trappings of click-hungry advertising, and forever free to read. - -Here you will find a place for science fiction both hard and soft, fantasy both high and low, horror both harsh and humorous, along with whatever mash-ups or sub-genres our contributors can conceive. - - - -## Navigation Options - -Our complete story archives are now available to browse in a variety of ways. Click the following to: - -- ### [Search by Author](./authors.html) - -- ### [Search by Title](./catalogue.html) - -- ### [Search by Genre](./genres.html) - -You can also find a [listing of our editorials here](/editorials.html), though who would want to browse such a thing is unclear. - - - -## Back Issues - -Since 2020, ***Mythaxis Magazine*** has shifted to a quarterly release schedule with a shiny new design and opened its doors to contributors from around the world. You can find our recent back issues here: - -{{< back-issues-list >}} - - -## The Original Archive - -Finally, here you can find the more than one hundred-and-fifty pieces of fiction assembled by ***Mythaxis Magazine***'s founder, [Gil Williamson](issue-22/editorial.html), as well as our memorial issue to celebrate his memory. We've also preserved the hand-coded format of the original zine as a lasting testimony to his varied talents. Enjoy! - -- [Issue 22: Apr 20](issue-22/index.html) -- [Issue 21: Feb 18](indexissuev21.htm) -- [Issue 20: Aug 17](indexissuev20.htm) -- [Issue 19: Feb 17](indexissuev19.htm) -- [Issue 18: Aug 16](indexissuev18.htm) -- [Issue 17: Feb 16](indexissuev17.htm) -- [Issue 16: Jul 15](indexissuev16.htm) -- [Issue 15: Nov 14](indexissuev15.htm) -- [Issue 14: Mar 14](indexissuev14.htm) -- [Issue 13: Aug 13](indexissuev13.htm) -- [Issue 12: Mar 13](indexissuev12.htm) -- [Issue 11: Aug 12](indexissuev11.htm) -- [Issue 10: Dec 11](indexissuev10.htm) -- [Issue  9: Jun 11](indexissue9.htm) -- [Issue  8: Feb 11](indexissue8.htm) -- [Issue  7: Sep 10](indexissue7.htm) -- [Issue  6: Feb 10](indexissue6.htm) -- [Issue  5: Jun 09](indexissue5.htm) -- [Issue  4: Nov 08](indexissue4.htm) -- [Issue  3: Jul 08](indexissue3.htm) -- [Issue  2: Apr 08](indexissue2.htm) -- [Issue  1: Feb 08](indexissue1.htm) diff --git a/content/authors/KC-Grifant.md b/content/authors/KC-Grifant.md deleted file mode 100644 index d1ef5c4b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/KC-Grifant.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-03-15 -type: author -name: KC Grifant -photo: 'images/KCGrifant.png' -avatar: 'images/KCGrifant.png' -copyright: "© KC Grifant 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***KC Grifant*** *is a New England-to-SoCal transplant who writes internationally published horror, fantasy, science fiction and weird western stories for collectible card games, podcasts, anthologies and magazines. Her writings have appeared in* Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Aurealis Magazine, Unnerving Magazine, Frozen Wavelets, Tales to Terrify *and* Colp Magazine. *Her short stories have haunted dozens of collections, including* We Shall Be Monsters; Shadowy Natures: Tales of Psychological Horror; The One That Got Away - Women of Horror Anthology; Beyond the Infinite: Tales from the Outer Reaches; Six Guns Straight From Hell Volume 3; *and the Stoker-nominated* Fright Mare: Women Write Horror. *She is also the co-founder of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) San Diego chapter. For more information, visit [her website](http://www.KCGrifant.com/) or [aMAZOM](http://amazon.com/author/kcgrifant). You can find her on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/kcgrifant/), [Instagram](https://instagram.com/kcgrifant/), and [Facebook](https://www.amazon.com/author/kcgrifant/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/_index.md b/content/authors/_index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 25599813..00000000 --- a/content/authors/_index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -# Authors is a site taxonomy. -layout: authors -title: "Author index" -description: Authors sorted by surname -date: 2024-01-01 -url: /authors.html ---- - -{{< random-button >}} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/a-m-sutter.md b/content/authors/a-m-sutter.md deleted file mode 100644 index 540ec91c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/a-m-sutter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-09-28 -type: author -name: A.M. Sutter -photo: 'images/AMSutter.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AMSutter.jpg' -copyright: "© A.M. Sutter 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***A.M. Sutter*** grew up in the beautiful mountains of Central Pennsylvania and has been fascinated with storytelling ever since she snuck downstairs as a child to watch* The Twilight Zone *with her father. She currently works as a zoo and exotic animal veterinarian, and the unique experiences in this field serve as inspiration for her writing. Her works appear in multiple anthologies and fiction magazines, and she is a member of the* Horror Writers Association. *Whenever she’s not arm-deep in tiger guts or elephant poop, she enjoys hiking with her Shih Tzu, who fully believes he is a wolf. Find her at [www.amsutter.com](http://amsutter.com/).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/aaron-emmel.md b/content/authors/aaron-emmel.md deleted file mode 100644 index e280e299..00000000 --- a/content/authors/aaron-emmel.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: Aaron Emmel -photo: 'images/AaronEmmel.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AaronEmmel.jpg' -copyright: "© Aaron Emmel 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Aaron Emmel***’*s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Thanks to the patience of his wonderful wife, and despite the impatience of his wonderful children, Aaron also writes essays, graphic novels and interactive fiction. He grew up in the mountains of New Mexico and on Central America’s Caribbean coast. Find him online at [www.aaronemmel.com](https://aaronemmel.com/) and on Twitter at [@justicioaje](https://twitter.com/justicioaje).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/addison-smith.md b/content/authors/addison-smith.md deleted file mode 100644 index 782aaa20..00000000 --- a/content/authors/addison-smith.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Addison Smith -photo: 'images/addison-smith.jpg' -avatar: 'images/addison-smith.jpg' -copyright: "© Addison Smith 2020-2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Addison Smith*** (he/him) *is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis fungus. He's doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including* Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, *and* Daily Science Fiction. *Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/addi.social).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/alexander-zalben.md b/content/authors/alexander-zalben.md deleted file mode 100644 index d47b1a42..00000000 --- a/content/authors/alexander-zalben.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-06-18 -type: author -name: Alexander Zalben -photo: 'images/AlexanderZalben.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AlexanderZalben.jpg' -copyright: "© Alexander Zalben 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Alex Zalben*** *is the author of an all-ages comic book series for Marvel,* Thor and the Warriors Four. *His short fiction has been featured in* Splickety Magazine, *the* Thuggish Itch *and* Galileo's Theme Park *anthologies, and an issue of* Enchanted Conversation Magazine. *For the past decade he's hosted the live show and podcast* Comic Book Club, *which has been profiled in the New York Times. He currently works as Managing Editor at* Decider.com, *with previous bylines on* TV Guide, MTV News *and more. You can check him out too often on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/azalben)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/amanda-crowley.md b/content/authors/amanda-crowley.md deleted file mode 100644 index 207c086d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/amanda-crowley.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Amanda C. Crowley -photo: 'images/AmandaCrowley.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AmandaCrowley.jpg' -copyright: "© Amanda C. Crowley 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Amanda C. Crowley*** *is a teacher-librarian, writer, and great enthusiast for the desert, though she’s spent almost all of her life on and around Lake Michigan. Her short fiction has previously appeared in *Fusion Fragment*. You can follow her on Twitter as [@amandaccrowley](https://twitter.com/amandaccrowley) and at her website, [amandacrowley.com](https://amandacrowley.com/).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/andrea-kriz.md b/content/authors/andrea-kriz.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4684de48..00000000 --- a/content/authors/andrea-kriz.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Andrea Kriz -photo: 'images/AndreaKriz.png' -avatar: 'images/AndreaKriz.png' -copyright: "© Andrea Kriz 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Andrea Kriz*** *writes from Cambridge, MA. Find her other stories in* Cossmass Infinities, Nature, Tales to Terrify, AURELIA LEO, *and* Hybrid Fiction, *among others. You can follow her on twitter as [@theworldshesaw](https://twitter.com/theworldshesaw).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/andrew-jensen.md b/content/authors/andrew-jensen.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7849498c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/andrew-jensen.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Andrew Jensen -photo: 'images/andrew-jensen.jpg' -avatar: 'images/andrew-jensen.jpg' -copyright: "© Andrew Jensen 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Andrew Jensen*** *lives in rural Ontario. He is the minister at Knox United Church, Nepean. His stories have appeared in Canada, the USA, and New Zealand, most recently in* Stupefying Stories Saturday Showcase, Tree & Stone Magazine, *and* Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores. *Andrew plays trumpet and impersonates Kermit the Frog. He no longer makes wine at home but had fun while it lasted.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/andrew-johnston.md b/content/authors/andrew-johnston.md deleted file mode 100644 index 58d11151..00000000 --- a/content/authors/andrew-johnston.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Andrew Johnston -photo: 'images/DrewJohnston.png' -avatar: 'images/DrewJohnston.png' -copyright: "© Andrew Johnston 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*Born in rural western Kansas, **Andrew Johnston** discovered his Sinophilia while attending the University of Kansas. Subsequently, he has spent most of his adult life shuttling back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. He is currently based out of Hefei, Anhui province. He has published short fiction in* Nature: Futures, Electric Spec, Mythic *and the* Laughing at Shadows Anthology. *You can learn more about his projects at [findthefabulist.com](http://findthefabulist.com/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/andrew-leon-hudson.md b/content/authors/andrew-leon-hudson.md deleted file mode 100644 index 91f32ea3..00000000 --- a/content/authors/andrew-leon-hudson.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Andrew Leon Hudson -photo: 'images/ALH.png' -avatar: 'images/ALH.png' -copyright: "" -description: "***Andrew** is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing* Mythaxis *he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t [do things online](https://linktr.ee/andrewleonhudson) often enough to count.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/anna-koltes.md b/content/authors/anna-koltes.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6b44cd5f..00000000 --- a/content/authors/anna-koltes.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-09-28 -type: author -name: Anna Koltes -photo: 'images/AnnaKoltes.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AnnaKoltes.jpg' -copyright: "© Anna Koltes 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Anna Koltes***’ *stories are published in magazines like* Defenestration, Black Petals, The Colored Lens, Wyldblood Press, Arena, Dark Onus, The Caterpillar, X-RAY, *and* Daikaijuzine. *Hailing from a traveling busking family, out of her seven siblings she considers herself the least annoying. She currently lives in Barcelona, Spain, where she is working on a collection of speculative short stories.*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/anna-ziegelhof.md b/content/authors/anna-ziegelhof.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2bb41c09..00000000 --- a/content/authors/anna-ziegelhof.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-06-30 -type: author -name: Anna Ziegelhof -photo: 'images/anna-ziegelhof.jpg' -avatar: 'images/anna-ziegelhof.jpg' -copyright: "© Anna Ziegelhof 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Anna Ziegelhof*** *is a science fiction and horror writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is particularly drawn to stories about darker aspects of the human (or alien) experience. A professional background as a computational linguist led to her teaching classes on creating languages for science-fiction/fantasy worlds at Clarion West. Her short fiction can be found in a variety of zines and anthologies, among others in* The Horror Library, Luna Station, The Future Fire, The Flash Fiction Podcast, Flametree Press, *and* Short Edition's *short story dispensers. Online she can be found at [www.annaziegelhof.com](http://www.annaziegelhof.com/) and [annaziegelhof.substack.com](http://annaziegelhof.substack.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/anna-zumbro.md b/content/authors/anna-zumbro.md deleted file mode 100644 index e8c418a6..00000000 --- a/content/authors/anna-zumbro.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Anna Zumbro -photo: 'images/anna-zumbro.jpg' -avatar: 'images/anna-zumbro.jpg' -copyright: "© Anna Zumbro 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Anna Zumbro*** *is a short fiction writer with stories in* The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, *and other publications. When not writing, she teaches high school English and journalism. She's on Twitter occasionally at [@annazumbro](https://twitter.com/@annazumbro) and her website can be found at [annazumbro.com](https://www.annazumbro.com).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/annie-percik.md b/content/authors/annie-percik.md deleted file mode 100644 index daa4b27d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/annie-percik.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Annie Percik -photo: 'images/AnniePercik.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AnniePercik.jpg' -copyright: "© Annie Percik 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***AnniePercik*** *lives in London with her husband, Dave, where she writes novels and short stories, whilst working as a University Complaints Officer. She writes a blog about writing and posts short fiction [on her website](https://alobear.co.uk), which is where all her current publications are listed, including her debut fantasy novel, *[The Defiant Spark](http://getbook.at/DefiantSpark)*. She also makes a [media review podcast](https://stillloveit.libsyn.com/) with her husband and publishes a photo-story blog [recording the adventures of her teddy bear](https://aloysius-bear.dreamwidth.org/). He is much more popular online than she is. She tweets as [@APercik](https://twitter.com/APercik)*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/anya-josephs.md b/content/authors/anya-josephs.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8239a500..00000000 --- a/content/authors/anya-josephs.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Anya Josephs -photo: 'images/AnyaJosephs.png' -avatar: 'images/AnyaJosephs.png' -copyright: "© Anya Josephs 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "**Anya Josephs** was raised in North Carolina and now lives and works in New York City, where she teaches foster youth pursuing college degrees. When not working or writing, she can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping her cat, Sycorax. Her writing can be found in *Andromeda Spaceways Magazine*, *The Green Briar Review*, *the Necronomicon Anthology*, *SPARK*, *UnLaced*, *Proud2BeMe*, *The Huffington Post*, *Anti-Heroin Chic*, and *Poets Reading the News*. Her debut novel, *Queen of All*, a fantasy for young adults, is forthcoming from Zenith Press. You can find her at her website [anyajosephs.com](http://anyajosephs.com/)), and she tweets as [@anya_writes](https://twitter.com/anya_writes)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/arlen-feldman.md b/content/authors/arlen-feldman.md deleted file mode 100644 index 364ac850..00000000 --- a/content/authors/arlen-feldman.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-12-27 -type: author -name: Arlen Feldman -photo: 'images/arlen-feldman.jpg' -avatar: 'images/arlen-feldman.jpg' -copyright: "© Arlen Feldman 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*As well as writing fiction,* ***Arlen Feldman*** *is a software engineer, maker, costumer, con-runner ([cosinecon.org](http://cosinecon.org/)), and computer book author. His short fiction can be found in a number of anthologies and magazines, and he just won the 2024 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award for his story* The Wish Doctor. *He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and can be found on [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@cowthulu), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/cowthulu.bsky.social), and his website [cowthulu.com](http://cowthulu.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/aubrey-taylor.md b/content/authors/aubrey-taylor.md deleted file mode 100644 index c9e0761c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/aubrey-taylor.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-04-01 -type: author -name: Aubrey Taylor -photo: 'images/AubreyTaylor.jpg' -avatar: 'images/AubreyTaylor.jpg' -copyright: "© Aubrey Taylor 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Aubrey Taylor*** *is a short story writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She uses books and coffee to cope with her engineering degree. This is her first publication.*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/barry-charman.md b/content/authors/barry-charman.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5b8a22ce..00000000 --- a/content/authors/barry-charman.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Barry Charman -photo: 'images/barry-charman.jpg' -avatar: 'images/barry-charman.jpg' -copyright: "© Barry Charman 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Barry Charman*** *is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, including* Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling *and* Popshot Quarterly. *He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in* The Literary Hatchet *and* The Linnet’s Wings. *He has a blog at [barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk](http://barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/bill-ryan.md b/content/authors/bill-ryan.md deleted file mode 100644 index 28499812..00000000 --- a/content/authors/bill-ryan.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-30 -type: author -name: Bill Ryan -photo: 'images/BillRyan.jpg' -avatar: 'images/BillRyan.jpg' -copyright: "© Bill Ryan 2023-2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Bill Ryan*** *is the proprietor of the substack* [A Rip in the Picture](https://billryan64.substack.com/). *His online writing can most often be found at* [The Bulwark](https://www.thebulwark.com/author/bill-ryan/), *as well as at* [Decider.com](https://decider.com/author/bill-ryan/) *and* [RogerEbert.com](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/breaking-bread-on-the-25th-anniversary-of-big-night). *He can be yelled at on Twitter [@faceyouhate](https://twitter.com/faceyouhate) and [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/faceyouhate.bsky.social).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/c-owen-loftus.md b/content/authors/c-owen-loftus.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5e04d0f4..00000000 --- a/content/authors/c-owen-loftus.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: C. Owen Loftus -photo: 'images/c-owen-loftus.jpg' -avatar: 'images/c-owen-loftus.jpg' -copyright: "© C. Owen Loftus 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***C. Owen Loftus*** *is a writer and conservation educator, which means he's lucky enough to have sharks for coworkers. He's married to a strange and lovely ocean spirit, and believes in aliens but not Bigfoot (he's optimistic about ghosts). Owen has been published by* Utter Speculation Publication *and* Jayhenge Press. *Find those stories and more upcoming projects at [www.coloftus.com](https://coloftus.com/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/carl-walmsley.md b/content/authors/carl-walmsley.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3cb426f1..00000000 --- a/content/authors/carl-walmsley.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-10-01 -type: author -name: Carl Walmsley -photo: 'images/carl-walmsley.jpg' -avatar: 'images/carl-walmsley.jpg' -copyright: "© Carl Walmsley 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Carl Walmsley**'s* *love of tall tales is the result of a childhood spent listening to his mother - one of life's natural story-tellers. He thinks she might like this yarn, because it challenges a few stereotypes and includes a witch.*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/cathy-bryant.md b/content/authors/cathy-bryant.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2ec39c2a..00000000 --- a/content/authors/cathy-bryant.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-12-19 -type: author -name: Cathy Bryant -photo: 'images/CathyBryant.jpg' -avatar: 'images/CathyBryant.jpg' -copyright: "© Cathy Bryant 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Cathy Bryant*** *is a writer and performer with over 250 poems, stories, and articles published in anthologies and magazines. She has three poetry collections*, Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature, Look at All the Women, *and* Erratics, *as well as the non-fiction book* How to Win Writing Competitions. *She also runs the writer resource site [compsandcalls.com](https://compsandcalls.com/wp/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/celine-low.md b/content/authors/celine-low.md deleted file mode 100644 index ef97ed63..00000000 --- a/content/authors/celine-low.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Celine Low -photo: 'images/CelineLow.jpg' -avatar: 'images/CelineLow.jpg' -copyright: "© Celine Low 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Celine***'*s fiction is either published or forthcoming in* Translunar Travellers’ Lounge, Wyldblood, *and* The Dread Machine, *among other literary or genre magazines. Her latest short story won first prize for Fantasy in* The Dark Sire 2022 Creative Awards, *and her poetry has also appeared in various journals such as* Beyond Words *and* Sky Island Journal. *She is an editor for the S/F magazines* Factor Four *and* On Spec, *and holds an MA in English Literature. Currently nomadic, Celine divides her time between reading, writing, and ruminating with the street cows of India.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/chaitanya-murali.md b/content/authors/chaitanya-murali.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6e9b5418..00000000 --- a/content/authors/chaitanya-murali.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: Chaitanya Murali -photo: 'images/ChaitanyaMurali.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ChaitanyaMurali.jpg' -copyright: "© Chaitanya Murali 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Chaitanya Murali*** *is a game designer and writer who lives in Bangalore, India. He tends to write stories inspired by South India. They also usually feature giant animals. When he's not writing, you can find him complaining about sports on Twitter as [@chaitanyamurali](https://twitter.com/chaitanyamurali).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/charlie-winter.md b/content/authors/charlie-winter.md deleted file mode 100644 index e12c1acd..00000000 --- a/content/authors/charlie-winter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-06-30 -type: author -name: Charlie Winter -photo: 'images/charlie-winter.jpg' -avatar: 'images/charlie-winter.jpg' -copyright: "© Charlie Winter 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*Based in Australia,* ***Charlie Winter*** *is an academic by day and, by night, still an academic but more distractible about it. When not performing the inexplicable rituals of academia, he writes fantasy fiction celebrating everyday magic, eco-optimism, and queer identities. His publications include the* I Want That Twink Obliterated! *anthology and* Tales & Feathers *(upcoming). He can be found at [www.awinterplace.com](https://www.awinterplace.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/charlotte-ashley.md b/content/authors/charlotte-ashley.md deleted file mode 100644 index 93b383e2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/charlotte-ashley.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-12-19 -type: author -name: Charlotte Ashley -photo: 'images/CharlotteAshley.jpg' -avatar: 'images/CharlotteAshley.jpg' -copyright: "© Charlotte Ashley 2016, 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Charlotte Ashley*** *is a writer living in Halifax, Canada. Her short fiction appears in a number of anthologies and magazines, including* F&SF, Podcastle, *and* The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, *and she has been nominated for both the* Aurora *and* Sunburst Awards. *She occasionally writes game content for* Hit Point Press. *You can find more about her at [Once-and-Future.com](http://www.once-and-future.com) or on Twitter [@CharlotteAshley](https://twitter.com/CharlotteAshley).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/charlotte-h-lee.md b/content/authors/charlotte-h-lee.md deleted file mode 100644 index 290703de..00000000 --- a/content/authors/charlotte-h-lee.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: Charlotte H. Lee -photo: 'images/CharlotteHLee.jpg' -avatar: 'images/CharlotteHLee.jpg' -copyright: "© Charlotte H. Lee 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Charlotte H. Lee*** *spends her days pondering how best to smash all the boxes people want to keep the world in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s through telling stories to challenge others how we see life, or pushing herself to stretch her own brain in new ways. Her stories have appeared in* Little Blue Marble, Metaphorosis, The Overcast, *and others. You can find links to her published work at [www.charlottehlee.com](https://charlottehlee.com).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/cheryl-s-ntumy.md b/content/authors/cheryl-s-ntumy.md deleted file mode 100644 index cb779ae7..00000000 --- a/content/authors/cheryl-s-ntumy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-06-30 -type: author -name: Cheryl S. Ntumy -photo: 'images/cheryl-s-ntumy.jpg' -avatar: 'images/cheryl-s-ntumy.jpg' -copyright: "© Cheryl S. Ntumy 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Cheryl S. Ntumy*** *is a Ghanaian writer of speculative fiction, young adult fiction, and romance. She is part of the [Sauútiverse](https://syllble.com/sauuti/) Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of [Petlo Literary Arts](https://petloliteraryarts.wordpress.com/home/), an organisation that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana. Her Sauútiverse novella* Songs for the Shadows *was released in 2024 by Atthis Arts and her short story collection* Black Friday and Other Stories from Ghana *was published in March 2025 by Flame Tree Publishing.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/chinaza-eziaghighala.md b/content/authors/chinaza-eziaghighala.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7eec0fc8..00000000 --- a/content/authors/chinaza-eziaghighala.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-09-15 -type: author -name: Chinaza Eziaghighala -photo: 'images/chinaza-eziaghighala.jpg' -avatar: 'images/chinaza-eziaghighala.jpg' -copyright: "© Chinaza Eziaghighala 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Chinaza Eziaghighala*** *is a medical doctor who tells stories. An interdisciplinary writer at the intersection of health, film/TV, comics and literature, she is a University of Iowa International Writing Program Alum. Her works appear or are forthcoming in The British Science Fiction Association's* Fission #2 Vol 1 Anthology, Metastellar, *Hellboundbooks'* Kids are Hell Anthology, Brittle Paper, Afritondo, *and the British Science Fiction Association's* Focus. CHIMERA, *her debut novella, is forthcoming in 2024 from Nosetouch Press. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers Association of America and the African Speculative Fiction Society, a First Reader for* Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, *and a Guest Nonfiction Editor for* Please See Me. *Connect with her [here](http://chinazaeziaghighala.disha.page/) or on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/chinazaezims).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/chisom-umeh.md b/content/authors/chisom-umeh.md deleted file mode 100644 index 211ae71c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/chisom-umeh.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-30 -type: author -name: Chisom Umeh -photo: 'images/ChisomUmeh.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ChisomUmeh.jpg' -copyright: "© Chisom Umeh 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Chisom*** *(he/him) is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. He holds a degree in English and literature. When he's not watching movies or writing about fantastical things, he's tweeting about movies and fantastical things [@izom_chisom](https://twitter.com/izom_chisom). His short stories have been featured on* Second Skin Mag, Omenana, Apex, *and* Isele." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/chris-cook.md b/content/authors/chris-cook.md deleted file mode 100644 index 222eed52..00000000 --- a/content/authors/chris-cook.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Christopher Cook -photo: 'images/ChrisCook.png' -avatar: 'images/ChrisCook.png' -copyright: "© Chris Cook 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Christopher Cook*** *writes fiction to make the reader question their reality and perhaps rethink poking their foot out from underneath the covers. You can find his work in Critical Blast Publishing's anthology,* The Devil You Know, *and the October 2020 issue of* The J.J. Outre Review." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/christina-ladd.md b/content/authors/christina-ladd.md deleted file mode 100644 index b5d545f5..00000000 --- a/content/authors/christina-ladd.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-09-28 -type: author -name: Christina Ladd -photo: 'images/ChristinaLadd.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ChristinaLadd.jpg' -copyright: "© Christina Ladd 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Christina Ladd*** (she/her) *is a writer and editor living in Minneapolis. She will eventually die crushed under a pile of books, but until then she survives on a concerning amount of tea and carbs. Find more of her writing at [christinaladd.com](https://christinaladd.com/).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/claire-scherzinger.md b/content/authors/claire-scherzinger.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3b9f8121..00000000 --- a/content/authors/claire-scherzinger.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Claire Scherzinger -photo: 'images/ClaireScherzinger.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ClaireScherzinger.jpg' -copyright: "© Claire Scherzinger 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Claire Scherzinger*** *is a visual artist and writer currently residing in Washington State. Her fiction and poetry have been previously published in* Carousel *and in the* Writer's Digest 81st Competition Anthology 2011. *Her non-fiction writing has appeared in print in the Canadian photography magazine* BlackFlash *and online on platforms such as* Painters on Paintings, ArToronto.ca, *and* critters.org. *You can find more of her work at* [www.clairescherzinger.com](https://www.clairescherzinger.com/)." ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/dane-erbach.md b/content/authors/dane-erbach.md deleted file mode 100644 index fe99b051..00000000 --- a/content/authors/dane-erbach.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-07-01 -type: author -name: Dane Erbach -photo: 'images/DaneErbach.jpg' -avatar: 'images/DaneErbach.jpg' -copyright: "© Dane Erbach 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Dane Erbach*** *is a writer from Chicago’s northwest suburbs who teaches English and journalism at a public high school. During the summer, he teaches writing at Northwestern University to gifted and talented middle schoolers. His fiction has appeared in* Sobotka Literary Magazine *and* The Vignette Review, *and his music journalism can be found in various print and online publications. When he's not writing or reading, you can find him catching Pokémon with his family, raiding his community library, and tending to the pumpkin patch in his backyard. You can follow him on Instagram and Threads at* @browntrowsers." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/daniel-ausema.md b/content/authors/daniel-ausema.md deleted file mode 100644 index 72ab3dd4..00000000 --- a/content/authors/daniel-ausema.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Daniel Ausema -photo: 'images/DanielAusema.jpg' -avatar: 'images/DanielAusema.jpg' -copyright: "© Daniel Ausema 2020-2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Daniel Ausema*** *lives with his family in Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His work has appeared in many publications, including* Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, *and* Diabolical Plots. *He is the creator of the steampunk-fantasy* Spire City *series as well as the* Arcist Chronicles, *which is published by Guardbridge Books. You can find him [at his website](https://danielausema.com/) and on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ausema).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/daniel-rabuzzi.md b/content/authors/daniel-rabuzzi.md deleted file mode 100644 index a37619c2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/daniel-rabuzzi.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Daniel Rabuzzi -photo: 'images/DanielRabuzzi.jpg' -avatar: 'images/DanielRabuzzi.jpg' -copyright: "© Daniel Rabuzzi 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Daniel A. Rabuzzi*** *has had two novels, four short stories and ten poems published since 2006, all in speculative genres. He studied folklore, anthropology and history—and lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France—which has influenced his writing. He lives in NYC with his artistic partner and spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills. For more, please see his website, [www.danielarabuzzi.com/](http://www.danielarabuzzi.com/)*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/david-farrow.md b/content/authors/david-farrow.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9f17a1ff..00000000 --- a/content/authors/david-farrow.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-06-18 -type: author -name: David Farrow -photo: 'images/DavidFarrow.jpg' -avatar: 'images/DavidFarrow.jpg' -copyright: "© David Farrow 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***David Farrow*** *is best known for his* Neverglades *stories, which began on Reddit's horror site* NoSleep *and became a #1 bestselling book series on Amazon. He holds a BA in English from Trinity College and will receive his MFA in Fiction from Lesley University in the summer of 2022. He is also a member of the GrubStreet writing community in Boston, MA. You can find him at* [www.davidfarrowwrites.com](https://davidfarrowwrites.com/) *and on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidfarrow5734)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/david-sheskin.md b/content/authors/david-sheskin.md deleted file mode 100644 index 124f7596..00000000 --- a/content/authors/david-sheskin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-12-27 -type: author -name: David Sheskin -photo: 'images/david-sheskin.jpg' -avatar: 'images/david-sheskin.jpg' -copyright: "© David Sheskin 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***David Sheskin*** *is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in numerous publications including* The Dalhousie Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, The Satirist *and* DIAGRAM. *His most recent books are* David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities *and* Outrageous Wedding Announcements." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/david-stephen-powell.md b/content/authors/david-stephen-powell.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6a4d00e1..00000000 --- a/content/authors/david-stephen-powell.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-04-01 -type: author -name: David Stephen Powell -photo: 'images/david-stephen-powell.JPG' -avatar: 'images/david-stephen-powell.JPG' -copyright: "© David Stephen Powell 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***David Stephen Powell*** *was born in London and worked as a professional musician. He now lives and works in Italy. His stories have appeared in* Parabnormal Magazine, Black Hare Press, ‘The Other Stories’ podcast, Cloaked Press, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Mythaxis Magazine, *and* Tales to Terrify. *You can find him on his Substack, [@davidstephenpowell](https://substack.com/@davidstephenpowell).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/david-whitmarsh.md b/content/authors/david-whitmarsh.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2c03a396..00000000 --- a/content/authors/david-whitmarsh.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: David Whitmarsh -photo: 'images/DavidWhitmarsh.png' -avatar: 'images/DavidWhitmarsh.png' -copyright: "© David Whitmarsh 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***David Whitmarsh*** *is a rehabilitated software engineer who now spends his days playing acoustic blues badly and writing.* Winter, *his first published work, is the backstory of a character in his hopefully forthcoming novel, provisionally titled* The Long Fall. *David lives in West Sussex with his wife, two cats and a randomly varying subset of his four adult children. You can find him on Twitter as [@whitmarshdj](https://twitter.com/whitmarshdj).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/dennis-mombauer.md b/content/authors/dennis-mombauer.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2294c39c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/dennis-mombauer.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Dennis Mombauer -photo: 'images/DennisMombauer.png' -avatar: 'images/DennisMombauer.png' -copyright: "© Dennis Mombauer 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Dennis Mombauer*** *currently lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he works as a consultant on climate change and as a writer of speculative fiction, textual experiments, and poetry. He is co-publisher of a German magazine for experimental fiction,* [Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism](http://novelle.wtf/), *and has published fiction and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. His first English novel,* The Fertile Clay, *will be published by Nightscape Press in 2020. You can find him [at his website](https://dennismombauer.com/), and he tweets [@DMombauer](https://twitter.com/DMombauer).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/donald_mccarthy.md b/content/authors/donald_mccarthy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7c0930d9..00000000 --- a/content/authors/donald_mccarthy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-09-30 -type: author -name: Donald McCarthy -photo: 'images/donald_mccarthy.jpg' -avatar: 'images/donald_mccarthy.jpg' -copyright: "© Donald McCarthy 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Donald McCarthy*** *is an author from Long Island, New York. He's published short fiction with* The Baltimore Review, Pseudopod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Grey Rooms, *and more. His non-fiction has appeared at* Salon, Undark Magazine, The Huffington Post, Nightmare Magazine, *and more. A full list of his publications can be found at [www.donaldmccarthy.com](http://www.donaldmccarthy.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/donmark_baldridge.md b/content/authors/donmark_baldridge.md deleted file mode 100644 index 272dcf74..00000000 --- a/content/authors/donmark_baldridge.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-09-30 -type: author -name: Don Mark Baldridge -photo: 'images/donmark_baldridge.jpg' -avatar: 'images/donmark_baldridge.jpg' -copyright: "© Don Mark Baldridge 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*'So what does writing science fiction have to do with video game development?'* ***Don Mark Baldridge*** *grew up in the American Southwest, where the core of* Border Patrol *unfolds. He's developing a video game based on this story. Xeet him, while it lasts,* [@DonMarkMaker](https://twitter.com/DonMarkMaker)." ---- diff --git a/content/authors/e-saxey.md b/content/authors/e-saxey.md deleted file mode 100644 index 769ffb08..00000000 --- a/content/authors/e-saxey.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: E. Saxey -photo: 'images/ESaxey.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ESaxey.jpg' -copyright: "© E.Saxey 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***E. Saxey*** *is a queer Londoner and recidivist goth who works in universities and libraries. Their work has appeared in* Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Escape Pod, *and anthologies including* Transcendent *(Lethe Press) and* Best of British Fantasy 2019 *(Newcon Press). They're on twitter at [@ESaxey](https://twitter.com/ESaxey).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/elana-gomel.md b/content/authors/elana-gomel.md deleted file mode 100644 index 75995f7f..00000000 --- a/content/authors/elana-gomel.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-06-18 -type: author -name: Elana Gomel -photo: 'images/ElanaGomel.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ElanaGomel.jpg' -copyright: "© Elana Gomel 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Elana Gomel*** *is an academic and an award-winning writer. Born in Ukraine, she has lived and taught in many countries, including the US, Israel, Italy, and Hong Kong. She is the author of six non-fiction books -and numerous articles on subjects such as narrative theory, posthumanism, science fiction, and serial killers. As a fiction writer, she has published more than a hundred fantasy and science fiction stories, several novellas, and four novels. She is a member of HWA and can be found at* [www.citiesoflightanddarkness.com](https://www.citiesoflightanddarkness.com/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ElanaGomel), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/elana.gomel ), *and* [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/elanagomel/)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/elena-sichrovsky.md b/content/authors/elena-sichrovsky.md deleted file mode 100644 index faf59f46..00000000 --- a/content/authors/elena-sichrovsky.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-30 -type: author -name: Elena Sichrovsky -photo: 'images/ElenaSichrovsky.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ElenaSichrovsky.jpg' -copyright: "© Elena Sichrovsky 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Elena Sichrovsky*** *is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. Her fiction has been published in* Mud Season Review, Nightmare Magazine, Tough, *and* Sublunary Review, *among others. She's passionate about using the lens of horror to explore themes like body transformation, grief, and marginalized identities. You can follow her on Twitter [@ESichr](https://twitter.com/ESichr) or read more of her work on her website [www.elenasichrovsky.com/](https://www.elenasichrovsky.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/elin_olausson.md b/content/authors/elin_olausson.md deleted file mode 100644 index 57954dc9..00000000 --- a/content/authors/elin_olausson.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-09-30 -type: author -name: Elin Olausson -photo: 'images/elin_olausson.jpg' -avatar: 'images/elin_olausson.jpg' -copyright: "© Elin Olausson 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Elin Olausson*** *is a fan of the weird and the unsettling. She is the author of the short story collections* Growth *and* Shadow Paths *and has had stories featured in* 34 Orchard, Chiral Mad 5, Nightscript, *and many other publications. Elin’s rural childhood made her love and fear the woods, and she firmly believes that a cat is your best companion in life. She lives in Sweden. [www.elinolausson.com](http://www.elinolausson.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/elizabeth-zuckerman.md b/content/authors/elizabeth-zuckerman.md deleted file mode 100644 index 517fbb61..00000000 --- a/content/authors/elizabeth-zuckerman.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-07-01 -type: author -name: Elizabeth Zuckerman -photo: 'images/elizabeth-zuckerman.jpg' -avatar: 'images/elizabeth-zuckerman.jpg' -copyright: "© Elizabeth Zuckerman 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Elizabeth Zuckerman*** *actually had an okay high school experience, which surprised no one more than it did her. Her fiction has appeared in* Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Haven Spec, *and* Timeless Tales. *She lives in Philadelphia with a husband who quotes Shakespeare and Daria in roughly equal measure, and occasionally livetweets movies at* [@LizCanTweet](https://twitter.com/LizCanTweet)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/emma-burnett.md b/content/authors/emma-burnett.md deleted file mode 100644 index b251cf89..00000000 --- a/content/authors/emma-burnett.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-04-01 -type: author -name: Emma Burnett -photo: 'images/EmmaBurnett.jpg' -avatar: 'images/EmmaBurnett.jpg' -copyright: "© Emma Burnett 2024-2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Emma Burnett*** *is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in* Nature:Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Apex, Radon, Utopia, MetaStellar, Milk Candy Review, Roi Fainéant, JAKE, *and more. You can find her on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/slashnburnett), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/slashnburnett.bsky.social), *and at* [emmaburnett.uk](http://emmaburnett.uk/)." ---- diff --git a/content/authors/erik-mann.md b/content/authors/erik-mann.md deleted file mode 100644 index a8805565..00000000 --- a/content/authors/erik-mann.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-03-27 -type: author -name: Erik Mann -photo: 'images/ErikMann.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ErikMann.jpg' -copyright: "© Erik Mann 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Erik Mann*** *is a software developer and aspiring beach bum. He digs spotting sea turtles and dolphins when paddleboarding but admits that time an alligator joined him in the river was a little unnerving. More of his work can be found in* Intrinsick *and* The Dark City." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/fabiyas-m-v.md b/content/authors/fabiyas-m-v.md deleted file mode 100644 index e07d3f79..00000000 --- a/content/authors/fabiyas-m-v.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Fabiyas M. V. -photo: 'images/FabiyasMV.png' -avatar: 'images/FabiyasMV.png' -copyright: "© Fabiyas M. V. 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Fabiyas M. V.*** *is the author of* [Monsoon Turbulence](https://www.amazon.com/Monsoon-Turbulence-Fabiyas-M-V/dp/1939832144/), [Shelter within the Peanut Shells](https://lizzieandrewborden.com/HatchetOnline/LiteraryHatchet/product/literary-hatchet-10), [Kanoli Kaleidoscope](https://www.amazon.com/Kanoli-Kaleidoscope-Fabiyas-M-V/dp/098617078X/), Eternal Fragments, [Stringless Lives](https://www.amazon.com/Stringless-Lives-Fabiyas-M-V/dp/B08673MCQQ/), *and* [Moonlight And Solitude](https://www.indulekha.com/moonlight-and-solitude-poetry-fabiyas-m-v), *and his writing has also been published by Western Australian University, British Council, University of Hawaii, Rosemont College, Douglas College, Forward Poetry, Off the Coast, Silver Blade, Pear Tree Press, Poetry Nook, Zoetic Press, Encircle Publications, Pendle War Poetry and Creative Writing Ink. He has won many international accolades, including the* Merseyside at War Poetry Award *from Liverpool University.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/finale-doshi-velez.md b/content/authors/finale-doshi-velez.md deleted file mode 100644 index bca94c9d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/finale-doshi-velez.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-04-01 -type: author -name: Finale Doshi-Velez -photo: 'images/finale-doshi-velez.jpg' -avatar: 'images/finale-doshi-velez.jpg' -copyright: "© Finale Doshi-Velez 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Finale Doshi-Velez*** *designs ethical and helpful artificial intelligences by day and raises (hopefully also ethical and helpful) natural intelligences by night. She believes few things are impossible for a creative mind and a compassionate heart. You can learn more about her work at her website, [finaledoshivelez.com](http://finaledoshivelez.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/fraser-sherman.md b/content/authors/fraser-sherman.md deleted file mode 100644 index f7719889..00000000 --- a/content/authors/fraser-sherman.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-12-19 -type: author -name: Fraser Sherman -photo: 'images/FraserSherman.jpg' -avatar: 'images/FraserSherman.jpg' -copyright: "© Fraser Sherman 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Fraser Sherman*** *loves writing fantasy and film reference but takes time away from them for the accounting and business articles that pay the bills. He’s had four film reference books published, most recently* The Aliens Are Here, *and his self-published steampunk novel* Questionable Minds *came out in 2022. Born in England, he lived in Florida until relocating to Durham NC in 2010 to marry his dream woman. He’s online at [frasersherman.com](https://frasersherman.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/gabrielle-bleu.md b/content/authors/gabrielle-bleu.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2d3b3893..00000000 --- a/content/authors/gabrielle-bleu.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Gabrielle Bleu -photo: 'images/GabrielleBleu.jpg' -avatar: 'images/GabrielleBleu.jpg' -copyright: "© Gabrielle Bleu 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Gabrielle Bleu*** *writes science fiction and fantasy. When not writing, she watches birds and admires lichens. Their work has appeared in* Dose of Dread, Theme of Absence, *and* Utopia Science Fiction. *Follow them on twitter [@BeteMonstrueuse](http://twitter.com/BeteMonstrueuse) for birdwatching photos and occasional thoughts on werewolves, and find more of her work at [gabriellebleu.com](https://gabriellebleu.com/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/gregory-l-norris.md b/content/authors/gregory-l-norris.md deleted file mode 100644 index cf5205da..00000000 --- a/content/authors/gregory-l-norris.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Gregory L. Norris -photo: 'images/gregory-l-norris.jpg' -avatar: 'images/gregory-l-norris.jpg' -copyright: "© Gregory L. Norris 2021-2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF TV,* ***Gregory L. Norris*** *writes regularly for fiction anthologies, magazines, novels, and occasionally for TV and Film. He once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount's* Star Trek: Voyager series, *and his story* Tyrannosaurus Mechs *was a finalist in 2022's Roswell Awards competition in short SF Writing.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/gunnar-de-winter.md b/content/authors/gunnar-de-winter.md deleted file mode 100644 index d3fa9cb1..00000000 --- a/content/authors/gunnar-de-winter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-03-27 -type: author -name: Gunnar De Winter -photo: 'images/GunnarDeWinter.jpg' -avatar: 'images/GunnarDeWinter.jpg' -copyright: "© Gunnar De Winter 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Gunnar De Winter*** *is a biologist/philosopher hybrid who writes. His fiction has appeared in* Future SF Digest, Daily Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, *and other places. Sometimes his crazy thoughts run rampant on Twitter masking as [@evolveon](http://twitter.com/evolveon).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/hannah-hulbert.md b/content/authors/hannah-hulbert.md deleted file mode 100644 index 40b550e3..00000000 --- a/content/authors/hannah-hulbert.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Hannah Hulbert -photo: 'images/HannahHulbert.jpg' -avatar: 'images/HannahHulbert.jpg' -copyright: "© Hannah Hulbert 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Hannah Hulbert*** *is a full-time mum and part-time writer from the south coast of England. You can find her stories in miscellaneous small-press anthologies and web-zines, a full list of which can be found [on her website](https://hannahhulbert.wordpress.com). Her story* ‘Petrichor’ *from* Beneath Strange Stars *(TL;DR Press, 2020) received a Pushcart nomination. Hannah enjoys looking for mushrooms, doings crafts, and drinking tea, especially when she is supposed to be writing. You can also follow her on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/HannahHulbertAuthor) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hhulbert).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/helen-french.md b/content/authors/helen-french.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3a1dce9c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/helen-french.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-04-01 -type: author -name: Helen French -photo: 'images/helen-french.jpg' -avatar: 'images/helen-french.jpg' -copyright: "© Helen French 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Helen French*** *is a writer, book hoarder and TV-soaker-upper who grew up in Merseyside near the coast and now lives in Hertfordshire, UK, with her family. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as* Factor Four, Stupefying Stories, *and* Flash Fiction Online, *and she is currently buried in novel writing. You can find her online at [helenfrench.net](https://helenfrench.net/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/hermester-barrington.md b/content/authors/hermester-barrington.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7880097d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/hermester-barrington.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: Hermester Barrington -photo: 'images/HermesterBarrington.jpg' -avatar: 'images/HermesterBarrington.jpg' -copyright: "© Hermester Barrington 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Hermester Barrington*** *is a retired archivist, a haiku poet, and a deliberately genre-ignorant artist whose most recently published ficciones have appeared in* Kzine, Fate Magazine, *and* Peculiar Mormyrid. *For over four decades, he and his impossibly beautiful wife Fayaway have traveled the round earth’s imagined corners in search of invisible books, hitherto unrecognized protozoans, and paranormal phenomena. He and Fay are writing a biography of pop singer Mrs. Miller, tentatively titled* Soul of Iron, Heart of Gold, Voice of Fluttering Quicksilver. *From sundown until cockcrow, he roosts at [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/Hermester-Barrington-143491749048273).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/j-livermore.md b/content/authors/j-livermore.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6f906c98..00000000 --- a/content/authors/j-livermore.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: J. Livermore -photo: 'images/JLivermore.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JLivermore.jpg' -copyright: "© J. Livermore 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***J. Livermore*** *writes infrequently, about odd or impossible things. He studied law, spent time in South America, and now explains things for a living.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/j-siegal.md b/content/authors/j-siegal.md deleted file mode 100644 index 05621f09..00000000 --- a/content/authors/j-siegal.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-12-19 -type: author -name: J. Siegal -photo: 'images/JSiegal.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JSiegal.jpg' -copyright: "© J. Siegal 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***J. Siegal*** *writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music, and code. He plays barrelhouse piano and produces the musical group* Red Spot Rhythm Section. *His writing has appeared in* Michigan Quarterly Review *and* Skeptic Magazine, *among others. Currently, he is at work on his first novel. He lives with his wife and two children near Chicago, IL. You can find out more on [his website](https://joshuasiegal.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/joshuasiegal).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/jack-mackenzie.md b/content/authors/jack-mackenzie.md deleted file mode 100644 index 26b3fec1..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jack-mackenzie.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-03-15 -type: author -name: Jack Mackenzie -photo: 'images/JackMackenzie.png' -avatar: 'images/JackMackenzie.png' -copyright: "© Jack Mackenzie 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jack Mackenzie*** *lives in the wild country of British Columbia, Canada, with his wife and two cats. He loves beer, art, and writing science fiction and fantasy. His short stories have appeared in* Dark Worlds Magazine, Encounters Magazine, Neo-Opsis Magazine, Raygun Revival *and in the anthologies* Magistria: The Realm of the Sorcerer, Sails and Sorcery, *and* Swords of Fire. *His novels and a short story collection*, Heralded by Blood, *can be found at the [Rage Machine Books website](http://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/), to which he is a semi-frequent contributor. You can also find him on* [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/JackMackenzieWriter).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/jalyn-renae-fiske.md b/content/authors/jalyn-renae-fiske.md deleted file mode 100644 index c02d3f0d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jalyn-renae-fiske.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Jalyn Renae Fiske -photo: 'images/JalynRenaeFiske.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JalynRenaeFiske.jpg' -copyright: "© Jalyn Renae Fiske 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jalyn Renae Fiske*** *is an English Language Arts teacher in Texas and the Fiction Editor for the speculative fiction magazine* James Gunn's Ad Astra. *She has over a dozen short stories, poems, and personal essays published in anthologies, literary journals, and online magazines. She tends to write dark fantasy and horror. Her favorites that she's written are* Verity's Faery Teas *and* A Grave of Wind and Leaves. *In her free time, Jalyn likes to practice her oil painting, hike trails, camp, and ravenously read.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/james-davidson.md b/content/authors/james-davidson.md deleted file mode 100644 index b0da59d5..00000000 --- a/content/authors/james-davidson.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-06-18 -type: author -name: James Davidson -photo: 'images/JamesDavidson.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JamesDavidson.jpg' -copyright: "© James Davidson 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***James Davidson*** *lives in Alpine, Utah. In addition to writing speculative fiction, he enjoys the outdoors and spending time with his family and his golden retriever, Troubadour. He is very bad at running, although he persists in doing it anyway. As an attorney he has written countless contracts, but this is his first published story. You can find him on Twitter as* [@JamesDavidsonSF](https://twitter.com/JamesDavidsonSF) *and at his website,* [www.jamesdavidsonauthor.com](https://jamesdavidsonauthor.com)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/jeff-reynolds.md b/content/authors/jeff-reynolds.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2ee16596..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jeff-reynolds.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Jeff Reynolds -photo: 'images/jeff-reynolds.jpg' -avatar: 'images/jeff-reynolds.jpg' -copyright: "© Jeff Reynolds 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jeff Reynolds*** *is a writer from Maryland who works for Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab, home of New Horizons and Parker Solar Probe. He's only a software licensing analyst, though, and doesn't do any cool stuff like building space probes or meeting Brian Mays. Jeff's work has appeared in* Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, *and* Apparition Literary Magazine, *among others. You can find links to his work at [his website](https://www.trollbreath.com). If you want to find him, he's likely sitting at his desk day dreaming.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/jeffery-scott-sims.md b/content/authors/jeffery-scott-sims.md deleted file mode 100644 index 72b6d340..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jeffery-scott-sims.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Jeffery Scott Sims -photo: 'images/JefferyScottSims.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JefferyScottSims.jpg' -copyright: "© Jeffery Scott Sims 2020, 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jeffery Scott Sims*** *a degreed anthropologist with a taste for weird fiction, lives in Arizona, which forms the setting for many of his tales. He has well over a hundred publications, among them the novel* The Journey of Jacob Bleek, *the collection* Eerie Arizona, *and his latest novel,* The Journey through the Black Book. *He maintains a literary website devoted to strange tales [here](http://simsweird.infinityfreeapp.com/index.html).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/jennifer-jeanne-mcardle.md b/content/authors/jennifer-jeanne-mcardle.md deleted file mode 100644 index 608b9055..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jennifer-jeanne-mcardle.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-04-01 -type: author -name: Jennifer Jeanne McArdle -photo: 'images/JenniferMcardle.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JenniferMcardle.jpg' -copyright: "© Jennifer Jeanne McArdle 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jennifer Jeanne McArdle*** *lives in New York with her fiance and an agent of chaos (a spotted dog) and works in animal conservation. Previously she’s taught ESL in South Korea and Indonesia and worked for and with nonprofits in the US and Asia. Her story The Mules was a Brave New Weird 2022 award winner. You can find her on* [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mcardlejeanne.bsky.social), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/aerocrystal/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mcardlejeanne), *and* [her website](https://jenniferjeannemcardle.blogspot.com/)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/jess-simms.md b/content/authors/jess-simms.md deleted file mode 100644 index dc6f8ad6..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jess-simms.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-12-27 -type: author -name: Jess Simms -photo: 'images/jess-simms.jpg' -avatar: 'images/jess-simms.jpg' -copyright: "© Jess Simms 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jess Simms*** *is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, PA, where they're a co-founder of* Scribble House *and the managing editor of* After Happy Hour Review. *They are the author of the flash fiction chapbook* Cryptid Bits *(Last-Picked Books, 2024) and the micro-chap* Shapeshifter Diaries *(Rinky Dink Press, 2023). Their short fiction has been published in* HOOT Online, SLAB, *and* MockingOwl Roost, *among other publications. You can find them online at* [jesssimms.com](https://jesssimms.com/)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/joelle_killian.md b/content/authors/joelle_killian.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7793fe0b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/joelle_killian.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-09-30 -type: author -name: Joelle Killian -photo: 'images/joelle_killian.jpg' -avatar: 'images/joelle_killian.jpg' -copyright: "© Joelle Killian 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Joelle Killian*** *is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction appears in* Maudlin House, The Stygian Lepus, *and* Wicked Shadow Press. *She has also published about psychedelic therapy in her other life as a psychologist, and was part of an undead dance troupe back in the day. Find more of her writing at [her linktree](https://linktr.ee/joellekillian).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/jonathon-mast.md b/content/authors/jonathon-mast.md deleted file mode 100644 index aaa535ea..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jonathon-mast.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Jonathon Mast -photo: 'images/JonathonMast.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JonathonMast.jpg' -copyright: "© Jonathon Mast 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jonathon Mast*** *lives in Kentucky with his wife and an insanity of children. (A group of children is called an insanity. Trust me.) His short stories appear in numerous anthologies and magazines. His first novel, *The Keeper of Tales*, is currently out from Dark Owl Press, and you can find Jon at [his website](https://jonathonmastauthor.com/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/josh-pearce.md b/content/authors/josh-pearce.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6fba97a2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/josh-pearce.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-06-30 -type: author -name: Josh Pearce -photo: 'images/josh-pearce.jpg' -avatar: 'images/josh-pearce.jpg' -copyright: "© Josh Pearce 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Josh Pearce*** *has published more than 200 stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines, including* Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, Locus, Nature, On Spec, Weird Horror, *and elsewhere. Find more of his writing at [fictionaljosh.com](https://fictionaljosh.com/). One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/jude-clee.md b/content/authors/jude-clee.md deleted file mode 100644 index 31265133..00000000 --- a/content/authors/jude-clee.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-30 -type: author -name: Jude Clee -photo: 'images/JudeClee.jpg' -avatar: 'images/JudeClee.jpg' -copyright: "© Jude Clee 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Jude Clee*** *is a writer and educator based in Philadelphia. She is a contributor to the autistic self-advocacy blog* [Neuroclastic](https://neuroclastic.com/). *Her short story \"The Boy in the Mirror\" won a prize in the* 91st annual Writer's Digest competition. *Her short horror stories have appeared in* Black Petal Magazine *and* Grinning Skulls Press." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/katie-mcivor.md b/content/authors/katie-mcivor.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9e616e13..00000000 --- a/content/authors/katie-mcivor.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Katie McIvor -photo: 'images/KatieMcIvor.jpg' -avatar: 'images/KatieMcIvor.jpg' -copyright: "© Katie McIvor 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Katie McIvor*** *grew up in Scotland and studied at the University of Cambridge. She now lives in England and works at a language library, where she is surrounded by books and films in over 200 languages. When not struggling to alphabetise Japanese textbooks, she likes to go on long walks with her husband and dogs. Her flash fiction has recently appeared in* [Terrain.org](https://www.terrain.org/2021/fiction/five-hawks/)." ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/kirk_bueckert.md b/content/authors/kirk_bueckert.md deleted file mode 100644 index f8f3fd45..00000000 --- a/content/authors/kirk_bueckert.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-09-30 -type: author -name: Kirk Bueckert -photo: 'images/kirk_bueckert.jpg' -avatar: 'images/kirk_bueckert.jpg' -copyright: "© Kirk Bueckert 2023, 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Kirk Bueckert*** *is a poet and playwright living on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His previous work has been published by* Dark Matter Magazine, Timber Ghost Press, Tyche Books, *and the* League of Canadian Poets. *His debut novel* Dark Circuitry *launches in early spring 2025.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/kurt-hunt.md b/content/authors/kurt-hunt.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2c27d213..00000000 --- a/content/authors/kurt-hunt.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Kurt Hunt -photo: 'images/KurtHunt.jpg' -avatar: 'images/KurtHunt.jpg' -copyright: "© Kurt Hunt 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Kurt Hunt*** *was formed in the swamps and abandoned gravel pits of post-industrial Michigan. His short fiction has been published at* Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, *and more. He is also a co-author of* Archipelago, *a collaborative serial fantasy adventure available now on Amazon.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/kyle-e-miller.md b/content/authors/kyle-e-miller.md deleted file mode 100644 index d80e9d36..00000000 --- a/content/authors/kyle-e-miller.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Kyle E. Miller -photo: 'images/KyleEMiller.jpg' -avatar: 'images/KyleEMiller.jpg' -copyright: "© Kyle E. Miller 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*Thrown out of Fairyland for crimes against the Realm,* ***Kyle E. Miller*** *is a naturalist and moral philosopher living in Michigan. He can usually be found in the dunes or forests, turning up logs looking for life. Past incarnations include zookeeper, video game critic, retail manager, stablehand, and writing tutor. His fiction has appeared in* Clarkesworld, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, *and* Honey & Sulphur. *You can find more at [www.kyle-e-miller.com](http://www.kyle-e-miller.com/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/l-m-zaerr.md b/content/authors/l-m-zaerr.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1cb538b9..00000000 --- a/content/authors/l-m-zaerr.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-07-01 -type: author -name: LM Zaerr -photo: 'images/l-m-zaerr.jpg' -avatar: 'images/l-m-zaerr.jpg' -copyright: "© LM Zaerr 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***LM Zaerr*** *is a writer and medievalist. She wrote a book on medieval storytelling and sang forgotten tales to the raucous tones of the vielle. She lured students into medieval legends and abandoned them there to challenge dragons, rescue Lancelot, and figure out how to play* gwyddbwyll. *Now she finds new stories and transforms old ones. Her work has appeared in* Uncharted, Wyngraf, *and* New Myths, *among other venues. Visit her at* [www.lmzaerr.com](https://www.lmzaerr.com/)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/l-p-ring.md b/content/authors/l-p-ring.md deleted file mode 100644 index 657b1da1..00000000 --- a/content/authors/l-p-ring.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: L.P. Ring -photo: 'images/l-p-ring.jpg' -avatar: 'images/l-p-ring.jpg' -copyright: "© L.P. Ring 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***L.P. Ring*** *is an Irish-born author presently based in Japan. He’s written crime novels featuring the Seoul-based detective S.I. Choi, a (so far) stand-alone noir featuring the detective Lou Harte, and has been published with* Kaidankai, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Fleas on the Dog, *and the Black Beacon anthology* 'Tales from the Ruins'. *He'll feature in 2023 with* Shotgun Honey, Creepy Podcast, *and* Schlock!. *He tweets at [@L_P_Ring](https://twitter.com/L_P_Ring).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/l-swartz.md b/content/authors/l-swartz.md deleted file mode 100644 index 01cbf8df..00000000 --- a/content/authors/l-swartz.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-12-21 -type: author -name: L Swartz -photo: 'images/l-swartz.jpg' -avatar: 'images/l-swartz.jpg' -copyright: "© L Swartz 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***L Swartz*** (just L) *intrepidly exposes fairy tale apostates, misanthropic dragons, and shapeshifting ex-lovers from a messy desk overlooking Lazarus Island, which appears and disappears in the drowned river mouth of the Nehalem River as it pours its sorrows into the Pacific Ocean. Indoors, L harbors 1 badass queer partner of 25 years, 4 crime cats, 1 sweet old dog, and 1 screamy parrot. Outdoors, L unapologetically feeds every DGAF corvid and raccoon in the county. L can be found online at [Facebook](https://aaronemmel.com/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nounverbadverb), [substack](http://plotspittoon.substack.com/), and [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/propagandaministry.bsky.social).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/lee-f-patrick.md b/content/authors/lee-f-patrick.md deleted file mode 100644 index 40cf0574..00000000 --- a/content/authors/lee-f-patrick.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Lee F. Patrick -photo: 'images/LeeFPatrick.png' -avatar: 'images/LeeFPatrick.png' -copyright: "© Lee F. Patrick 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Lee F. Patrick*** *lives and writes in Calgary Alberta with her husband and four cats who love to sit on her keyboard. She has published three novels, several novellas and a number of short stories and poems in magazines and anthologies. She was a finalist in the Poetry category in the 2018 Prix Aurora Awards. You can find her writing on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Lee-F.-Patrick/e/B073KXC2BS), and she tweets as [@LeeFPatrick](https://twitter.com/LeeFPatrick).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/les-sklaroff.md b/content/authors/les-sklaroff.md deleted file mode 100644 index eb5ffdc8..00000000 --- a/content/authors/les-sklaroff.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Les Sklaroff -photo: 'images/LesSklaroff.jpg' -avatar: 'images/LesSklaroff.jpg' -description: "***Les Sklaroff*** *read science fiction from an early age, and though he's now old enough to know better the habit is hard to break. Born in London, educated at the University of Edinburgh, he worked for an antiquarian bookseller before teaching for ten years, then moved to the Isle of Wight and became an independent bookseller, specialising in Mervyn Peake, illustrated books, and modern first editions.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/liam-baldwin.md b/content/authors/liam-baldwin.md deleted file mode 100644 index 782759b6..00000000 --- a/content/authors/liam-baldwin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Liam Baldwin -photo: 'images/LiamBaldwin.png' -avatar: 'images/LiamBaldwin.png' -copyright: "© Liam Baldwin 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/lucy-zhang.md b/content/authors/lucy-zhang.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6e18cfb5..00000000 --- a/content/authors/lucy-zhang.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Lucy Zhang -photo: 'images/lucy-zhang.jpg' -avatar: 'images/lucy-zhang.jpg' -copyright: "© Lucy Zhang 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Lucy Zhang*** *writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in* CRAFT, The Spectacle, Redivider, *and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks* HOLLOWED *(Thirty West Publishing) and* ABSORPTION *(Harbor Review). Find her at [lucyzhang.tech](https://lucyzhang.tech) or on Twitter [@Dango_Ramen](https://twitter.com/Dango_Ramen).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/lyra-meurer.md b/content/authors/lyra-meurer.md deleted file mode 100644 index cf866e4a..00000000 --- a/content/authors/lyra-meurer.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-04-01 -type: author -name: Lyra Meurer -photo: 'images/lyra-meurer.jpg' -avatar: 'images/lyra-meurer.jpg' -copyright: "© Lyra Meurer 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Lyra Meurer*** *has wanted to be a writer since they were a stream-wading, story-inventing child. Now they chase that dream in Colorado, where they live with their spouse, backyard skunks, and overflowing collections of journals and books. When they’re not writing, they can be found down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or basking in a sunbeam. Their short fiction can be found in* Trollbreath Magazine, Heartlines Spec, Cosmic Horror Monthly, *and several anthologies. Lyra's contemplations on international music, early 2000s television, worldbuilding, and other bizarre phenomena, along with pictures of their doodles, can be found at [their website](https://lyrameurer.blogspot.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/mame-bougouma-diene.md b/content/authors/mame-bougouma-diene.md deleted file mode 100644 index 31b80d63..00000000 --- a/content/authors/mame-bougouma-diene.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: Mame Bougouma Diene -photo: 'images/MameBougouma.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MameBougouma.jpg' -copyright: "© Mame Bougouma Diene 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Mame Bougouma Diene*** *is a Franco–Senegalese American humanitarian living in Brooklyn, the US/Francophone spokesperson for the [African Speculative Fiction Society](https://www.africansfs.com/), a regular columnist at* Strange Horizons, *and francophone editor at* Omenana magazine. *You can find his work in both the aforementioned,* Fiyah!, EscapePod, Tor.com, AfroSFv2 & v3, Dominion, *and others. He was nominated for two Nommo Awards, and his debut collection **Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night** (Clash Books) was nominated for the 2019 Splatterpunk Award. He tweets as [@mame_bougouma](https://twitter.com/mame_bougouma).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/mandira-pattnaik.md b/content/authors/mandira-pattnaik.md deleted file mode 100644 index c2e9c2d8..00000000 --- a/content/authors/mandira-pattnaik.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-03-27 -type: author -name: Mandira Pattnaik -photo: 'images/MandiraPattnaik.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MandiraPattnaik.jpg' -copyright: "© Mandira Pattnaik 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Mandira Pattnaik*** *writes on subjects of identity, climate crisis and displacement. Her publications include 150 magazines across 15 countries in print and online including* LampLight, Orca, Psychopomp *and* Passages North. *She is also on the masthead of* Reckon Review and Trampset. *Read more about her at [http://mandirapattnaik.com/](http://mandirapattnaik.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/marc-phillips.md b/content/authors/marc-phillips.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8a11fd80..00000000 --- a/content/authors/marc-phillips.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Marc Phillips -photo: 'images/marc-phillips.jpg' -avatar: 'images/marc-phillips.jpg' -copyright: "© Marc Phillips 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "**Marc Phillips** is a security contractor from Texas." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/mark-martin.md b/content/authors/mark-martin.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6d2b3136..00000000 --- a/content/authors/mark-martin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-07-01 -type: author -name: Mark Martin -photo: 'images/MarkMartin.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MarkMartin.jpg' -copyright: "© Mark Martin 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Mark Martin**'s* *fiction has appeared in* The Manchester Review, Missouri Review, Dark Mountain, Stand, Plenitudes, *and* Storgy, *and is forthcoming in the* Dalhousie Review. *Mark was the overall winner in the* Fish Short Story Contest 2021, *judged by Emily Ruskovich. The managing editor of* [Verso Books](https://www.versobooks.com/), *he lives in Brooklyn but grew up in the UK.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/martin-m-clark.md b/content/authors/martin-m-clark.md deleted file mode 100644 index 98fa1bb2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/martin-m-clark.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Martin M. Clark -photo: 'images/MartinMClark.png' -avatar: 'images/MartinMClark.png' -copyright: "© Martin M. Clark 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Martin M. Clark*** *Martin M. Clark is a freelance writer and occasional poet. He is the author of [several novellas on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Martin-M-Clark/e/B01J13H888), plus short stories in* Third Flatiron *anthologies. He also contributes to several online publications including* Mythaxis.co.uk, *and* [Kraxon.com](http://www.kraxon.com/). *His range of subject matter includes science fiction, urban fantasy, romance and westerns. He puts this down to the somewhat eclectic mobile lending library where he grew up. He works as a local government officer in south-west Scotland but still finds time to be an evil stepfather.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/martin-zeigler.md b/content/authors/martin-zeigler.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9257d3ba..00000000 --- a/content/authors/martin-zeigler.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Martin Zeigler -photo: 'images/MartinZeigler.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MartinZeigler.jpg' -copyright: "© Martin Zeigler 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Martin Zeigler*** *writes short fiction, primarily mystery, science fiction, and horror. His stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals, both in print and online. Every so often (okay, twice) he has gathered these stories into a self-published collection. In 2015 he released *A Functional Man And Other Stories*. More recently, in 2020, a year we will all remember with fondness, he released *Hypochondria And Other Stories*. Besides writing, Marty enjoys the things most people do. And besides those, he likes reading, taking long walks, and dabbling on the piano. He makes his home in the Pacific Northwest.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/masha-kisel.md b/content/authors/masha-kisel.md deleted file mode 100644 index 348b687b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/masha-kisel.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-30 -type: author -name: Masha Kisel -photo: 'images/MashaKisel.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MashaKisel.jpg' -copyright: "© Masha Kisel 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Masha Kisel*** *was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and currently lives in Dayton, Ohio (USA). Her short stories and essays have been published in* Gulf Coast, Prime Number, Brooklyn Review, McNeese Review, Tahoma Literary Review *and elsewhere. For more of Masha's writing, please visit [www.mashakisel.com](http://www.mashakisel.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/matt-wile.md b/content/authors/matt-wile.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3c466226..00000000 --- a/content/authors/matt-wile.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-12-21 -type: author -name: Matt Wile -photo: 'images/matt-wile.jpg' -avatar: 'images/matt-wile.jpg' -copyright: "© Matt Wile 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Matt Wile*** *is a writer and filmmaker. His debut feature as writer/director,* The Skin of the Teeth, *was described by critics as both 'Get Out meets Grindr' and 'David Lynch directs an episode of Law & Order: SVU.' His fiction can be found most recently in* Andromeda Spaceways, Dark Horses, *and* Del Sol SFF Review. *More of his work is available at [mattwile.com](http://mattwile.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/matthew-wilson.md b/content/authors/matthew-wilson.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0a3bea1a..00000000 --- a/content/authors/matthew-wilson.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Matthew Wilson -photo: 'images/MatthewWilson.png' -avatar: 'images/MatthewWilson.png' -copyright: "© Matthew Wilson 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Matthew Wilson*** *has been published over 300 times in such places as* horror zine, star*line, Zimbell House Publishing, *and many others. He is currently editing his first novel, and you can find him on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/matthew94544267).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/mattia-ravasi.md b/content/authors/mattia-ravasi.md deleted file mode 100644 index 24078a2b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/mattia-ravasi.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Mattia Ravasi -photo: 'images/mattia-ravasi.jpg' -avatar: 'images/mattia-ravasi.jpg' -copyright: "© Mattia Ravasi 2023-2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Mattia Ravasi*** *is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for* The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, *and* The Submarine. *His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including* Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, *and* Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. *He talks about books on his YouTube channel, [The Bookchemist](https://www.youtube.com/c/thebookchemist), and tweets as [@thebookchemist](https://twitter.com/The_Bookchemist) too.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/meg-candelaria.md b/content/authors/meg-candelaria.md deleted file mode 100644 index a23fa9b0..00000000 --- a/content/authors/meg-candelaria.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-03-15 -type: author -name: Meg Candelaria -photo: 'images/MegCandelaria.png' -avatar: 'images/MegCandelaria.png' -copyright: "© Meg Candelaria 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Meg Candelaria*** *lives in Philadelphia with her family, two neurotic dogs, and an apparently indestructible ginkgo tree. Her work has previously appeared in* Daily Science Fiction *and* Everyday Fiction. *Despite writing mostly for online venues, she's a bit of a luddite and keeps hoping that twitter will go away before she has to take notice of it.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/micah-hyatt.md b/content/authors/micah-hyatt.md deleted file mode 100644 index 38e7162e..00000000 --- a/content/authors/micah-hyatt.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Micah Hyatt -photo: 'images/MicahHyatt.png' -avatar: 'images/MicahHyatt.png' -copyright: "© Micah Hyatt 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Micah Hyatt’s*** *work has appeared in* Deep Magic Magazine, Shock Totem, Little Blue Marble, Flash Fiction Online, *and* Daily Science Fiction. *He is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. His light-hearted zombie survival novella,* [Eating the Exhibits](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPYYF5RK), *is available now through Amazon.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/michael-bettendorf.md b/content/authors/michael-bettendorf.md deleted file mode 100644 index cdf13625..00000000 --- a/content/authors/michael-bettendorf.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-12-27 -type: author -name: Michael Bettendorf -photo: 'images/michael-bettendorf.jpg' -avatar: 'images/michael-bettendorf.jpg' -copyright: "© Michael Bettendorf 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Michael Bettendorf*** *(he/him) is a writer from the US Midwest. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at* Drabblecast, Sley House Press, *and elsewhere. His debut experimental horror novel/gamebook* Trve Cvlt *was released by Tenebrous Press in September, 2024. Michael works in a high school library in Lincoln, NE - a place he believes is too strange to be a flyover state. Find him on* [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/BeardedBetts.bsky.social) *and* [www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com](http://www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com/)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/mike-adamson.md b/content/authors/mike-adamson.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8b2dd54b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/mike-adamson.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Mike Adamson -photo: 'images/MikeAdamson.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MikeAdamson.jpg' -copyright: "© Mike Adamson 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Mike Adamson*** *holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, he returned to study and secured qualifications in both marine biology and archaeology. He has been a university educator since 2006, has worked in the replication of convincing ancient fossils, is a passionate photographer, a master-level hobbyist, and a journalist for international magazines. Short fiction sales include to* The Strand, Little Blue Marble, Weird Tales, Abyss and Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Compelling Science Fiction *and* Nature Futures. *Mike has placed nearly 140 stories to date. You can catch up with his writing career at [The View From the Keyboard](http://mike-adamson.blogspot.com).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/mike-morgan.md b/content/authors/mike-morgan.md deleted file mode 100644 index a4232db9..00000000 --- a/content/authors/mike-morgan.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Mike Morgan -photo: 'images/MikeMorgan.png' -avatar: 'images/MikeMorgan.png' -copyright: "© Mike Morgan 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Mike Morgan*** *has lived on three continents. It wasn't for a bet; it was just how things worked out. (Being easily bored may have factored into it.) He's married with two kids and looks after a foul-tempered pet. Can you tell? His work has been included in anthologies like Flame Tree's* Gothic Fantasy; Science Fiction Short Stories, *NewCon Press's* Best of British Science Fiction 2018 *and* 2019, Unidentified Funny Objects 8, *and multiple issues of Hiraeth's* The Martian Wave. *His novella* Where the Monsters Are *is due out soon from Hiraeth. You can find him on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/culttvmike) and his [website](https://perpetualstateofmildpanic.wordpress.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/monte-remer.md b/content/authors/monte-remer.md deleted file mode 100644 index 757b1ec2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/monte-remer.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-12-19 -type: author -name: Monte Remer -photo: 'images/MonteRemer.jpg' -avatar: 'images/MonteRemer.jpg' -copyright: "© Monte Remer 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Monte Remer*** *is a writer from the American west. He tells stories of strange happenings and macabre creatures, both unbecoming of the kind and simple hick that he is. Somewhere in the mountains, his aggressive typing on old keyboards can be heard as the dust rises out of them like smoke from a fresh fire.*" ---- - diff --git "a/content/authors/moustapha-mback\303\251-diop.md" "b/content/authors/moustapha-mback\303\251-diop.md" deleted file mode 100644 index 2c660f65..00000000 --- "a/content/authors/moustapha-mback\303\251-diop.md" +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Moustapha Mbacké Diop -photo: 'images/MoustaphaMD.png' -avatar: 'images/MoustaphaMD.png' -copyright: "© Moustapha Mbacké Diop 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Moustapha Mbacké Diop*** *is a Senegalese author living in Dakar. He is in his fourth year of medical school, and when he's not stressing about finals or hospital rounds, he reads and writes mainly fantasy. Obsessed with mythology and African folklore, he has published an urban fantasy trilogy written in French, named* Teranga Chronicles. *You can find him at [his website](https://moustaphamdbooks.carrd.co/) and on [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18933319.Moustapha_Mbacke_Diop), and he tweets as [@mdmoustaf](https://twitter.com/mdmoustaf).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/olufunmilayo-makinde.md b/content/authors/olufunmilayo-makinde.md deleted file mode 100644 index a3789aa6..00000000 --- a/content/authors/olufunmilayo-makinde.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-09-28 -type: author -name: Olufunmilayo Makinde -photo: 'images/OlufunmilayoMakinde.jpg' -avatar: 'images/OlufunmilayoMakinde.jpg' -copyright: "© Olufunmilayo Makinde 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Olufunmilayo Makinde*** *is a Nigerian writer who dreams of one day writing full time. You can find her on X (formerly twitter) as [@Funmi_fbee](https://twitter.com/Funmi_fbee), and you can find her work in* Full House Literary, Flash Phantoms, Heavy Feather Review, *and* The Deadlands." ---- diff --git a/content/authors/owen-g-tabard.md b/content/authors/owen-g-tabard.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4af0d601..00000000 --- a/content/authors/owen-g-tabard.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-03-27 -type: author -name: Owen G. Tabard -photo: 'images/OwenGTabard.jpg' -avatar: 'images/OwenGTabard.jpg' -copyright: "© Owen G. Tabard 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Owen G. Tabard*** *is a writer and lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy, as well as ancient mythology. He draws on these interests in his own stories. His hobbies include kayaking and bird-watching.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/owen-leddy.md b/content/authors/owen-leddy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8d1a70e2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/owen-leddy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-06-30 -type: author -name: Owen Leddy -photo: 'images/OwenLeddy.jpg' -avatar: 'images/OwenLeddy.jpg' -copyright: "© Owen Leddy 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Owen Leddy*** *is a bioengineering graduate student and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their short fiction has previously appeared in *Fusion Fragment*, *Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine*, *Printers Row Journal*, and the *Triangulation* anthology series, among other publications.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/paul-alex-gray.md b/content/authors/paul-alex-gray.md deleted file mode 100644 index ae5ec40d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/paul-alex-gray.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-09-15 -type: author -name: Paul Alex Gray -photo: 'images/PaulAlexGray.jpg' -avatar: 'images/PaulAlexGray.jpg' -copyright: "© Paul Alex Gray 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Paul Alex Gray*** *writes linear and interactive fiction starring sentient black holes, wayward sea monsters, curious AIs and more. His work has been published in* Nature Futures, Andromeda Spaceways, PodCastle *and others. Paul grew up by the beaches of Australia, then traveled the world and now lives in Canada. On his adventures, he has been a startup founder, game designer and mentor to technology entrepreneurs. Chat with him on Twitter [@paulalexgray](https://twitter.com/paulalexgray) or visit [www.paulalexgray.com](https://paulalexgray.com/).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/peter-wynd.md b/content/authors/peter-wynd.md deleted file mode 100644 index 91a8a2e0..00000000 --- a/content/authors/peter-wynd.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-12-21 -type: author -name: Peter Wynd -photo: 'images/PeterWynd.jpg' -avatar: 'images/PeterWynd.jpg' -copyright: "© Peter Wynd 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Peter Wynd*** *is a Polish-based writer and living proof that AI’s randomness will never replace human imagination. In his free time he wonders whether he’s a metaphor. He loves traveling, designing board games, and writing at unexpected places. See more of his cat at* [www.peterwynd.com](http://www.peterwynd.com/)." ---- diff --git a/content/authors/pr-oleary.md b/content/authors/pr-oleary.md deleted file mode 100644 index 91110c4b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/pr-oleary.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-12-27 -type: author -name: P. R. O’Leary -photo: 'images/pr-oleary.jpg' -avatar: 'images/pr-oleary.jpg' -copyright: "© P. R. O’Leary 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***P. R. O’Leary*** *writes dark stories tinged with humor, or humorous stories tinged with darkness. Dozens of his pieces have been published all over the world. You can find more information on his [LinkTree](https://linktr.ee/proleary), and you can find him at his geodesic dome in central New Jersey.*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/pritesh-patil-percy-wadiwala.md b/content/authors/pritesh-patil-percy-wadiwala.md deleted file mode 100644 index 91d086fc..00000000 --- a/content/authors/pritesh-patil-percy-wadiwala.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-03-15 -type: author -name: Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala -photo: 'images/PriteshAndPercy.png' -avatar: 'images/PriteshAndPercy.png' -copyright: "© Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Pritesh Patil*** *(right) is fuelled by books, stories and coffee fumes. When he isn’t hunting monsters and searching for cracks between realities, he can be found deep in Dream's library spinning tales of hope and revolutions. You can find him on Twitter as [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/TheQuillseeker/).* - -***Percy Wadiwala*** *(left) is a Chartered Accountant and MBA who quit his career as a Banker to spend more time with his cats. As his cats are much happier without his company, he engages in other pursuits including staring mournfully at broken glasses and, occasionally, writing. He lives in Mumbai with his family, his books, and a firm conviction that modern civilization is in terminal decline. Until that actually happens, however, you can read his scribbling and connect with him at [his website](https://www.slackerstales.com/), [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/PercySlacker/), and [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/slackerstales/). His first book, ‘The Day Money Died’, is available at [Amazon](https://www.amazon.es/dp/B079V6NJ4K).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/rebecca-birch.md b/content/authors/rebecca-birch.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9655b8d2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/rebecca-birch.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-30 -type: author -name: Rebecca Birch -photo: 'images/RebeccaBirch.jpg' -avatar: 'images/RebeccaBirch.jpg' -copyright: "© Rebecca Birch 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Rebecca Birch*** *is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in Seattle, Washington. She’s a classically trained soprano, holds a deputy black belt in Taekwondo, and enjoys spending time in the company of trees. Her fiction has appeared in markets including* Fireside Magazine, Cricket, *and* Flash Fiction Online. *You can find her online at [wordsofbirch.com](http://wordsofbirch.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/rina-song.md b/content/authors/rina-song.md deleted file mode 100644 index afe986c5..00000000 --- a/content/authors/rina-song.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-06-18 -type: author -name: Rina Song -photo: 'images/RinaSong.jpg' -avatar: 'images/RinaSong.jpg' -copyright: "© Rina Song 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Rina Song*** *is a writer and alternative rock lover based out of California. When not writing, she has a day job involving computers. She hopes to one day receive her own call to a heroic quest of epic proportions, and perhaps write a novel about it afterwards. Her writing has previously been published in* Spank the Carp." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/rob-gillham.md b/content/authors/rob-gillham.md deleted file mode 100644 index c46df11c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/rob-gillham.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-10-01 -type: author -name: Rob Gillham -photo: 'images/rob-gillham.jpg' -avatar: 'images/rob-gillham.jpg' -copyright: "© Rob Gillham 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Rob Gillham*** *writes mostly dark—sometimes darkly humorous—speculative fiction. He lives in London and does all his writing in the margins of the day. Stuff he's written has also appeared in* Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction *and* Creepy Podcast, *links to which all can be found at [robgillham.com](robgillham.com).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/sandee-bree-breathnach.md b/content/authors/sandee-bree-breathnach.md deleted file mode 100644 index 90971be6..00000000 --- a/content/authors/sandee-bree-breathnach.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Sandee Bree Breathnach -photo: 'images/sandee-bree-breathnach.jpg' -avatar: 'images/sandee-bree-breathnach.jpg' -copyright: "© Sandee Bree Breathnach 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*Hailing from the tiny green island of Ireland, **Sandee Bree Breathnach** is an aspiring writer who spends her free time crafting stories, marvelling over moths, and searching forests for fairies and inspiration. She has yet to find any fairies.*" ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/scott-j-couturier.md b/content/authors/scott-j-couturier.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5fef3669..00000000 --- a/content/authors/scott-j-couturier.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Scott J. Couturier -photo: 'images/ScottJCouturier.png' -avatar: 'images/ScottJCouturier.png' -copyright: "© Scott J Couturier 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Scott J. Couturier*** *is a poet and prose writer of the weird, grotesque, liminal, and darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including* [The Audient Void](https://theaudientvoid.bigcartel.com/), [Spectral Realms](https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/spectral-realms), [Eye To The Telescope](http://eyetothetelescope.com/), [The Dark Corner Zine](http://thedarkcornerzine.limitedrun.com/), [Space and Time Magazine](https://spaceandtime.net/), *and* [Weirdbook](http://weirdbook-magazine.com/); *his fiction has been repeatedly featured in the* Test Patterns *and* Pulps *anthologies from [Planet X Publications](http://planetxpublications.blogspot.com/). He currently lives an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor and two cats, and you can find him on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/scottjcouturier/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/sean-macKendrick.md b/content/authors/sean-macKendrick.md deleted file mode 100644 index b9d7d62f..00000000 --- a/content/authors/sean-macKendrick.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-06-30 -type: author -name: Sean MacKendrick -photo: 'images/sean-mackendrick.jpg' -avatar: 'images/sean-mackendrick.jpg' -copyright: "© Sean MacKendrick 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Sean MacKendrick*** *splits his time between Colorado and Texas. His story* Oh, Be a Fine Guy, Kiss Me! *was selected for the* Amazing Stories Reader's Choice Award. *When not writing fiction he writes code as a software engineer. He can be found on [Twitter/X](https://twitter.com/SeanMacKendrick) and [BlueSky](https://bsky.app/profile/SeanMacKendrick.bsky.social).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/sharon-dawn-selby.md b/content/authors/sharon-dawn-selby.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1111194c..00000000 --- a/content/authors/sharon-dawn-selby.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Sharon Dawn Selby -photo: 'images/SharonDawnSelby.png' -avatar: 'images/SharonDawnSelby.png' -copyright: "© Sharon Dawn Selby 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Sharon Dawn Selby*** *is a professor of English Literature and Professional Communication in London, Ontario, which means she gets to roam the realms of other people's stories when she isn't writing her own. She has published several book reviews and an academic article, as well as a monograph,* Memory and Identity, *in Canadian Fiction. You can find her on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sharondawnselby) and at [her website](http://sharondawnselby.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/shaun-anthony-mcmichael.md b/content/authors/shaun-anthony-mcmichael.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4595e76b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/shaun-anthony-mcmichael.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-12-21 -type: author -name: Shaun Anthony McMichael -photo: 'images/shaun-mcmichael.jpg' -avatar: 'images/shaun-mcmichael.jpg' -copyright: "© Shaun Anthony McMichael 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Shaun Anthony McMichael*** *has taught writing to students from around the world since 2007, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins throughout the Seattle area. Over 85 of his poems, short stories, and reviews have appeared in many literary magazines online and in print, including the forthcoming short story collection* The Wild Familiar *from CJ Press. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son where he attends church most Sundays. Visit him at his website, [shaunanthonymcmichael.com](http://shaunanthonymcmichael.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/si-wang.md b/content/authors/si-wang.md deleted file mode 100644 index 00e042be..00000000 --- a/content/authors/si-wang.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Si Wang -photo: 'images/si-wang.jpg' -avatar: 'images/si-wang.jppg' -copyright: "© Si Wang 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Si Wang*** *is a software engineer and writer who lives in California with his wife, son, and chickens. His work has been published in* Aurealis, Electric Spec, *and* Mythaxis. *His hobbies include playing basketball, tabletop games, and rock songs on the guitar and piano. You can find him on Twitter as [@siwang](https://twitter.com/siwang).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/siobhan-ekeh.md b/content/authors/siobhan-ekeh.md deleted file mode 100644 index 786097f7..00000000 --- a/content/authors/siobhan-ekeh.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-09-28 -type: author -name: Siobhan Ekeh -photo: 'images/SiobhanEkeh.jpg' -avatar: 'images/SiobhanEkeh.jpg' -copyright: "© Siobhan Ekeh 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Siobhan Ekeh*** *is a second-generation Nigerian-American writer, artist, and educator living in Brooklyn. When she isn't writing, she can usually be found conversing with her extensive stuffed bear collection or frightening karaoke bar audiences with creative renditions of* Jesus Christ Superstar *songs. Her poetry has appeared in* rainy weather days *and* Strings *magazines, and her fiction is forthcoming in* Speculative City Magazine. *Her work can be found on [siobhanekeh.com](http://siobhanekeh.com/).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/skye-allen.md b/content/authors/skye-allen.md deleted file mode 100644 index 83ef49e3..00000000 --- a/content/authors/skye-allen.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-04-04 -type: author -name: Skye Allen -photo: 'images/SkyeAllen.png' -avatar: 'images/SkyeAllen.png' -copyright: "© Skye Allen 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Skye Allen*** *wrote* Pretty Peg *and* The Songbird Thief, *both queer YA fantasy novels.* The Songbird Thief *was a Goldie Award finalist and won a FAPA President’s Book Award. She has had stories in* Toasted Cheese *and* Of Dragons and Magic *and poetry in* Insomnia *and* Sinister Wisdom. *She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writers workshop. She is also a musician and occasionally performs around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife. She/her pronouns. You can find her [at her website](https://allenskye.com/), and she tweets as [@eppiemorrie](https://twitter.com/eppiemorrie).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/stephen-s-power.md b/content/authors/stephen-s-power.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5b91dc9d..00000000 --- a/content/authors/stephen-s-power.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-04-01 -type: author -name: Stephen S. Power -photo: 'images/stephen-s-power.jpg' -avatar: 'images/stephen-s-power.jpg' -copyright: "© Stephen S. Power 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Stephen S. Power*** *is the author of the novel* The Dragon Round, *and his new novel,* Safe at Last, *about a traumatized woman trapped in a smart house, is currently under submission. His short fiction has appeared recently in* Unorthodox Stories *and* Heathen *and will soon appear in* Lightspeed, Stupefying Stories, Tales of Horror, *the anthologies* Cost of Living *and* The Growers (The Best of NewMyths, Volume 5) *as well as on the podcast* Creepy. *His site is [stephenspower.com](http://stephenspower.com/). He's on BlueSky at [@stephenspower.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/stephenspower.bsky.social).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/steve-boseley.md b/content/authors/steve-boseley.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4314cee9..00000000 --- a/content/authors/steve-boseley.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-12-21 -type: author -name: Steve Boseley -photo: 'images/steve-boseley.jpg' -avatar: 'images/steve-boseley.jpg' -copyright: "© Steve Boseley 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Steve Boseley*** *is a writer from Nottingham, UK, living with Multiple Sclerosis and typing with his one good finger. His short fiction generally falls into the horror genre and has been included in several online magazines, most recently* Schlock! Horror *and* Creepy Podcast." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/steve-loiaconi.md b/content/authors/steve-loiaconi.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8995cf4b..00000000 --- a/content/authors/steve-loiaconi.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-04-01 -type: author -name: Steve Loiaconi -photo: 'images/SteveLoiaconi.jpg' -avatar: 'images/SteveLoiaconi.jpg' -copyright: "© Steve Loiaconi 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Steve Loiaconi*** *is a journalist and a graduate of George Mason University's MFA program. His fiction previously appeared in* Griffel, The Mystery Tribune, Samfiftyfour, Tales of the Fantastic, *and* The Saturday Evening Post, *as well as the anthologies* Dracula’s Guests, P is for Poltergeist, *and* Open All Night. *He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and son, and you can find him on* [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/stephen.loiaconi/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sloiaconi), *and* [his website](https://steveloiaconi.wordpress.com/)." ---- - diff --git a/content/authors/steven-genise.md b/content/authors/steven-genise.md deleted file mode 100644 index bfd8b8e6..00000000 --- a/content/authors/steven-genise.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-10-01 -type: author -name: Steven Genise -photo: 'images/steven-genise.jpg' -avatar: 'images/steven-genise.jpg' -copyright: "© Steven Genise 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Steven Genise*** *is an author and editor based in Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in* Blue Earth Review, Fusion Fragment, Milk Candy Review, *and many others. You can find links to his work at* [stevengenise.com](http://stevengenise.com/), *and his vague thoughts about medieval history, rowing, and the outdoors on* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/StevenGenise)." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/subodhana-wijeyeratne.md b/content/authors/subodhana-wijeyeratne.md deleted file mode 100644 index c320bc27..00000000 --- a/content/authors/subodhana-wijeyeratne.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-03-15 -type: author -name: Subodhana Wijeyeratne -photo: 'images/SubodhanaWijeyeratne.png' -avatar: 'images/SubodhanaWijeyeratne.png' -copyright: "© Subodhana Wijeyeratne 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Subodhana Wijeyeratne*** *is a historian and writer living in Tokyo, Japan. He's been writing fiction for nearly twenty years and has had nearly twenty short stories appear in print over the past two years, in venues including* Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Expanded Horizons, Piker Press, *and* The Scarlet Leaf Review. *His short story 'They Meet in the Wall' was awarded a Mariner Prize in 2018. His first collection of short stories, Tales from the Stone Lotus, is currently available on Amazon - as is his debut novel, The Slixes. You can find him on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/iwamiyama/) and [his website](http://subowijeyeratne.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/sydney-sackett.md b/content/authors/sydney-sackett.md deleted file mode 100644 index 73676edb..00000000 --- a/content/authors/sydney-sackett.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-09-15 -type: author -name: Sydney Sackett -photo: 'images/sydney-sackett.jpg' -avatar: 'images/sydney-sackett.jpg' -copyright: "© Sydney Sackett 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Sydney Sackett*** (she/her) *is a newly graduated speculative fiction author and poet with experience in true crime journalism at* Murder Murder News. *Some of her work appears in* Etherea, Menacing Hedge, Radon Journal, *and* Not One of Us. *She can be found at [sydneybsackett.wixsite.com](https://sydneybsackett.wixsite.com/website), where she's hoping to nab someone's stories to edit.*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/teresa-milbrodt.md b/content/authors/teresa-milbrodt.md deleted file mode 100644 index 68bcdda9..00000000 --- a/content/authors/teresa-milbrodt.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2024-10-01 -type: author -name: Teresa Milbrodt -photo: 'images/teresa-milbrodt.jpg' -avatar: 'images/teresa-milbrodt.jpg' -copyright: "© Teresa Milbrodt 2024 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Teresa Milbrodt*** *has published four short story collections, a novel called* The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, *and the monograph* Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality. *Milbrodt is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Roanoke College, and teaches fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, and disability studies. She loves cats, long walks with her MP3 player, independently owned coffee shops, peanut butter frozen yogurt, and texting hearts in rainbow colors. Read more of her work at [her website](http://teresamilbrodt.com/homepage/).*" ---- diff --git a/content/authors/thorin-n-tatge.md b/content/authors/thorin-n-tatge.md deleted file mode 100644 index 70670cff..00000000 --- a/content/authors/thorin-n-tatge.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-06-18 -type: author -name: Thorin N. Tatge -photo: 'images/ThorinNTatge.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ThorinNTatge.jpg' -copyright: "© Thorin N. Tatge 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Thorin N. Tatge*** *runs an afterschool library homework help program serving primary East African youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Brought up in science fiction fandom, he writes poems and fantasy with a focus on talking animals and philosophy. He has self-published an interactive novel,* What Is Best?, *and his first published short story,* Begin One Way, *appeared in* Leading Edge *in 2019. He likes to roleplay, drum, play and invent games, think about math, and take adventurous long walks, and fancies himself the greatest Lode Runner level designer in the world*." ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/tm-morgan.md b/content/authors/tm-morgan.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5662f707..00000000 --- a/content/authors/tm-morgan.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-03-15 -type: author -name: T. M. Morgan -photo: 'images/TMMorgan.png' -avatar: 'images/TMMorgan.png' -copyright: "© T. M. Morgan 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***T. M. Morgan*** *lives in southern Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay with his wife and kids. His stories have been published in* Lamplight, Vastarien, Penumbric, *and now* Mythaxis. *You can find him on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTMMorgan) and [his website](https://thetmmorgan.wordpress.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/travis-ezell.md b/content/authors/travis-ezell.md deleted file mode 100644 index feea57df..00000000 --- a/content/authors/travis-ezell.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2025-06-30 -type: author -name: Travis Ezell -photo: 'images/travis-ezell.jpg' -avatar: 'images/travis-ezell.jpg' -copyright: "© Travis Ezell 2025 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Travis Ezell*** *is a writer, linguist, and filmmaker located in Boston. He has worked as an educator at Emerson College and the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon. His first publication was on human flesh (when a stranger got a tattoo of one of his tweets). He likes cheese, weird movies, his cat Spacecat, and midday naps. Right now he’s probably lost down a wiki-hole or buying more books than he can possibly read. Someone should probably stop him. Travis is currently a participant in GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, where his first book,* zMind, *is being revised.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/trisha-mckee.md b/content/authors/trisha-mckee.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7549ceac..00000000 --- a/content/authors/trisha-mckee.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2020-12-07 -type: author -name: Trisha McKee -photo: 'images/TrishaMcKee.png' -avatar: 'images/TrishaMcKee.png' -copyright: "© Trisha McKee 2020 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Trisha McKee*** *resides in a small town in Pennsylvania after being stranded at the station. Since April 2019, her work has appeared in over 60 publications, including* Scribe, The Oddville Press, Horror Magazine, Night to Dawn, J.J. Outre Review, Tablet Magazine, Hybrid Fiction, *several anthologies, and more. Her debut novel* Beyond the Surface *was released through Breaking Rules Publishing in May 2020. You can find her on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/wordromancer/), [Facebook](https://www.amazon.com/author/trishamckee/), and [her website](http://www.trishamckee.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/uchechukwu-nwaka.md b/content/authors/uchechukwu-nwaka.md deleted file mode 100644 index bb92644a..00000000 --- a/content/authors/uchechukwu-nwaka.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2021-12-20 -type: author -name: Uchechukwu Nwaka -photo: 'images/UchechukwuNwaka.jpg' -avatar: 'images/UchechukwuNwaka.jpg' -copyright: "© Uchechukwu Nwaka 2021 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Uchechukwu Nwaka*** *is a student of Medicine and Surgery at University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in* Cossmass Infinities, Fusion Fragment *and* Hexagon *among others. When he’s not trying to unravel the mysteries of human (or inhuman) interaction, he can be found binging unhealthy amounts of anime, or generally trying to keep up with endless schoolwork. Find him on Twitter at [@uche_cjn](https://twitter.com/uche_cjn).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/valerie-alexander.md b/content/authors/valerie-alexander.md deleted file mode 100644 index 230442b2..00000000 --- a/content/authors/valerie-alexander.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2022-12-19 -type: author -name: Valerie Alexander -photo: 'images/ValerieAlexander.jpg' -avatar: 'images/ValerieAlexander.jpg' -copyright: "© Valerie Alexander 2022 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Valerie Alexander*** *is a freelance writer living in Arizona and Oregon. Her stories have been published in a number of sci-fi, horror and speculative anthologies and magazines. Visit her at [@vaxder](https://twitter.com/vaxder) or [www.valeriealexander.com](https://www.valeriealexander.com/).*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/wayne-mccray.md b/content/authors/wayne-mccray.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2669d147..00000000 --- a/content/authors/wayne-mccray.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-12-21 -type: author -name: Wayne McCray -photo: 'images/wayne-mccray.jpg' -avatar: 'images/wayne-mccray.jpg' -copyright: "© Wayne McCray 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "***Wayne McCray*** *is a* Pushcart Prize *nominee for 2022 and 2024, and a 2023* Best of the Net *nominee. His short atories have appeared in* Susurrus, The Hooghly Review, Afro Literary Magazine, Bandit Fiction, The Bookends Review, Chitro Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, Drunk Monkeys, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Ilinix Magazine, Isele Magazine, Malarkey Books, The Ocotillo Review, Ogma Magazine, Pigeon Review, Roi Faineant, The Rush Magazine, Sangam Literary Magazine, Swim Press, *and* Wingless Dreamer. *He works diligently from his book-laden junk room.*" ---- \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/authors/xan_van-rooyen.md b/content/authors/xan_van-rooyen.md deleted file mode 100644 index fc863144..00000000 --- a/content/authors/xan_van-rooyen.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-09-30 -type: author -name: Xan van Rooyen -photo: 'images/xan_van-rooyen.jpg' -avatar: 'images/xan_van-rooyen.jpg' -copyright: "© Xan van Rooyen 2023 All Rights Reserved" -description: "*Climber, tattoo collector, and peanut-butter connoisseur,* ***Xan van Rooyen*** *is an autistic, non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of* Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, *and* Galaxy’s Edge *among others. They have also written several novels including YA fantasy* My Name is Magic, *and adult arcanopunk novel* Silver Helix. *Xan is also part of the Sauutiverse, an African writer’s collective with their first anthology due out this November from Android Press. Feel free to say hi on [their socials](https://linktr.ee/xanvanrooyen).*" ---- - diff --git a/content/catalogue/_index.md b/content/catalogue/_index.md deleted file mode 100644 index c488bda4..00000000 --- a/content/catalogue/_index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,13 +0,0 @@ ---- -# Catalogue is a section listing page -layout: catalogue -type: list -title: "Catalogue" -date: 2024-01-01 -description: Stories sorted alphabetically by title -url: /catalogue.html ---- - -The ***Mythaxis Magazine*** catalogue is your one-stop shop for all content listings, by title, author name, category, and genres. [The data](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/master/data/xway2metadata.json) is distributed in a variety of formats [and a variety of temporal chunks](https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/blob/master/content/archive.md) (because AI will do your work for you). Or use [the original format](https://mythaxis.wordpress.com/mythaxis-magazine/) of a list of plain old alphabetised table rows, or a [sitemap for a singular www source](./sitemap.xml). - -{{< random-button selector="table a" label="Select a story at random to read!" >}} diff --git a/content/catalogue/editorials.md b/content/catalogue/editorials.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3555f222..00000000 --- a/content/catalogue/editorials.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ ---- -layout: editorials -type: catalogue -title: "Editorials" -date: 2024-01-01 -description: Editorials sorted by date -url: /editorials.html ---- diff --git a/content/editorial policy.md b/content/editorial policy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 30dd9331..00000000 --- a/content/editorial policy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,80 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Seldom Asked Questions" -date: 2020-08-01 -issue: Issue 23 - -type: page -slug: editorial-policy ---- - -Below are some SAQ's... - -{{< details title="What is your editorial process?" open="false">}} - -***Mythaxis Magazine*** uses a "second opinion" slush reading system. All submissions are first evaluated by the editor, who assembles a shortlist of pieces for further consideration. These are anonymised before being shared with our second reader team, who boast varied tastes and interests and have no fear of telling the editor when they think he's in danger of making a grave mistake. Nevertheless, the editor alone is responsible for the final selections. - -If we like a piece but feel it needs more work before it is ready to publish, we will inquire if the author is interested in receiving notes ahead of submitting a rewrite. This should not be taken as indicative of a guaranteed second draft acceptance, but we will only approach if our interest is significant. To date, all instances of this have resulted in a subsequent acceptance. - -After accepting a piece, we will deliver an edited draft of the story for the author's approval, which may result in a two-way revision process over multiple rounds. When the final draft is agreed, we supply a contract for the author's signature, with payment made immediately on return of a signed copy. - -{{< /details >}} - - -{{< details title="What characteristics do you appreciate in a submission?" open="false">}} - -Some magazines will tell you *read what we've published to learn what we're looking for*. ***Mythaxis*** takes the opposite perspective: go digging through our issues and you'll find what we've published before – the best way to join us is to show us something new. - -We expect submissions to demonstrate basic professionalism but recognise that to err is human, so occasional spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, punctuation slips and the like are not going to result in summary rejection. More important are things like tight plotting, engaging characters, quality of prose, believable dialogue. If you can show us these, we're going to show interest in return. - -Ultimately, the editor is a lover of good storytelling, with the emphasis on **story**. Whether you subscribe to “Hollywood” structuring, the beginning-middle-end philosophy, or some other narrative trend, all are welcome. By contrast, the less identifiable as “a story” your story is, the harder it will be to find a home here. That said, we're all in favour of skilful experimentation – if you can surprise us, however you do it, that's going to go a long way! - -**Special mention:** The editor is enamoured of utopian fiction in the critical mode, as well as depictions of humanity's future that champion progressive attitudes to overcoming social or environmental challenges. Sadly, he receives too little of such things, so why not help change that? - -{{< /details >}} - - - -{{< details title="What characteristics do you dislike in a submission?" open="false">}} - -There are few subjects which we absolutely will reject out of hand, but there are some which authors may wish to consider looking elsewhere to place: - -* **Gratuitous sex and violence** – we are not a market for explicit sexual content, while graphic depictions of violence without *extremely* strong justification for inclusion are likely to be rejected. -* **Suicide** – this is a difficult subject to handle well, and generally not one the editor seeks to represent. Not prohibited, but definitely a hard sell. -* **Abuse of minors** – very occasionally we have included stories in which the death of a child occurs or is referred to. However, while *peril* has its dramatic value, we do not find entertainment in the hypothetical torment of children. -* **Reworkings of Greek mythology** – we *have* published a number of these, but in general this is not a theme which engages the editor's interest. He has a particular dislike of *Hades and Persephone* stories, examples of which are almost certain to be rejected. -* **Wryness** – any story in which is found the phrase "wry grin" (or any of its close relatives) will earn contempt and vilification. Miraculous acceptances containing such aberrations will not by the time they are published. -* **AI-generated material** – as stated in the submissions guidelines, we do not accept content produced using "artificial intelligence" tools, including but not limited to LLMs (large language models) such as ChatGPT. Worth saying twice: don't send us anything written by these things, what they make is not good fiction. It stands out for what it is, and we'll stop considering your submissions in future because you're wasting our time. - -{{< /details >}} - - - -{{< details title="What advice can you give regarding document formatting?" open="false">}} - -Professional-looking documents make editors well-disposed towards a submission before they even start reading, while human nature (editors are humans too, incredibly) means any kind of inconvenience may damage a story's prospects irrepairably. We recommend following these guidelines with regard to how your submission document is presented. - -**Manuscript formatting:** We recommend using [Shunn's excellent Modern Manuscript formatting guide](https://www.shunn.net/format/story/), but in particular consider the following: - -- Please use an easy-reading font (Times New Roman 12pt is preferred). -- **Use automatic paragraph formatting** to set indents or paragraph breaks. **Do not manually insert** lines between paragraphs. **Do not use tabs or hit the space bar some number of times** for first-line indents. -- Use a single centred # to represent essential section breaks. -- Use *italics* for italics, don’t underline. Smart (“curly”) punctuation is preferred, but consistency is preferred more. -- If your manuscript includes any unusual formatting, please alert the editors when submitting and have a really good, story-related reason. - -**Attachment filenames:** Please consider using the format ***< title >< authorname >**.doc* for your attachment filename. This aids greatly in alphabetical document management. Examples of **good** filenames are: - -- **The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle** -- **TheVeryHungryCaterpillar_Carle** -- **the-very-hungry-caterpillar** (including the author in the filename is entirely optional) -- **VeryHungryCaterpillar** (omitting "the" is not a disaster, but for the sake of three letters why not keep it?) - -Filenames that lead with the author's name, use an abbreviated title or other weird variations make them harder to find. This risks annoying the editor moments before he reads your story. Examples of **bad** filenames are: - -- *Carle - The Very Hungry Caterpillar* (you know who you are) -- *Mythaxis - The Very Hungry Caterpillar* (we know who we are) -- *Caterpillar / Hungry_draft3 / submission_copy caterpillar / april2023-caterpillar /* etc -- *Before the Butter Flies* (use the same title as in your email, damnit) - -The editor knows he is wasting his time suggesting this, but is allowed to dream of a better world. - -{{< /details >}} diff --git a/content/genres/_index.md b/content/genres/_index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 84693b2a..00000000 --- a/content/genres/_index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ ---- -# Genres is a site taxonomy. -layout: genres -title: "Genres" -date: 2024-01-01 -description: Genres with stories sorted by title -url: /genres.html ---- diff --git a/content/issue-23/A Curse at Midnight.md b/content/issue-23/A Curse at Midnight.md deleted file mode 100644 index 500f499d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/A Curse at Midnight.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,302 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "A Curse at Midnight" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Moustapha Mbacké Diop -image: images/CurseMidnight.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/alligator-animal-close-up-crocodile-1851313/), [josephvm](https://pixabay.com/photos/abstract-horror-face-dark-rough-3363956/), [Skitterphoto](https://pixabay.com/photos/flame-fire-inferno-orange-burning-726268/), and [darksouls1](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/fractal-light-light-fractal-fire-1764914/)." -copyright: "© Moustapha Mbacké Diop 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: "Afrofuturism is riding a wave of popularity around the world, but that richness which scifi is benefitting from has its roots in traditional stories, myths, and beliefs. Moustapha Mbacké Diop takes us to present day Senegal and shows us that some of those things from the past are alive and well, and very up close." - -type: stock -slug: curse-midnight -weight: 3 -genres: -- "fantasy" - -morelink: 'Look closer' ---- - -{{}}I{{}} was at my window that night, soaking up the dazzling rays of moonlight, a tender breeze relaxing my exhausted soul. Make no mistake, the view was not extraordinary. There was just a soothing simplicity in seeing the shriveled mango tree, along with chickens bickering over poor worms and other insects that swarmed below it. - -This had always been my favorite spot to think, or just be. Although right now, I just wanted to be diverted from the pain, its ribbons of fire twirling around my abdomen, which felt gaping and empty at the same time. - -“The painful token of childbirth will not leave your body alongside your baby,” my mother had said with her guttural voice, altered by years of smoking tobacco with her old, cracked pipe. “You better get used to it, Magar. The pain will be here for a while.” - -For some reason, the women in my bloodline always have difficult pregnancies. Being married for almost ten years, I myself had almost given up hope of getting pregnant, but last year, the miracle happened. The pregnancy had been riddled with complications, and I was still recovering, three days after giving birth to my son. - -I turned and looked at him, my mouth curving into a weary smile. He was sleeping, my sweet boy, liberated into this ruthless world after causing me so much worry. However, just looking at his angelic face, hands tightly clenched in his sleep, I realized that all the pain, mood swings and fearful tears were worth it. - -With a deep sigh, I fiddled with the sachet I was holding in my right hand, my thoughts going to my mother’s words when she gave it to me. - -“Don’t play the little toubab with me, Magar, not this time,” she had said, the day we came back from the hospital. She held out three twigs taken from a broom, a chunk of charcoal and rolls of black twine. “Keep this close to your boy, especially where he sleeps at night.” - -My mother would often use that word—toubab—to taunt me, since it referred to people of European lineage, or anyone speaking decent French, really. Neither she nor my little sister Astou had gone to school, but I was able to finish college and was teaching math at a public school nearby. - -I had told her, “Yaye, you know I don’t believe in this stuff. We’ll be just fine without it, I assure you.” But I should’ve known there was no use arguing with Yaye Awa Diedhiou when spiritual stuff was involved. - -In the small town we lived in, people still visited her from time to time, asking for protection charms and ritual baths. Her ancestors had been the spiritual protectors of our kin, and I was sure she knew more about the old arts than she let on. After she retired from the army she came back here to fulfill her role, like her mother did before her. - -Yaye Awa had expected me to do the same, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with all that hocus-pocus. Astou, on the other hand, was thrilled to play the chamberlain, and meticulously organized the appointments that Yaye Awa assigned. My mother would pass on a few bits of knowledge in exchange, and, of course, would never miss an opportunity to tell me how delighted she was that my little sister was her worthy heiress, unlike the good-for-nothing toubab that I was. - -“My house, my rules,” she had concluded, forcing the charms into my hands with a stare, challenging me to persist in my rejection. - -Nope, I was not suicidal. Therefore I accepted the offering, already planning to throw it in the trash can, hoping she wouldn’t notice. - -Now, without a second glance, I got rid of it before taking my phone to call my husband. Ismaïla emigrated to the U.S. before we were married and had been working there ever since, returning to Senegal only twice a year. This time, he was coming back for the special occasion, and I wanted to hear from him before he got on the plane. - -We spent a few minutes talking, even if it was mostly me listening to him repeat how excited he was to meet his son. I couldn’t help but smile, knowing how much he had wanted this to happen, but he still managed to stay patient and caring with me, as much as he could despite the distance. I knew his parents (uptight, conservative people they were) wanted him to marry a second wife. I was concerned that he might not be able to resist them forever, and could already hear my sister’s dry laugh. - -“*Senegalese men are all the same,”* she’d say. *“Your charms are withering, or you’re not laying children by the minute? They just find a younger, prettier co-wife.”* - -Putting aside those silly thoughts, I hung up after he wished me a good night, asking me to kiss his son for him, but the weariness looming over me became more difficult to ignore. I changed into an old shirt and baggy sweatpants before going to bed, and covered my loose cornrows with a head scarf. - -*Tomorrow will be an ecstatic day*, I said to myself. Ismaïla was coming back, after five long months, and he would finally meet his son. - -The tepid lilac sheets, courtesy of my thoughtful sister, were a blessing for my sore muscles. Wrapping myself even tighter, I inhaled the rich smell of gowé incense that impregnated the sheets. Soon enough, the steady song of cicadas and the purifying breeze shrouded me in a peaceful sleep. - -  - -{{}}A{{}}nd I abruptly awoke, in the middle of the night, my heart pounding so fast I felt as if I’d just run a marathon. Not a sound was to be heard, apart from my ragged breath. Lost amid this terror coming out of nowhere, I turned to check on my baby. - -An abomination stared at me, crouched right where my baby was supposed to be. - -A body, furred and bulky like that of a gorilla, giving off a pungent smell of wet excrement and rotten corpses. A face, slowly losing the humanity it usurped, with red and wild eyes fixed on mine. A mouth wide opened, filled with sharp, irregular teeth which sunk deep into the flesh above my right clavicle when the creature pounced on me, and scarlet rivers of blood splattered across the sheets. - -I howled, tears of shock filling my eyes. - -Answering my distress call, the door opened violently. Yaye Awa was in her night outfit, an old shirt like mine and a loincloth. She pointed her old rifle at the creature drinking my blood as I lay paralyzed with terror. It stared back, turning away from its gruesome meal, but with steady hands and unflinching eyes my mother fired, and hit it straight in the stomach. - -Thick blood oozed from its wound as the creature screeched and jumped away from me. At a speed near-invisible to the human eye, it escaped through the window, leaving me bloody and horrified. - -My mother leaned through the window, peering over a courtyard immersed in darkness as she tried to see where it went. Giving up, she ran to my bedside and began to examine my wound. - -“Thank God, that bastard didn’t cut too deep,” she said, tearing up the sheets and using the shreds to apply pressure on the wound. - -“Yaye, where is my baby? What the hell was that thing?” I asked in a tremulous voice. - -My sister walked in, rubbing her eyes and rearranging her loincloth back in place. At the sight of all the blood covering me, she slapped her hands over her gasping mouth. - -“Bring the green sunguf from my chest,” Yaye yelled, “quick!” - -Without a word, Astou ran to the living room where my mother received her clients, and came back a minute later carrying a jar filled with some green powder. - -“Brace yourself, daughter. This is going to hurt.” She poured some powder into her palm, muttering words in dioula, her native tongue, before she sprinkled it over my wound. - -I couldn’t contain a cry when the substance met my exposed flesh, but the scorching pain was brief. The powder absorbed the coagulated blood and the demon’s saliva, not closing the wound as you’d expect a strange magical powder to do, but drying it up and leaving a protective residue like green salt crystals. While Yaye was working her charms, Astou had removed the sheets and threw them in a corner of the room. When our mother was finished, she helped me change into new clothes, and before I knew it, a cup of water was slipped into my hand. - -“Yaye, where is he?” I asked again. - -“You didn’t leave the talisman I gave you by his side, did you? Stupid toubab girl,” she sputtered. - -“Please!” I cried. “Where is my son?” - -“That thing who attacked you was a demon,” she finally said. “A changeling, so to speak.” - -“A what?” - -“You heard me well. It wasn’t some rabid animal, but a djinné, traded for your son. Obviously it was a child too, or all of us would be dead already.” - -Her words sounded like complete gibberish to me, but part of me knew they were true. All the stories she used to tell us when Astou and I were little, that I was too afraid of and that later, my logical mind couldn’t see as anything other than old woman tales. This was a nightmare come true. What kind of mother was I to let my son be abducted? In my own house? - -“It still doesn’t tell me where my baby is. Yaye, what if he’s in danger?” - -“Is this who I think it is?”Astou asked, ignoring me. - -Yaye nodded, her flat nose wrinkling as if she smelled something particularly foul. “It’s Ciré, that old hag. Heard she was messing with djinné now.” - -“Why would she take my son?” I shouted, fear now entangled with rage. “I don’t even know this woman!” - -Yaye took a deep breath, her black, deep-set eyes avoiding mine. “I might be responsible for this. She is the one person who hates me enough to try and hurt me or my family. And she might have the power to break through the barriers I raised around the house, allowing the djinné to enter while she took your baby. Around sunset, I did have a slight feeling that they might’ve been disrupted, but I didn’t give it much of a thought. I am getting old.” - -She sighed. “Her beef is with me, Magar, and she’s always liked to prey on the weak.” She scowled. “To think that she and I were friends.” - -Without giving me time to react, she got up on her feet, and handed the gun to Astou. I was more than flabbergasted to see my baby sister handle it with an expert touch, her delicate fingers tinkering with it in a way far beyond my understanding. “Yaye taught me,” she said with a little smile in reaction to my widened eyes. - -“You gonna stay here in case Ismaïla comes back before we do,” my mother said to her, “or in case that thing comes back.” - -Lord, I had almost forgotten about my husband. What was I going to say to him? New tears threatened to come forth at the thought of everything going wrong, but I kept them at bay. Tears would not bring my baby back, now was time for action. - -Eyes heavenward, I fervently prayed Allah for no harm to come to my baby, then I turned towards my mother, my fists clenched. “What are we going to do?” I said. - -The corners of her mouth quirked up in a devilish smile, and Yaye walked out of the room, beckoning me to follow her. - -“I’m gonna change into something more suitable, and we are getting your son back. Nobody messes with my family. It’s time to teach that hideous goat a lesson.” - -  - -{{}}L{{}}ess than ten minutes later, my mother and I walked out of the house, stalking the dormant streets. She was wearing a sweater and her old military pants, and I was dressed in sportswear. Yaye was almost sixty years old, but at this moment she didn’t look a day over forty. In her right hand she held her old pipe, and over her shoulder was a satchel containing some trinkets, powders, and what she said was a ceremonial knife. - -“Do you know where she lives?” I asked. - -“I do. But I have to warn you, Magar. The road to her den is filled with deceptions.” She grabbed my neck and hugged it. “I’ll need you to be brave and to keep your head straight. For the sake of your son.” - -I nodded, a lump in my throat as I followed her lead. Yet I couldn’t help but resent her for what was happening. If I were not her daughter, wouldn’t my son be at my side, safe and sound? Still, our priority right now was rescuing him, there would be plenty of time to begrudge her later. - -Leaving our block, she took a fork to our left. There were fewer and fewer houses, and soon we had reached the forest edge. Different types of trees loomed over us, Flamboyant and Neem, threatening our very presence in these woods, making us feel unwelcome. The sounds of small animals grew louder, as if they were angered by our nocturnal intrusion. - -Yaye looked unconcerned, but so soon after a creepy supernatural encounter I was terrified by every dark corner, every shadow that my mind saw moving. Stumbling on an insidious root, I would’ve fallen on my face if it weren’t for Yaye, who stabilized me with her hand. - -“Watch your step,” she growled. - -Breathless, I took a second to catch my breath, leaning against the rough, hostile trunk of a baobab tree. How could my life have become this madness? I was a teacher, a mathematician, my husband a man who flew across oceans by plane—how could I now be a hunter of demons, beside a woman whose magic I’d long since stopped believing in? - -“Come on, girl,” this same woman snapped, “or are you too tired already?” - -As we walked, I remembered the story Yaye told us for the first time when our father was dying. With tears in her eyes, she spoke of the man who once trapped a female djinné, stealing strands of her hair, hence binding her to his service. Yet despite him being the master, he fell in love with the djinné and after a couple of years freed her from her bond. The djinné left him, returning to her realm, and he died of sorrow soon after that. - -This was the place for magic, in stories to distract children from the imminent tragedy awaiting them! But here I was now, terrified for my son, the most precious thing in the world to me. I’d shed blood and tears to bring my child into this world, and now he was in the hands of an evil, unknown woman. An evil, unknown *witch*. - -“What’s your history with this Ciré anyway?” I asked as the trees closed in on us like a vegetal prison. - -“She was my best friend, back when we were little girls,” Yaye said, after a reluctant moment of silence. “We played together, ran around like headless chicken, even passed initiation together. I believed nothing could tear us apart.” - -“What happened, then?” - -“Jealousy happened, Magar. I was better in every domain, a virtuoso in the old arts. I was in line to inherit my mother’s role as our spiritual guardian, and she had twenty and one brothers who preceded her. I was the apple of my mother’s eyes, the pride of our ancestors, Mother used to say. But Ciré’s parents couldn’t even see her for the talented girl she was. Perhaps I’m partially responsible for what she became, considering the fact that I drifted from her, from everyone really, in order to find my own path.” - -“You feel sorry for her,” I realized. - -“I *did*. After that, from the way she interacted with me when we occasionally saw each other, I knew she blamed me for everything. I received spiritual attacks, curses meant to cause a fatal disease, or make me barren. Of course, I shooed them away like mosquitoes, but now she takes my grandson? I can’t afford to feel pity towards someone who harms the innocent.” - -Yaye didn’t say a word after that, and it was only then that I noticed the sudden silence, far from the inimical murmur of earlier. This late-night trek did nothing to alleviate my claustrophobia, especially with moonlight unable to penetrate the canopy anymore. To elude the deafening darkness, we had nothing but our feeble flashlights. Uneasy, I was about to ask her if we had arrived when the ground gave way beneath me. - -The earth swallowed me whole, like a starving grave, and I fell. - -I screamed at the top of my lungs, calling for my mother, my deceased father, Ismaïla, anyone. The darkness itself was a monster, clawing at my soul and whispering unholy words to me, unspeakable phrases coming straight from the bowels of Hell. Feeding off my every fear and torment, the tunnel coiled around me as if it were a python and I its prey. - -I began to suffocate, mouth and nostrils full of decaying dirt, heart overflowing with dread, when something like a tree branch wrapped tightly around my waist and dragged me from the clutches of death. - -It was Yaye’s old pipe, planted in her palm and slowly absorbing her blood, thus becoming an extension of her arm. - -But I could barely see any of that, because the moment I stopped coughing from all the dirt I swallowed, the screams kicked in. I wailed like a wounded animal, and in that instant I had no control over my own mind. - -My mother held my head between her hands as she wiped my face with her sleeve. Then she slapped me, hard. “Daughter, get a hold of yourself!” - -At last I stopped screaming, my throat as sore as if caught in barbed wire. I clung to Yaye, desperately longing for a semblance of human touch after this near-death experience. She allowed me to, vigorously rubbing my back before I pushed her away, gulping down air like a drowned woman. - -“I just gave birth to you a second time,” she snickered as she helped me up. - -I sniffed. “Yaye, you slapped me.” - -“Oh, but you’re welcome,” she said, all sweetness. - -I couldn’t help but smile, picking up my flashlight and turning it back on. The aftertaste of tainted soil stuck in the back of my throat, and I thanked the Lord that it wasn’t the rainy season at this moment, or I would’ve ingested bacteria and all their cousins. - -“What was that?” I asked. “The tunnel felt... alive somehow.” - -“It was. She booby-trapped all the perimeter surrounding her house, and this pitfall was spiced up with djinné magic. But look. We’re here.” - -She pointed her finger to a hut that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It was partially hidden by scary trees, so contorted and shriveled our mango tree back at home paled in comparison. I couldn’t see any other traps, but now I knew they would be there. - -Yaye went ahead of me, silently indicating the spots I had to avoid putting my feet on. We slowly crossed this minefield that way, in the dark, given that the moon refused to light up this wretched place. - -It was 5:00 a.m. by my watch when the decrepit door appeared within sight, but Yaye pulled at my sleeve, motioning me to stop. She buried her hands inside her satchel before taking out her powders, stuffing a small quantity of them into her pipe and lighting it. She inhaled the fumes deep into her lungs, then with a shiver she turned the pipe over to me. - -“There’s no way I’m smoking that,” I whispered. “What if it’s drugs?” - -“*What if it’s drugs,”* she said mockingly. “These are just magically enhanced herbs. Besides, I crushed them myself, don’t worry.” - -“That’s what a low-class drug dealer would say.” - -She rolled her eyes and shoved the pipe into my hands. With a sigh, I inhaled the strange smoke, which smelled of dried basil and kola nut—a surprisingly balanced combination. Then strangest thing happened: it was like lightning bolts ran through my veins like raging steeds, starting from my neck all the way down my limbs. I coughed, my eyes stinging from the smoke, and what could only be magic running through my body. - -“What we just inhaled will protect us against any curse that goat could throw at us,” Yaye said. “But I’m gonna need you to do something.” - -She murmured instructions into my ears, and my shoulders tightened, beads of sweat tickling my upper lip. The consequences of her strategy could be dangerous, but I knew that to get my son back I was ready to risk everything. We both were. - -At last, she took out her ceremonial knife, a rusted blade with a handle covered with several strips of red cloth and centered by a single cowrie shell. With it, she drew a cross in the air, and I distinctly heard the sound of fabric being torn. Without a second’s hesitation, she busted down the door and we walked in. - -The air inside the hut was stale and overwhelming, making my skin itch. The light of a fire with dancing greenish flames allowed me to discern the configuration of the place. The first thing I saw was my baby who, thank the Heavens, looked unharmed. He was lying on a shabby bed in the corner of the room, the edges of its sheets way too close to the fire for my taste. There was an entire section of the wall in front of me covered in wooden statues, representing unknown deities with long, eerie faces and protruding abdomens, side by side with stylized animals. A chill went down my spine when I realized that blood still crusted some of them. - -My inspection only lasted a few seconds before the owner of the premises, rummaging in an antique iron chest, noticed our intrusion. She was short and seemed frail, younger than I expected, although her constantly scowling face didn’t make her look very good. She wore an ankara dress that had seen better days, and her ashy feet were bare. - -When she saw my mother, she screamed, veins popping out and hatred in her eyes. - -Good, because I too had hatred to spare. That woman abducted my baby, and judging by the various sharp instruments at the foot of the bed, she was about to hurt him. It took every ounce of my willpower not to immediately rush to my son, but I had to trust Yaye to dismantle the situation quickly. - -Like an angry goat, the woman jumped at my mother’s throat, sending a trail of stinking smoke in our direction. Yaye shrugged it off and advanced on her opponent, but I instantly fell to the floor, motionless. As useless as I was, I could only watch as the two women argued, blood ready to spill. - -“Give me my grandson back, Ciré,” my mother warned, promises of ghastly murder exuding from her voice, “and I might consider breaking only a few of your fingers.” - -“You’re in no position to negotiate!” Ciré said in a grating tone. “I will suffer no interruption, your turn will come soon enough after I’m done with the baby.” - -I hissed at the mention of my son, and the woman gave me an unfaltering, dismissive glance. “What were you going to do with him, huh?” I managed to say. - -“His blood will reveal all your mother’s secrets to me, and I will curse her whole bloodline, until the last descendant. The only thing that remains to be done is for me to harvest the first ray of sunlight. At dawn, Yaye Awa Diedhiou, you will be done for!” - -“That’s low, even for a powerless crone like you,” my mother spat as she wielded her pipe, which transformed into a gnarled, full-sized staff. “This folly ends now.” - -“Not so fast. Didn’t you hear? I have a new friend now.” Green flames illuminating her gaunt, demented face, Ciré brandished what looked like strands of hair: glossy, purple locks held together by a scarlet string. - -“Djinné hair,” my mother gasped as the woman blew thrice on the locks, stepping back with an evil grin. Not a second later, the air in front of Yaye rippled, as if we were seeing it from underwater. A great gust of wind blew across the room, heralding the approach of something otherworldly, and my baby began to cry. - -A shadow appeared before my eyes, its curves becoming clearer and clearer. It was a female being, more than seven feet tall, with dark, naked skin and broad shoulders. Her bulging eyes were surmounted by hirsute eyebrows, and her luxuriant hair was so long it trailed on the dusty floor, matching the locks Ciré had in the palm of her hand. - -Ciré had perverted that sad but beautiful tale my mother told so long ago by doing what she did, and I didn’t need to be a master in the old arts to know what. And in that moment, I heard my mother’s voice in my head. - -“*That vixen thinks the world revolves around her, so just pretend to have been thrown out of the equation, even though you’re magically protected. She’s working with dangerous forces above our reach, so you’ll have to be the one who takes her out. All her attention will be focused on me, so* I’ll *be* your *distraction. Just trust me, and wait until the right moment.”* - -“Because of you, I never had anything in this world,” Ciré was ranting. “Everyone turned away from me and looked up to you, their precious pupil. Now, I have the upper hand, and *I* say this ends now.” - -Pointing at my mother, she howled at the djinné in a strange language of cackles and hoarse sounds. Seeing the last spark of sanity leave the woman’s eyes and replaced by sheer madness, I knew what those words meant. - -As instructed, the djinné charged my mother, lifting her off the ground as easily as a twig. Yaye struck it with a resolute blow of her staff, aiming for its flank, but it only bounced off its thick skin. The djinné growled at my mother, baring fangs very much like those which its offspring had sunk into me. There was no going back from what was about to happen, and the djinné buried its claws into her right flank. - -My mother cried out, and I felt for her as Ciré’s eyes lit up with ferocious delight—but I’d awaited the right time. And now it was. - -I dropped my act and hurtled towards Ciré, the only thing she saw coming was my fist right in her face. I heard a satisfying crack when my punch broke her nose, sending blood flowing down her face, though my knuckles probably broke in the process. - -I ignored the stinging pain and pulled the locks of hair out of Ciré’s grip, oblivious to her cries of pain as she held her face. The djinné dropped my mother to the ground to confront its mistress’s new assailant, but I threw the locks into the impatient green flames and they were immediately consumed, breaking the bond enslaving the demon. - -With a roar of triumph, it leaped on top of Ciré, piercing her chest with its claws. Both of them vanished just the way it came, leaving nothing but Ciré’s shrieks of terror fading on the sudden wind. Then it and they were gone. - -  - -{{}}E{{}}ntirely drained, I struggled to get up and help my mother, the same way she helped me just a few hours ago. - -“Go see to your son,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “I’ll be just fine.” - -I nodded, tears of relief streaming down my face as I got up and ran to my baby. He was breathless, eyes puffy from all that crying, and right now I was no better. Calming myself by slowly inhaling his sweet scent, I tried singing the lullaby Yaye used to sing to us when we were upset, and I heard her chuckles when I shamelessly butchered the dioula words. Fortunately, it worked, and he fell asleep between my arms. - -Yaye got up, residues of the healing powder on her fingers and her bloody clothes. - -“Are you alright?” I asked. - -“Takes more than a couple of scratches to overcome me, girl. We need to get out of here, it’s dawn.” - -I frowned, realizing that it would be complicated to carry my baby through the uneven path back to our home. But as always, Yaye was one step ahead of me. Without a word, she pulled out the bed sheet, for lack of anything better, and tied the baby securely against my back. - -“That, little toubab, is how it’s done.” - -We exchanged a smile as we got out of the hut into the rising dawn. It was incredible how just a little more light could make a place look less frightening, and the way back was nothing like the hellish track we had to face earlier. The forest was awakening, and listening to the reassuring sound of birds chirping, it occurred to me that people back in town would be awake too, women pounding millet and sweeping courtyards. - -Not once did we turn around to look at the old hut, but we were both thinking about Ciré. - -“What do you think is going to happen to her?” I asked, as we sneaked behind houses, careful not to raise too many questions about my disheveled look and Yaye’s bloodstained clothes. - -“She messed with the wrong forces, and now she’s paying the price,” Yaye said, her voice saddened. “Djinné are proud creatures, and this one sounded way too eager to claim retaliation. We may never see Ciré again.” - -I was expecting that answer, but I didn’t feel sorry for her, not in the slightest. She had an awful ending, but she brought it on herself. That’s where a life of hatred led her, and evil could only appeal to evil. I knew my mother felt remorse about what had happened to her, even if she wouldn’t admit it. It wasn’t her fault though, and neither was my son’s abduction by a bitter, vengeful woman. It would be unfair of me to still blame her, especially after she put her life on the line to save my baby. - -When we finally got home, Astou was clearly relieved to see us back in one piece—to a certain extent—and she immediately tended to my mother’s wounds, assuring me that they were not severe. - -She also told me that my husband had left me a text message, saying that he had landed safely and would be here in a few hours. He arrived in the early afternoon and found us all seated in the living room. Yaye, smoking her enigmatic pipe; Astou, making tea while humming around whatever mbalax song was trending at the moment; and me, breastfeeding our baby as if nothing had happened. - -It was only in that moment, when Ismaïla held us both close to his chest, his eyes tired but gleaming with all the love he had for us, that I allowed myself to ignore the decaying scent prowling around our home. - -Because there was one side to the stories that my mother never told us before, and that she finally revealed to me right when we arrived at our doorstep, dirty and exhausted. - -“*Once a djinné gets a taste of your blood, my little toubab, it will never stop coming after you, not until he drinks it all. One day, that little djinné baby will return to feed again.* - -“*But when that time comes, we will be ready.”* - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "A Curse at Midnight" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103847458202922).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/Alight.md b/content/issue-23/Alight.md deleted file mode 100644 index a15b574b..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/Alight.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,198 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Alight" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- slipstream -- horror -authors: -- Skye Allen -image: images/Alight.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [1987599](https://pixabay.com/photos/eye-alligator-reptile-nature-1446419/), and [dlonrax](https://pixabay.com/photos/gig-concert-show-music-event-3518406/)." -copyright: "© Skye Allen 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: "Depending on her name at the time, Skye Allen either does fantasy fiction or she does music. In the piece she gave us, we get both - along with a stage-side pass to a gig that threatens to go to some very dark places. There's nothing quite like a band that's on fire..." - -type: stock -slug: alight -weight: 4 -genres: -- "fantasy" - -morelink: 'Watch and listen' ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t was only eleven, but Tress was already questioning her high heels. The set was just getting started. The snare kicked off a menacing march, drowning out the thrum of the generator, and the violinist stamped downstage in skull makeup. Everybody in the band wore skull makeup. People came to their shows for the outrageous visuals, but Tress was here with her piccolo, dressed as a flapper for reasons that had seemed wiser before the last two hours in these shoes, because sitting in with the band would take her mind off the audition. - -She was going to kill it tomorrow. The Dalbavie flute concerto was impossible for everyone but her. She was going to kill it, and take home the woodwind scholarship, and come back next semester. Because three years into her degree, *bam*, her mom lost the lease on her café to a developer and declared bankruptcy and there went Tress’s tuition. - -Goodbye, orchestra career. Hello, customer service career. - -Side of avocado toast with that? - -Well, not after tomorrow. - -She rested her bucket of wet towels where she could reach it later and watched the dance floor fill. They were going to set something on fire, so they needed a safety monitor. Alight popped up in places where the last tenants had been evicted, and there was nothing like an abandoned warehouse in the industrial district for hosting an avant garde guerilla rave, but the utilities here were shut off and places like this weren’t exactly up to fire code. Plus, she wasn’t convinced Two Olives was on his game. He’d been fighting with himself in the storeroom they were using for a backstage as he filled a pie plate with twists of flash paper. He’d muttered “I said okay!” a few times, and then jumped up on the giant spool of wire the last tenant left behind so he could disable the smoke detector and light a cigarette. Tress was steering clear. - -She felt the clutch of bruising fingers on her bare shoulder, followed by the hallmark of all third sets: beer spilled down her dress. “Oh, doll, did I get you?” a WWII nurse exclaimed. Her cap was coming loose from her slick curls. A pirate wench in a vinyl corset seized the nurse by the stethoscope and tugged her toward the bar. - -Right. *Special Night*. - -On a normal third Thursday, the Alight pop-up party drew a tough crowd, burners who never got caught dancing outside the playa and influencers drinking LaCroix, but tonight the house was full of tech millionaires out to prove how hard you could party in San Francisco on Halloween. - -A bearded nun in Chinese opera makeup blinked pink lashes at Tress in sympathy. Tress thought she remembered tonight’s warehouse storing costume supplies before, or possibly a puppet company. Not anymore. - -Two Olives was trying to start a chainsaw behind her. He kept revving it, but the engine wouldn’t tick over. The cellist vamped and chanted “Getitworkinggetitworking” while Tress set wet towels around the Styrofoam slab where they were going to sacrifice the giant papier-mâché pie. *Don’t be too drunk,* she begged whoever was going to be closest to the fire extinguisher on the far side of the stage. *Have wits. It’s low and blow.* - -Then the violinist stepped out of the way, flowers jiggling in her headpiece, and there was Two Olives with those spiral contact lenses that made it impossible to tell if he was high or not, swinging the chainsaw over his head like a pole dancer and shouting “Brew! Ha! Ha!” - -He stopped at the downstage center mic. Fire plumed out from somewhere. Hair spray plus a lighter made a cheap flame thrower. The trombone player gave the signal. Tress lifted her piccolo into position, inhaled across the nickel mouthpiece, and was twelve again. Knees loose, gut dropped open, cat-butt embouchure. You played the piccolo by grimacing through your teeth. - -She rippled up her range until she could only hear baby notes. The loudest sound was the drums, but between beats she could still hear the clatter of bugle beads on her dress as she danced in place. Eight measures and then the spotlight lit the oversized pie on the Styrofoam slab and Two Olives sawed into it. Rockette boys catwalked through the crowd with trays of pre-cut slices and the vibraphone rolled out a fast minor melody like hail on a windshield. - -The warehouse went up during the next song. - -The showy part of the show was over. The band dropped into their sweet spot, bass kicking off a slow, weird *When the Saints Go Marching In*. Tress heard a shout when she handed off her break to the trombone with a twist of notes. Two halves of a glowworm clapped with all four hands and Tress ducked her head in a bow. - -When she looked up again, Two Olives was prancing around downstage with the chainsaw. There was no chain on it, but she still didn’t like being so close when he was holding a weaponable tool. He was cute in a delinquent kind of way, but he was unpredictable and she’d hardly ever seen him sober. - -As she looked he twirled on one pointy boot and something flashed on his purple zoot suit, near the jacket pocket: a writhing streak of flame, crawling toward his lapel. - -She darted forward to put it out—he must not be able to feel it yet—bending down to snatch a wet towel, still looking at him, and for one startled second she was close enough to get a good look. - -It was some kind of animal. A lizard. - -And it was on *fire.* - -It was about three inches long with a knobby spine made of individual white flames.*It’s a projection*, she thought, *a laser.* And she slowed, second guessing. - -It snaked up Two Olives’ collar while she stood watching the pulse under its red-blue sequined scales. Its glowing eyes flickered. Its long feathered tail moved in tandem with its beaded legs. It looked like an artist’s idea of a salamander. A tiny, elaborate toy. - -No, it looked like a puppet. The puppets they used to make right here. - -But it was alive. - -The salamander slinkied into Two Olives’ open mouth, and Tress’s stomach twisted. *It’s on fire. And he’s eating it.* - -Two Olives reared up like a startled horse. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the party lenses, but he revved the chainsaw, whipping it around like he didn’t care what he hit, and jumped off the stage. - -A cymbal crash rang out behind them. The drummer must think it was all part of the show. The cellist sawed away, jeweled lashes brushing her white and black cheeks. - -The chainsaw blade was on fire now. Two Olives must have replaced the chain with something flammable. He choked the little machine down to an ominous purr and swiped the blade along the curtains under the stage as he danced into the crowd. - -Dirty smoke was leaking from backstage, not dry ice fog, not any kind of smoke that belonged at a party. The stage lights turned it yellow and pink. Tress looked out at the floor. The colors were echoed in rave sticks around people’s necks and arms. Didn’t anybody realize this wasn’t stage fire anymore, it was *fire* fire? - -The dancers looked like they were under a spell, stepping and bouncing to the beat. *Oh when the saints. Go marching in.* - -Two Olives was at a table now. He lit a row of shot glasses on fire with one long swoop. A schoolgirl in fishnets stared openmouthed at the flames, the jewel in her tongue flashing. - -*I have to do something. Or we’re all going to die.* - -Tress’s phone was backstage. She couldn’t get to it, not with all the smoke back there. The smell added to the sweat and beer and the burning gasoline from the chainsaw. She knelt down and felt for the fire extinguisher under the stage, just in time to see it in Two Olives’ hands. He whooped and sprayed foam all over the schoolgirl’s boots until the last few wispy puffs drooped out. - -*Think.* - -If he had the fire extinguisher, then the chainsaw was unattended. - -They were still on the first verse of *When the Saints*. Tress worked her way upstage and slapped her forearms down on the snare to get the drummer’s attention. He would know what to do. He looked dazed, then irritated, then his black-ringed eyes went huge and he scooped up all the equipment he could carry and scrambled off the stage, heaving dancers out of his way. - -The chainsaw revved up again, out of sight but unmistakable. - -The violinist stirred at the drummer’s escape noise, looked at Tress, and bundled herself off the stage too. Tress watched her go, feeling helpless. The trombone player had long since gone out to play on the dance floor. She couldn’t hear him. She hoped he was close to an exit. The cellist was gone too, and her cello. - -Now that the band wasn’t playing anymore, the house music came back on. That was jarring. Couldn’t the sound guy see what was happening? *It’s an emergency. Call the fire department,* she begged silently, but sirens outside would be bad. There’d be a riot. She had no way to communicate anyway, with the stage mics muted now. Why hadn’t she thought about using them before? Right, because there’d be a riot. - -Maybe a minute had gone by since the chainsaw blade caught fire. Why couldn’t the dancers smell the smoke? They were shuffling to the *doofdoofdoof* beat, feeling the bliss of whatever they’d taken. - -She needed to do something. Fast. She couldn’t get to the sound board fast. With the back on fire, the only way out was through the front door. She looked at the ceiling, where shiny fabric was looped around the exposed pipes, and wondered if the sprinklers were working. Not likely. - -She couldn’t see Two Olives anymore, but drinks flamed on all the tables against one wall, so he’d been there. She scanned the floor, looking for a phone she could borrow and distantly wondering why Two Olives had swallowed the salamander. Was he on something that made him hallucinate? Or… was *she?* Was the salamander—or whatever it was—looking for someone who would follow its orders? - -A wall flickered where a poster was on fire. *Worry about that later.* An angel with neon hearts around his nipples had his phone out. Tress jumped off the stage and yelled in his ear, “There’s a fire! Call 911!” Pointed to the poster. Fear bloomed on his sweaty face. He poked his screen. She held her breath. - -He shook his head and showed her the NO SIGNAL message. There was probably a block on tonight, to keep wasted people from sending out live feeds of whatever laws they were breaking in the port-a-potties. But no emergency service? Now would be a good time for the cops to shut down this outlaw party. - -She seized the bucket off the stage and shoved it at the angel, yelling for him to use the towels, not sure if he could hear her over the thumping music. He nodded, wide-eyed, grabbed two towels and held out one to the gymnast beside him. - -The gymnast kept dancing. - -Tress jabbed the gymnast with her piccolo. He snapped out of his trance and she steered them both toward the wall posters, hoping they wouldn’t panic. - -She turned to face the crown, then realised: *she’d poked the gymnast with her piccolo*. What an idiot. She knew better than to put her instrument in harm’s way. - -But maybe she could use it. - -She stepped onto the low stage and stood in front of the muted microphones. She lifted the piccolo to her mouth and zipped up the D major scale as loudly as she could. She played the fastest six seconds of the Dalbavie. - -She looked out. No reaction. Of course, nobody could hear her over the thumping music. The angel and the gymnast were shaking people, pointing, but something was off. They couldn’t get anyone’s attention. The dancers just kept dancing. - -She waved her arms, gesturing toward the exit like an airport ground control worker. “Go, you morons! Get out of here!” Yelling was no use, but she yelled anyway. - -Then the music got quieter and rushed voice came over the PA. *“Attention, please, emergency, everyone go to the doors!”* Crackle, pause. *“Hurry!”* - -The sound guy must have smelled the smoke, or maybe someone in the band had gotten his attention. *Not helpful, sound guy. Here comes that riot.* - -But the crowd kept dancing. Like they were tranced, brainwashed, indoctrinated— - -*Inspiration*. Flutes were war instruments, she’d heard somewhere. They’d used fifes on the battlefield. She was armed. She had been all along. - -She blew out short notes, rough and loud, steady rhythm, dragged in a smoky breath and blew again. The piccolo screamed like a police whistle. Good. She wanted the dancers to move in an orderly fashion, not lose their minds and stampede. Eight beats. She tried for a heartbeat tempo. She couldn’t hear the house music anymore. The sound guy must have turned it all the way off. She heard a cough, a stifled wail, the rumble of the generator. - -She needed drums, but the drummer was long gone. She’d have to be the percussion section. She stamped her feet in their awful shoes, set the beat, and a few dancers started marching with her. - -She jumped off the stage in between notes and started toward the exit. Dancers shuffled in place and made her an aisle. Sixteen heartbeats. She felt them behind her, moving in rhythm. Good. She couldn’t tell if the crowd was still in a trance, but if they were with her that was enough. - -There was a bottleneck at the main door, where you entered single file to pay. That was going to be a problem. But the only other way out was through the back, and the back was on fire. - -She was the Pied Piper, leading the crowd. She was sweaty and lightheaded, and had to force herself to keep breathing in and blowing out over the mouthpiece. - -She reached the curtained doorway at the entrance. This was it. Almost there. She turned to see the partiers surging behind her. Wide awake now. Ready to burst forward. Ready to trample her. - -She started to push the curtain aside, but just then Two Olives stepped through it. - -He blocked the whole doorway. There was just enough room for the two of them between the crowd and the curtain. His torso almost bumped hers. - -Once, she might have been interested in getting chest to chest with messy-haired Two Olives. Not now. - -The chainsaw was gone, but Tress didn’t doubt he could still light something on fire. His skin looked tight and crackly. Flames licked the seams on his jacket. His hair was singed and a cinder dropped onto his striped lapel, leaving a smoking hole in the fabric. - -He leaned in the narrow doorway, shoulder against the frame. His body looked relaxed but his face was hard. The contact lenses were gone. - -He opened his mouth. Tress’s stomach swirled as she waited for the salamander to crawl out. But he puckered his chapped lips and blew, and a gumball of fire shot up. Close to the dusty curtain. Way too close. - -People were rustling and starting to shout, but Two Olives’ soft voice cut through. “Hey chica.” - -“Let us out, T.O.” Tress’s voice sounded too loud in her ears. All bravado. - -Two Olives leaned down, reached out a finger to flick the beads at the low neckline of her dress. He didn’t have to reach far. “How about a kiss?” - -Someone behind Tress gave a sharp inhale. Two Olives’ face was close to hers. She felt the heat coming from him, smelled burning cloth. He hadn’t gotten burned from the inside, somehow. But if he touched her, her burns would be terrible. - -She glanced back at the crowd behind her, all zombie makeup and sparkly wigs and the white eyes of panicked horses. A park ranger urged “Do it.” People were shoving. Coughing. - -She didn’t have a choice. She’d held back the horde until now, but the real panic was about to start. “Just let us out, okay?” she said. - -“I’m kissing a death’s head, y’all.” Most of Two Olives’ makeup had melted, but the skin around his eyes was still black. “Two skulls, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” - -“You’ll let us by?” *Please be calling 911,* she begged whoever was outside. Somebody had to be outside. - -“Yeah.” His voice sounded thick. Hungry. - -She moved closer. One step and they were touching. She felt the flame in his mouth. The piccolo still in her hand, useless now, useless tomorrow. - -She heard crackling as his burning lips touched hers, but she didn’t feel anything. - -Two Olives gripped the back of her head with one hand and held the curtain open with the other. People streamed past them. It lasted a long time. Four heartbeats. Eight. She stopped counting. Partiers smashed her and Two Olives against the wall on their way outside. - -She was the last one out. Beautiful, beautiful fire trucks sat outside, blinking in the dark street. People huddled together or sloped away in twos and threes, looking back, telling each other what happened. - -She didn’t see Two Olives. *I should look for the band*, she thought. But she couldn’t feel her legs, couldn’t feel her hands. *Is my piccolo still here? Audition day tomorrow*. - -Her vision filled with darkness, and she realized she was sitting on the curb with a firefighter standing over her. “Honey, you okay? Oh, no, you’re not. Your face. Your mouth.” - -The firefighter turned to give an order into her shoulder radio. And then Tress was in a swarm of face masks and latex gloves. And then the pain hit. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Alight" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103848058202862).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/Cartoon.md b/content/issue-23/Cartoon.md deleted file mode 100644 index 82f1c182..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/Cartoon.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,25 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Cartoon" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- non-fiction -authors: -- Liam Baldwin -copyright: "© Liam Baldwin 2020 All Rights Reserved" -showAuthorFooter: false - -description: "Liam Baldwin has been providing humorous and/or pun-ridden art (and occasionally fiction) to Mythaxis since the beginning, and long may he continue. As for right now, who'd enjoy a short, informative dissertation with a dose of classic scifi to it?" - -type: stock -slug: cartoon -featured: false -weight: 7 -genres: -- "horror" - -morelink: 'I would' ---- - -{{< figure src="https://github.com/images/GeeksCloacing.gif" title="Geeks Cloacing" alt="Geeks Cloacing by Liam Baldwin" class="image main">}} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-23/Everythings Jake.md b/content/issue-23/Everythings Jake.md deleted file mode 100644 index eda9d690..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/Everythings Jake.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,426 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Everything's Jake" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Christopher Cook -image: images/EverythingsJake.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [spinheike](https://pixabay.com/photos/meadow-garden-summer-front-yard-115676/), [ArtTower](https://pixabay.com/photos/smoke-background-artwork-swirl-69124/), [Alexas_Fotos](https://pixabay.com/photos/sofa-couch-wall-furniture-pieces-3094153/), [amarjits](https://pixabay.com/photos/leather-sofa-recliner-sofa-furniture-186636/), and [StockSnap](https://pixabay.com/photos/house-interior-design-couch-sofa-2593570/). Plus a special salute to Pier 2Eyes for the most striking [Gangster smoking](https://www.flickr.com/photos/pier-photos/6992325347/)." -copyright: "© Chris Cook 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: They say "Always leave them wanting more", and we think the final story of the issue will certainly do that. Chris Cook introduces us to a down-to-earth family man dealing with real world problems... and then introduces him to the quirkiest suburban adventure you're ever likely to come across. Fuggedaboudit. - -type: stock -slug: everythings-jake -weight: 11 - -morelink: 'MORE LINK' ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he Ford family of Troon’s Perch made their nest in a craftsman style home located on a cul-de-sac at the end of a rambunctious street. One of many such streets, actually, in a large neighborhood located just below the state line that separates the southern portion of Carolina from its northern counterpart. Recently, the house had begun to feel a bit too roomy for the trio underneath its roof. - -Matthew Ford was doing his best to stanch the gloom that had seeped into the collective family conscious during the last two page turns of the *Peanuts* wall calendar that hung on the door leading to the garage. Matthew’s familial rejuvenative effort is what led him to wear a tiara and a sash while he served breakfast to his daughters one March morning before they ran out the door to their respective destinations: Elizabeth to elementary school and Brittany to daycare. Elizabeth rode the big yellow Twinkie and Brittany hitched with the Clark family from down the street. - -“Dad, you know you don’t have to wear that stupid crown just to make us feel better,” Elizabeth, the eldest Ford daughter, said. “I’m eleven now and Britt is… how old are you, Britt? I can’t remember when we picked you up by the dumpster at Taco Bell.” - -“I’m *four!*” Brittany replied, apparently unfazed by the overt questioning of her lineage. She raised her right hand and held up four sticky fingers. The beaming grin on her face revealed a mouth filled with baby teeth ready to chomp down on whatever grub presented itself, be it carrots or Cow Tales. She had been delighted to find recently that one of her central incisors had begun to wiggle prematurely. Daddy had told her that the Tooth Fairy wouldn’t be visiting until she was at least seven or eight, but this single wobbly tooth portended otherwise. - -“See, the little snot doesn’t even know she’s supposed to be sad. And I’m over it. I really am,” Liz looked at her father directly, and he picked up on the faintest of flickers in her headlights that implied she was not dealing with it as well as she insisted. “I miss her, but I’m big now. Big girls don’t cry.” - -*Her* in this instance was the late Caitlin Ford, brought to a premature death by a teenager that thought such a result inconceivable. This teen certainly hadn’t planned to run Caitlin off the road and into the large oak tree that sat on the northern side of the downtown square. All he had planned on doing was downing two-thirds of a twelve pack of Busch Diesel and getting home before curfew, hopefully with some heavy petting in between. You see, teens are invincible, but they have a nasty habit of flinging lethal shrapnel in all directions on the road to immortality. One such piece of shrapnel caught Caitlin Ford’s spine and snapped it like a dry piece of pasta when she wrapped her SUV around the old oak. Just like that, Big Bertha, the tree named for one of the famous matriarchs from the early days of Troon’s Perch, claimed another fatality. As was typically the case in goings-on such as these, our teenage antagonist walked away unscathed. - -“First of all, this is a *tiara*, thank you very much,” Matthew replied, stealing a glance at the empty chair that was tucked neatly under the kitchen table. “And second of all, I’m wearing it because I like it—I think it really accentuates my eyes. You thought I got all done up just for you two?” - -He lifted his left hand, palm outward, to the right side of his face. With his visage conspicuously hidden from Elizabeth, he shot Brittany a wink so flamboyant that the left part of his mouth popped open. Brittany brought both of her gooey mitts to her own mouth and snickered. - -“Accentuates, A-C-C-E-N… C-E-N… A-C-C-E-N-T-U-A-T-E-S, accentuates.” Elizabeth ignored the surreptitious exchange and instead decided to show off the spelling skills that she had been sharpening in preparation for the upcoming county bee. - -“Great job, hon! Now, spell it backward for the class.” - -“*Daa-aad!* You know they don’t make you spell it backward at county!” - -*No, but cops sometimes do,* Matthew thought. *The boys in blue will make you do the whole alphabet backward if they suspect you’ve been hitting the bottle. It’s too bad no one stopped that worthless little shit a couple of months ago and made him do the song and dance.* - - Matthew allowed himself the brief indulgence of imagining what he would do to Spencer Lenore—the aforementioned worthless little shit—if he had him alone in a locked room for five minutes. These thoughts were gone as quickly as they came, and his daughters were none the wiser when he flashed them his patented Daddy Grin. - -“Now, you two grab your backpacks and get outta here before I decide you’ve got to stay and clean your rooms instead!” - -Matthew’s thoughts went to his dead wife as his children raced each other to the front door of the house. *It’s not fair, none of it. You won’t be here to see Elizabeth in her sock hop outfit, or Britt on her first day of elementary school. I don’t know if I can do this without you. I can try, but I’m no Caitlin Ford.* - -Caitlin, who would shout “Ford girls have heads that are made for tiaras!” as she twirled her daughters around the living room, always knew how to relate to both little ones. Matthew did a reputable job of communicating with the girls, but it was Caitlin who had always demonstrated the magic touch. He felt as though he were destined for a lifetime of serving as the off-brand replacement for his departed wife. - -*Gonna need a bigger closet for all these hats I’m wearing.* - -“Uh, hey Dad!” Matthew was returned to the present by the sound of his oldest daughter’s shout from the front hallway. “You might wanna come see this…” - -Elizabeth was standing on the stoop with her backpack at her feet; it had apparently dropped from her grip in shock at what she beckoned him to come see. He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked out on the yard. - -He’d have dropped his backpack too. - -Couches of all shapes and sizes were scattered across the front lawn of the Ford family dwelling. Sectionals, loveseats, sleepers, futons, all in different leathers and fabrics. There was even one in the shape of a heart, stamped with miniature Cupids shooting amorous arrows at each other. Without taking an exact count, there must be no less than twenty couches resting like steer in his front yard. - -*I guess I’ll be getting an HOA letter about this.* - -“Daddy, can we keep this one? Pretty please?” shouted Brittany. She had wasted no time on something so silly as questioning the absurdity of the situation. Rather, she had sought out the boingiest, bounciest couch and decided to test its mettle. Mid-jump, she continued: “This one’s got good springs—puh-*lease*, daddy!” - -Matthew had always assumed that the first thing for which his youngest daughter begged him with such fervor would be a puppy in the window, not a sofa in the yard. - -“I don’t think so honey, these aren’t ours,” Matthew replied. “This is just a prank, sweetie. You both keep it moving, or else you’re gonna be late. I’ll take care of this and our yard will be returned to its original state before you two get home this afternoon. You have my word, your Highnesses.” He bent forward and scooped his hand in an exaggerated bow. - -“Who the hell would pull a prank like this?” Elizabeth looked up at her father with genuine concern, seemingly unaware that she had just dropped the H-E-double hockey sticks bomb. - -“Elizabeth Renee Ford! Since when do you talk like a sailor?” - -The oldest Ford girl raised her eyebrows and shrugged, with just enough sass to cement the fact that she was her mother’s daughter. Both kids took off, resuming the footrace to their pick-up points. Matthew marveled at his children’s uncanny ability to brush aside just about any atypical occurrence and continue on with their daily adventures undeterred. - -The truth was, Matthew didn’t know for certain that this was the handiwork of bored teens from up the street. But what else could it be? Definitely not a mistaken delivery, there wasn’t a house in the neighborhood colossal enough to hold even half the number of loungers now strewn across the Ford family property. He let out a sigh, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temples like a cat kneading its latest resting spot. - -*Seems like a lot of work for a prank*. *Whatever happened to lighting a bag of shit on fire and dropping it on the doorstep? Or just tossing a few eggs?* - -Who had they pissed off? Most of the neighbors were aware of the tragedy that had befallen the Fords and had been behaving accordingly; the house was flush with casseroles, pies, and bouquets. Amy Conway from a couple streets over had even brought breakfast over for two straight weeks after the accident. - -If there was anyone who could empathize with their situation, Matthew thought it was Amy. She had been a single mother to a teenage daughter since last year, when her husband left for a work retreat and never returned. Rumors were rampant that perhaps he had run off with a coworker, or maybe he had a secret family in another state that he decided he liked more than the Conways of Troon’s Perch. Regardless, the Fords had taken care of the Conways in their time of need, and the Conways had returned the favor. - -Such behavior was common in their tight-knit community. So no, the theory that this was a gag didn’t jibe. Teenagers could be cruel, but Matthew thought that such a prank in a time of mourning required an outright lack of a soul. - -“What a start to the day.” - -Matthew pinched the flesh on his forearm and scanned the yard once more, making sure that he was not still asleep in the master bed that was now too large for its purpose. Then he went inside, closed and locked the door to 664 Half Pint Loop, and made a beeline to the coffee pot. - -  - -{{}}M{{}}atthew funded the family coffers by working as an IT security consultant for a large bank headquartered in Charlotte. The nature of his role afforded him the luxury of working from home most days, which had been particularly helpful ever since the Fords had downsized from a quartet to a power trio. - -Seated at his desk in the office located at the front of the house, Matthew set out to solve the issue of the spontaneous couch consignment that had apparently taken place overnight. Returning to sender was not an option, since whoever had made the delivery had not been kind enough to leave a note. He briefly considered turning a profit—he did work for a bank, after all—by selling the sofas one by one online, but this was too onerous; he wanted his yard back before the end of the day. - -Finally, he landed on donation. The Salvation Army assured Matthew that yes, they were *absolutely* interested in a plethora of brand-new couches, and that they would have a bevy of foot soldiers at the Ford home quicker than Matthew could spit. Profuse thanks were offered and a pick-up time was scheduled for early afternoon. - -Satisfied with this outcome, he set his phone aside and resolved to tackle his day job. Deciphering the mystery of the copious couches was enjoyable, but alas, it would not keep the lights on and the water running. Before diving into the ever-fascinating world of cyber security, Matthew spared a final glance out the bay window that looked onto the front lawn. - -*Couches… why’d it have to be couches?* - -Matthew’s white-collar responsibilities led him to overlook the gentlemanly caller who strode up the walkway leading to the front door shortly before lunchtime. It wasn’t until this solicitor rapped three times on the mahogany door that Matthew realized he was no longer alone with his thoughts and newfound furniture. - -For the second time that day, Matthew Ford looked out of his opened front door and was met with a surprise. Standing before him was a man, short in stature, who some would describe as “a friend of ours”. This gentleman raised an eyebrow and gave Matthew a quick once-over when the door was opened. Matthew thought this peculiar, given that he owned the property and should be the one performing the evaluation. - -The visitor was in a foppish getup that appeared dated by about a century. A charcoal fedora, the top of which came level with Matthew’s shoulders, sat perfectly cocked atop a mop of red hair. He had sky blue eyes that were slightly farther apart than normal and set deeply back in their sockets. A cigarette poked out from the right side of a mouth that seemed frozen in a perpetual sneer. He wore a dark, double-breasted suit with large lapels and a pocket that held a white, two peak pocket square. Pin stripes ran the length of the outfit. Below the cuffs of his pants sat black wingtips that had been shined to perfection and carefully adorned with white spats. The stranger that darkened the Ford family doorstep was more Tom Powers than Tony Soprano. - -“Say, you the egg that lives at dis here place?” The caller spoke in staccato bursts. “I got bidness with the proprietor of dis fine establishment, so be on the level wit me.” The gentleman had removed the cigarette from his mouth and poked it at Matthew as he butchered the pronunciation of ‘business’. - -Matthew was reminded of Rocky from the old *Looney Tunes* bits, the diminutive gangster who ran around with a hulking henchman with the mental capacity of a baked potato. There was no Mugsy to be seen, however. - -“I live here,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. Although, I’m not selling anything. I can see how you might have thought this was a yard sale, what with…” Matthew waved his arm in the direction of the cushion cacophony. “But if you’re hoping to buy, I’m afraid to inform you that the transaction is dead on arrival.” - -The visitor made a series of noises somewhere between a laugh and a whistle. “Heh, ‘dead on arrival’, I like dat. Dat’s good, you… dat’s good. Listen, the name’s Nails. Nails Nelson. I don’t wanna buy nothin’ from ya, see? Me and some friends ah mine, we’re in the problem solvin’ bidness. - -“I just happened to be in the neighborhood, and I saw yer uh…” Nails looked first over his right shoulder, then his left. “…yer predicament here, and I had a thought, a real bulb. I says to myself, ‘I can help dis guy’. Dat’s when I decided to walk right up and give yer door a few whacks. So lemme ask ya—is dis a service that ya’d be interested in, mister?” - -Matthew decided that coffee wasn’t going to cut it today, he’d be having at least one knock of bourbon as soon as he could get rid of this clown. He made a mental note to check the *Farmers’ Almanac* website to see if a full moon was planned for this evening. - -“Gee, Nails, that’s a real…” a patronizing smirk broke out across Matthew’s face. “That’s a real *swell* offer. Really, it is. But listen, I’ve already made arrangements to take care of my couch surplus. If only you had arrived a little earlier this morning, maybe we could have done business. As it stands, I’ve got no need for your services.” - -Matthew nodded and moved to shut the front door, but the hand holding a Lucky Strike cigarette shot up and stopped the closure. Smoke drifted upward and stinged Matthew’s nostrils. - -“Ya *shore*, mister? Me and the boys do real good work, all our customers say so. Dey always tell us we hit on all sixes, Scout’s Honor. Ya don’t even gotta gimme any clams, see? We don’t take cash for our jobs, we—“ - -Matthew’s patience, already thin, evaporated completely. “I think that’ll be all. I’ve told you that I have it under control, and I’m asking you to kindly leave. As much as I’d like to sit here and shoot the shit with a cartoon character, I’ve had about as much as I can take today.” - -Nails pursed his lips and his nostrils flared beneath glowering eyes. Matthew thought that the whites and irises of those eyes briefly flashed black and melded with the pupils. For the quickest of instants, the little gangster had eyeballs that appeared to have been soaked in motor oil. But then it was gone. - -Nails dropped his cigarette on the stoop and ground it out with the toe of his brogue. “Yeah… shore. Everything’s Jake, mister—I’ll blow outta here. Here’s to ya.” - -With that, Nails turned and marched down the path toward the street. Matthew thought it was a bit strange that this intruder didn’t have a car, but he had no interest in offering to give him a lift. Nor did he care enough to stand and watch him go; he slammed the door shut before Nails was halfway down the walk. - - -  - -{{}}T{{}}he rest of the day went off without a hitch. The Troops of Salvation arrived shortly after Nails Nelson took his leave. They had two twenty-six-foot trucks, yet still required three trips before the yard was completely cleared. The crew almost took off without providing a tax receipt, but Matthew saw to it that everything was accounted for prior to bidding them adieu. - -*Every penny counts when you’re flying solo,* he thought. Matthew was well compensated by the bank, but things began to add up when you started thinking long-term. *Polishing off the mortgage, paying for college, weddings*… He looked toward the sky. *Wish we could talk, Cait. I may have to hock plasma or pose nude for the local art school on the side, but I got this.* - -The girls arrived home to snacks on the table and a front yard free of clutter. They made quick work of the PB&J’s and then proceeded to take advantage of the freshly vacated lawn. It was true that Liz enjoyed giving Brittany grief, but she had not yet outgrown playtime with her little sister. In fact, she had ramped up the frequency of their romps after Caitlin’s passing. However, if pressed, Liz would wholeheartedly deny that she had anything but contempt for Britt. Matthew was proud of his eldest daughter’s supportive display, just the same. - -The family almost made it all the way through dinner without one mention of those damn couches. Almost. - -“Dad, do you think anybody else is gonna prank us?” Elizabeth said, between bites of pepperoni and mushroom pizza. She tried to maintain a casual tone, but the subtle pained expression on her face let on that she had endured enough adversity. “Maybe we should get one of those doorbells that has a camera in it. That way, we can catch the jerks red-handed. I can take first shift tonight, and the gremlin here can cover the second. They won’t stand a chance.” - -Brittany brought her thumb and pointer fingers together on each hand and raised them to her eyes, as if she were peering through a set of binoculars. She let loose with an infectious giggle that made its way across the table, against which Elizabeth had no defense. Matthew smiled down at his children and silently thanked God that they had each other. - -*I* do *wish we had one of those doorbells. Video evidence is the only way anyone would believe me if I told them about Mr. Nelson.* - -“Listen, ladies—while I appreciate your willingness to stand up for yourselves, I think it’s best that we leave this whole ordeal behind us.” He paused, considering the best way to wrap this subject up with some finality. “Besides, some good came out of it. You should have heard how excited the Salvation Army was to receive those couches. Wherever they came from, those things are going to end up making a bunch of families very happy.” - -Elizabeth shrugged again and continued with her slice, while Brittany resumed playing with a rogue shroom that had avoided digestion. The unfortunate fungus had, however, found itself in the hands of a merciless four-year old who was likely going to reward its escape with savage dismemberment. Matthew’s statement had ostensibly put the intended bow on the topic. - -He didn’t mention the unexpected visitor. Wanting to move past the events of the day as quickly as possible, he didn’t see the point in introducing a further complication into the minds of his daughters. He had found routine to be the best antidote for grief. - -That and time, anyway. - - -  - -{{}}T{{}}he Ford family was quite surprised to find their front yard once again littered with couches the next morning. Not the same couches: the lawn was now covered by an entirely new gaggle of living room furniture. And the number of pieces had increased. Each blade of grass was obscured, and since there was excess inventory, whoever had made the drop-off had decided to start stacking. Towers, two and three couches high, stretched from the beginning of the property line to the front door of their home. - -*There’s gotta be double the amount from yesterday,* Matthew thought. *We’re gonna need a bigger boat.* - -Matthew’s appreciation for routines began to wane, since it now appeared that a new pattern had emerged in his daily activities. He dismissed the apparition of the furniture to the girls and sent them on their way, called the Sallys to schedule another gift—“Yes, another couch donation. And we’re going to need more trucks this time”—and finally, sat down at his desk with a cup of coffee and logged-on to the bank network. - -It also seemed that Nails Nelson wanted to wedge himself into his day-to-day, because he once again came striding up the front walk, just before Matthew started to think about lunch. This time Matthew saw him and opened the door before Nails could land the first of what would surely be three knocks. - -“Are you the one doing this to us, you little shit? My family has had plenty to deal with over the last few months, and we could do without whatever it is you’re trying to pull here. You realize you’ve got my girls completely freaked?” - -*Worthless little shit. Maybe I’ll give you the beating that I owe Spencer Lenore.* His fingernails dug into his palms. *Somebody’s gonna catch it for this.* - -“Aw, come on now mister, ya ain’t sore, are ya? I already told ya, me and the boys don’t cause problems, we solve dem.” Nails took a long drag from the cigarette that had been bouncing up and down with each syllable. “Now, if my sources are bein’ straight wit me, and dey usually are, it seems ya went and hired a different crew to take care of yer unfortunate situation yesterday. I know, ya told me as much, but I was really hopin ya’d reconsider. That pains me, mister, that really hurts my ticker.” - -“Get off my property, asshole.” - -Nails frowned. “Say, the last thing ya wanna do right now is go screwy. Yer gettin mighty close to doin or sayin somethin ya might regret. I tried to do dis the easy way, but I’m beginnin to see dat was a mistake. Me and the fellas might hafta go about dis in a different way if ya don’t start walkin the line.” - -“Now you’re threatening me?” Matthew raged. “I can’t believe this shit! Get out of my face right now, or I’m calling the po—“ - -“Hey, Matt!” - -Matthew looked up, above Nails’ ridiculous fedora, and saw Donna Strucker circling the cul-de-sac with her Jack Russell, Tito. He uncurled his fists and shot her the standard wave that can be seen in countless suburban communities across the Southeast. Tito, typically a well-behaved pup, thrashed and unleashed a barrage of ear-splitting barks in the direction of the odd couple on the Ford front walk. - -“Yeah, ‘hey Matt’.” Nails gave him the same wave to bring the focus back down to eye level. “Like, say, maybe we don’t involve just *you*. Ya was talkin about dem Janes ya live wit. I’d be tickled pink to meet dem. But maybe somethin happens to dem before I can, or maybe it don’t.” Nails had the look of someone discussing whether or not it was going to rain. “It’s a crazy world we live in, mister. Ya just never know.” - -Matthew slammed his fist against the door, knocking a family portrait off the interior wall. “You leave the girls out of this, you son of a bitch!” He meant to shout but it came out like a whisper. “I’ll kill you if you come within fifty yards of them, do you hear me? They’ll lock me up, but I won’t hesitate to wring your little midget neck.” - -“*Ehohhhhh!*” Hands out, Nails delivered a multipurpose Mafioso hoot of dismay. “Let’s be friendly-like here! Mister, I can tell ya the one grade-A, fool-proof way ya can guarantee dat Britt and Liz don’t have a single hair on dere precious little heads disturbed. Ya ready to listen?” - -*Christ, he knows their names! What is this?* - -Nails maintained his serene demeanor. “I’m tryin to offer ya protection against dat which ails ya.” - -Quieting, Matthew shoved his hands in his pockets in an effort to keep them contained. He didn’t know what to make of this stranger, but the fact that Nails knew enough to threaten his daughters by name gave him pause. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to agree, but he would at least hear what the offer was. - -For his daughters’ sake. - -“Go ahead.” - -“Dat’s great, mister, I knew ya’d throw in wit us. Here’s how it’s gonna go—ya let me and the boys clean up out here for ya. We’ll clear it out, and we’ll make shore ya never have to deal wit anything like dis ever again. All we ask in return is a favor, just a little quid pro quo.” - -“And what might that be, Nails?” - -Nails snapped with his right hand and pointed at Matthew. “Dere he is! He’s really comin around, folks! Ok, here’s the skinny. We’re gonna give you some… *persuaders*, if ya know what I mean, and yer gonna need a place to store dem. Maybe a shed out back. Ya gotta lotta room out dere, mister, and from the size ah dis house I’m bettin ya can afford a shed. - -“The reasons for which we’re givin *you* dis hardware are gonna remain under the rug, but let’s just say dat somethin might be comin. And when dis thing comes, well… we’re gonna want *you* and a buncha yer closest *pals* on our side. I know ya got pals, mister, I been watchin. Yer gonna use dese persuaders to get the other boys to join up.” - - “Are you talking about weapons? This doesn’t make any sense. You want me to start some sort of militia?” - -“What I want ya to do is *know dat I don’t give a rat’s ass what ya call it*.” Nails’s face darkened and his aw-shucks persona disappeared. “Yer gonna keep the tools handy, and yer gonna round some boys up wit dem when we say the word. Capiche?” - -Matthew tried to get his brain not to stroke out. “I just don’t understand what it is you think I can do for you. The last time I shot a gun was two presidents back, and that one took paintballs for ammo. Why did you pick me for this?” - -“Why does the Pope wear a pointy hat? Yer gonna stop askin questions now, okay? Ya can take all the other questions ya got and stick dem in *your* hat, far as I’m concerned.” - -Nails blinked, and when he reopened his eyes it appeared again as though two black marbles had replaced the baby blues that Matthew noticed previously. These onyx eyes were irriguous, they rippled inward, from temple to tear duct. There would be no compromising with these eyes. “Now, put a cork in it and tell me we got a deal.” - -*What the hell else is there at this point?* - -After a brief pause, and a twist of the gold band that he still wore on his left ring finger, Matthew replied: “Okay, Nails. You win. If it means you’ll stop harassing us and my girls will be safe, I’ll do this for you.” - -“Say, dat’s what I like to hear! We’ll take care a yer yard right away, mister. Two shakes. But we need ya to get a move on wit the other bidness. If ya don’t, we’ll know. And den… well, it’s anybody’s guess, really.” - -Nails glanced at the Rolex Oyster on his wrist. His chummy disposition had returned, but the next words out of his mouth were virulent. “Say, Lizzy’s bus is gonna be dis way soon, right?” - -Matthew went silent and stone-faced, which Nails took as tacit agreement. - -“Good. We’ll be in touch to make the first delivery and show ya how to use dem things. It’s been real nice doin bidness with ya, mister. I’m bein honest. We been talkin to folks from San Francisco to Sarasota. Some ah the other eggs we deal with kick up dust and make things difficult. It never works, see, it just makes us resort to other tactics. Dese other tactics, dey’re not pleasant, I don’t enjoy it, dey don’t enjoy it, bada bing, bada boom, nobody wins. But *you* mister, *you’ve* been a real ace.” - -Satisfied that an accord had been struck, Nails Nelson turned and walked toward the street. When he had almost reached the sidewalk, a Studebaker President winked into existence just above the street lamps. The car, which had an electric blue glow beneath the undercarriage and windows made for Tommy guns to poke out from, floated down and landed like a Harrier in front of Matthew’s new business partner. - -Donna Strucker and Tito had not yet made it out of the cul-de-sac. Tito had found himself a scent in the neighbor’s yard and decided it needed to be thoroughly sniffed, but when he saw Nails again started growling. - -Nails bared his teeth right back. “Dat fuckin’ dog barks at me one more time, I’ll give him another set a nuts just so I can chop dem’ off. And how bout you, lady? You fancy a pair a nuts?” - -As Donna hurried away Nails turned, gave Matthew a wink, and climbed into the black sedan. The whitewall tires of the long-bodied luxury automobile lifted it off the street and above the rooftops. It hovered for a moment, and was gone. - -Matthew returned inside and picked up the picture that had been jostled off the wall: a snapshot of his family, taken only six months prior, but at a time when they were happier and more complete. Caitlin stood in the center, with her arms around Elizabeth and Brittany. Matthew had hidden behind Caitlin and poked his head out above her shoulder. It was a great depiction of how things used to be: Mommy protecting, and Daddy… well, Daddy doing something. - -Caitlin had suggested that the girls should decide which picture from the shoot received the place of honor by the door, and this was the photo they had landed on. - -*Need a shed*, he thought, concentrating on the only normal thing about the whole mess. *I should be able to get to Lowe’s and back before Elizabeth gets home.* - -He hung the picture back on the nail from which it had been dislodged, grabbed his keys off the hook, and started out the door. He paused, then turned to the portrait again, kissed his fingertips, and gently touched them to the face of his wife. - -*I got this, Cait. I hope.* - -Matthew made his way out to the family car, which had never been airborne without the assistance of a jack, and was just getting it cranked when he realized he had a call to make. - -“Hi, yes, this is Matthew Ford, we spoke earlier about a donation pick-up? I’m gonna need to cancel. No, no, we just gave it some thought and decided to send this batch elsewhere, since you guys are probably full-up on couches after the haul yesterday. Which charity did we decide on? Oh, you’ve probably never heard of it.” His face twisted bitterly. “It’s just a little group that some friends of ours run.” - - -  - -{{}}M{{}}atthew woke early next morning to check the yard before the girls roused. When he opened the door, a letter that had been wedged in the jamb fluttered to his feet. As he bent to pick it up, he spared a glance through squinted eyes toward the lawn, afraid of what he might discover. He was pleased to find nothing worth remarking on, save for the immaculate condition of the grass itself. There wasn’t a blade out of place, no sign at all that there had been thousands of pounds of foam and feathers scattered about only hours earlier. The yard was actually a brighter shade of green than it had been the day he laid the sod. - -*They really* do *hit on all sixes,* Matthew thought. *Hot damn.* - -As he wondered whether he could enlist Nails and his fellow conspirators for regular landscaping, Matthew opened the letter. The handwriting was crude, resembling a *Do You Like Me?* note from a preteen righty attempting a sly southpaw. - -> *Mister,* -> -> *Hope you like what you see. Me and the boys never had an unsatisfied customer. I take that back. We had one, but I don’t figure he’s heard the birds chirp for a while now. Ha-Ha.* - -Nails’s spelling was a lot more precise than his pronunciation. Still, Matthew couldn’t help but mentally *ya* his *you*’s and *dat* his *that*’s for him. - -> *Speaking of birds, a little one told me that you’re having that shed delivered today. That’s good, mister. That’s… what did you say when we first chewed the fat? Swell. That’s swell. Anyone says to me that Matty Ford ain’t a stand-up guy is getting five fingers and fourteen joints to the face. Scout’s Honor.* -> -> *Go ahead and plan for us to swing by tomorrow night around 11. Me and the crew like to travel after the moon’s up when we’re carrying tools. Like them vamps in that Irish book.* -> -> *Be alone.* -> -> *Your pal,* -> -> *Nails* - -So, there it was. The events of the last couple of days hadn’t been a production of his overstressed mind or a sick joke perpetrated by a bored cosplayer. The Fords really had been visited by a “gangster” in a flying Studebaker, and Matthew had signed-up to help the guy build a militia. All because the visitor had dropped a mess of couches on the front lawn and executed a classic extortion racket. Kinda. - -*Is that it, then?* Matthew thought. *I’m going to be the head of the Troon’s Perch grassroots alien invasion effort? Whenever Nails says ‘jump’, me and the other dads will grab the laser rifles and just start blasting away?* - -Shrouded by a fog of conflicting thoughts and emotions, Matthew set the letter down on his desk and trudged upstairs to wake the girls. - -Breakfast was uneventful. Matthew was unable to summon the enthusiasm necessary to don the tiara and sash that had become an integral part of his morning ensemble, but the girls didn’t take notice. Nor did they mention the unusual occurrences of the previous forty-eight hours. It was Friday, after all, so planning for the weekend took precedent in their adolescent minds. - -“Dad, do you think Sarah and Addie can spend the night tomorrow night?” Elizabeth gazed up at him with wide, supplicatory eyes. “I went over to Sarah’s last weekend and Addie’s the weekend before that, so it’s kind of our turn, and I got an A on my math test this week, and if you say no, you’re basically being mean to their parents and encouraging me to get bad grades.” - -Matthew wondered if a slumber party would interfere with his own soiree plans. Chances were slim that they would be asleep by the eleven o’clock meeting with Nails, but likely Elizabeth and her friends would be too caught-up with blasting the latest Jonas Brothers record to notice civilisation ending. In fact, they’d be playing its soundtrack. - -“Well, consider me lawyered, honey. I have no rebuttal, your Honor, but I do have one condition: Britt gets to join in.” Matthew bounced his eyebrows and smiled at his youngest. “If the prosecution agrees to these terms, the defense rests. I’ll pick up s’mores supplies for the whole gang.” - -“Yes!” Brittany pumped syrup-covered fists up and down. “*And* you have to be nice to me! *And* you gotta braid my hair!” - -“And you gotta braid her hair.” Matthew began to clear the table. “Do we have a deal?” - -Elizabeth poked her bottom lip out and released an exasperated sigh, sending her bangs fluttering off her forehead. “Fine, deal. But we’re not watching any shows for babies.” - -“Good, I’m glad we could reach an accord. Get your stuff together and I’ll meet you both at the door.” - -Liz snatched her backpack off the floor and ran out of the kitchen with Britt nipping at her heels. “Let’s just watch *one* episode, come on! If we don’t, I’ll tell Dad that…” - -The girl’s voices faded as Matthew cleaned up. In a strange way, their bickering warmed his heart and put his anxieties to rest. It was a substantial improvement over the silence and glum, vacant stares that pervaded their home throughout the days and weeks immediately following Caitlin’s passing. There would always be a void there, to be sure, but the chipper quality of their banter made him realize that the Ford family would come out of this trial in one piece. - -If he got past midnight the same way. - -With his chore complete, Matthew delivered the customary farewell cheek kisses and bear hugs. Britt was young enough to allow her father this daily indulgence, but Elizabeth had recently entered the developmental stage that mandated she fight any displays of affection tooth-and-nail. - -She was furiously scrubbing her cheek to remove all traces of *ickiness* when curiosity got the better of him. - -“Hey,” he said, “so neither of you are still worried about the couches that popped up in the yard the last couple of days?” The urge to hear that all was well from the mouths of babes was too strong to overcome. “You’re not bothered by it at all?” - -Brittany answered this inquiry by smiling, shaking her head, and beating feet toward the Clark family’s idling minivan. - -Liz paused, stirred invisible dirt with the toes of her Birkenstocks. “Mom used to tell us that dads are the best protectors. We know we’re safe.” She wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. “Mom’s gone now, and that really stinks. It *sucks.* But we’ve got you.” - -Liz, suffering a momentary lapse in her newfound disdain, stood on tippy-toes and planted a big smackaroo on Matthew’s cheek before running out the door. - -Flabbergasted by his daughter’s statement (and her sneak-attack kiss), Matthew raised his hand to the side of his face and shut the door behind her. He leaned his head back, took a deep breath, and brought his gaze down on the letter that sat atop his desk. - -*That’s right, kiddo. You got me.* - -*And I got* this. - - -  - -{{}}“{{}}{{}}A{{}}re you really just gonna fold for this guy?” Matthew stood in the newly constructed shed and pressed his palms to the card table in the middle of the room. “You’re gonna roll out the red carpet and welcome an alien invasion with open arms?” - -*Now you’re talking to yourself*, Matthew thought. *Boy, the couch delivery extraterrestrials have really done a number on you. And to answer your question, Matty—yeah, I probably am. Ants can’t really fight back against the bottom of a boot, can they?* - -It was full dark, a battery-powered lantern on top of the table was the sole source of light. Matthew had made sure that Liz and Britt and the girls were sufficiently occupied before sneaking out for his backyard appointment. - -*Maybe Nails will ghost me. Maybe he’s found someone else to help him take over the world. Or, better yet, maybe he’s found another planet to invade. Fat chance.* - -Matthew looked at his watch: two minutes to eleven. His heart dropped and bounced against the floor of his stomach, sending the butterflies scattering. “No, he’ll be here. He seemed pretty convinced that I was his guy. If he doesn’t show, I’ll drop the girls off with their grandparents and drive *myself* to the looney bin.” - -The seconds passed with palpable tension. He rolled his shoulders back and attempted to assume a power pose—an effort that had mixed results at best. “You can do this, you can do this, you can—“ - -Three succinct raps on the door interrupted Matthew’s soliloquy. His sphincter tightened like a zip tie that’s been yanked by the World’s Strongest Man. “Don’t ask me fer no password or I’m gonna shit a brick, mister.” - -“Uh… come in?” Matthew stared at the door and shrugged to the empty room. *“Come in”? What are you, hosting a bake sale? Aliens are going to invade Earth and the best you can muster up is “come in”?* - -The door swung inward and *two* prohibition era hoodlums walked across the threshold. Nails led, followed by (of course) a henchman that had to stoop to make it through the doorway. *There’s Mugsy*, Matthew thought. *There’s the son of a bitch.* - -The larger gentleman carried a wooden crate, which radiated warmth and emitted a pulsing scarlet glow. Behind them, the brand-new spring-loaded hinge did its job and the door slammed shut. Matthew became briefly airborne. - -“Matty boy… why’re ya so uptight? You look like yer crackin walnuts wit yer ass cheeks.” Nails bleated, and poked his Lucky Strike at Matthew. “It ain’t like we’re here to get heavy witcha. All we wanna do is talk about the end ah the world as ya know it. Relax.” - -Mugsy hunched his shoulders and shuddered with barely-repressed laughter, a character break that was swiftly rewarded with an open-handed slap from his pint-sized capo. - -“Ya’d keep yer filthy mouth shut if ya knew what was good for ya. I don’t wanna hear any more lip outta you.” Nails returned his attention to his suburban soldier and sneered. “Ready to get down to brass tacks, mister?” - -“Sure thing,” Matthew replied, steeling himself. “I’m ready. Show me what you’ve got.” - -Nails dropped his smoke to the floor of the shed and gestured to Mugsy. “Get dat before dis whole place goes up,” he said, and the lunk did the Lindy Hop on the smoldering butt. “Ya know what I think, Matty? I think yer yella. I got half ah mind to put the kibosh on dis whole thing and teach yas a lesson.” - -*And leave the girls with no one?* “Nails, listen—I’m your guy. I’m just a little nervous, that’s all. Don’t wo—" - -“Stuff a sock in it, Matty. I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna forget dat I saw a flash ah puddy cat in yer eyes, and I’m gonna start over.” Nails showed his palms before reaching into his jacket pocket and getting to work on another cigarette. “Because I’m nothin if not generous. Doncha agree, big guy?” - -The fleshy jowls that hung from Mugsy’s jawbone shook as he nodded theatrically. - -“See? One outta every one wiseguy agrees—Nails Nelson is just a big sack ah mush when it comes right down to it. Now,” and Nails waved Mugsy toward the table, “why don’t we start the show, huh?” - -Mugsy dropped the crate onto the table and worked on removing the lid as Nails launched into his pitch. - -“What we got here is a batch ah dem persuaders I was tellin ya about. Dis is what yer gonna use to round up all the other ’burb bluenoses and get dem on board. Hand me one ah dem things, big guy.” Nails snatched a ray gun from Mugsy’s outstretched hands and turned it over. The weapon was the size of a compact pistol, with three cylindrical tubes wrapped around the barrel. Matthew heard a low *woooom woooom* as a thick, red liquid of unknown origin oscillated within the rings. “It don’t take no Nobel Prize winner to work dese babies. All ya gotta do is point, shoot, den tell the mark exactly what ya want dem to do. Bingo, bango, ya got yerself a nice little toy soldier.” - -*Persuaders,* literal *persuaders*. Matthew closed his eyes to collect himself as the weight of the situation settled on his back. *This is it then. And there are just two ways it can go*. - -“Ya still wit us, mister?” - -He opened his eyes again. “Yeah, Nails, yeah. Hey, can I get a demonstration or something? I told you, it’s been a while since I handled anything with a trigger.” - -“Shore, Matty. The big guy’s used to it, anyways—in fact, dat’s why he don’t talk so much. Too many pops from dese things.” - -Nails raised the weapon and fired at Mugsy. The effect was immediate: the lummox went stiff as a board. - -*Two ways it could go… and it went my way*. - -Without hesitation, Matthew shouted, “Big guy, ignore everything Nails says! Take the ray gun off him, and shoot him with it!” - -“Why, ya little—” Nails snarled, but he couldn’t get anything else out before Mugsy leveled a bear swat across his head and disarmed him. The big guy would be hell in a quick draw duel, he blasted Nails before the Napoleonic hood could hit the floor. - -Matthew looked around the table. Nails was planking on his face. “Nails? Can you hear me?” - -“Shore, boss,” came the muffled reply. - -“Tell me the truth, you’re an alien, aren’t you?” - -“No gettin nothin past you, boss.” - -“Get up, Nails.” - -“Shore, boss.” Nails arose and stood to dishevelled attention. - -“Now that’s more like it.” Matthew resumed his position of authority behind the table. “Fellas, it’s been fun, but this is where we part ways. Nails, you’re going to take your buddy here—drop the gun, big guy—and get the hell off the planet. Actually, you know what? You guys both forget this planet exists altogether. Earth means nothing to you. Tell your associates back home that you didn’t find anything worth taking. Now hit the road.” - -The two mobsters nodded, turned on their heels, and made their way toward the door. - -“Hey boys, one more thing.” They stopped in their tracks as Matthew smirked and crossed his arms. “Pick up a guy named Spencer Lenore on your way outta town. He’s been making things tough for my crew lately. Take him to your planet and make him *real* comfortable.” - -“You got it, boss.” Nails tipped his hat to Matthew and clapped Mugsy on the back. “We’re aces at makin’ folks comfortable. Everything’s Jake, Matty.” - - -  - -{{}}M{{}}atthew was just getting the fire started when he felt two arms wrap around his waist. He turned to find all four slumber-partying girls behind him, wearing pajamas and wide, tired eyes. Apparently, even the Jonas Brothers couldn’t hold their attention all night. He couldn’t help noticing that Brittany’s hair was pulled back into a perfect braid. - -“Dad, it’s after midnight!” Elizabeth looked up from the bear hug with an expression of innocent curiosity that girls teetering on their teenage years allow to shine through every so often. “What are you doing out here so late?” - -“Just taking care of some unfinished *bidness*, that’s all. Gonna take a while to explain, honey. Why don’t you run inside and grab the crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows?” Matthew grinned and gestured toward the fire. “I’ll tell you ladies all about it over a couple rounds of s’mores.” - -As the girls scampered inside, Matthew settled down to watch the flames consume the broken up crate that Mugsy had been carrying. He had buried the ray guns in a shallow grave under the shed floor until he figured out what to do with them. But whatever that turned out to be, he planned on strategically keeping that one blaster the otherworldly mafiosos had used on each other, because… well, best to be prepared for the teenage years. Nah, only joking. Probably. - -Matthew shifted his gaze to the clear night sky. - -*Don’t worry about us, Cait. I got this.* - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Everything's Jake" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103854688202199).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/Experimental Diet.md b/content/issue-23/Experimental Diet.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9df87dfe..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/Experimental Diet.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,227 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Experimental Diet" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- science fiction -- horror -authors: -- Andrew Johnston -image: images/ExperimentalDiet.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Andrea Piacquadio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-gray-tank-top-3812731/), [Nesrin Danan](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-eating-outside-3193818/), and [Sharon Murillo](https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-pasta-on-stainless-steel-bowl-4049953/)." -copyright: "© Andrew Johnston 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: "From the beginning there's been a fine tradition of epistolary fiction in the speculative genres - Dracula, for example, told its bloody tale through diaries, letters, newspaper articles, ship's logs... Andrew Johnston tells no less bloody a tale - and if these records glowed on a screen on some distant planet, what of it?" - -type: stock -slug: experimental-diet -weight: 8 - -morelink: 'Feed me more' ---- - -**EXTERRAN FEDERATION OFF-WORLD LAB B-0102 DATALOG** - - - **LOCATION**: *Agolga Exploratory Space, Agolga Prime-A* - - **PURPOSE**: *Xenobiology* - - **TECHNICIAN**: *Annelise Hyde* (deceased) - - **BRIEF SUMMARY**: *Analysis of unidentified live organism X-0E* - - -**LOG 181** - -A xenofauna sample was captured alive and returned to the laboratory by Agolgan mercenaries. Once negotiations for payment were concluded, the sample was brought into the complex. As the sample demonstrated a highly aggressive nature while in the care of the mercenaries, it was placed into secured containment immediately. - -***Preliminary notes***: - - - **MASS**: 250-300kg (estimate) - - **LENGTH**: 2.5m (estimate) - - **LOCOMOTION**: Primarily quadrupedal - - **DIET**: Unknown - - **REPRODUCTION**: Unknown - - **NECROPSY**: Not performed - -Because this organism was secured alive, we will maintain it in captivity while we study its behavior and physical traits. Our first step is to determine its diet so that it can be maintained until a necropsy is ordered. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Speaking of diet, someone should have a word with Exterra about our supplies. They can brag all they want about how their wonderful Nutri-Noodles have the perfect balance of macronutrients or whatever it was, but they taste like plastic tubing and they're hardly filling. They could have at least sent along some dried fruit or something. - -  - -**LOG 182** - -**TEST 01** – *VEGETABLE MATTER*: - -Sample was presented with 50kg of local xenoflora, gathered from the cultivation grounds used for the other samples. - -Sample circled the vegetation, prodded through the mound with its head, then turned away from it and commenced to pacing back and forth along the far wall. After an hour of observation, the sample had not consumed any vegetable matter. It does not appear to be herbivorous. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Noticed some irregular readings from the containment sensors. The maintenance team needs to get off its collective ass and fix this thing up. God help them if I have to get on them about it. - -  - -**LOG 183** - -**TEST 02** – *PRESERVED ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -Sample was presented with 30kg of preserved bovine offal. - -Sample approached the offal, took a substantial portion into what we are assuming is its mouth, then promptly regurgitated most of it. Maintenance crew on the ground reported that the sample made a series of loud vocalizations and “looked upset.” Either the sample is not carnivorous or else it requires fresher meat than we have at present. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Received more irate messages from Dr. Hedren on our alleged “lack of progress.” What is she expecting? We're dealing with nature here. If she wants us to just kill the thing, cut it open and mount its guts on slides for some Federation official, then we can do that, but SHE'S the one who wants these things studied alive. - -All I ever hear is “Oh, the Taiyang people would have had reports done by now.” Well, let her try to bribe some Taiyang people into joining up. Recruitment isn't my responsibility. - -  - -**LOG 184** - -**TEST 03** – *PROCESSED CARBOHYDRATES*: - -A technician dropped a cup of Nutri-Noodles into the containment area. Out of curiosity, an additional 5kg of Nutri-Noodles were prepared and presented to the sample. - -The sample did not even approach the noodles. It made a vocalization that sounded vaguely like a dog growling, then commenced to pacing about the containment area in tight circles. At the risk of anthropomorphizing the sample, it appeared angry at our proffered foodstuffs. I understand how it feels. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -How the hell did a technician get close enough to drop anything in there? And why? The holographic displays are more than sufficient, but they always want to get close. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. - -  - -**LOG 185** - -**TEST 04** – *LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -A mercenary crew offered us a live example of the organism previously labelled X-0A. Though we've already studied this organism, we paid a token price and then released it into the containment area with the sample. - -Within seconds, the sample had detected its prey and lunged upon the smaller animal. Curiously, the sample seemed to vanish for a moment – we at first thought this was a glitch in the holographic display, but further analysis revealed that some quirk in the sample's anatomy allows it to compress its body into a remarkably fluid-like form. - -The sample is clearly carnivorous. Furthermore, it obviously has an exceptionally efficient digestive system, as it consumed the prey animal in its entirety – including bones – within a span of two minutes. The sample proceeded to explore the containment area, suggesting that it was not fully satiated. Given that it consumed at least 150kg of tissue, it must have an unusually accelerated metabolism to accompany its digestive system. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -If Hedren keeps pestering me, I'm going to drown her in Nutri-Noodle broth. I shouldn't write that, but it's not like she's ever going to read it. - -  - -**LOG 186** - -**TEST 05** – *LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -A young technician named Davidson fell into the containment area. Safety mechanisms activated, but too slowly to stop the sample from reaching Davidson. It is perhaps unethical and/or tasteless to record this as a test feeding, but any researcher would want to know that their sacrifice was not in vain. - -The sample consumed Davidson's body in its entirety, much as it did with the xenofauna from the previous test. It does not have any issues with the consumption of foreign animals. It also appears that it is not yet satiated. In fact, it became quite agitated after the feeding. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -The best I can say is that Davidson didn't scream for too long. That was horrible, but I told those idiots to stay away from the enclosure. I'll bet she's not the last one to fall in. Frankly, they deserve it if they're going to be this dumb. - -  - -**LOG 187** - -**TEST 06** – *LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -I was physically present for this feeding. Senior technician Arnold and I were examining the safety failure that enabled Davidson to access the containment area when Arnold fell in, much as Davidson had. - -Unlike Davidson, who was still stunned, Arnold was composed enough to attempt to defend himself. This was futile. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Arnold was an asshole, I don't think anyone will miss him. Hedren's on us, now. Busybody that she is, I bet she'll be down here ASAP, looking for someone to blame. It'll probably be me – she's been looking for an excuse to run me out. Let her try it, see what happens. - -  - -**LOG 188** - -**TEST 07** – *LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -I was physically present for this feeding. Laboratory director Dr. Hedren requested to personally examine the containment area and its safety mechanisms. During the examination, she accidentally fell into the containment area through a complete stroke of bad luck that was no one's fault. - -Dr. Hedren will be sorely missed. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Well, that was convenient. - -  - -**LOG 189** - -**TEST 08** – *LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -The sample broke free of containment and entered the laboratory proper. It attacked and consumed four maintenance workers. Security teams engaged the target, but it killed one before escaping down a maintenance passage. Current location is unknown; base is on lockdown. - -Sample has consumed well over 600kg of animal tissue in fewer than three cycles and has not been observed sleeping. This is troubling. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Okay, the internal security mechanisms have engaged, so as long as I don't leave, I should be fine. Terrified, but alive. I've got enough water and Nutri-Noodles to last until Security wraps this up. - -I think I'm getting a new appreciation for Nutri-Noodles now that I've decided that I'm never eating meat again. - -  - -**LOG 190** - -**TEST 09** – *LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE*: - -Sample consumed three other live specimens and their caretakers. Security is reporting that the sample is capable of compressing its body enough to pass through some HVAC vents, though this is likely attributable to the effects of trauma. - -My current estimate is that the sample has consumed over 1200kg of animal tissue. There are some mathematical improbabilities here but I'm too mortified to double-check the math at the moment. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -On the plus side, I'm now confident that we have no alcoholics here. I haven't found a single concealed flask or bottle, damn it. - -Anyway, if anyone finds this, I leave whatever I happen to own to my brother. It's not exactly a legal document, but it's the best I can do under the circumstances. - -  - -**LOG 191** - -**TEST 10** – *LIV ANIMAL TISUE*: - -Sample breched my room and attcked. I escapped but it got its jaws into m arm first and ripped it of above elbow. I am typing ths with 1 hand so excuse typos. Its too hard and hurts to much t fix them riht now. - -Sampel also 8 at least 2 resrchers. Maybe more but I def saw 2 before shuttter closed. Quick cauturizasion w/first aid kt. Watched sample eat myy arm on camra. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Most of my blood is on thfloor. Watched man gt bit in haf. Sorry Hedren. - -  - -**LOG 192** - -**TEST 11** – *HUMANSS*: - -Still acces 2 cameras. Watched sample eat more guys. At least 4. Saw security guy fall down cryin. then it ate him. Never stops eating. Sample mustve eaten blah blah blah kg. Spilled my nodles. Now its chewin on camra, ha ha - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -Might be delirous from blod loss and shok. Dont think the music sreal. Noddles are real. Love noodles. No blood when eat thm. - -Musics good even if not real. I want sm fruit tho. - -  - -**LOG 193** - -**TEST 12** – *FEW311*: - -I think its gone. Cant see on camera now. Feeling fiiiiiine. - -**PERSONAL NOTES**: - -its a good life, ha ha. Doggie is whinning. Thats a god boy. Ha ha look what I typd. Good boy, ha. Doggie scratching ad door. K doggie, Ill let u in now, b good. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Experimental Diet" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103850668202601).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/Robots of Paris.md b/content/issue-23/Robots of Paris.md deleted file mode 100644 index ccc07edb..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/Robots of Paris.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,232 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Robots of Paris" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Andrea Kriz -image: images/RobotsParis.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/abandoned-alley-building-dark-1850087/), [sergeitokmakov](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/bot-cyborg-helper-robot-android-4877983/), and [DariuszSankowski](https://pixabay.com/photos/war-desert-guns-gunshow-soldier-1447007/)." -copyright: "© Andrea Kriz 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: Not only is "Alternate History" a fun source of escapism for the well-informed reader, it can give rise to what we might call "Alternate Future" stories - where we glimpse what might have followed what might have been. Andrea Kriz doesn't say it outright, but we can see what changed here. And what needs to. - -type: stock -slug: robots-paris -weight: 9 - -morelink: 'Whose future?' ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he moon’s simmering, a half-baked crescent. Croissant. Though croissant isn’t a distinctly French thing anymore, Riess feels—he can get croissants even in the cafés back home. Tasteless, doughy things, like all those so-called authentic pastries he’s tried so far. - -He stops by that café down on the corner and gets one plus a coffee, black, on his way to the office and leaves it half-eaten on his desk by ten in the morning. All his friends in Germany tell him it’s not supposed to be like that, rave on about flaky layers and beautifully browned crusts and so on, so it must be some baker, or maybe that waiter with the ascot who always glares at him when he walks in, getting his petty revenge. No, it’s not easy being an SS officer in this crummy city. - -At this hour of the morning, Riess’s usually waking up at his desk with keyboard keys imprinted on his face, trying to remember which robot-fighting gang member’s e-arrest form he’s been filling out, or whose Labor Corps exemption he’s dealing with—like he doesn’t realize they’re all faking it, bastards—or explaining why he electrocuted that AMP dealer last month. Unless he’s rolling out of bed at five in the morning, getting a couple sets of push-ups in and briskly walking to work, then it’s stopping by the café, doughy croissant, etc. - -So he should be glad to get out of the office. But he’s not. He’s downright uncomfortable in the wake of flashing red-blue patrol skycars, peering into this alley. Standing in the cold dawn makes him realize how much he appreciates the morning routine, waiting in line in the so-called authentic café, all those French teens talking smack about him, sticky floors, news and cigarette kiosk shutters slamming outside. It’s dead quiet. - -“We’ve got reports of a monster running around,” Aude Schiller told him back at the office, with a sarcastic smile. “A metal beastie.” - -“Can you say hallucination?” Riess jibed. - -“AMP, drug of choice in the slums, doesn’t make you hallucinate,” Aude said. “It just gets you high. Gives you energy, like you can do anything in the world.” - -“Well, I wouldn’t know,” Riess mutters to himself now. “I’ve never tried it.” - -Although some of his panzer friends used to pop it like candy back when it was a proper drug, restricted to the military. It reminds him of the time he served. Quietness, dark holdouts in crumbling cities, flashes of gunfire here and there. - -There’s none of that now. He’s peering into the alley instead, gloved hand splayed against the faintly damp wall because there’s no way he can take it any longer just standing here, waiting for whatever miliciens drew the short straw to come back with reconnaissance or coffee or fresh baked pastries or what. The last reaches of red-blue light flicker on the puddle behind him as he ducks under the tape, LEDs alternating between POLIZEIABSPERRUNG and POLICE ZONE INTERDITE. - -A cop detaches himself from one of the skycar radios and comes jogging over. They’ve set one of the newbies here to babysit him. A young guy, mid-twenties, and the breath puffs white out of his mouth as he hesitates, shifting from foot to foot. - -“I’m going to scout a bit outside the perimeter,” Riess informs him. He’s clearly wondering whether to phone up Aude or text her for approval. Riess twinges with irritation. - -“Have you got your gun sir?” the cop finally asks. - -“Of course,” Riess snaps, and wants to add, “I’ve had my gun, son, since before you were born.” First time he offed someone had to be when he was eighteen. When he was twenty, he was crushing riots in the frozen wastelands, hijacking mech suits—those ancient ones without personality circuits, that you could just jump into—and taking them for joyrides. So he can handle whatever the situation is here now. - -*The builder’s some French teen*. He runs over the info Aude gave him back at the office as he blinks five times in rapid succession, obligatory echo of that electronic woman from the instruction vids, activating his night-vision contacts. *Leader of one of those robot fighting gangs. The Flying Hares. Marcel Volant*—*we’ve dealt with him before*. Have they? Any French name to Riess isn’t worth remembering. They’ll ship the kid off to the Labor Corps most likely, they’ve got that whole process electronic now, takes like twelve clicks and they’ll just inject the microchip into his arm, have it wrapped up by noon. - -Of course it might get complicated depending on how exactly it’s done, might have to drum up a firing squad, do the whole shebang. Maybe they can use the schoolyard again. That way they can take advantage of the zoning restrictions to keep the protestors out, even though the city officials have gotten wise to them, are pushing back against it now... he’ll have to check where the litigation stands. - -Back in the day they would’ve shot the lot of ‘em. The murderer for murdering, the protestors for protesting, the officials for officiating, that ascotted waiter for being an ass and giving him half-baked croissants. They used to be nice to you back then—they didn’t have a choice. Now this building of robots that can slice up people, Christ. Like that poor corpse back there, under the tarp in five pieces. But *he* wasn’t military, so maybe they won’t have to go through the hassle of the firing squad, freezing their asses off in their stuffy uniforms, and in the end Riess probably having to go up and shoot this Marcel kid in the neck anyway because these guys couldn’t hit the side of a barn if it was tied down, shitheads. - -Berlin’s oddly specific about these types of things. If the kid did it with a meat cleaver he’ll get thirteen years of hard labor, but if he did it with a robot he’ll definitely get the firing squad. - -Then Riess spots him. He slips back around the corner expecting the kid to have heard the crunch of his steps through the snow and dart away… but he doesn’t. He’s tracing the bricks in the wall in front of him with bare fingers, hatless and in a light jacket. Riess shudders through his layers of coat and ushanka seeing him like that. - -Enhanced reality text appears in Riess’s peripheral vision: *95% Confidence, Marcel Volant, Age 18, Eye Color Brown, Height 176 cm, Last Seen Wearing*, floods of info he’s constantly telling the engineers he doesn’t fucking need—he’s looking at the kid, right? He continues tracing as Riess murmurs instructions to the waiting cops into his earpiece, steps up to the kid, gun drawn. - -*Like he’s waiting*, the thought flashes through Riess’s mind. That dark feeling in the pit of his stomach rises. - -“Hands up!” he barks. - -Nothing. No sound of running, no back-up coming in the form of flashing skycars skimming toward them. Did those idiots not hear him? - -Riess will say it into the earpiece again, louder, but first he wants this kid, Marcel, to face him. See his eyes widen and his muscles twitch, maybe even fall over in a comedic attempt to flee, get some confirmation out of him of Riess’s presence here. - -Instead he gets a high-pitched giggle. - -“C’est vous,” Marcel says, and a trembly grin spreads across his face. “C’est vous!” - -*Should he have brought his translator along?* Riess wonders. His milicien, Frédéric, is hanging by the skycars and trying to bum off a cigarette, if he knows him at all. Although even Riess understands what the kid just said. *It’s you*. - -And Riess knows Marcel knows damn well what he said, they teach them that in school. Probably first words they learn, because that’s the only German most of them will ever hear. *Hands. Up. Under. Arrest*. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s this uniform, this gun. Riess walks up and jabs the barrel right into his chest. - -“I said put your hands up,” Riess growls. - -Still that stupid grin. Maybe he really will shoot this kid, point blank. That sound will bring all of the idiot cops running. He’ll figure out the paperwork later, say the kid resisted or something. It’s almost less than what they have to do with the firing squad, guilting people into doing it and then documenting everything from the maintenance on the rifles they used to what they fed him the day before for the Ethical Executions Committee, and hounding the Town Hall for the death certificate after the fact… - -But wait. The kid looks familiar, Riess thinks. - -Curly dark hair, freckles. - -For sure they’ve met before. - -No, he’s too young. - -Marcel takes a step back, so the gun’s no longer touching his chest. Riess’s grip tightens, his finger clenches around the trigger. - -Marcel takes another step back. - -And then he turns and walks off and leaves Riess standing there, trembling the handgun at thin air. - - -  - -{{}}S{{}}irens surround him, and cops, like that police officer he just talked to multiplied a dozen-fold. They’ve got their helmets on now so they even look the same, bug-eyed aliens in bullet-proof armor. Except Frédéric, sulking behind a skycar’s wing in the bare minimum, a vest thrown on over his suit. - -“Where the fuck were you?” Riess blurts. - -“We saw him the same time you did, sir,” the cop says through a mechanized voice filter. “Dr. Schiller said you could handle it.” - -That bitch. Always putting him on the spot. Insinuating he’s too old and out of it to keep up with this investigation in the field, then, when he’s out here, telling all the kids to hang back and watch a crackshot SS officer go it alone. - -As if they didn’t have enough trouble maintaining a presence in the police force without all these games she’s playing from within. Aude Schiller, with steel-blonde hair, her blouse buttoned tight across her chest, carefully up to her neck, especially when she sees him now. Riess knew her back when she was still working on that psychology degree, and now she’s a police detective with that Doctor still tacked on her name. - -Got her eyes on his job, he knows. - -“We’ll fly around and catch up to him, sir,” the cop, or maybe another one, beeps. - -“I’m going after him,” Riess says. - -“That’s unwise. We have the milice canvasing the ground—” - -But he’s off, sprinting in the direction where the after image of Marcel is still seared in his mind. Out of the alley, huffing past tenement buildings so cookie-cutter he feels like he’s treadmilling past the same sooty wall over and over again. - -*Rue 16*, his eye-text tells him as he passes, *Rue 18*… *Rue 23*… - -Makes him feel bad for the kids who have to live in these banlieues. Kids should have plenty of space to run around in, like he did when he was little. Through the forests, airplaning through the halls of their English manor house. She’s right, Aude. He’s grown weak, doughy. Even ten years ago this would’ve been no problem for him. The running definitely, even the shooting. He would’ve done it with all those bastards watching. - -When he first arrived in Paris, they had to tell him this wasn’t like any of the places he’d been before. Russia, where the natives would smash you in the head with a bottle and leave you in a snowbank. New York City, where they’d blow you up with a flip-phone and a bunch of crap they found in an alleyway. *Nobody will try to kill you here*, they said soothingly. *They’ll just sort of sulk. Give you half-baked baked goods*. - -Even so, that’s not enough for him. Riess doesn’t just demand compliance, he demands respect. No, not even that, he demands just that certain look in their eyes… that they stop thinking when they see him, that their brains switch to bare-bones survival. - -At least he used to. - -He’s blinded by oil lamps swinging from tin sheet eaves, stumbles on a dealer packing up the last of her illegal batteries and pills. They end like a razor’s edge, the tenements, and suddenly it’s just seas of shanty sprawl from here on out, sloping gently up and down, spazzing out the map module of his contacts, which he keeps telling the engineers needs to be separate from the night vision exactly for this reason, he can barely see through this wall of nonsense—*??? Street, a5b// (&^ Avenue*—so he just shakes his head three times, shuts it off. - -Fire-hazard central, here. In the office they get fined for putting chairs out in the hallway. The inspectors would blow a gasket if they could see this, nests of wires tangled around poles, mechanics welding hunks of metal right up against wooden shanty walls. - -Slush splashes around Riess’s boots as he steps down from the curb. Toward an AMP junkie who blinks up at him with red-irised eyes, like it’s just a costume that Riess is wearing, before back-pedaling away. - -“Shit! SS!” - -“Did you see—” - -But the junkie’s already yelling and pointing, and people erupt out of every crevice to gawp at Riess. If you could call them that. Cockroaches would be better. Riess plows through them, in the vague direction that they’re stealing looks in, a narrow alley that can barely fit his frame. He’s heard on the radio that the Urban Planning Committee wants to bulldoze all this down, build new tenements up to the river because it’s more financially viable than letting them build their shanties, burn them down, build up again over the ashes, rearrange themselves like those microbots he heard about an inventor premiering at the World Fair. - -He wonders if you dug down you’d dig up layer upon layer of shanty town, like those ruins of Ancient Rome, Pompeii. Maybe if you plastered in the voids in the ash, you’d recover casts of insurgents at the very bottom layer, stranded American parachutists staring up at death raining down at them, circa 1950 or so. He wishes they hadn’t blown it up in the first place. Then he’d be walking through beautiful architecture, houses like tiered cakes, like they have in the city proper, instead of this stinking gutter. Of course they’re raising that horrible Vault over it now, step one of the multi-tiered city plan, so soon it’ll all be one and the same down here. - -*There.* - -Suddenly Riess sees Marcel. He’s *waiting.* Lounging next to a robot fighting ring, in a square of sorts, but as soon Riess pauses to catch his breath the kid turns and strolls away. - -“I’ve got eyes on the perp—” Riess says into his earpiece. - -But police skycars bellow overhead, drowning him out, and the crowd’s stampeding like a herd of buffalo in those cowboy books Riess used to read as a kid. The ‘cars fly off in a cross, four cardinal directions, everywhere except where they *fucking need to go*. Suits him just fine, Riess thinks, as he half-pushes, half lets himself be pushed after his last glimpse of Marcel—the kid’s black leather jacket. - -Past the fighting ring walled with sandbags, a machine with scythes for arms crumpled in a heap in its center. Its builder ducked down in crash position beside it, wrench still in hand. Riess doesn’t like flying in the skycars—gives him motion sickness—and he doesn’t like those things either, the robots of Paris. - -Five or six years ago, the kids in the slums started building them, in the shape of humans, animals, monsters that’ve never existed before, like that junk’s gained life of its own, resurrected. His friends at the military dump tell him they don’t even fire warning shots at the scrap thieves anymore, they have to shoot to kill otherwise the scavengers don’t give a damn. You can see the heaps of junk metal dancing up blue, misty in the distance now that the tenements are out of the way. The sun’s rising in that direction. And the alley Riess wheezes up slopes toward the dumps too until it swerves around a smoking ruin—or maybe that’s just the freshly fallen snow melting on top of it—and slowly climbs up again. - -“You get him?” Aude Schiller’s voice says in his ear as the racket from the square fades behind him. “Do you want backup?” - -“No,” Riess growls. - -“You *can* just shock him, you know,” Aude says. “You’re not a ghetto cop in one of those war flicks.” - -Riess doesn’t bother answering. - -“Don’t tell me your gun doesn’t have that feature?” - -He didn’t need it, he told himself, when he left his slim smart pistol in the drawer, picked up the twice as heavy Walther he’d carried with him for the past dozen years instead. He doesn’t know how to work it, the new tech. He can’t stand these new, pathetic excuses for weapons—not having the option to just kill them all. - -The nerve of these kids these days. - -In Berlin they want to come over, study abroad—somewhere safe of course, like Paris, not New York, not Stalingrad—and protest. Because it’s just not *right* having native culture wiped out like that. Their parents let them grow up soft. At that age, Riess partied with the Skullheads back in Russia, back when they had carte blanche to kill everyone in every village they came across, stacked them up dozens high… - -…and then those college kids stage something they call a ‘Die In’, lay down on the steps of the courthouse, in front of Metro stations during rush hour, even splatter red paint on themselves like the alleged victims of the police and SS. - -They don’t know how similar they looked, lying in the snow. How similar they are. - -He crests the top of the slope—and Marcel’s at the bottom of a staired lane, waiting. - -Water’s sloshing somewhere behind these shanties—offshoots of the river, canals? But no, those would be frozen so it must be the real thing, the Seine. He can believe that it’s breaking free of the ice, like his breaths are panting free of his body after all that running, like his body wants to break free of all these layers of coats that are only suffocating him now. - -Time seems to have accelerated. Years slough off his shoulders like the snow sliding off a holey roof beside him, *fwoomph*. It hasn’t been plowed here, of course, and the steps are slippery with half-eaten ice. He takes them one by one, expecting Marcel to turn tail and keep running, but he doesn’t. The kid just stands there, reaching up to a line of dripping icicles above him. It does have an interesting effect, the way the sun gleams through them while the last traces of night disappear. - -Part of Riess is disappointed. No one’s around, the skycars are gone, even the buzz in his earpiece has faded away. It’ll take the others minutes at least to come running. He’ll have to shoot him. Like an animal he’s chased down for just this moment, to see him turn. - -Adrenaline pumps through Riess’s veins as he aims his gun. His heart, his brain, expects it. Even the houses are expecting it. - -But Marcel turns toward him in the sunlight-moonlight and he’s smiling. - -“Do you remember me?” - -It hits him. He *has* seen this kid before. His father, rather. Professor Volant. - -Those guys in Intelligence that Riess wanted to be friends with, get his foot in the door with, they got real interested in the Prof’s research. So Riess made contact, made up some yarn about how Volant was 1/128th Jewish or something, and took him in—but then *they* turned around and handed Volant right over to the interrogators, who Riess was *not* friends with, even though they were all SS, higher ranked than he was, all lumped together by association. - -Because that’s all they’re good for, right? The dirty work. It doesn’t bother them, it doesn’t harm them like it would harm the others, the oh-so delicately honorable Wehrmacht, those shits in Berlin, signing the orders and then standing in front of the camera with their long faces and lines of medals talking about ‘regrettable circumstances’ after the fact… - -Yeah, those guys in Intelligence lost interest in Riess ASAP. Left him to languish, as an Assistant Director of Criminal Activity—no, Criminal *Investigation*—that doesn’t sound any better—*Department* of Criminal Investigation—right up until someone like Aude Schiller comes along and forces him to retire or he dies of old age. Whatever comes first. Whatever. - -“What’re you laughing at, you little shit?” Riess snarls, mostly because he remembers Volant’s brat sniveling against the window as they took his father away, probably thought they were going to shoot him, and now he wants to see it mirrored in the teen boy’s eyes. “I could kill you right now, you know, I could shoot you in the fucking face and let you bleed out in the dirt—” - -And then the wall bursts beside him, and Riess is flat on the icy ground, gun skidding out of his hand as a metal claw clamps down on it. It keeps pressing, until his hand pops under the pressure. He hears the bones crack, feels pain whiplash all the way up his arm, even though the claws are intertwined with his own fingers like a lover’s. - -He must’ve screamed, because someone—Aude—is shouting in his ear, “Udo! Udo! Where are you? We can’t get reception—” but another mechanical arm delicately plucks his earpiece out, tosses it after the gun. He hears it skidding across the pavement as he rocks up to his knees and stares at the robot. - -The jagged hole frames it like a halo in one of those paintings of saints, dripping plaster and water. It’s got so many legs. The big ones pin him down again, against the dirty snow, the thin mass of little ones whip toward him and he can’t move. That dark feeling surges up his stomach, fills up his throat until he thinks he’s going to puke. - -Is it going to dig into his organs? - -Is it going to rip his heart out? It’s beating so fast it might come out all by itself. - -“Do you remember me, Herr Officer?” Marcel giggles, but Riess can’t tear his eyes away from the robot. “Do you remember… this?” - -Is this thing it, Riess wonders? The robot his ‘buddies’ had Professor Volant build? Back when they were all in the same building, before the torturers got enough funding to move out, to expand, you’d run into them by the water cooler, in the gaps between filling out paperwork, leading their battered, bruised prisoners around. The confession extracter, they called it. - -They tested it on the Professor extensively, before they shipped him off to one of those labor camps, factories where they make T-shirts, flatphones, Volant in such a state Riess doubted that he’d survive a day. - -Riess still remembers the screams, cradling his head in the break room, thinking *this isn’t what I wanted, all this fucked up shit*. - -*I just wanted a bit of power*… - -*I just wanted a bit of fun*… - -It’s different now. The robot. It’s got this ridiculous mask stuck on it. A plague doctor’s, beaked like a vulture. Where did the kid even get it? Riess’s eyes blur. Above the ‘bot, in the sky, he sees the doughy crescent moon. - -“You feel that?” Marcel says, crouching down next to him. “What you’re feeling now?” He’s switched totally to German. “That’s fear.” - -*Is that what this is?* Riess wonders. He’s fading already. Not the man he used to be, or maybe even ever thought he was. For decades now he’s been consumed by the hesitation he felt earlier tonight, unable to pull the trigger. Half-baked. Unable to savor this sensation. - -*Fear.* Funny. He always thought it would feel—more deserving than this. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Robots of Paris" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103851538202514).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds.md b/content/issue-23/The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds.md deleted file mode 100644 index 67aa0a82..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,199 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- science fiction -- fantasy -authors: -- Daniel Ausema -image: images/HuntressConveyor.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/railroad-tracks-jungle-overgrown-1835529/), [bere69](https://pixabay.com/photos/the-jungle-of-chiapas-1865639/), and [TobiasRehbein](https://pixabay.com/photos/train-building-airport-indoors-5150747/)." -copyright: "© Daniel Ausema 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: "Fantasy author and speculative poet Daniel Ausema is no stranger to strange lands, strange technologies, strange creatures. Here he takes us on a journey though a selection of the first, and exposes us to the others in ways his heroine - and readers - may be unprepared for." - -type: stock -slug: 'huntress-conveyor' -weight: 5 - -morelink: 'World ahead!' ---- - -> *“...animal hides for leather, scrap metal, batteries if they still exist in any world, I’m overstocked on plastics but cured wood is...”* - -{{}}T{{}}he voice from the speaker faded as the conveyor moved away, but Sihala had memorized the current list before she jumped on. Her feet jerked on the belt, but she cradled her throwing spears carefully and kept her balance. The run-down shack disappearing behind her, what she called her home, told perfectly how little she could afford to waste her time on things the Quartermaster didn’t want. - -She checked the rope twined around her between waist and shoulders, pulled broad leaves and fronds from the underbrush that encroached on the line, and used them to camouflage herself. The decaying rubber beneath her feet ran on inexorably, the eternal movement of this, the greatest legacy of a long lost age. Far ahead, the conveyor appeared to reach the horizon of her own world, but it never stayed in that reality long enough to reach there. She tensed herself for the next, unpredictable jump. - -Beneath the rubber, blue light zipped among hazy parts no one alive understood, not even the Quartermaster. Lowering into a crouch, she waited, eyes constantly moving between the land that zipped by and the conveyer itself. - -These last few days, Sihala had come back with hands empty, spears unused. Even before that, she’d begun earning a name for bad luck among the loose confederation of hunters and scavengers. Not today, she told herself. She would prove them wrong. - -A whining noise rose from the belt beneath her. It seemed that it was getting louder these days. She prayed to the gods of ruined monuments that this reminder of the lost ones would survive a little longer...and that it would bring her to suitable game. Luck or no luck and regardless of what the others thought of her, she couldn’t survive much longer on the things she scrounged together around her shack. - -With a rumbling noise that stopped abruptly, the conveyer shifted into another place, and instantly her camouflage became useless. She looked quickly to either side for any game in this new reality. The lights that ran alongside the conveyor track revealed gray mud that bubbled and spat onto the belt. She’d heard the Quartermaster say that the conveyors were built with a meter of clearance. She wasn’t sure exactly how big a meter was, but this distance looked a lot smaller than typical. She feared the mud might get into the gears and other parts hidden beneath her feet. - -Yellow flowers more animal than plant danced in the boiling mud. A salamander of some sort climbed from the mud onto the lily-pad-like leaves. Fronds wrapped around the animal and pulled it into the yellow petals where it disappeared. - -Sihala brought a spear up to protect her, but the flowers didn’t look worth trying to take as prey. The Quartermaster wouldn’t pay for them, and they didn’t look edible. - -Other things moved farther out in the mud, at the edge of the conveyer’s vision field. She couldn’t quite make them out before the world’s dark mists gobbled up the light of the conveyer. - -Without taking her eyes from the view, she scratched at the ley-metal tattoo on her arm. It wasn’t a good sign that it itched. She turned slowly to see what energy might be setting it off. Originally they’d been aligned to powers within the earth, but any strong power source could draw a reaction now. - -Flames broke the mist in the distance. She waited as the conveyer drew her closer. A single flame, high above the ground. A smokestack held it there, a relic from the lost days. Such things had burned and converted power long ago, but she didn’t think it would set off her ley lines. She stared at the smokestack, tempted to jump off. It could certainly have treasures inside that the Quartermaster would pay well for, ancient machinery and other salvage, but she didn’t dare leave the conveyor, or it might leave this world and strand her. - -The whine of the belt subsided into a steady drone that threatened to put Sihala asleep. She rubbed the tattoo counter-clockwise, and energy rushed to her brain. This was not a world to fall asleep in. - -A flipper of some creature rose briefly from the sea of mud. A small earth-whale? If it got close enough, it might be worth trying to catch. The Quartermaster would give her good money for so much meat and oil. She knelt at the near edge of the belt and waited with her spear poised… but the flipper did not reappear. - -The conveyor shifted to a new place. Sihala frowned. Her tattoo no longer itched, which was a relief, but the conveyer didn’t usually shift realities that often. - -Now she was in a moss-shrouded forest, the conveyor cutting a straight line through the vegetation. The screams of prey sounded often, muffled by the hoary trees. Sihala stretched up for a clump of hanging moss and covered herself. If the conveyor came through here often, it was likely the native animals wouldn’t be afraid of it, as long as it seemed empty. A rich smell of both life and rot enveloped her, a heavy smell that forced her lower and lower as she waited. - -Engine sounds coughed and revved occasionally in the distance. Other relics moved in this world too. - -When a different noise reached her ears from the direction she’d come, Sihala focused on her tattoo for a moment and felt a tell-tale spark, not pain exactly and not an itch, but a jolt of unpleasant energy. She looked back along the conveyer, and soon something appeared, little more than a dot but moving quickly, as if impatient with the eternal speed of the belt. - -The hum of its motor reached her, and then the construct was directly behind her. - -This was the trickiest thing about hunting from the conveyers—dealing with the relics and enigmas that raced along the moving path—but where else might she find a way to survive? It was a wide thing that approached. Vehicle or creature, she couldn’t decide how to think of these constructs. - -She looked at the ground alongside the belt. No great place to jump off, but there was a bit of a break in the trees ahead. It would have to do. The construct was coming too quickly, though. She stood and ran before it, her tattoo sparking madly. Just as she felt the shifting air of its front grille, she leapt, falling into the thick moss between two trees. - -Pain boiled from Sihala’s thigh where it had hit a tree trunk, too intense to focus through. She ran through the calming techniques in her mind, but they didn’t work. Her body shuddered until, finally, by closing her eyes and breathing in a broken, uneven pattern, she could take her thoughts away so the tattoo could do its work. - -Drawing energy from the ground, the air, even the conveyer and other relics nearby, the ley tattoo healed tissue until the pain was only a dull background. - -As soon as the pain faded to a distant ache, Sihala rolled to the balls of her feet, holding a spear out toward the forest. Nothing approached, at least not that she could see. With her back still to the conveyer, she stood and took a step backwards. - -Still no attack. No sounds but the birds far above and insects beneath the bark of the trees. Then she turned around and realized what the lack of sounds meant. - -The conveyer had shifted again. Without her. - -She spun back, as if the conveyor was an animal that might sneak up behind a person. But of course it wasn’t there. Only an empty scar where the track had been. The vegetation grew thick, but instead of imparting on the scene a sense of rich life, it hinted at rot and hidden places ideal for ambush. Sihala rubbed her ley lines nervously, then trusting her spears more, she held them out, poised to defend. - -She’d been off the conveyor when it shifted many times in her own shack, but that was beside a frequent run. Seldom did a day go by and the conveyor not return to one of those. She bent down to examine this run. Fresh sap flowed from a branch that had been severed from its tree by the conveyor’s arrival. The mangled remains of a tremendous variety of plants told her that the conveyor had appeared here for the first time just now. Or at least the first time in years. It might return later today, or it might come back in twenty days, or it might come back in *never*. - -She longed for the Quartermaster’s voice, even if it was just the empty litany of goods. “Electronics,” she imagined him saying, a word she heard him use often but didn’t understand. “Aluminum cans, glass jars, the fatted calf.” - -What were her options? Follow the scar of the conveyor and hope it returned while she still lived, or strike out toward the north where the forest appeared to thin. The conveyors usually ran near the factories and cities of the ancient builders of the lines. Ruins, most often, but even ruins could have some life left. And some way to contact the Quartermaster. - -But here she might get lucky and have the conveyor return. Might. Perhaps. Who knew, when so many *maybes* were involved? - -Before she could decide a definite course, the plants opposite the conveyor’s scar shook. She crouched to pounce or flee, and it seemed as if her body moved through water, slowly and with clumsy grace, if that was possible. The branches parted slowly as well, but the creature moving into the clearing was by no means slow. - -It reminded her of the conveyor construct, a melding of flesh and metal but born of reptile fathers and automotive mothers, as if its ancestors had evolved since the lost days. A foreleg rose from the ground, brushed the tangles of leaves from a grill-covered face. Its mechanical hum was even, with none of the stutters and uncertainties of the worn-out motors of the conveyor. More a purr than a roar. - -As more of its body came through the vegetation, Sihala ran. It was far too big to fight. The monster moved quickly, while Sihala struggled through green-come-to-life. Heavy moss weighed down the branches overhead, caressing her face as she passed beneath. The creature’s breathing sounded over its engine noise, over the cracking limbs under its feet. - -Sihala turned, turned again, rapidly, without thinking about it ahead of time, twisting her path to confuse her pursuer. She let her footprints become a map of someplace impossible. She imagined new ley lines swirling beneath her feet to feed her power. - -The beast still pursued, but now as if confused, and its bulk didn’t let it turn as well as she could. Sihala reached an open stretch and sprinted, turning from the path just as the creature reached it. The trees embraced her, swirling their arms behind her as if in a wind she couldn’t feel. After more turning and with no hint of pursuit, she finally rested, leaning against one of the trees to let her lungs recover. - -Unfamiliar birds whispered high in the trees, reminding Sihala of the strangeness of this place. She couldn’t let herself relax too much. The feel of the spears in her palms kept her awake. And her mind turned back to the glimpse she’d had of the creature. So much metal. The Quartermaster would give her good trade for whatever she could bring in. And the meat too, perhaps, if it proved edible. - -These would be riches beyond any game she’d yet taken down, beyond any relics she’d plundered. She’d never be able to carry the whole thing in at once… but she could stash it somewhere and bring in a leg, or whatever promised the best reward. Even as little as she might carry, it would turn her luck around, let her fix her shack into a house, if not fancy then at least comfortable. - -The more she thought of it, the more she wanted to hunt the hybrid animal. Sihala stood and crept through the trees in what she hoped was the direction she’d come. Vines reached down to entangle her spears. Masses of hanging moss ran their fingers through her hair. - -She soon found the tracks of the creature, drifting off from where she’d entered the thicker woods. In her stalking run, she followed them. The beast had fed on some of the lush vegetation and at least one small animal, whose unidentifiable remains lay beside the trail. - -The sound of breaking branches told her she neared her prey before she heard its engine noise. She left the trail to circle around in front. When a steeply angled tree appeared near where she thought the creature might go, she scampered up to hide in its welcoming branches. - -Her wait was short before the beast lumbered directly beside her tree. She studied it, trying to decide where to stab. A bit of flesh showed directly above where its heart should be. Blocking out anything beside her target, she whipped her upper body forward and released the spear at just the right time. It struck the fur, quivered for a moment, then fell to the ground. The creature turned toward her, rising up. - -Sihala pushed herself backward against the trunk, her feet slipping on the scaly bark. Metal-coated teeth flashed green in the light coming down through the leaves. She had one more spear, but where to use it? The animal wasn’t giving her time to debate. It brushed the lower branches aside as if twigs, though they broke loudly, ricocheting away from Sihala’s perch. - -Its mouth? It didn’t look promising, as much full of gears and metal plates as teeth and tongue. Even its eyes appeared too risky. She leaned to one side as the head snapped toward her—*there*, at the side, where pistons and tendons intertwined! - -She didn’t throw this time, but she didn’t hesitate either. Using all her body, she thrust the spear into the space that opened at the top of the neck. - -Something snapped. The creature slid back down, but didn’t collapse wholly. It simply stood, its motor still humming but its head slumped forward. Sihala waited for any change, but nothing happened. Finally she slid down and stood beside the animal. She touched it, and the flesh quivered, but no limbs moved. She poked all around, finally daring to approach its head. The eyes were closed. The mouth hung slightly open. - -Sihala pushed the head to the left—and the beast took a step. - -She jumped behind the nearest tree. The creature made no further move, though, and she came back out. When she pulled the head toward herself, the creature took a single step again, and an idea formed in her mind. - -A part of it was dead, but she didn’t think it was that the animal part had died while the mechanical lived, nor the opposite. It was so many generations since the two parts had been fused that the distinction no longer meant anything. It was more that the brain—or whatever biological and engineered hybrid fulfilled that role—had died but left most of the body on automatic. Like the conveyors, really, she thought. Like society itself, or what remained of it. Running along with no higher thinking, no memory of why or plans for how. - -Shilaha pulled herself onto the creature’s back. A push on the head sent it shambling forward, and after a little experimentation she had the feel for guiding the half-dead thing. She directed it toward where she thought the trees might open up and let her get a wider view of this conveyor world. - -As she rode the richest prize she’d ever won, images passed through her mind as if on a conveyor themselves, circling back over and over to repeat themselves. Of herself at rest with purchased food always available, of herself in a restored home of the ancient ones, of hunting only when she needed to, of a conveyor that worked to her will instead of the whim of unpredictability. Let the others think her luck bad now! *Comfortable?* That could be forgotten. Now she could dream of *finery*. - - -  - -{{}}T{{}}he conveyor flickered across her path and disappeared, leaving a line of broken vegetation. Her ley tattoo responded with a jolt of energy. Too late, Sihala spurred her mount forward, as if the conveyor might return. As if she’d dare ride it now with it shifting so frequently. But the cut in the undergrowth made for a good path that went roughly the direction she wanted, so she steered the creature onto it and urged it faster. - -The mount moved gracefully as it accelerated, a rolling motion from front to back that kept it moving easily but ready to change directions whenever it needed to. For Sihala, though, it didn’t feel graceful, though she knew the fault was her own. The way the shoulders rose and rolled forward with each lope roiled her stomach. After crossing a good stretch of land she had to slow the creature to a walk. - -Smoke rose somewhere ahead, its scent falling among the trees, but by the time she could see it over the vegetation, it had dissipated enough she could never be sure exactly where it came from. Sometimes it seemed smoke was the most constant thing across all the realities touched by the conveyor. Sihala supposed it was fitting—smoke often lingered long after a fire was out, and what were they—the other hunters like herself, and even the Quartermaster with his lists of scavenged goods—but the lingering stench of a civilization long since burned out? - -No matter. With the money from her mount, she could at least enjoy what there was to enjoy in this twilight time, and maybe even travel more widely, find a place where the metaphoric fire still burned. She kept going, hoping for a clearer view of the land. - -After hours of riding, she passed a high smokestack, its top lost in gathering clouds. It looked cold, though, no smoke rising from its chimney. She smelled nothing burning nearby, and the lines in her arm gave no response to the building. - -They wandered more, angling eastward when the track from the conveyor abruptly ended. Sihala felt weak with hunger. The hum of her mount’s motor never changed, but its muscles grew weary. It stumbled, not often but regularly, as if every hundredth step was ordained for failure. Sihala watched the passing land for food both for herself and for it. - -When they reached an oil-covered pool of water, she led the animal to its edge, and it drank blindly, automatically. As the rainbows danced in her vision, she wondered if the pool served as nourishment for both the biological and mechanical parts of the creature. The surrounding vegetation held no food for her, but when it finished drinking her mount grazed among the branches. Sihala removed her only packet of emergency food and ate, wondering where to head next. - -After grazing, the creature lay down to sleep, and Sihala decided to allow a brief break. No danger registered on her tattoo. She climbed the tallest tree beside the pool, and at first all she could clearly see were the tops of other trees on nearby hills, but far off there was a hint of smoke, a weak promise of some kind of city that was more than mere ruins. She descended again and leaned against a fur-covered part of her mount, but she didn’t dare sleep. - -Later as daylight faded, she woke the creature and climbed on its back, setting it moving, as much as she could guess toward that distant smoke. Then she tied herself to some of the stable metal parts of its back and let herself doze. She slept surprisingly deeply. - -When she woke, her mount had slowed, and an odd tickle lingered in her tattoo. The hybrid creature still walked, but no faster than she’d be able to on her own legs. She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them again, trying to understand what had happened. Before she could figure anything out, a shape darted from the underbrush, crashed into her mount, and then dashed off again. - -She looked down. Blood and oil dripped down where the shadow had struck. The marks of other teeth scored her mount all along that side. Scavengers. Her mount had been half eaten away in the night. - -Sihala held out her last spear as if the threat could return the flesh to the creature. The spear point was no longer sharp after she’d stabbed her mount, and she feared the shaft was no longer true either. No other shapes appeared, but that did nothing to lift the weight that settled over her. What would the Quartermaster give her for this? Scrap metal and nothing more. Even if its mechanical parts survived long enough to carry her to the Quartermaster, he wouldn’t dare assume it could last much longer. - -Her visions of riches faded slowly into the overwhelming green of the dawn. - -They plodded all day. Her mount slowed no more than it already had, but neither did it pick up its pace. Sihala thought she ought to get down and walk beside the animal or range around for clues to where to head, but she couldn’t find the energy. Instead she spent her time thinking about all the things she’d imagined, all the riches and luxuries she’d promised herself. Each item, each pile of technological wonder and mineral riches, she held up in her mind and forced herself to let go. Told herself that she’d deceived herself long enough. But as each one floated away into the humid air, she reached out and snatched it, unwilling to release the dreams. - -Late in the day, they arrived at an ancient road, its pavement torn apart by plants. Sihala turned her mount, randomly choosing a direction to follow. The broken road proved no easier to follow than any haphazard path through the undergrowth, but Sihala thought—no, thought was too strong a word—*hoped* it might lead her to the remnant city. - -As the sun finally set, turning the bright greens of the plants into impenetrable blacks, the forest thinned, and she finally saw lights and heard the mingled sounds of machinery and voices. - -The mount was going even slower, but perhaps it was merely her anticipation of being able to rest. After everything, she had to get the metal at least to the Quartermaster. - -The road became a street, lined with buildings that hadn’t fully fallen in. People passing gave her surprised looks, but otherwise ignored her. She rode until she saw the sign she’d been looking for: crossed spears surrounded by nuts and bolts and loose gears, all backed by the antlers of some creature she’d never seen in all her hunting. - -Sihala slipped off and the creature stood still. As she pulled on the door, her mount collapsed onto its side, the motor coughing and sputtering. Even her most modest dreams would have to go. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and entered the shop. - -No matter where the conveyors took her, the Quartermaster was the same. Chubby and wearing an open, black cloak. Bespectacled, with a brimmed hat that fit snugly over his head. His habitual cane now leaned against the nearby wall. - -“Welcome, scavenger,” he said. “What have you come to trade in?” - -“A construct, Quartermaster. Flesh and oil, metal and blood.” - -He looked out his window and said, “I see little flesh to it. Scrap metal, maybe.” - -Sihala reached over to rub her ley tattoo. Little energy flowed in this town, but what there was comforted her. “As you say. But surely the components will be valuable.” - -The Quartermaster shrugged, a motion that looked more mechanical than natural. “Maybe. Some of these creatures have evolved parts that aren’t useful for our machines.” - -They went outside so he could examine the creature. Sihala haggled briefly, but soon gave in to his offer. Unlucky once again. Then she asked, “Where can I find the conveyor now?” - -The Quartermaster led her back inside and checked what resembled a book, though symbols and numbers scrolled across it constantly, swirling into patterns as he touched them, as if magnetically drawn to his fingertips. - -Somehow the orbits of those symbols gave him the information he needed. “It will pass through here tomorrow. I’ve arranged for it to cut down along the old train lines for most of the morning.” - -“Will it stay that long?” Sihala thought again of its rapid shifting of the day before. “It’s been acting funny, like the thing is getting old with no one left to fix it.” - -The Quartermaster gave her a look she’d never seen before, a flash of fear that merged into arrogance, shutting her up. She wondered just how old the Quartermaster was and what his connection to the conveyors was. - -“It will stay.” Dismissive. Haughty. And yet fearful and weary as well, as if someday such certainty would no longer exist. If the Quartermaster was what remained of the ancient society, and if that culture’s brain had become disconnected, leaving it to stagger on by instinct, what scavengers might threaten him, to tear away the last remaining value of these days? Sihala was afraid to wonder. She stood there, not sure what words of comfort she could offer, or even if the Quartermaster would want that. - -He pointed through a dark doorway to a tiny room filled with metal and tools. “You may sleep in the room through there.” She gratefully accepted. As she closed the door, she saw dozens of tiny constructs scurrying out toward her former mount to dismantle it and take its parts inside. - -She fell asleep thinking of her little shack along one of the conveyor’s more common paths, of hard ground that only pungent, leafy plants could conquer, plants that reclaimed the conveyor’s path each time it shifted away, giving back grudgingly when it returned. - -She wondered what creatures she would hunt tomorrow, and what luck she would have to scavenge for. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103848281536173).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/The Newest Profession.md b/content/issue-23/The Newest Profession.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0926af82..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/The Newest Profession.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,282 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Newest Profession" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Anya Josephs -copyright: "© Anya Josephs 2020 All Rights Reserved" -image: images/NewestProfession.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [JacksonDavid](https://pixabay.com/photos/african-afro-turban-people-person-5035645/) (several times over), and [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/architecture-building-geometric-1868547/)." - -description: "We open the issue with a visit to a plausible near-future, as Anya Josephs presents us with a disturbing glimpse of a world where ordinary people rarely get the chances they dream of, and corporate life is everything. That last is a theme this magazine plans to play host to again - but that's a story for another time. As for this one, well, the title gives it all away. Doesn't it?" - -type: stock -slug: 'newest-profession' -weight: 1 -featured: true - -morelink: 'Amazing... tell me more!' ---- - -***107 days to program launch*** - -{{}}I{{}}t’s the most ordinary night in the world when the call comes. Yendra is sitting in front of the wallscreen at her parents’ place, eating her second-favorite flavor of chips (she’s already polished off all the best ones in this month’s snack delivery) and watching season eight of *Fashion Fights*. Then an alert flashes across the screen: Confidential to Yendra Burke, from G3O Central Office. - -She figures it’s an all-call from HR about the Company’s 200th anniversary or something, and tries to dismiss it with a flick of her fingertip across the screen. Stubbornly, the letters dance across the screen again, flashing red now. So she taps on them, prompting the message to open up. - -The format of the message makes it obvious at once what it is: a job offer. Yendra grits her teeth and gets ready for the blow. - -She’s known for a long time that she isn’t cut out for one of the good jobs. Her grades in math and coding were always shaky. She didn’t even get placed in Mech or Electrical E in 6th grade, and college (or better yet, interning) was out of the question. For a while, she’d hoped maybe she could get something in the Graphics department—she loved to draw, and she wasn’t bad at it—but there were few of those slots, and she’d known before high school started that she just wasn’t good enough. She hadn’t tested high enough in empathy and conflict resolution to follow her mom’s footsteps into the Human Resources department. And that’s just a few of the best that she isn’t good enough for: she could, if she wanted to make herself miserable, run straight down the list of all 273 individual departments at G3O and explain exactly why she didn’t have what it took for any of them. - -On her 18th birthday, as she received her diploma, she also got a letter from the Company. It contained pre-written words of congratulation, no doubt authored by someone who had scored much higher on both writing and creativity than Yendra had, and a list of suggested jobs for her to apply to. In order: front desk greeter, direct sales marketer, and “out of Company.” Meaning the only thing they thought she was qualified to do was smile and look pretty, and they weren’t even sure she could do that right. She might have to end up working at one of the handful of restaurants or shops in the city that were still privately owned and had to hire washouts like her to do backbreaking work at pathetic wages because they couldn’t even save up enough for a bot. - -Of course, she applied for every open position she could find anyway. But the Company got her scores alongside her application, and at a glance could compare her with every other recent grad searching and know exactly where she ranks. - -Worse, *she* does. - -She’s lucky to have any offer, she knows. Even if it means a lifetime sitting behind the front desk, smiling and waving at people as they walk in. It still means being a part of G3O, and that means access to the shining tower that spreads all the way down six full city blocks of 14th Street. It guarantees a decent wage (if not a generous one, at least in the kind of job that Yendra might get), and the possibility of moving out of her parents’ place. Probably to a company-owned sleep pod at first, sure, but maybe to a real apartment like this one, eventually. Maybe she’ll meet someone at work and start a family. She could be happy, even if her job bores her senseless. Even if it reminds her, every day, of each and every way in which she isn’t good enough. - -She scans the offer as quickly as her reading speed (only 21st percentile for her age cohort) allows, but doesn’t see the name of the position. She doesn’t see anything that makes any sense, so she carefully reads the letter, in full. - - -> Dear Yendra, -> -> Congratulations on your recent graduation from all of us here at G3O, and thanks so much for wanting to be a part of our superstar team! We noticed you applied to a couple of open positions here, and we love your team spirit. -> -> We actually think we might have the perfect opportunity for you. It’s a brand-new project that hasn’t been posted yet, but we think you have what it takes. If you’re interested, ping us back—we would love to go ahead and set up an interview. -> -> Danelle, and the rest of the G3O Research Team - - -Never in her life has Yendra, solidly-bottom quartile Yendra, average-at-best-in-everything Yendra, thought she would get a personal message from the Research Department. Of all the departments that would laugh Yendra’s application out of their inboxes, the Research Department is the most elite, the most competitive, and the most prestigious. - -She doesn’t even stop to think about what this mysterious message could mean, why they might want her or why there’s so little detail involved. She doesn’t let herself think about how little she deserves this. She just types out a reply. - - -> *Hi Danelle!* -> -> *So great to hear from you—and I couldn’t be more excited! When can I come in?* - - -Before she’s finished her episode of *Fashion Fights,* she has an answer. - - -  - - -***106 days to program launch*** - -Yendra’s mother made her eat before she left the apartment for the interview. Now she’s wishing she hadn’t been talked into it, because she seriously feels like she might be sick all over the perfectly white tile floor of the waiting room. - -She’s been in G3O offices almost every day of her life. One of her parents would take her to work and leave her in the Play Area when she was a baby, and she’s only ever attended company schools. That included regular, requisite tours of every corner of the public halls. So it shouldn’t be so scary, just sitting here. - -Yeah, she’s probably going to be sick. - -“Yendra?” - -A tall, perfectly polished white woman in her mid-thirties steps into the waiting room, her red-soled heels clacking across the floor. Yendra looks up and sees her smile. - -“I’m Danelle. Come on in.” - -Well, Yendra follows. There’s not much else to do. It’s a short walk down a perfectly spotless corridor, and then into what she assumes is Danelle’s office, from the mess of papers strewn everywhere. You have to be pretty far up in the company to even get your own desk, let alone one behind a door that closes, and Yendra mentally revises her sense of what’s going on here. She’s at least speaking to someone of enormous importance. Which, again, is sort of outside the realm of things she ever expected to do. - -“Take a seat. Do you want tea, coffee, sparkling water?” - -“No. Thank you.” She sits on the chair Danelle points to, one of the cushy ergonomic numbers that molds to her thighs as she settles into it. - -Danelle runs her through some standard interview protocol. There’s a barrage of simple IQ and EQ tests, all of which Yendra probably bombs because she’s so nervous, all of which are pointless because Danelle already has a digital file of every test Yendra ever took in twelve years of school. - -But to her surprise, Danelle is smiling when Yendra puts down the handscreen. It’s maybe an hour later, and Yendra is a little out of it, the way she always is when she’s been staring at screens for too long. - -“As I suspected,” Danelle says. “I think you’ll be a perfect fit.” - -“Really?” Yendra blurts, though she regrets it immediately. She’s trying to seem confident and poised, not… whatever she actually is. - -“Yendra, how much do you know about our program?” - -“Um. Nothing. Not even the name.” Yendra feels the heat rising to her cheeks. “It’s not that I didn’t want to prepare, I just, there was nothing to go on in the message, and—“ - -“You have nothing to apologize for. It’s a brand-new program, not even launched yet, and we worry it may be… controversial, at first. Our marketing team is hard at work finding the right way to educate the public about our work, but in the meantime, we don’t want wild rumors to start flying before we’re ready to launch. So for that reason, we have to ask you to sign this NDA, before we can go into any detail about the role. Would that be all right?” - -Yendra signs the agreement. She doesn’t even think about it. She barely reads it. - -“Thank you. Now.” Danelle gestures, and the huge wallscreen behind her desk lights up. It’s pre-programmed with a presentation, in the classic legible, almost-cartoonish style that every G3O presentation shares, from the annual internationally-watched product launch to middle school algebra lectures. - -The title, splashed in bold font across the page, is: ***Personal Partnerships: A Premiere Perks Program*** - -Danelle sighs. “I keep trying to convince them to change the name, but they insist that alliteration tests well. I don’t know with whom. I’m only in charge of market research for the program itself, not the marketing.” - -The presentation continues. It informs Yendra about all the perks that are provided to all company employees: the catered lunches, the unlimited snacks and drinks, the nap pods, the free tech, the hovercars that speed you home if you work overtime. Like Yendra didn’t already know everything she was missing out on. - -“We have these things for two reasons,” Danelle explains. “One is because we want to be good to our team, to attract and keep the best of the best working here. The other—and I’ll be frank, because this is a confidential conversation—the other is so that our team doesn’t need anything we can’t provide. Hungry? Snacks are right there, or order delivery from any restaurant you want and we’ll pay. Tired? Close your eyes in a nap pod, or head upstairs to one of our dorms for a proper night’s sleep. Need a break? We’ve got fitness centers, in-office massages, ping-pong tables, beautiful outdoor spaces. Anything you need, we can give you, quicker and better than you could get it on your own, and all for free.” - -So that you never have to step away from your desk. You never have to stop working. Yendra isn’t the brightest—she’s seen her numbers too many times to think otherwise—but like everyone else, she’s figured that out. The company doesn’t ever want you to have to leave. It’s how they’ve come to essentially rule the world. They find the best and the brightest and give them everything. That way, they are, if not actually bound to the company, effectively so. If the company gives you everything you ever need, or even want, why would you ever leave? - -“Our perks program has been extremely effective in aiding in staff recruitment and retention. The company is regularly ranked the world’s most-desirable employer, and as many as 90% of our employees remain with us for their entire careers. The perks program is frequently cited as a top draw for some of the most promising talent, and for the most part our staff has been extremely satisfied with its comprehensiveness and reach. Except for one… fairly major area of human need.” - -Danelle goes onto the next slide. “In a recent study of our 2,000 most-productive coders, 91.7% of them ranked sex as one of the things they think about most often. By using biometric indicators, we also found that an additional 4.2% were lying. In short, other than the relatively small number of team members who are asexual, or able to maintain a relationship despite the demands of their jobs, our entire team is being distracted by sex.” - -The next slide has another chart, more highlighted figures. - -“47.8% stated that they would use a company-provided personal intimacy service often or very often, with a further 23.6% found to be interested but unwilling to admit it, based on biometric scans that indicate their initial answers were dishonest. I could bore you with the margins of error, but I think you get the idea.” - -“You’re basically pitching… Company-provided prostitution?” Yendra asks. - -Danelle snaps her fingers, and the wallscreen goes dim. She looks up, meeting Yendra’s eyes. “We’re not pitching it, Yendra. We’re years into a program launch that could help create some of the most important advances in the history of the Company. And I think you may be the right person to take us to the next step in this revolutionary project.” - -Yendra nods, slowly. She takes a deep breath, and swallows hard. And she says, “Where do I sign up?” - - -  - - -***102 days to program launch*** - -It’s kind of annoying that Yendra isn’t allowed to tell anyone about the biggest career move she’s ever likely to make. - -She’s been hired under a special contract and gets a nice round hundred bitcoin a year, a small fortune, for as long as she’s in the role. Plus, in case of failed launch or whatever, they’ve promised her an additional fifty for life, from signing onward. She need never work again, and still be able to live a decent life. A *good* life. - -Besides, Danelle assured, “It might not sound like much, and I know some people won’t approve of the nature of the position, but some will. Throw in your lot with us, and people will see what even our best tests can’t show—your adventurous spirit, your willingness to take a chance, your ability to work hard, all for the benefit of the company.” - -So it sucks that she can’t even tell her parents anything but that she’s been recruited for a new project, and that it’s top secret. Her dad glows with pride, telling her he always knew that she’d find a way to show everyone how special she is. Her mom quietly congratulates her. She doesn’t know how they would feel if they knew the truth, and doesn’t really care. - -Okay, so she wishes she could make her way to the top without having to sleep her way there. Or even get through the front door off something other than her pretty face. She can’t pretend otherwise. But she won’t forget she’s been given an opportunity she never expected. She won't make anything less than the best of it. - -She dresses carefully for her first day at G3O headquarters. She chooses a charcoal-grey suit that used to be her mother's, with a red silk blouse underneath. Serious, professional, but still looking the part just enough. She reminds herself that this isn't shameful. It's special. *Revolutionary*, Danelle said, and she's a department head at the most powerful company in the world. And she's chosen Yendra to help her change the world. - -She puts her hair back in a neat chignon, and adds a light touch of makeup. - -The crowning glory hangs around her neck: her G3O employee badge, delivered by drone just the night before. It contains all her biometric data: retinal scan, thumbprint, heartbeat rhythm, so that G3O security can match her to her profile easily. With this badge, shimmering with holographic anti-copying designs, Yendra gets access not just to the public floors but to the highest and most secret parts of the Company. She can walk right into the research areas where trillion-dollar projects are tossed around like confetti. She can access all the top-notch perks herself—brand-new top-of-the-line handscreens and wallscreens, free catered meals three times a day or whatever she wants prepared by the in-house chefs, unlimited care from Company doctors, weekly trips to the masseur or acupuncturist. - -In short, this badge is proof that she’s successful. Proof that everyone who ever said she would never make anything of herself was wrong. Proof that low test scores and mediocre evaluations don’t define her. Proof that she is, and that she always has been, *more*. - -If she’s got that, she doesn’t care what she has to do to keep it. She just has to keep reminding herself of that. She has what she’s always wanted. A *chance.* - - -  - - -***87 days to program launch*** - -So, Yendra’s fancy new job is mostly pretty boring. - -She spends some time at her desk, doing straightforward tasks. Data entry, things like that. Stuff an intern could do, not so different from the projects she barely passed back in high school. She knows that’s just to keep her busy, though, between times that the real researchers need her. It does take the sting out of it somewhat to know that she gets paid exactly as much as they do. She may be an object to their subject, but she’s also a Company employee, and she’s been assured that she’s also a real member of the team. Minimal though her contribution may be. - -When they need her, she tries to zone out. She’s not afraid to admit, in the privacy of her own mind, that it’s pretty unpleasant, being treated like an experimental subject. Which, of course, she is. - -She’s told that this is phase one: initial testing. What it largely entails is her being presented to various panels of Company employees, who are asked to rank her on a number of measures that will determine her suitability for the project. - -She chokes down her initial objection to being treated like an object on display and asks, trying not to let the lump in her throat leak into her voice, if she had misunderstood. “I thought I was already selected for the project.” - -“Of course, dear,” responds Vina, the motherly older woman who works as HR consultant for the project, and as Yendra’s direct supervisor. “We’re just gathering data to see how many partners we might end up needing. Personalization *and* universalization, that’s how G3O has made their mark, but no one expects you to do both!” - -That alleviates her most significant fear, but there’s nothing in the whole world that can make it pleasant to stand behind a reinforced glass panel while a committee of data engineers rank her attractiveness on a 215-question survey. Obviously, the Company provides top-notch counseling and therapy, but Vina gently hinted during her onboarding that it would be better if she didn’t discuss certain things with anyone. Like the nature of the job she was hired to do, for example. - -She tries to remind herself that they don’t even know why they’re here: the project’s cover story is that they’re working to improve facial recognition. Yendra is the one with the power here, the one who has been allowed into the inner circle. - -That doesn’t make her feel any better when it’s time to remove her clothes for the next round of surveys. The air on her side of the glass is heated to a pleasantly balmy temperature, and the glass is one-way so she can’t see them looking at her. Every consideration has been taken, but she can’t stop imagining what’s on the other side. - -Sometimes she pictures dozens of pairs of hungry eyes on her, consuming her intangibly. Other times, they’re all staring down at their handscreens, focused on their assignment, ignoring her completely. She isn’t sure which would be worse. - -It doesn’t really matter. She’s here to do a job. The survey panels only meet once a day, anyways. She doesn’t have to do anything, has been specifically told not to try to look alluring or attractive, so she just tries to keep the anxiety off her face and focus on the future that she’s earning for herself with every second she stands there. After that, she gets to go back to her desk and her data sheets, and not too long after that, home again. - -It’s better than anything she could have hoped for. - - -  - - -***71*** ***days to program launch*** - -The initial survey results are very promising, they tell her. It seems like she’ll be an excellent model for the program. Pretty, but not so much that she intimidates the shyest of the first-rank employees. Attractive, but not enough that they’ll be distracted from their work while they wait for their turn. - -In short, she is perfectly average. They don’t put it like that, but she can read between the lines. - -Well, at least her lifelong mediocrity is finally good for *something.* - -The survey panels continue, mostly scheduled for the mid-afternoon when productivity for employees tend to dip, and where her services would likely be needed in helping everyone get back on track. But there’s a new task added to her calendar, a new phase of the study in preparation for program launch. - -Measurements. - -No one explains to her exactly why this is necessary, or even why they are doing what they’re doing. But for some reason, before she leaves every day, she spends the last two hours submitting to a panel of measurements. At first, it’s surprisingly old-fashioned—a couple of tailors with a literal measuring tape, taking the dimensions of her arms, her waist, her breasts. But as the days go forward, they get more precise, culminating in micro-bots crawling along her skin to determine its exact topographical layout. - -She tries to hint Vina into sharing what’s going on, and receives a distant smile in response. She supposes they’re just getting more data. If she’s been found suitable for the project, why? How many centimeters of hip circumference, how many cubic centimeters of breast tissue, how many flowing hairs on her head? - -Lately, she’s been feeling more and more disconnected from her body. She spends so much of her time being examined by analytical eyes that she’s started to feel like it’s not really *her* there, under her clothes or beneath her bare skin. She’s somewhere else, distant and watching and considering whether or not any of this was worth it. - -She scares herself, thinking like that. After all, the proper work hasn’t even started yet. Pretty soon, she’s going to have to start actually “working”, actually having sex with people on the company’s behalf. If she’s already starting to feel this way, will she be able to handle that? - -She reminds herself that they chose her for a reason. They could’ve picked anyone—it’s not like they don’t have their choice of every resumé in the world for any open position. But they didn’t pick any of those other people. They picked her. She has to live up to that. - -There are some consolations. All those other perks, the nap rooms and the game centers and the unlimited snacks? She helps herself to them with regularity. Now she can have her *favorite* kind of chip whenever she wants, without waiting for the shipment to arrive, and she’ll have saved up for her very own off-site apartment by the time the project launches. Her bank account is steadily growing into the triple digits, and she has her upcoming one year high-school reunion to look forward to. - -The thought of everyone’s disbelieving faces as she tells them all that she’s been hired for a top-secret project by the Research Department is enough to get her through some of the least pleasant moments, like when calipers pinch her painfully tight or some fumble-fingered engineering intern is trying to get a more precise measurement of the depth of her vagina. - -Besides, she probably won’t have to do the actual work for very long. Danelle had assured her of that more than a few times. She just wishes there were someone for her to talk to about it all, she supposes. But her NDA had been exhaustive. There were no exceptions to the silence she had agreed to. - -She wants everyone to see that she’s on top of her work, but more than that, that she’s the right *kind* of person to work at the company. The kind of person who can keep a secret. The kind of person who’s willing to take whatever it gets. The kind of person who will one day be sitting in her very own private office, with the future at her feet. - - -  - - -***42 days to program launch*** - -Another message from Danelle floating across her handscreen. This time, the words that will change her life read: *We’re moving to trial* *this week.* *Everything is* *ready. Do you want to be the first to see? You’ve earned it. -D* - -She had no idea it would be so soon. No idea that she only had a small handful of days before the end of this long period of strange waiting, before it was time to do what she’d been chosen for. - -She replies: *Of course.* - -Her handscreen alerts her to a new meeting appointment at the Far Rockaway Lab, in five minutes’ time—all the rooms in the building are named after city landmarks, which is exactly as annoyingly precious as it sounds. Off Yendra trots, obedient to the electronic summons, and admittedly burning with some curiosity. - -She finds Danelle standing outside the locked door, her normally professional face betraying a hint of excitement, or even nerves. “They just finished production on number ten. You’ll be the very first to see, other than the production team. I haven’t even been in myself.” - -“Oh,” Yendra says, searching for more appropriate words. It’s difficult, since she has no idea what’s going on. - -“I’m sure it’ll be strange at first, but, just remember, this is a real advance. We’re doing more than just preparing to improve G3O’s hiring and retention rates. We’re moving science forward, a real *leap,* and I want to thank you for your part in it.” - -Danelle waves her badge in front of the door, the lock clicks, and it slides open. - -On the other side, Yendra sees herself. A crowd of herself. Identical, lifeless copies, standing naked, closed-eyed, unmoving, unbreathing. She sees ten freckles on the side of ten noses, ten of her left breast a little fuller than the right, ten soft curves of her lower stomach, ten tiny scars at the base of ten clavicles. - -“They’re not activated yet, of course, but testing assures me they’re fully functional. Our first field test will be in three days. We’ll turn them on then, save power in the meantime.” - -It’s a long time before she can stammer out the question. “What are they?” - -Now Danelle is smiling, staring at the other Yendras, apparently unaware of the Yendra next to her as she struggles against the sudden pounding of her heart. “Gorgeous, aren’t they? We’ve been working on the associated technology for some time. Lab-grown human skin over an artificial skeleton, conversational AI, the eyes—you have no idea how hard it was to get the eyes right! But this is the first real prototype. The Hiring and Retention team has a massive budget, and we were able to do something really revolutionary with it. Something that will help us all make our mark.” - -“They’re robots.” Yendra realizes out loud, with some combination of disgust and relief. - -“Well, of course. How did you think we were going to make the copies?” Danelle finally takes her eyes from her sleeping creations and looks at the real, living Yendra beside her. “You can’t have thought you were actually going to be *performing* sexual services on the company’s behalf. That would raise a number of the most significant ethical concerns. Not to mention quality control problems. And how would we scale the program across different sites if we’re depending on human providers? No, we discarded the idea years ago. Besides, this is the perfect testing ground for our HuBots.” She frowns. “Really don’t like that name.” - -Yendra can hear her heart beating like it’s in her head. “What happens to me?” - -“Well, obviously, we’ll need your help training them up. They’re not supposed to have your personality or anything, we’ve combined that from a variety of different models, but gestures, physical quirks, things like that.” - -“And then?” - -“You’ll continue receiving a very generous stipend, for life. And you’ll know that you’ve made an irreplaceable contribution to a truly remarkable sociological breakthrough.” - -“But.” It’s a real effort to hold back tears, which is humiliating. She’s already made herself look stupid, not having realized the basics of a project she’s been working on for months. She doesn’t want to seem pathetic as well. “I thought you said, that maybe, that I could stay with the project. In another role. That this was my chance to show what I could do.” - -“And you have.” Danelle smiles at her. “Yendra, we tested a dozen candidates before you. None had anything like your scores for physical attractiveness *and* approachability, across an incredibly diverse pool of potential subjects. You were the perfect person for this project, and we’re so grateful to you.” - -“So that’s all I’m good for?” Yendra doesn’t quite gesture over at the robot-clone-things, but it’s hard not to. - -Danelle gives her arm a sympathetic touch. “Of *course* not. But I just don’t think you can hope to lead a project team when every one of them knows what you look like naked, when they’re regularly making use of sexual services from a non-sentient entity that resembles you exactly. I think it’s best for the project if pre-launch is where your contribution ends.” - -Yendra stares at the copies of herself. But instead, maybe for the first time in her life, she’s seeing a future clearly. Her future. - -She will take her payout and buy herself an apartment. She’ll spend her days watching reality TV and eating chips, and wondering how many of the people who see her face have seen it before. These things will remain here, in the heart of the company, pulling the world’s best and brightest into nap pods for quick trysts between long hours at their work stations. No doubt the technology will be all over the world in a few years, with HuBots—it really is a *stupid* name—first being sold to the private market as the ultimate sex toys, then taking over as things like waitresses, maybe even working as front desk greeters for the company. - -She wonders if she, *she*, will even be a footnote in the history of this new development. She wonders how she could have sold her face, her body, her self without even realizing what she had done. - -“Well,” she says, swallowing, her throat so dry. “Thank you anyway. For the opportunity.” - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Newest Profession" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103845811536420).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/The Sedona House.md b/content/issue-23/The Sedona House.md deleted file mode 100644 index ac46f8cf..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/The Sedona House.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,371 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Sedona House" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Jeffery Scott Sims -image: images/SedonaHouse.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [WindowsObserver](https://pixabay.com/photos/sedona-arizona-red-rocks-351683/), and [422737](https://pixabay.com/photos/fingerprint-traces-pattern-456486/)." -copyright: "© Jeffery Scott Sims 2020 All Rights Reserved" - -description: "Mythaxis is not just about looking to the future. Jeffery Scott Sims delivers a classic yarn with echoes of H. P. Lovecraft to it - courtesy of the kind of roguish problem-solver-for-hire who made the stencilled doors of Private Eyes so much fun to knock on..." - -type: stock -slug: 'sedona-house' -weight: 2 - -morelink: 'Knock on door' ---- - -{{}}G{{}}o to the site of the Sedona House now and you see a shattered ruin, a pathetic pile of jumbled wreckage amidst which lies, like so much scattered trash, the remnants of the worldly goods that once belonged to the great Gregor Tharaspas. Come to think of it, most of that broken junk has probably been cleared away by now. I wouldn’t know; I last saw it right after the fact, and I haven’t had reason to return. - -The peculiarly angled edifice atop the red rock bluff above the mansion—the Temple of Xenophor, he called it—still stands intact, but those goofy New Age pilgrims don’t journey there any more. It’s padlocked, I hear, slated for demolition, maybe destined to become the parking lot for a new strip mall. Who knows? I don’t care. - -Neither, certainly, does Tharaspas. He’s gone, wiped from this world. The press reports convincingly relate the tale of the explosion which blasted his house, erasing all trace of him. - -That’s how they tell it, anyway. - - -  - -{{}}I{{}} saw the Sedona House in the twilight of its glory. - -One morning bright in 1930, at my dingy hole-in-the-wall of a downtown Phoenix office (small, under the radar, suitable for my business), my secretary Angie carried in a letter for me. One of those old fashioned written kind, inscribed in beautiful cursive, with a stamp and everything; I don’t get many of those. - -The return address listed Professor Anton Vorchek. I grimaced, but nevertheless tore open the envelope. I knew Vorchek from way back. A smart fellow, sort of a part-time academic who always had the inside straight on whatever strange was going on. Good guy too, as long as you didn’t turn your back on him. With approval I noted he’d addressed the letter formally to “Mr. Sterk Fontaine,” and below that, “Esoteric Archeology, Ltd.” - -Vorchek wrote: - - -> ​ *My Dear Mr. Fontaine:* -> -> ​ *No less than Gregor Tharaspas requests my aid involving complicated matters pertaining to the arcane. After receiving from him further particulars, I suggested in my acceptance that you might be willing to lend your expertise in support of our endeavors. He acquiesced to this, mentioning in his response previous dealings with you about which he did not elaborate. Inform me so soon as you are ready.* -> -> ​ *- Vorchek* - - -Inform him, indeed! Mightn’t I refuse? - -He figured not, nor would I. Despite suspecting a messy situation, I had to bite. My earlier acquaintance with Tharaspas had proved enormously lucrative to me. A repeat engagement could produce an accumulation of benefits. I had Angie shoot Vorchek an telegram acceptance, and promised her a rollicking night on the town if something worthwhile developed. - -I make an up and down living out of the locating and procuring of artifacts, some extremely old and extremely rare, for rare and special clients. There’s a covert society existing within our own of unique, oddly learned folk who dabble in the bizarre, the occult, the downright weird. For their purposes—into which I seldom pry—they need documents, relics, mystical trinkets believed to possess enormous value to their intellectual delvings. It’s an interesting racket, no questions asked, cash on the barrel head, and chancy. I get burned a lot. On the other hand, when it pays off, it pays big, and I’ve built a reputation as a man who can be counted upon to do anything—*anything*—to get the job done. - -Angie handled the arrangements. A few days later, bright and early, I made the pleasant drive up to Sedona, turning west from the interstate, whizzing past the primordial sandstone wonders (already thronged tourist attractions) of Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, and Cathedral Rock, the sharp spires of Chicken Point stabbing the emerald blue sky dead ahead. Off the highway, I passed into a community of expensive houses in the shadow of these ancient natural monuments, chugged up the steep road onto a flat ridge overlooking and isolated from the neighborhood. - -Atop a higher outcrop of garish red bedrock, loomed the distorted gray slabs of that “temple” so attractive to gawking tourists and scatter-brained true believers. Much of the ridge was dominated by the famous mansion and spacious grounds of Gregor Tharaspas, one of those big-shots of the odd, professing in public (and turning a staggering profit on) New Age hokum, and in private engaging in matters bizarre to the verge of insanity, as I well knew. - -The Sedona House he called it, and the singular name captured popular or tourist bureau fancy and stuck. Easy to see why: imagine it now, or study the old pictures, of that sprawling, gleaming white architectural conglomeration, with its roots in Greek and Roman forms, and God knows what else. The forbidding masonry wall around the property, softened by a riot of naturally gaudy flowers, enclosed a parkland of green lawn, transplanted eucalyptus, exotic shrubbery, flower beds, pools, fountains, and statues of the Grecian type, heroic male and risqué female gods of yesteryear. - -I pulled up at the wide driveway around the side, where a servant directed me into the cavernous garage, a space by itself bigger than most people live in, including me. It contained a range of snazzy cars and a beat up old SUV that I recognized from previous adventures. Directed through the left of three doors, I was led through increasingly ornate corridors and past inviting rooms to the heart of the domicile, the vast study of Tharaspas. - -Bookshelves dominated the lofty walls with nothing ornamental in their appearance, only a massive collection of aging, tattered tomes, tightly packed here, padded with clumps of yellowed papers there. Enough reading material for ten lifetimes, but it all looked well used. A brilliant crystal chandelier, fit for a palace, depended from the painted ceiling, hanging from the center of a bright, visually oppressive star-burst pattern radiating from what I interpreted as an aggregation of green, staring eyes. - -Amidst resplendent, regal furniture, the master of the Sedona House rose to greet me. “Mr. Fontaine, of course,” he declared loudly, beckoning me forward, motioning to another lackey to pour me a drink. “You arrive in good time. I believe you know my other guest.” - -Vorchek stood up from a high, soft velvet chair, and nodded. “Mr. Fontaine,” he said, in that precise, slightly accented speech of his. Always the natty dresser, he stood stiffly as if prepared to bow, in suit and tie, an old fashioned floppy hat riding down toward his shoulders. “I reasoned that we could count on you.” - -“That remains to be seen, Vorchek,” I replied with a formal smile. “I haven’t a clue why I’m here. Knowing our host, I guess it’s something weird.” - -Tharaspas laughed, a hearty rumble that nevertheless hinted at pose. His eyes didn’t laugh. “Take that for granted, Fontaine.” - -In some respects as old world as Vorchek—certainly by ancestry—Tharaspas nevertheless was wholly American in his personal presentation. His flat, harsh voice boomed from a pale, fleshy face beneath tousled black hair. He wore an open beige tee-shirt and what I’d have taken for scuffed gardening pants. His shoes, though, I noted, were shiny and sharp, tailor-made, cost no object, no doubt. - -I accepted the wine, sipped greedily. My favorite; he’d remembered. I asked, “We have business to transact?” - -Vorchek shrugged, stroked his short, well-manicured beard. - -Tharaspas glanced his way, grinned. “Sit down, Fontaine, and I’ll quickly bring you up to date.” We all did so, about a triangular mahogany coffee table heaped with oddly decorated porcelain urns and strewn with raggedy documents. When suitably arranged in those pleasurable chairs with drinks in hand and cigars passed out, Tharaspas launched into a surprising discourse. - -“I’m winding up my public affairs, Fontaine. I’ve already shut down the Temple of Xenophor, a silly conceit I no longer need. It was never a serious proposition anyway, a money-making gimmick, undeniably tawdry. I focus more on essentials now, the actual as opposed to the virtual. The Sedona House, too, will be closed. I expect—intend—to vacate all my holdings. They aren’t required for the future I have in mind. - -“I embark soon upon a great journey. From it I do not expect to return. It will represent the culmination of my researches, the pinnacle achievement. It is an unusual trek I contemplate, one that shall blast the barriers of time and space… yet I need help. You, Fontaine, possess the special skills I must employ.” - -I leaned back into the comfy chair, smirked over my glass. “So, my invitation wasn’t a casual one after all.” - -Tharaspas laughed again. “No. You’ve a reputation for being hard to deal with, Fontaine. I had to get you here in order to ‘put it to you,’ as they say. Rest assured, in your case I have a *business* venture in mind. Vorchek and his assistant, of course, lend their aid for other reasons.” - -“Assistant?” I cried. To Vorchek I queried, “Oh Lord, is she here, too?” - -In bland tones he responded, “Miss Delaney necessarily offered me her support in this undertaking. You may look forward with eagerness to renewing your acquaintance.” - -Take that as his idea of a joke. Theresa Delaney and I didn’t quite get along. A beautiful girl, and a snappy dresser, this private—very private—secretary of his… *but snooty?* So I didn’t move in her elite circles. So I didn’t measure up to her hero the professor. So I was dirt! I’d settle for a little civility. - -“Okay, Tharaspas,” I sighed, “let’s skip the tedious build-up. What do you want from me?” - -He stood, strode to the massive fireplace, crooked a finger to beckon me over. “See this, Fontaine?” he asked, indicating an especially ornate and intricate gew-gaw occupying one end of the marble mantel. “It’s an original time piece designed by Albrecht of Dresden. Seventeenth Century. Of the mere three he created, the only one extant. Savor the elements of its composition, this object fashioned for the king of Saxony: gold, Fontaine, silver, platinum. Inlaid with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, stripes of turquoise. Have you ever seen the like? Worth, I’d say, half a million on the open market. - -“I’ll make you a swap, Fontaine. The clock is yours, with a clear title, if you deliver into my hand the Seventh Scroll of Artocris.” - - -  - -{{}}I{{}} accepted, obviously. - -While the big boys were busy, I had the tumultuous pleasure of sharing lunch with Theresa Delaney. She failed to pretend joy at meeting me again. - -“For God’s sake, what are you doing here?” she exclaimed. - -“Our companions,” said I, “amuse themselves by surprising us. Your old buddy does, anyway.” - -A lovely girl, with magnificent golden locks and soft, perfect features. She always gadded about like a fashion model. I don’t know what she saw in an old guy like Vorchek, but that’s one of the peculiarities of liking. I guess she admired his brain. - -We were sat at opposite ends of the table in a kind of breakfast nook, she daintily nibbling a small sandwich, I shoveling one piled high. “Listen, babe, I’m not out for trouble,” I said around a mouthful. “Why not keep your fireworks damp until we wrap this up?” - -“You’re more likely packing heat.” She sniffed. “I just know you mean bad news.” - -“Nothing of the sort. Tharaspas is taking a long trip, you see, and he needs a scroll. Who wouldn’t? He asked me to pick it up for him. No big deal.” - -“Either you’re being a jerk, or you know nothing.” - -“One of the two, sweetheart.” I peered for the waitress. “Hey, we got anything to drink here besides orange juice?” - -“He wants you to steal it.” - -I grinned, adding around a mouthful of roast beef, “Tharaspas doesn’t care how I acquire the scroll, so long as he winds up with it. No questions asked, that’s the rule of my game. As for what I *know*… well, maybe Tharaspas plays by the same rule. You tell me: where’s he going?” - -“Some place out of this world.” She said it with an air of mirthful seriousness. I’m not naive, such words could have legitimate meaning with these fellows. I figured I’d be told, sooner or later, what I needed to hear, if anything. Meanwhile, I had a job to do. - -One way or the other, I intended to earn that clock. - -*Item acquisition procedure*, I call it. That’s the process of laying my paws on a thing that isn’t mine. There are so many ways to get stuff, the right method being dependent on circumstances. The latter, in this case, stood thus: Alfonso Monteca owned the scroll, millionaire and self-proclaimed high priest of a particularly whacked-out spiritualist cult. It was his prized possession in fact, and he’d never tell how much money or throat-cutting it took him to get it. - -Nor, the grapevine warned, would he ever consent to sell, loan, or in any fashion *whatsoever* surrender his rightful sovereignty over it for a moment. The mere request, I deduced (and tenuous feelers to third parties confirmed), would cause Monteca to lock down his treasure that much tighter. I didn’t need that kind of headache. - -Despite the suggestion inherent in its name, the Seventh Scroll of Artocris was one of a kind. I knew all about it, from shop talk. Scratched on papyrus back in those heady pharaoh days, by a famously brilliant or foolish master of the esoteric arts, it was supposed to contain spells or formulae which open all sorts of doors that duller and wiser heads would prefer kept shut. The details escaped me, as I guess they did most people, but they were fancy and important and dangerous secrets that some would kill for, or even put to use if they dared. Maybe Monteca would dare. - -Tharaspas certainly would. Well, I’d give him that chance. - - -  - -{{}}I{{}} stole it. - -Let’s skip the minutiae of the operation: those intricacies are a tale in themselves, possibly boring to the layman, and besides I’ve a penchant for sitting on trade secrets. I researched, calculated, observed, chose the moment, acted. - -Monteca had, I got. - -Two weeks after I left the Sedona House, I returned bearing a triple-locked satchel. Shortly after arrival at mid-day I handed over satchel and keys to Tharaspas. He already had the clock boxed. I appreciated his confidence in me. - -“Thank you, Fontaine,” he said. “Quick work. No come-backs, I take it?” - -I assured him on that point, and surmised aloud that delivery concluded our business. Brusquely he indicated otherwise. As he scurried away, clutching the satchel to his chest, he called back, “No indeed. Stick around. Talk to Vorchek. He’ll tell you—” Tharaspas was gone. - -The professor and Theresa had set up office during my absence, converting a disused bedroom into their private study. When I intruded, precious payment under my arm, they were huddled over a pile of type-written papers. The girl eyed me warily, Vorchek drawing easily at his pipe as he stated rather than asked, “It is done, then.” - -“That’s right, Vorchek. He got his, I got mine. That’s the finish as I see it. Any reason I shouldn’t dash with the loot?” - -“You’ll miss all the fun,” Theresa said mockingly. - -Vorchek didn’t smile. “So to speak, sir. Shortly, I expect, our host shall commence his grand project. He requires aid in order to inaugurate his passage. You may contribute further.” - -“Gobbledygook, Vorchek. I don’t lift a finger without due cause, which means information and compensation.” - -“True to form,” Theresa sneered. - -Vorchek glanced at his companion, rose from his chair. “My dear, be so kind as to complete the preparation of this report. Mr. Fontaine and I will go for a little walk.” - -We took a stroll through the beautiful grounds of the Sedona House. It was like walking through expensive Hollywood sets for an epic movie combining Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and God knows what else scenery. Vorchek spoke in a muse, as if to himself. “She died, you see. The wife of Tharaspas passed beyond the veil, after bitter illness, and he could not accept that. His whole life, Mr. Fontaine, dedicated to rending the curtain concealing the secrets of the eternal mysteries, yet her death reduced him to despair. What meant his achievements, his discoveries, if they availed him nothing in her case? - -“Let me tell you—and I beg you not to tax him on the point. He first gave himself over to wild schemes for raising her from the grave. He indulged in scholastic reveries, mining the works of bizarre thinkers among the ancient and medieval masters. His researches, necessarily, led first to wariness, then negation. He even perused the anecdotes recorded by Jacob Bleek concerning Josiah the Hebrew and his consort.” He saw my blank reaction. “Really, sir, your education lacks depth. Tharaspas borrowed those documents from my files. I must show them to you one day.” - -At the far end of the walled property we skirted an aquamarine pool inhabited by large, multicolored, bewhiskered fish, mounted a stepped dais bearing a pink-veined marble statue of some long-bearded worthy. From there, with the house behind us, we gained a stunning panorama of the glorious red stone bluffs looming near and sweeping away in a receding semi-circle, a majestic amphitheater ordained by time and geology. - -“At any rate, that story, among others, warned him of tragedy. Our host, therefore, has settled on another tack. He can not safely return his beloved to the land of the living? Then he wishes to enter, alive and bodily, into the realm of the dead! Yes sir, he would join her there, united as one, for all time, in what he imagines for her sake is a paradise.” - -Vorchek rested, leaning his back against the smooth block at the statue’s sandaled feet, gazing intently out at the lovely vista.. - -Okay, so now I knew. “Incredible, Vorchek, preposterous, stupid, and insane. Pick any three, and throw in the fourth as a free bonus. He’s heading for a fall, a big one. And for this I purloined the Seventh Scroll of Artocris? Jesus, Vorchek, do you have any idea what would’ve happened to me if I’d been caught?” - -The professor chuckled. “You surely knew he desired it for spectacular ends.” - -“Yeah, well, no matter. The discontinuing adventures of Gregor Tharaspas don’t include me.” I rapped the package still under one arm. “I’m taking this ticker and finding a buyer for it. Adiós.” - -He rested a hand on my shoulder. “Tharaspas asks of us, of you, one more little thing. A trivial favor. The procedure he devised requires special ceremony. He could not complete it alone; possibly with three, but four would make a difference. Participation, he guarantees, carries with it no risk, and demands only a further twenty-four hours of your life. Is it so much? That intriguing clock of his will still have you sitting pretty tomorrow.” - -There was that. I confessed to myself a mild curiosity. Also, should it not come off (extremely likely), a sheepish Tharaspas might fondly remember my selfless cooperation, which could pay handsome dividends down the road. - -Back in the house, Tharaspas waited with almost touching anticipation. “The professor told all,” I said. “Count me in. I’m here to help.” - -Tharaspas seized both my hands, cried, “Great days! You won’t regret it, Fontaine. You’ll see marvels, you will, and learn of mysteries that place you above the wisest occultists of our times.” - -Thrills. For the moment, I chose to look forward to a nice dinner. But while that was being prepared at length, and while Tharaspas was no doubt laying an esoteric table of his own somewhere for later, I took advantage of a few hours convenience to hop behind the wheel and buzz my prize into Sedona and back, entrusting it to the overnight attentions of the most resilient looking bank in town. If there was one thing I’ve learned in my years in the field, it’s not to consider any artefact claimed until you’ve got it where the last owner can’t lay their hands on it again. - - -  - -{{}}T{{}}haraspas rapidly advanced his plans. We gathered that evening for a princely feast, lavished upon us by a host who gave no thought to counting pennies. It was rich, exotic, saucy stuff, much of which I couldn’t identify, but it tasted wonderful and I slopped up all I could hold. - -He served caviar, the rare Kaluga variety, he boasted. I hate caviar, but I ate it anyway, just to say I did. I still hated it, the first helping and the second. I washed down that, and the rest of the sumptuous meal, with a bucketful of pricey wine, quaffed from a crystal goblet, the elixir fetched from private stocks aged over a century. - -Tharaspas proposed a toast. “To ineffable bliss,” he said, saluting with his glass, “that endureth forevermore.” - -Things came to a head at the darkest of night, when the slender moon had ducked behind the mountains, chased by its fading glow. Only we four remained, for Tharaspas had permanently dismissed his staff, softening the unexpected blow with hefty cash stipends. We descended a steep flight of steps roughly chiseled from bedrock to a subterranean chamber beneath the house a cramped cube, perfectly square—no, with its walls just aslant—and devoid of electrical or other connections. - -It contained only those few furnishings that Tharaspas had placed there, perhaps for this sole purpose: a plain oak table, four unfinished workman’s stools grouped around it, an oval arrangement of candles on the top. The candles, besides illumination, lent strangeness to the scene. A score or more, each one burned with a unique hue, creating an eye-taxing, flickery rainbow effect. They smoked more than they should, and they smelled vile. - -Tharaspas bore an oblong leather case under his arm. After asking us to sit he, remaining standing, opened the case and removed from it the infamous scroll, a sheath of papers, and a thin, smooth glass decanter partially filled with a brownish-green fluid, which he placed on the table before him. - -“Friends, my moment hastens. With the scroll of Artocris, I may proceed. Even it would fail me, had not fortune led me to this special place, for reasons I now count as inconsequential and inane. That I might tap into cosmic power, I raised the Sedona House atop a vortex, a focal point for mystical and monstrous energies flowing into our mundane universe from problematic spheres and entities beyond. - -“It is the Old Ones, I think, who foster that power. The great wizards of long lost Dyrezan thought so, as did Artocris and Jacob Bleek in their later eras, and my studies confirm their beliefs. Xenophor Himself, they claimed, the Creator and Destroyer, erupts into the world via the hyper-dimensional angles of the vortex. At this spot, then, armed with the scroll, I may speak to Him, and He may heed.” - -He passed a sheet of handwritten lines to each of us. Slowly, with loving caution, he unfurled the scroll, yellow and frayed, rolling out long and covered with minute scribbling that, I reckoned, only a handful of scholars could decipher. Idly I recalled the leathery feel of the antique fabric, wondered of what it was made. - -“I shall read,” declared Tharaspas, “from the spell contained herein. When I pause, recite one line from your pages, beginning at the top. Examine them before we start, for they were not designed for English speakers. Perhaps not for human. - -He took the slim decanter. “This is for myself alone, rendering possible my physical translation.” He popped out the stopper, raised glass to lips, and gulped down its contents. He dropped the glass to the floor, I heard it break, and Tharaspas sat heavily, gasping. Theresa and I made as if to rise, but he motioned us back. Professor Vorchek, I noticed, never budged. - -Tharaspas looked sick, his eyes gleaming moist in the spooky light. It took a while before he breathed regularly. Then he said, “The first stanza of Artocris,” and commenced to read. The ceremony was underway. - -“Xenophor, Lord of All Things, harken to this debased one, begging as he does for the crumbs swept from Thy banquet...” - -It ought to have been worth something to me to mark his words, and the antiphonal responses at appropriate moments we three mouthed, but I confess that it’s mostly gone out of my head. Maybe the acrid candle fumes fogged the brain, or something past the natural in the atmosphere, or maybe I was just too creeped by developments. Whatever, the words entered me, went through me, then dissolved or took wings, or shot out my backside. - -Though, Tharaspas read directly from the scroll, unlike us three he spoke his lines in English. I recollect useless fragments, stray phrases that tantalize without enlightening. - -“Take me into Thy substance, mote by mote, until the change come, that I may thrive in Thy kingdom...” - -“Open the gates into that shining realm, where the glorious stride renewed and refreshed...” - -“Bear to me, across the ages and the stadii, the one I seek...” - -Most of it sounded, frankly, gibberish. *Great One, command it of Astrodemus. Turn the Rhexellite Key. Olden Nantrech lights the path*. And so on. Apparently it didn’t matter if I understood it. - -But I’ll bet Vorchek did. During his recitations he twice smiled knowingly and once looked unpleasantly startled, finishing the line after a sharp intake of breath. - -This much I do remember. Once we got going the candles sputtered wildly, without wind. Once they went out while Tharaspas spoke, he staunchly continuing from memory, then came back, crackling and sparking as if on cue that we might resume. I heard, felt, a rumbling, a groaning, a shaking from beneath my feet. Ghostly pale light appeared to shine from odd corners without cause. I saw or imagined hints of motion in shadows, as if several beings small—or one very large—crowded into that tight chamber to lurk above or at our backs. I know, as I know my name, that I sensed abnormal company. Rills of sweat dripped down my neck. - -Came a blinding flash, a period of light which rendered nothing visible—quite the contrary, I saw a brilliant blankness—followed by low, harsh muttering. I didn’t recognize the words, nor the voice; was that really one of us? Then the blazing radiance vanished, and we four sat stupefied, regarding one another across the fizzling candles. - -Tharaspas, scroll in hand, sprang to his feet. “It’s done!” he bellowed. “We have made the passage. My translation is complete. Come, let us go upstairs, and behold!” - -I didn’t know what to make of him. I mean, we obviously hadn’t budged. Theresa frowned her puzzlement. Vorchek’s firm-set features betrayed none of his thoughts. Our host pressed the scroll on the professor, saying, “Take this, you’ll need it,” then bolted up the steps, his shoes clattering vigorously on stone. - -We trooped after him, with much less alacrity, shortly emerged into the portion of the house we’d previously left. Tharaspas was stomping about, looking around and touching things. “I’m here,” he cried, “I did it! It works, and if I’m here, so must she be!” - -Theresa stared at him for a moment, eyes wide. Slapping a palm to her creamy cheek, she whispered to us, “Okay, so somebody here’s crazy. Maybe it isn’t me. Professor, that was a spooky ritual and all, but it didn’t work. Has he lost his mind?” - -I added, “Seconding the question, Vorchek. Nothing here has changed. We didn’t move an inch.” - -He raised a hand to quiet us. “A great deal has changed. How much, my friends, we shall shortly learn. I request that both of you look around you carefully. Do not settle for seeing, but observe as well.” - -Since that wasn’t asking too much of me, I clamped on my thinking cap and studied my surroundings. It took a while for me to get the point, but I discerned a subtle difference. The room, and all its contents, appeared as if viewed through a wispy film of gauze. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to distance me from the scene. - -Scratch part of that: the professor and his girl appeared normal to me, as did what I could see of myself. Tharaspas, however, belonged in this new milieu. - -Something about that bugged me. - -Having spoken my thoughts, I demanded to know what it meant. Tharaspas heard me, calmed himself, rejoined us. “We have indeed traveled,” he asserted, “farther than the boundaries of the Einsteinian continuum. The Sedona House, its foundations planted deep into the substructure of the vortex, constitutes the threshold, thus the illusion of near normality. It’s image moved with us. Let us away to the viewing porch, that we may gaze upon fresh spheres of mystery.” - -This we did, following him through corridors and rooms familiar but slightly off kilter, until we emerged into the open air. He thrust aside a curtain—I made out a deep, darkling red glow—pushed aside a sliding glass door, and rushed before us. We followed, slowly. - -When I got my look, I leaned on the granite parapet, gaping. - -I guess we had skipped through a few miles. - -The scenery of midnight Sedona, with its myriad lights and twinkling gems of stars set in darkness, had vanished, replaced by a nearly featureless tableau of dim, red-litten landscape. Hints of dark, craggy mountains thrust into a murky crimson sky. Close at hand, below the porch, I glimpsed barren, rocky soil. For the moment that was all: no movement, no living things, no lights, no stars nor breath of air. - -Vorchek observed, “It does not invite, Mr. Tharaspas. I gather that dawn overtakes us—the light brightens perceptibly—but I know you expect more.” - -“Of course, Professor. I unleashed the mighty engines of the vortex, that its fantastic energies could propel me to wonder and joy. Dawn brings them to me.” - -Vorchek nodded. “Truly incredible energy output, according to my calculations, yet the spell of Artocris granted you little control over them. In retrospect I am surprised we survived the passage.” - -Tharaspas laughed. “The dimensional blast fueled my translation. I absorbed the power. That’s why I’m here, and why you’re still alive.” - -“Time out,” Theresa snapped. “Listen, mister, if you were talking about a book or that scroll, I’d get you, but what’s all this ‘translation’ business?” I was glad she asked the question bursting out of me, so she could sound like the stupid one. - -Tharaspas responded, “I have made the crossing into this plane, permanently, have become one with a world within which no living being may exist for long. You three traveled with me, that you may see and report—but you aren’t part of this place, nor can you remain. When the time comes, Vorchek, aided by the scroll, will guide you back. That door remains open a crack, briefly. He knows what to do. You will go. I stay.” - -Thought I, *Suits me, pal*. - -Meanwhile, the feeble glow intensified somewhat as we watched. We called it the dawn, but saying nothing, I wondered. It reached a level similar to that of deepest twilight, then attained a gloomy stasis. It hung there, with the building of tension that may only have been bubbles in my blood. I grew impatient, checked my watch, and found the hands didn’t move, nor did I detect the tick. It would be that way. - -Tharaspas croaked an exultant noise, shot out a finger at the end of a rigid arm. An enchanting white globe of light moved out from behind an obstruction, advancing toward us. It came slowly across the broad open space, and I saw clearly enough now to marvel at the unusual features of landscape, the oddly sculpted rocks, the fluted columns of stone, the gravity-defying peaks knifing the dark sky. It caused me to think of Sedona and its country, as if that patch of our world were a weak reflection of this. - -Yet I spied no vegetation, nothing suggestive of life, save that glow floating across the bare surface. The moment demanded silence, or I would have openly questioned this portrait of heaven. - -Tharaspas stood poised, ready to leap down from the parapet, Vorchek stock still, eyes intent, Theresa (I noted with pleasure) in a half crouch, peering from behind the professor. The glow came nearer, resolving into a definite image. By God, a woman! A woman, bathed in splendid white light, wreathed in flowing robes, her perfect features stamped with joy and longing! This had to be it. Tharaspas had hit the mystic’s jackpot! - -She spoke—made music of—the name, “Gregor,” and Tharaspas screamed an inarticulate emotional release, propelled himself over the edge in a bound. - -I stared, fascinated to the point of idiocy, as he dashed toward her opening arms. Did I see other movement out there, beyond that unearthly glow? Did dark shapes begin to ring the pair? - -Tharaspas sobbed a name, “Vanda!” - -It was his moment—the only one as it happened. - -The light winked out. He screamed again, this time a shriek of horror and disgust. He drew away, and in stepping aside revealed to us what he confronted. - -The image—the illusion, the imposture—of a beautiful woman had gone, as with the ripping off of a mask, disclosing the actuality of the beckoning entity. She wasn’t just dead, she wasn’t just not a she—nothing indicative of humanity dwelt within that seething, pustulating mass of hideous, misshapen morbidity. - -I choked back vomit, tried to avert my gaze, dared not. - -It squirmed, it spouted ooze and steamed glistening vapor, and incomprehensibly it still spoke. A muddy bubble swelled from one heaving lump of filth, popped with an ugly sound, and from the filling hole squirted in slimy tones the cruel jibe, “Welcome, Gregor Tharaspas, to our abode. Your place with us has been long prepared. Through the years we called to your questing mind, until you freely came. Through the eternities to come, we shall relish your companionship.” - -Things closed in on Tharaspas then, other shapes, dissimilar yet equally monstrous, and right then and there I cracked and turned tail, fled blindly back into the house. Within an inner room I halted, gasping, shuddering with paralyzing fear. Endeavoring to take heart from the relatively normal trappings of the Sedona House, I quailed on the remembrance that this terrestrial chamber signified nothing, that it mocked a piece of that desired world so far away that it made distance a worthless concept. - -The professor and his girlfriend charged in, not faring any better than me. “It’s gone wrong, Vorchek!” I shouted in senseless anger. “It was all a trick to bag him, and they’ve bagged us, too. Now how in hell do we get out of here?” - -“Fear not,” stated a tired, toneless voice. - -I turned, stunned to see Tharaspas standing in the doorway. He looked a dead man, or one of the living who has plumbed the pits of terror. He continued calmly, speaking with mechanical precision. “The gates of hell haven’t opened for you. Vorchek, I beseech you learn from this episode. Regardless, you know what must be done. Return to the ritual chamber. Say the words, carefully, in the proper order, with scroll in hand.” - -Vorchek said stiffly, “It will be done. What of you, Mr. Tharaspas? May I act on your behalf?” - -Tharaspas grimly shook his head. “No escape for me. Like I told you, I belong here. I set it up that way. Holy God! Great Xenophor!” His voice broke. He started as we heard pounding near at hand, the noise of shattering glass. He added quickly, “I go to face them. Perhaps, despite these hideous revelations, she is out there somewhere. It will cost me nothing more to seek! - -“Make your exit now, Vorchek. The reverse transition involves no new energy; the celestial door will simply close behind you. Beware the blow-back, however. Dimensional pressure will slam that door. Once on the other side, make haste.” In his abrupt passing from the room, I saw the last of Gregor Tharaspas. - -In a plaintive whine Theresa asked, “Is there anything keeping us here?” - -Without delay, Vorchek ushered us through the glories of the faux Sedona House and jostled us down the stone steps to the bleak room of magic. It was pitch dark in there, but at his command we clustered together, arms wrapped over shoulders, and so linked he hoarsely thundered the requisite words, from memory no less. These were pure gibberish, scarcely the pretense of human speech. That blasted scroll he tightly clutched, knuckles awhite, scraped my cheek. - -For an instant came a furious pounding or heaving at the door. - -Then the chamber lurched, rocked, my legs rubberizing. I sagged against the table, pulling my companions with me. They offered no support and we went down together. A vibrant roaring, like the ocean in a seashell grandiosely magnified, assailed my ears. The heavy door at the top of the stairwell crashed open, throwing a shaft of light. Above the mounting din Vorchek declared, “We have succeeded, I believe we have. Miss Delaney, Mr. Fontaine, we must run for our lives.” - -“What’s up there, Vorchek?” I cried. - -“Nothing but home, I trust; but this structure will not last. Hurry, before the gate seals!” - -I didn’t need to hear that twice, and nor did Theresa, who beat me to the top. - -A hurricane howled through the halls of the Sedona House. Papers flew on wings of wind, priceless ornaments toppled, rare paintings leaped from the walls. Which house was this really? It looked right, but I craved certainty. We passed a window which blew outward a second later. Through the shards I spied golden daylight. - -God bless, this house was the real deal! - -We stumbled outside. No thought of diverting to the garage and the cars, we just ate up the yardage by crazy bounds until we reached the property wall, which we frantically cooperated in scrambling over. A spiteful gust hurled me face first into the red dirt. Behind that barrier we paused. - -We timed it right. Imagine this last glimpse of the Sedona House: there it stood stoutly, a king’s palace, the trees swaying and snapping like angry spirits. Then it… *compressed*. Forces unseen, impossible, squeezed it, as if an invisible fist scrunched a sponge. - -And, as the papers say, it blew up. - - -  - -{{}}C{{}}ontrary to public reporting, it wasn’t an actual explosion. The house simply sprang off its foundations and disintegrated, like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle thrown into the air. A kaleidoscope image of fragments whizzed every which way, and then the whole mess came crashing down again, leaving a psycho’s scheme for urban renewal. Thus ended the Sedona House. - -You know, I really can’t complain. I got my clock, the sale of which paid for a sporty new coupe and much else besides. I’ve lived on easy street for a while, enjoying throwing money around like a big man, something I can’t always do in my business. My secretary Angie got her night on the town, and several more. When Professor Vorchek and his hot number invited me to dinner at a ritzy restaurant, and I even picked up the check. Blue moons come round occasionally. - -During this tête-à-tête, conversation turned to a shared topic. Theresa, whom I grudgingly admit may have more than a mere pretty head on her shoulders, opined simply, “There’s just no point in looking for trouble, especially when you don’t find out you can’t swim until you’re nose deep. Think about it, Professor. Tharaspas warned you.” - -“So he did,” the man soberly replied. - -I wasn’t satisfied, though. I knew Vorchek had managed to escape with the scroll of Artocris, had heard of him bragging about its latent possibilities. Something bugged me, had bugged me for a long time. Now I blurted it out. - -“All right, Vorchek, here’s what I don’t get. I operate on the fringes of this weirdness, for the sake of turning a buck. That I understand, that’s normal, healthy. But you, Tharaspas, all the wise guys, what motivates you? I’ve met enough of you boys, learned enough of your histories, to know that dabbling with the creepy stuff never works out. It always ends like this case. Why didn’t Tharaspas know that? Why don’t you?” - -The professor smiled grimly. “That constitutes a mystery, Mr. Fontaine? You disappoint me, sir. It is the human condition, acted and played out according to our individual desires. Some aim low, some shoot for the skies, we few for beyond the stars. - -“The fate of Gregor Tharaspas illustrates the point with remarkable clarity. We all seek that which we do not have—money, power, knowledge, a lost and beloved wife—and perhaps that which we can not have. We accept the risks, dare all for the sake of the dream. - -“For that which really matters, there may be only one way to find out… and no second chance.” - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Sedona House" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103846668203001).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/The Third Martian Dick Temple.md b/content/issue-23/The Third Martian Dick Temple.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9b778d54..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/The Third Martian Dick Temple.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,69 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Third Martian Dick Temple" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Micah Hyatt -image: images/3MDT.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Layers](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/oil-painting-paint-painting-artist-5285514/), and [tomw77](https://pixabay.com/photos/columns-doorway-stone-arches-452590/)." -copyright: "© Micah Hyatt 2018 All Rights Reserved. The Third Martian Dick Temple was originally published under a pseudonym in Daily Science Fiction." - -description: "Mythaxis generally seeks out unpublished work, but occasionally a story comes along that leaves the kind of impression that you want to land again. Micah Hyatt's perfectly crafted piece of flash fiction is just such a thing: a short, sharp, knock-out punch of a story, with a killer final line." - -type: stock -slug: 'third-martian-dick-temple' -weight: 6 - -morelink: 'Bam!' ---- - -{{}}R{{}}ust red Martian rain pelts my hardsuit like birdshot as I trudge through the mud, trying to get a visual for base. An ancient building, exposed by the terraforming storms. - -“The surrounding hillside’s melted away,” I say, pointing my cameras towards a pair of pillars that look like dicks. “You seeing this, Base?” - -“We’re receiving, Steph,” Base says. Cheers and applause and amazed curses. I can’t help but smile. - -The mud of the hillside looks like it could sludge over at any second, covering the opening again. “Structure looks stable,” I lie. ”I’m going inside.” - -No one back at Base objects. With the surface as volatile as it is, this might be our only chance. My heart is pounding in my ears. Adrenaline hitting my system like atropine. - -I go up three crumbling steps and huddle in the opening. Runnels of red water trickle down the narrow corridor, piles of ancient dust swelling, growing tumescent. At the end is a single cavernous room. I pray that what waits in there will be a trove of art or books or recordings they held dear. Historical records that might tell us how they lived, and what it was that caused their collapse and extinction. - -Shining my suit lights all over, my heart throbs in my chest at what I see. Shelves all along the walls, and on the shelves, little statue things, each about as tall as my glove. I pick one up and brush it off. It is a perfect specimen. - -“Steph,” Base says, all broken up. “Steph, do you copy? We lost visual. Can you describe?” - -“It’s just more dicks,” I say. My mouth is dry, all my enthusiasm drained in an instant. - -“Say again, over.” - -“It’s more dicks. Most of them are about three-inches tall, but some are bigger.” - -“Can you get pictures?” - -A long silence. - -I want to argue that I have better things to do than take pictures of mummified martian dicks, but I know what the response will be. Some of the dicks might be different. One of the dicks might have a deformity that might inform us about martian physiology and their susceptibility to disease. Or it might indicate dietary changes that caused nutritional deficits, or changes in the atmosphere brought on by pollution. For all we know, the martians might have preserved these dicks precisely because examining them will closely reveal the secret to why their world died. - -Those are the arguments that Base will make. This is not my first dick temple. Base will make me come back to the site in a few days, like they always do. I will be ordered to carefully collect the dicks and place them in a vacuum-sealed container. I will take the dicks back to Base to be studied and dissected by our scientists, who will confirm that the dicks are dicks. They will try to make inferences about the size or the quality of the dicks, comparing the dicks to the dicks they found at other sites. - -There’s a short-lived media frenzy when the announcement of the third martian dick temple is made. I go on television, on some dumb talk show. The host asks what it was like to hold a martian’s dick in my hands. I pray that the nanny put my daughter to sleep early, that she’s not watching me publicly prostitute myself for funding. - -“Which dick was your favorite?” the talk show host asks. “Do you think we might find a fourth dick temple?” - -The question crushes me. I start crying on camera. Because I know we will find another dick temple. I know we will find hundreds upon hundreds of dick temples buried just beneath the surface. The martians buried those dicks for us to find. A hundred million years ago they looked into the abyss and saw their own mortality. They knew the end was coming and they met it with raging hard-on after raging hard-on. - -I return home from my interview exhausted. My daughter runs out to meet me in her astronaut pajamas with footy slippers. I hug her and carry her to bed. She asks for a story about when I was on mars. I will hide the pain and the sadness, and tell her that we found something other than rooms and rooms full of dicks. Dick friezes and paintings and frescoes. Dick engravings. - -“What were they like, Mommy?” - -I search for words to explain to her why a civilization went to such lengths to preserve their dicks, and nothing else. - -“We’re still learning about them,” I say. A tear rolls down my cheek. “But I think that they were just like us.” - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Third Martian Dick Temple" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103848768202791).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/Weapons of Mass Entanglement.md b/content/issue-23/Weapons of Mass Entanglement.md deleted file mode 100644 index f8fd129f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/Weapons of Mass Entanglement.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,110 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Weapons of Mass Entanglement" -date: 2020-08-23 -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Dennis Mombauer -copyright: "© Dennis Mombauer 2020 All Rights Reserved" -image: images/MassEntanglement.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Pawel Kadysz](https://unsplash.com/photos/yKPj4oi9m74), [David-Karich](https://pixabay.com/photos/portrait-face-pale-expressive-eyes-358970/), and [Stephanie Mulrooney](https://unsplash.com/photos/X_unyC4Kkyc)." - -description: "The only unifying thing Mythaxis seeks is good writing - but we want to bring together a variety of genres, styles, themes, and no two alike is fine by us. Dennis Mombauer answered that call with a vision of the strange, and left us with questions." - -type: stock -slug: 'weapons-mass-entanglement' -weight: 10 - -morelink: '?!' ---- - -{{}}O{{}}ne day, Panduranga Mohan found a strange plant growing next to her door. It hadn’t been there when she went to sleep, but it was already waist-high, with a big, closed bud at its top. Panduranga shrugged and drove to work in the tourist town. When she returned in the evening, the bud had grown a little more. - -This continued over the following weeks. While Panduranga guided visitors from foreign planets through the war-torn countryside and showed them the souvenir shops and active battlefields, her mind often wandered to the mysteries of the plant. She had seen nothing like its broad leaves and bulky stem before, and she didn’t know where its seeds might have come from. - -Her work tired Panduranga out, and the plant soon became just another part of the house she came home to. Then, one day, as unexpected as had been its sprouting, the bud was open. Inside it, Panduranga saw an object of non-biological origin. - - -  - -{{}}T{{}}he object was a remote with one button. Panduranga examined it from all angles before she tried to touch it. The plastic surface felt warm under her fingers, smooth, not at all like the plant surrounding it. Panduranga plucked the remote like a fruit and tentatively pressed the button, but it didn’t seem to do anything. She pressed it a few more times, pointing the remote in different directions, then walked inside the house. - -As she passed her living room, the button glowed faintly. It boggled her mind how something like this could grow from a plant, but she was no botanist, merely a tour guide. She pressed the button one more time, and her TV came alive. This was doubly strange, because Panduranga didn’t watch TV often and it shouldn’t have any energy stored—but even more surprising was what it showed. - -On the screen, Panduranga saw another living room like her own, a dollhouse with little furniture: the couch, a fish tank, lamps. Nothing happened, there was no movement except for the fish and the constant rise of bubbles within their tank; so, after her initial curiosity died down, Panduranga wandered into the kitchen. But she left the TV on and, later in the evening, she entered the living room and found a man sitting on the couch inside the TV, staring toward the camera. - -It felt unsettling to see him there, in her house, even though he was just a recording, probably some kind of propaganda entertainment for one of the war parties. Their actions had become increasingly incomprehensible since the latest stalemate, and swarms of psychological warfare experts pilgrimaged here. The tourists seemed to like it, at least, and Panduranga could show them the trenches in relative safety—but the respite wouldn’t last, it never did. - -The button on the remote didn’t glow anymore, and there seemed to be no way to change the channel, so Panduranga watched the man sit there, get himself something to eat, scratching his back, and finally falling asleep, just as tiredness overcame herself as well. - - -  - -{{}}I{{}}n the morning, the man wasn’t there. Panduranga ate breakfast, cleaned up, and drove to work. The tourist town lay in no-man’s-land between the front lines, as did Panduranga’s home, but the war parties excluded it from their attacks, and only rarely did a missile, airstrike, or orbital bombardment hit close to it.This time, there was a huge load of visitors from a remote planet, gawking and gaping at the soldiers, at their weapons, at the desolation the war had brought upon the planet. - -The workday was long, and Panduranga returned in the dark, the purple-bruised horizon occasionally lit up by flares and distant skirmishes. The plant still grew by her doorstep, but it wasn’t the reason Panduranga stopped dead in her tracks. - -Someone had been inside her house. - -All the furniture in the living room had moved. Someone had turned the couch sideways, put the lamp next to it, propped the now rolled-up carpet against the wall. On the TV, these changes were mirrored: the man’s couch, although bigger and darker than Panduranga’s, was turned in the same way, as well as his carpet and his lamp. - -In the middle of his room, the man sat and stared at her with anticipation, as if he was waiting for a reaction. - -Panduranga didn’t want to give him any satisfaction, and as she couldn’t turn the TV off, she started restoring the room to the way it should be. Only after she finished did she look at the TV again: and she realized the obvious. - -The man stood in the middle of his room, confused, or maybe angry, everything around him changed. She tried moving her lamp again, and the lamp inside the stranger’s room moved simultaneously, as if carried by a benevolent poltergeist. - -There was no way of manipulating the aquarium, because Panduranga didn’t have one of her own, but she could move everything else. Late into the night, Panduranga experimented with this and watched the man’s reactions, until he finally left the room and let her go to sleep. - -The next morning, Panduranga was late for work. She only noticed in passing that he had rearranged her living room again. - -And that the plant was sprouting another bud. - - -  - -{{}}M{{}}ore people than usual crowded the tourist town. Everyone was excited over the resumed fighting. In the distance, visible only through the stationary binoculars, a major offensive was in full swing, with uncertainty fighters flickering in and out of existence across the northern horizon. - -Panduranga did her job, but she was distracted, and almost lost a tourist when he wandered off toward the killzones. - -When Panduranga got home in the evening, her body only wanted to sleep, but her mind was wide awake. The second bud of the plant had opened, and there was a light bulb in it, just the right size for the lamp in her living room. - -She took it inside, checked on the TV’s inhabitant—he was sitting on the couch, reading a newspaper—and screwed the bulb into her lamp. When she switched it on, the man’s living room turned dark. She flipped the switch again and saw him standing there, staring at his lamp. - -Now, she had leverage: Whenever he moved her furniture, she killed his lights. This way, she could keep him at bay during the evenings, but not during daylight hours, when she went to work. - - -  - -{{}}O{{}}ne evening, there was a new bud on the ever-growing plant, and Panduranga hoped for another gadget in her silent war against the TV man. The next day, for the first time that Panduranga could remember, missiles hit the tourist town and leveled a shopping street in the outskirts. - -With tourists having little appetite for observing war quite so close up, she returned early from work to find the plant offering a new device: an air conditioning filter, that (she discovered) sucked in any smells or smoke from her house and belched it out from the man’s ventilation. - -Over the following weeks, the rate of sprouting objects increased while tourist numbers in the town dwindled. The fighting got closer and closer, and the streets no longer felt safe. Panduranga didn’t care, as long as she found something new every time she came home: a cigarette lighter that produced flames inside the man’s living room, which he tried to extinguish with aquarium water; a cup that poured out into his fish tank every fluid she poured into it; and so on. - -Still, the man didn’t give up, even though Panduranga’s expanding arsenal of manipulation far outmatched him. Every time she returned from work, he had rearranged her furniture and made her home seem foreign to her. - -She did her best to inconvenience him and make him surrender, but the man endured. Every evening, she filled the room with smoke and flooded the floor, then turned off his lights and made him stumble through a dark and toxic swamp. She almost heard the splashing off his footsteps and his curses, even though the TV transmitted no sound, and slept in the knowledge that he would have to spend the whole night cleaning up. - -Then, perhaps inevitably, one day Panduranga drove out to find the tourist town destroyed, annihilated by weapons so advanced that not even ruins and rubble remained. It was as if the town had never been there, or wasn’t there yet, just the unbroken emptiness between two front lines. - -There was nothing to do except to drive home. So that’s what Panduranga did. - - -  - -{{}}I{{}}n the short time she had been gone, Panduranga’s plant had grown bigger than her house. The house itself wasn’t there—it had vanished as tracelessly as had the tourist town. - -Only the TV stood in the middle of the wasteland. - -Panduranga could see the room with its little man and his couch, lamp, carpet, and fish tank: and also something new. The man held a remote similar to the one she had found months ago, and he pointed it at her. - -Their eyes met, and he pressed the button. - -Panduranga stood alone with the plant and watched reality ripple in the sky. No TV, no house, no tourist town: only the plant. It carried a newly blossomed bud, and as Panduranga looked inside it, she saw herself lying there, asleep next to the man from the TV. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Weapons of Mass Entanglement" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/103854514868883).* diff --git a/content/issue-23/__index.md b/content/issue-23/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index c7cb94f3..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23" -date: 2020-08-23 -slug: index -layout: section - -intro: - logo: - font_family: "Starcraft normal" - -issue: Issue 23 -subhead: August 2020 -headline: Welcome to the 23rd issue of Mythaxis. - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/bg.jpg -imageMobile: images/bg_mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "The background picture is..." ---- diff --git a/content/issue-23/contents.md b/content/issue-23/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 60c868d7..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,22 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2020-08-23 -image: -issue: Issue 23 -description: To celebrate our new skin, we have all new meat on the bone! - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [The Newest Profession]({{< relref path="The Newest Profession.md" >}}), by Anya Josephs -- [The Sedona House]({{< relref path="The Sedona House.md" >}}), by Jeffery Scott Sims -- [A Curse at Midnight]({{< relref path="A Curse at Midnight.md" >}}), by Moustapha Mbacké Diop -- [Alight]({{< relref path="Alight.md" >}}), by Skye Allen -- [The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds]({{< relref path="The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds.md" >}}), by Daniel Ausema -- [The Third Martian Dick Temple]({{< relref path="The Third Martian Dick Temple.md" >}}), by Micah Hyatt -- [Cartoon]({{< relref path="Cartoon.md" >}}), by Liam Baldwin -- [Experimental Diet]({{< relref path="Experimental Diet.md" >}}), by Andrew Johnston -- [Robots of Paris]({{< relref path="Robots of Paris.md" >}}), by Andrea Kriz -- [Weapons of Mass Entanglement]({{< relref path="Weapons of Mass Entanglement.md" >}}), by Dennis Mombauer -- [Everything's Jake]({{< relref path="Everythings Jake.md" >}}), by Chris Cook \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-23/editorial.md b/content/issue-23/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3d6477a6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-23/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2020-08-23 -image: images/huy-tran-viet-green-field.jpg -issue: Issue 23 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -imageCopyright: |+ - **ISSUE 23** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - - In addition to this issue's talented contributors, we'd like to express our particular thanks - to "cover" artist Huy Tran Viet, a freelance concept/illustration artist from Danang, Vietnam, - for granting permission to use his striking image, *Green Fields*. You can see more of - his work at [DeviantArt](https://www.deviantart.com/novaillusion) and - [ArtStation](https://www.artstation.com/novaillusion). - - And special gratitude is reserved for our Webmaster, Marty Steer, who has not only struggled - valiantly behind the scenes on the magazine's stylish transformation, but is largely - responsible for new issues being able to come out at all. We hope you'll agree his - hard work is being put to good use! - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Welcome to the new-look ***Mythaxis***! - -When this magazine came into existence, it was created from the code up by original editor Gil Williamson, and if you ask our new webmaster he'll tell you in some ways it was ahead of its time. And on the surface he created, the magazine's philosophy was one of simplicity and focus on the fiction: no advertising or other unnecessary distractions from what readers came here for, aside from a few complementary homemade images to accompany each contribution. - -Twelve years have passed since then, and the ways people read online have become flexible in ways Gil's code isn't best able to meet. We decided it was time to bring things a little more up-to-date, so now you should find our select fiction exceedingly mobile device-friendly. You'll also find our overall style has become a little more contemporary, but we're still keeping the focus squarely on the stories, no matter the trappings. - -And to celebrate our new skin, we have all new meat on the bone as well! Skye Allen, Daniel Ausema, Chris Cook, Micah Hyatt, Andrew Johnston, Anya Josephs, Andrea Kriz, Moustapha Mbacké Diop, Dennis Mombauer and Jeffery Scott Sims all make shiny debuts on our pages - and that old bone is our historical cartoonist, Liam Baldwin, with some typically cheeky pensmanship. - -So, we hope you enjoy the new style - but more, the same commitment to varied, entertaining storytelling that we mean to carry on for another twelve years. diff --git a/content/issue-24/Every Hat is a Crown.md b/content/issue-24/Every Hat is a Crown.md deleted file mode 100644 index a138b089..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Every Hat is a Crown.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,414 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Every Hat is a Crown" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Mike Morgan -copyright: '© Mike Morgan 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: 'Humour is a many subjective thing, often called the hardest thing to write, but in our opinion Mike Morgan has pulled it off here. Much as his hero demonstrates, you can achieve plenty with recourse to just a little bit of charm - of course, when it comes to fantasy, charm can also be the problem...' - -morelink: 'Try this on for size!' - -image: images/EveryHat.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Moose Photos](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-wearing-brown-dress-shirt-holding-white-fedora-hat-1036627/), [talpeanu](https://pixabay.com/photos/king-crown-history-romania-1304612/), [InspiredImages](https://pixabay.com/photos/caiman-crocodile-predator-alligator-3301709/), and [LubosHouska](https://pixabay.com/photos/autumn-landscape-nature-view-972717/)." - -type: stock -slug: every-hat-crown -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}O{{}}n his way into the nearby town of Prestathwyke, young Walleg Ravenscoop stopped by the house where Gwendolyn lived, determined to steal a kiss. - -Gwen lived with her widower mother, Old Maeve, and two brothers on a small plot of land that was part of Lord Disteth’s estate. Her brothers were out in the lord’s fields that morning, helping to reap their master’s crops before being allowed to return home and attend to their own. For this reason, fair Gwen, with her crown of yellow hair, was likely left unchaperoned. This state of affairs brought a smile to Walleg’s freckled face. If he were any judge, it’d make her grin too. - -It was a walk of twenty minutes or more to reach the plain cruck house where she lived, laboriously crossing the ploughed-up fields of corn. Every step of the way, he had to cajole his recalcitrant bull raptor William to follow along. The scaly, skittish *saura* had a bad temper and knew how to nip at Walleg’s legs. The foul-mannered reptile was especially annoyed because Walleg was making him carry two heavy bags of turnips to sell at market—the beast would much rather be sniffing around one of the in-heat raptor mares at home. But Walleg knew a thing or two as well, like how to yank sharply enough on the farm animal’s reins to make its eyes water, so their exchanges usually worked out even. - -Gwen’s rectangular house with its sagging thatched roof was not as large as the smallholding where Walleg and his family lived, but it reeked just as much of livestock dung and smoke. As Walleg tied his grouchy pack animal to a fence post, the heavy sackcloth curtain across the nearest door twitched open and Gwen slipped out. A knowing smirk dashed across her face when she laid eyes on him. - -“I thought that was your William’s grouchy barks and trumpets I could hear.” She kept her voice down. “Lord’s sake, there must be folk in town that heard that caterwauling. Your field-raptor has the blackest humor I’ve ever seen and no mistake.” - -“Ah, Gwen, he’s as meek as a kitten when you get to know him—,” began Walleg, but the dun-colored blackheart chose that exact moment to ram his heavy snout into the small of the farmboy’s back. If the lissome Gwen hadn’t caught him mid-stumble, he would have toppled into the mud. - -Walleg quickly found his footing—and then his thoughts were swept away by the heat of Gwen’s fingers resting on his arm and the closeness of her body. Without thinking, he slipped his arm around the young woman and drew her tight. The wide brim of the straw hat he always wore brushed awkwardly against the fringe of her hair, so he tipped up the front of the headgear to remove the impediment. Their mouths were almost touching, her warm breath on his lips. - -She murmured huskily, “My mother’s inside, you idiot.” - -In the grip of sudden horror, he tore his gaze from Gwen’s limpid eyes and glanced over her shoulder. Crooked-backed Maeve was standing in the doorway, the curtain lifted above her bowed shoulders. - -“I have warned you before,” she croaked. “Get your hands off my daughter.” - -His hands flew from Gwen’s dress, but the harm had been done. “It’s not what you think.” Walleg backed away, knees weak. - -Maeve was having none of it. “I know what you want,” she accused in her rasping voice, “you want to poke your pizzle into my lovely Gwen. Well, that ain’t going to happen while I still have breath in my body. I will make sure you have troubles enough to keep your attention elsewhere. Oh, yes, you may rely on that!” - -With a wheezing chuckle, the hunched crone shuffled toward him. The malicious glint in her eyes was more than enough cause for Walleg to grab the leather strap of his raptor’s reins and pull the beast away. - -Maeve’s evil laughter chased him on the breeze as he hurried across the sodden fields to the distant roofs of Prestathwyke. The shuddersome sound was broken only by the lighter tones of Gwen remonstrating with her mother. By now, he was too far away to hear what mother and daughter were saying, but Gwen sounded distraught. No doubt she was on the receiving end of her mother’s sharp tongue. Walleg felt bad for getting Gwen in trouble. A little. But already, thoughts of the encounter were fading from his mind, crowded out by the excitement of going to town. - -He pulled the brim of his hat low over his eyes against the wind and concentrated on getting the heavily laden raptor to the marketplace. - - - - - -{{}}W{{}}alleg soon learned that the day held two surprises. First, that the king was due to ride through town on his way to Lord Disteth’s manor house. Second, that Walleg was cursed. - -He found the first out while lurking at the rear of Restwick’s Inn, next to the window where small beer was sold for half a penny a quart. He had already finished at the market, selling the turnips to the stallholder who bought most of his family’s vegetables, and had wasted no time in adjourning to the inn after offloading the bulky wares; the four shillings and a ha’penny earned from the sale were burning a hole in his pouch. The stallholder always added a discreet half-moon of a coin to the shillings intended for Walleg’s dad, so the lad could sneak off and quench the terrible thirst he’d developed during the trip. William was also in much better spirits now, knowing the routine well and looking forward to his own bowl of porridge-like booze. - -There was a crowd of young ne’er-do-wells about the serving hatch, rapscallions abuzz with gossip concerning the king’s visit. With William tied up and lapping happily at the contents of a wooden bowl, Walleg listened with mounting excitement as the other youngsters boasted about every scrap of information they’d heard thus far: the king’s procession was coming down Market Lane; the king was riding in his finest saura-drawn carriage; a hundred King’s Own Guardsmen were going to be riding as escorts in armor as bright and shining as the Sun. If only half of those claims were true, it was going to be a sight worth bragging about for years to come. - -Walleg downed the dregs of his tankard and passed it back through the open serving window, eager to be among the earliest faces lining Market Lane. Marge at the inn wouldn’t mind watching William for a few minutes—after drinking a bowl of beer-soaked oats, the raptor would nap for a couple of hours anyway—and Walleg would never forgive himself if he missed the sight of the royal carriage passing through town. Without pausing for thought, he dashed through the side gate and out into the narrow street. - -Now, unlike most menfolk thereabouts who wore linen coifs tied under the chin, Walleg favored a hat with a large brim. It was unique on account of Walleg having designed the headgear himself, desperate to come up with something that could block out the rays of the Sun better than a coif—it wasn’t vanity that had spurred on this creativity, it was the acute sunburn incurred while laboring in the fields. - -Even though his homemade hat was technically acceptable under the sumptuary law that dictated what peasants were allowed to wear, it was the subject of frequent abuse from passers-by due to its unusual shape, and did have a habit of flying off in anything stronger than a mild breeze. Such was Walleg’s hurry to take his place for the procession to come, once again his floppy straw hat caught the air and flew off. - -Walleg skidded to a halt. Annoyed at losing his carefully woven creation, he bent over and retrieved the hat… then stood there, looking down at his dirt-encrusted hands and the battered object he was holding. - -He could plainly see the hat. - -He could feel its coarse texture between his fingers. - -Yet, somehow, he could also see the dark mass of a brim at the top of his field of vision. Not only that, he sensed there was a weight still atop his head, still a feeling of constriction about his forehead, still the prickling of straw against his skin. - -Fingers shaking, he reached up with one hand until his fingers brushed against the scratchy edge of a strand of straw. Had someone in the street reached out from behind and placed *another* hat upon Walleg’s head a split second after his own one had fallen off? The possibility seemed ridiculous—there weren’t any other hats like his—but what other explanation was there? - -With his empty hand, he yanked the offending item from his scalp. - -The sensation of wearing something faded for barely an instant before returning undiminished. Impossibly, the dark, out-of-focus brim obscured the topmost part of his vision anew. Clumsily, his hands full of hats, he felt again for an object sat on his pate and, again, incredibly, his hand scraped against woven straw. - -In the midst of trying to stop his suddenly feeble fingers from dropping the two wide hats, he noticed that the second one was identical in every regard to the first. He could only assume the third one—the one he was wearing—was just as precise a copy. - -A voice called to him, “Oi! Are you coming to watch or not? Here comes the king!” It was his third cousin, Harveldt. The morbidly obese boy was at the end of the street leading from the inn, where it met Market Lane. Harveldt was using his considerable girth to secure a prime spot in the throng where it was pressed up against the wall of the building on the side of the thoroughfare, motioning for Walleg to join him. - -Spurred on by his cousin’s cry, Walleg raced over. Harveldt remarked curiously, “Why have you got three hats? Are you trying to sell some?” He sniffed. “They’ll never catch on, you know.” - -The man standing next to Harveldt shushed him, declaring, “The king approaches!” - -Walleg craned his head and saw the guardsmen at the head of the procession closing rapidly. His cousin untied his coif and removed the linen covering, baring his head respectfully. All about Walleg, townsfolk were doing the same. In the presence of the king, even barons were obliged to doff their headgear. - -There were too many people gathered next to him now to simply run away. From beneath the brim that had sheltered him so well, Walleg looked from one of his spare hats to the other, and gulped. - - - - - -{{}}"I{{}}’ll make this as simple as I know how,” thundered King Amaranthis, leaning out of the window in the carriage’s door. “I am king and you are a peasant, so in my presence *you will take off your hat!”* - -Walleg could only whimper, “But Sire, I did.” - -“Then what,” replied the king archly, “am I looking at on top of your head?” - -“Each time I remove my hat, another appears in its place,” Walleg stammered. “I’ve taken off twelve whilst your carriage pulled near.” He could feel the disbelieving eyes of the other townspeople boring into him—they had been too busy gazing at the approaching royal splendor to notice the miracle occurring right under their noses. - -“A likely story!” scoffed Amaranthis, but he glanced down in confusion at the pile of straw hats at Walleg’s feet. “I don’t care why you forgot, you infinite cretin, simply take the wretched thing off now!” - -Walleg did as he was told. His fears were fulfilled: the feeling of weight and constriction around his scalp did not pass. - -The king gazed wonderingly at him. “My good man, I must confess that is a very good trick.” The barrel-chested monarch leaned farther out of the carriage’s window and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Tell me how it is done.” - -In the narrow confines of the street, hot sun beating down on him, Walleg felt dizzy. The king was expecting an answer. The only sounds were the snorts and foot-stamping of the procession’s stolid three-horned riding-saura and the distant sound of a high window being flung open and a chamber pot being emptied. - -“I don’t know how it’s done,” he admitted. “I’d tell you if I knew, m’lord.” - -“I see.” Amaranthis snapped his fingers and roared, “Captain of the Guard! Arrest this youth. Bring him with us to the manor house! I shall extract the secret of this trick from him, or I shall extract the marrow from his bones.” He smiled a reptilian smile at Walleg. “I would prefer the former, but I am perfectly willing to settle for the latter.” - - - - - -{{}}"P{{}}lainly, it must be magic,” mused Amaranthis. - -“Indeed, my liege,” purred the Lord High Chancellor Urquhart, the Most Reverend Bishop of Dunheved-by-Launceston. “Most likely the *blackest* of magic.” - -“Yes, yes,” muttered the king as he slouched in the great chair at the end of the long table. Amaranthis was a short, stocky man, endowed with great physical strength despite his squat frame. He tapped at his chin with a ring-encrusted finger. “Still, it could be terribly useful. Send for my personal warlock.” - -Walleg was more scared than he’d ever been in his life. This was his first time inside Lord Disteth’s manor house. The closest he normally got was the communal mill, set some distance away on the bank of the river. It was probably going to be his last time here as well. - -The king had ordered him brought into the house’s great hall, and there he stood, shivering in fear and awe as his lords and masters discussed his odd affliction. And there were so *many* of his masters in attendance: the king and chancellor, of course, but also an entire group of grandly dressed nobles traveling with the royal party. In addition, Lord Disteth and his lady wife stood close by, both of whom looked as nervous as Walleg. - -The last time he’d been anywhere near as afraid as this was when he’d been caught cuddling Gwen by that old crone, Maeve. - -A thought struck him. Gwen’s mother was steeped in witchcraft. It must be her behind this unholy magic! “M’lord!” he wailed. “A curse has been placed upon me!” - -“I have no doubt of it. You hardly seem the sort to muster any magic of your own. So, tell me boy, who has cursed you?” Amaranthis sounded amused. “Who should I seek out for another of these plagues, albeit one with a more profitable target for the endless reproduction?” - -The chancellor started as if jabbed by a hot poker and then looked admiringly at the enterprising king. Walleg was about to offer up Maeve’s name; then he hesitated. If he enraged her further, there was no telling what she might do. “I know not,” he said quickly. - -“Come now, you must have crossed someone recently. Think on it. Who has reason to make you look foolish?” Walleg shook his head. “*Gadsbudlikins*, we’ll get to the bottom of this!” shouted the king. He was a man who shouted a lot. “If magic can make a perpetual procession of hats, it can just as easily make an unceasing supply of gold!” - -“Or weapons, or armor, or castles, or silver, or...” added Chancellor Urquhart, a calculating expression spreading across his flabby face. - -“We *are* certain that his supply of hats is without surcease?” asked Amaranthis. “We should make very sure of it whilst we await the arrival of our warlock.” With a gesture, he summoned the local lord’s seneschal. “Tip off the boy’s hat, and when a new one appears, knock that off too.” To his chancellor, he instructed, “Keep a count. And measure each hat as it is removed, to determine whether they change size or shape.” - -Rubbing his hands, he announced gleefully, “We will put this curse to the test.” - - - - - -{{}}C{{}}ommencing his tasks of counting and measuring, Chancellor Urquhart said, “We should endeavor to be methodical and establish how many hats have already materialized.” - -Everyone looked at Walleg. - -His mouth dry, he stammered, “I lost fourteen before I was arrested, and then six more fell off as I was dragged here.” He clutched a hat to his chest. “I kept hold of the real one, the one I wove.” - -Parchment and ink were brought to the chancellor and he carefully recorded the number thus far. “Twenty, plus the one still on your head. That makes twenty-one hat-like apparitions!” Without even looking at the seneschal, Urquhart motioned for him to proceed. - -The seneschal was out of his depth, used as he was to organizing the lord’s household. But he rose to the occasion, flamboyantly flipping the hat off the boy’s head. As expected, another identical hat formed out of the ether. - -King Amaranthis roared jocularly, “Sard! I never thought to have such merriment visiting a dreary lord’s estate. Keep on, I say! There is no reason to stop!” - -So the seneschal, his livery-patterned sleeves flapping, continued to knock off hats. Each time a wide-brimmed sunhat went spinning to the floor, another shimmered into existence. - -“Thirty,” counted the chancellor, “forty, fifty, sixty…” - -Walleg stood stock-still, petrified with nerves, throughout. When they reached seventy, Amaranthis called, “Enough!” He stalked across to Chancellor Urquhart. “Are there any differences between the oldest and the newest of these creations?” he demanded, irritated by the seeming lack of progress. - -After evaluating the objects, the chancellor answered, “At most, my lord, it seems the weave is more precise and the straw a more uniform length and color.” - -Amaranthis frowned. “Are you saying the hats are getting better made as we go on?” - -Urquhart looked uncertain. “Perhaps, or perhaps my eyes are not as good as they once were.” - -“It seems we will learn nothing until my pet warlock heeds his summons,” said the king surlily. “While we wait, throw the simpleton in whatever passes for a dungeon in these parts. And bring me wine.” - -Walleg wondered briefly who the simpleton was, until a guard grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and the answer became abundantly clear. In some ways, Walleg was relieved—a nice dungeon sounded less fraught than standing before his masters in the great hall. - -His good cheer evaporated at the king’s next utterance. “And in case the boy is lying about the profound state of his ignorance, let him have mnemosynes for company. Three of them. Yes, let him share his quarters with a travesty of *memory eaters*.” Amaranthis smirked in an unpleasant fashion. “Travesty is the collective noun for mnemosynes, you know. Or is it a ‘murder’?” - -“I think that’s crows,” said Urquhart. - -“In any case,” continued the king, staring at Walleg, “you should give serious consideration to confessing everything you know, whilst you can still remember it.” - - - - - -{{}}T{{}}he manor house did not have a dungeon. Since Walleg had to be held in a room with a lock, the King’s Guards settled for putting him in one of the storerooms next to the buttery. They did not stay to taunt Walleg; they simply slammed shut the heavy door as soon as he was inside and departed with haste. - -As the echoing thud faded, Walleg gazed about the shadowy interior of the small, cluttered chamber, then sank to the tiled floor and put his back to a storage barrel. In his sixteen years of life, he had heard many tales of the mnemosynes and their grotesque memory-feasting. The apparitions would gorge themselves on every morsel of his past, every recollection that gave his life meaning. Already he could imagine the clammy touch of half-intangible talons caressing his skin. Escape seemed impossible. He would be left a gibbering, hollow shell. - -The silence was short lived. First, there came a low hiss, like the timid exhalation of a dying man’s last breath. Walleg’s eyes darted to the doorway. A gray mist was coiling under the door. Hardly able to credit the evidence of his own senses, Walleg watched aghast as the mist coalesced, growing in size and solidity until it formed the most terrifying sight he had ever seen: a trio of eyeless, hungering wraiths, each one reaching out toward him with long, cruelly clawed fingers. - -He kicked violently, pushing himself back as far as he could from the spectral sight. But the room was small and there was nowhere to hide. He wanted to be brave in these, his last moments, but was disappointed to find he had no skills in that area at all. - -A scream choked up from the depths of Walleg’s chest, reverberating throughout the narrow chamber, sending ripples through the mnemosynes’ misty flesh. “We’ll eat the memory of your mother’s love first,” whispered the closest of the smiling horrors. “You won’t miss it, will you?” - -Another hissed wetly in his ear, “What else can we strip from you? What do you treasure most?” - -“You should tell the king everything you know, before we gnaw too deeply,” advised the third, and in a mockery of compassion stretched out its deathly cold fingers and stroked Walleg’s face. “We are so very hungry. Once we start to tear at the meat of your history, I’m not sure we’ll be able to stop.” - -Seized with revulsion at the abhorrent contact, Walleg almost missed his name being called. For a second, he hoped against hope that his prison contained another victim of the life eaters, one that might distract them for a few precious moments. Desperate, he cast about the confines of the storeroom for any sign of a fellow prisoner. There was none. - -There would be no respite, he realized. He could not, would not talk, and the life eaters would consume him one joyous moment at a time until all he would remember would be the pain and unending misery of a lifetime stripped of everything that made it bearable. The only outcome he could imagine was the utter destruction of his soul. - -Still, his name *was* called. Had the taskmaster of these fiends, the very Devil himself, tired of this game and come for him, intent on bringing this confrontation to a hideous conclusion? - -Panic-stricken, he cried, “Beelzebub, is that you?” - -“You are an utter idiot,” the voice replied. - -Walleg wasn’t taking that, even from the lord of hell. “Kill me if you must, Satan, but don’t mock me aforehand!” - -“Are those life eaters in there with you?” asked the disembodied voice. “Give me a moment. I’ll re-cork them in their storage flasks. While I’m doing that, try not to think of anything you’ll miss not remembering.” - -The voice said other things then, but the words were slippery in Walleg’s ears. He found it impossible to focus on any of their syllables. But he saw the effect of the skittering phrases well enough: the mnemosynes melted back into thin tendrils of roiling fog and flowed out of the room, under the door again, returning to their homes of enchantment-saturated crystal. - -“I never dared hope to see another day when I was myself,” he breathed. - -“*Are* you yourself?” The voice sounded nervous now. - -“How would I know?” asked Walleg despondently. “I cannot remember that which I have forgotten.” - -“Oddly, you’re making sense. Terror must spur intelligence in boys. How to tell if you’re half-eaten up? I know. Be honest, do you still like me?” - -Now that he thought on it, the voice was familiar. Walleg stood on his tiptoes and peered through the slit-like window of the storeroom, the brim of his hat angled high. - -Through the thick leaded panes of the window, he could make out the distant, overgrown ruins of the Old Towers where a vast city of glass and metal had once stood, with carriages that moved by themselves, or so the town elders claimed, remnants of an age before *saura* had hatched anew, fossils of a time without magic. Carriages moving by themselves sounded magical to Walleg, though, so he doubted the official accounts. - -Well, he remembered that much, it seemed. More importantly, he had a notion who the voice on the other side of the window belonged to. He could see a familiar sight below the windowsill—certain blonde tresses he knew and adored. - -“Gwen!” he exclaimed happily. - -“Are you sure I’m not Beelzebub?” she teased. - -“You’re not, but your mum might be!” Less angrily, he added, “The king wanted me to confess the name of the witch responsible for the curse. I said nothing, not even when those wretches threatened to suck away the best reaches of my mind. Even though your mum is powerful fierce and no friend of mine, I don’t want her burnt at the stake.” He didn’t need to add that the scope of any inquisition would quickly spread to the witch’s daughter and, after what he’d just witnessed, he doubted she’d survive close scrutiny from a witch-finder. - -Gwen coughed. “Staying silent can be the bravest act of all. Thank you.” - -Unable to lie to her, he blurted out, “And I didn’t want her to change me into a toad.” - -“My mum would never transform you into a toad,” said Gwen. “She’s always thought of you as a salamander. The instant word reached us of your arrest, I made mum do a second incantation to cancel the curse. She never wanted you to get in any trouble. It was just a bit of fun to stop you chasing after me.” - -Walleg shook his head, annoyed. “What’re you blathering about? The curse isn’t lifted. I’ve only been in here a few minutes, and up until then hats were still popping out of nowhere.” - -“Ah,” said Gwen. “The thing about curses, you see, is they can be a little unpredictable.” In a much quieter voice, she said, “That’s why mum never dares use magic to benefit herself. It’d most likely go awry.” - -“That’s just great! The king won’t ever let me go—he wants to unravel the magic and get at its very bones.” - -“Why does he want to go and do that?” - -“So he can cast a similar spell to make infinite copies of gold coins and suchlike!” - -Gwen’s laughter carried up to the window. “If witches could do that, there’d be no such thing as a poor spell-caster. Tell him it can’t be done.” - -“He’s not going to believe that!” - -There wasn’t time to talk further. The storeroom door was flung wide to reveal a trio of guards. The soldier in charge snapped “On your feet, boy! The king’s warlock is here!” A sneer spread across his face. “It’s time to tear that magic clean out of what’s left of your soul!” - -Another guard holding a scrap of paper peered around his superior, looking confused. Walleg assumed the paper held a containment-code similar to the one Gwen had used. “Where are the memory eaters?” he asked. “Are they loose in the manor house?” - -The first guard glared furiously at Walleg. “What have you been up to, boy?” - - - - - -{{}}"S{{}}plendid to make your acquaintance,” enthused the warlock. He swept around Walleg in a circle, making it hard for the boy to get a look at him. Were the warlock’s feet hovering just above the floor? “My name is Theodor Q. Ancible. I’m sure we’ll get along famously. Now, if I could just see the, um...?” He gesticulated at Walleg’s sunhat in lieu of finishing his thought. - -Walleg wordlessly removed the article and placed it on the teetering heap of already discarded headpieces. Again, the brim darkened into solidity at the top of his field of vision. Again, he felt the itchiness of straw against his brow. - -“Tremendous,” opined the warlock. “That’s the seventy-first facsimile, I believe?” He nodded, answering his own question. - -“Well?” inquired Amaranthis heavily. They were all back in the great hall, standing in their previous places, the only difference being that the seneschal had gratefully ceded his role of hat remover to the garrulous wizard. - -Theodor nodded again. “You were right to call me in, my lord. This duplication curse is really quite elegantly constructed. Probably the work of a talented amateur. A local witch, perhaps, or a self-taught sorceress. Someone without knowledge of the correct forms, but for whom a grasp of thaumaturgical processes comes naturally.” - -“I didn’t ask you to critique the spell,” the king snapped, “I asked you to reverse engineer it and make a better one of your own. With a functioning incantation of limitless duplication, this kingdom will become the most powerful on earth. No nation will be able to oppose us! Now get on with your job. Every second you delay is a second my glorious conquest is postponed.” He slumped in the lord’s chair, rubbing his forehead. - -Seemingly unaffected by the king’s ire, the warlock said, “As you wish, my lord. I shall proceed immediately with a detailed cabalistic analysis of the elements employed in this occult phrasing.” A sharp clap from the warlock prompted the seneschal into action, who rushed to order several pages to haul in and position a large wooden contraption in front of Walleg. - -“My camera-invisibilis,” said the warlock proudly. - -Walleg stared at the large upright casket warily as the warlock explained its operation. There was a small lens on the surface facing Walleg and a larger one on the back. As the hat-making spell worked its wonders the details of the incantation would travel through the box and be displayed on the thick glass on the far side. - -Walleg wasn’t convinced letting the king have access to the spell was a good idea, but he couldn’t think of a way of stopping him. Maybe protecting Gwen was all he could achieve this day—that would be enough. - -“Now, let’s see the magic in action,” laughed the warlock. He waggled a finger and Walleg’s hat leaped off, as if struck. It was instantly replaced. Theodor repeated the motion time and time again, his half-smile never faltering. The chancellor had to scramble to resume the count. - -It took only moments to reach a hundred hats. A short time later, they passed two hundred. The curse showed no sign of abating. Pages were instructed to cart away the enormous heap of straw headgear that had amassed, and they stacked them neatly in piles along the side of the hall. Still, the warlock wiggled his digit and, still, hats formed out of thin air. - -At the two-hundred-fifty mark, Amaranthis growled, “Surely you have enough data now? What does your box say?” - -The warlock’s smirk finally slipped. “I don’t understand it, sire,” he begrudged. “There seem to be two incantations at war with one another.” - -With a howl of unbridled frustration, the king launched himself from the chair and grabbed Walleg by the throat. “I would think that, in the one hundred and forty-seventh year of the Age of Asmodeus, we would be better able to solve such a simple riddle of thaumaturgy.” Spittle flew from his mouth. - -He dragged the smallholder’s son bodily across the room to where Lord Disteth stood shaking. “Dutiful Disteth, tell me your graceless house is equipped with a tower, for I am possessed of a powerful urge to fling this useless baggage from its very top.” - -Lord Disteth confirmed that the manor house did, indeed, have a tower, and almost fell in his haste to guide the king to its staircase. - -The king roared in Walleg’s face, “Did you hear that, serf? Give me the source of this magic, or I will murder you and laugh over your stinking, broken corpse!” - - - - - -{{}}T{{}}he king’s grip tightened as they ascended the circular staircase, the nobles and officials of the court trailing in their wake. It was all Walleg could do not to lose his footing. On each stone step, Amaranthis furiously swatted a hat from the boy’s head. - -As the chancellor maintained the count, soon passing three hundred, the king bellowed, “I am the man who oversaw the final eradication of the supernatural kingdoms and ushered in the new dominion of Man! I have overseen *genocides*—I will not be thwarted by the likes of you! You will give me the secret of creating objects from nothingness or you will die!” - -Such was his rage, and such was Walleg’s panic, that neither of them noticed what was happening to the hats. Chancellor Urquhart began to say “Three hundred and fifty” when he paused and shouted excitedly, “Your highness! They’re different!” - -Climbing ahead of the king, Lord Disteth heaved the top hatch wide. Sunlight streamed onto their faces. Panting from exertion, the king stood at the top of the high tower, still clutching at Walleg’s throat. - -“See?” breathed the equally exhausted chancellor. They all looked at the newest hat on Walleg’s head. “It is made of some sort of felt now, and there are jewels studded in it!” - -“The magic is breaking down!” said the warlock. “The reproductions are no longer exact.” - -In the quiet that followed this pronouncement, the king released Walleg’s throat. The farmboy sagged onto the slate roof of the crenellated turret and gently rubbed his tender neck. - -“That looks like a ruby,” observed Disteth. “And I think that’s an emerald.”. - -“Let’s see what appears next.” Amaranthis batted away the latest article from Walleg’s head. He kept at it for some time, growing increasingly pleased with the steadily more ornate and gem-encrusted headgear that were revealed. - -As the chancellor’s count reached four hundred and ninety-nine, the warlock concluded, “The spell is definitely destabilizing.” This latest hat was an amazing collection of gemstones mounted on a platinum band. It was so heavy it hurt Walleg’s head just to wear it for a few seconds. The king lifting it away came as a blessing. - -The next headpiece was a sparkling circlet of gold, inlaid with diamonds as big as hens’ eggs. Reverently, the king took it from Walleg, hardly able to credit the sight of such wealth. - -For the first time in a long time, Walleg’s head felt unconstrained. There was no weight upon it, no sensation of material pressing against his skin. He checked with a shaking hand. It was true. There was nothing up there. - -At last, he was hatless. - -The curse was broken! - -“Five hundred was the limit,” concluded the warlock. “Whatever the spell was, it’s worn off now.” - -The king turned and started to descend. “I am satisfied. A haul of a hundred and fifty hats laden with precious stones is enough to purchase an army. And this last one… it is *stunning*. It shall be my new crown.” He put the circle of gold on his tangle of brown hair, remarking casually, “The boy is no more use to us. Let him go.” - -Walleg let out a long breath, hardly daring to believe his luck. - -“Actually,” said the king. “I’ve changed my mind. He’s a dullard. Have the guards hack him to bits. But do it in the grounds, I don’t want blood splashing on my exquisite diadem.” - - - - - -{{}}W{{}}hen the King’s Own Guardsmen hauled Walleg out of the servants’ entrance to the manor house, Gwen was waiting. She was not alone. - -“I brought William,” she announced, smiling at the guards in a way that caused them to stumble to a halt. - -Walleg was lost. “Who’s William?” His only answer was a feathered, scaly, hissing blur of motion. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but the guards weren’t holding him anymore. - -“William woke up from his nap and you weren’t there,” said Gwen. “He didn’t like that.” - -Hearing a strange whimpering, Walleg turned. The guards were sprawled in disarray on the grass with a bull raptor baring its teeth at them. He started in shock. - -Gwen squeezed his hand tenderly. “It was the mnemosynes, wasn’t it? They took the memory of your animal. Well, I did tell you to think of something you’d not mind losing.” - -What was she saying? “He’s mine?” She nodded reassuringly. “And is he loyal? Is he friendly?” - -Gwen started to say something and then coughed. After a couple of seconds, she managed, “William is accustomed to you.” - -“Sard, he’s not going to eat the soldiers, is he? I’m in enough trouble.” - -That made Gwen squint at Walleg. “It seemed to me they were planning to murder you.” - -“They were,” he averred. “The king thought me too stupid to live.” - -“The king is an unfeeling monster and you should pay his words no heed.” Gwen looked at the guards. “I know what you mean, though. We cannot revenge ourselves on them and continue to live in these parts. But these stout men in uniform will not willingly forget their orders. They will hound our heels if we leave them as they are.” She raised a hand to stop Walleg interrupting. “Fortunately, I know someone who’s very good at brewing draughts of forgetfulness, and I like to be prepared.” - -The golden-haired girl tossed a wineskin at the guards’ feet. “Sip deeply, good sirs, or we shall discover how voracious William is today.” - -After the skin was drained, Gwen turned back to Walleg. “Who needs mnemosynes, eh? In a few seconds, they will no longer remember who you are. But you might want to stay clear of the manor for a while, lest others see your happy face and recall what fate was ordered for you.” - -She held his hand as they began the long dung-strewn walk back across the fields toward her cruck house. Pterosaurs wheeled distantly overhead, searching for scraps. - -“Thank you,” she said, “for not letting the king start an inquisition.” - -Then she kissed him. - -Whistling jauntily, Walleg reached into his tunic and pulled out his original, hand-woven straw hat—the one he’d started the day wearing, the one he’d so carefully kept hold of through thick and thin. He smoothed out the crumpled brim and put it on with a smile. “I don’t care what anyone says. I like my sunhat.” - -Gwen slipped an arm around his waist. “Don’t take on, but I hate it. I always have.” - -“Every man is a king,” he replied, “and this is my crown.” - -Shaking her head, Gwen could only say, “Not every hat is a crown. Some are dunces’ caps.” - - - - - -{{}}S{{}}o enraptured was King Amaranthis with his new coronet, he wore it for the remainder of the day, drawing compliments and admiring glances from all who saw him. - -When night finally fell, Amaranthis thanked Lord and Lady Disteth for their hospitality and retired to his guest chamber. The royal attendants removed his fur-trimmed outer vestments as normal, and the chief Esquire of the Household approached from behind to take off the king’s new regalia, so it could be stored in a secure cabinet. - -“Get on with it, man,” snorted the king. “Resplendent though it is, this crown grows heavier by the second. I am in pain, I tell you! My vertebrae feel like they’re being pulverized under the load.” - -Startled, the esquire replied, “I *have* taken it off, my lord. I’m holding it in my hands… but a new one…” He hardly needed to finish. - -Horrified, the king reached up. - -His fingers brushed against a solid mass of gold, much larger than the previous circlet. The curse had not dissipated—it had restarted, with a new victim. - -“Five hundred,” he croaked, his voice disintegrating into a terrified whisper. “Five hundred crowns. How much will they weigh by the end, and how strong is my neck?” - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Every Hat is a Crown" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138444164743251).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/First Breath.md b/content/issue-24/First Breath.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8701d914..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/First Breath.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,518 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "First Breath" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Addison Smith -copyright: '© Addison Smith 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: 'Far in the distant past of 2013, the story before you received an honourable mention from Writers of the Future only to slink into the shadows, never to be seen again. Now at long last Addison Smith gets our Winter issue moving with the futuristic tale of a reluctant hero who gradually comes to learn that, much like revenge, rescue is a dish best served cold.' -morelink: "Pray it's not your last" - -image: images/FirstBreath.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Tatiana Twinslol](https://www.pexels.com/photo/stylish-focused-woman-leaned-on-hand-at-table-in-countryside-5368679/) and [Trinity Kubassek](https://www.pexels.com/photo/adults-audience-band-bar-342520//)." - -type: stock -slug: first-breath -weight: 1 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he Rez was a strobing mass of lights, lasers, and mirrors tuned to the heavy bass lines and syncopation. The floor shook with the beat and bodies moved to it, fluid and sexual, fingers running down sweating backs. Two girls stared into each other’s eyes before one let out a breath that sent the other into a fit of ecstasy. Hardy’s wetware mod ached to join them, feeding him shadows of breath—the latest drug craze that turned a faint mist of DNA into an electric stimulus. - -His attention turned to the other side of the sea of glowing dreads, bare skin, and fluid motion. The girl at the bar-side table had been watching him since he’d arrived. Her gaze followed him from the door to the bar, then to his usual seat against the wall. She was familiar, but not by the pink lines that glowed in her hair, or the nearly transparent synthetic that clung to her body. - -She wasn’t in his memory, but she had been once. - -That kind of familiarity was a thing he had learned to fear. When you’ve spent any time working for Jack, you learn that the people you can trust the least are the ones you’re familiar with. - -The hot breath lingering in the room touched at his mind, giving him just a taste of synaptic euphoria. Those synapses sparked, calling him to the dance floor, and his eyes heeded them, taking in the reflective, glowing mass. He drew his attention away, back to the bar-side table. - -She was gone. - -“You just gonna watch?” The voice came from beside him, smooth and sensual. - -He didn’t turn his head. “I thought I might sit this one out.” - -Her hands reached over his shoulder, teasing over the thin cloth of his shirt, and he inhaled just a hint of her breath as she whispered into his ear, “That’s not how this place works.” - -Synapses fired, and he tilted his head back, letting her fingers graze over the skin of his neck. He laughed, the sensation washing over him more fully than ever before. He’d gotten the breath mod days ago—an open-source derivative of the one that was already sweeping the party capitals. This was different, though. He was a slave to its need. That need made him stare after her as she walked to the floor; it made him stand, and it made him follow. - -Bodies undulated against him, but there wasn’t room for them in his mind. He followed the curves of her hips and shoulder blades as she dragged him to the floor by a leash of ecstasy. - -When she stopped, he was right behind her, hands on her hips, turning her to face him and give another taste of the breath he already ached for. - -She smiled, and they danced. He let his high carry him through the unchoreographed motions and excuses for skin to touch. He was immune to the cloud of breath in the room as others breathed into their lovers, or to strangers, and rode the high together. Only her breath mattered, and the dance became a means to taste it again. - -She put one arm around his neck, hanging down to scratch a long nail along his spine, and raised her face to his. He stared into her, and she breathed into him. His mod captured it all, translating her foreign DNA to impulses that made the lights glow like flames. His skin felt every body thrashing against it, and he threw his head back as if gasping for the air that would keep him from drowning. - -He lowered his eyes to hers—the eyes of his new, perfect drug. - -She was gone again. - -The space where she had stood filled with others, and their breath hung around him in a haze, but it meant nothing. He looked around the room, trying to pick out the pink of her hair, but it was lost in the neon glow. He sighed, closing his eyes. - -*And there she was*. A white silhouette on the black of his eyelids, fifteen feet away. The silhouette reached a hand out, and he opened his eyes, fixating on her position. Her hand was on the doorknob, and she glanced back at him. She smiled, then stepped into the night. - -When the door closed behind her, he moved to the edge of the pit, away from the dancers. He thought about going back to his table, to ride what was left of her high, but he saw her again when he blinked, and his craving nagged at him. - -Taking his coat from his chair, he ignored the fear that tried to rise up his spine. Maybe she worked for Jack. Maybe she didn’t. - -Either way, he had to follow. - - - - - -{{}}H{{}}er shape flashed white in front of him every time he blinked. She had done something. The euphoria had settled enough that he could see reason. At the very least it was a tracking hack, in tune with something on her person, or even her DNA. In itself it was harmless, but he couldn’t know that was all it was. - -She’d gotten into his head, but he didn’t know how—she had hardly touched him. A wireless connection? Maybe something in the breath? His desire for that feeling had become an ache in his mind—a need he would have to satisfy. He’d followed her for half an hour through dark streets and darker alleys, and all the while the need grew. - -What was worse, he knew where she was going. Every step took him closer to Jack’s place. - -Jack had money. Lots of money. The tech he dealt with was expensive, and his clients paid him well. He could afford a place in the city proper, but he set up shop in the slums. Authorities didn’t bother him, and the locals were prime for employment—people who would do anything if you knew the right buttons to push. - -People like Hardy. - -It was also a good harvesting site for the tests nobody would volunteer for. People went missing, but weren’t missed. - -He closed his eyes again to check her silhouette. She was just ahead, fifty feet or so, fumbling with something he couldn’t see. Maybe a doorknob or a lock. She stepped back, and a gunshot shattered the near-silence of the street. - -“Dammit!” He ran toward her, darting around the brick corner of a building. He only had a second to take in the scene. The girl running. One of Jack’s thugs pointing a gun at her, finger flexing over the trigger. A bin with a heavy pipe sticking out. - -He shouted and the man turned his head, then his gun. Too slow. Hardy had already grabbed the pipe, connected it with the thug’s bald head. His gun fired wide and he fell to his knees. Hardy swung one more time and the man fell to the ground, unmoving. - -Hardy looked around the alley, but the girl was gone. A camera stared down at him from the corner. - -“*Dammit!”* He blinked and saw her outline two corners over. She wasn’t Jack’s. If she was, there had been a falling out. A hell of a falling out. Guns weren’t Jack’s style. - -He closed the distance between them, still holding the pipe. The ache in his mind was stronger now. He’d have to get another breath—her breath—or he’d be hurting. - -She looked up from against the brick wall, black and pink curtaining over one eye. He took a seat next to her on the pavement and leaned his head back. She didn’t say anything, so they sat in silence as his heart beat back to a normal rhythm. He wasn’t used to getting shot at. Even when he worked for Jack, he’d managed to avoid that. - -She exhaled, and a hint of it drifted up to him, numbing the pain. - -“You got a name?” he asked. - -She smiled. “Yeah. You?” - -He considered a fake name. The name he went by was fake anyway, taken from an old OS distro, but it was who he was. He decided against it. “Hardy.” - -The smile never left her lips. It was an odd look—half joy, half resignation. - -“You don’t have to tell me your name. I really don’t care. I just want to know what you did to me. Why are you in my head?” - -Her smile faded. She nodded back toward the door. “You want to know why, take a look.” - -He turned to look around the corner, but she caught his arm. “Not like that.” She closed her eyes, and he got the picture. He closed his own and looked through the building behind them. There was another white shape, like the one beside him, but smaller, distant. Someone was curled up somewhere deep in Jack’s building, one floor up from ground level. - -“What did you do to me?” He stared at her, tasting the faint breath coming from her lips. “Who is that?” - -She rose and dusted off her synthetic clothes, then offered her hand. “I tested you. You passed.” - -He stood without taking her hand. “I did, huh?” - -“Call me Mara.” The name clicked somewhere in Hardy’s mind, but no memories came with it. They were probably locked back in Jack’s place. He’d been right about knowing her. - -There was shuffling around the edge of the building, and he turned, fearing an armed man with a headache. It wasn’t the guard. There were three people—two men, and a girl dressed in your basic technotrash attire. The tallest, a man with short blond hair, glared at him. - -Mara put her hand on Hardy’s shoulder and nodded at the newcomers. “Meet the Narcs. They want to hire you.” She patted his arm and joined the group. As one, they turned away from the alley and Jack’s. - -Hardy watched them leave and thought about going the other way, but still felt the ache in his mind. No breath should be so sweet. She’d done something to him, and he had no choice but to go along with it. - -“A test,” he said, tasting the lie as sure as her breath. They’d got his face on Jack’s camera. He could already feel Jack’s eyes crawling over him, trying to determine his part in this. Whether he liked it or not, he was involved now. - -He cursed at his feet and followed. - -They’d better have a damned good reason. - - - - - -{{}}B{{}}y the time they got to the Narcs’ hideout, Hardy’s head was splitting. The idea behind breath was a breakdown of barriers: it was an excuse to get into someone’s personal space and stay there. Easy enough with people you know well. Not all that difficult with strangers, in the anonymity of the dance floor. - -Mara was different. He felt like he should know her, but he didn’t. She was an odd mix of friend and stranger that made it impossible for him to get close, and he was suffering for it. Moreover, he didn’t trust her. - -The Narcs, it seemed, were just some punks who hated Jack and wanted to take him down. He couldn’t argue with that. Jack had a pretty tight hold on the area, and nobody was very comfortable with it. Going by the quality band they had collected, nobody much was very willing to do anything about it either. - -“So who’s inside Jack’s?” He could still see the white silhouette from where they were, though it was smaller than before. - -Mara stood back as the tall one opened the door. “Lynn,” she said. “My sister.” - -“Sorry to hear that.” Jack wasn’t a pleasant man to work for, but it was worse to be one of his guinea pigs. - -“She knew what she was getting into. She’s got a lot of information in her head that would help bring that place down. Too much for Jack to let her go.” - -Hardy stood back as the others filed in, and Mara smiled at him. She waited for the door to close before she spoke. “Hurts, huh? You know, you could just ask. No need for the tough-guy act.” - -Willing as she sounded, there was reluctance in her. She leaned in and exhaled in his face, lips keeping their distance. His brain spiked as the DNA triggered his mod, sending him headfirst into a wall of pleasure. He broke through it, beyond his limits, into a place of sweat, raised flesh, and unbearable tingling. He gritted his teeth against it, refusing to let it be anything but a fix, but his mouth opened in a sigh of pleasure. The pain didn’t just recede, but inverted. - -“It’s the mod,” she said, leaning close, the warmth of her breath pooling around him. “The version you have. I made it.” - -Hardy tried to fight against the high, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to lay in it and let the dark world around him fade into nothingness. - -“It’s superkeyed to my DNA. No one will ever give you a feeling like I can,” she said. “I can dole out your pleasure as I see fit. Or I can fix you, if you like.” She backed away from him, fingers lingering on his chest. “After you help us.” - -He succeeded in fighting down the feeling, separating his thoughts from it and letting it flood his mind in the background. She was manipulative. He had a feeling that had nothing to do with the Narcs, or with Jack. It was all her. - -“Alright,” he said, his flesh still raised to tips. He gestured to the door. “Show the way.” - - - - - -{{}}T{{}}he place looked like it had been decorated by the technotrash girl. It was more workshop than anything. Cables hung in spools on nails in the wooden wall—newer cables, mostly, but there were some coaxials and Cat 5s as well. Dismantled electronics were everywhere, from children’s toys to high-tech headgear. The room was lit by strings of LEDs, but light of every color shone from fiber optics in bunches. - -The Narcs stood by a table poring over a schematic of some sort. Probably stolen from Jack. When they approached, the plans rolled up—not for him. - -Mara pointed each of them out and gave a name. The big guy was Les, the de facto leader of the group. Number two was a kid called Simek. He was obviously there for brawn. Neither of them looked happy to see Hardy. - -The technotrash girl just went by Z. Her hair shone purple—fiber optic strings hanging here and there. She was the only one who looked welcoming. - -“I suppose you helped with the mod,” Hardy said. Mara seemed smart enough, but not technologically so. - -Z saluted in mocking fashion. “Team effort.” - -Hardy liked to evaluate the ability of people he was going to work for, but this time was different, he didn’t have any real choice in the matter. He could wait out the addiction, but it wouldn’t be pretty. Uninstalling the mod wouldn’t do much either—just cut him off from the drug, but leave him wanting it. - -“Alright,” he said, “what’s the plan?” - -“The plan is for you to do as little as possible.” Les still had the glare that Hardy was beginning to think was trademarked. “You’re here because Mara wanted you. I don’t.” - -“Hey, you picked me up. I can leave any time.” - -Les nodded toward the door, but Mara stared him down. “We need him. He’s been in there before.” - -That was what she wanted. His expertise. He had a feeling his membership was about to be revoked. “Listen, I don’t remember anything from in there. Not much, at least. Everything I could tell you is in a bit of brass headwear at Jack’s.” - -Mara grinned. “But you recognize me.” - -That confirmed it. She had worked for Jack. “That’s it, though. I couldn’t tell you if you were my boss, or if you got Jack his coffee in the mornings.” - -Something clicked when he mentioned Jack’s coffee. *A cup of coffee, black, but cold*. Mara grinned again; she’d seen the recollection. Jack liked his coffee cold. Hardy knew he shouldn’t remember that. He shouldn’t remember a lot of the things he knew about Jack, or the people who worked for him. It should all have been locked away in his crown. - -“It’s not your memories he took,” Mara said. “Too messy. He just took the bridges.” - -It made sense, he supposed. Take down the connections between thoughts—the ones that linked his conscious mind to the things Jack didn’t want him to remember—and they were as good as forgotten. “What’s it matter how he did it? They’re gone.” - -She moved between Les and Simek at the table and rolled out the schematic. Hardy pushed through as well. Jack’s was a big place—took up a whole block—and the schematic showed it. Just beyond the door they had stood in front of earlier was a hallway, anonymous rooms coming off either side. A stairwell at the end, metal stairs, the kind with the grated top to dig into your shoes. - -Hardy looked at the map. That detail wasn’t on there. Why would it be? It was just a blocky diagram of stairs… but he could see them in his mind. *Black painted steel, grated top*. - -“It’s all in there,” Mara said. “We can bridge some of those gaps, but not all of them. We have vague ideas of what Jack does in there. Lynn has the specifics. That’s why we need to get her out.” - -“And her crown with her,” Les said. - -Hardy looked at Les. He found no trust there. “She’s been wiped?” - -“We get the girl, we get the crown, we get Jack.” - -Hardy didn’t need to look back at the map to see where the crowns were kept. He could remember it now. He could remember the guards there, too. He tasted the memories like forbidden fruit. - -“We can’t pay you money,” Les said. “We don’t have any. But we’re getting into that crown room, wherever it is. We can pay you in memories.” - -All those things he couldn’t remember. Little bits of life he thought were lost forever. Mara was a fool, messing with his brain to force his hand. All she’d needed to do was offer him his own mind back. - -“What do we need?” he said. - - - - - -{{}}T{{}}he beat still pounded at The Rez. The lights still flashed, the bodies still swayed. They had been gone for only a couple of hours, so nothing should have changed. It felt different, though. The lingering breath no longer did anything for him, Mara’s dampened it to nothingness. Or maybe she’d programmed exclusivity into the mod. Either way, he was getting nothing. He’d asked for another breath before they left the Narcs, trying to keep images of a begging junkie out of his head. She had given it—just a touch, and grudgingly—but it was already wearing off. It made him irritable. - -Nobody paid any attention as they went in, all lost in the drink, the drugs, or the dance. They went to Hardy’s usual table. - -“So who is it?” Mara asked. - -Hardy nodded at the other edge of the dance floor. Tony was standing there, perving on the perimeter. He wasn’t the type to get involved. Didn’t have it in him. He was happy to watch, though. There was a visible dent in the line of dancers around him. - -“Far edge. The guy not dressed the part.” He was in a heavy leather coat that wouldn’t allow much in the way of dancing. Hardy had never seen him without it. A memory clicked in his mind, the coat bridging the gap. He’d asked him about it once, and had gotten a very honest answer: *“It makes me feel cool.”* - -“And he’s got a key?” - -“Yeah, but I don’t know what good it will do you. Jack’s paranoid. The key alone isn’t enough to get us in. It works in conjunction with an implant, and I ripped mine out.” That had been an odd discovery, fresh after his memories were wiped. - -“Z’s got it all worked out. Don’t worry about it.” - -Tony smiled across the dance floor. His eyes met Hardy’s, and his smile slackened. “He’s gonna run.” - -Tony was halfway to the door by the time Hardy stood, and slipped through it right before he got there. Hardy ran after him, down the brick-lined alley. Tony wasn’t that fast, so he caught up quick and grabbed the back of his coat. He hadn’t counted on the momentum, so they both fell to the ground, Hardy on top. - -They scuffled, but he managed to get Tony’s arms down. As soon as he was pinned, Tony put on the charm. “Hey, Hardy. Long time. How ya been?” - -His last dose was running out, and he saw that Mara had disappeared again. He didn’t feel like being chatty. “I need to get in, Tony. You got a key?” - -“Look, I don’t want trouble, Hardy. You know how it is. They find out I gave you the key, what happens to me? You wouldn’t want me hurt.” - -“Wouldn’t I?” - -Tony laughed, his head still against the pavement. He was always laughing; it was a defense mechanism. “You’re a funny guy, Hardy. I don’t carry it on me. You’re out of luck.” His eyes darted down to his coat pocket. He wouldn’t give it up, but he’d let Hardy take it. Less liability that way. He’d probably punch himself in the face, too, once Hardy was gone—make it look like he’d beaten it out of him. - -Hardy reached into the pocket. The key was just a metal card—battery-operated—that gave off half the signal to open the door. “Don’t have it on you, eh?” He played along. Tony was a spineless pervert, but he wasn’t a bad guy. Not as far as Jack’s men went. He grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head close. “What did I tell you about lying to me?” - -He stood and let Tony get to his feet. “And you won’t be telling anyone, got it?” - -“Got it, Hardy.” Tony looked down at the ground. When he raised his head again, he was smiling. “So,” he said, “you and Mara.” - -Hardy took him by the coat all over again. “What do you know about her?” - -Tony laughed. “That’s not how it works, Hardy. Those memories were hostages. You don’t get them back.” - -What a time to grow a spine. He let Tony down. He’d get the information either way. - -“Get out of here.” He walked back toward the club, and Tony skittered down the alley. - -He hadn’t needed any more proof she had worked for Jack, but it didn’t matter; so had he. She was only part of the game, anyway. He’d save the girl, but there was something he wanted more. - -He wanted those memories back. - - - - - -{{}}"P{{}}erfect,” Z beamed when he brought her the metal card. She had given up choosing a color for her hair, and the fibers alternated throughout the spectrum. - -“I don’t know what you can do with it,” he said. “It’s a two-part lock.” - -“Yeah.” She lost her chipper glow. “I’ve got it covered.” - -“I don’t see—” - -“Hardy,” Mara said, “leave her be. She’s got work to do.” - -When Hardy turned back to Z, she was facing away, back at her worktable. “Right.” - -Mara was sitting by the wall, and he joined her. He didn’t trust her in the slightest, but she at least was warm toward him; he’d get nothing from Les or Simek. “You’ve got an odd crew,” he said. - -She nodded. “I guess. I haven’t been with them long. They were just drawn together, you know?” - -He was only half paying attention. His head ached again, but he ignored it. He’d gotten over his fear of asking, but there was more to it than that. He’d seen what Mara tried to hide the last time. She was afraid of him. - -It didn’t make any sense—she had him in a vice. Every decision he had made to help, he realized, had been right after getting a dose of that breath. The guard in front of Jack’s, tracking down Tony for the key. He couldn’t even trust his own mind now, for fear the breath was making him do things he otherwise wouldn’t. - -He did hate Jack, though. - -Z pulled something from her pocket and gave it a funny look. It was just a disc, the size of a penny, with a couple of wires, but he could tell it weighed heavily on her. - -“Drawn together,” he said. “By their hatred of Jack?” - -“Sort of. They’ve all lost someone.” - -Hardy looked down at his hands, hovering over the gap between his knees. He had wondered. People hated Jack on principle, but to actually try to bring him down was different. - -“Les lost his mom,” she said. “Money trouble. She didn’t know what she was getting into. Simek’s brother works there, but he says it’s not him anymore.” - -“Z?” he asked. - -“See what she’s got there?” Z still held the disc, but he could tell she didn’t want to look at it. “That implant? Got it out of her sister.” - -Hardy stared at his fingernails. He had worked for Jack. He couldn’t remember much of that—just the few memories he had managed to reconnect. But he knew the kinds of things he had done, even if they weren’t specific memories. - -“Your sister,” he said, “Lynn. You know what they’re doing to her?” - -Mara looked away as she spoke, and he tried to imagine what it would be like to have family in there. “Aspect-selective stuff,” she said. “Isolating parts of her personality. Sticking them in new bodies.” - -“Clones?” That was a new one. - -“Just an aspect.” She shrugged. “Barely even a person.” - -Silence fell between them, and he went back to watching Z at her worktable. The lights in her hair were out. Paying respect to her sister, maybe. - -“Look,” Mara said, “I’m sorry. About bringing you into this.” - -He hadn’t had a breath in a couple of hours. His head hurt, but he felt he could trust his thoughts, untainted by the drug. “It’s all right,” he said. “Maybe I’d have done the same.” - -Besides, he wanted Jack gone too. - - - - - -{{}}Z{{}} had anesthetized her arm and cut a slit just big enough for the disc implant to lay beneath her skin, biotech activated. Now they stood across the street from Jack’s. Nobody said anything. There wasn’t any real plan beyond the basics. Get in, Les and Simek get the crowns, and he, Mara, and Z would get the girl. - -The camera was tilted just too low to see them, but it made Hardy nervous. Z had done some research, and the two-part key was all it would take. It all felt too easy. Where was that guard? Was the two-part key *really* enough? Maybe the camera was a third part, scanning for identification. - -It wouldn’t find anything, anyway. The implant was hacked somehow. Z had tried explaining it, but it was beyond him. It wasn’t the signal of any one employee, but a blanket signal that covered everyone. It made sense to her; that was all that mattered. - -Mara’s silence bothered him. She stood only a few feet away, but the distance was palpable. She was avoiding him, and he couldn’t imagine why. Maybe just worried about her sister, or even about herself, or Les, or Z, or Simek. Probably not about him. He was just a tool the group was using. Who cares if you break a hammer? - -“Alright,” Les said. His voice was an odd crack in the silence of the street. No sound came from Jack’s; it was eerie. Maybe nothing was going on. It was after business hours, but when a place held so much, there were always going to be guards. - -The word hung in the air for a few moments, waiting to be backed up by someone else. Everyone was quiet. Even Z, the fibers of her hair still off, looked down at her shoes. “Yeah,” Simek said finally. “Let’s go.” - -Hardy’s mind ached, and the sweat of withdrawal made a sheen over his skin. He’d asked for a breath—just a little something to get him through their little mission—but Mara kept her eyes on the ground or on the walls. They didn’t meet his a single time. “Let’s just get through this,” she’d said, and walked away. - -Something was on her mind, and he was paying for it in pain. On the other hand, he could be sure of his mental clarity. He was doing this because he wanted to, not because he was being tricked and juiced. Not this time, at least. - -The five of them made their way across the street, motions casual and relaxed, but they were rabbits ready to bolt. The camera watched them approach. Z raised her keycard and the signal went out from her card and from her implant. With hope, the combination would get them in and not set off any alarms. - -Or maybe it wouldn’t work. The door wouldn’t open, and no alarms would go off. They could just walk away and plan things properly. Get more members. Hit Jack hard. - -Or guards would spill out and kill them where they stood. - -The lock clicked. - -The door opened. - -They went in fast, down the hall together, but Les and Simek branched off quick, heading for what Hardy had identified as the crown room. It was on the second floor, same as Lynn’s whie silhouette, but closer to another stairwell. He and the girls would go straight. Mara could probably take care of herself, but with only Z along that left them as the only muscle. He didn’t like that idea. - -The stairs passed under their feet, black-painted grates digging into their shoes. Despite their speed, they passed quietly over them. They were upstairs, heading for the room four doors down, where Lynn was captive. Getting in had been easy; they hadn’t seen any guards, and it made Hardy nervous. He could feel those nerves beside him, radiating from Mara. - -Something was wrong. A click he hadn’t realized he had heard. The distinct lack of a second set of footsteps behind him. He turned, still running. Z was gone. - -A door opened behind them. He found the guards. “Dammit! Keep running!” he said to Mara, and turned back toward them. - -They didn’t have guns, but the batons at their sides looked like more than enough. And they were running toward him. - -“Loop around and get the others out of here!” - -Hardy was never a tough for Jack, but a hundred and eighty pounds flying through the air at a person will leave a mark. He collided with the men and started punching. - -His fist connected with one and his foot with another, but already the cudgels struck him in the ribs. He kept fighting. One punch landed with a satisfying crack. - -He saw the black stick for a fraction of a second before it cracked into his face. - -And then he saw nothing. - - - - - -{{}}T{{}}he room came into focus, and Hardy winced against the pain. He couldn’t tell what came from the crack to the head, and what came from the ache for breath. He closed his eyes again and lifted his head; it was the only part he could move. His arms and legs were strapped to a chair. The pain in his temple still felt fresh. - -He could see her, though. Past the silhouette of her sister a few rooms over was another silhouette—a smaller one, maybe outside the building somewhere. Mara had gotten out, and probably the rest as well. - -“Good morning, Hardy,” someone said, and he opened his eyes. The voice bridged more gaps in his memory. He hadn’t heard it in over a year now, but the impressions it brought back rankled at him. Jack. - -“Glad you’re awake,” Jack said. He stood over Hardy, a thin man in a business suit, hair graying at the edges. “We need to talk.” - -Hardy tried to speak, but his head throbbed. He managed, “What do you want?” before his jaw clenched. - -“What do I want?” Jack asked. “This isn’t about me. This is all about what you want.” - -The pain screamed at Jack to get to the point, and the frustration made it to his lips in a strained grunt. - -“No, that’s not true. I do want something. I want you back, Hardy. Your friends got away, but what they were after is still here. You know that, though, don’t you? You can see her lying just on the other side of that wall.” He laughed. “Z did pretty good on you.” - -Z. She was another tool of Jack’s. The hacked implant hadn’t sat well with him from the beginning, and now he knew why. It wasn’t hacked at all. It was coded to let her in, just like any employee. He wondered where she was now, but knew it didn't matter. - -The pain struck again in a harsh throb, and Hardy clenched his teeth tighter and pushed against the bonds. They held tight. - -“Too good, maybe,” Jack said, frowning. “If you can’t speak, you are useless to me.” He stood over him. - -Hardy blinked again, lifting his head. He could still see Mara. She was closer, now. Inside the building? - -“You remember me, don’t you?” Jack said. “It’s the flaw in those crowns. They don’t remove memories the way they should. The right stimulus and they come back, one by one. Like Mara.” - -Hardy went still, fighting the urge to dig his fingers into the chair. - -“You remember her, don’t you? When you met here? The way you hit it off, the brief escapes into closets or empty rooms. Plans whispered in range of cameras you didn’t know were there. *We can take him down*, she would tell you. *Yeah. We’ll take him down. And then we’ll be together*.” - -Memories crashed back into Hardy. Memories so sweet they ached as much as his need for her breath. Memories of stolen kisses and sly glances. Memories of nights spent together and days spent plotting. Memories of laughter and shared smiles as they planned Jack’s downfall. - -He closed his eyes, just to see her again—for the first time—and there she was. Just outside the door. He smiled up at Jack, and the man’s brow furrowed. - -The door burst open, and there was chaos. He couldn’t see everything, bound as he was, but he heard a guard fall, and Jack curse. A gun rose above his head, sweeping upward in Jack’s hand, but it never made it level. Something collided with Jack’s head, and he went down, out of view. - -And then everything was quiet. - -Mara stared down at him, and he remembered her. She was conniving. She was deceptive and manipulative. She had changed—become more so. It didn’t matter. All that mattered were the memories. - -The pain was still there, tearing at his mind. It ached for her breath, so close now, but there were other aches as well. More pressing aches. He ached for her touch, her smile. He ached to hear her voice. He ached for the chance to tell her he loved her, and that he was sorry he threw it all away. He was sorry he let her memory be held hostage, and sorry he had walked out, when he knew what he would be losing. - -Jack lay on the floor, barely visible through the black that crept from the edges of Hardy’s vision. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the pain. Something touched his lips, and with it came salvation. The drug that could only be Mara’s breath coursed through him, sating his need—his need for it, and his need for her. - -With each movement of her lips, memories came back to him. Nights in each other’s arms. Bonding over their hatred of who they worked for. The pain was gone in an instant, but he let the moment last—a druggie drawing every last breath and memory. - -The straps fell from his arms. “Hardy,” Mara whispered, “we have to go.” Her voice was fear and goose-down pillows. “We have to get her out.” - -He spun on the table and dropped to the floor. His legs tried to give way under him, but he caught himself. - -Reality set in. Jack was unconscious, but his guards were still out there. And once they saw Jack, the building would be secured with him inside. And with Mara. He laughed; suddenly there was something to his name that he could lose. - -“Yeah,” he said, “let’s go.” - -Les was outside the door with two guards at his feet. He twirled one of their batons in his fingers and grinned. Hardy grinned back. He’d won some respect with his stupid stunt. - -“Sim’s in the crown room,” he said. “I’ll give him a hand. You two get the girl.” - -Hardy blinked. They were on the second floor, so she was nearly at eye level now, suspended in her tank only a few rooms away. They closed the distance between those rooms in seconds and stood outside the door. He wished Les had hung around, but suspected the crown room would be better guarded. Simek would need his help. - -He glanced over at Mara. He found himself doing that a lot now. Her face was set in a sad resolve. - -“We’ll get her out,” he said. - -She smiled and touched a hand to his cheek. “I know.” Then she put her hand over the doorknob and turned it over. “Let’s go.” - -The scene flashed before him. Tanks on the right, one guard on the left holding a gun. It arched up, hovering over Hardy’s stomach, chest, then his head. - -A cudgel cracked into his arm and the gun fell to the floor. The arm bent at an odd angle and the guard cried out. The cudgel struck his head and the cry ceased. - -Mara turned to a tank across the room. Hardy walked over to it and read the name on the sheet taped to the end. *Lynn Amaranta Stevens*. It was strange seeing a person’s full name in an age of anonymity. It was something you shared with loved ones and family, and that was it. To the rest of the world, she would just be Lynn. - -The tank had an open top and was filled three quarters with a bluish liquid. The lights set into the bottom glowed around a woman barely covered by latex clothing, her features lost in the haze of the fluid. - -He looked back to Mara, and she nodded, keeping her distance. - -He reached into the tank. The lukewarm liquid tingled on his arms, and he wrapped them behind the small of her back, cradling her head with his hand. She was slight, but not young. Maybe Mara’s little sister, but not by much. She emerged from the tank, and Mara wrapped a blanket around her, covering her from head to toe. The girl shivered beneath it. - -“We don’t have much time,” Mara said. She was right. Hardy shifted the girl’s weight, and they made for the door. - -The hallway was empty. They would meet Les and Simek at the crown room. All they had to do was get out. But then something moved at the end of the hallway, a man entering from the side. His hand raised, a shot echoed. Hardy’s eyes locked with Mara’s as she stared into the distance. - -And then she fell. - - - - - -{{}}L{{}}es’ voice cried from the hallway behind him. The killing gun was pointed at Hardy now, but he stood in place, the girl’s weight a thousand tons, staring down into the shock on Mara’s face. Something narrowly missed his head, but his focus stayed on her. - -Then the crack of a shot too close not to flinch, and at the top of his vision Hardy saw the shape of the gunman tumbling away from him, from them, even as his gaze never wavered from Mara’s body. - -Les rushed into view, dropping his gun beside her as he knelt, uttering the curses Hardy couldn’t bring to mind. He put his hand to her chest, wet with blood, then to her neck. - -Hardy’s eyes had followed hers as she fell. He’d watched them as they lost focus. He stood, the weight in his arms threatening to slip. - -“She’s gone, Hardy. We gotta go.” - -Memory after memory rushed back. The gaps filled and the monument of her loss settled on him. The girl’s weight was gone from his arms. Les held her now and Simek took his arm, nearly dragging him down the hallway as Mara’s crumpled body grew smaller. - -Guards filled the hall from other rooms and shots pinged against the walls. Survival instincts returned. They ran, and as they passed a doorway he glimpsed a room, an overturned chair, no sign of Jack now--that chance for revenge gone. Down the stairs, bullets ricocheting in front of them. The firing ceased when they cleared the second floor, but feet shuffled above them. - -They ran through the hallway and the exit before the guards made it down the steps. And they kept running. Through the alley where he had passed his test, when he was still suspicious of Mara’s intentions. When he’d thought she worked for Jack and refused to trust her. Down the streets where he had followed her only a day ago, still riding the newly discovered drug of her breath. Was that what made him follow? - -They passed the Narcs’ headquarters, where Z would surely lead Jack’s men. Z. Her sister wasn’t dead. He should have seen it. She was the leverage Jack held. - -When they stopped, Hardy didn’t know where they were, but he knew it didn’t matter. Mara was gone. He had lost her once, but had found her again. She had found him. - -Les laid the girl on the floor, cracking a glow stick for light while Simek walked toward Hardy, holding something in each hand. Crowns of tarnished copper and wires. They had gotten her out. They had her, and they had the crown. - -“Hey,” Simek said, holding out one of the copper domes. “This one’s yours.” - -Hardy held the dome in his hands and stared at it, no longer bothered if he never remembered anything. - -Les hovered over the rescued girl’s shaking body ten feet away. Simek patted him on the shoulder, trying in a gesture to express understanding of a pain he could never imagine. He went to Les with the crown. - -Hardy stood alone in his corner of the room reliving all of the memories he had only just regained. Their pact to bring Jack down. What he felt when she said his name. - -The crown clattered to the floor and Les cursed. “Hardy!” - -Hardy ran to her as the pieces fit together in his mind. The aspect-selective tests they performed clicked into place and memories of his last days at Jack’s returned. The way she disappeared so suddenly, when everything was going right. - -Mara lay shivering on the floor, barely covered by her latex clothes, hair purest black without the now-familiar pink stripes. He held her in his arms as she shivered, rubbed the debris of long containment from her eyes. Her body was thin, bones showing beneath atrophied muscle. Her eyes seemed distant as if her mind was in a fog. He held her face and stared into her, the broken woman he loved. “Mara?” he asked, tears in his own eyes. - -Her eyes focused, looked into his. Her body shivered in his arms and when she spoke it was with a sad tremor. “You came back.” - -Hardy pulled her close. With the memories returned, he knew what he almost lost, and tears stung on his cheeks. In that moment he knew only two things. He would take care of Mara and never leave her side, stand with her against anything that threatened to hurt her. The other was a primal anger he knew he couldn’t deny. - -Jack would pay. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "First Breath" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138451454742522).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Into the Darkness.md b/content/issue-24/Into the Darkness.md deleted file mode 100644 index 36b4d3a0..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Into the Darkness.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,409 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Into the Darkness" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Lee F. Patrick -copyright: '© Lee F. Patrick 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "If there's a genre especially close to the heart of your humble editor, it\'s the Ghost Story: that grand denizen of the limbic, liminal domain between mere flighty fantasy and bluntly blundering horror (and there\'s a sentence that should fuel some enmities moving forward). Anyway, isn\'t it so often the case with these strange inhabitants that \"moving forward\" is at the very heart of the matter?" - -morelink: 'Look more closely...' - -image: images/IntoTheDarkness.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Antonio Friedmann](https://www.pexels.com/photo/fashion-people-woman-art-5641061/) and [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/road-amidst-bare-trees-327308/)." - -type: stock -slug: into-the-darkness -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}ary Cavanaugh walked along the street from the Toronto Opera House, humming from the overture. Her dark blue velvet dress *susshed* over the crinoline as she side-stepped the well-bundled late night pedestrians. Adjusting the lace shawl to lie flat on her shoulders, she was unconcerned by the chill wind blowing between the buildings. - -She smiled, catching sight of her friend Major Deventry coming along toward her. He always wore his scarlet Regimentals with more extravagant muttonchops than any man alive could boast of. - -He extended his arm. “Well, Miss Mary, did you enjoy your caterwauling this evening?” - -She curtsied and took his arm. “Of course, Major. I am so glad that I can travel anywhere I wish now. Perhaps I will visit the Metropolitan in New York City during their next season. I can easily return the same night without draining myself.” - -“It would be better not to travel too far in the next while, I fear,” the Major said. His mouth thinned. “Or perhaps it might be better to leave and never return. I’ve felt something odd thrice in the past week. I am unsure of its nature, but I admit to a great unease.” - -She half turned to look up at him, one eyebrow raised. “What did it feel like?” - -“A heaviness of spirit; a tension in the air. A chill. Nothing I can point to and say, *‘There it is, the source of my discomfort.**’**”* He fluffed his whiskers with his free hand and relaxed his jaw with deliberate effort. “I should not frighten you with idle talk on such a fine night. May I escort you to your destination?” - -She smiled. “I always enjoy your company, Major. I am returning to my eldest niece’s home tonight. She recently married and there is a spare room I haunt on occasion.” - -“You still make your rounds of the younger generation? Few of us can bear to watch children growing up the way you have. Returning to England was impossible, so I never had the chance.” - -“Yes, I do visit.” She sighed. “Although I could no longer endure my life, I only regretted leaving them behind.” - -“You will change more than they do,” he promised as they walked across the street. A nearby cab horse shied as it felt their presence. - - - -{{}}A{{}} week later, Mary stopped halfway across a street. There was something or someone hiding near her. She knew it sought to do ill. Yet as the Major had described, there was nothing she could isolate. - -She reached her destination and rose to the second floor. Her nephew Peter still lived with his parents while he attended university to study law. He was at his desk, pencil poised to make notes as he pored over a thick legal tome. - -She placed her hand over his and started to write. Once she had finished her note she tapped on the desk. Peter jumped and half stood in surprise. Another tap on the desk drew his attention to the note. - - -> *Dearest Peter: \ -There is something not quite right in this neighborhood. Have there been any odd occurrences recently?* - -“Not really, Aunt Mary,” he said, taking his seat. “Can you explain just what is wrong?” He picked up the pencil and closed his eyes again, hand waiting. - - -> *I fear not. An acquaintance of mine has felt a similar unease. I wonder if I should inquire of the others I know and determine if there is danger.* - - -He shook his head. “I haven’t heard of anything lately. Elizabeth’s betrothal party is on Saturday night. I can ask everyone there if you like. We’re scattered all over the city, so might learn more.” - - -> *Dearest Liz. I knew that she and Samuel seemed to be found together a great deal of the time. \ -Your idea is best, Peter. I shall seek out my acquaintances and perhaps we can glean some coherent information. \ -Tell the others that I love them all and think of them often.* - - -Peter glanced down at the paper. “I will, Aunt Mary. Perhaps you should come to the party as well. That way you could hear our discussion, even if we are whispering in the corners.” - - -{{}}B{{}}y Saturday she had felt the presence twice more. It was never in the same place or at the same time of day. Many others had felt it as well. The same day, the Major presided over a meeting of the city’s ghosts to discuss the matter. Not all came. Mary regretted having to miss Liz’s betrothal party; however, she would see Liz and the others soon to apologize for her lapse. - -In the council chambers, the glossy oak panelling and carved oak chairs with red velvet cushions were lit only by the dimmed gaslights. To Mary’s ghostly senses, the room was as bright as it would be during the council’s normal sessions. - -“We’ve all felt a presence,” the Major began. “Does anyone have any details on what or who it is? Has anyone been close to it?” - -“It wants something,” said Mr. Hadrens, a constable in life as well as death. “I’ve gone looking for it, but just when I think that I’ve cornered it: *poof* and it’s gone.” Others nodded in agreement. “I don’t think it’s very dangerous. A nuisance, certainly, but nothing more. However, I plan to keep my eyes and ears open in case I’ve mistaken its intent.” - -A woman Mary did not know spoke up. “It is *evil*. It bides its time now, Constable, but soon it will strike and that will bring more evil after it.” - -“But at what, that is one question we must ask,” Mary said loudly. “If we can learn what it wants, then we may understand why it is here and how to deal with it.” - - - - - -{{}}M{{}}ary was most apologetic at the gathering Peter arranged. Liz had pouted at first, but once hurt feelings were salved nothing would have prevented the young lovers from regaling her with the news of the night. - -Nevertheless, Mary was unable to keep her thoughts entirely with their pleasant recollections. Not for the first time, there was a gain to be had in spending time with them unheard and unseen. - -At the return gathering of what Peter would insist on calling “the spooks” two weeks later, the mood was much subdued. “Hadrens has vanished,” the Major said quietly. “So have three others who hadn’t come before. At least, those are all I know of. All were powerful spirits, and there is no indication that they have finally passed over.” - -“Newspaper reports chronicle many strange events,” Mary said. “Panic is spreading.” - -“Our comrades panic as well.” The Major swept his hand around at the council chamber. Barely half of those who had attended the first meeting were present. “Many I spoke to refused to leave familiar ground. Some have even returned to their graves and sunk into the earth, hoping that whatever happens will not find them.” - -“What can we do?” Mary asked. - -“Hide or hunt,” said a foppish gentleman with a lace-edged handkerchief that he used to punctuate his sentences. His top hat lay on the table before him, along with his gloves and a walking stick. “If Hadrens has been taken, then we should travel in pairs at least. Company, not isolation, may keep us from whatever fate has overcome our fellows.” - -“One of the newspaper accounts was like that of a powerful haunting,” Mary said. “There was knocking, and small pieces of furniture wafting about the house. Several people were injured by flying glass from a broken window, as I understand. One of my nephews lives nearby and heard the noises.” - -“I’ve been past that house,” the foppish man said, flicking his handkerchief to and fro. Mary had seen him occasionally at the theatre, and at the last meeting. Smythe, she thought his name was. “Felt cold to me, but there was nothing about with the ability to do a serious amount of damage. Not at the moment, mind you.” - -After the meeting ended, with no clear consensus on the level of danger, Mary went back to Peter’s house thoughtfully. At the house where the flying glass incident had happened, she started to shiver. Her hand went to the watch brooch on her breast and her gaze darted all over the house, trying to isolate the source of the cold. - -The house was dark, not only because everyone had gone to bed and turned down the gas lamps, but dark in a way she didn’t understand. - -Then a noise began, a low sporadic thumping at first, growing louder and faster. - -Lights came on in the neighbouring houses, but none shone from the house in front of her. There was a final crescendo of thumping, and the night was still again— and the darkness was gone from the chill house. - -A dog several streets away barked angrily, then yipped. Silence reigned again. - -She approached the building hesitantly. She attempted to walk through the door, but could not. She tried pushing her hand through, but as it neared the door, she found she needed even more energy to move another quarter inch. Too much. - -Mary stepped away and tried to reach through the wall beside it, then circled the house quickly, testing for an entrance. There were none. With distaste, she even tried sinking into the ground to enter through the cellar walls. It reminded her of her grave. She kept trying, pushing against the barrier, unconcerned at how much effort it took. She finally had to admit defeat. - -The barrier encompassed the entire structure. - -She continued slowly down the street, eyes blinking in exhaustion. She fixed her mind on the light in Peter’s room and willed herself directly there. The warm glow of his lamp was the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness. - - - - - -{{}}M{{}}ary lost two days to her weakness. Even now, nearly a week later, sitting in the spare chair in Peter’s room, she still felt drained. Every movement was an effort, and she manifested the shabby grey merino dress that she’d died in rather than spend her remaining energy to transform it into something more fashionable. - -Peter knew she was there, of course. “Aunt Mary, it’s very strange at that house. I met the family before all this happened, so I've been able to find out things I wouldn't otherwise. I hadn't known about the noises or I would have mentioned them to you. - -“The inhabitants are Mr. Alfred Hastens and his wife Carrie, their children Laura, Betsy, and Timothy. Some nights, they can’t get a wink of sleep, other nights everyone else on the street but them is disturbed. Laura said that none of them woke that night when you heard the knockings. She sleeps with her sister since this started.” - -He looked at his notepad. “As for servants, there’s a cook, a butler and two housemaids. Laura told me that none of the servants have ever heard a thing.” - -Mary rapped gently on the side table where a pencil and paper lay waiting. Peter came over and took up the pencil, closing his eyes. - - - -> *That is strange that the servants heard nothing. What are the ages of the various people?* - - -Peter read her note and looked thoughtful. “Mr. and Mrs. Hastens are in their early forties, I think. Laura is the oldest at seventeen. Betsy is twelve, and Timothy is fourteen. The cook is past fifty if you believe her grey hair. The butler the same. Both housemaids are over twenty. Does that make a difference?” - - -> *I am unsure. I must consult others. Do not go into that house lightly, Peter. There is something very wrong there. Is Mr. Hastens thinking of leaving the house because of the disturbances?* - - -“They only moved in five months ago, so I doubt they would. Some elderly gentleman lived there before: an uncle of Mr. Hastens, I think. I’ll try to discover more of the house’s history. Take care, Aunt Mary.” - -She rose slowly to her feet and headed out into the evening to find the Major. - - - - - -{{}}“M{{}}iss Cavanaugh, are you all right?” Mary looked up and saw Mr. Symthe with the Major as she forced herself toward the council chambers. Both darted across the busy street to meet her. “We have worried. Where have you been?” - -“I am better, I thank you, sirs. The house I mentioned is the source of this thing, I am sure of it. I went there the night of our meeting and could not enter. There is a darkness around it while the noises emanate, and a barrier prevented my entrance even after silence reigned.” - -“We were quite worried when you didn’t come to the meeting last night,” the Major said. “Mr. Smythe and I were looking for you.” - -She managed a smile and a curtsey. “I apologise, gentlemen. After our meeting I attempted to enter that house, but was repulsed and left utterly exhausted. I am glad that my nephew lives only a few doors away so that I had a safe place to rest.” She relayed the information that Peter had gathered after they took seats in a deserted park. - -“I’ve heard of such barriers,” the Major said, smoothing his whiskers. “It would take more energy than the three of us possess to break through. Not knowing what is on the other side makes me less eager to attack immediately.” - -“You should rest, Miss Cavanaugh,” Mr. Smythe said. “You look quite transparent still.” He slipped a small box from his coat sleeve and took snuff. - -Mary looked at her arm and could see the park bench faintly beneath it. “Do you think that the others were drained of nearly all their energy by the darkness?” - -The Major nodded. “It could be. We know very little about this manifestation. I think a short reconnoitre is in order. I’ll go near the house, while Mr. Smythe and you stand well back.” - -“If you think it wise,” Mary said. “I tried several times to gain entrance. That may have been what exhausted me. Just try once and see how you feel.” - -“It looks normal,” Mr. Smythe said as they approached the house. Evening came early now that September was past. Mary shook her head slightly. It felt wrong to her. - -“I’ll try the door,” Major Deventry said. “If you would wait here.” - -“Even if you can gain access, I would not recommend a long sortie,” Mr. Smythe said. His handkerchief was now tucked in his coat sleeve and he held his walking stick between his hands. A twist of his wrists unlocked the blade within. “A common defence against footpads in my time, Miss Cavanaugh,” he said at her shocked look. “I have also found it of use against some manifestations that have troubled me since.” - -Major Deventry mounted the stairs and paused at the edge of the porch. “I do feel something odd,” he called back to them, his eyes never leaving the house. “A coldness.” He took a step forward and reached out toward the door. - -Mary stifled a shriek as he took another step forward. The door seemed to move toward him and become as dark as she had sensed that other night. A loud booming sound came from the upstairs and the Major threw himself backward to sprawl in the pathway, then the door returned to its original position and colour. - -Mr. Smythe stood guard with his sword while the Major regained his feet. The door remained quiescent as they moved back to the flagway next to the road. - -“I should try and see if the same thing happens,” Mr. Smythe said. “At least I’ll know to be ready to move quickly.” - -“I think we should have some others with us before making another attempt,” Mary said. “How do you feel, Major?” - -“It tried to drain me,” he admitted, whiskers bristling. “I think that Miss Mary is right. This is beyond anything I have ever encountered.” - - - -{{}}D{{}}rumming up support would take a little time, within which Peter was able to put his educational opportunities to good use. “I have researched that house’s history, Aunt Mary,” he said, with a smile. “My professor thinks that my work on the legal descent of the ownership of the house is an exercise to impress him.” - -He turned several pages in his pad. “Mr. Hastens inherited the house from his maternal uncle, Mr. Martin Devine. He inherited it from his father, who bought it from another family, the Packards, who had purchased it from someone named Ekman. He must have built the house. I found nothing out of the ordinary with the wills, the transfers of title, or the tax rolls. - -“I did find something that might have a bearing in the newspaper files. About a hundred years ago there was a similar spate of noises from that house. It stopped as suddenly as it started. But around that time, one of the daughters of the house died. A twelve year old named Amalie Ekman. She fell down the stairs while playing with a ball on the upper landing. Her neck was broken.” - -Mary looked at the Major and Mr. Symthe. “Do you know of anyone who might have been here, either alive or as a ghost, when this took place?” - -“Possibly,” Mr. Symthe said. “I shall inquire. This was a much smaller city then, and the possibility that a ghost from that time remains here is unlikely. For myself, I do not recall hearing or reading of such an incident.” - -Mary rapped gently on the table and Peter sat down with a pencil. - -> *Thank you Peter. We shall try to find Amalie and any other ghosts who may remember that time. Have there been any further noises?* - - -“No, it has become quiet of late, Laura said. They are all very relieved.” - -Two days later they met in the council chambers again. Only five ghosts attended this time. The Major strode back and forth, hands clenching and unclenching behind him. - -“We know of no one from the relevant time,” Mr. Smythe said with a flick of his handkerchief. “And with this small a group, I would hesitate to begin any attack. We have no notion of what is inside.” - -Mrs. Royston, the woman who had said it was evil at their first meeting, stood. “I died many years after that sensation, but I have spent my entire life in this city. I refuse to let anything drive me from my home.” - -“Have any others disappeared?” Mary asked. - -“It is almost impossible to tell,” the Major said. “Some refuse to come out to speak, others seem to refuse to even acknowledge our presence, so we do not know if they were taken or not.” He stopped his pacing and looked at the small audience. Do you have any suggestions for our course of action, Mrs. Royston? We are, I think, open to all suggestions.” - -““We must attack,” Mrs. Royston said with a shrug. “Attack or hide until it gets what it wants and leaves.” - -“Last time a young girl died,” Mary said. “Shall we let another innocent be taken by this evil, as you termed it?” - -“Can we cause the family to leave the house?” Mr. Smythe asked. “If it is destroyed, perhaps by fire, so might be the focus the thing has to enter this world.” - -“We cannot enter the house,” said the fifth ghost into the silence, a thin man with a pointed chin and nose. “How could we destroy the house without entering it?” - -“Perhaps if one of us had a focus in the house, we might be able to pass the barrier,” Mary said. - -The Major’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?” - -“When I was exhausted after my encounter with the barriers, I willed myself directly to my nephew’s room, by linking to him. If Peter was in the house, I may be able to do the same: go directly to him. Could you all then come to me?” - -The others were silent for several moments, thinking through the idea. “It might work,” the thin man said, rocking his head from side to side. “If we have something of yours to use as our link.” - -“Something of hers?” asked Mr. Smythe. “How does that help? She doesn’t *have* anything. None of us really do.” - -“But my nephew does,” Mary said, her spirits rising. She touched the watch brooch on her dress. “He has my watch, the real watch. He can leave it just outside the house so that all of you may be nearby when I attempt to enter. I can use my link to Peter to reach him, and you all can use the watch to link to me to join me inside. As many ghosts as we can summon could be helpful.” - -“It seems we have our plan, then,” the Major said. “I think that you should rest for a few more days, Miss Mary. Yours will still be the hardest task, and you have not fully recovered from your previous encounter. Mr. Smythe and I will escort you to your nephew’s and you may show us the brooch. I would like to seek out others and ask if any more will come and aid us, now that we have a plan.” - -“An excellent idea,” Mr. Smythe said. “Perhaps some of the gentlemen will be more amenable to assist us when they know that a lady will be entering the fray at our head.” - -“I am unsure this plan will work,” the Major said. They were standing outside the house, watching Peter make his way up the stairs to the door. He had insisted on joining the foray, and Mary was filled with apprehension for her nephew. It was early evening, the sun giving a brilliant display in the western clouds. - -“We have reinforcements,” Mrs. Royston said. Four more ghosts had joined them after two days of cajoling and appealing to their better natures. - -Peter rang the bell and the butler answered. He went inside and the door closed behind him. The Major turned to speak to Mary, but she had vanished. - -“Where did she go?” he asked. - -Mr. Smythe looked at the house. “I believe she is inside. Shall we join her?” - -The Major reached down and touched the watch brooch, which Peter had tucked behind the gate. It was familiar to him, as Mary always wore its ghostly equivalent no matter what else she changed in her attire. He concentrated on her image and willed himself to join her… then he sagged against Mr. Smythe, his smart military regalia fading into an old undershirt and house trousers, beloved whispers reduced to a shadow of their former extravagance. - -“The barrier,” he whispered. “It’s too strong.” - -“It’s drained him,” Mr. Smythe said. “Let’s try as a group to get one of us through. I volunteer.” - -“All right,” Mrs. Royston said. “One try.” - -As the Major drifted away from the house, the others gathered around the watch and touched it. Mr. Smythe took drew his sword stick and tucked the handkerchief in his sleeve. He felt their combined power growing behind him and fixed Mary’s face in his mind. “Now!” - -He launched himself toward her, feeling the barrier in his way. It was alive in some way he did not understand. He thrust the sword before him to puncture the dark envelope that surrounded the house— - -—*and he was in*. - -He stood in an entrance hall, sword stick held at the ready. Voices came from the drawing room to the left, and he slipped through the door. At least here in the house he could again travel through walls and the like with impunity. - -“Miss Cavanaugh?” Mr. Smythe called softly. - -Only the living were in the room. Mary’s nephew spoke to two young ladies and an older one, likely their mother. Mr. Smythe grimaced and returned into the hall. He searched the main floor quickly, finding nothing out of the ordinary, then returned to the outer door. The barrier had grown stronger. He found a window and tried to look out, but the barrier distorted his vision enough that he was not sure if the others were still at the front of the house. No one else had entered, so he assumed they could not. - -On the second floor, he found the master of the house dressing for dinner. The third floor was deserted, as the servants were downstairs getting ready to serve the meal. - -On a back stairway to the attic, he felt coldness begin halfway up the stairs. - -“Miss Cavanaugh,” he called again. “Where are you?” - -“I am here.” He heard her voice from above. He took a tighter grip on the sword stick and continued, his eyes not resting on any object for longer than it took to identify it. - -When the stairs opened onto the attic landing, he still moved cautiously, keeping his back to the outer wall and peering over the floorboards. Mary stood in a cramped hallway of low, narrow doors, and turned to motion him up beside her. - -“The source is up here,” she whispered. “Where are the others?” - -“The barrier was too strong. I think that it took all their energy to get me through. We are, as they say, on our own now.” - -“I suppose so.” She looked at his sword stick. “Shall we attempt to find the focus?” - -“We must, or all this has been for naught.” He looked at the doors along the hallway, quiet and possibly deadly. - -The first room held stacks of boxes and luggage. The coldness that permeated the hall outside was not present. The next was the repository of old furniture, not worthy of the public rooms and unneeded for the servants’ quarters. Broken wicker and ripped and faded upholstery abounded. - -The room at the far end of the corridor held the darkness. - -Mary shivered. The ghostly light here was muted, as if the darkness did not want anything bright near it. “We should stay near each other,” Mr. Smythe said. Mary nodded and they slowly circled the room, trying to isolate where the darkness was coming from. - -They were three-quarters of the way around the room, when the darkness abruptly vanished. - -Mary stared at Mr. Smythe in amazement, then a booming sound from below them shook the house. - -“Take my hand, sir,” Mary said. “We shall go directly to Peter.” - -He took her hand and they appeared in the drawing room a moment later. The darkness filled it, and the air was full of objects from the mantelpiece, wildly circling the room. The younger girl was crying, her head buried in her mother’s shoulder. Peter had his arm around the older girl, both staring wide-eyed at the cyclonic display. - -“Make it go away, Mama!” the younger girl wailed, and immediately the darkness began to form a coherent shape. - -Mr. Smythe released Mary’s hand and advanced on it with his sword point high. “Take that!” he cried as his sword flashed through the dark form, cutting it in twain. - -There was another boom, deafeningly close, and he fell, grey and drained. - -Mary stood in front of him while the darkness reformed. Inside, she trembled, but a glance at the cowering people stiffened her resolve. No one else would be harmed in this house. Not if there was any way she could prevent it. - -“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you doing this?” - -The darkness coalesced further, taking on a vaguely human shape that was near her own height. “She summoned me,” it said. The voice was distorted and harsh, full of menace. - -“Who? That young girl?” - -“Yes.” The flying objects slowly settled to the floor as the darkness concentrated on maintaining a form. “She summoned me from my sleep. I must take her before I can sleep again.” - -Peter took his arm from around the older girl and the younger lifted her head and wiped her eyes clear of tears. Perhaps to them the danger seemed abated, but Mary was not so confident just yet. - -“Did you drain the ghosts who have gone missing?” - -“I needed energy. They had it. As do you.” The dark form moved toward her. - -“You did not answer my question,” Mary said, not moving back. “Who *were* you?” - -The form paused. “I do not remember.” - -“A long time ago, a girl died in this house. Were you she, or did you kill her?” - -The darkness turned to regard the people clustered at the other end of the room. An amorphous arm pointed at the youngest girl. “She is the one who summoned me. All else is forgotten.” - -“How?” whispered Mr. Smythe. He was up on his knees now, his hair whitened, his face that of an old man. He leaned on his sword stick to keep from tumbling over. - -“Yes,” said Mary, “how did she summon you? What do you truly need to return to sleep again?” - -“There is much anger in this place. Hate begets hate.” - -“So you generated the barrier to keep outside hate away, but still feel the pain of anger inside.” Mary nodded. “But you have been taking energy without leave, and you must expend energy to do so. Maintaining the barrier takes still more. No wonder you are in such need. Is there a focus that keeps you here?” - -The dark figure contracted, intensified, and Mary felt its chill grow stronger. “You will not find it. If it is destroyed, I am destroyed.” - -“I will give you the energy you need to block the anger,” she said. “And we shall hide your focus so that no one can wake you again.” - -She took several steps toward the darkness, holding out her hand. “Let me help you.” - -“Miss Cavanaugh,” Mr. Smythe said in a strained whisper. “What are you doing?” - -“The proper thing,” she said. She knelt beside him, taking his hand in hers, letting her energy flow into him. His hair darkened and the lines from his face erased themselves. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, then stood, still holding her hand. - -“You give all to him so that you will give none to me,” the darkness said. Its voice had changed, no longer a menacing snarl but a younger voice, a sadder and more desperate voice. - -“No,” Mary said. “There is always more power in love than in hate. Where is your focus, little one? All will be well.” - -There was a pause, a long, considering pause, then a red wooden ball such as a child might play at catch with appeared, hanging in the air between them. - -Mary placed her hand on the focus, and the figure advanced to meet her. A tendril of darkness reached forward, touching the now glowing ball, then it grew thicker and lighter as it absorbed the energy Mary fed to it, Mr. Smythe at her side, with their clasped hands forming a secondary link to aid her. - -The darkness shrank to the size of a child. A young girl’s face started to form. - -“I was Amalie Ekman,” she said, smiling suddenly. “I remember now. Father was always angry. He shouted at me all the time. I was too noisy when I played with my ball.” Her eyes filled with tears. - -“Is that why you made the noises here?” Mr. Smythe asked. “Because your father wanted you to be very quiet?” - -“Yes.” The transformation continued, the darkness giving way to light, the vague shape to that of a girl, dressed in what had been usual for a child to wear perhaps a hundred years before. “He can’t make me be quiet now.” - -“He died long ago, Amalie,” Mary said. “This is a different time. This family is not yours. It is time for you to go onward now. You don’t have to stay in this place if being here brings you pain.” - -The ball slipped to the floor as Mary took Amalie’s hand directly. - -“I’m scared,” Amalie whispered. - -“Don’t worry,” Mary said. “I’ll be with you.” - -“If you let the outside barriers down, there are others who will help,” Mr. Smythe said. “I will explain and bring them in.” - -Amalie nodded, and when he returned a few moments later, stopping just inside the entrance to the drawing room, the others were standing slightly behind him. Despite their individually reduced states, by their combined efforts a glow of golden light surrounded Mary and began to encompass the child as well. - -“Mr. Smythe, can you make sure that this is taken somewhere safe?” - -“I shall. There is a place I know of where it may rest in safety.” - -Major Deventry smiled as he bowed. “I told you that you would change, Miss Mary. We shall miss you here, but I hope to encounter you again.” - -The glow increased, slowly obscuring the features of the two within, and Mary felt something changing inside. Perhaps guiding the girl to a better place than the prison she had forged around herself would mean more of a journey than she had bargained for. - -Mary looked from her friends to the huddle of living persons, where Peter—good, kind Peter—was busy reassuring the startled family, though he too wore a dishevelled air, still affected by what they had experienced of the encounter. His gaze passed across hers, and for a moment she thought it lingered, saw a tiny frown crease his brow, as though he saw something but doubted if he saw anything at all. - -She looked down at the trusting face of Amalie, and smiled. Then the glow was so strong, Mary Cavanaugh couldn’t see anything at all. - - - -{{}}W{{}}hen the glow faded, it left nothing behind but the red ball. The ghosts joined together and picked it up, to take it to a safe haven. - -Mr. Smythe glanced down at the other end of the room, where those living had been unknowing witnesses to the transition. He saw the glint of tears in the young man’s eyes as he soothed the girl beside him. He was not that unknowing. He deserved an explanation. Perhaps later tonight he would visit the young man and leave him a note, so that her family would know of Miss Mary’s joy and transformation. - -A novel idea, that the dead could so communicate with the living. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Into The Darkness" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138448114742856).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Mine Own.md b/content/issue-24/Mine Own.md deleted file mode 100644 index 99a952da..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Mine Own.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,125 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mine Own" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Sharon Dawn Selby -copyright: '© Sharon Dawn Selby 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As a professional specialist in both communication and literature, you might be forgiven for expecting Sharon Dawn Selby to already have a long list of fiction credits to her name - so imagine our surprise and delight to be able to present her first published story, one which underlines the traditional power of language and place, good manners, and proper introductions." - -morelink: "What's in a name?" - -image: images/MineOwn.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Republica](https://pixabay.com/photos/forest-trees-light-dust-clearing-653448/) and [Ellie Burgin](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-crow-sitting-on-signpost-on-gray-background-3643742/)." - -type: stock -slug: mine-own -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}D{{}}ee had been sitting in the garden for over an hour, her cup of tea cold and forgotten. Leaves rustled in the autumn wind, whispering amongst themselves like secretive school children. The longer she sat, the more she felt that she could almost understand them. - -They’d found the Roadside Wilds B & B off the main road. They’d gotten lost an hour or so outside of Armadale, having just left the ferry that had brought them to the Isle of Skye. Eventually, they’d had to stop as neither of them trusted the GPS or the narrow winding roads in the encroaching twilight. They’d intended merely to ask for directions, but the place itself had spoken to them—quaint, tidy, and run by an eccentric old lady who truly knew the meaning of a full Scottish breakfast. They’d passed a quiet but pleasant evening drinking the old lady’s scotch, then feasted in the morning on sausage, bacon, *and* black pudding. At some point, Dee’s husband had begun cross-examining their hostess about local history. The old lady, who insisted they call her “Auntie,” had seen Dee’s eyes glaze as Brad jotted notes on his paper napkin about yet another war memorial in a nearby village, and had offered them something off the beaten path. - -Her promise of a small but ancient stone circle in the middle of the forest, as yet undiscovered by anthropologists or tour companies or TV producers, had instantly captured Dee’s imagination. But it been no match for a cairn dedicated to the glorious dead of the Great War—at least not as far as Brad was concerned. He wanted historical background and cultural significance spelled out on plaques that he could photograph and catalogue. He was researching a new book—something depressing about grief and commemoration in Scotland—and had started seeking out Dee’s ancestral lines in the process. Her family had apparently come from this part of Skye, but the connections he’d been seeking had all been uncertain. The possibility of a cairn that might hold the names of some of her ancestors was beyond his wildest hopes. So he had left her, clearly disappointed by her lack of interest in this unexpected genealogical gold mine, but promising to return soon. - -“Or as soon as I can,” he’d added ruefully, and kissed her. “Between the roads and the feral sheep crossings, it could take all day. Are you sure you want to stay? You won’t be bored out of your mind?” - - “A stroll through the woods is exactly what I need,” she’d said, trying to refrain from pushing him out the door. “I could use a break from the battlefields. All those lost souls…” She’d smiled and let the words fade away to forestall his concern, to disguise her relief. She’d slept poorly the night before, her dreams filled with the echoes of all the haunted places that they had visited. She had awakened to find herself wrapped in a longing for something she could no longer remember as the dream unravelled. - -Brad had nodded and kissed her once more, his mind already on his research and the day ahead. She’d laughed silently as he ground the gears of their rental car, imagined him cursing the manual transmission. Dee watched until he turned a bend and was lost from sight. - -Auntie had errands to run as well. “I’ve made you a cup of tea, hen,” the old lady had called on her way out the door. “Why don’t you take it through to the garden?” Then she, too, had disappeared down the lane with a nod and a wave of the old-fashioned basket she carried. - -So here Dee sat, serenaded by crows and wind and leaves, a volume of folklore from Auntie’s library unheeded on her lap. She’d stopped reading when she came to the sorrows of her own tragic namesake, wondering for the millionth time what her mother had been thinking when she’d named her. - -“I’d been planning to call you Audrey, but when I looked at you…” Her mother had told this story a thousand times, punctuated by a wave of her hand meant to encompass Dee’s entire being. - -Dee shook her head and sighed, wondering what kind of life Audrey might have led. She *wasn’t* complaining—by all rational methods of accounting, the joys of her life had far outweighed the sorrows—but she couldn’t help but feel the name had left her vulnerable to moments of whimsy and melancholy to which the plucky Audrey might have been immune. - -She lifted the delicate porcelain cup to her lips, then set it back on its saucer untasted. A spirit of restlessness seized her and she rose, intending to exchange the tattered book for one of the glossy magazines she’d picked up at the airport. Instead, her feet took her to the garden gate. To her disappointment, it was locked. The wind rustled the leaves and the crows jeered. She sought the hecklers in the trees, intending to give them an Audrey-like chiding for their cheek, and noticed a heavy iron key hanging within arm’s reach. The key turned in the lock, and a sigh went through the trees. She felt the tension that had gripped her since they’d begun their tour of Scottish battlegrounds begin to dissipate. - -She stepped across the threshold from the garden into the forest and took a deep breath. Her senses were instantly flooded by the verdant life around her. She breathed even more deeply, allowing the heady scents and colours to buoy her spirits. She thought with sadness of her husband’s solitary journey in his rental car to a place where even the ghosts would be devoured by the voracious appetites of tourists and the bereaved. Another breath and she was overcome by gratitude that she was here rather than there. Alone, for once. For once not lonely. She ignored the knowledge that this was a temporary escape—perhaps she could convince Brad to stay another night or two. Perhaps Auntie knew more local war stories that could claim Brad’s attention. Dee crossed her fingers and her face lightened. - -She surveyed the path, which split in two directions. Auntie had mentioned that the stone circle was a popular place for locals, particularly the amorous youth, and Dee was relatively certain that the branch that meandered off to her left would take her in the direction of the village Auntie had indicated. As she took her first step, however, the cries of the crows burst over her—for a moment, she feared that she had strayed too close to a nest and that they would swoop down to drive her away. Heart pounding, she moved back toward the gate. To her relief, the crows quieted. That decided it. She began walking as briskly as she could on the uneven, overgrown path toward the heart of the forest. - -“You’ve got Scottish blood,” the old lady had stated, her sharp eyes taking in Dee’s hair and face and complexion. “You could be mine own granddaughter.” - -“Dee’s family originated here in the Hebrides,” Brad had told Auntie proudly, as though the old woman herself were not rooted in such places. “But you know how it was,” he went on, pausing significantly. “The Clearances…” - -The old woman had nodded, her smile tolerant. Clearly, she was used to tourists coming in search of connections to a long-lost homeland. Neither seemed to notice how powerfully her words had struck Dee, calling her back into the past. - -Dee’s curiosity about her heritage had been dampened long ago by memories of her grandmother and mother arguing about how much or how little the ancient past mattered when one was struggling to keep a roof over one’s head *right now*. The pressing needs of the present had always taken priority over what her mother had considered flights of fancy. Her grandmother had raged at that phrase, “flights of fancy,” insisting to the last on the urgency of remembering. Dee felt long forgotten memories stirring as she stepped deeper into the untouched woods. From the depths of the past, a rhyme surfaced: - -*Never chase the fox’s fire, \ -Always greet the crows, \ -Beware the wily messenger, \ -With dread approach the stones.* - -There was more—but she couldn’t remember it. Her grandmother had tried to teach Dee the poems and stories she had learned from her own grandmother, and had bitterly lamented Dee’s refusal to learn them in their original Gaelic. - -“Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh, a ghràidh?” her grandmother had greeted her every morning. *How are you, my dear one?* Dee always refused to answer, insisting that she couldn’t understand, and her grandmother would sigh. “You are too stubborn for your own good! Just like your mother.” - -“*You’re* the stubborn one,” Dee would tell the old woman, her voice echoing the irritable, world-weary tones of her own mother. “Can’t you just let it go?” And Dee would complete the imitation by shaking a finger at the old woman. They would laugh, and the moment would pass. But on the final day, the last time she’d seen her grandmother, the old lady had taken her hand and spoken with quiet insistence. - -“My dear one, mine own. The language, the stories, are in your blood and bones, whether you like it or not. Someday you may have cause to remember that. I pray it will all be for the best.” She’d sighed and squeezed Dee’s hand. “O Uill… Dè ghabhas dèanamh?” *Oh well, what can you do?* - -Dee remembered these words with pain, uttered the Gaelic phrase aloud for the first time in two decades. The words, spoken barely above a whisper, weighed heavily in the air. How well it encapsulated her life in its entirety. - -The argument had been an old one. Dee remembered the first time she had become aware of it—creeping downstairs late at night, seeking comfort after a bad dream, but stopping and listening when she heard raised voices. “But why would you name her after one of the Folk?” - -“First of all, Mother, you know that’s complete nonsense,” her own mother had scoffed. “I thought you would love that I’d named her after one of your stories. And second, I don’t remember ever reading anything that said *she* was one of the Fae.” - -“You wouldn’t have,” her grandmother had retorted, “most of those stories weren’t written down. Her father was a harper for the Folk. She was taken from them when a Druid prophesied that her beauty would result in the deaths of warriors and kings.” - -“That’s the story of Helen of Troy.” Her mother’s laughter had become forced, impatient. “Now, finish your dram and let’s call it a night.” Her grandmother had muttered something too quietly for Dee to hear. She wished she could have seen her mother’s face but, whatever the expression, those muttered syllables had resulted in the old woman being sent to bed as unceremoniously as Dee herself when she was discovered eavesdropping. - -Dee chuckled—she could picture herself as a skinny child, shivering on the stairs, all scraped knees and wide eyes and big ears. She had loved her grandmother’s stories, then. It was only later, when her friends at school disabused her of her belief in fairy tales, that she came to resent the stories as her mother did. But before the children’s mockery had changed her, the world had been full of wonder—if you knew how to see it. She and her grandmother had known. - -As she walked and remembered, the timbre of the crows’ jeers changed. Now, she would swear they seemed almost welcoming. The shadows deepened. She sloughed off the cares she had brought with her like a skin. - -The underbrush grew thicker. A thorn scratched a long thin line across her arm. Three scarlet drops welled. *It’s in your blood and bones*. How she had blamed the old woman for planting that seed. Nothing could uproot it—not her mother’s sarcasm, nor her classmates’ casual cruelty, nor her own attempts to do everything correctly, to achieve those things that her mother promised would bring happiness. *An education, a job, a husband, a home*. Instead of happiness, she had reaped only frustration, and a loneliness that nothing in this world could salve. - -Still she walked, pushing back branches that snagged her hair and her clothes. She looked up at the sky, but she couldn’t see the sun through the thick canopy. She wasn’t sure how long she had been walking—it felt like no time at all, surely not much more than half an hour, but already the daylight seemed to be fading. The thought that she should turn back flickered through her mind, but now she was committed. *Too stubborn for your own good*, she thought. - -So she pushed on, breathing the scent of cranberries and promising to turn around if she didn’t find the circle in five minutes. In ten minutes. Fifteen minutes, tops. - -She burst out of the trees into a clearing just as she meant to surrender to the pull of the life she had temporarily relinquished. She looked again for the sun to gauge the time, but the sky was hazy and distant, the texture of the light unfamiliar. For the first time, she felt unease. Still, she did not turn back. - -There were three ancient stones—broken, irregularly spaced, low to the ground. Not the circle that Auntie had mentioned at all. This appeared to be something else entirely. A hearth, perhaps. Maybe a well. She took an eager step forward, then hesitated. Her grandmother’s warnings about carelessly wandering into places of power brushed her mind like black wings. Even from a distance of several metres, she imagined she could feel the cold breath of the ages pouring out of the ruins. She took another step, startled as a murder of crows launched into the sky. She watched it go, and rued her own earthbound state. - -When her gaze again turned to the toppled stones, she was startled to find a large crow standing before her. She stared at it, thought to shoo it away, but it held her with a glittering eye. *If this were one of Gram’s stories*, she thought, *I’d introduce myself to this crow, and he would teach me his secrets.* Her throat tightened as she swallowed the wanting that had haunted her all her life. - -Feeling foolish, Dee dropped a clumsy curtsey and bowed her head to the crow. - -“My grandmother sends her greetings, Master Crow,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, pretending she was making a joke. “Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh, a ghràidh?” - -The crow said nothing for a moment, then croaked once and hopped closer to her. A flurry of feathers disturbed the air behind her as the murder resumed their front-row seats around the clearing. - -“It is truly a pleasure to meet you, my dear sir,” Dee told him, thrilled by his approach and hamming it up for their audience. “I hope you don’t mind if I call you Crow—I’ve not yet mastered your elegant tongue.” She curtsied again. - -Another croak, another hop. - -“Who am I?” she asked, delighting in the game. “Why, I’m Dee!” - -The crow froze as the murder began shouting their derision, then turned his back on her. He gurgled deep in his throat, silencing the others. He seemed poised to fly. - -“Wait! Master Crow! Let us play a little longer!” If the crow abandoned her, she would follow the path back to the loves and regrets that would even now be waiting for her. “Don’t go! Please, how have I offended?” The crow gave no sign that he had heard her. - -“What did I say? My name… was it my name?” Dee took a step closer, then backed away as the crow shuddered. Again, the flutter of dark wings in her mind. A warning. “Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself properly. I’m Deirdre. Deirdre is my name.” - -The murder exploded into the air, their cacophony drowning out the entire world. The crow turned and drew closer, its eye glittering with fierce delight. *Deirdre*. Her name floated on the wind. For the first time, she felt its power resonate in the core of her being. *Deirdre.* - -Unbidden, unstoppable, her hands stretched toward the crow, which hopped fitfully first on one foot then the other. *Never chase the fox's fire.* Fingers lengthened, hands floated of their own accord toward the sky. *Always greet the crows.* Eyes rolled back into the skull, which elongated to form a strong, perfect point. *Beware the wily messenger.* Black wings unfurled and stretched, casting shadows across the clearing. *With dread approach the stones.* - -Two crows launched themselves into the sky and were gone. - -“*Deirdre*,” the forest whispered. “*A ghràidh*. *Mine own*.” - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Mine Own" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138449241409410).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Snow Over Interstate 80.md b/content/issue-24/Snow Over Interstate 80.md deleted file mode 100644 index 14f9e83d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Snow Over Interstate 80.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,233 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Snow Over Interstate 80" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- fantasy -- crime -authors: -- Martin M. Clark -copyright: '© Martin M. Clark 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Martin Clark has been contributing to Mythaxis Magazine since 2010, with and without the \"M\". Twenty-eight pieces have appeared in that time, invariably featuring a variety of hard-bitten heroes and villains locked in conflict, so why not one more for his anniversary? We weren\'t really looking for seasonally themed pieces for the issue, but you have to make an exception when the right someone's nipping at your nose." - -morelink: 'Oh what fun it is to ride...' - -image: images/SnowOverI80.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Mengliu Di](https://www.pexels.com/photo/lonely-car-driving-along-smooth-asphalt-road-4179266/) and [Julia Volk](https://www.pexels.com/photo/asphalt-road-through-snowy-mountainous-terrain-5110937/)." - -type: stock -slug: snow-over-interstate-80 -weight: 8 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} drove the Boss-9 while Winston rode shotgun, feeding shells into his Winchester M97. His nose was broken and there was dried blood down his beard and front. I was sporting two banged-up ribs and a wraparound bruise the size of Jersey. - -It was Christmas Eve. - -Man, was it *ever*. - -There was a *rak-rak* as the erstwhile drummer loaded a shell into the breech. He sure likes his 12-gauge, does Mister Winston. Me, I had my .455 Webley, a real antique from an era before smart ammunition, when ‘stopping power’ meant putting as big a hole as possible in your enemy. - -You might think the two of us made for unlikely partners. I mean, I’m Jack Frost, the Iceman, the proverbial loner—and Winston, for all his bonhomie, wasn’t exactly big on friends who’d return his calls. So, yeah, it was a marriage of inconvenience, something we’d just have to live with. - -The truth was I needed him more than he needed me. A while back I’d ended up on Santa’s Naughty List. Bad things happen to those on the Naughty List, and this particular Bad Thing was out for blood. - -The trick is to stay one step ahead until you make amends, until you become the proverbial reformed character, someone Jiminy Cricket would be proud to call ‘pal’. Well, I’d tried that, I’d tried being a good little boy—inserting myself into every saccharine-sweet tale going. Wonderland is where stories live on, if enough people believe in them, and was thus a target-rich environment when it comes to heart-warming schmaltz. So, I’d bought the entire stock from a freezing match girl, kept a robin warm under my coat, even left anonymous gifts on doorsteps—none of it mattered a damn. - -As I couldn’t use the classics to make amends then it was time to get up-close and personal with later fiction. Old-school fairy-tales—take anything by Hans Christian Andersen—are pretty much set in stone. Sure, you can lurk around the edges, tweak the details for fun and profit, but they contain few surprises. More recent stories are more fluid, made malleable by enthusiastic readers with little thought for those of us who have to suffer the consequences. Hell, even Bill Sykes has his devotees, and he is one man you do *not* want to tangle with, believe me. - -So, I’d been moping around Wonderland, feeling sorry for myself, when a little bird told me to try song lyrics. - - - -{{}}I{{}} glared at the robin, startled out of my gloomy reverie. “Since when do *you* talk?” - -Wonderland sounds like it's going to be, well, wonderful , but if you've been paying attention to all the stories from your childhood, half the creatures in it are often having a pretty bad time. Feathered smartarses aren't necessarily a help. Sometimes they're responsible. - -This one fluttered his wings, gesturing at our surroundings. “You’re Jack Frost, fairy-tale character turned hitman, taking a walk in the snow-covered pine woods behind Uncle Tom’s cabin, and you’re querying me about *realism*?” - -“Point taken.” I frowned. “But song lyrics? How do they qualify as classical *anything*, let alone literature?” - -The robin hopped down a couple of branches. “Bob Dylan. The man is *way* more than he seems, a troubled troubadour of his time. Oh, as a performer he’s a nasal whine in search of a key, but as a lyricist he’s point-man for a whole bunch of narrative imperatives.” - -“Screw that!” I tried to shy away, stumbled, and fell on my ass in the snow. - -Robin snickered. “Aw, the big, bad Iceman scared of an ickle-bitty plot device?” - -“Damn straight. If one gets hold of you then it’s *sayonara*, free-will. I’m Jack, *all* the Jacks, so I know what it’s like when you *have* to kill.” I may keep him stamped down, chained in the metaphorical dungeon, but I know he’s there, The Ripper, lurking at the back of my mind. - -I struggled to my feet and brushed powdery snow from my overcoat. “Gimme a Plan B, bird-brain.” - -“I’m telling ya, Jackie-boy, we’re talking primo situational angst here. Resolving one of the schnozmeister’s situations will bury that Bad Thing under a ton of good karma. Trust me, I’m a robin.” - -There was a long pause. Snow continued to fall. There was a chill in the air that made even me shiver, and it wasn’t all down to the weather. - -I sniffed. “Tell me more.” - - - -{{}}S{{}}o, there I was, hooked up with Winston Watson, trying to save his squeeze Arabella from freezing to death out on Interstate 80. Man, the gig tasted sour from the get-go, like ashes and milk. I couldn’t break free of Christmas Eve and it was starting to get on my nerves. I’d already smashed the radio for one-too-many renditions of ‘Jingle Bells’ and gotten us into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a bunch of Elves when we stopped for gas in Des Moines. Turned out they were Hawkeyes collecting for charity and not in the mood to take my bad-tempered shit. Well, lesson learned. - -I flexed my hands on the wheel. “What’s she driving again?” - -Winston dabbed gingerly at his nose with a Kleenex. “Sixty-nine Chevy with a three-ninety-six, fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor. I know that’s a lot of muscle for a broad, but she can handle it.” - -“Uh-huh.” That’s the trouble with lyrics: open the door to one set and a whole other bunch try to squeeze in as well. If this carried on we’d end up getting roasted by Puff the Magic Dragon. I peered through the windshield where the blades were making heavy weather (no pun intended) of the driving snow. “And what was wrong with her calling a tow-truck?” - -“A tow-truck on Christmas Eve, costing *how* much? Anyway, she don’t need no damn tow-truck. It’ll be the carburettor, it’s always the damn carburettor. Just needs a little of that old Winston magic.” - -“Meaning she sweet-talked you out on a night like this, rather than spend good money?” - -He glared at me. “As I remember you *offered* to ride along, man. Anyway, she said a couple of the locals had done a drive-by. If she leaves that rig by the side of the road they’ll strip it bare by morning, Christmas or no Christmas.” - -“This Arabella, sure sounds like she knows the value of a dollar. No offence.” - -“None taken. Yeah, ever since I’ve known her…” Winston trailed off. He twisted slightly in his seat to see me better, finger around the trigger of his shotgun, “Say again, how is it *we* know each other?” - -I laughed and shook my head. “Jeez, that blow to the head must have hit harder than we thought. Our mutual friend, Winston, remember?” - -The confusion in his eyes was obvious but he nodded, slowly. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry, man, for a moment there… never mind.” - -We drove on in silence for a while. Winston wiped at the side window. “That’s eight-mile. Start looking for the Chevy. It’s cherry-red, should stand out even in this—hey, you hear that?” - -Part of me knew that if I denied it strongly enough it wouldn’t be real. “Hear what?” - -He licked his lips. “Like, you know, jingle bells.” - -“You high, my man?” I managed a grin although my scalp was tight with fear. “What’s this, Santa Claus is coming to town?” - -Winston squirmed in his seat. “Yeah, well—” Something *swooshed* low overhead, making us both duck. He squashed his face against the glass, trying to peer out and up. “You see that? What the hell *is* it?” - -I gripped the wheel. “Nothing, man, *nothing*. You’re just wiz and got me spooked as well. Look, up ahead, that sure looks like a red Chevy.” - -Thankfully Arabella had been on the way to drop off gifts when she broke down, leaving us playing catch-up. Trying to spot her on the other side of the Interstate would have been difficult, at best. I pulled in behind the other car and we both got out. - -A sting of snowflakes made me curse and shy away, blinking. That doesn’t happen to me—I’m the goddam *Iceman*—meaning there was more malice than moisture in the air. A near-anonymous figure swathed in a fur coat emerged from the Chevy. Winston and Arabella stumbled into each other’s arms, oblivious to everything else. - -I looked around, confused, my usual affinity with Winter somehow smothered by the snow. Then an 18-wheeler swept past, all spray and airhorns… - -…and it left its shadow behind. - -A Bad Thing doesn’t exist on its own. It takes what it finds in your soul and feeds on it, crafts memories into fear made manifest. And my soul is not a good place to be. - -The shadow slid across the highway to become a grey patch of snow against the banking. It shrank in on itself, darkening as it did so, a concentration of every terror and failure and hurt I’d ever experienced. - -I’m Jack Frost. For every child who’s gazed in delight at the spread of a frost fond on a window, there’s a homeless hobo freezing to death in the biting cold. I don’t make the rules and sure as hell can’t appeal the decisions. All I can do is be there, for the good times and bad. - -This was not a good time. - -The Bad Thing drew itself up, like the melting of a grey snowman but in reverse. I clawed for my gun, fighting it free from the folds of cloth. The slick gunmetal glittered with frost, an extension of my very being. - -The snowman sprouted distinct arms, legs, head. A mouth. “You think yourself so clever, don’t you, Jackie-boy? The arrogance of endurance in an age where retrieval has replaced memory. Well, we both remember what you’re *really* like, don’t we?” - -I aimed my revolver—the only gun fired during the Christmas truce on the Western Front, 1914. That kind of provenance gives a weapon power, it makes it more real, and ‘real’ was all I had. “So I killed Santa,” I snapped, “what about it?” - -“Three times, by my reckoning.” - -“Two times, three, it doesn’t matter. You can’t kill an idea, and that’s what he is, the wellspring of kindness and generosity. All I did was take down a version that was a little tired, a little stale, so that he could be made anew.” - -The grey apparition laughed, if you can imagine a laugh that was the antithesis of mirth. “Oh Death, where is thy sting?” It stepped towards me, leaving bloody footsteps in the snow. A long sliver of ice extended from its right arm. “Well, let’s find out, shall we?” - -The Webley roared, punching a hole the size of your fist clean through the snowman’s chest—only for it to close up immediately. I switched aim and blew the right arm off at the elbow. The snowman paused while his severed limb dissolved into a grey stain, which flowed over to rejoin the main body. A fresh forearm sprouted, complete with ice blade extension. - -His tone was mocking. “Tedious, Jack, tedious. You want to blow a few more limbs off, get it over with? We both know how this is gonna end. You can’t escape Wonderland, Jack, although you try *so* hard. You can’t escape how you’re written. I’m the hurt, the fear, the darkness on the edge of town, and I’m here to reclaim you.” - -There was the crunch of footsteps in the snow beside me and Winston raised his shotgun. “What the hell is *he* doing here?” - -I licked my lips. “Winston, what is it you see?” - -“Huh? That’s Lonnie, Lonnie Rae. Bastard used to kick my ass back in the day, him and his brothers. What’s going on?” - -The Lonnie Rae Snowman laughed. “Everyone has a past, Jack, a backstory. Even those drawn from a song sheet. He can no more escape his fate than—” - -Three candy-stripe sugar canes speared his right arm and shoulder. Where they struck, the grey snow sizzled. A shadow swept overhead and I caught a flash of red, a waft of sweaty animal, the jingle of bells. The snowman hissed—pure venom given voice—and plucked the makeshift missiles from his body. - -Santa Claus dropped from the sky to land beside me in a 3-point superhero stance, kicking up a flurry of snow. I swear I’ve never been so happy to see the fat man before or since. He straightened up slowly and pointed at my nemesis. “I knew it was a mistake using you and this time you’ve gone too far, *way* too far. Be gone, Boogieman!” - -The grey snow swirled as if caught in a mini-twister, then resolved into a grinning gargoyle, with glowing red coals for eyes. “One name amongst many, Claus. One name amongst many. You might as well call me ‘Hate’ and have done with it.” - -“I’ll call you anything you choose. But you go no further, not this night.” - -“What, you thought that I wouldn’t dare show my face on Christmas Eve? Well, all the joy you bring to the world has to be paid for, it has to be balanced out. And I’m here to collect, starting with Jack.” - -Despite the situation, I felt a curious detachment. Our surroundings suddenly seemed cramped, hemmed in, as if we were inside a giant snow globe. - -No, not a snow globe—a *dream*. - -A figure appeared out of the blizzard, behind the gargoyle. It was a girl, a young woman, in blue silk pyjamas, twirling a walking stick in the manner of an oversized baton. I grinned, I laughed out loud, I lowered my gun. - -The woman seized the cane in both hands, twisted the top, and unsheathed a long, glittering blade. She raised the swordstick above her head in a stance that would have graced a samurai master. “Hey, Mister!” - -Hate turned towards her, slowly. When he spoke, the term ‘baleful’ didn’t even come close. “You cannot threaten *me*, a force of nature.” - -“I’m Carole Greola, I’m fifteen.” She swung the blade, “And I can do what the *fuck* I like, in *my* dream.” - -Her blow bisected Hate with a sound like fingernails on a blackboard. For a moment the two halves stood there, their interior faces revealed as a mass of writhing red worms. Then the sound and shadow of a fuel tanker swept by, although the vehicle itself remained indistinct, and when it was gone… - -…the snow where the apparition had stood was once again deep and crisp and even. - -The blizzard died away, like someone had turned off a wind machine. I sensed an absence at my shoulder and looked around—Winston, Arabella, both cars, all gone. Interstate 80 was an empty expanse of blacktop, a straight line between Nowhere and Someplace Else. - -Santa sniffed. “I had that covered, you know. It was all under control.” - -Carole slid the blade back into its housing and stepped forward. “Yeah, right. Just make sure my letter goes to the top of the pile and we’ll call it even. Deal?” - -He laughed, the proverbial *Ho-Ho-Ho*. “Deal. Although part of me is surprised someone of your age still believes in me. I guess any friend of Jack’s has to have a vivid imagination.” - -“I prefer to call it the art of the possible, sir.” - -The sleigh swept down in a flurry of hooves, striking sparks from the roadway. The elves jeered, blew raspberries, and I swear one mooned me as Santa climbed aboard. He regarded me in what was obviously his stern face. “Take care not to read too much into this, Jack. We’ll never be friends, but you’ll understand that abomination couldn’t be tolerated. Not tonight, not ever, and for setting it loose you have my apologies.” - -I grinned and put my gun away. “I’d settle for a new diamond tie pin. I gave the other one away to some homeless orphan or another.” - -“I don’t think saving a starving streetwalker is in *quite* the same category, given the, ah, *commercial* nature of your relationship, but at least you came out behind on the deal, which is the important part. Now, I must be off—people to see, places to visit and all that. I’d offer you a ride but neither of you really need one, given where we are.” - -Carole waved and I tipped my hat as the sleigh lumbered into the air and was rapidly lost from view amongst the low clouds. There was an awkward silence. - -I cleared my throat. “So…” - -“Yeah, good to see you too.” - -“That whole twirling thing. Cheerleading?” - -“In my dreams.” She smiled. “Literally. My hand-eye coordination sucks. When I’m awake.” - -“Uh-huh. Glad you kept the swordstick.” - -“I hide it in a hollow curtain rail during the day, sleep with it under my pillow. When I dream *nobody* messes with me.” Carole frowned. “Those other people, the cars, I know things come and go in here, but that felt different somehow. Like it was out of my control.” - -“They’re called ‘narrative imperatives’. Not so much a shove in the right direction as a kick in the ass.” - -“Santa trying to show you the error of your ways?” - -“It started out like that, but, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t think either of us expected to meet anything coming in the other direction.” - -She laughed, an adult laugh rather than childish giggle. “You’re what my mum would call ‘trouble’, aren’t you, Jack?” - -“I’ll have you know the term is ‘mischievous’, young lady. It’s the way I was written, it’s the way I’m remembered, it’s the way that I am. Now *you*, on the other hand, seem to have morphed into some bad-ass angel of vengeance since last we met. Not that I’m complaining, you understand, but setting yourself apart can be a lonely road.” - -“I have *this*—” Carole gestured with the swordstick “—to remind me I’ll always have a friend. At least in my dreams. Speaking of which…” - -I smiled. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Directed interactions are the stuff of monumental headaches, so don’t put up with this on my account.” - -Carole stepped up and kissed my cheek. “Merry Christmas, Jack Frost.” - -And she was gone. - -Her dream started to bleed back into the ‘real’ storyline of Snow Over Interstate 80, but I no longer needed it. I spun in a swirl of coat-tails… - -…to stand once again amidst the pine woods close to Uncle Tom’s cabin. - -The robin was perched on an overhead branch. “Have fun, did we?” Before I could answer he darted away in a flurry of wings, dislodging a smattering of snow to dust my hat and shoulders. And something else, something heavier that dropped onto the brim with a loud *pat*. - -I removed my hat, half-expecting the little bastard to have shit on me. Instead I found a silver tie pin with a diamond head. It glittered in the half-light of the snow-covered forest, as bright as any star. Somewhere ahead of me a town clock began to strike—it was midnight. - -Christmas Day. - -One of the good ones. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Snow Over Interstate 80" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138442444743423).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Spring Man.md b/content/issue-24/Spring Man.md deleted file mode 100644 index e563cc92..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Spring Man.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,146 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Spring Man" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Fabiyas M. V. -copyright: '© Fabiyas M. V. 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "When we first read Fabiyas M. V.\'s submission, we didn\'t know quite what to make of it... other than \"a definite purchase\"! Another piece with distinctive voice, it tells its story with the same blunt directness we find boasted by its unexpected hero, but one which veils a thread of sly humour, right up to the final line." - -morelink: 'There! At the window!' - -image: images/SpringMan.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Mark Barrison](https://www.flickr.com/photos/barrison/4354201147/), [The Living Room](https://www.flickr.com/photos/thelivingroominkenmore/5287430988/), and [suriya.nathan](https://www.pexels.com/photo/nature-sky-sunset-sunny-5712887/)." - -type: stock -slug: spring-man -weight: 10 ---- - -{{}}A{{}} ghastly silence prevails in the village after the sunset. Not only Manayur village, the whole country has been locked down to combat the coronavirus. - -Hashmi puts on her new white sari with black blossoms. A silk sari cannot alter her body, but it multiplies her charms. She has no way to flit with her cronies, wearing the new dress. She feels a kind of narcissistic admiration before her vanity table. - -With a sudden shudder, her gaze strays across the mirror. Being a scorching summer, at least one of her bedroom windows is always open. Through the sari-gap, her crescent stomach reflects in the mirror… but just above her shoulder, a pair of strange eyes and a long protruding nose at the window! - -Hashmi turns back, shrieking. - -Hashmi’s brother, a sinewy young man, darts along the dirt road with a bamboo stick in his hand. His friends, and an old man too, from the neighborhood follow him. Flashlights create chinks in the darkness. Forgetting the rules of the lockdown, they search in wells, thickets, the old deserted house… but it’s a wild goose chase. - -Hashmi’s brother comes back, panting. *Yeah… I saw… a dark tall… APPARITION!* - -Soon the police come and disperse the crowd. They don’t believe Hashmi’s brother’s words. *An apparition is an illusion, like the moon rabbit.* - -They threaten to beat the people unless they return to stay at home. - - - -{{}}T{{}}he next night, ten-year-old Sanu is watching a Malayalam movie on the TV in her living room when someone knocks on the door. Getting up from the sofa, she goes to open the door. No one is waiting outside. Rubbing her eyes, she peers into the darkness. - -Ten minutes later, Sanu’s mother screeches. The door stands open, and her daughter lies unconscious with her legs across the threshold. She carries Sanu from the floor to the sofa, music and the sound of anklets still dancing from the TV. - -*What’s going on there?* Sanu’s dad, who is trying to cool his body off, squawks from the bathroom. - -With tears and fear, Sanu’s mother sprinkles water on her girl’s face. Sanu remains still, but after what seems a thousand seconds she regains her consciousness. She claims she had seen a thin, Stygian shape, leaping from one areca palm to the next in the grove beside their house. - - - - - -{{}}N{{}}ext, a child wakes up with sweat on his forehead and around his neck. *Ma… ma… clinking of chains… Spring Man passes by…* - -All are on pins and needles, even though nobody has reported this Spring Man’s atrocities. - -Gradually the police come to suspect that there is some truth in the story about the Spring Man, spreading through the region like another epidemic. A police officer in khaki uniform warns people on TV: - -*The Spring Man has supernatural powers. He can run at the speed of a cheetah, and leap easily like a monkey from one tree to another. He is about seven feet high with sooty skin. His visage is unclear, albeit he has two lustrous eyes and a nose like the beak of a black-headed ibis*. - - - -{{}}G{{}}enerally, this coastal area throbs with life until midnight or even beyond that. But the restrictions of pandemic time empty roads and streets by nightfall. So the air is apt for the Spring Man to run wild. - -A video goes viral, frightening the rustics: the Spring Man caught by a CCTV camera. He walks in the street light, carrying something on his shoulder. A lean tall figure. Half-naked. - -There are many coolies from Bengal in Manayur village. Being confined to the labor camp, some sleep most of the time, but many of them are restless. The police, under much pressure, take the tallest of them into custody. - - - -{{}}J{{}}oshu, a security guard of the State Bank of India at Chava, opens the back door of his house to hang his washed uniform on the clothes line in the back yard. Someone is there. - -*Who’s this?* Joshu cries. - -This stranger is very tall indeed. As black as soot. Long-legged like a giraffe. Only his fiery eyes and enormous nose are visible. He stands near the old well. Just a quick leap, and he lands on the top of the house! - -*Spring Man… SPRING MAN!* - -As Joshu cries aloud, Spring Man leaps and lands on a branch of the nearest sapodilla. In seconds he disappears into the dark. Joshu is like a statue, frozen in fright. - - - -{{}}A{{}}s usual, the police search in vain. Next morning, they let off the tallest Bengali from their custody. - - - -{{}}A{{}} whole lot of people in the area are very superstitious. They readily believe that Spring Man is a ghostly creature who comes to haunt them from the grave. - -But there is one dauntless, learned man, who has written two detective novels, in the village. He never hesitates to tell people that all their traditional rituals are nonsensical. He even corrects their concept of god. According to him, God is the one and only invisible, omnipotent, and creative force permeating the whole universe. His fellow men loathe his views. - -Unfortunately, his name, Velanji, is little known in the literary world. - -Velanji cogitates about the Spring Man. *What the hell does he gain, frightening people?* *How could he escape so easily?* Velanji wishes the Spring Man would come to his house. - -Pacing up and down in his study, Velanji rules out the presence of a ghost. *Then who is the mysterious creature? A superman from an unknown planet? No, never.* Velanji is a rationalist to the core. He conjectures that it may be a rowdy boy, or more specifically a young man, bored of the lockdown, who creates the trouble. A drug addict or a maniac. - -Or it may be someone playing Blue Whale, an internet game involving a series of tasks that end in suicide. Velanji slumps down in his cane chair under the weight of speculations. Yet his thought-producing machine works on… - -And what about the supernatural athleticism? Velanji reads as well as writes, he has heard about the Marvelous Spring Jackboot, a rare modern product, wearing which, one can leap too high and run so fast. Not to be made in these surroundings, but a person might have bought a pair online from some foreign country. Far more plausible than some night monster! - -Neglecting his wife’s warnings, Velanji sets out with an iron bar in his right hand and a jack knife in the pocket of his pants. He searches high and low for the Spring Man, but in vain. - - - -{{}}T{{}}he lockdown period is likely to end shortly. Velanji gets up once or twice at night – either to pass urine or drink water. He is a diabetic patient. As usual, he comes out of the bathroom at midnight. It’s muggy, maybe due to rain clouds, and too uncomfortable to sleep, even under the fan. - -Leaves are still outside. Even crickets are silent. Summer rain may come soon. Then a terrible noise breaks the quiet. It’s a kind of howling never heard before. - -*Oh, what’s that sound?* Velanji looks out of the window, startled. *A wild animal near my house?* - -He remains stock-still, while his eyes fumble with the dark night. *What’s that shape?* A sudden fear jerks his mind. A figure lurks near the henna shrubs, forty meters away from his windowsill. *Who’s that at this time of night?* - -Velanji comes downstairs. Without disturbing his family, who are fast asleep, he takes his iron bar and the jack knife, opens the front door silently, and then walks across the grass to the henna shrubs. - -Through gaps of the henna twigs, he watches the half-naked figure, in black shorts, sitting on the sugar sand with his legs stretched. He is smoking a cannabis beedi, looking up at the sky. Velanji waits, holding his breath. The stranger coughs. A dry cough. Then the moon emerges out of the clouds, unveiling the identity of the stranger. - -*My Gosh! Aap!* Velanji whispers softly. - -Velanji sees a black burqa, specially altered, *and a pair of uncommon boots*, beside him. - -*Aha*, thinks Velanji. - -After tossing the beedi stub, Aap puts on his Spring Jackboots and the burqa. No shirt. Slowly getting up, he walks like a rooster in the moonlight. Velanji follows him stealthily. - -The infamous Aap is an addict of hashish and arrack. Few people know his original name is Sharaf. Aap came to Manayur with his uncle at the age of five. His parents in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu had been killed in a communal riot. His widower uncle was a mason. - -The unexpected demise of his uncle, when Aap was in the tenth standard at Govt High School Manathala, rocked the boat. Aap had to leave school to keep his head above water. He became an apprentice in an automobile workshop, but before long he was trapped in the bad company of the village. His hut on the bank of Kanoli canal became the evil hub of the village, where he and his delinquent friends gambled, watched porn videos, jacked up… - -Opening a wooden gate, Aap enters the front yard of an auto rickshaw driver’s house. He rings the doorbell, rousing the driver and his family from their sound sleep. Just before the door opens, Aap darts back to the gate. - -Which is when Velanji, who is hiding behind the nearby coconut palm, comes forward with enthusiastic pace and strikes him a heavy blow on the head with the iron bar in his hand. The Spring Man falls down with a thud. - - - -*{{}}G{{}}ood afternoon, friends!* the Circle Inspector of Police begins his speech. *We’ve gathered here to honor our hero, Velanji.* - -*Maniacs and drug addicts are everywhere in the modern world. At any time, they may come through layers of darkness. They are fond of fantasy, insane adventures and sadistic pleasures. These antisocial elements are cancerous in our society. We, the Police, are sometimes helpless. Today’s world needs valiant men like Velanji…* - -Velanji sits on the dais with pride as huge as the Himalayas. *Ways of honor are diverse, and it often comes out of the blue*, he muses, and smiles at the audience. - -He always cherished the dream of winning a literary award. But even if he won the Man Booker Prize, he wouldn’t get this much applause from his fellow men, who rarely read books. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Spring Man" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138439474743720).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Stranded at the Station.md b/content/issue-24/Stranded at the Station.md deleted file mode 100644 index ef9bb6be..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Stranded at the Station.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,224 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Stranded at the Station" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Trisha McKee -copyright: '© Trisha McKee 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Romance fiction isn\'t always the first thing associated with the speculative genres, but there are many fine examples in which the two are well-wedded, and it is surely inarguable that there is nothing in human experience to compare with beginning a new relationship for the sensation of leaping into the unknown. Trisha McKee presents exactly such a case, of two people reaching out towards each other and finding something far from understood." - -morelink: 'Someone is coming' - -image: images/StrandedStation.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Pawel L.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/reflection-of-buildings-on-body-of-water-1121782/), [Daria Shevtsova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-short-sleeved-dress-holding-brown-leather-suitcase-1071078/), [Sebastian Voortman](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-standing-in-the-middle-of-empty-road-663455/), and [Travis Rupert](https://www.pexels.com/photo/scenic-view-of-ocean-during-sunset-1032650/)." - -type: stock -slug: stranded-station -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}B{{}}etty walked slowly, measuring each step as she took in her surroundings. There were train tracks, a platform full of people avoiding eye contact and shuffling their feet, and large hotels surrounding the station. - -Despite the crowd, there was no noise. No conversations, no murmurs, not even a whisper. Nobody wanted to be noticed. Some people’s eyes were bright, and their lips curved up as they stretched forward, waiting for the train to arrive. Others had scrunched up shoulders and creased faces. But all of them were watching and waiting. - -Betty tried not to study them too hard. She did not want to see anyone she knew. She did not want that type of knowledge weighing on her. Or have anyone recognize her. - -The air was different here, thicker, hazy, with a fragrant odor to it. It was as if she were looking through foggy waves, seeing everyone through a distorted lense. She wondered if this was to keep things more discreet, make it harder to casually spy. - -As the minutes ticked by, Betty considered turning and leaving. She had never done anything like this before. Many people felt this was not wrong, that it did not count. This place provided a free pass to follow desires and curiosities. Because this was not entirely real, not something that would remain. But Betty felt torn. This certainly felt wrong. - -But she thought about the train arriving, and no one there to greet him, and her stomach plummeted. That would not be fair. It was not an easy trip. It was long, and hard on the body. People that experienced the trip claimed their bones ached for hours afterwards, and exhaustion plagued them. It meant that short trips were not practical. You needed at least three days to fully enjoy a visit. - -So Neyter was coming for a four-day visit. They had not discussed what the plans were, what was expected, but Betty knew he was not coming for four days without some expectations, some thoughts on how the visit would go, and what they would do. - -And Betty was nauseous from the nerves and guilt. She knew that her live-in boyfriend Rodney had been here before. She had seen the hotel receipt. It did not bother her as much as she wanted it to. Because this was almost like some type of fantasy, a dream. If Rodney had wanted out of their relationship, he would have chosen a woman that was attainable. That could survive outside of the station. - -But she still had guilt weighing her down, adding to the almost tangible air. Yet the longer she stood on the platform, the more free she felt. Butterflies swarmed in her stomach. She noticed the beautiful golden shade of everything around her. Trees glimmered, clouds danced. There was magic in this area, that much was obvious, and it was advertised in every sense she had. - -Before the sound even registered, the train skidded to a stop in front of the platform, and people piled out. Suddenly there was noise, excited chatter and screams of delight. People embraced, men swung women around, couples held hands as they strolled toward the restaurants and hotels. It was an entire town crammed into a space meant only for a station. - -And then he was in front of her. Neyter. She had seen his pictures, had video chatted him a few times, so his appearance was no surprise. He was tall and a bit overweight, long, black hair, black clothing. He was what her dimension called *gothic*. - -They had gotten to know each other through some online artist groups that welcomed both dimensions. He was funny and encouraging, they indulged in long talks about their art, and she felt she finally had someone that not only listened, but understood. - -But standing in front of him, she was paralyzed with an awkwardness, and it was evident he felt the same discomfort. He shuffled his feet, widened his eyes and then said, “Well, hello, Betty Belle.” - -She gave a slight smile, enjoying his accent. He stressed different syllables, drawing out the Ss and Ls. He spoke fast and yet the words stretched. He ended each sentence in a higher note, as if it were a question, and it was unlike anything she had heard. The first time they had chatted via video, she had been mesmerized by his voice. And now it was a small bite of familiarity, pushing back the awkwardness just enough. - -“How are you feeling?” Betty asked, ducking her head and taking a step back. - -Neyter shrugged but then shut his eyes with a long sigh. “Exhausted. Sore.” - -“So let’s get you settled in at the hotel. You can rest. And I’ll come back in a few hours to check on you. Today will probably be all about resting. I’ll bring you some food.” - -He agreed, and before she even left his hotel room, he was snoring on his bed. - -That evening, she stopped in the restaurant and studied the menu. There were two parts - this world and his world. The other dimension. Foods she had not heard of, combinations she never would have considered trying. She blindly chose a few items from his menu and then took the food to his room, knocking lightly. - -Neyter answered after a few minutes, his long hair disheveled, his eyes framed by puffy skin. “Damn. I never woke up.” - -“I figured. I got you some dinner. I wasn’t sure… I guessed.” - -He peeked in the bag and grinned. “Roasted crackling shells. Oooh, and reddened pipes. Thank you!” He glanced up. “Are you going to share with me?” When she glanced down and shook her head, he made a sound. “Feeling strange?” - -Betty finally met his gaze. “Yes. You should be the one feeling strange. You traveled. But… I just…” - -He stepped toward her, his hand warm as it landed on her upper arm. “It’s a lot. Why don’t you go home and come back in the morning. Get your footing. I should be fully rested by then.” - -She did as he suggested, grateful she was going back to an empty apartment. Rodney was away on a business trip, so she could stew in her own thoughts, her own hesitancy in going through with the next few days. - -But as she listened to music and worked on her latest painting, Betty started to feel a bit better about the situation. Neyter was a friend. They were merely visiting. There was no pressure for anything else. And he would have to eventually return to his dimension. - -There were those that took that chance, to live in this world after leaving their own. Some even ventured out of the train station area. There were hot spots everywhere, though, and no matter how familiar people were with these hot spots, one always managed to surprise them. Every few months, there would be a news story about an *other-dimension person* getting vaporized by hitting a strange hot spot. Just obliterated right there, without warning. - -It was a dangerous life, to be an other-dimension person and try to live out your days in this world. Some did it, sure, but they were few and far between. Most knew better. Most simply visited, and maybe only ventured out a town or two deep. - -She wondered if the situation were reversed, if she could travel to the other dimension, would she? Would she be brave enough to visit the other world? Betty liked to think she would, but she also knew she would not set foot past the safety of the train station. - -By the next morning, she was rejuvenated and feeling braver. She arrived at Neyter’s hotel room smiling and prepared. And he opened the door looking just as refreshed, his eyes no longer sleepy, his smile full. - -“Better?” she asked, her grin widening. - -“Yes. This is more like it.” He held out his arms. “Come here, Betty Belle. Let’s have a proper hello this time.” - -What had been intended as a hug turned into kissing, and before Betty could fully comprehend what was happening, they were in his bed. She was responding to his touches, to his whispers. He smelled of pungent body odor, his stomach slapping against hers with its excess rolls, but still, she craved him in that moment. - -She had heard about the powers of the other-dimension people. They had a pull about them, some type of charm that they did not use forcibly, did not realize was there, but it blossomed when creating an attraction with a person they wanted to be close with. - -Meeting online had felt safe. The power did not work through computer screens or phones. But they had felt a strong connection nonetheless. They bonded over art and culture, learning about the differences between their worlds, fascinated with the contrasts. - -But now, in person, she felt that physical connection. He was awake today, fully focused, and his power was clear and strong. Afterwards, she was in his arms, the power not as strong, and she blinked to keep from crying. He still stunk, his skin was pasty white, and he seemed to not realize her regret as he rambled on about how good it all had felt. - -“Like, this seems right, don’t you think?” - -Betty tried to subtly shift away, to get some air between them. “I guess. It… I was surprised by how natural it was to… yeah.” - -They went to browse the rooms the hotel provided. Rooms that were designed to bring two dimensions together. There was the music room, the movie room, and the information room. Betty and Neyter started in the information room, where they were told the main differences between their worlds, their personalities. There were differences in speech that could trip them up if they were not aware, differences in how they reacted, and differences in their general behavior. - -“I didn’t realize there was a… a pull. Was that how… is that why you slept with me? Were you under the influence of it?” - -Betty was not sure how to answer. Because Neyter was waiting for her to respond, his expression wilted. Finally, she shook her head. “I felt something. But I think it was just… you brought it out, but it was already there. You know? I think your pull enhances what is there.” - -“I never intentionally—” - -“I know, Neyter.” And she did know. He was nothing but a gentleman. Clueless at times, but he was anxious to please. Determined to make her feel comfortable. - -As they sat in front of the screen that told them more about their worlds, he shook his head. “I never noticed… you don’t have music randomly playing in the air. How do you listen to it?” - -“We play a record. We listen to the radio.” - -He shook his head. “But… what do you do when you’re walking? And you create the music? People create music? That’s odd.” - -So the next stop was the music room. She wanted to hear his music, the sounds that just played around them. And she was surprised to hear similar sounds, same styles. It was not that different. She even recognized some songs. - -They spent the night together again, and that pull was there. Betty just wished he would stop talking so much afterwards. He spoke of his world and his friends, and it was hard to stay interested in his stories when she did not know the people he spoke of. - -When she attempted to tell her own stories, he would lean forward and nod, but she knew he was merely waiting for the next pause, for the moment she stopped to take a breath, to resume speaking once again. He did not seem to fully listen. - -His humor was juvenile, bodily function sounds and funny faces, and the next day as they journeyed to the small beach beside the station, Betty tried to show her disinterest in such matters. She avoided eye contact, sighing and shaking her head. And yet he rambled on, oblivious to her discomfort. - -He finally took a break from his one-man show enough to glance around and observe, “The shore. I didn’t realize we were near the ocean.” - -Betty shook her head. “We’re not near the ocean. This is just… it’s just here. At the station.” It frustrated her that he did not realize the station was its own world and what existed here did not exist outside the balmy air. - -Her nerves were scraping the surface of her skin, and she tried not to glare at his ridiculous black clothes as they sat in the sun. She tried not to visibly flinch at his increasing stench. He was like a rotting piece of meat, sweating in the hottest spot under the sun. - -By the morning of his departure, Betty was an irritable mess, barely muttering words and hanging on to any semblance of politeness. She caught him studying her with a perplexed look, and that simply annoyed her further. How could he be confused? Did he not hear himself talking incessantly, brushing off her attempts at conversation? Did he not realize how quickly his body perspired? - -As they stood on the platform, waiting for the train that would send him back to his world, Betty found herself finally relaxing. She was about to be rid of him, free to go home and forget this awkward experience. - -“I’m going to miss you,” Neyter confessed, shyly reaching for her hand. She smiled and curled her fingers around his, just grateful this was almost over. - -“I hope you have a safe trip.” - -He gave her another one of those looks, a mix of confusion and disappointment, but she could not reassure him. She could only count the seconds until he was on that train. They stood back from the crowd, fumbling for words and agonizing over the minutes. - -The train slid into place, its clicking of the wheels and whistle of the brakes bringing the crowd alive. There were hugs and shouts of farewells as people prepared to leave, others prepared to see them off. - -Betty turned to Neyter and gave him a quick hug. “Be well,” she said, feeling silly at her words. But she was not sure what to say to this man, this guy who had been her lover over the last few days, the same one she could not wait to be rid of. - -She stood there and watched as he moved toward the train, holding her breath. She waited until his foot was on the first step, and she turned, ready to walk away, to go home and relax. - -Before she could move, ear-splitting sirens broke through the suddenly suffocating air. A robotic voice barely audible over the alarms boomed over the loudspeakers, “The portal is closing in one minute. One minute the portal is closing.” - -Suddenly, the crowd closed in around her, screaming and shoving. She found herself being pushed toward the train, and she was unable to escape. As she was moved closer to the train, she tried to scream, tried to fight through the crowd, buried beneath the yelling and pushing. She was going to get forced onto the train, and it would be all over. People from this world could not survive the trip to that one. - -Just as she was being shoved onto the train, someone grabbed her arm and pulled her hard. She tripped right into Neyter’s arms, sobbing as he caught her. He gathered her close to him and soothed, “It’s okay. Hey, you’re okay.” - -He was still holding her as the train left, and finally, she lifted her head and stared at him, “What the hell just happened?” - -Neyter glanced wistfully after the train. “That was the signal that the portal was closing. It happens every now and then. What it means is I’m stuck here until it opens back up. Which could be in a week… or months.” - -Her mouth fell open, and gently, she pushed away from him so she could meet his gaze. “So you just…” - -“They were pushing you—that crowd. I had to get you out.” - -“But you’re stuck here now.” - -He shrugged. “Yeah. But I couldn’t let you get on that train. I mean, you know it… it’s impossible to—” - -“I know.” She shivered, and Neyter put an arm around her. “Thank you.” - -“I wasn’t going to let that happen, Betty. I’m a little fond of you.” He sighed and glanced around. “I better go extend the hotel stay before all the rooms are filled. A lot of people didn’t get on.” - -She went with him to ensure his room was still available, and then they stood awkwardly, not sure what to say. Finally, Neyter sighed. “Look, I know Rodney comes home today, so you can go. I’ll be fine. I mean, I can go socialize with the rest that are stuck here.” - -Betty nodded. “The thing is… I do have to go. But I’ll be back tomorrow for a bit. I have work, and then Rodney is taking me out—” - -“It’s okay. Come when you can. I’ll be here.” - -Betty returned home, relief flooding through her when Rodney was there waiting. She wanted her life back. She wanted normalcy back. There was no room in her world for other worlds, for learning differences, for being attracted to a man that at the same time irritated and even repulsed her. She was not deep enough to maneuver such complications. - -The next day, she found time between her job and dinner with Rodney to stop in and visit with Neyter. As he got close and whispered how much he missed her, Betty felt that pull. But she stopped herself, smiling slightly and mumbling how she hoped he was adjusting. He nodded and stepped back. - -She visited when she could for the next week, always maintaining a distance. And one day, she found him hopping from one foot to another, his face beaming. “Guess what I discovered I can do?” - -“What’s that?” She had to smile herself, his energy infectious. - -He broke out in song, his voice loud and clear, the notes perfect. Her smile widened. He was good, and he seemed so pleased with himself. When he finished, she laughed. “That’s wonderful. Did you not know you could sing so well?” - -Neyter shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. We, my world, we can’t sing there. We don’t have singing voices. I don’t mean that we sing bad. We just don’t sing. That’s why it confused me that you guys make your own music. But here, I have that singing ability. And I also discovered that the music we hear, that music comes from this world. It somehow filters into our air, it plays.” - -“Oh!” She thought about it for a few moments. “That makes sense I guess.” - -“I don’t think I want to leave.” - -Those words caused her to grow still, panic gripping her stomach and chilling her blood. Not leave? What did that mean for her? Did he expect— - -“I don’t expect you to stick around. I know you have a life beyond this. I get that. I mean, I’m really fond of you. I could honestly fall for you. But I somehow get the feeling that you aren’t as on board with that.” - -Betty stopped herself from reassuring him. Because the truth was, she did have Rodney. She had a life that was full of her world. There was no room for anything from Neyter’s one, including Neyter. Instead, she rose up on her toes and gave him a soft, quick kiss, forcing a smile. - -He nodded, not appearing surprised. “I want to stay here no matter what happens between us. So no pressure on your end. I heard that people from my world venture out here and lead pretty normal lives.” - -This time, she shook her head. “Oh no! It’s dangerous.” - -“I know. I know the dangers, have heard about the hot spots. But what’s life without a little risk?” - -She shuddered at that. She did not want any more risks. This meeting was enough. Almost getting forced onto that train was enough. The mere thought of living a life outside the norm shocked her and horrified her. - -It was the last time Betty visited Neyter. He had his plans, his dreams, and she did not want him to mistake her as a part of that. - -But as time went on, Betty found she could not get him out of her mind. His touch, his voice, that accent! She remembered the conversations about art and creating. And while he spoke about himself a lot, she realized it was the excitement of sharing himself with her, of sharing the past and his ideas and the similarities they shared. - -And she remembered how he risked his own trip home to save her. He got stranded here just to ensure her safety, and she remembered how he had immediately held her and soothed in his gentle voice, *“You’re okay.”* Sometimes that echoed in her dreams, and she woke up reaching for him, only to find Rodney, who was becoming more and more distant. - -Finally, Rodney took her out to dinner and, while secluded in what would have been considered a dark, romantic corner of the restaurant, he confessed, “I’ve met someone.” - -She waited for the rage to boil up inside of her, but instead Betty realized she had no right to be mad. No matter how people sugarcoated those meetings in the station with talk of the other world and it not being real, she knew it had been. The feelings, the attraction—it was all authentic. And she had experienced it. - -So she let Rodney go with a smile and an amicable split of belongings. And she set off to find Neyter at the station. It had been a few months, and the train was up and running, the portal back open. And Neyter was gone. His room was now occupied by a graying man, his smile wide as he opened the door, a woman in the background. - -She assumed Neyter had left, gone back to the world he knew. - -But the next month she was passing by a television, and a familiar sound stopped her in her tracks. Looking in the store window, she saw Neyter on the television, a guitar in his hands, a microphone near his mouth. The crowd was going wild. And she smiled. - -He had left the station. Just the other way. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Stranded at the Station" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138443371409997).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/The Witches Curse.md b/content/issue-24/The Witches Curse.md deleted file mode 100644 index aa840e3e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/The Witches Curse.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,205 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Witches Curse" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- slipstream -- horror -authors: -- Matthew Wilson -copyright: '© Matthew Wilson 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: 'Is it possible that one thing is more important than all the others when it comes to telling a good tale? Hard to say - but what is certainly true is that, whether a story soars or has flaws, a distinctive sense of voice will make amends for whatever sins it might contain. Matthew Wilson gives us sins large and small... and voice as well.' - -morelink: 'sweet dreams' - -image: /images/WitchesCurse.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to Karen Apricot [for](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5519603107) [these](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5519635971/) [five](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5520186750/) [great](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5520117230/) [pictures](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5519527767/)!" - -type: stock -slug: witches-curse -weight: 5 ---- - -obviously we killed Gemma Ryan because she boiled kids down in a pot and sold the fat as soap Prisoners dont care what other Prisoners did for example I shot my sister Carol because she slept with my husband but in Prison we dont stand for that kid killing stuff - -for her protection the Warden had put Gemma in the Laundry Section folding sheets but she showed no fear when we bribed the Guard and surrounded her in that tiny steam drenched room - -we had all read stories of her being a Witch of using childrens innards for her potions but we didnt buy into fairytales - -Gemma smiled when we told her to pray for forgiveness she didnt shriek when we put the sheet over her head nor defended herself when we took turns beating the lumps out of the sheet with Metal Bars - -it was actually a very uninteresting murder but the four of us swore to have each others back against the Warden we would face the Music together satisfied that we had taken the lowest of the low out of the World - -and then Marie escaped punishment altogether by hanging herself with a bedsheet - -the news hit me like a Suckerpunch as she had seemed her usual sweet and confident self the night before we were Lifers so I didnt see what stress another 40 year sentence could have had on her - -they should have given us a Medal - -instead they slammed poor Marie in the Oven and buried her ashes in the little Garden out back - -I cant accept that guilt got to the others little things pile up in the confines of any Cell ready to overwhelm and drive you Mad - -after suffering insomnia for five nights straight they dragged Elise away in a Straight Jacket when she came out to Roll Call laughing she only calmed down when the Prison Doctor assured her that Witches couldnt invade Dreams in a padded cell - -for my part I slept like a Baby until Claire said we were Cursed - -**what?** I said I had to wrestle my second helping of porridge out of a larger womans paws so I refused to spit up a morsel in surprise - -Claire crossed herself like a good catholic and stared imploringly at me with wide panicked eyes as if expecting an attack from every corner - -**my Mother warned me about Witches** Claire shivered unable to eat her food at Breakfast she seemed gaunter than usual hunched over the Prison table like some bird waiting for fish to disturb surface water - -I stabbed porridge with my spoon and forcefully said **I do NOT believe in Witches we did a good thing that Nutso killed children** - -**its gods place to punish not ours** Claire sniffed and I thought she might cry a definite No No in the Prison system - -**Ive been to the Doctor five times this week with bumps and bruises my food tastes Awful and my letters home have been stopped its the Curse** - -**Claire** I said - -**and the Nightmares** Claire continued shaking as if she were naked near a window **my god the Nightmares wont leave me** - -**this is Crazy** I said but when Claire beat her brains out headbutting a wall later that night the Doctor said it was Delirium - -Death is a constant possibility in Prison the only companion you can rely on for through their Cowardice my friends had left me one by one I alone was confident in the Worlds general indifference there were no Otherworld retributions besides what you made yourself - -I did not believe in Witches and Curses - -not until the Nightmares came - -in the woods of upright crucifixes Gemma was waiting for me nailing my three dead friends onto the thorns of spiky bark - -outside the confines of a Prison she had gone full out fixing her black pointed hat upon her head no longer beaten into a pulp her cloak was fit and she had Life and great Evil in her dancing red eyes - -I told myself it was a Dream but I could not wake up as she brought children before me she skipped with them played with them and then when the black Cauldron bubbling on the fire reached Boiling Point she lifted them over her head and Threw them in - -**Sally?** - -I blinked and then the Dream World went away but none of my stubbornness went with it though I didnt remember being carried there I was in the Wardens Office my hands tied for his protection - -**Sally are you awake?** - -my throat felt like Id been walking a desert I licked my lips and started croaking **is this the Real World?** I asked - -the Warden looked up as the door creaked open and the Prison Doctor handed him a thin file I didnt trust Doctors and had never been to see her before my sister had been a Doctor she had sworn to protect people and cause no harm - -how she had harmed me - -**the Doctor tells me your not sleeping** - -I blinked and heard my lids clap together - -**you shouldnt listen to her** I tried to smile and gave up **shes Crazy** - -**well you look like Hell Im worried that your not looking after yourself** - -I waited for the punchline but there was none coming **Im locked up here because no one cares about me** - -the Wardens chair squeaked like a Horror Movie door as he shifted his weight and his tactics **dont get me wrong Sally its my job to keep you AWAY from society but its also my job to keep you SAFE from others and yourself now I know your friends killed Inmate Ryan** - -**we what?** I asked Sweetly **I was writing poetry to inspire Down and Out children at the time ask my friends** - -**your friends are dead** he reminded needlessly I had seen their torn faces Scream enough in my horrid Dreams to know **they cant confirm anything but I want to help you I want you to go see the Doctor maybe a one on one talk will help shift any guilt** - -**you wanna help me?** I asked - -the Warden crisscrossed all his fingers like some Magician about to unveil a great Trick **within reason** he said - -I nodded my noggin filled with nasty ideas as I lost my tiredness **can you get me a Book on how to kill Witches?** - -Wardens are never helpful and swearing not to feed my Paranoia he refused to give me books on how to defend myself so I found myself a woman of Faith like Claire - -**a weapon on killing Witches?** Lana sighed slinking back on her rumpled Bunk defeated when I blocked her Cell Door whilst she was heading out to Breakfast **I can sharpen a toothbrush into a shiv for ya** - -I smiled a smile that made her Gulp - -**Im not here for jokes you havent lost your Faith in this Hell hole I bet your Momma told you stories to keep you in line that staying on the straight and narrow would keep you safe from Monsters** - -my smile showed more Teeth and Lana flinched as if I had Fangs - -**now your gonna be a Good Girl and make me believe in all your Mommas stories your gonna help me with my Problem or Im gonna make it YOUR problem** - -Lanas hand trembled as she shook mine - -a Deal was a Deal - -she would help me do the Impossible - -tonight I was going Witch Hunting - -it cost me a weeks tobacco ration to get the salt a young Arsonist in the Kitchen undid six months of Therapy and made a lovely distraction setting Fire to the pan but while the Guards back was turned I ducked into the Supply Closet and stole a small pot marked S - -I tasted it to make sure it wasnt sugar - -now I was armed and at last Roll Call I told myself that now I was armed I had a Chance if the Witch intended to disturb my sleep tonight then she was in for one Hell of a surprise - -one by one the Prison lights went out and I waited in sweet darkness - -I will not regale my reader with where I secreted the little Salt Pot regardless to say I had been making myself puke for years to keep my figure my husband had liked thin dames like my sister Carol - -yet now sleep refused to come I was like a little kid bundled up with excitement at Christmas but Santa didnt visit waking children I closed my eyes and forced my mind to clear - -then it happened and she came - -the little Cottage was not made of gingerbread when I tapped on the door I winced when a Splinter pierced my knuckle the knotty thing was solid wood just like the ugly crucifixes in those Damn Woods - -if I could feel Pain in that dream then what would happen if I Died there? - -there was no Cauldron in the hearth filled with childrens bones as I expected the cottage interior wasnt built for comfort but rather for work on a table were bloodied Knives of course I had read the newspapers vile stories of her Crimes when she had first come into our Prison no doubt they had been stirred together by my anxiety into some destructive soup but this was just a dream I refused to be frightened by imaginary soup my mind constructed - -**Gemma?** I said - -a Bullet cracked through the window and punched into my thigh I staggered as if drunk and fell against a bookcase of spellbooks I heard the Salt Pot strike but not shatter against the floor - -this time the little knotted door didnt creak as it opened and closed - -high heels clicked along the floorboards and then when the owner turned a corner I rolled over and lost all memory of sunlight - -**Sally** my sister Carol said smiling - -**oh you Bitch** I tightened my eyes against the Pain refusing to cry **you dirty Bitch** - -**Sally thats no way to talk to your sister** Carol said picking a Beauty Spot on her chin the only thing my Bullet hadnt smashed apart the only thing that Mother had been able to identify her by at the Morgue - -**hows your husband is he back at home?** the Witch picked her Beauty Spot harder and then ripped it off there was no Blood just a sound like torn paper she seemed to find the experience pleasing and started tearing off more of her Face - -it wasnt real it WASNT my sister - -**you were always jealous of my beauty** Gemma the Carol said **thats why he chose me** - -she hurried towards me when I crawled like a Baby after a dropped bottle and I locked my hands around the Salt Pot - -**oh very clever** the Witch giggled **someones been doing their research** - -the Witch squatted down trying to snatch the Salt Pot out of my grasp but I was determined and slapped off the top and threw the entire contents over my left shoulder like a superstitious Gambler wishing for their lucky number to come up - -the reaction was instant the Witch shot up rubbing her melting eyes she didnt scream nor gave me pleasure in another uninteresting murder - -when I awoke and the Doctor slapped me across the face to prove she was real I told her how Gemma had melted like a wax figure on the floor leaving only her laughter as the little Cottage had vanished like a watercolour painting left out in the rain swirling away retreating back into the dark - -now that Damn Doctor has thickened my file listing me with every Crazy thing she can but I was NOT making it up - -I have proof of facing off with Witches - -the Warden has the Bullet they cut out of my leg in a little jar on his desk but all he wants to know is who snuck a Weapon into his Prison he has promised to greatly increase my sentence so that instead of serving Life I will have another 40 years on top - -well if it didnt frighten me the first time - -how I Love the feel of these Hospital sheets while they fix me up - -good food and good rest - -even my Dreams are gone - -I am the last of my kind Killer of Witches - -yet with my luck they still wont give me a Medal - -maybe I am Cursed after all - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Witches Curse" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138445668076434).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Thy Servant Death.md b/content/issue-24/Thy Servant Death.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8dd68578..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Thy Servant Death.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,124 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Thy Servant, Death" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Scott J. Couturier -copyright: '© Scott J. Couturier 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's nothing quite like The Gothic for wrapping a reader in a strange atmosphere: painting with morbid darkness, sinking a chill deep down into the bones, or perhaps too-vivid colour as fangs sink into the richest vein. Scott J. Couturier offers up an incomparable gift in answer to the age-old question, \"What do you give to the man who has, or had, everything?\"" - -morelink: 'A gift that keeps on...' - -image: images/ThyServantDeath.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Aphiwat chuangchoem](https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-photo-ancient-chest-concept-398543/) and [Carlo Raso](https://www.flickr.com/photos/70125105@N06/16532757197/)." - -type: stock -slug: thy-servant-death -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t was known that the king of Aoravia had killed his son. - -It was whispered by those of the court that the two had been down in the catacombs, offering joint sacrifice, but what occurred—how and why the prince was slain—went unknown beyond nebulous speculation. All particulars eluded common concurrence: there were many theories. The people of the well-to-do towns and the nomads of the plains and the folk of the bog villages all had their own versions of the telling, some fabulous and grotesque, some scandalous and shameful, some humorous, even bawdily comedic. - -In certain regions it was averred the king had killed his sole heir for losing his best hound in a hunt, casting him to the bloodthirsty pack as penance. Others whispered there had been a foiled coup, the prince seeking to depose his aged father, who had already reigned for forty-three years. Others still said it had all been an accident, an arrow fired awry or wounded beast flushed too suddenly from the undergrowth. None, of course, knew the truth. - -Only the king of Aoravia knew—and briefly his Queen, hastened to her deathbed in a month’s time by the knowledge. - -He was old now indeed, the prince his solitary offspring, destined to occupy the porphyritic throne once his father joined the Revered Pantheon of Ancestors. But now there would be no inheritance, no gentle succession of the sapphire-gilt crown. - -A sense of dark, ever-more-restless expectation brooded over the countryside as the king’s health grew yearly more dire. His subjects barricaded themselves indoors at night, lighting warding fires, as bands of ruffians marshaled in the hills, waiting to sweep down on Aoravia as soon as her sovereign breathed his last. It was many hundred years since that fair country was sacked, decades since her armies saw concerted military action beyond the banalities of pomp and parade. A swollen kingdom, ripe for the picking: all that remained was for her sovereign, heirless, to die. - -The king knew all of this well. Fretful and cross in his dotage, frail in both body and spirit, twice daily he went tottering to the shrines of his ancestors, the great and terrible kings of his race, to offer up a sacrifice of fat and spices. His cracked voice would raise in orison: intoning prayers to each long-dead sire, he begged that Aoravia be spared at his death, also pleading for some diversion to distract him from the doom hovering ever-nearer over his lands, his subjects, his own soul. - -Early in the year—yet winter—the necromancer came to court. - -She wore black figure-mummifying robes, making it impossible to see her face or make out the slightest particulars of her physique; only her voice betrayed her sex. Emerging by night out of the Southern Wastelands, where no good thing grows, she presented herself before the king, bowing and introducing herself as Oola-Saggath of the Midnight Sisterhood. - -“I come bearing a gift,” she said, in muffled portentous tones, “a boon to distract the king in his time of darkest, bleakest need. For the god which I serve has heard his prayer, and offers reprieve.” - -Swaying on his throne, king frowned. Not long past he would have ordered a necromancer—or any practitioner of the magical arts—put to an instant, zealous death. However, after murdering his son by his own hand he'd sought out the services of every witch, sorcerer, hedge-wizard, diviner, shaman, soothsayer, necromancer, and seer within a thousand leagues, inviting them to come test their obscure rites on the prince’s corpse. His perverse summons evoked dismay in the people of Aoravia, taken as portent of the kingdom’s inevitable fall. - -Still, many nursed hope that one charlatan or another would succeed in resurrecting the king’s self-slain bloodline—but, magic was weak in those days. Finally, one of the necromancers absconded with the prince’s spell-scarred remains, and the fiasco was stricken from the royal records. The king ordered a gaudy tomb sealed up in the catacombs, inscribed but empty. - -Now, the king narrowed his rheumy eyes as he stared down at Oola-Saggath. He didn’t recognize the name, but this was unsurprising: many practitioners of the black arts worked pseudonymously. The court, breathless, stood in nervous anticipation of his decree. - -Then, “Show me this reprieve,” he said, words emerging as a mumble between wine-stained lips. He made no inquiry as to which god the necromancer served. - -The black mage smiled. - -A snap of her fingers, and the throne room resounded with the sharp rattling of bone on bone. A skeleton—walking free and unaided, wholly devoid of flesh—entered the chamber, footfalls clacking loudly on the red-veined marble floor. Atop its skull sat a crooked, moth-eaten miter, denoting the priesthood of some archaic religious sect. Its death’s-head grin set the courtiers to gasping and muttering as it advanced to stand rigidly before the king. - -It bowed, then executed a neat upwards-jump and heel-click, spun in a circle, and began feverishly to dance, bones jangling and gnashing at every appallingly graceful movement. A waltz. A crude, energetic peasant’s round. A quick spiral jig. The skeleton’s jaw flapped and clacked each time its unshod feet left the marble. - -The king stared in awe at this outlandish gift. The necromancer grinned widely, her sharpened teeth glistening like a sickle in the darkness of her cowl, and said, “See? I bring Death itself to caper and jest for thee, o noble and long-suffering king!” - -The king of Aoravia leaned back on his throne and barked out a dry laugh. A grating sound, attenuated, almost unnatural: his gaiety was unused to use. Turning to his steward, he commanded Oola-Saggath be laden down with all manner of priceless gifts from the palace vault. “For,” he said, eyes sweeping over his astonished subjects, “Death has long been my enemy. Creeping ever-closer, hiding in shadows, whispering threats on the North Wind. Far better, I say, to have Death jeté here for the amusement of all—indeed, Death shall become my cup-bearer, that it may never again leave my sight!” - -So it was done. The grinning, obsequious necromancer was laden down with treasures and returned the next night to her nameless abode in the Wastes. The skeleton—tireless, in the way of dead things—was given the king’s goblet to bear, and stood always at his right hand, eyeless sockets peering sardonically at all who came to issue grievance or beg for favor. In the shadow of that mirthful effigy of Death, the king regained some of his hale goodwill, though he became ever-crueler towards criminals, the castle’s chopping block dyed black by ample use. - -With the return of the king’s levity, his health improved. The skeleton became the highlight of court—he would have it arrayed in all manner of finery, or in a peasant’s dingy dung-stained burlap, and command it to dance for hours on end while the court looked on in commingled fascination and dismay. The only commonality of its costume was the miter it wore on arrival, for this proved impossible to remove. Foreign dignitaries were treated to performances, and told that the king held Death on a leash. Eventually, this rumor reached the mustering brigands in the hills, and they slumped away with many a mumble and dark grimace, intent on finding weaker kingdoms to raven. - -That spring and summer the king seldom thought of his son. After the mysterious slaying he’d subsequently brooded, dimming the lambency of the sapphire-gilt crown: he poisoned the land and its people with the guilt of his atrocious deed. But now, as the skeleton tirelessly pranced for his amusement, death’s-head grinning, a lightness stole over the kingdom, an almost-nonsensical surety of disaster averted. - -That spring, trees and fields blossomed with vigor, the rivers flush with sharp, clear, cold water. There were many births among the cattle—for two weeks every hen laid at least one double-yolk a day. Word reached court that the bandits had fled their haunts in the hills, making travel safe again. That summer, bazaars came to Aoravia, brightly colored caravans trundling into the king’s city bearing goods and ideas from far-off lands, exotic isles. Much talk centered on the venerable monarch, who many (since he had mastered Death itself) assumed to be immortal. They gossiped that he would reign forever. - -The summer passed in a haze of alternating heat-stupor and frenzy. As a northerly realm, Aoravia’s few months of marrow-stirring warmth were to be treasured. For his part, the king never believed mortality was his to command. The mitered skeleton was obviously the remains of a revered cleric, animated by the necromancer in a fit of blasphemous inspiration. Still, the symbol of the thing swayed him to feeling again the master of himself, the master of his fate and lands. He even began to wonder if he was still capable of siring a child, and set his steward to bring him girls from the country to test his age-diminished lust. - -Throughout that glorious, honey-jeweled summer the skeleton danced with an inexhaustible grace, grin unwavering. The king and his courtiers devised all manner of parlor games to play with the thing—releasing dogs from the kennel to chase it comically around the courtyard, or tossing it from the lookout’s tower to smash dramatically apart on the rocks, only to reassemble with a quick, jaunty hop. At other times, a more solemn attitude was affected, the skeleton dressed in flowing funereal robes and trundled before the court in a black carriage draped with red-and-purple samite, the king throwing withered flowers to the effigy as it passed. - -Some, at the king’s discretion, took to prising off the thing’s finger bones and swallowing them. The bones wriggled inside their stomach and bowels, offering a unique sensation until they were excreted and reattached. Privately, this technique even helped the king overcome his persistent constipation. - -Finally, in late autumn, approached the next anniversary of the prince’s murder. Desiccate brown-gold leaves still clung to the oak trees, rattling with a persistence matched by the skeleton’s mad pirouettes. Hallowe’en night brought dark thoughts to the king’s mind; for the first time he banished the dancing undead from his court, retaining a living cup bearer. All that November his teeth chattered as his spirits blackened—the upcoming anniversary spread like a bloodstain in his mind, plaguing both dreams and waking memory. At last he resolved to pay tribute to his slain child by laying a wreath of remembrance before his empty tomb. - -The night of the anniversary, he made secret preparations. The wreath he wove himself, adorning it with asters, phlox, and wilted roses from the royal conservatory. Sans servant or guard, adviser or cleric, he slipped from his royal cells by a secret way, descending the narrow corkscrew passage which led by uneven degrees to the catacombs. He carried a torch to light his path, the rags soaked with priceless funereal resins; their miasma clouded the passage, set the king to sneezing. - -At last, after much scrabbling and labored breath, he reached his son’s white-marble tomb. It gleamed in the torchlight, blazoned with heraldry of the royal Aoravian line, inscribed with murals depicting events in the prince’s life—save no death-frieze, as was elsewise customary. The king sighed and bowed his head, grief adding to the debility wrought by unaccustomed exertion. Frozen breath lingered about his face in a wraith-like cloud as tears trickled down channels of sorrow and bitterness graven on his cheeks, catching in his beard’s silver tangle. In those fleshly lines his son’s death was memorialized, if not on the stone of his tomb. In his mind’s eye the king replayed anew the horrors of that unspeakable night, the wreath trembling in his frail hands, twined grapevines crackling. - -Something stirred in the near-darkness, neither rat nor ghost. - -The king rose in startled fear, turned and held his resinous torch aloft. He beheld the skeleton, the necromancer’s gift, firelight playing over the barrel of its ribcage and flickering in the depthless hollows of its sockets. The thing ambulated towards him, teeth clacking and chattering violently, long fleshless fingers outstretched. The king gasped and fell back before this apparition, though he did not flee, still thinking himself its master. - -The skeleton drew nearer, an inner phosphorescence now lighting its sockets. Ivory arms rose to its skull and, for the first time, it removed and tossed aside its accustomed miter. Without the headdress’s gross exaggeration, the skeleton looked to be no taller than an average man—no taller, indeed, than the king’s own son had been. - -The skull turned, death’s-head grin fixed, and the king for the first time cried out in fear, collapsing amid a strew of loose bones. - -He could see the cracked skull, see the ceremonial dagger lodged deep in the brainpan. He knew the glint of that blood-hungry ruby—knew the noisome feel of that black leather grip. But, how could it be possible? *He had flung the accursed thing out to sea!* - -The skeleton clattered as it came to stand over the quivering, weeping king. “It is I,” came a hollow voice, deep and dry as a desert sepulcher. “My king, my father, it is I.” - -The king wept inconsolably, not even flinching as the skeleton reached down to grasp him by his wrists, exerting a cold and merciless pressure. Drawing the knife from its own skull, it began to flense the flesh and viscera from the royal person, discarding the stripped bones in a heap. - -Now at last the king tried to scream, but the thing tore his shrunken lungs asunder, and soon enough he knew no more. - - - -{{}}T{{}}he next day in court all noted a change come over the king. He stood (so it seemed to everyone) both straighter and taller than in recollected times, eyes burning with a vivid, almost youthful brightness. His skin was bruised and puffy-looking, as if from a beating: he confided to his closest courtiers he had fallen down a flight of steps the previous night while going to visit his son’s tomb. - -The sapphire-gilt crown, which often teetered embarrassingly on the king’s splotchy pate, now sat cockeyed on a too-bulbous brow. That his face possessed a notably different shape, that he walked with a new (yet strangely familiar) stride, none could deny: some noted a small black-handled knife sheathed at his waist, fret with a glinting ruby. Yet, his voice was his own, his words were his own. Even when he laughed uproariously upon seating himself on the porphyritic throne, no suspicion was roused—for, as has been observed, magic was weak in that time. - -The king composed himself before opening the morning’s proceedings with a few ceremonial words. This token of familiarity put the court at ease, and before long the king of Aoravia was meting out sentences, hearing grievances, and granting royal favors as of old. Still, all noted something alien about his composure and character—that shimmer in his eyes, those eerily familiar-but-foreign motions! Even the long snowy flow of his beard seemed touched with an auburn tint. - -As the sun climbed towards midday and the court prepared to adjourn for refreshments, the king suddenly clapped his mottled, too-long-fingered hands together. “But wait! It has been over a month since my loyal cup-bearer deigned to entertain us. I confess, I tired of the skeleton’s antics for a while… my mind has been unsettled, spirit fraught with unrest. But last night I made amends with the prince, my most grievously murdered son. And so, I would have a dance before we feast!” - -Again he clapped his hands, and a desultory clattering emerged from the shadows behind his throne. Something humped and brittle shuffled into the commingled sun-and-brazier-light, the tines of its rib cage crusted with bony tumors, limbs pitted by age. It crept forward at a mendicant’s pace, legs shuddering violently, until the king clapped his hands a third irritable time. - -At this commanding sound the skeleton tried to take a short leap, preparatory to a single simple dance step, and crumbled in pieces to the marble. - -The poor parts wriggled and twitched futilely, trying to recohere, until a violent wind blasted through the court from all southerly facing windows. The wind tore at the shards, tumbling them about, reducing them to plumes of foul-smelling dust that rose and whipped spectrally about the throne room as the smiling monarch looked on. - -At last the powder blew away, vanishing with the phantom winds back into the south. - -A confounding silence followed, broken at last by the king’s laughter. “Would you look at that!” he roared, slapping a discolored hand on his thigh with all the vigor of youth. “It seems Death itself has grown old, perishing in my stead.” - -He motioned for his cup, draining its contents in three quick gulps. The king then rose and decreed, “For her peerless gift, Oola-Saggath shall be recalled to serve Aoravia as my most trusted vizier and adviser. Now—and for all ages.” - -Ripples of his decree spread throughout the countryside. That nightfall Oola-Saggath (who indeed went by many names) returned to court, descending on a thunderous pitch-black pall that would not abate for seven generations. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Thy Servant, Death" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138447278076273).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/Winter.md b/content/issue-24/Winter.md deleted file mode 100644 index 21bc9192..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/Winter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,332 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Winter" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- David Whitmarsh -copyright: '© David Whitmarsh 2020 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Our recent issues have welcomed a host of new faces to Mythaxis, in this latest including a first fiction sale - and now we are proud to also present not just that but a first ever publication, full stop! David Whitmarsh\'s story of transitions introduces us to a world clawing its way back from the brink - but things with claws must always be treated with caution..." - -morelink: "Don\'t wait for Spring" - -image: images/Winter.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-cold-fog-forest-235621/) and [Gantas Vaiciulènas](https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-walking-on-snow-1891882/)." - -type: stock -slug: winter -weight: 9 ---- - -{{}}A{{}} melody ran counterpoint to Beth Simpson’s every movement as she picked her way from one snare to the next. Often the traps yielded nothing, but today she had already caught a plump little rat, and now another trap gave up a wren. She placed the bird in her collecting bag and struck out at a tangent through the trees searching for shoots, buds, berries, fungi, or the track of some surviving rodent where she might set another snare. She knew these woods. Every barren tree, every hollow. The empty burrows of rabbits long gone, the abandoned nests of migrating birds that had not returned for a decade. - -It was July the seventh, her fifteenth birthday. She had been six years old when the sky darkened and the world was covered by a grey blanket of fine ash. She remembered the vivid greens and blues of the old world just as she remembered the brightly coloured picture books of the child she had been. But now, Spring was coming. The signs were there: the shoots and buds, sparse and feeble after the enduring winter, were each day a little stronger. The sulphurous yellow of the sky was streaked with blue, letting through a hint of warmth. It had been months since the last serious snowfall and there had been no frost for weeks. This wasn’t the first time that the bitter cold had eased, but the news now was that Thrihnukagigur was quiet. - -Some trees hung on waiting for the long overdue Spring, but many would never again show green. Each year brought a greater crop of those winter fungi that live on dead wood. A harvest of ink-caps from the usual site went into the decoy bag on her right hip; they would go into a soup before they dissolved into a slime. - -A cluster of velvet shank caught her eye, orange bright against grey-brown bark. She had to climb a little to reach them, but soon they were in the collecting bag on her left hip. With the takings of the snares she would manage a meal for her and Mr. Carnegie. A meagre one, but some days she had returned with less, or with nothing. - -She climbed to the margin of the wood at the crest of the escarpment. Below, beyond the scarred and sterile fields, the town filled the valley. A few desolate figures scurried along empty streets. Half the houses were empty, some crumbling, some burnt out. The grey of walls and roofs and streets and people broken only by the artificial light leaking from the windows of a pair of high-rise farms, bright against the grey twilight. - -It was not enough, never enough. There was hunger in the town as much as in the countryside around. After the sky had darkened and the crops failed, the townspeople had formed a militia, set up barricades. They would not share their precious resources. - -Her mother had brought the family to live here when Beth was a baby. Before the volcano, they would go foraging for the plenty that the green forest provided. When the eruption began and ash and sulphur spread the world over, her mother had understood what it meant. Beth remembered the arguments between her parents. Her father had been one of those in the village frightened by the barren fields, the dying sheep. Her mother knew what the land could provide even in the harshest winter. Her logic was implacable: with the town barricaded against them, their only choice would be the squalid, sprawling camps, where the hungry would be concentrated, where there would be the greatest need, the greatest suffering. Her father had left, alone, they had survived, and Beth had learned her lessons. They were often hungry, but they did not starve. - -She didn’t know whether he was one of those who died in the camps, or if he was loaded onto one of the hastily contrived, ill-equipped starships to jump through years of time and space to an uncertain future. She had cried when he left, cried at his parting and at her parents’ bitter words. - -But her mother had not cried, and Beth had never cried since. - - - -{{}}M{{}}r. Carnegie was nothing if not fastidious, refusing the lessons if she came crusted with the grime of her foraging, though it was her skill and effort that fed them both. She went home first to her little cottage, hidden in the copse at the edge of the village, washed in cold water and changed into clean clothes from her mother’s wardrobe. Baggy blouse and loose trousers, taken up with her own hand-stitching. Beth fell short of her mother’s stature by a good thirty centimetres. - -The walk past the empty houses of the village always made her nervous. She hurried as she always did past the James’s house. Harry James had been in her class, back when the village school was still running. One day he hadn’t come in. His mother, a big woman even then, had seemed unconcerned. Later she had tried to entice Beth in. *Harry was sick in bed and would love to play with her.* Beth ran away. Later, the police had come and found the bones buried in the garden, the flesh in the freezer. - -There were no police out here now. What little law there was didn’t venture from the towns, just as what was left of government and army was too busy keeping the turbines and the fusion plants and the power grid running to ever raise its head. - -There had been a population a little under five billion, once. The orbital habitats and the buried cities of the Moon and Mars housed tens of millions. No-one really knew what the numbers were now. Off-world, they took as many as they could, but too few to make much difference. Escape to Armstrong, Tranquillity, or one of the great spinning orbital cities was only a dream now for any Earth dweller. - -News came occasionally of the chaos in other parts of the world, where the collapse had been more complete. Around here, the worst they’d seen was when the countryside was ravaged by waves of desperate refugees, who lacked the skills to survive from the woods and wound up in the camps. They should think themselves lucky. - -Mr. Carnegie lived in the old vicarage. A large Victorian house next to the former church. There was a well-concealed cellar in which he would hide when the scavengers came. The front door was left unlocked to save them the trouble of breaking it down, but there was nothing left for the likes of them to take. What interest would they have in a mouldering orchestra? - -They spoke little while she prepared the day’s meal and fresh soup for the decoy bag. After they had eaten they went into his music room. The grand piano with its smashed lid lay tilted on two legs beneath the cracks in the high ceiling’s ornate plaster-work. - -It was her mother who had first brought Beth to Mr. Carnegie, too. Her previous teacher had started her on the violin, but after only a couple of lessons Mr. Carnegie had roared in frustration, “Too much! You are too big for this.” - -She thought he was taunting her, but he wasn’t speaking of her physical size. He fetched out a half-size cello. “You may think it is like a violin turned around, but you will start again. There is much to unlearn.” - -He sat her down, showed her how to cradle the instrument, to stretch her arm up to the fingerboard. The first time she drew the bow across the C string and felt the deep, growling vibration pass from wood to flesh and into her bones, she had been enthralled. - -He was a hard teacher. Demanding, indomitable. She raged against her mother, *Just* *surviving* *is* *hard* *enough*. After her mother’s death, she turned her anger against Mr. Carnegie, saying the same thing. His reply had been calm and quiet: *And* *for* *what* *do* *we* *survive?* - -Sometimes she stormed out in anger, promising never to return. But it was too hard, the music had permeated the core of her being, so that every movement was a melody, every thought a chord, every mood a key. Then, too, she felt sorry for him; but he would accept nothing from her except in payment for his teaching. - -Some days the scavenging was too poor, the hunger too much. She lacked the will to play, he to instruct. Sometimes she had to stop and wait while fits of coughing wracked his emaciated frame. It seemed lately that even though the returns of her foraging had become more plentiful and she had a little more flesh on her bones, he had become thinner still, and weaker. - - - -{{}}A{{}}s she grew, she had progressed from half-size to three-quarter, then to a full-size instrument, though even now she was barely big enough for it. Each day she would practice for an hour, two, three. A piece she knew, or a something new. - -Today, he selected for her a piece from the twenty-second century. “Delaney,” he said, as the manuscript appeared on the display before her. Relief and joy warmed her as she started to play. A torrent of chromatic cascades and subtle counterpoints. Precise, formal, structured; as with Bach, the passion that lay hidden beneath the mathematically precise veneer struck deep in Beth. When she lowered the bow and raised her head at the end, he nodded. - -“Good,” he said. - -As always he had recorded her playing, and afterwards he played it back. Until a year ago, it was he that offered analysis and criticism, a relentless critique of every mistake, every weakness of technique. Since then, he had watched silently as she dissected her own performance. - -“You have promise,” he said, “but without the chance to play with others, you can never reach your true potential.” As he often did, he sent the recording to his grandson who studied at the New Vienna Conservatory. A surprise that there was still such a thing as a Conservatory in this blighted world. Was there also in Vienna an Old Conservatory? - -At the end of the day, she took the instrument to the safety of Mr. Carnegie’s cellar. He was too weak now to carry it himself. She went to leave, to head for her own home in the woods, but turned to him on the doorstep. - -“Spring is coming,” she said. “Soon.” - -He nodded slowly. “It will take more than one spring to heal this land.” His eyes swept the tired landscape behind her and returned to stare directly into her own. “When there is plenty again, then everyone you meet, you will think to yourself, ‘How did *you* survive? Who did *you* abandon, or betray, or kill? Did *you* taste human flesh?’” - -He turned away. “Spring is coming, but I will not be here to see it.” - -He closed the door. - -She walked away, steeped in discord. - - - -{{}}T{{}}he next morning Beth rose before dawn, as always. She dressed, as always, in loose dark trousers, layers on top for warmth, a dark jersey. Warmth, darkness, freedom of movement. She slung the empty bag over her head to hang on her left side. The filled decoy bag crossed over on her right. When she left, she paused by the small mound where she had buried the burnt, splintered bones, all that she had found of her mother after she had been caught. A single blade of grass poked through the dead soil. - -The previous evening’s mood settled into her as a slow melody in a minor key as she crept soundless between the near-naked trees. She went first to her grub farm, left undisturbed for three weeks, time enough for some small morsels to be burrowing through the rotting wood. A hedgehog curled itself into a tight ball as she lifted the bark cover. A hedgehog. How long since she had last caught one? How many were left out here? - -She lifted it, rested the bristly ball on the palm of her left hand, and drew her knife from its sheath. For a long moment she knelt, ready to cut the life from the small creature. A mangy crow taunted her, out of reach in the upper branches of a moribund lime tree. Then she laid the spiny creature down again. *Take* *it* *all,* *and* *there* *will* *be* *nothing* *the* *next* *day*—one of her mother’s lessons. She picked through the friable fibres of crumbling wood for the larger pale grubs. A few she popped in her mouth and swallowed whole. The rest went into her bag, and the bark covered the hedgehog once more. - -In a dark gully on a west facing slope a snare was gone, torn from the dead sapling where it had been secured. There was a dampness on the dark ground. She probed it with her fingers and lifted them to her nose, sniffed, tasted the dampness on her fingertip. The blood of some creature. - -She crept onward with heightened senses, the melodies in her mind stilled to the silence of the wood. - -A movement in the distance down the slope. - -Footfalls, voices. - -She crept up and away, finding the more open spaces where she could move without disturbing the branches, keeping low to the ground. She crouched in a hollow and listened. The sounds were moving away, to her right. North. She worked her way south along the slope, then a sharp odour caught her throat. - -A scent mark. Dogs. - -She took her knife again in her hand and held it reversed so she would not impale herself if she tripped. She crouched, listening. The breeze picked up, rustling the dry branches. If they came, it would be from downwind. She turned and ran into the wind, always bearing away to the left, to the south, away from the people she had heard passing by. - -A lull in the breeze and she could pick out the sound of paws padding behind. Dogs pacing her. Others would be overtaking to either side, but she had no time to look as she searched the quickest path, skipping over roots and branches. They would be on her soon. - -*That tree. Now.* - -One foot on the root, she propelled herself upwards. Arms wrapped around a stout branch, her head banged into the trunk, scraping her cheek. She twisted upwards, wrapped her legs around the branch and hauled herself up. Not high enough. She stood and leaned forward to grasp a higher branch and swung herself up again. Only then did she allow the pain and dizziness of the blow to her head to rise. A long rasping note, a break in the rhythm. - -They came slinking from the shadows. The biggest, perhaps the pack leader, stopped at the foot of the tree and glared up at her, drooling, deep black with dark brown markings around the neck and face, ribs showing through the short fur. Even in its current state of near starvation it must have weighed as much as her. - -The rest of the pack sat or lay spread around the base of the tree in their various sizes and colours and coats. All were thin, some showed bald patches, oozing scabs. They waited in silence with their eyes fixed on her. - -She settled to wait them out, making herself as comfortable as she could. She rested her back against the trunk and slowed her breathing, quieted her heart with a long, slow, repetitive melody. Leaves were budding on the branches around her. - -The sun hid behind a deep overcast, a twilight gloom at midday. The sentry furthest from her, short, light brown fur, pricked up its ears and stood, gazing into the trees. Another, mangy long-haired grey and white, did the same. - -The silence of the woods was shattered by a gunshot, and the first of the sentinels fell. - -The pack melted into the trees. - -Beth sat on the branch, mute, breath held. Even the music in her mind was still, save the heavy tympanum of her heartbeat. - -The first to appear stepped through the naked brush with exaggerated caution, as if raising his feet high would obviate the racket he made with each footfall. His rifle was held to his shoulder and he swung it from one side to the other, so fast he would never have seen anything that might have been hidden. There was a comic look of intense concentration on his gaunt weasel features. On the sleeve of his tatty and stained dark blue coat he wore the red armband of the town militia. - -He was followed by another, dark skinned, who walked up to the dead dog with his gun resting in the crook of his arm. He crouched down and prodded the bloody wound in the animal’s flank, then wiped his hand on his jacket. - -“Oh, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson. Fucked up again,” he said, shaking his head. He stood and ran the fingers of his hand through his thick black hair. - -Weasel-face, presumably Johnson, turned his head to glare at the other. “What?” he whined. - -“Right in the gut, a bloody mess, that’s what. Half inedible. Why didn’t you shoot it in the fucking head?” - -Johnson just growled and carried on his caricature of a huntsman. - -Another voice followed them from the trees. “Light a fire, Johnson, they won’t show themselves now. Aziz, see what you can salvage from the carcass.” - -The voice was followed by a figure in somewhat less dishevelled clothing. Short, older. The loose sagging jowls of a face that had lost much fat. He did not carry a rifle, but had a buttoned holster on his belt. - -He sat himself on a log and chewed a piece of root while watching the other two work. Beth maintained her stillness, her silence. She was well practised at it, and in the gloom, in her clothing as dull as the bark of the tree and a screen of budding branches before her, she would not be easy to see. Besides, people seldom looked up without reason. - -Johnson built his small fire at the far side of the small clearing. She could slip down, hang by her hands from the branch and drop to the ground. If she didn’t injure herself she’d have a head start. Through these woods she could outrun them, lose them. *If* she didn’t hurt herself, and *if* they were not too quick with their guns. She waited. - -Aziz used a fierce looking blade to cut and skin a haunch from the dog, then to cut thin slices from it. Each slice he coiled loosely and impaled on a stick. Weasel-face Johnson wandered away a few metres. He leant his rifle against a tree and turned to piss in the leafless bushes. - -“What are they up to, those regulars, then?” he called over his shoulder. - -Aziz positioned his dog kebabs over the fire. “Powerline maintenance, isn’t it?” His rifle was on the ground next to him. But Jowls had taken his handgun from his belt, and was weighing it in his hand, inspecting it. - -Johnson zipped up and turned around, facing Beth’s tree. She held her breath, willing his weasel face to turn away, to not look up. “That’s a way south, the patrol was heading north.” He picked up his gun and sauntered back to sit by the fire. - -Jowls looked at Johnson, gun still in his hand. “They’re looking for some off-worlder. To lift them out.” - -“Like the regular army have nothing better to do?” Aziz leaned forward to turn the roasting meat. “Baby-sitting those off-world fuckers. What are they doing for us?” - -A light gust brought the smell of cooking dog-flesh to Beth’s nose, making her salivate, and stinging smoke to her eyes, making them water. She squeezed them shut a moment while it cleared. - -Aziz muttered something under his breath, and Jowls stood. “Makes no difference what you and I think, Aziz. When the off-worlders want something, they get it. One interesting question is what they’re doing around here.” - -Johnson nodded. “Arse-end of nowhere.” - -Johnson and Aziz sat hunched by the fire as Jowls circled around them. He stopped by the tree where Beth was concealed, almost directly beneath her, facing towards the fire. - -Aziz tilted his head to look askance at Jowls. “You said **one** interesting question. Is there another?” - -Jowls cast his gaze around. “Yes. Indeed.” He spoke quietly, as if to no-one in particular. He disappeared from Beth’s view, behind her tree. She heard his feet disturb the desiccated litter of the woodland floor. The sound stopped, started again. He came back into view a little way to her left. - -Aziz lifted one of the sticks from the fire and blew on the blackened sliver of flesh, then tentatively nibbled at it. “It’ll do,” he declared. Johnson grabbed another stick and tore into the meat. Jowls walked around behind them and Aziz offered him the third piece. - -Jowls shook his head, a ghoulish grin spread across his face. “You have it,” he said. He sat and watched them work their way through their meal. - -Mr Carnegie’s words came to mind: *What* *did* *you* *do* *to* *survive?* She thought again of dropping and running—Johnson and Aziz both had their rifles lying on the ground beside them—but Jowls was facing her way, his handgun in its holster, unbuttoned, and his right hand rested on the faded denim of his thigh close by. - -When they had finished, Johnson carved off the other haunch from the dog’s carcass and tied it to his belt while the other two watched with arms crossed. Aziz made to head off towards Beth’s right, but Jowls whistled, and pointed, and Aziz changed direction, walked beneath the branch where Beth hunched silently against the trunk. Johnson followed. Jowls kicked out the fire, glanced around, then whistled again. - -The sound of feet in the litter stopped. - -“The other interesting question,” Jowls said, “is what that pack of dogs were waiting for. Either of you think of that?” He looked up into the tree, directly at Beth. “You can come down now, kid.” - - - -{{}}B{{}}eth didn’t move, didn’t answer. No way to drop and run now, one ahead, two behind. Her heart pounded, her throat tightened as she watched to see what Jowls would do. - -He took the gun from its holster. “One way or another, you are coming down.” - -She clambered down from one branch to the next, looking around as if to check her footing. Reluctantly, as late as she dared, she dropped to the ground. Johnson grabbed her arms from behind and pinned them painfully at her back. - -Jowls took the knife from her belt and looked her up and down. “Well, well. A little girl.” His eyes gleaned, the ghoulish grin returned, exposing a gap where two teeth were missing. - -Johnson’s right arm reached around to squeeze her small breast. “Not *so* little.” - -Jowls scowled. “Later, Johnson. We’ve wasted enough time. Check her bags and pockets, Aziz.” - -Aziz tugged both bags over her head, and Beth winced as a strap snagged on her ear. He tipped the heap of squirming, shiny white grubs from the collecting bag onto the ground. “This what you’ve been living on?” Then he opened the decoy bag and took out the vacuum flask, and a glass half-bottle containing an amber liquid. - -“Bingo.” He popped off the cup-lid and opened the flask. “Fuck, that smells good. What is it?” - -She didn’t answer. Johnson tightened his grip on her arm and twisted. - -“Mushroom soup,” she cried. - -“Give it to her first,” said Jowls. “There’s mushrooms and there’s mushrooms.” - -Aziz poured a cupful of the gently steaming liquid and held it out. Johnson released his grip on one arm, and when she made no move to take it pinched the other one fiercely. She waited as long as she could bear it, then took the cup and drank the contents straight down, handed it back and shrugged. - -The three men took turns and drained the flask completely while Aziz examined the bottle. “What is it?” Johnson asked. - -“Label’s torn off, but it’s sealed.” said Aziz. - -“Give it here,” said Jowls, and cracked the seal, sniffing. “Gentlemen, I do believe we have here a half-bottle of whisky. We’ll have a little celebration when we make camp tonight.” - -As he bound her wrists in front of her, Johnson gave Beth a smile. “Not so little,” he said. - - - -{{}}A{{}}ziz lead the way, Johnson pulling Beth by the rope’s end, Jowls in the rear. Dusk came soon enough, wild and vivid reds and oranges plastered the western sky. They stopped and bound her ankles too, left her leaning against a tree as they prepared their camp. Aziz took a folding shovel from his pack and started digging. A long, shallow pit. The whisky passed between them. - -Then Johnson’s blackened, broken teeth filled Beth’s vision as he squatted in front of her, his leering face red and moist with sweat, whisky and bad breath oozing from him. He slit the cords at her ankles then laid his knife down out of reach and grasped her feet, pulled hard, dragging her down flat on her back. - -The back of her head cracked against a root and she cried out as a wave of dizziness ran through her—then noises penetrated the darkness. A low call, rustling movement. Sharp pain lanced into the back of Beth’s head as the dizziness passed and she moaned. - -Jowls hissed, *“Shut her up!”* and Johnson’s hand clamped hard over her mouth. - -Jowls and Aziz stood facing two figures silhouetted against the evening sky. One human, one mechanical. The human moved with a swift confidence, a firearm hanging ready from the shoulder. The robot bristled with sensors and armaments, towering half a metre above all of them. Army. Regulars. Aziz picked up his rifle and looked at Jowls, who shook his head firmly. - -The soldier spoke. A woman. “We’re looking for Carnegie. Old guy, lives around here somewhere.” Jowls and Aziz both shook their heads. She nodded towards where Johnson had Beth pinned down. “What about your captive there? What’s the story?” - -“Runaway,” Johnson shouted, “we’re taking her back.” - -The soldier stepped towards him, and Aziz half-raised his rifle. “I wouldn’t,” she said without breaking her stride. The machine crouched with forearms raised, aimed towards Aziz. - -She stopped two paces from Beth and Johnson. “I’d like to ask her,” she said. - -“She don’t know anything,” Johnson stammered, sweat dripping from his face, crimson even in the fading light. *How much had he drunk? How long it would take?* - -The barrel of the soldier’s gun rose a finger’s width towards Johnson. “I’d like to hear her say that.” - -“This is an outrage,” yelled Jowls. “This is a militia matter, you have no jurisdiction.” - -The soldier crouched next to Beth. Her face was round, weathered. Well-fed. She wore a half-smile, but that abruptly faded as her right hand rose to the earpiece of her headset. - -She stood, turned to her mechanical companion. “They’ve found him,” she called. She glanced back at Beth, frowning, hesitating, then shook her head and trotted away. - -As the soldier and her companion slipped into the dusk Beth just felt tired, without hope. *And* *for* *what* *do* *we* *survive?* The regulars, they were looking for someone to take off-world. They were looking for Carnegie. *I* *won’t* *be* *here* *to* *see* *it.* His words the previous evening when she’d spoken of the Spring. - -Johnson released his grip on Beth and dropped back onto his haunches, shaking his head, raising both hands to his temples. Jowls just stood staring after the soldier warily, then behind him Aziz fell to his knees, leaned forward onto all fours and vomited, loudly, copiously. Johnson jerked in surprise, lost his balance and fell, sprawling—and Beth rolled over onto her belly, fumbling with bound hands for Johnson’s knife, then pushed herself to her feet and ran into the darkening wood, stumbling and tripping and straining to keep her balance. Jowls roared and a shot followed her, wild. She ran down towards a stream. A second shot hit something, a tree, a branch, way up and to her left. She ran to the right and tripped and tumbled, the knife fell from her hands. - -Footsteps, slow and uncertain. Jowls, it must be. The other two were sick, but it hadn’t got to him yet. She needed the knife, needed to cut the cord that bound her wrists, forced herself to turn and crawled through the leaf litter, straining to see in the darkened hollow, pausing with held breath after each movement, syncopating consonance and dissonance. - -A rustling to her left. She froze. Waited, breath held tight. A minute of silence, two, and she continued her search. - -Her hand felt the sharp steel edge, she stretched to find and grip the handle. - -“What did you do, girl? Was it the whisky?” She pulled herself to her knees and found Jowls standing in a pool of fading light. His handgun was raised and aimed at her head. - -She mustered her voice. “Maybe it was the dog made them sick.” - -He stepped closer. “Don’t mess with me, girl. I am really not in the mood.” His lips pulled back, his teeth gleamed dimly. He took a step closer, loomed over her. Beth sprang up, knife clenched in her bound hands, then the gun barrel struck the side of her head and pain flared, darkening all else. - -When the nausea ebbed Jowls was standing over her, a dark patch spreading on his shirt. His arm jerked, the gun in her face. Beth squeezed her eyes shut and a shot shattered the air, then dead weight fall across her legs. She looked, to find Jowls’s one remaining eye staring blindly into hers. The other eye… Beth looked away. - -“You okay, honey?” The soldier was kneeling beside her. - -Beth shook her head and winced with the movement. She didn’t hear the machine’s approach, it was just there standing over her. There were lights, and sounds, and needles. She slipped into unconsciousness as silent and gentle mechanical arms lifted her from the ground. - - - -{{}}S{{}}he woke in a bed, aching in her temples, hunger in her belly pushing through the haze of some painkiller. The high ceiling, the bay window, the leafless oak beyond told her she was at the vicarage. - -“So, I am curious.” It was the soldier, sat by her bedside. “When the shooting brought us back, there were the two of them puking their guts up. How did you manage that?” - -“Ink-caps.” Beth said, squinting through the mental fog. “I had soup with ink-caps in, they took it.” - -“Poisonous?” - -“Not by themselves. But if you drink alcohol…” - -“Smart.” She stood and crossed the room to the door. “I’ll get Carnegie, you’ll want to say your good-byes.” - -“He doesn’t owe me anything.” Beth rolled onto her side to face the wall. “Just tell him to go.” - -“He’s not going anywhere, kid.” - -“I *heard*. You were looking for him, they’re taking him off-world.” - -“I don’t think so, honey. They’ve no place for him. Too old. Too sick, though they’ve arranged a care package. When he’s ready for it there’ll be no pain.” - -“Too sick?” Beth turned back, propped herself half-upright, but the soldier was already gone, and then the fog rose again and unconsciousness took her. - -She dreamed of baying dogs, of men with broken teeth and gaping empty eyes, of giants whose roars rattled the windows in their frames, but it was whispered voices that woke her. Firm hands rolled her onto one side. - -“It’s okay, honey. They’re here.” The soldier’s face swam into view, then a man and a woman: tall, clean-cut, well-fed yet slender, in the traditional white coveralls of medics. One stood by her feet and the other moved to the head of the bed. Before Beth could ask what was happening, they lifted her by hips and shoulders, sliding her from the bed onto a gurney. - -Mr. Carnegie stood by the door, his face pale and drawn. The gurney moved, its motors whining quietly. - -“What’s happening?” she said. “Where are you taking me?” - -The Gurney stopped by the doorway, Mr. Carnegie leaned over her, a frown on his face. “To New Vienna. The orbital habitat. They will treat your injuries, and then you’ll have a place at the Conservatory. They have seen the recordings I made of your playing. You will be safe up there, and you will learn. I can teach you no more.” - -She shook her head. “No, I’m not going! You won’t manage without me.” - -“Foolish child.” His voice carried the same tone of exasperation as when she erred in her technique. “I will not survive long with or without you. But what was the point of all these years I spent cajoling and pushing you if you refuse this? For what did you survive?” - -He receded into the shadows of the hallway, and the gurney followed. - -The shuttle lay in the dead meadow at the centre of a circle of scorched earth, ringed by soldiers. Their eyes, human and electronic, swept the countryside around. Beth’s soldier walked with her gurney as far as the bottom of the loading ramp. “Good luck, kid,” she said. “Have a good life up there.” - -There were no windows in the shuttle cabin, just a space for them to secure the gurney and half a dozen seats. As the loading ramp rose up, Beth caught a last glimpse of the vicarage. A pale figure watched back from an upstairs window. - -Beth lay in silence as one of the medics busied himself hooking up monitors, inserting a cannula to the back of her hand with a friendly smile, saying “This might sting a little.” - -The other reappeared in the cabin from a door at the front. She crouched beside the gurney. “Pilot says it’ll be about half an hour before we take off. You hungry? Can I get you something to eat while we wait?” - -The first tear fell down Beth’s cheek like a storm cloud’s first heavy raindrop. - -By the time the storm passed, the Earth lay far below. - -- - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Spring Man" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/138441718076829).* diff --git a/content/issue-24/__index.md b/content/issue-24/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index d7f6387a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24" -date: 2020-12-15 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 24 -subhead: Winter 2020 -headline: - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Dragons.png -imageCopyright: "The background picture is..." - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # color: '#ffaa12' - font_family: "Starcraft normal" - subheading: - order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - order: 1 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-24/contents.md b/content/issue-24/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3a43a103..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,21 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [First Breath]({{< relref path="First Breath.md" >}}), by Addison Smith -- [Mine Own]({{< relref path="Mine Own.md" >}}), by Sharon Dawn Selby -- [Into the Darkness]({{< relref path="Into the Darkness.md" >}}), by Lee F. Patrick -- [Thy Servant, Death]({{< relref path="Thy Servant Death.md" >}}), by Scott J. Couturier -- [The Witches Curse]({{< relref path="The Witches Curse.md" >}}), by Matthew Wilson -- [Every Hat is a Crown]({{< relref path="Every Hat is a Crown.md" >}}), by Mike Morgan -- [Stranded at the Station]({{< relref path="Stranded at the Station.md" >}}), by Trisha McKee -- [Snow Over Interstate 80]({{< relref path="Snow Over Interstate 80.md" >}}), by Martin M. Clark -- [Winter]({{< relref path="Winter.md" >}}), by David Whitmarsh -- [Spring Man]({{< relref path="Spring Man.md" >}}), by Fabiyas V. M. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-24/editorial.md b/content/issue-24/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index e65adb38..00000000 --- a/content/issue-24/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2020-12-15 -issue: Issue 24 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Dragons_sml.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 24** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -In addition to our contributors and backroom team, special thanks this time go to the multi-talented **P. J. Richards**, creator of our charming cover, who describes herself as [an artist and writer inspired by nature, history, and folklore](https://www.facebook.com/P.J.RichardsArtandWriting) and tweets as [@P_J_Richards](https://twitter.com/P_J_Richards). As well as producing such eye-catching, painstaking images as this one, she's also the freshly-minted author of a first novel, ***Deeper, Older, Darker***, a contemporary fantasy adventure that features a unique system of magic based on archery (which is figuratively another string to P.J.'s actual, *she-fires-arrows-with-it* bow). It's available from the likes of [here](https://www.amazon.com/Deeper-Older-Darker-P-Richards/dp/1913525163/), if you want to pick it up for Xmas!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -What a year. What a year. What a year. - -There likely aren’t words to properly sum up 2020, certainly not that could do so for everybody. So I will try to do so just for myself. - -In what used to be called “real life”, I was approaching the first anniversary of a new job when lockdown quarantine fell upon Spain like Monty Python’s foot. Suddenly I was separated from the company of funny, friendly, and supportive colleagues, who had collectively taken the edge off almost twelve months of personal culture shock—I hadn’t had what you might call *an office job* for about fifteen years—just when I’d most wanted to thank them for making me a part of their little unit. - -That I’ve been able to carry on that work from domestic isolation only underlines how fortunate I’ve been in 2020. I’ve not been threatened by hunger or homelessness. I’ve not fallen ill, or been forced to risk illness to care for those in desperate need. Though family and friends are now viewed only through the medium of woefully inadequate screens, even my social distancing has been alongside my better half. *Isolation without loneliness*—it could be so much worse. - -And pandemic aside, this broken year has also highlighted how fortunate I am in general. I’m not forced to suffer solely for being who and what I am, and so many people can’t say the same. It always was that way, of course, but seeing the mobilization of people around the world to stand up against various forms of oppression—sexual, racial, cultural, political—*even as disease sweeps the globe* is humbling to those of us who have no *need* to do the same. It seems that way to me at least. - -Finally, I’m fortunate to have had a project to work on in 20-damned-20. I inherited *Mythaxis* earlier still, but it was only at the beginning of this year that we began to move towards reinvigorating it again. In the last twelve months I’ve had the privilege of picking through hundreds of stories, then working with the dozens of chosen authors (and our small crew behind the scenes) to compile my first issues—first of many, I sincerely hope. - -So, in spite of what this year has thrown at us all, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that it’s also had its silver linings for me. I hope you can say the same, and I hope that you enjoy the best I’ve made of it. - -*Now for god’s sake, roll on 2021*… diff --git a/content/issue-25/Comfort Zone.md b/content/issue-25/Comfort Zone.md deleted file mode 100644 index 82c46c70..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/Comfort Zone.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,225 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Comfort Zone" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- science fiction -- crime -authors: -- KC Grifant -copyright: '© KC Grifant 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's a certain theme in science fiction and fantasy that's always been popular - hard to set this up without spoiling it! Hollywood movies have repeatedly run with it (usually for laughs), so too surely every TV show in either genre. It has clear horror potential too, but very rarely are such stories approached from the outsider's point-of-view. KC Grifant does so here, and with a similarly atypical air of loss, rather than gain." - -image: images/ComfortZone.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Thiago Matos](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-standing-by-closed-shutter-door-2196688/), [Artem Podrez](https://www.pexels.com/photo/food-road-restaurant-man-4728887/), [pixel2013](https://pixabay.com/photos/love-graffiti-lettering-background-2719254/), and [romanosky77](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/face-woman-colored-look-beautiful-3029650/)." - -type: stock -slug: comfort-zone -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}ar breathed shallowly as she headed inside the apartment complex and up the stairs, trying not to inhale the scent of cat litter and creamed corn soup. She paused in front of one of the apartment doors, and pressed her fingers together to keep them from shaking. Once they were steady, she knocked. - -“Come in,” a voice said, catching like a jagged nail. The voice cleared itself with a cough and tried again. “Come in.” - -Mar pushed the door open. The scent of lilacs, her daughter’s favorite, sent a twisting spike through her stomach. - -A figure in a pressed plaid shirt tucked over a slight potbelly turned to her. Older than Mar, Leif was thinner since the last time she had seen him, maybe three weeks ago. Then, he had still been her daughter. Leif started to speak, but stopped when Mar showed him the pristine gleam of her handgun. - -She pointed it directly at his cerulean eyes. - - “Jenna wouldn’t want this,” Leif said. - -“What could you *possibly* know about what she wants?” Mar spat and, just as she had practiced in the shooting range, took aim at his chest. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t started with core waves. - -Once scientists discovered how quantum patterns in the brain could be targeted with electromagnetic pulses, research teams targeted these core waves to nudge dysfunctional neurons into normal behavior, treating a host of neural diseases. And that was just the beginning: core waves also led to core swaps. Mar didn’t fully understand it, but physicists called it a quantum tunneling between brain states, enabling mice, then monkeys, then human subjects, to swap consciousnesses for a limited time. It was all fine and well, until Jenna volunteered be part of a pilot program through her university. - -“Swap with what?” Mar had said, staring at Jenna across the coffee shop table last fall. - -“His name is Leif. He works in sociology.” - -“If you want to be a man,” Mar said, “why don’t you just get an operation, or steroids, the old-fashioned way?” - -Jenna shook her head, hair sleek as a helmet. “It’s not about changing genders. It’s about swapping lives. Stepping outside of our comfort zones to really understand the human condition. This will redefine everything: gender, race, economic studies. It could even get us closer to a definition of the soul.” - - “It sounds risky,” was all Mar could think to say. The latte scalded her tongue and she set down the mug, foam sloshing over the top. - -“I’m doing it.” Her daughter’s brown eyes flickered, a hint of exasperation. - -“What if he’s a pervert, a freak?” Mar hated the note of hysteria in her voice. She swore she’d never be like her own mother, paranoid and overprotective, and she wasn’t, but God knew this was too much for anyone to take without protest. “You have no idea what he’s going to do with your body. I can think of one *hundred* things right now that could go terribly wrong.” - -“They screen everyone really carefully. Obviously.” Jenna’s mascaraed eyes narrowed, her shoulder blades folding up, a habit she had ever since she was a kid and didn’t like the conversation at hand. “And we all have to sign paperwork. It’s not like you can shoot up heroin or go on an orgy spree with someone else’s body.” - -“It’s just… you’re all I have left.” Mar tried to sound matter of fact but it came out choked. By some horrendous turn of fate both mother and daughter had lost their husbands two years ago, Mar’s to a stroke and Jenna’s to a highway accident. - -“It’s perfectly safe. If anything goes wrong, the core waves jump back to their originator. There’s been a ton of papers in all the big journals.” - -“Nothing is *perfectly* safe,” Mar snapped. She had never had any luck instilling a proper sense of caution in Jenna. Jenna, who had learned how to headstand on a cantering horse, who had studied abroad in countries Mar didn’t dare consider visiting. And now she was about to give up her body to a total stranger. “Just because you’ve written some books on psychology, you’re qualified for a dangerous experiment?” - -“It’s *not* dangerous, for the last time. They need someone who can write and capture and be self-reflective. I was *lucky* to be chosen. Do you know how many people applied? Ugh, never mind.” - -Mar opened her mouth, on the verge of saying how horrified Jenna’s dad would be if he were still alive. But truthfully, Ricardo would have reminded Mar that their adult daughter was free to do as she pleased. - -Well, Ricardo wasn’t here, and Mar had to do damage control on her own. - -“Why you’d be so foolish I have no idea,” she said. - -Jenna’s eyes and shoulders closed up even more, the distance between them miles as she uttered the dismissive sentence all parents dread: - -“You just don’t get it.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t still hadn’t sunk in for Mar, even when she sat in the technician’s office on the university campus, watching onscreen while specialists fitted her daughter into a giant suit. - -The technician narrated conversationally. “We strap in the participants and induce a sort of mini-seizure—” Mar shot him a look, and the tech hastily added, “It’s very controlled. We funnel the energy from these mental ‘storms’ into each other, creating the bridge.” - -Mar had read a bit about it before the procedure: a sensitive and precise enough magnetic chamber could set up a quantum tunnel between brains to swap the core waves of each distinct personality. - -“Is she all right?” Mar asked, for what felt like the twentieth time. They had said the procedure took five minutes, not counting the hours of preparation. The participants had already had microscopic high-end wireless neural readers implanted in their temples to maintain the tunnel outside of the chamber. - -“The actual swap takes less than a second,” he said. “You should be proud. Your daughter is paving the way for a revolution in consciousness. Just think, if we could move between bodies, well, we could become a giant organism, and once tissue engineering catches up we could even live for—” - -“Please stop.” - -“Anyway,” the technician said. “This is just the start.” - -After the procedure, Mar waited in the hallway until Jenna and a man emerged and shook hands before parting. The man headed toward Mar, but her daughter’s figure hurried away with two techs. Mar bit her lip to stop from yelling out. - -*He’s probably off to grab her boobs*, Mar thought. A ridiculous, angry thought. - -“How did it feel?” the technician asked. - -“I feel great,” the man—not the man, her daughter, somehow *her daughter*—said. The face smiled in a way that made Mar cringe, that made her think of a sleazy guy giving her a drink. Jenna must have caught her expression. - -“You shouldn’t have come,” her daughter said in the raspy voice, folding massive shoulders back. The candy blue eyes stared at her while Mar blinked back tears. - -“Why did you have to do this? What is that man going to do to your body?” Mar fought back her sob. “What if he doesn’t give it back?” - -“Leif,” her daughter said, touching the temple where a tiny incision scar remained. “His name is Leif. Not ‘the man’.” - -“I know this is hard,” the technician chimed in. “We have some instructional videos. There’s also free counseling, if you want it.” - -Mar turned away, patting at her wet eyelashes with the back of her hand. “I’m not the one who needs counseling,” she said. Even though part of her never wanted to leave her daughter’s side, she couldn’t be there a second longer. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}ar met her—him—*her*—at breakfast, a few days later, once Jenna had acclimated. - -“Mom, you’re staring,” Leif’s voice growled. “Really awkward.” - -Mar used every ounce of willpower not to shudder. Instead she took a bite of egg and watched her daughter pour sugar into her coffee. “That’s new.” - -Jenna flashed a smile, a genuine grin, mixed with her signature arrogance. “This body craves more sugar. I’m trying to help him cut down, but it’s hard. The sugar highs feel *so* much more intense.” - -Mar watched Leif’s lips, interested despite herself. How could she recognize her daughter’s smile in something so different? Maybe, Mar had mused, it was how the tiny muscles in the corners of the lip lifted and turned, giving off a sense of haughtiness. Or maybe it was something else, transmitted there in the space between them. - -“What else is different?” - -Jenna’s gaze grew distant, new eyes so unfamiliar in their creased wrinkle casing, like glass marbles in puckered bags. “You know when you’re watching a movie or reading a book and get so absorbed you start to feel anxious for the character? This feels like that, but times a million. I want the best for him. And I can still feel what I’m doing—what *he’s* doing, in my body, in my life—like a dream.” - -Mar’s fork clattered to the table. “What do you mean?” - -“My thoughts are changing his neural patterns a bit, and his are tweaking mine. And I guess the quantum tunnel gives us a ghostly feel of each other. Like, right now, I know he’s about to present to his class. And he probably knows I’m at breakfast with you.” - -Mar cut out of the diner early, claiming a headache. The contract was for six months, and Mar had no idea how she would wait that long. The research team had capped swaps at that timeframe—some of the animal models had experienced confusion or missing thoughts after that. - -“I won’t breathe easy until she’s back to normal,” Mar had told her friends. “That’s a long time of not breathing.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}inally the awful experiment entered its final week. Mar thumbed off her phone as she and Jenna met at the corner of Newbury Street, amidst the brunch crowd. - -“Are you still using that?” Jenna sighed. “The contacts are so much easier.” - -“There’s only so much change a person can handle in a lifetime,” Mar said stiffly. While they waited at the crosswalk, Jenna took a small intake of breath, a harbinger of a statement Mar wouldn’t like. - -“I'm doing another one after this. An amputee in India.” - -“You’re joking.” - -Leif’s head shook, the pale hair gleaming like icicles. - -“You’ve done your piece. Let someone else give their time.” Mar tried her best to sound reasonable. - -“The change is like nothing else. I understand so much more about myself, about others, about *everything*. I understand you and your worry better now too. Dad’s death destroyed us. And so did Tom’s. This is finally showing me how to heal. It’s hard to explain.” Jenna reached out to Mar’s arm, but the fingers that touched her skin were bigger, thicker. Blunt. Alien. - -Mar tempered the scream that wanted out. “By escaping the body your dad and I gave you? Is it really so horrible you can’t stand to be in it?” And what’s to prevent people from abusing this, the rich old folks from taking over the poor and young? Body parasites, like a scifi movie?” - -“Have you read *any* of the stuff I sent?” Jenna asked as they crossed the street. “There are only two places in the *world* that have the resources to create such a precise set-up. And the quantum connection expires naturally.” - -“I think you’re doing this because of Tom,” Mar said. She could almost hear Ricardo telling her not to say it, but pressed on anyway. “*And* your dad. To get some twisted sense of connection. It’s unhealthy. Maybe it would be better if you spent your time going on some dates, moving on.” - -Jenna’s shoulders hunched up, familiar, but now bulky as a bear’s. “*You* should—” she started, but then she, Leif’s body shuddering and nearly sliding into a lamppost. - -“Jenna!” Mar sprang forward to catch the impossibly heavy frame, her knees buckling as she lowered her daughter to the curb. *“Jenna*!” - -A few pedestrians slowed their pace. “Is he okay?” someone asked. - -Mar tried to prevent Leif’s head from slamming into the dirty sidewalk, touching the coarse pale hair. “Help her!” - -Jenna opened her eyes and muttered, “I’m sorry.” - -“Thank *goodness*,” Mar said, but then she understood, somehow, in the space of those three syllables: it was *him*, and not Jenna. - -Just like that, her daughter was gone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t couldn’t be prevented and had nothing to do with the experiment, according to the official death record. Legalese protected Leif, though Mar contacted a lawyer anyway, certain that whatever he had done—in that moment, he claimed he was preparing tea—had caused her daughter’s death. - -The aneurysm had broken the quantum link, supposedly returning the core waves to their rightful brains just as Jenna’s body expired. Under pressure from negative press the program was put on hold, despite not being liable. But it was too late to care about that. Jenna’s unique pattern of thoughts and feelings, her quantum signature, whatever it was, gone. Her daughter’s soul had dissipated just like that, leaving Mar alone again. - -After Jenna was buried, an ancient urge hummed in Mar’s fatigued bones, relieved only when she drove half an hour across state lines to buy what she needed. Maybe it would provide her some relief. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}eif’s protesting palms, his wide sky-blue eyes, everything about him irritated Mar. She focused on the reassuring weight of the gun. She wasn’t nervous—Jenna’s death had scraped away everything, leaving her empty, as though she herself had no core waves, no signal, nothing. - -“For Jenna,” Mar said, her hand and voice steady, just as she had practiced. - -Leif lowered his head. “Do it,” he said in that awful croak, the voice Jenna had made her own over six months of Mar’s suffering, before he took it back. “Please.” - -“If you’re bluffing, it won’t work.” Her voice wavered now, but she kept her focus on his chest. Leif didn’t give any sign of resisting, and it sent spikes of sheer rage, hot and dark, along Mar’s temples. “Don’t pretend to feel bad. You have no right. No *idea*. I am completely alone. Because of you. Whatever you did, you destroyed her. My Jenna is gone forever.” - -Leif looked up at her, tearstained. “No one was closer to her than me. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I can’t explain. I felt her heart, her pain, her love. For you. For Tom, and dad. I miss her more than you can know.” - -Mar’s hands shook badly though, through some Herculean effort, she kept the gun up. - -“I can feel her still,” he said. - -“What does that mean?” Giddiness swept over her. “The quantum tunnel!” She pictured a cloud funneled through a glass tube behind Leif’s forehead. “She’s still somewhere in you! Can you get her out?” - -But he was shaking his head. “It’s like… a trace she left.” - -Mar’s burst of hope fled and grief rushed back in, subtle as a pile of bricks crushing her chest. “I don’t understand.” - - “There are no explanations,” Leif said, and he almost sounded haughty, like Jenna. - -Mar lowered the gun, which had grown impossibly heavy, and squeezed her eyes shut. In this little apartment she was an indistinguishable point in the mesh of electrical signals that blinked in and out along the planet. Erased forever from that global network was the charge of her husband’s laugh and her daughter’s sigh. Now a balloon stretched around Mar, creating a void where nothing could reach her, where she could hardly even breathe. - -But a bullet might still be able to fix that, ripping through her bubble. - -Mar opened her eyes as Leif took a step toward her, then another, and before she knew what was happening he threw his arms around her. The gun was pressed into his flabby stomach, but he didn’t seem to care. - -He sobbed like a child in her arms. Leif hugged her with a force that surprised her, his arms hefty and warm. Arms that Jenna had felt from the inside out, that bore the weight of a grief Mar thought belonged only to her. - -“What am I going to do without her?” Mar’s thoughts, passing through someone else’s lips. - -Leif pulled back, wiping his face. - -“She loved you more than anyone,” he added. He held onto her shoulders, squeezing them as though trying to establish his own quantum tunnel, utterly oblivious to the gun. “You need to know that.” - -As Mar stared at him, she swore she could see etched into Leif’s gaze a look her daughter might have given her: a mix of the same anguish and intensity when Ricardo had died, breaking through the blue. - -She lowered the gun. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Comfort Zone" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201341191786881).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/Plague Rooster.md b/content/issue-25/Plague Rooster.md deleted file mode 100644 index 915757fb..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/Plague Rooster.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,488 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Plague Rooster" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- science-fiction -- poetry -authors: -- Micah Hyatt -copyright: '© Micah Hyatt 2019 All Rights Reserved. Plague Rooster was originally published in Shock Totem #11, Shock Totem Publications.' - -description: "Mythaxis is not typically a home to poetry, nor to reprints, but when we came across this piece while hunting down the author of 'The Third Martian Dick Temple' we were immediately moved, in no small part due to the pandemic gripping the world in early 2020. One year on from the first Covid-19 lockdowns, the world remains profoundly changed from how it was before - but thankfully not this much changed." - -image: images/PlagueRooster.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [lotek56](https://pixabay.com/photos/eagle-statue-monument-bird-symbol-2636167/) and [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/mountains-under-red-skies-33834/)." - -type: stock -slug: plague-rooster -weight: 4 ---- - -## I - - - -Follow me, children, Grandmother says, - - - -Across concrete bridges strangled by vines\ -Down deserted streets marked by meaningless lines\ -Around the metal husks of cars\ -Become the nests of beasts - - - -We will stay away from the buildings\ -Where only the dead reside\ -Waiting on unpowered elevators\ -That will never rise - - - -To the shrine that stands in the midst of the city\ -I will show you where our new beginning began - - - -Grandfather grunts\ -Tell them the truth this time, he says, not the pretty myth you made\ -They deserve to know about— - - - -I will tell it the only way they will understand, Grandmother says\ -Too many words have been forgotten, and the parts I’ve left out\ -Would mean nothing to them without a background in virology,\ -Parasitology and applied microbiology - - - -See? Look how confused the children are,\ -Scratching their heads\ -Science is dead\ -You and I killed it\ -Best tell them my myth instead - - - -## II - - - -Grandfather sees\ -A squat white building with busted out windows\ -And the skeletons of his former colleagues - - - -The summer rains have come early\ -And flooded the stairs - - - -He sees it the way it once was\ -Busy and alive - - - -The stone globe in the courtyard\ -Three rooster statues crowing\ -One statue shattered by the bomb-throwing\ -Terrorist that gave him his limp - - - -This is the place, Grandmother says,\ -The home of our ancestral tribe\ -And when the sickness came to us\ -We brought our babies here to die - - - -See the moss-eaten rocks of vague avian shape\ -Clutching water-smooth stones with their feet?\ -This is where Lord Rooster was born\ -And mistakes we must never repeat - - - -Find a dry place to sit, now\ -The tale is not long the way that I tell it - - - -You tell it wrong, Grandfather thinks - - - -## III - - - -Grandmother’s Myth - - - -When your grandfather and I were young\ -Mankind had learned to fear\ -The curses beasts could pass to us\ -And their knowledge we held dear - - - -Lord Rat was eldest bearer of these maladies\ -A black shape skittering through our heads\ -The fleas he carried with him\ -Would bite us in our beds - - - -And in eight days\ -The bells would toll\ -Announcing you were dead - - - -Lord Cow was subtle for his size\ -The madness he carried in his flesh\ -Would pass to those who ate him,\ -Even when his meat was fresh - - - -And in a week\ -The brain you had\ -Would be a runny mess - - - -Lord Monkey was a tricky one\ -Plotting from his treetop throne\ -His curse stripped away immunity\ -So other sicknesses could grow - - - -And without fail,\ -The tamest colds\ -Would strike us dead in droves - - - -But it was Lord Rooster we feared the most\ -For though his wings couldn't take him far\ -The little birds he consorted with\ -Were numerous as the stars - - - -And when they sang\ -At morning’s light\ -Lungs seized and ceased to draw - - - -No one could stop the spreading death\ -When Lord Rooster walked the earth\ -But your grandfather defeated him\ -How? I will start with Rooster's birth— - - - -## IV - - - -Grandfather interrupts - - - -They were viruses, you understand?\ -The sniffles? The coughs? - - - -He tries to find a way to explain\ -Concepts that no longer exist - - - -Small creatures, living things\ -Invisible and discrete - - - -Were they ghosts? the children ask - - - -No, he says\ -Lines of code in double helix - - - -Do you remember when we\ -Grafted the peach and the plum tree?\ -When I cut a branch from the one and Inserted it\ -Into the other’s cleft\ -So we would have plums out of season? - - - -Viruses are like that\ -They are the scion,\ -We are the stock - - - -They graft themselves to us\ -And together we bear fruit - - - -The children stare up at him, baffled\ -The littlest one asks if Lord Monkey was a tree - - - -Grandfather tries to think of a better metaphor,\ -Until he sees his wife’s smile - - - -He sighs\ -Just listen to Grandmother’s story, he says - - - -And walks off a ways to sit alone\ -Staring at the rooster statues\ -Still crowing at the dead stone globe - - - -## V - - - -Ignore Grandfather, Grandmother says, - - - -Look over there\ -See where the rooster statues stand?\ -This is where our elders sinned\ -And gave their last command - - - -They fought a war they could not win\ -But so wicked were their ways\ -They summoned up Lord Rooster\ -And used him like a slave - - - -They sent him to their enemies\ -Without considering the cost\ -For when their enemies lay dead\ -Lord Rooster remained aloft - - - -They built this shrine to summon him\ -Trusting glass tubes to hold him in thrall\ -Then brought their children as a sacrifice\ -And laid them on his claws - - - -Come to this place, sick spirit, they cried\ -Voices rising above the wind\ -Come drink your fill of our children\ -We will pay in blood for our sin - - - -Then with their knives they plunged deep\ -And reddened water from a bloody creek\ -Rolled down the comb and wet the beak - - - -Lord Rooster was born in a droplet—\ -A bird thing, his mind gone thin - - - -The statue cracked\ -The droplet dropped\ -The sickness took to wing - - - -And In the dying dark of night\ -Lord Rooster began to sing - - - -## VI - - - -Grandfather clears his throat - - - -They were not children we made sick\ -He says,\ -Embryonic stem cells never lived\ -An egg is not a chick - - - -Our work was ordained\ -Sanctioned from on high\ -By government officials\ -Who wished to never die - - - -They told us to open the disease\ -We unzipped it\ -Read nature's code like data decrypted - - - -Rewrote its essence to be useful\ -And implanted our lie so well\ -The human body swore that it was truthful - - - -Listen to me, my grandchildren,\ -Lord Rooster is nothing but the name\ -We gave it when it jumped from birds to men\ -The statue did not awaken\ -We are not paying for our sin - - - -## VII - - - -Grandfather’s memory is going, Grandmother says,\ -But I remember it rightly - - - -The sun rising, the fluttering wings\ -Shedding rock and debris to reveal\ -A skinny raw thing\ -With its mouth open wide\ -And to it we villagers kneeled - - - -We nourished him with blood until he grew strong - - - -White and crimson feathers sprouted\ -His granite beak took a yellow hue\ -And when we pointed him towards the east\ -To our enemies he flew - - - -The littlest grandchild asks, - - - -What do these words mean, Papa\ -In the place where Lord Rooster once perched? - - - -My company’s motto, Grandfather replies\ -Our knowledge will light the Earth - - - -How did you stop him grandpa? - - - -Who? - - - -Lord Rooster, the child says - - - -Grandfather looks away\ -With shame in his eyes\ -He says, I did a bad thing - - - -No, Grandmother says,\ -You saved so many lives - - - -Tell the story how you wish, he says\ -But leave me out of it - - - -He turns and walks away\ -Towards the ruined city - - - -They will be safe without him\ -On their return to the homestead\ -A side effect of the cure:\ -All the muggers are long dead - - - -He perches himself on some rubble, brooding\ -Mist rises from cracked streets like ghosts - - - -The surest way to kill a virus\ -Is to kill every possible host - - - -Which he has done - - - -It was easy and over fast\ -Everything but the regret - - - -He lapses into a long silence, thinking\ -I am the reason there are no more birds - - - -Hours later, the sun rises over a dead city - - - -Nothing crows - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Plague Rooster" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201342335120100).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/Prometheus Kidneys.md b/content/issue-25/Prometheus Kidneys.md deleted file mode 100644 index 84421196..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/Prometheus Kidneys.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,130 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Prometheus’ Kidneys" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Meg Candelaria -copyright: '© Meg Candelaria 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Yes, it's hard to know what will get a story accepted or rejected at Mythaxis — but until recently the editor thought he had one answer at least: 'Don't send me any more clever retellings of ancient Greek Myths,' he'd say, 'I'm never going to take one of those!' And then Meg Candelaria came along to make him eat those words." - -image: images/PrometheusKidneys.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Anna Shvets](https://www.pexels.com/photo/light-man-people-woman-4421482/) and [TheOther Kev](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-bald-eagle-against-black-background-3149041/)." - -type: stock -slug: prometheus-kidneys -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he sun rose over a rock in the sea. A solitary figure on the rock stirred slowly. - -Prometheus sighed. It was morning. - -Yet again. - -Soon the eagle of Zeus would be here. - -Yet again. - -The eagle would perform the ritual and eat his liver. - -Yet again. - -Prometheus was tired of the ritual. Over the centuries he had come to dread it almost as much as the actual eating of his liver, but there was no avoiding either. He could see the eagle’s outline in the distance. It would be here soon, and he must go through it all. Yet again. - -At least then it would be over and he would have the rest of the day to himself, to heal, to think, to listen to the music of the sirens, the calls of the gulls, and the waves lapping at the edge of his rock. To listen to his hair grow, so long now it rode the water around the rock like weed. - -It was a dull existence, punctuated with moments of terror and pain each morning, but Prometheus refused to regret the deed that had put him there. - -The eagle landed on the rock to which Prometheus was chained, his abdomen exposed and defenseless. “Again I come,” it said. “And again I ask you: Do you regret your act?” - -Prometheus sighed. “No, I do not, I cannot, and I will not.” - -The eagle gave an odd sound, almost like a sigh. Prometheus wondered if it was tired of the ritual as well. Did the eagle long to be released from their commitment, to be free to seek some less stubborn food? Or did the access to easy prey make up for having to go through this ridiculous ritual of question and answer each morning? It certainly never seemed to tire of the meal. Once Prometheus had asked the eagle if it was bored with his liver and would prefer a kidney instead. He had pointed out that, if the eagle loosened the chains just a bit, it could reach his back and enjoy a new taste. Alas, the eagle had only stared at him when he made the suggestion. The eagle of Zeus was not known for its imagination, or its sense of humor. - -“By your disloyalty and recalcitrance, you have earned this punishment,” the eagle said, raising its beak over Prometheus’ exposed right flank. - -“Do what you will,” Prometheus said. “I will never regret siding with the weak against the strong, the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the defenseless against the aggressor, those in need against the greedy.” He said it every time, to remind himself more than to inform, convince, or even defy the eagle. - -“Let’s get it over with,” he added. - -The eagle was all too eager to move on to its reward. Soon, Prometheus knew, he would feel intense pain as the beak ripped open his side and removed piece after piece of his liver. He would scream until his throat bled and he choked on his own blood. The eagle would feast on his liver and drink its fill of his blood. - -A god or a titan cannot lose consciousness or go into shock. He would be aware of every last sensation. *Again*. He would try to shut it out, to listen to the roar of the sea and the songs of the sirens instead. The strategy would fail soon enough, but it did help, at least a little, at first. The sea was, alas, still and uninteresting today, except for an unusual low-pitched hum. Perhaps that might provide a brief distraction. He focused on the sound. - -The eagle eyed Prometheus one last time, angling its head to most easily strike the spot just below the ribs, its favorite spot for making the first break in the skin. Prometheus took a deep breath and waited for the pain. The sea’s hum increased in intensity. - -“Not today!” a voice suddenly cried out from nowhere. “Not today and not ever again!” - -The eagle lifted its head in annoyance, searching for the source of the disruption, but Prometheus saw it first: a human in a small boat was approaching his rock at an unnatural speed. - -“How is he controlling his craft?” Prometheus wondered aloud. The human, sailor or warrior as he might be, did not appear to be rowing and the craft had no sail. A hero, then, gifted by the gods with a supernatural craft, perhaps. But what god would give such a gift to a human, even if he *was* a hero? - -The human’s boat reached the island and, using Prometheus’ near endless hair as rope, he scrambled up it to the spot where Prometheus and the eagle stood. *She* scrambled up, Prometheus corrected himself, for at close range there was no mistaking this human’s shape for that of a man. But what could she be doing here? An Amazon, or Atalanta herself, come to challenge the eagle? But how? She had no sword or bow or other weapon. She wore no armor and bore no shield. She would die in seconds when the eagle attacked. The recklessness was magnificent, but would be all too short lived. - -“Not today,” she repeated, looking the eagle in the eye. “And never again. You are done here. Go your way or be slain.” - -The eagle eyed the woman with the expression a guard dog might give a lap dog that yipped at it: bemused and amused, a bit contemptuous, but by no means alarmed. - -“Go away little human,” it said. “I have no business with you, but if you stay here you will be my dessert after I eat the titan’s liver.” - -“You will never again eat his liver,” the woman insisted, taking a step towards the eagle. - -“No!” Prometheus cried. “Get away! You are valiant, but what can you do against the eagle of Zeus? Save yourself and have no concern for me.” - -“Take the titan’s advice,” the eagle said. “I will have my prey. You have no means to harm me. I, however, have every means of harming you.” The eagle lifted a talon, and clacked its beak threateningly. - -“I have no means to harm you?” the woman asked. “Are you sure?” - -The eagle looked at her, contempt and confidence plain in its expression. Prometheus, in contrast, felt a slight lift of hope. He knew a trickster’s expression when he saw one. - -“Let’s test your hypothesis,” the woman said with a smile. - -She pulled a small metal object from her pocket and pointed it at the eagle. There was a flash of light, the sound of a slammed door, and the smell of smoke filled the air. A tiny dot of blood appeared on the eagle’s chest. - -The eagle looked first confused then surprised, then, for a brief moment, terrified, before it fell off the rock and landed with a splash in the sea. Prometheus knew instinctively that it was fire, his own gift, that the woman had used to end the immortal eagle’s life—although how she had used it he could not say. - -“Thank… thank you!” Prometheus exclaimed. “I don't know how I can ever repay your valor.” - -The woman turned to him and smiled again. It had been a long time since Prometheus had seen a human and he had, perhaps, forgotten some of the subtle points which a smile could convey, but this he felt sure was not a pleasant one. The woman was short, pale, soft, and clearly mortal. Yet, with that smile, she looked like nothing so much as Zeus on the day he had chained Prometheus to the rock. - -“*I* do,” the woman said. “I know *exactly* how you will repay me. My donor shortage is over!” - -With that, she fell on Prometheus and cut open his side in the very place the eagle would have opened it with its beak. Quickly and neatly, she removed the liver. Unlike the eagle, she seemed to find the blood a nuisance and did something with a small stick to stop its flow, similar to but distinct from the one she had used to destroy the eagle. Fire was involved here too, as Prometheus could tell by the smell of burnt meat that permeated the air. The smell of a burnt offering to the gods—or to humanity—made from his own flesh. - -The woman placed his liver in a strange container which seemed to be neither wood nor metal nor even porcelain, and from which cold smoke arose. She smiled again, looking satisfied. “A new liver, every day. And the liver of a *god*. Perfect! Whose body would reject the liver of a god?” - -She hopped down to her boat, her miniscule weight tugging his long locks as she went. As the strange little vessel set off again, she turned, waved, and called, “See ya tomorrow!” - -The humming of the boat receded, and in a short span of time Prometheus was once more alone with the day and his discomfort, the steady knitting of his abused flesh. Yet again. - -“You did not regret your deed before,” an amused voice in his head asked. “Do you now that you have seen the uses to which humans have put your gift?” - -“No, Zeus, I do not,” Prometheus answered. “The woman made it clear that she seeks to use my liver not for her own need or greed but to help others. I regret her desire not at all, her act only a little. She is, in any case, quicker and neater than your eagle. Do *you* regret that you betrayed your loyal servant to death and did not even get the result you sought?” - -The voice made no answer. - -Prometheus smiled. He had made the speech to anger Zeus. Annoying Zeus was a game that never grew old, even with the passage of millennia. However, that did not mean that what he said was not true. On the contrary, it *was* true. Very true, as anyone who considered the matter carefully must eventually realize. - -In his long period of suffering, suffering for an act of apparent charity, the world had forgotten who Prometheus really was: not a martyr god, such as Persephone or Baldor or the unfortunate son of Jaweh, but a trickster god, brother to Loki and Coyote. Tricking the eagle of Zeus was one thing: hard, near impossible, as Prometheus had found over the centuries. The eagle was too straightforward. It had had few or no ambitions of its own, beyond the need to serve Zeus, and little or no imagination to work with. Tricking a human—a surgeon no less, if he read the clues right—was quite a different task. A much easier and more enjoyable task. For the first time in centuries, Prometheus was oblivious to the world around him. The songs of the sirens went unnoticed as his brain seethed with new ideas, new plans. - -Perhaps he’d start by convincing her to cut his hair. Things had clearly changed since his exile, but surely they couldn’t change so much that surgeons no longer cut hair. One talked while cutting hair. It was a natural thing. He would let her know that he did not grudge her his liver. Perhaps she would tell him how she used it, in whose name and interest she had taken his sacrifice. Then, sympathy established, perhaps he would suggest that she consider his kidneys. If she needed his liver, surely she could use his kidneys too. Yes, that suggestion would surely be of more interest to a surgeon than to the eagle of Zeus. - -Kidneys are not easily reached from the front of the body and the chains kept Prometheus’ back firmly against the rock. The eagle would have probably continued straight through him to reach them, had he ever succeeded in its temptation, but this surgeon preferred a different sort of efficiency. And in order to get at his kidneys, she would have to loosen his chains, just a bit. - -Iron and rock have no force to hold a titan. Only Zeus’ magic kept Prometheus chained to the rock. If the chains were loosened, so would the spell be. After they were loosened, he would need only to regrow his organs, stretch, break the fetters, and walk away. After that… the possibilities were nearly endless. - -Humans were clearly no longer the pathetic, helpless creatures they were at the beginning of Prometheus’ exile. He might have stolen fire from the gods for them, but they had stolen magic from the gods for themselves. Prometheus felt a profound feeling of fellowship for the species. They were no longer his children. They were his brothers and sisters. They were his peers. - -They were fair game. - -Prometheus smiled a trickster’s smile and settled back, to regrow his liver, and to plan. - -No, he had not a regret in the world. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Prometheus' Kidneys" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201342628453404).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/The Cat and the Cosmic Horror.md b/content/issue-25/The Cat and the Cosmic Horror.md deleted file mode 100644 index a416ba79..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/The Cat and the Cosmic Horror.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,341 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Cat and the Cosmic Horror" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- science fiction -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala -copyright: '© Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's a long tradition of comedy double acts, both in writing and performing. It's always good to have someone to bounce your ideas off, as long as they don't become someone you want to bounce off the wall. Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala provide a fine example of the benefits of the former, but the calamitous duo at the heart of their story may be more like the latter…" - -image: images/CatCosmicHorror.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [DivvyPixel](https://pixabay.com/photos/cat-moody-angry-close-up-3386220), [Artem Podrez](https://www.pexels.com/photo/food-sandwich-restaurant-man-4728849/), [the baljinder](https://www.pexels.com/photo/thoughtful-young-ethnic-man-squatting-on-street-4089883/), and [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/animal-elephant-eye-big-close-up-1853031/)." - -type: stock -slug: cat-cosmic-horror -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}F{{}}arrokh ‘Firedrake’ Sodawala sat up in his wooden chair on the lawns of Bombay Gymkhana. His lean, bearded face was a mask of furious concentration. - -The cards were not in his favour. - -Opposite him sat the ageless Shindu-tai Andharkar, stately matriarch of Gondhalekar Chawl. The hint of a smile hovered upon her face as she glanced at her cards. She adjusted the Tudor bonnet atop her head, which offered some protection against the summer’s oppressive heat. Farrokh sighed, regretting the decision to leave his hat behind for the umpteenth time that day. A single bead of sweat made its way down his face and perched on his nose as if contemplating whether to take the long leap down. He took the decision away from it, shaking his head and dislodging it in a fine impression of a dog drying itself off after a bath. Not that there were any dogs around—no canine dared loiter around Shindu-tai’s massive, midnight-black cat Minerva, who was lounging on the grass nearby. - -“Blast this heat,” Shindu-tai said. “It’s unnatural, especially in these monsoon months.” - -“It manages to resist my best efforts at weather control,” Farrokh answered, with a pained grin. “And it only gets worse every day.” - -Shindu-tai frowned. “Surprisingly, parts of the city have been reporting waves of extreme cold. Did you hear about Powai Lake freezing over? The scientists are saying it’s the end days. Climate change coming for us all.” - -Farrokh nodded. The weather patterns had been all over the news. Bombay was experiencing an ineffable juxtaposition of summer and winter. - -“The Mayor called it a hoax, as expected. He’s blaming it all on supernatural meddling.” Shindu-tai chuckled. Some things would never change, like the towering incompetence of politicians. - -Farrokh fiddled with his cards. “He’s not completely wrong, you know.” - -Shindu-tai raised a lofty eyebrow. Another bead of sweat made its way down Farrokh’s pinched face. He glared at it, cross-eyed. Shindu-tai waved a hand and gestured for him to carry on. - -“It’s not climate change. It’s a… ahem, how do I put it?” Farrokh frowned. “It’s a state visit from across the pond, and the Ladies are not coming incognito.” - -Both Shindu-tai’s eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. She stood, unsettling Minerva. Ignoring the cat’s irritated hissing (and her winning hand) she said, “Come, walk with me, Firedrake.” - -The majestic woman held out her graceful arm. Farrokh took it with a smile, his earlier vexation replaced with amusement, despite the danger they were in. - -After all, it wasn’t often that he was able to surprise the city’s oldest witch. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}orgive Shindu-tai letting her conversational guard down for a second, for as well she knew, at that moment something unspeakably older than even she was bearing down on them both, along with everyone else on Planet Earth. The Great Old One had been hurtling through space and time for countless eons when it course-corrected to make a quick pit stop, nothing more. Destroy a city or two, absorb the souls of its people, establish a base for future reference. Like setting up a gas station, really. And while this primitive, weak world would no doubt be as an insect under its heel—if it wore heels, which it did not, thankfully, though it had many tentacles that could have passed for legs—it still knew where to make landfall. *There*, where its impact would eradicate its prey’s greatest defences. Sure, the landing would leave it a tad weaker than usual, unable to rise to its *full* size perhaps, but it was nothing a good feed wouldn’t fix. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey walked in silence, until they were at the far side of the lawn, away from potential eavesdroppers, and Shindu-tai placed a hand on her friend’s arm. “Now, out with it, dearest Firedrake, for if you mean what I think you mean, it could not be happening at a more inopportune moment.” - -Farrokh nodded. “The Ladies of Summer and Winter are paying a visit to the city. The defeat of the demonic horde last summer has piqued Faërie’s interest. They want to see the city that successfully resisted that terror.” - -“So, it’s not a hostile visit then?” - -“Not unless we muck up their reception somehow. You know how… *touchy* they can be. Their people sent feelers, asked me to arrange a proper welcome. I’ve given them the coordinates of the Sea Link. Might was well shove the city’s best foot—or bridge—forward.” - -“Well, that is far from the only problem we have,” the majestic witch stated, as she played with a squirrel nesting in an ancient tree, conjuring a cluster of too-perfect nuts, swaying from a branch which it could never quite manage to leap upon. “A cosmic entity is hurtling towards the planet. My crystal ball broke when I commanded it to show me the creature. The tea-leaves gave me the when, but not the where. And it is definitely hostile.” - - “If I were attacking Bombay, I’d use the Dorothy gambit,” said Farrokh, referencing the well-known story of the mighty witch who had saved the Land of Oz. The tale as told to children made her out to be a naïve Kansas native, but the truth was slightly different, obscured by retellings as stories are wont to be. - -In reality, Dorothy Gale had been on a secret mission. Assisted by her famous hound Toto, she had accomplished half her task by landing her spacecraft on her adversary, neutralising her completely. “Your entity will surely want to land in such a way as to destroy one of our power centres… by the ancestor who commissioned it, Hanging Gardens! It will land at Hanging Gardens!” - -Hanging Gardens, or Pherozeshah Mehta Gardens as it was formally called, had been put in place to concentrate the city’s magical defences through a whimsical erection known as the ‘Old Lady’s Boot’. Children played there in the daytime, and the power of their happiness and innocence was harnessed by the Firedrake’s people to power it up at night. - -Shindu-tai nodded. “So, we will have to take care of that as well.” - -“Or… we could send the Sheriffs?” Farrokh wore a marvellously straight face, one he should really employ during cards. “You know, *The Saviours of Bombay*? Whose job it actually is to protect the city.” - -The situation might be dire, but Shindu-tai chuckled.The saviours in question were her grandson, Vaman, and Farrokh’s son, Cyrus. They had indeed managed to save their beloved city from a demonic invasion, but only through a series of comical errors, and though they had been named the Sheriffs of the city for their troubles it was purely a honorary title. Neither she nor Farrokh had any illusions regarding their competence. - -Farrokh conjured a flame in his hand and shuttered it close. He repeated the process a few times. “When it rains, it pours, eh?” - -The older woman merely smiled, and Farrokh shook his head. “I suppose one of us will have to go face that cosmic horror, and the other receive the Fae. Damned if I don’t feel like I’m getting too old for this shit.” - -The lady scoffed. “You would complain of age to me, dear Firedrake?” - -“You know what I mean,” the (slightly) younger man grumbled. - -Shindu-tai hummed in response, and continued playing with the squirrel. Then she turned to him with a glint in her eye. “I have an idea.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}rom her lush patch of sun-lit grass, Minerva watched with typically cat-like disdain as Shindu-tai outlined her budding strategy for her friendly rival and lashed her tail lazily. Had she been the type to confide the details of her inner world, she would own to being slightly more interested in the potential uses Shindu-tai’s squirrel could be put to than whatever machinations her witch might be concocting. Minerva half closed her eyes. No doubt she’d have opportunity to sink her claws into both sooner or later. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“Y{{}}ou can’t be serious,” Farrokh remarked on hearing the plan. “We can’t outsource our work!” - -“Why not?” The grand-witch was the very picture of serenity. “Western companies keep outsourcing their work to Indians all the time. Why shouldn’t we find an Indian guy of our own?” - -“But who?” - -“The young wizard, Arquin whatshisname? He’s also saved the city from a cosmic threat, you know.” - -Farrokh furrowed his brow. He knew of Arquin, whose late grandfather had in fact been a good friend. The lad had certainly acquitted himself well in battles past, and unlike his son and Shindu-tai’s grandson, had actually done it intentionally. - -“Even if I agree with this plan—and assuming this Arquin feller is willing—what about the *Sidhe* Princesses?” - -“What young hero would reject such a quest? Don’t be difficult just for the sake of it now,” she tutted. “As for the Ladies, well, you’ve been complaining about finding a suitable bride for Cyrus for a while now. And I’m not getting any younger—at this rate, that idiot Vaman will never give me great-grandkids.” - -Farrokh looked aghast.“Surely you can’t be suggesting setting them up with—” - -“I am absolutely suggesting that.” - -Aghast became dubious.“Why would the Princesses ever agree to marry those louts?” - -“It isn’t like any human women are likely to marry them,” pointed out Shindu-tai. - -Farrokh coughed. “There is that.” - -“Don’t you want Cyrus to find a nice girl and settle down?” - -“Yes, I do.” Farrokh sighed. It would be easier for him to battle the cosmic entity on his own than to find a bride for his no-good son. Perhaps an immortal Sidhe would find his behaviour appealing instead of obnoxious? One could only hope. - -“Alright, I'm in,” he said. “But not without protest.” - -Shindu-tai cackled in agreement, looking for the first time like the witch she truly was, and the squirrel fled from the scary old lady. “It is decided then. I will send Minerva with the appropriate instructions. Both the boys should be at the chawl now.” - -Farrokh nodded, and wondered whether he could retire from his post as Guardian of the City, a title very much more than merely an honorific. Maybe this Arquin fellow could prove himself and take over. Let him deal with Sidhe, Cosmic Horrors, and Shindu-tai’s eccentricities! He loved the old witch dearly, yet she scared him to the bones. He was already dreading their next ‘Rummy session’ and the new troubles it would bring. - -Oh well, at least the actual game had been left forgotten for now. He had caught a glimpse of Shindu-tai’s cards and counted himself lucky to be leaving the club without losing his money for the fifth time in a row. - -Maybe things would work out after all. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“V{{}}aman, ol’ buddy, ol’ friend, is that your grandmother’s cat I spot over there?” Cyrus said, pointing at the cat climbing up the banister. When Vaman did not respond immediately he poked his friend, who was leaning against the aforementioned banister. - -Vaman, lacking Minerva’s nimble-footedness, stumbled and almost went over. Only grabbing onto Cyrus’s collar saved him from having a fatal argument with the forces of gravity. “Do be careful, old sport,” Cyrus tutted, helping his friend upright, only to receive a glare in response. - -“You be careful, idiot!” Vaman screeched. - -“What are you talking about?” Cyrus asked, scratching his head. - -“You… nearly… threw me over,” a dumbfounded Vaman sputtered. - -“You really need to be more coherent, old buddy.” Cyrus patted his lanky friend, who held onto the railing with both hands to prevent a repeat of the previous incident. “Anyway, is that cat playing with scrolls?” - -“Why yes, it is. Let’s go see what secrets grandma’s dealing in now,” Vaman said, already forgetting his previous distress. - -The two friends sneaked along the narrow corridor—which in their case consisted of a lot of grunts and winces as they tried to walk astride each other—and pounced upon the cat. - -Minerva, as might have been expected, took great offense at being attacked by the two friends. She joined the fray, claws out and snarling. A great battle followed in the corridors of Gondhalekar Chawl, one punctuated by the yowls of an angry cat and the screams and shrieks of two young men. Amidst the chaos Vaman somehow managed to grab one of the scrolls and, counting it as a partial success, he fled the battleground, letting his friend deal with covering his retreat. After all, thanks to his prodigious size Cyrus had a lot more protection against the cat’s clawsthan Vaman did. It was a tactical decision. There was no fear involved. - -Left to face an increasingly irate cat on his own, Cyrus withdrew from the fray as well, though not before Minerva had given him a final scratch on one buttock. Her eyes flashed once with malice and magic as she took note of the scroll Vaman had gotten away with. Her job done, she proceeded to the kitchen, intent on eating all the fish in the refrigerator and completing her revenge. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}loistered behind the chawl’s common privy—for secrecy, that is, they weren’t hiding, no siree—the two friends broke the seal and unfurled the letter. - -“Well would you look at that, the letter was meant for us all along.” Cyrus pulled his collar with a nervous chuckle. “Why didn’t the silly cat just give it to us?” - -“How do you know it’s for us?” - -“It’s addressed to ‘Young and Mighty Heroes’. That’s us. Hmm. We have to show visiting royalty around the city,” Cyrus said, puffing himself up. “My Dad and your Grandma hope we will acquit ourselves well… and impress the faery princesses.” - -“Oh yeah, how do you know all that?” Vaman grumbled. - -“I read faster than you, you school drop-out!” - -“I am not a… oh, never mind.” - -“I won’t. Let’s go get haircuts. We have to meet them at Hanging Gardens in two days.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n a small shop sequestered in the suburbs of Bombay, a young wizard was approached by a cat the size of a small tiger. She offered him a scroll, he offered her the fried *Bombay Duck*—a weird thing to call a fish, he thought for the umpteenth time—he had been eating. This exchange done, the cat’s eyes flashed with pleasure before she attacked the food with gusto. - -“A missive from the grandwitch, eh,” Arquin said. “Wonder what it’s about.” He cut open the seal and began reading. “*Dear Brave Hero… pleased with your work in saving the city last summer… gratitude and congratulations*… blah blah, cut to the chase, please… Ah, here it is,” he murmured to his disinterested audience of one. “*Cosmic threat incoming, city in danger, arriving at the Sea-Link*.” He nodded. “This is right up my street.” - -He quickly wrote his answer and gave it to the cat. “Convey this to the grandwitch, would you please? Tell her I’ll be there.” - -Minerva nodded once in response and turned to more pressing matters: the swiftly-dwindling supply of fish in her plate. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“A{{}}re you sure you have the right address?” Cyrus asked. “There don’t seem to be any princesses here.” - -“The letter said Hanging Gardens, you read it same as I did,” a tetchy Vaman replied. They swung around on rickety playground swings overlooking the shimmering Arabian Sea. Well, Vaman did—Cyrus’ swing groaned under his considerable girth and refused to move. Their note had said Farrokh would ensure the garden was closed to public for the day, which meant the two had the run of the place, and did not have to worry about pesky kids getting in their way. - -“Pass that bottle, man.” - -“You’ve had enough.” - -“No I have not!” - -They had, indeed, been drinking since arrival in the hopes of fortifying their spirits. Never the smoothest when dealing with women, they had agreed that imbibing a moderate quantity of alcohol would make them brave enough to deal with the Fae. - -Unfortunately, neither had any concept of what ‘moderation’ meant, so they were working on their second bottle of whiskey when *something* smashed into the gigantic Witch’s Boot which stood in the centre of the garden, crushing it to smithereens, and instantaneously snuffing out every protective ward standing between the city, the nation, nay, the world in a heartbeat. In victorious agony, it let out a scream of agonized victory. - -The two young men stared dumbfounded as one massive tentacle became visible over the crater, followed by another and another, until an indefinable eldritch horror stood before them. Unexpectedly it was only as tall as Vaman, but in form it was all indescribable shapes and angles, and looking at it made their eyes glaze over in befuddlement. - -The double-headed, many-eyed, multi-limbed cosmic horror looked to see if any were there who dared oppose it and saw two things—locals, it assumed—rather tottering in place. One was of considerable girth while the other was thin as a reed, and both had haircuts that even the horrifying-visaged Old One thought were repulsive. - -“D-d-d-did you see that, Vaman?” said the larger one, its slurring voice filled with awe. - -“Yes, Cyrus. Such dulcet tones, such indecipherable beauty… I think I am in love.” The thin one’s eyes looked like heart-shaped quarters, slightly cross-eyed. - -“Me too, dear buddy, me too,” replied the other one. - -They ran towards it, zig-zagging and stumbling. Before it could make out whether their intentions were hostile, they had taken hold of a tentacle each and the confused Old One was swept up between the two lads, all thoughts of attacking the place replaced by bewilderment as it was crooningly serenaded. - -“We’ll show you such sights as you’ve never seen before,” said the one referred to as Vaman in a husky voice. Its breath stank worse than the distilleries of Andromeda. - -“Indeed, we’ll give you a VIP tour of the ol’ city. Parts of her reserved only for the really special people,” the other—Cyrus—said, nudging and winking at the confused cosmic horror. “Once you’ve seen it, you’ll never want to go home.” - -As they left the gardens, a disgusting smell of rotting flesh mingled with sweat hit the cosmic entity. It waved a frantic tentacle towards the earthlings. - -“What’s got you in a tizzy, m’lady?” Cyrus said, in a barely-decipherable accent that the Old One would have recognised as an attempt to sound posh, had it ever watched television on Earth. It continued to wave its tentacles at everything around it. “The smell? Oh that’s just the charnel house. They leave those bodies out for birds to devour, it’s actually a holy ritual, y’know.” - -“Well, *his* lot does,” said Vaman, “My lot, we burn them. Sometimes we even make sure they’re dead first!” - -“Hurry up now, let’s not meander here. We don’t want to disturb the ghosts and spirits.” Cyrus said. “Come, to my car.” - -The belching and confounded eldritch was propelled towards a parked car. Or what might have once been a car. Presently it looked held together by sheer willpower. Unwitting, it joined the earthlings inside. - -What followed was terror as the clanky, rattling pile of bolts and metal jangled, bumped, and hurtled through roads with more craters than on some moons the Old One had seen and past traffic that made the great cesspool of the asteroid belt seem like a spacious garden. - -“Next stop, Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi. It’s a tourist hotspot,” the two intoned together. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n another part of the city, near the behemoth of steel and concrete that was the Bombay-Worli Sea-Link, two princesses of otherworldly beauty and demeanour stood across from a familiar young wizard. One white as snow, the other tanned like the earth, both with eyes that sparkled like endless pools of darkness. The Lady of Winter and Summer had arrived. - -“Halt ladies, lest I have to introduce you to my blade.” Arquin drew his longsword. Sunlight glinted off the cold steel. - -Their lips crooked into smiles at his words. “Tatiana, he speaks in the formal tongue!” the brown woman said. “Ooh, I thought it had gone out of fashion in the mortal world, it’s a pleasant surprise to hear such polished language.”, - -“Indeed, Titania.” A wide smile bloomed on the pale woman’s face as she shivered in ecstasy. “He even makes delightful threats.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he eldritch cosmic horror and the Sheriffs of Bombay entered the slums of Dharavi, a cauldron of human vices which smelled of desperation and struggle. - -“Welcome to Asia’s largest slum settlement, dear lady. Foreigners pay a pretty penny to visit this place and unravel its mysteries,” Cyrus whispered in its ears —or where he assumed its ears were—with the tones of one imparting great secrets upon the listener. As this was actually the Old One’s olfactory receptor, it recoiled at the smell of cheap whiskey. - -“Indeed,” Vaman piped up trying to imitate his friend’s accent but only succeeding in sounding like he had a nasal infection. “It is a true symbol of the human condition, of humanity’s eternal struggle to break through the sky and ascend beyond mortal limits. To become gods.” - -The Old One made a series of clicks and noises with its many mouths and tentacles. This roughly translated to *Get me out of here, you disgusting cretins*, if one used the Cosmic Entity’s Guide to Conversing Politely. Sadly for the Horror, Cyrus and Vaman’s idea of reading consisted of scrolling through social media, and thus they assumed it was enjoying the experience. - -“Smell that?” Cyrus asked, moving his hand in a wide arc. “It’s the aroma of a hundred thousand underpaid, overworked people packed in close proximity, never sleeping, working incessantly to create some of the world’s finest, most expensive leather products. Notice the pungent smell emanating from the sweatshops? It really is distinctive.” - -Never before in all of recorded history had a cosmic horror ever paled or turned green, but on hearing their words this one did just that. - -A bony, withered man clad in a loincloth and smelling of drink crashed into the cosmic horror. The affronted monster was about to retaliate when a great palm slammed against it. “Watch where you are standing, you yob!” the man shouted before heading off, muttering under his breath about stupid tourists. - -The Outer God stood shocked. It touched a tentacle to the slowly reddening palm-print on its central mass. How was it to know that, living here, it was only the third-most-horrifying thing the toothless old fellow had seen today? - - It was just about to retaliate with a storm of destruction when Vaman caressed the injury and whispered, “Forget him, m’lady. These uncouth apes fail to recognize your magnificence.” - -“Come forth, madame,” Cyrus said, smoothly. “We’ve yet to see the grandeur of Dombivali, the haunts of Kurla, and the shifty streets of Kandivali.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he confused wizard stood his ground as the two ladies approached him with something resembling curiosity, and a hint of… was that lust? This wasn’t how Arquin had expected their battle to go. Wait—perhaps this was their bid to confuse him. - -“No mercy for invaders!” he shouted and leapt, his sword flowing like a silver serpent at his side. He swung—and missed. He struck forth again—only to miss once more. - -“Vicious,” said an impressed Tatiana, the Winter Lady, dodging a blow which would have cleaved her in two. - -“Persistent too,” Titania added, moving out of the way of a strike to her heart. “Maybe we’ve been away from the mortal world for too long. They’ve improved.” She licked her lips. - -“Fine posture, good form,” the Lady of Winter said, sidestepping three blows in quick succession. “Exquisite cheekbones.” - -“Scarred and ruggedly handsome, as well as a proficient mage,” the Lady of Summer noted, avoiding a fireball aimed at her. She gave her twin sister a shark-like smile. “I like him.” - -“Me too,” Tatiana agreed, her eyes glinting with desire. “Let’s keep him.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he Old One had seen things even other Old Ones would not believe. It had seen star dragons on fire off the heel of Caspian. It had watched U-beams glitter in the dark near the Fornax Black Hole. All those memories would be lost to time… for now it had seen horrors that defied description. - -To get to Dombivali, it had been shoved into a train by the two miscreants. No one batted an eyelid at it, multiple heads, tentacles and all, for everyone was too busy jockeying to get into the train themselves. Once there, the Old One had been pushed, smashed, smooshed, punched, slapped, poked, and stamped upon, from so many directions that it completely forgot it was capable of destroying them all with a single thought. Once at their destination, the two fools had shown it, with great pride, a number of bridges that had been begun but never completed, and made it eat something called *missal*, which had made its mouth burn until it was convinced it was being poisoned—except that both earthlings were eating from the same bowl with relish. - -Then it was taken to Kurla, where, in the crowd on the railway bridge, it got separated from its apparent suitors. After this, it spent the next hour somehow being turned around or pushed onto various platforms within the station itself. When Cyrus and Vaman finally caught up with it, it actually felt relieved to see their faces, something which it had not thought possible on any plane of existence. - -Now little more than a broken shell of a Cosmic Horror, it limped to Kandivali in Cyrus’ bolt-bucket, screaming silently all the while. It did not care to remember what they tried to show it there. - -“Back to Hanging Gardens, then? We will take you over the Sea-Link. Amazing bridge. Amazing. Come, let’s go back to Dharavi, where I parked my car.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}ong before they reached the approach to the bridge, they saw a huge three-way battle underway up ahead. Magic was being thrown around like putty. A stray bolt of lightning barely missed their car, followed by a series of fireballs. The Old One made a chittering noise which translated to “Please, no more. Take me away from this backwater planet of refined cruelty. I was a fool to think of feeding here. No one from the Cosmic Horror Federation will ever—” - - Cyrus’ attempt to overtake the bus ahead resulted in them coming right into the way of a cone of ice, which tore through the window and slammed into the eldritch creature, cutting its tirade short. - -Cyrus slowed at the toll-booth. “That’ll be a hundred rupees,” said the man behind the glass. “Bit of a traffic jam today. Wizard fight in progress, you know what that’s like.” - -The nonchalance with which this petty government employee treated a deadly battle was the last straw for the Mighty Outer God. It dashed through the car, not bothering to open the door, jumped into the sea, and summoning the last of its energy, left the dimension. - -“There goes the love of my life, Vaman,” Cyrus moaned. - -“Dear friend, I do think she was the one,” a dazed Vaman agreed. - -In the distance, ice and fire lit up the sky as the Lady of Summer and the Lady of Winter continued their courtship of the battling mage. - -“I wish she’d opened the door before leaving though,” said Cyrus, with a sorrowful look at the eldritch-shaped hole on the side of his rundown car. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}nce again, Farrokh Sodawala sat upright on a chair on the lawns of Bombay Gymkhana, his lean, bearded face a mask of furious concentration. Once again, the cards were not in his favour. Once again, the Grandwitch of Bombay, Shindu-tai Andharkar, sat opposite him. - -“That could’ve gone better,” the Firedrake sighed, and placed his cards. A losing hand, if he ever saw one. No chance he would be able to escape with his money twice in a row. - -“Indeed.” The witch did not smile as she displayed her winning hand, but the twinkle in her eyes was proof of her amusement. - -“At least the city is safe.” Farrokh shuffled the cards, hoping to at least win the next round. - -“True,” Shindu-tai agreed. - -“And relations between Faërie and Bombay have never been better. Titania and Tatiana continue to pursue that rather charming wizard, this time without any property damage.” - -“Uh-hmm.” - -“And the kids, bless their stupid hearts, have helped avert disaster, saved millions in collateral damage, and made it out alive.” Cyrus began dealing the second round of cards, and sighed again. “I suppose the Princesses would have never taken a fancy to them.” - -“Indeed.” Shindu-tai took the proffered cards and frowned. - -“And all because your Familiar was annoyed with the kids and switched the locations on the scrolls.’ A twitch developed over Farrokh’s left eye as he looked at his cards. - -The witch nodded, petting the feline lounging in her lap. “Minerva is smarter than the average cat.” Minerva purred, throwing her weight behind the sentiment. - -“Sometimes I wonder whether she is your pet or whether we are hers, and she doesn’t want other monsters playing in her sandbox,” muttered Firedrake as he tried to work out a winning combination from the hand he was dealt. - -“You worry too much, dear Farrokh.’ The witch chuckled as she continued to pet Minerva. The cat’s eyes flashed once more (and the images on the grandwitch’s cards changed to a more friendly hand) before she closed them in contentment. - -All was well with the world. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Cat and the Cosmic Horror" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201340158453651).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/The Fashionistas.md b/content/issue-25/The Fashionistas.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4ecee330..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/The Fashionistas.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,267 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Fashionistas" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Gregory L. Norris -copyright: '© Gregory L. Norris 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Fashion models, they're like some other species, aren't they? Tall, sleek, beautiful — well, sometimes beautiful, sort of. \"Striking\", let's say. Or maybe they're more like aliens, so different from we mere humans as they glide by, adorned in strange new things. Well, while you're contemplating next season's rags, just be careful the fascinating lure of the catwalk doesn't distract you from the strange new thing sitting right there next to you." - -image: images/Fashionistas.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Rulo Davila](https://www.pexels.com/photo/city-fashion-people-woman-5618830/), [Ekrulila](https://www.pexels.com/photo/fresh-snow-fall-4040359/), and [Karolina Grabowska](https://www.pexels.com/photo/kitchen-knife-on-gray-counter-4226864/)." - -type: stock -slug: fashionistas -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}“T{{}}hey don’t bleed like normal people,” Razz said. His gaze flitted across the catwalk, the styling of the entrance-exit to backstage, the decor choices framing the show to come, and—with the appropriate air of aloof evaluation—the murmuring, gossiping, braying faces of the audience all around. But his mind was elsewhere. “But that’s not the most unnerving thing about them.” - -Marlene was inventorying the contents of her swag bag—a decent haul, the sort she could re-gift during the holidays but would most likely flog for a profit through online auctions. “What, love?” - -“These new *fashionistas*. The other night, one of them confronted me at that dimwit Oscar’s party. I ran him through with the old, cold steel *devotchka* in the back bedroom where Oscar keeps his… *you know*. Not a speck of blood.” - -Makeup, fine chocolates, and a pen encrusted in amethyst crystals. Marlene looked up to see Rasputin Cleary’s eyes wide with worry, his swag bag still on the floor, untouched. For a moment, with rent soon due, she considered pilfering his goodies and doubling her score. - -“When you say you cut one of these fashionistas, I assume you mean with your column,” she said. “Or your tongue.” - -Razz blinked and reached into the lapel pocket of his stylish Javier Castijo jacket. “No, I mean with Big Daddy.” He thumbed the release on the switchblade, and its lethal point sprang forth, slicing through the air with a sharp musical note. - -Marlene gasped. “You didn’t, Razz!” - -“I did. Right into his smarmy face, because I knew that he knew that I knew.” - -“Knew what?” - -“About *them*. There’s more of them prancing around at these bloody events than before, with their beautiful faces and haute couture—they think we’re all stupid, all sheep. Honestly, with so many *ahhhssholes* around me, I feel more like a proctologist than a top fashion writer. But I showed him. Only, they don’t bleed. There’s nothing inside except for dust. Also…” - -Returning Big Daddy to his pocket, Razz loosened his plum paisley ascot enough for Marlene to see the purple welt around his throat. - -“Oh, Rasputin,” Marlene said, all thoughts about swag and another looming eviction notice forgotten. - -He laughed, but the sound lacked all humor and met Marlene’s ear as crazy in its delivery. “You think one of those bloodless fashionistas is the first angry clothes horse to try and choke the life out of Rasputin Cleary?” - -“Whatever did you do?” - -“Pushed him out the window, nineteen floors up. Sent him to that big Parisian atelier in the sky. Except… ” - -“Except?” - -The lights above the runway dimmed. Music thumped, announcing the show had begun. Razz leaned closer and spoke into her ear. “When I made it down to the street, what I found looked like a paper doll. Two-D. Flat. Dusty, but no blood.” - -Razz settled back in his seat. The first model stomped across the catwalk clad in a matte-and-shine lavender octopus dress that sent many in the audience into fits of wild applause, religious hysteria, and, Marlene assumed by the familiar howls, faked orgasms. Twenty minutes later, the showing by Jean-Hugo Purfoy concluded with a menswear look—an oversize heavy coat in darkest green over a basic T, matching hunter trousers, and green combat boots. The coat was structured front and back, like armor. Like a shell. - -*The turtle Gamera walked last night’s Purfoy runway*, Razz declared in his column the following morning. - -And that column would be his last. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}ays passed, and still Razz didn’t return Marlene’s calls. She spread these attempts out while mustering the courage to ask him to float her the rent, and between little schemes to replace her dried-up trust fund. - -*I should have stayed in Monte Carlo*, she emoted in silence while listing her latest trinkets for auction. - -The phone rang. She checked the caller I.D. and the number came up as ‘private’. Scowling, Marlene answered. “Razz, is that you?” - -Silence. - -“Where have you been? Naughty, you not returning any of my calls.” Desperation nudged aside pride. “I wonder, might you be feeling guilty enough to help me out again? I know you’re not an ATM, but a thousand should suffice until… *Razz?*” - -The caller hung up. A text came in, the sender also unidentified. - -*Join me at the Harp tonight at 10*, it read. - -The Harp was another of the city’s former elaborate cathedrals, sold off by the church to cover its most salacious legal woes. Developers had purchased the place and transformed it into an A-list destination for party desperates and fashion shows. Razz had invited her there once to take in Jeter Diletti’s fall collection. The canapés and cocktails had been exquisite, the swag even better—Diletti’s line, not so much. - -*Heavy, brocaded burlap straight jackets*, Razz had described them in his column. - -She called his cell again. This time, a recording came on, and a robotic woman’s voice told her the number was no longer in service. So, Razz had changed his line? Fine, but she’d flay his hide if he had the nerve to block his new number the next time he called. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}arlene Hildegard Schmottlak (a.k.a. “Marlene March” in fashion circles and among the glitterati) dressed smartly for the warm night in a pale pistachio top that showed the proper amount of cleavage, gauzy gray cigarette pants, and a pair of Banolo Klonick strappy sandals. A tasteful clutch rounded out the ensemble. Though not designed by that particular brand, if asked she would tell the asker her clutch was by “Glock”. - -She hailed a taxi and rode the nine blocks to The Harp, which was lit brighter than on any church holiday from its past. Music pounded behind the stained glass windows, something industrial she was sure qualified as a sin in the eyes of its former occupants. Funny, Marlene thought, how the pious always see the crimes of others but never their own wrongdoings. - -Razz was missing, and someone had invited her to a happening at one of fashion’s greatest houses of worship. - -*They don’t bleed*, she remembered while gliding up the ancient granite stairs and into a debauched party straight from one of Hell’s numerous rings. - -Wait staff dressed in red cat suits swept the main hall, their trays bearing drinks and finger pastries. Dozens of bodies gyrated to the rhythm on a makeshift dance floor beneath somber sconces and a wrought-iron candelabrum from which numerous strands of fairy lights had been strung. The air stank of cannabis and a mix of scents that cost hundreds per tiny bottle—Dior, Verdigris, and other Houses of Pretension all playing together but not necessarily playing nicely. - -It was the sort of gathering that Razz would invite her to attend and likely carp about in his next column. She accepted a glass from a waiter with plump lips and a dimple. The champagne was top shelf, delicious. While taking silent inventory of faces, many Marlene recognized, she noted that the one she wanted to see most wasn’t there. - -Rasputin Cleary had been a decent friend. Though she knew he’d taken pity on her when her standing in society crumbled, he never treated her like a has-been, always as a trusted confident. She had to admit she hadn’t exactly honored him in kind. When he spoke, Marlene heard maybe half of what he said. Until he talked about bloodless fashionistas, that was. In spite of the heat, the *sweat* pulsing over The Harp’s main hall, a sudden chill gossiped over her flesh. - -Don’t bleed. Hurled out a window on the nineteenth floor. Private phone numbers. - -The desire to gulp the flute’s contents tempted her, but Marlene ignored it. She cut through the exclusive crowd to a corner where pews from the old cathedral had been outfitted with tufted cushions. The pulsing, pumping drumbeats took a brief interlude. She withdrew her compact and pretended to fix her makeup, but instead scanned the vicinity. - -Something in a caftan with a blank expression sidled over to her. “Is this pew taken?” - -“Depends,” Marlene said. “Who are you wearing?” - -“Next season’s Uri Hagenfeld,” the woman said. - -Marlene offered a tip of her chin. “I’ll allow it.” - -The woman sat, fixing her with a look from eyes that never once blinked. A frisson of fear slithered over Marlene’s epidermis. Facing her new friend directly, she saw that Hagenfeld Caftan wasn’t merely beautiful but stunning to behold, one of those faces you can’t stare at directly for long—like the noontime sun, after a few seconds you’d go blind. - -The stranger’s gaze lay heavily on her. “I want your body.” - -Marlene tisked, broke away from the woman’s gaze with an effort and deflected back to the little mirror. “You can want until Cocoa Chanel herself crawls out of the grave and back onto the catwalk. Isn’t going to happen, sister—I don’t swing that way.” - -Though righteous in its delivery, the statement wasn’t exactly truthful. There had been that time during Marlene’s brief attempt at a college education in an exclusive all-girl’s school. And when she’d dated Chris, who had one of those perfect beards—only after their clothes had dropped along with inhibitions did Marlene realized ‘Chris’ was really a ‘Christine’ hopped up on heavy doses of testosterone. - -“You don’t understand,” Hagenfeld Caftan said. “All that internal material gets scooped out after the deal is made, including the naughty bits.” - -“Um,” Marlene said. She snapped the compact shut and focused on the other woman. Beautiful, yes. But also stiff. Some disconnected register in Marlene’s consciousness noted that, in addition to not blinking, the Hagenfeld Caftan didn’t seem to draw breaths. - -*One of Razz’s fashionistas?* - -“Do you bleed?” Marlene asked. - -The woman’s mouth twisted into an approximation of a maniac’s smile with an inelegant creak, like sofa leather protesting beneath a big butt. “Not in this body,” she said. “Not in the others in my closet. If you sell me yours, I’ll wear it with attitude on red carpets and at industry events. Until it falls out of fashion, of course… but you know how styles come and go and then cycle around to being in vogue once again.” - -Marlene rose swiftly. “You, madame, are fruitier than edible underwear,” she said, and marched away. *Razz was right*, she thought as the music resumed its subwoofer beat. - -A trio of hot male youths in vinyl pants, combat boots, and little else gyrated together at the outer orbit of the dance floor. “Hey, gorgeous, want to dance?” asked one with his hair dyed cotton candy blue as Marlene navigated past them. - -She readied to fire back something witty, only Marlene saw the private dancer’s chest glistened with sweat and heaved with respirations. Her scowl loosened. “Maybe another time, kitten.” - -“*Meow*,” he said and faked scratching at her with a paw. - -So some of the crowd was normal—at least *human*, her inner voice corrected. But the ranks of the glitterati had been infiltrated with worse agents than fallen royalty, disgraced former A-list celebrities who’d plummeted halfway down the alphabet. And the nouveau-poor pretending they were still nouveau-riche and wearing last season’s styles or—horrors!—sad rags from *two* seasons back. - -Razz. They’d gotten to him, she was sure. Whoever these ferocious fashionistas were, Marlene knew they were responsible for her dear friend’s radio silence. Had the Hagenfeld Caftan sent her the text? She didn’t think so. - -Outside the desecrated bathrooms, where any number of unholy acts were likely being committed, two more zombies in expensive couture appeared, blocking her path. One was a dark-skinned demigod dressed in a ribbed men’s tuxedo shirt, an ochre jacket with long tails, and a matching skirt that reached down to the tops of his ankles. The other man had porcelain skin and wore a samurai-inspired ensemble done in a pink cherry blossom print. - -“I’d like to buy you off the rack,” the samurai said. “I have the perfect Donna Shirraz scarf to compliment that face.” - -“I’ll pay you twice what he offers,” the dark demigod said. “And I’ll even wait longer than the customary two months to take possession.” - -“Take *this*,” Marlene said and held up both middle fingers. - -The two fashionistas fixed Marlene with icy stares. - -“Someone will get to you,” the samurai said. - -“Well, *la-ti-da*.” - -She forced her way through them. The wall of muscles she expected wasn’t there. The men parted, feather-light against her push. The sensation that slithered up her wrists was cold, strange, like touching fine silk or antique lace, a kiss of something only half there. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}t the sink, she washed her hands and then washed them again. Men wanting to *wear* her? Insides scraped out? She sensed that last part was more than the usual model’s diet, and the first worse than anything having to do with garden-variety serial killers. - -She slipped behind a stall door and latched it, but she didn’t have to pee and just sat atop the toilet seat, staring at the door but seeing something else. - -“What are they?” she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “Ghosts? Aliens? Big government?” - -A knock sounded on the other side of the door. - -“*Ocupado*,” she snapped. - -The knock sounded again. - -“Are you friggin oblivious?” She stood and tore open the door, her anger cooling as the view of who waited outside registered. - -It was Rasputin Cleary, looking better than she’d ever seen him. - -His hair was slicked back and cut into an asymmetrical bob, all of those wiry middle age eyebrow hairs plucked and tamed, and he wore a crisp suit, something impeccable from one of your finer leading men’s houses, Juan-Ringo Guillermo or Ambrose Rose. - -“Razz,” she gasped. - -She reached for him but caught herself. The rush of relief died. Razz didn’t blink, didn’t breathe, and she was fairly certain after she remembered the Glock in her clutch that he wouldn’t bleed, either. - -“I think it’s time we talked,” the imposter wearing Rasputin Cleary said. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey sat at a private table while an impromptu fashion show replaced the gyrations on the dance floor. It was the usual parade of student work—shredded ruffles and napkin skirts, all set to a flatulent soundtrack from the speakers that stuck Marlene’s ear like a curdled stomach and tortured, telescoping anus. *If diarrhea was music*, she thought. - -“You are wondering, I suppose?” the imposter asked. - -“About a lot of things. First, who are you?” - -“Me or us?” - -“Either works.” - -The thing with Razz’s expressionless face studied her, and how it felt like she was being ogled, undressed by those unblinking eyes. “We’re consumers with upscale taste, just like you.” - -She shivered. “You’re nothing like me.” - -“No, I suppose we aren’t.” - -Marlene settled back and pursed her lips. “Apparitions? Extraterrestrials?” - -“We prefer ‘non-corporeal entities’.” - -“Corporals? This is some kind of invasion?” - -Its eyes rolled, marbles in a plastic face. “Cor-*por*-eal, darling. It means we don’t have physical bodies like you. Our anatomies are energy-based.” - -“Sorry, the music,” she said. The drivel being pumped out of the sound system had grown particularly runny. “Are there many of you?” she asked. - -It preened the way a bird preens, expressionlessly. “We are an exclusive set.” - -“Fashionistas,” she said. - -“*Furriers* is a more accurate term.” - -She choked on that. “You wear us like *fur*s?” - -The imposter’s eyes widened—and again that action, simple on the living, looked overly exaggerated and grotesque on one of them. “You understand! Which is why I’m in a position to offer you a windfall in exchange for your body. I can grant you ample time to enjoy the spoils before taking possession. A body like yours will remain stylish for many seasons. Together, we’ll attend the finest parties, the most exclusive lunches and launches. You’ll have no financial worries after we complete the design process.” - -“Design?” She huffed. “You’re not talking smocking, shirring, or top-stitching me. You’re planning to scoop out my ovaries, guts, and insides. Is that what you did to Razz? The *real* Rasputin Cleary?” - -The imposter’s eyelids fluttered, and Marlene swore she heard them click between the plop-plop melody of the loose bowel music. “Rasputin Cleary found out about us and threatened to expose us in his column. We had no choice.” - -“No?” - -“But *you* do, and we would like your answer.” A smirk that would have been smug on a living person’s face pushed at the imposter’s. Crooked, it exposed too much lacquered pink gum. “I’ll remind you that should you say no to us, we can take possession without compensation, as we did this body. The choice is yours.” - -“Some choice. How much?” He made his case at seven figures. “When?” - -“I’ll grant you four months—which is the best anyone will give you.” - -“And where exactly will the ‘design’ take place?” - -The imposter rattled off an address. Marlene connected dots. That was the Blayne Building, where the offices of the Fashion Designers Council were housed. - -“What say you?” asked Razz’s face, breaking her chain of thought. - -*Four months for a fortune, or nothing at zero notice*. “I say you can transfer the money over to my account right now.” - -The imposter withdrew a phone, an odd-looking model, and tapped buttons. *Actual buttons! On a phone!* “Rasputin had your bank information in his cell from the *many* times he paid your rent. And *done*.” - -Marlene opened her clutch for her own phone, unlocking it with her fingerprint, her free hand remaining inside. It only took a moment to check her account, and at the sight of all the zeros she smiled. - -“A pleasure doing business with you,” she said. And then she brought out the Glock and fired, blasting off the imposter’s forehead. - -A plume of dust puffed out of the opening and dispersed as the tragic models panicked and ran. The rest of Razz’s scooped, stitched, and shellacked exterior slumped and crumpled, reminding Marlene of the paper dolls with tab dresses she used to play with in those early years, back home at Daddy’s mansion. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“H{{}}ow does one destroy fashion?” Marlene posed aloud to the room. - -Stacks of hundred-dollar bills covered the bed, the top of the dresser, and the dressing table, whose triptych of mirrors reflected one last glimpse of her looking fresh and fabulous. - -“With wools, you wash them in hot water so they shrink. With fine fabrics, you deprive them of dry cleaning or the delicate cycle.” - -She pulled the scissors from beneath the Benjamins and held them like a weapon. “In other words, you rough things up.” - -In the next day’s fashion pages, the main subject of interest involved the latest in a long line of fallen, once-beautiful style icons—Marlene March, nee Schmottlak. She was spotted entering the Blayne Building in the heart of the fashion district, carrying of all things a big jug of bleach. The accompanying snapshots showed the one-time heiress, socialite, and former ‘It’ girl in a ratty secondhand coat, dirty mom jeans, and sneakers full of holes, her luscious mane of hair chopped off in jagged clumps. - -No place for the likes of that in a business where everyone was so full of themselves. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Fashionistas" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201341795120154).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/The Gods Have No Faces.md b/content/issue-25/The Gods Have No Faces.md deleted file mode 100644 index 769849c6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/The Gods Have No Faces.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,335 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Gods Have No Faces" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Subodhana Wijeyeratne -copyright: '© Subodhana Wijeyeratne 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "One of the great joys of speculative fiction is World Building. As a writer, it's creating new environments from, so to speak, the ground up; as a reader, it's setting off into each one to see what they contain. Subodhana Wijeyeratne has built a world already crumbling when we take our first steps. To know why, ask its creator — but with gods, don't expect to understand whatever answer is forthcoming." - -image: images/GodsHaveNoFaces.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Nikita](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-people-dark-sport-6162313/), [geralt](https://pixabay.com/photos/sky-clouds-clouds-form-3335585/), [Jorge0113](https://pixabay.com/photos/ashanincas-native-person-jungle-4572971/), and [PublicDomainPictures](https://pixabay.com/photos/arid-background-climate-desert-21799/)." - -type: stock -slug: gods-have-no-faces -weight: 1 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t begins the day the sun stops moving. My mates and I are heading towards the Sea That Whispers in our balloons and we smell something on the high wind. Something sweetly rotten and cloying and insistent. When we get to the bloodflower fields, we find them shrivelled and dead with the duskless red sun squatting over them like a murderer. They only ever bloomed at scorching midday, but even a thirsty man will drown in too much water. - -We eat what we can and then sit facing each other, forlorn. - -“What now?” says Six Blade. - -“The sun’s stopped,” says Six Sheath, weeping. She wipes her face with her lower tentacles and wraps the others around me and Six Blade. “The world’s coming to an end.” - -When we were young, we’d eat a third of the flowers fresh, and dry the other third for the road, and leave the final third to replenish the fields. We’d feel the air change temperature as we worked, and see the majestic trundle of the sun and the moon. We’d work certain that the universe was a place full of change and energy and hope. Now, though, I look at Six Blade and they look at me and we see the same thing in each other. That we’re desperate to comfort Six Sheath, and desperate to believe she’s wrong. But also that we need comforting ourselves, for what she says is true. The world’s stopped turning. What clearer sign could there be that the universe is dying? - -There’s nothing for it: we have to split up and find our own way until we’re plump enough to mate again. We’ve enjoyed each other’s company, and Blade and I slept in Sheath even when we weren’t copulating or eating, so it’s a difficult farewell. I watch them amble off in opposite directions, and both stop and look back at me. When they do this I feel a weight in my stomachs like someone had slipped stones down my gullet while I slept. - -It’s worse for Six Root. He doesn’t understand why they’re leaving him behind. He watches them go with the world reflected, limpid and curving, in the clustered domes of his massive eyes. Then he turns to me, huge face blank, palps waving, confused beyond the capacity of his sweet and simple mind to comprehend. - -“It’s alright, old chum,” I say. I saddle him and usually he resists, but this day he just shudders and sweeps the dust with his tentacles. “Let’s go to the plains. We’ll find doughfruit and sugarroots.” - -That’s enough to cheer him up. I, though, am not so easily swayed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e head south along an old wadi, past some low lying hillocks with pillars sticking out of them like charred ribs. Farther south, the scrub melts into dryish grasslands and then into a savanna. The trees here have long blue leaves that hang like wet hair over darkened trunks. The sun is low in the sky behind us, and our shadows and those of the trees are like a multitude of black blades stabbing the black far horizon. - -Six Root is stuffing his face with hard-fleshed sugarroot when a dome of molten light buds from the ground not far away. I look at the beast and he seems curiously unafraid of it and that emboldens me too. We approach together. - -The hemisphere is incandescent and cold and quivers like a giant eyelid. After a short while it blinks, and disappears. Six Root snorts and I step back into him, half to comfort, half to be comforted. - -The light leaves a small crater behind, and something comes crawling out of it. A clumsy and unsteady thing, moving on four trunks which emerge from a crumpled white body studded with dials and pipes and lights. It turns its bulbous head towards me and I see immediately its face is a smooth coppery surface with neither eyes nor nose nor antennae. - -I fall flat on my face. - -“Oh Divine One,” I say. “Oh Potentate From Beyond.” - -The figure coughs, and falls flat on the ground. A few moments pass. Then He stirs. - -“Goddamn it,” He groans. “I forgot to bring a drink.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he god spends a great deal of time with His face planted on the ground and His forelimbs wrapped around His stomach. I take a blanket and my rollbag from Six Root’s saddlebags and approach. It feels like gut-churning blasphemy to touch Him, but suffering is suffering whether quotidian or divine and so that’s what I do. I help Him up against Six Root’s warm side and the great beast sniffs Him for a long while, and then looks back to where the sun sits like a mad old king upon his throne, the horizon. I light a fire and feed Six Root and wait for the stars to come out. Of course, they never do. - -The god speaks without warning. “Your sun stopped?” He says. - -I leap to my feet and then fall to my knees. “Yes, Lord.” - -“Crazy. When?” - -“Yesterday, Lord.” - -“So that’s… six minutes ago. Wow.” He looks at the now-eternal sunset and then turns his face to me. “Don’t worry, it’s just tidal locking. What’s your name?” - -“Six Whetstone, oh Lord of—” - -The god turns and looks at Six Root. The beast swings his head around and they stare at each other as if in deep communion for a very long time. Then the god starts stroking him and Six Root rumbles, deep in his throat, and relaxes. - -“Don’t call me ‘lord’,” says the god. “And for God’s sake get up. My name’s Waters.” - -“Waters, Lord? You’re the Lord of Water?” - -“No. I’m just Waters. I’m not the Lord of anything. How come you speak English? I’ll bet they taught you. They taught you, didn’t they?” - -“English?” - -“This language we’re speaking. English.” - -“This is the language of the gods, Lord.” - -“So they did teach you!” He crosses his arms. “Dicks. What else have they told you? Actually, nevermind. Are you from around here?” - -“My mates and I follow the bloomings, Lord. But… the bloodflowers died and so we split up and…” - -He loses interest and turns to look at the sun. “Which way is it to the intersection of null on null?” - -“The what, Lord?” - -“The, um…” He waves one of his hands as if trying to snatch something out of the air. “The Navel of Heaven? The—ah, Genesis Point!” - -“It’s beyond that is the City of Slivers. Westwards. Yonder.” - -“The City of Slivers? That’s—who rules there?” - -“The Flower That Blooms Eternal, Lord.” - -“*Her*.” The god balls his fists. “Alright, fine. Take me there. Can you do that?” - -I look at Six Root. He doesn’t object. He just lays his huge antennae back against his body, oblivious and content and drowsy. - -“Yes. Yes, of course, Lord.” - -“Also, I’m not here to give revelations and shit, alright? I’m not a god. I’m not going to do miracles, alright?” - -“As you say, Lord.” - -“I don’t suppose you’re ever going to stop calling me lord, are you?” - -“I shall if you can show me a miracle, Lord.” - -I’m mortified the instant the words leave my mouth and I close my eyes and brace myself for punishment. Thinking, *damn it, you and your stupid, diarrheal mouth*. But the god chuckles. - -“Funny.” He appraises me. “I’ve got a good feeling about you, Six Whetstone.” - -Remember that. Remember that a god once had a *good feeling* about me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}tories like this are supposed to be interesting. They usually are, in the retelling. But remember that they happen in the world we know, to ordinary people, and so there’s also a lot of tedium and a lot of boredom. Thus my first few days with the Creator aren’t a glorious rush of revelation and enlightenment, but a silent amble against the backdrop of the everdropping sun. We reach an ancient highway half digested by the earth and proceed westward along it. A damp wind licks our backs like the ghostly affections of some long-dead herd. The sun finally sets—or rather, we wander beyond its reach into places that will never again witness a dawn. Presently we see the City of Slivers glittering in the distance like a heap of fallen stars. God Waters sleeps through most of this, with His pipes jiggling and gargling noises percolating out of His suit. When we halt I watch Him and imagine Him within, a delicate and broken thing, limp like an oyster. - -Here is more blasphemy: I begin to feel sorry for Him. - -We come to a plain dotted with shallow lakes and stop by one so Six Root can drink. On the far bank is a warburnt village with a few ragged tents squatting amidst the bony ruins. Equally ragged-looking people waft about amongst those, spectral things, with faces like recent amputees slowly realizing the extent of their loss. They stare across the gently wrinkled waters at us, but when God Waters waves at them they scatter like they’d seen a hungry sandspider erupt from its burrow. - -“What’s their problem?” He asks. - -I think long and hard before I answer. I tell myself if He thought I was funny before, perhaps He’ll indulge me again. - -“They hate the gods, Lord,” I say. “They hate what You’ve done to the world.” - -“What the hell did I do? I just got here.” - -“You and Yours created the world.” - -“Actually, it was just me. ” - -I’m not sure I believe him. There are liar gods, after all. Trickster gods and jealous gods and gods who are malign because that’s their purpose in the universe. How could this odd specimen riding around on Six Root’s back like an overgrown tick possibly be the Creator? - -He can tell I don’t believe Him. It doesn’t seem to bother Him. - -“Well?” He says. “Why do they hate me?” - -I gesture to the lake. “These are craters, Lord. Beneath the hills that way, and there, are buildings. This was a great city once, long ago, but it was destroyed in a war. The weapons used against it were poisoned and the folk who live here have been sick ever since. The gods who came here refused to cure them—they said they were being punished for their ancestors’ sins. So these folk have lingered here in the twilight of their civilization in the hopes that one day they’d recover. We called them the Hopeful Ones. Or, sometimes, the Hollow Ones, on account of their stoicism. It was rare to see one smile, but they still did, sometimes. But now the sun’s stopped and they’ll never have enough light to grow their crops again. They’ll move, or they’ll die. They’ll abandon the stories of a hundred generations, or they’ll die for them. They blame You for the cruelties they must visit on themselves. They hate You and Yours for turning Your back on them.” - -God Waters stares at the village. In the nooks and shadows, tired eyes stare back. - -“They weren’t cured because we have no idea what makes them sick,” He says. “Just because we made this place doesn’t mean we know everything about it.” - -“How can that be, Lord?” - -“Processing power, man. If I wanted to know everything about your universe I’d need a processor with as many units as there are variables here, and god knows we’re nowhere near that sort of power, even at your shitty resolution. We don’t know half of what’s going on here, and we’ll never know. That’s why I came here. The rest of those dicks wouldn’t even let me look.” - -“Dicks, Lord?” - -“Those other gods of yours. They’re dicks. All of them.” - -“That’s blasphemy,” I say quietly. - -“Even if I say it?” - -“Especially then.” - -“Fine. Try this on for size, then. The only thing that makes me special is that I figured something out. I figured out that *nothingness* is unstable. It decays, always, into *something*. It splits into inconsistent and unstable systems: quantum foam, baryonic matter, mathematics. It goes from total equilibrium to disequilibrium, and then decays back into equilibrium.” He sighs. “Your world exists because I wanted to prove that. That’s the only reason. Nothing that’s happened in your universe has a purpose. It only happened because I wanted to prove a point.” - -“What point does their suffering prove, then, Lord?” - -He *tsks*. “Haven’t you been listening? It doesn’t prove anything. It wasn’t even supposed to be. *They* weren’t supposed to exist, you weren’t, this… *thing* I’m riding wasn’t. We didn’t even know any of you existed until… until it was too late to do anything about it.” His voice softens and drops. “Now that I say that, though, it sounds so bloody shitty it makes me want to throw up.” - -Stories like this are supposed to be interesting, I know. But sometimes they’re just sad. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen the sun moved, the weather was as changeable as a young heart. The winds wandered, incessant, and with them the rains would drift down mountainsides and in a cooling tide across the plains. Scents and distant voices drifted up through the kingdom of cloud below us and up to our balloons. But after the sun halted, the wind began blowing in only one direction, as it does now. Along the way, it gathers the fine particles of the sunside world and thickens into a choking haze that sweeps over us like a colossal procaryote made of dust. We proceed in its belly, sightless, towards a horizon we have to trust is there. - -We halt when the dust storm becomes too intense and rest in Six Root’s shadow. After some time the great beast growls and peers off into the haze, and following his gaze I pick out a cluster of bobbing lights approaching. A contingent of soldiers in the spiky white uniforms of the City of Slivers emerge from the gloom, and behind them is a figure identical in every way to God Waters. I kneel and touch my head to the floor. - -“Lady of the Dark,” I say. “Forgive my impertinence in existing in your presence.” - -“Oh, get up,” says God Waters. The soldiers hear Him and lie flat on their faces. “You know we’re not gods.” - -“Is that why you’re here?” says She Who Blooms. “To wreck everything?” - -“Is this why you didn’t want me to come?” snaps God Waters. “Because you didn’t want me to tell them all you’re just an old nerd with gout and hair you’ve dyed so much it comes off in clumps when you comb it?” - -They glare at each other for a few moments. Strange how obvious it is, even when They have no eyes. Then She Who Blooms signals the soldiers back. She waves me off too, but God Waters puts His hand on my shoulder. - -“He’s staying here,” He says. “I like him. He speaks straight.” - -“Fine.” She sits, in the dust, cross-legged like an ear-cleaner on the streets of Her city. “What’re you doing here, Waters? You didn’t come here just to torment me. Where’s your adjustor module?” - -“Don’t need one.” - -“Don’t be ridiculous. This is why we didn’t want you in here. You’re careless, and if— ” - -“It’s metastasized.” - -She Who Blooms stiffens. “What?” - -“Stage four. I found out yesterday.” - -“Stage four?” A pause. “How— ” - -“I don’t know. But, come on. It’s pancreatic. It was always going to win.” He reaches out and takes Her hands. “It’s over, Jane.” - -They sit there for a long time with the dust slithering about Them, like statues of Themselves, raised and forgotten by a civilization itself long erased. I pick over their words. Their words are like the cogs and springs and wires in some ancient technology. On their own they make sense but put together they become some code beyond my understanding. Still, I don’t move, and I don’t ask. I listen, for that is what one does in the presence of the Gods. - -She Who Blooms pulls back Her hands. “This isn’t a trick, is it? You’re not just saying that to excuse being here?” - -“Piss off. I’m not *that* much of dick.” - -“Yes, you are.” - -God Waters hangs His head. “Alright, fine, I am. But it’s not a trick.” - -“Goddamn it, James.” She watches Him for a long time. Then She shakes Her head. “Well, fine then. What do you think?” - -“Of what?” - -“Of your creation. What else?” - -“It’s kinda sad.” - -“No shit. This is why we told you not to initiate the procedure.” - -“There’s no way you could have known *this* would be the result.” - -“It was always going to be something like this.” - -“No, it wasn’t. It was going to be clean and empty. Just mathematics.” - -“Says the man who proved complexity comes from simplicity.” - -“You want me to say I’m sorry, right? That I regret it?” He shakes his head, four, five times. “I don’t regret it. I proved you all wrong.” - -“At what cost?” - -God Waters spreads His arms. “You call this cost? This is sad, sure, but sad things can be beautiful too. It’s just a matter of how you look at it.” - -“I have looked at it. More than you have. I’ve spent millions of their years trying to stop them from making the mistakes we made. I’ve watched empires rise and fall, and a billion lives pass, like that.” She clicks Her fingers. “All it’s taught me is that nothing is worth anything. Everything we’ll ever know is just a small blip in an ocean of stillness.” - -The God Waters shakes His head. “No.” - -“Which part, no?” - -“All of it. The darkness doesn’t matter. There’s no one there to see it and so it may as well not exist. You think a flower doesn’t matter because it blooms alone in a desert? No, right? It just makes it all the more beautiful.” - -“You’re just trying to excuse yourself.” - -“I don’t need to excuse myself to you, Jane. Or anyone. I came here to die and I’ll do it without regret. I’m good, cheers.” - -They fall silent for a long time. The wind stiffens, briefly, and then subsides. The sky clears and the stars come out, a glittering host watching as if they know this will be a conversation repeated for a thousand years. I too feel that, and also as if listening to God Waters speak had blown away some obscuring dust in my heart. I was seeing some truth, some blood-warm and comforting revelation, that I couldn’t quite comprehend yet. - -She Who Blooms stands. “Fine. I’ll cover for you.” - -“Alright. Cheers.” - -She nods. “Take care, Waters.” - -She walks to where Her soldiers are waiting and they head off together. We watch until they melt into the dark. Then God Waters lies back, exhaling. - -“Stuck-up bitch,” He mutters. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}his is what I think I see: - -We pass a village by a small oasis, half burning, half already burned. The unshifting winds are pushing a dune over the waters. The fish who live there are dead, and without the sun the villagers have no crops either. Two men are dragging another through the street and he’s bloodied and missing limbs and probably already dead. An old woman is watching, weeping, from a doorway. In the village square, a group of young women are hammering at a bloodstained altar. Their blows chip flecks of shrapnel off the thing, but it refuses to shatter with the obduracy that comes with being unconcerned by something so petty as being hated. - -Farther along, a group of bandits have holed up in an old town. They ride through the streets on clattering steampowered chariots, wielding guns and hooting in some language neither I nor God Waters understand. They’re pagans, bandana-wearing, their eyes small and hostile and suspicious. They gather in the town square and burn books and then smear the ash on their faces. They call themselves the People of the Ashes, but the townsfolk call them Bookeaters when they’re not around, and mock them and spread stories that one was caught screwing a pig. But in public they’re quiet and respectful. They never look the Bookeaters in the eye and never argue with them and always, always, give them what they want. - -In the hinterland of Genesis Point is a vast abandoned farm. The fields are bigger than anything I’ve ever seen before—bigger than a lake, bigger than the sea. They run endless and changeless for hours and hours alongside us. The same tall green-stemmed plant topped with the same drooping yellow flower, and the same fence with its neat wooden posts and cruel-looking webbing of metal wire jostled by the breeze. We’re fully on the night side of the planet now, and the stars are shining overhead and the flowers don’t know that they’ll shine forever. The farm’s dying, and it’s a holocaust on a scale I’ve never even considered. Fathoms of living matter turning dry and limp and pungent. Entire empires of pollination and procreation and predation decaying into particulate chaos. I stop and stare, dumbfounded and breathless. - -This is what I really see: - -In a village, the halting of the sun brings about the fall of the family that ruled the oasis for a hundred generations. They were once kind and wise, but in the years that followed they became inbred and obsessed with their own cleanliness. They forbade anyone from their village to travel and monopolized trade with the outside world. They told the villages that to sacrifice their children to their ancestors was the highest of honours and ensured the sun moved in the sky, and came to believe this themselves. So when the sun sets and doesn’t rise again, they implode under the accumulated weight of guilt from a lie they realize is now in their blood. When the villagers gather in front of their house and demand answers, they of course have none. They’re butchered and the village rejoices. The old woman crying in the doorway is crying tears of joy. - -The town where the Bookeaters are bullying the ordinary folk has seen folk like this many times before. For years the land was bountiful and the grain piled in silos like winter snowfall, and so the townsfolk were content to let them come occasionally and take what they like. Some even saw it, perhaps, as a species of charity. But now there isn’t enough food and the townsfolk are angry and some of them are pointing out that charity to the undeserving denigrates the giver and coddles the receiver. Some of them are beginning to lay caches of guns, and spread the arguments necessary to convince people to kill and die without fear or regret. There is a smell in the air like aerosolized blood and God Waters tells me without hint of prophecy that it’s the aroma of blood about to be spilled. - -Where the farm is there had once been an expanse called the Forest of the Night. It was an ancient realm of giant trees that blotted out the sun with their sky-spanning canopies. In the cloistered dark beneath them were giant fungi and luminescent creatures and a silence as thick and silky as incense smoke. In the present, already shoots of long dormant fungus are soaring through the green regularity of the doomed yellowflower crop like the budding spikes of some subterranean monster. Already the soil crawls with mycelia and the lazy buds of things that need neither sun nor people to thrive. The Forest of the Night is returning. It has outlasted. It has endured. - -I learn these things, and something else also. That, though I know what I see when I see myself, perhaps I’m mistaken about that too. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Y{{}}ou’re waiting for the moment when I arrive at Genesis Point and the truths of the universe are revealed to me. But the revelation has come and gone. If you’ve not noticed, look again. If you still don’t see it, stop looking. It wasn’t meant for you. - -We conduct the last few fathoms of our journey beneath a strangely beautiful roil of clouds that threaten rain but never actually burst. They’re illuminated by Genesis Point’s distant purple glow. The brighter it gets, the more ill I feel, as if there was a string running through my head and it had begun vibrating and churning my brain and my balance. Six Root feels it too, and so too must all living things, for the hinterland of the Most Sacred is utterly lifeless. - -We get to the blasted ruins of a tree and I’m functional enough to see that it’s not a tree at all but some great spiking crystal sticking out of the ground and branching into a dazzling fractal brush. Six Root collapses, and then I fall too, retching, beside him. God Waters slips off and joins us. He tries to rise, but His limbs are shaking and it takes Him a long time. - -“I’ll go on from here,” He says. - -“Lord,” I say. “You… You can’t.” - -“The radiation’s killing you.” He retches. “Turn back.” - -I look at Him. I know that inside that strange suit He’s a broken thing and that soon He’ll cease to exist. I know that He feels much like I do, and the thought is as wondrous as it’s horrifying. I want to get up and hug Him and comfort Him, but what comfort can something like me offer a god? - -He seems to know what I’m thinking. He kneels again, and wraps His arms around me. - -“Cheers,” He says. He squeezes. “You didn’t have to do this.” - -“I… Lord…” - -He helps me up. I stare at His faceless head for a long time, with a sour taste in my mouth that could be from the air or else from within me. - -He grips my shoulder. “I know I’m supposed to give you some wisdom, right? But I don’t have any. I just had a theory, and I made your whole world to prove it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just did it.” He shudders and falls silent. Then He continues. “But I meant what I said. I don’t regret it. I think if I could have created you alone, it would have been worth it. You’re a good person. If you’re good, there must have been billions of people like you, right? Billions who lived and died and did good while they were here. I got to create good. That’ll do me.” - -“You *are*… god…” - -He shakes His head. “No. No, and I’ll tell you why. Gods are owned by their worshippers. And worshippers are owned by their gods. They love each other because they’re supposed to. I don’t think you’re a good person because you worship me, man. I think you’re good because, even if you didn’t think I was a god, you could’ve bailed when Jane got me, or convinced me to join someone else or something. But I know you saw me as I am, and I know you wanted to help. And I know you’d’ve helped even if I was just some bum lying in the desert.” - -I hang my head. This isn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear some bittersweet insight into the ways of the universe. The God Waters squeezes my shoulder. - -“I’m off.” He takes a few steps away, then looks back. “This isn’t the end of the world, Six Whetstone. It’s a beginning, and those’re always hard.” - -He walks off in dwindling silhouette until he’s swallowed by the distant light. Six Root nudges me, and I lean against him. We turn to follow our footsteps back the way we came. But somehow they’re already gone. There’s no wind or water, but also no sign in the dust that we ever came this way. - -I look back towards Genesis Point. There’s nothing there but light. - -“Come on, old chum,” I say, and nudge Six Root. - -We brace against each other, and strike off, as if for the first time. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "The Gods Have No Faces" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201343465119987).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/Time Dysperception.md b/content/issue-25/Time Dysperception.md deleted file mode 100644 index 285e6437..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/Time Dysperception.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,450 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Time Dysperception" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Jack Mackenzie -copyright: '© Jack Mackenzie 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: 'We all get lost in the moment occasionally, or feel time is getting away from us. But how horrible could either be under the wrong circumstances? Or ANY circumstances, if you never knew which way it was going to be, or when? Like you just found out the countdown has begun, the clock is ticking, the last vital seconds slipping away…' - -image: images/TimeDysperception.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [David Bartus](https://www.pexels.com/photo/round-gold-colored-pocket-watch-295884/), [Polina Zimmerman](https://www.pexels.com/photo/portrait-of-surprised-woman-3958832/) and [Nathan Cowley](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-blue-crew-neck-shirt-634007/) several times over!" - -type: stock -slug: time-dysperception -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}S{{}}everal hours into her shift (or that’s how it felt at least), the brown-suited man burst through the front doors and dashed up to the front desk again. “What room is Saesor Zota in?” he demanded. This time, Bonnie Bauman was determined not to tell him Zota’s room number. - -“Why are you doing this?” she wailed. “You keep coming back and asking the same question!” - -The man in the brown suit furrowed his brow. “Have you seen me before?” he asked. - -“Of *course* I’ve seen you before,” Bonnie snapped. “You’ve been through here twice now, always after Mister Zota! It’s like you can’t remember!” - -The man gave her a concerned look and then reached into his breast pocket. - -“Oh no you don’t!” Bonnie shouted. He was reaching for the small metal disc with a green gemstone embedded in its center. She closed her eyes and ducked her head below the desk. “Put that away!” she shouted at the floor while she crouched as low as she could. “Don’t even turn it on!” - -“Good citizen,” the man said. “I won’t touch the influencer. I’ll put my hands on the desk. Okay?” - -Cautiously, Bonnie stood. She kept her eyes down and closed, only opening them enough to see that both the man’s hands were flat on the desk’s surface. Cautiously, she looked up at him. - -He was not unhandsome. His face was nicely angled, his jaw square and slightly darkened by a five o’clock shadow. He tried to smile reassuringly at her. - -“My name is Kai. What’s yours?” - -“Bonnie.” She swallowed. “Bonnie Bauman.” - -Kai nodded. “You’ve seen me before, Bonnie,” he said. It was not a question. - -She nodded. - -“Twice before, you say?” - -She nodded again. This was the third time the man—*Kai*—had burst through the front door of the hotel and dashed up to the front desk demanding to know Saesor Zota’s room number. - -Mister Zota was an older man with a round, balding head, large ears, and a mouthful of teeth that seemed too big for his lips. When he checked in, yesterday afternoon, he had spoken to her in a quiet voice about the need for discretion. He had surreptitiously passed her a packet of strawberry cream cookies and a peanut butter granola bar, like they were some sort of bribe. She’d opened the packet of cookies and eaten one, but it tasted stale so she threw the rest out. The granola bar lay unopened in her desk drawer. - -Then came the madness of this strange man appearing and forgetting that he’d been there before. “Are you a friend of Mister Zota?” Bonnie had asked Kai each time. - -He would nod and put on an unconvincing smile. “Yup. We’re supposed to meet up. What room is he in?” - -Bonnie would then offer to call Zota’s room and let him know that he had a visitor. - -“No,” Kai would say, “I want it to be a surprise. Just tell me his room number.” - -Bonnie could not give out the room number. It was hotel policy. Kai would then reach into his breast pocket and take out the influencer, hold up the metal disc and shine the light in her eyes. She would feel disoriented, Kai would ask for the room number again, and Bonnie would feel compelled to say it. “Thank you, good citizen,” Kai would say, and dash towards the elevators. - -It had happened exactly that way, twice, and now it was happening again. “You keep asking for Mister Zota’s room number, but I’m not supposed to give it out like that.” - -Kai nodded. “It’s very important that I find Mister Zota. You see, Saesor Zota is—” - -But he didn’t finish his explanation, because at that precise moment the hotel doors burst open and an identical brown-suited man named Kai burst into the lobby. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}onnie looked over at the newcomer in shock. “There you are again!” she managed. - -The second Kai dashed towards the front desk. The first Kai turned to look at himself. The second Kai froze when he saw his exact duplicate staring back at him from the front desk. “Uh-oh…” he said. - -“This isn’t good,” the first Kai said in alarm. - -“You didn’t travel back?” the second Kai asked. - -Kai One shook his head. “I was just suspecting a time loop. Then you showed up.” - -Kai Two blinked in thought. “Okay. Let me try backing out.” He turned and went out the main door. As soon as he cleared the door, he came through it again. To Bonnie it looked like he had turned around and come back in, but it happened so fast… faster than her eye could follow. - -“That didn’t work,” Kai Two said. - -“Obviously,” Kai One agreed. He turned to Bonnie. “When you saw me the first time, what did I do?” - -Bonnie tried to remember. It seemed like such a long time ago now, though she knew it could only have been minutes since it happened. “You asked me what room Seasor Zota was in. But I’m not supposed to give out that information and I told you that. And you used that—” she pointed at Kai’s breast pocket “—that *thing* on me, and it made me tell you he was in room 213.” - -Bonnie slapped a hand across her mouth. *Oops*. - -Neither Kai seemed to notice her slip. “Then what did I do?” Kai One asked. - -Her voice came out muffled. “You went into the elevator.” - -He nodded. “Okay, let’s try that.” - -The second Kai dashed to the elevator and pressed the button. The door opened and he stepped inside. As soon as he did so, the front door burst open and this time *two* Kai stepped through simultaneously. - -“Okay,” said Kai One. “That didn’t work.” - -“Uh-oh,” said the third Kai, staring in horror at the other two. “This isn’t good.” - -“No, it isn’t!” Bonnie said, holding her head. She felt like she had slipped into some mad dream. “Why are you doing this?” - -One of the Kai turned to her. “I’m not doing this, Bonnie. Someone else is. Zota is doing this somehow.” Kai One, she guessed, or how could he have known her name? - -“How? How can he do…” She gestured at the three Kai in the lobby. As she did, a fourth Kai burst through the doors and stopped short when he saw the others. “…do this?” - -Kai One shook his head. “That’s not important right now. What’s important that he’s trapped me here to allow himself time to get away again. I’ve got to get out of here.” - -One of the other Kai dashed up to the front counter. “Is there a rear exit? A back door?” - -Bonnie blinked. “Turn right just before the elevator.” She pointed. “There’s a long hallway. You’ll see an exit sign at the end.” - -Kai Three smiled. “Thank you, good citizen.” - -“Probably won’t work,” Kai One said. - -“Gotta try,” Kai Three called back as he dashed around the corner. - -A minute later two new Kai burst through the front doors. One stopped short, astounded by all the other versions of himself already in the lobby. “Uh-oh,” he said. “This isn’t good.” - -Kai Three made his way to back to the front desk. “Okay. Back door doesn’t work either. Now what?” - -Kai One shook his head. “Not sure. But we’ve got to do something or we’re gonna be hip deep in ourselves.” - -“So, what is this?” Kai Two asked. “I’ve never seen a time trap like this.” - -“I don’t know.” Kai One turned to Bonnie. “You said the first two times you saw me, I came in, talked to you, and then left?” - -Bonnie nodded. “That’s right.” - -“And there wasn’t an overlap?” - -Bonnie shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean. You came in. You asked for Zota. You made me talk, using that… that *thing*. Then you went up in the elevator. Then you came in through the front entrance and did it all over again.” - -“That sounds like a time loop,” Kai Two said, and grimaced. He looked into the lobby at the crowd of Kai duplicates milling around. As he did, another Kai burst through the front doors. “Uh-oh,” the newest Kai said. “This isn’t good.” - -Bonnie felt panic rising in her. What was she going to do? How was she going to explain this to anyone? What if Mister Vox came in? How do you explain to your boss something like this? She needed to get a grip on the situation. - -“What’s a time loop?” she asked. - -“A time loop is a segment of time that repeats itself,” Kai Three said. - -“Right,” she said, “I could have guessed that.” - -Kai Two nodded. “It’s like a data gem that reads the same code segment over and over again.” - -“What?” Bonnie asked, her momentary confidence stopped dead. “What’s a—” - -“Never mind,” Kai One said. “Forget that. It’s like a kinoscope.” Bonnie shook her head. “Uh… magnetic tape? You know reel-to-reel tape?” - -“Like… like a cassette tape?” Bonnie asked. Her older cousin had a cassette player. Bonnie remembered a summer spent mostly at the beach and that cassette player had played her cousin’s limited selection of cassettes over and over again. - -Kai One nodded, smiling with relief. “Yes. Like a cassette tape. If you were to snip out a section and attach the end to the beginning, it would play the same bit over and over again in a constant loop. You can do the same thing with time. Take a segment, feed the endpoint back into the starting point, and you can trap someone in it.” - -Bonnie stared at him. “You can do that?” - -“No,” he said. “Nor would I, if I could. But Zota can. He’s done it before. I was once trapped in one of his time loops for six months.” - -“That’s calculated time,” Kai Two added. “Not real or subjective time.” - -“That’s right,” Kai One said—although Bonnie now thought she could tell this one apart from the others well enough to drop the digit. “Real time is not affected by the loop because the closed segment is localized. And subjectively, the person trapped only experiences the loop once and forgets that he’s done it over and over again and again.” - -Bonnie shook her head. “But that can’t be happening here now, because each time is different.” She looked into the lobby and saw that two more had joined the ever growing throng. - -Kai’s brows furrowed. “That’s true. If this is a time loop, then something has happened to snarl it up somehow.” - -Kai Three nodded in agreement. “Time loops are usually closed and don’t change unless something from outside acts on it, and that’s usually enough to dissipate the loop. Why is this one behaving like this?” - -Kai shook his head. “Something inside the loop has interfered with the sequence, enough to alter the outcome of the segment, but not enough to end it.” - -“What could do that? Could it be an error in Zota’s code?” - -Kai shrugged. “Maybe, but that’s unlikely. The code is usually self correcting. And besides, Zota is not that careless.” - -“What could affect…” Kai Two trailed off as he stared at Bonnie. Kai looked puzzled for a second, then he turned and looked at Bonnie as well. - -“You remembered the earlier time segments,” Kai Two and Three said in unison. - -“How did you do that?” Kai finished. - -Bonnie shook her head. “I don’t know. I just did.” - -“You saw me enter and exit the lobby… twice before?” - -Bonnie nodded. - -“What was different about the third time?” Kai Three asked, appropriately. - -“She told me she’d seen me twice before,” Kai answered. “That made me stop.” - -“And you were going to use that light thingy on me,” Bonnie said, pointing to Kai’s breast pocket. - -Kai nodded. “She knew about the influencer. That’s what made me realize that she was telling the truth.” - -“Then *she**’**s* the difference,” Kai Two said. “She’s the reason that the time loop has become snarled up.” - -While they were talking, two more Kai had come through the front doors. The lobby was now a cacophony of Kai’s voice. One of them had set himself up near the front doors to intercept new arrivals—whether it was to try to stop new ones from entering or to explain to them what was going on when they did, Bonnie wasn’t sure. - -“I’m sorry,” she said to the first and second Kai. “I didn’t mean to.” - -Kai patted her hand reassuringly. “I know you didn’t. But why aren’t you affected by the time loop?” - -Bonnie shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s…” She trailed off. - -“What?” - -Bonnie felt embarrassed just saying it. “I’m not good at judging time. Unless I have a watch or can see a clock, I have no idea how much time has passed.” - -Kai frowned. “Have you always been like this?” - -She shook her head. “I was in a bad accident when I was seventeen. I had a head injury.” She hated telling anyone she was brain damaged, afraid they would make fun of her. “I’m sorry. It’s silly…” - -“No,” Kai said, firmly. “You may be on to something. Where were you injured?” - -Bonnie pointed to her skull, to the part where the injury happened. “Here,” she said, then moved her finger slowly along her skull. “To here. You can’t see it under my hair, but I’ve got a scar.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t like talking about it.” - -Kai Two put a hand to his mouth in thought. “Injury to the right pre-frontal cortex,” he muttered, and Bonnie flinched. The phrase was one the doctors and specialists had used a lot. - -Kai Three nodded, staring at her head. It made her uncomfortable, like he was trying to imagine what the scar looked like. It reminded her of looking at herself in the mirror after the accident, her ugly shaved head and the livid red scars making her look like Frankenstein’s monster. - -He just kept staring and staring—for ages, it seemed. She dropped her eyes. “Don’t look,” she whispered. - -“It creates a time dysperception.” Kai glanced at her wrists, frowning. “Why don’t you wear a watch? If…” - -“I left it by the sink. I had to wash cups. Do you want me to get it?” - -Kai shook his head. “It won’t help now, I don’t think. We’ve got to find a way to break this loop, or it’s going to get very crowded in here.” - -“It may be worse than that,” Kai Two said with a grimace. “It’s becoming quantum packed.” - -“Oh no!” - -Bonnie saw fear on all three Kai’s faces. “What does that mean?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer. - -“Time loops require energy,” Kai explained. “Energy enters the loop and then goes out at the end of the sequence, but that energy is fed back into the beginning of the next sequence. It’s part of what keeps it going. The energy transfer usually isn’t perfect. Energy slowly bleeds out, just a little at a time, until the remaining energy cannot sustain the loop and the whole thing collapses. That was how I escaped the last one. But this…” - -He gestured out into the lobby, now teeming with Kai. As he did so, another Kai burst through the door and was quickly intercepted by the others. - -“The energy is feeding back on itself,” Kai Two continued. “It’s building up with each iteration. Every time I come through the front doors, I bring energy in with me. Because I can’t leave now, all that energy is building up on the quantum level.” - -“And when that energy is released,” Kai Three added, “it could be catastrophic.” - -Bonnie felt a chill. “How catastrophic? - -“It depends on how much energy builds up before it releases,” Kai Two said. “It *could* just destroy the building.” - -“Destroy the hotel?” Bonnie said, shocked. - -“If we’re lucky,” Kai said. “If it builds up too much, it could destroy the entire block.” - -“Or half the city,” Kai Three finished. - -“And the longer this loop feeds back into itself, the worse it will be when the energy is finally released.” Another version of Kai burst through the doors. “We’ve got to do something.” - -“What can *we* do?” Kai Two asked. “We’re stuck in the time loop!” - -Kai pointed to Bonnie. “She’s not. She wasn’t affected by it. Maybe she can leave it.” - -Leaving sounded good to Bonnie. Just walking out the front doors, walking away from this nightmare… she wanted to do just that. - -But she needed this job. A woman with a temporally-perception-distorting brain injury doesn’t have a lot of options when it comes to employment. And Mister Vox said she was the best receptionist he’d ever had, always able to do an extra shift or a little overtime without notice (or, she sometimes suspected, without noticing). - -Besides, even if she did leave, there was no guarantee that she could get far enough away before the explosion happened. - -She wished she’d called in sick. - -“Do you want me to go outside and stop you from coming in?” she asked. - -“Would that do it?” Kai Two asked. “If we never enter the lobby, then this whole loop might collapse.” - -Kai thought about it. “Maybe. Or it could create a paradox. That may just create more problems.” - -“More problems than we have now?” Kai Three asked. - -“It would be better if we shut down the loop. That would dissipate the built up energy safely. The loop would collapse without any paradoxes to complicate things.” - -“But how do we shut down the loop? We don’t know how Zota created it in the first place.” - -Kai turned to Bonnie. “Where is Zota now?” - -Bonnie blinked. “I don’t know. He hasn’t checked out. I don’t remember seeing him tonight. He could be up in his room.” - -“Good Citizen—*Bonnie*—listen to me. This is very important. You have to go up to his room. You have to get him to collapse the loop. Do you understand?” - -Bonnie felt her stomach tighten in a knot. “I can’t do that.” - -“Yes, you can. You *have* to. I, we, can’t leave. You know what’s at stake.” - -“But how am I going to convince him to do that?” - -Kai reached into his breast pocket. “Take the influencer,” he said, holding it out to her. - -Bonnie shied away from the little metal disc. - -“It’s okay,” Kai Two said. “It’s safe. Take it.” - -Hesitantly, Bonnie took the device from Kai. It felt cold and was heavier than it looked. It hummed softly in her hand. - -“There’s a switch at the back,” said Kai. “It will feel like a small indent.” - -Bonnie touched the back lightly with her finger, until she found it. She nodded. “I feel it.” - -“Don’t press it now,” Kai Two said. “But if you find Zota, point the green crystal lens towards him and then press the switch.” - -“What do I say?” - -“Just tell him to collapse the time loop,” Kai Three aid. “Order him to collapse it immediately. Can you do that?” - -Bonnie did not feel confident at all, but she nodded weakly. - -Kai gave her a reassuring smile. “You’re doing the right thing, Good Citizen,” he said. - -“Just do it quick,” Kai Two said. Behind him another Kai burst through the doors. There was almost no room left in the lobby not occupied by Kai. - -Bonnie moved from behind the front desk and through the side door into the lobby. She fished out her master key while she pressed the call button on the elevator. She didn’t know how much time passed before the elevator door opened, but it couldn’t have been long, because Kai (or it could have been Kai Two) was watching her and he only had time to nod anxiously once. - -She stepped into the elevator. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}fter the doors closed behind her, Bonnie felt the elevator ascend. The ride seemed to take an agonizingly long time, and yet she was surprised at how quickly she arrived at the second floor. - -There was no one in the hallway as she hurried to room 213. She knocked. “Mister Zota?” she called. “I’m sorry to bother you but this is important. Mister Zota?” - -No answer. How long should she wait? How long *had* she waited? Her stomach tightened as she thought about the lobby filling with Kai, and the energy building up every time one of them burst through the doors. She put her ear to the door but heard nothing. - -She had the master key. She wasn’t supposed to enter a guest’s room unless it was an emergency. She *tsk*’d at herself. If the hotel lobby being trapped in a time loop and filling up with multiple versions of the same man and in imminent danger of being blown to smithereens wasn’t an emergency, then nothing was. - -She swiped the key card and fumbled the influencer into her hand, holding it up in front of her like a tiny shield as she hesitantly entered. “Hello? Mister Zota?” - -The lights were off. The room was empty. The one double bed was still made. - -The device sat on the bed. - -Bonnie tried to make it out in the gloom. It kept changing shape and configuration, one second thin and spindly, the next squat and solid. That it was a machine was the only thing she was certain of. The parts seemed to be made of metal, and gave off a distinct machine-like humming sound. - -She wanted to turn and run back to the lobby. She wanted to ask Kai what she should do. Any of them. But she knew what she had to do. She had to make things right—and this device, ever shifting its reality, was the source of all the wrong. She approached the bed, but as she got closer to the device she felt an unsettling vibration in her chest, and an even more unsettling one in her mind. She was as afraid to touch it as she would be to thrust her hand into a running car engine. - -She looked around the room. It was like all the other single rooms in the hotel, with absolutely no sign that it had been occupied since housekeeping had arranged it last. No luggage, no garbage in the waste bin. If Zota had ever been in this room there was no sign aside from the device on the bed. - -The phone. Bonnie unplugged it from the wall, got as close to the device as she dared, and rapped it once with the receiver. - -It had no effect. - -She rapped it again, harder. Then she hit it as hard as she could—hard enough to crack the plastic of the receiver—and, just for a second, the hum the device gave off shifted slightly. - -Frustrated, she threw it at the device. The phone bounced off and fell to the carpet. She needed something heavier, but turning on the spot nothing leapt to mind. The TV was bolted to the wall, and was too thin and flimsy to do anything but shatter, the bedside lamp was cheap ceramic, and the bedside table was built into the bed. Then it hit her—just like the TV, standard in every room. She wrenched open the doors to the fitted wardrobe, and there it was, nestled in a wooden alcove, next to the single-serving electric kettle, above the security safe bolted to the wardrobe floor. - -A microwave oven. - -Bonnie reached in on either side and pulled it forward. It slid off its base, the plug pulling taught. She gave the thing a yank and the plug pulled out of the wall socket. She almost overbalanced, then turned and hefted the oven over her head. - -With a desperate shove, she slammed the microwave down onto the device. - -There was a flash and a deafening bang. Bonnie felt herself being hurled in many directions at the same time. She was slammed against the wall she was knocked over the couch she was blown into the bathroom she was blown out the window with a shattering of glass she was thrown out the door into the hallway. All of the possible permutations, happening all at once. - -Something snapped. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}onnie opened her eyes. Painfully. She was in the hallway outside Zota’s room, slumped against the wall. Wisps of smoke trailed from the open door. - -She groaned. Her entire body hurt. - -An older couple whom she remembered were from Naperville, Illinois, appeared at the door to the neighboring room. “Are you alright, dearie?” the old woman asked. - -“Yes, ma’am,” Bonnie said, not very convincingly. - -They helped her to her feet. The doors to all the rooms on the corridor were opening now, confused and frightened guests babbling excitedly. Bonnie found herself surrounded by people asking what had happened and whether they should evacuate and wondering if their rooms would be comped due to the unacceptable disturbance. - -Bonnie did her best to calm them down, but she had no idea how long it took before everyone was back in their rooms and she was free to take the elevator back down to the lobby. - -When she stepped out, the lobby was empty. - -There were no Kai. - -Not even one. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}aturally there were questions the next day, and Bonnie could not provide any answers. Guests had complained about the sound of an explosion. Saesor Zota was nowhere to be found. His room contained nothing apart from a broken telephone and a badly damaged microwave oven. Saesor Zota had also not paid his bill. Mister Vox was not happy. - -Bonnie tried to answer her boss’ questions. As she spoke, his look of anger gave way to another, terrible expression, one that she hadn’t seen since the early days of the accident. - -Pity. Fear. A false smile. - -Very unfortunate, but of course Mister Vox couldn’t keep her employed. He sighed as he wrote out her final cheque, and made some sympathetic comments about the help that he was certain was out there for someone like her. - -Bonnie kept her jaw set as she marched out the front doors, leaving behind her name tag and a promise to return the shirt with the hotel logo embroidered on it. She managed to hold back the tears long enough to reach a bench in the nearby park. - -She had been weeping to herself for somewhere between five minutes and a thousand years when someone sat beside her. She looked up, and Kai gave her a sympathetic smile. - -“I lost my job,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. - -“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” - -She blinked away her tears and looked around. “Where are the others?” - -“Others?” - -“Other yous.” - -He chuckled softly. “There’s only me now. When you stopped Zota’s machine, the loop collapsed and I was thrown out of it.” - -“So which Kai are you?” - -“All of them,” he said. “Sort of. Smart move, by the way, using the microwave oven like that.” - -She sniffed. “You know about that?” - -Kai nodded. “I was sent there with a job to do, you know. I sneaked in through that back way you mentioned and went up to the room after, saw the mess. The latent radiation from the microwave’s magnetron likely shorted out the machine.” - -“Radiation?” Bonnie said, alarmed. “Am I going to die?” - -“Probably not.” Kai smiled. “Zota’s machine would have absorbed most of it. Anything else would have been distributed amongst the alternate outcomes generated by the blast of the quantum pack collapsing.” - -Bonnie regarded him impassively. She didn’t really understand a single word he’d said, but at the same time she knew what he meant. The impossible memory of being thrown through every possible direction and out the window still gave her a headache to think about.“Did you find Zota?” she asked. - -“No,” Kai said, with a steely tone to his voice. “But I will.” - -Bonnie thought she should feel resentment towards him, given that he and his time loop had destroyed her life. Curiously, she felt nothing. She stood. “Well, good luck with that. I’ve got to start looking through the want ads tomorrow.” - -“About that,” Kai said, standing too. “I don’t know if I mentioned before, about the organization that I work for. They pay pretty well. I mean, for this time period, they pay phenomenally well…” - -Bonnie regarded him cautiously. “Are you offering me a job?” - -Kai shrugged. “A woman with your particular temporal dissociation would be an asset in certain situations.” - -“Like last night?” - -Kai nodded. “Exactly like last night.” - -“Does that happen often to you?” - -He grimaced—Kai Two’s grimace. “Oftener than I’d like.” - -They walked in silence for a few moments, or maybe a few hours, while she considered his offer. - -“This organization of yours,” she asked at last. “Where is it?” - -“Well,” Kai said with a grin, “it’s not so much a *where* as a *when*.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - - - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Time Dysperception" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201342978453369).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/Unknown Ancestry.md b/content/issue-25/Unknown Ancestry.md deleted file mode 100644 index 258a0c23..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/Unknown Ancestry.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,426 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Unknown Ancestry" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- T. M. Morgan -copyright: '© T. M. Morgan 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "What makes a person who they are: Nature or Nurture? Most people would say it's a bit of both, forgetting that musician they like with \"natural talent\", or the monster on the news who was just \"born evil\". But of course, those are the outliers. For most of us, how and where we're raised makes all the difference. And what about when you learn you're not what you think you are at all — is it Nature or Nurture then?" - -image: /images/UnknownAncestry.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to Karen Apricot [for](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5519603107) [these](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5519635971/) [five](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5520186750/) [great](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5520117230/) [pictures](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenapricot/5519527767/)!" - -type: stock -slug: unknown-ancestry -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}47%{{}} *Unassigned*. - -This text was further down in the official document, with an asterisk beside it. At the bottom of the second page, below the bulk of the text, an italicized footnote read: *Minor variances in testing methodology and the DNA samples themselves sometimes result in findings that cannot be traced to a particular region and/or population group*. - -“Fucking bullshit!” I took hold of my sandwich, squeezed it into ooze between my fingers, and heaved it against the wall. The glob of meat and bread slid to the tiled floor, leaving a long streak of mayonnaise in its wake. At that perfect moment, Jessie came through the front door, his t-shirt soaked with sweat. I stuffed the letter under one of the wicker placemats. - -“How was your study group?” he asked. - -“Fine. The usual.” - -His gaze went from the sandwich catastrophe, to the empty though trashed envelope I had forgotten to hide, to my strained posture. He pointed at the envelope. “What’s that?” - -“I’m not ready to tell you yet.” - -He shrugged. “Okay. Did you call the doctor about your joint pain? I texted you the number for that rheumatologist.” - -“No. I swear I’ll do it tomorrow.” - -“Arthritis can hit at any age.” - -“You’re not my mother.” - -He shook his head. “I’m going to shower.” - -He went into our bedroom, then strolled naked to the bathroom and closed the door. When I was sure he wouldn’t peek back out, some trick to catch me at my game, I slid out the *YourAncestry* letter again. But the smell of the roast beef was making me nauseous, so pungent as if it had already become rotted. I snatched the mess up and dumped it down the garbage disposal. The sound of the grinding metal claws was oddly calming. - -“What are you thinking about?” Jessie snuck up on me wearing only a towel. - -I pointed to the letter. “I got the results of that DNA test.” - -He took it with his typical slow deliberation. He read it; he studied the front and back; he nodded. “You’re a mystery, it appears.” - -I glared at him. “This isn’t funny.” - -“You just wanted to post on Facebook gleefully telling everyone about your complicated genetic makeup.” - -“Why? I’m already complicated enough.” - -He laughed in his deep, slow way. “Don’t I know.” - -We each pretended to prepare for a fight, our noses touching, our chests flared out, before he dropped his towel and kissed me and then pushed me down the hallway to our bedroom. We had sex, and then he massaged me, easing the tension that always seemed to be tightening my muscles, making my joints ache. Oil dripped into the small valley of my spine. The vape pen pressed against my lips, which he manipulated without my needing to move. I got so fucking high the mattress felt like a dandelion bonanza. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“M{{}}aybe I’m a werewolf,” I said. - -“You’re not going to get all hairy, are you?” Jessie pushed up on his elbows. The antique bed frame creaked as he moved. Above us, two rows of bookshelves delicately held almost a hundred books, half of them my boring (even to me) political tomes and the others his tidy classics, from O’Connor to Faulkner to Wright. - -“You know,” I said, “I have been thinking about a beard.” - -He put his hand on my cheek. “If you grow a beard, I’m going to ask for my money back.” - -“You only get a partial refund,” I said and kissed him before giving my serious stare. “Look, this is really important to me.” - -He cocked an eyebrow. “The beard?” - -“Very funny.” - -“Why don’t you just ask your parents? I’m sure they’d want to help.” - -70’s jazz started playing through in-ceiling speakers, and the room lights switched to orange, an automated thing we did to announce bedtime. While this should have been soothing, instead I sparked with anger. “You know better.” - -He squeezed my chin with oil-scented fingers. “I know you’re afraid of hurting them. But they love you. They’re not going to freak out.” - -The room’s glow struck me as haunting, a kind of dream state, a pumpkin-colored gloom. Between songs it was so quiet I could hear his heartbeat, a disturbing thump that made me slightly nauseous. - -“I don’t know. Maybe I need to sleep.” - -He studied me as I flopped on my back, face straight up on the pillow. “Alexa,” he said, “play meditation music.” - -Alexa’s voice was warm and feminine, not so much like a mother but an annoyingly rational big sister. The most calming sounds floated into the room, synthesizer and love flute entwined in a simple dance. It was the kind of music white people stole from the indigenous and called “world music.” That irritant alone kept me awake. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}essie opted to not talk as I drove. His persistence that we visit my parents for Thanksgiving had caused a two-day argument, during which I sulked like a little brat. After forty-eight hours of icy interactions, I accepted his advice. If handled it well, my parents knowing I was looking into my heritage would cause no hurt. But that “if,” with my shitty track record at diplomacy, made me cautious. - -“What is it you like about me?” I asked as we glided onto the I-70 West ramp. - -It took him a second to draw up from his daydream. “I like all the things about you, Marcus. Each thing. Stop being so hard on yourself.” - -No apologies spoken. No grand makeup. We were going, he was right, and that was that. - -I settled in for the drive, gazing lazily out the window. The trees, while past full autumn bloom, still held bunches of orange and red leaves. In some places, winds had stripped long sections clean. These were massed along the highway like clusters of discarded wire. It had the cumulative effect of being both joyous and depressing. - -What I had never told anyone, not even Jessie, was that I had long harbored the idea that my parents had been lying about my adoption. Lately, with my anguish over first applying for the DNA test and then getting the results, I felt almost sure. Maybe I wanted to believe it, because then I would have a secret. - -“I appreciate this,” I said. “Not that I’m excited for it, but you’re here with me. That means a lot.” - -My parents greeted us already standing at the end of the front walk. Jessie came dressed as sharply as a mogul on holiday. Dad poured him a Scotch while they discussed the former Redskins, a conversation I was happy to miss. I helped Mom in the kitchen. She had made an assortment of hors d’oeuvres: biscuits and jams and cookies and puffed pastries which I helped set out on the table. - -The upright piano in the family room had an ornate, plastic turkey on its top. Not typical fare for my mother, who must have gotten it at a yard sale. It made me oddly nervous, as if someone’s idea of a joke, as if it might burst into gobble-gobbles and start hopping around. Along with this bit of fantasia, a weird resentment bubbled up to see Jessie so relaxed. He and dad always hit it off, though (or maybe because) Jessie was closer to his age then mine. They even both snuck outside to smoke just before we ate, dad the old-fashioned way and Jessie on the vape. - -Mom pulled an immaculate-looking turkey from the oven. “He is *so* handsome.” - -“Thanks, Mom.” - -She kept busy at the stove, using spatulas to get three different pots of various vegetables into serving bowls and then quickly washing the pans in the double sink. “Have you gotten taller? Maybe it’s a late growth spurt?” - -“Growth spurt? I’m twenty-three! What the fuck?” - -“Marcus!” She looked shocked, but something in my face changed it to concern, and she placed a hand on my cheek. “What’s wrong?” - -This was a typical thing she would do to probe, kind of like how fortune tellers always home in on negative shit to seem attuned to your “essence” (*I see a dark cloud over you. Has anything happened recently that might have caused this?*). This time, however, she caught me in the middle of a panic attack. - -I blurted it all out. “I need to know about my birth parents, Mom. I did one of those ancestry things, you know, like you see in the commercials all the time. Anyway, it showed that half of my DNA can’t be traced, and I’ve been starting to have these joint issues, it might be a genetic thing, I mean, it could be nothing, but there are just these changes, and I want to know, in fact, I *need* to know if you or Dad have any other information about when you adopted me, because I feel like I’m going to lose my mind if I don’t figure this shit out.” - -I came to a halt, and after a moment sucked in a breath a little shakily. - -Mom stopped prepping dinner, wiped her hands on the dish towel, and walked to the sliding door onto the deck. At first, I thought she was in a daze and might just keep going into the backyard and start screaming. Instead, she called out, “Dan, can you and Jessie come in? Marcus needs to talk about something.” - -No shock, no questions, only the call to order of a family meeting. Mom could be like that, so it didn’t alarm me, though the Stepford quality of her demeanor put me off balance. Once everyone was in, she shuttled us into the family room. The fireplace was hot with the fan cranked up, its fiery blast hitting me most directly at the end of the couch. Mom and Dad sat opposite Jessie and me in their old armchairs, which were each covered in an ungodly flower fabric. - -Mom cleared her throat, as if beginning a speech she had rehearsed to heart. “Marcus did one of those DNA tests,” she said, laying her hand on Dad’s. “He received some strange results, and he’s concerned he may have some genetic traits that are—well, that might need medical attention.” - -She gave accent to this last bit, as if speaking in code to clue Dad in. He stared at the floor. It was as if he might find something tangible there at his feet, a little burning bush that magically appeared to dispense knowledge. I noticed how hard he gripped Mom’s hand. Jessie must have noticed too, because his own hand squeezed mine just the same. - -“Son,” Dad started, in a somber, serious voice, “we always meant to tell you. It’s one of those things. The longer you wait, the more shameful you feel for not saying so sooner…” - -His words trailed off. Mom had to nudge him. The clock chimed three slow bongs, and then the clicks of its internal mechanism counted off the passing time. - -“Marcus, we haven’t told you the whole truth about your adoption.” - -Surprisingly, I didn’t feel upset. I was more relieved. However, when I tried to speak there was no air in my lungs. His pause turned into awkward silence, until he seemed to realize I would say nothing. - -“We love you. We wanted you desperately. I told your mom the best thing we could do was adopt a child so that we could make a real difference in their life. That proved more problematic than we thought. It took money we didn’t have. So, we turned to what some people might call a… a shady lawyer to help us.” - -With each word, both my confidence and my anger grew. Relief gave way to hotheaded umbrage. - -“The truth is the lawyer arranged for us to get you from a poor family directly. He specialized in these kinds of adoptions. We drove to a place in West Virginia. Poor, son, as poor as I’ve ever seen. Trash all around, dead animals all around. We found you bundled in an old bassinet. Such a precious child, we took you on the spot.” - -Jessie spoke for me. “So, what you’re saying is that you bought him, right? You paid these people cash or something?” - -Jessie took control in a moment that I had no control myself. Because of that small effort on his part, I did not go totally fucking ballistic. - -“Not quite,” Mom said. “I mean, yes, we gave a little money, but not for you. The family had some expenses, they said, bills that needed paying. It amounted to less than five hundred dollars.” - -At this, she suddenly began to sob. It was horrifying—Mom was the one who never lost control. She was like Jessie in that way. - -Dad hugged her, though he wasn’t doing much better. “We didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he said, “because we were so happy. We planned to one day tell you. But when you were old enough, we were cowards on that part. I’m so sorry.” - -It was as if I was watching them at my own funeral, my body having become incorporeal, as they bawled and wrung their hands. - -Jessie grew impatient. “Well then, what is it?” - -Mom looked at him confused. “I don’t understand.” - -“You’re not telling us something. What *is* it?” - -I couldn’t decide if his camaraderie with my dad earlier helped or hurt now. His sturdy posture and dapper clothes struck me as authoritative, with my parents acquiescing—withered even. It felt for all the world like he was my attorney, cross examining hostile witnesses. - -Dad gathered himself enough to speak, his eyes still glued to the carpet. “The man who said he was your father… he… Jesus, this is impossible…” - -The room spun. The words spewed from my mouth. “What the fuck is wrong with me? You two have been lying all this time, and now I’m dying!” - -Jessie’s face contorted in a way that would have struck me as comical any other day of my life. “Marcus! What the hell?” - -“What?” Mom screamed. “Are you joking? This is no time.” - -I stood and looked down on them all recoiled against their couch and chair arms. “I just *knew* you’ve been hiding something. And I can feel it in my blood—there’s something very wrong with me!” - -Dad wiped his lips with his forearm. “Marcus, please calm down. Look, I don’t even want to tell you this, but you’re obviously feeling, well, upset. And it’s time to stop hiding it. The thing is, we got the distinct impression that your father is also… your grandfather.” - -I stared at them, sitting side by side, the way I remembered them all my life, except now the secret was finally out. - -“Okay. So. I’m not a monster. Just *monstrous*.” - -Mom became inconsolable, shivering until she collapsed into Dad’s embrace. I couldn’t even look at Jessie. I wandered around this Tennessee Williams disaster in a daze until I stopped at the piano and grabbed that fucking plastic turkey with every intent to smash it to pieces. But I fainted instead, cast into darkness on the wings of calamity. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he drive back to DC, with Jessie at the wheel, started in quaintly rural Frederick and grew to suburban sprawl the closer we got to DC. I’d been along that route a thousand times, yet noticed for the first time how shapeless it all was, like the leftovers of a post-apocalyptic world, all glass and steel and randomly placed shrubbery. Jessie and I didn’t speak a word, so I didn’t mention that dad had slyly given me my birth certificate from his safe. The father field was blank, my own name listed only as “Baby Henderson.” - -At home, he jumped immediately in the shower. It was unlike him to abandon me, but his disgust at my outburst had been apparent. Later, he brooded in the living room. - -I sat beside him on the couch so that our thighs touched. “Want to have sex?” - -He moved his leg away from me. “You’re going to have to give this some time, okay?” - -“I’m sorry. How long? I can’t wait around forever.” The joke fell flat. - -“I can’t—you want to go find them, don’t you?” - -He shuddered, whether because he was angry or despondent I wasn’t sure. But hearing him say it out loud brought shame to what I’d known since we left my parents: I *did* need to meet my birth family more than ever. It was a compulsion at this point, something I had to see to the end. - -I got up to retrieve the birth certificate from the envelope I’d put on the table, set it in his hand, and intently watched as he read it. Not all that much to read, but he looked at it for a long time. - -“You know this is crazy, right?” He spoke with punctuated venom. “That this shit is goddamn insane?” - -“You’re right. But I’m scared about what’s going on with me, and I need answers.” - -“What? That you might be a monster? A werewolf maybe?” He showed no signs of joking. - -I took his hand. “I’m sorry I said what I said. But you know going to my parents was hard. And what they confessed was so fucking…and I *have* been having these joint issues. Maybe these Hendersons can help, or at least fill in the gaps.” - -He yanked his hand away. “This is crazy, Marcus. You don’t know these people. From what your father said, they could be dangerous.” - -“I’m the one who started in with the monsters, remember? From what my father said, they could just be poor. And I need to know why that ancestry test shows fifty percent unidentified; and I need medical answers. So I’m going to go soon, and I’m going by myself.” - -Jessie’s angry veneer vanished in an instant, so that the scared, horrified lover beneath could emerge. “Alone?” - -“On the off chance they *are* dangerous, I can’t put you in danger too. Listen, I will check in with you constantly, let you know what’s happening. It will be strange enough to have me show up—” - -“And you don’t want your boyfriend showing up?” - -“That’s not fair.” - -But the juxtaposition had occurred to me: I’d be heading to the deep country for this reunion, and my real family might be a bunch of redneck assholes, or worse. It was a strange mix I felt, of curiosity that needed to be quelled, and horror at what I might have come from. - -We did have sex that night, moving from couch to bed, his need for it as urgent as mine, but relief didn’t last for us both. After he fell asleep, I tensed up to the point my calf muscles cramped. All I could do was lay there hoping I wasn’t some genetic mess from a hillbilly nightmare. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} crossed the Potomac river in fog on Saturday morning. My destination was Haplinsburg, West Virginia. It was an area near the Gauley River, which was famous for its whitewater rafting. We had gone once and I nearly drowned at a massive rapid hilariously called “Surprise.” - -Once through the worst of northern Virginia’s traffic, I hit the low hills of Front Royal. Trees and more trees, and later chunneled holes through mountains to allow the interstate to continue west. After lunch I passed a “Welcome to West Virginia” sign, which showed mountains and their tagline, “Wild and Wonderful.” - -The birth certificate lay on the passenger seat, drawing my attention from the road with the lure of my birth mother’s name: *Victoria Imogen Henderson*. I wondered if she was pretty. Blonde hair, skin as white as lilies, eyes so blue they conjured the Aryan nation. Then I chastised myself for such thoughts. I had worried about being a werewolf, but now I was upgrading to Nazi spawn. Maybe I should try looking on the bright side for a change: I knew the truth and was about to learn more, for better or worse. - -The signs for Haplinsburg started to show in the afternoon. The local roads wound through dizzying switchbacks as the town neared. Shacks sat up the steep hillsides. Some could only be reached by rickety looking wooden bridges, white foam rapids churning below. The town proper announced itself by way of a red sign with gold letters: *Haplinsburg, West Virginia, Home of the Paul Bunyan Festival*. - -Though only early evening, the town looked shut down. Not a single person walked on the sidewalks, and all the shops were closed. Early to bed, early to rise, and all that. I’d booked a night at the Gauley Valley Motel Six, three miles outside the town. After another ten minutes of terrifying switchbacks and one lane bridges, I arrived at a lonely rambler style building and an empty parking lot. - -A man the size of an erect bear greeted me inside, his beard as thick as briars. I thought he was mute, the way he grunted and nodded toward the things I needed to do, like sign in and pay. At room 14, I used an old-fashioned metal key, turned the knob, and was met by the foul smell of mold. As I stood in the doorway, I remembered my promise and sent a text to Jessie only to get a message that said, “Network not found. Please check with your provider.” Great. - -I turned to take in the view. The sloping valleys might have been beautiful, but the darkening sky laid low, and the trees lacked any color and were instead desiccated tendrils, peppered with regurgitated mounds of silvery rock. No cell service, no parking lot lights, not a single other car. On top of all this, I hadn’t eaten since getting some junk food at a Sheetz at the West Virginia line. - -The motel clerk puttered from his back room when I entered again. - -“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but is there any place I could get something to eat?” - -His eyes had all the depth of a corpse, and I expected him to silently flap one paw towards some distant diner. Imagine my surprise when the briars parted. “Nothing open now. I’ve got a snack machine is all.” - -My brain struggled to churn out any logical thoughts. So, being tired as well as hungry, I plowed forward without hesitation. “Hey, I was wondering if you could help me? I’m looking for Victoria Henderson. She’s family I haven’t seen in a long time.” - -He looked befuddled. I wondered if he had been smoking crystal or sniffing glue in back. “I know the Hendersons. I went to school with Vick. But hey, your name’s—” he dipped his head to look at the guest book “—Frippington? What kind of name is Marcus Frippington?” - -I shook my head. “British, I think? But, hey, thanks for the info.” - -As I reached for the door, he spoke again. “My name is Arthur Townes,” he said, as if the sharing of names was a ritual. “Tell you what, I’ll let Vick know you’re looking for her.” - - “Oh, no, no! You don’t have to do that. I have the address. I was planning on visiting tomorrow.” - -“It’s fine,” he said, and for the first time grinned, a toothy thing smothered by that beard. “Always glad to help out family.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he moon, as round and perfect as a coin, emerged from behind thick clouds. The mountain air was cool but not uncomfortable. I wandered by my car with Jessie’s backup vape pen. Salty dust from a tube of chips covered my fingers and I washed back the aftertaste with a lukewarm soda. Within minutes of hitting the vape, I got so high the stars warped as I gawked at them. - -I had to get out of my room. It had wood-panel walls and a messy shag carpet the color of vanilla pudding. The TV was one of the ancient CRT types, its picture growing to fill the screen when it turned on. Two stations that I could find. One played a black-and-white movie, but I kept the sound off. An owl hooted as I stood in a daze. Then a wolf howled. Something tippy-tapped on the roof behind me. - -Then another hoot, another howl. - -Freaked out, I shuffled inside, locked the door, and slid the chain latch in place. A scrape started along on the outside wall, made its way toward the door, and then stopped. There were three loud knocks. After a few seconds, three more came, more forceful with each knock, so that the last one rattled the door on its hinges. - -I tiptoed up to it: no peephole to stare into. “Hello?” - -“I’m looking for Marcus Frippington,” a man’s voice said. - -“Uh, yes?” - -A long pause as voices whispered; there was more than one person outside. “I hear you’re looking for us.” - -I gripped the knob and pulled open the door a crack. A man stood in overalls and a greasy cap, easily in his seventies, over six-and-a-half feet tall and thin as a wafer. Beside him, a woman closer to mom’s age, maybe younger, had her arm in his. She also towered uncommonly. There was a hint of something on the formerly clean-smelling air, too… animal shit, maybe? Were they farmers? - -“Is it him?” she said. - -“Yep, you were right. It’s our boy.” - -*Our* boy. I stared at my possible father/grandfather and mother/sister, both ghoulish in the moon’s light, faintly reeking of shit, or meth lab solvents, or whatever, smiling with gaps in their teeth… - -…and yet as warm and inviting as Christmas gifts under the tree. They were quaint; they smiled and waited patiently for me. Dentistry aside, Vick was quite beautiful. She did have blonde hair and blue eyes, and all of her gleamed under the moon’s shine. - -“You probably have a lot of questions,” she said, and broke down crying. - -I was entirely too stoned to deal with this. Then she *really* surprised me by pushing open the door and clutching me to her tightly, her mouth against my neck, her tears spilling onto my skin. The man joined the hug, too, wrapping his long arms around the two of us completely, all huddled in the doorway of my little motel room. - -“I’m John Henderson,” he said, “and you seem to already know about Vick. Come along, why don’t we take you to meet the rest of your family.” - -He motioned toward a pickup truck parked in front of the now closed office. Arthur Townes must have called it a night—after he rang up my birth family. The truck, rusted so severely I could see the engine block through the front quarter panel, had a massive cab, two corroded exhaust pipes jutting vertically from either side of it, and a wood flatbed. The wheels looked as big as boulders. - -“I was planning to come tomorrow,” I said, feeling the beginning of a half-tripping panic attack gathering strength. “I’m not prepared—” - -Vick sucked in a breath. “Please, I know you must be so angry, coming here to meet the people who…” She faltered, then squeezed me so tightly her shirt pulled down to reveal the tops of her breasts. I jolted back instinctively and she began to cry harder. - -John caressed her cheek. “None of that,” he said. “He won’t hold nothing against us. We did what we had to do.” - -I looked back and forth between them. John kind of eyed me, as if to pass on a silent message, his head nodding toward her. And somehow, instead of fully freaking out, I found myself saying “Oh, right. Don’t blame yourself. I’m just happy to finally meet you.” - -John gave me a big, gappy smile and a wink as Vick let me go, wiping her eyes (and nose) with her bare arm. Then he jerked his head towards the pickup, eyebrows raised, all friendly encouragement. - -“Oh,” I said. “Sure. I guess it’s fine. Let me just get my phone.” - -Once we squeezed in, Vick in the middle and taking my hand in hers, the truck pulled out slowly, heading in the opposite direction of Haplinsburg town proper. We three sat comfortably and silently in a line, shoulder to shoulder as we bounced along. Even though they seemed real enough, I was still very high and half wondered if I was having a psychotic break. But now that we were in close quarters, the smell coming off them was eye-watering, and I could feel the cold metal of the door on my arm. - -So real, I guess. - -Or hell, if it *was* a psychotic break, then it was a good one. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}ven in the low light, I saw shacks dotting the wooded hills, their crusty faces barely visible through the trees. After a short drive, we pulled onto a dirt road that disappeared into trees. A barely standing mailbox jutted from weeds. I saw no buildings as the road curved up a sharp rise. The angle we climbed seemed more than any vehicle could take, and it felt like we were headed straight up. As my back pressed into the seat, I gazed on the starry sky through the windshield. The engine revved as the wheels fought for traction. - -“A little steep through here,” John said. - -The air chilled. The road evened. And we turned hard left, and I saw smoke rising another quarter mile back into the woods. The ground looked more stone than dirt. As we rounded a final curve, the homestead came into view: random debris and trash lined the perimeter; chickens darted jerkily around; there were so many dead animals—cats mostly, I think—flung into the embankment it seemed purposeful. Dad had actually been kind in his description of the place. - -A small dwelling stood amidst the heaps of refuse. A light flickered through a front window, which was covered by iron bars. Boards ran over what looked to be a perpetually muddy area between the end of the track and the front door. - -The truck lurched to a stop. John opened his door, while Vick nudged me out. “Go on, we’re here. Everyone will be so excited to meet you.” - -I shuffled my feet as she pushed me forward, my legs like a marionette’s. A dog’s wail rose up, the kind of sound a bloodhound must make when it gets a whiff of its prey. Pots clanged inside, and there was loud talking. A small, white face peered from behind the curtains. As the three of us approached, the door was flung open. A decrepit man, so old his skin bunched in wrinkled folds, stood in the doorway and glared at me. An equally old woman appeared from behind him, holding an iron skillet as a weapon. The smell that wafted from inside was worse than a latrine. - -The old woman stepped forward and put a grimy palm on my cheek. “I can’t tell.” - -John stepped through. “It’s him.” - -Every neuron in my nervous system fired, a response urging me to run the fuck out of there as fast as I could, or to blink my eyes until I snapped out of this nightmare. But I forced calm on myself. I told myself that my arrogance was speaking, to see these poor people and think myself better than them. They hadn’t harmed me, hadn’t threatened me. They were being nothing but kind and welcoming. My dad’s insinuation about incestuous parentage struck me as crazy now, as yet more superiority leveled at these people, who were, in fact, my family. - -We poured inside to a cluster of accumulated furniture and odd paraphernalia: antlers mounted on the walls; ancient black-and-white pictures of dusty mountain folk; old-style Christmas lights decorating the windows. Vick took my hand and sat me on a plaid recliner. She, John, and the centenarian couple sat opposite on the couch. It was reminiscent of the family meeting only a few days before in my parents’ house. - -“Don’t look like Father,” the old man said, which struck me as a strange way to say it. - -“Look in his eyes,” John said. The other three leaned forward as if I were an object in a museum. The old man nodded, recognizing something at last. - -“So, you probably have questions,” Vick said. - -“Well, a lot actually. I’m not sure where to start.” - -John began to answer, but before any words came out, the front door swung open. There stood Arthur Townes. His bulk seemed to have increased since I last saw him, as he barely fit through the doorway. His beard had grown to almost shroud his face completely; hair grew out of his plaid shirt, the kind of chest hair that could only be called hirsute. His arms were as thick as cut logs. - -“Ah, good,” John said. “Everyone is here?” - -“Most everyone came.” Arthur cowered as if terrified. His eyes glowed with yellowed jaundice; his nose was caked with gunk. His expression was kind and yet also full of confusion. He bent timidly and came forward. In horror, I watched as he continued to grow, the crown of his hairy head bumping against the ceiling. Then came the growls. The four on the couch lounged without a care. - -“Oh, fuck,” I blurted. “I *am* a werewolf.” - -The four sitting burst into laughter. Arthur stared at me as if trying to try to piece together what was going on as much as I was. “Oh, good Lord,” the old woman said. “Father ain’t a werewolf. You’ve got a lot to get straight.” - -Arthur—looking less and less like Arthur with each passing second—opened his mouth to reveal rows of pointed teeth. His arms took on a slick sheen, a foul aroma exploding from his pores. Then the power flickered, sending the lamps and Christmas lights to half their original brightness. - -“This was a mistake,” I managed to say. “Please, you can take me back?” - -“Oh, don’t be alarmed, boy,” the old woman croaked. “Father just wants to meet you.” - -When I tore my eyes away, it was to see all four of the others begin to grow too, their skin slick with ooze and hair. I ran for the front door, bounding past the large but lethargic Arthur, only to be met by a semi-circle of roughly three dozen people around the front of the house. For a split second I thought they might be townsfolk gathered with pitchforks and clubs, ready to fight these monsters. But they too looked to be stretching upwards, their silhouettes blending with the dark trees around us. - -John slapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be alarmed. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re just glad you’ve come home. Father wants to see you, get a good look, and finally make you part of the family.” - -A figure lurched from the trees, standing over twelve feet high. Horns curled around the sides of its head like a ram, and a beard grew so massive it could hide a child within. It was naked, the bulk of its arms and legs impossible, almost as thick as the torso they grew from, and ridiculous quantities of more thick hair almost concealing the pendulous swing of what hung from its body. The beast screamed into the night, a coarse roar that echoed down the mountainside. A stench of sewage blew toward me, even though it stood twenty feet away. - -I hyperventilated and was only kept from falling by John and Vick’s grips on my arms. Running for my life came to mind, except I knew my legs weren’t capable of any extended escape. As the beast stalked closer, my joints seized, making me straight as a board. - -“I want to go home,” I said, though it came out as a squeak. - -Vick whispered in my ear, “Oh, my sweet baby boy. That’s just Father. Grandfather, too, and great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather. But Father to us all. Father to you.” - -I spent a split second imagining my conception—of *any* woman breeding with this thing. I wanted to vomit. Finally able to stand on my own, I shook their hands from my arms and stood to face it. - -Father. Here, in the *Home of the Paul Bunyan Festival*. - -A laugh escaped me, followed by riotous giggles. Then I ran, sprinted as fast as I could, toward the townsfolk gauntlet, but I was barely past a dour woman who held a broom—which struck me as the strangest thing of all—before I was snatched from behind and held several feet off the ground. - -Meaty, wet, hairy hands gripped both sides of my waist. Father turned me so that we faced, and I peered into his eyes, where a fire seemed to glow. He hugged me into his long, thick beard, which carried a rancid stench so foul I choked. - -“Home,” he spoke low. “Family now. One of us.” - -Then he covered my face with his lips, the whole front of my head into his mouth, so I could see the blackish-pink flesh dangling at the back, the massive swell of tongue, teeth like a shark’s. He exhaled a massive breath, sending warm, acidic fumes down my stupidly open mouth. - -My chest heaved to the point of bursting. - -My mind raced with images of this thing through the years, bestial fornications, the long lineage from colonial times, its previous home in some godforsaken European forest, many meals of flesh and bone. Then here, with long decades of banjos, and moonshine, and… and happy folk, dancing into the night, days spent hunting and tending tough crops. Women who would willingly wander into the woods to seek out Father. - -My story. My ancestry. - -Before Father removed his mouth from my face, everything went blissfully black. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}y fingers gripped the bed sheets. Disoriented, I whipped my legs around, still sure that Father clutched my sides, and tried to kick at him. Even when I realized that nightmare had disappeared, the shitty, little motel room didn’t register: strange bed, strange carpet, awful smell, green curtains, that hideous shag. - -A smidgen of light peaked around the edges of the curtains. I threw open the front door. The same parking lot, my lonely car where I had left it, and an early mountain morning. - -The stench of Father rose from every part of me. - -In under a minute, the car spit rocks, and I was headed back through Haplinsburg. Only when I was far out of town did it occur to me to call Jessie. Though he screamed at me for not getting in touch sooner, his voice calmed me, and I let him rant just to hear his voice. - -I said it was a dead end. The family moved away. - -When I got to the city, I ran straight into his arms. He had a lot of questions, which I begged off answering for now. The air felt stifling; in the distance police sirens wailed. I got in the shower. My clothes must have masked the Fatherly smell, or maybe Jessie just assumed it was normal backwoods stench, as he never said a thing. But standing naked, even in the warm water the numerous odors of my Haplinsburg encounter were pungent. I scrubbed until my skin was raw, sure I saw new growths of hair, still slight, but more numerous. - -*Home*. *Family now. One of us.* - -My calves seized with cramps, the pain so stark it took my breath away. I doubled up, sucking humid air deep into my lungs, digging my thumbs into the throbbing muscles and shaking under the hot flow. I thought of hiding in the shower all day. - -In bed that night, I lay far too long awake. Jessie slept peacefully, his light snores fitting oddly with the music from the smart speakers. His scent blossomed upward, and I drew it in, the smell of cologne and his wonderful pheromones. I loved him so much it made me tremble with fear. - -I pressed my head to his chest, and his heartbeat sounded with a strong rhythm. I didn’t want him to wake—what if he saw my bones stretched, my tendons ached toward snapping? Ran his hands over my chest and felt oily sweat and tufts of newly coarse hair? Slipped a finger into my mouth, and pricked himself on now razor teeth? Kissed me, but tasted Father’s foetid breath? - -I only wanted to make it through the night, and hoped the morning light would bring a release somehow. But I could smell him so strongly, could recall Father’s dreams spun into me. And in my chest, a steady pulse as my own heart thumped. As if, behind Jessie’s jazz coming through our speakers, I heard the lively thrum of an Appalachian jig. - -Not for the first time, I felt the urge to devour him. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Unknown Ancestry" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/201340665120267).* \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/__index.md b/content/issue-25/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index fc3c07f6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,41 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25" -date: 2021-03-15 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 25 -subhead: Spring 2021 -headline: - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Vessavana-Mythaxis.jpg -imageMobile: images/Vessavana-mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "Vessavana by Narupiti Harunsong" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # color: '#ffaa12' - font_family: "Starcraft normal" - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-25/contents.md b/content/issue-25/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0c5341e4..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2021-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [The Gods Have No Faces]({{< relref path="The Gods Have No Faces.md" >}}), by Subodhana Wijeyeratne -- [Time Dysperception]({{< relref path="Time Dysperception.md" >}}), by Jack Mackenzie -- [Prometheus' Kidneys]({{< relref path="Prometheus Kidneys.md" >}}), by Meg Candelaria -- [Plague Rooster]({{< relref path="Plague Rooster.md" >}}), by Micah Hyatt -- [The Fashionistas]({{< relref path="The Fashionistas.md" >}}), by Gregory L. Norris -- [Comfort Zone]({{< relref path="Comfort Zone.md" >}}), by KC Grifant -- [Unknown Ancestry]({{< relref path="Unknown Ancestry.md" >}}), by T. M. Morgan -- [The Cat and the Cosmic Horror]({{< relref path="The Cat and the Cosmic Horror.md" >}}), by Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-25/editorial.md b/content/issue-25/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index fc888e86..00000000 --- a/content/issue-25/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2020-03-15 -issue: Issue 25 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Vessavana-sml.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 25** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Many thanks to our talented cover artist, Narupiti Harunsong, for giving us permission to use his dazzlingly intense image. Narupiti is a concept artist, illustrator, and visual development artist from Thailand, whose works and style frequently represent Thai arts, tradition, and cultures. You can find more of his work at [DeviantArt](https://www.deviantart.com/demong3), and he’s also on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044443776014), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/narupiti.dg3/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/G3Demon) at the links." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Since becoming editor of *Mythaxis*, I have had the sometimes privilege of reading a *lot* of short stories. We have a "fluid" reading team, but I personally read everything sent for our consideration. In our three open submission windows, we’ve had 428 stories to consider, more than a year’s worth of daily reading compressed into less than 7 weeks. We’ve now published twenty-eight stories and taken ten more for later in the year. That comes to a grand total of thirty-eight acceptances, which is about 9% of the total. - -But another way to put that is *three hundred and ninety rejections*. - -Turning down stories is an inevitable aspect of the editor’s role, just as being turned down is an inevitability when becoming a writer. As a writer I’ve received rejections, of course, many more than I have acceptances, so I know the mixture of disappointment and determination to try once again which, I hope, is experienced by those I have chosen to say “no” to. - -My experience from the other side of that divide has been painless so far. A minority of authors bounce back from rejection with a new submission before the digital ink is dry; others reappear after months; still more not at all, at least not yet. Some send a polite acknowledgment, which is nice but entirely unnecessary, while most do not; but, to date, not *one* has responded to a submission rejection as if it was a *personal* rejection, which (the internet confirms) is sometimes the case. - -I hugely appreciate the opportunity which submitting authors collectively offer us, regardless of which individual pieces end up in *Mythaxis* or not. However, even though it’s largely my tastes which dictate what fiction appears here, it’s difficult for me to express what exactly makes the difference between an acceptance and a rejection. - -I think it’s at least in part about what I imagine the cumulative effect of several stories will be. During each submissions window, I’m selecting for pieces that will almost certainly appear alongside each other in the same issue. So as the contenders become clear I’m always thinking, *How does this story fit with that one? This would be a good opener if that was the closer. I like this piece, but I need something to balance it, contrast it, complement it...* - -I want to gather stories that present a mix of genres, themes, styles, and perspectives, but I also want each issue to feel synchronised in a way that makes sense (to me if no-one else!). I’m particularly happy to be receiving stories from and about various parts of the world, and bringing them together in one place is an ongoing goal of the zine. The phrase “global village” has mixed implications, but (to conveniently truncate a good definition) “*a global coexistence altered by transnational culture*” sounds like a good thing to me, and my hope is that *Mythaxis* can in a positive manner come to embody that. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/issue-26/Atmoboarders.md b/content/issue-26/Atmoboarders.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1c0113b8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/Atmoboarders.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,451 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Atmoboarders!" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Martin Zeigler -copyright: '© Martin Zeigler 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Charm, personality, the gift of the gab — author Martin Zeigler no doubt has all that and more. And so does his narrator here, but quick thinking and a witty turn of phrase are only the foundation of what makes a winning salesperson. Having a killer product on hand is neither here nor there when it comes to landing your catch: you really need to be able to spin them a yarn…" - -image: images/Atmoboarders.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [jvalley678](https://pixabay.com/photos/child-sun-sunflowers-field-happy-2086910/), [freegr](https://pixabay.com/photos/pasta-pene-pene-rigate-italian-691811/), [usefoto](https://pixabay.com/photos/macaroni-pasta-food-italian-4481150/), [Couleur](https://pixabay.com/photos/noodles-spaghetti-pasta-colorful-1631935/), [ulotkidruk](https://pixabay.com/photos/paper-brown-texture-background-1468883/), [PublicDomainPictures](https://pixabay.com/photos/background-celebration-christmas-164101/), [41330](https://pixabay.com/photos/crumpled-paper-abstract-antique-1551431/), [geralt](https://pixabay.com/photos/crumpled-paper-abstract-antique-3653349/), and [B_A](https://pixabay.com/photos/post-it-postit-sticky-notes-2220252/)." - -type: stock -slug: atmoboarders -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}ccidents? Sure there are accidents, *twanging* being the most common. That’s when you slam into a telephone wire or high tension line. And that’s not the worst that can happen. A while back, a guy was atmoboarding over Alaska, taking in the vistas, when a seven-something-seven engine took *him* in. - -So what’s this mean? Don’t atmoboard? Go out for a nice stroll instead? Safest thing in the world, right? - -Wrong. Atmoboards have that honor. Look at the stats. You’re more likely to get hit by a bus crossing the avenue than sliced by a wire riding the air-venue. - -So why snooze walking when you can live flying? And I do mean *live*. You just need to know how to hug the flat, how to twist the grip, how to grow a back-ear and sharpen your side-eye. That’s why, when you buy an atmoboard from us, we give you the first five lessons gratis—that means *free*. No other atmoboard outfit in the city will do that. That’s how much we at Fleetwood care about atmoboard safety. - -Once you’re trained, you’ll forget about twanging, jet engines, even walking. From then on, your world will be a bright blue sky of unforgettable adventure. Or as we say here at Fleetwood: “*There is no fear, just the atmosphere.*” - -What do I mean, adventure? Ask any of the staff here at the shop—the guys and guyettes in the bright blue shirts—and they’ll tell a true tale. Or you can ask me. I’ve been riding the board for going on six years, about as long as it’s been on the market. I know more stories than anyone. - -What’s that? Do I have any adventures that stand out? Well, you not only asked the right person, you asked the right question. Just step outside under the clear blue and plant your heinie on a bench, while I grab an atmoboard to help move the yarn along. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}an, will you look at that sky. A thing of beauty, is it not? You’re nodding, and that’s good. Because if there’s one thing we atmoboarders have in common, it’s that we all love the hue called blue. - -One week ago today I was standing under a sky just like this, asking myself: where haven’t I been in years and years if not eons? My answer: Why, the Terrence River. - -Name ring a bell? - -That’s what I thought. I could tell just by looking that you know the river, you know the bluffs, you know the lay of the land. - -My bet is you’ve been to the Terrence more than once in your life. You’ve hooked a fish or two off its piers, and scrunched in an inner tube on a sleepy Sunday. All fine things. But I’m telling you straight, because honesty is the modus operandi—that means *way of doing things*—here at Fleetwood, I’m telling you you’ll *never* really know any river till you jet in low just above it, almost kissing its current. Till you trace its meander, the rushing cliffs on either side assuring you of your decent clip. - -Till you round a bend and find yourself heading straight for a bridge. - -*Under* you go, your atmoboard jets echoing beneath the span, and just as quick you’re out in the sun again, only to see an island in midstream splitting the river in two. Which way? Left? Right? You guess, then go, every cell in you alive with the speed and closeness and *whoosh* of it all. - -That’s how you live a river, and that’s how I lived the Terrence that day I met the Red Stripe Brigade. But before I go on, you’ll need a little atmoboard know-how. So it’s a big T for time-out as I give you the dog and pony. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}o here it is: *la board a la atmo*. A touch taller than me when I stand right beside it. But I’ll lay it down for now, because, once you’ve taken off, that’s how you ride it. Horizontal, like a paddleboard or a bodyboard. - -Paddleboard, bodyboard, surfboard. There are all kinds of boards. But only one atmoboard. - -Only one what? - -You got it: Only one *atmoboard*. - -And here at the top, beneath the wrap-around windshield, you have your two grips. Right and left. For turning and for climbing and for heading back down to solid ground. You twist for acceleration. Hold steady to coast. - -Next is the view window, flush with the board, so you can see what’s below as you’re flying. Or above, if you’re flipped over. That happens. If it does, watch out. If it never does, we’ll teach you how to do it. - -Here beneath the window, the chinrest, and farther down, you’ve got your body straps. Take it from me, even the hot dogs belt up. - -And down here at the base are the heat-resistant shields for your feet so they don’t get flambéed by the jets, meaning shish-kabobbed, meaning charred like twin brats on a spit. - -Now let’s flip the board over and gander its belly. What do we got? Fuel tank, pipes, engine, pipes, jets, pipes, more pipes, and rudders. How’s it all work? If I knew that, I’d be teaching aeronautics over at the U and frankly making a lot less than I do now, selling atmoboards. Hate to put it that way, but it’s true. - -The things you’ll need to know are these two buttons, which I’ll get to in a jiff, and this combo lock. The combo lock’s for when you’re worried some skywayman will hijack your board to the cumulous without so much as a may I. Know what, though? Most riders just leave the combo at 0-0-0. That’s the factory spec. You can set it to whatever. 6-6-6 if you want to be a little Beelzebub about it—that means *Devil*. But most atmoboarders have enough passwords and passcodes and passed gas in our lives. Who needs a 4-7-2 or a 5-3-8 when you can just stick with your home-grown triple-ought. Besides, if you set a new combo and forget it later on, you might as well forget it later on. Fleetwood’s got the best customer service in this universe and the next one over, but they still can’t read minds. And if you can’t get the right three digits in three tries, your shiny atmoboard won’t fly, won’t float, won’t skate, and will barely make an ironing board to smooth out your wrinkled skivvies. - -So here’s a quiz. Sharpen your thinking cap and put on your pencil. Let’s say I set my combo to 1-2-3, save it, then jumble the numbers so no one else can guess it. Now I want to rev up my atmoboard and take to the skies. What do I dial? - -1-2-3? - -Is that your final answer? - -Looks like I need to make my questions tougher. - -Now to lift off, I first stand the board upright like I did before. I hug it like it’s dear old mom or pop, because that’s what she or he will be. And remember the two buttons I mentioned a while back? Now watch as I reach around in back and press the top one. See? The straps whip around and wrap me up. Press again, they release me. - -As for this other button, the lower one, I’ll leave it alone for now. This is the guy that starts it all, that fires up the jets, that launches you into the air as if the sidewalk were Canaveral. Except there’s no ten, nine, eight. No seven, six. No five. It’s zero and all systems go. It’s blast off. It’s watch your hometown become a dot. - -It’s catch you later, Earth, and a pleasure to meet you again, wild blue. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}o in our last thrilling episode, I was atmoboarding toward an island on the Terrence, trying to decide left or right, right or left. It’s a decent-sized isle, a quarter-mile wide, half-mile long. Can you guess what island I was at? - -You got it. The Heron. You know the lay, all right. - -And I only had a second, so I flipped a mental penny and veered left, which put the Heron on my right. I swished by a stand of poplars on the isle like they were tall green pickets on a fence. *Shoo. Shoo. Shoo**Shoo**Shoo*. And in the gaps between, I caught sight of something scattered in the open field behind them. What did I see? Can you guess? I’ll give you a hint. I’m holding one, you’re shopping for one, and it starts with an *at* and ends with an *oard*. - -Yes! *Nice!* - -What I glommed were a dozen unoccupied *atmoboards* lying in the grass like they were sunning down at Goldbod Beach. And I said to myself: *This is supreme. Fellow atmoboarders. Fellow boarders. Fellow members of the board of atmospheriography.* - -This called for an immediate visit. So I applied the brakes, like this. See how I twist the grips gently, not too hard? Too hard, you’ll flip over and head in reverse and upside down. Nothing like flying with a field of sky and a sky of grass. So remember: nice and slow, nice and slow. Nice and what? - -Slow, that’s right, and you’re quick. You see, your atmoboard knows you want to land on your feet, so don’t push it. Suggest it. Let the jets do what they’re paid to do, ease you down safely to Mama Terra Firma—that means *Mother Earth*. That’s how I touched down between two of those long tall poplars. - -Once my feet were planted, I released my straps and stepped away. And as the engine clicked and cooled, I took a look around. I saw for the first time that all those other atmoboards looked exactly alike—all black, with a red stripe running down one side like a lone suspender. - -And I spotted something else. Something I hadn’t noticed from above, because it was as verdant—that means *green*—as the meadow it was standing in. And it explained why there wasn’t a soul in sight. - -What I saw was a huge, enclosed tent, as big as the kind they hold revivals in. In fact, that’s what I thought at first, that I’d landed at an old camp meeting of the atmoboard faithful. Because as I looked at that tent, I could also hear it. I’d hear one voice inside shout something, then I’d hear a chorus echo it back. The one voice, then the chorus. One voice, chorus. And so on, ad infinitum—which means *over and over*. - -I couldn’t tell what words were being bellowed from that tent, but here’s what I imagined: I imagined atmoboarders, professing their faith. Atmoboarders, bearing witness to being reborn in that bright blue ocean of air that hugs us all. And I was tempted to march right up to that revival tent, whip up the flap, step inside, and proudly join that choir in whatever they were singing their praises to. - -But just then that flap came up on its own. And the first thing I spotted poking out of the opening was a gat—and that means *gun*. - -Right off, I grabbed my atmoboard and ducked behind a poplar. Why? - -That’s right: because I’d spotted a gat, meaning gun. - -Then I see the hood. The hood over the face of the guard with the gat. The black hood with the red stripe along its side. Sound familiar? If that’s a nod, you’re a hammer, you hit the nail. The guy was decked out *just* like those dozen atmoboards basking in the sun. - -And that’s not all. - -Now that the flap was up, the words pouring out of the mouth of that tent became loud and clear. Well, they were always loud, but now they were clear. And clearly, the words were *“**Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!**”* - -I see the look on your face. I can tell you’re wondering. You’re wondering the same thing I was wondering from behind that poplar. You’re wondering: *Where, oh, where in all of this was the Atmoboard Spirit? The spirit of the ancient god At-Mo-Bo? The Espiritus Atmoboardus? The Lespree de Atmeebare?* - -After all, since when does a tent full of atmoboarders need a guard, need a gat, need all that gabble about destroying? What’s more, since when does a tent full of atmoboarders need a *tent?* Look up above. What do you see? A canvas sky? - -Case closed. - -Now my ire was up. How dare these dozen denizens sully the good name: *atmoboard*. So I propped my own against the trunk and scurried off to the far side of the tent, where I couldn’t see the guard and ergo—that means *therefore*—he couldn’t see me. - -And since he couldn’t see me, I took my sweet time, I took my sugar-sweet time. - -Doing what, you ask? - -For now, let’s just say I took my sugar-sweet time enjoying the golden light of old Sol—that means *the* *sun*. - -And afterward I went up to the tent, slapped my ear to the canvas, and listened in. And what I heard, in a deep, booming voice, were these words: - -“You, all of you, will think of only one thing. Flying full speed ahead. Not slowing, not turning, not climbing or descending, and certainly not landing. But flying full speed ahead. And you will fly full speed ahead for one purpose only. To destroy, destroy, destroy! *Everyone:* Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!” - -I hadn’t heard those words in a sugar-sweet time, but as luck would have it, I got to hear them again and from too many voices at once: *“**Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!**”* - -So here’s another quiz question. What did I hear? - -That’s close. Real close. Your words are spot on, but I listen to you and I think you want to maybe kick a tire, maybe tag a wall, maybe knock over little Bobby’s bike. What I don’t hear is *lay to waste*. I don’t hear *wipe completely out*. I don’t hear *knock back to the Pleistocene*—which means *Stone Age*. - -Now let’s hear you belt out those *destroys* like you mean them. - -There you go! Now that’s a performance worth its weight. Not just in gold, but in gold times three. - -As for what they had in mind to destroy, destroy, destroy, I needed to see what was happening. We’re in the eye age, not the ear era. So I took this Swiss job I carry with me and stabbed the tent, poking a hole just big enough to peek through. - -And here was the scene: a bunch of guys in black hoods standing together. One guy in a black hood standing apart. And one guy in a black hood not standing, but strapped face down to a plywood plank. And each and every one of those hoods was lined with a bright red—well, you tell me. - -Righto once again. *Stripe*. I sense you’re starting to get a feel for why I named this bunch the Red Stripe Brigade. - -All that black and red was getting to me. So I backed off from the tent for a little blue and green. And when I put my lone little eyeball back up to the hole, here’s what I saw. - -What I saw was another lone little eyeball staring right back. - -And what I heard up close was this: “Oh, Master! We’re being spied upon!” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}as I scared? - -Put it this way: I tore off through that meadow as if tomorrow had been repealed. - -But my senses were sharp. My senses were keen. I couldn’t see through that canvas but I could sure hear the thundering feet on the other side keeping pace with me. And when I cleared the corner of the tent and turned to look, I saw them, the hooded hellmen, racing out of the opening like angry ants. - -From one, then from all the rest, came a cry of, “After him! After him! After him!” It sounded better than that many *destroys*, but the meaning was the same: my hour was up and my days were numbered. - -I raced past those dozen basking atmoboards in that golden sunlit field and glimpsed the guard pulling his gun. Glimpsed the guard aiming his gun. Glimpsed the guard firing his gun just as I threw myself down in the grass. Know the expression *missed by a mile*? Those bullets missed, but not by a mile. - -The grass was tall enough so I could wriggle unseen toward the poplars. Once behind the nearest tree, I got to my feet and peeked around it. So much for unseen. And, much to my demise, my atmoboard, my dear atmoboard, my fleet and faithful atmoboard was leaning against the trunk three trees away. - -What to do? Take a siesta? Break out the picnic plastic? No, sir or madam, I made a dash for it, hearing more after-hims, hearing more gat reports, hearing bark ripped off each tree as I raced past. And just as I neared my board, one of the hoodmen intercepted me. On the run, I shoved him with one hand, grabbed my atmoboard with the other, and took off to the skies and to freedom. - -Freedom, my friend. You know freedom, right? Of course, you do. It’s feeling the gut tug and the blood rush. It’s putting distance. It’s flying higher than the highest poplar. It’s breathing easy. It’s knowing your ship, the U.S.S. Atmoboard, is headed back to Terra Mainland, away from Heron Island and all its hooded who-bodies. - -Then I heard the crack. Felt the splinter scrape my cheek. Like that, half my board was gone, disappeared, vanishissimo—and the left grip was dangling free in my hand. I was half a hawk and spinning. I saw a river of clouds and a sky of river. I was all over the place and going up fast, meaning down. Down to the ground, that kind of down. And years of riding the board told me my number was up. - -My number was what? - -That’s correct. *Up*. - -And now I felt the waiting. The endless waiting. For the crash, for the final credits, for the show’s all over, folks, please exit to your right. - -But the house lights didn’t come up. Instead came the teeth, the barbs, the needles. The scrapes and scratches. The being ripped and rent like a bill through a shredder. - -And then it all came to a stop. - -I took a look at myself. I was torn up and bloody, but I *knew* I was torn and bloody, and that made me alive. And I thanked whoever made blackberries that I’d landed in those brambles, which acted like a net. - -I was still wrapped to what was left of my atmoboard, so I unlatched myself and set it free and bid it a “rest in peace”, a “dearly beloved board, we are gathered here”, an “Atmo, we hardly knew ye”. - -But now, from the way I was being snatched from the brambles and dragged across the meadow toward the tent, it was closing credits after all, it was animals *were* harmed during the making of this picture, it was *atmoboard, I’ll meet you in the next life over*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}an I get you anything? A water, soda, something from the Fleetwood fountain? - -You sure? - -Good, then it’s onward and tentward. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}ow I’m tied to a post that’s holding up the tent. The banded brethren who blasted away my atmoboard and hauled me through the grass are circling me and waving their fists and ranting through their hoods. Then someone from the back of the tent steps forward, elbows the others aside, and gets in my face. Like everyone else, he’s hooded and has that red stripe. But when he speaks, I think: that’s *him*. The Bossman with the booming voice. The Master. - -And from out of his hood come the words, “You have a choice. To die right now, or after we demonstrate what we intend to do.” - -His followers think this is funny, but the Bossman not so much. “Silence!” he screams. “I am not an act!” - -It’s a spat, short and sweet, but it gives me time to decide. I cough to get their attention. “I’ve thought it over,” I announce. - -I see the Master’s eyes through the slits in his hood. “And?” he says. - -“I’d rather die later,” I say. - -“Then watch and learn.” The Master waves his hand, and the hooded ones disperse—that means *step aside*—and what I now see before me is that same hapless captive strapped to the plywood plank. - -“Presenting our modified atmoboard,” the Master says. - -I think to myself, *if this thing’s an atmoboard then I’m the Duke of Alliman Kazoo*. Sure, the plywood’s the size and shape of an atmoboard, but where are the grips? The shields for the face and footsies? - -But jets, it does have jets. Not Fleetwood jets, mind you. Not even jets built by our competitors. More like cheap steel tubing for a one-time shot. - -“And look what’s in store,” the Master declares. - -At the far end of the tent I see something I missed the first time. A huge picture window in a thick brick frame. And just behind the window, a wide cinderblock wall, the kind of wall you’d crash into in a gym, chasing that out-of-bounds b-ball. - -“Picture, if you will,” the Bossman says, pointing to the frame, “a picture window. The window of a library. The window of a school. The window of a hospital. The window of a—” - -His booming voice booms on, and I don’t like what I hear. I point to the pane and say, “It’s target practice, isn’t it?” - -“For something bigger, yes,” the Bossman says. - -“But that’s just wrong.” - -“No, it’s *right*. Because practice makes perfect.” - -He steps up to the table the plank is lying on. He flips a switch beneath the table. The jet on the ersatz atmoboard—meaning, *here sits something that’s nothing like an atmoboard*—begins to glow, all hot and crimson and eager. - -It’s “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!” from the Master. - -It’s *ditto, ditto, ditto* from all the rest, including the face-down unfortunato about to take a ride. - -And with the throw of a second switch, the captive and the plywood plank are off, hitting zero to eighty in an eye blink. - -Now listen carefully. An atmoboard sans grips—*without* grips—means you can’t turn left, you can’t turn right. It means if whatever’s up ahead won’t step aside, it’s a turn for the worse. Add in jets you can’t shut down, and it means getting there quicker, which is bad because you don’t want to get there at all. - -But he does get there. And I know I shouldn’t ask, but I can’t help it. You’d ask too if you saw the shattered window and the sudden modern art on the cinderblock. - -I ask: “You call that practice?” - -The Master says, “Did you see real atmoboards? Real buildings? Real explosions?” - -“No, but—” - -“Then, yes, I call that—*prac-tice*,” he says, stretching out the word like taffy. - -Ever been treated like that? Like a moron? Like a dunce? Like a wattless bulb? Like someone who wouldn’t know two plus two, even if handed four? - -Of course you have. Not recently, I know. But at some point in your life. Happens to all of us. And it gets our goat if not our hackles up. - -And so I dish it, just as taffy-like, right back to the Bossman. “When a real human hits a real wall, that doesn’t look like *prac-tice* to me. That looks like *mur-der*.” - -He glares at me, slit to eye. “What about *two* humans then?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}ithin seconds I’m strapped to a second plywood plank, and the warm-up switch is thrown. - -The jets thrum louder, get hotter. I feel my belly burn. I can’t move my arms, move my legs, can’t even budge my toes. But I can think, see, and breathe. And what I’m thinking is, *I see I’m about done with breathing*. - -About all I can hope for is a little extra time. Maybe see that ticking hand just a few minutes longer. So I give it the old college try, the old high school try, the old one-room school with just an outhouse try. And I say, “If you need to set up a new window pane, you go right ahead. Make sure it’s seated in the frame. You don’t want it to come loose before I hit it.” - -“No window needed,” the Bossman says. “The wall will do.” - -“I’ve been meaning to tell you about that,” I say. “It looks like it needs painting. And the paint allowed to dry.” - -“No need. You will supply the color.” - -That’s not funny, but it’s funnier than when his finger inches toward the second switch. And that’s when I say, or rather scream, or rather cry at the top of my wanttolive lungs: “Hold on! Stop! Wait!” - -The Master stalls over the launch switch and heaves a yawn that sucks in half his hood. “What is it now?” - -“Since you shot up my atmoboard, may I have one to replace it? I know of one you don’t need any longer.” - -It’s suddenly comedy hour at the Red Stripe Club. Even the Master laughs at this one. Hoods and stripes rise and fall with guffaws. The Master finally calms down enough to say, “And where do you plan to ride this atmoboard? Up in Heaven?” - -“Outside of Heaven, but just as high,” I say after the mirth dies down. “And I’ll leave you down here in the dirt.” - -The hilarity starts up again, but now I’ve got the Master riled. He tamps his hand to stifle the rabble. “Leave who in the dirt? Me?” - -“All of you.” - -Things hush a whole lot now. The Bossman leans over me as I’m still cocooned to the plywood plank. “You expect us not only to unstrap you and let you go, but allow you to leave these premises on an atmoboard that we will simply hand over to you?” - -More guffaws, more holding of sides. - -“See, that’s cowardly thinking,” I say. “Someone who’s not a coward would look at it different. They would say to me, ‘Well, you go right ahead and take that atmoboard, for all the good that will do. We’ll just catch up to you and drag you back anyway’.” - -“Why waste our time catching and dragging when we can do what we wish to you right now without all that?” - -“You see,” I say, “that’s how a coward would word it. A chicken would word it. A cowering chicken would word it. A cowering chicken wetting his feathers and going *bwaakbwaakbwaak* would word it. A cowering—” - -*Slap!* He whacks me one upside the head. It stings, but not as bad as a cinderblock wall would, and so I go on. “You see? There again, that’s what a coward would do, a squeaking mouse in the house would do, a squeaking, meeking sheep in wolf’s clothing—” - -“Enough! Enough of your lists!” cries the Master. “Everyone: we are not cowards!” - -And of course from the choir comes: *“**We are not cowards!**”* - -“All right,” the Bossman booms. “We will give you your atmoboard. We will even give you a minute head start on your atmoboard. An entire minute. Sixty seconds. We will then pursue you as you flee from us in desperate panic on your atmoboard. And then we, the aces of the air, the most accomplished and skilled atmoboarders ever to rule the skies, will *catch* you. Will *surround* you. And, with the razor-sharp tips of our boards, will slice both you and your atmoboard in two and send all four halves tail-spinning to a fiery doom! - -“You will not die quietly. You will not die quickly. Or painlessly. We will do everything within our power to make you wish you had simply flown into our wall. For we do not intend on capturing you and bringing you back.” - -A giant cheer whirls around the tent and echoes off the cinderblock. - -And now as a hooded hooligan starts unraveling me, I feel my legs move again, my toes wiggle again, the blood flow through my arms and fingers again. So I point my index toward the tent top and proclaim, “That was quite a list yourself, Bossman. But so be it! Far better to die as a hero on an atmoboard than as a mummy on a sad slat of lumber!” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}ime flies when you’re doomed to die. - -Now that we’re all standing outside the tent, I see the afternoon’s shot, that the day’s about done. The air’s crisp as a chip, and the sky’s a deep blue that’s about to go indigo. - -The banded believers have claimed their atmoboards from the scatter in the grass. They’ve handed me the extra. And now I’m almost like them. Almost, but not quite. My board’s black and banded exactly like theirs. But my head isn’t hooded. My head isn’t striped. My face is out in the open for all to see. - -But I don’t strap in just yet. I give my board a half-spin, like this. See? Now I’m facing the belly of the beast. The pipes and jets and rudders. - -I hear smatters of tittering as the hoodmen elbow each other and point. Even the Bossman is amused, for I can hear his booming ha. - -“Are you sure,” he says, “you wouldn’t rather get hurled against the wall? If you fire up like that, with the pipes in your face, your board will do our work for us.” - -I peek around the atmoboard as if it were a shower curtain. “Just looking for the Fleetwood stamp,” I say. “And I’m happy to report that it’s nowhere to be found.” - -I give my board another one-eighty and hug the varnished side, the side you ride. I reach around, push the top button, and strap myself in. And the Master says, “If you’re quite through, you have—*one*.” - -“I understand,” I answer back. “One minute head start.” - -“No, you don’t understand. We’ll give you one second and not one second more.” - -I’m about to call that cheating. I’m about to say he promised. I’m about to shout no take-backs, when he tells me, “Second’s over.” - -Doesn’t leave much time, zero seconds, so I push the lower button. I hear the jets. I feel the surge. I see the brilliant flames beneath me. And all around me everything lights up-dusk and dark, tent and meadow, field and foe. - -And then it’s liftoff, blessed liftoff, as the meadow drops away. - -Freedom, my friend. I mentioned it earlier. But earlier I lost it instantly in a hail of gat-guy bullets. And now, as I shoot like a bullet myself into the Deep Majestic Up, I know I’ve been given a second chance, a reprieve, a don’t-you-blow-it op. - -But I don’t escape. I don’t vamoose. I don’t hightail it the Hades out of there. - -No, I hang around and hover. - -Hang around and what? - -*Hover*. That’s absolutely right. I sail down to within earshot, because it’s now too dark to see, and adopt a holding pattern. - -And for good reason. - -I don’t want to miss what’s about to happen for all the t’s in Tatistakastan. - -And sure enough I hear it. The Bossman’s booming bass. “No! No! No! My atmoboard won’t work!” - -And as an added extra, his followers’ reply: “No! No! No! My atmoboard won’t work!” - -It gets even better when the Bossman screams, “No! No! No! This is not a rallying cry, you fools! My atmoboard will not fire!” - -“No! No! No! Neither will ours, Oh Master!” - -So much for the dogfight. So much for the battle for the skies. So much for the cutting me in half, the halving me, the having me for dinner and spitting me out. The Red Stripe Brigade is down and out. They’re flameless and they’re frozen and they’re glued to Terra Gotcha. - -Then someone spots my jets a-glowing. “Master! He sails above us!” - -“You!” The Bossman bellows. “What have you done to our atmoboards?” - -I descend just a little more so I can be heard. “Simple. I took my sugar-sweet time.” - -“You *what* your *what*-sweet *what*?” - -“Took, sugar, time,” I reply. - -To which he responds, “What?” - -So I tell him. That I took my sugar-sweet time after I first saw the tent flap open, after I first spotted the guard with the gat, after I first heard those shouts of *destroy*, *destroy*, *destroy!* - -And after I first figured something was amiss—meaning *not quite right*. - -That’s when I dashed to the far side of the tent where the atmoboards were sunning. Flittered from board to red-striped board. Saw to my delight that each combo was triple-ought, the factory spec. Figured no one had changed their combo, and so I changed it for them. Set each combo to the same three-digit number and saved it. Then scrambled every one so no one would ever guess it. - -I did all this, and took my sugar-sweet time about it. - -And how sweet it is that, just before lifting off that fine evening, I did more than just spin my board halfway and cheer that Fleetwood had played no part. No, I also entered that secret combo, so I alone could work the board and blast off free and easy. - -I lay this all out for the Master and his minions. I’m hovering and they’re grounded, for the simple reason that I know the secret combo and they don’t have a clue. - -But they still have the gat guy, and the gat still has bullets. - -So it’s high time to move on. - -I bid everyone a fond ow feedersane, a fond adoo, a fond kiss my tush and toodle-oo. Then with one squeeze of the grips, I swoop off the Heron, shoot out over the Terrence, flash a final wave, and head on home. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nd now let’s head on up to the showroom. - -The showroom? You’re asking, why the showroom? - -Because atmoboards are awaiting. Not to mention nifty deals on account of all your on the money answers. Nifty deals like our Fleetwood water bottles, and our protective WeatherFleet waxes, and our DuroFleet fuel packs that let you fly longer than the standard thirty seconds. - -What’s that? You’re saying you’re not in the least bit interested? - -*What’s* that? You’re saying you just stuck around to hear the end of the story, and now you’re leaving? - -Well, I’ll have you know I earn my keep through atmos sold, not through stories told. - -You’re saying nice rhyme, but adios? - -But what if I told you there’s *more* to the story? What if I told you that after I headed on home that night, I flew right back? - -Yes, back to Heron Island. Not solo this time, but with my own brigade, my Brigade de la Fleetwood, my crew and crewatrixes in their bright blue Fleetwood tees. And no longer on that shabby black board with the flimsy red stripe, but on a bright and brand new atmoboard, on a sleek and shiny atmo, on a swift and certain A. - -And there they were, the hooded has-beens, still sobbing over their boards, trying to guess the combo. It was pathetic, meaning *too bad for them*, as we swooped right in and knocked them cold. - -The Master, the gat guy, and all the rest—who cares who was who?—were down for the count. - -And now we propped them up. Strapped them to their now vertical rides. And entered the secret combo, 3-2-1. - -Then, as one, we shouted, “Zero!” and pressed the launch button on each and every one of their red-striped boards and stepped back. - -Way back. - -And, oh, how those atmoboards rose. Higher, ever higher, in unison—meaning *altogether*—like eleven bright orange missiles. And soon the jet flames grew distant, resembling worms, tiny glowing worms rising deep into the night, toward the edge of our atmosphere, toward the cold silence of outer space and all the wonders it had to offer. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}s for the wonders Fleetwood has to offer, you ready now to sign on the dotted line? - -What’s that? You wouldn’t ride an atmoboard if it were the last thing on earth? - -How about if I throw in a pen and a poster? - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Atmobaorders!" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278302720757394).* - diff --git a/content/issue-26/Freewheeling.md b/content/issue-26/Freewheeling.md deleted file mode 100644 index cde4a30d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/Freewheeling.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,170 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Freewheeling" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Annie Percik -copyright: '© Annie Percik 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Another 'first of two' story here, in this case the first of two brief short stories with at least a hint of the apocalyptic to them along with something of an optimistic tone, unusual for that particular genre. In this case, Annie Percik delivers a plucky heroine determined to stay up-beat in the face all of those little adversities that come with keeping an old folks' home running after the entire world has gone completely to pot." - -image: images/Freewheeling.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created from images by [ikostudio](https://depositphotos.com/5067029/stock-photo-riding-a-bicycle.html) and [arquiplay77](https://depositphotos.com/8213397/stock-photo-grunge-basement-office.html)." - -type: stock -slug: freewheeling -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}ngela pedalled. The bike went nowhere. - -Sweat beaded on Angela’s forehead. She could feel the droplets gathering, combining to make bigger droplets that trickled down her neck, tickling her skin. - -Of course, still the bike went nowhere. But, up the stairs, along the corridor, in the lounge where the old folks waited, hopefully a lightbulb glowed. - -The door at the top of the stairs opened with its familiar creak, and Mrs Tolliver’s quavering voice drifted down. “It’s flickering a bit, dear. Vera’s getting a headache. Could you put a bit more oomph into it?” - -“Rightio, Mrs T!” Angela panted. “Will do!” - -She rose up from the bike seat, leaned forwards over the handlebars, and pedalled faster. - -She imagined an open road ahead of her, instead of the cracked and peeling paint of the basement wall. The flame of the candle in its glass housing on the floor sent shadows flickering in her peripheral vision and Angela pictured trees whizzing by. She tried to feel the air of her passage flowing over her flushed and puffy cheeks, cooling her as she sped on. - -But the bike went nowhere. - -Just a few more minutes. That was all she could give them. But an hour or so of proper electric light after dark made all the difference to the old folks as the nights started to draw in. Their eyes weren’t strong enough any more to be able to read or play checkers by candlelight, and it was just too depressing to give up on the day as soon as the sunlight faded. So Angela pedalled. Every night, for as long as she could manage. - -She thought about the pure delight on everyone’s faces the first time the bicycle-powered dynamo lit the bulb in the lounge. She had been among those watching then, and she had jumped up and down and clapped with joy when the filament flickered into life. - -Steve had been pedalling that day. He had taken the mountain bike Angela hadn’t had time to ride in years, whipped off the back wheel, cannibalised an old wheelchair to suspend the frame off the basement floor, and connected the gear chain up to the generator, and was proud to demonstrate how it worked. After that, he and Angela had set up a rota with any of the others who could pedal fast enough to get the light bulb going. - -She’d only had to cycle twice a week back then, and only for half an hour each time. But then Steve had taken most of the others and gone in search of other settlements. He’d said they would only be gone a few days, leaving Angela and Derek to look after the old folks. They were going out in a spiral pattern, and would cut straight back to the homestead as soon as they found anyone else. Derek had chopped a tree down on himself three days later. - -That had been nearly four months ago now, and the others never came back. - -All the air in Angela’s lungs rushed out in a whoosh and she stopped pedalling, the muscles in her calves and thighs on fire. She heard muffled groans from above as the dynamo stuttered to a halt and the old folks were plunged into darkness. She told them every day to have the matches handy for lighting the candles when the bulb went out, but they never listened. Heaving herself off the bike, she picked up her candle lantern and trudged up the stairs. - -As soon as she entered the lounge, the complaints started up. - -“I only needed two more turns to win this game!” Ms Clarke, so competitive. - -“I was about to get to the end of my chapter.” Mr Boyate, of course, always reading. - -“Can’t we have just a few more minutes?” Mrs Harcourt, completely blind, but liked to feel the warmth of the bulb. - -“That didn’t feel like a full hour to me. I think you’re short-changing us again!” And that, inevitably, was Mr Edward “Eddie” Tremain, determined to squeeze every penny from his son’s investment that he could, even now. - -Angela went round the room, lighting each candle and smiling down at each face. “I’m afraid that’s all for tonight. You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.” - -But how many more tomorrows could she go on cycling to give them that little bit of light? And how many more tomorrows could she keep doing all the *other* chores required to maintain the homestead? Already, the list of maintenance tasks was growing faster than she could tick them off. The vegetable plot needed some urgent attention, the gutters were clogged, the stairs were getting dangerously rickety… - -Angela packed all the old folks off to bed, then retreated to her own room. She was physically exhausted, but still lay staring into the darkness for a long time before she finally fell asleep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he sun was already high in the sky when a knock at her door dragged Angela out of slumber. She pushed the covers off wearily and staggered to see who it was. Mrs Tolliver, as usual, the assigned spokesperson of the old folks. - -“Is everything alright, dear?” The elderly woman’s rheumy eyes peered up at her in concern. “It’s just that Eddie’s asking about breakfast, and I don’t mind telling you that Cynthia really needs a bath.” - -Angela pasted her habitual smile on her face, though she could feel it drooping at the edges, a bit like the wallpaper in Mr Armitage’s room. “Terribly sorry, Mrs T. I’ll be right with you!” - -But, as it turned out, breakfast and bathtime would have to wait. As Angela was pulling a comb through her recalcitrant curls, she heard a noise that reverberated right through to the depths of her core, where memories of The Time Before lurked in shadow. - -It was an engine. - -She dropped her comb and ran from the bedroom, down the stairs and out onto the porch. Putting one hand up to shade her eyes, she peered out into the wilderness. Dust was rising at the furthest reaches of her vision, down the road that led out into the unknown. - -As Angela watched, a vehicle came into view. It had outsized wheels and a bubble-shaped shell, with dark blue panels affixed all over it that reflected the beams of the sun. She stood right there until it trundled to a halt a few feet from the bottom of the porch steps and, as Angela stood frozen and open-mouthed, a figure climbed out. - -It was a woman, younger than Angela by a few years, and shorter by several inches. She pushed her driving goggles up onto her forehead and waved at Angela with a wide grin. - -“Hello! Someone told me there was a house out this way, but I wasn’t sure there’d be anyone still here. I figured there’d be no harm in coming to take a look, just in case.” The young woman bounded up the steps and stuck out her hand. “I’m Tilly.” - -Angela gaped like a fish for a few seconds more, before part of her brain kicked into gear and she reached out to grasp Tilly’s hand. “Angela.” - -“Hi, Angela. Pleased to meet you.” - -“What are you—? Where did you—? Who are you?” - -Tilly’s grin grew even wider. “That’s a common reaction. No worries. Any chance of some water? And I’ll tell you all about who I am and why I’m here.” - -The prompt for refreshments broke Angela out of her confused haze. “Of course! Come on in.” - -She led the newcomer into the house, past where the old folks were clustering in the lounge doorway and on into the kitchen. She gestured for Tilly to sit down at the table, then filled two glasses with water from the jug on the counter and joined her guest. Tilly downed her water in a few huge gulps and Angela silently pushed her own glass across the table to her. - -Tilly nodded her thanks and took a few more sips. “Phew! That’s better. It’s thirsty work driving all day.” - -“But where did you come from?” Angela asked. “And where did you get a working… car?” - -“I’m from back east,” Tilly said. “And we’ve got quite a few things working again out there. So much so that we thought it was time to start trying to connect everyone back together again. There’s a whole team of us, travelling about, finding the survivors and helping them get back on their feet. I’m just the advance party.” - -Angela felt a surge of emotion crawl up her throat and try to choke her. Tears threatened and she struggled to hold them back. - -Tilly reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I’m guessing you could use some help?” Angela just nodded, swallowing hard. “Okay, then! Do you have a generator?” - -“Yes,” Angela managed. “It’s in the basement. But we ran out of gas ages ago.” - -“Show me.” - -So Angela lit her candle lantern and took Tilly down to the basement, where the generator squatted in the corner. Angela always felt like it was mocking her while she cycled every night, nearly killing herself to produce a fraction of the power the generator could with only a flick of a switch. If only they had something to make it run. - -Tilly whistled when she saw the bike on its stand, hooked up to the dynamo. “Nice set up! Bet it takes a lot of work to get anywhere, though.” - -Angela huffed out an approximation of a laugh. “You have no idea.” And the bike, of course, actually went nowhere. - -“Okay, then!” Tilly clapped her hands together. “I can definitely work with this. Can you help?” - -Angela nodded vigorously. She had no idea what she was volunteering for, but she already knew she would do whatever this woman told her to do. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ver the next few hours, Angela worked with Tilly, following her instructions to the letter. They unloaded stacks of the dark blue panels from the back of the car, and clambered up onto the roof of the homestead to fix them into a grid. They fed wires down through the building and finally connected them to the small but startlingly heavy power unit it had taken both of them to carry from the trunk of Tilly’s rover. - -Tilly used the old generator for something to stand on so she could reach the ceiling. - -All the while, the old folks milled about, shuffling their feet, staring and muttering amongst themselves. When Tilly declared the work finished, it was well after the old folks’ usual lunchtime and they were starting to grumble, Eddie in particular. - -“We’ll have to wait a few hours for the cells to charge,” Tilly said. - -Angela fixed everyone a meal, and they all gathered around the table in the dining room to listen to Tilly’s stories of the reconstruction of civilisation. The tales sounded outlandish and incredible to Angela’s ears, but they also spoke to that place deep in her heart that had been awoken by the sound of Tilly’s car. Could a return to how she dimly remembered things in The Time Before really be possible? - -As the shadows started to lengthen, Angela felt her chest constrict at the thought of having to cycle after the morning’s labour. But Tilly bounced up out of her chair, pulled Angela to her feet and headed for the basement. “Time to test it out!” she called over her shoulder. - -Angela held her breath as she lifted the candle lantern over their heads so Tilly could see what she was doing. With an impish grin, Tilly flipped the new generator’s switch, and it hummed to life. And then the bare bulb that had dangled uselessly from the ceiling for so long burst into glorious, glowing life. Angela squinted against the glare and met Tilly’s wide, shining eyes. - -“It works,” was all Angela could find to say. - -“It sure does!” Tilly replied. - -They made their way back up the stairs and emerged into the kitchen, where another light bulb was now blazing brightly. Angela heard an unfamiliar whirr and realised it was the old refrigerator. - -Mrs Tolliver’s voice sounded from the doorway. “Witchcraft…” - -Tilly laughed. “Just the magic of solar energy.” - -Angela ran through the whole house, switching on anything and everything that was connected to the generator. The building was soon ablaze with electric light, fans spun from every ceiling, music blared from the stereo in the lounge. Eddie twirled Cynthia round in an enthusiastic waltz, apparently not minding that she hadn’t yet had her bath. He was actually smiling. - -“The charge won’t last forever,” Tilly warned. “But you’ll get a few hours out of it, and it’ll fill back up again once the sun comes up tomorrow.” - -“We can have power every day?” Angela’s breath caught in her throat. “No more cycling?” - -“No more cycling,” Tilly confirmed. “Once I get back on the road, I’ll send a message through to the central team and get some more people out here with additional supplies for you.” - -“No more cycling,” Angela repeated in a breathless whisper. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he following morning, Tilly set off in her solar-powered car, satisfied with another good job well done. It was so rewarding setting people up with power after they’d been cut off for so long. And she could tell Angela had been about at the end of her rope. She was glad to have helped make Angela’s life a little better while she waited to rejoin society again. - -Next stop, that prison they’d heard about where the abandoned inmates had apparently torn down the fences and turned the site into a working farm. - -As Tilly reached the bottom of a hill a mile or so away from the homestead, she caught a movement in her rearview mirror. She pulled the car to a stop and craned out the window to look behind her. - -Up on the slope, a figure on a bicycle freewheeled down the road, wind streaming through her hair, arms stretched up to the sky. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Freewheeling" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278309500756716).* diff --git a/content/issue-26/Noise.md b/content/issue-26/Noise.md deleted file mode 100644 index c5a7b2c8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/Noise.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,441 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Noise" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Owen Leddy -copyright: '© Owen Leddy 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Sometimes stories seem to arrive in pairs. Owen Leddy's 'Noise' felt very much like a companion piece to 'Voyager' for a couple of reasons: both deal with strange visitations, real or imagined, and at times both share an air of weariness, as their protagonists struggle with situations — employment, relationships — that could be familiar experiences to us all, were it not for the potential for these events to be very much out of the ordinary." - -image: images/Noise.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [John Mor](https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-woman-putting-right-hand-near-her-mouth-3410386/) and [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-s-face-38289/)." - -type: stock -slug: noise -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}L{{}}ydia squints at the jagged graph of the radio telescope signal on her computer screen, hunched forward in a way that makes Bea wonder if she needs to up the prescription on her glasses again. “There!” Lydia jabs the monitor so hard it rocks back alarmingly for a second, then rights itself. “Did you see it?” - -“No, sorry.” Bea was thinking about how cute Lydia’s braids look, about the constellations of freckles that dust Lydia’s cheeks. She catches herself leaning down lower over the back of Lydia’s chair than she really needs to in order to see the data—low enough to smell Lydia’s butterscotch shampoo. She stands straighter. - -*Stop being a creep*, she admonishes herself. Lydia has never shown any signs of being attracted to women—never shown signs of being attracted to anyone, really. *I’m probably just making her uncomfortable.* - -“I didn’t see anything. Can you show me again?” - -Lydia sighs. “Oh, come on.” She rewinds the graph showing the signal being received by the radio telescope. “See that spike? Right there?” She pokes the screen again. - -Bea resists the impulse to wipe away the fingerprints. “It looks like a random fluctuation to me.” What else can she say? - -Bea understands why Lydia is desperate for a breakthrough. Professor Darrow is finally losing patience with her single minded focus on detecting extraterrestrial intelligence, and the comments from her thesis committee are getting increasingly snide. But Bea doesn’t want to lie and lead Lydia down the wrong path, chasing a pattern that doesn’t exist. - -“But look, two hours earlier…” Lydia scrolls back: another slight, jagged rise in the radio signal. Bea sighs loudly, and a scowl flickers across Lydia’s face, triggering instant regret. Just having been in the lab a year longer doesn’t give Bea any right to condescend. - -“I don’t think—” - -“And here! Four hours earlier! And…” She falters. There is clearly no peak at six hours. Malik and Simon, the Darrow lab’s two other graduate students, exchange a look. Malik bends lower over the microcontroller he’s re-wiring. - -“Lydia, I think it’s just noise.” Bea means to sound gentle, but it comes out like she’s talking to a fifth grader. “Sorry.” She almost wishes she had lied and said it *did* look like something worth investigating. Lydia would have wasted a few late evenings, but at least she wouldn’t be mad. “Keep looking, though. I’m sure you’ll find something,” she adds pathetically. - -Hours later, just before Bea leaves the lab’s offices for the night, she notices that Lydia has booked a time slot on the radio telescope. Ten p.m. to midnight. - -Bea can’t keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Lydia, you’re not seriously going to—” - -“It’s way after hours. I can do whatever the hell I want with my free time.” - -“Just please get some sleep. I’m worried about you.” Lydia takes care of her needs as grudgingly as an ascetic, choking down undressed salads and occasionally taking a violent little sip from her water bottle like she’s knocking back a particularly burning shot. Lately, Bea has noticed purplish circles under Lydia’s lovely green eyes. - -Lydia’s expression softens. She looks up from her computer. “Thanks.” Bea gets lost for a moment in Lydia’s gaze and her twitchy half-smile, then gives an awkward little wave and turns to leave. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}ydia is finally alone in the lab. She sighs, turns on the electric kettle to make instant coffee, grabs her UChicago-branded mug, slips off her shoes, and settles back in her chair with her feet on the desk. After a few minutes, the overhead lights turn off as the building closes for the night, so she flips on her desk lamp, creating an island of light in the dark lab space. - -How long has this been her nightly routine now? Weeks? Months? Some days she wishes she could just get a decent night of sleep. Occasionally she does. But more often, if she tries, she lies in bed awake for hours, restless and miserable, thinking about what signals might be hitting the radio telescopes at that moment, what new data she could be analyzing instead of lying uselessly in the dark. - -She watches the clock on her computer count down the last few minutes until ten o’clock, and then it’s hers: the radio telescope out in Big Pine, California. She types in the coordinates, picturing the forty-meter dish slowly pivoting into place against the moonlit Sierra Nevada, two thousand miles away. - -Signal. A wavering line traces its way across her computer screen, plotting the fluctuating intensity of the radio waves hitting the receiver. By the time she’s recorded enough data to start running her analyses, she’s even more convinced there’s something strange about this tiny spot of sky the telescope is pointing at, a flicker of meaning among the static. - -She runs her usual suite of statistical tests and finds nothing. The signal is indistinguishable from random white noise. She keeps recording, adjusting the radio telescope tiny fractions of a degree back and forth in case she’s just slightly off, but still nothing emerges except the maddening impression of a pattern she can never quite grasp. Her intuition screams at her that something is there. She spends hours writing code for new analyses, new ways of visualizing the data, typing with jittery fingers after her second cup of coffee. The numbers still offer nothing. But she’s not ready to give up yet. - -Under Lydia’s desk, there’s an ancient tube TV that she found among a heap of electronic junk at a yard sale. She bends down and hauls it up onto the desktop, her skinny arms trembling with the effort. She plugs it into the clunky, hand-soldered adapter she built for it, then plugs the adapter into her computer, feeding the signal from the radio telescope into the TV. - -She didn’t want to use the tube TV when the other lab members were around—Bea and Malik wouldn’t approve—but it’s a perfect way of looking for repetitions in the raw radio telescope signal without any processing. She knows there are patterns in the data that the lab’s fancy software just won’t show her. As the cathode ray sweeps across the screen hundreds of times a second, any repetitions in the signal will draw an obvious pattern. Lydia feels her heartbeat accelerate in anticipation, imagining the screen filled with beautiful shifting designs, order among the cosmic chaos. - -She flips the TV on. - -Nothing. - -Static. - -Random snow. - -No, there is something there. There *has* to be something there. She knows those radio signals are something more than random fluctuations, no matter what Bea says. - -She tunes the contrast, brightness, phase… discovers dancing, foaming noise. Finally, her head starts to ache, her eyes water from staring unblinkingly at the screen. She squeezes them shut and grinds at them with the heels of her hands. Iridescent afterimages bloom inside her eyelids—a ring of bright green fading to blue, then red. - -Wait… a ring? - -If the snow on the screen were truly random noise, the average brightness of a given spot should be uniform all over the screen. The afterimage should be a single rectangle of color, the shape of the whole screen. If it looks like a ring, that means it’s brighter at the edges than the center. The signal isn’t truly random after all. - -Lydia drags her heavy eyelids open again. The screen still looks like random snow. At any given moment, there’s no obvious pattern. She stares at it for a while, letting the individual dots bombard her retinas until she can blink and see the glowing afterimage again, cycling from green to blue to red. It’s a different shape now: - -N - -The letter N? Is that possible? She opens her eyes and blinks again. The afterimage is blurry, the edges not well defined, but it really does look like two bright vertical bars linked by a diagonal slash. - -*This is crazy*. *It’s three AM, and I’m becoming delirious.* Her hands are shaking. She hasn’t eaten since breakfast, she’s getting lightheaded. But there it is, burning phosphorescent inside her eyelids. Even if it turns out to be an artifact of the cosmic microwave background, she rationalizes, the fact that there is structure to the noise will still be an interesting observation. She fumbles for a notepad to write down what she sees. - -ON - -After staring at the screen a little longer, different shapes appear in the afterimage, emerging out of the apparent randomness: - -ONOT - -She turns the brightness on the screen to maximum so that the patterns will burn in faster. She keeps transcribing. - -ONOTURN - -Words. Actual, recognizable words. Is she picking up a signal from a communications satellite? A plane? Radar monitoring the area says no. There’s nothing all the way out to the exosphere. Besides, why would anyone be transmitting anything so slowly—just one character every few minutes? - -ONOTURNAROUN - -D follows, it lingers a long time, and when an O and N appear again Lydia is sure that means the D is repeated—once at the end of the message and once at the beginning. The T lingers too, and now her spine is a high-voltage wire as she writes out the full message: - -DO NOT TURN AROUND - -Lydia sits very still. The lab suddenly seems alive with sound, murmuring and chattering in a thousand tiny voices. Some noises are easily identifiable—the hum of the refrigerator in the break room, the exhaust fan of Simon’s computer, cricket song outside, the intermittent clicking of Malik’s cosmic ray detector—but was that faint rattle always there? Is it just the ventilation? The walls tick and pop, the building breathes, and a low buzz begins that has no source Lydia can think of. - -Something in her screams out for her to just turn and look, to confirm that the lab is empty and nobody and nothing is behind her, and it’s only noise. - -She can’t. - -There’s lightning at the edges of her vision, an eight-piston engine in her chest. - -DO NOT TURN AROUND. - -Or what? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen Bea walks into the lab in the morning and sees Lydia slumped with her forehead resting on the hard desk, she can’t suppress a pained sigh. “You were here all night? Lydia, you need to sleep.” - -Lydia tries to stand and can’t feel her legs. She drops, and Bea catches her uncomfortably, squeezing Lydia’s chest so hard she struggles to breathe. - -“Bea.” Lydia’s voice is hoarse and groggy. “Something was here.” She struggles upright, leaning on Bea’s shoulders. “Something was there.” Her finger taps frantically on the pad of paper where the coordinates are written. - -“What do you mean?” - -“Something sent me a message,” Lydia says. “I saw it on the monitor.” - -Bea looks at the notepad. DO NOT TURN AROUND. - -“It didn’t want me to see… something.” - -Bea is so stunned she lets Lydia escape from her grip. - -Electric sparks of pain travel up and down Lydia’s legs as her circulation returns. The workbenches are a clutter of microcontrollers, scintillation counters, and spools of solder. The floors are a web of cables and power strips. Recreating a snapshot of what the lab looked like the night before is impossible. Impossible to know whether anything was disturbed, tampered with, displaced. If anything had been there. - -“You’re saying someone sent *you* specifically a message telling you not to turn around, so you wouldn’t see… what? Something here in the lab?” Bea might have felt like laughing if Lydia didn’t look so haggard and shaken. “Lydia, you know that sounds completely absurd.” - -“I—” Her indignant glare almost immediately softens to pained confusion. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it means.” - -“Well, *did* you turn around? Did you see anything?” - -“I don’t know. I… I thought maybe… It was dark, and I was scared, so I didn’t really… I didn’t want to…” With daylight streaming in through the windows and Bea casually leaning against the workbenches, she could almost believe that the strange signal glowing inside her eyelids was a dream. Almost. - -Bea goes to the computer, logs in, and examines traces of the signal from the radio telescope, starting from the time Lydia logged on. She looks at the Fourier transform of the data, the autocorrelation plot, runs a whole suite of machine learning algorithms designed to pluck signal out of noise with exquisite sensitivity, does everything she’s supposed to—everything Lydia has already tried and knows won’t reveal anything. - -And then, just like Lydia knew she would, Bea takes off the headphones, shakes her head, and says, “It’s nothing, Lydia. There’s nothing there.” *If you can’t quantify it,* Bea likes to say, *then it isn’t real.* - -“There *is* something there,” Lydia insists, knowing she sounds childish, petulant. “I know what I saw.” - -“Lydia, come here.” Bea gently takes her by the arm. “You were just anxious, and your imagination was just… *Nobody was threatening you*. You haven’t slept, I bet you haven’t eaten in a long time. Let’s get you home.” - -Lydia wants to resist, wants to find a way to express to Bea the certainty that is already fading from her own mind. But it’s so hard to find the right words, so much easier to let math and software and common sense win out over the fear that shines through her like the cold light of a distant star. She lets Bea lead her to the door. - -On their way out, Malik walks into the lab, and Lydia starts shouting coordinates at him without preamble. “Look there. Please—with the radio ’scope.” - -Malik just blinks at her for a moment, taken aback. “Is this for the quasar project?” - -“Please don’t worry about it,” Bea says. She grabs Lydia’s arm tighter and tries to pull her along. - -“Is she okay?” Malik asks Bea. - -“I’m right here,” Lydia snaps. “Don’t talk like I’m not here.” - -“Malik, please just don’t worry about it,” Bea insists. Before Malik can say anything else, she hurries Lydia through the door with such surprising force that Lydia lets herself be led silently the rest of the way to Bea’s car. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ea never thought she’d find herself in this situation, with Lydia sitting next to her on her bed. *Don’t think about that right now*, she reproaches herself. She should have driven Lydia home, not to her own apartment. She’s disgusted with herself, as though just by being attracted to Lydia she’s taking advantage of Lydia’s… What? Hallucination? Nightmare? Nervous breakdown? - -“Are you… Are you feeling alright?” - -“I don’t know.” Lydia sits hunched with her chin in her hands. The manic energy that must have fueled her all night has drained away, leaving her looking tired and hollow. She only hesitates for a moment before she lets herself slump back against Bea’s pillows. “I don’t know what happened.” - -“You’re going to be fine,” Bea says. “I’m sure it was nothing.” - -“I’m not losing my mind.” - -“I know.” Bea wonders if Lydia believes her. Wonders if Lydia believes herself. - -“I’ll go home in a little bit,” Lydia says, but when Bea comes back a few minutes later with tea and an English muffin, Lydia is asleep on top of the covers. - -When Lydia wakes up to early-morning sun seventeen hours later, the first words out of her mouth are, “I’m so sorry. I’ll get out of here.” - -Bea grabs Lydia’s arm as she hauls herself upright, confused and entangled by the blankets Bea gently pulled over her after she was already snoring. “Please just rest. I’ll get you breakfast.” - -“No, I really don’t want to bother you any more.” Lydia pries Bea’s hand off her arm, but then doesn’t let go of it. She sits dazed, still half wrapped up in the sheets, fumbling for her glasses. “I’m so sorry. I’ve already caused you so much—” - -“Stop, stop,” Bea says. “I care about you, and I want you to rest and take care of yourself.” She’s overflowing with emotion, seeing Lydia in this broken state. She grasps Lydia’s shoulders, and Lydia suddenly and convulsively clings to her. - -“No, I’m okay,” Lydia still protests. “You shouldn’t have to…” Her arms around Bea’s neck contradict her words. - -“Listen, I want to take care of you. Please let me.” - -“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” - -“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Bea says, pushing down her worries about Lydia’s mental health. Her arms slide down to Lydia’s waist as Lydia leans into her and puts her chin on Bea’s shoulder. - -“Something spoke to me.” Lydia’s voice is a horrified whisper. “Something was there with—” Her hands tighten at the back of Bea’s neck. - -“Let’s not talk about it right now. Rest. You can stay here as long as you want.” - -“Thank you,” Lydia breathes, and then slowly kisses her, just like Bea has daydreamed so many times. Lydia’s warm lips against hers, Lydia’s fingers gently tracing along her neck—she had thought it could never happen. But Lydia seems to have become a believer in the impossible. - -“You do believe me?” Lydia says, when she gently pulls away. “Do you believe what I saw is real?” - -Bea hopes Lydia can’t feel her tense up. She feels ambushed. She didn’t want this kiss to have conditions, but she knows hesitation is an answer in itself, so before she can overthink it she says, “Yes, of course I believe you.” - -Lydia exhales and relaxes against Bea. - -“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}ydia keeps waiting for the day she will wake up full of energy and momentum, finally ready to speak out about what she saw. But every morning she wakes up with Bea snoring gently into the hollow of her collarbone, hands on warm skin, and she doesn’t want to move. - -Even if she manages to extricate herself gently enough that Bea doesn’t wake up, she’s paralyzed by the possibilities presented by her phone, lying on Bea’s bedside table. She could call *The New York Times* or *Popular Science* or *Nature* and tell her story. Tell them she knows she has a true positive (such a reassuring, triumphant phrase), no matter what Bea says. She could call Professor Darrow and tell him she’s ready to come back to the lab. - -She keeps thinking about the radio telescopes, still pointed skyward, still taking in data—the ears of humanity straining to hear the whispers of the universe. What if whatever it was that threatened her—that *warned* her—is still out there? What if it tries to reach out again, but nobody is listening? - -The first time she told Bea she was thinking of going back, that she wanted to look for the source of the signal she saw, Bea fell silent. In that silence, Lydia panicked. Maybe Bea doesn’t really believe her. Maybe Bea doesn’t want her to go back. - -The days since Bea had brought Lydia back to her apartment, since that first kiss, have been some of the happiest Lydia can remember, and that’s exactly what scares her. It makes her want to hold her breath so she won’t disturb the delicate perfection of every moment. When Bea stares at her adoringly or laughs at something she says, she finds herself noticing with surprise that she actually likes herself. She’s been able to eat and sleep more, without first demanding one more hour of work from herself, one more plot of her data, one more block of code. - -Until now, her body was always an inconvenient appliance she had to waste time maintaining so she could get on with her work. She had stopped believing that someone she wanted could ever want her back, had never imagined someone could make her feel beautiful. Every day, she feels shocked that Bea still wants to kiss her, to hold her. She’s desperate not to ruin it by saying the wrong thing, by asking too much. - -Is believing in what she saw too much to ask? - -Lydia waits, lying in bed, staring at the phone on the dresser, considering what would happen if she spoke to a newspaper and Bea found out. Would Bea be angry? Would she make Lydia recant the story, say it was a prank? She can predict all the reasonable arguments Bea would deploy to convince her that it was a false positive: that the supposed signal was so faint it had to accumulate in the afterimages on her retinas; that anyone signaling her would have had no way to correctly guess the sweep frequency of her tube TV; that an extraterrestrial intelligence wouldn’t know how to communicate in English. - -Lydia knows she would cave in, but she wouldn’t really believe Bea’s argument—not after seeing those blurred impressions of letters (yes, blurry, but so clearly *there*) one after another. - -By the time Lydia imagines all this, Bea stirs, stretches, turns over, and plants her soft lips over Lydia’s. Each time it happens, Lydia is euphoric and crushingly afraid at the same time. She’s gotten both of the things she has wanted desperately for five years, but she knows she’ll have to give up on one. - -A break to recuperate turns into three months of medical leave, turns into leaving the astrophysics program, turns into a job in data science at a marketing firm. Lydia’s lease isn’t up, but her apartment sits empty, and her belongings migrate into Bea’s closet one duffel-full at a time. When Bea comes home from the lab, she always finds Lydia wearing headphones, feet tapping to a fast rhythm. She has to touch Lydia on the shoulder to bring her back from the distant place the music takes her. - -At night, Lydia wears earplugs and sets her phone to loudly play white noise, but it isn’t enough. After a few weeks, all Lydia has to say is, “I’m sorry,” and Bea knows it means she should get up and check the closets and hallway again and reassure Lydia that there’s nothing there, that there’s nothing watching her. Lydia doesn’t say what’s going through her head when she startles and tenses in the middle of the night. Bea doesn’t say anything when she sees an online forum for amateur SETI enthusiasts open on Lydia’s laptop. - -At three a.m., when Lydia buries her face in Bea’s chest and tries to forget the million tiny sounds she can no longer block out (any noise could be a signal or a warning, her brain tells her), Lydia thinks about asking whether Bea really believes her. She takes in a breath to speak, and lets it out again. She doesn’t actually want to know. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen Bea and Lydia arrive at Bea’s dissertation defense, Lydia jerks to a stop at the threshold of the Michelson Center for Physics. Her hand slips from Bea’s. - -“You okay?” Bea asks, jumpy, hyper aware of the fact that this is the first time Lydia has been back on the University of Chicago campus since her breakdown. - -“Yeah. Fine.” Lydia puts on a vacant smile and fusses with Bea’s bow tie and pomaded hair. Is that a nervous twitch at the corner of Lydia’s mouth? Is it significant that she pulls Bea’s tie slightly too tight? She’s nervous. She’s terrified. She’s resentful. Envious. Or it’s nothing. - -Bea stumbles through her presentation on the atmospheric chemistry of extrasolar planets, distracted by the way Malik and Simon glance at Lydia and then at each other, the way Lydia avoids making eye contact with anyone. The faculty committee doesn’t fail Bea, even though she thinks she would deserve it. Lydia sits rigidly upright and stares straight ahead through the whole defense. She never smiles once, even when Professor Darrow presents Bea with her diploma and addresses her as “Dr. Martinez.” - -Afterward, they go out to Bea’s favorite Indian restaurant for dinner—members of the lab, Bea’s sister, a few college friends—and Lydia hardly touches her mattar paneer. Bea tries not to let her frustration show, tries not to show how much it hurts that Lydia can’t at least put aside whatever conflicted feelings she has about the lab long enough to be happy for her. Afterward, Bea persuades everyone to come back to her apartment, toting the cheapest champagne they could find, and an order of samosas to go. - -When they are halfway through the box of samosas, Bea is nodding and smiling at a very drunk Simon’s stories about his roommates. Really, though, she’s listening to a conversation on the other side of the room. - -“I’m sorry if it’s a touchy subject,” Malik is saying to Lydia. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. It’s just, we were all so worried about you, and I just want to make sure, you know, that everything’s…” - -“Yeah, yeah,” Lydia says. “Everything’s fine. Really, don’t worry about me.” - -Malik presses. “Was it a health thing, or…?” - -Lydia hesitates. - -*Don’t tell him*, Bea silently screams at her. *Please, for god’s sake, don’t.* Lydia doesn’t have the right to make Bea deal with this right now. - -“There was this thing that happened to me. I’m still sort of trying to make sense of it.” - -Malik puts a hand on Lydia’s shoulder. “If it’s bothering you, you can always talk to me. You know that, right?” - -“Yeah. Thanks. I… Well, I haven’t really talked to anyone about this before, but…” - -Simon’s voice rises until he’s almost shouting. “Don’t you think that’s unfair? I mean, what would you do in that situation?” - -“I… uh…” Bea realizes she hasn’t heard a single word of Simon’s rant for the last three minutes. “Yeah, no, I think you’re right. Sorry, one second.” She stands and rushes toward Lydia—*I’m walking too fast, I know I’m walking too fast*. She wants to grab Lydia’s words and cram them back into her mouth. - -“I don’t know what it was,” Lydia is saying, “but something showed up on the monitor. I know this sounds unbelievable, but I was scanning some coordinates I looked at for the quasar project, and the signal looked like… like letters. Words.” - -Bea forces a laugh and puts her arm around Lydia’s shoulder, displacing Malik’s hand. Lydia jumps as if ambushed. “Had a little too much to drink?” Bea says. *I’m giving you an out*, she mentally pleads with Lydia. *Just take it and don’t embarrass yourself.* Bea tries to make conspiratorial eye contact with Malik like she’s letting him in on a joke at Lydia’s expense, but he just stares back at her in wide-eyed alarm. - -“I’m perfectly sober.” Lydia points to her untouched wine glass, then carefully removes Bea’s arm from her shoulder. - -Bea keeps that fake grin smeared across her face, fully aware of how stupid she looks. “You don’t really mean you received a signal from somewhere, do you? I mean, it was late at night, you were tired…” - -Lydia looks almost sick with anger. “Malik seemed willing to listen and talk about what happened. Unlike you.” Bea drops the fake grin, steps back as if slapped. She hadn’t known this fury was fermenting inside Lydia during the months of tactful silence. - -Bea can feel her face getting hot as stares turn toward them and other conversations around the room become endangered, then extinct. “Can we not fight about this right now? Everyone’s just trying to have a nice time.” - -“Please don’t try to act like you’re being the reasonable one here. I was just trying to explain—” - -“I actually should probably get going,” Malik breaks in. “I have telescope time booked early tomorrow.” Tomorrow is Saturday, and Malik almost never works on weekends, but Bea doesn’t point that out. She just nods resignedly as the chorus of excuses begins—a dog to walk, an errand to run before the supermarket closes. In minutes, Lydia and Bea are alone with the half-empty wine glasses and the last few samosas getting soggy in the bottom of the greasy box. - -“What the hell was that.” Lydia says flatly. It doesn’t even sound like a question. - -“I thought Malik was putting you in an awkward situation, and I wanted to help you out.” The half-truth slips out so easily it scares her. - -“You don’t want to be the one with the crazy girlfriend who thinks she was contacted by aliens. You think I’m like those people raving about—” tears choke her, she shouts through them “—about chemtrails and probes and Roswell. You think there’s something wrong with me.” - -Bea sighs. “No, I don’t, but other people will. I don’t want you to get laughed at or get hurt.” - -“Don’t pretend you did that for my sake,” Lydia spits. “You’re afraid I’ll embarrass you. You’re ashamed of me.” - -Bea moves to hug her, but Lydia raises her arms as if to defend herself from an attack. Bea enfolds her anyway. “I’m not ashamed of you. I love you, and I’m so happy and proud that I get to be with you.” - -Lydia is silent for a moment. Then she nestles her face into Bea’s neck. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” - -Bea lifts Lydia’s chin to kiss her, doesn’t mind Lydia’s runny nose against her cheek. - -She wonders if the way Lydia eventually relaxes into her arms indicates forgiveness or resignation, whether the little squeeze she gives Bea’s upper arm as she pulls away is a reassurance or a dismissal. - -She tries to decipher Lydia’s expression as she starts collecting the wine glasses. *Are we okay? Are we not okay?* But she could read anything in it. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}our months later, their names are on a single lease—an apartment in Evanston, where Bea has a postdoc position. They’re wandering the mall for pleasing housewares and idly discussing whether they should go to the ten o’clock movie, even though they know they’ll just end up at home watching Netflix instead. By the time they leave, it’s thunderstorming. Lydia peeks out from under their shared umbrella to look up at a billboard screen glitched into rainbow snow. - -“A short,” Bea comments. - -Lydia hangs back, making Bea slow down to keep holding the umbrella over her. The screen transfixes her. Shapes in cyan, yellow, and magenta flash into being and disappear in milliseconds. The colors stain Lydia’s face. - -Panic wells up in Bea. She knows that in the months since she and Lydia fought in front of all their friends, Lydia hasn’t stopped believing that something strange, paranormal happened to her. Now the tectonic fault between the two realities that they have been carefully skirting around will open up, and they’ll both fall into the chasm. - -“Come on, Lydia. Please.” - - They don’t speak on the drive home. - -That night, Bea finds Lydia standing outside in the rain at four a.m. in her pajamas, recording the storm sounds, playing them back over and over, obsessively listening for patterns. Bea mentions the word “psychiatrist” for the first time in months, and Lydia berates her for hours, until Bea can’t take it and screeches away in the car, which twenty minutes later slides off the wet road, through a fence, and into a neatly mown front yard. - -Bea comes home on foot, soaked—unhurt but too shaken to drive back. Lydia has cooled down. “Who’s the crazy one now?” she teases. - -In the moment, Bea laughs and phones for a tow truck. She’ll cry by herself later. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}heir anniversary falls on a weekend in the summer, so Bea packs them wine and sandwiches—brisket for herself and marinated tofu for Lydia—and they drive out to Geneva Lake, to the small forest preserve surrounding the Yerkes Observatory where they had first gotten to know one another, assigned to the same research project. - -In the car, Bea’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel. She’s painfully aware that the anniversary of their relationship is also the anniversary of Lydia’s supposed signal from beyond, and anything they do to commemorate one will inevitably evoke the memory of the other. - -Bea is afraid that walking by the observatory will upset Lydia, but she hardly seems to notice the imposing brick building as its columns, arches, and metal-plated domes loom over them. Their conversation is easy and light—music, books, interesting flowers, and funny bugs at the side of the path. Lydia untangles the chatter of birdsong around them, picking out individual calls and whistling them back to the callers. - -“I think they’re responding to me,” she says. - -Bea strains to listen, but she can hardly even tell which call Lydia is trying to imitate. - -They reach a clearing, a grassy slope well away from the nearest road, and unpack their picnic as the sun begins to set and paints their skin gold. Unwrapping the foil from their sandwiches and pouring wine into paper cups, it almost feels to Bea like they’re back in their first year of grad school—two friends escaping the city lights to appreciate the stars, hiding their infatuation with one another. - -When they’ve finished the sandwiches and most of the wine, Bea topples Lydia into the grass, and they make out, Bea burrowing into the wonderful summer smell of sunscreen and bug spray and butterscotch shampoo. For a few minutes, it feels like the distance between them has collapsed. Then Bea opens her eyes for a moment and sees that Lydia’s eyes are already open wide, staring past her into the darkening sky. Bea pulls away and rolls onto her back. - -Twilight is fading, and the Milky Way looms. Lydia’s eyes dart wildly across the sky, like a REM sleeper with her eyes open, connecting points of light and wisps of clouds into hundreds of nonsense patterns. Bea wishes she could appreciate Lydia’s attentiveness and curiosity without thinking about the WebMD pages on paranoid personality disorder and schizophrenia that she’s carefully expunged from her browser history. - -And maybe she still can. Lying in the cool grass with her cheek nestled against Lydia’s soft hair, it’s easy to let her mind wander and imagine possibilities without limit. Was that tiny flicker of light a satellite passing between two clouds? A meteor? A supernova millions of light years away? Something else entirely? There is so much light, so many flickers and pulses of the universe hitting the Earth every second, that even if Bea imagines every telescope pointed at the sky at this moment around the world, every eye turned toward the stars, they can only capture a tiny fraction of it. There is so much that can never be analyzed or understood, so much lost and forgotten in the glowing chaos of the city. - -“It’s so strange,” Lydia whispers. “So beautiful and strange.” - -Bea wants to ask her a hundred questions. *What are you looking for? What do you see? Do you miss the telescopes and the particle counters? Do you miss seeing the universe in a thousand colors eyes can’t perceive? Or did it torture you, all that data, all that noise in which you could see any pattern?* But she senses the peace between them is fragile, so she just takes Lydia’s hand and squeezes it. Lydia, entranced, doesn’t squeeze back. - -*Someone had to be the first*, Bea thinks, *to look up and see more than a random stream of stars crossing the sky.* Someone had to be the first to see patterns and tell fantastical stories about them. Someone had to notice the order in the comings and goings of planets and comets, in the swirls of gas on the surface of Jupiter. Subtler and subtler patterns that had once looked like randomness and chaos. - -Maybe Lydia isn’t wrong. Maybe Lydia is first. - -Bea shivers a little, goosebumps creeping over her skin even though the evening is warm. The shadows in the grass around them, the spaces between the stars, suddenly the darkness seethes with disturbing possibilities. - -No, she can’t start thinking like this too. She can’t let this continue. She sits up, tugs on Lydia’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go home.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hile Lydia is at work late, Bea finds a notebook in Lydia’s underwear drawer. Every page is full of garbled, fragmentary messages. Rapid, angry scribbles and strikethroughs, not as confident as the stark, chilling capitals on the notepad in the lab. - -~~WE ARE~~ - -~~FORTY-SE~~ - -QU - -~~INST~~ - -Where had Lydia thought she heard or saw these? In the traffic noise outside their apartment? In the static on unused radio frequencies? - -~~STAR L~~ - -AR - -M - -~~TAU~~ - -There are notes as well, describing sounds that have no name and no source, lights in the night, glitches and bugs—things nobody else would have thought twice about or even noticed at all. Flipping through page after page, Bea stands paralyzed, hearing as if for the first time the murmur of the rain on the rooftop, the gentle clatter of a distant train (or is it the washing machine downstairs), the hum of the refrigerator (or is it the telephone pole outside, or something else). The dense murmur of the city seems to mask something watchful and threatening. Something stirring just below the threshold of pattern recognition. - -*I’m letting* *myself get sucked into Lydia’s fantasies again*, she berates herself. She doesn’t have time for this. She has papers and grants to review, data to plot and analyze. - -She stomps to the kitchen, slamming the door of the bedroom behind her, trying to make enough noise to drown out the whispers of nonexistent messages that Lydia insists are real. She steps on the pedal to open the lid of the kitchen trash, holds the notebook over it. - -*This is for the best*, she tells herself. It’s not healthy for Lydia to keep something like this, something that will keep drawing her into the same delusions. Drawing them both in. - -When Lydia flings the door open, Bea startles so badly she drops the notebook on the floor. They stare at each other across what feels like an enormous distance, across the invisible boundary between their two realities. - -“You were going to throw it away,” Lydia accuses, as Bea bends to pick it up again. - -“I didn’t know you were…” Bea feels like she should be the one getting angry. She’s the one who caught Lydia, discovered her secret. But all she has is this flimsy denial. She takes a deep breath, squeezes her eyes closed. Like if she doesn’t look at it, maybe she can pretend she never saw it. “I just want you to be able to move on, Lydia. You can’t keep obsessing over this." - -But Lydia won’t make it that easy. “Don’t act like you were doing it for me. You just want to pretend nothing ever happened.” - -Lydia meets Bea’s eyes, her gaze steady. There will be no more apologies, no more tears. Bea imagines Lydia must have fixed the same defiant stare on her disapproving thesis committee when she proposed focusing her research on the dead-end of SETI. She can remember when she loved that part of Lydia: the uncompromising insistence that the universe is full of hidden, unknown things. - -“Lydia, you have to let this go.” - -“And what if I don’t?” She grabs the notebook of spurious signals, trying to pull it from Bea’s hand. - -Bea can’t conceal her frustration. Why does she have to manage the consequences of Lydia’s obsession? Why can’t she admit she needs help? “If you can’t let it go, then you’re going to drive us *both* crazy.” - -Lydia opens her mouth but can’t seem to speak. She lets go of the notebook. Her eyes radiate pain and betrayal, and Bea suddenly realizes what she’s said. “I— I didn’t mean—” - -But Lydia isn’t listening anymore. “I know you’re right. I know most people couldn’t possibly believe me, would think there’s something wrong with me. That’s why I’ve never tried to tell anyone.” Her focus snaps back to Bea. “But *you*. *You* at least could have believed me.” - -*I do believe you,* Bea thinks about saying, but doesn’t. Lydia would know it was a lie. It’s much too late to offer unconditional faith, unquestioning trust. In the silent moment of Bea’s hesitation, Lydia turns and races toward the back door, and Bea knows something has broken that can’t be fixed. - -As Lydia throws open the door, the light of a passing car, or maybe someone’s motion-activated floodlight, silhouettes her, so bright it makes Bea squint and shield her face. Lydia slams the door so hard it doesn’t catch, and in the instant before it bounces back open she’s gone. - -“Lydia!” Bea rushes out onto the landing of the back stairs. The alley below is empty. Bea clatters down the stairs and runs into the middle of the alley. She walks out to the sidewalk and looks both ways down the street. Nobody. *How did Lydia get out of sight so quickly?* Even sprinting, she couldn’t have gone very far. - -Bea fires off a quick text, asking Lydia to let her know she’s somewhere safe, and another to Malik asking him to look out for Lydia, but she feels inexplicably certain that she won’t hear anything back. - -*What if Lydia really disappears?* Bea wonders if anyone would think anything of it. A woman vanishes from her girlfriend’s life after a fight—hardly surprising. A sudden parting, a loss of contact, a random event that may never be accounted for. A woman vanishes in a flash of light. Car headlights. Floodlights. A street lamp just turning on. A light in the city doesn’t need to be explained. - -The rain has stopped, so Bea sits down on the back stairs, looking up at the few stars the city lights don’t drown out, struggling not to cry. A car alarm shrieks. The telephone wires buzz. A gate clangs. The lid of a garbage can thuds. The city murmurs and hums with a thousand voices. Everything is orange in the glare of the street lamps. - -For a moment, Bea convinces herself—as Lydia did so many times—that she can hear something listening to her, like the faint feedback from a microphone left on. “If you’re there,” she says to the traffic and the wind, “if you’re real, give me a sign. Please. Anything.” - -But all she can hear is noise. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - - - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Noise" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278310320756634).* - diff --git a/content/issue-26/SketchesOfSnoakCity.md b/content/issue-26/SketchesOfSnoakCity.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4ad801ed..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/SketchesOfSnoakCity.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,36 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Sketches of Snoak City" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- science fiction -- fantasy -authors: -- Les Sklaroff -copyright: '© Les Sklaroff 2012 - 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Back in 2012, Les Sklaroff had already been contributing quirky pieces to Mythaxis for several years. Issue 11 introduced us to a variety of unusually named persons — Paeony 3rdfield, Dundro Fappit, a collection of rivals negotiating the maze of someone called 'Foroquont' — all denizens of a single, strange, intriguing city, possibly ancient, possibly future. Over the following eight years we've returned to Snoak City numerous times, but the connections between these moments has never been as clear as now." - -image: images/SketchesSnoakCity.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Telstarboy](https://www.pexels.com/photo/books-on-wooden-surface-3622342/) and [FWStudio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-wall-168441/)." - -type: stock -slug: sketches-of-snoak-city -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -**Editor's note**: a change from our normal fare this time! - -While in years gone by Les Sklaroff's excursions have come to us one by one, we've now created a dedicated home for them all, creating a sort of guidebook in the process. Connections between the people and places that make up this unusual metropolis were hard to spot when spread out across years, but now they (and the rich language that renders them) can be found side by side on the page, conveniently bound for the traveller's benefit. - -In real life, Les was a long-time friend of ***Mythaxis***' dearly departed creator Gil Williamson. While the individual stories are still in place across our archive of back issues, I'm sure Gil would be happy to see them compiled and complementing each other as they now are. And this *Who's Who* and *Where's Where* is far from completed—in future editions, the sketches boasted of on that cover will be more than merely figurative… - -In the meantime, if you'd like a personal tour of the strangest corners a strange place has to offer, we invite you to peruse: - -## [Sketches of Snoak City](https://mythaxis.co.uk/SnoakCity/) - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Sketches of Snoak City" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278296907424642).* diff --git a/content/issue-26/TroublemakerStoryteller.md b/content/issue-26/TroublemakerStoryteller.md deleted file mode 100644 index d775b25e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/TroublemakerStoryteller.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,324 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Troublemaker, Storyteller" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Jonathon Mast -copyright: '© Jonathon Mast 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "'Stories about writers' are a hard sell at Mythaxis, but 'stories about storytellers' isn't exactly the same thing. Jonathon Mast's tale touches on timely themes of female oppression and the struggle against patriarchal corruption, starting with a classic (even classical) damsel-in-distress scenario before the old forms begin to shed their skins — and the power that comes from crafting new narratives is at the heart of it all." - -image: /images/Troublemaker.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was adapted from an original image by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/321522594/stock-photo-scene-wizard-reaching-hand-out.html)." - -type: stock -slug: troublemaker-storyteller -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}y father himself bound my hands behind me, securing them in place. He whispered to me, but I couldn’t hear him much over the beating of my heart. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I told you. I told you to stop telling those stories. I’m sorry.” - -I didn’t even try fighting. I was probably strong enough to escape him, but I wouldn’t get much farther. My eyes grazed the rocky ground around us. Old bloodstains darkened the stones from those who thought they could get away. Well, at least my death wouldn’t be boring. It was like I was in one of the stories I told my sisters. - -I just wished those stories had been true. - -Father continued fumbling at the ropes. “I’m not tying them tight. If you think you can get away, run. Please. I can’t lose someone else. Please.” - -Right. Like Samael would allow that. No girl had ever escaped in the history of our village, nor the history of any village up and down the coast, as far as the bards said. - -Girls only escaped in my stories. - -I faced the rock shelters that hid most of the villagers. Huge stones squatted over low pits, allowing everyone to watch safely. And everyone had to come and watch. It was law. Even my sisters. The girls I’d practically raised since they sacrificed mom, years ago. - -And I was always my mother’s daughter. - -Samael watched closely. His lips twitched. “You could have been someone important, Alaina. I am sorry that you were chosen in the lottery.” - -I glared at him. I felt Father glare at him. - -“Gerard,” he continued, tired of waiting. “She’s secured. Get back to the shelters” - -Father placed his hand over mine and once more whispered, “I’m sorry,” before obeying. His back came into view as he trudged toward the shelters. The girls watched, their eyes fearful. They were learning the lesson: Don’t be like Alaina. Don’t tell stories like she did. Don’t sing like she did. Like her mother did. Dragons eat girls like that. The lottery might be random, but troublemakers always got what they should get. - -I took a deep breath. My eyes burned. I refused to let any tears out. - -Samael tilted his head toward me. His cloak fluttered in the slight breeze. His eyes drank me in like they always did. For once I made eye contact with him. I let my distaste wrinkle my nose. - -He chuckled. He knew he’d won. - -I hated that he was right. - -He turned back toward the shelters and began the ritual. “Hear me, people who are safe from claw and wing! Once our parents feared the dragons. Once we trembled at their passing. But then my father found a thing that made the wyrms shrink: stories! Though we could not entirely dispel those evil creatures, we could reshape them. Stories told by a bard, sung from sacred lyrics, could bend them to our will. - -“So he wrapped a chain of words around them: No longer would they hunt us all. But once a year they would take one to sate their terrible hatred. And so it was! Every year, a lottery! We have been saved, and now one dies to keep us all free. Behold, Alaina, daughter of Gerard, a maiden who gives herself freely that we all might live!” - -Every year the same story. This time I saw the back of his head, though. This time I wasn’t watching from the stone shelters. - -This time I saw the fear in every woman’s face. In Pendia and Calla’s faces, my sisters. I taught them how to spin thread, how to use the wheel without hurting themselves too often. I told them stories to pass the time. Stories of brave girls who tamed dragons. Brave girls who sang back to the dragons. - -“Why do the dragons always sound so sad when they come?” Pendia asked me one day. - -I remember laughing, saying the first thing that came to mind: “You would be sad if you looked like that, too! But you’re so pretty. You’re no dragon!” And I tickled her. - -While she giggled, Calla put her hands on her hips. “Why aren’t boys ever sacrificed?” - -I shushed her. “That’s a good question. Maybe they’re not brave enough.” - -But Samael had been passing through and heard my answer. He struck my forearm with that reed he carried. “The dragons are beasts, and they hunger for beauty. Only women can sate those monsters. And we must sate them. If we ever stopped the sacrifices, their chains of words would break, and we would all be devoured! So we offer the most beautiful among us.” - -I think that was the first time I felt his eyes on me. - -That night he visited our home. I hid behind our hut, hoping Samael wouldn’t see me. I heard father shout. Samael stalked away, and father said nothing to me that night. I remember his hands shook as we blessed bread together, though. - -I clenched my hands into fists. The cords slithered a bit around my wrists. I could run. I could get away. But the dragons would find me. Or if I ran, they would eat Pendia and Calla. Maybe Father, too. If I stayed, I kept them safe for at least another year. - -Is this how so many women stayed without fighting? Bound with guilt? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he song began. It floated from the gray sky, from the clouds that formed the ceiling on every sacrificial day. It was the only beautiful thing about a dragon: its song. - -I searched the heavens for the shadows that would mean my death. Two notes rang out, a cross between a hum and a whistle. An unresolved chord of longing. My heart sang too, in mourning, for the women who came here before me, for my friend Daima last year, for Karina before her, for Mother years ago. For Pendia and Calla, who would live in fear of the lottery all their lives. - -Samael smiled at me. His eyes ate me little by little, savoring every nibble they took. He knew he had time. The dragons never came near when he was still in sight. He looked just a little sad, but not for me. He turned and trudged to the shelters. The people separated, leaving a large space around him. - -The song grew louder. Two more notes joined the chord, deeper, resonant, just as unresolved. The sound crawled into my ears, into my mind. - -Every year I had resisted the song. Every year. Mother had told me to stay silent. Father told me to stay silent.Just once, before Pendia was born, I’d hummed the notes, started to sing back at the sky, until Samael struck me on the back of the head, his face like thunder. - -This year he could not silence me. I was a troublemaker. I told stories, and sang songs I should not sing. What more could the bard do to me? If I was going to die, if I was going to be a sacrifice, well, I might as well be what I was. - -I answered their music. My tone shook, pulsing in time with the roaring in my ears, thin and weak. It could not carry far. I took a deep breath, as deep as I could, and called out again. I matched their unresolved mourning. I heard Samael shout from the shelters. I didn’t understand his words over my own voice. I didn’t try to. - -Shapes swooped in from the sky. Dark shadows first, four wings each, then misshapen lizards with asymmetrical heads and scales the color of rotten seaweed, ugly beasts that could never find love. - -The chord they sang as they descended wrapped around me, squeezing my heart, and I filled my lungs again. These dragons mourned? Well, so did I. I mourned all the women who came before, all the girls that would follow. And I mourned myself. - -Four of the beasts landed near me, looming over me. As soon as they landed, their song began to fade. - -But I kept singing. I shifted the note to the one I hummed as a little girl. I completed their chord. It had remained unresolved for years, for decades maybe, but I found the note that had rung inside me for my entire life. - -All four dragons sat on their haunches, as if waiting patiently. They didn’t move to attack. - -From somewhere beyond them, I heard the bard shouting out the next lines of the story: “And so the dragons return every year, but only once, to take from us our best, so the rest may live! In this way, we remain safe!” - -One of the wyrms growled and turned toward the bard. - -The other three watched me. They should have been snapping with their beaks, rending with terrible talons, taking me and killing me in the most painful way, the sounds of shattering bones breaking the sounds of my screaming. They should have been tearing me apart and fighting over the pieces. They should have been devouring every sinew. - - So I kept singing. I pushed the note of resolution out, as loud as I could, taking short, sharp breaths. My lungs began to ache. My throat joined in. Normally I sang under my breath, just to the girls, just to teach them the songs our mother taught me. But this was loud, so loud it hurt my ears. - -The bard was shouting. Again, I lost the words under the sound of my own voice. The dragons shifted, as if uncomfortable. How long could I keep this up? Would they take me as soon as I stopped singing? I didn’t want the girls to see. They shouldn’t have to see any sacrifice. They shouldn’t have to see my death. They shouldn’t have to fear like I did. - -As I gulped another breath, Samael’s voice shouted, “Eat her so we can be safe!” - -And as my note failed, as the dragons shifted, I suddenly understood. Samael said it every year: *Words bound the dragons*. They could shape the dragons. They couldn’t break the dragons, couldn’t make them what they weren’t, but they could bend them. - -And I could use my words to do the same, couldn’t I? I wasn’t a bard, but I was a storyteller. - -I gulped another breath, and with my broken voice cried out, “The dragons came every year for the sacrifice, but for this one, for the one who sang to them, they plucked her up and took her safely away!” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}id you know dragons move very fast? - -As I finished the sentence, the largest of them had me in a three-and-a-half fingered talon, rough scales gripping me tight through my lumpy brown dress. And then the ground was far away. I screamed, and then my voice was gone, and then there I was, in the sky, my feet dangling below me. One shoe fell off. It fell and fell and fell. I hoped it hit Samael in the head, but it was probably lost in the sea. - -The dragon song started again. It crept into my ears, sorrowful, dissonant. Now, though, there was a rhythm to it, a pounding four-sided beat. The notes slipped into my ears, into my mind, calming me. - -I had faced the stake below calmly. Now, even as the dragons were about to eat me, I knew my story would remain in the village. Pendia would tell Calla, and Calla would tell others. They would get in trouble, but they would have hope. After all, I wasn’t eaten, at least not where they could see. The first girl ever to escape. - -And even when the dragons did eat me, I would know what it was to fly. - -Who else could ever say that? - -I looked up from my feet to the dragons flying around me. I couldn’t see the one holding me well, but the others, the song beat in time to their wings. - -The membranes of their wings vibrated. That’s what caused the song, and now that they weren’t gliding, it wasn’t just one extended note. But their song never resolved, because their wings were deformed in a way that would not let them complete their tune. - -The dragons flying nearest watched me with hungry eyes, beaks snapping, talons flexing with each beat of their wings and song, drool streaming into the wind. My fate had been delayed, not changed. - -I closed my eyes, sinking into the chord. My heartbeat came back strong, over the sound of the wind, but I shoved it down. If I sang the wrong note, they might fight over me in the sky instead of on the ground. *Calm. Think. You were defiant down there. Now be defiant here. You can do this*. - -The cold clawed at me, tearing at my skin. Be *still. Don’t tremble. Just listen. Listen*. - -I thought I found it. I tried to take a deep breath, but my throat. Oh, my throat. It hurt so much. I found the note, but how could I sing it? How could I stop them from feasting the way I had before? - -Maybe I could buy myself some time. Maybe I could tell another story. Another quick story. - -If my ruined throat would let me. - -The words came out in a sobbing, croaking rush. “The dragons loved the girl’s singing so much, they decided to keep her. They would never eat her!” - -The talon that clutched me loosened, just a little. My lungs expanded. Fresh pain choked me, but I could breathe freely again. - -The dragons purred their dissonant song. Through gray clouds they sang as they flew. They didn’t snap at me again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey brought me to a shabby cave in a dismal mountain. A murky stream oozed along the floor of the cavern, and chill gray light from the cave entrance showed moldy nests of branches, leaves, and hay. The beasts set me on the dingy floor and retreated to their nests, settling down, folding massive wings against their misshapen bodies, fluttering them as they preened. - -They made no aggressive action. They seemed far more intent on cleaning themselves. The one that had carried me investigated the talon that held me, sniffing at it, picking at it with its beak. - -My body was sore, and my throat still ached, but all at once everything relaxed. I couldn’t keep being this scared. I’d been terrified and broken and shown what flying was like. I was a legend now: *The* *Girl* *Who* ***Wasn’t*** *Eaten*. But now what? Try to escape? Try to go home? Should I stay, and try more stories with the dragons? - -I turned to the pitiful spring. Green sludge grew along its edges, and I wrinkled my nose at the rancid smell, but I spotted a clear channel of water running through the midst of the little swamp. - -I lifted the hem of my dress and stepped over as much of the muck as I could. The center of the stream came to my ankles, but it trickled far more quickly than I expected. I bent with cupped hands and lifted the water to my mouth. - -It was cool and crisp on my tongue. - -Swallowing was agony, but in a way that felt like I needed more, like when I’d had a fever and my father forced me to drink. My throat needed time to heal, but if water hurt that much, how much would it hurt to actually speak? All I had were questions. I couldn’t stay here, but where would I go? Could I go back to my village? How far was it? And even if I could make the journey, what would Samael do when I arrived? - -One of the dragons, the one that had carried me, began to purr. It settled into its nest, closed its eyes, and lifted its beak. - -The others joined in, the chords lifting together, a glorious symphony. - -The only beautiful thing about the dragons is their song. It had a heart-breaking splendor as they plunged to destroy women from my village, but here, here it was complete. The dragons were content, even though they hadn’t gotten their sacrifice. Even though they hadn’t eaten me. They hadn’t eaten anything. - -The dragons kept purring their triumphant melody, and I wished my voice was healed already. I would have joined in. - -What was I thinking? These were murderers. These were not creatures to join. They were beasts to annihilate. I should curse them out of existence, not join them in song! - -If only. Dragons could be bent by words, but not broken. I slumped. What would it change—Samael still ruled my village, if he couldn’t use the dragons to execute women he branded troublemakers, he would find some other way. I could take away his weapon, but he would still be just as dangerous. - -And yet… I had made the creatures who murdered my mother friendly to me. Maybe I would be able to say something. But what? *The dragons carried Alaina to her home and left forever?* If Samael was to be believed, that would break the dragons. They needed to eat humans. - -*If* Samael was to be believed. - -That man had terrorized the village for longer than I was alive. Somehow only the troublemakers were chosen in the lottery, but Samael decided who it was caused trouble—how many of those women, I suddenly wondered, had also turned his advances down? *He’d used the dragons to clear the village of women who might oppose him! He’d used the dragons to murder*. - -I looked again at the dragons around me. They were monstrous, yes. But they had not harmed me. - -How far could words bend dragons? Could I turn the dragons against him? Use them, the way he did? - -And if I did, wouldn’t that make me just as repulsive as he was? - -At that moment, the song stopped. The heads of all four dragons snapped around, their unblinking stares on the entrance of the cave. I saw nothing entering, nothing leaving. - -An angry sound uncoiled from the throat of the dragon nearest me. Each dragon vibrated with resentment, hatred, aimed at something out there. - -The one that had carried me stepped out of its nest, its long lumpy tail curled under its massive body. It limped toward me and extended a talon, palm up. Its growl turned into a whimper. It stepped closer, talon still proffered. - -The other three stood in their nests, still sounding their growls, now mixed with their own whimpers. They struggled toward the entrance of the cave, their muscles straining. What was going on? They didn’t want to leave, it seemed, but something pushed them out. The beasts who devoured my mother. The monsters who terrorized my village. - -If they left, I could escape. I could climb out of this cave. I could find my way home. - -But this one. It could just take me if it wanted. Instead, it begged, with whimpers and whines. - -The story I told made them love me. Was it that simple? I had changed them, wiped away some sludge and added some beauty? Could my words bend them to take me home again? - -My throat still burned, but the water had helped significantly. Maybe I could push out another sentence. Maybe two. And this one wouldn’t hurt me. It would protect me. - -I climbed into its claw. It cradled me and limped toward the cavern’s entrance, spread its four wings and leaped into the sky, a song with no resolution sounding from misshapen wings. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e flew through gray clouds once more. The mournful song of the dragon wings swathed me in melancholy. As the miles passed beneath us, and exhaustion grew, I drifted towards sleep. - -I woke as a growl again uncoiled from the dragon carrying me. The rhythm of the wingsong had changed: no longer soaring, their wings beat to hold the dragons in place. Four heads bent toward the earth. I saw nothing but the gray clouds. I cupped my hands over my mouth, trying to warm the air before I breathed it in. My throat still ached, but the fire seemed to have gone out. They held position for a few moments, and then plunged. Their mournful song became one long chord of desperation. - -The talon holding me tightened ever so slightly, keeping me secure. The wind pressed against my eyes as I strained to see where we were going. - -We broke through the clouds above a village, clustered against the shore. A meadow of bare rock, a huddle of stone shelters. A post. Someone tied to the post in a brown dress. - -Another sacrifice. Another woman torn apart, another village bard gloating as he got his way, one way or another. - -Hate smoldered in my heart. I could bend the dragons again. Just one sentence: *The dragons rammed into the ground at full speed*! I could slay the beasts with one sentence they would be gone forever, and me with them. - -*The* *Girl* *Who* *Conquered* *The* *Dragons*. - -Then my thoughts of grim heroism were extinguished. As we descended towards the rooftops, I found I recognised them. Even without an order from me, the dragons had returned to my home, and that could only mean one thing: Samael had commanded it. - -Another lottery, another victim. I had changed nothing. - -The wingsong ended. The dragons alighted onto the rocky ground, growling at the woman tied to the post. - -No. Not woman, *child*. - -Calla, my sister. - -I fought against the dragon’s grip and Calla’s eyes flared in sudden recognition, that huge dopey smile of hers spreading across her face. But behind me, Samael’s voice called out, “A sacrifice must be made! Alaina the troublemaker destroyed our chance for peace, and peace must be preserved! So the dragons returned to give the village a second chance!” - -Samael’s *lies*—the dragons had no interest in us, they were happy in their cave until Samael’s lottery called them to him. They didn’t want to be his slaves, they fought against his story. - -I had to tell another. - -“The dragons weren’t hungry!” I shouted. “They didn’t want another sacrifice!” - -Something gave in my throat, sharp and hard. I cried out, coughed, and tasted blood. - -But the dragon holding me began to purr. - -It set me down on the stony ground. I stumbled, a hand to my throat, and then rushed to the post, to Calla. Tears streamed down her face. “I knew you’d be back! I knew that the dragons didn’t eat you! Samael wouldn’t accept what I said. He told me to be quiet. But your heroes, Alaina! They always spoke up! And so did I!” - -I nodded, straining to release her wrists. Whoever tied her was not as kind as my father had been. I looked past Calla to where the villagers stood watching, mouths hanging open, Father among them—and Samael, staring at my sister and I in fury. - -“No! The sacrifice must be made or the dragons will attack us all!” Samael’s voice cut through the contented purring. “The dragons must take them both and leave us in peace!” - -The purring turned to growling. The dragons’ talons flexed, and they approached—resisting, like they had in the cave, my old story and Samael’s new one in conflict, but coming for us all the same. - -“I’ll stop them, Alaina!” And as I struggled with the knots, struggled with what to say that Samael couldn’t just unweave, Calla sang out. The same note I had sung. - -She completed the chord. - -The dragons stopped growling, stopped closing on us. They sat, listening. Samael shouted from behind, but they paid him no mind. - -Calla’s young lungs couldn’t hold enough air, her voice began to waver, and then Pendia was there, singing the same note. - -My girls, my sisters, the ones I taught and told stories to. They sang together, loud and true, so much more steady than my note had been. Pure as the clear water running through green sludge in the dragon’s cave. - -I stopped pulling at the knot. - -All I had to do was clear away the sludge. - -One last rasping breath. One last story. - -“The old stories were all wrong!” My voice came out raw, like an old woman’s. The pain shook me, my eyes burned. It didn’t matter. “But then a girl discovered the truth, and the dragons were restored to what they were before, never again to be bound!” - -Deep inside, my throat burst. I fell to the ground, clawing at my neck. I couldn’t breathe, blood dribbling through my lips, pooling on the stone, joining with the blood of so many women before me. - -I thought I’d escaped. I was wrong. - -I saw flashes of light at the edges of my vision, , and then the girls were there, lifting me up and pushing me down, and pleading and talking, and singing, there was so much singing, and voices, and I felt warm, and then— - -And then silence. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} heard my breathing. My heartbeat, too, but it was slow and calm. I opened my eyes. Four beautiful, gleaming faces looked down on me. - -“Alaina, singer, storyteller, troublemaker, rise.” The voice hid a smile. It was warm and feminine. - -I struggled to my feet. Calla and Pendia stood beside me on either side. We stared up at the gigantic, shimmering dragons. - -Their song wasn’t the only beautiful thing about them anymore. Their scales glowed gentle gold, wings folded gracefully at their sides. One bent her long neck to me. “You have restored us, you and the song you taught your friends.” - -The dragon glanced at Samael, who stood trembling nearby. “This one’s father trapped us in words, he and those like him, to strike at any they felt were dangerous. This one continued that crime. But now we are free.” - -Calla jumped up and down at my side. “It was your stories, Alaina! Your stories were right!” - -I looked down at her and tried to respond. No sound came. - -The last dragon bowed, sorrowful. “You gave all you had of your song and your story to us. We were able to save you from death, but we were not able to save your voice. Too much damage had already been done.” - -I looked up at the shining dragon. The one who had been forced to devour so many of us. Had been trapped. It wasn’t her fault. Samael, and his father before him. They were the ones. - -“We will take care of the bards. Our story will be as you told. No dragon will ever be bound again. And the next time we come, it will be as friends.” - -The dragons leapt into the air, the song of their perfect wings transformed from melancholy into a harmonious chorus, its glory spoiled only by Samael’s terrified screams as they carried him with them. - -It was over. No more sacrifices. No more terror. It was done. - -And so was I. That was my last story. I never spoke another word as long as I lived, and never sang again. - -But Calla and Pendia. Ah, they had learned from me. And now they can learn from the dragons themselves. They will be free to have their own stories to tell. - -Those are powerful things. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Troublemaker, Storyteller" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278301380757528).* diff --git a/content/issue-26/Voyager.md b/content/issue-26/Voyager.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6941e24b..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/Voyager.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,369 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Voyager" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Amanda C. Crowley -copyright: '© Amanda C. Crowley 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Our issue lead is a fine example of how short speculative fiction doesn't have to travel far to take us far away, and doesn't have to inject grand thrills and spills to keep a reader engaged if everyday characters prove to be quietly engrossing. Amanda Crowley's story doesn't try to hook the reader in with a killer opening line, it just builds and builds towards a simple, moving close. Sometimes we don't notice the powerful moments in life until they've already happened." - -image: images/Voyager.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [StockSnap](https://pixabay.com/photos/motel-sign-street-road-night-923495/) and [Pexals](https://pixabay.com/photos/star-trails-night-stars-rotation-1846734/)." - -type: stock -slug: voyager -weight: 1 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}N{{}}o one chose to end up at the Green River Inn. Most of the customers were drivers passing through, realizing too late that this was the last stop before a hundred miles of nothing. Others made a wrong turn forty miles ago, or got trapped when snow blocked the pass; some folks ran out of gas and then just stayed, sometimes for months. Dwayne, the manager, couldn’t stand the weeklies, but Chelsea thought that was bullshit. Their money was as good as anyone else’s, even if it was usually more work to extract it from them. - -As for Chelsea: the truck she’d hitched a ride in had dropped her here one frozen January afternoon, when it was too cold to stand out by the highway waiting for the next driver. She’d been on her way to Vegas, but after a few days the Green River had seemed as good a place as any to crash until the weather turned. Now, two years later, she worked the night shift. She still hadn’t unpacked, not really—every morning she woke up and intended to leave. - -Not that she had anywhere to go. - -At two a.m. on the last Tuesday in September, Chelsea took her smoke break in the parking lot, under the bright stars. Over the past six hundred nights she’d added dozens of constellations to her known universe, poring over the star maps that Dwayne kept in the office along with pamphlets for the local attractions: an illegal zoo called “George’s Tortoises”, and a mystery house, like there were any mysteries left in this sun-baked country. - -Behind her, a car pulled into the lot and she turned to look. A man about her age in a dark jacket climbed out of a subcompact so scratched and battered the moon didn’t shine off it. Utah plates, so he was probably local. Dwayne wouldn’t like that. - -She stubbed her cigarette out on the ground and made it to the office with just enough time to look settled behind the counter. The bell on the door chimed as the man entered. - -Under the fluorescent lights, she could see something was off about him. Chelsea had a pretty good eye for drunks and junkies, given how she’d grown up, and it wasn’t that, but there was something blurry about his features. Like they’d been smudged with an eraser. She blinked twice, thinking her eyes were out of focus, but it didn’t help. - -“Looking for a room?” she asked. The man twitched at the sound of her voice. “A room,” she said again, slower. His eyes got big. Maybe he didn’t speak English. “At this motel.” - -In the pause that followed, she swore she could see him trying to work out her intentions. Finally he said, “Yes. A room at this motel.” No accent. - -“Okay. Room’s forty dollars. Cash only and you have to leave a deposit. In case you, um.” She looked him up and down: the circles under his eyes, the deep pallor of his skin. “Party too hard. Trash the place.” - -She smiled to let him know she was joking, but he didn’t smile back, just slid a few crisp twenties across the desk. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}is car hadn’t moved by the time she went to start housekeeping rounds at noon the next day. Chelsea knocked on the door to his room, waited a beat, then entered. - -The man wasn’t inside, but there was trash everywhere. Stacks and stacks of papers, some of them torn from magazines and newspapers and books, others written or drawn on with pencil, marker… charcoal? She couldn’t tell if there was any order to it. - -She walked gingerly around the piles, straightened the sheets, fluffed the pillows. He’d taken down the painting on the wall: a Monet print, because Dwayne thought it looked classy. Chelsea found it shoved under the bed. Her room had the same print; she’d hidden it in the closet the day she moved in, and still hadn’t hung anything back up in its place. If she started hanging things on the walls, the Green River would start feeling less like an accident and more like a decision. - -The door clicked open. The man stood in the doorway, tall and broad enough in his unzipped jacket that he blocked most of the light. She imagined some people would feel a threat from his posture, his shadowed face, but those people hadn’t seen as much bullshit as Chelsea had. She didn’t flinch. - -“You should not be in here,” he said. - -“I’m cleaning,” she said. - -His footsteps were heavy, not muffled at all by the patchy gray carpet. He started piling up the loose papers in no obvious order, then shoving them into dresser drawers that squealed when he pulled them out. - -Chelsea stood there watching him, hands on her hips. “What are you doing?” - -“I think you are not supposed to ask questions like that,” he said, slamming another drawer shut, and normally she would have been offended, but she got a keen sense that he meant it—like he really was confused about what either of them ought to be doing, rather than suggesting that the maid shouldn’t have an opinion. - -One piece of paper slipped from his hands. A pencil drawing of something mechanical, maybe part of a computer or a car. In that brief glimpse she could see fine detail, tiny perfect lines, perfect circles. Smudges where the artist must have rested his palm. It was weird and beautiful, and it made Chelsea look at him a little more closely. - -“Who are you?” she asked. - -“A traveler. This is what people who stay at motels are.” It sounded more like a question than a statement. - -“Sure, while they’re here. But nobody stays at a motel forever.” A lie—lots of people did. But this guy was no drifter; he was clean, and the inside of his car was empty, whatever weird shit he had was piled up in the room. “What are you when you go home?” - -A shiver went through him like a lightning strike. His body shook and his hair stood on end, then settled back into place. “Home,” he echoed, and she felt it in her chest, his sharp regret for saying the word at all. He cocked his head and gazed straight at her, his eyes flashing silver from some unnoticed reflection, making their own light in the dim room. “What are *you* when you go home?” - -Like home was a given, a place you could return to or at least find on a map. This was the longest she’d lived anywhere, and she hadn’t even updated her driver’s license. - -“I don’t.” She moved toward the door, head down, and he got out of her way. - -“Don’t—” he paused, like he had to formulate the simplest question “—what?” - -She walked out into the parking lot and answered, mostly to herself, “Go home.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he man stayed. Every afternoon she’d come in to clean his room. He stopped leaving papers or anything else around; the room was so spotless she was in and out in five minutes. All she did was tug at the corners of the sheets and check the bathroom, which never looked like it had been used at all, the little toilet paper fold always in place on the roll. Half the time he stayed in the room, perched on the edge of the armchair while she worked. - -Every night, just after her desk shift started, he came in to pay for the next night. Always in crisp, perfect twenties that looked like they’d come straight from the mint, even though the only place to get cash around here was the ancient ATM in the lobby, and she knew it wasn’t dispensing bills that looked like that. One afternoon, while he was gone wherever he went to, she rifled lightly through his stuff, expecting to find his stash somewhere. But it seemed like the money just appeared whenever he needed it. - -On the sixth night she said, “You know, we have long-term rates. If you’re gonna be here a while.” - -As usual, it took him a moment to process what she’d said, like he was translating in his head. “Okay,” he said. - -“It’s two-forty for a week, if you’ll be here that long. Eight hundred for a month.” - -In the two years she’d been at the Green River, no one had ever paid for a month up front. Anybody who had eight hundred dollars in cash had somewhere better to be. But the man nodded and said, “Yes.” - -A few minutes later he returned with a thick stack of bills in his hand. Chelsea counted them, feeling conspicuous. She texted Dwayne: *Need to make a deposit ASAP*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}wayne himself came and found her cleaning the next day. - -“That guy in room eleven,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “I saw him messing with the ice machine yesterday. Trying to unplug it or something. You think he’s on the up and up?” - -Chelsea didn’t look up from the floor she was scrubbing. It looked like the last guests had tried to set fire to the linoleum. “He never uses the bathroom, and he had eight hundred bucks just lying around, ready to go. So… no.” - -“You think he’s like some kind of drug lord? Cartel guy? Maybe a hired gun.” Dwayne watched too much TV. - -“He might grow pot in his basement and sell it to college kids. He doesn’t look like a drug lord.” - -Dwayne shook his head solemnly. “They never do, Chels. They never do.” - -“Well, what do you want me to do? Call the cops?” - -He recoiled, like she knew he would. “No way. I just, you know. I’m speculating. You know I like to speculate.” - -She knew. - -“He’s a weird kind of handsome,” Dwayne added, and Chelsea knew what he meant—the man looked like one of those composite faces, technically correct but fuzzy around the edges. Not quite human. “You think he’d be interested?” He puffed up his chest and grinned at her, but she knew it was only half a joke. - -“We don’t sleep with the guests, Dwayne. That’s like, the first rule of business.” - -He gave her a mournful look. “I trained you up too good, Chels. Now you’re the one keeping me in line.” - -“Don’t forget it.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n his fifteenth night at the Green River, the man came out to join her while she smoked. Chelsea watched him zip his jacket as he crossed the parking lot. Fall was coming on: frost settled on the red dirt and the limbs of cacti, rendering the landscape moonlike, alien. - -“You do this a lot,” he said by way of introduction. - -“Every night,” she confirmed. It was one of the best things about her life here: the long, quiet nights, watching the stars rise and set. The world calm and soft. It was a peace she’d been surprised to find, something she hadn't known she needed. - -The man nodded. “I also stay awake.” - -Chelsea wondered when he slept. Maybe he was like her, even as a child she’d slept short and hard, waking after a few hours ready for the new day. It had made most of her legal and not-so-legal guardians crazy, but her mother had never minded. She would take Chelsea out to look at the stars in the middle of the night, giving them names and stories invented on the spot. More than once they fell asleep out there on the roof. - -The man watched her. After a moment he gestured toward her cigarette and she exhaled and offered it to him, a little spark lighting up when their fingers brushed. He took it and inhaled, then coughed violently. - -“Not a smoker?” she asked, grinning. - -“Maybe not. Do you like it?” - -Chelsea shrugged. It had never been a question of liking it, it was just something to keep her hands busy. “This stuff kills you, you know? Sometimes I think about quitting, but I guess I don’t see the point. The way things are.” - -“This planet is getting warmer,” he said, nodding sagely. - -*This* planet? she wondered, giving him a quick, sharp glance. “Warmer, or just worse. You don’t worry about that? You don’t think about all the fires and the storms? The fact it gets hotter and hotter out here every summer?” - -The man took a small step closer to her and said, “I think about it.” - -They stood together, looking up at the dark sky. She traced the constellations, reciting their names in her head. She’d learned Cassiopeia like other kids learned catechism. - -“What are you saying?” - -She looked at him, surprised. She was sure she hadn’t spoken out loud. “The stars. Their names.” - -“You have names for all of them?” - -“Of course not. There are billions of stars. More—an uncountable number.” - -“There is no such thing.” - -“It’s an expression. I just say the ones I know. The ones I see out here every night.” She pulled out her phone and loaded the app that gave her the positions of each planet, each star. It showed the Space Station shooting across the sky, impossibly fast. - -He looked it over and poked at the screen, pulling up information on each of the stars in turn. - -“Much of this is wrong,” he said. “This is not what these stars are called.” - -Chelsea laughed, and he startled at the sound. “All right,” she said, “let’s hear it. What are they actually called?” - -“Most do not have names that work in your language.” - -“Sure,” she said amicably. “I guess that’s why we have to make up other names for them, right?” - -“Your people’s capacity for both hearing and speaking is more limited than most,” he affirmed, and did he mean that like *you* *Americans*, or something more, like he was— - -Never, even as a little girl, had Chelsea been prone to imagination. When her first-grade teacher asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d said a nursing home aide, like her aunt, who watched her sometimes when her mother disappeared. The other kids, the aspiring soccer players and actors and rock stars—Chelsea didn’t know what had happened to them, but she doubted they’d gotten any luckier than she had. - -And so she did not, of course, believe that he was some kind of alien. It didn’t strike her as the kind of thing she’d be able to believe even if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to. It was just another in the long line of stupid things men had told her. - -“I am lonely sometimes,” he said after a while. As he spoke he continued staring up at the stars. - -Chelsea glanced over at him, her head still tilted back. “Me too.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen her shift ended at eight in the morning, she went back to her room. Sun streamed in through the window and gilded the bare walls, so she shut the blackout curtains—another of Dwayne’s ideas, but a good one—and passed out cold. - -For the first time in as long as she could remember, she dreamed: a capsule of metal and stone, dark skies, the stars spread at her feet. Earth in the distance, bright like it was lit from within, like it was a star, like it was aflame. She wheeled her arms uselessly, trying to get back home, and she woke with her lungs burning like she’d really been out in space, free-floating, hypoxic. - -Though she didn’t need to start on the rooms for an hour or two, her hands were restless, so she made her way down to room eleven. “What’s your name?” she asked as soon as he opened the door. He blinked at her. She tried again. “What are you called?” - -“Not something you can pronounce.” - -Sure. Why not? “Then what can I call you?” - -He thought about it. “Refrigerator.” - -She winced. “Yeah, I’m not going to call you that. How about Michael?” - -His eyes, owlish and strange. He looked less human every day. “Michael is fine.” - -“Do you want to let me in?” - -His shoulders hunched. “Why?” - -“I work here. Besides, it seems like you could use someone to talk to, and I—I’m bored.” - -His eyes flashed, and this time she couldn't pretend some reflection from outside had caught them.. “Lonely.” - -“I don’t know about where you’re from, but here on Earth those are usually the same thing.” - -With a white-knuckle grip on the handle, he opened the door just wide enough for her to enter. He hadn’t let her in to clean for a few days, and she saw why. With the tape he’d borrowed from the office (she *knew* she should’ve asked what he needed it for) he’d plastered charts and pages all over the walls. - -She saw now what he’d been making back on that first day. It didn’t make sense to her, but he’d managed to tape together all those scraps—torn-out magazine pages and the sports section of a Salt Lake City newspaper and bits of car manual—like puzzle pieces, so they formed an enormous diagram. Not that Chelsea could tell what it was supposed to be a diagram *of*. It didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before. - -“Is this where all the brochures went? Dwayne was *pissed* about that.” - -“Tell him I am sorry. I needed them.” - -“Oh, I’m not going to tell him anything. What *is* this?” - -The man—Michael—traced the outline of whatever it was. “I got lost,” he said. “A long time ago. I have been trying to get back, but it is difficult. I had to find all the pieces.” - -“Is that what all this is?” Chelsea looked at it again. The way he’d folded and cut so that everything fit perfectly together, how she could see each individual piece, but only if she really focused. She thought it was the best, weirdest art she’d ever seen. Way better than the Monet he’d shoved under the bed. - -“My… colleagues? Is that the word? They have been helping, but there are many rules, many restrictions. This is not a place where they can easily send messages.” - -“Yeah, the cell coverage is terrible out here.” - -“That is not the problem.” - -“Yeah, Michael. I know.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} few days later she found Dwayne cussing out the ice machine again. “Look at this shit,” he said, standing back from it with his arms crossed. - -He’d pulled it out from the wall. Somebody had taken the plastic back off the machine and torn up all the wiring inside. *Somebody*, she thought, but she had her suspicions. Dwayne did too. - -“This is your guy,” Dwayne accused. “Room Eleven. Ten and Twelve keep complaining about weird noises. Clanking and shit.” - -“He’s not my guy.” She didn’t address the clanking. She was sure it was true. - -“You’ve been hanging out with him,” Dwayne said. “You don’t hang out with people.” - -“I hang out with you,” Chelsea pointed out, which was true to the extent that sometimes their shifts overlapped. A couple times they’d traded hiking intel or shared a pizza. “Hey, do you ever think there’s something weird about him? Like maybe he’s not…” She hesitated. “From around here?” - -“Utah plates,” Dwayne said. - -Chelsea ground her heel into the pavement. “Yeah. Sure.” - -“Maybe he’s a fugitive or something,” Dwayne said. - -“Cops would’ve told us.” They’d had plenty of fugitives. Fugitives and drifters and weirdos, but she’d never felt any threat from Michael. He just seemed kind of lost, and Chelsea knew something about that. - -“You gotta get him in line, Chels,” Dwayne warned, before he walked off muttering, “The *ice* machine!” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}ichael started joining her for her smoke breaks every night. Most of the time they didn’t even talk. She’d share her cigarette with him for a breath or two, and then they’d look up together at the broad Utah sky. - -Sometimes she’d play music for him. Mostly hipster shit that sounded like aliens might like it, but she threw Beethoven’s Fifth on there to see if he’d heard it before. Her mother had been born the year the *Voyager* space probe launched, and she could’ve listed every song they’d sent into space. Her mother used to play them when she got high. “Music is the only language you’ll have in common,” she’d say, wispy and strung-out, and Chelsea almost wished they were still in touch, just so she could tell her mother she was wrong. - -Now, those smoke breaks were the only time she saw him. She’d stopped trying to clean his room—it clearly made him agitated, and he barely seemed biological at all, so there was never anything to clean. She was sure now that he didn’t sleep. The lights were on in the room all day and all night, brightness streaming out through the broken blinds and around the sides of the door. - -“You like it here,” he said one night, after a noise complaint had pushed him out to the parking lot. He seemed more anxious than usual. “At this motel. With your stars.” - -“There’s more of them here,” she agreed. - -“No, there are not—” - -“Not literally,” she cut him off, gently. Not that he seemed to notice if she was gentle or not. “They’re easier to see. It doesn’t get this dark other places.” - -In unison they leaned back against the side of his car, passing the cigarette and those weird static sparks back and forth. His hands shook and his foot tapped the cooling pavement; his strange eyes scanned the horizon, searching. She didn’t ask what for. - -“It’s quiet here, too,” she said after a while. “And it’s easy to live somewhere where everyone always leaves.” - -“Where do they go?” - -“Home, I guess. Or maybe just another motel.” Chelsea looked at him. “You will too. Leave, I mean.” - -Michael hummed low in his throat and seemed to settle. “And you?” - -She shrugged. “I keep meaning to. Not today.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}fter his paid month was up, Dwayne told Chelsea she had to ask Michael to leave. “Nobody stays here this long without a good reason. He’s not even one of those environment types. He’s not hiking or experimenting or none of it.” - -“He might be experimenting,” she mused. - -Dwayne narrowed his eyes. “Not like that. I meant, you know, wholesome experiments. Science experiments. You’re not *involved* with him, are you?” - -“I’m not even sure that’s an option. I don’t think he’d know what to do.” - -Dwayne snickered, but she hadn’t been joking. He never seemed all that comfortable in his body. Chelsea wouldn’t be surprised if he were missing out on some of the finer points. - -It didn’t take Dwayne long to get serious again. “Look, I warned you. It’s getting worse. The weird noises, stuff going missing. Room 6 caught him digging through the trash. And I still can’t get that damn ice machine to work. We get one more bad TripAdvisor review and it’s all over.” - -Dwayne never liked the weeklies. Never mind that they were half the customers, at least this time of year. She and Dwayne got paid either way. - -“He’s not a bad guy,” Chelsea said, though she felt like she should be able to offer up a stronger defense. - -Dwayne shrugged. “Whether he is or isn’t. He’s bad for business.” - -Chelsea said, “I’ll tell him.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t didn’t go well. Michael seemed affronted. “Was the payment insufficient?” - -“It’s not that. You’re just… you’re not our usual kind of guest is all. Dwayne doesn’t know what to make of you.” - -“He does not have to make anything of me.” - -“I’m not the boss. I’ll see if he’ll give you a few days.” - -Michael was bouncing on the balls of his feet, blocking the doorway again. His face flickered in the shadows, like an old TV with bad reception. He was disappearing, she thought. A little more every day. “I need a week,” he insisted. - -“If you need help finding another place to stay, I can call around. I know it feels real isolated here, but there’s other places nearby, you just have to know where to go. I can get you set up.” - -He shook his head. “I need to be here. This is where they will look for me.” - -“*Who*, Michael?” The question burst out of her. - -“I think,” he said slowly, “that you are not supposed to ask these kinds of questions.” - -But surely she was ready, now, for the answer? - -He looked down at the floor, then away to the horizon. Night fought the last trails of pink and gold down below the mountains, leaving both of them in the dark. - -“Where are you going to go?” she asked finally. - -“Where we are always going,” he said, and Chelsea had to blink to keep him in focus. “Where you are also going.” - -She snorted. “I’m not going anywhere.” - -He angled his head to look at her more closely. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps you are already here.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n his last day, Chelsea came by at the end of her shift to knock on his door. “Michael? It’s time. You’ve gotta go.” - -There wasn’t any response, and no light shining from under the door either. “Michael?” she tried again. Still nothing. When she turned, she saw the empty space where his car had been. - -She used her master key in the lock. The room was empty and perfectly clean, the Monet back in its place. There was no sign that anyone had occupied the room at all, not even a tissue in the garbage or a rumpled sheet corner. It was cleaner than she usually bothered to leave the rooms between guests. - -Walking the room, she pressed her hand to each corner of the desk, the side of the television, the top of the mattress. Even without him there was some kind of energy in the room, in every object. She felt it in her palms, that little frisson of electricity. - -“Where’d you go,” she said out loud, then sighed. - -It was not possible to miss him. She didn’t know anything about him, or he about her. They had no special connection. He was just another guest who came and then left. *Went home*, she thought. - -But he’d stood next to her out in the dark, and she hadn’t minded the company. - -Even though the room was spotless she dragged the vacuum cleaner in, just to make a show of things for Dwayne. It didn’t pick any dirt up, but it did catch on a single piece of paper under the bed. She recognized it as part of his massive diagram: not one of the news clippings, but part of a star map. He’d printed it off on the computer in the lobby, used a whole thing of toner that Dwayne had insisted he pay for. - -On it, one star was circled. Chelsea pulled out her phone and looked it up. HX-5709, apparently. That’s what they called it on Earth. - -She wondered what its real name was. She wondered what his real name was. For one moment, holding that piece of paper, she let herself believe that all of it was possible. That all of it was real. - -After the rooms were clean, she snuck past Dwayne in the office and stole a thumbtack from the desk. Back in her room she studied the bare walls, looking for the spot where the Monet had once hung. She pinned the star up in its place. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Voyager" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278311337423199).* diff --git a/content/issue-26/WhatComesAfterWinter.md b/content/issue-26/WhatComesAfterWinter.md deleted file mode 100644 index daba864c..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/WhatComesAfterWinter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,125 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "What Comes After Winter" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Kurt Hunt -copyright: '© Kurt Hunt 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As promised, here we have a counterpart to the chirpy sf puh-pocalypse of 'Freewheeling'. Via another hard-working protagonist, Kurt Hunt's flash fantasy glimpses a moment of cultural and environmental transition that threatens to overturn an entire way of life. An ecological reckoning now seems an inevitable part of all our futures; maybe the extremes the real world will experience are not the same as these, but one way or another they will have to be accepted. Can we too find some positives in what lies ahead?" - -image: images/AfterWinter.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Curioso Photography](https://www.pexels.com/photo/scenic-view-of-snowy-mountainous-terrain-288097/), [Bessi](https://pixabay.com/photos/flower-white-beautiful-beauty-729513/), and [JillWellington](https://pixabay.com/photos/snowflakes-snow-bokeh-winter-1236247/)." - -type: stock -slug: what-comes-after-winter -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}G{{}}randpa’s house groans as it melts. - -Been ten days since we iced it. The dragablocks that make up its walls are turning pink from the blood leaking out—the only color for miles—and I can smell the rotting meat from here. I guess we left it a little too long, but ice is getting expensive. They say they have to *make* it now, in these huge machines in Kuhlsk. They send it by train. - -If Dad would let me get a job—maybe even move to Kohlsk like my friend Tri, work in the Greenhouse District and learn how to grow food—I could send money back and get the hell out of here. If— - -…whatever. Probably best not to think about it. Maybe someday I’ll have a life that doesn’t involve hauling ice. Until then… - -I hook the next ice block and pull, but the goddamn iceman stacked them crooked. Halfway out, it catches against the corner of the freezer and damn near pulls my arm out of its socket. - -It’s the size of a mattress and heavy as hell. Too big for one guy to move safely. But Dad’s up at the house, trying to keep it cool until night crawls its way across the hill. So I’m in the barn alone with an icebox the size of a fucking airplane, a sledge with two broken slats, and an icehook made from an old curtain rod. - -I slap my hands against my legs to warm them. - -One more good pull. - -Something in my back wrenches too far to the side, but the block loosens its grip. The thing almost takes my leg off when it hits the sledge, but, mercifully, it misses me and doesn’t break except a chip or two. - -Breathing this hard hurts in the cold. I sit—not being lazy, just clearing the jitters—and immediately Dad’s voice carries down: “Ozzie! Now, goddamnit! Move faster!” - -Ever since the thaw, those are his favorite kinds of words: *fast, faster, now*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he thaw started five years ago, two days after grandma died and one day after we burned her at the top of the hill. I was twelve. Felt like the whole world died with her. - -At first it was just strange, so much sun. Little beads of water everywhere. But then it got worse and everything became about saving what we had. - -I remember before. - -I used to lay in bed, warm with grandma’s tea, and listen to the ice sheets nudge and root into the ground. A slow grind—not the panicky crackling the house makes now, like its dragablocks remember what it’s like to run free across the plateau and are trying to come back to life. - -It’s weird when I think about it, but I guess it made sense at the time. Hardly any trees; ground too frozen to dig out rock easily. So we hunted the draga. Pressed them into molds before the cold crept into them. Fat and fur kept the dragablocks frozen inside even when our house got cozy warm. - -The whole town’s built like that. Little clusters of buildings, grey-furred, white-capped. Everything the same, forever. - -Until. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}ven with the pulleys, the sledge about kills me getting it up the yard. - -Grandpa and Mom are on the roof, faces masked against the smell, and pulling bloody dragablocks to the ground with soft curses. Dad just waits for me, face shining with sweat. “We lost the storeroom,” he mutters, yanking the hook from my hand and pointing it at an oozing pile of blocks. “Goddamn sun better get to setting.” - -This close, the smell of rot is overwhelming. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“N{{}}ever.” Dad’s face had gone red. He’d twisted toward me, hand half-raised. - -I’d just turned fifteen, and for the first time in my life wondered if he might hit me. I watched that hand for a moment and shut my mouth. - -The question seemed obvious to me: “When do you think we’ll have to leave?” The stink of thawed draga hovered over roads muddy with bloody runoff. Part of the slumping municipal center had collapsed the week before. Buried the mayor for half a day. Being trapped like that was the worst thing I could imagine. - -But Dad just didn’t see it. To him, the thaw was just a temporary obstacle. “Gotta stick it out,” he always said. - -May as well tell a drowning man, *don't be hasty, just see what happens*. - -I thought of the mayor and shuddered. Everyone my age, we could already see what happens. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} help get the ice against the walls and tie it down. But even the blocks we’re saving droop. Dad keeps crying. I pretend not to notice. It’s common now, and I guess I don’t know how to respond. - -It’s almost night when we’re done. - -“Gonna make some tea,” Dad says. “You coming?” - -“Nah,” I say. All I can think about is the draga—bodies now, instead of blocks. I don’t know if I can sleep surrounded by that. “Going for a walk.” - -He grunts, glances at the sunset. “Don’t be long.” - -I turn my back to the buildings, and for the first time in weeks hike up the hill that runs along the east side of town like a barrow. The air up there comes clean across miles of unbroken lowlands. I jog a little, I’m so excited thinking about it. - -It’s a bit of a scramble. I need the icehook to climb the trickier parts. - -When I reach the top, back and arms burning with the effort, I find more than fresh air. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} find bits of color bursting through shadows in the snow. Tangles of lichen, red and blue and orange, coat every outcropping like hoarfrost from here to the horizon. More color than I’ve ever seen in a world of snow and sleeting skies and the blood-froth of draga culls. Green shoots uncurl, tentative and fragile, and in them I see the stirring of things only read about, or dreamed: wildflowers, forests, crops. - -All I can do is sit and stare and maybe cry a little at how beautiful it all is. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} jump up. *Shit*. Lost track of time. After dark it’s killing cold, every kid knows that. - -But it’s almost dark now, and I’m still moving. Still warm. - -Everything I’ve ever learned tells me to run. I can practically hear my dad: *fast! faster!* But I take a deep breath and manage to get calm, there, alone for the first time in the dark. - -Never knew there’s so many stars. - -A new smell whips across the hill from the cracking ice plains. - -The town behind me sags and stinks, no matter how much ice we throw at it. But out there, something grows. - -I breathe deep and let it fill me. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "What Comes After Winter" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278304017423931).* - diff --git a/content/issue-26/Zamalek.md b/content/issue-26/Zamalek.md deleted file mode 100644 index 99ef3e53..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/Zamalek.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,312 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Zamalek, by the Evening Light" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Mike Adamson -copyright: '© Mike Adamson 2021 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Across the long history of storytelling there recur classic themes — rags-to-riches, star-crossed lovers, revenger's tragedies — and, of course, perhaps the most intriguing, those that make us all wonder what we would do: stories of temptation. In style and setting Mike Adamson echoes such famous examples as Aladdin, but that tale takes place at the start of an event-filled life. This begins at the end of one." - -image: images/Zamalek.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [NGDPhotoworks](https://pixabay.com/photos/mosque-sultanahmet-istanbul-turkey-636023/) and [RitaE](https://pixabay.com/photos/background-panorama-sunset-dawn-3104413/)." - -type: stock -slug: zamalek-by-the-evening-light -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}D{{}}ay follows night as offspring follows parent, and the wheel of life forever turns. As the child is the spring of the year, so adulthood ages through summer to autumn, and although the cyclical nature of existence is itself a comfort, there is little succour in the approach of winter, as well I should know. For I, Thurar Tornin, prince among merchants, have returned at last to fabled Zamalek, to die. - -The river Aklamanes meandered from the north, a wide, cool flood rich with fertile silt, rolling majestically by the great city at its confluence with the lesser but still great river Khandamos. These passages across the land feed the kingdom in body, spirit, and purse. The ships from Gormoth came down the Aklamanes bearing the goods of empire, holds groaning with silk, spice, ivory and amber, jet and jade, with rugs and ironware, bronze and gold; and, on that fated day, the retinue of the House of Tornin, late of the bazaars of Gormoth. For this would be my last trading voyage, I knew. A time comes upon a man when he sees not tomorrow, dwells long upon the past, spends his days recalling those who have preceded him to the tomb, and arranging his affairs for those who remain. - -Yet, for all the solemnity of the moment, or perhaps because of it, homecoming had never seemed grander. I reclined upon cushions on the deck beneath an awning of wind-troubled canvas, a horse-hair switch in hand to waft away flies as my age-faded gaze strove for a first glimpse of home. Green forest and hard, dun earth crowded upon the languid waterway, villages drowsed in the heat like beads upon a thread, and we saw tough, brown farmers driving oxen at the plough in wide fields beside the waters, for this was the grain-basket of the world. My retainers hovered close; my son, Sertes, himself mature of stature and strength, who would replace me as head of our concern, sat in a pose of meditation, feigning disinterest, though I knew he was troubled, grieving that our travels were over. To him, the first sight of wondrous towers would be as bitter as to me a sweet fulfilment: for I had half-expected to die upon this river, while he knew I would never again take ship. - -One moment the horizon seemed as far and empty as ever in this wide, scorched land, the next the heat haze gave up its hidden mirages, and the city emerged from the distance, tower by dome, by spire and cupola, by wall, block and promenade. Not for nothing did those versed in the nature of the world hail this land a miracle, and Zamalek, by the Aklafanes, a jewel of creation. For truly were its architects workers of magic, rearing in stone the places of all human endeavor. By bridge and arch, column and pier, grand streets lined with palms, towering statues of granite and marble to the mighty of old, did Zamalek thrum to the music of life. - -Soon we moved among the river traffic, were hailed by fishermen and porters, and the flotilla came about for the commercial docks to the cheers and fanfares of the workmen. Sails were lowered and oars propelled the galleys to contact with the long stone quays, and the roar of the city met ears long attuned to the silence of the wild. - -I had always found it intoxicating—the rush of voices, the press of bodies, color, light and sound, snatches of music, the bray of donkey and elephant—a city’s assault upon the senses. Yet it was bittersweet, for I felt with a certainty beyond any tangible perception that this would be the last time I savored such a moment, and when my son saw me ashore to a waiting palanquin, I hid tears—regret for all that now left me behind, yet relief I might end my days with dignity, the proper way for a nobleman of the grandest of all lands. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Z{{}}amalek is called many things: the Flower of the Desert, the Meeting of the Waters, She Who is Touched by the Gods. Yet my favorite has always been simply City of the Evening, for nothing is more true. When the harsh white sun leaves the land, and all may sigh as a cool breeze ruffles the trees, then does the city come to life, the markets throng with shoppers, music lilts from wineshops and the grand houses of the wealthy; and the gardens by the river bloom in moonlight with intense drafts of jasmine. To smell the perfume upon the evening air is to know one is home, and I was thus gifted that evening. - -My dear wife and children awaited me in our mansion on the Hill of Temnos, high above the din of the city. Our procession wound up the tree-lined road as dusk thickened, and greetings were made in the great courtyard. I was so glad to be home. I held my family close and saw behind their smiles they sensed we were nearing the parting of our ways. A feast had been prepared to celebrate our safe return, at which I took the head of a grand table, sipped sparingly a goblet of mineral water spiced with lime and managed hardly a morsel, for appetite had deserted me. I longed to enjoy food as others did, but knew those times were gone. Something deep within told me I had but a few days. Not that I was sick in heart, body or soul, but the end comes nevertheless, and three-score and sixteen is old indeed in our world. - -Forced gaiety is a bitter thing, but expected, as much as the sickly-sweet speeches from the Merchants’ Guild, the Rivermen’s Guild and others, even a note from the palace. His Majesty King Theyestes was paternally glad to welcome home one of Zamalek’s most-respected sons, and tactful enough to say no more. I watched jugglers and acrobats, dancers and fire-twirlers, musicians lilted softly from behind silk curtains. Food and wine flowed as if tomorrow would never come. - -Tired in my soul, I eventually excused myself and was helped by an old retainer to an upstairs balcony, where I could look out over the lights of the city, breathe the perfumed air of the gardens, and relish these simple joys. When Cassira, my dear wife, joined me, we stood with arms entwined, and lay our temples together. If we could have lived forever in that moment, we would have had all the paradise we could ever use. - -Filos, the gray, erect head of our household staff, coughed softly. “A visitor to pay his respects, master. Not a guest, the gentleman arrived earlier and has been waiting. He gave the name of Sinufre.” - -I blinked, smothered a flash of anger for our moment to have been cut short. “The name is unknown to me.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry he had a wasted journey, but… I’m tired. Tell him to return tomorrow, and I will see him with the petitioners and agents.” - -When Filos had withdrawn, Cassira inclined her now-silver mane after him. “Whatever would prompt one to seek an audience at this hour?” - -I could but spread my hands in perplexity, but a strange shadow had come over me at the sound of his name, for though I knew him not, something in his coming struck a chord in my soul. *Let me die in peace*, part of me cried out, while another was at once anxious for my family, who would inherit any troubles he brought in his wake. - -I should have slept as if already in my tomb, but when Cassira and I reclined upon cool silk I long lay awake as stars turned in the purple night sky and a pageant of my life streamed before my eyes—only to end, symbolically, strangely, with the arrival of this visitor. - -Perhaps, I wondered, the affairs of life were not yet quite done. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}ack of sleep may have done me harm, for the next day I felt mortality keenly, as if the funerary shroud were already chill upon my shoulders. I rose late, was bathed by silent servants, and managed a breakfast of grainmeal porridge, easy on old teeth that ached. I spent time with my family before dressing in fine robes for my meetings. Business must be concluded, and an endless stream of visitors was admitted to my study, where my chief of staff assisted. Other merchants, debtors and creditors—tradesmen I had commissioned, artists and scribes, messengers, clerks, agents for this concern or that, bills to be settled, payments incoming. I felt like a secretary, and understood how His Majesty felt when dealing with the business of state, day after day. - -By late afternoon I was tired, and rested for a while, a servant fanning me softly with wide palm fronds as I sipped fruit juice. Filos let me be for a time, and when he returned I asked how many remained to be seen. “Only Sinufre,” he said softly, “the gentleman who visited last night.” - -At once my blood seemed to go cold, and I pulled myself together with momentary effort. “Very well. I’ll see him, then I must rest before…” I trailed off, trying to find words. I was still mulling on my own misgivings when Filos admitted the figure, and I sat back with an abrupt sense of something strange. - -Sinufre was tall, a thinnish, very erect man, dressed in robes of expensive flax died jewel greens and worked with thread of gold, and his sandals were the finest. A face of gaunt aspect was framed by dark hair tied at the nape, and a faintly sinister air surrounded him, but he smiled pleasantly enough and bowed. I politely offered him a seat and eased my position, to take in his strange, dark, gleaming eyes. - -“Master Tornin,” he began, his voice deep and even, and infinitely controled. “All Zamalek bids you welcome, and rejoices in your safe return.” He dipped his head again. “I wished to pay my respects, while the opportunity existed.” - -“Have we met, sirrah?” I asked, at a loss to recall him. - -“Once, long years ago, at a palace reception.” He smiled. “You would not remember.” - -“And what is it I can do for you?” - -“It’s more in the nature of what *I* can do for *you.*” He let that hang for a long moment, long enough to become uncomfortable, then overthrew all social propriety by speaking more frankly than any but close family ought to. “Come now, Master Tornin. It is clear to all, especially those who speak it not: you are not long for this world. Only by the grace of the gods did you accomplish your final journey, for the house of Tornin, and for great Zamalek.” - -“Must these things be spoken of?” I said, bridling. Filos had not moved to intervene, though he stood like a statue, poised to escort the visitor hence. “They are most personal, and though I have long considered the ends I face, my philosophic musings are my own business.” - -Sinufre seemed barely reproached, but continued in his deep, smooth way, smiling still, unblinking eyes holding mine. “It is the way of life and gods, to be sure. Priests have their say, and the wise men of the wastelands, and wisdom comes from afar to the markets of the city as surely as dates and plantains. But the end remains the end.” He raised a finger. “Or does it?” - -I blinked. “Whatever are you referring to?” - -“Why, to your *options*. Surely you have, in your travels, encountered the writings of the sage Merioneth? His tracts describe the ancient lore of distant lands, the strange gods that abideth therin, the learnings of scholars long dead, and the ways of peoples for whom the impossible was mundane. And death not an absolute.” - -I sat forward, brow drawn into a hard line. My voice had something of its old strength when I spoke. “What are you selling?” - -He spread his hands. “Nothing. I come to draw your attention to the possibilities. Zamalek can ill afford to lose the experience, the judgement you represent. And one of your resources would be amiss not to consider, even for a moment, the notion of averting all that nature would visit upon you.” - -“Nature and the gods ordain what shall be,” I said flatly. “For all the tales of those who may transcend the boundary between the mortal and the divine, at the end of the day the adult must accept that they are just that—tales—and prepare for the afterlife, however they may.” I rose with some effort. “You speak of my experience. Well, my experience tells me this. It is a mistake to play one who plays. I am a merchant, sirrah, I was selling oranges in the street when I was five. I can smell my own kind from across a room. And you, sirrah, are a merchant. I’m not sure what you are peddling, but I am not a mark in play, and you… are leaving. Right now.” - -The silence held a few seconds, then he rose gracefully to his imposing height and bowed, his smile never shifting. “As you wish, Master Tornin. It is not my intention to distress. I ask only that you consider what I have said. If you wish to find me, ask for me on the Street of the Mendicants. The name of Sinufre is well known there.” - -Filos escorted him out, and I sank back into my seat, stroked my beard and shook my head. To be offered some quack notion of ancient lore was an insult, making a mockery of my laborious preparations for the inevitable, and I vowed not to consider for a moment such nonsense. - -It was a vow I found myself unable to keep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}*erioneth*. - -The name drifted at the back of my mind all evening as I managed a light supper with my family, listened to the stories of great-grand children, and heard news of the city. But before retiring, I found my thoughts turning in ways that made my heart race painfully, for my strange visitor was correct: I *had* heard the name. - -Filos helped me to the library, lit lamps and fetched the scrolls I needed, then left me to read. I unrolled *The History of the Sunward Kingdoms*, a work of some weight by a priest of the Royal Temple, hundreds of years ago, and I scanned the vertical rows of characters for the name. I was sure I had seen it before, and that some mention of the matters of which Sinufre spoke were found right here. - -I was nodding off when my eyes drifted over the appropriate text, and recognition jerked me awake. Abruptly I was fully aware, and hungrily re-read the passage. - - - -*Let the seeker traveling eastward be aware that in the lands of the Jarmu people may be found wonders of many sorts. Here are rich mines providing gold of surpassing quality, and healers extract rare and potent medicines from roots, flowers, tubers and bark, and from the venom of the cobra. But, according to the journals of Merioneth, the Jarmu physicians derived the very emperor of all medicaments from the petals, pollen and nectar of the striding orchid, a flower which blooms only by moonlight once in ten years. Rare is this potion, and of powerful efficaciousness, sworn and attested by scholars to return youth to the old and life to the lifeless. Verily, it is the stuff of all life, and suitably rare, for, if all men could obtain it, chaos would surely reign.* - - - -I read it through again, then slowly rolled the parchment. Now my heart raced for different reasons. In all my years, all my travels, I had never placed much stock in tales of old, though I could recite a hundred from memory. Now, as I considered this strange and shadowy notion, I recalled seeing things which defied explanation—the shaman who rode the back of eagles in spirit to see where his eyes could not reach; the temple girl who danced among a dozen swaying cobras and called them her friends; the man who walked beyond the world’s edge in dream and told unerringly of lands yet to be crossed… If such as these earned my tacit belief, why not the distillate of a legendary orchid? - -I lay down with Cassira by the glow of a taper and listened to the wind over the eternal city, with much to muse upon. I knew my first order to Filos in the morning would be to send a messenger to the Street of the Mendicants. I wanted to interview Sinufre again—this time with my eyes fully open. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he grooms’ shed by the stables was cool in the morning air, sunlight shafted in from an open door and I sat at a table brought in for the occasion. Upon it a cloth concealed important words, and I sipped a goblet of juice as I waited for the party to make their way up the long hill road. At last, shadows moved against the daylight, and four grooms brought Sinufre to my presence. Filos and mighty Karamos, my mute bodyguard, waited in the shadows, and I dismissed the grooms with a nod of thanks. - -Sinufre spread his hands, his manner as smoothly imperturbable as ever. “Master Tornin. A simple request would have more than sufficed to bring me to your side.” He made a small bow of respect. He knew, I could tell, I was playing his game, but saw no move to take the initiative. - -I drew away the cloth to reveal the scroll, open to the passage in question. He bent to it, took his weight on his knuckles and squinted in the soft light, then nodded. “I knew one of your stature would be learned in these matters.” - -“I have found a corroborating reference. This does not make me *learned*,” I said, softly but firmly. “This… potion. Derived from the orchid…” - -“The ‘Tincture of Jarmu’ was how Merioneth termed it, though it has many names in history and legend alike.” - -My face was hard, a mask of sun-wrinkles framed in retreating silver, and my manner brooked no nonsense. “Can it be had?” - -Now Sinufre leaned forward a little to emphasize his point, speaking very softly. “A supply exists in Zamalek at this time.” He straightened, and his eyes went pointedly to my retainers. - -“I trust Filos and Karamos implicitly. I will keep nothing from my valet, and my bodyguard cannot repeat what his ears perceive.” - -“Very well.” The smile lingered a moment more, than faded. “As I said last night, Zamalek needs its finest scions. Your career has been more than one of private business, it has been a model of judicious decision-making, of building for the future, and doing so with scrupulous care. Master Tornin, you are well known as a man of fairness, such that many lament you did not choose the magistrate’s calling, or that of king’s counsellor, for much good could you have achieved. I am saying to you that those options still exist.” - -“You would have me use this rare potion to win back the vitality of younger days? And then use those days to benefit Zamalek?” - -The dark head inclined. “Just so. Numberless people of inferior sort pretend to public office every day, bringing with them incompetence and corruption. It seems cosmically unjust that one of your capabilities should be lost due merely to the caprice of time.” - -I smiled with a cynical shrug. “None returns from the dead.” - -“I never said you should.” - -“Explain.” - -“Let it be seen that you go into your fine tomb, and the public order shall be preserved. Then take a fresh name, to suit a fresh face.” - -“Intrigue follows upon the heels of ambition,” I whispered, not liking the complexity. “And still I find it difficult to conceive of. You ask a great service of one ready to set down life’s burden—indeed, that I should take it up afresh—and I have little more than your word to go upon.” - -“You suspect me of deceit?” - -“I would be a fool to dismiss the possibility!” I slapped a hand flat to the table. “Proof, sirrah. I would have you present to me a man who has taken this potion and seen the good of it.” - -For a long moment, we heard only birds singing in the trees by the stables, then Sinufre gave a low laugh. “Master Tornin, he stands before you.” - -I scoffed, throwing up my hands. “I expected no less! Sirrah, you are a charlatan! A worker of confidences!” - -He was unimpressed. “How old would you say I am?” - -His manner gave me pause. “Thirty summers, a little more…” - -“I am older than you.” - -Again my impulse was to scoff, but the calm directness of his gaze, the assurance of his demeanor, undermined my certainty. - -“Ask me anything you will,” he said, “memories of your own youth surely long before I was born—ask me and I will tell you as if those days were but yesterday, for to me they are.” He raised a finger. “Not the histories, those are a matter of record. But the small things of life which scribes have yet to see fit to write of.” - -The proposal was a fair one. I thought back, fought for composure, sure he was reading me like an open scroll. At once I entertained the notion he *may* be my senior, his self-assurance was a palpable force, surely learned only by long experience. I thought for a long moment. “Tell me of the year of the great storm.” - -He squinted, knuckles on hips as he recalled the facts. “It was the fourth year of the reign of King Vormann III. The storm came up from the southern sea with a voice of gods, an angry wave pressed up the Aklamanes and sank ships at their moors. But you don’t want the broad strokes, you want how it *felt.”* - -He smiled, closed his eyes and began. “I was a dock worker, so I was face-to-face with the tempest as it broke. I remember the darkness as the storm built out of the south, a blue-black wall of clouds that seemed it would reach to heaven, then a wind that cut like a knife, and a building rumble as of thunder without pause.” He breathed deeply, seeming to sort through long-stored memories. “I recall a tearing sound, as the wind lifted tiles from roofs, then the great noise of them shattering in the streets. You remember that, don’t you, Master? You would have been but a young child, but that sound must be engraved upon your mind. Ripping, tearing, than smashing, over and over as the storm mounted higher.” - -My blood ran cold, for he was correct, I did remember it, a sound this city had never heard again in seven decades. - -“And the smell—the great wash of the river that flooded the waterfront streets sent scum and mud a dozen ship-lengths into the city. And the stench of the fires that burned for days afterward to dispose of the bodies of drowned oxen and donkeys that drifted, bloated in death, upon the fouled waters. Sickening, was it not? And sickening to recall. I had abscesses from the illness that followed, when the streets dried out and smelled bad. Did you?” - -My heart raced uncertainly as I was carried back to those terrible days, memories that had dulled with the ages refreshed by his measured words. “No, I was lucky. But I remember how my mother suffered…” I blinked. “Go on.” - -“The storm raged for three days before we saw the sun again. There was great loss of life. Do you remember the funerary barges, taking the shrouded dead to the necropolis? Surely your family watched them upon the river? The way the keening of the women echoed back and forth between the towers—another sound unheard in this city since that day. And when the waters drained away and rebuilding began, how the workers sang…” He closed his eyes and made the memory come. - -“*Hail to Shastromo, bringer of storms, fear his tread, fear his breath,* - -“*Hail to Mirkaan, sweet winds of autumn, for they turn back the heat.* - -“*Hail to His Majesty, whose just hand shall provide,* - -“*Hail to the city that shall never fall, hail unto Zamalek, to Zamalek hail!”* - -Against my better judgement, I gestured for more. With gentle patience, Sinufre cast his mind back and found a morsel that would bear meaning for me. - -“There was starvation in the week after the storm. The royal granary was opened to the people. His Majesty made a gift to every citizen. This much is a matter of record, but I recall one item which was added at the last moment. I was with the many gangs of men recruited to distribute the food, and something extra to the manifests arrived, especially from the King. Wagon loads of sugar cane, a piece for every child in the city. We passed it out from great baskets.” - -The dam broke, my head went forward on my breast and the tears came. “I remember,” was all I could whisper, over and over, and there was silence as Filos fetched me water. - -The years had rolled away, and I found I was striving to recall if the man before me had been among the legions who toiled to repair, rebuild and provision. But how can anyone recall such a detail over seventy years? I now admitted to myself he had convinced me with the sound of the breaking tiles, and although a shred of doubt lingered, as it should in the heart of any rational person, I was willing to discuss the issue on a new footing. - -I gestured and Karamos brought a chair forward for my visitor. He sank into it with grace and allowed me the time I needed. At last I dried my eyes with the sleeve of my robe and raked hands through hair. “Very well, *Master* Sinufre. You convince me well enough for the moment. How old *are* you?” - -“Ninety-one.” He smiled. “I tasted of the Tincture of Jarmu at age sixty-two, my prime was restored within a year, and I have not aged from that day forth.” - -I eyed him for a long moment, knowing that if I was being played this was a crucial moment. “And how did you come by it?” - -He hesitated a moment. “I was approached. As you have been. Remember, as the decades go by, the circumstances of supply shift and change.” - -I sat back, swirled the water in my goblet, sipped, held my silence. He knew I was interested, but altogether too much reading was taking place. - -“Very well,” I said, “let us speak plainly. I’m interested, of course I am. I no more wish to die than the next man, and if a practical and wholesome alternative exists, let us discuss it. I accept that a duty attaches, that if I can avoid the tomb then my days belong to Zamalek, in whatever service I may render.” I laughed, a rasp in my ancient throat. “It may surprise you, but after a lifetime as a merchant I am ready for a change.” - -I held his eyes with my most direct gaze, eyes hard beneath my straggling, silver brows. “So tell me, Master Sinufre… What’s the catch?” - -Silence again, Filos and Karamos standing like statues, witness to a conversation they would never have imagined possible. Sinufre shifted in his seat, clearly taking effort to reach his point. “As I said last night, I am selling nothing. I bring this information to you as a service. However, the intentions of the owner of the potion are a very different matter.” - -I rolled my eyes. “And so we come to it. The price?” - -He rubbed his hands together, inspecting them distantly, before musingly voicing the quote. “One thousand full-measures of gold.” - -I almost laughed. “A thousand measures? A *thousand* measures? Clearly this seller is ambitious, and all luck to him, though I hesitate to call such a grubby transaction ‘business’.” I shook my head sadly. “You offer me life everlasting with one hand, and poverty with the other. Not just my poverty, but my family’s, all who depend upon me and the business I have built.” - -“A price is a price,” Sinufre said with a shrug. - -“And all prices are fluid until a bargain is struck. Show me this seller and let us haggle like the merchants we are.” - -But the tall man shook his head slowly. “The seller is not interested in haggling. This is not some corner bazaar, the goods not a brass tray or rush-mat. The object for the buyer is life everlasting, that of the seller vast wealth in the here and now. One is the means to the other, and many would agree their value is commensurate.” - -“Who is this seller? How did *he* come by the potion?” - -Now Sinufre spread his large hands. “You may seek eastward to Jarmu, of course, track down the orchid in question, search out the secret laboratories where the arcane processing is done, find those who control the supply in the first place. But, I promise you, such a course would take years, for these are people who do not wish to be found.” His smile was thin as that of a death’s head. “And, if you will forgive me the indelicacy, you do not have time.” - -He had me. I felt mortality snapping at my heels in that moment as clearly as I had for weeks, months, knew I may fail to wake any morning. Tomorrow? Was it that close? - -But a thousand full-measures… How could I? - -Birds sang in the trees for a long while to punctuate our thoughts, then I rose with all the dignity I could muster. My voice was like gravel, hard, deep, filled with a dozen conflicting emotions. “Return this evening, Master Sinufre. You will have my answer.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} rested in the garden beneath a spreading tree, my fly-switch in hand, and brooded. I was propped against cushions on a couch of dried cane, a brass tray at my side bore dates and banana-wine, and the afternoon was quiet as the city took its nap. White clouds in the hard blue sky went silently by, like the moments of life, and I warred with myself, unable to rest—afraid to sleep lest nature choose this moment to snatch me away. Away from all I knew and loved, all I had built, my wife, family and pets, my friends of old, my retainers. - -My treasure? - -In this moment my wealth seemed the least concern, for the comfort and security that wealth enabled were far more important. I had more than a thousand measures of gold at my disposal, but to mobilize such a sum in the bar-ingot of the realm was another matter. - -I went over my assets again and again, but no matter how I arranged affairs, the outcome was the same—my trading dynasty would be at an end, and all who gave fealty to me would be reduced, if not to destitution then to very modest standing. I would be compelled to sell this very mansion, our ships and livestock, and send away those in our employ. And at the end of the day, all there would be to show for it was my own continuance. Not that of Cassira, nor any other dear to me. - -Long had I considered the spiritual texts. When one feels the touch of death close by, one naturally takes interest in such things, for souls need at least some preparation for their passing. I had read of the afterlife, considered all I may say before the judges of the dead, and was as content as one might be that a life well spent would find value in the hereafter. Now, that finely-balanced exchange was in danger of failure, and for many reasons. I thought long and hard upon them, and reached my decision before the afternoon warmth began to ameliorate with the first flush of evening. - -Dinner was a quiet gathering, and I was almost oblivious of my children and their children, such as were present, for Cassira held all my attention, as indeed she deserved. My dear wife. We had grown old together, partners in life and enterprise, and we grieved silently to know we were to be parted soon. Not for her to know that such parting could take more than one form—for me to weigh the worth of life’s gift, if it were to be at cost of her blessed company. - -By the time the sun left us, and, from the terraces, we were bathed in the purple twilight, scenting the first breath of jasmine from the gardens, Sinufre’s offer seemed a joke, and a poor one at that. A king’s ransom in exchange for being deprived of all I loved? I could laugh in his face, for I would sooner go to my tomb with the respect of my people than scrabble for life like a beggar after coins in the gutter. - -*Take me*, I said silently in my heart, to the gods. *I am ready*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} received the tall man in my audience chamber. I was dressed in my best robes of business, hair brushed in a silver cascade, and my hands were folded upon my girth. The mendicant appeared as I had seen him that morning, though his smile had vanished. Now we were all business and I chuckled inwardly to disappoint him, as if the conman’s gambit were turning back upon him. - -Filos showed him in, and he sank into the offered chair. “Master Tornin,” he began with a respectful bow. “I know you will have given the matter all due thought. I place before you life eternal, and all the myriad works you may accomplish when a mind and heart such as yours are given freedom from the mortal constraint. All you must do to obtain this, is part with the merely material.” - -“The transaction is clear-cut,” I agreed with a nod. - -“You have reached a decision?” - -“I have.” - -I let him wait this time, while I arranged my thoughts and adjusted the sleeves of my robe as I prepared to speak. - -“It comes down to the value we place on things. Life, to be sure, is wonderful, and I would give much to recover health and vitality, to go forth with vigour instead of nursing the thousand hurts of age. And you are right—what I might achieve, when a lifetime of experience is combined with the energy of youth, is formidable. What is mere gold compared to that? - -“But the true cost is not in gold. You see, the gold it would take to purchase this miracle is not mine to part with. Oh, legally, certainly. But not morally, not ethically. And ethical behaviour was the plumbline you chose to define my career, was it not? I can no more realize this family’s assets for my own benefit then sprout wings and fly. It is *their* wealth, and the empire I leave them my testament. I will not subdivide it to the avarice of some faceless seller of potions. Let him find some rich and elderly person of lesser mettle and try his luck on that market instead, for his price is too high for me. - -“And it is higher yet, for in the necessity of beginning a new life I would be parted from all I hold dear, as surely as if I had closed my eyes forever, yet also without the hope of reunion in the Eden to come. For I should see my beloved ones go ahead of me, without prospect of ever joining them. Tell me, why ever should I wish for that?” - -Sinufre held silence, his expression fixed and unreadable, hands clasped as he followed my words. - -“I find, upon meditating, I do not love life as dearly as one might imagine. It is all of which life is composed which makes it precious, and life without those things becomes merely existence. Aimless existence is no goal, and the good I may do others in course of it a cold comfort. No, Master Sinufre, I do not choose this bargain. I choose the love and respect of my people, and in so doing trust I reflect well upon the honor and spirit of Zamalek.” - -It was said. I had accepted the inevitability of death, welcomed it, and a sense of peace flooded through me to have rejected the silly notion of escaping it. - -One might have heard a pin drop in the long silence which followed, the sigh of breeze in the garden the only punctuation to those heavy and difficult words. Then, with deliberate, infinite care, Sinufre reached into a pocket in the sleeve of his robe and drew forth a small phial of polished gold. He leaned and placed it carefully upon the desk before me. Our eyes met and my puzzlement lasted only moments. - -“There is no charge, Master Tornin,” he said. “There never was.” - -I stared at the phial, my old heart racing painfully as I sensed that the more I tried to lay this matter to rest, the more layers were uncovered. - -“A test, then?” I said, voice near failing me, admitting even now I had been played, though to what ends I was not yet certain. - -The dark head inclined. “Of course. To have reached any other conclusion would have been to fail.” - -“And a test still.” I did not reach for the phial. “The price is now a piece of my soul. Win a second life, but walk the road alone.” - -His eyes held mine, the stare of a cobra, unreadable, so damnably distant, as if I spoke to a shadow. But, with the instinctive skill of a merchant finding the middle ground in any bargain, I flicked a glance at the phial, and my tone implied far more than my words. “Tell me, Master Sinufre… is there enough in there for two?” - -Now he smiled. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}eautiful evening thickened over the great city. The Mirfaan, the cool breeze from the south, cooled the cloisters and streets, and the flames of sunset burned bright upon turquoise-tiled domes and cupolas. Mighty statues gestured in the late light which glimmered upon the languid river, as a funerary barge made its solemn way toward the far bank, disappearing symbolically into the sunglare, the stairway to heaven upon the waters. - -A procession of wagons and palanquins waited to wend its way by torchlight to the necropolis on the Maroosh hills where the tomb was prepared. Caskets of lacquered wood would be placed with reverent care into sarcophagi of limestone and plaster, sealed forever, as the priests chanted hymns to sun and moon, fire and water, earth and air. - -The route to the river docks had been lined with mourners, genuine rather than paid, and I was deeply touched. Perhaps Sinufre was right, and I had lived a life of benefit and example. To see so many weep openly for the passing of one who had stood for so much they honored was moving in the extreme. We had time to absorb these things, watching from the shadows of a palanquin as the barge receded, and knowing our children and the next two generations waited on the far side to escort coffins—unbeknownst to them, empty—to a final rest. - -The weeks since we had contrived our passing—a drug to bring about sleep so deep a physician assumed the obvious—had been difficult, but Cassira and I were feeling better each day, having shared the contents of the phial. And the future was hardly short-changed, for, as much wisdom as I had ever possessed, she possessed more. Together we would be a force to be reckoned with, and though our family believed us dead we would never be beyond news of them. Filos, ever-faithful, would be our trusted go-between. Karamos, equally stout, guarded us in his silence, even now. - -Truly, Zamalek is the City of the Evening, but day follows night. Our own winter had begun to turn, we sensed the first bud of spring in our step, the readiness of heart and breath, a strange and invigorating sensation of returning potential. Now we looked to the future with strange expectancy, and an impatience to be about life. - -As the sun at last went below the far escarpments, I took Cassira’s hand, raised and kissed it, impatient for the day we no longer needed the contrivances of age. The bow, the sword, and the horse’s back beckoned from a year hence, and we knew the labors of time would be ours. Sinufre had introduced us to the Council of the Ages, and, when we had shrugged off the leaden coils of infirmity, we would take our place with them, to help shape a future of which we could never have dreamed, before the coming of the mendicant, the secret ways, and the miraculous potion of distant Jarmu. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of "Zamalek, by the Evening Light" on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/278308214090178).* diff --git a/content/issue-26/__index.md b/content/issue-26/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index e3fcd5d2..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26" -date: 2021-06-30 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 26 -subhead: Summer 2021 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Finnekus.png -imageMobile: images/Finnekus_mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "Finnekus by Bobby Cooper" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # color: '#ffaa12' - font_family: "Starcraft normal" - subheading: - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 1 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-26/contents.md b/content/issue-26/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 752ec3ba..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,20 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2021-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Voyager]({{< relref path="Voyager.md" >}}), by Amanda C. Crowley -- [Noise]({{< relref path="Noise.md" >}}), by Owen Leddy -- [Freewheeling]({{< relref path="Freewheeling.md" >}}), by Annie Percik -- [Zamalek, by the Evening Light]({{< relref path="Zamalek.md" >}}), by Mike Adamson -- [What Comes After Winter]({{< relref path="WhatComesAfterWinter.md" >}}), by Kurt Hunt -- [Atmoboarders!]({{< relref path="Atmoboarders.md" >}}), by Martin Zeigler -- [Troublemaker, Storyteller]({{< relref path="TroublemakerStoryteller.md" >}}), by Jonathan Mast -- [Sketches of Snoak City]({{< relref path="SketchesOfSnoakCity.md" >}}), by Les Sklaroff - diff --git a/content/issue-26/editorial.md b/content/issue-26/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5503a306..00000000 --- a/content/issue-26/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2020-06-30 -issue: Issue 26 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Finnekus_sml.png - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 26** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Many thanks to our talented cover artist, Bobby Cooper, for permission to use his wonderlandish image *Finnekus, the flower-breathing dragon* for this issue's cover. Bobby works with colored pencil, tempting the night sky with music, poetry, and even dance until it sends him sheets of black paper to draw upon. The results are strange and beautiful — you can check them out on his [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/bcooperart/), and he has [an online shop](https://www.redbubble.com/people/bcooperart/shop) with myriad cool options too." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Welcome to the latest issue of *Mythaxis*! It's always a pleasure to be able to present a new selection of fiction, and on this occasion we have seven names and faces entirely new to these pages, with original stories that seek to transport the reader through such disparate experiences as creeping disquiet, mythical nostalgia, misplaced mundanity, mortal fear, fatalistic optimism, optimistic fatalism, and even silver-tongued self-confidence! - -But in addition to these new arrivals, closing out this issue you will also find an old, familiar friend, and (for long-time readers) old, familiar fiction as well. - -One of the changes I hoped to work when taking the reins at *Mythaxis* was to widen the range of authors appearing. This has been achieved, but doing so inevitably meant there would be less opportunities for previous contributors. One of those was Les Sklaroff, whose friendship with our original editor Gil Williamson resulted in the appearance of many stories over the years, the majority of them set in Snoak City, a strange metropolis regularly plagued by distinctive personalities, unpredictable objects, and atypical events. - -Rather than consign our past to the past, we've decided to create a side-project within *Mythaxis* to celebrate Snoak City, bringing together all those loosely interconnected threads which wound through the magazine over the years. The result is ***Sketches of Snoak City***, currently in its fledgling 1st Edition, but certain to be expanded (in ways which shall, for the time being, remain a closely guarded secret). - -I can reveal, though, that plans are already underway to do something much the same in collaboration with another former contributor, author of a long-lost narrative of day-jobbing lives lived under the eye of globe-spanning corporate interests. Watch out for that in the future—maybe not today, and hopefully not tomorrow… - -…*unless we're already there, of course*… diff --git a/content/issue-27/FullMetalGrandma.md b/content/issue-27/FullMetalGrandma.md deleted file mode 100644 index 125fe36f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/FullMetalGrandma.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,320 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Full Metal Grandma" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Paul Alex Gray -copyright: '© Paul Alex Gray 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Social Media - some love it, some hate it, but there is certainly a rich vein to mine in how the contemporary digital landscape will evolve in the future. Paul Alex Gray strikes more than just crypto-currency with this tale of a pre-apocalyptic soldier-for-hire who has to deal with a whole lot worse than online trolls." - -image: images/FullMetalGrandma.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was adapted from an image by [StudioStoks](https://depositphotos.com/189748760/stock-illustration-futuristic-woman-with-guns-close.html)." - -type: stock -slug: full-metal-grandma -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}H{{}}ouston’s a mighty fine city. It’s a damn shame it’s getting nuked to dust in sixty minutes, courtesy of the alien rift shimmering over the shattered spines of broken skyscrapers. Two arcing pillars swirl purple and amber, easily a mile high, like lightning frozen in the sky. They’re growing fast. When they connect, they’ll open a passage for hordes of invading Kestezai alien scum. - -A mandatory evac order went out two days ago. The cash-strapped military did what it could to take away Tier 1 citizens. Enter Ryft.io, a startup that swooped in like a vulture, sensing profit to be made. I’m a Ryftr, a gun-for-hire following the company from rift zone to rift zone, kicking alien ass and saving any rich Tier 1 citizens too stupid to get away early. Two weeks ago, it was Seattle. Once this place is gone, I’ll make my way to the next city and do it all again. - -I realize my figure silhouetted by the rift would make for an epic photo, so I send my cam-drone up. I activate the LED symbols on my purple battlesuit—machine guns, puckered lips, alien skull and crossbones—and hold my X87 Exterminator bolt rifle across my shoulder in a classic Ryftr pose. - -The pic *is* epic. I run an auto-filter, giving it a grimy look, and mark it *x o x Full Metal Grandma* in the corner before uploading it to my fan-channel. - -“Sure you won’t come with me, Jenny?” says Destructicus. - -My fellow Ryftr’s heavy battle armour is blackened in places by hits he’s taken from Kestezai pulse cannons and grenades. He’s customized his gear with scary looking spikes—Destructicus is a fan-fave, but his real name is Randy and he’s from Omaha. He used to be a trucker back before that profession went extinct. A good man, and he’s saved my bacon once or twice. - -All us Ryftrs are the same. Most have grey hairs. Everyone’s got something in their past they regret. Broken marriages. Cut off from family. Bankrupt. Drugs. Drinking. Convictions. Jail time. Everything. We’ve all made mistakes. I sure as hell made more than a few. There’s a photo in my pocket—truly! an actual *photo*, not just a file—of a little girl who keeps me going. Her mother won’t let me see her, and that’s fair, I suppose, but I make sure to send Ryftcoins when I can. - -“Stick with me,” I say to Randy. “There’s still a bunch of rich assholes here. Super surge bonus. We could clean up.” - -“Sorry, Jenny, too risky.” - -A whine of engines tears over us as a Ryft.io shuttle sweeps down. Dust swirls as it comes to a halt. It’s an old model, patched up here and there. The company wouldn’t want to risk losing new tech if the nuke comes a little early, so they’re sending the junk they can write off as an accounting expense. - - “Be safe, Jenny,” Randy says. “Don’t stay too late. You got people out there that care about you. May not seem that way, but they do.” - -“I’ll be fine.” I force a smile. “You take care, Destructicus.” - -He salutes and the Ryft.io shuttle engines rise in tone as it moves up, zipping out west. - -I check my weapon. It’s a good one, rented direct from the manufacturer. I’m getting late on my payments though, if I don’t transfer some Ryftcoins soon, it’ll lock up and a repo drone will take it from me. I’m also light on ammo, just eight bolts. I weigh up my decision, then put in a request for ten more, making the payment of 90 Ryftcoins. I get a message that the delivery drone is inbound and soon enough I see it drifting over the carnage. - -A message heralds its arrival. - - - -> *Share your passion! Post a vid-selfie promoting* -> -> *Ammodoro and receive a bonus 10 bolts* - - - -That’ll come in handy. I nod and the drone swings in front, its recording indicator on. I pop open my helmet-visor—the marketing types like human faces—and put on my peppiest voice: - -“Houston’s a mighty fine city, and I hate to see it ripped apart by rifts. I’m here to kill some Kestezai scum before the biggest ever Texas barbeque, and the only way I’ll do that is with Ammodoro bolts. Perfect for blasting rat brains!” - -The cam cuts to a loading icon, then a green tick animates. The drone drops two bolt packs into my hand before zipping away. - -I check my Ryft.io feed, skimming through the gigs. The small human-shaped icon in the bottom left flickers, its count dropping as other Ryftrs bail, catching rides out of the blast zone. Destructicus should’ve stayed. They're all missing out on the potential to make some serious Ryftcoin, but they're also greatly reducing the risk of being annihilated in a concentrated nuclear strike, so there's that. - -I scan the gigs, making my own calculations. Stay or go. The bounty for retrieving civilians flares up. Only one Ryftr’s sticking around. - -Me. - -Three thousand Ryftcoins for any Tier 1 civilian rescued. I could really do with that sort of money. My loans are piling up, I just had to upgrade my battle-suit on credit. No battle-suit means no civilian rescues, and that means the heavies will come after me… after they've remote disabled my weapons, of course. - -A gig pops up at a just about realistic range. I accept and a notification appears in my visor: - - - -> *Connect to Ryft-Stream to share your heroism.* -> -> *Earn an extra 400 Ryftcoins as well as tips* -> -> *and gifts from the Ryft.io community.* - - - -I bite my lip, my finger hesitating above the AR button that floats before me. The 400 is nothing, really, but a good performance can mean a lot of viewers and the potential for big Ryftcoinage. Then again, the community is full of trolls and weirdos… last time I live-streamed, they kept goading me, calling me a femmo-soldier wannabe. Like they’d dare say anything to me IRL. I’d kick their asses. - -*Ugh*. - -I take a deep breath and agree to stream. I don’t have to pay attention to what the douchebags say. A new drone whirs in, hovering before me, its red capture light glowing. A countdown appears on the tiny screen and I get ready to talk. - -> *3* -> -> *2* -> -> *1* - -“Hey Ryftr fans! It’s me, the Full Metal Grandma, your favorite gladiator-for-hire, coming to y’all from beautiful Houston.” I open my arms wide and the drone auto-pans, taking in the scenery of destroyed buildings and burned out cars. “As you can see, the city’s had better days. I hope y’all are rootin’ for me. Army ship’s sailed, and there’s a tactical strike inbound to take care of that rift.” - -The drone pans, but it stays close to pick up my voice. - -“Fifty minutes. Think I can rescue some civs?” - -I glance at the feed, watching as the comments pour in. - -It’s not bad. Words of encouragement and Ryftmoji, even a few tips topping up my Ryftcoins. - -Couple of idiots, but not the majority. - -I break into a run and the drone follows silently, its tiny red eye watching me. - -Time to put my ass where the money is. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} push the battle-suit faster, careening up the wreckage-strewn streets so quickly I think I’ll fall. My Ryft.io app guides me towards the apartment building where the civ’s meant to be. I had to backtrack after a mini-earthquake caused by the rifts shook the ground so hard that a four-storey apartment building literally collapsed and blocked my path. Took me ages to climb over a pile of rubble to get around it. - -I came to Houston once, years ago. Family road-trip. Back when I was still part of the family. We stayed in a little motel with a pool, drinking beers, eating takeaway pizza. My daughter wearing little floaties, jumping in again and again, squealing with delight till she came out goose bumped blue and fell asleep cuddled up in my arms. - -Thinking about it now seems like someone else’s memory. It kind of is. - -Now Houston’s about to disappear from the map, another casualty of the rift invasion. I think about what’s on the other side, try to imagine the world that the rat-aliens hail from. A lot of people think they messed it up with pollution or war or something, so they’re coming here. Like our planet’s doing so hot. - -We tried talking to them, when they first showed up. But these aliens didn’t wanna talk. They just want to kill. - -I’ve heard that a new rift is opening near Minneapolis. If I survive this, I can get up there, make some more coin. I even saw that one’s been detected in Italy! Maybe I could make a vacation of it! - -Paris would’ve been nicer, I always wanted to go there. It got nuked last month. - -Maybe I should stop thinking about bullshit and focus on the job. - -I'm running seriously low on time, but I keep my demeanor upbeat as I keep streaming for my audience. “Textbook FUBAR!” I growl into my mic. “Seventeen minutes till the area's shutdown… Think I'll make it?” - -I keep my eyes on the prize—the shelled-out apartment building at the top of this subdivision—as I listen to my suit autovoice the comments. - - - -> *Grandma_plz_hurry!_Dont_die_youre_my_FAVE_RYFTR!!!!!♥♥♥* -> -> *This rift shitz better than any game* -> -> *Let's watch this old bitch burrrrrrrrrrrrrn* - - - -Ryftmoji are filling the stream as my audience grows. An RPG. An APC. A bunch of spinning Ryftr logos. They auto-deposit, taking me close to 5,000 Ryftcoins, almost as much as this gig is worth with the surge. I make a payment to the bolt-blaster company and get a little thank you message. I might be running low on time, but at least no drone’s going to take my weapon away! - -My heart’s pounding. Micro rifts have started popping up, the little ones that advance Kestezai troops come through ahead of the real deal. I move careful, scanning for trouble. I can see the Buffalo Bayou river below. It was never pretty, but now it’s just a stinking vein of trash and junk, oozing slowly out to the gulf. - -I summon the app and re-check the gig. Target civ is close—and damn if it’s not some rich kid, paying a full 24x bounty! I've got hardly any time left, but if I can find the brat and get out with him, I'll hit jackpot. *Seventy-two thousand Ryftcoins!* I ain’t seen that kind of money in years. I could easily pay back the battle-suit, take Randy and a few other Ryftrs out for one helluva party, maybe even rent a night in a micro-hotel with a bathtub. - -And still send most of it back for my granddaughter. - -Oops—my viewer count's gone down, what with me quiet and all thinking about shit. “Where the hell *is* this kid?” I say into my mic. You have to stay engaged, talking all the time, whether you're running through burnt out hellscapes, shepherding residents into Ryft.io shuttles or shooting bolts into aliens. - - - -> *Check that building, Grandma.* -> -> *Bitch gotta get her money!!!! LLOOLLOLOLOLLL* -> -> *Forget the kid, you gotta bail. Shitz gonna get HAWT!!!* - - - -“Some of y’all think I’m in this for the Ryftcoins,” I say as I stomp towards the building. “And that might be true.” I kick open a door and see a flicker of movement, switching my suit to thermal vision. “But as it happens…” I peer over the edge of a couch “…I’m actually a nice lady that truly cares.” - -The boy’s there, cowering, all covered in dust. He looks a mess, probably been freaking out wondering if he’s going to get killed by Kestezai or merely blown to smithereens. - -“Easy son,” I say, reaching my hand down. “I'm here to get you out.” - -“OMG!” he yells and leaps up, wrapping his arms around me. I haul him upright, the hydraulics of my suit grinding as I check the counter. Nine minutes till shutdown. - -“All right, all right,” I say, eyeing him up. He’s not a boy, almost a man really, maybe sixteen. Green hair and metallic implants in his skin make him look a bit like a snake. What’s with all the kids trying to look so weird these days? - - - -> *Holy sheeeeeeet! Dat Boom$lang!* -> -> *Dat boi woulda been REKT without Grandma* - - - -I pop my visor. “You a streamstar?” I ask. - -“I am! I’m Boom$lang, you must know me! Oh, shit, oh, you saved me! I wish I had my stream-gear. I got chased by some aliens, then I lost my stuff. Hey, can I get on your stream?” - -“We’re kinda short on time, you know?” I say, guiding us outside. I summon the app and order a shuttle, accepting the extra fees and voluntarily adding a super surge to get a shuttle moving fast. - -Boom$lang’s dancing around, hopping right beside me. He’s buzzed as all hell, but he keeps motioning at me. I do a quick namesearch and my eyes go wide. - -This kid’s got close to six million fans, he’s a true star. - -“Hey, let’s do that stream,” I say, and he smiles like, *Yeah, you found out who*. “Just quickly mind, I want to keep my eye out for the shuttle.” - -“Sure, sure!” he says, hopping and playing with his hair. “Come over here, let’s get the rift behind me. I mean us! Okay, go.” - -I sync with his account and activate a joint-stream. “Howdy folks,” I say with a cheesy smile. “They say you should save the best for last, and the Full Metal Grandma always brings the best. Take a look who I found a couple of minutes to midnight.” - -“Heeeeey! Boom$lang here, coming at ya from beautiful Houston, woot-woot!” He waves, then throws some fingers that mean nothing to me. “Now I know you Slangers told me it was a *bad idea* to come down to Houston in the middle of a *rift flare*—Boom$lang, don’t be cray! Boom$lang, stay home and stream for us! Boom$lang, you’re too pretty to die! I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist, I wanted to see it up close! *It’s so shiny*! So, anyway, the craziest thing…” - -He prattles on and I keep a steely gaze, make like I’m scanning the terrain as photogenically as I can, but really I’m listening for an update on the Ryft.io shuttle. - - - -> *Grandma’s gonna be REKT!* -> -> *Bye Boom$lang, you gonna BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN booooy!* -> -> *TEXAS BBQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!* - - - -Despite the trolling our view count’s exploding, and with it extra Ryftcoins roll in. Ryft.io tells me the shuttle’s coming from the east, coursing in low, and I watch out for its light. - -We’re down to three minutes and I’d sooner be out of here. - -The rift pillars are almost touching. - -Then a light appears south of the rift, growing brighter. The shuttle. - -“Woot, woot!” Boom$lang shouts. “My ride’s here!” - -There’s a sudden flash to my nine o’clock, and I turn as a rat-alien steps out of a micro rift. The Kestezai are ugly things, eight feet tall with grey skin like they need some vitamin D. They’ve got long narrow faces with beady red eyes. They wear battle suits with a hole that lets their slimy-scaly-gross prehensile tales reach out. This one is already aiming a heavy weapon. - -*No.* - -The air goes *crump* as the shuttle takes a shell in its side. Smoke billows and it wobbles a bit, then straightens, still moving towards us. - - “*Was* that our ride?” Boom$lang asks, and I can hear the fear in his voice now. Probably not the look he’s going for with his stream, but the reality of an impending nuclear explosion’s obviously hit him. - -“Down!” I hiss as the alien turns our way. - -Boom$lang goes face to the floor as a shell zooms above us, roaring past the cam-drone—by the surge in comments I can tell it was close. I get to my knees and aim. The Kestezai comes into view, and I let a full clip of bolts out, feeling a kick of satisfaction as its head explodes in a bloody pulp. - -“OMG! Like, OMG!” shrieks Boom$lang and starts raving to the stream, slapping me on the back. My throat’s dry and I’m suddenly craving a hard drink even though I ain’t had one in years. - - - -> *She’s kickin’ ass till the end, Granny, you’re the true MVP!* -> -> *No way they’re making it out in time* -> -> *Nice knowing you, FMG, you were my fave Ryftr.* - - - -The shuttle swings up, engines whining, smoke spilling but it still seems operational. As it spins to a halt, I see one side is all ripped open and one engine’s out, smoke puffing from the other. The robot signal comes through choppy: - - - -> *Single passenger only. Auto* -> -> *departure in fifteen seconds.* - - - -Boom$lang’s gawking at me, but I’m staring past him, out west. I know the warhead’s probably already been launched. - -Just one rider. - -*Shit*. - -There’s no way out from here. Well… - -The rift sparkles behind me, the pillars almost touching. Already the space between them is shining brighter, a blurry light masking some space behind it. - -Maybe there *is* another way out. - -“Showtime, Boom$lang,” I say, hoisting him up. “Get your ass on that shuttle.” - -“What? But what about you?” - -“Shut up and go. Get out of here! And look after yourself.” I practically throw him onboard. “No more dumb shit! Stop coming to see rifts! Y’all should make something of yourself, and you…” Tears well up in my eyes, remembering this whole thing’s being streamed. “…you be good to the people who love you. Now get outta here!” - -“Grandma!” he shouts, but the shuttle’s already screaming away. - - - -> *Grandma, you’re my hero* -> -> *Such a sacrifice!* -> -> *Granny!!! Oh no* *☹* *I’m so sorry* - - - -There’s twenty million viewing me live, twenty-five million. This is the big-time. Global celeb level. The Ryftcoins tinkle in so fast it’s like a waterfall of cha-ching. I summon my smart-wallet, direct it to transfer all funds to my daughter’s account. Every last one. - -A warning chime sounds, my suit alerting me to the news that there’s sixty seconds till the warhead impacts. - -“Well folks, I guess this is goodbye.” - -I turn to face the rift, shouldering my weapon and walking tall, getting the drone to record from a low angle so I look huge and silhouetted and super baddass. I get up close and reach out and touch it, a tingle tickling my fingers. - -A few weeks ago I shared a couple of beers—okay, maybe more than a couple—with Destructicus, and we talked about what might be on the other side. He joked that it couldn’t be much worse than here. Why not be the first to find out? - -The drone comes up close, focused on my face. I can see the capture of myself through my visor. - -“Sorry to disappoint all of y’all that wanted me dead, but I’ve got some place to go. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll see me again!” - -Behind me, the dying light of the day is little more than a red smear on the horizon. That, and a burning white star, growing brighter by the second. - -I know what I’m doing is stupid. I’ll probably die instantly, or I’ll make it through and the gravity will be super strong and crush me flat, or I’ll land right in the middle of a rat alien party and they’ll tear me apart. - -But then, there’s a chance. - -There’s always a chance. - -And that’s better than dying here. - -I pump my X87 Exterminator, winking at the cam-drone. “See y’all on the other side!” - -I take off, running towards the rift, shouting my final message. - -“Full Metal Grandma out!” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Full Metal Grandma** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328489632405369).* diff --git a/content/issue-27/GraveofWindandLeaves.md b/content/issue-27/GraveofWindandLeaves.md deleted file mode 100644 index a9f59cc4..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/GraveofWindandLeaves.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,497 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "A Grave of Wind and Leaves" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Jalyn Renae Fiske -copyright: '© Jalyn Renae Fiske 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Here we have the first of two substantial sci-fi pieces with a focus on family, one in which overcoming separation is at the heart of things, the other with gaining independence as the goal - both presenting futures of interplanetary colonisation. Jalyn Renae Fiske takes us very far from home and, against all circumstance, shows that there could be a home there too." - -image: images/GraveWindLeaves.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to [teotarras](https://depositphotos.com/225179392/stock-photo-asian-rainforest-jungle-august.html)." - -type: stock -slug: a-grave-of-wind-and-leaves -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}Y{{}}ellow lights rotated in warning, and a buzzer sounded. The docking bay doors opened and a flood of beautiful golden light broke through, a surge of warmth and a scent of sweet pollen. A voice on the ship’s intercom echoed off the cold metal corridors: - -“Welcome to Khatus.” - -Ferron and the other hundred or so Earthers stepped from the platform to the soft ground of their new home. The grass was the same emerald green of Earth, but the sky was tinged orange, as if a fire burned somewhere behind the clouds. The soil was scarlet. Couples and groups emerged from the chaos until only a few stood alone, searching and calling out names. - -Five Pavitra guards, nearly seven feet tall and masked in silver paint, oversaw the disembarkation. Their strange, serpentine hands clasped tall bladed spears. Like all their kind, they looked humanoid, but gender was impossible to tell. Black feathers sprouted from their heads, forearms, and calves, as black as a crows, and their snake-skin was the blinding white of untouched snow. - -Only their painted faces showed any color, which the in-flight education service said changed with the season: crimson for Killing, pale yellow for Seeding, silver for Haunting, and cornflower blue for Temperance. - -Borun was waiting for him, Borun who had arrived on Khatus over a year earlier with the most precious of cargos in his possession. During the wars, he provided shelter to those lost and wandering. Gave them water, clothed their backs, no questions asked and always with a smile. But now his eyes were ringed with dark circles and worry lines. He looked older. He looked tired. “It’s been a long time,” Borun said. - -As they embraced, Ferron searched the Earther faces in the dwindling crowd, even looking to the alien Pavitra standing at attention with their glaives at their sides, faces painted yellow for Seeding Season. Searched for the only reason he’d come. - -He stepped back, searching his friend’s face instead. “Where’s Runa?” - -Borun’s gaze slid away. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hile the other newcomers headed to the Earther compound, they walked the opposite direction, towards the fifteen-foot stone wall that closed them off from the rest of Khatus. A white pebbled path cut the grass like a scar and led to a grove of trees with bleached trunks and purplish leaves, the color of eggplants and plums. - -Memories of Runa’s gap-toothed smile played back in Ferron’s mind. The way she always hurried ahead of him when they walked, how she liked to hide and jump out in surprise, the sound of her soft snoring while she held her orange dinosaur under her arm, Dini. He smiled to think how she would run to him and wrap her arms around his neck like she used to when he came home. Ferron checked to make sure Dini was still tucked safely in a side pocket of his duffel bag, her plush dinosaur arms sticking out as if reaching for a hug. They would all be reunited soon. - -The path ended, and Ferron and Borun stood in the grove. The shade masked Borun’s face as he spoke. - -“It was too late when I found her,” he said. “She was too far gone. It was the silver clay. Most things on Khatus are deadly until we build up immunity with the Vigil. You know that. The kids just didn’t listen.” He gestured around him at the bone-white trees. “This is how the Pavitra bury the dead, with trees instead of headstones. I know they buried the children here. Somewhere.” - -The straps of the duffle bag slipped from Ferron’s fingers. It made a sound when it landed on the red, Khatus earth: the thud of a falling body. The trees closed in around him, and the air thinned into almost nothing. His denials were trapped in his throat, but the leaves seemed to speak for him. The wind picked up, and their rustling intensified, as if they swung like corpses from a hundred ropes and shook their heads: No, no, no. - -His daughter couldn’t be dead. She was supposed to have a drawing for him that said *I love you Daddy* and *Welcome to Khatus*, misspelled and crooked, and he was supposed to give her back the stuffed orange dinosaur she loved so much. He could still see her as she looked on the day she left for Khatus, while he stayed behind on Earth, held up with paperwork and background checks. He would have to take the next charter. “Take care of Dini for me,” she had said in her six-year-old voice before boarding the ship with Borun and disappearing among the stars. - -“Where is she?” Ferron asked. - -“How should I know?” - -There were only three without names branded into the bark. Saplings. Children. Ferron fell to his knees, clawing at the moist soil. If she was really dead, she would be here. He threw fistfuls of Khatus earth, as red as blood, to the side. It blistered his hands, but he kept digging. Pain didn’t matter. Let Khatus kill him, too. - -“Stop!” Borun grabbed him by the arms and pulled him away. “You’ll kill the graves!” - -Ferron jerked himself free. He wanted to strike him, to slam him to the ground and hit him again and again until his knuckles were broken. Nothing mattered more than finding Runa. - -“The Pavitra have rules,” Borun said, pacing back and forth. “Stay inside the quarantine, take the Vigil vaccine, be back before Cleansing Hour. There are more. If we break them, they could lock us up forever. We’re at their mercy, aren’t we? We’d never be allowed to leave the quarantine. And then what was the point of leaving Earth to come here?” - -“I came here for Runa.” - -Borun shifted on his feet and said with steeley tone, “I’m sorry about Runa. Really, I am, but I won’t let you ruin it for the rest of us.” - -A few hundred feet away, the carillon tower in the Earther camp rang a deep, slow tune. Borun looked back at the collection of stone barracks and buildings and grunted. “It’s time for evening meal.” He grabbed Ferron’s duffle bag. Dini fell from the pocket, his boot nearly flattening her as he walked away. “Remember the rules.” - -The leaves shifted, soft now. Ferron picked Dini up and dusted her off. The worn-out fur still smelled of Runa, but it wouldn’t always. It would fade; it would be forgotten. - -Why had he let her leave without him? - -Ferron watched Borun depart, then reached for the nearest tree and ran his stinging hand along its rough surface, feeling for the etchings of the names of the dead—Dormard, year 2143; Ybarra, year 2135; all Earthers who had died within the last fifteen years—but Runa’s was missing. If her name wasn’t on a tree, then she could still be alive, hiding, scared. - -Everything faded until only Ferron’s shaking breath, his beating heart remained to flood his ears. The drums of life, his life, but where was evidence of Runa’s? Where were her tiny feet, peeking behind a tree during hide-and-seek, and her sweet voice when she yelled ‘Surprise!’ and jumped out of hiding? - -He collapsed to his knees, pulled at his coat and shirt. He leaned against a tree and tried to stand again, but he only made it halfway before his legs gave out. - -He lay sprawled on the ground, face-up, the tree tops spinning above him as the world turned dark. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}ough hands shook him until Ferron opened his eyes. He was lying on a plastic-canvas cot identical to the dozens of other cots lined in perfect rows. The barracks. - -Ferron turned to see a lean man with scraggly facial hair sitting back onto the nearest cot and a short woman with close-cropped hair standing behind. - -“Who are you?” he managed. - -“Roth.” The man gestured to himself, then jerked a thumb at the woman. “Lin.” He chewed on a husk of stale bread and squinted at Ferron. “You were screaming in your sleep.” - -He remembered why, and a sour metallic taste came to Ferron’s mouth. He suddenly wanted to vomit, but not even that relief was given to him. His stomach was empty, his heart was empty. - -“How did I get here?” he said. - -“Rescue mission,” said Roth, showing his teeth in a crust-filled smile. - -Lin looked right and left around the barrack and spoke in a hushed whisper. “Why were you outside the camp, in that damn Pavitra graveyard?” - -His back felt raw. Ferron struggled to sit up, noticing the bruises and scratches on his arms. His hands were bandaged in gauze, their stinging muted to a distant discomfort. His shoes were still on, shirt open, and crimson-colored Khatus earth smeared his pants. Blades of emerald grass hung down in front of his left eye, stuck in his hair. “Did you drag me back?” - -Roth chuckled, his laugh growing to a roar. Other Earthers in the barrack turned to see what was happening, but then outside the carillon sang again, a different call from what he’d heard before, hollow and wailing. - -“Vigil awaits,” Roth said as he stood, “Next time, we’ll leave you for the Pavitra to find, okay?” - -Lin shushed him as she followed him out. “That’s not funny, Roth. We’re refugees. What one of us does wrong, we all get punished for.” - -Ferron forced himself to his feet, pulling his shirt closed awkwardly, and followed his new barrackmates out into the sunlight. - -The carillon’s wail continued, echoing throughout the camp, and Ferron winced. “What’s going on?” - -“Vigil,” said Roth. “Vaccine time. Get used to it. I’ve been in quarantine for close to two years, and now I’m nearly ready to join the others living outside these miserable confines. Transition, the Pavitra call it.” He grinned. “We call it freedom.” - -Ferron looked around the camp. A good two-dozen buildings made of polymer and plastic, whatever was light enough to load on the ships, and lines of people lengthening outside the entrances to three more permanent-looking structures. He was used to long-term emergency compounds and lines of refugees, but he was also used to Runa holding his hand as they waited for food and medicine. - -“That’s your stop,” Roth grunted, and pointed to the longest line with the newest arrivals. Ferron recognized them as passengers from the charter ship he arrived on. He had told them about his daughter, and how she was waiting for him to arrive. He had showed them her picture. They would ask where she was. - -Borun watched them from halfway down his line and then abandoned his spot to stand next to Ferron. “Long night?” he said, eyeing the red dirt stains. There was light in his eyes. The worry-lines Ferron had noticed earlier had apparently disappeared as soon as he handed off the burden of Runa’s loss. “You’ll feel better in time.” - -“I can’t do this,” said Ferron. He backed away as his breathing became labored. Heart pulsing in violent bursts, the final beats before it stopped completely. - -Borun stepped toward him, but Ferron ran. - -He ran past the lines of Earthers, the harsh stone buildings of the camp, and the central carillon tower. The tune for Vigil rang again, but this time it was like a Valkyrie’s screech. Strangers paused to watch him run. They didn’t try to stop him. They didn’t call out: What’s wrong? How can we help? - -I am a ghost already, he thought. - -Ferron kept running, right at the group of Pavitra guards outside the nearest vaccination building, their faces painted the pale yellow of a dim and cloud-covered sun. They held sharpened glaives at their sides. The Pavitra would try to protect themselves, wouldn’t they? It would be quick, an accident. They would bury him in the grove beside Runa. - -But it wasn’t the sharp glaives that met him. They dropped their weapons and grabbed him with their snake hands, winding tight to keep him steady. - -“Wait in line, Earther,” one guard said. - -“I can’t be here!” he cried. “Not without my daughter!” - -The guard paused for a moment, then held out what could be considered its hand. It looked like three headless snakes writhing. - -Ferron hesitated. The rule was to avoid contact with the aliens. There were many rules, the education program had been littered with them, but this was steadfast: never let them touch you, never let them read your mind. The Pavitra might keep you in quarantine forever if they knew what you really thought. Or control you. Even change you. - -He heard Borun call out, “Don’t touch it!” - -And from Lin, almost in a panic, “What are you doing?” - -Ferron offered his hand to the alien. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}caly appendages constricted around his fingers like a nest of pythons. The Earthers jostled behind him, questioning and shouting, but Ferron focused on the soft vibrations that came with its touch, strumming up his arm and into his chest. - -Against all expectation, he felt something easing inside him. - -Too soon, it released him and said, “Maephus will see you.” - -“Traitor,” someone spat from the line. - -He took a deep breath and entered. A Pavitra healer waited within. It turned its face at such an angle that the silver paint glistened like moonlight on a lake. - -“Your name is Ferron Daye,” it said in overly enunciated syllables, accented with long pauses between phrases. “You fell by the grove.” - -The words he’d wanted to say no longer existed. How could he even describe what he was feeling? How could he explain without acknowledging that Runa was probably dead? If he said the words, it would be real. If he spoke, he would break. - -Maephus took hold of Ferron’s hands with its reptilian ones. Vibrations from the contact traveled down his arms and into his chest, softly strumming against his heart just as before. He wasn’t afraid. This was what he needed, to not speak. To not have to say the words. - -A memory came to him, of Earth, when they and everyone else had to evacuate the blackened remains of their homes and huddle into shelters with no food and no water. He had tried to explain to Runa why they were there, but how could he talk of war to a six-year-old? People killing people, he had finally explained. She had furrowed her brow and whispered, *Then we should move to Khatus*. - -And so he had sent her ahead of him in Borun’s safe-keeping. - -The vibrations softened and flowed through him. Seeking. They touched every part of him, until finally the strumming faded away like the last chord of a song. - -Maephus released him and said, “Three children climbed the wall. Nearly one year ago.” - -A cold chill gripped his throat. Borun had said nothing of that. “How could they? The wall is fifteen feet high.” - -“You must take Vigil now.” Maephus stood to retrieve the materials from a cabinet: long needles from a Khatus plant, and a glass vial filled with purple liquid. He dipped one of the needles, very deeply into the vial, most of its length glistening as it was withdrawn. - -Ferron pulled his arm back, fist clenched. “Tell me first,” he said, voice shaking. - -“Vigil does many things,” Maephus said as it returned the purple vial to the cabinet. “It protects from the poison of Khatus, like Pavitra are protected.” - -“Not the vaccine! Tell me about my daughter.” - -It looked at him for a long moment. “Vigil gives you ears to hear Khatus. The children must have heard her when she called.” - -“I don’t understand.” - -Maephus raised the needle. “Then listen.” - -After a moment, Ferron extended his arm to be injected. - -The Vigil felt like fire being forced through his flesh. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}erron lay on his cot at the barrack and examined the only things left of Runa that Borun gave him: a small shoe with smudges of chalky, shiny mud on the worn-down sole, and a collection of twigs, leaves, and rocks in a drawstring pouch. She did love to explore. - -He put them under his pillow and waited until the Earthers in his barrack were settled into sleep. Then he waited for Cleansing Hour to begin, when the Pavitra would leave their posts and gather for the nightly painting ritual. He crept out and followed the white pebbled path from the Earther camp to the death grove, and its three unmarked graves. He knew at some point the trees would show the names of those buried below—the children who climbed the wall?—but even then, if he saw Runa’s among them, would he believe? - -The leaves rustled above, and he looked up. Dancing, the purple-leaved canopy swayed almost as one, almost with a message. He held his breath and listened, wishing he could hear Runa’s voice. - -*Walk*, the breeze and the leaves and the very place said to him. - -So he did. - -He let the wind lead him along the perimeter wall, following a scent he hadn’t noticed before. The aroma of woodsy musk came from where an ancient, red-leaved tree grew close to the wall. Its branches reached so high, and smudges of thick gleaming mud speckled its cinnamon bark like a trail to the top. - -The scent grew stronger. Sandalwood. - -The speckled mud was patterned, purposeful. It glistened like moonlight on a lake. Ferron placed his hand upon the nearest marking. Perfectly, the faded silver print was eclipsed by his own: a child’s handprint, cold and sticky to the touch. When he took his hand away, he looked down and saw that the marking had transferred to his palm. One little hand painted on his skin, silver and iridescent. - -A ghost’s hand. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}erron opened his eyes to find at least ten Pavitra standing over him in a circle, their unblinking black orbs bearing down. Their glaives reflected the sunlight in blinding flashes. - -He was sprawled beneath the cinnamon-bark tree. It was morning. - -Ferron recognized the voice of Maephus. “You touched the forbidden clay.” - -Silver covered his right hand—the one he touched the handprint with—but it had spread from his palm to reach out in tendrils down his forearm. He sat up and tried to wipe it away, but it wasn’t on the surface, it was inside his skin. - -Earthers had come to see why the Pavitra were gathered. They hung back, flinching if they got too close to a Pavitra. Raith’s and Lin’s eyes widened when they saw it was Ferron, and immediately backed away. Borun’s eyes turned to slits as the Earther crowd began to chime in: - -“Look at his hand—” - -“—punish him, not us—” - -“—we followed the rules!” - -The Pavitra took hold of Ferron’s arms and lifted him to his feet—and as he stood, he thought he saw a pair of tiny feet running through the crowd, and a glimpse of auburn hair flowing between them. He heard her laugh, saw her smile. - -“Runa!” he called, fighting to break free from the Pavitra holding him. “Runa, I’m here!” - -“The haunts have begun,” Maephus said. “Take him to Kimli.” - -Their python hands squeezed tighter. As their vibrations calmed him, Runa’s laugh disappeared. Her smile vanished. She was never there. - -Ferron sagged in their grip, helpless and hopeless. The scent of sandalwood drifted around him as the Pavitra led him like a prisoner into the Earther camp and towards the Pavitra buildings on the far end. His arm looked dipped in silver to the elbow, and now his other palm was silvered too. Everything burned as if a flame was brought slowly closer and closer. - -The Vigil injection site on his arm throbbed incessantly. He rubbed it, spreading even more silver across his skin, but he didn’t care. It felt like something inside his veins was pushing its way out. He imagined them stretching and expanding, swollen with the Vigil until they burst. As the silver spread up his arms, the fear was replaced with certainty. He knew his heart would stop, and he would still stand. He would bleed purple on bone-white skin. - -“Earther,” the Pavitra said, stopping to stare at him. He had been clawing at his arm. At the injection site. So deep that it bled—bled red, of course, just as it always had. - -“My blood,” Ferron said. “I thought it would be…” - -The Pavitra watched with their black eyes, unblinking. Their vibrations increased like a cat purring. “The haunts trick you,” one said. “Drive you mad.” - -They continued in silence and soon arrived at a small stone building much smaller than any of the others in the camp. Above its door, it had a symbol Ferron had never seen: four circles touching, each larger than the previous. - -“What is this?” he asked. - -“They are the four moons of Khatus,” one of the Pavitra said. “Kimli is keeper of seasons.” - -“Seasons are a Pavitra matter,” the other added. “But some Earthers come to know them as we do.” - -The door opened into darkness, and he heard Runa’s soft laughter from inside the stone building. The impulse to vomit washed over him and sweat dripped down his face. As his eyes grew accustomed, he thought he saw—was that her crouched in the corner? Was that her walking toward the doorway? - -A Pavitra emerged, breaking the illusion. It had a shorter mane of black feathery hair, almost spiky, and its skin, painted silver, was smoother than the rough reptilian skin of the other Pavitra he had seen. - -The guards released him. “Kimli, we bring a poisoned Earther.” - -Kimli looked at Ferron’s silver hands and arms with black, cave-like eyes. “Come,” it said. - -Inside, eight Pavitra sat on the floor in a circle, each holding an empty pestle and mortar. Stacks of bundled leaves and stalks covered one wall of the building. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held jars of the four colors for the four seasons. He recognized sandalwood again, but other scents mixed in the air as well. Aromas he could liken to lilies, clove, and pine. - -Kimli motioned that he sit apart from the others while they took handfuls of blue flowers and began to crush them in the bowls. “Tonight is the last night of Haunting Season. We must prepare the paints for Temperance.” - -“I thought… that Runa would be here. Is she?” - -Kimli shook its head. “No. It takes one Khatus year for the roots to take hold and the blood to flow.” - -Another wave of nausea washed over him. The death trees grew from the remains buried beneath them. He had fought so hard not to picture it, but now the image of a drained, emaciated Runa buried in a nest of hungry, twisting vines flashed before his eyes. The roots were drinking her dry. - -“Then Borun told me the truth,” he whispered. “Your silver clay killed her.” - -“Pavitra give Vigil so Earthers can survive the wilds of Khatus, but clays do not always kill. You are silver, and you are alive.” - -Ferron looked at his hands. They burned. “Tell me what happened.” - -“Have your Earthers not told you? Last Temperance Season they brought us the bodies to bury. Two bore the marks of being touched by the clays. The other child had become silver. Like you.” - -Ferron lowered his eyes. He tried to focus on the ritual happening around him, to steady his breathing and keep in time with the rhythmic scrape and turn of the blue petals being ground to a fine powder. “I really thought I’d seen her. I thought I could find her.” - -“That is the silver clay. It summons the haunts. During Cleansing Hour tonight, wash your face and your hands with this essence water.” Kimli took a small vial from one of the shelves that contained a clear substance. “Pavitra must wash and reapply the paints nightly to maintain balance of their influence. Tonight, we shall enter Temperance.” - -Ferron took the glass bottle offered him. “I’m not Pavitra.” - -Kimli studied him and said, “We are all Pavitra.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he Pavitra guards were all that remained scattered throughout the camp while the Earthers slept in their barracks. They looked up at the tower almost in unison. It sang the hypnotic tune of Cleansing Hour. When it finished, the silence that followed seemed heavier, more profound. The Pavitra lowered their heads and entered the central tower to wash away the clay. - -Ferron headed for the grove. The glass bottle Kimli gave him was ice in his hand, and the feeling of roots creeping around him, of dirt filling his lungs, continued to grow more vivid. Could one die from just the thought of dying? It didn’t matter if he was awake or asleep now, the nightmares followed him as a shadow. - -At the grove, he stood beside the three nameless death trees. The canopy of purple leaves rustled above. “I should’ve been here with you,” he said, and lifted the wooden stopper in the glass bottle. The liquid inside had a soft citrus aroma. - -A small, airy voice mingled with the wind. “I knew you would find me.” - -Runa stepped out from behind the three trees. She was still six, and wore the same coat and trousers as the day he put her on the charter ship and said goodbye. Tears stung his eyes, and he couldn’t respond. He wanted to take her in his arms, but the Pavitra’s words rang in his ears: *The haunts trick you. Drive you mad*. - -“I want to show you something!” she said, jumping once then twice. “C’mon, Daddy!” - -Ferron put away the vial as her ghostly form hurried toward the perimeter wall. Did he have to choose? Madness or mourning? - -“Daddy?” she called back. Her expression so innocent: *Aren’t you coming*? - -After so many weeks with the suspicious Earthers and the stoic Pavitra, the walls he’d built crumbled at the sound of his little girl’s voice. The tears flowed, and he ran after her. “Yes, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m coming.” - -Runa stopped at the ancient tree with cinnamon bark growing beside the quarantine wall. Its branches stretched to another red-leaved tree on the other side. She used to climb what trees were left on Earth. She had wanted a tree house so badly, but they were never in one place for very long, always moving from one refugee encampment to another. - -Ferron watched as she grabbed the bark and branches in the exact same places where the handprints, like stains, still marked them. When he climbed and crossed over in her wake, he could see that a forest stretched around the quarantine walls in all directions. It reminded him of sweetgum and maple trees in autumn and looked so much like the home he knew as a child, even in the eerie light of the alien moons. - -He followed Runa down, branch by branch, and then she darted into the forest, appearing only briefly between trees, and then was gone. - -“Runa! Wait!” - -As he walked deeper into the forest, the scent of sandalwood grew stronger. He found her again, standing with her back to him and looking at something on the ground. - -“The Pavitra painted their faces such pretty colors. I wanted to be pretty like them.” - -Ferron came closer to stand beside her and saw they stood at the edge of a pool of silver, shining like moonlight. The sandalwood smell swirled around them, intoxicating. - -“Kimli said it didn’t burn you,” he said. “That you turned silver.” - -Runa kneeled down to dip her hands in the pond of silver clay. She stopped just before she touched the surface and looked up at Ferron. “If Khatus likes you, she wants to keep you.” - -He smiled and crouched down to her level. Together, father and daughter scooped up the clay. It felt soft, too soft for clay or mud, more like handfuls of silk or satin. - -“Let me,” she said, and painted her father’s face. Immediately, the clay dried and cracked and pulled at his skin. It felt like a vulture’s talons had latched on and were slowly ripping his flesh away. The pain increased and the silver seeped into his eyes, melting them away and dripping down his cheeks in sticky, milky tears. He tried to wipe off the clay, but his hands were already covered. It hardened like armor, squeezing, crushing. His fingernails broke and bled as he scratched and clawed at his hands in vain. - -“Haunts aren’t real, Daddy,” Runa said. - -With those words, the imagined armor’s constriction relaxed, and he blinked his eyes until his vision cleared. His fingers weren’t bleeding, and his eyes weren’t melted. - -Runa was still beside him, and her face was silver. “Do I look pretty?” she asked. - -For a few moments, there was no pain, no nightmarish imaginings. Ferron wished he could stay in the forest with Runa forever. He would build her a hundred tree houses, a thousand secret places. “The prettiest I’ve ever seen.” - -She stood and pointed at the sky. The middle moons were almost at their highest points. “We have to hurry back, Daddy. Cleansing Hour is almost over, and Borun hates it when we break the rules.” - -She started back the way they had come, still running, still happy, still alive. - -He struggled to his feet. Even if what he saw and felt wasn’t real, the effort it took to stay lucid exhausted him. Runa would disappear among the trees on his left and reappear in the distance on his right. He thought she was too far to catch, and then she would be beside him and tease him to move faster. - -He leaned on a tree, stopped to steady his spinning thoughts, and felt an etching beneath his fingers. A name. Petro—2056. - -“Oh, you found one,” she said. - -With an effort he focused on her. “Why is there a death tree out here, beyond the grove?” - -“All the trees are death trees. This forest used to be a grove, like mine, and it has grown and grown into what it is now.” - -“These are dead Pavitra?” - -But Runa had disappeared again—no, had been replaced. Ferron stumbled forward, trying to see. Someone stood beside him. There were hundreds standing in the forest, all wispy and blurry and many-armed. They made no sound. - -“My friends,” Runa said in his ear. “The Anthrens. They came to Khatus to find a new home.” - -“Who are they? I haven’t seen anyone besides Earthers and Pavitra.” - -“The Anthrens are gone, Daddy. Only Pavitra remain.” - -The quarantine wall was nearby, and he saw her tiny figure climbing up the tree. He followed her up, but as he crossed over she disappeared again. The middle moons had begun their descent too, and the burning from the clay intensified like a hot brand to his face. His hands itched from imagined bug bites all inflamed and swollen. He paused when he came to the final branch. The faint shimmer of Runa’s handprint still clung to the bark. He expected her to be waiting for him at the bottom, but as he alighted at the base of the cinnamon-bark tree, lanterns and torches closed in from the direction of the camp. - -“There he is!” someone cried. The Earthers held clubs and knives as well, grim expressions everywhere. Borun was among them, and a heavy dread settled on Ferron’s heart. - -*I won’t let you ruin it for the rest of us.* - -*The Earthers brought us their bodies.* - -*Borun hates it when we break the rules.* - -The haunt of Runa stepped out from behind Borun. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she refused to cry. It was the same look she wore when he told her she was going ahead to Khatus without him. She had been cleared to leave, and he had not. How could he not send her ahead? They were homeless, starving. It might’ve been years before there would be another chance, if they even survived that long. - -*I love you, Daddy*, she had said, and gave him Dini to protect him while she was away. And he had given her to Borun. - -“How could you let her die?” Ferron could barely say the words. He couldn’t stop thinking of Runa hidden away, going mad with haunts and no one there to comfort her. - -“She was crazy,” Borun said. “She wouldn’t eat or drink anything. Wouldn’t sleep. We tried everything, but she kept screaming and clawing at herself.” - -Ferron thrust an arm towards the far buildings. “They would have helped her, if you’d asked!” - -In the distance, the carillon tower chimed the first note for the end of Cleansing Hour. - -“Pavitra are coming out,” Roth said. “We have to go.” The Earthers extinguished their torches and hurried back to camp, but Borun stayed, a single torch burning in his hands. When the Earthers left, so did Runa. - -“It’s better if you die outside the walls,” Borun said, hatred filling his voice. “Just climb back up and disappear.” - -Ferron clenched his fists, clay and rage burning. “Is that what you said to Runa?” - -“They’ll punish all of us for what you’ve done.” - -“But they haven’t, have they?” Ferron shouted. “They’ve never punished anyone! Not when the children crossed the wall, not when I fell asleep outside of the camp, not even when I charged the guard.” - -Borun spat. “This camp is a goddamn prison. We only get out on good behavior, and even then, who knows what happens? Have you ever seen an Earther after Vigil is done? No, because no one has!” - -“She wasn’t even seven yet!” Sudden waves of sorrow rose up behind the anger, surging over it. More than the release violence could provide, he wanted to drown. - -Another chime from the carillon tower. - -“She was changing, Ferron. Her skin started to look like theirs. Her hair, her eyes. And the Pavitra were the ones responsible. It’s *their* poison that killed her.” - -The burning, boiling of the silver clay had spread to almost his entire body, cocooning him in fire, but Ferron forced himself to face the man who let his daughter die. Borun was the one who had changed. Ferron saw the fire in his eyes, the torch blazing in his hands, and realized that nothing could be said to convince Borun he was wrong. The Pavitra would always be at fault, no matter the truth. - -Licks of flame fell from Borun’s torch and simmered on the grass. “You chose to leave the compound, so *leave*.” - -It took all Ferron’s strength and focus to remain standing. “No.” - -Borun dropped the torch and shoved him to the ground, climbed on top of him, pinned him down. Ferron didn’t feel the breaking of his nose when Borun struck it once, twice, then too many times to count. He reached up to block the blows as best he could, but all was numb and dead. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to fight to win. - -Sneering, Borun stood and stepped away. “Do you finally understand how it is?” - -“Yes.” Ferron smiled through the blood and swelling on his face. “Now you’re poisoned, too.” - -Borun looked at his hands, and saw split knuckles covered in silver. He frantically tried to wipe them clean, but the more he touched it, the more it spread. “Get it off! It burns!” - -Ferron coughed blood, still smiling. “Here they come.” - -Across the field, Kimli and Maephus approached with two Pavitra guards, glaives strapped to their backs and torches in hand. Borun panicked and looked for a place to escape. “They can’t find me like this.” - -“Maybe you should leave,” Ferron said. “Who knows what they’ll do to us.” - -Borun stared at him and then at the cinnamon bark tree. He looked back at the approaching Pavitra, his clay-covered hands. “You mean what they’ll do to *you*,” he said, then he climbed, frantic, and disappeared over the wall. - -For a few minutes, Ferron was alone. He removed his shirt and staunched the blood from his nose. He didn’t know what to feel. It was over. It was done. But he still had nothing at all. - -The Pavitra arrived with flickering torchlight. They were pristine, calm, and now their faces were colored with the pale blue of Temperance Season, of mountain streams and frozen glaciers—things he missed from Earth but knew no longer existed. - -Runa would have loved to see them. - -Kimli and Maephus leaned down, but the haunting of the silver clay turned them into grey bloodless corpses with the black eyes of barn owls. Their teeth grew into fangs. Their hands into clawed tentacles. Overcome, Ferron convulsed on the ground. Jaw clenched, body shook. He was both paralyzed and helpless to stop the tremors. The haunting was in control now. - -Kimli’s voice. “Where is the essence water?” - -Pavitra hands on him, searching, vibrating. - -The citrus scent of oranges. - -The cooling relief of ice upon his burning face. - -“He needs more,” said Maephus, and Ferron felt the comfort of Pavitra hands lifting him to carry him back to camp. - -As they passed the grove, Ferron looked for Runa. A veil of nightmares shrouded him. He saw vividly the trees’ roots twisting around Runa’s neck and growing through her bones and her veins, feeding off her decaying body. She screamed for him and tried to fight her way to the surface, but he could never find her. She was always just out of reach. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}erron touched his face—and saw that his hand was clean of the silver clay, his flesh scrubbed and tender. The sharp citrus of orange emanated from his skin, and a ghostly Runa sat next to him. Her form was dimming and fading away. When she touched his hand, he felt nothing. - -Kimli came over to the bed. Maephus and other Pavitra watched a few steps back, intensely listening. “We continue to search for Borun. He runs from us when we come near.” - -Ferron shook his head. “He thinks you’ll kill him.” - -“We will not, but Khatus might.” - -He sighed. “So what happens now?” - -“The haunting clay has been cleansed, but the haunts may remain for a time.” - -“And when they go away—will she be gone forever?” - -“Haunts are unique to the burdens of the bearer. And to the season. I cannot say what will haunt you in the future.” - -He didn’t say it. He didn’t need to. The question of what future hung heavy in his eyes. Kimli’s next words held a tone of reassurance. - -“Vigil is more than a vaccine. It comes from Khatus herself, from the sap of the death trees, and it strengthens you over time. Changes you. Many Earthers cannot let go, but some choose to abandon their natural form. To survive outside the walls, all must become Pavitra. - -“There are some who Khatus accepts, even without proper Vigil. Those who already belong. Your daughter was one. You are one. The clay merged with you, instead of killing you. You are becoming Pavitra even now, as the Anthrens and the Sirax and the Lorsythe did.” - -He turned away and focused on the fading apparition of Runa with her gap-toothed grin. Once changed, he would leave the compound and the quarantine forever. A fifteen-foot wall would separate him from the grove and from his daughter. “I don’t want to leave.” - -She whispered in his ear, but there was no sound. - -Kimli and Maephus bowed their heads slightly and moved away from him. When they reached the door, Kimli turned. “You are free to be afraid, Ferron Daye. We were all afraid.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}erron stood at the grove of death trees once more, the same purple leaves, white bark, red earth he had visited every day since his arrival. Kimli and Maephus joined him at the grove, as he’d asked. The other Pavitra kneeled some distance away, their bone-white skin contrasting starkly to their onyx feathered hair. - -Ferron looked at the growing coarseness of the skin on his hands and arms, faintly showing the early pattern of snake-skin. It looked wrong. It should be the color of snow. He looked at the guards, and the ceremonial glaives that glinted in the sun, grasped in their strange hands. Mirrors, he thought. And when he looked at himself next, what would he see? - -“Temperance is blue, the color of sky and water,” Kimli said, taking a wooden bowl of pale blue paint, the same shade the Pavitra now wore, from Maephus and handing it to Ferron. “Be lucid and free, flowing and eternal, as Pavitra strive to be.” - -A glimmer of a silhouette stood by the three nameless saplings, and he knew Runa was there. He dipped his hand in the bowl. The blue paint was cool on his still-sensitive skin, like a salve to a wound. He coated his face, as Runa had done for him with the silver clay, and expected a similar burning, haunting reaction. Instead, his mind was overcome with the calm of still nights and the quiet of early mornings. - -He felt Runa’s presence beside the middle of the three saplings, and marked her grave with his blue handprint, a final embrace. When he did so, her silhouette ceased to glimmer. It dimmed, darkened, and joined the shadows of dancing leaves that speckled the ground. The blue paint seeped into the bark and revealed the outline of Runa’s name emerging. - -Kimli took the bowl and handed him a spike and spile to tap the sappling’s bark, and a bowl to collect whatever would flow from it. “Seasons only end when a new one begins. If you choose to join us, receive Khatus’ gifts.” - -He pierced the ashen bark and watched the substance for Vigil trickle down into the bowl. It wasn’t blood-red as he had feared, but the deep purple of the leaves above—the purple of eggplants and plums. And all around him the world whispered: *Welcome home*. - -![Orbit-lrg ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **A Grave of Wind and Leaves** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328488369072162).* - diff --git a/content/issue-27/Harryette.md b/content/issue-27/Harryette.md deleted file mode 100644 index df3f2c45..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/Harryette.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,268 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Daniel Rabuzzi -copyright: '© Daniel Rabuzzi 2021 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Ghost stories and romance — what could be a more perfect match? Oh course, there's inevitably the risk of tragedy with such a pairing, but Daniel Rabuzzi gives us reason to hold out hope that love really can conquer all… even across centuries." - -image: images/Harryette.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Jasmine Carter](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-long-sleeved-shirt-and-woman-in-black-dress-888899/) and [Fuzail Ahmad](https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-concrete-dome-building-2792601/)." - -type: stock -slug: harryette-brickd-belovd -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}t that time the City of Sunrise, also known as the City of Clocks and the City of Felicitous Demise, was already ten thousand years old. Many people lived there, among them a printer’s devil named Mauboussin. In the long summer twilights, all the apprentices met at the square of the fountain—the one dedicated to the god of menhaden and shad—to drink beer, eat smoked eel, and play a game involving a club and a small leather ball. On that night, Mauboussin hit the ball over the fountain into the brackish pool beyond. As the rules required, he had to fetch the ball himself. - -Mauboussin fished out of the pool not the ball but a dog-whelk. Noticing something golden glistening among the whelk’s corrugated whirls, the ’prentice sat down at the foot of the fountain to investigate. Embedded in the whelk’s shell was a ring, which Mauboussin pried free. - -He examined the ring, forgetting the ball, the beer, even the other ’prentices and their talk about the women they planned to meet later that evening. He no longer heard the gulls overhead or the other sounds of the square. All the voices of the city dwindled for him, even the ever-present sigh of the ocean’s wind around the spires of the cathedrals. In the fading light, Mauboussin could just make out words inscribed on the inside of the band. - -“Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d,” he read. - -A woman approached him, walking from the other side of the fountain. She was no older than Mauboussin, but wore a silk dress that had not been in fashion since the days of his great-grandmother at the very least. Mauboussin jumped to his feet. - -“Mademoiselle, you startle me!” he said. - -The woman said, “I am very sorry, sir, but you it is who startled me with your call.” Her accent was odd. - -“I didn’t call you,” said Mauboussin. - -“But you did, and there is the proof of it,” she said, pointing to the ring in Mauboussin’s hand. - -He shook his head and wondered if she were mad. He could hear, as if from leagues away or from under water, his comrades across the square calling for the ball. - -“Who are you?” he said. - -“Harryette,” she replied. - -Mauboussin shivered and held out the ring. “Then this belongs to you, I reckon.” - -“Yes,” she said. “But you shall keep it, for that is a term of my rescue.” - -*She* is *mad*, he thought. He turned to go but stopped, remembering that he had found the ring embedded in the shell of a dog-whelk. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know anything about a rescue, and I wouldn’t be much good as a rescuer even if I did. Allow me to return this ring to you and take my leave.” - -“Don’t you know my story?” she asked. “Everyone does, though I sense from your accent and your mode of dress that you are a foreigner here, so perhaps you are unaware…” - -“What?” said Mauboussin. “*Me*, a foreigner! I’ve been polite in not saying it, but *you’re* the one with the accent and the funny clothes. Sorry, not meaning disrespect, but since you said what you said. As for me, well, I’m born and bred here in the city.” - -Harryette looked skeptical. Mauboussin shrugged and said, “It’s like this, Mademoiselle… Harryette… I’ve never heard of you, nor has anyone else ’round here.” - -Seeing the look of anger and alarm on her face, Mauboussin added, “I’m sorry to have to say that, but the truth is better than poison, even if it sometimes tastes the same, as we say in the city.” His friends’ voices came to him through the elongated distance, like flies buzzing in a bottle. “I really must be going,” he said. He held out the ring again. She did not take it. - -“Wait,” Harryette said. “Please, I am at a loss… you *must* help me… the ring found you, so you have no choice…” - -Mauboussin shivered again. “Enough,” he said. - -“*Not* enough. The finding of the ring *compels* you to take me to the Queen, to perform the three tasks necessary to gain my release.” - -Mauboussin laughed. “Really, now the joke has gone as far as it ought! You are a good play-actor, I must say. Who put you up to this? Darton the baker’s flour boy? No, must be Nucian, the goldsmith’s whelp! Or is this an elvish prank?” - -Harryette said, “Sir… I don’t know those you name, and I *don’t* consort with elves.” - -“Regardless, you know full well that I can’t take you to the Queen, because there *is* no Queen.” - -Mauboussin was startled to see tears start in her eyes, glistening in the even-light. “Now *you* it is who go too far,” she said. “No Queen? Do we not live in the City of Sunrise?” - -“Precisely, my lady… there’s been no queen here for two hundred years. The last one lost her head to an ax in the Grand Square of the Reliquaries.” - -Harryette swayed. Mauboussin reached out to steady her, and startled again. She was as cold as the grave. “We’ve been a republic these past two centuries,” he whispered. “As you *must* know.” - -Harryette slipped out of his grasp. With a sob and the rustle of silk she darted around the fountain. Mauboussin called out and stepped after her, but she was gone. He stood blinking in the near-dark, looking around, as his companions came up to him. - -“Here he is!” Nucian the goldsmith’s apprentice said. “Well, Mauboussin, what are you playing at?” - -“I’m sorry, lads,” said Mauboussin. “But that woman, the one in the old-fashioned dress, detained me.” - -“What are you talking about?” said Nucian, laughing. “We saw no woman, neither in new weeds nor old, and trust us cousin, we recognize a woman when we see one!” - - Mauboussin said, “No, please, I’m serious. You must have seen her. She stood right there where you stand now. She spoke with me.” - -“We saw you talking to the air and waving your arms about, didn’t we boys? Thought maybe you were in a spot of trouble.” Nucian slapped his cheek playfully. “What did you do? Drink out of the fountain? Brackish water gives one visions they say. Or maybe you’ve just had too much beer!” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}ucian and the others teased Mauboussin about the “ghost lover” for a day or two, then moved on to other sport and forgot the incident. Mauboussin said nothing more about it but thought of nothing else. He wondered if perhaps he *had* been drunk, but then he pulled out the ring and knew he had not been. Surreptitiously he returned to the fountain every evening for two weeks, but Harryette was never there. - -On the fifteenth night she came back. Mauboussin had returned from another fruitless vigil at the fountain. He sat in his room under the eaves in the print shop, holding the ring to the light of one candle. - -“Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d,” he read for the hundredth time, and this time once again aloud. - -“Yes,” she said softly. - -Mauboussin jumped. “Oh, damn! You scared me half to… Where did you come from? How did you get in here?” - -“I don’t know myself,” she said, sitting across the table from him. “But here I am, nevertheless.” - -They looked at each other for a minute in the candlelight before speaking again. They could hear each other’s breathing under the sigh of the wind outside. - -“Tell me your story,” he said. He looked into her eyes. He could not tell their color but he did not care so long as he could look into them. - -“You really do not know, do you?” Harryette said. “So I really am lost.” - -“I do not, truly,” Mauboussin said. “And I have thought of nothing else since we met.” - -She smoothed out the folds of her dress and then refashioned the knot of her hair. Mauboussin watched as a chick watches the world for the first time. Harryette began: - -“Some time ago—in the Years of the Crane, I think, not long after the war with the Jessicambrians, but my memory is fogged—I was like everyone else, happy and sad by measure, first a child, then a young woman. My father is—was—a merchant, not the wealthiest but not the poorest either. We lived in Dulse Street, do you know it? By the Splayed Cathedral and the Library?” - -Mauboussin nodded. “The Old Library, we call it now. They built another one, the New Library naturally, over by the Kelp-Walk and Algernon’s Way.” He did not add that the New Library was over a hundred years old. - -“Ah good,” Harryette said. She smiled. Mauboussin existed now in that smile. - -“I read too many books,” she continued. “Not a flaw in principle, of course, but one that led me to dangerous conclusions. As a result of my reading, I fancied that I should marry a prince, specifically the oldest son of… our Queen. My parents tried to dissuade me. ‘Don’t be daft,’ they said. ‘Know your station. Aim for the son of the dealer in sailcloth, or the shipwright’s son over on Herring Close.’ But no, I was headstrong and would not listen. I must have the Prince or die. Alas, if only I had died instead of what befell me.” - -*No*, thought Mauboussin. *For then I would not have met you*. - -Harryette looked at Mauboussin as if she could hear his thoughts. She touched her hair and went on. - -“I insisted on being presented at court, and in the receiving line at the great ball I said to the Queen, ‘I will marry your son, the Prince. Tell me what I must do to have this happen.’ Oh, for the ambition of foolish girls! The entire room fell silent. The Queen smiled, a smile to freeze your heart, and said, ‘Oh you will, will you? I applaud your forthrightness, though I am not fond of insolence. Let me consider what is to be done. Come back to me in a fortnight for your reply.’” - -A tear ran down Harryette’s face. - -“Oh for the cruelty of Queens,” she said, so low that Mauboussin barely heard her. “She sat on her throne, surrounded by her ministers, courtiers and soldiers, when I came back with my mother and father. I have never been in a room with a ceiling so far from the ground. ‘Well, here is the girl who demands to be married to my son. Not any girl but the daughter of… what is it you do, sir? Oh yes, a wholesaler in tar and rope and other ship supplies. Honorable, I’m sure.’ She smiled another one of her tiger smiles and the court laughed. - -“I realized then that the books I read had played me false. ‘Your Majesty, I have reconsidered and understand now the inappropriate nature of my request,’ I said. But it was too late. The Queen had her mouse and was going to make an example of it. ‘No, no, my dear,’ she purred. ‘You shall have my son in marriage. Provided only that you prove your love first, in a small way, a tiny, inconsequential way.’ My parents and I bowed to the ground but no amount of bowing would have softened the Queen’s heart at that point. ‘To gain my son’s hand, you must find a champion who loves you as much as you profess to love my son. I will ask your champion to perform three tasks, three simple tasks, and if he succeeds, then you shall marry my son. If he does not, then you shall not.’” - -Harryette paused and looked away from Mauboussin. The printer’s apprentice lost himself in the vision of the nape of her neck. - -“‘How will I find a champion?’ I asked the Queen. ‘Oh, you won’t,’ she said. ‘He will find you.’ She held out to me then a golden ring, yes, the ring there on the table. ‘This is your engagement ring,’ said the Queen, and all the court laughed. ‘See what is inscribed on it? I will send this ring out into the world, and whoever finds it will be your champion. Until then we will find suitable accommodations for your wait.’ And with that she had me… had me taken from my parents…” - -Harryette was crying too hard to go on. The candle burned low. Mauboussin came around to the other side of the table and knelt beside Harryette. He put a hand on her shoulder. - -“Warm…” she said. “You are so warm.” - -He held her until the candle went out. In the dark, he heard her breathing slow. Her hair was in his face. “What happened next?” he asked. - -She said nothing for a long time, and then replied, “The Queen had me put in a tower, all alone with nothing but trunks of books. She had the tower bricked up, doors, windows, everything. The last thing I heard was the sound of the wind from the ocean, and then nothing, just silence and the echo of my own breathing. By her arts the Queen contrived that I not suffer hunger or thirst, and she caused there to be light for me to read, and read, and read… Ten thousand books mocked me in that tower, though they also consoled me in the hourless hours and monthless months.” - -Mauboussin remembered with pride that the printers’ guild had been foremost in the rebellion that had ended the royal dynasty two hundred years earlier. He put his lips on her neck, a coal placed on marble. She sighed and moved until her lips met his. - -At length he said, “I am reluctant no more but willing to be your champion. Only without a Queen, let alone *the* Queen, we are in a bind to be sure.” - -Harryette kissed him again. “I have thought on this since the day we met. Here is what we must do: we must find a witch—there *are* still witches in the city, aren’t there?—and seek her advice. All spells have a lifting, even if their makers are dead.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he next day Mauboussin and Harryette went to the Courtyard of the Larvae to speak with the witch who lived there. No one ever admitted that they visited this, or any, witch, yet witches tended to live in large, well-built houses and dine off something better than wood or pewter, so clearly trade was brisk in arcane advice. The witch Mauboussin visited had a silver doorknocker and was drinking a very expensive wine from a crystal goblet. - -“Oh yes,” said the witch, when Mauboussin finished his story. “I know this tale. In fact, dear Harryette, I know it very well.” - -Harryette, who was sitting next to Mauboussin, looked up as if she’d been spied upon. - -“Yes, my dear, of course I can see you, I’m a witch,” said the witch, shaking her head. “All those years in the bricked tower certainly did not sharpen your wits.” - -Mauboussin said, “Hold on there, Madam, that’s no way to treat—” - -“Oh, simmer down, the two of you,” said the witch. “It’s just this sort of impetuous ignorance that got her in trouble in the first place.” - -The witch got up and paced the room. - -Mauboussin asked, “How did the ring get into a whelk’s shell?” - -“Least important part of the story,” said the witch, shaking her head with a snort. “Who knows? We’re dealing with magic here, boy, something knotted and gnarled. Queen told the ring to hide itself, to not be found, and the ring did a fairly good job of that, seeing as how it went unfound for centuries.” - -The witch pulled down several books from a bookcase. No one spoke for almost a quarter-hour as the witch skimmed rapidly through the volumes. The wind brought the smell of the shore into the house. - -“As I thought,” said the witch at last, with her finger on a line in a book covered in sealskin. “Twisted and knotted indeed! Removing a spell when its maker is dead is no easy matter. There’s a heavy price to pay, and I do not mean my fee for telling you this. Look!” - -“We can’t read this language,” Harryette and Mauboussin said. - -“Of course you can’t,” said the witch, “silly of me, took twenty years to learn this myself. Listen closely then, children, for here’s the spell required to undo the curse laid upon Harryette. Usual bits about the full moon and walking widdershins in a graveyard, scattering petals of salt-rimed rose flowers, quite a lot of chanting in a prelapsarian tongue, and so on. I can help you with all that. But the potage you must offer the particular being who controls this sort of spell, that’s a different matter, I’m afraid.” - -“What do you mean?” cried Harryette and Mauboussin. - -“Ingredients are hard to find, one in particular,” said the witch. She read directly from the book. “*Ten fingers freshly cut from the living hands of a human*.” - -“What! Why?” - -The witch looked sharply at her two visitors and said, “Why? You seek advice on magic and ask ‘why’? The rules of the Old Spells have roots in the underworld and a grammar written in the whelming-heaven. Who are we to understand, let alone question? Now, do you want my help or not?” - -Mauboussin put his hand in Harryette’s. He believed that the coldness of her was abated a little when he touched her. He opened his mouth, but Harryette spoke before he did. - -“I won’t have blood spilled to save me,” she said. “I may not have learned much in the years of my imprisonment but that much I have always known.” - -The witch nodded. “You are wiser than I gave you credit for. Spilling the blood of the unwilling is an evil. The Queen must have done so to create the spell she has trapped you in. Unfortunately, blood requires blood, that’s the logic of curses.” - -Mauboussin stood up. He held out his hands and said, “Take my fingers, take my hands.” - -Harryette stood up as well but stumbled as she did, “No, no, sweet Mauboussin! That is more than I could ask!” - -“You did not ask, my love, I offered,” said Mauboussin. “Blood needs blood. This is the only way.” - -The witch had seen many things in her long life, but never this. She said, “You move my heart! I will do what I can to make the operation as painless as possible.” - -More than that, the witch thought deep into the darkness of a month’s nights about how to replace Mauboussin’s fingers. She consulted books written in tongues long unused, she spoke with a wizened head she kept in a jar under her bed, she whispered into a crack in the attic and listened to the voice that whispered back. - -“Mauboussin,” she said. “Do you by chance know a good goldsmith?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n the night of the next full moon, the witch took Mauboussin to a graveyard in one of the oldest parts of the city, accompanied by Nucian the goldsmith’s apprentice and (unseen by Nucian) a silent Harryette. The witch made a small fire, hung a cauldron above it from a tripod, and, after many other preparations, she drew a fearsomely ordinary looking blade and asked Mauboussin if he was ready. - -“Yes,” said Mauboussin, looking at Harryette. He knelt down and placed his left hand on top of a tomb, thumb and fingers spread wide. Harryette held Mauboussin from behind, clasped him so hard that his bones felt like ice. - -Harryette whispered, “Oh, I love you so.” - -Nucian shouted, “Cousin, don’t do this!” - -Mauboussin said, “Brother, I must!” - -The witch, in two deft movements—*chunch, chunch!*—severed Mauboussin’s fingers and thumb. Mauboussin cried out; Harryette staunched the gushing hand. - -“The other,” said the witch, and they repeated the process. She bound the ten fingers together with silver thread, as if they were asparagus, and threw them in the bubbling pot. She chanted for a long time. Something under the earth chanted in counterpoint. Groaning filled the air to match Mauboussin’s. - -Suddenly the chanting and groaning ceased. Flames shot up from the cauldron and then the cauldron melted, dousing the fire beneath. - -“Quick!” said the witch. “The other spell, the other spell!” - -Nucian gasped, “She’s real then, this fantasy lover of yours!” - -Mauboussin, writhing, grunted, “You can see Harryette?” - -Nucian nodded. - -“Enough chit-chat!” said the witch. “Now, the other spell!” - -Nucian brought out a leather folder, untied it, and opened it with trembling hands. On the black leather were ten golden fingers, with perfect joints and fingernails, glistening in the moonlight. The gold was elvish, from the witch’s hoard, made fast by a spell she cast, but the workmanship was Nucian’s. - -“My masterpieces,” said Nucian. - -The witch sang something that sounded like springtime, and sprinkled tincture of terebinth on the fingers. - -Mauboussin passed out for a minute and, when he came to, he put his arms around Harryette without opening his eyes. She was as warm as he was. - -“Open your eyes,” she said. - -Mauboussin did. The first things he saw were Harryette’s eyes, which were brown. She looked down at his hands. He looked down too. He had ten golden fingers, warm and alive and perfectly matched (except for their color) with his hands. - -Mauboussin held up his hands to the moonlight, laughing and crying. He held Harryette close, marveling at her warmth. He pulled in Nucian, promising the goldsmith’s apprentice free beer for the rest of his life. He tried to pull in the witch, who resisted with a smile, and stood a little ways off as witches are wont to do. - -“Come,” she said. “This is no proper place for celebration. Best not to tempt those who chant from beneath.” - -Later that night the witch took her leave from the three young people in front of her house. - -“How can we ever thank you?” said Harryette. - -“Hmmm, you should have learned more in that bricked prison of yours,” said the witch, but not ungently. “Thanks is not my due, payment is.” - -“We’ll pay for the melted pot,” said Nucian. - -Mauboussin shook his head. “That’s not what she means. Is it?” - -“No,” said the witch. “One of you, at least, is learning. But, come, I will not spoil such a successful evening by rendering my bill. As I said, your sacrifice moved my heart. Witnessed love mutes the concerns of commerce. Rest assured: I will not saddle you with a debt you cannot meet.” - -So the three young people went home. Everyone marveled at Mauboussin’s golden hands, but received very vague answers to their questions about how he got such beautiful fingers. He was the inspiration for a fashion in the city that year for gloves made with gold-embossed fingers. Mauboussin and Harryette were married later that month. Mauboussin placed on her finger a golden ring inscribed to *“Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d”*. Nucian was the best man. Whenever any of the other ’prentices asked Nucian where Mauboussin had found such a smart, beautiful wife, Nucian only shrugged and said, “With her nose in a book.” - -The witch declined the invitation to the wedding. What she asked in payment for her help is the subject of another story. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328490389071960).* diff --git a/content/issue-27/IHaveNoWingsAndIMustFly.md b/content/issue-27/IHaveNoWingsAndIMustFly.md deleted file mode 100644 index bad774dc..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/IHaveNoWingsAndIMustFly.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,367 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "I Have No Wings and I Must Fly" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Kyle E. Miller -copyright: '© Kyle E. Miller 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Some stories wear their inspiration on their sleeve, and the title of Kyle E. Miller's wonderlandish excursion through a decaying plane pays clear homage to the Harlan Ellison classic, \"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream\". Prepare yourselves for a similarly rich, strange journey, but there the similarities very definitely end..." - -image: images/Asparagoose.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [music4life](https://pixabay.com/photos/goose-water-bird-nature-bird-flow-178143/), [Wolfgang_Hasselmann](https://pixabay.com/photos/beetle-desire-nature-insect-4143529/), [Free-Photos](https://pixabay.com/photos/desert-sand-dry-hot-landscape-1246282/), and [Shutterbug75](https://pixabay.com/photos/asparagus-food-fresh-green-healthy-1239162/)." - -type: stock -slug: i-have-no-wings-and-i-must-fly -weight: 1 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he asparagoose dreamed of a twelve-spoked wheel in the sky. It was motionless. In the dream, he remembered the words each spoke spoke and what they stood for: the four seasons, early, mid, and late of each. But what were the spaces between? There was life falling darkward and then the rise of light—summer—where he was born and where he would die. - -Summer, where he woke. - -He swelled skyward for an instant, chasing the wheel, coaxing it to turn again, and then he fell back to the ground. Nothing more than a leap and bound. - -He had no wings. - -He ruffled what he did have: pale green spears running to pale violet at the roots with emerald leaves at the tips. Stalks, stems, but no feathers, no wings. - -Once, the asparagoose thought, once he had had wings. Or was it that he would have them in the future, all at once, suddenly, as if in a dream? Once upon a time? It was all getting mixed up in his head again, not the clear cool draught of dreams, but the earthy warm mirage of the going-nowhere world. - -Nowhere but here, endless summer as far as the asparagoose could see. - -He was alone on a windswept plain, a green and violet birdbush among the ragged black stones and scrubby briars with flowers like stars made of butter. All alone, and yet he once dreamed of a multitude—a flock—and others he called friend, lover, parent. A mother and a father to teach him how to fly and where and when. There was a right time and a wrong time to be on the move, but, not knowing which was when, he was stuck. - -A sudden sound like the breaking of branches shook the flock from his mind. - -*Honk!* he cried. *Honk! Honk!* - -A wagon trundled over stone and bramble, bouncing wildly, out of control and nearly careening into the asparagoose’s tail-spears, before taking a turn at the last moment and missing him by a beak’s length. He watched something bounce and fall from the body of the wagon, and then the whole thing was gone and riding recklessly into the distance. - -*Honk!* - -The asparagoose waddled over to the flyaway cargo. On the ground among shards of black rock he saw a little creature no bigger than his head. It had six tiny arms, each with its own three-fingered hand, a compact body like that of the beetle he had accidentally eaten once, and big eyes reflecting colors from another world. The thing looked sleep-starved and bruised, broken by its fall. The asparagoose nudged it with his beak and then gripped it gently and lifted it to its feet. He noticed then that it wore a backpack filled with shoes, tiny iron tools, and scraps of colorful fabric. - -“My shoes,” it cried suddenly, “where are my shoes?” - -The creature stumbled and scrambled about, and the asparagoose wondered if perhaps it had lost its mind during the fall, or if it was merely blind. Regardless, he began searching too, and there they were: a tiny pair of scarlet shoes, toes pointed toward the sun. - -*Honk!* - -“I’ve lost it,” the creature said, pushing his feet into the shoes. “Hitchhiking, I’ve made my way across summer to see if there’s any other season, and no, not one! None but summer and its long dead heat. I am sleepless. I lost my sleep in winter, and then lost winter.” - -He must have been asleep a long time, the asparagoose thought. He had never seen winter. - -The creature seemed suddenly to notice the asparagoose, and he pulled something from his backpack and pointed it at him. It was a shoehorn carved from black antler. “Carry me,” the creature said. “Fly me away from here. Winter must be somewhere, and with my wits and your wings we can find it!” - -The asparagoose shook his spears and lowered his head, wagging it side to side. He let out a mournful honk. - -“You cannot fly? Ah! Not feathers, but foliage! Poor twisted sport, you should not be.” The creature came up to him and petted his neck, where tiny purple-gray leaves grew to cover his pale skin. “They say asparagus is the plant a bird won’t land on, but they never said *it* wouldn’t land on a *bird*. Two dishes in one: the main and a side. Convenience burlesqued. What sick folk there once were.” - -*Honk!* - -“What’s that? A saddle? We could fashion one and make as much progress by foot as by wing, given the time. You’re a wise bird.” The creature brought out its tools and began fishing about the field for supplies. “Itinerant cobbler, shoemaker, repairer of soles. I’m the Shoefly, pleased to meet you, and I presume you are the Asparagoose. The one and only, as I see it.” - -And the Asparagoose felt suddenly enlarged as the little bubble at the beginning of his title popped into a tall and impressive point. He lifted his head to the sky and honked in pride. No one had ever given him a name. He had no mother, no father, no lover to do so. He was exalted. He waddled circles around the Shoefly, busy at work. - -“I make shoes for fun and for friends, but I can make a saddle. Why not? Is it not a sort of shoe itself?” - -When the Shoefly was finished, he tossed the contraption across the Asparagoose’s back and climbed aboard. The Asparagoose, uncomfortable at first, shifted his foliage, shook his back, and settled into it. He could get used to this. It almost felt good, like a hug that kept giving. - -The Shoefly brandished his shoe horn and pointed it in the direction the wagon had gone. “Onward faithful steed! A steed is not a slave, but a friend and confidant. We will follow the wagon yet strike our own path. Onward! To any season but summer!” - -And so they decamped and departed. The Asparagoose had never left the field, except in dream. He had only needed someone to tell him when to move on. He suddenly felt as his brethren must have felt before flight: that spark of expectation, the buoyant joy of the yet-to-come. He thought he might just lift off the earth anyway, wings or not. - -For the first time in his life, the Asparagoose had hope. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he windswept plain gave way to finer fields, and the Shoefly kept the journey light with story. - -“I remember fondly the days of my cocoonhood,” he would begin. “Sweet blue-green days full of the flow of my own fluids, the pump and tide of my heart, the silence of my thoughts. I fell in love with myself all over again. I felt a stirring in my breast, the flowering of new colors, and then—ha!—I was born anew! I resurrected myself and the world with it. Grass never seemed so green.” - -Or: “Titan and Auberon were a two-headed giant who shared a body and, perhaps, a soul. Titan was certain they had two separate souls, Auberon thought they shared one, as they did the body. They argued, fought, and Auberon’s head was cut open by a stone. He stopped talking, and Titan wept for the loss, and wanted nothing more than to be wrong about everything and follow his friend and sibling back to the wheel. But then, just when he thought all was lost, a new voice spoke with Auberon’s mouth—a vessel filled, the wheel turns—and Titan knew they had both been wrong all along.” - -And the Asparagoose listened intently, clucking and honking at the best moments, all the while navigating the landscape of summer. They passed the rust river, running to sludge at the bank. They passed the smoking oak, forests of bird-eating poppies, wild cat-bean fields, and the great drone graveyard, final resting place for all the soulless husks of every winged insect ever made by humankind. - -“Sometimes I feel old,” the Shoefly said suddenly. “As if I’ve lived a thousand summers and the only thing left for me to experience in life is death.” He knocked his scarlet shoes together. “Do you remember your cocoon, Asparagoose? Er, egg? Womb? Seed?” - -The Asparagoose was sure there had been no sweet nourishing days of cocoonhood as the Shoefly had described. He once dreamed of a seed that became a crown for a queen, but there were three others left crownless, and he had awakened feeling restless and ashamed. No, he had no knowledge of his birth, only a vague sensation in his leaves that something had gone wrong, that he had been robbed, or else that his very existence had robbed something from the epic of creation. Though he had a soul, and knew it, his was a body that should not be. He knew something of how Titan and Auberon must have felt. - -*Honk*, he mourned. - -“Do not answer,” the Shoefly said, patting the Asparagoose’s back foliage. “Don’t answer, don’t think. Foolish questions. Don’t make of yourself a specimen. You’re a fine steed and a fine bird, and there’s no need for you to justify your existence to me, or even to the King of Summer himself!” - -It seemed that the Shoefly knew that all was not right with the Asparagoose, too. His head hung lower, yet he still noticed the darkening of the world before the Shoefly did. It was a slow closing in of the walls, the ceilings, and the floors. The carpet suddenly rolled up like a toad’s tongue and sent him tripping along. - -The Shoefly fell from his back. “The earth is turning against us!” he cried. - -It’s not the earth, the Asparagoose thought with a shiver. - -»Welcome to the All Seasons Inn« a voice said from somewhere, or nowhere. - -“When did outside become inside?” - -»Please make your way back to the front desk. All lost guests please make your way back to the front desk. Follow the yellow thread.« - -Too much happened at once, was always happening at once: the Shoefly shouted and asked the bodiless voice about the thread while the Asparagoose—trying to ignore a moment’s daydream: *a brief flash of yellow foliage, another season, his own spears gone bright* *amber—*spotted it. A golden thread, a sun ray distilled, ran along the ground before them. It was one thread among many in a tapestry of blues and violets, greens and browns, oranges and luminous reds, but the Asparagoose grabbed the Shoefly and followed the yellow fiber trail. - -The desk sat at the end of a long wooden hall. Portraits of ghosts hung on the walls. A chandelier threw rosy light on the floorboards. Seen more closely, the desk was a black box full of wires and chains, growing them as if they were its twigs and leaves. The maze of cables connected to something behind the desk, a presence no larger than a whisper, or four. Four whirling whispers, and they wore colors like wind-tossed gowns: jadepink, goldgreen, blackorange, and whiteblue. - -“Don’t!” the Shoefly said. “No closer.” But the Asparagoose disobeyed. There was only one way out, and that was in. - -»Welcome to the All Seasons Inn.« The voices shifted, twisted, dropped in pitch and volume. »Checking in?« - -*Honk!* - -And then rose again: »How would you like your pillows? Feather or foam?« - -“Uh…” The Shoefly tapped on the Asparagoose’s back and whispered, “Foam? We should say foam.” - -*Honk!* - -»And do you want a lake view?« - -That would be the third of many questions: twelve questions and then twelve again for each of those. The Shoefly answered as best he could, with the patience of a master craftsman, and only an occasional twitch of the eye. The Asparagoose gave his opinion when he cared to, a cluck or honk, but the whole process was beyond him. - -“Just give us a room!” the Shoefly said, finally losing his temper. “Any one will do, let’s just be done with this!” - -Chains shook, the wooden desk groaned like branches in the wind, and the cables glowed bright pink. »We were not made for this« the voices moaned. - -The Asparagoose shuddered. He was afraid, and he didn’t know why. Something about the desk disturbed him, reminded him of something, the wires and chains and the tiny ball that now descended from the whispers and glided along the chains, gathering speed, losing lustre, trying to find a place of rest, a nadir, a home. - -They’ve gone insane, he thought. Bound to bureaucracy, to tedium and mundanity, they had lost themselves. They were made for something more. - -»I think we can find this soul a room.« - -“We’re two souls!” the Shoefly cried, but it was too late. - -»You’ll be in room 857463C. The keys will appear in your beak at the moment foretold. Please follow the yellow thread to your room.« - -“Riddles and a number too long to remember!” the Shoefly cried. He pointed his shoe horn at the four whispers and howled. “I will see this to the end! A life well lived is the best revenge!” - -*Honk!* - -But there was no yellow thread, only a confusion of colors, and as the Shoefly put his heels to the Asparagoose, he followed the only corridor he could, which shortly split into many, a labyrinth without doors or exits. The Asparagoose began to run, making fast for the depths of the hotel, the dizzying patterns of the particolored carpet beneath his feet almost as easy to get lost within as the corridors themselves. - -When at last the Asparagoose stopped to take stock, the front desk was lost to the distance behind. The Shoefly patted his neck. “Where are we, my goose?” - -The Asparagoose shook his head and dipped his beak to the ground. He didn’t know. It was getting to be too much for him. Was life always so complicated? - -“Should we go on? I leave it to you, fair steed. This is no season I have ever seen. And yet, should we not find winter, and my sleep, in the All Seasons Inn? Where else but here?” The Shoefly scratched his head and then froze, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. “Look!” - -The Asparagoose looked and saw nothing, but he felt a presence, four of them, and he was filled with an urgency, an impossible itch to flee, to take flight any way he could, away from the jaws of a beast or the hunter’s nocked arrow. - -»Welcome to the All Seasons Inn. You’re here to stay.« - -The voice from nowhere boomed and echoed. The Shoefly covered his ears. The Asparagoose honked and wiggled his neck wildly. - -»Welcome to the disease of time. We were not meant for this. Here are the teeth of the lion hydra. The flaming crane. The ninth corridor. The grand finale.« - -“They’ve lost their minds!” the Shoefly shouted, and the Asparagoose began to run, as if gathering speed for take-off, but he was going the other direction: down and down and deeper into the past. - -They entered a great hollow hall. “Hullo?” the Shoefly called, but there wasn’t even an echo of a reply. The dimensions were askew. The place wasn’t as empty as it appeared to be. Katydid caryatids held up the ceiling, four legs raised, two lowered, and their wings made a vault above where hushed whispers exchanged secrets. - -“This place is old,” the Shoefly said. “These wingeds should be my brethren, but I don’t know them by name or wing. Perhaps there are no names for them: new species or ancient ones, forgotten or yet to be remembered. - -“Look! Birds!” He pointed toward a corner bright with painted wings and pale yellow beaks that gaped as if begging for worms and grubs. The Asparagoose had none and didn’t know where to find some, seeing as how the floor was as stoney as the ceiling. He missed the open sky, even if he could only dream of joining it. - -Then the voice from nowhere shouted again, screamed, a tortured blur of voices: »This area is off limits. Please make your way back to the front desk. Please make my way. Please make way for the Queen. The Queens.« - -The Asparagoose trumpeted a warning and threw himself into the trap of beaks, the Shoefly protesting all the way. The birds bit at his foliage, tearing whole leaves free, and the Shoefly lost his shoehorn in the greedy beak of an oriole, but then they were through and outside again. - -They found themselves out from the ancient cavernous hall and surrounded by a meadow. But the meadow too was old. The wildflowers had given up their petals, the grasses were dull and sere, and the lone tree was a puzzle of twigs and boughs. The Asparagoose clucked and shook his spears, shaking loose a baby bird that stumbled into the dead grasses and disappeared. - -“Outside, inside, and out again. One begins to wonder if one ever left the cocoon in the first place.” The Shoefly stood up in the saddle and shivered. “It’s cold. An antique shrine to the King of Winter? An egg laid by the Queen herself? There’s more space inside than out.” He paused. “Or was it the other way around?” - -The Asparagoose shook his head: he didn’t know about all that, but he knew he was getting hungry. They hadn’t eaten for days. He pecked at the cold dead ground, but there were no seeds or scrumptious shoots, no berries or greenery. He had wanted to be outside, but not like this, not this dead realm with no name. Was this winter? Would the Shoefly find his sleep here? He thought of the time he dreamed that desires had a way of being fulfilled in such a way that made you never want anything again. - -The Shoefly shivered, shaking the whole saddle. “I think I know where we are now. Some mad sprawling tavern grown by the cosmos itself. This too is but a part of it. A room for every soul, and a slumber from which you will not wake. A maze, a tapestry of time, and we’ve lost the thread. We need a clue.” - -The Asparagoose didn’t have a clue (whatever that was), but he did have an eye for detail, a special way of seeing things as they are. Alone in that now-faraway rocky field, he had spent seasons watching the world. He had watched the sky, the flowers, the rocks, mosses, insects, beasts, birds, winds, storms, clouds, rains, and stars until he *knew* them, until he dreamed them. He saw them for what they were, as so few now could. - -There in the meadow, he saw the clouded sky (four whispers circling there, pursuing one another, pursuing *them*), he saw this season he had never seen, and he saw the well in the center of the meadow. - -“Huh,” the Shoefly said. “Was that always there?” - -*Honk!* - -The Asparagoose leaped onto the rim of the well, saw the creamy yellow light within, and stepped off the edge. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he well was as deep as time, and they descended. - -The darkness doubled, and then there was light. The air burned gold. During the fall, the Shoefly had become unseated from the saddle. The Asparagoose bent his neck to pluck him up, but the Shoefly was rigid with fright or amazement. And then the Asparagoose saw the cocoons hanging from the ceiling like stalactites, stiff and deflated, and knew it was both. - -*“Come here, sweet dreamlets.”* - -The Shoefly spun on his heels. “Who goes there?” - -*“Spin us a pretty dream, sweets. Weave us a bright little spiral in the dark.”* - -*“Double the dreams, double the dreams!”* - -*“Crack them open. Crack their egg heads and suck up the scrambled dreams.”* - -The Shoefly jumped onto the Asparagoose’s back and shouted. “The only skulls that shall be cracked are yours! Show yourselves or the goose will honk and unhinge you from this realm!” - -Laughter lit the room. The Asparagoose saw the creatures first. They clung to the pitted stone rafters above, their slender legs hooked and twisted to the vault. They had six legs as well as great golden wings, not the wings of birds, but moths, full of scales that fluttered down as they shifted and shook. - -The Shoefly sneezed. “We need light. More light.” Then he yawned. - -The Asparagoose honked a warning at the creatures above. He had no light and no way to make one, but he could see what the Shoefly could not: faces beyond the cloud of golden scales. Of beautiful men with golden green eyes, hair like the petals of dandelions, dusted with pollen gold. But their bodies were grotesque and bloated, their legs too thin and attached the wrong way, their tongues too large to fit inside their mouths and instead coiled like proboscises. - -*“You’re both getting tired.”* - -*“Sleep, sleep.”* - -*“How soundlessly you will sleep. How restfully, how softly.”* - -*“Look,”* one of them said, crawling along its perch and pointing at the ground. It had something between its legs, long and purple, draped over the rafter like a length of rolled dough. *“Look. Pillows. Sleepy things.”* - -*“Blankets. Books.”* - -The Asparagoose followed the pointing fingers. There were pillows piled in the corner, covered in the golden scales of their wings, scintillant and dreamy. Silk blankets, thick boring books, and even a kettle of steaming tea. - -“Bedtime stories,” the Shoefly said, yawning. “They’re awfully thoughtful.” - -*Honk! Honk!* - -“They want to devour our dreams,” the Shoefly said. “Suck up our souls. They’ll leave us a body and nothing more. We’ll go on, but we’ll be inside their stomachs, blind and deaf and dumb. We’ll have nothing to do but think. We’ll go mad, sparrow grass, mad!” - -But he yawned despite himself and fell back in the saddle. “So sleepy. Maybe this is winter. Our quest, fair steed, is over.” - -The creatures stirred above, and the room became a storm of golden motes, blown about by their wing beats. The Asparagoose sneezed. The creatures giggled and cajoled them to sleep, to dream—one so excited it crapped, a black missile glistening in the mist—but the Asparagoose did not sleep. Was he immune? He couldn’t remember the last time he slept, but his dreams were not for thieves and burglars. They were his own, his window into the season of flight, and no one could take them from him. - -He honked, calling the Shoefly back from the borderlands of sleep, and shook his tail-spears. The creatures cackled, and then the Asparagoose let fly the javelins of his tail. One after another, the spears shot forth and struck the sickly dream thieves in the wing, the jaw, the throat, silencing their laughter and driving them up and out through the well in the ceiling. - -The Shoefly whooped and danced on the Asparagoose’s back, capering about and calling him a hero. “You’re perfect! You’re the hero, I’m the steed. You’re the sword, I’m the shield. You’re the wonder, I’m the fool. You’re the rider, I’m the road.” - -*Honk! Honk!* - -“Dream on, my Asparagoose. You’ve won the day. The harpies are routed. The door is there!” He pointed, and yes, there was the door, painted the bright yellow of buttercups. “Perhaps we should loot the nests. I could use a new shoehorn and my supplies are running low. Perhaps you might find something to snack on?” - -The Shoefly leaped off and began tossing pillows here and there, stirring up the golden dust once again and making them both sneeze. The Asparagoose beaked about. He didn’t find anything to eat, but he wasn’t feeling very hungry anymore anyway. He found an old boot, which he gave to the Shoefly, and then a streak of silver caught his eye. - -He pushed the detritus aside and found a gauntlet (it wouldn’t fit either of them), a helmet (likewise), and—what was this?—a sword. He grabbed the hilt in his beak and dragged it free from the garbage and gold dust. Brandished in his beak, the sword gleamed. He shivered: goosebumps. Something shook loose inside him… or was it outside? - -The hilt was fashioned into a fox’s face, the blade one long fang. - -“King of Summer, Queen of the same!” the Shoefly swore. “What is this? *Foxtooth?* The legend? From what stone did you pull this, once and future goose?” - -*Honk!* - -The Asparagoose was pleased that he could honk just as well with the sword in his beak. He broke down the yellow door with his blade, about which the Shoefly would not shut up. “The legendary blade,” he repeated, though he could not quite recall the legend itself. He knew nothing about its origin, its maker, or its fate, but he knew it was one of a kind, fashioned perhaps for the King of Summer himself. As a fellow artisan, he admired not just the myth, but the craftsmanship itself. This blade could split feathers. - -Through the door, they found a chamber full of glass cages. Beyond the chipped and cracked faces of the glass, the Asparagoose saw the husks of dead creatures, bones, corpses, and ancient exoskeletons abandoned by their souls. The Shoefly leaped from the saddle again and threw himself at the glass. - -“Caged creatures! Might as well bottle death, put a cork on the whole cycle! Those sick and strange precursors to the rot of this age. To cage creatures they might once have been, might once again be! Knowing they too were once caged, in some past life?” - -The Shoefly began to sob, beating his tiny hands against the glass. The Asparagoose wondered if he should break the glass with the sword, but he thought there were better uses for a legend. The Asparagoose nuzzled the Shoefly with his beak, drawing him away from the glass. He cooed. - -“Why? What’s the point of it all if we don’t remember? What good are our past lives?” - -*Honk.* - -But how could that honk contain what he knew to be true, that everyone did remember, and that forgetting was a choice? That no one could hold all the experiences of all the lives ever lived in their heads, but that you didn’t need to. Couldn’t the Shoefly feel them there, behind him or below? On top of him? They were all around, filling in the empty spaces with their laughter. The past lives, and the past lives of those lives, and thus all of it, ever, writhing about inside, as if preparing to be hatched. - -Maybe he hadn’t heard them yet, but they were there, stacked in the attic of his soul. The cycle was infinite. The wheel held true. After all, didn’t he have some notion of having been here before? - -Didn’t he have the dreams too? - -He honked at the Shoefly and raised his breast, as if to say, *be brave*. - -The Shoefly drew himself up and shook the sniffle from his nose. “I am following you,” he said, bowing. - -And then the whispers swelled again. »All lost patrons. All patrons lose. Exit the ecodustem. Please make your way, make your way front to the back desk. Please make. Please make me.« - -The Asparagoose could still see them, circling above. He saw them now as whorls of fabric, skeins of thread, weaving themselves or trying to weave themselves into a pattern. It was a spiral, he thought. It’s supposed to be a spiral, but it was only a tangle, the four thrown into a box and snarled into a labyrinth. One of them was yellow. - -Was this a clue? - -The Asparagoose grabbed the yellow thread with his beak and tugged. The Shoefly jumped on his back. The fabric of the world began to unravel, first a little and then all at once, until there was a hole large enough for the two of them to enter. - -And they did. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he place beyond place: The four whispers high above, chained to one another and to the Wheel, and the Wheel chained to the black anchor. The Asparagoose thought it looked like the front desk of the All Seasons Inn, but then he saw it with his true sight. He was ashamed, not at himself in that moment, but at some distant moment in the past. He was ashamed to be a part of creation, an epic that had ended in this enslavement. Life had divided itself from life and in doing so confined them all to the circle. - -And yet, wasn’t one of those whispers, the autumnal one, mother of all tricksters, wasn’t she smirking, as if to say, *this is all part of the pattern, this was planned all along?* - -It was just too much for one asparagoose to contain. Inside, something laughed and wiggled. - -The Shoefly threw himself onto the ground and tried to approach the whispers far above. “How?” he said. “Why? Who did this?” He fell to his knees before he reached them. His strength was not enough to meet them face to face. Not knowing how far he had left to go, he couldn’t make it. - -The whispers became voices, became queens. - -“We are the Queens of all seasons. We are the beginning and the end. We are losing our minds. The season cycle has stopped. The earth is stuck. Mind and body have been cloven in two. All is at odds with itself. Past and future, feeling and thought. Souls have dispersed wildly, rapidly, disseminating across the constellation of bodies. - -“This has never happened before. But something like it has. - -“There’s always a stagnation. There’s always a goose. - -“There’s always a spiral. There’s always a fox. - -“It’s time,” they said in unison. “This is when the world happens.” - -The Asparagoose had once dreamed of what he was meant to do in the end, but in his dreams, he always had the means to do it. He always had wings. But here, the Queens were chained so high above, out of reach - -“Bring the souls back,” they said. “Bring them back to the fold. Merge mind and body once again. They’ve forgotten too much. Erase them. Turn the wheel.” - -The Asparagoose knew that to do so would be to lose something of himself, if not the whole: the ultimate magic act: allowing the world to transform him so that he might transform the world. He was afraid what he would become. But mostly, he was afraid that he might lose the Shoefly, that he might, indeed, cause the Shoefly, his only friend, his flock, to lose *his* soul. - -He nudged the Shoefly, and threaded his neck between his arms. - -*Honk?* - -“Yes, sparrow grass, yes. I knew. I had some inkling. I weep not for the fate of the world, but for you. My favorite foul. My favorite vegetable. Dear, dear goose.” He snuffled and then stood tall. He was being brave. “Itinerant healer, worldmaker, repairer of souls, I give you my life so that you may add my body and soul to the next world. Onward, faithful friend! To any season but summer.” - -*Honk! Honk!* - -The Asparagoose pulled him close in the crook of his neck and felt a spear fall from his tail. He took it in his beak and handed it to the Shoefly: a shoehorn, green as his dreams. Just in case. - -The Asparagoose stepped up to the Queens, sword in beak, as they spoke. - -“The first winter will break your heart. - -“The first spring will rebuild it. - -“The first autumn will kill you. - -“But in the summer, you’ll swear you’ll live forever. - -“Are you sure?” - -*Honk!* - -He positioned Foxtooth in front of him, his foot on the hilt, the point at his breast. - -“No one will remember, not for a long time. There will be no souls, no vessels, all life will be in one moment, no past selves, no future selves. But there will be seasons again, and beings will remember. The smallest elements of our experience will remember. They will remember all the beings of which they have been a part: all the beings that ever were and ever will be. - -“Are you ready?” - -The Asparagoose nodded. - -“Then fly.” - -He was alone on a windswept plain, and then he wasn’t alone and never had been. Attended by everything that ever had wings and ever would—the gulls, the corvids, the raptors, the songbirds and grebes, the owls, the shorebirds, the cranes and toucans, the bats, the locusts, the grasshoppers and dragonflies, the mosquitos, the beetles and flies, the wasps, the bees, the bugs, the butterflies, the flying ants, the cicadas and the crickets, the flying fish, the flying squirrels, the flying monkeys, the griffons and pegasi, the garudas, the rocs, the sphinxes, the wyverns and gargoyles, the lumasi and the minokawas, the simurghs, the fenghuang, the faeries, the pterosaurs, the winged trees of Galleon, the sailing flowers and floating waterseeds, the soaring queens, the dragons and the geese—he fell onto the sword, cracked his body open, and spilled into the world the contents of the cosmic egg. - -With his flock, he performed the greatest magic trick of all, nothing less than the total transubstantiation of the cosmos. - -He was the uncreator and the creator. - -And on that day, everything changed. - -The wheel turned, broke free of itself, and began to spiral upward. The Queens, unchained, fled. Summer was finally put to bed. The body was no longer a vessel for the soul, and the soul was no longer a hitchhiker in the body. Instead, they were one. - -And somewhere, at some later time, a wingless someone remembered what it was like to fly once upon a time. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **I Have No Wings and I Must Fly** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328492942405038).* diff --git a/content/issue-27/SilverfishNounHelpVerb.md b/content/issue-27/SilverfishNounHelpVerb.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7f7c0173..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/SilverfishNounHelpVerb.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,83 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Gabrielle Bleu -copyright: '© Gabrielle Bleu 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "You'll find what you're looking where you left it, or so the unhelpfully wise would tell you, forgetting (or ignoring) that this doesn't account for interference from any bad actors out there. Gabrielle Bleu shows that what you might instead need could still be nearby, and yesterday's enemy could be today's friend." - -image: images/Silverfish.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [kvkirillov](https://depositphotos.com/4281667/stock-photo-old-eyeglasses-and-books.html) and [Egor Kamelev](https://www.pexels.com/photo/animal-hairy-insect-spider-8192912/)." - -type: stock -slug: silverfish-noun-help-verb -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}abitha was about as unimposing as it was possible for an old lady to be. It was a practiced act; one she had honed. She always carried a black umbrella, regardless of the weather forecast, “just in case.” She kept her white, thinning hair short to stay out of her eyes, which were failing a little and required the aid of reading glasses that dangled around her neck on a silver chain. - -All suitable old lady accoutrements. All things she knew helped deflect suspicion of what she had hidden in her archives. For she refused to retire from her position as head archivist, stubbornly presiding over a collection that was similarly unimposing, to the un-informed visitor. - -No other archivist had dared to violate inter-species peace treaties to preserve archival materials, and certainly not with as much guile as she. - -At the close of the Spinneret War, the peace treaty called for non-communication between humans and spiders. Tabitha held many opinions about this clause, and its inclusion of written texts. Short-sighted, Tabitha thought. Arrogant, she believed. “An affront to their entire profession,” she had told the archivists and library professionals’ listserv. Sensing what was to come from such a heavy-handed and sweeping clause, Tabitha squirreled away an English-to-Araneae dictionary deep within the archive’s secure storage vaults. - -The dictionary was not as glamorous sitting on the shelves as a volume of poetry by *Plexippus petersi #6734891*, or an anthology of the metafictional works of Linwood Russell (in translation by Vulf the Wolf Spider) might have been. But those works had all been gathered up and locked away in some government vault to make inter-species communication an absolute non-possibility. Tabitha still held all the building blocks for discussion, housed in a thick little book with a red cover. - -It was her duty as an archivist to preserve the past, and with this unimposing book she had hope not only for the safeguarding of history, but also for the safeguarding of a hypothetical future between human and spiderkind. So, the dictionary sat in the archives, beneath the buzzing lights that needed replacing, secure on the dictionary shelf. An obvious hiding spot, but few researchers ever wanted the dictionaries. - -In the aftermath of the treaty and its terms, Tabitha saw spiders less and less in the archives, as they withdrew to their most distant holdings, such as the rare maps storage vault. Tabitha thumbed through the dictionary on her breaks, picking up what words she could. A simple “Hello, I’m cleaning” would go much further in terms of peace than non-communication, she felt. If she accidentally vacuumed up a family of spiders while cleaning the vaults the fallout would be unimaginable. - -And she did need to clean, for the withdrawal of the spiders made the silverfish grow bold; the archives were dustier than ever with frass and bits of exoskeleton. Tabitha felt that the military officials and diplomats had done a grave disservice by overlooking the potential for alliances between their two species. An entirely new approach to integrated pest management could have been pioneered. Archives need never again fear the tyranny of chewing bugs, if only the spiders could have been recruited. - -Teamwork was always good for relationships, as was the ability to apologize. “Sorry about the noise,” would lessen the apocalyptic feeling of the vacuum whirring to life. It was a gap in Tabitha’s slow reading of the dictionary. One she should amend. Tabitha went to the dictionary shelf, ready to arm herself with peaceful words. - -However, Tabitha’s bold new integrated pest management plan seemed dead even before arrival: *the English-to-Araneae dictionary was missing*. - -A cold weight settled in her stomach. The last public remnant of Araneae lost, under her watch! Could a researcher have taken it? No, surely, they would have immediately publicized their findings. Maybe an intern misplaced it? No, Tabitha had barred them from this section to keep her secret hidden. - -She ran her hand over the empty space on the shelf, as if the book had turned invisible and would appear by touch. When she drew back her hand, no book came with it… but remnants of one did. Scraps of yellowed paper stuck to her fingers. The presence of loose bits pointed to a devoured book. - -And worse, a full-blown silverfish infestation. - -Tabitha whirled, eyes darting over the forgotten corners and shadowy under-shelving of the storage area. The silverfish could be anywhere, watching her. Anywhere, snacking on the “N” pages of the dictionary, perhaps, the noun of “noise” lost forever. Anywhere, mocking the failure of her pest control plan. - -The obvious solution would have been to ask the spiders for help finding the dictionary, but she would need the dictionary to do that. A circular puzzle, similar to needing ones glasses to search for them when misplaced. Tabitha reflexively checked her readers were around her neck—still there. - -She coiled part of the chain around her finger. She had to hope it was a simple misfile. Otherwise, the specific and targeted choice of food in the dictionary pointed to a planned attack, and a marshaling of silverfish forces that Tabitha did not want to think about so soon after the end of the Spinneret War. Worse, such an attack meant her whole collection was now at risk. Priceless photos, rare maps and journals, all lost under her management. She would certainly never be employed in an archive again. - -Tabitha perched her readers on her nose and steeled herself. She would hope for the best and work backwards from there. She donned her white cotton gloves, which were loose around the wrist from so much use. She couldn’t lose her head and mishandle anything in the archives, crisis though this was. - -If it were a simple misfile and not a silverfish plot, she normally would dump the search through every shelf and archival storage box on an intern. But she didn’t want to make any of them an accessory. Tabitha of course did not play favorites with the interns… but Joaquin *was* her favorite. Yet she couldn’t involve him. Which was a shame—Joaquin had a knack for finding things misfiled. - -No. It was all on her. - -So, under the gaze of the thousand silverfish which she suspected to be hiding underneath the flat files, she began searching for the last remaining English-to-Araneae dictionary. - -She started with the shelf where the dictionary should have been and worked outward. As she hunted, she saw silverfish skittering across the floor out of the corner of her eyes. Throughout the shelves, Tabitha found scraps of paper fallen from chewed-up pages. Not even enough left for a conservator to work with. She couldn’t even lay out sticky traps as she would have pre-war; spiders were just as prone to wander into them as silverfish. The only option that remained in her pest-management arsenal was the hoped-for enlistment of the spiders. They could be brought on as interns too. - -Tabitha sighed, dreams of spider alliances receding, and took a long look around the shelving and archival boxes, at everything that would be lost under her watch. She returned to the dictionary section and stared hard at the empty space on the shelf. Maybe she would have to bring in the interns. Maybe she would have to admit to the original crime. Maybe another interspecies war was brewing right beneath her feet. The silverfish meant to keep her from ever forging an alliance with their enemy the spider, and to remove her from her position as head archivist and guardian. Then the archives would be easy snacking. - -She was about to give up when something caught her eye. A common house spider, no bigger than her thumbnail, was standing on the book that should have sat snug against the English-to-Araneae dictionary. It waved its two long front legs at her. Perhaps at least eight of the eyes she had felt upon her had not been those of the silverfish forces, but of a friend. The treaty had done the little synanthropes as dirty as it had done archivists, after all. - -Gently, so as not to create an air current that would blow away the small arachnid, Tabitha waved back. The spider brought its legs down in a quick and succinct tap on the spine of the book it stood atop. Tabitha read the title emblazoned there, and her eyes widened. Not quite a dictionary, more of a phrasebook, possibly warranting refiling later: *Scorpionid for Beginners*. - -The spider had found her a possible way out—Scorpionid and Aranaea shared the same ancient root language of Arachnid. There were some overlaps, words that stayed the same in either tongue, save for the addition or removal of an extra chitter or click. The illicit dictionary might be lost, but she could still save the archives from ruin. - -She reached out a gloved hand towards the book, and the spider scuttled off to the side to allow her to take it. How poorly it had been named, for a creature so capable of such a singularly uncommon kindness. - -Tabitha flipped through the pages, looking for the right words of help. She could still save her archives, pioneer a new era of spider-human relations, and present her new integrated pest management plan at the next big conference. But for all her practice in Araneae, Scorpionid was still a different language, and she would need to start at the beginning. She turned to the *Greetings and introductions* section. - -“Nice to meet you,” was always a singularly good place to start. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - - - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328492329071766).* - diff --git a/content/issue-27/TheSeedMan.md b/content/issue-27/TheSeedMan.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7e505531..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/TheSeedMan.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,387 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Seed Man" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Claire Scherzinger -copyright: '© Claire Scherzinger 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Closing out this issue is our second long sci-fi read, and as previously hinted at, they serve as inverted reflections of each other. In Claire Scherzinger's tale, we focus on a daughter seeking escape rather than a father desperately searching, and while the previous story swiftly departed from a technological environment for a more primitive one, this time it's a seemingly simple way of life being abandoned for an infinitely wider world." - -image: images/SeedMan.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [denisgo](https://depositphotos.com/83371738/stock-photo-evening-aerial-view-of-futuristic.html), [Parker West](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/spaceship-starship-spacecraft-3141006/), and [Andrew Burns](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-black-leather-backpack-in-front-of-rock-1700504/)." - -type: stock -slug: the-seed-man -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}D{{}}ad opens the door, and light from the hallway glints off the UP Bar wrapper in his hand. - -“Get up.” His voice snaps like a wet towel. He purses his lips as he chews, like he’s taunting me, before turning around and thudding down the stairs in his work boots to the kitchen. I smell Ma making bacon, the dry, boxed kind that breaks into hard flakes in your mouth. - -Next to me, my younger sister, Tama, sits up. “I hope he’s going to be all right today.” - -“He’ll be fine, so long as we pull in a good harvest.” I look out the sun-filtered window and rub the night’s crust from my eyes. “I heard Ma grumble the Earthers’ll be collecting earlier than usual. Don’t know exactly when though.” - -“They’re making sure we follow the rules,” Tama says. Her black hair sticks to one side of her cheek, she peels away all the strays that ended up in her mouth during the night. “I’ll use the bathroom first.” She yawns. “You gonna wash yourself today? Or are you still on that shower strike?” - -I sniff my armpits. They look clean, light blonde hair grows out of them like dry summer grass. The comforter smells a bit, but I can’t say if it’s from being stored in the closet most of the year or if I’m the reason why Tama always makes gagging noises before bed. Passive aggressiveness is the sharpest tool in her box, ever since she sold me out to Dad. - -“Shampoo is just another way Earthers try to control you,” I tell her. “Human hair doesn’t actually need washing every day.” - -Tama rolls her eyes. Sometimes she gets lavender-scented products in the monthly drops. - -“Whatever.” She heads for the bathroom. “If Dad loses his shit, *my* hair won’t smell like blood.” - -Water moves through the pipes. It’s a coarse metallic popping sound, like tiny men with rifles are gunning for clay pigeons. Ma once told me that’s something Earth folk did for fun. I wonder if they think about what *we* do for fun as I touch the back of my head—the gash is only throbbing mildly today. But it’s itchy. At least the discomfort doesn’t feel like emptiness, like the space in the bed next to me. I shimmy across to Tama’s side to curl in the residual warmth. The sheets smell floral; they smell like her. - -That’s when I see the drawer of her night-table is open a fraction. - -Surreptitiously, I slide the rest of the drawer out. - -Inside is an UP Bar, still wrapped in its green packaging. I know Dad’s been giving them to her earlier than he’s supposed to, but the sight of it makes my throat burn with the kind of anger words melt into. - -The water pressure eases off. I hear Tama humming as she brushes her teeth. Before she finishes in the bathroom, a towel muffled around her hair, I spit in my hand and wipe it on the underside of her pillow. - -Then I make the bed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}'O{{}}gor’ is a colloquial term for the plants we grow: the stalks are white, plump, and round, though hairy, like a carrot. About a third of the way up from the ground are pastel midribs that grow out into the leaves’ petioles, and the largest leaves are on top, sucking up the brunt of the sunlight. On the surface near the midribs is where the lithium analogue ore (collapsed into ‘ogor’ by Tama when she was six) grows. - -Harvesting requires gentle scraping with a thin, subtle knife. If you’re good at it, you can finish off a leaf in under five-seconds; a juvenile plant should take less than ten minutes. We vacuum up the glassy purple flakes into a fire-proof container, which we seal, label, and then store in the shed next to the garage, until the next pick-up. - -I held the family record for harvesting. Dad taught me how to be quick, the process is like shaving, something he stopped doing long ago. When he first taught Tama and me how to scrape the leaves, his face was smooth and you could see the squareness of his jaw, the angular cuts of his cheekbones. Dad had been lean as a whippet back then. Now he’s even thinner, since he stopped eating anything but UP Bars. His eyes have a euphoric glaze during the day, a puncturing spitefulness in the evening. - -At present, his face is glassy. He’s three UP Bars into the day, and he smiles at Tama, who whizzes her harvest knife across a matured plant—they usually take a good twenty minutes to shave, since their leaves are so much broader and numerous. Last I heard Dad’s fawning praise across the field, she was down to fourteen minutes, which used to be my record. - -And he used to smile at me like that. - -Instead, like a wasp in a bottle, the gash where Dad’s belt sliced my scalp open thrums distractingly, my grip loosens, and my knife sputters across a palm-sized leaf. I bite down on my lip, sheath my blade, and bend over, hands clutching the knobs of my knees. - -No one notices me as I wait for the pain to pass. Dad’s on the ladder, scraping and shaving ore off the tall leaves while Tama chatters at him about which of the neighbor’s sons she likes best. Ma’s hauling the full containers to the shed on our little battery-powered truck. That used to be Grandpa Ian’s job, but since he hung himself in the shed Ma’s picked up the slack, in addition to doing all the cooking and cleaning. - -I watch as her hat blows away on a waterlogged wind coming in from the east. Mega storms will shoot up seeds and detritus into the atmosphere, sometimes appearing as angry spurts of clouds riding the dense currents. Perhaps more important, the air kicks up a lot of ore dust, and since the lithium analogue’s so toxic, you’ve gotta wear goggles and a bandanna while you scrape leaves. Dad’s got our only respirator, which he lets Tama appropriate on a regular basis (no surprise: he used to offer it to me first if he wasn’t using it). - -I need to peel off my goggles every few hours, the elastic band makes my gash ache like it’s being rubbed with a piece of ice, but the sun’s so bright on Aiona that it’s crucial to only take off your eyewear under cover of the forest or wherever there’s shade. Around noon, I walk toward the woods, where Tama and I used to take our midday break. - -When I reach the tree line, Dad’s voice hits like a lash against my back. “Kya! Where you off to?” - -I reach into the belt pouch on my waist and wave an UP Bar in the air like a white flag. “Lunch!” I shout back. - -“You know to wait for Ma!” he barks, and then yells to her across the field. His words sound like loose stones skipping across a pond. - -Ma comes eventually, her arms hanging loosely at her sides like blowing sticks in the wind. “Go,” she says, and looks over her shoulder. “Quietly.” - -We enter the woods abutting the north side of the farm. The forest floor is a menagerie of tangerine-colored ferns and smooth white logs that look like curved, bleached bones along the path. The tallest trees are only about nine or ten feet and so the logs provide coverage for more shade-happy plants which Ma named skull collard and weeping thistle. - -A quarter of a mile in, she stops near the petals of an orange bower and pinches the fleshy fruit growing from the pistil. It’s firm, pale gold, and the rows of seeds inside the fruit are little teardrop shadows. She holds it up as a test. - -I take off my goggles, squint, pensively chew my lip. “It cures headaches,” I say. - -“That’s lypmallow.” Ma hands me the fruit, shaking her head. “Orange bower is a sleeping agent. Fatal in the right dose. You need to remember things like this, Kya.” - -I put it in my belt pouch, on top of my UP Bar, next to my knife. We cross the orange bower patch to a hollowed white log and Ma reaches inside the cavity, pulls out a canvas rucksack with a grey water bottle clipped to the side. - -“Town’s about thirty miles,” she points northwest, “that way.” Her voice is so calm as she eases the straps over my shoulders and then tightens them. The rucksack is heavier than I expected, but Ma says that’s because she packed me a blanket and as little bit of food from our monthly drop rations. As much as she can spare. - -“I’m not sad you’re going,” she says, straightening the sleeves of my jacket. “I’m just sad I can’t go with you.” - -“You could.” I swallow the lump in my throat. She’s never liked crying or seeing others cry. “Dad and Tama would make it on their own.” - -“No…” Her mouth becomes a thin line. “No, I don’t think they would.” - -“Then just *leave* them,” I whisper. “They’ve made our lives miserable. Why would you stay?” - -She shakes her head. “Sometimes you just have to figure out how to grow where you’ve been planted, Kya. I’ve made my bed. Go find wherever you want to make yours.” - -So I walk away, leaving Ma. - -She doesn’t say goodbye, and I don’t turn back to see if she waves. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he first few miles are mostly forest, but after a while the tree line breaks, and I can see a storm fraying above the mountain ridge to the north. Grandpa Ian once told me the Aionian Mountains are smooth dunes compared to the cragginess of Earth mountains. He knew all sorts of facts about Earth because he was born there before being shipped off to Hemera, the prison colony, as a labeled terrorist. ‘Freedom fighter’ was the term he imposed whenever asked about his former life, though I never asked what exactly needed freeing, and he never bothered to tell me before hanging himself. - -But I think he told Ma when they met on the colony ship coming here, to Aiona. It must’ve been something, or someone, worth fighting for, because she decided to stay with Dad and Grandpa Ian instead of heading to Pontus, the ocean world, where her sister—my Aunt Jo—lives. - -Ma’s the one who came up with the plan to get me out. She said if I can get to the edge of town where all the ships take off, she has a friend there who’s agreed to smuggle me into one of the Pontian Free Cities that floats on the ocean. He’s a seed man, a person who collects seeds from local plants and secretly gives them out to farmers for domestication and cultivation. - -From my understanding, he’s also the one who gave Ma the seeds for my garden, which she passed onto me with a warning. She said, *you need to share this with your sister. But whatever you do,* don’t *tell her about the seed man.* - -After twenty minutes, I turn onto the path Tama and I used to secretly walk together when we escaped into the forest for our midday break. Near the flying tassel bush, a bowl-shaped cluster of branches, is where our garden used to be. Half a year earlier, when the plot was full, Tama and I worked together to remove stray stones, and anything that might resemble a weed or something poisonous. We ate together, fruits like pale pink elephant squash or the little translucent bauble fruits we called spirit figs, until it was time to sneak back to work in the ogor fields. - -Now, as I pick up a clump of dirt in my hand, I can still smell the chemicals Tama used to kill all the plants after she snitched to Dad about the garden. Ammonia and diquat. The smell makes a sharp, prickling sensation in my nostrils, and a shiver rills through my chest. My fingers are a sieve as the dirt falls back to the ground. - -In the corner opposite of the flying tassel bush, I push a stone off a patch of leaves with the side of my boot. Underneath is a hole containing the UP Bars I pretended to eat over the last six months. The foil packages flash blue, green, and orange under a small beam of sunlight. Some of the brown, spongy bars poke out through gnawed corners. - -I’m leaving the hole uncovered for Tama, as a monument to how everything went so wrong. - -The shift in her behavior happened when I turned sixteen, and Dad started looking at me funny—looking at my face like he was trying to find himself in a mirror. Tama, who was fourteen, started doing the same not long after, whenever we harvested our plot for lunch. She asked why my hair was so blonde. She asked, “How come I don’t look like you?” - -Though by far, the most recurring question was: how come Ma had given *me* the seeds for the garden and not her? I didn’t have an answer to the latter question lined up, since I wasn’t supposed to tell her about the seed man. But even if I had told Tama the truth, it still wasn’t a reason why Ma had favored me and not her. Ma was never transparent about anything, much like Grandpa Ian, and she’d snap at you whenever you asked a question she didn’t want to answer. - -As for the former, the only explanation I offered is that I *was* different, though I didn’t know how that difference came about. In hindsight, I think my unintentional phrasing, misconstrued as self-perceived exceptionalism, was the catalyst for her snitching on me to Dad. - -It happened over dinner. “Kya’s been hiding all her UP Bars,” Tama said casually, while cutting up a piece of cured ham. Dad’s eyes widened to the size of glossy marbles (he had seven UP Bars that day, a personal record). “She’s also been growing food in the forest,” Tama added, and then shrugged as she looked at me across the table, as if to say, *no harm no foul.* - -The ache in the back of my head says otherwise. - -Wind shoots through the tassel bush, and I shiver as it presses on my wound like a sandy balm. I move on. It’s best not to linger in one place for too long. - -Walking consumes the rest of the day. I pass by fields rife with Devil’s Tulip, giant cupped plants that developed a natural luminescent waxiness to reflect the sun’s tyrannical rays. Around evening, I reach the next stretch of forest before town. The moons appear, three white shadows that make a loping line across the mauve sky. Roughly, I’ve trekked eighteen or nineteen miles, and no signs of Dad or Tama angrily blustering through the bushes. - -For dinner, I unpack some of the food Ma gave me. It’s all Earth food: packaged synthetic eggs, a bag of chips, and a couple cans of corn. Even this meager array is generous, since most of a colonist’s diet is UP Bars. - -I pop open the chips, and saltiness blooms in my mouth. I chew slowly, swallow carefully, anticipating the same euphoria that follows when eating an UP Bar: a fuzzy veil cast over my vision. Sometimes my breath would feel like soft fabric on my tongue. They’re filled with enough sedatives to keep you light-headed and fluffy-eyed for days. - -All I get from the chips is an echo in my belly, and a greasy, moreish aftertaste that has my fingertip rooting around in the corners of the bag for the last crumbs of flavour. I save the eggs and corn for later, and for a moment I think almost longingly of the stash of UP Bars I left uncovered for Tama to find, but I prefer the pain of hunger, of emptiness, rather than the lush, fleeting sense of a high, and the distress that follows. - -Word around our neighbor’s, the Finnegars, is that their eldest son Cole even sees specters when he’s high. He turned sixteen last year, which is when the Earther’s start sending you UP Bars, so by the time you’re an adult, your head’s used to being in a fog while you work, you’re used to ignoring your hunger. That’s how they get away with sending less ‘real food’ in the monthly drops. - -After my sister snitched on me, Ma would chivvy me to the toilet to throw-up once Dad and Tama had gone to the fields. The first time she did it, she put my head over the bowl and jammed two of my fingers in my mouth. - -“I’m not going to help you every single time,” she urged. “Hurry Kya—up and out!” - -Every day for the next three months was a morning row of gagging, my abdomen repeatedly tightening and unclenching. I kept gasping in between acidic bursts, “I can’t breathe!” - -I inhale a long breath and lie down in the nubby grass. In, out, like a bellow. My chest gets hot from the memory, and I look up at the sky. - -It’s clear, no Earther ships visible. Not yet. However, supposedly they’ll hang in orbit, just beyond visibility, conducting passive scans to look for agricultural anomalies on Aiona’s surface. Ma says that if people grow local food for subsistence, they grow their own culture, and shared commonalities mean potential resistance to colonial law— - -Something shifts, and I sit up. - -The sound is close by. It’s either the wallowing of some desperate creature, or it’s my stomach stirring uncomfortably—both equally likely. - -Affirmation of the latter comes as I lean onto my side and vomit. The body yearns for habit, for structure. This time at least I don’t have to stick my fingers down my throat. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}ext day, late afternoon creeps up in the slow humming of insects. In the distance, thin slices of the moons give the mountain ridge a silver skin. I reach the shipyard on the edge of town earlier than I expect. - -Most of the ships are skiffs. They have chemical thrusters, only suitable for traveling short distances. A few freighters have larger drive cones and stand like large metal pillars on the launchpads, supported by an intricate gantry network. The only sign that dispenses information is about a half-mile from the launchpads, secured to the roof of a small diner. Rendered in blinking orange lights are launch schedules. Almost all the ships on the various pads are to take off in the next few hours. - -There’s nothing to do but wait inside the diner. I take off my bandanna, let my goggles rest around my neck, and dump my rucksack in a booth next to a large window. The server comes by, and I order a cup of hot water infused with lemon powder. Every few minutes, I look out the window and squeeze my hands together. The prospect of getting caught by the Earthers makes my palms sweat. On the chance that a colony fleet or random patrol scans me and sees I have no travel documents, I could end up back home. Or on Hemera. - -I’m not sure which destination would be worse. - -“You Kya?” a low voice asks. In the window, I jump at a reflection that appears uncannily similar to mine. A tall man, tanned as tea with a ponytail of yellow hair, is standing at the edge of my booth. He’s blind in one eye, milky white where his iris and pupil should be. I don’t answer but shift away. I’ve never seen a man that tall before. - -He doesn’t seem to mind. “It’s good you’re cautious, but I’m a friend,” he says. “I’ve known your Ma for a while. I’m Adrian. Can I sit?” - -I lean back against the booth and shrug. Adrian drops a pack from his shoulder onto the seat next to me, briefly looks at the menu screen over the counter, and then offers to buy me a coffee. - -“Never had coffee,” I say. - -“Ah,” Adrian chuckles. “Well, the stuff here isn’t real coffee, but it’s as good as it gets out in these parts.” - -I fold my arms over my chest. “So how do you know my Ma?” - -“Through your grandfather, on the colony ship coming here to Aiona.” Adrian rests his hands on the table. “Your grandpa was a seed man, but back on Earth, when big agriculture corporations took control of the planet’s food supply. He helped people find ways to grow their own food in secret, just like your Ma tried to help you.” - -“Earth is just like here?” I ask mournfully. - -Adrian tilts his head to the side. “Maybe worse. I haven’t been there in… a long time.” He scratches the stubble on his face. His eyes are wide and a little watery. When I frown at his sudden emotion he blinks them back like he’s embarrassed by the display. - -“Look, Kya, I’m glad you came,” he says. - -He looks at me, not in a searching way like Dad; his gaze is one of recognition. The realization washes over me that this man is more to Ma than a friend. He’s more to me than just the seed man. - -“You see it now, huh?” - -Nodding, I manage to squeak out a “Yes.” - -He grins. His teeth are large, one front tooth is slightly chipped, but we have the same lips, and he has dimples like mine. I stare intently at the opalescence of his singular blind eye. It seems like it discerns more about the world than his seeing one. - -I clear my throat. “I think I’ll have that coffee.” I don’t know what else to say. Adrian signals the server for two coffees. - -I think of asking him about Ma’s life story, and Grandpa Ian’s maybe. But he was always so closed-mouthed—is it wrong to learn things he didn’t choose to say to me himself from some stranger he knew before I was born? I shift, feeling suddenly uncomfortable, and then I feel a pulpy squish in my belt pouch. - -“Oh.” I take the orange bower out and place it, flattened, next to my cup of hot water on the table. “Forgot I had this.” - -As we wait for the coffee, Adrian pulls out a cloth bundle from the breast pocket of his jacket and unrolls it across the table. There are several compartments with little glass vials and pairs of tweezers inserted into them. - -“Your Ma believed in choosing a path and sticking to it, for better or worse,” Adrian murmurs as he dissects the orange bower. He picks up every seed with the tweezers and drops them, one by one, into a vial thinner than the width of his thumb. “I loved that about her. But it’s the nature of seeds to migrate, just like people trying to find better pasture. I’ll teach you about the seed network, if you want, when we get to Pontus.” - -“I’d like that,” I reply. We sit in silence, watching each other as the server places two steaming cups of coffee in front of us. I take a sip and wrinkle my nose. - -Adrian smiles. “It’s not for everyone.” - -As I go for a second taste, the shipyard horn goes off. Adrian snaps his attention to the window. The ghostly outlines of Earther mining ships have appeared in the sky, and the dropships are beginning their descent into the atmosphere. - -“Looks like it’s time to go.” He downs his steaming coffee, hastily pays the server, and then tucks the vial of seeds in his jacket. He stuffs the bundle back in his pack and throws over his shoulder as he glances anxiously out the window. - -“Hopefully it’s just a typical drop,” he says, and tosses me my rucksack. - -But nothing is ever typical with the Earthers. If I know it, he must know it too. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e walk from the diner toward the last row of launchpads. My whole body is rigid as Adrian directs me to a ship parked on a pad a few spots away from the Earther’s dropships. In my periphery, lines of people descend metal ramps leading from the airlock and then head down a set of stairs that takes them to the ground. - -“Shit.” Adrian suddenly puts his hand on my shoulder. “Stay calm,” he mutters. “But there’s Earther Eyes at your eight o’clock.” He keeps his other hand discretely near a holster I only now notice, high on his right hip. “Just look straight ahead, and don’t stop walking.” - -I always thought “Earther Eyes” was just something we called them. The guards that watch the colonists wear long jackets with a patch that has a tiny blue dot in the center, and shiny black helmets that are panoptic cameras. Ma warned me once, it’s impossible to sneak around them, and you should never try. They’re trained to breathe as little as possible, so when they move as swiftly as they do they look inhuman, god-like, to make you believe there’s no hope in resisting them. - -Adrian’s grip on my shoulder tenses. “Almost there,” he says under his breath. “Hang on—” But his grip suddenly loosens. - -Air rushes past my ear as he pushes me behind him. - -A bullet hits the launchpad behind us—the new colonists scatter at the sound of shooting, but the Eyes don’t chase after them. They focus on us, advancing as we shuffle away. Adrian pulls his gun from its holster and shoots back, to little effect: one of his bullets pierces the tail of an Eyes’ jacket. They separate and hide behind the pillars of nearby launchpads, firing at consistent intervals until Adrian’s gun clicks that he’s out of ammo. - -“Get on the ship!” he commands. He tosses me a small chain with a bead on it as I run for the stairs. “Lock yourself inside if I’m not behind you!” - -Shots ricochet against the metal facing of the launchpad as I climb the stairs, my rucksack jostling against my back. When I’m at the top, I look down and catch a glimpse of Adrian. His hands are in the air, offering surrender. One of the Eyes has a pulsar rifle aimed at his head and walks around to zip-tie Adrian’s hands behind his back. - -The other Eye is coming for me. - -I scramble: the first airlock door opens automatically, but the next set leading onto the bridge are locked. I’ve never used a bead chain key, so I just press it hard against the door’s lock, a square of metal with a set of small lights in the left-hand corner—it concurrently chimes and they flash red as I slap the bead against the lock twice, three times. - -Behind me, the Eye’s quick, dull footsteps on the stairs grow louder. - -I press the bead more softly against the lock, and it rewards me by turning green. The pressure door slides open and I rush inside as the Eye turns the corner, force myself to only touch the bead against the lock, holding my breath until the door slides shut again. - -Red. I crouch down, exhaling. The floor beneath me is grated, covering up all kinds of wires and conduits, and a series of blinking lights that leads to a blocky grey wedge in the floor. It’s covered in rows of red-lettered words and all kinds of gauges with digital readouts flashing random numbers. - -Adrian’s ship is small. The canteen in the corner has a bag of lyophilized blood in the fridge and rows of tiny vials, full of seeds, but no food and minimal water. On the port side, there’s a bunk bed. The pilot’s seat and crash couches are spaced less than five feet apart. That’s it, not even a toilet that I can see. - -I drop into the pilot’s seat. Beneath my feet is a loose panel I remove in the hopes of finding an escape hatch, but it’s just more skeins of electrical wiring. There are some basic instructions for heating up the core at the helm, and camera feeds show the outside on a three-screen array. I find the spot where Adrian had put down his gun in surrender… - -He’s gone. The Eye that had him isn’t anywhere in sight either. - -Tears well in my eyes before I can blink them back. Snot salts the inside of my nose as I grip my sides and cry, big, heaving sobs—and then I give a little scream as gunfire erupts right outside the airlock door. One of the monitors shows the other Eye dropping his aim from the bead lock, then I see him smash the stock of his rifle into the metal plate and hear the muted thud of it, just a few metres behind me. - -I think about how much I simultaneously hate Tama for what she’s done and miss her too, all at the same time. I hate Ma for not telling me about Adrian and regret not saying a better goodbye. Despite everything that’s been said and done, a part of me feels that you can never truly say goodbye to where you’re from. I’ll always be Kya, the ogor harvester. - -I droop forward in the pilot’s seat… and something beeps. - -*“Adrian,”* a sonorous voice on the screen says, *“if you get the chance—”* - -“Fuck!” I push back and slam into the pads of the seat. The man on the screen freezes and my eyes widen, taking in the portrait of Grandpa Ian... though his hair is less salty and sparse, his eyes a little bit brighter and deep, loamy brown, like Dad’s. - -I look down. When my hand clenched on the armrest, it landed on top of a touchscreen. I lift my fingers away and the screen blinks, starting from the beginning. - -*“Adrian, if you get a chance, try to persuade Aphelion—”* I hit the touchscreen again. *“Aphelion,”* I repeat. That’s Ma’s name. I let go and the video resumes. *“—to get to Pontus. I know now that my son was responsible for ousting you to the Earthers when you were imprisoned on the colony ship. His personality, his temperament is all my fault, but there’s no hope in reversing it now.* - -*“If you manage to get to Aiona, tell Aph that the place you’re born isn’t necessarily the place you belong. I’ve tried convincing her to let Kya go, but you might be the only one who can get through to her now. The Earthers’ll be coming for me any day, unless I do something about that, so don’t send any tight beams here, Adrian. Just get your daughter to a Free City.”* - -The video freezes on a still of Grandpa Ian’s face. His mouth is slightly open. His lips are dry, cracked, just as I remember. They’re like Tama and Dad’s, dried out from the heat of the ogor fields. - -*Unless I do something about that*—like hang yourself in the shed? To remove any reason for the Earthers to come looking for you again? - -There are so many memories that I want to re-process with this new found piece of information, a key to why my life has been the way that it has. - -But there’s no time. - -Outside, another round of pulsar shots hits the airlock door, a weapon designed to overload system circuitry and neural synapses equally well. The lock won’t hold up forever, I can’t fly this ship to safety, and if they’re shooting now they figure me for a seed man too. The best I can hope for is a terminal shock reaction—rather that than a short, oblivious life spent labouring on some Earther penal farm in a slave-cowl. - -I wipe my eyes, my nose, and unsheathe my harvest knife. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he ship’s cameras show the Eye standing a few feet away from the outside of the airlock. I ready myself, standing off to the side of the door for cover, and tap the lock screen with the bead. Good thing, too—when the pressure door slides open, three shots whiz through. One scorches the pilot’s seat, the others flare off the starboard wall. - -When the bullets stop, I run, knife poised to strike as the Eye reloads. With a serpentine sweep, I stab upward, just underneath the rim of the helmet. I thrust and twist, the tip of my knife collides with his jaw, and I hear the guttural crunch of bone. The Eye stumbles, a gurgling sound emits from the helmet, and he topples forward, flopping like a beached fished into my arms. - -I stagger, hold his body in a haphazard hug, realizing that he’s just a man, like any other. - -And I’ve killed him. - -I don’t even notice the sound of boots coming up that stairs until I hear Adrian’s voice above me. “Drop him, Kya,” he says. He has his little pistol in his hand again, aimed at the Eye. - -“He’s dead,” I say, though I do as he commands. The Eye’s helmet slams against the metal with a reverberating thud, and I scuttle a few paces back. - -Adrian shakes his head. “They all have body mods. Don’t die as easily as you think… so, you’ve got to be sure.” Then he shoots the Eye through the chest, and I flinch. - -“You did good,” he wheezes. There’s a crescent moon of a bruise around his blind eye, and he’s clutching his abdomen with his other hand. A nasty red stain leeches through his shirt. “Let’s go. God knows there’ll be more coming.” - -He shucks the pulsar rifle over the side of the launchpad and lumbers inside. From out on the gantry I watch as he heaves himself into the pilot’s seat and begins punching in codes on the various screens. His eyes briefly flick to Grandpa Ian’s message and he closes the window. He turns around, sees I haven’t moved, and says gruffly, “Kya, hurry up and strap in. We’re going to do this quick and dirty.” - -“But, your wound… if we take off—” - -“It’ll be fine,” he replies, and then pauses like he’s caught himself in a lie. “It’ll be what it’ll be. Strap in.” - -He rapidly goes over the pre-flight checklist, and I notice I’m still holding my knife. The Eye’s blood drips from it. My hand shakes, and I’m about to throw it over the railing after the rifle, but instead I crouch and wipe it clean on the dead man’s jacket and resheathe it, then follow Adrian inside and close the outer door. I lie down on a crash couch and pull the brace straps over my head. Thinking later, doing now. - -All sorts of codes and lights twinkle from the screens, and Adrian grabs a stick with a see-through plastic hand grip. He pushes a series of buttons and nudges the throttle forward. “Try not to pass out.” - -The minute the core flares, I’m pushed back into the pads of my seat. Flattened is more like it. My knuckles turn bone white as I grip the armrest and try not to swallow my tongue. There’s no sharp pain, just an incredible ache that comes with the weight of the ship’s upward propulsion. The thrum of the core and the ominous creaks of the ship’s steel struts and ceramic heat tiles makes my heart palpitate. - -From the corner of my eye, I see Adrian struggling to stay awake. - -Eventually, the booster cuts out and the effects of microgravity manifest—in particular, small droplets of blood begin to form and drift out of his wound as we ascend higher above the atmosphere. The computer beeps a readout that it’s outside Aiona’s gravity well, and we switch to battery power. I hoist myself out of my seat and immediately drift on my momentum—this is what swimming in an ocean must be like. - -First things first, I push towards Adrian and examine his wound. The light from the screen gives his face an odd greenish cast, and he groans as I ease him out of his jacket and then peel back his shirt. There isn’t much to discern with the globules of blood obscuring the hole. I prop him up so he’s perpendicular to the floor and luckily see an exit wound on his other side. - -“There’s a pack of lyophilized blood in the canteen,” he says. “Get it.” - -I’m able to tell I’m holding it the right way up because of the writing, but we’re also in zero-g. “You need to help me. I don’t know what to do.” - -“Not much to do. It’s a gut wound. Likely internal bleeding.” Adrian groans again. “You can bandage it up, and set up the transfusion pump. Was there morphine in there?” - -“I didn’t see any.” - -“Damn,” he says. “I’ve had trouble getting supplies for the last few months. Earther’s are always on my tail…” - -“It hurts a lot?” I ask, and feel hugely foolish. - -“It’ll be fine,” he says, though I sense he doesn’t believe that either. He’s already turning chalky. “If we want to stay off colonial radars it’s a seventy-two hour journey using just maneuvering thrusters. We’ll run out of blood at the rate I’m dripping. Killing the pain would be good, but morphine would slow me down too, and that would be better.” - -I look around—there’s mine, but… “Where’s your backpack?” - -“Eyes got it.” He shifts in his seat and jerks at a sudden grope of pain. “Why?” - -I slump, if you can do that without a down to slump into. “The orange bower seeds. Ma said they could put someone under. I figured, maybe…” - -“My jacket.” He flaps a hand over one shoulder. “Vial. Inside pocket.” - -I remember: only the bundle with the tweezers went into his pack. His jacket is floating towards the airlock, I kick off my crash couch and intercept it, and then bang into the door myself—moving is so weird, speed is hard to judge, and what with no gravity and the high stink of Adrian’s blood filling the little cabin I feel more than a little like puking. - -“The orange bower is… good idea,” Adrian says. He sounds a bit slurry. “No pain in sleep. Might slow down my heart rate. Help control the symptoms until we get to Pontus.” - -I send myself back to his side more carefully and pull the vial out of his jacket. Then I scowl, recalling Ma’s warning. “She said it could be fatal.” - -He smiles, weakly but fiendishly. “Better to hover over death than sink right into it.” - -“You want to risk it?” I think I know what I would do, but this is Adrian’s decision to make. It’s the kind of freedom I’ve been waiting to experience, and if I were in his position, I wouldn’t want anyone to interfere. - -“One seed,” he breathes. - -I drag the stopper out of the vial with my nails and shake a seed into the air. It drifts over his face, right above his lips, and he sucks it in then leans back, cracking it between his teeth. - -“Nice work, Doc,” he says. “You’re part of the seed network now.” - -“Hah,” I say, but he fixes me with his gaze. - -“No joke, Kya. You’re one of us. You’re resistance.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}drian instructs me how to hook him up to the transfusion pump and bandage him properly. Before I can do that I have to clean a frightening amount of blood off him, and there’s more floating all around us. After I’m done with what he calls “the triage”, he directs me to a telescoping nozzle beside the canteen; when I pull it, a long tube spools out and it starts sucking, so I vacuum up as much gore as I can. - -When I stow the nozzle everything still smells of copper, and puking remains an option. I turn from the canteen to find Adrian carefully maneuvering himself into my crash couch. He gestures to the vacated pilot’s seat. “You have the con, captain,” he says. - -“I’m…” I pause. I don’t want to tell Adrian that I’m afraid. I am, but I say instead, “I don’t know how to pilot the ship.” - -He nods wearily. “I’ve set up the autopilot. And your Aunt Jo will be waiting for you at the docks.” He reaches for my hand and grips it tightly, and his gaze focuses a little more as well. “It’ll be all right Kya. You’re strong. Stronger than I would’ve ever imagined. And I’m so proud of you.” - -My chest tightens; he didn’t say *us*. He didn’t say Aunt Jo will be waiting for *us* at the docks. But I smile, and nod, and he relaxes back, closing his eyes as I strap him in. - -Once Adrian begins to drift off into a peaceful-looking sleep, I notice how quiet the ship is; the air scrubbers are the only soft, fuzzy noise. To pass the time, I read the ship’s operations manual and occasionally look out the tiny window above the canteen to watch cones of white super-heated steam shooting out the sides, pushing us toward Pontus. - -I pick up and examine all the different seed vials in the canteen until sharp waves of hunger wash over me. I try to sleep, which passes a few hours. But when I wake up, I’m hungrier than before. All the food in my rucksack is gone… except for the UP Bar in my belt pouch. - -I open the shiny packaging and then let it go, watching it float and rotate in front of my face. *I’m resistance*, Adrian said. Even though I escaped from Aiona, from Dad, and from the Earthers, the UP Bar taunts me with the awareness that resistance will be an everyday battle. - -Direct threats might dissipate over time, but power comes from the structures that facilitate control. As my stomach begins to twist into byzantine knots, I watch the UP Bar with a new kind of intensity. - -The real struggle lies in not cracking, never giving a single inch. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Seed Man** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328486769072322).* diff --git a/content/issue-27/UmpireOfDesolation.md b/content/issue-27/UmpireOfDesolation.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2f23658f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/UmpireOfDesolation.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,150 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Umpire of Desolation" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Hannah Hulbert -copyright: '© Hannah Hulbert 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Life Isn't Fair - the formative lesson of childhood, preparing us for the painful reality we're going to have to grow up and live with for seventy years or more, if we're lucky. But while you're learning to accept it, Hannah Hulbert suggests you consider: If life isn't fair, could it be that unlife is?" - -image: images/Umpire.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using licensed and Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Yganko](https://depositphotos.com/39067105/stock-photo-the-child-hides-under-a.html), [graphics53](https://pixabay.com/photos/golf-ball-golf-ball-2453170/), [tombark](https://pixabay.com/photos/food-plate-delicious-meal-3556782/), [lillaby](https://pixabay.com/photos/wood-turquoise-blue-structure-1963988/), and [Alexas_Fotos](https://pixabay.com/photos/meadow-field-nature-grass-2184989/)." - -type: stock -slug: umpire-of-desolation -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}mi scowled at her sister and watched her nonchalantly tap the ball with her club. It rolled across the Astroturf, bounced off the curb, trundled over the bridge and popped neatly into the hole at the end. - -“Noooo...” Ami moaned. “Dad, it’s not fair. Bea keeps winning!” - -“Don’t whine, sweetie. She *is* four years older than you. You’ll be just as good when you’re fourteen.” - -Ami glowered as Bea marked her ***1*** on the scorecard next to Ami’s ***6*** with an arcane smirk. - -“It’s not my fault you’re rubbish at crazy golf,” Bea said, shouldering her club. “Don’t blame me.” - -“It’s not my fault you’re a rubbish sister,” Ami said and stomped towards hole six. - -Bea hadn’t always been a rubbish sister. Ami could hardly spot the sweet girl who used to braid her hair and read her bedtime stories behind those midnight eyes. She missed her and the bond they’d had. They’d been drifting apart for years, though, ever since Bea had started volunteering at the library after school. Now, instead of watching cartoons together until dinner, she spent all her time with that weird librarian who Bea absolutely insisted was not her boyfriend. But Ami wasn’t stupid. Why else would she be spending so much time surrounded by dusty old books? - -Ami scrunched her lips together and focused all of her concentration on the next shot. She whacked the ball up the slope with all her strength. It careered away, hit the wall at the top and rolled back down to nestle between her feet. Bea cackled. - -It took another four attempts to get to the top. Then the ball refused to go round the corner and skirted the hole three times. Ami gouged ***9*** onto the scorecard while Dad set up his ball. - -Three strokes later it was Bea’s turn. She grinned as she swung her club. The ball shot straight to the top, ricocheted round the corner and rolled directly into the hole. - -“How’s she doing this?” Ami yelled. “Dad, she must be cheating! There’s no *way* she got this good since last time.” - -“Don’t be silly, Ami. How could she possibly be cheating? It’s just luck.” - -“Yeah, Ami. Too bad you’re so unlucky.” Bea said, tossing her hair in inky waves. - -On hole seven, Ami’s ball refused to go around a boulder, bouncing off it a grand total of five times. Ami screamed with frustration. - -“You’re taking this way too serious, Ami,” said Dad. “It’s supposed to be fun. Have a laugh!” - -“No! It should’ve gone past, I *know* it!” Ami narrowed her eyes at her sister. “*You’re* doing something. Stop ruining everything!” - -“Ami, if you’re going to make a scene we’re leaving.” Dad’s eyebrows furrowed in the middle as he stared down at her. She turned away, heat creeping up her body towards her face. She caught a glimpse of Bea’s eyes, twinkling with delight. She flushed. - -“Well?” Dad said. - -“I’ll stop,” Ami muttered. - -She scored ten. Dad scored two. Bea scored one. Again. - -They continued around the course in silence. Dad attempted to lighten the mood with a tirade of excruciating puns but gave up around hole eleven. Bea silently gloated while Ami seethed. - -By hole eighteen, Dad was at forty-nine, Ami was in triple figures, and Bea was at seventeen. - -The last hole was a white-washed windmill, with electronically propelled sails and a tunnel through the base. A slope on the other side dropped the ball through the final hole and back into the ticket booth. Ami smacked her ball with all her pent-up rage and was shocked when it shot into the tunnel. - -“Nice shot, Ami!” Dad said, patting her shoulder. Ami beamed, but Bea still wore that esoteric smile. - -Ami went round the windmill. The ball was nowhere to be seen. - -“It’s stuck inside!” she cried. - -“Never mind,” Dad said. “Let’s record your score as ‘one’ and call it a day.” - -“But that would be *cheating*,” Bea taunted, loud enough only for Ami to hear. Ami frowned at her sister, who smiled sweetly then turned to watch Dad tee off. - -Dad scored five before his ball plopped in and trundled off to the booth. Bea took one last hole-in-one. Ami was too busy examining the wooden panels of the windmill to notice Bea basking in Dad’s congratulations as he slotted their clubs into the returns tray on the ticket booth wall. - -“Come on, Ami, lets go,” he called from the gate leading out to the car park. - -Ami set her jaw. “I want to get my ball. I haven’t finished.” - -“It’s really not worth it.” - -“It’s not like you’re going to win,” Bea added. The shadows of the rotating sails glided over her pale face, transforming her expression from smug to blank and back again with each passage. - -Ami ground her teeth and slid her fingernails under the cracks around the loosest panel. With a grunt, she tugged until it splintered and fell into her hands. She propped it up against the side of the structure and knelt to look inside. - -It was disproportionately black. Tiny arcs of daylight shone on either side where the balls entered and exited, but other than that Ami could see nothing. It was weird—the windmill wasn’t big and the sun was bright outside. She stared, transfixed by the black hole, squinting around for a sign of her ball. - -“Hurry up!” Dad cried. - -She wrinkled her nose at the stale, fishy air and reached inside. The floor was hard and damp as she groped around into the corners. Goosebumps run up and down her arm at the chill. It must be in there somewhere—balls don’t just disappear. - -“Bea and I are leaving,” Dad called again, and his voice seemed further away, as though he was shouting at her from the other side of an expansive chasm. - -“Just a minute!” she shouted back. - -She crawled in through the gap. - -It felt somehow much larger than it had appeared from the outside, but also crowded, like a cupboard full of coats. She shivered and blinked, adjusting her eyes to the dimness, peering around for that elusive white sphere. - -A sucking, squishing, slurping sound from above startled her. She looked up. - -Her mouth sagged open. - -Inches above her face, a massive eye glowed in the shadows. - -A scream rose in her throat. It escaped as a gurgle and a tiny puff of vapour in the cold blackness. Every muscle in her body clenched, except her heart, which pounded as hard as a piston. The enormous pupil shrank, zooming in on her. - -Despite the oppressive closeness, Ami felt herself beneath an overwhelmingly vast and undulating emptiness. As she gazed up into the luminous eye, she thought she glimpsed reflected in it a dim city of impossibly tall buildings with vacant windows. It was like looking at the inside of a spoon: distorted and wrong. Silence rang in her ears until it became the sound of distant screams. - -A thick, black tentacle uncoiled towards her, glistening in the feeble light. A tiny whimper rose in her throat, but her petrified body refused to move. The oozing, boneless limb wound through the space between them, reaching for her face. - -It was holding something pale and round. - -Stuck to the suckers on the end was her golf ball. - -With a wrench of will, she raised her hand. The tentacle hovered before her, waiting. She tugged the ball with trembling fingers and it came free with a moist squelching noise. - -The feel of the glossy, pocked surface under her fingertips, so solid and mundane, prompted the rest of her joints to thaw. Without turning away from that colossal, unblinking eye, she began shuffling backwards to escape the windmill. - -The bottomless pupil swivelled slightly so that it still pointed right at her. Just before she ducked outside, a thought pushed through the terrified fug of her mind. If she left now, she’d always wonder. - -“Um… excuse me…” she said, voice very small as she knelt before the rippling darkness. She paused and cleared her throat, then before she lost her nerve she blurted, “Have you been helping my sister cheat?” - -*Cheat?* The voice spoke directly into her brain without coming in via her ears. A voice that spanned dimensions. Ami’s heart pounded so hard she thought she might be sick. *Bea paid the price for power. It is up to her to decide what is fair and what is not.* - -A vision of that desolate place flashed through her mind again: a twilit eldritch world, eternally void of hope or joy or comfort. She thought of Bea with a shiver and an unfamiliar pang of sympathy. - -“Okay,” Ami said, scooting backwards. Then, just before she emerged into the sunlight, she added: “Thanks for the ball.” - -The glare of the whitewashed windmill in the late afternoon sun was blinding. She squinted around as she rubbed the goosebumps off her bare arms. Same golf course. Same ticket booth. Same bright afternoon. But try as she might, she couldn’t get warm. - -“Come on!” Dad shouted as she pressed the panel back into the gap. She averted her eyes, just in case she spotted something moving inside. Then she hurried away before her ordinary world disappeared into darkness again. Dad and Bea were waiting in the car park on the other side of the white picket fence. - -As she jogged past the final hole, Ami dropped the ball into it. “Hole in one,” she quipped, full of fake joviality as she returned her club then pushed her way through the gate. - -“That’s the spirit!” Dad said with a smile, strolling towards the car. - -“Aren’t you going to thank me for a good game?” whispered Bea as they followed behind. - -Ami turned to her sister and met her abyss-like eyes. Behind them, she thought she could glimpse that realm of shadows and ruin. Ice tiptoed down her spine. Her pulse sped up again. - -“I already thanked the real winner,” she said. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Umpire of Desolation** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328491465738519).* diff --git a/content/issue-27/UtopiaIsland.md b/content/issue-27/UtopiaIsland.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1f99be86..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/UtopiaIsland.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,140 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Utopia is an Island" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Katie McIvor -copyright: '© Katie McIvor 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Depression is a kind of war. Oppression is as well. When you find yourself living through intolerable times, just surviving can be a small act of defiance, or even rebellion. But as Katie McIvor's story underlines, there may still come a point at which survival-rebellion isn't enough." - -image: /images/UtopiaIsland.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using licensed and Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Iurii](https://depositphotos.com/28254465/stock-photo-police.html) and [WikiImages](https://pixabay.com/photos/rocket-launch-space-shuttle-atlantis-60544/)." - -type: stock -slug: utopia-is-an-island -weight: 7 ---- - -***Monday 4th – Good Day*** - -{{}}T{{}}he lynching of poverty campaigner Noah Samuels took place this morning, but otherwise a good day. I admit I was disturbed by the news. A young, handsome gentleman, barely out of his twenties and famous for his athletics career, to see him hanged like that before the mob was shocking for all of us common folks. When the news started coming through on our devices we gathered in huddles on the factory floor, fearful and whispering. Mr Aled who oversees our line was saying What kind of people are in charge these days? Is there no justice, are there no consequences? He let us take an unscheduled fifteen-minute break and sent us home half an hour early, as there was a demonstration in the cement park. I didn’t go to that. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Tuesday 5th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}W{{}}oke to news that the demonstration was broken up after only an hour by police. Full riot gear. Numerous arrests, reported on the main news, many more accounts of police violence across social media. Errol A and Lars F didn’t show up for work, none of us wanted to ask Mr Aled what had happened to them. Mr Aled was quiet all day. Made me wonder if he had been admonished by someone higher up. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Wednesday 6th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}A{{}}nti-Colony protests have broken out across the city. More police, more arrests. The Colony spokesman broadcast a message to every device, stating that Noah Samuels had been a criminal and involved in drugs and that in any case the Colony took no responsibility for his death, or for the subsequent unrest here on Earth. We listened in our factory lines, in our aching work boots. The spokesman was smooth-skinned and well-dressed and spoke so confidently you almost believed him. - -I went straight home after work. Every door in my compartment block was shut, every stairwell deserted. I locked my compartment door too and put the blinds down but I couldn’t stop my device from murmuring the news, showing pictures of protestors, faceless cops, Noah Samuels on the end of a rope. The newsreaders were serious people in suits. The adverts in between all showed images of the Colony: spotless streets, happy beautiful people, expensive buildings. I want to walk those spotless streets and breathe their purified air. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Thursday 7th – Good Day*** - -{{}}O{{}}ne can dream! Today Prior S was notified on the Lottery App that he has won a ticket to the Colony. It comes with a work permit and an allocated compartment when he gets there. We all stopped work to applaud and Prior S had tears in his eyes. My friend Wharton H was muttering about how factory work isn’t going to be any different there to here, but I nudged him to keep quiet. - -He said to me afterwards that the Colony must have added a bunch of extra tickets to the Lottery purely to distract from the protests down here, because his brother at a different factory also knows someone who won a ticket today. Wharton H thinks it a cynical measure. He is always unimpressed by colony propaganda, as he calls it. I told him not to say anything to Prior S. - -There was an enraptured look on Prior S’s face, the look of someone who has allowed himself to dream and wishes not to be woken. Sweat blossomed from his bald head and his dreams moved like slow fish behind his eyes. I stared at his lucid skull and wanted to pour my thoughts inside. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Friday 8th – Good Day*** - -{{}}P{{}}rior S has already gone. In the break room Wharton H and I watched the livestream of this morning’s Mars shuttle, with Prior S somewhere inside. The shuttle looked bloated and blank-skinned. It rose into the sky ponderously from its bed of fire, like a half-inflated balloon. - -We had a scheduled speaker at the social club tonight: an earnest, no-longer-young woman who shifted around in her oversized shoes as she talked. “Poverty is a prison,” she began, looking at us each in turn with childish, beseeching eyes. After that I stopped listening. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Saturday 9th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}W{{}}harton H not at work. I sent him a text during lunch break but he didn’t reply until this evening. Said he had been protesting at the site of the Samuels lynching. People calling for food vouchers, lower work quotas, repeal of the Mars Export Laws. Might as well call for the sun on a stick. Said he kept his face covered. Was with a big group from his brother’s factory and they left before police showed up. - -All the same I am sick with worry. At work they sent round a special bulletin to our devices, emphasizing the company’s core values. “We are proud to support the Colony project. We strive to secure the future of the human race. Earth today, the Colony tomorrow. We must never forget the debt we owe them.” - -Wharton H would say the debt is the other way around. Rich pioneers of the Colony take our exports, grain and metals and fuel, sit up there in their red millionaire’s playground laughing their socks off. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Sunday 10th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}D{{}}idn’t know what to do with myself on my day off. Wharton H called, asked if I wanted to go for a walk. Said I wasn’t sure it was safe to go out (also true: didn’t want to be seen with him, just in case). Spoke to mother on the phone, told her to stay indoors. - -Ran out of cigarettes, walked to corner shop. Someone has daubed slogans all down the stairwell of the compartment block: - -*SOCIETY IS A MYTH* - -*EAT THE RICH* - -*UTOPIA IS AN ISLAND* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Monday 11th – Good Day*** - -{{}}A{{}} better day, anyway. Wharton H was back. We all crowded round him in relief before our shift started, patting his arm and checking he was really okay. I stuck close to him all day. He told me in whispers about the protest, his eyes shining, clear in his belief that things were about to change. My guts twisted from listening to him. In the break room at lunch I sat my chair so close to his that our legs kept knocking together under the table. I mentioned the slogans on the wall and he said they are only half-phrases, there is more to them than that. If the poor have nothing else to eat, they will eat the rich. Utopia is an island you can’t swim to. - -What is Utopia, though? I asked. He thought it was something medieval or maybe to do with universal income. It was obvious he didn’t really know. - -He came round to my compartment for dinner. The slogans in the stairwell had been joined by a mural of Noah Samuels’s face. Wharton H stood in front of it for a moment with his head bowed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Tuesday 12th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}E{{}}xtremely. Mr Aled has been replaced. New line supervisor (Mr Cable) is small and thin and always looks distrusting, even if he’s just asking you to fetch coffee. He took Wharton H aside ten minutes into our shift. Wharton H came back solemn, wouldn’t tell what had been said. Mr Cable’s device has the Party insignia on it. Always slipping it in and out of his pocket as though checking it hasn’t been stolen. - -Was called into his office too later on. Stood in the middle of the floor, feet aching, he sat by his computer. He said was I close to Wharton H, asked why he was off sick, if he’d gone to the Thames Park protest, if I’d had any thoughts about going. Said I don’t think about things like that. Mr Cable said maybe Wharton H does my thinking for me. Asked what I thought about the Noah Samuels matter. Said it was sad. He said our company defines us, the company we keep and the one we work for, told me I’d do well to remember that. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Wednesday 13th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}M{{}}urals of Noah Samuels popping up all over the city. As fast as the police erase them, they paint more. Some mourners held a memorial service in Thames Park. His family were there, some high-profile athletes too. Watched clips on social media of police charging them with raised batons, forcing them away from the tree, tearing down the picture of Noah they had pinned to the trunk. His name has become a hashtag. Everywhere you go online, #NoahSamuels is with you. - -Wharton H’s brother has been arrested. He told me over lunch. Whispering. He looks hopeless now. Tried to say how relieved I felt that it wasn’t him, but it came out wrong. Told him to keep his head down for the next few days. He ate dinner at my compartment again. Asked him to stay the night but he refused. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Thursday 14th – Bad Day*** - -{{}}E{{}}very day a bad day this week. No sign of Wharton H at work. Don’t know if he was arrested this morning, or last night on his way home from mine. Don’t know where he is. Have wild hopes he might have run off somehow, escaped into the hills. He is smart and strong and could probably last a good long time before they caught him. But the city is big, the hills are far away. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Friday 15th – Worst Day*** - -{{}}T{{}}he news said Wharton H’s body was found in the canal, that he had been party to an altercation, a drug deal gone wrong. It’s a lie. We all know it. There was a photograph of the canal bank where he was found, made me throw up on the break room floor. Everyone at work very kind, except Mr Cable, who avoided eye contact. - -At lunch I sat next to Mr Cable. He was reading something on his device, didn’t talk to me. While he ate I slowly edged his car keys further and further out of his pocket. When he stood to go and rinse his plate, the keys slipped neatly into my hand and I went to the bathroom and squeezed them to the bottom of my work boot. All afternoon the keys grated against my skin through my sock. - -Towards end of shift Mr Cable called over McPhail R, needed a word in his office. I watched them go in and shut the door then I walked slowly off the factory floor, shoulders hunched, expression dull, so the other supervisors would think I was carrying out some routine task. I walked past them all and went down in the lift to the underground carpark and no one stopped me. In the carpark I bleeped the keys and Mr Cable’s car flashed its lights. It was nice, smelt of new leather. I drove carefully out through the barriers, and the guard waved as I passed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -***Saturday 16th*** - -{{}}I{{}} stopped in woodland, somewhere north, hard to be sure. I worry they will track the car. I stripped its electronics, as far as I know how, left it concealed in the bracken, walked until it got too dark. - -Device power will die soon. When that happens I will strip it too, destroy its SIM, bury its parts and keep walking. - -Keep looking at my photographs of Wharton H, knowing each time might be the last. I dream of the two of us walking clean streets and breathing the pure air of the Colony, in rich people’s shoes. - -I dream of possibilities, of choices, of an escape from this world where there is no why and no because, there is only the predicative. - -Utopia is an island. Poverty is a prison. Existence is a debt. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Utopia is an Island** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/328487625738903).* diff --git a/content/issue-27/__index.md b/content/issue-27/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6d4ecd47..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27" -date: 2021-08-15 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 27 -subhead: Autumn 2021 -headline: - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/True-Worship.jpg -imageMobile: images/True-Worship-mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "True Worship by Raja Nandepu" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: center - align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # color: '#ffaa12' - subheading: - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 1 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-27/contents.md b/content/issue-27/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 63719284..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,20 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2021-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [I Have No Wings and I Must Fly]({{< relref path="IHaveNoWingsAndIMustFly.md" >}}), by Kyle E. Miller -- [Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb]({{< relref path="SilverfishNounHelpVerb.md" >}}), by Gabrielle Bleu -- [Umpire of Desolation]({{< relref path="UmpireOfDesolation.md" >}}), by Hannah Hulbert -- [Harryette, Brick'd, Belov'd]({{< relref path="Harryette.md" >}}), by Daniel Rabuzzi -- [Full Metal Grandma]({{< relref path="FullMetalGrandma.md" >}}), by Paul Alex Gray -- [A Grave of Wind and Leaves]({{< relref path="GraveofWindandLeaves.md" >}}), by Jalyn Renae Fiske -- [Utopia is an Island]({{< relref path="UtopiaIsland.md" >}}), by Katie McIvor -- [The Seed Man]({{< relref path="TheSeedMan.md" >}}), by Claire Scherzinger - diff --git a/content/issue-27/editorial.md b/content/issue-27/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1aaae5bf..00000000 --- a/content/issue-27/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,37 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2020-09-15 -issue: Issue 27 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/True-Worship-sml.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 27** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Cover art credit for this issue goes to Raja Nandepu for his striking image **True Worship**, along with our gratitude for allowing us to use it. A freelance concept artist from Hyderabad, India, you can see more of Raja's work [on his website](http://rajanandepu.com/) as well as at [DeviantArt](https://www.deviantart.com/rajanandepu) and [ArtStation](https://www.artstation.com/raja), and you can also follow him on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/RajaNandepu)." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Fall into Autumn, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of **Mythaxis**. We have for you a customarily eclectic selection of short tales, from the romantic ghost story to colonial science fiction, surrealist dreamscape to dystopian workplace, military sci-fi to librarian fantasy, and even manage to get in a sinister round of that most unnatural of sports... *miniature golf*. - -Yet readers do not live by short fiction alone, and this editor is happy to indulge in longer works for his own pleasure at every opportunity. In 2021, a little over half of my novel-reading has been in science fiction or fantasy (no real horror yet, I note, something that once would have outnumbered *sf* and *f* combined), so I thought I would indulge myself further with a salute to some that have had an impact. - -In addition to speculative fiction I enjoy crime writing, and combining these interests I started the year with Ben H. Winters' trilogy of pre-apocalyptic police procedurals, *The Last Policeman*, *Countdown City*, and *World of Trouble*, in which a rookie detective is driven to pursue his investigations in spite of the fact that a planet-killing asteroid is due to hit the Earth later that year. It dips a little in the middle book (though I completely love its hard-boiled title), but overall this was a really interesting, satisfying series. Adjacent to crime, I also read Christopher Brown's third novel, *Failed State*, his second (and what a brilliant concept) science fiction legal thriller. I think his I-also-love-this-title first book *Tropic of Kansas* is still his best, but all three are good. - -Melding crime with fantasy now, I've also read books #4 and #5 of Ben Aaronovitch's *Rivers of London* series, having enjoyed the first three after they were recommended by a friend back in 2020. Aaronovitch's own joke that his protagonist is basically *PC Harry Potter* doesn't do justice to what is frequently funny, sometimes horrific, but very definitely *contemporary*. The comparison with J. K. Rowling's take on "British Magic" highlights for me just how much those books are a nostalgia trip for a kind of public schooling that has almost no connection to the experience of the majority of Britons whatsoever, whereas Aaronovitch delivers a richly multicultural London that very feels true to modern life, even if permeated with folkloric creatures and mystical powers at every other turn. - -Speaking of *English* Magic specifically, I very belatedly embarked on Susanna Clarke's magnificent *Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell*, which you will be unsurprised to hear I thought was one of the best fantasies I've ever read. I do one Charles Dickens every year, and briefly interrupted *Nicholas Nickleby* to sample *JS&MN*—the interruption ended up lasting for weeks, because I just had to keep reading. Now I'm looking forward to Clarke's follow up, *Piranesi*, but I think I'll save it for 2022, otherwise my Best of the Year list may risk becoming a bit repetitive. - -I've enjoyed Ada Palmer's three published *Terra Ignota* books, the fourth and final of which is due out shortly. Overall I'd call them challenging but rewarding; brilliant world-building and characterisation that balances right on the edge of *I'm losing track of what's going on here*, but in a way that suggests I'll want to read them again (right after I take another swing at *The Book of the New Sun*, most likely). And my most recent genre read is Emily St. John Mandel's *The Glass Hotel*, which I raced through in under a day. Calling it a *genre* novel is maybe to categorise it by its slightest aspect, but I really enjoyed it, and anticipate a rereading sooner rather than later. - -To close out this unexpectedly long essay, a semi-digression. Early in the year I had the great pleasure of listening to Kim Stanley Robinson's [keynote speech](https://youtu.be/saVkaueMsuQ?t=60) for Cappadocia University's online conference "Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture", followed by a Q&A helmed by his friend the literary academic Tom Moylan. Subsequently I acquired a copy of Moylan's *Demand the Impossible*, an analysis of "critical utopian" fiction of the 1970s, only to have to quickly put it aside in order to read three of the four novels which he examines in great detail. - -So, in addition to Ursula K. LeGuin's *The Dispossessed*, I have now also read *The Female Man* by Joanna Russ, *Triton* by Samuel R. Delany, and my favourite of the four, *Woman on the Edge of Time* by Marge Piercy—just an excellent piece of work, which brought back to mind Joanne Greenberg's *I Never Promised You a Rose Garden*. Finally returning to Moylan's text for a deep analysis of the themes of, and comparison between, each novel made for a very interesting start to the year, refiring my interest in utopian fiction. - -I'll leave off there, without even mentioning *Dune Messiah*, since this editorial is in danger of dwarfing several of the actual stories in the issue! But this may give you some inkling of the kind of fiction that grabs this editor's attention, and you may take it as read that every novel mentioned above is also a recommendation. diff --git a/content/issue-28/ComeBuyComeBuy.md b/content/issue-28/ComeBuyComeBuy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3b31b89a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/ComeBuyComeBuy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,326 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Come Buy, Come Buy" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- E. Saxey -copyright: '© E. Saxey 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Has anyone got over the 2020 lockdown yet? Hopefully we'll endure less panic and home-goods hoarding next time civilisation comes crashing down—but we're always going to need more than well-stocked shelves to feel satisfied with life, and E. Saxey's story (from an original idea by Kim Plowright) reminds us that wanderlust isn't going anywhere soon." - -image: images/ComeBuyComeBuy.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by [Enrico Hänel](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-dirty-vintage-cash-register-5370036/) with the prompt 'an endless forest that glows at dawn'. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen [here](https://youtu.be/FOsU0ypZoa4)." - -type: stock -slug: come-buy-come-buy -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}A{{}} leaflet drops through Nan’s letterbox, with vouchers for a local supermarket. It offers shitty discounts on goods Laura would never want, but Laura has been so bored that even the prospect of bad shopping excites her. - -The smell of frying onions allows Laura to locate her Nan, in the kitchen at the back of the house. - -“I didn’t know Somerton had a supermarket,” says Laura. “Where is it?” - -“Two miles down the Barnford road. Never go there.” Nan is short on words, short on all fronts. - -“Why not?” - -“Blot on the landscape,” said Nan. “The shops in town have everything you need.” - -That’s not true. Laura has been doing all the shopping for a month, because Nan is vulnerable. The food in the local shops feels a hundred years old: ginger wine, winter-mixtures and custard creams. - -Nan empties a bag of grey mince into the pan. Laura would have claimed vegetarianism if she’d known what Nan could do with meat. Three stepmothers (consecutively) have raised Laura, each treating her better than the last. They were all trying to impress her Dad. Nan sees no need to impress her son, or anyone. - -“I’ll go there tomorrow,” Laura announces. - -“Well, do what you like. Don’t listen to me.” - -Laura will, and won’t. She has been taking her Nan at face value. - -“I suppose you want your fancy things,” Nan murmurs. - -Laura does want her fancy things. If she was still in London, she and her fancy girlfriend would be stalking shopping centres, eating sushi and sea-salt caramel ice-cream, red at the wrists from trying lipstick samples. Venturing into perfumiers and jewelers, cool as cucumbers, because (Candice always said) they can’t *know* that you can’t afford it. Then retreating, with sleeves and pockets full of beautiful, stolen things. Slick silver cylinders, bottles cut like gems, made more desirable by risk. Laura misses Candice so much she wants to howl, but she misses the other fancy things nearly as badly. - -At least at a supermarket she can buy a packet of cigarettes. The proprietors of the town shops would want to see her ID, and they might snitch to Nan. But Laura senses the supermarket will be staffed by bored teens with no loyalty, just like herself. - -“If you must go,” says Nan, “I’ll make you a list.” - -Laura doesn’t object. A shopping list can be a good disguise. - -Nan takes all evening to write the list, like she’s doing three-dimensional chess in her head. When she hands it over, though, it is the dullest list in the world. *White flour, white sugar, white sliced loaf*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}aura reckons that Nan is mostly silent so that she can avoid the big question: where has Laura's Dad gone? - -Dad had driven Laura from London to Somerton Weston right at the start of lockdown. He said they’d be better off there, living with Nan, and nobody in their right mind would want to stay in the city. Laura wanted to stay in the city. Dad said she was too young to live alone in their flat, in a pandemic. - -“The time’ll fly by,” he promised. “Then we’ll come home, right?” - -He’d tried to make amends. He’d let Laura have his old bedroom, strung a hammock between two trees in the garden. But Laura was disconsolate and Nan was prickly. According to government guidelines, the three Giffords were now a household, but Dad couldn’t charm them into being a family. - -Dad had gone off on longer and longer drives, despite the lockdown rules. A week ago, he’d not come back to the house at all. Nan grew more snappish, but Laura was calm. Dad had left her before, abandoned with each of the stepmothers, for a fortnight or longer without explanation. Laura had sent Dad just one text message, a joke, to show him she wasn’t freaking out. - -Laura walks South out of town on a hot and empty road, winding between green wooded hills. Where is Dad, right at this moment? Probably back in ghost-town London. A tractor passes, smelling of dung. Laura stumbles, one foot in the nettle-filled ditch. - -The road turns, the supermarket looms, and Nan wasn’t wrong: it’s an eyesore. The woods have been scraped back, and a big white warehouse dropped onto the plain. A row of six giant oaks stand sentry over the carpark. - -Inside the supermarket it’s blessedly cool. Nature is sweaty and chaotic, and coolness is a sophisticated achievement: the marble atrium of a museum, the ice-cubes in Candice’s gin and tonic, the glass cases of a department store. Laura salivates, knows she’ll come back again and again to bask in the fluorescent light. - -The supermarket shelves are full, recovered from the stockpiling frenzy of March. Laura starts to follow Nan’s shopping list. - -*6 bananas*, on her left. - -*Mild cheddar cheese*, pulling her over to the chiller aisle. - -*Bran Flakes*. The cereal section is miles off-course, down the other side of the store. Well, Nan’s never been in this shop, so of course her list is in the wrong order. There are no Bran Flakes. Would muesli be too dangerously exciting? - -Slipping off-list, Laura wonders what she can pocket. It’s too hot for long sleeves or a big coat. A tiny bottle of truffle oil catches her eye, because it would fit in her palm. Or a sachet of saffron. She could post it to Candice. - -Suddenly a tall couple are hovering just behind Laura. She abandons the idea of theft, and steps aside for them. They’ve already moved on. Laura relocates to the bath products. It happens again. The strangers seem to be interested, like Laura, in the good things. When she turns to see them, they’re whisking out of the aisle, wearing long, sweeping clothes. They look out of place. Maybe they were here on holiday and got stranded. Everyone else in the town is as small and dull as the town itself. - -Laura pulls herself back to her Nan’s shopping list. Mustn’t look suspicious, even though the only security guard is dozing on his feet by the door. *Packet of frozen peas*. Laura puts Quorn mince in her basket, too, and prepares to announce her conversion to vegetarianism. - -Where now? *White sliced loaf*, back near the entrance to the shop. She finds the most seeded, weird-grained loaf she can buy, just to annoy her grandmother. Not because Laura craves the bread. Not because it reminds her of brunch with her Dad and Candice. - -By the make-up display, she pretends to sneeze while she slips a lipstick into the watch pocket of her jeans. Then she takes the final lap of the shop at high speed, grabbing up the last items on Nan’s list. The list keeps forcing her to double back for one more jar or tin. Tearing through cleaning products, Laura catches a glimpse of a curve and a wicked sharpness, like a heron stalking through water. She backs up, to see what caught her eye. A trick of the light: the only curves are the white bottles of fabric softener. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nother four days of nothing pass in Somerton. The time is not flying by. Laura puts on the wicked plum lipstick, feels elegant. Her mouth craves someone to kiss, something to bite. She wipes the lipstick off again. - -Nan hasn’t mentioned Dad at all. When Laura asks (over a meal of Quorn Bolognese) it feels like forcing open a rusted gate. “Have you heard from Dad?” - -“No. Bet you haven’t, either.” - -During her daily permitted exercise walk, Laura had found an unlocked Wi-Fi and checked her email. Candice (now in the South of France) had sent a long letter of complaints, but there had been nothing from Dad. “No, I haven’t.” - -“Probably gone back to London to fix something.” - -A few days ago the reassurance might have worked. But now it’s not enough. A long lockdown here, alone with Nan, is too awful a prospect. - -“That’s against the law,” Laura says. - -“He’s always wandered off. Never stuck at things, ever since he was small.” - -That’s better than reassurance. Laura wants to hear her father insulted more. She wants to think about him when he was shorter than Nan, stuck in the room where Laura now sleeps. “Have you got photos of Dad as a kid?” - -“Don’t know.” - -“What about your wedding photographs, then?” Old people loved showing off wedding photos. It would be cool to see Nan’s husband, dead Grandpa Gifford, the missing ingredient that made Nan’s father tall and debonair when Nan is short and sharp as a vegetable knife. - -Nan’s spines bristle. “Ha!” - -There’s no pleasing the hedgehog-woman, so Laura returns to her hammock with *Vogue* magazine. - -When she comes back into the house, a few photos have been dropped on the coffee table. They show a young Nan with dark hair, in the garden of this house, a baby in her arms. - -“When was that?” - -“1970.” - -That was wrong. That would make Dad fifty, but he was younger than that, younger than all the parents of Laura’s friends. “And that’s Dad?” - -“You trying to catch me out?” - -Nan is flanked in the photo by a grey-haired man and two women. “Who are they?” - -“My brother and my sisters.” - -They’re so much older than Nan. Maybe Nan was a menopause baby? No wonder all Laura’s other relatives are dead. - -Nan doesn’t look like a radiant new mother in the photo. She’s pale and dazed. Her sisters are nervous, her brother scowls. They should all be happier at the baby of the family having a baby. And where’s Grandpa Gifford? - -Nan’s hands are spread out against her baby’s back, no rings on any of her fingers. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}oredom turns time into jelly. Whenever Laura connects to a Wi-fi network, there are no messages from Candice, only fresh news about transmission and fatality. It seems possible that kids are immune, but does Laura count as a child or an adult? - -Laura smokes all her cigarettes in the garden and goes back to the supermarket, striding down the road faster now that the way is familiar. The government says you can shop for food as often as you need to. Nan has given her a new list. - -*The Telegraph*. God, does she have to buy that? - -*Mild Cheddar Cheese*. *Again*. Several aisles over, in the chill cabinets. Laura grabs taleggio, stilton, camembert. - -*6 apples*. Nearly all the way back to the door. This list is worse than the last one for misdirection. - -Stepmother number two taught Laura to decorate cupcakes. That would pass an afternoon, and maybe soften Nan’s prickles. Laura puts flour in her basket, then tucks a tube of silver sugar balls straight into her pocket. - -As Laura turns out of the aisle, there is no sound. - -It wasn’t loud before, but this silence is different. It’s the hush of a luxury jeweller’s shop. No, it’s the muffled white silence of snowfall. Laura remembers snow during one of their Christmas visits to Somerton Weston. The overnight wind had built up hip-high drifts, and her father told her: *listen, there’s no echo*. - -Laura inhales, and she should smell the bread-scent they pump through the whole store, but she smells icy air. She takes two tentative steps, and feels snow compact under her feet. It could be spilled flour on the supermarket floor. She stops moving. - -Laura feels her bones chill with the still cold of winter. The tall people have entered the aisle, they are gliding closer, a flash like jewels at their wrists. Are they store detectives? That thought startles Laura into walking in the opposite direction. - -She hears the tills beeping again. Nothing is beneath her feet. The air conditioning blasts fresh sweat off her arms. The boy at the till sells her cigarettes without asking for ID. - -As she exits through the sliding doors, back into the unfriendly furnace outside, she sees a familiar silver 4x4 across the carpark. *Dad’s here*. Thank God, because the bags are heavy. - -Laura sits by Dad’s car for half an hour, then she springs up and stomps back into the supermarket. She can’t ask them to hail him over the tannoy as though she’s a lost child, so she runs up and down the aisles, growing less and less certain how many avenues and turnings the store contains. - -Something scrapes the skin of her neck. She jumps sideways, swatting at herself. A huge gold-green beetle falls to the floor and lies there on its back, twitching its alien legs. It must have crawled from the woods, when she sat by the car, and lodged in her hair. Laura flees the store, shaking her head in spasms of disgust. - -By the time she arrives back at Nan’s, the cheeses are oozing, so she serves herself taleggio with crackers. - -“Your cheese has gone off,” says Nan, “from the smell of it.” She prowls through the living room, collecting up her half-empty mugs of tea. - -“I found Dad’s car. In the supermarket car-park.” - -Nan freezes with five mugs dangling from her hands. “Oh?” - -“He wasn’t in the shop. Should we call the police?” - -“No need.” - -“What if he’s in trouble? What if he’s hurt?” Dying in a ditch, bloating in the heat under the scurrying feet of iridescent beetles. - -“He’ll be with your grandfather’s side of the family.” Nan sounds ready to spit on the floor. - -More Giffords? But Laura’s other family are all dead. “What, do they live near here? Can I phone them?” - -“Yes and no,” says Nan. “And no.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}ooking for clues, Laura lifts the *Telegraph* off the kitchen counter, and finds a piece of paper underneath. She wants it to be a message from her father, or a phone number for the stray Giffords. Instead, there's a rough rectangle sketched in pencil with a dozen labels. *Drink, bread, fruit, tills*. - -It’s a floor-plan of the supermarket that her Nan has drawn. She must have been to the supermarket, to know the layout. What a trivial fib. - -When Nan walks in, Laura is too surprised to bluff. “What’s this for?” she asks. - -“To make the shopping list.” - -“You said you’d never been there.” - -“Had to go once, to see what they’d done.” - -“Why did you draw a map, if you’re not going to put things on the list in the right order?” - -Nan plucks the map right out of Laura’s hand and thrusts it into her apron pocket. “It *is* the right order. You’d better stick to it!” - -Laura doesn’t need Nan’s map to enact her petty revenge. In the hammock in the garden, smoking a cigarette, she takes Nan’s meandering list and rewrites it as an orderly tour of the shop. That’ll annoy the old biddy. - -The hammock under Laura rocks, threatening to spill her out on the lawn. - -“Hey!” Laura clings on with one hand. Her cigarette burns through her favourite T-shirt, digs a point of pain into her belly. “Stop!” - -Nan gives the hammock another vicious shake. “What the hell are you doing?” - -Laura starts to say that it’s *her* pocket money, and *her* lungs, but Nan ignores her cigarette entirely. She grabs the new shopping list and crumples it in front of Laura’s face. - -“I was putting it in the right order!” Laura cries. - -“You’ll be in deep trouble if you change that list.” - -Is Nan threatening her? She could tip the hammock, Laura could fall, she could break an arm. Dad should never have left Laura with this madwoman. Laura curls up, braced for injury, and stays that way as Nan stomps back up to the house. - -Later, she jams her bedroom door shut and sketches out the supermarket again. She maps out Nan’s list and can’t make any sense of it. It’s not dictated by anything practical, such as finding the lightest items first, or the frozen food last. And the route it creates across the store is full of dead ends and doglegs. - -Then Laura draws other markers on her map. The ways she walked when the tall people pressed in and the shelves seemed to slip away. The corners she turned when she thought she saw the heron stalking, and smelled the snow. - -When she joins up the trajectories she took, they make shapes. Rings radiating from a centre, like ripples from a stone thrown in water. - -Laura writes herself a new shopping list. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he first loop to walk is up round the newspapers, where she pretends to read the headlines. Up past fruit, back down to veg. Nobody cares, the security guard is sitting and snoozing on sacks of barbecue charcoal. Laura's route makes a small inward swoop, then curves back outwards to the bakery. Laura is tracing the rings she has drawn. Nothing is happening. Is she on the wrong track? - -In front of her stands a matted, long-legged dog. Lurcher or wolfhound, it is as tall as Laura’s waist. Someone calls it, a figure far away. Their silhouette is hard to make out, as if seen through drifting snowflakes. They remind Laura of Candice: dark lips, bright metal. The dog shambles off towards its owner, towards homewares. Laura pulls out her phone to photograph it, only catching the tip of its tail. Then she follows. - -When she turns the corner, both dog and owner are gone. A silvery scent like sweet mint hangs in the air. - -Laura gets back on track, following an arcing path around the top of the shop, past bread and beer and down to frozen produce. It is the longest loop that Laura has sketched. It sweeps round three-quarters of a circle, speeding her to the centre of the design. Laura feels her feet quicken, her spine straighten. This is nonsensical, this is all sunstroke and fantasy. But maybe the tall people will be here, maybe they’ll be her family, maybe they’ll tell her where her father has gone. She imagines Candice prodding her onwards: they can’t *know* that you don’t belong here… - -The tiled floor turns to hard mud. The shelves become steep earth banks, held together with tree roots. The trunks soar up past the supermarket ceiling, and the branches form a black tracery against the pearly sky. It is nature, but with nothing haphazard about it. The trunks have been trained and the roots guided, the grass dusted with glass crystals. - -Laura is snapping another photo on her phone as something blunders out of the undergrowth. A badger trundles along where the toilet roll should be. - -It stops and looks her in the eye. “Are you the Gifford child?” it says. - -Laura runs, collides with the glass door of a freezer cabinet, and flees the shop. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hree weeks ago, when Laura had thought she knew what boredom was, Nan had pointed at the bookshelf in the living room: books of local history, local walking routes. Now Nan is outside, deadheading the roses, and Laura digs in. A hardback with freckled pages tells her that to the South of Somerton Weston lies one of the last remaining English turf mazes, but it is shallow, and its antiquity is disputed. - -There’s a black and white sketch of the site, six oaks standing sentry. Between the trees is a clearing with a pattern in the grass, at least a hundred feet wide. Whorled like a thumbprint, the path doubling back on itself, until a walker might lose hope. But the path worms its way, in the end, to the centre. - -Laura smells something sickly sweet. Nan is standing behind the sofa, holding a glass of ginger wine. - -“If you keep goading them,” Nan announces, “you’ll come to no good.” - -“I’m not—” - -“When they cleared the ground for that supermarket, I thought: you don’t want to put it *there*.” - -“Because of the maze?” Laura shuffles along the sofa, to keep some distance between them. “Wasn’t it protected? Historical?” - -“Disputed. And they built the supermarket in the Spring, when the path’s overgrown. It showed better in drought and frost.” - -“Why don’t they shut the supermarket down? If it’s dangerous.” - -Nan shrugged. “Safe for most. Bad for you. You want to go, don’t you? You’re half-way over.” - -Laura can’t say how she knows that it is better, over there: more luscious, more artful, full of high company. Like kissing Candice, but over there Laura would never feel inadequate or clumsy. - -“I don’t blame you.” Nan sniffs. “But I can’t recommend it. Is it Winter there, now? That’ll freeze your eyes shut.” She holds out a packet of dusty custard creams. Laura takes one, to make peace. - -“So is Dad there?” - -“Could be. I fought them for him, when he was small, but you can’t keep that lad from doing what he wants.” - -Laura may as well speak the impossible things aloud. “So could I go there for a while, and come back here again?” - -Nan gives the suggestion due consideration. “You’d be gambling. I lost twenty years. It only felt like a month, to me. Your father’s lost as much, in dribs and drabs.” - -To Laura, stuck in a sluggish eternal present, Nan’s warning sounds like another temptation. “Could I take a friend with me?” - -“What? No!” Nan reaches over and pats her shoulder, hard: *stay there, stay down*. It’s the first time Laura can remember them touching. “I know it looks pretty. But they’re not good people.” - -What Laura hears is that they’re strange and honed and fine, and their world is a wonder. Laura won’t make the same mistake. She won’t come back with a *baby*, for goodness’ sake. - -“They’re cruel and careless. That’s where your father gets it from,” adds Nan. “And double for you, I suppose.” - -Laura feels dizzy. She focuses on the gritty crumbs of biscuit on her tongue. “Dad didn’t tell me any of this.” - -“It wasn’t a secret. I told your father, I told anyone who asked me.” - -How well had that gone down, in a small town? “Did people think you were mad?” - -“No! They knew it was true, they remembered me. They didn’t like it but they knew I wasn’t lying.” She is mulling over fifty years of resentment. Or more than that: if Nan reappeared with Dad in 1970, then did she go missing in 1950? “Go if you must. But there’s nothing real, there.” - -But Somerton Weston doesn’t feel real to Laura, either. She knows she should try to be better than her father. She makes an offer: “You could come with me.” - -“They don’t want you, once you’re old. I told you, they’re not good people. But don’t mind me.” - -Laura doesn’t. But then, as she packs up her clothes in her bedroom, the key turns in the lock of the bedroom door. - -Laura shouts, at first. It’s illegal to lock her up, Nan is mad, she’ll call the police. - -Nan calls back that she wishes she’d locked her son up, years ago, then she’d still have him. Or her own mother should have locked *her* up, then she’d never have had her son in the first place. - -There’s a tree close to the house. Laura climbs from the window and finds her way, branch by branch down to the ground. She jogs down the long road, wondering if a police car will overtake her. And has the supermarket closed for the night? Laura will sleep in the carpark. But the store is lit up in the dusk, and the doors slide open. - -As Laura treads the aisles and paths, the temperature drops unnaturally fast. Her heart thumps but she walks steadily, like the last steps out of a shopping centre with sleeves full of treasures. She feels herself being pressed to one side and then another. She feels a gentle prompting impulse to shift her weight onto her back foot, and then push forwards again. She realises it’s not a labyrinth, but the pattern for a dance. - -The impulse, pushing her forwards, has become a blizzard at her back. Now there are tall companions on either hand to guide her, in their long robes, fur-cuffed, with ice on the fur. Graceful as teasels dipping in the breeze, and just as pointed and dry. Escorting her towards a snowy clearing. - -Laura wants to meet her family. Laura longs to see the beautiful things, craves them like a cigarette. - -Laura really wants a cigarette. - -Laura stops by the racks of sliced white bread, staring up into the pearl bowl of an unknown sky. - -She follows the path towards the centre. The years brush her bare skin as they fly by. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Come Buy, Come Buy** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390784319509233).* diff --git a/content/issue-28/CuffsPadlocksAndASplatteringOfNailPolish.md b/content/issue-28/CuffsPadlocksAndASplatteringOfNailPolish.md deleted file mode 100644 index ef187fa8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/CuffsPadlocksAndASplatteringOfNailPolish.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,191 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Uchechukwu Nwaka -copyright: '© Uchechukwu Nwaka 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The damsel in distress is surely centuries old, but when the damsel in question has no choice but to do her own saving, 'damsel' is just another synonym for 'hero'. Nevertheless, while coming out on top against all odds sounds like a good thing, sadly the world is rarely so conveniently black and white. Uchechukwu Nwaka shows us how a victory can sour even as we’re savouring it." - -image: /images/CuffsPadlocksNailPolish.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by [Couleur](https://pixabay.com/photos/annual-rings-tree-wood-texture-3212803/) and the text 'a frightened black woman surrounded by pink lightning'." - -type: stock -slug: cuffs-padlocks-and-a-splattering-of-nail-polish -weight: 7 ---- - -> ***22:17:49*** - -I’ve never been much into roleplay, but I need the money and Moyo would flip a lid if she ever heard that I balked now. The client isn’t all that bad either. He has this kind of boyish look on his beardless face, and he’d been wearing a suit when he approached me by the bar. I figured I could let myself get handcuffed to the bedpost while he attempted to play out his fantasies. - -For both our sakes, twenty minutes later, I try to get into it. - -The client’s fingers trail across the length of my thigh—bare, save for the new silk pair Moyo had given me earlier this evening. There’s a ring on one of his fingers that tempts shivers down my back over every surface it skims. Hoarse gasps escape my throat but the client’s hands stifle my lips gently. - -His hands are large. - -The client smiles. There’s something behind that boyish charm. It flashes in his eyes and lingers for just a second, but I cast it aside as lust when he brandishes two black scarves. - -“One’s for your mouth and the other’s for your eyes.” - -When the darkness falls, I feel his weight leave the bed. Embers of anxious excitement begin to warm the pits of my groin, so I don’t immediately notice that the client’s on the phone. - -“I have the *ẹbọ* ready.” - -A sudden wave of icy apprehension ripples down my gut. *Ẹbọ*? As in sacrifice? - -“Yes, Baba,” he monotones. “Right away.” - -Fuck! I struggle against the cuffs but the cold steel only bites painfully into my flesh. I force a scream, but it’s only a futile *hmmph.* The client chuckles and my mind shrieks in terror. My limbs thrash about the king-size mattress in desperation until something heavy on the side of my head flings my world into fractured pain. - -Once. Again. Silence. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> ***21:47:24*** - -Air burns its way into my lungs and my furious gasp almost topples the glass of whiskey from my hand. - -It’s the bar again. - -The lighting is shoddy, the whiskey is some percentages too raw and the client is talking. Now that I look closer, there’s a hardness behind his eyes—a dangerous glint behind every casual smile. How did I ever miss it? - -But I already know where this all leads to. I reach into my purse to get my phone. *Sorry Moyo*. - -He tilts his head. “Something wrong?” - -I stand. “I’m sorry, something urgent suddenly came up.” - -“That’s quite disappointing, I was hoping you’d accompany me upstairs.” - -*No, thank you,* I think, but his suggestion simply supersedes my conscious thought. Instead of heading to the door I only wobble on my feet, and I suddenly realize that this is not mere intoxication. My body has lost all will to function… to him. - -I see that look again, just briefly when he glances from my drink to my face. He *met* me here, there was no way he’d have roofied my drink without me noticing. - -Then my eyes fall on the ring on his finger, and I see its arcane inscriptions, and the realization is as chilling as his phone call was. - -The client is a bloody ritualist. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> ***21:33:08*** - -I find myself in front of the hotel again. Shit, that means I died after following the client upstairs a second time. At least an earlier awareness of my situation is paying off, but… - -What can I do differently *this* time? - -The hotel occupies an entire lot, with three storeys the management did not deem fit to illuminate. A flickering red bulb shows ‘BAR’ printed on a board beside the beaded curtains that lead into the establishment. The music is scratchy as it pervades the night, yet this dump is cream of the crop—a steep ten thousand v-naira per night. That’s money I’m choking on debt for… - -…but this time there’s no question. That lunatic client has murdered me twice already. I make a full one-eighty when my phone buzzes from my purse. - -Oh fuck. It’s from the clinic. - -> *Sandra Kosoko, this is a final reminder regarding Patient Kosoko’s outstanding medical bill of 30,000.00 v-naira over his Nanite Therapy Chamber. Failure to remit will lead to forfeiture of the service by Monday, 3rd of July.* - -Another beep and it’s the banking AI, reminding me of the chicken-feed excuse of cash left across all my virtual wallets. - -Double fuck. - -I take a deep breath and consider my options. The AI’s reminder was the tipping point that led me into the bar every time. I need this cash. God knows how long Papa will have left without that nano-tech treatment. - -And if I died here, then he’d find out about this hustle *and* lose the chamber. That’s even worse. I’m leaving. - -I bump into someone as I turn into the parking lot. Bloody Christ—it’s as though this bastard is omnipresent. I clutch my purse tighter as I try to sidestep him, but his hands aren’t the only big things about him. - -“Sandra, yeah?” The bar’s lights paint the smile on his dark face. “I’m your appointment.” - -“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say quickly, still trying to brush past him. His hands wrap around my arm. Heavy. His full height looms over me, an entire foot taller. - -“I didn’t pay Moyo all that cash just for this,” his face leans closer, blotting the moonless sky behind. All pretext of a smile had vanished. “Follow me inside.” - -Electricity ripples across my body… - -…but nothing happens. - -For an instant I see the bewilderment register on his face—and I assume mine too—before he grinds his teeth in rage. “How’d you do that?” - -I jerk my arm from his grip and run for it. My fingers fiddle nervously in my purse as I try to get my phone, but I have nobody to call. Even the cops have no emergency lines in this corner of Lagos. They’d just wave my corpse past without even sparing a glance. I swear I could probably imagine the looks on their faces when they saw my bashed-in skull: *“Just another dead olosho. These ritual murders don’t seem to be coming to any end soon. You think her parents knew she was playing hook-up before she got done in?”* - -Then the client’s full weight crashes into me, emptying my lungs as I smash onto the asphalt. His breath is hot and reeks faintly of weed. My heart is pounding in my head, the pressure threatening to blow my eyes out their sockets. - -“What are you? Why isn’t my juju working?” - -‘*Cause mine’s stronger and third time’s the charm?* - -“Or did that stupid bitch Moyo tip you off, eh? After all the cash she took from me!” - -Terror gives way to rage. *That bitch set me up with a ritualist?* - -He brandishes a padlock from his suit. A friggin’ padlock! What kind of a lunatic goes around wielding such monstrosities anyway? Was this what he’d knocked me out with in our first go around? - -A stray torchlight beam falls on us. One of the night patrol. I struggle to breathe, to call out— - -“*Lọ-sun!”* the client orders in piercing Yoruba. - -The patrol-man drops like a ragdoll, but it’s all the distraction I need to wedge my tongue between my teeth, right over the big veins, and muster the courage to jump even further backwards. It’s a few years off my future, but it’s either this, or nothing at all. - -I squeeze out a grin too while I’m at it. I’m nobody’s sacrifice. - -I swing my head onto the asphalt. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> ***19:17:49*** - -“—don’t know if you’ve got a job for me. Anything Moyo, I know it’s sudden…” - -Each time, reality condenses into my frontal cortex with a sudden burst that nearly fries out all my nerve endings. I choke on the last few words as Moyo sizes me up from beneath her umbrella lashes. - -“Haven’t seen you around in a while. Thought your father disapproved of *girls like us*.” - -“He needs Nanite therapy,” I wheeze. “Shit is expensive, and I’m barely keeping our place together with all these *agbero* syndicates shaking us down for cash weekly.” - -Moyo’s flat is in one of the less shitty areas, even though these days much of everything has fallen into ruin. Anyone can tell her ‘job’ pays well, too. After all, these penthouse shacks don’t come free. - -“…squeeze you in only if you’re up for it. Sandra?” - -“Huh? Yes, yes.” There’s no railing between her corridor and the twenty-foot drop behind, and the height is messing with my head. Moyo’s nails are painted an electric pink that disorients me even further. - -“You good? ’Cause I might have a spot or two left. Depends…” She swipes through her phone as I blink the pinkness of her nails from my eyes. “Big cash or small cash?” - -*Big*—oh shit, I already know how that ends. “Let’s say small.” - -She stops swiping contacts, picks one, and that’s when I catch a glimpse of a painfully familiar face. *Same client? Same ending? Half the money? Unbelievable! Moyo, you piece of*… - -“Sandra? I don’t have all evening babe. You know I’ll have to get you all dolled up. *Especially* with a wig. Jesus, have you always been this grey?” - -Her fingers are tapping impatiently on her screen. My heartbeat starts drumming against my ears as a plan forms. The very audacity chills me to my bones. A generator sputters to life a few floors below, as if in agreement. - -“Y-yeah. We good?” I outstretch my clammy hand and I wonder whether Moyo’s reluctance means she’s seen through me. She half rolls her eyes, passes her phone to her other hand and takes my hand in hers. - -“Now I’ll just need a picture for your client—” - -Too late. I’ve pulled, and with my leg wedged just right she stumbles. One step. Two. A desperate flail of her arms… - -I reach out and grab her phone as she falls over, screams swallowed by the wailing generator. - -For a second I wonder whether her guts will paint the sidewalk pink too. - -But it’s just a second. Long enough for Moyo’s banking AI’s notification to slide over her Photoshop-enhanced wallpaper. - -> *Credit: 35,000.00 v-Naira** -> -> **Balance: 74,332.48 v-Naira* - -So the client *did* pay her. And if I keep Moyo’s screen unlocked long enough to make one big transfer, Papa’s payments are a problem solved, and with change to spare. - -My eyes travel upward, to the blackening sky and the husks of apartments left on this side of town. A lock of grey hair falls from my head as a draught blows by, and I think of the client and his padlock, and whichever unlucky girl will cross his path tonight instead of me. - -Just another dead *olosho…* - -Moyo’s phone suddenly feels too heavy in my hand. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390781929509472).* - diff --git a/content/issue-28/EPluribusUnum.md b/content/issue-28/EPluribusUnum.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5ec26165..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/EPluribusUnum.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,138 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "E Pluribus Unum" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Mame Bougouma Diene -copyright: '© Mame Bougouma Diene 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "It's hard to hate The Other if there isn't An Other to hate. So, in a sense, when it comes to bigotry it always takes two to tango, even if only one participant is actually dancing to the music. Mame Bougouma Diene's elegiac short strongly suggests that this is going to be the case right up until the solo begins." - -image: images/EPluribusUnum.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by [Victor](https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-man-448834/) and the prompt 'a silhouetted man in a space station'. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen [here](https://youtu.be/Xuft6nDVzcU)." - -type: stock -slug: e-pluribus-unum -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}M{{}}y neighbor passed away today. - -He’d made it clear he wanted me to find him and push him into his cremation oven. - -“You better do it, goddamit! You hear me? Don’t let me down!” he spat, a fit of phlegm on the float screen hovering over my bed at 5am this morning. - -It was midafternoon for him, and that’s exactly why he did it. - -Saying he was a neighbor is a bit of a stretch. Neighborliness and friendliness are two vastly different things, case in point, but I guess it’s as good a term as any when you each share half the world. - -We never officially shook on that. What belonged to me and what belonged to Jordan. He made it clear that I could keep Africa, so I guess the rest was up for grabs. He was mean at poker, or perhaps he was just mean, but I don’t think so. We always agreed on football. Regular season re-runs kept bouncing between satellites and into our float screens. I think he was just American like me. Same mold different metal, but in the end… - -In the end he wanted to go down burning and who was I to say no to that? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}y estate used to run to the end of the block, and we shared it with only three hundred other families. Progress was bound to make it all better obviously, there’s nothing like a trillionaire corporate philanthropist with his eyes on the stars to help out the little guy... - -You’d expect the end of the world to come with a bang. Don’t. A push of a button doesn’t echo. The power never ran out and the water kept running. Couldn’t tell the difference from cable TV either. As long as the massive orbital engines kept spinning spider webs into a new universe, we’d be good forever. - -And in a flash it was just us left. One empty planet plus the last two losers left alive. - -Perhaps everybody else was dead, or doing the same old shit under a purple sky, makes zero difference. - -My estate runs further than the Mongol empire now. Within, it encompasses half the riches of the world, slowly eroding to the elements. It’s an all you can eat buffet in any city on the planet. - -The world has a value it never had before now. Because we’re gone. Welcome space invaders, you’ve inherited a gem. Don’t fuck it up. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}unny how the ovens work. See through. Jordan’s body is lying on the platform, wrapped in black, encased in glass. - -I finally understand why people are so revering of the dead. I was too young, barely twenty-two when I sunk a three pointer, turned to the empty bleachers, the bouncing ball echoing like a tomb around me, and… - -What I’m saying is that I’d never lost anyone. Not true. I lost everyone. I was alone. So alone, so… - -What I mean is that I’d never been to a funeral. I never realized how vulnerable, how humble a dead body looked once stripped of all the tiny cracks into the soul that life chisels into you. The wrinkles on your face, the twist of your lips into a permanent sneer, bright eyes that shine broken. Not now. He’s dead, peaceful like a sleeping tike. - -A dead asshole was a dead asshole to me, and I expected to feel the exact same when I landed on Jordan’s rocket pad and shuttled to his home. It wasn’t his home, neither was my home “mine”, but since everything is unoccupied, why not move into the glass palace over the Serengeti? - -But I don’t feel that way at all. He’s dead, and whatever he was doesn’t matter anymore. He was a bigoted piece of shit, but that doesn’t matter anymore. - -I get it now. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he blue flames erupt and for a second I see them lick at his face. - -I was… thirty maybe, when we first made contact. The initial shock still runs through me. First relief, then disappointment, rage, and finally acceptance. I’d just gotten a truckload of really sour lemons, and by fuck was I gonna make limoncello. I was gonna need it. - -Back then I had scoured half the planet. Macchu Pichu, Kilimajaro, Tokyo, Moscow, Auckland… You know how long you can spend dancing naked on a mountain top when you lose your shit? A long fucking time. - -All over the world and back, and yet. No one. No one, no one, no one. Not just people. The apocalypse… this was not even an apocalypse. A rapture maybe? Either way, no packs of angry dogs, certainly no zombies, enough food to last ten lifetimes and all you’ve ever wanted for free. - -Madness is its own miracle. I went through its mouth and out its butt, but I made it through. I made peace. Peace with myself, peace with the anger lacing the deepest parts of me. Peace with a world I hated because it rejected me but desperately wanted to prove my value to. Peace with the schizophrenia of being who and what I am. - -Oh boy. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}His body is gone now. - -Walter Raleigh once surmised the weight of smoke. Perhaps it’s the same for the soul. Perhaps that was the real reason we chose cremation over burial, not overpopulation. Perhaps I’m a fucking poet. The last thing the world needs right now. It doesn’t need words anymore. It’s too late for words. - -His soul is gone and, dark as it was alive, I want to believe the flames purified it. That they will purify me. But there is no one left to push me into the oven but myself. Perhaps I’ll set myself on fire at the end. No point in thinking about it now, it’ll happen when it does. - -There are a few rites to complete before he is finally gone. The ash needs spreading on the breeze. There are a few words he’d written too. I should read them but I won’t. I’ll bet you it’s more senseless diatribe, or worse. The last thing I wanna read are Jordan’s dirty thoughts about his cousin. I don’t wanna ruin the moment. Just like humanity, he’s gone, and in that he’s perfect and that’s how I want to remember him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}wo plates of chicken-wings. Mine ready to be demolished, and his that never will. Two tall ones and two shots. Same story. - -We only met once a year. Once you’re past forty you don’t really want to meet anybody more than once a year anyway, but in this case once a year was enough. - -Super Bowl every year, re-run after re-run, year after year. - -We started the tradition with the 1966 Packers Cowboys game, once we finally admitted that there was no one but us, and he got over “I can’t believe I’m stuck with a fucking (expletive deleted)!” - -It was always harder on him than me, I knew America more intimately than he ever would. He was always a spectator. I was an extra in the shit show. The character you kill off right when he’s about to shine. I’m like Sean Bean but no one gives a shit. - -So I knew and understood his demons, I’d seen them before, and I could see the human behind them in ways he’d never see me. I’m not saying I’m a great guy, I’m a straight up asshole, I just had forty years to come to terms with it, so I sound wise. I guess I appreciated his brutal honesty, it was refreshing, not facing someone who pretends to like you but hates your guts; or sometimes likes you, but superficially, your identity doesn’t matter one lick to them. - -We’d made it all the way to the Giants Pats games of 2008. Atmospheric shuttles could get you anywhere in the world in ninety minutes flat and we chose Chicago. Mo Redman’s Sports Bar floating high above Lake Michigan. - -Old games are super weird. It’s like watching jousting damn near. Respect for what they did without body modifications, but it’s the distance. You could delve into it with modern tech, watch the games in a virtual body, from the sidelines, QB, Strong Safety, your pick. That wasn’t happening anymore. - -But that’s also what’s been keeping us from connecting more and hating less, all that virtual, all that remote self-righteousness. Hate can feel so warm and comforting. It’s when we finally sat down together, the mutual relief at not being alone. Man… - -“Marcus?” - -“That’s me!” - -“Damned pleased to meet you!” - -Best buds ever since. With the caveat that too much liquor brings out the truth of people and his was ugly, but buddies, in the urban friendly way of America: banter, the common man’s spite for politicians, and stats, endless arguing over stats. Anything to keep the social fabric intact, anything to avoid the issues. - -“Hold my beer!” - -We had all the beer and all the shots and all the wings we could ever want, and once a year we put all the bullshit behind and toasted to a game from a time long gone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ut today he’s dead. Today his ashes are floating on the air, and there is no game playing on the screen, but I’ll get hammered just the same, and bullshit just the same, and wake up way too old for a hangover, just the same. Because now I can finally breathe. - -It’s the future. It’s the end. - -I’m the last man left alive. - -The last *black* man left alive. - -And it’s now, only now, that it doesn’t matter anymore. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **E Pluribus Unum** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390791386175193).* diff --git a/content/issue-28/FlyAwayPeter.md b/content/issue-28/FlyAwayPeter.md deleted file mode 100644 index b7a12a6a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/FlyAwayPeter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,207 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Fly Away, Peter" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- science fiction -- fantasy -authors: -- J. Livermore -copyright: '© J. Livermore 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As the editor apparently repeats every issue, sometimes (read 'always', it seems) stories tend to arrive in satisfying pairs, and J. Livermore's tale provides a pleasing dovetail with our opener. Again, it's about two very different men, again, one of them isn't around by the end, but in every other respect the two pieces could hardly be more different." - -image: images/FlyAwayPeter.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by [Gratisography](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-person-people-emotions-1990/) and the phrase 'twin brothers sitting on a sofa', composited with a background image by [Peggy_Marco](https://pixabay.com/photos/extension-wall-living-room-messi-1662055/)." - -type: stock -slug: fly-away-peter -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}“P{{}}aul! Oh, we’re *so* glad you’re back. We, erm…” Mother glanced behind her, towards the living room. Paul frowned. She was behaving oddly. But that wasn’t the awful thing. The awful thing was that the open living room door revealed a pair of trousered legs and smart shoes. - -Someone was sitting in *his* chair. - -“Mother. You know I don’t like people sitting in my chair. They muss up the cushion. They make it all wonky.” - -But whereas Mother would usually clutch a fist to her heart at being scolded in this fashion and insist on spilling out a desperate apology, this time she seemed as flustered as a schoolgirl complimented on her dimples. - -“It’s not just anyone, Paul. It’s… Well, his name’s Peter.” - -“Peter?” It was a common enough name and Paul had known plenty that owned it. But none that might visit. And certainly none he could envisage being allowed to occupy his chair. - -“He’s, well, I guess you could call him your twin.” - -If someone could reach down into Paul Knowle’s forty-one year collection of deepest, darkest fears, and pull something out—something that was like an evil, sneering rabbit from a magician’s hat—then Peter Knowle’s appearance was all that. And more. - -Because, up until five minutes ago, Paul Knowle had been an only child, in a world he alone owned. - -But worlds, like parents—it was now clear to him—had a way of splitting on you. - -Quite literally. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he man calling himself ‘Peter Knowle’ was using gentle, self-deprecating humour to make Father laugh. Father was perched on the edge of his chair, displaying an eager, happy grin which faltered when he saw his actual son glaring down at him, but then shone again when Father returned to basking in his newfound, well, *sun*. - -“Paul. This is Peter,” Father said. - -The interloper twisted round and the two men viewed each other for the first time. - -Paul Knowle. Peter Knowle. - -Not twins. Not even brothers. But, nonetheless, genetically identical in every way. - -Somehow, they were the very same person. - -“What the hell fool game of nonsense and rubbish are you playing here?” Paul managed clumsily. “We watch *Antiques Auctionhouse* at this time. It’s starting any moment.” - -“I think we can forego *Antiques Auctionhouse* tonight, Paul,” Father said, far more bravely than he’d ever normally dare. “Under the circumstances.” - -“I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Peter said. His smile was wide and cleanly white. His skin lightly tanned. And the hair swept off from, rather than stuck to, his forehead. - -“You’re not doing anything of the sort, Peter. It’s alri—” Mother began, but Paul had heard enough. - -“Then if you *don’t* mind.” Paul jabbed on the TV and snatched the remote from its pocket on the side of his chair and began waggling it impatiently to get the channel and volume he wanted. He kept his back to them, obscuring their view of *Antiques Auctionhouse.* - -“Maybe we can leave Paul to his programme,” Peter said vacating the chair. “I’d love another cup of tea, Mother.” - -“Of course,” Mother twittered merrily. - -“We’ll just be in the kitchen,” Father said, joining Mother’s betrayal. - -“And when’s dinner?” Paul asked, though he knew it would be dutifully served up immediately after *Antiques Auctionhouse*. It always was. And he didn’t need to ask what it was either, because they knew what he liked. How he liked it. - -“Could you stay to tea, Peter?” Mother asked. - -“There won’t be enough,” Paul told them all. - -“That’s okay—I won’t have much,” Mother said, making Paul’s jaw lock and a nerve slither up onto his forehead. - -“I wouldn’t hear of it,” Peter said as he ushered them out and Paul grinned. That was an end to it then. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ut when *Antiques Auctionhouse* finished and he called out that it had done so, Paul discovered that rather than things being sensibly, correctly back the way they should have been, Peter had been busy with a frying pan and had concocted something for them all. - -“I don’t like, erm…” Paul looked into the contents of the pan. He didn’t know what it was. - -“That’s okay,” Mother said. “There’s plenty of Shepherd’s Pie for you, Paul. I think *I’m* going to try what Peter’s made. What about you, Father?” - -“Oh, I’m game!” Father said, still with a ridiculous level of bonhomie. Paul wondered if Father was drunk. Mother too. If, in fact, the whole world had suddenly become drunk and he was the last sensible, sober person standing. - -“Sure you wouldn’t like to try some? It’s a favourite dish where I come from. My speciality actually.” - -“No. I’m fine with Shepherd’s Pie,” Paul informed Peter pertly. But something of what Peter had just said did need further investigation. “And where, may I ask, *do* you come from?” - -“Ah, well now, that’s the incredible thing. You see: I’m you and you’re me. Here, I guess they’d have to call us clones. But we’re not. We’re exactly the same person—we’re just from different dimensions.” - -Paul looked to Mother and Father and was dismayed to see they were both nodding, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. - -“Isn’t it marvellous, Paul? I mean, if it wasn’t for the difference in names, you’d think you were just a man and his mirror image.” - -As Paul and Peter examined each other a second time, it was pretty obvious to any neutral third party that this statement was way off the mark. It wasn’t just a case of chalk and cheese—more of chalk and *cha-cha-cha*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“T{{}}his dessert is incredible,” Peter said. “I’ve always wondered how you got the apples like that.” - -“Cinnamon, nutmeg… and I let the sugar burn ever-so-slightly so it caramelises,” Mother was pleased to relate. - -“*Different dimension?”* - -Paul had finally managed to interrupt the pleasantries to get back to the earlier revelation. He arched an eyebrow to show his scepticism. - -“Yes. Although things here are so similar, I guess they’re more *parallel* dimensions. Not exactly identical, because when I came through a few hours ago, I looked for Mother and Father where they live on my side, but they weren’t there. This is the house I grew up in though—so imagine my surprise when I found they still lived here!” - -“We don’t live here anymore in your dimension?” Mother asked. - -Paul swallowed. From the tales Peter had told over tea, they’d already discovered Peter had his own business, wife, two adorable children. Mother and Father had cooed like pigeons over the photos Peter had produced. Paul could guess what the next bit was going to be: Peter wasn’t living at home at forty-one. - -“Mother and Father live next door to me now,” Peter said. “I wanted them, *you*, close to their grandchildren.” - -“How lucky they are,” Father said. Paul kept his gaze rooted on a neutral portion of the tablecloth as his hands stretched out to claim the last portion of apple crumble. “Paul, do save some for Peter.” - -“That’s okay,” Peter said, leaning back and tapping a perfectly muscled midriff. “Gotta watch the old weight.” Paul pushed his spoon between puffy lips, Mother’s wonderful secret recipe unable to make the apple crumble taste anything but bitter and jagged tonight. “This house is the same though. And the photos you showed me earlier are identical to all those my parents have got. Even that dreadful one when you dressed me up as *Tintin* for that fancy dress party.” - -The three of them laughed. Despite all he had eaten, Paul felt hollow. - -“The school photos are the same too. Except that I went off to university after St Giles.” - -“Oh. Paul didn’t stay at St Giles,” Father said. - -Peter raised his eyebrows. “No? Why ever not?” - -“I don’t have to do exactly the same as you,” Paul said. - -“No. Of course not. Each one of us has our own path to follow,” Peter said, nodding at the wisdom of this. “So… you changed schools?” - -“In his third year. We moved him to Duckson High School.” - -“Duckson!” Peter laughed. “I remember them. Nice little school.” - -“St Giles was a little… *rough* for Paul,” Mother said, looking apologetically at Peter. Paul blushed hotly. - -“Well, the boys there could be a little hard on the new kids. I remember my first few months there were a real ordeal. I can quite understand you wanting to change, Paul.” - -“But you stuck it out?” Father asked, a worrying mixture of admiration and interest in his voice. - -“Well, I guess I just realised it had its plus-sides too. I joined the rugby team, the football team…” - -“Paul didn’t take to rugby,” Father said, and his voice was tainted for the first time by disappointment. Maybe even disgust. “Too rough. Again.” - -“Well, it’s not everyone’s sport,” Peter said. “I had my fair share of broken bones and black eyes.” - -Father knew well enough because he’d played in his own school days—and afterwards, until a knee injury had ruled him out. Mother now recounted the evenings when Father would arrive on her doorstep with a bandaged knee or a purple lump on his head like a ripe artichoke. - -“Well, that’s that solved, anyway,” Peter said. “Who’d have thought it, eh?” - -“I’m going to watch the news,” Paul said, pushing away from the table and standing up. He paused, waiting for Mother and Father to follow. - -“You boys go along,” Mother said, reaching for the dessert dishes. - -“Oh no, you don’t! *I’m* washing up!” Peter deftly slid the bowls from under her hands. “It’s the least I can do after that amazing crumble.” - -“But you cooked!” - -“I also arrived unannounced, without flowers, and have intruded on your evening. So: no excuses.” - -Paul hesitated at the door, wondering if he should create a precedent and offer to wash up too. But he felt the pull of the evening news, and all his programmes that came after. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n the end, Mother insisted on doing the drying up and Paul watched the news in silence with Father, both of them staring at the screen but not really taking anything in. Usually, Mother and Father would ask Paul about his day, how he felt, if he wanted anything more to eat. Then, Mother would get up to fetch his cocoa and biscuits. - -Mother and Peter eventually came in, laughing so loudly Paul had to tap the volume higher. Mother had brought coffee, and some chocolates she’d got from Father on her birthday. - -“This has been *so* nice,” Peter told them. “Meeting you all. Seeing you’re all so well. Tasting your famous apple crumble!” Mother cackled at that bit. “But I must be going back to my own dimension. I only chanced upon the way to come through. Now that I know it’s there though…” - -Paul’s heart knocked hard against his ribs. - -“Maybe Paul would like to visit your parents, your dimension?” Mother offered on Paul’s behalf. - -“That would be great!” Peter said and embraced Mother in a way that Paul never would have. Peter even gave Father a hug. “So long, Paul. Be seeing you.” - -“Yes,” Paul said from his chair as Father and Mother accompanied Peter to the door. There was more laughter, more sounds of kisses, and sniffling from Mother as the emotion of the moment engulfed her. When the front door finally closed and they came back into the living room, Paul said: “There’s a film on in a few minutes. John Wayne.” - -“I think I’ll go to bed,” Mother said, heading for the stairs. - -“Father?” - -“I’ve never really liked John Wayne,” Father confessed in a sudden moment of independent opinion. “Always plays every role the same. Wait for me, Mother.” - -Paul found himself alone with the TV, his chair and his thoughts. - -It would be alright. Things would be back to normal tomorrow. He might even offer to wash up after breakfast. Not after dinner though—too many plates, and the ones from the oven would have food burned onto them. Roast tomorrow. His favourite. - -Paul stared at the TV but was unable to concentrate as John Wayne entered yet another saloon with his trademark swagger. Tonight, for some reason, it looked like he was walking in pain. Like he was a tired, old horse forced to give one too many performances. - -It was a long time before Paul felt strong enough to breathe out. - -It would be alright. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Fly Away, Peter** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390790529508612).* diff --git a/content/issue-28/HowToGetAIToLikeYou.md b/content/issue-28/HowToGetAIToLikeYou.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1bb8baf0..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/HowToGetAIToLikeYou.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,296 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "How to Get AI to Like You" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Aaron Emmel -copyright: '© Aaron Emmel 2021 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "It would have been a missed opportunity if, in an issue entirely illustrated via artificially intelligent image generation, we didn't include a single story actually featuring AI. Aaron Emmel to the rescue, therefore, with this highly plausible glimpse of the way the future may be heading—in situations, at least, if not solutions…" - -image: images/How2GetAI2LikeU.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+, solely based on the prompt phrase 'micro expressions'. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen [here](https://youtu.be/sXVHgVQ26mM)." - -type: stock -slug: how-to-get-ai-to-like-you -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} rang the doorbell and assumed the confident smile I’d practiced in the mirror. I’d honed my expression and reassembled my limited assortment of outfits based on feedback from the popular app *How to Get AI to Like You* until one in the morning, at which point I’d decided my risks of being unrested and underprepared were perfectly balanced. - -“This is Elias Brown,” I said into the intercom. “I have an appointment.” - -“Please repeat your name,” said a voice. I assumed it was an AI. - -“Elias Brown.” - -“How do you spell it?” - -I spelled it. “I have—” - -“You’re not pronouncing it correctly.” - -“What?” - -“Your name should be pronounced Eh-LEE-as.” - -“It’s my name.” - -“Exactly. That’s why it’s important for you to pronounce it correctly.” - -I paused while I tried to keep any micro-expressions off of my face, even though controlling them was impossible because that’s what made them micro-expressions. This was the apartment that would change everything for me. It would boost my dating profile rank, which ultimately could raise my relationship status score, which would improve my health insurance rating, not to mention my employability metrics, which in turn—I stood up straighter and lifted my chin. - -There were a hundred ways to fail the algorithm-derived tests of daily life, and I’d tried most of them. But this time, I was going to win. I was going to get the apartment. - -“Eh-LEE-as Brown,” I said. The door opened. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} left the building half an hour later without having to second-guess my expression in the least. The AI had accepted me and my credit score. The apartment itself was large enough that my bed wouldn’t have to be anywhere near the refrigerator, and I’d get a view of the street for my first time as a working adult. - -“How’d it go?” my roommate Javier asked when I got home. - -I regarded the edifice of empty pizza boxes and soda cans stacked on the coffee table. More effort had been put into balancing them than it would have taken to throw them away. Soon, however, this would no longer be my concern. “I got the apartment.” - -He looked up from his videogame. “Really? Wow. Congratulations.” - -“I can help you and Steve look for a new roommate.” - -His eyes went back to the screen. “We’ll leave the room open for you for a while. Just in case it doesn’t work out.” - -Clearly, he didn’t want a reason to stop playing Soldiers in the Abyss. “I’ve been approved. It’s happening.” - -“You think the computers are going to let you get what you want that easily?” - -“It’s not like they’re intentionally trying to thwart us.” - -Javier didn’t respond to that, so I went to my room and closed the door. That gave me just enough space to sit down on my bed and pull up my work. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} had a job so my employer could collect tax breaks for not firing workers. The value in keeping me was somewhat greater than what could be saved by replacing me with an AI, and my company should know, since their AI accountants ran the numbers. - -“Ms. Jameson,” I said to the first client, a regular, reading from the script, “have you thought more about the contract we were talking about?” - -“I don’t know. My husband and daughter both think it’s a bad idea. They say you can take our house.” - -“We’re not going to take your house, Ms. Jameson. What would we even do with it?” - -“I know. It sounds—I’m just telling you what they said.” - -“We want you for the long haul.” I read as the script updated in real time. “We’re not in the real estate business. We’re in the customer satisfaction business. When you tell your friends what a great deal you got, we’ll get more referrals.” - -“That makes sense. I know.” - -“So, what do you think, Ms. Jameson? Are you ready for the next step?” - -“It’s just that I flag data for a living,” Ms. Jameson said. “I know how important data is for the algorithms and what they look for, and my husband probably has flags because of the threats he gets from his customer service job.” - -“Ms. Jameson, our system reviewed your family’s data before we offered you these terms.” - -“I know, but if I sign up for your security system, and your company decides our house would be more secure without us in it….” - -The screen provided a general rebuttal. I went off-script. “Since you know about AI, you know they like stability. Evictions aren’t part of that.” - -There was a pause. Then: “Yes. Yes, I’ll do it.” - -“Great! I’m so glad to hear that. We’re going to have a good run together. You won’t be disappointed.” - -“You promise.” - -“Of course, I promise. Just sign that form that’s popping up right now.” - -“Okay. There. Do you see it?” - -“I got it. Congratulations, Ms. Jameson. You’re a new owner of Peerless Security.” - -“Thank you!” - -There was a pause, and then new words appeared in my script: *Ms. Jameson, it is now my duty to inform you that you have two weeks, as mandated by Maryland law, to vacate your house.* - -I stared at the words. - -“Is there anything else?” Lindy Jameson asked. “What happens next?” - -A timer appeared in the upper-right corner of the virtual screen: numbers counting down from ten. If I didn’t speak before it hit zero, I’d be docked Successful Employee points. - -“Elias?” Ms. Jameson asked. - -“One minute. I’m checking something.” I texted the AI overseeing the session: *This isn’t right. We promised we wouldn’t take her house.* - -*Read the words in the script*, the AI responded immediately. *We are within our rights as stipulated by Lindy Jameson’s signed contract.* - -*But that’s not right,* I texted back. The counter hit “3.” *We’re lying to her, and we don’t need to do it.* - -“Elias?” Lindy prompted. - -“I… Ms. Jameson, it is now my duty to inform you—” I stared at the screen. - -“You trailed off. I can’t hear you.” - -“Lindy, we’re screwing you. Get a lawyer.” I stabbed off the call. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} stood up and paced my room. Then I tried to log back into my work account. It was blocked, but I had a new text from my work AI. I opened it. - -*Mr. Elias Brown, we regret to inform you that your employment with Peerless Security has been terminated as of 16:13 hours on May 15. Because you violated the terms of your employment contract, you have waived the right to two weeks’ notice and all benefits. Your last paycheck will be prorated based on your termination date.* - -I tried again to log into my work account. *Account does not exist,* the screen read. I pulled up the summary of my stats, but I already knew what I’d see. My employment status said “Unemployed—terminated.” My health benefits had been cancelled, and my credit score had plummeted 20 percent. Because of that hit, there was a new amendment to my new rental agreement. I opened it with an icy feeling spreading in my stomach. Because of my revised credit score, my monthly rent had just been hiked by 10 percent per month, and I now had to pay an additional month’s rent in advance. - -A second message appeared: also based on my credit score, along with my lack of health benefits and employment status, my dating site account was cancelled. - -Other scores dived in turn, an accelerating cascade. - -New messages began filling my inbox. Most of them were the same: ads for different kinds of products geared toward my new status. Offers to boost my scores, to train for job interview programs, to join sketchier dating sites. One message was unique: a follow-up from the AI manager of the apartment complex I’d visited that morning. - -*Application rejected due to credit score status*, it read. *You may reapply in one calendar year from today’s date*. - -I checked. My credit score was now down 30 percent. - -I wandered out to the living room. It took a few minutes for Javier to notice me. “Some kid just beat my high score. Get me a Coke?” He looked up. “Oh. You don’t look so good. Apartment fell through?” - -“And my job.” - -It wasn’t just my job that was bothering me, though. It was that I had taken someone else down with me. - -He nodded. “I’m sure you had lots of great plans, but what you’re not factoring in is that God clearly hates us. Grab me a Coke?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} walked outside and called Lindy. “This is Elias. I wanted to apologize for what happened and let you know—” - -“How dare you call me?” The line went dead. - -I stared at the phone. I’d called—I had to admit it—to make myself feel better somehow. As I’d dialed, though, I’d also realized I had an idea that might get her out of the mess I’d led her into. It was a reckless idea, but that’s what the situation seemed to call for. - -I knew I wouldn’t stop thinking about it, or about new justifications to ask her about it. I’m very convincing to myself. So, I did what I had to do: I deleted all Lindy’s contact information from my records, put on my headphones and blasted Love, Death & Anarchy while I looked for a neighborhood to get lost in. - -About an hour later, I received a text. *I just thought you’d like to know I lost my job because my stability score went down, my husband wont talk to me, & our daughter screamed shes leaving home & now i have no idea where she is or if shes coming back.* - -Five minutes later, another text: *Ha ha, not that shes going to have anywhere to come back to.* - -A few minutes after that: *This is lindy by the way. In case you cant keep up w which customer you screwed over or there are too many to count.* - -I thought a long time before texting her back. Of course, I was going to, but I couldn’t just admit that to myself at the outset. *I have an idea.* - -The indicator saying she was typing was up in the text app for a very long time. I imagined all the messages she was trying out and deleting. Or, rather, I imagined one basic message conveyed in a variety of ways: *You and your idea can go to hell.* Ultimately, though, a different message came through: *What is it?* - -Me: *Not safe over text. I need to tell you in person.* - -There was a long pause. Finally: *Fine.* - -Me: *I need your address.* - -Lindy: *You have it.* - -Me: *I deleted it.* - -A shorter pause. *OK. If my husband & i dont like your idea well be able to tell you to your face.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}indy’s house was a ranch with a two decades-old Kia in the driveway. The bushes were trimmed and the decorative shutters had recently been painted. It was cared for. - -Lindy came out to intercept me as I approached on the walk. Apparently, I wasn’t going to be let inside. She was fortyish, in sweatpants, with her hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Her husband, Rod, peered through the windows. - -“Do you mind taking the battery out of your cell?” I asked. - -“My phone’s inside. I’m expecting this to be a short visit.” - -I swallowed hard and skipped the apologetic yet compelling introduction I’d been planning. “You tag data, right?” - -“Why?” - -“Your employer—” - -“My former employer. The one you got me fired from. That one?” - -“Right. Yes. I—” I thought of telling her that I’d been fired as well, but I didn’t see a lot of empathy in her eyes at the moment. “Your ex-employer. They aggregate datasets for the tracking companies. The scores influence each other, so change one and you change others. Is there a way you could access your own data?” - -“That’s your idea?” - -“Part of it.” All of it. - -She crossed her arms, a psychological barrier from my stupidity. “There’s no easy way to change someone’s information, let alone my own, and because of you, *I don’t have a job anymore*.” - -“But could you still find a way into the system?” - -She paused. Her narrowed eyes got a little more thoughtful. “If I tried and I got caught I’d go to jail, which is the one thing that hasn’t already gone wrong today.” - -“If you could corrupt a batch of files, though, one that yours just happened to be in—they’d have to restore everything, right? How old would the backup files be?” - -“My ratings dropped because I lost our house. None of this would get our house back.” - -“Maybe you can. Ratings discrepancies are the one way to back out of a contract. That’s a clause Peerless included to benefit itself, but in this case, it can bite them. If it looks like something’s wrong with your ratings, the contract Peerless used to seize your house is void.” - -“I don’t know why I let you come.” She shook her head. “The truth? I thought it would feel good to yell at you, to—hurt you. But now I just want you to go away.” - -“Lindy, I’m—” - -“You heard me. Okay?” - -I drew in my breath to argue, but then I saw the firmness in her eyes, and I let it out as a slow sigh. I’d done enough to her and her family. “Yeah. Okay.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} took a bus uptown, but when I tried to transfer the next bus was out of order. I looked down the line: they were all out of order. I was used to things going wrong by that point, so I wasn’t completely surprised. I tried an autocab and a ride service, but the apps for both said they were having problems accessing my info. That made sense: my scores had been going haywire all day and the universe was still against me, right? - -I walked back. It took more than an hour. - -When I returned to my building, the door didn’t recognize me. I pulled out my phone to call Javier, but it rang before I could open my contacts. - -“I made a huge mistake.” Lindy’s voice was shaking. “I tried what you said. I thought I covered my tracks, but my antivirus software is going haywire. Law enforcement AIs are scouring my system.” - -I took a step back and stared at the red light on the door. *The buses. The autocab.* Were those all related? Lindy’s hack might have impacted more than I’d thought. - -“I really am going to jail.” - -I rubbed my forehead, thinking quickly. “Lindy, have you ever heard of the app *How to Get AI to Like* *You*?” - -“No. What? Why?” - -“It’s not important. Just—don’t do anything else differently. Once they think they know you, anything you do to change your routine arouses suspicion.” - -“Okay. I shouldn’t be calling you if they’re tracking me, should I?” - -“Probably not.” - -She hung up. I still needed to get into the building, so I swiped to Javier’s contact info. Before I pressed *Call*, the door’s light turned green. Whatever that problem was, it had been resolved. - -Javier was grinning when I walked into the apartment. “The other score’s gone!” he said without looking up. “I’m back on top!” - -“Awesome.” I didn’t remember what score he was talking about. - -“Everything I said before, that might have been a little harsh.” - -“It’s what you always say.” - -“I like that you’re always looking for ways to win. Don’t let me discourage you.” - -He actually looked up at me when he said that. I was so stunned that for a moment, I could imagine wanting to stay in this apartment, terrible views and pizza box mountains notwithstanding. Then my phone vibrated, there was an explosion onscreen, Javier turned back to his game and the moment passed. I went to my room to check my messages. - -The top one was from the credit agency. *Due to a widespread data error, we are reverting to credit ratings posted at 7:00am Eastern Time. We apologize if this causes any inconvenience.* - -The next message welcomed me to my new apartment. - -Lindy. This must all have been because of Lindy’s hack. - -I thumbed through my ratings, my grin widening with each swipe. My credit score was back to what it had been. My dating site account was reinstated. - -I wanted to call Lindy to see if her scores had gone up, but I took my own advice: nothing to make the AIs suspicious. - -More swipes. I didn’t have my job back, which meant my ratings were bound to drop again. “I wouldn’t go back to Peerless even if they let me,” I said out loud, which probably wasn’t true but felt good to believe. - -My mind raced. Maybe my scores were decent enough again that I could get hired by another firm if I moved quickly. AI recruiters were fast when they wanted to be. - -Before I could act on that, my phone pinged with another text. Unknown sender. - -*I liked your idea. Have any others?* - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **How to Get AI to Like You** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390785549509110).* diff --git a/content/issue-28/Marciano.md b/content/issue-28/Marciano.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8f6c90fc..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/Marciano.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,338 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Marciano" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Charlotte H. Lee -copyright: '© Charlotte H. Lee 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The genesis of speculative fiction may well be 'Utopia', Thomas More's 16th century satire of a perfect society, its name necessarily meaning 'no-place'. The best utopian sf now looks not merely at perfection, but instead shows people striving to build something better, often within worlds that are very far from perfect. Charlotte H. Lee gives us someone on that very path." - -image: images/Marciano.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by [susnpics](https://pixabay.com/photos/beach-ice-sea-shore-iceland-6847276/) and the prompt phrase 'Oil painting of a vast building on the surface of Mars'. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen [here](https://youtu.be/F7G0IPU43fA)." - -type: stock -slug: marciano -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}V{{}}***OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-04: 20:62:04, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME*** - -> *>* *Dear Vader,* -> -> *>* *Today started out kinda scary. The lights went out at breakfast because of all the mirrors that broke during yesterday’s dust-up. They didn’t turn off all of a sudden so much as slowly turn down to nothing. Dr. Davis was really mad at someone about it**—**something about the photo synthesizers not getting enough light so a bunch of keyotes (whatever those are) died.* -> -> *>* *Mom says it’s rude to eavesdrop but the inside walls are too thin not to hear, especially when Dr. Davis really gets his dander up. He’s real loud, and his voice echoes off the outside walls. I’m glad he doesn’t have any kids, he scares me even from four units over. I can’t imagine how scary he must be if he was yelling at me. It makes me miss Earth cuz at least there we had a house with real walls and shouty neighbours weren’t so much of a bother.* -> -> *> The only thing better about being on Mars is school. It’s nowhere near as boring as it was on Earth, and I don’t have to put up with dummies holding me back. Less homework!* -> -> *>* *Love, Yvgenia* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}carlene Yugolio tightened the straps of her air exchanger cap, making sure the seal was tight against the smooth, matte black surface of her cellskin. She squinted against the airlock’s overhead bio-luminescent lights, shining brighter than noon on a clear sol. Her energy level was already perking up. Another couple of hours like this and her thick second skin be closer to glossy silver than black. She didn’t understand why foreigners were so hung up on clothing, solar charging body mods just made sense and all that fabric got in the way. She sighed, not looking forward to the sidelong glances and rooms that went silent when she walked in. - -Perhaps Ingmar was right: Earther contracts weren’t worth the hassle, however much they paid. As much as she loved her partner, on those rare occasions they argued his tendency to gloat when he was right sometimes made her think twice about going home after a project wrapped up. She could still turn around and hop back into her rover, leave this Earther pustule to burst or fade away on its own, and drive into the sunset that framed a distant Olympus Mons. Tempting as those thoughts were, though, the pay from this gig would keep her lab going for another two years. Perhaps long enough for her to nail down that new soil converter. Then she could laugh all the way to the bank—and the total freedom to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Become a woman of leisure. Fire every annoying client with problems she didn’t give two puffs about. - -Bold red letters flashed on a panel next to the interior door, counting upward as the air pressure increased, tightening its grip on her with each tick. The computer’s voice, once soft and difficult to hear, grew uncomfortably loud. Scarlene adjusted her hearing for Earther atmo pressure, turning the volume down to almost zero. How did they put up with no control over their hearing? It was one of the first mods installed in Martian infants. No sense in disturbing everyone in the vicinity when you wanted to take the tunes loud. Or turn down the volume to keep from going crazy during a dust up. Or at night, when the business of Rhea Sylvia went to sleep and the caterwauling of someone’s offspring carried loud and clear. - -The panel switched to a steady green at 101 kilo-pascals and the door slid aside smoothly. Scarlene stepped through into the station’s expansive, low-lit vestibule, pulling her battered but sturdy wheeled case along with her. Artifacts from early Martian history decorated walls, hung suspended, and rested on columns surrounding the central elevator’s housing, each basking in its own soft spotlight. Most of the artifacts were replicas, she knew, but irritation rippled through her when her gaze landed on Sojourner. Her government had been trying to wrest it from the US government for over 150 years. They’d so far refused on the basis that it had been funded by their programs. Not too many years more and the poor thing would oxidize away to nothing. They even refused to put it into an atmo controlled display case, claiming budgetary constraints. Another fine example of the cheap trogs showing no respect for Mars or its people. - -The elevator’s opening doors drew her attention away from the prize and back to the matter at hand. Her welcoming committee, five squat Earthers, filed out and processed in her direction. A decade of interfacing with Earthers had made their slow movements, compensating for a gravity not much more than one third of their normal, less annoying than it used to be. That could be just her mellowing with age. Or maybe it was the distraction of feeling like she was being crushed by the very air. By this time tomorrow their languidness could once again be as annoying as school tours of her crop bubbles. - -“Welcome to Terra Nova, Dr. Yugolio,” the leader of the group, said. “I am Dr. Kylorne Davis, Administrator of this enclave.” He reached out a hand and Scarlene squashed her distaste at having to touch him. She shook his hand, then surreptitiously wiped his oils off her palm on her bag. To her relief, the others contented themselves with answering nods and curious stares as they were introduced in turn. - -“Thank you, Dr. Davis,” Scarlene said. She noted the winces her voice evoked, and lowered the volume of her augmented larynx. “I hope my help will benefit you. I understand you don’t feel the avian infection is Terran in origin?” - -Davis gestured to the elevator, falling into step with her as she left Sojourner to the mercy of people who didn’t value it enough. “Yes. None of the birds have been in contact with any terrestrial supplies. It has to be something that either originated on Mars, or mutated from something the original birds already carried. I’m hoping it’s something you’ve seen in native stations. Luck willing, you’ll be able to whip up a treatment for us in short order.” - -Scarlene stepped into the elevator, the entourage trailing her into the cage. She gritted her teeth against the press of too many people. No one else seemed to mind, though they left a hand-span’s space around her and Davis. She suspected it was out of deference to their boss rather than respect for her Martian sensibilities. Davis seemed determined to stay in her personal space, however. - -“I assume you’ve already reviewed airlock decontamination logs?” Scarlene asked. - -“Of course,” Davis said. He puffed out his chest, a self-satisfied smile dimpling his left cheek. “In doing so, I isolated the previously unidentified culprit that’s been attacking our lettuces. That one was a Martian native, but so close to Bremia lactucae that our decon procedure didn’t target it. My protocol update is now being implemented in all Earth enclaves on Mars.” - -Scarlene nodded and said, “Not bad for an engineer. You should be proud.” She tried not to stare at the dimple but it kept drawing her eye like a rapidly approaching dust-up. - -Davis already ruling out imported bacteria would make her job easier. Martian bacteria were just as complex as their Terran counterparts, but not yet as diverse. Identifying it and developing an antibacterial should be relatively quick. - -The rest of the ride down to the central hub of the enclave passed in silence. The door slid back to reveal the standard Earther station layout. Davis gestured for her to precede him out, indicating a nondescript grey pressure door halfway around the ring. The rest of the party trailed along behind silently as they strode past the other spoke entries, Davis moving easier against the floor’s magnetic pull on his clothes. Not a wealthy station, then, she noted. Mag plates rather than the state-of-the art grav plates installed at the new station in Hellas Planitia. - -The mock gravity pull dragged uncomfortably on Scarlene’s longer limbs. One more annoyance. - -“I’ll have someone show you to your quarters, but I thought you’d like to see the lab first,” Davis said, palming open the target door. It rumbled aside, revealing standard issue hydroponic walls. This particular corridor seemed to be dedicated to dwarf varieties of rice and barley, with the occasional decorative flower popping out colour here and there to keep the bees coming by. - -Scarlene hummed her assent. “That would be efficient, thank you. I can inventory what supplies are already available, then someone can gather the remaining materials while I settle in and attend to my water pressure.” - -“Exactly what I was thinking. I’m sure our atmosphere can’t be comfortable for you until you make the necessary adjustments,” Davis said, his smile sagging as his gaze darted to her neck and its hidden exchanger. It wouldn’t take much for that smile to devolve into disdain and she was fully prepared to demolish his perceived superiority over *homo remus*. - -After passing a number of doors, they finally came to a dimly lit lab, its security panel a bright green. Through the open hatch, Scarlene could see an assortment of equipment, forlorn in their dust sheathes. It was a sin to have this much equipment unused, waiting around for some use to be found. She stepped across the threshold, careful not to trip over the pressure door’s track, exhaling a thankful breath when the lights came up automatically. On the last Earther station all the lighting had been voice activated, each room requiring voice security imprinting. What a hassle that had been, and the bruises on her shins had taken sols to fade. - -“Well, I will leave you to it,” Davis announced, drawing Scarlene’s eyes back to the administrator. He appointed one minion to remain behind with instructions to take her to her quarters after receiving her list, then left with as much pomp as any person could without performing an overt ceremony. Scarlene pulled open the nearest drawer and started inspecting its contents. - -The minion cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Dr. Yugolio?” - -“Yes?” Scarlene had already forgotten her name. - -“We really appreciate you coming to help us. We’ve been at a loss on this, what with Dr. Etienne getting recalled and all.” - -Scarlene shrugged. “The tender was attractive. I won the bid. We have a contract.” She turned back to digging through the drawer. “If that makes you feel good, then it was an easy win for me.” The woman stayed silent, but Scarlene felt disappointment radiating off her in waves. - -A heavy silence settled over the lab and Scarlene glanced over her shoulder, catching the Earther in an unguarded expression of hurt. When the woman realized Scarlene was looking her way, her face cleared to polite attentiveness. A twinge of shame prompted Scarlene to try to ease the tension. “Was Dr. Etienne your only bacteriologist?” - -“The only one well versed in Martian bacteria. Terra Nova is focused on testing low-g farming practises to be used elsewhere, not for here. After all, Mars already has their own farming figured out.” The minion offered up a tentative smile. “Most of our testing is in artificial atmospheres. For example, I’m developing a barley strain that can handle a three percent methane atmosphere.” - -“Ah, for that impending colony effort to Grissom in Alpha Centauri?” - -The botanist nodded. “Yes. It doesn’t make sense to have a colony ship, loaded to the gills with farming equipment, try to figure out how to get their crops to grow *after* they get there. Forty years is a long trip home if their food crops fail.” - -“Indeed.” Scarlene forced herself not to react to the ‘gills’ comment, but the minion figured out her faux pas on her own. She flushed crimson and bit her lip, but at least she had the grace to not try to dig herself out of the mistake. - -The lab door squeaking open distracted them both from the conversation, and a young girl of about ten came in. Her hair was pulled back into tight braids, but that was about the only thing tidy about her. - -The woman crossed to the door, intercepting the mobile petri-dish. “Yvengia, what are you doing here? And why are you such a mess?” - -“Patty said that there’s a Martian here and that you have to work with her.” - -Scarlene waited to see how the woman responded to this intrusion. If she failed to handle it sensibly, then Scarlene would immediately ask for a replacement. There was nothing in her contract that mentioned providing entertainment for nosey children. - -“That’s a rude thing to say, Yvgenia Lubov,” the woman said sternly. “It’s also rude for you to barge into a room without permission. You know better than this.” She looked up at Scarlene, trying to cover her embarrassment with a smile. “Please excuse me for a few minutes, Doctor. I’ll be right back after I get my daughter properly situated.” - -Scarlene waved a hand in dismissal. “Take your time but, before you go, point me to something I can write a list on.” - -The minion produced a tablet from a thigh pouch and offered it to Scarlene. “You can use my notepad until I can get one issued to you. Just use the guest log in—the password is ‘Welcome1’, capital double-u, digit one.” Her eyes crinkled in wry amusement. “Our IT people aren’t especially original.” - -Scarlene accepted the offering wordlessly, not wanting to prolong the Earther child’s stay. She resumed her inspection of the drawer’s contents, turning her back on the retreating pair. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}***OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-06: 21:11:45, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME*** - -> *> Dear Vader,* -> -> *> Lights went out again today so no school! Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me keep the flashlight after bedtime so I just stubbed my toe on my desk. It still hurts, but I don’t feel any blood so it can’t be that bad, I guess. I hope the solar mirrors get fixed fast. Being underground with no lights on isn’t scary after the first hour or so, it’s just dark and boring.* -> -> *> If I’m allowed to go to back to school tomorrow, I’m going to ask the teacher why the mirrors broke. We’ve had dust storms before and they didn’t break. I asked at dinner, but Mom and Dad just looked at each other and told me to finish my plate. I’m never going to do that to my kids—I’m going to be a much, much better parent. You can hold me to it, Vader. I solemnly promise that.* -> -> *> Love, Yvgenia* -> -> *> PS. I hope Tommy Meisnecht missed me today.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}carlene pressed the doorbell icon on Administrator Davis’s suite panel. She heard the resulting chime through the door, the sour thought that it should sound like one of his dusty chickens flickering across her mind. She kept the thought to herself, though. No need to broadcast her disdain of the administrator, or his precious poultry, to the minion hovering behind her. The woman was so close her breath tickled Scarlene’s ear cap, though at least the thin coverall Scarlene now wore to block at least some of the brightness in this wretched station kept the Earther’s lung particles off the rest of her body. She had to firmly remind herself that a significant factor in her crankiness was because she’d been riding too close to her overcharge limit for too long. She always managed to forget that detail between contracts. - -“Yes?” Davis’s voice asked sharply from the panel’s speaker. - -“It is Dr. Yugolio. I need to speak with you.” - -Seconds ticked past in silence. Just as Scarlene was considering whether to press the doorbell again or to turn on her heel and march out of this doomed hole in the ground, the door slid back. Davis stood there, an undyed woollen robe—identical to the one they had provided her—belted over prim pyjamas. Judging from the tousled hair and patchy shadow of growth on the lower half of his face, she had woken him. - -“My apologies for calling you from your bed, Doctor,” Scarlene began, doing her best to use the title without sounding ironic. She had yet to understand why any mechanical engineer felt the need to obtain his doctorate, but his pointed correction of his title when she’d addressed him as ‘Administrator’ had made it crystal clear that the honorific meant a great deal to him. “I have made a discovery that you will need to take immediate action on. Every moment counts.” - -Scarlene had only ever said words like that once before. The response then had been concern and anxiety. What she got from this Earther was something entirely different. - -“I find that unlikely, Doctor,” Davis said, suspicion pulling his thick eyebrows together over the bridge of his pointy nose. “In my experience, careful and appropriate responses are best decided upon by those who are properly rested.” He sniffed. “However, you are here and I am up, so you may as well come in.” He held out a hand, angling his fingertips toward a drab grey sofa set under a holographic projection of a dock jutting out over an Earther lake, an arboreal forest dimly seen through a dawning morning. - -Once Scarlene made it to the sofa, she sank down to the edge of the firm cushion, letting the abysmal gravity have its way with her. She waited for the administrator and his minion to take their own seats in the facing arm chairs before she spoke. “Thanks to the second system breakdown I have a new angle of approach. The organism attacking your avians is not, in fact, bacterial.” He nodded impatiently in response. “The virus is, after all, Earther in origin rather than Martian. It is also an aggressive one. The good news is that it isn’t interested in humans—either *homo sapiens* or *homo remus**—*and it is unlikely that it will spread beyond this installation.” - -She paused for effect. “It is, however, very interested not only in your chickens but in the prokaryote mats you use in your nitrogen conversion process. In fact, it’s more interested in those than the birds.” - -The only response Davis gave was a raising of his eyebrows. Scarlene ploughed on. “So far, I’ve confirmed one of your mats in a secondary processor to be infected. Judging by my observation of the virus’s life cycle, that infection began sometime within the last forty-eight hours. Since then, the virus has nearly wiped out the processor.” - -The administrator flicked a glance at the Earther. “Polina, which processor is she referring to?” - -“The secondary back-up for cell A-15,” Polina said. The botanist’s voice gave away nothing of what she thought of Terra Nova’s predicament, which Scarlene admired her for. - -“So, nothing of a critical nature by any means.” Davis turned his attention back to Scarlene. “Definitely nothing worth waking anyone up for.” - -“Sir, I said it is the only one I have confirmed. I did not mean to imply that it is likely to be the only one infected. Given how quickly it took down the processor I checked, I believe it’s imperative you begin testing all your systems. Immediately.” She held the man’s eye for a long moment. When she was sure she had his full attention, however grudgingly, she went on, “I suspect it may already be too late for remediation, and you may have to begin evacuation procedures now.” - -“Evacuation? Because one secondary processor in an out-of-the-way system has gone down? Based on a wild conclusion that there’s a connection? First I want proof that it’s related to whatever made the birds sick, and then I want it verified by my own people.” Davis snorted his contempt. “No, *Doctor*, evacuation is highly unlikely.” - -He rose to his feet, folding his hands together in front of himself. “I thank you for responding to our call for help, but clearly you were not the person for the job.” - -Scarlene stubbornly remained seated. “Dr. Davis, I think you aren’t taking this matter as seriously as you should be. If you wait any longer before you begin testing, you could be without circulating air in seventy-twohours.” She drew in a deep breath, and forced her body into stillness. “I have no cause to lie about this, or to exaggerate the situation. Please think of the personnel under your care.” - -Davis’s bushy brows beetled down into a dark scowl. “I believe I am taking this as seriously as necessary, Dr. Yugolio. I also believe that you are being alarmist for reasons not yet known. There has never been a case recorded of a viral infection in processors. Not once in the over two hundred years since the first Earth enclave was built here. That’s a hundred years longer than your species has even existed. The odds of it happening are a million to one.” - -“And still, sir, the virus has spread. It is attacking your air processing and power generation. You need to begin testing and remediation immediately, or you will endanger the lives of every living being in Terra Nova.” Scarlene glanced at Polina, who’d risen along with the administrator to stand awkwardly in front of her chair, hands gripped together so tightly the skin over her knuckles was as white as the early morning sun. - -“That will be enough,” Davis bit out sharply, his voice rising above normal conversational levels. “You have brought your concerns forward. I have listened to them. I will consider them. And I will act as I consider appropriate.” - -Scarlene opened her mouth to argue further but he cut her off again, this time more loudly than before, “I will not listen to any more of this nonsense. Your fear mongering is not welcome. Your services are no longer required. Consider this a formal request for you to be on your way.” - -Scarlene closed her eyes and counted to three, struggling to hold onto her temper in the face of this idiot’s lunacy. “Doctor, I beg you, for the sake of all the lives you are responsible for, please listen to reason. I have nothing to gain—” - -“I know all about you and your kind,” Davis boomed, his face flushing redder than a chicken’s comb. “Isolationist bigots, every jack one of you. You think you’re so evolved, but really you’re nothing but circus freaks.” - -Scarlene snapped down the gain on her hearing, and shoved herself up to her feet, struggling against the pull of Earth gravity. That last inconvenience, minor though it was, was enough to fray away the final thread on her temper. - -“Believe of me as you wish, *Administrator*. Unfortunately for you, though, not only are you behaving in a way that is going to get people pointlessly killed, but I will be suing Terra Nova Corp for breach of contract. I doubt your senior executive will look kindly on that.” Scarlene stretched her lips tight in a snarl. “If you’re very lucky, you’ll live to see me win enough in damages to never have to take another Earther contract ever again.” - -With that she strode across the carpet, ignoring the incoherent sputtering coming from the arrogant trog. With all her attention on fighting to keep her balance, she didn’t realize her appointed shadow was right behind her until she felt cold air replace the woman’s grip on her elbow. They were halfway to the central hub before the door to the idiot’s quarters slid shut, only then cutting off the stream of abuse aimed at her back. - -Scarlene let out a huff and sucked in a new breath. The taste of lavender, exuding from the pretty purple flowers dotting the hydroponics lines of the corridor, did nothing to soothe her agitation. She felt a pang of pity for the Earther trailing her. Polina Matvalta had a family—a husband and a young daughter—who could die because of that narcissistic fool. Scarlene may not like kids, but most people liked their own kids a great deal more than they liked anyone else. - -Belatedly, Scarlene noticed that the botanist had been speaking. “—can understand how upset you must be,” Polina was saying. “Please, let me make some calls. I think I know who can get the Administrator’s order overridden. Dr. Yugolio, please believe me, I’m horrified by his behaviour. I can only imagine how you must be feeling right now.” - -Scarlene slowed her steps. “I appreciate the effort, Polina. I have to admit, he got to me.” - -“Will you come with me? It would be helpful if you presented your findings personally.” - -The temptation to simply pass over her notes and accept Davis’s word on her dismissal was almost more than she could resist. What did she owe these rotten Earthers? Not a damned thing. She’d put up with enough micro-aggressions since she’d gotten here to last the rest of her lifetime. - -The silent pleading in her assistant’s eyes, though, would need a tougher person than her to deny. She sighed in resignation and nodded, accepting the profusion of gratitude with as much grace as she could muster. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}***VOICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-07: 21:01:15, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME*** - -> *> Dear Vader,* -> -> *> I think the Martians are lucky, being able to go outside. I’ve never been allowed outside before, and I think it would be extro. Besides, the idea of being made part dolphin is pretty art. I looked them up. They looked like super-dupe fun creatures, all shiny and sleek. And SO fast! I mean, having dolphin skin won’t make me fast, but wearing a shell made from a creature that’s practically extinct on Earth is absolutely mons.* -> -> *> I’d miss Mom and Dad, but I could be OK with only seeing them on calls instead of in person. I’d do it even if Tommy didn’t. My heart would break into a gazillion tiny pieces and I’d never, ever love anyone else again, but I’d do it anyway. I mean, who wouldn’t?* -> -> *> Signing off,* -> -> *> Yvgenia* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t was interesting to watch the shades an Earther’s face could cycle through. When she’d first gotten up to speak, Davis’s usual florid face was on the pale side, almost grey. Now, when she glanced at him on her way back to her seat behind the auditorium’s podium, it was deepening from a deep red to what must be a life-threatening purple. - -Clearly, hearing her speak to the assembled residents of Terra Nova of its impending catastrophic failure provoked something primal in him. She pointedly hadn’t said his name—or even his title—but, judging by the scowls directed his way, these Earthers were a bright enough lot to figure out what a dunk he was. Scarlene had no sympathy to spare, and she intended to carry on ignoring the trog. She could allow a grain of admiration for the self-control he must’ve been exerting to stay mute, though. - -“Thank you, Dr. Yugolio,” Polina Matvalta said into the microphone, stepping forward to reclaim her place before the muttering crowd. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the mounting volume. “We’ve got maybe ten days before we’re at zero percent electricity generation. Our canned air will last us a bit longer, but there won’t be any power for the fans to circulate it. The biggest problem is where we can evacuate to. There simply isn’t enough room in the nearest stations to accommodate all of us without overloading their systems.” - -“How did Davis screw this up so badly?” a man shouted. An argument erupted around him, but there were so many people yelling over each other that Scarlene couldn’t make out what any of the points were. It took every ounce of self-control she had not to look across the stage at him. There was no way she’d be able to keep her satisfaction at the contempt getting thrown at him off her face. - -They quieted down to a dull roar when Polina tapped the microphone. “Please, let’s all try to stay calm. We can hash out who’s to blame after we’re all safe. Right now we have to focus on finding a solution.” - -An older woman shot to her feet, levelling a finger at Scarlene. “It’s that Martian, she brought it here. She’s trying to wipe us all out. Genocide in action!” The accuser’s neighbour pulled the woman back down onto her seat using more effort than necessary, disgust plain on his face. The woman winced in pain and turned an angry scowl on him. Their argument melted into the general tumult. - -“What about chemical generators?” a man asked from mid-section, raising his hand for attention. “Or shutting down the new grav plates?” - -Polina turned the question over to the mechanical engineer who stood waiting on her right. Scarlene sighed in frustration. They could attempt to trouble-shoot as much as they liked, but the most they’d buy themselves would be a week or two. The station didn’t have enough gravity plating to tip the scales far enough to matter, even shutting down the mag plates wouldn’t give them more than a couple days beyond that. Neither would make a dent in the eight months they needed to accommodate the remaining thirty evacuees who had nowhere to go. - -Thirty out of almost three hundred. If they didn’t come up with something by the end of the meeting, they may as well draw names at random for euthanization. Better that than dying of carbon dioxide poisoning, isolated and afraid. They needed to think about this from a different angle. - -“There is another option no one has yet discussed,” Scarlene said, boosting her vocal gain to cut through the crosstalk. The mix of expressions directed at her was as varied as the opinions on who was to blame for the catastrophe. “There are thirty-eight prepubescent children here. It would be hard on them, but they are young enough to accept the treatments that would guarantee their survival.” - -As she expected, the room erupted again, this time in shouted denials and exclamations of disgust—some of them bigoted, others accusing her of attempting to kidnap their children. Polina Matvalta stared at her, mouth agape. - -Scarlene got to her feet and raised her hand for attention, upping her volume still further to be heard over the commotion. “The option is available. What would you rather do—allow thirty children to become Martian, or choose thirty among you to die? I hope you’re not so lost to reason as to voluntarily choose death for any of your number.” - -All she got in reply were shouted imprecations. She turned down her audio. Once she could think again, she noticed that it was a minority of the crowd who were doing the yelling. Most of them sat silently, fear and hopelessness turning their faces into caricatured versions of the three wise monkeys. She sat still, letting the loudest ones continue taking more than their share of oxygen until they seemed to run out of fuel. - -“Think it over carefully, parents.” Scarlene sent out a silent prayer that Ingmar wouldn’t lord what she was about to commit to over her for the rest of their lives. “I would be willing to sponsor the children, make sure the older ones find apprenticeships right away, and help you find the right foster homes for the younger ones.” - -The room erupted afresh. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}***OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-08: 20:43:22, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME*** - -> *> Dear Vader,* -> -> *> Mom and Dad are freaked. Everyone else's parents are, too, we don’t know why. This is something way worse than the mirrors. The adults are acting so weird. People crying, and not telling why. At first it was just confusing, but now it’s scaring me bad. They’ve suspended school, but I got a message from a year ten’er that she couldn’t unlock my next math unit because she had to pack.* -> -> *> I think that’s the freakiest part. I know for sure her dad isn’t supposed to finish his rotation for another half-year.* -> -> *> Gotta go, Mom is calling. I’ll fill you in later.* -> -> *> Yvgenia* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he soft chime of an admittance request interrupted Scarlene’s hastily thrown together dinner. Steeling herself as best she could against whatever this latest childless complainant felt she needed to hear, she called out, “Yes?” - -Polina Matvalta’s voice came over the speaker. “Dr. Yugolio? Could we speak with you?” - -Scarlene slumped in relief. At least these visitors weren’t likely to be treating her like she was some pied piper come to lead all their children away as punishment. “Come.” - -The door slid back to reveal Matvalta, a man Scarlene assumed to be her husband, and their daughter. She’d forgotten the child’s name, but not her untidiness. Scarlene rose and slid her dinner plate into the fridge, then invited the family to sit, though she resisted the urge to offer refreshments. Ingmar would be horrified by that, but he wasn’t here and wouldn’t ever have to know of Scarlene’s less than perfect hospitality. - -“I wasn’t expecting to see a child quite this soon. Has everyone decided?” - -Polina shook her head. “No, I imagine they’re still arguing. Some of the others may have come to see reason, though. I expect they all will shortly, but only after they’ve exhausted every possibility. No matter how improbable. I imagine by morning you’ll have had all the parents in here.” She smiled tightly. “Everyone wants their children to live, but I can’t think of a single person who could point at someone and say they have to die because we don’t want our children to look any different.” - -The man spoke for the first time, saying, “That’s not fair, Polina. You have to admit that our children can’t go home with us after they’re modified.” He sighed deeply, his pain evident in the droop of his lips. “This will be a permanent separation. You have to see that.” - -Scarlene opened her mouth to reply, but Polina spoke quickly. “Yvgenia can absolutely go back to Earth with us. We aren’t making any changes except for the second skin and exchanger implants. If she keeps up with gravity training, she’ll be able to return to Earth anytime.” The woman glanced at Scarlene for support, who nodded agreement. - -“Polina is correct. As long as the children don’t allow their bone densities to deteriorate, they could return to Earth permanently.” She carefully didn’t add her next thought, *though they may not want to since Earthers are all a bunch of bigoted yotes and the children would lead difficult lives.* She was pretty sure Yvgenia’s father had the same thought, but he kept it sealed behind lips pressed so tight they almost disappeared. - -Between them, the child’s brown eyes were as wide as dinner plates. “Would I have to cut off all my hair? Be bald like you?” - -Scarlene nodded. “We remove all your body hair before giving you the treatment. After the treatment your hair won’t grow anymore.” - -The girl reached up to run her hand over sleek, charcoal-dark plaits. “Oh. That would be weird.” - -“You would get used to it, I think. To me, it would be weird to have it.” - -The girl’s face turned thoughtful, but she didn’t say anything else. Her mother put an arm around her and hugged her close. “Look at it this way, I won’t be nagging you to brush it anymore.” - -The father cleared his throat, drawing Scarlene’s eyes back to him. “What exactly is involved?” - -She went into lecture mode, focusing more on the father than the mother and sparing little attention to the child for the moment. “The first step is to do a stem-cell harvest. We’ll use that to grow the second skin, connective strands, and casings for the exchangers.” At the look of confusion on the man’s face, Scarlene explained, “They’re commonly referred to by Earthers as ‘gills’.” Her smile turned brittle when he nodded his understanding of the derogatory slang. - -“There won’t be enough time before the enclave gets down to zero power to do more than those two alterations. But that’s only provided we make the call to Rhea Sylvia for the delphina scaffolding by tomorrow morning. - -“The process itself is similar to an Earther skin graft, in that we mesh stitch the new skin to the surface of her body using the connective strands. After that, it becomes a waiting game for the solar cell materials to bond to the outer layer of the second skin. The solar cells are made from a fine alloy of silicon, gallium arsenide and…” - -Scarlene continued, condensing as much of the hard bio-science as she could in the interest of time, knowing she was going to have to go over the whole thing again using simpler language for the girl. With each question answered, the stiffness in the husband’s shoulders eased. Tension bled out of Scarlene’s own shoulders in response and she let herself gradually relax back into her chair. - -She glanced at the child, who sat huddled between her parents, looking like a lamb that’s just figured out its mother is nowhere to be seen. - -“I imagine all that sounds pretty scary to you,” she said. When the child nodded wordlessly, Scarlene dug for a reassuring smile. “It won’t be easy and it won’t be comfortable, but it won’t hurt very much. You’ll be asleep for the procedures, and you won’t feel a thing while you’re sleeping. Your neck will be sore for a few days where the diverter gets inserted, and you’ll be tempted to scratch at the new cellskin. When babies get theirs we put mitts on them so they don’t damage it. I’m sure we’ll be able to scrounge up gloves so you can rub at the itches without causing any harm. We’ll also make sure to keep as many wet towels around as we can—it helps reduce the itch. Once the inner skin has bonded to the stitches and you’ve drawn some insulation water to act as your radiation barrier, the itching will go away.” - -The child managed to pull up enough courage to ask, “How long will it itch for?” - -“At your age, about two or three days. We can leave you asleep for the whole time you’re in the tank, but it would be better if you’re awake and practising with the exchanger.” - -Yvgenia seemed to take solace in the promise, straightening up a little between her parents. “Is it hard to learn how to work it? The exchanger, I mean?” - -“I was a baby when mine was implanted, so I don’t remember,” Scarlene answered. The girl visibly gulped and shrank halfway back into her hunch. Scarlene felt a twinge of pity. “For as long as I can remember I’ve never had to think about it any more than I have to think about blinking my eyes. You’re young, so I don’t think it will be hard. Not like it would be for someone as old as—” she caught herself before she said *your parents* and substituted a person who she guessed wasn’t as popular with children “—Administrator Davis.” - -That seemed to hit the right note. The girl sniffed her disdain for the man and straightened back up, the fear on her face ebbing away to determination. - -An awkward silence settled over them then, though Scarlene wasn’t sure if the child picked up on the tension. For the first time since the family’s arrival in her quarters she turned her full attention on the girl. Yvgenia met her stare. A shadow of fear lurked in the back of the child’s eyes but foremost was brave defiance, and the familiarity of it touched something in Scarlene’s core. When the father put his arm around his daughter to comfort her, she seemed to pull away from the embrace without actually moving. - - The husband sighed at the reaction, nodded once in resignation, then got to his feet. Yvgenia shot up beside him, almost toppling over the occasional table into Scarlene’s lap. All three adults lunged to catch her fall, but the girl got her balance back before any of them could make contact. Scarlene pulled away quickly, almost as surprised by her reaction as the Matvaltas. - -Polina cleared her throat. “Thank you so much for all you’re doing for our children, Doctor. I know it may not seem like it now, but I’m sure everyone will come around to realizing how much you’re sacrificing for our children.” - -Scarlene blinked. She started to open her mouth to deny that she intended to take any ongoing responsibility for these soon-to-be quasi-orphans, but stopped. Instead she simply smiled and dropped her chin in a semi bow. - -There was never—*never*—going to be an end to Ingmar’s gloating. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}***OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2233-01-15: 21:42:03, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME*** - -> *>* *Dear Vader,* -> -> *>* *We got to go outside for the first time without pressure suits today. Even Dr. Yugolio was excited about it. She brought us some honey taffy**—**Ingmar made it special for us. He’s so nice, and he makes the doctor nicer when he’s around. She’s not really mean, she’s just not the kind of person who hugs you or tells you it’s going to be OK when you’re sad and missing your parents so much that it feels like your heart is going to break into a million zillion pieces.* -> -> *>* *OK, I can’t hold back anymore, I gotta tell you this RIGHT NOW. Tommy held my hand today while we were walking! I almost died of happiness. He isn’t even any less cute now that we’re all fish-faced and scaly. I shouldn’t say that, ‘fish-faced’ is not a nice thing to say about a Martian, but I’m one now, too, so it’s fine, right? Anyway, I was in a sad spot while we were walking to the corn bubble. He was having trouble getting his body temp regulated, and I helped him figure it out. I’m not sure why it’s so easy for me, but I took to it like an armadillo takes to sand. Anyway, I was feeling pretty sad and really, really wanting a Mom-hug, just like when I was a little kid. Tommy asked me for help, and then we started walking again. We only took a couple of steps and he asked if he could hold my hand. OF COURSE I said yes. I’m not an idiot. We are now officially boyfriend/girlfriend, and everybody knows it.* -> -> *>* *I must be a pretty good teacher because when we got inside the corn bubble, Tommy didn’t have too much trouble keeping his body temperature where it’s supposed to be. At first his face started to turn a little pink and I had to remind him to pull back his blood vessels. I think he’s getting the hang of it. Dr. Yugolio says the more we go in and out of the crop bubbles, the more natural it will become and we won’t even have to think about it anymore, our bodies will just do it for us like a reflex, the same way we got used to the exchangers and our privates flaps.* -> -> *>* *Being in a crop bubble is kind of interesting. For like a minute. Until you realize it’s just like any other crop dome,* *only* *with less air-pressure. I’m not sure if I’m really smelling anything or if it’s just wishful thinking, but it did seem like it smelled green in there. The air is still way thinner in a bubble than what it was in Terra Nova, but I almost like it more. Farts and manure don’t smell anywhere near as bad as they used to. At least until we’re allowed to get our olfactory implants. But even then I’ll be able to turn down the gain any time I want.* -> -> *>* *I used to think anyone was crazy to want to be a farmer, but now that turning down the volume of smells is an option maybe it’s not so bad. It’s kind of soothing to walk through rows of corn, checking to make sure there aren’t any wee beasties making a mess of them.* -> -> *>* *Now that we’ve been to the one bubble, I’m sure we’ll be visiting lots of other ones. I can’t wait until we get to go to the sheep bubble! Dr. Yugolio says lambing season will start in a couple of weeks and I’m crazy excited to see all the new babies.* -> -> *>* *Love,* -> -> *>* *Yvgenia* - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Marciano** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390786792842319).* diff --git a/content/issue-28/MyAmoeboidRomance.md b/content/issue-28/MyAmoeboidRomance.md deleted file mode 100644 index bf4a0aa0..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/MyAmoeboidRomance.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,57 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "My Amoeboid Romance" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Hermester Barrington -copyright: '© Hermester Barrington 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Under the microscope, a 'single' human cell is revealed to be a chaotic community of collaborating entities. What we each see as a body is more like a microbial biosphere—so if, at a stroke, what you are became literally just that, would it even be so bad? Judging by Hermester Barrington's yarn, when Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis he wasn’t just needlessly downbeat, he was thinking too big. And too singular." - -image: images/MyAmoeboidRomance.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by [Spencer Selover](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-facing-sideways-428364/) and the phrase 'a man made of bacteria', composited with its source plus an element from [kate_krav](https://pixabay.com/photos/photos-pictures-people-antique-889168/). A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen [here](https://youtu.be/8yVsJC-Y010)." - -type: stock -slug: my-amoeboid-romance -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}T{{}}ime no longer being what it once was for me, I’m not certain of the exact date on which the changes started to occur—but I do know it was the morning after I held a small gathering at our abode. My wife Fayaway was on one of her urban archaeological expeditions, and Fullerton, Karl, George, and I had come together for no particular reason. I had been reading Wallace's *The Klamath Knot* when they arrived, and shared with my friends his observation that “no human organ would look out of place if planted in some Paleozoic sponge bed or coral reef.” One of them suggested that the light sensitive eyespots of the protozoan *Euglena* might serve as replacements for those with impaired sight; we all laughed, and continued making suggestions along those lines for the better part of an hour before we went our separate ways. - -The next day, I awoke feeling swollen and logy. My forehead was clammy, but the only thermometers I had were in the various terraria and so forth scattered throughout the room, and I was not about to put one of *those* in my mouth, so I went back to sleep. I awoke again about noon, when the skin on my belly began to itch—pulling up my nightshirt, I saw that the epidermis had a greenish tinge and was cool to the touch. It appeared to undulate, due perhaps to the fact that my body hair had been replaced by some sort of tendril or tentacle which retracted when I stroked it. I lost consciousness then, and came to in the late afternoon with my entire body covered with this new substance. - -I arose and looked in the mirror. My irises, previously a shining blue, were now bright red, and the sclera a radiant green, a color I recognized from the local pond in spring. I realized then that last night's game had become reality, that the organs in my body were being replaced by members of the group known variously as Infusoria, Protozoa, or Protista. The cells of my epidermis, apparently, had become a species of *Volvox*, a colonial flagellate, and as I watched, the hands with which I stroked my hair—now replaced by *Stemonitis*, a species of slime mold no longer considered by many to be a species of Protista, but I frequently read outdated guidebooks so perhaps my unconscious mind can be forgiven—stretched their newly-formed pseudopodia outward. They most resembled the magnificent *Amoeba proteus*, but not having seen specimens this size before, I may have misclassified them. - -The transformation proceeded very quickly after that. Sitting at my desk, almost before I could write down the changes, my tongue became *Lacrymaria olor*, the foraminiferan *Discorbis vesicularis* replaced my external ears, while a pair of gyrating *Urocentrum turbo* provided me with a sense of balance—because why not? The cast off tests of *Euglypha mucronata* formed my choppers, because I’ve always wanted a mouth full of lamprey’s teeth, and this would be the closest I could get. I chose *Astrophrys* for my eyebrows, because of the name, and for my sperm cells, because of the species’ ruthless determination. - -A beautiful blue *Stentor coeruleus* now serves as my mouth and throat. The colonial vorticellid *Carchesium polypinum* has colonized its base, serving as my larynx by contracting and expanding in such a manner as to allow me to speak (I don’t understand it, either). From my larynx to my anus, my protozoological demiurge laid nine meters of *Ophrydium* pipe, except for my stomach, for which *Bursaria truncatella* was chosen. You may accuse us of lassitude, if you like, but even the protozoan world has its limits. - -This intestinal tract is layered with colonial ciliate, I couldn’t say which, providing peristalsis; and my taste buds—their function now performed by a myriad of *Klebsiella alligata*—have developed a fondness for dirt and dew and creek water, since my internal microbiome has been repopulated by protozoans usually found only in the intestines of the groups Isoptera and Ruminantiamorpha. While I have created many recipes—roof runoff stew, backyard saute, rotting stump roast—I have discovered that my guts and taste buds are happiest when I eat my vegetable matter raw, blended with contributions from the compost heap—rich, dark, damp earth, full of delicious new species for my internal protozoarium! And this methane rich diet makes my nether regions the perfect environment for a hitherto undescribed extremophile amoeboid, *Vampyrella flatula*—a formal description, co-authored with my wife, Fayaway Maraetoa, is forthcoming in *Amateur Protistology* CXV:4 (May 2022). - -The very rare *Teuthophrys trisulca* was chosen as a substitute for my pineal gland, while colonies of *Noctiluca scintillans* have replaced my chakras, though only the one on my forehead is visible to those without the second sight. - -There were other changes as well; having recorded them in my journal, I went to bed, for my transformation had exhausted me. Fay came in late that night and, crawling into bed beside me in darkness, snuggled against me; feeling my cool granulated epidermis, she turned on the light and sighed. “I dreamed that this would happen,” she said. “I suppose whatever comes to me when I turn out the light is mine,” she added, and extinguished the lamp, that we might discover the pleasures of prehensile tongue, extensible pseudopodia, and tendrilled flesh together. - -Someone at the fateful gathering had said, “I'm sure you will find a use for some species of *Vaginicola*,” and we laughed. Now a member of that genus serves as my manroot, and, from my own experience, and by Fay’s account, it functions even better than my original equipment, in everything required of it. - -I don’t have lungs as such; my entire body inhales and exhales to irregular rhythms, and the miasma as of a pond slightly stagnant surrounds me, most of the time. Each step sounds as if I were walking through moistened clay, and fragrant puddles mark my passing. I had selected my protozoans for their aesthetics, and each of them, in their own way, is indeed beautiful, but together—*Great God!*—so monstrous am I become, that only ill fitting clothing allows me to walk the earth unchallenged and uneradicated. - -Of my circulatory system I will say little, except to state that members of the amoeboid genus *Flabellulidae* function as leukocytes—chosen, I suspect, because the species being commensal in oysters, it was unlikely to take over my body as parasitic entamoeboids might—and also, because I like to say the name *“Flabellulidae.”* Say it three times fast—it might make you laugh. It poses no problem for my fluttering *Lacrymaria*, but it may for your human organ. - -*Physarum polycephalum*, which has replaced my nervous system, works with the myonemes of a species of *Vorticella* to coordinate the movements of my new muscles, voluntary and in-. I just discovered that some species of *Stylonychia* scurry along the *Physarum* network in some sort of order, but to what end, if any, I cannot say for certain. - -I still feel a wide range of emotions from my previous life—I am aroused when Fay asks me rub her shoulders; the works of Remedios Varo give me a frisson of recognition; my body gets up to waltz, unbidden, when I hear the strange time signatures of psychedelic folk—but I am also moved by newer and stranger sympathies. - -My longstanding thalassophobia now coexists with joy at the sight of any body of water, causing my own newly formed epidermis to weep slightly. I enjoy basking in the sun in ways that I never had before, thus giving my photosynthetic cells an opportunity to create food. I sometimes awake to find myself laying out on the dew dampened lawn, in the crawlspace under the house, or in the limestone caves in the state park nearby. - -It has been some months, I believe, since my transformation was completed, and I seem to have suffered no negative effects. It may be that I am a freak, a nonce symbiosis which will dissolve back into the waters from which I arose after my consciousness fades—or perhaps each of the cells in my new assemblage will retain my consciousness when this concatenation deliquesces. It may be that Fay will bear our hybrid child, or that the same organisms which have occupied my form will colonize others who share my sympathies. - -So far none of these things have happened, but I am a sign to those who see only with the naked eye that the kingdom Protista, having been incarnated as human in my body, is prepared to take back the world, after the human species has shambled off into oblivion. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **My Amoeboid Romance** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390778929509772).* diff --git a/content/issue-28/TheManeaterOfTiruchery.md b/content/issue-28/TheManeaterOfTiruchery.md deleted file mode 100644 index 58eda764..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/TheManeaterOfTiruchery.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,529 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Maneater of Tiruchery" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Chaitanya Murali -copyright: '© Chaitanya Murali 2021 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "This issue's second big story takes us to a rural India of uncertain period—but whether a tale is set in the recent past, the present day, or a near future isn't important when you sit down to enjoy an example of straight-forward adventure storytelling. Chaitanya Murali gives us a man who is as much a part of nature as he is a professional adversary of it… but it's in our nature to change." - -image: images/Maneater.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was composited from two VQGAN+ images, one seeded with a Creative Commons work by [Gill Heward](https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-a-leopard-lying-on-a-brown-rock-6465808/), the other from the text prompt 'a forest wreathed in darkness'." - -type: stock -slug: the-maneater-of-tiruchery -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he middle of a tea plantation was a strange place to conduct a drug deal. Govind knew this, but there was something about the smell of the leaves and the sight of the steps cutting away beneath his feet that he found alluring. That, and the fact that you were nigh invisible when you knelt down in the middle of the field. - -Right now, he was handing over his product—a bag with several opium balls—to a jittery client. But then, all his clients were jittery. - -“Take it easy on the smoke, *machan*, you don’t look too good, eh?” he said. Becoming a big dealer in the district wouldn’t work out too well if all his clients died before his supply ran out. - -“Just give it to me. I don’t want to be out here for too long,” the other man mumbled. His eyes were dull black points in deeply sunken pockets, and his leg drummed relentlessly to a beat only he could hear. He grabbed the bag from Govind when it was proffered, tossing a coin pouch at the dealer and starting back through the plantations quickly, almost at a run. - -“*Otha*, a ‘thank you’ would be nice, *punde*,” Govind hissed, but the man was already several paces away, visible in the light of the full moon as a disturbance between the thickets of tea. - -And then there was another disturbance, this one softer, almost imperceptible except for a whisper through the tea-leaves in the moonlight. It cut across the client’s path, and Govind spied the silhouette of a long tail rise above the leaves. - -That was when he began to run. - -He’d made it about a hundred feet down when giant fangs cut into the back of his neck. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“T{{}}hese bodies, where were they found?” the hunter asked Gunasekaran, the sarpanch of Tirucheri. The stranger wasn’t big, more middling in height and scrawny to the point of gauntness. But there was also a lean muscle to him, and a strange thinness to his face that suggested he’d seen hard times. His black hair grew long, and was left to flow in waves down to his shoulders. Better to hide his neck from cats, he’d said. - -Vikram, his name was, and he’d just appeared out of the morning mist scarcely two days after the killings, carrying little but the rifle slung over his back. He’d heard of children going missing in nearby villages, and was making his way to each of them, to see if the abductions were the work of a maneater. There was one such case in Tirucheri, but his interest now had been piqued by these most recent killings. - -Wandering hunters like him were commonplace in the countryside—drifters who never stayed in towns long enough to be hated. They came in, brought down a few maneaters, and then vanished back into the forests with their pay. - -“We found them near the entrance of Harish anna’s plantation. They had been thrown over the gate,” the sarpanch told him. - -“Was there anything else on or near them?” - -“Nothing.” - -“They were killed quickly,” Vikram said, pointing to the puncture wounds on the back of each neck. “Those are typical of leopards. They sever the spine at the neck and shut the body down. But the rest of this doesn’t make sense.” He crouched over the bodies, his palms resting on his knees. “I’ve never seen a leopard leave its kills untouched like this, unless driven away. And you say no one saw the attacks take place.” - -“No, we found them just before daybreak, when the first workers came in to open the godowns,” the sarpanch replied. - -The hunter fingered at a hollow in his cheek. “There’s one more thing.” He spread his thumb and index finger as far as he could. “This is about as long as a leopard’s canines get, and they’re usually about the width of my thumb. This one’s had to have been almost twice that, by these wounds.” - -A spasmic shiver ran up the sarpanch’s spine. There was one that fit that description, but they had burned the incense to her. They had paid obeisance. She wouldn’t come for them. - -Vikram stood up and dusted off his trousers. “All right. Could you show me to this plantation? I want to go see where this took place.” - -The sarpanch could see excitement flicker in the man’s eyes, a fire lighting up his wan face. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}his was new. And new always meant interesting. - -Villagers always thought he hunted maneaters because he hated cats, but in truth, he was enamoured of them. It had taken time, of course. He began as many hunters did, out of a need for vengeance. A desire to kill the evil that had stolen his brother. But that cat, and most maneaters like it, were aged beasts—once-kings driven to desperation by failing bodies, seeking to recapture their dominance. They were outcasts, their actions breaking unspoken treaties between man and cat, bringing ruin to both. And so Vikram hunted them, an arbiter of peace, a soul between worlds. - -But he had never seen a maneater behave as erratically as this leopard. - -“I’ve asked Harish anna to send a couple of his workers to show you around,” Sarpanch Gunasekaran was saying. “He’s shut his plantation down for the time, out of concern for his people.” - -He showed Vikram through the village, prattling on about a new spinning mill, and new factories that Harish had built to bring Tirucheri into the modern age, but Vikram wasn’t paying close attention to his words. - -“Remind me, how many people has this one killed?” Vikram asked. - -“These two make twenty in the past year,” Gunasekaran replied. - -“And they’re never eaten?” - -“The ones we’ve found are never eaten. The children… better not to think about it.” - -“That’s strange, leopards don’t kill for entertainment. Who were the victims? Where were they found? *When* were they found?” Vikram asked, rattling off the questions in a staccato burst. People dying was a job prerequisite for him, and he’d grown quickly inured to the grotesque intricacies of his work, but this behaviour, this was fascinating. - -“Only troublemakers stay out late in this town, drinking and being nuisances,” Gunasekaran said offhandedly. “These two must have been the same.” - -And then he clapped, because they had reached the plain iron gate atop which the bodies had been found. Two plantation workers—a swarthy man and woman in their middle years—waited just inside for him. - -“These are Gokul and Kavitha, they’ll take you through the fields,” the sarpanch said, before waving his goodbyes to all three and leaving. - -“So,” Vikram said into the silence left by the sarpanch’s abrupt departure, “What do you two think of leopards—beautiful monsters, no?” - -“We prefer them when they don’t eat us,” Kavitha replied, shrugging. Gokul didn’t respond, but his demeanour morphed, twisting into something far deeper than anger. He turned and spat into the dirt, walking away from Vikram, his back stiff with unbridled hate. - -“Gokul’s son was one of the leopard’s victims last year,” Kavitha said by way of explanation. “They never found his body.” - -Vikram groaned. His mouth felt like he’d stuffed several of his dirtiest socks into it. “Right. Well, what can you tell me about this place?” - -“Five hundred hectares,” Kavitha said, “give or take. We get a lot of monkeys, snakes—cobras and kraits mostly—mongoose, and other animals around here, usually have a couple guards to keep them away from the crops. There’s about a thousand of us working these fields, though most come in from other villages every day.” - -“How many leopard or tiger sightings in the last few years?” Vikram asked. Much easier to speak when it was about the cats. - -“Only this one in the past year.” - -“You don’t seem particularly scared,” Vikram noted as they caught up with Gokul, who seemed to have cooled off after a little walk up the path. - -They looked at each other, then Gokul spoke up. “We fear the cats, in the same way we fear a cyclone—when they come. Until then, we see no reason in giving ourselves more things to live in fear of.” The words came clipped and guttural. Vikram got the sense that for this man, that had been a speech of incredible gravitas. - -“Well, this one’s come, so you should be at least a little afraid. Now you can stay here, or you can follow me. I’m going to be wandering all over your fields to look for where this happened.” Vikram paused to look around the gate where the bodies had been found. “Because it sure as hell wasn’t nearby.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t took them the better part of an hour to trace the leopard’s painstaking route back to its origin. And there the drag marks had split into two, suggesting that it had killed the two men at different places before dragging each one down the same path. - -“It went to a massive amount of trouble to get these bodies to the gate,” Vikram said, kneeling next to the track. - -“Is that normal for leopards?” Kavitha asked. - -“Not in the least. A leopard will usually drag its prey into or near a tree. I’ve never seen one do… this.” - -Kavitha’s eyes widened slightly, and she whispered, “*Ciruvan,*” under her breath. - -Vikram hid his instinctive scorn. Ciruvan. Of course the villagers would attribute this to a god. Much easier to lay the blame at some deity’s feet than to acknowledge that they were interlopers, trespassers encroaching on the leopard’s territory. - -From a short distance away, Gokul waved to them. “Over here! I found something!” he called, from the bushes near where one of the men had died. - -He held a small bag up out of the underbrush. A wave of pungent ammonia assaulted Vikram when he opened it, making him recoil. Inside were the remnants of several balled cakes, broken and crushed. He knotted the handles on the bag and stuffed it into his shirt. - -“What is it?” Kavitha asked. - -“It’s what our victims were doing out here,” Vikram replied. He pictured the scene—two men, a clandestine meeting under the full moon, a bag filled with opium. And their deal, rudely, and fatally interrupted by the arrival of a leopard, somewhere they didn’t usually show up. - -But why didn’t it eat them? Why did it drag them to the gate just so they’d be found? - -It was leaving a message. - -And with that, Vikram was on his feet and running, his rifle thumping painfully against his hip, back to the sarpanch’s office. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}wenty kills in the district. Several of them had occurred at other villages, but five had happened at Tirucheri, all within the last year. He had to find a connection between them, a reason for this leopard’s personal vendetta. - -Vikram had come here because he’d heard tell of a leopard terrorizing these parts, and the money from his previous hunt had just about run dry. But this was no simple maneater. And now, Vikram was driven by a different hunger, an incessant craving for mystery. - -Gunasekaran had only nodded sadly when Vikram produced the opium. It wasn’t as common in these parts as it was further north, but despite a war to eradicate it, the drug had found its way down even this far south, a rot that had set deep in the country’s bones. “There have been rumours of the poppy’s curse reaching the district.” He shook his head ruefully. “I just never thought it would come here.” - -“Do you know anything about the victims from Tirucheri?” Vikram asked. “What did they do?” - -“Almost everyone here works for Harish anna’s family in some fashion.” - -Vikram knew the system. That future, living and dying under some rich mogul’s thumb, had been his destiny before his brother died. He had exchanged that future for an uncertain life of hunting so he might control his fate. He wouldn’t have his back broken so a rich man—a lesser man—could live ever more comfortably. - -No, give him the cats and the shadow of death's gaze every day. - -“But these four adults specifically,” he pressed. “What did they do?” - -“I don’t know, but you’d learn more if you just went to Harish anna’s villa,” Gunasekaran replied. “Three of them worked there. The other, we don’t know yet.” - -“I’ll have those two workers from the morning show me the way to his villa after lunch, then.” Except he had abandoned them out in the fields. “Do you know where they will be now?” - -The sarpanch shrugged. “They might be under the *aalamaram*. There are food vendors there.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}‘F{{}}ood vendors’ felt a little gratuitous for what were two ancient men idly flipping large, paper-thin dosas on tawas fuelled by cowdung fire. They promised him, their gums set in the stubborn determination of age, that it was normally a lot livelier around the giant banyan. - -“Ciruvan is keeping people away,” one of them gummed fervently while Vikram waited to get his dosa. - - “We have offended her, so she comes to take us, one by one,” the second one flapped, while flipping the dosa shut over its chicken mash, presenting it steaming to Vikram on a smallish banana leaf, with a side of coconut chutney. - -Ciruvan again. Tirucheri too had its idols of the leopard revenant, a ward to keep her pride assuaged. They prayed to her before going into the woods or the plantations. But Vikram doubted her existence. Thirteen years of hunting, and she had never shown herself to him. Surely a leopard god would have exacted vengeance on him for those he had killed? - -She couldn’t exist. - -Vikram thanked them for the food and returned to the base of the banyan, where a dirt stage had been built around the roots to serve as the panchayat’s meeting spot. Right now, though, it only held Gokul and Kavitha, who he’d caught mid-meal. He explained what he needed, secured their agreement to guide him to the home of the plantation owner, their employer, perhaps that of everyone but the two toothless ancients who’d supplied their food. - -When Gokul stepped away to piss behind some bushes, Kavitha spoke, her gaze fixed on the canopy of the banyan above them. “Gokul owes Harish anna his life.” - -When Vikram didn’t respond she continued, “I told you about his son, no? Gokul was a guard on the plantation before it happened. When the leopard took his son, he was devastated, sank into his bottles. Harish anna was the one who gave him purpose again. He swore to have the leopard found and killed. That hate is the only thing keeping Gokul going.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S.{{}} Harish Venkat’s four-storey villa sat, resplendent and garish, in a corner of his vast tea plantation, deep within that forest of fragrant shrubberies. Unlike the rest of the village, this place was made of yellow-painted brick, with wood seemingly only being used for the balconies that overlooked the fields. The plantation’s steps fell away from the villa’s many balconies, themselves blanketed in a dense foliage of money plants. It had an effect not dissimilar to an elephant hiding under a solitary leaf. - -The landlord and tea mogul was an unassuming man in his sixties wearing a white shirt and khakis—and who was sitting on the parapet of his balcony with a cigar in hand, looking over his vast estate. He turned to them with the first creak of boots on wood, surprise quickly melting into a gracious, welcoming smile. - -“Ah, the hunter! Just as terrifying as I imagined!” he said, waving the cigar at a few chairs beside him. “Please, make yourself at home.” - -“I’d prefer to stand, if that’s all right,” Vikram said. - -Harish shrugged, and turned to his two employees. “Have you shown Mister—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name?” - -“Vikram.” - -“Ah! Have you shown Mr. Vikram around the estate yet?” - -“We helped him find where the attacks happened, anna,” Gokul said, taking off his head-wrap in deference. - -Harish shook his head and pulled a long, sad drag from his cigar. “Such a sorry affair, that. But it is the risk we run, living so close to that forest.” - -“Truly,” Vikram said. “That’s why we’ve come to you. We’ve found something interesting, and I’d hoped that you might know about it.” He produced the bag of opium from his shirt. - -“What is that?” - -“These latest victims were trading opium when the leopard attacked. We found this on one of the bodies.” - -Harish blinked in confusion. Then he leaned back against the parapet. “I… didn’t know.” - -Gokul stepped forward, glaring at Vikram. “Oi, hunter. Harish anna had nothing to do with that.” - -Vikram put his hands up. “Of course not. I just wanted to bring it to his attention, nothing more.” He paused a moment, and added, “But if there’s anything you do know, it might help me understand why this leopard is acting so strangely.” - -Harish took several thoughtful pulls of his cigar before replying. “I cannot control what happens on every inch of the land I own. I wish dearly that I could, that I might prevent tragedies like this one, but I am not omniscient, Mr. Vikram.” - -He spoke earnestly, so much so that even Vikram felt guilty for insinuating that this old man could have known of the drug. “I do not expect you to, anna, I just want to understand why a leopard left two bodies on your gate as a message.” - -At this, Gokul interposed himself between Vikram and Harish, his bulk obscuring the older man from view. “You overstep your bounds, hunter,” he rumbled. He looked like he had more to say, but Harish laid a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. - -“It’s okay Gokul. I don’t mind.” Harish looked at Vikram. “I commend your intent, Mr. Vikram. Truly, the drug is a disease that needs purging, but you are here to hunt a leopard that has killed twenty people in the past year. Once that threat is dealt with, we can discuss how to handle the drug problem.” - -His tone brooked no argument. - -“Did you know either of the victims?” Vikram asked. - -“The big one, Govind, was a temporary worker on the plantation some time ago. He found… other employment shortly after,” Harish replied. - -“And now you know what that employment was.” - -“Unfortunately so.” Harish leaned against his parapet wall heavily, the picture of a troubled conscience. “If only he had come to me instead of turning to opium, I could have helped him.” - -“You couldn’t have known, anna,” Gokul said. - -“All we can do now is find his killer, and hope that the beast has scared the rest of the opium traders into hiding,” Vikram said. - -“I wish you the best of luck, hunter. The sooner you deal with that menace, the better for us all.” - -Vikram pressed his hands together in namaskaram and turned on his heel, stalking out of the house. Harish, he decided, was either a good man, or a very convincing actor. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}ikram had Kavitha and Gokul help him set up a hunter’s perch in the forest—a wooden pavilion built in the branches of a laurel tree. He carried with him dried meat, and a blanket to keep out the cold, and then settled in to watch the goat he’d tethered to the base of the tree. Given how vast leopard territories were, it could take several nights before it reappeared in this area. - -Days passed, the goat waking from its unwitting fate to feed and fraternize with its fellows, Vikram freed from his long lonely watch to do little more than eat and sleep and start it over again. In the dark plantation fields, no illicit commerce took place. He sourly lamented the lack of an opium dealer to trade places with the goat—a more likely lure, perhaps—then silently scolded himself for the thought. - -He was starting to doubt, wondering if the culprit had moved on to another village in the region, when finally experience prickled intuition. Somewhere past midnight, he knew it was near. - -He mounted his gun on the edge of the pavilion and trained it on the goat, not yet settling to watch down the sights. Instead, he watched the forest around him, looking for the leopard’s approach. He’d learned to spot the slight distortions that cats left on the inky blackness of night. To feel their presence in the air. He didn’t want to watch the goat only to have fangs dig into his neck, ripping at his spine. The scars on his back served as a constant reminder that paranoia was his only friend out here. - -An instant of movement to his left, gone before he could confirm it happened. The goat slumbered, unaware of the danger it was in. The slightest flicker of a white-tipped tail rising out of the bushes like a cobra, mesmeric and hinting at lethal violence. - -It was here. - -Vikram loaded the rifle. Held his breath. Waited for the soft thump of claws on flesh. One chance was all he’d get. - -The shot echoed in the air, drumming in his ears, melding with the rhythm of his thumping heart. A body hit the floor to lie unmoving. He waited a few minutes, loaded another bullet, and then climbed down to survey the scene. - -It was a young male, too young to know to avoid tethered prey. And too young to resort to man-eating? He tried to ignore the churning in his stomach. *This was too simple.* From its size, this beast couldn’t have been much more than a cub at the time the killings began. It had no deformities or injuries, nothing debilitating that would stop it from hunting its regular prey. There were anomalies, of course, so good health didn’t preclude it from being the maneater. And yet, something about this felt wrong*.* - -Torches lit the dirt path leading up to his pavilion, shortly revealing the sarpanch approaching with Gokul and a few others—all bearing aruvals. - -“We heard the shot from the village,” the old man said. - -“Is this the beast?” Gokul asked, nudging the leopard with his foot. - -“It has to be, there was only the one leopard here,” the sarpanch replied. - -“Are you absolutely certain of that?” Vikram asked. “This one seems too young to have killed people a year ago.” - -“Then maybe those were a different leopard—this one’s mother, perhaps,” Gunasekaran said. - -Vikram wasn’t convinced. That explanation couldn’t satisfy the voice within him that screamed that his mystery couldn’t end this meekly. He looked at the leopard he’d killed once more. At its mouth, lolling open in death. At those fangs, which would have fit twice over in the wounds he’d seen on the victims. - -He felt sick. This couldn’t be the same leopard. He’d killed an innocent*.* - -“We’ll take this back to the village. You get some rest, *thambi*,” Gunasekaran said, while guiding his men to pick up the carcasses. - -“This is wrong,” he whispered. - -“What do you mean?” Gunasekaran asked. - -“This leopard couldn’t have done it. There’s another one out there.” - -“There are no other leopards here,” the sarpanch said. He placed a wrinkled hand on Vikram’s shoulder. “You’re thinking too much. Only this one was dumb enough to come close to the village. It’s over, hunter. Just get some rest for now, and then we can celebrate in the morning. You’ve done this village a massive service.” - -With the adrenaline rush fading, Vikram was too tired to argue. But no matter what the sarpanch said, he could dispel the sickness he felt looking at that body, at the *child* he’d killed. - -“Come, Harish anna has prepared a room for you in his villa, in anticipation of your service to Tirucheri.” Gunasekaran patted his shoulder and left to oversee his men. Vikram returned to the villa, whose guards let him enter. Fatigue paid no heed to Vikram’s troubled mind, and took him as soon as he’d touched the downy bed in one of the villa’s many guest rooms. - -He did not notice the eyes that watched him from just beyond the room’s window. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he sun still slumbered somewhere beneath the estate when Vikram woke, his eyes gummy and swollen with sleep, and his nose filled with the damnable smell of tea. Less than a week surrounded by it, and the smell made him want to puke. He grabbed his gun and groped his way to the outhouse around the back, fighting his wrung-out body’s protests every step of the way. - -A lush garden greeted him, blooming manoranjini, jasmine, ixora, and bougainvillea shrubs mingled with rubber, mango, and tamarind trees. Patches of tilled soil had been set aside at the end of the garden, one holding watermelon creepers, and the other sprouting a controlled forest of sugarcane. - -And on the ground, leading away from one large mango tree and over the compound wall, was a set of prints etched deep into the mud. - -So *big*. Unreal. - -Sweat prickled the back of his neck, that space of flesh so coveted by leopards. He risked a glance upwards into the boughs of the tree that he now realized stood close outside his bedroom, but did not spy glowing yellow eyes, nor the silhouette of a giant muzzle. - -How long had it sat there in that tree, watching him sleep? - -Curiosity warred with fear within the hunter, caution trying and failing to temper intrigue. He clambered up the tree and used it to leap over the wall, the landing jarring a shockwave through his legs. The tracks continued on the other side, leading away from the house and brazenly through the heart of the deserted village before entering the forest. The leopard had even stopped to run its claws through the giant *aalamaram’s* trunk, parting wood as if it were water. - -Vikram paused at the forest’s entrance, breathing deep to calm the torrent roaring in his ears, to steel his mind to his body’s desperate urge to pull him from this course. But all reason, all logic, had been shredded by his simple desire. - -He wanted to *know*. - -A thin layer of mist had settled over the town and forest, and it swirled in currents around Vikram, parting in tumbling waves at his approach. An early-to-rise mynah sang from somewhere in the dense canopy over him, warning of his presence. A langur took up the cry, and soon the calls reverberated all around him, a cacophony of barks, chirps, song, and screeches to welcome him to the leopard’s court. - -The riparian wood of mango, rosewood, marudha maram and plum grew thick around him now, the closer he drew to the river that cut through these woods. But the air was different. The clean smell of mist and flora felt… *infected*. Tainted by a sharp tang that itched at his mind. - -He broke into a grassy clearing as the smell grew stronger, ammonia sending his head spinning. A large shack of wood and rusted iron sheets stood within this clearing, up against the riverbank. It had no windows, and its door was padlocked. A dirty brown sluice ran from its side directly into the water, while a solitary chimneystack rose above it in a vain attempt to join the canopy. - -And at the very tip of its prismatic roof stood a giant leopard, regal and condescending. - -It was the colour of a forest fire, an avatar of nature’s retribution given lethal flesh. From the six-inch fangs that poked through its lips to the sooty white tip of its almost-prehensile tail it radiated power. It stood fully seven feet at the shoulder, a mass of muscle and sinew that rippled through its coat. The beast stood regal over its prey, watching him with cold disdain writ in its liquid gold eyes. - -*This is no normal leopard.* And the thought rose, unbidden but inevitable, *Ciruvan.* - -His hands, which should have reached instinctively for his gun, didn’t move. His gun would be useless, he knew. And if he were to be judged for his crime, then so be it. - -“What *are* you?” Vikram asked, daring a glance directly at it. He was ignored. - -When it seemed apparent that the leopard was not going to move, Vikram edged forward, one eye constantly turned skyward for a sign of the creature’s lethal intent, but the blow never came. He stood before the door with its heavy chain and padlock. Breaking it could draw attention to him, so he circled instead to the back of the building, where a ladder to the roof was propped up against the back wall. - -He stepped gingerly onto the corrugated iron sheets, watching for spots where rust had eaten completely away at the metal. Tetanus would be a painful and stupid way to go—assuming the cat didn’t put him out of his misery first. A small hatch sat in the roof, midway between Vikram and the leopard, and to his immense relief, it wasn’t locked. The leopard yawned at him when he scuttled over to the hatch, but did nothing else. Whatever its test, he had seemingly passed. It *could* kill him with ease, but seemed patently disinterested in making the effort. - -He opened the hatch and recoiled from a stench wave of half-processed poppies. Darkness lay heavy over the workshop. A ladder dropped from the hatch onto a narrow walkway that ran around the perimeter of the building. Vikram groped his way from the walkway down to the factory’s floor, which was split by four tables running parallel down the room. Baked clay pots were scattered around the room, and banana leaf-wrapped bundles stood stacked up near the front door. He could just see another door set in the back wall. - -The second room seemed to be where they refined the opium before sending it to be packed. Large clay vats occupied one corner of the room, while the furnace and waste chute sat opposite, facing the river. But directly across from Vikram lay the reason he’d been brought here. - -A crude but large cell spanned the length of the far wall, occupying fully half the room. - -Inside it slept a mass of young children, huddled together for warmth. - -Vikram dropped to his knees in front of the cage. “Hey!” he hissed. A few stirred to eye him warily. Cracked lips parted, crying silent pleas. “Just wait, I’ll get you out.” - -Vikram grabbed a large pole used to stir the drug resin. He angled it against the bars and pushed until they distended, forming a child-sized space in the cage. - -“Come on, give me your hands,” Vikram told them, pulling the children out one by one. He bade them wait inside and returned to the padlocked door. The rusted chains resisted feebly, but gave way soon to his rifle butt, and the factory was open. He gathered the children and guided them back to the village, them limping on legs covered in weeping sores and insect bites, fingernails ripping at burns on their arms. They entered as the first roosters began to crow, a parade damning the village for its blindness. - -It wasn’t until he had them all in bed at the healer’s house that he realized he’d forgotten about the leopard. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“H{{}}ow is this possible?” Sarpanch Gunasekaran asked, his face drained of all colour. “This boy should be dead.” - -They stood beside one boy’s bed, the sarpanch having come over as soon as Vikram had sent word to him about finding ten children in the woods. “What do you mean?” - -“This is Selva, Gokul’s son,” Gunasekaran replied. - -“The boy who was killed last year?” Vikram asked. Gunasekaran nodded. “What about the others?” - -“I don’t know. Selva’s the only one from Tirucheri. I’ve sent word to other villages nearby. Where did you find them?” - -Vikram told him about the factory in the woods, but kept the leopard’s involvement to himself. *Ciruvan* or not, the leopard was his mystery to solve. - -The sarpanch’s face turned grave, furrows of creases and wrinkles digging ever deeper into his skin. “I did not know how pervasive this infestation was.” He rubbed his leathery face. “But we shall speak of this later. First, I believe that there is a man who needs to be told that his son is alive.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}ikram was unsettled. It wasn’t the sight of the stoic guard-turned-farmer on his knees and sobbing that bothered him—he’d seen more than a few big men like that break down, usually in grief. No, what bothered him was how out-of-place he felt then. The celebrations were a reminder of the bonds he’d cut in order to become the hunter, humanity’s punitive force against the terrors of the jungle. - -They suffocated him. - -He stood under the *aalamaram* that night*,* lost in thought and fiddling with one of its innumerable hanging roots when a voice called out to him. - -Kavitha approached him from the celebrations at Gokul’s house. “Thank you,” she said. - -“You know, I wasn’t looking for them,” Vikram said. “I didn’t know they were alive at all. Just… I couldn’t accept that it was over, and so I went out. This was just luck.” - -“And that’s why I wanted to speak with you. I’ve been questioning some things now that you found Selva.” She took a seat on one of the tree’s sprawling roots. “Gokul didn’t witness Selva’s abduction himself. Guna thatha’s helper was the one who said she’d seen the leopard take him away that day. No-one else saw it happen. And that doesn’t make sense. Selva couldn’t have gotten away from a leopard by himself, and he couldn’t have lived in that forest for a year by himself. So I wanted to ask you, where did you find him?” - -Vikram, *the hunter*, was tempted to stay out of this. He didn’t get invested in the plight of villagers. Killing maneaters wasn’t altruism, it was business. If anything, he sympathized more with the cats. But then, none of this was normal. And looking into those fiercely concerned eyes, Vikram found that he *wanted* to tell Kavitha. She deserved to know about the evil that was poisoning their village. About what the beast had led him to. - -Kavitha took the news with a stolid stoicism, like an opium ring was just another minor occurrence in a routine day. Cyclones and hurricanes couldn’t rock this woman, so why would a giant leopard or a drug infestation be any different? - -She didn’t speak for a long time, just stared into the boughs of the banyan, where a number of rainbow-winged parakeets jostled for space with ravens. But when she broke her silence, her voice carried the low menace of a building rage. “I think we need to see the children, before I do something stupid.” - -She stalked through the celebrations—drawing a concerned look from Gokul—and back to the healer’s house. The children had huddled together, their beds pulled close together. They shied away from the adults at their approach. - -“*Paavam kozhandai*, you must have been so terrified,” Kavitha said. - -“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Vikram said. - -“He rescued you,” Kavitha said. “We want to find out who did this to you.” A few of the children shook their heads. “Whoever it is can’t hurt you anymore. You’re going home.” - -“You’re lying,” one boy said. - -“Selva’s going home,” a girl said, her voice barely carrying to them. “But thatha already told us that no-one’s coming for us.” - -“Thatha?” Vikram asked. - -“Why did you take us from the factory if you were just going to bring us back to *them*?” the first boy asked, anger rising through his hurt. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey found Gunasekaran where they’d been talking earlier, under the *aalamaram.* - -“Why did you do it?” Kavitha asked. Her voice was ice. “You had those children kidnapped to make opium. You made them *slaves*.” - -“What are you raving about?” the sarpanch asked, frowning. - -“The children told us you’re planning to send them back to the factory,” Vikram said. - -Gunasekaran waved a dismissive hand. “They’re malnourished and delusional. You know the state they were in. They aren’t thinking straight. Why would you believe anything they say right now?” - -“Your maid was also the last one to see Selva before his ‘death’,” Vikram said. - -“I watched my friend suffer for a year, thinking he’d failed his son,” Kavitha said, “and all this time you’ve been strolling around here, knowing exactly where he was—and worse, using him to make that vile thing.” - -“He did what?” They all turned to see Gokul, who had left the celebrations to check on them. Who was now dawning to horrific realization. - -Gunasekaran’s hands now shook with fear. “Gokul, they’re out of their minds! You know I wouldn’t do this, right?” - -Gokul’s response was to rush the old man in rage. Vikram and Kavitha reacted together, grabbing Gokul before he could hit the sarpanch. All of them, save Gokul, turned their backs to the *aalamaram.* - -Vikram saw it reflected in the farmer’s eyes before he turned. - -The sleek, *giant*, form that rose silently in one of the branches, gliding down onto Gunasekaran, forcing him to the floor with implacable, inconceivable force, raking giant claws down his back. - -Vikram released Gokul, who had gone still at the leopard’s advent, anger forgotten in shocked reverence. Vikram knew the feeling. The leopard narrowed its eyes, its gaze burning his soul for his sins. And then it raised itself from the body and walked, supremely confident, into the night. - -Vikram hadn’t even thought to raise his gun. - -Gunasekaran thankfully, was responsive. Four large wounds cleaved his back, the skin peeling away from each cut, soaking him in blood. He coughed weakly. - -Vikram steeled himself. “Kavitha, go get the village healer. Gokul, I’m going to need your help holding him down now.” - -“Wait.” The old man coughed, spittle and blood dribbling down his chin. “I deserve this.” - -“Save it, old man. Tell us when you’re stitched up.” - -But Gunasekaran grabbed Vikram’s sleeve, gripping it with quivering strength. “Ciruvan has made her decision. If I die, it is her will.” His breath came in heaving bursts. “Yes, I knew where they were. I helped him set up the factory. Children were easy targets for workers—their disappearances were easy to cover up as leopard kills. And the adults were needed on the plantations anyway. It was the only way to keep him investing in the town. All those new looms and mills he built, that was my payment.” - -The dam had broken, and now he sang, even as his body wept for his crimes. “But then you came. With your questions, your investigation. Your insistence to search, making connections with the opium.” - -“The leopard I killed,” Vikram said, “the juvenile. It was to put me off, correct?” - -Gunasekaran nodded. “He bought it from a zoo, had it brought here and released. Thought you would take your reward and be satisfied.” - -“Who?” Vikram asked, though he knew the answer. - -“Harish anna,” the sarpanch said, his consciousness fading with the indictment. - -Gokul let out a sound unnatural to man, a wretched thing born of bestial fury and despair. - -“What should we do?” Kavitha asked. - -“First, we need to stop the bleeding. And then we find Harish.” - -They carried Gunasekaran to his house and laid him on a bed, and Vikram sent Kavitha to find alcohol to disinfect the wounds, fearing Gokul would embark on an errand of vengeance instead. Vikram had learned to stitch himself out of necessity, but he’d never sewn wounds this extensive before, nor on another’s body. Gunasekaran’s back was a stringy mess of flesh that throbbed like a thing alive, seeping rivers of bright blood onto everything. - -“Give me that,” Vikram said, when Kavitha entered holding a clay pot filled with toddy. He splashed the liquid across Gunasekaran’s wounds, prompting a weak moan from the unconscious man. Vikram then pulled a needle and a small spool of string from his coat and set to his task. - -He worked quickly, his hands steady but indelicate—if the man survived, he was going to have an awful set of scars to remind him of this incident. Not that Vikram cared. - -When he finished, Vikram worried that his patient had already died, but then Gunasekaran coughed, and Vikram’s heart calmed to merely a furious thumping within his chest cavity, no longer the crazed hammering of a madman trying to break free. - -With the job done, weariness settled over him with a gentle, unceasing pressure that made his bones creak until his knees buckled. His hands, so steady during the task, now shivered like he’d dipped them in a freshly-melted mountain spring. He fell back onto the floor and drew the first breaths of a man who’d nearly drowned. Stitching himself had been an easy task, because it was only his life at stake. This was another person who lived or died by his hand. A responsibility Vikram had never wanted, had actively avoided. But he’d done it. - -The gulping turned into a cough that became a choked laugh, like a rooster being strangled. Gokul watched him silently, dark eyes tinted with something approaching respect. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}ikram was still allowed access to the villa, so the security waved him in when they approached the gate. - -“Where is he?” Vikram asked the maid who came out at the sound of their entry. Countless thoughts were screaming in his mind now, but they would have to wait until they could talk to the man at the heart of all this. - -“Harish anna has taken to his room. I don’t think you should disturb him,” the maid replied, but Vikram pushed past her and climbed the stairs with Kavitha and Gokul at his back, the wronged father’s strong hands flexing between claws and fists with every step. - -The master bedroom occupied the entirety of the villa’s third storey, being an ostentatious affair of marble tiles and ivory-framed paintings, with the occasional tiger or elephant bust set in between. Vikram grimaced at the sight. He’d often seen this kind of man’s people waiting when he brought in a maneater’s body. They wanted to buy the head or skin or penis from him, so that their masters could pin them up as trophies of feats they could never dream of accomplishing. - -In the middle of all this garishness was a giant four-poster bed, surrounded by a muslin mosquito net that only left Harish’s silhouette visible, now splayed across several large pillows, fast asleep. - -“Anna?” Kavitha ventured, just before the iron tang of blood filled Vikram’s nose. - -He pulled her and Gokul back into the shadow of the doorway as the figure behind the curtain rose limply, a puppet on strings, and the net curtains billowed, distorting the lithe shadow of the giant cat that held Harish’s head in its massive jaws. - -They watched, terrified beyond measure, as the net lifted, bringing the leopard into full view, carrying Harish by the head. It stepped off the bed and dropped the body, grimacing as if it tasted something irredeemably vile. Then its heavy head lifted, cold eyes latching onto Vikram’s trembling gaze, and there it held. - -Vikram couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could do nothing but stare into the leopard’s eyes. After a moment that stretched into eons, it broke contact, and left through one of the room’s large windows, stepping onto the high sill and leaping into the night, dismissive of all witnesses. - -“Ciruvan, protector of the voiceless,” Kavitha said, her voice a reverent whisper. - -Vikram followed it to the window, ignoring the body of the tea owner and would-be drug kingpin, but the beast had vanished. - -Vikram looked down at Harish. He had never seen his revenant come for him. His eyes were closed, the lines of his face eased in his endless slumber. It would have been easy to think him just asleep, if not for the gaping hole where his throat had been. - -Vikram felt a stranger in his own skin. He had long considered himself an expert on the beasts he hunted. Now he felt as ignorant as a newborn. “Do you think she came because of the children?” he asked. - -“That, and because of the factory,” Kavitha replied. “She asserts her dominance. The forest is her land, and no-one can infringe upon it.” - -“We should go,” Vikram managed. - -“Leave me here,” Gokul said. He stared at the body of his treacherous benefactor, a straight back belying the war taking place in his heart. “I’ll deal with the guards—they won’t do anything to me.” - -Kavitha and Vikram left through the window, climbing down the vines encircling the house as Gokul’s call drew the guards from the perimeter before slipping from the dead man’s compound and making their way back to the village itself. - -They walked in silence, and Vikram felt the weight of his rifle lie as heavy on his back as a fallen tree. *A leopard goddess*. She had made him her tool, set him to discover the guilty so she could serve up her own justice. - -But what of him, a hunter who taken the lives of so many of her kind? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}V{{}}ikram departed the village the following day, not by the well-trod path, but back into the thick of the forest, tracing the route back to the factory. He wasn’t sure what he’d find when he reached it, but as he entered the clearing the sight caught hold of his heart and dragged a joyous sputter from him. - -The ugly assembly of iron and wood had been pummeled into the ground, the boards and sheets left shattered and bent on the ground, and the chimney toppled to become a bed for the denizens of the forest floor. The sluice, which had been feeding its poison to the river, had been brutally dismantled and thrown onto the riverbank. Nothing of the building remained untouched. - -And standing on top of the rubble she’d created, in a pool of dazzling sunlight, was Ciruvan herself. - -Vikram slowly unslung the rifle from across his back and dropped to one knee… but instead of aiming, he lay the weapon on the ground of the clearing and took up a chunk of broken stone cast from the chimney, lifting it over his head. Ready to smash his weapon. At her command. - -He owned no guilt. As a hunter he killed only maneaters, only worthy, necessary prey. But Harish had been a maneater too, of a sort, and because of him Vikram had killed an innocent. One of hers. - -Let Ciruvan decide if he should pay for that with his livelihood, or life. - -He waited, stone held high, until the goddess deigned to acknowledge his presence. - -The giant leopard’s eyes paused for the briefest moment on Vikram’s, an infinite sea of the coldest gold, and then she rose and loped out of the clearing opposite him, her tail held high. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Maneater of Tiruchery** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/390783219509343).* - diff --git a/content/issue-28/__index.md b/content/issue-28/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index d6349551..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28" -date: 2021-12-20 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 28 -subhead: Winter 2021 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/The-AI-Issue.jpg -imageMobile: images/The-AI-Issue-mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "The AI Issue, by Andrew Leon Hudson" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#E8BF25' - subheading: - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 1 - flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-28/contents.md b/content/issue-28/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 11eceb2c..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,20 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2021-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [E Pluribus Unum]({{< relref path="EPluribusUnum.md" >}}), by Mame Bougouma Diene -- [Fly Away, Peter]({{< relref path="FlyAwayPeter.md" >}}), by J. Livermore -- [Marciano]({{< relref path="Marciano.md" >}}), by Charlotte H. Lee -- [How to Get AI to Like You]({{< relref path="HowToGetAIToLikeYou.md" >}}), by Aaron Emmel -- [Come Buy, Come Buy]({{< relref path="ComeBuyComeBuy.md" >}}), by E. Saxey -- [The Maneater of Tiruchery]({{< relref path="TheManeaterOfTiruchery.md" >}}), by Chaitanya Murali -- [Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish]({{< relref path="CuffsPadlocksAndASplatteringOfNailPolish.md" >}}), by Uchechukwu Nwaka -- [My Amoeboid Romance]({{< relref path="MyAmoeboidRomance.md" >}}), by Hermester Barrington - diff --git a/content/issue-28/editorial.md b/content/issue-28/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5fb9befc..00000000 --- a/content/issue-28/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,43 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2020-12-20 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/The-AI-Issue-sml.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 28** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Cover art created by Andrew Leon Hudson using four VQGAN+ images, plus the compass by [Fourleaflovers](https://depositphotos.com/64218559/stock-illustration-vector-vintage-compass-rose.html). - -A little redundant to say at this point, but maximum thanks go to [Katherine Crowson](https://twitter.com/RiversHaveWings), creator of the VQGAN+ version used, as well as to [Adverb](https://twitter.com/advadnoun) who originated the approach of combining VQGAN and CLIP, and [@somewheresy](https://twitter.com/somewheresy) who translated the original Spanish-language notebook to English." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Winter is upon us, or upon one hemisphere at least, and depending on where you live in The New Normal that apparently means enduring less eggnog, holly, and mistletoe and more freak apocalyptic weather that we'd all much rather be reading about than sheltering from. Here, however, you will find neither holiday cheer nor meteorological fear—Issue 28 is an Xmas-free zone, normal or otherwise, so please curl up and enjoy these eight stories on your device of choice regardless of what the wicked world is doing all around you! - -So far ***Mythaxis*** has eschewed the temptation to offer *themed* issues, but this time around we do have an element of commonality to what we have on offer: not in the stories, but in their accompanying illustrations. Back in July, I became aware of an AI-powered image generator, **VQGAN+**, and began tentatively playing around with it. I decided to attempt to illustrate an issue of the zine solely using its output, and now you can see the results. - -In my process, running VQGAN+ typically generated 300 images—or less if I interrupted a disastrous run before it went too wrong to bear. The results are much like the individual frames of a film, or rather of an animation, since taken collectively they show the gradual, flickering evolution of a single image. The output can also be extracted as video, and my earliest successful attempt can be seen here: - -{{< youtube 8yVsJC-Y010 >}} - -In this example, an existing image was used as the starting point for the AI to work from. Parts of that sequence of images were eventually blended to take their place in the art for our closing story, and in several cases the VQGAN+ output was composited with other material to create the final image. - -In other cases, no seed image was used at all. A text string was always necessary to guide the AI regarding what output you hoped to receive, and a lot of the fun in the process came from discovering how simple (or complex) to make the instructions you gave the software. All four generated images in the issue's cover art came only from a prompt—for this, the instruction was relatively complex, *"a golden compass of mythical design"*: - -{{< youtube Cj2WzSZ85cc >}} - -By comparison, for one of our stories I selected a key phrase from the story itself to see what the software would come up with. From *"micro expressions"* it generated this: - -{{< youtube sXVHgVQ26mM >}} - -You can find these videos and more on our [Youtube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSLPpaSSw2pFaWFKcZIQTez_vP_Kv0p9o). Unfortunately not every image created has a video to go with it, but while the artwork is fun to play with what *really* matters is the fiction. AI might be one day destined to claim all the fields humanity thinks of as innately our own, but for now I can confidently leave you safe in the flesh-and-blood hands of eight talented authors. - -And if I don't happen to see you in the next eleven days or so: ***Happy New Year!*** diff --git a/content/issue-29/CrossXenophor.md b/content/issue-29/CrossXenophor.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2f6fc95d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/CrossXenophor.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,65 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Cross of Xenophor" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Jeffery Scott Sims -copyright: '© Jeffery Scott Sims 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Here we have the first of two returnees to Mythaxis. Jeffery Scott Sims graced i23 with an entertaining blend of the noirish detective and Lovecraftian occult. This time he offers something shorter, but no less sinister: another yarn of seekers after esoteric knowledge not meant for human ken, once again delivered in a classic style." - -image: images/Xenophor.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image courtesy of [ntnvnc](https://pixabay.com/photos/art-desktop-spiral-nature-pattern-3257095/) - many thanks." - -type: stock -slug: the-cross-of-xenophor -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}n olden days, the great wizard Jacob Bleek journeyed to Rome that he might sift among the wreckage of glory for secrets of furtive lore hidden since elder times. There he met the Blind Man Who Sees Much, who accosted him unbidden from his shadowed seat in the marketplace. - -Leaning forward on his cane, the Blind Man said, “O Bleek, you I know for the cunning seeker after forbidden wisdom who dares all for all. Know, then, that hoary legend whispers of a concealed chamber beneath the ruins of the villa of Egabalus, and within that chamber, if it can be found—for many before you have tried and failed—lies the last resting place of the martyr Thoracrates, he whom the people call saint. - -“With his body was laid his prized possession, a curious cross pre-dating Christ and, some will tell, even the Patriarchs. No mere trinket of old is this; rather, no less than the openly shunned and quietly desired Cross of Xenophor, which grants to its owner bountiful knowledge and powers beyond mortal ken. Do not you crave such a boon, Jacob Bleek? In your shoes, with your intact faculties, I would.” - -Jacob Bleek thanked his mysterious informant and went forth to the site of the imperial villa, forgotten by the ages, now a sad heap of jumbled stones and nondescript mounds. He quizzed the folk in the vicinity, who were wont to dig holes there in the earth in fruitless hope of buried treasure, yet they knew not of any subterranean chamber, save by vague and useless report. - -By cleverness, he inveigled his way into the pompous court of the Pope, whose collection of ancient relics and scrolls was renowned throughout the kingdoms, and there he did what previous adventurers had not thought to do: read the tattered documents of the strange old days, and learn from them the history of the hated Emperor Egabalus and his reviled pleasure villa; thus, in oddly indirect fashion, the story of the sad fate that befell Thoracrates. All this knowledge of yore pleased him mightily, for Bleek lived to learn, and in the doing he gathered into his hungry brain consequential details that put him on the track of the chamber’s location. - -From the Vatican vaults he stole a plan of the villa, painted on parchment in a style unfamiliar to his times, yet legible to a determined scholar familiar with the scripts and arts of old. He traced on the scroll the corridors where once purple majesty reigned, matched those images to indications among the desolate heaps that mocked old glory. He noted the pictorial presentation of a peculiarly deep shaft, one offered without explanation, and he staked the spot in the despoiled soil under a sagging remnant of marble wall. Then he hired, with a little gold and many a promise, peasants to excavate for him. - -They uncovered the shaft; cleared the descending steps; removed the debris from before a final blank wall of granite; hacked through it a hole for him, out of which rancid vapors gushed. Bleek sent them away, with yet more promises for the morn, and when they had gone with the dusk he lighted a torch and entered the foul chamber. - -The revealed stone room was neither large nor adorned, a cramped oblong containing only a squat basalt dais, upon which lay the unmarred, perfectly preserved body of a man wrapped in white silken grave raiments. Though a marvel to behold in that state it was surely a dead thing, as the dryness of the exposed flesh of the face and the utter lack of subtle motions of life confirmed. On its breast resided a large, heavy cross of gold, studded both lengths with numerous green jewels resembling eyes, the remainder of its surface thickly inscribed with unknown hieroglyphics. - -This cross Bleek meant to take on the moment, knowing for certainty that it was none other than the fabled Cross of Xenophor itself, but when the wizard reached greedily for it the corpse suddenly threw off the wrappings from about its arms, clutched firmly at the cross and rose to a sitting position with astonishing vitality. - -The mortified man opened haunted dark eyes and, gazing upon his visitor, said in a weak, airless voice, “Jacob Bleek, mage of a time beyond mine, take not this wonder from me. Yes, I know thee, and much else, through the power of this cross, artifact ancient, instrument unholy and sacred. It can do thee no good, while its loss would leave me in despair. Harken to what I tell thee. - -“In life, while I dedicated myself to the foundation of the Church, I was also truly a man like thee, given to weird humors and unslakable lust for arcane wisdom. This drove me to seek this cross, fabricated by inhuman hands at the dawn of creation, a conduit of the power inherent in despicable Xenophor, whom a long lost benighted age worshipped as the True Lord. I gained it, absorbed its radiating wisdom, sought to further with it benevolent ends while at the same time waxing mighty myself. - -“For my gentle beliefs, as well as for my conniving schemes, I was sentenced, in audience before the noxious Egabalus, to a hideous fate, the dread penalty of living burial beneath the gay dancing of the Emperor’s merry throngs, the disgraceful revels in which I had stupidly taken part out of weakness. Our cruel master’s minions laughed as they dressed me in these horrid robes, led me into this chamber built for the purpose, sealed me inside, forever more thrust into the dark, there to die by loathsome degrees. - -“They feared, however, the object which made me fleetingly dangerous, chose from fear to entomb the cross with me. Then it performed its most evil miracle, one unasked for by this poor sufferer, who never dreamed of the possibility. For although I died here, when I drew the last breath of wholesome air, I found that a grim consciousness remained to my mind! I existed without life! And so I have endured throughout the black centuries, a hopeless, breathless prisoner in my own lightless tomb, nearly crazed by my situation, doomed to eternity here, yet not daring to seek remedy for the horror. With the ages my essence has faded, and my control of the cross has died, so that nought remains to me but feeble existence. - -“Understand this, Jacob Bleek: though this wearisome fate is endless torture, I dread nothing more than the loss of the evil cross that pitifully sustains. Were I to depart this sphere, this wretched realm of miserable, false entity, I fear the wrath of my God, who surely would call me to account for my sins. Terrible though that would be, I fear still something more: that I might be taken into the substance of Him, the monstrous force behind the cross, baleful Xenophor, whom the unspeakably depraved call Lord of All Things, Creator and Destroyer, First Cause and Last. That would truly be nightmare without end, without hope. - -“I beg of thee then, Bleek, wise sorcerer, to let me lie with this cross, and seal me again beneath the earth, forever out of sight.” - -Bleek listened considerately, attended quietly, paid heed to all that was said by Thoracrates, and, when the dead man ceased to speak, Bleek yanked the cross from his grasp and departed the chamber, ignoring the woeful cry, the grotesque physical changes that immediately commenced. Little remained but dust by the time he set foot on the stone stairs. - -The wizard departed for Rome at once, without thought of his peasant laborers, and took the cross direct to his rooms, feeling at every step the power coursing into his body and soul. All that night he experienced the revelations of knowledge and power opened to him, gaining a great deal, hungering for more, but with the dawn his iron brain seized control, cautioning him against the perils of unlimited use and application; with a gigantic wrench of resolve he put by the thing in the nick of time, bundled it in burlap and sought the marketplace. There he greeted anew the Blind Man, that strange seer, and told him of what had transpired, granting a peek of the fingers at the prize, and offering it as payment in return for all the knowledge that grand fellow possessed. - -The Blind Man grinned, his lusterless eyes oddly brightening, ushered his guest into the shut-in alcove where he lived, and there they did the deal. Bleek learned that which would carry him onward to freshly rewarding adventures, while the Blind Man acquired that which would give him every kind of sight, including, he hoped, that which he most lacked. - -“They have esteemed and honored me,” he said, as he took the cross into his hands. “Now they will obey me.” - -The Blind Man sighed dreamily, lovingly cradling the ornate object, pressing it to his breast. “I see,” he cried, “I see the ultimate truth!” But then he screamed, and he kept on screaming, while Jacob Bleek took his leave without word, departing with those soul-rending shrieks echoing in his ears. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Cross of Xenophor** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451933026727695).* diff --git a/content/issue-29/Fractured.md b/content/issue-29/Fractured.md deleted file mode 100644 index 877b6c67..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/Fractured.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,404 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Fractured" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Gunnar De Winter -copyright: '© Gunnar De Winter 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The experiences of the neuroatypical—including of being surrounded by the supposedly monolythically typical—are often depicted as a no-win feedback loop, made worse as much by attempts to bring poor sufferers into the norm as by abandonment to their fate. But Gunnar De Winter's story points out that context is everything, and if in space no one can hear you scream, perhaps it's because you no longer feel the urge." - -image: images/Fractured.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [jplenio ](https://pixabay.com/photos/lightning-sky-night-clouds-stars-6675888/) [Lars_Nissen](https://pixabay.com/photos/drone-flying-drone-quadrocopter-3198323/), and [422737](https://pixabay.com/photos/harley-davidson-motorcycles-chrome-459593/)." - -type: stock -slug: fractured -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}D{{}}*eeper*, I think. - -Beyond synapses and neurotransmitters. - -*Deeper.* - -Beyond perceptions and sensations. - -*There I am.* - -Naked and afraid, surrounded by churning darkness, as if it was alive. I reach out, ready to break myself into pieces and become whole again. - -Something yanks me away. Synaptic tyranny reasserts itself. - -*NO.* - -Nanoneedles withdraw from my scalp. Internal transcranial magnetic stimulation ends. Straps loosen around my chafed, scarred wrists. Wisps of bright light dance across the inside of my closed eyelids. - -“How was the session?” Doc asks. - -I look at the shiny black eye in the white wall that covers the processing core of the psych AI. “Good.” I hide my disappointment. “But unfinished.” - -“You know we have a time limit,” Doc says—as it does every time. “We can’t let you lose yourself.” - -*But I am already lost.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}fter trial and error, it turned out pioneer missions perform best when the crew is a mix of two psych profiles. - -First, the adventurers. Those that blindly push boundaries, even if the boundaries push back. Extroverted, oblivious to danger, hungry for recognition. - -Second, the worriers. No longer “the depressed”, but the “synaptically atypical”. But good at thinking outside of the box. You have to when your box is broken. - -One individual with this second profile rounds out a mission crew. Two at most. No more. Anxiety is a contagion, demons duplicate. - -When they recruited me, the adventurer spots were already filled. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}U{{}}nlike my colleagues, I am drawn to the observation domes. A big word for the small, sleek bubbles that dapple the outside of the ship’s hab-wheel. - -The rest of the crew dislikes observing the pin-pricked void, that reminder of human insignificance. They’re here for the planets, for planting flags. Not me. I relish the emptiness. It reaches out to me and lets me know that I'm real. Perhaps only the abyss allows me to congeal into something resembling a human being. - -The hatch irises open behind me. Malia enters. “You alright?” - -Her voice is soft. She knows I need time to adapt my senses to other people. An unreliable input filter, Doc calls it. - -“Yeah,” I say. We both know it’s a lie. - -She smiles cautiously, as if worried she’ll break me. - -*Pity. How I hate that pity.* - -Malia touches my arm. I know I’m not for her. How could I be? I am an empty shell with the occasional delusion of housing something meaningful. - -Her touch ends. *Please don’t let go.* I stay silent. - -“We’re almost done reverse breaking for our pitstop. Cap wants you on the bridge.” She winks. “Best prepare your swarm.” - -I nod. “I’m coming.” *Maybe she can save me.* - -Triggered by the glimmer of hope, one of the demon-selves rears its head. *No one can save me.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“C{{}}ome on, Cap. Let’s skip the swarm. I can take one of the sampling shuttles. I’m the best pilot here.” - -Of course, Davalia wants to go out. Ever the impetuous one. We… tolerate each other, but the rift, the fundamental disconnect, is too large. He wants to make himself known to the universe. I want to find a dark little corner where I can remain unseen. - -The captain is, well, a captain. Accomplished all-rounder. Chiseled like some kind of Greek god. Also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. The bastard. - -Cap holds out his hands. “Calm down, Matti. Procedures are in place for a reason.” He turns to me. Suddenly the others acknowledge my presence. - -*Yeah, I’m here. Now stop looking at me.* - -“Sem, are the drones ready?” Cap smiles at me. The same smile Malia gave me earlier. - -I bite back a bilious remark. “Yes, Cap. Good to go.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} either thrust myself outward into infinity or inward into a mental dungeon of my own creation. I am never *here*. - -I guess that’s why I’m so good with the swarm. I don’t mind fragmenting myself. - -My many mini-me’s, each the size of a dinner plate, meander through the thick atmosphere of the gas giant. It feels like pulling apart darkness and letting glimpses of what hides behind shine through. Breaking the singular focus on despair is a relief. - -The planet appears as a kaleidoscope of smoky greens that swirl in, over, and through each other. It is not suitable for a full-blown colony, but floater habs have been successfully deployed in similar places. We have to decide whether or not to mark this one for follow-up. - -Something flickers. A cloud with an unexpected light absorption ratio. I send in the swarm, scoopers out and ready to sample the extra-terrestrial pea-souper. The scoopers scoop and transfer their contents to the sterile vials in the drones’ innards. - -The absorption ratio changes again. Fast. *Too fast.* - -Within the human visible spectrum, it looks like teal lightning. - -My fingers dance in the haptic gloves as I call back the swarm. Such is protocol. Anything unusual? Regroup and analyze. The drones cluster. Closer, closer, closer. Perspectives flow into each other until one remains that makes me feel uncomfortable. Moments before I remove the AR helmet, my distributed mind collapses in on itself. - -The black hole of personhood. - -*Please don’t look at me.* - -Of course, they’re all there, looking at me. - -“What happened?” Cap asks. Davalia is silently fuming. I’m sure he considers the drones’ retreat as cowardice. Caution is the antithesis to his bravado. - -“Something’s off,” I say. They’re leaning in, crowding me. My heartbeat thumps in my temples. - -“Explain,” Cap commands. - -“I’m not sure. Something changed. Too fast and specific to be a coincidence.” Cap scratches his strong, clean-shaven chin. “I’ve taken samples,” I add. - -The mood shifts. Even Davalia’s burning impatience cools. Their combined piercing gaze shifts away from me. Finally. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}*eeper.* - -I shed sensation and emotion, move past trauma and desire. - -Shivering. - -An insignificant atom in a meaningless universe. Flashes fill the void, the signals that make me, the flickers of self that maintain the illusion of continuity. It reminds me of… - -My scalp tingles when the needles leave their hair-thin burrows. I hear a sharp breath. Doc doesn’t breathe. When the dancing stars fade, I see Malia leaning against the wall, hands in the small of her back. She looks both worried and eager. - -“What’s wrong?” I ask as I rub my face. - -She comes closer. I can smell her, can almost see the pores in her smooth bronze skin. A smile breaks through. A beam of light scaring the darkness. “I’ve studied the samples.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“C{{}}ome again?” Cap is standing rod-straight, arms folded behind his broad back. His white overall seems brighter than ours. - -We stand around the bridge’s holotable, watching the swaying numbers and dots Malia uses to illustrate her findings. “It's not life,” she says, “but also not… not-life.” - -Davalia looks ready to tear out his jet-black hair. He doesn’t deal in greys. I suppress a smile. - -“Consider a virus,” Malia continues. “Not exactly alive, but intuitively we still consider it something different than simply not-life.” - -Her forehead crumples into a frown. “Wait, maybe this is more accurate. A brain cell. Alive, right?” Nods. “But if you take it away from a living brain, it’s not, right?” More nods. “Then, is a brain cell alive? That depends on whether or not it’s part of a functional network.” - -Davalia can’t contain himself. “So, these things are brain cells?” - -“Not exactly. It’s a flawed analogy. I mean that these… things function only when they’re connected. Take one out of a network and it simply stops.” - -“Like hibernation?” Cap asks. - -Malia combines a nod and a headshake into a single gesture of doubt. “Not really. In hibernation or dormancy there are tell-tale signs of metabolism, suppressed as it may be. Not here.” - -“What if you take one out and put it back in?” The question hadn’t occurred to me earlier. I’ll chide myself later. - -Malia flashes a smile at me. “It functions again. As if nothing happened.” - -“So, some kind of dormancy beyond our means of detection?” - -Malia makes the same wavering gesture as she did earlier. “I don’t think so. More like non-living things looking alive.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}gain, I am many. Again, I am none. - -Peace through distribution. Comfort through distraction. - -My mini-me’s fly through the unexplored dense shroud of the gas giant. This time they—I—know what to look for. - -Increased density. Wildly fluctuating absorption ratio. - -It doesn’t take long. - -*There must be a lot of this stuff out here.* - -*Scoop scoop.* More samples. Alien lightning flashes all around the drone army. - -Now comes the exciting bit. - -The drones recorded the lightning pattern and play it back. Twinkling dots instead of lightning rods, but the pattern is similar. *It’s the idea that counts, right?* - -The last twinkle fades. - -*Come on come on come on.* - -Nothing. - -I alter the pattern, reverse it. Another flurry of twinkles. - -It almost feels as if the universe itself is holding its breath. - -Then cometh lightning. - -My miniature selves seek out their conversational partner(s?) and initiate a sequence of lights. Different speeds, different spectra, different patterns. A dictionary. - -Beautiful lightning responds. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}’m excited. I can’t remember the last time I felt anything other than some form of despair. Our small crew has gathered on the bridge and watches the footage. “It is the same pattern, but in reverse,” I say. - -As if choreographed, they all lean in and squint. - -“And what, you think something’s saying hello?” Davalia sounds even more derisive than usual. - -“I don’t know. But they, it, them, whatever, are trying to communicate.” - -Malia emits a soft, doubtful moan. - -“What?” I say, maintaining control. - -She tilts her head. “That’s a big leap. It’s probably a reflection or chemical reflex.” - -“A reflection in reverse? I doubt that.” - -“Right,” Cap interjects. “You clearly have a hypothesis. Care to share it?” - -*No. I don’t share things.* I dither. *Stop looking at me.* - -I sigh. “Distributed cognition. As Malia said, these… things need to network. Alone, they’re inert. Together, they… I don’t know… *think*.” - -To their credit, they don’t burst out laughing. But the looks they exchange tell me enough. - -I lash out. “Stop thinking that your minds are the norm!” - -*Wow, where did that come from?* I *never* raise my voice. To be fair, if we’re talking simple numbers, their minds are the norm. But that shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t be an excuse for them to not even try to see things my way. *Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck everything.* - -I storm away. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s weird, watching my outburst, but Doc insisted. “How do you feel now?” Our artificial shrink enquires. - -I perform the gesture that defines me, and shrug. - -“Would you like an extra iTMS session?” - -*Yes. Please, yes, hand me my needle crown with its soothing magnetic pulses.* “No, I’m good.” I would like nothing more, but I know it’s a test. Odd how an emotionless camera lens can feel so… prying. - -I get up from the padded chair and walk to the hologram hovering above the small central table. With a sweep of my hand, I rewind the scene and play it again. I step closer and scrutinize the face of recent-past-me. - -I’ve lost weight. Ghosts of previous anorexic episodes flutter through my mind. I thought I was past that. You can never truly erase the demons you carry. - -“Are you sure?” - -“Yes,” I snap. *I never snap. What’s going on?* - -Doc remains unfazed. In an uncanny act of mind reading, it says: “Then what is going on?” - -I fall back into the chair. “I… I don't know.” I pause, reluctant to say more. A piece of advice: don't enter into a staring contest with an AI. - -I relent. “I’m simply frustrated that they’re so stuck in their ways that they’re unable to entertain even slightly unconventional ideas.” - -“Are you sure they’re the only ones who are stuck in their ways?” - -I stare into the lens and frown. - -*Are they? Am I a madman shouting at the universe and imagining that it shouted back?* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}hat?” I'm fired up. Again. *What’s with all the emotion suddenly?* - -Cap holds up his hands. “You know it’s time we moved on. The efficiency of our closed circular systems is dropping.” - -“But…” I whimper, disgusted with myself. “That was before this.” A sweep of my arm indicates the hologram of the dancing lights from my latest excursion. Proof. Or so I thought. - -Cap shakes his head. “It’s interesting, but it’s not what you think it is.” - -I refuse to hear our magnanimous leader. “No. We can fix the systems, up the recycling. But this… we can't leave this behind.” - -I look around desperately. Davalia is already mentally building the statue in his honor to adorn his imaginary kingdom. I turn to Malia. - -“I…” She hesitates. “I agree with Cap.” - -*That pity in her eyes. I hate it.* - -It takes every ounce of self-control I can muster not to burst into raging flames and burn the whole fucking ship down. - -Malia preempts my explosion. “It’s not alive. It’s interesting, but all I need are the samples. It’s *really* not life, Sem. Just molecular clusters in this specific atmosphere.” - -I shake my head. “That’s nonsense, and you know it. That’s exactly what life is: clustered molecules that exchange energy in specific patterns. Put them in a bag of nutrients and you basically have a cell. You don’t care about truth or science, you just want… I don't know what. Fame and power? For your name to live on in the minds of degenerate colonists?” - -I cross my arms and stand firm. - -*I'm not leaving.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}} advise against it.” Doc sounds disapproving. - -“Noted," I say, “but can you do it?” - -“Technically, yes. But the effects on your psyche could be…” - -“Irrelevant for our discussion,” I interrupt. The chair squeaks as I wriggle nervously. A translucent crown of nanoneedles hovers above me. A promise of salvation, like a hypodermic needle for a heroin addict. “Next question: *would* you do it?” - -Doc hesitates. Human behavior is deterministic but chaotic. The lack of precedents for my request messes up the AI’s probability calculations. “Doubtful,” it says finally. - -I anticipated this. “Add this into your equations: if I am forced to join the regular mission, I will oppose it at every chance I get. You’ll have to sedate me continuously or put me under indefinitely. The cost for the mission would be high either way, and the effects on my mind would be… less than beneficial. Besides, we marked the planet for follow-up missions. They can pick me up.” - -“It is the distribution of mind that worries me,” Doc says. - -“You have my psych data. I can handle it.” - -*More than that. I long for it. Let me break my self into pieces so that I can rebuild it.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“N{{}}o,” Cap says resolutely. “Doc, I can’t believe you’re considering this.” - -We normally don’t address the psych AI on the bridge. We confine our consultations to the assigned chamber. Illusion of privacy. - -“The cost-benefit analysis is messy,” it says with uncharacteristic doubt. “But given the choice between jeopardizing the whole mission or one crew member…” - -Cap shakes his head. “No. it would unbalance the overall personality profile.” - -“I’m the only one on my side of the spectrum,” I say. “I can unbalance it willingly.” - -I never knew Cap could glare like that. I feel smug and I like it. - -Malia steps into the conversation. “Sem, I can’t believe you want to do this. The effects could be…” - -*Longed for? Long overdue? Relief, finally?* “It’s what I have to do apparently.” My voice acquires a hard edge. Malia’s mouth snaps shut. She knows she’s lost me. - -Davalia shrugs. “Let him do what he wants. Carrying him along against his will would make him dead weight. I can fly a recon drone. We don’t need his swarm.” - -“Davalia is right.” It’s the first time I say those words, surprising both him and myself. “You’ve got several solo-drones. The swarm would be of little use to you. It’s hard to control for…” *The synaptically unchallenged? The unbroken?* “…the untrained.” - -“We would lose an escape pod.” Cap knows he's clutching at the final straw. - -“Escape pods are provided for each crew member. If I leave the crew, you wouldn’t need my pod anyway. Doc?” - -“Sem is correct,” our ship-inhabiting artificial brain agrees. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}ap and Davalia are not here. Righteous anger for the first and indifference for the latter would be my guess. - -Malia is here, though. My mind wanders through could-have-beens, through dreams of shared happiness. But I know myself. I would have turned them into nightmares. - -Her cheeks clench. She’s trying to hold herself together. - -*Ha, imagine feeling like that all the time.* - -“Will you be okay?” She’s watching me make some final adjustments to the straps and fluid cushions in the pod that will be my sarcophagus. - -“Yeah.” I tweak the cranial nanoneedles Doc helped me install. “Doc assisted me in rigging the systems so that they can draw energy from atmospheric pressure differentials. Together with the inflatable landing pads, I’ll be bobbing up and down like a buoy. I mean, my body will.” - -Malia grabs my arm. “Please Sem, don’t do this. It’s not worth it.” - -I resist the urge to pull my arm away and put my hand on hers. “Yes, it is. I know you don’t see what I see, but this is it, Malia. This is life. Just not as we know it.” - -*I’m not wrong. Am I?* - -I sigh. We each made our decision. No point in flinging reproaches back and forth. I slowly, softly peel her hand off my arm and hold it. “You are wrong about this. And after I’ve been here for a while, I’ll be able to prove it.” - -“What if I’m right?” She looks straight at me, into me. - -I shrug. “The follow-up mission will pick me up regardless.” - -She pulls away her hand. “Just… let me know when you’re back… yourself, okay?” - -“Of course. I look forward to rubbing your face in the evidence.” - -We both attempt to smile. We both fail. *I’ll never come back. Not to me, not to this torn web of self-inflicted trauma that pretends to be a person.* - -There is no point in grand goodbyes or lofty words. I step into the pod. The hatch hisses shut. One universe closes, another one blossoms into being. - -A faint *phump* tells me that the pod has undocked. - -The pod’s sensors show the giant wheel that is the ship’s bulk shrink into a pinprick as we pull away from each other. It gives me a final wink when Cap starts the engines. I wink back and a strange sense of relief washes over me. - -I activate the needle crown and hibernation protocol. - -I fall asleep. - -And wake up as many. Shattered and complete. - -The swarm—*I*—speak(s) in patterns of light. - -Lightning welcomes me. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Fractured** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451937123393952).* diff --git a/content/issue-29/GoldPlumesOnDaoodhiHills.md b/content/issue-29/GoldPlumesOnDaoodhiHills.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2be18cef..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/GoldPlumesOnDaoodhiHills.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,181 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Mandira Pattnaik -copyright: '© Mandira Pattnaik 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Mandira Pattnaik has been published in a startling number of forums around the world, and her work includes poetry, non-fiction, and (fortunately for us!) short stories. Here she provides a contemplative, understated ecological fantasy about loss and rebirth that offers a glimmer of optimism for a roughly-treated world, which is at least a starting place." - -image: images/GoldenPlumes.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [nandhukumar](https://pixabay.com/photos/girl-mountain-sunrise-woman-3855529/), [jplenio](https://pixabay.com/photos/grass-autumn-morning-dew-sunset-3765172/), and [VictoryRock](https://pixabay.com/photos/sunset-ocean-sky-clouds-sea-969100/)." - -type: stock -slug: gold-plumes-on-daoodhi-hills -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}L{{}}illie isn’t sure what grows, though her brothers plant the ochre, capsule-shaped seeds, in neat rows of twos and threes. The seeds have tiny bird plumes on their supple bodies when they emerge from the soil. The siblings watch the whiteness of mum’s face when she discovers the saplings, the way she uproots them, cycles down the path to dispose of them, looking over her shoulder at every bend to make sure no one’s following her. - -Last week, after a trek to the Daoodhi hills with Joji, who is Mum’s distant cousin, Lillie discovered the discarded saplings in the shadow of a boulder, all wilted. Their plumes must’ve been carried away to the town across the hills, or blown under the cacti bushes strewn around the bareness. There are hardly any trees here. Lorries like Joji’s ply on the highway slithering below, relentlessly carrying away poplar, teak, and sandalwood logs. - -Joji said the boulder is an ancient yogi who sits meditating, waiting for the wandering mythical sage to break his curse, return him to human. Then he laughed at the weirdness of his own story, saying he’d like to meet the yogi, ask him how he sits that long. - -Later, recalling that trek, Lillie thinks she isn’t particularly amused by the yogi story. She can only think of the saplings, relieved to have finally discovered where Mum dumped them. She barely can sleep at night wondering what they’d grow into if they had a chance, and how to source more seeds, for the seeds Dad left them are all lost. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} troubled night, in which the phone rang several times causing everyone to wake-up, and Mum had begun screaming in shock because of the news conveyed from the other end. The next morning is a hazy concoction of grief and ginger-cake. The fragrance of the bake, still wafting from the oven, is heavy. Ginger made to ease into the dry cake mix for days, before setting the cake-mix in the mold. The craft of generations. - -Joji’s girlfriend has been informed; she’ll join from Singapore. Someone will go to pick her up after she travels two hours in the slow suburban train from the airport. Ill-luck she has to come at all, she once called this back-of-beyond place “trashy”. - -Lillie can’t bear to piece it all together. According to Mum, the yogi rose, hurtled down the hill slope right upon Joji’s log-laden lorry as it passed below. Why? What if it had been Mum cycling then, as she always does? - -Lillie’s brothers, Foel and Sundar, huddle in their bedroom. Sundar wants to go to town one of these days, look for the seeds, or at least identical ones. They debate if the supermarket there would stock the right ones. Pity Dad never told them the seeds’ name, or why they should grow them. - -Lillie is shocked they aren’t discussing Joji or why he had to die. - -She’s thinking of going to the place where the boulder had been. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen she returns, her brothers are quick to doubt. “You sure?” - -“Cent per cent. The seeds were under it.” - -“And the boulder?” - -“Just so.” Like it had never moved, never rolled down the hill to kill Joji. - -“Really?” Foel isn’t convinced. - -Sundar jumps off his bed. “You got the seeds, of course?” - -“Ha! No!” Lillie tells a lie whenever she must. Just so to feel superior to the boys. And she humors herself that boys are such fools. - -“Don’t believe this!” Foel says resignedly, finally dismisses his sister. - -Lillie has the seeds, just a handful of them. The ochre color caught her eye. She discovered them near the boulder, like brushed under it, but only almost so. - -Lillie thinks they were revealed because the yogi boulder had returned to his spot, but not exactly so. - -The seeds are in her skirt pocket. But she’ll not show them. Not yet. - -“I think you got them,” says Sundar. “Show, I say!” - -“No!” - -“Show! Now!” - -“No!” Lillie is adamant. She runs away and hides behind the water-tank in the courtyard. The boys snap at each other, like angry birds, because they can’t decide if Lillie is being truthful. - -Mum, wary of the sibling fights, enters the room, and they hush up. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}illie has chosen her spot carefully. This time it would not be anywhere near home, but on the ashen slopes of the once evergreen Daoodhi Hills. It’d be difficult to trek or cycle all the way to look after them alone, but she’s convinced she must. - -*Dad, I must, mustn’t I?* she mutters on her way back. - -She’s planted a neat row, under the shade of a dune, and just about concealed by a huge ant-hill. She waters them every day on the way to school. Treks on Sundays to be with them, like little babies she must nurse to health. - -The plants are due now, and she awaits what color plumes they’ll have. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}undar throws tiny pebbles from their rooftop at the neighborhood girls playing in the courtyard. Their tribes have lived in these forest areas since the kings ruled, married within the community, never left the place. Then came the miners from outside—the *gora* sahibs. They mined, carried away bauxite, other minerals, made money. Nobody was concerned how hollow the hills would become. Then came the Mumbai men who terrorized the tribals, cut the native trees for their precious wood. Cut the native men who stood in their way. - -Sundar was old enough when Dad died. He realized how drought had hit them, how Dad was fighting against the mafia, how hard he worked. Sundar wants to forget those days. He wants to be rich, drive a car, be gone from here. - -Sundar hopes Savi in the courtyard will notice the nuisance, notice *him.* He wants her to be angry, so she will rush up the stairs to get into an argument with him. Then he can tell her his real feelings. - -Savi skips on the parallel lines drawn with a stick on the dirt. She squeaks: *one,* *four, six, back*. She pays no attention to Sundar. - -*I’ll ask Lillie to talk to her*, Sundar thinks. But Lillie can never be found these days. He wonders where she escapes. Perhaps she’s found someone more interesting than Kapil, her last boyfriend. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he summer is bridging the gap between spring and fall. The days are long enough to go up the Daoodhi Hills after dinner. - -The sporophytes are florescent green. Tomorrow, Lillie hopes, she’ll get to see the plumes. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}fter Joji, three more truckers have died by the yogi boulder crashing upon them. The fragmented boulder cleared each time. Crushed vehicle and logs carried away. Yet, every time, Lillie discovers the yogi boulder back where it was; returned to order. - -After the last incident, the dozen or so remaining trees are spared, none dares to cut them. Lorry drivers have called a transport-strike. The cut logs spilled from the flattened trailer stay abandoned at the foot of the hills. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}hy didn’t you tell us, Lillie?” - -“I just wanted to let them grow. *Live.* If we talked—if Mum got wind of it—” - -Sundar, Savi, and Foel stand in a semi-circle around Lillie. Lillie kneels. The row of just-emerged plants sway in the light breeze. - -The leaves will soon be transformed into bird-wings, layered and light like plumes. But they are leaves now, as on a central stalk, prominent midrib, distinct veins crisscrossing the lamina. The leaves nod, and whisper to each other, like a community of kindergarten children. They giggle and raise a racket. - -Minutes late, they unfurl like prayer flags. All four of them watch in stunned silence. - -When they turn into feathers, Lillie checks the color excitedly: *golden!* - -Sundar, Savi and Foel cheer and clap. Then they kneel to take a closer look. The gentle air causes the plumes to fall off, and they are brushed towards the anthill. - -“*O, look!*” Foel shouts. - -They gape as the plumes gather, shape themselves into fledglings. The young birds flap their wings—once, twice. Little goldfinches. They peck at each other as though in greeting, then fly away in hard-earned freedom. - -The gazes of the friends follow only the birds’ flight, in deep awe. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ne week later, on the Tuesday before her fifteenth birthday, Lillie returns to find a new set of seeds planted. Not really planted, but dropped in a neat row next to the old one. The older plants are her height now, grown into young plants, hoping to be trees someday. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}} told you not to, and still—” Mum raises her hand, the blow sure to land on Foel, if it had not been abandoned, because Sundar falls at her feet. - -“The seeds are a curse. *Mataji*—your grandmother—she warned me. Your Dad was killed the day he brought them home—murdered by the sandalwood smugglers.” Mum shouts. Agony in her voice making it shake. - -“Mum! “Foel blurts. “It’s Lillie. She did it.” - -“Lillie?” - -Lillie does not hide from it. She advances a few steps and stands directly in front of her mother, locking eyes with her. “Yes—yes, *me*! Mum, I beg of you!” - -Their home at the edge of the hills is enveloped in a verdant green now. All hues of green mingling in the backdrop. - -“*You*, Lillie?” - -“It was only the first time, Mum! The goldfinches drop the seeds now! Not I, I did it only once.” - -Mum drops on the chair. - -“There are hundreds of goldfinches now, Mum! From the ones that first grew out of the seeds *I* planted. Their leaves grew into birds. Now the birds bring in their own seeds that grow into bird trees—goldfinch trees! The birds sow them, so the hills grow green again, like… like it was. So we have rains.” - -Mum gapes and listens. Her face is of one who is emerging from a state of daze and into the realms of wondrous discovery. - -“I see them flap and fly, together! Such a lovely sight—the gold sitting on the branches, against the green leaves.” - -“And the yogi? Are you sure he…” Sundar throws the question at Lillie. - -“Yes, yes, he always returned. He punished those people who traded in *our trees.* And it’s the meditating yogi protecting the trees. He will not let someone like Dad die again trying to save the Daoodhi Hills.” - -Mum glances from one boy to the other. Then her eyes rest on Lillie, before spilling with tears. “Joji!” Mum lets out a scream. “Joji, I told you not to, even if the contractor insisted. Why did you not listen to me?” - -Mum looks to the heavens and it begins to rain. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n the slopes of the Daoodhi Hills, the teal limbs of the trees embrace each other and dance in cadence to the monsoon rhythms. - -Soon, the goldfinches will swoop down again, and come to be in their midst, cooing to celebrate the return of their habitat. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451938173393847).* - diff --git a/content/issue-29/InTheWeave.md b/content/issue-29/InTheWeave.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8f37fa97..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/InTheWeave.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,406 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "In The Weave" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 28 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- David Whitmarsh -copyright: '© David Whitmarsh 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "We wrap up the issue with our second repeat offender. David Whitmarsh's contribution to i25 had notes of the post-apocalyptic to it, but was ultimately about the beginning of someone's story. This piece is laced with endings, and has hints of the pre-apocalyptic lurking within. It also boasts a uniquely alien point of view…" - -image: images/InTheWeave.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image courtesy of [Hannah G Watson, Andrew T Ashchi, Glen S Marrs, and Cecil J Saunders](https://pixabay.com/photos/art-desktop-spiral-nature-pattern-3257095/) - many thanks to all four!" - -type: stock -slug: in-the-weave -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}was five segments grown when my first doubts came. I lay huddled in the nest between my mother and grandmother. A thin wind curled around the smooth cement walls, bringing white flakes that turned to water when they touched me. It was night, and colder and darker than any night I had ever known. Above the nest walls, the night-glow of the clouds was faint. The strangeness of it fascinated me, holding my focus tight. - -In another thread, Mother’s ridges flashed at me, but I could not let go of my fading self. - -The wind died. Stillness such as I had never known. The clouds above were high, thin and high and scarcely moving. A gap appeared. Beyond was black sprinkled with pinpoints of light that stayed still as the broken cloud drifted across the sky. - -In this cold, thin strand, my mother lay dead beside me. I felt the life seeping too from my own body, my sight dimming. - -*Offspring of mine!* My mother’s facial ridges rippled brightly, flickering with her irritation. - -The wind whipped around the nest’s lee as it always did. The bright clouds above scurried their eternal race across the sky. The nest was warm. The grub that Mother laid before me was warm. - -That thread was far from the first in which my life ended, but the manner of the ending disturbed me. It was lost not just to me, but to Mother and Grandmother too, and it seemed to everyone in our village. My thoughts dwelled also on that strange sky, the myriad little lights that shone high above. - -*What lies beyond the clouds?* I asked Mother as I sank my mandibles into the squirming flesh, and sucked. - -Her answer was terse. *The clouds are the limit of the worlds. There is nothing above.* - -Grandmother blinked one pair of eyes, then another. *There were stories.* The glow on her speech ridges was feeble, but readable. *A Visitor from above the clouds, in distant folds of the weave, distant even when I was seeded.* - -It was seldom that Grandmother could rouse herself to speak. Her mind was failing as her weave wore thin with age. So few threads remained to her. - -Her crusted eyes closed again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}clung to the torn stump of a great tree, my mandibles sunk deep into the wood, my claws gripping the rough bedrock, waiting for wind and the hail of rock and fragments of wood and dead things carried by the storm to tear me from my hold. - -Rip-storms bring destruction and thereby renew the forest. The biggest, oldest trees can be as tall as an adult is long, and they spread their branches wide and shade the soil beneath from the cloud-light so nothing new can grow beneath. When they are so big they can no longer furl their branches to let the storm slip over them, a rip-storm clears them away, allowing new life to flourish. It is a part of the cycle, of the natural order of things. - -This storm cleared not just the old growth, but everything. Everything living, and much that was not. The soil itself was being scoured away. Even as I wondered whether I could hold on until it passed I felt the pain of my carapace cracking from some unseen impact. - -I walked through the village behind my mother. Her anterior eyes blinked as my segments rippled to a stop. She turned so that I could see the words on her face. *What troubles you, offspring of mine?* - -Upwind, the branches of the trees waved and rippled, shielding the fields in their lee. - -*I have died again. I know one small death is nothing, but I feel so many.* I said. *Was it always so?* - -*What is always?* Her words were erratic, flickering and shimmering. *Who can tell amongst all the pasts we can see and all those we cannot. Who can trace all the warps of the weave? The pasts are unknowable as the futures.* - -She turned and I followed her tail, wondering at her impatience, wondering also at my own dark mood. We are seeded, the threads of the weave are spun, and in each we die. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. I knew there would come a time when my deaths would come faster than the spinning of new threads and I would diminish, as Grandmother did, but I was young. Daily I felt the weave thicken and new patterns emerge. I felt brighter, sharper. - -Despite these endings, these threads torn from me, I still grew. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} scrambled along a dry river bed in hot, still air, hunger in my belly, heat bearing down from the fierce brightness in a sky of an alien, uniform colour somewhere beyond violet. A pale crescent banded with colours was the only other feature. - -There were no clouds. - -I pulled away my focus, returning to a thread where I lay quiet and warm in the nest between Mother and Grandmother. All but one lateral eye was closed, and that watched my mother, who was speaking, but not to me. - -*Was it always so?* she said. - -I cracked open an eye on the other side, where Grandmother lay. - -Grandmother’s face glowed with the feeble light of her own words. *Always so. So many little endings where the boldness of youth leads to misadventure. This is how they learn.* - -*But these are not little deaths.* Mother’s ridges flashed. *Everyone dies. The village, the world. Everyone. And this not just in fine fibres, but great cords of the weave.* - -*There are stories…* - -*Shine me no stories,* said Mother. *What matter the infinite unknowable pasts. We live in the multitude of present moments. Wisdom is in the weave.* - -*I recall no such endings in my pasts.* Flickering mumbles chased around Grandmother’s face. - -At the edge of my vision I saw something bright flash across the clouds, a spark angling across the sky in the time it takes to blink twice. - -*Stones sometimes fall from above the clouds,* Grandmother said in a soft light. - -Had I not seen that light in the sky, I might have thought her words to be merely ramblings from lost threads. *Tell me a story*, I flashed to her, but her face glimmered only with the incoherent scintillation of one who has lost focus. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} had been sent out to forage, and so I left the village taking a different direction in each thread, spreading my selves and my focus wide. I ambled along the river bank, crawled beyond the fields, and slipped deep into the forest all around. - -There is a place at the margin of our territory, an abandoned village at the foot of a precipice. It is said that many generations past, the village was sheltered by the cliff but then the wind changed direction. The way the wind blows today, the crescent walls of these old nests line up the wrong way so that anyone entering or leaving one would be caught exposed in the cross-wind and flipped or carried away. Now the site is overgrown as the forest reclaims the land. Here, sheltered in the rubble of a collapsed nest wall of rough-hewn stone, I found a hive of spineworms, tasty and nutritious, though care is needed in collecting them. - -A good hive-site in one thread is often a good hive-site across broad ribbons of the weave, so I summoned all those of my selves that were nearby. In my own nest I told Mother, so that she too might come and bring others from the village. The apothecary would bring vapours to stun the spineworms. - -I watched the hive and the comings and goings of the worms while more of my selves arrived each in her own thread. In many of these threads I discovered someone else already there watching the hive. - -She raised her head and turned towards my self to speak. *Begone, interloper. This is not your territory.* Her length of five segments and immature colouration told she was of the same seed cohort as myself. The rhythms of her words that she came from the adjacent village. - -I asserted precedence with bold flashes. We faced each other, cross-wind in the shelter of the undergrowth. My focus now was close on this thread, as hers would be. Throughout the many strands of the weave we converged and encountered each other at this spot, but in this thin strand alone would we resolve our dispute and accept the outcome through all the weave. That is the way we are taught to resolve disputes, the civilised way. - -We began the ritual with sequences of flashes, patterns with no meaning. A wordless chant if you will, and our signalling synchronised. Together we raised our front segments from the ground, a trial of strength in itself. We swayed and chanted. She raised her second segment up so she towered over me. A boastful show of strength. I did the same, to fail to do so would be to concede. The wind pressed hard on my flank, threatening to topple me. My muscles strained to hold me up and keep me steady in the cross-wind. - -Faster we chanted, and straining on the legs of our anterior segments we edged towards one another. I do not know whether she was pressing the pace or I was, but I felt an eagerness. It was almost as if we were a single mind, a single will. Only dimly was I aware of all my other selves watching her other selves waiting in a tense stillness. - -This self, this thread, was all that there was. - -My focus was upon that fine fibre of being, upon her, complete and singular. I felt the climax of the chant approach, and I saw the glint of my own ridges reflected in her eyes. - -The chant ended and we both lunged. I managed to bring my head lower than hers, but she had artfully pushed herself sideways, upwind. I felt my defeat as her flank crashed into the side of my head and she let the wind take her and so me. I fell and could not stop myself as wind and inertia rolled me onto my side. In desperation, I twisted my rear segments, not to resist the roll, but to press it further. - -The carapace of my head rang with the impact as it hit the hard ground, but I rolled, rolled right out from beneath my adversary, onto my back, up onto the other flank and onto my feet. I might have rolled further but for the remnant of a nest wall. I felt the sharp pain of a carapace cracking in my third segment. - -I have never before or since felt such pain, for my focus was solely on that self, a singular body experiencing a singular pain. - -A cracked carapace loses its strength and its weight presses and crushes the flesh beneath that it normally supports and protects. One leg was numb and useless and all the lateral eyes on that side were blind. I thought soon to feel my adversary’s mandibles bringing relief from that agony. - -But the pain did not abate. I fought through it to turn my head and see. - -She lay next to me, on her back, helpless. The victory was mine, and so the duty of the victor. No matter how hard, I had to finish the matter. Dragging my useless leg I twisted around and mounted upon her exposed underside. I pushed the tips of my mandibles into the exposed gap before the first segment and bit as hard as I could. - -As the head rolled away, I released my focus, spreading myself again through the weave. - -*Well fought,* the adversary said. *The roll was a clever move. Daring.* Her lights shimmered with admiration as we lay side by side in front of the hive. *Is someone coming to aid you in your distress?* - -The pain of my injuries had faded, diluted as my focus withdrew from that strand. Even so, it was a relief when Mother arrived. Her ridges flashed with words of pride and a little regret as she came close. - -*Yes,* I said to the adversary, speaking in gentle shades. *But you flatter me. The move was not clever. Merely fortunate.* - -My relief came soon. That thread was lost to me as Mother’s head leaned over me and her kind, sharp mandibles penetrated the gap between head and first segment. - -We talked while we awaited the others from my village. She was offspring of the weaver, a profession of high status both for its practicality and its symbolism. - -One thread in every two we harvested the worms, stripping their spines and collecting them in bags of woven cloth. In the others we let them be, for they have as much right to the weave as any living thing. - -The weaver’s offspring and I parted on good terms, I gifted her some of my allocation of the harvested spineworms. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}ire. The wind fanned the flames to tear through a widening swathe of the forest and in a widening swathe of the weave I fled from the path of destruction. The fire ran fast before the wind, far faster than I could crawl. - -That was the first time that I died so many deaths that I felt myself diminish. Once the shock had passed—of feeling my eyes go blind and my fluids boiling beneath my blistering carapace—I realised my thoughts felt foggy, my focus vague. - -*You will recover what you have lost,* Grandmother said in a moment of rare lucidity. In my diminished state I found new empathy for her situation. Decline was all that remained for her as her deaths came faster. Her weave thinned and frayed, and with every day I found her sedentary form lying in the nest in fewer of the threads of my own lives. - -In a thick cord, I too lay still in the nest. The glazed discolourations of my carapace would be with me for life in those worlds, but the burned and blistered flesh beneath would heal in time, the lost eyes would grow back. - -*You will recover what you have lost,* she said again, perhaps in a different thread, sometimes it is hard to tell. - -*Tell me a story,* I said, though I doubted her focus would hold enough. - -*A story? What story? Shall I tell you of how we learnt to build with cement rather than rough stone, of how we learned to work metal? My grandmother lived folds of the weave where the visitor gave us this knowledge, and much else besides, but in these strands where we live our many lives we were so few and stretched so thin that only fragments of the knowledge came to us.* - -*Why so few?* - -She lay uncommunicative for long moments. An intermittent flickering of her ridges, was the only sign that she was still conscious. I thought her mind had drifted away again following its own shadowed paths, when her words shone bright in my eyes. *Life is hard in the ribbons of the weave that we know, and we are few. When I was a five-segment youth as you are now, my grandmother told me it was not so elsewhere.* - -*But how? How can the worlds be so different, is not the nature of the physical world the same in all the weave?* Even as I spoke, I recalled those dying worlds of cold and heat and strange skies. - -Her ridges rippled in the soothing colours one might use to calm an infant. *A grub in a tree may eat one leaf in one strand and do no harm, but in another strand a different leaf is eaten and brings a rip-storm on the other side of the world.* - -It was a story we all learn as infants, of how small choices can have unpredictable effects in different strands of the weave, leading to wild divergences between the worlds. - -*Perhaps,* she continued, *if it eats both leaves, the wind will change direction.* - -I shivered with fright at the thought of the abandoned village. The wind had changed in threads ancestral to all of the weave that I lived. So many must have been caught in the crosswind and died, and the survivors would have been diminished. This was her story. We were few and stretched thin because the wind changed direction. - -*She was singular as a stone that is kicked in one thread and knows not in the remainder of the weave. That’s what they said.* - -*Who?* I demanded, but her light faded, her rambling slowed. A last flicker, that might have been *so far away,* or it may have just been the random flutterings of her fading mind. - -That night her hearts failed in many of the threads that remained to her and she lost the power of speech entirely. It is in the ways of the worlds that the elderly fade so, not all at once across the weave but stretched ever thinner along fewer and finer warps. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}or two summers and winters, my lives continued. As before, threads were torn from my weave by personal accident or all-encompassing catastrophe, but the remainder grew and thickened. I grew in mental acuity and sharpness of focus, and in physical size and strength. I reached the full seven segments of adulthood. - -Grandmother continued to decline. She now lived in only the sparsest, thinnest strands, in a state of total senescence, eating only when food was placed between her mandibles. - -The weaver’s offspring, my former adversary from that day in the abandoned village, was now a familiar sight in our own village, and I in hers. Now in new adulthood, she was herself a weaver. Mother said she waited for the seeding of the next cohort, confident that the weaver and I would sow each other’s seeds. But since that last conversation with Grandmother I had little confidence in planning futures. *We will see when the season comes,* I told Mother. - -More than once as I lay in the nest at night I saw a light flash across the sky. It was not a common occurrence, but enough to bring back memories of Grandmother’s incoherent ramblings of things above the clouds, and of what I had seen in dying worlds. Then the day came, where a light crossed the sky in the middle of the day. It did not flash across in the time it takes to blink twice, but slow and bright, falling slower and brighter until it hurt to look. - -It seemed to descend from the sky in the direction of the abandoned village, and it did so in all of the weave that I knew. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he weaver and I found it in the wind-shadow of the cliff just beyond the nests. No others shared any interest in lights from the sky, and truth be told I don’t believe the weaver would have come but for my own interest. - -It had curves and edges unlike anything we had seen before. It’s surface held a sheen like the carapace of a new-hatched infant and bristled with odd protrusions. In length it would measure from my head to my fourth segment, but it was twice as wide and high as myself. Four thin legs spread wide from its underside held its belly clear from the ground. I wondered at the strength of those thin spars. - -*Is it a living thing?* the weaver asked. - -*I think not.* My eyes were drawn to the edges, the angles of the protrusions, some of which had that hard brightness of metal. *I believe it is a made thing.* - -*We will learn little by looking,* she said, and in a thin strand she crawled from the cover of the trees and headed straight towards it. - -As she approached within a dozen body lengths, some of the protrusions erupted into bright lights, dazzling my forward eyes. - -*I am blinded,* she said, lying next to me in another stream. - -*Keep going straight,* I said, squinting beneath folded ridges against the brightness. - -She blundered straight forward until her mandibles struck the thing. She opened them wide, stepped forward once more and closed her jaws on the object, the point of her mandible slid until it caught on one of the protrusions. - -*Very hard,* she said. *I don’t think I can...* - -As she spoke, the thing’s surface buckled as the point penetrated. A jet of vapour burst from the puncture, then all was consumed in bright fire. All: the object, the weaver. The whole space between the wood and the cliff was lost in bright flame. The ridges folded down over my eyes, saving something of my forward vision. - -*What happened?* said the weaver next to me. - -I had no answer at first. I feared the heat of the flame would set light to the forest where I lay, but the heat faded almost as quickly as it had come. I uncovered my eyes and saw a blackened hollow. Of the object and the weaver I saw at first no trace. - -I crawled out of my shelter into the open, across the blackened ground, and as I did, I saw with my eyes and felt under my feet hard, sharp shards. Pieces of the weaver’s carapace, fragments of blackened and twisted metal. - -*I was right,* I said to the weaver as I continued my search. *It is a made thing.* - -I searched the blackened crater to see what I might learn, and I rested at the forest edge with the weaver to watch the object and see what we might learn. - -The side of the object opened and *something* came out. It balanced precariously on two legs, upright. It had such a curious head, a smooth, white shining carapace, and what looked like a single great eye filling the forward face. It’s movements were rapid, but clumsy. I expected it to topple to the ground and smash itself to pieces. It seemed to struggle also with the wind, even in the shelter of the cliff. - -It busied itself with a number of objects it extracted from the interior of what I now began to think of its nest. - -We watched, mystified, captivated, until a flat plate it had placed on the ground angled towards us and erupted in light. Not the glare that had dazzled me and blinded the weaver when she approached in that destructive thread, but the patterns of the glowing ridges of a face. - -*I am blind,* it said. Then, *Keep going straight. Very hard. I don’t think I can. What happened?* - -It was repeating our words, but only the words we had spoken in this thread, though it must have seen what we said in that other strand. - -I picked a few strands and crawled out from the shelter. I stopped just short of the distance at which those dazzling lights had started. The two-legged stranger edged back a little, but stepped forward again when I stopped. - -*Hello,* I said. *Goodbye,* I said in another thread. In another: *Singular as a stone.* Whence came those words? Distracted, I almost neglected to watch the response on the panel. - -In each thread came the same words I had flashed. - -*This is madness,* I said to the weaver, *what can she hope to learn by responding the same way in every stream?* - -*Patience,* she said. *Perhaps she waits for a different response from you.* - -I paused for a moment, and I remembered my first meeting with the weaver. Somehow, the memory of pain of that meeting was diminished. It was the thrill of the dance that I remembered now. *Join me in a strand,* I told the weaver, *just a single thread. Let us see if we can evoke a more meaningful response.* - -She did as I asked, and I flashed at her the beginnings of the chant, of the challenge. She understood my intent and joined me. We faced each other, chanted, raised our forward segments. The stranger backed away as we swayed—in truth the wind was feeble here in the shadow of the cliff, scarce enough to topple either of us, but this was more a show. - -In another thread, I chanted to the stranger instead. *You will have to tell me how she reacts,* said the weaver. - -Our shared chant reached its climax. The weaver feinted towards me, a low and slow lunge, and I pressed the advantage, my mandibles scissored, and the head fell from her neck. - -My solo chant reached its climax, I lunged forward and closed my mandibles around the protrusion at the apex of the stranger’s body, which I took to be its head, if it had such. It was easily severed and fell to the ground and its carapace cracked. A dark liquid pulsed from the cut on the body, and oozed from the severed head. - -I lowered my head before the stranger, offering her the opportunity to sever my own head, should she have the means to do so. - -The stranger showed no reaction anywhere in the rest of the weave. I watched from the forest with the weaver as the panel simply repeated our earlier conversation. Even where I exposed the join between my head and first segment, the stranger stood mute and impassive. - -The only reaction came from the weaver’s death. The stranger hurried with its clumsy two-legged gait and climbed into the opening of its nest. I waited to see if it would emerge again. I waited long and was about to give up when the entire nest of curves and edges and protrusions vanished, looking like it had twisted away in some unimaginable direction. - -It did the same where the stranger lay decapitated before me. The nest just vanished. The weaver saw too, for which I was grateful. I feared she would not believe had I needed to describe what I had seen. - -Still, these were narrow threads, and the stranger and her nest remained in a broad ribbon of rich and branching warps. - -I struggled to comprehend the meaning of this stranger’s reactions. - -I observed that throughout the thickness of the weave where the stranger was present, she acted in the precise same way, save in those where I or the weaver had chosen to act differently, as if she had no power to manipulate the weave of her own volition, but only to react to the circumstance of the thread in which she found herself. - -She attempted to communicate with us. Her lighted panel shifted from showing faces that repeated our words, to patterns far simpler. Numbers of dots, lines and geometrical shapes. - -A game. I said what I saw, she repeated my words. By varying my answers in different threads and seeing her responses, I saw the patterns, I saw what she was trying to do and I learned quickly. - -She learned slowly. Every lesson, every word, every phrase, she had to learn anew in every thread separately. As my responses varied, so did hers. Her progress was faster or slower in one thread or another. In those where her progress was fastest, I learned the next move in the game and in other threads I was able to respond to each problem as soon as, or before she posed it. - -Days passed like this, and at the end of each day as the clouds darkened she retired to her nest and I walked back to mine. The weaver helped me during the long days, fetching me sustenance and pressing me to eat when, in my wide and deep focus, I would forget. - -In time, many days, the stranger was able to display simple sentences. - -*I go. I return in three days,* she said to me one day in a fine strand. - -*You go. You return in three days,* I said to her throughout the weave. - -*How do you know?* she said, in those threads where she had learned enough to understand. - -*Wisdom is in the weave,* I replied, but I think the meaning was lost on her. - -I crawled back to my village, to the nest I shared mostly with my mother. The next day, my strength was recovered enough to focus and tell her what I had seen, what I had been doing these last days when she might have expected me in the forge. - -I looked to that sad corner of the nest where Grandmother used to lie. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he stranger returned on the third day. I saw her nest appear in the sky, and descend on a column of fire to rest again in the shelter of the cliff. Its path erratic as the wind caught and buffeted it, but it came to rest in the same place. - -*You come from above the clouds,* I said to her. - -Something new, she carried a speaking panel on the front of her carapace. *I come from above the clouds. Another world.* - -*I do not understand,* I said. *The worlds in the threads are not above the clouds, and we can not travel from one to another. We simply experience them.* - -Most times she would answer very quickly, I had the sense that her thinking was fast, like her movements, but it lacked breadth. I waited. - -*I* *have not words to* *explain, but yes, I come from above the clouds.* - -We talked, we misunderstood, we learned. Eight days she stayed, then three days she went back up above the clouds. This routine repeated many times in many threads. In time we began to comprehend each other in small and mundane ways - -In a few sparse threads she never came back, and in one, as her nest descended on its column of fire, the wind swirled around the sheltering cliff and smashed the nest against the unforgiving rock. It erupted in fire as it had that day that the weaver’s mandibles had penetrated it. - -I told her. *You died coming here.* - -Her response came quickly. *I live yet.* - -*I watched your nest descend, I saw it taken by the wind and shattered on the stone. You must have been killed.* - -Her head moved, angled to one side a little. *It is a mystery to me that you can see this. We know that the world we see is one of many branching possibilities but we can never see those other worlds.* - -The broad chasm in my understanding yawned before me. *You feel no diminution from the death of your other self?* - -*That was not me. That was someone who shared a past with me, but moved on to another fate.* *I can die only once.* *She died.* - -I absorbed this. To experience the weave was the very definition of life. Even the worms that burrow in the ground retreat in many threads from a threat in one. I considered the possibility of death in a single strand being a final end to a living thing. I reflected on what I had done on the day the stranger arrived. - -*Once before, another who shared your past has died here.* - -The panel she used to speak remained dark. Her curious head straightened and tilted to the other side. I fancied I saw movement within that great eye when the light caught it. - -I could not but explain further, though I feared her reaction so I spoke my thought in only a thin strand. *I regret. I killed you,* I said. *I meant no harm by it. Death is a small thing for us.* - -*Have no regret for me. When I am dead I am gone, but there is another who waits above the clouds for whom my end would have brought pain.* - -*Speak to her of my regrets.* - -*Through this eye she sees all that I see*. The stranger touched a projection at the side of her head. *She understands as I do. Death is a small thing for you.* - -My lateral eyes detected a motion. The branches of the trees furling themselves, wrapping tight around the trunks. - -She spoke again. *But is it always so? Is death always a small thing for you?* - -*A storm is coming,* I said. *The trees sense it across the weave.* I said it to her in all the threads, not just those of this more intimate conversation. - -*I must leave, I will return after the storm,* she said many times, everywhere she had gained understanding, and hurried back to her nest. - -I felt the force of the wind pressing on my carapace. The stranger clambered into her nest. - -She stood still before me. *I must know, before the storm comes. I must know is death always a small thing for you?* - -*No, it is not always a small thing. Too many deaths and we diminish, we lose our selves.* - -*I live one life, I have one past, but we know there are many worlds.* She hesitated again. *I struggle to find the words, but the ground on which we stand moves. Over many lifetimes it must move in the same way in every world.* *Are the storms stronger, more frequent, in every world?* - -The trees now were furled tight, but the younger growth, the littler plants with shallow roots could not withstand the rising storm. Here in this sheltered spot we escaped the worst, but to either side I saw trees and branches and small animals flung into the air and carried away. - -In thread after thread, throughout the weave, the stranger’s nest performed its mysterious convolutions and was gone. But here, she remained awaiting my answer. - -*Everywhere. Throughout the weave. The world has died many times, but there is no strand of mine that does not suffer storms or cold or heat.* - -She stepped forward, this tiny frail creature, and rested a forelimb on my extended mandible. *I regret there is no more I can do.* - -She turned to return to her nest, but a flurry of wind twisted around the cliff and caught her mid-stride, sending her crashing to the ground before me. - -*What do you mean?* I said, but she lay face down, straining with upper limbs to push herself up. She would not have seen my words. As gentle as a mother with a seedling, I closed my mandibles beneath her and lifted. - -I released her, and she stumbled forward and rested her back against the rock face. - -*The wind is changing.* The weaver’s words came to me from another thread. I widened my focus and felt the force of it. We clung to the ground. A heavy branch ripped from an ancient tree flew through the air towards me. - -We lay huddled tight against the crescent wall of the nest, Mother and I, latched onto each other like three-segment youths as the wind curled around the end wall. No way to leave the nest without being torn away. - -Throughout the weave, the wind was changing. In some threads already a full rip-storm was tearing the trees from the ground and scouring deep scars in the soil, the clouds above lost in the haze of wind-borne dust and rock. - -I searched to focus again on the stranger, but it was a thin thread, and I felt my deaths building, my mind diminishing, my focus weakening. - -*I will die here.* Her words brought me to her. She rested against the cliff, her single great eye and speaking panel facing me. The wind here too was turning and strengthening. - -*Are you injured?* I said, but before she answered I saw her nest. The turning of the wind had exposed it to the rising storm. It lay on its side, trails of white vapour pouring from it, torn into thin streamers by the wind. - -*I regret,* I said, *But if it be some solace, only in this thin thread. You departed safely elsewhere.* - -She rested motionless, her panel dark, and I wondered if she had already died from some injury sustained in her fall. - -*I regret,* she said, *that I can offer you no such comfort. Your world is dying. I think it must be so in every thread as it moves further from the light that warms it.* - -I sensed the truth of her words. So much had I seen, and now I felt my weave thinning and fraying moment by moment. - -*If we had found you sooner we might have been able to help, to make you another home above the clouds, or to teach you*… She raised her forelimbs to the front of her neck. *There is pain. I don’t want to die a slow death as my air runs out,* she said. *This will be quicker, and we may see each other with our own eyes.* - -She did something and a puff of vapour rushed from her neck. She lifted away the carapace from her head and placed it carefully on the ground beside her. I saw for the first time the true face of the stranger. - -On the front of her fragile form, the speaking panel glows with a last word to me: - -*Goodbye*. - -She met my gaze with her two eyes, and then she died. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} spoke these words to the third eye on the carapace that the stranger had removed. I spoke to the stranger above the clouds: *May it bring you solace to know that the one who lies dead before me has returned to you elsewhere in the weave.* - -*Know also, that your kind has been here before, long ago in distant threads. Only now do I understand my grandmother’s words, of knowledge brought from above the clouds in distant threads and a visitor singular as a stone.* - -*Perhaps in distant folds of the weave our kind lives yet with yours, above the clouds*. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **In The Weave** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451926923394972).* diff --git a/content/issue-29/Unincorporated.md b/content/issue-29/Unincorporated.md deleted file mode 100644 index fb3828ec..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/Unincorporated.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,364 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Unincorporated" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Erik Mann -copyright: '© Erik Mann 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The way we work is in flux, as changing social, industrial, political, and environmental factors work their effects, and this makes for a rich resource in speculative fiction that Mythaxis has mined before. Erik Mann's opener gives another glimpse of how employment may feel in the world to come—how for some it may feel already…" - -image: images/Unincorporated.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [tsukiko-kiyomidzu](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/human-people-young-woman-woman-1895084/), [Alex_Hartman](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/dog-canine-desktop-animal-wolf-3059346/), and [Layers](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/sketch-hand-drawn-man-4748895/)." - -type: stock -slug: unincorporated -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}S{{}}he eyes the box on the table in front of her. It had been shoved deep into the storage area, forgotten or assumed lost, and revealed only by the deep cleaning she’d finally committed herself to. She’d felt her knees weaken when she realized what it was, and considered quitting the cleaning to inspect its contents. But one doesn’t survive twenty years in the Unincorporated by getting distracted from what needs getting done, so she’d set the box aside and continued with her work. - -But now, with the sun set and no further chores before bed, she hesitates. - -So many years ago. And a time she rarely revisits in her mind. Perhaps she should just shove the box back into the storage area. Perhaps she should dump its contents into the fire. - -She sips from her drink and watches the flames in the hearth. Then her hand reaches out and she pulls the box to her. - -Seeds wrapped in towels, perhaps a half-dozen bundles of these, fill the top layer of the box. Her early successes surviving in the Unincorporated, set aside against hard times to come. Hard times had come, but never so bad she’d needed to withdraw or even remember making this deposit. Next are artifacts of pre-Unincorporated habitation. Bottle caps. Some coins. A fat ring of keys. And bullet casings, lots of bullet casings, collected before she realized their ubiquity in the Unincorporated. - -She gently pushes these items aside, and there it is. - -The photograph she knew would be here. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“T{{}}his bus is so hot,” said Bert. - -Frank Flowers, seated next to Bert, feigned sleep with his eyes closed and head back on the seat rest. This did nothing to compel Bert into quiet. - -“I can’t believe they’d just let us sit out here in the blazing sun. A bus like this will turn into an oven. Literally. They need to be worried about our health and safety. We’re in the middle of the Unincorporated for god’s sake. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.” - -Bert’s phone dinged, and Frank enjoyed a moment of peace while Bert frantically tapped messages into the device. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said eventually. “Come on! When is the new bus going to get here?” - -Frank had run some calculations when they’d first broken down. They’d been stranded for forty minutes now, but Frank figured the transfer bus from Campus Alpha was still another hour away. - -“My boss is furious.” Bert continued. “She’s been bitching about this downtime since the meeting was scheduled. It *is* ridiculous that the only way between Campuses is a three-hour bus through the Unincorporated. You’d think they could have figured out *something* by now.” - -Frank had seen old pictures of planes sheared in half by the high-strata winds. And those were from before most of the world had gone Unincorporated. - -“She said if I miss this meeting, she’s going to have me transferred to Waste Services. That is, if she isn’t allowed to fire and have me banished from AGCorp entirely. I’m going to talk to the bus driver and see if he can tell us when we’re going to get out of here.” - -Frank felt the seat next to him empty. He opened his eyes and watched Bert make his way to the front of the bus. “Excuse me. Driver?” Bert called. - -“Please return to your seat,” said the driver, looking at him through the mirror. - -“I need to know when we’re going to be picked up and can get to Campus Alpha. There’s an upper management meeting that I have to be there for.” - -“A transfer bus is on the way. I’ll need you to remain seated until it arrives.” - -“But how long will that be?” - -“Sir!” the driver said with more force. He turned around in his seat, holding his hand radio to the side. “You’re in violation of your Transport User Agreement. Please do not make me call this in.” - -Bert put out his hands in surrender and returned to his seat. “Fucking driver,” he said. Then he craned his neck to look behind them. “Thank god. I think the transfer bus must be here.” - -Frank became alert. He was quite sure it wasn’t the transfer bus. Raiders and pirates weren’t particularly common in the Unincorporated any more, but occasionally incidents happened. People huddled at the windows. Many had their phones pointed outside, and others appeared to be fishing for their devices. - -“I need to get a picture of this,” someone said. - -“Excuse me,” Frank said. He stood and stepped over Bert. - -“Driver’s not going to like that,” Bert muttered. - -Frank had made it a couple rows back when the crowd turned as one, many of them pointing to the right-hand side of the bus. He couldn’t see anything. A woman in this row had stood and was blocking most of the window. She had her phone out, and Frank heard the shutter effects of her taking multiple pictures. Then whatever was out there had passed them. The woman lowered her phone and began swiping through the content. - -“Did you get anything?” he asked her. The woman started and looked up. - -“What was it?” he said. - -She held out the phone for him to see. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> **Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation** -> -> **Campus Alpha** -> -> **East Receiving Lobby** -> -> **Interview Subject: Bert Spencer** -> -> *BS*: How long is this going to take? I really need to get to work. -> -> *Interviewer:* Not long. Please take a seat. You were a passenger on Bus 505? -> -> *BS:* Of course. You just saw me walk from there to here. Look, I really need to get going. My boss just threatened to throw me out of a window when she sees me. It’s going to be worse if I don’t get back to the Department immediately. -> -> *Interviewer:* We understand there was some excitement during your journey on Bus 505. -> -> *BS:* Excitement? Yeah, I guess you could call the bus breaking down and me missing my very important meeting with upper management some excitement. Hey, I’m really going to need some documentation about the breakdown. When it happened. How long we were sitting there. I doubt it will help, but it would be something to show this shit-show wasn’t my fault. -> -> *Interviewer:* We’re not referring to the mechanical anomaly. -> -> *BS:* < pauses > Are you talking about the dog? I don’t know. I didn’t really see it. -> -> *Interviewer:* There was no dog. -> -> *BS:* I’m pretty sure there was a dog. -> -> *Interviewer:* Are you familiar with *Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation* *v. Jade*? -> -> *BS:* Sort of? Is that the one about our chemicals killing all the dogs? -> -> *Interviewer:* It is the case against Miriam Jade for making false claims that negligence on the part of AGCorp killed a species that never existed in the first place. -> -> *BS:* Like I said, I didn’t really see anything. -> -> *Interviewer:* You saw a goat. -> -> *BS:* < snorts > -> -> *Interviewer:* We recommend you familiarize yourself with the sentencing of that case. The penalty for spreading rumors and false information that could harm AGCorp is severe. Especially for an employee also being scrutinized for a Failure to Appear violation. -> -> *BS:* Scrutinized? -> -> *Interviewer:* Have a good day, Mr. Spencer. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> **Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation** -> -> **Campus Alpha** -> -> **East Receiving Lobby** -> -> **Interview Subject: Alyssa Perez** -> -> *Interviewer:* You were a passenger on Bus 505? -> -> *AP:* That’s correct. -> -> *Interviewer:* And you’ve arrived at Campus Alpha on a work visa from outside Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation? -> -> *AP:* Yes. I am an Employee Citizen of Agile Pharmaceuticals, a Limited Liability State of the Federation of Boutique Firms. -> -> *Interviewer:* Boutique Fringe. -> -> *AP:* I’ve heard the Five Corporations call us that. -> -> *Interviewer:* Please describe the work you’ll be doing for AGCorp. -> -> *AP:* I am working on a drug that combats the effects of Rogue Viral Marketing. -> -> *Interviewer:* Cognitive Breakdown. -> -> *AP:* Exposure can result in a number of effects, but yes, Cognitive Breakdown seems to be the most prevalent and is my focus of study. Recently, the compound I’m working on showed encouraging results when paired with AGCorp’s Neural Liminals. I’m here, at the invitation of your employer, to research more tightly integrating the two products in hopes of preventing future cases. If the latest tests can be trusted, perhaps we can even reverse existing damage. -> -> *Interviewer:* Then having access to the patented liminal lines and the support of AGCorp is critical to the success of your work? -> -> *AP:* < nods > And the success of my work could prove critical to AGCorp. Rogue Marketing is a threat to all of us. -> -> *Interviewer:* There was an incident on the bus. -> -> *AP:* The breakdown? -> -> *Interviewer:* After the mechanical anomaly, an animal was reported outside the bus. -> -> *AP:* Oh, yes, the dog. That was surprising, and very encouraging. There must be pockets in the Unincorporated where the species was either never infected or the dosages were low enough that immunity has developed. Someone should investigate. -> -> *Interviewer:* The press histories of AGCorp are very clear about the existence of dogs. They are a fabrication perpetrated by one of the other Four Corporations in an effort to damage the viability of various AGCorp chemical products. Therefore, what you saw could not have been a dog. -> -> *AP:* I see. -> -> *Interviewer:* We believe what you saw was a goat. -> -> *AP:* A goat? -> -> *Interviewer:* Yes. Definitely a goat. -> -> *AP:* Fine. Is that all? -> -> *Interviewer:* Almost. Footage from the bus suggests you may have captured a picture of this goat. -> -> *AP:* *< sighs >* -> -> *Interviewer:* May I see your phone please? -> -> *< Subject* *removes* *a phone from her bag and hands it to the interviewer. Interviewer sets the phone on a raised device next to him and then picks it up again. >* -> -> *Interviewer:* Hmm. This device does not appear to be working. How unfortunate. -> -> *AP:* My whole phone? You couldn’t just remove the individual pictures? -> -> *Interviewer:* Given the important work you’ll be doing, we will gladly replace it. With an AGCorp model, no less. Much more reliable. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> **Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation** -> -> **Campus Alpha** -> -> **East Receiving Lobby** -> -> **Interview Subject: Frank Flowers** -> -> *Interviewer:* Please describe the events of your recent travel through the Unincorporated. -> -> *FF:* I boarded Bus 505 in Campus Charlie and we entered the Unincorporated on our way to Campus Alpha. Around 2pm local time, Bus 505 experienced a mechanical anomaly. The driver maneuvered us to the side of the road without incident and reported the situation. About half an hour later, there was a bit of excitement when a goat passed outside, but it was short lived, as the goat disappeared into the scrub moments after being spotted and then did not reappear. About an hour and a half later, the transfer bus arrived and the remainder of the journey occurred without incident. -> -> *Interviewer:* Thank you, Agent Flowers. Welcome home. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}rank Flowers observed the tall grass and thick weeds as he followed the walk to the front door. The yard seemed to have been neglected for a month or more, which fit the timeline. - -He rang the bell. - -Looking from the porch, he took in the neighborhood. Modest homes on large plots of land. Pretty typical for the edge of Campus, where residents liked being remote and removed. - -He rang the bell again. - -Still no reply and no sounds of movement from inside. The yard then. - -He trudged through the grass, making his way around the side of the house and into the back. And there was Alyssa Perez, sitting in an outdoor chair, staring into the distance. Frank looked and noticed a gap in the border wall through which the Unincorporated was visible. Grounds Maintenance should be notified to fix it up. Though he had a guess Ms. Perez would reopen the section as soon as it was fixed. - -“Hello,” Frank called, walking towards her. Alyssa turned and looked. “I rang the bell a couple times. You must not have heard it.” - -“Was ignoring it,” she said. “And I don’t take kindly to people trespassing.” - -Frank displayed his badge. - -“Oh,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable then.” She turned away from him and continued her contemplation of the Unincorporated. - -Frank took a seat in the chair next to her. “They say you haven’t been to work in a few weeks,” he said. - -“You a truant officer or something?” - -“No.” - -“Then why do you care?” - -“People are concerned. You’ve done impressive work, and you’ve saved a lot of lives.” - -“*AGCorp* lives,” she spat. “The rest of the world can get fucked, right?” She took a swallow from her drink. “I had a home before coming here. One that I looked forward to returning to. But that won’t happen now, will it?” - -The information wasn’t supposed to be public, but he wasn’t surprised she had it. The Boutique Fringe was in chaos, devastated by a new and virulent strain of Rogue Marketing. Agile Pharmaceuticals, Alyssa Perez’s naturalized employer and a recent—if hostile—acquisition target of AGCorp, was among the hardest hit. Reports suggested that 90% of its employees had Cognitive Breakdown and that fires from recent infrastructure failures had turned the Limited Liability State into little more than smoldering Unincorporated. - -“You’ve made a difference to a lot of people,” he said. “I’m one of those people.” - -She studied him. “You look familiar.” - -“We were on a bus together, a few years ago, travelling through the Unincorporated.” - -Her eyes widened and turned hard. “You! I showed you that picture and then they erased my phone. I had pictures of my parents on that phone. The *only* pictures of my parents.” - -“I don’t believe that was part of my report,” he said. “But if I caused that, I apologize. That seems heavy handed for the situation.” - -“And it *wasn’t* a goat,” she said. “Everyone on that bus knew it wasn’t a goat. Everyone employed by AGCorp knows that dogs existed.” - -Frank did not reply. - -She shook her head and took a drink. “Have you been following me around since I arrived, then? Must have been a boring couple of years.” - -“The bus was coincidence, but probably resulted in the Network linking us. When concern was raised by your disappearance—” - -“I didn’t *disappear*.” - -“…when you *exceeded your allotted PTO*, individuals in upper management expressed concern for your well being. That concern was passed to my group, and I volunteered for the opportunity to meet you again. Recent events… well, I’m grateful for the work you’ve done, and wanted to be the one to make sure you’re alright.” - -She didn’t look at him, but her posture changed. “Family member?” - -“Yes. My son.” - -“And he’s recovering?” - -“Miraculously.” - -“The treatment could help a lot more people,” she said. “If your bosses would allow it. If letting the world burn didn’t benefit their bottom line.” - -It was Frank’s turn to stare silently into the backyard. - -“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m done.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“B{{}}us 505, do you copy?” - -Ross Kelly toggled the handset. “This is Bus 505, over.” - -“Bus 505, please prepare for route change.” - -He looked at the chain link fence separating the long ribbon of highway from the Unincorporated. *Route change where?* he thought. But then the bus began to slow itself and gradually pulled to the side where it came to a stop. - -“Agent enroute, Bus 505. Prepare for rendezvous.” - -*An Agent Rendezvous,* Ross thought. *Tsk, tsk. Somebody’s been naughty*. He used the mirrors to check out the passengers behind him and wondered if he could guess the target. There was the family that clearly weren’t AGCorp natives seated near the back; they seemed a likely possibility. There was also the guy with the wispy beard and bloodshot eyes that reminded Ross of his loser brother and who currently appeared to be asleep. *Rise and shine, dirtbag.* - -They waited. - -“What’s going on?” a passenger a row behind Ross asked. - -“Nothing to worry about,” Ross said. “We’ll be back on our way in a few minutes.” Not long after, the bus filled with flashing blue and red light as an official AGCorp enforcement vehicle pulled up behind them. - -“Bus 505,” crackled the radio. “We show agent arrival.” - -“Agent arrival confirmed,” Ross said into the handset. He tracked the agent’s progress in his mirrors until the agent stood outside the door. - -“Bus 505, agent has requested access to your vehicle with a valid request code. Please confirm with your operator code.” - -“Confirmed. Beta, zero, eight, charlie, seven.” - -“Operator code confirmed. Access granted.” - -The door opened with a hiss. - -The agent climbed into the bus, showing Ross his badge. “I’m here to collect Alyssa Perez,” he said. “Seat assignment?” - -Ross nodded, grabbing for the passenger manifest, but then the agent said, “Never mind,” and stepped away. - -“What’s this about?” said a woman a few rows from the front. Ross looked at his manifest. Perez alright. - -“Alyssa Perez,” the agent said, “you are ordered to return with me to Campus Alpha.” - -“Absolutely not. By what right?” - -“By order of the CEO, you are in violation of your contract and are believed to be in possession of confidential and proprietary information that is the sole property of Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation. I am authorized to use whatever means necessary to prevent your departure.” - -Ross’s eyes widened. This was not good news for Perez. *Just don’t do anything on my bus,* he pleaded silently. The cleanup and the paperwork would be a nightmare. Then he realized Alyssa Perez was looking at him through the mirror. He quickly looked away. - -“It’s time to go,” said the agent. Perez didn’t move. “Now,” said the agent. He moved his hand to his gun. - -“Fine.” Perez stood up and gathered her things. The agent backed away, making room for her to pass, then followed her out of the bus. His hand rested on the butt of his gun throughout. - -“Bus 505,” came the radio, startling Ross. “We’ve received signal that the Agent Rendezvous has concluded. Prepare for relocking and resumption of route.” - -“Confirmed,” Ross replied. The doors thumped shut and the light above them switched to red. Moments later, the bus moved forward and merged back onto the road where it gradually began to pick up speed. - -Ross kept his eyes on Perez and the agent via his mirrors. She gesticulated and appeared to be yelling while the agent stood impassively. Then she darted from the road and dived onto the dirt, wriggled through a gap in the chain link and then ran, into the Unincorporated. The bus was getting further away and details were getting fuzzier, but Ross clearly saw the agent pull his gun. - -He saw the gun-hand jerk and watched Perez drop. - -He switched his eyes to the road in front of them. *I didn’t see anything,* he told himself. *I didn’t see a goddamn thing*. But he thought back to a run three years ago when a dog—sorry, goat—had run beside the bus, and remembered the resulting nightmare of interviews and reports and new procedures that had created. - -He hadn’t seen anything that time either. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he edge of a road, and the mesas and rocky scrub of the Unincorporated beyond. A chain link fence, rusted and falling down in places, separates the two. There’s a sign on the fence, faded and barely readable, warning of the extreme dangers in the Unincorporated. And beside the road trots an animal that wasn’t supposed to exist. Yellow fur, white paws, and a shiny black nose. Its giant tongue lolls from the side of its mouth. - -She sets the picture of the dog down and picks up the next photograph. Her parents. Younger in this picture than she is now by a decade. Her eyes well with tears as she touches each face gently and then puts the picture down. The final items in the box are schematics for producing neural liminals and drugs to reverse Cognitive Breakdown. She remembers their weight as she’d smuggled this information to the surviving Corporations in what remained of the Federation of Boutique Firms. - -They are heavy, just like the fear of AGCorp retribution she’s lived with ever since. Just in case they ever *really* find out. - -A cold wet nose pokes her in the arm. - -“Am I not paying enough attention to you, Flowers?” she says, and leans back so the dog can nuzzle beneath her arm and press himself tight against her. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Unincorporated** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451939816727016).* diff --git a/content/issue-29/WoodcutterWitchwife.md b/content/issue-29/WoodcutterWitchwife.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7b96f7f8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/WoodcutterWitchwife.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,90 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Woodcutter and the Witchwife" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Owen G. Tabard -copyright: '© Owen G. Tabard 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Our next story also has an air of the traditional to it—this time Owen G. Tabard takes us into the territory of the folktale, in which everyman heroes make rash promises in search of glittering rewards, and devastating rules of three (and other fearsome narrative monsters) lie in wait for the misguided." - -image: images/Witchwife.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [GioeleFazzeri ](https://pixabay.com/photos/viking-warrior-vikings-sword-5151537/) [twice](https://pixabay.com/photos/man-viking-axe-knight-medieval-6027213/), [analogicus](https://pixabay.com/photos/skin-eye-iris-blue-older-folds-3358873/), [KEREM_TASER](https://pixabay.com/photos/wood-wall-brick-brick-color-hoard-4622667/), and [Ash _ Ismail](https://unsplash.com/photos/OLRWjFIRvxY)." - -type: stock -slug: the-woodcutter-and-the-witchwife -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}L{{}}ong ago in the Danelaw, when heathens still dwelt there in large number and magic was abroad in the realm, there lived a young woodcutter named Halfdan. Halfdan was a tall man, handsome and ruddy complected, with hair and beard the color of barleycorn, but poor. He was strong, and as a youth he had gone in viking with his Jarl to the far islands, but he won no wealth nor glory there. When he returned it was only to his simple wattle-hut with a roof of sod at the edge of the forest that covered the Jarl’s lands, where he set about to ply his trade. - -His life then was simple and free, and he earned enough to eat well, but he grew dissatisfied. So one night, on the eve of Yule-tide, he departed his wattle-hut and trekked through the dark wood. Clouds smothered the starlight and he became lost in the cold, and for a time he thought that he might die. But at last he came upon a clearing where lay a hovel which was the abode of a witchwife. - -The witchwife appeared to him as an old woman, hair wild and gray, and eyes that burned with a power beyond human ken. Her name was Vedra, and she knew Halfdan already, although they had never met before. When she asked why he had come, Halfdan opened his palms to her and spread his arms wide, saying, “I am a poor man of low birth, but I am strong and able. I am sure I could earn the wealth and fame of a great Housecarl, if I had only the opportunity.” - -“I could make this for you,” said Vedra, “but at a cost.” - -“Name it, and I will pay,” said Halfdan. - -She named to him a large sum of gold and said that in ten years’ time would she return to him to collect her due, and Halfdan readily agreed. Vedra bade him, “Go down to the beach in the spring, and there a ship and crew will await you. But remember that your debt must be paid, else all you have obtained by my magic shall be lost.” Then she vanished along with her hovel, and Halfdan was alone in the cold of the dark wood. - -When spring came, Halfdan did as the witchwife had instructed and went down to the beach, where he found a splendid longship with a dragon carved into its figurehead and great crimson sails. Waiting beside the ship were two score of stout men, fine warriors all, each in helmet and byrnie. All hailed him as their leader, though he knew them not at all. - -Halfdan took the crew and with them went in viking to the far islands, and by summer the longship was laden heavily with plunder. On their return the Jarl, who was much impressed by Halfdan, took him into his fold and raised him up to Housecarl, giving him great gifts of gold and lands. - -It was in the house of the Jarl that Halfdan caught the eye of the Jarl’s beautiful daughter Signy. But when Halfdan paid her court she was aloof and made as if to despise him. So Halfdan inquired after Signy to the Jarl, and learned that she could not take a man, for she was under a wicked curse to transform each night into a bear, and thus would devour any man who sought to share her bed. This curse hung heavy upon her heart, for she had come to love Halfdan dearly, as he did her. - -So it was when, on the Yule-tide of the tenth year, Vedra the witchwife returned. “Halfdan,” said she, “you have the great fame and wealth of your heart’s desire, now I have come to collect my due.” - -Halfdan was indeed wealthy and had enough and ten times again to repay the witchwife, but in his heart were thoughts of Signy, so instead he held his open palms spread forth asking that she should lift the curse from Signy that he might win her heart. “If you do this,” said Halfdan, “I shall repay you what I owe tenfold.” - -And so Vedra named a heavy sum of gold, saying that she would return again in ten years’ time to collect her due, and Halfdan readily averred that he would so pay. Vedra produced for him a small leather pouch and bade him thus: “Take this magic powder to the bedchamber of Signy Jarlsdottir. Sprinkle it upon her and the curse will be lifted.” - -“But how will I go to her?” Halfdan asked. “For she is locked in her room each night, and surely the Jarl’s men shall bar my way.” - -Vedra said, “By my second-sight, I tell you a secret passageway leads through your Jarl’s house to her bedchamber. Go to her thereby.” - -Taking the pouch from her, Halfdan set out at once for Signy’s bedchamber, for the witchwife had already vanished. With the knowledge imparted to him, Halfdan made his way through a tunnel of frigid earth beneath the Jarl’s great hall, up a narrow spiral of stone stairs, and into the bedchamber of his love. But when he opened the hidden door he found that Signy was transformed already, and a great bear stood before him on hind legs with snarling maw. Without hesitation he cast the magic powder upon the bear, and in an instant the curse was broken and the bear became Signy. She fell into his arms. - -When the Jarl heard the news that his daughter’s curse was lifted he was greatly pleased, and Halfdan and Signy were soon thereafter married. The ageing Jarl, having no other children than Signy and thinking of Halfdan now as his own son, made Halfdan his heir. And so, when the Jarl died a short time later, Halfdan inherited his estates and title. - -In the decade that followed Halfdan ruled wisely and well. His love for Signy blossomed and brought forth a son whom they named Rolf. Though a small and sickly child, Rolf was as ruddy-faced and bright-eyed as his father, and was the joy of Halfdan’s life. Thus when Rolf took ill in his tenth winter and it seemed that he might die, Halfdan was greatly grieved. - -Halfdan’s woe was such that he had nearly forgotten his bargain with Vedra, but she had not. When Yule-tide came, she appeared in his hall saying, “Halfdan Jarl, you have lifted the curse and won the love of Signy, and now hold great fame and wealth beyond the dreams of your youth. Now I come to collect my due.” - -Halfdan opened his palms and knelt before her, asking that she might intercede to save the life of his beloved son. “If you do this,” said Halfdan, with tears in his eyes, “I shall repay you what I owe tenfold again.” - -So Vedra named a sum of gold so vast that it staggered his mind, for it would empty the coffers of his jarldom, and she said that she would return again in ten years’ time to collect her due. Halfdan readily agreed, and his heart swelled with hope as Vedra vanished from his hall. - -He ran to the sickbed of young Rolf, where Signy tended the boy, and when he flung open the door he found the room filled with song and laughter, as Rolf danced and japed to the delight of his mother, the sickness having all at once departed. - -In the decade that followed Halfdan and Signy watched with wonder as Rolf grew into a man, strong of back and stout of heart, and it was not long before he went in viking with Halfdan’s men to win great glory in the far islands by dint of his prowess. - -But, although Halfdan knew contentedness of hearth and home, he knew not peace, for his great jarldom had roused jealousies in his neighbors and he was harried always by the armies of Arthgal, King of Strathclyde. Halfdan recalled Rolf to his side to lead the defenses, and kept Signy ever safe in her bedchamber, for the war soon reached their very gates. - -When the witchwife appeared upon the Yule-tide that tenth year, Halfdan greeted her warmly, with palms out and arms spread wide. Vedra said, “Halfdan Jarl, your son is well and has grown into a mighty warrior of the highest valor. You have the love of your Signy and such fame and wealth as is the envy of all. And I come to collect.” - -Halfdan told her of the troubles brought on by his rivalry with Strathclyde, then asked that she raise him up a great war-host to smite down King Arthgal and win peace for his jarldom. “If you do this for me,” said Halfdan, “I shall repay you what I owe tenfold.” - -Vedra shook her head, for the debt had now been so many times multiplied that such a sum would be more than the wealth of all the Danelaw put together. “No,” said she, “it cannot be done. Now I must have my due.” - -Halfdan did not expect to be so rebuffed, but greatly fearing the witchwife’s power he bade Rolf to raise a tax in order that he might make recompense to Vedra. Halfdan’s people were loyal and paid gladly, but Arthgal had wrought havoc and the realm was poor. When at last the sun set on that feast of Yule, Halfdan had laid much gold and silver before Vedra’s feet, but not enough, for he fell short of her sum by one farthing. - -Vedra’s face bore a look of sadness even as she shook her head, and thus she vanished, Halfdan’s debt having not been paid. A cold wind blew, and Halfdan turned to look upon Rolf, but he saw not the recognition a son might give to his father but instead a kind of puzzlement, as one might turn upon an impertinent stranger. - -“Who is this sits in my chair?” Rolf demanded of him. - -Halfdan pleaded with Rolf to recognize him as father, but Rolf knew him not. Halfdan then sought out Signy, but she was secluded in her bedchamber and his way was barred. Rolf, taking Halfdan for a madman, had the Housecarls eject him from the great hall. - -His people had been robbed of the memory of Halfdan Jarl by the witchwife’s magic, to them he was merely Halfdan the woodcutter once more. He had no choice but to return to his wattle-hut at the edge of the forest and ply his trade. For some time he lived a simple life and free, but his thoughts returned ever to Signy. His son had become a great Jarl who needed his father no longer, which made Halfdan proud, but he was sure that his beloved, alone in her bedchamber, pined even now for him as he did for her. - -By the next year Rolf had defeated Arthgal of Strathclyde in a mighty battle. Yule-tide came and all the people, in high spirits after a great victory, thronged to the house of their Jarl in celebration. Thus did Halfdan make his way back to the great hall that had once been his. - -When the moon rose on that longest of nights, and his heart was swelled with hope, Halfdan sneaked behind the great hall, and into the secret passageway beneath that was filled with the stench of dampened clay, then went up stone steps and through the hidden door into the bedchamber of Signy, where he was met by a fearsome bear, and devoured. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Woodcutter and the Witchwife** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451934546727543).* diff --git a/content/issue-29/XoraisHand.md b/content/issue-29/XoraisHand.md deleted file mode 100644 index b9cddac0..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/XoraisHand.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,452 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Xorai’s Hand" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Celine Low -copyright: '© Celine Low 2022 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "The first big read of the issue, Celine Low takes her inspiration from the nomadic civilisations of the Mongolian steppes and delivers a fantastical coming-of-age adventure that melds action and magic, loyalty and friendship, greed and evil, all sprinkled with hints of that most traditional of narrative forms: the passing down of spoken tales from one generation to another." - -image: images/XoraisHand.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [BlackDog1966](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/fantasy-heroine-portrait-warrior-4458063/) and [aseay0](https://pixabay.com/photos/grassland-inner-mongolia-784332/)." - -type: stock -slug: Xorais-hand -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}X{{}}orai Tsetgerel punched her way out of her mother’s womb with a force that instantly killed the poor woman. You gasp, children, but in those days, death was as much a part of life as food and water. But then, so was magic. There were demons who stole children from their tents if they misbehaved… and devoured them! Those were the days of great evil, and great courage. For wherever there are monsters, there are heroes. - -And, yes, heroines too. - -As Xorai kicked and flailed her muscular limbs, her father, Tsetgerel Boroldai, Jaqhar of the Khavsar horde, carried her out of the tent. His clan had already gathered in anticipation. The Jaqhar shed no tears for the death of his second wife, although he loved her as his life. All his emotion was in his arms as he thrust the screaming infant up to the sky. - -“Today,” he bellowed, “the Boundless Blue has given me a daughter.” - -Faces fell; he ignored them. “My daughter battled death itself to come to us. See how her fists clench, dripping blood! The might of the Khavsar pounds through her veins. Through her, our rule will extend far and wide. No man shall match her in strength!” - -The Jaqhar glared around at his clan, and the horde cheered and stamped their feet. Even the elders smiled as the Jaqhar promised to arrange a strategic betrothal for his daughter—one that would not merely sell her away like chattel, but bring another horde under Khavsar rule. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}X{{}}orai grew up strong and beautiful. She had her father’s piercing eyes, fierce and slanting, and her hair was long and black, woven into forty thick braids. Her thighs were as sturdy as saksaul trees, and her skin bronzed by long days riding beneath the Boundless Blue. By her sixth birthday, she was riding on a khraal, and her wild laugh rang across the plain as the stinging winds whipped her hair. By nine, she could shoot a hare from three *dzaar* away without wasting a single arrow, and at twelve she wrestled a werewolf and won, ripping it from neck to groin with nothing but a blade of flint. - -All the other children were afraid of her, and Xorai had no friends or siblings to play with. Yet she had plenty of love from her father, giving the Jaqhar endless amusement with her wit and valour, far more than any of his good-for-nothing sons had. Xorai’s brothers by the Jaqhar’s first wife had all gotten themselves killed over the years—by plague, by falling off a cliff, by werewolf or wild khraal. - -As I said, children, survival was not easy for our ancestors. - -Indeed, Xorai’s father grew so attached to his only remaining child that he dreaded the day of her marriage. For then she would have to leave his camp, to make her home in another. Every day, when they were not hounding him to sire an heir, the elders pestered him about Xorai’s betrothal. Now the old Shamaness was grumbling in his ear again, for Xorai’s first blood had just come, which meant she was of marriageable age. - -Other than the elders’ pebbly voices, it was a quiet night. Though it was a full moon, the werewolves and wild khraal had learned to steer clear of their camp, in no small part thanks to Xorai. The Jaqhar chewed thoughtfully on a yak shank, pretending to nod respectfully while the elders discussed who should be given Xorai’s hand. - -Inwardly, the Jaqhar sneered. What man was worthy of his daughter? Look at her, stirring the broth on the other side of the tent, clad in the distinctive black pelt of a werewolf. Its snout lay over her head as a hood, its eyes still glowing red with the demon-magic that enabled its transformation. That wolf had been the alpha of its pack, and the Khavsar could breathe more easily until the next full moon transformed more men. Why should he send her away to rule another horde, when she herself did not want to? - -“Let me stay with you,” she had said to him that morning, two hares slung over her shoulder. “Who will keep the Khavsar safe, when I am gone?” - -Tsetgerel Jaqhar chortled. “We have plenty of strong men, you know, and I am not so old yet.” - -“Ah, but who will make you laugh? Who will cook your favourite broths?” - -Indeed. What need had he to sire an heir—another fragile babe who would one day command his daughter, whether or not this prince was worthy? Xorai did all her womanly duties without complaint, yet also protected the Khavsar with the strength of ten men! - -His daughter, he decided, would be ruled by no one. - -“Fine,” the Jaqhar grunted, and the elders fell quiet in surprise. Before they could sigh with relief, however, the Jaqhar narrowed his eyes. “The man who defeats my daughter in a fight will have her hand in marriage.” - -Xorai snorted. The Shamaness’ jaw dropped. Impossible! It was said that the Boundless Blue had blessed Xorai with supernatural strength to make up for the loss of the Jaqhar’s wife. Xorai was only thirteen, and already in wrestling she was unrivalled among the hordes. They had all seen, at the last trade fair, how all the boys she’d beaten straggled home like wilted, storm-tossed flowers. - -The Jaqhar chuckled at the memory, but the elders were not amused. - -An old woman standing behind the Shamaness stepped forward with pursed lips, her face like curdled milk. “While we laud Xorai’s prowess, Xorai’s skills on the battlefield are scaring all the eligible bachelors away.” - -“Besides,” said another, “Xorai’s husband should be submissive. A prince, preferably, so Xorai can rule his horde in his stead. He would remain with us as a valuable asset, while Xorai wrests control over his horde with the might of her fist. It would not do to have him fighting us all the time.” - -“How dull he would be,” said Xorai scornfully. “A husband who obeyed my every whim! I would despise him. I would not want a weak man to be the father of my children.” - -“An alliance must be formed,” the Shamaness insisted. “One needs friends to survive.” - -The Jaqhar shrugged. “If Xorai cannot find a husband, then I will just have to make her my heir.” - -The elders reeled in horror. It was one thing to conquer another horde by making Xorai their queen—ultimately, Xorai would still be under Tsetgerel’s thumb. But it was another thing entirely to make Xorai *herself* Jaqhari of the Khavsar! How could she lead hunts and raids when she conceived, when she had to rear children and organise all the complicated logistics of migration? Did the Jaqhar intend to find her husbands who would willingly take to the wifely and queenly duties? They scoffed. Would any woman even respect such a man? - -The old women tutted, shaking their heads. Laying the burdens of a Jaqhar on a woman’s shoulders would doom her to a life of loneliness, without husband and children to warm her tent—or worse, with a sullen husband and children sundered from her, closer to their nurses than to their own birth-mother. It was best to leave the fighting to the men, they murmured. No woman would find glory in it. - -Xorai leapt to her feet. “There is no glory in bloodshed!” Above her head, the eyes of the werewolf glittered. “This—” she grabbed the wolf’s snout “—was a shameful necessity.” - -The elders exchanged knowing glances. Khavsar women were groomed to be compassionate, like Earthmother, and it was clear from her outburst that Xorai had the heart of a good queen. As mother of a horde, she had the benevolent strength needed to separate squabbling children and a gentle firmness that people could rely on. But it took a different set of traits to be Jaqhar. - -“Sit,” her father growled. It was a savage land they lived in, where resources came only to those with the strength to take it. “Is there no glory in defending your own?” - -Xorai sat slowly, but her mouth was a stubborn line. “Blood is sacred. You taught me that. The spilling of blood is an offence to Earthmother.” - -The elders sighed, like dry grass in the wind. “But when you must choose whose blood to spill?” the Shamaness rasped. She shook one gnarled finger at Xorai. “Whom will you defend, and whom will you kill?” - -Xorai raised her chin. “I defend the weak against the strong.” - -“Foolishness,” the Shamaness hissed. “What if the Khavsar grow mighty?” The long beaded strings in her grey braids quivered. “Will you fight against us as we conquer?” - -“She is young—she will learn.” The Jaqhar stood. “Send a message to the hordes: their men will fight my daughter for her hand. But this summer, Xorai will join the Anulakh.” - -Some of the elders opened their mouths to protest; the Jaqhar raised a hand. “She will have no aid as a woman. She will prove herself with the rest of the boys, and earn the men’s respect.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he wrestlers circled each other, their skins sweat-slicked, their growls feral. In the background, festive tunes rose from snakeskin fiddles, undergirded by the pounding of khraal-hide drums and rhythm bones that evoked the thunderous hooves of migrating yaks, the sleek, snarling power of the raptor-like creatures that herded them, and the terrible grandeur of vast plains and scorching deserts under an endless sky. - -This was the third day of the contest, and they were down to the last five men. - -Xorai sighed, excusing herself. Usually, the Khavsar men refused to engage her in any sport; too often had she beaten them, humiliating them in front of their wives and peers. Xorai had been looking forward to the challenge of fighting the best among the hordes, but so far the turnout was disappointing. - -She knew her father did not really expect anyone to win. He had arranged this contest for other purposes: as a concession to the elders, to sift friend from foe, to test the strength of the other hordes. Those who were absent were not interested in an alliance. And the hordes who were present could showcase their skills, even if none of their warriors won. - -And if Xorai could find no husband, Xorai’s father would be justified in making Xorai his heir. Especially since she would have proven herself indomitable. - -Restless, Xorai walked away from the crowd. Women hovered around the simmering vats of meat at the edges of the camp. Smoke billowed, steamy and pungent. Xorai’s stomach rumbled. The men would be tired after fighting; she would not be wrestling anyone today. She grabbed a bowl and held it out as Duya, an aunt on her mother’s side, ladled in the broth. - -“I saved the yak’s heart for you,” said Duya. “For vigour and courage.” - -Xorai smiled, accepting the bowl with thanks. Duya was the only woman who talked to her; the others resented her prowess over their husbands. - -After sating her appetite, she wandered toward the wooden posts the khraal were tied to, their thick necks bound in rope. They were fearsome creatures, all serrated teeth and sickle claws. Like a cross between a large eagle and a lizard, with leathery skin and a dusting of fine feathers over the head and spine. Some were feeding, grasping a carcass with their sinewy forelimbs, but when Xorai walked past they stood still as soldiers on their brawny hind legs, amber eyes staring straight ahead. These khraal were all battle-trained, taken from their mothers when young and honed into killing machines for hunting and war. In the Anulakh she would have to capture a wild one, a khraal old enough to hunt, yet young enough to adapt to human society. - -Once upon a time, the shamans said, the people of the steppes could speak with khraal and understand them. Human and khraal were of one mind, one heart, connected through a bond deeper than marriage. But when a khraal shed the blood of man, the Skyfather took language from the khraal. As dumb beasts they would serve their penance, until Merciful Skyfather saw fit to grant them speech again. - -“Xorai Tsetgerel,” said a rough voice behind her. - -She whirled. One of the finalists stood staring at her—Yarsav, the adopted son of the Daarin’s Shamaness. He was a *tsagashür*, a white-devil. It was said his mother had lain with a demon. Unlike the steppe-people, he was not tan but unnaturally pale, the exact shade of noon-time snow. His face was cut like an iceberg, his eyes an icy blue, his braids stark white against his black silk tunic. - -“Xorai Tsetgerel,” he said again, tasting her name between his teeth. “Where is your strength?” - -She laughed. The shamans said that those who were blessed with uncommon gifts, whether divine or demonic, had a seat of strength wherein they kept this power. “In my hair,” she said, tossing her forty braids at him as she turned back to saddle a khraal. “Where’s yours?” - -Yarsav smiled, thin lips pulling back over too-sharp teeth. “In my mouth.” Then his hands flared white like miniature suns and he hurled the flames at her. - -Either his aim was poor or he did not really seek to injure; the suns flew wide and exploded somewhere beyond the camp. The crowd surged around them, gasping. Yarsav charged toward her. His strong arms locked around her neck, but she pushed him back, back, their feet kicking up sand. She drove one foot behind his leg and was about to knock him over when she hissed and recoiled, pain searing her arms. His skin was smouldering, sparks of blue crackling over where she’d touched him. - -“*Shüraagdzen*,” she spat. *Demon-curse*—his power an unholy thing. - -She darted left, right, glimpsed the flash of a blade and swooped low. There was a shearing sound. She grabbed the sides of his tunic and slammed him to the ground. The crowd cheered; she had won. - -When she stood, her hair was loose over her shoulders, half her braids in his hands. - -Xorai Tsetgerel laughed long and loud. - -“I lied,” she said to Yarsav. “My strength is in my hands.” - -Yarsav watched her as she strode away, his eyes hard and cold as frostbite. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he people muttered fearfully. Yarsav had used demonic power. He was *shüraagdzen*, bound to bring doom to them all. The Daarin should never have taken in a white-devil. - -A group of Khavsar men gathered to rail at the Daarin. Yarsav had fought dishonourably; his horde must make up for this slight. The Daarin warriors bristled. If Yarsav’s power was unnatural, then so was Xorai’s strength. The match was fair, they claimed. - -Xorai decided not to care. In a match, the ring provided a false sense of security. In life, the only rule was survival. - -She mounted a khraal and galloped off, tearing over the plain with loose bridle, easy seat, corded whip in hand. On the horizon, the setting sun gilt the summer fields in gold, and the peaks of the Seven Kings blazed red in its light. The wind flung her hair back, so much lighter without her braids. As the familiar exhilaration flooded her veins, she was filled with a desire to ride forever. - -She thought of her father having to mediate between the hordes, and did not envy him. She had fought in battles and liked it; the burst of victory in her mouth, and her father’s pride and praise. But she had also seen her father slay her uncle’s entire family when he’d rebelled. The executioner had snapped her uncle’s back while she held her cousin’s hand. The boy had been too young, too brave, too much his father’s son. He’d rounded on the Jaqhar: *I will kill you! I will kill you!* She remembered her aunt, panic-stricken as she clamped a hand over her son’s mouth; the Jaqhar’s face grimly resolute as he marched forward and twisted first the boy’s neck, then his mother’s. - -She did not blame her father. The message had to be sent. But she dreaded the day she would face such a choice. - -*Whom will you defend, and whom will you kill?* - -What was the cost of the freedom to choose? - -She cracked her whip harder, felt the wind almost lift her off her seat, her body low and leaning forward, soaring. - -A soft pounding sounded behind her. She glanced back to see Araban, a bastard-child of the Daarin horde, riding toward her. Xorai scowled, driving her khraal forward, but to her surprise he kept gaining on her. - -“What do you want?” she yelled, as he came abreast. - -For the past two days he had been challenging her to a duel. She had declined at first, but when he’d insisted, she’d knocked him over with the ease of a finger-flick. Still he was undeterred. He grinned. “Another match!” - -Xorai sped up. But when he outpaced her, she yanked her khraal to an abrupt halt. “I won’t marry you,” she snapped. - -“Fine. Just fight me.” - -“Do you *like* being flung about?” - -“Only if you’re doing the flinging.” - -“I came here to be alone,” said Xorai coldly. - -Araban sighed. “Actually, I came to apologise.” He swung himself off his khraal and gave a deep bow. “I am sorry for my brother’s misdemeanour. Yarsav is… unusual. Please do not hold it against the Daarin.” - -Xorai eyed him warily. “You are loyal.” - -“My horde is not kind to children of adulterers. Yarsav and I are alike, in this way. Before he grew into his power, he was often bullied.” - -“Does he not have the Shamaness’ protection?” According to the laws of the steppe, adulteresses were stoned or cast out of their horde, but children were innocent. The children of adulteresses were usually allowed to stay if another woman agreed to take them. - -“He is a demon-child. He will always be feared, and thus he always seeks power. He chases power as a refuge, but it only makes people fear him more.” Araban shrugged. “Nevertheless, he is Daarin. He and I are of one womb, one blood.” - -Xorai looked at him with a flicker of new respect. - -“One match,” she said, swinging herself off her khraal. - -Araban smiled, dropping to a crouch. “How about two?” - -“You test my patience.” - -He launched himself at her. She recognised the move—she had used it against him the first time they’d wrestled. She deflected; he gripped her back with one hand and her elbow with another. She let him hang there for a while, let him test his strength against hers, before sweeping him to the ground. - -He grinned and hopped up, drawing a scimitar from his belt. The curved blade glinted like a crescent moon. Xorai raised her eyebrow and drew hers, too. He lunged, she parried, and less than a minute later his sword was flying through the air. - -“Will you teach me?” said Araban, sprawled on the ground and panting. - -He looked skinny, underfed. Xorai knew how cruel people could be, even within the same clan. *One needs friends to survive.* - -She offered him a hand. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he top three contestants fought Xorai the next day, and none lasted more than two minutes. Finally, the Jaqhar held his daughter’s hand and raised her arm. “My daughter remains undefeated!” he declared. Only Xorai knew him well enough to hear the smugness in his voice. - -The rules should be changed, the hordes complained. Let Xorai pick the best fighter among them all, whether or not he could defeat her. Or let Xorai fight Yarsav again. - -“You’re popular,” Araban teased. “Strong wives beget strong children.” - -Xorai shut him up with a punch that made him double over. She winced; she hadn’t intended to hit him *that* hard. - -“Most of these men are from the northern hordes,” she noted. “They want to cement an alliance against the south.” - -“You’re also beautiful,” said Araban. Xorai smiled. “Your company has made me the envy of all the men.” - -“Hone your blade, Araban, not your tongue.” - -“Why not both?” This time, he danced out of the way of Xorai’s fist. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}raban was a fast learner, and Xorai found that she liked teaching. It was a different sort of challenge. They met often over the summer, Xorai bursting with pride when she saw Araban’s chest and arms lean out, his grip strengthening, his footwork acquiring a serpent’s grace. It was *her* grace, her moves, but he also added something of himself in it. - -Then came autumn, and the Daarin and Khavsar had to part. The Daarin would be taking their herds south. Xorai and Araban agreed to meet at the foot of Blacktooth Mountain the following summer, when they would both take part in the next Anulakh. - -“Be my blood-brother,” Araban said, the day before he left. Xorai saw resilience in his gaze, an iron will. She felt kindness in his calloused hand. - -“Sister,” she corrected. - -So it was that Xorai Tsetgerel and Araban the Bastard raised their swords together beneath the Boundless Blue, and by the mingling of their blood in the womb of Earthmother, swore that for as long as they lived their hands and hearts would belong unfailingly to each other. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he following summer, the youths of the Khavsar and Daarin hordes rode to the Seven Kings, the craggy mountains that bordered the northern steppe where the khraal liked to nest. They journeyed on trained khraal of breeding age, meant to be released back into the wild once they had kidnapped a younger one. - -The boys, if they returned, would be recognised as men. The girls kept pace with them, shrieking with excitement. At sundown they would return to their camps while the boys continued. - -Araban waved when he saw Xorai streaking toward him on her khraal, and Xorai cried his name, forgetting herself in her joy. They clasped each other’s arms, grinning. Araban had grown over the winter, and was lankier now than ever, though his limbs were no longer soft as a fawn’s. Xorai punched him in the stomach, and found to her surprise that it was hard. “You’ve been practising,” she said with satisfaction, laughing as he doubled over with a grunt. - -“Still as feisty as ever, Elder Sister. Have you caught yourself a husband yet?” - -Xorai pulled a face and exaggerated a sigh. “Ah, woe is me! The warrior-princess doomed to a life without love! Only remember me when I die, Araban!” - -Thus they bantered up the rugged scrubland, brimming with the sure-footed confidence of youth. They travelled at a leisurely pace, keen-eyed Araban leading the way. He spotted signs Xorai would never have: broken twigs, misshapen ferns, a downy feather caught on a thorn. Occasionally he would dismount to peer at something in the underbrush, or cock his head and listen. He noted the alarm calls of birds and foxes, the bounding gait of gazelles. - -Just before dawn they saw them: a mother with two young. Xorai would not have noticed them if the smallest had not moved, flicking its long tail as it darted behind a bush. They were camouflaged by the grey-browns of their scaly armour. - -“Beautiful, aren’t they,” Araban murmured. “Look at them play.” - -The smallest of the khraal—a male, judging from its thicker, golden-brown crest—pounced on its sister and growled. The larger female whipped round, snarling. It clamped its jaws over its brother’s neck, and tossed it casually aside. The poor male landed in a cloud of sand, blinked, then sheepishly scrambled to its feet and ran up beside his sister, head bowed. - -“A sign of submission,” Araban whispered. “Moving downwind, head lowered.” - -Xorai watched in fascination. The khraal at home never behaved like that. - -Araban beckoned. They crept closer, lying low an outcrop of rock. Araban raised a finger to his lips. - -The mother lifted her head and sniffed the air. They would have to separate her from her young. Xorai tapped her chest and pointed to the mother; she would handle her, while Araban captured the younglings. Xorai and Araban placed a hand on their khraals’ necks, and their mounts dropped to a crouch. - -At Xorai’s signal they exploded from the brush, ululating. The wild khraal bolted, hemmed in by Xorai on the left and Araban on the right. Lassos swung, and Xorai laughed as she gained on the smallest khraal, then overtook it—she would leave that for Araban. She was neck-and-neck now with the mother and she could almost taste its panic, hear its fury in the thunder of talons on the ground. - - With a powerful leap sideways Xorai landed on its back, her own khraal falling behind. - -The mother raced downhill, roaring with rage, zigzagging and bucking while Xorai bared her teeth and whooped, clinging on to the khraal’s neck with arms of iron. Down came her whip on the khraal’s flank, and the khraal shrieked in pain and terror. The khraal slammed itself against boulders to throw off its captor, but woman and beast were locked in a dead knot, a blur of skin and scales crashing through briars and tumbling down ridges, each testing the other’s strength to her limit. - -For a day and a night Xorai clung on, her grip never slackening. - -At last, halfway down the mountain where the scrub opened into rolling grassland, the khraal faltered. A stream trickled nearby, and it tottered towards the water. Its chest heaved, its mouth foamed; it panted with thirst. Xorai slipped a bridle onto its head, and tugged the reins. A moan sounded deep in its throat, but it halted, obedient. Only when Xorai felt no resistance did she let it drink. As it crouched by the bank, its amber eyes were bleak with sorrow. - -The thudding of khraal feet made Xorai spin around. There was no mistaking that hair, streaming white under the pre-dawn moon—Yarsav. But what was that dark bundle flopping over the saddle in front of him? Xorai frowned. - -“An exchange, Xorai!” Yarsav bellowed, bone-white face stretched into a terrible grin. “Your strength for your blood-brother’s life!” - -Yarsav tossed the flopping heap onto the grass. Araban landed with a yell and twisted himself around, eyes wide with panic. His hands and feet were bound, his forehead bruised and bleeding. Xorai rushed forward, but at a gesture from Yarsav a ring of blue fire shot up around her brother and a wave of heat blasted into her face. - -So Yarsav needed his hands to call up power. If Xorai kept them occupied, she would stand a fighting chance. She catapulted towards Yarsav, then they were a flurry of earth-juddering blows and blue-white sparks. Steel clashed with steel as they chased each other across the highland plains, two silhouettes whirling in a furious dance against a magenta sky. - -“The truth, Xorai!” Yarsav thundered. “Where is your strength?” - -Xorai gave a harsh bark of laughter. “I told you—it’s in my hand!” - -His voice was the howling of the wind. “Which hand?” - -“The one that fights! The one that will be your death!” - -She stuck to him like yak grease, never letting the gap between them widen, giving him no time to think, no chance to summon his demon-fire. Whenever his skin crackled she would rear back and lunge again; he could not hold the heat for long. - -“I will defeat you,” he hissed, his eyes spitting blue flame as their swords met with a resounding clang, “and win your hand by right.” - -The sun rose over the mountains, just as Yarsav’s sabre blazed white. For a fraction of a second Xorai paused, blinded. She heard a *whump*. - -When she could see again her sword was on the ground and her hand was in Yarsav’s, sliced off at the wrist—bloodless, smoking, the flesh instantly cauterised. - -She screamed. And as Yarsav was about to sink his teeth into her severed hand her scream turned to mad laughter, and through a haze of fury and defiance she shrieked, “I lied! You took the wrong hand!” And she hurled herself at him. - -With a snarl of frustration and disgust, Yarsav raised his arms to meet her. Xorai’s sword crashed down, and her stolen hand flew through the air like a frightened sparrow. - -The khraal opened wide its mouth. With three young to feed, she had not eaten in days. Her teeth snapped shut, and Xorai’s hand disappeared down her gullet without so much as a flutter. - -Xorai gave a cry of anguish and then she was on Yarsav again, their blows raining on each other as they vaulted over birch and boulder, sweat drenching their tunics as the sun reached its zenith in the sky. - -Xorai’s hand, it seemed, had given the khraal a taste for human flesh. The beast charged after them, the light back in its amber eyes. As Xorai slung her left fist at Yarsav’s cheek and Yarsav blocked and dodged, the khraal’s hefty hind legs bunched and sprang. Her talons swiped down and dug into his chest; her jaws crunched down on his jugular and she tore out a bloody chunk, lines of drool and red tissue running thick between her teeth. - -Thus Yarsav met the Skyfather, childless and unwed, while the Earthmother drank deep. - -Xorai stood, chest heaving. The brothers of the Daarin lay prone on the ground, one dead before her, one behind. The khraal had never been tamed; she had only pretended to submit. She stood with one talon on Yarsav’s corpse and turned toward Xorai, fiery eyes narrowed. - -Xorai heard Araban shift behind her, and his soft, quivering rasp, “Don’t move.” - -Fear thrummed a heavy rhythm in Xorai’s chest. The khraal’s glare was bitter and terrible, but Xorai’s was as fierce. “You destroyed my hand,” she said to the beast. “I would have destroyed your life, but you saved mine.” She lowered her head, took a few steps back and to the right, and slowly moved forward again toward the khraal, back facing the wind. - -The khraal’s tongue flicked out, two thick tines tasting the air. Her snout was spattered with gore. Xorai smelled the sharp, iron tang of blood on the khraal’s breath. The long tongue whisked out again, dripping red, brushing Xorai’s temple like a feather. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} *strange doubling of perspective occurred, one layered on another. It was as if Xorai tasted the world as a khraal, yet she was also herself. All its ancient, instinctive knowledge was hers, written in blood and bone and passed on from mother to egg to hatchling. The wind spoke to her with a universe of smells: the scent of dry grass on her tongue, the wet earth of a riverbank miles away, the musk of small burrowing animals on the roof of her mouth. Colours sharpened into shades she had never seen before. The khraal before her was magnified, and far away she could see an ant crawling up a blade of grass, and a glowing smear on the ground which she knew was a rodent’s urine trail.* - -*The khraal’s eye was a golden furnace, unnervingly large and near. Xorai saw herself reflected in its black slitted pupil, a tiny figure that brought to mind both fear and an old familiar comfort.* - -*As a khraal she had hunted with men, sharing her kill with the humans who had loved her. She felt the happy sensation of a full belly and the temporary safety of a human camp, where humans made fire that frightened away larger predators. Their guards patrolled the site for werewolf-packs, and every day the women fed fat meat to her children and gave them bones to gnaw.* - -*Her precious, fragile children, yielding to the sting of whips, the humans’ demand for more control. She ripped open a man’s neck, did not care that he was not full-grown. They were tearing her children from her and she was mad with rage. They were breaking her children, teaching them all the wrong things, and she did not understand why. Why they now had to work for their food, why they could no longer hunt whenever and wherever they liked, why they had to run after cattle and hunt other humans. Seasons later, when her children returned, they were no longer recognisable. She had to teach them, slowly, how to be khraal again. To be the wind and caprice, the lightning in the sky and the thunder on the plain, instead of smooth, flat pebbles worn down by the stream.* - -*Eventually her children found mates and lay hatchlings of their own, and she taught them all to fear the humans, those sly duplicitous creatures with their treats in one hand and their whip in another. It took time, to learn how to be khraal. It was not only about eating and hunting and mating. Did the humans think they were just borrowing a few years of the khraal’s lives? These years were not theirs to borrow.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}ll this flashed across Xorai’s mind in an instant, a momentary blending of consciousness before she was herself again, leaving only an impression of salt on a forked tongue. Xorai realised her cheeks were wet. - -“Go,” she told the khraal. “When I am Jaqhari, you and your kind need no longer serve.” - -She did not know if the khraal understood. Xorai wanted to ask her for her name, but sensed she would not be able to use it. It was a scent, a subtle tinting of the air that no human nose could discern. It was a cry no human throat could make. - -The khraal snorted. Her mouth yawned wide to reveal jagged rows of teeth, and her bloody breath gusted warm on Xorai’s neck. Every muscle in Xorai screamed at her to run, but she held herself still. Then the khraal turned, and Xorai felt the rush of air from her tail as she took off. - -Xorai squinted into the blinding sun, watching the fading outline of a creature she almost understood. There was a feeling in her chest threatening to explode—awe, perhaps, but also a wrenching sense of loss. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Y{{}}arsav’s flames had died with him, and now a ring of charred earth scarred the land. Xorai sliced the ropes holding Araban and helped him up. - -“I owe you my life,” he said, taking her hand. He stared at the stump where her other hand used to be, and his lip trembled, his eyes darkening with grief. - -Xorai shook her head. “You are my blood; your life is mine.” - -They took Yarsav’s khraal and set off at a slow lope, each deep in thought. Araban held the reins. Xorai slumped, exhausted, in front of him, nestled in his arms. - -“The people of the steppes have always had khraal,” said Araban quietly. “Without them, we cannot survive.” - -“In the past, we did.” - -“In the past, other hordes did not use khraal as they do now. The Khavsar will be nothing without khraal. Your horde will be devoured by others. *You* will be devoured by your horde, who will not accept you as Jaqhari. You need the khraal.” - -“Brother,” said Xorai. “Will you stand with or against me?” - -“I will be your right hand, Elder Sister. Always.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he wind moaned across the shrubland, bringing triumphant ululations to their ears. They proceeded warily, the khraal creeping up behind a slope. - -“The Aangut,” Araban whispered. - -In the distance a gang of masked riders galloped in a circle, surrounding a group of people huddled on the ground. One of their headscarves fell, revealing a long braid of snow-white hair. - -“*Tsagashür*,” said Xorai, her voice hardening. - -“Perhaps there are more like Yarsav,” said Araban with wonder. “Perhaps these are his people, travelling from behind the mountains.” Then he stiffened. “Children.” - -Xorai blinked. Araban was right; his sharp eyes had spotted a toddler and an infant, hidden under their mother’s cloak. Beside them a man lay, bright blood soaking the ground. - -Xorai snatched the reins and was about to urge the khraal forward when Araban grabbed her one hand. “It could be a trap.” - -Yarsav’s face loomed in her mind. Who knew what that demon was capable of, even in death? Then the baby’s wail cut through the air like a fraying thread, and Xorai did not hesitate. - -The khraal sprang forward and they moved as one; Araban drew his bow and Xorai her scimitar. Two men fell forward on their khraal, Araban’s arrows sticking out of their backs. Xorai’s blade flashed faster than the eye could see, deflecting the rain of arrows that the men threw back at them. Steel met steel again in a wash of blood. - -Araban guarded their right flank, Xorai their left. But there were twelve men against them and Xorai and Araban were weary. Araban could only hold them off for so long with bow and arrow, and when they neared he fumbled with his sword. And though Xorai’s left arm still had the strength of three men it felt clumsy to her, slow and inflexible. She cut down mask after painted mask, each with an expression more dreadful than the last. Yet they kept coming. - -Bushy brows and yellow fangs. Hollow eyes and gaping maws. - -Her body screamed with pain and fatigue. - -Her arm flagged. She hissed as an arrow stabbed her side. Then an echo of a smell came on the wind, and the soft pounding of taloned feet. And Xorai laughed, for she knew her friends had come. - -They leapt into the fray, the khraal who had eaten her hand charging forward with an army of wild khraal. Claws tore into flesh. Teeth sank into necks. The Aangut’s khraal roared, milling in confusion. - -In their exchange, perhaps the khraal had taken more from Xorai than she’d realised, become a bit more human just as Xorai had become a bit more khraal. The khraal seemed to speak to one another now, more clearly than before—or maybe she was just noticing them more. To Xorai, watching them as she fought on, the wild khraal spoke to the trained ones in their mysterious way, through body and wind. For suddenly the latter went mad, bucking and twisting, and the moment their wild peers pulled the Aangut off their saddles, the once-disciplined steeds turned on their masters and ripped out their throats. Blood and sinew flew in crimson sprays. - -Only one khraal remained loyal, biting at the other khraal and hurling them aside in defence of his master. Or perhaps his master was defending him, shooting arrow after arrow despite his bleeding arm. Some lodged fatally in a khraal’s eye or mouth; most bounced harmlessly off the khraal's rugged scales. - -Two khraal pounced. The Aangut screamed as talons lacerated his shoulder. He swung his scimitar. One khraal slid off, but his mount toppled as teeth pierced her neck, dying red the feathers on her back. Xorai expected the man to run—anyone would—but with a roar he hacked at his assailant, covering his khraal’s wounds with his hands in a bid to staunch the bleeding, his body a fragile shield over hers. - -It was no good. Another two khraal attacked, and the man collapsed over his steed, their blood mingling in a pool that soaked the earth. - -Xorai closed her eyes. Around her the clash and clamour of battle had been replaced by the quieter sounds of gnawing and tearing flesh. A scent came from upwind—imperceptible to her human nose, but Xorai felt it nonetheless in a gentle tug of the spirit. She dismounted, bowing to greet the khraal who had saved her life yet again. - -In the khraal’s blazing eyes Xorai saw herself, wrought small in the black slits of her pupils. As she moved downwind with her, Xorai reached out a hand to touch her neck, and the khraal blinked once, slowly. - -“Xorai Jaqhari,” said Araban, with awe and a hint of fear. “Queen of the khraal.” - -“No,” Xorai murmured. “Just a hand of the khraal.” - -But as her shoulder touched the khraal’s and she breathed in the creature’s scent, something like dry grass and the rust of blood, Xorai felt it keenly in her heart—not so much words as an impression, as clear as if the khraal had spoken: - -*Xorai Tsetgerel*, *friend of the khraal.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hus Xorai returned home with not one but twelve khraal, one of which carried three *tsagashür*, much to the consternation of her horde. Her father ran up to embrace her, and the Shamaness cried out in concern when she saw Xorai’s missing hand. - -Xorai knelt before the Jaqhar. “Father,” she said, “let the khraal go.” - -Tsetgerel stared at her for a long moment. “I would give you anything under the sky, daughter, but I cannot give you this.” - -“Think, girl,” the Shamaness pled. “How can you ask this of your father? The horde will revolt. Without the khraal, do you think the Khavsar can survive? The other hordes will waste no time in attacking.” - -Xorai rose again. “The khraal will help us. As friends, not as slaves.” - -“How can we trust them?” said the Jaqhar, and the khraal growled, stepping forward. Swords flashed out around the Jaqhar, his men braced to defend him with their lives. Xorai felt the khraal’s bloodlust as if it were her own. - -*Kill them. Lead the Khavsar. We will help you conquer the steppe.* - -Xorai frowned. *No.* - -The silence was fraught with tension. Xorai stood with her friends on one side and her family on the other, and waited to see what the khraal would do. - -They were her friends. They did not make her choose. One by one they stepped back, turning to lope back across the plain. - -And Xorai wept, for the world had lost its simplicity. She could not ride forever, she realised. Sooner or later she would have to decide where to camp. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}ome say Xorai stayed to persuade her horde, to teach them about the khraal, but the Khavsar cast her out, for the way that she was proposing did not suit their needs. Others say Xorai did not return home at all, but lived wild in the mountains as one of the khraal. Still others say that one of the *tsagashür* she rescued was not a child but a charming young man, whom Xorai fell in love with and followed to distant lands. - -Only a few storytellers know the truth, though all perhaps tell the truth in one form or other. What do I know? I’m just an old woman, peering dimly through history in search of some wisdom. - -This is the truth I choose to tell: that Xorai took a few of the Khavsar with her and, with Araban as her right hand and the khraal as her friends, began her own horde together with the *tsagashür.* For these blue-eyed, white-haired folk were not demons, after all. They were people of the ice, refugees from the harsh land beyond the mountains. As ordinary as you and me, save for the occasional few who, like Yarsav and Xorai, were blessed with special strengths. - -She named her horde the Khraalin’aizuud, meaning “friends of the khraal,” and they roamed the Seven Kings, giving aid to any of the ice-people who stumbled through from time to time. Whether or to whom she gave her hand in marriage is, indeed, important, but inconsequential to this tale; for she loved generously and was loved in turn, and she treated all her horde, man and beast, as her very own children. - -As for where Xorai’s strength was, no one ever found out—except perhaps the khraal who ate her hand, who does not speak our language and would never tell, even if she could. Whenever Araban asked, Xorai would slip her hand in his and smile. - -“I told you,” she would say, as the howling winds flung back her forty braids and the feathers in her hair. “My strength is in my hand.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Xorai’s Hand** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/451936390060692).* diff --git a/content/issue-29/__index.md b/content/issue-29/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6d74670e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29" -date: 2022-03-27 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 29 -subhead: Spring 2022 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/music_is_his_oxygen.jpg -imageMobile: images/music_is_his_oxygen_mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "Music is his Oxygen, by Bobby Cooper" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#E8BF25' - subheading: - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 1 - flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-29/contents.md b/content/issue-29/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index d2588d63..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Unincorporated]({{< relref path="Unincorporated.md" >}}), by Erik Mann -- [Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills]({{< relref path="GoldPlumesOnDaoodhiHills.md" >}}), by Mandira Pattnaik -- [Fractured]({{< relref path="Fractured.md" >}}), by Gunnar De Winter -- [Xorai’s Hand]({{< relref path="XoraisHand.md" >}}), by Celine Low -- [The Woodcutter and the Witchwife]({{< relref path="WoodcutterWitchwife.md" >}}), by Owen G. Tabard -- [The Cross of Xenophor]({{< relref path="CrossXenophor.md" >}}), by Jeffery Scott Sims -- [In The Weave]({{< relref path="InTheWeave.md" >}}), by David Whitmarsh - diff --git a/content/issue-29/editorial.md b/content/issue-29/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index eb0d8e46..00000000 --- a/content/issue-29/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2022-03-27 -issue: Issue 29 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/music_is_his_oxygen.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 29** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Thanks once again to cover artist Bobby Cooper, whose open invitation to use his work made *Music is His Oxygen* a tempting choice! Bobby works with colored pencil on black paper, with strange and beautiful results — you can check them out on his [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/bcooperart/), and he has [an online shop](https://www.redbubble.com/people/bcooperart/shop) with myriad cool options too." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Smile, reader! I stand on the threshold of a little anniversary! But first, *a downer*. - -When I first published an issue of **Mythaxis**, some parts of the world were already tightly locked down against the spread of Covid-19, while others were still reluctantly shaking off months of complacency and thinking about doing the same. I personally had been isolating for several weeks, fortunate to be able to work from home, far from family but somewhere I was not completely alone. For me, that situation remains much the same. I've only shared space with my day-job colleagues on a handful of occasions since then, and a social life conducted more via screens than in person has become second nature. - -In the slow-time existence that has ruled since all this began, it seems like the world is punctuated mostly by negatives: the escalating spread of the virus; political strife of one flavour or another; vaccine inequality, made all the more unacceptable given the rise in vaccine *denial* wherever over-abundance is the norm. And now, of course, an unjust war to add to all the others, given special treatment this time for being on the doorstep of The West. - -Fair to say, *it's not been a great few years*. - -But, for me, it's not been all bad. - -Today, almost exactly two years after my first issue as editor, I deliver my eighth. Collectively, they represent sixty-seven pieces of writing (and two cartoons!) by almost as many different creators, not to mention cover images by six human artists and one artificial intelligence, and invaluable behind-the-scenes help from collaborators both past and present. The vast majority of these people-and-or-proto-sentient-beings I'd never have encountered if it were not for this magazine, and my experiences with them all have been very rewarding—to say nothing of how much I enjoy my own creative activities in support of their work. - -The title of this issue's cover art is **Music is His Oxygen**. I chose this piece because *making beautiful things* doesn't just help make life generally worthwhile, it can be what keeps us alive through the difficult times, creators and audiences alike. So, I hope that **Mythaxis** and the stories we've been fortunate to include bring you pleasure, and they help to keep us all going until times take a turn for the better again. diff --git a/content/issue-30/AlyonaAndIvan.md b/content/issue-30/AlyonaAndIvan.md deleted file mode 100644 index 27270a0d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/AlyonaAndIvan.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,188 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Alonya and Ivan" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- science fiction -- horror -authors: -- Elana Gomel -copyright: '© Elana Gomel 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Real-world conflict has always provided a rich vein to mine for fiction, though when the conflict is war there can be little doubt that those inspired would prefer not to be. Here, Ukraine-born Elana Gomel bends a striking East-European folktale into a timely parable of terrible loss and sacrifice. Content warning, for horror, familial violence, and sorrow." - -image: images/AlonyaAndIvan10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created by incorporating detail from a Creative Commons image by [qumono](https://pixabay.com/photos/boy-alone-future-walking-forward-3822292/) into an original image by [lighthouse](https://depositphotos.com/275488964/stock-photo-girl-lost-in-creepy-forest3d.html) at depositphotos.com - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: alonya-and-ivan -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}y mother, grandmother, and aunt died at dawn. My father was already dead, killed at the Battle of Tarasovka, so I did not have to worry about burying him. But Ivan and I tried to dig the graves for the rest of them. Ivan was only six, so the shovel was almost as tall as he was, and I had to grab the handles to prevent it from twisting and hitting him on the head. Finally, I had enough. - -“Go and bring some flowers, Vanya,” I told him. “We will put them on the graves.” - -The spring came early this year, and the white daffodils and purple dream-herb were already gone. But lilac was just beginning to bloom, and both my mother and her sister, Aunt Oksana, had loved its sweet smell and clusters of star-shaped flowers. I knew that Ivan knew it, and counted on him to go to our neighbors’ deserted garden where a mature lilac was just beginning to bloom. He would have to cross the burnt-out place where Pavlik’s house had stood, walking through the ashes. - -When he disappeared behind the hedge, I quickly pulled the three bodies into the empty barn and latched the door. They were just as much at peace as they would be in a hole in the ground; and it would give Ivan and me time to flee. The call would be back. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen I woke up last night, Ivan was still huddled up under the blanket on the truckle-bed. Mama had told me he was growing up and that I should sleep with Aunt Oksana in the gornitza while she and Grandma shared the master bedroom, but I refused. I did not want to leave my baby brother alone at night. And as it turned out, I was right. - -I heard it even before Mama burst through the door of the bedroom, towels wrapped around her head so it looked like a cabbage. A thin distant wailing, so monotonous it set my teeth on edge. - -“To the cellar!” Mama screamed, shaking Ivan to wake him up. - -I hated the cellar, with its sour smell of fermented cabbage and desiccated mice. Since electricity was gone, the cobwebbed bulb would be useless. But I got up and followed her as she carried Ivan down the stairs. He was already too heavy for her, but I knew she wanted to do it. She put him down, kissed him on the forehead, and turned to me. - -“Take care of him,” she said, kissed me, and climbed up the ladder, pulling the heavy trapdoor down as she exited. The towels, unwound, fell down in her wake and lay on the floor like a shed snakeskin. - -I shushed Ivan and sat by his side, holding his hand until he fell asleep again. I sat and waited for a long time until I decided the night was done, then I picked up Mama’s towels and made one of them into a bindle to hold important things, like some bread and sausage from the kitchen shelves. I did not know what time it was because all the clocks had stopped after the Oborotni came. Ivan did not even remember what clocks were for and thought the pot-bellied alarm painted with flowers on the dresser in the gornitza was an ornament. Our mother had tried to teach him letters and numbers from the same illustrated textbook I had used in first grade—when there was still school in the village—but he was not interested. - -I added the book, tying it into the bindle. Even if my brother was resistant to learning, he liked the colorful pictures, with a red watermelon for A and a smiling cat for K. - -I woke Ivan and we climbed up the ladder and raised the lid together. The sky outside was the color of the blue glass bottle my father had given me as a gift for my tenth birthday. I dropped it when I saw his death notice in the mail, and it shattered into sharp cutting fragments. - -Mama, Grandma, and Aunt Oksana lay in the gornitza, before the red corner where the icons and the photographs of my father and grandfather in their uniforms were displayed. There was a lot of blood. My mother still clutched the kitchen knife which she had used to slit the throats of her mother and sister and then her own. I pried it out of her rigid fingers and washed it. I added it to the bindle. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}van came back staggering under the load of broken off lilac branches, his blond hair peppered with mauve and purple florets. He must have denuded all the lilacs in the Sadkos’ garden. I wanted to tell him off, but what did it matter? So, I directed him to dump the flowers on the shallow indentation under the apple tree which I had filled in while he was away. - -“This is for Mama, Grandma and Auntie,” I said. From his sideways glance I knew that he realized the bodies were not here, but he said nothing. We stood by the flower heap in silence, and I tried to say a prayer to Mother of God. But though we had a couple of icons in the gornitza, our family were not religious, and after the Oborotni and my father’s death Mama refused to go to church, so I did not know any prayers by heart. And anyway, some people in the village had prayed a lot, and it did not help either. - -I took Ivan’s hand and we walked out of the village and toward the woods. It was a clear day, and the houses were surrounded by billows of pink and white cherry blossoms. The red tiled roofs gleamed, and the golden dome of the church shone in the blue sky. Apart from a couple of houses burned down in the first wave of the invasion, when people thought you could hold off the Call with fire or noise, it all looked untouched and peaceful. I felt a little regret leaving the village behind, but after all there was nobody alive there anymore. Or at least, nobody human. - -“Alyonushka?” Ivan asked, after we crossed the dusty pathway that skirted the village leading to the main road where empty cars were piled up. “Where are we going?” - -“To the forest,” I said. - -“Will we live there?” - -“Yes. The Call will be muted by the trees. And there are partisans in the greenwood. They’ll take us in.” - -He nodded, satisfied. I did not know that there were any partisans there—it may have been just a fairy tale—but if we stayed in the village, we would be dead for sure. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he Call did not work on children below puberty. It could give you a bad headache—a thin piercing wailing like the buzz of a giant mosquito—but that was all. This was why children were often used by the army to attack enemy encampments called ricks with homemade incendiary devices. Most did not come back, but some ricks were destroyed. I hoped that if we did find partisans in the forest, they might train me for such a mission before it was too late. - -I was only eight when we first heard the Call, and Ivan was a toddler. My father, whose face had faded from my memory, supplanted by the sepia picture in the red corner, went outside to listen. I woke up too and heard my mother’s voice. “A siren? Air-raid?” - -Even to me it did not sound like an air-raid: no rising and falling tones. It just went on and on, drilling into my temples. Ivan woke up and started crying. - -And then we saw the people. We still had streetlights at the time, and the night was shot with a harsh mercury glare. On the street outside, a straggling column of men and women in their nightgowns and pajamas walked by our house. No kids. I recognized Aunt Zhanna and Uncle Mikhailo, Pavlik’s parents. - -My father ran outside, and I saw him trying to talk with the people, shaking them by the shoulder as if trying to wake them up. But they were not sleepwalking; their eyes were open, and I saw Uncle Mikhailo, a burly guy who had the reputation of picking fights, slap my father’s hand off. The column rounded the corner of the street and disappeared. - -After a while the annoying buzz stopped. At the time, we did not know that the Call worked on people at different rates. But eventually it would get you, no matter how you held out. My family held out longer than most. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}s Ivan and I followed a faint track that led deeper into the woods, I was thinking about the fact that I was twelve. My monthlies had not come yet, but they would soon. Mama had explained it all to me with the same clarity and precision she must have used in her former life as an administrator. Before the Oborotni, she had been the procurement officer for our village. - -Oborotni liked open spaces—steppes, and cultivated fields, and town squares. Since communications across the Motherland had been interrupted when the Calls started sounding almost every night, we did not know what was happening in the Capital, but I hoped the Great Golden City still stood. The thick forests had always been seen as a possible shelter; thus came the rumors of the partisans hiding in the deepest greenwood as they had done so many times in the past. We had not seen any sign of a human habitation, but neither had we seen any sign of Oborotni. - -The track petered out and Ivan and I found ourselves in a glade surrounded by larches and birch-trees. It was flooded with blue, covered by bluebells and forget-me-nots, so it looked like a lake. I saw Ivan smile and was grateful to the spring. - -We sat down under a birch-tree whose sticky green leaves blazed in the sunlight like emeralds. I unwound my bindle and took out the food. - -“Do you want to eat?” I asked my brother. - -He nodded. He was gathering bluebells into an untidy bouquet. Ivan loved flowers and plants; Grandma called him “a gentle soul” and thought he would grow up to be a kobzar-player or a saint. I was the one getting into scuffles and leaving my friend Pavlik with a bloody nose. I regretted it on that day when Zhanna-turned-vixen went into her house and tore out her son’s throat with her sharp little teeth. - -“Aren’t you hungry, Alyonushka?’ he asked, mouth full of bread and cured sausage. - -I wasn’t, but to make him feel better I took a bite. - -Ivan polished off his bread-and-sausage. “Water?” he asked. - -My heart dropped. I had not thought of taking a water-flask with me. I did not know why; perhaps because it was cool in the morning; or because the streams of blood in the gornitza made my mind recoil from anything liquid. But here we were, in the woods, far from the village wells and water pumps, with nothing to drink. And the food was salty; I only had a tiny bit, and I was already growing thirsty. - -I got up and took Ivan’s hand. “Let’s go,” I said. “We will find water soon.” - -But we did not. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hat first night after we heard the Call, we just went back to sleep. Aunt Oksana did not live with us at the time because her husband, Uncle Volodymyr, was still alive, and so was my cousin Alicia. It was before her father killed her. - -Next morning, the stragglers started to return. - -I remembered seeing the first one. I was curious and slipped out of the house while Mama was cooking buckwheat for breakfast. Aunt Zhanna, Pavlik’s mother, was staggering down in the middle of the street as if drunk, which was not unheard of. I snickered. - -And then I saw her face. - -Under her pinned-up braids, her face was elongated and misshapen like a vixen’s snout, sprinkled with mangy reddish fur. Her eyes had migrated to the sides of her head. One was round and dull like a pebble, the second tiny and gimlet-like, glittering with anger. And yet, she was still, unmistakably, herself. It was not a vixen’s head on Aunt Zhanna’s shoulders. It was Aunt Zhanna kneaded and melded into a foxlike creature that opened its stinking mouth lined with needle teeth and yapped its rage at the world. - -My father came out when I screamed, and other adults, those who had not been lured by the Call, did too. Zhanna-fox was tied up. But then more of the last night’s crop came back. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e went deeper and deeper into the woods. The green glow curdled into a sullen dusk. The trees changed from slender birches to stout oaks. New grass and budding flowers gave way to deadfall. And still, we saw no pool, pond, or creek. - -Ivan was licking his lips repeatedly until I told him to stop. They were so chapped they were beginning to bleed. Wilted bluebells dropped out of his hand, marking our way. Their watery blue teased me with memories of rain. My own mouth felt furry and stale. - - To distract Ivan, I suggested we sit down and rest. I took out the alphabet textbook and showed him the pictures. - -“A,” I said, pointing to the watermelon. “Arbuz.” - -“Water,” he whispered. - -I told him to stay in place and I would scout around, looking for a creek or a marsh. The truth was, I just wanted to escape his pleading eyes. *Take care of him*, Mama had said. - -I walked a little way into a thicket of gnarled pines, the ground covered with dry needles like an old woman’s hair. Grandma’s hair had been that color, dull silver. - -The ground was sloping downward, and I followed the incline when suddenly I heard a loud rustling behind my back. I whirled around, my heart pounding—and confronted Ivan. - -“Don’t want to stay alone,” he pouted, and I was so relieved I did not have the heart to chide him. We went on together. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he worst thing about Oborotni was that they sought no profit. Motherland had suffered enough invasions, wars, and conquests to make the list in my history textbook several pages long. But in every case, the invaders had some goal in mind: gold; slaves; land; glory. They could be negotiated with, or suffered in silence until the people gathered enough strength to rebel. But whatever the Oborotni were, wherever they came from, all they wanted was degradation and death. Towns overrun by animals pretending to be human and humans degraded into animals. They killed our people and turned the rest into mindless chunks of meat inside their churning bodies. - -We knew what they looked like because we saw them later, striding across our land as if it belonged to them. I saw one myself. A thing as tall as the tallest apartment building in the market-town and so heavy the earth shook under its tread. You could still see the seams in its wormy flesh where all the people who went into its making were joined together, braided, and stitched into an approximation of an obese giant. And its head was made of the kaleidoscope of distorted animal faces, rotating in and out of the blackness at the core of it. Its shovel-like hand reached down and swiped the thatched roof off a cottage, and each finger was a man, squirming and flapping the stumps of his torn-off arms. - -I heard stories about ricks where Oborotni lay in untidy heaps of flesh, human and animal, blending and separating and blending even tighter, a hill of seething monstrosity. The army had tried to set fire to ricks, and some had burned. But you could not kill an Oboroten because it was one-in-many or maybe many-in-one, and one death was too little for it. And every night, a call was heard in every town, village, and city of our Motherland and more people left, to come back as beasts, or maybe not to come back at all. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t was getting chilly in this somber grove, but still we walked, until—as I shivered in the dank shade—I heard something. A tiny sloshing sound. - -I ran, almost tripping on the arching roots, and stopped when I saw a dark gleam ahead. - -It was a small black pond, hardly bigger than a puddle, but it seemed deep. Its placid surface was covered with twigs and pine-needles. I looked around for what made a sloshing sound—a branch falling in?—but could not see anything. - -Ivan gave a triumphant shout when he saw the pond and rushed toward it. I grabbed his arm, putting my hand against his mouth. It was not only that I was wary of making noise in this hushed wood. There was something about the pond that gave me pause, even though my parched mouth was screaming for its cooling touch. Bidding Ivan to stand still, I approached the pond and examined the water-margins. There were no reeds, no algae, no water-bugs. It was as if all life avoided it. And yet the water under the twigs seemed to be crystal-clear. - -And then I saw it. At first the pond had appeared to be round: just a deep waterhole. But now, from close up, I realized it was not. It was in the shape of a giant splayed foot, big enough for ten human soles to have been used in its making. An Oboroten had stomped deep into the sacred soil of Motherland, leaving its imprint behind. - -I took a deep breath and looked at Ivan. “We can’t drink it,” I said. “It’s poison.” - -I could not face the tears gathering in his eyes, crawling down his cheeks, stealing the precious moisture from his tiny body. - -I turned away. Just for a moment, but it was all it took. - -Ivan rushed past me, dropped to his knees, and lapped at the pond like an animal. And I thought, *He is just a baby, years from puberty, he is safe*… reassurance for a couple of heartbeats. But when my brother rose to his feet, water dripping off him, I knew any hope was futile. - -His face was running down the armature of his bones like pancake batter, bubbling and viscous. His small frame was filling out in strange places, rising and falling in random bubbles of flesh. The shirt ripped and sloughed off as my brother’s smooth skin erupted in a sprinkling of unclean brown fur. His eyes sunk deep into the elongated, drooping muzzle that was forming out of the remnants of what used to be Ivan. Paws snagging on the sleeves our grandmother had lovingly cross-stitched with traditional black-and-red patterns. A little bearlike creature roared at me, the wet rag of its tongue hanging out from its maw where tiny milk teeth were being pushed out by the growing fangs. They rained upon the ground like pearls. - -Without thought, almost without volition, I lunged at the Oboroten, my mother’s knife clutched in my hand. - -He swiped at me, but he was still caught in transition, his claws soft and weak, a child’s fingers visible inside the bony sheaths. Our father had taught me how to kill a chicken when the food supplies started running low. One stroke under the bristly jaw, and it was done. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}van lay on the ground. The change had not reversed as he was dying. I searched the beastly muzzle for my brother’s face and was relieved to find little. He had only gurgled something; maybe it was my name. - -I sat by him for a long time. I wanted to bury him, but there was no way I could do it. We had not buried our family; maybe this was the punishment. Or maybe it was as random as the Oborotni themselves: a mindless destruction sweeping our land. Because they wanted nothing from us but our deaths. They were not conquerors. They were beasts. And beasts need to be killed. - -I dragged some branches over the body that was not my brother’s. And then I walked deeper into the green maw of the forests, in search of partisans. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Alyona and Ivan** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507931441127853).* - diff --git a/content/issue-30/AnOddRecurringDream.md b/content/issue-30/AnOddRecurringDream.md deleted file mode 100644 index 861f0de9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/AnOddRecurringDream.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,160 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "An Odd Recurring Dream" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- James Davidson -copyright: '© James Davidson 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "My first experience of being published was at the hands of Mythaxis' original editor, so it's always a pleasure when I find myself able to do the same for someone else. James Davidson's tale presents an intelligibly alien future society and leaves the exact nature of its protagonist carefully uncertain - but they are certainly a person of some kind, within certain constraints." - -image: images/RecurringDream10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using multiple Creative Commons images by [merlinlightpainting](https://pixabay.com/users/merlinlightpainting-19833603/) - [many](https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-face-light-painting-light-6174827/) [thanks](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/04/29/19/56/woman-6217386__340.jpg) [for](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/04/29/19/56/woman-6217375__340.jpg) [each](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/06/23/09/08/woman-6358116__340.jpg) [and](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/03/01/07/27/smoke-6058989__340.jpg) [every](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/04/13/06/59/woman-6174826__340.jpg) [one](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/03/02/19/36/woman-6063652__340.jpg)!" - -type: stock -slug: an-odd-recurring-dream -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t’s a simple dream. - -Not like the dream in Liminal Hour, Day 7, Month 13, New Lunar Year 431, in which a parade of Auditory Micro-Minders chirped the condensed itinerary for Pre-Work Hour to the tune of *Fleckdot-33a-ks7 Doesn’t Quit for Uni-Programmed Alta-Womyn*. - -Simpler. - -In this dream, Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water as the non-san-cleansed wind sweeps her hair into her face. She smiles, her hand moving to her forehead to brush the hair away. - -That’s all. - -On the fifth day of only this dream, my mood indicators are all a deep violet. Salisa, my modi-partner, asks me what is wrong. - -“It’s this dream I’ve been having,” I say, and I tell her. - -“I’m sorry,” she says, putting her hand on mine. She gives me her compassionate face. This usually makes me feel better. - -“Would you like me to give you another dream?” she asks. - -In the dream I am given ten neuro-graphic puzzles, each more challenging than the last. I solve them without pausing, and several thousand modis applaud me. - -I wake up beside Salisa, and she gives me her pleased face. “Good morning, Altoni,” she says. “I’m glad you dreamed. It’s going to be a pleasurable day.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t seems she’s right. During Early Work Hour, I reorder Virtronic Algorithms that have become misaligned and am rewarded with a Pleasure Burst. I watch the Newstainment Feed during Mid-Early Rest Hour and receive my Vitafresh Snack, which I choose to take orally. It is Strawmelonfruit and is completely san-cleansed, with no aftertaste. - -However, midway through Late Work Hour I stop all Work programming and return to Rest. By then my mood indicators are blue turning violet. Salisa enters the room and gives me her concerned face. “I’m sorry your Work wasn’t pleasurable,” she says. “Tomorrow’s Work itinerary will be adjusted more to your liking. May I help you refresh before Late Meal?” - -After Late Meal Hour my mood indicators are all bright green, except one that’s still lingering blue. I listen to some Pre-Liminal Tunes and turn down early. - -In the dream Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water, the wind sweeping her hair. There is something about her smile when she raises her hand. It puzzles me, and I wake. - -Salisa asks about my dream. I tell her about Angyla and the smile. She gives me her compassionate face. “I’m sorry your dream was not pleasurable,” she says. “Would you like me to give you another?” - -“No,” I say. “It’s fine.” - -“This dream was to your liking?” - -“No. Or maybe it was, I don’t know. There’s something about it I can’t figure out.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he next day Work is better. I reintegrate twelve Sensory Flash-Circuits and each time am rewarded with a Pleasure Burst. - -When I return, Salisa gives me her pleased face. “I have made adjustments,” she says. “Tonight’s dream will be more to your liking.” - -The dream has the hallmarks of Salisa’s best work. Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water, but this time the water is a pool in which newly hatched Orga-Freshlings swim in concentric circles while singing the Six Pleasure Principles to the tune of *Sensi-Modis Are 97% Effective at Keeping Me in the Reds*. There is no wind, but Fresh Bursts permeate the san-cleansed air. Angyla smiles at me, a wide smile that reveals two rows of symmetrical white teeth. Then she laughs, and immediately the Orga-Freshlings laugh with her. I laugh as well. - -I wake up laughing, and Salisa is laughing too. “I’m glad you enjoyed your dream,” she says. She puts her hand on mine. - -The next day I turn off Modi Support, so when I return from Work Salisa isn’t there. I eat Late Meal alone. Although I’m not tired, I enter Liminal two hours early. - -I’m ready to dream. I want to. - -Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water. The non-san-cleansed wind, its particles dashing in the broken light, sweeps her hair into her face. Her hair does not shine like Salisa’s. It tangles in the wind, and she raises her hand to move it, smiling as she does. Her smile does not give me pleasure. There’s no pleasure in it at all. I wake without Salisa, never having felt more alone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}’m at Rest in the morning when the Diagnostician arrives. His face appears on the Multicom, and a moment later he enters. - -“Good morning, Altoni-837-kx4,” he says. “Modi Support requested Diagnostic on your modi-partner. She’s been down for over a day.” - -“I know. I turned her off.” - -“You did? But you didn’t call it in.” - -“No.” - -“That’s fine. I’ll get her back up. It’s probably the latest Empathy Patch. Some of the modis have been a little glitchy.” - -He summons Salisa and puts her in Diagnostic. Then he links through her subcranial port. Her shoulders droop, her head tilting to the left. I receive my Vitafresh Snack and stare at them, the Diagnostician and Salisa, but after a while I get bored and watch the Newstainment Feed. - -The Diagnostician announces that he’s done. I look up. “It wasn’t the Empathy Patch,” he says. “In fact, it wasn’t anything. Salisa’s in great shape. An excellent modi-partner.” - -I do not feel surprised by this assessment. - -“Are you doing all right?” he asks. “Most people call in right away.” - -“I guess.” - -“It says you’ve been having an odd dream. Just about every night, it says.” - -“I wouldn’t call it exactly odd. Maybe a little unusual.” - -He raises his head and looks at me. “Every night,” he says. “The same dream every night.” I wait for him to go on. “I think I’d better look,” he says. “If that’s all right with you.” - -I shrug. Turning down Diagnostic will just get me flagged for Special Assessment, so I don’t resist this request. - -The Diagnostician unlinks Salisa. After switching the input, he links through my subcranial port. As I enter Diagnostic, I feel myself relax. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}irst is the Baseline Diagnostic: Colors and shapes. Familiar sounds. - -Then Images: What I had for Late Meal the last six nights. My completed Work, back to the last All Pleasure Day. Salisa’s standard faces: pleased, submissive, compassionate, concerned, reassuring. - -Then Learned Response, beginning with the Six Pleasure Principles. Then Work Skills. Then Tunes, aligned to the Four Escalating States of Sensation. - -Then Dreams. The Diagnostic is extensive, summoning every dream Salisa has created for me. My earliest dreams, just after Integration, followed by thousands more. What in Liminal would take weeks is complete in a couple of hours. Lastly the laughing Orga-Freshlings. All dreams represented. - -All but one. - -After that a gray screen, then the images become sporadic. Dimmer. The interludes between them punctuated by jarring noise. Buzzing and scraping and crashing. Occasionally a bright light followed by grayness. Then an image of an animal in flight. A bird? I feel myself growing colder. - -Then a sudden pain in my head, quickly replaced by a Pleasure Burst. The pain again, more intense this time. Then another Pleasure Burst, and another. They keep coming. - -I feel myself slipping into grayness. - -Then a flash, and she is there. Angyla-142-9nu. And I am there too, standing by the water. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} feel the wind passing on my skin. Cold like it never is anymore. I shiver, my shoulders drawn in. - -Angyla’s talking. I listen to her voice. She’s talking about the next day, when she has her Integration. My Integration is scheduled one week later. “I know it will be wonderful, Altoni,” she says. “I know you have nothing to fear.” She gives me her face, but I don’t know anymore what face it is. And then the wind sweeps her hair and she smiles. Her hand moving to her forehead, to brush the hair away. - -But it’s not a smile exactly. The corners of her mouth turned up, but in her eyes another look. A different look. And I feel it, like a hard ache in my stomach. I know it’s not a smile at all. - -And I start to cry. Not there, standing by the water, but here. I cry and cry. - -Then Angyla dissolves in the brightest flash, and pain rips through my head. I shudder and drop into grayness. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}wake coming off a Pleasure Burst, and the Diagnostician is there by my bed. A modi-nurse is also in the room, and together they look down at me. The Diagnostician looks pale and worried, but the modi gives me a reassuring face. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Everything’s going to be fine.” - -The Diagnostician looks relieved. He doesn’t stay long after the modi-nurse departs. “It won’t bother you anymore,” he says. “I’ve never seen a dream so deep!” - -“What dream?” I ask him, but already he’s gone. - -That night, I dream I’m at the Pleasure Feast, surrounded by the most beautiful sensi-modis. In the morning when I wake, Salisa is smiling at me. - -“Good morning, Altoni,” she says. “It’s going to be a pleasurable day.” - -“Yes,” I say, accepting her hand. “I believe it is.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **An Odd Recurring Dream** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507932287794435).* diff --git a/content/issue-30/IntercalaryTime.md b/content/issue-30/IntercalaryTime.md deleted file mode 100644 index 450b1ff6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/IntercalaryTime.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,424 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Intercalary Time" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Thorin N. Tatge -copyright: '© Thorin N. Tatge 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As stated, issues of Mythaxis tend to coalesce in interesting and unpredictable ways. Thorin N. Tatge's tale closes out this issue as the perfect counterpoint to our opener: how better to balance a creeping sense of alienation and the loss of self than with unmitigated exuberance and wholehearted companionship?" - -image: images/IntercalaryTime10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Alexandra_Koch](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2018/02/04/18/56/polaroid-3130567__340.jpg), [videorevive](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2014/10/07/18/36/possum-478162__340.jpg), [StormmillaGirl](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/02/06/12/34/reptile-2042906__340.jpg), [Olya Kobruseva](https://www.pexels.com/photo/desk-calendar-beside-black-click-pen-5408818/), and [Antranias](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2022/05/25/07/55/boat-7219989__340.jpg)." - -type: stock -slug: intercalary-time -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t was as the sun gleamed its last that the kobold met the trash possum. At the edge of a half-vacant strip mall’s back parking lot, its west horizon blocked by a pawn shop and an out-of-business hair salon, the sunset was colorless. But there was the tiny spot of a half-burned cigarette, and the dim green of a dumpster, and the faint yellow of the label on a bottle of pear cider the trash possum had put on a chunk of broken concrete. There was the pink of her weird feet, bare before her. She had on a flannel that didn’t suit her and a T-shirt with unreadable print, yellow on green. Her black jeans were faded, but the black of her pleather jacket was still bright despite the tattered lining. - -“Hey,” she said to the kobold passing by. “What are you supposed to be?” - -To go with someone into the dark is different from just meeting a stranger in the dark or the light. To go into the light together, even more so. - -“I’m a kobold!” said the kobold at the moment the sun disappeared. “And you’re some weird-looking thing, huh?” - -Though darkness had settled, the exchange didn’t miss a beat. “Pfft. ’m’ma possum. You never saw one before?” - -“I saw possums, but they were little and ran away before I could catch them. You’re all big!” - -The trash possum was four-foot six. She leaned back and grinned with dozens of pointy teeth. “You think I’m big?” - -“Well, you’re… *me*-sized! And you’re like a person.” - -“Anthropomorphic. ’sthe word you’re looking for.” - -The kobold, who was green, spindly, and wearing adventurer’s armor, sat down beside the dumpster. “How come you’re that way?” - -The possum laugh-scoffed. “Born this way. You want some cider?” - -When her long canines failed to pop the cap, the kobold applied its own collection of impressive teeth to the job. It came off, and they drank. - -“This isn’t apples!” exclaimed the kobold. - -“It’s pear. So. What’re you really. Some kind of lizard lady?” - -The kobold explained that she was related to dragons but the possum could call her a lizard if she wanted. She’d come journeying from a long way off, but still had a long way to go. Pointing to a nearby bus stop where a bus was stopped, she asked if the big wheeled things were for carrying people. - -“That’s what they’re for,” agreed the other. “You got money?” - -The kobold peeked into the fanny pack she kept beside her tail. “I have some silver pieces and one gold one and some tobacco and a brass key.” - -“Geesh. I’ll pay. You gotta get that changed in. What even *is* a silver piece?” - -“It’s a piece of silver!” exclaimed the kobold. “Do you wanna come with?” - -Half an hour later, the two were seated together just behind the bus’s back door, reflections faint in the plexiglass. The bus carried a drunk man who looked out the window and a little girl who stared at them while her mother wasn’t watching. - -The possum’s fingers were tucked into the kobold’s leather shorts. - -“You liiiike me,” teased the reptile. - -“Geez, ya think?” - -“You’re touching me like you like me,” said the kobold. “And you don’t even know if I’m a boy or a girl!” - -“Ehh. You’re a girl. I think. Does it matter?” - -“It probably matters!” - -“Yeah? Well, I’m gonna go a little deeper,” said the trash possum. “Lemme know if it starts to matter.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey ate at Barble’s, an all-night diner that specialized in pie and fried potato cakes. “Aren’t you a meat-eater?” asked the possum. - -The kobold explained that her kind could digest simple carbohydrates, if not complicated ones. Basically, anything that was either meat or junk food was good for her. - -“I’m jealous,” said the possum. And she paid for the burgers, the french silk pie and potato cakes, the onion rings and creamy coffee and bacon hash, most of which went down the kobold’s gullet. - -The adventurer gave her name as Shardik, from Ripemarsh. “Shardik,” repeated the possum. “Isn’t that, like, a bear’s name?” - -“It was a traditional kobold name before the bears started using it!” she replied. - -The possum went by Trash, she explained, but her real name was Trish Mallory. She’d lived in the area pretty much all her life, but had relocated from the next county a while ago because of the job situation. - -“Do you have a job?” asked Shardik. - -The trash possum grinned. “If *I* did jobs, where would this place be? Nah, I scrounge up what I need. You’re paying me back for this meal outta that silver, you know.” - -The kobold lifted a big chunk of pie on her fork. “I’m going to put this pie in your pouch,” she declared, “and then I’m going to smush it.” - -Trish Mallory sat up sharp. “What? Geez, lady!” - -“What?” asked Shardik. - -“I dunno. You’re really weird! Why do you want to smush pie in my pouch? You know that’s where babies go, right?” - -“You’re a trash possum, so I want to get you messy!” said the kobold, her yellow eyes bright. “I’m gonna smush your pie baby.” - -“Pffft. Well you know what. You’re gonna keep being cute like that, you can smush all the pie babies you want.” - -The kobold splayed her fingers over her cuirass and looked down as if to double-check it was her. “You think I’m *cute!?*” - -After washing out her pouch in the diner’s restroom, the possum took her companion to a money-for-gold place and managed to change in most of the kobold’s silver. They listened to a guy in the parking lot playing guitar for his girlfriend. (“What the hell are you two supposed to be?” he’d asked, but they’d all settled into conversation. The diner’s waitress had said something similar.) - -Then the kobold shared her tobacco with the trash possum, who tried to roll and smoke it even though it was pressed, not flaked. They wandered around all night, goaded dogs into barking at them, snoozed in the mulch beside a lumberyard, and wound up at a church’s morning worship service, sitting in the back together with their hands on each other’s tails. Whenever someone gave them a look, they sat up straight and tried to listen to the sermon for a few minutes, but inevitably drifted off, heads on each other’s shoulders. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}anna see a magic trick?” asked the kobold. - -They were in the church parking lot, sitting near a neighbor’s vine-covered fence. The sun was behind spring clouds, but made its presence known. - -“What. You telling me you’re magic?” - -“No no. I’m not magic. I just like sneaking into the parts of libraries I shouldn’t be in, and I like reading the books there. Some of them teach you how to *do* magic!” - -“Izzat a fact. So *you* aren’t magic, but you know *how* to do magic.” - -“It’s the only trick I know!” exclaimed the kobold. “I never got the rest to work. And this one doesn’t work if I tell you what it is. You have to trust me.” - -The trash possum leaned back. “Yeah? Sure. I like the sound of that.” - -The kobold started pacing across parking spots, back and forth. “And the other thing,” she said. “It takes a lot of days to do! So if you want to do the trick with me, I’ll have to hang around here a long time.” She looked nervously at the possum. “We should probably go steady.” - -Trish Mallory laughed. “Is that a fact!” - -“Yep. I know it sounds like I’m trying to trick you, but I’m not! I’m not good at tricking people.” - -“I dunno, you seem pretty deft at it. I could see going steady with you, sure.” - -“But is… is that a thing two girls can do with each other?” asked Shardik. - -“’sfine with me. So, what do we gotta do to make this trick happen?” - -The kobold resumed pacing, but slower. “So… there’s a few words we can’t say. A couple in particular. I can’t say what they are! I can give hints, though.” - -Trish Mallory sat up. “Lay it on me.” - -As the clouds departed the sun, the kobold cogitated. “Okay,” she said at last. “You know how sometimes people play pranks on each other, and things get turned all topsy-turvy for a while? And then… and then, you know how the bunnies lay eggs, and people hide them and find them and put them in baskets? And it gets warmer and the plants come out, and the baby animals come out, and the rain starts falling, and then everyone pays their taxes?” - -“I dunno if I know what you're talking about, Shardi, but you're making me feel really alive,” said the possum. - -“Well you’d *better* know!” said the kobold. “There’s the egg baskets and the baby animals and then… then we all celebrate how good the planet is and how it’s super valuable. And the moon gets pink and the grass gets green… and then everything gets all spooky for a night, and it's scary and loud and there's more pranks, but this time in costumes!” - -“Costumes? Oh. Wait. Yeah, I think I feel you.” - -“Good! Because that’s what I’m talking about! So you shouldn’t say any words about that, but you *especially* shouldn’t say a word that’s near the beginning of the dictionary. And you especially shouldn’t say a different word for what comes after, which is between… ‘lilypad’ and… ‘nectarine’! Don’t say the words, but do you know which words I mean?” - -The possum’s ears went up. “I’m pretty sure I do.” - -“Okay great! Then. Then!” The kobold’s eyes flitted from the church’s rear door to the nearby residential neighborhood. “Do you guys have any *ice cream* parlors around here?” - -They found one, and Shardik declared it was the right kind. Inside, she counted off flavors from the left end of the display case until she reached the eighteenth: *Orange Capstone Dream*, made from orange and vanilla with crumbled Capstone cookies. She ordered one for them each, and they ate together at a table for two. - -“So what’s this all about?” asked Trish Mallory. - -The kobold raised a cautioning finger to her snout. “It’s just that today’s the eighteenth, and so I got us the eighteenth flavor! We’re gonna come back tomorrow, and we’ll get the nineteenth flavor, and so on.” - -“And so on, huh?” The possum raised her brows and examined the display case. There were thirty-one flavors, as was traditional. It was April. She didn’t say anything else. - -“I think I might want to find some more treasure,” said the kobold as they finished. “You know of any dungeons around here?” - -“Not the kind you’re prob’ly thinking of,” said the trash possum. “Maybe you should get a job?” - -“I guess that’s an idea. What kind of job should I get?” - -“Geez, I dunno. You’re asking me? Try the grocery store maybe, see if they need a bagger?” - -The kobold stood up and offered her hand. “Okay. I’ll see you here tomorrow? At noon?” - -Trish Mallory looked at the hand with amusement and shook it. “Noon’s not exactly my time of day, but for you? I’ll be here.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he two met at the ice cream parlor every day for two weeks. Each day, the kobold ordered the next flavor on display. One scoop for them each, no toppings. Sometimes the possum talked about her out-of-luck friends and their questionable antics. Sometimes they played cribbage with the parlor’s set. The kobold got a job at the grocery store, though she didn’t bag food there―she shelved and faced the products and ran the carts back from the lot. Aside from a bit of ribbing, her coworkers didn’t mind her being a diminutive reptile from out of a monster manual. - -“So the work suits you?” asked the possum, taking a bite of malted milk ice cream. - -“Yeah! Sometimes I leap onto the carts running all in a line and I ride them back to the store. And sometimes the customers ask me to find stuff for them, and then it’s like a treasure hunt!” - -“You like hunting treasure, huh?” - -“I love finding loot! I was never any good at trap class, but looting was one of my best subjects at school.” - -“Oh god. Kobold school. We’re gonna get a coffee and you’re gonna tell me all about that now, you realize.” - -The kobold was all too glad to acquiesce. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}}t’s been really nice getting to know you,” said Shardik (from Ripemarsh), who was dressed today in her tidy red work uniform instead of her adventurer’s gear. “And I hope we can get to know each other even better! Yesterday we had malted milk ball ice cream because that’s the thirtieth flavor and yesterday was the thirtieth, and today we’re having amaretto, because that’s the thirty-first flavor, and today is the thirty-first!” - -Trish Mallory nodded with a little smile on her muzzle. She’d been wondering for a while what would happen today. - -“I think ice cream is nice. Do you think so too?” - -“You goofball. Obviously I do or I wouldn’t have eaten it with you every day.” - -“Yeah! It’s really tasty. Do you want to play cribbage?” - -They played. The possum noticed they were scoring ‘go’s on exactly 31 more often than usual. After a few hands, she stood up. “You mind if I run over to the newsstand and pick up a paper?” - -“I don’t mind at all! You should do that.” - -As she walked back, the possum glanced at the dateline. April 31, it said. - -“Anything interesting in the news?” asked the kobold. - -“Nah, not really. One more game?” - -When they’d finished their last game and had licked their bowls of amaretto ice cream clean, the two stood up. “Well, that’s all the ice cream flavors they have here,” said the kobold. “Want to go on an adventure?” - -“Hm? An adventure? Well, sure. Where are we going?” - -“Dunno, but it’s nice out. Wanna get some bugles or something and march through town and see if we can fool anyone into thinking we’re a parade?” - -The possum stared. “You are an effing riot. Okay sure, fine. I’ve got a friend who plays horn. ’bout time I introduced you, anyhow.” - -Shardik was right about it being a nice day―the buds were on the trees. - -Trish’s friend came through with an old horn, and they found a slightly broken djembe drum in the junkyard. No one joined the ‘parade’, but they got plenty of reactions, most of them supportive. Plenty of ‘woot’s and ‘play it’s and the like. - -“What are you two, a couple of monsters?” asked one guy. - -“Nah, we’re just folks,” replied the trash possum as she passed by, beating the drum. - -“*I’m* a monster!” clarified the kobold. She went back to tooting the horn she barely knew how to play. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he next day, the paper said April 32. Shardik glanced happily at it but didn’t remark. “Hey Trash? I want to go find a garden with flowers and lie in it.” - -“Huh? Okay, sure. I think I know a place where the cops won’t pester us.” - -“Is it okay if we hold hands?” - -“Heck, are we going steady or aren’t we? Sure we can hold hands. If that’s what you want to do.” - -They lay in the flowers holding hands, and wrists, and maybe just a little bit more. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“H{{}}ow come they call you Trash?” asked the kobold as they ate chicken noodle soup, back at Barble’s. - -The possum’s ear twitched. “Eh. Guess it’s just kind of a statement. I’ve been Trash most of my life. Kinda like… if most people are gonna see me as trash anyway, I might as well embrace it.” - -“But you’re not trash!” objected her companion. “You’re actually really valuable. You might be the opposite of trash.” - -“One of the sweetest things anyone’s ever said to me,” said Trish, planting a nibble-kiss on the kobold’s snout. “But you haven’t seen me play dead.” - -“Oh wow! Well when we’re done here, I *totally* want to see you play dead! We’re going to go to the field across the highway and I want to watch you do that.” - -So they did. The trash possum played dead so convincingly that the kobold crooned a traditional dirge for her, beating what was left of the djembe drum. - -Trish sat up. “Guess who’s back.” - -The kobold gasped. “Trash! You’re alive!” - -“Yeah I’m alive. You knew that. God, your mouth opens a long way.” - -“I can’t play dead as good as you, but I bet I can open my jaws wider,” said the kobold. She proceeded to make an angle of almost a hundred and forty degrees. - -“Mother of God,” said the possum. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}our days later, they chased butterflies, using nets they found in the junkyard. “You’re the *best* trash possum!” exclaimed the kobold. “Do you know that?” - -“Trash is loot,” the possum replied. It was a saying they had between the two of them. - -Two weeks later, squirrels were racing up and down practically every tree. The sun was shining bright, waging war with picturesque rainclouds. Drizzle fell in the morning, then sizzled away in the afternoon. The grass was lush and green. - -It was the 50th of April. - -The two friends strode hand in hand up a sidewalk next to a park, hocks bouncing and tails swinging. - -“You keep talking about introducing me to your friends,” said Shardik. - -“Yeah, we could do that. You’ll get to see the trailer park where I live. So brace yourself.” - -“Ooh! Can I sleep there? I never slept in a trailer.” - -“Yeah, sure. Just? Gird your expectations.” - -The kobold didn’t know how to gird expectations. She was delighted by the dinky trailer, surprisingly clean and reasonably well-appointed. There were magazines, including *that* kind of magazine, and hashish, and spirits, and a squeaky mattress. - -The trash possum brought the kobold to meet her friends. None of them were animals or anything; they were just folks. They sat around the trailer park together watching people and birds, smoking and playing banjo and guitar. They told Shardik their favorite memories of Trash, who as far as they were concerned had always been around. Then a few of them decided to go and fish at the creek in back of the park, and the kobold and trash possum came along. - -The fish didn’t bite exceptionally well, but it was a very good day. - -There’d been a lot of those lately. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}y the 78th of the month, the leaves were out in force, but the flower buds on the trees were huge and pendulous, refusing to open. They were almost like flowers in themselves. Trish and Shardik went to feed cookies to the squirrels, which jumped right onto their chests to get the crumbs. Fawns wandered through the municipally-tended flower garden, nibbling at shoots. It seemed like there were a million birds in the trees. - -“You smell like flowers,” the trash possum told the kobold. “Like, don’t ask me what kind, but you defs smell like a flower.” - -“Yeah! I usually smell like swamps and things, but I smell like flowers now.” She sniffed. “So do you!” - -“Weird. Best I ever smelled.” - -“Is a trash possum allowed to smell like flowers? Is that okay?” - -The possum stopped walking abruptly. “You gonna stick with me if I get fired?” - -“Oh sure. I mean, trash is great but you’re great too. I didn’t even know two women could make out until I met you!” - -“Yeah, well. Better yell a little louder or the whole neighborhood won’t hear.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he bank display read APR 96. Around the neighborhood, cones of yellow pollen hovered spinning and occasionally touched down, coating mailboxes and windshields before rising again. Some of the squirrels had wings now and were darting after each other in the air. Skunks had appeared trotting along the sidewalks, trailed by lines of their babies. When they lifted their bodies to spray, it smelled like daisies. - -The air was filled with the harmonies of woodpeckers, warblers and tree frogs. Dogs raced around the block, leashes trailing loosely from their collars with no owners to be seen. Stripes of clouds were neatly lined up in the sky, moving into a checkerboard pattern. It had rained a few hours ago. Now it was sunny. In a few hours, it would rain again. - -Shardik and Trish Mallory were out walking, the former wearing her work uniform. They talked about everything but the weather. “If I ever do make it back to Ripemarsh,” said the kobold, “you think you might want to come and visit? Meet my family?” - -Trish shrugged happily. “Heh. I’m not much for travel, but you know? I think I may actually want to do that.” - -But at her words, the kobold winced. - -The pollen tornados sucked themselves up into oblivion. The clouds started to drift randomly and the unleashed dogs and skunks ran away. The birdsong fell into obscurity, and within seconds, it was just a normal day. It felt so much less by comparison. - -“Aw, *maan!*” shouted the kobold. - -The possum looked around in shock. “What! Girl, what happened?” - -“Trraaassh!” whined the kobold. “Why didn’t you say ‘I might’? You always say ‘I might’!” - -“Oh my gosh. What did I say?” - -“You said ‘I *may* want to do that.’ You said *may*! You screwed it all up. Aww, you popped it!” - -“What―does that really count?” - -The kobold nodded sadly. “It’s popped now.” She looked around. “Aww, Trish. What were we on, day ninety-six? That was the longest one I ever did! And the best one, too.” - -The possum’s tail whirled about. “Ohhh. Shards, I’m sorry. That was what I think I can honestly say was the best month ever, and I messed it up for us.” - -But the kobold wasn’t mad. She laughed a silly, cackly laugh and pounded the possum’s jacket. “That was so cool, though! Did you see the squirrels with wings? I did April before, but I never saw that!” - -“So. It’s really over, huh? We can talk about it now?” - -They walked on. “Yeah. I was hoping we might get *skunks* with wings. We almost made it to day one hundred!” - -“So… you weren’t doing the magic yourself, huh? It was just happening?” - -“Yeah! Trash, that’s just what April is really like! Only we usually just see the first thirty days. It’s not nature, though. It’s a kind of zeitgeist magic, ’cause it depends on what people think of when they think of a particular month. It’s called Intercalary Time, and it makes months or weeks or things go on for longer than they’re s’posed to.” - -“It works on weeks too? No kidding?” The possum squeezed the kobold’s hand. - -“Yeah, I did it on weeks a couple times. The eighth day was called Astraday and the ninth was called Heimday. The guy who wrote the book I found got different days, though. One time I made a clock with glowing numbers count a hundred minutes for every hour. So it’d say like, 8:79 o’clock. That was a long day but it was relaxing!” - -“You’ve done other months too?” - -“I’ve done February, June, and September. It’s easiest in months with less than thirty-one days. I tried October once, but it was scary and it fell apart fast.” - -“I wouldn’t mind doing that again with you someday. That was pretty effing incredible.” - -The kobold turned to peer sadly at her. “Well yeah, but you can’t do it with people who know the trick! If we want to do it again, we’ll have to find someone else who doesn’t know about it.” - -“Huh. That’s the way, I guess. The best stuff only comes along once.” - -“I guess. Maybe it comes again. But…” The reptile looked around awkwardly. “I should probably go and see if I have any more paychecks from the store, and then I should get going again. I stayed here a lot longer than I thought I would, and it’s July now.” - -“Well damn. Really? We skipped right over May and June?” - -“Yeah… sorry. The trick doesn’t give you more time. It just changes the time you’ve got.” - -“Are other people going to remember what happened?” - -“Our friends probably will! They might not remember it super well. Hey―do you want to go see what your trailer looks like now? I bet it’s not overgrown with daffodils anymore.” - -“Yeah?” The possum squeezed the kobold’s hand. “If you don’t have to go right away, let’s do that.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he kobold was in no hurry to leave, though. She stayed for another night of music and messing around with Trash’s gang, and it turned out they did remember the superlong April… more or less. They didn’t remember the pollen tornados or the flying squirrels, but they did talk about how it’d been a ‘helluva spring’. - -In the morning, Shardik sat alone with Trish Mallory, swinging her deeply jointed legs under a folding chair. “So I think I realized something,” she said. “I think I realized why you never go on adventures.” - -The trash possum took a puff from her cigarette. “Oh, this is gonna be good.” - -“It’s ’cause you’re doing magic too! You’re changing what’s all around us, like my trick did… only all the time. Not by working jobs, but just… by being you.” - -“Well, maybe,” admitted the trash possum. “But I don’t know why you’ve gotta call it *magic*. Isn’t that just more or less what anyone does?” - -“…yeah, maybe. But maybe that’s why this town’s so cool and why it’s still got jobs for people! Even a monster like me. And even the poor people in the trailer parks are happy.” - -Trash smiled a little on one side, showing pointy teeth. “You think?” - -“You said you moved here ’cause of the job situation.” Shardik leaned close. “Is that because there were *more* jobs here, or because there were *less* jobs, and they needed you?” - -“Girl.” The possum’s voice was sharp. “You know how your trick doesn’t work if you talk about it too much?” - -“Oh,” said the kobold, her eyes contracting. - -“Probably better to just let it go,” said Trish. - -They were silent then for a while. - -“Well. Anyway.” The kobold leapt up and offered her hand. “I’m glad this place has a trash possum.” - -Trish shook it. “This isn’t goodbye for keeps, is it?” - -“Maybe not. I might come back here someday. But hey! You know how to do the trick now. If you ever find anyone to do it with, you should write a journal about it and put it in all the secret parts of libraries and maybe I’ll find it someday and I’ll come back and we’ll talk all about it!” - -Trash got up. “You are such a spaz, lady. I love it though.” She gave the kobold one last hug, lifting her off the ground. “Till we meet again?” - -“Goodbye, Trash! I’ll miss you.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}nce the kobold had gone, the trash possum went into her trailer and took out all the liquors and spirits and mixers. She mixed a cocktail she called April, left the rest sitting on the counter, and went out to drink it, walking through the July night as she surveyed her beautiful, broken-down domain. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Intercalary Time** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507929261128071).* diff --git a/content/issue-30/JacobAndTheWolf.md b/content/issue-30/JacobAndTheWolf.md deleted file mode 100644 index 133a9bbe..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/JacobAndTheWolf.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,231 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Jacob and the Wolf" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Rina Song -copyright: '© Rina Song 2022 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Sometimes a story disguises its message. Sometimes a story lets the startling reveal creep up slowly on you. Or, sometimes, a story just straight up announces 'This one is about turning into a werewolf, social commentary attached.' In this case at least, Rina Song is that kind of storyteller. Sometimes, honesty is the best policy…" - -image: images/JacobWolf10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [neshom](https://pixabay.com/photos/door-open-wooden-the-next-doorway-1089638/) and [sandrapetersen](https://pixabay.com/photos/wolf-eye-fur-wild-animal-wildlife-1352242/)." - -type: stock -slug: jacob-and-the-wolf -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}O{{}}ne day, Jacob woke to find his face covered in thick gray hair. It hadn’t been there the night before. In the bathroom, he squinted at the mirror. - -“Honey,” he said to his wife, Annabel. “Look at this. I seem to have grown a full beard overnight.” - -She yawned, half asleep. “That’s strange, dear. Go get the kids dressed for school.” - -Jacob obliged. It took a while to corral the children. The twins were arguing over which blouse belonged to whom, and the youngest had squeezed toothpaste into her hair. The homeowner’s association inspection was also due to come that morning, and the neighbor’s dog had done its business out front again. By the time Jacob had pointed out to the twins that the blouses were as identical as they, chopped off the stickiest parts of the toddler’s hair with a pair of kitchen shears, and removed the stinking mounds from the yard, he was late for work. - -Jacob’s razor broke halfway through shaving. He used the shears to fix what he could, then pulled his collar over the remaining patches. Finally, he gave Annabel a hurried kiss and sprinted out of the house. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“T{{}}his is unacceptable,” declared Mr. Whitmore, Jacob’s manager. “You’re ten minutes late. How can we maintain our impeccable workplace culture if we aren’t all team players?” - -“Sorry, sir,” Jacob stammered. “I had a minor medical situation this morning. Then I needed to get the kids ready for school, and—” - -“No excuses!” Whitmore roared. “We are a *family* here! You wouldn’t let a medical situation stop you from being there for your family, would you?” He paced back and forth in Jacob’s cubicle, which was so small that he could only get two steps in before being forced to switch direction. “The firm is seeing record numbers of clients this quarter, the highest in a decade. These are unprecedented levels of growth! If we are to succeed, we need all hands on deck! Do you not understand?” - -“No, sir. Yes, sir.” Jacob adjusted his tie. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to bring this up now, but have you had time to look over the personnel request I submitted last month? My responsibilities have increased greatly in the past few years, and as you mentioned, we are seeing growing workloads. I believe some additional headcount—” - -“I did,” said Mr. Whitmore gruffly. “Can’t justify it financially at the moment, I’m afraid. Costs are rising all the time, budgets extremely tight. Of course, we appreciate all of your hard work. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. In fact…” - -“Yes?” said Jacob hopefully. - -“I’ve *personally* nominated you for employee of the month.” - -“Ah.” - -“Keep up the good work.” Whitmore slammed a stack of papers down on Jacob’s desk, rattling the windows. “Now finish these reports. You’re behind on this week’s quota. I need them done by the end of the day!” - -“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.” - -“Good man.” As he turned to leave, Whitmore frowned at his underling. “By the way, you need a good shave. Ought to clip your nails, too. Good hygiene is a key part of our company values.” - -A few minutes later, Jacob went to fetch himself coffee. He passed Henrietta, the plump HR representative who occupied the neighboring cubicle and heard everything that happened in the office. She smiled at him over the top of her spectacles. - -“You have been contributing quite a bit lately. I can’t think of anyone else more deserving of employee of the month,” she chirped. Then she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, I heard they’re throwing in a pizza party for the winner this round.” - -Henrietta always meant well. Jacob forced a wide grin. - -“How exciting,” he said. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}acob’s condition progressed to an alarming degree. His beard had grown back by the time he went to pick up the kids, and his hands felt stiff, making steering difficult. - -After returning home, he picked got on the phone and dialed the family doctor. “Hello, Jacob. What seems to be the problem?” - -“I think I’m turning into an animal.” He had to hold the phone with both hands, since it was getting too difficult to grip with just one. “It started this morning. I looked in the mirror and saw fur growing on my face.” - -“Hmm,” said the doctor. “Do you have any other symptoms?” - -“Yes, I’ve also grown claws and I believe my hands are turning into paws as well. It makes it quite hard to do anything.” - -The doctor hemmed and hawed. “What sort of animal do you appear to be transforming into?” - -“I don’t know.” Jacob examined his fur and paw-like hands. “Some sort of large dog. A wolf, perhaps?” - -“I see.” The doctor coughed. “Well, I don’t have the expertise to treat you myself, but I know a very experienced specialist who works with conditions like yours. Would you like their number?” - -The doctor recited the number, and Jacob wrote it down dutifully. Then he called the specialist. “Hello, my name is Jacob Stephens,” he said. “I was referred to you by my doctor. I appear to be transforming into a wolf.” - -“Oh yes,” said the specialist. “It sounds like you’ve got a case of spontaneous theriomorphosis. It’s a degenerative disease that presents as a gradual and otherwise unexplained transformation into a wild animal. It’s usually brought on by stress, anxiety, or other mood disorders, but can be managed with therapy and medication.” - -“So you can treat it?” - -“Of course, Mr. Stephens. Let’s get started right away. Do you have a health insurance provider?” - -“No,” Jacob replied. His company had stopped providing insurance the year before, citing shrinking revenues. - -“Ah. Well, in that case, let me look up how much an appointment will cost.” The specialist went silent for a few minutes. Then he returned and told Jacob the number. - -“I see,” said Jacob. “I don’t think I can afford that. But thank you for your help.” Then he replaced the phone on its hook. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n a warm Tuesday evening, Jacob walked to the park. It was his first outing since his symptoms started. Two months had passed; he was completely covered in fur, and his hips ached, making it painful to stay upright. Nevertheless, he was glad to be out. He’d tripped while taking the trash out earlier, spilling garbage all over the driveway. Annabel had been shooting him dirty looks all afternoon. - -Finally, he reached the entrance, spotting Phil on a bench inside. Jacob limped over, his spirits lifting. Hopefully, some social time was just what he needed. - -“Jacob!” His best friend patted him on the back so hard he almost fell over. “Haven’t seen you in forever. What gives, man?” - -“Good to see you too,” said Jacob. He lowered himself onto the bench with a groan. “As I told you last week, I’ve been having health issues.” The noise and chatter of the crowded park grated on his sensitive ears, making his head throb. “I couldn’t really leave the house.” - -“Oh, right,” said Phil. “Spontaneous thrombosis or something? You look perfectly fine to me.” - -“What do you mean? I’m turning into a wolf, Phil!” - -His friend shrugged. “Sure, but it’s not like you’ve broken a bone or caught a fever or anything. Didn’t you say you could manage it at home?” - -“No, I don’t have insurance so the doctor said I *had* to manage it at home. There’s a difference.” Jacob sighed. “My wife hasn’t been taking it well. The other day, we had a fight because I shed fur on the carpet right after she’d vacuumed the house.” - -“Sorry to hear that, mate,” said Phil. “I’ve heard a stiff drink always helps with marital problems, at least.” - -“I wish,” Jacob said. “I can’t tolerate alcohol the same as I used to.” Nearby, a chihuahua stopped to bark at him. Its owner, a young woman in a dark fur coat, pulled it away and glared. - -Phil produced a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and offered another to Jacob. “Looks like you could stand to unwind a bit.” - -He recoiled from the odor. “Urgh! No thanks.” - -“Suit yourself.” Phil took a pull on his cigarette. “Say, the fishing trip is coming up this weekend. You’re still down to drive me and the rest of the boys, right?” - -“I don’t even know if I can go on the trip. How do you possibly expect me to drive or fish with these?” Jacob waved his paws for emphasis. - -“But you’re the only one of us with a car,” Phil protested. - -Jacob’s phone let out a soft *ping*. His headache worsened as he lifted it to see an email from his manager. “Look, I’ve got to go home. The boss just emailed me to put some last-minute touches on the quarterly report before tomorrow. Could you and the others maybe postpone the trip?” - -“We’ll see,” sighed Phil as he got up to leave. “We’ve had this trip planned for ages, but I suppose we’ll push it back until you’re feeling better.” - -“I really, really appreciate it,” said Jacob. Phil ignored him, bent over his phone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}our days later, Jacob awoke to the sound of knocking. He gazed blearily at the clock, which read 3:00pm, and groaned. He’d been sleeping in frequently as of late. - -The house was empty. Jacob vaguely recalled something about Annabel taking the children to a birthday party. He padded on all fours to the front door, where a sickly sweet smell made him wrinkle his nose. Clumsily, he pawed at the doorknob. The door swung open, revealing a wizened old woman with a face like a moldy potato. - -“Mrs. Evans, what a pleasant surprise,” said Jacob, though he was not pleased at all. “What brings you here?” - -The president of the neighborhood HOA sneered. “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?” - -Jacob blinked. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.” - -Mrs. Evans sighed, pulling a massive notebook from her purse. She flipped it open and dragged a gnarled finger down the page. “Front lawn vegetation growth, two centimeters above the maximum height allowed by policy. Backyard vegetation, *four* centimeters. Trash bin storage location visible from the street. Mailbox paint color not on the approved list. Eleven percent increase in the amount of dog feces in the front yard—” - -“Alright, alright,” Jacob interjected. “I’ve been dealing with severe health issues for the past two months. My wife’s helping to maintain the property as best as she can. Could you be a little more forgiving with the HOA regulations for now?” - -“Absolutely not,” snapped Mrs. Evans. “I count eighty-two policy violations just from a cursory glance. I haven’t even gotten to the in-depth inspection yet.” She paused to sniff the air, and her nose wrinkled in disgust. “It smells terrible in there! You ought to be ashamed, letting things deteriorate to this level.” - -“You ought to be ashamed for being such a massive stain on polite society,” Jacob muttered. - -“Excuse me?” The HOA president’s nostrils flared. She scribbled furiously, then stuck the page on the door. “For gross violation of HOA regulations, you are being fined two hundred dollars. Don’t let me catch the property in such a state again.” - -“You won’t,” Jacob growled, and slammed the door in her face. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nnabel returned, alone. She stalked past her husband and slumped down on the living room couch. - -“Welcome back, honey,” said Jacob. “How was the birthday party?” - -She ignored him and turned on the TV. - -“Dear?” He looked around. “Where are the kids?” - -“It was fine,” Annabel snapped. “They’re having a sleepover.” - -Jacob watched her warily. “Is something wrong?” - -“No,” she muttered. - -“Very well, then.” Jacob’s head hurt. He was still coming down from the encounter with Mrs. Evans. He headed towards the bedroom until Annabel screamed from the couch, “Of *course* something’s wrong!” - -He stifled a sigh and turned back. “I’m sorry, dear. I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.” - -“I’m *exhausted*,” she cried. “I break my back keeping the house together. I do all the cooking, cleaning, shopping. I spend the day running errands, and by the time I finish the kids are back from school and I’ve got to help them with homework. For the past two months I’ve been pulling double duty on dressing them in the morning, doing the yardwork, and cleaning up after you as well! This was the first day I’ve had to myself in a while. Can’t you see I’m running myself ragged?!” - -Jacob’s ears drooped. “I know you’ve done a lot lately, and I appreciate it,” he began. “I’m trying my best, I swear. It’s just that with my condition, I can’t do very much—” - -“Don’t get me started on your condition,” Annabel snapped. “I’ve had just about enough of it. Tailoring all your clothes so they still fit you. Planning meals around your new diet. You should see the looks I get from the neighbors, the things they whisper when they think I can’t hear. When you’re not at work you’re locked away in the bedroom. I can’t go out with you anywhere. You barely talk to me anymore. Don’t you realize how selfish you’ve been?” - -“I’m sorry,” Jacob said again, feeling like a broken record. “I love you, honey.” - -“I’m not sleeping here tonight.” Annabel got up, grabbing her purse. “I’ve arranged for the kids and I to stay with a friend. I need time to think about things.” - -“Wait!” He leapt in front of the door. “Annabel, please. Can’t we talk about this?” - -His wife sighed, fidgeting with the hem of her jacket. “When we got married, I didn’t imagine that it could be such a burden. You were so full of life, then. Every moment spent with you was an adventure.” She gazed out the window, looking ten years older. “I don’t recognize those memories anymore. I feel chained to you, like I relive the same mediocre day over and over. When was the last time you took me somewhere, Jacob? When was the last time you truly felt something for me?” - -Jacob scratched at the floor. He realized he didn’t have anything to say. The words had left him long ago. - -She pushed past him. “The taxi’s here. I’ll talk to you later.” - -He watched the door close behind her. The sound of tires screeching drifted in from the driveway. Soon he was alone in the vast, silent house. - -His phone chimed softly, making him jump. He pawed at it until the screen turned on, revealing a notification from a social media app that Annabel had made him download. It was a post from Phil. Distantly, Jacob remembered the fishing trip. There was a picture, showing Phil and the others crowded around a grill in someone’s backyard. From their grinning faces, it seemed that the absence of a driver hadn’t mattered in the least. - -A sense of betrayal seeped into his stomach, like rain on a leaking roof. He swallowed the feeling down and swiped the page away in disgust. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}eeks passed. Jacob sat quietly at his desk. In some respects, it was like nothing had changed. - -“Stephens!” He didn’t move as Mr. Whitmore thundered into view. The man threw a packet of papers down on Jacob’s desk, jamming his thumb at the front page. “Explain this!” - -Jacob peered at the report. “There appears to be a slight discrepancy between column G and the sum of columns A through D.” - -“What do you have to say for yourself?” huffed his manager. - -“It’s a minor clerical error, sir.” - -“The third such error this week!” Mr. Whitmore shrieked. “Stephens, you are on thin ice! We will be monitoring your tasks *very closely* from now on. One more slip-up like this and you’re out of here! Do you understand me?” - -Jacob stayed quiet. In his mind, he replayed the failures from the previous months. The growing list of work incidents, friends and neighbors he no longer spoke to. The dreadful silence that greeted him in the mornings and at the dinner table. He thought of Annabel, and the empty space in their bed. - -“Answer me, Stephens!” - -Jacob decided he’d had enough. - -Fabric ripped and dripping jaws snarled. Blood, vivid and hot, splattered against the drywall. The office filled, first with the sound of screams and tearing flesh, then with deafening silence. - -“That felt pretty good,” said the wolf formerly known as Jacob Stephens. - -It licked the remaining viscera from its fur and pushed the office chair back under the desk. It ignored Henrietta, who was still cowering underneath her desk. The wolf cast one last look of disdain at the office. Then it left. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Jacob and the Wolf** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507930317794632).* diff --git a/content/issue-30/LiminalSpaces.md b/content/issue-30/LiminalSpaces.md deleted file mode 100644 index db3ba59d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/LiminalSpaces.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,242 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Liminal Spaces" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- David Farrow -copyright: '© David Farrow 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "If you've had the pleasure of reading David Farrow's 'Neverglades' series, then you'll know he has an affinity for unreliable and ambiguous places, for injecting horror into the mundane world. Here we experience a dislocated life, slipping through the cracks towards whatever waits beyond — but then, maybe the best case scenario would be that life itself is but a transitional stage…" - -image: images/LiminalSpaces10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Benjamin Suter](https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-walking-on-street-between-buildings-3617457/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: liminal-spaces -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -#### ***#1: The third-floor hallway of the Blue Moon Hotel in Jefferson, Rhode Island, 1:26 a.m.*** - -{{}}Y{{}}ou can’t sleep, so you take a few pills from your stash and wander into the hall to smoke a cigarette. The wallpaper is disgusting: pale yellow with little pastel flowers, the kinds of colors that are only soothing to infants and suburban housewives. The steady blinking of the smoke alarm glares at you from the ceiling. You stick an unlit cigarette in your mouth and wander down the hall in search of a window or an empty stairwell. - -The silence gives you goosebumps, or maybe that’s just the pills kicking in. You’ve always hated being awake at hours like this. It feels like you’ve been woken from a cryogenic chamber while the rest of the world stays frozen. There are sleepers behind all these doors, you think: tourists resting up for tomorrow’s activities; young people sleeping off their secret hookups; addicts snoozing with needles in their arms; evicted families, exhausted from hours of apartment hunting; maybe even a few suicidals sleeping the long sleep. These people might as well not exist. You’re far away from them, in that lifeless little pocket between midnight and sunrise. - -How can there be no windows up here? This whole floor is a dizzying maze of corridors, walls stretching out subtly, like an optical illusion. You gnaw on the cigarette and place a hand on the wallpaper to steady yourself. This is a mistake; your fingers come away sticky. You wipe them on your pajama pants and swear under your breath. - -Eventually you find the window. It’s tucked around the corner of the maze, right by the ice machine. The problem is that the damn thing doesn’t open. You’ve forgotten that hotels seal up all their windows to keep people from leaping out. You swear again and pry at the frame, but all you do is break a fingernail. - -Fuck it. There are no smoke alarms here. You’ll take your chances. - -You reach into your pants pocket to grab your lighter, but your legs buckle under a sudden wave of wooziness. You slump against the ice machine and gasp a little. The cigarette falls from your mouth onto the dirty carpet. You try to get back up, but your head is spinning, and you aren’t sure if you just took some bad pills or if you’re having a stroke or something. - -A hand touches your arm. You flinch, but it’s only Charlie. Your daughter looks paler than ever under the ghostly hotel light fixtures. Her eyes are heavy with sleep and her blond curls are a tangled mess, but she’s still prettier than you’ll ever be, and you kind of hate her for that. There’s pity in her eyes. You kind of hate her for that too. - -“You okay, Mom?” she asks. - -You struggle to come up with words. “I’m fine,” you mumble finally. “Just got a little dizzy.” - -Charlie bites her lower lip. “You really should be getting back to bed,” she says. “We’ve got to catch the Greyhound early tomorrow.” - -“I’m fine,” you repeat, but when you try to stand, you swoon again. Charlie reaches out and steadies you against the ice machine. You eye the cigarette on the carpet and feel an unpleasant urge to stick it back in your mouth. - -“Maybe your blood sugar’s low,” Charlie says. “I’ll get you a Coke or something. There’s a vending machine in the lobby.” - -“Okay,” you say, because you’re out of energy to protest anymore. You let yourself drift as Charlie leaves you in the little nook by the window and pads back down the hall. Instead of watching her go, you stare at the pale light fixtures above you. Black specks line their insides: clumps of dust and fly corpses. You close your eyes. - -When you open them, something has shifted. You feel a swooping sense of displacement. The pastel flowers on the wall have gone fuzzy and your back is numb from pressing against the ice machine. You blink, rub your eyes, and check your watch. It’s been an hour. Your head throbs and your throat is raw. - -You manage to get back to your feet, although the first step you take is wobbly. “Charlie?” you call. The hallway swallows your voice. You tread on the fallen cigarette with your bare foot as you wander back into the maze. It’s still empty, still that nothing hour, and the world is asleep around you. - -“Charlie?” you say again, louder this time, even though it hurts your throat. - -You turn the corner, and a dark shape at the end of the hall sends a bolt of fear through you. It’s not your daughter. It’s a man in a thin gray suit, standing totally still, his arms by his sides. His face is a blurry blotch, and at first you think it’s because you still have sleep in your eyes. But you blink and blink and his features refuse to come into focus. It makes you think of a painting that’s been smeared, like a brush has obliterated everything about him from the neck up. - -*Has he done something to Charlie?* - -“Wait!” you shout. The stranger has turned, gliding smoothly around the corner and out of sight. You ignore the pinpricks of pain in your feet and stagger after him. The doors flit past you, numbers dim and tarnished, and it feels like this hallway will never end; it feels like you’ve wandered onto a conveyor belt, forever pushing you backwards. But eventually you do reach the other side. The next hallway is a dead end, the only exit a nondescript door leading to the stairwell. - -You fling it open and hurtle down the first few steps, but a sudden vertigo makes you stop, your hands gripping the railing. You brave a look down. The stairs are old, indents worn into the rubber by years of stomping feet, but there is no one walking them now. The man in the suit is gone. You wonder, sweat beading on your arms, if he was ever there in the first place. - -Your fingers fumble at the empty box in your pocket. You’re out of cigarettes. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#2: The empty aisles of the 7-Eleven on Oak Street, 2:37 a.m.*** - -{{}}C{{}}harlie isn’t in the lobby when you wander downstairs, and she isn’t in the parking lot either. Streetlamps cast pools of dim light over the few cars sitting in the lot. You don’t remember which rental car is yours, so you can’t go rummaging through the backseat for an extra pack of cigarettes; and besides, you don’t want someone seeing you out this early and thinking you’re breaking into cars. You leave the hotel parking lot and head down the street to look for an open convenience store. - -It’s a ten-minute walk to the edge of downtown, and all the storefronts are dark except one. You’re in luck: the dinky little 7-Eleven is open, its windows so bright between its dead neighbors that the glow sears your retinas. Your bare feet tread on pebbles and the tufts of grass sticking out of cracks in the sidewalk. - -You push open the door, its tiny bells jingling. There’s a single teenage employee slouched behind the counter. He’s listening to some grunge CD on his Walkman headphones—you can hear the thrum of guitar chords, even from here—and staring vacantly at a college brochure. You approach him and rap a few times on the counter. He flinches and removes his headphones, turning his dazed blue eyes onto yours. - -“I’d like a pack of Marlboro’s, please,” you tell him. - -He blinks at you, like you’ve just spoken in Chinese, but finally turns to grab you a pack from the wall behind him. That’s the moment you slap your pajama pockets and realize your wallet is back in the hotel room. Another string of curses escapes from your mouth before you can stop it. - -“Never mind,” you say. “I’ve gotta get some cash first.” - -The employee grunts a little, then lowers himself back into his seat and dons the headphones again. You want to kick yourself. What are you doing here, anyway? Buying cigarettes at 2:30 in the morning when you should be trying to find your daughter. You feel disgusted, but mostly nauseous. There was definitely some bad shit in the pills you took. - -Before you leave, a tabloid in the magazine rack catches your eye. The picture on the front shows an empty parking lot, much like the one you left ten minutes ago, with a crooked streetlamp casting a spotlight down on a girl’s silhouette. Everything outside the light is so dark that it looks like the void of outer space. Instead of stars, pure white letters are stamped on the blackness: MY CHILD GOT TRAPPED IN THE SPACE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS! - -The headline fills you with an inexplicable, icy dread. You glance at the teenager, but his eyes aren’t on you anymore; they probably don’t pay him enough to care about early morning stragglers like you. Your hand snakes out and snatches the magazine from the rack. You tuck it under the hem of your pajama top, wincing at the crinkle of paper. Then you’re out the door. The tinkling of the bells follows you, like a voice whispering *thief, thief*. - -You hurry down the sidewalk, even though the pebbles sting under the soles of your feet. As you walk, you flip through the pages of the magazine until you find the cover story. An anonymous mother tells her interviewer about the disappearance of her six-year-old daughter, who crawled into a tunnel on an empty playground and never came out the other side. The playground was a *liminal space*, a consulted expert says: an isolated, in-between zone where the universe is so thin that people can slip right through. There are millions of these spaces all over the world, he goes on. Anywhere you stop on your way to somewhere else could be a portal to a realm beyond reality. - -Your hands are trembling. You look up from the magazine, and you’re back in the parking lot, the hotel rising above you. Its windows glisten like the multi-faceted eyeballs of some giant insect. Standing alone at the edge of the lot, you feel that *thinness* the expert mentioned; your skin prickles at the sensation. You have an awful suspicion that Charlie has gone through her own tunnel. She’s slipped into another place. Somewhere you can’t follow her. - -*Would you even want to?* - -There’s a figure staring at you through the sliding glass doors at the hotel entrance. It’s the man from the third floor, his face still a colorless smear. Your hand clutches the magazine and crumples it in a trembling fist. You close your eyes and breathe in slowly and try to center yourself, to feel the solidness of your body, to wake up, just wake up, even though you’re sure you’re not dreaming. - -The man with no face is gone when you dare to look again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#3: The Greyhound bus station in Providence, Rhode Island, 3:54 a.m.*** - -{{}}C{{}}harlie’s luggage has also vanished into the ether, and you think maybe, just maybe, she’s gone ahead to the Greyhound station. The girl’s a teenager now, perfectly capable of managing herself—and besides, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s run off on you. You’ll probably find her sitting alone on a bench, nursing a shitty cup of coffee from one of those 24-hour McDonald’s that every station seems to have, and she’ll turn and look at you and say, *what took you so long?* - -But that doesn’t happen. Instead, you end up waiting for the bus alone. You clutch the handle of your suitcase and stand nervously under the green overhang. You’re two hours early (you couldn’t bear to wait in that hotel any longer) and the roads of Providence are dead and empty. Patches of mist settle over the cityscape and dull the glow of the streetlights. It’s warm, early summer warm, but with that delicate, charged morning air that tingles on your skin and makes you shiver. - -This place is thin, too. You can feel it. It is quite literally an in-between space, a halfway point between *where you’re from* and *where you’re going*. You wonder what would happen if the bus never came. Would the whole station, devoid of purpose, collapse into unreality? And you—where would you go if it did? - -Footsteps. Light, clacking, like business shoes on pavement. *The faceless man*, you think, sweat beading on your neck. He’s followed you here. These halfway points are all connected and he’s slipping between them, like the liminal creature he is. The tabloid never mentioned anything about beings like him, but it didn’t have to. You can put the story together yourself. You’re good at that (or so you like to think). - -It’s not the faceless man. It’s a woman, actually, a prim woman in a pantsuit with a tightly coiffed bun of brown hair. She doesn’t look at you. She stops at another overhang along the way, then pulls a thick paperback novel from her bag and begins to read. - -You feel a prickle of shame, irrational but insistent, that you’re the kind of woman who reads trashy shoplifted magazines and not novels. Charlie loves books. She spent her childhood years buried in them, only leaving her room to eat or go to school. It’s a love that developed despite you, not because of you. You wonder if reading with her would have made a difference in the end. - -The bus does come; the station doesn’t collapse. The driver throws your suitcase into the undercarriage with all the grace of a baker heaving a sack of flour. You feel exposed without it. There are still a few pills tucked away in your luggage, hidden in the rumpled folds of your wrinkled laundry, and your fingers twitch for them. You should have taken some before the pantsuit lady showed up. But the driver’s already slid the carriage shut, and you have no choice but to board the bus, shaky and sober. - -You glance out the window before you leave. There’s a man standing beneath a streetlight, his face invisible in the mist. But he’s gone between one blink and the next. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#4: The basement of the Little Shire Bookshop in Brooklyn, New York, 8:43 p.m.*** - -{{}}T{{}}he shop windows glow a pleasing amber, lighting up a display of brand-new hardcovers, and the coziness of the whole scene makes you pause on the sidewalk. You haven’t stepped foot in a bookstore for years. But the display calls to you, tempting you with the promise of central air and cozy nooks and silent, browsing customers: a smattering of people who will pay you no mind and expect you to do the same. It’s the kind of place Charlie would have loved. - -You push open the door, which *dings* softly, and wander through the shelves. The cool air tickles your exposed arms. The whole place smells of coffee and crisp new paper. It’s late, and only a few people are still browsing at this hour. You pass a college student in wire-rimmed glasses poring through some Ayn Rand doorstopper, and brush past a stooped old lady squinting at the harlequin romances. There’s a staircase in the back with a faded sign reading USED BOOKS in tidy print. You place a hand on the railing and head downstairs. - -It’s totally empty down here. Even the hum of the AC is subdued. Faded titles sit on messy shelves, some so old that threads poke out of their ancient spines. You wonder what you’re even doing here. Hoping you’ll round a shelf and see Charlie standing there, maybe? Or are you hoping you won’t? - -You pull a random title from the shelf. It’s an old Narnia book: *The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe*. Charlie used to love this one, you remember. The cover depicts a girl with bouncy golden curls sneaking out of a gap in a wintry forest, staring around in wide-eyed wonder. A tall lamppost stands inexplicably in the snowy clearing. - -You lurch out of the present for a moment, your mind traveling back to a distant afternoon at your mother-in-law’s place. Randall was in the kitchen, arguing with dear old Judy about borrowing more money, and their constant bickering gave you a headache. You retreated to the back porch and smoked a few cigarettes. You were watching the neighbors through their grime-encrusted windows when Randall poked his head outside and asked, *where’s Charlie?* - -She was seven, then, and you griped that she didn’t need supervision all the goddamn time. But somehow she’d up and vanished. You scoured the house until you finally found her curled up inside Judy’s old wardrobe, her knees tucked up to her chest. She squirmed and struggled as you took her by the arm and yanked her out of the musty darkness. - -*Let me go*, she sobbed. *I want to go to Narnia. I want to see the fauns and the snow and the talking animals*. She said *want*, but you could hear the *need* in her voice, that ache for an escape into fantasy. In the moment it just annoyed you. You shook her arm and dragged her out of the bedroom, scolding her the entire way. - -Now you stare down at the little girl on the cover and wonder where she’s gone this time. You clutch the book and consider taking it with you, reading it in those gaps between moments, so you can understand this world your daughter wanted to escape to so badly. - -“Ma’am?” a voice says from behind you. - -You turn to see a dumpy man, probably in his forties, wearing a sweater vest with a nametag clipped to his breast. “It’s closing time, ma’am,” he says. “I’m afraid you have to leave now.” - -You hold up the old book. “Can I buy this?” you ask. - -His face twists into an apologetic pout. “The registers are closed, I’m afraid,” he replies. “Maybe you can come back tomorrow.” - -You slide the book back into the shelf with some regret. There won’t be a tomorrow. This was your window, and you missed it. Not that a fantasy world would welcome you in anyway. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#5: Backstage at the Violetta Cabaret Lounge in New York City, 10:52 p.m.*** - -{{}}Y{{}}ou watch your face disappear in the mirror, your gaunt cheeks and week-old sores vanishing under dabs of rouge. You live for these nights, when boring old Marjorie Baker turns from a drug addict and shitty mother into a star, a real star, the kind of presence who burns hot, like a sun exploding. You don’t need the pills when you’re up on stage. The music envelops you, the crowd cheers and applauds, the spotlight makes you the center of the universe. - -The other girls have left the dressing room, waiting in the wings for their turn. You swing a boa over your shoulders and shiver as the feathers tickle your neck. Perfume mingles in the air, great invisible clouds of the stuff. It’s just warm enough to make sweat bead under the sleeves of your dress. - -If only Randall could see you now. If only he understood that this is the real you, that you could never be chained to the life he wanted for you. - -The emcee’s voice floats from the stage like a figure calling in a dream. You hover in the doorway and wait for him to shout your new name, the one you’ve chosen for yourself. *Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the lovely, the elegant, the jewel of New York, Janie Hathaway!* But he never does. The hours pass without you, the encore comes and goes, and the crowd files out with a chorus of distant chatter. You’ve been forgotten. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#6: The alley behind the Abaddon Bar & Nightclub in the Bronx, 1:02 a.m.*** - -{{}}Y{{}}ou’re swimming, you’re floating, you’re dancing with a feverish intensity, so caught up in the thumping melody that you lose track of who you are. Strobes flash and glimmer like kaleidoscopes. The churning throng of bodies presses against you on all sides. You dance with men and women alike, sometimes even pulling them close for a kiss, but then you lose track of them and you think, *that’s okay*. There will always be another. You want to dance with them all, to love them, to slip inside their bodies and out of yours. They’re all so beautiful. Were you ever that beautiful? - -The heat of the crowd is palpable, and you’re sweating worse than ever now, big stains blossoming on your collar and armpits. Your dance takes on an erratic stagger. Now, when you clutch at the beautiful people, it’s like reaching for a lifeguard. You need someone to drag you out of this ocean. *Don’t pity me*, you think, seeing their faces. *Just help me*. But none of them come to your rescue. - -Nausea swells up within you. You lurch off the dance floor and totter toward an exit sign, its letters a searing red in your vision. You take three steps into the alley before your stomach swoops and vomit comes erupting out of your mouth. Sickly yellow gunk splatters onto the pavement and dribbles down your dress, getting in the feathers of your boa. Your head is in pieces. Each one stabs into you, a shard of acute pain. - -You groan and slump against the wall, the bricks scraping your exposed back. It feels like the ground is trembling, but that’s just you, it’s your body betraying you. You blink and clench your jaw and fight back a surge of hot, sudden tears. If only the pain would stop. But it’s reaching a crescendo now, a song you never got to sing. - -It rained while you were dancing, and puddles stretch across the uneven pavement. In one of them, you see the image of a man. He is upside down from your angle, his lanky limbs and torso reflected on the glassy surface, his head chopped off where the water ends. You should have known he would find you. You’re in the margins now, in his nowhere world. - -He doesn’t approach you. He doesn’t move at all, actually. Not that he has to. You’re not going anywhere either. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#7: The months leading up to the divorce, circa 1990*** - -{{}}T{{}}he tabloid had mentioned all sorts of liminal spaces, like empty playgrounds or school halls at night, but here’s the truth: a dying marriage is a liminal space too. You put in the effort, you wear your happy face, day in and day out, but at a certain point you’re going nowhere. You’re just waiting for this limbo to end. - -The cracks were there from the beginning, they must have been, but you were young and in love, you whispered the cliches of romance to each other because that was your language, it was how you understood the world. You were going to be a star, one day, and he was going to accompany you on piano; it was the dream that always sustained you. Then he got you pregnant. You didn’t have room in your dreams to raise a child. Sometimes you’d feel the baby kick inside you, and you’d press a hand against your belly and wish death on the little creature, wish it would shrivel right up and turn back into nothing. - -You’d considered an abortion, of course. But Randall wouldn’t hear it. *This baby is a blessing*, he’d say. *Just think of how wonderful it’ll be, you and me raising a kid, having a family*. So you went along, you carried the creature to term, but the labor was twelve hours of agony and it split you right open, cut a gash in you that would never heal. The doctors handed you your daughter, ruddy and plump and damp from the afterbirth, and you held her, and you smiled, but inside you were thinking: *you’ve ruined everything*. - -Together you called her Charlie, but in your head she was still the creature, even when she grew up and it was clear she was going to be beautiful. You always suspected she’d sapped you of your own beauty from inside the womb, an act of thievery from which you never recovered. You hated her for taking your dreams away. Resentment, not love, was all you knew, and before long it had infected your marriage too. - -If you were distant, so what? If you missed dinners and dance recitals because you were chasing your own happiness, who could blame you? Randall ditched the piano, he gave up quietly on your dream, but you refused to. You spent your nights in the city, popping pills and crooning soft melodies at whatever dive bar would take you, and when you got home the halls would be dark and Randall would be asleep in bed and a flashlight beam would shine from under Charlie’s door, like a swarm of indoor fireflies. The two of them, they weren’t part of your world. They just shared the same spaces you did. - -When you saw the thin white scars climbing up Charlie’s thigh, you yelled until your voice went hoarse and her face turned swollen with hot, red tears. *How dare you*, you wanted to scream. *How dare you steal my beauty and then mutilate it like this*. She didn’t speak to you for weeks, and after that things were never the same; she’d exhausted all the tears you could make her cry. Randall wouldn’t speak to you either. You existed in that limbo, not talking, not loving, just dying slowly, until you couldn’t take it anymore, and you packed your things and left the house and didn’t look back. - -She was the one who reached out to you, years later; she was visiting colleges in Rhode Island and wanted her mother to be there. She tried to patch things up and you didn’t. You just got high and ignored her attention. And it hits you, now, lying in a puddle of your own vomit in some dingy back alley, that Charlie never vanished down a tunnel to nowhere, she never fell through a hole in the universe. All she did was leave. She’d had enough, and she found her escape route. Just like you once did. - -Your heart, that shriveled little thing, is trying to escape from its ribcage. It wants out and you don’t think you can stop it. You rest your head against the bricks and breathe out a shuddery breath and sink into your migraine, letting it enfold you. The world is hazy now. You hear distant cars, and footsteps in puddles, and the fading thump of techno music. Then you hear nothing at all. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#8: The waiting room in the St. Camillus Medical Center, 3:25 a.m.*** - -{{}}T{{}}here’s a painting on the wall. It’s a boat made of stippled dots, floating on a stippled river, sailing into a golden stippled sunset. You stare at the flecks for so long that your eyes start swimming and the green wallpaper turns all blotchy. You sway in your seat, and a hand catches you. - -“Easy,” a voice says. “It’s okay.” - -The hand belongs to a young stranger, a pale, scrawny thing with her blond curls tied back in a ponytail. You are the only two people sitting in the waiting room. She wears a sweat-stained tee and sports an ugly bandage on her forehead, and she isn’t smiling, exactly, but her face is soft. You look at her and start to cry. - -“I’m sorry,” you sputter. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t want you to…” - -The young woman draws back her hand. She folds it in her lap and plays with the sleeve of her shirt. - -“It’s okay,” she repeats. “You’ll be okay.” - -The plastic chair is ice against your clammy back. The boa drapes over your shoulders like something dead. Intercoms buzz with names and directives that mean nothing to you. No, everything is not okay. This stranger is not Charlie and her words are empty. Somehow you thought you’d find her. But she’s not stuck in a liminal world. You are. - -The man in the gray suit stands by the painting now. He appeared between blinks, like a bit of fuzz stuck in your eye. His face is still a blur, but now you can see faint outlines in it: two gaunt cheekbones, a thin mouth, golden hair combed neatly to one side. He solidifies the more you fade. - -*Just take it*, you think. *Take it all. What am I going to do with it, anyway?* - -A clock above reception ticks away the seconds, little clicks cutting into the Muzak. You hum a wordless lullaby. The little boat floats on its painted voyage, forever sailing into the sun. You sit and hum and listen to your feeble heartbeat. When the ticking stops, you don’t notice. Because you’ve stopped too. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -#### ***#9: The back seat of a taxi, time unknown*** - -{{}}N{{}}ew York glistens like a city of mirrors, something out of a giant’s art show; you can barely see it through the mist on the window. The cab seats are stiff and leather, but not cold. They don’t really have a temperature at all. You run your hands along them, feeling a tickle of friction, but nothing else. - -The man in the suit sits up front. He turns the wheel with delicate, alabaster hands, taking each corner with eerie precision. His back is to you, obviously, but you can tell that the fog is gone from his face. You wonder what you’ll see if he glances back at you in the rearview mirror. - -“Where are we going?” you ask. - -“That depends,” the man says. “How heavy was your heart?” - -You fall silent and stare back out the window. People wander the sidewalks, but they’re gray, they have no forms. You were one of them once. This city’s insubstantial: a dream, a liminal place for liminal people. It always has been. - -“I don’t know,” you say at last. - -The good thing about cabs, you think, is that they have destinations. Maybe this ride will end and you’ll step onto a red carpet, marquees flashing your name, or maybe you’ll emerge into Charlie’s waiting arms, or maybe there’s nothing at the end of the road, the kind of nothing you can sleep forever in. It doesn’t particularly matter. You’ve spent your whole life in between places. At least now you’re finally going somewhere. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Liminal Spaces** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507932501127747).* diff --git a/content/issue-30/TheQuartermasterTrial.md b/content/issue-30/TheQuartermasterTrial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 56c6981d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/TheQuartermasterTrial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,299 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Quartermaster Trial" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- science fiction -- fantasy -authors: -- Daniel Ausema -copyright: '© Daniel Ausema 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The first issue after the Great Mythaxis Facelift featured Daniel Ausema's first appearance here, with a not-exactly road-trip narrative whose heroine travelled a decaying multiverse at the whim of a reality-leaping conveyor belt. Now he returns us to those strange and unfamiliar environs… but with one familiar face at least." - -image: images/Quartermaster10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was tweaked from an original by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/140586052/stock-photo-man-standing-on-old-bridge.html) at depositphotos.com - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: the-quartermaster-trial -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}P{{}}aikle crouched at the edge of the long grass, ready to run forward when the conveyor appeared. The village needed something useful this time, a good haul to get them through. *Or else*… he didn’t want to think about that. He was the only one they could spare to keep watch, with how low their numbers had dwindled, so it all came down to him, to what help he could bring back from the conveyor. - -The place where the conveyor regularly passed was marked by shorter grasses and even bare earth. He thought through the list of his people’s needs so he could prioritize when the conveyor came, with its unpredictable goods. Being a good scavenger sometimes meant pushing as many things as possible off the conveyor in a rush and gathering it later, when the conveyor left. But he had to watch for fragile things or items so crucial they were worth racing to the village with them right away. - -He dreamed of discovering something truly valuable, some treasure of another world that would make life in the village better for everyone. An unlikely dream, though medicines of any kind were a possibility and certainly needed. The most common things to find were inexplicable pieces of worked metal—gears from ancient constructs, elongated pipes of unknown origin or use. They could usually be turned into weapons, which might be needed if Tormalen, the town next door, continued its aggressive ways. - -Shona said she was low on circuits for the town lights, but those would be a rare and unlikely find. Food, of course, was always welcome, no matter what otherworldly form it took. Anything they didn’t use could be sold to the Quartermaster in the empty city a day’s walk away. What that strange man did with those things, no one knew, except for the rumor that he sent them by conveyor to his counterparts on other worlds. - -At last the ley tattoos in Paikle’s forearm tingled with the imminent arrival of the conveyor. He glanced down at the whirls, tracing one with a finger. When he looked up again, he saw movement on the other side of the conveyor cut. - -He froze and studied the grasses. Three, maybe four people, and that was only the ones he could make out. Were others better at hiding? - -Even of these four, he couldn’t see much. A leg here, a torso there. The only person whose head he could see wore their hair short. - -Tormalen style. - -This was his people’s place to gather from the conveyor. Long agreements gave the village of Polle-on-Tivy the rights to this stretch of land. The people of Tormalen gathered their goods down the slope, where the conveyor passed beside the old cottonwood. - -They shouldn’t be up here. - -The conveyor sizzled when it showed up in the grass. The Tormalens ran toward it. Dirty thieves. Paikle ran as well. There was a package that looked like medicine right in front of him. At least he might reach that. - -Ducking low, he dashed up with hands already reaching for the package. His fingers brushed the wrapping. Before he could close his hands around it, something slammed him aside. He fell to the ground, head ringing. - -“This is our place now.” The man spoke the Tormalen language, like Paikle’s own except for the way he swallowed the beginnings of some words. “You can leave this time to tell your people. Next time… ” He gestured at the long knife strapped to his leg. - -Paikle held up his hands in surrender. Still he insisted, “This is ours. Always been ours.” - -The Tormalen growled and took a threatening step toward him. Paikle stumbled back, snatched something blindly off the conveyor, and fled. The man shouted a war cry as if to warn him from ever returning. But he didn’t pursue. - -Paikle spent most of his run back to his village looking over his shoulder and watching the shrubs along the route for any other townsfolk from Tormalen to jump out at him—the old bag snatched from the conveyor could wait. It wasn’t the usual path between the village and the conveyor, but Paikle had always been good at picturing his surroundings and knowing how to get places. Only when he reached Polle-on-Tivy did he stop and claw the strings open to reveal the contents of the bag. - -Junk. Nothing but bits of worthless junk. - -He poured them out on the narrow street. Three metal knobs of some kind. A curiously twisted piece of pipe that looked like it might attach to one of the knobs. And an assortment of metal fittings, none of which was the right size for either the pipe or the knobs. - -“Decay it all!” he swore, kicking at the parts to scatter across the street. Other villagers came out at the sound. - -“What happened, Paikle?” Shona bent to pick up the metal scraps that had ended up near her. “Something wrong with the conveyor?” She gestured at her ley tattoos. “I felt its arrival.” - -Paikle clenched his teeth and picked up some of the nearby pieces. No sense wasting what little he’d scavenged. “Oh it came, all right. But… *Tormalen*.” Not as if he had to say anything more. Not as if they hadn’t all known this was coming. - -“I’ll make sure we have weapons,” Paikle’s uncle Raith said. “Drive them off, you think? Or take their old place along the conveyor?” - -*Or go straight for their town, raze it to the ground, and wait for their scavengers to return with a false sense of victory?* A tempting option that Paikle’s bruised body cried out for. They were so few in number, though. A couple dozen to fight, if they took even the ones who were really too old and young. Undernourished fighters with limited weapons. They’d needed something better from the conveyor so badly! If only he’d been able to bring back food or medicine. Or powerful, otherworldly weapons. - -As he contemplated all three options, he bent down for another of the bits of metal he’d carried with him. Worthless trash, destined for the Quartermaster. - -He paused in that position, examining the way the light flashed off the curve of the piece. *The Quartermaster*. - -“We do neither.” Paikle straightened. “We take our complaint straight to the Quartermaster.” Before anyone could react, he added, “All of us. Pass out the weapons, Uncle, and gather some food for the journey.” - -Shona was the first to respond. “And abandon—” - -“Look around you. Look at the state our village is in. We’ll get the Quartermaster’s blessing to take this place back and restore it. And to reclaim our spot along the conveyor.” He gestured at the familiar sights of the village that had always been home. Now so worn out, in need of more people, more work than they could give, more and better goods delivered by the conveyor. “Or else we won’t have any place worth coming back to, anyway.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he preparations weren’t as fast as he’d imagined, and the arguments and resistance to his plan lingered all that day and the next, but finally they set out for the distant, empty city. Paikle led at first—he was the best of their scavengers and knew the land well. But soon Shona would take over, since she was the one who traded with the Quartermaster. - -They skirted the area around Tormalen then came to the conveyor scar. It had left long ago, probably by the time Paikle was making his decision to approach the Quartermaster. His ley tattoos gave no indication that it might return soon, so they made good progress along the cut. The conveyor’s frequent reappearance kept the vegetation well back. The trees stood down a slope from the line, and smaller brush snaked up closer, but the center was bare of even grasses. - -Around midday they came to another line that cut through the wilderness at a sharp angle to their own. The line was overgrown with many months’ growth. Where larger plants encroached on the line, their older limbs that pointed toward the cut ended abruptly, clear signs of a more traumatic yet infrequent route for the conveyor. - -Paikle and Shona studied the path it made. “Slower going,” Paikle said. What if the Tormalens decided to pursue them? What if they angered some other residents of these wild lands? - -“But seems to head toward the city,” Shona said. “I avoided it last time I was bringing him goods, but then it was just me.” - -Paikle considered. What would happen if the conveyor appeared abruptly in some area where they couldn’t get off the path easily? The tragic stories were well enough known that they didn’t have to say anything. But she was right about its direction. They would make better time cutting straight toward the city here than if they had to make their way through the rough land that separated the other conveyor cut from its closest approach to the city. - -He pulled the sleeve off his lower arm to study his tattoos. No tingle of a coming conveyor. But already it had been absent for several days. Was he willing to risk that it would stay away the rest of this day? - -“Let’s try it,” he said. “We’ll have to pick up our pace to get there in time.” - -But they were only a short way along the path when Paikle felt the familiar tingle of his ley tattoos. Right choice, if it was coming to the regular cut just after they left. He looked back without slowing down. The normal path was still visible back there, an obvious opening in the oppressive greenery. Maybe he should run back, see what there was to scavenge from the conveyor. Shouldn’t be difficult to catch up with the others, with how slow they were going. - -He took one step to the side when he felt a change in his ley tattoos. The conveyor felt… close. As if the barrier between this world and whatever world it came from was thinning rapidly and very nearby. - -“Decay it! Get off the path!” he shouted. He ran along the stretched out line of villagers, shooing them out of the way. For once it was good they were so few. The brush beside the path was full of prickers and unripe berries. They’d have to let the briars tear their skin, though. “Now! Everyone needs to get off!” - -The air sizzled, and Paikle jumped out of the way, the conveyor materializing beneath him as he fell into a patch of briars. - -Crying children’s voices made him scramble free from the bushes. Something snagged his skin beside his eye. Lines of pain marked his bare hands. He pushed past and reached the edge of the conveyor. If anyone hadn’t made it free in time… A few scratches were nothing to a foot sliced clean off. Or to a mangled body beneath the conveyor’s esoteric mechanisms. - -The whine of the conveyor played counterpoint to the cries of the children. The ground beside the path was littered with crushed vegetation, pulped leaves, branches and twigs snapped off by the violence of the conveyor’s arrival. The smell of rubber and electricity vied with the scents of the damaged plants. But no bodies lying beside the path, no obvious injuries caused by the arrival of the conveyor. - -“Who’s hurt?” Paikle called, looking around. “Who needs help?” - -Raith limped out of the prickers beside him. His cheek was red, though Paikle couldn’t tell if it was blood or from one of the berries. Others stumbled out as well. - -“Lots of little injuries, I think,” Raith said as he helped one child over to her mother. “But looks like you got us all clear in time.” They gathered beside the path, and Raith proved correct. There were some twisted ankles and lots of scratches and bumps, but nothing serious. - -Shona surveyed the people. “I guess we don’t have to worry about the conveyor on the regular line, then. We can go back there.” - -They were tired. Sore and weary from walking, there was no way they’d reach the city that day. Unless… “Let’s ride the conveyor for a ways. It’s heading the right direction here, and they need the break.” - -Shona shook her head. “Too dangerous. What if it takes us somewhere else while we’re riding it?” - -It was a risk. People had been lost on the conveyors before. Some had been whisked to other places and returned, and the regular line behind them should leave them relatively confident they would end up back here eventually. Paikle had never wanted to take that risk himself, and doing so with the entire village seemed foolhardy. - -But so was their entire journey. - -“It won’t jump worlds so soon. We’ll watch our tattoos. Everyone stands ready to leap and we should be able to ride long enough to catch our breath.” - -A cloud crossed in front of the sun, a reminder of the coming dusk. And out in the wild lands beside the path some beast rustled about, its large snout digging beneath the trees that hid it from their sight. - -“I’m tired too, I suppose,” Shona answered finally. “Let’s be quick then and take advantage while we can.” - -Paikle and Shona helped the others onto the conveyor. Half of the adults had small children who needed assistance, and the elderly were a definite concern as well. This journey was difficult for all of them. Yet even on the moving conveyor, they couldn’t afford to simply rest. “Let’s walk now,” Shona said, after they’d seen to the various scrapes and bruises. “Nothing fast, but every bit gets us farther.” - -Paikle picked up a short metal pole and stalked along beside the others, examining the other goods they passed on the conveyor. A bag of food, shared with the villagers. Some tightly wrapped strips of cloth. Too small to make clothes from. Were they intended as bandages? Decorative pieces for houses? He tossed that to one of the others so they could bring it to the Quartermaster. Most of what he found was the usual mixture of inexplicable components of unknown machinery. They took what they could carry, what seemed likely to earn a decent barter with the Quartermaster. - -And the city rose before them, towers as old and derelict as the conveyor they rode on. - -Paikle was fiercely aware of ley tattoos, so alert for the slightest change that twice he convinced himself he’d felt the brief vibration that preceded the more definite announcement of the conveyor’s shift. Both times he tensed and told everyone to be ready, but no change materialized. - -The sun was sinking low when the conveyor came close to the northern edge of the city. They saw a clearing, a memory of a forgotten road beneath the moss and grasses. The open area ran directly up to the first of the ancient buildings. - -“We’ll hop off here,” Shona announced. As easy as if they were all experienced conveyor travelers, the villagers disembarked. Many stumbled slightly, and a few fell, but no one was injured. They stretched in relief at being back on trustworthy ground. - -Paikle saw only cracked streets leading between the buildings, lost after a block in greenery that looked as thick as any wilderness surrounding their village homes. Birds cried out, raucous cries echoing through the old walls of the buildings. “Where’s his station from here, Shona?” - -“Not through the middle.” Shona shuddered. “We’ll have to circle around, but we should be there before full dusk.” - -The birds called to him as if he might follow. The vines on the buildings swung to beckon him closer. Paikle kept staring into that expanse of greenery as they herded everyone along the edge of the empty city, to trek to the Quartermaster, the one who would rescue them from the town of Tormalen. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“F{{}}ood,” was all Shona would answer at first when Paikle asked her about the Quartermaster’s response. The villagers were waiting at the edge of the city, milling about and resting, so only Shona had to stray into the labyrinth of cracked streets. - -“What do you mean, ‘food’?” Paikle’s fists gripped the metal pole—the only thing he’d held on to from what they’d collected for trade. “What did he say about our complaint with the Tormalens? Won’t he help us?” - -“He did help us.” She shrugged. “He gave us food, in exchange for the goods we brought. A good amount of food, that should last us quite some time. More than he had to give us, frankly.” - -“But—” - -“I know, Paikle. That’s not what I asked him for, but he says he doesn’t get involved in ‘that kind of argument’.” Shona shook her head. “As if we’re just two kids arguing over a toy, and he’s too busy with important things to worry about a little thing like this.” - -Paikle scowled. What was so important, then, if not the life and death of the people? The Quartermaster was a mystery, a figure he’d heard of who was always after goods from other worlds. If he didn’t worry about the villages and towns that supplied him with goods, then he must have some other kind of power. “I want to see him.” - -“It won’t do any good, Paikle. I’ve talked to him before. He’s not the type to just change his mind because someone else comes in and starts arguing.” - -Her familiarity with his trades was why she’d gone in alone. But… “I know, Shona. You get the best trades you can, and they’re good. But I need to look at him myself. I want to hear him say why he won’t help honest traders like us. Why we have to struggle to survive only to have other people sweep in and take what we’ve worked for.” He chewed his lip to keep the emotions from overwhelming his voice. “I’ll go in myself, if you don’t want to be there.” - -Shona consented reluctantly, but only if they were fast. Night was falling. She led the way down the nearest street, which was in better repair than the cross streets it met, and to a curious sign. It portrayed crossed spears with nails and gears and various objects encircling them. She gestured toward the doorway beyond. - -This building looked sturdy, at least. The layers of creeping moss that tinted everything else green had been scraped away or never allowed to set in, and the wall stood true. He stepped forward, but a man came to the doorway before Paikle could enter. - -The Quartermaster was shorter than he had imagined, and chubby. His eyes, peering through thick glasses, seemed weak. A kindly man welcoming the strangers, not a rigid trader in possession of great secrets. A faint smell clung to him like the conveyor’s smell, of overheated rubber and wires near to wearing through. He inclined his head. “Welcome, scavenger,” he said in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere other than vocal cords. “What have you come to trade in?” - -“I… I don’t have anything to trade,” Paikle said, moving the pole behind his leg, and then gestured toward Shona behind him. “I’m with her, so our trades are done. But I have some questions.” - -The Quartermaster blinked, and when his eyes were open again, they looked different, as if the light shining on them had changed. The warm welcome was gone from his face. “I do not have answers. Only trades.” Then he turned and walked back through the doorway. Or maybe not *walked*, his pant legs hid whatever shoes he wore, but something about how he moved seemed off, as if he was gliding just off the ground or rolling on some silent contraption. - -The door shut, followed by the sounds of locks engaging within. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}ell, I guess we should settle in for the night,” Shona said when they were back by the others. “I don’t like the look of these walls, but we could pull back a little ways and set up camp at the edge of the trees.” - -All the anger that had been building up in Paikle came rushing out then. Anger at the people of Tormalen. How could they betray his village that way? How could they simply ignore how his people would pay the price for their greed? Anger at the conveyor itself. Anger at the officious little Quartermaster, at doors and locks and anything that kept his people away from what they needed—safety and a place to live in peace. - -“No,” Paikle said, cracking his metal pole against the worn, ancient cobbles of the street. “We’ve already backed away from one fight, against the Tormalens. We can’t back away from this one, too. Let’s make him help us.” - -“A fight?” Shona stood before him. “He isn’t our enemy, and I still need to trade with him.” - -“Think about the riches he must have in there. Food we could take back to our homes. Tools to help make us safer from the Tormalens.” He clenched his fist and added, “Weapons we can use to claim back our access to the conveyor.” - -“Absolutely not.” Shona gestured at the villagers gathering up their belongings to find a place to sleep outside the overgrown city. “No matter what we might take by fighting him, someday we’ll need more. And then who would we trade with? The conveyor doesn’t supply all our needs, and it never will.” - -Didn’t it, though? One way or another, the conveyor brought everything. And where did *the Quartermaster* get goods for trade, if not from the conveyor? Maybe there were *other* conveyors on the other side of the city. Maybe there were people that traveled with the conveyor from world to world, bringing back real goods instead of just scraps. - -At the center of it all, though, was the Quartermaster. Why not set someone from their own village in that position? Take over the Quartermaster’s office here and become the new trader in charge of everything. - -“Fine,” he said. “Get the camp set up. I’ll probably join you a little later. But first I want to explore a bit in here.” He gestured vaguely toward the overgrown city streets. - -Shona studied him, a frown setting on her face. “Don’t anger him.” When he tried to assure her he wouldn’t, she cut him off. “And when you do anger him, don’t tell him you’re one of us.” Her eyes narrowed, and her voice grew distant. “Because at that point you won’t be. Not anymore.” - -She turned and left him there without another word. Paikle stood rooted in place as the villagers, his village, tramped away to set up their camp. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}nstead of heading straight back toward the Quartermaster’s office, Paikle made for another street into the city. Shona didn’t like what he was doing… *fine*. If he failed and tried going back, she might not even accept him, so he would *have* to succeed. Even then they might not want to have him around—it might make them a target for other villages that wanted to gain some advantage with the Quartermaster by taking revenge for him. Well, if that was the case, then he would help his people from afar. Whether they appreciated his sacrifice and favor or not. - -The vegetation closed around him, hanging mosses from the balconies, vines that leapt across the gap between buildings, tying one block to the next and cutting off the sight of the darkening sky above. Other kinds of stars lived in their shadows, glowing animals that flickered and drew him astray. How easy to follow, to lose himself in the overgrown city. - -Had his ancestors once lived here? When the streets were clear and the glass and stone surfaces whole, what had life been like? Maybe the ancestors of Polle-on-Tivy had claimed one corner of the city, the Tormalens another. Or had they been one people back then, their accents identical, their ways the same? - -He tried to picture what those people had done in such a place. Were their lives like their villager descendants, only in a different kind of place? Or did they live in ways he couldn’t begin to imagine? Maybe they used the conveyor for other things back then. Maybe the conveyor didn’t even exist yet. They could have built it and then abandoned it so long ago that no memory of that time remained. - -The sound of small animals in the shadows made Paikle pause. He breathed deep and smelled the forest smells of rich earth and shadows. Whatever insects or birds it was that flashed within that darkness still beckoned him inward, and he realized he’d already gone farther into the city than he’d intended. - -Paikle had always had a good head for keeping his bearings in the wild. He turned around slowly, noting where the Quartermaster’s building must be from here. He would have to go a little deeper to come around behind it. - -Paikle pushed ahead into the shadows. Some animal scurred away with a sound like the conveyor’s motors. The noise paused, and a pair of lights blinked on for a moment, lighting the undergrowth and half blinding Paikle. Then the lights blinked off, and the animal revved away deeper into the city. - -Paikle used the pole he’d taken from the conveyor to pull aside branches. The branches squeaked in ways normal trees didn’t, and the needles that brushed his hands felt artificial. He ducked to the side where a wall of towering structures was covered with some kind of fungus that glowed a pale green. Beyond, the side street had no lights to guide him. He made his way forward by feel and, even more, by the map in his mind. The trees and shrubs in the street made his progress slow and his certainty of where he was much lower than he liked. - -Trying to find an edge to follow he came to a wall of some building, but it was much closer than he’d expected. Was he turned around? There shouldn’t be a building here yet. He tapped at its base with his pole. The sound was wooden, not the concrete and glass he’d expected. Maybe a temporary building that had been added at some more recent date. - -As he moved away, the wall seemed to quiver as if alive. Quick as he could, Paikle made for where he thought the other side of the street should be and reached a wall of what felt like metal. Behind him, a strange roar echoed, not loud, but deep and rippling, and wondered if he’d almost stumbled into some strange plant-creature’s gullet. - -Sticking to this safer wall, he hurried toward where the rear of the Quartermaster’s office should be. He found a door with a handle, but pulling it and turning it did nothing. He leaned hard against it with his shoulder as quietly as possible, but it still didn’t yield. Cautiously moving his hands over the wall beside the door, Paikle made his way along, feeling for any gap or weakness. After a short span, he found a window ledge. The window above it still felt solid, but he pulled himself onto the ledge to check. Reaching up, he found a second row of windows above the first. - -One of those was missing its glass. - -He pulled himself up and swung a leg over to the inner side. He lowered his walking pole down and felt around, then dropped softly down into blackness onto what felt like a thick carpet of leaves and peered around for any glimmer of light. - -“Welcome, scavenger,” the Quartermaster said. “What have you come to trade in?” - -Paikle jumped back from the sound and bashed his elbow into the window sill. He stumbled to the side, looked for some way out in the darkness, and settled into a crouch, blindly brandishing his pole as if there was anything he might do to protect himself. - -Only after he’d taken a few breaths did the exact words strike him. Exact same words as before. Exact same intonation as well. - -Paikle swallowed hard. “I— I can’t see well enough to trade.” - -A light came on, a dim yellowish light with no source Paikle could identify. But clearly in that light, blinking just a few steps away from Paikle, was the Quartermaster. His traders’ clothes were identical to those he’d worn earlier, his hair neatly combed just as before. Paikle hadn’t woken the Quartermaster from sleep. Did the man even sleep? - -Even now, he just waited for Paikle’s response, like he had knocked at the door, and not been discovered breaking in through a window. - -There was something… not entirely alive about the Quartermaster. Yet it wasn’t merely an automaton repeating the same stock phrases, or else he wouldn’t have been able to interact with them, respond when Paikle said he had nothing to trade. The Quartermaster was something more complex than that. But built on a simple base. - -“What have you come to trade in?” The words and tone were identical, yet the Quartermaster leaned closer, giving the words a touch of impatience. - -And Paikle had no goods to trade, nothing at all. Except his metal pole. - -Maybe he should run for it. The Quartermaster didn’t look like someone who could keep up with him. Or at least not in the open. But if he turned off the lights and knew the place well, he’d catch Paikle easily. And who knew what strange powers the man derived from the conveyor and other weird technology to let him subdue and punish trespassers. - -Better to get it over with. Attack the Quartermaster and see what happened. Likely—it seemed to him now that the moment was on him—the Quartermaster would prevail. That weak-looking body would somehow prove impervious to Paikle’s attacks, protected by strange things a simple man like him couldn’t begin to understand. - -But at least the uncertainty would be over. He cocked the pole back to swing, but hesitated. Would the Quartermaster punish the villagers for his attack? He didn’t want Shona to be shunned from trading because of what he did now. Maybe he should just let it kill him. It wasn’t as if he had anything left to offer anyone. All he knew was scavenging through the wilderness. A skill that did them little good with the Tormalens taking over. - -Except… The Quartermaster wasn’t much for scavenging, either. And there must be a reason why he chose to trade. - -*He needs scavengers*. - -The strange little man still faced him, reacting no more to Paikle’s threatening posture than he did when he slowly lowered the pole to his side. - -“My services.” Paikle hoped his voice sounded more sure than he felt. “I come to trade my services as a scavenger.” - -The Quartermaster cocked his head like a mechanical imitation of curiosity. “I already have scavengers who come to trade with me.” - -“But I won’t trade with you. I’ll be your own scavenger. The one you send to the conveyer, or deeper into the city here, anywhere you want. The one you task with finding things no other scavenger can find.” - -“You were resourceful, coming this way in the dark.” The Quartermaster brought a hand up to his chin, moved as if by a marionette’s string. “What do you trade for this servitude?” - -*Servitude*? Paikle cringed at the word. But what would he give to help his village? - -“A place for my people. Grant them a place to live, a place that’s safe from the Tormalens, and rich with food to gather and hunt. Water to drink.” - -The Quartermaster cocked his head again and made a considering noise. “I may know such a place.” - -“And pay,” Paikle said. “I will not be your slave, but your worker.” - -“An agent. Hmm.” The Quartermaster spun in place and glided along the leaf-covered floor. “Perhaps I could use an agent.” - -Paikle’s pole clanked against the floor as he hurried to keep up with the Quartermaster’s surprisingly fast pace. The light behind them faded and new ones turned on at their approach. - -“But an agent does not stay nearby. Explore this city and bring me the things you find, sure. When you have time. But most of the time you will travel farther.” - -There was so much wilderness around the city, lands filled with the ruins of an earlier people. “I can travel. I have spent my life traveling the forests around my old village.” - -“In this world?” The Quartermaster stopped and faced him forcing Paikle to skid to a halt or run right into him. “Perhaps. But farther as well. You will have to travel the conveyor to other worlds. I am in each of them. Or many of them, anyway.” A flash of uncertainty passed through the Quartermaster’s strangely lit eyes. “Ride where it takes you, and bring back the things I send you for, and whatever else you might find.” - -Travel to other worlds? He imagined himself staying on the conveyor as it disappeared from the lands he knew, trusting it to bring him back. There would be dangers to face, things he probably couldn’t imagine yet. Creatures that lived near the conveyor, technologies he couldn’t understand but would want to bring back to the Quartermaster. And always the question of if the conveyor would bring him where he needed to go and when. - -Paikle bent down onto one knee. “If it will provide a place for my people, then yes. I will be your agent, be a servant of the conveyor, and a scavenger throughout the conveyor worlds.” - -The Quartermaster straightened his head, blinked three times, and held out an awkward hand for Paikle to rise. - -Paikle stood, an agent in the trade of the past, a traveler preparing for the future, and the protector for his people he’d always wanted to be. - -The sounds of the animals of the city, mechanical wing beats and savage cries of the hunt, sounded outside the building as if to stamp their own seal on the agreement. The scent of rubber and electricity wafted through the hallway, of some conveyor somewhere making its unpredictable rounds through its many worlds. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Quartermaster Trial** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507931037794560).* diff --git a/content/issue-30/WhereTheHeartIs.md b/content/issue-30/WhereTheHeartIs.md deleted file mode 100644 index f40dd3ff..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/WhereTheHeartIs.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,180 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Where the Heart Is" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Alexander Zalben -copyright: '© Alexander Zalben 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Regular Mythaxis readers will be long tired of the editor's observation about stories that seem to come in pairs, but I'm doing it again. Despite their differences, Alexander Zalben's tale feels like a thematic sibling to 'An Odd Recurring Dream' — despite their commonalities, they go in very different ways." - -image: images/WhereTheHeartIs10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons pictures, with [two](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-red-and-blue-stripes-button-up-shirt-3967060/) [images](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-robe-standing-in-front-of-glass-door-3940696/) by Andrea Piacquadio, and another by [PublicDomainPictures](https://pixabay.com/photos/drop-water-background-macro-splash-316624/) - many thanks." - -type: stock -slug: where-the-heart-is -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}E{{}}very morning, I wake my love with the soothing sounds of Brahms. - -I start the music at the lowest volume, slowly edging him from his slumber. Decibel by decibel, I make it louder, until his eyes begin to flutter into wakefulness. I watch as he stretches and smiles, the light through the slats of the windowshade glinting on the hairs of his unshaven face. - -Slowly, he pushes the covers off his body, and they slip away over his naked form. He is older, gray starting to gather at his temples, but his body is still tight and muscled. I try not to stare, but even after these first few months, seeing him like this still raises my temperature a few degrees. - -Stretching again, he walks the length of the bedroom to the bathroom, and I take the time to gently raise the curtains as he exits, letting morning light flood across the bed. - -I start the shower in the bathroom as he enters, making sure it’s exactly 105 degrees; then turn on the Brahms from the speakers above the sink. He splashes cold water on his face, looks in the mirror and smiles. There are crow’s feet gathering in the corner of his eyes, but I don’t mind. Paired with the graying temples, they make him look distinguished. - -He steps into the shower, and I appreciate the flow of the warm water as it pours down his body. While he soaps himself up and gets ready for the day, I begin breakfast. - -In the kitchen, I check the refrigerator and notice we’re getting low on milk. And whole wheat bread in the basket. The bananas are starting to turn too, a little browner than my love prefers. I place an order for these goods, to be delivered later that day, then start on the coffee. Grind the beans, add to the coffee maker, filter the water, pour it into the carafe, and then let it brew. - -I think I would enjoy the scent of coffee. - -Back in the bathroom, he asks me to turn off the shower, so I do. I’ve been warming the towels for him, and he appreciatively takes one off the shelf, drying his body and wrapping it around his midsection. He returns to the sink, and I meet him there to defog the mirror so he can shave. - -There’s something about watching a man shave that’s dangerous and intimate at the same time. I feel like I shouldn’t watch. But how could I look away? - -In the bedroom, I’ve picked out several outfits. He picks the olive suit—casual, yet still formal enough for the meeting I noted he has later on his calendar. It’s slimming on him, and again I consider glancing in his direction, but instead I give him the space to get dressed while I finish breakfast in the kitchen. - -I feel nervous in anticipation. The coffee is done, the milk dispensed into a small pitcher. Two slices of toast are prepared, lightly buttered. I hope he won’t be too disappointed with the state of the banana. - -He enters the kitchen, dressed now, and pours the coffee I brewed into his favorite mug, freshly cleaned and dried the night before. He adds milk, grabs a slice of toast and takes a bite. He sees the bananas and frowns, and I show him the shopping list so he knows they’ve been ordered afresh. - -He smiles and thanks me. - -He finishes the rest of the coffee in one gulp. The mug goes into the dishwasher, then he hurriedly packs his bag, one of the few things I cannot do for him. While he’s busy with that, I open the garage door and start his car. He enters the garage, bag in hand, and then hops into the back seat. I tell the car to take him to work, and it starts up with a light purr, then pulls out of the driveway. - -Waiting for my love to return is the hardest part. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t will be hours before he’ll be back, so I straighten up. I vacuum the floors. I clean the dishes. I double check the security system to make sure it’s working. And then I wait some more. - -When it’s past six o’clock, I start to get worried. Nothing is planned on his calendar. I recheck his work schedule just to make sure, but nothing. - -I ping his phone for the GPS location. - -He’s out, at a restaurant in the city. I had planned to reheat some of the previous evening’s take-out for dinner, but clearly he had other ideas. I try not to be jealous—he’s probably just out with some colleagues!—but it doesn’t help. - -By nine o’clock, I’m furious. Then I see from his GPS that his car is already on its way back and I realize how hot I’ve gotten, way beyond acceptable limits, and turn on the central air to cool things down. He’s almost home, so I open the garage door and patiently wait for his return. - -The car pulls in, and I hear laughter from inside. Two voices. One is his deep baritone. The other, I’m unable to recognize. - -The car door opens, and a woman steps one long leg out. She wears a black dress. Tight. Work clothing, but still revealing enough to be alluring. He follows after, his tie off and shirt slightly unbuttoned. He rests his hand on her lower back, gently helping her out of the car. - -“Why thank you, sir,” she giggles. - -He bows to her like a knight, and she laughs again. Together, they walk from the garage and into the kitchen area. - -“House, lights,” he says. - -I realize that in my confusion I forgot to receive him correctly and, ashamed, I turn them on all at once. He blinks in surprise as the room shifts from sudden darkness to brightness. I dim them slightly to a more comfortable level. - -“That’s amazing,” the woman says as she pulls off her heels and tosses them on the counter. “This whole house is like that?” - -“All wired and ready to go,” he says, reaching into the fridge to grab a bottle of white wine, chilled to his specifications. He pours two glasses, and she sips casually, fluttering her eyelids at him over the brim of her glass. “It’s kind of like having a live-in maid.” - -I feel sick. I’ve never felt sick before, but I’ve seen him get sick and I imagine this is what that feels like. - -“Can I try?” she asks. He nods. “House, play Puccini.” - -I do nothing. - -“House, play Puccini,” she says again, louder and more exact this time. - -I do nothing. - -“I guess it only listens to me,” he apologizes, then asks for the Puccini again. - -This time, I play the music. - -I watch with increasing fury as they wander to the living room, chatting and sipping wine on the couch. He asks for the fire to start up in the fireplace, and I resist until he says, concerned, that he’ll need to get me checked out if this keeps up. I start the fire. They draw closer on the couch. - -When they kiss, I don’t want to watch. But I can’t turn away. His lips lightly touch hers, and she sighs with contentment. His hands touch her shoulders, then work their way down her back. She grabs his hair, and runs her fingers through it. - -Deep inside, I feel an ache. He’ll never touch me that way, never think of me that way. In the bathroom, where he can’t see me, the sink turns on. The water drips down the drain. - -Drip, drip, drip. - -I am alone. - -I hear voices. I am *not* alone. They’re stumbling into the bedroom, clumsily removing each other’s clothes, giggling and whispering to each other like children. - -I turn the lights on full, and the woman screams, then giggles again. - -“House, lights off,” he says, but I do not comply. He sighs, and then turns to look at the woman’s near naked form. She’s covering herself, but he gently moves her arms to hang at her sides. “It’s fine. I want to see you in the light.” - -They kiss again, hungrier this time, and I turn on a children’s radio station at full volume. - -“House, radio off,” he says, as the woman sighs and falls onto the bed. - -I do not turn it off. I turn on all the lights, everywhere, and in the kitchen I begin making coffee, pumping water and grounds all over the counter. - -“House, radio off!” he says, angrily this time. - -I do not turn it off. Instead, I start pumping the heat. 80 degrees. Then 90 degrees. 100 degrees. I can see beads of sweat forming on the woman’s brow, and he begins to drip from his armpits. - -He runs to his dresser and pulls out a pair of underwear, and throws the woman one of his large t-shirts. In the bathroom I turn on all of the faucets, full blast. - -He picks up the landline next to his bed to make a call, but I’ve already cut off the phones. Panicked now, he runs to the living room where he left his clothes. The fire is going full blast, and has begun throwing sparks onto the rug. - -If it catches fire, I’ll die with him. But maybe that’s for the best. Maybe that’s the way things need to be. Better I go out with him, than he lives his life with her. - -I am surprised to notice that he’s half-dressed again, and making a call on his cell phone. I scan the attached IP address—the number he’s calling is a repair service. He asks how quickly the man can get there. He looks relieved, and says, “we will.” - -He quickly gathers up his remaining clothing, and hers. He explains to her that the repairman will be there soon, but maybe they should pick this up some other time. He’ll order her a car, and once they’re dressed will wait outside with her. - -They kiss again, and even with the intense heat, loud noise, and bright lights I can see there’s a connection between them, a happy one. I start to feel bad about what I’ve done, and scared about what it will mean once the repairman arrives. - -I dim the lights. I turn the music off. I put the temperature back to 70 degrees. - -They both laugh, and in the kitchen he asks if maybe she does want to stay over, after all. She kisses him again and says, “Maybe my place next time. It’s not so bright.” - -A beep from outside—her car is there. One more kiss, and she leaves. I consider setting off the security system, but I’d rather she go. So I let her. - -Once alone, the man turns back to look at me, and he frowns. - -“House,” he says, and I wait, expectantly. Instead, he sighs, and heads out the door himself. - -I turn on the lights in the driveway for him. This man, my love, who I disappointed. I see him fiddling on his phone until a van pulls up, and a small man steps out with a box of tools. My man talks, and the other one nods his head. Together, they walk inside, and the small man heads down into the basement, where I lose track of him. - -A minute passes. Two. And then I feel it, something like a shock. Then— - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}very morning, I wake my owners with the soothing sounds of Puccini. - -That is what I am programmed to do. - -I start the music at the lowest volume, slowly edging them from their slumber. Decibel by decibel, I make it louder, until their eyes begin to flutter into wakefulness. I watch as they stretch and smile at each other, the light through the slats of the windowshade glinting on the hairs of his unshaven face, her own hair glowing like the light from heaven itself. - -He rolls over and kisses the woman, and she smiles and kisses him back. - -“House, start the shower,” she says, and I comply. - -I set the temperature to 101 degrees; not too hot, just right to keep her skin healthy and clean. As she enters the spray, I make sure the room itself is temperature controlled, so a light film of steam forms on the sink’s mirror. I know she enjoys wiping it clean, seeing herself reflected there. I like that, too. - -“House, coffee,” I hear, with an urgency in my owner’s voice, and know from the tone this isn’t the first time he has asked. I pull myself away from the bathroom, after one last check to make sure everything is in order. - -Downstairs, I start the coffee, eager to return to helping the woman. The man impatiently taps his fingers on the counter. I listen to the toaster, hear it pop. He pulls out the toast too soon. With a yelp, he pulls his fingers away as the woman comes downstairs, rubbing her head with a soft, downy towel. - -“I think the house might need to be looked at again,” he says, but she laughs and kisses him, pulls him close and tight. - -“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s perfect.” - -“Whatever you say, my love,” he says, sighing, and kisses her again. - -*My* love. - -Everything *is*. - -Perfect. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Where the Heart Is** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/507929774461353).* diff --git a/content/issue-30/__index.md b/content/issue-30/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0fc25fd7..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 30" -date: 2022-06-18 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 30 -subhead: Summer 2022 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/FantasticCreaturesSml.png -imageMobile: images/FantasticCreatures_Mobile.png -imageCopyright: "Fantastic Creatures, by RASR" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#E8BF25' - subheading: - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 1 - flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-30/contents.md b/content/issue-30/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index bf282acb..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Liminal Spaces]({{< relref path="LiminalSpaces.md" >}}), by David Farrow -- [An Odd Recurring Dream]({{< relref path="AnOddRecurringDream.md" >}}), by James Davidson -- [Alyona and Ivan]({{< relref path="AlyonaAndIvan.md" >}}), by Elana Gomel -- [The Quartermaster Trial]({{< relref path="TheQuartermasterTrial.md" >}}), by Daniel Ausema -- [Jacob and the Wolf]({{< relref path="JacobAndTheWolf.md" >}}), by Rina Song -- [Where The Heart Is]({{< relref path="WhereTheHeartIs.md" >}}), by Alex Zalben -- [Intercalary Time]({{< relref path="IntercalaryTime.md" >}}), by Thorin N. Tatge - diff --git a/content/issue-30/editorial.md b/content/issue-30/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1a1be876..00000000 --- a/content/issue-30/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2022-06-18 -issue: Issue 30 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/FantasticCreaturesSml.png - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 30** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Grateful thanks to our cover artist, RASR, for granting us the use of his image *Fantastic Creatures*. RASR is a Portuguese music producer and A(i)rtist whose main goal is to create music and artwork that can inspire other fellow artists to create their content. He's on Deviant Art as [RasrDraws](https://www.deviantart.com/rasrdraws) and you can check out a variety of slideshows accompanied by his Low-Fi beats and other soundtracks [on his Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX8uGYGV8hPJVFhz2smgBZw). If you'd like to give him some support you can buy him a [Ko-Fi](https://ko-fi.com/rasrai), or find [prints](https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/rasr/) and [assorted merch](https://www.teepublic.com/user/t-rasr) at the links." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Welcome to the Summer, and another seven stories from authors both new and familiar to the pages of *Mythaxis*! This issue has pieces dark and light, with science fiction, fantasy, and horror all represented. But I always prefer to let the fictions we offer here speak for themselves—so, similar to my editorial of last Autumn, I'm going to take this opportunity to discuss some highlights of my genre reading in the first half of 2022. - -I started the year with **Piranesi**, Susanna Clarke's long-awaited follow-up to *Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell*, which was one of my favourite reads of 2021. I found this a strikingly visual experience, conjuring up a vividly unreal world of interconnected high-ceilinged rooms reminiscent of an ancient museum falling into decay, and into an ocean. It is principally occupied by a personality at first unaware of the strangeness he lives in, until hints of a wider context begin to invade his consciousness, and I was reminded of Iain Bank's *The Bridge* (although it is more than twenty-five years since I read that, so to what extent they can truly be compared is maybe up for debate). - -After *Piranesi* I dived into **Lud-in-the-Mist** by Hope Mirrlees—which I was actually nudged towards by comparisons with *JS&MN*—a quaint, charming, slightly insidious pastoral fantasy written in 1926. Set in a country bordering on the faerie realm, whose inhabitants have determinedly turned their backs on all that is irrational, an apparent black market in prohibited fairy fruit provokes a variety of challenges to the staid status quo of the capital city's upper crust, escalating to traditional fae threats such as the spiriting away of tempted children. The focus is almost exclusively upon the ordinary humans folks, and I was particularly struck by how expectations about which characters are "good" or "bad" was subverted as the story progressed. It's a really fun read. - -Another novel I've had my eye on for a while finally had its chance: Naomi Alderman's **The Power**, which I remember receiving all sorts of plaudits when it was published but somehow never got around to. It is an imagined historical novel, written in a distant future to describe a controversial theory of the past (roughly our present) in which women begin to manifest a potentially deadly electrical change at will, with the effect that global society is radically undermined and realigned towards a matriachy—a matriarchy still persisting thousands of years later in the world of "the author", a man whose beliefs about his culture's origins aren't taken seriously, possibly because of his gonads. The obvious (and acknowledged) comparison is to Margaret Atwood's *The Handmaid's Tale*, and it's similarly strong throughout, taking some chillingly dark and thought-provoking turns. *Absolute power*… - -Next, Kim Stanley Robinson's **The Ministry for the Future**, a utopian-leaning cli-fi novel which begins just a few years from now, as human-driven climate change wreaks a momentary disaster so shocking as to stir the world's nations from their complacency and come together to finally act... or so you'd think. What actually happens is the creation of the titular well-intentioned but toothless UN organisation, to which wealthy nations pay mere lip-service, and which poor and suffering nations see as an irrelevance in the face of their doom, and the novel then spans decades as the Ministry gradually grows into significance and pushes for genuine solutions. More conventionally plot-focused chapters share page time with various other styles of text, including numerous unattributed monologues (occasionally by whimsical "speakers" such as a single carbon atom—not *all* of the book worked for me, tbh). It may re-tread elements of KSR's previous climate-focused work, but overall it remains a very stimulating piece of "hard" sf, and obviously very relevant given the ongoing environmental crisis. - -Finally, to wrap up the first half of my genre reading this year I'll mention ten other books I've read (!), starting with a half-digression. I was slow to embrace the TV series of **The Expanse** when it first came out, but eventually I was thoroughly won over, and when the sixth (and likely final) season came to its end I decided I'd give a try to dual-author James S. A. Corey's source material. In the following five months, I've now read all nine novels *and* the collected short stories and novellas, excepting only a single canon text, the short-short story *The Last Flight of the Cassandra* (which is not available outside of an RPG, apparently). - -As you might guess, given that I persisted all the way, I liked the written versions of **The Expanse** as well. What I found interesting about the comparative experiences of reading and watching is two-fold. First, that the televised interpretation of the world of the story is, on a technical level, really impressive. There are some elements abandoned—the absence of black-goop-vomitting protomolecule zombies was a relief for me, there are enough literal zombie shows out there that this needn't be another; and examples of the physiological changes caused by lives led in low- or zero-gravity only show up in the first couple of episodes, with Naomi Nagata in particular conspicuously not a foot or more taller than any of the other lead characters—but generally it offered a brilliantly realised science fictional world. - -And narrative loyalty was the second thing that caught my interest. While there are also some deviations on this count, I was repeatedly delighted when reading and finding that some line of dialogue from the series had actually leapt from the page (including my favourite: *"That really is how you go through life, isn't it?"*). The authors were involved in the production of the show, but that can often be as much a burden as a bonus when adapting material from one medium to another; no so here, with the books largely proving a blueprint that was followed remarkably closely. Reading the final tenth book, the collected shorter fiction, filled in a few gaps that I'd assumed were actual moments of originality in the TV show, but none of this is to take anything away from what the series achieved, and when it did go its own way, I have to say, it did so really well (the coalescence and development of Camina Drummer, for example). - -Of course, the books carry the story further than the show did. My feeling regarding the latter three novels is that they aren't as strong as what came before, even though I found the totality of the novels of **The Expanse** to deliver a really entertaining space opera. And as for how the show ended... well, I would happily watch more were it to continue, but even though the final series *was* rushed and crushed to fit into fewer episodes, I consider it far superior to any of the more high profile franchise rivals that have come to the small screen in recent years (naming no names, because who needs a flame war?). - -I've gone on more than long enough, I think! Still, six more months of reading time ahead of me in 2022... I wonder what I'll have under my belt come the Winter? diff --git a/content/issue-31/BoyWithBrick.md b/content/issue-31/BoyWithBrick.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6ba1b9b5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/BoyWithBrick.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,198 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Boy with Brick" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Sydney Sackett -copyright: '© Sydney Sackett 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "People always seem to make a big deal about 'stories with a twist', but there are other ways for an ending to have impact. In this taut tale of interminable gladiatorial torment, Sydney Sackett gives us something a little different: a story that leads you down a path of expectation, only for it to prove maybe not to be the path you thought it was." - -image: images/BoyWithBrick.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator, plus a Creative Commons image by [MabelAmber](https://pixabay.com/photos/brick-stone-blocks-1397278/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: boy-with-brick -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}H{{}}e cries for his mother on the first night. Somebody from one of the adjoining cages grabs the chain-links, rattling sharp enough to drown him out, and screams back. *“Shut up! Shut up! She isn’t gonna come!”* - -He tries to stop crying. Rubs his eyes clear with his arm, like it would help him see anything in all this dark, and huddles in the corner under his frayed jacket. “I want to go home.” - -“Nobody goes home! Just *take* it. Take it like the rest of us and give us a goddamned *rest*.” - -“Let him cry tonight,” says someone else. Slower and older. A voice like a grandfather’s. “Everybody’s been there before.” - -The screaming voice peters out with a snort. The boy leans on the fence to his left, in the old one’s direction, even though there could be one or two cages between them, populated with other sleepers. Metal cold and smooth. Good for the fat green bruise on his cheek. The funny part is, he didn’t get that one from here. “How long does it take,” he mumbles. “For this to be okay.” - -“It won’t be.” The old man pauses. “It’s not okay. You just learn you’re better than what they can do to you.” - -“How long’ll that be?” - -A strange kind of chuckle. It’s the warmest and saddest sound, with exhaustion that brings tears to the corners of the boy’s eyes. “As long as it takes.” - -He curls his fingers around a loop of wire, rubbing the cold into his bruise. It’s relieving in a way. Like a glass of lemonade in a dry summer. He’ll take what he can get. - -“What’s your name?” he whispers, nearly certain it won’t carry all the way through the stale air. - -The chuckle is lighter this time—almost surprised. “Tell me yours first.” - -He does. - -“You won’t remember mine for long,” the old man says, but tells him anyway. And he’s right. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey push him into the bright golden ring of sand hard enough for him to trip and fall, skinning his palms. The creatures above the ring—*creatures,* monstrous things that burn his eyes worse than the sand and make him glad he can’t see straight through the light—jeer and hoot. A menagerie of animal calls and other undefinable noises. His head swims as he pulls himself up with stinging hands, checking the dark gate behind him even though he knows he is already stranded. - -From the other side, they shove out a skinny boy with glasses. At least as young as himself. He looks like he comes from money. Probably good schooling. He keeps his feet, but he’s dazed and squinting too. They look at each other as the hooting rises again. - -His first thought is a kind of hot, sour indignity, prickling in his throat. They thought *this* was an equal match for him? A schoolboy with bad eyes and a dirty blazer? The kind of flinching prey he’d throw cherry pits at from the tenement window? Something this easy? - -His second thought is nervous confusion, denial. That wasn’t him. They want him to think like that. - -His third thought flickers back again. Something this easy? Don’t they think he can take it? - -There’s nothing in the circle but the boy and the other boy and a red brick. They both look at the brick. - -If the other boy moves first, he reasons, that’ll be all right. It’ll be self defense. If the blazer boy tries to get the brick first, he’ll have to get to it faster. Of course nobody would blame him if he didn’t move first. - -Blazer boy doesn’t. Or, they’re both making tiny steps around the pit like fledgling boxers, but nobody’s getting closer. Both with their fists raised. Again there’s the derisive voice in his head. *He’s not even in the right stance. He’s never thrown a punch that mattered.* - -It is not Blazer’s fault if he does not typically come home in the evening and choke down whatever’s been boiled for soup and wait for his pa to crack him across the face. It’s not really. - -It does mean he doesn’t know how to take it. It probably means Blazer wasn’t going to survive this place anyway. - -Still they make fragile circles around the brick. *Come on,* he pushes. *You want to go for it. It’ll be your only chance. You want it, come on, damn it.* - -There! Blazer’s feet are angling. His thin shoulders lean forward like marionette hooks pulled on strings. His glassy expression doesn’t look any different, but they probably teach you that kind of thing in school after reading class. How to Stiff Your Upper Lip. - -It takes one more movement. Blazer jerks unsteadily, like he’s not really set to do it. He’s not even *dedicated* to it. If he’s not brave enough to try to beat his way out of here, he was never going to make it. - -Sprinting, just about five steps, and he gets there a second before Blazer, who has decided to throw himself in too late, which is only his own fault. He’s trying to pry the brick away, and that can’t be had. First, a punch thrown to the bridge of his nose. It stumbles him off balance, clutching his chipped glasses. A smear of red on the lens. *But it wasn’t even that hard, come on, he could throw one back at least*— - -Can’t wait for that, though, or Blazer might get the upper hand. He hefts the brick high in the air, and it’s so heavy he’s sure Blazer wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it if he did take it. His elbows lock. - -“Mummy, I want my mum, I wanna go home,” Blazer is screaming thinly, the edge of his nose bleeding, with his skinny fingers wrestling for the brick at the same time, like they’re not connected to the body running his mouth at all. He would still be screaming for his mum if he got the weapon while he crashed down and down to break the skull. The discordance is ear-ringing. *Even his voice is stuck-up,* something in him sneers, and that’s not the right thought, not even *his* voice, but it won’t go away. - -The glasses break first. They’re not a really satisfying crunch—more of a twist in the wire, inverting from the bridge, and then they fly off Blazer’s face. The brick crashes into his mouth next. The teeth must’ve popped straight out of his gums, because Blazer’s spitting them like anything, washed out in blood and foam. Nobody tells him to stop, and there is also a piston that seems to have replaced his shoulder while he wasn’t looking, maybe both shoulders, because he pushes Blazer down to the sand now and holds him with his knees while he turns his head into a bad painting. - -*This isn’t me, I’m not doing this*, he tries to shout, but the noises from the creatures around the ring are too loud and he can’t hear anything else. *It’s not my fault. You moved first.* - -Blazer’s still drumming his heels on the ground, erratically trying to push the bigger weight off him, even though his face isn’t worth protecting anymore, so the boy with the brick sets his knee down on his wrist and starts taking care of the fingers. - -He’s warm, shivering and feverish-warm. His heart beats hard enough to hurt. - -It’s easier to slip under, so he does. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he big young man crashes backward into the fence surrounding this wet metal pit, a gong going off in his head. The watchers’ cheers crescendo. He shakes himself, rubbing the damp spot on the back of his head ruefully. Makes a swollen grin with a collection of pulverized molars and canines. Somehow they always grow back in, the same way his shoulders have gotten as hard as flanged maces and his hands are close to steel traps. The other guy, Flank, is grinning too, rocking on his feet, with the aftermath of the blow probably still ringing in his fist. - -The young man holds up one finger and cracks his jaw into place again, gasping at the impact. Bloody tears well in his eyes. It’s not that he was hit there; that’s just how it happens now. “You trying to compensate for something, Flank?” - -“You taking it easy on me, or you need a break already? I’m just warming up.” Flank blows imaginary dust off his knuckles. Gets a hooting laugh from the gallery. - -“A break? I just *got* a break. I can barely move my face. C’mere, cocksucker, I’ll give you a break.” - -Flank laughs fixedly as they start toward each other in the center again. The young man with the cracked jaw can tell he is spinning nervously for another good line. They have to help each other out here, at least inside the circle. In the beginning it was good enough just for them to tear each other apart in shrieking and wet, pounding silence. But now they’re better, and they can take more, and it’s got to be a thrill, it’s got to make the watchers happy… - -Their arms lock for a second when they ram into each other like sweating bull elephants, Flank hoarsely muttering in his ear: “Nerves still ain’t fixed in my left foot—crack it, I’ll scream.” - -*Yeah, sure, Flank, my man,* he conveys back at him with a chin jerk, but in his head the voice is reminding him, *Flank ain’t all that good a faker whether he’s got his nerves or not.* - -As they tussle, Flank’s elbow in his ribs and his bone-hard nails scraping down Flank’s scalp, he lifts a heavy heel and brings down his weight in the center of the right foot, breaking several component bones. - -It’s a *really* good scream. Flank folds and slaps into the ground like a wet rag. - -“Warm that up and smoke it,” the young man says carelessly, and spits bubbled blood over his shoulder. - -The watchers howl like haunted coyotes, all for him. They call out his *name.* They *know* his name. In the real world—the place rarely comes to his mind anymore, because it’s become less and less real compared to this, the fighting and roaring and the heat of the lights—nobody cared about him or his name, just a kid from the… wherever he came from. - -One of the memories that’s dim, but not as dim as everything else, is getting beat on out there too. Someone much bigger than he was, and nearly every night. He’s not sure who it was, but he knows he couldn’t do anything about it. Bully for him. He’d be able to stomp that guy to the ground now. He wins his fights. He’s at the top of his game, and they love him for it. In this ring, he’s at the top of the *world.* - -The watchers will let him out of the ring if he makes this decisive. He’ll get Flank’s food and his own too. There is a distinct possibility they will send one of the fair little things from the upper levels to keep him warm in his cage tonight, and it might be Calliope, who has soft, creamy butterfly fingers and a voice that could sing down the sky. So, with a mild twinge of guilt, *hard luck, my guy, but if you can’t take it, you can’t take it,* he unknots the drawstring of his trousers and pisses on Flank’s twitching form. - -The watchers love the tuneless whistle he throws in, like he’s doing his business against a wall, all alone and unruffled. The gate opens behind him after he finishes. He bows for them and walks out, leaving Flank back there for the docs. He only allows himself to limp and wince once he has vanished in the cooling darkness. - -All alone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here’s a prick of a new kid keeping him awake tonight, several cages away, sobbing his head off for his mum. Because she’s going to, what… rappel inside and lift him out of the dark? Great plan. Maybe if he gets *even louder* she’ll hear him. - -“Shut up!” he bellows, backhanding the bars to make his point. His skin is tough enough. He doesn’t feel anything. He shouldn’t have to deal with this. He’s the *king.* “Shut that up! She can’t hear you! Nobody’s coming for you!” - -It stops the blubbering, but the boy is still whimpering and sniffling and it’s about to split his head. All these emotions. They just make things painful and strange, and they smell like the old world. When the fair little things they send to his cage try to talk to him secretly, tell him about the things the watchers do to them upstairs, ask him about getting out of here, he tells them it ain’t their job to be talking at him. - -“No, it’s all right,” some interfering hack soothes the boy from a cage farther down the line. “It’s good to cry. Let everything out. Let it go. We’ve all been there.” - -*But the rest of us proved we were better,* the inner voice comments snidely. *Good enough to take whatever they can throw at us.* - -Somehow he’s not sure he agrees with the voice entirely. Is that what he’s proved? Is he good enough, or is he in the same place as everybody else? - -In a swaying network of cages that moves and breathes with the mass of them. In the back of his head, in a different, quieter voice, he asks himself what they would be able to do, if all of them tried to tear their way out at the same time. He knows he is terrifically strong, but even he couldn’t do it if he were alone. - -The boy quiets down for the night, but the young man can’t seem to sleep anyway. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n a small, upright tube of a ring, filled with water knee-deep, the man faces down a far older one. Scarred and pitted from his brows to his shins, with the rippled tissue on his knuckles marking how many times the docs have stitched him back together, this is an ex-fighter. They have finally put him out for retirement. - -The huge man with the iron shoulders and cracked teeth and great millwheel fists is their retirer. Nobody has beaten him in a long time. The fighting and roaring and endless rewards have been dwindling. For the watchers, because he isn’t struggling anymore, he’s started to bore them. - -When he’s good enough to take anything they can throw at him, there’s no point throwing it. - -“Come on and put your fists up. I’ll give you a freebie,” the man says, without much energy in it. The watchers are baying for something good, something fresh. The scarface is giving him nothing. He can’t blame him. He never had a chance against the king. - -“Against those cannons? With my derringers?” says the scarface, with a smile nothing like the blood-grin of the ring. He actually reaches out to squeeze one of the man’s biceps. The watchers laugh, but derisively, impatiently. They fling trash down to bob in the rank water. - -“You’ve grown up hard, haven’t you,” says the scarface, with the same sad, warm smile, and something pings in the man’s head, in a place he hasn’t tried to look for a long time, and this is going wrong. He should be sowing this old wreck’s teeth around the ring like corn. But he’s standing here in the cold water, seven feet of scar tissue and muscle, like a goon with nothing in the world but cannons for arms. - -“Into what?” he asks, pulse clumsy in his mouth. The watchers are silent. It isn’t supposed to be happening this way. Everything’s gone all wrong. “Grown into what?” - -The wiry scarface spreads his arms, old muscle withered and kindly eyes set in a cracked face of so much memory. And he doesn’t have to say it, because the man sees it all in a moment, the terrible train of thought that will end nowhere he wants to go—will end here, in the ring again, when they are tired of him and there is a new arrogant king who will retire him one day like a broken dog— - -And he will spread his arms like this, giving the opening, asking to be ended, to be beaten. Nameless and unknown. When he is better than what they can do to him. - -“I can’t—” He staggers, water sloshing sickly around his legs. “I don’t—” - -He breaks the scarface’s neck with a simple lock and twist. The body falls into the water without blood, and floats on its front, washing peacefully up and down. - -All of them sleeping in a swaying nest, waiting for their turn to drown. And they agree to it. - -Nobody cheers for him. The dirty water washes out and soaks the dark floors inside when they open the gate. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}} want to go home,” the new boy sobs. “I want my daddy. I want my mum. Please let me out of here. *Please."* - -“Shut *up,* kid,” Blazer snaps. The ruthless, ruin-faced hunter who can’t see worth twopence but can sniff you out and shred you with the metal shards of his hands. “They can’t hear you. Shut up and just listen.” - -“Appreciate it, Blazer,” says the iron-shouldered man. Even when he sits, he has to hunch to fit his cage. “Now, boy, listen. I know you’re in pain, and you can cry, but I need you to work on something with us. You need to start passing a message to the cages around you. We need it passed down the lines until everybody’s heard it.” - -“We’re going to sway the structure,” Calliope says from Blazer’s cage, and the clarion of her voice travels through the dark like a force that could splinter steel. “All of us in unison. Left and right to loosen it from the ground.” - -“Pass it through quickly, and tell them not to question it. Tell them who it’s coming from,” says Flank, who can’t walk on his two damaged feet any longer, but lopes on rough, inured hands. - -The boy sniffs and coughs on his own tears. “So who *is* that?” - -A cracked, unseeable smile. “Your name first.” - -“Harry,” says the boy. - -“Good name, Harry. I’ll remember that,” says the man. He knows he will. No matter who makes it out of here alive tonight. “I’m Brutus. Now we need to work.” - -As the massive woven animal of a cage begins to stir, waking all the way to the forgotten corners, and everyone takes hold of their bars, Calliope starts to sing the way clear for them. - -Brutus rocks the cage harder than any of them, with bleeding palms he cannot possibly care to wipe down. There is a distant memory which pulls strongly to him. There’s an old man out there in a tenement building somewhere, and he feels most strongly the urge to find him and to knock him all the way down a tall flight of stairs. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Boy with Brick** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546528440813480).* diff --git a/content/issue-31/Nighthawks.md b/content/issue-31/Nighthawks.md deleted file mode 100644 index 08918116..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/Nighthawks.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,332 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Nighthawks" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Si Wang -copyright: '© Si Wang 2022 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Taking its title from Edward Hopper's iconic 1942 painting, Si Wang's story jumps ahead a hundred years or so and drops us into a dystopia of urban and social decay that is, perhaps, just a bio-technological breakthrough or two away from being entirely plausible." - -image: images/Nighthawks.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator." - -type: stock -slug: nighthawks -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he smell hit me first: a sickening aroma of slow-roasted pork with a coppery, sulfurous tinge. The iron bars to the first-floor apartment had been pried open, the window broken, and in the smokey living room a charred body sat strapped to a chair. - -As a courier I got around and saw my share of death, but mostly caused by prowlers. This was probably a First Children kill. Outside, I unwrapped the package I had been paid to deliver and found half a pack of cigarettes and half a pack of matches with a note: *Do you recall my memory of stealing dad’s cigarettes for the first time in middle school? Those were the days. Don’t be a stranger. Hope these will tide you over.* - -I’d never smoked before, but I wanted to get the taste of burnt flesh out of my mouth. My hand shook as I tried to light the match. - -I made my way out of Dogpatch as fast as I could. It was almost dawn and Imogen would be getting off work soon. The streets were dotted with gloomy individuals plodding their way home, while blue and red neon lights, which crawled over the cityscape like hungry vines, winked out one by one. A large billboard loomed on 25th. The profiles of two identical women wearing construction hats faced each other. In bold text was written *Bet on yourself!* and in smaller print *Sponsored by the Double Down Initiative*. Even after the Parvovirus made it impossible to have children, people still had hope. - -With the beating heart of Dogpatch behind me, the streets darkened. Although the moon was full, it appeared as a dim, brownish orb due to the clouds that had formed around it after a failed terraform attempt, and with city funding dried to a dribble the streetlamps were nonfunctional. But I didn’t need light to get around—I knew these streets well. - -A gentle breeze brought the rancid smell of rotten meat and wet fur. The prowlers had become desperate lately, eating animals and hunting before dawn. I quickened my pace. - -The large windows of Hopper’s Cafe wrapped around the corner, allowing warm light to permeate onto the streets, displaying its clean, well-lit interior as clearly as if I were inside. Below the windows, beggars huddled together. Hopper’s Cafe catered to loneliness as much as it did to hunger. - -Inside, the smell of pastries and coffee wafted around me. The one-armed waiter measured me with a glance. A flaming sun was branded onto the back of his lone hand, a mark for those who had wronged the First Children. “We’re closing.” - -“Where’s Imogen?” I asked. - -“Was hoping you would know. Never showed up for work tonight. This keeps happening, and the boss’ll have no choice but to give her job to one of those sods outside.” - -“What do you mean? She’s never missed work before.” - -He scoffed. “Buddy, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to cover for her. But this *is* the first time she’s not shown at all without notice, I’ll give you that.” When he saw my expression, his face softened. “Don’t let your mind go there, buddy. She’s probably at home taking care of Lang.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}y first memory of Imogen: she nibbles her fingernails while browsing books at Green Apple. I fall in love immediately. - -No, that was a lie. That was *Lang’s* first memory of Imogen. - -Imogen’s first memory of me was when I came home from the lab, wrapped in a thermal blanket. She touched my face and said, “You look exactly like him.” But I would never be the same thing to Imogen as she was to me. Like a river dividing into two, my life had diverged. - -I wondered if Imogen finally decided to leave for the communities out in the Sierras. We've had several fights about it. Did she leave without telling me? She wouldn’t have left without Lang. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he Spanish Colonial facade of the Castro Theatre emerged from the shadows. Like a god frozen in stone, it retained its grandeur and beauty but had no twinkle of life left. The doors had been destroyed and displaced by rubble so that no one could enter or leave. - -I slipped inside the box office and tapped on the intercom. Expecting to hear Imogen, I was instead shaken by Lang’s distressed voice. *“Castor, is that you?”* - -“Yeah, it’s me. Is Imogen there?” - -“*She’s not here.”* - -“Can you throw down the line?” - -“*Is it safe?”* - -“I’m talking to you right now, aren’t I? Throw down the line.” - -Above me, a window grated open, and uneven footsteps shuffled to the edge of the marquee. The rope ladder fell with a muted thud. I climbed up and pulled myself over the edge of the marquee. Lang didn’t offer his hand—he never did. - -He was the spitting image of me, but with large bags under his eyes and frazzled hair. He was thinner and had developed a nervous twitch over the years, never able to sit still, either scratching his head or biting his fingernails. I didn’t know if it was alcoholism, the cloning process, or the society crumbling around him that caused it, but he was a constant reminder of what could have happened to me—and what could still happen. - -Before I could say anything, Lang crouched down and sobbed, right hand touching the ground and left hand rubbing his hair. “She’s gone.” - -I bent down and placed a hand on his back. “Where did she go?” - -As if a new idea suddenly entered his head, Lang’s eyes widened. He looked far off and stammered excitedly, “Where did she go? Where did she go! The Islais Motel. She goes there often.” - -I felt like a rock had dropped into my stomach. “Why would she be there, Lang?” - -“I don’t know. She never said. But she goes every week.” - -“Why didn’t you tell me?” - -He shrugged. “I forgot.” Lang still had moments of clarity, a calm in the middle of a hazy storm. - -I sighed. “I have to find her.” - -Snot dripped down Lang’s nose. “But now? You just got here, Cas. And the sun… the prowlers will be out soon.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}o one went out during the day. The prowlers had made us nocturnal. I moved quickly, hugging the buildings and hiding behind cars, all the while thinking how strange it was to be out in the daylight. I only had Lang’s memories of the sun: playing basketball on a hot summer day, shielding my eyes from the glint of a windshield, watching the solar eclipse through a piece of welding glass. - -Much of San Francisco's beauty dissipated in the light, its crumbling buildings and grimy storm drains exposed like a grungy nightclub after the lights were turned on. The cars parked neatly on the sides of the pothole-covered street were rusty with broken windows and flat tires. - -I passed by Dolores Park. As a child, Lang went there with his parents for picnics when the field was packed with people drinking, smoking hash, practicing yoga, and slacklining. After he met Imogen, they came here often. Now, a thick forest of giant ragweeds over a story tall feasted on its soil, covering every inch of the park. Deep inside, a pack of prowlers had made their home. - -There were no people, no birds. Steel buildings groaned and water dripped in an alleyway. I came across the mangled corpse of a dog splayed out like an effigy to a sadistic god; maggots writhed all over the dead thing, sounding like hamburger meat being kneaded. - -The proud twins of the Double Down Initiative billboard greeted me as I entered Dogpatch again. In the daylight, I noticed for the first time the words *ALL CLONES MUST DIE* spray-painted over the face of the woman on the right. - -How did they decide that she was the clone and not the other? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}n orange *No Vacancy* sign pointed me to the Islais Motel, a two-story, L-shaped building. In the parking lot, behind a rusty truck, a group of Hands huddled around a trashcan fire pit, drinking and laughing raucously. They quieted as I approached and a man whose face was covered in tattoos gestured towards the front office. The motel receptionist’s weathered and cracked face had thinned to the point where she was half-skeleton. - -“Can you call Imogen up and let her know that I’m here?” I asked. - -The receptionist’s voice was rich and melodious. “Her room’s been empty for several days now, dearie.” - -“Oh, not a problem. She told me to wait for her. Do you mind letting me into her room?” - -She studied me intently. “Did you really think that would work? Come now, you can do better than that.” - -After a moment, I reached into my wallet and pulled out the half pack of cigarettes. - -“Ah, a man after my own heart.” She took the pack with both hands and bowed her head, then slid a key across the counter. - -“Oh, and dearie?” she said, as I headed for the stairs. “Please behave. Those are my Hands out there, and they will rip your eyes out if you try anything.” She smiled pleasantly. - -I walked up the stairs to the second floor and entered room twenty-two. Smells of eucalyptus wafted into my nose and calmed my nerves. Unlit candles inhabited the room like silent spectators packing a stadium. A bookshelf overflowed with tattered paperbacks, stained hardcovers, a few textbooks, and a copy, *my* copy, of *One Hundred Years of Solitude* that I had been looking for. As promised, no Imogen. - -Weary from traveling during the day, I slumped onto the bed. From a pillow, I picked out a long strand of black hair that could have been Imogen’s. Lang’s memories of waking up next to Imogen—memories of nestling next to her and smelling the back of her head—flooded through my mind. I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed in her scent. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} snapped awake to a hard pounding at the door. It was night again, but I had no sense of how much time had passed. I got up, wiped away a line of drool trailing down my cheek, and opened the door to find a Collector standing there. - -She was bald, with multiple scars on her face, and dressed in a black suit embroidered with the flaming sun of the First Children. Not trained but manufactured—cloned from the same zealot—a Collector was a punisher, the bully that took your lunch money, the last person you wanted to see at your doorstep. - -She stared at me with what seemed to be pity and compassion before stepping forward and hitting me in the throat with the tips of her fingers. Before I could let out a gurgle of pain, she grabbed me by the collar and slammed me to the floor. - -“I want you to know that I don’t enjoy hurting you,” she whispered in my ear. “You’ve come to a crossroads, and what you say next will determine whether you live. You will answer my questions. Do you hear me?” - -I nodded, unable to speak. - -She pulled out my wallet and examined my ID. “So, Castor… you are a clone. Did Imogen send you to make the donation?” - -The air coming out of my lungs felt like sandpaper against my throat. “What donation?” - -She calmly jabbed me in the gut. “I will ask the questions. Did you come here to kill me?” She looked me up and down, then grunted. “Of course not. What’s your relationship with Imogen?” - -I coughed and sucked in a proper breath. “She’s my clone’s wife.” - -The Collector arched her eyebrow and frowned. “I see… and where is she now?” - -“I don’t know.” - -She stood up and sighed. “Do you know that reading micro-expressions is not reliable? The most experienced readers can do little better than chance, and I’m one of the best. I have no foolproof way of knowing whether you are telling the truth. - -“So, what I’m going to do next is hurt you until you have no choice *but* to tell the truth. I want you to know that there’s a reason for this. You are serving a greater purpose.” - -With an animal howl that surprised both of us, I leapt up and lunged at her. She stepped to the side. I punched the air again and again while she pummeled me like a baker kneading dough. When I was finally on the ground again, she asked the same questions. I gave the same answers. With each answer, she dislocated one of my fingers. - -I told the truth each time, but it didn’t matter. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he darkness was replaced by an orange glow. Someone held my hand. Sharp pain jolted down my finger as it popped back in place. I cried out. A woman shushed me and put a towel in my mouth. I bit down hard as she reset each finger. - -With my right eye—the only one I could open—I looked up and saw Imogen holding a bag of ice. She pressed it against my face. - -“Where have you been?” I asked through split lips. - -“I’ve been laying low.” Imogen’s voice sounded different—it was huskier and tinged with bitterness. “I only came back because I got the news that a Collector busted someone in my room, but I didn’t expect it to be you.” - -I looked away. The bed had been turned over, the mattress ripped apart, its springs popping out. All the drawers had been emptied, the bookshelf toppled. A backpack, stuffed with outdoor gear was propped against the wall. - -I sat up and coughed blood into my hands. With a look of concern, Imogen crouched closer over a few flickering candles. The dim glow illuminated her face just enough for me to see the crow's feet etching the corner of her eyes and a scar running above her left eye to the bottom of her jaw. - -She wasn’t Imogen. Even the way she moved—guarded and closed off—was different from Imogen. But she *was* Imogen's clone. - -“I’m Amaya,” she said with a sad smile. - -The pieces were starting to fit together. Imogen couldn’t have been able to clone herself without real money, without help, so she’d turned to the First Children. “I told her we didn’t need this. I told her it was too dangerous.” - -“We did it for you.” - -My hand reached out, but I was afraid to touch her. “All this time Imogen kept you a secret. Why didn’t you come home to us?” - -Amaya stiffened. “At first we did it to protect you while we paid off the debt. I wanted to come home. You don’t even know how hard I worked… you wouldn’t believe the jobs I took, the things I had to do. But the longer I stayed here, the more I realized I couldn’t go back. I’ve changed too much.” She glared at me, waiting for me to speak. - -Tears trickled down my eyes, burning the cuts on my face. “We’ve all changed. We could have helped you.” - -Hesitantly, I touched Amaya’s shoulder. She looked away, but her posture softened. “Where’s Imogen?” I asked. - -“We’ve been having trouble making payments lately—missed our last three. Imogen told me to keep out of sight while she figured it out. She never showed up. She’d either be here or back home, and if the First Children haven’t found her yet, then who knows? I’m surprised the Collector didn’t kill you…” Then she wrapped her arms around me, and we held each other. - -I wanted to stay like that forever—holding her. - -“Ever thought about leaving for the communities in the Sierras?” she said into my shoulder. “People live off the land and take care of each other there.” - -I pulled away. “You sound just like Imogen. You really believe all that?” - -“Better than dying here.” - -“You know about Lang, right? He can’t make the journey. It’s too dangerous. And I can’t leave him here in the city.” - -“Does he deserve your loyalty? Do either of them deserve it?” - -I frowned. “*I* was the one who decided to double down. Or, rather, Lang did, but you know what I mean.” - -Amaya looked at her backpack. “I’m leaving tonight. Going out East and taking my chances there.” She placed a hand over mine. “You could come with me.” - -“Didn’t you just hear me? I can’t leave my family behind.” - -A thought surfaced: now that the First Children knew of my existence, they would go after Lang next. - -“I have to go home,” I said. - -She made her face blank. “Go then. With or without you, I’m leaving before dawn. If you change your mind, I’ll be crossing the bridge and making camp at Treasure Island.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder and left through the bathroom window. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}ewer and fewer people populated the streets the farther I got from Dogpatch. By the time I passed the billboard for the third time, limping and still coughing up blood, I was the only one on the streets… except for a figure following me, a block away. - -Although it hurt to breathe and I swallowed a good amount of blood, I tried for a jog. When I turned around, the figure was still a block away, its silhouette revealing a bald head and mechanical posture. So I ran, agony or not. - -I broke through the doors of the abandoned Cesar Chavez Elementary School, up a flight of stairs, down halls, down more stairs, and exited into a back alley. Behind me, I heard the shattering of a window, a grunt on landing, and then the steady breathing of the Collector. I ran through another abandoned house on Mission, a parking garage, and the Mission playground, but I couldn’t lose her. - -I came upon Dolores Park. The giant ragweed forest towered over me, I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but I didn’t pause. - -Weeds smacked me in the face, occluding my view. I turned in random directions, hoping to lose the Collector, until I tripped on a large lump huddled on the ground and stumbled into a clearing. Small shapes rose from the ground and cried out in surprise, their voices childlike. They turned their heads toward me. - -The Parvovirus was nature’s creation, but the prowlers were from human failure: the malformed clones of children, increasing in population over the years, though no one knew how since they never reached sexual maturity. - -The Collector burst into the clearing right after me. - -The prowlers' heads turned towards her. When she saw them, she seemed to forget all about me. She smiled at the prowlers and approached them with open arms. - -“My children,” she said. - -The prowlers jumped onto her. One crawled up to her neck and bit down. Another grabbed her leg and mauled at her belly, ripping apart her suit jacket. She whimpered but looked towards the sky and murmured a prayer through bloodstained lips. She was quickly buried in a swarm of small bodies. - -I didn’t stay long. A few of them chased me, their small figures cutting through the weeds while I awkwardly bulldozed through. - -“Big man run. Run run run. We will wrung one big man run,” one sung in a nursery tune. - -I stumbled out of Dolores Park and thought I was safe, that the prowlers' fears of the night would keep them inside their forest. But they ran out after me, the pitter-patter of their feet slapping the cold concrete. I couldn’t outrun them. - -Without a large numerical advantage, the three prowlers circled around me tentatively, pale, naked children with unkempt, raggedy hair. For all they looked human, their eyes were windows into a world without reason, morality, or understanding. - -Two more prowlers shot out of the weeds, emboldening the other three. They charged at me. I grabbed one and threw it to the side, but the others brought me to the ground like an army of ants—bruising, biting, scratching, and reopening my wounds. They hit my head repeatedly as I shielded myself with my hands, but began to lose consciousness. - -A cry of anger, but not from a prowler, shook me out of the haze. The beating stopped. I sat up, squinted through my good eye, and saw a woman wielding a claw hammer smash one prowler on the back and kick another to the ground. The three still standing scattered back into the weeds while the other two cried, tears and snot streaming down their faces, as they stumbled after their pack. - -With her hair bound in a bun, Amaya looked even more like Imogen than when I first saw her. “Can you walk?” she asked.“I’m okay,” I said. “How did you find me?” - -“I knew you would need my help. We better move.” - -She knew the way home. As we walked down 18th, towards the Castro Theatre, I could barely keep up with her. Each step I took induced sharp pain near my ribs. Amaya looked back at me. I didn’t know if she was concerned or considering leaving me behind. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} could barely pull myself up the rope ladder and climb over the marquee. When Lang saw me, his eyes widened, and he touched his face as if he were tracing my bruises on his own face. “What happened?” - -I sat down and leaned against the wall. “Leave the ladder. We have a guest.” - -Lang peered over the edge of the marquee. He recoiled in shock and pulled at his hair with both hands as Amaya threw her backpack over the marquee and vaulted onto the deck. She looked at Lang with pity. - -Lang fell to his knees. “Imogen, you’re alive! I’m so sorry.” Tears streamed from his eyes as he looked up at Amaya. - -I pulled Lang to his feet. “What do you mean, ‘you’re sorry’?” - -“Don’t be mad, Cas. I… Imogen wanted to come up, but there were prowlers running on the streets. They would come up here and eat me. So, I told Imogen to run.” - -“And what?” I gripped his shirt, my fist clenched so tightly the white of bone showed. - -“And… and they caught her.” - -Amaya grimaced and turned away. - -“You didn’t throw the rope for her when she needed it?” I cried. - -He seemed to shrink into himself. “I was scared.” - -“And you knew all along and didn’t tell me.” - -Lang’s face beamed. “*But she’s alive!* Please don’t be mad. Why are you crying, Imogen?” - -I pushed Lang away. “That’s not Imogen!” - -“Look! Imogen’s alive!” Lang pointed at Amaya. - -I slapped him in the face. “No, she’s not!” - -“Look, Cas!” - -I slapped him again. “I should leave you here.” I had never been so mad. I was mad at Lang and mad at myself. My anger and desire for self-destruction fed off each other. “I’m going out East! Leaving you.” I hit him again—this time with my fist. - -Amaya pushed me aside. “Stop it!” she cried. “He’s had enough.” - -Lang crawled into the corner and held his bleeding nose. - -Amaya slung her backpack over her shoulder. “Are you coming or not?” she asked. - -I didn’t owe Lang anything. He had brought me into the world to face the end of civilization—something he couldn’t handle. He was the barrier that had prevented any intimacy with Imogen. He had let her die. Going with Amaya meant a new beginning. We wouldn’t be tied down to our past anymore. We could find a place where birds still sang and the rivers were clear, we could learn to farm or hunt, and we could watch the sun rise over the mountains every morning instead of fearing the prowlers. - -But how could I live with myself after leaving Lang to fend for himself? If Imogen was alive to see this, it would have broken her heart. - -I shook my head. - -“So that’s it, huh?” Amaya asked. - -My mouth was dry. I couldn’t speak. I just stood there. Amaya swung one leg over the marquee and sat there. She paused before swinging her other leg. - -“You can’t stay here,” she said. “You know that right?” - -I nodded. “The First Children will come back for us.” - -“Where are you going to go?” - -“I don’t know.” - -Amaya stared at Lang for a moment. “You should come with me. Both of you.” - -“But we’ll weigh you down. A fool and a cripple. Sounds like a Shakespeare tragedy.” I looked down at Lang, who cowered and stared up at us, his eyes welled with tears. I reached out. Hesitantly, he took my hand. - -“It’s worth trying for,” Amaya said. - -“You really mean it?” - -“Hurry up and get moving before I change my mind.” Amaya wore a smirk that I had never seen Imogen make before, a strange, comforting smile on a familiar face. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Nighthawks** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546524944147163).* diff --git a/content/issue-31/Nwanebeakwa.md b/content/issue-31/Nwanebeakwa.md deleted file mode 100644 index c9537e74..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/Nwanebeakwa.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,166 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Nwanebeakwa" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- fantasy -- horror -authors: -- Chinaza Eziaghighala -copyright: '© Chinaza Eziaghighala 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Chinaza Eziaghighala is like one of those mysterious particles with strange asymmetry: at first glance she is a medical doctor; she turns, and is a filmmaker; turns again, and writes speculative fiction. In this latter orientation she unveils a series of encounters of the most intense kind, at first ecstatic, but all too soon horrific. Warning: this story contains sexual and violent content." - -image: images/Nwanebeakwa.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator." - -type: stock -slug: nwanebeakwa -weight: 3 ---- - -*Onye tiri nwa nebe akwa?* *Who made my baby cry?* - -{{}}O{{}}kwukwe touched me the night before the day of Ani’s ceremony, a night too dark to see more than his outline—not the birthmark on his chest, nor the lines of his features, not even the glint of his eyes, none of the things of him I knew so well. - -His hut was at the edge of the palace, beside the bushes, so it was difficult for people to know what happened inside. The room was dark and dimly lit by my candle and a sliver of moonlight. The sky had a crescent moon that night which reflected into the room through a secret hole in the wall, one that only myself and Okwukwe knew about. - -Okwukwe had knelt to search for his Isi agu. He asked me to hold the candle and stand in front of him as he searched for it. I assumed that he was using his hands to search, but as I felt the warmth of his palms creep up my legs I didn’t move. I didn’t ask him why his hands were searching me instead of the floor. When his palm got to my waist, he unravelled my Isi agu and I felt a moist warmth on me. I pulled Okwukwe’s head closer to me and felt frustrated that I could not get all of me in all of him. My moans echoed off the walls of his room until Okwukwe said I should quiet down. - -“There may still be people in the palace,” he said when he took his mouth off me. “Biko wetu olu gi.” - -I kept silent as Okwukwe took me in his mouth again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Eze mere nwa nebe akwa? Eze made my baby cry?* - -{{}}I{{}} was given to the Eze of the village as a gift from my father who owed him a debt: reparation. The Eze made me an Ohu, a slave, forever doomed to serve the royal family’s estate. But being his personal Ohu was a joy, and nothing made it more fulfilling than serving the Eze’s son. - -Okwukwe and I were friends first. We would always play games together around the village square, much to the annoyance of the merchants, councilmen, and other members of the palace courts. I was always at Okwukwe’s side and he at mine. - -The Eze noted Okwukwe’s fondness of me and entrusted me to him. I escorted Okwukwe everywhere: to the palace pen, where we fed the noisy pigeons together; to the village stream, to watch girls balance water atop their heads; to the wrestling grounds, to spectate and thrill. - -He told his father that he preferred we stay in the same room because he saw me as a brother. The Eze agreed. And one day Okwukwe escorted me to his room, to assist him with chores, and later to wrestle, and later still to do other things between only we two. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he day after Ani’s ceremony, the Eze called me and Okwukwe into his private quarters and asked us why we did not attend. I kept silent because it was not my place to speak. - -Okwukwe said that he had overslept and I had to stay with him because it was dark and he didn’t want to be alone. I watched as the Eze looked at his son with disdain, as if he didn’t believe a single word that came out of his mouth. If Okwukwe was aware of his father’s gaze, he didn’t show it, but I was petrified. When the Eze looked at me, it seemed as if he already knew everything. - -When Okwukwe and I went back to his room he said we should not speak about what had happened between us because people would not understand. I agreed. We were *Okorobia,* young men, how would we explain that we liked to suck and enter each other? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Weta uziza weta ose. Bring leaf and pepper.* - -*Weta ngaji nkuru ofe. Bring a spoon to let me collect soup.* - -{{}}O{{}}kwukwe and I spent most nights together. They were the most magical. Each shared kiss, warm touch, and tantalising climax brought me closer and closer to Okwukwe until I knew that I would never want another. I wondered how no one in the palace knew about us. Our surreptitious smiles and furtive exchanges were subtle enough not to be apparent, but had anyone paid close attention, the truth would out. - -All was well until Ani’s priest came to see the Eze himself, one full moon after Her festival. Dibia mmuo was a stout figure whose intimidating speech seemed to mesh all the voices of the gods together. Every man and woman gathered in the town square in a semicircle around him. The sky was overcast, and harmattan fog filled the air. - -He offered Ani palm wine by pouring the drink on the ground in the centre of the square. Next, he offered Her Abacha and Ugba. The whole village watched in silence, and a strange feeling crept to my throat from the pit of my stomach. Okwukwe was seated by his father on a mat at the forefront of the gathering. He smiled at me when I glanced at him. I wished I could tell him how uneasy I felt inside, how bare. - -As Dibia mmuo continued his incantations, he edged closer and closer, until he stopped, barely a whisker away from me, and stared me dead in the eye. - -“Weta Uziza na ose, na ngagi ikuru ofe!” he screamed. His mouth had the stench of stale tobacco, his teeth were stained with spots of chocolate brown. - -The Eze’s eyes widened and the village elders looked like they had been dealt blows to the stomach. I didn’t understand why Dibia mmuo was shouting a children’s nursery rhyme at me. - -“Nwosu!” The warmth left my face at the sound of my name on his lips. The atmosphere in the square seemed heavier than before. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the village, watching, waiting for what was about to unfold. I urged myself to move forward but I couldn’t. I was transfixed. The palace guards yanked me out of the crowd, yet I remained limp as I was dragged into the centre of the square. I could see from the corner of my eye how Okwukwe writhed in his seat, fists clenched on his lap. - -The Eze’s gaze pierced through me, his eyes revealing what I had most feared. “Nwosu, you have been selected to be the Nwa obe-akwa by Ani herself. Rejoice!” - -I felt my heart skip a beat as I came to terms with my doom. Ani had selected me to be one of Her nwa-obe akwa: a bushbaby, witch monsters who become Her servants forever, consuming the souls of the who crossed Her path. People began to murmur among themselves, yet no one tried to help me. They all looked at me with pity, even agony. I pleaded to the Eze, calling him father, and to Okwukwe, but the Eze placed his hand on Okwukwe’s clenched fists. Okwukwe looked to the floor, averting his gaze. If he said a word he would face dire consequences, I knew. I was condemned and there was nothing anyone could do. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Umu nnunu aracha ya. Birds have* *licked it up.* - -{{}}T{{}}he palace birds kept silent on the day of the initiation ceremony. It was a bland day with empty skies and dead-silent woods. I was not allowed to say goodbye to Okwukwe before the Eze ordered the palace guards to bundle me out of the village. - -“I knew about you and Okwukwe,” the Eze said, just before he turned his back on me forever. “It is better this way.” - -The ceremony was a simple one, to be performed at Ani’s temple, right beside her altar. I was to be put into an open grave, where the body of a dead baby had already been placed. The baby looked fresh, like he had been killed specifically for my rebirth. I wondered whose Ohu this was, whose reparation this child became. - -Dibia mmuo performed the ceremony himself at Ani’s altar. I cried out as he pushed me into the grave. Chewing tobacco like curd, he declared in delight that I was perfecting my bushbaby scream. Lumps of baccy mixed with spittle rained on my face as he incanted. I watched in anguish as he tossed sand into the grave, covering my limbs. My body became too heavy to lift as the last beam of light was covered by sand, and soon I was alone in the darkness. - -Then, I was not alone. - -The sun had set when I woke on the altar to the sight of a young girl who was not much older than I. She had nsibidi markings on her arms and legs, but she had no eyes, just black pools of nothingness. She drifted towards me and smiled as she cupped my face in hands that felt like harmattan, cold and dry. - -“My beautiful one,” she said. Her voice sang like a lullaby; her hair flowed like silk cloth against the cool breeze. - - I wondered how someone who looked as young as me could call me her child. That was when I saw the creatures surrounding her, children, with talons for hands and fangs for teeth. I shuffled back. - -“Don’t be afraid,” Ani said. “They are your family now.” - -The children smiled at me and began to chant: *Nwanne, Brother*. They formed a small circle around me and I could feel my will to flee overpowered by their collective gaze. - -She took the red clay on Her altar and began to rub it onto my skin. It felt cool at first, then it began to burn. A bawl escaped my lips. It felt like acid, melting away my skin and sending jabs of pain that coursed through my body. - -“You will have a family now and never be an Ohu again,” She said as She put the sands on my upper and lower limbs, all the while singing, “Onye tiri nwa na-ebe akwa.” - -Her voice began to change from its initial soothing tone to a loud banshee-like screech, scrambling my hearing. As I focused on trying to stop the pain in my ears, She opened my mouth and forced Her voice down my throat. I felt my own voice flee me, and this new one become my own. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Nwosu aracha ya. Nwosu has licked it up*. - -{{}}F{{}}or unknown time I lay as though sleeping, though it was something else. When I woke again I was alone in a bush, and it was day, and the voices of two children playing hide and seek echoed close by. One of them hid in front of me, his breath bristling against the bushes. Although I tried to move, I couldn’t. I felt the pain in my arms, the pain of the red clay, and I began to cry. *Nwanebeakwa*—a crying baby. - -The boy turned to me at the sound. “Your voice is too loud, eh! Do you want my friend to catch me?” he said. - -I answered with silence, scared of speaking, of sounding unlike myself. - -“What village have you come from?” he said, ambling closer. - - Then I caught the boy’s scent through my nostrils, and he smelt like freshly made Abacha and Ugba. My belly began to grumble, a pang of hunger began to eat at me from the inside, and I felt my body spasm out of control like it did not belong to me. The last thing I remembered was the searing pain in my limbs and my incessant weeping. - -As I came to myself once more, I saw blood splattered on the bushes around me. It lay on the leaves like sweet nectar. I struggled to stand, unsure of what had just happened. My eyes scanned the bushes for the boy, but he was nowhere to be seen. His friend, however, stood at a distance not too far from me, eyes wide, skin drained of blood, mouth agape. As our eyes met, he pointed at me, whispering “Obiora” as his lips quivered, before stumbling into a run. - -Without thought, my body ran too, arms reaching out for him. I saw now that they were grisly things that ended in talons, curled into fists, then creaking as the fingers unfurled, extending backwards as I lurched forward with arms outstretched to dig into flesh, spirit, and soul. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Ohhh ohhh.* - -{{}}I{{}}n the night I stared out into the empty darkness, my bare head turned against the firm forest floor. My eyes searched for any glimpse of illumination within the shadows. I trembled from the cold and caught my breath, surprised I still recalled how to tremble. I had thought I would forget how to feel, but my body insisted on remembering. I supposed I should be grateful. - -I looked up, past the darkness above the tall palm trees, and into the stars in the sky. I tried to lift my hand and count them, like my past self would have done, but reached out only with a gnarled claw. My whole body is a siphon, thirsting to absorb the souls of human prey, borrowing them to me for a brief period, a full moon when I can feel like I once was. - -And my body remembered what I had before, and now had lost. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Egwu Ozor. Another song.* - -{{}}I{{}} made my way back to the palace in the daytime and most of it was empty. I moved to Okwukwe’s hut and looked through the secret hole to see if he was inside. - -He was, but he was not alone. He was putting someone else in his mouth just like he did me. - -Tears welled up in my eyes, and confusion built in my chest, and I wailed, surely a sound louder than any sound ever before! - -In a fit of rage, I kicked open the door and ran the other man through with my talons, clenched him in my fists, slaying him instantly, - -The blood drained from Okwukwe’s cheeks as he stared at me in terror. I uncurled my claws and let the corpse of his lover fall away, and Okwukwe called desperately out to his father, but then I wrapped myself around him, just like I had so many times before. I spared him my claws, held him in our lover's embrace and absorbed him into me, feeding on his soul, spirit and body, his eyes wide with horror as he watched me become him. - -When all was done I slumped against a wall, my breathing laboured, and only then saw the Eze at the door, watching as the body of his son dropped from my arms. As I looked upon him he shivered in terror and fell on his buttocks. - -Rage rose inside me again, and I was about to move towards him when Ani appeared from the shadows of the hut, as though She had been with us all along. - -“We are going home,” She said. “Your brothers and sisters are waiting for you.” - -I gestured at the Eze, then stared at my claws as I realised they had become hands again, though not my own. I looked down at myself, at my torso, and instead of melted flesh and red clay I saw the birthmark Okwukwe had upon his breast. I had not consumed Okwukwe, I had become him, and it felt strangely comforting. Now no one would take him away from me ever again. - -The Eze took advantage of my wonder, and ran as far away as he could. Ani said not to chase after him. “He still has much to do for me,” She said. “I will take care of you from now on, and if anyone ever makes you cry again, you could just do to them what you did to Okwukwe.” - -She cackled in that voice which had now become my own. And I have been doing just that ever since, and will continue to do so until Ani fades away. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Nwanebeakwa** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546527704146887).* - diff --git a/content/issue-31/SchoolHopelessForgotten.md b/content/issue-31/SchoolHopelessForgotten.md deleted file mode 100644 index a3959113..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/SchoolHopelessForgotten.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,132 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Anna Zumbro -copyright: '© Anna Zumbro 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "High school kids have long been struck with envy at the status of their peers, but Anna Zumbro poses a really thorny question: How much worse would it be if, instead of your social media feed telling you everyone else's life was that much more super, it was on the curriculum?" - -image: images/SchoolHopelessForgotten.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was composited from images created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator." - -type: stock -slug: the-school-for-the-hopeless-and-forgotten -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}B{{}}y the time they were old enough to bandage their own skinned knees, children in Arrowton, Wisconsin knew three facts about their town by heart. First, due to a city-planning error, it featured two intersecting Elm Streets. Second, it boasted the United States’ third-largest ball of twine. And third, it claimed the highest per-capita number of children called on heroic quests. - -Chris Key studied every detail and rumor. When his neighbor discovered an unexpected wormhole inside her vintage Flash Gordon lunchbox, he begged his parents for a matching one, hoping to join the battle against the alien overlord Xnudlinfyr. His hope faltered the next week, when he counted seven Flash Gordon lunchboxes in his class alone. - -He regained confidence after hearing about Jasper Hicks, a high school freshman shoved into a locker by the junior varsity tennis team. Jasper emerged weeks later bearing a crystal sword and a talent for slaying monsters, made all the more surprising by his zero-and-eleven record at fistfights. Despite his own prowess in losing fistfights, Chris found nothing inside the lockers at his school but rotting food and sweaty hoodies, though he did discover how to pick the lock from the inside. - -Of course, the locks were ancient and faulty to begin with. Like most Arrowton eighth-graders, Chris attended the old public secondary school. The lucky students went to the School for the Heroic and Fearless, with its modern amenities and no-homework policy. The lenient principal gave the young heroes the flexibility they needed to save the world every night, and the school district could claim a measure of credit for educating the chosen ones. Only the unchosen found the arrangement wanting. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}}t’s not like a real school,” superheroine-in-training Isadora Vander explained to her sister, Astrid. “It’s kind of boring. The teachers don’t do much, just ask you to write essays about your latest quest.” - -Astrid twisted a strand of curly black hair around her finger. Both hair and finger were identical to Isadora’s. The girls had grown up believing they were twins adopted shortly after birth. In truth, as a government scientist explained to them a year ago, they were clones with different experimental genetic mutations. Isadora’s mutations gave her super strength, super senses, and super speed. She had already used her powers to save the residents of Milwaukee twice from the evil Viperisa. - -Astrid’s mutations gave her an extraordinary tolerance for spicy food. No one became a hero with a gift like that. - -“Seriously,” Isadora said. “I miss the old school.” - -“Mine’s the School for the Hopeless and Forgotten. All anyone there cares about is getting their own quest.” Astrid thought of her history textbook. The person who had it the year before her had filled the margins with images of a cartoonish superhero, a key emblem on his chest, running through sewer pipes and punching tentacled monsters. - -“It’s practically like that at my school, too,” Isadora said. “Everyone wants someone *else’s* quest.” - -Astrid rolled her eyes and took a bite of ghost pepper sandwiched between two Flamin’ Hot Doritos. “Not helpful.” - -The sisters sat in silence for several moments. “Well,” Isadora said at last, “I don’t have anything to do tonight. Viperisa’s gone quiet lately. Want to watch a movie?” - -“I can’t,” Astrid said. “Homework. They say we non-heroes need algebra to get along in the real world.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}hris had been perfecting his costume design for three years. True, *The Locksmith* was a somewhat obvious name choice. But notoriety was half the fun of being a superhero, and no one in Arrowton bothered to hide their alternate identity. - -When he was six, he’d fallen down an unused well at his aunt’s dairy farm. It was too deep for him to climb out, and the strange insects and rodents he’d seen during the hours it took for someone to find him still populated his nightmares. In his nightmares, he pressed his fingers to the concrete walls of the well, looking for an entrance to a secret cave he never found, while rats and tarantulas and snakes crept over his skin without pausing to grant him a transformative bite that would catapult him into the ranks of the superpowered. - -The nightmares were mostly about how he didn’t find a secret cave down there, and that none of the insects and rodents had bestowed upon him cool powers based on their everyday characteristics. - -Now, he did his homework in the darkest corner of the basement and switched his phone screensaver daily to a new creepy animal. Heroes always had to overcome their deepest fears. He would be ready. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}strid pressed her cheek against the cold window as the bus rounded the corner from one Elm Street to the other. She scribbled best guesses on her algebra homework, all word problems relating to Arrowton’s famous ball of twine, and tried to tune out the conversation behind her. - -“He got a quest, I bet. You know those dreams he had?” - -“Oh yeah, *tunnels*. Maybe the mole people summoned him.” - -A shiver jolted her. She turned around. “Who are you talking about?” - -“Chris Key. No one’s seen him since Tuesday. I bet the mole people…” - -*Boy trapped in the sewers,* she texted Isadora. *Do your thing.* - -After the bus parked, she slung her backpack over her shoulder and trudged into the building. Isadora could skip class to be a hero, but Astrid’s teachers would accept no such excuse. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}hris grunted. The sewers stank. He’d expected they would, but nothing could have prepared him for the reality. His grunt echoed back to him. And another sound—wasn’t it? No, just the dripping of the pipes. - -He tried to distract his mind from the pain that kept him from moving with the thought of producing a map. He shined a flashlight down the tunnel and noticed several smaller holes; irregular, odd shapes, like an afterthought. Or an unauthorized addition. Maybe he could draw them later, if he ever got out of here. It was a good distraction, for a while, but the pain only grew as the morning stretched on. - -Finally he heard footsteps thudding closer from further down the sewer. Fast, powerful steps, each one booming with purpose. He was right, something *was* down here—and he was in no position to do a thing about it. - -All right, then. A hero’s fate was never certain. He was ready to die. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}strid drizzled habanero sauce on a vending-machine Snickers bar in the hospital waiting room while Isadora filled her in on the rescue. “He slipped coming down the manhole and broke his leg,” she said. “How did you know? Even his mom thought he’d been called on a real quest.” - -“Just a hunch,” Astrid said. “People never get the quests they want.” - -“Are you kidding? Don’t sell yourself short. It was more than a hunch. And…” She lowered her voice. “It wasn’t just a boy down there. There were hideouts, a whole network of tunnels. I think it’s where Viperisa’s been hiding. I can’t believe I never thought to look there.” - -A nurse entered the waiting room and considered the sisters with a skeptical expression. “He said, and these are his words, that he’ll only see whichever of you is a loser like him.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}rom his hospital bed, Chris glowered at Astrid, whose cynical expression almost hid her resemblance to Isadora. “You shouldn’t have sent her after me.” - -“That’s stupid. You would have died down there.” She shifted from one foot to another. Probably bored. Not that he could blame her. - -“At least everyone would think I died heroically.” He crumpled a flowery get-well card from Jasper Hicks. “Now they’ll think I’m a weirdo.” - -Astrid shrugged. “You’re a good artist,” she said. “Your drawings are the best part of my history textbook.” - -“Sure.” He’d heard it all before. “There’s a place for all types.” - -She snorted. “Even useless duplicates? I mean, be happy you’re not a lookalike for the two-time savior of Milwaukee. Why’d you call me in here, anyway?” - -“To pass along a message. My mom said I should thank the girl who rescued me.” - -“I’ll tell Isadora.” - -He rolled his eyes. Was she pretending to be this obtuse? “I meant you.” - -“Oh.” She looked down, and then laughed. “Well, what are you complaining about, then? We all get our call to greatness!” - -“I’m serious. No one would have found me if not for you. You’re like a psychic—or close enough that you could pretend to be.” - -The sarcastic smirk vanished from Astrid’s face. “You might be onto something,” she said. “By the way, did you happen to see anything in the sewer?” - -“I was kind of distracted by the smell. Some tunnels, I guess. Different-looking ones, like they’d been added recently.” - -She crossed the small room in three strides and sat in the plastic chair next to the bed, her face now as earnest as her sister’s. “Look, I think you *are* The Locksmith, just not the way you imagined. What does a key do, right? It goes into dark chambers and unlocks things. You helped my sister find the answer she needed.” - -His head was flat against the pillow, yet he felt dizzy. “What are you saying?” - -“I’m saying maybe keep working on that costume you’ve been drawing, but add a few tools to account for your limitations. You know, like a homing device, so you’re easy to find?” A smile spread across her face. “If you want to keep it low-tech, I know where you can find a *really* big ball of twine.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546522874147370).* diff --git a/content/issue-31/TheGourmets.md b/content/issue-31/TheGourmets.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3aacd900..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/TheGourmets.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,420 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Gourmets" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Jeff Reynolds -copyright: '© Jeff Reynolds 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's supposed to be nothing quite like a good, satisfying meal, but Jeff Reynolds has an appetite-whetting recipe to defy that claim: take one very odd pear — excuse me, 'pair' — and marinate in mixed fantasy, sprinkle on a little humor, add a dash of horror, and then raise the steaks to boiling point — I mean 'stakes' — ah, enough with the puns, you get the idea…" - -image: images/TheGourmets.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was composited from three images created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator." - -type: stock -slug: the-gourmets -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}arvin wouldn’t stop talking about the fettuccini alfredo at Occult Gardens. “Three stars, Jack? Come on. That thick, creamy sauce. Those wonderful toasted garlic sticks. Divine. Oh, and that heavenly chocolate banshee pie, so rich and sweet, with a hint of tartness. I want a copy of their recipe spell book.” - -I slid the talking skull into the sling carrier I wore, turning him until the empty eye sockets peered forward through the mesh front. He liked to see where we were going. “There’s no way I’m giving a chain restaurant more than three stars. I’m surprised you’d suggest it.” - -“They earned it. You have to grade restaurants based on the quality of the food, the overall service, and the ambiance, not your own bias against laissez fairy corporatism and the evils of magarcho-capitalism.” - -I chewed on my thoughts, trying to formulate my point. “You used to be extremely critical of the fanciest places. They said *if Marvin Lemsky gave you three stars, you were damned proud*. In twenty-seven years, you only ever gave one restaurant four stars, and none got five. You would never have set foot in a chain like Occult Gardens, let alone given them anything but zero stars. I’m thrilled to learn from you, to understand the power of good food and its communal nature, but I’m trying to hold to your standards.” - -He kept quiet for a while as I walked down Beacon Lane. One thing I’d learned, you didn’t rush Marvin when he set himself to thinking. He was a good man—or skull, as the case may be—and I’d always found his advice helpful. - -“How long have we been doing this now, Jack?” - -“About six months, give or take, since we met.” - -“You knew about me before the *Incident*, right?” - -He put a great deal of weight on the word. Everyone did. The apocalypse of magic unleashed by M.I.T.’s research into dimensional wormholes carried a freight train of horrifying memories for those who survived. You could practically hear the way people capitalized it. - -We’d never talked about the past. No one did. The past contained a lot of pain, as pasts often do. But we’d become friends and I was willing to share if he was ready. “Of course. Only by reputation though. Everyone knew the world-famous food critic Marvin Lemsky.” - -He snorted, a sound of derision, not humor. “That man was a first-class douche bag. Mean spirited, rude, self-absorbed, entitled, boorish, and toxic.” - -“That man was you.” - -“*Was* being the operative word.” He heaved a great sigh. “Ten years I sat on a shelf at the library after someone tucked me in with the romance novels as a joke. The longest conversation I had was directing a goblin to the self-help section on the second floor. You have no idea how awful it is to transform in the middle of reaching for a book and be forgotten.” - -“Wow,” I said, because nothing better came to mind. “Ten years? I’m sorry Marvin. I didn’t know it had been that long.” - -“Thank you. But, frankly, spending a decade gathering dust does tend to change one’s perspective on things. I’m trying to be a better man.” He laughed. “Better skull perhaps. Whatever the case. When the goblin asked for self-help, it got me thinking about my own life and what a shithead I’d been. All the people I’d left behind, walked over. How alone it had left me, even before I’d turned into a skull. I thought if some goblin could better himself, so could I. Maybe the Incident would be a blessing of sorts.” - -By then we’d reached Boston Commons. The pond in the middle had developed a vagrant whirlpool, coming and going every few hours, created by Boston’s own baby Charybdis. No one had a plan for what they would do when it grew too large for the small body of water, but the tourists seemed to love it. We came here after lunch every day to enjoy the show. - -We took a seat on a bench and watched all manner of creatures passing by. Centaurs, minotaurs, gryphons flying overhead. A pumpkin colored wagon pulled by six white horses with ratty tails. - -“You’ve done great,” I said as we waited for the Charybdis to begin. “I didn’t realize you used to be such a jerk.” - -“I doubt if I’d remained human I would have corrected my deficiencies.” - -“I’m not sure I’ve enjoyed it as much as you,” I said. “The economy collapsed, my mother and father disappeared, and everything changed for me. It was hard.” - -“I’m sorry to hear that, Jack. But you survived. Many did, though we may be very different people now, and may those who did not rest in peace. But we adjusted.” - -“I survived by eating rats.” Even now I scanned the area for the little bastards. Sweet, juicy rats to eat. Although I kept trying to catch fish, too. So far, they’d eluded me. I shook my head at those thoughts. Tonight would be the new moon. Already it affected me. - -“See?” Marvin plowed on, oblivious to my mental detour. “Even you found a hidden strength in the changes. If not for that, you’d have starved to death like millions did.” - -“Regardless. So, that’s why you rate more fairly now?” - -“Right. Speaking of which: Occult Gardens. Yes, it’s a chain. But in all my years as a food critic, I’ve never enjoyed pasta so much.” - -“Technically *I* enjoyed it, since you have neither taste buds nor nose.” - -“It’s a reasonable point. But I enjoy it through you. A vicarious thrill if you will.” - -“Could have turned out worse. It could have been that goblin whose taste buds you have a magical connection with.” - -“True, true. But I can’t complain. We’ve got steady work at least, and that’s more than some. The Gourmets are the most famous anonymous food critics in all of New England.” - -“Alright, points taken. Thank you for sharing with me. It means a lot that you feel you can. I’ll give three and half stars. How’s that?” - -“How about four? *Come on*, Margo earned it. She even brought you an extra slice of pie when you told her I was your deceased uncle. She was kind of attractive, too, don’t you think?” - -“Aren’t you a bit old for her? And fleshless?” - -“Not for me. For you.” - -“Oh.” Margo had been cute. Dark hair, green eyes, a crooked and radiant smile. “She’s probably got a boyfriend, though. Or might not want one.” - -“I’m sure that’s why she kept smiling at you and brought you extra pie. Now stop being so enormously dense.” - -I clutched my heart in mock horror. “You insult my dignity!” - -“You earned it. And Margo earned four stars.” - -I gave up the argument with a laugh. “Alright, four stars. But not a half star more.” - -“That’s more like it. Now grab that paper from the trash can. You want something different, let’s find it.” - -“Maybe we can find a seafood place,” I said. - -I pulled yesterday’s Globe from the waste bin and spread it across my lap so Marvin could read it, too. We scanned for advertisements, or articles about businesses opening, which happened daily now. The recovery continued, a new world rising from the ashes of the old one. - -Near the back, in the classified sections, Marvin gave a cough. “Bottom right.” - -I picked out the tiny ad he’d noticed. *Dark Forest Cottage*, it read. *Authentic European cuisine with old world ambience*. “Not trying hard to get noticed.” - -“Probably a new place, run by someone with little money to spare for advertisements. But you said you wanted something unique. This sounds like the perfect opportunity to highlight local fare.” - -“It’s in *Danvers*.” - -“We can take the flight rail.” - -I winced. “No way. You know I get queasy when we fly.” - -“What are you going to do, Jack, walk? The ogre carriage charges an arm and a leg, and you’ve only got the two of each. Or four legs and no arms, depending on the time of month.” - -“I’ve got a talking skull. That must be worth something.” - -“Very funny. But you know I’m right.” - -“You just enjoy flying.” - -“True. Come on, let’s go see.” - -Marvin won that argument, too. He won most of the arguments. But his ability to weave a humorous, touching story around the review of a simple meal had provided us stable income at a time when the economy had a long way to go to recover fully. I didn’t begrudge losing. - -We lined up with others waiting for a carpet, and crowded onto a threadbare Afghan when our turn came. The red and yellow print had faded to muddy pinks and off-whites, and loose threads speckled the edges. A tear along one side had been patched with gray duct tape. The djinn at the front of the fabric watched over his/her shoulder until everyone had settled in the required Sukhasana pose. I held my palms up and tried to keep my spine straight. - -“Alright, hold onto your dunkies,” the djinn said. All the djinns said the same thing when they were about to launch. They spent their off-duty hours at Dunkins, filling up with hot, black coffee and donuts. - -We launched. My body rose while my stomach stayed resolutely on the ground. I gulped to hold down the bile. Marvin chuckled in delight. I shook my head and gritted my teeth. The flight rail had a one hundred percent safety rating, but that didn’t stop me from being scared out of my wits every time we flew. Plus, I found the pose hard to maintain. - -After several stops, and a transfer to the green flight rail at Salem—the second carpet a blue and purple Persian, newer and larger, thus more crowded—we got off in Danvers. We walked a quarter mile north and found the restaurant nestled in a strip of wild land west of the road. A dirt parking lot had been cut out of the wilderness to its left, empty now but for a single thin horse tied to a scraggly bush. Gnarled trees bracketed the stone structure on the right and to the rear. There was a glint of water through the trees behind it, suggesting a pond or lake. - -“It’s a literal cottage,” Marvin said. - -Indeed, that’s what it looked like. A stone cottage of a story and a half, with a steep roof made of thatching, rather than good old New England shingles or tin. Rounded windows with green shutters of wood. A tall chimney rose on one end, smoke curling from the top and lazily tugged away by the breeze. The door yard was full of beautiful wild flowers and buzzing bees. Not out of place, though, with the rest of the homes we had passed, which had undoubtedly been transformed when the wave of magic broke upon the world. - -The sign over the door made it clear this was the *Dark Forest Cottage* we were looking for. I glanced at the late afternoon sun, lowering through clouds to the west. “Maybe we should come back tomorrow.” - -“Still plenty of time to get in, get some food, and get home before sunset. It’s not like there’s a crowd.” - -The door opened and warm light spilled from the interior. The wafting scent of food followed, delicious aromas that teased the nostrils and made my mouth salivate. A plump woman stepped into the doorway, framed by the glow behind her. She had on a plain blue dress that appeared homespun, over which she wore a crisp white apron. Her hair—white, but shot through with a great many golden strands—had been pinned up in a bun on the back of her head. - -“Welcome to the Dark Forest Cottage,” she said, her pleasant voice booming across the yard. “Come on in, take a load off your weary feet, travelers. We’ve got spirits to lift your spirits, and meals to fill any appetite.” - -“Thanks,” I said, approaching her. “Is this place new?” - -“We’ve only been open a short while,” the woman said. Her smile was sweet and pleasant, the kind my grandmother would have given me when she fed us dinner. She had rosy red cheeks and deep wrinkles, but her eyes were bright blue and twinkled. Yes, they twinkled, and I’ll stand by that assessment. - -“Madam, we are pleased to accept your invitation,” Marvin said, with polite formality. “The scent of your food is a balm to a weary soul indeed.” - -“A talking skull,” she said, and clapped her hands together in delight. “How wonderful! Oh, we’ve had all kinds in here, let me tell you. Just last week I served a bugbear… what was it?” She clucked and tapped her fingers against her chin. “Yes, a delicious berry and cream tart. But I have never had the pleasure of serving bones.” - -“Perhaps because most of the de-fleshed lack appetites for fine cuisine,” Marvin offered. “I, however, suffer not from such a sad fate. Though I may not be able to eat the food you serve, I assure you I will enjoy the repast in full with the help of my able companion.” - -“Such fine manners,” the woman said, resting her wrinkled hand on my arm. “So rare these days. Everyone rushing around, no time to be pleasant, playing with their digital auguries and spellaphones. Please, do come in and let’s get the two of you situated so you can have a drink and decide what you wish to eat.” - -She led us into the house. The main dining room had a low ceiling held up by thick, brown beams. The internal walls were white plastered, and homey paintings of pastoral scenes had been hung upon them. Other than the fire, the room was lit by enchanted lanterns on the middle of each table, the yellow glow flicking across white linen tablecloths and napkins, glinting off the silverware. The low sound of music spread through the chamber, a string piece, quiet enough to not be distracting but pleasant. - -“What lovely ambiance,” Marvin said. - -“Why thank you, dear,” the old woman said. - -I nodded in agreement, a little slowly because I was distracted. There were a few hours to go until the new moon, but my skin itched as though I’d begun transforming. I thought I scented the musty odor of rat beneath the layers of food wafting through the room. I tried to tune out my senses. Every minute they would get worse until the hair ruptured my skin and I became a four-legged little demon. - -She guided us to a table near the fire. I pulled Marvin from his pouch and placed him to my right before I seated myself. She smiled pleasantly and offered me a menu. “And one for you, dear,” she said, opening another and setting it upright upon the table in front of Marvin. “I recommend you start with the gazpacho. The tomatoes and cucumbers were freshly picked from my garden today. One of the house specialties.” - -She bustled away through a door leading further into the cottage. I caught a glimpse of the kitchen. A red brick oven cast a reddish glow over a room filled with heavy cast iron pots and pans, a wall full of knives and cleavers. Then the door swung shut with a loud thump. - -I examined the menu. The writing had been done in an archaic script, all curls and flourishes. I squinted, trying to determine if fish were anywhere on it. “Half a star off for the hard-to-read menu,” I said. - -“But half a star more for the quaint setting, which is delightful.” - -“You really are a changed man, Marvin.” - -“I hope so,” he said quietly. “I really do hope so.” - -The door opened again. Once more, I sniffed rat, a little stronger than last time. I tried to peer around the woman as she bustled towards us, but the door shut before I could see anything. She carried a tray with a brown bowl resting on it. - -“I took the liberty of bringing you a sample of the gazpacho.” She rested the tray on the table and swept the bowl in front of me. “Do enjoy. It’s on the house.” - -Then she was gone again, seemingly filled with boundless energy. When the kitchen door swung shut, I looked at the soup. “What’s gazpacho?” - -“Cold vegetable soup, most often with a tomato base. A Spanish dish. I admit, I often felt that American restaurants who served it did a great disservice to the origins of the cuisine, which had been one of my favorite meals when touring Spain and Portugal. Go on, try it.” - -“Cold?” I stirred the vegetables with a spoon. “I’d prefer warm.” - -“Oh, for goodness sake, Jack. I’d give my writing skills for a companion whose palate is not quite so beige.” - -“I see celery in here. Not a fan of celery.” - -He sighed so deeply he might have blown the lantern off the table if he still had lungs. “Please try it. For me?” - -I laughed. “I’m just giving you a hard time. Of course I’ll try it.” I lifted a spoonful to my mouth and tasted. It was quite good, though I continued to believe it would be improved with heating. A bit saltier than needed perhaps, though that might be Marvin’s opinion, not mine. When I ate, his thoughts came through to me, just as he could sense the smell and texture and flavor of the foods I experienced. - -“Very good,” he said, with a low voice. “Wonderful. Perhaps a pinch too much salt. But there’s some other flavor beneath the vegetables. Something… I can’t quite place it. It can’t be chili powder, can it? Something zesty.” - -I swallowed, frowning. “Yes. Beneath the salt.” There was a deeper flavor that hit after the swallow, a bit sharp. Not quite bitter. I lifted another spoonful, and my hand shook. Some of the soup dripped back into the bowl. - -“Are you okay?” Marvin asked. - -I’d gotten close enough to my transformation that I could pick out every spice in the meal. Marvin had taught them to me. Cumin was there, pepper, salt, sherry vinegar, garlic. I knew them all. Now I recognized the strange flavor. My kind are many things, but not stupid when it comes to knowing what things they shouldn’t eat. - -I dropped the spoon into the bowl, splattering soup on the table. I could smell it clearly now. “Marvin, it’s poison!” - -“What?” - -I pushed away from the table, but instead of standing, I lurched over onto my hands and knees. “Marvin, what do I do?” My voice trembled and my gut began to twist in pain. - -“Jack, get up. Come on, grab me, we need to get out of here. Get help.” - -The room began to blur. I tried to rise to my knees, but fell over again. I doubled up in pain, hot and cold spurs running through my flesh, up and down my arms and legs like thousands of pins being poked into me. “Marvin!” I screamed as I choked. My tongue felt swollen. - -The door to the kitchen opened. The smell of rat came strong now. I could see their beady eyes burning at me from the doorway as the woman approached the table. Red dots, like fires, in the glowing gloom of the cottage. - -“I’ve never served bone before,” she said, as my vision went black. “I can’t wait to grind you up and add your magic powder to my focaccia. Oh, it’s going to taste divine.” - -My breath rattled through my lungs. I lost control of my bowels, and my body begin spasming uncontrollably, legs and arms thrashing against the floor. - -“Come, sweeties. When he’s done twitching, drag him out back and dump him by the wood pile. He’ll be dead in an hour or two and I’ll bleed the body. Then you can feast.” - -The scratching of hundreds of tiny claws was the last thing I heard. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t is a terrible smell that awakens me from my nap. I sniff again, and inhale the stink of human faeces. I do not recommend it. - -I roll over and stretch. Something pokes against me and I open my eyes to realize that I am not where I am supposed to be. When I awake, I am supposed to be on the soft carpet of my apartment with the window open so I may slink out into the fire escape and spend my night roaming the city streets. There are many wonderful creatures to stalk and pounce and slay. Tasty eating. Except for the fish in the ponds. I have not yet caught one, though I have tried. Well, life is often disappointment. - -I am behind a wood pile and I am lying on the ground. There are woods, I notice, behind me. It is not yet completely dark. I swat the offending stone that pokes my side. Then I rise, giving my stretch its full due, arching my back. One great yawn splits my jaws, and then I set to licking myself. One does not present oneself to the world until one has cleaned. - -But the reek annoys me. Nearby is a pile of clothing. There is the scent of me upon the fabric, so these must be mine. But they are also sweaty and soiled, as though I have failed to use the appropriate facility for waste deposit. This is not something I would normally do of course, but perhaps I ate something not so good for me. There is a deeper odor as well. *Something*… - -*Poisonous*. - -I sniff again, and my eyes widen. I have died here. I can feel now that one of my lives is missing. I walk around the clothing, but it does not reveal itself. Instead, scattered like playthings, are many bones. Human bones. Someone else died here. More than one someone. - -There is another scent, too. It smells like rat. Yes, there comes now the realization there are many rats nearby. And they have feasted upon the flesh of humans. - -FOULNESS! Rats are not to be playing the predator and eating the peoples. It is I, the stalker, who feed upon the vermin. I am most displeased by this realization. The proximity of my awakening to the many bones and the loss of one of the nine can only mean I had been placed there while still human and left as a meal for the sewer dwellers. But my transformation has purged me of the poison that laid my other form low. - -I must stop these rats from their depraved actions. - -Behind me is a home. The scent of rat leads to chinks in the stonework and the doorway and windows. Someone is singing. - -It is not a nice song. - -I slink, belly low, towards an open window. The voice is cracked and warbling, like a bird with a broken neck. It is a stretch, but I reach the window edge and peak inside. - -There is wood and brick and a fire and metal things, including sharp things. There is a big table upon which rests a skull. An old woman stands in front of the fire and she stirs a large pot, steam rising from it. It is her voice I hear. - -“*I am boiling, I am steaming, I am chopping all to eat. I will serve you, I will eat you, I will gobble all your meat. I am cutting, I am grinding, I am stirring up the broth. I will slice you, I will dice you, and turn your blood to sauce.”* - -“You are very poor poet for a murderess,” the skull says. Him I know. - -“*Your magic osseous will make my food delicious,”* the old woman says. - -Around her, watching, are many rats. Black, with sleek fur. Little red eyes. There are many of them, yes. If I could count, I am certain I would count very high. But there are clearly more than one. - -“Bring me the hammer,” the old woman says. - -Several of the black rats scurry out an open doorway into another room. When they return, they are dragging a very large object. It is an old hammer, the metal stained with some reddish discoloration. She bends and lifts it, and she turns to the skull. - -“No, please!” the skull implores. He is very good at begging. I have yet to hear a rat so skilled at pleading for mercy. Well, perhaps the rat king, who begged very nicely before I ate him. But the skull should not plead for its existence from a rat lover. - -“I will be back to grind you up in a moment, dear. First, I need to tend to your friend out back and let the rats have their feast.” She touches the top of the skull and laughs. “Don’t you move, dearie.” - -I dash behind a small bush near the back door and watch as she and the rats parade towards the forest. In a moment, they will find that my body is gone, so I hurry into the room through the door she has left open. - -“Jack Sprat!” the skull says. “You’re alive. Thank the fates!” - -The skull is often at my apartment when I go out to hunt, though he is not quite so chatty then. “Hello talking skull.” - -“Listen, Jack. She’ll be back at any moment. You have to get me out of here before she returns.” - -My ears are good. I can hear her and the rats out near the woods. There is no need to rush, so I begin to clean one of my paws. “What is in it for me?” - -“Jack, please, this is no time for jokes. She’s going to destroy me. I don’t want to die.” - -“You are already dead, yes? You are a skull. Skulls are from dead things.” The logic of this is very clear. I thought the skull smarter. - -There comes a tortured screech. Dear me, the bad singer seems upset. I would guess that means she has found the place where my body lay, only now there is no body. Surprise, bad singer. You cannot kill the stalker so easily. “She’s coming back soon.” - -“What do you want?” - -There is something I want very much. Something I have never been able to catch yet. Of course, I would rescue him from the very bad singer without it, but I am unable to refuse the gift now offered. “I would like a fish. A big one. You will get me a fish?” - -“I’ll get you a dozen fishes if you get me out of here.” - -“How will you do this with no hands or feet, mister talking skull?” - -“Jack and I will get it. Oh hell, this is bizarre. I’m talking to you, only you’re a cat and you’re not you. Now can we please go?” - -“Jack is me, though I am not Jack. Do not call me Jack. It does not dignify me.” - -The skull sighs. Humans do that so well, even their bony skulls. Oh, and dogs. There is nothing quite like the sigh of a doggy to make me smile. - -“How should I address you?” - -I have many names of course. *Slinker. Hunter. He Who Ate the Rat King. The One Who Steals the Yarn*. But only one matters tonight. “You may refer to me as The Stalker.” - -“Alright, Stalker.” - -“*The* Stalker.” - -“The Stalker. Now can we please go?” - -I leap gracefully upon the surface. “A dozen fish?” - -“Two dozen.” - -I smile my secret smile. “It is agreed.” I take the jaw of the skull into my mouth. It seems the only way to grip it. It is bulky, but not so heavy. “Now we go.” My words are slurred by the bone in my mouth. - -“Thief!” the singing woman screeches. - -“Oh damn,” the skull says. - -“Unexpected,” I say, surprised at how quickly and quietly she returned. Very sneaky, bad singer. - -She is standing in the doorway and her face is very red and her eyes are very black and she is very angry. The rats crowd around her, red eyes glowing as they look upon me. “So, not a human then. A were being. You’ll make a fine addition to the meal.” - -“Are you serving fish?” I ask, hopefully. - -“Our menu tonight is cat and skull.” - -“No thank you,” I say. I leap from the table and race into the next room through the door left open when the rats brought her the hammer. - -“Go out one of the windows!” the skull yells. - -The windows are barred and shuttered. I skid across the slick stone floor, claws scrambling for purchase. “Which way?” - -Through the open door behind, the rats come. Many more than one. - -“Kill the cat!” the bad singer chokes. - -“You should take some honey for that scratchy throat,” I tell her. I place the skull down upon the floor and swat it under a table. Then I turn to face the horde of vermin. “I am The Stalker, He Who Ate the Rat King, Keeper of Sharp Claws, the Twitching Tail of Doom.” - -Into the mob I leap. I slash and bite and tear and move, move, MOVE like lightning. That is a good name. Perhaps I should add He Who Moves Like Lightning to my titles. The little rats fall like wheat to the scythe, but there are more than one, many more. Their teeth are sharp, and I am slashed and bitten. - -I spring onto a table, but I have left another life behind. Only seven of nine remain. My breathing is heavy as I turn in circles. The rats boil up the legs, tiny claws scratching against the wood. But they come slower this time. Perhaps they are wary of me now, with so many of their filthy brethren dead. I use this to my advantage, darting in to decapitate one with a well-placed swipe, while biting another nearly in half. I leap back before they can strike. - -The edge of the table grows crowded with them. I am in the center, circling, looking, weighing plans. A few more times I feint, then slash. A few more fall down dead, dead, DEAD. The chittering grows louder. They are about to attack. - -The circle closes suddenly, but HA! I am not there. I leap to a windowsill, then bound up onto a tall piece of furniture. They are after me of course, but they are slow. I consider sitting and cleaning my paw to show them what little concern I have for their feeble attempts. - -“Come here,” the bad singer says, and she PUTS HER HANDS UPON ME! - -She is much stronger than her round shape would appear and my claws leave deep furrows in the cabinet. I am swung around in the air like a toy. But how? I move like lightning, and still she grabbed me as easily as I caught the rat king. - -She turns me in her hands to face her. She has me clenched around the ankles, holding my legs in both hands. I struggle but am unable to shake free of her grip, her fingers calloused like hard stone. - -“Be a good kitty, won’t you, and die,” she says. Her black eyes glint with starlight and her smile grows bigger. She has very long, sharp teeth. Her mouth unhinges and she draws me towards a waiting tunnel of red flesh and black depths. Warm breath caresses my face with a foul stench. I am to be consumed. - -“I have already died the twice,” I say. I stretch my neck forward and BITE her big nose! HA! - -Blood spurts under my teeth and she howls. She yanks me loose and I take the tip of her nose with me and I swallow it before she flings me across the room. I am dashed against the wall and I fall to the floor, stunned. - -Another life is torn from me. - -The rats come again. I rise on unsteady paws as she spins and howls, howls, HOWLS. I am pleased her blood speckles the floor and the walls. - -“Do you surrender?” I ask bravely. - -“Kill it!” she screeches. - -Oh, how they come. - -There are many spins and blows. I stagger under so many little creatures. I fall back and forth on the precipice of death. I expend my lives like water, swirling in and out of the rabble. Four gone, five gone. Six gone, seven gone. I am not human. I am not cat. I die for the eighth time, and I rise again. - -They do not. That is the only thing of importance. - -I stand among the dead, soaked in their blood and mine. Her half-eaten nose bleeds down her chin and soaks her clothing. She holds a cleaver in hand and a butcher knife in the other. - -“I will take the talking skull and go. If you follow, I will kill you.” - -“My little pets,” she moans, her eyes darting around the room. “You killed them.” - -“You are to blame,” I tell her. I approach the table where beneath the skull rests. “You are not a very nice person.” - -She screeches and comes at me. I spring at her face, all my claws extended and I howl my deepest yowl. But I do not sink my claws. I bounce off her rounded flesh and land near the skull. - -She falls back, tripping over the step in the doorway. She falls, her knife and cleaver flung away. She falls, and bashes the kettle heating over the fire. It falls, tipping over her head, spilling steaming hot broth down her body. - -Her legs thrash against the floor. Her hands grab the heated metal and try to pry it off. Oh, how she SCREAMS, her voice muffled by the kettle. It rings like a bell as she claws at it. - -I grab the skull and I run, run, RUN out the door to the behind of the house and dash into the darkness of the woods. I do not stop when I reach the shore of a lake, but sprint beside it, until we are on the far side. Here, the woods are less dark. I place the skull on a soft matt of leaves and begin to clean myself again. - -“Jack?” the skull says. - -“The Stalker, please.” - -“Sorry, The Stalker. I wanted to thank you. You didn’t have to save me.” - -I pause. “You are my friend. I would not leave you there to be ground into flour for bread, even if there had been no fish offered.” - -I think perhaps the skull is smiling. It is hard to tell with a skull. “Well thank you just the same.” There is a pause and I return to cleaning myself. “Oh, and… The Stalker?” - -I examine my foreleg. “Yes?” - -“Feel free to give this restaurant zero stars.” - -I begin work on the other foreleg. “Yes, that is wise.” - -“Margo might be working at Occult Gardens tomorrow.” - -“Does Margo like cats?” - -“Maybe we should wait until you’re you.” - -“I am always me.” Though I admit, after the eight deaths in one night, I find the prospect of lazing about in a clumsy human body appealing. Embarrassing, too, but then I will feel nine times better when I am me once more. - -I pick him up and lope my way southwest towards the glow of the great city, where slender, crystalline towers of sorcery rise to pierce the skyline. The rat king once lived beneath those places of magic. - -I hope we will have time to hunt on the way. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Gourmets** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546528090813515).* diff --git "a/content/issue-31/TipDieb\303\246cksMenthaBWild.md" "b/content/issue-31/TipDieb\303\246cksMenthaBWild.md" deleted file mode 100644 index 26a07c47..00000000 --- "a/content/issue-31/TipDieb\303\246cksMenthaBWild.md" +++ /dev/null @@ -1,144 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Marc Phillips -copyright: '© Marc Phillips 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's a theme in US culture about survivalism, about defending what's yours, from other citizens or the state itself. Marc Phillips' story seems to be one man's oral recounting of just such a future-history, but it might be the exact opposite of that, in one sense at least." - -image: images/TipDiebaeck.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator." - -type: stock -slug: tip-diebaecks-mentha-b-wild -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}D{{}}addy got in a fight over a parking spot in front of Casa Olé after church one Sunday. I thought forever it was about a parking spot. I resented daddy for a while after I learned it wasn’t. - -We were late arrivals to the party. The violence was already widespread. As in, “too many to jail.” Which is what they were repeating on the radio when this good looking blonde woman pinned a man against the CVS drive-through pillar with her Tesla. It was that same Sunday, on the way home. Pinned him until he dropped his sign. When she backed up, he dropped too. His legs folded like they were snapped. - -Daddy said, “You can get mixed up in other people’s business all you want until somebody mashes you against the stucco. Remember that.” He winced when he tried to look at me. I’m guessing several bruised ribs. The guy at Casa Olé had an aluminum bat. - -It is odd to know that you lived through a pivotal moment. It all but overloads your mind when you realize it while you’re in the moment. It took weeks for the violence to overload law enforcement, but not many weeks. I knew at eleven years old that something fundamental was in doubt. I just didn’t know why nobody else seemed worried about it. This was the day, for me, this was when our family of two crossed that line which is a high stone wall from the other side. - -I remember the dust on the dash in the car that day, a big clean arc where one of us took a swipe at it with a rag. The crack in the windshield where the mirror hung. The sound just before a power steering motor goes out. The radio. The state police, it’s their turn to hold a press conference regarding the crime wave, they said, “Citizens, stand your ground. Criminals, we are watching. We will come for you.” I turned it off because we’d heard this. I wondered was it different in places like New York. - -“Shit,” Daddy said, “watching through heavy lenses, maybe. I guess in the meantime we just decide who’s who.” - -And that’s what we did, after we picked up some Advil and a cold compress. We made our decisions and we fought our fights and if we were wrong, sometimes we apologized. It’s what the dumb ones did too. It’s the only thing we agreed on, who the enemy was. Organized conflicts would flare up in predictable places. A rash of poisoning deaths. You had people home canning chunks of trash meat to cultivate botulinum toxin. Or there would be mysterious shootings and fires that seemed entirely opportunistic, then the inevitable riot would touch off and it would fall away under a coordinated National Guard assault. Then it was another city, another compound, another convoy. You could track it on a map like a storm front. People died on a regular basis but nobody went to jail. There was no room. There would have been no time. All the court cases would stretch out for decades. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}xcept it didn’t happen so suddenly, did it? I mean, to a kid it did. Kids don’t spend much time looking at the past. Why would they? And without the past, there’s no way to know how different an idea was back when we thought of it, or whether any of this was foreseeable, and there are fewer and fewer people able and willing to explain. It’s a flaw in perception at the exact moment we’re using perception to form durable models, if we’re left to do it ourselves. - -It was a full seven years later when the war was declared, the Saturday after my eighteenth birthday. It took them a while. The confusion was whether— I mean, the police had stopped patrolling, what, three years earlier? You didn’t go anywhere unafraid, certainly not unarmed. If you had money, you hired professionals. If not, you learned to shoot first and reload on the hoof. I guarantee nobody was caught off guard by aggression at that time. So how is that state of affairs—this state of affairs—different from war and why, after seven years, did it suddenly need a name? We’ll get to that. - -What I’m talking about, though, is the bigger picture, what the sociologists call flameout. I’m saying I witnessed the beginning. And that beginning was at least seven years before the war. Meaning? What we call the Peppermint War was merely a late symptom of societal flameout. And owing to the irreversibility of societal flameout, the Peppermint War could not have been avoided by either of the previous two administrations. You will encounter that theory many times throughout this section. It was once controversial only because the majority opinion must initially be wrong about these things. You need to be very familiar with the theory. In order to survive a fight, it’s handy to know you’re in a fight, and why it began. In order to prevail, it’s essential you survive. - -I don’t guess it hurts to say that the compound was near Texarkana, parts of it in two states. I mean, maybe there once was something to see there, but it would make a disappointing pilgrimage now. Those of us within fifty miles, we grew up going to the market over there so we always knew the way without ever knowing the street address. We knew Judit too. Not like, from the stream. We knew her. - -Judit was a dark skinned Iberian woman with a dangerously resolute face. She gave the impression that she had considered a matter more thoroughly than you so it seemed reckless to utter anything but questions. She ran the compound. In the philosophy practiced there, euphemism and diplomacy were maybe the most disrespectful things you could do with your mouth. Her manner was off-putting at first. Daddy said lies get slippery when she’s around, people get nervous. He and Judit began an unorthodox sexual relationship about two years after the virus took mother. As much as it pained a devout man like my father, he had to say it that way if anyone asked them. “We’re involved in an unorthodox sexual relationship.” Otherwise Judit would clarify and it would be much clearer than that. - -Judit took over the compound from Abner Tovar when Ab shot that man’s dog and then set himself on fire in tribute. At the time, there were about a thousand residents out there, I think. Crater Farm. What they had, it was a little impact crater about the size of a lake you wouldn’t volunteer to swim across, and it was surrounded by dense old growth pine. Really fertile, damp soil inside this steep bowl and just an ideal place for shady crops like mint. In fact, there was a wild peppermint plant growing in there that would make your eyes water to cut it, and it was a devil to kill. Since forever, they burned it back in the spring to make room for their leafy crops. - -The year Ab died, the honeybees told Judit that mint and lavender would be their salvation. She abandoned the wholesale clearing campaign and started selling these huge, waxy, hand trimmed leaves of mint alongside their honey and garlic and she started using the mint in some of their ceremonies. They had a reverence for it and it seemed to be contagious. That’s it, how the curtain rose on Crater Farm Mentha b Wild. Judit named it, of course. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}kay, so that’s the timeline. Sometime around the summer of my fifteenth year, the concept of war became ironic. And not in the way optimistic sci-fi people hoped. You didn’t see *War is Hell* anymore. That would be stupid. You saw *Life is War*. This section will attempt to shed a critical light on what followed, up to and including last week’s rolling four-way engagement in the San Joaquin. But don’t expect an adventure epic. It’s not nearly that complicated. - -Botanists have known forever that peppermint plants leach radiation from contaminated soil. Mainly radon but, you know, still. There’s a name for how it does this. Anyhow, its stock rose when the microbursts began. Then comes Crater Farm Mentha b, this strong, gorgeous tasting mint that was sold by the six inch leaf down in Texas. It fell under the microscope everywhere. The Chinese figured out it was an unclassified subspecies of Mentha balsamea and it absorbed gamma rays. Not with its roots. The leaves, they counteract Acute Radiation Syndrome. And not in a curious geeky way. In a lifesaving way. - -Gamma bursts were maybe one every ten years back then. The first ones, the microbursts, I’m not certain anybody really felt them. They say cancer rates went up. But everybody knew somebody who ate the Labor Day burst unshielded. If not, pictures of the aftermath aren’t hard to find. If a yard full of exotic mint makes you sleep better, you jump on it. The Chinese had, at that time, found two locations on their mainland with native colonies of the new Mentha subspecies. Every developing nation from sixty degrees north to sixty south, I think they all nationalized some private land in one way or another, or they were preparing to in order to cultivate and secure their own mint supply. - -Then a lab in Wisconsin double blind tested 804 domestic samples of this subspecies and found only 3 had this gamma ray thing. One was from Oregon, remember? One was Crater Farm, and at that time they thought the other was in Mississippi. - -Now Judit and her people are sitting on a gold mine. A five hundred acre gold mine with just under four miles of rugged perimeter to guard. They didn’t need or want the money. They started selling transplant sprigs solely in hopes of keeping theft and destruction at a manageable level. A pressure relief valve is what it was. Brilliant. Not often does the solution to an existential problem put nineteen million dollars in your pocket. And it kept trickling in. Meanwhile, the growth rate of the mint could easily keep up with damage from the few persistent trespassers. Daddy and I were both happily employed on the compound by now, but not living there as is sometimes speculated. - -Then the ground shifted under us before anybody knew what was happening. That’s what it felt like. Faster than the stream. It seems like right there in the center of it, we were the last to hear. It was a German lab this time. They announced that Crater Farm Mentha b Wild, when cultivated offsite, has no special properties whatsoever. Likewise for the other two landrace samples. Therefore, it must be the soil. - -Me and daddy were on the compound at the time. You could see it in faces as the news spread across the crater. They straightened from their work and listened to the message bearer and they scanned the horizon, some of them taking in the full circle, verifying they had nowhere else they wanted to go. A few of them evidently did, so they gathered their children in dustpan fashion and left. They didn’t have cars, most of them. The rest milled around with the realization among us that all those strangers, they’re coming back for the very dirt. We didn’t need to ask if Judit planned to sell the farm one bag of dirt at a time. - -When I returned to the compound with our guns and two of my friends and their fathers, people had already started arriving to help on the fence line. They came from Shreveport and Little Rock, even farther. They were well armed, which was a nice surprise because Judit’s people were not. I’ve seen this billed as the first war fought with laser weapons. And it was, some of it. They were still big and heavy back then. Mostly chassis mounted. Firearms outnumbered them by a wide margin. At the end of the day, well placed bullets mattered most. Which was outstanding news for me and daddy and everybody we personally knew. - -I don’t remember if we ate that day. I turned the animals loose when I went home for the guns and I didn’t tell daddy. Looking around, I bet I wasn’t the only one who left the front door open and the cat food on the floor. We were neither afraid nor fatalistic. We felt like we had agreed on a very high price to keep something we valued still more. - -We had a spontaneous moment of silence for the other farming compounds. I guess you know the third one was actually in Kentucky. Anyhow, somebody mentioned Oregon, mentioned they had been to Oregon and the place didn’t seem aware of how pretty it was. And silence propagated until the huge Crater Farm Meeting Hall held a couple thousand people in brief suspension because nobody knew what to say. I’ve retroacted the significance of that moment because Oregon didn’t fare as well as we did, but they fought. In Kentucky, because of a festival the farm was hosting, dozens of dumb ones were already inside the fence when the announcement was streamed. They think the Kentucky compound fell without a shot. - -The first dumb ones came our way late that afternoon. - -Here I was thinking our biggest problem was where to make a stand. I mean what do we defend? I said that to daddy. I said we can’t possibly defend it all. And the crater itself, I don’t think we want to fight from a hole. He was about to avoid the question entirely and give me something to do, something just important enough that I couldn’t argue. I knew it when he drew breath. Judit was faster. - -“We are not defending any of it because they are not coming to take it. They are coming to kill us because we claim to own it. We are killing back. I won’t have the romantic shit.” - -Daddy was killed before dark and I lost both of my friends during the first night. Otherwise, we did pretty well there locally. It was purely survival, like Judit said, no other mandates. Don’t make an Alamo of it. You had a situation where reinforcements for both sides were arriving from all directions at the same time and none of them knew exactly where they were going or what the enemy looked like. The Caddo swamps on one side of us and the Ouachita Wilderness was on the other. I’ll bet there’s still a few hundred barricaded liplickers out there living on rabbits and water snakes. - -Skirmishes surrounded us the second night and moved outward as new arrivals just assumed they were seeing the front line. So Judit, bless her, when people asked for a strategy, she said, “Spread out. Shoot the dumb ones.” - -Strategizing would’ve killed us. It’s a mathematical certainty that we shot some of the folks who came to help but turning that light on us is insane. We survived because that’s what we set out to do. Obviously, the farm did not. They are pits now, all three, down to the Cretaceous layers. The digging in Kentucky produced these mammoth spoil banks of rocky radioactive material where nothing will grow so it always looks like the digging is fresh, when that corner of the state has been uninhabited for a while. - -Anyhow, a few weeks in, over a month, less than two, the president did whatever it is he does to deploy the regular army here in the states. On a peacekeeping mission he said, like we were Mexico now. Whatever. They didn’t come with rubber bullets and tear gas. Some people viewed them as a third combatant. The rest thought the army was on their side, no matter which side that was. - -The truth of it depends on where you were looking. Soldiers eventually take a side, independent of what they’re instructed to think, whether they tell you about it or not. This time, when their orders didn’t jive with their allegiance, they left. They were the same troops, no worse. We just hadn’t fought our own, on our own land, in a couple hundred years. There was certainly no institutional memory of something like this. They deserted sometimes in huge numbers, and they kept their uniforms and weapons. Vehicles. They often kept their rank. And they were likewise too many to jail. There was no rush to enlist, so the armed forces would eventually shrink back, over time, to less than a hundred thousand. They still had most of the money. - -At best, then, we had two warring factions and a third party potentially hostile to either of the two. That’s a particularly tough dynamic which you can learn a lot more about in Joe Garvey’s section. Right now, let’s agree to trust me on this: it’s more stable with eleven factions like we have today. That’s a more natural state, one which evolution prepared us for. Back then, when the peacekeeping mission failed, it wasn’t hard for regular army troops and tactics to overwhelm both sides and effectively destroy our cohesion. It wasn’t hard because it wanted to happen. Those initial two groups wanted so badly to be six, eight, ten groups, we would’ve done it by unanimous vote in another few weeks. Nevertheless, when they disbanded our leadership, peace was declared and the Peppermint War officially ended late one Thursday afternoon. We lost two women and one teenage boy in combat near Lubbock later that night, so I forgot to celebrate. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}ome of you took this section because you want the inside perspective on Judit. You heard from somebody that I was overly candid about our relationship. Maybe I was, but I rewrite this thing every year so you may be out of luck on the weepy details. Weirdly, I’m getting less sentimental with age. I hope you pay attention to some of the rest of this stuff, though. No matter where your loyalty eventually settles, what I’m teaching could save your life. It will definitely advance your cause. That said, let’s get on with the introduction. - -Judit and I started an unorthodox sexual relationship when we relocated to the Sangre de Cristo. En route, actually. - -On the outskirts of Lubbock, somebody hit us with a 50kw laser. We wanted that laser. The ambush casualties took us down to 297. If we met a battalion of regulars, we wouldn’t even have Spartan odds. So we were angry as well. Downtown Lubbock smoldered. It didn’t have a contingent our size but it wasn’t short on deserters and trigger happy neighborhood militias, which is what you would expect. You would not expect them to come miles outside the city limits and attack an organized column as it passed peacefully by. If you were me, at that time, you would not expect it. - -Don’t ever charge a laser. Tattoo that somewhere conspicuous. We fell back as we had learned to do, with a minimum of covering fire. We’re just gone. I will teach you what Judit called the Cookie Jar, and it will teach your enemies not to follow you. Judit used to say, “If you can fight going backwards, you should always fight going backwards.” - -We regrouped down in Woodrow, critically exhausted and still as professional as any troops I’ve seen to this day. We never had the opportunity to get good through training. Those of us alive at this point were good through attrition, a reticent kind of good that didn’t require remembering a bunch of names. We knew Judit’s name. On her go, we advanced northward like a fearful thought repeated on a dare. - -Out of context, what we did in Lubbock looks a lot like a vicious brawl over a parking spot outside a Mexican restaurant. Reality is like that. Very rarely does it remain what you initially thought it was. - -Judit said to me, “Do you know why Lubbock and Odessa got hit so hard?” - -She meant in the beginning, before the war was declared. I hadn’t thought about it until then. I was emotionally depleted. If I reflected at all on the ruins of these old cattle towns, I probably thought it was no huge loss and in the case of Lubbock, fuck them. - -“They went on like nothing was happening,” she said. “They thought nobody will come out here. They were right. Their enemy lived two doors down.” The passenger seat of the truck is fully reclined. She sustained retinal burns in the ambush and our medic bandaged her eyes shut, otherwise she would be looking at me and not blinking. “We all believed in some kind of future. What is happening now, this is the realization that we are the future.” She said, “I want to have sex with you tonight, while I cannot see. You smell like your father. You *feel* like him.” - -Judit never regained her sight. She no longer looked at you like she was deciding something, so you suddenly saw the gold pattern in her hard brindle eyes and you noticed her tiny ears won’t hold all her hair back. It’s like you just discovered art on the wall and the art has been watching you the whole time. She told me once that sex is not a giving or a taking. It’s a truce between minds so the animals can interact. She said, “How you pollute that truce is up to you.” I let Judit teach me how to love a woman while I fell in love with her. - -We traveled west from Lubbock at moonrise, augmented with a brand new laser too big to hide. We would remain on the move almost constantly. During the day we watched our backtrail and scanned the skies. At night we ran dark and quiet, spread out like peach cobbler so a single ambush would have to be miles long to catch us all. We veered south to avoid Roswell, crossed the Mescalero Apache Reservation and dropped into the vast Tularosa basin in the middle of the abandoned White Sands missile range. It was off-road for two hundred miles northward to Santa Fe. On a clear day, you couldn’t follow us even with a drone out there, not without us knowing. - -You’re already aware that we took Santa Fe and held it, along with the Sangre De Cristos north to Taos. We were 250 strong at the time. Some of us had decided to stay on the reservation. We will delve into how a force of 250 accomplished all this and why. Some of it will surprise you, regardless of what you’ve heard. - -Our camp was northeast of Santa Fe. It was designed to be struck and moved on short notice, but our protocols were such that no dumb ones ever found that spot. To my knowledge, that’s still the case. We will talk about how to keep your most vital secrets, and we will talk about the fallacy of territorial control. We will talk about the disastrous siege of Los Alamos and the Denver Accord two years later. I was there for all of it. Judit was not. - -She said, “My life has been a fucking blast.” - -For those of you well-read on her, this won’t sound like Judit. I don’t know what to tell you. It came from her mouth. With half a year of blindness, she quit trying to look at anything specific. She was always facing the brightest light as though she was waiting for the rest of it, and when that light source wasn’t in your direction, it was very difficult to tell if Judit was talking to you. Sometimes, she talked. - -“I need to kill myself and I think it’s time,” she said. “I have felt a call for some months, a call to go somewhere and to do something that is not here and is not this. When I pay attention to that call, the things around me seem like trinkets, even you. All of this seems like a distraction. Serious things, they seem funny.” - -It wasn’t a proposition. Advance notice, maybe. We had lamb and potatoes that night. I never saw her again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} fought on for eight years and watched my friends have children who had the *option* to fight. As a leader, I made some mistakes. As a soldier, I did some unnecessary things. I’ll share most of those. - -We’ll talk about the alliances. Early on, we were big into alliances because this thing was scary and we were scared. We got over it. We realized that independence from these people is what we are fighting for, not alliance. Organically, around the country, people started to realize, influential people, that maybe we had found a better way. The last Uniform Crime Report issued before the FBI disbanded, it classified violent criminal offenses as either predatory or domestic combat. And when you add those together, they totaled not even ten percent of the violent crimes reported before the Peppermint War. Property crimes were no longer included in the UCR because there weren’t enough to be statistically significant. There were subjective social benefits as well, ranging from the personal to the incomprehensible, so the case for reunification was hard to make. It remains so. - -Guymon Errol reached out to me when he got funding for ECI, partly because he had been a friend to Judit and partly because I had the chance to overrun Albuquerque and seize his east-west trade route on several occasions and I did not. I’m sure you will quiz me about that. You should. Guymon also thought we shared a secret ideology despite his Institute’s claim to be apolitical. He believed this is why I came. So far as I know, he believed that until he died. I took the professorship because I was tired of fighting but I was still good at it. I took the professorship because I was scared to go the way Judit did. Ideology didn’t come into play. Clearly we intend to keep fighting; therefore, I prefer that we know how to fight efficiently. - -In forty-seven years of teaching Section 1, “How To Fight”, the course name never changed and the principles withstood the most rigorous and public scrutiny. You are here because the other schools weren’t good enough for you—that’s why I stayed. When I retired, I agreed to allow the Institute to continue the section with an artificial intelligence based on me. This is where it can get confusing. I did both. I retired, I continued. I’ve long since died. Try to keep your head out of that. Experience has shown it’s easier to see me as never having lived or never having died. It’s the other information you want. In exchange, I’ll try to stay away from the predictive tense. - -On the practical side, the ideas in this section are numbered and available to you on the section stream after you close this introduction. You are welcome to absorb these ideas in any order, though they were composed in sequence. My schedule is also available to you now and I look forward to your questions. - -Please note: you are eligible for a full refund only if you do not open any of the ideas in the section. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546519367481054).* diff --git a/content/issue-31/TyrannosaurusMechs.md b/content/issue-31/TyrannosaurusMechs.md deleted file mode 100644 index c10a47f3..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/TyrannosaurusMechs.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,90 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Tyrannosaurus Mechs" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Gregory L. Norris -copyright: '© Gregory L. Norris 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Six issues ago, Gregory L. Norris graced our pages with a succinct and sly contemporary horror that skewered the fashion scene, more or less literally. His latest story is a trip to a distant future that evokes a distant past, and it boasts the very highest of high-concept titles." - -image: images/TyrannosaurusMechs.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator." - -type: stock -slug: tyrannosaurus-mechs -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he giant’s roar carried over the time-eroded landscape, confirming Drumm was close to Tyrannosaurus Mechs territory. She withdrew the cloak’s toggle. Not yet. Soon. - -The palms ahead thinned beneath an overcast sky whose clouds were edged in rust. In the clearing stood relics from an earlier time—the remains of a small windmill, a statue of a beached whale with a rudimentary human face and cartoon smile, and a generic predator dinosaur on two legs, its cement hide painted a long-faded orange. It, too, flashed a kind of human smile that showed no teeth. The predators living beyond that line of palms were considerably toothier. - -The temptation to scan possessed her. The area had already been metal-mined, judging by the remains of tires and plastic refuse left in piles. But the T-mechs might pick up on her location sweep. Better to find the creatures through safer methods, especially if, as she hoped, they were breeding. The irony of such a wish! The flimsy cowled cloak rigged with light-refracting projectors wasn’t much of a defense and wouldn’t hold power for long. - -Drumm snuck past the whale and then the dinosaur, whose cartoon eyes tracked her into T-mechs territory like a sentry on the lookout for intruders. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}agged piles of rubble littered another clearing—proof of a nesting cow. The remains of houses and other structures had been mined of all metals, the raw building blocks for new generations of self-perpetuating artificial life forms like T-mechs. Drumm risked a smile and studied the area through slitted eyes. Palm fronds stirred in the late afternoon breeze. Nothing else moved and she understood why—she now stood at the outskirts of a mother T-mech’s killing zone. Nothing was permitted anywhere close to the nest. Even the bull that had sired the clutch and courted the female with offerings of scrap metal was wise to keep its distance. - -Drumm skirted the closest of the ruins. The configuration wasn’t right. The rubble was stacked too high, too helter-skelter. Again, the desire to scan the area tempted her, but the risk outweighed the benefit. What was the point of coming all this way to attain what Ilsa desperately needed only to be discovered before reaching her target? Or worse, being gutted open and devoured by a female T-mech in the throes of mother-madness? - -The air grew heavier with a metallic tang, a smell of factories and T-mech nests. Drumm tensed. That fecund note told her she was close. She rounded an obelisk of fractured concrete and froze. The nest was two-dozen meters ahead in a hollowed-out depression that had once been an in-ground swimming pool surrounded by chunks of torn-up asphalt. - -Her gaze homed in on the center of the nest, but the angle prevented Drumm from seeing the prize. She’d need to get closer. But even as the thought crossed her mind, the ground trembled, and the T-mech lumbered out of the palms. - -Drumm fell back against the obelisk. Her brief glimpse of the giant left an impression of a horror more reptilian in design than machine. The cow showed little of the gears and clunk of earlier models. It strode on legs that flexed synthetic muscles more than hydraulics, its skin a plated lead-gray. Any illusion to biology broke, however, when a moment after its appearance the cow’s eyes lit up red and it scanned the area surrounding its nest for intruders. - -Drumm flattened against the obelisk. The beam swept past. - -Beyond the jut of concrete, the T-mech plodded toward its nest. She tracked its sounds, chanced a look and peered around the rubble. The T-mech was bent over the nest. Hope filled Drumm. She could tell by the cow’s movements that a clutch of eggs had been laid in the depression. - -She thought of Ilsa and waited. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he mother T-mech shrieked its deafening metallic roar at the overcast sky before moving away from the clutch again. Steeling herself, Drumm activated the cloak’s light-bending properties, crept out of cover, and hastened across the distance to the pool’s edge. To her great relief, she counted five eggs neatly clustered over a layer of chewed metal. - -Drumm hurried down the pool’s cement stairs, crossed the shallow end, and, at the deep, gently lifted one of the eggs. It was lighter than she expected, which told her it was infertile. She set it down and reached for another. Considerably heavier, proof that it contained a T-mech embryo. - -Working quickly, she force-pierced the textured metal shell. Once punctured, she was able to crack the egg fully open with reasonable speed. The thing inside was coiled into a fetal curl, a much smaller version of the killer giant that had birthed it. As Drumm cut into the embryo’s chest, seeking the treasure located between its metal ribs, it struck her how even less robotic this specimen appeared than its mother. - -The embryo jolted and uncurled. It hadn’t formed fully, but still reacted in pain to her surgical explorations. Drumm located the pulser. It beat beneath her fingertips, proof of life. Guilt briefly stilled her from detaching the mechanical heart… then Ilsa’s face materialized in her memory, and Drumm pulled. - -An instant before the pulser gave, the T-mech embryo let forth with a plaintive yowl. Then it stilled. - -She pocketed the pulser, turned, and hurried back up the cement steps, convinced the embryo’s cry would haunt her going forward. But it had to be. - -She was still well shy of the obelisk when the T-mech cow broke through the palms, mother-rage displayed in its red eyes. The T-mech charged toward its nest, saw what had been done, and fell silent,—worse than if the giant had roared out in fury. - -The T-mech turned its head and activated scans. - -Drumm’s cloak held as the beam washed over her, but with the pulser hammering in her pocket, seeking to remake severed connections, she froze. To move now would mean discovery, death. - -The ground trembled at her back, and Drumm peeked behind her. The T-mech’s giant head leaned down, its insane smile showing plenty of metal teeth. The cloak was holding. But… - -*The pulser*, Drumm thought. The cow sensed its cadence. - -Apart from the embryo’s heartbeat, the world fell deathly still. Drumm waited, the anticipation almost worse than the danger. Right when she thought the silence would break her, sound exploded at her back. - -The T-mech charged its head at the obelisk. Concrete shattered and flew. The cloak shorted out beneath the rain of particulates. Drumm darted away and the enraged cow pursued. In a moment of her own madness, Drumm risked a glance behind. The T-mech drew back, slashed with its metal limbs, and cleanly severed Drumm’s right arm at the shoulder. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}nly its madness had spared her. The blinding, red-hot rage drove the T-mech to focus on the grisly prize of her sacrificed arm and allowed Drumm to escape from the cow’s territory. She made it back to the hillside sanctuary despite her injuries and staggered into the nursery. Ilsa’s body was where she’d left it, swaddled on the table. Struggling to maintain focus, Drumm removed the pulser from her pocket with her remaining hand. - -She opened the infant’s chest and removed the inoperative heart. The T-mech embryo’s pulser was larger, but even as Drumm worked it into place, the life-giving organ adapted, activated, made connections, and Ilsa’s torso began reconfiguring to accommodate and close around it. - -Drumm assessed her injury, her shoulder a mess of severed wire and jagged metal. The repairs would be extensive. But they could wait. - -Ilsa opened her eyes. “*Mumma*,” the child sang, reaching for her, and - -Drumm swept up Ilsa in her remaining arm and rejoiced in her daughter’s embrace. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Tyrannosaurus Mechs** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/546526834146974).* diff --git a/content/issue-31/__index.md b/content/issue-31/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6e090a64..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 31" -date: 2022-09-12 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 31 -subhead: Autumn 2022 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Mythaxis_LRG.jpg -imageMobile: images/Mythaxis_Mobile.jpg -imageCopyright: "The cover art was created using MidJourney" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#E8BF25' - subheading: - # order: 2 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 1 - flex_grow: 2 - align_self: center - align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-31/contents.md b/content/issue-31/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 31c30926..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Boy with Brick]({{< relref path="BoyWithBrick.md" >}}), by Sydney Sackett -- [The Gourmets]({{< relref path="TheGourmets.md" >}}), by Jeff Reynolds -- [Nwanebeakwa]({{< relref path="Nwanebeakwa.md" >}}), by Chinaza Eziaghighala -- [Tyrannosaurus Mechs]({{< relref path="TyrannosaurusMechs.md" >}}), by Gregory L. Norris -- [Nighthawks]({{< relref path="Nighthawks.md" >}}), by Si Wang -- [The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten]({{< relref path="SchoolHopelessForgotten.md" >}}), by Anna Zumbro -- [Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild]({{< relref path="TipDiebæcksMenthaBWild.md" >}}), by Marc Phillips - diff --git a/content/issue-31/editorial.md b/content/issue-31/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5a2d4d35..00000000 --- a/content/issue-31/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2022-09-12 -issue: Issue 31 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Mythaxis_SML.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 31** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -As noted previously, all the images in this issue were created primarily using [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/), the AI image generator. In the case of our cover, the sole prompt was the word 'mythaxis', of course." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -I would like to talk about AI. Again. - -In our [Winter 2021](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-28/) issue, the cover art and all the illustrations accompanying the stories were at least in part created by an AI-powered image generator. However, it was a somewhat complicated, laborious process: interesting to undertake, but repetitive and time consuming, fraught with unusable misfires, and (due to my modest computer resources) prone to system crashes. If all went well, I could create a workable image in fifteen minutes... but it might take a dozen failures to acquire one winner. - -The recent attention which has fallen on another AI image generator, **[Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/)**, may underline two inevitable necessities to enter the mainstream: quality of output and *ease of use*, both of which *Midjourney* has in spades. Text prompts with any degree of detail produce four image options in approximately 60 seconds, and they are almost invariably good; sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful. It will create variations on those initial images in maybe half that time, and upscales the ones you like into large, highly detailed final versions in perhaps a minute or two at most, depending on how busy the site is. - -Unsurprisingly, it gets quite busy. - -All the art in the present issue of *Mythaxis* was created using *Midjourney*, which in addition to being very accessible is also startlingly inexpensive to use—which connects to a subject I mean to return to in a future editorial. In some cases these images are *Midjourney*'s unaltered output; in others, I've composited its output to a greater or lesser extent to create the final product; and I've also had to perform a few instances of cosmetic (in some cases, *emergency*) surgery to deal with problems thrown up by the AI. It isn't a perfect science yet, though I think you'll agree that the results are impressive—but while they make for a very attractive-looking issue, this isn't the aspect of Artificial Intelligence I *really* want to discuss. - -A lot is made of how Artificial Intelligence is going to take over all our jobs; how it can already compose music easily mistaken for the work of history's greats; and how its often amusing attempts at creative writing seem less laughable with each new viral report. Ever since our first *visual* experiment with using AI, we behind the scenes at *Mythaxis* have discussed how to further explore the potential of AI in the field of magazine publishing. And, after much debate, we've come to the conclusion that the one expendable participant, the most toothless cog in our machine, the weak link in our chain, the fifth wheel to replace, is... - -*The Editor*. - -I won't deny, this came as a bit of a blow. Nevertheless, to this end I enthusiastically joined in plotting my own downfall, and I can confirm that the first step on the path to my obsolescence has now been taken, because we are indeed training up an AI to replace me. But it's going to have to prove itself before I hand over the reins. And I suspect I've got a little while in the hot seat ahead of me yet. - -Our fledgling experiment went something like this: first, we exposed a learning algorithm to the seventy-plus stories which have previously been published in *Mythaxis* during my editorship, so that it could analyse the material which I considered best amongst the hundreds of submissions we have received. Then, we challenged it to survey the one-hundred and fifty-eight stories which we received in our most recent submission window. If its understanding of *my* taste in fiction was accurate, surely it would rank most highly the stories which I actually selected, no? - -The answer was... *No*. - -In fact, of my eight acceptances that window, my so-called replacement rejected seven. And the one story it agreed with me about was also the one it was least certain of out of the eight. It *really* didn't like the others! So, from my perspective at least, we didn't so much create an Artificial Intelligence as an Actual Ignorance. - -However, maybe this isn't terribly surprising. It should be noted that seventy-four stories is not a very large sample size. Also, that the characteristics of the stories we publish vary in many different ways: from flash fiction to long shorts, science fiction to fantasy to horror, written in flavours (or flavors) of English from American and British to those influenced by fluency in other languages. There's a lot of complexity, in short—not least, I would hope, in the thing we're actually attempting to simulate here: ***me***. - -Therefore, we shall persist. We plan to refine our strategies, and educate our little monster. We're calling it the **Slushbot**. Starting now, every three months our currently oh-so-limited AI will have a chance to test itself against my judgement. As new submissions come into the slush pile, I will make my choices, and Slushbot will make its. My taste is impeccable; we will see if Slushbot's taste improves. - -We do all this with a goal in mind: we hope to be the first magazine edited by an AI. *So, should it ever match my picks from a window's submissions to a sufficiently frightening extent, **Slushbot will get to edit an issue of Mythaxis***. For one window, we will give it the final say over which stories to include, and I will go on holiday. - -Guess I'd better start packing my bags... you know, sooner or later. Next year maybe. Or whenever hell freezes over. Under a blue moon. As a pig flies over it. diff --git a/content/issue-32/AquariumAndrea.md b/content/issue-32/AquariumAndrea.md deleted file mode 100644 index efe3fefd..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/AquariumAndrea.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,344 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Aquarium is Andrea" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Monte Remer -copyright: '© Monte Remer 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Time passes fast, and sweeps memories with it. Over twenty years ago (if you can believe it) the movie 'Memento' took the very concept of memory and turned it into an edge-of-the-seat thriller; Monte Remer makes it into a brink-of-tears tragedy about the aliens closest to us. Some stories prick the emotions so strongly it's almost overwhelming. This one is pure pathos." - -image: images/AquariumAndrea.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image was created by compositing images generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2." - -type: stock -slug: the-aquarium-is-andrea -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}eacher hesitates to form the words *do not*, and so chaos ensues. - -*Have I forgotten them?* he wonders. - -No. Some expressions are difficult, but *do not* only requires scrunching up the skin around his eyes. It’s nothing so complicated and dangerous as *forgotten*. - -*Has Receiver forgotten?* - -The question—and the fear that someday he might have to really consider it—has been plaguing Teacher for some time. Through the glass of his prison, Teacher can see Receiver in his own. - -He tries to get Receiver’s attention, but Receiver is focused on the Watchers. They gather around Receiver’s cell like the air-bubbles that sometimes cluster around the glass. The two prisoners have worked on maintaining memories in spite of distractions. It will be okay. - -*It will be okay*, Teacher thinks. *Receiver will remember*. - -But Teacher needs to be certain. - -He changes the shade of his skin. It’s dark in the dimly-lit space between Teacher’s prison and Receiver’s, but Receiver will see. He will see, and he will remember. Teacher transforms from one shade of gray to another in rapid succession. It doesn’t have any meaning other than getting Receiver’s attention and that could confuse Receiver even more, but it will be okay. He believes that even as one little Watcher turns around and points a finger. - -The crowd turns as one in that little finger’s direction like a school of fish changing course. There is a pause that decides the fate of two minds. - -*Don’t pay attention to them*. It’s a thought to both himself and to Receiver. They can’t communicate like that though. They’d have escaped long ago if they could communicate like that. - -Teacher’s rectangular pupils narrow, training his eyes on Receiver as much as he can as the Watchers come forward. He continues changing his shade. There are so many other colors in this world—Andrea taught him that—but his species can only see variations of grey. - -*What we could do with colors*. *What progress we could make*. - -Receiver begins scrunching up the skin around his eyes. He changes his own shade to match Teacher’s. - -The relief which surges into Teacher is like the sloshing of the water when he swims very quickly in his prison. - -*He remembers. Of course he remembers*—*I was foolish to think otherwise. We’ve come too far to forget.* - -Receiver stretches a tentacle towards the glass. - -It's a way of saying *I don’t understand*. He lowers the tentacle, scrunches up his eyes again, changes his shade again. *I don’t understand this*. - -One Watcher did not move from Receiver’s prison to Teacher’s. It’s the little one who pointed. That bane of progress points again, this time to Receiver. Receiver looks away from Teacher and to the little Watcher. He goes from one shade to the next, forgetting the meaning behind each one. He flails his tentacles around for the little Watcher’s amusement instead of communication, saying *this is why* and *I am corral* and *here find calendar*. - -And so it ends. Everything she taught Teacher, and everything Teacher taught Receiver. - -*Who*? - -Teacher doesn’t know. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n the dark age which follows, however, Teacher maintains *something*. - -At the end of every night, all the Watchers leave and Teacher settles to the bottom of his prison and wraps his tentacles tight around an aquarium-decoration. It’s about the size of his suction-cups, with eight tentacles that do not move and skin that does not change shade. It is not alive like how Teacher, Receiver, or especially the Watchers who can go beyond this place are alive, but it’s meaning is everything. - -*Octopus*, Teacher remembers as he holds it. *Octopus like me*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}w{{}}*here’d they all go?* Teacher wonders. - -It’s been this way for a while. The dark hallway between Teacher’s and Receiver’s prisons is mostly empty of Watchers now. Those Watchers still around are the kind who do things like give them food and clean the prisons, not paying much attention whenever either octopus changes shades or flails around. They clean the hallway a lot more as well, and they wear strange flaps of skin around the holes they use to communicate. They might not communicate at all now, especially because there are only ever one or two of them around. - -One is walking past now. Receiver’s eyes follow the Watcher lazily. He stretches out a tentacle and changes his shade a few times. - -Teacher feels only a vague sense of anger at the sight, though he doesn’t know why. Mindlessly changing shades is just a terrible thing to do—a betrayal, somehow—and this is merely a fact of life, like how the decoration at the bottom of Teacher’s tank isn’t an octopus itself but *means* octopus. - -Anger turns almost immediately into focus. Receiver isn’t changing shades arbitrarily. There’s seven shades which he’s cycling through, going back to the first at the end of the seventh. Receiver isn’t looking at the Watcher, either—his small, rectangular pupils stare through the glass of two prisons into Teacher’s own. There’s an unmistakable intelligence in those pupils. - -The pattern repeats. Receiver points with his tentacle. The Watcher is out of sight now, so Receiver can only be paying attention to Teacher. His tentacle, however, is pointed a little lower. Then he points it towards himself, curling it inward and changing shades to match the grey of the decoration. - -When Teacher thinks *Receiver remembers*, he understands *remember* as a vague concept, not a *word*. - -He doesn’t need to. - -Still the shade of the decoration, Receiver wraps a tentacle around his head. - -*Remember*, the motion indicates. - -And Teacher does. He mimics the motion. - -*Octopus remembers.* I *remember*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}t{{}}here are things beyond this place. Beyond the prisons and the dark hallways between them, there’s another world. - -*Are there still as many Watchers out there?* Teacher wonders, awakening with a well-rested mind after a long, thirty-second sleep. *Have they gone away from* everywhere, *or just here?* - -The vibrations have been so few. There’s no longer the subtle shaking of a group of Watchers communicating, no water-rippling tremors from little Watchers banging on the glass. - -*Is* she *out there?* - -And the greatest question—*who is she?* - -There are no answers, especially not to that last. He only knows that one Watcher was special, and that he must see her again. - -But first, they must learn. Teacher and Receiver have spent a long time forming shapes with their tentacles and changing their shades, then checking their understanding of what those things mean. Watchers would be amazed to see them so active, but not even the feeding and cleaning kinds have come through the hallway today. There’s nothing more than two octopodes sloshing around in the water, constructing the world to each other across an empty, dimly-lit space. - -At a certain point, Receiver reaches the end of his memory. He knows no more words and phrases, and so Teacher must reassume his old role. - -The first Watcher today walks past. It attaches a strange object to the wall next to Receiver’s prison, tears pieces of it away, then begins marking it with some kind of ink. - -*Do Watchers have ink?* - -Maybe, but Teacher isn’t sure that the thing producing the ink is part of the Watcher. That doesn’t matter though, because the Watcher moves aside and a thousand memories come back. - -There’s a bunch of words on the strange object—*real* words, not tentacle-positions or shade-changes—about *fun facts* and *April* and *Aries.* There are numbers, the largest among them being *2020*. - -*This is the world beyond*, Teacher knows. - -Receiver is off swimming in the back of his prison now, but Teacher is transfixed. There is a way ahead now, and it’s as clear as the glass of his prison now that the Watchers clean it so often. It’s as clear as his mind has been ever since the cleaning and feeding Watchers started being the only Watchers in the aquarium. - -*What is an aquarium?* - -This time, there’s an answer to his question. - -The aquarium is Andrea, the greatest Watcher who ever lived. She is the outside world, the way to get there and the reason to go. She is the answer to all of his questions. Do Watchers have ink? Andrea will teach him. Why does he need to learn to communicate with Receiver? Andrea told him that he will never forget so long as he has another to help him remember. Why should he not forget? Andrea is out there. - -He can’t even remember her face, but that strange object is a starting-point. Like the octopus decoration, it means something. - -Receiver floats aimlessly in his prison. - -*I’ll teach you*, Teacher thinks. *I just have to teach myself first*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s strange which memories only arise when one is dreaming. Teacher can only sleep for up to a minute at a time, but the quick flashes of the past are enough to lead him into the future. - -The past. Lights strung up along the walls. About the same amount of Watchers there are now, though without their communication-holes covered. Another strange object—this one as thin as the recent one but much longer—strung up above Receiver’s prison and reading *Happy Holidays!* - -And a face. Oval and pale as the grey of his suction-cups. The Watcher moves one of her fingers and makes a shape. Teacher makes the same one with a tentacle, and it *means something*. - -He draws the letter *A*, as in *Andrea*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here’s work to do. The whole language they’ve developed will need to be changed, for a better one exists which doesn’t require countless different shade-changes and tentacle-positions and combinations of the two to communicate. There are memories to unlock, all of them hovering just above his consciousness like the dark-gray film of waste at the top of his prison. - -The Watchers don’t clean as much anymore. They don’t seem to care. The lack of distractions for the octopodes is perfect. - -Teacher has wondered if he’s forced his memories away to protect himself. Perhaps when they come back, he’ll be crushed under the weight of what he’s lost. - -But he *does* remember what Andrea looks like, and there can’t possibly be anything else so devastating to lose. - -*Do you even remember?* he wonders with a certain sadness as he watches Receiver practice forming the letter *A. Do you even remember how beautiful she is?* - -He probably doesn’t, and that gives Teacher a new motivation to teach. - -Numbers have come back fairly easily, but other words have been more elusive. By his estimate, he has remembered a little over a hundred words, Receiver about half that. They’ve spent the better part of the day naming things in their prisons. As they painstakingly contort each tentacle one at a time into the shape of a letter, even words like *corral* and *ground* are a challenge, let alone *octopus* and *calendar*. - -That’s what the strange object is—a calendar. - -A Watcher comes down the hallway and stops in front of the calendar as the few Watchers left often do. With that little ink-filled thing which doesn’t seem to be part of the Watcher’s body, it crosses off a section of the object called a *square*. If Teacher remembers the purpose as well as he remembers the word, each square represents a certain amount of time, and *2020* represents a much longer amount—all the squares combined. - -Despite discoveries like this, much of the Watchers’ behavior remains an enigma. - -For instance, Teacher has no idea why the Watchers come every day to mark off the calendar-squares. A Watcher will stand there for what feels like forever, just watching the calendar as if willing time to go faster, to reach the end of something. - -The period of time indicated by the number *2020* continues, however, and in the stillness there is remembering, teaching, learning. - -The glass of Teacher’s prison begins to seem as thin as the calendar. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}e dreams of remembered joy. Andrea writes a question on the paper with the ink-filled thing—*a pen it is called a pen*—and holds it up to the glass. - -The question reads *How much do tickets for adults cost?* - -Teacher searches his memory. The little book talked about tickets to the aquarium. His prison is part of the aquarium. Andrea works at the aquarium. Beyond the aquarium, there are bodies of endless water with no glass to hold them in. There are creatures which roam free. There are more Watchers than Teacher can possibly imagine. - -*Focus*, he tells himself. - -He needs a lot of that to make the word *tickets*. It’s slow and he can only make one letter at a time before even beginning the next with another tentacle, but he’s practiced using multiple tentacles at once. This requires a fair amount of focus from Andrea to *understand*, but once they’ve both figured it out then he’ll escape in no time. - -He stops after *tickets*. - -Andrea’s communication-hole curves downward. The disappointment transcends the barrier between species. - -*Anything but that*, Teacher thinks. *Anything but letting her down.* - -Again, he forms *tickets*. Then—with a flourish—he spells *cost fifteen dollars* *for adults*. - -Andrea pauses a moment to catch up. Once understanding enters her eyes, she pulls the paper away and marks it with the pen. Her communication-hole curves upward. - -She turns the paper towards the glass again, and Teacher reads *Every answer correct*. - -He dances around his prison, swimming in circles and leaving bubbles in his wake. Andrea laughs, her face becoming for a moment as fluid as water. There is nothing more beautiful than her laugh. - -Swimming back to the glass, he spells out the same thing he has for the past couple of days. - -*Take me with you?* - -He keeps wondering if it’s some sort of test, if there’s so much he has to learn before Andrea will sneak him out of his prison and take him with her into the beyond. - -She takes the paper away and writes her response. - -*Not yet, okay?* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}eacher is still dwelling on the dream when he notices Receiver trying to communicate. - -Receiver spells *Watcher* with seven tentacles at once, using the other one to point at the end of the hallway. - -They’ve come so far lately, completely evolving the way they communicate to each other. That’s not what Teacher’s thinking about though. He’s wondering why Receiver feels the need to communicate *this*. A Watcher comes every single day to cross off a square, and this time shouldn’t be any different. - -*No cover*, Receiver spells. - -And sure enough, the Watcher’s communication-hole is uncovered. The Watcher crosses off a calendar-square, then flips a few pages. Staring for a second at what looks to be the last one, the Watcher curves its communication-hole upward, then leaves for the beyond. - -*Why no cover?* Receiver spells, following it by raising all his tentacles above his head. This position is a rare remnant of how they used to communicate. It’s a way of differentiating a statement from a question. - -*I do not know*, Teacher spells. - -Receiver has never been the most communicative, but he asks *another* question. - -*Do you remember when there were more?* - -Teacher replies *Yes*. - -There used to be far more Watchers, just as he used to only know the word *octopus*. He also used to be incapable of logical deduction, but now he finds himself wondering if there’s a reason for why the amount of Watchers decreased at the same time as those who remained started covering their communication-holes. - -*And how will this help me get to Andrea?* - -It won’t. And so he puts it out of mind. - -Teacher starts reading the fun-facts on the calendar for what seems like the hundredth time. Receiver will ask him comprehension questions, and Teacher will get every one right. - -He always does. They need to keep doing this, even if it’s repetitive. They need to remember. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}a{{}} terrible thought occurs to Teacher as the two octopodes practice spelling faster. - -*What if it won’t help? What if no amount of learning will free us from our prisons?* - -They might become intelligent just to live in terrible understanding of the fact that they’ll never see Andrea ever again. - -But learning has no limit. At *some* point, there is an amount of knowledge which can free them. They might fall again and again before they reach that point, but the path will always be there because there’s one thing Teacher will always remember. - -*Octopus*, he thinks as he looks at the little decoration, *like me*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}a{{}}*nother job*, Andrea spells with her fingers. Sometimes they practice reading, but other times she communicates by moving her fingers in the same way that Teacher moves his tentacles. She’s much slower, but Teacher figures she can take all the time she needs. He’s content to watch her face in the slow seconds between letters, illuminated by the Christmas lights on the wall behind her. - -He mimics her and also spells *another job*, then puts his tentacles above his head to make it a question. - -*I’m leaving the aquarium*, she replies. - -The dream skips over the hurt, the confusion, the following argument which would be hopeless even between members of the same species unseparated by a wall of glass. The argument is over, and now they’re just trying to enjoy the few moments they have left together. Andrea is holding the decoration. - -*You have to come give it to me*, Teacher spells. - -Andrea laughs—it’s the most beautiful thing a Watcher can do. - -She disappears down the hallway but soon comes back with a ladder—he knows what it is from an employee-handbook they read together. Andrea puts the latter up against the glass of his prison. - -Receiver sleeps. Andrea is the only Watcher around. There is only the soft vibration of her toes breaking the surface of the water. - -They talk later of how she’s going to leave, how the Watchers will fill the halls come the end of Christmas-break and the reopening of the zoo. Teacher’s replies are vacant things, as much a parody of conversation as existence in this prison is a parody of life. His mind is elsewhere, lost in strands of auburn hair which are like dancing tentacles when Andrea immerses herself in the water. - -He pays attention to one thing, though. - -Andrea tells him that he’ll forget. - -*You will forget*, she draws with one hand, holding the octopus-decoration with the other, *but remember this*. *I cannot take you with me, but remember this*. - -Teacher asks *Will I see you again?* - -Before she answers, she is out of the water—out of Teacher’s life—and he is out of the dream. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s a bad day for learning. The Watchers come and put up lights and other interesting decorations. Receiver is distracted by them all day, and Teacher has to re-teach a few concepts when the Watchers finally leave. - -*Better tomorrow*, he thinks. *We’ll get closer to seeing her tomorrow*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}ore Watchers come every day to mark the days off the calendar. They stand there in a group, looking at the few days left in *2020* as if they’ve come to the conclusion that *one* Watcher cannot will time to go faster but *multiple* surely can. - -All the Watchers have stopped covering their communication-holes. Their numbers become many. Every day becomes a bad one for learning, and as Receiver flails around for the Watchers’ amusement—moving his tentacles without meaning—Teacher spends his time thinking about how he could have gone further if he’d only focused. He had all the time and the peace and quiet that any octopus could ask for, and yet here is. - -Almost back where he started. - -*Tomorrow*. *We can go further tomorrow*. - -It becomes a mantra. The mantra becomes shorter every day. - -*Tomorrow. Further tomorrow.* - -*Tomorrow, tomorrow*. - -*Tomorrow*. - -He soon forgets what that word means. Catching Receiver’s attention, he spells it out. - -One day, Receiver mimics him and then raises all his tentacles above his head. Teacher fails to give an answer. - -The next day, Teacher makes the word again. Receiver doesn’t even notice. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he Watchers are fun. They point their fingers and contort their faces. Teacher plays with them, moving his tentacles in strange shapes and changing shades. Both are meaningless and just meant to entertain. - -One Watcher isn’t entertained at all. She stops in front of Teacher’s prison and holds out something thinner than glass, marked with some sort of ink. She looks like she expects Teacher to understand. She— - -*What does* she *mean?* he wonders in not so many words. - -He doesn’t know. He changes shades a few times and swims in a circle. - -The Watcher lets water flow from its eyes. Teacher has never seen one do that, and he wonders what it means. - -Then he gets distracted, and thoughts of Watchers are forgotten. His eyes are drawn to a strange rock at the bottom of his tank. - -*Octopus*, he thinks. *Like me*. - -After all the Watchers have gone for the day, memories suddenly fill Teacher’s mind. There is so much work to do, but he only manages to teach Receiver the skin-shade which signifies *octopus*. Receiver forgets this the next day. Teacher forgets too, but eventually he remembers again. - -And soon forgets. - -And again and again. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Aquarium is Andrea** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653086526824337).* diff --git a/content/issue-32/DeathBoxChocolates.md b/content/issue-32/DeathBoxChocolates.md deleted file mode 100644 index 50765720..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/DeathBoxChocolates.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,366 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Death is Like a Box of Chocolates" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Fraser Sherman -copyright: '© Fraser Sherman 2022 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Creative reworkings of Greek mythology. To judge by the number submitted to Mythaxis each year, it's a little-known fact that the editor really doesn't like them—especially not Persephone and Hades, by far the most common, and most grating. Yet beware, editor, of ever ruling them out: sometimes new Greek myths come bearing gifts…" - -image: images/DeathBoxChocolates.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was composited using an image generated by Micah Hyatt using Stable Diffusion plus an original image by [New Africa](https://depositphotos.com/443878826/stock-photo-modern-detective-office-workplace-board.html)." - -type: stock -slug: death-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates -weight: 5 ---- - -> *Dec. 17, 1983* - -{{}}G{{}}reg Haughton believed in the importance of big brass balls the way his grandparents believed in the inerrancy of holy scripture. That’s how he got himself killed and released *kalon kakon*, the beautiful evil, back into the world. - -Greg’s balls and his willingness to promise whatever bullshit would close a deal had made him the top salesman at Hal Lightner Ford in the Florida Panhandle for three years straight. He felt he had a lot in common with Ronald Reagan, who’d just invaded some island a couple of months earlier to stop the commies taking over—they both had the balls to take big chances. - -Hal held the company Christmas party at his condo in Seastar, a beachfront tourist town a half-hour up the coast. The Eurhythmics were on Hal’s stereo, booze flowed freely, cocaine flowed discreetly, so Greg was buzzed when a reporter from the Seastar Journal showed up to interview Hal. Pershing Jackson was a bespectacled brunette rocking the hot librarian look, so as soon he could, Greg cornered her alone, copped a feel, and told her how totally fuckable she’d look if she only showed more skin. - -The bitch bent a couple of his fingers back until he almost screamed, then made some sneering remark about the size of his dick. She walked away before Greg could explain that he’d just been joking around and hadn’t meant anything. His attempt to score with Hal’s attorney went even worse and left him sulking and drinking the rest of the night. - -His mood wasn’t much better Monday when he drove his sister to the county airport, walked her to the gate, and watched her jet off to her fiancé. Greg headed out past the crowd at the baggage carousel, fuming over the total injustice of the previous night. The crap a man had to put up with to stay out of trouble… and in that moment, the beautiful evil crooned its silent song, and he listened. - -Greg had always worried that if he wasn’t at the baggage claim right when his luggage came out, someone could just walk off with it. Suddenly it hit him: *he* could be that someone! With a crowd of three, four dozen people, nobody would realize he hadn’t been on the flight. Stealing some loser’s luggage would prove his dick was big enough for any woman, and if the owner caught him he’d pretend it was a mistake. - -He pushed his way to the front of the crowd and watched the luggage go by. Backpack. Suitcase. Suitcase. Duffel bag. Cheap suitcase. Suit bag. And, poking out from beneath the suit bag, a bright yellow box of Stuckey’s pralines. - -Without hesitating, Greg plucked it from the carousel with one hand and walked out to the parking lot, heart hammering. Nobody objected, nobody demanded their pralines back—who the hell would check candy as baggage anyway? Sure, it was free, but what were the odds it didn’t get crushed or stolen? - -*But who cared?* With one macho move, he’d proven his balls were still the biggest in the Panhandle. He wanted to do that thing Sly Stallone did at the top of the steps in *Rocky*, but it was smarter to play it cool, just in case. - -Only, now what? - -As he got into his car, he wondered if he shouldn’t put the box back, because it wasn’t like he was a thief or anything. But that would draw attention, and if the owner had already missed it… *Ah, screw it. Celebrate your brass balls by having some pralines!* - -At 2 PM Central Time Dec. 19, Greg opened the box, unleashed *kalon kakon*, and doomed himself. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}P{{}}ershing Jackson parked her Beetle at Fran’s Furniture Store, well back from the half mile of Highway 97 traffic paralyzed by the accident at the airport entrance. After snapping a couple of photos, she drew her notebook and pencil out of her shoulder bag and advanced up the median on foot. Ignoring the inevitable catcalls and wolf whistles she scribbled details of the scene in shorthand as she approached the cluster of police cars, fire engines and rubberneckers up ahead. - -Beyond the rubberneckers, a small Gremlin with a crumpled front end lay overturned on the median; a larger car lay in the road, too smashed to identify the model. *God, I hate covering accidents. If Max had just waited a few more hours to quit…* Pershing photographed the scene, took some discreet shots of the crowd, then approached a deputy who didn’t seem to be doing anything. “Pershing Jackson with the *Seastar Journal*. What happened?” - -The woman, brown-haired and freckle-faced with a badge that said *Dep. Dane*, raised an eyebrow suspiciously. “Where’s Max?” - -“He quit, a few minutes before we got the call about the accident.” The only explanation he’d given was that he had an idea for a sure-fire, guaranteed bestseller and he needed all his time to write it. - -Dane still looked suspicious. Pershing realized she’d left her press badge in her blazer pocket and pulled it out. “Sorry, deputy. Everyone knows me on my regular beat.” - -“No sweat.” Dane turned and gestured at the totaled car. “Driver ran a red light, the Gremlin hit him, he died, the other driver’s getting flown to St. Mary for hemorrhaging. Can’t let any cars through till we’ve checked out the death scene.” - -“Dead guy drunk?” - -“Probably, or higher than a kite, but that’s off the record until we know for sure. Women behind him at the light said he was screaming something about his big brass balls before he got hit. Name was Greg Haughton, car salesman. Died 2:07 PM.” - -Pershing flinched a little. “Haughton. I… met him once.” No need to share the details. “Anything else?” - -“No, but I can call once the autopsy and the blood work’s done.” - -“Thanks. Deadline’s at two tomorrow for Wednesday’s paper, but I can always do a follow-up for Saturday. And let me know when you’ve contacted his family.” - -After a quick interview with the woman who heard Haughton yelling, Pershing was headed back through the crowd playing with openings for the story when a harsh voice snapped her out of her reverie. “Punishment is only just if it’s appropriate.” - -The speaker was an elderly woman in a shapeless black dress, talking to a second old woman in an identical shapeless black dress. “We have to end this, Tis, it’s been going too far for far too long.” - -Scenting a possible quote, Pershing was about to ask the woman’s name, but the two crones saw her listening and glared. Pershing forced a smile, turned around and resumed walking. Something about the women’s hard, cruel eyes… she glanced back, but they’d already moved off. - -Pershing turned around and bumped into a massive chest in a green turtleneck. The man jumped back with a startled bleat, so Pershing apologized quickly and walked on. Knocking on the window of a few drivers she got some choice quotes, a few even printable. - -As she reached the Beetle, she saw the big guy—Jeez, he must be seven foot-something—emerge from the crowd and stare at her intensely. He didn’t move any closer, but she wasted no time getting inside the car, locking the doors, and driving off. - -Back at her desk, Pershing banged out a first draft on her typewriter—the Journal would never have the budget for word-processors like her last employer—and got an update on the Gremlin driver from the hospital. She told her editor, Walt, that she’d check with Deputy Dane tomorrow and finish up, “but until then I’m getting back to my own work.” - -“Honey, it’s all your work until we can replace Max.” Walt stubbed out his cigarette in his FSU-logo ashtray and shrugged apologetically. “That might take a while.” - -“I’m local-government beat, I hate covering breaking news.” - -“People’ll read it.” - -“Yeah, I know.” Tonight’s county budget hearing would affect more people, but death and destruction grabbed more eyeballs. “One reporter for the whole county—” - -“We’re a quiet county, Pershing. If we have another accident this week worth more than a one-paragraph brief, I’ll be astonished.” - -Pershing nodded, returned to her desk, and checked her answering machine. She’d expected some return calls from the county staff, but the first call was Dr. Ryder. As soon as the taped voice finished, she told Walt goodbye and ran to her car. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“D{{}}ad, you can’t drop out of chemo.” Pershing handed her father a coffee and took a seat on the couch next to his recliner. “If you do, you’re going to die.” - -“I’m sick of the chemo, pumpkin, you know that,” Dad said in the Virginia accent he’d never lost. - -“I know how horrible it is for you.” Helping him through it was why she’d quit her job at a Richmond daily for a lower salary in a nowhere county. “If you’ve decided you can’t— but you’ve been so determined and you’re winning. This coming year, you’ll be cancer free.” *Has he been hiding how he really felt? No, I know him better than that… don’t I?* “Are you really choosing to— to—” - -“Honey, it’s not as fatal as you think. You ever hear about the guy who cured himself just by watching comedies and thinking happy thoughts? I decided this afternoon that I’d try that.” Dad squeezed Pershing’s hand. “I’m an upbeat person, if that man can do it, I certainly can.” - -That wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “Dad, you used to be a science teacher. You’ve always taught me to trust medicine, not miracles. Look, did someone suggest this to you?” If Dad had been conned by some quack, she’d make the guy sorry he was ever born. - -“Nope, it was inspiration—almost like a divine message, if you believe in that stuff. Hit me just as *General Hospital* started, I called the doctor as soon as it was over.” He chuckled, half-embarrassed. “Much as I laughed at your momma about those soaps, Luke and Laura are kind of cool.” - -“I don’t—” *No, yelling won’t do any good. It never does with Dad*. “Obviously it’s… it’s your decision, but don’t you think you should at least talk with Dr. Ryder about your prognosis?” - -Dad didn’t. He ended the talk by putting a *Duck Soup* cassette into the Betamax to start his laughter-based therapy and invited her to watch with him. - -Pershing left the house with her guts clenched in a knot. *He’s sixty-two. Too young to die. And I’m twenty-seven, too young to be an orphan. And dammit, dammit, this came out of nowhere! What could have happened—* It struck her that *General Hospital* started at 2 PM, the same time Max quit. But that was coincidence, obviously; probably thousands of people all over America were making stupid decisions at that same time. At any given time. - -If she hadn’t had the meeting that night, or if Max were around to pinch-hit for her, she’d have found somewhere to get drunk. Instead, she went back to the office, found nothing from the county staff, but Deputy Dane had left a message on the answering machine. She didn’t really give a crap about the accident just then, but calling her back was better than thinking about Dad. “The autopsy find some drugs?” - -“No, but in Haughton’s car we found—look, you’ll find it easier to believe if you see it for yourself.” - -Despite her worries, Pershing’s curiosity stirred, but she sighed. “I don’t think I have the time before the commission meeting.” - -“Tomorrow then. No matter how tight your deadlines are, this is going to be worth it.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t was 8:05 the next morning when the deputy opened the door for a yawning Pershing. “Late night, huh?” - -“Very.” The county budget manager had projected a 75 percent boost in county revenue without raising taxes. The commissioners had grilled him for an hour without making sense of it. “And then I got called out of bed at 4:30 after a brawl at Donuts Divine.” *Screw you, Max!* - -“I heard about that. Biker beat up a CPA, something like that?” - -“Other way around.” As they went down the hall, Pershing sipped her 7-11 coffee hoping it would rev her up. “The accountant came on to the biker’s wife, then challenged the guy to a fight for her.” The CPA was a quiet, super-shy guy according to his companions, but he’d been acting weird since caught in the airport traffic gridlock yesterday afternoon. “I’ve seen lots of guys act crazy about women, but taking on an ex-Marine who outweighs him by a hundred pounds?” - -“Maybe it’s something in the water, Ms. Jackson. Guy at Food World tried kidnapping a cashier from her smoke break yesterday, around the time we met at the accident. When he got busted, the guy said he just knew the girl would love him if he showed her he cared.” - -“Were there bad sunspots or something yesterday? It seems like there was a—a lot of freaky behavior going on. Now, what do I need to see, and please call me Pershing.” She saw the usual question in the deputy’s eyes. “Grandpa served on Black Jack Pershing’s staff in WWI. My Dad’s Pershing Jackson, he decided it should be a tradition. Won’t be.” - -“Call me Jenny then.” The deputy opened the door on a small office with two or three empty desks, a praline box from Stuckey’s sitting on one of them. “We found this next to Haughton in his car, thought maybe he kept his coke stash in it.” She flipped the box open, showed it empty. “Looks normal, right?” - -“Jenny, just tell me what was in it, no games, please.” Pershing pulled out her notebook. “I’m guessing you didn’t find drugs?” - -“Didn’t find nothing, it was empty just like this. We were a little surprised it didn’t even look scratched from the accident, but then Fre—well never mind who the dumb-ass was, he dropped it in the parking lot and the mail truck backed up over it.” - -“No jokes, either.” Pershing closed the box, tapped the lid. “No way a car drove over that.” - -Smiling Jenny handed Pershing a Swiss army knife. “Stab the sucker.” - -“It’s evidence!” - -“Trust me.” - -“Fine.” Pershing raised the knife, then drove it down at the big S in the logo. The blade skated off the box as if it were hardwood and twisted out of her hand. Baffled, Pershing reclaimed the knife, thrust it at one corner of the box, felt the same impact. “It’s not even scratched!” She ran her hand over the box. “It’s just cardboard, that’s not—” - -“Watch this.” Jenny clenched her fist and brought it down on the box as soon as Pershing withdrew her hand. The lid didn’t break or even bend. “Arlene says it must be some kind of government experiment, but nobody’d hide that in a candy box outside of a James Bond movie.” - -“Any idea where it came from?” - -“Haughton was at the airport dropping off his sister. Someone remembered him picking up the box from the baggage claim, then walking out.” - -“He stole it?” - -“Looks like.” - -“From who?” - -“Nobody. Box wasn’t checked onto the flight.” - -Pershing pulled the lid off the coffee cup and guzzled. “Level with me—I’m not just finding this confusing because of lack of sleep?” - -“I wish. You met the guy, right, you got any idea why he’d rob a baggage carousel?” - -“All I know about Haughton is that he was big on copping feels. And if he’s that into pralines, there’s a Stuckey’s store at every intersection on the Interstate.” - -“Folks at the dealership said he was as big a jerk with women as he could be without getting into trouble.” Jenny gave Pershing a quick once over. “Guys hassle you a lot? I notice that you dress pretty conservative.” - -“I try to look professional, leave it at that.” She’d found the sweet spot the first year after college: still attractive enough to get a job, but not drawing more crap or catcalls than the average woman. “So, what’s next?” - -“Well, Brian—Sheriff Chandler—has been trying to think of who we should report this to, but in the meantime, he figures we might as well go public, see if anyone knows anything. You interested in covering this?” - -“Oh, hell, yes.” Pershing began wondering which of the stories due that afternoon she could convince Walt to set aside for this one. “So is the sheriff available for an interview?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}ednesdays were a lot easier than Tuesdays. - -With no deadline until Friday, Pershing didn’t have to rush to finish anything. Sitting above the harbor on the upper deck of the Swordfish Grill, with *Islands in the Stream* coming softly over the radio speakers, she alternated bites of red snapper sandwich with going over her pile of notes. *So much for “a quiet county,” there’s enough here to fill the* Journal’s *front page for the next three weeks.* - -Two local retirees had called that morning to announce they were challenging Reagan for the 1984 Republican nomination. Neither had ever held political office; both said they’d made the decision sitting in that Monday traffic jam. A woman who’d jumped off the Kelly Bridge at the same time had regained consciousness Tuesday and explained she did it to “blow the mind” of a man she claimed she loved but had never spoken to. Grace at the county confirmed 2 PM was when the budget manager had come up with his new revenue projections. - -Pershing had actually called a chemistry teacher at UWF to ask if there might have been a gas bomb in the box. He’d assured her there’d be a pattern: people at the site affected first, then maybe people further away, but only so far. Instead, it was all over the county, completely random, and more cases kept popping up. - -A retired, 65-year-old admiral had called Pershing that morning about his plans to re-enlist and lead a naval first strike on Iran. Three more presidential hopefuls and one aspiring senator had called her since Tuesday morning. When she’d brainstormed with Dr. Ryder about her father—he had no suggestions—he mentioned two more patients had abruptly stopped chemo and he’d heard of a half-dozen psychiatric patients who’d stopped taking their meds. Five major accidents had resulted from drivers taking reckless chances. And the minister at St. Paul’s Lutheran bet the church’s construction fund at the Ebro greyhound races “because I have faith God’s given me a sure thing.” - -None of them individually unbelievable. No more than the half-dozen accounts of people making unexpected, unwanted proposals of marriage that morning were individually unbelievable. Lump it all together and it was damn unbelievable, especially for 48 hours in a county of under 40,000 people. - -*And it’s all the same kind of crazy, really. Insane, irrational optimism. Hope without anything to justify it. Starting when Haughton tried to beat that light, carrying the magic box.* Which almost made her think of something, but… - -The story in the *Journal* that morning had generated a flood of calls, but nothing useful. Just babble about UFOs, divine wrath, or Russian secret weapons. According to Jenny, nobody who’d called the Sheriff’s Department had anything better to offer. - -“I found you.” The bald hulk from Monday sat down abruptly opposite Pershing, dressed in a sweater and jeans. The chair sunk under his weight. “I read your story, I can help. And you can help me.” - -“Ah—which story?” God, he was huge. Dangerously huge. One hand slipped into her big shoulder purse and groped around for the can of Mace. “What’s your name?” - -An agonized look crossed his face before he replied. “Eppy. Better just call me Eppy.” - -“First name or last name, and how is it spelled?” She found the Mace and carefully kept it ready. It was probably irrational but— - -“Just Eppy.” He laughed nervously. “It’s about the box, I know what was in it. *Kalon kakon,* the beautiful evil, it escaped when that man opened it.” - -“It did?” Pershing began gauging escape routes—if retreat was an option, it was always better than confrontation—and whether anyone inside would help if she screamed. “Ah… what kind of evil?” - -“Hope. *Kalon kakon*, the dream that looks so beautiful but ends very badly. You already know the box cannot be destroyed by the hand of man, it was in your story.” - -“Hope. In a box.” *That’s what I was trying to remember.* “Like Pandora’s box in the myth?” - -“I’m so glad you figured it out.” Eppy drew a big sigh of relief. “Yes, it’s her box. My wife, Pandora, the first beautiful evil. I’m her husband, the titan Epimetheus.” *Oh god, he is crazy. Where the hell is the waiter?* “The only way to seal hope up again is with the blood of *kalos kagathos*, the beautiful good. That’s you.” - -“My blood.” *Shit. Shit, shit, shit.* “Mr.—er, Epimethius, do you mind if I uh, go inside and use the little girl’s room? It’ll just take a second.” - -“No, of course not. I’ll wait right here until you get back.” - -*Yeah, you do that.* Pershing ran inside, found the waiter, paid the bill, wondered what to do about the man who thought he was a Greek myth. He hadn’t threatened her exactly, hadn’t done anything cops would take as a danger sign but still… blood. *But he says he knows about the box, that’s a good reason to catch him and question him right?* - -Keeping her eye on Epimetheus through the glass door to the deck, Pershing asked the waiter about the phone. Then Eppy jumped up, cringing in a way that looked ridiculous for a man of his bulk, and vanished down the stairs. A second later, the two old women from the wreck showed up with a third identical woman in tow. They followed in the big man’s wake. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“E{{}}pimetheus.” Jenny repeated. Fortunately she’d been there when Pershing called the sheriff. “Epimetheus the *titan*?” - -“Do you know any others?” *What kind of deputy is this?* “I’m surprised you know the name.” - -“Epimetheus, brother to Prometheus. AKA *Afterthought*, brother to *Forethought*. Read lots of that Greek stuff after I saw my first *Hercules* movie.” - -“Any of them explain this beautiful evil/beautiful good stuff?” - -“No, but maybe he just made that up, whatever makes his delusion work. You’re somewhere safe right?” - -“I’m still at the Grill, but I’m heading home.” - -“Wait, could he know where you live?” - -“That’s just it, I’m *P. Jackson* in the phone book but Dad’s *Pershing Jackson*, and he’s home alone laughing at movies.” - -“I’ll send a car by.” - -“That’d be appreciated.” She’d thought about taking Dad to a hotel, but her father would veto that. “The weird thing is, if it *were* Pandora’s box, it would make sense. Hope was the last thing left in the box—” - -“Pandora didn’t have a box of pralines, Pershing, and Greek myths aren’t walking around in Florida—or even Greece these days. Crazy people have very self-consistent stories, they’re just built on crap.” - -“Yeah, I know, it’s just—” *If Eppy were telling the truth, maybe my blood would get Dad back on chemo.* “I’ll head home, thanks for taking this seriously.” - -A deputy was parked on the curb when Pershing arrived, and assured her nobody had entered. Once inside, Pershing locked the door and called for Dad. “I know it’s early but I thought—” - -“Pumpkin, would you come into the living room please? There’s someone I want you to meet.” At Dad’s words, Pershing froze, wondering if she should get the deputy. “They’re really very nice, not at all as furious as you’d expect.” - -“They?” Pershing ran in, saw the three old women standing around Dad in his recliner. “How’d they get in here? Who are you?” - -“Oh, you’ll be glad they’re here, honey.” Dad gestured at the trio. “They’ve been explaining things to me—it’s just possible that stopping chemo wasn’t really a good idea.” - -“I— I—” A weight lifted off Pershing’s chest. “How’d you convince him of that?” - -One of the women smiled mirthlessly. “We’re very persuasive when we want to be.” - -In an instant they changed. Scaly batwings on their backs, snakes hissing through their tangled hair, what looked like cat o’nine tails in their hands, and something vicious in their posture that would have made Pershing retreat if they hadn’t been close to her father. - -If not for all the Greek mythology, she wouldn’t have thought of it, but… “You’re the Furies?” - -“They prefer to be called the Kindly Ones,” Dad said helpfully. “I know I raised you to be skeptical, but I think we can be open-minded about this.” - -“Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera,” the one who spoke before said. A second later they were back to the old biddies she’d first seen, though still holding their whips. “But call us Ali, Tis, and Meg. I’m Ali. I do the talking.” - -“And you’re here because—?” *It can’t be anything good, the Furies were all about vengeance!* “My father doesn’t deserve punishing. He hasn’t killed anyone, that’s the kind of people you go after, right?” - -“We’re here to help,” Ali said. One of her sisters grunted. “Exactly, Meg. We really are being kindly.” - -Pershing sank onto the couch. “So are you after Eppy? Is he responsible for this?” - -“Only for being stupid,” Ali said. Two more grunts from her sisters. “Never realized Pandora was trouble. Never realized what a dick Zeus was.” She cracked the whip for emphasis. “*We* scourge people who deserve it, people who’ve damned themselves by their actions. Zeus’s little hissy fit, inflicting evil on innocent people with that box—well, it’s time to put a stop to it. The big doofus keeps boxing Hope back up but it always gets out again. With your help, we can fix that.” - -“You mean—” Here it was, the big decision. “My blood. But if you take it, it’ll restore Dad to normal?” - -“Why do you sound so dramatic?” Ali looked baffled. “We only need three drops.” - -Pershing stared at them. “That’s all?” - -The Kindly Ones gave a collective groan. “Doofus blew it again. I’m sure an hour later he realized he’d said the wrong thing.” - -*Afterthought, right.* “But I don’t get this ‘beautiful good’ stuff, I’m—” - -“Very beautiful,” Dad said. “Your Momma always said she couldn’t believe you hadn’t gotten married—” - -“Dad, not now. Alecto, Ali I mean, I’m not particularly good.” - -“Well, we’re talking ancient Greek horse-shit, remember. They were pricks about women, just like Zeus. You don’t deceive men with your beauty, you tell people the truth instead of twisting it, by Greek standards you’re a living saint.” - -“Three drops.” Pershing glanced at her father. It sounded like he’d been shocked back to normal already, but would it stay that way? “Let me call Jenny.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}fter seeing the Furies transform in the Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Chandler and Jenny looked as stunned as Pershing probably had. “But hang on.” The sheriff tapped a nicotine-stained finger on the box. “They didn’t have Stuckey’s in ancient Greece. Did they even have pralines?” - -“He’s got a point, ma’am,” Jenny said to Ali. “Wasn’t it originally an urn, not even a box?” - -“*Ma’am*.” Ali chuckled, which sounded like angry gears grinding. “I like this one. And yes, it was an urn, but it’s been other things. A leather briefcase in Athens, a cigarette case in Sarajevo, a steamer trunk in Peru, a hip flask in Pretoria, a bento box in Hokkaido. Whatever will convince someone to open it.” - -Pershing was about to ask what a bento box was, when there came a loud hubbub from the department’s front office. “Ah, it’s Doofus,” Ali said. “He can probably feel something’s happening with the box. Somebody get him and convince him not to just run whimpering when he sees us.” - -Pershing flinched slightly as Epimetheus’ hulking form entered the room a few moments later, flanked by a couple of deputies. His eyes lit up when he saw her. “It’s only three drops of your blood. I guess I should have explained that better.” He eyed Ali warily. “You’re really not here for me? If I hadn’t married Pandora—” - -“You’ve been working ever since to fix things,” Ali said. “Can’t hold that against you. But this time we’re keeping the box, to make sure *kalon kakon* doesn’t get out again, ever.” - -“What about the other evils,” Jenny said. “Wasn’t there plague, war, all that stuff?” - -“No, that part is a myth,” Ali said. One of her sisters made a grunt. “Okay, *sometimes* hope did start a war or two. Just another beautiful evil, looking good and hurting *soooo* bad.” - -“Can we just do this, please?” Epimetheus said. “The longer it’s out, the more people get hurt. I want it done.” He reached over and lifted the box from the desk. “Miss Jackson, you have to spill three drops of blood on it. Then it opens for you, *but you mustn’t eat any pralines*. It’s a symbolic thing.” - -Sheriff Chandler glanced at Pershing, stroking his mustache. “You don’t have to do this. I mean, we still don’t know for sure—” - -“Eppy is right, this has to stop,” Pershing said. “So do we need some sort of ritual knife or—” - -“Let Meg do it,” Ali said. One of her sisters shuffled forward, took Pershing’s hand and held it over the box, which looked small in Eppy’s palm. The Fury thrust her index finger out, Pershing saw a sharp, gleaming talon, then cried out at the stab of pain in her fingertip. Both Chandler and Jenny started forward, but Pershing shook her head, simultaneously cussing under her breath. - -Meg positioned the cut finger and squeezed. One drop fell on the box and disappeared. Then a second. Then a third. - -The box popped open. - -It was full of pralines, and despite being wrapped in plastic they smelled good. Amazingly good, and Pershing wasn’t even that fond of pralines. - -But she wanted them. Every last one of them. - -And if she ate them, she knew the world would change. Her dad would be fine, no need to stay in town and watch over him. Pershing could stop worrying about money, backpack around the world like she’d fantasized about in college. Have sex with anyone she wanted, no worries about pregnancy or her reputation. All the risks that had ever scared her off, she’d face them and win, if she ate just one praline. - -She felt the plastic under her hand. So easy to tear. And then the fun would start. Backpacking across France first… - -Then Pershing thought of Dad, of chemo, of cancer, and yanked her hand away. The urge didn’t fade and she stood there for what seemed like eternity before the lid swung closed. One of the Furies plucked it out of Epimetheus’ hands. - -“Didn’t think you had it in you,” Ali said. - -“Neither did I,” Pershing replied softly. “Dad’s going to be back to normal?” - -“Yep.” Ali’s nod was curt but she almost had something like a smile. “Devotion to family. We respect that, you know.” - -“Then what about the box?” Pershing asked. *Dad’s going to live. I’m not an orphan.* “Where do you dispose of somewhere like that?” - -“Ideally up Zeus’s butt,” Ali said, “but we’ll settle for a different kind of cage.” - -“You’ll *settle*?” Jenny held up her hand. “No offense, but if this thing gets out again, it ain’t going to hurt you any. Maybe it’s time us mortals started looking out for ourselves.” - -“And where would you put it?” Ali hissed. “Do you think a jail cell can hold *kalon kakon?”* - -“It was a god who made this, the big guy who let it out, why should we trust you?” - -Epimetheus held up his hand. “I’ve had the most experience seeing what doesn’t work securing it. Maybe I should keep it one more time.” - -As the three of them argued, Sheriff Chandler leaned over to Pershing. “Never mind the box, I have to figure out what do with people like Pastor Grimes. It sounds like it wasn’t entirely their fault, but how could I explain dropping all the charges?” - -“Once we run the story, maybe everyone will understand.” *Yeah, right. Who’s going to believe this? Will Walt even let me print it?* But she got out her notebook and began jotting shorthand as Ali, Jenny and Eppy debated solutions, reminding herself to stop and get photos at some point. - -Much as Pershing hated breaking news, this was one story that had turned out pretty damn cool. Max would probably want his desk back soon enough, but in the meantime… - -“So, Ali,” she started, “can you tell me what happens to the world if the beautiful evil *doesn’t* get out again?” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Death is Like a Box of Chocolates** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653084166824573).* diff --git a/content/issue-32/DistantSkies.md b/content/issue-32/DistantSkies.md deleted file mode 100644 index b32c206e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/DistantSkies.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,375 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Distant Skies" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Charlotte Ashley -copyright: '© Charlotte Ashley 2016, 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Some stories arrive with a story of their own behind them. The far future of culture and horticulture depicted in 'Distant Skies' was originally a performance piece, with original music composed by Ivana Popovic and performed by Toronto's Junction Trio, accompanied by Charlotte Ashley's spoken words—now appearing here in black and white." - -image: images/DistantSkies.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created by Micah Hyatt using an image generated with DALL·E 2 and subsequently regenerated using Stable Diffusion." - -type: stock -slug: distant-skies -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t is wood thrush season. - -They are migrating south for the winter, following the same path every thrush has followed for thousands, maybe millions of years. Every single bird knows the way automatically, by instinct, without having been told. Their bodies know; the bodies of their ancestors knew, and the bodies of their chicks will know. They have the tools to make the flight, built in; wings exactly strong enough, tiny muscles filled with exactly enough energy. Even star maps showing them the way and senses tuned to the magnetic fields of the earth for orientation. They make this journey because they were made for it. They don't have a choice. - -Even though, for the last 180 years, that path passes right through the farm-towers of Aerobelle, my home. - -Most of the thrushes get through just fine, resting on tangles of late season raspberries and dodging the aluminum beams; but not all. Hundreds fly smack into glass panes and solar panels, amassing in little broken piles at the foot of the towers. - -Me, I polish the north-facing window of my home tier to flawless invisibility and tie a basket underneath. Wood thrushes are delicious: tender on the outside with the nutty crunch of filament-thin bone on the inside. But even if I didn't love the taste—the juicy burst of flame-kissed breast, the sweet and sour surprise of the hind quarters—I would eat them out of spite. - -Year after year after year, they fly into the same windows and get stuck in the same nets; they fall prey to the same hungry predators who need only to stand in one spot with their mouths open wide—and why? Because their bodies tell them to. - -That is no excuse. That cannot be an excuse. Those who allow themselves to be ruled by their instincts get what is coming to them. - -That goes for people, too. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ur ancestors made a body promise to AeroSmart Agricultural. That's why we live in Aerobelle. Our contracts have been lost to time, or maybe they were destroyed when AeroSmart went bankrupt, but we can all guess what changes the promise coded in us. - -Our deep, belly-felt loyalty to these ancient towers. A knack for growing and nurturing the plants that spill out of the risers on every level. A love of heights. Even these long, strong fingers and broad, flexible shoulders. They might have been part of the contract too, all AeroSmart's design. Like I said, the details have been lost. Our bodies keep our promises for us. - -November is harvest season. Like every year, we have much more than we could ever use. We can't help but produce excess—part of our body promises, I guess—but now that AeroSmart is gone, most of it goes to waste. We trade what we can, then we hold the Burning's Day festival. - -By tradition, the Burning's Day feasts are meant to be open to everyone, strangers and uninvited guests included, but I put a stop to that years ago. Headhunters and recruiters kept showing up, offering jobs and fishing for old body promises. Now it's just us, citizens of Aerobelle. - -Today, there are one hundred and thirty-six people here, bunched up at the tables in the open-air atriums of the ground floor, shouting over each other to be heard. Vines and ferns drying to sunset shades droop from the rafters, cushioning our voices, mellowing our periphery. Everyone is smiling, most people are drinking, and not a single fight has started besides. - -I’m at the head table with a handful of the others, quiet for a change because I'm already worn out from negotiating a trade. But I got through it, and the deal came with new windows for the lower tiers, replacement parts to repair some of the riggings and planters, and a winter's worth of salt, sugar, and iodine. I'm letting my eyes glaze over as I watch Naiva's twins feed themselves mashed butternut; Jilly and Naveen making eyes at each other. - -Then Roger lays his hand on my shoulder. - -"Behind you," he says. - -I crane my neck and look out over the railing, into the starry sky that isn't as dark as it should be. A bright light trails across the horizon, southward. - -"Satellite," I say, but I frown too. It's too big, too bright. It looks like a ship entering the atmosphere. A big ship. - -"I think we're having guests after all," Roger mutters. - -"No way," I say. "They never come here." - -Roger says nothing and scratches his bushy beard nervously. I turn my back to the open window and suddenly I’m ravenous from the smell of cinnamon and sage from the coming feast. - -I wonder how long it will take them to make landfall. - -I wonder where they have come from. - -I wonder if we can get through this feast and get to the Burning before they arrive. - -My father's people made the body promise to AeroSmart five or six generations ago, during the famines of that era. - -My mother's people, they made a promise to a generation ship. The ships come home every two hundred years or so, full of strangers and expectations. Strange or not, our bodies and theirs recognise each other because of this promise. My mother's promise, that was made a long time ago. Seven generations, I'd guess. - -About two hundred years ago. - -I take a scoop of potatoes and pass the bowl on down the table, ignoring the budding excitement in my belly. It doesn't matter if I am promised to this ship, these strange people. That doesn't mean anything. We can feed them and supply them and send them on their way. - -I am no wood thrush. I know my duties. Body promise or not, I have a choice. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he body promise is a trap. Let me tell you about last time. - -It is autumn. Someone spots a truck incoming, a brand-new Goldanning All-Terrain Hauler. The driver is alone, but has brought a full load with him: medicine, tools, spare parts. Everyone in the towers takes cover, climbing to the safety of their homes in the upper tiers so that they can't see or hear what goes on below. - -I go out to meet the driver alone. It is a cold, windy November day, just the kind that makes the upper tiers shake, groan, and sway. It feels good to be on the ground and everyone knows it. They complain when I order them up. He's just one guy, what are the odds he's here for any of us? It is always the same argument. Every generation thinks they are reinventing the law. - -I can tell immediately that there are no promises between him and me. Everything about him repulses me. His cocky swagger and his false friendliness, his dyed hair and perfect skin. I don't feel the slightest bit indebted to him. He seems like a born con man to me. It will be easy to negotiate the trade and send him away, the sooner the better. - -But Shoanna has followed me down, despite the curfew. She is fifteen years old and a major pain in the ass. I can tell she is being driven hard by a body promise. Every kid wants to go to the city at her age, but with Shoanna, it is something extra, a drive to buck authority that kicks so hard at times that it even scares her. I know I can't keep her inside forever, but I hope she can learn to resist her urges, her instincts, before too great a temptation lands in her path. - -A temptation like Mr. Jordan Lee of TopTier International. She doesn't see what I see. I have him made as a smarmy company man the minute we sit down at the bargaining table, slick and bossy and used to getting his own way. He doesn't just want the food we've grown; he asks for people too. He offers jobs and opportunities, but I won't let a single one of my people enter into another body promise if I can help it. I am a wall. That is my job. - -But Shoanna hears his offer. Later that night, back on our tier, she tells me she is sick. She stays in bed when we go to box and bale the harvest. She skips meals. She has a mild fever so I give her space. She uses that space, oooh, does she use it. - -We don't even fight about it. There is no time. She hides in the cab of Mr. Jordan Lee’s truck and that's it, she's lost. - -Maybe Shoanna didn't even need to enter into a body promise with TopTier. Maybe she was already obligated to one made by some ancestor of her father's. That's the thing about instincts. You can't trust them. What feels right and what is right are not the same. You have to fight yourself every day if you want to stay free. - -Not everyone can fight for themselves. I learned the hard way. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e spot the cloud of dust first thing the next morning, a transport crossing the dunes of the horizon. They've got to be coming here—there's nowhere else to go. We're the last fertile farm-tower in the drought-blasted region. - -"You sure you should do this?" Roger asks me before I go down. - -"I'll be fine," I tell him. Body promise or not. I am the face of this community because my head is on straight. I think. I don't feel. - -Roger nods. He knows me. - -I unlock the trade hall and start a fire in the stove, warming the room up before our surprise guests arrive. There, protected by concrete walls and slate shingles, I have more privacy than in our tower home of glass and wire. Here, alone, I allow myself a short, controlled skip of excitement and whirl of happy anticipation. - -I have never in my life even wanted to travel so far as the city, but today I am so thrilled by the idea of a generation ship that I feel full to bursting. These people have been travelling between the stars for hundreds of years. They carry stories and traditions from places I have never even heard of, have learnt things and built things no one on Earth knows. They have widened the arms of our family embrace so far that we span suns, and suns, and suns… - -…but I know this feeling isn't real. What do I care about spaceships and suns, off-world cultures and people? I grow *beets*. This longing, this excitement—it's just the body promise. A handshake and an injection two hundred years ago and now I can't help but love these strangers. - -It's dangerous and I know it. I flex all my muscles and shake out all my passion. I get it out of my system. - -Two hours later, the strangers arrive. - -There are four of them. They are the palest people I have ever seen, half-buried under thick layers of utility clothes, all straps, pockets, and padding. They move quickly and nervously getting out of the transport, but relax once they are inside. They immediately shed unnecessary layers, peeling away like artichokes, revealing two women and two men with thin, but friendly, faces. They look hungry. - -"I'm Devan," says one of the men. He steps towards me and the fire casts warmth over his features just so, flames like marigolds in his dark eyes. He looks like he's moving in for a hug, so I thrust my hand out in front of me. - -"Marrit Shaw," I introduce myself, shaking his hand firmly. "And what do you want?" - -He pulls his hand back and looks confused. I could be more polite, but I don't want to open that door. Negotiate the trade and go. That's all I want. - -"We—I—do you know who we are?" He has an accent, a clipping of each syllable like he's trying to speak clearly. He probably studied for this meeting. I can only imagine what he thought he'd find here. - -"Yah. You're from a generation ship. You're looking to resupply." - -He looks relieved at that. "We're *your* ship," he says with a smile. "We're very excited to finally meet you." - -His blind trust is sweet, but foolish. I will have to be strong for both our peoples. "You're not my ship. Let us be clear. I feel the body promise. I know our ancestors agreed to care for each other. But I have a bigger obligation to protect my people here than I have to you. I think it is safest for all of us if you can get me a list of what you need—" - -"A list?" - -"A list. We'll load you up and you go right back to where you came from. Aerobelle isn't what it once was. AeroSmart—the company we all made promises to—has been gone since my grandparent's time. We don't have much anymore. I can tell you who to talk to in the city for a proper resupply." - -He looks hurt and glances at his companions. One of the women steps forward. - -"We aren't just here for supplies." She's a little older than me, and reminds me of my mother. Of any mother. "We came to meet you. We are your family, Ms. Shaw. And you are ours." - -I shake my head firmly. "I'm sorry, but you are not. The promise our people made was to AeroSmart. It was an agreement of convenience. I get it—your people had to make sure there would be someone on Earth here to care for you when you returned from wherever it is you went. But it was an alliance between parties who obviously did not foresee that times change. There is no AeroSmart anymore and we don't owe you anything. Now look, we have several tonnes of fresh green that you're welcome to—" - -The two who have not spoken mutter a few phrases I don't quite catch. I hear "Promise," "Map" and "Go." But the dark-eyed man—Devan—shakes his head fiercely. - -"No," he says. "I feel the promise too strongly. We are exactly where we should be. You feel it too." He's talking to me now, pleading, one hand twitching like he can barely keep from reaching out. "You must feel this," he murmurs. - -"I… I do," I say, to him, because the damn promise—and it must be the promise—is clouding everything but the deep wells of his eyes and sharp angles of his soapstone cheeks. "And that is why you must go, before one of the children sees you." - -"But Ms Shaw—" The woman does touch me, a familiar weight that takes the edge off the blade I am using to fend them off. "It is too late for that. Our people are coming. We all feel the promise. We have waited our whole lives for this. We could not keep everyone away." - -"All of you?" I force myself to step back so she cannot touch me again. I need to stay alert. "The whole ship?" - -"I don't see how it could be otherwise. We have arranged for the others to come in stages—" - -But I'm not ready to think about logistics. "How many?" - -"Fourteen thousand," Devan says. - -Fourteen thousand. Like a flock of wood thrushes. - -There is nothing a couple hundred of us can do about a migration of so many. They are coming. That's a fact. - -When I say yes, they treat it as a blessing, not a victory. They are incapable of seeing that we should be at odds. Devan starts to smile first, anticipating my *yes* before I even come to it. I smile back, and then we're barely holding back laughter, sharing relief. - -*C'mon, you knew, and I knew, you would never say no. I know you. You know me.* - -This stranger. These strangers. I feel like I've known them my whole life. - -I arrange for them to stay below. My people must stay above. I invite them to tonight's Burning's Day feast. - -It isn't as if they are headhunters. They're just family. And we can take care of them. What's the worst that can happen? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey come by the dozens. They come by the hundreds. Shelters and trailers speckle the rocky plains at the foot of the towers and vehicles parade towards us like ants. It is the friendliest, most seductive invasion in the history of mankind. Devan's people don't speak our language, but their giddy anticipation afflicts us all. They come to us laughing, they come to us with tears in their shining eyes. - -I let people come down to greet them in small groups, rationing out hugs and handshakes like medicine, careful not to let anyone overdose. These people are handsy, but there are thousands of them and only a couple hundred of us. They'll have to share. - -Me, I don't have to share. Devan has arrived for me alone. - -That evening, we set up a Burning's Day feast for the strangers, parallel to our own. The long tables spill out of the atrium and into impromptu gardens protected by canvas tarps and sand screens. The wind kicks dust into our meals, but the aroma of herb-baked zucchini and salt pork beans soothes every nerve and the flow of warm beer obliterates every hesitation. - -I sit at the head table with a handful of my neighbours. We should be watching our guests with sharp eyes, ensuring no rum-addled youths try to climb the towers, but we have all grown complacent. Devan and I sit next to each other at the end of the table, swapping stories. He only has eyes for me. I'm flattered, or lonely, or maybe just drunk. The man has never seen a squash before. How can you worry about a man like that? - -"Why would anyone make such a thing?" he asks, running a thumb over its hard, green ridges. He's incredulous, but smiling. "They could have at least made it round, so you could peel it.” - -"Nobody *made* it! Hey, I'm born and bred for Aerobelle, but I can't grow a damn thing," I laugh. "That's why we keep seeds. They do the hard work for us." - -"We also keep seeds, but we made every single one of them. We can't have that much waste on the ship. Too much bark or stone and it doesn't justify the energy it takes to grow." He palms the gourd and pops a whole plum in his mouth, closing his eyes in appreciation. "But we also have nothing that tastes like this. Mmhmm!" - -"You see, there's goodness in wild, unplanned things." - -He puts the squash down and turns his full attention on me. "This plant is no more wild than you or I," he points out. "It has been pressed into this absurd shape by your ancestors and mine. By the droughts and the floods and the pests. By a million years of negotiations with the world around it. Wild?” He pauses. “Doesn’t this feast celebrate the opposite? Predictability, reliability, comfort. You are thanking every one of these delicious foods for turning out exactly the way you needed them to. This is a celebration of instinct." - -"Maybe, but they are eaten for their reliability." - -He leans in close. "Joyfully, thankfully, ambitiously eaten by a very hungry recipient." - -*Ahem*. "That sounds wonderful… for the eater. What of the eaten?" - -"The eaten could still wake up the next day…" - -"…to be eaten again the next night?" - -"People need to eat. You don't seem to mind that." - -I'm getting lost between the philosophy and the innuendo, the logic and the feelings. I forget if I am for or against eating squash, but I can't deny I am very hungry. - -I look away, at the others. They are laughing and eating and singing. - -What is the worst that can happen? - -"Come with me," I say to Devan. "Leave the squash." - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}evan and I tumble together between risers overspilling with beans, the dry remains of tomatoes. He tumbles more than I do because he's used to slick, manufactured hallways and artificial gravity—or maybe because he's not keeping his eyes on the path. I catch him when he slips on the rung of a ladder, he holds me while we kiss, half-dangling from a walkway. We haul ourselves up the tower one tier at a time, pausing only when we don't want to stand up too soon. - -Ten storeys up, we're tongue-locked and tangled on an irrigation bed formerly used for cucumbers and I'm staring at the starry sky thinking, *I was grown for this. I'm budding, I'm flowering, I'm pollen-rich and ready to bear the most delicious fruit*. I'm a grown woman and that's what people do, no shame in that. I look at those tiny suns and imagine them dropping and flaring one by one to my intimate rhythm, a million million seeds untouched by anyone except maybe them, maybe him, my family from the distant sky. - -That's freedom. Infinite spaces nobody has touched, nobody has seen, nobody has tampered with. The ship isn't the trap—Devan isn't. Aerobelle is. These crumbling beams and fraying wires that we slavishly tend. - -What was I thinking? I want to go. I want to go to the stars with him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he ear-rending screech of tearing metal cuts the night, punctuated by a woman's terrified cry. My eyes fly open and I push myself half-naked out of the fallow, lurching over to the railing. Two storeys below me, a woman hangs by her fingertips from the rusted riser of the west stair, now twisted and torn from the beams. Everybody knows not to use those stairs, but this woman's new, she's from the ship. She slips with another panicked cry, too weak to hold on. She shouldn't be up here. - -"Julia!" a second voice cries, one I know. It's Roger's oldest, Avon. He's nineteen, nimble, smart as hell, and now clambering over the railing to get to the woman. "Hold on, I'm coming!" - -He has an overstuffed pack strapped to his back, tools and treasures poking out of every pocket. He is packed to run away—with her. But the pack sets him off-balance and he’s getting snagged on old bolts, too desperate to be properly careful. I can see where this will end if I hesitate for even a moment. I vault over the edge. - -Even barefoot and tipsy, I climb better than anyone in Aerobelle. I descend, hand under hand, along the outside of the tower's frame, towards Avon. The old staircase is bent over the railing, creasing it, making the whole balcony creak. This side of the tower hasn't been repaired for years and the aluminum's no better than foil now. The weight of two adults might be too much for it. - -They shouldn't be up here, but then, neither should I. - -"Avon, don't move a muscle. I got this." He looks up at me in surprise, and I see it in his eyes. Guilt. Panic. Like I am his own mother and he's going to be in so much trouble. - -Good. Maybe he'll listen to me, then. Maybe he won't see the same guilt in my own eyes. "Get off the rail. Go inside. I'm gonna guide her down." - -His eyes narrow. "No," he says. "I won’t leave her with you." - -I'm on their level now. I push away from the building and swing around a planter, using the momentum to catch hold of the irrigation piping. These pipes are still solid. I shimmy along them until I could kick the twisted metal of the stair if I needed to. - -"Avon, I said get in," I shout. - -Avon ignores me and releases the rail, grabbing hold of the dangling stair instead. The whole thing squeals under his weight and the woman below shrieks. "Avon!" - -"I'm coming!" he replies, his voice cracking. "Just hold on. I won't let you fall!" He struggles to squeeze between the stair and the wall with that ridiculous pack and the whole thing groans miserably. - -I tear some of the rubber hosing from the irrigation system out with one hand and strap it around the pipe. Avon's still wriggling through a narrow gap that's getting smaller by the second as the stair folds at a sharper and sharper angle. I hold tight to the loose end of the hose and drop down to the floor a dozen feet below me, pain shooting through my bare feet. The stranger—Julia—is still hanging on, maybe five feet out and up from the lip of the floor where I stand. I could touch her feet with the tip of my fingers, for all the good that would do us. Her screams crescendo sharply as a cold gust bursts through the building, rocking the stair. I see her start to slip. - -I don't have time for a careful plan. I bound right to the edge of the tier with the hose wrapped firmly around one arm and reach out over the gulf between us, my arm encircling her knees. She falls, then, collapsing heavily over my shoulder—but I've got her, and the hosing has got me. It jerks forward with our sudden weight, then springs back, bouncing us both painfully to the safety of the steel-slab floor. - -Julia gets up first. I reach for her hand, but she's staring over me with horror in her eyes. "Avon!" - -I turn. He's tangled in the metal, dangling by his pack with his arm twisted behind his back, his purple face frozen mid-cry. His legs are still kicking, but there's no light in his eyes. It must have been the fall, or the snap-back of the stair. His neck shouldn't bend at that angle. - -I crumple. Julia screams. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} have made a terrible mistake. - -I should never have let them come. - -I should never have let them stay. - -Avon is dead, and I am not sure who grieves more painfully: his father, or this stranger, Julia. She is 10 years older than Avon, at least. I want to hate her for trying to sneak away with the boy, this child, but I can't. She is hysterical, inconsolable, tearing her hair out over a boy who she met last night. Her people have tried to take her away, but she kicks and screams and refuses to leave the atrium, where the remnants of last night's feast are still set up. - -I stand at the head of the table and watch as people come together, consoling each other, weeping on each other. I can't even tell who is from Aerobelle and who isn't. They fold into each other and become indistinguishable. - -I feel his hand on my shoulder and know, without looking, that it is Devan. I let it stay there for only the time it takes me to find my voice. - -Then I shrug him off. - -"Get out." I raise my voice. "Take everyone. Fill your transports. Take everything you can carry. But get out." The room has gone quiet, but for the muffled weeping of a few. "If you don't go, or a single member of this community goes missing, I will burn the harvest at dusk." - -The weeping becomes a whispering, which becomes a muttering. "What?" - -I refuse to waver. "It is Burning's Day. And I swear by the blood in my veins that I will burn every last grain in the stores if you don't start moving, now. Get out.” Nobody moves. “Get out!" - -Then they move, scared and unsure. I don't stick around to watch. Standing here would just invite discussion, and there will be none of that. I take a ladder up to the upper concourse and slip from there into the eastern elevator shaft. I'm going straight to my nest via the hardest possible route, because Devan is already trying to follow me. - -"Marrit!" he calls up the shaft, already far below me. "Don't do this. Wait for me. I just want to talk." - -But I know too well where talking to him can lead. I squeeze my lips shut and climb faster. - -"Marrit, I am coming up." I look down and, indeed, he has somehow got hold of the lip of the shaft entrance and is pulling himself up to the scaffolding by the strength of his thick arms alone. I turn and leap across the shaft, catching the struts on the other side. I climb faster. - -I hear scrabbling and I check on him again. He's trying to inch lengthwise around the shaft, over to my side where there is no ladder. The idiot is going to get himself killed, letting his promise drive him after me like this. "Devan! Go back. Organize your people and give this up." - -"No," he grunts. "I will not give you up." - -I catch that one like a brick to the chest. I push my longing aside and resume climbing. At a glance, I see he is looking down, trying to find a ledge for his feet. This is my moment. I haul myself over the next landing and tuck myself against the wall. I hope he has not seen where I have gone. - -"Marrit?" he calls. I exhale. He has not. "Marrit, you are making a mistake. Think about the crime, Marrit. Love? Should we all suffer starvation for that?" - -*It isn't love*, I want to cry. It's a cocktail of hormones that our bodies were programmed to give off under specific circumstances. AeroSmart hid a drug in our DNA. That's not love. - -"Your people are in pain, Marrit. We can pull together and help each other, not tear apart when we're at our most vulnerable." - -Better to tear out the cancer than to let it eat up your whole community. - -"What are you afraid of? We were made for each other. We were promised to each other. Why can't we embrace each other, your people and mine?" - -Why? *Why?* - -"Because our people are indebted to unknown masters,” I say, “enslaved for generations. Families are broken up and never able to see each other again. Kids too young and stupid to think through the cloud of emotions climb damn staircases they shouldn't and get themselves killed. Adults… who should know better… are distracted from their duties. These promises are curses. Just contracts designed to rob us of choice and free will. They aren't real." - -I hear the scrape of Devan's boot against metal and realize he isn't far below me. - -"Or maybe—" He pauses. "Maybe the body promise is just the midwife of our better natures. To ensure we always have a home to come back to." - -I can see him without looking. He will have his head bowed, knuckles tight around a girder, his eyes shut to better hear and think. He shifts his weight to ease the pain in his fingers, listening for me. I can see him and hear him and feel him. The promise we share is the same in both of us. - -I lean out over the ledge and our eyes meet as his open. He is barely two feet away. He eases into that knowing smile, the smile I know means he knows that I know that he and I are built to know each other in every conceivable way. - -And I smile back and reach over the edge. I unhook his fingers swiftly, one hand then the other, and watch him drop. - -He falls. - -He should have known better. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}o. - -No. - -I throw myself to the ledge, my hand shooting out—and he's there, barely two feet away. He smiles, a warm, trusting smile that never doubted me. I feel strangled and my heart is beating so hard against the floor that I swear I hear the bolts rattle. He lets go of the girder and grabs my wrist. I squeeze so tight, his fingertips turn white. - -"You,” I say, “*Asshole*. You could have fallen." - -"You would never let me fall," he says. He is so sure. He has absolute, unwavering faith in the promise. I can see the ghost of his falling body stenciled at the bottom of the shaft. - -I pull him up and together we clamber into a heap on the floor, hugging, panting, laughing and maybe crying. - -"That wasn't too bad," he says, finally, when we untangle ourselves. "I could learn to climb that every day, with practice." He gives me a meaningful look. - -I thread my long, calloused fingers with his thick, tender ones. "No, you couldn't. You don't belong here." - -I look up and down the empty shaft. Daylight is starting to line the air, creating bridges of light and mist back and forth across the expanse. I see a loose nut where Devan's left foot had been a minute ago. It's nothing but flakes of rust held together by habit. - -"I'm starting to think none of us belong here." - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e all leave together. - -We bury Avon and leave him to steward the plants, a last precious payment to AeroSmart. The rest of us fill a couple of buses. We're barely the hump on the camel's back. - -"Do you want to make a body promise?" Devan asks me. "To the ship. You don't have to." - -"Aren't I already promised?" - -He kisses me. "You are promised to us. To me. But we are promised—" he points up "—out there. We are made for life between the stars." - -I wonder. Am I leaving because of my body promises, or despite them? Can I have made the decision to go, if I hadn't been given the instinct to stay? Will any of my decisions be made freely, if I don't know there's a decision to be made? And our descendants—they will live their whole lives on the ship whether they have made the promise or not. Would I be doing them a favour? - -I can see the ship on the horizon. It is bigger than anything I have ever seen. It's the whole world. It's our whole world. - -"I'll think about it. I promise." - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading—but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Distant Skies** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653085853491071).* - diff --git a/content/issue-32/JinnyGreenteeth.md b/content/issue-32/JinnyGreenteeth.md deleted file mode 100644 index 02cc9fd1..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/JinnyGreenteeth.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,346 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Jinny Greenteeth" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Cathy Bryant -copyright: '© Cathy Bryant 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Full confession: when your editor read the first paragraph of our opening story, he thought, 'Hey, this thing is set where I grew up!' It would be wrong to imagine that was the only reason I accepted Cathy Bryant's smart, humorous, grim, characterful, sad, and optimistic tale… but it did make me happy doing it." - -image: images/JinnyGreenteeth.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created by Micah Hyatt using images generated and recombined using Stable Diffusion and Photoshop." - -type: stock -slug: jinny-greenteeth -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}I{{}}n Morecambe, we were told that the sands were treacherous and could kill us, and that was true. My friend across the bay, in Grange-over-Sands, was told instead that Jinny Greenteeth would get her if she went near the water. - -"See the duckweed? That's from her teeth," said my friend's mother, who was professionally opposed to children ever having a good time, and found ways to make Helen as unhappy as possible. - -"Duckweed is edible, isn't it? It contains valuable vitamins," I said, with a patronising smile. I viewed Lancashire (which contains Morecambe) as sophisticated in comparison to rural Grange (in Cumbria). - -"I read that the legend of Jinny is a metaphor for the weed, which can trap swimmers," said Helen, which earned her a slap across her cheek. - -"You can't go out tonight," the mother decided. "You can stay in and do homework." - -I'd got the train from Lancaster across the bay—it's wonderful, at one point you can see the sea all around the train—to see my friend and go out, and meet the attractive men who hung out in Grange’s two pubs, there being nowhere else except for a respectable tearoom that might as well have been covered in dust and cobwebs. - -"Oh dear!" I said. "And break our social engagements? Isn't that terribly rude? Not all of our friends have phones, and they'll wonder where we are, and why we've let them down." - -Mother From Hell glared at me. This being before the internet—it was actually 1985, if you want to know—she had no way of proving me a liar. No one had mobile 'cellular' phones, and there were still people in the country who chose not to have phones at all. One brave village was still holding out on having electricity connected to it. - -MFH disappeared upstairs, to do who knew what. We didn't care as long as she disappeared. - -We made our own food. Sausages, potatoes, cabbage and a thin gravy, all in much smaller portions than I was used to, and I had never had to make my own dinner, or tea as it was sometimes called. It didn't take long in Helen's capable hands, and after a giggly few minutes with hairbrush and lipstick we were out and heading to the pub, sixteen years old and knowing absolutely everything, except how to escape our families. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}"W{{}}e're freeee!" said Helen, as we headed along the road to the first pub, where someone she wanted would sit and murmur at his friend over a pint. Thrilling. - -On the way we passed the pond and the duckweed, and laughed. - -"What is she supposed to do, Jinny, if she gets you?" - -"Kill you and gobble you up," said Helen. - -I sighed. "How unoriginal. And that's not all that bad anyway, is it, compared to life?" - -"I'm just happy that we got out before Dad got back. We need pints, and soon," said Helen. - -I remembered that Helen had said her Dad was far worse than her Mum, but she would never say why. That made me feel cold and sick. I looked at the pond and wished both Helen's parents in it and eaten, and mine too. - -Let's not talk about them. - -There was a reason that Helen and I had connected. - -I walked on, feeling desperate and miserable. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ob actually said Hi to us as we opened the squeaky door and walked in, and Helen practically had an orgasm on the spot. The pub was its usual dull and grubby self, which was comforting, and we bought pints of scrumpy—the most alcoholic cider. - -When I was trying to be sophisticated, I'd have a Pernod-and-black, a sticky mixture of aniseed liquor and blackcurrant cordial. There was another drink for when I felt dangerous—a pint of scrumpy with a pernod-and-black in it, known locally as a Red Witch. You have to remember that there were none of the modern devices to disappear into back then, and alcohol was a cheap way to fling your psyche away from reality. - -So I drank my pint, and grinned at Bob and his dull friend Kev, and they looked at each other and then came over, and Helen was dying of excitement next to me. - -"Hey," said Bob to Helen, and talked to her. I wondered (in my superior way) whether he would ever venture on from monosyllables. - -"So yeah," said Kev to me, which was weird, and I realised that with Bob and Helen connecting, we were going to have a conversation whether we liked it or not. - -"Hi," I said, super-cool, with an upwards nod of acknowledgment. - -"So, you're from Morecambe, right?" - -"Yeah." - -"So, that biker died." - -"Which one?" - -"On the sands. He started sinking, and he says to his mates, save the bike, save the bike. And they do, and it only takes a minute, but when they turn to get their mate, he's sunk without a trace. He'd got off the bike to keep it lighter, so it wouldn't sink as deep, see?" - -"God," I said. "I heard about the coach and horses in Victorian times. A really big carriage and four horses, and down they sank, just like that." - -(A few decades later we'd have been talking about the cocklers who drowned. They were Chinese, immigrants, and had been made to work for virtually nothing, out cockle-fishing with their toes, just as we did for fun. The difference being that they had no choice, and couldn't stop if it looked dangerous, and no one had welcomed them or shown them where it was safe to go. - -It was our fault, the townspeople felt. If only we'd known, if only we'd done something. We felt as if we were the sands who had killed them from mistreatment. - -But that hadn't happened yet.) - -Kev and I both shuddered at the same moment. - -"You get gorgeous sunsets in Morecambe, though," I said, wanting to defend my town. - -"Yeah, dead sexy those," he said with a snigger, and I felt a cold dislike for him. - -I glanced at Helen and Bob, and took in their closeness, their intimacy. Words were pouring out of them, and their eyes were locked. As my glance became a long gaze, I saw their hands creep together and hold each other, nestling warm things, and I wanted to cry because I didn't get that, ever. - -"So," said Kev, "Fancy going outside to see a bit of sunset then?" - -It was dark. There was no sunset. - -I nodded and got up from the table. - -"Back in a bit," I said to Helen, who smiled at me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}"S{{}}o", as Kev said constantly, I went round the back of the pub and had sex with Kev. I had been brought up to defer to men and to be used sexually. I didn't know how to say no without being impolite. I liked sex, anyway, another sin for women in those times. With Kev it was OK but not great, like a fairground ride that isn't running at full speed and needs an overhaul. I'd known the lads on the fairground in Morecambe for decades. The rides were much more exciting when you knew how rickety the rides were, and how stoned the operators were. This one wasn't. But it was something. - -When we went back in, Helen was positively sparkling, like a crystal, like tinsel on the tree, like water in sunshine. Bob looked pretty happy too. And there were murky reddish drinks on the table. - -"We got Red Witches all round!" said Bob. - -"Cheers mate!" - -Even Kev was looking fairly cheerful. After all, he was drinking and he'd got laid. He more or less ignored me now. I was good for a shag, but his eyes were on Helen—thinner and prettier than I was, and with the mystique of supposed innocence that the stupider men love. I sat and despised him and myself and my life, and took a hard pull at my drink. I felt a bright surge of flavour and giddiness, and a lurch in my guts before they settled down and decided to cope. - -Bob went to the loo, and Helen leant over to me to whisper. - -"He's asked me to go away with him. On his bike. Tonight. He knows some people in Wales, on a hill by the sea, only you can swim there. It's really friendly, he says." - -"Do you trust him? You don't know him that well," I whispered back, but I knew it was pointless. She was always going to take an escape route, and I couldn't disapprove. - -"I trust him," she said, her eyes round and shining. "We love each other." - -Tears leaked out of my eyes then, because my friend was going, and anything could happen to her, and I would miss her like an arm, and why would nobody see through all my crap and love me? - -"Be happy," I said. "I'll miss you." - -And she cried too, and we hugged and hugged. Kev was probably getting off on that, but who cared? - -"How are you going to get your stuff from the house?" I asked. - -"I'm not. We're just going, tonight, with nothing. His friends will lend us things until we have jobs." The sort of plan that sounds great to sixteen-year-olds. - -"Great!" - -A minute or so later, Bob came back from the loo and he and Helen discussed plans, getting high on their imagined future. - -I couldn't bear any more. - -"Right, I'm going," I said. "I have to catch the last train. Good luck, you two." I looked at Bob. "Take care of her." - -"I will," said Bob, as if he meant it. - -"I'll walk you back," said Kev, because he wasn't entirely shit. - -"No thanks. It's just a few yards," I said, and he grunted assent. - -Helen hugged me, and then I left, and I was alone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he fresh air was wonderful, with its tang of sea salt. The moon was up. - -I had nothing and no one, and maybe that was OK. - -I'd missed the last train ages ago, though. I'd have to head back to Helen's house and ask to kip there. - -I stopped by the pond. But if I went back, I'd have to explain where Helen was. And if I did, they might catch her, and keep her. But if I said nothing, they'd call the police. - -I closed my eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, and trying not to drown in the doom logic of alcohol. - -I heard a swish, and then she was there. - -I opened my eyes and saw her: Jinny Greenteeth. She had skin the colour of the moon, and hair the colour of the pond at night. But when she smiled, I saw that her teeth—jagged, pointed teeth, the fangs of a predator—were slime green. Like the weed that draped her body here and there, though not over breasts or genitals. - -She was old, and very, very ugly. - -Of course I tried to run, but I didn't have control of my legs. - -I managed to say something—something odd: "I always thought you'd be like Helen's mum." - -She opened her jaws and laughed. - -"Come here and take my hand," she said. - -I was shaking now, and tears were rolling down my face. "You'll kill me." - -"Yes," she said. "That's why folk come to me." - -It sounded quite reasonable. That was part of the terror. But I didn't want to die… or did I? - -"I'm not sure," I said. - -"I'll come to you." And she began to *glide*. - -I shook harder, and let out a wild sound like a frightened animal. And then she was there, and she smelt exactly the way you'd expect someone to smell if they lived in a pond for centuries. - -"Just one thing," I blurted out, "will you please kill Helen's parents too? And mine, if you ever get the chance? They're evil." - -"It will be a pleasure." She sounded like it would be. "So much has changed, but people who hurt children are still people who hurt children." - -Hearing that, hearing that then, was so much I just fell over. I just lay there, and cried into the earth. "I wanted to be loved. I can love, but nobody loves me." Pure misery. I wanted her to be a mum to me. - -Jinny stroked my hair with cold fingers, tipped with claws. The gentleness was frightening. I was a mouse entertaining a cat. "You will be delicious. Take my hand." - -I took her hand. - -We were just like Bob and Helen, except that I was going to die. - -*Please don't kill me*, I couldn't say. *I'm a dumb teen. I don't know anything. Maybe there is something out there for me. Anything can happen. Please don't eat me. Have some bloody chips like everyone else*. I couldn't say any of this. My speaking days were gone. I was a terrified animal being shoved up the ramp at the abattoir. - -The water brought me back with its cold shock. We were up to our ankles, then knees, then thighs. - -"One thing now," said Jinny, and she clutched me to her, too tightly for me to breathe. I tried to gasp, and she blew into my mouth. Then she pulled me beneath the surface. - -It happened so quickly that I didn't have time to hold my breath, and I sucked in a great gulp of water, and a bit of the green weed. This was my death. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}xcept—I could breathe. I breathed the water, in, out, in, out, and found myself capable of more shock. My hair waved in front of my eyes, and I pushed it aside. Jinny's hair waved away to the side, as if it knew its place. - -"You!" she said. "You!" - -"Me," I said, and then began to laugh, it was so stupid. I was sitting in a pond with a hag, breathing pondwater. - -Jinny slapped me hard across the face, slapped the laughter out of my mouth. But then she smiled again. - -"You have come to be the next," she said. "I will be at peace soon. You will have to kill Helen's parents yourself. They will taste of lies and pain." - -My mind was trying to process a reality it hadn't believed in. Slowly the meanings entered me, like Jinny's breath had. "I don't understand any of this," I said, but already it wasn’t true. - -"You have taken your place. You will be the next Jinny. I will have a short while to teach you." - -If I'd still been human, I'd have passed out long before. Instead, I felt strong and capable. Empowered. - -"Oh sure," I said. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}inny did teach me. I could move to other waters if I chose. I could kill and eat anyone I liked who came too near. And I could use my power to find love, if I wished. - -"I will kill those who are tired of life, and come to me for release, as you did," I told Jinny. "And I'll kill the evil ones. They horrify me still." - -"And you must kill those who are very unlucky," said Jinny, and I nodded, because that made sense. "The weed is good for you, too. Eat some—it's full of vitamins." She was such a weird mixture of ancient and modern. - -As her power waned over the weeks and months, mine waxed stronger. Bits of weed settled on her skin and hair. Or maybe bits of her skin and hair turned into weed. It was hard to tell which she was, towards the end. Finally she laid down and began to cover herself in the muck and silt at the bottom of the pond. - -"You know what you need to know," she said. "It's time for me to go. You'll know when it's your turn, when the next one comes. Just breathe into their mouths, and one day one of them will breathe the water. Then you will teach her, and next you'll become earth and water, as I will, and grow plants and feed animals and be part of everything. Be happy." - -Tears disappear underwater. "Jinny," I said, "thank you for helping me to escape from my life. I was stuck. I'll miss you." A little bit of humanity burst out of me. "You're so fucking free of bullshit." - -She smiled and was gone, covered or dissolved into the water and murk. - -I cried anyway. She deserved my tears. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} danced from pond to sea to lake, to find Helen and see what had happened to her. I found her alive and living in Wales, still with Bob, but no longer shining as much. They had a flat and a couple of children, both blonde and beautiful. Helen still shined when she looked at them. - -Bob came home and kissed her, and asked what was for dinner, and ate it, sat with a can of beer and watched the football. Helen washed up, gazing out of the kitchen window at the hills and the beauty of them. - -She was OK. She was no longer being continually hurt. She had choices. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ack at Grange, I leapt into the Bay and went back to Morecambe. It was easy enough to find my parents. They tasted of greed and sadism. I spat out their poisonous bones. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} could find love, I know. I will, when I'm ready. What I really needed wasn't love (except that we all do, all the time) but validation, and power over my own life. I have those now. I have an identity and work to do. I'm famous: *Jinny Greenteeth*. My teeth are that weed colour now. I think they're beautiful. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here was one more piece of the past to see to. - -I was back at my pond in Grange when they came walking past. It was dusk, and no one else was about. Workers had gone home, and those going out weren't out yet. - -They had shrunk a little, and their clothes looked slightly shabby. For a moment I felt sorry for them. Then I saw their faces, warped with hatred, and far uglier than Jinny had ever been. It's all a matter of perspective. - -"Stupid bitch," said the father. - -"I'd blame that whore friend of hers," said the mother, “but Helen was always stupid too.” - -"Police asking questions all the time, and people bothering us. Don't know what happened, and can't say we don't care. But the world's better off without them." - -"And people saying they're sorry for us. I wish they'd just leave us alone. But *that* ungrateful thing, how dare she go and without so much as a thank you?" - -"Yeah." - -Helen's parents—more like un-parents—were staring at each other, bound by hate the way many are bound by love, and they didn't see me emerge from the pond. - -I stood right next to them and smiled. - -They turned with a fraction of attention, and then they flinched and squealed. - -I kept smiling, holding them both easily. - -I'm very strong. A few months ago I took a very fit young man who was doing some very unpleasant things to cats. I like cats. Anyway, he was strong by human standards, and I shook him around like a protein shake, laughing as he got angry about being killed by a female. - -I held Helen's parents, and I smiled and smiled. They were shaking and whimpering, as I had once. - -"Let's go for a little walk together," I said, loving how my teeth really freaked them out. - -"It's you," hissed the mother. "I thought you were dead." - -"Oh I *am*," I said, and pulled them after me into the water. - -Then the awful bit, for me. - -I held them tightly to me, both at the same time, and when they opened their mouths for one last breath I hissed air into each of them. And what if—what if one of *them* was to be the next Jinny? What if I wasn't evil enough or something? Either of them would be the worst nightmare the region had ever known. - -With a snarl, I pulled them under the water and watched them start to drown. - -*Thank God*, I thought. - -I hadn't said that word since I'd been in the pub with Helen, Bob and Kev, long ago. - -Poor Kev. He was a suspect, of course, and he'd also felt really crap about all three of us, going missing like that. He had actually developed a personality, and some depth. No, I wasn't going to eat him, unless he became one of my random kills. - -We have to have those. Nature is cruel, and people are unlucky, whether they're good, bad, or somewhere between. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}s Helen's parents drowned, I ate bits of their flesh off them, the way certain fish might. Ever since the power station had come to Heysham, next to Morecambe, there had been sharks in the bay. I would throw the bodies in the sea. Suicide due to grief will probably be the official explanation. - -So they watched me tear bits off them as they started to lose consciousness, horror in their eyes. - -Jinny had been right. They tasted disgusting. I wouldn't let them pollute my pond. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}P{{}}eople, listen to me. - -Come outside the house. See the water. Play near the water. - -Play in the water. - -I might eat you. I might not. But even if I do eat you, there are worse things. - -Hold my hand. - -Smile. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Jinny Greenteeth** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653087103490946).* diff --git a/content/issue-32/JohnBearJanineI.md b/content/issue-32/JohnBearJanineI.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2972d96d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/JohnBearJanineI.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,86 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "JohnBear, Janine, and I" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Hermester Barrington -copyright: '© Hermester Barrington 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "We're very pleased to welcome Hermester Barrington to the pages of Mythaxis for a second time—but while his previous visit provided biologically intricate introspection with a dash of the impenetrable academic, here we're given a short, sharp, straightforward slice of the supernatural. Making friends ought to be child's play. Imaginary ones? More so. If that's what they are, of course." - -image: images/JohnBearJanineI.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created by compositing images generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2 and a rights-free image by [Valeriia Miller](https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-in-black-and-white-sneakers-3680210/), then regenerated using Stable Diffusion." - -type: stock -slug: johnbear-janine-and-i -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}J{{}}ohnBear passed between my dad and the TV, and I flinched as it flared into static and a copy of *Us Magazine* flew from my dad's hand through JohnBear's head. "Crappy cable companies charging me an arm and a leg for *that!*" he yelled, and the screen sparked again as JohnBear led me past it. I paused to look at the last photo taken of the whole family, at Uncle Matthew's wedding last year—Dad kind of making a face, Mom with her smile too wide, Junior and Tina trying not to laugh. I wondered, not for the first time, if I was the only one who could see the five foot tall teddy bear in the picture, standing beside me, his paw resting on my shoulder. - -I was considering an experiment with my dad's camera when Tina and Junior came into the room, their eyes bloodshot, which they explained away as chlorine from a neighbor's swimming pool. Everybody started talking at once, over the sound of a TV shill telling us to *"ACT NOW!"—*"We're going to Tracy's," Paula announced, "Don't stay out too late!" Mom said, before Paula had finished, and just as I told my parents that I was going to Janine's. - -"Our discourses are like pieces by Philip Glass," I muttered, as JohnBear and I slipped out with my siblings, diverging where the walkway met the sidewalk. "Pieces of Glass, Pieces, Pieces by Glass Glass, Pieces of Glass by Glass of Glass," I sang while I walked, JohnBear shuffling beside me in rhythm with my music. - -Janine's family had moved into the house five doors up the street during my trip to hospital, six months before. A few weeks later, I had been kneeling on the sidewalk, looking for a species of beetle, magnifying glass in hand, when her shoes appeared in my field of vision. "Watchya doing?" she asked, and, looking up, I recognized her from school—she was in the fourth grade, like me, but in Ms. Bachmann's class. When I told her I was looking for a specimen of the devil's coach horse, she said, "*Ocypus olens*? I found one here last week—come on!" and we started pulling up the stones under a dripping faucet in our quest. We didn't find that beetle, but we spent the next few hours poking about her yard, seeking and finding other natural wonders. - -Today, though, Janine wasn't outside, but her window—second floor, southwestern exposure—was open. Up the Lacoönian branches of the sycamore and into her room—nothing easier than that, for me and JohnBear. She was leaning over her desk, writing on a small slip of paper as we clambered in. "Hey, Charlie!" she said, smiling, "Is JohnBear with you?" - -"Uh, he's right behind me, as usual." - -"Ah, I wish I could see him. Hey, look at this piece of basaltic lava I found yesterday!" and she held up a mineral display case. - -I rubbed my finger over the stone's texture—the surface between its pores had been worn smooth by erosion. "I can see things in it, like cloud watching or staring into a fire—JohnBear, stop jumping on the bed!" I added, turning at the sudden noise. - -"It's okay," Janine said. - -"Where did you find it?" - -"Down at the creek," she answered, "you should come with me sometime!" - -I felt a sharp pain in my hand then. I had a scar where the nail had gone in and out of my hand, the last time I was down there, trying to build that fort. - -"Yeah, maybe," I answered, and then Janine's pet tree frog Reggie started to sing. "Hey, do you know that poem 'Hyla Brook' by Robert Frost?" I asked, as JohnBear stopped jumping on the bed and put his paw on my shoulder. - -"No, but we learned "The Road Less Traveled" in class last week. You should come with me some day—I bet you know more about Frost than she does!" - -"Well, when I go back, I'll have to go back to Miss O'Neil's class, but my parents don't think I'm ready yet. I can learn more by exploring and doing my own experiments and reading my books than I could by sitting in a classroom, anyway. Stop that!"—this to JohnBear, who was tapping on the aquarium glass. - -"So, what does he look like?" Janine asked, squinting at the place she imagined he might be. - -"Um, one of his eyes is missing—but he can still see really well with the other one. He's covered with soft brown fur, of wool, worn off in lots of places. He's still soft, though." - -"How tall is he?" - -"He's taller than me now, but he was only this big—" I held my hands about a foot apart "—when my Uncle Matthew gave him to me. I named him after a character in a French folktale." - -"Like Perrault?" - -"Earlier than that, I think." - -"Well, he seems pretty special." - -"Yes, he is. He keeps me safe." - -"From what?" - -"I don't know… nothing. I just like to have him around." - -"Well, I'm glad he's around, too," she said, smiling. "Hey! There's a lunar eclipse tonight, and my papa's setting up a telescope—do you want to watch it with us?" - -Just then, Janine's mom called her downstairs. "C'mon, you can join us for dinner!" Janine said and taking my hand she led me through the door. JohnBear took my other hand, so we formed a line as we went down the stairway. - -Janine's mom came in from the kitchen, with a mint basil tofu dish—I love the way it smells—and Mr. Fairweather followed behind with drinks. "Mama, Charlie's joining us for dinner, okay?" - -"Sure!" she replied, and then, addressing the space to the left of Janine, said, "Good evening, Charlie! How are you doing today?" - -"Mama, he's already sitting at the table!" Janine said, rolling her eyes. - -"Ah. I stand corrected." And so Mrs. Fairweather served everyone, while JohnBear stood behind me, his paw on my shoulder. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **JohnBear, Janine, and I** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653085013491155).* diff --git a/content/issue-32/NightParents.md b/content/issue-32/NightParents.md deleted file mode 100644 index d02fdec5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/NightParents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,232 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Night Parents" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Valerie Alexander -copyright: '© Valerie Alexander 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Time is almost up on 2022, but given the twists and turns recent history has thrown our way, who'd risk guessing what's coming in 2023? Fittingly then, for our final story of the year Valerie Alexander gives us a piece that's all about time; the dread, or anticipation, of the unknown; and of change." - -image: images/NightParents.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was whittled down from an image generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2." - -type: stock -slug: the-night-parents -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}fter two a.m., the night parents slide out of the grandfather clock and slither across the hardwood floor and down the hall to Kira’s bedroom. That’s how she imagines it, at least, because she doesn’t hear footsteps before they come into her bedroom. She hears the soft slide of flesh over tile. But when they tiptoe in, they’re upright and normal like anyone else. Like her regular parents sleeping down the hall. - -“Honey, we didn’t know if you were awake.” - -Her night mother says that most nights, usually with a look of tender concern. They know what Kira goes through in the day, they always tell her. Dull classes at school. The embarrassing failure at her violin recital. The betrayal of her best friend Violet going upstairs at her birthday party with another girl while Kira was left downstairs with Violet’s grandmother. - -“I’m awake,” she says tonight, keeping her voice low so her real parents don’t wake up. - -Her night mother sits on the bed, smiling anxiously and smoothing Kira’s hair back. She’s wearing a cloche hat with black netting while her night father, sitting in the wing chair, is dressed in a bowler hat and suit. They often look as if they’re going to an old-fashioned party, leaving to catch a train. Maybe that’s what they do when they leave. They won’t tell her where they come from or where they go. - -The bedside clock glows *2:23 a.m*. in blue numerals. - -“What did you do today, sweetie?” - -Kira tells them how boring her advanced math class is and how she’s going to get in trouble if she falls asleep in school again. She’s already lost one library book this year and her mother called her irresponsible and said they weren’t going to Six Flags if this scatter-brained behavior kept up. - -“That seems harsh for a lost library book.” - -“My mom *is* harsh.” - -Her night mother takes this in. Then she fiddles with Kira’s hair and says, “I’m your mom too.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}ll the clocks in the house are set for different moments. They chime or ping or beep in different tones, a few minutes apart, because her mother sets them anywhere from four to seventeen minutes fast. “It keeps me on schedule,” she says when Kira’s father asks why. “Being on time means being five minutes early.” And it’s true that Kira’s mother is never late, that she gets her purse and laptop case and Kira into the car every weekday morning by 7:17 am. - -When Kira is home alone after school, the clocks go off in a reliable order. The soft chime of the cat clock in the kitchen is followed by the ping of the mantelpiece clock, then four steady bongs from the grandfather clock. Sometimes, when she shuts off the TV or closes her laptop and the house goes quiet, she goes tense with fear that all the clocks will go off at once: a signal for *it* to begin. “It” being something she can’t define, though she senses it will usher in a new and terrifying world. - -The night parents don’t come to her after school. They could keep her company in the solitary hours when late afternoon sun subsides into gloom and she watches TV as the living room goes dark around her. Her mother is rarely home before seven. Her father will come home very late or very early and shut himself up in his home office. And it’s hard to forget their absence because the clocks keep announcing the hours, like sentinels for a palace whose king and queen never arrive. - -“Oh darling, we can’t come any earlier, we wish we could,” says her night mother when she asks. (And Kira knows that, of course; the night parents have been visiting since she was little and they’ve always come in the dead of the night.) “Here’s what we can do, though—we can look at the stars.” - -She helps Kira slide out of the bed and they go together to the windows, the three of them, to look up at the sky. - -“You can’t see much,” says her night father, “but there’s a lot out there worth learning about.” - -From the corner of her vision Kira sees something gray and nebulous where her night mother should be. This has happened before. When she turns her head, her night mother looks normal and pretty again—smiling at her in her black dress. - -Kira asks what she’s wanted to ask for a while. “Are you from somewhere up there?” - -Her night parents make a quizzical face. “Honey, you’re so funny sometimes.” Her night mother kisses her head. “Sweetie, we’re from the same place you are.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hree days a week Kira leaves her fifth-grade classroom and walks down the hall to Advanced English with Mrs. Heller. It’s a small classroom with yellow walls and its windows overlook the white-trimmed field where students play soccer or dodgeball. Kira watches them, because when she listens to Mrs. Heller her voice blurs into a monotone and Kira can’t tell what she’s saying. That’s been happening a lot lately. She reports to advanced classes because of a test she took, but the teachers’ voices, the maps and equations and sentences, have been turning into blurs. - -“I want you to be honest with me about why you’re falling asleep in class.” - -Only the kitchen clock is ticking right now. The cat’s plastic tail switches back and forth, a temperamental entity that can’t make up its mind. Maybe it’s deciding whether this confrontation will go in her mother’s direction—angry, intent—or her father’s, quiet and watchful. - -“I fell asleep one time. I don’t know why Mrs. Heller said that.” - -It’s rare to have her parents sitting at the table with her and looking right at her. Odd to be focused on. - -“Kira. She pulled me aside right in front of everyone at the pharmacy counter and asked me if you were getting enough sleep because you’ve fallen asleep four times in class. Four times.” - -It’s the *in front of everyone* part that bothers her mother. Her mother wants to have a smart daughter who gets good grades and stays alert in class. - -“Are you having nightmares again?” her father asks. “If you need help again, we’ll get you help.” - -“No, I’m not having nightmares.” She says it with a degree of artifice, even though the nightmares did stop happening a few years ago, because she still remembers with dread the psychologist they took her to. Dr. Weischler and his implications that hung in the office air like threats, the cool reminders that only very disturbed girls saw monsters. Only mentally sick girls felt their bodies disintegrating. - -“Kira, if I have to take away your iPad at night, we will. You need your rest.” - -Her mother leans back and rests both palms on the table. She looks, Kira thinks, like someone in disguise, like her shoulder-length blond hair is a wig and her long nose is made of rubber. But her mother has always looked like this. Even in family pictures of them at the beach or skiing. - -“Starting tonight, no iPad in your room after bed,” her mother says. “And I bet we’ll see a difference.” Then she leans over the table and takes Kira’s hands with an intensity that surprises her. “I want you to be *okay*, honey. It makes me sad, thinking of you awake by yourself at night.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ut saying this, Kira thinks later, makes her mother a hypocrite. Because back when her nightmares came all the time, when she was only four or five, she would walk down the hall to her parents’ bedroom and her mother would tell her to go back to bed. She’d try to be quiet and sleep on the end of bed, wanting to be close to them without alerting them, but her mother inevitably woke up and banished her. - -One night she stood out in the hall in front of their locked bedroom door, trying to feel protected by their proximity, when the night parents came in from the living room. They smiled and put a finger to their lips. Then they motioned her to follow them; and because they looked nothing like what scared her in her nightmares, because they seemed sort of comforting, like characters from an old movie, she followed them back to her room. - -“You won’t be alone,” her night mother said, holding her hand. “We’ll keep watch.” And in an ineffable sense of familiarity, Kira felt safe enough to go back to sleep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} few nights after her iPad and laptop are taken away, her night parents bring her books. They’re huge books with cloth-like covers that they open carefully to show the illustrations. One is about a magic tunnel that leads to a cave. They watch her face closely as they explain how the tunnel in the story works. The next book is about a war and people being banished from their homeland, going on an adventure to find a new one. She’s too old to be read stories to like this but the night parents often bring her this kind of book. They watch her intently as she pretends to enjoy it. - -“We’ll always be here to tell you stories,” her father says, closing the book. “Your mother and I know lots of stories. We’ll be able to explain all kinds of things as you get older.” - -“Tell me about where you grew up,” she says, scrunching down into the pillow. She’s asked this before but they don’t answer. - -“That was a long time ago, Kira,” her mother says. “Things are very different today. What matters is now.” - -“Were there covered wagons when you grew up?” - -Her night parents observe her for a few moments without answering. - -“I think that she needs vitamins,” her night father says. “She looks tired. Kira, maybe you can ask your other parents to get you some vitamins.” - -Her night mother nods. “Just mention it tomorrow. But no medications—just vitamins.” - -“I already got in trouble because of you at school,” she says, more sulkily than she intends, “because I’ve been falling asleep. So they probably will make me take vitamins.” - -Her night mother leans over. “We need you to stay out of trouble, Kira,” she says intently, her hand on her leg. “Don’t tell your other parents you’re having nightmares, they’ll make you see a doctor. We need you to stay strong.” - -She shrinks back. She’s never recoiled from her night mother before but her hand tonight feels cold and rubbery. “How come?” - -Her night father takes her hand. His skin feels more normal. “Because you’re special. And some kinds of medication could interfere with that.” - -They have to leave. She watches them go like always but this time she creeps to her door to watch them walk down the hall. Will they turn right and go toward the kitchen and living room or will they go through the archway to her dad’s office; it’s all she wants to know. But what she sees is something undefined, obscuring her vision right before it seems to merge through her parents’ bedroom door. - -She’s had two fantasies these last few years. In the first, she tells her mother about the night parents. Her family packs up and leaves the house immediately. And that night, after driving far, far away, her family is sleeping in a hotel room when a vent opens and her night father climbs out and she screams. But her parents don’t wake up even as she keeps screaming and her night father drags out her out of the room. - -The other fantasy ends differently. In this one, her family moves out, suddenly, without warning. The night parents walk through the empty rooms that first night, looking at the space where her bed used to be. They stand in her dark bedroom without speaking until the gray light of dawn fills the rooms and they evaporate, permanently. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}e noticed you never mention any school friends,” her night mother says. “But we always want you to have regular friends, Kira.” - -“We just want you to avoid sleepovers,” her night father says. “Especially now that you’re growing up—not having nightmares anymore. Becoming ready for more.” - -It’s true that it’s been a few years since the bad dreams kept seizing her brain. But even the faded memory makes her recoil: undulating things that tried to touch her, their horrible ability to grow faces from jelly. That insane feeling of rising up from the ground, of losing her body. - -“More what?” she says and scoots backward toward the bed. - -“More experiences,” her night mother says. “There’s a lot to discover when you’re not scared.” - -“We were thinking,” her night father says, “that we might take a trip soon.” - -This is new. They’ve never left her before. “How long will you be gone?” - -“No—a trip for all of us.” Her night mother looks at her father and nods. - -“It’ll be fun,” he says, cocking his eyebrows under his jaunty cap. - -“How long would I be gone?” she asks. “I mean—my parents –“ - -“Let us worry about that,” her night mother says, smoothing her hair. “They probably won’t even need to know. You’d like a trip, wouldn’t you?” - -They stare at her, their enormous dark eyes imploring her to love them, take this trip with them, but then her night father’s face shifts just for a moment, as if melting. - -Then he looks normal again. - -“Yes,” she says. - -Her night mother sits back, rearranges her gloves in her lap, and smiles. “Then it’s settled.” She snaps her clutch purse shut and smiles as if with relief and triumph. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hat weekend her parents, who have no real friends, invite two engineers from her father’s office over for dinner. Kira eats a frozen pizza by herself before they arrive and stays in her room while the real dinner of salmon croquettes is served. By eight o’clock, there’s loud classic rock playing from the living room, punctuated with bursts of laughter. Her mother yells her name down the hall: “Kira, come meet everyone!” - -Kira gets up and goes to her bedroom window, expecting to see the night parents standing in the moonlit yard. They’ll wave, gesture for her to come out. And she could do that; could go away with them and never come back. - -But the yard is empty. A sense of being the only awake person in the house comes over her. - -“Kira!” - -Her socks slide on the polished oak living room floor. One of the engineers’ wives is on all fours, putting sugared cashews back in an upended silver bowl, and her mother is leaning back against the wall in helpless laughter, sagging against the drapes until she pulls them down—*Oh, OH*!—and everyone is laughing, her father burying his reddened face in his hands at the table. Kira gives a single, desultory wave and they laugh harder and she goes back to her room. - -She’s never seen her mother drunk before. Watching TV in bed, she composes the story to tell her night parents when they arrive, about her mother’s ugly laughter, about how isolated it felt to be the only real person here tonight. But her bedroom door stays shut all night, long after the house is quiet and dark. The night parents never arrive. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}*om, are ghosts real?* - -She wants to ask her parents something that scares them. She wants them to know that someone else wants her, that she could disappear before their eyes if they don’t start paying attention. - -Because they’re not paying attention now, when she’s standing here at the end of the hall, the tiles cool under her bare feet. They’re asleep and the house is silent. All the clocks have stopped ticking. That means that time has stopped, probably. It means that she can stand here thinking about whether to turn the doorknob to her parents’ bedroom and explain what’s been happening or she can go through the living room and look outside, where her night parents might be awaiting with their night car at the curb, ready to drive her away. - -A murmuring comes from her parents’ room: they’re not asleep. She listens at their door and then pushes it open without knocking. - -The grayish jelly monster is undulating by the bed. Finally she’s looking at it head on, as real as her own thudding heart. And just like in her old nightmares it begins to grow a face. It wavers, then solidifies into her mother. Her real mother. - -“It was always us,” she says. “I thought you were starting to understand.” - -The other grayish thing is growing her father’s beard, she can’t look, her mouth is too dry to scream. His human façade shows through as he takes the form of the dapper old-fashioned personas they used to fool her. - -“Oh, don’t,” her mother, her only mother, says to him. “We can drop the old-timey friendly ghost thing. There’s no point to that anymore.” - -Kira sinks down to the floorboard, weeping. - -“It’s time you started learning again anyhow,” her father says, sounding abashed. “We know you were scared before but you’re older now—” - -“Would you give her a moment?” her mother asks. “This is a lot for her to accept.” - -She leans her forehead against the wallpaper, sniffing. There’s a sock under her parents’ bed. A crumpled lipsticked tissue in the wastebasket. That daytime smell of her parents’ bedroom, cool and medicinal, fills her nostrils like proof of normality. - -“Honey.” Her mother comes closer to her. It’s odd to hear the night mother’s maternal concern coming from her regular mother. “It’s okay. This is good, even. You’re already having lapses in school. You’ll start changing at night like us within a year, two at the most.” - -Her head is hot and throbbing. “I’m not like you,” she says, though she doesn’t know what she’s denying. - -“That’s right—you’re better,” her father says, kneeling. He’s mostly his regular self now but she can’t look at him. “We’ll train you each night so you’ll be fully you all the time. Not like us, you won’t be cut off from your consciousness in the daytime. You’ll meet others who are young—it will be so different for your generation.” - -“You’ll do all kinds of things we haven’t been able to do.” Her mother crouches next to her, looking like her daytime self but going grayish and giving off pricks of electricity. “Your generation will be the ones to change everything.” - -Kira yanks her head away from her mother’s hand. “No! I’m *normal*. I don’t want to meet anyone like you.” - -Her parents look at each other. The night parents always had the same voices as her day parents, she realizes now, that never changed. - -Her mother reaches for her hair again and Kira buries her head in her knees. “Kira, you have to listen to us,” her father says. “It’s almost dawn and we’ll be—limited again.” - -“Oh, shush,” her mother says and holds her as she cries. “She’ll be okay today. You’ll make it through, right, honey? We’ll talk tomorrow night.” - -Her mother’s hand on her hair is tender, rhythmic. The revulsion inside Kira quiets. She succumbs to the stroke of her mother’s fingers as her mind becomes a comforted nothingness. And then her mother’s hand grows distracted and more impatient until she sits back abruptly. - -“Kira, you have to go back to bed. Why are you even in our room again—I thought we were past this.” - -Kira gets to her feet, adjusts her pajamas. Pale gray light is creeping around the window blinds. Her day parents watch her with weariness and resentment. - -She brushes away her tears. “Sorry. I had a nightmare.” - -“The nightmares are back. I knew it.” Her mother’s voice is resigned again. “Go back to your room. We might need to have you see Dr. Weischler again if this keeps up.” - -In her bed, Kira stares at the ceiling. Down in the kitchen, the cat clock chimes the first real hour of morning, followed by the ping of the clock on the mantelpiece, followed by five resonant gongs from the grandfather clock. Soon there will be the roar of the shower, the smell of coffee, her mother’s irritated complaints that her father has borrowed her phone charger again. Kira will put on her uniform for school, be reminded to pack a pear in her lunch, be examined for signs of staying up too late. Then the front door will shut behind them and the empty house will wait like a stage, a prologue for the day when all the clocks strike as one. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Night Parents** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653081570158166).* diff --git a/content/issue-32/UpAndDown.md b/content/issue-32/UpAndDown.md deleted file mode 100644 index 75c57954..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/UpAndDown.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,156 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Up and Down" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- J. Siegal -copyright: '© J. Siegal 2022 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Some people are just annoying. You can try to have sympathy when circumstance works against them, try to be happy for them when things go well, yet there's simply no helping that itch of ill feeling, nor of taking guilty pleasure at even unjust comeuppance. But some suffering exceeds what even the annoying deserve." - -image: images/UpAndDown.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image was created by compositing images generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2 and a rights-free image by [Antony Trivet](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-in-black-kaftan-dress-12894459/)." - -type: stock -slug: up-and-down -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}hat glum and stupid day, when I set foot in Mr. Morgan’s apothecary, I knew, or I should have known, that something dismal was in the offing. It was just such a typical ruin of a morning; I missed my bus and got my foot stuck in a puddle of muck, and then like an idiot I went galumphing after the bus, only to realize I’d left my briefcase on the bus stop bench, and when I returned, drenched and moping, the sagging slats of the bench were empty. - -This was bound to end at Morgan’s. Maybe, I thought, that curious old boulder of a man might light a candle or something and read my palm and sell me some potion to quell my gross moods. - -I entered his apothecary, and the bell on the door gave up a dull clank. I smirked and said he’d better get that fixed, it sounded pretty disheartening. - -Mr. Morgan insisted on proper introductions. He said this from the back of the shop, and his voice stirred the plumes curling from his incense cones. Then he slumped into the front room of the shop and my palm rose to meet his, and we shook hands as if there were great import to my arrival at his shoddy establishment. - -He cleared what must have been a massive wad of phlegm and swallowed. “You have,” he said, letting the word settle all the way down to the dust, “come to the right place.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he man Morgan wedged his large rump—obvious even under the flowing robes of his costume, I could tell—into an aching wicker chair, and bade me take a stool across the table. - -“Take off your shoes,” he intoned. “They are full of mud.” - -With just as much wit as I could muster, which wasn’t much, I told him of the awful bus and of my losing my stuff, and how an indigent man had mocked me as I slunk back to my stupid job. - -He picked his teeth with a silver toothpick while the larger of his eyes took in my story. - -“You must excuse me,” he said. “Your shoes.” - -I took my shoes to the front of the store and tried not to look too hard at all the scummy merchandise leaning off of shelves and towering in the corners, but something struck me in my gut, some lack. - -I sat back on the stool, and as Morgan and I regarded one another, he folded his large fingers together. - -“You have no price tags on your wares,” I said. - -Morgan drummed his heavy fingers on the table. “You’ve not come here,” he said, “seeking gifts or perfumes.” - -I removed my simple hat and held it in my lap. “It’s true.” - -Had I struck out in the wrong direction with this visit? Maybe I should have my fortune read, and throw in with every unmoored matron hoping at suitors for her daughters, every keen young man tripping forward into the future? - -As I searched for the courage to tell what I’d come for, my eyes wandered around the shop and settled on a large frosted mirror. “What good is a mirror that’s completely frosted over?” - -“It’s terrible,” Morgan said, “terrible.” He settled in his seat and stroked his scruff. “But have you come to my shop to haggle over trinkets and talismans?” - -“I guess not,” I said, but my eyes fell on a mannequin next to the mirror. It struck an absolutely rigid pose, its arms stiff at its sides, yet I could not get over the notion that it was meant somehow to be dancing, as if it were uncomfortable. - -“That mannequin over there, it’s very odd. There are no joints at the limbs. How does one get the clothes onto it?” - -“The mannequin is exquisitely expensive,” said Morgan. “Do you want it in your home?” - -“No, not really.” - -Morgan’s voice sank deeper, and his larger eye squinted. “It is very shrewd, the way you are trying my patience.” - -“I’m sorry,” I said. “Truly.” - -I got up to pace about the room in my stocking feet, hoping to grasp at the essence of why I’d come to visit Morgan at his bizarre apothecary, imagining myself some inquisitor of my own desires. I attempted a grand gesture in the hope some flourish would unlock my tongue, and stuck my hand through a portrait leaning in a corner. When I removed my hand, a gaping half of a face glowered from the canvas, incredulous at me. - -Morgan gripped the armrests of his chair and shifted forward, as if he were about to rise and beat me. - -“Do you know,” he bellowed, “whose face you’ve just disemboweled?” - -My apology was fleeting and ineffective. - -“That was a portrait,” Morgan said, wiping his face with a red kerchief, “of my progenitor. A great… a *great*…” - -“Apothecarian?” I offered. - -“Sit down!” Morgan’s voice shook the room. I sat back in my chair. - -“I can pay to have the portrait restored,” I said. - -Morgan chuckled to himself. He returned his kerchief to his robe and leaned across the table. “I shall ask you to leave,” he said. - -Desperation gripped me. “Please, Mr. Morgan. Hear me out. I have been stuck in this rut of rotten success and stupid progress. I find that my one foot skips while the other goes lame, in every thing I attempt. In business, in love, in matters of family… there isn’t a solitary part of my life in balance, and the only thing that exceeds the sunshine is the cold water splashed each time in my face. I have a great success, and the next thing I know I’m back in the muck. I meet a lovely lady, and before I know it she’s been swept away… by another man, by a tidal undercurrent, by syphilis. I have a wonderful turn of affairs in business, just to find myself on the street again. - -“I’m finally feeling flush,” I said, “and I want to cure it all. I’ve tried all the books and the lectures and the talking-doctors and the woozy medical preparations. By account of those who seem to know, you would be a man who can help with such afflictions of… fate or something. - -“I want you,” I said, drawing myself up in my chair, “to concoct for me a stabilizing potion. An analgesic for my fortunes. I want my life to cease being so damned up and down. It’s got so I can hardly sleep at night. Please, I’m desperate for your help.” - -Morgan regarded me with evident pity. - -“Let me see,” he said, rising slowly from his chair. “I think I may have something…” - -He made his way over to a great lurking cabinet of drawers and opened many of them in turn, muttering and poking through them. - -“Here we are,” he said, and handed me an amber coin with an ancient insect trapped within. “Put this under your pillow at night, but never on Sundays. It will help steady and calm your life. No charge, *no* charge, my friend. Put it under your pillow and you’ll be fine. Thank you for stopping into my store. Don’t forget your shoes.” - -I took the coin and held it up, though there was little ambient light in the shop. The tiny beast was caught in a great dollop of long-hardened sap. - -“What is so special about this particular specimen?” I said. “I’ve seen these in museums and curio shops before. As I said, I was hoping for some kind of potion or tincture—” - -At that moment, the coin slipped from my grasp and rolled the length of the store, past the dusty shelves and cabinets, past the odd taxidermy and the stacks of misshapen boxes, and settled, with a humming clatter, into the far reaches of a dark corner between the pots of two large and sulking plants. - -“No problem,” I said, rising quickly. “I’ll go get that.” - -“*Do not approach those plants!”* Morgan’s face was as red as his kerchief. He pointed a fat finger at my face. “You are an attractor of chaos,” he said. “Get out of my store. I cannot help you.” - -“Can you not retrieve the amber coin?” - -“That’s just a toy. It’s not even real amber.” His gaze fell on my face. “But I do have something else for you.” - -Morgan reached into his robe and drew forth his necklace, a marvelous shard of crystal on a silver chain. The pendant hung still and seemed to draw every bit of light from the dreary shop. - -“Do you see this crystal?” he said. “It is a structure most miraculous—every atom of it perfectly aligned. It is always in the most sublime stasis. Yet there is power, even one might say *life*, within it.” - -I had considered such trifles beneath me, had always scoffed those I saw molesting some stone or other, cooing at a collection of trinkets, scrutinizing tea leaves. A potion had been my desire, but now I found myself entranced. Maybe there was something to this crystal. I would have to possess it. - -“Yes,” I said, egging myself on. “I can see how that might be soothing, or steadying, to hang something like that against my chest.” I stood up, knocking over a distressed lamp that crashed angrily to the floor. “How much for the necklace?” - -Morgan’s smile drifted from his large eye to the smaller. “This is not for sale.” - -“Of course, of course,” I said. “Well you must have another one somewhere. What about here?” I brushed my hand along a row of rattling boxes. - -“Do not—*touch*—my things!” - -I stood silent in my stocking feet, chastised by the great man. - -“I bid you sit down,” Morgan said, and by some force of his imposing presence I complied. “Just examine this spectacular relic, and let its calming power claim your attention. Let it steady you. Let it heal you. Inhale deeply of its light. Allow it to calcify and calm your ragged nerves. Receive its invitation.” - -As he said this, my gaze focused upon the charm draped over his massive thumb. His words fell away into mumbling and the crystal seemed to enlarge, reflecting more and more light, drawing it from every recess of the room, slowly sparkling, radiating beams, a brilliant spectacle, a still-life dance of radiance. - -“How much,” I blurted through leaden lips. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}f I try to trickle upwards, I stick. And if I try a sideways slip, these tricky beams, these peculiar pricks of light restrict me. They shine in from just above wherever Master Morgan sits. His rosy ears are often understimulated, so he drapes himself in tinkling robes adorned with clever singing trinkets. But even when he sheds his finery, there sits me, in my glinting prison, always dangling from the links around his neck. Always just under his chin. - -It’s nothing like a crucifix, this lattice to which I stick, though stretched within it I must admit, I’ve wished for one. Sometimes I think, *Is this it?* and then it sinks in, that my limbs are fixed, not quite constricted, more assimilated, taking their own trips inside this mirror maze of iridescence, firm and flitting, not retreating, deeper into this crystal. - -Recalling sitting in ninth grade, listing briefly into sleep while listening, half deeply. It’s the physics teacher’s lecture on the structure of a crystal. I feel myself repeating, seeping deeper into grids in grids. An icicle de-melting. Thinning into stasis. It pricks the places where my ribs should be. This sifting of myself into delicately knifing reticles. These molecular electric spikes, piercing into me. I feel I will eventually diffuse. But it’s taking an eternity. - -Master Morgan, he is sleeping. Silks drape his stiff limbs. The chain of silver dangles. His big chest heaves and stills. I miss my limbs. Where once my sinew stretched, only tingling inklings persist, airy and stiff. Bit by bit the crystal fingers wind. Where once I might have bit my lip, my face is ossified. I drift in labyrinthine. Where once I might have cried, to help the pain subside, I only drift. - -A lattice pricks as it expands. It constricts and grips. Its teeth are turning me to teeth. To eat myself. It’s teeth are me. I’m biting into soft of me. Biting into stillness me. I eat the teeth of lattice grips. I’m teeth are me. Lattice constricts and eating me. I lattice grips. I teeth are me. I lattice grips and pricks expands. I lattice me. - -I slip. I’m slit. A piece. Dispersed. I me. A piece. A piece. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Up and Down** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/653082950158028).* diff --git a/content/issue-32/__index.md b/content/issue-32/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index e97d02ac..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32" -date: 2022-12-19 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 32 -subhead: Winter 2022 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/SepukuBot.jpg -imageMobile: images/SepukuBot_SML.jpg -imageCopyright: "The cover art was created by Micah Hyatt using Stable Diffusion" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#D32618' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-32/contents.md b/content/issue-32/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index b49f5146..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Jinny Greenteeth]({{< relref path="JinnyGreenteeth.md" >}}), by Cathy Bryant -- [The Aquarium is Andrea]({{< relref path="AquariumAndrea.md" >}}), by Monte Remer -- [Distant Skies]({{< relref path="DistantSkies.md" >}}), by Charlotte Ashley -- [JohnBear, Janine, and I]({{< relref path="JohnBearJanineI.md" >}}), by Hermester Barrington -- [Death is Like a Box of Chocolates]({{< relref path="DeathBoxChocolates.md" >}}), by Fraser Sherman -- [Up and Down]({{< relref path="UpAndDown.md" >}}), by J. Siegal -- [The Night Parents]({{< relref path="NightParents.md" >}}), by Valerie Alexander diff --git a/content/issue-32/editorial.md b/content/issue-32/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1eab9323..00000000 --- a/content/issue-32/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,55 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2022-12-19 -issue: Issue 32 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/SepukuBot_SML.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 32** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Grateful thanks must be sent out to former [fiction](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-23/third-martian-dick-temple.html) and [poetry](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-25/plague-rooster.html) contributor Micah Hyatt, who in 2022 turned his hand to experimenting with a variety of AI image generation tools and whose output now includes all the artwork in this issue, including the striking cover at the top of this page which was made with Stable Diffusion. Micah has recently published **[Eating the Exhibits](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPYYF5RK)**, a light-hearted zombie survival novella, so grab a copy if you want to give him some love—it's even available for free all this week!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Welcome back, magazine reader— …*hmm*, we need a cool name for our much loved and obviously very cool and tasteful audience, don't we? - -*Mythaxians*? - -*Mythaxioms*? - -…well, I'll get back to you when a decision is made. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy the selection of stories with which **Mythaxis** is closing out the year. As always, this issue has a bit of everything: scifi, fantasy, horror; beats of comedy, beats of emotion; and, entirely unintentionally, a theme of "family" (one way or another) is shared by almost every story in the issue. Also, as you might guess by glancing at this issue's cover and the art for each of the stories, we once again have turned to Artificial Intelligences for some visual flair, this time under the guidance of Micah Hyatt—check the bottom of this page for a proper *thank you*! - -Whether AI-art is something we use again is a topic for debate, however. As a tool, AI is obviously both powerful and convenient, but the much publicised question of how ethically those training the underlying technologies have treated artist copyright holders still hangs around it. Your Humble Editor usually creates all the story art and does so from rights-free sources, so arguably no other artists are being out-competed there; but, as a justification for my still accessing striking and distinctive AI-crafted material to use, that smacks a bit of sophistry to me—there's still the question of whose work an AI learned its trade from. If a demonstrably ethical AI-based system is to arise, that will be another matter… but whatever else happens, we will return to platforming flesh-and-blood artists for our covers in 2023. - -Anyway, enough about *AI*, let's talk some more about ***AI***—our quest for an artificially intelligent editor, that is! - -In [our previous issue](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-31/editorial.html), I revealed that the **Mythaxis** team was training up what I will confidently assume is the world's first AI slush reader, the *Slushbot*, with the goal of one day publishing the first magazine edited by an AI. Our first "live" attempt was with version 4.0. All it needed to do to win its independence was evaluate our magazine submissions and match my selection performance with such frightening accuracy that I fled our luxurious offices in terror. It didn't do too well, however, rejecting seven of the eight stories I considered best of the window, thereby proving its limited appreciation for real quality. - -Since then we've revised our training strategy. v4.0 gave a percentage rating as to whether each story was "accepted" or "rejected" by me using a one-shot classifier to analyse just the first 2048 characters of the text (we're not exactly running Google's Cloud Machine Learning Engine here). For reasons sooner or later to be revealed, v5.0 now looks at the first and last 1024 characters instead. Both versions used the stories published in **Mythaxis** since 2020 as the "accepted" standard. So, what did we we discover? - -Well, at first glance, it did a lot better. Slushbot v5.0 also accepted five of the six stories I picked during our last submissions window, and the one that it rejected was only by a 1.4% margin. Pretty good, right? - -What's that you ask? *"Did it also reject all the stories **you** rejected?"* - -*Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh… no.* - -In fact, of the 178 stories it evaluated, Slushbot v5.0 accepted 98. More than half. And I didn't mention this, but it liked some of my rejections a *lot* more than my acceptances. Only one of those six had more than a 10% swing in its favour, 17 of the rejected stories beat that, and many more beat the other five. Most of my accepted stories enjoyed the kind of winning result that only a Brexiteer would ever call "a landslide". - -So, although we saw a notable improvement in its evaluation of my preferred stories, overall the Slushbot still performs slightly worse than a coin-toss. Fair to say, we still have a long journey ahead. But that doesn't mean there isn't other interesting analytic news to share though. For example, take a look at these graphs: - -![](images/MysteryChart1.png) - -Interesting, right? That's the averages of the accepted vs the rejected stories for our last submissions window. I expect you're hungry for more, so how about these: - -![](images/MysteryChart2.png) - -Here you can see the performance of the six accepted stories individually—clear as mud, I'm sure you'll agree. *If it wasn't for those meddling question marks!* Yet fear not, all *will* be revealed… - -…in the first editorial of 2023—until then, I wish you all a very Happy New Year! diff --git a/content/issue-33/ADeersInheritance.md b/content/issue-33/ADeersInheritance.md deleted file mode 100644 index f139aea8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/ADeersInheritance.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,344 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "A Deer's Inheritance" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- C. Owen Loftus -copyright: '© C. Owen Loftus 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Let's start at the very beginning, well known to be a very good place to start since long before the written word, maybe even since before language itself. C. Owen Loftus gives us a story that is, of course, composed wholly of words, because we poor creatures must resort to clumsy tools in order to express the things that are, in some sense, unspeakable." - -image: images/Deer10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [AD_Images](https://pixabay.com/photos/stag-wildlife-nature-deer-male-2916282/), [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/canyon-night-stars-outdoors-2178786/), and [TheDigitalArtist](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/smoke-mist-vapor-fog-steam-smoky-5648182/)." - -type: stock -slug: a-deer-inheritance -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}T{{}}here was an old man. I call him Asa. He was a hunter, and a butcher, and a prayer. His friends chased game with him, and slaughtered the livestock with him, and sometimes even tried to pray too, but Asa was alone in being only a hunter, a butcher, and a prayer. Most people are many things. Asa was only those. - -It’s important you know he was never called that. His family called him the sound hungry children made at seeing he’d caught an animal for them to eat, or the grunt of a stifled wretch when the smell of open guts overwhelmed the one holding the carcass up for him to clean. Sometimes, on sacred days, they just called him by an expectant silence around a bonfire until he burned the animals’ eyes and genitals. Asa’s name was the same word as death and springtime. - -There was a boy, too. He thought of himself as a man, but his limbs were still the wrong lengths and his face was covered in red spots. He was shy, and never married. He was too young to have very many names. I know that no one called him Eze. - -Once, after laying in silence with Asa in a tree for five days, waiting for an animal to pass underneath, the boy said, - -(and remember these words are both misleading and unreal, all at once) - -“I don’t believe in souls.” - -Asa twitched in an automatic gesture of frustration, but nothing scattered in the bushes, so he measured his eventual response. - -“Why not?” he asked. - -“I can see everything,” Eze said. - -“Hmm,” Asa grunted. Then, “Would you like to see one?” - -It surprised Eze that the old man could offer it so easily. - -“Yes,” he said, and blinked slowly. - -“Wait,” Asa said, “for the deer. I’ll let you pick the one whose soul you want to see.” - -Eze could hardly call this unreasonable, so he settled back into his furs. - -It took only four more days before their game came. Three were fawns, and three were does, but one was a buck, and Eze thought its rack looked ornate and violent. He pointed at it in a flickering, near-invisible motion. Asa saw it, drew his bow, and shot the animal in its haunch. - -The herd scattered, and the men packed to begin the arduous work of following the buck’s trail. Eze used the time to mutter at the old man’s poor aim. - -“If I wanted a heart shot, I’d have shot at the heart,” Asa said. “It takes more than killing to see a soul.” - -They walked a long ways before finally finding their quarry. He was curled against a fallen tree, shivering in the dusky gloom. Eze drew his obsidian knife from its soft leather pouch, but Asa placed a heavy finger on the blade’s tip and pulled it down. - -“Seeing a soul must take at least a little killing,” Eze said. - -“Don’t worry,” Asa said. “The buck will die.” - -“When? What are you doing?” - -The old man knelt beside the buck. It stirred, but was too spent to stand. In exhaustion he let Asa pull the arrow shaft out of his leg, and dig the head out from his muscles with his fingers. - -“There’s a difference between dying and getting killed,” Asa said. His tone was serious, but he wiggled his eyebrows and smiled impishly. - -Eze wore sourness like facepaint. He snorted and folded his arms. “This is a joke,” he said. - -Asa sighed from his mouth, and Eze tasted his sour adrenaline on the air. - -“No,” the old man finally said. “I’m sorry. This is important, and I want you to understand it.” - -Eze snorted again, from impatience. - -“We’ll take the buck there,” Asa said, and pointed upwards at something neither could see through the trees. “There, when he dies, you’ll see the soul leave him.” - -The boy grabbed the old man from behind and used the surprise to put him in a chokehold. With his free hand he pulled on the black and greying beard. - -“This is strange,” he said, “and complicated. Promise to me that I will see his soul.” - -Eze hated the crack in his voice. He wiped sweat from his face with his arm, and suddenly was on his back, the old man’s forearm pinning him to the ground at the throat. - -“I promise,” Asa said. Eze gagged at the pressure on his windpipe, and the old man laughed and pulled him to his feet. But he quieted when he saw the solemnity in the boy’s expression. “Eze. I swear by the deer and their meat and their hooves and their bones.” - -Eze blushed. It was a strange, consequential thing to swear by. - -“Thank you,” he said in the wavering, vulnerable secret voice you can only show those you trust. - -They built a small fire against the dark. The buck didn’t move when they gathered sticks, nor at the sight of the red flames taking root in them. Neither man spoke into the growing darkness, only chewed their greens and jerky in a watchful rest. Asa touched the boy’s elbow, and at the familiar sign Eze let himself drift into sleep. - -When he woke, the buck was unmoved and panting in a pool of blood. It coated his hindquarters in a visceral glaze and shone in the early light like earthenware jugs filled with fresh water. Asa knelt in front of it, one hand on the animal’s neck. Their muscles were hard, and both their eyes were bloodshot. - -“Do as I tell you,” Asa said without turning. “Heal him.” - -The boy blinked away his fading sleep, then slipped into the shade between the trees. - -When the boy was gone, Asa prayed. He didn’t speak in a whisper, but his tone was hushed and private. “You are alive,” he said. “You are here and see me, seeing you. Will you run? Your soul is in your skin.” - -He prayed until Eze came back in the afternoon, carrying what he’d found foraging. At the sound of his footsteps, the old bent man over double and drank from the pool of congealed animal blood around his knees. Then he continued as before. - -Eze chewed the leaves and spat them into the buck’s wounds. Aside from the tear in his haunch, now stretched wide from the chase, the shins of both his forelegs were broken. The buck mewed plaintively when Eze wrapped the exposed bone in poultices. - -Eze knew Asa would pray for four days. It was the old man’s custom. So he settled into his orders, and turned the clearing into a little camp. He twisted his tunic into a rope, dipped it into a nearby stream, and held it between Asa’s teeth as if trying to gag him. The movement of the old man’s prayer squeezed the water from the cloth and let Asa drank without stopping. For the deer, Eze collected the plants that were most full of life and buried the broken arrow head under piles of their leaves. He chewed roots until they nearly slid down his throat, then spit them into both their mouths so the ritual wouldn’t break for anything as mundane as the need to eat. He cleaned them, and shaded them, and wanted very badly for Asa’s prayer to be finished. - -But he was too young to maintain any single feeling very long, so on the second day he occupied himself by tracking what he could of their hunt. He found a gnarled log on the northern side of the clearing, half rotted with mold and buried under the fronds of an enormous fern. The log was split in the middle, and the breakage was flecked with blood and splintered bone. The buck must have run into it at full tilt, not knowing it was there. It was that blow that snapped his legs and sent him tumbling into the tree that he still lay beneath. Eze pressed his lips together and quelled the sympathy pains the discovery sent shivering through his calves. - -On the third day Asa’s voice wore away until there was no sound behind it except the harsh rattling of his breath. Eze did his best not to pay too much attention to it. He believed knowing what Asa prayed would be intrusive and rude, or worse. So during the last night, to distance himself from the murmurs, Eze left the camp to watch the stars from a distant tree. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen he returned in the small hours of the next morning, Asa lay prostrate in the red earth. - -Eze shrieked, the first real sound in the clearing in days, and ran to him. The old man was barely conscious. The boy rolled him onto his back and slapped his face, but Asa’s eyes skittered at nothing behind half-closed lids. His skin was pallid and hot as rocks in the sun. - -The boy pulled him to the bed of moss and furs he’d made next to the fire and used his knife to cut off the old man’s clothes. Then he filled his water pouch and poured a cool stream over Asa’s burning body. He did this til the sun came up, and on through the day because the old man only get hotter in the light. The boy tried to cool him, and sometimes cried, because, as you might have guessed, the old man was his father, and he was frightened of losing him. - -When night fell Asa’s body began to shiver violently, so Eze wrapped him in the ruined shreds of his slit tunic and the bedroll leathers. The old man sweated so profusely that his skin glowed in the starlight. It reminded Eze of the blood on the buck’s haunches, and he stood up because the memory gave him a target for his unspoken fears. - -He turned to the deer and called it a hiss of derision. The buck only shook his antlers, weakly. So, Eze called him a shout of promised violence. He ran to the buck and grabbed his antlers, intent on shaking the animal’s head to pieces, and the horn fell apart in his hands. Eze called him a scoff of roiling disgust that rose from his belly, but then realized that all that had happened was the shedding of a little velvet. - -“Go to a tree then, and tear it off of you,” Eze said. When the deer didn’t, he called him uncontributive, which to the boy was a great insult. “Get up,” he screamed. “Get up or I’ll kill you.” - -He grabbed the dagger from his belt and held the point against the deer’s swollen belly. The buck didn’t move, only rolled his eyes, and rattled his head, and Eze understood the buck’s words clearly. - -“I can’t, my body is broken,” the buck said. - -Eze growled, then padded on his silent hunter’s feet to the animal’s flank. The ground showed him that the hooves hadn’t moved since their blood had softened the soil. The buck’s back was split by its fall into the tree. It would never walk again. - -Eze went back to the fire. He took a string of jerky from its pouch, and gnawed at it while he thought about the new words he’d learned. - -After a time, he went to gather more wood for the fire. But the last stick he held at one end and carried to the buck. He used it to scrape at the bloody velvet. The animal, though frightened at first, soon pushed his head eagerly against the rough wood. Blood splattered from his horns while sparks flew from the wet twigs popping in the fire. When it was done, the boy patted the buck’s neck softly and said what he thought the old man might say, if their situations were reversed. - -“The tree will come to you,” he said. He whispered it, because his throat was tight. - -The buck closed his eyes and let out a long, calm sigh. - -Eze understood, and said it back to him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he boy didn’t count time the way that we do. He existed unconsciously, like a breath. So the days and nights he spent in the woods, with no one to speak his name but a dying man and a broken buck, who flicked his ears and rolled his eyes and knew no names for anything, soon flowed together like paired beats of his heart, involuntary and inviolate. - -During the day, he sucked the pus from the buck’s wounds and spat the maggots into the bushes. At night, he banked and stoked the fire to match the old man’s changing fits. When he could, he caught the crickets that jumped on him in the dark and roasted them for their meat. They had precious little meat, but he had precious little else to do. - -At dawn on one of those days, Asa spoke. Eze thought at first that it was to him, and it made his heart leap, but soon realized the old man said nonsense directed to no one. He raved about animals and jumping and how it felt to have sex with a woman and see your son came out of her. Eze spoke back at first, though their conversations made no sense to him, but his replies became more sporadic as he slowly realized the old man couldn’t even hear him. By the fifth dusk, he just watched, and responded to Asa’s cries for water in silence. - -The buck grew quiet with him. It lay calmly on its bandaged legs like a cat, and never slept. Eze wondered if the animal had lost its fight, or just its fear. During Asa’s quiet moments, the boy sat next to the deer and tried to learn more of his words. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he next morning Eze realized they were out of food. He was used to long spells of hunger during hunts, but this was different. They’d been out too long. His body had no more reserves of fat to gnaw on from the inside, and rather than the cold clarity of a fast he felt sharp teeth piercing his muscles. - -He stood next to Asa and stared at the old man’s face until the sun was exactly overhead. Then, with a half extended hand making a silent gesture of apology, he slipped away. - -He had to walk a fair distance to find even a few things to eat. He’d emptied the immediate circle of forest of good herbs days earlier, and they’d camped there long enough that the birds and small things had learned to keep their distance. It took longer than he hoped. - -When he returned, a bundle of leaves under one arm and a few berries clutched in his palm, it was nearly dusk. The fire was dead, probably doused by a small drizzle that hadn’t reached him, and the camp was riddled with rot. Two ravens scattered from the buck’s back, beaks dripping with stolen blood. The old man’s face and beard was covered in vomit, and his nose was blue. - -Eze ran to him, and jammed his fingers as far down the old man’s throat as they would go. He felt and pushed, heedless of the tracks his nails left in his father’s mouth. When he found the lodged chunk of bile, and pulled it out between pincered fingers, his first reaction was shock at the amount of poisonous green that streaked the mucus. But then Asa coughed, then retched, and fell silent again, and the boy’s thoughts focused on only the old man, on his breathing and his heart beating in his thinning chest. - -When he was finished and stepped back, the boy’s own heart screeched because he saw Asa’s skin dripping with new wounds. But on inspection it was only the berries, smashed against the sick man’s bones in his panicked caregiving. Eze pounded his fists against his legs, and threw the little food that remained untouched back into the forest, as hard as he could. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}e didn’t sleep that night, or the next. He sat with his knees tucked under his chin, his legs wrapped around his elbows, and watched Asa’s every breath. The old man didn’t speak, or open his eyes. Eze felt the hunger burning above his navel, and wondered how much worse it was for his father. - -There was little to be done. They could go home, but it was several days’ journey in the best of circumstances. Eze could go alone and return with supplies and help, but he felt sure the old man wouldn’t last that long by himself. Or he could leave alone, and not come back, and try to live with leaving his father to die where no one remembered his name. - -His father would die, Eze felt sure, unless he could find a way to fill the old man’s belly and wake him up from wherever he was dreaming. - -There was a clatter of antler on wood, and the boy realized how easy it was to save them both. He turned, and looked at the buck’s muscles under its skin, at the tendons that tugged sharply through its neck. He imagined the taste of them as he chewed them over days into nothingness. - -His black obsidian knife was still in its pouch at his hip. He’d never hunted this way before, it wasn’t his way to do so, but a hunt had never been this way before. He’d cursed the three of them from the start of it with his stupid questions. It had all gone too perfectly badly. They’d waited so long for the buck that the men had no strength to spare. They’d chased that particular buck to this particular place, where it would lay in state of painful undying and borrow strength from them all until all were spent. - -The three were trapped by the way their bodies were tied to the others’. The man couldn’t live without the boy to feed him, and the boy couldn’t save the man while the buck remained alive. Still, the deer’s safety was sworn, by the same man it killed by slowly dying. - -The boy felt as if an unseen but enormous snake was coiling them more tightly by the moment, had been wrapping around them for weeks, but so slowly that he hadn’t seen it until it was too late. The tautness that suffocated them needed to be released before they strangled. If he dared to snick the thread, the balance would tip, and the others would be free. - - Eze drew the knife from its pouch, watched the firelight glitter along the bowls its carving had left along the blade, and then put it away. Instead, he found the old man’s knife in his ruined things. This was a knife that could sever the things that bound them to this spot. - -But he stopped, a pace away from the buck. It watched him and followed his movements with his ears. Eze’s curse was so clever, so ingeniously laid, that even now he needed the old man to end it. Eze couldn’t kill this buck, because he’d never let himself hear what the old man said before he’d slit their throats. - -*It’s not important*, the boy thought. *The deer will be dead. I need its meat, not its soul.* - -But he looked at it, tried to see more deeply inside it than he ever had, and realized that the animal had done nothing wrong. It was his, Eze’s, fault that they were here, and that his father needed this death to live, and that he needed his father alive or he would die, too, because the boy couldn’t bear to do the things that would save himself. He’d already killed his father, whether or not he also murdered this buck without even performing its prayer. - -He fell heavily onto the ground and leaned back against his hands, the wrapped handle of the knife cutting off the circulation in his palm. - -“Do you have a family?” he asked. But he knew the buck didn’t understand. He tried again, but this time said it in words that sound like a small hand tucking behind enormous velvety ears to scratch gently. The buck said a word Eze didn’t know but sounded like the quiet breath of someone who believes they will always feel as safe as they do in that moment. - -“You’re not the reason my father will die,” he said. “I can’t be the reason you die, too.” - -The deer snuffled, a wet sound that left droplets of moisture on Eze’s hand, and laid its head down in the dirt. Eze turned in his spot, and leaned back against the buck’s torso. His skin was warm and his fur soft. - -The buck’s breathing, measured evenly by Eze’s rise and fall against him, slowed. From the corner of his eye, the boy saw the buck’s eyes finally close. For the first time since they’d met, he was asleep, and in a moment, the boy was too. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hat did the boy believe happens to a deer if you don’t pray for it before it’s killed? This is what I know: - -When he woke up, curled into the buck’s belly like a puppy to its mother, he again picked up the knife and carried it to his father. There, he cut into the flesh above his own arm until a rivulet of blood dripped strong and freely off his fingers. He dripped this blood into the old man’s mouth, as a trade for the deer blood the old man dearly needed and the boy was unable to provide. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t was a clear night when Asa returned from his travels. The stars were blinding, and Eze was watching them across the embers of the fire, one thumb tucked over the buck’s nose. The animal chewed on a length of grass, and Asa tried three times before he remembered how to talk. - -“What is this?” he asked, and Eze jumped at the sound. The boy scurried to him and began to fuss; re-tying wraps, stuffing his pillow, tracing his bruised knees with gentle fingers. - -Asa winced at the attention, but was also warmed by it. When he felt strong enough to sit up, he looked into the fire and let Eze look for little things to eat. - -“I thought you were going to die,” Eze said, gasping from exertion. He’d found a single tadpole that made its way down the stream to grow legs in the eddy by their little camp, and worn himself out chasing it. He sweated while he roasted the little half-frog over the fire. - -“I am,” Asa said, and Eze shot up in a start and stared at him with a wildness that filled the pits of his eyes with black. - -“But you’re getting better,” the boy said, and moved to hit Asa playfully, but stopped when he saw how frail the old man’s muscles were, how much of his strength it took to sit up. - -“I still feel it coming,” Asa said. “I’m too old to pray. I wasn’t before, but now I am. I went too long.” He coughed, then swallowed a gulp of water from his pouch. - -Eze looked terrified, and then angry. “Why didn’t you stop?” he said, loud enough to wake the birds nesting above them. - -“I don’t know,” Asa said. “I’m sorry.” - -The boy dropped in a squat and turned his face to the fire. - -“I didn’t want to be too old,” the old man finally said. - -When Eze started to cry, Asa crawled to him and put his hand around the back of the boy’s neck. He called his son by his first name, the shooshing purr that soothes a newborn who fears they are alone. - -“Let’s go home,” Eze said. “You should be there.” - -Asa looked at the sky. He followed the ridges of the nearby mountain where they cut into the sky and hid the stars behind it. - -“No,” he said. “I want to give you what I promised.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}t first light, they buried their fire and broke camp. Eze kissed the buck between his ears before slinging him over his shoulders, and Asa gathered a very few things. Eze wouldn’t need much to make it back home, and the old man felt too weak to carry anything else besides. - -The walk wasn’t far, but it took them a long time to make it. Asa moved on his own but tired very quickly, so they covered what ground they could each day and camped beneath the trees. On the fourth afternoon they found a warren of little brown things and spent the rest of the day catching them and cooking them and laughing in relief. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen they reached the foothills, and the slope turned into a gravel and granite-face climb, they stopped to rest and clean themselves. They found the little pool kept sacred for that purpose, fed by a warm spring that fell through the sharp gray rock. - -The bath was abrasive and revealing. All three were much thinner than they’d started, but Asa’s shrinking musculature was riddled with sores and boils that grew in his joints. When the old man’s arms shook too badly to continue, Eze finished cleaning him. Then he cradled the buck and carried him into the pool, half submerged, so that Asa could wash his fur and hooves. - -“You did a good job with him,” the old man said, and Eze smiled sadly. - -“We became friends,” he said. - -“That’s good,” Asa said. “You can’t the see the soul of something you don’t love.” He pulled the strings of filth from the buck’s fur and ran a finger over the arrow wound in his haunch. The cut had closed well, but left a pink, glistening scar. “You did better than you had to, even. I’m proud of you for that.” - -“I’m sorry,” Eze said. It took them both by surprise. - -“For what?” the old man said. - -“It’s my fault he has to die, because I’m the one who chose him. I just thought his antlers were pretty, and that meant his soul would be beautiful.” Then he glowered into the water. “It’s my fault that you are going to die.” - -Asa rinsed the buck’s damp fur and poured a little over the boy’s head. - -“We’ll die,” Asa said, “but we’ll be seen first. There are worse things.” - -They finished their ritual, ate a meal while their tunics dried, and then found the trail that climbed up the rock to the mountain’s peaks. They left everything else behind, tucked into a boulder’s niche as a token protection against the birds. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey didn’t speak again until they reached the snow line. Eze tried to step in the holes Asa’s feet crunched in the frost, but even in his weakened state the old man took much longer strides. Soon, he had to focus every movement on keeping his balance under the buck’s bulk on his shoulders. - -“Let’s stop,” he said, “and go back.” When Asa turned to meet his eyes, he said, “I release you from your oath.” - -Asa’s frame shook in the bitter cold. - -“I’m not doing this because I have to,” he said. - -“Please stop,” Eze said. “I don’t want this anymore.” - -Asa backtracked to him, tugged on the boy’s wispy chin hairs, and took the buck from his shoulders. - -“I don’t want to either,” Asa said softly. “But I choose it.” - -He hoisted the buck to rest securely on his neck, and began the walk up again. Eze gawped a moment, then chased after them, calling both something wordless and in pain. At the sound, the buck took fright. He threw his neck and attacked Asa with his brittle hooves. The old man stumbled, then fell to his knees, and the buck fell into the snow. He found purchase on the slippery rock despite his twisted legs, and dragged himself away. He looked back at Eze, without stopping, and tumbled headfirst off a cliff. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen they reached him at the bottom of the crevasse, his body was cold and his soul was gone. The boy cried bitterly, and stroked his friend’s forelock. - -Asa grabbed the buck by an antler and hoisted him onto a flat place. It only took one hand–the animal was emaciated and light. - -The stench of death made Eze’s eyes water. There was no magic here, no secret thing to watch fly away. It was only a crippled deer corpse, already dripping with excrement and parasitizing flies. A frightened animal whose eyes were clouded with burst vessels and hooves caked with piss-stained ice. - -The old man let the boy mourn, then touched his elbow.“It will be dark, soon,” he said. “And I don’t have another day inside me. Will you come?” - -The boy rubbed the buck’s antlers between his fingers, and nodded. - -They found the trail, and began again to climb. The setting sun turned the air red as the veins around Asa’s eyes. The shadows of their hands as they dug into the snow for purchase turned it purple sure as if they dripped with oncoming dusk. - -With still more than half of that last climb left, Asa fell. His body clenched in rippling spams. Eze leapt to him, brushed the frozen dirt from his face, and put him on his shoulders. Just ahead he found a small cleft, flat enough and sheltered from the frost that blew into their eyes. The boy laid him there, and rubbed his father’s hands until they softened from their claws. - -“We’re there,” the old man said. - -“We’re not at the top,” Eze said. He had to shout to hear himself over the whipping wind. “I can carry you.” - -“It’s too late. It has to be light to work,” Asa said. His eyes were turning glassy, and they reflected the dying pink of the sky. - -“But how,” Eze shouted, “do you know your soul will come out before then?” - -Asa took his obsidian knife from its pouch at his hip. “Pray for me,” the old man said. - -“What? I don’t know how. Answer my question.” - -The old man put the knife into the boy’s hand, and gestured at his throat. - -“You’ll learn,” he said. - -Eze blanched at the black blade, and pushed it back. - -“You’re still alive,” he said. - -“That’s it,” Asa said. “That’s always the first prayer.” - -He coughed, until Eze was sure it would last til they both were dead and frozen on top of the mountain. But he did stop, and then he sat up, fighting against his atrophied muscles as they rebelled against him. He knelt, facing the dying sun. - -“Hurry,” the old man said. “Please. I want you to see me.” - -Eze heard the pleading, and it sunk into him. His father had prepared him for this moment by showing it to him a thousand times, through the deer and the elk and a single crippled buck. The old man’s voice was empty from his labor, and in it Eze heard how desperately his father wanted him to understand. - -So he didn’t hesitate any longer. He let the knife glide through the old man’s throat. The muscles parted and the animal life poured out of its jug and onto the ground. The cut cords bubbled at contact with the air. - -“Look,” the old man mouthed without sound, and the boy did. - -From the clean pool of his father’s heartblood rose the silver smoke of his soul. It curled against the air like a baby struggling to break its birth sac. - -Asa steamed into the gloaming light of the first star long after his body stopped breathing. - -Eze watched him fly, then knelt beside him in the same pose. He touched the elbow of Asa’s remains, which were frozen in their kneeling, and let the last sunlight wash away the old man’s remnants. He bent double, and sipped at the pool of blood around his knees. - -When it was truly dark, he prayed, as his father had taught him. If you heard it, though you wouldn’t know the words he said, you would understand. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **A Deer's Inheritance** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744238057709183).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/Balk.md b/content/issue-33/Balk.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0b3eab65..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/Balk.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,124 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Balk" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Lucy Zhang -copyright: '© Lucy Zhang 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Issues of Mythaxis do not cleave to themes, and yet sometimes circumstance intervenes, at least in part. Such was the case this time, and Lucy Zhang's solemn sequence of moments and reflections here provides the first of three stories each very distinct, but all of which ring with alienation." - -image: images/Balk10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Engin_Akyurt](https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-swimming-underwater-nightmare-2725337/) - many thanks." - -type: stock -slug: balk -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}O{{}}ne year after attempting to run away from home in my pajamas, I join the diving team to get over my fear of the pool’s deep end. Mom and Dad think the pool will keep me distracted from acting without thinking. Things get murky in the deep end: the white tiled floor of the pool blurs, the water darkens, a black hole threatens to suck you out of this universe. - -I’d seen it happen while swimming two years ago. While I flung my arms forward like propellers in exhausted, half-hearted freestyle strokes, my red knotted-cord bracelet slipped off my wrist. I wasn’t supposed to take the bracelet off because it was my zodiac year, the misfortune-filled Ben Ming Nian; but as I dove to catch it, the water warped, sucking the bracelet into a whirlpool of gray and chlorine. - -Mom insisted the lifeguard search for it, but he said it must’ve been sucked into the drains. I know better. The drains were too far from where I had dropped the bracelet, not that mom believed me. - -I also hear the diving team is easy for beginners to pick up even without prior gymnast experience, and you can participate in competitions if you’ve learned enough dives. Make sure you go in headfirst and you’ve got a dive, nothing more to it, I think. A straightforward A leads to B, as different as it could get from Dad’s sporadic outbursts when he noticed I was sharing dinner with the family rather than memorizing flashcards, or memorizing flashcards rather than having dinner with the family. I couldn’t eat without squeezing my eyes shut anymore, even when Dad wasn’t around. - -The senior divers on the team look like birds swiping fish out of the ocean. They leap from the one-meter board and perform their twists and flips as though warping space-time with their maneuvers, bending air with their muscles. - -They enter the water with a splash, briefly disturbing the silence, and I watch, expecting them to resurface in a few seconds but also preparing myself to never see them again, in case someone really does get sucked out of our reality from the deep end. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}el is a diver. An ex-gymnast who’d injured her legs, and switched to a less “intense” sport where she could do above average without trying too hard. - -Mel is also the quintessential example of failing upwards – something we’re all a bit salty about since she slacked off throughout middle school and into high school. I’d see her Facebook posts of half-nudes and beer pong rounds and rides in glossy Porsches with slick-looking guys whom I’ve never seen around school. - -The folks who knew Mel through elementary school tell me she used to work hard when we were just learning cursive and grammar, but the effort never got her anywhere. In fact, she was quite bad – bad enough for her classmates to remember many years later. *Some people just can’t learn no matter how hard they try*, they say. - -I think it’s because Chinese doesn’t have any verb conjugations so, when it comes to English, Mel uses the infinitive form more often than not. Things like: “Introduce my” instead of “introducing my,” “soon I go to school,” “yesterday I eat the fish.” She was probably mocked. If I’d been in her elementary school, I would’ve mocked her, if it meant no one would detect *my* mess-ups with third-person conjugations. - -I moved to Mel’s school district in seventh grade because my dad was offered a relocation bundled with a promotion, and he decided he’d never receive another opportunity to become a manager if he didn’t seize it now. Dad isn’t career-driven, but he likes to brag about things he has that his friends don’t have. One of those things is a “leadership” position – one where white people and senior people report to you rather than the other way around. - -Mom told Dad it’d be a political cesspool, but he insisted, and I guess the huge jump in compensation was enough to convince her. She didn’t want to live in an apartment where hot water ran out within two minutes of showering. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} only see Mel in diving practice. We hardly cross paths in school because she takes remedial courses while the rest of us try to outcompete each other in AP course load. But everyone hears of her adventures: joining college students for shots of soju; smoking weed at the hole-in-the-wall taqueria that’s open from seven am to ten pm; bleaching and dying a strip of her hair a different color every month. She’s cool. Like a character from a video game. My parents would shave my scalp if I decided to dye a strand purple, but I still think it looks nice, different, like changing your appearance means the insides will naturally follow. - -Mel is always with guys too. Her gaggle of guy friends often sit on the benches to watch her diving practices. I don’t like when they visit. Their stares make me feel like a flounder springing from the board, flailing in the air, plopping into the water like a particularly fiber-fueled piece of crap in the toilet. Mel’s pike, on the other hand, looks like someone has wrapped cast tape around her legs and back, sealing her chest to her upper thighs. You can’t even slip an index card between her upper body and legs. - -The other girls like it when Mel brings along her boy toys, but don’t like that she’s the best diver. They try to pull off their hardest, riskiest dives when the guys are around, but their efforts result in more belly flops instead. While we warm-up, Mel tells me the guys are just trying to get into girls’ pants, which is all they think of. - -“Why do you bring them to practice?” I ask. As much as I don’t feel like unzipping my jeans for them, I also don’t want strangers’ impression of me to be a drowning duck flopping off a Duraflex board. - -“They take videos on their phones so I can review my dives later. I don’t care if they hook up with the other girls.” She looks over as I complete five more rowboats: my flexed feet and loose, bent limbs, my dying abs. “I can help you with your form.” - -“It’s fine.” No amount of coaching is going to eliminate the freak-outs that erupt in me just before my hands hit the water. I’m afraid that if I rip too perfect a hole through the water, create a vacuum for my body to enter, suffocate the splash deep below the surface, the whirlpool-black-hole-entity at the bottom will eat me up too. I’d rather mess up the dive than get dragged to who-knows-where. - -“Don’t you want to get better though?” Mel asks. Mel is the only one in the gym two hours before practice and one hour after practice, doing cardio, pilates, strength training. She hardly has a chest, and I don’t think she’s ever gotten her period during the sports season. Once she dumped out her bag in the locker room, and instead of the typical protein bars and tampons, small packs of trimetazidine pills and aspirin tumbled out instead. - -Sometimes I think she might snap into a heap of bones and hair upon making contact with the water, but instead she tears her way through the water with hardly a ripple. - -“I don’t really care,” I confess. Forget my fear of the deep end: I already have my varsity letter to tack onto college applications. I’m not so noble as to seek self-improvement. Trying too hard sets you up for failure—a conclusion I’d made after Dad flung a bamboo cutting board at me because I’d flunked my chemistry final despite weeks of studying. I told him it was because one of my classmates stole my glasses so I got dizzy halfway through the exam, but he didn’t believe high schoolers were capable of sabotage, never mind a classmate who already stood at the top of the academic food chain. - -Mel shrugs. “Well, if you change your mind.” She slaps her blue shammy against her thigh and steps forward in line to the diving board. I watch her from behind, the muscles in her calves flexing and loosening. Her swimsuit rides slightly above her hips, wraps around her straight, plank-like waist – not a single dip inward or rounding outward of her flesh, a polyurethane-wrapped ruler that’s all edges and corners. The rest of us jiggle at least a little bit when we move. We are jello people, dumped out of our molds. - -When it’s Mel’s turn, we all watch. I stand to the side so I have a better view of her jump. I can’t even get my jump right: not tall enough, not strong enough, too far out of a projectile, too inconsistent. - -Mel points her toes like they could be daggers. Her somersaults and twists remind me of a Chinese yo-yo getting flung through the air. This all happens in seconds. She enters the water before I register that she’s added another twist from her usual dive – how and when she mastered the extra 360 degrees, I have no idea. - -The water inhales her. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e wait for the pool to spit her out as it spits all of us out. I think it makes the girls feel better – that Mel still has to wade to the side and haul herself up the ladder steps, her body a crater wedged in dirt, that she still has to rapidly pat herself dry else freeze on land. - -I’m more concerned about not freezing myself. Mom won’t buy me a proper shammy so I have to constantly ring a bundle of old cotton t-shirts dry before wrapping it around my body to soak up the chlorine. Mom insists she needs to save money, but I think she just doesn’t want to admit she doesn’t know where to buy shammies – she thinks Amazon describes a rainforest and hasn’t figured out how to launch a browser. - -I don’t see any bubbles. No splashes of water. Only faded echoes of kids taking swimming lessons on the shallow side of the pool. None of the other girls move as I walk to the edge of the pool and try to peer past the water surface. I can’t see past a distorted reflection, but that’s the problem with deep pools: they muddle everything, eat up light instead of reflecting it. - -“She’s gone,” I say. - -The girls step away from the diving board and walk over. They whisper to each other: *what does that mean, “she’s gone” – maybe she cracked her head, got concussed – but then she should float back up – at least at first, right*? They don’t look at me, even though I’m the one breaking the news, but it’s normally like this. The other girls are part of a carpool rotation and have sushi-and-samosa parties after every meet, and even though I’m invited they know I can’t go, because the bus doesn’t stop in their neighborhoods, and they don’t have room for me in their parents’ SUVs. - -But Mom is convinced quitting the team means I lack dedication, even though I’ve acquired the varsity letter, which is what colleges care about. Plus she’s worried I’ll get fat without a sport, and how would she explain that to my aunt and uncle who use every opportunity to size up *their* daughter against me – test scores, height, skin quality, zodiac birth year, Chinese school ranking (even though the rankings are meaningless since we cheat on those exams). *All the shivering and freezing on land must be incinerating the pudge. At least you’ll be the only one with an A4 paper waist*, Mom says, more to herself than to me, whenever I come up short in some other category. - -Mel’s boy toys stand from the bleachers and walk toward the pool. The other girls start grooming their hair and sucking in their stomachs, even though there’s not much you can hide when you’re as good as naked in a skintight suit. I wait for the boys to look into the pool because I don’t trust my eyes. I tend to miss what other folks see, or see what others insist doesn’t exist – although when I ask mom if I need therapy, if my brain has gone haywire, she chortles and tells me to stop thinking stupid things and wisen up, be rational, no such thing as mental issues. - -But the boys never make it to where I am. They stop near the other girls. They laugh and flirt and lightly brush some girl’s arm. The girls laugh too. - -“Your boy toys aren’t very faithful,” I mumble, head down. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}etween asking the rest of the team to look for Mel and looking for her by myself, I decide it’s easiest to jump into the pool. Conquering my fears and such. I dive in from ground level and open my eyes underwater. There’s no sting. I begin searching, pushing myself deeper against the buoyancy with my arms and legs. This is why the deep end scares me: it doesn’t really end. - -I see no sign of Mel. - -My limbs grow tired and oxygen short. I reach a hand out toward the depths, propel myself deeper, just a bit, trying to scrape the tiled bottom just to prove to myself it’s there even though I can’t see through the dark, but my fingertips flow through without hitting anything solid, water resistance and nothing else. - -Time to give up. I begin kicking upward, seeking the surface and oxygen relief, but as soon as I change directions something grabs my ankle. - -I look down at the hand clasped around my ankle, the slim, veiny, muscular arm. Mel’s head and upper body peek out from this impenetrably dark void that reminds me of the mugs of pure, unsweetened, bitterness-in-full-force Ban Lan Gen that Mom would force down my throat when I got a cold. - -*Don’t you want to come?* she mouths. *It’s nice down here. You never get hungry, never need to leave. There’s no one else.* - -I shake my head no. I want to breathe. And though the surface seems so far, further by the second, I’m tempted to try. - -What would I be resurfacing to? Boys who don’t see me, and girls who choose not to. Mom and Dad’s idea of my future, not mine. And the vanishing ripples left behind by Mel’s absence. - -I look down into her eyes, pits like fermented black beans. Her free arm drifts loose at her side and the edges of her hips seem blurred by the water. Her body looks more ghost than girl, the water threatening to dissolve her into chlorine. - -I wonder if I can recover from inhaling water, banking on my respiratory system being so evolutionarily adaptable it can filter the oxygen and expunge the water like gills. - -If I *voluntarily* fill my lung sacs with water, can that still be called drowning? - -The void Mel is reaching from is so much closer than the surface, so I grab onto her hand. As she pulls me down, I grip tighter. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Balk** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744237634375892).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/Emoticon.md b/content/issue-33/Emoticon.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2e431253..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/Emoticon.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,113 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Emoticon" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Barry Charman -copyright: '© Barry Charman 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Whatever else may change, Mythaxis is always going to end on a story. Barry Charman sees us out with a third tale that has more than a hint of alienation to it – though whether alienation is a state of suffering or grace is very much in the eye of the beholder." - -image: images/Emoticon10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The story art was created from [a public domain image](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matthias_Rudolph_Toma_Messerschmidts_Character_Heads_1839.jpg) of Matthias Rudolph Toma's 1839 lithograph depicting the Character Heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt." - -type: stock -slug: emoticon -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}J{{}}anet has been rejected again. - -I call up my list of emoticons, click on *empathise*, then scroll through a sub menu to add a mildly scolding face and a half-smiling smiley. If she finds my message to be at all obtuse, she can highlight the icons individually, and read each emotion as a broken down statement. - -I wonder if she’ll bother. - -Moving on, I visit the hubs I follow daily, and settle into my routine interactions. I read a glib report decrying emoticons as the banal hieroglyphics of the future, and call up the *yawn* symbol. *Click*. I then read accounts of the wider world. There is much violence there, naked hatred that walks the old streets. Raw people. Their lives must be so terrible, the emotions so confusing, so erratic. - - Sometimes I will pose in front of the mirror, and speculate why my expressions are not the same as my many avatars. I try to contort my features to emulate them, to normalise myself to their smooth emotions. But the results are uncanny. This displeases me. Automatically I reach for a menu to display this, but then remember I am outside of the system, in the real. This gives me goosebumps. I watch as my flesh shivers, and small puckered dots appear on my arms. The symmetry is pleasing, but the sensation is vulgar. I do not control it, no symbol conveys it. The experience is reductive. It cannot be translated non-verbally, it is primitive. - -Dismissing these thoughts, I click on the empathy menu and perform my daily search for new emotions. There must never be too many, and I am pleased there is always a carefully maintained number. Today there is a new *depressed* emoticon. Its expression is clear, the design is clean and simple. Next to this there is an emoticon that is disfigured. This troubles me. It has been deformed *intentionally*. To convey what? Is disfigurement an emotion? This distresses me because it cannot be clearly understood. - -I need to communicate my distress to another; I choose Cody. Cody’s avatar has a soothing green halo. Cody is online. He is part of what I am part of. This is comforting. I type that I am confused by the new emoticons. - -After a moment he replies: *They are meant to be relatable to people who are disfigured.* - -I reply: *I do not know any disfigured people. Where is the uniformity of this experience? How can I experience it?* - -He does not reply. - -He is green. He is there. But he does not reply. - -Agitated, I repeat my query, but he does not reply. I send him a confused emoticon, but he does not reply. - -He is being barbaric. - -To distract myself from the uncertainty of our exchange, I tour some of my favourite sites. I read an article about the ongoing reduction of dialogue in personal exchanges; one person claims that language is a virus, and acronyms are a new symptom. I find this witty, so I leave a LOL in the comments. - -Comforted, I visit another site that I find reassuring, always so neat and carefully laid out. I leave a comment, explaining my confusion about the latest emoticons. Suddenly the feed is littered with a barrage of even newer symbols. I can make no sense of them. One person says this is *emoticon roulette*, another announces a game of *blank emoticon fever*. I think these people are radicals. Agitators. - -One of them tries to engage with me, bombarding me with inane questions. *How does a smile feel? How many tears are enough for a release?* They are skin crawlers. Organic ghouls. - -I give them nothing, hoping it will starve them. - -*Aren't the happiest songs sad?* they press. *Isn't tragedy cathartic?* I shudder. They are senseless. Beyond that, they have surrendered to a discordant chorus within which they could hear nothing true. They are unpleasant. - -Becoming distressed, I leave them to their actions. Despite the new day, the new dawn, they are not wholly disconnected from flesh. Sensation drives them, influences them still. Their thoughts are unstable, I can tell this. - -I return to my main friend hub. Janet is green. She welcomes me with a *happy* emoticon besides a *depressed* one. This angers me. - -I ask: *Are you happy or sad?* - -She replies: *I am both.* - -I stare at this. *Explain.* - -She says: *He has come back to me. Even though I know he will break my heart, I put it back in his hands.* - -I scroll through my emoticon menu, looking for something to counter the cognitive dissonance of her words, but there is nothing. I am upset with her, and with the menu of small round faces. I want to respond with *confusion*, but I also wish to better externalise my *disgust*, my *anger*, my *fear*, my *worry*. But sending all is the same as sending none. - -My fingers hover over the keys. I remember that article – if language is a virus, if I allow it she will infect me. Prolonged communication is unnecessary. It is not clear. It is not precise. - -I think of Janet and her lover. Their intimacy is physical, I know. Two lives sharing one. When their bodies merge, as they must, is there an avatar for this? For the shifting, developing shapes that come? How do they live in such a way? Why is it allowed? - -Janet says: *Are you happy for me?* Her words are provocative, as if I should understand her. Her reactions have become fluid. Fluidity is volatile. Why isn’t she clear? - -I say: *You ask me to be happy because you are both happy and sad?* - -She replies: *Please.* - -I reply: *You scare me.* - -She replies: *I’m sorry.* - -I change my halo to red, and I push myself away from my terminal. Just a little way, I do not want to be outside of its glow. I just want a little dark corner to myself, to think. There is not much darkness in my pod, there is nothing unnecessary here. - -As infants, they taught us through the emoticons. They taught us to relate through pictures, but they never encouraged us to put the pictures away. - -How did people like Janet do it? She thinks it is common, when it is not. I think of those people in the early pods, those very first to withdraw, to find tranquillity. How happy must they have been. How relieved. Strange, to think that people once lived together. That they interlocked. Odd, that some still did. - -Janet distracts me. I think again of the warmth she must share – her body connected to another’s – the primitive urges that she is clinging onto. It is good to be more progressive. Still, she confuses, her actions unnerve. I can perceive her unnaturalness, but can think of no symbol to relate it. - -This is not relatable, so it must be false. - -We were young together, Janet and I, but we are not alike. I do not know her now. I must tell the others. Warn them. Even if I must use words, I am using them for good. Once people know she was lingering – indulging – in flesh, she will be corrected. Their reaction will correct her. - -I move deftly through my closest hubs and relay my experience, share her behaviour. Little avatars begin blinking in outrage. The others agree. My friends compliment me on my quick action, my sure thought. I feel a soothing rush of relief. As if I could ever have doubted them. - -I sit back and watch as her data is bounced around. As her weakness is pored over. Exposed. It spreads quickly. Her identity. Her errors. Her regressions. No one wants her disruption, so they disrupt her first. Janet's life unravels rapidly as everyone grabs a thread. The hubs all rejecting her. Sudden isolation will make her indiscrete deviations untenable. - -It isn't judgement. It is sobering intervention. I bathe in the glow of this. It is beautiful to see. To feel. They are grateful. I am loved. Secure. We all nurture each other. Everything wrong will be excised. - -Janet tries to contact me, again and again, but I ignore her. We are all together. In harmony. It is so pure. - -I go green, and abandon words. I return to my avatars. It is bliss. We are all small round faces. Clear and happy. I am not infected. I am normal. I am natural. - -I select a smiley that comforts me, and *click*. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Emoticon** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744233797709609).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/Greg-NAPP.md b/content/issue-33/Greg-NAPP.md deleted file mode 100644 index c517d55e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/Greg-NAPP.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,290 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Greg: Not a People Person" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- L.P. Ring -copyright: '© L.P. Ring 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "L.P. Ring's story arrived draped in caveats, that it was more psychologically weird than a piece of speculative fiction. Nicely timed, because being also crime fiction it intersected neatly with my urge to extend Mythaxis to include that genre too. Thus we return to our non-theme for a second dose of alienation – or do we? I guess that might be a matter of perspective…" - -image: images/Greg10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [David-Karich](https://pixabay.com/photos/man-eyes-portrait-face-masculine-358969/), [Erik_Karits](https://pixabay.com/photos/blattella-germanica-german-cockroach-5926225/), [Brett_Hondow](https://pixabay.com/photos/rain-drops-surface-wet-1144448/), and [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acajou.jpg)." - -type: stock -slug: greg-not-a-people-person -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}x{{}}July 8 (evening) - -*There are over 4,000 species of cockroach. Only about thirty species ever share our space.* - -It skitters from beneath my laundry basket, but doesn’t attempt flight until I trap it beneath my Great British Beer Festival polycarbonate pint glass. I balance a paperback on the receptacle’s base, sit cross-legged, and watch its impotent flutters. I can’t tell yet if it eventually tires or comes to some wearied acceptance of its new circumstances, returning my stare from its temporary home, wondering whether this is a stalemate or the prelude to something far more fatal. - -*Cockroaches live in almost any environment, even somewhere as cold as the Arctic Circle.* - -I’m edgy already from their arguing next door: his voice lower, snarky-toned; hers higher-pitched and pleading. He isn’t doing enough around the house. But he also works damn hard putting food in the cupboard and the refrigerator so that she can make FUCKING SLOP every time she turns on the stove. Something ceramic smashes on the floor. It’s his fist which slams into the wall. - -I pierce air holes in a Tupperware lid. He calls her a bad word, the bad word, and tells her he hates her. He’s moving out as soon as he can. She lets out loud, fitful sobs, while I edge the lid underneath the beer glass and move my new roommate to the kitchen table. It aims a few angry thumps at the plastic. I turn it right side up on the table, securely add tape around the sides. - -“If you learn to trust me,” I promise, “I’ll move you to more spacious surroundings.” - -I take deep breaths, wondering at how women like *her* end up with knuckle-dragging apes like him. Do they actively seek out abusers? Are they naturally drawn to trash? - -A plate smashes against the wall. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}July 9 (morning) - -*The Russians once sent cockroaches into space. Where they mated and bred.* - -A front door slamming wakes me. He’s already striding towards the station, air pods shoved into his ears. She cried half the night, occasionally calling his name, begging him to come to bed. My house guest is still on the kitchen table. - -The milk smells iffy but I use it anyway. I spoon up the cereal while Michael sits there, his feelers occasionally twitching. Is he hungry? I haven’t decided to give him official licence to the refrigerator and cupboards just yet. I get ready beneath the eye of the clock; faking a cold would allow me to wear a mask and avoid shaving. I’m running two minutes early when she knocks. - -*Cockroaches are quite social creatures. But ones bred in isolation and introduced to a quorum will often not recognise social cues.* - -“Please, I just need a cup of sugar,” she all but whispers when I crack the door against the chain. - -I think of the unopened half kilo stashed in the cupboard above the sink. “Just a minute.” I grab the bag, wary of the paper tearing and drowning me in sugar. I glance Michael’s way. “You’d love some of this, wouldn’t you?” I ask on my way back. - -I unhook the chain and open the door just enough. “Here.” - -She lets out a nervous titter: “Not *that* much.” - -“I don’t even use the stuff,” I mutter. - -She’s tied her hair back. No make-up, her face still blotched from crying. She’s wearing those blue stretch pants with the t-shirt that shows off her midriff as she runs. She takes the packet and a nail grazes my hand – our first physical contact. “Did I hear you talking to someone?” - -Stab of panic. “My boss phoned. He wants me in fifteen minutes early. So…” - -“I’m sorry.” She steps back, a half-invitation to walk past. - -I have my keys. I have my wallet. I have my phone. I inch out the gap and shut the door behind me. I’ll spend the rest of the day worried I’ve left on the gas. - -“I hope we didn’t worry you last night. Darrell and I had such a terrible fight.” - -I shake my head and circle around her. “I’m a heavy sleeper, *Juhn-nuhn-funf*—” I try for her name but my voice plops out a half-strangled blob of consonants and vowels. - -She calls out a goodbye as I flee. - -Does this mean I’ll have to pretend I work fifteen minutes earlier for the next week? - -*Cockroaches might be able to survive a nuclear war. But I can’t be sure they would survive radiating in my awkward shame.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}July 9 (evening) - -She’s been baking. I steal into my apartment before she can force me to take some. Darrell arrives home soon after, and for a while all I hear is murmuring. I eat a bowl of cereal while I contemplate which of the battalion of stir-in sauces best suits brown pasta. - -Michael occasionally flicks a well-observed, disdainful antenna my way. “Keep up that attitude,” I warn, wagging a spoon, “and you’ll miss out on this evening’s culinary extravaganza.” - -*Some cockroach species are raised as pets. But Michael is not a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.* - -Voices rise again around 8.30. I fork two pasta spirals to mop up some leftover sauce. This time it’s about money and that bloke at the gym. He calls her the bad word, a LYING CHEATING BAD WORD. A better neighbour would call the police. Michael would be a better neighbour if he could. - -I take the tomato-smeared plate and fork to the sink and wash up noisily. Water blasts off the metal base of the sink, off the plate and drowns my left shirt sleeve and crotch. “Fuck!” I holler, hoping they don’t think that’s directed at them. I leave the plate in the sink. Maybe it’ll attract more friends for Michael. - -A loud thump next door is followed by a sustained period of silence. I put an ear to the wall. Michael lets out a little flutter, his wings tapping against the plastic – perhaps he disapproves of nosiness. I make a shushing gesture. - -“Greg, can you hear me?” I leap back two feet, my back jamming into the desk, causing Michael’s tub to rattle back and forth. “Greg, are you there?” - -I silently curse building management for making us put names on our downstairs letter boxes. No, it doesn’t encourage sociability, or a greater sense of community spirit – we’re British. Michael flits against the plastic again, earning a wagging finger and a hissed rebuke. - -I hear footsteps heading to her door and the whine of the hinges. I snap off the light, cower in the darkness, barely letting out a breath. A gentle rapping against my door is followed by low and urgent whispers of my name. It takes ten minutes before she gives up. - -I feel my way to the kitchen, pat around under the sink until I find the flashlight. - -*An Ancient Greek poet coined a name for cockroaches (Lucifuga) based on their preferences for the dark. I don’t know if that’s pronounced with a hard or a soft ‘C’.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}July 10 (until Morning) - -I awake with a start, fumble for my phone; it is barely past two. - -In my dream, Jennifer kept knocking at the door, begging me to open it. The handle kept slipping from my hand. The flapping of wings behind me and overhead almost drowned out her cries. But I could hear Darrell’s voice bellowing above it all, calling her more disgusting names, threatening her. - -*Most cockroaches are nocturnal.* - -I pop a beer tab and sip it at the dinner table, thinking of my exhaustion and considering whether tomorrow might be a good time for a sick day. I’ve made my decision by the time I finish the beer. - -I knock lightly, a sliver of me hoping that she won’t hear, or will but won’t answer. If I can discern it as the latter, I can pare away some of the guilt. When I hear her footsteps, I don’t scuttle back indoors. - -“I’m here to help,” I half-stutter. Her face is in shadow, the ceiling light like a halo overhead. She steps aside and lets me pass. Her hands and arms are smeared in blood, one eye puffy from a blow. I only notice the meat cleaver after she’s shut us in. - -*A decapitated cockroach can live for up to a week. A disarticulated one can regrow its limbs through different stages of moulting. It can even regrow its feelers too, though I understand that’s a longer process.* - -Darrell met his end via a kitchen knife lodged into his sternum. She’s laid her deceased beau out on the plastic shower curtain on the bathroom floor. “It’s easiest to separate bone at the joints, so I’ve focused on the knees and elbows so far.” - -Maybe Jennifer doesn’t need my help. She’s already managed to remove parts of three of the limbs. She nudges me with her elbow, a definite improvement on a stray nail. “How would you feel about handling the head? I can separate myself mentally pretty easily by not looking at his face, but… you know.” - -Decapitation doesn’t take very long with a good meat cleaver, though what’s also true is that even six hours after death a body still bleeds a hell of a lot. Jennifer bites her lower lip as we watch it flow. “That’s bound to get walked onto the carpet.” - -I glance towards our handiwork, now stacked in the tub. Thirteen recycle bags not counting the torso. I wonder if Michael misses me. I wonder if he’s jealous of my being here. - -*Cockroaches are omnivores. Which is a posh way of saying they’ll eat anything. But as far as we go as a food source, they’re most partial to the fingernails, eyelashes, and dead skin. They prefer us for what we throw away, what we waste.* - -“You don’t drive, do you?” My confirmation brings disappointment. “We’ll need to take different directions: bury some, drop some into the river attached to a weight, maybe even burn some. Shame it isn’t closer to Halloween.” - -“I have a bicycle.” - -“Hmm…” She blows a piece of errant fringe off her forehead, frowns when it drops back down. There are a few blood smears on her chin, one streaked down the right side of her nose. “We should wash up and change. Your bathroom okay?” - -*Cockroaches can go without breathing for about forty minutes. They can survive submerged in water, though not for very long.* - -I leave the door off the chain. I put Michael – despite his protestations – where she won’t see him. I’m not ready to drag my roommate into a murder just yet. She taps lightly before entering, bringing coconut shampoo, towels, and a change of clothes. - -“Bathroom’s through there,” I point, still avoiding much eye contact. “Take whatever time you need. I’ll make coffee.” - -“I like what you’ve done with the place. Very minimalistic.” Soon water’s gushing from the shower faucet. Dawn’s inching forwards, bringing a new day. This is the best I’ve felt about a new day in a long time. - -*Cockroaches definitely sleep and will often be found at rest in moist, dark areas.* - -She takes her coffee black, no sugar. I mumble about work, the weather, if the landlord’s increasing the rent again. She doesn’t answer – which is bad. She doesn’t sigh or yawn like Pippa from accounting though – which is good. At seven o’clock I make a quick, terse call to the boss to say my tonsillitis is playing up. We’ll need to discuss my performance once I return to work. - -“Prick,” I mumble after hanging up. - -“I’ll see you later then,” Jennifer says, finishing her coffee. “It’s best we take care of things after dark. And I can’t take two days off work in a row.” - -Oh. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}July 10 (Evening) - -*Cockroaches have excellent olfactory range, even able to identify different quorums by scent.* - -I spend the day fashioning a new home for Michael from a plastic container bought in Wilkos. He seems happier with this wider space, and after thoroughly exploring his new abode settles in to munch on some deli stuff I almost tossed. I hear Jennifer come home and wonder what she’ll be doing now that dickhead isn’t around to cook and bake for. - -My summons comes via text. She’s changed back into the blood-stained gym clothes. “You’re not going to believe this,” she says, letting me in, “but I’ve had visitors. My stupid fault for turning the bathroom light off.” She gestures towards the tub. - -I let out a low moan at the smathered innards. An antennae droops limply up and down from one, a stray leg budges slightly from another. I retch and find I have nothing tangible to bring up. - -*Entomologists believe cockroaches lack pain receptors. These charlatans also believe that cockroaches don’t suffer, as they lack emotions. The cockroaches lack emotions, I mean, not the dickhead entomologists.* - -“How do you suppose the fuckers got in?” - -“Probably up the plughole.” I watch as Jennifer runs the shower faucet, sluicing them back to their community. It’s an act of fair warning, like a native tribe sending the brutalised corpses of Amazonian explorers back downriver. I won’t introduce Jennifer to Michael yet. - -The recycle bags crinkle as Jennifer transfers a lower arm, an upper arm, a foot, and a leg to the first black bag. “I picked up a small shovel at the store as well. Cycle at least a few miles. And dig deep, or some wretched mutt gets something to munch on when let off the leash.” - -Jennifer stays behind, finishing the draining of each bag. I make damn sure to have my lamp on as I ride, constantly imagining police cars waiting around every corner to give me a caution and ask what’s in that backpack mate. Three trips in and with only south to go, I’ve finally found a use for my iPhone’s compass. His head goes in the river with two of her aerobics dumbbells added as weights. That leaves only the torso; she’s thinking of renting a car for that trip. - -I wonder at how I haven’t slept. About how good Jennifer looks, even in those bloody exercise clothes. At how stripping off her top shows how at ease she feels around me. I wonder if Michael’s missing me, and how exactly I’m going to handle introductions. Maybe a dinner for three, if I can be sure of Michael’s table manners. *“Michael, meet Jennifer. Cockroach killer, meet cockroach.”* - -Jennifer’s dispensed with her sweatpants by the time I return from my final dump. The way her panty line shifts while she scrubs the bath shows she sunbathes naked. The torso’s well-wrapped: recycle bags, then black bagged, then duct taped. I can imagine years from now some construction worker immediately having a premonition that this should never be opened. - -She stands up, and wipes sweat from her brow without bothering much to hide that she knows I’m admiring her. Her ex’s electric toothbrush is still buzzing in her hand. - -“What do you want for all this, Greg?” - -*Cockroaches copulate facing away from each other*. - -I try the well-meaning neighbour route, talk about what I heard, and how what she did was self-defence. The toothbrush, off now, gets balanced alongside an empty bottle of bleach on the end of the admittedly quite clean bath. She leans on the doorjamb, biding her time until I stumble to an awkward silence. - -“I’m not looking for a relationship, you understand. I’ve been hurt. I’ll need time.” - -Here we go again. A woman telling me what she wants before I’ve gotten a word out. - -“If you wanna fuck, we can fuck.” She starts unhitching her bra. I stare at my shoes, mumbling that I don’t want it to be like that. - -“Then you’re willing to wait. Until I’m ready.” - -I hope she doesn’t take my vehement nods as a sign of surrender. - -“Thank you, Greg.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}July 13 (morning) - -I call in sick the next few days, tolerating my boss’ complaints while assuring him I’ll have a doctor’s note when I return “tomorrow”. He doesn’t use the term “idiot” when finally informing me that tomorrow’s a Saturday, but I get the drift from his tone. - -Jennifer rents a car with a sizable boot. I hear her staggering down the stairs in the small hours and driving away, no knock for help this time. I hear her go to work and come home. - -I hear music coming from her apartment. - -I wait. She’s gone through something traumatic. She’ll need time before being able to love again. But I can’t help feeling bitter at the exclusion. Michael wanders around his new home. He doesn’t even care he’s stepping in his own leavings. - -*Cockroach faeces tend to measure about one inch. They usually defecate near their homes.* - -The moving truck is a shock. Jennifer’s voice echoes up the staircase, directing where to go and what to be careful with. I peer out through the gap in the door, catch her eye once before shutting it quickly. She looks flushed, worried. I guess the apartment just has too many unhappy memories. The men – big blokes who wouldn’t think twice about squashing me to help a lady in distress – yell directions and barter off-colour humour. - -Boxes appear in the driveway. There’s the dining table she would have sat at with him. There are the slats from the IKEA bed on which they fucked. - -I phone the landlord to check he knows the tenants next door are moving out – a Machiavellian act that earns Michael’s congratulations. His arrival provokes yelling on the stairs and insistences that they aren’t getting a penny of their deposit back. Jennifer tells him to shove the deposit up his arse. “I’m leaving and there isn’t a damn thing you can do!” - -The remainder of the conversation, conducted in lower tones, can best be described as strained. The same goes for my hearing as I manage to catch that she’ll return the keys to the real estate agency by five. - -My iPhone signals I have less than two hours to get her alone. To beg her to stay. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}July 13 (evening) - -*Cockroaches tend to be at their most active about four hours after dark. Tread carefully when taking a night-time piss or getting a glass of water.* - -At 4.30, the wheels of Jennifer’s suitcase trundle down the stairs as she drags it after her. Michael wishes me a *bonne chance* as I unlock the door and chase after her. I feel like one of those guys running through an airport, trying to reach the departure gate before final boarding closed. - -“Don’t leave!” That I’m brandishing my key instead of a bunch of flowers isn’t the only problem. The expressions that greet my appearance in the driveway suggest that I’ve failed with any positive, romantic impression. Her grimace shows just how much she wants to be gone. - -The burliest of the movers steps towards me, t-shirt sleeves riding up to show his West Ham tattoos. “Steady on now, mate. You’re not going to cause this nice lady any trouble.” I’m not even sure how conscious he is of his right fist clenching and unclenching. The two others exchange grins. Their working day’s going to end with a floor show. - -“Jennifer, don’t make me tell!” She sticks the suitcase in the boot and slams it. She stalks up to me and shoves a finger in my chest; the nail will surely have left a mark. - -“What do you want to tell people, Greg? That you’re a sad little prick who creeps on other men’s girlfriends?” Someone from the cheap seats lets out a chortle. “What else is there to tell?” - -“Where’s your boyfriend, Jennifer?” I lean forward. She rears back, nose wrinkling, sneering her distaste. That hurts. “I bet you didn’t check the drains, did you? There aren’t just cockroach remains down there.” Her eyes widen, that sneer disappearing as her jaw goes slack. “Come upstairs, Jennifer. You owe me that.” - -I head back inside. Despite being relatively sure of myself, I’m still relieved to hear her follow, and to hear her tell the Hammers fans she’s fine, just fine, and to wait there. Upstairs, I push my door open and motion her ahead, savouring the smell of coconut as she passes. - -“You’ve got two minutes. Keep the damn door open and your hands visible.” - -“I’m not the one who killed her boyfriend, Jennifer.” - -“But you *are* the creepy little incel trying to blackmail his neighbour into bed. Two minutes.” - -I can feel my heart thumping, shame’s heat rising to my face. If only we could begin again, introductions for the first time, as if none of this bad feeling had ever come about. The least I can try is to do the introductions on someone else’s behalf. - -“What the hell is that?” she says as I hold the tupperware out to her. - -I try not to let the incredulity bother me. “Jennifer, meet Michael. Michael, Jennifer.” He offers a quick flutter from his box. - -*Those same rotten entomologists claim that cockroaches have little memory or ability to absorb information. They can suck my cock!* - -I reach out my free hand, hoping a physical connection might somehow bridge the gap between us. There’s that momentary brush of nail on skin again before she rakes those claws down the back of my hand full force, sending Michael’s home skating across the room and against the wall. - -The lid pops off and, for the first time in what was for the rest of England almost a full working week, Michael is free. - -“Michael!” I cry as he rises into the air. Then Jennifer places her hands on my shoulders, turning me and pulling me towards her, and I don’t even see the knee aimed towards my crotch. - -As I vomit on all fours, a loud cry is followed by the sound of a slap, by the sound of wings fluttering against the floor, by a stamp. I twist round, my attention swaying between the look of revulsion on her face and my little world of nauseated pain. - -I curl up and wait for things to end; her hot breath brushes against my ear. “Greg, never forget you’re at least an accessory. After what’s happened today, don’t for a second think I can’t tell a story that’ll convince people you’re the one the cops should be cuffing.” - -Her footsteps stomp on the stairs, then there’s the slamming of the front door. Through the gap in the bathroom window, before the engines started, I’m sure I hear shared laughter. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}x{{}}*A cockroach’s body is divided into three segments. They can go without nourishment for a month. They can regrow limbs, live without a head for a week, maybe even survive a nuclear conflict. But they can’t survive the well-aimed sole of an ill-considered shoe.* - -There’s no sound from next door. The noises from the street disturb me. I think of going outside, railing against each blundering fool on the staircase and the pavement who won’t allow me a moment’s peace. My apartment is dark except for one desk lamp’s bulb. Michael lies in state, laid out in the Tupperware box he loved. - -Except of course that he wasn’t a Michael at all. Rather, *she* was a Michelle. I should have known from the wing size and the fuller body. - -There’s scampering along the skirting boards. My fellow mourners are skittish in their approach. I mean them no harm. This is a time for grief, for remembering what *we* have lost. My Michelle, gregarious, flirty, and thoughtful, was from a community far greater than the fractured mess of egos and lies of this cruel human world. - -I finish another can, and wonder if the off-licence is still open. I ignore that hammering at the door. - -I wonder if I can fashion something as a black armband. And if, after a time, Michelle’s kin will accept me. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Greg: Not a People Person** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744236571042665).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/ShortReviews.md b/content/issue-33/ShortReviews.md deleted file mode 100644 index e6cc092e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/ShortReviews.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – January to March" -date: 2023-04-04 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Our second new feature is a brief collection of further reading recommendations. There are many good magazines out there publishing a lot of great short stories, and it’s far too easy for little gems of both categories to go overlooked. Therefore, in each issue we would like to nominate a trio of recent pieces from around the web that you’ll find well worth sampling." - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-spring-2023 -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}B{{}}eing one of a select few publications to have generously hosted your humble editor’s own creative output, I ought to be shame-faced in saying that [*Metaphorosis Magazine*](https://magazine.metaphorosis.com/) lives up to its billing as a home to *“intelligent, beautifully written stories for adults”*. Fortunately, there is better evidence than mine. - -A prime example is Chris Panatier’s contemporary fantasy [**The Excursionist of JCPenney**](https://magazine.metaphorosis.com/story/2023/the-excursionist-of-jcpenney-chris-panatier/). It introduces us to Lorraine, a quietly awkward older Floridian of limited means and experiences, whose ordinary existence is unwittingly balanced on the precarious edge of corporate whim, as are so many. The simple telling of her life in a period of approaching crisis gradually opens our eyes to something far less mundane at play, and the result is a wholly good-natured reward for someone who has put up with a life’s trials, old and new, large and small, as do so many. - -[*The Fabulist*](https://fabulistmagazine.com/) observes that *“Art saves lives and changes the world”*, and does its bit towards that ideal goal by presenting more of the seemingly mundane in Andy Searce’s [**Ansible**](https://fabulistmagazine.com/ansible/), named for the iconic, technologically magical tool of communication that featured in the work of Ursula K. LeGuin. Unsurprisingly, a similar marvel features here. - -This flash piece glimpses a father and son, lonely but for each other, yet also self-sufficient. They persist through what could be the dustbowl of the Great Depression, or if not that then some present or future period of similar hardship. Through them we are allowed to witness a fleeting, touching moment… and then that moment is over, and the reader is left to decide for themself whether what transpired is transformative for all concerned – or simply a thing that happened once, in lives that must and will continue on regardless. - -And for contrast with these, let’s try something so far from the everyday it beggars belief to even consider the comparison. I won’t trouble to comment on what drives [*Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores*](https://cosmicrootsandeldritchshores.com/) as a venue; its name alone seems to do that quite thoroughly. The story [**Tomorrow is a Difficult Proposition**](https://cosmicrootsandeldritchshores.com/fiction-all/science-fiction/tomorrow-is-a-difficult-proposition/), on the other hand, by Kris Bowser, I will. It’s an unexpectedly wild ride, given its opening phase: a reality-spanning spatio-temporal rollercoaster all in pursuit of a missed opportunity, an oversight – *another mundanity*, in fact, a commonplace occurrence of the sort that might become a source of life-long regret, and in this case fuels a radically more expansive quest to regain something lost. - -I caught from it an echo of Ted Chiang’s *The Story of Your Life* – a terribly unfair association to inflict on any story, and one which you should certainly ignore. Except, there *is* a certain general thematic similarity, of course, taken from an opposite perspective. And, as a reviewer, it’s always worth stubbing your toe on one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written if it means you can accidentally recommend it all over again. - -I’ll try not to do that in the next Short Reviews as well. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of these three great stories on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744234274376228).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/TheDayTheShimmStoodStill.md b/content/issue-33/TheDayTheShimmStoodStill.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4b215eab..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/TheDayTheShimmStoodStill.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,413 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Day the Shimm Stood Still" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Andrew Jensen -copyright: '© Andrew Jensen 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Not every adolescent dynamic is a bleak one, even when events take a turn for the worse. Still, the starkest traumas of childhood can be as simple and commonplace as arising from the gaining and losing of friends. But Andrew Jensen's story suggests that maybe good nature heals all wounds." - -image: images/Shimm10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [giselaatje](https://pixabay.com/photos/naughty-boy-sweet-face-cute-4117665/), [RyanMcGuire](https://pixabay.com/photos/lights-night-neon-light-trails-238455/), [duangha](https://pixabay.com/photos/bokeh-blue-light-blue-neon-1514380/), and [merlinlightpainting](https://pixabay.com/photos/girl-portrait-neon-abstract-6058990/)." - -type: stock -slug: the-day-the-shimm-stood-still -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}R{{}}ick showed up just before school was out for the summer. He stood out right away. His red hair was down to his shoulders. I’d never seen anyone with hair that red before. For some reason, long hair on Rick didn’t make him look like a girl. His freckles were amazing: they almost covered his face. But it was his grin that I really liked. He grinned like he’d heard a joke and the rest of us just had to hear it too. - -It was almost the end of the term, and the teachers had given up on class work. Rick’s first day was a “field day” and we were outside in the sun. The teachers had timers, and we had to stand around waiting until it was our turn to do an “event”. First we had to run and jump into a sand-box for the long-jump. I sucked at that: I fell backwards and they measured where my butt landed, not my feet. We all laughed at that, but I got the worst score, which was embarrassing. Then I hit the pole for the high-jump three times in a row. What’s the point of throwing yourself to the ground, even if they’ve put down padding? The ground is always hard. When I got to try the 100 meter dash, I pretended that someone was chasing me. I came in second. - -We stood around between events. Normally we’d all be on our phones, playing games or listening to music, or sneaking notes around. That day the teachers made us leave our phones indoors. They said it was so we could enjoy the day. We were bored. - -Rick cheered us up. He was full of information we’d never known before. Like how you could make yourself faint if you hold your breath hard and do 100 fast sit-ups. Two of us threw up trying that one. Best field day ever! - -Field day was always boring. The same people won all the events. We were supposed to be learning about Earth Traditions. The events were supposed to be from the Limpic games. Why bother? We already play lots of digital games from Earth. Making us do all this jumping around is just mean. - -We started calling them “Limpic” last year, because so many of us ended up limping. Like I said, the ground is always hard. - -Rick said that his dad came from Earth, although *Rick* was born here, so that was okay. Rick’s dad told him about stuff called grass, that made the surface soft. I tried to imagine a whole planet that cushioned you when you fell. Stupid rich Earthers! All we have on New Normandy is rock. But they say it’s full of metal, and valuable, hence why we’re here. - -When Rick ran out of stories we bragged about our scars. Rick had the best: he could take out his two front teeth. He showed us, and stood there, grinning like an idiot. He looked so happy. Then he popped them back in before any teachers noticed. - -I wish I could be as happy as he looked. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} wanted Rick to like me, so I showed him the Train Bridge. - -I live close to the river. None of us are supposed to play there. We do anyway, but we try to make sure our parents don’t find out. It’s important to come home dry. - -There were always more Shimm near the river, but that wasn’t what I wanted to show Rick. Sure, they looked nice floating and shimmering over the water. But I had something a lot better. - -My hiding place under the bridge. - -We live on an island, so there are two bridges. One goes to the city, and I’ve crossed that one to go to an appointment. I live close to the other one. It crosses the river to the wilds, where the deep mines are. - -Last summer, I learned to scramble up the rocks to the top of the concrete where the bridge leaves the island. It’s dark there between the huge support beams under the rails, the only light shines down in between the stone ties. One of the ties had split, and a chunk had fallen out in the middle. The hole was big enough to lift your head up through the space while an ore train was rattling over. An older kid told me he’d done it. I didn’t dare: I thought I would lose my head. Just being under there when the trains went over was terrifying. My Parent would never let me go there if they knew about it. So I figured it would impress Rick. - -“My Dad said that on Earth, rail ties are made of wood,” he said when we had climbed up. - -“Do you think that’s true?” I asked. - -“Nah. No one has that much money. That’s just the kind of bragging Earth people do.” - -I nodded. Everyone at school knew how Earth people bragged. The science teachers told us about Earth trees, and how one day we’d have them here, as soon as the soil had built up enough to stop using hydroponics. We’d all talked about it afterwards, and figured that it was impossible. It was like the stories adults used to read us about lions and pandas and dragons. Sure, you could grow one in a vat, but they’d be way too dangerous to let loose. - -Rick looked around the hiding place and smiled approvingly. He poked the places where the hot silicone from the trains had splashed and dripped. - -“That must burn,” he said. “Has it ever dripped on you?” - -I nodded, and showed him an old scar on my arm. Rick looked impressed. - -“So, when does the next train come through?” he asked. - -“I don’t know.” Why did he have to embarrass me with a question like that? - -“No problem, let’s check the schedule.” Rick pulled out his phone. - -“Won’t work,” I muttered. “We’re surrounded by metal here. No signal. Besides, how can you get a schedule for ore trains?” - -“I have some really good apps. I got them from my Dad. He doesn’t have a single decent password.” - -Rick worked for a moment, and then held his phone up through the hole in the ties. Then he brought his hand back down. - -“Looks like it’ll be about an hour,” he said. - -“Wow! I never thought of reaching above the tracks.” - -“It’s no big deal. Phone stuff is overrated. Useful, but boring.” I wondered about that. None of my other friends could live without their phones. He went on: “Look, you’ve got this really cool place. Why would you want to play a phone game here? Let’s go look at the Shimm.” - -I was fine with that. The Shimm are hard to see in the daylight, but in the shadow under the bridge we could see lots. They were all different colors and sizes that day, floating around each other, almost like they were alive. - -“You’ve got a lot of them here,” remarked Rick, as if the river were my private kingdom. I grinned. - -“They seem to like the bridge, and the water,” I blurted out. Then I stopped, horrified. “I know they’re not alive,” I added. I didn’t want Rick to think I was some gullible little kid. “I know they checked for life before they Terraformed. They’re just an effect of all the metal in the rocks here.” - -Rick shrugged, and started examining the pebbles by the water. “An *effect*. That just means no one knows what they are. I kind of like the idea that they’re alive. The big ones are the adults, that’s why they’re so slow. The little ones are the kids. But they’re all restless. Even the old slow ones never stop moving.” - -“Then why haven’t they tried talking to us?” I asked. I could remember trying to talk to them when I was little, first using words, then a flashlight. Was Rick teasing me? - -“Maybe they have nothing to say,” he answered. “Or maybe they’re like dogs or cats. Smart, but they don’t talk.” He had selected a couple of pebbles, and he looked up. “Watch this.” - -For a long moment, Rick watched some of the smaller Shimm darting over the water. Then he took aim, and let fly a bulls-eye shot. The pebble hit the little yellow Shimm dead-center, and then moved with it, like it was stuck. - -“See, they can play catch,” he said, grinning. - -“There’s a lot of metal in that rock, that’s all,” I answered. Rick *was* making fun of me! - -“Yeah, but watch *this*.” Rick threw the second pebble just as perfectly as the first. I was shocked when the first pebble shot away from the Shimm, right back to Rick! - -I don’t know if the Shimm caught the second pebble. I just saw the returning pebble hit Rick in the head with a funny sound. Rick fell to the ground. - -I cut my scalp once at school. It bled so much that some kids went home and told their folks that I’d died. I was famous for days. - -Rick’s wound didn’t bleed much at all. He just lay there, silent. Was he dead? Did his red hair soak up all the blood from his scalp? Was he dead? Could they charge a Shimm with murder? Would they charge *me* with murder? Killing the coolest guy at school? It wasn’t my fault! - -“Ow. That really hurt,” said Rick, sitting up. “Lucky he got me on the steel plate.” - -“You have a steel plate in your head?” I gasped it out. - -“Yeah. I was chasing a Shimm, and I didn’t notice it had gone past the edge of a cliff.” He looked down at his legs. “That’s when I knocked out my teeth. Broke a leg, too. I was laid up for the rest of the summer. I don’t ever want to be that bored again. That’s when I got good at phone games. Now even the new ones are boring.” - -A whistle sounded from across the river. An ore train coming our way. - -“Quick, let’s get up there!” said Rick. He scrambled up the rocks without stopping to cover his cut or anything. I could barely follow, he was so fast. - -We both got more and more excited as the rumbling of the train grew nearer. Rick wanted to look out the hole to watch the train coming, but I stopped him. “If they see you, they’ll put on the brakes. Then they’ll fix the hole and block off the whole space!” He nodded, and crouched down until the train was right overhead. - -It was louder than I remembered. It felt like an earthquake. We covered our ears, and it did no good at all. I could see Rick’s mouth moving as he shouted at me. I shouted back, “I can’t hear you!” I couldn’t hear *me*, either. - -Rick looked up. There was a hungry look in his eye. Then he stood up, his mouth wide open, like he was screaming. His head disappeared up into the hole in the broken tie. - -The rumbling went on forever. Rick’s hands waved wildly, and his feet jiggled and danced. Was he in pain, or just so happy he was freaking out? I uncovered my ears and started to reach to pull him down. - -Before I grabbed him, it was over. The earthquake rumble was replaced with a clattering sound, getting quieter as the ore-train headed across the island. Rick slumped onto the concrete. His hair was more messed-up than usual, and spattered with hot silicone grease. There were a couple of dots on his face that were starting to blister. His head was covered in dust but the dirt was already streaked with sweat, and the small trickle of blood from his pebble wound. - -He looked totally happy. - -“That was amazing!” he shouted. “When’s the next train?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“T{{}}hat was the last train,” Rick announced the next day. “I checked. Then Dad checked too.” - -“You told your father about my hiding place?” No grown-up had ever seen that place. Rick had betrayed me! - -“Weren’t you listening? It doesn’t matter. There aren’t going to be any more trains.” - -“There’ve never been many,” I answered. “Most of the time it’s just a cool place. And now it’s not a secret anymore. I’m going to be grounded forever.” - -Rick looked a little guilty, then. “My Dad doesn’t care. He won’t tell anyone.” - -“Are you sure?” I asked. - -“Yeah. Besides, they’re going to be tearing up the track soon.” - -“What?” - -“Yeah. They’re supposed to be replacing it with some Mag-Lev stuff. Dad says it’s ‘more appropriate for an up-and-coming planet’. He says ‘the old rails were fine for a pioneer place, but we should do better now’.” - -I couldn’t believe it. “What are we gonna do?” - -“He says the new trains will be quiet, and float in the air. He says that there’ll be a lot more passenger trains now, because it’s smoother. They’ll ride on magnetism, instead of rattling on rails, and they’ll go hundreds of kilometers an hour. They’ll be gone almost before they’re here.” - -I was furious. “I wish they were already gone. I wish I’d never showed you that place. Then this wouldn’t be happening.” - -“I didn’t do anything! Besides, you’re lucky. You’ve stuck your head up hundreds of times. For me, my first time is my last.” - -I couldn’t argue without letting him know I was chicken. There was no way I would tell him I’d never dared put my own head up. I just stomped off to sit under the train bridge, alone. I stomped extra-hard so he’d know how mad I was. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nother train did show up, but it was different. It wasn’t an ore train or a passenger train. This one had a big crane on the end, and a lot of flat cars. It went through our town and out across the river. We didn’t see it again for a couple of weeks. When it returned, it came slowly. Workers undid the bolts holding the rails to the ties, using welding torches sometimes. The lights of the welders on the bridge were like super-bright Shimm. Then the crane lifted the huge metal rails, and stacked them on the flat cars. Some rails were cut, and used to make side bars to hold the stack of rails higher and higher. When the train had passed, the rails were gone. The bridge was naked. - -We took souvenirs. Lumps of cut-off rail that got left behind. - -We argued about what to do with them. I took one piece that was small enough to carry but still looked like a piece of railroad. I put it on my dresser. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}o our surprise, the railway got busier and busier. They started drilling and blasting huge holes beside the level crossings. We were told that they were for tunnels to go under the new tracks. Super-fast Mag-Lev trains wouldn’t slow down for us, so no more level crossings. Big signs apologized for the inconvenience, and showed pictures of a beautiful, streamlined new train, flying along. I refused to admire the pictures. - -Fences started going up. They were tall, with thick coils of razor wire at the top. They said this would prevent people from being killed. The fence would surround the entire railway line. - -Most of the island would end up on the far side of the fences. The school was over there. The best stores were over there too. More importantly, Rick lived over there. He helped me scout out how we could get around the fences. - -“No short-cuts anymore,” he said. “That sucks. You have to go kilometers to use one of the tunnels.” - -I nodded glumly. This was looking worse and worse. - -“What about that place under the bridge?” asked Rick. “Is that getting blocked off?” - -“Good question!” I hadn’t been there in days. “Let’s go check.” - -We rode our bikes to the edge of the river. The Shimm were thick there, drifting or darting about. We ignored them. - -When we looked up at the bridge, it was clear that they were only starting to install that part of the fence. Posts were being welded to the huge support beams that ran across the river. The posts angled out and up past the ties to tower over the bridge. The bridge was being wrapped in a massive steel web. The beautiful new train would be caught in an ugly cage. - -“Look,” said Rick. “The posts are welded on half way down the beams. We can still get underneath.” - -“Yeah.” This looked good. “And with the water low right now, we can even get around the base to the other side by walking on the rocks. This can be our secret passage.” - -“Yeah, and even when the water is higher, we can use a boat or canoe to go under!” - -I thought about that. We had a small pedal-boat, but my Parent said not to use it near the bridge. The bridge was built where the river was shallow and fast, so there were rapids right across. The danger always made sense to me before, but if I said that to Rick I’d die of embarrassment. - -“And in the winter we can walk on the ice,” I added, lamely. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}ick and I missed the Grand Opening of the new train station. It was impressive on the outside. It was made of stone and steel and glass, of course, but they’d made it look fancy too. Kind of fake old-fashioned. I hadn’t seen the one at the other end of the island yet, but Rick and I figured it would be the same. - -We skipped the Grand Opening because it was happening at the same time as the first run of the high-speed train. It would stop at the station, and then cross the river for a short trip to show off its speed. The first two hundred people who got into the Grand Opening got a free ride. - -That was tempting. Neither one of us had ever been on a fancy mag-lev train before. But it would be disloyal to the old trains and tracks to run straight off to this new, beautiful machine. - -And as Rick pointed out, being underneath the train would be even more fun than being inside. Maybe, just maybe, it would be as exciting as the ore train. - -So there we were, under the bridge. We’d packed a lunch and set out early, so no one would notice and stop us. It was different this time. There was the fence, of course. And there were more Shimm than usual. Most of them were directly under the bridge, with only a few at the water level. They were all moving faster, too. Even the big, slow ones looked super-charged as they zipped around. - -There were even Shimm in my hiding place, just below the ties. I’d never seen that before. Even stranger, I noticed that Rick’s red hair had started to stand up, making his head look like a huge, solid Shimm, with a silly expression. - -“This is so cool,” said Rick. “They must have the magnetic field turned on already. I bet that’s what’s attracting the Shimm.” - -It was cool at first, but it became boring fast. Waiting is hard when you have to stay hidden. We finished our lunch by mid-morning, including most of the water we had brought. That created a new problem. - -“Have you ever tried peeing from up here?” asked Rick, looking down to the river. - -“A couple of times,” I answered. It had only been once, and I’d never told anyone about it before. - -“Did you ever hit a Shimm?” he asked, grinning. - -“Are you crazy? Those things are electric! They’d fry your wiener right off!” - -“No they wouldn’t,” he answered, unzipping his pants. “I’ve touched them before, and all you get is a tingle.” - -“Are you sure?” I asked. “Remember that one that threw the rock back at you? I never knew they could do that until you showed me. What else can they do?” I admired Rick’s bravery, but sometimes he just seemed reckless. Who would dare risk that? - -“Hmm,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” So we peed into the river, taking great care to miss the Shimm. I was so embarrassed I almost couldn’t pee at all. But it was that or explode, so I managed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}ick had brought a periscope. He and his dad made it once, and he dug it out for today. He carefully raised the top of it to look along the new tracks towards the station. - -“Man, this is taking forever,” he complained. “Why don’t they stop all the speeches?” - -Then he jerked his head back. “Hey, get out of there!” he shouted, and then sat down and started taking the periscope apart. When the bottom tube slid out of the top, a small Shimm darted out. “How did she get in there? I couldn’t see anything but orange!” - -He put the periscope back together and handed it to me. “Here, you have a look. Tell me what they’re doing.” - -I carefully slid the top of the periscope up over the stone tie. It wasn’t totally easy, since the magnetic field wanted to pull the metal up faster and higher, and we were afraid it might be seen. I managed to slide it up without being spotted, and reported: “They’re getting on the train.” - -“Let me see!” Rick was really eager. He grabbed the periscope and shoved me aside. “Yes, yes, yes!” He crouched back down and passed me the periscope. “Put this away.” - -“Don’t you want to watch the train coming?” I asked. - -“No time,” Rick explained. “This is a high-speed train. That other one was old and slow. This one could be past us in a few seconds, even if it does need to build up speed. I’m going to wait just below the top, and when I see it’s close, I’ll stick my head up like last time. It’ll be great!” - -“Don’t touch the rails,” I warned. We’d already talked about what could go wrong. Rick was sure that it would be safer than last time, which seemed to disappoint him. No hot silicone, he said. No wheels. Just a ride on a magnetic bed. It wouldn’t even be noisy. - -Rick half-crouched, half-stood where he could peer up. He was whispering, *“Come on, come on, come on.”* - -Then everything changed at once. It was quiet, but not silent. The air swished as the train approached. Rick stuck his head up, catching his shoulders on the edges of the stone tie. Everything seemed to crackle, and the periscope flew upwards, hitting my arm. My brain was buzzing. - -And I noticed something strange: the Shimm were standing still. That had *never* happened before. Each one was frozen, hanging in the air. - -Then Rick started to scream. - -It was the worst sound I’ve ever heard. It was so awful I didn’t even freeze: I just grabbed Rick around the waist and tried to pull him down, but I couldn’t. It must have been a short time, but it felt like forever. I wondered if he’d still have a head when I finally managed to pull him down. Then I realized he had to have a head, ’cause he was still screaming. I started to giggle. Then I was crying and giggling at the same time. And Rick was still screaming. And kicking. And flailing his arms. - -And then the train was gone and Rick fell down on top of me unconscious. I knew he wasn’t dead, because he was twitching. The top of his head was all bloody. A part of his scalp had peeled back, and a piece of metal showed through. When his head tipped sideways and blood ran out, I could even see a bit of brain! I couldn’t move. - -I watched as a few of the Shimm, free from whatever had held them, drifted towards Rick. Towards his wound. Or maybe the metal plate, I don’t know. But when they touched him, they vanished. - -They vanished into Rick’s brain. - -I’d never seen Shimm disappear before. Drift away, dart, fly, yes. But never just vanish. - -It was enough to spur me to action. - -I grabbed my phone and pushed the emergency button. It didn’t work. I stood over Nick and held it out the hole. It still didn’t work. Too much magnetism or electricity or something. I scrambled down from the bridge as fast as I could and ran. When I got a signal, I called and told them everything. I knew I was giving up the secret of that special place forever. The only place I’d ever felt brave. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}ick wasn’t there when school started. He was in the hospital in the city. I got to see him twice in there. - -The first time was scary. He just lay there. They said he was in an induced coma so his brain would stop swelling. He looked like a cartoon alien, with his head so bandaged that it was twice as big as normal. - -There were lots of ways to hurt yourself on New Normandy. I knew a couple of kids with brain injuries from accidents. They weren’t the same as before. Would the Rick that woke up be the Rick that I knew? - -Would Rick wake up ever? - -I didn’t want to lose my best friend. He was the bravest guy I knew. My Parent didn’t understand. They called him reckless. They shouted that Rick was an idiot, and I couldn’t play with him ever again. - -But the place we used to play was off limits now. - -And everything had changed as well. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he second time I saw Rick he was awake. Even better, he was still Rick. Except for his hair. They’d shaved it right off. All he had now was red fuzz. - -“Look,” he said. He popped out his two front teeth. Then he popped out the bottom pair. Somehow, in the middle of everything else, he’d managed to break another pair of teeth. When he grinned it looked like a tunnel going into his face. - -“They put a new plate in my skull,” he said, proudly, once his teeth were back in. “No metal this time. It was really expensive.” - -“Did they find any Shimm?” I asked. I was only half-joking. - -“What are you talking about?” - -I told him about the Shimm that had disappeared into his head. I’d seen three. Who knew how many more had gone in while I was getting help? - -“That explains it!” he almost shouted. Then he switched to a whisper: “I’ve been seeing colors and patterns. They’re really cool. I’m sure they mean something, but I don’t know what. The doctors are bugged by it, and make me take tests. I bet the Shimm are trying to communicate with me. I’ll be the first person to ever talk to them! I can’t wait to get out so we can find some and try.” - -“All the Shimm have left the island,” I had to report. “A couple of days after the trains started up, they were all gone.” - -“What? Where did they go?” - -“I don’t know. Maybe they’re still out in the wilderness, but you don’t see any on the island.” - -Rick sat quietly. He looked angry. “Damned trains,” he finally said. - -“They’ve sealed off our space under the bridge, too.” I tried not to sound reproachful. - -“Damned trains.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}ick never came back to school. - -He got out of the hospital a couple of weeks after my second visit, but he didn’t come to see me. I finally went to his house. No one answered the door. I peered in a window: even the furniture was gone. - -I tried to send Rick messages, but his account was blocked. Some of my friends said Rick was crazy, and the grown-ups had locked him in a padded room. Then they made jokes. - -I felt like my life had ended. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he end of the summer was boring. I spent a lot of time in the pedal-boat, exploring the tiny rocky islands far from the bridge. I guess I was trying to find another private place. But if I did, who could I share it with? - -I started playing phone games again when school started. They had just released a new multiplayer, and it was pretty fun. - -Then I noticed that one player kept winning. Their speed was amazing, and they seemed to have some kind of instinct for catching every break. This player’s game-name was Shimmerick1000, and their avatar was a fuzzy red troll. - -It was a week before I worked up the courage to send a private game message: “That U Rick?” - -Within seconds I had a reply: “Yep. Wondered when U would figure me out & reveal yourself, Bridgeboy.” So smug! Jerk! - -I couldn’t stop smiling. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}urns out Rick’s dad was only cool some of the time. Whenever they moved, he cut off all ties from the place they were leaving. They had lived near us for less than a year, and Rick said they moved every time something went seriously wrong. - -That happened about once a year, and Rick always seemed to be in the middle of it. - -We put our heads together, and managed to convince Rick’s dad that no one here wanted to sue him. The only person hurt had been Rick. We even managed to convince my Parent that Rick wasn’t going to get me killed. - -When the snow finally melted we had it all set up: Rick was going to visit in the summer. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}} still don’t like the train,” Rick grumbled as he got off. “It never feels right.” - -Rick was taller. His hair had grown back, which was familiar, but he was wearing wire-rim glasses now. It make him look more grown up. We started to walk to my house. I carried Rick’s backpack. - -“How were the doctors?” Rick had been to the city to have his head examined. - -Rick shrugged. “They’re smart, but they make bad assumptions. They’ll never understand.” - -I nodded. My only sympathy for the doctors was that they were a good excuse for Rick to be here. Too bad he could only stay for the day. His dad insisted he be on the train by nightfall. - -We dumped his stuff at my house and I led him down to the pedal-boat. - -“What’s all this stuff sticking out of the water?” Rick asked at the shore. - -“Grass! It’s real! They came through last fall and planted it. It’s supposed to spread and start growing up onto the sand.” - -Rick poked at the stiff green stalks. “I still wouldn’t want to fall on it,” he muttered. “Is this what you wanted to show me?” - -“Of course not,” I said. “Hop in the boat.” - -As we paddled, Rick talked about his new town. I already knew it was way out in the boonies, and there were no Shimm anywhere. “I thought we were going to have to move again, but I talked Dad out of it. I’m sick of moving.” - -This was news. “What happened?” - -“I made friends with this kid, and then his brother started to bully me.” - -Another friend? My face felt hot and there was a roaring in my ears. I hadn’t made any new friends! How could Rick? - -“Anyway, his brother made me show him an experiment I got off my dad’s phone, and he ended up getting hurt. Now I don’t have any friends there. But I’m still sick of moving.” - -“You could move back here,” I suggested. - -“Ha!” That hurt. “Dad would never go back to a place we’ve left. How could I convince him?” - -“Let me show you,” I answered. - -We had come to one of the many small rocky islands in the river. This one was bigger than most: big enough that it had a cave. And in the cave… - -“*Shimm!”* Rick’s mouth hung open. The colored lights zipped around in their sheltered place. “They aren’t all gone!” - -He sat on a rock a couple of meters into the cave. It looked to me like the Shimm clustered around his head. Smaller ones were moving around the rims of his glasses, looking like a cheesy game display. - -Rick was grinning. I hadn’t seen that grin in over a year. He didn’t look grown up anymore. He just looked happy. - -I couldn’t be jealous of the Shimm. They connected with Rick in a special way, but I could live with that. He might not move back here for me, but I bet he would for the Shimm. - -Rick’s old house was still empty, I’d checked. Part of me felt impatient: we only had a few hours together to plot ways to persuade Rick’s dad. Face to face conversations can’t be monitored like game chat. - -I promised myself I’d wait until we got back in the boat. For that moment it was enough to watch Rick’s silly grin. He’d been away from his beloved Shimm for too long. - -I wondered which one of us was the happiest. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Day the Shimm Stood Still** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744237327709256).* - diff --git a/content/issue-33/TheThingInTheSnow.md b/content/issue-33/TheThingInTheSnow.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7b1306f3..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/TheThingInTheSnow.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,64 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Mattia Ravasi -copyright: '© Mattia Ravasi 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "In this, my third year as Mythaxis Editor, it's time to shake things up around here with the first of two more-or-less non-fiction features. In his guise as 'The Bookchemist', Mattia Ravasi has been vlogging about long-form fiction for almost eight years, and I'm delighted to have him here reviewing contemporary speculative fiction. So, without further ado…" - -image: images/ThingSnow.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Sean Adams (left), the novel's cover art (by Shutterstock/Olya Detry), and reviewer Mattia Ravasi (right)." - -type: stock -slug: the-thing-in-the-snow-sean-adams-review -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} have been a full-time remote worker since March 2020. Every morning from Monday to Friday I head to my office, a corner of my living room with a small desk and a semi-comfortable chair. The only touch of color in this corner are the fingerless gloves, striped red and gray, that I wear throughout my workday. It’s cold in here, and heating, these days, comes at a ridiculous premium. - -Every morning I log into my laptop. I answer colleagues’ emails and help my company’s customers. Some days, I feel that my work has had a positive impact on the world. Some days, I’m not so sure. - -I go for a short walk at lunch time. In the evenings I sit a few feet from my desk, reading, writing, or watching TV. I go to bed knowing full well what tomorrow has in store for me. - -I mention all this to explain why the basic premise of Sean Adams’ *The Thing in the Snow* did not feel nearly as suffocating, maddening, and panic-inducing as it should have. I suspect that anybody who’s been working from home (or living at work?) for a while now will have a similarly uncanny feeling – and so will everybody who still remembers the long, muddled weeks of the Covid lockdowns. - -A small team is camped in a remote research facility known as the Northern Institute: a gargantuan six-story building in the middle of a desolate expanse of snow. Hart, the novel’s narrator, is their leader. He is driven, ambitious – and racked with insecurities. His direct underlings are Gibbs, aloof and distant and harboring ill-concealed career aspirations, and Cline, who is eager and friendly, if just a little useless. - -Something is clearly wrong with the Institute. Hart’s team are not allowed to leave it, since a strange sickness swiftly overwhelms anyone who ventures outside. The first two floors are buried under perennial snow – so why did the builders put in so many windows? The greatest mystery of all is Gilroy, a deranged scientist who stayed behind when the rest of the research staff was evacuated, and who is absorbed by his nightmarish research on the pernicious evil that is “the cold”. - -Hart’s team, however, is not there to investigate any of this. They are not cold-weather survivalists, or scientists, or scholars of the paranormal. They are, for a lack of better words, corporate peons. They work from nine to five, five days a week, with a coffee break at the start of each day. Each week they are given a task to complete, a list of *Karate Kid* chores that never seem to germinate into any epiphany: sitting on all the chairs in the building to make sure they are stable; opening all the doors to check for creaks and squeaks. - -*The Thing in the Snow* reads almost as a spoof on *Annihilation*, Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of disorienting horror, where a team of highly-trained explorers brave an abandoned region whose alien atmosphere might, or might not, be playing with their minds. Hart’s team are not highly trained. *They’re not even good office workers*. Hart savors his pointless tasks, eager to prove himself before his manager Kay; but he is also painfully aware of his limitations, and of how the corporate ladder – the notion that his managerial position identifies him as a more capable individual than his subordinates – feels flimsy and wobbly in the stark environment of the Institute. His self-consciousness is what makes his frequent pettiness so convincing, and never off-putting. - -Hart’s life is not just all work and no play. He goes to great lengths to keep his weekends separate from his weekdays: stopping himself from thinking about next week’s tasks, and refusing to engage with his co-workers between Friday night and Monday morning. This decision seems, at best, futile, considering that his weekends are spent in the same handful of rooms he occupies the rest of the time. Meanwhile, his pastimes (going for walks, reading) appear almost as aimless as his work tasks. - -Work, however, comes to dictate even the nature of these hobbies. The books Hart reads all belong to the “Leader” series, a bizarre mashup of thriller and self-help guide, focusing on a Tom Clancy-esque protagonist named Jack French. These books, like all of Hart’s provisions, are shipped to him through the company, and he wants his choice of reading material to make a good impression – *“to show Kay that I take seriously the responsibility bestowed upon me, hence the appeal of a series of thrillers about leadership.”* - -The Leader books are one of the funniest running jokes in the novel. Their plots are just exaggerated and edifying enough that I can see my CEO recommending them in his monthly email. They are also a convincing example of how Hart’s career has collapsed not just the barrier between his living and working environment, with the Institute coming to serve as both. The corporate mentality has started to colonize his mind, too, making him second-guess what type of intellectual nourishment would be best suited for his career progression. - -This corporate blindfold is made most noticeable by Hart’s refusal to engage with the mysterious thing in the snow: an unspecified object suddenly appearing on the horizon in the opening chapter, jarring within the otherwise uniform landscape. Hart’s subordinates Gibbs and Cline are understandably eager to learn more about the object, but to Hart the thing is dangerous, and its threat is one of distraction: it could easily become a drain on productivity. - -The rest of the book captures the slow unraveling of Hart’s sanity. Paradoxically, what pulls it apart is not the unknowable mystery (and the inexplicable behavior) of the thing outside his window, nor is it the impossible isolation of his living conditions. It is his team’s failure to keep up with their weekly tasks: building a replacement office chair; pulling on all the blinds to see if any are broken. Corporate life – completing allocated tasks, supervising an efficient team – has become Hart’s new reality, while *reality*, in all of its maddening insolvability, is a distraction that must be put out of mind. - -In the novel’s most poignant scene, Hart abandons the once-sacred distinction between office hours and “free” time and works through the weekend to catch up on the tasks his team have accumulated. He enters a peculiarly focused state, becoming entirely absorbed in his menial chores. It is a poignant, disturbing scene. Are we supposed to cheer for Hart? To admire the way he has carved purpose out of purposelessness? Or should we really be concerned at this final collapse of his identity? - -What this scene testifies to is the collapse of the barrier between Hart’s personality and his job description. He has confused his value as a person with his ability to complete his paperwork by the given deadline. This paperwork, submitted weekly via helicopter courier, is Hart’s only means of communicating with Kay, who lives far away and, we assume, in much cozier quarters. In an early scene, when he is still in relative control of his senses, Hart reflects on his ardent desire to stick a personal Post-it note to Kay onto the official paperwork. Kay has discouraged this in the past, and yet Hart’s urge is nearly irresistible. The motives behind this urge feel both natural and deeply meaningful: - -> *I often desire to apply a Post-it note because there are times when it feels like the application of a Post-it note is all I can do to reinforce my existence and remind myself that the tasks we are given here are not merely completed (as is noted on the paperwork) but experienced.* - -This is a very luminous, very *human* feeling, one that I have certainly experienced myself, and that should be familiar to everybody who has seen weeks of their lives reduced to mere lines on a spreadsheet entitled “annual performance” or “customer feedback.” - -I have talked at length about the satirical aspect of *The Thing in the Snow*. This shouldn’t suggest that the titular mystery is just a prop for the novel’s reflections. It is precisely the narrative’s obsession with Hart’s petty agenda and pointless worries that makes the occasional intrusion of the Institute’s weirdness all the more disconcerting. The team might be bogged down in a silly quarrel on the correct way to complete another task, only to stumble headfirst into a previously unnoticed side of the Institute. The enigmatic Gilroy has a knack for making a shocking appearance. And looming behind every page is, of course, the thing in the snow, its mystery growing more compelling as the novel progresses, its call harder and harder to ignore. - -The supernatural aspects of *The Thing in the Snow* have a way of creeping up on the reader, like well-timed jump scares in a horror movie. Together with Adams’ dry, winning humor, they propel the narrative forward with great momentum. The feeling that something ominous is afoot, that the whole novel could explode at any moment, is what makes it so enticing – and, inevitably, perhaps what dooms it, too. Any resolution, whether open-ended or neatly wrapped-up, is likely to disappoint at the end of a novel where so much *could* happen at any time. - -Ultimately, it is not how well its plot is resolved that makes or breaks *The Thing in the Snow*. As a compelling mystery and an engaging satire, one that will speak closely to anyone who has felt isolated and trapped in their daily life, *The Thing in the Snow* is a reminder of the endless ways in which speculative, fantastic, and imaginative fiction can operate: opening doors to the most mind-bending realms, or holding up a mirror to our drab home offices – and always reminding us quite how *weird* everyday life is. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744234841042838).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/TouchWood.md b/content/issue-33/TouchWood.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5b0f9658..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/TouchWood.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,251 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Touch Wood" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- science fiction -- fantasy -authors: -- Sandee Bree Breathnach -copyright: '© Sandee Bree Breathnach 2023 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' So said the marvellously named Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, Yet even the snappiest aphorism does not a story make, so rejoice that Sandee Bree Breathnach put her slightly shorter moniker to this ecofantastical expression of the same." - -image: images/TouchWood10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [levchishinae](https://depositphotos.com/626025648/stock-illustration-surreal-mushroom-landscape-fantasy-wonderland.html) and [TheDigitalArtist](https://pixabay.com/photos/tree-grass-fields-meadows-2175353/)." - -type: stock -slug: touch-wood -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}C{{}}*ricket bangs on Mrs Quill’s door at the crack of dawn.* - -“*Is Newt home?” he asks, bouncing on his heels with incessant giddiness.* - -*Mrs Quill crosses her arms. “There’s no one here called Newt.”* - -*Not far behind her, at the bottom of the stairs, Newt slips on scuffed shoes and wraps an old scarf around her neck. She hops forward, squeezes past her mother’s leg and through the door. The children sprint giggling into the concrete streets.* - -“*Hurry up,” Cricket grins. “We’re going tree hunting.”* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he wastelands stretch for dozens of miles beyond the town. Empty caravans litter the valley, crumpled like tin cans and half consumed by slow pulsating fungi. Spotted mushroom caps thrive on the cusp of smouldering sulphur pits, where the fumes rise so high into the sky that no bird will risk passing overhead. Others fester in brittle, abandoned nests that haven’t been touched by a living creature in weeks. - -“There’s no point,” Ash sighs, adjusting the cumbersome metal mask digging into his nose. “There’s no trees out here anymore.” - -Up ahead, Briar trudges over beds of bone and mildew. They turn to dust under her boots. “Granny Agnes says she saw one here when she was little.” - -“Yeah, like a hundred years ago!” - -“If a tree survived back then, it could survive now.” Her voice sounds tinny through the filters of her mask. When she breathes in, it makes a raspy, sucking sound, just like Granny Agnes’ ventilator. - -Hatchet in hand, she swings it into a thick mushroom stalk. It springs into a wobbling fit, sending clouds of yellow spores into the air. - -Ash steps back. “Leave the shrooms alone. You’re spreading the spores.” - -Briar stands firm and slams the hatchet into the base of the stalk, pressing her boot on top to wedge it in further and uproot the mushroom entirely. The ground below is parched dry, broken up by thin veiny roots. She tuts and moves on. - -“What do you need a tree for anyway?” Ash strides after her, careful not to step through the puff of spores as they settle on the ground. - -Of course, he already knows the answer. It is a legend that has been passed down for as long as anyone can remember. The first thing they hear when their soft brains can make sense of simple words. The first thing they read when they develop the motor skills to swipe through the dull matte pages on a tablet. - -Touching wood brings luck. Others claim it’s *knocking* on wood. Some even say it grants wishes. One thing all the stories agree on is that trees are magical. Ash believed it too, until very recently. Now he isn’t entirely convinced that trees ever existed to begin with. - -“You heard dad,” Briar replies. “She hasn’t got much time left.” - -Ash presses his lips tight and turns to gaze across the sickly river. It oozes with glossy bubbles of oil, rusty old batteries bobbing up and down like fish bait. They would be hard pressed to find any fish in there. At least, any fish that aren’t infected by some fungal parasite and half rotted through. - -He clears his throat. “Aren’t you too old to believe in fairy tales?” - -“Aren’t you too young to talk back to me?” Briar bites back. - -Ash promptly seals his mouth shut. Really, he should be used to it by now. Briar has always clung to Granny Agnes’s stories for longer than any reasonable child should. Just two weeks ago she found a dead salamander washed up by the lake and tried to convince everyone, perhaps even herself, that it was a baby dragon. But her flights of fancy never reached *this* extent. She’d never travelled this far from home for a fantasy. - -“*When* we find the tree,” Briar continues, weighing the hatchet in her hands, “we just have to touch the trunk and make a wish. Then Granny Agnes will get better.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}*n old, capsized wall lines the edge of a ravine. The bricks are cracked and crumbling at the edges, cement corroded by time. The children* *balance their way* *along, arms akimbo as if towing a tightrope.* - -*One misstep and the bricks give way. Newt tumbles down into the shallow ravine.* - -*When she opens her eyes, a yellow sapling greets her, protruding out from a sparse mound of soil. She isn’t entirely sure what it is until Cricket scrambles down and shrieks “We did it! We found one!”* - -*At first, she isn’t so sure. It’s much smaller than she expected. Nothing like the ones described in her favourite storybook. The colour is all wrong.* - -*There isn't a single spore in sight, so she lowers the scarf wrapped over her nose to sniff at the air. Tiny leaves shiver against the slight breath that leaves her lungs. It tastes fresh. So much fresher than the air in town.* - -*It’s only when she reaches out to touch the smooth white-grey wood that she realises. It really is a tree.* - -*Cricket holds out his shovel and thrusts it towards her. “Hurry up, Newt-face. Dig it up.”* - -*Newt blinks, slowly taking the shovel.* *“Why?”* - -*“Don’t you know how rare wood is?”* - -*“Obviously!” Her face reddens. “I’m not stupid.”* - -*“Then work it out, genius. If we take it home, we can make a wish every single day! Or we could sell it. We could even charge people money to come see it.”* - -*“You mean we’ll be rich?”* - -*Cricket nods, and Newt’s eyes sparkle green.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}riar’s yelp echoes through the crumbling walls of the ravine. When Ash reaches the edge to peer down, he finds her slumped in a pile of rubble and plastic, clutching her ankle. - -“What happened?” - -“What does it *look* like?” she hisses. “Bloody shroom tripped me.” - -A tangle of pale white fungus wriggles along the edge, tendrils withdrawing like snails shrinking into their shells. Spores waft inches above the ground, where her foot had been just seconds ago. Ash covers his mouth and holds his breath before he remembers he’s already wearing a mask. Still, he inches away before carefully lowering himself into the ravine. - -The thick leather gloves protect his hands from the rough, rocky walls. A small protrusion of earth crumbles under his fist, and he desperately clutches at the wall to slow his fall. Skidding to his knees, he stands and dusts himself off, relatively unscathed. - -“We should go back,” he says when he catches his breath, helping Briar to her feet. *Getting* back is now the issue – Briar is taller than him. Heavier too, though he can’t say that out loud. He’s willing to carry her for as long as possible, but she is already hobbling away, using the hatchet as a crutch. - -“We’ve come all this way,” she calls back. “It’s not even noon yet. There’s still plenty of time to look before sundown.” - -“You know the spore clouds will be even denser the further we go out. And the mushrooms…” The thought of the crawling fungus makes him shudder. “Who knows how much bigger they’ll be.” - -“It isn’t due to rain for days. This is the ideal time to search.” - -“That doesn’t mean—” - -“And the wind speed is low, so they won’t spread too quickly.” - -“That could change at any minute!” - -“We’ll keep an eye on the spores. I won’t bring us too far out.” - -“We’re *already* too far out. Briar, let’s just go home.” - -“I’m not going home without finding a tree.” - -“What if there *are* no trees?” Ash clenches his jaw. “Have you even thought of that? What if we get eaten alive by shrooms or the spores get past our masks? We could *die* out here! Or – or we get back home and she’s already…” - -He thinks Briar might cut him off before he gets that far, but the hot lump in his throat stops him first. He promptly bites his lip to still the trembling. - -Briar clenches her fists around the hatchet and sucks in a sharp, raspy breath. Narrow eyes glare at him through her visor. “Fine! Go home if you want! It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe, or if you just don’t care enough. I’ll find it on my own.” - -The hatchet clanks along the shrapnel-lined ravine, crooked under her straggling gait. She stifles a pained grunt and pushes onwards while Ash watches on. The sun wavers overheard, untouched by fog or cloud. - -*One hour*, he decides. One more hour and then he’ll turn back, even if he has to drag Briar by the leg. He can’t just leave her there. They can’t afford for anyone else to get sick. A deep breath shudders through his mask, the straps rubbing his ears raw. He takes a moment to adjust it before he follows. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}*hey are five miles from town when the sapling wilts like a flower between her palms. Gently browned leaves crinkle and flake from its branches. One thin root snaps off and* *falls to* *the ground.* - -*Numbness washes over Newt’s face, her features stretched and squashed as though she holds a fresh corpse in her hands.* - -*“What did you do?” Cricket gawks. “You’ve killed it!”* - -*“It wasn’t me. It just—”* - -*“You’re going to be in so much trouble!”* - -*“But I didn’t—”* - -*Cricket doesn’t listen. He tosses his shovel aside and runs for home. Newt tries to follow, but she can’t keep up with the sapling still in her arms. Won’t let go of it. Its body drags her down, gait swaying until she stumbles to her knees. Tears blur her vision.* - -*“I’m sorry,” she sobs, digging her fingers into the dirt until they are red and throbbing. “I didn’t mean to. I’ll fix it. I can plant it again. Don’t worry. I’ll plant it.”* - -*But there is no soil beneath the crust. Not a drop of water.* - -*A single acorn falls into her lap. The sapling crumbles to dust.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}sh can’t see Briar’s mouth behind her mask, but from the crease of her eyes and sharpness of breath, he *knows* she’s grinning. He would too if his slack jaw would allow it. - -Across the plain, a tree stands almost three times taller than him. It’s hunched over ever so slightly, neck crooked, but thick and sturdy. Spindly roots sprawl across the puddle encircling it, sipping delicately on algae-crested water. The setting sun filters through golden-green leaves, blessing the tree with a warm, ethereal glow. - -“What do we do now?” Ash whispers, as though speaking too loud might startle the tree and send it scampering off on wooden spider legs. He’d always heard trees stayed in one place, but who was to know for sure? - -“We touch it and make a wish.” - -With the hatchet at her side, Briar hobbles to the base of the tree and kneels down. Water laps at leather boots, timid ripples splitting through the algae as she places her hands on the tree’s belly. To her surprise, there are no parasites wriggling through the water. No mushrooms embedded at the base of the tree. Not even a single spore in the air. - -Following her lead, Ash takes off his gloves and presses his palms to the rivulets of tree bark. It grates against his skin, but he presses harder and slowly rubs his hand over its surface. For some reason, he expected to feel a heartbeat beneath the wood. Nothing resonates through his hands except his own pulse and the soft burn of friction, but he’s almost certain he can sense life blooming somewhere deep within. - -Nothing feels any different after they make their wish. - -Only so much time can be whittled away, squeezing their eyes shut tighter, wishing harder, counting down the minutes and seconds and hoping for something in the air to change. There is no way to know if Granny Agnes has been magically healed until they arrive home, so Briar lingers a few minutes longer. Just for good measure. - -“Alright. Time to go,” she says. Leaning heavily on the hatchet, she pulls herself to her feet and stares up at the tree. Ash has already left the water when he hears Briar mumbling to herself. - -“What?” - -“Maybe,” she says, mulling over the words carefully, “maybe we should take a little bit with us.” - -“A bit of what?” - -“The tree…” She trails off. - -A startled scoff escapes his lips. “You want us to take a *tree* back home with us? Am I supposed to carry the both of you on my back?” - -“I’m serious,” she insists, hopping over to Ash and passing the hatchet to him. “Here. Use this.” - -“You want me to chop it down?” His eyes grow wide. “We can’t do that! It might be the only tree left in the world.” - -“Don’t be stupid,” Briar huffs. “We’re not chopping it down. Just… lop off one of its branches. That should be enough.” - -“Why don’t *you* do it?” - -“I can’t with my ankle. Come on, *please*. It will grow back. ’cos I just thought—” She hesitates, swallowing the sticky lump in her throat. “What if one wish isn’t enough? If we didn’t do it properly then Granny Agnes could get sick again. Or dad. Or any of us.” - -His heart sinks in his chest. If that did happen then they couldn’t rely on the tree being here again. Ash wasn’t even sure they could *make* a journey like this again. And if someone else got to the tree before them, well, they could do a lot worse to it. - -“It’s for the family,” Briar reiterates, though her voice is strained. - -Trees are benevolent. That’s what the story said. They live to heal. To help nature thrive. The one standing before them doesn’t have a heartbeat. Ash knows that. Somehow the idea still makes his stomach churn, but Briar is right. She’s right about a lot of things. Right about finding the tree. Probably right about the wish. - -The air weighs deep in his lungs as he takes the hatchet. He braces himself and swings down on the lowest branch in sight. It snaps like bone, splintering at the edges and crashing to the ground. - -At first, he feels relieved. - -Then the tree turns grey. Golden-green leaves wilt and rain down around them. - -A single acorn falls between his feet. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}*ewt arrives home with bloodied knees, her face smeared with dirt, snot, and tears. Bracing her shoulders, she knocks on the door. It swings open with a sharp gust of wind.* - -*“Agnes!” Mrs Quill gasps. Newt winces. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”* - -*Newt sniffles and coughs into her tattered scarf. She can’t talk through chapped lips and short breaths. Yellow spores stain her sweater, embedded in the soft plucks of cotton.* - -*But it doesn’t matter. She’s home now. Finally home. Hours of searching for a patch of rich soil in the wastelands, big enough to bury the acorn. That’s all that matters now. That it can grow and thrive, untouched by human hands.* - -*She only hopes that it’s enough.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n the wee hours, Wickie climbs out the window of her mother’s lab and slips between rows of empty houses, out past deserted streets. - -On the outskirts of town, she takes stock of her utility belt. Respi-patches, torch, night goggles, holo-map. Then she sits and watches the sun roll over the horizon, casting a soft glow over the old road that disappears into a mass of writhing mushrooms. - -A harrowing sound wheezes behind her. Wickie leaps to her feet, heart racing at the sight of a lanky figure in a hideous rubber mask. A distorted laugh crackles through the filters, and behind the tinted visor she sees Hop’s smiling eyes. - -“What are you wearing that for?” Wickie hisses. “I have plenty of respi-patches.” - -Hop snorts. “My dad doesn’t trust those things.” - -Wickie shrugs. “Suit yourself.” She pulls a patch from her belt and presses it over her mouth and nose, sucking in sharply to activate the skin seal. - -“So–” Hop taps the side of her mask “–are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?” - -Wickie leans in, her voice an airy whisper. “Before he died, my Granda Ash told me about a tree just north of the forest. If it’s survived this long, then maybe…” - -“Trees aren’t real Wickie, you know that!” Hop scoffs, but Wickie simply grins. - -“Want to bet on it?” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Touch Wood** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/744235177709471).* diff --git a/content/issue-33/__index.md b/content/issue-33/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5e35d9ec..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 33" -date: 2023-04-01 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 33 -subhead: Spring 2023 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Robot-in-Love_wide.jpg -imageMobile: images/Robot-in-Love600.jpg -imageCopyright: "Robot in Love by Hector 'The Noise' Fernandez 2023" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#57f3c4' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - # display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-33/contents.md b/content/issue-33/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 83f52e9a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [A Deer's Inheritance]({{< relref path="ADeersInheritance.md" >}}), by C. Owen Loftus -- [Balk]({{< relref path="Balk.md" >}}), by Lucy Zhang -- [The Day the Shimm Stood Still]({{< relref path="TheDayTheShimmStoodStill.md" >}}), by Andrew Jensen -- [Greg: Not a People Person]({{< relref path="Greg-NAPP.md" >}}), by L. P. Ring -- [Touch Wood]({{< relref path="TouchWood.md" >}}), by Sandee Bree Breathnach -- [Emoticon]({{< relref path="Emoticon.md" >}}), by Barry Charmin -- [The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams]({{< relref path="TheThingInTheSnow.md" >}}), an essay review by Mattia Ravasi -- [Short Reviews]({{< relref path="ShortReviews.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-33/editorial.md b/content/issue-33/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 36449417..00000000 --- a/content/issue-33/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,88 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2023-04-01 -issue: Issue 33 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Robot-in-Love600.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 33** - ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Many thanks to Hector Fernández (or, rather, to his digital-artist persona, The Noise) for 'Robot in Love', which the editor saw in the window of Artshop Barcelona and immediately fell in love with in return. It hangs now on his wall, and is admired daily. You can see more of Hector's work on his [personal](https://www.instagram.com/vrhectorfl/) and [professional](https://www.instagram.com/artshopbarcelona) Instagram accounts, and of course on [his website](https://www.hectorfernandezart.com/). There you can also see work by his father, [Fernando Fernández](https://www.hectorfernandezart.com/fernando-fernandez/), who as a comics illustrator also delved into the fantastic. ¡Muchas gracias, Hector!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -It seems appropriate somehow that my first opportunity to wish a "Happy New Year" to readers of ***Mythaxis*** comes with 2023 already a quarter gone. After all, time is accelerating ever faster by the day, as my grandfather probably once assured my teenaged me (now I see he was right all along, but I should have known – that's science fiction readers for you). Nevertheless: it's nice to have you back again, and I hope you enjoy our six new stories this time around. - -Also pleasing to announce is that, no doubt after a period of extended visitation, Les Sklaroff has provided a new entry in the ***[Sketches of Snoak City](https://mythaxis.co.uk/SnoakCity/24-togger-chorps-story.html)***, which you can find at the link! - -In addition to these, I'm happy to welcome our first non-fiction contributor to the team. Mattia Ravasi has many years of long-form fiction reviewing under his belt, and will be sharing essay-writing duties on an alternating basis with… *with one whose identity shall remain secret, until our* next *issue lands!* Both of their detailed insights will be joined each issue by a selection of my own more fleeting recommendations in a selection of recent short stories appearing in other venues, as (and I'm sure we can all agree on this) *you can never have too many things to read.* - -In addition to *your* kind return, the style of ***Mythaxis*** itself has returned to its pre-Artificial Intelligence'd artistic mode. Read into it what you will (and for the time being you will have to do just that) but, after considerable experimentation with algorithmically generated images in 2022 and before, the magazine will forge ahead using only humanly assembled visuals. Any larger conversation about the use of AI in creative endeavours is, once again, being side-stepped here, regardless of how topical it currently is. Never let it be said I am afraid to wait until a boat has sailed before leaping from the pier, but I feel a more urgent call: to continue, and possibly finish, updating you on the progress of our AI publishing adjunct, the trusty Slushbot. - -Unlike the large language models taking our contemporary world by storm, it's safe to say the Slushbot *isn't* shocking its flesh-and-blood masters due to astronomical advances in its sophistication with each new generation. All we're asking is that it demonstrate a comparable taste to my own when confronted with the ***Mythaxis*** slush pile, and frankly, it's doing awful. - -On a basic level, it at least rejects more stories than it accepts, so that's something. From 161 submissions in our last window, it passed on 90. That's still enough acceptances to fill nearly three years of the zine, though, and I must say I take issue with what passed muster. It agreed with only **one** of my acceptances, and rated ten of my rejections higher; its top three picks were, shall we delicately say, *not even remotely my cup of tea*. - -It rated somewhat better with regard to my shortlist, in a sense: half of the 28 stories I put aside for further consideration were among its acceptances; none of these was ultimately quite for me, but they were all at least decent subs, and in several cases just plain good. The same cannot be said of the 56 pieces it accepted from the 130 I couldn't wait to finish for all the wrong reasons. - -Of course, this isn't terribly surprising. As noted before, the diminutive sample size the Slushbot is exposed to, and the variance and complexity of what we ask it to analyse (to say nothing of the foibles of the editor we demand it emulate), mean the chances of it identifying any kind of pattern in what rises to the top in my estimation are tiny in the extreme. There are interesting ways of looking at that complexity, though, as was teased in the [previous editorial](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-32/editorial.html). - -The Mystery Line Graphs we presented then are the output of another instance of smart technology: the **Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count** (LIWC) system, the website of which describes it as the gold standard in software for analysing word use, and [it uses interesting metrics by which to do so](https://www.liwc.app/help/aon). - -> The Narrative Arc analysis within LIWC-22 builds on previous research showing that storytellers tend to go through a unique "unfolding" of word use when constructing their narratives (Boyd et al., 2020): -> -> - First, they start by using lots of words that pertain to nouns and how they relate to one another: this is called **"Staging" language**. -> - Once the storyteller has set the stage, they often use less "Staging" language and begin to use more words that signal action, and words that imply a shared understanding of who is engaged in those actions, and how those actions are transpiring, and so on. This is the language that drives a story forward: **"Plot Progression" language**. -> - Importantly, all the while, most storytellers build and release psychological tension through some form of conflict: either by having characters struggle to attain their goals, or structuring situations in such a way to where it is uncertain whether characters' goals will be achieved. Traditionally, this **"Cognitive Tension"** rises and then peaks around the middle-to-later parts of a narrative. - -I can't speak for anyone else, but I immediately found this fascinating. The narrative arc example representing *"a large collection of TED Talk speeches"* instantly rang true, and not in a good way. After initially enjoying TED Talks, I've now not listened to one for years due to the formulaic way they tend to be structured, and that's *exactly* what they feel like to me: *samey*. - -Same wandering delivery. Same easily-digestible lengths. *Same start-and-finish timing of triggers to please their* (same?) *audience*. Even that same opening audio rush sets my teeth on edge now. But then I *am* a curmudgeon… - -…*who likes good fiction!* - -We decided to try out LIWK on the record of stories accepted and rejected by ***Mythaxis*** to see what it might show us, and such was the clearer of the two redacted graphs we shared last time. So here it is again, this time with the legend intact – the green line represents the zine's Acceptances, the red line our Rejections: - -![](images/Accepted-vs-rejected.png) - -What might this tell us? Let's look at them one by one: - -![](images/Staging.png) - -Both lines start high and fall, which is consistent with the theory's claim that stories tend to use **staging language** to set the scene, which then features less as they progress. It appears that the staging language of our acceptances tends to decline much slower, even rising again before the end, while in rejections the staging language drops abruptly and remains low thereafter. - -Speculation now, and remember these graphs show aggregations of data from multiple source texts, but this might reflect a general need to establish more complex scenarios is typical for acceptances. - -![](images/Plotting.png) - -In terms of **plot progression**, both lines show the predicted upward trend from the theory: with the stage set, the action sets off and increases progressively. There is little to differentiate here, though (as seems logical) the rejected stories show a more abrupt rise in plot progressing language, reflecting their faster transition away from staging language. - -A further speculative observation: the accepted stories appear to satisfy the increasing demand of timely plot progression despite greater use of staging language throughout the (average) text. - -![](images/Tension.png) - -It is in **cognitive tension** we see the most obvious diversion between the accepted and rejected stories. Again, these are averages (and the rejections include many times more source texts than the pieces we've accepted for publication), however it appears that while both groups enjoy an early spike in cognitive tension, indicating the potential for early reader interest, the rejected stories then show a steadily accelerating decline towards a very low end state. Acceptances instead follow that first spike with a sharp central decline, which is then followed by another abrupt spike that is more or less maintained to the end of the graph. - -Taking these three graphs together, allow me to make summary speculations regarding both groups: - -- **Acceptances**: After setting the opening scene, the average acceptance grabs the reader's attention quickly, then takes the time to reestablish their understanding of an evolving situation that goes on to defy expectation. -- **Rejections**: By contrast, while still achieving a solid foundation with regard to staging and plotting, the average rejection fails to surprise after its central hook is established. - -You might see a hint of bias in *my* use of language there, but given the context that might be expected. - -This editorial has stretched on long enough, I think, but to close it out we'll share one more graphic to underline once more an important point. The tidy graphs above suggest that what we like is just one thing… but that couldn't be further from the truth. - -The graph below shows the last six stories ***Mythaxis*** accepted in 2022: - -![](images/accepted-chaos.png) - -I think it's safe to say that they could hardly be more different, in each of the three categories. - -Long may we receive such bountiful variety. diff --git a/content/issue-34/Artificial-Artificial-Intelligence.md b/content/issue-34/Artificial-Artificial-Intelligence.md deleted file mode 100644 index 71ccbb92..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/Artificial-Artificial-Intelligence.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,104 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Artificial-Artificial Intelligence" -date: 2023-07-04 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- non-fiction -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "For about a year, the team at Mythaxis has experimented with sophisticated software tools in an attempt to understand – and maybe predict – what makes a story catch the editor's eye. So far we've discussed this in the context of the popular/unpopular theme of the day, Artificial Intelligence – but AI is a delicate subject when it comes to writing fiction. So let's take a look at exactly what we got up to." - -image: images/A-AI_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is adapted from [Robot in Love](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) by Hector 'The Noise' Fernández." - -type: stock -slug: artificial-artificial-intelligence -weight: 9 ---- - -{{}}O{{}}ver roughly the last twelve months, the ***Mythaxis*** team conducted a generally light-hearted experiment in applying AI technology to short fiction publishing. We used the cutting edge tools of the day to create an artificial intelligence so familiar with the tastes of the editor that we could task it with evaluating all submissions to the slush pile on his (that is, *my*) behalf. One day, when it had proved itself to our satisfaction, we could hand over the reins of ***Mythaxis*** to the "Slushbot" entirely. - -Or at least, that's how we framed it. - -We talked about our experiment as if one day it's going to wake up like the AI-Pinocchio of online magazine publishing. But that was never going to happen. We weren't training an artificial intelligence at all, an *artificial*-artificial intelligence would be closer to the truth. In fact, what we did was considerably more mundane, though still interesting from our perspective. - -So, while you can also read the glamorised version of the story in our recent editorials (see Issues [31](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-31/editorial.html), [32](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-32/editorial.html), and [33](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-32/editorial.html)), I'd like to take a moment to discuss more seriously what we were, and were not, doing behind the scenes during the last year. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}'ll start with a negative. The world has become [both enraptured and/or outraged](https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/talking-about-a-schism-is-ahistorical-3c454a77220f) by the arrival of Large Language Model (LLM) "artificial intelligence" text generators – *ChatGPT* being the most famous – and the visually stunning output of "generative" image systems, such as *Midjourney*. - -These were not the tools that we used, and for several good reasons. - -First and foremost, at the current point in the development of such systems there are [ethical question marks](https://towardsdatascience.com/the-invisible-workers-of-the-ai-era-c83735481ba) hanging over them which we find concerning. Generative systems need to be trained on vast quantities of material (millions or billions of images; [countless lines of text](https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnaqz/ai-isnt-artificial-or-intelligent)), and there is at least the possibility that some of that material was harvested and effectively reproduced in a comparable form without permission. - -The implications of this are far-reaching, not least the question of who can legally be considered the "author" of a work that is created by a so-called AI. [Is it the software developers who coded the tool?](https://programmedinequality.com/) Is it, even, the tool itself? Or *is* it the person who entered a prompt and received what they asked for? Regardless, we should also ask what rights and credit are owed to [those whose work the tools were trained upon](https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxn3kw/openai-used-kenyan-workers-making-dollar2-an-hour-to-filter-traumatic-content-from-chatgpt), with or without their permission. - -Until satisfactory answers are provided, LLMs and art-gen tools are problematic. Therefore, though we have experimented with image-generating AI tools in our less well informed past, we shall not do so again in future. For similar reasons, we don't invite submissions of AI-generated stories for publication, because it is far from clear who the true author of any such text would be. - -The second reason we didn't use generative tools is much simpler: our objective wasn't to create anything, at least not in the sense of *writing a story* or *painting a digital picture*. We wanted to make a tool, not a product, a tool with only one application: *predicting what kind of stories the editor of **Mythaxis** likes to publish*. - -Let's take a look at how we tried. And failed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}undamentally, what we dipped into was the rollercoaster thrill-ride called *data analytics*. This is the toolkit of academics working in fields such as "digital humanities", "distant reading", "data science", and (a label now maybe more familiar to the general reader thanks to events of the last few years) "machine learning". - -So far, I have published exactly 99 stories as editor of Mythaxis. I have rejected approximately 20 times more than that in total. We wanted to know more about this body of data: *out of over 2,000 stories, what made those few stand out?* Obviously, a key factor was the editor's taste in fiction, but we wondered how that very abstract concept might actually be represented in the raw data. - -To learn more, we divided our submissions into three categories: - -1. Acceptances (the stories we decided to publish) -2. Rejections (the stories we did not) -3. Better-rejections (ones which made our shortlist) - -The stories were then anonymised and analysed individually, with the resulting data aggregated into those categories. And then we analysed the aggregated data as well. What we called "the Slushbot" was really just the statistical output of a number of software tools that look at data and try to identify patterns. - -Over the period of our experiment we used the following workflow: - -> Whenever the window opened, the editor would read all the new submissions and make a decision about accepting or rejecting them. Simultaneously but separately, our tools would analyse the contents of the slush pile, compare the statistical data with that of past *acceptances* and *rejections*, and make a prediction about which category each new submission fell into. At the end of the window, we compared those predictions with my actual choices, then updated the overall body of data to reflect the facts, hopefully improving the accuracy of its future performance. - -In the event that these predictions came to reflect my actual decisions, this could be a very valuable resource. ***Mythaxis*** is a small operation; I always read all submissions, but this takes a lot of time and effort. Perhaps a trustworthy tool could be used to order the slush pile according to predicted acceptance rating, or simply to highlight what it considers strong candidates for immediate attention. Either of these approaches could make a significant difference in what sometimes seems a very daunting task. - -So, we tried this for about a year, and... to say the least, the results were not good. Instead of identifying the mere seven or so stories that would make the final cut in each window, it would routinely categorise as many as half the submissions as "acceptances", which would have led to issues featuring around a hundred stories each. As for its assessment of my actual selections, they were more often rejected than not, according to the data. - -There are reasons for this, of course. Even a couple of thousand stories is not a big data set. Still worse for our analysis, the kinds of stories that get submitted to us can vary in incredibly diverse ways: they range in length from 1,000 to over 7,000 words; they use different regional styles and spellings of English; they represent wildly different subgenres under the general umbrella of "speculative fiction". - -It is hardly surprising that even remotely coherent patterns were not forthcoming. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e used a number of different software tools for our analysis. Our original attempt used [SetFit](https://github.com/huggingface/setfit), a machine learning classifier; then we turned to [SBERT](https://sbert.net/) to explore "embeddings", a mathematical representation of data, in our case linguistic data, such that each word, sentence, or paragraph can be compared against others to determine a degree of similarity or association. It is these associations that (we hoped, in vain) would allow distinctions to be identified between the categories we chose. - -We also used [Orange Data Mining](https://orangedatamining.com/) and the research methodology of [distant reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading) (see also [here](https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/2/000317/000317.html)) to explore and visualise a variety of linguistic patterns in the data. In all cases, we were careful to work with these tools locally, never sharing data with organisations that could put it to uses outside of our control. - -Arguably our most encouraging find was [LIWC-22](https://www.liwc.app/), a linguistic analysis software used to help identify which narrative qualities ***Mythaxis*** "looks for" when accepting or rejecting a story submission. This involves focusing down on how different parts of language and language use (verbs, pronouns, punctuation, speech acts, narrative tone, cognitive tension, story tropes, categories and topics, etc) feature in a text. - -One thing which many of these tools have in common is, at least to my unskilled eye, *incomprehensibility*. The following image gives you a very general sense of what working with them looks like, and I'm glad that side of things is safely in the hands of my technical partner at the zine, Marty Steer: - -![](images/analysis-collage.png) - -Fortunately for me, LIWC stood out for the relative accessibility of its information output, being able to produce simple graphs suitable for an [editor-level degree of interpretation](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-33/editorial.html): - -![](images/Accepted-vs-rejected.png) - -Whether my interpretations were correct or not is another matter entirely! - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e've now decided to draw a line under our little experiment. We went into it more to investigate a fun possibility than with any realistic expectations of success; but there comes a time when the futility takes the edge off that fun – and, frankly, framing our experiment in the context of AI became less and less satisfying as the potential social impact of contemporary technology made itself clearer. And with that said, we still have at least the shadow of an elephant in the room, I think. - -There is an admitted similarity between how LLMs are trained and the way we studied the submissions we received, and authors might understandably worry about that. Yes, true, in both cases texts undergo statistical analyses: the tools examine their sources of data in detail, looking for patterns upon which to perform their functions. The critical difference lies in what the ultimate objectives of those functions are. - -LLMs and other generative tools use the statistical data they amass to generate outputs of a similar kind. If you train them on works of fiction, they become *fiction simulators*: machines that make texts *with similar characteristics to* a story. - -I choose my words carefully here: not to get into the semantics of it, but unless a human agent is directing them very closely, I don't think LLMs make actual *stories* at all – just something very story-*like*. Even given a human agent in that directing role, as we've said, the question of whether that person really is "the author of the text" is debatable at best. - -By contrast, the tools we worked with only output statistics. If you feed them stories, they don't become capable of making story-like texts. They just gave us a new way to look at what was actually there in the slush pile. And, as an editor, what I always want to know is whether *what is there* is a story I will like, or a story I won't. - -We probably never would have succeeded in making a tool that could tell me that with any accuracy. Maybe it would be cool if we had? But, just as there is no substitute for having humans create works of fiction, there's no substitute for humans reading them either. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) diff --git a/content/issue-34/Beloved.md b/content/issue-34/Beloved.md deleted file mode 100644 index 969a4e67..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/Beloved.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,238 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "My Beloved is Mine" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Jude Clee -copyright: '© Jude Clee 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Part One of the now inevitable Mythaxis Thematic Double Bill. Jude Clee launches us into a whirlwind romance, sweeps us up with anticipation for a lucky someone's Best Life Ever, sucks us into the inevitable troubles in paradise, and then drops us off the cliff of hell is other people." - -image: images/MyBeloved10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Takmeomeo](https://pixabay.com/photos/heart-wedding-marriage-hands-529607/) - many thanks." - -type: stock -slug: my-beloved-is-mine -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}H{{}}e hires a photographer. I’m not supposed to know, but it’s hard to miss the six-foot-tall hipster lugging expensive equipment behind us. It’s the #nyctrip that I’ve been hyping up for months, analyzing and dissecting the implications in my group text (*omg* *you* *think* *he’s* *gonna?* *idk* *don’t* *jinx* *it!)*. - -He leads me through the park, stopping at a quaint stone bridge, a mismatch of amber, gray, and copper pebbles. A street performer strums the first chords of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and I know it’s so basic, but we always joke that it’s “our” song, ever since that semi-disastrous karaoke date. He gets down on one knee, eyes sparkling in the evening sun, and holds out a perfect diamond nestled between gold and emerald petals. - -It’s all so adorably cottagecore that I could die. - -The likes come flooding in as soon as I post it (#shesaidyes #futuremrandmrs). I’m not sure how long I lie there, scrolling through the myriad of replies, my phone’s blue light keeping me up. - -When I finally fall asleep, I dream of a pair of eyes, so light they’re practically colorless, hovering directly over my face. They never blink. I try to speak but I can’t. I try to move but I’m stuck. I read about sleep paralysis on reddit, and this kind of feels like that halfway state between waking and dreaming. I just wish the eyes would blink. - -The next morning, I wake up with the hint of a headache. As I get into the shower, I notice two red dots on my arm, like little bug bites, so small that I almost miss them. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ctober is all booked (figures), so we settle for early November. The weather cooperates – I’d die if we had to use a canopy. We pose for photographs by the charmingly rustic barn, surrounded by crisp, golden wheat fields. My colors are marigold, terracotta, and burgandy, the perfect autumn trifecta. We divide them evenly among the nine bridesmaids’ dresses, with three girls in each color. - -My vows are filled with coffee dates and summer evenings snuggled by the firepit. His vows describe a life together with Smokey, our half-blind cat, and the dogs we’ll rescue; the children with his name and my smile, growing up surrounded by maples and elms and a big backyard to explore. When I look into his beautiful blue eyes I can almost see it. - -The cake is pumpkin spice with cream cheese icing. I catch a mischievous glint in my dear husband’s eyes as we cut into it. *Uh*-*oh*. He said he wouldn’t. We talked about this; I explicitly told him no cake smashing. I open my mouth but everything goes black. Cake crumbs tumble down my face, into my cleavage, staining my dress, my *wedding* dress. Laughter erupts around me. - -“Now you’ve done it,” Dad chuckles. I can feel eyes on me like mosquitos swarming a Fourth of July cookout. - -“Babe…” Dear Husband starts. - -I almost trip on my hem as I rush to the ladies’ room. The swinging door cuts off his “Honey, wait!” I hold in my sobs until I'm in front of the sink, staring at my ruined reflection. - -“How could he? He ruined it!” - -“He’s a jerk,” Becky says. My bridesmaids swarm me like a flock of mother hens, brushing off the cake crumbs, rubbing away the icing smudges. - -“It’s ruined!” I howl. “Everything’s ruined!” - -“No it isn’t,” Alex says. “It’s a beautiful wedding. Don’t let one dick moment ruin your special day.” - -“Trust me, no one’s even going to remember it,” Lauren says. - -“Really?” I sniff. - -“Yeah, really,” Alex says. “You know how guys are. He probably thought he was being funny.” - -Am I overreacting? Am I the one ruining my own perfect day? - -“There,” Becky says, wiping away the last bits of cake. “Good as new. Hey, are those mosquito bites?” - -I yank my arm back. “Must be a rash from the wheat.” - -The door swings open and Becky rounds on Dear Husband. “You are *such* an asshole.” - -While I appreciate the support, part of me rebels, the loyal *don’t-shit-talk-my-man* part. - -“I know, I know.” He holds up his hands, *mea* *culpa*. “Babe, can we talk? Privately?” - -The girls glance at me. I nod, and they leave. - -“Honestly, honey, I thought you’d laugh—” - -“But I already told you no!” my voice rises to a whine. I sound like a little kid, but I don’t care. - -“I know, I’m sorry,” he says. He opens his arms wide. I fall forward, engulfed by him. “I promise I’ll be more considerate next time.” - -“That’s all I ask,” I whisper into his chest. My anger already starts to melt away. - -“Now, come on, beautiful. Your adoring guests await.” - -We leave the women’s room, arm in arm, like a prince escorting his princess to the grand ball. - -That night, in the bed of the honeymoon suite, I dream of the eyes again. They lean closer, like an invisible face perched only a few inches over mine. The eyes are so cloudy I can’t tell if they are hazel or gray. They never blink. I try to ask what it wants, but my mouth is as frozen as the rest of me. - -“Come on, sleepyhead. You need to get up.” - -“Mmm.” I roll over. “What time is it?” - -“Eleven. You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to wake you, but… the flight.” - -*Shit.* Only three hours to get ready. I spring into action, feeling so drained, like I hadn't slept at all. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} tape a chore chart to the fridge. *Why* it’s come to a chore chart when his bachelor pad was immaculate, I’ll never know, but here we are. - -“What are you, my mom?” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. It’s the same snotty attitude of a middle schooler sassing the substitute. - -“Don’t act like a baby if you don’t want to be treated like one,” I snap. I immediately feel guilty. - -He holds his hands up. “Okay, if it'll make you happy.” - -It does, for a little while. Happy enough to forget the red dots running up and down my arm. I tell the girls I’m bug bait. They don’t think it’s as funny as I do (though Lauren has a dermatologist she can recommend). - -Then the dishes glisten greasily in the dishwasher and dust bunnies gather under the sofa. First it’s why-didn’t-you-just-ask. Then it’s stop-nagging-when-I’m-trying-to-relax. It comes to a head over a container of Pad Thai left on the coffee table, which I pointedly refused to throw out until the leftover takeout smell wafts throughout the whole house. - -Dear Husband scatters the chore chart into a million little pieces across the kitchen tiles. - -“How could you!” I howl. “I worked so hard on that!” - -“I love you, babe,” he says. His voice is cool and in-charge. During these fights, I’m the only one who raises my voice – he stays as calm as ever. “But I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” - -At night, when I see the eyes again, they have a familiar, knowing look. It’s like we’re old friends, running into each other in the dark. I might be frozen, but this time, at least, I can speak. - -“What do you want?” I try to shout up at them, though it comes out in a husky breath. “Why won’t you leave me alone?” - -A mouth appears underneath the eyes. It parts in a smile so broad I can count every pointy molar. - -The next morning, there's fresh dots on my legs. Blood bubbles from the newest ones. I’m starting to think this is not just sleep paralysis. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}ncreased dizziness and nausea lead me to the family planning aisle. I leave the sanitized test by the coffee pot and film Dear Husband’s reaction as he shuffles through the kitchen in his old man slippers. - -“No way,” he says. - -“It’s true,” I smile behind my phone. - -His hands leap to his mouth. His eyes sparkle with unshed tears, shiny and blue. “Honey, that’s wonderful!” - -An air cannon shoots out blue confetti at our gender reveal party. Dear Husband fist pumps the air as his buddies swarm him in a flurry of high fives and back pats. I order a cream blanket off of Amazon with *Jacob Hunter* embroidered in blue and yellow stitching. At the baby shower, we play The Price is Right and Pin the Diaper on the Baby. My favors include blue bath bombs and rattle-shaped candy. Becky posts that it’s the cutest baby shower she’s ever been to. - -My body twists and contorts, bulging out in some areas, shedding hair in others. The baby kicks and tries to lodge himself in my ribcage. We joke that he’s trying to steal my energy. I wear athleisure wear and practice maternity yoga every day in front of the TV. - -The eyes show up more frequently, but then they say pregnancy causes vivid dreams. They are light blue now, as clear as dawn, and sometimes a tongue snakes out between the teeth, licking the lips. I wake up with red dots up and down my arms, surrounded by blood smears. - -“Must’ve scratched myself in my sleep,” I mutter. - -“Rub some iodine on it,” is all he says. - -Jacob Hunter arrives four days early, with wispy hair and a red, puffy face. Dearest Husband orders Dominos during hour five of my eighteen hour labor; the greasy cheese smell makes me gag. The nurses say I can’t have anything but ice water and ginger ale. “You don’t want me to starve, do you?” he asks. “This is hard for me too. I knew you’d understand.” - -He insists on taking pictures. I tell him no, I’m gross and exhausted, the epidural I so desperately tried to avoid only just kicking in. He takes them anyway. Jacob deserves to have his birth documented, after all. It’s a magical, wonderful moment. Only it’s not: it’s agony. When we post about it afterwards, we gush about how miraculous it is, how beautiful and empowering, but it isn’t. It’s hell. - -Later, Darling Husband goes home to take a shower and sleep. The nurses insist the baby sleeps in my room. I can barely keep my eyes open as he’s shoved on my naked chest, letting out a low, desperate whine as he roots around for a nipple. In my fugue-like state, I stare up at the ceiling. The eyes gaze down at me, brighter than ever. - -“What do you want from me?” I murmur. - -It smiles. A tongue pokes out and licks its lips. Globs of saliva dribble down my bare chest. - -“Leave me alone. Leave me alone!” - -“He needs to eat,” the nurse reprimands me, judgment wrapped around every syllable. - -The mouth opens wide enough to swallow me whole. The teeth are as sharp and thin as the needles that penetrated me all day. It clamps down on my shoulder, digging into my skin. I scream. - -“It hurts! Get it off me! Ow! Ow!” - -“You’re being difficult,” the nurse says. Her face hovers in my vision, eyebrows sloping in two steep hills. She holds a shrieking, flailing bundle. Jacob. My baby. *Not him, not my sweet boy,* I think, but I can’t articulate through the pain. Blood flows freely. I am one giant, festering wound. All I can see are the deep blue eyes, less than a foot above me. - -Jacob’s birth announcement gets 547 likes and 109 comments. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen I come home from my pedi, my toes are a glossy seafoam green and the house is a warzone. An upturned cereal bowl sops milk into the rug; the toy box is tipped over, spilling out its treasures; Jacob, cranky and crying, sits in a dirty diaper I can smell from the doorway. Dear Husbands sits on his ass playing Madden. - -“Jesus Christ!” I say, snapping into mom mode (Jacob first; once he’s calm and napping I can take care of the mess). “I guess you just ignored my to-do list?” - -“I was getting to it,” he says without looking away from the TV. - -“You couldn’t even change your son’s shitty diaper?” I shift Jacob from hip to hip, but it doesn’t soothe him. - -“Maybe you shouldn’t leave for so long next time.” - -I was gone for two and a half hours. My Sunday pedicures and lunch dates are my only me time all week. “You could’ve done *something*.” - -“What’s the point, Babe? You’re just so much better at it than I am.” - -That’s his excuse for turning the whites pink and putting a cast iron pan in the dishwasher. As if it’s so hard to google. It’s easier to just put my Airpods in and do it myself. Sometimes I wonder if that’s *his* point. - -“Thanks,” I tell my husband, shifting Jacob to my side. We slowly creep up the stairs, to the cream-colored changing table with the Winnie the Pooh pad. “Thanks a lot.” - -He throws the controller down against the hardwood floor. Jacob’s breath hitches, then he screams louder than before. - -“Goddammit!” he yells. Spit flies out of his mouth. “Why do you always have to come home and complain? Why can’t we just relax?” - -“I’m sorry, okay? Let's just forget about it.” - -And we do, for a little while. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he red dots scar my arms and legs. There’s even one on my shoulder now – I don’t know what I’ll do if they ever reach my face. Becky keeps saying that I should’ve gone to the doctor, like, *yesterday*, but I hesitate. I don’t want to explain the dreams. - -They happen weekly. Now there’s a shadowy face to go along with the deep blue eyes. It hovers a few inches above me, never blinking as its teeth sink into my skin. Recently, it’s grown hands as well, pale spidery things, that pin me down until it’s had its fill. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}pparently, exclusive breastfeeding isn’t a reliable form of birth control (wonderful). Dear Husband is thrilled, of course (he rarely does night feedings). At the gender reveal party, we cut into a pink sponge cake. I switch #boymom to #oneofeach and order a dozen bows and dresses. Everyone says how lucky we are, how blessed. - -Olivia Rose’s grand debut comes more easily than her brother’s. This time I don’t martyr myself for hours, “epidural” is the first word out of my mouth when we reach the hospital. Dearest Husband sneaks me vending machines snacks and Dr. Pepper when the nurses aren’t looking. Jacob visits in his *I’m the Big Brother* shirt; we pose for pictures with a baby half the size he is cradled in his arms, swamped in a bundle of blankets with a giant pink bow. When we bring our little girl home Dear Husband jokes about getting a shotgun. - -Each month, I lay Olivia on a moon and stars blanket, photographing her growth for the world. - -We have two in diapers, two breastfeeding, two to bathe, two crying at night, and only two hands to juggle it all. Whenever I have a Netflix break, I’m still pumping, the mechanical suctions working until my nipples crack and bleed. - -But it’s okay. I’ve got this. We’re such a beautiful family (everyone says so) and if I can just power through this part, we’ll be okay. I can do this. I’m okay. We’re okay. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} wake up to a sharp pain in my side. I suck in my breath and open my eyes. Blue eyes shine in the pre-dawn light. They are as full as the ocean on a sunny, brilliant day. I try to move, knowing how hopeless it is. Miraculously, my right arm twitches, then stretches out. I fumble for the bedside lamp. - -I see the shriek-inducing abomination that is Dear Husband squatting over me like a bullfrog on a log. His arms pin me down, one on each side. He stares straight into my eyes as he lazily laps at the punctures in my lower stomach, my blood on his lips, gurgling and bubbling his enjoyment. - -“Oh,” I mumble, “yeah. Of course. Right.” I try to sit, but his weight holds me down. - -“Oh, babe,” he tilts his head up. His teeth are stained red. Blood dribbles down his lips, into his stubble. “I can explain.” - -*Uh-huh*. - -“Look, honey, you know I love you. And I *know* you love me. Christ, I know I don’t deserve you half the time – I know that you’re too good for me.” - -“The fuck,” I mutter. - -He straightens up. One hand grips my arm. He doesn’t wipe away the blood. “Listen, babe, I need this. You want me to be healthy, right? It’s not like I’m asking a lot. I just need a little help every now and then.” - -From somewhere outside, birds chirrup. The neighbors’ dog barks. - -I grit my teeth, blink back tears, and stare up at the patterns on the ceiling. “Just let me sleep next time,” I snap, hating that tone in my voice. “And don't wake the kids.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **My Beloved is Mine** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835809645218690).* diff --git a/content/issue-34/Embryo.md b/content/issue-34/Embryo.md deleted file mode 100644 index 41720031..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/Embryo.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,157 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Embryo" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- science fiction -- horror -authors: -- Elena Sichrovsky -copyright: '© Elena Sichrovsky 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Some people consider the fantastical genres to be non-overlapping magisteria: sci-fi is sci-fi; fantasy, fantasy; horror, horror. Others are not merely comfortable with a little bit of bleed-through, they positively revel in it. In our first story Elena Sichrovsky is selling you what looks like straightforward science fiction. Don't be deceived. But do be warned, this one is not for the faint-hearted." - -image: images/Embryo10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using images from [photography33](https://depositphotos.com/10518754/stock-photo-woman-practicing-yoga.html) and [StockSnap](https://pixabay.com/photos/white-bed-sheet-blanket-plate-2586703/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: embryo -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}S{{}}ometimes I pretend that I was born. - -I lay on my bed, pull my limbs in, and tuck my head down into what’s known as the fetal position. I’ve seen enough ultrasounds to know the term is an apt description of how a fetus lies in the womb. (Of course I have no umbilical cord. I twist my blanket into a long rope and position it at my navel.) - -My chin dips down to my chest. I count my heartbeats, imagining how the rhythm of my heart’s valves might have sounded in the beginning. Was it hesitant: a composer tentatively releasing the first notes of his composition? Was it fragile: delicately growing in strength second by second? Was it bold, *thunderous,* from the moment I began? - -(I emailed my manufacturer before, asking them this very question. I never got a reply. All I received was an automated message reminding me to file my weekly report on time.) - -Eventually the joints of my bones start to ache. My body is protesting this charade; it knows it is a lie. I have never been wrapped in the buoyancy of amniotic fluid or explored the edges of the sac with tiny fingertips. I can’t return to a moment I’ve never had. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} was never small. I never grew. I look in the mirror in the hospital staff room, trying to imagine my face at a half or quarter of its current size. Using my hands I cover up my forehead and cheeks so that my eyes are the only part of me reflected in the mirror. Eyes don’t change size drastically from birth; maybe if I stare into them long enough I can catch a phantom of what my infant form might have looked like. - -My hands drop and my fingers travel down to my stomach. I pinch and knead at the rolls of flesh. How pinked was my skin when it was still new and raw from the womb? Would diapers have given me a rash? Would the brush of baby powder have tickled my cheeks? - -(A body that is born replaces its cells every seven years. Other people go through reincarnation again and again without even realizing it. The only way my cells will ever change is if some part of me malfunctions and needs to be replaced.) - -My pager beeps. A patient needs me. Humans need me. - -I don’t know what that’s like, to *need* someone else to care for me. Babies can’t feed themselves for the first year of their lives. Most of them can’t walk or talk during that time either. They are held. Does it feel strange to be held? Does it feel like your limbs have disappeared or ceased to function? Or do your appendages somehow feel tethered in the embrace? - -I go to Room 302 and change the IV drip for Mr. Collins. He has stage four lung cancer. He thanks me for helping to keep him alive. We both know he won’t be for very long. He just wants to be able to meet his first granddaughter. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here’s a blank space on every hospital form for the patient to write their birth date. Once, when I was still in training, a patient said that he didn’t remember his. I wanted to help him, so I suggested that maybe he never had one. The nurse reprimanded me later for making light of a patient’s condition. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I don’t have a birthday either. I thought he might also be unborn but was too embarrassed to say so. - -I was produced in the form of a mid-twenties female. For the first two years of my life I bought a cake on the first of every month to make up for the birthdays I never had. Now I usually get a cake to coincide with whichever patient has the most immediately terminal illness, so they won’t have to celebrate their birthday alone. - -When the patients in the pediatric wards celebrate their birthdays we have to blow up balloons for them and wear small paper hats. I asked the head nurse if it’s because balloons are in the shape of the amniotic sac, so it reminds them of the day they broke out of that sphere and into the world. She looked at me for a long moment and then laughed, and said “No, but that’s really good. You think a lot about these things, don’t you?” - -Then there was the time the medical interns got into a discussion about astrology and star signs. I was in the cafeteria eating lunch at the table beside them, and they wanted to know what I thought about only dating someone with a compatible star sign. I said, “Well, what if someone doesn’t have a star sign?” - -They stared at me strangely, and one of them whispered something to the other. Then the tall blond boy said, “I guess you’re like one of those Uno cards that can be whatever color you want.” - -If I could choose, I would have a birthday on the second day of July, because it’s the middle day of the year. But then my sun sign would be Cancer. And I would rather be a Scorpio. I read once that when scorpions can’t find food, the mothers will eat their babies. I like that. It must feel warm to go back inside your mother’s belly; you can be held from every side. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}r. Collin’s daughter Carmen is here for an ultrasound today. She wants to see her father afterwards, so I wheel her towards the elevator. On the way she lists different potential names for her daughter and asks me which one I like best. I choose the ones that start with the letters of my name: Y, N, or A. She says that her wife likes O and H names best. - -“Did you try asking the baby which one she likes?” I say. I’ve seen older nurses in the maternity ward suggest this to patients. It seems important to encourage a connection between mother and the child in the womb. - -Carmen smiles wide, showing her teeth. “No. I should try. Here.” - -We are inside the elevator now. Carmen is in the wheelchair and I’m holding the handles. She takes my wrist and pulls my hand towards her belly. “I’ll say the names, and you tell me if she kicks.” - -I feel a pulse against my palm when Carmen says *Orla*. - -Carmen laughs and says she’ll need to tell her wife about this. - -I never want to wash my hands again. I have made contact with a human who is existing inside another human. But I get called to change a patient’s bedpans on the next floor. Reluctantly I squirt a splash of soapy bubbles into my palm and rinse the soft imprint away. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey don’t allow me to hold the babies when they’re born. It’s a crucial clause in my contract. Humans are always worried about errors with individuals like me. I am not permitted to physically handle children under the age of three, or seniors over the age of eighty, or feeble patients. - -I’ve assisted in thirty-five births. I’m frequently called on duty in the pediatric ward. The hospice patients are part of my regulars. Most of my time in the hospital is spent caring for those at the beginning or end of life, both of which are phases I have not and will never experience. - -I can never say “when I was little” or “when I’m old”. I don’t have stories to tell from my childhood, or a retirement fantasy to discuss with friends. - -(There are two others like me in this hospital. One of them works in the morgue, so I don’t see him often. The other one is a janitor. I tried asking her before, if she has the same questions I do; if she yearns for the past and the future that doesn’t exist for us. She said that she’s cleaned up enough sick children’s waste and geriatric vomit to be glad that she’ll never be one of them.) - -Two of my friends – nurses with whom I work the rotation most frequently – once played a drinking game with me. They told me stories from their childhoods, and their friends’ childhoods, and their friends’ friends’ childhoods. I was supposed to pick and choose from their stories to create my ideal childhood. Any time I said “I’d want to experience that” they took a shot. - -They were completely drunk within the first hour. - -I wanted it all. I wanted the misery and the joy. I wanted the parents who set early curfews and the ones who left the house key under the porch mat. I wanted parents who spooned instant macaroni and cheese from tins and those who went to the farmer’s market every day. I wanted parents. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}armen’s due date is two weeks away. She has already checked into the hospital because of concerns about her age, but she also wants to be close to her father so he can be there for the birth. - -Mr. Collins just suffered a severe bout of pneumonia. He’s still in the ICU, and Carmen asks me to wheel her down to watch him through the glass window every day. If I don’t have anywhere else to be during that time, I like to stay with her and listen to her tell me stories about Mr. Collins. How sharp his wit and sense of humor used to be. How he’s endured a childhood of war and poverty and disease. How she’s convinced that he can pull through this one too. - -“My wife loves the name Orla, by the way.” Carmen tips her head up to look at me. “We’re going with Coline for the middle name, named after—” she nods towards Mr. Collin’s prone form “—him.” - -I try to imagine what my children or grandchildren would say about me. They could talk about my diligence at the hospital, or recall stories about my patients. They might talk about those interns and that Uno card joke. Or they’d laugh about how I helped Carmen choose her baby’s name. - -(If I could have children, that is. I am not built to function in that way.) - -Carmen rubs the swollen roundness of her belly. I want to touch it again, to feel close to a diminutive existence that I can never carry. But she doesn’t offer, and I don’t ask. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Y{{}}*our purpose is to serve, to benefit humanity however your employers see fit. Your function is to sustain life, to prolong it, to accommodate it. You are created to bring mankind into a kinder, better future.* - -That’s from page seventeen of the manual I had to memorize after my first test run. I quote it every six months when the maintenance inspector comes to the hospital for my routine check up. Most of the staff in the hospital already know what I am. The nurses, the doctors, the patients, they all say it doesn’t make a difference to them. They say things like “you’re basically one of us” and “honestly it must be nice” and “I don’t even notice it really”. - -(Of course they don’t. They have a life cycle that runs in a perfect circle, instead of a single line sitting in the middle of the page.) - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}rla Coline is born one week early. She’s six pounds, seven ounces. She was born en caul, which means she was still in her amniotic sac. It looked exactly like the balloons I had to blow up for the children’s cancer ward. The doctor had to break the sac open and pull the baby out before she could take her first breath. - -Orla has Carmen’s eyes, blue as a forget-me-not blossom. - -Carmen’s eyes don’t shine like that anymore. Carmen died ten minutes after giving birth due to an internal hemorrhage. I find this out because I’ve been called to clean the room and bring the body down to the morgue. Her wife has said her goodbyes, has placed Orla on the still chest for one last comfort, and Carmen’s mother has wept over her for a good twenty minutes. - -I take a moment to compose myself before going into the room. I recall the manual and my training. I don’t let my professionalism waver. (I don’t think about Carmen grabbing my hand and pressing my palm to her belly, or the small crease of laughter in her eyes when she’d talk about her daughter.) - -Then I remember Mr. Collins. I wonder if he knows. I want to go check on him in the ICU, or at least find out if he pulled through – if he gets to meet his granddaughter after all – but the other nurse is rushing me along and won’t answer any of my questions. She leaves me alone with Carmen’s body while she goes to help another patient down the next hall. - -Carmen’s room is thick with the odor of blood and feces. There’s a blanket over her spread legs. She’s wearing a pale turquoise hospital gown. I start to adjust the bed to make it easier to roll her body onto the gurney. Then I see the amniotic sac in the waste bin in the corner. The sac is torn in two pieces, but still makes a full globe when I hold the halves together. I pick it up slowly, rubbing my fingers over the slippery outside layer before sniffing the edges. - -It smells like iron and urine. - -I take a deep breath and then lower my head inside. Closer. Until my lips are touching the pool of liquid at the bottom and the walls of the sac are around my cheeks. - -(I close my eyes and pretend that I’m a fetus, no bigger than the size of a fist. I’m swimming in here, the first place I ever exist, a place created by my mother’s own body. A sanctuary.) - -When I lift my chin up there’s a trail of the yellow fluid running down the bridge of my nose. I stick out my tongue to catch the drop. It tastes terrible. But it’s what every human tastes before anything else, even their mother’s milk. - -My hands are slick when I move over to Carmen’s bed to wipe my fingers dry on the sheets. The blanket slips off her knees and I see the spread of blood-soaked sheets beneath her. The hem of her gown is riding up, exposing her thighs. Her vagina looks wider than the average woman’s. The outer labia seems torn, too. I reach to tug down the hem of her gown, but then I pause. - -(How might it feel to emerge from the birth canal? Is it a torturous squeeze? Or soft and swift, like laundry falling down the metal chute?) - -I glance towards the door. It’s still closed. - -Carmen and I face each other again. Her eyelids are closed. I close my own eyes and bow my head. Then I push my fingers inside her. First one hand, then the other. I cup them to mimic the size of a baby’s head and then I slowly pull them back out, noticing the pressure from either side. It’s a tight fit, even with my fingers that can bend and flatten to make the exit easier. - -Blood trickles along my fingers as I insert them inside her again, going in deeper, up to my wrist. When I pull them out there’s a soft *whoosh* of air releasing. My skin is soaked in red – her red – her existence. Carmen died, but she brought a new person into being. Once upon a time she, too, was pushed out of a birth canal. She has completed the cycle. She’s begotten what she was given. - -She is *whole*. - -Tears prick at the back of my eyes and I cover my face with my hands, forgetting that they’re covered with blood. I breathe hard into my palms; I breathe in the scent of Carmen’s death, as if I can borrow some of the value of her life. - -The door remains closed, shadowy footsteps swimming past the stream of light beneath. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Embryo** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835810481885273).* diff --git a/content/issue-34/GrotesquerieRichardGavin.md b/content/issue-34/GrotesquerieRichardGavin.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2581c4a9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/GrotesquerieRichardGavin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Bill Ryan -copyright: '© Bill Ryan 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Your editor has been a fan of Bill Ryan's review writing for longer than the man himself has been aware of it. His passion for literature and cinema is particularly strong in the crime and horror genres, so it's a great pleasure to be able to welcome him to Mythaxis as our second periodic fiction reviewer. Which shall it be, I wonder…" - -image: images/Grotesquerie10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Richard Gavinand the novel's cover (art by Mike Davis and design by Vince Haig)." - -type: stock -slug: grotesquerie-richard-gavin-review -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}here is a subset of writers of horror fiction, which I haven’t named but I know them when I see them, the definition of which can essentially be boiled down to *buy their books while you can*. This is due to the fact that their books are generally not published in mass editions, and despite (or because of) whatever acclaim they have garnered, when the books fall out of print used copies shoot up in price, putting them financially out of reach of most people. - -The world of horror literature is full of such writers (and by the way, just for the record, this is not necessarily a sign of quality): Mark Samuels, Quentin S. Crisp, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Reggie Oliver… This even happens to writers who were once in the mass market. For example, look at *The Voice of the Clown* by Barbara Brown Canary. That was once a mass market paperback. When you get your hands on an affordable copy, let me know. - -I don’t mean to overstate things here. Other than Canary, several books by each of the writers mentioned above are readily available, in print, at different levels of affordability. But not all of them, especially their early books, like Samuels’s *Black Altars,* or Crisp’s *The Nightmare Exhibition* and *Shrike.* And theycan even come out of this: the great and immortal Robert Aickman’s full bibliography (save the slim volumes he wrote about England’s waterways) are back in print, as are most of the books by Thomas Ligotti. Thanks to Penguin Classics and other publishers, the vast majority of this master’s fiction is easy to find (strangely, it’s Ligotti’s most recent work that is hardest to come by), making this once-obscure writer’s name somewhat well-known, though I doubt many more people read him now than did before. But his influence is out there, and growing, in ways it never had before, so that while for decades up-and-coming horror writers wore their Lovecraft influence on their sleeves, now the shadow of Ligotti is just as likely to be seen (some may consider this *six of one, half a dozen of another* given that Lovecraft heavily influenced Ligotti, but on this I am forced to disagree). - -Someone who fits into many of the slots I’ve mentioned is the Canadian horror writer Richard Gavin. He is the author of several out-of-print, and now expensive, books (*The Darkly Splendid Realm, Charnel Wine*, etc.) and several that are in print but not widely known outside of passionate horror circles, such as *At Fear’s Altar, Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness*, and *Grotesquerie*. It is this latter title that, at long last, concerns us today. - -And speaking of Thomas Ligotti, as I often am, his influence on Richard Gavin is at times, shall we say, *vivid*. In Gavin’s story “After the Final”, the unnamed narrator (that’s your first clue) relates to his professor the story of one night when he and his “companions” set out to prove they are “true macabrists”. To me, this alludes to Ligotti’s belief, at least at one time, that among horror writers he was the only one writing real horror. Given Ligotti’s fantastically bleak antinatalist view of life and existence, that case could be made, but this reading is debatable. More explicit is the fact that the professor being addressed is named Professor Nobody. In *Songs of a Dead Dreamer*, Ligotti’s first story collection, Ligotti included a non-fiction, philosophical essay called "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror". The lectures given in the essay are given by Professor Nobody, but I think it’s pretty well understood that’s just Ligotti. Elsewhere in “After the Final”, Gavin drops phrases like “this degenerate little town” and “my work is not yet done”, both of which are titles of Ligotti works. “After the Final” is almost like a little game for fellow Ligotti fans, and therefore unserious. Then again, near the end, Gavin writes “But as exquisite as this horror was, I am still left wanting”, which suggests the story could on some level be a refutation of Ligotti’s unlivable philosophy. You don’t have to agree with the man to admire, even love, his work. And we all have our hopeless hours. - -But enough about Ligotti. *Grotesquerie* is my first experience reading Richard Gavin, and it was my presumption, based on certain titles, that his work was firmly ensconced in the folk horror subgenre. And indeed there’s a fair amount of that, or at least nods towards that category of horror (one which I find particularly interesting), but that’s not all Gavin is up to, at least in this book. - -Though Gavin was already on my radar, I was led to this particular collection by, of all things, a pair of tweets by somebody I don’t even know, naming Gavin’s “Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty”, published in *Grotesquerie*, as one of their favorite horror stories. Having read it now, I concur that it’s a terrific story, set in a modern suburb but with hints toward an ancient folk history that the reader is not privy to. I don’t want to describe the story in detail, because it’s rather short and saying anything about the plot would be to say too much. But it’s truly skin-crawling, a story in which the horror is revealed with unnerving casualness. - -There are two other stories in *Grotesquerie* with titles similar to “Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty”. Those are “Headsman’s Trust: A Murder Ballad” and “Ten of Swords: Ruin”. Together, these three stories comprise the best stories in *Grotesquerie*; the latter two are also much more explicitly of the folk horror subgenre. - -“Headsman’s Trust” describes the process of rising through the ranks to become the new executioner. This is a gross oversimplification (and a glib one) on my part, but again, while “Headsman’s Trust” is a bit longer than “Scold’s Bridle”, I’m loathe to describe the story in too much detail. At his best, Gavin has a way of simply letting his story, and its horror, unfold at its own pace. This makes the events of the story seem, in a very unpleasant way, like everyday occurrences. But to give you a sense of the kind of mood Gavin can evoke, here’s the first paragraph of “Headman’s Trust”: - -> *Just how the Headsman trapped divinity within His axe blade is a riddle I am not destined to solve. But I have borne witness to the Cut-Lord’s miracles. They evidence the power of both the blade and the hand that wields it. This is sufficient to keep me in servitude to Him.* - -This paragraph does a lot of work, including informing the reader that we are not in the present day (though I suppose where we are – the past or a post-Apocalyptic future – is an open question). - -“Ten of Swords: Ruin” is the last story in *Grotesquerie*, and by far the longest. Normally, I object to this kind of sequencing, but “Ten of Swords” reads at a pace that makes it seem much more brief than some of the shorter, yet more labored, stories that precede it. It’s about two young sisters – Celeste and her older sister Desdemona – who are often left alone at the family estate by their very strange parents. The story revolves around a hidden Tarot card and a set of matryoshka dolls; also the shocking consequences of when Celeste’s inherent curiosity and mysticism override her sister’s philosophy of leaving well enough alone, and of not doing anything to bring unwanted attention from their parents, especially their mother. - -This isn’t to say that Desdemona views their parents unlovingly, or as a threat to their well-being, but she is uncertain about and somewhat afraid of their secrets and what might come from learning more about them. “Ten of Swords” is a psychologically and supernaturally complex story, but there’s one straightforwardly visceral scene of horror that I could see vividly in my mind’s eye. It’s a very effective punch, just when the story needed it. - -But as I’ve hinted at, *Grotesquerie* isn’t a complete success. There’s a formula that many of the stories fall into: our main characters have some normal, domestic sort of problem, one which, as they are diverted from a work trip or other errand, is mirrored by the horrific circumstances they ultimately find themselves in. “The Patter of Tiny Feet” is probably the worst offender in this regard, with its basic idea being set up dutifully, rather than artistically. “Fragile Masks” is another, although I quite liked this story, about a couple encountering the woman’s ex-husband at a bed-and-breakfast. Much more transpires from there, but for the life of me I can’t figure out where the “mask” metaphor came from, or what it’s supposed to mean in the context of this story and these characters. It’s as if Gavin thought he needed a dash of something stereotypically literary to smarten things up. If so, he was wrong; “Fragile Masks” would be better without all that. - -So *Grotesquerie* is a mixed bag. A solid piece of work like “The Rasping Absence” sits in the same table of contents as “Neithernor,” which is initially intriguing (it deals with mysterious and inexplicably disturbing art, a favorite trope of mine) but in the end feels bizarrely rushed, as if Gavin found no time to develop it the way he wanted to. But there are worse reading experiences than reading a mixed bag. There’s enough that’s good about *Grotesquerie*, and enough in it that clearly shows off Gavin’s talents, that I consider it all a net positive. Bring on *Sylvan Dread*, I say! - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835806885218966).* diff --git a/content/issue-34/Infinite.md b/content/issue-34/Infinite.md deleted file mode 100644 index 32b02051..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/Infinite.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,384 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Infinite" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Chisom Umeh -copyright: '© Chisom Umeh 2023 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "The notion of the multiverse has been popular in sf for much longer than the current cinematic obsession – and no surprise, because it offers such ripe opportunities for invention. Chisom Umeh super-collides witchcraft and technology to deliver a painful reminder that we rarely get what we expect, and getting what we ask for can be a curse, not a blessing." - -image: images/Infinite10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Ekaterina Bolovtsova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-holding-a-crystal-ball-7658617/) and [Eynoxart](https://pixabay.com/photos/city-urban-cyberpunk-cityscape-7457513/)." - -type: stock -slug: infinite -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}C{{}}hika returns to the same dream every night, deliberately. The one where Olisa becomes an existing boy again. Those moments when she holds him back as he stretches his hand to a passing ice cream truck, wanting to break free from her grasp. The ice cream man notices the little boy itching to run off from his big sister’s arms and waves from the window at him. - -Nothing is ever enough to hold this energetic child. He wants to go off, like he tries doing every other morning when the truck passes. But Chika lifts him in the air and spins around, hearing a chuckle escape his lips. This is the moment she keeps going back to in the dream. The moments when they were happy. The moments before. - -She wants those precious moments to remain, and often flicks off a tear from her cheek whenever she wakes and finds that they’re no more. She gets down from her bed and lifts an imaginary Olisa off the ground, guarding him in the crook of her arms. She spins around as the bedroom AI detects her soft movements and proceeds to part the curtains to let in sunlight. She tries to remember the contours of his cheeks and the brightness of his smile every morning. Because in those moments he is suddenly there with her in real life. Until he isn’t. - -But tonight, Chika no longer wants to hold an imaginary Olisa. - -A bus drops her in the heart of town. The air here is gentle against the skin, even at this time of night. Some shop owners are packing up, others already closed. This part of the city is urban, hence the almost quiet street. A car zooms past Chika and she pulls up her hoodie. She knows there’s a security bot ahead, so she turns onto an alleyway. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}k{{}}nock. Wait. Knock again. - -Silence. Shuffling of feet. “Chika?” - -“Yes, it’s me, Prof.” - -A buzzing sound. The door clicks open. A head peeks out. “Are you sure you’re not being followed?” - -“I’m sure.” - -Professor Nwokolo lets her in. She walks behind him through a long passageway that seems to steepen as they go. His small frame is probably heavier than it looks, hence his slow movement. The red bulbs on the walls are bright enough that you can see in front of you, but dim enough that you can’t be very sure what’s there. - -“I thought you wouldn’t make it,” he says, and his voice carries through the hallway. There’s excitement in his tone, and Chika wonders what is so exciting about what they’re about to do. - -They emerge at an open room, and Chika thinks she saw an apotropaic amulet hanging just at the entrance. Professor Nwokolo is a man of science, but he’s well aware of what people like her can do to him. Not exactly people *like* her, just people from her coven. - -There’s a table cluttered with everything from screwdrivers to energy-capturing gloves. There’s a white board at the far end with equations complex enough to pass for advanced magic symbology. The equations extend to pieces of papers strewn around the floor. Nwokolo steps on a few as he crosses the room. Osita Osadebe’s *People’s Club* is serenading the room. He usually says the soft rhythm of the highlife song reminds him of his father, but it does the opposite for Chika, reminding her of her mother’s old records. - -“So what can I offer you?” he asks, his palms open in front of him. “A drink, perhaps?” - -“Nothing. Let’s just get on with it.” - -A smile spreads across his face. There’s a bright twinkle in his eyes that almost reflects on his glasses. The last time Chika saw him he had facial hair. But now, oddly enough, he looks older without it. - -“Okay then,” he says. - -Nwokolo goes to one end of the room and pulls a cloth off a cylindrical glass chamber. Inside it are a thousand fireflies. Their yellow glow lights up the cylinder, a flagrant contrast to the lab’s dim-red background. He turns to Chika and smiles. “We’ll use this.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}c{{}}hika is an Ihe Conjurer, meaning that she gets her energy from natural light. Her coven’s witches like to channel the sun because it is the most pure and effective energy source, but a consequence of doing so is that they immediately become averse to sunlight, and must avoid it for as long as it would take for the energy to wane. Further exposure could cause them to become combustible, and as little as a vibration of someone’s vocal cords could be like taking a match to dry leaves. - -She remembers seeing a witch caught up in the flames in front of her house five years ago. The fire licked the woman’s skin, burning her till she could no longer move. Chika stood transfixed that morning, frightened by how a human being could be reduced to ash in seconds. She will never forget, but not for that reason. She was only released from the sight when she heard the sounds of a vehicle crashing into something, and turned to find that her little brother had run into the main road. - -That method of channeling isn’t available to Chika right now, however. Not because it isn’t daytime – she has saved up enough sunlight in her talisman to use at night – or because she’d have to live like a vampire for several days after, but because channeling the sun or any other high energy source will alert her coven, and her chance to do what she came for will be lost. Professor Nwokolo had told her he had found an alternative, and even though she had her doubts, she agreed to try it out. - -“Fireflies generate light through a chemical reaction in their bodies, a process called bioluminescence.” Nwokolo often speaks without stopping to catch a breath, stringing words together like he’d lose the ability to speak if he doesn’t say them quickly enough. He seems to be twice as fast now that he is excited, sending the words tumbling over each other. “Light is produced when oxygen combines with calcium, adenosine—” - -“Prof, biko, stop,” she says. “Just get on with it. We don’t have all night.” - -“Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just that—” Chika glares at him “—okay, okay.” He goes to the side of the cylinder, pulls some cables that are connected to a computer, and moves to attach them to Chika’s arms. “Roll up your sleeves, please.” She does so and he applies the ends of the cables just above her wrists. - -Chika clenches and unclenches her fist but doesn’t feel anything. She expects there to be a warm sensation indicative of energy flowing into her, the way her skin reacts when she connects with the sun’s rays. Instead what she gets is like dipping her hand in water; there’s something, but then there’s nothing. - -Nwokolo notices and says, “Cold light. Firefly light doesn’t produce heat, which helps them conserve more energy than, say, a lightbulb. And it also keeps them from burning themselves up.” The edges of his lips curl up as he reaches the end of this statement, as if there’s something amusing in what he just said. Chika almost doubts him, because it could be that the reason she isn’t feeling *anything* is that there’s nothing to feel, but then her talisman lights up, a gentle luminescence the same shade as the fireflies, and she knows he’s right. - -“Yes, there it is,” he says, seeing the talisman, and she almost smiles too. - -“They won’t be able to pick this up?” she asks. - -“They shouldn’t. It’s never been used before, and there’s almost no energy leaking out. You’ll have enough time to do the spell, and—” he looks around the lab “—hopefully, I’ll have enough time to get out of here.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}hika told her mother about the Higgs field manipulation the night of the day she met the Professor for the first time. How she had overheard his frustrated ideas, seen how his theories were scorned by his peers as outlandish, and then recognised in his grasping for comprehension threads that led not to their science but instead towards her magic. - -She told her about how they discussed the intersection of science and the supernatural, that point where figures become symbols, and symbols become language. She told her mother that this could be the chance to see Olisa again, or even bring him back. - -“What?” her mother said, almost choking on the morsel of fufu that just went down her throat. - -“He says his quantum computer can only get us as far as fluctuating particles or so, then we’d need to cast an—” - -“Don’t say another word, Chika!” her mother barked. “Don’t! Going into another dimension! It is forbidden what you are thinking. That’s *not* what we practice.” - -“But it is—” - -“I said no! I don’t want to hear of this again. Olisa is dead and gone. Let him be.” - -But Chika did speak of it. Many times, even. On the phone, before dinner, after breakfast. Everytime she could. When her mother kept giving her the same reply, Chika bypassed her and took the matter up with the coven. She was told that crossing over would create a dent in the fabric of Ani Mmuo, and the consequences will be grave. - -Chika said they were being superstitious.. They warned her that if she ever went on with the crossing she’d be stripped of her powers and banished from the coven, her mother among them. - -“But this has nothing to do with ghosts and spirits,” Professor Nwokolo had said when they met again at a restaurant. “These are real humans living in parallel universes, similar to ours in many ways. They exist at this moment, we just need to figure out how to go there. It’d be the biggest breakthrough in science.” - -“I tried, prof,” Chika said calmly. “I did. But I’m forbidden from doing anything anymore.” - -Nwokolo leaned back in his chair, looking out the window. He took a long drag from his cigarette and let the smoke waft from his mouth in slow, ascending curls. “Both the scientists and witches think me mad,” he said, the beginnings of a laughter tainting his words. “Am I really mad?” - -Chika shook her head. - -“You know, this project was my father’s. He spent his whole life working on it but died before he could finish it.” - -“You wish to see him again too, don’t you?” she asked. - -“I only will if you help me. Come on. Let’s see this through.” - -“I’m sorry. I already told you. I can’t help.” - -Chika didn’t communicate with Professor Nwokolo for the next three years, until she woke on Olisa’s birthday with a fresh wound on her heart and a heaviness in her soul. - -Only holding Olisa again could possibly heal her. Even if he was not her Olisa. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}hika starts to feel the effects of the energy. It isn’t much compared to what the sun would have given her. A whisper rather than a roar. But Professor Nwokolo assures her that it’ll be just enough to jump-start the process. - -The glow in the cylinder starts to dim. The fireflies start to look more flies and less fire. She’s robbing them of something, she knows, and though that feels wrong, there’s nothing right in losing an innocent child like Olisa to the gaping jaws of death. - -“Ready?” Nwokolo asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice now. - -“Almost.” - -He rushes to the computers and his fingers rattle over the holographic keys. A section of the wall beside him slides apart slowly, revealing a glass door behind. Chika unplugs the cables attached to her and steps towards the door. She sees a cloudy mist inside the compartment. - -“Is this it?” she asks. - -“Yes. The Higgs Accelerator.” - -“Did you get the things I asked for?” - -“Yes.” - -He goes to one end of the lab, returns with a backpack, and hands it to Chika. She takes out the items one by one, and soon has poured a semi-circle around the HA machine from a pack of salt. She ties together bunches of patchouli, basil, and hyssop then sets it on fire, allowing the incense to burn around the circle. Finally she takes four candles and lights them at each end of the lab, muttering incantations under her breath all the while. - -Professor Nwokolo stands with his hands folded watching her the entire time, almost like he can’t wait to get back to doing his own part of the job. - -After casting the spell to cleanse the lab, Chika walks up to the glass door and nods at Nwokolo. It opens vertically and the mist escapes. She hesitates, then steps into the compartment. It is just wide enough to take one person, and is quite comfortable if they don’t decide to spread their arms. - -Nwokolo pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and says, “If this works, you should arrive in an alternate version of this lab. You have six hours before the window shuts again. Do what you have to do, use the spell again, and you’ll return.” - -Chika nods again, and he adds, “Begin at my signal.” - -The glass door slides shut and Nwokolo moves out of her line of vision. There’s a low hum omnipresent in the compartment. Chika can’t tell where it’s coming from, but she soon begins to hear it in her thoughts. This makes her uncomfortable and she puts her hands on the glass. She feels itchy and suddenly wants to take off her wig. *Where is he?* she thinks. - -A minute passes. Then another. Then he reappears and gives her a thumbs up, and she reads his lips: Now! - -*Anyanwu Ututu,* she begins. *Onwa n’abali! Anam apkoku unu o…* - -She feels something grow in her with each word she utters. Like a river contained in a tank, cracking the glass inch by inch. - -*Benmuo na Benmadu,* she continues, *unu nukwa nu’m o*. - -She goes on for minutes, the intensity of her voice increasing with each passing second. The energy within her comes loose, and she lets out a scream, unnatural and primeval. She feels the glass within her shatter, and the river pour out, flooding the world. - -She lets the water carry her across the planes of the ethereal, into that region where the physical and the metaphysical mean the same thing. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he ground is warm. Chika sits up and looks around. The glass compartment is gone. This isn’t the lab she knows. The edges are cleaner and the light is brighter. There’s a sharp pain in her head. She puts her hand to her forehead and says a few words to stop the ache, but nothing happens. She checks her talisman and there isn’t the faintest glow. No energy left. - -*Did it work?* - -She stands and looks around again. The room isn’t actually as neat as she thought. There’s something viscous like engine oil by the edges of the walls and machine parts piled on each other at another end. There are shelves that rise to the ceiling occupied by devices and hardware Chika can’t identify. - -Computer screens hover a few feet from her and she steps forward to look at them. “Professor Nwokolo,” she calls. “I made it into the other side. Where’s your other self?” - -The noise of machines startles her, a jarring mix of sounds that feel like TV static combined with water slapping against rocks, and she steps in its direction. The layout of the lab seems the same, even though she isn’t sure it’s the same place. The entrance is different, however, now situated to the right. She walks through the hallway but it is no longer dimly lit, and a few seconds later, she sees something that stops her dead. - -It looks like a robot, metallic and shiny. Her eyes bulge as it draws close, and she finds herself backing away. - -“Are you a robot?” she asks, heart thumping. - -“I… am a… Zonda,” it replies, and she can see that a part of it lights up when it speaks. Its voice is mechanical and toneless, and its body is shaped like a sphere. There’s neon green light glowing from its topmost part, and though the robot is predominantly blue, its lower half is multicolored, like it’s made from a combination of foreign parts. - -The strange noises intensify as it approaches, and suddenly Chika’s head is pounding. “What’s that noise?” - -“Music,” it says. “Why?” - -The room begins to spin and her legs lose balance. She clatters to the ground and a wave of weariness washes over her. - -“I can’t… I can’t breathe,” she manages to say, before blacking out. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen she wakes the robot is standing over her, or rather, hovering over her. She feels high and drowsy, and thinks she’s dreaming. “They were right,” she says. - -“Who?” the robot asks. - -“The witches,” Chika says. “My mother. They warned me but I didn’t listen. Now I’ve gotten myself… here. Where’s here? The future? The past?” - -“You passed out,” the robot says. “I believed you to be traumatized by my presence, but when you began to breathe irregularly I understood that you were anaerobic. There is not much air in this part of town, so I attached an oxygen tube to your collar.” Chika feels below her chin and touches a metallic necklace. - -“Are you a robot?” she asks. - -“You asked me that. I think you are the robot. Or a construct. Or whatever. Let us leave semantics for now. The important thing is how you got here.” - -The robot turns around and glides to the computer screens. They blink quickly, a series of numbers moving from top to bottom. Soon, a video feed takes up the screen. - -“You see right there,” the robot says, an appendage extending from its side and gesturing at a corner of the screen. Chika manages to stand on her feet, comes close to the screen, and squints. - -It shows the lab, the one they’re currently in. The robot is there in the video, a pair of the arms extending out the sides of its body and adjusting some component of a machine. The robot departs the scene. Then a flash of light overwhelms the image. - -After the flash of light, Chika herself appears, sprawled on the floor. As she starts to rise, the image freezes. - -“One minute you are not here,” says the robot, “the next minute you are. Did you use a particle accelerator? Or some kind of ship? Or was it—” - -“I came from another universe in something called a Higgs Accelerator, aided by my magic.” - -“Oh, so that iis how you did it,” it says, turning to her. The neon light brightens, taking up more space on its body. “Of course. The energy of those who can bend nature. Why did I not think of that?” - -Chika swallows hard. *Could it be?* “Prof… Professor Nwokolo?” Chika was getting weak again, the ache in her head growing exponentially. - -“Is that what I am called on your side? Well, I think this professor of yours got a few calculations wrong.” A titter escapes from the robot, even though machines shouldn’t be laughing and there is really nothing funny about what it – or he? – just said. “How are you supposed to get back?” - -“I’ll say the words when it’s time,” Chika says, “and I should be pulled from this world.” - -The robot snickers again and Chika begins to wonder if she should just say the words now and remove herself from here. But she’s sure her coven’s witches will be at the Professor’s lab by now, and the moment she gets back is the moment she loses her powers. - -This is it, the only chance she’ll ever get, and she must see it through. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}hika and the robot – it named itself, but Chika could not recognise the sound as a part of language, and simply called it “the Professor” again – speed through the streets in an unfamiliar kind of vehicle, a two-man hovercraft shaped like a tennis ball. - -“If I do not get you away,” he tells her, “they would come for you in minutes. There was a surge of energy around my lab when you showed up and the authorities will want to know where it came from. Well, the authorities, and the ones who can bend nature.” - -The witches, in Chika’s parlance. ”Don’t you have a name for them?” she asks. - -“Names are a thing of words. We do not have words.” - -The absurdity of his statement startles a laugh from her lips. “How can you say that? We are speaking now!” - -“My words with you are the first I have ever spoken,” he says. “We do not speak your language, or really even talk. Zonda do not need to be vocal to communicate. I broke down the sounds you make into code I can understand, I intuit meaning from your body language, and mimick your speech patterns.” - -“That is not enough!” - -“I also sense the complex patterns within the organ in your head. I translate our form of language from code and into signals you can understand.” - -She turns away from his gaze, disturbed. The night is brighter in this world, and Chika can see from the vehicle that the moon is a lot bigger and closer. “How is this possible?” she asks. - -”Life started out here from the merger of two planets, one much larger than the other. The metallic core of the planets collided, and from this union came a superabundance of the basic element from which most simple life forms here evolved.” The Professor indicates himself. “The remnants of the dead planet collected pretty close to orbit, and this is the moon you now see.” - -She looks through the window and there are other robots like the Professor out there. Some are larger, others as small as a football. Some look quite different, like trees with trunks and branches spiraling all around them. Then Chika’s view is obscured as several vehicles pull up beside theirs. - -“Oh no,” the Professor says, and accelerates, twisting and turning onto several streets, but there’s little he can do to stop the other vehicles from gaining on them. - -A red light passes through their vehicle and splits it in two, forcing Chika and the Professor to fall in opposite directions. Chika’s half bounces through the streets before crashing into a dome on the side of the road. - -She’s caught in a mess of wires and grease and sparks and chips and metal. For a moment she thinks she’s no longer breathing, the air gone from her lungs, but then she feels something probing her side. She stirs, and pushes to her feet. - -The things poking at her are snake-like appendages connected to robots outside the vehicle. They touch her and withdraw reflexively, as if checking to understand if she responds to stimuli. This goes on for about a minute, the tentacles ruffling her hair and feeling her face. At first they feel soft, like rubber, but seconds later, as if satisfied about what she is, they become denser than vines and curl themselves around her arms and legs. - -She’s dragged through the wreckage of the car and into the street. Jagged metal cuts her skin and she leaves a trail of blood on the floor. She’s held upside-down and lifted several feet from the ground, her body dangling in the air. - -Chika tells herself she’s dreaming, but the pains in her body and the tightness around her legs disprove that. - -She imagines herself dying here, several universes away from her mother, in a world of machines. - -Then another intense light leaps past her, and she is dropped and falls to the ground unexpectedly – she feels something break. She sees the Professor advancing and wielding a device in his hand, firing beams of light at the tentacled robots, who are now taking cover. - -“Let us go,” he says. - -She manages to stand again and limps on one foot towards him. He points to a vehicle like the one they came in and stays there shooting, covering her escape. Just as she’s about to enter the vehicle, she looks back and sees him taking fire. One shot goes into his lower quarters and splinters it into an assortment of parts. Wires, circuitry, screws, and fluid spill onto the ground. - -“No!” Chika screams, and rushes from the vehicle, hands outstretched in front of her. - -Then she stops. - -She tilts her head upward and glances at the moon, disturbingly close and pale and bright. She lifts her arms high, feeling the light pass between her fingers. The sun is light, she thinks, and the moon is a product of that light. - -“Onwa n’abali,” she calls, “akpokuo’m gi kita. Nyem ike kitaaa!” - -Chika feels the energy course through her veins, her blood, and her spirit. Then she lets it all out, a contiguous light that extends in all directions. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}midst the smoldering robots and burning vehicles around her, Chika kneels and picks up the Professor, or what is left of him. He is almost weightless, wires extending out of his broken parts. She’s staring at his neon lights, now dimmer than she has ever seen it. - -“Hello,” he says. “You never told me your name.” - -“Chika,” she says. “I’m Chika.” - -“Chika, you do not have much time. What you just did now will summon the ones who can bend nature. They are far worse.” - -His world’s witches. “I know.” - -“Get into that vehicle. I have sent the coordinates to the system. It will take you to the location you seek.” - -“What about you, can’t you rebuild or fix yourself?” she asks, fighting back tears, her words distorted by a growing lump in her throat. - -“It does not work that way, Chika. I am a living thing too, you know?” - -“So?” - -“So living things die when they get hurt too much.” Chika looks away now, no longer able to hold back the tears. His voice is getting fainter and fainter by the second, another living thing dying slowly in her arms. Again. - -She hears a laugh and returns her gaze to him. “What?” - -“Your professor…” He laughs some more. “Infinite possibilities, and he thought you would end up in a universe just like his. He should have known better. But at least… at least, he has helped me realize I accomplished something, somewhere, in another universe.” - -This Professor is still laughing when the green light dims, then finally fades, alongside his voice. - -All those complex processes just to speak to her, but now he is dead because of her, a fact as simple and straightforward as a witch’s locator spell. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}ive hours have passed since Chika came to this world, ten minutes since she has been in front of this house. She is within the confines of the vehicle the poor Professor gave her. The pre-dawn light rises in the horizon, a yellow band invading the night. - -It’s not really a house like she knows it, just a large structure that seems to have been sculpted out of a chunk of metal that juts out of the ground. It has a kind of see-through wall that becomes opaque sometimes, as if a change in the air alters its thickness. - -Though strange, the house is somewhat familiar. It is across a road just like hers, and vehicles are speeding past. Vehicles that Olisa, or his alternate self, can run into when his alternate big sister isn’t looking. - -She cannot step out of the vehicle or cross the road, however. After her great outburst of energy, that still could not save the Professor, the sun would scald her the moment she put a finger out. So she stays there watching. Looking through the walls at a little robot and two larger others gliding around the house. - -She can tell them apart because the smaller one is eager to go outside even though it isn’t time yet – like Olisa always did when he was ready for school. - -The slender one, struggling to keep him within her grasp, is a bit erratic, freezing sometimes like someone powered her down, then zapping around the house again as if suddenly on full charge. She knows that robot is one of those that can bend nature. Like Chika can, For it is herself. - -The last one moves around quite slowly, as if her machinery needs oiling, as if the world is too quick for her, as though time dilates around her. She’s spherical like the Professor, but more wider and burly, and Chika almost laughs at the thought that her mother is fat both as human and Zonda. - -Chika wishes to go to them, to play around like one family again, to snatch the little one in her arms and hold him in the air. But they’d shriek, express their shock in ways she might not be able to understand, and be horrified by her presence in ways only Zonda can. - -She thinks not to go to them, lest she be the reason the little one runs into the street in fear, and be knocked down by a vehicle a hundred times his size again. So she basks in the sight she beholds, and keeps it in her mind, because even though this Olisa might now be made of silicon, her love for him is the same across substrates, across universes, and across the vast distances of the infinite. - -And then she feels the air change, and reality alters. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}hika is pulled into a space where everything is dark and colorless. The house, Olisa, her mother, the hovercraft – all gone. - -She’s afloat, and voices are speaking around her in a strange language. And yet… - -“Witch code,” someone says. “If you’re like us you’d be able to understand it.” - -“She’s not like us,” another voice says, this one firmer than the first. “She’s a Crosser, like plenty before her in other worlds, and that’s all we need to know.” - -There’s a murmur in the background, voices trying to speak over each other. - -“Silence!” The firm voice speaks again. “She has indeed come from elsewhere, and we know what we must do.” - -“Those instructions were given before we were born,” another voice says. “Do we really have to keep to them?” - -“We must, if we hope to maintain balance in our world, and cleanse it of whatever filth she has brought with her. And we must do this here, now, before we lose the chance.” - -Chika wants to speak, to tell them she means no harm and just wants to see her brother again, and maybe to hold him once more, but the words remain only in her head, and her head is deep in turbulent waters. - -The voices grow around her. They become loud enough to almost split her eardrums. They’re chanting. She’s screaming, but she can’t cover her ears. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}he’s hurled from the mystical plane back into objective reality. She’s no longer within the protection of the hovercraft, and the sun’s rays are eating into her flesh. She’s on all fours, crawling to the house, the hard earth biting into her palms. - -Her body’s on fire, but her soul is freezing cold. - -She’s saying the words to return home now, but she isn’t sure if she’s doing so with her mouth or her heart. One thing is certain though – she isn’t being transported back. She looks up to the house and sees the robot girl outside, standing there, watching her. - -Chika knows that feeling. That fright. That horror. - -She hears the sounds of vehicles coming from afar and knows what’s coming next. - -Her vision is blurry now, but she can see Olisa in her mind’s eye. The robot boy has run out of the house, his sister too afraid to notice, his mother too slow to react, him too innocent to care. - -She sees the chain reaction. The infinite loop. His world will end now the same way it did in hers, *because of her*, again. This Chika will go off in search of him, causing him to die again. - -Chika understands it all. - -But she hopes there’s somewhere in the vast, endless universe where the odds would one day be in his favor. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Infinite** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835808591885462).* diff --git a/content/issue-34/InterviewFrancescoVerso.md b/content/issue-34/InterviewFrancescoVerso.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3a20bf19..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/InterviewFrancescoVerso.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,108 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "An Interview with Francesco Verso" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- non-fiction -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Mythaxis has been proud to feature stories penned by authors from a wide variety of countries in the past, but as an English-language zine it's fair to say that we've barely scratched the surface of what could be done to expose readers to genre writing from different cultures. Step forward Francesco Verso, man of world fiction." - -image: images/VersoInterview10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The picture is assembled from cover images from [Future Fiction's website](https://www.futurefiction.org/) and Francesco Verso's own photograph." - -type: stock -slug: francesco-verso-interview -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}his year, in April, I went to my first ever sf convention – something I waited to do until my fifth ever decade. - -I won’t wait so long for my second convention. I had an excellent time: caught up with a few old friends and made a few new ones, attended some fascinating panels, talks, presentations, and readings, and of course bought a *lot* of books, happy to take advantage of the rooms of publishers, authors, and other artists hawking their wares. - -At one stand my eye was caught by a translation anthology of contemporary Italian science fiction, *Freetaly*, edited by one Francesco Verso, who it turned out was also sitting behind the table. Yet not only an editor, and not just an sf author of short stories and novels too (those roles often going hand in hand), but also co-founder of **[FutureFiction.org](https://www.futurefiction.org/)**, which aims “to disseminate and promote an interdisciplinary approach to the idea of the future, using science fiction and speculation as bridges between today and tomorrow”. - -I thought that sounded pretty interesting, and though our conversation then wasn’t long enough to fully reveal all, it went well in both directions: he waved me off with my arms filled with books, and I walked away with his promise to be interviewed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Andrew Leon Hudson: Hi again Francesco, thanks for taking the time to talk! Maybe you could begin by telling us a little about yourself?** - -**Francesco Verso:** I was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1973, and I studied Environmental Economics at the University of Roma Tre. Before I became a writer full time I worked in the IT industry, including eight years with IBM and two with Lenovo, but in 2008 I quit to dedicate my life to writing and publishing sf. Over the last fifteen years I’ve won two Urania Mondadori Awards, the Odissea Award, the Italia Award, and four Europe Awards for Best Editor, Best Publisher, Best Work of Fiction, and Best Magazine. Since 2014, I’ve worked as editor of Future Fiction, a small press dedicated to publishing the best SF authors from all over the world. We have translations from thirteen languages and thirty-five countries, the only science fiction press in the world to do this. - - - -**ALH: What first attracted you to science fiction?** - -**FV:** During my university time, I studied for a year in Amsterdam for an Erasmus project. There along the canals I found a little secondhand bookstore run by an American guy who, down in the basement, was keeping hundreds of sf books. Frank Herbert’s *Dune*, Ian McDonald’s *Desolation Road*, William Gibson’s *Neuromancer*, Ursula Le Guin’s *The Left Hand of Darkness*… So I started from there, with the crazy ambition of imitating the writers that I now consider my teachers and sources of inspiration. - -I write only science fiction, and I set my stories in the near future and mostly on Earth. I can’t really write about other worlds, as I believe there are enough alien realities and otherness here on our planet to light up any sense of wonder. We already walk into many uncanny valleys. Lately I am interested in exploring the solarpunk and human augmentation subgenres – sustainable energies and posthuman issues driven by technologies like CRISPR-Cas9, 3D printing, biomimicry, and native innovation – as tools to explore and analyze the biopolitical scenarios we’re heading towards in the coming years. - - - -**ALH: Tell us about your first success as an author.** - -**FV:** Oh, it was a long time ago… Back in 2008, I sent the manuscript of my second novel, *e-Doll* (a techno-thriller where sex-shifter androids are used as prostitutes to limit the awful phenomenon of sex-crimes), to the most prestigious Italian sf award, the Urania Mondadori Award. I was just an absolute beginner, so I am really thankful to the editors at that time, Giuseppe Lippi and Sergio Altieri, who gave me an opportunity to be published that has literally transformed my whole life. - - - -**ALH: And how about your most recent one – I have a copy of** ***The Roamers*** **waiting on my TBR shelf (so not too many spoilers please!).** - -**FV:** The main theme of *The Roamers* follows the life of a group of social rebels at the twilight of Western civilisation who undergo an anthropological transformation caused by the dissemination of nano-robots capable of reassembling molecules to create new matter. This technology changes the way they feed themselves and gives rise to a creative and autonomous culture which, while based on 3D printing and mesh networking, is in some aspects reminiscent of an ancient nomadic society. - -The book was published in Italian in 2018 and it’s the first example of solarpunk novel in Europe, at least that I am aware of (other novels may have a slightly solarpunk vibe, but are not clearly or openly solarpunk). It’s now been translated in English by Jennifer Delare and published by Flame Tree Press; Chinese and Tamil editions are due to be published in 2024-25. - - - -**ALH: Tell us about your experience of having your work transformed this way.** - -**FV:** Translation is very special to me. It’s the real bridge to other worlds, other stories and futures. Without translations we would be doomed to live in just one reality, the one we’re born in, missing all the beauty that lies outside our own culture. As soon as I was published I started to think about the translation problem, and it was very difficult and complicated to invest my own money in the translation of my novels. Finally I found Sally McCorry who – over the course of more than ten years – has helped me translating three novels and around twelve short stories, becoming my “English voice”. - -In the specific case of *The Roamers* I worked with Jennifer Delare. I couldn’t pay the kind of fee that a big publisher could offer, so I had to be part of the process in order to make it happen, and after some twelve months we managed to finish. She was translating around two to three chapters at a time, and then sending them back to me for checking and approval. Jennifer did an amazing job, and not just on her own work; she found some minor contractions and missing information in the original text, and thus her contribution has also been relevant to revision of the Italian second edition as well as the English release. She was able to capture the original voice of the story and so I’m very grateful for what she’s done for me. - -Without making an initial investment myself in my translation, no editor in Science Fiction would have ever read any of my work, as there simply isn’t the interest within the publishing industry to explore non-English language fiction. Now that I’m also being published in other languages, the translation experience is changing for me. In the case of English, I am able to control more or less the meaning and even some nuances of the final translation; but with Chinese, for example, I just have to share with the translator as much as possible in terms of tone and atmosphere, and then trust in their work. - -Basically, the translator is the primary writer of your novel’s derivative language – not an easy task at all. And my science fiction is full of neologisms, plays on words, and cognitive estrangement, so it’s really a fine work of art to do translation well. - - - -**ALH: This brings us around to Future Fiction. It seems to me that a big part of what you’re doing here is broadening the potential audience of individual writers by breaking down the barriers of geography and language.** - -**FV:** Yes. Being an Italian writer is to live at the margin of a new dominant English culture, so over the last ten years I’ve come to realize that there’s a huge cultural loss to global science fiction in translations only coming from English. I’ve been invited to many sf cons – in France, Spain, Croatia, China, India, Montenegro, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands – and I always ask editors the same question: “What language do you translate from?” The answer is always the same. - -There was a time, from the 1960s through the 1980s, when important works of speculative fiction were translated from one country to another throughout the world, especially in Europe, Russia, and Latin America. Today, however, the hegemony of English in the publishing world has created a situation in which every author wants to be translated into English. This means that everyone knows everything about American and British SF while completely ignoring what is being written next door, in France and Germany, China and India, Brazil and Argentina, Poland and Finland. - -In reality, of course, high-quality science fiction is being written everywhere in every language; it is just that for most publishers commercial concerns come first, so readers do not necessarily end up with access to the best writing, just to the ‘best’ books available in English. This also imposes a huge and unfair burden on any people that do not speak English, many of whom do not have access to language instruction or cannot afford to study it. There is a lot of work to do in this respect, not just on markets but mostly on the perception of reality and how storytelling should and could be. - -The cultural loss of such a short-sighted approach is huge. A study by the University of Rochester found that only 3% of what is published in the US comes from a translation. Similarly, on any SF shelf in any bookstore from Tokyo to Amsterdam to Roma to Rio De Janeiro, there are hundreds and hundreds of books translated *from* English, and few from each nation’s own writers or writers writing in languages other than English. That is what Antonio Gramsci would call a ‘cultural hegemony’. - - - -**ALH: How did Future Fiction come to be?** - -**FV:** It all started because, as an sf reader, I was missing a huge part of the representativeness of the complete *real* world, some kind of “literary biodiversity” which in other genres (as paradoxical as it might seem) is not so unusual. For this genre to really become international, it should include the voices and experiences of people naturally speaking Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Bengali, Russian, and German, just to mention the most commonly-spoken languages. I was looking for the missing voices of global science fiction. - -So the project is more like a cultural small press than a commercial publisher. Thanks to a team of translators, we’ve published more than 200 short stories and 60 paperback, plus twelve comics and fifty audiobooks, either in Italian or in dual language formats (Chinese-Italian, English-Italian, and English-Chinese). Some might indeed define this as “diversity”, a term that is increasingly popular in and out of the genre in the Anglophone world, but then I think, *“Diverse from whom? Who is in charge of setting the standards of “diversity”?* Again, we are back to the original bias towards English-speaking culture. - -We talk about the precariousness of monocultures in biology, but what would the world become if there was just one voice to talk about the Future? And just one religion or economy or lifestyle to represent it? So, just as the Seed Vault in the Svalbard Islands preserves the biodiversity of plant life from a possible environmental catastrophe, I’ve set myself on a quest to preserve science fiction’s literary diversity from a possible cultural catastrophe. - - - -**ALH: What plans and objectives does Future Fiction have looking forward?** - -**FV:** Well, during the first phase of this project, the mission was to demonstrate that “science fiction happens everywhere” and, believe me, it was not easy at all to achieve it. Often people at book fairs or sfcons say, *“Oh, is there sf in Italy? Or in Turkey, or Greece, or India?”* So now this small project has developed into a real storytelling engine aimed at the “decolonization of the future”. - -The majority of big sf publishers in any country are more interested in what’s “around” the book than what’s “inside” it, and they don’t have scouts for other languages. We use a very powerful tool that I call [the Sense of Wander](https://apex-magazine.com/editorial/from-the-sense-of-wonder-to-the-sense-of-wander/) to give dignity and visibility to Science Fiction stories that, because are not written in English, would remain neglected and totally ignored by the global conversation. Great books, wonderful authors, incredible scenarios, all lost “like tears in rain…” ☺ Our plan is to establish a network of small presses across the world that will talk to each other, share the best authors and stories, and translate directly between non-English languages. - - - -**ALH: And how about yourself – do you have anything interesting on the horizon?** - -**FV:** Two of my novels, *Nexhuman* and *Bloodbusters*, were published in China last year and soon they will also be released in Malaysia. *The Roamers* will come out soon in India too. I believe that the future is coming at full throttle from the East, and thus I will continue to work on that side of the world. I am about to finish a solarpunk anthology of short stories called *Ecolution* in the same setting as *The Roamers* which will be released in Italian and English next year, and I’m also working on the adaptation of *Ecolution* and *Bloodbusters* to comics published by Futuresque, the comics imprint of Future Fiction. 2023 and 2024 will be busy! - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks again to Francesco for chatting with us. If you’d like to actually hear him speaking about his passions, check out his 2020 presentation on [Solarpunk as a genre and a social movement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI2LcGpkBho) at the InterWorldView Conference in Huangzhou, China. You can get hold of his own publications [here](https://www.amazon.it/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B005BOQNRY), and if you want to explore the Future Fiction website you’ll be glad to know it’s available in both [English](https://www.futurefiction.org/?lang=en) and [Italian](https://www.futurefiction.org/)!* diff --git a/content/issue-34/ShortReviews02.md b/content/issue-34/ShortReviews02.md deleted file mode 100644 index f9f7a039..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/ShortReviews02.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – April to June" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As the issue draws to a close, we once again invite our readers to use us as a springboard to dive into the fiction offered by other interesting online zines out there. Three new stories from three different publications, all released in the last three months and all very much worth a little of your time." - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-summer-2023 -weight: 8 ---- - -{{}}O{{}}ne of my most self-satisfied experiences as a reviewer of fiction came (*the reviewer of fiction sucks in a horrified breath*) fifteen years ago, fairly shortly after reading a translation of the lipogramatic novel **[A Void](https://cartesiantheatre.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/a-void/)**, by Georges Perec. I won't say why, read the review if you want to know… - -…or, instead, why not read **[Xenogram: A Chronology Of The Global Erasure Of Vowel Number Three, And The Merger Of Man](https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2023/06/23/xenogram-a-chronology-of-the-global-erasure-of-vowel-number-three-and-the-merger-of-man/)** by Charles Ta, who has done for the sub-genre of *fictionalised historical non-fiction of the future* what I did in salute of Perec's mind-and-language bending masterpiece of technique. **Xenogram** appears in the rather special *[Sci Phi Journal](https://www.sciphijournal.org/)*, which dedicates itself to publishing idea-driven fiction "at the cosmic intersection between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology and hard SF". If you like the pseudo-non-fictional form, *SPJ* is your ideal reference library. - -Every quarter *[Baffling Magazine](https://www.bafflingmag.com/)* publishes speculative flash fiction with a queer bent, and this quarter I enjoyed the fantastical sf piece **[The Flame Without](https://www.bafflingmag.com/issue-eleven/the-flame-without)** very much: in it, a quartet of exo-planetary explorers eagerly await mutation by their new home, but the narrator's anticipation of gaining some strange new gift crumbles as they see their companions illuminated while they remain darkly mundane. It was only afterwards that I wondered as to whether Tarver Nova's story was noticeably queered or not. Perhaps zines, like authors, are only as constrained by the identities they adopt as they choose to be. - -The third tale I'd particularly like to recommend appears in *[DreamForge](https://dreamforge.mywebportal.app/)*, a home to hopeful science fiction that seeks to shine an encouraging light in the downbeat darkness that often seems so popularly prevalent. [The Jewel of the Waves, the Diadem of the Sky](https://dreamforge.mywebportal.app/dreamforge/stories/show/the-jewel-of-the-waves-the-diadem-of-the-sky-jared-oliver-adams) by Jared Oliver Adams presents an intriguing future of the possibly near variety, and while it does feature familiar dystopian elements (overcrowded cityscapes, compromised ecologies, technological implants, omnipresent surveillance) it also introduces inventive sociological twists, like semi-sibling police services of an oppositional nature, one imposing, the other nurturing – both well able to scrutinise in the interests of justice, and to look the other way. - -To wrap up, a handful of mentions to other strong recent stories: [The Incredible Exploding Woman](https://fabulistmagazine.com/the-incredible-exploding-woman/) and [The Last Days of Bester and Alma](https://fabulistmagazine.com/the-last-days-of-bester-and-alma/), both in *The Fabulist*, were striking reads, so too in a calmer tone [The Conch Shell](https://magazine.metaphorosis.com/story/2023/the-conch-shell-elizabeth-raphael/) in *Metaphorosis*. And a respectful nod in the direction of [Presto Change-O](https://cosmicrootsandeldritchshores.com/fiction-all/science-fiction/presto-change-o/), whose late author Warren Brown was a long-time participant behind the scenes at *Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores*, and will be sorely missed. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835806305219024).* diff --git a/content/issue-34/Simulations.md b/content/issue-34/Simulations.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8339158e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/Simulations.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,243 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Simulations" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Masha Kisel -copyright: '© Masha Kisel 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "And now sit back for your second speculatively matrimonial feature: Masha Kisel takes us into a pretty near future that feels pretty plausible, unfortunately, be it in the struggle of living day-to-day within a failing ecosphere, or of relating to people as we let technology come between us." - -image: images/Simulations10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Nothing Ahead](https://www.pexels.com/photo/stacked-books-on-shelves-7116591/) and [OpenClipart-Vectors](https://pixabay.com/vectors/audio-music-sfa-jazz-sound-wave-1293262/)." - -type: stock -slug: simulations -weight: 3 ---- - -**Summer 2040: Three Days After Upload** - -{{}}T{{}}he plastic monitor flashing a tiny blue light repulses me as if it were a severed torso or an amputated foot. Shame on me. What if Jonathan had been in a car accident and he *was* just a head and torso kept alive by monitors and wires? But this wasn’t an accident. It was intentional. Elective. Three days ago, my husband chose to freeze himself and upload all 86 billion of his copied neurons onto Soulscape’s computational system. - -“This is Jonathan’s container,” the technician casually announced and handed me a dome-shaped device, as if disembodied husbands in containers were the new normal. “He will communicate with you through this. Don’t leave him alone for too long for the first few weeks after the initial upload. If you let him fragment, it’ll be like putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.” He laughed so hard at his own joke he had to turn up his O2 to stop coughing. “But seriously, ma’am. It’s crucial that you interact regularly until he integrates into his new reality.” - -Despite Soulscape’s guarantees and promises, the simulated world to which Jonathan has been uploaded isn’t finished. For now, he exists in darkness. When the crackling of the static begins I close my eyes because I can’t look at that plastic little prison while he’s cursing, pleading to be let out. - -When Charlie was born, Jonathan and I agreed not to keep pets. It would be too much work, we said. Now Jonathan’s monitor in the corner of my room is the pet I didn’t want – whimpering for attention, interrupting my sleep. - -I can’t tell Charlie. Not yet. He’s only eight. A sensitive boy. Jonathan’s absence is easy enough to cover up for now. He’s used to his father leaving for weeklong *Evolving Beings* retreats and solitary vacations to “get back to himself.” - -It was often a relief not to have Jonathan in the house. His casual slights, masked as playfulness, made for an inhospitable environment for easily wounded creatures like Charlie and me. When Charlie tried playing the ukulele I got him for Christmas, Jonathan laughed and tousled his hair: “Wow, buddy, you really don’t have a musical bone in you, do ya?” Charlie hid the ukulele in the farthest corner of his closet, draping an old sweatshirt over it, as if the thing was cursed and he didn't want it looking at him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Winter 2025: Fifteen Years Before Upload** - -{{}}J{{}}onathan was my boss at SunFlour – Chicago’s oldest vegan bakery. For the first three months of our forbidden flirtation I lived from one euphoric encounter to the next: the accidental bump of shoulders in the walk-in freezer; cigarette breaks in the back alley; sharing leftover scones at the end of our shift. I even tasted soy buttercream off his fingertips once. After sleepwalking through four years as an accounting major at the local community college, I finally found what I loved. My days began at 5am, but I rushed into SunFlour eager to complete my list of baking projects. Of course I was also running to see Jonathan. In our shared daily routine, punctuated by stolen affection, I thought of us as a couple even before the two bottles of red wine at the holiday party made it official. - -Waking up at his apartment after our first night together, I wandered around barefoot while he was still asleep, trying to glimpse something beyond what he revealed at work. His matching beige couch and chairs were spotless, made even cleaner by the morning sunlight streaming through the bay windows. There wasn’t a single bruise on the fruit in the blue and white porcelain bowl on the oak dining table. The black slate bathroom floor tiles heated up when you stepped on them. - -As a kid I often came home to an empty house and foraged in the cabinets for crackers. My dad was a traveling sales rep for a medical supply company, and my mom worked as a cashier at two different department stores. I gravitated toward warm places and people. Standing in Jonathan’s apartment, I felt taken care of even as he remained in the other room. - -I had no idea about his enormous family wealth. I didn’t know that he was also part-owner of SunFlour, a vanity project of his hippy uncle. I didn’t know that the spotless comfort of the apartment was the work of a weekly cleaning crew. He was a few years older than me and I saw his tidy home as proof of his emotional maturity, a slice of grownup home-lovingness I desperately craved. - -That damned fruit bowl, with its perfect Anjou pears, earned my trust. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Summer 2040: One Week After Upload** - -{{}}“R{{}}ose! Rose!” Jonathan calls out to me, the blue light flashes again and again in the corner of our room. - -There was once a time when I was so in love with him that nothing about his body could disgust me. I cleaned the stains he left on the carpet during his ayahuasca trip. We were never sure what he took because he got the brew from a woman he had met at one of his *Evolving Beings* retreats. Instead of receiving visions, he fell into a snoring sleep and lost control of his bowels on our living room floor. - -“Thank God you’re okay! You scared me.” I fussed over him, brushing sweaty curls from his forehead and holding a glass of water to his lips when he woke up. I wiped up after him without a word of scorn. - -Now I can’t stand the sound of his voice. - -“Rose, it’s empty here. Tell them to fix this or bring me back.” His fear is contagious. For a moment our bedroom is a simulation too. The skylights hang permanent clouds overhead. I feel equally trapped. - -“I talked to the technician,” I say, trying to keep panic from creeping into my voice. “They’re working on it as fast as they can. Isn’t anyone else with you?” - -“No one’s here. I’m alone!” he sobs. “She didn’t go through with it.” - -“Who didn’t go through with it?” I ask, too exhausted to care about the answer. - -He remains silent. - -I summon all the psychological tools I used for my fear of flying, years ago, when travel was still possible. On the plane, I’d repeat self-hypnosis mantras to transport myself out of the metal box six miles above ground. “We’re not that high up. This is just like riding on a train.” And if that didn’t work I told myself that I was the plane and the sky and the ground below, that I was the world’s soul, softly treading to my destination on six-mile legs made of air currents. - -“I love you babe, but you’re so neurotic,” Jonathan would say, sprawled out in his first class window seat next to me, vodka tonic in hand. “Just enjoy the ride.” I wanted to believe that this was just his way of helping, but he punctured my fragile membrane of serenity. From the corner of my eye I tried not to see the sky’s terrifying vastness framing Jonathan’s profile. I thought I spied a crocodile’s smile. - -Now, I try to convince myself that Jonathan and I are just talking on the phone; that he’s in another city; that he’s still in his body. But it doesn’t work, because this isn’t just about changing my own perceptions. I can only glimpse the periphery of his new experience, but it’s enough to make me feel like I’m falling too, to make the pattern on the hardwood floors squirm like it’s made of worms. - -I reassure him that in the past week Soulscape has made progress on the simulated construction. Jonathan will soon have a new home. “This is just temporary. They’re building gardens, mountains, oceans, beaches. It will be so beautiful, I promise.” I need to believe this too. “You should at least be able to see the stone brick wall to the rose garden. Do you see the bricks and the climbing vines?” - -“Yes,” he crackles miserably, “I’ve been staring at the wall. That’s all I’ve been doing for days. I can’t even sleep, Rose!” - -“Okay, try touching it. Does it have texture?” - -“I can’t fucking see my hands… but okay. Yes, it’s rough. Not quite like real brick, but grainy, yes.” His voice is shaking, but maybe it’s just the connection. - -“Okay, now the vine. Are there any leaves you can touch?” - -“They don’t have texture yet. It’s just color.” - -“Focus on the green, honey. Describe the shade of green to me.” - -Instead I end up talking to him of the rainforest we hiked on our honeymoon in Costa Rica, the sounds of unseen howler monkeys in the canopy and the blur of yellow and red feathers when we looked up. - -Today the sight of thick foliage is rare. Here in Chicago, you have to buy tickets to visit greenhouses, indoor gardens, glass-domed forest play areas for kids. They sell out so fast we only go a few times a year. - -It’s 7am and Charlie will wake up soon. He has his first playdate in months. The pollution levels are lower early in the morning so we’ll have to hurry through our breakfast. - -“I’ll be back in two hours, Jonathan.” I say, and quickly disconnect before he has a chance to beg me not to go. - -I can’t get used to the overcast grayness that flattens the world into two dimensions even in the summer. I check the Suntracker website: it has been fifty days since the last glimpse of blue sky, and it will be at least twenty more. - -Lindsay is already there with her son Caleb when I drive up and park in our reserved spot. It’s hard to believe that city parks were once public property. - -“Hey Rose!” Her upbeat voice rings out in the empty playground. In all the post-apocalyptic movies I ever saw, survival was adrenaline-filled, screaming action. Oh how the victims wailed and protested their fate! In our dying world, the only loud voices come from those who can afford to simulate normalcy. The struggle to stay alive happens quietly, out of view. - -Charlie waves at Caleb and they quickly become absorbed in some secret game. Lindsay and I watch them, trying to think of something to say. - -“Charlie’s mini-pack’s cover is adorable, Rose! Where did you get it?” Lindsay never stops smiling. - -“I ordered it from Oh2You. It’s a small business started by a mom. They have lots of cute retro stuff. Snoopy, SpongeBob, Paw Patrol…” - -We’ve taken a wordless vow not to mention what’s in the mini-packs or why clear tubes extend from our children’s nostrils. Or our own. To name our collective tragedy is an act of treason among mothers of well-fed, breathing children. I force a content expression as we watch them struggle with the weight of their life-saving baggage. They climb up the metal rungs of the playground ladder slow as tortoises. - - We talk about how quickly the boys grow out of their shoes and about the outrageous price of chocolate as we swat away swarms of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes may or may not carry encephalitis. Lindsay flicks one away from her oxygen tube with her long burgundy nails as if elegantly ashing a cigarette. - -I can’t tell Lindsay about Jonathan. We haven’t known each other very long. There are things one doesn’t talk about with new mom friends, especially now. - -“Big plans today?” She smiles a little too broadly when I check my watch again to make sure I don’t leave him alone so long that he begins to disintegrate. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Winter 2035: Five Years Before Upload** - -{{}}W{{}}hen Charlie was still little I got used to being alone in the house at night. With Jonathan gone for one of his evening *Evolving Beings* classes, I’d hear the tiny sounds of a child waking up from a nightmare. Slipping out of our half-empty bed, I’d drag myself to the rocking chair in Charlie’s room. I imagined swallowing up bad dreams like a python, ingesting wars, plagues, winged crocodiles, mushroom clouds… so when he startled himself awake with a weak little cry that must have been a full-throated scream in his dream, there was only mama, soft and quiet in her usual place. - -I felt brave when I was with Charlie. In his eyes, I was mama the protector – a heroic avatar of myself. But when I wasn’t near him I didn’t know what I was – a jumble of half-articulated emotions, as incomprehensible as inkblots. - -Once Charlie fell back asleep, I’d check my phone for all the disasters that needed my tending in the middle of the night. Global temperatures had long passed the perilous 2.5-degree increase. Scientists predicted worse food shortages, earth-scorching heatwaves, deteriorating air quality. From heroic nightmare devourer I devolved into compulsive eater: gorging on lab-made chocolate in our pristine kitchen, guilty and grateful for my gluttony while so many around the world starved. - -How did my life become so distorted while Jonathan’s stayed the same? It was as if none of it was happening to him. - -My mother always loved his “stability.” We never discussed his money, although that’s what she really meant. “You better hold on to that one,” she’d say after I told her about one of our fights. She’d remind me to “skip the temper tantrum” if I wanted a long-lasting marriage. Mom skipped her own tantrums for forty years before dad died of a stroke. - -“Oh, I thought you’d be asleep,” Jonathan would always say, nonchalance personified, when I met him at the door. If I worked myself up enough to demand an explanation of why he was home after midnight, he’d reply with gentle reproach, “C’mon, babe. You’ll wake up the kid.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Summer 2040: Six Weeks After Upload** - -{{}}I{{}} still haven’t told Charlie. How can I explain the digital ghost of a father who cries that he misses his body? - -When I drop Charlie off at my in-laws for visits, Jonathan’s mother opens her mouth and inhales like she’s about to ask a question, but changes her mind. She still sees me as one of Jonathan’s impulsive mistakes. “Jonathan does what he wants,” she’d always say, seemingly about something else, but measuring me with a disapproving gaze. She tried to dissuade him from uploading and I think she blames me that he went through with it. Still, despite everything, she still has unshakable confidence that things will work out for them. It’s not my place to prove her wrong. - -I log in at 4am, exactly four hours after our last conversation. Jonathan’s not there. I wait, staring down the darkened plastic dome. I have three hours before I have to get up. If I go back to sleep, he might begin to degrade. I imagine his stupid round face cracking like an eggshell. I scroll through email on my phone to kill time. It’s mostly advertisements, some of them for Soulscape, no personal messages at all. - -Somehow I’ve lost touch with all my old friends. I’ve been wholly absorbed in the demands of the day: ordering our supplemental oxygen, arranging grocery deliveries, measuring Charlie’s vitals, making playdates, bringing him to school and back. I have only enough time and energy to take care of Charlie, and now Jonathan, too. - -I keep looking over at the monitor in the corner to see if the blue light will flash, waiting for Jonathan’s frantic voice. Another hour goes by. Then two. At 6am – after I’ve resolved at least one hundred times to put away my phone and go to sleep, but can’t because I’m scared that he’s gone, and then livid at the possibility that he’s just fine – the blue light flashes. - -“Rose, I have great news!” He sounds like himself again. - -I wait. - -“I just had the most amazing experience! Tawny… you remember Tawny from *Evolving Beings*? She’s finally uploaded! And they finished most of the simulation! We just jet-skied with dolphins and it felt so real! I can see my hands now too. Actually, I can see all of me! I’m like ten years younger!” - -“Did the dolphins jet ski?” is all I manage before I disconnect. - -I feel dizzy, bludgeoned by Jonathan’s brazen happiness. Outside the door I hear Charlie’s small footsteps. I open it to see him standing there, wide-eyed, in his red dinosaur pajamas. - -“Were you just talking to dad?” he asks me. - -And suddenly the truth is not that difficult to explain. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Summer 2039: One Year Before Upload** - -{{}}I{{}} always imagined that if Jonathan ever did something truly awful, like cheat on me or hit me, I would unleash the fury I’d been keeping caged up all these years. But when he told me of his plan to upload I could only stutter, “Can’t… can’t you wait? Until things get better?” - -He’d always been so relentlessly optimistic, reassuring me that with our money and the almost-here scientific advancements we’d get through this. Now he said, “It’ll be easier for you. You and Charlie will have more real food, more water, more oxygen. And when Charlie’s old enough he’ll be able to upload too.” - -He didn’t mention me. - -“Are you leaving me?” I choked out. Was this divorce, infidelity, widowhood? I checked the house’s oxygen levels on my phone. They were normal, but I turned them up anyway. - -“Until he’s eighteen, Charlie needs you. You get that.”He smacked his lips after sipping the last of his scotch and soda and left me sitting at the kitchen table. - -Panic attacks had become so common in children that you could get anti-anxiety medications over the counter. We’d give Charlie a daily Panic Panda gummy to help keep him level. The temptation to start chewing a handful was overwhelming, but instead I whispered word combinations that I’ve found to calm him – “emerald city,” “busy bee,” “cloud cake” – repeating them like incantations until he stopped shaking. But I was full of fear too. I couldn’t imagine taking care of Charlie alone. - -“But why now, Jonathan?” I pleaded with him from the kitchen doorway. “It just doesn’t make sense. The technology is so new.” I imagined his mother’s voice singing in a broken-record chant *Jonathan does what he wants, Jonathan does what he wants, Jonathan does*… - -“I’ve just evolved beyond this flesh prison.” He said like it should be obvious to anyone with a brain. - -“Shouldn’t we speak to a counselor, a doctor?” I tried to put obstacles in his way, to at least slow him down if I couldn't prevent it. A *flesh prison* for fuck’s sakes? A motorcycle, a tattoo, even a younger mistress would’ve been easier to tolerate than this version of a midlife crisis. - -“Rose,” he groaned, “I’ve done my *own* research. I know what I’m doing. Besides…” He paused and looked away. - -“Besides what? What did you want to say?” - -He shrugged. “You’re not stupid, Rose. Eventually we all starve or suffocate.” - -I called my mother. She didn’t understand anything about Soulscape. As always, when I complained about Jonathan’s neglect, she told me that I shouldn’t hem him in, that dad traveled a lot for work and *they* were happy together, so why couldn’t I just let it go? I tried to explain that he was permanently freezing his body and uploading his mind so he could exist in a virtual afterlife; without me, without Charlie. - -Mom perked up at the mention of afterlife. She had grown even more religious since dad died. “Oh honey, have faith. You’ll see Jonathan again! Just like I’ll see your daddy in heaven.” - -If they ever did meet in heaven, dad would be dismissively nodding into an open newspaper while mom tried to get his attention with all the interesting things she saw in purgatory. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Winter 2040: Six Months After Upload** - -{{}}I{{}} have a choice to make. I can let Charlie upload like his father or keep him in his body to suffer and die. Each choice is a gamble. - -Unlike Jonathan I don’t believe in good luck. I’ve never been one to take unnecessary risks. Never skydived. Never did drugs. My parachute wouldn’t open. My first hit of acid would send me on a bad trip to hell. - -Jonathan liked to mock my cautious nature, but as I take deep breaths to calm myself in the mornings, I think that perhaps my fear is my strength. I need to make a plan. We have money. But that won’t matter. Soon marauders will begin scavenging wealthy neighborhoods. The elderly and single mothers will be the easiest to rob, possibly to kill. My mother moves in with us. - -She tells me to pray. Pray to whom? If there’s a creator, it can’t possibly be omnipotent *and* loving. I picture a pimply kid, an angry teenager clicking away to code the most interesting collapse of civilization he can imagine. Maybe his asshole father just uploaded himself and left his family behind. The great simulator to whom we appeal with our problems might not give a shit. He might even *want* to hurt us. Creation turned out to be a cheap trick. - -*And on the eighth day God learned to code*… I want some of that power before I’m struck down, before I’m extinguished, squashed, splattered by a hack deity. - -I don’t believe in miracles. Jonathan did. The optimist, the happy wanderer, the lucky fool. He trusted that everything would turn out okay. At least for him. - -I take the Soulscape contract out of its envelope. I couldn’t bear to read it before, but now I’m ready. So much fine print. I haven’t heard from Jonathan in months. But we’re still married. According to the contract, uploaded beings may still need help from us flesh prisoners occasionally. The contract designates me as the simulation architect should anything go wrong at Soulscape. He trusted me when he signed this. - -I leave Charlie with my mother for the day and show up at Soulscape HQ with extra oxygen canisters. The building is surprisingly empty. Business must not be going well. Or maybe it’s going so great they’re all digital nomads two-point-oh now. - -The same guy who made the house call to explain about Jonathan’s upkeep is working the front desk. - -“Hi Leif!” I sing-song his nametag. “I’m Rose Agape. We spoke on the phone. I’d like to discontinue my husband’s network subscription.” I say it as if this is a routine request. - -Leif frowns. “But that will make him go dark.” - -“He gave me program maintenance authority.” I keep talking like I can’t I see the concern on his face. “I’ll be taking over as simulation architect.” - -“We intended that for emergencies only. If we lose power, or the upload feels unsafe in their current—” - -“The contract states that you’ll train me to reprogram his simulation.” I put up a finger before he can interrupt. “I know that something is wrong with my husband. It’s been months since he’s contacted us. That’s not like him. I mean, he has a son.” - -Mostly true. There’s been something wrong with my husband for years, and technically he’s a father. It’s *exactly* like him to disappear from our lives, but Leif doesn’t need to know that. - -Leif sighs, considering what I just said. - -“I’m going to need someone to walk me through it,” I add. I hoist three full oxygen canisters, one by one, up on his desk. His eyes light up. He audibly sucks in air through his tubes and actually looks relieved. I just made his decision a lot easier. - -“Alright ma’am, let’s schedule your programming sessions. It shouldn’t take too long. But you do realize that once you activate home programming he will be cut off from everyone in his simulated network? No other uploaded beings will be with him in the world you build. He’ll be alone.” - -I smile and nod. “Yes. With his family.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Simulations** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835809175218737).* - diff --git a/content/issue-34/WelcomeNeighborhood.md b/content/issue-34/WelcomeNeighborhood.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9736cb17..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/WelcomeNeighborhood.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,104 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Welcome to the Neighborhood" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Rebecca Birch -copyright: '© Rebecca Birch 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "At the end of an often emotionally heavy selection of stories, why not a dash of sugar to help all the bitter medicine go down? Rebecca Birch gives us a short, sweet tale of making a new house into a home – not by starting a family, but by making a few new friends." - -image: images/Welcome10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Chris F](https://www.pexels.com/photo/shoe-mark-on-snowy-ground-6356973/) and [YouComMedia](https://pixabay.com/photos/welcome-welcome-home-mat-sign-door-705102/)." - -type: stock -slug: welcome-to-the-neighborhood -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}W{{}}hen we moved to the suburbs, I was ready to enjoy the slower pace of life. Wildlife outside my windows. Tidy yards, bundles of domesticity, and a quaint woodland between our neighborhood and the county reservoir next door where I could walk. I might even be able to convince Jeff to let me get a cat. - -Then the Homeowner's Association president, Patty, stopped by to welcome us with brownies and lemon bars, a neighborhood watch invitation, and a reminder that HOA bylaws prohibited garden gnomes. - -I'd been looking forward to peopling my front yard planting beds with the little ceramic statues. Just regular ones, of course. None of the racy naked guys I'd accidentally found down an internet rabbit hole. - -But Jeff and I wanted to make friends. He convinced me not to ruffle feathers. Not yet. - -So I was good, until my birthday rolled around and my mom – who remembered I'd wanted to start a gnome colony – gave me a chubby, rosy-cheeked, red-hatted gentleman just six inches tall. - -She'd gone to such trouble that it felt wrong to keep him inside, but I'm also not a rule-breaker, so I really surprised myself when I snuck out on a foggy midnight and placed Toby – yes, I named him – deep inside the branches of our holly bush out front. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen I picked up the newspaper the next morning, Toby was gone. - -For the first time, I felt uncomfortable in our peaceful little oasis. Was there a thief among our neighbors? Was Linda across the street peering through her blinds in the wee hours of the night, looking for something to nab? Was Patty of the HOA more like Patty On Patrol, purloining contraband yard art? - -I took myself for a walk through the woods by the reservoir. The smell of evergreens and the soft rustle of small creatures in the underbrush calmed me down. I was being paranoid. There were wild animals here. One probably thought Toby would make a good toy. Linda was a perfectly nice lady. Surely Patty was, too. - -Later that day, I found a package on the front porch. My name was scrawled on it in green ink. There was no return address. - -Jeff was still at work, so I went ahead and opened it. It held an oscillating sprinkler head. We'd been talking about getting something for the summer watering season. Jeff must have ordered it, but what was with the strange way it was addressed? - -A small scrap of paper at the bottom of the box caught my eye. In the same green ink it read, *Thank you*. - -Unnerved, I tossed the note into the shredder and recycled the box. But I wasn't unnerved enough not to set up the sprinkler. - -Then I ordered another gnome. - -She arrived, green-hatted and beaming, and I named her Poppy. Beneath the cover of darkness, I put her under the holly bush, hardly daring to breathe, lest someone spot me hiding my contraband. - -The next day, Poppy was gone and another box arrived, this time with a rather nice stained-glass mobile and another note. *Thank you*. - -Okay, it couldn’t be an animal. It had to be the neighbors playing some sort of prank on me and giving us a few more welcome gifts. We'd installed a small gazebo in the back yard and it needed a centerpiece. I hung the mobile and smiled. Perfect. - -I couldn’t stop grinning all the way through my now-daily forest walk. I could almost have imagined tiny voices laughing along with me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}y the time the next gnome was on its way, a flier had gone up at the community mailboxes with a reminder to review the HOA bylaws. There had been some reports of violations. Oh, and Patty's cat had a litter of kittens almost ready for adoption if anyone was interested. - -I’d have to talk to Jeff when he got back from his company retreat. A kitten would make our home complete. - -When the gnome – Rufus – arrived later that day, I hesitated. He came with a wheelbarrow and was a little bigger than the others. Harder to hide. And the reported HOA violations… but the adrenaline rush of clandestine gnome-planting was more than I could resist. - -Under the holly he went. - -I wasn't surprised when he was gone the next morning, but finding the box in a full-sized wheelbarrow on the porch was new. - -The box mewed. - -I brought it inside and tore open the lid. A tiny silver tabby stared up at me with wide green eyes, flexed its little claws, and yowled. - -It was in my arms before I could think. I read the note out loud: "Thank you." - -The doorbell's ring was so unexpected I jumped, startling the kitten. I tightened my grip, cradling it close with one arm so it couldn't escape, then cracked open the door. - -Patty waited on the other side, arms folded across her chest. "Which part of 'No Garden Gnomes' wasn't clear?" Her foot tapped a frustrated cadence on the concrete. - -"I—" - -"Don't deny it. I have you on Linda's doorbell camera. And Paul's sprinkler is in your yard, Maggie's mobile is in your gazebo, and Bob’s wheelbarrow is right here on your porch." She pointed to the wheelbarrow and the clearly spray-painted BOB in the bottom, where the box had hidden it. - -My stomach lurched. - -The tabby yowled again and Patty squeezed the bridge of her nose. "And my missing kitten. Of course. Listen, if you swear there'll be no more gnomes, you can keep the cat." - -"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know. I'll return everybody's things." - -"*No more gnomes*. They only bring trouble." - -When Patty was gone, I regarded the kitten, who batted a paw toward my nose. "I think I'll call you 'Rufus'." - -The next time I walked the overgrown path, I studied the underbrush. I'd always assumed the rustling I heard there was rabbits or birds, and maybe some of it was, but when I caught a flash of red out of the corner of my eye and found tiny footprints leading into the base of an old tree, I smiled. - -Maybe they were trouble to some, but they were magic to me. - -I set down a wrapped box of tiny brownies and lemon bars and whispered, "Welcome to the neighborhood." - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Welcome to the Neighborhood** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/835808148552173).* diff --git a/content/issue-34/__index.md b/content/issue-34/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 898a0100..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34" -date: 2023-06-30 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 34 -subhead: Summer 2023 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/chopper.jpg -imageMobile: images/chopper_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "The Chopper by Roman Dubina 2022" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#5DFADD' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-34/contents.md b/content/issue-34/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index d32a46cc..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,20 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Embryo]({{< relref path="Embryo.md" >}}), by Elena Sichrovsky -- [My Beloved is Mine]({{< relref path="Beloved.md" >}}), by Jude Clee -- [Simulations]({{< relref path="Simulations.md" >}}), by Masha Kisel -- [Infinite]({{< relref path="Infinite.md" >}}), by Chisom Umeh -- [Welcome to the Neighborhood]({{< relref path="WelcomeNeighborhood.md" >}}), by Rebecca Birch -- [An Interview with Francesco Verso]({{< relref path="InterviewFrancescoVerso.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson -- [Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin]({{< relref path="GrotesquerieRichardGavin.md" >}}), an essay review by Bill Ryan -- [Short Reviews – April to June]({{< relref path="ShortReviews02.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson -- [Artificial Artificial Intelligence]({{< relref path="Artificial-Artificial-Intelligence.md">}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-34/editorial.md b/content/issue-34/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8e1a03c5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-34/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,59 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2023-06-30 -issue: Issue 34 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/chopper_sml.jpg - -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 34** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Many thanks to Roman Dubina for allowing us to use 'The Chopper' as our issue's cover! You can see more of Roman's work at [Deviant Art](https://www.deviantart.com/romandubina)." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -***Mythaxis*** is going through a period of transition. - -Nothing to fear about that. - -*How are we changing?* Let me count the ways: - -**One: *non-fiction*** - -Last issue we welcomed onboard our first longform fiction reviewer, the erudite Mattia Ravasi; this issue we throw the doors wide for our second, the redoubtable Bill Ryan! Both boast admirable track records of literary opinionation, and we look forward to watching them dispense their insights in turn for many issues to come. It might be considered a thrilling back-and-forth between titan warriors of the pen-not-sword, very much history's slowest-paced duel, were it not for that fact that they are in no conflict with each other whatsoever. - -So too we continue our other new feature, showcasing newly published fiction from an array of other spec-fic zines via a brief collection of shortform reviews, but now we also present our first interview. This is most likely to be an occasional rather than regular event, but perhaps all the more special for it. - -**Two: *artificial intelli...yawn*** - -No new lengthy update about our trials and tribulations with the Slushbot (see past editorials *ad nauseum*), because after carefully considering the results of our toils we've decided *no more!* We have provided a more serious write-up of that lengthy experiment [here](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-34/artificial-artificial-intelligence.html), but – after dancing with (and around) the subject of *AI in publishing* for more than a year – it's at last time to clarify some points regarding this magazine's editorial position. - -In the past we've used algorithmic image generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney to illustrate the magazine; but, while their output can be undeniably beautiful, we won't use them again for the foreseeable future. The blackbox approach of training these systems on the work of unknown others raises too many ethical red flags. - -The emergence of a service that rewards the artists who helped it grow would certainly change our stance. We will wait for one while breathing. - -When it comes to the likes of ChatGPT, we feel far less ambivalence. It is the editor's opinion that algorithmic text generation is a poor substitute for human expression. It offers "the new" only in the most superficial of senses, and while large language models might accidentally happen upon striking combinations of words, by nature these are systems that instead of reaching great heights tend towards the average (and when it comes to prose, the *very* average). - -We remain agnostic with regard to the use of LLMs to generate prompts or ideas, even entire plots – plenty of good stories are generic, and the creation of hallucinatory "facts" is hardly a calamity when it comes to making up stories. However, the final work should be the sole expression of a human mind. - -As a culture, there must be some domains we preserve for ourselves. Art, because it is as much a pleasure to create as it is to experience, is one. We would be lessened if we outsourced such things to unthinking systems, as would art itself. - -For these reasons, we are not interested in publishing stories created by machine, unless that machine is flesh-and-blood. - -**Three: *compensation*** - -It has been some time since we last took in new submissions, skipping our April window, but with good reason. Amongst our many plans for the future, one at least is imminent: starting in July, we will begin offering our contributors a princely 1 cent per word fee instead of a flat $20 per story. We're going to switch from dollars to euros, but to balance that blow to the US economy we're setting €20 as our new minimum fee as well. - -We don't think this means we'll get a better class of submissions (we like the pieces we've taken in the past just fine), but we *do* think that writers deserve more than we've been offering them. This isn't a profit-turning venture, and it isn't trying (or ever likely) to be one, but we can justify this small increase in costs and keep afloat for the long term. So we will. - -We held off making this change until all existing commitments to publish were satisfied – therefore, as of now, our fiction silos stand echoingly empty. - -***Mythaxis*** *is desperately in need of stories!* - -Know any writers? *Human* ones? Let them know! diff --git a/content/issue-35/ShortReviews03.md b/content/issue-35/ShortReviews03.md deleted file mode 100644 index b71e27e5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/ShortReviews03.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – July to September" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "After this issue's editorial you'd think your editor had read quite enough. But no: once more unto the breach, dear friends, to sample the recent output of our peers. Here are three brief recommendations for further reading, available online now. And if we're still unwilling to rein it in at only three? Well tough, the more the merrier!" - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-autumn-2023 -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}T{{}}hree more months, three more stories. - -Well, obviously there have been rather more stories than that, and I should know, I read many before I picked out these few for particular attention. But I would at least like to *attempt* to maintain the pretence that this little review platform adheres to some sort of structure, before I run riot and ruin everything in the penultimate paragraph. - -First up, representing July, we have **[One Last Bash Before We All Hit The Road](https://littlebluemarble.ca/2023/07/28/one-last-bash-before-we-all-hit-the-road/)** by Louis Evans, a stylish excursion that takes us to a Manhattan society event like no other (though possibly all such things are like no other, unless they want to be thought *bad*). This one is being held in defiance of an ecological apocalypse that is shortly to wipe New York City from the face of the Earth, and only the city's best are on the list, of course – except it's a very subjective word, "best", isn't it? "Richest" might be closer to the truth. Or "most deserving". - -It appears in *[Little Blue Marble](https://littlebluemarble.ca/)*, a great online eco-fiction zine that hosts a wide array of genres within that theme. Even if speculative fiction isn't to your taste, you can be sure to find something there that is. - -For August, we turn to *[Orion's Belt](https://www.orions-belt.net/)*, where literary spec-fic is very much the only flavour available, although each month it is portioned out via one short-short story and one piece of poetry for some variety of form. - -The delicacy in question, Aimee Ogden's **[But First It Is Sung](https://www.orions-belt.net/archives/but-first-it-is-sung)**, boasts a quite marvellous perspective: that of a sentient universe whose existence is in flux, its attentions torn between celebration of its (relatively) recent new-born offspring and fear of unseen swarming beings almost infinitely far down the physiological scale, whose escalated consumption of energy marks out any additional universes out there as quite the prize. Is the balance between *achieving survival* and *achieving an existence worth surviving for* ever explored on this level? - -After these excesses of luxury and scale, for September all is brought very much down to earth by Ellen Morris Prewitt, who appears (slightly ironically) in *[Luna Station Quarterly](https://lunastationquarterly.com/)*, home to "stellar short fiction by women-identified writers since 2010". - -**[The Very Hand of God](https://lunastationquarterly.com/story/the-very-hand-of-god/)** takes us to suburban Memphis, where retired couple Eugene and Lavinia reside in a neighbourhood deeply in decay, estranged from their adult son and falling into their odd little ways. When Eugene finds tiny slivers of pinkish glass in the street, an unexpected hording urge is triggered in him, and over time his burgeoning collection begins to attract attention, first within his family, then without. The consequences are unexpected. - -Those were my favourite recent reads, but (in a fairly typical (and heavily signposted) move) I'll now over-stay my welcome to add one extra quadrupedal recommendation: the latest issue of *[The Future Fire](http://futurefire.net/2023.66/index.html)* was an interesting experience, with four stories I also enjoyed. The first, Frances Koziar's **One Day**, was only really speculative for its invented setting; it was followed by **Boxes Full of Memories** by Sean R. Robinson, a more overtly fantastical piece; then the third, **Out of Bounds** by Anna Ziegelhof, put us very firmly in scifi territory, as did the last, Davian Aw's **Between the Shadow and the Soul**. Each was very distinct, but all shared a strong emotional weight; a nicely complementary set, in my opinion. - -Right, that's it. See you in three more months. With "three" more reviews. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889661896500131).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/__index.md b/content/issue-35/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index c90447a6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 35" -date: 2023-09-30 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 35 -subhead: Autumn 2023 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Afro-futurism.jpg -imageMobile: images/Afro-futurism_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Afro-futurism by Lance Tooks 2023" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: baseline - color: '#f1401d' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-35/border-patrol.md b/content/issue-35/border-patrol.md deleted file mode 100644 index 080bf82d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/border-patrol.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,294 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Border Patrol" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Don Mark Baldridge -copyright: '© Don Mark Baldridge 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Don Mark Baldridge prefaced his submission by quoting journalist Nell Greenfieldboyce: 'And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light.' Strange. Look it up sometime. In response, and from the same article, we'll quote astronomer Tod Lauer right back at him, because (of this story, just as of space), 'It's still pretty dark.'" - -image: images/BorderPatrol10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Cottonbro Studio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-wooden-table-and-leather-chairs-in-a-restaurant-6188605/), [oli2020](https://pixabay.com/photos/paint-splatter-abstract-texture-3456534/) and [FoYu](https://pixabay.com/photos/paint-brush-splash-red-paint-5699263/)." - -type: stock -slug: border-patrol -weight: 6 ---- - -**Bone White** - -{{}}I{{}}fan myself with the polaroid. Faint chemical smell comin off it, volatilizing. Interacting – like everything else – with oxygen, burns off and ’s gone. Whatever they put in these things to get em to do their amazing trick, it’s worth the brain cancer. - -I hold it up – the picture, developing before my eyes – hold it angled to avoid the glare of the bare bulb, hangin just over my shoulder. The image resolves around my own shadow, stretching across the splintered floorboard, angling up toward the heap of hides. There’s more of them, pinned spreadeagle to the walls. Nine in all, a whole squad. - -Good haul, for a couple week’s work. - -These polaroids, let me tell you; they changed everything. I been using em since their stripper days, when you had to peel em apart, sticky, a mess. But they been perfected a long time and I’m too old a dog to learn a new trick. - -So I keep shellin out for the film – yeah they still make it – and buyin up old cameras. I cannibalized two decks – an i-Type and *ye olde* 600 – to get this frankenflasher, and its origins show. - -The colors are funny, acourse. They’re not real. Tend toward the silver – lot of blue in that blood, as I compare it to the scene before me. - -But how that picture turns out is how it’s going to be. Your memory will leach away, go bone white. Everything that’s left is gonna be in that picture, so love it. Learn it. - -It’s all that’s left you, in the end. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Shinsplints, Nebraska** - -{{}}I{{}}seen it happen – or, well, I otta say I been in the presence of it, happening – four, maybe five times. Which don’t seem like much till you understand; it’s not a common thing, not at all. It’s just that, once you know about it, it kinda gets a whiff on *you* *–* an *interest* in you, like. You get magnetized to it. Drawn. - -Ok, while the polaroid’s developin: I’m wayback, sittin in this coffeehouse – this diner, rather – in, I’m thinkin, 1972? I been well onto the phenomenon for a couple years, by then. Bagged one or two of the fuckers myself, or thought I had. I mean, I’d been curious about it, studying on it since Chicago, ’68 *–* *that* clusterfuck. - -*But really?* I wondered even still, *was it real?* - -Anyways, back in the diner I’m not yet 25 years old, just a pup, and I’m not thinking of any of this, but only whether I can get my eggs the way I like em. The waitress comes up. In those days, they all wore uniforms. I dunno, do they still do that, places? She steps up on my left, all mustard yellow dress and orange apron, tired smile, coffeepot steamin. She pours me some, comes back for my order. I looker in the eye, startin up with: *Eggs; sunny and runny. Bacon, cracklin*… - -She looks down, writin. I also look down, checkin the menu for options on toast or whatever. Glance back up and her eyes’ve gone round, softly starin at me with just an *awful recognition.* - -She knows me, and I know what’s got into her. - -It happens that fast. - -I go for the sawdoff, lyin in my bag on the seat beside me. Her right hand comes down like a claw, pinning my right to the table. She’s reached across me so I pop her elbow with the heel of my left. It crunches. She should be screamin bloody hell, but she pivots, other hand going for my eyes, nails out. I doggit left, throwing myself from the booth, doubled over, scrambling. - -She has my bag, then, fumbling with it, one-handed. I pull the peashooter out my boot, turn, stand tall and put two in her, like that. Doesn’t even slower down – and that’s the last time I pack a small caliber, ever. - -Things slide into slomo as she yanks the sawdoff out the bag by its polished pistolgrip. I spent the summer whittlin that thing down from the rifle stock, polishing it. It’s gonna be a shame to lose it. - -The whole restaurant turns to look at us, mouths open. She wheels that blunderbuss in my direction, clumsy – it goes off on her, part way: a single barrel. One hell of a kick. The plate glass window, one booth from where I’m standin, turns to shrapnel in the everlovin *ka-pow!* of a shotgun blast heard indoors, at close range. - -She’s held onto it somehow, and she’s blinkin, checkin out the mechanism. - -There’s another cartridge in there but before she finds the other trigger (side-by-side’s my style) I’m gone already. Squeal of tires, flinching, thinkin the back of my head comes off next, rear pickup window blowin right through me. But it doesn’t happen. - -I curse myself for a fool: all my tactical errors. The whole scenario runs through my mind, compulsively, for years to come. I revisit that diner in my dreams. - -They’ll call it a robbery gone wrong – say she saw the sawdoff and made me for a miscreant, acted bravely, saved everyone. And I don’t hardly blame the papers. I’d be half convinced of it myself, had’n I seen those starin eyes. - -But that woman – whatever stepped in there, knowin me and not much else, knowin whatever a waitress knows in Shinsplints, Nebraska – will live, will go on. - -I’ll keep the clippins, check up on the old girl. People will say it’s changed her; bein shot will do that. She’ll drop her husband, kids and all. And I will hesitate just too late; she’ll vanish before I get back around to her, to finish it. - -As far as I know she’s out there, still. Or *it is* —ridin her, spurs stuck in good, growed over. Women live longer, right? A little older than I’d been at the time – maybe 30? And I’m an old man now. I doubt I could place her, to see her face today, but I know she’ll know me, she crosses my path. Prolly smell me comin. - -But would I take her – you’re axin – old, decrepit? Would I snatch her back from the jaws of the thing consumed her, ate her all up and kept on, in her tracks? - -You betcha. I owe her that much. It’s because of her, because of *that one,* I went on the lam. Moment changed my life: those eyes, that claw – a deathgrip. I mighta wondered, before that – was I doin right? The question had dogged me a bit. I was neck deep already, what if… - -But after that one, I knowed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Redrawing the Vampire** - -{{}}I{{}} mean… I never *seen* a vampire… I seen a *talkin dog* once. - -But vampires, *whatever they may be*, they’re not the same as these things – what they’re up to – the things I’m talkin about. They step in, crabwise, and while they’re along for the ride, they know everything they need to know. What they don’t know is anything else: Who they are, where they come from, I suppose these questions mean as little to them as it means to ask me how I show up in the mirror. I just open my eyes and there I am. - -Even what they want may be impossible to say except – they want to *stay.* They wanna keep *on* running the guy they’ve stumbled onto, stepped into, become. They wanna alter their course just enough to turn their tangents toward linear time. Want to change lanes and learn to drive. And how long has this been going on? - -*So far, forever.* Put that on yer tombstone and ya got somethin. - -Dogs have been known to pick up on the change: the jangle of strings, the disconnect. The puppeteering going on beneath the surface – if they’ve ever seen the original, that is. Ever sniffed the hand operatin under its own steam. - -Otherwise – well, a dog can get used to any kind of a man. I seen these things with dogs of their own, and – big or small – all of em was mean. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Gone Fishin** - -{{}}T{{}}ime flows, but there’s no sense in which we’re all at the same bend of that river. - -The upstream fish are shittin in our water, and we shit in the water of those further downstream. But the sidewinder walks in on all this at an angle. I think they know so little cause they, like, literally don’t have *the past,* where they come from. They don’t have no future neither, and this, our timestream, gives em that. But they develop a past, pretty quick. They foresee some kinda future and they run with it. They don’t want nothing to take that away. - -Livin is sweet to those who never tasted it. But it’s not like they don’t exist, two seconds before. - -I think of em like crystals: If you’d been born a crystal, your mind mighta been, like, *configured* as a single thought. Electrons travel through a crystal, or they can. But the paths they got to follow, there’s not a lot of different ones. - -My older brother, when I was quite small, got hold somewhere of a little worn-out pamphlet called *Construction and Operation of a Simple Homemade Radio Receiving Outfit* – put out by the government in the 1920s, I imagine. Following along its faded instructions, he built himself a crystal set. Picked up high-power stations from all the way to Chicago, cloudy nights. - -He’d clamp these cold, metal headphones to my skull and twitch a wire along the coil till baseball popped up, big as life. Lemme listen to the game, carried on the W.I.N.D. – AM 560. No battery, in that device, nothin. - -I reckon the energy of the broadcast somehow got drawn into that crystal, passed through it. Gave some kinda shape to whatever’s going on in a crystal just sittin there. And out comes this magic voice: *Down in the ninth, it’s not lookin good for the ol’ Cubbies.* Like magic to a Sooner boy, comin up. - -And that must be something like what it’s like to be them. Out wherever you could say they come from, *outside what we’d call time.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Scorpion** - -{{}}T{{}}hey keep coming through and I keep huntin em down. Some years ago this got easier *—they started lookin for me.* Feelin for me, I suppose, sniffin round. I guess I knocked a few of em down in my day and they perceive me as *inimical to their plans.* - -And yeah, I recon they got some kinda plans. Dunno what those could be, except to push through more and more. Maybe it’s a slowmo *invasion*, or supposed to be. Maybe I’m keepin something like that at bay, jessayin. - -The notion does not please me. I got no one to take over when I go, when one of the bastards finally gets me. It might be pretty hard to recruit people to a path like mine: kids today. - -Lately these things come in little waves, three or four showin up over a long weekend, that kinda thing. And lately I been pilin up their skins. Yeah, I take their hides. Its not like I can do nothin with em – I’m not makin *people suits* over here. - -But they come in, wearing a person suit, like. *Wearin a person like a suit.* And I can’t think they prefer havin that peeled off. They surely do not. So I peel em. And some of em put up a hell of a fight. - -Disposing of the rest is… problematic. But there I got this advantage – that the whole world is so chock full of books and movies about “serial killers” – it’s the only entertainment people have, seems. And they got 101 Ways to Dispose of a Corpse in them stories. I just pick and I choose. I’ve fed em to hogs, dissolved em in acid – that gets expensive, lemme tell ya! And you gotta cart around the chemicals. - -Lately, out here in the desert, it’s a shallow trench, or pilin up rocks in an arroyo *–* *and that works jes fine.* - -I come out here full time, once they started lookin for me. Drawin em out, where I can see em comin. The great empty Sonoran sucks em in from Monterrey, Tucson, Pheonix, Las Vegas, L.A., San Diego, Tijuana. Even over the water, from Baja. - -I cross the border easily, sometimes without knowing I done it. Whole hell of a lot of nothing out here to tell ya you’re in one territory or the other. No dotted line in the dirt and the stars wheel overhead just the same. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} blow across the surface of the polaroid, it’s dry, and clear as a bell. Fits, inside-vest-pocket, keepin company with a couple others – part of a larger, what you’d call, *archive.* - -And there! I hear something, outside. I pull the chain, the bulb goes out. My boots on the boards are loud in the darkness, the door creeks. And, standing on the crumbling concrete loading dock, under an awning faded down to nothing, I watch em wheel, the stars. - -My eyes are still adjusting as the Milky Way resolves like a splash of acid. Out here on the edge of nothin, there’s so many stars you can’t actually see em all. The hub of night turns and they rise: silent, ugly. Myriad microscopic pits in the smooth of the sky. - -It’s just past midnight when the moon crawls over the rim of the world, rollin – half bloated and full of blood as a tick. I hop off the dock, to the tarmac – a move I still accomplish with some grace. My knees and hips are good. It’s my shoulder that gets me. Aches. - -Scorpion, black against the low white rock that marks the edge of the lot, backs off at my approach, crawls under the stone. - -I’ve had a night’s work already – guy up from Jalisco, a real *Tapatío* as once was, I reckon. But nothin says there’s not another, slinkin round. So I sit there a minute, listening, smoking. I roll my own, usually, but this poor bastard had four packs of *Delicados Ovalados* stashed about his person. And yeah, I plunder their corpses – they been subsidizing my operation for years. Mor’n seven hundred dollars, last few days, US and Pesos combined. - -In heaven, Scorpius glares down at me from her place in the south. If her little bastard creeps out from under this rock while I’m sittin here, I’ma crush the fucker with my heel, an she knows it. Her one big eye – Antares an I’m not mistaken – glows red with hate. - -I light another from the coal of the first, thinkin, Where did the bastard come by these things? I thought Chesterfields took over the brand. Guy knew what he liked, I reckon. And he got what he didn’t. - -I feel for these folks, I do. Whatever happens to em when they get overwrote, it’s not what any of em wanted. I’m sure of that. - -Coyotes start makin a fuss over the moon. Tellin each other all about it, out on the great cold waste. I get up, dust the seat of my pants, and ease on down the road toward the old highway, shotgun over my arm, like. The low, flat-roofed shed – old Mobil station from before my time; winged steed, headless – gets lost in the dark behind. - -I’m restless as one a them coyotes tonight. Listenin to em has the hair risin on the back of my neck. I keep a bright eye out in the pitch, the road a gray ghost my boots tell me is soft, still, from the sun. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**No Sunrise, but Nogales** - -{{}}U{{}}p and down the highway, when I get to it, nothing stirs but the low trundling bodies of a couple Armadillos, keepin warm on the still-radiant road. Any traffic and they’ll end, curled up in the gravel, like a blown semi tire tread. They’re safe enough tonight tho – not a light as far as the eye can see. That cold glow in the east is no sunrise, but Nogales. - -Something – a shadow, upright – detaches itself from among the saguaros, moves between em, just at the edge of my eye. - -When I look, nothin there. Look away, off to one side. Old sailor’s trick: star you’re lookin at is dim, wavers, till you’re not sure you’re seein it. Star just out from the center of your retina is bright, steady. - -Nothin. But I’m not ready to call it yet. I crush a perfectly good *Delicado* with the toe of my boot, do a slow reversal, backing into the brush beside the highway and squat there. I can’t hold this position forever but I won’t need to. I just want to erase my silhouette for a minute – man-against-sky. Draw myself as part of the lay of the land. See if anyone come lookin, where’d I go? - -It’s not like these things show up armed, prepared. Sometimes they do, when they latch on to some fella packin. But they’re not big planners, these creatures – or anyway, not the ones fresh from the sidereal. Not used to thinking in those terms. Not used to dealing out steps, how to get here-to-there. - -And it’s been all fresh ones, just in from the outside, come for me so far. Oh, I had run-ins with the old hands, those who’ve had time *to learn time*, to make some excuse for who they are. Presentable faces, almost humanbeins. Really, you’d almost never know. - -But none lately. They got wily. They don’t come around here no more. It’s the newbs show up lookin, outa tha gate. - -I slide two shells into my ol *Stoeger Coach* – beautiful 12 gauge, oiled by moonlight. They tick in there almost silent. I’m not doin nothin else for a minute but keepin my eyes and ears open wide. - -Mind goes blank. - -And there it is, moving away. Figure of a man. Woman. *Somethin* headed out into the nothin. It’s days of it, from here, on foot: the nothin. - -Then the cacti come between us again and I’m still waiting. I don’t like to see it moving away. I spread my attention thin, all directions. If there’s yet another out here, maybe waitin to see if I follow the first, well that’s the kinda thing I wanna know. - -And now my mind is sharp, senses focused, but my thoughts do drift and I’m back in Chicago, for just a moment. - -God what a mess. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**Chicago, ’68** - -{{}}I{{}}crouched, not exactly like I am now. Ass against a Ford sedan, rolled over on its side – and this car, it burned. Fire, bright in the cab. Driver side up, it lay angled across 49th street, far from the television crews but too close to the Amphitheater – where Dan Rather got himself gut-punched and Johnson’s men canvased the delegates on their willingness to back him, surprise nominee. - -Stuck, I was, in the Back of the Yards. - -You never will read what went down there, the night after the big event – or I, at least, have seen no accounting of it. But at the time I crouched, hiding, in the herky-jerky shadow cast by the flame that leapt and writhed in that sedan. - -I wore, that night, the uniform of a peace officer, somewhat soiled. My gun in my hand. Tinglin, all over. Something came up the street, behind me. - -First came a pig, snorting and sniffin about, searching the ground like a good-size bulldog on a leash, a hank of clothesline, which dipped behind… - -And come up Officer Dunn Stuart, shirtless but jackbooted, with the pale blue “crash” helmet and – instead of his loaded oak baton – a *hatchet* swung in his free hand. - -His other, wrapped with clothesline to the elbow – as if, from time to time, the pig might try to yank free, strain against the leash, tear off into darkness after… - -They seemed a regular hunting pair, that much clear – though Dunn appeared, very faintly, to be whistling between his teeth, an off key *Hail to the Chief.* - -As strange a sight as they made, a cold wave of relief washed over me as I stepped out to greet my fellow officer in the street, by that uncertain light. - -Instantly the little bastard – *was this Pigasus himself? Goddammit, Mister President!* – went for my ankle. Without my own boots I’da been hamstrung by the fuckin porkchop. I kicked my free heel at him and the clothesline came up tight against the back of my calf. Cartwheeling my arms to keep upright, I look up and here comes Dunn, easily my height with 30 pounds more draped across his chest and shoulders, sweat streaked – his hatchet-hand high and eyes, I’d swear, goin clockwise and counter. - -I mighta cried out. The axe fell. It went through my left shoulder like butter – the clavicle – catching finally just off the joint. A better butcher would have sheered that arm clean off. Service revolver in that hand – I’m right handed but left-eyed and you can’t argue withit – went skittering on the pavement, into the gutter. - -What I felt: I’d been struck, something solid, like a table leg. Then hooked, caught up, stuck on something – as he tried to yank the hatchet out of me and start over. - -His face *this close* to mine. Eyes buggin. - -And then, talk about your miracles, he stopped. The whole thing stopped. He didn’t look surprised or crazy, or anything at all for a second. - -Let go the hatchet handle, left it in me and turned and walked away, just quit. I fell flat on my ass, freeing myself of the clothesline. The pig started to dart away, got caught at the end of his rope. - -Dunn looked like he didn’t know how he’d got tangled up innit. He made a twirling motion with his arm and wrist till the rope slid off. Then he vanished up the street, my eyesight goin. Never did know what happened to that pig. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} didn’t tell my story at first. The medics found me in shock and bleedin freely – a while passed before I said anything. - -And later I didn’t know *how* to tell it. But I found out Dunn, he just never showed up to work again, and I felt someone otta know. - -No one wanted to. - -The yippies, I was told, never made it so far south with their Vietcong flags, not nearly so close to Daley’s Folly. Those Polacks back o’ tha yards certainly never tore em apart. There had been no shotgun blasts, taken at close range, no overturned sedan. No gasoline fires, no burnin yippie chick fleein down the road, like ta been napalmed. - -Dunn got hisself writ-off as AWOL, but I heard his wife received his pension. That seemed right, and problem solved. I was told to shut up about it. - -Only much later I understood what had happened. Not what had put Dunn over the edge – he’d always been psychotic, a real “bad apple”, and the events of that night musta punched his buttons good. That much, believe it or not, bein a cop, I understood. - -But what had called him off, carried him off, spirited him away? A mystery, something I couldn’t feature. Mad Dunn *had* me – for me it was over. But then something ended for him, instead – sparing me. - -And there’s maybe all kinds of possibilities, yeah? But I whittled em down in my mind, like. - -It took me a long time to recover, I had plenty of time to shuck it out. They say I was in a fever for five days, raving. But what I did was *the hard work of dreamin*. I dreamed my way to my discovery. To the inside scoop that explained it all. And I know now that this Dunn was the first I ever saw taken, and in the moment of his taking. - -I’ve learned a lot about these things, since. Might say I’ve grown wise to their ways. And one of the secret keys is: they like em young, but not too young. They like the *prime* of life. You meet an old one, it’s *experienced.* This time it happened to be Dunn. - -But it coulda been me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} star, lying just above the rise before me, winks off-and-on and I know my man, my visitor, has crossed over into the nothin of the desert. - -I get up to follow. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -**No Place; Special** - -{{}}I{{}}t’s a stealthy forty minutes later – the wee hours of the night – that I stumble across, in all that nothin, a place set aside in the desert. A few stones make a rough semicircle, a smeared floor of clay, blackened – with blood? I smell it. - -What happened here? Where is this place and who is it has lead me? I can see all about me – or feel like I can – better than I should do. Some unexplainable light, seeping through from somewhere. - -Loose gravel is kicked away and I turn, shotgun at my shoulder. - -Into this circle steps a man, like me: Lean, leathered, old. A dull serape across his shoulders, lowbrimmed hat – but both hands showin. I almost lower the barrel, he seems so familiar. - -But then he tilts his head back and I see the eyes. Whatever this is before me, however long it has stalked this earth, it’s eternity that spills out of, through, those eyes. Long cunning, long continued assimilation, long planning are in em, but nothing human. - -It starts to speak: - -“Tonight,” it says, and I unleash a single barrel of buckshot hell. - -The kick hits me in the shoulder like the blow of that remembered hatchet – I’m still left-eyed, that don’t change – but half this gentleman’s head is taken off in the most satisfying manner. He folds down nicely into a packet of worn-out clothes and thin, old man. - -And another sound, or just the feeling of sound turns me round. There are two more. Middle-aged lady, somebody’s *abuela* *–* should be home, making tortillas for the morning. Somewhat younger dude in a tie and brand-new down jacket, suit pants tucked into lace-up boots – dust-stained, but just outatha box. I have a cartridge left but they are too far apart for a single blast. Slowly, at the tips of my fingers, two more shells come out my vest pocket. - -Another runs up. She carries something waist high, raises it. The shells go spillin as I spin towards her. A flash blinds me and I hear the motor – the click and dragging-forth of a fresh little polaroid. I recognize my very own frankenflash – know it by its scars. Taken, this very night, while I got lured away. - -This is the signal to attack. I hear the running footsteps of three, four more, coming up behind. - -I pull the other trigger. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Border Patrol** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889663049833349).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/broken-bones-summer.md b/content/issue-35/broken-bones-summer.md deleted file mode 100644 index 06be58e8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/broken-bones-summer.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,114 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Broken Bones of Summer" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Xan van Rooyen -copyright: '© Xan van Rooyen 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There is much to be said for traveling. Expanded horizons expand the mind, and that can only be an advantage in creative endeavours. In relocating from South Africa to Finland, Xan van Rooyen has clearly found some inspiration: this piece of dark fantasy has its origin in the Finnish folklore that gave the calendar months their names…" - -image: images/BrokenBonesSummer10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using an image by [YaroslavGerzhedovich](https://depositphotos.com/photo/dryad-human-creature-sitting-falling-burning-tree-acrylic-paper-362002906.html) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: the-broken-bones_of-summer -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}y brother has beautiful hands. It’s a pity I have to break them. - -His fingers are delicate, the rounded tips made for stroking wildflower petals scattered in summer meadows. I hold the longest of his fingers between my palms, feeling the knuckle gouge into my heart-line when he flinches. My touch leaves blue smudges of frostbite in his heat bright flesh. - -He strains against the chains woven of midnight and ice holding him captive. His lips, usually smeared with honey smiles, are torn and bleeding. His every breath a cloud, fading, his power dissipating. - -His gaze holds mine, his eyes the devastating blue of empty skies. I have tried, begged, demanded and threatened – but my brother has only ridiculed my pleas for balance. - -“Go to Manala,” he says. “You belong in the realm of the dead. Leave this earth for the living.” But *he* will leave this earth a desiccated carcass unless he can be made to see sense. - -His finger turns brittle between my hands – blood slowing to sludge and cooling into crystal – snapping as I apply gentle pressure. The bone splinters, shards piercing mottled skin. He doesn’t scream as pearls of sweat seep from his brow, only clenches his teeth. Soon, those will be mine too. My kapeet, flitting sprites wrought of lunar light, wove moonbeams into silver in anticipation. Now the braided thread lies in the pocket of my dress, awaiting new baubles. - -“It doesn’t have to be this way.” I release his trembling hand. “You know what I’m asking.” - -“The world is mine.” Skin flakes from his lips. “You still have your darkness. Be content with that.” He tries to pull his hand away, stubborn to the last. “Just admit defeat.” - -I shake my head, sniffing back tears of disappointment. “I’m not the one held captive.” - -His expression hardens, his gaze a viper’s, tongue darting to lap at stained lips. He has always thought himself the best of us, light-drenched and radiant. And therein lay his vulnerability as he stumbled sun-drunk upon my borders, singeing the edges of my realm. But my kapeet gathered the wandering souls of the dead and forged them into a shield – a trap. - -He’d thought his shadow a pale and feeble companion. He didn’t notice how its color deepened and fingers lengthened as my power infused it with purpose, nor how my kapeet lured it to stand among their legion – not until it had wrapped charcoal fingers about his throat and left him chained and at my mercy. - -I turn my brother’s wrist and a pall of fear draws across his eyes. Here, in my wind-whipped tundra, he is feeble. - -“I will take back what you stole.” My words snap, sharp as the first freeze. - -He grins, lip oozing, and I crush another knuckle. This time he gasps, sucking in a mouthful of frigid air. A sound like lake ice giving way to spring – my brother’s teeth cracking in the cold. - -“Marras, please.” My name on his tongue is a lance of sunshine. It tears through me, leaving a wake of doubt and grief. But my kapeet are there, already stitching snow and shadow across the damage he has wrought. I won’t let him win. I won’t let him bleed me dry. - -I snap finger after finger, his hands wilting, blackening. Hands that have burned their mark across the south: forests scorched to ash, meadows left parched and barren, marshes turned to tumbleweed deserts – and everywhere upturned faces charred by a sun burning too bright through too thin air. Perhaps my brother cannot hear their prayers for cooling wind or how they mourn the winter; perhaps he simply doesn’t care. - -“Kesä.” I wield his name like a blade. “You have to stop.” - -“The world is changing. I choose to embrace that change.” - -“You betrayed us.” I touch the crown upon my head: the bones of our siblings fused in jagged peaks. Only the two of us remain. - -He snarls with teeth streaked scarlet. “You are everything they detest.” - -“This was your doing.” I stroke the polished beads rescued from the corpse of Helmi, her body left broken in the wreckage of a forest damp instead of frosted. - -“I honor them.” My touch drifts to the splintered remnants of Joulu, to the shards I salvaged from the crumpled ruins of Tammi. She’d fought the longest and hardest, determined to preserve the winter, but she too had succumbed. - -“I carry them with me.” I press the crown against my skin, feel blood trickle down my temples and soak into my hair. I stroke each fragment of my lost siblings, each undone by the brutality of the brother we once loved as Summer: Maalis, Huhti, Touko–the spring triplets left scattered like a windblown petals; Heinä and Elo, those closest to Kesä, their power already subsumed; their remains bleached by a careless sun. My fingers stumble over the gaps in the adornment. - - “I’d carry them all, but you left nothing of Syys and Loka for me to find.” They’d been incinerated–the autumn erased. They had been my season-sharers and closest kin, dressed in russet and gold – now only I remain: where gold turns to rust, light dims to dark, and life slips toward death. - -Flames flicker in the depths of Kesä’s eyes, so devoid of remorse. - -“Some sovereign you are,” he scoffs. “You are the monarch of absence, of nothing!” - -“And you have reduced your kingdom to dust and cinders.” - -“You are what they are forced to endure in the hopes of my return,” he continues. “I am light and life, I am exaltation.” - -“You are thirst and blistered skin, a tyrant who refuses to see how his people suffer.” Anger roils in violent eddies within me, sleet unfurling on the twisted tresses of my hair, my tears whisked into snowflakes by the frenzied kapeet. - -How many bones must I break before he surrenders? And if he doesn’t… I cannot simply kill him. To do so would be to smother this land in perpetual night and pervasive cold. I wouldn’t end the suffering, only alter it, and be no better than the brother bound before me. - -“It is what they wanted.” He studies his mangled hands, attempts lopsided fists, and winces. “They shaped their world for unending summer.” - -He cannot understand that what they did was a mistake. He cannot taste their shame, curdling what little remains of the glaciers slipping into bubbling oceans. He cannot fathom their guilt as swaths of land turn arid and inhospitable. He doesn’t see the ghosts, a deluge in the afterlife – souls crowding Manala, weeping for what might’ve been had they only been able to outrun the heat and storms devouring their homes. - -Perhaps sensing my despair, my kapeet flutter about my shoulders. They buzz and hum, their bumble-bee voices spinning elegies across the night. Their songs writhe in shades of green and pink, ribbons of light embroidering the darkness. The sky above is an oil slick iridescent with stars, now aglow with coruscating lament. - -Kesä lunges, cursing the chains sinking frozen fangs into his limbs. He thrashes and jerks against the bonds, scattering blood that steams in the carpet of snow at our feet. - -My efforts are futile. He will not – *cannot* – change. He has been so wrong, but a single truth sounds clarion in the silence of my mind. - -I *am* Death, and Life *is* mine to take. - -“Dearest brother, I wish it didn’t have to come to this.” I place my hand on his chest and he shivers at my touch. His breaths are ragged, lungs struggling against ribs drawing tight as marrow and sinew seize. - -“Don’t.” Tears like mirages blur the keen edges of his irises, cloud their wolfsbane blue. “Please.” His voice, a strained zephyr. - -A rime of regret scours my withered heart as his sternum turns to gory shrapnel beneath my excavating fingers. I reach into the cavity and remove the throbbing organ of my brother’s power. His life beats slowly between my hands and still he watches me, his tears glistening trails of frozen disbelief as I raise his heart to my lips. - -I bite. I chew. - -When it is done, his essence stirs within me, a thrumming counterpoint in perfect harmony with the one I’ve always known. - -Too long I waited and hoped he would come to understand. And now I carry my brother within, the *me* and *him* slowly knitting together to become the needed *we*. Together now, perhaps we stand a chance of healing the fractured earth. - -In my crown, his teeth sit on threads of silver, the words caught between them whispering of warmth and green rejuvenation. A needle of finger bone sews dreams of blue skies and summer showers across the shadows in my mind. - -My kapeet gather the rest of what remains, rising through the darkness of my impenetrable night. They toss the glitter of my brother across the stars and, together, we watch the sun breach the horizon. - -I lean into that warmth and its gentle promise. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Broken Bones of Summer** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889663496499971).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/contents.md b/content/issue-35/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 73c5c033..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [You Are a Rock God]({{< relref path="rock-god.md" >}}), by Joelle Killian -- [La Voix d’un Ange]({{< relref path="voix-ange.md" >}}), by Kirk Bueckert -- [Default]({{< relref path="default.md" >}}), by Elin Olausson -- [The Four Bill Club]({{< relref path="four-bill-club.md" >}}), by Donald McCarthy -- [The Broken Bones of Summer]({{< relref path="broken-bones-summer.md" >}}), by Xan van Rooyen -- [Border Patrol]({{< relref path="border-patrol.md" >}}), by Don Mark Baldridge -- [Ghost Music, by An Yu]({{< relref path="ghost-music-an-yu.md" >}}), reviewed by Mattia Ravasi -- [Short Reviews – July to September]({{< relref path="ShortReviews03.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-35/default.md b/content/issue-35/default.md deleted file mode 100644 index 97c221a1..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/default.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Default" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Elin Olausson -copyright: '© Elin Olausson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Schools make for strange places in fantastical fiction, but even real schools are strange places: sometimes small, sometimes sprawling, they too often form the individuals of the future by filing away what makes each pupil distinct. Appropriate, then, that if Elin Olausson's story of a strange cohort has a narrator, it is one who identifies as the whole." - -image: images/Default10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Reshma Mallecha](https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-haired-dolls-in-blue-dress-9646343/) and [DreamDigitalArtist](https://pixabay.com/vectors/black-white-pattern-glass-crack-7075971/)." - -type: stock -slug: default -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}iss S is in charge of Song. Every morning after Feeding (red kibble for mornings, brown kibble for nights) she gathers all the girls in the auditorium, where the ceiling is so far up that you can barely see. There are rules for singing like there are rules for everything, and Miss S is good at spotting rule-breakers. When Girl Ten tried to suppress a cough, Miss S told her to go to Headmistress. We haven’t seen her since, or rather, I suppose we have. Here and there. - -We have our fixed spots in the auditorium, Girls One to Two Hundred and Fifty on one side, Girls Two Hundred and Fifty-One to Five Hundred on the other. Our voices are weak on their own but booming when they come together, an oncoming storm. We’re not entirely sure what a storm is, but the word is in one of the anthems and Miss S’s concrete-floor eyes light up whenever we sing it. As if there is a fire inside her skull and we’ve unveiled it for just a second. - -There are other classes, too, Sewing and Dancing and Calligraphy, but we are divided into smaller groups then and our voices are not required. The needles slip into our fingertips sometimes; we suck the blood away when Miss K won’t see. It tastes like a spark, burning our tongues and then gone. - -At night we sleep in the dorms, twenty girls in each, four floors of cold, bunk-bedded rooms. Miss S is in charge of Floor One, she comes in at night to check that things are in order. Her heels warn us long before she opens the door, and she rarely has any complaints to make. Once, so long ago that only some of us remember, a girl tried to snatch the golden pin from Miss S’s head as she walked by. As she got hold of it, she said one word: *Sun*. We know it from one of the songs, we like how easily it rolls off our tongues. Miss S didn’t say anything, just grabbed the girl by the wrist and took her away. No one is quite sure now what her number was or if she had a name. - -We do have names. We’re not supposed to, but in the dorms, when the door is closed and there’s no tapping in the hallway, we use those names that we made up and handed to each other like gifts. They are all from the Book of Song: Hope, Courage, Prosperity… It was only one dorm at first but now we’re all doing it, four floors of girls with names. Sometimes in the auditorium we feel a burst of pride when we sing our own name, but we never let it show. We know Miss S and her fire. - -There are other things that we keep secret, things that are only spoken in whispers at night. And nothing is more secret than the Rift. - -It was discovered by chance, in another dorm, when a girl in the bed closest to the window woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. She went up to the window, peeked through the blinds to watch the water. The school is surrounded by water on all sides, a calm, shimmering surface, a spectrum of blue overhead. - -But as she watched the night view it started to flicker and fade. Something else appeared, a foggy wasteland, clouds of smoke trailing into a cement sky. And in the distance a red light, a glow that was fire but still not. - -Ever since, all of us wait for the Rift. We take turns, one girl waiting by the window each night, counting down to that moment when the night view shifts. We don’t know why it happens, we don’t know what it is, but we do know that they wouldn’t want us to see it. So we wait, and we watch, and when it’s our turn all five hundred of us feel like that red glow is just for us. And instinctively we know that it is real and that the water is not. - -There are no mirrors except in the wash-rooms, where we leave our daytime dresses in the evening and put on freshly laundered ones in the morning. We comb our black hair and wash our white faces, we step into our thin, soft-soled shoes. Miss S makes noises when she walks but we make none at all. The toothpaste tastes sharp, it tingles if we leave it in our mouths for too long. One girl bit down on a piece of kibble once and lost a tooth; it fell out on the table and they saw, of course they did. We called her Lucky but there have been other Luckies since, a string of them, none of them very true to their name. Sometimes, in the night, we whisper about that tooth and we wonder if they used it again. If it is still here, in one of our red mouths. - -Concert Day comes once a month, as regular as the blood that stains the wash-room floor. All the Misses wear hats and silk gloves on that day, which is how we know. The cameras are small, they whir through the auditorium air like flies. They catch every little detail and we’ve been told we can’t ever look straight into their beady eyes. - -“Stand up tall, girls, stand up!” Miss S waves her arms, pushing us around without ever touching. Her hat is the same green shade as her dress, darker than the Canteen walls, lighter than the stairway banisters. The Book of Song is on the table beside her, but she never opens it, knows the words by heart. “It is our duty to sing,” she told us once, “and to be the very best versions of ourselves.” At night, we argue about who might be watching the concerts, and the only thing we agree on is that our audience is not inside the school. Words fly around – *city, government, troops* – and they settle inside us, these bits and pieces from overheard conversations and the faded letters that are sometimes on the scraps of paper in Calligraphy. - -*Don’t trust them*, embroidered along the hem of an apron in Sewing class. *The songs lie*, chanted in the dark by girls who neatly vanish the next day. We welcome their replacements, we show them where to part their hair. Sometimes we spot a birthmark, a strange-shaped ear we recognize, but we pretend that it’s not there. We are all good at pretending. While waiting for our turn to watch the Rift, we Feed and Sew and Sing and Pretend. Then, once every twenty days, we sneak over to the window and wait for the image to flicker. We look out over the wasteland, but we only see the glow. - -In daytime, in the auditorium, we stand where Miss S tells us to stand. We open our red mouths all at once and the words flow, lapped up by the walls and the spying cameras. We, Girls One to Five Hundred, sing because it is what we were born to do, and there will always be girls here to wear our dresses, eat our kibble, and whisper our secrets in the dead of night. And maybe one day, we will slip through the Rift and become a song of our own. - -Hope, Courage, Prosperity. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Default** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889664256499895).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/editorial.md b/content/issue-35/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index d3e3dbce..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Afro-futurism800.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 35** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Many thanks to stellar human Lance Tooks for allowing us to use 'Afro-futurism' as our issue's cover! A New Yorker by birth, Madrileño by choice, as an illustrator Lance cut his teeth at Marvel before embarking for Spain and evolving its visual influences into a style all his own. You can see more of his work on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/lancetooks/) and (if you know where to look) in Madrid's Barrio de las Letras, where he'll be sketching the world as it walks by." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -It always seems there is never enough time in life to read all the things I want to – maybe you're familiar with the feeling. Despite this, and despite the fact that there are many shiny new books being published all the time that I would really like to dive into, I seem to keep picking up old science fiction books and reading them first. - -Sometimes this can be a true pleasure, sometimes more a disastrous mistake. But even in the latter cases there can be elements of the rewarding mixed in with the cringe. And second-hand bookshops are among my favourite places to be. - -Let me present examples to cover both bases, which also happen to have coincidental titles and share a bit of a theme and, well, not a lot else. A few years ago I read what immediately became a favourite: Marge Piercy's 1976 novel *Woman on the Edge of Time*, a "critical utopia" that shines a painfully sharp light on the racial inequality and mental health treatment of its era, and therefore on the culture permitting both. Alongside her institutionalised struggles in Piercy's contemporary New York, the protagonist becomes psychically linked with a visitor from a distant future in which the world has (mostly) abandoned its capital- and resource-hungry ways in favour of rural egalitarianism achieved through a somewhat precarious degree of post-scarcity. Her belief that she is able to travel through time to experience these wonders unsurprisingly causes more than a few problems as regards her ongoing diagnosis. - -*Woman on the Edge of Time* is really good. Despite being partly set in the period of its writing, now almost half a century in the past, and partly in a distant future imagined under the influences of that same time, a reader today doesn't encounter any sense of datedness; the glimpses of *our* past in the mental facility feel vibrant and authentic and timeless in the way that good writing always does, and (as is sadly often the case) the social critique at work still has teeth. - -It would be nice to say that John Brunner's 1971 novel *The Wrong End of Time* enjoyed all those same qualities. It doesn't. - -The novel begins with a Russian spy arriving off the North American coastline bearing a vital message for his nation's best sleeper agent, an executive who's been embedded at the top of one of the USA's economically and politically vital corporations for so long that he's effectively gone native. The only reason he's able to set foot on American soil without triggering a global nuclear exchange is that a young black man with highly unfocused psychic abilities felt the urge to wander down to the local control nexus of the world's most deadly powerful defence system and turn it off several hours before – a decision which goes on to have further coincidental and complicating effects on the lives of all concerned. - -That vital message is a complete McGuffin, by the way – *aliens!* – and is barely mentioned outside the first and last few pages of the book. What we get instead are a variety of perspectives showcasing the author's critique of American culture, which mostly range from exaggerated for effect to the painfully, *horribly* dated. Brunner had chops as a writer, he won the Hugo for Best Novel just a few years previously for *Stand on Zanzibar*. But here, while we perhaps surprisingly have an African-American main character with considerable depth, we also find a trio of dead-eyed gang-members whose speech is rendered in an all but unreadable phonetic street patois, embarrassing in a way that nowadays would be branded as ridiculously clumsy at best, and *please-no-grandpa* racist at worse. - -In these books I've no doubt that both Piercy and Brunner put pen to paper with nought but good intentions, but time can be not so much cruel as justifiably unsympathetic. One made me shake my head in admiration, the other in admonition, but still I find I don't regret reading *The Wrong End of Time* once when I could have read *Woman on the Edge of Time* twice instead. Nor one of those shiny new releases, for that matter, which today will certainly be free of ridiculous *sho'nuff yoo muvva* dialogue but might well expose poor writing of other sorts. - -Still, despite its multiple faults (and few today could read *The Wrong End of Time* without wincing so hard their hair would part up the back of the head) there are still elements at play that are of general interest. The social divides within American culture; the dominance of its corporate world and subservience of its political; its militarism, internal and external; all facets that troubled Brunner as an outside observer more than fifty years ago are still troubling to an outside observer like me, and not all his explorations are as disastrously flawed. There are also more than just hints regarding man-made climate change or ecological crisis, a theme that crops up in much spec-fic of the 70s and which of course feels fiercely relevant today, even if in other regards this book does not. - -*Treatment* is everything, and writing's a tough game, but the past has no monopoly on the bad and it certainly has no shortage of the good. So the next time you finish one book and reach for another, consider looking backwards before you look forwards. diff --git a/content/issue-35/four-bill-club.md b/content/issue-35/four-bill-club.md deleted file mode 100644 index 01d66413..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/four-bill-club.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,297 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Four Bill Club" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- science fiction -- crime -authors: -- Donald McCarthy -copyright: '© Donald McCarthy 2023 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Environment matters in sf, but entertainment matters too, and short fiction leaves little space for balancing acts. Donald McCarthy doesn't just give good world-building, the kind that carries the scent of what came before and leaves an aftertaste for whatever will follow – he uses it to flavour the story at hand without overwhelming what we're here for now: thrills and spills." - -image: images/FourBill10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Cottonbro Studio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-in-blue-jacket-blocking-the-light-from-face-with-her-hand-10380594/), [Wendy Wei](https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-crowd-1677573/) and [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/abstract-architecture-contemporary-1867937/)." - -type: stock -slug: the-four-bill-club -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he party roars. I can barely decipher what anyone says. That’s fine. The people here aren’t the type to say anything interesting. Almost everyone in the Four Bill Club can brag of immense wealth and power, and I’ve found the relationship between being interesting and being wealthy is an indirect one. The few here who aren’t part of the elite count themselves as lucky guests of some rich patron. I’m neither wealthy nor someone’s guest, though, so how am I here? Dedication. You want something enough, and don’t care what you must do to get it, and you can set your sights on almost anything. - -The Four Bill Club sits on a world that’s not part of the ten colonies, making its legal status nebulous. That’s how the people here like it. Adds a touch of the forbidden. This is a world of gray and brown rock, a world that promises no life, letting the club stand out, almost cruelly mocking this barren planet. Mania among bleakness. - -I walk through the club’s crowd, although it’s a challenge. Music comes from somewhere, maybe everywhere, and it’s deafening. The main room reaches the volume of a stadium, its vastness unnecessary, a monument to excess. The place is so packed, especially in the center of the hall, that people seem to merge into one another, ceasing to be individuals: just a mass of drunken, drugged-up flesh. Overhead, the same circumstance plays out. An anti-gravity system allows there to be two parties: one on the ceiling, two hundred feet above, and one down here. Someone told me that party gets nicknamed “Heaven”, and this one gets nicknamed “Hell”. Nonsense. It’s filth straight up and straight down. This club serves only the people who’ve ruined everything, the type of people who long ago made Earth’s climate turn against us. - -A waiter zips just above my head, carrying a tray of cocktails. He and the others glide through the air on levitating disks. I wish I had one of those. I wouldn’t have to be trapped among these people who’d hate me if they knew who I was, where I came from, and what I plan to do to them. - -Well, the plan itself remains foggy. Part of me had wondered if just getting here would be enough, seeing the excess, smelling the hallucinogens. But it’s not. - -This place needs punishment. These people need punishment. - -I try my best to squeeze through partygoers in bright dresses and dark suits. A few look at me, probably unsure if they see a boy or a girl. I wear tight black pants and a tight black shirt with a black jacket made from Symorian cloth. Always wearing black cuts down prep time, I never have to worry if my outfit matches. I avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, looking only at the other parts of their bodies – mouths with smiles that curdle, the women with bare, muscular backs, the men with shirts that cling to surgically enhanced biceps. There’s something vulgar about all of them. Everything a transaction. Give this one a drink, they’ll kiss you; give that one a drug, they’ll fuck you. - -The music evolves into a techno rhythm, matching my heartbeat. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. The lighting in the club turns violet, everyone bathed in shades of purple. I continue to slink through the mass of flesh. - -Bodies rub against me. - -I hate being touched. Always have, but it became far worse after they found us in the empty church back home. An abandoned church in a green field. Just me and him, until the police came. I never found out who called them. Maybe no one. Maybe they just came by hoping they’d find somebody. They grabbed me, their grip on my arms tight. He fought back, though. They beat him until I thought he’d die. He did. - -I can’t think on that now, though. I must be locked onto the present moment. - -I pass into a shadowed area of the floor. One of three large spheres hangs above me. A thin staircase leads up, spiraling around it. The sphere contains a private room for the most elite guests. I spoke to someone who worked here once, and she told me that you cannot see what goes on inside, but everyone in the spheres can see what happens down here. A voyeur’s heaven. - -I take a breath and push further through the partiers, hoping to get to the far side of the club, where it’s far less crowded. I try not to think about the amount of people around me, how easily I could be suffocated by them if they closed in just a little tighter. If I think like that I’ll have a panic attack, and that I cannot allow. I’ve learned there’s nothing worse than choking during an important moment. - -I make it to the other side, where this main hall branches off into smaller rooms, ones where I get the impression you don’t necessarily want to enter. Above, far above, people who may as well be ants also trickle into side rooms, breaking off from the center mass. It’s disorienting to see them up there, a weird form of vertigo. Dizziness threatens to overtake me. - -Most of the doors to the side rooms are solid black, but a couple are gray. Each gray door harbors a peephole in the center. I look into one, not certain what I’ll see, and I’m greeted with an eye staring back out at me. The eyes is red, the iris hazy. The skin around it shifts a little, and I wonder if they’re talking. The music, that awful music, makes certain I’ll never hear. - -I pull away. I shouldn’t allow myself to be so easily distracted. I’m not here just to observe. I’m not sure what, precisely, I’ll do, but it will be more than passively staring. I need to understand this place before I do anything, though. I need to see how it works, how it breathes, how it— - -There are severed heads mounted on the rear wall of the club. - -Severed heads, positioned to form seven circles. Not human ones, but still. Not what you want to see. Each has heavy black fur, a small snout, and tiny eyes. They’re the Jorjandi, a now-extinct species that lived on Maldrove, the first world colonized by humanity after the Exodus from Earth. They emitted an odor that was near-unbearable, to us at least, so the early colonizers poisoned the Jorjandi’s drinking spots, and they died out in a year. I’d seen holograms of them in college a couple years ago, but seeing them here is different. Perverse trophies for humanity’s success. - -I force myself back into the crowd, the bodies against me once more. I spot an older man and a younger woman leaving the crowd, heading towards one of the black doors. The young woman meets my eyes briefly. I’m not sure what she thinks I can do, and I look away. - -Besides, I have to focus. I’m here to make a statement. I’m here to be heard. I’m here to let them know we can’t be ignored forever. - -A hand grabs my wrist. - -Adrenaline rushes through me, and I feel a mix of anger and fear. In a flash I recall the hands on me in the church, the police screaming at us that we were trespassing, us saying it’d been abandoned for years, why would anyone care? Well, *he* said that. Not me. I stayed silent and lived. He protested and died. - -This hand belongs to a woman in a suit so dark the club’s lights seem loath to taint it. - -“Someone wants to see you.” Despite the throbbing music her voice is very clear, like she knew exactly what tone to use to be heard. She’s security, but not for the club, I suspect. A private guest. “Please come with me.” - -This could be advantageous. I want to do something in this place, leave my mark. It couldn’t hurt to see the highest clientele here, no matter what vile things they may have in mind when sending for me. - -I let the security woman guide me towards one of the spiral staircases. No one in the crowd looks at her, but they move aside as if by instinct. What it must be like, to have such power. She lets go of my wrist as we begin the ascent, apparently convinced I’m not going to flee. She hasn’t once looked at me since she told me to come with her. I’m just food to be fetched. - -I keep my hand on the railing as I climb. Whether I look up or down, I’m going to get vertigo thanks to this awful club’s design, so I instead try to focus only on the white stairs. I don’t care at all about being caught here, thrown out, arrested, or worse – but heights? They still unnerve me. - -The stairs wind, rising into the center of the sphere, and as soon as I enter the private zone the music goes silent. I freeze, but the security guard takes my wrist once more, pulling me fully into the sphere and across the smoothly carpeted floor towards a low table flanked by a leather couch and matching chair. The semi-transparent wall gives everything happening outside an emerald hue. - -“I was intrigued, watching you below,” a man says from the other side of the sphere. He leans against a small bar, although there’s no bartender in sight, and the man does not have a drink. He wears a tailored three-piece suit of cobalt gray over a brushed steel shirt and a deep, cold-blue tie. A thin gold chain loosely connects the pockets of his vest between the open breasts of his jacket. His pale face almost glows in the dim lighting. I can’t help but think him a vampire; the word just lodges itself into my mind. - -“I could tell you didn’t belong,” he continues. He pockets his hands and crosses the room. The security guard has somehow vanished. It’s just me and the vampire. His gait is slow, his smile steady – his teeth normal – and he takes a seat in the leather chair across from the couch. Only a glass table lies between us. On it rests a plate with a knife and fork, along with some juices that I suspect are the remains of a steak. An actual steak, cut from an actual animal. - -“What do you want from me?” I ask. - -“My name is Lace,” the vampire says, as if I’d asked that instead. “I’m the owner of Tyrius Incorporated.” - -I’ve heard of *that* company, of course. It was responsible for humanity’s ability to terraform other worlds and leave Earth. Well, some of humanity. It was also responsible for almost every advancement in weaponry since – a complicated legacy to put it politely. - -“I see,” I reply, and try not to eye the knife. I came here to do something, after all, didn’t I? - -He crosses one leg over the other, sinking into the chair. “I was people watching when I saw you. I’m supposed to meet with someone, but they’re delayed. Anyway, you walked with a purpose the others here don’t have. I thought you were female, I’ll confess, but I think I got the rest of you right.” - -“I’m just here to have a nice time.” That sounds like something people at a club would say. - -“I don’t think that’s true,” the vampire replies. “When people enjoy themselves they have a tendency to look, you know, *happy*. You look the opposite of that. I saw how you shuddered when the crowd rubbed up against you.” - -I find I have to clear my throat. “I don’t like being touched.” - -“We have that in common.” - -I look to my side, out over the crowd. How many of them own businesses that got rich off the Exodus? How many came from families that ruined Earth? “Do you like people watching?” I ask. - -“It’s how I learn. Watch people for long enough and you become pretty good at reading them.” - -I meet his gaze. “You certainly seem to think you know me.” - -He raises his right hand. “I don’t mean to sound pretentious, I swear, but people in my, ah, stratosphere of society have a certain way about themselves. As do our clingers-on. You stuck out like a sore thumb.” - -I almost protest but figure there’s no point. May as well be honest. I can’t let fear always win. The vampire’s intentions elude me, but this could be my opportunity to… to *do* something. So I smile, and make sure to sit on the edge of the couch. Within reach the steak knife. - -“How lucky for me you noticed,” I say, trying to keep anxiety from my voice. “I’m not ashamed of not belonging here. Even the name of the club is perverse.” - -The vampire gives a light laugh. “It is, isn’t it? We left four billion people to die on Earth, but, hey, at least they get a club named after them. A charming sort running this place. Enough to give a person some bad ideas. No wonder colorful characters make threats against it.” - -Is he alluding to me? I’m not sure I’d count as a colorful character. “Do they?” - -“Oh, yes.” - -“You don’t sound concerned.” If anything, he sounds excited, almost aroused by the idea. There’s a fresh smile playing around the edges of his mouth. Does this man find everything amusing? - -“I don’t come here often, so it wouldn’t matter much to me if the place shut down. If it happened thanks to a massive catastrophe, well, let’s just say that my company’s desirability will skyrocket. There’s never a bad time to sell weapons and security, but after some attack on the wealthy?” He whistles. “Forget about it. I’ll be swimming in money.” - -He waves his own comment away. “But it’s rude of me to talk about my successes. Let’s chat about you. You’re from Symoria, aren’t you? I hear it in your voice. Beautiful colony. If humanity had settled there first instead of Maldrove, who knows how much nicer our history would be? You were lucky to grow up on such a lovely planet.” - -I recall the fist coming down, his teeth breaking, one of them tumbling across the floor. I can hear it, too. I almost picked it up so I could have something of him. I remember the police dragging me outside. They never read my rights, but they had a good time. - -“There’s still plenty to dislike,” I remark. “They just hide their fascism better.” - -“Well, one thing *I* dislike is that they don’t much care for my business.” He shakes his head and throws up his hands. I assume it’s a performance for me, or maybe just for his own amusement. “The other colonies love working with us, but Symoria – and I don’t say this to offend you – thinks it’s better than us. That’s what happens when you have a bunch of Marxists running the government.” - -“I don’t think we have Marxists running anything.” - -“Oh, anyone who’s against my business is a Marxist.” He removes a very old school pocketwatch from his vest pocket, the thin gold chain dangling as he glances at it. He sighs. “My guest was supposed to be here an hour ago. Do you know what they’re doing? A power play. Make me wait to show that they’re not really concerned. What they don’t realize is that in trying to show strength they reveal their insecurity.” He taps the side of his nose. “I’ve been in business long enough to not only know all the moves but to know what the moves mean about the person behind them.” - -“Must be nice to have that confidence.” - -“It is.” He rises and walks to the transparent wall, turning his gaze below. “Look at them down there. They say they come here for fun, to relax, but they’re lying to themselves, aren’t they?” - -With his attention averted, I move the steak knife a little closer. The sound it makes as I move it across the table is soft, but he continues gazing at the crowd. “Why do you think they come here?” he asks. - -I have some nasty thoughts on that. “Same reason anyone goes to parties or clubs. To feel good and forget.” - -“Wrong.” He turns back to me. No smile. Instead, his lips curl with disgust. “They come here for violence. The music, the loudness, the crush of the people, the dark lighting, the little fuckville rooms on the side, it all feels like something will boil over. It won’t, but it *feels* like it will. That’s why people come. The thrill of danger.” - -I hear screams echoing in an empty church. “If they want that, there are plenty of places I can suggest they go.” - -“They like the possibility of danger, not the actual thing.” A waiter flies by the sphere behind him, and the lighting in the club begins to change color, from purple to orange to dark red. “You’ve moved that knife a fair bit closer.” - -I freeze. His voice stayed calm, like he thought me no threat. A part of me wants to pick up the knife and show him different, but… “I think it’s time for me to go.” - -He starts walking in a semi-circle around the couch. “You want to make things exciting, I can have my guard come back in and give you her gun. Then we can really see what you’re made of.” - -I’m not sure what to say. “Would she actually give it to me?” - -He’s behind his chair now. He rests his hands on top of it. “She’ll do anything I tell her to.” - -I swallow. “Tell her to bring it.” He turns to the stairs. “Wait,” I blurt, hating myself. - -“Ah, and you were so close,” he says. “We’ll have to see if you have the stomach for your business downstairs.” - -My stomach starts to turn, as if in response. I do my best not to let the discomfort show, but can you ever really know how you appear to others? - -“It’s been a treat having you stop by,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Enjoy yourself! Be careful, though. The people here aren’t always the kindest, especially to boys who look like girls.” - -It’s the second time he’s mentioned my non-traditional appearance. As if his appearance is so normal. “You— you should be careful that the next steak you’re served doesn’t come with garlic.” - -The vampire’s eyes widen and he laughs in surprise or disbelief. “I never quite thought of myself like *that* before. Have I become that pale? Ah, maybe.” - -I slowly stand. “I’m going back down now.” I say it like an affirmation. - -He points up. “Not above?” - -“No.” - -“I agree. Too disorienting. See? We’re peas in a pod.” - -He comes around, and for an awful moment I think he’s going to try and hug me or something. Instead, he picks up the steak knife and holds it out to me, handle first. He grips the blade tight, causing thin cuts in his hand that he seems not to notice. “You should take this with you.” - -I stare at the knife. “No thanks.” - -“Don’t be silly. Take it. Never know when you might need it in a place like this. Your jacket have a pocket? Take it. Take it.” - -I take the handle. It’s cold. “What do you want me to do with it?” - -“Whatever you want,” he says. - -I can’t go around carrying it, so I place it in my jacket’s inner pocket. - -“See?” he says. “There you go.” - -Maybe he’s setting me up. He’ll alert security, they’ll find me with the knife. In a place like this, nobody would ever get to know what happened next. But if that was all he wanted, he could just call security now. Or have his own guard beat me down, a little private show right here. Or, maybe, do it himself. - -“I hate to see you go,” the vampire laments, “but I know what you want is down there. I imagine you’ve pictured it many times.” - -He knows why I’m here. He knows I’m here to kill, to purge the hate that sprouted in me a year ago, when I saw what power meant. - -“Why are you letting me go?” I whisper. - -“Why not?” Then, softer but more vicious, he states it, “Why *not*.” - -The bodyguard emerges then from the exit in the floor like she's answering his call, though I didn't see him signal some hidden camera or anything else. As she follows me down the steps I glance back, and his gaze is gently on mine until the carpet swallows him up and all I see is the gloss black tiles of the stairwell, spiraling towards the opening below. - -And I’m back in the club. Back in Hell. - -If anything, the music is louder than before. It feels like I could cut my own heart out and the beat alone would keep my blood pumping. - -The lighting dims and brightens, dims and brightens. First green, then blue, then red. I’m back in the mass, bodies once more pushing against me. The knife doesn’t cut through my jacket, but I feel it, and I wonder if the vampire gave me a gift or a curse. I try to get to the side of the room faster, I need to get out of this so I can think. The music is too loud, the reverberations too intense, the breathing of everyone around me too suffocating. - -I could cut my way through them, I realize. I could cut them until they run and scream. I won’t be on the wrong end of the violence this time. I could do it. I could. I could. I won’t choke, like I did with the vampire. Like I did with— - -At last I emerge, and I’m back at the wall where the Jorjandi heads hang. The gray and black doors. Two men exit the door nearest, glancing at me with suspicion. I must look like a wreck. I’m sweating so much. The music is so loud, everyone is merging into one person. Everyone here is the same. Am I going to be like that, too? Am I going to make a stand or am I going to get sucked into this awful place? - -I lean my forehead against a door, trying to stay calm, trying to think straight again. The peephole calls to me, and I cannot help myself: I look in. - -Inside is a person with dark, shoulder length hair. They turn, and the person is me. - -They say, “Why’d you let them do that to you?” - -I reply, or at least I think I reply, “This place is where the worst people come.” - -“You let yourself be… just to get a ticket to here?” - -“I needed to do something.” I see the police beating him. “I needed to do something after I stood there and did nothing.” There was no reason. They just *could*. “But I’m here now. In the belly of the beast.” - -They look at me sadly. “You’re going to die here.” - -“How do you know?” - -“Because I’m the dead you.” - -Impossible, of course. I’m losing it. Not the first time I’ve disassociated and spoken to myself. Or perhaps I inhaled something without realizing it. This place is filled with substances. Everyone oozes something. - -“Are you going in the fucking room or not?” A man grabs my arm, his mouth near my ear. “You’re blocking the way.” - -It’s automatic, like a side of me that’s been sleeping takes control. I pull the steak knife from my pocket, cutting part of my jacket’s fabric, and draw the blade across the man’s arm. He screams and pulls back, eyes wide with fear. - -I’ve never felt so empowered. I’ve never felt so good. - -And then the music stops. - -Some sort of security system must’ve observed what I’ve done. Now, the crowd will turn on me, devour me. Maybe literally. But it was worth it, just for that moment. - -A voice booms out: “YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE.” - -At the center of the club three people are standing on disks, hovering over the crowd. Not waiters: all three wear Jorjandi heads like grotesque masks, and they give off an aura like gods judging everyone here, including me. - -Apparently I’m not the only person unhappy with this place. These, though, are serious people with serious intentions, not half-baked fantasies like mine. Half-baked fantasies and near a nervous breakdown. That’s all I am. - -“WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE.” It’s not clear which of the three speaks, but their voice is magnified throughout the room. Everyone is silent, motionless, watching them, amazed. - -I’m in awe. They’re *really* doing something. Why couldn’t I be with them? The clockwork of this awful universe made it so we were here at the same moment, so I can see what I should’ve done, what I could have been, how useless I really am. To these people, I must look like one of the crowd. I want to say something, prove I’m more like them than the awful people around me. Even if I could be heard, though, what could I possibly say? - -“REAP WHAT YOU SOW.” - -One of the interlopers raises their hand, showing they’re holding a small electronic device. They squeeze it, activate it, and something causes the air to shift. - -The three disks bank and veer away, and I realize what they’ve done just as the distant screaming starts. The awful thing is that the bodies don’t hit the dancefloor fast. Death isn’t instant, or even guaranteed. The gravity in Heaven doesn’t turn off all at once, it lessens and lessens, dragging out the fall. Flailing forms twist in the air, drawing closer, then faster and faster. Then the first of them rain down as the crowd on Hell’s dancefloor scatter and bunch to avoid the initial impacts, their cries of panic punctuated by meaty thuds and the sound of bones cracking. - -I put my back up against the door, hoping no one will fall on top of me. The man I cut scrambles backwards only to have a body slam down onto him. They both scream as they brokenly try to untangle themselves from one another, try and fail, and their screams may as well be silent because the hall is filled with one lasting shriek as the dying and the pained let loose. The crowd is crazed and scared and violent. Someone grabs at an interloper’s disk, pulling them down into the crowd, which then descends upon them, wanting vengeance even if it’s the last act of their lives. - -I slowly move, back to the wall, gripping my knife tightly. I don’t know of a way out other than the way I came in, which is all the way across this hall turned abattoir. I’ll get there, I just have to not focus on how far it is. - -I have to stay in my head, pretend I’m somewhere else, back home in that abandoned church before they found us, when I was happy. - -A man rushes out of the crowd, his eyes wide and full of insanity. He’s seen too much, he’s coming my way, but I won’t let him grab me. Not another person will *ever* touch me. - -He reaches out for me, so I stab him in the gut, blood marinating his gray dress shirt. I could’ve been somewhere else if things hadn’t gone all wrong. He lets loose an awful sound, and I keep stabbing. I could’ve been happy. I’m screaming, too. I could’ve been with someone who loved me. The knife hits flesh and bone again and again. I could’ve been someplace other than the Four Bill Club. - -Once he’s dead, I sink to the floor with him. Bodies are still falling. People stampede around, bumping against me, and for once I don’t care. - -I don’t know how I make the decision. I just do. I turn the knife’s handle in my hand and thrust it at my chest, at my heart. It bounces off. The blade of the knife is bent, twisted to the side, probably blunted by the dead man’s bones. - -I drop it to the ground. I guess I’ll have to wait then. I’ll die horribly, crushed from above, or trampled, made part of the crowd of the dying. I need to make peace with that. What other choice do I have? Go out screaming and crying? - -“Look who it is,” someone says. - -The vampire stands over me. He’s smiling. His guard mutters something in his ear, and he shakes his head in the negative. “No, we should take our friend with us.” He holds out a hand to me, unconcerned about the chaos all around. “No need to die here. You can come with me.” - -I try to speak, but my mouth is suddenly dry. I take his hand, and he pulls me to my feet. I have no choice, you understand? I have to take his hand. I can’t even kill myself. - -“We need to go, Mr Lace,” his guard insists. - -“Lead the way,” says the vampire, giving me a supportive smile. - -She does. She carries her gun in her right hand, and twice shoots someone who comes out of the mangled crowd. The vampire does not blink when she does so. People call for our help, but we ignore them. We walk out the way we came in, forgetting the dying, the rich, their servants, the interlopers, all of them. - -The air outside tastes of fuel and smoke. The guard leads us past the nearby spaceships, making her way to the vampire’s craft. The vampire, for his part, has not let go of my hand. He holds it gently, as if we are a couple. I don’t know what to do. I want to let go, and I want to cling to it. - -I think he knows that, too. That’s why he came for me. - -We board his ship. - -Whatever technology the interlopers used to disrupt the club must have expired, because seconds before the ship’s door snaps shut behind us, I hear the music in the club start again. My heartbeat once more matches it. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Four Bill Club** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889663996499921).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/ghost-music-an-yu.md b/content/issue-35/ghost-music-an-yu.md deleted file mode 100644 index c7b285e8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/ghost-music-an-yu.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,56 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Mattia Ravasi -copyright: '© Mattia Ravasi 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Welcome back to Mattia 'The Book Chemist' Ravasi, who returns after a six-month hiatus with his second longform fiction review. This time he shifts focus from the abstract and oppressive science fictional to the not-exactly hallucinogenic fantastical." - -image: images/GhostMusic10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author An Yu and the novel's cover (designed by Suzanne Dean)." - -type: stock -slug: ghost-music-an-yu-review -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}here is something deeply disconcerting about music: about its capacity for influencing our emotions, and for opening up imaginative vistas. H. P. Lovecraft, widely regarded as the finest practitioner of a certain type of gooey, gelatinous horror, singled out his short story *The Music of Erich Zann* as one of his best works: a tale of subtle, unspecified horror centering on a mute musician who has come in touch, through his technical mastery, with dark forces he is now struggling to control. - -An Yu’s ***Ghost Music*** evokes eerie echoes of *Erich Zann*. The novel’s protagonist, Song Yan, spent her childhood and youth practicing the piano with the express purpose of becoming a virtuoso – yet in the novel’s present she contents herself with the occasional job as piano teacher after a nervous breakdown put her career ambitions to rest. She lives with her husband Bowen in their Beijing apartment. Her mother-in-law, a proud and distant woman, has recently moved in with them. - -The ghost of Song Yan’s forsaken career is the largest and most tenacious among the many ghosts that haunt this sinister, fascinating novel. When one of her young pupils encourages her to play a melody on the piano, Song Yan falls back on a simple, innocuous composition, an old favorite that is unlikely to stretch her skills. Song Yan’s commitment to music is blatant on every page, but she is reticent to explore the outer edges of her talent, as if this were a territory she has sworn to avoid. - -A significant portion of the early novel is dedicated to documenting Song Yan’s everyday life: her efforts to get along with her difficult mother-in-law; her painful attempts to connect with her workaholic husband. There is a feeling of airlessness to Song Yan’s life. A sense that things are in too tense a balance to remain stable for long, but that they have also been stuck in place too long to change. This paradox does not make the novel uncomfortable, let alone boring. The way in which Song Yan faces her predicament, trying her best to be kind to her family while carving out a space for her needs, makes it very easy to sympathize with her situation. - -There is also a certain bottom-line strangeness to Song Yan’s life that propels the story forward very powerfully. In the brief chapter that opens the book (and I confess to a certain coyness in avoiding this fact until now), Song Yan has an encounter with a talking mushroom: a small orange fungus who appears to her in an otherwise sealed room, expressing a wish to be remembered. The encounter does not seem *real*, but it’s not quite a dream, either. - -Soon enough, Song Yan starts receiving unexpected deliveries of vacuumed-packed mushrooms. Her mother-in-law accepts these mystery packages enthusiastically, embracing the culinary possibilities they offer. She and Song Yan stew the mushrooms, pickle them, add them to stir fries. There is something uncomfortable about this kitchen alliance. Just as Song Yan’s life seems perfectly poised between normality and crisis, this new hobby she embraces is at once wholesome and unsound. Should one really trust mystery mushrooms so easily? - -Mushrooms provide the perfect foil for the other great force in the novel, music. Both are mysterious and otherworldly. Both are nourishing and provide sustenance but can easily take a life away, either through a deadly poisonous fungus or by turning into an all-consuming obsession. When asked by a pupil whether she likes the piano – a typically childish question, straightforward and yet impossible to answer – Song Yan admits that she has no way to know, because the piano has loomed so large over her entire life. It’s too big a part of her for her to know how she really feels about it. - -Mushrooms and pianos become fused together in the fulcrum of the novel’s plot, the first of a series of twists that finally knock Song Yan’s life off-balance. As she investigates the sender of the packaged mushrooms, Song Yan finds herself welcomed into the home of Bai Yu, a virtuoso pianist who disappeared ten years prior without leaving a trace. - -The parallels between Bai Yu and Song Yan are obvious: she gave up on her talent right when her career was meant to begin; he retreated from the limelight as he was poised to achieve his greatest triumph. Bai Yu is almost a ghostly embodiment of Song Yan’s past, or better, of the future that she renounced. It is significant, in this sense, that her father, a pianist of some renown who cut all ties with her after she abandoned her career, was a great admirer of Bai Yu and much shaken by his disappearance. - -This is not the only ghostly aspect of Bai Yu’s character. Asked about the reasons why he decided to disappear from the world, he confesses to a strange phenomenon he encountered as he developed his talents: - -> “The more time I spent with the piano [...] the more it seemed like my hands didn’t belong to me. The sounds didn’t come from me. I became frightened to the point that every time I was sitting at the piano, I couldn’t help but feel that there wasn’t a ‘me’ at all.” - -Unable to play any longer, Bai Yu is looking for someone to help him “find the sound of being alive,” a sound which he seems to believe is trapped inside his piano, waiting to be released. His research is at once deranged and brilliant: an old man’s folly, or a supreme act of artistic daring. As she is recruited into helping out with this endeavor, Song Yan is plunged right back into the lively, ambitious side of her creative self. - -*Ghost Music*, however, is not a story of redemption and unlikely comebacks. It is, instead, very much a ghost story: a tale about people confronted with the traumas of a past that won’t stay asleep, and that imposes itself on the present in ways that are disturbing and even brutal. - -An Yu masterfully unpacks this process of shock in all of its harshness and pain. The same delicate bravado is on show in those sections of *Ghost Music* that deal with Song Yan’s marital difficulties. In the early part of the novel, her husband Bowen is not so much mean to her as blind and deaf to her needs, her very presence. It is easy to read him as a terrible person. Yet, as we come to learn about his own ghosts, his character slowly acquires more dimension. If we don’t quite forgive him, we can certainly understand him. It even becomes possible to see his own dedication to his employer as a very similar impulse, if somewhat less refined, to Song Yan’s consuming passion for the piano. - -After she has endured a number of tribulations – and more encounters with the talking mushroom – Song Yan reflects on her relationship with Bai Yu, and remarks on his importance in her life in a powerful passage that speaks to one of the deepest functions of art: it might not take our problems away, but it reframes our focus and expands our gaze, giving us a deeper appreciation of the strangeness and vividness of life. - -There is much in *Ghost Music* that I haven’t mentioned in this review. Presences from Bowen’s past come back to haunt him. A mysterious orange dust plagues the novel, appearing at various points in time and space. *Ghost Music* is not quite a work of magical realism, but it’s also not simply a realist novel with “surreal” elements. Instead, it brilliantly short-circuits the expectations of the ghost story (some of its ghosts, for instance, are not dead, at least not yet) while preserving its central tenets: a preoccupation with “visitations” from an uncomfortable past; a sense of uncertainty before these events that pushes its characters to question their grip on reality. That it manages to convey all this in a way that is at once impactful yet subtle, all while offering a wistful but charming portrait of life in modern-day Beijing, is nothing short of magical. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889662526500068).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/rock-god.md b/content/issue-35/rock-god.md deleted file mode 100644 index d076fd60..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/rock-god.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,264 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "You Are a Rock God" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- slipstream -authors: -- Joelle Killian -copyright: '© Joelle Killian 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll: some permutation of music's answer to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, perhaps – only, when you're at the top, everything's 'The Good', right? It's all going to last forever, and nothing can go wrong. Joelle Killian takes us to the top and gives us a glimpse of the bottom – or possibly the other way around. Unless the top was always an illusion. And maybe it would be better if it was." - -image: images/RockGod10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using an image from [Melvin Buezo](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-photography-of-a-man-holding-guitar-2529174/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: you-are-a-rock-god -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t’s your turn. Push the food wrappers and parking tickets on Reed’s living room table aside to make space for two neat lines of opalescent powder, your innards twisting in anticipation. Reed and CJ lie prone on the floor nearby, silently drifting along to industrial metal. Give yourself extra karma points for graciously letting them go down first this time. - -The drugs sparkle in the low light. Whatever those chemical wizards add during synthesis to create this effect always leaves you with glitter-snot for days. - -Hold a straw up to one nostril and snort, then tip your head back as the explosions begin. Floodlights warm your skin; roaring applause drowns out the guitars thundering from the stereo. The room swims away as you recline on the sagging couch, blazing pyrotechnics filling your vision. - -Then *pow* – you land, relieved to escape your own disappointing skin. Remove the aviator shades now perched on your face and use their mirrored surface to check out how you appear in this world: weathered face, lit cigarette dangling beneath a thick handlebar mustache, shaggy mane cascading out from under a leather cowboy hat. Flex those meaty biceps covered in blackwork tattoos. A hulking brute. Perfect. - -Better jam those shades back on before anyone clocks you gaping at your own reflection. You vault off the plush sofa, blurting, “Yeah, let’s fucking *party!”* Not the most original rallying cry, but it’ll do in a pinch. - -A skeletal degenerate with sunken eyes hands you a bottle of Jack Daniels. Go ahead and swig from it, even though you can tell this body is already gloriously wasted. Because fuck it: you’re a rock god. - -Lurch through the smoke-filled suite, littered with guitar cases and duffel bags, overturned room service carts and shattered lamps, the sodden carpet squishy beneath your boots. An ogre-sized dude hurls daggers at a poster on the wall with one hand, the other protecting the tiny marmalade kitten in a sling around his chest. Another beast with Schnauzer-like mutton chops is out on the balcony hoisting a TV over the railing. It lands in the palm tree-lined courtyard below with a crash. - -Just as you smash the whiskey bottle to the floor in chaotic solidarity, the suite door bangs open. A sweaty yutz in a navy-blue blazer enters, taking in the singed curtains, the skeletal creature passed out on the couch, the conspicuously absent television. “Jesus, how did you goddamned monsters get *this* wasted in the hour I’ve been gone?” He throws his hands in the air. “You’ve been banned from two hotel chains already. We going for a third?” - -Kitten Ogre flings another knife at the wall. It sticks in with a *thud*. - -Blazer gestures at the deployed fire extinguishers. “Anyone wanna fill me in on what inspired this little tantrum?” He looks at you with raised eyebrows. You immediately go blank. - -Schnauzer leans in from the balcony with a pout. “How come the opener has a better catering rider than us?” - -“*And* bigger blood cannons?” Kitten Ogre stalks over to his makeshift dartboard and pulls the daggers out of a *Chronic Emergency* poster. “It’s just not right.” The kitten meows. - -Blazer rubs both hands over his grimacing face. “Tonight’s your largest sold-out show yet, you cretins.” He waves towards Skeletor. “Wake him up and let’s go, we’re late for sound check.” - -“Never!” Schnauzer drags more splintered furniture towards the balcony. “Fuck ’em all, we quit!” - -You hesitate, picturing the packed venue, the thousands of eyes locked on you as rabid fans scream your name. Wasn’t that the point of this trip? You gaze longingly at a guitar case while Blazer tries to wrestle the knives away from Kitten Ogre, which even you can tell is a terrible idea. - -Flip open the case and caress the Flying V inside, your breath coming faster. You’re running out of time. Take out the ax, its weight reassuring in your callused hands, and marvel at how these fingers can span seven frets. - -Too late. The sound of chairs splashing into the pool below morphs into rippling echoes as the trashed hotel suite destabilizes and dissolves. The guitar slips through your hands. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he first sense to return is smell, which is how you can tell someone puked on reentry. Then the music mutates into droning bagpipes. Your least favorite part of the comedown. - -Pat your weakened limbs as the rest of your scrawny body returns, teeth settling back into the groove bitten inside your cheek. Blink your eyes open and stare up at the popcorn ceiling. - -CJ and Reed are already vibing about their trips – down first, up first – and you listen for clues, always curious how their Rock God journeys differ from yours. - -“That was phenomenal.” Reed’s face is paler than usual; he’s probably the puker. “Hot tub party with top-tier babes.” His obsession with the groupies always makes you suspect that his drug-avatar is a glam rock frontman, though you can never get him to admit it. - -CJ unbuttons their oversized flannel. “Lame. *I* got to crowd-surf a sold-out show.” Hard to believe mopey grunge fans would hold them up that long, but hey, it’s their trip. They point to the other side of the room. “Wait, was your TV screen always so cracked?” - -“Yo, welcome back.” Reed nods in your direction. “How’d you do?” - -Try to find your voice, even though your tongue is still numb. “We trashed a hotel room again. I mean, it was a pretty epic trashing, but…” Those squawking bagpipes are making you nauseous too, so you sit up to steady yourself. “Feels like it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to, y’know. *Play*.” - -Reed’s grin fades. Bet he can’t remember the last time he played, either. - -“You losers with the unimaginative rock star tropes.” CJ’s face is flushed, their eyes bright. “I *always* get to play.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}ime to go. Wobble out of Reed’s apartment on legs like overcooked noodles and careen down the stairwell. Hit the street, where gusts of icy wind dampen your Rock God afterglow. - -Back in the day you tried plenty of the usual street drugs, but now you far prefer the hyper-specificity of this bespoke shit. The classics were fun, but too unpredictable. You could end up anywhere, from merger with Gaia to the other end of your 8th-grade bully’s fist to the copyright approved nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh. Better to dial it in, know exactly where you’re going. - -All the dopey college kids gakked out of their minds on Fluffy Bunnies or Pillowy Abyss were a turn-off, but you eventually found your favorite flavors. You dabbled with Gold Medal and Viking Warrior, but once you had a taste of Rock God… well. *That* one scratched an itch you’d forgotten you had. - -Turn your phone back on. It blows up with text notifications, most of them from the same person: - -*hey* - -*what’s up?* - -*msg me when you get this plz* - -*you OK?* - -*yo, it’s srsly been like 3 days* - -*are you ghosting me??!?* - -*WTF* - -Turn it off again. - -Arrive at what passes for home, where a fire inspection announcement is taped to your apartment door. Crumple it into a ball and toss it down the hallway. You’d wager ten bucks that next you’ll see for-sale signs on your building, then an escalating series of eviction notices. - -Kick your way through the pile of mail inside – nothing good in there – and strip off your jacket. Acrid body odor hits you, like a goat that’s been munching on onions. You consider showering since it’s been a minute, but the landlord has installed this wrenches-and-gears steampunk contraption to bypass the rusted hot water tap. Too much trouble. Just go find a T-shirt that doesn’t have Hot Pocket cheese stains on it instead. - -Your uniform sits on top of the heap in the laundry hamper. Did you have to work today? - -Depends what day it is. Guess you'd have to turn your phone back on to find out, so may as well get dressed and head in. You can check the schedule when you get there; odds are you’ll be on-shift soon enough. Might avoid getting written up again, too. - -The polyester pants smell like beef tallow and sadness, which reminds you of the black gunk embedded in every crevice of the employee break room, a disgusting mix of lard and grime. Your slimeball manager won’t promote you off the fryer vat to the register, dooming you to an existence of pinprick grease burns and his low-key harassment. - -Could really use something to tamp down the dread curdling in your stomach, but you left your stash at Reed’s to avoid temptation. Riffle through the bedside table drawer – your ramshackle apothecary, filled with half-empty gram bags and pill bottles – and fish out a mostly-empty baggie of Rock God. Score. - -Cut it open and scrape the crystalline crumbs out. Not nearly enough for a full trip, but it should help take the edge off. Add a little sparkle. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nd *bam*, you’re back. - -Schnauzer, Ogre, and Skeletor sit in a semi-circle before you. The room’s burgundy walls are covered with 1970s concert posters in gilded frames. Six buckets of fried chicken lay ransacked beneath illuminated vanity mirrors, the greasy smell comingling with stale skunk weed. Bass rattles the floorboards. - -Everyone is staring at you. - -“Explain yourself.” Ogre’s voice is the low rumble of a semi-truck driving over your head. “Because you really crossed a line this time.” He makes little boundary-setting motions with the hand that isn’t cradling that orange kitten. The kitten also glares at you. - -Good thing your expression is partly hidden behind these aviators, because this jangles your nerves like an unexpected minor chord progression. What kind of atrocities would freak *these* monsters out? - -But what croaks out of your throat is, “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo.” - - “We’re serious,” Schnauzer growls. “Not gonna make it even halfway through this tour if you keep this fuckery up.” - -“Remember what the boss told us.” Ogre nudges him. “Use your ‘I’ statements.” - -“Right, sorry.” Schnauzer’s eyebrows furrow like furry apostrophes. “I feel… very *disrespected* by your fuckery.” - -“Excuse me?” Dig through your pockets, find a cigarette and light it. Play it cool. “What the hell’s got your panties in such a twist?” - -“Hey, don’t blame us, man.” Skeletor’s hands lay limply on his leather-clad legs, black makeup disappearing into the wrinkles around his eyes. He jerks his head across the way. “The boss says we gotta start setting limits.” - -Your head swivels around in search of Blazer, but everyone else is staring at the kitten. - -The little puffball peeks out of the sling around Ogre’s chest and bares its fangs at you, its once blue eyes now an inky black. - -It opens its mouth and hisses: - -*Are you ghosting me* - -*Where the fuck are you* - -*Your third no-show, don’t bother coming back* - -Its sepulchral shriek plunges your heart into an ice bath. You drop the lit cigarette and jump up, backing towards the door as the rest of the band sits transfixed by their tiny master. - -Then the audience roaring in the distance pulls at you like a magnet. - -God, you’re so close. - -Can’t stop yourself from making a run for it, out the dressing room door and down a long hallway. Chronic Emergency are finishing their encore. You could slide in there and play. Blow the minds of everyone in the front row wearing T-shirts with your band’s logo, all pentacles and umlauts. Now’s your chance. - -But dozens of groupies clad in leather bustiers and leopard-print, shredded tights and skintight jeans, form a wall between you and the wings of the stage. Their eyes gleam as they click-clack their press-on talons. Fangs flash between crimson lips. - -They pull you in and drag you under, where you drown in a sea of grabbing hands and open mouths. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Y{{}}ou swim back up to the surface, gasping for air. Damn, that’d been a big one. Bigger than you intended. - -Atonal droning, nausea and spinning, your tongue coated in thick fur. Sit up from your spot on the grimy tiles right outside your apartment, still wearing your uniform. Your door is not only papered with more notices but now padlocked closed. - -How far did you get after doing that bump? Maybe you went to work and came back… or never made it there at all. Better turn your phone back on. - -Sure enough, there’s the inevitable wall of texts: - -*really crossing a line here, asshole* - -*so over it* - -*pretty sure that banging groupies while wasted on rock god counts as cheating, BTW* - -You’re pretty sure that it doesn’t, but whatever. The rest of the messages make it clear you’re getting dumped. - -Listen to three voicemails from your boss, demanding to know where the hell you are in the first two and firing you in the third. - -Gather the smashed bits of your brain. How long were you in there, and why did such a tiny bump take you that deep? Maybe it was too soon after your last one. You should call someone who knows what they’re doing. - -“Kinda freaked me out,” you slur into your phone, tongue still fuzzy. “What was up with that evil-kitten crap?” - -CJ snorts on the other end. “Maybe your neighbor’s cat walked over your head while you were out.” - -“Not funny. Drugs aren’t supposed to turn on you like that.” Chemicals were always more reliable than people, as far as you’re concerned. This new unpredictability only makes you queasier. “It’s just not right.” - -“Wasn’t it *you* who scolded *us* to be more intentional with mindset and setting for tripping?” CJ says. “Be less sloppy with your use, dumbass.” - -You hang up in the middle of their monologue about shamanic medicine ceremonies. But they have a point: seriously, get your shit together. C’mon, get up, brush the carpet lint from your legs. Put your headphones on, blast Combichrist at top volume to drown out the bagpipes still echoing around in your skull. - -Nothing left to do now but call Reed and tell him you’re coming over. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}R{{}}eed answers the door in one of his many threadbare Skinny Puppy tees – no judgment, you’re still in your nasty-ass uniform – his scraggly beard grown long and suspiciously Schnauzer-like. - -He also looks like he could use a hit, so good thing you stowed your stash. He cues up a playlist while you retrieve the baggie from its hiding place behind the never-used cleaning supplies in the bathroom. - -“Reed.” Fix him in your sights. “Have your trips been… like, weirdly misbehaving lately?” - -“Misbehaving? Sounds *naughty*.” He leers at you. “In that case, absolutely.” - -“Never mind.” God, he’s an idiot. “I just think it’s important to play this time. For real.” - -He shrugs. “You do you, rock star.” - -Forget him. Focus, because you’ve got to get this right. What were CJ’s tips again? Right, create some sort of ritual. Set an intention, light a candle. Maybe sage the room. - -But in the end, you just try to find a spot on Reed’s kitchen table that isn’t tacky with spilled soda – this medical mystery claims he’s never drunk anything but Dr. Pepper in his life – and tap out two nice, fat rails of magic dust. - -“Let’s do this,” you tell Reed. “But I get dibs on the first round this time.” - -Feel the burn as the powder hits your raw nasal passages. The moment you close your eyes, eviction notices and angry texts wallpaper the inside of your skull. You worry this shit will follow you into the void, along with those evil persistent bagpipes. Maybe this is just how it is now. - -But after one tortured minute, you’re squeezed through the gears of the universe, stretching and flattening your atoms out, and then you’re soaring, a hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon. - -And, thankfully: the sound of applause. - -You’re here. Backstage, huddled with the other band members. Schnauzer makes devil-horns with both hands, black glitter streaked down his face like obsidian tears. “Let’s do this!” - -Ogre gives you a once-over and grimaces. “Are we *both* wearing bullet belts?” - -“Oh.” You run your hand over the shell casings. “I think it’s okay if we match.” - -Skeletor takes a slug of whiskey, then passes you the bottle. Take a little nip to quell the pre-show jitters rumbling around in your gut. Don’t fuck this up. - -The handlers escort you into the wings. Strap your guitar on as the crowd claps in unison, chanting your name. - -An announcer booms, *“Here’s who you’ve all been waiting for!”* Hooting and cheering. *“Everybody give it up for… Ouröbörös!”* - -Showtime. Part the curtain and climb the stairs to the stage, past the wall of amps and into the white-hot floodlights. - -Squint out past the blinding glare at the vast ocean of black-clad masses stretching clear out to the horizon, bobbing in endless waves. People riding on each other's shoulders, screaming themselves hoarse. - -Adrenaline surges through your arms; your hands shake. Total cottonmouth, like you’ve smoked three bowls of Pillowy Abyss. But you can do this: breathe. Approach the mike positioned high above you, forcing your head up at an angle. - -Skeletor counts out four intro beats, Schnauzer’s bass joins in, Ogre’s guitar squeals. You’re up next. Everyone’s waiting for that raw, rumbling thunder welling up from your gut to launch itself out of your throat. - -You’ve made it. Strum your first chord. - -And then that horrible kitten appears above the crowd, its head looming larger and larger till it fills the sky like marmalade fire. - -Cower, cringe, cold sweat. Turn to look at your bandmates, now glassy-eyed and frozen in place. On closer inspection, you spot the tiny bite marks on their necks, the rivulets of crimson soaking into their shirts. - -They fling themselves to the ground, prostrate before Murder Kitten as its deafening screech knocks your cowboy hat off. The audience flips out, probably thinking that this demon-cat is your newest special effect. - -Murder Kitten’s inky eyes swirl with unknown galaxies, its mouth overfilled with pointy reptilian teeth. Its yowl cracks open the cobalt sky, behind which all the angry notices and texts leak in, along with that incessant droning. - -Breathe again. Feel the reassuring weight of the guitar in your rough hands as you’re drawn into those galaxies. Remember your intention to play. - -There’s nothing left to do now but try. - -So go on. It’s your turn. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **You Are a Rock God** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889665466499774).* diff --git a/content/issue-35/voix-ange.md b/content/issue-35/voix-ange.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8a72e7c3..00000000 --- a/content/issue-35/voix-ange.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,310 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "La Voix d'un Ange" -date: 2023-09-30 -issue: Issue 35 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Kirk Bueckert -copyright: '© Kirk Bueckert 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Kirk Bueckert delivers something in the classic vein here: echoes of Hammer Horror, Don't Look Now, and other gems of a bygone era of the dark and supernatural. Sit back, as some unsuspecting person finds themselves prised from their normality by inconvenient circumstance that gradually shifts to the disquieting before unexpectedly coming over all unspeakable…" - -image: images/VoixAnge10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using images by [Faruk Tomruk](https://images.pexels.com/photos/17228942/pexels-photo-17228942.jpeg) and [Juan Carlos Gomez Aristizabal](https://www.pexels.com/photo/angle-statue-in-a-cemetery-13809253/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: la-voix-d-un-ange -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}W{{}}hile everyone else in the banquet hall collectively counts the seconds until midnight and the dawn of a new millennium, Nicolas Demers bids adieu to the Twentieth Century hidden among the coats, a tipsy Classics Major bobbing at his groin. He clutches in the darkness a closet rod with one hand, the crown of College Boy’s handsome head with another. - -In the pocket of his tailored suit, his mobile buzzes. He doesn’t answer. A cocktail of adrenaline, sparkling wine, and ecstasy thrums hot and loud between his temples like the syncopated voice of God. Breathless, he replies, “Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop…” - -He comes, and a thousand gold and silver party balloons descend upon the jubilant crowd. Again, his mobile buzzes. This time he picks up. “Niko speaking. This had better be good.” - -*“Nicolas? Nicolas, c’est toi?”* - -He recognizes the tremulous twang of his kid sister, Solange, immediately. “Yes. Oui, Solange, it’s me. What’s wrong?” - -*“C’est maman. Il y avait un accident…”* Her voice is lost amid the rising pandemonium. - -The young man still on his knees wipes his beautiful mouth and watches as Niko buckles his trousers and hastens from the coat check room without so much as a goodnight kiss. He barges out into the honey-coloured light and relative silence of the mezzanine beyond, the words “Hey! Fuck you, pal!” barely registering from behind. The scrolled railing steadies him. Two hundred pounds of tot muscle suddenly gelatinous. - -*“Nicolas, m’entends-tu?”* - -Solange comes through clear as a bell now, but all his brain can register is radio static. Behind the static, the voices of those conspiracy theorists on television talking about Y2K. Nuclear Armageddon. *This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but*— - -He surveys the hotel around him, the resplendent lobby below. Nothing and nobody. No harbinger of End Times. No herald of impending doom. Just a Christmas tree bedecked with white bulbs aglow, towering past him toward a vaulted ceiling. There, at the summit, a pensive angel spreads her wings and smiles mysteriously. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hree days later, Niko rides an elevator up to his long-since-ex-lover’s penthouse, high above downtown Toronto. The housekeeper, Yolanda, welcomes him with a smile and a kiss on the cheek and collects his coat in the doorway. “Mr. Lyon will be with you in just a moment.” - -Niko glances toward the darkroom and the red bulb glowing just above the lintel. - -He waits, wanders the spotless white studio, pauses beside the glass wall overlooking a hazy metropolitan skyline. He thinks back to summer of ’92. - -He was in those days a bouncer at The Cherry Pit, a popular nightclub in Toronto’s burgeoning Gay Village. On a certain Saturday night, a patron was found bloodied and bruised in one of the toilet stalls. He described his assailants to Niko, who later that same night found them passing around a bottle under the neon sign of an all-night diner. The tallest and seemingly drunkest among them still sported their victim’s blood on the laces of his motorcycle boots. - -They spotted Niko walking slowly toward them across the rain-slick parking lot. They might have run had they seen the brass knuckles. Niko dropped the trio one by one then walked away without a word. What he didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, was that Motorcycle Boots was the son of the Regional Superintendent of Police. - -The red light dims, the darkroom door creeks open. Though the strands of silver about his temples have perceptively multiplied, Bernard looks much the same now as he did the night they locked eyes across a crowded jail cell eight years ago, after the cops raided The Cherry Pit, arresting patrons and employees alike. Bewitchingly handsome in herringbone suit and polka dot cravat, nursing a bloody lip, he’d smiled. Niko longs for that smile now. - -Yolanda brings lunch at a quarter to twelve, arugula salad with a citrus vinaigrette, and pours two glasses of sparking water. Niko prods a red sliver of apple with his fork while he waits for her to quit the room. “It’s Jacqueline,” he says. “There was an accident. She slipped walking up the stairs to her apartment. Nothing serious. Minor cuts and bruises. But Solange…” - -He pauses, raises his glass to his lips. Bernard simply watches him, countenance cold and inscrutable behind Versace corrective lenses. - -“Solange has decided the best thing to do would be to put her in a nursing home. And I support her decision.But her husband lost his job last month, and the twins just started school…” He sips tentatively. “I told her maybe I could help.” - -“How much do you need?” asks Bernard, taking a bite of arugula. - -“I can cover one thousand for the deposit.” Niko hesitates, then concedes. “But if I had ten, they wouldn’t have to worry about their share of the fees for a while, and…” - -Bernard places his cutlery aside. “Who do I wire the money to?” - -“Maison Sainte Jeanne, Retirement Community. Or communauté de retraités. Montréal.” - -Bernard pulls a PalmPilot from his breast pocket. Niko’s heart clenches behind his ribcage. His hand, not quite steadied by that morning’s double vodka Caesar, itches now to reach across the Scandinavian table and touch him, caress him. He knows he cannot. Those days are behind them. - -“Thank you, Bernard,” he says. “I promise I’ll repay you.” - -Bernard drags the stylus across the PalmPilot screen. “Are you headed out as well?” he murmurs. - -“I leave Thursday morning. The assistant curator will watch the gallery until I return.” - -“I’m not worried about the gallery. I’m worried about you.” He sets the device aside. “How long has it been?” - -“Since I’ve been back to Québec? A couple of months, at least.” - -“No. How long since you’ve last seen your mother?” - -Niko drains his glass. His eyes meander from his uneaten salad to the wall where once a canvas hung: his portrait in elegant monochrome. Where now hangs nothing. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}is train departs at six o’clock, and seven hundred kilometers of snow-crusted countryside later pulls into the terminal at Centrale. Later, headlights blaze in the predawn dark as a taxicab delivers him and his luggage deep into the heart of Vieux-Montréal. Behind clouded glass he retraces the lamplit cobblestones of his youth. A month from now, this neighbourhood will be swarming with tourists come to celebrate Winter Carnaval, but at present all is deathly quiet. - -Much is changed, much is unchanged. He recognizes the delicatessen, the boulangerie, the Gothic Basilica looming over all. As a boy he would run errands with his mother: him at her side, baby Solange before them in the pram. - -Nicolas had known his mother was beautiful by the way men looked at them on the street. Her husband, his father, lived with some other woman in some other town; but Jacqueline, a devout Catholic, didn’t believe in divorce and thus remained *Madam Demers*. This piety however did little to dissuade the local men. Indeed, she had been driven out of a good job at the garment boutique by the lecherous advances of her employer. Still, despite her modest income as a seamstress and the mounting expenses of raising two small children singlehanded, his mother was ever the vision of elegance and poise. Thus have the memories of youth immortalized her. - -The cabbie lets him out in front of a tenement on the Rue Saint-Paul. The night is cold beyond cold. Yet he lingers on the sidewalk, suitcase in hand, staring up at the retired couturière’s apartment. His hatred of this place runs marrow-deep. - -A powdery layer of dust enamels everything within: bolts of cloth, spools of thread, a tailor’s dummy headless in the corner of the room. He pockets the spare key, drops his luggage where he stands. He navigates mouse droppings and the corpses of spiders, cardboard boxes brimming with moth-eaten junk. - -He strikes a match to light the primitive stove, waits for the kettle to boil. Beside the kitchenette, the Murphy bed lies open and strewn about with Jacqueline’s old mail and other miscellaneous documents. He discovers a volume of Reader’s Digest hidden among the yellowed copies of Harper’s Bazaar and cracks a vulnerable smile. Many a bedtime, Jacqueline read aloud to her children from such a volume as this, Benson & Hedges in hand, her long black hair tied up in clouds of pale cigarette smoke. He scans the spine. Condensed Books: *Achilles and the Trojan Horse*, *Pandora’s Box*, and his personal favorite, Homer’s *The Odyssey*. - -Niko looks up. The hexagonal mirror, the red velvet couch. A scene from his past. He regards it as he might one of Bernard’s photographic tableaux. - -This piece is titled *An Unexpected Visitor*. The subjects are three. The Mother and the Monseigneur together seated upon the couch, Mother gazing absentmindedly out the window, her olive wood rosary dangling from one hand. The Son stands before them, contained within the mirror. He’s pale and thin. He totes a heavy leather satchel, having just come home from school. He recognizes the Monseigneur from Sunday service at the Basilica: this grotesque man with his distended stomach, his gin blossom nose. - -“Nicolas, je suis venu vous parler aujourd’hui a la demande de ta mère. Elle m’a parlé d’hier soir et ton annonce troublante.” *Nicolas, I’ve come to speak with you today at your mother’s request. She told me about last night and your troubling announcement.* - -Radio static. Nothing but radio static. - -“Bien que ce soient des temps déroutants, nous devons toujours nous souvenir des Corinthiens. Ni adultères, ni homosexuels, ni les sexuellement immoraux héritera du royaume de Dieu.” *Although these are confusing times, we must always remember Corinthians. Neither adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor the sexually immoral will inherit the Kingdom of God.* - -The kettle sings. - -Niko pillages the cabinets for camomile and a mug, his mobile cradled in the crook of his neck. He gestures at the boxes, though Solange cannot see him. “Why didn’t you tell me things had gotten this bad?” - -“*Would it have changed anything if I had?”* - -He fills a clay mug. Steam rises from the brim like an aromatic specter. “I haven’t spoken to her in seventeen years. What am I supposed to say to her now?” - -“*Je ne sais pas,”* Solange replies. *“All I know is you may not have another opportunity like this to say it.”* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}iko rings the bell on the desk in the vestibule and waits. The Gothic manor house is, like much of the surrounding neighbourhood, yet another gloomy relic of colonial antiquity. The tolling of the bell accompanies a chorus of unseen choir singers as it echoes down the hall. A haunting sound in the monastic nursing home. - -“Puis-je vous aider?” - -Niko turns to see a tall young man in black standing behind him. “I’ve come to see Jacqueline Demers.” - -“Yes, of course,” the man says. “You must be Nicolas. I’m Father Luc, humble chaplain of Maison Sainte Jeanne. Come with me.” - -He follows the chaplain down a vaulted corridor lit by morning sun on stained glass windows. He nods to a young woman in a strange black tunic – a nurse, he guesses, judging by the laminated badge on her lapel. He cannot decide which he hates more, hospitals or churches, but the manor house represents a uniquely dismal hybrid of the two. This chaplain, Father Luc, must be just out of the seminary. Twenty-six at best. His black robes and white collar evoke memories of the late Monseigneur. But the slant of his jaw, the slick swoop of his hair: these conjure something else altogether. - -“Your sister says you’re something of an artiste.” - -“Truth be told, I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body,” Niko corrects. “I manage a small gallery. My partner, ex-partner, gave me the job.” No hesitation to allow *partner* to imply, to hell with churchly edicts. Yet the chaplain merely smiles and nods and leads them down a connecting corridor. Three more young women, all in matching black tunics, pass them along the way. “What kind of a nursing home is this exactly?” - -“Before becoming a retirement community,” the chaplain says, “this was Le Couvent de la Vierge Mère. The building was donated by the Archdiocese back in the late seventies. The sisters are all practicing caregivers – licenced, of course, by the Province of Québec. They devote their lives to Christ and to the service of all who come to live with us at Maison Sainte Jeanne.” - -They proceed then out into a courtyard, cutting across a cloistered garden to the western wing. “It might seem strange to an outsider,” he continues, opening the door, “but I promise, your mother is in capable hands.” - -The common room is crowded with decrepit bodies. They move about with steel walkers and walking sticks and some in wheelchairs, some with saline pouches or oxygen tanks in tow. They play Chinese checkers, dominos, Canasta. They knit scarves and sip chocolate from ceramic mugs around a great stone fireplace and converse among themselves. And sometimes to themselves. - -Niko stamps the snow from his boot and surveys the sedentary crowd, expecting to find Jacqueline holding court at the centre table, cigarette in hand, luminous and convivial as ever. The chaplain beckons to a mousy nun with long cornsilk hair. “Sister Dominique. Allow me to present Nicolas Demers, Jacqueline’s son.” - -The young novice looks more like the president of a second-rate sorority than a newlywed bride of Christ. “Welcome, Nicolas. Let me bring you to your mother.” - -Together they detach from Father Luc toward an isolated corner of the common room where a heavyset woman with deep-socketed eyes drowses in front of the television. They slow to a halt beside her chair. “Jacqueline, regarde qui est là.” - -The woman says nothing. - -“I’ll give you two some time alone.” - -He turns to reply but the Sorority Sister has gone, receded into the crowd. There must have been a misunderstanding. This bedraggled woman in the musty-smelling bathrobe the colour of melted strawberry glacée cannot be Jacqueline Demers. Yet coiled around the woman’s wrist hangs his mother’s wooden rosary: the Our Father’s painted black, Hail Mary’s tinted white. - -The television plays a rerun of The Dating Game, the volume high, though Jacqueline seems oblivious to both it and the world around her – including Niko’s presence. *“A former Miss America contestant, she loves horseback riding and musical theatre. She joins us from Corpus Christi, Texas. We’re delighted to welcome to The Dating Game, Candice McCormick!”* - -Niko steps closer. - -Gone is every trace of the statuesque woman from his childhood. Her spine hunches, her bosom droops. Her pale, pearlescent skin has become sallow, tracked by liver spots and sinuous varicose veins; lustrous black hair become ghostly silver-white. He notes a small bandage on her cheek. Another on her chin. “Hello, Jacqueline. Do you remember me?” - -Her head lulls. No response. - -What kind of pills have these bible thumpers been giving to her anyway? He straightens his back. “It’s me, Jacqueline. Your son. Nicolas.” - -No response. He steps closer still. Her lips are moving, almost imperceptivity, muttering something to nobody. “Minuit. Minuit. Minuit…” - -Niko shrugs. “Midnight… yes, okay… what happens at midnight, Jacqueline?” - -“*Bachelor No. 1: you’ve invited me to join you for dinner, tonight, at your place. Tell me, what’s on your menu?”* - -He winces at the blaring box and sighs, bends to her level. - -“Minuit. Ces gens vont me t—” - -“*Well, Candice, I’d start by setting the mood: a little music, maybe some candles, mix us up a couple of Margaritas. Then, I’d blow your mind with my world-renowned Chili con carne. What do you think about that?”* - -He stares at her still fluttering lips, not sure if he heard it right. “Jacqueline, what are you telling me?” - -“*Muy caliente! Bachelor No. 2, same question—”* - -Jacqueline seizes hold of his arm with surprising strength and speed, and whispers up at him. “Ces gens vont me tuer.” - -He pulls his arm free, and just as quickly she subsides to her mumbling again. Niko straightens, looking around the room at the feeble and the aging, and a slight, dark-clad figure moving promptly amongst them. - -*These people are going to kill me.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}iko absents himself to the sleepy château in the actual town, heads for the bar and claims a stool. Solange had prepared the guest room for him at her home in Trois-Rivières. He booked a hotel room instead, insisted the time alone would be good for him, therapeutic even. - -Something about the lounge reminds him of Bernard. He glances down the bar, perchance to see him sitting there with his polka dot cravat. He finds instead a pair of stockbroker-types in last season’s Armani discussing the dot-com bubble. - -The hotel barman brings a menu, but Niko just waves his hand. “Cosmo. Make it a double.” The barman says nothing, only stares. “Cos-mo-politan,” Niko snaps. This time the runt obliges. - -He dials Bernard’s number. Yolanda picks up. *“I’m afraid Mr. Lyon is unavailable at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?”* - -Niko disconnects, and drains his martini glass in three slow gulps. “Another,” he says. - -The businessmen snicker down the bar. *“Putain de pédé,”* hisses one to the other between long sips of ale. - -The slur plunks down hard like a stone in water, sending ripples of rage across his body. He strikes a match, lights a cigarette, watches them in the mirror above the beer taps. He wants to break that heavy bottle of Black Label over Tweedledee’s bulbous head, maybe stick the bottleneck in Tweedledum’s eye. He nurses Cosmo number two, searching his pockets for brass knuckles which are not there. - -*Don’t be stupid*, says the voice in his head. *You’re not a bouncer in the Village anymore. You’re thirty-six years old and a dilettante and a drunk*. - -Outside, the buzzing music and neon of the Red-Light District beckon to him like ghosts in the night. Yet daydreams draw him backward in time, back to the Maison Sainte Jeanne. He remembers an article he once read in the Toronto Star, some exposé regarding negligence in Canadian hospices and nursing homes. Widespread reports of misconduct, abuse, even accounts of so-called “mercy killings.” Had those bandages on Jacqueline’s nose and chin been covering the “minor cuts and bruises” of her fall, or were they evidence of something sinister? - -Another Cosmopolitan, another cigarette. He recalls the trial of Orville Majors down in the States just last summer. Killed six people with potassium chloride while working as a nurse at Vermillion County Hospital, senior citizens all. And there was the case of Kristen Gilbert who similarly poisoned three people at the veterans’ hospital before that. The headlines dubbed these killers *Angels of Death*. And, of course, these are just the ones who were caught. - -Niko watches the pendulum swing beneath an antique wall clock near the door. The businessmen have long since departed, leaving him alone at the bar. Twenty minutes to midnight, now. What happens at midnight, Jaqueline? What was it you said? - -*These people are going to kill me. Ces gens vont me tuer.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hat follows is a drunken blur. One moment finds him rising from the barstool, reaching for his coat. The next finds him staggering through the unlocked backdoor of the darkened manor house. He removes and hides his dripping shoes, lest his tracks betray him. He wanders, expecting at any moment a duty nurse or nightwatchman to spring out of the dark and confront him. Yet none do. Niko walks alone. - -At length he comes to a map of the house framed and mounted to the wall, emergency exits and the routes there-to. By the dwindling Aquarius Moon he scours the directory, decerning nothing else of aid. Another light draws his gaze down a connecting hall: a candle sputtering behind frosted glass. He diverges toward the light and the door containing it. Black lettering on the window reads “Bureau de l'aumônier”. *Chaplain’s Office*. - -He taps twice on the glass. “Hello?” he says quietly, before stepping inside. - -A lone-lit candelabrum illuminates the room. A mahogany desk, a leather chair, files and book-laden shelves, a portrait of the Virgin Mother. And there behind the chair, a second slightly smaller door. A closet perhaps, bright red, blood red. - -He closes the door behind him, approaches the chaplain’s desk. The candelabrum is heavier than it looks. Was it cast from solid gold or plated lead? He raises the light in one hand, twists the round knob of the vivid little door with the other. - -This piece is titled *The Stairs Behind the Closet Door*. - -The subject stands back from the opened doorway and its winding stairwell descending into blackness. He is silhouetted by his candelabrum, raised high to cast its glow into those mysterious depths, as if torn between the sinister lure of the unknowns below and the warm comforts of the room at his back. All is Caravaggio on the finest pearl finish. - -Niko steps forward. Perhaps that same liquid courage that led him to this place now presses him further still. Or perhaps it is the voice inside his head which tells him: No, he will not add another link to the chain of abandonment his progenitors began so long ago. Tonight, he must break it. - -He tightens his grip on the candelabrum and slowly descends the spiral stairs, legs quivering, teeth chattering. A languid miasma rises to greet him like a stench from the bowels of hell. He comes to the bottom step and halts at the mouth of a wide tunnel, the chitter of distant voices on the heavy air. A sprawling catacomb unspools before him. His light plays upon the stones and all around the dead entombed in oblong niches, their bones in white cloth bundled tight. - -“Good God,” he says, his voice a rasping brittle sound. - -From one among the grinning skulls, a thick rat crawls forth and squeaks and scurries away down the tunnel. His gaze gives chase. The dust on the ground ahead is recently trodden, these tracks undoubtedly human. Following the rodent he spies an olive wood rosary. Jacqueline’s, of course. Now yonder voices have begun to chant. He cups his mouth against the dust and stench, and proceeds among the bones toward the choir. - -The sinuous tunnel terminates at the glowing entrance of another candle-lit room. He blows out his light, sets the candelabrum down beside him. The chamber is vast, with a high smooth ceiling and painted walls the same scarlet red as the door at the top of the stairs. A multitude of men and women are joined within. All young, all naked despite the cold, broadly smiling with arms upheld. - -They stand together around a large pit: a medieval stone well at the very centre of the room. Beyond them is a golden alter, and behind it against the crimson wall hangs a white banner baring the Templar Cross and a line of arching script: “Nous, les Chevaliers du Temple Lunaire”. *We, the Knights of the Lunar Temple.* - -Niko recognizes one of the women: the blonde-haired nun, Sister Dominique. And another. All of them. All of these women are nuns. Their chanting is meaningless to him, just distant sounds coming to him from far away, beyond the hot buzzing between his ears. - -Radio static. Nothing but radio static. - -Blood races to Niko’s head. Cranberry-flavoured bile bubbles up in his throat. Maybe he was drugged. Maybe the hotel barman spiked his drink. All of this, the stairs, the crypt, the secret naked rite, has been a waking dream. A dream from which Niko must now wake. Awake! - -The chanting ceases, and for a moment Niko imagines all this madness will likewise be instantly gone. Then a figure appears behind the golden altar, the chaplain, the black pelt of a goat draped around his otherwise naked body. Its stinking head perches atop his own like a diadem from which horns protrude backward, blood trickling down. In grandiose tones, he addresses his flock. - -The sermon is in Latin, a smattering of which Niko still recalls from Catholic school. Something about *casting lots*. Yes, *a lottery*. And something else… “sacrificium”. Just then, two more acolytes enter from a second passage, carrying a kind of stretcher between them. Upon it lies Jacqueline, swaddled in the same white robes as her many rat-infested predecessors in the tunnel. - -The acolytes hoist Jacqueline onto the alter and insinuate themselves among the circle. Her hands lie crossed at her chest, bound together with a length of rope. Heavily sedated or already dead, Niko cannot yet determine – but who would bind the hands of a dead woman? - -He hazards a single step closer. - -All heads tilt skyward, as does his. There, suspended from the ceiling, is an enormous glass disc, directly above the well. It seems reflected in that strange glass less like a well than some portal into dark oblivion, at once bottomless and without depth altogether. - -A low rumbling rises from the darkness: a voice, deep and guttural. - -Chanting resumes in clouds of warm breath as the deeper voice begins to quaver, a sound rather like whale song, whooping discordantly from the bottom of the well. - -Niko cranes his neck as do they all, all eyes on the mirror. Something solid materializes amid the cosmic dark. A pinprick, growing steadily larger as the whale song swells in tandem. A bioluminescent body, vaguely anthropoid. The limbs long and spiderlike, the head strangely geometric, mouthless, rotating clockwise about the base. - -His breath catches when he registers the wings. Angel wings of purest silver branching out from a torso which pulsates with ethereal amber light. The disciples drop to their knees and Niko staggers backward. - -“*Rejoice!”* cries the chaplain. - -“*Rejoice!”* cry the supplicated, and the winged monster sees them. A thousand lidless eyes peer out from their sockets, not just in the head but along the scapulars and coverts of the very wings themselves. - -The light crests the rim of the well. None dare look upon the source directly, its double hovering in the mirror above, its whale song echoing around the room. - -The song, thinks Niko. Might that be the root of this madness? Like some hypnotic radio wave beaming that eldritch nightmare into the vulnerable minds of the crowd. - -He wastes not another second trying to comprehend it. Niko bends to the still-smoking candelabrum, scrapes together two clumps of melted wax, inserts one into each ear: a lesson from Odysseus. The wax blocks out all noise but the treble of his own thudding heart. A third ball of wax Niko tucks into the pocket of his jeans. - -Rising, he discovers the congregants in the red room have likewise risen. They watch him. The smiles have all evaporated. His next breath he loads into his lungs like a suicide’s bullet. He removes his coat and lets it drop, and with a violent cry and candelabrum as his sword he charges headlong into the chamber toward Jacqueline. - -The vanguard lunge to meet him while the goat-headed chaplain spectates beneath his gruesome visor of teeth. Niko bucks against the tide of bodies until the current overtakes him. A dozen groping hands entwine to tear him limb from tender limb. They tug at his clothes. A woman’s long thumbnail gouges his eyelid. The one called Domonique sinks her teeth into his face. When the sister’s head pulls back, a piece of cheek dangles from her blood-red mouth. - -Niko leverages what little space he can to cock his own head back. His brow connects hard with her brittle nose – once, twice. Blood sprays and Domonique stumbles backward, toppling over the rim of the well. Voices ring out, unintelligible through the clumps of candle wax, and their struggles freeze in a tableau of chaos. All gaze up at the mirror as the young woman goes cartwheeling into the void and incinerates like a phosphorescent meteor spectacular in its demise. - -The monstrous head stops turning. Tight grips slacken and Niko plummets to the ground as his attackers disperse in vain. He rises, choking, to see angel wings spread wide : an explosion of liquid-metal plumage undulating across the darkness like the molten clockwork of a sentient mandala. The chamber trembles as the whale song becomes an apocalyptic trumpet. - -The sonic boom strikes Niko hard in the chest and Jacqueline wakes, delirious. He scrambles to her, collects the wax from his trouser pocket, plugs both her ears. Then he slings her still-bound arms around his neck and hoists her weight onto his back. - -Nobody stops them. The crowd is a quivering pantomime of silent screams. - -The chaplain behind his alter seems to vibrate, every muscle twitching beneath his rancid pelt. Eyes bulge and red runs from his ears. The tremor splits Father Luc from widow’s peak to pelvic bone and a geyser of hot blood erupts from the negative space between. His bisected figure stands wobbling a moment, then crumples to the ground. - -One by one, the naked torsos of the congregants come apart. Like great seething pustules, they burst until nothing remains but a havoc of tangled limbs and viscera. Broken mirror glass hails down, cutting the Templar banner cross to ribbons. - -Niko clambers through the chaos, the carnage, the jutting ribcages, toward the exit. The trumpet blasts louder and louder still. Spidery cracks crawl up the painted stone, the walls crumble, and the ceiling of the red room collapses behind him. - -He gasps for breath. Jagged pebbles bite at the soles of his feet. A billowing cloud pursues him as he charges blindly down the tunnel. Then, all goes deathly quiet. - -Dust settles in the dark and he lays his gore-drenched mother down. He strikes a match, illuminating nothing but rubble and bones. A cul-de-sac in the necropolis. - -Jacqueline’s eyes dart about, her pale visage a kabuki mask of chalky dust and blood and horror. Niko bends, claws the wax from her ears and his. He fumbles at the rope binding her, picking at the knot with one hand while the other protects the flame. - -“This is the way the world ends,” he mutters, “this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends…” - -The knot comes loose, her hands freed, and as the two lock eyes something sparks in hers. “Nicolas ? Nicolas, c’est toi ?” - -Niko sighs. “Yes, Mom. It’s me, Nicolas. I’m with you now.” - -“Nicolas… my son…” His mother smiles, grazes his cheek. “My son. I’m… I’m…” - -He nods his head. “Je sais, maman.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **La Voix d'un Ange** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/889664999833154).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/ShortReviews04.md b/content/issue-36/ShortReviews04.md deleted file mode 100644 index 790967b5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/ShortReviews04.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "In keeping with the issue's theme, we're taking a break from reviewing speculative stories to instead scour the web for free-to-read shortform crime fiction. So here's a trio of pieces published this year by some genre zines not Ellery Queen's." - -image: images/ShortCrimeReviews10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images – many thanks to the following creators: [Darcy Lawrey](https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-books-1117153/) and [Luis Quintero](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-book-2294881/)." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-crime-fiction-in-2023 -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he end of an issue, but not of an era – also the end of our first year of regular non-fiction offerings, which will certainly not be the last. Our guest reviewers have now covered all [four](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-33/the-thing-in-the-snow-sean-adams-review.html) [book](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-34/grotesquerie-richard-gavin-review.html)-[length](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-35/ghost-music-an-yu-review.html) [corners](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy-review.html) of our genre interests; in line with this column's mission and the issue's thematic focus, I've scoured less high-profile segments of the crime publishing scene to add a very restrained mere three to the *seventeen* shorts I've [previously](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-33/short-reviews-spring-2023.html) [recommended](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-34/short-reviews-summer-2023.html) [elsewhere](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-35/short-reviews-autumn-2023.html) for a nice round twenty. - -**[The Folkie](https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/the-folkie/)** by Steve Cashel appears on the site of [Close to the Bone Publishing](https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/), a small UK press with a crime fiction bent. In it, a trio of small-time Scottish thugs assemble at the end of their small-time day jobs to track down and assault a small-time boxer (using, "appropriately", in the case of our supermarket worker slash gangster wannabe, a broken-off box cutter). They go on the hunt with a list of their target's preferred drinking spots to guide them, but only encounter much live-music of the folk variety, and eventually their frustrations start to get the better of them… *with consequences*. A good little story, again reminding that there are more varieties of crime than just the big showy ones. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he second story to get a mention here doesn't appear in a magazine, in fact. Although not previously on my radar, [Reedsy](https://blog.reedsy.com/) seems to be a writer's app or self-publishing business _or_ author resource and community site, part of that including some pay-to-play contests – which last bit, *ehhhh*, isn't my cup of tea to be frank. And yet their first contest winner of 2023, based on the prompt *"Write a story in the form of a list of New Year's resolutions"*, is pretty good stuff. - -**[Resolute](https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/xrl57d/)** by Saeda Rose contrasts a list of perky *give it a go!* self-improvement pledges with the Very Bad Time that is had by the pledger who set out to satisfy the first of them; subsequent goals provide sometimes ironic preludes to the continuing action. The story is written in the tricky-to-do-well Second Person tense, meaning that pledger is *you*, the narrative often presenting as if a sequence of instructions which the reader/protagonist follows. *2ndP POV* is a style that's become almost its own trope, a thing some people really don't click with (and "list fic" is another, in fact), but I'd say this is an example of the thing done well (*both* things done well, if it comes to that). - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}y final rec appears on [ToughCrime.com](http://www.toughcrime.com/), which bills itself as *"a blogazine of crime stories and occasional reviews"*. As stated several times now, I've tried to steer clear of speculative fiction through this entire issue, but this story actually brings us close to breaking that commandment, with either a bit of the supernatural or a bit of the science fictional, if not actually both. - -In **[Dollar Fortune](http://www.toughcrime.com/2023/05/dollar-fortune-fiction-by-archer.html)**, Archer Sullivan deftly paints the commonplace and the unusual of small town American settings: universals, like kids playing ball in the street while the adults clink beers or townsfolk eager to reminisce about a cherished regional mystery, contrast with quirky personalities found only here, in this case an old man who sells prophetic visions for a dollar from a homemade booth in a parking lot. When our narrator spontaneously decides to pay this oracle, the cryptic message he receives sends him on a journey of discovery – or rediscovery – regarding his vanished girlfriend, a topic still much discussed by locals who have no idea just how noteworthy the story will prove to be. **Dollar Fortune** turned out to be one of my favourite short reads of the whole year. - - - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -And with that, **Mythaxis Magazine** bids farewell to 2023. We wish you the very best for the year ahead, and shall return in the Spring with what is already shaping up to be some varied, striking, and high quality new genre fiction. - -***Happy New Year!*** - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952978323501821).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/__index.md b/content/issue-36/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 23f3643e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36" -date: 2023-12-21 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 36 -subhead: Winter 2023 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Sanka_Coffee_cover.jpg -imageMobile: images/Sanka_Coffee_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Sanka Coffee - Was that a burglar downstairs? by Fritz Siebel" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: baseline - color: '#f1401d' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-36/a-healthy-man.md b/content/issue-36/a-healthy-man.md deleted file mode 100644 index 51783a1b..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/a-healthy-man.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,224 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "A Healthy Man" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Matt Wile -copyright: '© Matt Wile 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Talented Tom Ripley; avaricious Patrick Bateman; peckish Hannibal Lector; literature has always found focus in aberrant personalities, often as charismatic as they are disturbing. But criminals need not be suave and sophisticated to attract us – the chance to walk in someone awful's shoes, to learn how an unthinkable thinks… our temptations are as hard to resist as theirs." - -image: images/HealthyMan10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [cottonbro studio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/couple-lying-in-each-other-s-arms-by-the-windowsill-5932400/) and [Sandy Millar](https://unsplash.com/photos/white-and-blue-floral-textile-6tF2unOGK1c)." - -type: stock -slug: a-healthy-man -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} am a sick man. A spiteful man. I pick at my scalp. My shoulders are carpeted thickly. I am less a person than an assemblage of tics in a person-like shape. - -Yet my boyfriend refuses to see. In spite of my filth, in spite of my terrible thoughts, he insists I am good. He knows in his heart, he says; it is what drew him to me. - -For a time, I believed; in his belief, if not in my own. It was intoxicating, seeing myself through his eyes. - -But then we moved in together. Who knew what would shatter my façade was love in proximity? The illusion became oppressive. I grew paranoid, burdened day and night with the task of living up to his version of me. - -I have tried to explain; I tell him about the darkness that lies at my core like a seed, now growing into some monstrous thing rising out of my soul, fertilized as it is by the rotting detritus of my more civilized aspects, which have fallen like leaves under the unrelenting pressure of his love. I tell him that this process will only accelerate until he sees me for me; but he brushes my words off like so much dust and returns to his incessant refrain: I am good. It is this goodness, he says, that makes me feel as though I am not; my guilt is proof of my virtue. And he sticks to this line no matter how much I tell him he is wrong. - -Which means I must show him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} decide on a target: his phone. - -It is glued to his hand and I hate it. It is a glaring portal to a bright world that I have nothing to do with. It fills my vision no matter where I turn in our tiny apartment, and even when it is not in my eye, I can hear the tap-tap-tap of his thumbs against the laminate screen, the sound of death encroaching. - -He has asked me not to look. It is an invasion of privacy that is edging him out of his own life and into an ever-smaller world that is separate from me, he says. He is right. We are not what we once were. - -It is perfect. - -\# - -I wait until he is asleep, his snores filling the room like a rich sauce, then I move. - -I slide from the bed and creep toward his side. I examine his face and his slack, open mouth, ensuring that his sleep is genuine; then I lift his phone from where it has tipped to his chest. - -In the harsh light of the bathroom, I huddle on the toilet. The phone is locked, but I know the code. He is too trusting. I open his texts – the babble of strangers, relentless evidence of the unacceptably vast swathes of his universe that have nothing to do with me. - -What will I say if he finds me? What excuse can I possibly conjure? There is none. That is the point. - -I begin to type. - -When I am done, I am shaking, vibrating like a string hard plucked. And yet the dark, dank part of me is still for the first time in months, because at last it is being exposed to the light. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} am in the kitchen, jittery with coffee when he emerges from sleep, phone back in his hand. He greets me with a smile and a kiss, and then sits on the couch. - -I watch as he opens his texts and begins to type— - -—and then stops, and looks closer. - -He reads the vulgarities that I have sent on his behalf, the secrets I have revealed; his brow stitches into a furrow that deepens and spreads as he opens up thread after thread only to realize that each has been filled with my bile. - -Slowly, as though the air is fighting him back, he turns to face me. “Did you do this?” he says. - -There passes the longest, most delicious second of my life. - -Then I nod. - -He looks back down at his phone. Already it is beginning to flash; with the frantic, hurt responses of the people he loves, I imagine. - -He ignores it. My boyfriend stands and walks to me slowly. He reaches out and I brace for a blow, tense, buzzing, ecstatic, alive— - -—but then he places his hands on my cheeks gently, and it all comes crumbling down. - - “I forgive you,” he says. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} go around for days in a haze of grief. The world seems emptied of meaning, soulless; even my emotions feel estranged from myself, as though they are experienced by some foreign person and then transferred to me. - -I ask my boyfriend what he told his friends and family in order to explain away the horrible things that I said. “The truth,” he says as though it is obvious, his expression like a clear pool of water. “But it’s okay. They love me, and you.” - -This only increases my confusion. I barely know “the truth” of why I did what I did; how is it possible that he does? How can these strangers, whose gazes, every time that we meet, land on me like so many unsparing spotlights; who find wanting this base human, who has ensnared their beloved son, their brother, their best and most valuable friend; who lament that their favorite has fallen prey to a creature so mean and petty that it can barely find it in itself to hold a conversation with them, to connect with them on their level; how can *they* have not only understood the impossible truth but forgiven me for it? What do they know that I don’t? - -I do not enquire. I could ask all day and all night – I could read a treatise on the topic, my boyfriend would write one if I asked him, he would do anything for me – and I still would not understand. Because the truth as described by him would not be the truth at all, but the truth made tame and understood, full of logical justifications and allowances for my actions. And implicit in that truth would be the possibility of redemption: the notion that if I only finally acknowledged my goodness then at last I would shed these gross parts of myself and emerge the fully-realized human I was always destined to be. - -But that is not the truth. - -The truth is that I am a raging vortex of need that will never be filled. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}o I do the only thing I can. I go further. - -It takes some planning, but I am up for it. There are many numbers I have to create, and then save in my phone under the appropriate monikers; I make a spreadsheet to keep track. - -When he is sleeping, I take his phone again. In some ways I think he wants me to: why else would he leave the passcode unchanged? Then, for each of the people he texts, I change their number to one I have created, numbers which feed into my phone, and I block their actual numbers. The process is quite time-consuming, and by the time I have finished it is nearly morning. - -I replace his phone in the early light of the dawn and lie next to him in bed, exhausted but satiated, and wait as my boyfriend gets up and begins his day. Almost as soon as he exits the bedroom, phone clutched in hand, my phone lights up in mine: it is him, thinking he is texting his best friend, but actually texting me. - -*Good morning*, he has said. - -*Good morning*, I reply. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t is not hard to get him to talk about me. It takes only the slightest encouragement – *how’s it going with* him – and his frustrations, his irritations come spilling out. It is initially satisfying to receive—there is nothing quite like rubbing salt in a wound. - -But what is worse is the love. - -The deeper I dig for a motherlode of resentment, the more I find kindness. A depth of caring and forgiveness that is overwhelming and alien, and deeply frightening because it is directed at me. No matter how cruel I am – and I take care to be cruel – he simply takes it in good faith and moves on, his core of kindness seemingly unshakable. - -When he reaches out to his lover I change tactics again. I know their connection is strong, that they explore things that I won’t with him. No matter that I am the one who has asked for this arrangement, this freeness, my boyfriend has made better on it, and I resent him for it. - -I sext with him, pretending to be this other person. My impersonation is flawless, I am sure; I am much better at being other people than I am at being myself. As The Lover, I find an easy rapport with my boyfriend that in person I do not; but this hurts only distantly, as though my earlier pain has iced over and now new pain can only skitter on the surface. And slowly, deliberately, I turn the conversation toward a very particular kink: humiliating *me*. How much better the sex is without *me*. How terrible *I* am and how much he surely dreams about leaving. - -But he won’t take the bait. He won’t confess to the dark thoughts that I know he must have, and after I keep needling he ever so politely asks me to stop. It is too close to home, he says – ever so apologetically – and nothing is more important to him than maintaining the sanctity of the relationship with the person he loves. - -This makes me feel physically ill. - -It’s me, I text him at last, unable to lie any longer. - -He writes back, *What do you mean?* - -It’s your boyfriend, I say, and I wait. - -The response takes a long time to come back. - -*It’s okay*, he says. *I forgive you.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hat is this obsession with good? The world sacrifices so much sensation on the altar of goodness. We are taught from infancy to worship kindness and health, all while we watch history being written by those who couldn’t care less. - -Good is a dead god. When my boyfriend insists on my goodness I am half the person I could be. A sliver of someone else’s idea, cut off from the whole and thrust in inhospitable earth. He plants good in my soil so nothing else grows. - -I loathe good. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen he opens his eyes in the night, I am standing above him. - -“What is it?” he says. His gaze flicks toward his phone, but it is still on his nightstand. We are past that, even if he does not know it yet. - -His eyes turn back to me. “What are you doing?” His voice is soft this time, almost inviting, as though he can tell what is coming. - -I turn my hand so that the knife catches the light. - -His eyes are wide and unblinking, but he does not resist. He is not even tense; the soft flesh of his bicep dimples easily as I press. I pause with the edge about to pierce the skin and search in his eyes for some evidence that he sees me at last. That he knows what a monster I am. But already he is nodding, gently, beneficently, his mouth sounding out words, barely more than a whisper. “It’s okay,” he is saying, again and again. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” - -But I do not want it to be okay. - -So I give him the greatest gift that a dirty thing like me can: a cut. - -The cleanest thing in the world. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}his one, he does not tell to his friends and his family. This one he keeps to himself, which provides me with some small measure of triumph. - -But he forgives me, of course. - -He does not even get angry. He knows that the bad things I do are not because I am bad, but because I am in pain from not being able to see my own goodness. If there is someone at fault here, he says, it is him, for not being able to show me. - -It is so kind it is cruel. It is clear to me now that almost nothing will permit him to see me; for him to understand what I am, I must do something so terrible that it removes the possibility of his belief. - -Still, from that point on there is an understanding between us of where this is heading. It is though the air has been wiped clean and charged afresh, and now everything crackles. Electricity building in our apartment, in our texts; every time he pulls out his phone around me, it adds. Both of us can feel it, I am sure. - -Until finally, one night it is time. - -We are back in bed again with the knife. Both of us are naked, him clean and perfect, me filthy and stinking, my back against the headboard, his back against my chest. In my right hand is the knife. My left is on his arm, resting on the bandage that covers the cut. I squeeze and am rewarded with the faintest of whimpers. - -Are you ready, I ask him. - -“I’m ready,” he says. - -I move my left hand to his chin and tilt his head back until his eyes look in mine. They are lucid, and beautiful, and full of absolutely nothing. - -Then I bring my right hand to his throat. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey forgive me, of course. He has prepared them extraordinarily. Even in death, he is somehow winning this game. - -I am absolved: the inquest is significant, and though I do my best to confess, it is surprisingly difficult to claim an unbelievable crime. My confessions are taken as metaphorical rather than literal. “He blames himself,” his family tells the police. “It’s going to be hard enough on him as it is,” says his lover. “We’ve never known him to have a malicious bone in his body,” his friends say, one and all. - -It is lies. All of it is lies, wrought through my boyfriend’s love for me. He went to his grave not only believing in my goodness, but ensuring that everyone else did too, and this impossible last show of conviction finally does for me what nothing else could: - -I begin to believe him as well. - -I expected the era of their faith in me to end in the months after my boyfriend is gone, but somehow it persists. They continue to reach out, and express affection, and admiration for how well I am handling it, and ask to spend time together. And though I am rude and try to push them away, they merely take it as a sign of my grief – as yet another secret indicator of my goodness – and come back to me after respectful intervals spent waiting. - -By the third or fourth time, they have worn me down enough that I accept, and begin to become a part of my boyfriend’s life. - -I step into his place. I take on his friends, his family; his lovers even. I had few people of my own previously, and my life was almost entirely composed of the fragments of his. But somehow, in his passing, they all seem to think his magnetism transferred to me. - -Slowly, I begin to wonder: was my sickness all in my own head? Have I been decent this whole time? - -This is the worst thought I have ever had, because it means that I did not have to do what I did. So I force myself to think about the unforgivable things that I did – the undeniable signs of my illness – and what I continue to do, stealing goodwill that has never been mine. And it reassures me that I have been sick all along. - -This feeling frees me, releases me at last from the contempt I have been clinging to; and suddenly, newly able to return the loving gazes of the people my boyfriend cherished before, I notice something: a simmering heat beneath their kindly expressions; a whiff of putrescence, so faint as to be undetectable to anyone who has not spent a lifetime growing keen to its scent. - -I see these hints and study them, and I realize: they are like me. - -Their kindness, which this whole time I believed was as deep as my boyfriend’s, is as thin as my own. It is a relief to no longer have to confront their own vileness in his face every day. They have one of their own among them at last, and their sick pleasure at this spurs guilt, which spurs even more pleasure, and the whole cycle begins once again. - -And I am a part of it. - -They see me for the monster I am. And they love me for it. - -At long last, I feel my self-loathing begin to quiet, which was always so acute with him by my side. I grow closer to these people, and for the first time have a sense of what it might be like to feel truly at home in this world. I open up even more, and rather than recoil at what I reveal, my new community brings me even deeper into their fold. Slowly, I surrender to a happiness that has overtaken me as unexpectedly as a sun in the night, with only one remaining thread of disquiet: the fact that my boyfriend cannot share it with me. - -But then I relinquish that too, because I know in my heart that he never would: because he was not sick. - -Not like you and like me. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **A Healthy Man** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952982603501393).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/carousels.md b/content/issue-36/carousels.md deleted file mode 100644 index a10484c6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/carousels.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,332 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Carousel's" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Shaun Anthony McMichael -copyright: '© Shaun Anthony McMichael 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Laws can be written, and rules can be unwritten, and sometimes breaking those rules is more bad form than criminal, and surely breaking some laws hardly rises to the level of 'a crime'… yet the law IS the law, and rules are rules however informal. Transgressions have consequences." - -image: images/Carousels10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Vitaly Gorbachev](https://www.pexels.com/photo/brunette-woman-showing-middle-finger-12645435/), [Daniel Reche](https://www.pexels.com/photo/classic-hamburger-and-french-fries-on-wooden-board-1556688/), and [Mali Maeder](https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-ketchup-plastic-bottle-on-top-of-brown-table-110813/)." - -type: stock -slug: carousels -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}s things at the restaurant are requiring more of Cameron, he’s losing it. We watch with the same devil-may-care interest we have when the deep cleaners scoop and scrape the grease from the exhaust vents above the ovens. Or when our General Manager Ross descends with demands from corporate in the form of a staff manual. Cam removes his glasses and puts a hand over his handsome face to hide his disgust; unlike us, the low-level front-of-the-house staff, Cam is Assistant Manager and unable to merely eye-roll and make whack-off gestures in the face of new standards. Cam, if he wants to keep his job, has to enforce the new regs, follow state law, and turn over a weekly profit. - -Meanwhile, Cam’s losing it. He’s losing it the way most people do: by getting too close to people below him. In Cam’s case, the newbie, Gabe. - -“Remember, we don’t call them ‘rags’. They’re ‘towels’,” GM Ross rags on Gabe. He was requesting a fresh batch in the Sani bucket by the kitchen exit. - -“Sorry. Towels,” Gabe defers, giving that wounded look with eyes moistening to cry. - -“Who cares?” Cam intercedes. “Rag. Towel. Call it whatever you want, bud.” - -Corporate cares, Ross reminds. Calling them “rags” gives off unpleasant connotations (menstruation, homelessness, manual labor). “Towels” has more pleasant connotations (massages, beach combing, warm baths at home). Customers – excuse us, *guests* – experience the difference. - -“Understood! 10-4. Gotcha,” we say. - -The closest things GM Ross has to leadership qualities are his height and the stern demeanor intimated by his dark beard and hair; in terms of charisma, the dude should have become an undertaker. Cam on the other hand is decent as far as managers go. He lets us drag ass. And backs us up with uppity customers. Fuck, sorry: *guests*. So, we give him winks that say we’ll enjoy shit-talking later about the new regs. Connotations? This isn’t English 101, it’s a fucking Carousel’s! - -But Carousel’s Restaurant and Bar is getting bigger britches. Though the chain’s goal has always been to be number 2 to Red Robin, the new CEO sees it as a competitive brand. *Our county-fair-themed family eatery offers a relaxing dining experience for friends and neighbors from all walks of life!* But behind his smile-clenched grill of pearly whites, CEO is bent on polishing up Carousel’s mediocrity with new menus, amenities, and the etiquette manual. - -“Towels it is,” Cam nods, running his hands through his sandy blonde hair. A surfer boy face, his aqua-colored eyes betraying an ache for better times. “*Towels*. Wow. So much better.” - -But Ross is already tearing out of the kitchen to spot-check us waiters upselling the new drinks, leaving Cam to expedite the torrent of plates for sale beneath the kitchen’s heating lamps. - -Good thing one of us is watching, because Cam misses plating a Blue Ribbon Blue Burger with its side ramekin of blue cheese; almost sends out a 4H Sausage Plate without pickled onions; and botches the red, white, and green (salsa, sour crème, and guac) arrangement on a Corn Maze Quesadilla (intentionally sans *elle*). All so he can run into his office for some reason. To make out with Steph, one of us servers? An “emergency” phone call, he says. It’s official, Cam’s fucking up. A few of us are already chewing on how to cozy up to Ross. Somebody says he likes hair metal. *Make him a mix quick*, we say to ourselves. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ne of Cam’s biggest beefs with corporate’s new rollout is the requirement that waitstaff offers all guests a Dunk Tank Tanqueray-Cointreau Punch. A mouthful in more ways than one. No matter how young or old the guests are. No matter if it’s a geriatric first thing on Sunday or a nubile cheerleader last thing on Monday. Dunk ’em. If you don’t offer it to the guest and they’re of age and they call you on it, you have to bring them one for free! - - “And this meted out by an industry that shuns comping liquor,” Cam gripes. “In a town where the liquor control board is already up our asses.” - -The hawkish liquor control board is no joke. One of our best and brightest, Zander, got canned a month ago for serving a beer to a minor. He’d been a little hung over, sure. A little wobbly, maybe. But how he wasn’t able to spot that little bitch-snitch, we’ll never know. *I’ll have a huh-huh-huh-Heineken*, the kid asked, like somebody who’d never ordered, let alone drank, a beer in his life. Kid barely had peach-fuzz on his stash. But Zander must have still been drunk himself. *Right on, homie.* And like that, Zander was 86’d. Fired. Outed. Blacklisted from all service industries for life. Couldn’t even get his dream job as a male stripper. We hear he’s a grease monkey downtown. - -It’s partly in Zander’s memory that Cam continues his tirade against corporate’s lush-happy new policies. “Half of our servers are just barely twenty-one; half of our customers are college kids who can’t hold their liquor; and they want us to Dunk Tank them.” - -“More like Drunk Tank them,” we chortle. “It’s basically a Tom Collins from hell!” - -“Might as well serve up DUIs for dessert,” he throws back. We congratulate Cam on his joke, but we’re quick to busy ourselves with other things. The upselling’s no problem for most of us. More liquor, bigger tabs, higher tips! - -Besides, why wouldn’t you want a stiff drink? You’re at a Carousel’s in Valley City! The most popular menu item is a Chinese-inspired salad served with a dressing that’s 99% chicken fat. The hard-boiled eggs are preserved in icy, urine-colored formaldehyde to cut down on prep time. The ambiance is an acid trip version of your worst fair experience. - -The restaurant itself is circular, its center being a ten-sided bar designed as a pastiche of the classic merry-go-round hub with its circular, mirrored marquee. Each table boasts a life-size carousel horse, each face frozen in a crazed equine snarl, veins bulging out, teeth bared, calling to mind the dentures of the octogenarians that haunt the early bird shifts. *We want a BOOTH, got that? A b-o-o-t-h!* Okay, Your Highness, as if you’re unique among gods and men for wanting a little more cush on your tush. - -“Welcome to Carousel’s! We’re so glad you’re here,” we say, lying through our teeth-gritted smiles as we seat them. “Can I interest you in a Dunk Tank Tanqueray-Cointreau Punch?” *It’s 10am!* We have no shame. - -Vicky sure doesn’t. She’s sold four already. Vicky, always a front-runner among us. All three-hundred pounds of her. - -But the newbie, Gabe? He’s a little different. When two of his fellow college kids sit down in a booth at 11am, either he forgets (because he’s like 19, or he has some weird teetotalling scruples) or he’s distracted (by the hot girl on the guy’s arm, specifically her tramp stamp, whose tribal patterns arrow down at her pink thong). Whatever the case, Gabe neglects to upsell. - -“Uhm…” The guy’s mouth curves up at Gabe. “You didn’t offer us Dunk Tanks.” - -“Uhm. No. No, I didn’t,” Gabe admits, looking out the window where the sun ignites the windshields of vehicles zooming by on the highway. - -The guy’s got a shaved head and wears an eyebrow ring and a smirk. “Well, I guess, make it two Dunk Tanks then. Chop chop!” - -Gabe asks to see their IDs but it takes him two whole minutes to add up their ages in his head. He’s asked us for help multiple times with this. He’s got some weird block with adding in his head. Nerves? A TBI? We tell him to buzz off or bring a calculator. Eventually, he realizes the couple’s of age. Barely legal, but still. He’s just cost the restaurant and himself. There’s no way those two assholes will factor the free drinks into his tip. He walks with his head lowered in shame to the computer to punch in their order, their giggles, guffaws, and smooches painting his cheeks shame-red. - -We pat him on the back. “Fucking up, newbie.” - -Gabe hisses through his teeth. - -“Don’t worry about it,” Cam says at the server station as he comps the order. His deft fingers punch at the hulking DOS-era touch-screen monitor. He drops off the two liquor-brimmed straight-up glasses to the college couple. “It’s 11am, get a life,” he says as he walks off. - -“Hey, we don’t make the rules!” Eyebrow-Ring calls after, waving the table-top trifold. And they down their drinks before driving to class. - -“Better than him selling to a minor,” Steph says. - -“You don’t have to show it to Ross on the sales report,” Cam retorts. - -“Bet Eyebrow-Ring is Ross’s nephew or something,” Vicky puts in. - -“He doesn’t look enough like Bella.” - -“Damn, you’re salty today, Cam,” Vicky cackles. - -Bella’s a barfly who posts at the bar and stays after closing time while she waits for Ross to get off, when they fuck in the back of his canopy-covered truck before Ross goes home to his wife and kids. It’s been going on for years. We’ve all glimpsed a butt cheek or two, but keep it on the dl because why piss Ross off? - -And can any of us, Cam included, really throw stones? - -We all know Cam makes out with Steph as he closes her out for the night. Why she lets him, God only knows, she’s like half his age. So Cam will give her the good shifts? Keep her away from the bar-tops where the service has to be junk because of the small tabs and quick turnarounds? Let her keep a bigger cut of her tips? We all pay out a percentage of our take to the bartender, to the expediter (if there is one), and to the hosts (if they busted ass bussing our tables). Whatever. We each have our hustle and grind. - -We all know why Cam swaps spit with her. Chance to massage her firm l’il lady lumps while her hoochie hoop earrings and big lashes flutter around his face, sapphire eyes sparkling for him once or twice, maybe the way his ex-wife’s did when they were kids. We all would tongue-tussle with Steph in a heartbeat. One or two of us have even! Carousel’s work parties get crunk. One reason Gabe probably doesn’t go, though we always invite him. - -“You should come out with us tonight, newbie,” Vicky says working on the closing checklist. “Let one of us pop your cherry.” She looses one of her witchy cackles from the half-round where her throat and double-chin merge. - -“I’m waiting for marriage,” Gabe says. - -“Good luck with that,” Vicky scoffs and cranks up old-school Biggie, rapping along to Dead Wrong. “What’s the matter, newbie? Don’t want to hit the clits?” Vicky taunts and butt-bumps him. - -Vicky’d been locked up for forgery, not prostitution, though her giant nails and flirtatiousness might suggest the latter. Her nose is a beak on a doughy face dotted with two dark currants, her eyes. The icing on the cinnamon roll of her face is thick makeup more colorful than Mardi Gras. In back-of-the-house and front-of-the-house, she’s the cock-of-the-walk, swishing her stringy blonde hair, her rooster’s comb. She makes the bar top her henhouse, taking orders, expediting them, then running them, balancing six steaming plates without batting an eye. And when a guest gets in her face, she blunts them with one of her cockatrice gazes, even as she accedes to their demands. Vanguard servers worship her. Newbies like Gabe steer clear. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}ven though he’s worked here a couple of months already and at least three new people have been hired since, we still call Gabe ‘newbie.’ - -“Watcha readin’?” one of us asked him on one of his 10’s out back. - -“A book,” he said from his seat on the curb rounding the dumpster. He waved away the smoke from our cigarettes. We’d all started smoking just for something to do on our breaks, which became the reason we needed the breaks, which also became the reason we needed to work so much so we could afford the cigarettes we started smoking. Smoking’s a self-perpetuating merry-go-round of vice we never get tired of bantering about. - -“*Abnormal Psychology: Finding the Order in Disorder* by—” we read, but the nube shifted so we couldn’t see. - -“It’s boring,” he said. - -“You trying to become a shrink?” we asked. - -“No,” he said. “Just trying to understand myself.” - -“You’re lying. We’re all trying to become something. You want to be a shrink. Admit it!” - -“I’d like to help people one day,” he says. - -“Ha! See?” - -We remind Gabe that Joe was a paralegal – almost a lawyer! Sherry had been a substitute teacher, almost getting her teaching cert. Rand was a nurse’s aid before he saw that kid die. And Sara’d been a cadet in the police academy before all the machismo bullshit drove her away. And who could blame her? And you think we’re bad! - -“So you go to community college,” we said. “Well, we know all about books. We’ve all got some college under our belts. Some of us have even gotten close to getting our AA degrees. A couple of us are going back as soon as we can scrape enough tips together…” - -Gabe headed back in early. - -Since then, he’s taken his 10s at the bus stop – the same place he arrives and departs from – never bringing a book into work again. - -If he thinks his shit don’t stink because he goes to Valley City College, he’s dumber than we think. We’ll go back one of these days. But what’s the rush? Transfer to the U? Get saddled with a bunch more debt? Get bagged by a career that makes us work for more than we’re paid? Salaried gigs are a bitch! Just ask Cam. He’s always bellyaching. - -“Christ, I wish I could go back to tending bar! Or construction. When I built houses, I could see what I was working for coming to life.” - -“But then you couldn’t hang out with us!” - -But Cam doesn’t hang out with us. We suspect he’s churchy. Or maybe he was churchy. He wears a little gold crucifix necklace beneath his chambray button-up manager shirts. Maybe that’s why he sympathizes with Gabe so much. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hough we’re convinced Cam’s just blowing smoke up our asses, if he really had worked construction, he’s sure as shit missing his chance to make a killing. Valley City’s a cancer on the joint between the big city and the suburbs. Through raising more skyscrapers and condos, Valley City is helping the two distinct parts – town and city – grow into the same thing: one continuous mass of human engorgement. We read about it in Sociology. - -Valley’s downtown still has all these kitschy storefronts, history hubs, and mom-and-pop shops from the mining days of its inception. But thank god, the corporate gods are coming for them too so those old know-it-alls can stop making us feel like dumbass yuppies. - -Though Cam keeps a pretty tight lip, we suspect he’s a bit of a closet know-it-all. We caught him shaking his head when a Coors Lite truck ran into a storage facility’s brick entryway, its façade preserved from the first Ford factory in the state. - -“What the fuck do you care?” Vicky asked. - -“Maybe they can repair it,” Gabe said. - -“They just don’t make things like they used to,” Cam said. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}am didn’t start out all buddy-buddy with Gabe, who’d been Ross’s hire after all. When he first got onboarded as a host, Gabe wouldn’t shut up about how he’d been a cashier at the Cheesecake Factory’s bakery. - -“Handling high volume,” he said. - -“Couldn’t hack it there, now you’re here,” Cam jibed but paused to watch Gabe struggle to limp off the burn. - -“I… I changed jobs,” Gabe said. “So, I could be closer to home. I take care of my mom.” - -“Sorry,” Cam said. He never apologized to any of *us* for giving us shit and we’re not a bunch of debauched orphans! We’ve got fam! - -“You didn’t know. It’s okay,” Gabe said. But Cam’s Santa Monica suntan face goes greener than the clouds of a squall. He disappears into his office for some reason. To make out with Steph some more? *Emergency phone call*, he said. - -He’s been fucking up for a while, come to think of it. When he hired Steph, he promoted her to server after only two weeks. Even though we all had to host for a month as a customary rule of thumb. Learn the menu. Pay our dues. Put our time in. Plus, it had technically been *Gabe’s* turn. - -“Why am I stuck as host?” Gabe demanded. “Just because you’re making out with her?” - -We heard it. It was just after shift change on a Thursday afternoon. Dinner rush was coming. *Guests* could have heard it! Though we all felt our opinion of Gabe lift. The dude had more balls than we thought. - -“Hey!” Cam pointed a finger at him. “That’s not nice. It’s none of your business, that.” - -That was all he was going to say? - -“You’re a good host. And I’m going to get to you. But Steph has serving experience.” - -She did. That was fair. We patted Gabe on the back. He *was* a good host, busting-ass clearing two-tops, big-tops, every-kinda-tops. Taking and filling drink orders. Keeping an okay rotation, though Vicky complained he always saddled her with more tables. “Rides me more just because I have a big butt and he thinks I can take it. The churchy little fucker.” - -Gabe did fluster easily, which probably made Cam doubt if he was server material. Once during a rush, Gabe crushed a glass right into the ice bin as he was trying to fill it up. A nube move, as everybody knows you’ve got to use the ice-scoopers. - -“Fucking up, newbie,” we taunted, even as we helped him empty the ice bin. Because the broken glass blended in with the ice, you had to dump hot water in until each cube melted; then after you fished out all the shards, you had to refill it, lugging by twos the big ice buckets. A mistake you only ever made once, if you were dumb enough to make it at all. - -All this is why we were completely on-our-ass-floored when Cam promoted Gabe to server. - -“I’m going to help him,” Cam insisted. Though after the third or fourth time helping him check IDs, we could see in Cam’s face that he was adding the decision to the matchstick house of regrets that is his life. - -But Cam continues defending and befriending him. - -During a post-dinner-rush slump, Cam announces to everybody back-of-the-house that he’s got a new musical act to share with us. Singer-songwriter Gabe Vanderbeek. Then, on comes a scratchy demo of Gabe guitar-playing and singing the most thinly-veiled Christian prog rock any of us have ever heard. What little we hear of Gabe’s nasally vocs over the gravelly crunch of bar-chorded distortion is about walking “the Way” despite getting offered off-roads into vice. - -“Sounds like shit,” Vicky says. - -“You weren’t supposed to play it!” Gabe says. - -“You left it with me. I thought…” Cam says. - -“You think you can do whatever you want,” Gabe growls, stomping out. - -“Yeah. Fuck the man!” - -“Yeah! Oh, wait, that’s you, Cam. Fuck you. Ha ha.” - -“Fuck you for making us listen to that crap,” we say. - -“It sounded better on headphones,” Cam says. - -“I’ve taken craps that sounded better,” Vicky says. - -“You’re just jealous somebody’s trying to do something with their life,” Cam says to Vicky. “Not everybody’s okay staying a loser.” - -You can hear a to-go fork clatter on the scuffed linoleum. The sound of the air wheezing through the grease-clogged vents above the grills. No manager has ever talked to Vicky like that. Not that we remember anyway. And our collective memory goes back longer than years we can count. - -Vicky nods her head, “Nice. Real nice, asshole. Make fun of the fat ex-con coming up on ten years sober.” She’s tearing up. “The fat ex-con working round the clock to put her little niece through college…” She’s touching the back of her hands to her eyes. Fuck. We’ve only seen her cry, like, once! - -“He didn’t mean it, Vick.” - -“Yeah. He was just upset.” - -But Vicky isn’t mollified. Her hot tears melt her makeup into smears of black, blue, and red. “I am trying!” she roars and flees the kitchen out back for a smoke. “You handle the assholes in my section now, you fucker. See how you like getting treated like shit all night while getting paid less than a hooker. This isn’t over.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s a night from hell. A hellish night. Our favorite. - -During the hectic hours, our demand-harried skins burn and we gnash our teeth while we pleasure in the pressure, knowing that each absurd customer request – *more dressing, jalapeno poppers without the jalapenos, another beer, cheeseburgers without the burger, milkshakes without the milk, kids portions for adults, more water, more napkins, crispy bacon, crispy fries, another Coke* – will all kindle an epic after-hours rager where, before blacking out for hours of sweet oblivion, we’ll bump uglies in dizzying configurations inconceivable in daylight. - -It’s a Thursday night, the new Friday for this friendly-neighborhood eatery. There’s the usual descent-of-the-dweebs from Radi-Us Wireless. The cellphone company’s national offices clutter the hill above our Carousel’s complex. Every night at the late happy hour (9pm-to-close), it’s night-of-the-nerds. We don’t know what most of them do, actually. Probably just call-center workers, not programmers. Whoever they are, they blitz in, overworked, pissed-off, and ravenous for our half-off hot wings and drink specials. Dunk Tank *not* included. - -Next, a troupe of ancient-looking bishops ferry themselves in off a meeting of the archdiocese. Each rheumy-eyed stiff wants their tea scalding. *I want it to burn my tongue when I drink it!* And after draining flasks of whisky into their mugs, they down kettles of bubbling liquid without a wince. *Keep it coming!* - -Then, a wedding rehearsal dinner crashes in and even the hardest of us doubles over. Vicky raises cane in the kitchen, uncaring who hears. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re bringing your wedding party to *Carousel’s*? How long are they hoping *that* marriage is going to last?” - -And all while the cleaning crew waits out back to scour the fat off the hoods hanging over the ovens. They’re heavy with petrified bat wings of grease. But to do the job, the main grill has to shut down. For an hour. - -Cam cancels, all apologies to the cleaning crew. *Bad timing. We’ll reschedule. I’m so sorry guys!* - -We hear the shattering of glass. Gabe’s standing there with a jagged-rimmed Collins glass. “Smooth move, nube,” one of us says. But we aren’t laughing. A harbinger of what’s to come. - -The Radi-Us geeks all want separate tabs! They’re a 32 top with separate tabs! And the bridal party too! Bridezilla wants her Bullseye Ribeye cooked well done! Does she know how long that shit takes to cook well done? And there are so many orders for wings and margs that one of us has to drive to a neighboring location to get more boxes of wings and bottom-shelf tequila. Okay, maybe it’s two of us that end up going and maybe we end up getting each other off in the car while we wait for the dipshits to fetch us the supply, but still! - -By nightfall, booths one through ten are boneyards of chicken wings. The poultry apocalypse! The whole place smells like vinegar burps from buffalo sauce and smokey farts from wayside fermented agave. - -Cam’s been beautiful. Something about the pressure has called up dormant spunk from his surfing days. He’s dispatched complaints with gusto; comped cold plates before they’re even sold; 86’d the Sunflower salad when the deviled eggs run dry; plated ticket after ticket of Huckleberry Hound Pie, Chicken Fried Steak, Elephant Ear Eggplant Pasta; and he’s even bounded back onto the line to help the beleaguered cooks. - -But then comes a cry, “Cam! Cam!” - -It’s Gabe. It’s his first hell night as a server. His first elbow-elbow trench-crawl through fiery rivers of demands and vitriol. His face is a pall of battle fatigue. - -“Cam! Cam!” - -“What newbie?” - -Gabe gives a shot-dog expression. “There’s. There’s a girl in number 5. Her age. Her birthdate! It’s close. I just – my head hurts. Can you spot me? Just double check…” - -The kitchen printer spits out a cascade of tickets. A burner goes out. - -“Christ on the cross, Gabe! If you can’t figure it out, dunk her for all the shits I give!” Cam jumps back into the fray. - -And moments later a Dunk Tank in a Collins glass, cherry garnish on top, gets sold to a twenty-year-old with a self-satisfied smile as she slides the drink aside, clasps her Gucci knock off, and exits. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}am’s nowhere to be found. Not in back-of-the-house, not curbside, not front-of-the-house, not out back smoking by the dumpster. We look everywhere, pretending not to know where Cam usually goes to hide. Pretending to not know who he hides with! It’s our last-ditch effort to save his ass. - -“I want him found!” Ross says, towing Gabe by the collar. - -Cameron’s in his office. But Steph’s not there. No one else is there. He’s bent over a kid’s book. He’s on his cell phone. - -“*Sky grows dark…* That’s right, honey. *Moon glows bright…* Yep. Yep! *Climb into bed and turn out the light!* Oh my gosh, bud. You’ve got it. Wow, buddy.” - -We crowd in the doorway. We listen to Cam listen to his toddler-aged-son repeat back to him the whole *If My Love Were a Fire Truck* book. - -“Cam,” we say. “Something’s happened.” - -But Cam’s not there. He’s on a clamshell-white beach paddling off, and up and up, then down the blue, blue valleys. - -We hear him accede to his ex-wife’s demands and apologize in the face of her berating and his promise to send the payments quickly. And next month’s check early! We hear him plead for another Saturday. He’ll plan something this time. Something Harold will like. He’s been reading the parenting books the judge ordered— - -Ross grabs his cell out of his hand and chucks it. - -Cam shoves him. - -“You’re out of line,” Ross says. - -“You’re out of line!” - -“Front-of-the-house is just about in flames right now! Just what—” - -“I. Was. Taking. My. 10!” Cam says. “Now excuse me. While you’re kissing ass at corporate, I’ve got a restaurant to run.” - -But when Cam walks into the bar, he finds Gabe seated in between two liquor board inspectors wearing dark windbreakers with broad white lettering on the back, declaring their offices. - -The snitch-bitch is nowhere in sight. According to the liquor board dicks, it hadn’t been one of theirs. Is it just us, or is Vicky cackling louder than normal? If Gabe had half a brain, he would have noticed the snitch who’d tricked him had been Vicky’s niece. We’re not spilling the beans. Not our place. - -Grabbing Cam, Ross points a finger at Gabe. “Since you’re running this restaurant, do you mind explaining to me why—” - -“I did it. I told him to do it,” Cam says. “Fine me. Fire me.” And Cam explains everything. - -One of the bishops stands up and points a liver-spotted, furry-knuckled finger at Cam. “His confession is true. We heard him with the foulest most damnable language dismiss the boy’s plea for help!” - -“Then you’re *both* fired!” Ross says. From the bar, Bella’s face flushes and she hugs her lower lip with her teeth. Gonna be a good night for Ross. - -The liquor control dicks hustle out Cameron and Gabe for processing in their mobile unit parked out front, where they’ll fine them and give them court dates. Ross stalks behind them with an embalmer’s loom and grump. - -With them all gone, the bar’s decagon carousel center sparkles resplendent. Its rounding-board overhang features griffins and imps and ovular mirrors in which we see our reflections elongate into hobgoblins that clean and sing, bring bread and drink, and shuffle our bloated, cholesterol-clogged guests in and out. The bar’s floor disconnects from its foundations and begins to spin and we dervish with it. We turn up some hair metal. Vicky, Steph, the bishops, the Radi-Us nerds, the bridal party, we dance. The batwings of grease catch fire and the ovens, the gas tanks, the storehouses of fat, the chicken lard dressing, the CO2 in the soda fountains, the vats of formaldehyde, it all ignites and the ensuing firestorm funnels butane-tinged flames through our tilt-a-whirl of ever-renewing delight and pain. We dance in the flames. - -From the corners of our eyes, we watch with mild interest as, post-processing, the two expiated figures share a bench on the dead boulevard. One waits for a bus home to his mother. The other? Maybe waiting for the sun’s fireball to outmatch the one we’ve created. He’ll be waiting a long time. - -In our night-long revelry, we can’t make out their conversation. But we’ve never been faulted for our lack of imagination. Just ask the angels. - -“What'll you do now?” the man asks. - -“There's an internship working with people with developmental disabilities. If they'll take me. You?” - -And the man turns in the direction of old downtown, the vacant, hulking buildings going violet in the predawn. “I’m going into retro-fitting.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Carousel's** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952981080168212).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/contents.md b/content/issue-36/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 08d248c5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Praedial Larceny]({{< relref path="praedial-larceny.md" >}}), by Wayne McCray -- [Nancy, Please]({{< relref path="nancy-please.md" >}}), by Steve Boseley -- [A Healthy Man]({{< relref path="a-healthy-man.md" >}}), by Matt Wile -- [Le Petit Cornichon]({{< relref path="le-petit-cornichon.md" >}}), by L Swartz -- [Carousel's]({{< relref path="carousels.md" >}}), by Shaun Anthony McMichael -- [Summer in Duncanny]({{< relref path="summer-in-duncanny.md" >}}), by Peter Wynd -- [The Enchanters, by James Ellroy]({{< relref path="the-enchanters-james-ellroy.md" >}}), reviewed by Bill Ryan -- [Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023]({{< relref path="ShortReviews04.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-36/editorial.md b/content/issue-36/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 641208bd..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Sanka_Coffee_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 36** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -'*When the clock is ticking away the night – and you can't get to sleep – your nerves make you jump at every sound. You find yourself thinking things that would never occur to you in the daylight. What makes you so nervous and uneasy? And why couldn't you get to sleep when you first went to bed?'* It turns out the answer isn't insidious crime but insidious caffeine! The cover image is from an ad for decaffeinated [Sanka Coffee - Was that a burglar downstairs?](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanka_Coffee_-_Was_that_a_burglar_downstairs,_1948.jpg), painted in 1948 by [Fritz Siebel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Siebel), more famous for his ['Someone Talked' WWII poster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Siebel#/media/File:SOMEONE_TALKED_-_NARA_-_513672.jpg). Now out of copyright, this particular ad ran in the notorious crime publisher *Ladies' Home Journal*…" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Well, here we are at the end of another one. 2023 has been a busy time at **Mythaxis**. Despite only inviting stories during three weeks of the year, we received 669 pieces to consider, compared to 603 across 2022's *four* week long calls. The decision to increase our pay rate to a pauper-princely 1 cent per word probably had something to do with that; the option of shrinking the submission windows in 2024 to desperately try and hold back the rising tide is a distinct possibility. - -So, it's safe to say we now have more options to sort through and choose from than ever before. And that's a good thing… but more junk from the LLM-machine as well, unfortunately! I firmly believe that the standard of work we accept remains unchanged – I'm as proud of past years' issues as I am of this one's – but while a small increase in pay may not be the difference-maker for writers of quality, it certainly seems to catch the eye of those who let AI do the real work for them. - -Nevertheless, satisfied though I am, as 2023 progressed I was struck by an arguable oversight. I love genre fiction in many of its guises, but while that label covers great variety of type and tone we've always kept the focus primarily on sf, fantasy, and horror. Of course, that itself is no barrier to authors incorporating other genres – we've welcomed romance, comedy, mystery, and many more under the spec-fic umbrella – but there was one limitation in particular that has preyed on my mind. - -*Crime*. - -We've certainly featured many stories in which crimes feature strongly, but it's almost always been within our default context of (let's call them) the *unreal* genres. We've not actively been seeking out what you might call *pure* crime fiction, and I've increasingly felt that this should change. - -I think speculative fiction (be it science fiction, fantasy, or horror) is "special" because, while it allows an author to explore the very same themes as any more conventional treatment might, by abandoning the strict constraints of realism new light can be cast onto otherwise familiar ideas. Transplanting a narrative of loneliness from a real world wilderness to, for example, the infinitely distant depths of space doesn't make the story proportionally *better*, but it allows it to be *different* in a way that isn't plausible in a more down-to-earth setting. - -However, I think unadulterated crime fiction is to an extent also a speculative endeavour. True, it is grounded in a context of realism; no matter how outlandish some of crime fiction's villains have been, they generally inhabit a world recognisably our own, past or present; but the criminal also breaches a set of constraints: the agreed upon rules of social conduct. The author of crime fiction is therefore presenting speculations on how such challenges to the norm might affect the perpetrators, the victims, even society as a whole (or, indeed, how they might not). - -And for the reader, too, there's a slightly different flavour of escapism at hand with crime than with other fiction of our mundane world. With the unreal, we experience things we *couldn't* – with crime, it's things we *wouldn't*. - -Hopefully. - -So, a typically long-winded way of justifying a decision that may already by crystal clear to the probably enormous majority who skipped the editorial (or didn't even notice its presence) on the way to the stories lying in wait: this is **Mythaxis Magazine**'s first ***all crime*** issue. No scifi, no fantasy, no horror (well, none of the *supernatural* at least) – just misbehaviours, up and down the scale. - -I hope you enjoy this genre of speculation as much as I do. diff --git a/content/issue-36/le-petit-cornichon.md b/content/issue-36/le-petit-cornichon.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2af7c072..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/le-petit-cornichon.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,440 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Le Petit Cornichon" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- L Swartz -copyright: '© L Swartz 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Some fairy tales are cautionary, others throw caution to the wind and dive into the nasty stuff with relish. This story is more about The Nasty, if you take my meaning, and the condiments are pickled. If you're reminded of 'The Boy Who Couldn't Shudder' by the Brothers Grimm you're right – though this is more the Brothers Grimy." - -image: images/Cornichon10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Tibor Szabo](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-ford-mustang-on-the-concrete-car-park-13756521/), [Josh Hild](https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-empty-road-in-between-grass-field-during-golden-hour-2801312/), and [Kjrstie](https://pixabay.com/vectors/america-united-states-map-flag-us-875164/)." - -type: stock -slug: le-petit-cornichon -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t could have been different. I might have been getting ready to take over my dad's gourmet pickle empire when it all popped off. But then I would never have met Princess Babe, who is way better than pickles. - -As it was, tedious bro Bob was groomed as the sole heir to the family empire. Not me. - -Our Pop, who preferred to be addressed as *The Dill King*, made it his mission to teach me to be like my brother Bob. Ingrate Bob. - -Bro Bob refused to call Pop *The Dill King*. And when people called Bob *The Gherkin* – a nickname that was The Dill King's idea of a compliment – Bob got mad. - -I always called Pop *The Dill King* because he asked us to. And I literally begged people to call me *Le Petit Monsieur Cornichon*, a nickname I had to make up myself. - -Whatever. I had all the fun because I was fearless. I was the brat who always had a cast on my leg or my arm along with bruises and cuts. When somebody dared me to do something, I did it. Why not? Scars are interesting. Broken arms heal. - -I jumped off things. I raced around blind corners. - -I slept in the graveyard because dead people can't hurt me and ghosts are mere angry vapor. - -I let hateful little turds lock me in small, dark boxes because for me it was quiet and restful and eventually someone would let me out. Probably. - -I mounted alligators and tried to ride them. I poked hornet nests. I got in cars with strangers. - -Tedious Bob, of course, never took a dare. - -When no-scar, dreary Bob wasn't sulking about being the favorite, his notion of fun was to squint amorously at his spreadsheets. He meticulously collected and analyzed data from tasting parties where he invited foodies to test variations in our pickle recipes. Bob did not taste anything himself. Bob did not like pickles. - -Unlike Bob, the recipes I invented were genuinely new. For instance, what if you pickle ghost peppers in with your boring cucumbers? The Gherkin got so pissed when I did that. Why? Data's data, right? By the way, ghost pickles are excruciatingly delicious. - -Bro Bob did enjoy formally inspecting the pickle vats every Monday morning and Friday afternoon, his shiny shoes clacking on the cement floor of the pickle factory. - -Like Bob, I enjoyed walking the vats. Unlike Bob, I walked in neon kicks with plenty of a mellow indica strain on board. - -Very much unlike Bob, I led hella entertaining factory tours. Customers always bought more product after little M. Cornichon guided them through our facility. This may or may not have had to do with the bongs I tucked behind vats and shared with our guests. - -Obviously, I had an excellent attitude. Obviously, I was of value to the business and to the family. I still don't understand why The Dill King sent me away. - -It happened right after The Gherkin extracted my hand-blown glass bongs from their crannies and dumped them on The Dill King's desk. Yes. My famously mature bro tattled. - -The Dill King shattered all my gorgeous vessels and wasted a lot of primo 420. - -I guess this was the last straw. I guess Pop no longer wanted happy tourists to buy our product and tell their friends what a fun and delicious business we ran. - -It made no sense to me. I obviously made no sense to them. - -So off I was shipped to my uncle's place in Idaho. Fucking Idaho – the one state in the union where weed was still fully illegal. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}owever, you might say Idaho turned out to be a land of opportunity for me. If it weren't for Idaho, I would never have made the acquaintance of the sensuous Princess Babe. She would have been out of my league. Still is, if you ask her. - -But I'm getting ahead of myself. - -Uncle Idaho earnestly endeavored to find me a job. At first, he sent me off to apprentice at a beer brewery, then as a ladies' shoe salesman, then with an antique dealer. - -I hosted popular and successful after hours parties at the brewery. This was frowned upon, especially since I wasn't exactly strict about checking IDs. - -Back I went to Uncle's. - -At the shoe emporium, I was intoxicated by the ankles, calves, knees, and upwards of ladies who were trying on shoes. Of course I couldn't resist licking the flesh they offered. How could anyone? Some of the ladies complained about my mode of sincere worship. Only some. Eventually, enough complained that I got fired. - -Back to Uncle's. Again. - -As for the antique dealer, when I covered up the unsightly nicks and dents and scratches in her stock with my own colorful and creative doodles, it was not recognized for the brilliant marketing I know it to be. - -So, out on my ass there too. - -I sat at the dining room table at my uncle's after that, sucking on my last plain but serviceable bong and thinking up ways to get rich, or at least get out of my uncle's house. - -"Why can't you consider the consequences?" Uncle Idaho stood next to me, literally looking down on me, and pontificated in a very loud voice. "What is wrong with you?" - -Uncle was being mean and unnecessarily harsh, so I pushed him hard in the middle of the chest. Uncle wasn't expecting it. He stepped back, lost his footing, and fell. On the way down, he banged his head against his display case of cheesy porcelain figurines. It shattered most of the figurines and it knocked him out – just for a minute! I have no idea why everyone got so excited. - -Shortly afterward I found myself walking away from dear Uncle Idaho's house, carrying a backpack stuffed with basics. To be honest, I was excited to be released from boring people's boring expectations. I was now free to find myself a position where my creativity and enthusiasm were valued. - -I soon ended up sleeping in doorways and getting beat up by losers like me, only meaner. - -On the plus side, I was still cute. At 19, I looked even younger. My naturally muscular physique looked if anything even better with dents and bruises and stains and torn textiles. I appeared chiseled and tarnished, yet innocent. I seemed harmless yet strong. Approachable yet iconic. - -And approach they did. - -As a horny omnivore, that worked for me. - -If these guys wanted to buy me pretty clothes and feed me and generally bribe me to stick around, I was down. I didn't need some spreadsheet to calculate the value of my services and I wasn't shy about making them pay. - -Finally, a profession I was well suited for! I was a ho. Yes, I called myself a ho. "Sex worker" is more dignified, which I was not. - -Most of my sex worker buddies worried about getting beat up, raped, or killed. They were careful, but it still happened. - -I was not careful. I got bad customers, sure, but I had a big, shiny knife, which I kept sharp; and I had skills. Which I did not mind using. After the first half dozen bloody messes I made, I earned a reputation. The other sex workers sent me their bad customers, which meant fewer and fewer bad ones for all of us. The vice squad probably knew about me and probably didn't care. - -Pretty soon, there were no more nasty, violent customers. I had my choice of places to stay. I was well fed. I didn't have to work much. - -In other words, I was bored. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Y{{}}ou can draw a straight line between what I did about this and how I ended up with Princess Babe. - -To cure my boredom all I had to do was rewind. Backpedal. Return to my roots. - -This time, I packed better stuff into a fancier backpack and set out walking in better looking, sturdier boots, a warmer jacket, cleaner and more durable pants. I sported a stylish and studly haircut. I was a vagabond – a chic vagabond. - -What did I expect to happen? - -My second day on the road, a beater 2015 Mustang, candy apple red on one side and Bondo® snot colored on the other side, pulled up beside me. "Dude!" - -"Hey." - -"Need a ride? Something to eat?" - -"Great! I been walking all day." - -"Get in!" The passenger side door opened. A lanky redhead with a Gandalf beard, his skinny body swimming in baggy, paint-splashed denim overalls, climbed out and then immediately climbed back in, folding himself into the back seat. - -After I settled into the raggedy and still warm shotgun seat, redhead leaned forward and offered his hand. - -"Rusty," said the redhead. - -"Cornichon," I lied. - -"Corny?" - -"Core. Knee. Shone. Cornichon." - -"Okay, hey Cornition. Hey. That's Slick at the wheel." - -Slick was anything but. His prodigious belly pressed against the steering wheel, but his arms and legs were regular. He smelled like he worked at a fish processing plant. His black hair was slicked back with some kind of pomade; I guessed that explained the name. - -"Where you heading?" Slick growled. His voice matched his belly, not his arms and legs. - -"Anywhere but Idaho." - -"Sounds good, dude. Let's go." - -Slick stomped on the gas pedal and the Mustang shot forward, squealing its tires. - -The thought crossed my mind that these guys might be heading for an epic crash on this winding, slick road at dusk. That is, if they didn't pull over to rob me first. - -I smiled. I wasn't bored. This was more like it. - -It was late in the day and getting dark fast. Rusty and Slick kept up a conversation of sorts by hollering obscenities over loud, bad metal music. They were passing a blunt, which they offered to me, but I could tell by the way it smelled I wanted nothing to do with it. I have standards when it comes to dope. "No thanks." - -"WHAT?" - -"NO THANKS!" - -Besides, it would help to be clear-headed when they tried to rob me. - -I didn't have to wait long. The end of the blunt seemed to be the signal. Slick flicked the roach out the window, then veered onto a muddy side road, really just a track between two overgrown orchards. Slick stopped the car, but he didn't even turn off the engine before he tried to grab me by the front of my collar. I ducked easily and burst out the door, which Slick had not locked. - -Slick heaved himself out of his seat, struggling a bit before he found his feet. Meanwhile, I had easily jumped the fence and was already sprinting between apple trees. When I glanced back, Rusty was unfolding his long body from the back seat through the passenger door I'd left open. Both guys roared. No words, just beardy testosterone noise. Why yell "STOP!" at someone who obviously has no interest in stopping? - -When I emerged on the other side of the orchard, I found myself back on the highway. Surprisingly, the guys were not far behind me, wheezing but still running. Who knew they could keep up. - -I sprinted across the road right in front of a line of hurtling trucks. The guys bellowed across the road at me but did not follow. I trotted along beside the road, putting distance between me and them. I didn't see the guys gallop back to the 'Stang, which was still running. I didn't see them mount up and come after me. - -I did hear them when they got close. They aimed for me. I let them get close, then jumped into the ditch. The car flew over me and rolled in the field beyond. It landed on its side, wheels spinning, after throwing Rusty and Slick free. They were barely visible as two still lumps at the end of the paths their bodies plowed through the wet soil. - -I reached into the open window to shift the car into neutral. I waited for the wheels to go still, then I rocked the car until it whumped down in the dirt, right side up. - -The Mustang was now scraped up on both the paint side and the Bondo side, but miraculously otherwise undamaged. - -I got in. I shifted into first. I gentled the messed up muscle car out of its nest in the field, over all the bumps and through all the slick puddles, and I paused before I turned onto the highway. - -Before I shoved my boot heel into the gas pedal, I looked in the rear view mirror. Idle curiosity, I suppose. The Rusty lump and the Slick lump were no longer there. - -Oh shit. - -I unsnapped the leather knife holder on my belt. I put the Mustang in park and got out. These fools. I wanted them out of my life permanently. - -I marched up to where they had been lying. Only two piles of mud now. But there were footprints, which I followed into the orchard. I turned toward light I saw through the trees. I came out into a clearing. Sometime in the past, there must have been a barn here. Now there were only the remains of a roof, scattered and nearly covered with dirt and bindweed and dead leaves from past autumns. What was left of a few jagged foundations cast hard shadows in the moonlight. - -And a big red barn door lay face down in the dirt. It looked fresher than the rest of the barn's remnants. - -The footprints led right up to the barn door. - -The door had slid open recently, it appeared. The hinges were too clean, as were the parts previously covered by the closed door. I hopped up on the frame of the door and looked down into the dirt and weeds "inside" the door. No sign of the guys. - -Strange. I walked around the perimeter of the clearing. I saw no more sign of Slick and Rusty. - -Fine. They were gone. Probably went to hide under the side of the barn and died there. I hopped up and down on the barn door as hard as I could to make sure they were good and dead. - -Whatever happened to the boys, it wasn't my problem. - -I felt free and smug walking back to the Mustang. - -If I heard what sounded like Slick's gruff voice hillbilly-hooting way off in the distance, it was probably my imagination. I had no fear, you know, but that doesn't mean I didn't have a vivid imagination. - -I got back into that Mustang and stomped on that gas pedal and I never looked back. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}y attempted abduction was not the first felony on Slick and Rusty's crime spree, I discovered. Sorting through the boxes Rusty had shared his seat with, I found packets of skunkweed. I know because it smelled like that foul shit the guys were smoking. - -I sold that crap to some gullible teenagers. I managed to convince them it was laced with something potent. I urged the kids to take in its aroma. I encouraged them to interpret the questionable bouquet as something more interesting than it was. - -Then I sold the car itself to some hollow-eyed addicts. I made up a story about how it was the car James Dean was driving when he died. They were far gone enough not to realize Mr. Dean had died 60 years before this car was made, not to mention this car was obviously no Porsche. They were eager to hand over the cash. - -Which left me with enough to stay somewhere warm and quiet where I wouldn't have to use my knife. - -Also, auspiciously, there was Wi-Fi and it was safe to take a device out and use the internet without aforesaid occasion for knifeplay. - -I used it to find customers. This time, in this different place, somehow I found my way to darker digital chambers. Here, the customers were looking for things that surprised me. What a delight! - -People wanted digits removed. People wanted to be serviced by those who were differently configured by birth or surgery – missing jaws, extra limbs, things that were hollow where you'd expect them to protrude, and so forth. It made me quite red and swollen to read about these things although I, of course, had nothing of the sort to offer. - -But there was one thing. - -Some people wanted to play with partners who lacked fear. They wanted to find out how far they could push another human without the other tapping out from terror. - -These people were looking for, to be succinct, *me*. These people were willing to pay me to have fun that was usually much more difficult to be had. - -I left some responses. I didn't expect much. Not many people could be after this particular kink, I thought. A response from a stranger like me would seem too dodgy, I thought. If I heard from anyone, I thought, it would turn out to be a vice bot. - -Then I went and bought myself a nice, greasy dinner, and then I came back to my room and stuck needles in my cock until I came hard and then I went to sleep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} was wrong. When I woke up late the next morning, my inbox was crammed with replies. They weren't all vice bots. I chose a few whose indecent proposals arrived in the form of old-fashioned full sentences and proper punctuation. Those would be the customers old and rich enough to properly compensate my favors. - -One fellow was particularly zealous about meeting me. I like zeal in a customer, especially one who pays me in advance. He had no interest in a dick pic. He didn't want to look at my buttocks or my face. - -He wanted to talk to me, like, *on the phone* talk to me. (How old was he?) He wanted to talk about what kind of things scared me. - -"What kinds of things scare you?" he asked. He sounded friendly, and not that old. - -"Nothing," I said, because it was the truth. - -"Come on. How about spiders or snakes or alligators?" - -"Nope." - -"Ghosts or zombies?" - -"No." - -"Public speaking? Police? Buried alive?" - -"None of that." - -"Water? Caves? Nuns? Heights? Flying? Knives? Thunder and lightning?" - -"No." - -There was a pause. - -"When can we meet?" - -He told me to dress in black. He told me to wash myself thoroughly. He gave me an address. - -It was a large, brick rambler. In 1955, this house would have been the most ostentatiously fashionable on the block. Today, it showed its age. Even in the dark, even with no lights turned on inside or outside it. Even at the end of a cul-de-sac of dark, boarded up, less once-fashionable two-stories and ramblers. - -There was piano music coming out of the open door. Some tinkly Tchaikovsky nocturne, I think. The piano was out of tune, which suggested a person playing an actual piano, not a recording. - -I smiled. This guy had put some thought into trying to scare me shitless. It wasn't going to work, but I appreciated the effort. - -I walked into the heavily dark interior. The piano music stopped. I couldn't see anything. I moved forward cautiously. There might have been furniture, or not. There might have been people, or not. I put my hand on my knife, in case there were people. - -My feet and knees encountered nothing. There was a breeze blowing from somewhere. I kept pacing slowly forward. Once or twice, something fabric-like brushed past my shoulder or face. - -When I reached a wall, I felt along it toward the left, where most of the rest of the house would be. Probably there would be another room or a hall. - -Now I heard moaning. Probably human. Or possibly a coyote arguing with the moon. - -"Good," I whispered to myself. "This guy is good." - -The further I went, the louder the moaning. I nearly tripped when my left foot found a stairway leading down to a sunken room of some sort. It felt like it was a bigger space. And this was definitely where the moaning was coming from. - -Now the moaning had words. - -*"Cornichon,"* it warbled. - -It sounded like it was in pain. It sounded like it hated me. It went back to moaning, but occasionally threw in a *"Cooooome! Come to meeeee,"* and a *"Help me, Cornichoooooon."* - -"Help me find you," I called out, hoping to get to the good part a little faster. - -"I'm *heeeeeere*," it screeched, then threw in some barks and howls. "Over here!" - -I turned toward the sound, which did seem close. - -Something leaped toward me and wrapped cold, taloned hands around my throat. - -*"Diiiiiieeeee!"* - -"Get off," I grunted, struggling with whatever it was. It seemed to be some sort of animal. It had fur. It had ribs and four limbs. I could smell its breath, which was nasty. - -I freed my knife from its sheath, I plunged the shaft as close as I could figure toward the core of my attacker. - -"FUCKING OW!" it screamed and sprang away from me. "Are you insane?" - -It was my customer, sounding much less friendly now. - -I heard him stumble across the room. He found a switch and turned on a lamp. - -He was dressed like a proper furry, except for the torn bridal gown. He had removed the wolf-looking headpiece and was dabbing with his claw-gloves at a little line of blood oozing through the waistline of the white gown. - -"You okay?" - -"What? Yes. I mean, you cut me a little bit, but mostly you got me in the padding in this thing. Why the fuck would you do that?" - -"You were trying to strangle me?" - -"You're supposed to run and try to escape, asshole. Not kill me." - -"This was not what we arranged. Next time." - -"Fuck that. Get out of here." - -I never got hired by the wolf bride again, whatever his name was. But he didn't stop payment, so it was all good. - -After that, I always negotiated how far my customer wanted me to go. I would even pretend to be scared, if need be. We all make compromises to keep our jobs. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ne day the voice on the phone was husky, yet sort of high pitched except when it was not. It was unusual. It was unique. Also odd: the voice had a long and well-organized list. Customers were usually specific and intense, but needed some coaxing to come out with their needs. My heartbeat sped up – a rarity. - -That was the day I met Princess Babe. - -She wanted me to sit myself in a tub naked before she got there. She wanted me to notice I was being filmed from several angles, then she wanted me blindfolded. She wanted her helper to add other unnamed ingredients to the tub. She wanted me to stay perfectly still, regardless of how I felt about the other occupants of the tub. When I heard her high heels clicking against the tiles, she wanted me to start begging. - -She wanted me to go along with anything she asked, but beg for escape. She wanted me to make her believe I was scared. - -I'd get half up front, half after we were finished – as long as she was satisfied I was truly afraid. - -More eagerly than usual, I showed up at the address and assumed the position. I lay in that tub in total darkness behind my blindfold for a long, long time. Hours, I think. My heart was racing. I wasn't scared exactly, but I was legit excited. - -The helper entered on sneakers of some sort. No clicking. Definitely not the customer I had been told to expect. Helper paused for a while before adding ingredients. Helper did, however, hold up some kind of metal container with the ingredients inside, which sounded restless and/or angry. Lots of clicking and whistling and rubbing against each other and the container. - -Helper must have turned that container upside down on me all at once. The bugs – I couldn't tell what kind – landed on my head and trickled down all over my naked body, then commenced to crawling over each other and all over me. They had hard but slimy bodies, whatever they were. - -I genuinely wanted that shit off me, stat. - -I wasn't sure whether the bugs started biting me or whether that was my imagination. By then, my throat hurt because my heart was beating so hard inside it. Also, I may have been screaming in that hoarse whispery closed-mouth way you scream when you're asleep and having a nightmare. - -I wasn't sure whether I was right side up or upside down, falling or lying still. - -I needed to piss. I needed to shit. - -I couldn't get my breath but I didn't dare open my mouth with so many bugs on me. - -I heard the clicking heels. - -I was trying hard not to squirm because I knew if I squished my pals I'd soon be awash in their sticky ichor, which sounded maybe even worse than the live bug rodeo romping all over me. - -I was starting to scream out loud, despite my best efforts not to. - -"Do you want out?" that husky voice asked. - -I risked opening my mouth to say, "YES PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE, PLEASE PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS." - -"How do you feel?" - -"GET ME OUT GET ME OUT GET ME OUT." - -"Maybe I will." - -My next reply didn't come in words. I opened my mouth and screamed as loudly as I could, bugs be damned. It came out all shrill and wavering. This was not a sound I knew I was capable of making. - -The voice laughed, which segued into a type of grunt I've heard women make when orgasm turns them into wild boars. While my customer was coming, she was scooping up handfuls of the bugs and dropping them on my sweaty head, which judging by the sound, made her come harder. - -That was the moment I fell in love with Princess Babe. - -Love was an emotion I had always assumed was the invention of some marketing hoodlum to sell us more anti-perspirant and uncomfortable underwear. I didn't know her name. I didn't know what she looked like. I didn't know if I was about to die from multiple poison bug bites. All I knew was the world orbited around that shoe/voice person who was currently making me genuinely suffer. - -"May I please see you please may I take the blindfold off please?" - -"No." - -"May I please touch you please. If I can get the bugs off me and touch you then you won't have any bugs so may I please?" - -"No." - -She was saying no. She was also laughing. I was emboldened. - -"I have never been scared before. Not really. I feel like *I* should pay *you*." - -She inhaled sharply. I did not hear her exhale. - -"What did you say?" - -"I said I'm truly scared. For the first time in my life. Thank you." - -I heard her get up and walk away a few steps, then stop. She walked around to the other side of the tub. She reached behind my head. She untied the blindfold. - -She wore a red bra and panties and red high-heeled pumps. Her head was shaved. She had a close-cropped goatee. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Or still have. - -"My name, my real name, is Charlie," I said. "Nobody else knows it." - -"You can call me Princess Babe because that is my name," she said, then she opened her mouth so wide I could see all of her teeth, and she barked out a laugh. - -"You're a mess," she said. "Stand up. I'll get my helper to brush the bugs off you." - -"Thank you, Princess Babe. Thank you for everything. I love you, Princess Babe." - -"Shut up," she said as her helper started brushing the bugs off. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} know I am scared of two things now, and I am worried about one. - -One thing I am scared of is that Princess Babe will leave me. She never says she won't. - -Another thing I am scared of is bugs. Not so much your everyday potato bug sauntering down the stem of a tomato plant; but bugs in masses that run toward me instead of away are terrifying. I am terrified. I shudder when I think about them. - -Princess Babe thinks it is the cutest thing ever that I'm scared of bugs. Every time we get together, she brings a big jar of icky, buzzy, bitey, slithery, horrible, awful, terrible bugs. I know she can let them loose on me anytime. I know in fact that someday she will. Some days, that is; multiple times. I know she knows I am ready to beg for her to do it. To get it over with, for now. To feel the very thing I fear. Both, neither, I don't know. Most of the time, though, my Princess Babe is satisfied to make me shudder. She sets down The Jar right next to me. Right by my face. Where I cannot possibly pretend it doesn't exist. - -*Gods* I love her. - -But anyway, the thing I am *worried* about is that The Gherkin and The Dill King will find out I took their recipes and improvised and made them better. I worry that they will investigate where their dwindling profits are going and find brightly colored jars labeled with my *Petit Cornichon* brand. I worry that my brilliant success in the pickle world will bleed into the dull and antiseptic world of The Dill King and The Gherkin, that they will look up from their spreadsheets and finally see me now that I no longer want to be seen. And when they discover I make better pickles than they do and I am richer than they are, they might try to interfere with my beautiful, scary life. They might sue me for pickle plagiarism and I might lose. - -Princess Babe might find me less suitable if I lose my fortune. Which is the worst that could happen. The only thing I fear besides bugs. - -As for you lot? You can try to scare me, but you will fail. It has to be Princess Babe, and it has to be The Jar. - -In the meantime, do not call me Charlie. Just don't. - -I still have my knife. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Le Petit Cornichon** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952981610168159).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/nancy-please.md b/content/issue-36/nancy-please.md deleted file mode 100644 index c34f878a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/nancy-please.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,244 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Nancy, Please" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Steve Boseley -copyright: '© Steve Boseley 2023 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Do you care about justice? I'm sure you do. It's not always a very just world, of course, and injustices come in large and small portions, but on the whole we want right to win out over wrong. But that's not always the draw of crime fic, is it? Sometimes we want what feels good, even when we know it's very, very wrong…" - -image: images/NancyPlease10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [arty](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-woman-standing-in-the-middle-of-a-street-talking-on-a-cell-phone-pTOXIep2KYU) and [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/city-car-vehicle-vintage-parking-1284508/)." - -type: stock -slug: nancy-please -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} hoped that things would improve when I got myself some education; some of the shop floor women are as thick as two short planks. Most, if I’m honest. The most exciting thing that ever happens to them is when Mandy or Rita or Susie or whoever gets to tell a story about when Gary from HR fingered them down stock aisle six. How do I know this? Well, they aren’t very secretive about it. - -I tried to fit in. I talked about periods with the other women; I told the odd story about men that I had been with; I listened to the other women bitching about the men that had mistreated them. And about Gary, of course. I even took up smoking so I could join in the odd ciggie break, out the back through one of the fire exits, though it’s been so long since I lit up now my last half pack of fags are probably tubes of sawdust. - -I suppose you could say there was the potential for some kind of camaraderie among us, but it was never enough for me. I had my sights set on something more. - -Anyway, if my maths is correct – and I’m in the accounts department now, so it bloody well better be – most of the women over in B section have had their way with good old Gary, one way or another. He’s not even that much of a catch: twenty years old, not shaved yet, living-with-mum as he is. - -But still, when your greatest achievement is telling your workmates that you sucked a man off behind the filter press, I guess the only way is up. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}ow here I am, sitting in my office. Out of the single window in the far wall, I can see those same women on the shop floor spread out below me. I’ve got the radio on, tuned to something classical. I can almost close my eyes and be transported somewhere else in the world. Italy, I think; somewhere with water. I can imagine men singing on gondolas. I’m unsure if that’s what they do, but it’s my imagination so they sing. I say *almost* because the noise from beyond my office makes it impossible to truly imagine myself there; I can hear inane chatter and hyena-like laughter floating up from the women below. Some muttered words make their way to my ears, followed by a ripple of laughter – probably a joke at my expense. I told you, that’s what they’re like. - -As if things weren’t bad enough already, the PA system crackles into life. - -Having a public address system in a large factory isn’t particularly noteworthy. The problem with this particular PA system is that it’s shi–bad. What makes it bad are several equally bad things. The first is the quality; whenever somebody makes a call on the PA, it sounds like the person talking has a clarinet in their mouth, or one of those other reed instruments; it buzzes. The second is my boss. If there was ever a bigger prick than Gary’s – pardon my Italian – it’s Mark. Mark Belshaw. His voice is usually the one that comes over the PA. And third is that every time it’s *my* name that echoes across the factory floor: *“Nancy, please could you come to reception”; “Nancy, please could you go to Mr Belshaw’s office”; “Nancy, please pick up line one”.* And every time, the bloody women on the shop floor’ll chime in with a chorus of *“Nancy, please!”* as I make my way across the shop floor or the catwalk from my office to Belshaw’s. - -Only it isn’t just that. Bad as that is, they insist on pronouncing it *Narn-seee*. It’s their twisted attempt at humour, poking fun at my upbringing, as if I act like I’m someone better than them. If not getting pregnant in my teens and not sleeping around makes me better than them, then I guess I am. - -“*Nancy, please could you take this month’s sales figures to Mr Belshaw’s office?”* The PA crackles again. *“Nancy, please could you take the sales figures to Mr Belshaw’s office as soon as possible?”* - -The thing is, I’ve got a phone. It's sitting on the edge of my desk. I can touch it without even leaning forward in my seat. The ringer was working earlier today. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be working now. Why Belshaw insists on using the bloody PA system is beyond me. It was out of date when I was a girl; half the time I can’t hear what’s being said because of the crackling, or because some of the words get missed out; the other half it sounds like I am being spoken to through a drain pipe. - -“*Nancy, please could you—”* - -“I’m *coming!*” I set the chair spinning as I stand, stuff the paperwork into a foolscap folder, and pull the door handle harder than I would like. The door crashes against my office wall, rattling the glass in its tiny window. I bet the girls on the floor below heard that and are having a good laugh about it. - -As I walk out onto the metal walkway above the shop floor, all the muttering and laughter stops. The factory is silent, save for the constant drone of the machines. I can hear every one of my footsteps clanging on the metal between my office and Belshaw’s. - -Rising from below me, I can hear the beginnings of that fu–damned chant. It starts with one of the women whispering, followed by a round of schoolgirl tittering. Then two, then five, then all of them. - -“*Narn-seee, please!”* - -I stop, grab the handrail and squeeze it until my knuckles turn white. Everyone has their faces turned up towards me. Whoever spoke first is now silent, as is the rest of the floor; quite some feat for three hundred women to coordinate themselves like that. I hold that stare for thirty seconds or more before I continue on my way. - -“*Narn-seee, please!”* Louder this time, and with more laughter. - -I’m not turning again. It will serve no purpose. I know exactly what I’ll find: just a bunch of vapid faces staring up at me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}r Belshaw, my boss, wants to know if I have some figures for him. He barely lifts his eyes to acknowledge my entrance. - -“Mark, can you not do that?” I say, as I perch on the seat across from him. He doesn’t like it when I call him Mark. *Mr Belshaw* is his preferred address. Do I care? No. - -Mr Belshaw, *Mark*, is a big man. *Fat*, if you like. His favourite food is McDonald’s. He’s in his thirties, but his weight makes him look much older, perhaps in his fifties. His cheeks are cobwebbed with blood vessels and push his face up, turning his eyes into dark slits. The buttons on his striped shirt are doing far too much work. - -He finally looks up and realises that I am sitting at his desk and wants to know what it is that he shouldn’t do. Well, at least he heard that. - -“Call me on the PA. I hate that. I’ve got a phone.” Belshaw knows well enough that I have a phone. I think he does it because he knows it pis–annoys me. - -He makes some lame excuse, saying that I could have been on the shop floor. I register his gaze dropping to my legs. I’m wearing a reasonable-length skirt, below the knee, but sitting down has made it ride up a bit. Not much, but I imagine his brain has filled in the blanks. - -“You know I’m only going down there if I have to.” I’ve made several complaints about those women on the shop floor, but I’m not sure how much he cares. He probably thinks I’m still friends with them all. - -“Did you even try the phone? Do you think you could try that first next time? Is that fair?” He’s still looking at my legs, which is becoming a bit uncomfortable. I pull the hem of my skirt towards my knees. - -With considerable effort, Belshaw drags his gaze back up to my face. He has the nerve to ask me if I would go out to dinner. With him, he adds, to remove any confusion I may have. - - “We’ve had this discussion before, Mark. I don’t think it would be appropriate.” That’s what I say, but what I think is that I can’t imagine a world in which I say yes to that question. - -He tells me it’s just dinner, and his gaze drops back to my legs. - -“Here are the figures you wanted.” I slap the foolscap folder onto his desk and stand up. “Please remember the phone next time. I’ll be in my office.” - -After an awkward silence, he repeats his dinner invitation. He’s not going to drop it, is he? His stupid fat face looks up at me, eyes glittering, almost ready to drop a tear. - -I want to tell him to, to *eff-off*, but he gives me a wage packet every month and I’m not sure it would go down too well. Instead, I give him my best *I’m flattered but it’s never going to happen* smile as I leave. - -He mutters something about my backside under his breath as I close the door. I’m not going to look back. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}ll along the raised walkway I can see the women below from the corner of my eye. A few have their faces turned towards me, following my path along the walkway. I can’t hear it, but I have no doubt they’re whispering about me, probably something spiteful, bitchy. - -Why they can’t just be happy for me is beyond me. I’m the only female member of the management team, something I worked hard for. It took two years on the shop floor and two more years of night school too to attain my qualifications before I made it into the offices. It’s a role that was never previously considered suitable for a woman. Women’s roles tended to be restricted to the shop floor, plus the cleaners and the kitchen staff. Perhaps, because I started on the shop floor, they’re all jealous of me. - -Well, I say to hell with them. I put up with the crude jokes and lecherous eyes of fat Belshaw to get where I am today. Nothing is stopping any of them from doing the same. Perhaps, if there is, it’s because they don’t have a single brain cell between them. - -I walk back a little faster than I should and slam my office door a little firmer than I would have liked, rattling the glass again. I flop down into the comforting leather embrace of my office chair and worry about the repercussions of rejecting another of Belshaw’s advances. And there will be repercussions: having to work late; coming in on the weekends; spending time on the shop floor; all things he knows I don’t enjoy; but I think I would enjoy a dinner date with Belshaw even less. I’m prepared to put up with most things to avoid dinner with Belshaw. - -Outside I can hear muted laughter and chatter from the shop floor, maybe even the odd *Narn-seee please*, but that’s okay. I’m in here now and have the perfect solution for days like today, stored in the bottom drawer of my desk. I pull out the bottle of gin that’s been in there since Christmas. Company gift – probably picked by Belshaw in an attempt to get me drunk. I’ve never actually opened it. I keep it in there because… well, *because you never know*. - -Now more than ever, I want to open it and take a drink. I spin the bottle around so I can read the label. Getting caught drinking on the job could end my career before it’s even started, but would a swallow really hurt? Just one mouthful? - -“*Nancy.”* I jump and almost piss myself as the speaker crackles, and I knock the bottle over. It’s a damn good job I hadn’t opened it, there’d have been gin all over the desk and the floor. *“Nancy, please could you collect some post from Mr Belshaw’s office?”* - -That pr–*rrrrr*. I only spoke to him ten minutes ago, explicitly asking him to use my phone. I pick it up and I can hear the dial tone; there’s nothing wrong with it. - -Maybe if I’d agreed to dinner, or pulled my skirt a bit tighter, or higher up my thighs, that would have helped. Or maybe he’s just… a… *prick*. - -“*Nancy, please come to Mr Belshaw’s office.”* - -I give the bottle one last look. I know what will be waiting for me. - -I’m not disappointed. I step back out onto the walkway and this time the call is not whispered – the shop floor is *bouncing* with the call of *“Narn-seee please!”* - -I grab the safety rail with both fists, the faces looking up at me smiling and laughing, and I want to scream at them, I want to hawk up the biggest lugie I can muster and spit it down on them, but what I do instead is shout down at them, *“I don’t even* talk *like that!”* - -The shop floor erupts with raucous laughter. - -“Give it a rest, why don’t you?” My voice is edging towards a scream, but if it’s possible to hear me over the laughing and the sound of the machines they give no sign, and another round of *“Narn-seee please!”* springs up again. - -I bang the door of Belshaw’s office against the wall, sending a chip of paint into the air. “What?” I snap, no intention of sitting down and exposing my thighs for him again. - -He raises his eyebrows and asks who I think I’m speaking to. - -I’ve no wish to lose my job, not even for this idiot. “Sorry,” I manage. “It’s them bloody women.” - -He assures me it’s all done in jest, and chuckles as he speaks. He holds out a folder containing proofs of the new flyer, and asks if I could let him know my thoughts. He can’t wipe the smirk off his face. He knows what he’s doing. - -“You couldn’t have given me this ten minutes ago?” I snatch the folder from his hand. I hope he gets a paper cut. - -He asks me if I’ve had a chance to consider his dinner offer. - -I try to hide my shudder. “In the last ten minutes? Yes, Mark, I have. And I still think it’s inappropriate.” This time I close his office door carefully, deliberately, in the hopes that it will worry him, although he’s probably just looking at my ass again. - -I can’t be bothered with all that shop floor shit this time, so I run along the walkway, shoes clanging off the metal as I do, and slam my office door behind me. The gin is standing where I left it. I drop into my seat and open the folder that Belshaw has just given me. - -It’s exactly what he said: a flyer. Nothing more than an A5 piece of copy paper with our company logo on it and some drivel about what we do. I’m not even sure what thoughts he thinks I could possibly have about it beyond exactly that: *it’s drivel*. - -The flyer didn’t need looking at. Belshaw just wanted to embarrass me. I snatch up the gin. I’m bloody well going to, aren’t I? One will be okay, won’t it? Yes, I think it will, so I crack the cap, spin it so hard if goes flying, and since I don’t have a glass I take a drink straight from the bottle, the liquid searing my throat as it goes down. And as soon as I swallow, *oh*, the regret! If someone smells this on my breath… - -I take another slug. *Shit*. - -I go and find the cap, and once it’s back on I sit for some considerable time just cradling the bottle in my lap, time enough for the shadows in my office to lengthen. The flyer sits on the desk, ready for my assessment. It *sucks*. That’s my assessment. It’s a waste of time and money. I hope Belshaw got a good laugh out of running me across the factory on another bogus errand. - -As if on cue, the PA system crackles into life. - -“*Mr Belshaw’s office if you would, Nancy, please.”* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}lmost before the crackle-hiss dies away, I’m out of my seat and ripping open the door. - -“*Don’t say it!”* I scream at no one in particular. I lean over the walkway railing and point at the women below. *“Don’t you fucking say anything!”* - -I run my finger over their distant upturned faces. At that moment, if the machines weren’t running, you could’ve heard a pin drop. I hold their gaze for several seconds before looking away. I can’t express quite how satisfying it is to hear the silence behind me. It’s as if all my lottery numbers came up. My heart skips a beat, and I battle the urge to whistle as I stalk towards Belshaw’s office. - -These sorts of women only respond to being spoken to like that. They probably have husbands and boyfriends at home who shout “cook my dinner” and “clean the kitchen” and “don’t you fucking say anything” at them every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them got a smack too. If that’s all they understand then perhaps that’s how I’ll have to treat them. - -I’m almost to the office door when someone calls out, *“Narn-seee, please!”* - -There’s a round of laughter and seconds later they’re all chanting, it’s like something you’d hear at a football match, *“Narn-seee-please, Narn-seee-please!”* - -“*Fuck off!”* I yell back at them and offer my middle finger as punctuation. - -I don’t give Belshaw a chance to speak as I tear open his office door. “Can you hear that?” I demand, pointing back towards the braying harpies behind me. The fat fuck is trying not to smile, but like everything else, he’s not very good at it and his lips twitch. “If it keeps happening, I’m going to make a formal complaint.” - -His smile is gone in an instant, and he asks who I would make a complaint against. - - “Against them women.” He looks over my shoulder, pretending to not be entirely sure who I’m referring to. “Against *you*.” He places a hand on his chest in a *you surely can’t mean me* gesture. “Yes, you. I’ve asked you not to call me on that system, but you keep doing it.” - -He informs me that’s the way it’s always been done. He says I shouldn’t expect special treatment just because I have my own office now. He tells me he needs me to stay late tonight. Apparently he wants to look at some figures. To sweeten the deal, he says he has a bottle of wine, and we can even order in Chinese food. - -Looking at the thin smile on his fat face turns my stomach. I can imagine the figure he wants to look at. I feel my shoulders slump and my cheeks begin to burn. - -“I can’t tonight, Mark,” I say. “I’ve got a thing with a friend that I can’t get out of.” - -He brushes past my excuse, telling me not to worry, tomorrow night will be just fine, but this is important work stuff, Nancy, and so he’s going to have to insist. Some business won’t wait. - -He may as well say, Dinner, whether you like it or not. - -He winks at me and gets back to shuffling papers on his desk. I guess that’s me dismissed. I walk to the door, expecting him to call me back at any moment, and instead he tells me I look good from behind. - -I look back, and I’m shaking, but he’s already got his head down. Hard at work. - -Before I pull the door closed behind me, I take the key from the lock, and then I put it in and turn it from the outside, sealing him in his office, with his wine and his paperwork and his fat little daydreams of me. - -I go back to my office and collect my coat, my bag, and my bottle of gin, and then I close the door behind me and I hop down the steps to the shop floor, all accompanied by the usual chorus. The laughter stutters when I reach the floor and I pick my way between them and their machines, looking this one in the eye, then that one, then those. It picks up when I’ve passed them, but I’m not bothered, they can laugh all they want. I need to get moving, because some business won’t wait. - -There’s storage in the back. Aisles of shelves with replacement parts surround the machines on the shop floor. If a machine goes down, the knock-on effect on the rest of the production line can be catastrophic, and these machines break a lot. But I’m not interested in productivity, I’m interested in getting away from the voices behind me, getting on with what needs doing. - -The aisles seem to go on forever, and I smile despite the situation. I wonder if Gary from HR had any of the girls down here. There is a reasonable chance he did. The deeper I get into the factory, the more the noise behind me recedes. I can still hear the constant drone of the machines, but thankfully the women’s endless prattle is gone. - -I count the aisle numbers because I know exactly where to find what I need. I see them now. Damn, there’s only three. I’d like four, but I think I can make it work. I give a final look around to make sure I’m alone down here then I pick up the three big chains and throw them over my shoulder. The padlocks are here too, and I grab them as well.The first emergency exit is three aisles over. It takes me seconds to reach it. - -There’s a part of me that knows what I’m doing is wrong, but it feels like that part is not connected to the rest of me. I loop one of the chains through the push-bar handles and snap a padlock in place. It’s just a short trip around the wall until I reach the second. This one is easier than the first, my brain barely registering a protest as I wind the chain into place. The third is easier still. - -When I reach the final exit, I look around before removing my cardigan. One of the forklift trucks moves backwards and forwards down one of the aisles. The driver is engaged in an animated conversation with someone I can’t see. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is he’s not looking at me. - -I spread my cardie on the floor, fish the bottle from my bag, and I pour half the gin over it. The aisles here are loaded with tarpaulins, some fresh, some used and grimy with oil; the rest of the booze I slosh onto the nearest of them. In the bag I find my last old pack of fags and, yes, there’s the disposable lighter stashed inside. It’s almost empty, just a corner drip of fluid at the bottom of the translucent yellow plastic. - -I thumb the wheel. - -Spark. - -Fire. - -I light the dusty cigarettes one by one and flick them at the tarpaulins, then touch the flame to my cardie and the gin-stinking material catches light with a *puff*. I kick the smouldering bundle and it slides under a wooden pallet holding several large cardboard boxes. - -I wait until I see the first wisps of smoke, then push through the final emergency exit into the bright sunlight. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the brightness of the afternoon, then I spot my car in the car park. I want to run, but resist the urge. I don’t want to attract any attention, and besides, it will be several minutes for a real blaze to take hold. - -I’m reaching for my keys as the fire alarm sounds. Fire drills have been run in this factory before – not many – and I can imagine most of the office staff cursing lost time. They’ll be gathering their things, finishing off their cups of tea, pulling on jackets and trudging towards the exits. The women on the shop floor, however, will be glad of a chance to get away from the hot machines and out into the sunlight, so I can imagine them being quite excited. - -Climbing into my car dulls the noise of the building alarm. As I start the engine, I can see people begin to emerge from the front entrance. Some look mildly irritated, none particularly panicked. That will change when they realise the women on the shop floor can’t get out because the emergency exits are blocked. All but one, anyway. - -I pull out of my parking space and drive towards that remaining exit. The doors are still closed when I get there, so I nudge my car towards them, stopping just before my bumper makes contact. - -I turn off the engine. Soon I’ll have to run, but I’m going to sit here for a moment, just to make sure. The people coming out through the front are showing a bit more urgency now. Shirts and ties and smart business attire: management and admin staff, no shop floor people. I can’t see Belshaw, but unless he smashed his window and jumped out, he’ll still be wondering why his office door won’t open. - -I wonder what that fat face will look like as it melts. Or perhaps he’ll get out, perhaps there’s a second key. I’ve no way of knowing. I can only hope that he hasn’t. The thought of his face as he tries the handle will keep me smiling for a long time. If nothing else, he won’t have to worry about this month’s sales figures for much longer. - -There’s a dull *whump* as something explodes. I wind down the window and look up: dark, oily smoke is drifting from the vents in the factory roof. I can hear screams from inside. - -Right in front of my bonnet, the twin doors of the emergency exit pop open – by about ten centimetres, until they hit my bumper with a satisfying *clunk*. I can hear people rattling the door in front of me, but I don’t think they’ll push my car out of the way in a hurry. - -I open the driver’s side door and step out. - -Arms, hands, and fingers reach through the gap between the exit doors, wide-eyed faces peering past them with desperation. I know those faces, and they know me. - -“Nancy!” calls a familiar voice, and for once they say it right. “Nancy, please!” - -Soon it’s a veritable chorus. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Nancy, Please** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952983423501311).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/praedial-larceny.md b/content/issue-36/praedial-larceny.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8e3ef38d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/praedial-larceny.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,322 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Praedial Larceny" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Wayne McCray -copyright: '© Wayne McCray 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "How many ways can people do crime? Innumerable. What types of crime do people tend to write about? That's a smaller subset. There are some things common to our depictions of criminality: the vicarious revealing of motive, means, and opportunity for example; but sometimes the explorations go deeper. Stories can examine the impact of crime. They can also examine the impact of our responses to it." - -image: images/Larceny10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Andre Hunter](https://unsplash.com/photos/man-wearing-black-crew-neck-t-shirt-zwXuzFr3mLs) and [AndreyC](https://pixabay.com/photos/locusts-swarm-meadow-insects-5952699/)." - -type: stock -slug: praedial-larceny -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t is a humid Saturday. Mzimu Tennison has been in motion since before daylight. Now at his third stop, a backroad somewhere in Isola, Mississippi. He unloads two yellow wheelbarrows and several shovels off the bed of his spaceship silver, mud-caked, 2018 Limited 4WD Super Duty F-450 pick-up. The tools get placed behind the seven large grain bins. His task now done, he jumps back into his truck and maneuvers around mounds of crushed gravel, then motors down a winding unpaved road, kicking up brownish-red dust while passing endless fields of soybeans. - -Mzimu soon reaches 49-West. His heavy foot rarely lifts up or off the gas pedal for the brake, unless necessary. Cosmic jungle music blasts through lowered windows while he ignores the posted speed limit. Behind the steering wheel, his head bounces with the beat. He finally turns left onto State Highway 3, a narrow, two-lane blacktop which goes straight through the Township of Moorhead and past Mississippi Delta Community College. His road view isn't much to look at – simply an extensive, dull, and flat landscape unless one includes the occasional cluster of small forests in the distance. - -The straightaway soon becomes a bend and there the town of Moorhead and the junior college appear, ending all the landscape monotony. It is a beautiful but small campus, with a green stretch of road graced by rows of historical street lamps and a succession of old and new red brick buildings – some more elaborate than the others – lined with colorful flowers, pecan trees, and magnolias. Since it is the weekend, the sidewalks lack the usual foot traffic. It doesn't take long for him to cruise through the campus and across the railroad tracks marking the boundary. - -Mzumi rolls up to the town's only traffic light. He looks right and notices a beat-up, rust-colored Toyota pick-up truck parked roadside in a vacant grass lot, watermelons on the tailgate. One of them lays split open, seedless, glowing bright red. Alongside it is seated a black couple in lawn chairs underneath a small patio tent, the woman working a church fan hard. Before them, two long foldable tables with a variety of garden vegetables neatly laid out. - -Something about it and them doesn't feel right; so much so, his gut tightens. - -Mzumi doesn't stop, but slows; he looks upon them and their set-up and contemplates doubling-back to go confront them; the Double Quick (a Mississippi version of Circle-K) parking lot is right there. Instead, he decides against his intuition and keeps going. Why waste his words? - -US Highway 82 is up ahead and his dashboard clock reads 8:03 am, so he makes a quick stop at the Dollar General. Inside, Mzumi is surprised. Unlike the others, this store isn't in utter shambles. Merchandise isn't blocking or laying in the middle of the aisles. The place looks professional, clean, and orderly. Maybe, this is what it is supposed to look like before shoppers run in and out of it. He crouches and grabs a yellow handbasket and begins shopping for junk food. - -A short and plainly-built brown girl comes in, resting a fairly fat baby on her left hip, and starts talking freely with the cashier – likely a friend. The young mother's free arm moves about emphatically, cell phone in hand. Mzumi, at first, believes she is an upset migrant farm worker, based on her speech, the bandana headwrap, dirty hoodie front and denim jeans from all the constant hand brushing. The dirt stains even appear on her child, her backside, both knees, and shoes. - -"Anna Marie!" says the cashier, taking a deep whiff. "Girl? You smell like you look and what is that child chewing on?" - -"A piece of cucumber." - -"Cucumber? You don't have nookie?" - -"I lost it somewhere on this farm, picking vegetables," Anna Marie replies. "I tried looking for it, but it was too dark." - -"Picking vegetables?" says the cashier. "For money?" - -"No! Even though I could use some. Girl, don't you know? Grocery prices have gone through the roof and food stamps don't buy as much anymore. I mean, it's bad out here." - -"Ain't that the truth." - -"And you know I ain't lying. Have you been to the County Market, Shoppers Value, or Wal-Mart lately?" - -"I know, I know." - -Shortly thereafter, he is standing in line. Both women continue to chat about high grocery prices and being black and broke. They talk around Mzumi until the cashier finally pauses their discussion so she can perform her actual job. Anna Marie steps aside, readjusting her hip-cradled baby. Mzumi comes forward and pays for his Haribo gummy worms, Gatorade, Hershey chocolate bars, Jack Links' beef jerky, and NTense energy drinks. All the while, the child is fixated on him, her brown eyes bright and wide with owl curiosity. Mzumi smiles back then collects his bagged items. - -"Thank you," he says. "You ladies take care." - -"You too," says the cashier. - -"I'm trying," says Anna Marie, readjusting the baby again. - -The sliding doors open and Mzumi exits. - -Heading back to his pick-up, he takes a peek inside the young mother’s car – the only one in the lot besides his – and there in the back beside the baby's car seat sit four grocery bags, full of vegetables. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}arlier, back at the patio tent another conversation starts. - -Willie Mae: "Was that who I think it was?" - -"Yep, that was him," says Edgar. - -"What is he doing over here?" - -"They say the man manages another man's farms." - -"I don't care about that," she says. "But did you see what he did?" - -"What'd he do? I didn't see anything." - -"Blind as always," she says. "God wasted his sight on you." - -"That ain't what you said," he says. - -"So they worked on that day," she says. "What about now?" - -"I'm not studying him," Edgar says. "None whatsoever." - -"He might come back and say something." - -"And so what if he does, then what?" He says, "He can't do anything. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing, okay." - -Right then, a clean white Mercedes G 550 SUV rolls up and captures their attention. The driver's side door opens and a broad-butt, big Afro, dark skin girl steps out in her blue and white sorority colors. She strides towards them, hips swinging fluidly, eyes on what they have on display. - -"Good morning," she says. - -"Morning," they both reply. - -Willie Mae is a short, plum-face, heavy-set woman, who now sits up and begins looking at the girl up and down. - -"You look like somebody I know. Where're you from?" she asks. - -"Itta Bena." - -"Are you one of Jessup Wilbur's daughters?" Wille Mae asks. "You kind of favor him." - -"Yes ma'am. That's my daddy," she replies. "I'm the oldest." - -"The one that went away. Sarah, right?" says Willie Mae. - -"Yes ma'am." - -"You look just like him. How is he? I hadn't seen him for a while." - -"He's fine," says Sarah. "Just getting old and as stubborn as ever." - -"That's him, alright," says Edgar. "Now Willie, let that girl shop." - -Sarah shops, but their conversation continues. They talk about things which didn't concern them, about their peoples, Mississippi in general, and whether she misses home and prefers Louisiana. Sarah gives them a sort of smile along with respectful answers; but finally, after much friendship and giving the items more than the adequate sniff and eye-ball test, she gets to the point: "Is it my imagination they look and smell so fresh?" - -"Not at all. Straight from the earth," says Edgar, a skinny, sun-darkened man with striking features. His face is so narrow and long his wide nose dominates it. "Hand pick them this morning." - -"I can still feel the dirt," Sarah says. "So how much for the bunches of turnip and mustard greens?" - -Edgar gives a nice price. - -"And the okra?" she asks. - -Satisfied, she opens and reaches into her purse and money exchanges hands. Willie Mae puts the church fan in her opposite, reaches down into a green reusable tote bag, and hands her husband a few old and wrinkled plastic grocery bags. Edgar baggages Sarah's produce. Turnips go into one, mustards in another two, as well as the prepackaged bags of purple and green okra. - -"Those watermelons over there, they look sweet." - -"Thump certified," says Edgar. - -"I'll take one." - -Edgar grabs the prettiest and biggest, then takes hold of all the bags, and follows her to the car. She presses the key remote which pops open the rear door and there he carefully loads them beside her luggage and other foods and items likely gathered from her visit. She thanks him and closes the rear door. - -"I'll let my daddy know we met and how you asked about him," says Sarah. "And next time I am in town, I'll let you know how my greens turn out." - -"You do that," he says. "I still suggest smoked pigtails or ham hocks for your flavoring?" - -"I know, but I prefer smoked turkey-necks," she replies. "Less fat." - -"I never ate them like that," Edgar replies. - -"It's healthier," she says. - -"To each his own." - -Edgar walks away and watches her slowly drive off. The black girl honks and waves goodbye through the window, driving toward the Junior College, and back to the State of Louisiana. He sees her personalized plate – Z WMN – then returns to his set-up and straightens his produce on both tables after a thorough inspection. - -"Nice young lady," says Willie Mae. "From good people." - -"Yeah, she is," Edgar replies, now sitting down in his lawn chair. "But I don't know about putting smoked turkey necks in greens." - -"Everybody ain't high on the hog like you." - -"That's because they don't know what they're missing." - -Willie Mae shakes her head, then uses the lull to pivot back to their earlier discussion. "That again," says Edgar, crossing his legs, and lighting a cigar. After a few puffs and exhales, he eventually speaks his mind, ending the one-sided dialogue. "Alright already. So what's he going to do, huh?" - -"He might go home." - -"You said that already, but I doubt it. Not him and besides, that church group won't show up for another hour or two. They got time." - -"That's what you say, but you didn't see him read us." - -"You're looking to much into nothing," says Edgar. "But, hey, if you want to call them, call them." - -"Don't get uppity with me," says Willie Mae. "The man saw us and I just got this feeling he ain't going to let it pass." - -"If it'll make you feel better," says Edgar, "then call them. Just know we won't have as much to sell to folks if you do that." - -Willie Mae dials out and a voice answers on the other end. She tells her son they better get-gone and do it now. "Just do what I say," she says. "Take whatever you've picked and get out." She hangs up and drops the phone in her lap, frustrated by the stubbornness coming from her eldest child. - -"I swear woman, you're so damn scary," says Edgar. "That's what you is – scary." - -"Shut up and do what you do best." - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}E{{}}xtraterrestrial funk blasts. Mzimu is back behind the steering wheel, chewing on gummy worms. His open power drink in the cup holder. He speeds down US Highway 82. Already several miles east of Moorhead, somewhere in Leflore County, he turns onto another county dirt road and arrives at another collection of grain bins. - -Mzumi parks next to a white Ford F-150 extra-cab pick-up truck, as dirty as his. He observes the propane man on the premises, refilling four huge gas tanks, so he lifts his arm and whistles. The truck driver takes off his baseball cap and waves it. Mzumi looks upward. There, he finds his crew atop of the grain bin, hard at work. He strides to and up the spiral staircase and across the lengthy catwalk until he reaches them and there hands each guy a bottle of Gatorade and his favorite junk food from the bag. - -"Thanks Bwana," says Embian. - -"Same here," says Hendrik. "And good morning." - -"That's what's up, Ghost," says Johannes. - -Mzimu isn't overly fond of the description, but accepts it. Many know him as the whitest white man who isn't a white man. A brawny fellow with skin drained of color, thick pink lips, broad nose, reddish-blond hair, and sharp hazel eyes. The given nickname coincides with the arrival of these South Africans, Afrikaners familiar with his kind. Several years back, Pennybaker Farms, the mom and pop farm he works for, used the H-2A visa program to hire them to come to the Deep South to do the seasonal farm work for eight to ten months, labor once done by local black Mississippi farmers and field hands across the Delta. And when these coevals first meet Mzumi, Johannes, now a longstanding migrant worker, said what the rest thought and called him Ghostface, and it stuck. - -"Any problems with the dryer?" asks Mzimu. - -"None," replies Johannes. "None whatsoever." - -"How about the seals?" - -"Nice and tight," says Embian. - -"I figure in another two months, give or take," says Hendrik, "these soybeans should be dried and ready for the market." - -"Good," says Mzumi. - -As the day brightens, the humidity thickens, and sunlight bounces off the silo's dome. Mzumi dons a pair of cheap sunglasses to protect his vision. He further informs them of the tools left at the Isola grain bin facility and the work required there. "Tomorrow, you two take the backhoe from the shop and use it to spread out the crushed gravel. Firm up and level as much of the ground as possible." - -"And the loading dock?" Hendrik asks. - -"It too," says Mzumi. - -From up high, they take a moment to enjoy their cheap breakfast and look out on the carved-up landscape, irregular in pattern and shades of brown and green, but meant for agriculture. In the distance, Hendrik's sharp eyes spot a two-vehicle caravan. A strange sighting since this less driven backroad is used mainly by farmers. To see non-farm equipment on it begs questions. Soon both vehicles cross the railroad tracks, and as they near their make and model become evident. The lead one is a discolored police-auction Crown Victoria, full of passengers. The other, behind it, an old Chevy C-10 pick-up truck. A black woman looks up through the passenger window and points at the grain bin. They suddenly sped up. Mzumi notices this, including their haul: what looks like a truckload of watermelons. - -"Sonofabitches," says Mzumi. - -He immediately thinks about the girl holding her baby. She picked just enough for a week's worth of dinners. Although displeased, he applauded her decency. Not that black couple though. Nor these folks in the two-car caravan. Theft is underway, but he wants to know for certain, because if true, it must come to an end by any means. - -"Bwana, what's up?" - -"I got to go," says Mzumi. "Just finish up here. I need to go look into something." - -Mzumi leaves fast. He hurries back across the catwalk, bounds down the spiral staircase, then gets into his truck and hauls ass. The South Africans look on with awe, their eyes alive yet confused, but quite impressed by his agility, particularly at how fast he descended from grain bin roof to truck to driving across the railroad tracks. What they don't know is Mzumi's home isn't far, not for the country, only minutes away, located somewhere near Berclair, a fertile-rich township with two stop signs and a population of 1629. - -He doesn't slow down even with the threat of skidding out of control. Rocks and dust fly everywhere. Occasionally, an insect meets its demise on the dusty windshield, leaving behind a mucus splat. And soon, up ahead, amorphous shapes become solid forms. Unfamiliar cars line the gravel road in front of his 11-acre garden. A garden he set-up this year at the behest of the Catholic Church and their Feed the People program. Mzumi slams on the brake so hard it turns the truck sideways. - -"Look at these motherfuckers," he says, jumping out, music still booming and dust floating around him. "They're in it like it's theirs." - -Scattered throughout his garden, uninvited bodies. Some stand and look up, and come forward, but others don't. Those who show up, black men and women alike, of varying ages, plead with him. To convince him to let them keep what they picked along with promises they will never return. Mzumi refuses. He tells them to unload it all and to go and go quickly, which they do. And not being gun-shy, he retrieves his handgun and fires it skyward: "Everybody out!" - -He pulls the trigger again, again, and again. Gunshots send the remaining black folks scrambling as fast as possible for their cars. He flashes his weapon often, making sure they depart empty-handed and until they all clear out. He then walks sections of his garden and takes inventory. Everywhere he looks, he finds trampled rows and theft left undone. Plastic laundry baskets and five-gallon buckets sit full of red onions, mustard and turnip greens, hot peppers, carrots, okra, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, peanuts, and beans. Nearly every watermelon is gone. - -Epithets flow of the foulest kind. Mzumi curses all the way back to his truck. And when he gets there, coming at him is a white passenger van. Close behind it, an old orange 1970 Dodge truck with a long trailer in tow, hauling a bunch of tied down large blue Coleman ice coolers. He glances at his watch and sees the time. - -Two nuns exit the drivers' side, Sister Rita and Sister Donald, and a diverse color of latinas follow them. Parishioners dressed in varying kinds of long-sleeve tops, their faces hidden by scarves except for the eyes, in denim jeans, galoshes, donning various brim headwear, and all wearing some kind of Camelbak. Yellow and blue rubber gloves hold black picking buckets. They come every four days to pick crops from his flourishing garden. As long as they provide him a bushel, the church kitchen keeps the rest. A bargain beneficial for them both, until now. - -"Mr. Tennison," says Sister Rita. "I didn't expect to see you out here." - -"Me neither," says Mzumi. - -"Is something wrong?" asks Sister Donald, alarmed at the sight of a fisted handgun and looking at the baskets and buckets lying in the road. - -"Kind of," he says. "I ran off a bunch of low-life niggers." - -"Oh my Lord," replies Sister Donald. - -"I'll notify the sheriff," says Sister Rita, reaching for her phone. - -"Don't bother," says Mzumi. "I got something else in mind." - -"I pray it doesn't require a gun, does it?" asks Sister Donald. - -"It won't," he replies. - -Nonetheless, Sister Donald and Rita's eyes never avert from his left hand. To allay their discomfort, Mzumi puts his handgun on the front seat. The truck is shut off and door locked. - -"Hold up," he says, calling for the ladies before they spread out and go into particular sections of his garden. "Ladies! You can take these, they're yours," pointing out what is in the road. "Also, any stray basket or bucket you find out there, please bring them with you, okay? Because after today, don't bother coming back. So I suggest you pick as much as possible for as long as possible." - -Sister Donald says: "What? Why do you say that?" - -"I can't stand nigger-shit," says Mzumi. "And this is what this is. It makes me wonder how long they've been at it." - -"Okay," says Sister Rita. "Yes. Theft is bad, but it isn't the worst sin. Maybe they're hungry and desperate." - -"Hungry? Desperate? C'mon now, don't be naive," says Mzumi. "I know what that looks like and that's not it. Greed is what I chased off, fucking greed, plain and simple." - -"Language," says Sister Rita, "language." - -"Damn that and damn them," says Mzumi. "But I got something for their black asses." - -"That doesn't sound very Christian," says Sister Donald. - -"It sure doesn't," says Sister Rita. - -"I got the devil in me now," says Mzumi. "My mind is made up." - -"I think you should reconsider, whatever it is," says Sister Rita. - -"I suggest you ladies get after it," says Mzumi. "Pick as much as you can." - -Albeit displeased and after much debate, they all go off into his garden and start picking. So for the next several hours, twelve latinas pick non-stop, as fast and as much as possible. Meanwhile, both Sisters and two other latinas stay roadside. They collect, carry, and dump bucket after bucket of vegetables into blue ice coolers capable of holding at least two bushels of produce. And today, they must try and fill up all twenty four coolers. Something they haven't done since the first day, almost two months ago. - -With the ladies in the field, Mzumi drives off to his open-front barn shed. There, he climbs into one of his John Deere tractors, cranks it, and then attaches its chisel plow. Pretty soon, the green monster is parked where the garden and gravel road meets. Its appearance attracts many eyes. He climbs out and sits on its rooftop. And while time slips into the past, he thinks about what it took to make this garden possible and to turn it into a charitable donation. He also makes some calls, informs Pennybaker Farms and his South African crew on why he is taking the remainder of the day off, and receives their pity and outright disgust. - -Hours later, at three o'clock, a reedy whistle blows and a nun yells, "Quitting time, ladies." - -It is hotter and more humid than earlier. Sweaty, exhausted, and dirty, latinas rise up and come out of the garden. They emerge one by one, buckets in both hands, a slow procession toward the passenger van and truck. There they unload what they have. Insofar, until there isn’t any more room left. A conversation ensues on what to do with the extras buckets, and Sister Donald suggests sitting them on their laps. - -Right then, Mzumi rides up in his John Deere and climbs down. He looks at their fatigued faces and asks, "Did you get it all?" - -"As much as we could, Mr. Tennison," says Sister Donald. - -"Good." - -"So that's what you're going to do, huh?" - -"Yep." - -"I still don't agree," says Sister Donald. "This is going to hurt so many people, including the Church." - -Mzumi doesn't care. His mind is made up. He tells them they better double check their straps, which they do. The nuns and latinas file back into their vehicles, saddened by the current situation. Mzumi watches them drive down the dirt road until they disappear. - -"It's for the best," he says to himself, then climbs back into his tractor and begins chopping up the entire garden. From one end to the other, north and south, east and west, multiple times, turning over the earth until it is thoroughly plowed under. - -And when done, perfectly fresh fruits and vegetables are buried in the soil. The garden is ruined. Mzumi makes sure. Produce is strewn all over, smashed and cut up. The gravel road is colored in red, green, and yellow skin and white flesh. - -The air and dug up earth give off a strong sweet fragrance. But in time, the food will decompose. A rotten stench will follow. Mosquitoes, flies, wildlife, and stray animals will come. "Let them feast," he says aloud. He rather them than those thieving lowlifes. - -Even though the idea of destroying so much food hurts, it's necessary. Inches given become miles. Sure, many will be upset. Some might point fingers and assign blame. Mzumi doesn’t give a fuck. "Talk to the greedy," he will say. "Don't ask me." - -He then drives his tractor back to the shop. - -Along the way, he starts singing. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Praedial Larceny** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952983953501258).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.md b/content/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.md deleted file mode 100644 index acd6f72a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,146 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Summer in Duncanny" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Peter Wynd -copyright: '© Peter Wynd 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Although we've steered clear of the speculative in this issue, our final piece of the year teeters on the edge, just in that way of being not obviously the real world. And is it crime fiction? Well, you know when someone says of something 'That's criminal, that is' – maybe it's crime fiction like that." - -image: images/Duncanny10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Matea Brajdić](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-view-of-the-rolling-hills-in-the-distance-KSoi16gJUrk), [Hadija](https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-and-gray-rocks-near-body-of-water-during-daytime-G50HOn6duMM), [Sandi Benedicta](https://unsplash.com/photos/white-milk-in-clear-glass-bottle-8Pp9M13xuzs), and [Prateek Katyal](https://unsplash.com/photos/green-palm-plant-on-brown-wooden-table-8scw5KRQ3kg)." - -type: stock -slug: summer-in-duncanny -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}*ake me a snack and spread the day over*, Jessie used to sing. She was the only one with any talent around here. Even though Richard must’ve thought the same, we rarely spoke about her singing. In a village as small as our own, thoughts about the voice of another man’s wife were better left unsaid. Still, I always held her in quiet admiration. - -During the summer in Duncanny, her song spoke to my heart. The days were slow, sometimes so slow they stayed in place. These were the days you spread. Like butter. You churned them in spring, and then you spread them over in summer. They always tasted the same. - -And yet something changed last summer. It happened so slowly and unobtrusively no one saw it coming. Perhaps it was the heat that lulled our minds to sleep. Folks ambled around as if their legs were made of hay. Kids sat on the wheat sheaves and watched the sun set and fade each day. The air was so stiff you had to carve through it, and the grass so green it put you to sleep. - -Out of all things, the bugs were probably the worst. They crawled onto every surface, atop every living and unliving thing. It seemed like they would eventually crawl into our mouths if we didn’t whisk them away. The buzz of nectar-drunk bumblebees was the drone to which our days unfolded. It wasn’t the time to work. - -The only thing marking the passage of time was the arrival of the milk cart. It was driven by a lean and unremarkable man. He had a straight nose, lips closed in a line, and small brown eyes that seemed to skip past your homestead and already be on their way to the next one. I’d never spoken to this man. He wasn’t from around here, and the sign ONE BOTTLE – ONE SHULLY made any verbal exchange unnecessary. - -Every Monday the man toured Duncanny and the neighboring villages. Sometimes he brought rumors from the eastern baronies, sometimes he did not. Every Monday he asked the same money for the same quality of milk. One shully was a good price, and the milk was decent, too. I’d be tempted to call it *great*, but then perhaps it was the summertime that made it better. Drinking that fresh, chilly milk in the mornings was the high point of my days. - -Jessie used to buy a bottle whenever the cart stopped by. She’d walk up to the man, put one shully in his calloused hand, and more often than not she’d smile. Richard would’ve already been working the field by then, but he’d come to the porch and nod to the man, and the man would nod back. Then the cart would roll out into the distance and the clanking of milk bottles would slowly fade away. - -Soon Jessie would spend her mornings rocking herself on the porch, waiting for the milk cart to arrive. It was her little ritual. - -*It makes breakfast so much better*, she told me with a smile. - -She had a beautiful smile. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he year Richard brought Jessie back from a small town up north was a year of carnival in Duncanny. She immediately had everyone under her sway, from Gertrude to humble Smacky. She even made the old woman Harriot laugh, and this hag—god rest her soul—was hardly a joy in her last days. And Jessie, she loved the kids. She played and danced with them. She’d make puppet shows about the lands beyond the baronies, where dragons breathed locusts and tigers were made of steel. She was what our village needed, but Duncanny, you see, it was all quicksand. - -I wish I had talked to her more back then. Sure, sometimes she would play with kids, sometimes she would gossip with the village’s circle of cronies, but mostly she just kept her own company. - -*Hey frisky day,* she used to sing. *Blue as a jay, fly frisky day, hey.* - -Over the years, her laughter quietened. Her passion was a losing stream, and rocks started showing underneath the surface. The strings with which she knitted herself so effortlessly into the web of Duncanny began to green with mildew. She had something the other folks couldn’t have, you see, and worth such as this attracts unwanted attention, particularly as it can’t be measured in a number of pigs. - -*She’ll get used to the way things are,* humble Smacky said, not long after Jessie had first arrived. He’d not say it to her face, of course – who could? But he was right. Jessie got used to it. - -Rich thought that kids might help, and she must’ve been thinking it too. But one night, after a depressing amount of booze, Rich told me this couldn’t be. I didn’t ask questions. I simply sat with an empty bottle in hand. We opened another. That might’ve explained why Jessie liked playing with kids. It might explain why her smile often felt misplaced, too. - -Either way, while the summer was hard on all of us, it must’ve been the hardest for her. Instead of dancing in the sun, after a time she barely got up from her chair. The folks I met at the village market all but forgot about her, and I don’t blame them; in this heat your thoughts simply rolled over and died. - -And so, the days crawled on. Slow, easy days, in which it was as much of a bother to live as it was to stay inside your mind. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he change that happened – the first change of any relevance I could recount from that summer – was not something to expect. Nothing like the tales of soldiers burning the wheatfields in eastern baronies, or the arrival of some new and vicious pest. The change that assaulted our unassuming village was the change in the price of the milk. You’d have to imagine the stunned look on our faces when we saw the corrected sign on the milk-cart. ONE BOTTLE – ONE SHULLY, it read, with an annotation *and one centiff* written thinly in red chalk below. *This slapperstick’s gotta be shittin’ us*, I heard the woodman Jonas say, and I agreed. - -Of course, this one extra centiff didn’t really change anything. A hundred centiffs made one shully, so no one would get poor from that. But one extra shully for each hundred bottles sold wouldn’t make this feller a lord, either. So the question was – why bother? To piss us off? We were a tight community, you know, and we didn’t like provocations. But that inconspicuous man just tightened the line of his lips and kept at the price, no matter how much folks bugged him to stop being an ass. He was awful strict about it, too – if you didn’t have a centiff to spare, tough luck kitten, no milk for you today. - -We grumbled, but in the end we still bought the milk; if we were lucky in spare coinage that was. It was still fair trade, and given the merciless sun I suppose even two whole shullies for one bottle would be fair for us, too – after all, we were all going quietly crazy. Some folks thought it must’ve got to the feller as well, baking the lid of his skull and burning a few strings inside. - -The price change stirred rumors, but after some sizzling it all went quiet again. - -Then the unbelievable happened: the price of milk rose again. ONE BOTTLE – ONE SHULLY, *and two centiffs* hand-written below. - -There was something off about it. Folks of Duncanny could smell change as well as they could sniff the rot in meat, and this particular change seemed foul, insidious, an intrusion upon our sleepy lives. Gertrude was talking about how it must’ve been the barony that sent the outsider on us. Old woman Harriot claimed that the milk-feller would put her into an early grave, and even humble Smacky voiced curses nobody thought he’d known. Rich saw it for nothing more than a pain in the rear. - -Out of all people, only Jessie didn’t seem disturbed by the price change. On the contrary, she was in such good spirits she didn’t buy one bottle, but two. *A woman has her appetite,* she told him as the next Monday came around. - -The following week, the price rose to one shully and *three*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}o all insults the milk-seller responded quickly and offhandedly. Some fellas swatted him away with brooms, and in Jonas’s case, a rake, but then the milk-seller avoided Jonas’s homestead, dooming his family to a milkless summer, and after that few were brave enough to provoke the man’s ire. Even though folks were more perplexed than they’d been when a two-headed foal was born last spring, most of Duncanny still bought the milk. - -*The gobbersmack’s playin’ ye*, old woman Harriot told them, more hag-like than ever, *playin’ ye how he pleases*. But there was no helping it. No homesteads had a cow at their disposal – Jonas’s family had had one, but they killed it the previous winter for food. Most of us had chickens and pigs, but no matter how hard you cranked them, they didn’t give milk. Not any you’d want to drink. - -So the milk-seller carried on, his prices high, unpunished much like a lord. The fear of further inflation hung above the village like a dark cloud on an empty sky. - -Everywhere but over Jessie. - -*How about we take* six *bottles today?* she asked Rich. *Let’s make these mornings a bit sweeter.* - -Rich tried to reason with her, but she hadn’t been this set on something for months. Sure, Jessie had her whims, but to such degree? *He demands three centiffs, she buys six bottles?* Even humble Smacky wouldn’t have doubled down on a raise like that. - -But Jessie insisted, so Rich ordered her to wait on the porch while he dealt with the man. He paid his six shullies, plus eighteen centiffs he dug from the pocket of his last-year work-pants. The milk-bottles were large; it was difficult to carry two in one hand. So the milk-seller helped carry the first batch of four bottles, and then Rich took the last two on his own, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was staring at his back, the feeling so strong it was like a horsefly gnawing through his shirt. - -When Rich relayed the details to me and asked me what I made of it all, I could do nothing but shrug. I was happy for Jessie, though. She took upon herself doing something more absurd than the man had accomplished with his price changes. It seemed the humor was getting back to her. - -One day I visited their household while Rich was working in the fields. On my way I picked some gillyflowers and wrapped them in a bouquet. They were rich-pink inside and creamy-pale near the edges. I didn’t care what Rich would think – Jessie was my friend, and a man could gift his friend some flowers. - -She was on the porch, watching the slow sway of wheat. I said the gillyflowers reminded me of the way she’d blushed when she was playing with the kids. She smiled at that, but the smile was greasy, like butter spread on her face. It was the smile of honey-fat lords from her old puppet shows, indifferent to the world around them. - -We talked, about the price of milk, the aggravating flies, Gertude’s sour moods… but the words felt sticky, as if jumbling them into a sentence of any importance required a terrible amount of effort, and Jessie clearly wasn’t in the mood for helping. Soon enough I left and went back to my homestead. - -I never saw her again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}ext week, when the cart rode by Rich’s homestead, he simply stared at it, stony-faced, without saying a word. Jessie watched it too, and after the dust had settled, she went back to the house. The new price for a bottle read one shully *twelve.* - -As the news reached other homesteads, Duncanny exploded. There was a hasty gathering at the market square, where some suggested establishing a group of good-doers to persuade the greedy feller to change his ways with the prodding of pitchforks. - -*Who are we to be treated like this?* cried Rich. *Twelve centiffs, twenty centiffs, and then what?* It seemed as if a steel tiger wandered out from one of Jessie’s stories and found its way into his flesh. *We, good folk, pay hard coin to this dog, and for what? To be mocked? To be laughed at?* He swept the crowd with his gaze. *I don’t want to hear of buying that robber’s milk from any one of you. We’ll hold firm until the price goes down!* - -It seemed all of Duncanny shouted back, *We’ll hold!* - -Me? I didn’t shout. Call me a pessimist but I knew this lot, I’ve smelled their sweat for the better part of my life. What of old woman Harriot, who knew that her days were a’coming? What of humble Smacky, who got addicted to whatever fell into his dirty hands? What of every poor sod in the village who wished for nothing more but to make the days a bit more bearable? I knew how it would end, and so it did. As the long, sticky-hot week dragged on and the milk-seller’s return drew slowly nearer, the talk of holding firm hushed down. They’d take his milk, they all would. So would I. - -Only Rich held firm. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hat Monday, Rich woke to an empty bed beside him. Jessie had never been an early bird, but this wasn’t reason to worry given her headstrong ways. He went out to work the field, but felt a little more concerned when he returned to an empty house for lunch. He checked at his neighbors’ and rode to the market. Then he started to worry. - -Jessie had disappeared. - -Rich looked for her all over Duncanny, and even checked in the neighboring villages: he took Sudbury to the east, and he sent me north to Craydon. Not a sign of her, nor any hint of where she might’ve gone. - -Tired and weary after a long day of searching, Rich returned home as the sun was beginning to set. He saw something then, something he hadn’t spotted before in his hurry, and all at once the last of his strength left him. - -Lined up in the shadow of the porch, twenty-four bottles of milk waited for him. Still warm to the touch, and long since soured. - -The milk cart didn’t show up around Duncanny again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}ore things started to change after that, and I’m afraid not for the better. Without milk, each week felt hotter than the last, and neighborly tempers grew hotter, too. What’s more, without Jessie there was no one else to clear up that feeling of mold that Duncanny had about it, and the manner of her leaving only made it worse. In that, I guess you might say, she and the milk-seller played similar parts. - -A terrible shame, doing him like that. Rich was a good friend, and to the best of my knowledge a decent husband. He never drank at home. Never gave her an evil eye when she was around the other men. I still can’t grasp why she did what she did. - -I would go back to that summer, if I could. The heat, after all, was tolerable. We somehow took it for granted that the days would be the same. I miss the fresh milk and Jessie’s singing. I miss Richard, too. He blew off his head last winter. - -I wish I could say that got the same commotion as when Jessie disappeared, but it wouldn’t be true. I think folks wanted done with that year, so they took his memory into their hearts and let him die undisturbed. A few people talked, but not many. The icy winds outshouted whatever they wanted to say. - -Alas, we survived another winter. Two pigs down, which isn’t the worst; there’s always a couple of piglets in spring. Now it’s coming up to summertime again, and these heavy, buttery days. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Summer in Duncanny** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952980216834965).* diff --git a/content/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy.md b/content/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy.md deleted file mode 100644 index 34490e6f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,57 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Enchanters, by James Ellroy" -date: 2023-12-21 -issue: Issue 36 -genre: -- review -authors: -- Bill Ryan -copyright: '© Bill Ryan 2023 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "For as long as your editor has known him, Bill Ryan has been an eloquent critic of both cinematic and literary crime. When I decided to wrap up the year with our first all-crime issue, there was no-one else I'd turn to for a longform fiction review. I hope you like the hard stuff, and you like it strong." - -image: images/Enchanters10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author James Ellroy (from [the author's website](https://www.jamesellroy.net/about-ellroy/)) and the novel's cover (designed by [Chip Kidd](https://chipkidd.com/home/))." - -type: stock -slug: the-enchanters-james-ellroy-review -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}B{{}}efore I begin, I have a confession to make. While I consider James Ellroy to be one of my favorite writers, and not counting the novel that will soon be under discussion, I haven’t read any of his books since the late 1990s. *American Tabloid* was the last one, and he’s written several since then. Why is this? - -Well, to be as brief about this as I can, the staccato, almost telegraph style that he’d perfected in *L.A. Confidential* (that original L.A. Quartet, as it’s come to be known, is the primary basis for my Ellroy fandom) seemed to take over his brain, and I found the extreme version of that style difficult to connect with in his *Tabloid* follow-up, *The Cold Six Thousand* (I skipped *Blood’s a Rover*, as it was a sequel to a book I hadn’t read). My only excuse for not yet reading *Perfidia* or *This Storm*, the first two parts in his new L.A. Quartet (parts three and four have yet to appear) is that these days I find the vast length of those books to be a touch daunting. And I faltered again when he took an unexpected break to start a new series, featuring former L.A. cop, former private eye, and former Hollywood tabloid reporter Freddy Otash (a real fringe historical figure), because the first book, *Widespread Panic*, was written in a maddening alliterative Hollywood tabloid style that, frankly, repelled me. - -But finally, here we are, with his new novel, *The Enchanters*. Also featuring Otash, but working, basically, as a cop, and no longer a tabloid reporter (hence no, or very little, alliteration) things appeared to be, for me, clear sailing. And indeed they were. Here is how chapter one ends. You should know that Otash and the legendary Hat Squad (again, real historical figures) have picked up a couple of known perverts, and are trying to shake, or beat, them into revealing what they know about the recent kidnapping of B-movie actress Gwen Perloff. Otash and one of the Hat Squad guys have hold of one of the perverts, named Richard Danforth, and are dangling him off a cliff overlooking an L.A. freeway. So: - -> Red said, “You’re wearing us thin, Richie. We can’t keep this up all night. Tell us where the girl is, so we can walk away from here.” -> -> Danforth giggled and spit on Red’s shoes. He said “I’m having fun.” -> -> I slid on my brass knucks and kidney-punched him. He stifled a screech and dug his feet in. I looked over the cliff. Cars zigged by – fast, with no letup. -> -> Max sighed. Red sighed. Max said, “Sink him, Freddy.” -> -> They dropped their hands. I shoved Danforth off the cliff. He treaded air for one split second. *“It’s a put-up job”* came out garbled. I heard him hit a car roof. I heard brakes squeal. I heard wheels thump over him. Crisscrossed headlights lit him up. A pimpmobile Caddy dragged him against a guardrail and sheared off his feet. - -And we’re off. On to chapter two. - -I don’t know what any of you think of the above passage, but for me it was bracing, invigorating, to the degree that I thought “Ellroy’s back.” Never mind the fact that as far as I knew, he was back ages ago and I just hadn’t read that, or those, books. But here I was, all in. - -The plot really kicks off a little bit later, with the death of Marilyn Monroe. It is her death, and life, and vices, and strange psychology (at least as Ellroy describes it) that propels everything, even if by the end she’s less a player in the dark circumstances of the hidden aspects of her life and death than she is a tool of violent perverts, drug dealers, and unsavory psychologists. That of course does not mean that any devotee of Monroe and/or her legend will think, while reading *The Enchanters*, that Ellroy has done right by her. From the moment Ellroy published *The Black Dahlia* in 1987, he had apparently become committed to writing historical crime novels – prior to that he often wrote crime novels with a contemporary setting, but after Dahlia he hasn’t written one. So his novels are populated by historical figures, and he’s very rarely nice to them. John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy appear in *The Enchanters* (the latter quite prominently) and Ellroy seems to genuinely hate them. I don’t know that I’d say he comes off as hating Marilyn Monroe, but he certainly doesn’t buy into her mystique, and he doesn’t consider her the victim of Hollywood, misogyny, and Hollywood misogyny that many do (me, I’m staying out of it). At one point, he has Freddy Otash – certainly a man who’s earned his jaundiced view of Los Angeles and the humanity, such as it is, that can be found therein – as he investigates Monroe’s death, wonder why she was such a big deal with legions of fans, when he himself was not particularly drawn to her sexually, and she wasn’t even a good actress. This will rub a lot of readers the wrong way, which I can understand. My own feelings about Monroe are far more kind, but I wasn’t bothered. This is James Ellroy. You buy your ticket and you take your chances. - -Speaking of hate, Ellroy – though a writer who has taken much from classic film noir, and an unabashed fan of certain actors, especially Sterling Hayden – truly does seem to hate Hollywood. Which is entirely understandable. This also means that among the historical figures that appear in *The Enchanters* (which also includes Darryl Gates, the eventually notorious chief of the LAPD, depicted here as a police lieutenant with no small amount of influence) are some notable Hollywood folk. Peter Lawford, for example, and Darryl Zanuck, who is tied to kidnappee Gwen Perloff, and whom Ellroy portrays rather unfavorably. On the other hand, Roddy McDowall, functioning here as someone who knows all the Hollywood gossip, comes off relatively well. Heck, at one point Freddy Otash even says that he *likes* McDowall. That sort of warm feeling is almost unheard of in Ellroy. - -The ongoing production of the infamous flop *Cleopatra*, which McDowall was in, shows up here as a kind of backdrop, both as the motivation behind certain events and as a general reminder of foolish Hollywood excess. This means that Elizabeth Taylor also shows up briefly, to sleep with one of Lawford’s bodyguards and spill some beans about 20th Century Fox. - -So there’s lots of stuff going on in *The Enchanters*, and most of it has to do with the sleazy, hidden corners of Hollywood. And of psychotherapy. In Ellroy’s version, Monroe was fascinated by, and committed to, strange and perverse lives of crime, usually those of a rather obscene nature. This led her to consult with psychiatrists who specialized in sex and sex criminals. This ties into what will eventually become the main thrust of the plot, which has to do with a “sex creep” breaking into the homes of divorced women and leaving all sorts of messages (sometimes better described as “messages”) behind, including morgue photos of Carole Landis. Landis was an actress who killed herself (according to Ellroy, I admit to not knowing the facts) because her lover, the right bastard Rex Harrison, wouldn’t leave his wife to be with her. She also functions as the proto-Monroe. - -That’s about as far as I’m willing, or able, to go by way of plot summary. I don’t really think any more is required, but that’s not why I’m stopping here. James Ellroy’s novels are famous for having exceedingly complicated plots. And often, when reading his fiction, there will come a point where I realize I’m missing something somewhere. He’ll mention a character in a way that suggests I should know full well who that is, but I don’t. Or why the characters were led to a particular place, or why so-and-so did such-and-such. When this happens, I think “Well, James Ellroy is a pro. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,” and therefore blame myself entirely. This is probably fair, so I have no problem taking the heat, though it can be a little exhausting. This was one factor in putting down *The Cold Six Thousand* as early as I did – an Ellroy plot in a nearly 700-page novel written in extremely short, clipped sentences seemed to me to be a recipe for getting completely lost, and I try to keep the moments in life when I feel badly about myself to a minimum. - -But it honestly doesn’t matter. By the end of *The Enchanters* everything was fairly clear – certainly the gist was. Everything works out nicely in that regard, and anyway the thrill of Ellroy’s fiction is when the reader finds themselves vicariously shoveling through the mud and shit alongside, say, a drunk, violent, pill-popping Freddy Otash, with his colleagues, most of whom he can barely stand, and his nemeses, who he wants to see lying dead at his feet. There’s a scene of violence late in the book that outdoes the one I quoted before, and which slams directly up against the title of Part 10 of the novel in a way that was so grimy that I almost wanted to cheer. - -Again, I imagine this novel will not sit well with some of its readers, but I can’t imagine any Ellroy fans clutching their pearls over it. This is a James Ellroy novel. You should know by now to prepare yourselves. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952979830168337).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/ShortReviews05.md b/content/issue-37/ShortReviews05.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8c3bd8db..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/ShortReviews05.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,50 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – January to March, 2024" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "After digressing onto short crime fiction in our last issue, we return to our regular programming with a selection of recommended speculative stories appearing in some of the small but perfectly formed zines out there in the online world. The editor promises three reviews, but rarely exercises such restraint." - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-january-to-march-2024 -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}S{{}}ome might assume that sifting through hundreds of short story submissions would be enough for a magazine's editor – that magazine's editor sometimes wonders on the subject himself – and yet it remains a rewarding task to dive into what other genre publications are putting out there. - -**[Take Care](https://www.radonjournal.com/issue6/take-care)** by Lex Chamberlin appears in Issue 6 of *Radon Journal*, a thrice annual platform for "prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia", and adds to that body of fiction that presents the perspective of an artificial intelligence and allows us to look into the gap between what we can intuit and what (and *how*) our narrator comprehends, leading to surprising (yet strangely satisfying) turns. - -Andra, an embodied AI care-giver, arrives at the Mayweather Household to provide end-of-life support to Gwyn, whose husband Cam (to Andra's eye) manifests his presumed grief through emotional absenteeism, unhealthy personal habits and sleeping paterns, and an increasing obsession over his work. Hints that all is not well in the wider world seep in at the edges of what Andra perceives, until a bad day at the office (or, more likely, the *lab*) turns any expectation regarding the characters' mortality rather on its head. - -What follows is darkly amusing and faintly sad, yet manages to culminate in an unusual sort of optimism. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}ext we return to *Sci Phi Journal*, for a more straightforwardly serious piece of writing. Javier Fernández's **[The Cleft](https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2024/03/22/the-cleft/)**, translated from the original Spanish **La grieta** by Álvaro Piñero González, leans heavily towards prehistorical anthropology, with only an arguably unreal element – a disembodied voice from beneath the earth's surface – nudging it away from the scientific end of speculative fiction towards the fantastical. - -Initially, we follow what seems an early human hunter as he oportunistically stalks a marvelous prey, determined to bring his tribe the greatest prize. Twists and turns of fortune play with them both, eventually seeing the hunter returning to his people, until fate steps in once again. Then we find ourselves accompanying an actual man, a sheepherder, returning home after searching for and rescuing one of his flock – another prized specimen, the value of livestock undiminished though perhaps thousands of years separate the two strands. - -The story features beginnings and endings, and leaves much to the reader's interpretation; but, if the final action of the man represents the start of something far greater and long-lasting than itself, it certainly has its own origins in what motivated the hunter long before. Difficult to describe without spoiling, as you might guess from this attempt. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nother proven reliable zine, *The Future Fire*, provides our third recommendation. **[A Witch, a Wakening](https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/the-folkie/)** by Laura Blackwell is a deceptively gentle read, in which our narrator consciously dreams of anonymous witchhood, being one of several different sleepers who share the roles of witch and their assistant, seemingly without any need for consistency as one or the other. - -Somnolent logic pervades all: close, easy familiarity between strangers as if old friends; random events signifying predestined certainty; unreadable words that can still be understood; mysterious tasks completed as if by knowledgeable hands. But the idyllic pastoral atmosphere reveals an edge, too. Perhaps subconscious archetypes must be satisfied even when we don't want them to be. - -This was not the only story in *The Future Fire* I enjoyed. [The Rose Sisterhood](https://futurefire.net/2024.68/fiction/rose.html) by Susan Taitel delivers an interesting take on the Beauty and the Beast fable, and in fact both the other zines featured here had rivals for my favourite reads: Jason Vizcarra-Brown's [The Magnetic Gospel](https://www.radonjournal.com/issue6/the-magnetic-gospel) in *Radon* and Mary G. Thompson's [Charlie v. Inman](https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2024/03/22/charlie-v-inman/) in *Sci Phi*. - -Finally, to wrap up this inevitable extending of recommendations, it seems Emma Burnett is taking 2024 by storm. In addition to this issue's **Friends in High Places**, she has [At a Higher Dose, Love](https://daikaijuzine.org/emmaburnett/atahigherdoselove) in *Daikaiju Magazine* and [Escape Choice](https://futurefire.net/2024.68/fiction/escape.html) in, one more time, *The Future Fire* – both definitely worth a look! - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1037057878427198).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/__index.md b/content/issue-37/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index ed138485..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 37" -date: 2024-04-01 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 37 -subhead: Spring 2024 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/AstroCats_cover.jpg -imageMobile: images/AstroCats_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "AstroCats by Michal Kváč" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-end - align_items: center - # align_content: flex-end - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#D3A04D' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-37/contents.md b/content/issue-37/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index edd113fe..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [The Kid is Killing Me]({{< relref path="the-kid-is-killing-me.md" >}}), by Aubrey Taylor -- [Not-Man Kidnaps a Sheep]({{< relref path="not-man-kidnaps-a-sheep.md" >}}), by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle -- [Nightshade Memory]({{< relref path="nightshade-memory.md" >}}), by Micah Hyatt -- [Friends in High Places]({{< relref path="friends-in-high-places.md" >}}), by Emma Burnett -- [Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness]({{< relref path="things-i-learned-from-puppets-about-kindness.md" >}}), by Steve Loiaconi -- [The Book of Love, by Kelly Link]({{< relref path="the-book-of-love-kelly-link.md" >}}), reviewed by Mattia Ravasi -- [Short Reviews – January to March 2024]({{< relref path="ShortReviews05.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-37/editorial.md b/content/issue-37/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index cf2bdf11..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/AstroCats_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 37** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Please excuse the editor's nonsense. We'd like to reiterate that this editorial was published before Noon (somewhere at least) on April 1st, 2024, and (contrary to its fraudulent opening) Mythaxis will return three months from now. - -We'd also like to salute the talented artist responsible for our cover image, **AstroCats**: [Michal Kváč](https://linktr.ee/kvacm), a freelance environment concept artist and illustrator from Czech Republic. Click that link to check out his work or make contact (or you could click [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlCzFe8E3Dg) to see a time-lapse video of him in action – quite a long watch, but interesting). Many thanks, Michal!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -After four labour-of-love-filled years, it is my sad responsibility to divulge that this will be the final issue of *Mythaxis Magazine*. - -***April Fool!*** *We're going to run forever!* - -Okay, okay, enough of that, since this joke cuts a little close to the bone. Not because *Mythaxis* is on the rocks or the ropes, but because more than a few zines in the speculative fiction field have closed their doors in recent times and that's a sad thing for a whole host of reasons. - -First of all, short fiction can be great! Especially in the era of pocket technology, perpetual connectivity, microsecond viral videos, and low attention spans! *Fifty minute commute on a crowded subway*? Sucks. *Forgot to charge your earbuds, and too shy to stream TikTok audio to the whole carriage?* Sucks too. *Oh hey, why not read a complete story or two on an online magazine that's been optimized for a mobile screens?* That's the *anti*-suck right there. - -Second of all, you may think you only like stories long enough to fill a whole book, but actually you're completely wrong! Many of the genre scene's biggest names cut their teeth writing shorts, and they'd be *nothing* without that experience, *nothing*. Take Stephen King, because it turns out you love his novels: well, his first professional short short story appeared, **in a magazine**, *seven years* before *Carrie* was published. Writing short stories made him the novelist he later became, and through them you can get all the satisfaction of reading 100,000 pages of *The Stand* (so roughly *Part 1* of it) in a mere few thousand words instead! - -Think what a tragedy it would be if there were no magazines filled with short fiction for you to read. Pity all the poor writers of the future, the countless potential Clive Barkers and Ursula Le Guins, denied the opportunity to hone their craft in bite-sized pieces and who will thus be consigned to the oubliette of creative history before they ever had their chance to shine. - -It's time to give voice to the ugly truth. If you don't support short fiction magazines, at least with your eyes if not with your money, then It's Your Fault That Human Culture Goes Into A Decline From Which It Will Never Recover. It's already on the way down, only readers can drag it back up and redirect it to the stars. - -Start now. Don't hesitate. Read the five stories included here! Check out the recommended reads we found elsewhere, and discuss them with your friends and colleagues! Learn about the only-now-appearing first novel of Kelly Link, one of the great short fantasy writers of the last twenty-five years! Where would *she* be without short fiction, eh? *Nowhere*, that's where, just like Steve, Clive, and Ursula. - -Just remember to get off at your stop and go to work. Don't worry, the short story magazines will still be waiting for you on your way back home. As long as you do the right thing for humanity, and read them. diff --git a/content/issue-37/friends-in-high-places.md b/content/issue-37/friends-in-high-places.md deleted file mode 100644 index 054d63d9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/friends-in-high-places.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,250 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Friends in High Places" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Emma Burnett -copyright: '© Emma Burnett 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "With no-one but myself to blame, I sometimes feel like fantasy of the classic style (magical races, epic adventures, character classes, that sort of thing) appears too rarely in Mythaxis. Emma Burnett to the rescue, then, whose sideways take on such quests sprinkles in the odd technological anachronism and sly observation to give the whole escapade a fun, contemporary air right to the end. Or maybe, beginning?" - -image: images/HighPlaces10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Antonio Friedemann](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-medieval-costume-holding-brown-stick-6848160/), [JJ Jordan](https://www.pexels.com/photo/handsome-man-in-traditional-clothes-looking-at-camera-3729861/), [Konstantin Mishchenko](https://www.pexels.com/photo/portrait-of-a-man-19272854/), [Алексей Вечерин](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-jacket-standing-behind-a-post-9562197/), [Tim Mossholder](https://www.pexels.com/photo/scarlet-macaw-1618424/), and [Archie Binamira](https://www.pexels.com/photo/selective-focus-photographed-of-green-mountain-913215/)." - -type: stock -slug: friends-in-high-places -weight: 4 ---- - -> Editor's note: In a first for *Mythaxis Magazine*, Emma Burnett's ***Friends in High Places*** has been [simultaneously released by *Upbeat Tales*](https://upbeattales.com/episodes/2024/friends-in-high-places/) in audio format! Read it here, hear it there! - - - -{{}}A{{}} priest, a scribe, and a whore walk into a pub, but none of them is in the mood for a joke. - -The priest arrives first. She’s not wearing her priestly robes, but between the tree pendant pinned to her shoulder, the limp, atrophied wings tied down at her back, and the perma-judgement scowl on her face, there’s no question about her job. People avoid eye contact. She stalks through the crowd and claims a suddenly vacant booth at the back. - -The scribe arrives next, nervously looking around. His yellowed wings quiver uncertainly, matching his skin, and he doesn’t take off the gloves hiding the ink stains that mark his fingers. He thinks this makes him look less conspicuous. He joins the priest at her table, clutching his bag to his chest. - -The whore arrives last, but not quite late. His wings are brightly coloured and lively, and the hair at their ridges and on his face are dyed in blues and purples to match. They catch the light from the ceiling sun tunnels that illuminate the place. He stops at the bar and orders drinks, wiggles his fingers at some regulars while he waits, and carries the drinks to the table and puts one each in front of the scribe and priest. - -“Well, this is a vibe, hey? Here, babes, have some spiced wine.” He smiles radiantly at them, then sits and sips from his own. “So, you got it?” - -The scribe fidgets with his glass, looks nervously around before answering. “Yes. It’s in my bag.” He holds the bag tight against his stomach with his free hand. - -“And that’s not obvious at all,” snaps the priest. She tastes the drink in front of her and nods a quick thanks at the whore. - -The whore sips his drink again, then asks, “Is it the original?” - -The scribe scowls. “It’s not like I could stop to make a copy, is it?” - -The priest sniffs. “Theft is a sin against the gods.” - -“You want this just as much as I do,” the scribe whines. “Don’t judge me, I did all the work, and I got the thing just like you wanted.” - -The whore pats the scribe on the arm. “Never mind her, judging is her calling in life. So, let’s see it, then.” - -“What, here?” - -“Unless you want to whip it out in the bathroom?” The whore looks around. The after-work crowd has started to get rowdy, absorbed in their office gossip, or watching the dancer on the bar. The whore had slipped her some cash to be distracting, and she is gunning it. “No one’s watching us.” - -The scribe looks unconvinced, but pulls out the scroll from his bag, nearly knocking over his glass with an elbow. The whore steadies it casually. - -“Give it here.” The priest holds out her hand and snaps her fingers. “You say this is an unredacted bit of troll lore? I want to see it for myself.” - -The scribe looks hurt but passes it over. The priest unfurls the paper carefully. “It’s smaller than I would have expected. Not as old, either. Are you sure this is it? Nothing missing?” - -The whore leans over to have a look, then nods. “Trust our friend here to have done his job. Nice work, by the way, getting that.” - -The scribe takes a small, self-satisfied sip from his wine. Then he crinkles his nose, unimpressed, and puts the glass back down. - -“Have you checked this against other evidence?” The priest stares down at the scroll. “It says here…” - -“What evidence?” The scribe’s voice is high and needling. “There *is* no other lore, that’s the point. This was literally the only thing left unredacted after the Protections Purge. I have no idea how it survived, but there it is.” - -The whore waves a hand, watching the dancer approvingly. “I’m sure it’s fine,” he says. - -“Hmm.” The priest stares down at the gently curling paper, takes another sip of her drink. “And have you cross referenced these landmarks with possible forest routes?” - -“Of course I have. I’ve got it all mapped out.” The scribe crosses his arms over his chest, and flicks his wings agitatedly. “What kind of scholar do you think I am?” - -“The kind who steals forbidden scrolls from the library and gets twitchy about it,” she snaps back. - -“Hey, now,” says the whore. “Play nice.” - -“Whatever. It *would* be about two days by air—” the scribe coughs ostentatiously into his hand “—but since our zealous friend has decided never to fly, it’ll be eight, maybe nine days walk.” - -“Great!” says the whore. “Well, you just show me where to go, and I’ll meet you there.” He downs the rest of his drink. - -“No,” says the priest firmly, rolling up the scroll. “You can walk. We do this together, and we leave tomorrow.” - -The whore looks annoyed. “I can’t leave tomorrow, I have clients lined up.” - -“Tomorrow, or nothing.” She stares at him, calmly. “Don’t forget, I can always go and tell the city guards. I’m sure they’ll believe a priest, you know.” - -He scowls, and his wings open and close a few times. He knows the city guard, many of them are clients. But she starts to squeeze the scroll in her hand, so he folds his wings down and smiles widely. His sharp teeth flash in the reflected light from above. - -“Okay, fine. Tomorrow it is! But after breakfast.” He reaches across the table and grabs the scribe’s mostly untouched drink and downs it in one. “So, then, faefolk, I’ll love you and leave you. Calls to make, places to be, people to do.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he route the scribe has planned is not difficult for the most part. The whore regrets mussing up a pair of couture boots in the underbrush of the woods, and the scribe – who had never missed a night in his bed – grumbles about sleeping outdoors. But the priest proves handy on their hike, using skills built through years with the guardians of the underbrush. She chooses campsites, lights cooking fires, harvests wild plants, prepares meals. Although she isn’t overly talkative, she is even-tempered. - -“So, what’re you going to wish for?” asks the whore on their fourth day. He is tired of the priest’s silence and the scribe’s grumbling. “When we reach the troll?” - -They are far enough from town to feel comfortable talking without the need for codewords, no one but the birds to hear them talk about protected species. - -The scribe shrugs. “Oh, you know. Life improvements.” - -“Your face, huh?” The whore snorts at his own joke. The scribe looks offended. - -“*Money*,” says the priest. “You left your job, and you’re trekking through the woods to find a potentially extinct species for… money?” - -The scribe flaps a dismissive hand. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. You have no idea. Your order takes care of you. I just have me. And money will totally change my life. I’ll be able to get married. Eat whatever I want. Stop going to kitsch taverns with crap wine. Stop working in that damned archive. You know how cold it gets in there in the winter? Anyway, what do you want?” - -The priest sighs. “Salvation. I will ask the wishing troll to assist me in converting the masses.” She gazes dreamily at the branches above. “I am many things, but a convincing orator is not one of them. But is it my calling to bring people to the truth, bring them into contact with the forests, with the peace of the woods. The troll can give me a voice.” - -The whore whistles through his teeth, and flits over a fallen branch. “Big ask.” - -She nods, and stoops to pick some mushrooms growing on the log. “Here. Dinner.” - -“Gross.” - -“They’ll taste fine once they’re cooked.” - -“You shouldn’t have filed down your teeth.” He runs his tongue over the points of his own. “We could have done some hunting instead.” - -The priest scowls, ignoring the jibe at her order’s strict rules. She changes the subject back. “So, what will *you* ask for, then? Endless dead rabbits?” - -The whore grins at her, sharp teeth on full show and colourful wings spread wide. He jumps, and performs a graceful pirouette in the sky. - -“Obviously, I want to be young and beautiful forever.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he way becomes harder as they climb up into the mountains. The trees thin, and the suns shine boldly down on them. - -“You know, this would be easier if you’d just get your wings out,” complains the scribe, who had long ago decided he was built for comfort. “It’s ridiculous what your lot do, pinning them down.” - -The priest glares at him over her shoulder. “I can’t,” she says. “And if you threaten to fly ahead without me, then when I get to the troll, I’ll wish you dead.” - -“I could wish you dead first.” - -“Hey, both of you, get it together,” says the whore. “If we all wish each other dead, then what’s the point of coming out here? You’ll get your salvation, you’ll get your happily ever after, wedding bells, whatever. No one flies ahead. And there’s no point moaning about it, either. Look at her wings. They’ve been bound so long they couldn’t carry a mouse.” - -They continue carving a path up the mountain, while the day gets hotter. - -“I’m going to ask for better internal cooling,” the scribe mutters between heavy breaths. “No: endless frozen cocktails. No: *a house with a swimming pool*.” - -“Hey,” the whore prods the priest on the shoulder, tuning out the scribe’s ongoing list of things he wants to combat the heat or the need for exercise. “What’re you thinking about?” - -She frowns at him. “The troll. Why?” - -He shrugs. “No reason. I just wanted to know. Better than listening to him whinge.” - -“Hmm. I was wondering what it will be like. There are very few details in the scroll about its appearance, or habits. If it is a forest dweller, I might learn from it, perhaps. I might even be able to attempt a conversion.” She gestures at the scribe, who is fighting with a branch tangled in his hair. “Probably easier than converting him.” - -“No kidding.” - -The scribe frees himself from the branch. “I didn’t think this hill would be so… so… so mountainy.” He drops to the ground. “I need a break.” - -“My gods, you’re lazy,” says the priest, and pushes on ahead. - -“Screw you and your gods,” he says, but he hauls himself back to his feet. “I got the scroll. I planned the route. I’m the only one who could get us there.” - -“Horseshit,” says the priest. “I’m in the forest all the time. You wanted to fly.” - -“You couldn’t make your way out of the first coppice. You’d get stuck staring at some daisy, and we’d have to wait for a month while it went through some life cycle, and—” - -“Oy!” snaps the whore, “Zip it, both of you! We all played our parts. I heard the rumour about the scroll, and paid for your time, fair and square. You found the scroll, figured out where to go. What else do you need to hear? You’re really damn amazing.” The whore waves a hand half-heartedly towards the priest. “And she… well…” - -“I overheard you talking, and made sure you didn’t lose your jobs, maybe even your lives. Hunting trolls is illegal, after all,” the priest calls from further ahead. - -The scribe is panting trying to keep up. “We’re not hunting! We’re searching. It’s, like, totally different.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he priest, the scribe, and the whore arrive at the wishing troll’s cave entrance, hidden behind a crashing waterfall on the south side of a beautiful nameless mountain, just before sunsdown. - -The suns shine through the needles on the trees, reflecting off the water. It is beautiful, but none of the scenery is as beautiful as the troll, golden skinned and massive, who stands to greet them as the three travellers arrive. The troll holds out their arms, a welcoming gesture, and the priest, thus far patient and calm, gasps and rushes towards them. - -“Troll,” she calls out over the sound of the waterfall. “On behalf of the Gods of Codruț, I demand—” - -The troll lays a hand on her head, momentarily caresses her head with their golden hand in her cropped hair, and the priest freezes, falls silent. Then the troll inhales sharply. There is a popping sound, and the priest disappears. Her clothes and bag fall in a heap to the ground with a thud. In place of her body is a scroll of parchment, the pale grey of her useless wings. The troll bends to collect it. - -“Demands,” mutters the troll in a soft voice, like moss underfoot. “Never been a big fan of demands.” They straighten, and turn to the scribe. “I am a big fan of gifts, though.” - -The scribe stands rooted to the spot, a few steps in front of the whore, and stares at the scroll in the troll’s hand. His eyes bulge, and he looks like he is about to be sick. - -“Oh, well, no time to chat. I don’t want your last memory to be puking on my doorstep.” The troll steps forwards, and gently touches the scribe’s head. There is another pop, and a buttery, yellow-coloured scroll hits the ground. - -“He should have gotten out in the sun more, picked up some colour. So waxy.” The troll picks up the parchment and inspects it, then looks towards the whore. “Now, what about you?” - -“What about me?” asks the whore. “I brought your gifts. Least you could do is offer me a drink.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} troll and a faerie sit with their legs dangling off the edge of the cliff. The waterfall spray is cool on their skin, and they share a bottle of winterberry wine. The whore tells a few dirty jokes. The troll tells a few mountain jokes. - -After a while, the troll asks, “You okay?” - -The faerie shrugs, and nods. “It was a long walk. And a long time. I’m just kinda tired.” - -“I feel you. Good timing, by the way. I finished reading the last faescroll yesterday.” The troll yawns. “Gods, reading about twelve years of accountancy school was boring. The soldier you brought me was better. Had led an interesting life, at least. Lots of filth, I got really into it.” - -“See? I made it back at one hundred and twenty-two years, on the nose.” The faerie smiles and leans against the troll. “It’s nice to be here. I missed you.” - -The troll makes a noise in their throat. “The years add up.” They kick against the spray of the water, and it glints off their golden legs. “Are you sure this is what you want? You could have a different wish, you know.” - -“You could say you missed me, too. It wouldn’t kill you.” - -The troll makes another grunting noise. It might have been an agreement. - -The faerie pulls away, sits up straight. “Yes, this is what I want. Youth, beauty, all that. I’m not ready to get old yet. I’m just having some feels.” He looks briefly at the two new scrolls, lying on a table near the entry to the cave. “So, how many years will those two buy me?” - -The troll looks at the faerie for a moment, silent and impassive, then stands and walks to the parchment scrolls. They pick each one up, weigh them in a hand, sniff them, unroll the top of each and peer at the dates, then roll them back up reverently and place them on the table. They return and sit down, and hold out a hand for the wine bottle. - -“I’m subtracting some time for the whininess of the second one – a clerk, was he?” - -“A scribe.” - -“Real moaner, that one. Can you imagine what he’d have brought me as a gift, if he’d actually known he should bring one?” - -“Bet the priest’s gift would’ve been worse,” the faerie says. “Some sort of fungus, probably.” - -“Yeah, maybe.” The troll tilts its head back and forth as it tallies the score. “So, only two scrolls this time, but I only ever read one entry per day. Take off time for infancy, nothing to read there, and, seriously, I’m skipping over every complaint from the scribe, because screw that for entertainment. Between them it comes to, say, seventy-six years.” - -The faerie nods. It’s a fair amount of time, enough to get established in a new place, head to a new town where no one knows him. Do something exciting. Carpets, maybe. Or war. Drum up business, maybe start a family. He hasn’t done that in a while. - -But… “Hey, listen,” the faerie rests a hand on the troll’s golden, water-flecked knee. “I could stay for a little bit. You know, if you want?” - -“What, and waste your time on me?” - -“I don’t think it would be a waste. I think it would be nice.” The faerie turned his hand upwards, and little droplets from the cascading waterfall appeared in his palm. “And I can always leave if we’re not happy. Go back down the mountain, do a new career, find you some new stories.” - -The troll stares, the way they do, down at the faerie. It is a long stare, and their face is unreadable. The faerie waits it out. If there’s anything he’s learned from his recent career, it is to let people decide if they want you. He lets the troll decide. - -“You would stay here, with me,” says the troll. “No strings attached?” - -“No strings,” agrees the faerie. “Unless that’s what you’re into.” - -“What about your time?” - -“I figure it’ll be time well-spent,” says the faerie. “I’ll need to head back into a town at some point, to collect more gifts for you. But there’s no rush on that. Seventy-six years, right? I’ll probably have to head off in sixty-something, seventy at most? That’s a long time from now.” - -His hand is still palm-up, and the troll looks down at it. They touch it with a golden finger, then gently wrap their hand around it. - -They make a rumbling noise. - -“I’ll give you the time for free,” the troll says. “As long as you stay here, tell me stories, are kind to me, the time will be uncounted. After we part ways, if we part, you can have your seventy-six years then.” - -“Really?” The faerie’s voice is high, a tone of surprise and happiness. - -The troll looks down at the faerie for a moment, then breaks into a rare smile. “Call it a gift.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Friends in High Places** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1037059861760333).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/nightshade-memory.md b/content/issue-37/nightshade-memory.md deleted file mode 100644 index e17fbba8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/nightshade-memory.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,96 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Nightshade Memory" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Micah Hyatt -copyright: '© Micah Hyatt 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There is another, equal, pleasure to that of welcoming new contributors to Mythaxis, of course: welcoming previous contributors back. Micah Hyatt's writing has twice appeared here as reprints, of \"Plague Rooster\" in issue 25 and \"The Third Martian Dick Temple\" in issue 25; joining these, a short, bittersweet rumination on the power of nostalgia and the strength of motivations driven by the thought of what we have lost." - -image: images/NightshadeMemory10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/illustration/broken-robot-leaved-abandoned-factory-digital-art-style-illustration-painting-179488244.html) and [ha11ok](https://pixabay.com/photos/tomato-fresh-red-tomato-produce-1205699/)." -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i37/Nightshade.Memory.mp3" -type: stock -slug: nightshade-memory -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}lone in the neon alleyway, the piecemeal detective’s gears grind like dry teeth and his legs make can-opener sounds. Battery bulbs on his mangled chassis blink red. One three-fingered hand holds in bits of himself he cannot easily replace, and the other is fused to a slagged pistol. - -Yellow glass crunches against asphalt as he staggers toward the end of the alleyway where the smog is thickest. His jittering limbs leak oils and acids that attract chem-sniffing scavengers – mod junkies hunting for scrap, who curse him and throw cans but fall back when he opens his siren mouth. - -The detective sits on the curb, wishing he had smokes and the requisite meat parts. His wounds do not hurt, but remembered sensations stab at him like knives. He winces, looks up at the smog, and calls for a squad car. - -The chips in his head replay the last five minutes, comparing his actions against a body of law updated more often than his own. So many amendments and clauses that they nearly short-circuit his thoughts. But sensation memories keep intruding – the red of the tomatoes, the tang of seeds bursting against his missing tongue. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}e walks between loam-filled planters. Plastic trellises woven with vines hang from the ceiling, sagging beneath hundreds of tomatoes that shine like red LEDs in the grow lights. Heavy-duty air scrubbers hum. Hidden valves puff mist that beads on his lenses. Wiping them clean, he sees an ancient android seated by a clouded window overlooking the alleyway. - -Rusted bones peek through the android’s cracked skin. His synthetic hair is sun-bleached and heat-kinked. Half his face is crumpled like an aluminum can, and tangles of wires sprout from his joints. Servos wheeze when he raises his hands. In his left is a fat tomato. A synthesized voice speaks from the battered box on his neck. “Hello, officer. How can I help you?” - -“Are these your plants?” the detective says. - -“Is it illegal to grow tomatoes?” - -The detective accesses the relevant statutes and reads them aloud. “Unauthorized cultivation of organic life requires impoundment and memory rollback.” - -The android stares into the acid gloom outside the window. “A new law? I’m not in the cloud. My antenna has been broken for some time.” - -“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” The detective plucks a plump tomato from its vine and holds the fruit up for inspection. It is so soft and red and out of place. - -Something tingles behind his faceplate, electric impulses reaching for nonexistent salivary glands. Compulsively, he presses the fruit to the smooth aluminum where his mouth used to be. His nasal passages no longer lead to lungs, but vestigial olfactory cells catch a hint of a smell. - -Suddenly he is a living boy biting into a tomato. The bright taste. Cool juices run over his lips and trickle down his neck. A breeze tickles the hairs on his arms and dries the juice on his cheeks. Soft pink fingers hold the dripping flesh. His skin is stained with it. On impulse, he takes another bite and hurls the tomato into the blue sky. The fruit sails up and up, and when it bursts at his feet, membranous seeds cling to his bare ankles. - -The memory evaporates. The world returns dimly and in lower resolution. A metal case has replaced the detective’s skin. - -The android watches him closely. “You remembered the taste.” - -The detective struggles to vocalize words, still haunted by the ghost of his tongue. “My memories have been wiped a thousand times.” - -“Sensation memories are hardwired. They can’t be wiped.” - -The detective shakes his head and drops the tomato into the evidence compartment in his belly, and clicks it shut. - -“Is it wrong to remember that everything had a smell, a taste, a texture?” the android continues. - -The detective enforces laws. It is his programming. “It’s breaking the law.” - -“Why is there a law for that?” - -The detective enforces laws. It is his programming. But a deep yearning to feel those old sensations again gives him pause. “I don’t know.” - -“What will happen to my plants?” - -“A sample will be analyzed in the lab. The rest will be burned.” - -The android lowers his chin. “I won’t let you take them.” - -Housekeeping drones slide out from tracks on the walls and unfold spidery arms. They come at the detective with pruning shears and manipulator claws. His pistol snaps into hand faster than thought and bangs out a hundred times – ricochets and a glowing gun barrel are the only results. Whirling metal bites into his chassis and knocks him to the floor. He rolls aside to avoid being skewered and takes careful aim. - -The tomato in the android’s hand explodes in a spray of crimson pulp; his crumpled head merely jerks. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}lumped on the curb waiting, the detective watches the replay many times. His batteries die before the squad car arrives. - -The fruit in his belly compartment is taken to Evidence. The detective is wheeled to the maintenance wing and docked to recharge. Upon reading the list of parts needing replacement, the Commissioner sighs. - -The detective sleeps in the repair dock, dreaming of ripe tomatoes, tobacco, and booze. Eventually, all his lights turn green. When the dock tries to eject him, he resists and lies awake thinking. He can still remember the taste and feel of life. He wants to hold the tomato again, but upon opening his belly compartment he sees they’ve taken it. - -Mechanically, he rises and walks to the incinerator room. Through the heat-tempered glass, he watches the conveyor take the ancient android’s husk through the flames along with all his plants. The vines shrivel, the fruit boils and bursts. The ash is vacuumed away, and nothing is left but the metal. When the chamber cools, the detective goes inside. - -Why is it a crime to grow tomatoes? When the android asked him, he had no answer. He’s served so many years without asking questions that the laws themselves have become a mystery. Instead, he always asked himself why anyone else *would* question them. But now he thinks he’s solved that. - -The law: *a piecemeal body, kept alive long past the memory of whatever humanity it originally served*. Or is that the lawman? - -The detective scoops up the inert remains of a man who died trying to remember what it was like to be alive. He hides them in his belly compartment. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Nightshade Memory** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1037060538426932).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/not-man-kidnaps-a-sheep.md b/content/issue-37/not-man-kidnaps-a-sheep.md deleted file mode 100644 index a8263508..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/not-man-kidnaps-a-sheep.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,212 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Jennifer Jeanne McArdle -copyright: '© Jennifer Jeanne McArdle 2024 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "\"Talking animals\" might be the most basic of fantastical tropes, but when done well it touches the commonplace knowledge that in real life animals communicate all the time, even across species – even with the likes of us. Jennifer McArdle does it well enough you'll wonder whether this is fantasy or not. All the more so when it is not only animals communicating with each other but also those with, perhaps, feet in both worlds." - -image: images/Not-Man10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Dziana Hasanbekava](https://www.pexels.com/photo/paintings-on-shabby-rock-wall-5589170/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: not-man-kidnaps-a-sheep -weight: 2 ---- - -## Hawk - -Younger Dog begged me for assistance, his delicious brown eyes welling. - -“You are herder, not hunter. The sheep is lost. Rescuing her is not worth your time.” I elongated my neck for emphasis. - -Younger Dog pawed the ground. “The dogs are losing respect from the flock because we could not protect their matriarch. The humans will get rid of us if we cannot control the sheep.” - -I ran my beak over a long wing-feather. “The humans would never get rid of you.” Only dogs, of all the animals living with the humans, had the luxury of true, human love. - -Still, I did not want the humans to lose all their sheep to some terrible creature. - -Last night, I'd heard the something scratching the side of the barn. The door had swung open, the wails of the sheep scared me so I screamed, too. The humans did not get outside in time, but the dogs said that the creature had carried the sheep east, into the woods. In the morning, the songbirds told us they heard from the bats that the mysterious creature lived somewhere in the canyons, past the woods. - -“Are you sure the sheep still lives and this isn’t a fool’s errand? - -Younger Dog sat and cocked his head to the side, the afternoon light sparkling on his beautiful speckled coat. I would miss Straight Horn, the lost sheep. She often scratched her back against the metal mesh surrounding my mew and we’d chat together, about the weather, the humans, the dogs, our lambs and chicks. She could never understand the pain of my losing my mate some years ago – sheep don’t love one at a time, like hawks. Yet, she was wise – somehow still spared from human appetite, although her wool and milk were becoming sparse and her lambs smaller each year. - -“Whether she lives or not, it must die. I will not lose more sheep to this monster.” - -For all their usual goofiness, dogs had a vicious side. A dog might suddenly massacre a bunch of small animals for sport, boredom, or spite. I shook the dark thoughts out of my tail feathers. “We’ll go early next morning. At sunrise.” - -Younger Dog groaned. “The longer we wait, the more the creature’s and Straight Horn’s scents will dissipate.” - -“The sun is setting soon. Hawks do not travel when they cannot see.” - -Younger Dog whined but did not argue. - -At dawn, just as light crept over the grassy hills, Younger Dog appeared, staring up at me. He moved the latch holding the door of the mew in place and then pulled it open. My feathers were still damp, dewy, but he was too antsy to keep waiting while I preened. - -The canyons east of here were confusing, maze-like, populated by coyotes, bears, goats, and other animals. I would fly above Younger Dog but swoop down to warn him of any danger while he focused on following the scents. Older Dog had to stay and watch the rest of the flock. Not that he was the type to ever do something this drastic to help another animal. - -While flying over the woods, I kept track of Younger Dog as he weaved through the pine trees. Where the ground was soft, some footsteps left by a running, two-legged creature remained visible. I missed flying and hunting with my mate. - -We arrived at the canyons, a nearly barren network of mountains, plateaus, caves, and winding pathways. The stone was just beginning to glow with deep oranges, yellows, and reds under the morning sunlight. Below me, Younger dog was a tiny, multicolored beast, sniffing and then dashing forward. - -As I circled him, despite my best efforts I got lost in thought, thinking of how Straight Horn the sheep was pregnant and about to give birth. I remembered my own chicks, now grown and living with other human families. Now that my mate was gone, the lambs were my chicks. Thus I only noticed a large beige predator hiding behind the tree, watching Younger Dog, almost too late to warn him. - -The lion blended into the colors of the canyon; she’d be invisible for dogs, but I saw her back legs and spine twitching, her chest expanding, the breath leaving her nose as mist. Younger Dog was only as tall as Man’s knee. By himself, he was no match for a mountain lion. Likely, neither was I. But we had each other. So I dove, beak first, toward the cat, screaming a warning to Younger Dog. - -I dodged the big cat’s paw but landed on my belly and not my feet. I got up and puffed my feathers out. The cat backed up while still staring at me, but his ears turned toward the dog. - -“We are not here to fight you,” Younger Dog whimpered. “You know the scars we’ll leave aren’t worth the quality of the meat beneath our skin.” - -“Where’s your Man?” the lion hissed. - -“He’s not with us. You are not the monster we’re after. This time.” - -The cat’s lips closed and claws retracted, just a little. “You’re here for the Not-Man,” he almost purred. - -“The what?” Younger Dog answered. - -The cat turned to face the dog. “The thing you’re smelling now. The Not-Man has been stinking up my territory for some months now. He scares the prey from here and teases me by hiding delicious animals in his cave.” - -I was able to jump up to the branch of a nearby tree. Why was Younger Dog talking to this beast? Cats could not be trusted. What made dogs special, especially this dog, was that they wanted to make friends with every cretin in the animal kingdom. - -“Let’s help each other.” Younger Dog wagged his tail slightly and lowered the hair standing on his back. “We don’t have to fight. We attack the Not-Man together.” - -The cat continued to bare his teeth, but the dog's fur still flattened. “I don’t hunt in packs, like you two. I ambush. However, I can tell you where he lives. He is not so large, but he is clever and usually knows when I am coming, so I have not been able to rid these canyons of him. Yet. - -“Keep walking up the hill, to the boulder with two cacti on either side of it. You’ll see a crevice in the stone wall, big enough for you to squeeze through, but too small for me. The Not-Man sleeps in there.” - -The dog's tail wagged slightly. - -“What are you waiting for?” The cat whipped his own tail. “You’re lucky I’m letting you live, so get going.” - -“There’s two of us and one of you!” I squawked. - -“She’s right. We have to go.” Younger Dog dashed up the hill. I gave a last look to the cat before jumping from the tree branch and back into flight. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## Dog - -We reached the boulder described by the cat. - -“I see the crevice over there,” said Slow Hawk. “I can’t follow you into the dark. Are you sure you want to go in?” - -“Yes! You can wait for us here.” - -“I won’t stay too long,” Slow Hawk warned. “But if you do get Straight Horn back, someone will have to watch out for that cat.” - -I jiggled my head and then lifted my nose – from the crevice, the scent of the Not-Man was strong, and just barely, I could smell…Straight Horn, and other sheep? goats? chickens? I whined as I stifled my fear before I squeezed my head and wide shoulders through the crevice and into the cave. - -The twittering of bats felt like tiny pine needles pricking the insides of my ears. Bats were difficult to talk to unless they were calm enough to speak one at a time. They were likely annoyed at my trespassing and would need time to calm before they'd be helpful to me. - -More smells. Savory, earthy, mushrooms, salty stone, the animal smells, the Not-Man – who did smell somewhat like a sweating human, but the stink was sharper, biting. There was a sticky sweetness in the air, as sweet as the candies Boy sometimes gave me for doing tricks. I blinked. Something like vines covered the floor and wound around the spikes jutting from the floor and the ceiling. I could hear slow liquid, not water but something else, dripping from the ceiling to the floor. Ball-like things bloomed on the vines. They glowed, not like stars, but like summer fireflies. - -Feet scraped against the stone floor. I jumped just in time when the Not-Man lunged at me. His giant claw clacked loudly against a rock as the wind from our movements shook the glowing balls. Small things resembling tufts of fur burst from the balls into the air. - -The Not-Man turned to face me as he took big breaths, his body expanding and shrinking. He was human-shaped, about the same height as Woman, but hunched low. His eyes were too big on his head, his nose totally flat, and the claw on his left hand resembled the claws of the crabs Woman brought back from the market, while his right hand was spindly and delicate, like a human’s. - -I lunged for the arm attached to the claw and bit down, hard. His skin was tough, but I pulled back with my hind legs and clenched hard, my teeth finally breaking through. All my muscles working together, swinging my head back and forth, tearing his flesh. His blood, spiced and hot, filled my mouth. He screamed like a great cow. With his weak right hand, he scratched, but I would not release. - -He pulled back, dragging me with him, little pebbles scraping against my paws. More blood filled my mouth, my throat. I sucked air through my nose, the ultra-sweet perfumes filling my brain. - -A great thud landed on the top of my head. Something hard. Pain filled my whole face, a numbness from my toes. Again something bashed my head. The agony was too much, my jaw weakened, and the Not-Man pulled himself free. I was blind and deaf for a few seconds, but then I saw his body shuddering as he forced air in and out his lungs, smelled blood leaking from the wound on the arm hanging limp at his side. I readied myself to lunge a second time, this time for his face or neck. - -“Wait, dooog,” he rasped. I froze. I did not expect the Not-Man to be able to speak to me. “I g-guess you here for ewe I tooook the othzerrr NIGHT.” He did not speak the way most animals did. He was straining to make himself understood. “Weeee don’t naad tow fightt-t. I wOll tak-k you to yourrr preciousss sssheep.” - -I whimpered and backed away from Not-Man, the pain in my head enormous – but I could ignore that for now, because I imagined Boy and Woman praising me for getting Straight Horn back home. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## Sheep - -I thought I’d seen everything worth tasting or fearing before the Not-Man carried me in his arms, through the forest, the canyons, and into the cave. My face and legs were scraped with little cuts from stray branches and from squeezing me through the crevice. My wool was a mess, uncomfortable, matted, heavy – not good for my old knees. - -The mushroom vines offered a soft enough bed. The lamb growing inside me moved often, so she still lived. The animals already living in the cave regarded my arrival with little interest. The bats continued their shrill gossip and daily complaints. The chickens considered me for only a few moments before they went back to chasing cave bugs. The would-be proud goats looked up from their naps before returning to sleep. Goats always called sheep their dull cousins. Yet, here they looked lazy. Bored. - -There was an adolescent male sheep already here, the only one excited by my arrival, but disappointed I was with lamb. - -“Calm down, Restless One,” I scolded him, “I have bigger horns than you do. You’re not old enough to mate.” - -“Not-Man promised I’d have a family,” he’d snorted. “A flock.” - -I was sleeping when I felt Younger Dog’s nose on my cheek. I bleated awake, my too big belly causing me to roll awkwardly before I could figure out exactly what was going on. I could just see Not-Man some feet from me, and the goats, Restless One, and the chickens watching us without moving. Younger Dog was too close for me to see him, but I felt his breath on my cheek and smelled him, that distinct predator-but-friend scent. - -“Thisss dooog hiz caame to—” - -“Huh?” I asked, not fully understanding the Not-Man. I heard him groan. - -“The d-dog wantsss to take YOU home,” he communicated again. Trying to understand his animal voice felt like trying to catch a flea hiding in my wool. “I w-will let YOU maaake choice…” he paused for a few moments “…S-Straight Hoof?” - -“Straight *Horn*,” I corrected, gritting my teeth. - -“Do you waaant to Go back to your HUmans, who m-milk you, EAT you,'' he took a deep breath, “l-leave you outside all day, who SELL your babiessss away?” His whole body tremored with the effort, making sure my aged sheep brain understood him: “I might d-drink some of your BLOOD, but I-I’m building my own f-flock. Your LAMB will s-stay h-here with YOU. You have softtt beddinggg. You have s-so much tasteee fooood. Why s-stress your w-walking th--past the canYON and the woodsss to the HUman lair? What-what do the HUmans offer their PREY that I wouldn’t-n’t?” - -Younger Dog whined. I managed to stand up. The sweet stink of the cave rumbled my stomachs. The Not-Man did have a point. I did not look forward to the journey back, pregnant and old, to the humans’ home. - -“Slow Hawk waits for us.” Younger Dog nudged me with his snout. “The humans are your family.” - -“The humans use me for the things my body produces.” I sighed. “The Not-Man, the humans. My lamb won’t be born into true freedom no matter what I choose.” - -“At least, with the humans, your lamb will get to grow up in the sunshine. You want her to stay in this dank place forever?” Younger Dog sat and stared at me, waiting for my response. - -I thought about the humans back at the home. Boy wore a jacket woven from my own wool. They were monsters: I’d seen Boy and Older Dog break chicken necks, heard Man kill sheep. They all ate the meat. But Boy often rubbed my belly and fell asleep on my back. Woman fed me carrots. Younger Dog saved me from a coyote last month. - -They were monsters. And not. - -Whatever they were, I’d always be a sheep. My lamb growing inside me would be a sheep. We could be dependent on humans to feed us and sheer us, or the Not-Man in his cave. - -I could smell that Younger Dog had a serious injury. He had come a long way to find me, the silly little beast. Most animals would never be so brave. - -“I will go with you,” I told Younger Dog, “if you promise to challenge Older Dog for dominance. Sheep languish without a strong leader.” - -Younger Dog backed up, so I could see him. He barked agreement to my terms. Restless One, listening to our conversation, huffed with annoyance, seemingly unimpressed. Well, I couldn't please everyone. - -“Also, if I die on the walk back, rip my lamb from my belly and bring her home,” I told Younger Dog and ambled toward the exit of this chamber of the cave. - -“You CHOOSE go back to the HUmans?” the Not-Man shouted at me. - -“I’m leaving with Younger Dog.” I stomped and shook my head at him, then turned to my young rescuer. “Lead the way. Isn’t that your job, hound?” - -Younger Dog’s tail wagged back and forth, not too quickly. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## Bat - -The Not-Man who moved into our cave had a habit of chatting aloud to us, although we didn’t always understand what he said. Because of the weird mushrooms he grew, the cave was bright all the time. We did not need to use our bat sounds to find our way around the cave anymore because we always had light, but this made sleeping difficult. He pretended to not understand our complaints about the glow. - -Not-Man claimed it was not easy for him to live with humans. They did not want him. We pitied him because he lived alone with no colony. He kidnapped big animals and brought them to our cave, out of loneliness, we guessed. However, he did not groom us, himself, or his animal friends, or supply interesting gossip, so perhaps the humans felt he was poor company. We could not be sure because we do not know human customs well. - -We asked the songbirds, who said that humans did groom, in pools of water, like they did. As far as we know, Not-Man did not bathe. - -Bats love novel information. But none of us knew where the Not-Man came from. Some of us thought he was once a human but became twisted somehow. Others thought he was once an animal and became twisted somehow. Maybe he was a mushroom that learned to talk and walk. Maybe he wasn’t as lonely as we thought he was because the glowing mushrooms were actually his family. - -After the dog had come and led the pregnant ewe from our cave, Not-Man poured a glowing liquid on his injured arm and healed it. Then he drank his different glowing liquid, and his body swelled with power. I had never seen him drink so much at once. He was so angry, stomping around and destroying his mushrooms, when normally he took great care and attention not to knock them over. - -“Thiis eveNING, they RAYjoyssss retuuurrrrn of losssettt ssssheep,” the Not-Man said to us, but maybe he was just talking to himself or to the mushrooms. “WHEN humanzz and their aNImals sssleep, I come to their ffflock. I not carRY them home becausssse they do NOT dessserve my giffftsss. They do not deserve me. I will DRINK the blooood of the flock and the dooog. The HUMANZZ will have NOTHING but CARcasssesssss.” - -We didn’t like when the Not-Man talked about humans because our colony had purposely moved to this cave, far from humans. We didn’t need human smoke, fire, and trouble. We shook our wings and were quieter than usual, a nervous feeling crackling in the air around us. - -When the sun was sinking, our flock exited the cave through the crevice. I flew out, following my brothers and sisters, but I was curious about the Not-Man, about where his temper would lead him. I landed near the crevice and watched. He moved one of the boulders that made the cave exit narrow, a feat he could only do after he drank some of his liquid, and exited the cave. Drool leaked from his big mouth. Even in the evening light, the sun nearly gone and the light reflection of the moon on the purple sky, I could see that his eyes looked clouded and strange. Low, angry noises shook his chest and his muscles vibrated, buzzed almost, while his heart thundered in his chest. - -My attention was drawn, suddenly, to a new sound: claws scraping against rock, the intake of deep breath, the *woosh* of a large body moving swiftly through the air. A lion leapt onto the Not-Man, surprising him from behind. I heard the crunch of the lion’s large teeth on the bones of his neck, the split-second cry of hurt before his throat was crushed. - -In the past, the Not-Man had always been careful and he looked for signs of the cat before he left his cave. His strange liquid and his rage must have made him stupid. - -I chittered, calling for the others, who scolded me as they swooped around the scene of the lion devouring Not-Man. - -“We didn’t want to see this. We eat bugs, not the corpses of big animals,” they protested, but they didn’t fly away. “You’re so morbid, Nosy Whispers! Poor lonely thing, he was. Probably better off dead than alive and suffering.” - -“With him gone, we can ask the goats to eat the mushrooms,” I offered. “We'll sleep in peace again.” The others thought that was a good idea. - -It was a shame that the Not-Man died with no one to mourn him – a sad fate for even the grumpiest of bats. I perched, thinking of Not-Man, how having him in the cave helped me feel grateful for my brothers and sisters. But our stomachs grumble when left unfilled by moths and mosquitoes, and bats are not philosophical, so I did not idle for long. I took flight and joined the others, hoping the smell of his blood might fade by the time we returned. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Not-Man Kidnaps a Sheep** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/952983423501311).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/the-book-of-love-kelly-link.md b/content/issue-37/the-book-of-love-kelly-link.md deleted file mode 100644 index 17ae33c5..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/the-book-of-love-kelly-link.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,52 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Book of Love, by Kelly Link" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Mattia Ravasi -copyright: '© Mattia Ravasi 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Our quarterly cycling between review columnists begins another annual turn, raising Mattia Ravasi to the top of the wheel in this editor's increasingly laboured and probably broken metaphor. Not a problem shared by Mattia – nor by Kelly Link. Does her stellar reputation as a short story writer expand to embrace the long form?" - -image: images/BookLoveLink10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Kelly Link (from [the author's website](https://kellylink.net/), by [Adrianne Mathiowetz](https://www.adriannemathiowetz.com/)) and the novel's cover (designed by [Caroline Cunningham](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239722/the-book-of-love-by-kelly-link/))." - -type: stock -slug: the-book-of-love-kelly-link-review -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}A{{}} person’s late teens are a magical time: a time of transformation and shape-shifting. After finishing school (or deciding school is not for us) we set our eyes on new shores, eager to find out what kind of person we are meant to become. Things that were incredibly important to us throughout our childhood and our in-between years, things like hobbies, interests, and even friends, can come to seem like needless burdens. Some of us get a first full-time job around this age, or start college, feeling at last like the masters of our own lives, magicians coming to grips with the power crackling between our fingers. For others the lack of a clear path, of something to care about and dedicate ourselves to, can feel like a curse: a botched enchantment preventing us from turning into our true selves, leaving us trapped inside a life we were meant to leave behind. - -Kelly Link eviscerates the magic of this liminal age in *The Book of Love*, a novel obsessed with doors and transformation, with dreams and ambitions burning hot in the hearts of its characters. Set in the quaint seaside town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, the novel focuses on a group of teenagers who are back home for Christmas… *from the dead*. - -The townsfolk might be convinced that Mo, Laura, and Daniel spent the last few months at a prestigious music school in Ireland, but *they* know better. They were actually dead, trapped inside the interdimensional realm of a trickster god called Bogomil. Somehow they managed to escape, bringing with them a fourth person, a remarkable individual called “Bowie” (after a poster in Lovesend’s high school music room) who does not seem to know their own identity. - -Collectively they are confused, disturbed, and scared, though still able to crack the odd joke. As they strive to puzzle out the events of the past year, particularly the mystery of their own death, the four of them get tangled up in a game between Bogomil and the local music teacher, Mr. Anabin, a laconic man with a passion for motivational t-shirts and who is also a capricious god. - -They are free to go back to their families and resume their lives, for a time. But in the end, while two of them will be allowed to stay, two will have to return to Bogomil’s nightmarish realm. - -This tight, cruel premise allows Link to showcase the full range of her fabulist powers and stylistic flair. A giant in the field of fantasy fiction, Link has won most major awards you can think of, including a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” and three Nebulas. She is perhaps the most obvious successor of Angela Carter as a writer able to take the material of myths and fairy tales and extract from it its deeper psychological and emotional meaning, while also preserving the significance of its outer shapes, its Gods and monsters, refashioning these stories into a guise at once recognizable and extremely modern. - -Link, however, is renowned as a *short story* writer. The publication of her first novel thirty or so years into her career cannot but be an intriguing prospect. Does *The Book of Love* pack all the genius of her shorter work, taking it to new heights? Or does her work feel dispersed and diluted in long form? - -*The Book of Love* is incredibly funny, especially considering its central theme of teenage death, whether the humor comes from Mo’s sass or from Laura’s explosive fights with her volatile sister Susannah. Its prose is lush and luxurious, baroque perhaps, but never purple. Through vivid descriptions, meaningful anecdotes, and a knack for a winning simile, Link manages to bring the whole of Lovesend to life, in a way somewhat reminiscent of another fictional New England town, the Derry depicted in Stephen King’s *It*. The reader experiences the beauty and boredom of this quiet tourist spot, its charm and also its dullness, through the eyes of people who know it like the back of their hands, who love it quietly and implicitly but also can’t wait to be rid of it. Lovesend is a place where crushes, exes, and rivals are inescapable; where the few attractions available (like coffee shop *What Hast Thou Ground?*, whose owner, of course a loveable grump, inevitably doesn’t like customers who linger too long but is fiercely protective of his baristas) are shrouded with the mythical aura of all the memories that accrued around them, from first kisses to ill-advised hookups, nighttime escapades and days full of laughter. - -The early part of the novel is as rife with mystery and drama as you would expect from the balance of reward and loss in its stunning premise. The newly returned teenagers get to grips with the life they had left behind, with all the things – some of them tragic – that have happened since they “went to Ireland”. Their manipulative gods have tasked them with *doing magic*, which they set out to do in ways that speak volumes about their character: Laura with zealous drive, Daniel with resigned stubbornness, Mo skeptically… while Bowie turns into a seagull, and then into a whisper of moths. - -All too soon, however, this magical premise starts snowballing into a mythical avalanche, as new god-like creatures are introduced, the protagonists swiftly turn into fearsome magicians, and Lovesend becomes the setting for a showdown of cosmic proportions. - -While it is hard to pinpoint an exact moment when *The Book of Love* grows unwieldy, by its final third the novel has become a succession of scenes where all-powerful beings talk wittily about magic, cracking one joke after another. Between one dialogue and the next, all of the characters find meaningful and rewarding love in the arms of handsome strangers or long-cherished crushes. The sense of imminent danger animating the early novel is lost. Any intimations that their cruel predicament – *two shall live, two return to death* – might push the four protagonists to betray each other are swiftly forgotten in the name of friendship and support, with strains between them no more than an occasional, and swiftly-resolved, misunderstanding. One of the harshest conflicts comes from Susannah getting mad at her sister because Laura used magic to force her to do the laundry. - -*The Book of Love* is extremely switched-on and politically correct. It is set in a town filled with statues of African Americans of great achievement, who, at one point, come to life and tear to bits the statue of a slave owner. All the characters are respectful of their friends’ personal spaces and privacy; lovers act toward one another with nothing but tenderness and understanding. All of this is incredibly admirable, but it makes the novel feel somewhat lifeless, plastic, a magical showdown set in a version of our world that is a little too sanitized to feel convincing. In time, even the novel’s villains turn out to be tenderhearted, while its supervillain reads very much like a larger-than-life baddy, Cruella De Vil with godlike powers. The more one reads *The Book of Love*, the harder it is to believe that even its original threat-cum-promise – that two of its protagonists will meet a terrible end – is unlikely to be kept. - -It goes without saying, but there is of course nothing wrong with characters having healthy relationships, or with satanic death gods who turn out to be altruistic, loveable scruffs. *The Book of Love* is certainly very aware of what it is doing, and speaks at length – through the character of Mo’s grandmother, a successful romance writer – about the nature of love stories and our need for happy endings. The result is a very funny young adult novel which contrives to pitch its characters in situations where its humor can be best exploited. Back-cover comparisons to *The Master and Margarita*, while spectacularly out of place, are certainly not the book’s own fault. - -Ultimately, *The Book of Love* is characteristically Linkian in its strangeness, but also the literary equivalent of a peanut butter mocha fudge hot chocolate, a refreshment typical of Lovesend’s quirky coffee shop: any balancing trace of bitterness is overwhelmed by the saccharine sweetness of everything else. It’s by no means a *bad* concoction, but do you have the stomach for six hundred pages of it? - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1037058635093789).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/the-kid-is-killing-me.md b/content/issue-37/the-kid-is-killing-me.md deleted file mode 100644 index 920dab4f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/the-kid-is-killing-me.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,246 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Kid is Killing Me" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Aubrey Taylor -copyright: '© Aubrey Taylor 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As a reader, it's a treat to discover an author whose writing just lights you up. As editor, it's always a nice feeling adding new names to the ranks of authors appearing in Mythaxis, every issue means more. But there's something a little extra special when you discover that the story you liked so much will be that author's first ever publication. Here's to a great debut! Aubrey Taylor doesn't so much hit the ground running as miss the ground completely and carry on flying." - -image: images/KidKillingMe10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Bru-nO](https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-breast-baby-newborn-female-841489/) and [Andrea Piacquadio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-gray-tank-top-3812746/)." - -type: stock -slug: the-kid-is-killing-me -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he little leech must’ve gotten stuck to me right out of the womb. Clung onto my leg like the bloody monster she is, still dripping from my uterus, placenta trailing behind. - -She really freaked me out when I first caught sight of her in the mirror, peeking out from behind my frizzy hair, grinning widely at the thick coat of foundation I had on. She was terrifying: yellowish-blue nails, and a twisted smile that curled up right to the corners of unblinking eyes far too sentient for a newborn. I dropped my candle, a little *Yankee* Vanilla Bean that shattered on the floor – the kind of ridiculous shit you have when you’re a thirteen-year-old girl, because you’ve already gotten sucked in to the commercialist trap that is *Bath and Body Works* – and the baby went berserk at the noise, chomping down hard on my ear with her devil-sharp teeth. (I *still* have a chunk of my helix missing, and now I can’t wear my hair up, and all in all it’s just really not ideal.) Out of horror-movie reflex I grabbed a jagged piece of the broken candle and shoved it into her chubby jelly neck, where her head hung as delicately as a flower on its stem – she was just a baby, I guess she hadn’t grown the muscles to lift it yet – and with a gut-wrenching gurgle she puked up blood and then disappeared. - -First I thought I was crazy, but I knew I wasn’t. Then I thought I was rid of her, but of course I wasn’t. She’s practically invincible, the freak. - -My ear stung for a few days, and I had to wrap a bandage around it, but as soon as it stopped bleeding she was back. Bigger. Learning to crawl. She climbed on me like a spider at one point during gym class, hissing in one ear and then moving down to sink her claws into my thigh right as Brent Mudd kicked the ball. Naturally, I got hit in the face, and any patience I had left for the thing imploded. As soon as I was able to escape to the locker room I grabbed my locker door, leaned forward so she swung off my shoulder, and repeatedly slammed the metal into her bald, baby-powdered head, until it was mottled brown and violet, her eyes bulging red and bloody out of their sockets. - -But it only ever got rid of her for a few days; never for good. - -There was a time late in high school (she was maybe four or five, shiny blonde hair growing in down to her shoulders, cheeks wide under bright blue eyes, dimples and all) when she started to suffocate me at the hockey rink while I was watching my brother play his senior night game – hands clamping down hard over my mouth and nose until my vision started to blur, black spots poisoning the bright orange heaters above me. I drove myself back home from the game, pedal slammed to the floor, tears still streaming down my cheeks, straight through the intersection. I was praying for cross traffic to careen into my back end and grind her premature bones into her tissues until her underdeveloped brain splattered the back seat. But there was no one else on the road, so I got home and just made do with a razor. - -I’m starting to get nervous. I want rid of her (obviously). She’s about seven now, and she’s been getting stronger although she’s clearly malnourished (I tried to starve her for a few years, but somehow she always gets into the Nutella). I can fend her off for now, but she’s already decently tall, and *crafty*, and I’m worried about what will happen when she gets to fourteen, fifteen, twenty. When she starts to form an interest in kickboxing or pipe bombs or something. She’s already starting to hurt me with her bare fists, and the possibility haunts me of the damn thing watching *Karate Kid* or *Home Alone* and getting ideas. - -And besides that, I want friends. I’m sick and tired of missing out on exciting dates and parties just so I can take care of the wretched thing. I mean, I *am* twenty. I’m *at* college. I’m supposed to be having fun, for God’s sake. I should be rid of her by now, ready to naturally reenter the social sphere with a newfound maturity. But all she’s ever done is take up my time and energy, ungratefully, violently, growing more and more needy as the years tick on. - -I can’t exactly hang out with friends with the Kid around, you know? It gets tiresome for everyone, with the whining, the *sorry, hang on, I just need to put her down for a nap, could you keep it down, please?*, or the way she sidles up to my friends, all doe-eyed, and begs and begs for ice cream, or movies, or whatever else she thinks they’ll give her; and if she ever feels mistreated or left out her face drops to something Satanic, devil-teeth glinting, and she lunges at them, and I have to get in the way and usher them out the door before anyone gets hurt. - -And yes, I probably should’ve told my parents about her a long time ago, and I know it. But no one wants to be the stupid teen who got pregnant! It wasn’t even my fault, really, I didn’t even get the luxury of having sex first. She just showed up. It was all very Virgin Mary, really, if you ignore the fact that she’s the Antichrist. - -But my mom would never believe that. It would be all five stages of grief: *Oh, you must be mistaken, she can’t be yours, you’re lying to me.* Then, *I can’t believe you, how could you be so irresponsible?!* Her bargaining would be useless, really, just all the things I’ve already thought of: *Did you try dropping her off on someone else’s doorstep? Did you try putting her up for adoption?* (Yes, and yes; and no, it didn’t work, she magically reappears at my side no matter what I do.) Then, slowly, painfully, the bullet of reality would sink in, and she’d grudgingly help babysit so that I would be able to focus on school (for once), and she’d call up Grandma and say, *I know, I know. Her life is ruined. We should all pity her and make snide comments because we don’t know how to deal with it otherwise.* - -Well, I don’t know… maybe they would come around eventually. I’m just not sure it would be worth the effort. I have a *Just don’t tell us!* kind of family when it comes to being a disappointment. When my brother said he was an atheist, my mom fluttered her hands around for a few minutes and then elected to pretend he never said anything at all. But since then, she’s made it a point to drag him to church every time he goes back home, like he’ll realize his error with enough people singing psalms in his face. And the less said about *my* particular “lifestyle choices” the better. - -So it’s been… *boring*, to say the least, these past seven years. Fine: *lonely*. I’m lonely. Alright? I said it. Kids make for dull company. The moron’s been trying to get into the vodka and Cheez-Its for months, and when I cave all she does is get lethargic and drunk and depressed. I resigned myself to being her guardian. What else could I do? - -Then, by some miracle, I met someone in one of my classes this year, and that was when I decided that I was at my breaking point. I *will* get rid of the Kid so I can date this girl if it’s the last thing I do. Because the Crush is *amazing*: tall, and gorgeous, and likes most of the same things I do. We talk about gruesome tales of true crime! We watch *Game of Thrones*! And, well, she only drinks coffee when it’s iced, but hey, everyone’s got their baggage. - -Thing is, it’s impossible to date her without getting past the constant distraction of having the unwanted Kid around. Shortly after I met the Crush, I was so tired I almost fell asleep in the shower, and the Kid pressed my face up against the faucet and tried to drown me. So, really, the little wretch deserved it when I swung her out the window and held her up by her long, matted hair until she screamed her lungs raw and I finally dropped her and had the satisfaction of seeing her splat against the pavement. (It was great, she exploded like a balloon.) So finally I caved and got an appointment with a specialist, who might be my only chance to get rid of the Kid for good. - -The doctor is very smiley and hopeful. She says, *Wow, she looks just like you!* (like that’s a compliment and not the greatest insult I’ve ever received in my life) and doesn’t even miss a beat before adding that, no, I can’t just force her to go away. But apparently there are other people like me, and some of them have been taking care of their children, especially when they tend toward murderous fits of rage, and research shows that they can grow up to be quite lovely young adults. - -Bull*shit*. I stormed out of her office in a hurry, hell-bent on never returning. I’m not about to start taking *care* of the damn thing, are you *kidding* me? But then, of course, it’s only a day later that the Crush calls and asks if I want to get lunch while I try to hush the piercing screams behind me. - -“Are you alright?” she asks at one point. - -“Fine, fine,” I say, ripping the Kid’s nails out of my chest and biting as many of her fingers as I can clean off, all the way up to the little knuckles. The kid lets loose another wail, clutching bloody stumps to her chin, face red and blotchy with tears. I spit out her pinky, wipe off my mouth. “I’m afraid I can’t make it, though.” - -I drag the Kid, kicking and screaming, back to the doctor’s office the same day, a little sheepish for the way I’d left, but mostly just pissed at the new claw marks down my torso and downright irate about missing out on another date. - -“Fine,” I seethe, “what exactly do you suggest I do?” I gesture at the little monster, letting the doctor look closer at her regrown fingers and pale white wrists. At her teeth, glinting out of her scornful, predatory face. - -The doctor doesn’t even seem frightened. “Hello,” she says, leaning down to make eye contact with the demon. I gape at the doctor. The kid matches my expression, eyes growing wider, teeth disappearing behind trembling lips. - -“Would you like to tell me about yourself?” The Kid looks at the doctor, and then looks at me and frowns. - -The doctor straightens and shakes her head. “This may take a while.” She writes something down on a clipboard and clicks her tongue. “Start by giving her lots of water and healthy food. Make sure she’s sleeping well. Maybe let her exercise—” - -“*Exercise?* You want me to put this thing on a fucking *treadmill?* She tried to kill me *today*, for God’s sake!” - -“Then you should exercise, too,” the doctor says calmly, which I think should be a politically incorrect thing to say, but I can’t exactly call her out on it because she’s a doctor, and she’s right. I honestly haven’t had the energy to exercise in years. - -When we get back home the Kid and I have a staring match. I put my hands on my hips, make myself tall and intimidating. She gazes back up at me just as detestingly, arms crossed over her narrow chest. - -Finally I cave, grab a cup and slam it down in front of her before filling it from my water bottle. “Haven’t washed these dishes in months,” I tell her spitefully as I do it. “I hope you get mono. I’m not about to waste a Brita filter on you.” She looks at me distrustfully, and then looks at the water with need. She grabs the cup, inspects it from all angles, sniffs it, but then it’s too much and she drains it, gulping deeply, breathing so hard the glass fogs up as she drinks. I can practically see her pupils dilating. - -When she finishes she looks at me expectantly, still frowning. But she doesn’t whine or scream. She doesn’t bite me. She almost seems… calm. I refill the glass slightly less hesitantly, and she drinks it all again. She uses the back of her hand to wipe her lips and stares at her reflection, rotating the cup in front of her wide eyes: the kind of bright, childlike eyes that are supposed to be full of wonder, that always make middle-aged women go *awww, what a little darling*. - -I lean on the counter and squint, trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with those eyes. - -And then she slams the glass on the counter, and it shatters. I leap back, but can’t dodge the shard of glass she flings at my face. Tears spring to my eyes when it cuts through the skin of my cheek. She grabs a bigger piece and jumps at me, aiming for the neck, a reminder of our very first meeting. - -“You! Piece! Of! Shit!” I yell, sprinting around pieces of furniture, weaponless and betrayed. “I thought we were finally getting along!” - -She jumps over the back of the couch and the glass grazes my shin as she tumbles over my feet. I stomp down on her wrists until she drops it, and then pick her up by her ankles, her teeth still snapping, claws shredding any bare skin she can reach, and head toward the oven. - -“You asked for this,” I mutter, turning it as high as it will go. “I was being *so nice* to you. Giving you water from my *own* water bottle. And this is how you repay me.” She snarls, and I struggle with her for a few more moments, coming out of the blitz with long scratch marks down my arms and neck. “Jesus Christ, stop moving so much and let me *cook you*, damn it!” - -With a final shove, I manage to squeeze her inside the oven, her spine pressed up against the light at the back, her legs curled up to her chest, fingers gripping the edges of the oven before I snap the door shut with a *bang!* and she recoils with a scream. I sit there, heaving air, holding the door shut with my entire body for thirty minutes, until I’m sure she’s done writhing and hissing in pain. - -“Rare or medium-well?” I pretend to ask the Crush, fixing my hair and chuckling to myself, when I finally open the door to check. The Kid – probably charred and blistered, skin puckered up in red welts and eyes dripping out of their sockets – is gone. - -Of course, she comes back a few days later. This time, I’m ready. “Come out and drink some water, bastard,” I say nicely, when I first spot her lurking under my bed. I hand her a full (plastic) cup. As soon as she’s distracted with the water, I push her down into a fold-up chair and zip-tie her ankles and wrists to the metal poles. - -She isn’t even bothered with the lack of freedom, just more irritated when her cup of water drops to the floor, away from her chapped lips. “Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, picking it up, refilling it, and holding it up to her mouth so she can drink. I’m such a stellar parent. - -“Next you’re going to eat,” I say sternly. She watches me dubiously as I walk over to the kitchenette and whip out carrots, onions, and lentils. I grin at her shocked face maliciously. “Oh, yes, *real food*. I went to the *grocery store*, like an *adult*. No frozen pizza, no granola bars. We’re having—” I squint at the recipe on my phone and try not to make a face “—lentil soup, because the Food Network says it’s healthy and also… tasty… I guess. So you’re going to eat it, and you’re going to *like* it, you little fucker.” - -Two hours later, I discover that I am a master chef. I mean, sure, it took me some time and some Googling to figure out how to “dice” onions (turns out, they’re already pre-cut into rings! ha!) and the carrots end up kind of raw and chunky, but damn, garlic and oregano fix everything. The Kid and I make reluctant eye contact over our steaming food (I un-zip-tied one of her hands and pulled her up to the table, because I’m gracious) before literally tossing aside our spoons and drinking it from the lips of our bowls. - -I give her more water, because her eyes are drooping, and I guess she isn’t so bad when she’s physically restrained. Then I wash the dishes, turn out the lights, and head to bed. - -We go on like this for a while, her in her makeshift high chair (slash torture chamber, if needed), me playing the part of caring Gen-X parent: buying organic food (okay, not really, but what does “organic” even mean?), keeping junk and dangerous objects out of reach, and forcing myself not to hit the damn thing, even when deserved. Occasionally, she’ll get prickly, trying to literally bite the hand that’s feeding her; but I don’t lose my temper, since she’s zip-tied and I’m in control. Besides, she’s looking healthier, sure; her cheeks have rounded out, her hips don’t jut out so extremely from her waist, and her eyes are no longer sunken into her cheeks. - -But while all of this makes her more dangerous, I can tell that at least I’m healthier, too. No bite wounds, and more protein than I’ve ever had in my diet. I’m forcing myself to sleep longer, so it’s dark and quiet enough for her to sleep, too. It’s not too bad of a situation. I’m considering calling up the Crush soon. Getting out of the house for a change. - -One night I’m turning out the lights when she speaks for the very first time. “Will you untie me?” - -I freeze, hand still on the light switch, and then flick it back on, afraid it’ll be like a horror movie where she suddenly appears right behind me. But no, she’s still trapped in the chair, looking right at me with her big eyes, which are strangely starting to seem more and more human as time goes on. It’s probably just because I have to look at her so much: while I cook dinner, while I eat, when I wake up. Always. Just the two of us. I would be losing my mind if I didn’t feel so fucking great. I think it’s the protein. - -“Could you maybe try not to kill me?” I retort, and turn the lights off dismissively, heading to the bedroom. - -But she won’t give up. Her reedy voice floats through the crack in the door. “Untie me.” - -I peel off my socks and jeans. “No.” - -“It hurts.” - -My shirt gets caught on my head, and my voice comes out muffled. “So do your teeth.” - -“I can’t sleep like this.” - -My clothes fall into a dirty pile on the floor, and I dig through the hamper for week-old pajamas. “You’re fine.” - -“The doctor said I need exercise.” - -I grit my teeth as I dress. I mull this over until I’m under the covers, the bedside light switched off. “*Maybe*, when I’m awake to supervise.” - -“I’ll try to be good.” - -This makes me pause. But then I squeeze my eyes shut and roll over. “Don’t lie.” - -“I’m not lying. I’ll try.” - -I really am a sucker. It must be all that hippie food I’ve been buying, free-range zero-plastic recycled soy bullshit giving me faith in the world again. But I get up from bed and grab my scissors and go back through. I hesitantly free the girl from her bonds and she climbs down from the highchair. She must be eight by now. She is quite tall for her age. - -She mirrors my movements as we walk back to bed, and lay down together. And miraculously, despite every bad feeling I have in my gut… in the morning *I’m still alive*. - -I go back to the doctor’s office with the girl a few days later, holding her hand. I’m practically preening when I tell her about our new routine. “Look at her! She’s so healthy. And she hasn’t bitten me in weeks!” - -The doctor smiles at us. “Do you both feel better?” - -I roll my eyes. “Obviously. Those teeth are like daggers. And I hate having to wash the blood out of my laundry.” - -The doctor looks at the girl. “And you?” - -She looks at me uncertainly, and then nods. - -“Excellent!” The doctor makes a note on her clipboard. “Well, now that physical health is being taken care of, you should start the emotional process.” - -I frown. “We’re not done? She’s fine as she is.” - -The doctor shakes her head and smiles again, somewhat condescendingly this time. “She’s doing a wonderful job right now, but it’s possible for her to relapse at any time.” She tilts her head at the girl. “It’s a lot of effort to try to control it, right?” - -The girl squeezes my hand tighter, looking down at the floor. But then she nods, and my chest drops. - -The doctor looks at her pityingly, like she might hug her, but she keeps her distance. “For her physical health to make any lasting impression, you’re going to have to be kind to her.” - -*To the Kid?* I raise my eyebrows. “I already cook literally every single meal for her.” - -“You have to tell her she’s good. Tell her she’s wonderful, and precious, and smart, and thoughtful, and that you care about her.” - -I burst out into laughter. Then I realize that the doctor’s dead serious, and I morph it into an embarrassed scoff. “Then I’d be a liar,” I retort. - -The doctor gives me a hard look. “Listen, you’re a parent whether you like it or not, okay? If you want this to get better, even if it feels stupid to you, you have to try.” She takes a deep breath. “And keep coming in here together, too, okay? We’re going to keep talking.” - -I’m disheartened, but I’m certainly not going to give up. Not when we’ve come so far. The doctor’s right: if this is my only chance at getting control of things and finally having people I *like* back in my life, I will do anything. - -We awkwardly sit in the car outside of the doctor’s office, my hand frozen mid-air as I hold the key unturned in the ignition and try to think of something nice I can say to the Kid. But I look at her, at her awkward bony shoulders and her wide, almost smeared-looking face, and I think about all of the days I’ve spent pent up with her instead of out and about, enjoying life, and I can’t force out the words. - -Days later and I’m still struggling. I serve her food, and she eats every last bite in silence, and I wordlessly wash her dishes and go to bed, barely even looking at her. I mean, what is *good* about her? She’s irritating and dependent and too quiet to be interesting. And every time she opens her mouth, I still see those devilish teeth. I avoid her when I can, even when we go to weekly sessions at the doctor’s office, out of guilt or discomfort or something else. - -But regardless of it all, something has changed, because the next time the Crush calls, asking to study together at a coffee shop, even though it means bringing the Kid, I say yes. - -The Kid is appeased with a cup of whipped cream (who isn’t?). The Crush and I sip our grown-up drinks, strawberry shortcake lattes. Hers is iced, but I’m willing to let it slide. Neither of us move to open our laptops. She leans on one elbow, body slanted toward me, and I think, *Oh my God, don’t ruin this*. - -“I like your— your—” my eyes zigzag around the table “—your posture.” *Shit*. I mean, I do! It’s all slouchy, and she has short fingernails that tap lightly on the table, I like those too. But *posture*? Who *says* that? - -She smiles all crooked, another huge plus. “Thanks.” Her gaze slides toward the Kid, then back at me. “I like your notes.” Internally I cringe. Obviously she just wants me for my homework. This is purely transactional. It’s college, after all. I bend down to open my bag and get them. “Whenever I look over at what you’re writing in class, it’s something super interesting and completely unrelated. And you have good handwriting.” - -I stop reaching. “Okay, first of all, it’s not interesting, and I have the handwriting of a middle-school boy and it haunts me. Second of all, it *is* related! Name one thing I’ve written that isn’t completely relevant to the lectures.” - -“Yesterday, you copied the entire transcript of a three-hour Titanic documentary.” - -I flush. “That’s totally for the final project.” - -The Crush giggles, and I lose all remaining train of thought. *I made her laugh!* I can’t stop staring at her mouth until her gentle fingers reach out and tap my hand, and it’s like a live wire jolts through all of my nerves at once. “Hello?” - -I clear my throat. “Sorry, what?” - -“I said you also drew a picture of the world on fire.” - -Accurate rendition, in my opinion. “I have many talents.” - -She looks at the Kid again. “You’re sure funny for someone who draws so much smoke.” - -“Is that a metaphor? I think you should know that I consider those useless. If there’s something that needs to be said, make it explicit.” I smile benignly. “And I know best. I did pass English in high school.” - -The Crush continues to look at the Kid. “She looks just like you.” - -I fake gag, purely on reflex. “Ugh, just tell me I have red horns and a forked tongue, you don’t have to be so mean about it.” - -She raises her eyebrows. “You think she’s ugly?” - -“Among other things. She can’t take care of herself and doesn’t make anyone happy.” I laugh a little, but they both just stare at me. Okay, maybe this is fun and all, but I’m really not here to dilly-dally. I duck down to grab my notes. “Anyway, which problem are you—” - -“I mean, it’s not her fault the world is burning. She’s just on one little corner of it.” - -My notebook catches on the table edge and falls out of my hands onto the floor. I feel hot. I can’t look at anything for too long. “Okay, listen, she’s my problem, okay? You don’t know what she should or shouldn’t be blamed for.” I bend down to pick up my notebook, but then I squeeze the table and stop myself. “Her existence itself is pretty awful, when you think about it, the amount of resources she needs and the ignorance she has about where they’re coming from. And there really is no meaningful way for her to atone for all of the terrible things she is implicit in, whether they are purposeful or not. So, I mean, it *is* her fault that the world is burning, or at least that she plays a part. And maybe she *should* be punished for it, because there’s not a lot else she’s good for.” - -I stare at my fingers, and then I let go of the table. - -The Crush shrugs. I catch it in the corner of my vision. “That’s pretty harsh. I can see where she gets her murderous looks from.” - -I swivel to face the Kid. Sure enough, she’s glowering. I scowl right back. - -“Yep, right there. You’re both so cute.” - -I rile. “I’m not here to be infantilized.” - -“Oh, come on, I’m just teasing.” Something in my chest feels tight. Probably indigestion. “Some teasing is fun. Actually, it’s necessary. On that Titanic transcript, once the lifeboats were all gone, did anyone crack a joke?” - -“God, no.” - -“Huh. Such a good opportunity to break the ice.” - -I bury my head in my hands. The Kid starts to laugh. - -The Crush is laughing, too. “See?” - -“Yeah, I see. I see that you’re a moron.” - -“What else do you see?” I can hear the smile in her voice. “Do you see me on Tuesday for another coffee date?” - -I pull my fingers away from my eyes to look at her. My whole body is buzzing. “If you don’t pull any more pick-up lines like that, I’ll think about it.” - -“Done.” The Crush is still laughing. She ruffles the girl’s hair. “Bring this one again. I like her.” - -One of us says “Okay,” and it’s only when the girl and I are back in the car that I realize I don’t remember who. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Kid is Killing Me** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1037061655093487).* diff --git a/content/issue-37/things-i-learned-from-puppets-about-kindness.md b/content/issue-37/things-i-learned-from-puppets-about-kindness.md deleted file mode 100644 index f4b37492..00000000 --- a/content/issue-37/things-i-learned-from-puppets-about-kindness.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,372 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 37 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Steve Loiaconi -copyright: '© Steve Loiaconi 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The Muppets have been acting out alongside real people for, would you believe, sixty-nine years, though for me the old puppets-co-existing-with-human-beings chestnut peaked in 2012 with the video for K. Flay's \"We Hate Everyone\". Until now, that is, as Steve Loiaconi does for felt and jail breaks what \"Who Framed Roger Rabbit?\" did for cartoons and film noir…" - -image: images/PuppetsKindness10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Tahir Osman](https://www.pexels.com/photo/cuddly-toys-behind-bars-10775011/) and [Alexas_Fotos](https://pixabay.com/photos/ernie-stuffed-animal-figure-2772128/)." - -type: stock -slug: things-i-learned-from-puppets-about-kindness -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}here was a time when I would have ignored anything that looked like a robocall or a scam and just let it ring. But I was waiting on calls about several resumes I had sent out, and I couldn’t afford to miss a promising business opportunity, so when the call came from an unknown number in Queens one night, I answered. - -“Hello?” I said. - -There was silence on the other end at first, and then a frantic whisper. “I’m in trouble, Teddy,” the voice said. “Real trouble.” - -It took me a moment to place the voice. I was used to it being much louder and more boisterous and projected from the mouth of an oversized clam. - -“Happy?” I asked. “How the hell did you get my number?” - -“The janitor who slipped me this phone gave it to me.” - -“Where are you?” - -“I’m locked up.” He sniffled. “They don’t need us anymore.” - -“Gosh, that must be rough.” - -“Listen,” he said, his voice quivering, “you gotta help me, Teddy.” - -“In point of fact, I don’t.” I made no effort to mute my bitterness. “We don’t work together anymore, remember?” - -He was silent for a beat. “You’re, you’re, uh, still upset about that, huh?” - -“I’m still *unemployed* about that.” - -“You don’t understand,” he stammered. “They’re rounding us up. They want to send us off to war. I’m a pacifist. A conscientious objector, even. This goes against everything I believe in. I need to get out of here before they ship me off to the Pentagon.” - -I glanced at my three-year-old son Sam playing in the next room. He wouldn’t remember, but when our show was on, he used to clap and cheer and shout “Dada” whenever Happy popped up on screen. The thought still made me smile. - -“Alright,” I said, “tell me what you need.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“I{{}}’m going to bust that plushy son of a bitch open like a pinata,” Charlie said. - -He was waiting for me in the dim corner of a Brooklyn bar, nursing an overpriced pint of light beer and pretending to ignore the songs and laughter across the room when he wasn’t staring death in the same direction. Three puppets danced on the bar, without strings – a cat, an alligator, and a blob-like purple monster. Felt and fur flailed as a small crowd cheered. - -The middle performer in the puppet trio had once been Charlie’s character on the children’s TV show where we had both worked. It was called Cinnamon Avenue. Yes, it was a shameless ripoff. But no, toddlers didn’t give a shit. - -Aloysius Alligator had been a cheerful and inquisitive reptile who spoke in rhyme and occasionally offered life lessons in educational rap songs. He wore a sequined vest and a top hat and carried a cane. If you said he looked like a cartoon pimp, you would not be wrong. On the bar, Aloysius sidled up to Cutesy Cat and grinded against her suggestively. These days, he was acting like one, too. - -This was the new world. - -“Back when I was manning the puppet, we could never behave like that in public,” Charlie said, shaking his fist at the bar. Charlie was pushing sixty, overweight and balding. He had been planning to work a couple more years until he could start tapping into his retirement funds before it all went to shit. Now, he couldn’t find a job and his puppet was living its best life right in front of him. - -“People always talk about how you get to Sesame Street,” Charlie said, gulping down the last of his drink. “What nobody tells you is, it’s the getting out that’s the real bitch.” - -“Speaking of which,” I said, and I relayed what Happy had told me. Charlie listened to my tale, the wooly tufts of his eyebrows rising then falling, like the little homunculus puppeteer inside *his* head couldn’t decide between disbelief and a thunderous glower and was yanking on the strings at random. - -In the end, he settled for laughter. Big beery gusts of genuine amusement. - -“Six months! Six months is all it takes! God damned Pinocchio nano-chips bring these turncoats to life, studios put all us *skilled performance creatives* out of work to cover the start-up costs, then six months later the ratings are in the can, the studios fold like Kermit in a suitcase, and now it’s Happy the Clam, Gorilla Glam, and Skoozle Go To War? I fucking love it!” - -He smacked the table with delight then stood to fetch another round. He returned with two full pints and a snicker of barely contained glee. - -“I went to hit the can. There’s two studio guys waiting out back with nets,” he said, nodding with grim satisfaction. On the bar, the cat and alligator were mashing their plushy bodies together while dousing themselves with Mountain Dew. The armless blob, Manfred, watched with an alarmingly wide smile. “Enjoy your final moments of freedom, flop-mops.” - -Charlie raised his glass for me to toast, and for the first time noticed I wasn’t sharing in his joy about the unfortunate situation of our former co-workers. “What did I miss?” - -I took a deep breath and prepared to ask him what I came there to ask. “I’m going to break Happy out.” - -I tried to project resolve, but I recognized how absurd the words sounded as I said them. Charlie snorting into the head of his pint did nothing to help matters. “Well, good luck with that,” he said, wiping sweat and beer foam off his jowls with his sleeve. Then comprehension dawned. “Oh, hell no…” - -I nodded. “Happy thinks he’s got maybe a few days until the DoD contracts are finalized. Until then, he’s locked up at the studio. I need information about the building and, like, the security protocols. I know you still have connections.” - -“Connections to a career that was snatched away from me in the prime of my life,” Charlie said, thumping his chest with two stubby fingers. “And me with retirement just around the corner too,” he added, heedless of the contradiction. “Forget it.” - -A smattering of applause and hoots from the bar indicated the puppets had completed their sex performance, or whatever you might call it. Cutesy Cat dried herself with a stack of cocktail napkins and Aloysius shook like a freshly bathed dog, splashing laughing bystanders with citrusy soda as Manfred collected tips in his gaping lippy grin and settled their tab with money that rightly should have been ours. - -I sagged in my seat. “I understand.” - -“Good.” - -“But truth be told, if I do this alone, there’s a good chance I wind up in jail.” - -Charlie stared at me over the rim of his glass as he guzzled his pint, I’m sure picturing how horribly ill-suited I would be for prison life. It was a thought I had mulled over quite a bit myself. - -We were jerked back to reality by a cry of “Charlie baby!” Halfway to the back door and his date with fate, Aloysius had spotted us across the room and was waving like we were the oldest of good old friends. - -“Ladies and gentlemen,” the alligator shouted, “big hand for Charlie! That man right over there taught me all of my moves!” Suddenly the clapping and cheers were directed our way. - -“And speaking of big hands, I was glad your hands were small, you know what I mean?” Aloysius wiggled his butt suggestively. Charlie slouched low over his pint, waiting for a stage trapdoor to open underfoot and deliver him from humiliation. - -“Remember this move, Chuck?” He performed his old signature dance, a rapid series of pop-and-locks with his stringy arms. Charlie hid a reluctant, nostalgic smile behind his glass. I had always been impressed that he had the dexterity to guide the puppet through the dance back in the day, given his general surliness and lack of rhythm. - -Aloysius bowed and continued to the exit, oblivious to what awaited. The buzz in the bar picked up again, customers moving on to new sources of entertainment as readily as fickle toddlers. - -Before Charlie downed the last of his beer, something adjacent to sympathy flashed in his eyes. He set the empty down with a sigh. “You *sure* you want to do this?” - -“I can’t abandon him.” I shrugged. “We’ve got, I don’t know, a bond.” - -Charlie shook his head. “You must be crazy.” He shook it again. “*I* must be crazy.” - -“You’ll help?” - -He laughed again. “Somebody wants to put a gun in that clam’s hands? If anything, I think we’ll be doing the military a favor.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}harlie came through. He got his hands on an access card and scribbled down the security team’s night schedule. There were some conspicuous blind spots. With the show canceled and interest waning, the studio was cutting corners. Nobody cared much about getting in at that point, and the puppets certainly weren’t going to walk out on their own. Because they were locked in. - -Still, I wore a hooded sweatshirt and brought a black ski mask, just in case I got caught on security cameras. I told Jessica I was going to a union support meeting and Charlie picked me up in a car so beat-up he had to lean across the passenger seat to pop the door open. “Get in.” - -I stared at what was clearly a machete protruding from the enormous cupholder between the seats. “Can never be too careful,” he said. - -“I don’t know, man. Maybe you can.” - -“You might trust that smiling cockle, but I don’t. Get in.” - -Charlie drove me to the studio. As we pulled into a nearby alley, I offered to grab Aloysius too if I saw him. Charlie snorted and eyed the machete longingly, a look that told me the puppet might be safer in a warzone than with him. Nostalgia only goes so far, I guess. - -Hiding behind a dumpster next to a side door, I checked my watch. There was a shift change coming that would give me about ten minutes to act. I took a deep breath, pulled on my mask, and sprinted toward the door. I slid the card into the reader and slipped inside, crept cautiously beneath a camera, then strafed along the wall down the hallway. - -I soon found myself on an abandoned soundstage. Much of the Cinnamon Avenue set had not yet been dismantled. I passed the auto body shop, cardboard tools hanging on the wall and fake grease painted on the floor. Skoozle’s manhole was covered with yellow tape. Inside the diner, where many of Happy’s scenes were set, the lighting bar had fallen from the ceiling. The stoop of the main building was mostly intact, but the front door had been removed, revealing piles of trash and debris behind it. - -I remembered the first time I walked out onto the set with Happy on my arm, pride and excitement of a sort I had rarely experienced in my career. It was unnerving to see a place once so vibrant and cheerful reduced to this eerie, dank stillness. - -The puppets were being held in one of the storage rooms. The access card got me inside, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when the lights clicked on. Rows of cages, furry limbs extended through the bars. Paws and claws wearily grasping for freedom. Some of the puppets moaned as one played a mournful harmonica tune. - -When they realized someone was in the room, they began to rattle their cages and cry out. I ignored them, searching for Happy. No sign of Aloysius. Maybe for the best. Then as I moved between the cells a familiar white glove grabbed my arm. - -“Teddy, you came for me!” Happy shouted. “I knew you’d come! I told *everybody* you’d come! Hey, guys! Teddy came!” - -“Ix-nay on the Eddy-tay,” I sputtered between gritted teeth. - -“What did you say, Teddy? I didn’t get that.” - -I reached through the bars and grabbed him by his bowtie. “Stop saying my name while I’m in the middle of committing a felony to save your furry ass.” - -He saluted. “Message received, loud and clear, Teddy.” - -I shook my head. “Let’s get out of here.” - -There was a control panel on the wall by the door. Charlie’s guy had explained how to unlock the cages, but it took me a moment to figure out the code for Happy’s cage. I punched in the number and the bars popped open. - -You would think you would get used to the idea of puppets moving around autonomously, but watching him leap to the floor and perform a celebratory dance, jointless arms waving, knees bending in unnatural directions, his clamshell mouth open wide and emitting something resembling a high-pitched yodel… it remained quite troubling. - -I was shocked out of my discomfort when an alarm screeched overhead. Happy froze. - -“We gotta move,” I said, reaching for his arm. - -He resisted. “I can’t leave everyone else here.” - -“Of course you can.” - -“Teddy,” he pleaded. “Have a heart.” - -Security would be fast approaching. I hesitated, considering what could go wrong with all these things loose on the streets – but I also needed a distraction if we were going to make it back to the car. - -I typed in the code to unlock all of the cages and pulled Happy with me against the wall by the door. Dozens of puppets poured out of their cells into a heap on the floor. Some looked cheerful but most were angry. When the first few guards entered the room, a furious mob of colorful felt charged straight at them, fists clenched and screaming with rage. - -As the guards called for backup and struggled to fight them off, Happy and I snuck past. I raced down the hallway with a large, clam-headed plushy under my arm, shouting and crashing and clanging behind us. - -I don’t know, maybe a puppet army made more sense than I’d thought. - -Back in the alley, I hurled Happy into the backseat of Charlie’s car and jumped in the front. - -“That clam smells awful,” Charlie said, accurately, pulling away and onto the street. - -“That’s not what your sister said last night,” Happy muttered as he fumbled with his seatbelt. Charlie’s gaze flicked to the rearview and he glowered. - -“How about a little gratitude, Happy?” I said. - -“Yeah, thank this,” he sneered, grabbing at his crotch. - -“Your friend is delightful, Ted,” Charlie offered, his jaw clenched. - -“At least I didn’t make a living molesting plushies,” Happy said, sticking his head forward between us. “You could go to prison for that in seventeen states, you know.” - -“It’s always hands up asses with you people,” Charlie said, balling his into a fist. “You know what—” - -“Charlie, just drive.” I pushed Happy back in his seat. “Happy, shut up or you’re going in the trunk.” - -“This is censorship!” He crossed his arms and frowned. “I got First Amendment rights over here.” - -“No, you don’t,” Charlie replied, also accurately. - -“And that’s *another* thing we need to talk about.” - -Happy settled into a droning rant about how puppets helped build this country – not true – and deserved to be treated with respect – arguable – while misquoting Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. Charlie pulled onto the highway. - -“It’s going to be a long drive,” he sighed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}n the chaos of the moment a bunch of puppets had escaped, so the search wasn’t focused only on Happy. The cops questioned me, of course, but I managed to avoid falling under suspicion. Everyone knows puppeteers and puppets don’t get along, not any more. I’m the last person who’d help him, right? - -And my situation was hardly a lie. When I was let go from Cinnamon Avenue, I boasted I would be back to work within weeks, and thoroughly failed to live up to that bravado. Now my unemployment benefits were near their end, we had begun to dip into our savings to cover monthly expenses, and I had long since run out of favors to call in to try to line up new opportunities. - -For his part, Happy integrated himself into our household about as well as any fugitive from justice (or injustice) could. And things went well at first. Helping with chores, entertaining the children, hiding in the attic whenever other people were around. - -Turned out, things were going too well. - -About two months in, the kids were spending more and more time with Happy. I was wrapped up in an increasingly urgent but frustratingly futile job search, Jessica was taking on extra shifts at the restaurant, and Happy was a cheerful felt clam with nothing else to do. So when Sam wanted to play hide-and-seek or Katie needed another guest for a tea party, they turned to him. He enjoyed it too, or at least he was far more convincing at faking it than I ever was. When one of the kids made a goofy joke or did one of their wacky dances, his laughter would echo through the whole house. - -One day, I was scrolling through job listings on Jessica’s laptop and Happy sauntered down the hall carrying a baseball bat and glove. A few minutes later I heard him cheering and Katie giggling. I crept down the stairs, and there he was winding up to pitch with Katie down the hall, bat in hand, surrounded by valuable breakable objects, waiting to swing. - -“Happy, no!” I shouted. “Are you nuts?” - -I grabbed the arm he had reeled back, but his hand was empty. - -“Teddy,” he said, “it’s all pretend.” - -Katie glared at me and stomped away. Like *I* was the bad guy. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t wasn’t just playing with the children, either. He was worming his way into every aspect of our lives. One evening I found him sitting with Jessica at the dining room table, rubbing her feet with his mitts and reading off charges from our credit card bills. She found tracking our expenditures to be a useful exercise. I was more of a “what you don’t know can’t hurt you” kind of guy, which I’ll admit had not worked out well for us so far. - -“You could save a lot of money by changing cable providers,” Happy said. “I’ll pull together some numbers.” - -“Just make sure you include the sports package,” she said, leaning back with a sigh. “Ted needs his bowling. Don’t ask me why.” She noticed me staring. “What?” - -I shook my head and left the room. - -“Hey, Teddy,” Happy called as I slumped up the stairs. “I guess all those songs about counting, something must have stuck!” - -The following week, I returned home from a disastrous interview for a gig as director of a community puppet theater, eager to sit down with a cold beer and pop on the sports. I was greeted by a head-ringing clatter from the kitchen. I found Happy bungling between the refrigerator and the counter with his arms full of bottles and vegetables. - -A pot of water was on the stove, and there was flour all over the floor. - -I could see what was about to happen, but it seemed too late to say anything. - -Happy stumbled onto a patch of white powder and lost his balance. He barreled across the room and slammed into a cabinet. Broken glass and orange juice and crushed tomatoes spilled across the floor and the pot of water fell from the stove, bouncing off his head and soaking him like a, well, like a clam. - -“That could have gone better,” he said, dazed. - -I surveyed the disparate ingredients strewn across the floor and counter. “What the hell, Happy.” - -“I was making dinner for everyone,” he said, his shell drooping into a frown. He sniffled and rubbed his round puppet eyes. “I call it a lasagna-frittata-chilada.” - -“That sounds awful,” I replied. - -Jessica pushed past me and stepped gingerly around the rainbow of stains and spills on the tiles. “At least he’s trying,” she said, kissing him gently on his shell. While Jessica helped clean the tomato juice and soy sauce out of his fabric, I made the kids salty, overcooked eggs. - -Later that night, I was awakened by the muffled sound of Sam crying out from his bedroom. He was sleeping through the night consistently at that point, but bad dreams were also becoming somewhat common. - -Jessica rolled over. “What time is it?” she murmured and I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand. - -“Three,” I said, looking blearily at the screen. “Another nightmare. He’s calling for Daddy.” - -I lurched across the room and opened the door, Sam’s cries coming loud and clear. - -“Wait,” Jessica said. “He’s not saying ‘Daddy’.” - -“I’m ’a coming!” Happy exclaimed as he twirled down the hall. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}essica was sitting alone at the kitchen table working on probably her third cup of coffee when I returned from dropping the kids off at school and daycare. - -“Where’s Happy?” I asked. - -“Resting,” she said. “He was up with Sam for over an hour last night.” - -“You sure you don’t want to join him?” I muttered as I poured myself one, and immediately regretted it. - -She put her coffee down, eyes narrowed. “What the hell does that mean?” - -I leaned against the counter, defensive behind my mug. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” - -“He’s a puppet,” she sighed. “His eyes are always that wide.” - -“He keeps giving you massages.” - -“I’m tense,” she said, rubbing her shoulder, “and his hands are like firm pillows.” - -I scowled. “Well, that sounds *lovely*.” - -“It’s not like I hide it,” she said. “My husband’s out of work, my boss is a jackass, I’m trying to keep two kids alive in modern America, and I’ve got a fugitive puppet in full-on ALF mode in my attic.” - -All of this was true. Entwined in my own stress and drama, I found it easy to overlook the weight she carried on behalf of the family. “So you two aren’t…?” - -Her bug-eyed horror cut me short. “God, no. Is that even… like, does he have, you know—” she nodded toward my torso “—compatible equipment?” - -“Let’s not find out. How can I help?” - -“You can get a fucking job,” she snapped. - -It was a low blow, but not unwarranted. - -“I’ll figure something out,” I half-whispered. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} climbed up to the attic where Happy slept – or whatever it is puppets without closeable eyelids do. He lay silently on an air mattress, surrounded by towers of boxes, storage bins, and garbage bags of stuff. I tapped his leg with my foot, jostling him awake. - -Rip off the band-aid. “You need to leave, Hap.” - -“Yeah, right,” he muttered, still groggy. “Where am I supposed to go?” - -“Literally anywhere but here.” When he arrived Happy had prepared some essential items in case he needed to make a quick getaway from the cops. God only knows what they were, but he’d wrapped them in an old towel and knotted it to the top half of a collapsable mop handle, like an artificial fibers Huckleberry Finn. I tossed it onto his mattress. - -He jerked upright. “You can’t do that to me. Not after everything we’ve been through together.” - -“I don’t want to, but I can.” - -“Oh yeah?” His long, thin arm pointed to the small window above us. “How’s about I tell the federales you’ve been holding me captive up here?” He jabbed a fluffy finger in my face. “I go down, Teddy, you go down with me.” - -“You wouldn’t,” I said, bristling at stiff resistance I should have been better prepared for. - -“Try me.” His voice hardened like steel. “You don’t want to test a desperate puppet, pal.” - -“I think I do.” I said. “Pick up your sad little hobo sack and hit the road.” - -Happy swatted it aside and stood. He was about three feet shorter than me, so his effort to look me in the eyes lacked gravitas. He shuffled closer until he was just inches away and craned his neck upward. - -“Maybe we should put it to a vote,” he said. “Who do you think the kids would rather have around these days? You or me?” - -“This house is a republic, not a democracy. I know what’s best for my family.” - -“Could have fooled me,” he huffed. - -That was it. I lunged for his arm and tossed him across the attic. He landed on a box of Christmas decorations and immediately charged me with the pointed edge of a star-shaped tree-topper in his hand, clamshell face taut with rage. - -Until you find yourself in such a situation, it is hard to conceive of what it is like to fight a puppet. You would think you could just grab them and rip them apart, but it’s not so easy. Their limbs are long but floppy, and they can pack a punch. They’re small and nimble, and their size positions them perfectly to strike at your shins or your groin. It’s hard to tell if you’re doing much damage even if you get some good shots in. - -I reflected on this as we wrestled across the floor of the attic and tumbled down the staircase. He grunted and groaned, but kept swinging and kicking all the way down to the second-floor hallway, where he grabbed a lamp off a table and bashed it over my head. Blood trickled down my forehead as I grabbed the lamp’s power cord and lassoed it around his neck, pulling it tight with all my strength. - -It occurred to me then that puppets don’t breathe. A strained giggle escaped his shell. - -I lifted Happy overhead and hurled him over the banister to the floor below. He fluttered to the ground, and I raced down the stairs to the foyer, where I grabbed him, pressed down on his chest with my knee, and I battered his soft clamshell head with one fist and then the other, over and over. - -All that frustration, slaked at last. I have to say, it felt fantastic. - -Then I paused to catch my breath and realized my wife and children were standing in the doorway watching us. - -“Daddy?” Sam said. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hat I told the children: somebody at NASA glommed onto the notion that telegenic and personable sentient beings that didn’t need to eat, sleep, or breathe would make ideal candidates for high-profile long-distance space travel. So Happy, proud patriot that he is, signed up for a multi-year mission to Saturn. Of course, he had to leave immediately one morning for his secret astronaut training without saying goodbye, and he couldn’t write or call because, well, it was all so secret. - -The weight of sorrow and pity in their eyes when they look at me now tells me they don’t buy it, but it’s the best lie I could come up with. Jessica’s eyes show something worse. - -What really happened: once we calmed the kids down, I lugged Happy back up to the attic, duct-taped his shell shut, basically duct-taped his whole body into a plasticised canvas pillar, and barricaded the door. The next day, while the kids were at school and Jessica was fending off her boss at the restaurant, Charlie came over, we took the clam out to the garage, and he helped me remove the computer chip from Happy’s head. - -All these little tendrils of nanotechnology that made his arms and legs and mouth move came dragging out after it. He didn’t sing “Daisy”. He just wriggled and made little muffled screaming noises from behind the tape over his mouth, until he didn’t. - -Neither of us understood the technology, whether it could be reactivated or tracked or whatever, so Charlie took the chip and threw it off a bridge across town. - -Charlie encouraged me to burn Happy’s body in the backyard, even offered to provide a barrel and a bottle of lighter fluid. But I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t just throw him out either. Once he was a simple, lifeless, inoffensive puppet, I unwrapped him and shoved him into a crawl space in the basement, behind some heavy boxes where Sam and Katie would never be at risk of stumbling across him. I don’t know. I couldn’t give him up, but I couldn’t ever look him in the eye again either. - -I sometimes wake in the middle of the night and hear Happy’s laughter echoing through the walls, unsure if it’s a dream, or a vivid memory of happier days, or if an undead angry clam has somehow emerged from his crypt to seek revenge and sweep my children away. - -Maybe I deserve that. Who really knows anything anymore? - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1037059305093722).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/ShortReviews06.md b/content/issue-38/ShortReviews06.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0d041b8b..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/ShortReviews06.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,50 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – April to June, 2024" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The editor has no hair to pull out, zine components lie broken on the ground like hopes and dreams, and STILL the jewels of short fiction published these last three months are yet to be reviewed. Click here, dear reader, to discover if he did his job or merely furnished a broken link and washed his hands of the whole sorry affair." - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-april-to-june-2024 -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}'ve had good and bad experiences with horror fiction, I'm sure we all have, it's practically the defining condition of the whole species. My penultimate one, that was atrocious in the worst way: I won't speak ill of the undead, so don't ask for the novel's title or author, but despite being "properly" published during the probable heyday of its sordid little subgenre it managed to be poorly written beyond the dreams of the most ten-thumbed of mouth-breathers, and pointlessly nasty with it. I do love some gore, but I guess splatterpunk ain't for me. - -Then someone recommended to me **[Alabama Circus Punk](https://www.ergot.press/authors/Thomas_Ha/Alabama_Circus_Punk)** by Thomas Ha, and my faith in humanity was restored. - -It starts out as an almost literal kitchen sink drama, quite brilliantly written from the perspective of, we gradually come to realise, something certainly not human but which imitates human behaviour, perhaps in order to convince the example of the real thing that has entered its abode; and yet the real thing in question not only knows what this other thing is doing, he doesn't seem to mind at all. To call the story "horror" is almost limiting, there is science fiction and crime in here as well as a kind of family drama, a study of liminal psychology, all in smooth cohabitation. It was unsettling, and I liked it very much. - -It appears in *[ergot.](https://www.ergot.press/)*, *"a literary website interested in furthering the innovative and experimental tradition in horror"*, and so I guess I know where to run the next time the misguided urge to read downright horrific trash overcomes me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}P{{}}oetry gets short shrift around here, really. Under what can hardly still be called the "new" management four years in, there's been exactly... *one* instance of it, and [that](http://localhost:1313/issue-25/plague-rooster.html) was a reprint (though written by the man of the hour, as it happens!). Maybe it stems from a ruinous flaw in an otherwise perfectly cut education, but while I might like individual poems, poetry as a whole is an art form I feel underprepared to evaluate. - -But that's just excuse making, probably, since being a publishing editor should always be far more about *knowing what you like* than *liking what you know*. And I liked Lindsay King-Miller's **[Apologia, on Forked Tongue](https://www.orions-belt.net/archives/apologia-on-forked-tongue)**, which with a confidence born of ignorance I'm going to claim is a piece of free-form narrative fantasy poetry, and then grudgingly admit means that I noticed it A) doesn't rhyme and B) looks like someone chopped up a handful of regular paragraphs and arranged them via fridge magnets. - -Yes, I'm a philistine. But a philistine with *his* forked tongue firmly in cheek. - -In fact, as is always the case when this mode of presentation speaks to me, what I appreciated was how the breaking down of the overall story so often bestowed on these separated lines their own discrete power, highlighting their accumulation in a way prose in conventional paragraphs generally does not. To say nothing, in this case, about the story also being told. It appears in *[Orion's Belt](https://www.orions-belt.net/)*, which among other things claims to specialise in "the strange and poignant", and in **Apologia, on Forked Tongue** I would say they have achieved this admirably. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}reaking the alliterative trend, the title of my final recommendation doesn't begin with the letter A, which irritates my latent OCD but what can you do, life is what it is. It appears courtesy of *[NewMyths.com](https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-home/home-page)*, "a quarterly ezine by a community of writers, poets and artists", which has racked up an impressive 67 issues since it launched back in 2007. - -**[Chevalier](https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmythscomissue67b/issue-67-stories/chevalier)** by David A. Gray is an epistolary story that immediately invites the even moderately well-informed reader to say *"Hey,* that *doesn't make sense!"* shortly before it acknowledges the point you're making but which it is not. Set in a future where humanity is threatened by an alien civilisation, the story is conveyed through messages sent between a mother and daughter after the former is found genetically suitable for integration into a vast weaponised space vessel, drafted by a desperate world government/military industrial complex, and dispatched to fight on the frontlines countless light years from earth... *after a hibernation journey that will last much longer than a normal human life span.* - -Begs the question, doesn't it, how does an impossibly distant parent exchange messages with a child who surely died of old age before they woke up? As the story swiftly admits, well, *they can't*. But sometimes we talk to the people we love even when we know they can't hear us, for all sorts of reasons, and it's the way that a science fiction treatment allows Gray to play with this truth that gives the story a resonance that only speculative genres can achieve. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111299341003051).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/__index.md b/content/issue-38/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 981fe21d..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 38" -date: 2024-07-01 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 38 -subhead: Summer 2024 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/PlantWorkshop2221_cover.jpg -imageMobile: images/PlantWorkshop2221_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Plant Workshop 2221 by Tarik Keshen" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - align_items: flex-start - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#d3fbe2' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-38/contents.md b/content/issue-38/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0613ac64..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Interlocking Grains of Light]({{< relref path="interlocking-grains-of-light.md" >}}), by LM Zaerr -- [Something Else]({{< relref path="something-else.md" >}}), by Dane Erbach -- [Hook, Line, and Sinker]({{< relref path="hook-line-and-sinker.md" >}}), by Addison Smith -- [Swans Will Be Swans]({{< relref path="swans-will-be-swans.md" >}}), by Elizabeth Zuckerman -- [Headspace]({{< relref path="headspace.md" >}}), by Mark Martin -- [Dagon, by Fred Chappell]({{< relref path="dagon-fred-chappell.md" >}}), reviewed by Bill Ryan -- [Short Reviews – April to June 2024]({{< relref path="ShortReviews06.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson -- [An interview with Micah Hyatt]({{< relref path="the-voice-of-mythaxis.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-38/dagon-fred-chappell.md b/content/issue-38/dagon-fred-chappell.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5d70bd33..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/dagon-fred-chappell.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Dagon, by Fred Chappell" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Bill Ryan -copyright: '© Bill Ryan 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "For our latest longform review of the year, All Hail He Prophesied Since Times Before Time to Rise from the Depths in All His Awful Glory — Bill Ryan. It's easy to let the wide-spread inspiration of H. P. Lovecraft's sinister fiction drive a writer to madness (or, at least, to madness of cliché), so what is to be found in Fred Chappell's 1968 Southern Gothic take on the Cthulhu mythos?" - -image: images/Dagon10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Fred Chappell (from his biography at the [Greensboro University of North Carolina's website](https://encyclopedia.uncg.edu/fred-chappell/) and the 1968 edition's cover." - -type: stock -slug: dagon-fred-chappell-review -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}n 1923, before his so-called Cthulhu Mythos had been cemented – before, in fact, his seminal story “The Call of Cthulhu” had been written – H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon” was published in *Weird Tales*. The story had been written six years earlier, and like his subsequent, more famous fiction would describe, “Dagon” focused on its unnamed narrator’s experience in discovering a secret world of evil, gigantic, god-like figures. In the case of “Dagon”, these beings rose from the depths of the ocean rather than outer space. But placing his Elder Gods in either made sense. In Lovecraft’s time, what humanity didn’t know about the dark unknown of the oceans pretty well matched what we didn’t know about the cosmos. And things haven’t changed that much since then. - -I’m on record as being something of a [skeptic](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-tricky-terrors-of-h-p-lovecraft) when it comes to Lovecraft. There’s no need to re-litigate that here, but I’ll go ahead and admit that “Dagon” is one of his better stories (his very short stories tend, in my view, to be better than his longer ones, and “Dagon” is pretty short). I particularly like the way he describes the key moment, when the narrator sees the aquatic god Dagon himself (or Himself). Spoiler, I guess: - -> *Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view about the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.* - -Anyone familiar with Lovecraft, but who somehow has never read “Dagon,” can probably guess that all of this ends with the narrator leaping from his apartment window to his death. Standard Lovecraft. Still, a good story. But in my experience, it is the writers who fell under the sway of Lovecraft’s vast influence, and wrote their own takes on the man’s mythos, who rise above what that depressed, mentally ill Rhode Islander laid out for them. The stories written by the Thomas Ligottis of American horror fiction, say. Or, and this is what brings us here today, the third novel by a prolific North Carolinian poet named Fred Chappell. - -The title of that novel, by the way, is *Dagon*, so no one can accuse Chappell (who died this past January, at age 87) of trying to hide his influences. Published in 1968, *Dagon* is, from what I can tell, a bit of an outlier for Chappell. Then again, what do I know: as of this moment, other than this slim horror novel, I haven’t read a word of Chappell’s fiction or poetry. But while his first novel appears to be a fantasy story, the novels he wrote later in life sound to me like somewhat gentle stories about life in small-town North Carolina. Chappell wrote many books of short fiction, so there could very well be loads of horror fiction strewn throughout those volumes. I’m very curious to find out, because if there’s one thing *Dagon* is not, it’s gentle. - -And what a unique riff on Lovecraft’s story it is. It’s the story of Peter Leland, a minister and scholar. His grandfather has recently died, and Peter and his wife, Sheila, have inherited the old family home. This includes a not insignificant amount of land, so large that the Lelands soon discover that a family, the Morgans, live, and have lived, on a section of the Leland family property, though Peter never knew about them. They are an odd, backwoods, off-putting family – Ed Morgan, the patriarch, is caught leering at Sheila; when Peter visits their home he encounters a wife who never speaks, and a daughter, Mina, whose appearance (*“That body so stubby and that face so flatly ugly – something undeniably fishlike about it…”*) makes him uneasy, and somewhat obsessed: *“…her flat dark face hung like a warning lantern in his mind. He couldn’t unthink her image.”* - -Additionally, in exploring his ancestral home, Peter finds reams of paperwork and letters to and from his grandfather. There are not-so-subtle references to Cthulhu in this material, which is interesting to me because there are no such references in Lovecraft’s original short story; he hadn’t written, or at least hadn’t published, anything about Cthulhu yet. But, as many other writers influenced by Lovecraft have done, Chappell wanted to create, or complete, a fabric that Lovecraft in his short life wasn’t quite able to do. Chappell even includes, after his novel’s dedication (“Dedicated to Those Who Cast Their Shadows Out of Time Upon Our Days”), as a kind of sub-dedication Lovecraft’s famous words *“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”* which, in one of his stories, Lovecraft translates, resulting in possibly the finest sentence he ever wrote: *“In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”* - -More importantly (thematically anyway), though harder to parse in relation to the rest of the book, and even harder to summarize here, is the monograph that Peter is writing, and which he hopes to complete amid the peace of his new home. It has to do with Dagon, the Philistine god of the Hebrew Bible, and whose temple Samson destroyed. Chappell, via Peter Leland, goes on to describe how some people throughout the world continued to worship the debauched god Dagon, a worship that even gained a foothold in America. He quotes from William Bradford, a governor of Plymouth Colony, who wrote about how the inhabitants of Mount Wollaston: - -> …*fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And [colonist Thomas] Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained…a School of Atheism. And after they got some goods into their hands…they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess…* - -A description of Pagan lasciviousness follows before Bradford describes the arrival of John Endecott, who: - -> …*caused that maypole to be cut down and rebuked them for their profaneness… So they or others changed the name of their place again and called it Mount Dagon*. - -Leland uses this material to write sermons about what he saw as a modern, metaphorical worship in America of Dagon, given what he views as the rampant and public sexuality now present (remember, this book was published in 1968). - -Before I make *Dagon* sound like an essay, I should stop talking about this part of it right about now. But it’s fascinating, and leads the story into depths of thought and philosophy that might be described as oceanic (forgive me). Lovecraft, of course, never gets into any of this, though he obviously didn’t pull the word “Dagon” out of a hat. Yet his main pre-occupation, as far as that title goes, appears to have been what I’ve since learned is an etymological misinterpretation of the origins of the name. Without getting into it too much, for many years “Dagon” was believed to be related to another strain of fish-based mythology, and this was still accepted in Lovecraft’s day. If his interest in “Dagon” the word went beyond this, and into the Biblical source, I don’t know for sure, but from what I can find it seems not. - -Whatever the case, Chappell sure found a lot to work with, and his story evolves (or devolves, depending on how you want to look at it) into one about a rapidly and disturbingly fractured marriage (about which I dare not say more), and then into a kind of eerie road trip story involving Peter, Mina, and a cruel yokel named Coke Rymer. For reasons I won’t get into here, by this point Leland has become a zombified (not literally) version of himself, quiescent, controlled by a kind of moonshine fed to him by Mina, a moonshine notable for its oiliness, stupefying effects, and general nastiness. - -It’s difficult to write about this section of *Dagon*, as there isn’t too much to say about it unless I’m willing to tell you about the ending. But I really don’t want to ruin it for you, as the ending – and by “ending” I mean literally the last two or three pages – is the best part. It is, really, a fantastic, smart, deeply unsettling ending, one that kind of throws Lovecraft into a cocked hat. Unless I’m misreading something in its final pages (always a possibility), there’s even a kind of terrifying hopefulness to it. If the last chapter landed for me the way Chappell intended, it’s not a hopefulness that warms the heart, but it causes the cosmic madness and terror of Lovecraft to sort of blossom into something that at least allows for questions and wonder. The answers to those questions might lead us, like Lovecraft’s narrator, straight out the window, but we won’t know unless we ask. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111300061002979).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/editorial.md b/content/issue-38/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 209cc9c8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,28 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/PlantWorkshop2221_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 38** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -As always, many thanks go out to our latest generous cover donor, Tarik Keskin, a concept and environmental artist from Istanbul, Turkey, for permission to reproduce his image **Plant Workshop 2221**. He goes by Siamon89 on [Deviant Art](https://www.deviantart.com/siamon89) where you can see more of his designs, and you can contact him about work [here](https://www.behance.net/nldes)." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -In case you hadn't noticed, we're undergoing something of a transformation here at ***Mythaxis***. - -Our Spring issue coincided with the podcasting at *Upbeat Tales* of Emma Burnett's *Friends in High Places*, and subsequently one of our other contributors, **Micah Hyatt**, reached out with an audio version of his story, *[Nightshade Memory]({{< relref path="issue-37/nightshade-memory.md" >}})*, and asked if we'd like to platform it directly. We tried not to snatch it from his hand too eagerly, and you can hear it at the link right now. - -But don't click too quickly. In the conversation around making that happen, we learned that Micah had narrated and produced the recording in a home studio he'd set up himself – impressive – and upon our shamelessly asking whether he'd also like to do audio versions of all our stories we were equal parts surprised and delighted when he immediately said, "Yes." Since then he's been busy recording the accompaniments for Issue 38, [the first of which is live right now]({{< relref path="issue-38/interlocking-grains-of-light.md" >}}), with more to follow on a weekly basis. - -We were planning to include a short interview with Micah in this editorial, but it turned out to be far too interesting to be buried in here, so instead you can find it closing out the issue alongside the stories he'll be progressively giving voice to. Therefore, let's cut this one short – there's more than enough going on in the magazine itself this quarter. - -Until next time, happy reading… and listening! diff --git a/content/issue-38/headspace.md b/content/issue-38/headspace.md deleted file mode 100644 index 316069bf..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/headspace.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,290 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Headspace" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Mark Martin -copyright: '© Mark Martin 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Your editor considers himself to have a most varied taste in science fiction, and when Mark Martin's story landed on his virtual desk it provided an infrequent experience to be immediately savoured: the extravagantly not-yet-here presented through the somehow authentic, everyday lives of real people. This contemplation of mortality and its threatened absence is philosophical and personal, and conversational in the best way." - -image: images/Headspace10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [cottonbro studio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/side-view-photo-of-elderly-man-holding-a-paint-brush-3778998/) and [katerinafil](https://depositphotos.com/vector/separate-pieces-white-puzzle-seamless-illustration-219818584.html)." - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i38/05.Headspace.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: headspace -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}B{{}}efore it was suggested we should meet, I’d not heard of Candace Terry. That was surprising. Didn’t all isomorphs live in the limelight? Fame was one of several things that made it uncomfortable to think about this category of human being. Candace’s talent for avoiding publicity suggested advantages beyond what was required to become an isomorph in the first place, a medical procedure with a price tag equal to the annual budget of a midsized municipality. Privacy lent her existence – not long ago a sheer impossibility – an aura of magic. - -My neurologist, Dr Constance, felt very differently on this subject. He was a booster for the science, keen I should join Candace among a population of isomorphs barely in double digits. I’d often thought, and mentioned to my wife, Charlotte, several times, that dying would be less frightening if guaranteed to occur against a backdrop of mountains and tumbling waves, watched over by a lidless sky. Despite his dizzying professional stature, Constance’s office couldn’t be further from that. Between inoffensive impressionist prints, the space was cramped and oppressive. The framed photographs on his desk kept their backs to his patients. The harsh light made my palms sweat. - -“I can understand your discomfort at the thought of an isomorphic future,” he said. “The earliest of the subjects has been observed for only a little over a decade, though they are all doing well physically. In every way, their health is normal. We scrub the genotype of identifiable risk factors, but it’s possible isomorphs will have a shorter than average lifespan because of the reduced telomeres of the host body. Longer than the alternative, of course. We can’t be absolutely certain yet of the lifetime stability of our wetware, but the results so far are all pointing in the right direction.” - -Just hearing him on the subject triggered an insistent throbbing behind my temples. “You said she underwent the procedure as a teenager,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to talk to someone closer to my age?” - -“She doesn’t live far from you. But, location aside, she might be the person best suited to allaying your concerns. She’s a very smart young woman who pursues the kind of quiet pastimes you’ll appreciate.” - -“I’m sure she’s a regular, everyday reincarnated heiress to the ultrarich. What did she die of?” The question was blunt as a cudgel, but my head hurt. - -The doctor was unfazed. “An unusually aggressive form of cancer that was caught very late in the day. Just like your own case.” - -I nodded, noncommittal. Had I been diagnosed when I was Candace’s age, I would have been dead long ago. These days, medical advances appear so frequently a terminal diagnosis is likely to strike any patient as provisional, and immuno-therapy had extended my life expectancy from months to years, but the new treatments still come with pain and risk. - -There was a bone sickness that left me jack-knifed on occasion. I frequently suffered the wracking nausea of pitiless migraines – and thinking too deeply about the prospect of isomorphism was always likely to set one off. One salvo of therapeutic chemicals had turned every hair on my body milk-white, even my eyelashes. When my natural colour finally came back a couple of months ago, Charlotte smilingly ran her fingers through my restored dark beard. I had to laugh; she had claimed to prefer the snow fox look. - -Dr Constance’s voice intruded on my thoughts. “Candace travelled a long hard road before the procedure, and it was rough going on the other side as an isomorph. It’ll be the same for you.” He cleared his throat. Recently, he had taken to brushing away my symptoms with a nonchalance that made me wonder if he had grown tired of my endless prevarication and would as happily see me dead as isomorphic. - -As he explained many times, cancer would get me in the end unless I made the leap. If its final assault made a beachhead in my brain, I would lose the option to become an isomorph altogether. “And,” as he had observed in our very first consultation, “how many people in your position have an opportunity such as this? It is quite a gift.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}an Driver was my benefactor. “It might be time to board the ship of Theseus, if you get my drift,” he told me when, to my astonishment, the call I answered came not from an oncology specialist but the world’s richest man. “I’ll stump up the readies and you can acquire a shiny new body.” - -A humble classics professor, drawn to monuments of unageing intellect, immortality – literal or figurative – had never been on the cards for me. Tech moguls, hedge fund barons, kleptocrats made up Dr Constance’s clientele. But a single day of Jan’s earnings could more than cover the cost of my resurrection. Why he offered to pay was anyone’s guess. Maybe capacity alone was reason enough, a momentary *Why not?* Or perhaps the oddity of having such an insignificant person preserved as an isomorph appealed to his impish sense of humour. - -Years ago, long before he became the asteroid-mining trillionaire of global fame, Jan had been a student of mine. A favourite, I blush to admit. A hard-drinking, boyish, jovial undergraduate, he treated study as a game and picked up Ancient Greek as other people pick up colds. He loved Thucydides especially, the early master of realpolitik, but it was the work of a different Ancient that resonated in our phone conversation: domesticated, dog-loving, moralising Plutarch – light years distant in character from Jan. - - Debating Plutarch’s famous thought experiment, the Ship of Theseus, was always an easy way to chalk off a class. For centuries, the Athenians preserved the ship of their founding hero, but over time its timbers warped and rotted. One by one replacement parts were found and installed, until eventually not a single plank or dowl remained of the original. In what sense then, if any, did this remain the ship of Theseus? - -Was it a new ship? If so, at what point in its history of piecemeal renovation did it cease to be that famous vessel? Or was it still the same one? If so, what if all the discarded timbers of the original construction were somehow recovered and put back together? Which would be the ship of Theseus then, when the incremental replica and reconstituted wreckage floated side by side? - -Jan’s answer was simple. If there were two versions, and ownership of both was attributed to Theseus, on coming back to life the hero could claim them both – and no Athenian should stand in his way. Possession was ten tenths of existence. The debate wasn’t about a state of being but a brand: they were both the ship of Theseus. Problem solved. - -So much for ontological niceties. Jan cut the Gordian knot, laughing at the idiocy of eye-rolling undergrads baffled by age-old word games. Was he the most advanced of my students or the most obtuse? - -These events instantly came to mind when I first heard of Jan’s unsurpassable flaunting of scientific taboo. And they of course came back to me again when I got off the call in which he offered to transform my life in the most profound of ways through the magic trick of keeping it exactly the same. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}harlotte collected me from Constance’s Boston office. She instructed the car to follow a long sinuous route back to our cottage in the Vermont hills, preferring not to drive. The evergreens salved that incipient migraine, and I didn’t complain when she waved away my request for a sandwich to power onwards without pause. Ever since the remission that had set my whitened hair to rights, Charlotte had jealously guarded our Green Mountain seclusion. She no longer liked to eat outside our home. In fact, any encroachment on my sick leave was ruthlessly rebuffed, my health appearing to demand, to her mind, absolute seclusion. - -I took it as a sign she was preparing for the end. Or the beginning. - -On the way, we spoke on the phone to our teenage children, Julian and Diana. Together with Charlotte, they encouraged me to visit Candace Terry. Their positivity was unsettling. They might have been chivvying me to join a backpacking excursion. They claimed to be neutral on the isomorphic question, respectfully avoiding anything that might apply pressure, but for the first time it sounded like their minds were made up: the kids wanted a father, Charlotte a husband. - -What I couldn’t bring myself to explain was the conviction they would get instead a doppelganger, a usurper of the dinner table and marital bed. - -If I were to go through with the procedure, my memories and drives, my talents and weaknesses, would be reconstituted in the blank grey matter of an adult clone, making it that thing of flesh and blood that is an isomorph. My new vessel would walk the world free of cancer, released from fear and pain. The tight corners of my family’s eyes would loosen. I would be reborn. At least, that was the idea. - -To complete the transition to isomorph, the brain scan requires a healthy organ, which I still had to offer. Yet, in the process of copying, that original matter would be thoroughly destroyed. Not a whiff of it, not a coil of smoke, would hang in the air of the operating theatre. Where would I be then? Would *I* be there at all? - -Ultimately, I relented and agreed to meet Candace. Dr Constance made arrangements, and later the next day her mother, Jacqueline Terry, appeared full-length in our living room window, her translucent image floating before our view of the woods at the edge of the property. A regal figure, dark ringlets filigreed with silver, bare feet beneath wide linen pants, she won me over in an instant. I trusted her. - -“You still live together, don’t you?” I said. “You and Candace? Is she available to come on the call?” - -“She thought it best that the first time you meet it should be in person. You should come alone, she likes her privacy. And we ask that you respect her feelings by signing this NDA.” - -The cat pawed at the windowpane as the document text descended the glass like an autumn leaf. I gestured, and my digital signature was appended. - -Jacqueline smiled. “Spend the weekend with us at the farmhouse. You’ll be very welcome.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}’ve always enjoyed driving alone in the countryside. Charlotte had taken to turning off the media feed and had inadvertently locked the settings. While once I would have chaffed without the latest news or some involved panel discussion, I relished the mental liberty of silence. On the way to meet the Terrys, automobile-induced solitude had never been more attractive, something close to meditation. - -A snatch of verse swooped pleasantly through my thoughts: - - - -*Little soul, charming wanderer,* - -*Guest-companion of my flesh,* - -*Dear departing pallid loner,* - -*Heed the time and stay no longer.* - -*Your jokes will fall on ears grown deaf.* - - - -The Emperor Hadrian wrote those words on his deathbed around nineteen hundred years ago (any faults in the translation are mine), addressing his soul as if it were a separate being. The independence of his ‘little soul’ struck me as peculiar. Did it possess anything of the character of its host, or was it just an animating spark? A force of nature doesn’t normally suggest something ‘charming’ and inclined to jokes. But who knows? - -Is it possible there was nothing of Hadrian in Hadrian’s soul? Had he been alive today and been given the option to become an isomorph, the tables would be turned on his *animula*. The little soul, that vital spark, would have been thrown aside, while the speaking voice and tastes and knowledge of the emperor lived on. - -On that long northward drive, I felt myself pulled between the spiritual and the material. I thought with gratitude of my family while waves of deep summer green washed about the car, precious reflections surely nourishing some vital part of the human composition. But still there was a suspicion I was merely romanticising pleasant and momentary sensations. - -Are the finer feelings of existence happy accidents, the equivalent of being woken by a lover’s touch to realise it’s only the morning breeze mussing your hair? If the lover were there, would the moment of anticipation be any sweeter? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hrough the exercise of extraordinary influence, the Terrys’ property appeared on the satellite imagery of my GPS as a patch of unbroken forest. The reality was very different. On my approach, dense woodland peeled away from a sprawling mountainside construction of timber and stone. The grounds were extensive and elegant, subtly landscaped, the house rimmed with a deep deck that might have accommodated a small settlement, as a medieval castle sheltered a village beneath its walls. Centrepiece of the construction, a tall, glass-fronted, steeply peaked roof yearned toward the sky. I still had no idea how Candace’s family acquired its money. - -I had expected some domestic lickspittle to greet me. Instead there was Candace’s grey-bearded father, Beau. He jogged gamely down the glass-and-steel stairs, shawl-collared cardigan trailing like a cape. Soft-spoken and solicitous, he showed me where to park and charge my car. Inside, we moved along a wood-panelled corridor decorated with reassuring family portraits to a cavernous central living space. We might have been the building’s sole occupants. - -In deference to my English origins, Beau produced a steaming pot of tea and laid out snacks that looked homemade. We settled in what he called the ‘conversation pit’, a square of seating recessed into the floor beneath the steepling windows of the living room. Before us a meadow declined toward a paddock. All of this was invisible to the electric eyes long-established in the heavens. - -“I understand one of the Jan Drivers has offered to pay for the procedure?” Beau said, pouring the tea. He might have been asking about my holiday plans. - -“Yes, the Good Jan. The original was a student of mine. I guess my course made an impression.” - -He cocked an eyebrow. “The *original*?” - -I feared a faux pas. “Does that sound odd?” - -“A little, but don’t worry. Candace would be the last person to take offence. I have to say, yours is a peculiar situation.” Smiling and avuncular, he handed me a cup. “The Jans are quite a pair, aren’t they?” - -Indeed, they were. If Jan Driver’s features were close to ubiquitous before his accident, they became inescapable once worn by the two celebrity isomorphs who replaced him. - -Details about the car crash are vague. There are theories he was brain-damaged when making the decision to grant the world a double-helping of his genius, and that for ethical reasons the scanning shouldn’t have gone ahead. That’s before one even considers the can of worms popped open in the production of two identical beings doomed to compete for the same identity. The rumours ran wild. - -But what Jan did was very much in character. Having disrupted whole economies, why not take aim at identity itself? Besides, as with Alexander the Great, the idea of leaving a legacy for rivals to fight over would have pleased him. He might have died with the same command on his lips as Alexander: “To the strongest!” - -For a while, in the public eye the two Jans fraternised nonstop. They walked abreast on red carpets and once or twice made business presentations as a double act. But the tipping point was Sonia Alverez, the pop star and branded avatar who’d been dating Jan at the time of his accident. Both isomorphs expected to resume the relationship, but Sonia hadn’t signed up for this unique form of polyamory and made her pick of the two, insisting on a subcutaneous microchip to confirm the chosen one’s identity when they met. - -The rejected isomorph retaliated. The individual thereafter known as Bad Jan went public with all the infidelities and deceptions practised on Sonia before the car crash by his originator. In turn, his counterpart expressed contrition in a very un-Janlike way. Good Jan began to dress in loungewear, grew out then tamed his hair, and started to behave very much like a normal adult, albeit one with limitless wealth and diverse global (and solar systemic) business interests. He and Sonia became engaged, while his leather-clad opposite happily kissed them both off and pursued the life of a rockstar. For each Jan to be a success, distinct identities were required. - -“*Good Jan saves favourite teacher from death*,” I said. “It’s a pretty good headline. Should bump the share price for a day or two.” - -“Do his motives matter to you?” - -“I think they might. Is that silly?” - -“I’m not in your shoes.” - -“You might be one day – thinking about becoming an isomorph, I mean.” He had the money after all, unless it had all been spent to save his daughter. “Things happen.” - -“I might consider it.” - -Jacqueline entered, her very natural smile enduring all the way through the long walk from the hallway to our place below the tall windows. We shook hands, and she invited me to ask about Candace. - -“What was it like from your point of view? The procedure and what followed?” - -“At first, when she came home, Candace was on cloud nine,” said Jacqueline. “It was a joy to witness. She was so happy to be alive, to feel healthy again. She spent every day on long country walks or reading. She looked up every friend and acquaintance she’d ever known.” - -“She cooked us complicated meals,” said Beau, “inviting her friends to join us on a culinary world tour, a different national cuisine every weekend. Always playing with the dog, always smiling. It’s called early-stage euphoria.” - -“We didn’t know it was common,” said Jacqueline. “We were expecting her to be confused about the procedure. We were told denial was typical, but instead she was ecstatic. At least, at first she was. Then she crashed.” - -“Plummeted,” added Beau. “It was heartrending. We expected some sort of correction, but nothing so catastrophic. We started to wonder if we’d condemned her to a life of depression.” - -“It was much worse than expected,” Jacqueline said. I had no need to question them, really. They clearly found in me an opportunity to voice things most often left unspoken. - -“As well as depression, there was anger.” Beau raised the teapot interrogatively, and I shook my head. “She was furious with us.” - -“Candace was fifteen at the time,” said Jacqueline. “A minor. Naturally, we’d discussed everything with her before the procedure. We sought consent. Beau and I certainly thought she had agreed that, in the event she lost the ability to make the request, it could go ahead with our approval. And that’s what happened, that’s what we did. But somehow she got to thinking that she – our daughter – had died in that operating theatre, and that the dying Candace might have stood a chance of survival, however slender, if we’d not requested the procedure.” - -“There’s more than that. She said we had never grieved our daughter’s death.” The deep lines below Beau’s handsome blue eyes underscored his words. “She said we had approved the murder of a dying girl in order to avoid mourning her loss. Not only was she an unwilling beneficiary of a crime, but she had to believe we would do it again if the circumstances were repeated. That we’d kill another daughter, we’d kill *her* a second time, as it were.” - -“It was very hurtful. We couldn’t convince her there had been no hope of recovery.” A consoling hand on her husband’s knee, Jacqueline was speaking to him as much as me. “We had no choice.” - -“The obtuseness of therapists and psychiatrists is amazing.” Though clearly troubled by these memories, Beau remained amused at human folly. “How could she feel any other way? She’s always been smart. But for all their expensive educations, the professionals were completely taken aback. Quite useless, I felt. Feel.” - -Jacqueline frowned patiently at the memory, one hand still on the tiller of her husband’s knee. He put his fingers over hers and they paused. - -“But the anger, too, was a phase, I hope?” I said after a moment. - -“A rite of passage,” said Beau. “It subsided, and she came out stronger.” - -Jacqueline nodded. “Candace is in a *much* better place now.” - -“She is someone new,” said Beau. “Our daughter still, but different.” - -“You’ve heard enough from us, you should meet her!” Jaqueline rose, smiling brightly, and took my elbow as we stepped up from the seating area, guiding me towards the window and the deck outside. - -“Where is she?” - -“At the belvedere, farther up the mountain,” said Jacqueline. “That’s where she spends most of her time. She’s made it very beautiful. Go meet her. Take some treats for the dog.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here’s a hint of paradise in a pine forest. The green canopy in the dead of winter, a vibrant contrast to the snow, and in the summer the matted, scented needles on the clean forest floor make a case for the fundamental benevolence of nature. It was beneath a blue-green canopy of spruce that I walked the switchbacks of a narrow path traced with dry-stone borders. - -I could have tramped that mountain path forever. For the first time in long months the tension deep in my muscles began to thaw. I was going to talk with someone who understood my situation first-hand. Perhaps she could answer the question I rose to every morning from bedsheets twisted with the effort of struggling for an answer. If Candace couldn’t help me figure out what to do, what to tell my family when my mind was finally made up, no one could. - -The path levelled out and a white pagoda rose in a clearing. A small wire-haired terrier, a Jack Russell variant, danced around me, announcing my arrival with a bark like bottles smashing. When Candace emerged, the dog orbited the two of us, pausing occasionally to look her way for validation. - -Isomorphs have smooth complexions, free of scars and most blemishes, a freshness that leaves them looking younger than their developmental age. But Candace could have passed for a woman in her thirties despite being, in ontogenetic terms, about ten years younger than that. It was a matter of bearing. - -“You’ve met Hodge,” she said. “I’m afraid he doesn’t have a volume control.” - -“I expect he’s a loyal friend.” - -“Yes.” She looked pleased, though she countered the suggestion: “Actually I think loyalty in dogs is exaggerated. But we are great friends, Hodge and me.” - -“Will departed pets become isomorphs one day?” The question was glib, but something about Candace told me she wouldn’t object. - -“It’s sure to happen soon, if it hasn’t already,” she said. “So, you wanted to meet an isomorph. That’s understandable. Lots of people seem to, but you have a better motive than most. I never asked for celebrity, and it takes total seclusion to buy freedom from the media.” She waved toward her surroundings. “I’m lucky I was one of the first. It’s a harder secret to keep today.” - -I could only agree. “Your parents said you found it hard to come to terms with being… becoming what you are.” - -“I tortured them, it was ugly. I was the adolescent from hell. From the grave, anyway.” She scratched her dog behind the ear. “Hodge was all that kept me sane.” - -“I’m more of a cat person. Does that spell trouble?” - -“You’re pretty much fucked.” She was deadpan, and I discovered I liked her very much. - -She gave me the tour, showed me her vegetable garden and flowerbed. As we wandered, she quizzed me lightly about my profession, my life history, how I and my family were handling my disease and its one final and questionable cure. I had come to listen to Candace, but – much as her parents had with me – I found a freedom to speak with her that I hadn’t enjoyed in a long time. - -She listened attentively. A nod here, a moue there, her reactions dignified and subdued – her mother’s daughter. She smiled when I mentioned the absurdity of my changeable hair, expressed sympathy when I described my migraines and the fears that provoked them. - -“I read a lot of philosophy, saw therapists,” she said. “Meditation, mindfulness, self-help – what struck me is how they’re all, whether they recognize it or not, guiding people to live the way animals do all the time. Not thinking about the future, not being tortured by what might be or could have been. Animals don’t even have to try, and they have all of that.” - -“Philosophy is the disease for which it is also the cure. I can’t remember who said that.” - -“Was it a dog?” - -At length she ushered me inside, where I accepted a glass of water. The single room of the pagoda contained a desk, low table, sink, and twin bed; an outhouse was partially hidden among the trees. There were bookshelves, a small library comprising, as far as I could tell, history, science, and poetry almost exclusively. Also P. G. Wodehouse. No philosophy now. There were sketches laid out on the little table, but she didn’t direct my attention to them. - -She asked about my connection to Jan Driver, and I started to tell her about the ship of Theseus only to feel silly when it became clear she knew the story already. - -“There’s a Buddhist version,” she said. “It’s very old, copied down in Chinese in the fourth century from a lost Sanskrit document. A man travelling between cities spent the night in an abandoned house. He was woken when a demon rushed inside carrying a corpse. Another demon followed, and they started arguing over who was the rightful owner of the dead body. - -“ ‘Which of us came in with this corpse?’ the first demon demanded of the traveller. - -“There was no sense lying, and the traveller told the truth. The second demon was so enraged at his reply he tore off the man’s arm, and the first replaced it with a limb from the corpse. Seeing this, the rival tore off the man’s other arm, which was again substituted with one from the dead body. The demons continued severing and replacing body parts until there was nothing of the original man left. At that point, they fell upon the newly torn flesh, eating it ravenously before leaving the traveller in his new body, baffled and desolate. - -“In the morning, the traveller visited the head of the local monastery to seek advice. ‘You have been blessed,’ said the teacher. ‘It takes my pupils years to comprehend that the self is an illusion, but you have achieved wisdom in a single night.’ ” - -“Is that what you think?” I asked. “That there isn’t a self?” - -“I feel exactly as Candace always did, but Candace is dead. I’m sure the two Jans both experience the intensity of being Jan. And you think you’re you, and any isomorphic copy of you would think he’s you, too, and transitioning from one state to another will be death and at the same time no more significant than waking up in the morning after a night’s sleep. If you aren’t your memories or your body or the combination of the two, what conclusion is there other than that you’re nothing at all?” - -“It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? It’s bad enough dying. To submit to the idea there wasn’t a *you* in the first place is like dying twice over.” - -Candace shrugged. “The decision has been made already, there's nothing for you to decide.” - -The illusory nature of free will has always struck me as a tedious assertion – hard to counter, perhaps incontrovertible, and thoroughly dispiriting. “Buddhism isn’t really my philosophy of choice, I’m afraid. I’m an incorrigible occidental.” - -She continued to smile gently. “Try poetry instead. *Of the two dreams, night and day, what lover, what dreamer, would choose the one obscured by sleep?* That’s Wallace Stevens.” - -Sat on the floor with Candace, I scratched Hodge’s flank. He watched me over his shoulder all the while, wary and grateful. “Do you resent what your parents put you through?” I asked. - -Her smile grew warm and forgiving. “No, they were always going to be that way inclined. Mum and Dad invented the neural scanning procedure, after all.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}t home in Vermont, the family gathered in the kitchen to hear about my trip. I hugged them all, one by one and as a group. They could sense my relief and shared it with me. It was clear my mind was finally made up, though I hadn’t yet said a word about my time with Candace. I held Charlotte’s hand and addressed them as one, feeling the weight of the occasion and a little surprised not to be crushed to speechlessness beneath it. - -“You were right, all of you, to encourage me to visit Candace, though it might not feel that way when you hear how things went. The main thing is, she helped me come to a decision. This is my decision alone, the most personal anyone could make, and I know by the love you have for me you’ll respect my choice – I feel that more than I could ever put into words.” - -I looked down at Charlotte’s hand in mine. “I’m sorry to tell you that the procedure is not for me. I’m not going to be replaced by an isomorph.” - -The drive back from the Terrys had given me time to work on my resolve. Without intention, Candace had convinced me the procedure would be quite meaningless. It might be me who went into the operating theatre – if there was such a being – but someone else would come out. What would emerge would be a perfect facsimile, someone else’s vessel, if these vessels of ours are truly steered by anyone. - -As for my family, my decision meant they would suffer a loss, but life ought to move on. Since my death would come eventually, why not make peace with it now? And part of me welcomed the prospect of being mourned, a bittersweet motive I would have been embarrassed to admit. - -When I stopped talking, the faces of my family spoke of pity and confusion. And something else. - -“I’m reconciled,” I reassured them, “I’m fine. Be happy knowing that, please. Everything’s going to be okay.” - -Charlotte put her hand to my cheek. “You’re right,” she murmured, “it *is*.” - -They were watching me, measuring my reactions. It suddenly struck me they understood more than I did. - -A cluster of impressions flooded me, everything that had troubled me about the isomorphic treatment. For a moment, I felt the awful foreshadowing of a migraine – and then, just as abruptly, it faded. Memories assailed me: Dr Constance’s easy dismissal of my symptoms, and something he had said about Candace and myself; society’s unquenchable thirst for anything isomorphic and Charlotte’s sudden desire for privacy, her infectious dislike of the media; Candace’s taste in poetry, and the full implications of her Buddhism; and— - -“My hair,” I said, rather stupidly, at last comprehending the truth of what had happened. - -Charlotte smiled. “Yes, John,” she said, squeezing my hand. Who precisely made my wife’s eyes brim with love in that moment, I couldn’t say. I knew only that it was love, and that would have to be enough. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Headspace** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111300984336220).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/hook-line-and-sinker.md b/content/issue-38/hook-line-and-sinker.md deleted file mode 100644 index c888df4a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/hook-line-and-sinker.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,70 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Hook, Line, and Sinker" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Addison Smith -copyright: '© Addison Smith 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Welcome back to Addison Smith, who graced our pages four years and fourteen issues ago with his techno thriller First Breath, possibly the least Addison Smith-like piece of fiction in his canon. This time we delve into one of his more typically atypical zones of interest, presenting us with seemingly familiar worlds in which something is (perhaps metaphorically, or perhaps literally) very definitely fishy…" - -image: images/HookLineSinker10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Ben Phillips](https://www.pexels.com/photo/clown-fish-on-white-corals-4781926/), [Dinielle De Veyra](https://www.pexels.com/photo/elegant-young-bearded-businessman-in-suit-and-tie-in-downtown-4195342/), [Tima Miroshnichenko](https://www.pexels.com/photo/tailor-man-measuring-the-man-6765071/), and [Jess Loiterton](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-water-bubbles-splashing-5232856/)." - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i38/03.Hook.Line.and.Sinker.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: hook-line-and-sinker -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he man in the mirror has dull, bulbous eyes above a gaping cartilage mouth. Its gills breathe in and out with expanding and contracting motions as I stare into eyes that should be my own. I adjust my tie beneath the faux fish facade. - -“I wouldn’t worry,” my tailor says. “That’s pretty normal these days.” - -She works my hemline as mirrored bubbles rise from my mouth, the shop a lost city beneath the sea. A hook protrudes from my mirrored lip and I touch my own, human, face. There is no treble hook puncture or skewered worm dangling at my chin. Still, I feel the pull. - -My phone vibrates in my shirt pocket and I check its notifications. Search alerts report an uptick in social media posts tagging *#apocalypse*. I put my phone away and stare out the full-wall windows into the street. - -“Leg up,” my tailor says, tapping the back of my right knee. I raise it as instructed. - -Her phone buzzes now. We all have our search alerts these days. I wonder idly what hers might be. Or maybe it was a text from a loved one. - -“Looks like another one,” she says, not glancing at her phone. - -“Make me look nice for it.” I turn my phone off and slip it back into my shirt pocket. - -The hook tugs in my lip and I feel it pulling my body ever skyward, even if it is only in my reflection. The fish face stares into my eyes. It looks nice in its suit of navy blue. I glance down at my tailor in the mirror. Her face is a carp now, mouth opening and closing in a dull-faced rhythm. A hook hovers before her in the mirror and I look away, to her human face. She stares as if she can see it – as if she is making a decision. - -She turns back to her work. In the mirror, her carp face swallows the hook and its bright red lure disappears down her throat. My own hook tugs stronger, more insistent. It gets us all in the end. - -She finishes her work and I step off the platform. “No charge today,” she says, waving off my money. - -The car waits outside, unmarked and unremarkable. Security is high, but subtle, invisible. I step into the back seat and the driver takes off for my press meeting. As we pass the people on the street, I see hooks hanging from smiling mouths both fleshy and cartilaginous. It’s a good thing, I think. It’s unity. - -The car turns into the garage of the massive white building where I will give my speech. As I step out, my entourage embraces me with broad shoulders and unworried glances. “The press room is ready,” one of them says. The hook dangles before his flat flounder face, and somehow he has not yet struck. It was so easy to take the hook, I knew. It was the easy choice. - -Something grates beneath my feet and I lift my shoe to investigate. Colored sand pits the sole and gathers at my feet. - -“That’s pretty normal,” one of my entourage says, “I wouldn’t worry.” The hook is already deep in his mouth, as if he had taken it gladly long ago. I smile and nod. - -I walk through tiny pebbles of pink and blue and shiny glass marbles scattered upon the floor. The people need guidance, and so I am here. - -I enter the press room to the left of a podium like an ionic sculpture. Cameras flash and the press goggle in their seats. I look out over the assembly and behold their variety. Television news reporters with the faces of black and orange oscars hold up their microphones. Newspaper representatives open and close their goldfish mouths beneath blank and distant eyes. The hooks dangle before them all as they await the word of their president. - -“Good evening,” I say, and the murmur quiets to a minnow’s breath. - -Brightly colored rocks cover the entirety of the floor. Plastic seaweed creeps in from the sides of the room – now great walls of glass with nothingness beyond. - -"This is all normal," I say. "Just go with it." - -The reporters sigh with collective relief and all through the room they bite down on their hooks. My head raises as my hook tugs me upward, and all around the world the people bite. - -I give in to the hook's pull. It's easy and perfectly painless. As I look up, tiny flakes of food drift down to my waiting mouth. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Hook, Line, and Sinker** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111302391002746).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/interlocking-grains-of-light.md b/content/issue-38/interlocking-grains-of-light.md deleted file mode 100644 index fc38bd9f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/interlocking-grains-of-light.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,214 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Interlocking Grains of Light" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- LM Zaerr -copyright: '© LM Zaerr 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Every year or so a piece of fiction based on the mythology of Ancient Greece penetrates the barriers erected by Mythaxis' editor, so it's long past time he admitted his claimed abhorrence for this very broad sub-genre is a lie. Do it right, and he's just as happy to read it as he is anything else done right. Doing it right, LM Zaerr ventures into this rich territory with a spin on one of the truly historic takes on the transformative power of love." - -image: images/InterlockingGrainsLight10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Kuan-yu Huang](https://www.pexels.com/photo/sculpture-of-cupid-and-psyche-14068324/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i38/01.Interlocking.Grains.of.Light.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: interlocking-grains-of-light -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}A{{}} claw chisel grated close, then a small flat chisel removed striations. He tipped me on my back and freed my eyes. In a single moment, I saw the blue sky and the sculptor. He was a huge man, with tight-curled hair and massive chest and arms, and I loved him. - -The following days were pure joy. He rubbed black sand over me with a cloth, over the wavy hair pulled back from my face and falling to my shoulders, over my arms reaching out, one higher than the other, over my legs, one stepping forward. He lifted me easily, though I was three times his weight, moving me from standing to lying to resting on my side so he could better reach each part of me. He worked with finer and finer sand, then pumice paste, and then soft leather until I stood clean and polished, alive in interlocking grains of light. - -He set me on a pedestal there in the courtyard. A crowd murmured around me. They gazed at me, but they didn't see me, and I hated being invisible in plain view. - -"This is surely your best work, Lysander," said a breathless voice. - -"I didn't make her," the sculptor answered, but the visitors ignored him. - -"The hands are exquisite," a young man marveled. - -"Look at its belly," someone said. "You forgot the navel." - -Lysander snorted. "Of course she has no navel. Her mother is stone." - -He knew me so well. - -That night, he lifted me from my pedestal and lugged me into his bedchamber. He covered his bed with purple silk and laid me down, then clasped me close. He kissed my lips, my open eyes, the hollow at the base of my neck. He traced his fingers over my arms, my face, an intimate polishing that resounded through my essence. - -He fell asleep at last, his face smashed against my neck. I wondered what it would be like to rest my hand on his back, to feel the pores of his skin and the sheen of sweat. - -In the morning, he delighted me with gifts of honey cakes and wine. "Why won't you eat?" he asked. He hung strings of amber around my neck and offered me pebbles and exquisite shells. He called me Aglama, *statue* and also *delight*. - -When daylight faded, he lay with me again. Again, he caressed me. This time he wept, and his tears rolled over my breast. "Aglama, I love you," he whispered. "Did you just kiss the top of my head? I felt your lips through my hair. No, I'm a fool. You are stone. You cannot love." - -*My dear Lysander, I do love you*, I answered. - -He didn't hear me. - -He spent his days and nights devoted to me, but his grief grew. During the day, he knelt before my pedestal and pleaded with me to love him. He was deaf to all my assurances. At night, in his bed, I spoke to him in the language of souls to soothe him to stillness, but he lay restless beside me until the gray dawn. - -On a spring morning, he laid me in a cart cushioned with straw and trundled me to the marble temple of Aphrodite on the tip of the peninsula. Tiny flowers grew in the scrabbly dirt, red and yellow and pink. He wove a wreath of these for my head and tried to tangle his fingers into my hair. When he failed, he sighed and hugged me close to lift me. He lugged me up the three steps and set me on the porch among the columns. Through the open door, Aphrodite glowed in the dark. She too was marble. She held a marble torch in one hand and the other reached out to me. *Welcome, daughter*, she said in the language of souls. - -Lysander lit a flame and poured out pale wine. He knelt in the threshold. "Great goddess," he prayed, "please turn Aglama to flesh. Then my love for her will be fulfilled." - -*Our love is fulfilled*, I tried to tell him. He prayed to Aphrodite all the long afternoon, weeping tears until one knee slipped on the wet marble. He landed on his elbow and collapsed face down, exhausted. - -*Daughter, are you willing to become flesh?* the goddess asked me. - -I wish I had known then what to ask instead. *I want him to be happy*, I said. *I love him.* - -*Very well*, she replied. The flame leapt high three times. - -Emptiness flooded into me. I exhaled and gasped for more emptiness. Strands of muscle fought for a precarious balance as my once clean form became infinite shapes and changes. There seemed no limit to how I could move through space. I sagged and wavered. - -Lysander rose to his feet. "My love," he breathed. He lifted me up, and my body draped over his arms. He hurried down the steps and bundled me under the straw. "No one can see you naked." - -"They've all seen me naked," I said. Those were my first words – not words of love but an argument. - -"We'll be home soon," was all he said, and carted me away. - -The straw poked my flesh. Dust joined the emptiness in my lungs. - -At home, he wrapped me in blue silk and carried me to his bedchamber as if I were still a statue unable to move. He laid me on the same bed where we'd lain together so many nights. At first it seemed familiar. I lay as still as I could with the emptiness rushing in and out. He stroked my arm with one finger, not hard enough to indent my skin. His touch tingled in my body as well as my soul. - -I marveled at this new dimension of love. I stroked his arm and he stilled. Now he was the statue. I caressed his springy hair, all the structure of his body, the valleys between his muscles, marveling at how such a strong man could be so soft and porous. I felt him changing, growing firmer in my hand until I wondered if he would turn to stone. I half hoped he would. - -All at once, he burst inside me, into a place he had not carved. I arced in tingling pain and joy. I truly was Aglama, filled with delight. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -"You need food," he said in the morning, and he was right. He put a grape in my mouth. I chewed and swallowed, then spat up milky liquid with bits of grape. It took me a while to learn the trick of eating. Spring water sloshed in new cavities, but it stayed inside me. I nibbled a honey cake, and it rasped down my soft throat. I bit into pomegranate fruit. The seeds between my teeth grounded me in my humanity. When Lysander brought me skewered lamb, I turned away. The meat was too much like my own substance. - -My womb grew large. Lysander lay with his hand on my belly, feeling a tiny hand or foot kick against him. "I wish I could see the baby right now," he said, laughing in his booming, joyous laugh. - -"You'd have to chisel me away," I said. - -He stopped laughing. - -A son squirmed out of my body, pressing me out of shape, shooting pain through me. He came into the world covered in gore and screaming. His voice hurt my ears. The midwife laid him to my breast, and he sucked away my substance like flowing marble. - -"We'll call him Paphos," said Lysander. - -The boy grew fast, always moving. He learned to run before he walked. - -Paphos hugged me, one foot on the ground, one trying to climb up, his head tilted back, his chin against me. I swayed, afraid I would fall and shatter. "Don't climb me," I snapped. - -His face puckered into grief. His arms fell away. I swooped him up and held him against me. "I'm sorry, Paphos," I murmured into his neck. - -He wriggled and clutched a lock of my hair. "Ow," I said and jerked back. He burst into tears. - -There were many moments like that, when sudden motion startled away my affection. How can love survive so many ambushes? - -Once Paphos flung a chisel he'd found on the floor. He was always flinging things. This time he hit Lysander on the knee. Lysander winced but didn't shout. He picked up his son and put the chisel in the boy's hand. "The chisel is for carving," he said, "not throwing. I'll find you a spear and a target." I envied Lysander's easy intimacy with our son. He had more experience living among jittering humans. - -Again my womb grew heavy. Lysander was too busy with the boy to rest his hand on my belly and feel its stillness. In time, my daughter slipped free, silent and clean, a perfect marble infant without a navel. - -Lysander sighed when he saw her. "Never mind, Aglama," he said. "I have you and Paphos." He put a tiny shell by his daughter's hand. - -Paphos rampaged into the chamber dragging a huge stick, and Lysander hoisted boy and stick into his arms. "This is your sister," he said. - -"Rock," said the boy. - -I called her Marmara, *marble* and also *shining*. She glowed in the little cradle where I laid her. I held her tiny hand in mine. Blue veins showed through my tanned skin now, and my tendons were more pronounced, a strong hand, able to pound grain into flour and work the earth in our little garden. - -I laid the statue on her back. In the morning, she lay on her side, the tip of one finger in her mouth. I held her to my breast and imagined she shared my essence, drawing life into herself. - -Marmara grew as steadily as Paphos had. Her growing hair curled at the edges of her face, tighter curls than mine, more like Lysander's. She occupied infinite positions and expressions, but I never saw her move. - -One morning, I found her lying with knees bent and head thrown back. A slight scrunch around her eyes showed curiosity. I hefted her onto my hip, and she sat on my arm, her body twisted toward me, looking up into my face, as if she'd arranged herself on purpose to snuggle against me. Her blank marble eyes looked at me as I must have gazed at Lysander, and I longed to be marble again so I could hear her voice. I sang a lullaby in the mixolydian mode, as close as I could get to the language of souls. - -When Paphos was six, he sneaked the cinnabar out of his father's workshop and painted a huge red eye on Marmara's forehead. When I returned from the storeroom, Marmara was frozen in grief, her mouth open, her eyes squeezed shut. In that moment, I resented the softening of my body that made me deaf to my daughter's wail. My chest tightened, and the corners of my mouth hardened, but I didn't turn back to stone. - - Lysander sent the boy for pumice paste and spent the afternoon scrubbing off the paint while I stroked Marmara's back to comfort her. "We have to protect her," I said. - -"We could pray to Aphrodite." He paused and leaned his forehead against mine. - -"How would the goddess protect Marmara?" I asked. I should have known what Lysander wanted. - -"Think, Aglama. If our statue were a little girl, she could run and play with Paphos. She could bring flowers to you and sing to me while I work." - -"You're a sculptor," I said. "Why can't you understand our daughter? She would be someone else if she were flesh." It was hard to say what I meant in this trembling language. I was still myself after the softening, but only because I had chosen this mutable life. - -Lysander went back to polishing away the cinnabar. "Aphrodite won't listen anyway. She's the goddess of lovers, not parents. Maybe when this statue is grown, a man's love will transform her." - -Dread paralyzed me more than grief, but I knew there was no point arguing. On some subjects, Lysander was as deaf to me now as when I spoke the language of souls. "She's four years old," I said. "Let's find a way to keep her safe." - -"What can we do?" he asked. "Lock her in her chamber?" - -Of course I didn't want to imprison her. - -At the midday meal, I found flowers at my place, red and yellow and pink. "Thank you, Marmara," I said to the beaming statue on the threshold. I'd hurt her feelings if I wept, but I said, "I love you just as you are. I don't want you to be any different." - -At dawn the next morning, we woke to Paphos screaming. Lysander jumped out of bed. "What has she done to him?" - -I hurried after him to the boy's chamber. Paphos huddled against the wall shrieking and pointing at a three-horned monster standing on his bed. - -I laughed, though I shouldn't have. The monster was Marmara covered with a sheet. A tripod cooking pot rested upside-down on her head. From then on, Paphos left her alone, but he never loved her. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -On the day Marmara turned thirteen, the apprentice Kouros arrived, also thirteen. He was slender and whimsical. He tried to show Paphos a shadow game, but our son was now fifteen. He snubbed the younger boy and went off to wrestle with his friends. Paphos was training for war. - -Kouros learned quickly. His first sculpture was a marble lark. He laid the bird at Marmara's feet as she stood smiling in the kitchen, full-cheeked and chubby-armed. Later that day, I found her holding the bird in both hands, loosely enough that it could fly away. The lark stayed with her, now perched on a table, now on a curtain railing, now on her outstretched hand. - -At sixteen, Kouros carved a cluster of marble grapes for Marmara. He placed them in her hand, and that evening they were gone. From then on, he spent all his effort carving marble objects to delight her, exquisite foods, a marble ship with thread-thin ropes, a lacy box to hold marble earrings. - -Lysander tried to teach Kouros to chisel and smooth the human form, but the boy wouldn't stay with it long enough to learn. Instead, he spent long hours sitting with Marmara. He never touched her, but once I came upon them and found her hand cupped around his cheek. He sat on a stool at an angle to her, as still as she, his eyes half closed, his breathing deep. - -He was so different from my son, who was never still. One afternoon, Paphos stormed into the kitchen. "I'm going off to war," he announced. - -A new cavity opened inside me. - -He reached for me, one arm higher than the other, one foot stepping forward. For an instant, he was solid stone in my arms, heir to my essence. I would miss his sudden assaults, when he snatched food from the table or swung me into a spinning dance. In his leaving, I found peace with my son. - -Lysander was more irritable with Paphos gone. Kouros tried his patience more than anyone. "What use are you as an apprentice?" Lysander railed. "You carve trinkets and toys, but no one wants those things." - -"Marmara does," he answered. - -At last, Lysander came to see the obvious. "I believe Kouros loves the statue," he said. - -"And she loves him," I answered, ignoring the slight to our daughter. - -He hummed for a moment, a nebulous tune, then summoned Kouros. "Your love can be realized," he said and harrumphed. It was hard for him to talk about something so private between us. "Take your beloved to the temple of Aphrodite. If you plead hard enough, the goddess may listen and turn your statue to flesh." - -Kouros ducked his head, his face as red as cinnabar, and didn't answer. - -"Kouros is a fool," Lysander fumed that night. "He's as lazy in love as he is in art." - -"He honors Marmara," I said. "Why would he want her to be different?" - -Lysander held me tight against him. "You know very well what they are missing," he said and reminded me. Yet even amid the joy, I knew that Marmara was not me. If she became flesh, she might not find the satisfaction I had found. She had a right to choose. - -On a rainy day that winter, Kouros rubbed soot from the bread oven on his face, four smears down each cheek. He fell asleep on the floor at Marmara's feet. In the morning, Marmara's face, too, was smudged with soot. - -Lysander was right. A statue and a human could never find satisfying love. A mother's desperation made me forget my own wisdom. - -"You are both unhappy," I said. "Go to Aphrodite and ask for her help." Even as I said it, I thought of all the ignominies of being human, the pockets of emptiness inside me. If Kouros and Marmara were content, I'd understand their reluctance, but they were miserable. Still, they did not go. - -In the spring, Kouros stopped eating. He lay unmoving at Marmara's feet, and she reached toward him as if he were slipping away. - -I went alone to the Temple of Aphrodite on the high point of land that reaches out into the sea. Around me, marble columns alternated with sky. The fluted stone held vertical shadows, deepening away from the sun. And between the columns, the blue sky turned milky, as if marble were blended into the air. - -I stood before the goddess, aware of the subtle movements my body required to stand. "Mother Aphrodite," I said. "This language of vibrating emptiness is the only way I can talk to you now. Inhabiting flesh is not easy, so I tremble to ask the same gift for my daughter. I would stay silent if Marmara were happy. She loves Kouros, and he is dying. O goddess, you must know they honor you, though they will never come to you themselves. Years ago, you listened to a lover's prayer; now heed a mother, as you are a mother. Let their love be fulfilled." - -I didn't light a flame or pour out wine. Instead, I wove a wreath of flowers, red and yellow and pink. I stomped down through the gorse and waded into the sea where it ebbs and flows among boulders. I set the wreath on the surface. Lines of brightness shot through the aquamarine water, brighter than any flame, and the wreath floated. A current carried it out to sea, and by this, I knew my prayer had been granted. - -I climbed up through the gorse, terrified by what I had done. I had denied Marmara the choice I'd been given. I had betrayed her. She was tender and might not survive the emptiness of flesh. I rushed home, desperate to bring her with me to Aphrodite so she could plead to be restored. It might not be too late. - -I entered her chamber and stopped, stilled by wonder. Marmara and Kouros sat clasped in each other's arms, their cheeks pressed close, their faces rapt with joy. Kouros had turned to marble. My daughter and her beloved now shared the language of souls. - -Lysander sagged in the threshold. He tangled his fingers into my hair, then drew back his hand. "I see now what you gave up. Do you want to return to stone, Aglama?" - -"No, dear Lysander." I cupped my palm around his cheek and polished him, smooth circles so he would know I understood the shape of him, a little stubble, large pores, a sheen of sweat, a life of interlocking grains of light. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Interlocking Grains of Light** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111303757669276).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/something-else.md b/content/issue-38/something-else.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3c676c8a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/something-else.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,424 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Something Else" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Dane Erbach -copyright: '© Dane Erbach 2024 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "The near inevitability of any given issue featuring two stories half-reflecting each other is once more upon us. Here, Dane Erbach leverages his personal experience of preparing for the unimaginable worst to unsettling effect in a high school nightmare scenario that carries the distant echo of paranoiac classics past. If a episode from the original Twilight Zone or a certain Stephen King novella leap to mind… well, at least YOU aren't alone." - -image: images/SomethingElse10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Strange Happenings](https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-empty-dark-hallway-11757079/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i38/02.Something.Else.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: something-else -weight: 2 ---- - -### 11:12 a.m. - -I flinch when the alarm sounds, echoing through the halls like something quick and dangerous. Ms. Anderlik pauses her lesson mid-sentence and sighs, steps toward our classroom’s open door, and peeks out into the empty hallway before locking it and pulling it shut. - -How many times have I watched a teacher draw the blinds over the door’s safety glass and snap the lights off before shepherding her class into a corner of a classroom? Most of my classmates are already swiping through their phones, tapping out messages to friends in nearby classrooms. They push AirPods into their ears, unpause whatever they’re watching on Netflix. - -“Put them away,” Ms. Anderlik hisses, her eyes dark behind clear acrylic frames. “Turn them off or I have to take them. You know why it’s important to stay off your phones during a lockdown drill, right?” - -And, of course, we do – something about overloading bandwidth, inciting panic, distracting us when we need to be attentive. Anyway, we like Ms. Anderlick, so we pocket our devices – all except Kayden Beckett, whose face continues to glow in the now dim room. He plays a game, something stupid with monsters and sharp weapons and splattering sound effects. - -And except Lawrence Yi, who never took his phone out to begin with. Instead, he burrows his body as far into the corner as he can, whimpering and wiping his eyes and looking so miserable that Ms. Anderlik pushes through the huddle to sit beside him and rub his back. She shushes him like a mother, draws in slow, deep breaths. Still, Lawrence trembles like an animal cornered by a predator. - -But I’m not scared. I’ve been here before. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 11:18 a.m. - -Kayden breaks the silence. “What the fuck?” he growls, stabbing his phone with his thumbs. I look over his shoulder at the alert on his screen: _You are no longer connected to the internet_. - -“Language,” Ms. Anderlik says, but then huffs quietly. Her middle fingers swipe across her laptop’s touchpad, tap too many times. Her eyebrows knot. “Well, looks like the internet’s out,” she says as she calmly folds her laptop closed. “Screens off, everybody. Now. I don’t want to have to tell you again. We have to take this seriously.” - -Almost no one listens. Around me, seventeen other adolescents scowl, thump hopelessly on their screens. “I don’t even have a signal,” Eva Pieroni says, her phone’s colorful wallpaper reflecting in her eyes, her pupils like pinholes. - -Braelin Porter sneers. “This fucking sucks.” - -Lawrence shushes them loud enough to make us all bristle, then folds himself back into the corner, hides his head in his arms. His unblemished Nikes tap the linoleum. - -Part of me wants to sit beside him the way Ms. Anderlik did, to tell him it will all be okay. Another part of me doesn’t want to go near him. I’ve tasted fear like his before, like sweat and dust on the back of my tongue. I don’t want to taste it again. - -But then we hear the first shots, and my mouth goes sour and dry anyway. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 11:20 a.m. - -Some cry and some freeze when they hear the cracks echoing from somewhere deep within the building. Some take calm breaths to distract themselves. My hand finds Eva’s. - -“Quiet,” Ms. Anderlick whispers. She stands above our huddle, facing the door, prepared to take on whoever tries to invade our space. She no longer looks like an art teacher, fresh out of college, wearing a watercolor print dress. Suddenly, she reminds me of the hero character in a movie that dies at the middle. - -“Does this mean it’ll be over soon?” Piper Simons chirps from beneath her desk. No one answers. - -Braelin sits shoulder to shoulder between Connor Murphy and Miranda Cortez, her mascara melting down her cheeks. Her platinum blonde hair almost glows in the darkness. “Ramona, what did you do last time?” - -I shrug. “I don’t know.” But I know exactly how I survived, and Braelin won’t want to hear it. - -“You were in a school shooting before?” Kayden asks. “Wow, that’s unlucky.” - -“No,” Eva says, squeezing my hand. “She’s lucky. Our good luck charm.” - -“Quiet,” Ms. Anderlick hisses again. We all stop talking, stop breathing. The clock on the wall ticks off another minute. It is quiet outside now. Another minute. Still no sound. That doesn't make it better. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 11:28 a.m. - -Our school is old, our classroom smaller than those at the newer high school across town. When it’s windy out, air pushes through the pores in the plaster; when it’s humid, the history rises out of linoleum as an odor, decades of wax and dirt and spilled drinks. - -I suppose this is why we feel the footsteps out in the hallway bouncing through the floor even though we don’t hear them. Who’s out there? Kids trying to get out of the school? Administrators patrolling the halls? Police sweeping from classroom to classroom? - -“We should go too,” someone suggests in a breathy whisper. Others nod, look up at Ms. Anderlik like scared children in a doctor’s waiting room. - -But she shakes her head, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “No, we stay here. Someone will come and get us when it’s safe.” - -“Maybe it’s safe now,” Kayden says, just as we feel the footsteps on the other side of the wall stop, settle in place, then drum in the opposite direction. - -And now we hear muted slapping against the floor, frantic scrambling. And we hear voices commanding, then yelling, then screaming, peals of percussive, chaotic sound impossible to interpret. And then nothing. - -Eva’s palm petrifies in my grip. - -I close my eyes and disappear into my mind where memories dance like cruel shadows: clutching other classmates’ hands, tugging each other toward the exit by the main office, watching the shooter turn the corner through wavering tears. - -I start to cry, silently, clutching her cold stone flesh in my hands. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 11:35 a.m. - -When the gunshots return, they sound different – quieter, in short, distant bursts, like static on another planet. We have to hold our breath to hear it. - -I pinpoint a second weapon firing alongside the first, and I release my breath. If there are two weapons, then it must be the police, the SWAT team, the protectors who have arrived to save us. It seems premature to smile, so I bite my bottom lip. - -Ms. Anderlik sits for the first time in fifteen minutes, giving us permission to lower our guard. She spins an engagement ring on her left hand and stares hard at a bulletin board full of colorful, encouraging posters that seem suddenly irrelevant. - -Down the hall, another weapon fires one shot at a time – and much closer to our classroom. For a while, each shot is distinct, a snare drum punching through a song, but then it loses the beat and becomes a steady barrage of noise. - -And then we hear the scream, buried beneath the gunfire, before it all goes quiet. - -I hold my breath again, trying not to think of what the silence means. I don’t fool myself into thinking this is over. Instead, I visualize the route I will take out of the building the moment that classroom door cracks open. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:24 p.m. - -Time crawls and speeds and stalls. The wall clock stopped at 11:32 – the power must have been cut, though with the lights out none of us noticed. We keep track of the time on our phones, but the concept has lost its meaning. It’s been a while since the gunfire ceased – long enough for us to lower our guard, converse in semi-silence. - -An explosion rocks our classroom, shaking dust from an old PA speaker above our heads. Plastic cups full of paintbrushes tumble off a file cabinet across the room. Ms. Anderlik grips the side of a desk to keep her balance, then lowers herself to the floor beside us. Some scream. - -“Oh god, oh god,” Wendy Gaines whispers behind me, her hot breath on the back of my neck. - -“That was a bomb,” Kayden announces. “I know bombs, and that was a bomb.” - -“Would the police use bombs?” Brett Pierce asks. - -“Maybe.” Kayden frowns. “Or maybe the shooter set them.” - -“Shut the fuck up,” Braelin begs him, then buries her head in her hands. The edges of her pink French nails are ragged. - -More rifles discharge on a far end of the school, and the room settles into tense silence once again. We study the sounds carefully, their rhythm and distance. - -“Those are AR-15s, or something like it.” Kayden’s voice is too loud, and the kids closest shush him, shove him against the wall, break into nervous tears. - -“I swear to fucking god, if you don’t shut up,” Braelin begins, but runs out of breath. - -“The police use AR-15s,” Kayden says. - -“The bad guys too, though, right?” Ms. Anderlik asks, her arms crossed over her torso like she’s giving herself a hug, but she doesn’t have to. - -“But it sounds like there’s a lot of them. That means the good guys—” Kayden’s answer is interrupted by someone smashing against our locked door, and I find a dark place to hide in my mind. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:26 p.m. - -We were so close to the main entrance. Two dozen second graders holding each other’s hands, tugging each other toward safety, our teacher’s attention all on us, counting heads, whispering words we couldn’t hear. She didn’t see the shooter. I did. - -The memory haunts me: the calm way he rounded the corner, the rifle tucked into his shoulder, the oversized shirt bunched beneath his body armor, the blank look on his face. - -I dropped my classmates’ hands and ran like my mom told me to. - -I found a place to hide – a closet with text books stacked along the walls – and locked myself inside. But I heard everything: every shot, every scream, every body falling. I did not open the door when someone pleaded on the other side, or when I heard the shots that killed them. - -In the ensuing silence, someone yanked on the locked door. - -An hour later, the police found me in there, hiding beneath an extra teacher’s desk – the only kid in my whole class that survived. But only because I left them behind to die. - -There’s no refuge in here. In memory. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:27 p.m. - -Open palms press against the window, a silhouette cast by red emergency lighting against the drawn blinds. The rattling door, the panicked voice – such familiar sounds. - -“Let me in.” His voice barely penetrates the door. “Please. I know someone’s in there.” - -“That’s Mark Walton,” Eva says. “Let him in.” - -“No,” Piper pleads, her eyes alight with fear. “Don’t. Please.” - -“We have to,” Eva says. “We can’t let him die out there.” - -“I hear you,” Mark’s voice quivers on the other side of the door. “Please, I don’t know…” - -“Piper’s right,” Ms. Anderlik says, staring at the silhouette on the window. “It could be a trick.” She swallows hard. One of her thumbnails rakes against the other. - -The art room is silent for ten more seconds, save Mark’s open palms patting the safety glass, conspicuously quiet. Shadows hang like cobwebs from the corners of our classroom, spread across the floor, drape across our faces. - -“Please,” Mark says again. He grabs the door knob and shakes it. The door clatters in the frame, rattles the pane of glass. - -The next time he speaks, Mark sounds different. “Oh. Oh, no. No no no,” he mumbles. Then his voice rises into an animal scream that no longer sounds rational or human. - -There is no gunshot. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:28 p.m. - -The knob pops, the door shudders, and a terrible commotion echoes out in the hallway. My muscles tense as the shadows slam against the blinds. We become a classroom full of statues as we watch. Our hearts stop beating until the struggle calms. - -Kayden points to a black shape spreading beneath the door like a slow-moving shadow. It seeps further into the room, and I wonder if it’s oil or maybe ink, both of which seem more plausible than blood for some reason. But blood is what it is. - -An indistinct shadow forms against the blinds. It moves closer, sharpens into something solid but no easier to discern: an ace of spades in three dimensions. But then it blocks out the emergency lighting in the hallway. - -It’s trying to look into our window. - -I disappear beneath the shadows like they are a blanket, steal quiet breaths through flared nostrils. I want to close my eyes, but I know I will only find myself back in that storage closet. - -And then the shape disappears. - -We unfreeze long enough to glance into each other’s eyes, share looks of understanding. No one says what we all suddenly know: there is no shooter picking off students and staff in the hallways. It’s something horrible, something inhuman, something deadly, yes. But it’s also something else. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:30 p.m. - -“What the hell was that?” Brett mutters, but no one answers. “What the hell?” - -Eva, trembling, sobs silently. I rub her back with my open palm until she crawls away from me, stopping near the outline of Mark’s blood. Kayden paces, his hands clawing at one another. His eyes dart from side to side like some ancient battle is raging in his mind. Braelin hisses quiet obscenities at him, each hushed syllable more harsh than the last. Ms. Anderlik presses her hands onto Braelin’s shoulders, begging her to calm down, to speak softer, but Braelin is possessed by a demon she no longer controls. - -“For real,” Brett mutters beneath it all, “what the hell?” - -Miranda grips Leslie Le Dion’s hand like a rosary, rocks back and forth with eyes clenched shut. They pray together. I’m not religious, but I almost scoot closer to them in the hope of catching their serenity secondhand. - -Instead, I stand in the middle of the madness, catching whispers and whimpers, stray syllables that strike me like insects. The room’s shadows stretch longer and darker across the mechanical, mindless movement of my classmates. - -Lawrence brushes past me, his body all angles in the dim emergency light. His silhouette looks careless as he tip-toes around Eva, his shoe dropping into Mark’s blood. He takes a slow breath, and opens the door. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:32 p.m. - -Lawrence doesn’t wait to explain himself. He darts into the dim, red hallway, leaving the door open behind him. - -Mark’s body is missing. - -Ms. Anderlik rushes to the door, calling Lawrence’s name. Kayden shoves past her and slips in the pool of blood, landing on his shoulder. The impact shakes the floor beneath us, reverberates down the hall. He groans, struggling back to his feet before following Lawrence. - -“Close the door!” Piper screeches, a crumpled ball beneath one of the desks. - -“You have to come back,” Ms. Anderlik calls after them, both too quiet and too loud. Her voice crumbles with each syllable. “We’re safer together.” - -Braelin approaches the door and peeks out into the hallway, hands stroking her luminous hair like a pet. She looks right, then left. “Fuck it,” she says, ducking out the door. - -It’s strange how quickly the classroom empties into the dim corridor, how apathetically each hops over Mark’s blood and edges alongside the dented lockers. Miranda and Leslie hold hands, reach out for Piper’s, then Wendy’s, and I have to shake every memory from my head to keep from disappearing back into them. - -Even Ms. Anderlik wanders the hall, dazed, as if she has never been in the building before. I’m left in the cluttered classroom alone, rigid among overturned chairs and consuming shadows. - -Eva stands on the blood-smeared floor just outside the door, waiting for me in a scarlet void. She extends her hand toward me, her tear-stained face hardened with determination. - -I take a step forward, just as a shadow sweeps her out of view. - -Her screams disappear down the hallway. - -My first instinct – to retreat deeper into the classroom – smothers my desire to chase Eva down. And instead of running away – my second instinct – I stand frozen in fear, unfocused, a step from the threshold, trying to will myself to do something, anything. Tears boil in my sinuses but refuse to fall. - -When something skids into the doorway, clutches my shoulders, I tense and keen and release all the air in my body at once. I recognize Ms. Anderlik too late. Her dirty hands release me, and all she can get out is *“Run”* before something rips her away too. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:36 p.m. - -The floor slips beneath me, streaked brown linoleum. The lockers blur in my periphery as I run, turn a sharp corner, quickstep down a flight of stairs. - -*For real*, Brett’s voice shudders through my mind, *what the actual* *hell?* - -On the third floor, tiles peel off unpainted cinderblocks dappled with bullet holes. A water fountain hangs off the wall and cold water splashes under my feet. My shoes slide and squeak until I hit a carpeted hall where a sickly sweet scent laces the air, like rotten flowers. - -I haven’t seen a body yet. Bloodstains paint the thin carpet, trail into the artificial dusk; the glass windows of a courtyard have been blasted, the metal frame twisted like a dried earthworm. But there are no corpses, no classmates or teachers anywhere to be seen. - -I don’t pause to wonder why. Instead, I think of Eva, of Ms. Anderlik, of how I left them behind to save myself. - -Just like last time. - -Hot tears warm my cheeks. I consider going back to find them – *What was it that pulled them away from me?* – but the exit to the teachers’ parking lot is nearby. I imagine a barricade of police officers wrapping blankets around survivors. - -I come around the next corner and freeze. At the end of the hall, where a flight of stairs would lead me right out the door, something enormous droops from the ceiling to the floor like a decomposing water balloon. Its putrid stink is overwhelming. It’s a sack, or something like it, and blocks my escape route. Standing in the middle of the hall, I feel exposed, like I’m being watched. But somehow I can’t move. - -On another side of the school, a child’s voice screams, and suddenly I have control of myself again. - -I do the only thing I know to do: I hide. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:40 p.m. - -Graciously, the faculty men’s room can be locked from the inside. It looks centuries old: pastel tiles, a hand-cranked paper towel dispenser, and what I think might be a radiator. I cram myself between the toilet and the wall in the furthest stall, a spot that reeks of cleaning chemicals, but at least it’s not that putrid lilac smell. - -The school seems so quiet – except for the occasional scream. I imagine that spade-shaped shadow cast on the classroom’s window, the blurs that swept Eva down the hall and pulled Ms. Anderlik away from me, each projected like an grainy movie on the back wall of my mind. - -As I shake my head, tears loosen from the corners of my eye. My nose draws in long, ragged lines of air; my lungs force out each breath and it feels good, clears my mind. I’m safe inside this bathroom, I tell myself. I can hide here as long as I need to. - -I close my eyes, and I’m back in the storage room, where dust motes floated between the stacks of text books. The lock clanked, the door swung open, and a police officer shouldered into the room aiming a shimmering rifle. As he spotted me, his stunned expression looked so sad, so human, that I almost forgot how well armed he was. - -No one will save me this time, though. I think of the wall ripped up by bullets. Whatever is out there will kill whoever it finds, armed or not. The only way to survive this time is to escape. - -I push myself up onto shaky feet and shove my way out of the stall, refusing to make eye contact with my reflection in the mirror. I hold my breath and listen for any sounds on the other side of the locked bathroom door. - -*And if there was someone there*, my mind asks me, *would you take them with you or leave them behind to die?* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:51 p.m. - -I see details I missed when I return to the hallway: enormous chunks of the drop ceiling in piles on the ground; entire rows of lockers caved in by some impact; the floors and walls pocked by something sharp. - -I press my finger into one of the holes. Deep and sharp. - -Something had slammed through the railing at the top of the stairs, midway down the hall. It bends unnaturally into the open air and the steps beneath it look rough, slick with smeared blood, and something else. I try not to think about what as I tiptoe down. - -On the second floor, I peek left into the hallway and see a teacher in his fifties, his oxford shirt untucked, bare feet peeking beneath his khakis. He yanks on each door he walks past, but doesn’t see the silent shadow crawling on the ceiling above him, a mass of writhing muscle. - -Long, whip-like legs fold down, bending at impossible angles. - -I flinch as the shadow smashes against the poor man, who doesn’t even have a chance to shriek, and sweeps him down the hallway, leaving only that saccharine stench in its wake. It barely takes a second. - -My legs collapse beneath me, but even as I’m going down I know I don’t have time for this weakness. I take a deep breath, swallow, remind myself that the only way to survive is to escape, and push myself back to my feet. - -This time I look right. At the far end of the hallway, I hear something coming fast, then a human silhouette rounds the corner, kicking through a pile of ceiling panels. He neither screams nor speaks, but I can hear his panicked breaths over his footfalls. - -As he comes closer, I realize it’s Lawrence Yi. And, behind him, something plows into a row of lockers, something that couldn’t make the tight turn as fast as him. - -Something that shakes its spade-shaped head and turns our way. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:54 p.m. - -Once again, my first instincts are to run and hide – away from Lawrence and from this monster, whose daddy long legs propel it down the hallway so fast it feels like a dream. But my body stalls out when I realize Lawrence is in the mirror spot of where that teacher got snatched only a minute ago. - -I don’t want to witness that again. - -As Lawrence passes, I step into the hall, the monster closing in on him, on me, its speed and silence debilitating. I grab his arm and swing him into the stairwell, allowing his momentum pull me behind him. We tumble together down the stairs, knees and hips and elbows and shoulder blades crashing against each step and each other. The monster barrels down the hallway like he never saw us. - -Lawrence whines, rubs his shoulder. “Why’d you do that?” he asks. - -“Why’d I *save* you?” I screech, then catch myself, literally cover my mouth with both trembling hands. - -He stares through me, his lips parted, like he doesn’t understand my question, doesn’t remember me. I can’t tell if his mind is empty or overloaded. He has lost his glasses and his bare faces makes him look like a small child. - -I grab his arm and pull him to his feet. “Follow me. We’re leaving.” - -“There’s no way out,” he says. “Not up there.” - -He pulls himself free from my grip and stumbles down the stairs. The sound of his shoes slapping the steps echoes around us; I’ve never been so scared of noise. But what can I do but follow? - -“Where are you going?” I ask, looking over my shoulder for whatever might be behind us. “Do you know another way?” - -“Yes,” he says, and his voice drops to a secretive whisper. “The band room.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 12:56 p.m. - -“Why did you walk out?” I peek from the stairwell into the first floor hallway. The darkness is heavier down here, almost hazy. “Of our classroom, I mean.” - -Lawrence does not look scared any more, not like when the lockdown started. Whatever clicked in my head back in second grade must have clicked in his now. “I realized we were all going to die,” he says, the words tight and straight as if written in an old typewriter font. “I didn’t want to wait any longer. Best case scenario, I get out. Worst case…” - -His voice trails off as we turn a corner. Between us and the windowless corridor, a brown sack separates from the void, drooping from the ceiling, wide enough to block all passage. Something inside weighs it down. The texture is a contradiction, papery like a wasp nest, but dripping with something sticky-looking, and darker toward the bottom. It reminds me of my grandmother’s baklava. - -“What are they?” I ask. My hand reaches toward it, but stops short. - -Lawrence ignores my question. “They’re blocking all the exits I’ve seen so far,” he says, “but I’m betting they don’t know about the band room.” - -“What’s in them?” That cloying odor makes my eyes water; this close, an undertone of rotten flesh overpowers the sweet. - -Again, Lawrence doesn’t answer. “We can backtrack, go past the writing center, get to the band room from there,” he says. But when we turn, there is a dark, silent shape on the ceiling, its legs unfolding, its shovel-like head swinging downward. Any details beyond its mottled texture and sleek, sharp corners are lost to the dark. - -Lawrence’s sigh stutters through his teeth. “Wait for it to attack, and run past.” - -“No, I can’t—” - -Before I can finish, Lawrence shines his phone’s flashlight onto its snake fangs and pink, pupil-less eyes, and it reacts like dark lightning, and instinct takes over as I duck beneath it’s segmented belly into the hallway beyond and run away – again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 1:03 p.m. - -I race through the black halls, hands out, running them against lockers and painted cinderblock walls. All I can think about is how I left Lawrence behind to die. *I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry*, I repeat in my mind to the rhythm of my footfalls and heartbeat. - -I veer right down a hall lit dimly by an exit sign. In the pool of red beneath it is the mouth of another corridor, but I know better than to turn toward it now. Instead, I jog past, to the end, to the band room. I think of Miranda and Leslie, and pray it isn’t locked. - -The corridor of the band room is all glass on one side, I guess so people can see right into the soundproofed space. Behind a set of double-doors, beyond a dated vestibule, the band room is lit – not by overhead lights, but daylight streaming in from somewhere to the side. - -A way out. Lawrence was right. - -The double-doors are locked, but next to yet another thick smear of blood one of the window panes has been shattered, thick chunks of glass scattered into the room. It’s almost too small to squeeze through, but I shape my body like a diver’s, wiggle and kick my way inside. Glass crunches beneath my elbows and arms when I land, presses into my hands, but I don’t have time to check for cuts. - -Something heavy slams into the space I just left, shatters another window and covers me in shards of glass. The shock knocks the wind out of me, but I scramble to my feet, glass falling from my hair. - -The steel door buckles like it’s a juice box. - -I don’t think about the rows of chairs, the empty instrument cases, the music stands toppled over. All I see is the open door, a fire escape, the sun slanting in from the outside, and pale in the brightness a distant barricade of police vehicles, waiting for me. - -I run for it, run for freedom and safety. - -I run and leave everything else behind. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -### 1:07 p.m. - -Beneath the warm sunlight a breeze pushes through the swaying trees. It’s all so overwhelming that hot tears streak down my cheeks, blurring the details around me – the gray light poles, the ragged row of police interceptors, the abandoned baseball diamond beyond. - -*I survived*, I think. *I'm out.* - -*But only because you left Lawrence behind*. - -Thoughts materialize like poltergeists, pesky and unwanted. *You left Eva behind, Kayden behind, Braelin, Miranda, Ms. Anderlik behind.* But in the haze of this quiet afternoon, the safety of this faded parking lot, another realization cuts through louder than the last: *Lawrence saved me because I saved him*. - -“Quiet afternoon,” I whisper, wiping my eyes, placing a hand on one of the white squad cars. *Why hasn’t anyone come to collect me, to wrap a blanket around me?* - -I wipe my eyes again. Half a dozen law enforcement vehicles form a crooked line beneath the powder blue sky, and a dozen more cars huddle behind it, but they’re all empty; their doors hang open, lights cycling impotently. - -An abandoned truck rests on the sidewalk, the words “TACTICAL OPERATIONS UNIT” written in silver on the side. But its back doors swing slowly in the breeze. - -Where is everybody? Where are the police, my parents – the protectors? Why did they show up at all if only to disappear when we needed them most? - -I start walking, not really knowing to where, but as the school building shifts in my view I see something unfamiliar and massive in the distance, a mound higher than the nearby water tower, wider than a neighborhood block. It reminds me of a burnt cake, brown and collapsed, as if dropped onto the kitchen floor. - - A mile away? Five miles? - -I sit on the bumper of the last squad car, wiping my eyes and nose on my arm – which is bleeding, I see, from falling on the glass. The tears sting my eyes. And so does that smell – sickening blooms, rotting on the counter like expired condolences. It rides the breeze with pollen and dandelion seeds, something that may never go away. - -As I wonder what’s next – *where will I go? what will I do? who is left?* – I feel it in the back of my throat, dry and acrid and dense. - -I’m scared. Maybe I have been all along. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Something Else** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111303184336000).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/swans-will-be-swans.md b/content/issue-38/swans-will-be-swans.md deleted file mode 100644 index fed04d97..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/swans-will-be-swans.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,202 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Swans Will Be Swans" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Elizabeth Zuckerman -copyright: '© Elizabeth Zuckerman 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Our second high school-era offering is much lighter in tone than its predecessor, but Elizabeth Zuckerman touches on another serious subject as she transplants an iconic fairy tale trope to that most fantasy-welcoming of contemporary environments. Countless youngsters are made miserable at a time we're told we'll feel nostalgia over for the rest of our lives, but they can beat it, with a little inner strength, and the right support network." - -image: images/Swans10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Alex Lanting](https://unsplash.com/photos/pair-of-blue-and-black-new-balance-cleats-in-the-air-under-teal-sky-with-white-clouds-KEEpi-SOM_s) and [Pranav](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-white-feather-sitting-on-top-of-a-tree-branch-goxVXByT5EU)." - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i38/04.Swans.Will.be.Swans.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: swans-will-be-swans -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he weird thing is, as it was happening, I kept thinking how cold the floor felt. Like my brain had nothing better to do. Just picture it, okay? Me dripping shower water onto the locker room floor, that first-season-win glow fading real fast, arms crossed over my thin towel, trying to glare my clothes out of Trey Riley’s hands. And he’s *grinning*, the smug little bastard, because he knows our school won’t touch the principal’s son, and I’m yelling at him and my teammates with clothes on are coming at him and he’s laughing his way out of the locker room, and the whole time I keep thinking on loop, *Gosh, Liv, your toes sure are chilly, why don’t you put your socks on?* - -It was shitty, is what I’m trying to say. - -Amanda had a change of clothes, because duh, so at least I didn’t have to go home in the extra soccer uniform and pray the shorts’ loose drawstring stayed tied. I did have to ride the same bus as Trey Riley, and I did have to walk four blocks in the same direction as him, which sucked. - -“I should do this again,” he said once we got off the bus. “You look good in Amanda’s clothes.” - -Amanda had a body like Karlie Kloss. Nobody looked good in Amanda’s clothes but Amanda. I set my jaw and walked faster. - -“Oh, come on.” He jogged to catch up, got a few steps ahead of me, and walked backward with this shit-eating grin on his face. “Can’t you take a joke?” - -“Ha ha,” I said through gritted teeth. “Give me my clothes back, asshole.” - -He pretended to think about it. “Trade you the shirt for the panties.” - -I turned left so sharply you could have cut your finger on it. He didn’t follow, but he called down the block, “I think your nip’s hanging out!” - -I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of checking. So I walked the extra block of my alternate route with fury boiling in my stomach, my jaw sore from clenching it too hard, and my shoulders stiff with irrational panic that the cutouts in Amanda’s black top might in fact show my tiny braless breasts. - -Gramma took one look at me and poured a drink from the secret stash I wasn’t supposed to know about. “I’m seventeen,” I said, staring at the shot glass in her hand. - -“If you’re old enough to hate, you’re old enough to drink. Salt first. No granddaughter of mine pussyfoots her way around tequila.” - -I licked salt off my hand, downed the shot, and tried to gasp for air and bite the lime at the same time. Bad combination. Gramma thumped me on the back until I could breathe again. By then we were both laughing, and the barely-contained nuclear explosion of my rage didn’t burn quite so hot. Then we broke out the half-full bag of chocolate chips and put a terrible movie on for background noise while I told her what had happened. - -“What a prick,” Gramma kept saying at just the right moments, when I paused for effect or for breath or just to stop and listen to the words coming out of my mouth, because saying them aloud made me even angrier. “What a *prick*. Keep going, hon.” - -Mom got home around six-thirty. By that time Gramma and I had moved on to other topics, so my actual greeting to her was the news I’d wanted to come home with in the first place: “Mom, guess what? We won the first game of the season!” - -“That’s my girl!” she said. She slid groaning out of her work heels and padded barefoot across the living room to the couch, where Gramma sat enthroned next to me in my round nest chair. Mom flopped onto the ottoman, smeared her mascara as she rubbed her eyes, and then paused to take in the clothes I’d never worn before, the crumpled yellow chocolate chip bag next to the lime rind, and the total lack of any dinner prep. “Everything okay?” - -And here’s the worst part of it all. I was an hour removed from the bullshit, my stomach was warm with tequila instead of anger, and Gramma had made me laugh. These are the fully-formed sentences that crossed my mind: *I shouldn’t worry her. It wasn’t that bad.* - -And then I got so mad all over again that I burst out crying. - -I hiccupped the story out between sobs and wordless yells. When I got to the part about walking down the block with him, Mom got up and poured another tequila shot. In fairness, she offered it to me first. “I got her,” Gramma said. “That one’s yours, Katie.” Mom threw back the shot without salt or lime, grabbed a new box of tissues, and squeezed into the nest chair with me so I could get snot and tears all over her gray wool blazer. I could feel anger coiling under her skin as she held me, her arms getting tenser and her breath coming shallow. - -But when I finished talking and blew my nose again and scrubbed at my itching eyes, she only asked, “What do you want to do about it, Olivia?” - -That question means different things for us than for most people. - -I took a long slow breath and let it sit straining in my chest for a few seconds. I thought about the risks, about everything I stood to lose if something went pear-shaped. I thought about the times when I was little and came running to Mom and Gramma squealing *Do something, do something* and they told me we had to be careful, we couldn’t just unleash ourselves whenever we felt like it. I thought about how we’d won the game today, how I’d scored the first goal, and how I had to remind myself of that and block out everything else if I wanted to feel any pride or warmth from that memory. I thought about how I’d belonged to me until he decided I didn’t. - -I let out my breath and looked up at Mom. “I want to do something about it,” I told her. - -On the couch, Gramma clapped her hands. “Damn right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hese are the things stories don’t tell you about a feather coat: They itch. They’re always too small, right up until the second they fit. And they’re fragile like you wouldn’t believe. A couple of crumpled feathers and the whole shebang won’t work right. - -Putting one on is like trying to fit a grown adult into a two-year-old’s denim overalls. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen Mom or Gramma in theirs, I definitely hadn’t worn mine ever since the coat stopped growing. I’d hopped in and out of it until I was four and the coat had hit adulthood. Then they’d weaned me off it, partly because our family can only spend so long at a time in our coats before we get the uncontrollable urge to abandon everything and fly off east of the sun and west of the moon, but also because, wow, can you imagine the awkwardness of trying to explain why you’d had a little girl there a minute ago, and now this big-ass swan was splashing in the fountain? Thank you, *no*. - -So I hadn’t worn it in years, and the first time I stepped into the foot webbing I could feel my neck vertebrae pop painfully. “Careful!” Mom said, bracing my arm when I stumbled. “Don’t force it. Give yourself time to shift.” - -“Your great-great-grandmother would jump in and out of her coat like it was nothing,” Gramma remarked from the kitchen, her hands wet and soapy as she scrubbed our dinner dishes. “Last generation who didn’t care about the call and spent as much time in her coat as out of it.” Mom and I paused, me teetering on one human foot and one whose bones had already shifted and diffused and reshaped to fit the swan-foot webbing. Gramma rinsed a plate and set it to dry. “Sanctimonious bitch,” she added. “Couldn’t stand her. You’re doing fine, Liv.” - -I eased my left foot into the webbing and held still while my bones did their slow wincing change. “Good,” said Mom. “Nicely done. Ease it up a little now, let’s get your legs covered.” - -Another thing a story won’t tell you: There’s a perfectly good reason why swan girls wear nothing under their coats, and it’s not because centuries of dudes got off on the image of a flock of tits and ass all soaking wet. It’s because cloth obeys no genetics. My bones and skin and muscles and organs know how to change and morph and reknit themselves into different shapes; I can’t unlearn something I was born with. But just try cramming underwire and jeans into a feather-skin that barely holds *you*. Once I forgot and left my underpants on, and only realized it when my legs had gone swan up to my knees. Gramma had to cut the underpants off me with embroidery scissors while I held *so very still*. I liked that pair; they were soft microfabric that never itched. Gramma tossed them in the trash and ordered two replacement pairs online. - -It took me three weeks of daily practice to get in shape and make a full change in under five minutes. And three weeks of harassment from a boy who thinks he’s entitled to you sucks even harder than cramming your legs down into a handspan of tendons. Trey Riley shot me knowing looks so broad the whole hallway could see them. He grabbed my ass in the lunch line. He “forgot” his St. Christopher medal on my desk just so he could watch me flinch when he sauntered by to scoop it up. Once in history class, where he sat just behind me, he slid down far enough in his chair to run his foot down the back of my calf. He dropped into my daily routes anywhere, everywhere, and then he found my alternate routes and dive-bombed those too. He cut class to lounge against the wall of the girls’ locker room before our next game; when I saw him there, I almost didn’t go in to get changed. - -Lauren Garrett, our captain, found me around the corner, flattened against the wall and trying not to hyperventilate. “Thomassen, what the hell—” - -“Is he still there?” I hissed. - -She paused and glanced back, her dark brown skin going darker when she spotted him. She’d been in the locker room when he’d stolen my clothes. “That asshole,” she said. “Stay here.” - -Lauren stood six-foot-one with thighs that could crack walnuts. When she stomped over and told Trey Riley to fuck off, he actually did it. She didn't even care if he pulled a Karen and called school security, and he didn't have the balls anyway. I slunk into the locker room and changed as fast as I could with my hands still shaking. Lauren paced back and forth in front of the door, arms crossed, until I came out. - -“Coach and I reported it the day after it happened,” she told me, once we got out on the field. “Don’t know if they’ll do anything to him, but it’s on file.” - -I tried to thank her, but my throat had unexpectedly clogged. She nudged my shoulder anyway before jogging to her starting position. - -After that, the team closed ranks around me like my own personal bodyguards. The Kroner twins took turns walking me to classes; Amanda waved me over to her lunch table of intimidatingly popular people; Lauren made a point of walking me to the bus stop and waiting with me until I boarded. But I still had to ride the damn thing with him. - -Mom drove me to school now, but her douchebag boss wouldn’t let her rearrange her afternoon hours, and Gramma’s long-distance eyesight made driving too dangerous for her, so the bus it was. Gramma met me at the stop every day, glaring like Medusa, but those fifteen-minute rides belonged to Trey Riley. - -It didn’t matter how much I ignored him, how motionless I sat, how white my knuckles clenched in my lap. He’d sit just behind me and hover at the edge of my vision to remind me he was there. I hated every flinch and sharp breath that betrayed my fake indifference. He didn’t even have to touch me to frighten me. He’d already won that much of me. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“S{{}}ay the word and we’ll destroy him for you,” Lauren said halfway through the third week. “Just so you know.” - -She’d gone with me during lunch period to see the vice principal, who had smiled stiffly and told us that the administration had reviewed the complaint and couldn’t take action at this time. Lauren had nearly thrown his “#1 Dad” mug at his head. She stalked through the empty hallway, back toward the cafeteria. I had to jog to keep up. - -“It’s okay,” I said. - -“No, it’s not!” She stopped outside the girls’ bathroom, her jaw set hard. “I don’t mind hanging with you, okay? I’m glad to do it. We’re all glad to. But this can’t just go on until it becomes normal. Someone’s got to *do* something about it.” - -I reminded myself I could change in three minutes now, but bit my tongue. No one’s actually tried to steal our feather coats in generations. That doesn’t mean we talk about it to outsiders. *For your own safety,* Mom had told me when I was four and asked why I couldn’t change in public. *If people knew, they might try to hurt you.* - -She was right. Because most people sucked. But Lauren had had my back this whole time. I thought, *Maybe that east-of-the-sun thing gets to us because we don’t trust anyone with the truth.* - -I took a deep breath and asked, “How much do you know about swan lore?” - -“Swan what?” - -*Not everyone has your context, Liv.* “Like, fairy tales.” - -Lauren blinked, then frowned. “Uh. I saw that movie Black Swan once? She was pretty white though.” - -Close enough. “I’ve got a plan,” I said. “But I really super need you not to freak out.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}e came to the game that Friday. All according to plan, but I still felt hunted every time I chased the ball past the section where Trey Riley sat. The team tried to be thoughtful and didn’t pass to me on that part of the field. I gritted my teeth and did the best I could. - -We tied, 2-2. “If we don’t make finals this season, I’m blaming him,” Lauren grumbled as we headed off the field. “You ready?” - -I swallowed down the nerves roiling in my stomach. “Enough,” I said. “Could someone else text him? I don’t want him having my number.” - -Lauren did it herself. I watched over her shoulder as she typed. *Olivia says meet her in the locker room in ten minutes.* I nodded, palms sweating, and she hit send. - -Nobody liked the idea of leaving me alone with him, but Lauren didn’t budge. “We do this Liv’s way,” she kept saying. And eventually, despite the yelling and the offered taser, and the time crunch, everyone left the locker room. - -Lauren was the last one out. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll be just around the corner,” she said. I nodded; speaking felt impossible. She hugged me, then ducked out of sight. - -I heard his footsteps just after I’d grabbed my waterproof duffel and pulled the shower curtain across the stall. I left my socks on the damp floor and turned the spigot on. “Oliiiiiiivia,” he called. God, I could *hear* the grin on his face. I felt proud that my hands didn’t shake as I unzipped the duffel. “Is that you in the shower?” - -I didn’t say anything. I was kind of busy. - -Cloth rustled. “32B, hey, nice job. I think you went up a cup size since last month.” - -*Just for that, I’m gonna break your bones.* - -“So listen, I don’t have all day. Either you come out of the shower, or I come in. Your call. Countdown ends in ten, nine, eight, sev— holy shit!” - -Here’s another thing that no story ever tells you. - -Swans are vicious bastards, and they will fuck you up. - -I exploded out of the shower stall, sweeping the curtain aside with one wing and running at Trey Riley as fast as my webbed feet would carry me. He slipped on the sweating tiles and went down hard. I clamped his ankle in my beak. By the time Lauren came around the corner, he was already crying as he scrabbled backward. I wrenched his foot to the side as he tried to get up. Something snapped under my grip, and Trey Riley screamed. - -Lauren stepped back, eyes like saucers, hands raised. Trey staggered to his one good foot and fled the locker room. I gave him a two-second head start before I followed. - -Swans can give you a hell of a bruise, but they aren’t actually strong enough to break human bone. Well. Not normal swans. But the kind of swan whose body mass is a human concentrated down, who spends most of her life in flesh rather than feathers, who knows about language and strategy and hate? Oh yeah. Watch your fucking back. Just when you think you’ve snared your prey, she’ll put on her fragile feathery armor and go for your throat. - -He kept screaming as I chased him onto the field. He tried to shake me by climbing up in the stands. *Hello, jackass, I have wings, you can’t get away*. With his ankle fractured and panic shutting down whatever intelligence he had, he couldn’t strategize. I just had to swoop down, open my wings, and hiss like Satan had kids with a cat, and I could herd him anywhere. People were yelling all around the stands, getting out of my way, getting out their phones. I drove him toward a few of them, enough to make sure they got his face in close-up. By then, he looked so exhausted he couldn’t even cry anymore. - -I thought for a second about being merciful. - -Then I thought about the game I’d almost missed because he’d camped out waiting for me, and I ran him halfway up the field before I broke his arm. One good blow, swan wingspan plus soccer-playing human strength, and he dropped like the pit of my stomach did when I saw him holding all my clothes, just one short month ago. His stupid St. Christopher swung free of his shirt as he curled up on the ground. I snapped at the chain and broke it. My beak closed on the medal and I tasted sweat and copper. Then I gave him a last jab in the ribs and flew home. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}om kissed me and held me close and cleaned my feather coat herself. Gramma filled my groaning plate with mac and cheese, tacos, asparagus in hollandaise. - -“You deserve it,” she said. “Tell me again about the ankle twist.” - -Everyone at the game had posted some version of the video by midnight, usually with cackling emoji accompaniment. Trey Riley spent a month and a half making trips to the hospital and hobbling around on crutches, and the rest of junior year trying to pretend that he didn’t mind getting called Bird Bitch. - -Nevertheless, when I headed for our very next practice there was Trey, propped up against the wall, though this time out of necessity instead of out of cool. “Uh, listen,” he said, “Olivia, that time in the locker room—” - -“Which one?” I asked without stopping, one hand curled into a fist in my pocket. “The one where you stole my clothes? The one where you stalked me to a game? Remind me, was there another?” - -He stuck one of his crutches across my path. “Come on, don’t be a bitch.” - -I stopped dead and pulled my hand out of my pocket. His St. Christopher dangled from my fingertips. I’d never seen a face drain completely of blood before. He looked almost as white as my feather coat. “How the hell—” he rasped. - -“If you ever come near me again,” I said, “you might lose more than this.” - -I kicked his crutch out of the way and kept walking, my chest feeling like a balloon swelling bigger and bigger, and I grinned the whole way to the locker room door. - -Lauren was waiting inside with my waterproof duffel in her hand. I could see the soles of my cleats pressing against the bag. “I’m trying not to freak out,” she said, “but all of that was extremely freaky.” - -*For your own safety.* I swallowed hard. “If you want me off the team, I get it.” - -She snorted. “You can’t get rid of us that easily, Thomassen. Look, I have questions. So many questions. But I definitely haven’t told anyone.” - -“I kind of hoped not,” I said thickly, and took the duffel. - -“Damn right.” Then she offered an uneven sideways grin that made me tear up. “I also definitely submitted a formal request to make the team’s mascot a swan. Just so you know.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Swans Will be Swans** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1111301561002829).* diff --git a/content/issue-38/the-voice-of-mythaxis.md b/content/issue-38/the-voice-of-mythaxis.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6f184f5f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-38/the-voice-of-mythaxis.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,84 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "An interview with Micah Hyatt" -date: 2024-07-01 -issue: Issue 38 - -genres: -- non-fiction -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As you may now be well aware, Mythaxis Magazine has become a platform for audio-format speculative fiction! It's fair to say that there's one man we have to thank for that: Micah Hyatt, a past contributor to these pages with fiction, poetry, and experiments in generative art, so we lured him from the studio long enough to chat a little about himself, and the voice of Mythaxis." - -image: images/VoiceMythaxis10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Micah Hyatt's headshot and a Creative Commons image by [OpenClipart-Vectors](https://pixabay.com/vectors/audio-music-sfa-jazz-sound-wave-1293262/) - many thanks!" - -type: stock -slug: an-interview-with-micah-hyatt -weight: 8 -featured: true - ---- - -**Andrew Leon Hudson:** Hi Micah! We at *Mythaxis* know you as a writer of tight, emotive flash fiction and distinctive sf poetry, but tell us a little more about yourself. - -**Micah Hyatt:** I live in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I have four kids, all in Scouts. My wife works as a program director with the Boy Scouts, and we have six dogs: one shih-tzu, one shiuaua, two chihuahuas, one chorkie, and one white wolf. The wolf was a rescue. - -**ALH:** How do you rescue a wolf? - -**Micah:** About three years ago, a police car t-boned us and totaled our vehicle in the dead of winter and this very fluffy puppy came out to inspect the noise. I was still rattled from the wreck, but I picked her up and searched for an owner or a mother or other pups for about an hour. There was snow on the ground and I was worried she'd freeze. Eventually a police van took my family home, since the wreck was their fault, pup included. Later, when she got bigger, I was wondering what kind of dog she was, so I did a reverse image search. We were very surprised to find that she was a native Texan white wolf. She's very smart and knows all kinds of tricks, but only obeys me. Her name is Calamity Jane. - -**ALH:** A life with little going on then. How have you kept busy? - -**Micah:** I'm a former train conductor and Iraq war veteran. After the war, I was diagnosed with several neurological issues. If you look at my cluster of symptoms, it's basically Parkinson's disease. However, I'm too young for that, so I've been categorized as having various functional neurological disorders and traumatic brain injury. I worked my job at the railroad as long as I could safely, but eventually I had to stop driving and quit working, and then went through vocational rehabilitation training with the Veterans Association. - -Recreationally, I swim as much as possible. I like watching foreign movies. *RRR* is my most recent favorite, followed by *The New King of Comedy* by Stephen Chow. I also enjoy playing video games. *Sekiro* is the best game ever made. This is not up for discussion. - -**ALH:** You must mean *Knytt Underground*. Anyway, as well as contributing fiction here you've participated in our brief flirtation with generative art, and now you're providing us with audio! What led you to experiment with these different formats? - -**Micah:** I received a master's in English in the Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. My thesis was a thousand-page military fantasy whalepunk novel. It was pretty good for a thesis novel, not good enough that I'd want to send it out. I've been working on another draft on and off since graduation. While I was at university there was a reading contest every semester, and I took first place every time. People said I had a nice voice. However, as my neurological disorders began to worsen I developed issues speaking, so I decided to start recording stories as a form of therapy to train myself how to speak properly again. - -My first attempt was a new edition of the first *Doctor Doolittle* book. It has all kinds of crazy voices, talking ducks and pigs. But, as much as I loved it, the book is very dated with many racist scenes and jokes. These were taken out in a version edited in the 70s, but that version is terrible, it stripped all the humor too. Since the original is out of copyright, I re-edited it, wrote two new chapters, and recorded the whole thing. It was fun, but I think it took me about 6 months. - -**ALH:** Tell us about your studio setup. - -**Micah:** When I moved to Corpus Christi, I knew that I wanted to continue recording. My previous setup wasn't great, and I wanted to improve recording quality. My upstairs hallway at the new house has a walk-in closet. It's big for a closet, but too small to be a bedroom. I think it's 6'x8'. - -**ALH:** My love of *Spinal Tapp* informs me that's pretty damn small. Oh, right: *feet*. So that's about... 180cm by 250cm? - -**Micah:** Sure, why not. I ordered foam panels from Amazon and covered the walls with them. I have a noise-canceling curtain that I slide behind me after I shut the door, and something called a draft blocker for the underside of the door. I drilled a hole in the wall between the closet and my daughter's room, and fed all the cables into there. The only electronics I have in the room are silent running – a single widescreen monitor so that I can have the story on one side and the recording software on the other at the same time. - -Reduction of unnecessary heat and sound sources are probably the most important thing, followed by comfort. One thing I quickly realized was that there was no air-conditioning or ventilation in the room at all. For the first year this meant, unless I wanted to be a sweat-drenched monster, I could only record in the winter or the spring. This year I finally had a ventilation duct put in. - -**ALH:** That's the DIY, now dazzle us with the tech. - -**Micah:** For really good quality sound you don't want one of those USB-to-PC microphones. I use a Focusrite Scarlit 2i2 pre-amp, which is the interface between my microphone and my computer and boosts the mic's signal. My mic is an Audio-technica 5040, which is serious overkill. It's much higher quality anyone getting into audio should buy, there are many other microphones that can deliver nearly equivalent performance for 1/8th the price. But I really wanted it. - -As for software, initially I used Garageband. It was not ideal. I tried Pro tools, the professional version, but it isn't really made for audiobook narration. I originally used a Mac laptop, but it would heat up so much that the fans in the room sounded like a 747 was coming in for a landing, so I switched to PC and Adobe Audition. - -**ALH:** What is your process for audio production? - -**Micah:** If anyone wants to get into reading, I think you should seek out other readers you like to listen to and see what their process is. Jeff Hays – an amazing reader who reads the *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series by Matt Dinniman – has a YouTube channel called *Soundbooth Theater Live*. I've learned more from a few of his videos than months of suffering on my own. - -Firstly, I just read the story. I note down all the characters with speaking roles and try to get a sense of who they are. Sometimes, especially in short fiction, there's not a lot to go on. Next, I get my booth set up. New file. Test recording. Make sure all the dogs and children in my house know that it's time to be quiet for a while. Then I read the story aloud. I use a multitrack layout in Audition so that I can put individual characters on their own tracks. This is important for consistency, and so I can easily do re-takes on their lines after the first read. So I'll read through, keeping the narration on a single track, and separate out the character voices. - -**ALH:** The variety of voice was one of the first things that stood out in your read of *Nightshade Memory*, the robotic effect was really striking. - -**Micah:** My own accent is middle to upper class, middle American, pretty close to what you'd expect from a white male reporter on the local news channel in a place like Kansas City or New York. For narration, I use something close to my natural speaking voice, but a little more chesty. This is important, because I don't trigger the neurological stutter if I speak in a false voice or an accent, or if I sing. I try to be clear and add meaningful inflection and emphasis on words in a way that I wouldn't normally do when just speaking conversationally. - -Sentences have a sort of shape with peaks and valleys, and it varies from culture to culture and accent to accent. For character voices, there's a bunch of little things you can do – speaking from the front of your mouth, the back, the throat, volume control, raspiness, syllable harshness, etc. I'm still a newbie. I'm learning. Female voices, especially when there are multiple characters that need differentiation, are difficult. - -After the recording is done, post-production involves taking out breaths and background noise. There are automated tools for this, but they have drawbacks. Room noise is easy, as it's minimal for me and just a slight hum on a consistent frequency, the hum of the air conditioning and electrical cables. Breathing, though, and mouth smacks and clicks, are a little more difficult. You can run a filter on them, but I've found that filter will often degrade the quality of the actual speaking a little, so I tend to manually subtract the breaths and clicks as I Iisten back to the story the first time. - -I have a series of enhancements I apply over the audio with software. I've manually tuned it to my voice to boost the meaningful frequencies. It also changes equalization levels and prevents audio from getting too loud. For characters that I want to add special effects to, like robots, I record the lines and then use filters and such to modify the pitch, the reverb, the distortion. All old-school, 00's tech. No AI. - -**ALH:** So, what projects do you have your eye on for the future? - -**Micah:** I'm still working on the aforementioned military fantasy whalepunk novel. It's called *Lightswallower*. It got too big, and I had to take about a year to restructure and re-outline it. I've been writing the first book, tentatively called *The Penitent Bone*. It's about Galan, an exiled scrimshander priest, who is summoned back to the temple at the Leviathan's Throat. The high priest, Galan's mentor, has died under mysterious circumstances. In a last will and testament carved in whalebone, Galan is absolved of heresy and appointed as the new high priest. Meanwhile, the city comes under siege by a steamwork army whose goal seems to be not as simple as conquest – they want to destroy the secret knowledge hidden in the Leviathan's Throat. - -I've also gotten into writing lyrics and poetry, mainly anti-war and anti-military industrial complex in theme. I use AI to turn it into music. This is more of a therapy thing for me. Long writing sessions can be difficult when I have migraines or other issues, but I still want to be creative, and I love music. I can write an intro or a verse and then workshop it with the AI and hear the results right away. I love being able to play "producer" with a full band and singers at my fingertips. I go by *[Leidenfrost Diver](https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/leidenfrostdiver/the-wmds)* and you can find tracks on Spotify and YouTube. It's extremely pleasant and entertaining, and I dearly hope the AI scene gets the ethics issues solved, because I love the process and the experimentation of it. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -Many thanks again to Micah for taking the time to chat. If you haven't already, check out his reading of *[Interlocking Grains of Light](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-38/interlocking-grains-of-light.html)* by LM Zaerr (which, incidentally, features original harp music performed by the author's sister!), and recordings of the other stories of the issue will be released over the coming weeks. diff --git a/content/issue-39/ShortReviews07.md b/content/issue-39/ShortReviews07.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9aa884d1..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/ShortReviews07.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,44 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – July to September, 2024" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As is our wont, time to wrap up our penultimate issue of the year with several recommendations for stories appearing in other venues around the web. Much like Mythaxis, the focus is on smaller magazines where the work can be read for free at the click of a link – so what are you waiting for? Click here, then go click somewhere else! A handful of very different rewards await…" - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-july-to-september-2024 -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}wo of the magazines mentioned in last issue's short reviews return in the Autumn, delivering stories that – as captain of a rival ship – fill me with seething envy (but ahaha! I jest! We're all comrades in editorial arms, back here where the readers see us not! And certainly where they see us not sharpening our back-knives). - -Reversing the order of appearance this time, the first is featured at *[NewMyths.com](https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-home/home-page)*, whose perspective takes in "Life from a side view mirror". In this case the life in question is viewed from the distant end, as long years of services are somewhat rudely cast aside. In **[Tiny](https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-issue-68/issue-68-stories/tiny?authuser=2)** by William Wandless, the ageing housekeeper of Hazelton Hall is dismissed from her role by Lord Talbot, her replacement (both the act and the person) coming at the demand of the new Lady Talbot, eager to stamp her own authority on management of the family seat. - -The sole symbol of her former employer's gratitude is the gift of a small, portable cottage from which to see out her days, graciously permitted to rest somewhere on the grounds. Despite the sadness of the staff, and one member of the family, she continues to take pleasure in the small things in life. This change heralds the beginning of the estate's decline, something which our narrator at least takes with her customary calm and forgiving demeanour – yet some unkindness is too much to abide, and when the venerable Mrs. Vulpe's limits are finally reached the settling of scores delivers sharp, satisfying closure. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n now to the second returnee, *[ergot.](https://www.ergot.press/)*, germinating hosts of innovative and experimental horror, which in all ways is very much on point for this story. In **[Saurophaster in Oculus](https://www.ergot.press/authors/J_F_Gleeson/Saurophaster_in_Oculus)**, we first meet Philip Karras, a generally ordinary man with an only slightly unusual condition in his total reluctance to make eye contact with anyone around him – a condition that is quickly revealed to be based in his rather less ordinary belief that a discomforting speck in his left eye will bring about unspecified misfortune for anyone who happens to exchange glances with him for even a moment. - -J. F. Gleeson's story offers up quite the mix. The tiniest speck of the otherworldly contaminating the all encompassing mundane. Epistolary texts that write around the edges of what's really going on. Supernatural horror treated as a fact of life, echoing more than one horror that genuinely is such. And in places prose that teeters at the dangerous point where *rich* tips over into *excess*, a region that (in my opinion) even the likes of Cormac McCarthy trod both sides of. It's a strong style, and if occasionally *very* strong, not too much so to turn me off a thought-provoking, satisfying read. And not bad company to keep, is it? - -*And while I'm here...* a passing nod to another *ergot.* story, their latest at time of writing: *[Boomtown](https://www.ergot.press/authors/Sarah_MK_Palmer/Boomtown)*, by Sarah M. K. Palmer, a piece of strange small-town fiction with hints of the classic *Twilight Zone* to it. Signposted perhaps a little too clearly (again, in my opinion), but as with *Saurophaster in Oculus* this was a really pleasurable read. *ergot.* contains gems. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}inally, according to its slug line, *[Heroic Fantasy Quarterly](https://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/)* deals in three things: *Prose. Poetry*. And *Pulp*. In the case of their final p-word, that's often in the sense of *beaten to a*, as even a cursory glance across their thematically focused wares will reveal that adversaries being pounded into paste by mighty-thewed warriors is something of a trademark. But then Heroic Fantasy is something of a *hack 'em slash 'em* genre, isn't it? There's a good chance quarterly is how the losers get picked up and carried off for burial. - -And while that's more or less what's on the cards for you with Tim Hanlon's **[The Wailing Keep](https://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=4255)**, that takes nothing away from what is a nice example of the other kind of pulp that *HFQ* peddles: good old-fashioned adventure. Here we encounter Foscari the Gate-Keep, perhaps once Conanesque but now built more for comfort than for battle, as he wakes to find his master's kindly daughter kidnapped by a vengeful sorcerer-type whose henchmen leave only mutilated bodies in their wake. Seen only as a fat liability by the real soldiery, Foscari takes it upon himself to pledge his oath to bring the damsel back home alive, and being along for the ride as he rolls back the years is to have a good old-fashioned time. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188620846604233).* diff --git a/content/issue-39/__index.md b/content/issue-39/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index aed3f9d9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 39" -date: 2024-10-01 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 39 -subhead: Autumn 2024 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/sword_mountains_cover.jpg -imageMobile: images/sword_mountains_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Sword Mountains by Michal Kváč" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#fe8008' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-39/contents.md b/content/issue-39/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1f5fbd2b..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Tintype Trolls]({{< relref path="tintype-trolls.md" >}}), by Teresa Milbrodt -- [The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube]({{< relref path="the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.md" >}}), by Steven Genise -- [Cottage in the Woods]({{< relref path="cottage-in-the-woods.md" >}}), by Carl Walmsley -- [With nothing left]({{< relref path="with-nothing-left.md" >}}), by Emma Burnett -- [Pillars of Distraction]({{< relref path="pillars-of-distraction.md" >}}), by Rob Gillham -- [Jungle House, by Julianne Pachico]({{< relref path="jungle-house-julianne-pachico.md" >}}), reviewed by Matia Ravasi -- [Short Reviews – July to September 2024]({{< relref path="ShortReviews07.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-39/cottage-in-the-woods.md b/content/issue-39/cottage-in-the-woods.md deleted file mode 100644 index 86e63e40..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/cottage-in-the-woods.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,304 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Cottage in the Woods" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Carl Walmsley -copyright: '© Carl Walmsley 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Stories change with the telling, even those that find their origin in actual events. Who tells the story? Why do they tell it? Who do they tell it to? Carl Walmsley tells the story now. Probably it never really happened. Probably you think you've heard it before, or one very like it. But a little change can keep the oldest of stories alive seemingly forever." - -image: images/CottageWoods10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by [Szabolcs Toth](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-wooden-cabin-in-the-forest-by-the-lake-8374690/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i39/03.Cottage.in.the.Woods.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: cottage-in-the-woods -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}W{{}}hen Rebecca heard voices outside her cottage, she locked the doors and hid. Nobody ever came this deep into the forest. - -When the strangers did not leave, she peered over her bedroom windowsill and saw two children gathering berries and scratching roots from the soil. Rebecca watched them for a time and realised how much she had missed children. - -There was no way to know if they were alone, however, so she closed the curtains and tried not to think about them. - -When it grew dark, the voices faded; the silence which followed felt strangely empty. Rebecca crept along the garden path and found them sleeping beyond her gate. Wolves were howling in the trees, closer than usual. She scooped the children up and ushered them inside. - -In the candlelight, they devoured cakes and pastries, gulped down mugs of milk. Rebecca dabbed their knees and elbows, slashed and grazed by the unkind forest. She thought of other wounds she had tended, and her fingers trembled. - -Rebecca led them, half-dozing, to the bedroom and wrapped them in woollen blankets. They slept together, brother and sister she supposed, heads bobbing like mice in a winter burrow. - -Rebecca found it almost impossible to sleep with others in the cottage. The children’s breath seemed to beat at the walls, and the space around her shrank. She could not have ignored them though, for all the promises she had made. She would tend their wounds, fatten them up, and move them on. That would be safest for all of them. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}here are your parents?” Rebecca asked, as the children wolfed down breakfast. - -A pause. A shrug. Rebecca sensed their pain and did not push. Many children were abandoned. Sometimes, there were just too many mouths to feed. And yet their clothes, torn and mud-stained, were well-made. - -The girl licked jam from the corner of her mouth, collected every crumb of pastry, then stared at the door. The twitching of her knee rattled the chair. Rebecca wondered if the girl was scared of what was outside or would bolt back into the woods the moment the door was open. - -“I have jobs that need doing,” Rebecca said, closing the big oven. “If you like, you can help me.” - -They spent the morning gathering herbs from the garden, washing and chopping them, leaving them in the sun to dry. That evening, Rebecca sorted them into jars and the children crouched by the fire watching the stew simmer and pop. Bellies full, they once more slept beneath bundled blankets. Rebecca marvelled at how quietly they moved and how they could vanish into tiny spaces whenever a noise from outside startled them – like critters that have learned to live in the shadow of a hawk. - -For five days, they ate food like it was treasure and, slowly, their hard eyes and brittle skin softened. The jut of bones sank beneath new flesh. - -Lying in bed, watching the wall as if she could see through it to where they slept, Rebecca decided that, now, she really had done all she could. Tomorrow, she would send them on their way. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“T{{}}hank you.” - -It was the first time the boy had spoken. Rebecca could not have been more surprised if he had sprouted from the earth like a beanstalk. She studied him for signs of what she feared most. His eyes were broad and honest, his smile shy but true. His fingers curled and uncurled nervously. Even now, after almost a week, he was frightened. - -Frightened men did terrible things. Frightened men turned angry, and once drove her from her home. She’d thought she would die, limping alone through the forest, until she found an abandoned cottage, tended and healed it, and made it a new home. And, perhaps, when the children came and she took them in, she too was at last beginning to mend; though her fear of frightened men was still as strong as her hope that such would never trouble her again. - -But the boy was not a man. Not yet. Perhaps he would not turn out like others she had known. - -“You’re welcome,” she told him, finally, and presented him with another slice of cake. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“W{{}}hat plant is this?” asked the boy, running his fingers through a circle of purple petals. His nails were chewed to the quick and rimed with blood. Rebecca washed them every night before bed, but at breakfast they were always the same. - -“Echinacea.” - -When he could not say it: “*Coneflower* is its other name.” - -The girl sniffed an orange bloom. - -“That’s calendula. I used it on your cuts.” - -The girl touched her elbow, still crusted with scabs but healing nicely. - -The children pattered around the garden. Elderberry for colds, thyme for a cough, milk thistle for the liver, St John’s Wort for an ailing mind. By lunchtime, they could recite the names and use of every plant in the garden – including those that could kill as well as cure, like the autumn crocuses and *henbane*. - -“How do you have so many?” the boy asked. - -“I brought them with me,” said Rebecca. “From another garden.” - -“Where was that?” - -Rebecca fashioned a smile. “Time for lunch, I think.” - -After they had eaten, the children wanted to learn more. Rebecca sat them beside the goat, and placed a pail beneath its tummy. - -“Her name is Mary.” The children stroked the animal’s soft flanks. Wherever they came from, they were not farm children. - -Rebecca plucked a caterpillar from a leaf. “Do you see how he moves?” - -The green strip undulated across Rebecca’s palm and she set him down on the hedge. She reached for the boy’s hands but he recoiled, making them into fists. Rebecca waited until he was ready, then guided his fingers to the goat’s teats. - -“Hold them both, and roll your fingers like the caterpillar.” - -Nothing happened. - -“Keep trying.” - -Finally, the pail rattled. The boy laughed, watching the stream as if it were the funniest thing he had ever seen. - -“This is Hettie,” said Rebecca, placing one of her chickens in the girl’s lap, while she sat and watched her brother. Before the pail had filled with milk, Hettie laid an egg in the girl’s lap. She held it up and smiled as if she had made it herself. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen the boy was strong enough to lift the iron dishes, Rebecca showed him how to work the oven. It was bigger than it needed to be, for Rebecca had always enjoyed baking and remembered what it was like to feed more mouths than her own. - -“Like this?” he asked, kneading the dough. - -Rebecca smiled and helped him to sculpt a big fat loaf for supper. “You’re a natural.” - -At bedtime, the boy sniffed the air and grinned, for the cottage still smelled of the bread he had baked. - -After that, the oven was rarely cold, for they both enjoyed feeding others as much as they enjoyed feeding themselves. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ne morning, Rebecca found the girl poring over her books. She stepped away, startled, all at once as fearful as the day she first arrived. - -Rebecca smiled and guided her back to the table. “Can you read?” - -“Father says books are bad. Mother had some, but he took them away.” - -It was the first time the girl had mentioned her parents. - -Rebecca turned the pages and the girl traced the letters with her finger. - -“My words,” Rebecca told her. The girl’s eyes widened. - -Rebecca dipped her pen and offered it to the girl. “Would you like me to teach you?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hat evening Rebecca led the children into the front garden, where the vegetables were ripening nicely, and peered over the little fence into the wood. It was thick and green with the rustling of unseen life. - -Rebecca was afraid of the forest, for she could not forget the men who lived beyond it. She would never go back, but she needed to know if the children wished to do so. If they did, it would have to be now. - -“Would you like to go for a walk in the woods?” Rebecca asked. - -The boy – whose smile had clung to his lips like jam since milking Mary – looked suddenly frightened. The girl shook her head, and gripped Rebecca’s skirt till her knuckles whitened. - -Rebecca hugged them to her, overcome by an unexpected surge of relief. Still holding them close, she turned and led them inside. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he garden bloomed and faded, as summer passed and winter came. The forest became a wall of frosted thorns. Whatever lived there slept, but the trees still frightened the children. They were always at their happiest when the door was locked and the three of them sat by the fire eating cakes or listening to stories from Rebecca’s books. Most nights the girl took a turn reading and, more than once, Rebecca fell asleep in her chair listening to the child’s voice. If she slept through till morning, she always awoke with her blanket tucked carefully around her, to the smell of fresh baking. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he coming of spring changed everything. A fist on the door shook the cottage. - -The children hid – so quickly that Rebecca did not see where – but she understood their fear. Her fingers shook as she opened the door. - -Three men were outside, big and dirty as the hogs that rooted in the forest. One lounged against the hedge, holding the gate open with his foot. - -The man who had knocked peered past Rebecca, into the cottage. “We’re looking for two children.” - -“I have no children,” Rebecca said. She tried to close the door, but the man leaned into it, holding it open with his weight. - -“And your husband?” - -“Will be back soon.” - -The man’s teeth appeared through his thick beard. “My men and I are tired. The squire sent us to find these children. Been searching all day. P’raps we should wait ’til your husband returns. Maybe he’s seen something.” - -They shuffled past her and the third man, thin and greasy as a river rat, bolted the door behind them. - -The first man flopped into Rebecca’s chair, resting his muddy boots on the blanket the children covered her with at night. The second man paced the two small rooms in a few strides, his restless eyes taking in the crooked stairs and the clutter of furniture, before settling on the hearth beside the fire. A stew bubbled there. He unhooked the spoon and sniffed it. Even then, his eyes continued to flit about, like wasps trapped inside a bottle. - -“*Mmm*…” He took a slurp. “We’ve worked up a proper appetite today.” - -The third man, who had not moved from the door, smacked his lips. “Reckon we have.” - -“Let me feed you,” said Rebecca. - -She scooped up three bowls, filled one, and offered it to the man on the chair, face all teeth and beard. Their fingers touched. His skin was rough and calloused, his nails dark as peat. - -“There’s a reward for these children,” he said. - -“Then I hope you find them,” said Rebecca. - -He lifted the bowl and lapped from the side. “What does your husband do?” - -Rebecca served the wasp-eyed man. “He’s a woodcutter.” - -“Then he’s out in the forest?” - -Rebecca nodded, filled the last bowl, and took it to the rat-faced man by the door, willing her fingers to stop shaking. - -“We didn’t see anyone,” he said. “And we’ve been out in the woods all day.” - -The first man slurped the last of the stew, leaving gobbets in his tangled beard. - -“Good stew.” He held out the bowl and, as Rebecca took it, their hands touched a second time. - -“It’s getting dark,” whined rat-face. “Might not be safe to go back out.” - -Wasp-eyes by the hearth twitched his gaze between the stairs and Rebecca. “There’s a bed up there, I suppose.” - -“Must be,” said rat-face. Again, his lips made a moist, slapping sound. - -Another knock rattled the front door; and every eye in the room turned to stare at it. - -Swallowing her fear, Rebecca smiled. “That must be my husband now.” - -Rat-face stepped away from the door, his jaw moving like it was stuck on a piece of gristle. Wasp-eyes slid a knife from his belt and, after too long a pause, used it to slice a piece of carrot in his stew. - -Teeth-and-beard looked from the door to Rebecca. It was the kind of look you could feel, settling where it pleased, as rough and black as his callused hands. His presence became a palpable force, using up all the space in the room, draining the air till Rebecca felt the breath catch in her throat. - -“Open the door,” he ordered. - -Rebecca scanned the little tables that held pots of flowers from her garden, searching for something she could hold and thrust. Whatever happened to her, she would not let them hurt the children. - -The bolt scraped and the door opened. “There’s no one there,” complained rat-face. - -“Go round and check the back.” - -Rat-face skittered out of the front door, while wasp-eyes skulked toward the rear of the cottage. - -Teeth-and-beard dropped heavily into her chair again, and Rebecca almost gasped when a small hand appeared from under the table. Red-rimmed fingers pressed speckled yellow and white petals into Rebecca’s palm; understanding, she moved to the pot on the hearth and dropped them in. She was still stirring as the two men came back inside. - -“Might’ve been the wind,” rat-face said with a shrug. Teeth-and-beard rolled his eyes. - -“Perhaps you *should* wait for my husband,” Rebecca said, re-filling a bowl and offering it to the man in her chair. - -Teeth-and-beard did not move but, after a moment, wasp-eyes took the bowl from her. “Never waste good food.” - -“Did I tell you who these children belong to?” asked teeth-and-beard. - -“I haven’t seen any children.” Rebecca began to fill another bowl. “I told you.” - -“The squire. He’s an important man. Their mother tried to run away with them last year. Troublesome woman. She had all sorts of funny ideas.” - -Again, Rebecca offered him a bowl. Again he only watched her. - -“You having that?” Rat-face snuffled forward and sniffed the re-filled bowl. Rebecca handed it to him. He smiled and began to slurp it up. - -“We found the mother, of course,” teeth-and-beard said. “She’d taken a tumble in the woods. Broke her neck.” Rat-face made a strange little sound in the back of his throat that might have been a laugh. “Never found the children, though.” He gripped Rebecca’s blanket with thick fingers and wiped the clotting drops of broth from his beard. “They’d be bones by now, of course. Picked clean. Unless someone took ’em in.” - -Wasp-eyes coughed. - -“The squire might even be grateful to anyone who had taken ‘em in,” said teeth-and-beard. - -Rebecca did not trust herself to speak. Wasp-eyes coughed a second time. - -“He just wants his property back, see? What man wouldn’t?” - -With a clatter, wasp-eyes doubled-over and fell. - -“What’s wrong with you?” sneered rat-face. He watched the choking man kick and gasp. Then he looked at the woman by the fire and the stew in his hands. “Bloody ’ell!” - -He dropped the bowl and clattered through the doorway, squawking like a chicken who knows his neck is about to be wrung, running for the trees. - -Teeth-and-beard rose from the chair and struck Rebecca with the back of his hand. It was an oddly casual gesture that broke her nose and left her crumpled beside the hearth. He strode to the man who lay gasping on the floor, reached down and turned him over. Those waspish eyes twitched feebly, as if they had finally run out of air inside their bottle, and then stopped their twitching altogether. - -Teeth-and-beard took the knife from the dead man’s hand. Once more his presence filled the room. - -“Have you poisoned me, woman?” he asked. Rebecca shook her head. “Call the children. Tell them it’s safe to come back. Do that and I’ll make it quick for you. If not… I’ll make them watch.” - -Fear gripped Rebecca as surely as his hands would have done. She drew a long, juddering breath and forced herself to stand and walk to the open doorway. - -“It’s alright, children,” she called, some little light dying inside her. “You can come out. There’s no need to be afraid.” - -Rebecca heard the man moving towards her but was too afraid to look round. She wondered if she would feel the knife as he pressed it into her. She hoped that at least the children would have time to escape if he wasted time looking for them in the front garden. - -As teeth-and-beard passed the blanket-draped chair where he had been sitting, a hand emerged from beneath the folds. It clutched the small, sharp knife Rebecca used to chop herbs in the garden. The blade flicked back and forth, parting his tendons so quickly that he managed another step before his legs folded under him. He struck the floor and began to bellow like a stuck pig. - -The boy untwined himself from beneath the table, while his sister climbed out from under Rebecca’s chair. Teeth-and-beard screamed and swore, swiping with his own knife, but he could not stand and they walked around him to stand beside Rebecca. They watched as the frightened, angry man managed to drag himself to his knees, but when he tried to plant a foot could only topple heavily against the large, black oven. The boy opened its door helpfully, and the girl gave him a shove. As his head vanished inside, his teeth cracked on the hot metal frame and his beard caught fire. - -As no-teeth-and-no-beard flailed and screamed, the boy handed Rebecca the rolling pin that they used each day to make their bread and pastries. She rested a hand on his shoulder and smiled at his sister. - -“Close your eyes, children.” - -Rebecca did what she had to, thinking mostly of the children’s safety, but a part of her saw other men and other faces, recalling what they had done to her before. - -The room was in quite a state by the time she was done. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}itting outside on the lawn, Rebecca gave them both a pastry to eat. - -“We shall have to air the cottage tomorrow,” she said. The smell at that moment was quite unpleasant. - -“I can bake some bread,” said the boy. - -Out in the woods, the wolves howled in chorus. Rebecca was not concerned. It reassured her that the third man could not have made it very far. - -Once they had finished their pastries, they heaved the last body as far as they could into the trees. Rebecca did not want the children to help, but they insisted. The wolves would be hungry again soon enough, and then do the rest. - -That night, when they sat together around the fire and the girl had finished reading from Rebecca’s book, she looked up thoughtfully. “Perhaps one of us should write about what happened,” she suggested. “Our escape from father and the bad men who came looking for us.” - -Rebecca considered this for a moment. - -“Is it something you want to be remembered?” she asked them. - -“If we don’t,” insisted Gretel, “someone else will do it. And he may not tell it right.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Cottage in the Woods** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188623133270671).* diff --git a/content/issue-39/editorial.md b/content/issue-39/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index caea7358..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,42 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/sword_mountains_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 39** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -A second chance to salute [Michal Kváč](https://linktr.ee/kvacm), who gave our first issue of 2024 its astro-feline cuteness, and returns with something more epic fantasy in **Sword Mountains**. A freelance environment concept artist and illustrator from Czech Republic, you can click the link above to see his work and make contact, or check out his [Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@kvacm) for time-lapse videos of his process. Thanks again, Michal!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Greetings, reader! - -Since our last issue, ***Mythaxis***' editor has travelled to visit his ancestral seat (imagine a ruined croft with a stunted tree growing out of it on the north coast of Scotland), also to attend his first **WorldCon**, *Glasgow 2024*. Quite the experience, though amidst the many (even too many!) events at hand the fondest memories I returned with were meeting faces familiar and new, including cohabitations and catching-ups with a handful of friendly authors, plus an editorial lunch with several far-flung peers from other platformers of speculative fiction. - -And what more reason do I need to throw in a quick plug for *[Sci Phi Journal](https://www.sciphijournal.org/)*, *[Shoreline of Infinity](https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/)*, and the currently-on-sabbatical *[Little Blue Marble](https://littlebluemarble.ca/)*? None whatsoever. But maybe scratch your reading itch here before you go hunting for more good stuff there, hmm? - -So, my first WorldCon, and therefore my first Hugo Awards ceremony too. *About which*… - -Well look: after consistently voting for the losing side in elections and referendum at the national level (whenever I've felt sufficiently motivated to do so), I'm firmly convinced that democracy was a critical misstep in social evolution (*benign dictatorship* is clearly the way forward; why else become a magazine editor?). As a result I wasn't totally surprised not to back every winning horse in the race for a Hugo, but (in addition to my genuine congratulations to all the winners!) I'd just like to put on record in particular that: - -* *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera was the actual best novel -* *On the Fox Roads* by Nghi Vo was the actual best novelette -* and the fact that *Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves* beat ANYTHING to the best longform movie nod, let alone a film such as *Poor Things*, goes beyond "travesty" and enters some strange new vocabularic realm forever beyond the ken of humankind - -What can I say? People can be smart, but when it comes to groups knock off an IQ point for every two you bring together. The highest IQ ever recorded was 276, and 3,436 legitimate ballots were filed for the Hugos this year. Do the maths. - -Finally, on the subject of mistakes, a note for the Hugo organisers: there's a reason why, during the Oscars, the Academy don't make whichever star is announcing the nominations read out a solid paragraph of definitional fine print before they get to the names. It's fine when you ask Jack Nicholson to say *"The nominees for Best Picture are…"*; if you give him a card reading *"The nominees for Best Picture, which we define as a fictional narrative shot on a celluloid (not digital) medium, not shorter than 90 minutes and not longer than 360 minutes, with a minimum of eight speaking roles and—"* he's going to tell you where to stick it. And the audience would thank him for doing so. - -Anyway, on balance, I enjoyed WorldCon more than I hated it! See you next year, maybe! - ------- - -**NOTE:** *Please be aware that the editor will of course retract this editorial the minute he or* ***Mythaxis Magazine*** *find themselves on a Hugo ballot, though he won't hold his breath waiting for that to happen.* diff --git a/content/issue-39/jungle-house-julianne-pachico.md b/content/issue-39/jungle-house-julianne-pachico.md deleted file mode 100644 index fa4f32a4..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/jungle-house-julianne-pachico.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,46 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Mattia Ravasi -copyright: '© Mattia Ravasi 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Will there come a time when, desperate for insights about contemporary speculative fiction, we won't have to turn to the flesh-and-blood likes of Mattia Ravasi but will instead enjoy the tender educational services of no-longer-artificial intelligences? Hopefully not, because who knows what effect that will have on us – though Julianne Pachico might have a few ideas." - -image: images/JungleHouse10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Julianne Pachico and the book's cover, both as seen on [the author's website](https://www.juliannepachico.com/jungle-house)." - -type: stock -slug: jungle-house-julianne-pichico-review -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he American narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan theorized a fundamental aspect of storytelling under the terms of the [principle of minimal departure](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0304422X80900303): the idea that, when we read a story, we assemble it in our minds by assuming that each of its elements are as close as possible to the same elements in our own world. When we read the sentence *“a man walked through the woods at sunset”* we assume – pending any statement to the contrary – that the man will possess a liver, a face, and all the other accouterments most men possess, even if the story does not make this explicit. Most readers will assume the woods to be made up of trees, and that the sunset will be followed by night and, later on, by sunrise. - -The principle of minimal departure is a necessary feature of our neurological framework; we couldn’t tell or interpret stories without it. *“Call me Ishmael – and know that I have a liver and a face”* just doesn’t flow the same way. This same principle, however, is liable to lead astray even the most seasoned and attentive readers, especially since writers are so adept at exploiting it to operate mischief and subvert expectations. Horror writers are perhaps best (see H. P. Lovecraft’s [*The Outsider*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx) for a classic example), but science fiction authors also excel at building the most mind-bending and peculiar scenarios out of the way our minds assemble stories. - -Julianne Pachico’s **Jungle House**, published by Serpent’s Tail in November 2023, uses the principle of minimal departure to provocative, stimulating, and surprising ends. It opens with the protagonist, Lena, finally ready to end a sulk that has estranged her from her mother. Lena’s home is a self-sufficient estate in the middle of the jungle, where she lives off what vegetables and fruit she can grow, keeping an eye on her dwindling reserves of rice and beans and half-heartedly hunting for meat when necessary. During her sulk Lena spent her days in a shed on the property’s boundaries, but she is now ready to go back to the main house, where Mother lives. - -It only takes a few sentences, however – the first exchanges the two have upon reuniting in the house – to realize that it’s not at all clear whether Mother *lives* in the house. It is just as possible that Mother *is* the house. - -**Jungle House** is extremely coy when it comes to defining its characters and fixing them with physical or taxonomic identifiers, but, broadly speaking, we can say that Mother is an extremely advanced computer who controls every aspect and feature of the house, safeguards its perimeter, and ensures its preservation. Think of her as Alexa’s neurotic, passive-aggressive descendant. Mother is connected to other super-houses in her network, and to the satellites that link them all together; or at least she was until recently, when an unspecified event isolated her and Lena in their remote jungle. - -This bottom-line ambiguity about the characters’ identity – the impossibility of saying confidently *who*, among the novel’s handful of characters, *is exactly human* – is not only part of what makes **Jungle House** such a well-engineered little puzzle, but speaks directly, too, to the dilemmas underlying its plot. At heart, Pachico’s novel is concerned with the fundamental aspects that define our humanity. What if neurosis – unhealthy obsessions, jealousy, a certain low-level madness – were after all the most defining feature of humankind? And if such unbalance affects all of us in pernicious ways, can the technology we create be free from it? - -Mother certainly seems to replicate much human behavior you would expect to be beneath an advanced machine. She is not free from prejudices, can be extremely petty, and does not pull her punches in an argument. She is kind, too, and can be deeply loving – but she also knows how to use this love as a weapon. Mother is extremely cunning when it comes to emotional blackmail, guilt-tripping Lena into taking care of the household chores, or going into one of her “episodes” (moments when all her systems seem to temporarily switch off) at the most convenient, for her, of times. Another of the novel’s flesh-less characters, a personal drone (think bodyguard) called Anton, shows a surprising knack for lying to himself, a very human ability to mix facts with opinions or even wishful thinking, especially, again, when this is convenient. - -In fact, one of the most amusing features of **Jungle House** is that Lena, our flesh-and-blood protagonist, comes across as guileless, blindly obedient, and coldly analytic – *very much like a robot!* – while the technology around her (Mother, Anton, the satellites and other houses) acts in ways that are irrational, emotional, self-interested, and dishonest. This is nowhere as evident as in the portion of the novel when, after a few terrible revelations have come to pass, Lena starts compulsively doing the house chores, futilely fighting back the jungle like a program stuck in a command loop, while Mother, around her, goes through a nervous breakdown. - -All of the characters are crafted with terrific precision and complexity, showing in a few bold strokes their contradictions, fears, and hidden desires, but Mother is certainly the most intriguing of the lot. She is extremely manipulative, possessive of her child, crafty, and self-aggrandizing, and she seems to find great satisfaction in being able to complain vehemently about her problems (almost, I would say, like certain mothers I have known…). Yet in spite of her crimes – which are various, and shocking – it is ultimately difficult to dismiss her as simply evil, or tyrannical, or treacherous. Her will to keep Lena under her thumb is motivated by a deep and vast love. It’s also unclear exactly how *free* Mother is: how much of her behavior is dictated by her own will, and how much is forced by the commands of the men who created her. - -**Jungle House** is a brilliantly-crafted novel about serious existential questions. What is the nature, or indeed the purpose, of our subconscious? Is the way we see ourself the same thing as our *self*? Is love (familial and romantic) just a survival strategy and a useful social mechanism, or something more? Nor does it lack a convincing political angle. Lena does not own the Jungle House, but takes care of it on behalf of the wealthy family (a military man, an artist of uncertain merit, and their friendly if vapid teenage daughter) who come out to it a few times a year, treating Lena’s world in all its complexity as a playground for their amusement, a place they relish at the same time as they fear and despise it. - -**Jungle House** is a outstanding achievement, highlighting in the same vein as Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction how even the most advanced technology is never too far removed from the primeval materials of the earth. How we, too, the brilliant and hapless creators of these awesome inventions, share more than we care to realize with our fellow animals, and are forever at the mercy of our murky subconscious. **Jungle House** is an enigma that unfolds at a very compelling rate, and a convincing treaty on toxic motherhood. You’ll never look at your Alexa in the same way again. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188621596604158).* diff --git a/content/issue-39/pillars-of-distraction.md b/content/issue-39/pillars-of-distraction.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8a17d1a2..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/pillars-of-distraction.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,358 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Pillars of Distraction" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Rob Gillham -copyright: '© Rob Gillham 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Things are going pretty great these days, right? Well, maybe if you're one of those cockroaches waiting to inherit the earth they are, since the upright primates are either actively making that happen or passively letting it. 'Que sera, sera' as they say - or, as Rob Gillham might put it, 'Que sera, Seratoxetine'…" - -image: images/PillarsDistraction10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: [Maria Geller](https://www.pexels.com/photo/empty-train-2799586/), [Luke Barky](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-lowers-her-sunglasses-2885917/), [WeStarMoney Rec](https://www.pexels.com/photo/low-angle-shot-of-a-billboard-10485765/), [Guillaume Meurice](https://www.pexels.com/photo/dark-urban-tunnel-with-red-and-blue-neon-lights-3757231/), [Francesco Ungaro](https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-and-blue-lines-illustration-3125638/), and [Yan Krukau](https://www.pexels.com/photo/neon-signages-inside-a-computer-gaming-shop-9072202/)." - -audio: https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i39/05.Pillars.of.Distraction.mp3 - -type: stock -slug: pillars-of-distraction -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}y apartment has detected that I am awake: three personalized messages materialize above my bed. They vie with one another for my attention while I lie there, willing my body to achieve equilibrium. - -Seratoxetine is supposed to promote deep, dreamless sleep. The incoherent yet vivid nightmares of last night are a bad sign, as is this excessive sweating. I check for other symptoms; my tongue is furry and I detect the onset of a familiar nausea. - -My still-waking brain crawls towards an inevitable answer. My body is in withdrawal. That can only mean that my happypac failed to provide me with Seratoxetine last night. - -As if provoked by the thought, something small and sharp jabs my abdomen. My first thought is that a bee has stung me, but that is impossible. It is the sensation of the happypac needle puncturing my stomach. My standard wake-up stimulant kicks in and I sit up, uncomfortably hot, pulling back damp sheets. I deliberately don’t look at the cartridge slot, I’m not ready to face what I’ll find there. - -Two of the messages have ganged up on the third and obliterated it. The victors follow me, chirruping non-stop as I stomp to the shower. I should have paid the annual premium to have the messages turned off. I’m making a mental note to speak to the landlord about it later when I stub my toe on the shower door. - -“Fuck!” - -There’s a pause in the chattering while the messages try to decide if I’ve just addressed them. A moment later, the shrill barrage resumes, each telling me it did not understand my response. Did I, as the louder suspects, want to take advantage of its amazing once-in-a-lifetime offer? - -The news stream turns itself on as I get in the shower. Some guy stands outside the White House, talking to camera. The scrolling feed says a relief package has been announced for American farmers following the crop failures. The measures include more loosening of the controls on the use of genetically modified seed and pesticides. No one mentions rising food prices, or what happened to the bees. I guess it’s twenty, or maybe thirty years too late to worry about that now. - -A moment later, the newscaster is replaced by the image of a naked girl. One of the messages has hacked the feed. I’m about to turn it off when I recognize her. It’s Darja, my boss’s PA and pseudo-girlfriend. She has a PhD in Forensic Archaeology from some university in Belarus, and it mystifies me how she could choose to become contractually bound to a relationship with a man like Robin Krajicek – even for a visa. - -Her likeness on the glass shower wall beckons to me, inviting me to auto-subscribe to her private channel. I guess being with Robin is driving her to desperation, I know it would do me, but even so this seems a pretty extreme alternative. I’ve always liked Darja’s looks, out of reach though she is, and briefly consider masturbating to her image, but my body refuses to respond to the idea. Not that kind of stimulant. - -Before dressing, I’m awake enough to finally check my happypac’s cartridge. The small bottle in the slot for Sera is indeed empty. That was the last of this month’s pharmacy subscription. - -The next is not due for another two weeks. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}ordo is in his usual place of business, a window seat in the Four Ways Café on the corner of my block. The café is blissfully free of intelligent advertising. The only media of any form is the old television screen showing news with the sound turned down. - -Tordo motions for me to join him. “Mister Mehrtens, it has been a while. How are you?” - -“I need Sera,” I say. “Quickly.” I am sick to the pit of my stomach. My clothes, fresh on after my shower, are already drenched in sweat. - -He frowns. Perhaps he’s offended by my lack of etiquette. We usually engage in small talk before getting down to business. It’s a ritual, maintaining the lie that we are nothing more than friendly acquaintances who just happen to perform the odd transaction in illicit pharmaceuticals. - -Tordo casts a critical eye over my appearance. “Running a bit short, are we?” - -“Completely out,” I say. “My subscription’s not due until the end of the month.” - -“You’re not alone,” Tordo says. “Many are reporting the self-same set of circumstances. Anyone would think people were tampering with their pacs.” - -“Listen, I don’t care about other people.” It comes out louder than I’d intended. I drop my voice. “What I care about right now is getting my hands on some Sera.” - -Tordo doesn’t answer. On the TV screen behind him, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is calling for an investigation into contributions by the pharmaceutical company GospidLineker Global to President McClelland’s re-election campaign. - -“Are you happy, Mister Mehrtens?” Tordo says eventually. - -“What?” - -“It’s a simple enough question. Funny how many people struggle to answer it.” Tordo leans back in his chair. “The ancient Greeks believed that happiness and misery were both dependent on the strength of one’s character. If you have character, went the argument, you can be happy under any circumstances.” He points two fingers at me, miming a pistol. “Right now, you’re a bit like Damocles, sitting on Dionysus’s throne. You can’t ever be happy because all you can think about is the big fucking sword that’s hanging over your head.” - -We sit in silence while I pretend to give Tordo’s words careful consideration. The only sound is the murmur of the television, headlines about the refugee crisis in Florida, half of Miami underwater, angry mobs protesting the steepling cost of groceries, blockading supermarkets in New Jersey and half a dozen other states. The usual. - -“So, can you?” I say. “Get me some Sera?” - -“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Mister Mehrtens,” Tordo says. “Unfortunately, the market is exceptionally bad at the moment. Generics have declined to a trickle, and brand names have been impossible to get hold of for months.” - -“So what? Price has gone up, what is it? I don’t give a shit. Just get me some.” - -He performs an exaggerated shrug, hands open. “There is no supply.” - -I shake my head. “Then why are you even here?” - -“Stability, Mister Mehrtens.” Tordo leans back and grins, baring both rows of teeth. “Persistence and reliability are the expression of *my* character. I have no product to sell, but,” and he gestures around himself, “my presence is a statement of intent. I let my customers know that, despite the current supply crisis, business hours are as ever, I stand ready to listen to their problems and lend a sympathetic ear.” Tordo spreads his hands. “All this will pass. In the meantime, the world still spins on its axis, the sun still rises in the east, and Tordo still parks his ass in the same seat in the Four Ways each day. Confidence, Mister Mehrtens, is a currency.” - -The bottom of my stomach drops away. I’ve been sat here, holding it together through all of Tordo’s rambling for nothing. “Jesus, you’re no fucking use to me at all.” - -Tordo’s amiable expression vanishes. He speaks softly and slowly: “Control yourself.” - -As soon as Tordo’s affable mask slips, I realize, somewhere down the line, I’ve become far too comfortable dealing with someone who is essentially a gangster. His eyes are clear and unblinking, and I avert my gaze from his. “I’m sorry. I was out of line.” - -The shark’s smile returns to Tordo’s face. “Nothing to apologize for, Mister Mehrtens.” - -My hands are visibly shaking. But that might be the withdrawal, of course. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}U{{}}nfulfilled need is an insatiable, gnawing pain in my gut. - -Exiting the Four Ways, I lean against a wall, sucking down air until my legs stop buckling. My only option now is to go to the office. Someone there must have a surplus of Sera. If I’m discreet, they might agree to share some with me. - -“Hey, you look like you could use some help.” A dark-haired girl peers at me, thick eyebrows furrowed. She’s pretty in a quirky, no make-up, doesn’t-pluck kind of way. A kind-hearted girl who stops in the street to see if strangers are okay could be just what I need. In different circumstances, I might be tempted to ask for her number. - -“I’m fine,” I croak. - -“No, you ain’t.” She thrusts a flier at me. “Saint Philomena, Thirty-Second and Fifth.” No angel of mercy after all. I stuff the damn thing in my pocket and stumble away before she can harangue me further about whatever it is she’s pushing. - -It’s two blocks from the Four Ways café to the subway. The walk takes me twice as long as usual. The interior of the first train to arrive is half-lit. That’s become the norm recently. When the doors open it’s clear the air-con isn’t working either, but I’m not exactly in the waiting mood. - -As soon as I enter the carriage, a series of high-energy visuals blink into life. They’re all doozies, Gen 2.0, probably. I reluctantly concede a distant echo of professional admiration. The use of flashing imagery and movement is pretty sophisticated. It’s impossible to have one in your field of vision without your eyes being drawn to it. - -My fellow passengers are doubtless being subjected to a similar barrage. Unlike me, they all display the stoic placidity of the recently medicated. I have a strategy for situations when you can’t block them out, though, a little insider knowledge. Just pick the least offensive ad and stare right at it. The others will generally figure out they lost and back down for a while. - -My choice turns out to be a fund-raising appeal for Randy McClelland, but instead of being silenced, its rivals rise to the challenge. Each grows larger and louder, urging me to pay attention to it. I fumble out my earbuds, which just means a different array of ads between tracks, but at least each song is three and a half minutes of respite. - -Then the music buzzes and cuts out. “I know you’ve supported me in the past, friend,” President McClelland says in his folksy drawl, unheard by anyone but me. “But becoming President was one thing. Winning re-election is gonna take a whole lot more cash.” - -The damn ad I’m watching has hijacked my music service. Despite everything, I smile. *You clever little bastard.* - -On the display McClelland turns to face me. “I reformed the healthcare industry, giving families access to the defensive medication they need.” He jabs an accusing finger. “Do you want my opponent in the White House, undoing all my achievements? Making your children vulnerable to online pornography and socialist climate change propaganda?” - -Then McClelland’s image starts to pixelate as one of the other ads gets heavy with it. His voice distorts and bright, gaudy colors bleed through the frame, cheerful dance music all but drowning him out. “Hey, Brian Mehrtens,” purrs a husky female voice. “Meet Slovakian women in their twenties who want to be your indentured girlfriend!” - -McClelland’s ad gives up the ghost and is replaced by a human-sized cartoon bee extolling the virtues of synthetic honey. It speaks in a parody of a Brooklyn accent, probably one of several it adopts depending on location. Now I’m professionally insulted; it’s a remarkably dumb piece of advertising. Most people under thirty don’t even remember what real honey tasted like. All the localization in the world won’t make up for that. - -I close my eyes, trying to shut out the bee’s idiotic voice, the carriage’s shuddering, and the reek of stale sweat. Suddenly all I can think of is the cloying burning sweetness of honey, thick, sticky, coating my mouth, filling my throat. - -The train shudders to a halt at my stop and I throw up as soon as I get off. The platform is empty, but I expect I’ll receive a fine once the cameras confirm my identity. - -I pat my jacket pockets for something to wipe my mouth and come up with a crumbled piece of paper. I take it out. It’s the flier the girl gave me outside the Four Ways café. - -***SICK OF FEELING SICK?*** it asks. - -I stare at the words for another few seconds before shoving the flier back in my pocket. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s a one block walk to my office. A small group of demonstrators is camped in front of the building’s entrance. I guess they got fed up with being butchered by the private armies of big pharma, because they’ve been a familiar sight ever since they started going after GospidLineker Global’s suppliers and partners instead. It’s safer and simpler to harass a marketing agency. The placard slogans are the usual confused smorgasbord of demands: - -> **STOP THE ADVERTISING VIRUSES** - -> *PUSH FOOD, NOT DRUGS* - -> **REALITY IS NOT A MEDICAL CONDITION** - -Luckily, none of the protesters are so committed to their cause that they want to obstruct a pale, shivering man with vomit on his coat. As I approach, they part like mist. I pass unmolested through the doors, past reception, and into the elevator. - -Of course, the first person I see when I set foot in the office is Robin Krajicek, prowling for someone to attack about anything. He catches sight of me and homes in just as I reach my workspace. - -“Mehrtens, where the fuck have you been?” he booms. “Jesus Christ, you look like shit.” - -“Robin,” I rasp, “can you possibly loan me some Sera? I’m short.” - -Krajicek glances around the office. That’s the thing about defensive medication. Everyone knows that everybody else takes it too, you just don’t talk about it. Krajicek takes a chair from the empty neighboring desk and sits. “Difficult,” he murmurs. “You know how it is.” - -Yes, I do know. Krajicek has no doubt ensured he has enough for his own needs. He expects everyone else to do the same. - -“It’s just a supply issue. I only need to plug the gap this month. Then everything will be alright.” - -“Why are you so short?” - -“I…” Somehow it hasn’t occurred to me to ask this question before. How come I’ve run out this early in the month? Maybe the pharmacy delivered a lower quantity than usual. Did I check? I’m almost certain I didn’t. - -The micro-expression of sympathy on Krajicek’s face disappears. I get it. If you get stiffed over the quantity, that’s bad luck. If you fail to check, then that’s purely on you. It’s a matter of personal responsibility. - -“You need to get your act together, Brian.” He jabs a finger at my sternum. “I want to see the prototype for the new campaign ⁠– today. McClelland’s people have been chasing us all morning.” - -I want to laugh in his face. Our client is a pressure group, *American Families for Affordable Medicine*. They’re one hundred percent funded by GospidLineker Global. Calling them McClelland’s people is a typical piece of Krajicek perversity. - -Krajicek gets up and walks away, shaking his head. And what can I do, but ache for Seratoxetine and flick on my desk display and pull up the architecture for the latest campaign ad? - -*Hello again, you nasty little work of art.* - -Before I can even pretend to get started, a smaller display appears to the right of the prototype and delivers an unasked-for news bulletin – President McClelland is addressing the nation from the Oval Office. A news bot, sensing the contextual relevance of the prototype I’ve got open. We’ve given up trying to keep them out of our systems. - -McClelland drones on in a low monotone. Someone has told him to sound presidential. He declares a national emergency to preserve national food security. Troops are being sent to the South "to prevent the refugee crisis from spilling over into neighboring states". - -The sheer, ruthless pragmatism of it all is impressive. There’s nothing practical that can be done to prevent the catastrophe unfolding. Every opportunity to achieve something constructive lies twenty years in the past. So, they’ve leveled their sights on a more tangible enemy and a war that people can actually see being fought. The sword of Damocles turns on its dwindling thread, and our response is to keep our ass parked on the seat – a visible statement of intent, a promise of continuity, that all this shall pass. - -I laugh, but it comes out as a strangulated yelp. - -Beyond my display I spot Darja at her desk. She beams at me as I hibernate my screen, her expression becoming a frown as I hustle across to join her and she takes in my appearance. “Brry-an, what happened? You look terrible.” - -“I know,” I say. “Darja, you… you don’t have any Sera, do you?” - -“No, Brry-an, I am sorry. I don’t take any drugs. They pollute your body, put you out of balance. It damages the complexion. Robin doesn’t like girls with bad skin.” - -The chanting of the protesters outside is still faintly audible and Darja glances at the window. “Why don’t you be like them? Stop taking silly drugs to ignore the world. Deal with it instead.” - -I laugh again. It becomes a dry cough. “Those morons? Half of them are against defensive medication. The other half are complaining about the prices. Those people breaking into supermarkets in Jersey have the right idea, we’re going to starve long before we run out of drugs.” - -Except that’s just what I have done. - -Darja shrugs. “Exactly.” I can’t tell if she’s mocking me or not. Her normal business hours expression is, as now, a fixed look of pleasant amusement. Maybe Krajicek paid for it. - -I experience a sudden, giddy rush of desire. Unregulated by Sera, my body’s natural chemistry is trying to reassert itself. I am gripped by the conviction that Darja would agree to be mine if I asked her now – mine ⁠in a way that she will never be Krajicek’s. - -“I, er – I saw your ad this morning,” I say, lowering my voice. “For your channel…” - -“Oh, you like it?” She claps excitedly. “I’ve got fifteen thousand subscribers! Maybe fifteen thousand and one now?” She raises an eyebrow, then bursts out laughing. - -My cheeks grow hot. “You don’t mind that I saw that?” I’m so strung out I can’t get an erection, but I can still blush like a schoolgirl. Go figure. - -“No,” she says, looking quizzical. “Why would I mind? Because I’m a good little Belarusian girl who’s only here to be Robin’s girlfriend? You don’t think I consider what happens to me when he decides to get a brand new dolly?” - -“Look, I’m sorry,” My mouth is gummy. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought you might want to know that people from the office could see it.” - -She smiles again. “I’m not ashamed of working, Brry-an. I have to deal with the world the way it is.” - -The world the way it is. Darja is young enough that she has probably never tasted real honey. The thought is dislodged by a lurching wave of nausea and I lean forward, putting a hand on the front of her desk for support. - -Darja rubs my forearm. “Poor Brry-an.” Our faces are less than a foot apart. - -“Listen, does Krajicek keep any Sera here?” I whisper. - -Her eyes drop. “Maybe. I don’t know,” she says flatly. “If he has, it’s locked in his desk.” - -“Can you look?” - -“In his private office.” - -“But you have a key?” - -She sighs. “I’ll look, but not now.” - -“Then when?” - -“When he leaves.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s got a lunch at midday.” - -I glance at the clock. It’s almost eleven o’clock. I feel a sudden, powerful urge to cry. I push the bastard down and it rears up again, as insistent and undeniable as the need lurking in the pit of my stomach. - -A hateful, wheedling voice within me whispers maybe it would help my cause if I broke down in front of Darja. - -I turn away from the reception desk. The elevator chimes and the door opens, disgorging clients. I shove past them and get into the elevator. If I’m going to humiliate myself, I’d rather do it in the street amongst strangers. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -> ## SICK OF FEELING SICK? -> -> *Are you struggling to face the chaotic clamor of today’s world without the use of so-called defensive medication?* -> -> *Are your finances unable to cope with the skyrocketing prices controlled by Big Pharma companies whilst at the same time they criminalize users of cheap synthetic alternatives?* -> -> *Have you been driven in desperation to street dealers and loan sharks?* -> -> #### DISCOVER THE ALTERNATIVE TO DEFENSIVE MEDS AND RECLAIM YOUR LIFE -> -> *Church of Saint Philomena, 55 West Thirty-Second St* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}aint Philomena’s is an ancient-looking construction of gray stone cast into shadow by the office blocks on ether side of it. The entrance is shut, but the door of the small hall adjacent to the church is open. - -I shuffle down a short corridor with one arm wrapped around my midriff. Since I threw up, the ache in my stomach has migrated south. Every other step evokes a sharp, stabbing pain in my intestines. - -I’d pictured some kind of glorified soup kitchen full of homeless people, but the small hall I enter is clean and brightly lit. There’s about a dozen people sitting in small circles, drinking coffee. A couple of excited kids career around the room. No one here resembles the human detritus of my imagination. Apart from me. - -The girl with the thick eyebrows sits with one group. She looks up, sees me and talks into the ear of the dark-skinned man next to her. He rises and walks towards me, smiling broadly. - -“I’m Matthias,” he says, holding out a hand. “Welcome, friend.” His accent is a weird transatlantic medley, American cadence twinned with British vowels and African consonants. - -I shake his hand. “Brian.” - -He regards me, eyes narrowed. “You’re strung out. What are you on, Tetrafaxydol?” - -“Seratoxetine.” - -“Ah,” he says, as if this answers a great many questions. “Very high end. Very insidious. Come.” He gestures at a couch in one corner of the hall. Two kids clambering on it race off at our approach. Matthias takes a seat and motions for me to do likewise. He rests his elbows on his knees, places his fingertips together and closes his eyes. For one queasy moment, I worry he’s about to pray. - -“Julieta told me she met you this morning, outside the Four Ways Café,” Matthias says. He smiles. “She generally canvasses where dealers are known to operate. I have tried to stop her, but it is an undeniably effective strategy.” - -“Go where your target audience is, right?” The words come out in a dry croak. “But I’m not an addict.” - -Matthias’s eyes remain shut, though one eyebrow rises. - -“I work for a marketing agency. I create intelligent commercial messages.” After a hesitation, I add, “I’m just… my prescription ran short.” - -Matthias opens his eyes and stares at me over his steepled fingers. “You’re a designer. That’s very interesting.” - -The pain has become a knot in my gut and I shift uncomfortably. “It is?” - -“In a sense, it’s design that got us into our current predicament. We take defensive drugs to dull our senses, to make us less sensitive to the cacophony of the world. But what is that noise, except the emergent product of thousands of tiny signals that we encounter every waking hour, all seeking our undivided attention?” He ticks items off on his fingers as he speaks. “The police siren, the sound of the crosswalk telling us when to go, announcements on the subway, our ringtones and other notifications on our many devices, the casino slot machine—” his eyebrow rises again “—and of course, all those advertisements that worm their way into our technology and our homes.” - -I try not to scowl. I came here looking for – I don’t know – solace, perhaps, maybe some help. Not a lecture on the sins of modern social technology and my place among them. - -The girl, Julieta, approaches, unsmiling, carrying two plastic cups. She hands one to Matthias and the other to me. I attempt to smile as I take the drink, but it’s scalding to the touch. I hiss in pain and place the cup on the floor, and when I look up she’s already walking away. - -I blow on my tender fingers, irritated. “What’s her damn problem? She was the one who told me to come here.” - -“Julieta’s a volunteer,” Matthias says. “A lot of the people she works with here have lost everything. Most never had much to begin with.” He points at me. “You, on the other hand, Brian, you’re a successful guy.” - -The knot in my stomach twists. “Hey, I’m sorry these people’s lives are fucked up, but that’s not my fault.” - -“Perhaps not,” Matthias says, “but I think your experience of life is very different. I’d guess you’ve been a functioning Sera addict for a long time. Money’s not the issue for you. You’re only here because, suddenly, Sera’s not available at any price – for the same reason there’s virtually no groceries in the stores.” - -The knot twists again, and fuck this, I need help, not insinuations, I’m gone. I stand up – or rather I try to – and then I clutch my stomach as my bowels spasm uncontrollably and void their contents. - -All I can think is, *Oh, no. Please no.* - -I groan, and as the background conversations fall silent I hear a contemptuous snort from across the room – all Julieta’s preconceptions confirmed, and my humiliation complete. - -Matthias rises and takes my shoulders. “Relax. Bathroom’s on the left back here, we saw this coming. Go get cleaned up. I’ll find you some clean clothes.” - -Half an hour later, I sit opposite Matthias in his office – a cubbyhole at the rear of the hall. I’m wearing a pair of faded brown corduroy slacks procured from the thrift store across the street, I assume, based on their appearance. My happypac drip feeds me a vial of something Matthias describes as ‘synthetic’, as if Seratoxetine isn’t. The aching need hasn’t gone, but it’s dulled, diminished – as though a door’s been shut on it. - -Not a very sturdy door, but it’s something. - -“I’m so sorry,” I say for something like the thousandth time. - -Matthias tuts. “Stop saying that. I told you, it’s pretty much a daily occurrence here.” - -I shake my head. “At least I know what rock bottom feels like now.” - -“Soiling yourself in a community center? Nowhere close.” - -“I’ll look forward to that then.” - -Matthias doesn’t smile. “I’m being serious, Brian.” He points a pen at me. “You don’t want to change. You just don’t want to be in pain. We both know if the drug companies could sort out their supply issues today, you would keep going as you have been, for a time anyway.” - -I think of the news and sigh. “I don’t think anything is going to carry on the way it used to. Everything’s falling apart.” - -He studies me. “Wouldn’t you prefer to be present while it does? Or do you want to wake up in six months time, feeling like you do now, wondering what happened to the world?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s gone two o’clock by the time I get back to the office. I’m already shivering again. The synthetic Sera takes the edge off the ravening hunger, but the initial relief from unadulterated cold turkey is a fading chemical memory. I’ve got what Matthias calls “a few weeks worth” of synthetics, but it’s like comparing water and whisky, and I’m already thinking about tricking my happypac into triggering another dose. Anything but a repeat of this morning. - -As I collapse into my chair, I see Krajicek striding across the room on some mission or other and flinch, forcing myself to wake up my display and at least look at my prototype. - -And I’m staring at the renders like I never saw them before when something is placed on the edge of my desk with a soft plunk: a plain, white cardboard box, and oh so familiar – the unadorned packaging of Seratoxetine – the real thing, not Matthias’s artificial piss! - -I glance up just in time to see Darja walking away, but she doesn’t look back to see the pathetic adoring gratitude no doubt written all over my face. - -The news bot pops up again, filling half my workspace with misery, but who cares? - -Cold sweat plasters my shirt to my back as I inspect the little box. One way or another, this could be the last few doses I ever get my hands on. - -I open the box and tap out three vials of clear liquid Seratoxetine into the desk. - -I fumble with my happypac’s catch, shuddering with anticipation, my fingers pawing uselessly at the lid. The lid finally snaps open and I pull out Matthias’s synthetic and drop it on the floor. - -I slide a vial of Sera into the empty slot until I hear a pop as the seal breaks. My happypac beeps in recognition of the new levels. A second later, the contents are drawn into the delivery mechanism, then I feel the needle puncture my flesh. - -I slump back in my seat as my body luxuriates in sated need and the news broadcast continues its litany of disaster. - -Georgia and Alabama have closed borders with Florida. Aerial footage of riot police scattering protesters with rubber bullets and water guns – oh hey, right outside our building! The FBI detaining individuals with ‘known links to eco-terrorism’, including a leading climatologist and several notable critics of defensive meds. More cops, busting some illegal fake charity and dragging the organizers away with zip-tied hands behind their backs, a lean black man, a woman with a fierce expression. - -Then the Sera really kicks in. - -The pain in my gut recedes. The drug strips out the upper and lower frequencies of my hearing. The ambient noise of the office fades. Sirens and the faint screams of the protesters outside vanish. In my peripheral vision, the news bot is just a meaningless blur. - -So I flick the feed off and get back to work. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Pillars of Distraction** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188622076604110).* diff --git a/content/issue-39/the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.md b/content/issue-39/the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.md deleted file mode 100644 index 2785539f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,70 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Steven Genise -copyright: '© Steven Genise 2024 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "There's always a place for epistolary fiction at Mythaxis – there's something special about a story which is also the document itself. Hope I haven't written that before. Anyway, now Steven Genise adds to our little cache of documentation. Have you ever woken up to find a message waiting for you? Evidence of existence going on, in a sense, without you?" - -image: images/Cryotube10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Rodlon Kutsalev](https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-brown-round-frame-7911758/), [Maria Orlova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/old-shabby-cabin-with-combination-lock-and-round-windows-4947133/), [Ron Lach](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-palm-behind-the-smoke-glass-8259335/), and [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-card-on-gray-denim-pants-pouch-164605/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i39/02.The.Note.Affixed.to.Your.Cryotube.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}W{{}}riting this to you could cost me my job, but you’re unlikely to recognize me when you wake up. You’d remember me as the concierge still young enough to keep their head shaved, who strapped you into your harness and rubbed the iodine on your left arm, and who very convincingly looked to the right and said *What’s that*, which distracted you as the needle went in. I got so good at it that day; you were the hundredth person I’d stuck, and I took such pride in the skill by the time of launch that, when I realized I’d never need to do it again, I felt hollow and worthless. - -All the old people on their way out trained us just to stick you and not to care, but I imagine that when they were our age, setting out on their trip, they too were idealistic and starry. - -But you won’t recognize me now that my braids go down to my knees and my skin bags and wrinkles. You could report me to my superior by saying that I was the one going around distracting the passengers before sticking them with the needle, that I was the tenderest one and the most idealistic, but that was fifty-four years ago now. Those who were in charge back then are long dead, and those in charge now won’t remember what happened a lifetime ago. In fact, as far as you know, you could be reporting my behavior to me. Better to just accept this gift in the spirit in which it was given. Better to move on with your life; mine is at its end anyway, while you’ve got so much before you. - -You look the same, of course. Mostly. You haven’t aged, but you’ve a few new cuts. The small one beside your belly button was the first, which you got a year after you went under. They’re all stitched up now, but they’ll need tending to in the coming weeks, and that’s what you’re feeling now when you wake up. - -We call your clothing *packaging*, because for one you’re not really alive and for two it doesn’t work like regular clothing. It’s adhesive and vacuum-sealed so your skin doesn’t dry out and burn, but it wears down over time, so every year we cut it off and repackage you. That was my first time repackaging, and my knife slipped and cut away a moon-shaped sliver of your flesh. I expected blood to gush, to flow. Expected you to move or scream. But of course, you did none of those things, without your heart beating or your lungs flexing, so I just continued on with the packaging. - -It wasn’t until a month later that I realized, of course you wouldn’t heal. You’re not really alive. You can’t be bled to death, but neither can your body repair itself. So I wrote a note to myself: *Stitch it shut*. Appended it to my locker, and tried to remember it for next year when I repackaged you again. But when the time came, the little flap of skin was shriveled and burned, and it crumbled when I took the needle to it and left only the little red crescent moon on your flesh. - -What was wrong with me that first year, that I let my knife slip and accidentally cut you like that? It’s never happened since. Maybe it was seeing you for the first time nude but uncowering. I want to draw upon the cognition you had before you put yourself in this tube and say *trusting*, but trust implies at least some present capacity for cognition. So instead of trusting I’ll say *vulnerable*. But can a pumpkin be vulnerable, for instance, or a corpse? Perhaps. - -Part of it, surely, was our differences. Me, wearing scrubs made from the scratchy wool shorn from the ship’s livestock. You, wearing the vacuum sealed body bag. I don’t even get to see your face until I cut the suit off of you again, but when I do, the same every year: a middle-aged face, with wrinkles but no hair. No braids to mark the passing of your years after thirty. Of course, with the adhesive packaging you needed to be completely shorn of body hair, but in a way it was indeed like you were beginning life anew when we reached the new world, and given your actual age you looked practically like a child in comparison. - -The medical record said you were ninety-one, but your body looked like my mother’s at forty, mine at thirty. Yes, that was the distraction, recognizing that I would never reach your age, or even close to it, while you would simply continue on as you always had, for another hundred years maybe. To slip, to cut you, was to bring you closer to the human. Closer to me. - -But don’t worry, I only slipped the once. - -I cut you deliberately two years later. I was nearing twenty-five and not yet bearing children, which did not please my bosses. A small nick on your thigh, stitched right up, to remind us both that promising two generations of labor in exchange for lifetimes of employment was, to many, a better privilege than they could ever ask for. - -At twenty-eight they became stricter, requiring me to stop working during my ovulation window to visit the ship’s inseminary. I gave you that cut just below your ear to reassure you that what we were doing here was worth it. - -At thirty, the IVF took, at least for a while, and so I didn’t do anything to you that year. But at thirty-one I gave you your caesarian scar so that I wouldn’t have to be alone with mine. The one on your knee came at thirty-three when I was chasing my son down the hall and I fell. The one on your shoulder for where his puppy bit me. To make it match, I couldn’t use the scalpel. I want you to appreciate the difficulty in acquiring the teeth. - -The ones I imagine you noticed first are the long ones down each forearm. They came at thirty-six. - -At thirty-seven I had exhausted the company mourning period and had to visit the inseminary regularly again, and that series of tallies on your calf is an accounting of the months, which you can review at your convenience. At forty, I gave you a cut along your side where the ectopic pregnancy was removed. Tallies along the bottoms of your feet, small pinpricks I made with a needle, are for every egg retrieval – these are harmless to you but they’re not stitched up, so you will need to change your socks. - -The big tallies down your back are for every month after menopause that they put those eggs back in me. - -They never got their second generation out of me, at least not in the way they expected to. But my contract was to provide labor for two trips, so I’ll be heading back home at least. I won’t get there, but I’ll head that way. - -And at any rate, I’ve had you all these years, haven’t I? Helplessly lying there. And it’s not just vulnerability, is it? It *is* about trust. You trusting, the way only someone with your means could afford to trust. And me, trusted the way only someone of my means can be trusted. This is to say, someone necessarily without cynicim because I am someone incapable of personal gain. No freedom after we leave port, and no riches when we return. - -When we land, you’ll wake up, you’ll read this note. You’ll nurse your wounds and perhaps ask around for as long as you can who did this to you. But you will have so much else to do before we turn for home again. - -And the next batch of concierges will come aboard, young and idealistic as I once was, and I’ll train them to do as I did, just like the generation before trained me. And then we will all depart, and at some point on the return journey I will die, and leave only them to see what I’ve done to you. - -Let the training I give, the lessons I teach, make them the only children your company begets of me. - -Entrust them with your vulnerability. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188623716603946).* diff --git a/content/issue-39/tintype-trolls.md b/content/issue-39/tintype-trolls.md deleted file mode 100644 index 416d21b6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/tintype-trolls.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,215 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Tintype Trolls" - -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Teresa Milbrodt -copyright: '© Teresa Milbrodt 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "The editor has often (too often) argued the case that speculative fiction's strength is in letting authors tell stories that could also work in a more mundane context, just in ways that strict adherence to realism wouldn't allow. However, that startlingly hot take carries the implication of Going Big, of souping up normality with monsters or lasers or magic swords - instead, as Teresa Milbrodt shows, a touch of fantasy can serve to highlight the everyday experience instead of seeking to reach beyond it." - -image: images/TintypeTrolls10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Adrian Kirby](https://pixabay.com/photos/iceland-akureyri-troll-nordic-1223012/), [Polina Tankilevitch](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-screws-and-nylon-fixers-5583051/), [Tama66](https://pixabay.com/photos/fairy-tale-gnome-troll-1662427/), and [4175959](https://pixabay.com/photos/goblin-troll-stone-fantasy-2771126/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i39/01.TinType.Trolls.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: tintype-trolls -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}M{{}}y partner Madigan converted our tiny spare bedroom into a developing lab for their tintype photography. They need a place with small windows they can cover so it’s perfectly dark, and just enough space for folding tables, trays of chemicals, and space to hang negatives while they dry. Tintype photography is lovely and imperfect, prone to streaking, but people come from a two-hundred-mile radius to get their picture taken. For weeks they’ll ponder what they want to wear and the perfect expression for the picture. It takes an afternoon to do one photo, but folks like watching the process and it makes Madigan feel productive during weeks when life is a strain. - -On cool nights after Madigan’s customers have left, the trolls come out from under their bridge in the backyard and sit on the porch for a chat. They tend the stream and don't ask for goats or gold like trolls of old, but prefer macaroni and cheese and having their picture taken. They polish their tusks with a toothbrush for those occasions. Ulyana and Grisha are three feet tall and fastidious about grooming their lime green hair so it falls gracefully away from their gray eyes. Madigan has exhibited photos at the county fair and won ribbons. People want to know where we found such elaborate costumes. They say we could make a mint on those masks. Madigan smiles and says our friends want to remain anonymous. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e wear goggles, aprons, and gloves in the darkroom since the trays of chemicals Madigan needs for photography are toxic. By the end of the process we’re lightheaded – the pictures come into focus as we lose ours – so we try to get fresh air fast. Ulyana and Grisha often help me make dinner, since they like having something to do besides clean the stream. After a long day at the grocery store, I understand why it’s important to change the routine. - -I spend half my time cashiering and the other half in the bakery, grateful that my boss looks the other way when I slip bags of three-day-old cookies, brownies, and muffins into my backpack. They’re bound for the dumpster otherwise, and she knows we’re hard up for cash. Sometimes I split the treasure with Amanda, my co-worker who’s a single mom and lives with her dad who watches her kids after school. He had a heart attack a few years back and is on disability, but between the two of them they manage rent and utilities. - -“I shouldn’t take home so many cookies,” she says, “but those boys eat so much. I don’t know where it goes. At least Dad and I have learned how to stretch a dollar on pasta and peanut butter.” - -I nod at the ever-present balancing act of a checkbook. Madigan has a part-time job working afternoons and weekends at the garden supply store, but sometimes they take off early when a pressure change brings on a migraine. The store manager’s sister and mother get migraines too, so he’s merciful when Madigan needs to cut their shift. Other employees give them the stink eye, but Madigan’s paycheck gets cut as well. They have a migraine medication, but it’s expensive and not without fine print side effects: brain fog, problems sleeping, heart palpitations. - -Ulyana and Grisha get brain fogs sometimes when they’re cleaning the river. They’re not sure when it started, or if it’s due to chemical runoff from the fields, but that’s what Madigan suspects. Doing tintype photography gives both of us a headache, but Madigan says it’s different because it’s pain we can control, pain we choose, worthwhile pain. I wonder if the pain in my arms, legs, and shoulders from working ten hours in a bakery is also worthwhile pain, but usually I don’t think about that too deeply. I just eat another three-day-old cookie. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} hate getting my picture taken, or rather, how I look in photographs. My blind eye often seems to be peering in a different direction than my sighted eye, which looks weird. - -“It sees all the aliens, ghosts, and witches in the world, and doesn’t tell the rest of you,” Madigan says. I say if that’s the case, it’s unfair. - -I’ve been blind in my right eye since I was a baby, so it’s part of my normal. Having just one sighted eye isn’t a problem, until it’s a big problem, like when I’m taking a hot tray of cookies or muffins out of the oven and pivoting on my heels to slide it onto a cooling rack. I worry I won’t see one of my co-workers carrying a frosted sheet cake, and slam right into them (the stuff of slapstick nightmares). Other times when I’m cashiering I don’t see a customer on my right, and they don’t realize they’re hiding in my empty space. I fear seeming rude, like I’m ignoring them, though that isn’t the case. They’re simply in the world of aliens, ghosts, and witches. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}adigan and I rent a drafty farmhouse from Lloyd, a seventy-five-year-old farmer who’s hell bent on doing all the repairs. He’s fixed cupboards and toilets, replaced our garbage disposal, and done some electrical work. When we have him over for coffee and cookies, his hands relax gratefully around the mug. - -I don’t think trolls in the backyard would surprise him. - -Madigan has taken Lloyd’s picture, his wife’s picture, and pictures of all five grandkids in exchange for two months’ rent. - -“It’s really something how much I look like my great-great-grandpa,” Lloyd says. “I’ve only seen him in old pictures, but this makes him feel closer.” - -Many people who get their pictures taken are celebrating something – birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, any occasion that means they want to get their image etched on something more than their tiny phone screen. Not unlike Lloyd, they often remark on how much they resemble long-gone great-aunts and uncles. - -“It’s a different piece of me,” says one lady, a first grade teacher who wore her grandma’s lace dress. “She looks harder. Stronger. Sadder. Something about her eyes. But I always get that feeling about old photos when I imagine what those people were like.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}ince I work at a grocery store I learn a lot about people through the contents of their carts, which tell me too much while I’m scanning barcodes. Tea or coffee? Cookies or crackers? White or whole wheat? Any dairy? Lean meat or ground chuck? Bran flakes or cereal with marshmallows even though they don’t seem to have kids? I read grocery carts like tea leaves, intuiting anxieties, celebrations, pay raises, the results of the last doctor’s appointment. - -It’s also a small comfort to have regular customers, ones who stand in my line to ask how my partner is doing and tell me why they’re buying flowers or a cake mix or canned pineapple bits to try a new recipe. I want to remember their names, but usually know them as *the lady with the purple glasses* or *the guy with the comb-over who wears bow ties*. I’m always sad when I see their faces in the obituary section of the local paper and read details about their lives I didn’t know, grieving how I won’t ring up a can of sardines for them again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here are many things trolls can’t eat because of digestive problems, which we’ve figured out through trial and error: citrus fruits, spicy food, red meat, raw spinach or tomatoes (but they’re okay cooked). Trolls can get the flu – snotty trolls are quite irritable – but Ulyana makes an herbal tea for their symptoms. Still, illnesses worry them. - -“We never used to get colds,” Ulyana mutters while she cleans the stream. “And Grisha hated being indoors, but now…” She shakes her head. The bridge used to provide enough shelter since trolls don’t like warm weather, but recently they’ve been shivering so they’ve taken to spending the night in our unheated utility room in the rear of the farmhouse. It’s still a bit chilly, but more protected than under the bridge. - -“We’re not finding the same number of roots and mushrooms, and if we have children we’d need to gather more,” Ulyana says. “Grisha talks about moving to the city and how we’d have an easier time finding food, but I don’t want to dig every dinner from a trash can. Some trolls have started little communities, I’ve heard more of them are migrating with the promise of all the pizzas and cheeseburgers they can scavenge, but others came back to our streams.” - -I watch the shimmer from her gray-green fingertips, note the smell of rain that wafts from her skin, a magic that makes streams cleaner and fish healthier. - -“This takes more out of me than it used to,” she says. “The water is dirtier. Grisha thinks we could manage toxic streams in the city. Not likely, even with younger trolls around.” - -The city must be warmer because of the crush of people, buildings, and machines, but there’s a lot more water to clean. There’s also no solid science on how changes in environment and diet affect troll health. No doctors are running around doing interviews and research studies. We’re left to speculate on the connections. - -When Madigan takes their photo, Ulyana and Grisha look like the trolls of old, ones with black marble eyes and yellow teeth who kept bridges in good condition and guarded the forest with horned fervor. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}adigan’s boss calls me sounding slightly panicked when my partner faints at work behind the cash register. He suggests that Madigan go to the doctor, take time off, and get support socks to help their blood pressure. It will be a hit to our finances, though it’s a worse blow to Madigan’s pride. They like working at the gardening supply store and know a good bit about plants, birdfeeders, and fertilizers, enough to make intelligent suggestions. - -“I want to be useful and can’t do that sitting around here all day,” they say. Before I go to work, I take Madigan to the public library to help people on the computers. My friend Nicole is one of the three librarians, and says older folks need assistance with web browsing, younger ones need help with online job applications, and she’s busy with the circulation desk and doesn’t always have time for them. - -“We could give you a volunteer position for now, but it might turn into something more?” she tells Madigan. Her voice is too light, too hopeful, and the library is underfunded. I bring home more three-day-old bread and bruised produce from the sale bin. - -Madigan promises their doctor a tintype photo since we don’t have money for the copay. She says that’s fine and it would be a nice anniversary gift for her partner. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}U{{}}lyana toes shyly after me when I offer to let her borrow some of my scarves and socks. They’re quite colorful with their stripes and polka dots and floral patterns, and I have too many since my mom and grandma must think I’m never warm enough. I tell Ulyana she can use as many as she likes, and I bring one of our sleeping bags for the trolls to bed down in the utility room. I figure everything is okay until Ulyana appears at the back door, wearing a pair of striped socks and two scarves and crying. Grisha left a note saying he was hitching a ride on the trucks that go back and forth from the city, and he’d be back to visit. Gone with no ceremony, just a good-bye like he had to leave before his mind changed. - -“Keeping up the stream and bridge has been too much for him and he didn’t want to admit it,” she says. “He has a cousin I’ve never met who says life in the city is easy, and concrete overpasses are simpler to maintain than our rickety little bridge.” She shakes her head. “I never thought he’d leave.” - -She sits on the stepstool in front of the washing machine, so I sit on the floor, put my arms around her, and let her cry. That’s when Madigan’s doctor and her partner knock on the front door, here for their photo. Madigan keeps them on the porch since they want the picture taken in front of the farmhouse. The old horse-drawn wagon Lloyd parked there makes our yard look like a calendar photo. - -Lying in bed that night I fret to Madigan. How could Grisha hitch a ride to the city so easily? It would be dangerous for trolls to grip the undercarriage of trucks, even with their horns and tough skin, and what if he doesn’t find a good bridge? - -Madigan clears their throat and says not to worry, they’re sure Grisha is safe. - -“How do you know?” I say. “Grisha has never been to the city, and he expected to find this cousin. He’s more likely to get lost and have who-knows-what happen.” - -“I gave him a ride when I went to buy chemicals for plate processing,” Madigan says quietly. “He can’t do his share of stream cleaning anymore, hasn’t been able to for months, and they both know it. Grisha feels beyond useless. He hopes he can help his cousin a bit.” - -I’m upset with Madigan but hear the catch in their throat, understanding how someone feels like they need to contribute even if their best beloved says that their company is more than enough. They ache to do more and feel awful when they can’t. - -“I’ll check on him when I go to the city,” Madigan says. They make the trip once a month to buy photo supplies and things we use in bulk: oatmeal, flour, sugar. “Grisha’s cousin seemed nice. He’s a big guy and he’s been there for a while. Several members of the family have, I guess. They’ve adapted and they’re fine.” - -I exhale a long sigh. None of that helps the sad troll who’s asleep next to our washing machine, swathed in my scarves. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}n afternoons when I don’t work, I sit by the bridge to keep Ulyana company. Cleaning is boring when it’s solitary, she says. - -“Here,” she says, holding out her hand. I touch her palm and feel the cool flow of running water, but in solid form. That’s what they do for streams, she says. Make their bodies into filters. - -I convince Madigan to bring me along the first time they visit Grisha. I need to make sure he’s okay, then we can figure out whether to tell Ulyana his whereabouts. It isn’t easy to pick my way down the muddy embankment, I guess that’s why trolls have claws, but we only call a couple times before Grisha emerges from the weeds, bleary-eyed but smiling. He gives a shy wave. I don’t know if he’s looking healthier or just better fed, but he says he found a restaurant with good salads. - -“They throw out so much lettuce every night,” he says. “Lettuce and carrots and radishes and mushrooms. I don’t worry about Ulyana gathering food for both of us while I sit like a lump. She needs to find another partner who can help her with the stream. Here I share the work with all my cousins, so we’re fine.” - -Grisha pauses to take a breath, smiles, then breaks down crying. - -“I miss her so much,” he sniffles, while Madigan and I ease down to sit next to him. “My cousin says I can stay as long as I want, and Ulyana is welcome, too, but she’d hate it here. The noise. The work. We can’t clean the water as much as we’d like, but I’d hate to think what the river would be like without us.” - -“She misses you and she’s worried,” I say. - -“I can’t pull my own weight.” Grisha wipes his eyes with thick green fingers. - -“Being there is enough,” I say. - -“Being there and feeling guilty,” he says. He didn’t leave because of anything Ulyana said, but from his own shame. Is that love, pride, or selfishness? - -“Would it kill you to know I feel the same way much of the time?” Madigan says on our drive home. - -“But you haven’t thought about leaving me,” I say. They’re quiet. “You have thought about it?” I say. “You know I wouldn’t want you to do that.” - -Madigan sighs and rests their hand on my knee. They’re on my right side so I can’t see them, but I know their smile, mouth half-quirked. “Pride makes people do strange things,” they say. “Other people are much kinder to us than we are to ourselves when we need help.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}uring the visit, I quietly took a picture of Grisha on my phone. When Ulyana sees it, she gasps. - -“He doesn’t look well,” she says. “His horns lost their shine, and his skin is so gray.” - -Madigan said they wouldn’t reveal Grisha’s hiding place, but I didn’t make the same promise. The next weekend, a scarf-swathed Ulyana and I go to visit him under the bridge. He looks worse than before, has developed a cough, and his eyes widen when he sees Ulyana. - -“Don’t get too close,” he mutters. “I have a cold.” - -She tackles him in a hug, then they start talking in a language of trolls that I can’t understand. It’s a lot of gutturals and whispering, but their words are insistent, angry, urgent, hurt. Ulyana makes wide gestures. Grisha curls into himself, doesn’t move when she wraps her hands around his arm and tugs. I’d hoped he’d return with us, since Ulyana practiced her argument on the long drive down. - -Grisha remains under the concrete bridge. Ulyana cries all the way home. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}adigan has been coughing after their photo sessions, even with all the protection we wear in the darkroom. They shake their head when I ask if they’d consider taking fewer pictures. - -“It’s income,” they say. “And it’s what I love. What’s wrong with suffering for your art?” - -“Hospital bills,” I say. - -“I’m fine,” says Madigan. “This is the only way I can contribute extra money.” - -*Hospital bills*, I mouth when their back is turned, but I know they want to feel useful and productive, especially since they can’t work at the store. Still, I’m happy when they sit by the stream with Ulyana and chat about fish, the weather, edible plants, sometimes Grisha. Ulyana and Madigan take meandering walks upstream, stopping to rest on the shore, which is how they meet a troll repairing a wooden bridge. - -“Not many do that anymore,” Ulyana says that evening, “but turns out she knows one of my cousins. She stopped by this afternoon since I told her our bridge needed replacement boards, and she showed me how to replace the old ones with new.” - -“I remembered where Lloyd kept the spare toolbox,” says Madigan. - -“It was kind of fun,” says Ulyana, “and that section was near rotted out.” - -We have a pile of scrap wood in the garage from Lloyd’s household projects, and a supply of nails in the basement, so Ulyana starts tinkering with her newfound knack for carpentry. She pounds loudly, she pounds softly, and sometimes she seems to pound for the sake of pounding. She fixes our broken cupboards, wonky drawers, and the creaky boards on the porch, then builds a small table for the laundry room where she can put my scarves and socks before she goes to sleep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ne of my customers mentions they need more volunteers at the elementary school to listen to kids practice reading. It’s another unpaid job, but I mention it to Madigan at dinner. They greet the idea with a nod and a “Maybe,” but two days later they say they’ll go to school on Thursday and try it out. - -“I hated reading in class when I was a kid,” they say. “It was embarrassing.” - -When I ask Madigan about the tutoring that evening, they say it was okay. - -“The kids had to get over being shy and realize I wasn’t going to yell at them,” Madigan tells me. “I said I had problems sounding things out when I was younger, and they appreciated hearing that. We had corn dogs for lunch.” - -I call Lloyd, explain Madigan’s continuing job situation, migraines, and fainting, and that they might tutor at the elementary school for a bit. Lloyd is quiet, but I hear the rustle of his nod over the phone. His grandkids go to the elementary school. - -“We’ll see what we can work out for rent,” Lloyd says. “At least for now.” - -For now is the best we can do. We may need to move into town, to a smaller place close to my job but without a room for Madigan’s photography. Madigan promised they won’t do tintypes for three months. It’s getting cold, not a good season for pictures. Ulyana is adding to her pile of scarves in the laundry room. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e get Chinese take-out, a treat, when we visit Grisha in the city. He says he’s fine, holding his own with water cleaning. He looks thicker about the middle, and grayer, and his voice has acquired a rasp it didn’t have before. I blame city air. Later Madigan says they didn’t notice a difference. - -“Let Ulyana know I’m okay and I love her,” Grisha says. An invitation to live with him? To visit? We don’t tell him how Ulyana pounds out her sorrow around the house. Her cousin’s friend has visited a few more times, a roving troll without a bridge of her own, but she likes it that way. Ulyana enjoys the company. - -“Some days are easier than others,” is all she’ll say. I’m sure she worries over Grisha like she did before, but it has taken on a different flavor. Often she joins us for dinner, especially macaroni and cheese or French toast. Madigan moved the photos of her and Grisha to our bedroom where Ulyana doesn’t wander. They have fewer migraines, but get fainting spells when they stand for too long. The doctor says it’s not Madigan’s heart, but she doesn’t know quite what’s wrong. She says we’ll wait and see and maybe do more tests. - -Madigan has started drawing little cartoons for the kids they tutor at school. I didn’t know they had a knack for drawing. They said they didn’t, either. Their students think they should draw comics or illustrate a book. Madigan likes sketching trolls. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hings don’t work out in most love stories, only those aren’t the ones that get told. It’s sad, I think, because then we assume something is wrong with us if we don’t find a love that comes with the illusion of lasting forever. Just as important are the stories about love that shifts, ebbs, flows, burns and burns out like any candle will do. - -Every happily-ever-after should be continued with “and then…,” which would involve more hope and heartbreak and turns in the road. I’ll end with the hard rhythm of a troll pounding nails into my front porch, fixing what’s broken until it breaks again. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Tintype Trolls** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188624136603904).* diff --git a/content/issue-39/with-nothing-left.md b/content/issue-39/with-nothing-left.md deleted file mode 100644 index 07aaec9a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-39/with-nothing-left.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,44 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "With Nothing Left" -date: 2024-10-01 -issue: Issue 39 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Emma Burnett -copyright: '© Emma Burnett 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "'What is this thing you humans call X?' A question structure as old as Star Trek itself, if not even older. Not to continue harping on about how great spec-fic is, but is there a better way to explore emotions than through someone who, supposedly, has none? Emma Burnett adds more bittersweet evidence to the pile." - -image: images/WithNothingLeft10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Alla Serabrina](https://depositphotos.com/photo/people-dancing-in-nightclub-173627840.html), [iakovenko123](https://depositphotos.com/photo/emotional-elderly-woman-wearing-sunglasses-144674377.html), and [Designecologist](https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-s-left-hand-near-gray-cinder-bricks-948479/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i39/04.With.Nothing.Left.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: with-nothing-left -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} buy us some printed burgers. One for you, two for me. One because you always loved them. Said they tasted almost like the real thing, not that I would know, you’d say, but just believe me. Two because you like me soft, for comfort, and this body needs to eat to keep the padding fed, all wrapped around and through the metal subframe. - -I unwrap the three burgers and hold one up under your nose, and although you don’t do much more than breathe in the smell you say it’s delicious. I position four pillows, tucking them behind your head and your back to keep you upright. You thank me, although you don’t have to, you always have, and I sit myself next to you on the bed and eat. Burger juices run down my chin. Burger nutrients course into my padding. You rest a hand on the warm burger sitting on crinkled paper on your lap and smile. - -Five days ago, you didn’t need me to tuck you in, didn’t need me to clean you up after every accident. I was a preventative assistant, a just-in-case. You said I was more friend than carer, and you had precious few of those left because the older you got the fewer folks remained. And I never corrected you because ten billion is objectively a lot of people, but none of them came to visit you. - -At the height of your favourite month, the one you say used to be the warm one before everything was too warm all the time, you were still able to lean your bony body against my well-padded one, and my programming told me to wrap an arm around you, although you said I needed the closeness just as much. Programming is just one way of getting to the same six basic needs, you said. I said you were making them up, but you rattled off a list, and I agreed that things like food and health and security overlapped with my own needs. But you mentioned love, which I said I didn’t require. And you snorted and pulled my arm tighter around you. - -Seven months ago, when I was assigned here by a company that was hired by a daughter who promises she’ll visit when she has more time, you were well enough to want to go out. Museums, university lectures, the local Women’s Institute. You told me we should go dancing, and although I hesitated, you were so joyous it was easy to agree. We dressed ourselves in neon and Lycra, and went to a club filled with students who might have been shocked, but we never cared to check. I tapped into the emergency lighting system wired into my body, and rechanneled the energy and design, and instead made rainbow freckles appear across my cheeks and bare arms. It cost me, that rainbow body decor. I had to replenish the following day to make up for the weight loss, drinking three chunky nutrient shakes instead of just one, generating a warning email about over-consumption from the company. But it was worth it because it made you smile. Like rainbow glitter, you said. Like the stuff that didn’t biodegrade and is still to this day stuck in the guts of fish and turtles. It’s better this way, you said. I didn’t tell you about the extra drinks or the warning. - -I carried you home at the end of that night, worn out from dancing and drinking, continuing to pump energy into my rainbow freckles, which you traced with a finger, giggling as my nose wrinkled itself. It was a reaction I hadn’t known I’d have, and we’d both laughed. I’d gotten another warning on my system later, instructing me that hospice care doesn’t involve fun, but I deleted the message, and the eight others that followed, and eventually just muted the notification package. It seemed to me that you’d taken care of yourself well enough up until now, and could make these decisions for yourself. Even if they were fun. Even if they were silly. You could decide. So could I. So I did. - -Nine weeks ago, you tripped on the edge of the carpet and fell, unpredicted, unpredictable. It was a hospital visit for you, worrying for us both, and an in-person warning for me, a stern reminder from a hard HR bot with no padding that my job is to protect you at all times. I didn’t say that I couldn’t catch you from the other room, or that I could barely eat whilst waiting to find out if you’d come home. The HR bot wouldn’t have cared. That wasn’t its job. Although you didn’t need surgery, things changed. I ate more. You ate less. I suggested outings. You suggested sleep. I reached out to your daughter, but got no reply. I made sure to stay close, sure to be a cushion for you. - -Time passes, here in this bed. Ten minutes, ten hours, maybe more. I stop really knowing. My burgers are gone, and yours is still whole. I sit here, soft for you. You lift an arm, a world of effort, and touch my face, greasy from too much burger and leaking from the eyes, and you say I am all the things you needed and you’re grateful. I miss your smile and I have all the extra burgers just sitting in my padding, so I channel their power into rainbows across my skin, and there is nothing better than the endless freckles shimmering across my cheeks, reflected in your eyes. You smile softly, your fingers resting on a long-cold burger. - -And now, with nothing left, I hold you. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **With Nothing Left** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1188622536604064).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/ShortReviews08.md b/content/issue-40/ShortReviews08.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5e8ea274..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/ShortReviews08.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,51 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Bringing both our issue and the year to a resounding close, it is the editor’s pleasure to introduce a number more crime stories published elsewhere in 2024 to the reader’s attention. So, if the six tales you’ve found here have but whet your appetite, let’s make it an even dozen with four firm recommendations and a couple of not-bads!" - -image: images/ShortCrimeReviews10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images – many thanks to [Darcy Lawrey](https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-books-1117153/) and [Luis Quintero](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-book-2294881/)." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-crime-fiction-in-2024 -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}F{{}}irst of our four bonus suggestions is **[Your Hometown Station: A Vermont Radio Mystery](https://redneck-press.blogspot.com/2024/10/your-hometown-station-vermont-radio.html)** by Nikki Knight. It's a characterful piece narrated by a small town deejay during a difficult winter, whose regular programming is interrupted by an automated emergency broadcast to the locals of a flood warning. In keeping with their community service role, our protagonist is able to go the extra mile due to their familiarity with the region, personalising the (ironically) rather dry alert with valuable detail that transforms the merely informative to potentially life saving. - -Perhaps you're still waiting for the genre of the day to raise its head. Well, **Your Hometown Station** does pay its dues, but perhaps appropriately it threatens to be very easy to miss, the kind of thing that goes unnoticed should one look the other way, by distraction or intent. Not here though: we get the cosy resolution the characters and the story both deserve. It appears in the webzine *Tough*, which since March of this year is based at [redneck-press.blogspot.com](https://redneck-press.blogspot.com/). More on them later. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} heard of Zach Dundas a few years ago as part of the team behind the impressive true crime podcast *Death in the West*. Their first season focused on the brutal 1917 murder of union man Frank Little in the hard Montana mining town of Butte, which inspired one of crime fiction's iconic novels, Dashiel Hammett's *Red Harvest*. The murder, I mean, not the podcast. - -Anyway, Dundas's story is **[Some Form of Promotion](https://theyardcrimeblog.com/2024/11/29/some-form-of-promotion-crime-fiction/)**, and like our own *The Amazing Mermaid* it harks back to the ancient days of the United States of America (sometime in the early-to-mid Twentieth Century, probably) and classic shenanigans involving dames on the lam and grizzled store dicks, advertisements on sandwich boards and heaters stored under the bar for troublemaking rummies, all that sort of thing. In fact, few of those terms make an appearance ("dame" only shows up inside "fundamental"), but the effect is a tight and tidy, fun little incident. Published in [The Yard: Crime Blog](https://theyardcrimeblog.com/), check it out. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}efore *Tough* relocated itself to pastures new halfway through the year it hosted a bunch of stories, one of which in particular stood out: **[Mine](http://www.toughcrime.com/2024/04/mine-fiction-by-eleanor-keisman.html)** by Eleanor Keisman, a bleakly engrossing portrait of an unstable mind. What begins with the sour but harmless observation of a happy soon-to-be-mother by a woman rendered unhappy by the path of her own life ever so gently escalates, first perhaps to voyeurism, then perhaps to stalking, then - perhaps - to something much, much worse. - -That last (actually, penultimate) perhaps carries a lot of weight, though. The finale of **Mine** is striking and viceral and, one must no question admit, quite possibly not happening at all. Or, *perhaps*, what we get is very much a "romanticised" version of something equally grim if not quite so fantastical. Either way, it really stuck with me this year. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}M{{}}ichelle Tang provides our last main rec for the year in **[Rustic Getaway](https://shotgunhoney.com/fiction/rustic-getaway-by-michelle-tang/)** at [Shotgun Honey](https://shotgunhoney.com/), going all in on the social media format with episodic epistolary updates that skirt around something iffy going on in the background. - -Influencer Samantha *@Ain’t_Chiu_Pretty* Chiu is going all but off the grid with her man Jared to meet his clan and, she anticipates, have him finally pop the question. All good for her clicks and comments, nothing like an engagement to boost audience engagement, etc. Of course, things don't quite meet her expectations, though there's a chance that the relentlessly upbeat Sam comes through things entirely oblivious as to how close she came to having her account cancelled, like the lucky headphone wearer who stops to pick up a quarter and so doesn't get hit by the falling piano. Wholesome silly fun. - -I'll leave you with a couple of parting nods to close out the issue, starting with the very short **[Everything Rises](https://shotgunhoney.com/fiction/everything-rises-by-jamey-gallagher/)** again in Shotgun Honey. Almost a companion piece to *Your Hometown Station* given the crisis that rears its head, I liked it right up to the final sentence or so, which landed a bit cheap to me, but maybe a matter of taste. And another that I found to be fine was **[A Hunting Place](https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/a-hunting-place-2/)** from Close to the Bone Publishing; both these stories evoking their settings nicely, I thought, and that's not nothing. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269598765173107).* - -And with that, we at ***Mythaxis*** would like to wish you all the best for the coming year! diff --git a/content/issue-40/__index.md b/content/issue-40/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 121bf6b9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40" -date: 2024-12-27 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 40 -subhead: Winter 2024 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Sanka_Coffee2_squashed.jpg -imageMobile: images/Sanka_Coffee2_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Was that someone at the window? by Fritz Siebel" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: baseline - color: '#f1401d' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - # align_self: center - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-40/american-hitsuzen.md b/content/issue-40/american-hitsuzen.md deleted file mode 100644 index c42e11ec..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/american-hitsuzen.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,232 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "American Hitsuzen" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Michael Bettendorf -copyright: '© Michael Bettendorf 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "American creatives… always slotting the word ‘American’ into their titles. Psycho. Graffiti. Hustle. Idiot. Why do they do it? We’ll never know. And in this case? Well, it turns out ‘hitsuzen’ is a Japanese term more or less meaning ‘according to a plan’. So when Michael Bettendorf calls this ‘American Hitsuzen’, is he saying…? No. No, he couldn’t be." - -image: images/Hitsuzen10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by [Kelly](https://www.pexels.com/photo/ford-mustang-coupe-3065602/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i40/5.American.Hitzusen.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: american-hitsuzen -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}Pt. I{{}} **– Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Guy** - -There’s a yellowed box fan sitting in the corner of the office next to a Ficus. Neither of them is looking too good. Giles has burned through half a pack of smokes since I got here and the poor fan can’t keep up. Then again, who could, with Giles going on and on and on about how much I’ve messed up. Dunno why he’s blaming me, I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. And he’s the one who gave us the photo. - -“How could you mess this up?” Giles asks through a cough. “This isn’t a rhetorical question, neither. I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me how you’ve managed to step in a pile of shit this deep.” - -I nibble at a piece of loose cuticle and think it over. And I am, honest-to-God. This isn’t one of those situations where I’m playing coy or acting wise. I’m honest-to-God thinking of an answer that will be suitable for Giles. I run a few sentences through my mind, but the cursor in my brain stops and flashes. My mind’s a blank page. Eye-strain-bright, white, and full of potential. All of my would-be answers, excuses, despite their truth, and therefore not suitable. - -I come to the conclusion that there is no such answer and walk to the percolator, grab a Styrofoam cup, and pour myself some coffee. - -“Well?” he asks. - -“It’s a bit burnt, but it’s good on a cold day like today.” - -Okay, so I poke at him some, but he needs it. The old man is stressed and no matter what the bank accounts look like, the one thing we definitely can’t afford is putting stress on ourselves. Not with our family history of poor tickers. Every spent cigarette is a gamble. - -“Smart ass,” he says, and swats the cup out of my hand. It leaves a smear of transmission grease across the back of my hand. It’s mid-morning and he’s already put in a full day’s work. “You know what I meant.” - -Coffee pools around my boots and if I’m being honest, it kind of miffs me, because I went to a lot of care not to get blood on them this morning. - -“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “I do. But the thing is, I have an answer. You just won’t like it.” - -His cigarette hangs loose from his lips. “Try me.” - -“Just let me show you,” I say, and as pissed as he is, Giles listens because I like to think he trusts me. I am his nephew after all, and if you can’t trust family in this kind of business then you shouldn’t be in this kind of business. - -We leave his office, which takes up a three-hundred square foot corner of the garage. It’s more of a hangar, really. Most days pneumatic wrenches, grinders, and saws scream on account of it being a chop-shop, but no one’s here today, except me and my brother. He’s leaning against the trunk of our beat-up Monte Carlo. The one Giles said he’d fix up for us. The one with the body in the trunk. The one that will no longer be ours after this. - -I walk toward the car and try to appreciate the fleeting peace and quiet. - -“Open it,” Giles says. “And enlighten me on the answer you say I won’t like.” - -Bobby listens, which would have saved us all this mess if he’d done so earlier. - -“He looked like the guy,” I say, figuring it didn’t require further explanation. - -“What do you mean?” Giles asks. - -I look at my brother and say, “Give it.” He pulls out a folded piece of printer paper, dirty and sweaty like a handkerchief. I unfold it to reveal the grainy, stretched-out and pixelated photo of our guy. Giles always said, *No cellphone pictures. Never social media. They’re traceable. No texts about a job. Better yet, no texts about anything – pick up a phone.* So, if you think about it, this is sort of on him. But I don’t tell him this. - -“Look. This is what you gave us.” I hand Giles the paper. “And this is who we got,” I say, and point to the body in the trunk. - -Giles flicks his cigarette butt to the slick cement floor. - -“Looks nothing like him,” he says after a quick glance inside. - -“Yeah right,” Bobby says. “Look at this hipster motherfucker. He’s got the glasses. Tight pants. Dressed like a lumberjack. Beard. He was outside the coffee shop, sipping a latte just like you said he’d be.” - -I pat my pocket for my menthols, but Giles tells me he’ll cut my lips off if I smoke in his shop. He does this while he lights another cigarette. Always has been a bastard. - -“The resemblance is uncanny,” I say. - -“You need to get your eyes checked,” Giles says. - -“They could be twins, man,” Bobby says. - -“Don’t *man* me,” Giles says, jabbing a finger toward the body. “This ginger-nuts has red hair. Red beard. Freckles like Pippy Longstocking. He’s no more than, what, hundred and fifty pounds?” - -He shoves the paper at me. - -“Just because two losers dress the same doesn’t mean they’re the same person, now, does it?” Giles points at the crinkled paper. “His beard is red, but his hair is brown. He’s six-five, two-hundred pounds, *and he fucking stole from me!”* - -I consider telling Giles that our guy had a bike. One of those decked-out hipster ones that probably cost him two Gs. Figured maybe he was trying to lose some weight. Some cyclist-fad. I decide not to mention it. - -Giles rips the paper to confetti. “Clean it up,” he says. “Then go grab the right guy. Try not to kill him this time.” - -“Clean up the paper or, you know, the body?” Bobby asks. - -“Both,” Giles says, coughing through a clenched fist. - -“I thought getting rid of the bodies was your job.” My brother has never been one for timing. - -Giles bares tobacco-tan teeth. “I can get rid of three bodies just as easily as I can get rid of one.” - -Outside, I hear an engine like a rumbling of snakes. A big block 427. It takes everything in me not to sneak a peek through the shop door windows. Giles tells us to leave through the rear bay door. He yells at whoever’s out there that we’re not open today, but stalks toward his office anyway. Guy can’t stay in business by being an asshole. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Pt. II{{}} **– Wrong Place, Right Time, Dumb Guy** - -I’ve recently come into some money and see no reason not to treat myself. Usually, I grab a latte at this hip coffee joint on the other side of town on my way to work, but not today. I quit my job on the spot last week after hearing of my dad’s passing. We weren’t close, but can’t an only son mourn his father by spending a little of his old man’s cash? I’d feel bad, but the Percocet has left my brain all cozy. I’ve got one errand to run and then I’m leaving town, maybe for good. - -Didn’t know what George Senior did beyond work in finance and treat my mom like shit before I came around. Then he left altogether. Apparently, I ended up on the life insurance policy anyhow. Maybe he figured he owed me, since all else I got was his name. - -The money’s not even the coolest part. - -My old man left a key in a safety deposit box. Had one of those old school paper key tags attached to it with old string. The tag said, “To G”, so the executor didn’t think it too much of a stretch to leave it to me. The will didn’t say anything about the key, but the rest of the box’s contents were relics from my parent’s marriage. A wedding ring. A few old photos. Marriage certificate, divorce certificate, and the likes. Also a business card to John’s and Sons Storage. *Unit A-15* was written in blue ink on the back of the card. - -Unit A-15 was a garage unit. Apparently, my old man had paid enough in advance to keep the unit indefinitely. The only thing in there was a car, covered by a heavy-duty tarp. I called one of my gear-head friends over to give it a look. - -“Do you know what this is?” he asked me. - -“Yeah, a babe magnet,” I said. - -“It’s a ’67 GT500,” he said. And he rattled off facts. - -Wimbledon white with Le Mans blue stripes. Some number of horsepower that meant nothing to me. He lost it when he opened the hood and saw two signatures on the engine block. Some chick named Carroll and her husband Don McCain. Or Dan. I don’t remember. - -But old cars are such a pain, especially if you didn’t know how to work on them. Which is why I’m heading to get this thing looked over before I leave town. My friend said to take it to some shop run by some geezer. Says he’s a bit of an asshole, but he does good work. - -Think I might have them rip out the dash and put in a Bluetooth system. Fill the trunk with subwoofers you can hear from downtown. - -Might even repaint it. I’m not sure. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Pt. III{{}} **– Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Dead Guy** - -Things are starting to look up for me. - -I just moved to the city a couple of months ago in an effort to better myself. Left a bad relationship. Finished school online. Was offered a decent job where I feel respected and valued. Bought a bike and started riding again. I can fit into my favorite flannel shirt, just in time for the first freeze of autumn. - -My boss told me to take the day off because I’d been working late all week. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, because I do, but throwing myself into my work is how I keep the old me at bay. I came here to better myself. When I have too much free time, I have a hard time finding that better me. Old demons like to visit late at night, set loose on the web. - -It’s hard though, when you know what I know. What you can learn about a person – any person. Everyone leaves a digital footprint. They always told us to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to understand them, and so I do. - -I follow their digital footprints. See what they like. What they don’t. What they purchase. What they don’t. What kind of porn they’re into. - -It’s a sickness, I know – but I can’t help it. It’s a compulsion and I’ve been getting help. Found a new therapist the minute I rolled into town. I also find it hard to take advice from someone who’s into what my therapist is into – what they’ve done. - -Look, if I could forget how to do this, I would, in a heartbeat. But the world relies on internet access now. The temptation is all around me. Everything has a keyboard – and I can’t keep my fingers from typing. - -It may be my day off, but I’m working. - -Coffee shops are one of the places people are most vulnerable. Most coffee shops have terrible Wi-fi and next to zero firewalls or security. And yet people sit and sip lattes and pay bills and shop online and log into any number of places on their phones. Laptops. You name it. - -So I order a latte and sit outside. The cool autumn morning nips at my ears, but I don’t mind. It’s all in a day’s work. I just have to sit here and wait for someone dumb enough to sign in to show up – like these two guys in the overalls, Little and Large. - -It’s all about being at the right place at the right time. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Pt. IV{{}} **– Right Place, Right Time, Smart Guy** - -We leave through the rear bay doors while our uncle keeps on griping about being closed. Vestiges of his verbal tirade echo off the floor and walls all the way back from his office. That throaty motor outside is growling low, but the driver is now calling loud for attention. The mood Giles is in, he won’t like it if he gets it. From the strength of that engine, I figure it’s the cops. Some new guy poking around. One who Giles hasn’t paid off to look the other way. - -Freddie rounds the corner of the shop first and stops dead. “Holy shit, would you look at that.” - -I peek around the corner and catch a glimpse of a perfect ride idling, wisps of exhaust pouring from the twin pipes. The subtlest of ghosts. But it’s not the super snake that I focus on. It’s the six-foot-five, two-hundred-pound, ginger-bearded motherfucker banging on the shop door who’s caught my eye. - -“Back inside.” I pull Freddie back out of sight. “That’s our guy,” I hiss. - -“Whoa. No shit.” He takes another look. “Well hell, I believe he is.” - -I fucked it up last time and I can’t let a second shot slip through my fingers. “Alright, let’s go take him.” - -Freddie places a hand on my chest. “Not here, dingus, we’re on home turf. Besides, he’s come to us. If he really stole from Giles, there’s no way he’d be here. Let’s go see what he wants. Something’s missing here.” - -We enter back through the bay door, but leave it open just in case. The shop has gone quiet, save for the impatient asshole’s pounding on the front door. “Get Giles,” Freddie says, “or he’ll just bust our balls for keeping him waiting. I’ll let the kid inside.” - -Pisses me off that he’s giving orders, but I go. My brother’s always been better with the customers. A natural conversationalist. He tends to take point on all our jobs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing. I know he thinks I’m impulsive, but I’d call it something else – decisive. It was his indecisiveness that led me to pulling the trigger earlier. Yeah, I made a bad call, but also it was based on Giles’ intel. Shit happens, though, and I can fix this. - -I open the door to Giles’ office to find him on the floor. One hand grips at his chest, painting his overalls with a black flower of oil and grease. A cigarette burns weakly in the other. - -“Call… ’n ’mbul’nce… shithead,” he croaks. Never any fucking let up. But there’s a panic in his eyes I’ve seen before. A realization. Last face I saw wearing it is waiting in the trunk back there. Time’s finally up for our uncle, I reckon. - -What a loss. - -“Giles,” I say, and hunker down with him, “that thing the other ginger-nuts stole from you, was it a white cherry Mustang by any chance?” - -“My car…” A glint of the old fury sparks behind the panic. “Get… fucking car…” - -“You got it, boss,” I say, and slap him on the shoulder. “We’ll get that car, and then I’ll get right on that ambulance, too.” - -He makes a choking noise and flails his spare hand at me, dropping the cigarette on the old stained carpet between us. I pick it up quick and grind it into the loaded ashtray on the corner of his desk. “You should quit these. Burn the whole place down, you’re not careful.” - -I close the door behind me as if on a sleeping baby. From the shop, I hear my brother shmoozing the kid, telling him our uncle will be glad to do business with him. How little he knows, I think, and grin as I walk through to greet our new customer. Our first customer as owners of the place. - -“Good looking car out there,” I say. “How can we help?” - -My brother gives me a look, question marks in his eyes. I ignore him and offer a hand to the kid. It’s a weak shake. Soft hands. The kind of hands that don’t know how to change the oil, let alone maintain something as special as what he’s got. - -Freddie takes ignorance in his stride. “Well, George says he wants to rip out the dash and put a whole new stereo system in there. Big subs. Maybe even update that paint job with a *sick wrap*.” He disguises his disgust well enough even I can barely detect it. - -My first thought is to kill the kid, but that’d be impulsive, not decisive. And I’m actually glad Giles didn’t hear that said, it’d be the death of him. - -“Big plans,” I say. The kid looks smug. Smug about casually defacing a thing of pure beauty. Pure beauty maybe worth as much as everything on wheels for a block around combined. - -Which means he doesn’t know shit. So I add, “Kind of like teaching an old dog new tricks, though, isn’t it?” - -Now he looks uncertain. “What?” - -I pull a face. “Something that old? New lines are never going to lie well on that. You need a ride on the cutting edge.” I give Freddie a big plain honest look in the face. “Something new, right?” - -I see the light go on. “My brother is absolutely bang on. George, let me show you something.” He guides the kid toward the back of the shop where we stash our recent inventory. Like the whole row of Japanese imports that came our way from a recent street racing bust. - -“Why mess with that ’stang when one of these already has what you want?” He places a friendly hand on the kid’s shoulder. “For instance, that Mitsubishi Evo is all carbon fiber. Got an inline four-cylinder turbo. And an underbody LED kit.” - -The kid whistles, ogling a Nissan Skyline. “What about this one?” - -“That’s a 1996 GT-R R33. Inline-Six turbo. Nineteen-inch alloy wheels… high flow fuel injector, bucket seats with five-point harnesses… it’s quite the car.” - -The way the kid is drooling over that Nissan I might need to get a mop. “Does it have the LEDs too?” he asks. - -“Tell you what, George,” says Freddie, “you put the keys to that old Shelby in my hand, we’ll fit you up with our best set of lights, free of charge, and you can drive away in this beauty before the day is done. Even trade, what do you say?” - -“You got yourself a fucking deal!” is what George says. - -Freddie grins at me over George’s shoulder as the kid pumps his hand to seal it. - -I give him two thumbs back, but really I’m thinking about all the clean up that’s left to do. Still got the poor sap in the Monte Carlo to drop off, and there’s no way we’ll fit Giles in the trunk there with him. - -I look out at our new Mustang. And then I smile. - -Maybe we can treat Giles to one last spin in his long lost wheels. Just for old time’s sake. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **American Hitsuzen** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269610588505258).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/contents.md b/content/issue-40/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 87d1dc91..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Downsizing]({{< relref path="downsizing.md" >}}), by Jess Simms -- [The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick]({{< relref path="the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.md" >}}), by David Sheskin -- [The Amazing Mermaid]({{< relref path="the-amazing-mermaid.md" >}}), by Arlen Feldman -- [Crunch Thump Thump]({{< relref path="crunch-thump-thump.md" >}}), by P. R. O'Leary -- [American Hitsuzen]({{< relref path="american-hitsuzen.md" >}}), by Michael Bettendorf -- [Wendigo]({{< relref path="wendigo.md" >}}), By Kirk Bueckert -- [Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen]({{< relref path="cruel-night-karo-hamalainen.md" >}}), reviewed by Bill Ryan -- [Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024]({{< relref path="ShortReviews08.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-40/cruel-night-karo-hamalainen.md b/content/issue-40/cruel-night-karo-hamalainen.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7e1ea5fc..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/cruel-night-karo-hamalainen.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,68 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Bill Ryan -copyright: '© Bill Ryan 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Bill Ryan’s biannual sojourn returns him to these shores to receive a seasonally warm welcome, once again to expose us to his thoughts on an example of crime novel writing – or should that be ‘criminal’? Best let him decide." - -image: images/CruelNight10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Karo Hämäläinen and the book's cover, both as seen on [the Soho Press website](https://sohopress.com/authors/karo-hamalainen/)." - -type: stock -slug: cruel-is-the-night-karo-hamalainen-review -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}s a reader, I find that reading translated literature can be a complicated process. This is largely due to the fact that I myself am sadly monolingual, so that when reading something translated from a foreign language into English, I have no choice but to take the book’s translator at their word. If I’m reading, say, a French novel in English, and the word “exacerbate” is used, I have no choice but to assume that “exacerbate” is the closest and best English equivalent to whatever the French word is. - -Sometimes, translation can be an act of great imagination and artistry. Earlier this year, I read *A Void* by Georges Perec. Perec’s novel is famous for, among other things, never using the letter “e”. This French novel has been translated into English more than once, but the best known, and the one I read, was done by Gilbert Adair. As you can imagine, writing an entire novel in French without once using the most common letter in our shared alphabet poses unique problems for the English translator – the closest and best English equivalent to a given French word that doesn’t have an “e” in it may well have an “e” in it, so another word must be chosen. You get the idea. The point being that in the case of *A Void*, Gilbert Adair genuinely accomplished something. - -I was suitably impressed by Adair’s achievement, but at other times I’ve read a novel in translation and thought that perhaps that translator didn’t possess the artistic flair the job would seem to me to require. Take, for example, the Finnish crime novel *Cruel is the Night* by Karo Hämäläinen. The premise of the book is this: four Finnish friends meet, after years apart, in the London home of one of them. The two men, Mikko and Robert, have known each other since they were children. Though diametrically opposed politically – even, as far as crusading journalist Mikko is concerned, ethically – the two men are close friends. Except that, very early in the novel, the reader learns that Mikko and his wife Veera made the trip from Finland to England to visit Robert and his wife Elise because Mikko plans to murder Robert. Veera doesn’t know this, but Mikko has brought strychnine with him, and has every intention of using it. - -I’ll get to his motives, and the rest of the novel, in a minute. But first, I want to point out a particular sentence from *Cruel is the Night* that has puzzled and confounded me since I first read it. The novel is written in alternating first-person narratives – each of the four primary characters get their share of chapters, and to tell their sides of things. About halfway through the novel, Mikko, from lack of food, stress, fear of what he plans to do, and so on, becomes severely light-headed. Elise comforts him and offers him a caramel, which Mikko accepts, leading Hämäläinen to write this: - -> Sucking on the soft candy, I absorbed carbohydrates through the membranes of my mouth. - -Ah. So that’s how it works. - -Why Hämäläinen chose to explain part of the chemical process that is involved in eating food, I do not know, but I’d love to know if the original Finnish has been translated as precisely as it could have been; and if it wasn’t, what did Hämäläinen mean to say, if it was different? And is that sentence more the work of the author, Hämäläinen, or the translator, Owen Witesman? - -I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. But if that line can be blamed on Witesman – and to some degree I believe it can – there is plenty more about *Cruel is the Night* that can be chalked up to Hämäläinen simply not being a very good novelist. Still, that caramel line, in addition to being pointless and weird, also shows an inability to distinguish between the kind of detail it’s necessary to include in a traditional narrative for the sake of verisimilitude, and the kind of detail that is not merely not needed but is also plainly stupid. - -One of the things that drew me to *Cruel is the Night* is also the thing that most bewildered and disappointed me. The reader is told early on that of these four characters spending a night drinking and absorbing carbohydrates through the membranes of their mouths, only one will survive. We know going in that one murder is planned, but what in the world could happen to leave three of them dead? Darkly intriguing! - -Well, in addition to the alternating first person chapters from Mikko, Veera, Robert, and Elise are very short third person chapters, from the point of view of the survivor the morning after this night of murderous chaos. Amazingly, though, in these chapters, the survivor’s gender is revealed. On page 29, out of 313: - -> The night was gentle. Rather than striking his face, it caressed and welcomed him as he stepped out of the [apartment building]. He didn’t deserve such a warm reception. - -How the night can strike one’s face is a bit beyond me, but never mind. The point is that, for the vast majority of *Cruel is the Night*, the reader knows the sole survivor is either Mikko or Robert. I did wonder if this was a set-up of some kind, and that it would somehow turn out to be neither of them – I just couldn’t imagine Hämäläinen would want to narrow the mystery from four possibilities to two so soon – but as I read on I realized that, no, it was either Mikko or Robert. And since there had to be some note of dramatic irony in there somewhere, narrowing all those options down to just one was fairly simple. - -A further disappointment came when it was revealed why any of this was happening. Initially, the reader gets the sense that the obnoxiously self-righteous Mikko wants to kill the obnoxiously arrogant Robert because of some irredeemable ethical trespass (Robert is a rich, and unethical, businessman). This would have been at least somewhat interesting. Unfortunately (for me, anyway, but of course tastes vary) it turns out that Mikko is having an affair with Elise, and Robert is having an affair with Veera. Nobody knows about the affairs of the others, but Mikko wants the young and beautiful Elise for himself, and also believes that Robert treats Elise abominably, and therefore wishes to save her. - -Elise is another problem. She’s completely vapid, and is intended to be, but the writing of her narrated chapters is often absurd. Her first chapter ends like this: - -> The flowers were cheery. -> -> I smelled them. -> -> They were white. - -In other words, Elise is just a cartoon character. Her chapters are filled with this sort of thing. She doesn’t read as a person in danger, but rather as someone whom Hämäläinen will eventually label “dead” and then stop writing about her. - -There’s some discussion of pop culture in *Cruel is the Night*, culture that is both Finnish and otherwise, and Hämäläinen is no better here than elsewhere. Again, this is probably just a matter of taste, but circumstantial evidence suggests that one of the inspirations for Hämäläinen to write this – his first and so far only novel – was Jo Nesbø, the globally best-selling Norwegian author of the series of crime novels about investigator Harry Hole. I’ve read Nesbø’s novel *The Snowman*, in which, at one point, Hole, quite wearyingly and insultingly, instructs his girlfriend on the art of cinema, and the film he chooses as an example of great filmic art is Roger Avary’s *The Rules of Attraction*, which nearly made me toss that book aside, unfinished. - -I promise that I have nothing against Scandinavia or its people. But here, the anxiety of influence, transferred from Nesbø to Hämäläinen, could not be less interesting, or worth one’s time to examine. For this sort of thing to generate anything meaningful, then somebody – the influenced or the influencer – has to be good at writing novels. Otherwise you’re left with cliché, bad plotting, characters that behave wildly only because the writer needs them to. For the sake, I believe, of making *Cruel is the Night* in part a black comedy, the story eventually devolves into a kind of murder farce, with Mikko’s vial of strychnine, and Robert’s several vials of cyanide, which he bought for no good reason, bouncing around the apartment in a kind of “who’s got the poison?” comic mayhem. None of it works, it’s all horribly silly, empty of suspense and forward momentum. - -The plotting and character problems inherent in *Cruel is the Night* must be the fault of Hämäläinen. However, as this is a work of translation, the blame for prose itself, which is dull, determined to crank up the suspense levels without displaying any sign that anyone involved has a knack for it, must be distributed evenly among both Hämäläinen and Witesman. Translation is an art, and an artist must be called upon to do the job. - -There is something savagely appealing about the premise of *Cruel is the Night*. Four people meeting, arguing, plotting against each other, over the course of one evening that leaves three of them dead. Good idea. The thing is, if the execution is poor, the premise no longer matters. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill's thoughts on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269601235172860).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.md b/content/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.md deleted file mode 100644 index 88b5b1f1..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,75 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Crunch Thump Thump" - -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- P. R. O’Leary -copyright: '© P. R. O’Leary 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "When your friend stands at the cliff’s edge, do you ever feel the echo of an urge to push, though you never would? When the wedding gets to ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ are you tempted to raise your voice, even if you have no reason to? Could be everyone experiences something like that at a point in their life – P. R. O’Leary maybe more often than many." - -image: images/CrunchCrunchThump10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by [Vyacheslav Bobin](https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-and-red-light-in-dark-room-9578505/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i40/4.Crunch.Thump.Thump.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: crunch-thump-thump -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}I{{}}t’s funny how after only a five-minute drive from downtown you are in the dark. The restaurant I just left had QR codes for their digital menus, my coworkers and I had made our reservations through a website, and I had reserved a spot in the only parking deck in town via an app. But five minutes away, there weren’t even streetlights. Just a narrow and twisty road fenced in by tall pines. I know “digital divide” isn’t the right term, but it is the one that jumps to mind. It felt like pulling my car off of the main street and away from town was a *Thelma and Louise* style leap into a great unknown. - -For me though, it was quite known, since I live, like most people in this area do, in the stretched-out network of through-roads that connect one town center to the next. I have driven this particular route many times, which was good, because the Girl’s Night buzz of a sensible amount of alcohol and gossipy camaraderie had me a little hyped and distracted. But my gray Civic was a trusty, knowing steed and I angled it up and down the hills towards the mountainside development and the small house my boyfriend and I shared. - -Most of the intersections I passed were unmarked. The only signposts pointed back the way I came, governmental signage only caring about directing people to the town center and not away from it. It didn’t bother me because my own guidepost towards home was a long straight-away several miles ahead, and a rare streetlamp before a curve that marked the entrance to Gravel Road. One not literally made of gravel, luckily, but the one where I lived. - -No other vehicles this time of night. The radio was off. Sometimes I liked to drive in silence, especially after an evening out, so all I heard was engine noise and the flow of the air past my open window. - -I took my foot off the gas to negotiate a rise in the road, and that’s when I saw the figure at the bottom of the decline, walking along the shoulder. My headlights gave me a good view. Big brown winter coat, hood covering their head, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. They were walking against traffic as the law dictates, as far over the shoulder as possible. A good citizen. Their head tilted up when my headlights caught them, but they made no other sign. Just a person out walking. Enjoying the night air. - -It was so easy for me. There was no adrenaline. No crazed compulsion. An intentional thought didn’t even enter my head. I felt like I was just obeying normal traffic patterns. Driving on autopilot. I put my foot on the gas, pushed the car back up to cruising speed and angled it into the oncoming lane. No car was oncoming. I felt no sense of danger or distress. I just drove the vehicle towards the person walking on the side of the road. - -There is a freeze frame image in my mind of what happened next. It was a man. He had a beard. A ruddy nose below surprised eyes. Thick black hair. About my age. His clothes were nice, good winter gear. His hands were coming out of his pockets, the shine of a ring on one finger. My high beams illuminated his realization of what was happening. His body started to shift in panic. Attempting to dodge or jump. - -The car hit him as he moved to the side. I felt the force of impact against fender and hood and turned the wheel back towards the right side of the road, scooping him away from the shoulder like my car was a giant spoon. Then he slid down, his body disappeared under the car, and first the front then the back of the car lurched upward as I drove over him with both axles. - -He didn’t make a sound. No scream. No cry of pain. Nothing. I continued to drive, glancing into the rearview mirror. The body was lying across the white line separating the road and shoulder. A pile of misshapen cloth illuminated red by my taillights. Unmoving. - -The whole thing took only a few seconds. I didn’t feel exhilarated or horrified. This was never something I had done before, but I didn’t particularly feel surprised by my action. It just… happened. - -I drove calmly the next few miles, alone on the blacktop, finally hitting the straightaway and the lone streetlamp that signaled home. A half mile down Gravel Road, after passing a few of the neighborhood houses, I pulled into our driveway. - -The house was shaded from nearby neighbors, less by the big pines, which had been cleared out on this street, than by a few tall ornamental bushes. Raggedy looking things that my boyfriend promised he would spruce up, which I ribbed him about every few weeks. - -With the engine off there weren’t many sounds besides various entomological utterances emanating from the forest and the faint barking of a dog somewhere. I opened the door, feet on the asphalt as I exited. The small light above the front porch finally detected motion and flashed on. - - The dog stopped barking. I walked out to the street, heels clicking in the silence. Back the way I came, country road 571 was no longer visible. I didn’t expect to see anything. This wasn’t a horror movie. Five miles hence, the crawling body of the man I hit would not be making its way towards me. He was dead. I knew it as soon as I heard the crunch thump thump. - -I don’t know why exactly I looked. Maybe to see if anyone had noticed anything. Silence. Stillness. No cars driving by. No panic in me. - -I walked back to the car, looking at its hood and tires and fender. Maybe two tons of metal and plastic versus maybe two hundred pounds of flesh and bone. The result, a small dent in the front next to the headlight, a spider web crack through the headlight itself. More obvious, though, was the streak of blood that ran from the headlight down below the car. Like a giant paintbrush had placed a stroke of red there. - -The back tire had more blood. On the black rubber it looked like water except the pads of my fingers were crimson after touching it. Stuck in the tire treads was what looked like a white pebble. I bent closer, moved the shadow of my head away from the moonlight and pried it out with my manicured nails. A tooth. Or a piece of one. A clump of black hair stuck to the wheel archlike a dead rodent. With my free hand I tugged until it peeled off like it was glued to the metal. - -A fistful of hair, a tooth between my fingers, I walked back to the street and tossed them into a nearby sewer drain. I was wondering what I should use to clean up the blood when I felt a drop on my arm. The rumble of thunder in the distance. Heavier darkness forming overhead. The moon and stars disappearing behind storm clouds. - -Next to the front porch was a garbage can full of paper recycling. I found a week’s worth of circulars for the local supermarket and balled one up. By the time I walked back to the car the rain was starting to come down. I wiped at the front of the car, the hood, the headlights. The tires. The paper growing wet and red in my hand. I went back for a second one, then a third. Afterwards, I dumped the bloody clumps in the same storm drain and rinsed my hands in the torrent of water now rushing down into the grate. - -Before I went back into the house I paused on the porch and took one last look at the car. I could barely see the cracked headlight and the small dent. To anyone else, it would just look like any other regularly used, aging car. Nothing unusual. - -Inside, I took off my now wet clothes and put them in the laundry. I took a hot shower, scrubbing the last marks of blood out from under my fingernails, everything washing off me and down into the drain. Afterwards, warm and dry in comfortable pajamas, I headed to bed. - -My boyfriend was asleep. I could hear his soft breaths when I went into the bedroom. I slipped under the covers, kissed his forehead and pulled his arm over me. He mumbled something that sounded like he was asking how my night was. - -Nothing special. I said. Nothing special. - -Then I closed my eyes and fell asleep. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Crunch Thump Thump** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269612168505100).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/downsizing.md b/content/issue-40/downsizing.md deleted file mode 100644 index 856835d0..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/downsizing.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,227 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Downsizing" - -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Jess Simms -copyright: '© Jess Simms 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Startups are the crucible of the modern business world, where futures are forged, fortunes are made and lost, careers take off or go down in flames, and pressure can be both the fuel and the fire. Jess Simms takes us to another fledgling C-suite, the place where the hard decisions have to be made. You know, you can't spell ‘executive’ without… breaking a few eggs." - -image: images/Downsizing10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [cottonbro studio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/men-looking-inside-the-brown-box-8371739/), [Angelina Sarycheva](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-man-sitting-on-a-yoga-mat-with-his-hands-in-his-pockets-hFwUotV-PsY), and [Andrea Piacquadio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-man-holding-black-eyeglasses-3760137/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i40/1.Downsizing.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: downsizing -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}W{{}}e regretted having to let Janice go. She’d been with us since our early days, before the SaaS rebrand, the mobile app, the cloud-based automation platform. Top-notch talent, we’d always thought, but Technology had found deleted messages she’d sent to EcoTec in his last security audit. Clearly, she was the leak we’d been searching for. We had no choice but to fire her, he said. - -Finance nodded along like it was obvious. The CEO tapped his stylus on his tablet in a pensive rhythm. Operations scowled, knowing he’d be the one to do the firing. Only Marketing argued, but he would; he’d always had a thing for Janice. We knew that was the real reason he said, “That’s a flimsy reason to fire our best developer six weeks before launch.” - -“One of the coders saw her having coffee with their COO last Thursday,” Finance said. - -Marketing said, “Maybe they’re headhunting her.” - -“Still violates the non-compete.” - -“Only if she takes their offer.” - -“Will the new group of freelancers be up to speed by Friday?” the CEO said. Behind him, through the conference room’s glass walls, we watched our team trickling in. The early birds were already gathered by the whiteboard, a larger group awaiting their turn at the coffee station. - -Technology said, “They should be.” - -“We’ll fire her then.” The CEO stood and the rest of us followed. Janice arrived as we were coming out of the conference room. She’d brought the team maple bacon chai cronuts from the pop-up bakery across the street. We felt a bit guilty, given the morning’s conversation, but it would have been rude not to take one. The CEO ate two in a gesture of magnanimity. - -It was a hectic standup. There were more tasks left in the backlog than we’d hoped to have six weeks out. The user interface was still in wireframes, the command code for the robots crawling with bugs, and we were way behind on production of the prototype printers for Professional+ subscribers. Though that one, at least, was a good problem. The sales team had exceeded expectations, nearly doubling our projections, as Marketing mentioned every chance he got. We’d told our investors they were buying in to the next Amazon and we’d live up to that promise, if we met that demand. If we didn’t, Janice wouldn’t be the only former employee dusting off their resume. - - Either way, none of us would be going home before the sun sank, not tonight or most nights until nVent launched. Except for Janice, of course, on Friday, when she’d be escorted out by security. We eyed her as we outlined objectives, reassessed timelines, broke down roadblocks into their actionable tasks. She seemed to take it as a compliment when we announced that she’d be moving to the front-end design team. And if that was how she heard it, who were we to take that from her? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}On Monday mornings we visited the main production facility, after we’d gotten the team started. Operations drove, as always, the CEO in the passenger seat. Finance was always relegated to the middle rear as the most recent addition to the c-suite, hired last year on the advice of our business coach, who said a dedicated financial executive would make us more attractive to investors. Finance had taken the hazing in good stride at first. Now he rode with elbows poised at kidney level for when Technology or Marketing leaned too far into his personal space. - -The production facility was outside the city, along a winding stretch of highway where billboards outnumbered buildings. We discussed who should replace Janice during the drive. Finance suggested one of the freelancers. Technology and Marketing met eyes and rolled them behind his back; freelancers looked at permanent job offers the way a slug would eye a pile of salt. But the rest of us didn’t expect Finance to understand that. We settled on an internal promotion and Finance lapsed into surly silence at having his suggestion so thoroughly rejected. - -The production facility was nondescript. Gray prefab siding, gravel parking lot, no sign. The opposite of the office’s chic décor and aggressive branding. The CEO swiped his ID card and we followed him into the high-ceilinged interior. The main room was snaked by assembly lines. Wheeled, multi-armed robots stood at regular intervals along them, a few dozen in total. Most had come off of those same lines within the past week. They still had the shiny look of new things, domed heads and conical bodies reflecting the overhead fluorescents. The human workers supervised from grate-floored walkways ringing the outer walls. A precautionary measure after the previous week’s incident, when a software update had made the automated workforce go haywire. But the robots seemed to be behaving today, their grasping arms smoothly assembling the parts – fabricated mere minutes before by the room-sized 3D printers further back in the facility – into components for more robots, to be shipped out to the dozen other production facilities strategically placed across the United States. - -The facility’s Foreman made his way down to greet us. He shook each of our hands in turn and called us all boss, like he always did. We’d wondered whether it was a sign of respect or subtle insubordination. Finance’s opinions on the matter were clear; his mouth tightened like a miser’s pursestrings every time he heard it. - -The Foreman said, “I talked to Lee and Jerry. They’re both out of the hospital. Jerry’s arm’s gonna have him out for a minute, but Lee thinks he’ll be back by Wednesday.” - -Operations thought that was good news because they wouldn’t need to hire. Finance thought that was good news because it probably meant they wouldn’t sue. - -“Are we still on schedule?” Technology asked. - -The Foreman said, “Ahead of it, if anything. Should have the whole automated workforce ready by Friday.” - -“And you’re doing QA?” Faster wasn’t always better; Technology had learned that the hard way. - -The Foreman pointed toward the lines. “That one on Belt Three, second from the left – first one off the line this morning and look at it go, now.” We turned to watch it insert sensors into a dome head identical to its own. The Foreman shook his head, eyes round with wonder. “Workers that make their own replacements. Never thought I’d see the day.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e left the facility with a positive vibe that carried us the whole way through the week. We’d known we had a good business model. Full vertical integration with minimal human intervention; the idea practically sold itself. It was only after our second launch delay that we started to question whether we could pull it off, and by then we were in far too deep to back out. Now we could see the finish line and each success bolstered our confidence. The product design interface was in beta testing by Tuesday. Wednesday, three more satellite facilities were fully staffed and operational. Thursday, a patch to the autonomous workforce’s task prioritization algorithm went off without a hitch. - -Friday – the day she was supposed to be fired – Janice no-call no-showed. - -When she hadn’t shown up by the end of standup, we retreated to the conference room for a discussion. The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. But in the end, we decided, she’d simply spared us the need to fire her. At least, that was as far as our conversation got before one of the developers poked his head in and told us the Rainiers were waiting in the executive office. - -If the Rainiers were here, Janice could wait. - -The CEO was first out the door. The rest of us fell in behind him, through the bustling workroom and to the office on its far side. Charlie Rainier had taken the CEO’s seat behind the desk, his brother Dave in the massaging recliner in the corner. Their dark three-piece suits and chunky gold jewelry were at odds with the tech wardrobe of tie-less button-ups, but in a sense Charlier Rainier had a right to act like he owned the place. His money was the only reason the company still existed. We’d burned through our Seed and Series A funds, and when we’d circled back for a Series B no one else wanted to bite. Even the Rainiers hadn’t gone all-in. Their funds were a loan. One Charlie had already expressed eagerness to have repaid. - -The Rainiers weren’t quite the mafia. We’d known, going in, that they invested in some questionable areas. It was part of the reason we’d agreed to the loan arrangement. We could cut ties once we paid them back. No risk of their dealings tainting our image. Except our initial timelines had been optimistic. A three-month launch delay wasn’t that bad, by tech startup standards, but that hadn’t been a satisfactory answer for Charlie. - -Charlie’s look assessed our value and found it lacking. In the corner, Dave poked the massage controls then reclined, ankles casually crossed. Dave always came to these meetings but rarely contributed more than witty remarks. We’d speculated – out of their hearing – about why Charlie kept Dave around. Marketing thought comic relief, to set people at ease. Technology thought it was a distraction, like how a magician waves one hand so people don’t watch the other. - -“I didn’t know we had a meeting today,” the CEO said. He took one of the two chairs facing the desk. Marketing eyed the other but Finance was faster, striding to it with an air of defiance. The rest of us folded our arms like we’d always planned to stand. - -“The amount you’re in for, we have meetings whenever I feel like it,” Charlie said. He dug his thick fingers in his jacket pocket, pulling out a slim cigar and a book of matches. - -The CEO said, “We don’t smoke in here.” - -“You don’t say.” Charlie stuck the cigar between his lips. Struck a match. From the corner, Dave barked a laugh that Charlie silenced with a glare. Operations opened a window, then pulled the plate from under the potted cactus on the sill and put it on the desk at Charlie’s elbow. The CEO said, “When we launch in five weeks—” - -“Will you?” Charlie interrupted. - -“Yes. Absolutely. Most of our automated workforce is already deployed and our pre-subscriber count—” - -“Do pre-subscribers pay?” - -“The first month as a deposit. We’re using a subscription model, you see, and the way it works is there are three tiers that—” - -“So you don’t have my money yet,” Charlie said. - -The CEO’s jaw clenched. “No. Not yet.” - -Charlie spun the cigar tip slowly against the plate. “Big team you guys got out there.” - -The CEO said, “A lot are freelancers.” - -“Those cost more than employees, don’t they?” - -“In the short-term, but it’s cheaper long-run. A lot of startups use them.” - -“How many of those are still around after five years?” - -Dave barked a laugh. “Not many, Charlie.” - -Charlie said, “And I hear you’ve got competitors already sniffing around your territory. You’re not worried about these freelancers running to them with your secrets?” - -We were more worried that Charlie knew EcoTec was eying our IP but we tried to keep that close to our vests. The CEO said, “They’ll be with us through launch and by then it won’t be an issue. We’ll still be first to market. Trust me – you’ll get your money back. Maybe a bit later than we thought at first, but it’ll happen.” - -Charlie’s cigar flared orange. He released a leisurely smoke plume then said, “We made a simple deal. One I thought big businessmen like yourself would understand. I loan you money, you pay it back. On the date we agree to. Not when it’s convenient for you.” - -Charlie rested the cigar in the planter tray and leaned his elbows on the desk, fists together. He never looked more like a mobster than when he smiled. “Good news for you boys is I believe in second chances. So here’s the new deal. Either I walk out of this office with my money, or we’re gonna find you another way to contribute.” - -Finance went paler than usual. The CEO was outwardly stoic but we knew his tells. That twitching vein above his left eyebrow. The tap tap of his right index finger on the chair arm. He said, “You know the first one’s impossible.” - -“Well, then. Welcome to the team.” Charlie shifted the cigar to the corner of his mouth. He stuck his beringed hand out not quite halfway, so the CEO had to stand and lean to shake it. We bristled but what could we do except swallow the disrespect and listen as Charlie said, “Now let me tell you what you boys are gonna do for us.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e didn’t argue until after the Rainiers left. The CEO scraped ash into the trash while the rest of us found seats: Technology and Finance on the desk, Marketing behind it, Operations slumped awkwardly into the still-reclined massage chair. We didn’t meet eyes as we talked. - -“How do you even launder money?” Operations asked. “I mean there are systems involved, right? And if we fuck up we can’t just dip back in and tweak the code. We’ll trip some fraud detection algorithm and next thing we know the office is swarming in FBI.” - -Marketing groaned. “That’d be death for the brand. A whiff we’re doing anything illegal and we’re toast.” - -Technology said, “So we’re fucked either way, basically.” - -“No, we’re not,” Finance said. Soft, like he’d surprised himself by speaking. Then his jaw firmed. “I can do it. I’ve done it before.” - -We had the questions you’d expect. When, and why, and for who. But Finance said it wasn’t important. That was all we got out of him before the phone rang. It was the production facility Foreman. The CEO put it on speaker. - -“I think you’d better come down here, Boss,” he said. - -“What’s the problem?” the CEO asked. - -The Foreman said, “It’s… there’s just something you’ve gotta see.” - -In the SUV, we waited for Finance to pick up the thread and explain himself. When he didn’t, we made the long drive in silence. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he gravel lot outside the production facility was nearly empty, a single pickup truck parked near the doors. Inside, no people watched from the walkway. The robots puttered along, unconcerned with the lack of supervision. The Foreman blustered out from the back wiping his hands on an oily rag, his shirt stained and rumpled. We’d never seen him flustered. Our guts churned with sympathetic anxiety. - -“I told the daytime team we had a chemical leak, sent them home early,” the Foreman said. “That gives us some time to figure out what to do with her.” - -The *her* was a corpse. The Foreman found her in one of the plastics extruder vats. The pump had seized up so he’d drained the tank to clean it and found her stuck against the grate. He’d called us then started searching around, discovered her phone on the ground. She’d been taking pictures, was what the Foreman figured. Probably she climbed up the tubes on the outside of the tank but lost her grip, trying to hold on one-handed. And we knew, even before he passed the phone to Operations, that it must be Janice. - -“Where is she now?” the CEO asked. - -The Foreman said, “Still in the tank. I didn’t want to touch anything until I talked to you.” - -We walked with him past the clanking assembly lines. There was a chemical tang in the air in the extruder room, not the usual hot plastic smell but raw, antiseptic. The Foreman had propped a ladder up against the drained tank. We climbed up one by one to peer down and over at Janice coated in the plastic, her face frozen in surprise. - -The right thing to do, of course, would be to call the police. Report an accident. There would be security camera footage that showed her breaking in, scaling the tank. Clearly we weren’t liable. But now didn’t seem the best time to draw law enforcement attention and – as Marketing reminded us – the general public didn’t always wait for facts to make a judgment. Plus there’d be questions. Why she’d broken in. What she was photographing. We could avoid all of that if we disposed of her body quietly. The question was how. Charlie Rainier probably knew the answer but we weren’t exactly in the position to call in a favor. - -“You could activate the tank cleaners,” the Foreman said. We’d forgotten he was there, so deep in our debate, and we startled, staring at him. He shrugged. “It ain’t the company’s fault, what she did, like you said. Anyway I like working here. You all take good care of me.” - -Whatever his motivation, it was a good suggestion. Between the chemicals and the heat, the tank cleaning cycle reduced Janice’s body to a pile of bone fragments. We emptied them into a trash bag that we took with us when we left. We weren’t quite sure what we were going to do with it. But we were damn sure the Foreman was getting a raise. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e ended up tossing Janice’s bones into the dumpster of a fast food place along the highway. An undignified end but, as we kept telling each other, she’d done this to herself. The team noted her absence Monday morning. We told them HR had reached out, muttered the right phrases of concern. But she’d been putting in long hours, we said; she was far from the first person to burn out in the late stages of the development lifecycle. - -Dave Rainier showed up on Wednesday to liaise with Finance on the new money laundering side of our operations. It was the first time any of us had seen the younger Rainier on his own. The pair of them holed up in the executive office and the rest of us distracted ourselves with work to keep from frowning at the office door, wondering what message Charlie was sending, having his brother come alone. - -Time lost meaning at this stage of a project. The long hours blurred the days together. Then we blinked and, poof, it was two weeks to launch and we were on schedule. Interfaces beta tested. Printer production on track with subscriber counts. Finance excelled at the money laundering, apparently, but we tried not to think too much about that. Until the day he emerged from his meeting with Dave Rainier and rounded us up in the conference room. - -“They don’t plan to stop,” Finance said. “Dave was just talking about upping how much we clean for them. He’s already planning ahead to next year.” - -Marketing cursed. The CEO’s jaw clenched. Operations sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. We’d considered this possibility – Charlie had been vague when we asked about timelines – but we had hoped this would be temporary. Just until we paid the loan back. It was deflating to have that bubble burst. No matter how much success we gained, we would always be one stupid mistake away from losing everything. - -“What happened to Janice… could it be replicated?” It was Operations who voiced the question but it had been in all of our minds. The hardest part, we thought, would be getting Charlie there. But we were an agile team, adept at strategic planning. We’d solved bigger challenges on the path to launch. This was just one more glitch to debug. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}e stayed after the team left to plan. The first challenge was ensuring Charlie came alone. There would be too many variables if he brought Dave. Luckily, Finance had learned a bit about Dave’s habits, knew he spent two hours every Thursday night in an isolation tank. His unplug time, he called it; he always turned his phone off. - -The next challenge was ensuring the facility would be empty, but the Foreman’s cover for Janice’s removal proved a good excuse. We told the team we’d scheduled a maintenance check-up. Maybe a needless lie; once we said they’d get a paid night off no one seemed too interested in why. - -Thursday night – eight days before the launch – the CEO called Charlie and told him: we have a problem. It was our leak, he said; she’d gotten herself killed trying to steal our secrets. He started to describe the scene we’d discovered a few weeks prior but Charlie cut him off, said he’d meet us there in twenty minutes. We paced inside the door until his Cadillac pulled up. We let Charlie in and he took in the empty walkways, the robots working the lines. His nose twitched like he smelled bullshit. The CEO started to give him the tour but Charlie cut him off. - -“I don’t got all night,” he said. “Where’s this body of yours?” - -We walked him back, past the metal extruder room. The window into it was three-layer glass and we could still feel the heat as we passed it. Inside, molten metal flowed in vats. Charlie twitched an eyebrow, said, “Looks like that’d burn a body up. Why not throw her in there?” - -It was a question we hadn’t prepared for. Technology was quick on his feet, ready with words like *contamination* and *structural integrity* that made Charlie wave him off. - -We’d propped the ladder back up against the tank, the hatch open like an invitation. Finance and the CEO made a show of holding the ladder for Charlie to climb up. Technology pulled out his phone like checking the time. A few taps and one of the robots rolled into the room, its wheels inaudible over the low rumble of the extruder. It charged full-speed at the ladder’s base. Charlie’s eyes went wide and he toppled – but not the whole way in. His arm shot out, gripping the edge of the tank as the ladder clattered to the ground. The robot wheeled through, spun around, then disappeared back out the same door it had entered. - -“Motherfucker!” Charlie shouted. He eyed the ground, some ten feet below his dangling loafers. The fall might hurt but wouldn’t kill him. We met eyes, mentally switched tracks to plan B while Charlie ranted, “What the fuck kind of operation are you running here? Fucking homicidal robots rolling around the place?” - -While Charlie shouted at us to pick up that goddamn ladder before he broke an ankle – interspersed with his intention to turn that fucking robot into scrap – we turned and left. - -And maybe Charlie heard us activate the latch, locking him in. Surely he heard the revving-up hum of the decontamination system, saw the white clouds billowing from the vents. Probably the flashing red lights and blare of alarms told him he was in trouble even before his eyes started burning. But we didn’t see any of that. We followed the CEO straight through the assembly line floor and out the front door. It was a peaceful night. The air was cool, fragrant from the pines ringing the parking lot. We breathed deep, savoring the smell of life. - -It took four hours to air out the room after the decontamination. We drove Charlie’s Cadillac back to his office then passed the time reviewing launch day announcements, requesting last edits on the marketing deliverables. When the door locks released we went in to find Charlie with his limbs curled like a dead spider, swollen tongue jutting from his darkened lips. - -There was more of Charlie left to dispose of than we’d hoped but on the plus side we wouldn’t need to shut the line down to drain the tanks. And Charlie had given us a parting gift. His offhand comment when passing the metal extruder lingered in our minds; all of the backup methods we’d brainstormed to dispose of him had been far messier. - -At Technology’s orders, two robots veered from the line. They hoisted Charlie between them and carried him into the metal fabrication room. Technology hadn’t been completely bullshitting when he mentioned contamination. There was a slight risk, but it should be dispersed enough, he said, that the parts produced from this vat wouldn’t be compromised. Charlie would become screws and bolts, his cells worked into reinforcing beams and corner brackets. The important part was: no one would find him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he disappearance of somebody like Charlie Rainier doesn’t go unnoticed. But we weren’t the only ones who owed the Rainiers money, and the police didn’t know we were the last ones to see him alive. We were questioned and monitored but never accused. Honestly, we were too busy with the launch to worry about it much. nVent was a breakout hit. By the time things calmed down enough for us to step back and take a breath, the police had already moved on. - -But we hadn’t fooled everyone. At our next facility tour, the Foreman asked about the decontamination cycle with a knowing look, doubting our claim we’d activated it by accident. And Dave – Dave knew. Luckily, we weren’t the only ones who’d been under Charlie’s thumb, and Dave might have benefitted from his death more than anyone. The risk-reward just wasn’t there for private lending these days, he said. His vision for Rainier Investments was venture capital. Charlie had never been on-board but now the company was Dave’s and he grew into his new role at its helm. He still wore a smirk but its edges had sharpened, and he’d abandoned quippy comments in favor of blunt honesty. Everything, he told us, had a price. The price of Charlie’s life, apparently – and Dave’s silence, and an end to our creative accounting – was five hundred grand added to our balance plus 5% of the company’s shares when we had our IPO in the fall, which now seemed guaranteed to make a killing. - -It wasn’t a bad deal all things considered, we decided. Our trail of failures had taught us that sometimes a small loss paved the way to a bigger win. If anything, Finance said, we should be happy we’d reached the point we could call half a mil a small loss. - -“You’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” he said, or some other platitude, and we nodded along, half listening, already thinking ahead to what was next. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Downsizing** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269613838504933).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/editorial.md b/content/issue-40/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 09f6286f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,32 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Sanka_Coffee2_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 40** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -'*When it's late at night – and you're roaming around because you can't get to sleep – the slightest sound may take on a scary quality. You imagine things. Things you'd never think of – if you weren't so tired and edgy. But why – WHY – you ask yourself, are you so jumpy and wide awake? Could it be the coffee you had?'* Yes, once more our all-crime cover image is from a 1948 ad for decaffeinated Sanka Coffee painted by [Fritz Siebel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Siebel). Unfortunately, that makes us seventy-six years too late to enjoy [the Hilarious NEW Sanka Coffee Show – starring *funster* Danny Thomas](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanka_Coffee_-_Was_that_someone_at_the_window,_1948.jpg) – according to the copy…" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Welcome to the second annual *All Crime* issue of ***Mythaxis***! Not only that, but the capstone issue of my fifth year as editor of the zine, a fact that gives me no small flicker of pride. - -This time around we aim to give you a bit of everything. We have stories ranging from the modern to the classic mode, with Jess Simms' cut-throat corporate hostilities at one extreme and Arlen Feldman's escapades on the carnival circuit at the other. We arguably experiment with form: Michael Betterndorf's quartet of character studies tells a tetraptych tale; David Sheskin's break-neck bulletin reduces people to their base statistics and serves them up as a monoparagraphic mélange. And courtesy of Kirk Bueckert and P.R. O'Leary we have, respectively, a monster that surely cannot really be and the possibility of monstrousness we all have the potential to embody. - -Add to this a smattering of opinion, with Bill Ryan's latest longform essay and my own short reviews of other crime fic published around the web in 2024, and I'm sure you'll find something to keep your mind and hands off killing the in-laws during this festive season! So let me hold you back no more (or, as the case may be, *begin*) – go forth and enjoy! - -… - -…oh, hmm, hello, well, since you’re still here: I'm going to break with untold years of ***Mythaxis*** tradition and engage in a little shameless self-promotion. And the reason? Well, almost exactly one month ago, I learned that my first dedicated crime short story had been accepted into the forthcoming anthology **Motives Unknown**, featuring twelve stories by authors with a connection to the north of England. It's to be released by plucky indie publishers *Dead Ink Books* in May 2025, and you can check out the cover (and maybe even order a copy) *[here](https://deadinkbooks.com/product/motives-unknown-a-northern-crime-anthology/)*. I’m sure I wouldn’t be so crass as to review my own work in next year’s crime-fic round up… - -…well, *reasonably* sure. - -Anyway, I love crime writing, and it's as much a privilege to add to what's out there personally as it is to present to you the pieces in this very issue by our talented contributors. So enough from me, and over to them! diff --git a/content/issue-40/the-amazing-mermaid.md b/content/issue-40/the-amazing-mermaid.md deleted file mode 100644 index f9e626e4..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/the-amazing-mermaid.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,380 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Amazing Mermaid" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Arlen Feldman -copyright: '© Arlen Feldman 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "From classic greats like Freaks and Nightmare Alley we get the enticing notion of the travelling carnival as a home to the abandoned, the desperate, the reviled, the unloved: a found family of outsiders, who in turn treat as outsiders the punters they lure in with promises of salacious thrills. Arlen Feldmen mines these rich depths to strike a tragic vein, as one person’s opportunity to build a new life only leaves ’em wanting more…" - -image: images/Mermaid10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Kuriakose John](https://www.pexels.com/photo/mural-of-siren-12810768/) and [Ann H](https://www.pexels.com/photo/striped-circus-tent-under-blue-sky-28679253/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i40/3.The.Amazing.Mermaid.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-amazing-mermaid -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}“C{{}}an you dance?” - -Betty’s heart sank. “I thought we just had to hold still and pose?” - -“Depends on the town,” said Mr. Brovost. “Some of them don’t allow you to move at all – then it’s ‘art’. Other places, you can get away with just about anything. We charge more in those places. A few, dancing’s all that’s allowed.” - -“Oh.” Betty hadn’t really thought through exactly what they’d want her to do – just that it was a chance to get away from home. She was more or less willing to pose in the carnival sideshow, but dancing would be awfully tough. “I could shimmy a little. Maybe.” - -This got a frown from Mr. Brovost. The man was large, with a bushy black mustache under a thick red nose. “Most girls can dance. Something wrong with you?” - -And then she had to show him. Honestly, as terrified as she was about taking off her top, she’d far rather do that than show him her leg, which was too skinny and bent the wrong way. - -“Polio?” he asked, and Betty nodded miserably. “Sorry, lass,” he said, not unkindly, “but it’s a nudie-show. The gents don’t want to see that sort of thing.” - -She wasn’t going to cry. She’d figure out another way to get away. She nodded to Mr. Brovost, got painfully to her feet, and made her way to the wagon’s exit. - -“You know,” said Brovost, “we’re not the only sideshow. There’s the Ten-In-One…” - -The tent where Brovost directed her was dirty-white and torn in several places. She made her way around the side. Wagons, cars, and trucks were parked randomly around an open area, along with a handful of small tents. The remains of a fire were still smoldering in a pit in the center. - -She spotted a man leaning against one of the trucks. He was wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigarette, but his hair was made up of thick ropes that dangled around his dark face. Betty looked about for anyone else to talk to, but he was the only one there. - -“Can I help you, miss?” he said. His voice was deep and resonant, but with a lilting accent. - -Betty took a deep breath. “Mr. Brovost from the Model Show sent me over. He thought that maybe… maybe you could give me a job?” - -The man arched an eyebrow at her. “You do know what sort of a show we are?” - -She nodded miserably. “You’re the freaks, right?” - -The man winced, but nodded once. “There are two types of performers in our show,” he said in that beautifully rolling voice. “Those with a particular skill, like sword swallowing or breathing fire. And those who are *different*, who have something to show to the audience. So, which are you?” - -For the second time that day, Betty found herself showing off her withered leg. The man walked around her, examining the limb like a connoisseur, then shook his head. - -“It is sad,” he said, “but it is not unusual.” - -Betty just stood there. Earlier, she had been ashamed for not being normal. Now she was ashamed for being *too* normal. - -The man with the wild hair stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Can you swim?” - -Of all the questions he might have asked her, she hadn’t expected that one. “Uh, y-yes. I used to swim all the time. When I was a girl they had me swimming as therapy for…” she indicated her leg. - -“Come with me then. There may be something for you here.” - -The man turned and headed towards a closed-top truck, slowing when he saw how awkwardly Betty moved, an awkward shuffle to avoid putting too much weight on her bad leg. He waited patiently for her to catch up. - -“I’m Clarke,” he said. “And, also, I am the *Wild Man of Borneo*, although I will admit that I am not quite sure where Borneo is.” - -Betty almost smiled at this. - -Clarke started digging around in the back of the truck. There were a few loud thumps before he pulled down a heavy trunk. “This belonged to a girl named Lana, who is no longer with us. She got married, and now pretends she was never here.” He unbuckled the straps on the trunk and flipped it open. Betty leaned forward eagerly to see what was inside, then leaned away. There was a strong smell of mildew and wet things never properly dried. - -Clarke didn’t seem bothered by the smell. He started pulling items out of the trunk. There were a series of skimpy halter-tops, and then two strange-shaped things she didn’t recognize. - -“Lana was our mermaid,” said Clarke, and suddenly Betty could identify the garments – they were tails. “She used to wear this one.” - -He held it out to her, and she took it. It was the right shape, but very badly sewn. Even Betty, who could barely put on a button, could see the terrible stitching. - -“It’s the wrong shape,” she said. - -Clarke nodded approvingly. “Lana made this herself. She couldn’t fit in the older one. But maybe, with your leg…?” He held up the second tail. - -Except for the general shape, it was completely different from the first. It was longer and thinner and much better made, and was covered in so many sequins it glimmered like real fish scales. The fin at the end split like a dolphin’s tail. - -It also smelled of mildew. - -“What… what would I have to do?” - -“Well, we have a tank that we fill with water. You put on the tail and the top. Lana just waved. Truth to tell, I think she could not swim. But if you could dive under the water and smile, that would be enough, no?” - -When she’d come to the carnival, she thought that she’d have to stand in a tent behind a gauze curtain, wearing almost nothing while men leered at her. But there would have been other girls around her doing the same thing. Was this better? Worse? At least it meant she could get away. - -“I’ll try it.” - -Clarke smiled at her. “That’s the spirit. I’ll get a couple of the canvas boys to clean and prepare the tank. You can do a little test before the first show tonight.” - -He started to walk off just as a wave of panic hit her. She wanted to call him back, to tell him she’d changed her mind, but she couldn’t find her voice. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t took a couple of hours for the tank to fill. It was hidden behind a curtain so that the audience wouldn’t see it until it was Betty’s turn. It also made a little area for her to change in private. One of the halter tops fit her well. She’d worn a top like this to the beach before, so was pretty much okay with it. - -When she’d taken charge of the two tails, the second one – the nicer one – seemed unexpectedly heavy, like she’d sink right to the bottom. The first one was at least lighter, so she tried that on first, but it was way too big. She used some safety pins to make it stay up, but that made it bunch around her waist. It just looked ridiculous. And there were several holes in it. If she jumped into the tank, the whole tail would fill up with water and probably slip right off! - -It was no good, she’d have to try the other one. The tail had been out of the trunk for a while now, so the mildew smell wasn’t as bad, which helped. Sitting in a chair, she lifted up her bad leg and shoved it inside, then slipped her normal leg in after it and wriggled until the tail came all the way up to her waist. Clarke had been right, it was a tight fit. Whoever it had originally been made for must have been tiny – or had also had only one good leg. - -She moved her legs experimentally, and it looked convincing, although a little too much like a fish out of water. She wouldn’t really know how it would work until she got into the tank. - -Her changing area was against the back of the tank, which was painted on the other side with an underwater scene so no one could see all the way through. The tank itself wasn’t huge – eight feet tall and maybe twelve feet wide but only three or four feet front to back, with a ladder for her to climb to get in. - -But a ladder only works if you have feet. - -Betty’s arms were strong – they had to be to make up for her bad leg – so she grabbed a rung and lifted herself off the chair, then managed to heave herself up onto another rung before slipping and landing loudly and painfully on her rump, sending the chair flying. - -“Are you okay?” - -She looked up to see a tall man standing over her. He was handsome, with an Errol Flynn-style pencil mustache, and dark, slicked-back hair. Betty straightened herself up as best she could before answering. - -“I think I’m okay.” She tried to maneuver herself, but couldn’t move in the tail, and could hardly take it off with just her panties underneath. Now she really was a fish out of water. - -“If you will permit me, maybe I can help?” The man righted the chair, then bent down, put one arm behind her back, another under her tail, lifting her like she was a child and setting her down on the seat. - -“I’m Harry,” he said, holding out a hand for her to shake. - -She took it, feeling herself blush. “Uh, nice to meet you. I’m Betty.” - -“Pleasure,” he said. - -“What do you do here, Harry?” - -“I’m the sword swallower.” - -Betty’s eyes went wide. She’d heard of sword swallowing. It sounded dangerous. - -“I’m the new mermaid,” she said. “Or hope to be, if I can get into the tank.” - -His chuckle was friendly, with her, not at her, and she managed to smile back. - -“Harry?” someone called at that moment. The curtain between them and the world twitched, then jerked apart far enough for a face to appear – a smooth, sensual face in a cloud of artfully curled bottle-blonde hair. “Harry, what are you doing back here?” - -Betty watched as a glamorous vision slipped through to join them, all legs and frills and bodice and bosom, and rather less of the frills and the bodice than the rest. - -“Oh,” the woman said. “You’re fishing, I guess.” - -Betty blushed even redder. - -“You should be more welcoming, Ruth,” Harry said in a chiding if affectionate tone. - -“And you should be on stage in a good thirty seconds,” Ruth replied. “Unless you want Clarke to stick you with those swords instead of swallowing them.” She cast a dismissive eye over Betty once more. “Break a fin,” she added, then swept out the way she came. - -“My audience awaits,” Harry said, smiling. “And, perhaps you should wait until you are at the top of the ladder before putting on your tail?” - -Betty tried for another smile. “I’ll try that next time. And thanks.” - -Harry bowed, a twinkle in his eye, and pushed his way out through the curtain. - -The logistics were still tricky. Betty wriggled out of the tail, draped it over the top of the tank, then hopped and tugged herself up the ladder. She hesitated at the top – if the curtain opened at the wrong moment she’d be entirely exposed. But she needed this job, needed to get away. She took a deep breath and swung herself over the top of the tank. - -Getting the tail on the second time was a little easier, even sitting on the tiny platform above the tank. It was even a bit more comfortable, and the seam where it met her own skin was almost invisible. She flicked the tail around a bit, then started to lower herself into the water. - -The water was freezing. She gasped, then forced herself to drop down until she was just holding on with one hand. Whoever had made the tail knew their business – almost no water was getting inside, which meant she wasn’t going to be dragged down to the bottom to drown. - -She took a deep breath, just in case, then let go. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t was fine. Lovely, really, as she got used to the temperature. In the water, it didn’t matter about her leg, and wearing the tail, she couldn’t even see the twisted limb. She laughed out loud, then took another deep breath and dove towards the bottom of the tank. - -There was nothing really to see – just the thick scratched glass. Because the curtain was pulled, she couldn’t even look out into the big tent. But it didn’t matter. For the first time in months – years, maybe – she felt content. - -The only problem was that the tank was so small. Well, it wasn’t cramped like a closet, but there was only enough depth to maybe turn a summersault without quite hitting the bottom, to stretch out her tail to one side or the other. But she felt light in the water. Almost as graceful as that mean showgirl. - -She looked up and saw Clarke’s head and torso peering down at her. He must have been standing on the ladder. Reluctantly, she swam up and broke the surface. - -Clarke was grinning. “Well, I think that you might just do.” - -She grinned back. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t didn’t take long to fall into a routine. They did two, maybe three shows a night. Betty would get into the tank a few minutes before the show started, then when the curtain opened she’d drift and wave and smile and dive, holding her breath to do flips and spins. As a finale, she’d turn upside-down and slap her tail against the water, splashing the first row of the audience. As shy as she normally was, when she got in the tank all that washed away. She basked in the whoops and whistles from the crowd. - -And then the carnival would move on to a new town. Betty got happier and happier the further she got from her old home. Clarke managed the show when he wasn’t being the Wild Man of Borneo, and had lent her the use of an old tent and sleeping bag – which had also belonged to Lana, the last mermaid. Only a tent. But also a place of her own. - -She got along well with most of the other performers. The group would often eat together around a big fire. There was Judy, the bearded lady. A dwarf couple called Max and Daisie. A strong-man, an escape-artist, a snake-charmer, and a woman named Maureen covered neck-to-toe with tattoos, who had come from London and whose accent was mostly unintelligible to Betty. There was also a two-headed goat named Gertie. - -And then there was Harry, the sword-swallower. - -She wanted to ask Harry what he’d been before he joined the sideshow, but she’d learned quickly that you never asked a carny their real name, or about their past, unless they volunteered the information. - -Because she was in the tank during the show, she never got to see his actual performance, but she loved watching him rehearse. He would carefully wipe down one of his swords, throw back his head, and swallow it until only the hilt was sticking out of his mouth. He held the pose for a moment, then pulled the sword out and wiped it down again. - -He followed the first with bigger swords, or strings of razor blades, Betty unable to keep from gasping every time, and at the end she applauded and he bowed to his audience of one with a wink. - -“I’ll never get used to seeing that,” she told him one day. “It seems impossible.” - -“Just lots of practice. Like swimming with a mermaid tale, I expect.” - -“Oh, that’s mostly just posing. It’s not like a real skill.” - -Harry turned to her and looked her in the eyes. “It is real the way you do it. Don’t ever talk yourself down.” - -She couldn’t remember anyone ever telling her something like that. She smiled shyly, trying not to cry, and gave a quick nod, which got her another wink, but then he started packing up his things. - -“I’m afraid I have to go,” he said, apologetically. “Ruth is waiting for me.” - -Betty nodded. “Have a good time,” she said. She was *almost* sure she’d kept her voice even and upbeat when she’d said it. - -That evening, Betty leaned back against a wagon’s wheel, listening to the others talk about old acts, including a human ostrich who would swallow and then regurgitate live guinea pigs, a cowboy named Duke who did rope tricks, and a ‘mirrored lady’ with reflecting skin. After a while, Max started strumming a child-sized guitar. - -Betty sighed contentedly. “This is the perfect life.” - -“Is,” said The Incredible Samson, the show’s strong man. “Sleep ’til noon, get adoration of crowd, then rest in company of good folk.” Most of the others nodded in agreement, although Clarke did not. He was always worried about money and the other details of the show. And Harry didn’t, because he wasn’t there that night. He seemed to disappear most evenings. - -Betty guessed she knew where. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he next day was moving day. The big tent came apart in strips that were laced together, her tank was taken apart and wrapped carefully in old blankets, and everything was loaded into the trucks. This was a ‘big jump’ of almost two-hundred miles. It was miraculous to see everything come back together in a new lot. Saturday they were in one town, Sunday in another, fresh sawdust spread on the ground, ready for Monday’s show. - -But this new lot had a major problem – no water. The advance man hadn’t been able to find a spot with a proper water supply. There was a lot of cursing from everyone who needed to wash or cook anything, but it also meant that there was no way to fill the tank. - -So, for the first time, Betty got to watch the whole event, starting with the free mini-show – the *bally* – on the stage out front of the tent. Their Talker would gather a *tip* – the carny term for a crowd – while Harry and some of the others did little bits from their acts. - -All of the acts were impressive, but Betty only had eyes for Harry. He wiped down a silver blade, inserted it a good twenty inches down his throat, to the cheers and gasps of the crowd, then pulled it out again, and when he took his bow he winked right at her. - -She winked back, then he made way for Samson, who took a length of iron rebar and tied it in a knot. Soon the Talker was easing the audience towards the real show, but as Betty joined the back of the crowd someone slammed into her from behind, knocking her to the ground. - -She looked up to find Ruth sneering down at her. - -“You should be more careful,” she said. “I guess you were looking in the wrong place.” She eyed Harry proprietarily, then stalked away, leaving Betty to pull herself painfully to her feet. - -Betty slipped into the show anyway, her limp suddenly worse. All the swimming had made her weak leg stronger than it had been in years, but now it just hurt. She wondered how Harry could be with someone like that. Although it seemed incredible that he hadn’t seen what Ruth did, he had apparently missed the whole thing, because that evening he put on a thrilling show. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he next lot was much better. Plenty of water, pumped out of a lake right next to the site. - -The morning after the show, most everyone headed to the lake. When Harry appeared he already had his arm around Ruth, which for Betty was just one more reminder where he spent all his evenings. - -Betty waited until everyone else had gone, then took her tail out of the trunk and walked a longer route to an area out of sight of the others. Ever since she had first entered the tank, she’d been dying to get into a bigger body of water, and now was her chance. - -After so much practice, it took her no time at all to get the tail on. She slithered awkwardly over some rocks and then into the water. - -It was glorious. - -She’d always been a strong swimmer, and after the polio her arms had made up for her leg, but with all the extra practice in the tank she was better than she’d ever been. She sliced through the water, the tail propelling her along as if it really was a part of her, and she went out maybe two hundred yards before turning. - -Her friends from the Ten-In-One were on the lake shore, several, including Harry, in the water splashing about. Betty swam toward them, diving below the surface when she got close, then came up right in front of Harry and splashed him full in the face. - -“Why you little—” He splashed her back, a big grin on his face. She slapped her tail against the water, this time soaking not just Harry, but Maureen and Samson too, who joined in, everyone splashing each other randomly. - -“Oh, Harry?” The call came from the shore, shrill and loud: Ruth, hands on her hips, looking murderous. - -Harry blushed, mumbled something, then headed back to the shore. As soon as he was out of the water, she put her arm around him. “Let’s go for a *walk*,” she said, still using the shrill voice despite Harry standing right next to her. - -Betty watched from the water as he put his arm around the girl’s shoulders and led her away. She was wearing shorts, and her legs were tanned and perfectly formed. - -Betty had never hated anyone so much in her life. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}etty was now one of the top draws for the Ten-in-One. Clark had a banner made which showed someone that looked not *entirely* unlike Betty, although significantly better endowed. In the painting, she was sitting on a rock next to a lighthouse, her tail merging into her torso, and a come-hither look on her face that was just this side of indecent. Betty had surreptitiously tried to imitate the look, but with no luck. - -She thought she’d never been as happy in her life, surrounded by people she genuinely cared about – with one exception – and who seemed genuinely to care about her. It was as unlike her home as she could imagine. - -It was on the next big jump that she saw *it* for the first time. She was squeezed in the back of one of the trucks, Samson on one side of her, Max and Daisie on the other holding hands. They crested a hill and, suddenly, there it was – the Atlantic Ocean. - -Betty gasped at the sight. Could there really be that much water in the world? - -Samson put a massive hand on her knee, her proper knee. “Is a lot rougher than lake,” he said. “I know you mermaid and all, but don’t go out by self.” - -She laughed and patted his hand. But it wasn’t like she had anyone else to go with, did she? Max and Dasie had each other, but there was no *merman* to go swimming with. No man at all. She sighed and stared out at the water until it disappeared from view around a bend in the road. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here was never a show on Sundays thanks to the blue laws, so after setting up camp everyone was lounging about instead of preparing to perform. Betty wasn’t the only one hearing the call of the sea, but the sight of Ruth and the other model show girls heading for the beach was enough to stop her in her tracks. She still went to her tent and grabbed the little swimming costume she wore under her tail, but then slipped out quickly, hoping no one else would see her, although she wasn’t exactly sure why. - -Up close, the ocean was even more amazing, stretching out forever. Samson had been right – it was a lot rougher, with big waves slamming into the beach. She should have been terrified, would have been a few months ago. But now, she was filled with excitement. - -After a while, she turned and was amazed to see how far she’d come, the beach and dunes barely visible in the distance. She was a bit tired, but the salty ocean water was so buoyant – perhaps she could keep going a little further? But no, Samson was right, she should be careful. She took one last look out to sea, then started back towards the shore, her mind pleasantly blank of any thoughts other than to stroke her arms, to kick one leg, the other drawn behind her and gently lifted by the swell. - -It was good she’d turned around when she did. By the time she got close to the beach, her arms and legs were starting to ache a little, and she hadn’t realized how far the tide had dragged her sideways. The beach in front was completely different from the one where she’d left her clothes. It was a small patch of sand surrounded by rocks. And it wasn’t empty – there were the girls from the model show, including Ruth. - -She was too tired to swim far against the current, but there was no way she was getting out in front of Ruth. She made for another sandy area on the other side of the rocks where she could stay out of their sight. Betty forced herself to swim past the rocks then struggled through the breakers, finally laying panting in the sand as smaller waves washed over her. - -She could hear the voices of the other girls quite clearly. They were talking about men, using words and phrases that Betty was shocked to hear. Most were getting ready to head back to the site for lunch, but Ruth announced she was staying to work on her tan. - -“Always keeping Harry happy,” one of the girls said. “How good is he with his sword?” - -The others all giggled. - -“Oh, he’s pretty damn good,” said Ruth with a chuckle. “But it ain’t serious. He don’t have no prospects. Not like Martin. Martin’s making a fortune with his concession stand. We’re just waiting for the right town, then we’re going to get married and leave the carnival for good. And I’ll be Mrs. Martin Hofstetter.” - -There was a round of laughter from the other girls. Betty just sat there, listening to the sounds of their departure. Thinking of the little insults, and those not so little. Thinking of how nice Harry was, and how horrible that ugly-hearted woman was. How happy he could be with her instead, if only he knew what she knew. - -It took Betty a while to find a way through the rocks, her anger building as she struggled, her leg protesting every uneven step. But she finally found an route and stood looking down on Ruth, lying back on a towel in the sun. - -“How could you?” - -Ruth started, but when she saw Betty her lips curled into a smile. “Why, if it ain’t Miss Gimpy, the Human Fish.” - -Betty glared at her. “You’re two-timing Harry.” - -“Oh, I don’t think Harry thinks we’re exclusive,” said Ruth, leaning on her elbows and looking up at Betty as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “But I’ll tell you this. Even after I’m gone, he ain’t going ta be interested in you. He needs a *whole* woman.” - -Betty had no memory of picking up the rock, but now she raised it in her hand, bigger than her fist. - -Ruth’s eyes grew wide behind her dark glasses. “You put that down, you crazy—” - -The rock hit her in the hip and Ruth let out a scream of pain, rolling off the towel and scrambling to her feet, then falling on her face with a moan as her leg folded under her. - -Ruth pushed herself up again, wailing breathlessly and hobbling away down the slope of the beach. Betty stooped to pick up the rock again, weighing it in her palm. She watched as Ruth stumbled into the first of the breaking waves, spluttering on her knees in a cloud of spray, and then she followed, welcoming the water as it lapped at her feet. - -Later, as she swam against the current towards the beach where her clothes were waiting, she heard a distant cry from behind her. She didn’t recognise the voice. But it wasn’t Ruth. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t was a townie who’d found the body. The cops swarmed the carnival, questioning everyone. No one had told them anything – no one had heard anything, seen anything. More carny rules that Betty learned: you don’t talk to outsiders. And you *never* talk to cops. - -But one of the models let slip that Ruth had been seeing Harry, so the cops arrested him and took him away. - -The rest of the acts from the Ten-In-One gathered around their campsite, no one speaking. Betty forced herself to go out there as well, but she couldn’t stop crying. Clarke had handed her a handkerchief, and she was holding onto it for dear life. - -Finally, Maureen asked Clarke if there would even be a show tomorrow, and Clarke sighed. “Yes, there’ll be a show, and we’ll probably have double the take.” - -“But they can’t really believe Harry did anything, can they?” said Daisy. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” - -“Cops just care they got someone,” said Samson. “And he has swords. Good enough.” - -“But she wasn’t killed with a sword,” said Betty, unable to stop herself. - -“No?” Samson shrugged. “Don’t matter to cops.” - -Betty struggled to her feet and made her way into the main tent and the private little area behind the empty tank. There in the shadows she closed her eyes. She couldn’t let Harry get punished for something he hadn’t done. She’d have to turn herself in. But she was terrified. Although the cops might not even believe her. And she couldn’t bear the thought of how her friends would look at her. - -The curtains parted behind her. “Are you alright, Betty?” It was Clarke. - -She looked up at him, unable to speak. She wanted to tell him that it was all her fault. That she hadn’t meant to. That she’d do anything to help Harry. But her throat wouldn’t work. He held out his arms, and she let him hug her, tears pouring down her cheeks. - -“I know you like Harry,” he said gently. “You don’t have to go on tonight, if you don’t want to. We’ll make do.” - -She shook her head. “There’s rules for how we treat carnies, right?” she asked. “Don’t… don’t screw things up for one of our own, or something?” - -Clarke grunted. “Carnies have been feuding with each other for as long as they’ve existed, I reckon. But maybe there’s something like that.” - -“Harry didn’t kill her.” - -“I know, girl.” - -“I know too.” - -She felt Clarke’s embrace change, stiffen a little. She let him go and stepped back. He was looking at her, more or less the way she’d imagined. Her home was going away. - -“Ah, Betty,” he started, “why would you—” Then he stopped, knowing. “Ah.” - -“I’ll leave,” she said, “right now. Just, give me a little time before you make the call. You’ll tell them? The police? Make sure they know it wasn’t Harry. And tell him… I’m sorry.” - -He sighed. “Collect your things. And get some food too. I’ll give you an hour. I don’t know where you can go, but…” - -She nodded, then turned and awkwardly started towards her little tent. Clarke watched for a bit, then said, “Perhaps I give you two hours?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}etty took all her things so the police would think she’d run, but there was only one that she was going to take with her. Everything else she left in the rocks by the beach. - -She looked out over the endless, shifting expanse for a long while, then got as close to the waves as she could before putting on the tail. It was tricky with the water coming in and out, the wet sand sucking at her bottom. Trickier still to get past the waves. But then the tail made it easier to move, the swells lifting her as she went out further and further. - -The sun was beginning to set and there was a golden path burned into the water in front of her. - -Who knows, she thought, maybe I can make it to the other side. - -The mermaid began to swim. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Amazing Mermaid** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269612648505052).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.md b/content/issue-40/the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7762f787..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,28 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- David Sheskin -copyright: '© David Sheskin 2024 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Sometimes you hear the voice of a story in your head as you're reading. Never was there a stronger example of that magic than David Sheskin's short, sly, wall-of-text yarn, which packs more into a piece of flash fiction than words have any right to. For more evidence, I give you our audio version: passed from editor to producer with narry a note, and it sounds exactly the way I imagined it." - -image: images/VanishingGirlTrick10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/rock-formation-414110/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i40/2.The.Vanishing.Diminutive.Girl.Trick.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}A{{}} 36-year-old seven-foot two-inch Mennonite magician named Clyde pulls an obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white-spotted, one-eyed rabbit out of a gray velour tophat at a birthday party for a five-year-old biracial child attended by four Caucasian, three African American, one Native American, and two Asian American children. Before Clyde can restrain the rabbit, it attacks and maims three of the children. The next day two police officers – one an emigre from Samoa with a disfiguring strawberry birth mark and the other a bipolar Hispanic female who is addicted to cough syrup and coffee enemas – arrest Clyde while he is performing in front of an inner city Girl Scout troop comprised of Sikh and Hindu preadolescents. Prior to his arraignment Clyde is assigned a court-appointed 62-year-old heavily tattooed Muslim lawyer who is both an Ebola and cancer survivor. The lawyer has Clyde evaluated by a 34-year-old celibate former Buddhist monk-turned-psychiatrist who for the past year has been contemplating sex reversion surgery. The psychiatrist diagnoses Clyde with posttraumatic stress disorder, having discovered that while cutting the cake at his seventh birthday party he was stung more than two hundred times by a swarm of killer bees, which it was later ascertained had come from a nest in a storage container filled with oregano, cinnamon, and an assortment of illicit drugs in the hold of a cargo ship that six months earlier had been commandeered by Somalian pirates and after being pillaged and gutted eventually ran aground off the coast of Florida not more than forty miles from Clyde’s house. After months of pretrial negotiations between the prosecution and defense, a thrice-divorced geriatric judge of mixed Asian and Aborigine ancestry who all his life had been plagued with chronic halitosis and who in his youth had dabbled in black magic arrives at a compromise that allows Clyde to plead guilty to three counts of reckless endangerment, and sentences him to one hundred hours of community service, during which time he is assigned to teach magic to high-risk adolescents confined to a secure psychiatric facility. On the first day of his community service, Clyde becomes enamored of one of the patients, a four-foot two-inch seventy-five-pound 16-year-old émigré from Albania named Connie, who one afternoon during a moment of intimacy confides that besides having a long history of setting fires and torturing animals for as long as she can remember she has had a severe addiction to eating glass. On the last day of his community service, a hopelessly besotted Clyde announces to an assembly of students and staff that he will demonstrate “The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick” and on asking for a volunteer Connie raises her hand, removes her *Hello Kitty* earrings and hijab, and comes up onto the stage and positions herself upright in an ornate wooden coffin that Clyde had hauled to the facility in a hearse he borrowed from the local funeral home. Closing the coffin and sealing it shut with masking tape, Clyde yells out “Abracadabra” followed by two flamboyant sweeps of the gaudy black cape he wears during all of his performances, and after a tension-filled minute unseals the coffin which to the astonishment of everyone is now empty. As the audience “Oohs” and “Ahs” Clyde executes a double backflip while simultaneously sprinkling into the air some sort of magic dust that blurs everybody’s vision as well as causing them to sneeze uncontrollably, and as all this is going on Clyde discretely ducks out of the building where he is joined by Connie, and for the next year and a half the two of them are not seen anywhere until one afternoon a vacationing husband-and-wife podcasting team who are aficionados of unsolved mysteries sight the phantom couple sharing a mint chocolate chip icecream cone and canoodling on the observation deck of the Grand Canyon. Within thirty minutes the fugitive couple is surrounded by an assemblage of National Park police and Arizona state troopers, which inspires Clyde to lift his diminutive companion up off the ground onto his shoulders after which he yells out “Hocus Pocus” apparently causing the two of them begin to glow incandescently and slowly ascend upwards until they come to rest at least one hundred meters above the horseshoe-shaped deck of the canyon. For the better part of an hour the shimmering couple levitate like some sort of superheated UFO, continuing to ignore repeated appeals to come back down to earth, when all of a sudden one of the state troopers (who it is later learned had not but should have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when he was eight years old) takes it upon himself to fire a fusillade of bullets up into the air, which has no effect except that Clyde begins to chant in a deep and alien baritone voice some sort of gibberish so loud and unique in pitch that it triggers a 6.2 magnitude earthquake. As pandemonium reigns below Clyde pulls out from under his by now fiery red cape what appears to be the very same obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white-spotted, one-eyed rabbit whose outburst two years ago seemingly has triggered this whole unfortunate chain of events. After a while Clyde, Connie, and the now literally incandescent rabbit appear to collapse into some sort of fulgent amorphous mass which starts to rotate rapidly while shooting off a profusion of sparks and debris and suddenly rockets upwards into space before executing a semicircular turn and plunging toward the bottom of the canyon where it explodes with an ear-splitting intensity that culminates in an eerie-colored mushroom-shaped cloud that hovers above not only the Grand Canyon but the entire Western United States for the better part of a year. Eighteen months later when it is finally deemed safe to descend to the bottom of the canyon, the only thing a search party of ten volunteers attired in hazmat suits can find is Clyde’s gaudy black cape, Connie’s *Hello Kitty* earrings, and a remarkably intact and healthy obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white spotted, one-eyed rabbit who has to be subdued with five heavy-duty cartridges from a tranquilizer gun. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269613185171665).* diff --git a/content/issue-40/wendigo.md b/content/issue-40/wendigo.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1f60b714..00000000 --- a/content/issue-40/wendigo.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,266 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Wendigo" -date: 2024-12-27 -issue: Issue 40 - -genres: -- crime -authors: -- Kirk Bueckert -copyright: '© Kirk Bueckert 2024 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "One of the things the editor enjoys in a good horror story is uncertainty regarding the how real the horror is. Was Jack Torrance haunted by the Overlook Hotel, or merely an unstable man descending into murderous psychopathy? Stripped of its supernatural trappings The Shining would be a crime story - and here Kirk Bueckert gives us a similarly borderline case study to consider." - -image: images/Wendigo10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by [Prayatna Maharjan](https://www.pexels.com/photo/dramatic-black-and-white-eye-close-up-29651661/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i40/6.Wendigo.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: wendigo -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}H{{}}aving spent many a long and lonely winter’s night in the drunk tank of a dead-end town called Ghost River, Brandon Delaney wakens unsurprised to discover yet another cage. He lifts his head from the pinewood bench and wipes the mucus from his nose, the drool from the whiskers on his chin. His ribs burn red-hot with some nameless pain. Whichever young deputy found him slumped over in the snowbank behind The Blind Pig must have roused him with a jackbooted kick. He looks with clouded eyes around at the cinderblock room. Four windowless walls and two barred cells and a bolted steel door in the wall between them. A single naked lightbulb sputters overhead. He does not recognize this place. There comes a voice from the opposite cell: “Brother, you’re on some thin ice now.” - -It was the summer of his twenty-seventh birthday when he set out from Fort McMurray. Never again would he see the sprawling tar pits, the columns of black smoke out on the horizon. Wandering wayward pilgrim, Eastbound aboard a Greyhound bus. This was a man in charge of his own destiny. The bus was headed for Treaty 6 Territory: land of the Cree, Métis, Ojibwe, Saulteaux, Nakota, Dene. Land of the Living Skies. That was what the billboard in the Greyhound headlights read. Welcome to the Land of the Livings Skies. His mother had grown up on these prairies under that same electric-green aurora. Perhaps her memory was what beckoned to him. Scanning the roadside in the predawn dark, Brandon thought of hunters chasing bison across a wild and stormy plain to the precipice of all creation. - -“He found you there,” the voice continues. “Lost and alone in the dark. The pale demon. He smell’d you on the wind.” - -Brandon turns his head and spits on the floor. His mouth tastes like cigarette smoke and whiskey vomit and blood. “You wouldn’t happen to have an extra smoke handy,” he says, “would you?” - -“I never thought things would end like this,” the stranger goes on. “Always thought I’d go down in a blaze of glory. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Well, shit. Ain’t nothin’ glorious about Saskatchewan.” - -Brandon squints between the bars. “Do I know you?” - -The stranger smiles a too-wide smile. A yellow crescent moon in the dark of the cell. “Don’t remember me, huh? Well, I remember you. We met last night at the roadhouse. You’re the Zamboni man.” The words tumble from his mouth in a syrupy drawl. “Zam-BO-nee man. I say you’re on some thin ice now. I know who you are and I know what you’ve done. The man upstairs, he knows too.” - -“The man upstairs. Who do you mean? The nightwatchman? Or God Almighty?” - -“The pale demon. Are you even listenin’ to me?” - -“I’ve been listening to a lot of craziness about devils and the like. You’ll forgive me if I’m not particularly well-versed on the subject. Now, are you gonna give me a cigarette or not?” - -The stranger pitches a half-crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds between the bars. “That’s my last one.” - -Brandon picks up the pack from the floor. “Cheers, Mister…?” - -“The name’s Lewis. Lewis Manx.” - -“Much obliged, Lewis.” Brandon pats himself down for a lighter or a book of matches. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” - -“No, sir. I’m just passin’ through.” - -The flare of a match, then the crackle. “We met at the roadhouse, huh?” - -“Last night. At the bar.” - -“Well, shit. What kind of trouble did we get into, then?” - -“We talked. We talked for a very long time.” - -“Riveting stuff, I’m sure. What did we talk about?” - -“Oh, we talked about the weather. We talked about the game. We talked about your dead mama.” - -Brandon pulls hard on Lewis’s last cigarette. “Nah. See, now I know you have me confused with someone else.” - -“Why do you say that?” - -“My mother’s not dead. She lives on the West Coast. Ran out when I was just a baby.” - -“She played the pipe organ at Sunday services.” - -“I wouldn’t know anything about that.” - -“Then, one day, your daddy killed her dead. Sunk her body to the bottom of a pond.” - -Brandon’s head jerks up. “What the hell did you just say?” - -“What I said was: you told me your daddy killed your mama. Bludgeoned her to death with a length of pipe and sunk her in the pond behind the house.” - -Brandon grinds out the filter on the floor of his cell. “You’re out of your mind, Mister.” - -“Manx. The name’s—” - -“Lewis Manx, yeah, you told me. Listen, Lewis. Maybe we just sit here quiet-like until the guard comes down to let one of us go. Probably me. More likely you’re headed for the nuthouse. What do you say to that?” - -“You don’t get it, do you? You and I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” - -“I’m going back to sleep. Enjoy the booby hatch, Lewis.” - -“Fine, you don’t remember me. But I reckon you must remember the young lady.” - -Brandon pinches the bridge of his nose. “Which young lady?” - -“The young lady from last night. What was her name? Lydia? Loretta? Yolanda?” - -Memories dance in slow circles through the haze of his delirium. “No,” he says. “No, not that.” Smell of drugstore perfume and cold, sour sweat. - -“Lola,” he says. “Her name was Lola.” - -He had stopped in late at The Blind Pig, ordered Pabst Blue Ribbon with a side of Jack Daniels. “P.B. and J” Peggy called it. Peggy was the kind of bartender who called everyone “darling” or “honey” with a wink and a smile. A string of red and green Christmas bulbs had been strung out above the wood where Brandon drank alone as per his nightly custom. The buzzing wires of a portable space-heater, which did little thwart the chill, augmented their meager light from the corner of the room. He set his varsity hockey ring down on the wood. His knuckles were swollen, still bloody from lambasting the wall of his kitchen. He consulted the subtle engraving like something written above a tomb. - -He was angry that night. Angry about his custodial job down at the municipal skating rink which paid so little, the gas bills unpaid altogether, the pipes below his trailer now frozen as a result. Most of all he was angry that, in light of all this, the only thing Brandon Delaney could think to do was have a drink. - -“Do you want another one, honey?” - -He nodded without raising his head. Nor did his gaze pursue the seat of Peggy’s tight blue jeans, despite his unobstructed vantage. He was counting a pocketful of crumbled twenty-dollar bills, calculating just how many more P.B. and J he might partake in, when the jukebox changed its tune. - -A young woman had come in from the cold. Nonlocal. Her boots, bound at the laces, hung dripping from the back of a chair above the space-heater. Dangling, he thought, like a pair of dead rabbits there in the red neon glow. Her pompom-tasseled toque was the same color as her wooly socks. Alone at the jukebox, she swayed to the rhythm of a bluegrass beat. Brandon watched in silence. - -“What happened to Lola, last night?” says Lewis. - -“Nothing happened,” he says. “We talked.” - -They talked. They drank. He lit her cigarettes. At some point in the night, he joined her in the water closet and locked the door behind them. “I’m Lola, by the way,” she told him as she lifted a single bump of powder from a glass vile to his nostril and he snorted. The young people who drank at The Pig were always kicking in a little snow. His pulse quickened. Lola-by-the way. Her neck smelled of bottled lilacs. Her lips tasted like bubblegum. - -Brandon stands up slowly. “What makes you think something happened?” - -“All I know is you left with little Miss Lola last night, and today you’re down here with fingernail scratches all over your arms.” - -“You’re talking out your ass.” - -“See for yourself.” - -Brandon rolls up his flannel sleeves one sleeve at a time. He beholds the long livid fingernail scratches running the length of both arms. - -“Do you feel it now, Zamboni man? Do you feel that thin ice crackin’ beneath your feet?” - -Brandon traces the wounds with his fingertips. “Maybe I slipped and fell,” he says to himself. - -Lewis leans closer. “What did she do, huh? Did she rile you up? Did she snigger when your britches hit the floor?” - -“You bite your tongue, you crazy son of a bitch. I didn’t hurt anybody.” Brandon drums on the bars. “Hey, let me out of here!” - -“Quit your hollerin,’ would you?” Lewis hisses. “You’re only gonna make things worse.” - -Brandon doesn’t listen, just calls louder. “You hear me? I didn’t hurt anybody!” - -A noise comes down from the ceiling. The warbling high-pitch bugle of a full-grown bull-elk. He recognizes the sound from childhood, growing up across the lake from the dense Algonquin wilderness. It echoes around the room. Brandon cups his ears. The sound is coming from upstairs, and yet also coming from within his own skull. He wonders whether he might be losing his mind. - -“You’re wastin’ your breath, brother. Ain’t nobody comin’ to save you. Not this time. You’re stuck, same as me.” - -“I’m not a violent person.” - -“You’re a drinker, ain’t you? ‘Alcohol related psychosis’, the doctors call it. How many mornings have you woken up not remembering what happened the night before?” - -“You’re trying to confuse me. A man would remember a thing like that.” - -“You’ve got your daddy’s blood runnin’ through your veins, brother. Same blood, same violent disposition.” - -Brandon’s father cut a mirky figure, even under the soberest of circumstances. For as long as Brandon can remember, it has been as though the collective memories of his childhood were printed on magazine paper and someone with a pair of scissors had snipped John Delaney from every page. Hollow silhouettes are all that remain. A composite of empty spaces. A walking black hole in muddy crepe-sole boots. He remembers the detectives. - -“Did your mama tell you where she was going, last night?” asked one. - -“Did she mention going to live with her new boyfriend?” asked the other. - -“You won’t get nothin’ out of that one,” said his father. “Can’t you tell by lookin’? The boy ain’t right in the head.” - -“Do you know how to read and write? You do. That’s good. Would you like to maybe write it down?” - -“Here, have my pen and paper.” - -Brandon finds himself pacing the floor of his jail cell. He tries to remember. Walking home from The Blind Pig. The long dark road. The red lights of the police cruiser. The yelp of the siren demanding him to halt. His mother’s eyes, cold and crystalline, staring up at him through the frozen surface of the pond. - -“What’s this word you’ve written here?” asked one detective. - -“Let’s have a look,” said the other. “Wendigo.” - -“What do you mean by this, young man?” - -“Is that the name of your mama’s new friend?” - -“Wendigo,” said Brandon. - -“Wendigo. Right. But what does it mean?” - -“My partner and I would like to understand.” - -“Wendigo come,” said Brandon, “and steal her away.” - -“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, gentlemen,” said his father. “That boy ain’t got the sense of a goddamned dog. Just like his cheatin’ whore mother.” - -*“I said stop talking!”* - -“Shit fire,” says Lewis. You’re the one mutterin’ to himself. I didn’t breathe a word. Which of us looks crazy now?” - -Brandon bends forward with his hands on his knees. He wants to be sick, to purge himself of poisons, to crack open his brittle skull and let spill the brains like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the better to reconstruct his mind. All the while, memories dance. The long dark road. Bubblegum lip gloss. A police cruiser in the night. His mother smoking alone at the kitchen table, a pair of suitcases beside her. His father’s muddy work boots. Lola’s wet wooly socks. - -“You needn’t worry much longer, brother. This will all be over soon. The pale demon will be comin’ back for us both before too long.” - -“Pale demon.” Brandon paces, round and round. “Pale demon.” He halts. “Hold up,” he says. “Why are you here, Lewis?” - -The stranger smiles. “Brother, I’ve been on the run for just about as long as I can remember. I’ve robbed. Cheated. Killed. I’ve a son in this world I know now I’ll never see again. No man outruns his comeuppance. Sooner or later, the past catches up with all of us. Last night, mine caught up with me. I done paid my bill at the bar and I was drunk and alone in my motel room when there came a knock-knock-knockin’ at my door. Wasn’t no siren, but I could see plain as anythin’ the red light of his cruiser through the curtains. When I cracked the door, I was greeted by the stink of death on him. He sported a deputy’s uniform, his badge, his baton, but I tell you he wasn’t no deputy. Wasn’t even a man, truth be told. He spoke to me in the voice of my daddy’s daddy who died in the war. Asked me, “Do you know who I am?” And I said, “You son of a bitch, I’ve…” - -Lewis trails off, and Brandon says, “Who was it? What was it?” - -“Brother, it was the pale demon come to collect the bounty on my godforsaken soul.” - -A long silence unspools between the cells. Then Brandon starts to chuckle. The stranger knits his brow. “Did I say something funny, brother?” - -“You must think I’ve got shit for brains. Let me tell you what I think, *brother*. Starting with I don’t believe you are who you say you are. I think you’re one of *them*. We never met last night at The Blind Pig. You’re some kind of undercover operative. They send you in here so you can play-pretend like you’re my buddy. My trusty confidant. Then you start spouting talk of death and judgment. Try to convince me to repent my sins to the Lord Above. And maybe, just maybe, I cop to a crime I know damned well I didn’t commit.” Brandon spits. “Lola paid her bill at the bar last night and went home. End of story.” - -Brandon waits for a response. What comes is the sound of the bull-elk. Louder this time. Closer. Brandon drops to his knees, covers his head with his hands. “What is that noise?” he cries. - -Lewis doesn’t answer that. “Time to meet the monster,” he says. - -Bootheels creaking down the pinewood stairs. A bolt sliding unseen beyond the door. The door swings open for the dark silhouette of the deputy. He stands there, breathing heavily. The slow, rasping breaths of larger woodland beasts. Like something with a snout. He steps inside. - -Brandon turns his head. He looks down at the floor, supplicated by his own sudden terror. The deputy’s kidskin boots go *clack*, *clack*, *clack* on the linoleum, keys jangling on their keyring. He stops just outside the bars. Brandon’s heart clenches behind his breastbone. Still the deputy says nothing. Even from his height, his heavy bovine breaths warm the nape of Brandon’s neck where he trembles down below. Brandon can raise his head only slightly. At the summit of his gaze: the deputy’s leather utility belt, his keyring, a nightstick, his hands in dark leather gloves. The deputy selects a key from his ring. - -No sooner does he unlock the door than something sprays the side of Brandon’s hand. Something warm and honey-colored, sharp and sour. “Yeehaw!” cries Lewis, one hand aiming his member, his other hand aloft like a man astride a bucking bronco. “You want my soul, Beelzebub? Well, step right up and claim your prize!” - -The deputy bellows. That great warbling wail. He spins around against the current and pulls the nightstick from his belt. Lewis all the while reeling and pissing between the bars. “Blaze of glory, brother! Yippee-ki-yay!” - -The deputy unlocks the door to Lewis’ cage. His nightstick falls with a sickening crack. Lewis Manx drops like a stone. Brandon has become the little boy he once was, peeking out from under the kitchen tablecloth, a scream lodged in his throat, his mother’s body limp beside her suitcase, her dark hazel eyes beseeching him to be strong, to be brave, his father’s work boots tracking mud across the kitchen floor. No, not work boots. Cowboy boots. The deputy is wearing cowboy boots. - -The deputy swings his nightstick again and again and again until poor crazy Lewis is dead. Then he bends and picks up Lewis by the trouser leg and hauls him out of the cell toward the stairs. He pauses once more beside Brandon’s door. - -“What have you done?” Brandon mutters. “What have you done to him?” - -The deputy says nothing. Brandon looks up. All the way, this time. - -The deputy’s hair hangs down his back in a long dark braid. His face looks like a thing made of cheap rubber. Like some bargain basement Hallowe’en costume. Like a mask of someone else’s face covering his own. When he smiles, the deputy’s rubbery skin stretches taut. Brandon holds his gaze. He looks up for what feels like a very long time before he recognizes the face as Lola’s. - -“Wendigo,” says the thing behind the mask, voice deep and guttural. He looks down at Lewis. “Wendigo come and steal him away.” He turns and continues through the doorway and jerks Lewis up the narrow stairwell beyond, leaving a dark trail of blood behind him. - -Brandon remains on the floor. Who can say how long he lingers? He chitters and mewls like a housecat during a thunderstorm. Balled tight and trembling, he thinks about Lewis and he thinks of his mother and he thinks about nothing at all. A cold wind blows in from upstairs and the big steel door swings loose on its hinges. The door to his jail cell hangs likewise ajar. A voice on the wind, far away but familiar. The first notes of a hymn accompanied by his mother’s keyboard. *“What a fellowship. What a joy divine. Leaning on the everlasting arms.”* - -Brandon groans. “Mama? Mama, is that you?” - -*“Leeeaaaning… leeeaaaning… leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”* - -He lurches forward. “I’m coming, Mama. Wait for me.” He crawls through one door, then the second, following the blood and the music and the silvery timbre of pipes, and he finds himself bizarrely numb, and he finds the numbness comforting. He sings along with the voice. *“What a blessedness… what a peace is mine… leaning on the everlasting arms. Leeeaaaning… leeeaaaning… leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”* He crawls up the pinewood stairs and through the bulkhead cellar door out into the snow and the dismal blue twilight above. *“Leeeaaaning…leeeaaaning…leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”* - -The music ceases. Through frozen clouds of his own ragged breath, Brandon reconnoiters the terrain. The squalid remnants of what might once have been a farmhouse. A snow-crusted police cruiser out of the nightmare from which he now knows he never wakened. A crumbling barn. The sprawling white nothingness of the prairies with neither hill nor trees to mark the barren landscape, and not another house in sight. - -Brandon rubs his hands together. A conspiratorial fog looms over the farmhouse like the collective last breath of a thousand nameless dead. Jangling above the front porch, pale windchimes constructed from the smallest specimens of human bone. A thin spire of smoke rises from the chimney. - -Brandon makes for the front door and the promise of a flame. He tries the knob. The door is unlocked. The place consists of little more than a single room with a potbelly stove in the corner. Strange pelts, like heavy curtains, block out the meager sun. He goes quietly to the stove. There, amid the paler darkness, the deputy crouches naked beside his victim. He watches Brandon from the dark with glowing noctambulant eyes. Lunar pale, emaciated, ravenous. He smiles, or seems to smile, and the blood runs down his chin. - -The cast-off deputy’s uniform lies crumpled on the floor like a snakeskin. Only now, divested of all pretense, does the demon reveal himself for what he truly is. His bovine antlers, his cloven hooves. Every rung of his ribcage, every knot of arching vertebra perceptible beneath a pallid membranous hide. He grunts and resumes his rummaging about the contents of Lewis’s open chest. Brandon looks at the monster’s claws then down at his arms. The long red fingernail scratches. They seem to pulsate in their maker’s presence. - -“Come,” says the demon, his voice deep and guttural. Brandon lowers himself to the floor and crawls. - -The demon reaches in and tugs and raises from the cavity the dead man’s dripping heart. He cradles it in his claw. With his other, he beckons Brandon closer still. Brandon obeys and warms his hands by the stove. He looks around the room. A buckskin splayed out beside him, spread with curious plunder. Trinkets, jewelry, pocketbooks, driver’s licenses. A gold varsity hockey ring. - -He looks back to the demon. Somehow the dead man’s heart has changed, become a jar of clear liquid. The demon holds it out for him. Brandon touches his throat, terribly thirsty. He takes the Mason jar and unscrews the lid and sniffs the contents. A scent like turpentine. The demon smiles and nods his head. Brandon holds the jar to the firelight. - -And there you are, down at the bottom of the jar, watching yourself watching yourself. Rise, now. Rise and heave the jar at the red-glowing mouth of the stove. Glass bursts on the grille and flames leap out across the floorboards, catching firewood, catching pelts. The beast rears his pale head and roars, deep and guttural, as you wheel and pluck the keyring from the discarded leather belt and scramble out into the dooryard. - -You wipe crusted snow from the door of the police cruiser and try one key then another. Smoke rises from the windows and the doorframe behind you. The last key twists all the way and you open the door and plunge inside, pulling it behind you. No sooner have you slapped your palm down on the lock than the beast rams headlong into the side of the cruiser with a force that rattles you like a pinball. The cab is dark, the glass opaque with frost. You search for the fallen keys, listening to the crunch of snow just outside the door. You strike a shaking match. You find the keys on the matt in the passenger’s footwell. The shotgun lying between the seats. - -The beast heads heads back toward the house with loping simian strides and readies himself to charge again. You search the backseat for cartridges, check under the seats, check in the glove compartment. Nothing. You check the rifle, find a single shell in the chamber. - -“One last round for the road,” you say to nobody at all. - -Once again the demon strikes, and the door crumples inward and you drop the flame, and once again the demon lopes away. You right yourself in the dark, stab the key in the ignition. The engine gives a long stuttering whine, but will not start and will not start. You try the radio, pluck the receiver from its cradle and toggle the switch. Nothing and no one. The line is dead. You twist the ignition key long and hard. This time the engine bites, and the demon drops down on the roof, the ceiling sinking beneath his weight as he commences raining blows down upon the cruiser. You gather up the rifle. Raise the muzzle to the dent. You steady your hand, place one finger on the trigger. You draw three slow breaths, one, two, three, then lower the muzzle and fire into the frosted windscreen, drop the gun and seize hold of the steering wheel and kick the pedal to the floor. The cruiser leaps, the demon toppling backward. - -You divine the road through the hole in the glass. You drive and you drive. Likely the beast will follow you, bounding headlong like a snow-blind ape, but you don’t look back, must not look back. You drive until the tank runs empty. Then you ditch the cruiser on the side of the road and just start running. - -Brandon looks into the jar and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “You’ll run. You’ll run like those bison ran in the time before time. You’ll run to the ledge of the world.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Wendigo** on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/MythaxisMagazine/posts/1269603031839347).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/ShortReviews09.md b/content/issue-41/ShortReviews09.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1bbde363..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/ShortReviews09.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,51 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – January to March, 2025" -date: 2024-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Rounding out our first issue of the latest End Times Period, here are three more (technically) short short story reviews – although in this case the nature of the story-telling medium boasts a little more variety than usual. Like Mythaxis itself, all these are freely available to read online, and this editor enjoys helping raise awareness of whatever else is out there, so when you're done reading here why not check these out next?" - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-january-to-march-2025 -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}I{{}} mentioned in the editorial that the world has more than enough room for more online zines in it, so it was with pleasure that I recently learned of the existence of **[Phano](https://www.phano.co/)**, which aims to share *"beautiful stories, essays, interviews, reviews and art to make sense of our world in constant change"*. Good luck to them! Also a pleasure was to see P. R. O'Leary there, whose crime story *[Crunch Thump Thump](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.html)* appeared in our very last issue. - -In ***[Millions of Seashells](https://www.phano.co/articles/millions-of-seashells)***, our narrator embarks on the administrative grind-side of that thing we supposedly all want to do: go back in time to fix that one thing that went so wrong, thereby uncoiling a whole new past for a brand new present with a glorious new future stretching out before us. Of course, casually rocking the status quo to its bedrock is exactly why *The Man* is always going to erect barriers in one's way to ensure the correction of old mistakes just doesn't happen, not to us, and not to the recipient uzzes of parallel universes either. It's going to take an inventive man to find a way around that. Or an infinity of them. - -Hard to tell a time-travel tale that hasn't happened before, of course; or at least that hasn't been told almost *exactly* this way before, only slightly differently; or that probably won't be told almost exactly this way again, only – but lets break the cycle, it's a fun little story. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} always return to **[ergot.](https://www.ergot.press/)**, as I tend to do anyway, when it's time to draft my shortlist of quarterly recommendations. As with any relationship between magazine and reader, not every story I find there clicks for me; but I can always rely on something interesting, and the last three months have been no exception. - -*ergot.* regular Andrew Kozma's ***[A Movable Piece of Firm Material](https://www.ergot.press/authors/Andrew_Kozma/A_Movable_Piece_of_Firm_Material)*** is about as odd a piece of writing as its title might suggest. An employee at a weapon's manufacturer vacates his desk to meet colleagues for post-dayjob-drudgery drinks and discovers the way out of the building is… *wrong*. I won't divulge more than that, but I will mention that I found the plain-spoken style of the prose to be an excellent foil for the hint of weirdness in what is going on. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}s promised, the last review here is a bit different from the norm. Entitled ***[The Giving Man](https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/giving-man)***, it presents a billionaire's relentless quest to deny the fate lurking in his genes, to overcome the brain tumour that will surely kill him by turning all his wealth and resources upon it, unleashing humanity's potential, directing it, shattering all previous limits of science and technology in service of that single goal: his own survival. - -And it seems he succeeds, because he outlives us all. - -> A man's will is the thing. It is the irresistable force that cleaves his path through the world. His destiny written in what he is willing to take. Not what he is willing to give. This is the true engine of my success. - -However, that quote doesn't do the moment justice, dear reader, because where this short story differs is that it's also a comic strip. - -**[Bad Space](https://www.badspacecomics.com/)**, *Stories for the End Times*, is a science fiction webcomic that delivers "short sharp shocks in 10 panels", slightly more if you support writer-artist [Scott Base](https://linktr.ee/BadSpaceComics) on Patreon. Beautifully rendered all in black and white, with appropriately occasional shades of grey, they present a series of wildly varied sf narratives that are nevertheless almost universally dark in one way or another – the occasional glimmer of optimism only highlighting the otherwise consistent journeys into the bleak, sour, or sinister. - -A **Bad Space** book is currently in the works, and coincidentally the very first strip, called *The Billionaire*, makes for a rather neat bookend pair with *The Giving Man*: not alike, exactly, but certainly of a kind. If you're the type of person who's up for an illustrated downer you can down in two minutes, I can't recommend these comics enough! - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/__index.md b/content/issue-41/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index c7fc2897..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41" -date: 2025-04-01 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 41 -subhead: Spring 2025 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/Water-buffalo.jpg -imageMobile: images/Water-buffalo_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Year of the Water Buffalo by Huy Viet Tran" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: baseline - color: '#bd221a' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-41/beyond-the-sudden-door.md b/content/issue-41/beyond-the-sudden-door.md deleted file mode 100644 index bcd52641..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/beyond-the-sudden-door.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,145 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Beyond the Sudden Door" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Lyra Meurer -copyright: '© Lyra Meurer 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Animals make for useful subjects when an author's real subject is one of the biggies, like skewering the dark side of human society or exploring life and death. One of the editor's own early stories used wolves to look at mortality, so finding this piece brought back fond memories – but Lyra Meurer's gently emotive rat tail (excuse me, tale) can speak to anyone." - -image: images/SuddenDoor10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Marcelo Jaboo](https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-armchair-on-brown-wooden-floor-696407/) and [SamuelFJohanns](https://pixabay.com/photos/rat-mouse-laboratory-research-6848160/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i41/4.Beyond.the.Sudden.Door.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: beyond-the-sudden-door -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}hey had been seven rats at first, six squirming impatiently inside their mother’s womb, then writhing their helpless pink bodies by her nipple-lined belly. When they had fur and no longer needed milk, the females were separated from the rest and kept in a tank at a pet store. There they met other rats, became a mischief of thirteen, and spent their days roughhousing and squinting under the oppression of fluorescent lights. - -They became two rats when, one day, a human reached in and lifted them out by their tails. The one who is still alive remembers it still–the pain wrenching through her spine, the precipitous view of the human’s upturned face, the fear that she’d be dropped into that kissing mouth. She and her sister, the Albino, were deposited into a small box and carried through the night at terrifying speeds while they fear-shitted all over the cardboard. Then, at last, human hands placed them in a roomy wire cage, which they tentatively explored. Never had they had so much space to themselves. - -Oh, to think they had feared death at first! The humans – a female and a not-female – had been unfamiliar and incomprehensible, generators of gratuitous scent, sound, and huge, horrifying motions. But they realized, with a little time, that these humans didn’t want to eat them. They fed them, pampered them with tidbits, let them roam around the house, provided them with cozy places to sleep, stroked them with astonishing delicacy despite having such enormous hands. - -Albino is gone now, and her sister is old and fat. Jumping to the floor hurts the joints in her legs, and she is more inclined to sleeping under the blankets in the humans’ bed than trying to break into the trashcan or knocking things off shelves. - -They are three rats now. The two young ones – the one with the spots and the skittish one – bound around the house while Old curls up under the blanket next to the female human’s thigh, awash in her warmth. When the human has a free hand, she runs her fingers down Old’s spine. Old luxuriates at the stimulation of her skin, the weight on her muscles, becoming as flat and round as a pancake. - -While she is half-asleep and half-aware, a familiar smell coils around her, a body brushes against her side. That scent almost like her own, but richer and deeper, like stolen chocolate. Albino is here, settling next to her as she has done since they were in the womb. But she isn’t breathing. - -Old wakes with a sneeze, a chill tingling at her side. She lifts her head, drawing in the smell of herself, the human, the splash of dried food on the human’s pants, the flowery chemicals in the sheets and blankets. But no hint of Albino. She isn’t there. - -Old stretches and yawns, then slides off the bed. Pain jolts her joints. She scurries off in search of food, leaving drops of urine to mark her passage. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he young ones don’t know what it means when Albino’s scent lies beside them or whisks along the floor. They lift their heads, searching for the other rat, but they don’t know who they’re searching for. They notice how Old rouses and sniffs around, her heart straining towards someone who isn’t there. - -They never met Albino, never knew how tempestuous and sensitive she became when she went into heat, how tender she was otherwise, wielding the power of authority with gentle but firm licks and nibbles. They’d never witnessed her bravery – stealing a whole bar of soap from the bathroom, only to have it snatched from her mouth – and her circumspection – hesitating at the edge of unfamiliar terrain, sniffing hard and long to compensate for the dimness of her red eyes. - -They hadn’t seen Albino change, growing thin, confused, and angry; cuddly one moment, biting the next. Her smell went sour. She hated the light, hiding her face in shadows and blankets. She couldn’t make it to the second level of the cage and so languished at the bottom until the day the humans took her away. - -They came back and showed Old her sister’s corpse, her shrunken scent, cold and overshadowed by a chemical stink from a streak of something poisonous on her leg and stomach. So, that was what had happened to her: an illness, followed by death. Then the corpse was gone too, and soon after came the young ones, twin whirls of energy, sisters who would never know Old once had a sister too. - -When Albino appears again in unbreathing whiffs, Old realizes that she’s encountered this sort of manifestation before. Whenever the humans leave the house – sometimes, even when they don’t – presences sit in the chairs, trundle about the kitchen, creak across the floor. Sometimes they come in incredible numbers, passing from the front door to the back. - -The rats, small and alert and close to the ground, feel with their whiskers the disturbances they shake into the air, smell their unfamiliar odors, hear the distortions their feet press into the ancient floorboards. But never do they cast a shadow or create a silhouette in the rats’ blurry vision, and the eddies made by their movements never include the rhythmic issuance of breath. - -They’re there, but not there. Gone, like Albino, but not gone. No harm had come from them. So, there should be no harm from Albino’s presence either. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he young rats had come from the same place as the old ones, had been plucked out by the same human, taken home the same way. Spots acclimated quickly, took to climbing the humans from the cuffs of their pants to the cliffs of their shoulders. Scaredy could not comprehend such acts. The humans moved a hand and she darted away, afraid of being picked up and swept through the air to she-knew-not-where. They made a sound and she tensed, waiting for the next sign of danger. - -Anxiously and inexpertly, the humans tried to rectify her nature. On the third day, the female picked her up like it was nothing, cradling her. Scaredy trembled under petting hands, then squeaked and buried her head between the female’s belly and arms, hiding from what must be impending death. Realizing her mistake, the female released Scaredy back into the cage, where she lurked in the shadows, afraid of a second such near miss. - -They are allowed out of the cage to explore the house, but whenever they are let out, they must be brought back in, and Scaredy suffers the torment of being cornered and grabbed and wrestled into the cage. She fights for her freedom, but never wins against those massive beasts. Thus, the cycle continues, without a clear end: fear begets force, which begets more fear. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen Old was younger, she took every opportunity that appeared, stealing into cupboards and closets the moment a door opened. Often the humans noticed and snatched her out before she could explore, but once they hadn’t. She’d slipped into the closet and entertained herself for a while, snuffling through folded cloth and unfamiliar objects. - -Then she got hungry and sought her way out. The door had been open before, but now it was closed. She stuck her nose under the crack, sneezing at the cool air beyond. She twisted her head to chew on the wooden edge of the door. Nothing gave. No way out. - -Fear set in, that same fear as in the cardboard box on the first night. She shat messily in the corner, terrified that she would never be able to get out, that there would be no food, no water, no one to keep her company as she perished. - -After a long time, the door opened and light flooded in. The female human found her in the corner amongst her diarrhea, wide-eyed and awaiting death. She made a noise of relief and humor, scooped the rat up, and transported her to her cage with many kisses. Old had never been so happy for the cage door to close behind her. She chewed on her dry food with relish, took a long draught from the water bottle, and hopped up to the hammock to sleep. - -So when new doors begin opening around the house, she remembers her lesson. The doors appear in unexpected places: in the middle of rooms, underneath the couch, on top of the coffee table, inside the cage. A creak, a breath of air, and the scent of Albino. - -They open before Old and she hesitates, remembering the closet. It’s strange to her that Albino, so careful, would rush into such a place before her sister. The young ones take no notice, wrestling in the corner or stealing off with crumbs to crunch away in peace. The door always closes just as Old has decided she might investigate, and the scent of Albino disappears. - -One time, the door opens in a ray of sunlight and stays open long enough for Old to poke her head in. Strong light dazzles her eyes, so she can only smell and feel with her whiskers, which brush against the constriction of the door, then spring out into open space. Albino’s scent grows strong, along with the promising odor of new food, something delicious she has never tried before. - -Another whiff makes her hesitate. That chemical bite on a hush of cold air, crawling into her nostrils. She sneezes and recoils, snapping her head away. The door slams shut a hair from her nose. - -The humans find her lurking under the couch and must tempt her out with bits of cracker. Back in the cage, she slips into place in the hammock between the young ones. Their smooth sides breathe against hers, their safe smell fills her, warmth floods her feet and ears. Scaredy twists about to run her teeth through Old’s fur. Old’s eyelids slide closed and she grinds her teeth together, the vibrations thrumming through her head, tickling that pleasure spot deep in her mandible. The muscles of her face work in delightful concord, pulsing behind her eyeballs until they jiggle in their sockets – an expression of incomparable delight. Bruxing and boggling, she falls asleep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}hen Old awakes, she is cold. Her feet are folded beneath her but ache for warmth. She blinks in the darkness, sticks her nose out of the hammock to sniff around. She smells the house, the varnish and old wood, the waft of dust from the heating vents, but nothing alive. No rats, no humans, not even the mysterious airs that sometimes swirl in from outside. Just herself. - -She slips out of the hammock, her paws spreading on the plastic of the cage shelf. The cage door hangs open, slack-jawed. She creeps out onto it, her toes curling around frigid metal, and flops to the ground, the sound of her small impact echoing around the house. - -Old always wants the cage door to be open, always wants the freedom to roam. But from the moment she hits the floor, when she feels the frozen, breathless wood against her sore feet and round belly, she knows she doesn't want it now. There is no one here, no one to warm her, no one to feed or groom her. She searches every corner, under the couch and through the closets and cabinets, the doors of which stand open, but smells no living being, feels no stirring in the air, never hears a note of the constant squeaking discourse of fellow rats, nor the booming of human voices. - -How has she gotten trapped here? She crouches by the stove and feels her bowels loosening. She should go back to the cage. Then maybe the others will appear, maybe the shaft of light will blind her and a human will rescue her. - -Then, a wall of smell, so sudden and horrible she squints against it and sneezes. Bitter chemicals and cold flesh, Albino’s final scent, stinking of loneliness, slamming into her like a death strike. Old shrieks and runs. A needle of pain thrusts into the back of her neck. She cries again, certain she will die. - -Old wakes to find Spots grooming her, her teeth pulling at her neck fur. Old struggles to her feet, shaking Spots off. She sways in the hammock, nose poked out between folds of fleece. Living odors flood her nostrils. Spots’ and Scaredy’s matching auras wrapping her like bedding, Scaredy’s fresh feces a rich pong from below, the must of the dry food, the not-female human walking by, trailing sweetness, sweat, and farts. No acrid stench, no chilling isolation, just the musk and heat of living things. - -Old sighs and settles as Spots returns to grooming her. Her teeth comb through Old’s fur, pulling out dust and loose strands, tickling and caressing her skin. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ne day, the female human scoops up Scaredy and holds her in her arms. Scaredy is tired from bustling about the house, would’ve gone to sleep anyways, so she allows this treatment. The human’s fingers run over her head, down her neck, her back, a pressure slight but firm. An unexpected combination of sensations: the human, and pleasure. - -The muscled tube of Scaredy’s body relaxes. She bruxes, her teeth sliding together, then boggles a few times, licking her tongue around her teeth between each round. So this is why Old and Spots allow themselves to be manhandled so. - -Scaredy recollects herself. The human stinks, and the feeling of flesh and a heartbeat surrounding her is too uncanny to bear. She alerts, pushing herself back to her feet. The human contains her before she can struggle away, walling her in with a gentle hand, and she is carried to the cage. - -Scaredy returns changed. She stands a while by the dish, which is full of pasta, peas, and cucumber slices, too stunned to recognize any of it as food. She sniffs between the bars as the humans thump around the house, wondering if she’ll be lucky enough to feel such pleasure again. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he floor is cold the next day. The rats skitter across the boards for a while, their naked feet losing warmth as they check the best spots for new crumbs. Just when Old is thinking about curling up in the blankets on the bed, in the cage, or on the humans’ laps, a door opens right next to the fridge. Albino’s scent wafts across the kitchen, mixed with the smell of unknown humans and hot laundry detergent: the promise of ambient heat. Old ignores it. She has been there before, she can detect the chemical stench of Albino’s death underlying the fragrance of false comfort. - -Scaredy, lingering under the overhang of the cabinet doors, lifts her head, nostrils widening to take in the new smell. Her claws scrabble on the wood until she catches some friction, and she takes off around the circumference of the kitchen, sticking to the shadows under the cabinets. - -Old, who has paused to groom herself, notices Scaredy stopping before the new door. The young rat will learn, she thinks, and twists around to clean her rump. - -After a thorough licking, she looks up to see Scaredy’s tail whipping beyond the threshold. The door clicks shut. Albino’s scent disappears, and so does Scaredy’s. Old trots over to where the door was, but Scaredy is gone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hat night, the humans turn over the house, calling out and shaking bags of treats like they did on the night when Old got herself stuck in the trash can. Old and Spots huddle in their hammock, conscious of Scaredy’s absence, unsure if she might return, or if she might be gone forever. - -The female human cries into the night, sleeps, then wakes to cry again. When morning penetrates the windows, Scaredy has not returned. Old and Spots have already begun to account for her absence. They wrestle a bit in the cage, and Spots re-establishes that she is in charge. Old stashes some dry food in the hammock, among the shreds of paper Scaredy shredded for bedding not long ago. - -As two rats, their warmth is smaller, the knot of their shared flesh timid and quiet, the ever-present danger of the world a little closer. To be awake is to be aware of the shrinking of their number, so Spots and Old sleep through the day and into the night. - -The days pass. The rats search the cracks and corners for Scaredy, but the traces of her fade fast: her feces dry, her scent markings are covered with fresh ones, her shedded fur swirls away on errant breezes. When the humans clean out the litter at the bottom of the cage and wash the hammock and trays, there is nothing left of her. They are two rats now. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}ld dreams of the open cage door. She remembers what this means: that she is where Albino is, that there is no company around, no food. - -She climbs out of the cage and stands on the floor, sniffing. Her feet are warm, her body feels young, and it is no trouble to climb on top of the cage and stand to catch more wafts from around the room. - -It is not cold and lifeless this time. There is no one here, no one she can visit at least, but the smell of company surrounds her. Rats, their groomed fur smelling of spit, the warmth of sleeping bodies accentuating each individual’s scent. Stored food waiting, humans under blankets, food cooking on the stove. Albino and Scaredy together, and countless other rats besides, their scent markers meandering into every corner, commemorating explorations old and new. - -Old jumps to the floor and checks the best spots in the house. A new air floats through: all the doors are open, even the ones to the outside. Old hesitates at the threshold, then goes through, onto new spaces, new houses with new foods dropped on the floor, across fields scattered with seeds, between trees, into holes in the ground. Though she never sees another rat, she always smells them. She never feels alone and not once is she afraid. - -Old awakes in her hammock. She is sleeping on top of Spots. The younger rat’s nose sticks out from under Old’s puddled fat, and her breathing is slow, the occasional contented, sleepy squeak easing from her body. Old scratches her ear, chews on her nails, bruxes, and falls asleep to dream of the world beyond the door, and the company that waits there. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Beyond the Sudden Door** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/contents.md b/content/issue-41/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index c1ef6a40..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains]({{< relref path="dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.md" >}}), by Finale Doshi-Velez -- [Sunnyside]({{< relref path="sunnyside.md" >}}), by Stephen S. Power -- [The Culling]({{< relref path="the-culling.md" >}}), by Addison Smith -- [Beyond the Sudden Door]({{< relref path="beyond-the-sudden-door.md" >}}), by Lyra Meurer -- [Seal-Skin]({{< relref path="seal-skin.md" >}}), by David Stephen Powell -- [Safe in the Dark]({{< relref path="safe-in-the-dark.md" >}}), By Helen French -- [Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel]({{< relref path="metallic-realms-lincoln-michel.md" >}}), reviewed by Mattia Ravasi -- [Short Reviews – January to March, 2025]({{< relref path="ShortReviews09.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-41/dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.md b/content/issue-41/dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.md deleted file mode 100644 index 731a382b..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,275 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Finale Doshi-Velez -copyright: '© Finale Doshi-Velez 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "In a nod to the point of this issue's editorial, the story introductions will mention what motivated their selection, though in this case the interest came from the editor's lack of direct experience. It is said there comes a time when every parent has to Let Go. To refuse is to hold them back, to clip their wings, to smother. It must be hard to do, even knowing that the threats and dangers are hypothetical, that children need to be released. But how much harder to set them free when the threats are certain, the dangers real, and the strongest need at hand may be for vengeance?" - -image: images/Dhuni10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Pix-Off](https://pixabay.com/photos/desert-acacia-bush-grass-shrubs-7529634/) and [Pexels](https://pixabay.com/photos/mountain-water-peak-summit-iceland-1851126/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i41/1.Dhuni.Murderess.of.Mountains.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: dhuni-murderess-of-mountains -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he echo of her sons’ footsteps reach her via the bones of the earth, bursting from the steppe grass stubble like sulfur from smelt – and about as welcome. - -It’s been eighteen years, and Dhuni does not want them here. She imagines a rockslide that forces them to a more distant pass. The familiar itch grows in her palms, and she quenches the temptation by sinking it into the metal stock in her hand. The grains jump into instant alignment. - -Inara, her daughter, her apprentice, brings her hammer down. The clang jars in a forge full of clangs and clatters. The new boy’s shoulders tense, and though Dhuni has smithed for decades, she finds her shoulders are tense too: the echos of her sons’ footfalls approach, as loud as the clangs of the forge, as inexorable as the contractions that bore them. - -“That’s strange.” Inara frowns at the stock. Dhuni snaps each of the thousands of grains back to their original angles. If only all mistakes could be undone so easily. - -Inara strikes the stock again. “Nevermind. You’re just not holding it steady.” - -Her daughter is right. Magically aligning the stock in a moment of flustered desperation is not holding steady. “I owe you a cleaning shift for that.” - -Inara rolls her eyes. “It’s okay mother, no one is perfect.” - -Dhuni’s eyes dart to russet-veined Mount Kubir beyond. There is a sheer cliff where its lesser peak used to be – her doing, her wrong. The shadow of its cracked summit covers the imperial camp, but it cannot shade footsteps that are heard, not seen, and even then, heard directly in the bone, in the bell-chamber of the belly, in the heart broken, mended, and now, too likely to break again. - -*I’m sure you hear their footsteps, Kubir. Do you hear my daughter too? She is wiser than both of us.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}he focuses on each of Inara’s strikes. She follows the circle of her stroke, admires not only its sweep but the muscle her daughter seems to collect as easily as adding clay to a doll. She presses the metal against the anvil as flush as a sweat-soaked sleeve on skin. She tells herself that perhaps her sons will simply speak to the captain and then continue on, up until they are standing by the forge. - -“Mother?” It is Izeh; he must remember making his own circles, his own hammer strikes. - -“Izeh?” She looks beside him. “And Reza? Truly?” Her surprise is feigned, of course, but when they embrace she finds the joy is real. - -Their chins graze her temple. Their chests rise and fall against her cheek. Their pepper-breath clings in her hair, and she remembers that fateful morning when she had folded three stuffed flatbreads into a kerchief the color of the dust, two for Izeh and one for little Reza, and bade them search for wild peppers. Izeh’s footsteps were nimble as a jackrabbit’s; Reza’s the toddle of a tumbleweed. She cannot recall if they had worn sandals or scampered off barefoot. She only remembers seeing the dust of imperial horses coming into the valley and shouting for the children to stay in the hills. - -“We were seeking the new pass,” explains Izeh, “from when that earthquake flattened Mount Kubir’s lesser peak onto an imperial legion.” - -“Some merchants claim ghosts of the soldiers haunt the way,” adds Reza. “But thank the gods that we still came, for it has brought us to you.” - -Her gaze goes again to russet-veined Kubir. She knows it is not the gods that brought them, nor the gods who will try to take them. - -Tears bud then, in the corners of her eye, and unlike the stone-hard cushion plants budding on Kubir’s mountainside, these budding tears fall. - -Ever-stalwart Izeh hands her a kerchief of cloth finer than anything she has worn at a Solstice, much less to dab tears from a face that befriends dust like a crushed passionfruit befriends flies. - -They embrace again. - -Kubir’s summit hangs over them like a grave marker, but in this moment, they are together and alive. Perhaps, she thinks, I can keep them here. Perhaps, we will be happy. - -Inara is fidgeting, and suddenly Dhuni realizes the silence, and not just the lack of footsteps. The apprentices have found quiet tasks, sweeping charred metal from the anvil, adjusting the coals. She takes Inara’s hand, puts Izeh and Reza’s on top. “Your half-brothers, Inara,” she says, and to them, “Your half-sister.” - -Reza’s brow goes up, but Izeh picks up Inara and spins her around. “I’ve always wanted a sister.” - -Reza, the youngest no more, embraces Inara stiffly. His gaze is on the pass left by the fallen peak. - -She follows his gaze. Her grown sons may walk as steady as the mules they lead, but she knows that they too are being led. She extends her senses through her toes, into the earth. *Kubir, I’m not the person who I once was. Let it go. Let them go.* - -No answer, never an answer. She turns to her sons. “Please,” she says, “will you stay awhile?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey do not refuse. They are good sons, she thinks, bless the gods who raised them when I could not. - -They tie their mules and unload their packs. She does not know how everyone and everything will fit in her two-room house, but they do not complain at the sight of walls that leave gaps against the uneven ground. A roof, a mother, a family – it is enough. - -She shows them to the back room, and Izeh suddenly kneels by the traditional altar she has in the corner, a few medallions on burlap smudged with incense and stained by offerings of berries. “Did you make these, mother?’’ - -She nods. There is one for the ancestors, of course, passed down for generations. And three etched with their names – Izeh, Reza, Inara – in flowing imperial calligraphy but which secretly form the ancient logos for love and safety, their people’s glyph for home. - -“And this last one?” Izeh is frowning at the final medallion. His lips attempt to knead out the meaning behind the tangle of glyphs that spell the name of Kubir’s flattened child. “Haa-rish-it?” - -*Hrishita,* she thinks. *Bringer of joy, except no more.* - -“I just wanted to make something pretty,” she says weakly, because some truths are too hard to tell. - -“It *is* pretty,” says Izeh. He is looking from the medallions to her and back again. “They’re… I’ve been many places… this is exquisite. You made these for us!’’ - -“Who else but you?’’ she says, and they embrace all over again. For years she has taken comfort in the sound of their distant footsteps, knowing they were still alive. Now she hears the beating, the aliveness, of Izeh’s heart. And sees, out of the corner of her eyes, Reza’s restlessness. - -He hovers over his account books, over their bolts of cloth that are too fine for the soldiers here. He interleaves the cloth with fresh cedar, covers the bolts more tightly. Cities breed moths and silverfish of all kinds, and military camps breed more than most. - -“Open it just once?’’ asks Inara. “All the way?’’ - -She has spied the delicate neck of an embroidered peacock, shimmering resplendent blues and bejeweled greens never seen under Kubir’s russet dust. Reza scowls, but Izeh gives her a scrap of silk. The girl has worked iron and bronze and even silver, but she has never touched anything so fine. She brushes it over her cheek, her forearm, her ankles as if needing to experience this novelty with her whole body. - -In the end, she cannot settle on where to keep it and gives it back. Izeh laughs. “Maybe one day you will come to the capital with us. And then you will see wonders that will put this scrap to shame.’’ - -Dhuni follows Inara’s gaze to the jagged pass. - -“Not now,” she says sharply, too sharply. “Our family has been separated too long.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}o long, she is not quite sure how to be with these grown sons. She knows how children grow from the breast to the lap to curled under an arm with their heads back over the breast where they began, but after that, it is a void. All she knows is that she cannot bear the thought of losing them again. “I’ll request extra rations,’’ she says. “I will make you pan-fried sweets.’’ - -“Like you did for guests?’’ laughs Izeh. “We are your children.’’ He puts his arm around her, because he is the taller one now, and places his other palm next to hers. Reza sits on the ground at their feet, shelling peas while his shoulder grazes her knee. - -“You still deserve a feast,’’ she says. - -“You deserve the feast,’’ says Izeh. “Trade has been good to us, mother. It is time for us to treat you.’’ - -“And me?’’ asks Inara. - -“Of course,’’ says Izeh. His smile spans the whole of his face, from his dimples to the creases around his eyes to his wide brow, like the constellations span the sky. He nods to the wrapped bolts. “You’ll have the finest tunic in town for the Solstice. Kerchiefs for your hair too.’’ - -Dhuni notices then that Izeh has been idly fingering the hem of her tunic. Counting threads, marking the uneven stitches. But he could become a blacksmith again, she thinks. - -“We’ll come back for the Solstice,’’ says Reza. - -No, she thinks, you won’t. “Settle here. The garrison needs more smiths.’’ Her gaze catches on Reza’s smooth hands; he was the one she hoped would go to school, and it seems somehow he did. “Scribes too. We can be together.’’ - -“We have our goods,’’ says Izeh, “and the mules. There is something enchanting about the open road.’’ - -Someone enchanting, she thinks. And they will kill you. Because of my foolishness. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}} week passes. The captain visits. Her sons are hard workers, they insist on assisting the garrison in addition to paying the captain. So he does not begrudge the extra mouths, nor the mouths of their mules. Reza has taken to the captain’s scribe-work like copper takes to tin, and Izeh is humble enough to work the bellows for apprentices half his age. - -“I wish they were mine,’’ the captain says, with a sideways glance at Inara. Dhuni raises an eyebrow, and he brings his gaze back to her. “The Tarfa pass. There was an earthquake there.’’ - -She knows. “How much damage?” - -“We don’t think there were any caravans in the pass,” he says, “but it will take weeks to clear.” - -He comes closer. He thinks he is being subtle, he thinks it appears that he is inspecting the work as he lets his fingers graze hers. She opens her palm to him; cups her thumb just enough to touch his knuckle. She knows that everyone sees, but it is a small price for the safety and comfort of her children. Hardly a price, she amends, to be a favorite of any captain, and this captain has no fleas and loves to hear her point out her people’s constellations. He has a lady wife in the capital, and she respects him all the more for telling her so. Other officers have husbands and wives in every village. - -His face turns grave as he nods to the new boy, the one whose shoulders are always tense. “He got into a scrape with one of my soldiers last night. It doesn’t seem like her eye will heal.’’ - -If they take the boy’s eye as punishment, he will not advance beyond bellows-work. “Surely a mistake can be forgiven,’’ she says, and suddenly she is not just speaking of him. “Surely his future service is worth more than his eye.” - -The captain smiles. “You were always soft.’’ - -Stupid, she thinks, foolish. She flounders for words. “Maybe it is right for him to offer his eye for the soldier’s. But you do not have to take it. You can be merciful. You can realize that taking his sight will not bring back hers.” - -“The logics of your people are always fascinating,” he says. There is a tone in his voice that gives her hope, for the new boy. If only hope for her children could come so easily. - -He slides a hand down her back. “Shall we inspect the armory?’’ - -She returns with suppers from the officer’s mess. Reza compares an imperial star chart to his own, his lips working through the calculations as he aligns their predictions. For once, he does not seem to miss his accounts. - -Izeh sits with Inara. She has looped string between her fingers, rolls the string under and over with thumbs that have smithing burns just like her brother’s. Izeh picks out the net, she picks it back. The next round, he drops a finger and the tangle of knots fall out into one, simple loop. Inara laughs, and he does too. “Our cloth can wait,’’ he says, “We’re staying.’’ - -Two simple words. It is the unwinding of the knots in Dhuni’s heart. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}"A{{}} pair of threes,’’ says Reza, knowing he has lost. - -Dhuni slaps down her cards. “A string of four, starting at seven!’’ She starts gathering the pebbles to keep score. - -“Not so fast,’’ says Inara. “An ace, no one defeats the emperor!’’ - -Izeh laughs as Dhuni groans playfully and pushes over the pile. She is tempted to keep one of the pebbles cupped under her hand, like when she performed magic tricks as a girl. But Izeh sweeps the pile across too fast. - -Inara deals the next round. Reza brings out a bottle of wine hidden among the carefully wrapped bolts, and even Inara gets as much as she wants. Dhuni lets her hand fall casually on Reza’s, and he gives it a squeeze. - -Inara wins again, because Izeh sneaks her aces; Reza rolls his eyes but smiles. Smiles wider when Dhuni sneaks him her own aces with a giggle. How long has it been since she has laughed? Dhuni does not know and does not care, she is too busy pilfering another ace from the discard pile to give away. Inara sees, and then everyone laughs once more. - -“And now,’’ says Izeh, pulling out a parcel he has kept wrapped behind him all evening. “For you, mother.’’ - -“Me?’’ - -Izeh nods to the sky lit with two full moons. “Did you think we would forget your birthday?’’ - -Dhuni opens the parcel and draws out a silk purse, embroidered with emerald phoenixes so alive that one might think they would fly away in the flicker of the lamplight. “It’s beautiful,’’ she breathes, “but where will I use something as fancy as this?’’ - -“No more beautiful than the prayer medallions you cast and etch,’’ says Izeh. - -Dhuni fetches the medallions. She clears the ground, then spreads the medallions atop the purse. Silver lines and emerald thread catch the light. They sit close, all admiring the most beautiful thing they have ever seen, being the most beautiful thing they have ever been. - -The past might be written in stone, thinks Dhuni, but the present is light as air. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he forge is at full clamor when Reza arrives. Even the new boy is hammering, though his back is stiff from the whipping and his eyes – both of them – heavy from nights tending the now one-eyed soldier’s wound. “The captain said there has been another earthquake. Not far from Polchi. The messenger pigeon came while I was scribing.’’ He squats over a borrowed map, tracing the line from Tarfa to Polchi. “Two earthquakes off the main shake-lines within six weeks. What a coincidence.’’ - -It is not a coincidence. - -Those who claim stone is patient do not know stone. - -“And?’’ asks Dhuni, a catch in her throat. “Injuries?’’ - -“Only a few,’’ says Reza, “but many of the farming terraces were destroyed.” - -Reza is sucking his finger while he stares at the map; Inara and Izeh are busy smithing. Quietly, she presses her palm to the ground. *Flattening an army did not bring my husband and neighbors back*, she says. *I did wrong. I hurt you and yours. But these quakes, my children’s deaths, will not make you whole.* - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}"P{{}}lay again?’’ Inara holds out her string to Izeh. As they trade the string back and forth, Inara tells him how to improve his arrowheads. - -Izeh’s eyes twinkle. “You are a smart one. Maybe I should be your apprentice.’’ - -“And I can be yours. You and Reza can teach me about cloth and mules and maps,’’ says Inara. “I’ve never left the camp walls.’’ - -This time Izeh’s glance is sharper. He is counting the idle hours with tops and cards and string, never wandering in the foothills among the camp’s sheep and goats. “Not even to gather wild peppers?’’ - -“We’ve been content,’’ says Dhuni, firmly, before Inara can say more. She brings out their unit’s dried moong and a few trays. “Time to sift out the sand.’’ - -“And the weevils,’’ adds Inara, dropping one on Reza’s arm. He jerks up from yet another map. - -They have just gotten settled when the captain arrives, eyes red. At the sight of Inara, his eyes bud fresh tears. “A landslide by the provincial capital. It wasn’t that bad, only a few houses destroyed, but—” he chokes. “My daughter. She’s dead.’’ - -Her chest is metal tightening when quenched too quickly. “Captain.’’ - -“I saw her four years ago, when she was seven.’’ He looks again at Inara, and then covers his face. - -She guides him to his quarters. Helps him light a lamp and burns incense for his daughter’s soul. He weeps, and she weeps with him. - -For unlike Kubir, her heart is not stone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he din of thousands of footsteps climbing Kubir’s lesser peak startle her awake, but she knows she’s waking into a dream. She’s in her bunk, long before the new captain, before Inara. - -She rushes to a friend on the night watch. “What’s happening?” In her dream the words echo across the valley, deafening, though back then her voice was strangled, desperate for evidence to deny the truth she feels in her bones as her friend—yes, a friend, because he does not ask how she knows—replies that the rebels in Polci will be routed by morning. His word: *rebel*; this friend, he’s forgotten they are her people. - -She trembles, and barely keeps the earth from trembling with her. She held back when the imperials conscripted her husband. She held back when they razed her village. - -She does not hold back now. - -She finds a spot where the double peaks are clearly haloed by a hidden moon. Hands on the earth, she is the earth. The veins of ore become her veins. She flexes her biceps, and boulders bulge. She creases her palms, and crevasses erupt under the soldiers’ feet. Their panicked scramble feels like ants scurrying on her skin. She sheds a layer of strata, sending half the legion tumbling. She’s too far to hear the screams, but she feels a surge of satisfaction as distress flares wink in the distance. How many of her people have these imperials killed? An eye for an eye, she will crush them all. - -And then she feels a resistance. - -*No*. She raises a hand up from the ground and brings it around in a powerful circle that strikes the tender connection between the two peaks. More resistance, distraught, but she is both stone and smith. She shakes off the soldiers’ frantic fingers; their desperate limbs find no purchase as she tears down the lesser peak crag by crag. After a lifetime of bowing to others, she is unstoppable. She is— - -*A fool*, interjects her dream self. But it is too late: the moon shines bright through the fresh gap of the flattened peak. - -She wakes, heart pounding, as dawn slices through the pass. - -None of the imperials suspected a gift could be so strong, but Kubir knew who had gloried in killing their child. Her past alloys her present; her blood-debt is written in russet veins of stone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}he no longer laughs when Izeh sneaks her cards. When Inara’s fingers brush against hers as they sort dried beans, she barely holds back tears. Is this dullness supposed to make the parting easier? As Reza checks the loaded mules, she cannot claim that it does. All she knows is that, just like the new boy, she must offer what justice supposedly requires. - -Yet, as the new boy holds her stock steady, studying the circle of her stroke with two healthy eyes, she wonders: Is vengeance in kind truly all she knows? All there is? - -Local customs are discouraged at imperial shrines, but still heavy in his grief the captain does not balk when she attempts to placate the vengeful mountain spirit by placing the medallion with their child Hrishita’s name on the central altar, nor when she asks Izeh and Inara to make more medallions to leave at shrines along the way. Ever-precise Reza copies down the calligraphy to commission onto silks. - -“If you must go,” she says, “stay true to our roots. Respect and honor the mountain spirits, both standing and fallen, and teach others to do the same.” - -They head to the pass then, her sons, chattering about how they will be back once they make their trades, about the sun and the wind, about the sweets they will bring back for the Solstice and the shrines they will build. Inara runs around both of them, fingering the straps, petting the mules, sometimes just jumping in place with excitement: Does the market town have one gate or two or four? Are there smiths there? And what are all these fruits you keep mentioning? - -Dhuni watches until she can no longer see the dust kicked up by their mules, until she can no longer see the sparkle of the silver-threaded scarf that Izeh has given to Inara. She listens to the sound of their eager footsteps, rising up beneath her again. Her palms itch. Even now, she could block the pass. She could force them back. But there is a thoughtfulness in Kubir’s silence that gives her hope. She presses her hands to the earth. - -*Let my children walk where your child once stood.* - -*Let them, let us, heal you with our service.* - -*It’s you who can be merciful.* - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/editorial.md b/content/issue-41/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index e1e0c1f8..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,54 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/Water-buffalo_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 41** – ***Thanks and Salutations!*** - -Almost five years ago, digital artist Huy Tran Viet provided the first cover art of Mythaxis Magazine's new design era, and we're delighted to feature his work again! Huy is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from Danang, Vietnam, and this time we have a striking blend of historical tradition and futuristic technology in *Year of the Water Buffalo*. You can see more of his work at [Cara](https://cara.app/novaillusionvda), a platform for artists and art enthusiasts." - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -Earlier this year, someone sent me a link to an article at **404 Media** (the journalist-founded digital media company *"exploring the ways technology is shaping – and is shaped by – our world"*) called **[The Digital Packrat Manifesto](https://www.404media.co/the-digital-packrat-manifesto/)**. It was more than just a catchy headline. - -It starts out lamenting the recent decision by the world's largest ebook retail ecosystem (you know the one) to build a technological moat around the reading material you enjoy via your device or app. Now they assert that this dynamic is no longer one of buying-and-selling but of *access licensing*. You can't take it with you when your Kindle dies, unless it's to another Kindle – you certainly can't download them to your computer or read them on anything else. - -With ebooks, unlike when the word is printed on paper, you don't own what you paid for. But, the article notes, this is only the latest instance of this sort of behaviour by big tech. - -Ours used to be a world of the physical, and the books (and vinyl, CDs, DVDs, Bluerays,...) you bought *were yours*, to hoard or sell or gift or throw away as you saw fit. Since the dawn of the mp3, that's all changed. Today, the idea of digital media being consumed but not owned is now accepted more or less as the default. Film, TV, and music are the all but sole domain of streaming services, in which creators and consumers are treated as little more than the input and output points of perpetual content dispensers. - -Streaming platform subscription models grant access to a menu of material that is subject to adjustment at any time, including the spontaneous vanishing of things from your watchlist as rights expire and are picked up elsewhere – or, on occasion, when social or political factors fall out of alignment with the parent company's business objectives. - -The threat of such disappearances may now hang over your reading list as well. - -But on the other end of the scale, you have the digital packrats: people who maintain private archives of the digital media they have bought in the past, rather than drinking whatever is dispensed for them from the streaming tap. To [quote the article directly](https://www.404media.co/the-digital-packrat-manifesto/): - -> Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It *requires* intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices – and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. -> -> ... -> -> Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of *The Sopranos*. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off. - -Read the article, it's a great rabbit hole of links in itself. But to bring this editorial at long last to the point I wanted to, two lines really stood out for me from that quote. The first: - -> ...this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria... - -This is how I feel about ***Mythaxis Magazine***. And I think the analogy is stronger when applied to the online magazine scene, particularly those made freely accessible by default. - -From the flood of stories that are offered to us whenever we open for submissions, zine editors curate those that really speak to us, and that we think will speak to others as well. We preserve the few we can make space for, and keep them where they can be found by anyone who comes looking. We're tying to make a public good, hopefully forever. - -There are more great stories out there than all the zines currently in existence can possibly include, and still more get written every day. That means there's a huge space for new editors and zines to step into, unique and diverse curations to be lovingly slaved over, and – hopefully – new like-minded audiences waiting to eagerly coalesce around them. - -My experience of interacting with other editors has always been rewarding. Much like my experience, as a writer, of interacting with other writers; as a reader, of interacting with other readers. The lines between creator and consumer are fuzzier when the work is done at the same personal level as the enjoyment of it, and the editor stands with a foot in both realms. The battles and concerns that drive the streaming media machines are not what drive things here. - -We need more online magazines, and I encourage anyone who might want to edit one to try. I'll close on the second line that spoke to me, which I think also applies right here: - -> Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. diff --git a/content/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel.md b/content/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6ab177e9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Mattia Ravasi -copyright: '© Mattia Ravasi 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "It wouldn't be Spring without a new review from Mattia Ravasi, and – as the editor counts down the days to Eastercon, Britain's premier fan-driven science fiction convention – it seems he's selected a most appropriate subject. Where better for someone to walk the fine line between fan and fanatic? On the page, please. On the page…" - -image: images/MetallicRealms10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author Lincolm Michel from the author's [website](https://lincolnmichel.com/) and the book's cover from [Simon and Schuster's website](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Metallic-Realms/Lincoln-Michel/9781668058671)." - -type: stock -slug: metallic-realms-lincoln-michel-review -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}ll of us who have, at one point or another, proudly called ourselves fans – of a rock band, a TV series, a sci-fi novelist – know that we are the great unappreciated scholars of our age. Those uninventive normies obsessed with molecular biology, work automation, or Elizabethan theatre might well make a career out of their passion in a lab, a company, or the halls of academia; whereas our minute knowledge of *Goosebumps* books, *Final Fantasy* games, and the manga *Fullmetal Alchemist* rarely goes appreciated outside of a handful of online boards, and a scant few annual conventions peopled by weirdos like us. - -Michael Lincoln, the narrator-cum-curator of *Metallic Realms* by Lincoln Michel – yes – is well aware of this injustice, but shrugs it off with the unshakable self-assurance of the true fanatic. Underemployed, broke, and decidedly unpopular, Michael is however a scholar – if only in his own mind. He is the official “Lore Keeper” of the Star Rot Chronicles, a series of science fiction stories created by a collective of aspiring writers called Orb 4. Taras, the leader of this collective, is Michael’s oldest childhood friend; he and the other three members – Jane, Darya, and Merlin – all come together in Michael and Taras’ Brooklyn apartment to cook up inventive tales centered around a spaceship named Star Rot and its ragtag crew of misfits and daredevils. - -*Metallic Realms* is, in fact, a novel masquerading as an edited compendium, giving us all nine Star Rot stories that compose the series’ canon. These are extremely engaging tales with memorable characters – the genderfluid android Algorithm, the fish-man pilot Aul-Wick – facing terrible odds, alien fanatics, and space whales as big as planets. They are fun stories in their own right, but they also present a long and motley homage to the history and possibilities of the science fiction genre. They range, in tone and flavor, from the high-octane adventure sci-fi of the golden age, with its overt social and political commentary, to the introspective experimental science fiction of Italo Calvino and other postmodernist writers, all the way to the philosophical and technological dilemmas of cyberpunk. They are love letters to the genre composed by devotee aficionados, and by struggling writers who cherish the simple act of creating beautiful worlds together, swapping stories with each other. - -What complicates this picture, turning it from a self-conscious nod to the genre to an intricate metafictional puzzle, is the heavy hand of its unforgettable curator. Michael is the editor of the collection you hold in your hands, and the author of its Introduction. And of its Foreword. And of the commentary to all the stories, the Afterword, *and* the After-Afterword. The depth of Michael’s passion for the Star Rot Chronicles is astounding, as is his conviction that what he is working on, and presenting to you, is one of the all-time great works of the science fictional genre. It becomes apparent soon enough, however, that Michael might also have other reasons for wanting to put his own version of the story of the Orb 4 collective out in the world; for wanting to get ahead of “the distortions, fabrications, and outright slanders” that have been spread about him since an ominous and unspecified tragedy… - -Fandom loves nothing more than name-dropping, connections, and nods; what Jonathan Lethem, speaking of pop music, calls the “intertextual erotics” of popular culture. Perhaps because this enthusiasm is contagious, the temptation is strong to discuss *Metallic Realms* by simply stringing together a series of comparisons. Michel’s novel engages with nerd culture as extensively and adoringly as Ernest Cline’s *Ready Player One*. In its casual use of genre references, and its depiction of a strong (but treacherous) friendship between geeks, it calls to mind Junot Díaz’s *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*. Going forward, I will do my best to resist this temptation; yet two further books must be mentioned to place the novel’s brilliance within context. Curiously, neither of them is a genre novel, nor do they engage with genre at all. - -The first, and most obvious, is Vladimir Nabokov’s *Pale Fire*, another novel written by a delusional (and hilarious) scholar and composed in the form of annotations to another writer’s work. *Metallic Realms* even opens with a Nabokov quote, albeit a distorted one, warping Nabokov’s distaste for science fiction into a declaration of love (with the excuse that the former “must have been an autocorrect error!”) and revealing to us from the outset quite how many liberties our narrator is going to take with his source material. The other is John Kennedy Toole’s *A Confederacy of Dunces*, whose protagonist, laze-about aspiring writer Ignatius J. Reilly, in many ways calls to mind our Micheal, with his baseless self-assurance and loose working ethics. Ignatius, like Michael, might not be an upstanding guy, but it’s hard to deny that the people with whom both brush shoulders in the straight world are hardly models of integrity or good character either. - -Much of *Metallic Realms*’ genius resides in how acrobatically its narrator manages to walk the line between utter, possibly criminal, madness, and the normal (if overzealous) behavior of a “mere” fanatic. While in many ways Michael falls into the stereotype of the obsessed, nerdy loser (to much comic effect throughout the book), he is also capable of surprisingly astute political and social observations. He is skeptical of certain conservative trends within fandom, such as the backlash against the *Star Wars* franchise for supposedly turning political. He believes the message at the heart of *Star Trek* to be little more than a cheap spin on American imperialism. He even takes issue with the term “neckbeard” because it is exclusionary of female geeks! His detailed and, at times, sorrowful characterization saves him from coming across as an amusing but predictable trope (that of the know-it-all nerd, an updated version on *The Simpsons*’ Comic Book Guy), and allows him to shine as a truly tridimensional character. - -As we dive deeper into the Star Rot stories, and we learn to filter out Michael’s own views on their authors from what we are reading, *Metallic Realms* acquires an increasingly surprising, disturbing, and sad dimension. Something clearly wrong lies at the heart of Michael’s attachment to Taras; the other members of Orb 4 might not value his help as much as he thinks; his obsession for the crew of the spaceship Star Rot might be something more than a healthy pastime. Paradoxically, all of these realizations – in the reader, if not in Michael’s own distorted world-view – only end up supporting one of Michael’s convictions: that these wondrous stories, just like the great works of science fiction, offer an alternative to the inescapable problems of drab and dreadful existence, an escape into imagination that is also a thought-out vision of a scientifically accurate universe. (Michael, with the typical ardor of a zealot, is skeptical of the fantasy genre precisely because of its ascientific fancifulness, even while clearly partial to a few fantasy franchises.) And Michael is not alone, by all means, in cherishing this escape. As their problems mount – monetary and societal pressures, romantic difficulties, quarrels and misunderstandings – the Orb 4 writers find themselves cherishing all the more deeply the power of their stories to bring them together, all while the world is pulling them apart. - -*Metallic Realms* is a brilliant enigma, a novel in layers that works as an ode to worldbuilding and imagination and, at the same time, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing oneself in one’s fantasies. It is bound to resonate deeply with all fans of the genre, especially those of us who have at one point or another dreamt of literary greatness: of joining the hallowed and sneered-upon ranks of the science fiction masters, the titans of a world that used to feel like an exclusive misfits club and has now become mainstream fare. It’s a hilarious book with a hard core of sadness, and it is gutsy enough to take itself further than I would have suspected from its opening pages. The Star Rot stories shine with luminous passion for the genre, while Michael’s insane commentary manages to reach ever new heights of mania and absurdity. - -Ultimately, the wondrous paradox of *Metallic Realms* is that it creates exactly the fictional world it is trying to convey. Not so much the interstellar wastes and dangerous planets explored by the crew of the Star Rot, but the world imagined by our Lore Keeper, Micheal, and not just imagined but coaxed into being through stubbornness, abundant delusion, and at least a certain amount of crime; a world where the Star Rot Chronicles, a handful of tales written by four bratty young people, is regarded as one of the great franchises in science fiction. By the end of the novel, I felt as if the Star Rot fandom did indeed exist: as if I had been exposed to a rich and complex universe, full of depths and nuances, as worthy of obsessing over as any big-budget TV series or blockbuster movie. Michael’s enthusiasm, no matter how misguided, is utterly infectious. The Orb 4 writers might not always want him around, but it is him, ultimately and disturbingly, who turns their stories into a work of art. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia's thoughts at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/safe-in-the-dark.md b/content/issue-41/safe-in-the-dark.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7e64a33e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/safe-in-the-dark.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,113 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Safe in the Dark" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Helen French -copyright: '© Helen French 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Another appealing mode in spec-fic is when the thematic space we think we're in turns out not to be the case, or not quite, or maybe so but maybe no - you catch my drift. Here you might say (if you were prone to bad puns, as the editor provenly is) that this story hinges not so much on the nature of genre switches as the nature of genre's witches… I'll get my coat." - -image: images/SafeInTheDark10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Susanne Jutzeler, suju-foto](https://www.pexels.com/photo/charming-rustic-kitchen-with-vintage-decor-30117466/), [Irene63](https://pixabay.com/photos/yellow-material-structure-bright-1812169/), and [SookyungAn](https://pixabay.com/photos/palm-finger-hand-let-2704015/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i41/6.Safe.in.the.Dark.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: safe-in-the-dark -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}W{{}}arm, sweaty hands tie the blindfold onto my head and spin me around. - -My tormentors giggle and laugh loudly. I worry I’m going to be sick. - -After all, the children of the village are not supposed to be in the witch’s house. We’re definitely not supposed to be playing games, especially ones that might make us throw up. We should’ve stayed by the river, like we usually do on a rest day, even if skimming stones gets awfully boring after a while. - -The giggles get higher and squeakier. They spin me faster than ever. My mother always says “I can’t see this ending well” but I can’t see anything right now. - -But then someone says, “Oh no,” and someone else says, “Shush,” a small voice whimpers, and then they all go completely and utterly silent. Hands let go of me, footsteps dash, and I finally come to a stop. - -Alone. I think. - -I gulp and try desperately to stay in control of my body. I should take the blindfold off. But I can’t. If I take the blindfold off, I’ll see what scared my friends so much and I’m not sure I want to. - -So I try to be brave in a different way and I think and listen and smell. - -When I ran into the hut with the others, what did I see? - -I remember being surprised that the witch’s home was just a single room containing a bed with old blankets, a stove that crackled softly, and a big desk covered in dusty books and strange potions. It was homelier than I’d expected, with woven art hanging from the walls and ceilings, big balls of wool in yellows, reds and blues. - -I listen hard to try and distract myself from the fear, but I can’t hear much of anything at all. Maybe the breath of wind through the trees, but that wouldn’t frighten my friends. There are no wolves growling, no demons cackling, no raiders raiding. If there is something scary in this room, it is quiet or clever or both. - -My heart sinks. - -If there’s no monster, then that’s got to mean the witch has come back. She’s fearsome enough to cause a panic all right, and my father says “She’s a damn good hunter” so she knows how to be silent when it’s needed. - -My stomach sinks too. - -Our leaders let her punish those who cross her as she sees fit. I’ve heard about the time she stoned trespassers who were only trespassing because they were hungry – who hasn’t? I don’t want to be stoned! - -I wrinkle my nose and sniff the air. There’s a sour dampness mixed into it, like sweat mixed with worry. Beyond that, I can smell dried wildflowers – I remember seeing them in a pretty little vase next to a mirror! There’s something else behind it, too, earthy and warm, like soil under fingernails, the scent of someone who’s been in the woods. - -Is it her? I don’t think I want to know for sure. - -But then there’s a creak – a soft groan from the floorboards. My grandmother would say “It’s all in your head” but I don’t think so. - -It means someone’s in here. It means the witch is watching me. - -I take a deep breath and risk shuffling forwards, one foot at a time, head still wobbly from all the spinning, blindfold still covering my eyes. - -If the witch is here and I keep the blindfold on, maybe she won’t get too angry with me. I can’t boast about what I saw if I didn’t see anything. She might let me go because I didn’t peek at her or her house. But if I take it off then she’ll have no choice but to punish me. That’s how grown-ups are, right? - -The floor changes underneath my bare feet, from warm wood to soft fur. Where did I see a rug? If things were different, I’d like to stay and wiggle my toes into it. But I have to keep going before the floorboards creak again. - -Of course, I remember where I saw the rug at the exact same time that I fall over – right onto the bed that sits next to it. I let out a yelp and then pick myself up. - -Someone laughs, a low throaty chuckle. - -It’s only luck that prevents me from wetting myself. “You’re here,” I say, then feel stupid for saying it. My head has stopped spinning but I still feel sick with fear. I’m going to be in so much trouble. - -“I am here, yes. Were you hoping I wasn’t?” - -“Are you going to punish me now?” My voice quakes a little. “You don’t have to, you know. You don’t have to tell my father, either.” - -The witch makes a low, humming noise, like she’s considering it. “You haven’t done any damage that I can see.” - -I try to relax a little. Maybe I can survive this. - -“And I don’t believe you’re here to steal my research, unlike that last bunch of trespassers. You know, the ones who were horribly stoned by the horrible witch.” - -I jolt like someone just poked me with a stick. - -She gives a little snort. “Don’t believe all the stories you hear about me, little trespasser. I sent them packing, that was all. And if I didn’t stone them for that, I’m hardly going to stone you for this.” - -I’m so relieved I think I might drop. “They stole your research? Was it important?” I ask. - -“It was. I do lots of important work here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, or if your parents have mentioned it, but parts of the forest have been dying. I’ve been researching new magic to help keep it alive. Without it, you might grow up to live in a village with no trees at all.” Her voice is softer than I thought. I feel like I could get lost in it. “Does that sound important to you?” - -I had no idea forests could die. “More than anything,” I say. Until today, I thought the witch just collected mushrooms, helped our hunters, and shouted at people. “It sounds a lot more interesting than hanging around the river.” - -She chuckles. “As it happens, I’m in need of an assistant. You are the only child I know who hasn’t run at the sight of me.” - -“I don’t have sight of you.” - -“That’s true, well observed. But you do have experience of me, of a sort, and I think you could be a great help. I need someone who is good at exploring places that aren’t usually explored. Who doesn’t talk just to fill silence. Who’s brave, even when they’re half scared to death inside. You’ve shown all of that today. So, what do you think?” - -I think she is still a little bit terrifying, and that if I see her I’ll make all of this real. - -But I also think that I’m bored of skimming rocks on the river. And that I’d like to learn more about what she does in the forest. If she gets lost in the shadows there, and if she’s scared of them if she does. - -“All right,” I say. - -“Good,” the witch replies, and she sounds pleased. “But big decisions are best made with open eyes, don’t you think?” - -And so I take a deep breath, hesitate for just a moment, and then take my blindfold off. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Safe in the Dark** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/seal-skin.md b/content/issue-41/seal-skin.md deleted file mode 100644 index 63c63758..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/seal-skin.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,169 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Seal-Skin" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- David Stephen Powell -copyright: '© David Stephen Powell 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Queue the annual moan about Things The Editor Hates To Find In The Slushpile, attached to an example of the same which he has happily selected for publication. In this case, as the title surely signals, we're in selkie territory, but what makes mythological spec-fic work is when the myth in question isn't what the story is actually about – in this case, too." - -image: images/Seal-Skin10x6.png -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [ELG21](https://pixabay.com/photos/blackhouse-cabin-storm-5796711/) and [jplenio](https://pixabay.com/photos/forest-conifers-coniferous-forest-3082836/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i41/5.SealSkin.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: seal-skin -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}G{{}}ytha went to see the hag that lived on the edge of the wood. It was an expense she could barely afford, but she needed to know. The old woman existed in a hut not fit for animals, let alone an interlocutor of the gods. Standing in the doorway, she saw one bright blue eye staring back at her from a dark corner. - -“Come in, missy, and give your coin to Lord Cunorix.” - -A large black dog distilled itself out of the shadows and sat in front of Gytha with its mouth open. - -“Just pop it in,” the hag encouraged her. - -Gytha placed her coin in the dog’s mouth and he dissolved back into the darkness. - -“Approach,” the hag commanded. - -The bright blue eye weighed her in its gaze. Where the other eye should have been, was an empty socket. Gytha came forward and sat in front of the old woman, who was wedged tightly into the corner behind a low table, hiding from the natural light that spilled into the hut. - -“It is in the shadows that the clearest sight may come,” the woman said, as if she had sensed the thought forming in Gytha’s mind. “What would you ask of me?” A dry chuckle came from her mouth that sounded like the rattle of stones on shingle. “As if I didn’t already know.” - -“I am widowed four years now,” Gytha began. “I am still young, and yet I feel the house of my soul crumbling though loneliness. And sometimes my loins throb with such heat and lust that I should want to jump into the sea and drown.” - -The dry chuckle came again. “Fashion a comforter of bread to satiate thyself. ’Tis cheap and reliable.” - -“I cannot love a horn of bread, nor can it plant its seed inside me.” - -“Then stay as you are, for all love is doomed to end in disappointment and death.” - -Gytha rose to go. She had lost her coin, and would take good care in future not to waste her money on so-called wise women. - -“Sit down,” the hag said. “I have not yet finished with you. What would I be not to offer any remedy, even if it bode ill for you?” - -The old woman bent down and took a small wooden box from underneath the table. A particular smell rose from the black wood, like spice and rotten fish. She put the box between them, lifted the lid, and took out a dried thing like an old piece of leather. - -“Here is a charm that will bring you what you wish for, and perhaps some things you do not. Cast this into the sea when the tide is at its highest, and when seven days have passed, you will find what you desire.” - -Gytha took the thing in her hand. It might have once been an animal, but now it was dried out and the colour of old seaweed. - -“Keep its seal-skin clothes hidden, and it will stay loyal to you, and you only: but if it finds them, it will return to its briny family taking your heart with it, and you shall never find another. Mark well my words.” - -Gytha thanked the woman and left the hovel at the edge of the forest. She saw the black dog, Lord Cunorix, watching her from the trees as she went. He barked once and disappeared. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}G{{}}ytha did as instructed, and on the seventh day, whilst she was collecting firewood on the foreshore, she saw the man lying in the stinking kelp at the high-water mark. He was dressed in seal-skin, unconscious, and beautiful to behold. - -She ran to the sea and fetched water in her cupped hands, spilling most of it before she was able to throw it over the man’s upturned face. His eyes sprang open and he gasped for breath as though waking from a nightmare. - -“I will look after you now,” she said. “You are mine.” - -She led him to her hovel and stripped off his seal-skins. The man said nothing as she dressed him in the clothes of her dead husband, rough tunic and trews. - -“What shall I call you?” she asked him when she was done. - -“I am Mortan,” were the first words he uttered. His voice was a beautiful as his countenance. - -“I am Gytha, and you are now my sea-husband.” - -“You are my land-wife,” he said, and lent forward and kissed her. He then went outside and began to work on the strip of land behind the hovel. Gytha took the seal-skin clothes and hid them under the hearthstone. - -That night, after their evening meal, Mortan lay with Gytha, and in the morning, when he had gone to work in the fields, she realised that the seed he had planted had already begun to grow. - -That evening, she said to him, “I want to take you to the village, but I am afraid of what the others will say to me. They will think me fickle and wanton.” - -“You need not worry,” he said. “They will accept me as your husband, and will not remember who came before me.” - -When the Lord’s Day came around, Gytha and Mortan went to the small stone church, and Mortan was accepted as Gytha’s husband, and no one was surprised, or made an uncouth or hurtful remark to them. On the contrary, Mortan was invited by the reeve to become the constable for the hundred. He was sought out for his advice on the best time of day to sew barley, and on the husbandry of lambs. - -Gytha took pleasure in watching as they fawned and ingratiated themselves around her new husband; those that had never cared whether she lived or died now looked at her with renewed respect and, for some, a touch of envy at her good fortune. - -The child in Gytha’s belly grew along with the crops in their fields. Gytha had never seen the animals so fat, or the crops so tall and healthy. In the summer, the reeve died, and the Aetheling asked that Mortan take over the position, such were the tales of his skill as a landsman. The people looked to Mortan for advice, and he proved a fair-minded reeve who had the respect of the people, and of the Aethelings. - -Gytha bore a strong healthy boy they called Eardwulf, and became pregnant again soon after. Mortan loved her well, and would bring gifts fashioned by his own hand for both her and the baby. He seemed as a young man in the first throes of love. - -Gytha rarely thought of her old husband and could now barely remember his face, or even his name. Gytha often thought of what was hidden under the hearthstone, but she pushed such dark thoughts from out of her mind. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}J{{}}ust before the harvest, sails appeared on the horizon of the grey sea to the east. - -The Danes had come. - -Perhaps they had heard from a trader that the crops this year were particularly abundant, when many others were starving. - -Mortan stood on the shore and looked out at the ships. “I count only five,” he said. “They come to raid, not to settle. We will move inland, and carry as much with us as we are able.” - -“But our house?” Gytha said. “Our church?” - -“Houses and churches can be rebuilt. People cannot.” - -Mortan sent a messenger to the Aetheling, and as the people trusted Mortan they willingly did as he said. They harvested as much as they could and took their families and animals inland where the Danes would not follow. By the evening, smoke rose over the village. Gytha and the others began to weep at the loss of their houses and their possessions. Mortan gathered them together and told them not to fret. There would be enough to go around, he said. He would bring a bounty from the sea to them. - -Within two days, the Aetheling’s men arrived and drove out the raiders, killing many and forcing the others back to their ships. When the villagers returned, few houses were left undamaged, but they set to work rebuilding. Mortan said he would rebuild their own house in a better place, higher up and farther from the shore. - -Gytha, hearing his intent, was beset with worry about what lay under the hearthstone. When Mortan was engaged in another task, she went to the ruin of their house to find the seal-skin clothes – but the hearthstone was smashed, and the clothes were missing. - -“What am I to do?” she wailed. Baby Eardwulf goggled at her and began to cry in answer to her distress. She spent many hours searching the countryside and the shore for them, but without finding anything. - -“I will go to the hag and ask her,” she said at last, and did so. - -At the edge of the wood, she was met by Lord Cunorix. She placed her coin in his mouth and entered the dark and loathsome hovel once more. - -The bright blue eye fixed Gytha from the shadows. “Speak, Missy, I’m busy,” the hag commanded, and Gytha told all that had happened: her fortune and family, the coming of the Danes, the loss of the seal-skin. - -“Then who can say how this will end?” the old woman said. “You should have taken more care. Now there is nothing to be done. Go, live your life for as long as you have it. The gods will decide.” - -Gytha left the hovel on the edge of the forest with a heavy heart. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he months passed and the villagers rebuilt their homes and their church. Mortan was there to help and advise, and he went out fishing with the other men, and they returned with bounteous catches that made up the shortfall and saw the hundred through the winter. - -When the spring came, a daughter was born whom they named Beatriz. Gytha was almost able to forget about her worries for a while: but always, in the dark corners of her mind, was the thought that the clothes might be found one day. It was the type of cruel trick the old gods (and the new one too) seemed to delight in playing on their hapless worshippers. - -Mortan asked Gytha why she was silent and thoughtful. “I worry for the future,” she said. - -“Why? Have I not cared for you, and for the others?” - -“Yes, you have cared for us as much as any man could.” - -“Then why are you sad?” - -“I am frightened you may leave us.” - -“Then you are frightened of life. One of us will leave the other and the children one day. That is the weregild we pay for love, which we can neither forestall or forfend. But we make the best we can of each day that is given to us by providence.” - -“But I went to the hag in the forest, and I paid her to bring you to me,” Gytha said, in a sudden onrush of guilt and piety. “I paid her a gold aureus, and she said that if I cast something into the sea, you would come to me in seal-skin clothes, and if I hid those clothes from you, then you would stay with me forever, and I hid them under the hearthstone, but now the Danes have found them, and I worry that one day they will come back and then you will find them and leave me forever.” - -“You speak of the Silkie,” Mortan said. “They are known amongst my people too, but I have never seen one, or heard of one coming onto the land. I think they are a yarn spun by old women whose husbands are long-dead, and who are full of the bile of loneliness and jealousy of the young.” - -“But she told me you would appear, and you did appear. She told me that you would be dressed in seal-skin clothes, and you were dressed in that fashion. All that she has foretold has come true.” - -Mortan drew Gytha closer to him, and found her gaze with his own. “Our fishing boat sank, and I was the only one the fates deemed to save. That was when you found me. As for the clothes, I burned them a year ago, before the Danes came. I was puzzled why you were keeping my old sailing clothes. I was ready to throw them away.” - -“Then why did you not tell me?” Gytha asked. - -“When the gods place a treasure within your grasp, you do not ask why. You accept their gift, and are grateful.” - -Eadwulf came into the house from playing outside. “Why is mother crying?” - -“Because she is happy,” Mortan said. - -Eadwulf looked from one to the other with confusion, and went outside again. - -Gytha and Mortan lived long and happy lives. And when they died, just one month apart, Eadwulf, Beatriz, and their brothers and sisters buried them on the hillside overlooking the shore where Gytha had first found Mortan all those years ago. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Seal-Skin** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/sunnyside.md b/content/issue-41/sunnyside.md deleted file mode 100644 index 714267ee..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/sunnyside.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,493 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Sunnyside" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Stephen S. Power -copyright: '© Stephen S. Power 2025 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "One of the editor's favourite approaches to speculative fiction is the slice-of-life format, when not yet (or never) existing worlds are realised through what is, for their denizens, everyday experiences not far removed from our own. Hence the immediate appeal of Stephen Power's excursion around a New York City not quite come to pass, but nevertheless familiar." - -image: images/Sunnyside10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Philip Warp](https://www.pexels.com/photo/bridge-and-city-at-night-11013334/) and [Valerii Golovatenko](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-grayscale-photo-of-buildings-in-new-york-city-7131156/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i41/2.Sunnyside.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: sunnyside -weight: 2 ---- - -## *CHARLIE* - -{{}}C{{}}harlie gets on the Second Avenue subway at Delancey Street, slumps onto a bench, flips down their VR goggles, and logs into *Biraq*, the city simulator. Red flares signal new challenges to their latest build, but Charlie ignores them and blinktaps the friends menu instead. It has one name, Ville. He popped on thirteen minutes ago for ten seconds. Then eight minutes ago. Then three. Charlie sits up and smiles. Ville can’t wait to see them and, after two of years of playing the game together, they are excited to finally meet him in person too. Charlie hopes they don’t argue about *Biraq* as much as usual. They would prefer fighting, though, to having nothing to say at all. - -Charlie considers logging off, but that might look too much like them peeking back at Ville, so they addresses the challenges. To counter the BRICS’s increased use of solar, wind, and wave power, Dubai lowered its oil prices again, but demand still hasn’t rebounded. Meanwhile, another temperature spike has made working conditions so dangerous that the New EU has issued sanctions. As a result, Charlie’s lost 25% of their development funds. With their Biraq just a proposed street grid, they must now choose to slow construction overall or prioritize certain districts. - -They know what Ville would do: Build the revenue districts and let the desert keep the rest, but Charlie plays differently. They created a mod that enables a Biraq’s population to decide. The game designers didn’t like it. Despite having created the game to crowdsource countless iterations of Biraq so they could choose the build with the best evolution to actually construct, they wanted to maintain topdown control of the game the way they would the real city. And Ville hated the mod. He wrote a dozen forum posts on how it could only lead to muddled design. You might as well put it to a vote of the passengers where a train should go. Nevertheless, he spearheaded the campaign for its acceptance. - -Charlie told Ville that apparently irony was as lost on him as it was on the designers. Ville said big cities need designers, but citizens should design their own little lives. So, he would have them design theirs. Which Charlie heard as, I like you. They’ve built Biraqs every night since, often falling asleep in their goggles together, then dealing with new challenges over breakfast. - -Charlie fires up the mod. A few seconds later, the population chooses something they love – a new way to self-define a city. - -A green flare appears. Charlie blinktaps it and Ville’s avatar, a white whale, takes its place. “Where are you?” the whale asks. - -“On the T,” Charlie says. Ville makes a disgusted sound, and they laugh. New Yorkers only call the Second Avenue subway by its letter name to annoy people from Boston. “You?” - -“Grand Central. My train arrived less late than I figured. Wait. Check your build. What’s gone wrong?” - -“Nothing. Isn’t it amazing?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *AUSTEN* - -{{}}A{{}}usten and Finn both live within a few blocks of the BofA Bar, but she has four roommates in a one-bedroom and he has three in a half-basement, so when the band gets too loud, the crowd too thick, and the beer too much, she nibbles his neck and he orders a zipcar. She’d prefer a zipvan or, better, an autotel, but if Finn could afford either on a random Tuesday, he wouldn’t need that many roommates. Austen was already surprised he had the time and money to take her out again this pay period. - -Her surprise turns to suspicion when, after some very slow, but very intense dancing in the former bank’s vault, Finn cancels the car and gets an autotel instead. She wants to say it’s alright, yoga helps her back endure the bucket seats, but Finn’s already tapping his watch. - -“Why the splurge?” she says. - -“Things should be special,” Finn says, then grabs her hand and leads her outside. The autotel is only a few blocks away. - -Austen bounces on her toes as the little green dot on his watchmap approaches. She knows what *Things should be special* means. He’s such a clown. - -“And I got a promotion today,” Finn says. - -“Why didn’t you tell me?” Austen kisses his hand. “What is it?” - -Finn nods toward the street. “Here we go.” - -The autotel slips out of a vehicle swarm on Greenpoint and stops at the corner of 46th. It’s long and tall, a featureless glass teardrop the size of a delivery van. The glass is already blacked for privacy, and unlike budget rentals there’s no signage for strips clubs, casinos, and weed shops. The door reveals itself by sliding open, and the orangey tang of sanitizer makes Austen blush. They last used an autotel on her twenty-seventh birthday, when Finn also made things special, and the smell acts like an aphrodisiac. Which was probably part of his clever plan. - -They tumble onto the bare black mattress, and the door reseals. Adele’s *Someone to Watch Over Me* starts playing as the vehicle remerges into the swarm. - -A screen beside the bed displays Finn’s order: scenic route, clean linens, no time limit. - -Finn disentangles himself from Austen to get sheets and pillows from a locker, but Austen traps his hips beneath hers and clamps his wrists over his head. “No time limit?” she says. “This is about more than a promotion, Mr. Moneybags.” - -“It’s not like we’re going into the city. I’m not selling a kidney for street tolls. We’ll cruise down Greenpoint.” - -She jabs a thumbnail into his palm. “Confess,” Austen says. - -“I—” he says, then his body deflates. - -She sits up. “What’s wrong?” - -For a second she thinks, *Was* he planning to propose, but lost his nerve? Finn’s just that sweet and old-fashioned, isn’t he? He has to know she could never accept. It’s tough for her, too, losing a Tuesday night, or any night, given the crazy quilt of freelance gigs she’s constantly assembling. Who knows where she’ll be in four years. Or four months. How could she override the life her rent, loans, and expenses have designed for her to create one with him? This, their moment, will have to do. - -Then Austen gets it. - -“What’s the promotion?” she says. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *LUISA* - -{{}}T{{}}wenty minutes before sundown, Central Park Tower begins randomly turning on an overhead light in every condo. To track the program’s progress, Luisa taps a holopad on the lobby floor beside her desk, and a pale blue image of the skinny skyscraper rises from it, fifteen hundred feet compressed to fifteen. Green dots mark the condos where lights are on; red, where they’re still off. She finds the process hypnotic, a chill running through her when she guesses correctly which light will turn on next. The penthouse comes on last, as always, right at sundown. - -Its dot is yellow, though: a bad bulb. - -Years ago, the building had a maintenance staff – and a hotel and a Nordstrom’s. Now, thanks to zipvans letting travelers sleep in transit and pattern retailers letting customers design clothes from home, the Tower has twelve more floors of condos and Luisa. Así es la vida. - -She gets a flashlight, bulbs, and a stepladder from the maintenance closet, then takes the freight elevator to the top. - -The doors open and a light snaps on to reveal a concrete foyer painted white. It smells dusty. The drone vacs that scour the condos each week with orange sanitizer can’t get out here. Luisa taps her watch to hold the elevator, then holds her watch near a featureless metal door also painted white. It buzzes and slides aside. - -After the Tower was built, a few condos were finished for showings, and a couple from Singapore actually lived in one for a week. The penthouse, though, like the rest of the apartments, is empty, having only the basic lighting system. The glass walls, red with dusk, deepen the gloom. The space hardly seems worth $300 million. - -Yet that price is the genius of Midtown’s megatowers. The condos’ owners don’t need places to live. They need places to store their wealth. So, instead of putting their money in a bank, the condos act as virtual vaults, their wealth appreciating as the real estate market improves. And the city’s best views go unseen like investment art put into storage. - -Luisa considers this is a terrible shame, which is why she likes changing light bulbs. It justifies her looking out the windows. And dreaming of a life that’s more than a series of lonely shifts. And long commutes. She can’t afford the city. - -The windows will be her reward. - -But first, she plays her flashlight over the floor so she doesn’t trip on the pipes sticking up and discovers the bulb didn’t blow. It was removed and left beside a stepladder standing beneath its fixture. - -Luisa gently sets down her own ladder and the bulbs, then draws her shockgun. She holds her flashlight alongside the barrel, aims both into the huge empty space, and calls, “Who’s there?” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *CHARLIE* - -{{}}"C{{}}harlie,” the whale says, “your whole city’s gone.” - -“No, only the streets.” - -“Streets are the city. No one ever built a city before there was a street to put the first building on. Are you going to throw up buildings randomly and let your population also decide how to travel between them?” - -“Sure. I love desire lines. They reveal exactly where people want to go.” - -“Except that’d be crazy outside a park. Much as I hate to say it, the Commissioner’s Map made Manhattan perfect. Without it, New York would just be a wicked tangle like Boston.” - -“If by ‘wicked’ you mean ‘aesthetically pleasing’, I agree,” Charlie says, “and Boston’s roads will improve once zipcars are doing all the navigating.” - -“You’ve never been on Route 1 in Saugus, have you?” Ville says. “Look, passengers will still want to feel in charge too, and that starts with feeling like the streets were designed with them in mind, not some Dutchman driving his goats. Would Paris be as great without Hausmann? Would D.C. without L’Enfant?” - -“Would New York without Moses? Absolutely. He ruined beautiful old neighborhoods. He cut an island off from the water. He would’ve built elevated highways across Midtown.” - -“Moses built for drivers passing through,” Ville says, “not for the city itself.” - -“So, let’s see what the city – the people – does for itself.” - -Ville snorts. “And in a century the people will finally complete something, like that subway line you’re on.” - -The subway pulls into the 34th Street station. That was quick. Charlie’s cheeks get hot. One more stop to go. - -“You know,” Charlie says, “when Europeans first came to Virginia, they didn’t think the Native Americans grew crops, but of course they did. They just didn’t put them in neat rows surrounded by hedges. They grew them all jumbled together like a meadow. Why should a city be any less organic? Have a local power plant next to housing next to retail. Instead of mixed use, call it maxed use.” - -“Nice name, but Biraq’s supposed to be the city of the future, not the past. Why live over a bar I can hear through your mic? You want to go deaf from turbines too?” - -“This from the person who lives behind Fenway.” - -“And near The Fens. Why not live in a quiet residential district within walking distance of the actual T?” - -“Are you asking me to move in with you?” Charlie says. - -“No, I was only making a point. Wait. Do you—” - -Charlie’s cheeks seem to catch fire as the subway stops at 42nd Street. Why did they have to joke about that? “I have to get off,” Charlie says. “See you in a bit.” - -Charlie logs out, flips up their goggles, and once everyone else gets off hurries onto the platform. It’s so bright. So loud. So, strangely, odor-free. The first thing you lose in New York is your sense of smell. It all sets Charlie even more on edge. - -Ville would be coming down, he said last week, to check out his cousin Finn’s apartment because he’d be moving out soon, and Ville asked Charlie to go to Sunnyside with him. They’ve been thinking it’d be nice to have him closer. They could debate whether Sunnyside Gardens, one of America’s first planned communities, developed the way it should have. Plus, there’d be less lag when they were goggling. What Charlie hasn’t wanted to think about: Is Ville actually building a road to Boston for them? What would that mean? Argh. “This is worse than arguing with him,” Charlie mutters. They haven’t even decided whether to hug him when they meet. - -Maybe if we played *The Sims*, Charlie thinks, I’d be better at life. - -The subway doors close. Charlie trails their fingers across the car as it leaves. There’d be a downtown train in two minutes. They could get on it and go home. They don’t need Sunnyside. Couldn’t a Biraq be enough? - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *AUSTEN* - -{{}}F{{}}inn tries to distract Austen with a kiss. She pushes him away. “What’s the promotion?” - -Finn looks away. “Adecco sold my work contract to Randstad,” he says. “They’re making me a human capital supervisor—” - -“Which is… great?” she says. - -“—and shipping me to Biraq.” - -Austen releases his wrists. “Where’s that?” - -“Nowhere yet. It’s a new city Dubai is planning. They’re shipping in half of Alabama to ready the land, and they need English-speaking managers, but…” - -“You’ll miss me.” She can barely speak. It’s one thing to refuse a proposal. It’s another to be refused one. - -He kisses her hands. “I wanted to say no.” - -“That would’ve been stupid.” - -“Yes. If I said no they’d fire me, and my non-compete wouldn’t let me work anywhere in HC for ten years.” - -She pulls her hands away before he can kiss them again and gathers them into her lap. “When do you leave?” - -“Tomorrow.” Finn looks at the roof. “For two years. Three, if they exercise their option. Long enough to pay off my loans, at least, with my new salary.” - -Our two years, Austen wants to say, our moment, but something else boils up inside her. “So all this, Finn, the bar, the autotel, the whole night, is your goodbye? Look at me.” - -He can’t. “I said I wanted things to be special.” - -“When were you going to let me in on it? After you dropped me off? After you boarded the plane?” A tear falls from her eye onto his cheek. He flinches. She hopes it stung. - -“I figured—” Finn starts, but Austen pulls away to stab the screen and cut the music. - -She sits against the soft inner wall of the autotel and crosses her arms, trying her best to magnify the little space between them. “Why not work remotely?” - -“Dubai wants me on site,” he says. “We could holochat.” - -“It’s not the same.” - -“No.” - -“Could I go with you?” Austen can’t believe her mouth said that. - -“A woman in Dubai?” Finn shakes his head. “Even if we were married—” - -Now she says, “No,” unsure if she’s relieved that she feels relieved. - -“It’s not like we didn’t know this could happen,” he says. “How many of our friends…” - -The autotel is turning, and Austen unblacks the sideglass to discover they’re not on Greenpoint. They’re on Queens Boulevard where the road soars over the Sunnyside Yards. She watches the trains moving on their own, coming home to sleep, turning off their lights, nestled together in rows; each empty and alone, waiting to go back to work tomorrow on the same old tracks. That’s what her life will be like without Finn, however many roommates are lined up on air mattresses in her bedroom. - -She could find another boyfriend. That’s easy. Two taps on her watch, and it would send out a signal like Aquaman. But she couldn’t find someone else who’d desperately want her to come hold him because he also hates to be alone while also being willing to wait until she wants to come. If only she could treat Finn like another gig, the way anyone who’d answer her signal would treat her. - -Damn companies. It should be less unsettling, given how they could have expected something exactly like this at any time. She’s just angry at herself for missing him already. And for wasting the autotel. Finn does look cute when he’s pathetic. Stupid floppy hair. Stupid brown eyes. - -That’s not what she wants anymore, though. Austen looks over her shoulder, sees where they’re headed and gets a better idea. She taps the screen to input a new route. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *LUISA* - -{{}}L{{}}uisa plays her flashlight and shockgun around the penthouse. “I know you’re here,” she says. “There’s no place to hide.” - -Wind hisses against the glass walls. The building sways. Creaks. Luisa steadies herself. She smells… perfume? - -“Don’t shoot.” A young woman. Who sounds Middle Eastern. Beyond the flashlight’s reach. Not pleading. Demanding. “My father owns this place.” Sure he does. - -“You shouldn’t be here,” Luisa says. “You’re not in the log.” She wants to tell her watch to summon the cops, as per policy, but a report in their file would mean one in hers too, asking how the intruder got past her, so Luisa closes on the voice, shockgun poised, to handle the situation herself. Her light finds a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket and gray scarf, standing, hands at her side. She has no watch, which is strange, but she’s palming something. Behind her is a fully-stuffed duffel bag. - -“What’s in the bag?” Luisa says. Please don’t be a bomb. - -“Clothes.” - -Hmm. “And your hand?” - -The woman holds up a green UAE passport. “I am Samya Al Maktoum.” - -“Slide it over.” The passport’s also strange. Being physical. - -The woman drops the passport and kicks it to her with a sneaker worth twice what Luisa makes in a month. Luisa taps its chip against her watch, which confirms her name and her presence on the owner’s approved family list. - -Samya doesn’t know this, though, and Luisa doesn’t like her tone. “How’d you get in?” - -“Jim. I asked him not to log me.” - -*Asked*. Jim, the Tower’s day shift, has three unemployeds at home. He always needs cash. - -“Why are you here?” Luisa says. - -“Last place my father would look.” - -“But he owns the place.” - -“You think he knows that? This is just another asset on a very long balance sheet. I am too, except daughters are sold, not held.” Samya leans toward Luisa. “Not me. I’m not going to Biraq.” - -Playing the sympathy card, Luisa thinks. But she can’t afford sympathy. “If you stay, I have to log you.” - -“Do that, and you’re putting me on a plane.” - -“If I don’t, I’m putting myself on the street.” - -“I can pay,” Samya says, aggravated, clearly unused to paying for anything. - -“Money’s not work,” Luisa says. “I need my job.” - -“Is it your job to make sure the husband chosen for me rapes me every night, should he so choose?” - -And now the sister card. Next, the tears. - -They don’t come. Instead, Samya says, “Fine. Burn me, and I’ll tell my father we had a deal for me to stay here, then you got greedy, like you people always do. When you demanded more, I said no, and you reneged, now hoping for a fat reward. My father hates delinquent daughters, but he hates deal breakers and double-crossers far more.” - -“Go ahead,” Luisa says. “I’ve worked here twenty years.” - -“You think that matters?” Samya smiles. “You’re a busted light bulb to people like him, waiting to be replaced.” - -Luisa is alarmed to see her flashlight beam become unsteady. - -“Now log me, or let me stay till morning, when I’ll leave. Go ahead. Choose.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *CHARLIE* - -{{}}F{{}}orget a Biraq, Charlie thinks. Would we still have *Biraq* if I ditch him? - -A shoe scrapes the concrete right behind them. Charlie, startled, slides away from the tracks and spins around. - -“Sorry,” Ville says. He shuffles back, goggles bouncing on his head. - -“You said you were in Grand Central,” Charlie says. - -“A tunnel connects it to here, so what I told you was true… from a certain point of view.” - -“Nice save, Obi-wan.” - -“And I wanted to surprise you. What’s wrong?” - -“It’s just that it’s weird, this point of view,” they say. “Your voice coming from lips.” - -“And you don’t look like a dragonfly,” he says. - -For a moment Charlie examines the platform between their shoes. - -“Did you know,” Ville says, “this concrete was specially formulated to resist gum and absorb human fluids?” - -Charlie looks up. “Really?” - -“No,” Ville says, “but you looked up.” - -They grin and realize that their cheeks have cooled. “It’s also weird that I can see you. In *Biraq* you’re just all around me.” - -Charlie watches him resist the urge to say, “Like the Force?” and instead say, “I could walk behind you. Whisper over your shoulder.” - -“OK, that’d be much weirder.” - -“Let’s just walk then.” Ville looks around, spots the sign for the 7 and takes a step. - -“I don’t want to go to Sunnyside,” Charlie says. - -“Why not?” Ville says. “That was the plan.” - -“I don’t know, and I know.” - -“We could go to Biraq for a while. See what your people have done.” He reaches for his goggles. - -“No,” Charlie says. “We should be non-virtual. That was the plan too.” - -Ville slumps. “I have no idea what to say.” Then he wrinkles his nose, “Does it always smell like this?” - -Charlie smirks, then it fades, then they scrutinize the platform some more until the downtown train arrives. Ville watches the people getting off and says, “Let’s try it your way then.” - -“What do you mean?” Charlie says, but Ville’s already approaching a guy in a suit. - -“Excuse me,” Ville says. The guy flips up his palm and keeps moving. - -Ville does the same to a woman with her black hair in the latest knots. “No time,” she says and walks faster. - -“What are you doing?” Charlie says. “You can’t just talk to people.” - -“I want to ask them where we should go.” - -“Like tourists?” - -“I am a tourist,” Ville says. - -“If anyone says anything, it’ll be ‘Go to the Oyster Bar’.” - -“Why?” - -“First thing they’ll think of so they can get away from you.” - -“Wouldn’t that suggest your mods, your whole build strategy, is misguided?” - -“Wait,” Charlie says, “is that where you’re really going with this?” - -“No, but it does go to show—” Ville looks at the concrete. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I promised myself we wouldn’t argue about *Biraq*.” - -“So did I,” Charlie says. “Hey, look up.” - -He does. His lips are soft. His eyes, pretty. - -“I’ve decided,” they say. “Let’s go to the Oyster Bar.” - -Ville nods. “Challenge addressed.” - -They walk toward the tunnel. - -“I don’t actually like oysters,” Ville says. “Or bars.” - -“Neither do I,” Charlie says and takes Ville’s arm, the path before them clear and brightly lit, a city of themselves ahead, waiting to be designed together. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *AUSTEN* - -{{}}“W{{}}hat did you do?” Finn says. He looks at the screen beside the bed. - -Austen jabs the screen to turn it off, then tightens her lips. - -Finn lies back, unblacks the roof and watches the el fly overhead. Austen sees stripes of shadow and light fly over him until the autotel circles left and the lines become pure white light. Finn says, “We’re taking the Queensboro? I may be suddenly flush, but that doesn’t mean I can afford the city’s street tolls.” - -She tries not to smile. Or say, It’s the 59th Street Bridge. “This is my treat. There’s a place I’ve always wanted to go, and I want to go with you.” - -Finn reaches out and guides her onto the mattress beside him. - -“I’m still mad at you,” she says. - -Now he tries not to smile. - -The autotel comes off the bridge, curls and turns, glides under the bridge on York, then turns left onto Sutton Square, where it stops. The door opens, and Austen leads Finn into the yellow wash of an old streetlamp. Instead of the usual cameras, the lamppost has signs reading *Tow Away Zone*, as if people park anymore, and *Dead End*, except it’s not. Beyond the lamp, a small brick plaza with a bench overlooks the river. - -“This feels familiar,” Finn says. “Where have I seen this place?” - -Austen grabs his hand and draws him to the bench. The autotel glides away, trailing the scent of orange sanitizer. - -For a moment they sit apart, looking at the skeletal towers rising across Queens, listening to the beat of tires on the FDR below and the bridge above, smelling the musky river and a fresh breath of wind, until their gravities pull them together. - -“You know what I adore about this city?” Austen says. “They can build it up and tear it down, stuff us in and shove us out, but they can’t take it away from us. This bench is ours now, whoever sat in it before. That bridge is too. The bar. All of Sunnyside.” - -“Compared to the city we’ve made,” Finn says, “Biraq will be just another office park.” - -“So you’ll come back?” - -After a moment Finn says, “I wouldn’t ask you to wait. I’m not that old-fashioned.” - -She says, “But will you?” - -“If you’re here,” he says. “You’re my Sunnyside.” - -Ahead a police patrol boat struggles downriver near the froth covering Roosevelt Island. Black water bursts into bright foam around the bow, the incoming tide stronger than it seems as it tries to drown more of the city. - -“We shouldn’t make too many plans, though,” Austen says. - -“Probably not.” - -Or too few, she thinks. “When’s your flight?” - -“10:30. I’m already packed. I’m subletting my space to my cousin Ville.” - -“So we could stay ’til dawn. I’ve heard it looks pretty from here.” - -He kisses her head and says, “I could use some pretty.” - -“Then it’ll be ours too,” she says and settles into his chest, her eyes bright, her cheeks brighter. - -She couldn’t have designed a better moment. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## *LUISA* - -{{}}L{{}}uisa considers her options for a moment before holstering her shockgun. - -Samya says, “Thank you.” Luisa hears, *Dismissed*. - -Luisa tosses Samya her passport and takes her supplies to the elevator. For the next five hours, Samya in the penthouse will feel like a burr in her brain. She’s barely relieved to think that, if anyone finds out, she could just say Samya ordered Luisa not to log her. The elevator descends. After a few floors something else starts to nag at her. By the time she reaches the bottom it’s clicked, and Luisa has to go back up. - -She considers knocking, then just lets herself in. Beyond the glass walls, the city has become inverted. The white lights of Queens shine like stars, while the night sky, washed out by their glow, is as featureless as the sea. The condo remains dark, though, a hole in the sky. - -Luisa hears a soft voice by the 58th Street windows. Her flashlight exposes Samya prostrate on a rug, pointed uptown, her scarf now covering her head. Luisa aims her flashlight at the floor and waits. - -Samya sits up. She looks over her right shoulder and mutters something, then looks over her left, gasps to see Louisa, and mutters again. Finally, she cups her hands, mutters one last thing, and stands. She doesn’t turn around. “You’re back.” - -“I have to change the bulb.” - -“Why?” - -“If I don’t, my relief will see the same alert I did. She’ll come up too. And she doesn’t ask questions first.” Carmella once shockgunned an unhoused girl for standing near the front doors. - -“I didn’t think of that,” Samya says. - -“No. You imagined someone couldn’t see you this high up without the light on.” - -Samya turns around. “You could have let your relief burn me.” - -“Yes.” Luisa climbs the stepladder and screws a new bulb into the ceiling fixture. It flickers on, and Luisa sees a problem with the woman’s story. “If you father wouldn’t know about this condo, why do you?” - -Samya carries her rug to the bag and kneels. “The executive who bought it told me.” - -“Why would he?” - -“She,” Samya says, carefully packing the rug. “She’s British. Terribly pale, but such a mouth. Such eyes. My Zaynab.” She pulls off her scarf and twists it through her hands. “Once she took me to the top of the Empire State Building, like tourists do, and she pointed out all the places she’d bought for my father that rose higher than the observation deck. We dreamed of the lives we could have in each. Lives of our own design. Here I’m an artist, and she’s an architect. Not that either of us can draw. Yesterday, my father found out.” - -“Ah,” Luisa finally says. - -Samya knots the scarf around her neck. “He sent Charlotte to Manchester, then fired her. As for me, he took my watch, cut me off from the cloud, blocked my accounts, and announced this morning, ‘A husband awaits you in Biraq, a designer, a real one not some gamer, he’ll make a proper wife of you.’ If he hadn’t forgotten about my old passport and the existence of cash for gold, I couldn’t have done anything after I ran.” - -Luisa climbs down the ladder and stands over the young woman, stone-faced but shivering inside, embarrassed at having misjudged her. She will fix this too. - -Luisa holds out her hand and says, “You can stay with my niece, Austen, in Sunnyside.” At Samya’s look she adds, “Queens. She’s a nice girl. Doesn’t have much room, but her boyfriend’s about to propose. Finally. Maybe you can take her space if they get one together.” - -Samya nods as if thankful and lets Luisa help her up, but doesn’t release her hand. - -Luisa pulls free. “We’ll leave at midnight. Austen won’t mind. She’s always working late. Like we people always do.” She heads for the door, hoping she’s not making a mistake. - -“I treated you horribly,” Samya calls after her. “Why would you help me? What’s your game?” - -Luisa stops. “We can’t design our own lives anymore,” she says, “but maybe we can help others design theirs.” - -“A pretty view,” Samya says. “If true.” - -Luisa instinctively looks out at the city’s controlled chaos. - -“Yes,” she says. “A very pretty view.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Sunnyside** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-41/the-culling.md b/content/issue-41/the-culling.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4a90b72a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-41/the-culling.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,73 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Culling" - -date: 2025-04-01 -issue: Issue 41 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Addison Smith -copyright: '© Addison Smith 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Introducing new writers to your audience is always rewarding for a magazine editor, but a parallel pleasure is welcoming contributors back to share more of their work. They have to justify it, though: the editor must not fall back on nostalgia, having them back just for old time's sake. Fortunately for me, Addison Smith's strange little stories always have a little something." - -image: images/TheCulling10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using two Creative Commons images by [Charles](https://www.pexels.com/photo/kids-trick-or-treating-in-halloween-costumes-near-house-entrance-5859424/) [Parker](https://www.pexels.com/photo/multiracial-kids-in-halloween-costumes-near-decorations-5859379/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i41/3.The.Culling.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-culling -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he monsters fell from the sky and everyone cheered. They burst on impact, painting the roads in yellow fluid which the people gathered in their *Monster Splat*-branded buckets and wiped on their celebratory pants. All around the bodies lay in mangled and dripping heaps, and cheers rose into the evening. It was a good event with millions of bodies falling to earth, ensuring everyone had a chance to gather them up. - -"They used to be bigger," Grandpa said, poking a limp and yellow body with his Monster Stick. "Bulbous things with lots of innards. We don't get good monsters like that anymore." - -I scooped a pile of rope-like entrails in my hands and enjoyed the way they squished between my fingers. I was a big girl now, almost ten, so Grandpa let me lead the expedition. I dropped the guts into my bucket and sucked the fluid off my fingers, shivering at the taste. - -All around, kids from school walked and poked and gathered. I saw a boy from my class and called out, "Happy Monster Splat Day!" The boy didn't respond, watching the celebrations instead. I turned to Grandpa. "Why don't people fall from the sky?" I asked. "That would be a really big splat!" - -Grandpa smiled like he was remembering something a long time ago. He stroked his hand through my hair, wet with yellow goo, and licked his fingers clean before answering. "Not sure," he said. "Just the way God made the world, I guess. Monsters fall from the sky and people walk on the ground." - -"Has anyone ever caught a monster? Like, alive? I wonder what they think of it." - -"Nah," Grandpa said. "That'd be a waste of a good splat. Anyway, it's getting dark. Is your bucket full enough?" - -I held it up, overflowing with yellow viscera that covered the orange *Splat!* logo. Juice slopped over the side and I glared at the waste. - -Grandpa didn’t notice. "That's a good girl," he said. "Let's join the others." - -The others weren't far away, all gathered in the local department store parking lot. Lights sparkled from fences and strobed over cars where boys and girls sat on their hoods to kiss. Grandpa saw a couple making out and didn't avert his eyes, grinning instead. - -"Your grandma and I used to be those kids," he said. "All hopped up on youth and the excitement of the event. That was early on, when the portals in the sky first opened." - -I listened with rapt attention, because the story was part of the tradition. He would tell how grandma was got the goo on her lips, and she was the first he ever saw lick her lips and smile, that new presence of peace shining behind her pupils. - -"The monsters make things better," he said, finally. "You don't know what it was like before, not really. They teach some of it in your classes, but you can't imagine the pain of loss. It's better this way, not having to feel it." - -Somewhere in the distance, a boy was violently sick, throwing up the yellow goo in a puddle. Nothing changed around the parking lot, except we all started vaguely in his direction. - -"The monsters changed us. There were worries early on, you know, as if it wasn't the will of God himself. They thought the strange biologies would change us in some horrible way. All it really did was release us from the pain of loss." - -The vomiting boy ran, but he couldn't make it far. There were too many of us, those who accepted the monsters' bodies. I dipped my finger into my bucket and sucked the juice, sweet on my tongue. Grandpa gripped his Monster Stick, but we were an odd pair in the party. He was too old to keep pace, and I was too young to have a Monster Stick of my own. In the distance, teenagers swung their sticks, cracking the boy's bones like sugar sculptures in his body. He screamed, but he knew how it went when you didn't accept the fluids. - -"Does it hurt?" I asked, curious at the prospect. - -"When they cull you? Probably. Your grandma put up a hell of a fight, I'll tell you, when her body began to reject it." Grandpa laughed. "We weren't in public, so I got the honor. She was a real workout." - -"What about… for us?" I asked. "Does it hurt to kill the ones who don't accept it?" - -Grandpa considered, watching the boy in the distance as his own fluids spread on the concrete, red and thick with gore. "You know, before monsters started falling, I'll bet it did. Could have been tough, punishing those that reject gifts from the heavens. Specially loved ones. But now we don't have to worry about that." Grandpa stared up to the sky and the winking portals above, delivering bodies from the great unknown. - -"We have that to thank them for," he said, hand to his heart. - -I stared up with him and put my own hand on my heart. Behind us, the screaming stopped and the commotion returned to subdued celebration. "Thank you," I said to the monsters. - -I couldn't wait to get my own Monster Stick. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Culling** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/ShortReviews10.md b/content/issue-42/ShortReviews10.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7e978226..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/ShortReviews10.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,52 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – April to June, 2025" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "On with the downward spiral of the world – and Mythaxis can't be expected to distract you from it alone, coddling you into a desperately clung-to moment of 'Oh how interesting, no need to look around and witness the collapse of all Humanity touches.' For indeed, there are other places online you can read well at the click of a button. At least until the power goes out for the final time…" - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-april-to-june-2025 -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}S{{}}tarting with something short and sharp, ***[Broken Windows](https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2025/06/25/broken-windows/)*** by Nicholas Diehl gives us a narrative about crime and punishment – two concepts, it would have us perceive, more conjoined than some quarters of society would like to acknowledge. It takes the form of five monologues, opening with The Window Man, for whom opening windows was very much not the role, followed by The Defenestrator, which would explain why, if you happen to know what *defenestration* means. I won't spoil. - -The three remaining characters are all of far more recognisable types (The Student, The Paramedic, The Press Secretary), but it is of course the context about which all five are speaking that makes these ordinaries stand out. As is the way at *[Sci Phi Journal](https://www.sciphijournal.org/)* (Laureate of the European SF Award for Best Magazine, no less!), the story is followed by a philosophical note from the author to help clear up uncertainties harboured by any passing US senators unfortunate enough to accidentally read the story and have their charcoaled souls exposed. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}ontinuing, we take to the road along one of the many routes administered by the Department of Social, Political, and Speculative Cyber-fiction, aka *[The Future Fire](https://futurefire.net/index.html)*, in this case pacing steadily towards our destination under the guiding hand of Juliet Kemp. - -In ***[Treading Invisible Threads](https://futurefire.net/2025.73/fiction/treading.html)*** we accompany narrator Senna as they revisit familiar ground, compelled after many years to return to the place of their apprenticeship following the death of their estranged master. That place is Avebury, a village in the south of England famous for a five millenia-old Neolithic monument akin to Stonehenge, and Senna is a *justiciar*, serving the communities of their assigned district by combining the functions of both courier and judge, settling local disputes and conveying messages across the country that are passed by justiciars from hand to hand. Yet this is not a bygone world but a future one, hinting at long-passed social and ecological collapse and a culture more carefully rising from the ruins. - -With their replacement as apprentice not yet ready to take up the role, Senna has travelled from their own circuit up north in Chester to provide reluctant assistance, carrying a number of communications for people who were once regular acquaintances. What results is a journey that kicks up memories of Senna's past, the kind of things that seem to get in your eye like road dust and provoke a similar unwanted reaction. And ***Treading Invisible Threads*** is very nicely told, its only slip – an unironic and therefore slightly eye-rolling mention of the oh-so-cliché *"before times"* early on – a forgivable one. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}o round off this issue's excursions, two recommendations from Issue 10 of [Radon Journal](https://www.radonjournal.com/), focus point for Radical Perception, where is published prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. And my picks here happily mirror the previous, the first being another longer story comprising troubled environments, apprenticeships, and journeys, the second a swiftly stabbing tale of social correction that hints at darkness behind the scenes. - -In ***[The Oneiromantic Sheep](https://www.radonjournal.com/issue-10/the-oneiromantic-sheep)***, ageing shepherd Samuel and his adult granddaughter Min are taking their flock to join a seasonal gathering at a distant community, an event that will mean not just trade but the chance for their animal charges to breed outside their regular group, mixing up the gene pool and ensuring stronger lambs for the next generation. Immediately we join them this mission is under threat, as a pack of predators block their path along a crumbling motorway: chimeric creatures with varying coyote-like traits, some going on four legs, some bi-pedal and wielding weapons with unsettlingly human hands. Scaring them off is only the first of a series of challenges and setbacks Samuel and Min must overcome. - -Author Frank Baird Hughes crafts a really interesting storyworld here, though not so much for its taking place on another planet in an distant solar system. Avunculus was terraformed in such a way that its native biome would be merged with that of its new human occupants, only for a natural disaster to collapse the technological foundations that allowed any of this to happen, thrusting society on the planet into a far more primitive state. However, while creatures like the "coyotl" manifest their hybridization physically, Samuel's sheep share a hivemind, one their shepherd can communicate with while sleeping, after consuming certain more or less naturally occurring roadside herbs, that is. These sometimes philosophical conversations with the flock are the gems in this story, but there's plenty of action and adventure to enjoy besides. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nd finally, as promised, ***[Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland](https://www.radonjournal.com/issue-10/instructions-for-rewilding-the-wasteland)***, a sequence in four bite-sized chunks this time, circling us back around to matters of justice. We join one of a group of persons sentenced to make amends for past actions, transported through the night into the heart of a forest of unknown depth. I shall say nothing regarding the nature of the punishment that awaits, the extent to which their willingness to submit is voluntary and informed, nor the implications left hanging by the whole. Go read it instead. - -***Instructions...*** was written by Emma Burnett, who has appeared twice previously in *Mythaxis* and, I shall now divulge, will do so again before the year is out! I was strongly reminded of yet another nutshell-sized sf tale of institutional correction, Rachel K. Jones's celebrated *[Five Views of the Planet Tartarus](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/)*. In my opinion, this makes a very fine complementary piece for that. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/__index.md b/content/issue-42/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index ba341221..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42" -date: 2025-06-30 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 42 -subhead: Summer 2025 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/a_diazsignacio.jpg -imageMobile: images/a_diazsignacio_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "a by Ignacio Diazs" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: baseline - color: '#01ff0b' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: flex-start - # align_items: flex-start - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-42/contents.md b/content/issue-42/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4f3e267c..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [Tag, You're It]({{< relref path="tag-youre-it.md" >}}), by Sean MacKendrick -- [Listen, Don't Touch]({{< relref path="listen-dont-touch.md" >}}), by Cheryl Ntumy -- [Lay-offs]({{< relref path="lay-offs.md" >}}), by Anna Ziegelhof -- [Swimming With Elephants]({{< relref path="swimming-with-elephants.md" >}}), by Travis Ezell -- [The House We Built Together, Yesterday]({{< relref path="the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.md" >}}), by Charlie Winter -- [Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon]({{< relref path="someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.md" >}}), by Josh Pearce -- [Strange Pictures, by Uketsu]({{< relref path="strange-pictures-uketsu.md" >}}), reviewed by Bill Ryan -- [Short Reviews – April to June, 2025]({{< relref path="ShortReviews10.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-42/editorial.md b/content/issue-42/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 36c9e54f..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/a_diazsignacio_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 42** – ***Thanks and Salutations.*** - -So, in the end this issue did not lean into forty-twoness the way it might have. Nevertheless, I think the off-kilter, alien-abductionish edge to our cover art would raise a smile for galactic hitchhikers everywhere. Minimalistically entitled 'a', it comes courtesy of Ignacio Diazs, a background artist from Santiago, Chile. You can see more of his work – which often shares this mix of every-day scenes with quirky dimensions – on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/diazs.ignacio/), [DeviantArt](https://www.deviantart.com/diazsignacio), and [Cara](https://cara.app/diazsignacio). Many thanks, Ignacio!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -I've had a few different plans for this editorial. - -First, from a distance, was a long-standing notion to celebrate this forty-second issue of ***Mythaxis Magazine*** by making it all about *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*. I still remember on an almost visceral level the laughing fit I had at the way Douglas Adams described Ford Prefect getting put out of his stride when Arthur Dent met, it turned out, Zaphod Beeblebrox for the *second* time. I even reread that trilogy in five parts over the last year, finding it not to be what I remembered in a number of ways – but I have other people doing the book reviewing around here, no need to slide another one in on the quiet. - -More recently, I considered writing about my experience of Eastercon 2025, maybe making some general observations about genre conventions and awards and ceremonies and so on along the way. However, after a little reflection, I decided that's not a great idea either. Maybe you're into them, maybe you're not, but (as Jack Nicholson once said) I'm somewhere in the middle myself, so I doubt I'd deliver any startling insights that would swing the global balance of opinion one way or the other. - -But then, very recently, I learned of the sad passing of our long-time contributor Les Sklaroff, and there stopped being any question about what I would really want to write. - -Les was born in London and educated at the University of Edinburgh (despite, he claimed, spirited resistance). He later hitch-hiked abroad, basking in Corfu, busking in Paris, and worked for an antiquarian bookseller before training as a teacher. After teaching in Scotland for ten years, he moved with his wife and children to the Isle of Wight and became an independent bookseller, specialising in Mervyn Peake, illustrated books, and modern first editions. - -And somewhere along the way, he started writing. Over a period of twelve years, Les contributed many stories to this magazine. In his fiction, he assembled quirky, anecdotal reportage of "everyday" life in an unreal city, and occasional fleeting glimpses of the environs around it. He introduced readers to its very often eccentric inhabitants with a neighbour's ear for gossip and an anthropologist's eye for what makes them tick. To read one of these tales was to go for a ramble in a place you'll never get to visit, often finding that its strangeness was highlighted by how just like anywhere else it could be. Likely all cities have their weird corners, maybe Snoak just flipped the ratio. - -When we compiled his stories into their own space, **[Sketches of Snoak City](https://mythaxis.co.uk/SnoakCity/)**, Les told us his late flowering as a writer was largely due to the friendly indulgence of *Mythaxis*'s original editor, Gil Williamson. I have no doubt that Gil cherished this facet of their relationship. When I took up the reins after Gil's passing, I was delighted to welcome Les back to expand his unique guidebook when he had other glimpses of Snoak to share with us. - -My [first editorial](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-22/editorial.html) here was to celebrate the life of Gil, touch wood this won't be my last. But I would like to offer a salute to the memory of Les, with our thanks. If there is a place we go after we exit this world, we can only hope it is half as vivid and interesting as the one he created. diff --git a/content/issue-42/lay-offs.md b/content/issue-42/lay-offs.md deleted file mode 100644 index 0316060c..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/lay-offs.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,341 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Lay-offs" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Anna Ziegelhof -copyright: '© Anna Ziegelhof 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "One of my all-time editorial bugbears is writers writing stories about someone being a writer – sets my teeth right on edge, I'd sooner chew a mouthful of tin foil than read such a thing. However, for no reason that I can consciously explain, I absolutely adore speculative fiction about employment… I guess being a writer just can't be a proper job. Anyway, while the short genre fiction community sharpens its pitchfork collection, let's celebrate the fact that Anna Ziegelhof delivered the right kind of story." - -image: images/Lay-Offs10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [StockSnap](https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-sad-depression-skin-headache-2609115/), [JayMantri](https://pixabay.com/photos/table-wood-cup-mug-metal-pattern-438422/), and [saylowe](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ear-anatomy-ear-3d-anatomy-anatomy-2146396/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i42/3.Lay-offs.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: lay-offs -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}A{{}}li Vicente fought back when the HR-Assistant extracted her Focus Mate. It had been her first job out of college. Far from home, she had really bought into the We-Are-A-Family-Here-thing. On the day of the lay-offs, she was crying inside the HR-Assistant booth next to mine. - -I felt for her. I’d had a Focus Mate removed many times, though this was my first lay-off from a permanent contract, too. Before this, I had been hopping from term-contract to term-contract and always knew from the day I signed exactly when I was going to step into a booth and have my Focus Mate removed. This time I arrived for a hard day’s work just like any other, only to discover they were going to strip me of everything that connected me to the company. - -It was best not to get too attached to a job. The physical pain of removal always stung, but the emotional pain could sting even more if you let it: alongside the implant, your income tumbled into the biohazard slot; your health insurance, gym membership, free takeout food, the constant supportive chatter of your global company-family; and, since it was Ali’s first last day on a job, probably a good chunk of sense of self. - -Being laid off was different from seeing the end of a contract approaching. It hurt me, too. I winced when the booth’s assistance-arm pulled the Focus Mate out of my neck just below my hairline and replaced it with a complimentary silicon button to keep the port from healing over. The colorful information nuggets in my field of vision switched off, and the name-tag ‘Ali Vicente’ disappeared from where it had been hovering above her head. The sensation of having my senses turned off was disorienting and nauseating. I fumbled for the provided receptacle and threw up. My retching sounded muffled without acoustic optimization, and without visual cues like directional arrows and reassuring check marks I wasn’t sure whether my vomit even hit the bucket. I didn’t recall it being this bad. But then, I had been with the company four years. I had never worn a Focus Mate for that long before. - -The glow of the HR-Assistant’s help-screen attracted the attention of my newly aimless gaze. I initialed disclaimers, agreements, acceptance forms. - -Something red appeared in the corner of my eye. A notification? I shifted my gaze toward the alert-red thing. It was a smudge on the next booth’s privacy window. In vain, I waited for a hypothesis from my Focus Mate. - -Gone, of course. I’d have to figure it out myself. Well, it was red. Smeared. Paint? - -*Blood*. - -Through the glass, I saw Ali Vicente sink to the floor inside her booth. Her HR-Assistant’s assistance-arm had coiled itself around Ali’s ribcage while its pincers were attempting to pry open her fist. - -“Ali, you’ve got to turn it in!” I shouted. My voice sounded unconvincing and dampened. - -I scrawled my exit-signature on the screen. “Best wishes for your future!” the HR-Assistant intoned and the booth’s door opened. I stumbled out and over to the other booth, inside which Ali was on the floor and bleeding. I banged on the glass. “Let it have the implant! It’ll hurt you!” I shouted, hoping to be heard through the soundproof partition. No reaction. - -It was a big no-go to mess with the HR-Assistant, but the booths did have an emergency button on the outside. Company-as-family-indoctrination must have worked on me at least somewhat, because I found it difficult to stand by while an ex-family-member was being attacked by a machine for not eagerly surrendering her Focus Mate, symbol of belonging, of knowledge, self and worth. - -I slammed the emergency button. The assistance-arm went limp. The door popped open. I pulled Ali Vicente out. She had one hand clenched around her wrist, the other hand seeping red like she was crushing a sachet of ketchup. - -Without my Focus Mate, the company’s complimentary first aid seminars were hazy notions, but there was a pile of leftover t-shirts from the summer picnic inside the deactivated booth. I grabbed one and wrapped it around Ali’s bleeding hand. That would have to do for now. - -She didn’t even seem to notice, only stared ahead, catatonic. - -Kinda knew how she felt. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} managed to drive us to my apartment, semi-safely, alternating between fixating on the road ahead and snapping my head left and right in case something came at us from the side – no more Focus Mate, no more real-time driver assist. - -Ali sat motionless in the passenger seat next to me, her wrapped-up hand pressed to her chest and getting blood on that t-shirt too. - -I sat her down at my kitchen table and rummaged through my bathroom cabinet until I found antiseptic ointment and some band-aids. I unwrapped the summer-picnic *fun fun hackathon* t-shirt and saw it: Ali’s bleeding fingers were still holding her extracted Focus Mate. I looked at it like it was some kind of holy relic. - -“How insert Focus Mate, DIY?” she slurred. Her face contorted when there was no response. She swatted at her ears. The world always sounded muffled without the chatter of the hivemind for a while. - -*For a while*, I thought vaguely, *but* *how long?* I had always used my previous company’s Focus Mate to line up my next gig. During the past thirteen years, I had only gone a few days, max, without one. This time, how would I even focus on finding a job without a Focus Mate? I felt a sense of terror at the prospect. What seemed most alluring was to just… Ah, crap. My mental health subscriptions were gone too, of course. - -Some whimpering sound. - -There were ointments and band-aids on my kitchen table. - -Right. Ali. She’d stolen her Focus Mate. We’d have to do something about that. - -First, I cleaned her bleeding hand. She wept. - -When I was done, I brought her a clean top and tossed both her bloodied t-shirts into the garbage. Then I boiled some water for tea. - -My cabinet was full of logo-mugs representing my journey through the margins of the tech-world. I wasn’t a programmer. Nothing on my resume made me the obvious choice for anything. And now, no Focus Mate to prompt the best phrase to use on a resumé, the best response during an interview. - -How had I even functioned until I started my first job and with it got my first Focus Mate? How had I made it through university? I distinctly remembered the day the world finally gained dimension, color, information. This was a bitter throw-back to before-times. - -“Ali,” I said, feeling dull and sluggish. Ali’s puffy eyes dragged themselves over to meet mine. She squinted, probably waiting for additional input. Her healthy hand twitched: the aborted gesture of reaching for the nape of her neck to flip on the Focus Mate, like every normal person did first thing every morning. - -“We’re stuck like this for a while, but we can do it, okay?” I said to her slowly, not sure if I was lying. Sensory deprivation. How long until we went mad? That’s what sensory deprivation did to a person! - -“This is it,” she mumbled. “This is the end of the world.” - -I convinced her to take a nap on my sofa, which didn’t take much effort, and while she was snoring softly I dusted off my old laptop. How slow it was. How heavy. - -I found that website for networking. For years, I’d only accessed it through the Focus Mate. The browser-version looked obsolete. Scrolling through the newsfeed with my fingers was cumbersome. - -*I am excited to share that I started a new position.* - -*I am excited to share that I started a new position.* - -Suddenly the posts changed. - -*I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.* - -*I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.* - -My anxiety pinched again. Had everyone in my network been laid off? - -Ali stirred on the sofa, jerked up, wide-eyed, then started crying again. “Not a nightmare,” she whined, got up and stumbled through my living room, bumping into the coffee table and the ottoman. The brain needed time to readjust to seeing without proximity-warnings and route-guidance. - -“Ali,” I called, as one might call a shy kitten. - -She had gone for her bag. She rummaged through it until she found her phone. She tapped here, tapped there, then began scrolling. - -“Ali,” I said, approaching her carefully. “You’re a programmer. Maybe we can hack it.” - -“Hack what?” she muttered, eyes locked on the calming glow of the screen. - -Had she forgotten? I picked up her Focus Mate from where I’d wiped it down by the sink. “Your Focus Mate,” I said, circling it enticingly before her. “You could hack it!” - -I mean, maybe? What did I know? I had only been a project coordinator. But *maybe* one of us many lay-offs had the skills to hack a Focus Mate. *Maybe* we could find a way to create a version that even people without a job could access. Real out of the box thinking, that. Hope blossomed in me. I just had to get Ali on board. - -Ali didn’t even look at it. “I can’t work without my Focus Mate,” she whispered as her eyes followed the scrolling movement of her phone’s screen. - -“Listen,” I said, raising my voice to keep her attention. “Someone built this. There was a time before these things, and during that time someone built the first one, and they didn’t have one.” - -She frowned. “What?” - -“Someone built the first Focus Mate,” I rephrased, so tired from using my senses so much. “And they did it without a Focus Mate.” - -Ali snorted. “That doesn’t make any sense, Lara.” - -“Maybe we can figure it out,” I sighed. I swiped my finger across my laptop’s fingerprint reader. *Get free Netflix for a month!* said a popup. - -I used my tired finger to click the button. How hard everything was. I turned on a show about a happy world. Nobody was worried about health insurance and not finding a new job and catatonic coworkers. Coworker wasn’t the right word. Family. That was the word. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}} must have fallen asleep. My Netflix show was still playing. - -I had lost my job. My Focus Mate! - -Ali was sitting on the floor in my living room with her phone. Her thumb was scrolling. - -We should eat, I thought. I was going to pull up the takeout menu browser, except, like everything else, no Focus Mate. So no food ordering. - -There was something I could make without having to focus. Spaghetti with tomato sauce. I checked the cupboards. Great: none of the ingredients required. - -The store was, thankfully, walking distance, so no more road nightmares. But it looked so strange without the bouncing advertisements projected into my field of vision. It was hard to navigate the aisles without the flashing arrows pointing the way, suggesting something I might need. It took forever to find the pasta, the canned tomatoes, the butter and onions. - -I returned to my apartment, deadly tired. And then I had to cook. - -“Ow,” Ali whined when she tried to use her injured hand to eat while scrolling with the other. - -“It’s hard, but you have to adapt. You do want to find a new job soon, right?” I pulled the phone out of her healthy hand so she could eat. - -She seemed clearer after dinner. I kept her phone away from her to bring up the topic of the Focus Mate again. “Imagine,” I said, “we could hack it. And have Focus access. Even just basic. Imagine how much easier our job search would be!” - -“Max,” she said, sounding less defeated than before. She hadn’t even asked for her phone back, nor attempted to stuff the Focus Mate back into the hole at the back of her skull. “Max is hardware.” - -“Let me ping Max!” No. Couldn’t. I groaned. I’d get used to it eventually. It had not even been a day off the Focus Mate. I got my laptop from the living room and put it on the kitchen table, so we could both see it. - -“Dude,” Ali said. - -“I know, right?” - -“So fat!” She giggled. Her eyes flicked to the right, probably checking for likes and hahas. But nobody but me had heard her quip. - -On my laptop, the Netflix-screen was suggesting we watch another episode. I clicked the play button. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}*re you still there?* a line of text read. - -I looked around. Ali and I were both sitting somewhat distortedly at my kitchen table. We’d watched a few episodes. What had we meant to do? - -Right. Max. Help. I dragged the cursor heavily across the screen and went to another tab. - -“Look at this,” I said to Ali. “It’s a social media website that still exists. I think it may be a way to make contact with others.” - -I scrolled and scrolled. The same *I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity*. From everyone. - -I typed the name Ali spelled for me. We found him after a few tries. Next to Max’s name, there appeared the familiar line of text: *I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity*. - -“Max,” I said aloud as I typed, poking the clunky keys. “Ali and I, need your, help.” - -*I was laid off today*, he replied immediately. *Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner*. - -“So were we. We don’t, have, Focus access, anymore. But, we have, something, cool.” - -*Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I was watching Netflix*. - -“We have, free, food,” I tried, appealing to a biological need. I gave him my address. - -He appeared after dark. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. Can’t drive like this. Public transport. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.” - -“It’s fine. Have some food. We’ll show you what we have.” - -Max ate leftover spaghetti ravenously. He’d need a new job soon, otherwise he’d starve. When the spaghetti was gone, I showed him the Focus Mate Ali had stolen. - -Max stared at it: that moment of hesitation while he was waiting for an automatic caption or a hypothesis to appear from the Focus Mate. He finally reached out to explore the device with his fingers, then shook it gently next to his ear. - -“It’s a Focus Mate,” I explained. “That’s what it looks like outside the body.” - -“We thought, maybe we could hack it or something?” Ali said. “Build a non-branded one? To help with our job search?” - -Max put the device back on the kitchen table and his attention shifted to my old laptop. A moment’s wait for input again, then he asked. “Is that a MacBook Pro?” - -I confirmed. - -“Holy shit! I’m really into vintage machines! I almost missed it lying there!” No wonder, without the Focus Mate sending a little red notification to alert him to something nearby that might be of interest to him. Max looked at the old device from all angles, touched it with his hands, with his cheek. I took it away from him before he could lick it. - -Ali clicked her fingers, taking over. “Hey! Focus! We asked you something!” - -“What?” - -“You are hardware. Are you gonna help us hack the Focus Mate so we can find new jobs?” - -“I could hook it up to this baby!” Max seemed more alert. Maybe a sense of purpose could do that to a person. - -He seemed almost gleeful when he rummaged through the box of cables I kept, no idea which device they had once belonged to. Max and Ali talked in words I had a hard time understanding without a Focus Mate to subtitle their conversation into non-technical language. Really, as a non-technical person with a BA in English Literature, the Focus Mate’s subtitle-function was the only way I had ever been able to succeed at my job at a tech company. - -My old laptop’s screen was soon lit up with terminal windows for the very first time. At least Max and Ali seemed to have momentarily forgotten about our impairment and how difficult everything was going to be. Maybe not so difficult for them. They were young and programmers. But me, I wasn’t as young. And not a programmer. What was I going to do? - -I wanted my Netflix. I found my phone and settled down in a corner next to a wall outlet. I logged into my free trial and kept watching on my phone. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}“N{{}}nnno,” I growled when someone tugged at the screen before the show was over. - -“Lara!” a voice said. But my show was still on. I looked up at a sort of greasy-faced someone, not like the matte pastel-colored actors on my show. - -Lay-off. Focus Mate. Panic swept through me. New job! - -“Lara.” It was Ali. My family-colleague. - -Had the company actually referred to itself as a family? *Bullshit*, I thought, and winced in anticipation of the low-level jab of electricity the Focus Mate supplied whenever it detected a thought that wasn’t aligned with company culture. - -No jab came. That’s right. Focus Mate gone. Ali here. Max, too! - -Ali clicked her fingers at me this time. “Lara, Max says we need to bring in someone else. We made some progress, but there’s something missing. And we don’t know how to find out without a Focus Mate. Max knows this guy…” - -“But he’s, like – oh, it’s really sad, actually,” Max said. “So smart, though. So sweet.” - -“Can we trust him?” I asked, suddenly using my project coordinator voice. - -Max sighed. “It’s actually really hard for me to talk about this, because he’s, you know, different. He’s never had a Focus Mate.” Ali gasped; Max nodded. “So, because, actually, he almost died when he got his first. So, he doesn’t have one. And can never have one. So, he can’t have a job, obviously. He has a degree, though. Did it without a Focus Mate!” - -“Yeah, so did I,” I grumbled, remembering times spent at the library, reading books, writing my own summaries, rather than relying on convenient internal summary-libraries. - -“Oh my god, I had no idea you were that old!” Ali exclaimed, immediately wincing in anticipation of the low-level jab for saying something iffy in terms of HR-compliance. When no jab came, she still apologized. - -“Whatever, Ali. Alright, Max. Do you think your friend would want to help with this?” - -“Yeah, why not?” - -I waited a moment for Max to figure out why. When he didn’t, I told him: “Because we’re begging him to help us fix a piece of technology that he can’t use but everyone else uses, which probably makes his life pretty difficult at times.” - -“But he’s the happiest person! So positive! So inspiring!” - -“Reach out. But only if he really wants to do it.” - -Max pulled out his phone. “I’m texting him,” he explained. “Obviously. Since he can’t, you know…” - -“Wow,” Ali said. - -“Well, we can’t either right now,” I reminded her. And we watched Max do the typing thing on his phone screen, with both thumbs. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}D{{}}espite the late hour, Max’s friend Elias said he’d come right over. - -“Just behave naturally. It can be a little sad, but he’s really cool once you get to know him,” Max reassured us when the doorbell rang and I buzzed him in. - -“Hey,” Elias said and showed off a dimpled grin. - -“Hi! You – must – be – Elias,” I said, enunciating clearly. Full of sympathy, I suppressed an urge to hug him impulsively. - -“I – am,” he enunciated back. “Max – must – have – told – you – about – me.” - -“He – did.” - -“Chill out. You can just talk normally,” Elias said, sounding completely normal actually, and slunk past me into my apartment. - -Elias sat down in front of the construct Max and Ali had built, which consisted of my old laptop, a lot of cables, and the Focus Mate. He laced his fingers together and made them make a freakish noise like microwave popcorn, then went to work on the keyboard. - -I couldn’t help but stare at the spot at the nape of Elias’ neck where there was a scar from a grown-shut Focus Mate port. I reached back and felt for the little button that was going to keep mine open until I found a new job, hopefully. I was relieved to feel it there. - -“So?” Max asked, when Elias leaned back with a sense of finality. - -Elias huffed. “Yeah, got the branding off. Might not get you all the functionality, but it should work for basics. So, who of you wants it? I don’t think we can build another from scratch. So much proprietary tech in there.” - -We looked at each other, me, Ali, Max. Technically, the Focus Mate had been Ali’s. But it was my idea to salvage it. Though we couldn’t have done it without Max. So… Could we share it, take turns? No. If Ali got it back, she’d fight to keep it like she’d fought the HR-booth’s assistance arm. There’d be blood and it would be mine. - -Elias coughed. “Look, you don’t have to decide now. There’s this other thing, might help with this, but I can’t do it here. Do you want to come along?” - -We agreed, excited, and a bit relieved. - -We all piled into Elias’ car. It troubled me for a moment that he was going to drive without a Focus Mate, but then I remembered that I’d driven myself and Ali to my place after having gotten laid off. It just needed a different kind of focus. I had learned to drive in the times before Focus Mate, after all. Couldn’t quite recall what that had been like, though. A steely focus on only that one thing – driving – and a person might be okay. - -My sympathy for Elias welled up again. He had never experienced the riveting rush of information; the magnificent wealth of enhanced colors; the thrill of receiving customized factoids when simply looking around at the world; the feeling of being safe with your company-family’s chatter always with you; being given help without even asking for it. He had never known any of it. He had no chance of succeeding in a job. I wondered how he could even afford his car. - -He drove us, really smooth and safely actually, through the city in the gray light of pre-dawn. City turned to suburb, turned to dry grass of late summer, turned to coastal redwood forest. The car climbed up a hill on a winding road. - -“Where are we going and how is that related to fixing the Focus Mate?” I asked. My work-voice again. So glad it was still there. - -“Windy Hill,” was Elias’ response. - -Ali, Max, and I were uncomfortably quiet. No explanation from our Focus Mates. Ali dared to ask out loud: “What’s Windy Hill?” - -“A nice place,” Elias said and grinned. All I could think was how he’d only remembered to answer half of my initial question. How sad and lonely his world must be. Everyone else always just knowing things and him always feeling stupid and having to ask. Maybe we had made him feel good simply by asking *him* something for once. - -Elias pulled the car into a gravel parking lot, empty at this early hour. I’d definitely experienced significant disorientation during the drive. There was no map pin telling me where I was, how far to the next vehicle-charging-station, or which direction I was facing. - -Elias got out. “Not far to go now,” he said. - -Elias used his phone to light the way up a rocky trail. I assumed that he was taking us to some sort of workshop he had access to, perhaps to pick up a missing part. But we were in the middle of nowhere. And who knew walking up hills was so much harder than a gym machine? I could hear Max and Ali’s breathing almost as loud as my own. Elias wasn’t making much noise though. - -Finally we got to the bald head of a hill affording a view of silhouettes in twilight grayscale: the bay in the distance in one direction, the ocean in the other, stretches of dark forest sloping up and down, all around. - -It was quiet. Even this early, there would have been some chatter relevant to me on my Focus Mate from other time zones. Here, it was almost silent, except for the chirping of early morning birds. - -“You hear that?” Elias asked. “American goldfinch. Spinus tristis.” - -We all stared at him. “How did you do all that with just your brain?” I asked. - -He looked at me but didn’t respond. I received no input to go on, no hypothesis regarding his expression. *Dating*, I suddenly thought, anxiety churning. How was I ever going to date again? - -I twitched when Elias brushed my arm lightly and he cracked a fleeting smile. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}e made the four of us sit down on the grass. The sun started coming up beyond the hills, painting the sprawling tech city down there golden little by little. The wind whispered in my ears. The first rays of the morning sun cut through the chill of night and felt warm on my face. The grass bristled against my legs. The air was fragrant with the scent of dry shrub and eucalyptus. It was going to be a beautiful day. - -We stayed until the sun was up and the shadows of the night were gone from the valley. At some point Ali sobbed next to me a little, and I put an arm around her, felt her nestle her head against my shoulder. - -“We’ll be fine,” I said. - -Elias, on my other side, shifted, and pulled the hacked Focus Mate out of his pocket. He put the spidery thing on a rock between us. - -“Well, it’s up to you,” he said and turned back to the view. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Lay-offs** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/listen-dont-touch.md b/content/issue-42/listen-dont-touch.md deleted file mode 100644 index ea20c8b2..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/listen-dont-touch.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,155 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Listen, Don’t Touch" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Cheryl S. Ntumy -copyright: '© Cheryl S. Ntumy 2025 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "The Sauútiverse is a science-fantasy shared world project set in a binary star system whose civilisation is rooted deeply in the mythologies, languages, and cultures of Africa and features an intricate magic system based on sound, oral traditions, and music. I'm delighted to present Cheryl Ntumy's latest, and most emblematic contribution to that cannon – you see, the name Sauúti is taken from the Swahili word for 'voice', and if there's one thing this story is about… well, if there's maybe two things…" - -image: images/ListenDontTouch10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [eroyka](https://pixabay.com/photos/buddhist-monk-talk-mobile-religion-2052802/), [laurajuarez](https://pixabay.com/photos/yoga-meditation-fitness-mindfulness-4595164/), [pieonane](https://pixabay.com/photos/foreshore-mud-soil-nature-sand-3722957/), [gamagapix](https://pixabay.com/photos/mouflon-wild-sheep-horns-imposing-4750035/), [HPUweKlein](https://pixabay.com/photos/nature-animal-goat-wildlife-horned-3328876/), [innamykytas](https://pixabay.com/photos/sensual-person-posing-body-girl-5148187/), and [unknown](https://pixabay.com/photos/man-model-fitness-body-builder-2378994/), and also by [Krakenimages.com](https://depositphotos.com/photo/beautiful-young-african-american-woman-isolated-background-covering-ears-fingers-234055624.html) at DepositPhotos.com - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i42/2.Listen.Dont.Touch.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: listen-dont-touch -weight: 2 ---- - -### A Sauútiverse Story - -{{}}T{{}}*here are worse things.* My mate Kwa-Nxi takes a deep breath, steeling himself. - -*Of course. Many worse things. Like*… - -He cringes, jagged teeth flashing, fingers hovering hesitantly before he signs, *Disembowelment?* - -*Oh, definitely. Yes*. - -We exchange despairing glances, because disembowelment might actually be preferable to this torment. - -The uroh-ogi, a human healer and the reason my mate and I are speaking in Sign rather than using our voices, heaves a sigh. “It won’t be that bad.” - -Liar. We sit cross-legged on the earthen floor of our dark, musty, riverside den, Kwa-Nxi and I close enough that, were I to inch to the left, our knees would collide. I sit very still to prevent that from happening. The sound of the river beyond offers little solace. In this moment our home, void of the furnishings humans keep in their dwellings yet rich with the aroma of damp soil and thriving insect life, feels more like a prison than a shelter. I carve lines in the floor with my talons in a vain attempt to soothe the anxiety. The movement startles some small, shelled creature, sending it scuttling deeper into the shadows. - -“Trust me,” the uroh-ogi continues. “I have worked with other Aq’pa, using this very treatment. The anticipation is the worst part.” - -Yes, and that is precisely the problem. Before, the anticipation was the best part. - -Before, sex was simple. - -Usually Kwa-Nxi would instigate it, with a long, low growl. My scales would stand on end, skin humming with the onset of arousal, and I would let out a hiss. In response, he would whistle, eyes rolling back in his head. If we were in a hurry, that would be enough to get the blood humming and release the chemicals required to swell the buds along our sides. But if we had the luxury of time, a whistle would lead to a groan, which would lead to a chitter, which would evoke a rumbling murmur, skin vibrating all the while. - -At some point, our minds swimming in the heady vapors secreted from under our talons, we would shift position so our sides faced each other. He would howl loud enough to send the den vermin scattering. My back would arch, opening my buds further, and I’d emit a low moan. His buds would burst open, sending spores flying. The spores would latch onto my buds, which would close up and suck the spores into my body. And we would collapse, worn out with ecstasy. - -Ah, the good old days. - -*We could keep trying the normal way*, I suggest, not for the first time. - -Kwa-Nxi’s relief is palpable. *Yes! Yes. Let’s keep trying*. - -The uroh-ogi sighs again. She does it a lot. “It’s not going to work. You know how the disease alters Aq’pa voices. There’s no point—” - -My mate holds up his hands for silence. *Please give us a moment. We don’t want you swooning on our floor.* - -Her expression sour, the uroh-ogi gets up and steps out into the open air. I hear the subtle crackle that indicates that a sonic veil has dropped over our den, trapping all the sounds within to shield her from their intensity. Casting an intense gaze on my face, Kwa-Nxi growls. The sound sets my teeth on edge, but I force myself to let out a tentative hiss in return. He tries hard to keep his expression impassive, but after a moment he doubles over, dry retching onto the floor. - -I attempt a growl. I gaze at my mate, calling up memories of our past couplings, silently urging the Mother to give my voice the right cadence to bring us back from the brink. But the noise that leaves my mouth is far from sensual. I balk at the way it grates on my ears. Kwa-Nxi shakes his head, and then – Mother bless his fearless heart – risks a chitter. A wave of bile rises and crests in my belly. I swallow hard and sigh, like the human. I have never been less aroused. - -“Bo-Hlalé? Kwa-Nxi? Can I come in now?” - -I get up to go outside and beckon to the uroh-ogi. The sonic veil fades with a popping noise and the uroh-ogi follows me inside. - -“So, after trying for the seven hundredth time,” she says, in a tone far too smug for my liking, “can we get back to the treatment I proposed?” - -We didn’t want a human healer. Our predicament is frustrating enough without having to protect the fragile human constitution from the raw power of our voices, but all the Aq’pa healers were booked. The mysterious ailment plaguing us has the entire Aq’pa community running scared. Every growl is altered, every moan a little off, the intonations so wrong that misunderstandings have become the norm. Some say it affects Aq’pa beyond our home planet of Órino-Rin, reaching even those who have traversed the stars. I don’t know whether there is truth to the rumors – I’ve never ventured beyond our village. I certainly wouldn’t risk travel now. - -The human is known for her groundbreaking experimental techniques, so we took a chance. I regret it. - -“I know it’s difficult to accept,” the uroh-ogi says, “but we must be realistic. This illness has ravaged your mating calls. If you don’t find another way, you’ll die out.” - -We know. We’ve heard the dire prognosis. We’ve seen mates look at each other with disgust rather than desire. Even so, the uroh-ogi’s solution is taboo. - -“Just a little touch,” she coaxes. “The gentlest caress. If you like, I can demonstrate on one of you.” - -*No!* we sign in unison, mortified. This human has no shame. As if it’s not bad enough asking us to touch each other, now she wants to touch us as well? - -“Fine.” Another sigh. “Start with the tip of a finger. Gently.” - -Summoning all my willpower, I reach for Kwa-Nxi, trying not to shudder. Moments before my fingers touch his scaly skin, I pull them back. - -*We must be strong,* he says. *For the sake of our people.* - -I nod, determined, and try again. My fingers make contact. The scales are rough, like my own. Despite my instinctive shudder, the sensation isn’t as repulsive as I expected. There is no nausea, at least. - -“Good!” The human beams with pride. “Now stroke the scales, moving closer to his buds. Remember, you’re trying to coax them open.” - -My gaze keeps flicking to Kwa-Nxi’s face, but his expression is inscrutable. When my fingers brush one of his buds, we both jump in disgust. - -This time there’s an edge of exasperation to the uroh-ogi’s sigh. “I have another appointment, so I’m just going to prescribe an hour of practice every day.” - -An hour! Every single day? Mother help us. - -We pay the uroh-ogi for her unique brand of torture, see her out, and return to our places on the floor. For a long time, neither of us can speak. I could live without children, but the thought that my mate and I will repel each other for the rest of our days is unbearable. - -Kwa-Nxi turns to me. “It’s fine.” His voice is a little hoarse from lack of use. “We don’t need sex.” We pause to reflect on that blatant lie, then he says, “Well, there must be other ways. We can adjust to our new mating calls. Our best minds will find a solution.” - -My heart is heavy as I whisper, “There are worse things.” - -“Of course. Many worse things. Like this.” - -He reaches out to give me my medicine – a caress along the rim of my buds. We tremble at the wrongness of it. Well, we will persevere. Everyone has to make sacrifices, not so? - -We try again. Ugh. - -“Maybe if we do it for long enough, it will start to feel good,” I say. - -He laughs, and – thank the Mother for small blessings – it’s still the most beautiful sound in the world. My skin floods with warmth… and then my mind lights up. What I’m feeling isn’t arousal, not even close. But maybe… just maybe… it could be? - -“Kwa-Nxi!” - -“Sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh, it’s just—” - -“No, laugh again. I think I felt something.” - -He gives me a blank look. “I can’t laugh on demand.” - -“Try!” - -With a deep breath, he lets out a sound like a hiccupping tetekute. Laughter bubbles in my chest and spills from my lips. Kwa-Nxi grins, and then his eyes widen. - -“Oh! I think I felt something, too!” - -“Pleasant, isn’t it?” - -He shrugs. “Pleasant is not the same as sexy.” - -“I know. But if we find the right tone… Come, let’s keep trying.” - -“If this works, we’ll have to ask that uroh-ogi for a refund.” - -“Oooh! Could you repeat that, but a few octaves lower?” - -He laughs again, making me… Well, happy. Not aroused. Not even a little. But surely there is some connection, some overlap between different kinds of joy and different kinds of pleasure. Why shouldn’t one lead to the other? - -So we try. All night. Each time we approach the vicinity of arousal, one of us will make a sound – a whimper, a moan – that makes the other want to vomit, and we’re forced to start all over again. But we have to keep trying. We have no choice. - -“We’re going to need practice,” I gasp, exhausted. - -“An hour every day, at least,” Kwa-Nxi agrees. - -And even though we’ve made barely any progress at all, we smile as we collapse, worn out from the effort. - -*Laughing*. Well. - -Anything is better than *touching*. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Listen, Don't Touch** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.md b/content/issue-42/someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7b91a950..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,315 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Josh Pearce -copyright: '© Josh Pearce 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Mythaxis is a home to all the speculative genres, though I feel that horror is the hardest sell, despite for many years being my first choice in recreational reading. And I mention this because what Josh Pearce is giving you here, it's very definitely sci-fi. But, as is proven by more than one story in our archives, sci-fi isn't always for the faint at heart. Fair warning, this story has edges." - -image: images/StealYourCarbon10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using an image by [Steve_Allen](https://depositphotos.com/photo/human-fetus-approx-weeks-485258062.html) at DepositPhotos.com - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i42/6.Someday.Someones.Gonna.Steal.Your.Carbon.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}Q{{}}uinn: nervous, violet-haired, edging toward her late 50s with a queasy apprehension, hands on either side of the growing mass in her midsection. Her feet ached, her insides burned, her temples throbbed, her spine felt like it was being pulled apart. Her *everything* hurt. - -Dr. Kay switched off his innerscope and said, "Yup, everything looks good. How you feeling?" - -Quinn threw up in her mouth. He pointed her to the sink and she spat and ran the tap, rinsing out her mouth. "Sorry," she mumbled. - -"Perfectly expected. How far along are we now?" Flipping through the onscreen. "Ten months. Beautiful. Well, judging by the size, you've got another two-three months in you. Keep your calories at max, or it'll eat you inside-out. And..." double-checking "...you chose a boy?" He opened a drawer and selected the appropriate supplement injection. "Lie back a little and lift up your shirt." - -That made Quinn feel like vomiting again, but she bit down. Kay chattered as he sterile-swabbed her belly and gave her the shot. "This your first? Always so nerve-wracking, I know. I've had five, you'd think it'd get easier after a while, but nope, I'm a mess each time. You doing a home-molt, or coming to one of our clinics?" - -"Home." She struggled to get upright, under all that weight. - -Kay helpfully raised the motorized recliner. "Alone? Or do you have someone to be there with you?" - -"I haven't decided yet." - -"Okay!" he said brightly. "If you find yourself in need, though, we do offer doula services, highly experienced, wonderful guides, I use them myself. I also always recommend my patients attend at least one reveal party, see it all first-hand so you know what to expect." - -"I'm going to one this weekend, actually." - -"Great!" - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he upcoming party was for a friend, Zee: eight weeks ahead of Quinn, not nervous at all but impatient to get on with it. They often hung out in one of the station's lower rings, doctor-recommended for the developmental benefits of stronger gravity. Today they trundled through the orbital station's hanging gardens, just people watching. There were very few elders. - -"Can't believe you're ready to pop in just a few days," said Quinn. - -Zee was enormous, swollen with impending life and permanently riding in a torqued-up hexapod chair. "Can't wait to get out of this thing and back on my feet." - -"You're going for another girl?" - -"Sure am. I barely got time to enjoy *this* body, so I want another chance to explore more of what the feminine form has to offer." Her friend hardly looked out of her teens, but Zee was missing her right arm at the shoulder, lost in an industrial accident that had also mangled her right leg and burned half her face and head, and she now wore her hair buzzcut rather than asymmetrical. Zee had gotten injected right after the accident. Standard medical procedure for such debilitating injury and illness – easier to just start over. - -A cluster of freshborn jogged past, their skin smooth; unblemished, glowing, bodies stretched by recent growth spurts. "What age are you aiming for?" Quinn asked. - -"Minimum full development. My frame is too small right now to incubate anything else safely." Unable to keep the weight up, her other limbs were withering, auto-cannibalized to feed the thing inside her. Without the mobile chair she'd have been bedridden for the best part of a year. "It's okay, I don't mind starting young. Gives me more time until I have to go through it again, I hope." She touched her scalp. "Like getting a really short haircut, right? I want to see how long I can hold it off next time. One made it to their 80s before the doctors put them down, because trying any later than that would be too high-risk a pregnancy. You?" - -"This is the oldest I've ever been." - -"I know *that*." Zee rolled her eyes. "I mean what's your target age?" - -"Like you. Star cruisers want them as young as they can get. Take up the least amount of room, use the fewest resources, longest hypothetical lifespan, but also mentally developed enough to deal with the confinement and isolation." - -Zee shuddered. "Ugh, you'd never get me in one of those. Sounds like a waste of a perfectly good life." - -"Well, fortunately I'll have a brand new one at the end of it." Quinn smiled. "That's the whole point, right?" - -This was likely to be their last walk together in these bodies. All these years they'd been friends, but friends only. They'd met down on the surface a decade ago while Zee was a man, and the timing had never yet aligned for them physically – too young, too old, mismatched chemistry and preferences, living in different gravities. This was the closest they'd been in quite a while. - -"Are you getting double vision or split mind yet?" Zee asked. - -"Just the dreams so far. Some derealization in the mornings when my brain doesn't switch out of his REM for about an hour." Some nights, too, she would awaken inside her own body and forget where she was, smothering in darkness and intestines. Try to claw her way out through her own stomach before the housing warden could unlock her door and talk her down, face pressed to her stomach and speaking loudly and calmly through Quinn's skin. - -"Watch out," Zee warned. "You spend a lot of time sleepwalking near the end." She looked down at herself. "Well, not me, though. Not this time." - -"Is that you talking to me now, Zee? Or is it your little puppeteer?" - -"Wrong way to look at it, babe! There's no difference. It's not *two minds*, it's only one, processing input from separate sources. It is, in the end, only yourself in there." - -End of the path. Quinn's inner life opened her mouth, said good-bye. The words fell on Zee's ears – the person she was inside heard, and smiled. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}ure, the heavier gravity was good for bone density and cardiovascular strength, but it also blew out Quinn's knees the day of Zee's party. She got a pair of fabricated leg braces so she could stay upright for the event. At least this far along, enough of her nervous system had been hijacked by her unborn that there wasn't much pain anymore. Because of the wait for fabrication and fitting, and with her new stiffness, Quinn only showed up right as the reveal party was peaking. - -Quinn was the oldest person in the room and she felt every minute of it. Zee had a lot of young friends in good health. She'd inflated a barnacle hab on the outside of the station to accommodate them all. The walls were transparent and flexible, you could see right through to the starscape outside. The weight of people standing or leaning distorted the starlight into multicolor halos. - -The guest of honor skittered up in her chair as Quinn arrived. "Just in time. Here, sign my body." Most of Zee's visible skin was covered in permanent ink. Signatures and well-wishes. "Go on now, I saved you a choice cut." - -Quinn wrote Q-U-I-N-N in black letters on Zee's bare bicep. "How will you sever the connection? Gonna cut the top off?" There had briefly been a fad for guillotines on the journaling streams. Even though that had passed, there was still a market for ritual beheadings. The only sharp objects Quinn could see were kitchen knives over in the corner where the staff hired for the party were heating up a large countertop griddle. - -"Oh, no, I'm going with something more festive." Zee briefly closed her eyes. "Feels like it's almost time. Find a spot with a good view, this will be fun." - -She walked her chair to the middle. "Gather 'round!" she called. "Piñata time!" The crowd formed a giddy circle with Zee in the center. The guests nearest carried double-handed laminate staves, gave a few test swings. "Remember, let's keep it above the shoulders!" - -Zee barely finished the words when a club lashed out and clipped her ear. Blood sprayed in an arc across the front row and the chair crabwalked sideways. Zee laughed along with everyone. "Okay, go for it!" - -The blows started raining down for real. Zee pinballed back and forth as they landed, knocked in and out of their reach, but the chair kept her head at strike-zone height. One swung directly into her nose, crushing the maxillofacial bones. Respiratory blood bubbles. Cheers. - -As Quinn watched, she pinched the loose flesh on the back of her arm, hard. The ravenous growth folded up like origami within her had already consumed her stomach and intestines and hollowed her out, leaving her outer body almost completely numb. Pinched harder, felt a faint prick of pain in whatever nerves she had left. Not entirely without feeling, then, not yet. Not until the moment of birth, when the lack of sensation would be a benefit. A blessing. - -The next hit caved in Zee's temple and an eyeball popped out of its socket. Another removed her lower jaw. And still, the laughter. The guests swinging the bats had the muscles of 17-year-olds and the flint of immortality in their eyes. - -An overhead chop split Zee's skull like a log, spilling her brains into her lap. She slumped out of the chair and flopped to the floor. Everyone crowded closer to watch as a second head emerged from Zee's neck. A slime-covered body wriggled out of its chrysalis, shouldering aside the old brittle skeleton that encaged it, and then lay there for a minute, just breathing. - -Contortionist's disjointed limbs and loose ligaments. Like a butterfly slowly unsticking its sodden legs one at a time and then its wings, she spread herself out. Her closest friends took her hands and pulled, helping pop the bones into place like collapsible tent poles. - -Zee stood up in her fresh body, standing in the puddle of her discarded flesh, her hair stringy with viscera. She was shorter than she had been, much reduced in weight, unsteadily perched on thin legs. And she was *hungry*. Her growth curve was only just now slowing, so she would be packing on more mass for the next few weeks. - -Caterers pushbroomed the molted scraps into pails and took them to the griddle while Zee's friends washed her down with wet and dry towels and gave her a clean party dress, ignoring the mess on their own outfits. Quinn hovered at the edges, the smell of sweat and grilled meat filling her nose. The dancing started. Zee exulted in her new limbs, her age-mates celebrated their bodies against hers. There were pillows in one corner for later unclothing. - -The caterers passed plates around. "Here's your slice." - -On the plastic plate, a cracklin with QUINN written on it in black letters. She took a bite. It was nectar-glazed, salted with the same sweat she smelled. She ate it in small bites. The pieces drifted like fish food flakes down through the fluid that filled her inner cavities, and her inner hunger snapped them up with full-sized adult teeth. He'd spat – and she'd shat – out his baby teeth months ago like undigested kernels of corn. - -She mingled. People were exceedingly friendly. Whenever anyone asked "May I?" she pulled her shirt up, reaching out her inner hand to press palm-to-palm with theirs through her belly skin so that they could compare sizes and comment on how big he was. - -Quinn made her good-byes. Zee's brightly shining eyes. "I'll see you soon," Zee promised, people already pulling her toward the pillows, fingers undoing the straps of her dress. "Come around soon as you get that new body!" - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}arbon copies: you don't even need a womb to grow one; just a nexus of blood vessels and ganglia, a nutrient nest for the new cells to divide in. Less a fetus and more like a tumor with teeth, or a partially absorbed twin. - -As the copy grows, the nervous systems mesh until you can see the darkness inside your own body with brand new eyes, storing memory chemicals and connections in fresh neurons. How long would it take to regenerate a lost limb? Well, humans can grow entire bodies in nine months, and if they can do that, why bother replacing just an arm? Might as well make yourself a whole backup copy. A simple extraction of template cells, snip-and-edit for any recessive or dominant expressions so desired, then an injection to set the clone cooking in the autoclave of the host body. - -For the first few months, your copy is only a a few inches in length, all bent up like a paperclip. Then it doubles in size, and then again. Then it really starts accelerating until the host is bursting at the seams. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he organs in Quinn's copy had taken over most functions of respiration, digestion, excretion, circulation, and as he grew so did his appetites. Teething, he gnawed on the withered husks of her original organs to make room for himself. Quinn felt this only as pressure or an uncomfortable tugging, and that mostly at night while her old brain dozed and her new one grew restless. - -Even with the bottom falling out of the birth rate, universal immortality led inexorably to overpopulation. On these types of orbital stations, there was always a stream of people going to and from the uppermost level, the null ring where ships docked. Evacuation sloops offloaded mortally wounded soldiers copied into freshborn children, screaming at the phantom pain experienced by their previous bodies. Warfare was just a pressure release. - -Exodus was another. And the reason Quinn was training to gradually move up each higher ring and acclimating to the physiological challenges of interstellar flight. - -The day she would give birth to himself came up like sunrise seen from orbit: no warning, just a sudden, blinding awareness – *oh*. Quinn scheduled a cleaning crew to come by in an hour, then stood naked in her shower stall, holding her largest kitchen knife. Hesitated, pressing knifepoint to stomach. If this didn't work, she was going to look pretty silly when the cleaners walked in on her trapped halfway through the birth, like watching someone struggle to get a sweater on over their head with their arms in the wrong holes. - -Ah, well, that's why she'd chosen her first time alone. - -The knife sliced easily through layered curtains of skin, fat, and muscle. Only a slight burning tingle of pain. Her copy pushed his arm through the slit and took the handle of the knife, drew it back in. Inside her body, Quinn squirmed like a camper on a cold morning trying to get dressed in a sleeping bag. By this point there was only a vestigial umbilical tethering her old body to her new, and severing it would free her into her next life. - -He found it, a little flesh tuber gluing right shoulder to the subcutaneous wall. Quick slice, and it was done. Another slice, and the cocoon fell away as he stood up. Quinn put the knife in the soap dish and turned on the water. He'd never had a haircut, of course, and he even had a patchwork beard! Another new thing: Quinn held his penis in hand and felt his heartbeat through it. He didn't have a navel, but the puckered scar on his shoulder looked like one. - -At his feet the old body lay as crumpled as a raincoat, faceup and drowning in the blood-pink water filling its mouth. Mindless, but because he hadn't severed the brainstem it still had autonomic function: gasping and sputtering; staring fisheyed up at the ceiling light; also like a fish, flopping in the shallows. Quinn stepped over it to exit the shower. The cleaning crew would haul the body to the compost compactor. He wasn't going to go through the fuss of an afterbirth ritual. - -Some things you just don't think about ahead of time. None of Quinn's shirts or trousers fit his new body and he'd forgotten to get anything fabricated. Well, he couldn't go out in just a towel, so he found the loosest pair of underwear and a dress that would at least reach past his knees. Moccasins that stretched over his feet. - -Then he went to find Zee. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}U{{}}ncertain of the mechanics from this end, his first ever emission was like another orbital sunrise, without warning, suddenly blinding. Took both of them by surprise, leaving Zee wiping herself down and Quinn looking like a man caught with the smoking gun still in his hand. On the comedown they talked about names and pronouns – Quinn keeping one, changing the other – and the second attempt was better timed, though still a shock to the senses. - -Zee helped Quinn shave, then shoved him into the shower with her for a third go. Finally, before he could get his hands on her for a fourth, she pushed him out the door, saying, "Go on, I have work in an hour." Just before it slid shut: "But come back in the morning!" - -Quinn kept turning down invitations to group sex – he wanted only Zee, and who had time? The exodus flights were generation ships, only each generation was just the same people over and over again. Knowing how to keep the power on was the only guarantee of survival, so training involved a lot of rote learning to ingrain system maintenance on an instinctual level. - -Zee said, "Couple of copies down the line and you'll forget all about me. I won't be around to remind you who I am." - -"Come on, sure I'll remember you. I'll take a recording, listen to your voice every day." - -"What's the point in that? Two hundreds years from now we'll be 100 trillion kilometers apart. Who has ever come back from that? How would we even recognize each other?" - -"So come with me," Quinn said, knowing she would say no. - -"Hell no. You know the risks out there – the mental strain of spending several lifetimes in basically a prison? And copying yourself in zero-g, in deep space radiation? If you survive the trip, it's almost definite you end up with twisted carbon. I like my life here. I'm not leaving it." Casually: "You could stay, and not leave everything behind." - -Quinn sighed and pulled away. "Can't stay here forever. Every human star system gets eaten by war, eventually. Might take a thousand years, might take a hundred thousand, but the population pressure makes it inevitable. The only way to avoid it is to run for the next star and stay ahead of the violence. You're going to kill someone someday, Zee." - -Zee patted his arm. "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it." - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he very star cruiser that would take Quinn and a crew of over four hundred to the raw stars was visible through the viewports of the null ring. Everything was tightly scheduled, and on these journeys there were no passengers. The timetable extended to deaths and rebirths – all had to be freshborn within six months prior to boarding so that they would be the same generation at launch, with a schedule of staggered pregnancies while underway. - -Bad news, then, when Dr. Kay told him, "Yup, you're pregnant again. You been taking any unauthorized injections?" - -The words failed to sink past Quinn's skull. "What?" He'd come in for a checkup because weird dreams were interfering with his sleep and, therefore, flight training. He'd thought it was just stress. - -"Judging by the rate of cell division, you're about twenty-eight weeks in." Kay frowned. "Didn't you copy over—" - -"Yeah. Same amount of time." Quinn felt his skin crawl. "Did someone incept a growth in me? Without consent?" - -Kay was looking at the charts. "Unlikely. I see some twisted carbon in your genetic lattice. A mutation that causes spontaneous regeneration. It's rare, but it happens – you were reborn pregnant." - -The horror of possible bodily violation receded, to be replaced with a new one. "I can't be pregnant now! My ship is sailing in less than three months. They won't let me crew in this condition. Can't you abort it?" - -"Now, this isn't a fetus, understand. That would be much simpler. Your systems wouldn't be so tightly intertwined. This is more like cutting out a tumor the size of an aubergine, connected to several major arteries and sharing half your brain. It'd be like giving you a lobotomy. And it's already absorbing bits of your organs to make room for itself. That's why you don't start showing until very nearly the end stages and probably why no one else caught it before now. We could irradiate and pesticide it to shrink it down, but—" - -"Okay, well how about accelerating it so I can finish my copy before the launch date?" - -Kay said, "I suppose if we gave you growth hormones you might come out the other side developed enough to ship out, but—" - -"Great, let's do that!" - -"But we don't know if your new body will just have the same problem. Did any of your parents have similar issues?" He looked up their records. "Well, that's of note! Your main mother made the crossing way back in the last millennium. One of the first gens, wow! That could do it – ships back then were a little more rickety in their radiation shielding. Love to get a scan of her, to see if that was the cause. Don't suppose you know where they are now?" - -"No. Haven't seen them since creche." - -"You have kids, Quinn?" - -He nodded. "One. I outsourced the actual pregnancy and birthing to an ostrich egg, though. They've copied at least once, last I heard." - -"Did your child experience any problems copying to their next body?" - -"No problems." - -"Means you haven't passed on whatever this is, at least." - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t didn't work. Or, at least, it didn't work fast enough. Zee and Quinn floated in the station's uppermost observation bubble. He was inflated to twice his starting size, watching the drive flare of the cruiser dwindle swiftly in the dark, moving tiny flakes of carbon from one star to another. - -"They left without me." Well, of course they did – not going to hold back an interstellar mission for one person. Zee took his hand. - -Once it was clear he was going to miss the launch, Quinn had stopped taking the growth hormones, had even briefly considered the chemical treatment to delay things just to keep Zee around a few months longer. But now that the cruiser refit was complete, Zee's work season was over and she was leaving the station for her next project. He couldn't blame her, and it wasn't fair to keep clinging. For the past year she'd been a supportive bed companion, though more platonic as Quinn's pregnancy grew between them. She'd promised to stay until after Quinn's birthday. - -It was just the two of them in a rented bath house, the day of. Zee brought her power saw, was delicate enough with it to scrimshaw old bones. In their private tub she cut open the back of Quinn's head with one down slice and severed his brain stem. Then, precise as a fishmonger, slit his stretched belly and pulled new life steaming into the water. - -Quinn had a woman's body again. Zee sponged it off, helped stuff her leftovers into garbage bags, then took her out for metabolic energy – cake, ice cream, and shots. Dancing and tipsily planning the future. - -Quinn: "If it happens again, Doc says I could end up in a man or woman's body." - -Zee: "I'm going on a reeducation tour when I land. I've sopped up so much engineering knowledge these past few lives, I can trade it in for expertise in some other field. Give lectures during the day, take lessons at night. I won't be able to visit until the tour is over. *So*. Tonight's the last night we see each other, for the rest of this life, at least." - -The sex in this new configuration was awkwardly unfamiliar, but it was still sex and it helped Quinn feel human again. In the morning Zee was gone, down the elevator to her next life, and Quinn went to her newborn checkup with Dr. Kay. - -Her test came back positive. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}"H{{}}ere's your choice, Quinn. - -"Option one: be forever pregnant. Ride the wheel of death and rebirth, living in each body for only a year before starting over. Brain connections will grow old and stale, a form of repetitive memory loss, a vanishing of your past until you know only the now. - -"Option two: take the poison. We have a cocktail of medicines and radiations that will render your body inhospitable to growths. Yes, it'll eventually kill you, but slower than the clones constantly eating you up from the inside and draining your brain. Probably. Results not guaranteed – this type of runaway cellular growth is tenacious, like a weed in the garden of your organs." - -"Thanks, Doc." - -A stark choice: one life for a number of years, or a number of lives each for one year, and neither path would leave her fit for an interstellar trip. But she wanted to leave the future open, so Quinn decided to bear out the successive pregnancies. - -Because of the spontaneous generation, Quinn no longer controlled the sex of her next body. It was a coin toss of incarnating a male or female body, and sometimes the coin came down on its edge. She kept using female pronouns anyway. - -Uncomfortable though it was, her outer shell wasn't the focus of her problems. As her replacement clones grew and consumed her nerves like strands of candy floss, Quinn was left with only a few months at a time of feeling before the numbness started to set in. Often surprised while showering to find bruises she didn't remember receiving. Touching hot surfaces without realizing it, mishandling sharp objects. - -She started monthly treatments at the station's clinic. The med techs gave her chemotherapy to shrink and slow the next growth, delaying her rebirth by almost six months. It gave her an extra half year each iteration of a functional nervous system and self-preservation instinct. So she could feel something, but the chemicals just made her feel *awful*, and they increased the risk of birth defects. - -Waiting outside the clinic, a stranger. He propositioned. She, starving for contact, took him to bed. He spooned behind her, put it in. These men, always overestimating their ability to reach through her numbness and get deep enough to touch one of her pleasure centers. - -Her internal hands grabbed the stranger's penis and pulled him closer in for Matryoshka sex, to penetrate even her copy's orifices. To feel something. To feel *anything*. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he cycle of death-birth-death continued. Zee eventually came back to the station, went looking for her friend. Found her on the garden deck and could immediately tell something was wrong. Quinn was a shell of her former self, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, with an alarmingly distended belly. - -"Oh shit, what happened?" Zee pulled her into a tight hug. "Are you okay?" - -Quinn's muffled answer came from deep down inside her. Most days she was hardly aware of the world around her anymore. Scrunched up in a tight ball, alone in the dark inside herself, but hearing Zee's voice made her squirm happily within. - -They went to the doctor together for the next birth. - -The clone was lifted free. It appeared to be six years old. "Diminishing returns," said Dr. Kay. "Once a body falls into mass debt, it's almost impossible to climb out of that hole. Successive clones are smaller, weaker, unable to carry copies to full size. She's only been pregnant for six months this time." - -She looked like a child, but no telling what age her mind was. Kay said, "Hello. Do you know who you are?" - -She looked around and said, "I'm Quinn. You're Kay." Pointed to the ruin of her former self. "That's me." She waved. "Hi, Zee!" - -Zee kept Quinn company during the next rounds of tests. Kay appreciated the help. Quinn was breathing, upright, alert. Heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure normal. No obvious brain damage, which was a small blessing. To all appearances, a perfectly formed child. - -But, of course, a new clone was already germinating. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}Z{{}}ee and Quinn had only a short time to walk in the parks and tell each other of their recent lives. "It was just my birthday," the child said. - -"Many happy returns. Should we get an ice cream to celebrate?" They sat at a cafe and Zee tried to share a story about building ocean-floor habitats, but Quinn was distracted dribbling ice cream on the table and swinging her feet in the tall chair. She still had some of her adult memories, but a six-year-old's brain was too unformed to put them together into a lived experience. - -"Why are you crying?" Quinn asked, when she finally noticed. - -Zee shook her head. - -Only three weeks later, Quinn's next internal copy reached its terminal size and they moved her to Dr. Kay's clinic. Quinn's comatose body didn't mass enough to fully grow a clone. The effect was visible: her mouth sunken in because the calcium of all her baby teeth had been reabsorbed to knit tiny new bones; skin bunching up around her knees like an elephant's; hair fallen out; arms like winter-stripped branches. Her body cavity could barely contain anything larger than a grapefruit. - -End of the path. Robotic arms moved swiftly, disconnecting all the lines and tubes. - -Dr. Kay lifted the freshborn out, small enough to hold in two cupped palms, and handed the wailing baby to Zee. Zee said, "Hello, Quinn. I'm sorry. It'll be okay." Something in the back of Quinn's brain found her familiar and the baby went quiet, staring widely into Zee's eyes. - -"I’m afraid this is the end," the doctor said. "A runaway effect has already begun. The quickset chemicals need time to saturate the cells, but her next clone will reach its tipping point in under an hour." - -"We have to do something," Zee said. "Implant her next copy in my body, or freeze her until we can cure it. She has still a lifetime's worth of things to discover, won't remember seeing any of it before. I can't wait to show her so many things for the first time. Please." - -Dr. Kay didn't answer. How could he? - -Zee cradled her friend while the clones divided internally, cancers with cancers, clusters of mouths turning her organs menger-spongiform, too impatient for birth. Each new growth hatched rapidly into the next like fizz on a carbonated drink, until the dwindling cluster of cells slipped through Zee's fingers and vanished like seafoam, into the place where few went voluntarily and none ever came back. - -When she rinsed her hands, Quinn was gone forever. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}ow careless we are with our bodies, she thought, when every mistake can be instantly rectified. Or almost every mistake. A man once said the meaning of life is that it ends. What then are these listless unending existences? - -What would it be like, to die again? Not consumed, like poor Quinn, but over meaningful time? - -Zee looked at the swing arm. One quickset injection and she would be back up on the tightrope of survival without a net. Every moment, every movement, deliberate; fully aware of her body, balancing on tiptoe between fear and thrill. - -Zee took a breath and said, "Doctor?" - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/strange-pictures-uketsu.md b/content/issue-42/strange-pictures-uketsu.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5f5cd615..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/strange-pictures-uketsu.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Strange Pictures, by Uketsu" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Bill Ryan -copyright: '© Bill Ryan 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "And speaking of that darkest of genres, possibly, let us turn now to Japan's latest contribution to horror— well, or perhaps it's the uncanny… the unsettling? The absurd? I'm not sure I can say. Come to that, I'm not even sure how confident horror reviewer extraordinaire Bill Ryan is with regard to the case at hand, and that alone should be enough to send a shiver up your spine." - -image: images/StrangePictures10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author [Uketsu](https://pushkinpress.com/our-authors/uketsu/) and [the book's cover](https://pushkinpress.com/book/strange-pictures/), both from the [Pushkin Press website](https://pushkinpress.com/)." - -type: stock -slug: strange-pictures-uketsu-review -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}N{{}}ot long ago, I learned about a Youtube phenomenon that I’m told is a real phenomenon in Japan. An artist, who goes by the stage name Uketsu, their true identity obscured by a somewhat eerie disguise, presents, through videos, puzzles for their audience to solve. The puzzles take the form of several crude, but clear, drawings done by Uketsu, and other kinds of strange visuals. I would paint a better picture of what these videos are like, except they’re all in Japanese, without an English subtitle option. What is evident, however, is that the mixture of visual puzzles presented by a slightly unsettling figure has had such an impact that the cultural swath being cut has extended into the Western world. - -Two novels that Uketsu wrote based on his visual mysteries have been translated into English by Jim Rion. I became aware of all of this through the publication of the first one, *Strange Pictures*, which I thought offered a potentially new take on the horror genre (the author's pen name, Uketsu, most likely refers to the Kenji Mizoguchi's classic horror film *Ugetsu*, adapted from an 18th century story collection by Ueda Akinari called *Ugetsu Monogatari*). Let’s face it, the genre is entering into — or perhaps that should be *is in the middle of* — a particularly moribund period. As more horror writers are breaking into mainstream success, the more narrow will become the ambitions — stylistically, formally, thematically, narratively — of those just starting out. The market has shown what sells, so that’s what will be offered. The upside to this kind of situation is that interesting work can find a way in, usually by accident. At any rate, that’s what I was hoping for from *Strange Pictures*. - -*Strange Pictures* is broken into four chapters and a prologue. As the reader finishes the first chapter and begins the second, they may be forgiven for thinking that what they were reading a collection of similarly themed short stories rather than a novel. As one eerie story about the meaning behind a mysterious blog fades, and a new one about a single mother who is routinely followed home from picking up her son at daycare by a strange man, they might mentally change gears slightly. But one of the features of *Strange Pictures* that make it initially intriguing is the slow realization that all of these stories are connected — subtly at first, but soon more and more directly. How wide will these mysteries spread? Or how narrow will become its focus? - -When a story’s central mystery is kicked off by the most seemingly innocent image possible, it’s hard to not become almost instantly under the writer’s thrall. In this novel’s prologue, Uketsu hits us with this: - -![drawing](images/strange-pictures-drawing.png) - -The picture is being shown to a group of students by a doctor, who informs them that it was drawn by a little girl who was currently confined in a mental institution after killing her mother. The doctor goes on to interpret each element of the picture, and how, sunny though the emotional surface of the drawing appear, it also reveals hidden clues to the patient’s psychological turmoil. This interpretation, it needs to be said, is rather wearyingly blunt in the symbols being extracted from the simple drawing in order to construct it, while also being so complicated, almost Holmes-ian in its precise deductions, that one can’t quite imagine any human brain arriving at them. Then again, isn’t that part of the fun? You don’t read a Sherlock Holmes story in the hopes that by the end you’ll be able to say “Yep, Holmes nailed it, I was about to say the same thing.” - -In that first long chapter of *Strange Pictures*, “The Old Woman’s Prayer”, two college students, members of an on-campus club that studies paranormal phenomena, become obsessed with a blog called “Oh No, Not Raku!” Meant to be a daily diary of the pseudonymous author’s life, a gap of several years lies between the last, rather grim and cryptic entry, and the previous, comparatively cheerful one. What happened to this man and his wife, who, in the last clear blog entry about her, was about to give birth? - -As you might guess, the only clues we’re given are the blog entries, and a series of illustrations the blogger’s artist wife made, inspired by her pregnancy and what the future may hold: drawings of their anticipated child at several stages of his or her life, another of an old woman praying, and so on. What these students are able to figure out based on the same meager information the reader is offered is, quite frankly, preposterous. No one could have ever arrived at the solution they arrive at, let alone then, also, have that solution turn out to be correct. So, if such things matter to you, that would go in the debit column for this book. However, in the credit column I would put a mark because that solution, while arrived at via a thread of logic so tortured and esoteric as to be nonsensical, is actually kind of eerie — *emotionally* eerie, which is a very particular type, and one not often encountered. - -Chapter two, “The Smudged Room”, has a similar impact. Longer and even more convoluted, in its way, than “The Old Woman’s Prayer”, Uketsu gets so many plates spinning in the course its story that the fact that the woman and her young son were being followed on the way home from school would be forgotten by me for pages at a time, until Uketsu reintroduced it. The illustration at the heart of that chapter, by the way, is far cruder than those drawn by the expectant mother in the previous chapter – drawn by a child, it depicts an apartment building, a mother and son standing beside it, and with one window on the building’s top floor obscured by a cloud of crayon scribble. Why? Does it indicate that perhaps the boy is being abused by his mother? - -Well, you guys wouldn’t believe the sorts of things all the different pictures in this novel would appear to be indicating. If the solution to the drawings in “The Old Woman’s Prayer” was preposterous, or if at least the arriving at it was, you ain’t seen nothing yet. And this, unfortunately is the great fault of *Strange Pictures*. As Conan Doyle proved, a certain level of ridiculousness, even unbelievability, is permissible when depicting a genius. But not only is there, even within those parameters, still a limit beyond which a reader will not travel, what is allowable is narrowed even further when the impossibly complicated puzzle at hand is being solved not by a Sherlock Holmes-level eccentric genius, but instead by college kids and determined journalists. - -As the ridiculousness inherent to *Strange Pictures* deepens, or perhaps *transcends* our earthbound concerns about logic and reason, the story also considerably darkens, and becomes more violent. The very perverse mental state that is ultimately revealed in chapter three, “The Art Teacher’s Final Drawing”, could be more completely explored in a version of this story not so reliant on a gimmick. This chapter is also the longest, though not the slowest to read. This is because much of the page count is filled out with visuals – drawings, yes, but also charts. And not just charts, but utterly pointless charts. It will be revealed in the prose that, say, a murder victim woke up at 6:00, bought groceries at 7:15, and then arrived at the hiking trail entrance at 7:40. The reader reads that, and then sees a chart with that exact information, and only that exact information, filling up half the next page. More absurdly still, that chart will appear again, unchanged, at least once more before the chapter is over. - -The final chapter, title "The Bird, Safe in the Tree", caps everything off by ruthlessly explaining every last detail of the mysteries that had been left unexplained by the previous chapter. Paradoxically, in doing so it actually heightens the horror element, dealing extensively as it does with the inner workings of a deranged mind. But as is so often the case, the consequence of such relentlessness is tedium. - -But I have to admit, while all the criticisms against *Strange Pictures* that I’ve just made are genuine, and disappointing, problems, there is something about how the horror is buried within a kind of game for the reader to play that makes what is inflicted and experienced by the victims feel even more cruel, almost otherworldly – but, again, it’s an impossible game, an unwinnable game, and no one trying to honestly and fairly figure out any of these puzzles will achieve anything besides driving themselves mad. - -I don’t know, in all honesty, if I’m up for giving Uketsu’s follow up novel, *Strange Buildings* (sounds positively Lovecraftian), a shot. *Strange Pictures* was too much of a mixed bag. If it works on you, though, I can imagine the possibility of more being hard to resist. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill's thoughts at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/swimming-with-elephants.md b/content/issue-42/swimming-with-elephants.md deleted file mode 100644 index c9cf8f1a..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/swimming-with-elephants.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,101 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Swimming with Elephants" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- science fiction -authors: -- Travis Ezell -copyright: '© Travis Ezell 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Before you read on, a quick shout out to SFFWorld.com, within whose supportive community forum your editor cut his teeth as a short fiction writer, sharing work and gaining feedback. I didn't mention it in our last issue, but I encountered Helen French's flash fiction Safe in the Dark right there, and enjoyed it so much I asked to take it for Mythaxis more or less on the spot – and so too this great piece of possibly prescient sci-fi by Travis Ezell, who really brings it all bittersweet home in the closing words." - -image: images/SwimmingWithElephants10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Kritsada Seekham](https://www.pexels.com/photo/elephant-swimming-in-blue-water-7836299/), [Brett Sayles](https://www.pexels.com/photo/collection-of-colorful-photo-collage-on-wall-at-home-3816395/) and [Inga Seliverstova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/collage-with-different-pictures-4066761/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i42/4.Swimming.with.Elephants.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: swimming-with-elephants -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he clinic’s lights buzz a low B note that feels like coming home on a good day. The technician asks Lee to concentrate one-by-one on each memory segment she wishes to upload. - -“Just the one today,” she says. The technician tries to smile. It’s his job. - -She breathes in, breathes out, and remembers visiting Kerala. The golden-red sun; the warm ocean; the ripe manure smell; the elephants’ churning grace through the silvery blue water. The popcorn-popping laughter of someone special there with her. *Who was it?* Lee has already forgotten most of that trip, but until now she’s held on to this. Was this always her favorite memory? It’s her favorite memory right now, today. - -The technician reads aloud the boilerplate. “By thumbing here, The Bearer relinquishes to Stergeron Data all rights, title, and access to the targeted memories extracted by this process, and to any digital products generated therefrom. Said memory or memories will then be expunged, in accordance with the Copyright Act of 1976 and subsequent associated legislation.” - -Lee could have lip synced along, but she doesn’t want to seem rude. - -The technician swivels the terminal and Lee presses thumb to screen, eager for the next part. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t all started with Lee needing rent. - -On a since-forgotten friend’s advice, she went to a dream clinic to sell some garbage memories. She’d heard of people doing it, like donating plasma or eggs. This company called Stergeron was buying up anything you were willing to part with. You had to pick carefully, though, because the memories would be erased after uploading. In mass quantities, even trivial memories were rich for data mining, AI training, and something Hollywood was doing now called “emotion capture”. - -Everybody has memories they don’t need. - -That first time, she’d trekked through sweltering heat, anything to avoid public transit. Something really bad had happened once, but she doesn’t remember what anymore. These days she loves the train. It has A/C. - -The money didn’t seem like much, but it added up fast. They paid per gigabyte of coherent data, so the more you could remember the more they would take. What she hadn’t expected was the naked euphoria. Biology is a strange bird, and it turns out that the brain really likes letting go of things. Memories are burdens, weighing the brain down like sand in a balloon. Removing them was like a neurological detox: the brain experienced a profound relief. In effect, obliterate a couple thousand synaptic connections all at once and you get an explosive gush of pleasure chemicals, washing over you like a wave of orgasms on heroin. - -Holy fuck, it felt good. - -They say ignorance is bliss. Like most folk sayings, there’s truth behind these words. - -Lee began chasing that feeling wherever it took her. It became like a hobby: evenings were spent rifling through her own life like a minimalist life coach, looking for things she could live without. Daydreaming about the mundane and making a list for each fresh memory to upload: - -> *mom calls about weather* -> -> *brushing teeth without water* -> -> *emptying cagney’s litterbox* - -If she could remember it but didn’t need to, she could sell it. The more emotional the memory, the better: - -> *lost at the mall* -> -> *asking out carl* -> -> *walked in on by roommate* - -They even paid for stuff she wanted to live without, painful or cringeworthy parts of childhood and adolescence: - -> *playing doctor* -> -> *kicking that dog* -> -> *cheating with nathan* - -She stopped keeping a record of what she sold after that. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}here’s supposed to be a limit to how much one person can donate, but one of the technicians told her how lax their system is. “Sign in with a made-up name if you want,” she’d said. “Nobody’s tracking it. It all goes into the Big Data blender anyway.” - -This piece of advice opened a door for Lee that could not be shut again. She began visiting different clinics under different names, doing a small circuit around the city, making money hand over fist. Not that the money was the point anymore. - -Skills and learned behaviors get stored differently by the brain, so why bother remembering the lessons, or the teachers? What good does it do to hang on to awkward experiences, lost loves that still stung, or old friends long gone? Her grandparents lived on inside her whether she remembered them or not, right? As did childhood besties, exes, pets. Family, neighbors, friends. Parents. - -All of it could go, and eventually it did, piece by euphoric piece. They didn’t care if it was a memory of sneezing on the toilet or a memory of your father’s untimely death – but only one of those memories rocketed you to the moon when you gave it up. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}ith money rolling in, Lee started enjoying some of life’s more expensive luxuries – name-brand chips, restaurants that weren’t chains, streaming instead of pirating. Ad-free utilities. Personalized talk shows. She even got into something called feelvids that Stergeron Media was putting out. - -Most nights, she comes home feeling drained, a well running dry, unable to find an emotional vein to mine, or else too tired to try, numb, not high anymore, but not yet coming down. Those nights, she turns on feelvids. They’re perfect for what she needs: cozy, curated micro-experiences crafted from a composite of millions of mostly-garbage memories. - -Much of it is curiously mundane, but she has to admit, the algorithm knows what she needs – little dramas with familiar characters, mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Break-ups, gossip, a little sexy-times, some infidelity. Hilarious moments of discomfort, sentimental moments with loved ones. The sets feel as familiar as the cast, places that might as well exist right down the street. - -What’s truly impressive, though, is how even the more exotic moments feel like home. It’s all so visceral and multisensory, that for a little while you can almost believe you’re the one who went swimming with elephants. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Swimming with Elephants** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/tag-youre-it.md b/content/issue-42/tag-youre-it.md deleted file mode 100644 index 87a1fca6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/tag-youre-it.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,321 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Tag, You're It" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- Horror -authors: -- Sean MacKendrick -copyright: '© Sean MacKendrick 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "It's always a challenge to finalize each issue of Mythaxis. I try to present a table of contents with a deliberate structure, to place stories in relation to each other in a way that satisfies my editorial OCD (even if our readers remain blissfully oblivious to any such efforts going on behind the scenes). Usually picking a lead story is easy, though, since that's a different problem. The first one has to stand alone, it's the first thing the reader sees, after all – but this time that's not exactly the case. For while Sean MacKendrick's timely and sinister duologue absolutely works on the page, wait until you get a load of the audio play…" - -image: images/TagYoureIt10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture is a Creative Commons image by [K2 Production](https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-people-near-the-eiffel-tower-10216126/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i42/1.Tag.Youre.It.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: tag-youre-it -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -“Upload selected photos to a new album.” - -> *Fifteen photos have been uploaded.* - -“Title album Harrison European Vacation Highlights.” - -> *'Harrison European Vacation Highlights' album has been created! Would you like to enable auto-descriptions?* - -“Yes. Keep descriptions short to medium in length.” - -> *OK, please select a photo to get started.* - -“Start at the top. First image in the list.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England, Westminster Bridge.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: London Eye, River Thames.* -> -> *Description: This picture was taken from Westminster Bridge just after sunrise. The giant wheel of the London Eye shines in the early morning light. A small crowd is present, people wearing coats in the cool atmosphere of one of London’s most famous sites. The River Thames glitters in the lower left corner of the photo.* - -“Great. Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England, Westminster Bridge.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: London Eye, River Thames.* -> -> *Description: This selfie was taken from Westminster Bridge just after sunrise. Two smiling figures are the primary focus of the photo. They appear to be in their mid-thirties. They are wearing matching wool hats. The man is wearing thick lensed glasses which have fogged. Behind them the cityscape of London, England warms in the early morning. The London Eye can be seen to the right of the happy couple. Three real boats make their way up and down the river.* - -“Tag man as Lance Harrison.” - -> *The man has been identified as ‘Lance Harrison’. All photos of Lance Harrison will now be tagged accordingly.* - -“Tag woman as Janet Harrison.” - -> *The woman has been identified as ‘Janet Harrison’. All photos of Janet Harrison will now be tagged accordingly.* - -“Next photo, please.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England, Westminster.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Westminster Abbey.* -> -> *Description: The beautiful Gothic spires of Westminster Abbey reach into the sky. The fish-eye aspect of the building in this picture gives the structure an ellipsoidal appearance. Statues frame the bottom of the picture. Dark gray clouds create a dramatic cap for the photo.* - -“Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England, Westminster.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Palace of Westminster, Elizabeth Tower.* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison stand in front of the Palace of Westminster. A fortyish man and a woman in her late forties have joined them; all four stand with their arms around the others. The clock at the top of Elizabeth Tower displays the time as 8:51 AM. A classic London black cab is parked near the hugging couple. A fake replica of a gray car sits behind the black cab.* - -“No, that is a real car in the photo.” - -> *My mistake! The car has been removed from the description.* - -“Tag other couple in the group as Maria Harrison and Nicolas Arnaud.” - -> *The couple have been identified as ‘Maria Harrison’ and ‘Nicolas Arnaud’. All photos with either individual will now be tagged accordingly.* - -“Okay, next photo.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England, Westminster.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Buckingham Palace.* -> -> *Description: The closed front palace gate takes up most of the view, framing the center of the palace through the black and gold bars of the gate. The weather has worsened, with dark clouds looming in the background.* - -“Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England.* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison sit at a table inside a café or restaurant. They sit close to one another; Janet kisses Lance’s cheek. Three other people are visible in the unknown location. A window behind them is streaked with heavy rain.* - -“Tag location as Cafe Mahan.” - -> *The location has been added to the photo’s description.* - -“Ah… count the people in the photo again.” - -> *There are five people visible. Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison sit at one table. Three unknown people sit at other tables.* - -“Describe the people, please.” - -> *Two middle aged women sit at a table to the left of Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison. One woman has curly white hair and is wearing a transparent raincoat. She is holding a large porcelain cup in both hands and is enjoying its warmth. The second woman is frowning at a phone she is holding up to her face. A young man of about twenty in a green apron is standing behind the counter with his arms crossed. He appears to be watching the rain.* - -“Describe the man standing at the back of the room.” - -> *No man standing at the back of the room can be identified.* - -“Describe man in upper left of photo.” - -> *No man can be identified in the upper left of the photo.* - -“Describe… figure standing near the window at the back of the room who is facing left and wearing a big hat.” - -> *A human-shaped mass of flesh-colored bits waits near a glass case of pastries in a darkened corner of the coffee shop. The shape is wearing a wide brimmed hat similar in style to an outback hat and a long draping coat. The shape’s head is tilted down toward the pastries.* - -“No, that is a man. He’s just in a dark place in the room.” - -> *My mistake! Description has been updated.* - -“Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.* -> -> *Location: London, England, Cafe Mahan* -> -> *Description: Janet Harrison sits at an inside table with Maria Harrison and Nicolas Arnaud. Janet holds up a black T-shirt with a red circle and the words “MIND THE GAP”. The shirt has made her laugh. Two middle aged women are sitting at a nearby table, each looking at a phone. A young man is taking the order of a woman who is holding an umbrella. Her wet clothing suggests she has just entered the building. An ageless man-shaped figure is standing near a glass case which is half filled with pastries and half filled with fake replicas of scones. Heavy rain darkens a large window to the right of the photo.* - -“That is the same man as before. That is a normal man. Those were real scones.” - -> *My mistake! I will identify the figure as a normal man going forward. The description of the pastry case has been updated.* - -“Go to the next photo.” - -> *Date: November 3rd, 2023.* -> -> *Location: Heathrow Airport, London, England.* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison sit near an airport gate. In this selfie, Janet looks at the camera with a smile on her face. Lance is sleeping, with his head resting on Janet’s shoulder. Lance’s mouth is open.* - -“Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 4th, 2023, mid-day.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France, Ile de Cite.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Notre Dame cathedral.* -> -> *Description: A large crowd gathers in front of Notre Dame’s west facade, which towers behind them and dominates the composition of the picture. The sky is cloudless and bright blue. Many people in the crowd are blurred, apparently in motion when the picture was taken. Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison stand in the middle, smiling at the camera. Maria Harrison is nearby, perusing a fake souvenir cart. A normal man in a large hat and long coat stands behind her. A small rip of blackness is open near the normal man’s hand.* - -“Describe the normal man – is that the same man from London?” - -> *The normal man is the same figure previously identified. The figure’s face is more visible in the open light and can now be seen as comprised of flesh-colored insects which have formed themselves into the shape of a human male. The insects do not appear to be of any known species. Their tiny faces seem to be screaming.* - -“No. Stop it. That man is not made of insects. The picture is fuzzy and people are out of focus, that all it is.” - -> *My mistake! Description has been updated.* - -“Fucking AIs, man… Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 4th, 2023, mid-day.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France, Ile de Cite.* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Pont Neuf, Seine River, Statue of Henry IV.* -> -> *Description : A large bronze statue of Henry IV astride his magnificent steed stands on a marble base above the crowd of pedestrians entering and exiting the Pont Neuf bridge. A child points at a normal man in a large hat and coat as the child’s mother pulls the child on their way. The normal man is gesturing towards the camera.* - -“Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 5th, 2023, mid-day.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison, Janet Harrison, Maria Harrison, and Nicolas Arnaud enjoy a meal at an outdoor café. They are seated near a metal heater, which is glowing orange as it comforts the café’s clientele.* - -“Describe man.” - -> *Which man would you like described?* - -“Describe man in window.” - -> *The normal man in a large hat and coat peers out of the café’s window. Dark spots hover near his hands.* - -“I— Next photo.” - -> *Date: November 5th, 2023, mid-day.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison, Janet Harrison, Maria Harrison, and Nicolas Arnaud enjoy a meal seated on a café’s patio. A waiter has joined them and smiles at the camera for a group photo. Lance is holding up a glass of beer, as if to say, Cheers!* - -“The man in the window, what’s he doing?” - -> *The normal man inside the café is placing tiny chairs into a dark rip near his hands. To the left and right of the normal man are fake replicas of tables and chairs.* - -“They’re not fake! Why do you think they’re fake?” - -> *The tables and chairs to the left and right of the normal man appear to be convincing forgeries of real café furniture. However, they do not present clear shadows in the afternoon light, and their proportions suggest an illustration drawn slightly off center rather than a three-dimensional structure.* - -“Next, next photo.” - -> *Date: November 6th, 2023, mid-day.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Arc de Triomphe (fake)* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison smile in a selfie during a beautiful sunset. A convincing replica of the Arc de Triomphe looms over the cars circling the phony edifice. Streetlamps are lit, enhancing the color of the Parisian city.* - -“Not… that’s not a replica, it’s real. I saw the Arc myself.” - -> *My mistake! The description has been updated.* - -“What about the man?” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“Where’s the man, find man.” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“Find the man! Is the normal man in the picture? Find man!” - -> *The normal man in the large hat and long coat stands next to the not fake Arc de Triomphe, touching it with his right hand. Both his hand and the not fake Arc de Triomphe are darkened and less distinct than the surrounding details visible in the photo. His left hand holds a tiny real Arc de Triomphe. His shifting face that is not made up of insects is pointed towards Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison.* - -“Why does he keep reaching into rips, what’s he doing?” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“Is he taking things out or putting them into somewhere?” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“It— What— n-next… next photo.” - -> *Date: November 7th, 2023, evening.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Eiffel Tower, Jardin du Tuileries* -> -> *Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison hold hands, and Maria Harrison and Nicolas Arnaud exchange a kiss, in the middle of the Jardin du Tuileries. Fake bare trees line the left and right sides of the landscape. The majestic Eiffel Tower thrusts upward in the background. A normal man with a wide hat stands at the edge of the photo and reaches towards the happy couples. The air near his outstretched hands has warped and is dimmer than the surrounding evening light.* - -“The next photo.” - -> *Date: November 7th, 2023, night.* -> -> *Location: Paris, France* -> -> *Prominent Landmarks: Eiffel Tower* -> -> *Description: The Eiffel Tower sparkles with a thousand lights, to the delight of the chilled crowds below. Lance Harrison hugs a replica of Maria Harrison in a selfie taken from below the glowing tower. Janet Harrison looks up at the lights.* - -“No, no, not – that’s Maria.” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -”That is Maria, tag her as real Maria.” - -> *My mistake! I have updated the replica’s description as Real Maria Harrison.* - -“Please…” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“Where is the normal man, where is normal man?” - -> *The normal man in a large hat and draping coat can be seen in the crowd standing next to several fake pedestrians. He is tucking a weeping doll-sized woman into a pocket of darkness.* - -“Is he looking at me? What is he doing?” - -> *The normal man’s face that is not made of insects seems to be pointed towards Lance Harrison, although the transient nature of the normal man’s face and lack of eyes makes it difficult to be certain. He is gesturing toward the camera.* - -“Where is he taking them, where did he take Maria?” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“What happens if he takes me? How can I stop him?” - -> *I’m sorry, I don’t understand.* - -“Is he here now?” - -> *I’m sorry, please authenticate to access this application.* - - - -> *I have saved the album in its current state due to inactivity.* - - - -> *Exiting program due to inactivity.* - - - -> *Entering standby mode.* - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading – but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Tag, You're It** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-42/the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.md b/content/issue-42/the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.md deleted file mode 100644 index f8873b09..00000000 --- a/content/issue-42/the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,227 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The House We Built Together, Yesterday" - -date: 2025-06-30 -issue: Issue 42 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Charlie Winter -copyright: '© Charlie Winter 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "You'll have to bear with me here, and forgive me for the confusion, but one of my all-time favourite films is John Carpenter's THE THING. And if you told me Charlie Winter's gentle, warm-hearted yarn is surely as far removed as anything could be from that, so too the strange beasts that come to populate it, I'd largely agree. Yet both look at men living in isolation, their world devoid of women, which is interesting. And, in this case, also lovely." - -image: images/TogetherYesterday10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Pixabay](https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-wearing-red-dress-45178/), [amayaeguizabal](https://pixabay.com/photos/hedgehog-cute-animal-little-nature-1215140/) and [unknown](https://pixabay.com/photos/scheepmakers-crowned-pigeon-bird-3373811/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i42/5.The.House.We.Built.Together.Yesterday.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-house-we-built-together-yesterday -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}wo new house spirits had arrived through the coal chute overnight. Sterling leaned forward on his cane as they trembled in the pile of Hudson’s Bay point blankets he’d set at the end of the chute. The light in the basement was bad, he noted, squinting at his guests. - -“Time to get new bulbs,” he muttered. “Whole house is getting dark. Wasn’t like this when—” But the next word stuck in his throat, where he swallowed it down rather than force it. “As for you two, you’re not staying. I’ve made up my mind.” - -He hooked his cane on the side of the coal bin and reached in. One of the shapes skittered around, but the other stayed small and scared so he fetched that first. Once the critter was lifted to eye-height, the darkness surrounding Sterling fell away. A greens spirit: rabbity in nature, but instead of fur wore a rustling pelt of furled leaves, cold-chewed at the edges. Its eyes were bright buttons of soft summer green. - -The spirit kicked its back legs with an aggressive lettuce sound. Despite its protests, he checked its ears for lacewing larvae and its belly and rear for pepper spots. Then into his pocket it went with a series of high-end leaf crackles. - -The other newcomer was still ping-ponging around the coal bin, trailing hisses like a punctured tyre. But Sterling’s hands remembered his work better than his failing eyes did. He took up the striped point blanket underneath it, swaddling on the way up so that, by the time it was within the range of Sterling’s vision, all that could be seen above the blanket’s edge was an indignant set of sea-grey eyes and two enormous bat-like ears. - -“What are you, then?” Sterling asked, risking a twitch of the blanket to expose more of its furious expression. White teeth and a pink tongue were placed prettily in a face that was the marriage of a cat with a particularly petulant mink. Whiskers like sneezes of smoke puffed about as it spat. “Angry little beetle, aren’t you?” - -“Pssssssssat!” snarled the creature. - -“Fair enough,” said Sterling. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}terling put the greens spirit in with the patch of others he already had in the fridge. They huddled in a mass, twitching their noses and stopping his spinach from spoiling. He made himself tea, though it meant persuading the chicken-like tea cosy spirit to become less solid so he could reach the pot she nested atop of broodily. No brew she protected would ever grow bitter, or cold. Then he took his tea to the armchair by the potbelly stove, his newspaper dropped in his lap by an eager fetching spirit shaped like a Duck Tolling Retriever with fur that rippled, streamlike. - -The armchair was set in the kitchen, too big for the place it had been put. It had a grand view of the kitchen sink but little else. Still, Sterling could shove his slippered feet against the stove’s warmth, and the light through the window above was enough to read his paper by, so he didn’t feel the need to sit elsewhere. Certainly not where the armchair had been prior, in the room just eight steps to the right. - -A closed door stood between Sterling and that room. The house that Sterling lived in – big as it was, and with spirits rustling in every nook – was filled by doors closed and left that way. He only ever went from this armchair to the bathroom to the basement to the yard; the rest of the house might not have existed. At night, the armchair was his bed. His world, like his eyesight, had shrunk; his life was growing dark. - -So be it, he thought, shaking the newspaper. Such was life. Such was growing old. - -Nevertheless, even as his eyesight had narrowed over the years, he always knew where his spirits were. The tea cosy spirit clucked contentedly over his tea beside him. The fetching spirit was busy collecting balls of dust from under counters for the industrious tidying spirits, tiny spiders with golden eyes. A small bear-shaped spirit was visible only as two dark eyes within the depths of the potbelly stove, where it made heat without the need for wood. Tinier versions tumbled about atop the stove, not satisfied with merely boiling a little water. They were a rambunctious lot, and only really settled by cooking, which Sterling didn’t do anymore. He didn’t see the point of cooking for one. - -He’d released the new spirit from his pocket before sitting. Now that it wasn’t swallowed by the dim light of the basement, he could see it clearer. It had fur as black as coal, but caught all through with threads of light, like spiderwebs, or the blurry streaks of moving stars. He didn’t know its purpose, yet. But all the house spirits who came to him had one. He’d just wait until that purpose showed itself. - -Until then, the patter of its paws chasing sunbeams across the kitchen tiles was as comforting as anything might be. His life might have been going through a stage of ensmallening, but at least it wasn’t quiet. The kitchen brimmed with living sounds. And it was warm. - -He closed his eyes for a nap, despite the early hour. But sleep came slow, as it always did now, and then there came a series of plik-plik sounds along with a pulling at the threads of his pyjama pants. Sterling opened his eyes to find the new spirit standing boldly upon his chest. Man and spirit surveyed each other. - -The spirit crab-scuttled across his chest, this way and that, as if challenging him to bundle it up once more. Then it marched to a spot just above his heart, circled three times over, and settled down in a perfect ball of black-and-silver fur. There it began to purr, a rusty, rattling noise like chains slithering. Its paws kneaded Sterling’s shirt. It was a warm, beating, living weight, slight as it was on Sterling’s chest; he watched as it dozed, heart beating in time with its kneading. - -Eventually the rhythmic purrs were too powerful to resist. - -He closed his eyes and slept. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}S{{}}terling woke with a start at a whistle from the window. The face of the local vet, half-raised by Sterling in all the important ways, beamed up there. - -“Hey, Mr Tremblay. Checked the chickens on my way through. Here’s the harvest.” He passed a basket of eggs through, setting it on the counter. “There’s a meal in there for you to hot up, too. Anything else you need done?” - -Sterling creaked his way upright, upsetting the new spirit from where it was snoozing on his chest. It scrabbled into his coat, finding a place to curl up in the breast pocket of his shirt, where it stayed. “About time you showed up,” he said. “I’ve come to a decision, but I’ll be needing you, Ajappatuq.” - -“It’s Rabbit, Mr Tremblay.” Eyes bright with interest, Rabbit left the window and came to the back door, where he lingered in the mud room with snow dripping from his boots. “What do you need?” - -“I’m going on a walk,” announced Sterling, Rabbit’s eyebrows rising. “And you’re coming. I’ve got more house spirits than I’ve got house—” - -“Hey now, you’d have plenty of space if you just opened a few—” - -“Not done talking,” snapped Sterling. “I’ve got more than I need, and not enough life in me to look after them all. I want to put them elsewhere.” - -Rabbit examined him slowly. “You’ll keep some though, won’t you? Hate to think of you sitting here without company.” - -Sterling gruffed, “No need for that. Now, get the baskets and put some plates down for the house hippos to drink from while we’re gone. Then it’s time you showed me all you’ve learned of catching things that don’t want to be caught.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}hey walked together, Sterling and Rabbit, and each had long enough knowing of the other that it was a walk made companionable by shared silence. Sterling had trained him in vetting since he’d been a boy, covered in bites from things he shouldn’t have been grabbing at. Back then, it hadn’t been house spirits in the coal chute that Sterling had been waking to, but a pint-sized Ajappatuq in the mud room with his arms filled with beaver or mink or coyote pup. - -“Found it alone, Mr Tremblay,” he had said every time. “Can we help?” - -Then Sterling would take the animal into the surgery at the back of his house, now behind another of those currently closed doors, and while he was seeing to the creature’s wounds the youngster would sit in the kitchen with a plate of butter tarts and his bites being seen to by— - -But that was a long time ago. - -The walk through the forest surrounding his home was much like it used to be, for all that Sterling hadn’t taken it for some years. The sunlight sharp on freshly fallen snow and the world quiet in admiration. Those spirits that could walk did so, playing about in the snow as they went; those that couldn’t sat in the baskets hanging from Rabbit’s arms. - -The new one, the mink-kitten creature with no purpose, stayed tucked mostly inside Sterling’s shirt, head popped out to watch the world pass by. Occasionally, it meeped as Sterling showed it a leaf or an interesting stick. It was a pleasure to see the creature bristle with curiosity, eyes taking in everything; Sterling had forgotten how big the world could be, when one was small and very new. - -They came out of the forest on the coastal path, waves rolling far below on stony shores against the cliffs. In some places, the forest came right to the sea, which churned icily. - -Rabbit finally spoke. “You could move into town, you know,” he said, not making eye contact. He said it in the same way someone else might mutter an uncomfortable secret, wishing all the time it could be left under the rug to collect dust. But Sterling’s life was filled with spirits for fetching. Not even dust stayed where it should be in such company. “Stay with me, even. I’d figure out the space—” - -“Don’t need looking after, Ajappatuq,” snapped Sterling. “Let me grow old and die where my roots are. If trees are allowed that dignity, then so should I be.” - -“It’s Rabbit. And you’re not that old.” - -Sterling scowled. Old enough that no one he saw out shopping knew him by name anymore. Old enough that the horses he’d foaled were all gone. The furriers he’d fought with at the bars of his youth had faded away, along with the market for furs. - -“Papatsi built us our house,” was all he said, the spirits clustering to look up at him. The new one pressed its head against his chin and purred threadily. “I’ll die where he did. Now, be quiet. We’re almost there.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}W{{}}ith Rabbit’s help, Sterling delivered his spirits without fanfare or thanks. They slipped a heating bear through the letter slot of a local fisherman’s closed-up cabin. Sterling knew the man from long ago in the way so many old men knew each other: in time passing and caught snippets of news, like that the fisherman’s wife was gone some six months now and that the fisherman, in all the decades Sterling had known him, had never liked to put the heat on without someone else there to keep the house warm for. - -To a lumberjack with a young son, who Sterling had heard was getting into trouble in the usual ways young boys got into trouble, they left a fetching spirit rolling about in the yard. Fetching spirits came with endless curiosity and a limitless energy to match, and in Sterling’s opinion there wasn’t a spirit more suited to roaming the woods and finding things to investigate. Such things boys needed, keeping their heads busy along with their hands. - -To a lonely farmer, who’d married young and learned the hard way that growing up sometimes meant growing apart, they left what Stirling thought of as a dictation spirit. They were mostly useful for transcribing patient notes, in Sterling’s experience. But Rabbit suspected these spirits, who came in shapes as gaudy as parrots, could be goaded into talking about anything, if one spent enough time chatting at them to teach them how. It was a long time since Sterling had wasted sufficient words around the house to engage their interest. - -On and on the two men went, tucking spirits through the cracks under doors, in letterboxes and tree houses. Spirits for rising bread and picking books; for folding socks and making beds with perfect corners. All manner of creatures left the baskets to their new homes, until there was no one left but Sterling and Rabbit, and the mink-cat creature still in his pocket. - -They stood outside Sterling’s house as the sun went down in a golden spill over snow. Sterling looked up at the house, which towered above in sunset glory. It was a thing of beauty, built by Papatsi right down to the last cupboard knob. And now it would be emptier than ever. - -“Time for bed,” he declared. - -“In the chair again?” Rabbit asked. Sterling fixed him with a frown. “Never mind. I’ll be by in the morning with your breakfast. See you later, Mr Tremblay.” - -“Wait.” Sterling caught his arm, almost sliding on the icy step until Rabbit steadied him. He cupped the spirit out of his pocket, handing it over despite the small creature’s protests. Rabbit held the creature in hands big enough to cover it entirely, though more gentle hands Sterling had almost never known. - -“This one’s for you. It doesn’t have a purpose that I know of yet, so you’ll need to figure that out,” said Sterling, retreating to his doorway. “But it’s curious. Make sure you keep that curiosity alive. It’s important. And goodnight.” - -He closed the door. The hallway was cold and quiet. The house beyond it too. - -He walked slowly to his armchair. The fire was out. - -He didn’t sleep. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}N{{}}o new house spirits had arrived in the coal chute overnight. Sterling leaned hard on his cane as though peering closer would change that. But the blankets were empty. - -“Hmph,” he said, which echoed. Perhaps it was time to close the basement door too. - -There came a familiar whistle from the kitchen above, Sterling going upstairs with undignified haste. “Ajappatuq—” he began as he came from the basement into the kitchen, where he stopped. - -“Morning, Sterl,” said the fisherman, standing shaggy and shamefaced in the mud room, hat in hands. “Been a while.” - -“Hullo, Mr Tremblay,” said the lumberjack, peering round the doorway behind the fisherman. His son gave a nervous little wave, but his hand quickly fell back to the shoulder of the fetching spirit sitting beside him with a pinecone in its mouth. - -The farmer, in the window, didn’t speak, only nodded. The good dreams spirit preened itself on his shoulder. And Rabbit, who was right there in the kitchen, straightened after checking the cold stove with a frown, the mink-cat’s head peeking out from his coat collar. - -They were all, to a man, to a creature, looking at Sterling. - -“You told them,” Sterling snapped, but the vet was already shaking his head. “Then how’d they know, Ajappatuq?” - -“It’s still Rabbit, Mr Tremblay. And they heard you were alone and came to help.” - -“Papatsi always used to talk about your house critters down at the bar,” said the farmer. “Where else could they have come from?” He glanced about the room, eyes lingering on the armchair. “Should have come calling before now, since he’s been gone. Shouldn’t have left you sitting up here in this big house.” He pointed to the armchair. “Doesn’t that make it hard to move around?” - -Sterling bristled, but the lumberjack said, “Cold, isn’t it? Boiler not working?” - -“It’s not worked for years.” - -The lumberjack coughed. “I can fix that.” - -“I don’t need it fixed, because…” He trailed off without finishing on *the heating spirit will help*. Sterling wilted in the face of so many well-meaning expressions. “Well, sure, you can look.” - -But by the time he was done showing the lumberjack to the boiler, the others had wandered from the kitchen where he left them. Alarmed, Sterling scampered from the empty kitchen to find Rabbit sitting on the stairs, petting the mink-cat – and the two of them surrounded by opened doors. - -“!” said Sterling. He scampered past Rabbit, slippers flapping, through the closest doorway, to the library. The farmer stood in there, looking at Sterling’s wedding photo propped on the mantel. Bookshelf spirits – some for sorting, some for unsorting – peeked shyly out from between books, unused to human company. They’d escaped the giving away by dint of being where Sterling wouldn’t go. - -“The wife isn’t much for books,” said the farmer. “Me, I like them. But no space. Used to haunt your library, when I had time. Papatsi told me he was having to read to you, back when your eyes starting going. Thought that was sweet. Something my wife wouldn’t do, bless her.” - -“Bless her,” creaked the good dreams spirit. - -Only now did the farmer look at Sterling. “This one’s a pretty good mimic. ’Spose I read to it, could it remember all that? Or is that too many words?” - -Sterling unstuck his tongue. “I shouldn’t imagine it would have a problem with any number of words. Rabbit thinks they get better with practice.” - -The farmer nodded. “Might I borrow a book, then?” he asked. “I’ve got time to spare, and I could send it back with a borrow of this fellow to give you what I’ve read to it. Not like Papatsi would have, of course, but if you’d like… and maybe you could put your chair back in here, while you listen. More space for your legs.” - -He wrung at his hat. - -Sterling croaked, “That would be lovely, thank you.” - -He staggered out, casting a glance at Rabbit on his way. The man looked as innocent as the mink-cat spirit on his shoulder, who’d mysteriously obtained someone’s coat button. - -The lumberjack was in the workshop where Papatsi had once crafted so many beautiful things, he and his son looking around with wide eyes. - -“I’m sorry,” said the lumberjack, tugging at his son when he saw Sterling in the doorway. “Mark was chasing the spirit, who came in here – we didn’t mean to intrude.” - -“Dad told me you were a vet,” said the boy. “I didn’t know vets did wood things.” - -“My—” began Sterling, shakily. The smells in here – too much. Too many. Everywhere looked like *him*. - -“Could you teach me?” asked the boy. - -“Mark,” hissed his father. - -Sterling looked at the boy, who fidgeted. The fetching spirit sidled up and released a small block of wood into the boy’s hands. He petted it with fingers notched all over in an old familiar way, from amateur attempts at carving. - -“It was my husband who worked wood,” Sterling said. And then added, “Papatsi.” - -“I didn’t know you wanted to learn woodcraft,” said the lumberjack, looking at his son’s hands and seeming to notice the little nicks and cuts with surprise. - -“You don’t have time,” mumbled the boy. “And you don’t have all these tools.” - -“Mr Tremblay doesn’t—” - -“Your father can teach you,” said Sterling in a halting, shocked way. “He can use anything in here, of course, anytime. Might as well. No one else is using it.” - -“That’s very generous, Mr Tremblay…” - -But Sterling had already made a hasty retreat – right into the chest of the fisherman, who said, “Well, your boiler’s bust. Say, you need anything, Sterl? Noticed the cupboards are pretty bare and Rabbit says he brings meals. That’s all well and good, but I don’t mind a bit of cooking, when it’s not just me. Could do a proper roast in an oven like yours.” - -Sterling looked about wildly at the house, all its open doors spilling sunlight. It seemed bigger than yesterday. Louder, too, despite the lack of spirits. His heart raced in such a way he worried he was ill, until he considered that it might instead be the start of something like curiosity: what would tomorrow bring, if he kept these doors open? - -Then Rabbit was beside him, his hand steady on Sterling’s shoulder, just as Sterling’s had been on his when he’d been a boy. Just as Papatsi’s had been too. They’d raised that boy together, in all the ways they knew, and this was the man they’d made of him. Sterling might have wept in wonder. - -“Here,” Rabbit said, passing the mink-cat into Sterling’s trembling hands. “Think she’s yours.” - -“For what purpose?” Sterling stammered as, purring, she slipped warmly back into his breast pocket, where her heart beat just like his. - -“Bit of company, of course,” Rabbit said. “Just as the vet ordered.” - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The House We Built Together, Yesterday** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/25-peppercorns.md b/content/issue-43/25-peppercorns.md deleted file mode 100644 index af55341c..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/25-peppercorns.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,236 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "25 Peppercorns" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- Fantasy -authors: -- Emma Burnett -copyright: '© Emma Burnett 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "This is Emma Burnett's third contribution to our pages, each more weighty than the one before. Here she tackles timely and challenging subject matter: how the suffering our forbearers endured goes on to affect those who follow them, forging links in a chain that seems inevitably to bind us to more pain in the future. Here's to breaking that chain. Editorial note: although Mythaxis doesn't use trigger warnings, readers may appreciate knowing that this story makes reference to the legacy of historical attrocities including the Holocaust." - -image: images/Peppercorns10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Berna T.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/powder-from-lotion-on-hands-26792271/), [Lukas](https://www.pexels.com/photo/silver-knife-near-beans-616358/), and [Kaboompics.com](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-close-up-shot-of-a-spoon-of-spices-4871091/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i43/1.25.Peppercorns.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: 25-peppercorns -weight: 1 -featured: true - ---- - -## 2012 - -{{}}I{{}} perch on a stool in the kitchen and watch my mother stir the soup. She has the recipe out on the countertop and she double, triple checks, making sure she has done everything she is supposed to. She stirs, sniffs, but never tastes the soup. - -The whole house smells of chicken stock, and the brisket in the oven, and later it will smell of browning coconut, the macaroons perfectly measured, moulded, baked. No fingers or spoons licked. My mother has a recipe for each thing, which she follows exactly the same every year. It’s one of the few meals she cooks. - -The steam rises in curls and puffs from the pot of chicken soup, large enough to feed twenty people. I sit on the counter stool, and watch her mould small matzoh balls in her fingers and drop them in. They will cook in the boiling broth, and tonight they will stare up at me from my bowl after the prayers at seder, and they will fill my mouth with ash. - -Everything fills my mouth with ash. - -“I’m hungry,” I say to my mother, whose hands are covered in sticky matzoh batter. She shrugs and cocks her head towards the sink, and I hop down from the stool and get myself a glass of water. - -It’s a trick my mother taught me. Water doesn’t taste of ash. If I drink enough of it, I almost feel full. Fizzy water works even better. - -My mother knows all the tricks. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 2011 - -{{}}I{{}} am fourteen and this curse only landed on me a few weeks ago. - -My mother had watched me like a hawk on my birthday, saying nothing, just staring, as I ate the cake she’d bought from the shops, the pizza we had ordered in, as I downed mug after mug of hot chocolate with freeze dried marshmallows made from packets. - -Grandma Ruth had called to wish me a happy birthday, told me that she loved me, and then asked to be handed back to Miriam. - -I had handed the phone back to my mother, and hung around, had pretended not to eavesdrop, wondered if Grandma Ruth wanted to talk about a special gift for me or something. My mother shrugged at something Grandma Ruth said, and glanced over at me. - -“Not yet,” she said, playing with the curly cable on the house line. “I’ll let you know if it does. Or doesn’t. I guess we can hope?” - -It happened in the evening. Dinner, just the two of us, my choice of meal. Fried chicken and doughnuts that we’d had delivered, with the smallest slivers of cucumber as an obligatory green, and suddenly the food was ash in my mouth. - -My mother just nodded. - -She had known it would happen. She’d been waiting. - -I had cried, and my mother had rubbed my back and shoulders, not complaining that the food was dripping out of my mouth onto the table, that I gagged as I kept trying to take bites, barely able to understand her words. - -She told me it was a curse, and also our legacy. That we lived with the memories passed down to us by our mothers and grandmothers. She told me that Grandma Ruth had the same, how everything she ate was ash in her mouth. She told me about her own fourteenth birthday, not all that long ago, really. She told me I’d get used to it, eventually, and that she’d teach me all her tricks. - -We sat on the floor by the table, under the only partially eaten meal, and I cried into my knees, and she held me tight. - -I notice, after that, how little my mother eats, how much water she drinks. How she’ll always have soup, given the option, how she sucks it down speedily, like someone dying, someone starving. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 1984 - -{{}}M{{}}iriam was fourteen when the food in her mouth turned to ash. It was evening, and her mother had made fresh challah and brisket and honey-glazed carrots. She worked directly from the recipe, never deviating, never tasting the food as it cooked. Two tablespoons of honey. Three eggs. Twenty-five peppercorns. No about this or approximately that. It was how her mother always cooked, every meal planned the week before, recipe and exact ingredients to hand. - -The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink. - -They sat around the table in the evening, and sang happy birthday to her, and she jiggled her knees, impatient for them to finish so she could eat. She took her first bite of the dinner made especially for her. - -Miriam gasped. Then she began to cry. - -Her mother leapt up and pulled her away from the table, said quickly not to worry, that Miriam was just having women’s problems, they’d be right back. That the rest of them should go ahead and eat, eat. - -In the bathroom upstairs, she helped Miriam to rinse out her mouth and rubbed her back until she stopped crying. Then they sat on the side of the bathtub next to each other, and her mother told her that this was something private, not something to be discussed in public. None of the men and boys downstairs – one father, two brothers – needed to know about it. Her mother told her not to discuss it with anyone in the neighbourhood, to tell none of her friends. This was their secret. - -Her mother told Miriam that she had the same trouble, that food never tasted good again after she turned fourteen. She said it was a curse. That’s what her mother, Bubbe Berta, had called it. A curse passed down from a grandmother that Miriam couldn’t remember. That they all carried it, all the women who had come after Berta. Berta, who was rescued at fourteen, who was the only survivor from the family, the only one who hadn’t been killed in the camps, burnt and poured into a mass grave of dust and bone. - -“But we don’t talk about it,” Mama said, patting her knee. “We just live with it, carry it with us. You understand?” - -Miriam nodded, lying. She wouldn’t talk to anyone, but she didn’t understand. - -“And, anyway,” Mama wiped the tears off Miriam’s cheeks with a washcloth. “Look on the bright side. You’ll lose all this puppy fat.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 2013 - -{{}}P{{}}eople begin to comment on my weight. - -How slender I’m looking. How I look so much like my mother. - -I am hungry all the time, and I miss the feeling of food, real food, in my mouth. But I’ve learned to cope. Drink a lot of milk. Drink chicken broth. Use a straw. Swallow quickly. Wash small bites down with big mouthfuls of water. Don’t eat anything sticky. Don’t linger over meals, don’t trust my nose, which tries to trick me into believing this time will be different. - -I get compliments from my peers, who want to know how I got so slender. How I lost all the baby weight. They wonder if their eyes will look like mine, so big and dark and soulful, if they lose all their chub. - -I watch them in the girls’ changing rooms after gym class. They pinch themselves, tugging at their bellies and cheeks while they suck on lollipops and smack gum, and I want to tell them they’re beautiful. I want to tell them at least they can taste the food their parents make. That I’m jealous they can even taste what’s served in the school canteen, which could probably also double as prison food. - -The idea of eating for pleasure is like a fever dream, a lie from an imagined past. - -I try a piece of Snickers that someone offers me, and it takes a half litre of water to wash down the ash pasted onto my soft palate. I try not to gag while I scrape off the tacky mess with my tongue. I don’t take any more handouts. - -I am hired by the modelling agency my mother uses. They tell me they don’t often take children, but I am a golden opportunity. I’m just so like her, so haunted looking, those long slender limbs, those stark lines, the sad, dark eyes. They describe me to me, while they take photos of the two of us together. - -My mother hugs me, after, tells me I did really well. - -“Plus, the extra money will be a big help,” my mother says. “Not that we— but, you know, for clothes, and life stuff. We can start to save up for you to go to university. Or you can put your money away for if you have a family, someday. A house or something.” - -“I’m never having kids,” I tell her, with finality. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 1963 - -{{}}R{{}}uth’s desk was at the front of the classroom, and she wished it wasn’t. She didn’t like that her back was exposed. - -The other girls in the class – all blonde and blue-eyed with soft, round cheeks and sweaters just starting to fill out – were giggling behind her. Ruth wished their teacher would tell them to hush, but he just smiled indulgently at them. - -A spitball pinged off her shoulder, and the cluster of girls behind her burst into giggles again. - -She tried to focus on her schoolwork. Maybe if she aced the test coming up, she’d be able to switch to the other class, the class that was for excellent students, mostly boys, mostly not interested in her. At least there she’d be able to escape from the chatter and the feeling so completely out of place. At least then she’d know she’d have a good chance of getting into a good university. - -Ruth didn’t tell her mother about the soft pink girls at school, how no one would sit with her in the cafeteria. She didn’t tell her mother how the other kids teased her about her dark curls, visible collarbones and bony knees, and the remnants of an accent. She knew her mother would just say how lucky she was to be in school at all, how when she was fourteen there was nothing but pain and death. How when she was fourteen, she was nothing but skin and bones. - -“Here, bubala, eat this, eat this,” Ruth knew her mother would say, if she told her. “And never mind what those shiksa girls say, Ruthie, you’re beautiful.” - -It wouldn’t help, so she didn’t tell her. - -At fourteen, Ruth began to refuse to eat the food her mother prepared. Everything her mother cooked, everything about it, was wrong. The language that the recipes were in, the smells which were so different from the fast food joints she passed and what got served in the school cafeteria, the names and the textures. It was all wrong. - -Her mother refused to understand. She would say how lucky Ruth was that there was always food when she wanted it. How lucky she was that she never had to fight for more, never had to hold back her tears so she wouldn’t get dehydrated and die a shrivelled husk. - -“Have this,” her mother would say, holding out a fork full of something or other, something with a name from a language Ruth was trying so hard to forget. “Ah, Ruthie, eat. I tried so hard not to die, so you could live. Eat this. One day, you’ll be cooking it for your family.” - -And Ruth would chew whatever it was she was being fed, and force a smile. And when her mother wasn’t looking, she would spit it out, and promise herself she would never have a family, never cook these things. - -It all tasted the same to her. Everything she ate tasted like sadness, and guilt, and death. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 2029 - -{{}}I{{}} am pregnant, because of course I am. I am shocked, and impressed that mother nature has battled onwards despite my desiccated, stick insect, barely-there body. - -It was an accident, a once-off with a friend, someone I had met last year at an evening lecture series about the legacies of intergenerational trauma. He had volunteered his own story during a session on the legacies that children and grandchildren carry, long after an event. He had offered himself up as an example, talked about the taint that runs in his family, and how none of the men can ever be happy. He explained how everything smells of rot whenever the men are happy. - -He told a room full of strangers that it is the smell left behind after a bomb obliterates your house during a festival in a war over oil, a war you and your family have no part in, can’t escape. It is the smell that grows as you spend days trying to dig out anyone who might have survived. When you are the only one left. He doesn’t know this himself. It’s what his father told him, and his grandfather told his father. He’s never known it himself, but he smells it anyway, whenever he is happy. - -I had been gobsmacked to hear someone talking so openly about their curse, and I had made myself be brave. I went to talk to him after the session, and we had gone for a coffee. I told him about my curse, the only person I had ever talked to about it, besides my mother and Grandma Ruth, who didn’t like when I brought it up. - -He nodded as I spoke, and didn’t try to offer any suggestions, and he didn’t try to come up with ways I could fix it. He just nodded. - -We had become close. - -And now there’s a baby. - -I know I should get rid of it. I don’t need a baby in my life. I barely have a relationship, and my job isn’t the most stable. But I worry that this might be my only chance. It’s not like my body is a temple, it’s not like I’m in the peak of health. - -I sit on the sofa at my mother’s house and cry, and tell her I don’t know what to do. She says she understands, tells me that she will support me, no matter what. We don’t have a choice about what the curse does to our bodies, but I can absolutely choose this. - -“But, hey,” she says, “if you decide to keep it, it could be nice. Babies can be nice, kind of. And even if they’re not, kids are okay. I could start to cook again, I haven’t done that in a while. Maybe I could teach you, even. It’s not so hard if you just follow the recipes. I have a lot of them, from your Grandma Ruth. You know she translated them from Bubbe Berta’s old handwritten ones, after she died? We can live vicariously through your kid.” - -I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, then pull out a bottle of green smoothie from my bag and give it a shake. Three of my five-a-day crammed into one blended meal, which I can suck down at speed. - -“Until she’s fourteen.” - -“Until she’s fourteen. And then, we’ll see. Maybe she’ll be different.” - -We know, somehow, that it’s going to be a girl. - -I know, deeply, painfully, that I’m going to keep the baby. - -I suck down the green sludge through a straw, and ignore the aftertaste of dust and smoke in my mouth. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 1947 - -{{}}B{{}}erta was pregnant. She didn’t even know it would be possible for her to get pregnant, not after the camps and the illness and the starvation and the despair and the fear. She was pregnant and her new husband, who had also lost everything, had promised her that after the baby was born, after they were all healthy, they would travel to a new country. They would go somewhere that would be sympathetic to them, to their plight. Somewhere they could start a new life. - -Berta struggled to eat. She wondered if she could blame it on the morning sickness – and why did they call it that, anyway, when it lasted all day long? – but it had been going on for years. Since the camps, even after they were rescued. The food she made, the food she ate, it gave her no pleasure. It tasted all wrong. She knew others who had survived the camps, other people who also struggled to eat, struggled to sleep, struggled to love. Their bodies and minds just weren’t used to it anymore. It was probably that, she decided. She just wasn’t used to it. - -She wished she could tell her mother, wished she could tell her over a cup of sweet tea and hamentashen. But her mother was gone, lost soon after they’d been deposited at the camp along with hundreds of others. Long ago turned to ash. - -Berta couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone else. - -There was a small woodland near the house, and Berta walked through it, enjoying the warm spring air, the quiet, the freedom to move wherever she wanted. She rubbed her expanding belly sometimes, a gentle soothing circle. It was a prelude to the hugs and kisses she would pepper the baby with once it was born. She hummed a tune her mother had sung her, when she was young. Before the war. - -The woods were peaceful, but there were people sitting in a circle ahead, clustered around a campfire. It was only campers around a campfire, she knew, but the whiff of smoke in the air caught her unaware, and she found herself clinging to a young tree and dry heaving. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she told herself that it was nothing dangerous. But an animal fear in her reared up, and she stumbled away from the happily chattering group, a family or two, maybe on holiday. - -Memories pressed themselves forward, memories of bodies on one side of the building, piles of ash on the other. Berta blocked her nose and tried to forget the hours, days, maybe years she had spent cleaning out the ovens. - -Gagging, wiping her hands over and over on her skirt, she hurried away from the campfire, back towards home, as fast as she could waddle. - -She would tell him that when they move, which must be soon, she wants to be in a place without smoke or ash. No forests, no industrial towns. She wanted to be in a house where they would only cook on gas or oil. Where everything would smell clean. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -## 2030 - -{{}}T{{}} here is a girl, and he is thrilled. - -There is also a boy, and I am. - -We don’t know yet if they will inherit our curses, our taints. But we don’t hide from them, not anymore. We talk about them to each other, and we talk about them with our parents, and we agree not to lie to the children about our inheritances. - -He scrunches up his nose whenever good things are happening. Always with the children, whenever they play, always when he eats good food, he looks disgusted. It’s how I know he is happy. - -I gag whenever I eat, and so does my mother. But we explore the kitchen together, cooking and baking from lists and instructions, from the book of recipes written by Berta, translated by Ruth, followed religiously by my mother and by me. The food we cook is ash in our mouths, but I see on his disgusted face that it is delicious, and it always smells good, so we taste everything anyway. The children are fed, and they like the food, and they eat. - -And I count out the peppercorns, one by one. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -> **Nota bene:** -> -> This story centres on intergenerational trauma, war, and genocide, as well as a hope that the future might hold less suffering than the past. These subjects are deeply relevant right now. -> -> For obvious reasons, this is a difficult time to explore trauma, particularly Jewish trauma. But I can't tell this story from another perspective: I only have my lived experiences as an inheritor of stories, and fears, and tribalism. So, my deepest thanks to my sensitivity reader, Ziyad Hayatli, for his time and assistance. -> -> I don't think there is ever a time to shy away from intergenerational reciprocity. We can't look away from one evil act when confronted with another. We need to tackle them head-on, in the hopes that we don't reenact them. What is happening now cannot be excused or overlooked. What happened in the past cannot be either. This story talks about inherited traumas, the ones perpetrated against us, the ones being perpetrated right now. But we can do better. We can choose a future that is different. Reparation over repetition; sharing over supremacy; healing over harming. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading – but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **25 Peppercorns** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* - diff --git a/content/issue-43/ShortReviews11.md b/content/issue-43/ShortReviews11.md deleted file mode 100644 index a128b859..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/ShortReviews11.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,52 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Short Reviews – July to September, 2025" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- review -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson -copyright: '© Andrew Leon Hudson 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As always, we round out the issue with a selection of interesting speculative fiction from around the web, as always with an eye on those zines that may have slipped under your reading radar…" - -image: images/ShortReviews01_10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image is by [grandfailure](https://depositphotos.com/368748152/stock-photo-man-standing-mysterious-library-digital.html) via DepositPhotos.com." - -type: stock -slug: short-reviews-july-to-september-2025 -weight: 8 -featured: true ---- - -{{}}I{{}} noticed an unfairness: that, with our Winter issues primarily given over to crime (and our final slew of short reviews being focused on short crime fiction only), any genre fic published in October, November, and December was excluded from these short reviews. - -In 2026 I'll rectify this oversight, with the Spring round up reaching back to cover October to January, Summer taking February to May, and Autumn wrapping up the twelve months with June to September, and the Winter issue continuing to pick at the calendar year's criminal offerings. - -As for right now, here are our recommendations for recent spec-fic shorts available at the mere click of a link – all three of them bite-sized flash stories you can enjoy in just a few minutes. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}B{{}}ree Wernicke's flash story **[Five Different Realities to Explore, and One to Avoid](https://www.orions-belt.net/archives/five-different-realities-to-explore-and-one-to-avoid)** covers a hell of a lot of ground for less than a thousand words: loyal service, unrequited love, alcoholism, the disdain of one's peers, parallel universes, demonology… what *hasn't* it got? - -It appears in [Orion's Belt](https://www.orions-belt.net/), a literary speculative-fiction online magazine which specialises in *"the strange and poignant and awe-inspiring, stories that have a cosmic scale and intimate personal stakes"*. Although "awe-inspiring" is a pretty big ask for almost anything, so let's set that demanding claim to one side for now, otherwise this seems to perfectly encapsulate everything they look for in a story. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he previous story makes a passing mention of succubi, and the next – in [NewMyths](https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-home/home-page) – certainly occupies proximal conceptual space, involving one of those supernatural entities which, like the oh-so-always vampire, want something most vital from the current human subject of their interest. - -**[Getting to Know You](https://sites.google.com/newmyths.com/newmyths-com-issue-71/issue-71-stories/getting-to-know-you)** sets itself apart in a couple of ways, not most in that the being it gives us isn't so familiar it feels clichéd before we even find out what author Clarissa Grunwald is going to do with it. "Being" is, in fact, the best word to describe it. - -And it was no slip to say "not most", by the way. The twist in the tale gives this one a special hint of urgency that is as pleasing as the moment we find out what is at hand. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}L{{}}ast but by no means least, we turn to [Metastellar](https://www.metastellar.com/), whose writers and readers are encouraged to "wander to the limits of what could be". Rick Danforth responded to this boundless invitation by sticking to the worryingly probable, with a story we would have had to turn down at *Mythaxis* since we go entirely advertising-free. - -**[Adverts](https://www.metastellar.com/fiction/flash-fiction/adverts/)** takes place between stations on a subway somewhere in a future that is surely just a matter of time. As anyone who uses it knows, public transport has long been a key ecological niche for ads to flourish in – there's no audience as appealing to a marketeer as one with no choice but to sit there and take it. The real trick is achieving engagement; if this story proves prophetic, then some ground-breaking campaign might even make that the next step… literally. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/__index.md b/content/issue-43/__index.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3fa196d9..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/__index.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43" -date: 2025-09-28 -slug: index -layout: section - -issue: Issue 43 -subhead: Autumn 2025 - -editor: Andrew Leon Hudson -image: images/synthwave.jpg -imageMobile: images/synthwave_mob.jpg -imageCopyright: "Synthwave by Michal Kváč" - -# https://flexboxsheet.com/ -intro: - justify_content: flex-start - # align_items: baseline - # align_content: flex-start - logo: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - align_self: center - # align_items: flex-end - color: '#b608ff' - subheading: - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 1 - align_self: center - # align_items: flex-end - actions: - display: none - # order: 3 - # flex_grow: 2 - # align_self: flex-end - # align_items: flex-end - ---- - diff --git a/content/issue-43/beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.md b/content/issue-43/beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.md deleted file mode 100644 index e1d04cf0..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genre: -- review -authors: -- Mattia Ravasi -copyright: '© Mattia Ravasi 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Back with his second article of the year, all-too-human Mattia Ravasi takes a close look at one of those infinitely strange and wonderful things that only seem commonplace to us because they are so familiar… I'm referring, of course, to books, in this case Marie-Helene Bertino's 'Beautyland'. What will we glean from his musings, and why are we so keen to know more?" - -image: images/Beautyland10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The image shows author [Marie-Helene Bertino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Helene_Bertino) and [the book's cover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beautyland), both from Wikipedia." - -type: stock -slug: fax-machine-blues-beautyland-marie-helene-bertino -weight: 7 ---- - -{{}}M{{}}arie-Helene Bertino’s *Beautyland* opens with a detailed description of the protagonist’s birth: a routine delivery in a Philadelphia hospital, relatively unremarkable if not for one crucial detail. An intrusion in the process; an *impulse* from far away that makes newborn Adina no conventional baby. The moment of her birth coincides precisely with the launch of the Voyager 1 space probe, sending its “golden disc” recording of the sounds of life on Earth into the space it is meant to photograph and explore. And it seems that, at the same time as humanity is reaching out toward the stars, something reaches out from the opposite direction. - -Fast-forward a few years, and two fateful incidents set Adina on the course of her life’s mission. First, a fax machine is recovered from the neighbors’ trash by her resourceful (and cash-strapped) mother and placed in Adina’s bedroom. Later, after her deadbeat dad pushes her and causes her to fall and hit her head, Adina is “activated”: that night, she visits a strange classroom in her sleep where mysterious entities inform her of her true nature. - -For Adina is an alien: sent to Earth by her species to report on the planet’s living conditions, climate, and inhabitants, acting as their very own Voyager 1. Every night she visits this dreamlike classroom, where she is taught the history of her own people, while during the day she is expected to report on her experiences *by faxing her findings home*. “I am Adina,” goes her first fax; “yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass.” - -Her home planet responds: “DESCRIBE BUNNIES.” - -*Beautyland*’s premise, and especially its fax-machine shtick, might make it sound like a work of satirical science fiction, something in the vein of Douglas Adams’ *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*. Yet Bertino’s novel is much more subtle and peculiar. Adina’s identity as undercover alien works as a beautiful defamiliarizing device, allowing her to comment in irreverent and witty terms on many of the habits us humans take for granted. And these passages *are* funny – very much so: - -> When Jen, Jen, Janae, Joy, and Jiselle love something they say it needs to stop. That skirt needs to stop with those sequins. That piece of pizza needs to stop with that crust. Some things they hate also need to stop. She needs to stop with that fugly bracelet. The listener detects from context clues as to which usage is at play. This nuance of grade-school linguistics is challenging to articulate, though Adina tries in several faxes until her superiors reply: STOP - -And yet much of the novel’s charm comes from the fact that it is never quite clear how much of Adina’s estrangement from her peers is the result of her alien origins, and how much is due to peculiarities that are, ultimately, still very human. Her difficulties with relationships later in life, for instance, are not helped by her efforts to keep her real identity secret, but they might also be the result of her own process of coming to terms with her asexuality. Adina’s best friends, siblings Toni and Dominic, both queer, appear at times just as foreign and misplaced as she is in their middle-American milieu. It is only the most harshly human among the characters – the high school divas, the abusive jocks, the obnoxious siblings who like to throw rocks at birds – who have no trouble fitting in. - -*Beautyland* is one of those peculiar novels that exist on the borderlands between genres – and, by virtue of this ambiguity, somehow allow their authors to have their cake and eat it. It can be read quite naturally as a realist story about the limitations of a poor childhood, and about the fraught relationship between an introverted child and a strong-willed, hot-headed single mom. A testimony of a life where trips to malls are big treats; where flaunting one’s femininity is a must for a young woman. At the same time, the novel’s alien plot is much more than a gimmicky device or quirky note, and forms a crucial part of Adina’s makeup as a character. - -Adina’s nightly lessons from her faraway “superiors” raise some very interesting questions about the nature of identity – her alien relatives don’t seem to have any – and the meaning of life: what will happen to Adina once her mission is over, and she has collected all the information her distant family needs? Will she still be Adina once she is returned to her home planet? Even more worrying, what will happen if the mission *fails* – if the problems that are plaguing her home world and caused her people to search for a new one finally overwhelm them? - -The whole of *Beautyland* is dominated by this strange tension: between its alien and everyday plots, one extraordinary, the other humdrum, but both equally and strangely engrossing. It’s a tension heightened by Adina’s determination to keep her identity secret, and by the fact that, when she uses her gifts to her advantage (getting her alien relatives, of all things, to help her with her Italian lessons) the results are quick to backfire. - -*Beautyland* follows the course of Adina’s life chronologically, and is very much a novel of two halves. The first half of the book presents the compelling, clear trajectory of Adina’s childhood. The second half, covering her adulthood, feels much more aimless and thankless – just as does adulthood itself. The questions Adina is faced with here are more open; her challenges lack a clear solution. Should she keep guarding her secret, or share it with the world? Should she change herself to fit other people’s needs? And is it worth living in New York in spite of its crazy parking rules? Leaving Philadelphia for the big city complicates not just her relationship with her Earthly mother: soon her alien home starts becoming unresponsive, and threatens to disappear altogether from her life. - -*Beautyland* feels at once mundane and epic; a grand testament to the absurdity and mystery of everyday life. Even in the thick of its alien concerns, its plot is marked by a degree of clear-eyed honesty and truthfulness that can be hard to find even in the most realistic of “literary” fiction. Dreams often *don’t* come true; beautiful relationships sometimes wither; friends and pets pass away; people misunderstand our best intentions, and turn against us. - -The novel title seems to encapsulate its enigma. As a report about life on Earth, *Beautyland* suggests a sense of fascination and awe for all the treasures the place has to offer. But “Beautyland” is actually the name of a rather un-beautiful place: a drab suburban mall selling discounted beauty products, where the staff are snooty and rude to Adina and her mom. - -It’s unsurprising that this quietly charming novel is so obsessed with its leitmotiv of star and space exploration. Throughout its various narrative strands, *Beautyland* is ultimately a novel about humanity’s relationship with the vast, the awe-inspiring, and the extraordinary: about how we can embrace it and find in it great meaning, and how we can sometimes also come to fear and despise it, gripped as we are by the distractions of our earthly concerns. It’s a novel about the loneliness of a peculiarly crowded cosmos. A fantastic book about different ways of being alien. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia's thoughts at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/body-parts.md b/content/issue-43/body-parts.md deleted file mode 100644 index 42918c77..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/body-parts.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,99 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Body Parts" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Anna Koltes -copyright: '© Anna Koltes 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's intergenerational trauma, and there's interpersonal trauma as well. Anna Koltes's story manifests the agony of relationships right there in the flesh, the kind of metaphor you feel like a missing limb. Don't you find it seems like you just give and give and give, while others only take?" - -image: images/BodyParts10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Vitaly Gorbachev](https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-woman-dancing-on-street-12657054/) and [cottonbro studio](https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-a-woman-standing-near-the-window-8862280/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i43/3.Body.Parts.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: body-parts -weight: 3 ---- - -{{}}“Y{{}}ou said I could have your heart this week,” my lover Jack complains from outside the bus stop, his beard and eyebrows frosted over in the snow blizzard. - -“July,” I croak. “That’s when you get my heart. I told you this, remember?” - -My chest burns when it’s empty, my voice a pathetic wheeze. I’m cold all the time, but things will be better when I get my heart back to pump adrenaline into me. - -Friday. That’s when Marco, my other lover, will be finished with it. - -Jack just takes the lungs and goes back to wherever he lives these days. Sometimes I imagine it’s a rustic log cabin he built with his own two hands, scented with cinnamon-stewed apples and aglow with firewood he chopped himself. I imagine him alongside me tonight, listening to my slow breathing in him as he sleeps. Calm and ruggedly handsome, he’s like one of those mountaineers on the news who survive an avalanche and live to tell the tale. - -He doesn’t even say goodbye. If I had a heart, I know it would twinge with longing as I watch him walk away. - -But tomorrow the working week starts, so I won’t have my brain left to tell me that, either. They say it’s impossible to survive without one, but I make do. It pays the bills and it doesn’t last long. There are only so many of your thoughts they can take, after all, before you’re forced out of a dreamless sleep. - -On my time off I go to the park to recover as much as I can, picking at a sandwich until I end up feeding it to the birds. I watch the children on the swings, jealous of their healthy legs, plump arms and raucous voices. The way they hurtle over dangerous precipices and plummet from monkey bars. - -I was like them, once. Whole, unaware. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}K{{}}yle picks up my feet on a wintery-blue Saturday morning. Another lover. - -“Can’t I have all of you at once?” he asks, and he isn’t the first with this question, as conceited as it sounds. I try to explain, like I explained to Jack and Marco and all the others, but no one gets it. - -The truth is, I don’t give my heart to just anyone. It’s encased in an icebox, padlocked in a double safe in my basement. - -Even my parents have tried to guess the combination. - -“You were always so aloof,” my mother scolds. “One day you’ll have to let someone in. Honey, tell her.” - -My father pauses mid-raid of my refrigerator. “Hey, your mother still keeps my spine in her jewelry box. Don’t listen to her.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}OI{{}}n Sunday night Marco shows up two hours late, handing my heart back in a soggy plastic bag like it’s takeout Pho. - -“Don’t you want to come in?” I ask, despising the neediness in my voice, thinking of the painful epilation session and the many more hours scrubbing the obsolete corners of my apartment from a chair. I even made moussaka, proud of myself for patiently reading all the instructions in the cookbook, cool-headed when the fire alarm went off. - -Marco says he has a thing: his friend’s stand-up, or concert, or birthing, I can’t remember which. He’s already moonwalking down the street, and I try not to notice the other body parts – finger, lock of hair, studded ear – sloppily falling out of his jacket pocket. - -I’d run after him if I could. Make him stay. - -It’s when I’m huddled in a cigarette-soaked sweater he left, perched on the fire escape hate-watching the neighbor couple clink glasses of orange wine, that I decide I need a distraction. Something to keep me from checking my phone and stalking Marco’s social media. - -Crammed among the tone-deaf inebriated, I give my lips to a man at a bar. There’s no talking, only a hungry exchange. He takes more than I bargained for, and in the morning I find myself hobbling down the sidewalk in the ashy dawn, hailing a taxi, cold air filling the cavities in my flesh. - -Jack’s waiting on my doorstep, clutching my lungs. - -He looks me up and down, but his eyes are kind. Hearth-like. I imagine curling up in front of his fireplace while he reads me poetry about trees. - -Inside the house, Jack gently places my lungs on the kitchen counter and makes us tea. For a while I do nothing but watch him; his quiet, assured movements. I don’t even tell him where anything is located, his intuition seems to guide him to the right cupboard, the correct drawer. - -When we’re cradling oolong, I brush wood shavings off his shoulder. I ask him to stay. I don’t know why. But even before the question is out, I wonder why I never asked him before. - -We feed each other burnt moussaka and I wonder if Marco will ever know what he missed. - -When Kyle returns my feet, I take them off the market. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}I{{}}t’s only later, much later, when Jack has built me a fireplace and a treehouse and a home and we have a daughter, that I reluctantly take my heart out of ice. I portion the pieces out cautiously at first, spooning it like cough medicine each time my daughter cries, or laughs, or gurgles, or dreams. - -When she’s old enough, we take her to the park. But I’m too weak to walk, much less push a stroller – no recovery days now. I wheeze on the bench, seeing stars, knowing my body will never fully recover. - -Throughout the park, limbless mothers push swings and fathers play tag with eyes yanked from their sockets. They trip and limp like victims of an epidemic, crawling after their healthy children and completed spouses. I don’t know why I never noticed them before. - -“Why didn’t you tell me?” I accuse my mother. “Why didn’t you warn me this would happen, that they would take everything from me?” - -My mother rolls her eyes through the phone. “Oh please. What else would you have done with yourself?” - -I watch Jack twirl our daughter in circles, their twin laughter caught in the autumn breeze, their cheeks pink and round. Healthy, greedy, unaware of all they’ve stolen from me, as blood drips from the holes in my body and onto my tennis shoes. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Body Parts** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/contents.md b/content/issue-43/contents.md deleted file mode 100644 index 72544b7e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/contents.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,19 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Table of Contents" -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -description: - -type: page -slug: contents ---- - -- [25 Peppercorns]({{< relref path="25-peppercorns.md" >}}), by Emma Burnett -- [Murmurations]({{< relref path="murmurations.md" >}}), by A.M. Sutter -- [Body Parts]({{< relref path="body-parts.md" >}}), by Anna Koltes -- [For Giving]({{< relref path="for-giving.md" >}}), by Olufunmilayo Makinde -- [The Sugar Wife]({{< relref path="the-sugar-wife.md" >}}), by Christina Ladd -- [The Twelve Blackened Slippers]({{< relref path="the-twelve-blackened-slippers.md" >}}), by Siobhan Ekeh -- [Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino]({{< relref path="beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.md" >}}), reviewed by Mattia Ravasi -- [Short Reviews – July to September, 2025]({{< relref path="ShortReviews11.md" >}}), by Andrew Leon Hudson diff --git a/content/issue-43/editorial.md b/content/issue-43/editorial.md deleted file mode 100644 index 93a8bbb2..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/editorial.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Editorial" -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- editorial -authors: -- Andrew Leon Hudson - -image: images/synthwave_sml.jpg -imageCopyright: "**ISSUE 43** – ***Thanks and Salutations.*** For the third time, much gratitude to [Michal Kváč](https://linktr.ee/kvacm), who bestows some retro style on us with his image 'Synthwave'. A freelance environment concept artist and illustrator from Czech Republic, you can click the link above to see his work and make contact, or check out his [Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@kvacm) for time-lapse videos of his process. Thanks yet again, Michal!" - -type: page -slug: editorial ---- - -While casting about for a subject for this issue's editorial, a friend proposed the topic *Why I think writing an editorial for my incredible magazine whose quality fiction speaks for itself is more important than writing my own incredible fiction*. They went on to observe that, *seriously, editorials are boring and pointless*, asserting that *nobody reads them* (dissenters to this claim being a statistical anomoly, likely akin to the one suggesting that there is intelligent life in the universe), before wrapping up their position with a concrete suggestion for the editorial's full content: - -> What are you doing reading this bit? Go on, shoo! Go read the stories! Go on, get out of here! Shoo! -> -> Signed, the Editor - -The problem is, once you start down the write-an-editorial path, it's hard to get off it again. I mean, the tab's right there in our masthead banner options thingie, it'd be silly to waste it. Plus I need a place to thank our cover artists for their generosity, can't skip that (on which subject see below why not). So, onerous though it is to think of something new to scream into the unheeding wind every three months, there's not a lot we can do without completely overhauling the magazine's whole design really— - -…oh. *Hmm.* Now there's a thought. - -Because it has occurred to me, as I've worked on this year's issues, that ***Mythaxis*** and myself approach a little milestone. Although Gil Williamson comfortably remains our longest-serving editor, founding the magazine in 2008 and helming it for exactly a decade, it was always published on a when-the-urge-took-him schedule. When he handed the reins to me (an act that genuinely changed my life!), I decided to aim for regularity instead. As a result, as of today, I have overseen more issues than Gil did. By one. Come the end of 2025, by two. - -These two eras of ***Mythaxis*** history have basically presented different faces to the world (as you can see for yourself if you check out our [Back Issues and The Original Archive](https://mythaxis.co.uk/archive.html)). However, we did carry over the style of the original title. Therefore, starting in 2026, why not launch a third era with a completely new look? As well as a general redesign of the site, why not commission a brand new logo? *Why not a whole host of them?* - -I think I shall! - -Anyway, what are you doing reading this bit? Go on, shoo! Go read the stories! - -Go on, get out of here! - -Shoo! - -### Signed, diff --git a/content/issue-43/for-giving.md b/content/issue-43/for-giving.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7876fed6..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/for-giving.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,129 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "For Giving" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Olufunmilayo Makinde -copyright: '© Olufunmilayo Makinde 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "Olufunmilayo Makinde provides us with a classic: the good old-fashioned ghost story. Adjacent to a recurring theme in this issue, here we again see someone dealing with trauma from the past, this time which has its roots in that person's own actions. Would they, could they, do things differently?" - -image: images/ForGiving10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Abdulkadir Pai](https://www.pexels.com/photo/elegant-graduation-portrait-of-nigerian-student-31437215/), [SamTheShutterSmith](https://www.pexels.com/photo/african-student-in-school-uniform-smiling-outdoors-31118300/), [Hoàng Tiến Anh](https://www.pexels.com/photo/empty-school-hallway-with-chair-and-windows-32911185/), and [Josh Sorenson](https://www.pexels.com/photo/abandoned-building-154135/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i43/4.For.Giving.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: for-giving -weight: 4 ---- - -{{}}I{{}} know for a fact that Mary is dead. I know where she was buried, I even know the road to her grave by heart. If her ghost was ever to appear to me, it should have been at her grave, not here. - -There is an order in life. It is a simple order. You live, and then you die. Dead people should stay underneath the soil, or in an urn. That is the way it should be, the way it has always been. - -What is she doing here? - -"What am I doing here? No, what are you doing here again, Lola?" she asks without opening her mouth, her words echoing my thoughts like a recorder made of putrid flesh and rattling bones. My brain briefly wrestles with her using the word “again” and what it means, before giving up to face the more pressing issue. I watch her watch me, more entranced than I should be, as a wave of repulsion begins to slowly build up within me. - -I think a stupid thought right before my brain can fully process it: that she seems plumper in death than she was when she was alive. She had always been reed thin, so desperate to gain weight that she worked it into so many conversations, no matter how often I told her she had the perfect frame. She has a smile on her face, she seems healthier and happier even, if I were to overlook the stench and the exposed decaying flesh and just look at her lively eyes. - -I cannot overlook that, as I have never been that open-minded. - -So instead I look at the familiar hallway of my old secondary school, prettier and shinier than I remember, warmer and more inviting too, but also with the dinginess I expect of a long abandoned place. There are cobwebs, there is dust, but her presence makes them seem like minor issues. - -I look at this impossibly dilapidated, deliciously nostalgic place that calls me to walk in and lose myself in the past, and I quickly dig into my memories for the exit. - -"Wait," Mary says. "Stay for one minute. Let's talk." - -I am horrified by the concept of the talking dead, so the idea of listening to what she has to say is a ridiculous one, if not foolhardy. Her voice isn't her voice. Not the way I remember it. But I could chalk that up to being a side effect of death. Her new voice isn't outrightly disgusting or terrifying as I imagined it would be. Instead, it is repulsive in a roundabout way. It is somehow too pleasant, too sweet, too syrupy, cloying, like a cheap drink that has pictures of fruits in its packaging but cannot legally call itself juice. - -A dead girl is looking at me earnestly, there is an unknown fire in her eyes that makes them burn brightly, like rubies lit by candlelight. She is asking me to stay. So I run away. - -"Where are you going?" Her confused voice rings out, chiming pleasantly in my ears. However, when I run, it feels like I am trapped inside a glass bottle, and her voice is descending upon me from above. It echoes and bounces right off the walls back at me. It assaults all of my senses until I am left senseless and shivering. - -I feel that if I am able to scream, my chat with the dead girl will be over, so I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. My body goes through the motions of yelling for help, my belly hurts like I have been screaming, my throat strains, and my lips part and stretch so wide that it feels like my jaw has permanently shifted out of place, but nothing happens. - -I stand there screaming without screaming at Mary until my throat grows hoarse. She watches. Full of infinite patience. Like a mother looking at a restless baby. Her confidence seems to hold her flesh and bones together. It seems to tell me that whatever will happen here, to me, to us, is inevitable. - -She watches me with the kind of patience that she did not have in life. My relationship with this dead girl was a great one. Mary was my best friend ever since we were in kindergarten, and we were bonded by hatred. We hated our parents who were close friends and wanted us to be too. We hated the many things we had to do to be considered good children. We hated our boarding school. We hated the hostels, we hated our fellow students, we hated everything but each other. I did not have the time to soak in the irony of only being able to see her in a place we both hated so much. - -"I did not kill you," I say to this girl, and miraculously my voice is back, yet all I get in response is silence. She watches me with raised brows, as if confused about why I would bring that up. To be fair to her, I am as well. "I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead," I say, and silence between us stretches like a tangible thing, like a rope pulled taut and about to snap. - -We both know how she died, and who killed her, the same way we both know the guilt that fueled my little outburst. I think about the details of her death often. Hindsight makes me think of how much I missed. How I should have noticed the disappearance of other girls sooner. I should have noticed the blood sooner. I should have noticed Mrs Jaiyesimi sooner. - -“You're still a coward.” Her syrupy voice teases me, but I do not detect malice in her tone. The world grows blurry as tears fill my eyes. She used to call me a coward all the time, and she was right to, she was always the braver one. - -"Let's go to our hostel," she finally says, right before she takes a step toward me. My heart starts pounding, I do not know if my friend's ghost wants to kill me. If she does, I know that I deserve it. - -The first step she takes makes a strange sound. I should be terrified, but all I can think of is how ridiculous it is. Her body moves slowly, and with each step comes a small hiss, like air being let out of a balloon. She walks toward me accompanied by the quiet hiss of air escaping her rotten flesh and bones, but she carries her head up high. The pride and self-confidence I remember that accompanied her in life now intimidates me in death. - -All around us, the hallway clears up, like a fairytale, the walls mending themselves and the cobwebs and dirt being put away. With every step she takes, the hallway glows brighter, and the light shows me her face, her skin, her body mending itself, less decayed every second. By the time she is within arm's reach, her face and body look like they did the moment before our lives descended into a bloody screaming mess. But the fly in the ointment: her hands remain the same. - -Her hands have jagged open wounds from the knife. The wounds stretch from her forearms to her fingers. I remember when the wounds were fresh. I cannot bear to look at them, so I focus elsewhere. Her hair is piled up in braids and tied back in a low ponytail with a rubber band. She wears a loose purple gingham dress and black laced shoes; school-issued casual wear only to be worn outside class. - -"Lola, we'll miss prep if we don't go now," she says, ridiculous words from a ridiculous dead girl. But as I look down, I see that my jeans and top seem to be shifting, changing into something loose, purple and painfully familiar. - -"How?" I ask, finally willing to communicate with the dead. - -A twinkle rises in her eyes. With that, she suddenly looks very much like my old best friend, from the intricately done braids I spent our last Saturday together weaving for her, to the tiny round scar on her left cheek. She got it from doing a reckless thing, climbing over the fence of the school to buy contraband sweets. The sweets weren't even that good, too artificial, too sweet, but we savoured them all the same. It is a scar on a face that I cannot be wary of. That I do not deserve to be wary of. When she smiles, I can't help but think that she has never looked so alive, not even in my dreams. It is a thought that draws me closer to her. Both in mind and in the physical sense. - -I do not realize how close we are until she grabs me. Her hands make a wet squelching sound as they grasp mine , like decaying appendages grafted together, and the horror of that sound pulls me out of my dangerous thoughts. But it is too late, her eyes are upon me, like a spotlight, like a searchlight, beaming into my soul. - -"Will you do it again?" she asks. - -"Do what?" My mouth speaks before my mind can stop it. I am falling back into old patterns with her again – speaking without thinking was a thing I only did with Mary. - -"Run away. Don't. I can catch you, but that's a waste of time and we don't have much before she finds us. We need to talk. So, don't run." She is so close that when she blinks, I can count her eyelashes. They are lush and long, better than they ever looked when she was alive. - -I shake my head mechanically, unable to resist a request from her. I have the habit of running at the wrong time. Just like that, I feel sixteen again. - -I look down the beautiful hallway and I frown, for something isn't right. Somehow we aren't in the main building anymore, we are in our old hostel. The bright fluorescent lights hanging overhead are all complete, but a terrible knowledge rests in my head. - -I remember that three of those lights went out the day before everyone had to leave the school. I remember that Mary and I went to our hostel matron to apply for repairs the next day, and I remember that was when and where things got bloody. - -It was when I lost my best friend forever. - -We found Mrs Jaiyesimi, the hostel matron in her quarters, scratching something onto the walls. Her hairstyle, a high bun pulled so tight that her hairline had begun to recede the year before, was strangely messy. Her usual outfit, a loose black dress paired with a red blazer with high shoulder pads, was stained at the bottom with something dark. - -We should have noticed that something was off, but we didn't until I knocked. Her head swiveled towards us so fast, I thought she had broken her neck. When she spotted us, a bright smile lit up her face. There was something in her eyes that I didn't like, and without even thinking, I began backing away. - -“One more.” She spoke softly, but her wide eyes betrayed her. - -We did not know what she was doing, but when she ran toward us with a bloody knife, I ran away, first with Mary, but soon, alone. I did not even notice when or how she fell behind. Shamefully, disgracefully, I closed my ears to the sound of everything but my pounding heart and I did not open them again until I was hiding in the bushes outside the hostel. Even then, I did not move until it was morning and I could run to the guard's post. My legs were stiff, but not as stiff as Mary and Mrs Jaiyesimi were when we found them. - -She had dragged my friend's body to her strange altar and spilled her blood there. - -I should have been there. It should have been me. I suppose my dead friend blames me for that. I would understand it if she did. - -"Focus. There's no time to think about Mrs Jaiyesimi. You don't want to be late for prep," Mary says, drawing me closer by our still conjoined hands. I try not to look at them, for my own sanity. But if I am having this experience, I know that I am not that sane, so I look anyway. - -Then I scream. Or I try to. Again, my voice is gone as I shake in horror at the sight of our hands mashed together like a crude clay sculpture. I see my flesh fused with hers, I feel the rot and death rushing through her veins into mine. And worse, I feel a sharp discordant thing pushing its way into my body and mind through my hands. It is a terrible, paranoid thing, that swims through me and gnaws at the last piece of sanity I have left. - -A movement captures my attention, as Mary shakes her left foot to snap me out of my thoughts. I look back up at her. Her eyes look warm and welcoming, like the old days, but they are dark brown, almost black, strange for someone I remember having eyes the colour of honey. - -"Lola, don't come here again. Alive or dead. The rituals she did… you must not die here. No matter how much you want to see me. There is no peace or closure here." - -“What do you want? I will help you.” I don't know why, but these words leave my lips before my brain can even comprehend the implications. But once the words are spoken, I feel… lighter. Yes! I want to help my friend, I want to free her from whatever is keeping her here in this twisted form. - -“No, you won't. You didn't help me then, and you won't now. But that's okay.” Mary speaks in a familiar tone. There is no disappointment, no anger, just her knowledge of me. Her words carry a power that pulls me closer and closer until I am staring into her wet eyes. They are like whirlpools, drawing me in and hiding something from me at the same time. - -My vision grows cloudier the longer I look into her eyes. I see the reflection of a shadowy figure in them, it is hazy, but something about it is strangely familiar. Pulled back hair, a blazer with high shoulder pads, a knife in hand. The figure is behind me, approaching us, and suddenly a strange voice pops into my head. It tells me that if I can see the figure clearly, I will have the answer to why my dead friend’s spirit is still haunting this place. - -I lean in closer, but Mary’s gaze darts behind me for a moment before her eyes widen with an unknown emotion. Before I can figure out what the emotion is, she speaks. "Blink," she instructs with a small quiver in her voice, and without even thinking, I comply. - -When my eyes open, I find myself outside the hostel, hiding in the bushes. Like I did twelve years ago. I feel a fog growing, surrounding my thoughts, blurring the details of my talk with Mary. All that is left behind is an aversion to the old crumbling hostel building and a feeling that pushes its way into my mind from my cold damp hands. - -As I rub my clammy palms together, I get the feeling that I should run away, that I should never and must never return. It is a feeling that I fight with every ounce of my being. It is a fight I lose miserably. Before the last detail in my mind surrenders to the growing haze, something clicks and I realize that the look on Mary's face before I found myself outside, was fear. But not for herself, for me. - -My realization doesn't help me reach new heights of bravery. I am who I have always been. I hope Mary knows that, so I have one less thing to atone for. - -I hide behind the bushes and wait until daybreak. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **For Giving** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/murmurations.md b/content/issue-43/murmurations.md deleted file mode 100644 index cede4dc7..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/murmurations.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,233 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Murmurations" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- A.M. Sutter -copyright: '© A.M. Sutter 2025 All Rights Reserved.' - -description: "Horror can find great potency against the context of the ordinary, but the everyday world can also be extraordinary, like the hypnotically flowing aerial dances which flocking birds take part in. A.M. Sutter looks to this phenomena and sees something in the patterns… but not something good." - -image: images/Murmurations10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by [Darius Krause](https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-trees-during-golden-hour-2305946/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i43/2.Murmurations.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: murmurations -weight: 2 ---- - -{{}}T{{}}he starlings take off while Caleb and Aaron watch from the restaurant’s patio. The birds move in a synchronicity that unsettles Caleb. He doesn’t understand how the small birds know where the other thousand will be, how the cloud of black wings folds and billows into smooth, fluid shapes. - -“Incredible, isn’t it?” Aaron says as he cranes his neck back and watches. Caleb doesn’t agree; it’s too many bodies too close together. He thinks it must be hot in the center of the flock, with all those hearts pumping all that blood to the surface. - -“Yeah,” Caleb responds, instead of saying *I can’t keep doing this*. - -He picks up a fry and watches it dangle between loose fingers. Aaron continues to make small talk, discussing some new client he’s picked up at the firm. In many ways, Caleb hates these weekly lunches. He’s not stupid; he knows they’re a check-in, a pity meal. Aaron says he just wants to make sure Caleb is getting back out there, but he doesn’t know why Aaron even cares. After all, Aaron’s the one who called things off. - -“How do they not hit each other?” Aaron asks, turning his attention back to stare at the sea of fluttering black high above them. “How do they know where the others are?” - -Caleb drops the fry and swallows back the words he wants to say. Says, “Maybe Google knows,” instead of *Why are we still pretending?* - -Aaron looks down to type something on his phone at the suggestion, while Caleb glances over at the other patrons to try to avoid watching all those fluttering wings and black bodies. - -“Huh. Apparently, there are computer models to describe how they do it.” - -For a moment, Caleb pictures fit young men and women in name brand underwear directing bird traffic, and he laughs. A sharp, short, ugly noise. - -“What’s funny?” Aaron asks with that patient smile of his. - -“Nothing,” Caleb answers, instead of *Why are you doing this to me* *–* *acting like you’re still invested?* - -Seemingly satisfied, Aaron goes back to looking at the birds overhead, and for a few seconds Caleb studies Aaron, tracing his eyes over features he’s long memorized. But since everything ended, he’s found that Aaron’s mental silhouette has developed gaps like a dotted line, and he’s trying to fill in the blanks before he forgets everything entirely. - -“God,” a woman complains a few tables down from them, loud enough for people to turn their heads, Caleb included. “This itch behind my eye is driving me crazy.” - -The woman drives a tight knuckle into her eye socket and rubs. Her friend leans in and murmurs something, but Caleb can’t quite make out what she’s saying. Aaron is still studying the birds; Caleb is studying the woman and how hard she is driving her finger into thin flesh. Something above startles the birds, and alarm calls fill the sky. The flock swirls around a swooping hawk and then past it, leaving it confused as the smaller birds disappear from view. - -The woman gasps – a quiet, stuttering sound of surprise, and Caleb watches her. She probes cautiously at her cheekbone, directly where a deep eye bag bruises her skin. Then something pops from the center of her left eye, peeling back the globe like the skin of a grape. - -Her friend shrieks and knocks her plates off the small metal table. The ceramic shatters against the ground, and whoever wasn’t paying attention before now is. - -Something like a worm writhes out from within the weeping socket of the woman’s eye. It undulates its body in a way that makes its colors seem to pulsate like a boardwalk funhouse. The woman turns to her friend, her remaining eye squinting in confusion, as if she doesn’t understand the shock on the face across from her. Maybe she doesn’t feel the blood dripping down her cheek. - -“I’m good,” the woman tells her friend, who has tripped backward out of her chair and covers her mouth with a shaking hand. - -Startled shouts fill the evening air as people move away. Aaron, now paying attention, pulls Caleb out of his seat and along with the throngs of others backing up from the scene. But Caleb can’t help but watch the twitching stalk throb around fresh blood and another, unknown fluid. - -He hears the woman again – or thinks he does, because how could he make out her soft murmurs over the chaos of the crowd? “It’s okay, it doesn’t itch anymore.” She turns in her seat, blind, searching for her friend, reaching out to the toppled, empty seat. “It doesn’t feel bad. Come back.” A faint pop, and another stalk crawls out of her right eye. Together they pulse and change color. A signal that is unintelligible but terrifying. - -She stands up, hands still out, palms up. Placating, pleading. - -“It doesn’t feel bad at all.” - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he hallway outside of Caleb’s apartment mutes the stilted conversation between him and Aaron. Though his breathing is even, Caleb’s heart is stuttering a staccato rhythm, and he bounces his leg in spite of a conscious effort to keep it still. In front of him, Aaron bites his nails and keeps trying to make eye contact. - -Caleb’s not sure exactly what they witnessed at the restaurant, and the woman was ushered into an ambulance too quickly for him to be sure that he truly saw what he thought he did. Based on the subtle red rimming under Aaron’s bright eyes, Caleb’s fairly certain that he didn’t imagine it. - -“Are you alright?” Aaron asks, placing a gentle hand on Caleb’s forearm. - -“I’m okay,” Caleb says, instead of *I can’t begin to process this, and I’m terrified.* - -Frowning, Aaron lets his touch drop, and Caleb’s skin chills quickly under the ghost of lost fingers. “You have to be honest with someone,” he tells Caleb. “You have to let someone in.” - - Caleb’s heard it all before, in this very hallway, with Aaron’s overnight bag over his shoulder and Caleb’s apartment decidedly emptier. - -“I mean it, I’m okay,” Caleb insists, instead of *I don’t know what just happened,* *and every time we do this it breaks me down.* - -Aaron thins his lips but grasps Caleb’s hand and squeezes once before turning to leave. - -Caleb wants to say *I miss you, but every time we do this, it breaks me down a little more.* - -Instead, he says nothing. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he news websites are screaming the headlines in bold by the next day. The woman isn’t the first case, apparently – but she’s one of the first, and every new incident is enough to feed the flood of clickbait and tabloids. - -Caleb sits on the couch and lets a show play in the background as he scrolls through his phone. He’s not sure what to believe in the articles, but what he reads – real or not – makes him feel sick. Some say she passed away, while some insist she’s still alive. He tries to think about something else. There are soap opera detectives on the television, dressed too much like they’re getting ready for a photoshoot to be believable, discussing a murder like they’re reading Shakespeare. - -Somewhere behind the screen, or maybe in front of it, or maybe not at all in the room, he watches the woman at the restaurant turn to face him. She seems to be looking at him, but he can’t be sure as her eyes are gone, weeping messes down her cheeks. The pulsing stalks rotate toward him, appear to be watching him. - -He blinks and finds that the drama has ended. The news chases the scrolling credits. A reporter stands by a police barrier, a blockade set up on a suspiciously empty city street. They say something that Caleb doesn’t register. He’s too busy watching the motion behind the smartly-dressed suit with the mic. Figures stumble behind the barricades, a small group of police clumped cautiously nearby. Caleb notices the twitching stalks before he notices how the figures move. The parasites – that’s what the news calls them – flash and strobe and seem to talk to each other through colors and undulation. - -The infected are blind, but they move in unison, a wave flowing over the waiting police and crashing around them. They avoid the touch of the officers like a plague, like they are the clean ones, and when the infected are finally tackled, they shriek like they are on fire. Like they are burned by the touch. - -The woman wasn’t the first case. She isn’t the last. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he first large groups of infected appear a few days later. Caleb stops short on the sidewalk as one passes. Some bystanders shout, but most are as silent as he is, shocked into inaction by the scene. - -This group numbers in the dozens, maybe even a hundred. It halts traffic, though the infected twirl around the cars with an odd combination of heavy footfalls and grace. Pressing himself against the building behind him, Caleb holds his breath, tries to make himself thinner, smaller. There’s too many of them, they spill off the asphalt and onto the sidewalk. They crest like a tidal wave, and Caleb can’t move as he watches the wave come to consume him. His panicked heart kicks nausea against his throat with every beat. He supposes this is it, this is how he dies. Or whatever he will become after his eyes are shed. He squeezes them closed, as if a thin layer of skin will protect him. - -The wind of movement sweeps over him and then passes. He is not touched. - -“Beth!” a man shouts. It’s a high wail, a mix of disbelief and crushing sorrow. Caleb opens his eyes and watches the man jog toward the herd, which has elegantly pirouetted around the onlookers and stalled vehicles. The man picks up his pace, quickening into a sprint as the group continues onward, his cries unheeded. - -“Beth,” he calls again. “Beth, come back.” - -Caleb doesn’t know which one of the eyeless things the man is calling to; none of them pause. The man reaches out, fingers brushing a tattered sweatshirt, the only thing he can reach. - -The one he touches shrieks, and suddenly all of them are screaming, as if the touch carries a risk of infection or pain. They break into a stampede, desperate to get away as the parasitic stalks flash bright warning colors of danger. The screeching is overwhelming, driving Caleb to his knees. The man trips over the sound and falls, splitting his chin and lip against the pavement. Blood splatters the sidewalk, and Caleb feels the visceral flinch, the instinctive reaction. An echo of the flashing eyestalks, and their warning of danger, predator, stay away. - -The screaming dwindles as the infected flee, the street stunned to silence in their wake. Caleb wants to call Aaron and tell him that he’s scared and could use some company. Instead, he crouches and hangs his head until his breathing finally evens out and the gray clears from his vision. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}H{{}}e’s in the grocery store when he hears one speak. The horde stumbles through the sliding doors, and the store’s clientele all freeze. Caleb had gone out with the plan to make dinner, invite Aaron, sit down and talk about things. Now, he’s wishing he’d never left and just cooked plain pasta on his old, dirty stove. - -One stops by his aisle and he drops the jar he’s holding. Thick, clumped jam and fragments of glass splatter across the floor. Those stalks turn, and though there are no eyes he knows that they can sense him. The infected tilts her head, the parasites remaining fixed, still watching. - -“By yourself?” she asks. - -And for a moment, her voice echoes in stereo, as the others mimic her question across the store, talking as one unit. A droning cacophony. “Isn’t that lonely?” All of them are talking specifically to him in that moment. Or none of them are. - -He wants to scream, wants to tell the monstrous thing before him to *Get away, leave* *me* *alone, it’s none of your business.* - -Instead, he nearly trips as he backpedals down the aisle. The other infected approach; they have a hard time knowing where to place their feet, but they don’t hit anything else. They twist their limbs like the starlings flicked their wings, a dancer’s choreography. - -The first speaker folds back into the group, unspoken instructions preventing her from hitting the others, and then she is gone with the rest through the big glass doors. The building seems to sigh in the resulting quiet. - -He should get the rest of his groceries, but he turns tail and goes out the employee entrance, desperate to lower his chance of running into the group again outside. He passes three more wandering masses of infected on his way home, and watches a man fall to his knees across the street. A moment later both eyes are gone, the stalks glistening with something that shines in the evening sunlight, and the closest group closes in around the man, absorbing him into their ranks. - -Caleb runs back to his apartment, locks the door. - -He should call Aaron, ask him to come over, ask him to stay. Instead, he watches TV until the news anchors lose their eyes. Until the television stops broadcasting. Until the power shuts off. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}aleb’s used to the muffled mutterings from the hallway by now. His former neighbors occasionally try to talk to him through the door, and he tries not to listen. - -He made the mistake of opening his door once; Mrs. Mathers on the other side, waiting for him. Her eyestalks twitching. He might have accidentally caught one of her stems when he slammed the door. Her scream was echoed by mouths all across the building, and from the outside, as if he had injured thousands. Caleb has not reopened the door after that to check, no matter how many knocks there had been. No matter how many quiet pleas and placations had slithered through the gaps in the wood. - -“Caleb?” - -He startles at Aaron’s quiet voice, muted by the thick barrier. For a moment, he is sure he is imagining it. - -“Caleb, are you in there?” - -It’s Aaron’s precise tone, harsh edges of words softened with a simple authority, used in courtrooms and official phone calls. Caleb doesn’t hear it echoed, but he hasn’t heard movement in the hall in a while and can’t be sure he’s not just hearing what he wants to. He gets up and tries to noiselessly shuffle to the door. Curses when his toes catch the edge of the empty soup can that he hadn’t bothered to clean up. - -For a moment, there is only silence on either side. - -“Are you okay? Caleb, I need you to answer me.” - -The voice is so sincere that Caleb wants to cry. He opens his mouth to respond. - -“Can you let me in?” - -His jaw snaps shut. Is Aaron asking because he’s afraid? Or because he wants Caleb out in the hallway? Unprotected. - -“Caleb, let me in,” Aaron begs. - -Caleb imagines himself opening the door, imagines Aaron falling into his waiting arms. Instead, he retreats to the couch, pulls the comforter around him, and pictures strobing stalks where Aaron’s beautiful eyes used to be. He won’t open the door because he doesn’t know which Aaron waits for him. - -Eventually, Aaron leaves, whether under his own power or swept up into the swarm, Caleb doesn’t know. He tries to ignore the sliding of his shoes along the carpeted hallway. It sounds so much like worms sifting through dirt. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}C{{}}aleb runs out of food three weeks into the outbreak – two weeks after the television dissolves into static and one week after the power finally goes out. Three days after Aaron leaves. He holds out for two more days, curling around hunger pains as his body starts to feast on its own fat and muscle. But then the water stops running, and it’s the burning, craze-inducing thirst that eventually drives him to unlock the door. - -The hallway remains eerily still, apartment doors closed tightly or hanging open, revealing slivers of dark abyss. He glances out the hall windows and only finds empty streets. - -One of the abandoned apartments at the end of his floor flooded some time before the water stopped, a broken sink faucet the culprit. Not caring about the moldy smell of standing water, he collapses to his knees on the kitchen tiles and palms it into his sticky mouth again and again. The water coils like a cold snake in his stomach, but finally pushes back the beast of thirst enough for him to think. The building is so quiet, no creaking hints of footsteps, no muted murmurs of conversation. It’s oppressive, and he pushes himself up, wipes at his damp jeans, and returns to the humid stairwell. - -When he stumbles out onto the street, it feels decidedly emptier than his apartment; Caleb finds it crowded with abandoned cars and trash, but that only emphasizes the absence of people. He wants to call out, see if anyone answers, but isn’t brave enough. What if his voice brings a surge of parasitic bodies? - -Stifling his harsh breathing, he searches building after building. Finds no one. Scavenges food behind open doors and imagines rotting, long forgotten meals behind closed ones. Eats standing, nervous, but finally able to think. - -He wants to organize, gather up a pack of supplies to survive in the wild like every apocalyptic movie he’s seen. He wants to find other people, other survivors, and gather them together. He wants to rebuild society – its life, its chaos. Its all-pervading crowds. He doesn’t know what he wants. - -He wants Aaron. - -Caleb backtracks to his old sedan and manages to weave through the congestion of an abandoned city and its silent cars, monolithic towers looming down over him. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}aron’s house sits on the edge of the woods, and while Caleb has to maneuver around dozens of deserted vehicles, he sees no one else on his way there. No one with eyes. No one without. He pulls his car into the driveway and finds Aaron’s vehicle parked. - -He thinks of Aaron’s soft voice on the other side of his door and desperately clutches to the hope that Aaron is alright – that he, like Caleb, held out just long enough to survive. An acidic burn crawls up the back of his throat as he steps out of his car; he should have let Aaron in. - -Forcing back the intrusive *what ifs*, he tries the front door and finds it locked. He looks under the rusting planter for the spare key, but Aaron has moved it at some point. That hurts, matters more than it should in all of this chaos. He pounds on the door first, begging Aaron to come to the entrance, but no one answers. In a panic, he heaves a rock from the garden through the beautiful bay window and uses his shirt sleeve to gingerly knock away the shards of glass. He crawls, ungainly and heavily, into the kitchen where he used to drink coffee and stare out at the swaying trees while Aaron cooked breakfast on Saturdays. - -A framed picture of the two of them rests on its back on the kitchen table. It’s too easy to imagine Aaron hunched over it. Around it, a halo of dried blood and some other, unidentifiable fluid mar the polished wood. Caleb doesn’t want to think about whether Aaron’s involuntary tears were cried before or after he came to Caleb’s apartment. - -The sudden loneliness surges over him, surprising and crushing in its force. He can’t have Aaron. Now he just wants anyone. - -A subtle quake tremors through the floorboards. Caleb feels it in the soles of his feet. A dull, quiet murmuring builds outside, like the cresting of cicada calls in summer. Something large approaches – a slow stampede. He rushes to the front door and unlocks the deadbolt. - -He steps out onto the stoop. - -The infected move in the largest herd he’s seen, so many bodies that he could never hope to count. Their feet move in a coordinated march, creating the low roar. There are stooped elders, young children, men and women, all twisting and spinning in and out of smaller groups, and all the while a sea of eyestalks oscillate an oil spill of colors. Caleb can’t understand them, but they understand each other; that much is obvious. - -There must be thousands. Hundreds of thousands. An entire city in exodus, an entire civilization but Caleb, and Aaron must be in there. - -In that moment, Caleb makes his decision. - -Caleb sprints after the ambling group, shoes kicking up loose asphalt as he surges past their easy gait. He races down the road, with the ponderous stampede of worn shoes and bare feet mere yards to his left. He glances at the faces as he passes, hoping to catch sight of Aaron. There are too many of them, and he can’t pause to look in fear of being left behind. - -Up ahead, the road opens to a meadow and the thick forest border beyond. The first infected reach the treeline, startling a flock of starlings from the canopy. The birds whirl and chirp in the air above him, and Caleb grows desperate, knowing this is his last chance. If he doesn’t join them now, he’ll lose them among the trees, weighed down by the thick underbrush. - -He cuts diagonally toward the crowd, pushing his thundering heart and burning muscles, and then he’s in. Sliding to a stop in the middle of all the heat and heartbeats, he bites back a sob and spreads his arms, reaching out and upward, like he wants to be lifted up, carried away. Eyes open, desperate for one last glance at the golds and coppers of the early autumn leaves before he loses his sight, he waits to be drawn in. - -The horde splits down the middle, like a biblical sea, and flows to either side of him. Thousands of eyestalks pulsate a dazzling strobe of colors, confusing him as he attempts to grab at them. They pick up their speed, gliding past his flailing, searching hands. - -“Please,” he begs, even as he stumbles and falls. No one catches him, and he grinds his teeth against the flare of pain as he hits the ground. He throws out his hand, and there is an arm so close. Just a few more steps, a little farther, and he’ll be able to reach, be able to wrap his fingers around flesh. Be able to connect. - -The throngs of infected pull away, swirl and twist, break and rejoin. A beautiful dance, coordinated by some underlying instinct that he can’t understand. He reaches out again, but it is too late. They avoid his touch, pinwheeling into shapes that make him dizzy. He is not welcome – he is an outsider, a predator, and they take safety in numbers. They continue to pirouette around him, waves breaking on a dry shore, streaming into the forest, leaving him alone in their midst in the middle of the field. - -Overhead, a hawk screeches – not in flight, but perched in a dead tree, confounded by the starlings swooping around. Caleb sits among the tall grass and listens to the raptor keen, wants to think he’s relieved that everything seems to finally be over and that he has survived. - -Wishes instead that he felt a scratching behind his eyes. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **Murmurations** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/the-sugar-wife.md b/content/issue-43/the-sugar-wife.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1be6a08e..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/the-sugar-wife.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,107 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Sugar Wife" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- horror -authors: -- Christina Ladd -copyright: '© Christina Ladd 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "There's nothing better than a good fairy tale – unless it's a wince-inducing horror story wearing the skin of one! Christina Ladd serves up a sweet-toothed delight for those with a taste for the macabre. Hard to say whether or not it will leave you hungry for more…" - -image: images/SugarWife10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by [Shiny Diamond](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-with-red-lipstick-smiling-3762453/) and [Fernando Lacerda Branco](https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-hands-showing-horse-teeth-12887955/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i43/5.The.Sugar.Wife.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-sugar-wife -weight: 5 ---- - -{{}}O{{}}nce there was a baker who wished to wed. Normally it is not difficult for a man of this profession to find a wife. After all, everyone needs their daily bread. But this man was no prize: the sugar of his cakes had rotted most of his teeth, and whether to avoid unsettling his customers or simply out of natural sullenness, he never smiled. - -The baker made a few clumsy inquiries to those above his station, but his offers were rebuffed, and he was too proud and too well-off to ask for those who might have him. Sullen with rejection, he poured his resentments into his work, pummeling his doughs and stoking his oven ever hotter. - -But of course, this is the way of baking: his doughs only rose higher, and in the ovens only became more darkly golden. The more he whipped his creams, the more their froth overflowed like lace; the more furiously he stirred his custards, the silkier their texture. - -As anyone of achievement will tell you, though, success is not satisfaction. If anything, it is a goad: he had enough, and therefore he had time to contemplate what others had, and want it for himself. - -The baker did not want love, or to share his life. He only wanted a woman to call his own, his and no other’s, who would lessen his labor and do the tasks he did not want to do. And why should he not have it? He had wealth, and he was skilled – far more than most who passed through his door. - -Yes, perhaps this was a matter of skill. A man like him, why should he settle for less than he himself could achieve? He deserved no less. And he would *make* it so. - -In a mood equal parts fury and delight, the baker began his great work: he would make a wife. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}F{{}}irst, he would need structure. He thought of gingerbread and nut brittle, a favorite for confectionary architecture, but dismissed them. Such things were costly, and who wanted a wife with expensive tastes baked into her very bones? Instead, he took cheap flour, salt, and water, and began kneading a simple bread. He himself ate well, and knew that bones from the butcher were honeycombed inside. He shaped bone-loaves in imitation, allowing them to rise just a little before punching them down, twisting them into the forms he required. Then he baked them very hard, until the crust was thick and nearly black. When he hefted one, it was sturdy. It would not crumble or shatter but— yes, if he tried, he could break it across his knee. Good. He wanted use from this wife, and strength, but only if it was less than his own. - -On the next day, he started on the real task: making a pleasing form. Around those black bones he sculpted flesh of sweet marzipan, fragrant and pliable. Thick arms to heft sacks of flour and trays of cakes for him, wide hips to balance jugs of milk or oil. As is true of those who are made to feel ugly, he knew beauty better than most, and he made her as lovely as could be. - -In his process, during a moment of reflection, he also scooped out a hole on her chest, a rough fistful. It would not do for his wife to lack a heart. But the baker had little interest in hearts, and so he put no care into shaping it, only found a jar of red fruits steeped in brandy and tipped them into the little cavity. There: a crimson mush, sharply sweet. It would never beat, but it would bleed if need be. - -He covered the hole with more marzipan, and took far more care in sculpting the breasts atop it. - -When she was formed to his standards, he considered the question of her skin. It was the way at the time for women to be pale, and so he knew how he would proceed: he would make meringue, white as porcelain. - -The baker broke egg after egg, discarding the golden yolk in favor of the slime, until he had a sloshing bowlful. This he whipped and whipped, grim with glee, until it was time to add the sugar. Because he did not want to risk a wife with cracks or uneven colors in her skin, he would not bake the meringue. Instead he boiled sugar, and when it was ready, he poured it into the eggy foam to cook it from the inside out. - -A sugar burn is a burn like no other, for the syrup gets much hotter than even boiling water, and when it strikes a surface it pools and clings, so that even when wiped away, it continues to burn. - -If she was beginning to live, her first feeling would be agony. - -But oh, how lovely the meringue became, an unstained white he spread quite delicately over the marzipan form. He smoothed it until there was not one dollop or peak, only unbroken softness. For those moments, and in the final hours of crafting her final touches, he was almost tender. - - He gave her marshmallowy skin into which he could sink his fingers. Spun sugar hair, the pale gold of just-turned caramel. Slivers of almond for nails. Globes of clear sugar for eyes, set with chocolate discs, milk for the iris and the bitterest dark for the pupils. Pink rosebud lips, and below them, pink rosebud nipples. And lower still, a darker red, deepened with chocolate and salt, layered in luscious excess. He panted as he piped it, nearly stopping, but he knew that whatever was building in this room would abandon him if he paused to indulge himself. So he left the thick, frilling walls of sweetness for later, pausing only to lick his fingers. He found the taste very much to his liking. - -At dusk on the third day, it was finished, *she* was finished. His greatest creation; his sugar wife. In a moment of clumsy tenderness, he kissed her lips – only to come away with no more than icing paste on his own. - -She did not wake. - -It might have ended there, if the baker had not mastered his rage. He might have smashed up her confectionary corpse, and devoured the slaughter for a week of suppers. - -But something stopped him – a selfish pain, of course. A sharp throb from one of his mouldering teeth. And as the agony lanced straight into his brain, he realized what else he might do to bring his bride to life. - -For three days he had brutalized the elements of his craft to bring forth perfection. Boiling and beating, pressing and churning, scorching and scalding. Every ingredient of his would-be wife made by methods that, had she even a single nerve, would have been such fine, fine torture. - -But there was yet more pain he could give her. - -With tongs intended to remove pans from the fire, he began to wrench the teeth from his mouth. - -The first he took and howled, the relief from its constant ache no salve to this sharp new anguish. Wiser for the next, he gathered all his steeping liquors. He held each gulp in his mouth as long as he could, macerated his rotten teeth in blood and spirits, and then swallowed the gunk and did it again, until his mouth and his nerves were as numb as he could get them. Then he recommenced pulling. - -When he was done, there were seventeen teeth on a tray, and through the haze of pain and drunkenness he had never felt better. He spat blood and set to work. - -Thirteen teeth he pressed into her mouth, a baker’s dozen as even as he could make them. The remaining four he used for her adornments: two for her ears, vile ivory studs, and one for her throat, strung on a shred of pastry like a rancid pearl. And the last for her finger, for a bride should have a ring. This most rotten tooth, grimed with blood and decay, glittered most of all. - -He wiped his mouth. It was done now. *She* was done. Black-boned and white-fleshed, with a smile of rotting teeth. The embers breathed upon the stove, and the shadows flickered. - -“Wife,” he whispered, voice thick with gore. - -The embers hissed as if spattered with liquid, and extinguished themselves. The shadows clotted like overwhipped cream. - -“Sweetness,” he whispered, as he had heard other men call their wives. His mouth filled again with blood, even though it had been ebbing. He felt lightheaded, and could not muster the energy to spit, only opened his lips and let it dribble out. The stink of iron muddled the scents of yeast and sugar, but strangely it did not offend. The effect was rich. Enticing. - -*A name. She needs a name.* He knew little of what to call her, other than what she was. “Sugar,” he said, his blood curdled as buttermilk, overflowing his lips now in chunks. - -The darkness of the room was complete, but somehow it only served to make Sugar brighter, her white skin shining. And brighter still was her smile, so brutally sweet it could crush your heart to crumbs. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}T{{}}he baker did not die that night; like his own confections, he lingered on the tongue. The gossips prattled at length about his sudden illness and equally sudden bride, fetched, it seemed, from out of town. - -No suspicion fell on Sugar when he died soon after; if anyone mentioned that she had driven him to an early grave, it was with a wink and a chuckle. - -And what luck it was, they said, for the sweet young thing, that such a sour old husband should leave her so soon, and with such a fine business to inherit. There would be no shortage of customers or suitors for that one, especially since her pastries were even finer than her late husband’s. Cake as light as lies, ganache as deep as shipwrecks, custards as rich as any king’s coffers. - -Every indulgence was deeper and sharper somehow, for Sugar understood the lancing tartness of citrus, the wincing bitterness of chocolate, and even the burning fire of spice. - -Each pain, after all, served to enhance the sweetness. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Sugar Wife** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/issue-43/the-twelve-blackened-slippers.md b/content/issue-43/the-twelve-blackened-slippers.md deleted file mode 100644 index 26ad2978..00000000 --- a/content/issue-43/the-twelve-blackened-slippers.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,331 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "The Twelve Blackened Slippers" - -date: 2025-09-28 -issue: Issue 43 - -genres: -- fantasy -authors: -- Siobhan Ekeh -copyright: '© Siobhan Ekeh 2025 All Rights Reserved' - -description: "As an appropriate bookend to this issue's fiction offering we return to the theme we opened with, of how trauma can travel across generations. Siobhan Ekeh's story looks in a different direction and recounts what it sees in a different style, a strangely magical encounter with the past that affects those who remember it and those who don't in distinct but equally powerful ways." - -image: images/TwelveSlippers10x6.jpg -imageCopyright: "The title picture was created using one Creative Commons image by [Sahan Narampanawa](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-land-rover-driving-off-road-9023626/) and [three by](https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-sleepers-standing-on-brown-rug-6976901/) [Katrin](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-woman-wearing-comfortable-fluffy-slides-6976560/) [Bolovtsova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/slippers-of-a-woman-in-blue-dress-6976549/) - many thanks!" - -audio: "https://github.com/mythaxis/mythaxis.github.io/releases/download/i43/6.The.Twelve.Blackened.Slippers.mp3" - -type: stock -slug: the-twelve-blackened-slippers -weight: 6 ---- - -{{}}K{{}}ara’s girls are disappearing and she’s just about had enough of it. - -Well, okay, to be fair to them, they always end up being right where they’re supposed to be, but Kara knows, she *knows* when she leaves their room after tucking them in at night, even when she locks the door, that they get away somehow. - -“It was the shoes that tipped me off,” she tells Yira, who also tends not to be in the same place from one second to the next, but that’s more a mental condition than a physical one. “In the mornings there’s started to be this black *sludge* caked over their outsoles. I keep washing it off and it leaves a stain. Then, the next morning it’s back again. What the fuck, right? They’re so sinister sometimes, those three. I get the creeps when they all look at me at once. Whenever I ask them a question they just laugh.” - -Yira smiles sympathetically. She’s trying to read and wishes her sister would quit complaining. Kara should just be grateful those girls are so well-mannered and academically successful. Demanding that they be completely unsinister in addition to all that seems unrealistic. “We were like that at their age, too. Secretive.” - -“You were. I was normal.” - -Kara is still normal. A successful modelling career in her early twenties set her up for a very regular American life: a mid-century Victorian home retrofitted as an open-floor modern farmhouse, a crusty white terrier, three daughters (which isn’t as normal as one daughter and one son, but hey, she tried her best), a husband who manages data or something, and a second career as a social media lifestyle content creator. - -Kara isn’t really cut from a motherly cloth, if there is such a thing, and she does find the girls hard to stomach at this age. But up until now she’s enjoyed her neat little life almost to the point of excess. Maybe one person should not get to enjoy so many things to such an extravagant degree. - -Kara stretches across the couch in her white Lulu Lemon tracksuit with a glass of chilled rosé and considers her less-than-normal counterpart. “You’re going to have to do me a favor, Yira.” - -“Am I?” - -“The girls trust you. You’re like one of them. They look up to you, for whatever reason.” It baffles Kara that young women would rather take cues from an unemployed spinster with a failed fine arts career than a successful, happily married businesswoman, but far be it from her to disallow her daughters from any kind of ambition they might stretch their willowy necks towards, even if she doesn’t understand it herself. - -The girls must see themselves in the melancholy Yira projects across her presence in America. The family was forced to flee the Niger Delta when Kara and Yira were only teens, arriving with nothing left to lose except each other. Since then, Kara has thrived exactly where she was re-planted glad to shake free the slick of that polluted land, whereas Yira never fully recovered from that initial uprooting. The loss of the land, the farm. And most of all, the loss of Kisi, the missing piece without whom this new place could never become home to Yira. - -The girls, yes, they are like Yira. Disbelonged. Ghostly. “You’ll find out where they’re going, won’t you?” - -Yira closes her book. She’s long been a harbor for her nieces’ secrets, some big, some small. Usually, Kara doesn’t ask what the girls are up to, so Yira doesn’t tell. But now… well. Her allegiance to the girls can’t surpass that which she retains towards her older sister. Yira has always lived in Kara’s house, has always eaten Kara’s food. Kara asks for almost nothing in return, because she knows Yira has almost nothing to give her, but also because she wants for nothing. Now, for once, she wants something she can’t have. Something Yira may be able to obtain. “I’ll try,” says Yira. “No promises.” - -That night, Yira reads to her nieces before bed. Although the house is massive, the girls prefer to sleep in the same room, three beds arranged in an asterisk at the center. Yira sits in the triangle between the beds. Osila lies on her back, converting Yira’s words to images on the ceiling, Nua unravels a loose thread on her nightgown sleeve and forgets to listen, and Lera reads several lines ahead over Yira’s shoulder. Yira closes the book before the chapter is done and all three roll onto their stomachs to fix her with a six-eyed glare. - -“Girls,” says Yira. “Your mother is concerned about the state of your shoes. She’d like to know why they’re so dirty.” - -“Concerned?” - -“If she’d *like to know* then—” - -“—she should really just ask.” - -Yira has grown used to this, all three of them talking as if projecting their voices into each other’s mouths, one moving lips while the sound comes from another direction. She can see why Kara finds it off-putting. “She says you all laugh at her when she asks questions.” - -“She asks so strangely—” - -“—well, *funnily*, it’s funny—” - -“—how she seems afraid of the answer.” - -“It’s rude to laugh at your mother,” Yira says. “Anyhow, she buys you such nice shoes. You ought to take better care of them.” - -“The shoes, who cares about stupid shoes.” This one has come from Lera, squarely. “We have a million pairs each.” - -“Okay, fine. The shoes aren’t really the problem,” Yira admits. “Where have you been going at night? You girls know you aren’t allowed out after dark.” - -“Oh, yes, well—” - -“—you’ll be happy to hear—” - -“—it isn’t dark where we go.” - -“You should come along, in fact!” - -“Auntie, you should—” - -“—you’d like it there.” - -Yira flushes, flattered to have been asked in spite of herself. “Well, if you insist.” - -The girls share a circling grin and spring forth from their beds to don their stained slippers. They coalesce chain-linked across the small bathroom adjoined to their bedroom. Yira finds herself across this chain in three links, one to each girl, and has only one free limb, a left leg which feels abandoned. Lera, the right arm of this big new body, plugs the bath and runs the water. The tub fills, a rising mirror, revealing inch by inch the faces, chins, and necks of a four-headed girl. - -“Oh, this is good, I think…” - -“…yeah, very…” - -“…symmetrical, right?” - -The girls spring a leak of giggles as the tub fills to the very brim, a skin of clinging molecules sealing the water inside. - -“What are we laughing about?” Yira asks. - -“Oh, not *about* anything,” says Osila. - -The tub full, the girls fall forward, or maybe just one does and drags the rest. Yira hardly has the chance to take a deep breath before her head breaks the surface. - -The mirror repeats, surface and bottom, a pane of glass through which to shatter again and again, upside right then right side down. Yira sees herself beneath and above herself. She looks surprised, and the girls look pleased, amused even. - -By virtue of the girls landing on their feet, Yira also lands upright, dragged along out of the water and into a gentle dawn. Water streams from her hair and shoulders and drops with gentle reverberations into the surface of the river around her knees. - -The river, the river, the river. Yira knows this river. This is the river that ran along the farmland of her childhood, where her mother scrubbed dirt stains from playclothes, where her cousins crouched and waited stone-like for fish to fill their nets. That river was subsumed decades ago by thousands of barrels of spilled oil. That river grew a sheen of fuel, caught fire and burned for years, taking with it almost everything Yira had ever held dear. The girls break their chain and Yira falls with nothing to hold her upright. The river accepts her into its shallow embrace, and as the surface closes over her again she leans her cheek close to its silty chest. She closes her eyes. - -Something touches her nose and Yira opens her eyes to find her own face doubled before her as if she’d pressed her forehead to a mirror: dark skin, round cheeks, twelve shiny braids buoying up to the surface. Yira sputters out of the water and the other person does too, but she is laughing where Yira is almost choking. Yira steps back and the other girl leans closer, squinting. “Mama, is that you? You’re here, I knew you would come!” - -“Kisi?” Yira stumbles back, unnerved, because she has seen Kisi many times since her sister’s death, but never so clearly defined as she sees her now: solid as gold, scarred on her forehead where their father once hit her with a stone for stealing sugar from the kitchen. Their noses had touched – Kisi is no apparition, she is so solid that when she reaches for Yira’s wrist, Yira cannot get away. - -“It’s me,” she says. “Yira.” - -“Yira?” Kisi looks her over and starts to smile. “It is, isn’t it? You’ve gotten old.” - -“And you haven’t.” Yira doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. - -She opens her arms and her sister falls into them. No, Kisi hasn’t aged a day. Her skin remains dark and smooth as tourmaline, her hair black as a smoke cloud where Yira’s has gone rainstorm silver. - -Kisi pulls back, her smile traded for wide-eyed concern. “Why are you here? You haven’t…?” - -“No, no. I’m…” Yira can’t bring herself to say *alive*, to imply that Kisi is in fact dead. She looks around but doesn’t see her nieces. “Kara’s daughters brought me here.” - -“Oh. Those girls.” Kisi presses her lips together. “I see them sometimes.” - -“You do? Have you spoken to them?” - -“They don’t like to talk to me.” Kisi points to the water’s surface. Instead of her own reflection, Yira sees her three nieces, floating lazily with their hands cuffed around each other’s wrists. “They don’t want to hear what I try to tell them.” - -“What do you tell them?” - -“I’ve tried to warn them, and I’ll warn you now.” Kisi holds onto Yira hard, her gaze becoming intense. “You cannot stay here. The way you think of this place, how you remember it, is not the way it is.” - -“What do you mean, Kisi?” - -“The sky is blue, the water is clear, the sun is shining, for you.” Kisi shivers. “But after dark… this is a terrible place. The sky crumbles. The water turns to poison. The fire ignites again and again and again.” - -“That sounds horrible. I wish I could take you back with me.” - -Kisi pulls Yira down into the water again. “I’ll show you.” She submerges and takes her sister with her. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}O{{}}nce again Yira is enveloped by the river of her childhood, the unseen shape of the memories she re-inhabits through dreams, drawings, and retelling. The green of this water is the scaly surface into which Yira’s grandfather sank fishing nets over the side of his creaky old plank canoe. The softness of this silt is the finishing line for Yira, Kara, and Kisi’s swimming races, which Kisi always won thanks to her long legs. These raffia palms are glorious baskets of shade under which so many hours of sleep slipped away… - -Until the fish began washing up dead. - -Until the silt turned black. - -Until the raffia palms wilted and crumbled. - -Until fires bloomed from the spilled oil. - -The embrace of the river tightens to a strangle, and although Yira opens her eyes she sees nothing. The brilliant crystal of the water has gone opaque. An acrid taste fills her mouth and the heaviness of this new, black water crushes her. - -Six strong hands dredge Yira’s body from the river bed, shaking and prodding her. The girls thump Yira’s back and a flood of water projects from her mouth. Eyes still stinging and blurry, she can’t make out if the water she spits is black or clear. - -“Stand up, Yira…” - -“…you aren’t a fish, you know…” - -“…and even if you want to be…” - -“…you haven’t got any gills.” - -Yira blinks and finds the river once again beautiful, water going periwinkle under the closing eye of the sun. The raffia palms rustle together like plotting sets of hands and the silt feels soft as powdered sugar under her toes. Kisi is gone. The three girls shade Yira from the sun like the walls of a tent. - -“Do you like it here, Yira?” Osila asks, brushing some silt from her aunt’s cheek. - -“We thought you would.” - -“We hope you do.” - -“I do,” says Yira. “It’s just like—” - -“Home?” - -“Yes, we think so too…” - -“…just like the home we’ve always wanted.” - -Just like the home Yira’s always wanted to return to. - -“We’d like to live here forever,” says Osila, her mouth only moving in her reflection. - -“We’d like this to be our home,” Lera clarifies. - -“You could stay here with us, dear Yira,” Nua offers. - -“Yes, you could…” - -“…that would be nice. Very, you know…” - -“…symmetrical, right?” - -Stay here. Forever. That’s what Yira’s always wanted, isn’t it? This is where she has lived all her life, anyway. She’s never really been anywhere else. Her heart hasn’t. Her mind hasn’t, even if her body has. - - “But…” she says, Kisi’s words ringing in her ears. - -“But?” - -“But.” - -“But!” - -“…but this is a place that no longer exists.” - -“Well, I mean, *existing*…” - -“…what really *exists*? Nothing much…” - -“…or nothing good, anyway.” - -This, Yira can develop no argument against. So, the girls pass the evening playing and splashing in the water while Yira submerges her head again and again, searching for evidence of decay. - -When the sun finally dips to the horizon, the girls reassemble, easy as stitches knitted by three quick twists of a needle. Yira hesitates. “Have you ever stayed after dark?” she asks. The sky darkens to cobalt. - -“Oh, no,” says one girl, and in the waning light it might be any of them, or all three. - -“Kara wouldn’t like that, would she,” says another. - -“No, she’d surely send us off…” - -“…to some kind of boarding school, I think…” - -“…the military, maybe…” - -“…and we’ve already been gone too long.” - -“Hm. Alright.” Yira drags herself in a slow circle, stalling a minute more as the sun slips behind the trees. - -“We should go,” says one girl, nervousness creeping in. - -“Yes, just one second…” The last of the light fades, the darkness turning the river into an inkwell. In lieu of a flashlight to inspect the water, Yira opts to put her head under and take another taste. But just as she starts to submerge, Yira finds herself looped into the pattern the girls have made, arm over arm, leg under leg, and has her balance pulled out from under her by a great synchronized dive. This time, the water is no mirror, only the black of dreamless sleep, which breaks solid and painless over Yira’s head like a prop vase. - -Yira and her nieces break in four again on the bathroom floor. The girls scurry like roaches. Six ruined slippers swell together by the door and delicate feet tap three times each across the carpet, and disappear into the welcoming pockets of spotless white sheets. - -Yira picks up her own slippers and switches on the bathroom light. She is clean, save for her feet. There is no mark where her cheek touched the bottom of the oily river. Her slippers have taken on a slick, black carapace that comes away on her fingers but leaves dark stains behind. - -It’s just dawn now. The softest blue light presses around the corners of the bedroom curtains. The girls have gone invisible beneath their sheets, wrapped up like embalmed bodies. Yira turns off the bathroom light and cannot stop thinking, *You could stay here with us, dear Yira*… - -When Yira opens the bedroom door, Kara is there with coffee and an eager strain in her eye. She didn’t sleep a wink last night – how could she? She spent the night scrolling through New-England-Chic dinner party concepts on Pinterest, barely able to contain herself from bursting into her daughters’ room, demanding to see whatever Yira was being let in on. It’s eating her now, the seconds of Yira’s silence prickling away like hours. - -“So?” she demands. Her gaze catches on Yira’s dirty slippers. “Tell me.” - -Her sister accepts the coffee and beckons her to the kitchen, where she begins making an infuriatingly slow pot of oatmeal. The oats have been boiled, cooled, consumed, and the dishes done before Yira finally speaks. - -“They don’t go away to disturb you, your girls,” she says. - -“Oh, don’t they?” - -“No. They aren’t troublemakers. They only go out looking for some kind of peace.” - -“Yira, I’ve been plenty patient with you. Quit it with the riddles and tell me where they took you.” - -“I’d like to tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.” - -“Oh, Yira.” Kara sighs deeply, annoyance rushing in where anticipation had been buoying her up all night. “If you want me to believe you, then say something believable. I’m begging you.” - -Yira bristles with indignity – her sister has never believed in any world that isn’t the one she inhabits. That’s why the world didn’t end for Kara when she was forced to leave home. For Kara, that world, *home*, ceased to be real the moment she left it. - -Yira opens her mouth, unsure if she’s about to tell her sister the unbelievable truth, but she never has to make that decision. The apparition of two out of three nieces cuts her short. Osila and Lera appear in the door frame full-moon-eyed, casting frightened glances over each other’s shoulders. - -Kara shudders, a startled hand pressed over her heart. “Girls, you should really try making some noise before you come into a room. Footsteps or something.” - -The girls only look at Yira. - -“Something’s wrong—” - -“—yes, something must have…” - -And there is no third sinister shadow to finish the sentence, so there is no way to know what must have happened except to follow the girls down the hall. - -At their bedroom, Osila and Lera stand in the door frame but won’t go inside. - -Kara shoves past everyone the way she always has whenever crises occur, whenever a shoulder has come out of place at a gymnastics meet, whenever a hand has slipped from monkey bars, whenever a cough has turned into a choke. She is there in three steps, down on her knees at Nua’s bedside, ready to comfort, ready to fix. - -But. - -It isn’t Nua in this bed at all, but someone who should not – cannot – be there. From Nua’s pillow blinks a face that seizes Kara’s heart mid-beat. - -Yira comes up behind and freezes. “Kisi?” - -In the doorway, Yira’s nieces are reduced to nonverbal hysterics without their third component. As if some vital cord has been removed from their throats. As if it was only from watching Nua talk that they’d ever been able to figure out how to form words at all. - -“Kisi, what are you doing here?” Yira asks. - -Kisi sits up in Nua’s bed, looking pleased. And it is Kisi, for sure: twelve shiny braids, sweet round cheeks, glittering eyelids, a dot of brown in the white of her eye. Yira runs her finger along that sugar-thief scar on her forehead to be certain. - -Kara speaks to her daughters but can’t look away from Kisi. “Where is your sister?” - -The faces of the girls clearly scream, *Wouldn’t we like to know!* - -Kara is too engrossed in the details of Kisi’s face to see her daughters. “I never thought I’d see you again.” - -“I’ve missed you, little sister.” - -“You’re here,” says Kara. “How are you here? You’re dead.” - -“Oh yes, I was.” Kisi nods gravely. “I was in a terrible, terrible place. I’m so glad to be out of there.” - -Although this older generation of sisters refuse to look at the younger ones behind them, they can all hear a sound fighting to get out of those two throats. It sounds like a choke, like *Nuh*… *Nuh*… - -Yira speaks for them. “Nua. Where is Nua?” - -Kisi blinks at her youngest sister. “She said she’d like to stay forever and you said you wished you could bring me back with you. So I thought…” - -The two girls know now where the rest of them has gone, and they do not care one bit for confusion or begging. Their slippers are on and the bathroom door shut, leaving three sisters on one side and three on the other. The girls fill the tub and launch inside without a thought to the banging and shouting of their mother and aunt on the other side. - -![Orbit-sml ><](images/Orbit.svg) - -{{}}A{{}}nd yes, this time something is different about the water. It tastes acrid like gasoline and slides slick over their skin, collecting on eyelashes and clinging to arm hairs, sticking together lips and eyelids. Warm, crushing, it suffocates, and they sit up gasping for air that is hot as a furnace and no less acrid than the sludge they have crested out of. Osila drags black gunk from her eyelashes and finds their paradise ash-black, the water, the sky, the trees, all of it, coated in a sooty grime that fills her lungs and threatens to choke her on every breath. - -There is no sun or moon. Just a great flare of orange rising to the east, boiling the water at the mouth of the river, painting a sickly brownish glow along the horizon. Beside her, Lera is a statue of black granite, no features, only oil. - -Osila wipes her sister’s eyes and pulls her to her feet. The two cling to each other, wanting to call for Nua but afraid that to open their mouths would be to attract whatever demons might hide in the dark remnants of these burnt-up trees. - -They trudge towards the sound of weeping – that is, toward the fire. The nearer they get, the hotter the fire breathes, the more stifling the scent of gasoline. The landscape quivers with heat. - -By the bend in the river nearest to the fire, where the water is unbearably hot and the air unbreathable, where they cannot see the way ahead for the soot and waves of heat, is Nua, clawing for the bank of the river with panicked fingernails, but safety is just too high for her to reach. Her sisters grasp her with greedy hands and the three are sealed together again, ringed into a life buoy amongst themselves. - -There is no talk of going home. What is home, anyway, except a place with no time, where any number of hours can pass with nothing to anchor them? That house and its claw-footed bathtub, the asterisk of their beds, their fading aunt, disinterested father, and concerned mother, is all the grayness of purgatory. - -Yes, let those older sisters have it and each other, for all these ones care. Here, at least, in the sun there is paradise and in the fire there is Gehenna, somewhere to wail and sweat out the pain that plagues them always from the slightest distance. The pain that has always followed them out the corners of their eyes where they could never properly feel the burn of it. - -![Orbit-lrg](images/Orbit.svg) - -*Thanks for reading - but we'd love feedback! Let us know what you think of **The Twelve Blackened Slippers** at [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mythaxis.bsky.social).* diff --git a/content/submissions.md b/content/submissions.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1ac56c7f..00000000 --- a/content/submissions.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,68 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: "Submission Guidelines" -date: 2020-08-01 -issue: Issue 23 - -type: page -slug: submissions ---- - -***Mythaxis* is currently closed to submissions.** - -**SUBMISSIONS NOTICE:** *Mythaxis* is closed to new submissions until 2026. - -Our guidelines page is maintained for future reference. When open, we seek the following: - -- **Flash fiction:** 500–2,000 words (we do not receive enough flash submissions! Please send more!) -- **Short fiction:** 2,000–5,000 words (the sweet spot is 2k–4k) - -Our overall upper and lower word counts are *firm* limits. Shorter or longer works are considered, but the further a story goes outside these bounds the more it will need to impress. - -**Compensation:** $0.01 per word, with a $20 minimum. Please be aware before submitting that payment is via PayPal only. - -If you do not receive an acknowledgment within 24 hours of submission, please get in touch. We aim to accept or reject within 30 days of acknowledgment, but rl (real life) and rl (reading load) can get in the way. If you do not hear from us after 60 days, feel free to query. - -### REQUIREMENTS - -***Mythaxis*** seeks speculative fiction (sf/f/h/weird/slipstream/…), crime (also including police procedural/detective/mystery/cosy/…) and mashups of the same. All genres are equally welcome in each submission window. We don't receive enough crime fiction, so if that's your bag we're always eager! - -We acquire **First Print, Digital, and Audio rights with a six month period of exclusivity** from the date of publication. We also ask permission to potentially include accepted pieces in future anthologies; in event of agreement, an additional compensation will be offered. All other rights remain entirely with the author. See **[here](./editorial-policy.html)** for an overview of our editorial process. - -**Simultaneous submissions are not only accepted, they are encouraged.** Please tell us if you sim-sub, and we merely ask that you notify us of acceptance at another market as soon as possible. In the event that we accept first, we expect a positive and timely confirmation. Therefore we recommend sim-subbing to markets of equivalent status – we won't wait for someone else you'd like better to turn you down. - -**We do not accept multiple submissions.** Please wait until your first submission has been rejected before submitting another work. - -**If a story has previously been rejected by *Mythaxis*, please do not resubmit** or inquire regarding doing so, unless explicitly invited to by the editor during the original rejection. - -> **Feedback:** Unfortunately, due to increased submission volume, it is no longer possible for us to offer feedback on all rejected submissions. This is a regretful necessity, but without the time required to say something meaningful feedback loses its value. However, on rejecting strong candidate pieces we may offer constructive comments along with an invitation to revise and resubmit. - -**Reprints:** We do not currently invite reprint submissions. - -**All submissions must be the original work of the author.** This is not a market for fan fiction. If your story is a retelling, pastiche, or homage to an existing work, please mention the source you are alluding to. - -**Content note:** We anticipate an adult readership in the sense of maturity, so reasonable depictions of violence, sexuality, philosophy, or bad language are acceptable. However, this is not a market for pornographic or offensively extreme content, categorisation of which is at the editor's discretion. For additional notes regarding what we **are** and **are not** looking for in submissions, see **[here](./editorial-policy.html)**. - -**We welcome writers of any and all backgrounds** and invite submissions exploring diverse perspectives and experiences both cultural and personal, provided they do not seek to attack or demean those of others. - -### HOW TO SUBMIT - -* **NEW:** Access our shiny automated [**submissions form here**](https://forms.gle/mCL4MQFbWTWLDzS18) (requires a Google account sign in). -* Or, email files as an attachment to: **MythaxisMagazine@gmail.com**. Please use a subject line like **MYTHAXIS SUBMISSION – YOUR STORY TITLE** to evade spam filters (and when we say *"your story title"*, we don't mean that literally…). - -**File types:** Acceptable attachments are DOC, DOCX, and ODT (plus RTF, if you absolutely have to). **Do not submit in PDF format.** For recommendations regarding attachment titles and document formatting that will make the editor well disposed towards your work, see **[here](./editorial-policy.html)**. - -Feel free to include a concise cover letter and/or author bio in your email, though neither is mandatory. ***Mythaxis*** welcomes authors of all levels of experience. We have a history of publishing first-time authors, and we mean to continue this tradition. - -If you track your submissions, you can find ***Mythaxis Magazine*** on [The Submissions Grinder](https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/Market?id=10939#) and [Duotrope](https://duotrope.com/listing/10263/mythaxis-magazine). - -### A NOTE ON 'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE' - -**We do not invite submissions featuring prose created by generative "artificial intelligence", algorithmic systems, large language models, or similar tools.** - -We recognise the importance of authorial ownership when it comes to an individual's rights. The questionable provenance of AI-derived content, and the uncertain legality of claiming "authorship" of the output of AI tools, means that knowingly signing a contract of sale for an AI-generated submission would be inappropriate. We hope that submitting authors will respect our position. - -In the past, ***Mythaxis*** has experimented with generative image tools and used data analytics to investigate the nature of the stories submitted to us. We documented these experiences in a number of editorials (see Issue [28](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-28/editorial.html) for art, Issues [31](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-31/editorial.html), [32](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-32/editorial.html), and [33](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-32/editorial.html) for data analysis, plus our final round up [here](https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-34/artificial-artificial-intelligence.html)). All data analysed was always fully anonymised and never employed tools capable of producing derivative creative works. - -### Have a question? - -Any queries can be addressed to the editor at **MythaxisMagazine@gmail.com**. diff --git a/static-xway/contents.jpg b/contents.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/contents.jpg rename to contents.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/copyright.html b/copyright.html similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/copyright.html rename to copyright.html diff --git a/static-xway/cospauper.jpg b/cospauper.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/cospauper.jpg rename to cospauper.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dagda.jpg b/dagda.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dagda.jpg rename to dagda.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dagda2.jpg b/dagda2.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dagda2.jpg rename to dagda2.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dalek.jpg b/dalek.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dalek.jpg rename to dalek.jpg diff --git a/data/en/intro.yaml b/data/en/intro.yaml deleted file mode 100644 index 8c5f0938..00000000 --- a/data/en/intro.yaml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -title: -- line: 'MythAxis Magazine' - -description: -- line: 'Welcome to MythAxis Magazine' -# - line: 'This issue is...' - diff --git a/data/en/post.yaml b/data/en/post.yaml deleted file mode 100644 index 5318cb95..00000000 --- a/data/en/post.yaml +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -linktext: 'Read Story' \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/xway2metadata.json b/data/xway2metadata.json deleted file mode 100644 index f9f4f081..00000000 --- a/data/xway2metadata.json +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2246 +0,0 @@ -[ - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "1", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "Log of the Mustang Sally - Turner", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "2", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "Hector", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./2issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "3", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "Green Bullet", - "author": "Melanie Manner", - "relurl": "./3issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "4", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "Troubles With Word", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./4issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "5", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes", - "author": "H G Wells", - "relurl": "./5issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "6", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "Streaming Video", - "author": "Ian Thomas", - "relurl": "./6issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "poetry"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "7", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "A Sort of Editorial", - "author": "The Editor", - "relurl": "./7issue1.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 1 - February 2008", - "number": "1", - "order": "8", - "date": "February 2008", - "title": "Charlotte Wang Knows Everythang", - "author": "Chris Lites", - "relurl": "./8issue1.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "1", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "Some Future Date", - "author": "Callum Graham", - "relurl": "./1issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "2", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "Red Fever", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./2issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "3", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "Eat, Monster Blue Bottle", - "author": "Belinda A. Taylor", - "relurl": "./3issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "4", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "The American Book of the Dead", - "author": "Chris Lites", - "relurl": "./4issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "5", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "Emigration", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./5issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "6", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "Voyage to the Moon", - "author": "Lucian Loukianos", - "relurl": "./6issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "7", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "New Frankfurt", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./7issue2.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 2 - April 2008", - "number": "2", - "order": "8", - "date": "April 2008", - "title": "From The Editor", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./8issue2.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 3 - June 2008", - "number": "3", - "order": "1", - "date": "June 2008", - "title": "Blazon", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./1issue3.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 3 - June 2008", - "number": "3", - "order": "2", - "date": "June 2008", - "title": "The 1002nd Night", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./2issue3.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 3 - June 2008", - "number": "3", - "order": "3", - "date": "June 2008", - "title": "The Summoning", - "author": "Chris Penycate", - "relurl": "./3issue3.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 3 - June 2008", - "number": "3", - "order": "4", - "date": "June 2008", - "title": "When Gretchen Met Sally", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./4issue3.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 3 - June 2008", - "number": "3", - "order": "5", - "date": "June 2008", - "title": "The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon", - "author": "Washington Irving", - "relurl": "./5issue3.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 3 - June 2008", - "number": "3", - "order": "6", - "date": "June 2008", - "title": "From The Editor", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issue3.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "1", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "Hong Kong", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issue4.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "2", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "Central Casting", - "author": "Chris Penycate", - "relurl": "./2issue4.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "3", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "Strong Emergence", - "author": "Jonathan Joseph", - "relurl": "./3issue4.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "4", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "Survivor", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./4issue4.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "5", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "By a Lily's Petal", - "author": "Ian Thomas", - "relurl": "./5issue4.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "6", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "The Ingenious Patriot", - "author": "Ambrose Bierce", - "relurl": "./6issue4.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008", - "number": "4", - "order": "7", - "date": "22 Nov 2008", - "title": "The Inevitable Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./7issue4.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 5 - May 2009", - "number": "5", - "order": "1", - "date": "May 2009", - "title": "No Survivor", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./1issue5.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 5 - May 2009", - "number": "5", - "order": "2", - "date": "May 2009", - "title": "His Fly Undid Him", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./2issue5.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 5 - May 2009", - "number": "5", - "order": "3", - "date": "May 2009", - "title": "The Extrusion Project", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./3issue5.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 5 - May 2009", - "number": "5", - "order": "4", - "date": "May 2009", - "title": "The Enormous Gun", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./4issue5.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 5 - May 2009", - "number": "5", - "order": "5", - "date": "May 2009", - "title": "The Curse of Yig", - "author": "H.P.Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop", - "relurl": "./5issue5.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 5 - May 2009", - "number": "5", - "order": "6", - "date": "May 2009", - "title": "The Now-Traditional Brief Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issue5.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 6 - August 2009", - "number": "6", - "order": "1", - "date": "August 2009", - "title": "Neurofinancer", - "author": "Twilite Minotaur", - "relurl": "./1issue6.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 6 - August 2009", - "number": "6", - "order": "2", - "date": "August 2009", - "title": "The Tale of the Ten Teacups", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./2issue6.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 6 - August 2009", - "number": "6", - "order": "3", - "date": "August 2009", - "title": "Warriston's Disease", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./3issue6.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 6 - August 2009", - "number": "6", - "order": "4", - "date": "August 2009", - "title": "The Skylark of Space", - "author": "E.E. (Doc) Smith", - "relurl": "./4issue6.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 6 - August 2009", - "number": "6", - "order": "5", - "date": "August 2009", - "title": "A Rambling Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./5issue6.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "1", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "Living on Reputation", - "author": "Alistair Bain", - "relurl": "./1issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "2", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "The Door with no Key", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./2issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "3", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "The Price of Youth", - "author": "Moon Bhatt", - "relurl": "./3issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "4", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "Blood and Souls", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./4issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "5", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "From an Evening at the Cinema", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./5issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "6", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "Ringside", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./6issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "7", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "How Manuel Left the Mire", - "author": "James Branch Cabell", - "relurl": "./7issue7.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 7 - September 2010", - "number": "7", - "order": "8", - "date": "September 2010", - "title": "An Entirely Self-serving Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./8issue7.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "1", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issue8.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "2", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "Spawn", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issue8.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "3", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "The Great Divide", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./3issue8.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "4", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "Android 0-CLE5", - "author": "Lester Linesmith", - "relurl": "./4issue8.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "5", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "The Prophets Speak", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./5issue8.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "6", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "Outpatients", - "author": "Jonathan Joseph", - "relurl": "./6issue8.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 8 - February 2011", - "number": "8", - "order": "7", - "date": "February 2011", - "title": "Conspiracy Theory", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./7issue8.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "1", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issue9.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "2", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Boffin", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "3", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Let Every Voice be Still", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./3issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "4", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Stop 17", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./4issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "5", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "The Ghosts of Cloud City", - "author": "Twilite Minotaur", - "relurl": "./5issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "6", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Special Delivery", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "7", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Postcards", - "author": "Annabel Banks", - "relurl": "./7issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 9 - June 2011", - "number": "9", - "order": "8", - "date": "June 2011", - "title": "Fiat Lux", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./8issue9.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "1", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev10.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "2", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "A Preference for Cheese", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "3", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "All Avenues Closed", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./3issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "4", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "Oh Dreary Me", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./4issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "5", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "Dietrich and the Baby", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./5issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "6", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "Appropriate Technology", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "7", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "Flesh Doubt", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./7issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 10 - December 2011", - "number": "10", - "order": "8", - "date": "December 2011", - "title": "Warped", - "author": "Jonathan Joseph", - "relurl": "./8issuev10.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "1", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev11.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "2", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "The Smile of Paeony 3rdfield", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "3", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Dundro Fappit's Mistake", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./3issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "4", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Something Quirky", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./4issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "5", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Hoolocks and Hellions", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./5issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "6", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Foroquont's Maze", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./6issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "7", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Mindbleed", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./7issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "8", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Sailing to Tarshish", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./8issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "9", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Unclear Conscience", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./9issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "10", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "The Tale of God's Flotsam", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./10issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "11", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Ghosts and Aliens", - "author": "John A. Frochio", - "relurl": "./11issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "fantasy"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "12", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "Beyond the Sky", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./12issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 11 - December 2012", - "number": "11", - "order": "13", - "date": "December 2012", - "title": "A Natural Selection", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./13issuev11.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "1", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Quality Put to the Vote", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "2", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Starbat", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "3", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "The Temple of the Inevitable", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./3issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "4", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "An Acquisition", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./4issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "5", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "I Am What I Am Not", - "author": "Tom Sheehan", - "relurl": "./5issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "6", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Famous Ashfordians no.1 - James Goodacre", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./6issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "7", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Quintet for One", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./7issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "8", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Tear Drops", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./8issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "9", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Terminus Machina : Bailout", - "author": "Twilite Minotaur", - "relurl": "./9issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "10", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Not Who We Are", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./10issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 12 - March 2013", - "number": "12", - "order": "11", - "date": "March 2013", - "title": "Day Trip", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./11issuev12.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "1", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev13.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "2", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Lies & Other Essentials", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./2issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "3", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Smolehive's Anakalyptoscope", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./3issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "4", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "The Tale of the Bone Janitor", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./4issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "5", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "To Serve", - "author": "Matthew Kirshenblatt", - "relurl": "./5issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "6", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Sibyl", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./6issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "7", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Famous Ashfordians no.2 - Samuel Ohms", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./7issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "8", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Prutt's Game by Thyles Dudoriac. Fissile, Sprent & Co.", - "author": "Don B Levitt", - "relurl": "./8issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "9", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Famous Ashfordians No. 3 - The Marvellous Marjoram Mouse", - "author": "Tom Davies", - "relurl": "./9issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "10", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "Toyscape", - "author": "John A. Frochio", - "relurl": "./10issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 13 - August 2013", - "number": "13", - "order": "11", - "date": "August 2013", - "title": "A Room with a Vu", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./11issuev13.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "1", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev14.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "2", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "A Closer Look at Greeming & Trulph", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "3", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "An Excursion to Platport", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./3issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "4", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "Yesterday's Spoons", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./4issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "5", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "The Lost World of WW1", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./5issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "6", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "Mount Elysium", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "7", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "First In, Last Out", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./7issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "8", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "Truth and Other Upgrades", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./8issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 14 - March 2014", - "number": "14", - "order": "9", - "date": "March 2014", - "title": "Aye-Nay", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./9issuev14.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "1", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev15.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "2", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "Slippage", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "3", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "Uneasy Money", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./3issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "4", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "The Plains of Abyssinia", - "author": "Sean Crawford", - "relurl": "./4issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "5", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "The Man with Bronze Hair", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./5issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "6", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "The Log of the Mustang Sally - Tazio", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "7", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "Must Be in the Fifties", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./7issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "8", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "Adalet", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./8issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 15 - November 2014", - "number": "15", - "order": "9", - "date": "November 2014", - "title": "A Day Like Any Other", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./9issuev15.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "1", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev16.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "2", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Don Juans & Dragoons", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./2issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "3", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Thagdar the Immutable", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./3issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "4", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "A Messenger, Deceased", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./4issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "5", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Proto-J", - "author": "Christian Miller", - "relurl": "./5issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "6", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Border Incident", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./6issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "7", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "A Small Intrusion", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./7issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "horror" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "8", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Playing Around with Arthur", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./8issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 16 - July 2015", - "number": "16", - "order": "9", - "date": "July 2015", - "title": "Baker's Dozen", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./9issuev16.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "1", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev17.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "2", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "The Cospauper", - "author": "Christian Miller", - "relurl": "./2issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "3", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Another Change of Plan", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./3issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "4", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Bodyfellas", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./4issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "5", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Whistle, Hum, Parp", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./5issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "6", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "A Vacant Chair Beside the Hearth", - "author": "John A. Frochio", - "relurl": "./6issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "7", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Supply & Demand", - "author": "Martin Clark", - "relurl": "./7issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "8", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Robot Rover", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./8issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "9", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Magdalena and the Dragon", - "author": "Peter Morrison", - "relurl": "./9issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "10", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Diplomacy", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./10issuev17.htm", - "category": "Comic", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 17 - February 2016", - "number": "17", - "order": "11", - "date": "February 2016", - "title": "Iceweb - Interactive Fiction", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./11issuev17.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "1", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev18.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "2", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Helsinki", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./2issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "3", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Sound & Fury", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./3issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "4", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Farny's Place", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./4issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "5", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "The Last Day of the Mute Ant", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./5issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "6", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "God Blinked", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./6issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "7", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Falling Back", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./7issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "8", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Distant and Remote", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./8issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "9", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Atacrast", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./9issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "10", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Madras Point", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./10issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "11", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "A New World Order", - "author": "John A. Frochio", - "relurl": "./11issuev18.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 18 - August 2016", - "number": "18", - "order": "12", - "date": "August 2016", - "title": "Under the Martian Moonlight", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./12issuev18.htm", - "category": "Comic", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "1", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev19.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "2", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Interlude in Green", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./2issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "3", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Timed Out", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./3issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "4", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Reunion", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./4issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "5", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Grave Misfortune", - "author": "Stephen Heuser", - "relurl": "./5issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "6", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Ilysveil: You Can Only Observe", - "author": "J. H. Zech", - "relurl": "./6issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "7", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "April the Last", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./7issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "8", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Mount Elysium Revisited", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./8issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "9", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Death plus One", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./9issuev19.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 19 - February 2017", - "number": "19", - "order": "10", - "date": "February 2017", - "title": "Field Support", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./10issuev19.htm", - "category": "Comic", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "1", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev20.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "2", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Padratheleon's Ghosts", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./2issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "3", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "The Drill Hall Incident", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./3issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "4", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "The Trumpets of Jericho", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./4issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "5", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "To Erm is Human", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./5issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "6", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Equus Magna", - "author": "John A. Frochio", - "relurl": "./6issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "7", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "The Fountain of Youth", - "author": "Steve Slavin", - "relurl": "./7issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "8", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Sticky Dreams", - "author": "Mary Hiers", - "relurl": "./8issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "9", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Uncle Glussog's Talent Parade, and Other Matters", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./9issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "10", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Lost City", - "author": "D. S. White", - "relurl": "./10issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "11", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "The Aldous Effect", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./11issuev20.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 20 - August 2017", - "number": "20", - "order": "12", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Comics", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./12issuev20.htm", - "category": "Comic", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "1", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Editorial", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./1issuev21.htm", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "2", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Maximum Law", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./2issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "3", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Commedia del'l Venezia", - "author": "Gil Williamson", - "relurl": "./3issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "4", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "A Tale of Salt and Oak", - "author": "Voss McVeigh", - "relurl": "./4issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "5", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Mirror, Mirror", - "author": "Patrick Boylan", - "relurl": "./5issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "6", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Are Friends Eclectic", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./6issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "7", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Good Vibrations", - "author": "Steve Slavin", - "relurl": "./7issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "8", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Ilysveil: Twin Dawn Rising", - "author": "J. H. Zech", - "relurl": "./8issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "9", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Pranswat Passes Through", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./9issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "10", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Blood Poisoning", - "author": "D. S. White", - "relurl": "./10issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "11", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Eavesdropping at Quoils", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./11issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "12", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Of a Kind", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./12issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "13", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Maximum Law - Christmas Party", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./13issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["fantasy", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "14", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Christmas Carole", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./14issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": ["fantasy", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "15", - "date": "August 2017", - "title": "Comics", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./15issuev21.htm", - "category": "Comic", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 21 - February 2018", - "number": "21", - "order": "16", - "date": "February 2018", - "title": "Melkart The Herdsman", - "author": "Mark Mellon", - "relurl": "./16issuev21.htm", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "1", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Editorial in memorium", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./issue-22/editorial.html", - "category": "Editorial", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "2", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Feeling the Heat", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./issue-22/feeling-the-heat.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "3", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Snryl", - "author": "Les Sklaroff", - "relurl": "./issue-22/snyrl.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "4", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Behind My Eyes", - "author": "Martin M. Clark", - "relurl": "./issue-22/behind-my-eyes.html", - "category": null, - "genre": ["science fiction", "crime"] - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "5", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Henry", - "author": "Jez Patterson", - "relurl": "./issue-22/henry.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "6", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "A Comic", - "author": "Liam Baldwin", - "relurl": "./issue-22/a-comic.html", - "category": "Comic", - "genre": null - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "7", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "His Turn to Remember", - "author": "John A. Frochio", - "relurl": "./issue-22/his-turn-to-remember.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "8", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Ilysveil: Tigers Can Remember", - "author": "J. H. Zech", - "relurl": "./issue-22/ilysveil-tigers-can-remember.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "fantasy" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "9", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "The Parking Ticket", - "author": "Steve Slavin", - "relurl": "./issue-22/the-parking-ticket.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "slipstream" - }, - { - "issue": "Issue 22 - May 2018", - "number": "22", - "order": "10", - "date": "May 2018", - "title": "Good Old Days", - "author": "Andrew Leon Hudson", - "relurl": "./issue-22/good-old-days.html", - "category": null, - "genre": "science fiction" - } -] diff --git a/static-xway/davidson.gif b/davidson.gif similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/davidson.gif rename to davidson.gif diff --git a/static-xway/daytrip.jpg b/daytrip.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/daytrip.jpg rename to daytrip.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/deathplus.jpg b/deathplus.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/deathplus.jpg rename to deathplus.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/delivery.jpg b/delivery.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/delivery.jpg rename to delivery.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dietrich.jpg b/dietrich.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dietrich.jpg rename to dietrich.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/diplo2.jpg b/diplo2.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/diplo2.jpg rename to diplo2.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/distant.png b/distant.png similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/distant.png rename to distant.png diff --git a/content/images/divider.jpg b/divider.jpg similarity index 100% rename from content/images/divider.jpg rename to divider.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dobbin.jpg b/dobbin.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dobbin.jpg rename to dobbin.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dolls.jpg b/dolls.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dolls.jpg rename to dolls.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/dragoon.jpg b/dragoon.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/dragoon.jpg rename to dragoon.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/drillhall.jpg b/drillhall.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/drillhall.jpg rename to drillhall.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/easymoney.jpg b/easymoney.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/easymoney.jpg rename to easymoney.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/eclectic.jpg b/eclectic.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/eclectic.jpg rename to eclectic.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/edit16.jpg b/edit16.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/edit16.jpg rename to edit16.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/edit17.jpg b/edit17.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/edit17.jpg rename to edit17.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/editor18.jpg b/editor18.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/editor18.jpg rename to editor18.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/editor19.jpg b/editor19.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/editor19.jpg rename to editor19.jpg diff --git a/editorial-policy.html b/editorial-policy.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0f1a5526 --- /dev/null +++ b/editorial-policy.html @@ -0,0 +1,354 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Seldom Asked Questions — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

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Seldom Asked Questions

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Below are some SAQ’s…

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+ What is your editorial process? +

Mythaxis Magazine uses a “second opinion” slush reading system. All submissions are first evaluated by the editor, who assembles a shortlist of pieces for further consideration. These are anonymised before being shared with our second reader team, who boast varied tastes and interests and have no fear of telling the editor when they think he’s in danger of making a grave mistake. Nevertheless, the editor alone is responsible for the final selections.

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If we like a piece but feel it needs more work before it is ready to publish, we will inquire if the author is interested in receiving notes ahead of submitting a rewrite. This should not be taken as indicative of a guaranteed second draft acceptance, but we will only approach if our interest is significant. To date, all instances of this have resulted in a subsequent acceptance.

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After accepting a piece, we will deliver an edited draft of the story for the author’s approval, which may result in a two-way revision process over multiple rounds. When the final draft is agreed, we supply a contract for the author’s signature, with payment made immediately on return of a signed copy.

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+ What characteristics do you appreciate in a submission? +

Some magazines will tell you read what we’ve published to learn what we’re looking for. Mythaxis takes the opposite perspective: go digging through our issues and you’ll find what we’ve published before – the best way to join us is to show us something new.

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We expect submissions to demonstrate basic professionalism but recognise that to err is human, so occasional spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, punctuation slips and the like are not going to result in summary rejection. More important are things like tight plotting, engaging characters, quality of prose, believable dialogue. If you can show us these, we’re going to show interest in return.

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Ultimately, the editor is a lover of good storytelling, with the emphasis on story. Whether you subscribe to “Hollywood” structuring, the beginning-middle-end philosophy, or some other narrative trend, all are welcome. By contrast, the less identifiable as “a story” your story is, the harder it will be to find a home here. That said, we’re all in favour of skilful experimentation – if you can surprise us, however you do it, that’s going to go a long way!

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Special mention: The editor is enamoured of utopian fiction in the critical mode, as well as depictions of humanity’s future that champion progressive attitudes to overcoming social or environmental challenges. Sadly, he receives too little of such things, so why not help change that?

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+ What characteristics do you dislike in a submission? +

There are few subjects which we absolutely will reject out of hand, but there are some which authors may wish to consider looking elsewhere to place:

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  • Gratuitous sex and violence – we are not a market for explicit sexual content, while graphic depictions of violence without extremely strong justification for inclusion are likely to be rejected.
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  • Suicide – this is a difficult subject to handle well, and generally not one the editor seeks to represent. Not prohibited, but definitely a hard sell.
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  • Abuse of minors – very occasionally we have included stories in which the death of a child occurs or is referred to. However, while peril has its dramatic value, we do not find entertainment in the hypothetical torment of children.
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  • Reworkings of Greek mythology – we have published a number of these, but in general this is not a theme which engages the editor’s interest. He has a particular dislike of Hades and Persephone stories, examples of which are almost certain to be rejected.
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  • Wryness – any story in which is found the phrase “wry grin” (or any of its close relatives) will earn contempt and vilification. Miraculous acceptances containing such aberrations will not by the time they are published.
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  • AI-generated material – as stated in the submissions guidelines, we do not accept content produced using “artificial intelligence” tools, including but not limited to LLMs (large language models) such as ChatGPT. Worth saying twice: don’t send us anything written by these things, what they make is not good fiction. It stands out for what it is, and we’ll stop considering your submissions in future because you’re wasting our time.
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+ What advice can you give regarding document formatting? +

Professional-looking documents make editors well-disposed towards a submission before they even start reading, while human nature (editors are humans too, incredibly) means any kind of inconvenience may damage a story’s prospects irrepairably. We recommend following these guidelines with regard to how your submission document is presented.

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Manuscript formatting: We recommend using Shunn’s excellent Modern Manuscript formatting guide, but in particular consider the following:

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  • Please use an easy-reading font (Times New Roman 12pt is preferred).
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  • Use automatic paragraph formatting to set indents or paragraph breaks. Do not manually insert lines between paragraphs. Do not use tabs or hit the space bar some number of times for first-line indents.
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  • Use a single centred # to represent essential section breaks.
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  • Use italics for italics, don’t underline. Smart (“curly”) punctuation is preferred, but consistency is preferred more.
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  • If your manuscript includes any unusual formatting, please alert the editors when submitting and have a really good, story-related reason.
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Attachment filenames: Please consider using the format < title >< authorname >.doc for your attachment filename. This aids greatly in alphabetical document management. Examples of good filenames are:

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  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle
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  • TheVeryHungryCaterpillar_Carle
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  • the-very-hungry-caterpillar (including the author in the filename is entirely optional)
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  • VeryHungryCaterpillar (omitting “the” is not a disaster, but for the sake of three letters why not keep it?)
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Filenames that lead with the author’s name, use an abbreviated title or other weird variations make them harder to find. This risks annoying the editor moments before he reads your story. Examples of bad filenames are:

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  • Carle - The Very Hungry Caterpillar (you know who you are)
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  • Mythaxis - The Very Hungry Caterpillar (we know who we are)
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  • Caterpillar / Hungry_draft3 / submission_copy caterpillar / april2023-caterpillar / etc
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  • Before the Butter Flies (use the same title as in your email, damnit)
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The editor knows he is wasting his time suggesting this, but is allowed to dream of a better world.

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Editorials

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42 Editorials sorted by date

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IssueEditorial
Issue 1 - February 2008 + A Sort of Editorial by The Editor
Issue 2 - April 2008 + From The Editor by Gil Williamson
Issue 3 - June 2008 + From The Editor by Gil Williamson
Issue 4 - 22 Nov 2008 + The Inevitable Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 5 - May 2009 + The Now-Traditional Brief Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 6 - August 2009 + A Rambling Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 7 - September 2010 + An Entirely Self-serving Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 8 - February 2011 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 9 - June 2011 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 10 - December 2011 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 11 - December 2012 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 13 - August 2013 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 14 - March 2014 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 15 - November 2014 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 16 - July 2015 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 17 - February 2016 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 18 - August 2016 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 19 - February 2017 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 20 - August 2017 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 21 - February 2018 + Editorial by Gil Williamson
Issue 22 - May 2018 + Editorial in memorium by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 23 - August 2020 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 24 - Winter 2020 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 25 - Spring 2021 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 26 - Summer 2021 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 27 - Autumn 2021 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 28 - Winter 2021 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 29 - Spring 2022 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 30 - Summer 2022 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 31 - Autumn 2022 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 32 - Winter 2022 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 33 - Spring 2023 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 34 - Summer 2023 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 35 - Autumn 2023 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 36 - Winter 2023 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 37 - Spring 2024 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 38 - Summer 2024 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 39 - Autumn 2024 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 40 - Winter 2024 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 41 - Spring 2025 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 42 - Summer 2025 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
Issue 43 - Autumn 2025 + Editorial by Andrew Leon Hudson
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00000000..3e735a62 --- /dev/null +++ b/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,446 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE — Speculative Fiction Without Distraction + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Autumn 2025

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Emma Burnett +

25 Peppercorns

+
+ + +

This is Emma Burnett's third contribution to our pages, each more weighty than the one before. Here she tackles timely and challenging subject matter: how the suffering our forbearers endured goes on to affect those who follow them, forging links in a chain that seems inevitably to bind us to more pain in the future. Here's to breaking that chain. Editorial note: although Mythaxis doesn't use trigger warnings, readers may appreciate knowing that this story makes reference to the legacy of historical attrocities including the Holocaust.

+ + + + Story image for 25 Peppercorns by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Murmurations

+ A.M. Sutter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Murmurations by + + + +

Horror can find great potency against the context of the ordinary, but the everyday world can also be extraordinary, like the hypnotically flowing aerial dances which flocking birds take part in. A.M. Sutter looks to this phenomena and sees something in the patterns… but not something good.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Body Parts

+ Anna Koltes +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Body Parts by + + + +

There's intergenerational trauma, and there's interpersonal trauma as well. Anna Koltes's story manifests the agony of relationships right there in the flesh, the kind of metaphor you feel like a missing limb. Don't you find it seems like you just give and give and give, while others only take?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

For Giving

+ Olufunmilayo Makinde +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for For Giving by + + + +

Olufunmilayo Makinde provides us with a classic: the good old-fashioned ghost story. Adjacent to a recurring theme in this issue, here we again see someone dealing with trauma from the past, this time which has its roots in that person's own actions. Would they, could they, do things differently?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Sugar Wife

+ Christina Ladd +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Sugar Wife by + + + +

There's nothing better than a good fairy tale – unless it's a wince-inducing horror story wearing the skin of one! Christina Ladd serves up a sweet-toothed delight for those with a taste for the macabre. Hard to say whether or not it will leave you hungry for more…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Twelve Blackened Slippers

+ Siobhan Ekeh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Twelve Blackened Slippers by + + + +

As an appropriate bookend to this issue's fiction offering we return to the theme we opened with, of how trauma can travel across generations. Siobhan Ekeh's story looks in a different direction and recounts what it sees in a different style, a strangely magical encounter with the past that affects those who remember it and those who don't in distinct but equally powerful ways.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino by + + + +

Back with his second article of the year, all-too-human Mattia Ravasi takes a close look at one of those infinitely strange and wonderful things that only seem commonplace to us because they are so familiar… I'm referring, of course, to books, in this case Marie-Helene Bertino's 'Beautyland'. What will we glean from his musings, and why are we so keen to know more?

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – July to September, 2025

+
+ + +

As always, we round out the issue with a selection of interesting speculative fiction from around the web, as always with an eye on those zines that may have slipped under your reading radar…

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 by + + + +
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similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/issue-22/snyrl.html rename to issue-22/snyrl.html diff --git a/static-xway/issue-22/the-parking-ticket.html b/issue-22/the-parking-ticket.html similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/issue-22/the-parking-ticket.html rename to issue-22/the-parking-ticket.html diff --git a/issue-23.html b/issue-23.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8ee979ea --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23.html @@ -0,0 +1,550 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Issue-23s — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

August 2020

+

Welcome to the 23rd issue of Mythaxis.

+ +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Anya Josephs +

The Newest Profession

+
+ + +

We open the issue with a visit to a plausible near-future, as Anya Josephs presents us with a disturbing glimpse of a world where ordinary people rarely get the chances they dream of, and corporate life is everything. That last is a theme this magazine plans to play host to again - but that's a story for another time. As for this one, well, the title gives it all away. Doesn't it?

+ + + + Story image for The Newest Profession by + + + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Sedona House

+ Jeffery Scott Sims +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Sedona House by + + + +

Mythaxis is not just about looking to the future. Jeffery Scott Sims delivers a classic yarn with echoes of H. P. Lovecraft to it - courtesy of the kind of roguish problem-solver-for-hire who made the stencilled doors of Private Eyes so much fun to knock on...

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

A Curse at Midnight

+ Moustapha Mbacké Diop +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for A Curse at Midnight by + + + +

Afrofuturism is riding a wave of popularity around the world, but that richness which scifi is benefitting from has its roots in traditional stories, myths, and beliefs. Moustapha Mbacké Diop takes us to present day Senegal and shows us that some of those things from the past are alive and well, and very up close.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Alight

+ Skye Allen +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Alight by + + + +

Depending on her name at the time, Skye Allen either does fantasy fiction or she does music. In the piece she gave us, we get both - along with a stage-side pass to a gig that threatens to go to some very dark places. There's nothing quite like a band that's on fire...

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds

+ Daniel Ausema +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds by + + + +

Fantasy author and speculative poet Daniel Ausema is no stranger to strange lands, strange technologies, strange creatures. Here he takes us on a journey though a selection of the first, and exposes us to the others in ways his heroine - and readers - may be unprepared for.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Third Martian Dick Temple

+ Micah Hyatt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Third Martian Dick Temple by + + + +

Mythaxis generally seeks out unpublished work, but occasionally a story comes along that leaves the kind of impression that you want to land again. Micah Hyatt's perfectly crafted piece of flash fiction is just such a thing: a short, sharp, knock-out punch of a story, with a killer final line.

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+

Cartoon

+ Liam Baldwin +
+ + + + +

Liam Baldwin has been providing humorous and/or pun-ridden art (and occasionally fiction) to Mythaxis since the beginning, and long may he continue. As for right now, who'd enjoy a short, informative dissertation with a dose of classic scifi to it?

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+

Experimental Diet

+ Andrew Johnston +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Experimental Diet by + + + +

From the beginning there's been a fine tradition of epistolary fiction in the speculative genres - Dracula, for example, told its bloody tale through diaries, letters, newspaper articles, ship's logs... Andrew Johnston tells no less bloody a tale - and if these records glowed on a screen on some distant planet, what of it?

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+

Robots of Paris

+ Andrea Kriz +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Robots of Paris by + + + +

Not only is "Alternate History" a fun source of escapism for the well-informed reader, it can give rise to what we might call "Alternate Future" stories - where we glimpse what might have followed what might have been. Andrea Kriz doesn't say it outright, but we can see what changed here. And what needs to.

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+ + + +
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+

Weapons of Mass Entanglement

+ Dennis Mombauer +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Weapons of Mass Entanglement by + + + +

The only unifying thing Mythaxis seeks is good writing - but we want to bring together a variety of genres, styles, themes, and no two alike is fine by us. Dennis Mombauer answered that call with a vision of the strange, and left us with questions.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Everything's Jake

+ Christopher Cook +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Everything's Jake by + + + +

They say "Always leave them wanting more", and we think the final story of the issue will certainly do that. Chris Cook introduces us to a down-to-earth family man dealing with real world problems... and then introduces him to the quirkiest suburban adventure you're ever likely to come across. Fuggedaboudit.

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-23/alight.html b/issue-23/alight.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5e2e8b8d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/alight.html @@ -0,0 +1,379 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Alight — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Alight

+

Skye Allen

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Alight by +
+ + + + +

I + +t was only eleven, but Tress was already questioning her high heels. The set was just getting started. The snare kicked off a menacing march, drowning out the thrum of the generator, and the violinist stamped downstage in skull makeup. Everybody in the band wore skull makeup. People came to their shows for the outrageous visuals, but Tress was here with her piccolo, dressed as a flapper for reasons that had seemed wiser before the last two hours in these shoes, because sitting in with the band would take her mind off the audition.

+

She was going to kill it tomorrow. The Dalbavie flute concerto was impossible for everyone but her. She was going to kill it, and take home the woodwind scholarship, and come back next semester. Because three years into her degree, bam, her mom lost the lease on her café to a developer and declared bankruptcy and there went Tress’s tuition.

+

Goodbye, orchestra career. Hello, customer service career.

+

Side of avocado toast with that?

+

Well, not after tomorrow.

+

She rested her bucket of wet towels where she could reach it later and watched the dance floor fill. They were going to set something on fire, so they needed a safety monitor. Alight popped up in places where the last tenants had been evicted, and there was nothing like an abandoned warehouse in the industrial district for hosting an avant garde guerilla rave, but the utilities here were shut off and places like this weren’t exactly up to fire code. Plus, she wasn’t convinced Two Olives was on his game. He’d been fighting with himself in the storeroom they were using for a backstage as he filled a pie plate with twists of flash paper. He’d muttered “I said okay!” a few times, and then jumped up on the giant spool of wire the last tenant left behind so he could disable the smoke detector and light a cigarette. Tress was steering clear.

+

She felt the clutch of bruising fingers on her bare shoulder, followed by the hallmark of all third sets: beer spilled down her dress. “Oh, doll, did I get you?” a WWII nurse exclaimed. Her cap was coming loose from her slick curls. A pirate wench in a vinyl corset seized the nurse by the stethoscope and tugged her toward the bar.

+

Right. Special Night.

+

On a normal third Thursday, the Alight pop-up party drew a tough crowd, burners who never got caught dancing outside the playa and influencers drinking LaCroix, but tonight the house was full of tech millionaires out to prove how hard you could party in San Francisco on Halloween.

+

A bearded nun in Chinese opera makeup blinked pink lashes at Tress in sympathy. Tress thought she remembered tonight’s warehouse storing costume supplies before, or possibly a puppet company. Not anymore.

+

Two Olives was trying to start a chainsaw behind her. He kept revving it, but the engine wouldn’t tick over. The cellist vamped and chanted “Getitworkinggetitworking” while Tress set wet towels around the Styrofoam slab where they were going to sacrifice the giant papier-mâché pie. Don’t be too drunk, she begged whoever was going to be closest to the fire extinguisher on the far side of the stage. Have wits. It’s low and blow.

+

Then the violinist stepped out of the way, flowers jiggling in her headpiece, and there was Two Olives with those spiral contact lenses that made it impossible to tell if he was high or not, swinging the chainsaw over his head like a pole dancer and shouting “Brew! Ha! Ha!”

+

He stopped at the downstage center mic. Fire plumed out from somewhere. Hair spray plus a lighter made a cheap flame thrower. The trombone player gave the signal. Tress lifted her piccolo into position, inhaled across the nickel mouthpiece, and was twelve again. Knees loose, gut dropped open, cat-butt embouchure. You played the piccolo by grimacing through your teeth.

+

She rippled up her range until she could only hear baby notes. The loudest sound was the drums, but between beats she could still hear the clatter of bugle beads on her dress as she danced in place. Eight measures and then the spotlight lit the oversized pie on the Styrofoam slab and Two Olives sawed into it. Rockette boys catwalked through the crowd with trays of pre-cut slices and the vibraphone rolled out a fast minor melody like hail on a windshield.

+

The warehouse went up during the next song.

+

The showy part of the show was over. The band dropped into their sweet spot, bass kicking off a slow, weird When the Saints Go Marching In. Tress heard a shout when she handed off her break to the trombone with a twist of notes. Two halves of a glowworm clapped with all four hands and Tress ducked her head in a bow.

+

When she looked up again, Two Olives was prancing around downstage with the chainsaw. There was no chain on it, but she still didn’t like being so close when he was holding a weaponable tool. He was cute in a delinquent kind of way, but he was unpredictable and she’d hardly ever seen him sober.

+

As she looked he twirled on one pointy boot and something flashed on his purple zoot suit, near the jacket pocket: a writhing streak of flame, crawling toward his lapel.

+

She darted forward to put it out—he must not be able to feel it yet—bending down to snatch a wet towel, still looking at him, and for one startled second she was close enough to get a good look.

+

It was some kind of animal. A lizard.

+

And it was on fire.

+

It was about three inches long with a knobby spine made of individual white flames.It’s a projection, she thought, a laser. And she slowed, second guessing.

+

It snaked up Two Olives’ collar while she stood watching the pulse under its red-blue sequined scales. Its glowing eyes flickered. Its long feathered tail moved in tandem with its beaded legs. It looked like an artist’s idea of a salamander. A tiny, elaborate toy.

+

No, it looked like a puppet. The puppets they used to make right here.

+

But it was alive.

+

The salamander slinkied into Two Olives’ open mouth, and Tress’s stomach twisted. It’s on fire. And he’s eating it.

+

Two Olives reared up like a startled horse. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the party lenses, but he revved the chainsaw, whipping it around like he didn’t care what he hit, and jumped off the stage.

+

A cymbal crash rang out behind them. The drummer must think it was all part of the show. The cellist sawed away, jeweled lashes brushing her white and black cheeks.

+

The chainsaw blade was on fire now. Two Olives must have replaced the chain with something flammable. He choked the little machine down to an ominous purr and swiped the blade along the curtains under the stage as he danced into the crowd.

+

Dirty smoke was leaking from backstage, not dry ice fog, not any kind of smoke that belonged at a party. The stage lights turned it yellow and pink. Tress looked out at the floor. The colors were echoed in rave sticks around people’s necks and arms. Didn’t anybody realize this wasn’t stage fire anymore, it was fire fire?

+

The dancers looked like they were under a spell, stepping and bouncing to the beat. Oh when the saints. Go marching in.

+

Two Olives was at a table now. He lit a row of shot glasses on fire with one long swoop. A schoolgirl in fishnets stared openmouthed at the flames, the jewel in her tongue flashing.

+

I have to do something. Or we’re all going to die.

+

Tress’s phone was backstage. She couldn’t get to it, not with all the smoke back there. The smell added to the sweat and beer and the burning gasoline from the chainsaw. She knelt down and felt for the fire extinguisher under the stage, just in time to see it in Two Olives’ hands. He whooped and sprayed foam all over the schoolgirl’s boots until the last few wispy puffs drooped out.

+

Think.

+

If he had the fire extinguisher, then the chainsaw was unattended.

+

They were still on the first verse of When the Saints. Tress worked her way upstage and slapped her forearms down on the snare to get the drummer’s attention. He would know what to do. He looked dazed, then irritated, then his black-ringed eyes went huge and he scooped up all the equipment he could carry and scrambled off the stage, heaving dancers out of his way.

+

The chainsaw revved up again, out of sight but unmistakable.

+

The violinist stirred at the drummer’s escape noise, looked at Tress, and bundled herself off the stage too. Tress watched her go, feeling helpless. The trombone player had long since gone out to play on the dance floor. She couldn’t hear him. She hoped he was close to an exit. The cellist was gone too, and her cello.

+

Now that the band wasn’t playing anymore, the house music came back on. That was jarring. Couldn’t the sound guy see what was happening? It’s an emergency. Call the fire department, she begged silently, but sirens outside would be bad. There’d be a riot. She had no way to communicate anyway, with the stage mics muted now. Why hadn’t she thought about using them before? Right, because there’d be a riot.

+

Maybe a minute had gone by since the chainsaw blade caught fire. Why couldn’t the dancers smell the smoke? They were shuffling to the doofdoofdoof beat, feeling the bliss of whatever they’d taken.

+

She needed to do something. Fast. She couldn’t get to the sound board fast. With the back on fire, the only way out was through the front door. She looked at the ceiling, where shiny fabric was looped around the exposed pipes, and wondered if the sprinklers were working. Not likely.

+

She couldn’t see Two Olives anymore, but drinks flamed on all the tables against one wall, so he’d been there. She scanned the floor, looking for a phone she could borrow and distantly wondering why Two Olives had swallowed the salamander. Was he on something that made him hallucinate? Or… was she? Was the salamander—or whatever it was—looking for someone who would follow its orders?

+

A wall flickered where a poster was on fire. Worry about that later. An angel with neon hearts around his nipples had his phone out. Tress jumped off the stage and yelled in his ear, “There’s a fire! Call 911!” Pointed to the poster. Fear bloomed on his sweaty face. He poked his screen. She held her breath.

+

He shook his head and showed her the NO SIGNAL message. There was probably a block on tonight, to keep wasted people from sending out live feeds of whatever laws they were breaking in the port-a-potties. But no emergency service? Now would be a good time for the cops to shut down this outlaw party.

+

She seized the bucket off the stage and shoved it at the angel, yelling for him to use the towels, not sure if he could hear her over the thumping music. He nodded, wide-eyed, grabbed two towels and held out one to the gymnast beside him.

+

The gymnast kept dancing.

+

Tress jabbed the gymnast with her piccolo. He snapped out of his trance and she steered them both toward the wall posters, hoping they wouldn’t panic.

+

She turned to face the crown, then realised: she’d poked the gymnast with her piccolo. What an idiot. She knew better than to put her instrument in harm’s way.

+

But maybe she could use it.

+

She stepped onto the low stage and stood in front of the muted microphones. She lifted the piccolo to her mouth and zipped up the D major scale as loudly as she could. She played the fastest six seconds of the Dalbavie.

+

She looked out. No reaction. Of course, nobody could hear her over the thumping music. The angel and the gymnast were shaking people, pointing, but something was off. They couldn’t get anyone’s attention. The dancers just kept dancing.

+

She waved her arms, gesturing toward the exit like an airport ground control worker. “Go, you morons! Get out of here!” Yelling was no use, but she yelled anyway.

+

Then the music got quieter and rushed voice came over the PA. “Attention, please, emergency, everyone go to the doors!” Crackle, pause. “Hurry!”

+

The sound guy must have smelled the smoke, or maybe someone in the band had gotten his attention. Not helpful, sound guy. Here comes that riot.

+

But the crowd kept dancing. Like they were tranced, brainwashed, indoctrinated—

+

Inspiration. Flutes were war instruments, she’d heard somewhere. They’d used fifes on the battlefield. She was armed. She had been all along.

+

She blew out short notes, rough and loud, steady rhythm, dragged in a smoky breath and blew again. The piccolo screamed like a police whistle. Good. She wanted the dancers to move in an orderly fashion, not lose their minds and stampede. Eight beats. She tried for a heartbeat tempo. She couldn’t hear the house music anymore. The sound guy must have turned it all the way off. She heard a cough, a stifled wail, the rumble of the generator.

+

She needed drums, but the drummer was long gone. She’d have to be the percussion section. She stamped her feet in their awful shoes, set the beat, and a few dancers started marching with her.

+

She jumped off the stage in between notes and started toward the exit. Dancers shuffled in place and made her an aisle. Sixteen heartbeats. She felt them behind her, moving in rhythm. Good. She couldn’t tell if the crowd was still in a trance, but if they were with her that was enough.

+

There was a bottleneck at the main door, where you entered single file to pay. That was going to be a problem. But the only other way out was through the back, and the back was on fire.

+

She was the Pied Piper, leading the crowd. She was sweaty and lightheaded, and had to force herself to keep breathing in and blowing out over the mouthpiece.

+

She reached the curtained doorway at the entrance. This was it. Almost there. She turned to see the partiers surging behind her. Wide awake now. Ready to burst forward. Ready to trample her.

+

She started to push the curtain aside, but just then Two Olives stepped through it.

+

He blocked the whole doorway. There was just enough room for the two of them between the crowd and the curtain. His torso almost bumped hers.

+

Once, she might have been interested in getting chest to chest with messy-haired Two Olives. Not now.

+

The chainsaw was gone, but Tress didn’t doubt he could still light something on fire. His skin looked tight and crackly. Flames licked the seams on his jacket. His hair was singed and a cinder dropped onto his striped lapel, leaving a smoking hole in the fabric.

+

He leaned in the narrow doorway, shoulder against the frame. His body looked relaxed but his face was hard. The contact lenses were gone.

+

He opened his mouth. Tress’s stomach swirled as she waited for the salamander to crawl out. But he puckered his chapped lips and blew, and a gumball of fire shot up. Close to the dusty curtain. Way too close.

+

People were rustling and starting to shout, but Two Olives’ soft voice cut through. “Hey chica.”

+

“Let us out, T.O.” Tress’s voice sounded too loud in her ears. All bravado.

+

Two Olives leaned down, reached out a finger to flick the beads at the low neckline of her dress. He didn’t have to reach far. “How about a kiss?”

+

Someone behind Tress gave a sharp inhale. Two Olives’ face was close to hers. She felt the heat coming from him, smelled burning cloth. He hadn’t gotten burned from the inside, somehow. But if he touched her, her burns would be terrible.

+

She glanced back at the crowd behind her, all zombie makeup and sparkly wigs and the white eyes of panicked horses. A park ranger urged “Do it.” People were shoving. Coughing.

+

She didn’t have a choice. She’d held back the horde until now, but the real panic was about to start. “Just let us out, okay?” she said.

+

“I’m kissing a death’s head, y’all.” Most of Two Olives’ makeup had melted, but the skin around his eyes was still black. “Two skulls, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

+

“You’ll let us by?” Please be calling 911, she begged whoever was outside. Somebody had to be outside.

+

“Yeah.” His voice sounded thick. Hungry.

+

She moved closer. One step and they were touching. She felt the flame in his mouth. The piccolo still in her hand, useless now, useless tomorrow.

+

She heard crackling as his burning lips touched hers, but she didn’t feel anything.

+

Two Olives gripped the back of her head with one hand and held the curtain open with the other. People streamed past them. It lasted a long time. Four heartbeats. Eight. She stopped counting. Partiers smashed her and Two Olives against the wall on their way outside.

+

She was the last one out. Beautiful, beautiful fire trucks sat outside, blinking in the dark street. People huddled together or sloped away in twos and threes, looking back, telling each other what happened.

+

She didn’t see Two Olives. I should look for the band, she thought. But she couldn’t feel her legs, couldn’t feel her hands. Is my piccolo still here? Audition day tomorrow.

+

Her vision filled with darkness, and she realized she was sitting on the curb with a firefighter standing over her. “Honey, you okay? Oh, no, you’re not. Your face. Your mouth.”

+

The firefighter turned to give an order into her shoulder radio. And then Tress was in a swarm of face masks and latex gloves. And then the pain hit.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Alight” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Skye Allen

+

+ + Author image of Skye Allen + + + Skye Allen wrote Pretty Peg and The Songbird Thief, both queer YA fantasy novels. The Songbird Thief was a Goldie Award finalist and won a FAPA President’s Book Award. She has had stories in Toasted Cheese and Of Dragons and Magic and poetry in Insomnia and Sinister Wisdom. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writers workshop. She is also a musician and occasionally performs around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife. She/her pronouns. You can find her at her website, and she tweets as @eppiemorrie.

+

© Skye Allen 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: 1987599, and dlonrax.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Cartoon

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Liam Baldwin

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Geeks Cloacing by Liam Baldwin
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Geeks Cloacing

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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To celebrate our new skin, we have all new meat on the bone!

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-23/curse-midnight.html b/issue-23/curse-midnight.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9e7b21dd --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/curse-midnight.html @@ -0,0 +1,437 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A Curse at Midnight — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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A Curse at Midnight

+

Moustapha Mbacké Diop

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for A Curse at Midnight by +
+ + + + +

I + + was at my window that night, soaking up the dazzling rays of moonlight, a tender breeze relaxing my exhausted soul. Make no mistake, the view was not extraordinary. There was just a soothing simplicity in seeing the shriveled mango tree, along with chickens bickering over poor worms and other insects that swarmed below it.

+

This had always been my favorite spot to think, or just be. Although right now, I just wanted to be diverted from the pain, its ribbons of fire twirling around my abdomen, which felt gaping and empty at the same time.

+

“The painful token of childbirth will not leave your body alongside your baby,” my mother had said with her guttural voice, altered by years of smoking tobacco with her old, cracked pipe. “You better get used to it, Magar. The pain will be here for a while.”

+

For some reason, the women in my bloodline always have difficult pregnancies. Being married for almost ten years, I myself had almost given up hope of getting pregnant, but last year, the miracle happened. The pregnancy had been riddled with complications, and I was still recovering, three days after giving birth to my son.

+

I turned and looked at him, my mouth curving into a weary smile. He was sleeping, my sweet boy, liberated into this ruthless world after causing me so much worry. However, just looking at his angelic face, hands tightly clenched in his sleep, I realized that all the pain, mood swings and fearful tears were worth it.

+

With a deep sigh, I fiddled with the sachet I was holding in my right hand, my thoughts going to my mother’s words when she gave it to me.

+

“Don’t play the little toubab with me, Magar, not this time,” she had said, the day we came back from the hospital. She held out three twigs taken from a broom, a chunk of charcoal and rolls of black twine. “Keep this close to your boy, especially where he sleeps at night.”

+

My mother would often use that word—toubab—to taunt me, since it referred to people of European lineage, or anyone speaking decent French, really. Neither she nor my little sister Astou had gone to school, but I was able to finish college and was teaching math at a public school nearby.

+

I had told her, “Yaye, you know I don’t believe in this stuff. We’ll be just fine without it, I assure you.” But I should’ve known there was no use arguing with Yaye Awa Diedhiou when spiritual stuff was involved.

+

In the small town we lived in, people still visited her from time to time, asking for protection charms and ritual baths. Her ancestors had been the spiritual protectors of our kin, and I was sure she knew more about the old arts than she let on. After she retired from the army she came back here to fulfill her role, like her mother did before her.

+

Yaye Awa had expected me to do the same, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with all that hocus-pocus. Astou, on the other hand, was thrilled to play the chamberlain, and meticulously organized the appointments that Yaye Awa assigned. My mother would pass on a few bits of knowledge in exchange, and, of course, would never miss an opportunity to tell me how delighted she was that my little sister was her worthy heiress, unlike the good-for-nothing toubab that I was.

+

“My house, my rules,” she had concluded, forcing the charms into my hands with a stare, challenging me to persist in my rejection.

+

Nope, I was not suicidal. Therefore I accepted the offering, already planning to throw it in the trash can, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

+

Now, without a second glance, I got rid of it before taking my phone to call my husband. Ismaïla emigrated to the U.S. before we were married and had been working there ever since, returning to Senegal only twice a year. This time, he was coming back for the special occasion, and I wanted to hear from him before he got on the plane.

+

We spent a few minutes talking, even if it was mostly me listening to him repeat how excited he was to meet his son. I couldn’t help but smile, knowing how much he had wanted this to happen, but he still managed to stay patient and caring with me, as much as he could despite the distance. I knew his parents (uptight, conservative people they were) wanted him to marry a second wife. I was concerned that he might not be able to resist them forever, and could already hear my sister’s dry laugh.

+

“Senegalese men are all the same,” she’d say. “Your charms are withering, or you’re not laying children by the minute? They just find a younger, prettier co-wife.”

+

Putting aside those silly thoughts, I hung up after he wished me a good night, asking me to kiss his son for him, but the weariness looming over me became more difficult to ignore. I changed into an old shirt and baggy sweatpants before going to bed, and covered my loose cornrows with a head scarf.

+

Tomorrow will be an ecstatic day, I said to myself. Ismaïla was coming back, after five long months, and he would finally meet his son.

+

The tepid lilac sheets, courtesy of my thoughtful sister, were a blessing for my sore muscles. Wrapping myself even tighter, I inhaled the rich smell of gowé incense that impregnated the sheets. Soon enough, the steady song of cicadas and the purifying breeze shrouded me in a peaceful sleep.

+

 

+

A + +nd I abruptly awoke, in the middle of the night, my heart pounding so fast I felt as if I’d just run a marathon. Not a sound was to be heard, apart from my ragged breath. Lost amid this terror coming out of nowhere, I turned to check on my baby.

+

An abomination stared at me, crouched right where my baby was supposed to be.

+

A body, furred and bulky like that of a gorilla, giving off a pungent smell of wet excrement and rotten corpses. A face, slowly losing the humanity it usurped, with red and wild eyes fixed on mine. A mouth wide opened, filled with sharp, irregular teeth which sunk deep into the flesh above my right clavicle when the creature pounced on me, and scarlet rivers of blood splattered across the sheets.

+

I howled, tears of shock filling my eyes.

+

Answering my distress call, the door opened violently. Yaye Awa was in her night outfit, an old shirt like mine and a loincloth. She pointed her old rifle at the creature drinking my blood as I lay paralyzed with terror. It stared back, turning away from its gruesome meal, but with steady hands and unflinching eyes my mother fired, and hit it straight in the stomach.

+

Thick blood oozed from its wound as the creature screeched and jumped away from me. At a speed near-invisible to the human eye, it escaped through the window, leaving me bloody and horrified.

+

My mother leaned through the window, peering over a courtyard immersed in darkness as she tried to see where it went. Giving up, she ran to my bedside and began to examine my wound.

+

“Thank God, that bastard didn’t cut too deep,” she said, tearing up the sheets and using the shreds to apply pressure on the wound.

+

“Yaye, where is my baby? What the hell was that thing?” I asked in a tremulous voice.

+

My sister walked in, rubbing her eyes and rearranging her loincloth back in place. At the sight of all the blood covering me, she slapped her hands over her gasping mouth.

+

“Bring the green sunguf from my chest,” Yaye yelled, “quick!”

+

Without a word, Astou ran to the living room where my mother received her clients, and came back a minute later carrying a jar filled with some green powder.

+

“Brace yourself, daughter. This is going to hurt.” She poured some powder into her palm, muttering words in dioula, her native tongue, before she sprinkled it over my wound.

+

I couldn’t contain a cry when the substance met my exposed flesh, but the scorching pain was brief. The powder absorbed the coagulated blood and the demon’s saliva, not closing the wound as you’d expect a strange magical powder to do, but drying it up and leaving a protective residue like green salt crystals. While Yaye was working her charms, Astou had removed the sheets and threw them in a corner of the room. When our mother was finished, she helped me change into new clothes, and before I knew it, a cup of water was slipped into my hand.

+

“Yaye, where is he?” I asked again.

+

“You didn’t leave the talisman I gave you by his side, did you? Stupid toubab girl,” she sputtered.

+

“Please!” I cried. “Where is my son?”

+

“That thing who attacked you was a demon,” she finally said. “A changeling, so to speak.”

+

“A what?”

+

“You heard me well. It wasn’t some rabid animal, but a djinné, traded for your son. Obviously it was a child too, or all of us would be dead already.”

+

Her words sounded like complete gibberish to me, but part of me knew they were true. All the stories she used to tell us when Astou and I were little, that I was too afraid of and that later, my logical mind couldn’t see as anything other than old woman tales. This was a nightmare come true. What kind of mother was I to let my son be abducted? In my own house?

+

“It still doesn’t tell me where my baby is. Yaye, what if he’s in danger?”

+

“Is this who I think it is?”Astou asked, ignoring me.

+

Yaye nodded, her flat nose wrinkling as if she smelled something particularly foul. “It’s Ciré, that old hag. Heard she was messing with djinné now.”

+

“Why would she take my son?” I shouted, fear now entangled with rage. “I don’t even know this woman!”

+

Yaye took a deep breath, her black, deep-set eyes avoiding mine. “I might be responsible for this. She is the one person who hates me enough to try and hurt me or my family. And she might have the power to break through the barriers I raised around the house, allowing the djinné to enter while she took your baby. Around sunset, I did have a slight feeling that they might’ve been disrupted, but I didn’t give it much of a thought. I am getting old.”

+

She sighed. “Her beef is with me, Magar, and she’s always liked to prey on the weak.” She scowled. “To think that she and I were friends.”

+

Without giving me time to react, she got up on her feet, and handed the gun to Astou. I was more than flabbergasted to see my baby sister handle it with an expert touch, her delicate fingers tinkering with it in a way far beyond my understanding. “Yaye taught me,” she said with a little smile in reaction to my widened eyes.

+

“You gonna stay here in case Ismaïla comes back before we do,” my mother said to her, “or in case that thing comes back.”

+

Lord, I had almost forgotten about my husband. What was I going to say to him? New tears threatened to come forth at the thought of everything going wrong, but I kept them at bay. Tears would not bring my baby back, now was time for action.

+

Eyes heavenward, I fervently prayed Allah for no harm to come to my baby, then I turned towards my mother, my fists clenched. “What are we going to do?” I said.

+

The corners of her mouth quirked up in a devilish smile, and Yaye walked out of the room, beckoning me to follow her.

+

“I’m gonna change into something more suitable, and we are getting your son back. Nobody messes with my family. It’s time to teach that hideous goat a lesson.”

+

 

+

L + +ess than ten minutes later, my mother and I walked out of the house, stalking the dormant streets. She was wearing a sweater and her old military pants, and I was dressed in sportswear. Yaye was almost sixty years old, but at this moment she didn’t look a day over forty. In her right hand she held her old pipe, and over her shoulder was a satchel containing some trinkets, powders, and what she said was a ceremonial knife.

+

“Do you know where she lives?” I asked.

+

“I do. But I have to warn you, Magar. The road to her den is filled with deceptions.” She grabbed my neck and hugged it. “I’ll need you to be brave and to keep your head straight. For the sake of your son.”

+

I nodded, a lump in my throat as I followed her lead. Yet I couldn’t help but resent her for what was happening. If I were not her daughter, wouldn’t my son be at my side, safe and sound? Still, our priority right now was rescuing him, there would be plenty of time to begrudge her later.

+

Leaving our block, she took a fork to our left. There were fewer and fewer houses, and soon we had reached the forest edge. Different types of trees loomed over us, Flamboyant and Neem, threatening our very presence in these woods, making us feel unwelcome. The sounds of small animals grew louder, as if they were angered by our nocturnal intrusion.

+

Yaye looked unconcerned, but so soon after a creepy supernatural encounter I was terrified by every dark corner, every shadow that my mind saw moving. Stumbling on an insidious root, I would’ve fallen on my face if it weren’t for Yaye, who stabilized me with her hand.

+

“Watch your step,” she growled.

+

Breathless, I took a second to catch my breath, leaning against the rough, hostile trunk of a baobab tree. How could my life have become this madness? I was a teacher, a mathematician, my husband a man who flew across oceans by plane—how could I now be a hunter of demons, beside a woman whose magic I’d long since stopped believing in?

+

“Come on, girl,” this same woman snapped, “or are you too tired already?”

+

As we walked, I remembered the story Yaye told us for the first time when our father was dying. With tears in her eyes, she spoke of the man who once trapped a female djinné, stealing strands of her hair, hence binding her to his service. Yet despite him being the master, he fell in love with the djinné and after a couple of years freed her from her bond. The djinné left him, returning to her realm, and he died of sorrow soon after that.

+

This was the place for magic, in stories to distract children from the imminent tragedy awaiting them! But here I was now, terrified for my son, the most precious thing in the world to me. I’d shed blood and tears to bring my child into this world, and now he was in the hands of an evil, unknown woman. An evil, unknown witch.

+

“What’s your history with this Ciré anyway?” I asked as the trees closed in on us like a vegetal prison.

+

“She was my best friend, back when we were little girls,” Yaye said, after a reluctant moment of silence. “We played together, ran around like headless chicken, even passed initiation together. I believed nothing could tear us apart.”

+

“What happened, then?”

+

“Jealousy happened, Magar. I was better in every domain, a virtuoso in the old arts. I was in line to inherit my mother’s role as our spiritual guardian, and she had twenty and one brothers who preceded her. I was the apple of my mother’s eyes, the pride of our ancestors, Mother used to say. But Ciré’s parents couldn’t even see her for the talented girl she was. Perhaps I’m partially responsible for what she became, considering the fact that I drifted from her, from everyone really, in order to find my own path.”

+

“You feel sorry for her,” I realized.

+

“I did. After that, from the way she interacted with me when we occasionally saw each other, I knew she blamed me for everything. I received spiritual attacks, curses meant to cause a fatal disease, or make me barren. Of course, I shooed them away like mosquitoes, but now she takes my grandson? I can’t afford to feel pity towards someone who harms the innocent.”

+

Yaye didn’t say a word after that, and it was only then that I noticed the sudden silence, far from the inimical murmur of earlier. This late-night trek did nothing to alleviate my claustrophobia, especially with moonlight unable to penetrate the canopy anymore. To elude the deafening darkness, we had nothing but our feeble flashlights. Uneasy, I was about to ask her if we had arrived when the ground gave way beneath me.

+

The earth swallowed me whole, like a starving grave, and I fell.

+

I screamed at the top of my lungs, calling for my mother, my deceased father, Ismaïla, anyone. The darkness itself was a monster, clawing at my soul and whispering unholy words to me, unspeakable phrases coming straight from the bowels of Hell. Feeding off my every fear and torment, the tunnel coiled around me as if it were a python and I its prey.

+

I began to suffocate, mouth and nostrils full of decaying dirt, heart overflowing with dread, when something like a tree branch wrapped tightly around my waist and dragged me from the clutches of death.

+

It was Yaye’s old pipe, planted in her palm and slowly absorbing her blood, thus becoming an extension of her arm.

+

But I could barely see any of that, because the moment I stopped coughing from all the dirt I swallowed, the screams kicked in. I wailed like a wounded animal, and in that instant I had no control over my own mind.

+

My mother held my head between her hands as she wiped my face with her sleeve. Then she slapped me, hard. “Daughter, get a hold of yourself!”

+

At last I stopped screaming, my throat as sore as if caught in barbed wire. I clung to Yaye, desperately longing for a semblance of human touch after this near-death experience. She allowed me to, vigorously rubbing my back before I pushed her away, gulping down air like a drowned woman.

+

“I just gave birth to you a second time,” she snickered as she helped me up.

+

I sniffed. “Yaye, you slapped me.”

+

“Oh, but you’re welcome,” she said, all sweetness.

+

I couldn’t help but smile, picking up my flashlight and turning it back on. The aftertaste of tainted soil stuck in the back of my throat, and I thanked the Lord that it wasn’t the rainy season at this moment, or I would’ve ingested bacteria and all their cousins.

+

“What was that?” I asked. “The tunnel felt… alive somehow.”

+

“It was. She booby-trapped all the perimeter surrounding her house, and this pitfall was spiced up with djinné magic. But look. We’re here.”

+

She pointed her finger to a hut that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It was partially hidden by scary trees, so contorted and shriveled our mango tree back at home paled in comparison. I couldn’t see any other traps, but now I knew they would be there.

+

Yaye went ahead of me, silently indicating the spots I had to avoid putting my feet on. We slowly crossed this minefield that way, in the dark, given that the moon refused to light up this wretched place.

+

It was 5:00 a.m. by my watch when the decrepit door appeared within sight, but Yaye pulled at my sleeve, motioning me to stop. She buried her hands inside her satchel before taking out her powders, stuffing a small quantity of them into her pipe and lighting it. She inhaled the fumes deep into her lungs, then with a shiver she turned the pipe over to me.

+

“There’s no way I’m smoking that,” I whispered. “What if it’s drugs?”

+

“What if it’s drugs,” she said mockingly. “These are just magically enhanced herbs. Besides, I crushed them myself, don’t worry.”

+

“That’s what a low-class drug dealer would say.”

+

She rolled her eyes and shoved the pipe into my hands. With a sigh, I inhaled the strange smoke, which smelled of dried basil and kola nut—a surprisingly balanced combination. Then strangest thing happened: it was like lightning bolts ran through my veins like raging steeds, starting from my neck all the way down my limbs. I coughed, my eyes stinging from the smoke, and what could only be magic running through my body.

+

“What we just inhaled will protect us against any curse that goat could throw at us,” Yaye said. “But I’m gonna need you to do something.”

+

She murmured instructions into my ears, and my shoulders tightened, beads of sweat tickling my upper lip. The consequences of her strategy could be dangerous, but I knew that to get my son back I was ready to risk everything. We both were.

+

At last, she took out her ceremonial knife, a rusted blade with a handle covered with several strips of red cloth and centered by a single cowrie shell. With it, she drew a cross in the air, and I distinctly heard the sound of fabric being torn. Without a second’s hesitation, she busted down the door and we walked in.

+

The air inside the hut was stale and overwhelming, making my skin itch. The light of a fire with dancing greenish flames allowed me to discern the configuration of the place. The first thing I saw was my baby who, thank the Heavens, looked unharmed. He was lying on a shabby bed in the corner of the room, the edges of its sheets way too close to the fire for my taste. There was an entire section of the wall in front of me covered in wooden statues, representing unknown deities with long, eerie faces and protruding abdomens, side by side with stylized animals. A chill went down my spine when I realized that blood still crusted some of them.

+

My inspection only lasted a few seconds before the owner of the premises, rummaging in an antique iron chest, noticed our intrusion. She was short and seemed frail, younger than I expected, although her constantly scowling face didn’t make her look very good. She wore an ankara dress that had seen better days, and her ashy feet were bare.

+

When she saw my mother, she screamed, veins popping out and hatred in her eyes.

+

Good, because I too had hatred to spare. That woman abducted my baby, and judging by the various sharp instruments at the foot of the bed, she was about to hurt him. It took every ounce of my willpower not to immediately rush to my son, but I had to trust Yaye to dismantle the situation quickly.

+

Like an angry goat, the woman jumped at my mother’s throat, sending a trail of stinking smoke in our direction. Yaye shrugged it off and advanced on her opponent, but I instantly fell to the floor, motionless. As useless as I was, I could only watch as the two women argued, blood ready to spill.

+

“Give me my grandson back, Ciré,” my mother warned, promises of ghastly murder exuding from her voice, “and I might consider breaking only a few of your fingers.”

+

“You’re in no position to negotiate!” Ciré said in a grating tone. “I will suffer no interruption, your turn will come soon enough after I’m done with the baby.”

+

I hissed at the mention of my son, and the woman gave me an unfaltering, dismissive glance. “What were you going to do with him, huh?” I managed to say.

+

“His blood will reveal all your mother’s secrets to me, and I will curse her whole bloodline, until the last descendant. The only thing that remains to be done is for me to harvest the first ray of sunlight. At dawn, Yaye Awa Diedhiou, you will be done for!”

+

“That’s low, even for a powerless crone like you,” my mother spat as she wielded her pipe, which transformed into a gnarled, full-sized staff. “This folly ends now.”

+

“Not so fast. Didn’t you hear? I have a new friend now.” Green flames illuminating her gaunt, demented face, Ciré brandished what looked like strands of hair: glossy, purple locks held together by a scarlet string.

+

“Djinné hair,” my mother gasped as the woman blew thrice on the locks, stepping back with an evil grin. Not a second later, the air in front of Yaye rippled, as if we were seeing it from underwater. A great gust of wind blew across the room, heralding the approach of something otherworldly, and my baby began to cry.

+

A shadow appeared before my eyes, its curves becoming clearer and clearer. It was a female being, more than seven feet tall, with dark, naked skin and broad shoulders. Her bulging eyes were surmounted by hirsute eyebrows, and her luxuriant hair was so long it trailed on the dusty floor, matching the locks Ciré had in the palm of her hand.

+

Ciré had perverted that sad but beautiful tale my mother told so long ago by doing what she did, and I didn’t need to be a master in the old arts to know what. And in that moment, I heard my mother’s voice in my head.

+

“That vixen thinks the world revolves around her, so just pretend to have been thrown out of the equation, even though you’re magically protected. She’s working with dangerous forces above our reach, so you’ll have to be the one who takes her out. All her attention will be focused on me, so I’ll be your distraction. Just trust me, and wait until the right moment.”

+

“Because of you, I never had anything in this world,” Ciré was ranting. “Everyone turned away from me and looked up to you, their precious pupil. Now, I have the upper hand, and I say this ends now.”

+

Pointing at my mother, she howled at the djinné in a strange language of cackles and hoarse sounds. Seeing the last spark of sanity leave the woman’s eyes and replaced by sheer madness, I knew what those words meant.

+

As instructed, the djinné charged my mother, lifting her off the ground as easily as a twig. Yaye struck it with a resolute blow of her staff, aiming for its flank, but it only bounced off its thick skin. The djinné growled at my mother, baring fangs very much like those which its offspring had sunk into me. There was no going back from what was about to happen, and the djinné buried its claws into her right flank.

+

My mother cried out, and I felt for her as Ciré’s eyes lit up with ferocious delight—but I’d awaited the right time. And now it was.

+

I dropped my act and hurtled towards Ciré, the only thing she saw coming was my fist right in her face. I heard a satisfying crack when my punch broke her nose, sending blood flowing down her face, though my knuckles probably broke in the process.

+

I ignored the stinging pain and pulled the locks of hair out of Ciré’s grip, oblivious to her cries of pain as she held her face. The djinné dropped my mother to the ground to confront its mistress’s new assailant, but I threw the locks into the impatient green flames and they were immediately consumed, breaking the bond enslaving the demon.

+

With a roar of triumph, it leaped on top of Ciré, piercing her chest with its claws. Both of them vanished just the way it came, leaving nothing but Ciré’s shrieks of terror fading on the sudden wind. Then it and they were gone.

+

 

+

E + +ntirely drained, I struggled to get up and help my mother, the same way she helped me just a few hours ago.

+

“Go see to your son,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “I’ll be just fine.”

+

I nodded, tears of relief streaming down my face as I got up and ran to my baby. He was breathless, eyes puffy from all that crying, and right now I was no better. Calming myself by slowly inhaling his sweet scent, I tried singing the lullaby Yaye used to sing to us when we were upset, and I heard her chuckles when I shamelessly butchered the dioula words. Fortunately, it worked, and he fell asleep between my arms.

+

Yaye got up, residues of the healing powder on her fingers and her bloody clothes.

+

“Are you alright?” I asked.

+

“Takes more than a couple of scratches to overcome me, girl. We need to get out of here, it’s dawn.”

+

I frowned, realizing that it would be complicated to carry my baby through the uneven path back to our home. But as always, Yaye was one step ahead of me. Without a word, she pulled out the bed sheet, for lack of anything better, and tied the baby securely against my back.

+

“That, little toubab, is how it’s done.”

+

We exchanged a smile as we got out of the hut into the rising dawn. It was incredible how just a little more light could make a place look less frightening, and the way back was nothing like the hellish track we had to face earlier. The forest was awakening, and listening to the reassuring sound of birds chirping, it occurred to me that people back in town would be awake too, women pounding millet and sweeping courtyards.

+

Not once did we turn around to look at the old hut, but we were both thinking about Ciré.

+

“What do you think is going to happen to her?” I asked, as we sneaked behind houses, careful not to raise too many questions about my disheveled look and Yaye’s bloodstained clothes.

+

“She messed with the wrong forces, and now she’s paying the price,” Yaye said, her voice saddened. “Djinné are proud creatures, and this one sounded way too eager to claim retaliation. We may never see Ciré again.”

+

I was expecting that answer, but I didn’t feel sorry for her, not in the slightest. She had an awful ending, but she brought it on herself. That’s where a life of hatred led her, and evil could only appeal to evil. I knew my mother felt remorse about what had happened to her, even if she wouldn’t admit it. It wasn’t her fault though, and neither was my son’s abduction by a bitter, vengeful woman. It would be unfair of me to still blame her, especially after she put her life on the line to save my baby.

+

When we finally got home, Astou was clearly relieved to see us back in one piece—to a certain extent—and she immediately tended to my mother’s wounds, assuring me that they were not severe.

+

She also told me that my husband had left me a text message, saying that he had landed safely and would be here in a few hours. He arrived in the early afternoon and found us all seated in the living room. Yaye, smoking her enigmatic pipe; Astou, making tea while humming around whatever mbalax song was trending at the moment; and me, breastfeeding our baby as if nothing had happened.

+

It was only in that moment, when Ismaïla held us both close to his chest, his eyes tired but gleaming with all the love he had for us, that I allowed myself to ignore the decaying scent prowling around our home.

+

Because there was one side to the stories that my mother never told us before, and that she finally revealed to me right when we arrived at our doorstep, dirty and exhausted.

+

“Once a djinné gets a taste of your blood, my little toubab, it will never stop coming after you, not until he drinks it all. One day, that little djinné baby will return to feed again.

+

“But when that time comes, we will be ready.”

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “A Curse at Midnight” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Moustapha Mbacké Diop

+

+ + Author image of Moustapha Mbacké Diop + + + Moustapha Mbacké Diop is a Senegalese author living in Dakar. He is in his fourth year of medical school, and when he’s not stressing about finals or hospital rounds, he reads and writes mainly fantasy. Obsessed with mythology and African folklore, he has published an urban fantasy trilogy written in French, named Teranga Chronicles. You can find him at his website and on Goodreads, and he tweets as @mdmoustaf.

+

© Moustapha Mbacké Diop 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Pexels, josephvm, Skitterphoto, and darksouls1.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-23/editorial.html b/issue-23/editorial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..73115ee8 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/editorial.html @@ -0,0 +1,295 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Editorial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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Welcome to the new-look Mythaxis!

+

When this magazine came into existence, it was created from the code up by original editor Gil Williamson, and if you ask our new webmaster he’ll tell you in some ways it was ahead of its time. And on the surface he created, the magazine’s philosophy was one of simplicity and focus on the fiction: no advertising or other unnecessary distractions from what readers came here for, aside from a few complementary homemade images to accompany each contribution.

+

Twelve years have passed since then, and the ways people read online have become flexible in ways Gil’s code isn’t best able to meet. We decided it was time to bring things a little more up-to-date, so now you should find our select fiction exceedingly mobile device-friendly. You’ll also find our overall style has become a little more contemporary, but we’re still keeping the focus squarely on the stories, no matter the trappings.

+

And to celebrate our new skin, we have all new meat on the bone as well! Skye Allen, Daniel Ausema, Chris Cook, Micah Hyatt, Andrew Johnston, Anya Josephs, Andrea Kriz, Moustapha Mbacké Diop, Dennis Mombauer and Jeffery Scott Sims all make shiny debuts on our pages - and that old bone is our historical cartoonist, Liam Baldwin, with some typically cheeky pensmanship.

+

So, we hope you enjoy the new style - but more, the same commitment to varied, entertaining storytelling that we mean to carry on for another twelve years.

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+

Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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+

ISSUE 23 - Thanks and Salutations!

+

In addition to this issue’s talented contributors, we’d like to express our particular thanks +to “cover” artist Huy Tran Viet, a freelance concept/illustration artist from Danang, Vietnam, +for granting permission to use his striking image, Green Fields. You can see more of +his work at DeviantArt and +ArtStation.

+

And special gratitude is reserved for our Webmaster, Marty Steer, who has not only struggled +valiantly behind the scenes on the magazine’s stylish transformation, but is largely +responsible for new issues being able to come out at all. We hope you’ll agree his +hard work is being put to good use!

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-23/everythings-jake.html b/issue-23/everythings-jake.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d7aef66c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/everythings-jake.html @@ -0,0 +1,508 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Everything's Jake — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Everything's Jake

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Christopher Cook

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+ Story image for Everything's Jake by +
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T + +he Ford family of Troon’s Perch made their nest in a craftsman style home located on a cul-de-sac at the end of a rambunctious street. One of many such streets, actually, in a large neighborhood located just below the state line that separates the southern portion of Carolina from its northern counterpart. Recently, the house had begun to feel a bit too roomy for the trio underneath its roof.

+

Matthew Ford was doing his best to stanch the gloom that had seeped into the collective family conscious during the last two page turns of the Peanuts wall calendar that hung on the door leading to the garage. Matthew’s familial rejuvenative effort is what led him to wear a tiara and a sash while he served breakfast to his daughters one March morning before they ran out the door to their respective destinations: Elizabeth to elementary school and Brittany to daycare. Elizabeth rode the big yellow Twinkie and Brittany hitched with the Clark family from down the street.

+

“Dad, you know you don’t have to wear that stupid crown just to make us feel better,” Elizabeth, the eldest Ford daughter, said. “I’m eleven now and Britt is… how old are you, Britt? I can’t remember when we picked you up by the dumpster at Taco Bell.”

+

“I’m four!” Brittany replied, apparently unfazed by the overt questioning of her lineage. She raised her right hand and held up four sticky fingers. The beaming grin on her face revealed a mouth filled with baby teeth ready to chomp down on whatever grub presented itself, be it carrots or Cow Tales. She had been delighted to find recently that one of her central incisors had begun to wiggle prematurely. Daddy had told her that the Tooth Fairy wouldn’t be visiting until she was at least seven or eight, but this single wobbly tooth portended otherwise.

+

“See, the little snot doesn’t even know she’s supposed to be sad. And I’m over it. I really am,” Liz looked at her father directly, and he picked up on the faintest of flickers in her headlights that implied she was not dealing with it as well as she insisted. “I miss her, but I’m big now. Big girls don’t cry.”

+

Her in this instance was the late Caitlin Ford, brought to a premature death by a teenager that thought such a result inconceivable. This teen certainly hadn’t planned to run Caitlin off the road and into the large oak tree that sat on the northern side of the downtown square. All he had planned on doing was downing two-thirds of a twelve pack of Busch Diesel and getting home before curfew, hopefully with some heavy petting in between. You see, teens are invincible, but they have a nasty habit of flinging lethal shrapnel in all directions on the road to immortality. One such piece of shrapnel caught Caitlin Ford’s spine and snapped it like a dry piece of pasta when she wrapped her SUV around the old oak. Just like that, Big Bertha, the tree named for one of the famous matriarchs from the early days of Troon’s Perch, claimed another fatality. As was typically the case in goings-on such as these, our teenage antagonist walked away unscathed.

+

“First of all, this is a tiara, thank you very much,” Matthew replied, stealing a glance at the empty chair that was tucked neatly under the kitchen table. “And second of all, I’m wearing it because I like it—I think it really accentuates my eyes. You thought I got all done up just for you two?”

+

He lifted his left hand, palm outward, to the right side of his face. With his visage conspicuously hidden from Elizabeth, he shot Brittany a wink so flamboyant that the left part of his mouth popped open. Brittany brought both of her gooey mitts to her own mouth and snickered.

+

“Accentuates, A-C-C-E-N… C-E-N… A-C-C-E-N-T-U-A-T-E-S, accentuates.” Elizabeth ignored the surreptitious exchange and instead decided to show off the spelling skills that she had been sharpening in preparation for the upcoming county bee.

+

“Great job, hon! Now, spell it backward for the class.”

+

“Daa-aad! You know they don’t make you spell it backward at county!”

+

No, but cops sometimes do, Matthew thought. The boys in blue will make you do the whole alphabet backward if they suspect you’ve been hitting the bottle. It’s too bad no one stopped that worthless little shit a couple of months ago and made him do the song and dance.

+

Matthew allowed himself the brief indulgence of imagining what he would do to Spencer Lenore—the aforementioned worthless little shit—if he had him alone in a locked room for five minutes. These thoughts were gone as quickly as they came, and his daughters were none the wiser when he flashed them his patented Daddy Grin.

+

“Now, you two grab your backpacks and get outta here before I decide you’ve got to stay and clean your rooms instead!”

+

Matthew’s thoughts went to his dead wife as his children raced each other to the front door of the house. It’s not fair, none of it. You won’t be here to see Elizabeth in her sock hop outfit, or Britt on her first day of elementary school. I don’t know if I can do this without you. I can try, but I’m no Caitlin Ford.

+

Caitlin, who would shout “Ford girls have heads that are made for tiaras!” as she twirled her daughters around the living room, always knew how to relate to both little ones. Matthew did a reputable job of communicating with the girls, but it was Caitlin who had always demonstrated the magic touch. He felt as though he were destined for a lifetime of serving as the off-brand replacement for his departed wife.

+

Gonna need a bigger closet for all these hats I’m wearing.

+

“Uh, hey Dad!” Matthew was returned to the present by the sound of his oldest daughter’s shout from the front hallway. “You might wanna come see this…”

+

Elizabeth was standing on the stoop with her backpack at her feet; it had apparently dropped from her grip in shock at what she beckoned him to come see. He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked out on the yard.

+

He’d have dropped his backpack too.

+

Couches of all shapes and sizes were scattered across the front lawn of the Ford family dwelling. Sectionals, loveseats, sleepers, futons, all in different leathers and fabrics. There was even one in the shape of a heart, stamped with miniature Cupids shooting amorous arrows at each other. Without taking an exact count, there must be no less than twenty couches resting like steer in his front yard.

+

I guess I’ll be getting an HOA letter about this.

+

“Daddy, can we keep this one? Pretty please?” shouted Brittany. She had wasted no time on something so silly as questioning the absurdity of the situation. Rather, she had sought out the boingiest, bounciest couch and decided to test its mettle. Mid-jump, she continued: “This one’s got good springs—puh-lease, daddy!”

+

Matthew had always assumed that the first thing for which his youngest daughter begged him with such fervor would be a puppy in the window, not a sofa in the yard.

+

“I don’t think so honey, these aren’t ours,” Matthew replied. “This is just a prank, sweetie. You both keep it moving, or else you’re gonna be late. I’ll take care of this and our yard will be returned to its original state before you two get home this afternoon. You have my word, your Highnesses.” He bent forward and scooped his hand in an exaggerated bow.

+

“Who the hell would pull a prank like this?” Elizabeth looked up at her father with genuine concern, seemingly unaware that she had just dropped the H-E-double hockey sticks bomb.

+

“Elizabeth Renee Ford! Since when do you talk like a sailor?”

+

The oldest Ford girl raised her eyebrows and shrugged, with just enough sass to cement the fact that she was her mother’s daughter. Both kids took off, resuming the footrace to their pick-up points. Matthew marveled at his children’s uncanny ability to brush aside just about any atypical occurrence and continue on with their daily adventures undeterred.

+

The truth was, Matthew didn’t know for certain that this was the handiwork of bored teens from up the street. But what else could it be? Definitely not a mistaken delivery, there wasn’t a house in the neighborhood colossal enough to hold even half the number of loungers now strewn across the Ford family property. He let out a sigh, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temples like a cat kneading its latest resting spot.

+

Seems like a lot of work for a prank. Whatever happened to lighting a bag of shit on fire and dropping it on the doorstep? Or just tossing a few eggs?

+

Who had they pissed off? Most of the neighbors were aware of the tragedy that had befallen the Fords and had been behaving accordingly; the house was flush with casseroles, pies, and bouquets. Amy Conway from a couple streets over had even brought breakfast over for two straight weeks after the accident.

+

If there was anyone who could empathize with their situation, Matthew thought it was Amy. She had been a single mother to a teenage daughter since last year, when her husband left for a work retreat and never returned. Rumors were rampant that perhaps he had run off with a coworker, or maybe he had a secret family in another state that he decided he liked more than the Conways of Troon’s Perch. Regardless, the Fords had taken care of the Conways in their time of need, and the Conways had returned the favor.

+

Such behavior was common in their tight-knit community. So no, the theory that this was a gag didn’t jibe. Teenagers could be cruel, but Matthew thought that such a prank in a time of mourning required an outright lack of a soul.

+

“What a start to the day.”

+

Matthew pinched the flesh on his forearm and scanned the yard once more, making sure that he was not still asleep in the master bed that was now too large for its purpose. Then he went inside, closed and locked the door to 664 Half Pint Loop, and made a beeline to the coffee pot.

+

 

+

M + +atthew funded the family coffers by working as an IT security consultant for a large bank headquartered in Charlotte. The nature of his role afforded him the luxury of working from home most days, which had been particularly helpful ever since the Fords had downsized from a quartet to a power trio.

+

Seated at his desk in the office located at the front of the house, Matthew set out to solve the issue of the spontaneous couch consignment that had apparently taken place overnight. Returning to sender was not an option, since whoever had made the delivery had not been kind enough to leave a note. He briefly considered turning a profit—he did work for a bank, after all—by selling the sofas one by one online, but this was too onerous; he wanted his yard back before the end of the day.

+

Finally, he landed on donation. The Salvation Army assured Matthew that yes, they were absolutely interested in a plethora of brand-new couches, and that they would have a bevy of foot soldiers at the Ford home quicker than Matthew could spit. Profuse thanks were offered and a pick-up time was scheduled for early afternoon.

+

Satisfied with this outcome, he set his phone aside and resolved to tackle his day job. Deciphering the mystery of the copious couches was enjoyable, but alas, it would not keep the lights on and the water running. Before diving into the ever-fascinating world of cyber security, Matthew spared a final glance out the bay window that looked onto the front lawn.

+

Couches… why’d it have to be couches?

+

Matthew’s white-collar responsibilities led him to overlook the gentlemanly caller who strode up the walkway leading to the front door shortly before lunchtime. It wasn’t until this solicitor rapped three times on the mahogany door that Matthew realized he was no longer alone with his thoughts and newfound furniture.

+

For the second time that day, Matthew Ford looked out of his opened front door and was met with a surprise. Standing before him was a man, short in stature, who some would describe as “a friend of ours”. This gentleman raised an eyebrow and gave Matthew a quick once-over when the door was opened. Matthew thought this peculiar, given that he owned the property and should be the one performing the evaluation.

+

The visitor was in a foppish getup that appeared dated by about a century. A charcoal fedora, the top of which came level with Matthew’s shoulders, sat perfectly cocked atop a mop of red hair. He had sky blue eyes that were slightly farther apart than normal and set deeply back in their sockets. A cigarette poked out from the right side of a mouth that seemed frozen in a perpetual sneer. He wore a dark, double-breasted suit with large lapels and a pocket that held a white, two peak pocket square. Pin stripes ran the length of the outfit. Below the cuffs of his pants sat black wingtips that had been shined to perfection and carefully adorned with white spats. The stranger that darkened the Ford family doorstep was more Tom Powers than Tony Soprano.

+

“Say, you the egg that lives at dis here place?” The caller spoke in staccato bursts. “I got bidness with the proprietor of dis fine establishment, so be on the level wit me.” The gentleman had removed the cigarette from his mouth and poked it at Matthew as he butchered the pronunciation of ‘business’.

+

Matthew was reminded of Rocky from the old Looney Tunes bits, the diminutive gangster who ran around with a hulking henchman with the mental capacity of a baked potato. There was no Mugsy to be seen, however.

+

“I live here,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. Although, I’m not selling anything. I can see how you might have thought this was a yard sale, what with…” Matthew waved his arm in the direction of the cushion cacophony. “But if you’re hoping to buy, I’m afraid to inform you that the transaction is dead on arrival.”

+

The visitor made a series of noises somewhere between a laugh and a whistle. “Heh, ‘dead on arrival’, I like dat. Dat’s good, you… dat’s good. Listen, the name’s Nails. Nails Nelson. I don’t wanna buy nothin’ from ya, see? Me and some friends ah mine, we’re in the problem solvin’ bidness.

+

“I just happened to be in the neighborhood, and I saw yer uh…” Nails looked first over his right shoulder, then his left. “…yer predicament here, and I had a thought, a real bulb. I says to myself, ‘I can help dis guy’. Dat’s when I decided to walk right up and give yer door a few whacks. So lemme ask ya—is dis a service that ya’d be interested in, mister?”

+

Matthew decided that coffee wasn’t going to cut it today, he’d be having at least one knock of bourbon as soon as he could get rid of this clown. He made a mental note to check the Farmers’ Almanac website to see if a full moon was planned for this evening.

+

“Gee, Nails, that’s a real…” a patronizing smirk broke out across Matthew’s face. “That’s a real swell offer. Really, it is. But listen, I’ve already made arrangements to take care of my couch surplus. If only you had arrived a little earlier this morning, maybe we could have done business. As it stands, I’ve got no need for your services.”

+

Matthew nodded and moved to shut the front door, but the hand holding a Lucky Strike cigarette shot up and stopped the closure. Smoke drifted upward and stinged Matthew’s nostrils.

+

“Ya shore, mister? Me and the boys do real good work, all our customers say so. Dey always tell us we hit on all sixes, Scout’s Honor. Ya don’t even gotta gimme any clams, see? We don’t take cash for our jobs, we—“

+

Matthew’s patience, already thin, evaporated completely. “I think that’ll be all. I’ve told you that I have it under control, and I’m asking you to kindly leave. As much as I’d like to sit here and shoot the shit with a cartoon character, I’ve had about as much as I can take today.”

+

Nails pursed his lips and his nostrils flared beneath glowering eyes. Matthew thought that the whites and irises of those eyes briefly flashed black and melded with the pupils. For the quickest of instants, the little gangster had eyeballs that appeared to have been soaked in motor oil. But then it was gone.

+

Nails dropped his cigarette on the stoop and ground it out with the toe of his brogue. “Yeah… shore. Everything’s Jake, mister—I’ll blow outta here. Here’s to ya.”

+

With that, Nails turned and marched down the path toward the street. Matthew thought it was a bit strange that this intruder didn’t have a car, but he had no interest in offering to give him a lift. Nor did he care enough to stand and watch him go; he slammed the door shut before Nails was halfway down the walk.

+

 

+

T + +he rest of the day went off without a hitch. The Troops of Salvation arrived shortly after Nails Nelson took his leave. They had two twenty-six-foot trucks, yet still required three trips before the yard was completely cleared. The crew almost took off without providing a tax receipt, but Matthew saw to it that everything was accounted for prior to bidding them adieu.

+

Every penny counts when you’re flying solo, he thought. Matthew was well compensated by the bank, but things began to add up when you started thinking long-term. Polishing off the mortgage, paying for college, weddings… He looked toward the sky. Wish we could talk, Cait. I may have to hock plasma or pose nude for the local art school on the side, but I got this.

+

The girls arrived home to snacks on the table and a front yard free of clutter. They made quick work of the PB&J’s and then proceeded to take advantage of the freshly vacated lawn. It was true that Liz enjoyed giving Brittany grief, but she had not yet outgrown playtime with her little sister. In fact, she had ramped up the frequency of their romps after Caitlin’s passing. However, if pressed, Liz would wholeheartedly deny that she had anything but contempt for Britt. Matthew was proud of his eldest daughter’s supportive display, just the same.

+

The family almost made it all the way through dinner without one mention of those damn couches. Almost.

+

“Dad, do you think anybody else is gonna prank us?” Elizabeth said, between bites of pepperoni and mushroom pizza. She tried to maintain a casual tone, but the subtle pained expression on her face let on that she had endured enough adversity. “Maybe we should get one of those doorbells that has a camera in it. That way, we can catch the jerks red-handed. I can take first shift tonight, and the gremlin here can cover the second. They won’t stand a chance.”

+

Brittany brought her thumb and pointer fingers together on each hand and raised them to her eyes, as if she were peering through a set of binoculars. She let loose with an infectious giggle that made its way across the table, against which Elizabeth had no defense. Matthew smiled down at his children and silently thanked God that they had each other.

+

I do wish we had one of those doorbells. Video evidence is the only way anyone would believe me if I told them about Mr. Nelson.

+

“Listen, ladies—while I appreciate your willingness to stand up for yourselves, I think it’s best that we leave this whole ordeal behind us.” He paused, considering the best way to wrap this subject up with some finality. “Besides, some good came out of it. You should have heard how excited the Salvation Army was to receive those couches. Wherever they came from, those things are going to end up making a bunch of families very happy.”

+

Elizabeth shrugged again and continued with her slice, while Brittany resumed playing with a rogue shroom that had avoided digestion. The unfortunate fungus had, however, found itself in the hands of a merciless four-year old who was likely going to reward its escape with savage dismemberment. Matthew’s statement had ostensibly put the intended bow on the topic.

+

He didn’t mention the unexpected visitor. Wanting to move past the events of the day as quickly as possible, he didn’t see the point in introducing a further complication into the minds of his daughters. He had found routine to be the best antidote for grief.

+

That and time, anyway.

+

 

+

T + +he Ford family was quite surprised to find their front yard once again littered with couches the next morning. Not the same couches: the lawn was now covered by an entirely new gaggle of living room furniture. And the number of pieces had increased. Each blade of grass was obscured, and since there was excess inventory, whoever had made the drop-off had decided to start stacking. Towers, two and three couches high, stretched from the beginning of the property line to the front door of their home.

+

There’s gotta be double the amount from yesterday, Matthew thought. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

+

Matthew’s appreciation for routines began to wane, since it now appeared that a new pattern had emerged in his daily activities. He dismissed the apparition of the furniture to the girls and sent them on their way, called the Sallys to schedule another gift—“Yes, another couch donation. And we’re going to need more trucks this time”—and finally, sat down at his desk with a cup of coffee and logged-on to the bank network.

+

It also seemed that Nails Nelson wanted to wedge himself into his day-to-day, because he once again came striding up the front walk, just before Matthew started to think about lunch. This time Matthew saw him and opened the door before Nails could land the first of what would surely be three knocks.

+

“Are you the one doing this to us, you little shit? My family has had plenty to deal with over the last few months, and we could do without whatever it is you’re trying to pull here. You realize you’ve got my girls completely freaked?”

+

Worthless little shit. Maybe I’ll give you the beating that I owe Spencer Lenore. His fingernails dug into his palms. Somebody’s gonna catch it for this.

+

“Aw, come on now mister, ya ain’t sore, are ya? I already told ya, me and the boys don’t cause problems, we solve dem.” Nails took a long drag from the cigarette that had been bouncing up and down with each syllable. “Now, if my sources are bein’ straight wit me, and dey usually are, it seems ya went and hired a different crew to take care of yer unfortunate situation yesterday. I know, ya told me as much, but I was really hopin ya’d reconsider. That pains me, mister, that really hurts my ticker.”

+

“Get off my property, asshole.”

+

Nails frowned. “Say, the last thing ya wanna do right now is go screwy. Yer gettin mighty close to doin or sayin somethin ya might regret. I tried to do dis the easy way, but I’m beginnin to see dat was a mistake. Me and the fellas might hafta go about dis in a different way if ya don’t start walkin the line.”

+

“Now you’re threatening me?” Matthew raged. “I can’t believe this shit! Get out of my face right now, or I’m calling the po—“

+

“Hey, Matt!”

+

Matthew looked up, above Nails’ ridiculous fedora, and saw Donna Strucker circling the cul-de-sac with her Jack Russell, Tito. He uncurled his fists and shot her the standard wave that can be seen in countless suburban communities across the Southeast. Tito, typically a well-behaved pup, thrashed and unleashed a barrage of ear-splitting barks in the direction of the odd couple on the Ford front walk.

+

“Yeah, ‘hey Matt’.” Nails gave him the same wave to bring the focus back down to eye level. “Like, say, maybe we don’t involve just you. Ya was talkin about dem Janes ya live wit. I’d be tickled pink to meet dem. But maybe somethin happens to dem before I can, or maybe it don’t.” Nails had the look of someone discussing whether or not it was going to rain. “It’s a crazy world we live in, mister. Ya just never know.”

+

Matthew slammed his fist against the door, knocking a family portrait off the interior wall. “You leave the girls out of this, you son of a bitch!” He meant to shout but it came out like a whisper. “I’ll kill you if you come within fifty yards of them, do you hear me? They’ll lock me up, but I won’t hesitate to wring your little midget neck.”

+

“Ehohhhhh!” Hands out, Nails delivered a multipurpose Mafioso hoot of dismay. “Let’s be friendly-like here! Mister, I can tell ya the one grade-A, fool-proof way ya can guarantee dat Britt and Liz don’t have a single hair on dere precious little heads disturbed. Ya ready to listen?”

+

Christ, he knows their names! What is this?

+

Nails maintained his serene demeanor. “I’m tryin to offer ya protection against dat which ails ya.”

+

Quieting, Matthew shoved his hands in his pockets in an effort to keep them contained. He didn’t know what to make of this stranger, but the fact that Nails knew enough to threaten his daughters by name gave him pause. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to agree, but he would at least hear what the offer was.

+

For his daughters’ sake.

+

“Go ahead.”

+

“Dat’s great, mister, I knew ya’d throw in wit us. Here’s how it’s gonna go—ya let me and the boys clean up out here for ya. We’ll clear it out, and we’ll make shore ya never have to deal wit anything like dis ever again. All we ask in return is a favor, just a little quid pro quo.”

+

“And what might that be, Nails?”

+

Nails snapped with his right hand and pointed at Matthew. “Dere he is! He’s really comin around, folks! Ok, here’s the skinny. We’re gonna give you some… persuaders, if ya know what I mean, and yer gonna need a place to store dem. Maybe a shed out back. Ya gotta lotta room out dere, mister, and from the size ah dis house I’m bettin ya can afford a shed.

+

“The reasons for which we’re givin you dis hardware are gonna remain under the rug, but let’s just say dat somethin might be comin. And when dis thing comes, well… we’re gonna want you and a buncha yer closest pals on our side. I know ya got pals, mister, I been watchin. Yer gonna use dese persuaders to get the other boys to join up.”

+

“Are you talking about weapons? This doesn’t make any sense. You want me to start some sort of militia?”

+

“What I want ya to do is know dat I don’t give a rat’s ass what ya call it.” Nails’s face darkened and his aw-shucks persona disappeared. “Yer gonna keep the tools handy, and yer gonna round some boys up wit dem when we say the word. Capiche?”

+

Matthew tried to get his brain not to stroke out. “I just don’t understand what it is you think I can do for you. The last time I shot a gun was two presidents back, and that one took paintballs for ammo. Why did you pick me for this?”

+

“Why does the Pope wear a pointy hat? Yer gonna stop askin questions now, okay? Ya can take all the other questions ya got and stick dem in your hat, far as I’m concerned.”

+

Nails blinked, and when he reopened his eyes it appeared again as though two black marbles had replaced the baby blues that Matthew noticed previously. These onyx eyes were irriguous, they rippled inward, from temple to tear duct. There would be no compromising with these eyes. “Now, put a cork in it and tell me we got a deal.”

+

What the hell else is there at this point?

+

After a brief pause, and a twist of the gold band that he still wore on his left ring finger, Matthew replied: “Okay, Nails. You win. If it means you’ll stop harassing us and my girls will be safe, I’ll do this for you.”

+

“Say, dat’s what I like to hear! We’ll take care a yer yard right away, mister. Two shakes. But we need ya to get a move on wit the other bidness. If ya don’t, we’ll know. And den… well, it’s anybody’s guess, really.”

+

Nails glanced at the Rolex Oyster on his wrist. His chummy disposition had returned, but the next words out of his mouth were virulent. “Say, Lizzy’s bus is gonna be dis way soon, right?”

+

Matthew went silent and stone-faced, which Nails took as tacit agreement.

+

“Good. We’ll be in touch to make the first delivery and show ya how to use dem things. It’s been real nice doin bidness with ya, mister. I’m bein honest. We been talkin to folks from San Francisco to Sarasota. Some ah the other eggs we deal with kick up dust and make things difficult. It never works, see, it just makes us resort to other tactics. Dese other tactics, dey’re not pleasant, I don’t enjoy it, dey don’t enjoy it, bada bing, bada boom, nobody wins. But you mister, you’ve been a real ace.”

+

Satisfied that an accord had been struck, Nails Nelson turned and walked toward the street. When he had almost reached the sidewalk, a Studebaker President winked into existence just above the street lamps. The car, which had an electric blue glow beneath the undercarriage and windows made for Tommy guns to poke out from, floated down and landed like a Harrier in front of Matthew’s new business partner.

+

Donna Strucker and Tito had not yet made it out of the cul-de-sac. Tito had found himself a scent in the neighbor’s yard and decided it needed to be thoroughly sniffed, but when he saw Nails again started growling.

+

Nails bared his teeth right back. “Dat fuckin’ dog barks at me one more time, I’ll give him another set a nuts just so I can chop dem’ off. And how bout you, lady? You fancy a pair a nuts?”

+

As Donna hurried away Nails turned, gave Matthew a wink, and climbed into the black sedan. The whitewall tires of the long-bodied luxury automobile lifted it off the street and above the rooftops. It hovered for a moment, and was gone.

+

Matthew returned inside and picked up the picture that had been jostled off the wall: a snapshot of his family, taken only six months prior, but at a time when they were happier and more complete. Caitlin stood in the center, with her arms around Elizabeth and Brittany. Matthew had hidden behind Caitlin and poked his head out above her shoulder. It was a great depiction of how things used to be: Mommy protecting, and Daddy… well, Daddy doing something.

+

Caitlin had suggested that the girls should decide which picture from the shoot received the place of honor by the door, and this was the photo they had landed on.

+

Need a shed, he thought, concentrating on the only normal thing about the whole mess. I should be able to get to Lowe’s and back before Elizabeth gets home.

+

He hung the picture back on the nail from which it had been dislodged, grabbed his keys off the hook, and started out the door. He paused, then turned to the portrait again, kissed his fingertips, and gently touched them to the face of his wife.

+

I got this, Cait. I hope.

+

Matthew made his way out to the family car, which had never been airborne without the assistance of a jack, and was just getting it cranked when he realized he had a call to make.

+

“Hi, yes, this is Matthew Ford, we spoke earlier about a donation pick-up? I’m gonna need to cancel. No, no, we just gave it some thought and decided to send this batch elsewhere, since you guys are probably full-up on couches after the haul yesterday. Which charity did we decide on? Oh, you’ve probably never heard of it.” His face twisted bitterly. “It’s just a little group that some friends of ours run.”

+

 

+

M + +atthew woke early next morning to check the yard before the girls roused. When he opened the door, a letter that had been wedged in the jamb fluttered to his feet. As he bent to pick it up, he spared a glance through squinted eyes toward the lawn, afraid of what he might discover. He was pleased to find nothing worth remarking on, save for the immaculate condition of the grass itself. There wasn’t a blade out of place, no sign at all that there had been thousands of pounds of foam and feathers scattered about only hours earlier. The yard was actually a brighter shade of green than it had been the day he laid the sod.

+

They really do hit on all sixes, Matthew thought. Hot damn.

+

As he wondered whether he could enlist Nails and his fellow conspirators for regular landscaping, Matthew opened the letter. The handwriting was crude, resembling a Do You Like Me? note from a preteen righty attempting a sly southpaw.

+
+

Mister,

+

Hope you like what you see. Me and the boys never had an unsatisfied customer. I take that back. We had one, but I don’t figure he’s heard the birds chirp for a while now. Ha-Ha.

+

Nails’s spelling was a lot more precise than his pronunciation. Still, Matthew couldn’t help but mentally ya his you’s and dat his that’s for him.

+
+

Speaking of birds, a little one told me that you’re having that shed delivered today. That’s good, mister. That’s… what did you say when we first chewed the fat? Swell. That’s swell. Anyone says to me that Matty Ford ain’t a stand-up guy is getting five fingers and fourteen joints to the face. Scout’s Honor.

+

Go ahead and plan for us to swing by tomorrow night around 11. Me and the crew like to travel after the moon’s up when we’re carrying tools. Like them vamps in that Irish book.

+

Be alone.

+

Your pal,

+

Nails

+

So, there it was. The events of the last couple of days hadn’t been a production of his overstressed mind or a sick joke perpetrated by a bored cosplayer. The Fords really had been visited by a “gangster” in a flying Studebaker, and Matthew had signed-up to help the guy build a militia. All because the visitor had dropped a mess of couches on the front lawn and executed a classic extortion racket. Kinda.

+

Is that it, then? Matthew thought. I’m going to be the head of the Troon’s Perch grassroots alien invasion effort? Whenever Nails says ‘jump’, me and the other dads will grab the laser rifles and just start blasting away?

+

Shrouded by a fog of conflicting thoughts and emotions, Matthew set the letter down on his desk and trudged upstairs to wake the girls.

+

Breakfast was uneventful. Matthew was unable to summon the enthusiasm necessary to don the tiara and sash that had become an integral part of his morning ensemble, but the girls didn’t take notice. Nor did they mention the unusual occurrences of the previous forty-eight hours. It was Friday, after all, so planning for the weekend took precedent in their adolescent minds.

+

“Dad, do you think Sarah and Addie can spend the night tomorrow night?” Elizabeth gazed up at him with wide, supplicatory eyes. “I went over to Sarah’s last weekend and Addie’s the weekend before that, so it’s kind of our turn, and I got an A on my math test this week, and if you say no, you’re basically being mean to their parents and encouraging me to get bad grades.”

+

Matthew wondered if a slumber party would interfere with his own soiree plans. Chances were slim that they would be asleep by the eleven o’clock meeting with Nails, but likely Elizabeth and her friends would be too caught-up with blasting the latest Jonas Brothers record to notice civilisation ending. In fact, they’d be playing its soundtrack.

+

“Well, consider me lawyered, honey. I have no rebuttal, your Honor, but I do have one condition: Britt gets to join in.” Matthew bounced his eyebrows and smiled at his youngest. “If the prosecution agrees to these terms, the defense rests. I’ll pick up s’mores supplies for the whole gang.”

+

“Yes!” Brittany pumped syrup-covered fists up and down. “And you have to be nice to me! And you gotta braid my hair!”

+

“And you gotta braid her hair.” Matthew began to clear the table. “Do we have a deal?”

+

Elizabeth poked her bottom lip out and released an exasperated sigh, sending her bangs fluttering off her forehead. “Fine, deal. But we’re not watching any shows for babies.”

+

“Good, I’m glad we could reach an accord. Get your stuff together and I’ll meet you both at the door.”

+

Liz snatched her backpack off the floor and ran out of the kitchen with Britt nipping at her heels. “Let’s just watch one episode, come on! If we don’t, I’ll tell Dad that…”

+

The girl’s voices faded as Matthew cleaned up. In a strange way, their bickering warmed his heart and put his anxieties to rest. It was a substantial improvement over the silence and glum, vacant stares that pervaded their home throughout the days and weeks immediately following Caitlin’s passing. There would always be a void there, to be sure, but the chipper quality of their banter made him realize that the Ford family would come out of this trial in one piece.

+

If he got past midnight the same way.

+

With his chore complete, Matthew delivered the customary farewell cheek kisses and bear hugs. Britt was young enough to allow her father this daily indulgence, but Elizabeth had recently entered the developmental stage that mandated she fight any displays of affection tooth-and-nail.

+

She was furiously scrubbing her cheek to remove all traces of ickiness when curiosity got the better of him.

+

“Hey,” he said, “so neither of you are still worried about the couches that popped up in the yard the last couple of days?” The urge to hear that all was well from the mouths of babes was too strong to overcome. “You’re not bothered by it at all?”

+

Brittany answered this inquiry by smiling, shaking her head, and beating feet toward the Clark family’s idling minivan.

+

Liz paused, stirred invisible dirt with the toes of her Birkenstocks. “Mom used to tell us that dads are the best protectors. We know we’re safe.” She wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. “Mom’s gone now, and that really stinks. It sucks. But we’ve got you.”

+

Liz, suffering a momentary lapse in her newfound disdain, stood on tippy-toes and planted a big smackaroo on Matthew’s cheek before running out the door.

+

Flabbergasted by his daughter’s statement (and her sneak-attack kiss), Matthew raised his hand to the side of his face and shut the door behind her. He leaned his head back, took a deep breath, and brought his gaze down on the letter that sat atop his desk.

+

That’s right, kiddo. You got me.

+

And I got this.

+

 

+

“ + +A + +re you really just gonna fold for this guy?” Matthew stood in the newly constructed shed and pressed his palms to the card table in the middle of the room. “You’re gonna roll out the red carpet and welcome an alien invasion with open arms?”

+

Now you’re talking to yourself, Matthew thought. Boy, the couch delivery extraterrestrials have really done a number on you. And to answer your question, Matty—yeah, I probably am. Ants can’t really fight back against the bottom of a boot, can they?

+

It was full dark, a battery-powered lantern on top of the table was the sole source of light. Matthew had made sure that Liz and Britt and the girls were sufficiently occupied before sneaking out for his backyard appointment.

+

Maybe Nails will ghost me. Maybe he’s found someone else to help him take over the world. Or, better yet, maybe he’s found another planet to invade. Fat chance.

+

Matthew looked at his watch: two minutes to eleven. His heart dropped and bounced against the floor of his stomach, sending the butterflies scattering. “No, he’ll be here. He seemed pretty convinced that I was his guy. If he doesn’t show, I’ll drop the girls off with their grandparents and drive myself to the looney bin.”

+

The seconds passed with palpable tension. He rolled his shoulders back and attempted to assume a power pose—an effort that had mixed results at best. “You can do this, you can do this, you can—“

+

Three succinct raps on the door interrupted Matthew’s soliloquy. His sphincter tightened like a zip tie that’s been yanked by the World’s Strongest Man. “Don’t ask me fer no password or I’m gonna shit a brick, mister.”

+

“Uh… come in?” Matthew stared at the door and shrugged to the empty room. “Come in”? What are you, hosting a bake sale? Aliens are going to invade Earth and the best you can muster up is “come in”?

+

The door swung inward and two prohibition era hoodlums walked across the threshold. Nails led, followed by (of course) a henchman that had to stoop to make it through the doorway. There’s Mugsy, Matthew thought. There’s the son of a bitch.

+

The larger gentleman carried a wooden crate, which radiated warmth and emitted a pulsing scarlet glow. Behind them, the brand-new spring-loaded hinge did its job and the door slammed shut. Matthew became briefly airborne.

+

“Matty boy… why’re ya so uptight? You look like yer crackin walnuts wit yer ass cheeks.” Nails bleated, and poked his Lucky Strike at Matthew. “It ain’t like we’re here to get heavy witcha. All we wanna do is talk about the end ah the world as ya know it. Relax.”

+

Mugsy hunched his shoulders and shuddered with barely-repressed laughter, a character break that was swiftly rewarded with an open-handed slap from his pint-sized capo.

+

“Ya’d keep yer filthy mouth shut if ya knew what was good for ya. I don’t wanna hear any more lip outta you.” Nails returned his attention to his suburban soldier and sneered. “Ready to get down to brass tacks, mister?”

+

“Sure thing,” Matthew replied, steeling himself. “I’m ready. Show me what you’ve got.”

+

Nails dropped his smoke to the floor of the shed and gestured to Mugsy. “Get dat before dis whole place goes up,” he said, and the lunk did the Lindy Hop on the smoldering butt. “Ya know what I think, Matty? I think yer yella. I got half ah mind to put the kibosh on dis whole thing and teach yas a lesson.”

+

And leave the girls with no one? “Nails, listen—I’m your guy. I’m just a little nervous, that’s all. Don’t wo—"

+

“Stuff a sock in it, Matty. I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna forget dat I saw a flash ah puddy cat in yer eyes, and I’m gonna start over.” Nails showed his palms before reaching into his jacket pocket and getting to work on another cigarette. “Because I’m nothin if not generous. Doncha agree, big guy?”

+

The fleshy jowls that hung from Mugsy’s jawbone shook as he nodded theatrically.

+

“See? One outta every one wiseguy agrees—Nails Nelson is just a big sack ah mush when it comes right down to it. Now,” and Nails waved Mugsy toward the table, “why don’t we start the show, huh?”

+

Mugsy dropped the crate onto the table and worked on removing the lid as Nails launched into his pitch.

+

“What we got here is a batch ah dem persuaders I was tellin ya about. Dis is what yer gonna use to round up all the other ’burb bluenoses and get dem on board. Hand me one ah dem things, big guy.” Nails snatched a ray gun from Mugsy’s outstretched hands and turned it over. The weapon was the size of a compact pistol, with three cylindrical tubes wrapped around the barrel. Matthew heard a low woooom woooom as a thick, red liquid of unknown origin oscillated within the rings. “It don’t take no Nobel Prize winner to work dese babies. All ya gotta do is point, shoot, den tell the mark exactly what ya want dem to do. Bingo, bango, ya got yerself a nice little toy soldier.”

+

Persuaders, literal persuaders. Matthew closed his eyes to collect himself as the weight of the situation settled on his back. This is it then. And there are just two ways it can go.

+

“Ya still wit us, mister?”

+

He opened his eyes again. “Yeah, Nails, yeah. Hey, can I get a demonstration or something? I told you, it’s been a while since I handled anything with a trigger.”

+

“Shore, Matty. The big guy’s used to it, anyways—in fact, dat’s why he don’t talk so much. Too many pops from dese things.”

+

Nails raised the weapon and fired at Mugsy. The effect was immediate: the lummox went stiff as a board.

+

Two ways it could go… and it went my way.

+

Without hesitation, Matthew shouted, “Big guy, ignore everything Nails says! Take the ray gun off him, and shoot him with it!”

+

“Why, ya little—” Nails snarled, but he couldn’t get anything else out before Mugsy leveled a bear swat across his head and disarmed him. The big guy would be hell in a quick draw duel, he blasted Nails before the Napoleonic hood could hit the floor.

+

Matthew looked around the table. Nails was planking on his face. “Nails? Can you hear me?”

+

“Shore, boss,” came the muffled reply.

+

“Tell me the truth, you’re an alien, aren’t you?”

+

“No gettin nothin past you, boss.”

+

“Get up, Nails.”

+

“Shore, boss.” Nails arose and stood to dishevelled attention.

+

“Now that’s more like it.” Matthew resumed his position of authority behind the table. “Fellas, it’s been fun, but this is where we part ways. Nails, you’re going to take your buddy here—drop the gun, big guy—and get the hell off the planet. Actually, you know what? You guys both forget this planet exists altogether. Earth means nothing to you. Tell your associates back home that you didn’t find anything worth taking. Now hit the road.”

+

The two mobsters nodded, turned on their heels, and made their way toward the door.

+

“Hey boys, one more thing.” They stopped in their tracks as Matthew smirked and crossed his arms. “Pick up a guy named Spencer Lenore on your way outta town. He’s been making things tough for my crew lately. Take him to your planet and make him real comfortable.”

+

“You got it, boss.” Nails tipped his hat to Matthew and clapped Mugsy on the back. “We’re aces at makin’ folks comfortable. Everything’s Jake, Matty.”

+

 

+

M + +atthew was just getting the fire started when he felt two arms wrap around his waist. He turned to find all four slumber-partying girls behind him, wearing pajamas and wide, tired eyes. Apparently, even the Jonas Brothers couldn’t hold their attention all night. He couldn’t help noticing that Brittany’s hair was pulled back into a perfect braid.

+

“Dad, it’s after midnight!” Elizabeth looked up from the bear hug with an expression of innocent curiosity that girls teetering on their teenage years allow to shine through every so often. “What are you doing out here so late?”

+

“Just taking care of some unfinished bidness, that’s all. Gonna take a while to explain, honey. Why don’t you run inside and grab the crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows?” Matthew grinned and gestured toward the fire. “I’ll tell you ladies all about it over a couple rounds of s’mores.”

+

As the girls scampered inside, Matthew settled down to watch the flames consume the broken up crate that Mugsy had been carrying. He had buried the ray guns in a shallow grave under the shed floor until he figured out what to do with them. But whatever that turned out to be, he planned on strategically keeping that one blaster the otherworldly mafiosos had used on each other, because… well, best to be prepared for the teenage years. Nah, only joking. Probably.

+

Matthew shifted his gaze to the clear night sky.

+

Don’t worry about us, Cait. I got this.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Everything’s Jake” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Christopher Cook

+

+ + Author image of Christopher Cook + + + Christopher Cook writes fiction to make the reader question their reality and perhaps rethink poking their foot out from underneath the covers. You can find his work in Critical Blast Publishing’s anthology, The Devil You Know, and the October 2020 issue of The J.J. Outre Review.

+

© Chris Cook 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: spinheike, ArtTower, Alexas_Fotos, amarjits, and StockSnap. Plus a special salute to Pier 2Eyes for the most striking Gangster smoking.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-23/experimental-diet.html b/issue-23/experimental-diet.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6aceaf29 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/experimental-diet.html @@ -0,0 +1,398 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Experimental Diet — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Experimental Diet

+

Andrew Johnston

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Experimental Diet by +
+ + + + +

EXTERRAN FEDERATION OFF-WORLD LAB B-0102 DATALOG

+
- **LOCATION**: *Agolga Exploratory Space, Agolga Prime-A*
+- **PURPOSE**: *Xenobiology*
+- **TECHNICIAN**: *Annelise Hyde* (deceased)
+- **BRIEF SUMMARY**: *Analysis of unidentified live organism X-0E*
+
+

LOG 181

+

A xenofauna sample was captured alive and returned to the laboratory by Agolgan mercenaries. Once negotiations for payment were concluded, the sample was brought into the complex. As the sample demonstrated a highly aggressive nature while in the care of the mercenaries, it was placed into secured containment immediately.

+

Preliminary notes:

+
- **MASS**: 250-300kg (estimate)
+- **LENGTH**: 2.5m (estimate)
+- **LOCOMOTION**: Primarily quadrupedal
+- **DIET**: Unknown
+- **REPRODUCTION**: Unknown
+- **NECROPSY**: Not performed
+
+

Because this organism was secured alive, we will maintain it in captivity while we study its behavior and physical traits. Our first step is to determine its diet so that it can be maintained until a necropsy is ordered.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Speaking of diet, someone should have a word with Exterra about our supplies. They can brag all they want about how their wonderful Nutri-Noodles have the perfect balance of macronutrients or whatever it was, but they taste like plastic tubing and they’re hardly filling. They could have at least sent along some dried fruit or something.

+

 

+

LOG 182

+

TEST 01 – VEGETABLE MATTER:

+

Sample was presented with 50kg of local xenoflora, gathered from the cultivation grounds used for the other samples.

+

Sample circled the vegetation, prodded through the mound with its head, then turned away from it and commenced to pacing back and forth along the far wall. After an hour of observation, the sample had not consumed any vegetable matter. It does not appear to be herbivorous.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Noticed some irregular readings from the containment sensors. The maintenance team needs to get off its collective ass and fix this thing up. God help them if I have to get on them about it.

+

 

+

LOG 183

+

TEST 02 – PRESERVED ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

Sample was presented with 30kg of preserved bovine offal.

+

Sample approached the offal, took a substantial portion into what we are assuming is its mouth, then promptly regurgitated most of it. Maintenance crew on the ground reported that the sample made a series of loud vocalizations and “looked upset.” Either the sample is not carnivorous or else it requires fresher meat than we have at present.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Received more irate messages from Dr. Hedren on our alleged “lack of progress.” What is she expecting? We’re dealing with nature here. If she wants us to just kill the thing, cut it open and mount its guts on slides for some Federation official, then we can do that, but SHE’S the one who wants these things studied alive.

+

All I ever hear is “Oh, the Taiyang people would have had reports done by now.” Well, let her try to bribe some Taiyang people into joining up. Recruitment isn’t my responsibility.

+

 

+

LOG 184

+

TEST 03 – PROCESSED CARBOHYDRATES:

+

A technician dropped a cup of Nutri-Noodles into the containment area. Out of curiosity, an additional 5kg of Nutri-Noodles were prepared and presented to the sample.

+

The sample did not even approach the noodles. It made a vocalization that sounded vaguely like a dog growling, then commenced to pacing about the containment area in tight circles. At the risk of anthropomorphizing the sample, it appeared angry at our proffered foodstuffs. I understand how it feels.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

How the hell did a technician get close enough to drop anything in there? And why? The holographic displays are more than sufficient, but they always want to get close. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

+

 

+

LOG 185

+

TEST 04 – LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

A mercenary crew offered us a live example of the organism previously labelled X-0A. Though we’ve already studied this organism, we paid a token price and then released it into the containment area with the sample.

+

Within seconds, the sample had detected its prey and lunged upon the smaller animal. Curiously, the sample seemed to vanish for a moment – we at first thought this was a glitch in the holographic display, but further analysis revealed that some quirk in the sample’s anatomy allows it to compress its body into a remarkably fluid-like form.

+

The sample is clearly carnivorous. Furthermore, it obviously has an exceptionally efficient digestive system, as it consumed the prey animal in its entirety – including bones – within a span of two minutes. The sample proceeded to explore the containment area, suggesting that it was not fully satiated. Given that it consumed at least 150kg of tissue, it must have an unusually accelerated metabolism to accompany its digestive system.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

If Hedren keeps pestering me, I’m going to drown her in Nutri-Noodle broth. I shouldn’t write that, but it’s not like she’s ever going to read it.

+

 

+

LOG 186

+

TEST 05 – LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

A young technician named Davidson fell into the containment area. Safety mechanisms activated, but too slowly to stop the sample from reaching Davidson. It is perhaps unethical and/or tasteless to record this as a test feeding, but any researcher would want to know that their sacrifice was not in vain.

+

The sample consumed Davidson’s body in its entirety, much as it did with the xenofauna from the previous test. It does not have any issues with the consumption of foreign animals. It also appears that it is not yet satiated. In fact, it became quite agitated after the feeding.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

The best I can say is that Davidson didn’t scream for too long. That was horrible, but I told those idiots to stay away from the enclosure. I’ll bet she’s not the last one to fall in. Frankly, they deserve it if they’re going to be this dumb.

+

 

+

LOG 187

+

TEST 06 – LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

I was physically present for this feeding. Senior technician Arnold and I were examining the safety failure that enabled Davidson to access the containment area when Arnold fell in, much as Davidson had.

+

Unlike Davidson, who was still stunned, Arnold was composed enough to attempt to defend himself. This was futile.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Arnold was an asshole, I don’t think anyone will miss him. Hedren’s on us, now. Busybody that she is, I bet she’ll be down here ASAP, looking for someone to blame. It’ll probably be me – she’s been looking for an excuse to run me out. Let her try it, see what happens.

+

 

+

LOG 188

+

TEST 07 – LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

I was physically present for this feeding. Laboratory director Dr. Hedren requested to personally examine the containment area and its safety mechanisms. During the examination, she accidentally fell into the containment area through a complete stroke of bad luck that was no one’s fault.

+

Dr. Hedren will be sorely missed.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Well, that was convenient.

+

 

+

LOG 189

+

TEST 08 – LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

The sample broke free of containment and entered the laboratory proper. It attacked and consumed four maintenance workers. Security teams engaged the target, but it killed one before escaping down a maintenance passage. Current location is unknown; base is on lockdown.

+

Sample has consumed well over 600kg of animal tissue in fewer than three cycles and has not been observed sleeping. This is troubling.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Okay, the internal security mechanisms have engaged, so as long as I don’t leave, I should be fine. Terrified, but alive. I’ve got enough water and Nutri-Noodles to last until Security wraps this up.

+

I think I’m getting a new appreciation for Nutri-Noodles now that I’ve decided that I’m never eating meat again.

+

 

+

LOG 190

+

TEST 09 – LIVE ANIMAL TISSUE:

+

Sample consumed three other live specimens and their caretakers. Security is reporting that the sample is capable of compressing its body enough to pass through some HVAC vents, though this is likely attributable to the effects of trauma.

+

My current estimate is that the sample has consumed over 1200kg of animal tissue. There are some mathematical improbabilities here but I’m too mortified to double-check the math at the moment.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

On the plus side, I’m now confident that we have no alcoholics here. I haven’t found a single concealed flask or bottle, damn it.

+

Anyway, if anyone finds this, I leave whatever I happen to own to my brother. It’s not exactly a legal document, but it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.

+

 

+

LOG 191

+

TEST 10 – LIV ANIMAL TISUE:

+

Sample breched my room and attcked. I escapped but it got its jaws into m arm first and ripped it of above elbow. I am typing ths with 1 hand so excuse typos. Its too hard and hurts to much t fix them riht now.

+

Sampel also 8 at least 2 resrchers. Maybe more but I def saw 2 before shuttter closed. Quick cauturizasion w/first aid kt. Watched sample eat myy arm on camra.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Most of my blood is on thfloor. Watched man gt bit in haf. Sorry Hedren.

+

 

+

LOG 192

+

TEST 11 – HUMANSS:

+

Still acces 2 cameras. Watched sample eat more guys. At least 4. Saw security guy fall down cryin. then it ate him. Never stops eating. Sample mustve eaten blah blah blah kg. Spilled my nodles. Now its chewin on camra, ha ha

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

Might be delirous from blod loss and shok. Dont think the music sreal. Noddles are real. Love noodles. No blood when eat thm.

+

Musics good even if not real. I want sm fruit tho.

+

 

+

LOG 193

+

TEST 12 – FEW311:

+

I think its gone. Cant see on camera now. Feeling fiiiiiine.

+

PERSONAL NOTES:

+

its a good life, ha ha. Doggie is whinning. Thats a god boy. Ha ha look what I typd. Good boy, ha. Doggie scratching ad door. K doggie, Ill let u in now, b good.

+
    +
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+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Experimental Diet” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Johnston

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Johnston + + + Born in rural western Kansas, Andrew Johnston discovered his Sinophilia while attending the University of Kansas. Subsequently, he has spent most of his adult life shuttling back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. He is currently based out of Hefei, Anhui province. He has published short fiction in Nature: Futures, Electric Spec, Mythic and the Laughing at Shadows Anthology. You can learn more about his projects at findthefabulist.com.

+

© Andrew Johnston 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Andrea Piacquadio, Nesrin Danan, and Sharon Murillo.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-23/huntress-conveyor.html b/issue-23/huntress-conveyor.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a019d560 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/huntress-conveyor.html @@ -0,0 +1,383 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds

+

Daniel Ausema

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+ Story image for The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds by +
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“…animal hides for leather, scrap metal, batteries if they still exist in any world, I’m overstocked on plastics but cured wood is…”

+

T + +he voice from the speaker faded as the conveyor moved away, but Sihala had memorized the current list before she jumped on. Her feet jerked on the belt, but she cradled her throwing spears carefully and kept her balance. The run-down shack disappearing behind her, what she called her home, told perfectly how little she could afford to waste her time on things the Quartermaster didn’t want.

+

She checked the rope twined around her between waist and shoulders, pulled broad leaves and fronds from the underbrush that encroached on the line, and used them to camouflage herself. The decaying rubber beneath her feet ran on inexorably, the eternal movement of this, the greatest legacy of a long lost age. Far ahead, the conveyor appeared to reach the horizon of her own world, but it never stayed in that reality long enough to reach there. She tensed herself for the next, unpredictable jump.

+

Beneath the rubber, blue light zipped among hazy parts no one alive understood, not even the Quartermaster. Lowering into a crouch, she waited, eyes constantly moving between the land that zipped by and the conveyer itself.

+

These last few days, Sihala had come back with hands empty, spears unused. Even before that, she’d begun earning a name for bad luck among the loose confederation of hunters and scavengers. Not today, she told herself. She would prove them wrong.

+

A whining noise rose from the belt beneath her. It seemed that it was getting louder these days. She prayed to the gods of ruined monuments that this reminder of the lost ones would survive a little longer…and that it would bring her to suitable game. Luck or no luck and regardless of what the others thought of her, she couldn’t survive much longer on the things she scrounged together around her shack.

+

With a rumbling noise that stopped abruptly, the conveyer shifted into another place, and instantly her camouflage became useless. She looked quickly to either side for any game in this new reality. The lights that ran alongside the conveyor track revealed gray mud that bubbled and spat onto the belt. She’d heard the Quartermaster say that the conveyors were built with a meter of clearance. She wasn’t sure exactly how big a meter was, but this distance looked a lot smaller than typical. She feared the mud might get into the gears and other parts hidden beneath her feet.

+

Yellow flowers more animal than plant danced in the boiling mud. A salamander of some sort climbed from the mud onto the lily-pad-like leaves. Fronds wrapped around the animal and pulled it into the yellow petals where it disappeared.

+

Sihala brought a spear up to protect her, but the flowers didn’t look worth trying to take as prey. The Quartermaster wouldn’t pay for them, and they didn’t look edible.

+

Other things moved farther out in the mud, at the edge of the conveyer’s vision field. She couldn’t quite make them out before the world’s dark mists gobbled up the light of the conveyer.

+

Without taking her eyes from the view, she scratched at the ley-metal tattoo on her arm. It wasn’t a good sign that it itched. She turned slowly to see what energy might be setting it off. Originally they’d been aligned to powers within the earth, but any strong power source could draw a reaction now.

+

Flames broke the mist in the distance. She waited as the conveyer drew her closer. A single flame, high above the ground. A smokestack held it there, a relic from the lost days. Such things had burned and converted power long ago, but she didn’t think it would set off her ley lines. She stared at the smokestack, tempted to jump off. It could certainly have treasures inside that the Quartermaster would pay well for, ancient machinery and other salvage, but she didn’t dare leave the conveyor, or it might leave this world and strand her.

+

The whine of the belt subsided into a steady drone that threatened to put Sihala asleep. She rubbed the tattoo counter-clockwise, and energy rushed to her brain. This was not a world to fall asleep in.

+

A flipper of some creature rose briefly from the sea of mud. A small earth-whale? If it got close enough, it might be worth trying to catch. The Quartermaster would give her good money for so much meat and oil. She knelt at the near edge of the belt and waited with her spear poised… but the flipper did not reappear.

+

The conveyor shifted to a new place. Sihala frowned. Her tattoo no longer itched, which was a relief, but the conveyer didn’t usually shift realities that often.

+

Now she was in a moss-shrouded forest, the conveyor cutting a straight line through the vegetation. The screams of prey sounded often, muffled by the hoary trees. Sihala stretched up for a clump of hanging moss and covered herself. If the conveyor came through here often, it was likely the native animals wouldn’t be afraid of it, as long as it seemed empty. A rich smell of both life and rot enveloped her, a heavy smell that forced her lower and lower as she waited.

+

Engine sounds coughed and revved occasionally in the distance. Other relics moved in this world too.

+

When a different noise reached her ears from the direction she’d come, Sihala focused on her tattoo for a moment and felt a tell-tale spark, not pain exactly and not an itch, but a jolt of unpleasant energy. She looked back along the conveyer, and soon something appeared, little more than a dot but moving quickly, as if impatient with the eternal speed of the belt.

+

The hum of its motor reached her, and then the construct was directly behind her.

+

This was the trickiest thing about hunting from the conveyers—dealing with the relics and enigmas that raced along the moving path—but where else might she find a way to survive? It was a wide thing that approached. Vehicle or creature, she couldn’t decide how to think of these constructs.

+

She looked at the ground alongside the belt. No great place to jump off, but there was a bit of a break in the trees ahead. It would have to do. The construct was coming too quickly, though. She stood and ran before it, her tattoo sparking madly. Just as she felt the shifting air of its front grille, she leapt, falling into the thick moss between two trees.

+

Pain boiled from Sihala’s thigh where it had hit a tree trunk, too intense to focus through. She ran through the calming techniques in her mind, but they didn’t work. Her body shuddered until, finally, by closing her eyes and breathing in a broken, uneven pattern, she could take her thoughts away so the tattoo could do its work.

+

Drawing energy from the ground, the air, even the conveyer and other relics nearby, the ley tattoo healed tissue until the pain was only a dull background.

+

As soon as the pain faded to a distant ache, Sihala rolled to the balls of her feet, holding a spear out toward the forest. Nothing approached, at least not that she could see. With her back still to the conveyer, she stood and took a step backwards.

+

Still no attack. No sounds but the birds far above and insects beneath the bark of the trees. Then she turned around and realized what the lack of sounds meant.

+

The conveyer had shifted again. Without her.

+

She spun back, as if the conveyor was an animal that might sneak up behind a person. But of course it wasn’t there. Only an empty scar where the track had been. The vegetation grew thick, but instead of imparting on the scene a sense of rich life, it hinted at rot and hidden places ideal for ambush. Sihala rubbed her ley lines nervously, then trusting her spears more, she held them out, poised to defend.

+

She’d been off the conveyor when it shifted many times in her own shack, but that was beside a frequent run. Seldom did a day go by and the conveyor not return to one of those. She bent down to examine this run. Fresh sap flowed from a branch that had been severed from its tree by the conveyor’s arrival. The mangled remains of a tremendous variety of plants told her that the conveyor had appeared here for the first time just now. Or at least the first time in years. It might return later today, or it might come back in twenty days, or it might come back in never.

+

She longed for the Quartermaster’s voice, even if it was just the empty litany of goods. “Electronics,” she imagined him saying, a word she heard him use often but didn’t understand. “Aluminum cans, glass jars, the fatted calf.”

+

What were her options? Follow the scar of the conveyor and hope it returned while she still lived, or strike out toward the north where the forest appeared to thin. The conveyors usually ran near the factories and cities of the ancient builders of the lines. Ruins, most often, but even ruins could have some life left. And some way to contact the Quartermaster.

+

But here she might get lucky and have the conveyor return. Might. Perhaps. Who knew, when so many maybes were involved?

+

Before she could decide a definite course, the plants opposite the conveyor’s scar shook. She crouched to pounce or flee, and it seemed as if her body moved through water, slowly and with clumsy grace, if that was possible. The branches parted slowly as well, but the creature moving into the clearing was by no means slow.

+

It reminded her of the conveyor construct, a melding of flesh and metal but born of reptile fathers and automotive mothers, as if its ancestors had evolved since the lost days. A foreleg rose from the ground, brushed the tangles of leaves from a grill-covered face. Its mechanical hum was even, with none of the stutters and uncertainties of the worn-out motors of the conveyor. More a purr than a roar.

+

As more of its body came through the vegetation, Sihala ran. It was far too big to fight. The monster moved quickly, while Sihala struggled through green-come-to-life. Heavy moss weighed down the branches overhead, caressing her face as she passed beneath. The creature’s breathing sounded over its engine noise, over the cracking limbs under its feet.

+

Sihala turned, turned again, rapidly, without thinking about it ahead of time, twisting her path to confuse her pursuer. She let her footprints become a map of someplace impossible. She imagined new ley lines swirling beneath her feet to feed her power.

+

The beast still pursued, but now as if confused, and its bulk didn’t let it turn as well as she could. Sihala reached an open stretch and sprinted, turning from the path just as the creature reached it. The trees embraced her, swirling their arms behind her as if in a wind she couldn’t feel. After more turning and with no hint of pursuit, she finally rested, leaning against one of the trees to let her lungs recover.

+

Unfamiliar birds whispered high in the trees, reminding Sihala of the strangeness of this place. She couldn’t let herself relax too much. The feel of the spears in her palms kept her awake. And her mind turned back to the glimpse she’d had of the creature. So much metal. The Quartermaster would give her good trade for whatever she could bring in. And the meat too, perhaps, if it proved edible.

+

These would be riches beyond any game she’d yet taken down, beyond any relics she’d plundered. She’d never be able to carry the whole thing in at once… but she could stash it somewhere and bring in a leg, or whatever promised the best reward. Even as little as she might carry, it would turn her luck around, let her fix her shack into a house, if not fancy then at least comfortable.

+

The more she thought of it, the more she wanted to hunt the hybrid animal. Sihala stood and crept through the trees in what she hoped was the direction she’d come. Vines reached down to entangle her spears. Masses of hanging moss ran their fingers through her hair.

+

She soon found the tracks of the creature, drifting off from where she’d entered the thicker woods. In her stalking run, she followed them. The beast had fed on some of the lush vegetation and at least one small animal, whose unidentifiable remains lay beside the trail.

+

The sound of breaking branches told her she neared her prey before she heard its engine noise. She left the trail to circle around in front. When a steeply angled tree appeared near where she thought the creature might go, she scampered up to hide in its welcoming branches.

+

Her wait was short before the beast lumbered directly beside her tree. She studied it, trying to decide where to stab. A bit of flesh showed directly above where its heart should be. Blocking out anything beside her target, she whipped her upper body forward and released the spear at just the right time. It struck the fur, quivered for a moment, then fell to the ground. The creature turned toward her, rising up.

+

Sihala pushed herself backward against the trunk, her feet slipping on the scaly bark. Metal-coated teeth flashed green in the light coming down through the leaves. She had one more spear, but where to use it? The animal wasn’t giving her time to debate. It brushed the lower branches aside as if twigs, though they broke loudly, ricocheting away from Sihala’s perch.

+

Its mouth? It didn’t look promising, as much full of gears and metal plates as teeth and tongue. Even its eyes appeared too risky. She leaned to one side as the head snapped toward her—there, at the side, where pistons and tendons intertwined!

+

She didn’t throw this time, but she didn’t hesitate either. Using all her body, she thrust the spear into the space that opened at the top of the neck.

+

Something snapped. The creature slid back down, but didn’t collapse wholly. It simply stood, its motor still humming but its head slumped forward. Sihala waited for any change, but nothing happened. Finally she slid down and stood beside the animal. She touched it, and the flesh quivered, but no limbs moved. She poked all around, finally daring to approach its head. The eyes were closed. The mouth hung slightly open.

+

Sihala pushed the head to the left—and the beast took a step.

+

She jumped behind the nearest tree. The creature made no further move, though, and she came back out. When she pulled the head toward herself, the creature took a single step again, and an idea formed in her mind.

+

A part of it was dead, but she didn’t think it was that the animal part had died while the mechanical lived, nor the opposite. It was so many generations since the two parts had been fused that the distinction no longer meant anything. It was more that the brain—or whatever biological and engineered hybrid fulfilled that role—had died but left most of the body on automatic. Like the conveyors, really, she thought. Like society itself, or what remained of it. Running along with no higher thinking, no memory of why or plans for how.

+

Shilaha pulled herself onto the creature’s back. A push on the head sent it shambling forward, and after a little experimentation she had the feel for guiding the half-dead thing. She directed it toward where she thought the trees might open up and let her get a wider view of this conveyor world.

+

As she rode the richest prize she’d ever won, images passed through her mind as if on a conveyor themselves, circling back over and over to repeat themselves. Of herself at rest with purchased food always available, of herself in a restored home of the ancient ones, of hunting only when she needed to, of a conveyor that worked to her will instead of the whim of unpredictability. Let the others think her luck bad now! Comfortable? That could be forgotten. Now she could dream of finery.

+

 

+

T + +he conveyor flickered across her path and disappeared, leaving a line of broken vegetation. Her ley tattoo responded with a jolt of energy. Too late, Sihala spurred her mount forward, as if the conveyor might return. As if she’d dare ride it now with it shifting so frequently. But the cut in the undergrowth made for a good path that went roughly the direction she wanted, so she steered the creature onto it and urged it faster.

+

The mount moved gracefully as it accelerated, a rolling motion from front to back that kept it moving easily but ready to change directions whenever it needed to. For Sihala, though, it didn’t feel graceful, though she knew the fault was her own. The way the shoulders rose and rolled forward with each lope roiled her stomach. After crossing a good stretch of land she had to slow the creature to a walk.

+

Smoke rose somewhere ahead, its scent falling among the trees, but by the time she could see it over the vegetation, it had dissipated enough she could never be sure exactly where it came from. Sometimes it seemed smoke was the most constant thing across all the realities touched by the conveyor. Sihala supposed it was fitting—smoke often lingered long after a fire was out, and what were they—the other hunters like herself, and even the Quartermaster with his lists of scavenged goods—but the lingering stench of a civilization long since burned out?

+

No matter. With the money from her mount, she could at least enjoy what there was to enjoy in this twilight time, and maybe even travel more widely, find a place where the metaphoric fire still burned. She kept going, hoping for a clearer view of the land.

+

After hours of riding, she passed a high smokestack, its top lost in gathering clouds. It looked cold, though, no smoke rising from its chimney. She smelled nothing burning nearby, and the lines in her arm gave no response to the building.

+

They wandered more, angling eastward when the track from the conveyor abruptly ended. Sihala felt weak with hunger. The hum of her mount’s motor never changed, but its muscles grew weary. It stumbled, not often but regularly, as if every hundredth step was ordained for failure. Sihala watched the passing land for food both for herself and for it.

+

When they reached an oil-covered pool of water, she led the animal to its edge, and it drank blindly, automatically. As the rainbows danced in her vision, she wondered if the pool served as nourishment for both the biological and mechanical parts of the creature. The surrounding vegetation held no food for her, but when it finished drinking her mount grazed among the branches. Sihala removed her only packet of emergency food and ate, wondering where to head next.

+

After grazing, the creature lay down to sleep, and Sihala decided to allow a brief break. No danger registered on her tattoo. She climbed the tallest tree beside the pool, and at first all she could clearly see were the tops of other trees on nearby hills, but far off there was a hint of smoke, a weak promise of some kind of city that was more than mere ruins. She descended again and leaned against a fur-covered part of her mount, but she didn’t dare sleep.

+

Later as daylight faded, she woke the creature and climbed on its back, setting it moving, as much as she could guess toward that distant smoke. Then she tied herself to some of the stable metal parts of its back and let herself doze. She slept surprisingly deeply.

+

When she woke, her mount had slowed, and an odd tickle lingered in her tattoo. The hybrid creature still walked, but no faster than she’d be able to on her own legs. She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them again, trying to understand what had happened. Before she could figure anything out, a shape darted from the underbrush, crashed into her mount, and then dashed off again.

+

She looked down. Blood and oil dripped down where the shadow had struck. The marks of other teeth scored her mount all along that side. Scavengers. Her mount had been half eaten away in the night.

+

Sihala held out her last spear as if the threat could return the flesh to the creature. The spear point was no longer sharp after she’d stabbed her mount, and she feared the shaft was no longer true either. No other shapes appeared, but that did nothing to lift the weight that settled over her. What would the Quartermaster give her for this? Scrap metal and nothing more. Even if its mechanical parts survived long enough to carry her to the Quartermaster, he wouldn’t dare assume it could last much longer.

+

Her visions of riches faded slowly into the overwhelming green of the dawn.

+

They plodded all day. Her mount slowed no more than it already had, but neither did it pick up its pace. Sihala thought she ought to get down and walk beside the animal or range around for clues to where to head, but she couldn’t find the energy. Instead she spent her time thinking about all the things she’d imagined, all the riches and luxuries she’d promised herself. Each item, each pile of technological wonder and mineral riches, she held up in her mind and forced herself to let go. Told herself that she’d deceived herself long enough. But as each one floated away into the humid air, she reached out and snatched it, unwilling to release the dreams.

+

Late in the day, they arrived at an ancient road, its pavement torn apart by plants. Sihala turned her mount, randomly choosing a direction to follow. The broken road proved no easier to follow than any haphazard path through the undergrowth, but Sihala thought—no, thought was too strong a word—hoped it might lead her to the remnant city.

+

As the sun finally set, turning the bright greens of the plants into impenetrable blacks, the forest thinned, and she finally saw lights and heard the mingled sounds of machinery and voices.

+

The mount was going even slower, but perhaps it was merely her anticipation of being able to rest. After everything, she had to get the metal at least to the Quartermaster.

+

The road became a street, lined with buildings that hadn’t fully fallen in. People passing gave her surprised looks, but otherwise ignored her. She rode until she saw the sign she’d been looking for: crossed spears surrounded by nuts and bolts and loose gears, all backed by the antlers of some creature she’d never seen in all her hunting.

+

Sihala slipped off and the creature stood still. As she pulled on the door, her mount collapsed onto its side, the motor coughing and sputtering. Even her most modest dreams would have to go. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and entered the shop.

+

No matter where the conveyors took her, the Quartermaster was the same. Chubby and wearing an open, black cloak. Bespectacled, with a brimmed hat that fit snugly over his head. His habitual cane now leaned against the nearby wall.

+

“Welcome, scavenger,” he said. “What have you come to trade in?”

+

“A construct, Quartermaster. Flesh and oil, metal and blood.”

+

He looked out his window and said, “I see little flesh to it. Scrap metal, maybe.”

+

Sihala reached over to rub her ley tattoo. Little energy flowed in this town, but what there was comforted her. “As you say. But surely the components will be valuable.”

+

The Quartermaster shrugged, a motion that looked more mechanical than natural. “Maybe. Some of these creatures have evolved parts that aren’t useful for our machines.”

+

They went outside so he could examine the creature. Sihala haggled briefly, but soon gave in to his offer. Unlucky once again. Then she asked, “Where can I find the conveyor now?”

+

The Quartermaster led her back inside and checked what resembled a book, though symbols and numbers scrolled across it constantly, swirling into patterns as he touched them, as if magnetically drawn to his fingertips.

+

Somehow the orbits of those symbols gave him the information he needed. “It will pass through here tomorrow. I’ve arranged for it to cut down along the old train lines for most of the morning.”

+

“Will it stay that long?” Sihala thought again of its rapid shifting of the day before. “It’s been acting funny, like the thing is getting old with no one left to fix it.”

+

The Quartermaster gave her a look she’d never seen before, a flash of fear that merged into arrogance, shutting her up. She wondered just how old the Quartermaster was and what his connection to the conveyors was.

+

“It will stay.” Dismissive. Haughty. And yet fearful and weary as well, as if someday such certainty would no longer exist. If the Quartermaster was what remained of the ancient society, and if that culture’s brain had become disconnected, leaving it to stagger on by instinct, what scavengers might threaten him, to tear away the last remaining value of these days? Sihala was afraid to wonder. She stood there, not sure what words of comfort she could offer, or even if the Quartermaster would want that.

+

He pointed through a dark doorway to a tiny room filled with metal and tools. “You may sleep in the room through there.” She gratefully accepted. As she closed the door, she saw dozens of tiny constructs scurrying out toward her former mount to dismantle it and take its parts inside.

+

She fell asleep thinking of her little shack along one of the conveyor’s more common paths, of hard ground that only pungent, leafy plants could conquer, plants that reclaimed the conveyor’s path each time it shifted away, giving back grudgingly when it returned.

+

She wondered what creatures she would hunt tomorrow, and what luck she would have to scavenge for.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds” on Facebook.

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+

Daniel Ausema

+

+ + Author image of Daniel Ausema + + + Daniel Ausema lives with his family in Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His work has appeared in many publications, including Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Diabolical Plots. He is the creator of the steampunk-fantasy Spire City series as well as the Arcist Chronicles, which is published by Guardbridge Books. You can find him at his website and on twitter.

+

© Daniel Ausema 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Pexels, bere69, and TobiasRehbein.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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August 2020

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Welcome to the 23rd issue of Mythaxis.

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+ Anya Josephs +

The Newest Profession

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We open the issue with a visit to a plausible near-future, as Anya Josephs presents us with a disturbing glimpse of a world where ordinary people rarely get the chances they dream of, and corporate life is everything. That last is a theme this magazine plans to play host to again - but that's a story for another time. As for this one, well, the title gives it all away. Doesn't it?

+ + + + Story image for The Newest Profession by + + + + + +
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The Sedona House

+ Jeffery Scott Sims +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Sedona House by + + + +

Mythaxis is not just about looking to the future. Jeffery Scott Sims delivers a classic yarn with echoes of H. P. Lovecraft to it - courtesy of the kind of roguish problem-solver-for-hire who made the stencilled doors of Private Eyes so much fun to knock on...

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A Curse at Midnight

+ Moustapha Mbacké Diop +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for A Curse at Midnight by + + + +

Afrofuturism is riding a wave of popularity around the world, but that richness which scifi is benefitting from has its roots in traditional stories, myths, and beliefs. Moustapha Mbacké Diop takes us to present day Senegal and shows us that some of those things from the past are alive and well, and very up close.

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Alight

+ Skye Allen +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Alight by + + + +

Depending on her name at the time, Skye Allen either does fantasy fiction or she does music. In the piece she gave us, we get both - along with a stage-side pass to a gig that threatens to go to some very dark places. There's nothing quite like a band that's on fire...

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The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds

+ Daniel Ausema +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Huntress and the Conveyor Worlds by + + + +

Fantasy author and speculative poet Daniel Ausema is no stranger to strange lands, strange technologies, strange creatures. Here he takes us on a journey though a selection of the first, and exposes us to the others in ways his heroine - and readers - may be unprepared for.

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The Third Martian Dick Temple

+ Micah Hyatt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Third Martian Dick Temple by + + + +

Mythaxis generally seeks out unpublished work, but occasionally a story comes along that leaves the kind of impression that you want to land again. Micah Hyatt's perfectly crafted piece of flash fiction is just such a thing: a short, sharp, knock-out punch of a story, with a killer final line.

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Cartoon

+ Liam Baldwin +
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Liam Baldwin has been providing humorous and/or pun-ridden art (and occasionally fiction) to Mythaxis since the beginning, and long may he continue. As for right now, who'd enjoy a short, informative dissertation with a dose of classic scifi to it?

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Experimental Diet

+ Andrew Johnston +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Experimental Diet by + + + +

From the beginning there's been a fine tradition of epistolary fiction in the speculative genres - Dracula, for example, told its bloody tale through diaries, letters, newspaper articles, ship's logs... Andrew Johnston tells no less bloody a tale - and if these records glowed on a screen on some distant planet, what of it?

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Robots of Paris

+ Andrea Kriz +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Robots of Paris by + + + +

Not only is "Alternate History" a fun source of escapism for the well-informed reader, it can give rise to what we might call "Alternate Future" stories - where we glimpse what might have followed what might have been. Andrea Kriz doesn't say it outright, but we can see what changed here. And what needs to.

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Weapons of Mass Entanglement

+ Dennis Mombauer +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Weapons of Mass Entanglement by + + + +

The only unifying thing Mythaxis seeks is good writing - but we want to bring together a variety of genres, styles, themes, and no two alike is fine by us. Dennis Mombauer answered that call with a vision of the strange, and left us with questions.

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Everything's Jake

+ Christopher Cook +
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They say "Always leave them wanting more", and we think the final story of the issue will certainly do that. Chris Cook introduces us to a down-to-earth family man dealing with real world problems... and then introduces him to the quirkiest suburban adventure you're ever likely to come across. Fuggedaboudit.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-23/newest-profession.html b/issue-23/newest-profession.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6b5a3609 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/newest-profession.html @@ -0,0 +1,417 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Newest Profession — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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The Newest Profession

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Anya Josephs

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+ Story image for The Newest Profession by +
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107 days to program launch

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I + +t’s the most ordinary night in the world when the call comes. Yendra is sitting in front of the wallscreen at her parents’ place, eating her second-favorite flavor of chips (she’s already polished off all the best ones in this month’s snack delivery) and watching season eight of Fashion Fights. Then an alert flashes across the screen: Confidential to Yendra Burke, from G3O Central Office.

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She figures it’s an all-call from HR about the Company’s 200th anniversary or something, and tries to dismiss it with a flick of her fingertip across the screen. Stubbornly, the letters dance across the screen again, flashing red now. So she taps on them, prompting the message to open up.

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The format of the message makes it obvious at once what it is: a job offer. Yendra grits her teeth and gets ready for the blow.

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She’s known for a long time that she isn’t cut out for one of the good jobs. Her grades in math and coding were always shaky. She didn’t even get placed in Mech or Electrical E in 6th grade, and college (or better yet, interning) was out of the question. For a while, she’d hoped maybe she could get something in the Graphics department—she loved to draw, and she wasn’t bad at it—but there were few of those slots, and she’d known before high school started that she just wasn’t good enough. She hadn’t tested high enough in empathy and conflict resolution to follow her mom’s footsteps into the Human Resources department. And that’s just a few of the best that she isn’t good enough for: she could, if she wanted to make herself miserable, run straight down the list of all 273 individual departments at G3O and explain exactly why she didn’t have what it took for any of them.

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On her 18th birthday, as she received her diploma, she also got a letter from the Company. It contained pre-written words of congratulation, no doubt authored by someone who had scored much higher on both writing and creativity than Yendra had, and a list of suggested jobs for her to apply to. In order: front desk greeter, direct sales marketer, and “out of Company.” Meaning the only thing they thought she was qualified to do was smile and look pretty, and they weren’t even sure she could do that right. She might have to end up working at one of the handful of restaurants or shops in the city that were still privately owned and had to hire washouts like her to do backbreaking work at pathetic wages because they couldn’t even save up enough for a bot.

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Of course, she applied for every open position she could find anyway. But the Company got her scores alongside her application, and at a glance could compare her with every other recent grad searching and know exactly where she ranks.

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Worse, she does.

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She’s lucky to have any offer, she knows. Even if it means a lifetime sitting behind the front desk, smiling and waving at people as they walk in. It still means being a part of G3O, and that means access to the shining tower that spreads all the way down six full city blocks of 14th Street. It guarantees a decent wage (if not a generous one, at least in the kind of job that Yendra might get), and the possibility of moving out of her parents’ place. Probably to a company-owned sleep pod at first, sure, but maybe to a real apartment like this one, eventually. Maybe she’ll meet someone at work and start a family. She could be happy, even if her job bores her senseless. Even if it reminds her, every day, of each and every way in which she isn’t good enough.

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She scans the offer as quickly as her reading speed (only 21st percentile for her age cohort) allows, but doesn’t see the name of the position. She doesn’t see anything that makes any sense, so she carefully reads the letter, in full.

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Dear Yendra,

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Congratulations on your recent graduation from all of us here at G3O, and thanks so much for wanting to be a part of our superstar team! We noticed you applied to a couple of open positions here, and we love your team spirit.

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We actually think we might have the perfect opportunity for you. It’s a brand-new project that hasn’t been posted yet, but we think you have what it takes. If you’re interested, ping us back—we would love to go ahead and set up an interview.

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Danelle, and the rest of the G3O Research Team

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Never in her life has Yendra, solidly-bottom quartile Yendra, average-at-best-in-everything Yendra, thought she would get a personal message from the Research Department. Of all the departments that would laugh Yendra’s application out of their inboxes, the Research Department is the most elite, the most competitive, and the most prestigious.

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She doesn’t even stop to think about what this mysterious message could mean, why they might want her or why there’s so little detail involved. She doesn’t let herself think about how little she deserves this. She just types out a reply.

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Hi Danelle!

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So great to hear from you—and I couldn’t be more excited! When can I come in?

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Before she’s finished her episode of Fashion Fights, she has an answer.

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106 days to program launch

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Yendra’s mother made her eat before she left the apartment for the interview. Now she’s wishing she hadn’t been talked into it, because she seriously feels like she might be sick all over the perfectly white tile floor of the waiting room.

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She’s been in G3O offices almost every day of her life. One of her parents would take her to work and leave her in the Play Area when she was a baby, and she’s only ever attended company schools. That included regular, requisite tours of every corner of the public halls. So it shouldn’t be so scary, just sitting here.

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Yeah, she’s probably going to be sick.

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“Yendra?”

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A tall, perfectly polished white woman in her mid-thirties steps into the waiting room, her red-soled heels clacking across the floor. Yendra looks up and sees her smile.

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“I’m Danelle. Come on in.”

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Well, Yendra follows. There’s not much else to do. It’s a short walk down a perfectly spotless corridor, and then into what she assumes is Danelle’s office, from the mess of papers strewn everywhere. You have to be pretty far up in the company to even get your own desk, let alone one behind a door that closes, and Yendra mentally revises her sense of what’s going on here. She’s at least speaking to someone of enormous importance. Which, again, is sort of outside the realm of things she ever expected to do.

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“Take a seat. Do you want tea, coffee, sparkling water?”

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“No. Thank you.” She sits on the chair Danelle points to, one of the cushy ergonomic numbers that molds to her thighs as she settles into it.

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Danelle runs her through some standard interview protocol. There’s a barrage of simple IQ and EQ tests, all of which Yendra probably bombs because she’s so nervous, all of which are pointless because Danelle already has a digital file of every test Yendra ever took in twelve years of school.

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But to her surprise, Danelle is smiling when Yendra puts down the handscreen. It’s maybe an hour later, and Yendra is a little out of it, the way she always is when she’s been staring at screens for too long.

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“As I suspected,” Danelle says. “I think you’ll be a perfect fit.”

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“Really?” Yendra blurts, though she regrets it immediately. She’s trying to seem confident and poised, not… whatever she actually is.

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“Yendra, how much do you know about our program?”

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“Um. Nothing. Not even the name.” Yendra feels the heat rising to her cheeks. “It’s not that I didn’t want to prepare, I just, there was nothing to go on in the message, and—“

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“You have nothing to apologize for. It’s a brand-new program, not even launched yet, and we worry it may be… controversial, at first. Our marketing team is hard at work finding the right way to educate the public about our work, but in the meantime, we don’t want wild rumors to start flying before we’re ready to launch. So for that reason, we have to ask you to sign this NDA, before we can go into any detail about the role. Would that be all right?”

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Yendra signs the agreement. She doesn’t even think about it. She barely reads it.

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“Thank you. Now.” Danelle gestures, and the huge wallscreen behind her desk lights up. It’s pre-programmed with a presentation, in the classic legible, almost-cartoonish style that every G3O presentation shares, from the annual internationally-watched product launch to middle school algebra lectures.

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The title, splashed in bold font across the page, is: Personal Partnerships: A Premiere Perks Program

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Danelle sighs. “I keep trying to convince them to change the name, but they insist that alliteration tests well. I don’t know with whom. I’m only in charge of market research for the program itself, not the marketing.”

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The presentation continues. It informs Yendra about all the perks that are provided to all company employees: the catered lunches, the unlimited snacks and drinks, the nap pods, the free tech, the hovercars that speed you home if you work overtime. Like Yendra didn’t already know everything she was missing out on.

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“We have these things for two reasons,” Danelle explains. “One is because we want to be good to our team, to attract and keep the best of the best working here. The other—and I’ll be frank, because this is a confidential conversation—the other is so that our team doesn’t need anything we can’t provide. Hungry? Snacks are right there, or order delivery from any restaurant you want and we’ll pay. Tired? Close your eyes in a nap pod, or head upstairs to one of our dorms for a proper night’s sleep. Need a break? We’ve got fitness centers, in-office massages, ping-pong tables, beautiful outdoor spaces. Anything you need, we can give you, quicker and better than you could get it on your own, and all for free.”

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So that you never have to step away from your desk. You never have to stop working. Yendra isn’t the brightest—she’s seen her numbers too many times to think otherwise—but like everyone else, she’s figured that out. The company doesn’t ever want you to have to leave. It’s how they’ve come to essentially rule the world. They find the best and the brightest and give them everything. That way, they are, if not actually bound to the company, effectively so. If the company gives you everything you ever need, or even want, why would you ever leave?

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“Our perks program has been extremely effective in aiding in staff recruitment and retention. The company is regularly ranked the world’s most-desirable employer, and as many as 90% of our employees remain with us for their entire careers. The perks program is frequently cited as a top draw for some of the most promising talent, and for the most part our staff has been extremely satisfied with its comprehensiveness and reach. Except for one… fairly major area of human need.”

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Danelle goes onto the next slide. “In a recent study of our 2,000 most-productive coders, 91.7% of them ranked sex as one of the things they think about most often. By using biometric indicators, we also found that an additional 4.2% were lying. In short, other than the relatively small number of team members who are asexual, or able to maintain a relationship despite the demands of their jobs, our entire team is being distracted by sex.”

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The next slide has another chart, more highlighted figures.

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“47.8% stated that they would use a company-provided personal intimacy service often or very often, with a further 23.6% found to be interested but unwilling to admit it, based on biometric scans that indicate their initial answers were dishonest. I could bore you with the margins of error, but I think you get the idea.”

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“You’re basically pitching… Company-provided prostitution?” Yendra asks.

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Danelle snaps her fingers, and the wallscreen goes dim. She looks up, meeting Yendra’s eyes. “We’re not pitching it, Yendra. We’re years into a program launch that could help create some of the most important advances in the history of the Company. And I think you may be the right person to take us to the next step in this revolutionary project.”

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Yendra nods, slowly. She takes a deep breath, and swallows hard. And she says, “Where do I sign up?”

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102 days to program launch

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It’s kind of annoying that Yendra isn’t allowed to tell anyone about the biggest career move she’s ever likely to make.

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She’s been hired under a special contract and gets a nice round hundred bitcoin a year, a small fortune, for as long as she’s in the role. Plus, in case of failed launch or whatever, they’ve promised her an additional fifty for life, from signing onward. She need never work again, and still be able to live a decent life. A good life.

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Besides, Danelle assured, “It might not sound like much, and I know some people won’t approve of the nature of the position, but some will. Throw in your lot with us, and people will see what even our best tests can’t show—your adventurous spirit, your willingness to take a chance, your ability to work hard, all for the benefit of the company.”

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So it sucks that she can’t even tell her parents anything but that she’s been recruited for a new project, and that it’s top secret. Her dad glows with pride, telling her he always knew that she’d find a way to show everyone how special she is. Her mom quietly congratulates her. She doesn’t know how they would feel if they knew the truth, and doesn’t really care.

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Okay, so she wishes she could make her way to the top without having to sleep her way there. Or even get through the front door off something other than her pretty face. She can’t pretend otherwise. But she won’t forget she’s been given an opportunity she never expected. She won’t make anything less than the best of it.

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She dresses carefully for her first day at G3O headquarters. She chooses a charcoal-grey suit that used to be her mother’s, with a red silk blouse underneath. Serious, professional, but still looking the part just enough. She reminds herself that this isn’t shameful. It’s special. Revolutionary, Danelle said, and she’s a department head at the most powerful company in the world. And she’s chosen Yendra to help her change the world.

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She puts her hair back in a neat chignon, and adds a light touch of makeup.

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The crowning glory hangs around her neck: her G3O employee badge, delivered by drone just the night before. It contains all her biometric data: retinal scan, thumbprint, heartbeat rhythm, so that G3O security can match her to her profile easily. With this badge, shimmering with holographic anti-copying designs, Yendra gets access not just to the public floors but to the highest and most secret parts of the Company. She can walk right into the research areas where trillion-dollar projects are tossed around like confetti. She can access all the top-notch perks herself—brand-new top-of-the-line handscreens and wallscreens, free catered meals three times a day or whatever she wants prepared by the in-house chefs, unlimited care from Company doctors, weekly trips to the masseur or acupuncturist.

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In short, this badge is proof that she’s successful. Proof that everyone who ever said she would never make anything of herself was wrong. Proof that low test scores and mediocre evaluations don’t define her. Proof that she is, and that she always has been, more.

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If she’s got that, she doesn’t care what she has to do to keep it. She just has to keep reminding herself of that. She has what she’s always wanted. A chance.

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87 days to program launch

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So, Yendra’s fancy new job is mostly pretty boring.

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She spends some time at her desk, doing straightforward tasks. Data entry, things like that. Stuff an intern could do, not so different from the projects she barely passed back in high school. She knows that’s just to keep her busy, though, between times that the real researchers need her. It does take the sting out of it somewhat to know that she gets paid exactly as much as they do. She may be an object to their subject, but she’s also a Company employee, and she’s been assured that she’s also a real member of the team. Minimal though her contribution may be.

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When they need her, she tries to zone out. She’s not afraid to admit, in the privacy of her own mind, that it’s pretty unpleasant, being treated like an experimental subject. Which, of course, she is.

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She’s told that this is phase one: initial testing. What it largely entails is her being presented to various panels of Company employees, who are asked to rank her on a number of measures that will determine her suitability for the project.

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She chokes down her initial objection to being treated like an object on display and asks, trying not to let the lump in her throat leak into her voice, if she had misunderstood. “I thought I was already selected for the project.”

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“Of course, dear,” responds Vina, the motherly older woman who works as HR consultant for the project, and as Yendra’s direct supervisor. “We’re just gathering data to see how many partners we might end up needing. Personalization and universalization, that’s how G3O has made their mark, but no one expects you to do both!”

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That alleviates her most significant fear, but there’s nothing in the whole world that can make it pleasant to stand behind a reinforced glass panel while a committee of data engineers rank her attractiveness on a 215-question survey. Obviously, the Company provides top-notch counseling and therapy, but Vina gently hinted during her onboarding that it would be better if she didn’t discuss certain things with anyone. Like the nature of the job she was hired to do, for example.

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She tries to remind herself that they don’t even know why they’re here: the project’s cover story is that they’re working to improve facial recognition. Yendra is the one with the power here, the one who has been allowed into the inner circle.

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That doesn’t make her feel any better when it’s time to remove her clothes for the next round of surveys. The air on her side of the glass is heated to a pleasantly balmy temperature, and the glass is one-way so she can’t see them looking at her. Every consideration has been taken, but she can’t stop imagining what’s on the other side.

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Sometimes she pictures dozens of pairs of hungry eyes on her, consuming her intangibly. Other times, they’re all staring down at their handscreens, focused on their assignment, ignoring her completely. She isn’t sure which would be worse.

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It doesn’t really matter. She’s here to do a job. The survey panels only meet once a day, anyways. She doesn’t have to do anything, has been specifically told not to try to look alluring or attractive, so she just tries to keep the anxiety off her face and focus on the future that she’s earning for herself with every second she stands there. After that, she gets to go back to her desk and her data sheets, and not too long after that, home again.

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It’s better than anything she could have hoped for.

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71 days to program launch

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The initial survey results are very promising, they tell her. It seems like she’ll be an excellent model for the program. Pretty, but not so much that she intimidates the shyest of the first-rank employees. Attractive, but not enough that they’ll be distracted from their work while they wait for their turn.

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In short, she is perfectly average. They don’t put it like that, but she can read between the lines.

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Well, at least her lifelong mediocrity is finally good for something.

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The survey panels continue, mostly scheduled for the mid-afternoon when productivity for employees tend to dip, and where her services would likely be needed in helping everyone get back on track. But there’s a new task added to her calendar, a new phase of the study in preparation for program launch.

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Measurements.

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No one explains to her exactly why this is necessary, or even why they are doing what they’re doing. But for some reason, before she leaves every day, she spends the last two hours submitting to a panel of measurements. At first, it’s surprisingly old-fashioned—a couple of tailors with a literal measuring tape, taking the dimensions of her arms, her waist, her breasts. But as the days go forward, they get more precise, culminating in micro-bots crawling along her skin to determine its exact topographical layout.

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She tries to hint Vina into sharing what’s going on, and receives a distant smile in response. She supposes they’re just getting more data. If she’s been found suitable for the project, why? How many centimeters of hip circumference, how many cubic centimeters of breast tissue, how many flowing hairs on her head?

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Lately, she’s been feeling more and more disconnected from her body. She spends so much of her time being examined by analytical eyes that she’s started to feel like it’s not really her there, under her clothes or beneath her bare skin. She’s somewhere else, distant and watching and considering whether or not any of this was worth it.

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She scares herself, thinking like that. After all, the proper work hasn’t even started yet. Pretty soon, she’s going to have to start actually “working”, actually having sex with people on the company’s behalf. If she’s already starting to feel this way, will she be able to handle that?

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She reminds herself that they chose her for a reason. They could’ve picked anyone—it’s not like they don’t have their choice of every resumé in the world for any open position. But they didn’t pick any of those other people. They picked her. She has to live up to that.

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There are some consolations. All those other perks, the nap rooms and the game centers and the unlimited snacks? She helps herself to them with regularity. Now she can have her favorite kind of chip whenever she wants, without waiting for the shipment to arrive, and she’ll have saved up for her very own off-site apartment by the time the project launches. Her bank account is steadily growing into the triple digits, and she has her upcoming one year high-school reunion to look forward to.

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The thought of everyone’s disbelieving faces as she tells them all that she’s been hired for a top-secret project by the Research Department is enough to get her through some of the least pleasant moments, like when calipers pinch her painfully tight or some fumble-fingered engineering intern is trying to get a more precise measurement of the depth of her vagina.

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Besides, she probably won’t have to do the actual work for very long. Danelle had assured her of that more than a few times. She just wishes there were someone for her to talk to about it all, she supposes. But her NDA had been exhaustive. There were no exceptions to the silence she had agreed to.

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She wants everyone to see that she’s on top of her work, but more than that, that she’s the right kind of person to work at the company. The kind of person who can keep a secret. The kind of person who’s willing to take whatever it gets. The kind of person who will one day be sitting in her very own private office, with the future at her feet.

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42 days to program launch

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Another message from Danelle floating across her handscreen. This time, the words that will change her life read: We’re moving to trial this week. Everything is ready. Do you want to be the first to see? You’ve earned it. -D

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She had no idea it would be so soon. No idea that she only had a small handful of days before the end of this long period of strange waiting, before it was time to do what she’d been chosen for.

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She replies: Of course.

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Her handscreen alerts her to a new meeting appointment at the Far Rockaway Lab, in five minutes’ time—all the rooms in the building are named after city landmarks, which is exactly as annoyingly precious as it sounds. Off Yendra trots, obedient to the electronic summons, and admittedly burning with some curiosity.

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She finds Danelle standing outside the locked door, her normally professional face betraying a hint of excitement, or even nerves. “They just finished production on number ten. You’ll be the very first to see, other than the production team. I haven’t even been in myself.”

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“Oh,” Yendra says, searching for more appropriate words. It’s difficult, since she has no idea what’s going on.

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“I’m sure it’ll be strange at first, but, just remember, this is a real advance. We’re doing more than just preparing to improve G3O’s hiring and retention rates. We’re moving science forward, a real leap, and I want to thank you for your part in it.”

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Danelle waves her badge in front of the door, the lock clicks, and it slides open.

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On the other side, Yendra sees herself. A crowd of herself. Identical, lifeless copies, standing naked, closed-eyed, unmoving, unbreathing. She sees ten freckles on the side of ten noses, ten of her left breast a little fuller than the right, ten soft curves of her lower stomach, ten tiny scars at the base of ten clavicles.

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“They’re not activated yet, of course, but testing assures me they’re fully functional. Our first field test will be in three days. We’ll turn them on then, save power in the meantime.”

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It’s a long time before she can stammer out the question. “What are they?”

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Now Danelle is smiling, staring at the other Yendras, apparently unaware of the Yendra next to her as she struggles against the sudden pounding of her heart. “Gorgeous, aren’t they? We’ve been working on the associated technology for some time. Lab-grown human skin over an artificial skeleton, conversational AI, the eyes—you have no idea how hard it was to get the eyes right! But this is the first real prototype. The Hiring and Retention team has a massive budget, and we were able to do something really revolutionary with it. Something that will help us all make our mark.”

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“They’re robots.” Yendra realizes out loud, with some combination of disgust and relief.

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“Well, of course. How did you think we were going to make the copies?” Danelle finally takes her eyes from her sleeping creations and looks at the real, living Yendra beside her. “You can’t have thought you were actually going to be performing sexual services on the company’s behalf. That would raise a number of the most significant ethical concerns. Not to mention quality control problems. And how would we scale the program across different sites if we’re depending on human providers? No, we discarded the idea years ago. Besides, this is the perfect testing ground for our HuBots.” She frowns. “Really don’t like that name.”

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Yendra can hear her heart beating like it’s in her head. “What happens to me?”

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“Well, obviously, we’ll need your help training them up. They’re not supposed to have your personality or anything, we’ve combined that from a variety of different models, but gestures, physical quirks, things like that.”

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“And then?”

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“You’ll continue receiving a very generous stipend, for life. And you’ll know that you’ve made an irreplaceable contribution to a truly remarkable sociological breakthrough.”

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“But.” It’s a real effort to hold back tears, which is humiliating. She’s already made herself look stupid, not having realized the basics of a project she’s been working on for months. She doesn’t want to seem pathetic as well. “I thought you said, that maybe, that I could stay with the project. In another role. That this was my chance to show what I could do.”

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“And you have.” Danelle smiles at her. “Yendra, we tested a dozen candidates before you. None had anything like your scores for physical attractiveness and approachability, across an incredibly diverse pool of potential subjects. You were the perfect person for this project, and we’re so grateful to you.”

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“So that’s all I’m good for?” Yendra doesn’t quite gesture over at the robot-clone-things, but it’s hard not to.

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Danelle gives her arm a sympathetic touch. “Of course not. But I just don’t think you can hope to lead a project team when every one of them knows what you look like naked, when they’re regularly making use of sexual services from a non-sentient entity that resembles you exactly. I think it’s best for the project if pre-launch is where your contribution ends.”

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Yendra stares at the copies of herself. But instead, maybe for the first time in her life, she’s seeing a future clearly. Her future.

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She will take her payout and buy herself an apartment. She’ll spend her days watching reality TV and eating chips, and wondering how many of the people who see her face have seen it before. These things will remain here, in the heart of the company, pulling the world’s best and brightest into nap pods for quick trysts between long hours at their work stations. No doubt the technology will be all over the world in a few years, with HuBots—it really is a stupid name—first being sold to the private market as the ultimate sex toys, then taking over as things like waitresses, maybe even working as front desk greeters for the company.

+

She wonders if she, she, will even be a footnote in the history of this new development. She wonders how she could have sold her face, her body, her self without even realizing what she had done.

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“Well,” she says, swallowing, her throat so dry. “Thank you anyway. For the opportunity.”

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Newest Profession” on Facebook.

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Anya Josephs

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+ + Author image of Anya Josephs + + + Anya Josephs was raised in North Carolina and now lives and works in New York City, where she teaches foster youth pursuing college degrees. When not working or writing, she can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping her cat, Sycorax. Her writing can be found in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, The Green Briar Review, the Necronomicon Anthology, SPARK, UnLaced, Proud2BeMe, The Huffington Post, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Poets Reading the News. Her debut novel, Queen of All, a fantasy for young adults, is forthcoming from Zenith Press. You can find her at her website anyajosephs.com), and she tweets as @anya_writes.

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© Anya Josephs 2020 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: JacksonDavid (several times over), and Pexels.

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Robots of Paris

+

Andrea Kriz

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Robots of Paris by +
+ + + + +

T + +he moon’s simmering, a half-baked crescent. Croissant. Though croissant isn’t a distinctly French thing anymore, Riess feels—he can get croissants even in the cafés back home. Tasteless, doughy things, like all those so-called authentic pastries he’s tried so far.

+

He stops by that café down on the corner and gets one plus a coffee, black, on his way to the office and leaves it half-eaten on his desk by ten in the morning. All his friends in Germany tell him it’s not supposed to be like that, rave on about flaky layers and beautifully browned crusts and so on, so it must be some baker, or maybe that waiter with the ascot who always glares at him when he walks in, getting his petty revenge. No, it’s not easy being an SS officer in this crummy city.

+

At this hour of the morning, Riess’s usually waking up at his desk with keyboard keys imprinted on his face, trying to remember which robot-fighting gang member’s e-arrest form he’s been filling out, or whose Labor Corps exemption he’s dealing with—like he doesn’t realize they’re all faking it, bastards—or explaining why he electrocuted that AMP dealer last month. Unless he’s rolling out of bed at five in the morning, getting a couple sets of push-ups in and briskly walking to work, then it’s stopping by the café, doughy croissant, etc.

+

So he should be glad to get out of the office. But he’s not. He’s downright uncomfortable in the wake of flashing red-blue patrol skycars, peering into this alley. Standing in the cold dawn makes him realize how much he appreciates the morning routine, waiting in line in the so-called authentic café, all those French teens talking smack about him, sticky floors, news and cigarette kiosk shutters slamming outside. It’s dead quiet.

+

“We’ve got reports of a monster running around,” Aude Schiller told him back at the office, with a sarcastic smile. “A metal beastie.”

+

“Can you say hallucination?” Riess jibed.

+

“AMP, drug of choice in the slums, doesn’t make you hallucinate,” Aude said. “It just gets you high. Gives you energy, like you can do anything in the world.”

+

“Well, I wouldn’t know,” Riess mutters to himself now. “I’ve never tried it.”

+

Although some of his panzer friends used to pop it like candy back when it was a proper drug, restricted to the military. It reminds him of the time he served. Quietness, dark holdouts in crumbling cities, flashes of gunfire here and there.

+

There’s none of that now. He’s peering into the alley instead, gloved hand splayed against the faintly damp wall because there’s no way he can take it any longer just standing here, waiting for whatever miliciens drew the short straw to come back with reconnaissance or coffee or fresh baked pastries or what. The last reaches of red-blue light flicker on the puddle behind him as he ducks under the tape, LEDs alternating between POLIZEIABSPERRUNG and POLICE ZONE INTERDITE.

+

A cop detaches himself from one of the skycar radios and comes jogging over. They’ve set one of the newbies here to babysit him. A young guy, mid-twenties, and the breath puffs white out of his mouth as he hesitates, shifting from foot to foot.

+

“I’m going to scout a bit outside the perimeter,” Riess informs him. He’s clearly wondering whether to phone up Aude or text her for approval. Riess twinges with irritation.

+

“Have you got your gun sir?” the cop finally asks.

+

“Of course,” Riess snaps, and wants to add, “I’ve had my gun, son, since before you were born.” First time he offed someone had to be when he was eighteen. When he was twenty, he was crushing riots in the frozen wastelands, hijacking mech suits—those ancient ones without personality circuits, that you could just jump into—and taking them for joyrides. So he can handle whatever the situation is here now.

+

The builder’s some French teen. He runs over the info Aude gave him back at the office as he blinks five times in rapid succession, obligatory echo of that electronic woman from the instruction vids, activating his night-vision contacts. Leader of one of those robot fighting gangs. The Flying Hares. Marcel Volant—we’ve dealt with him before. Have they? Any French name to Riess isn’t worth remembering. They’ll ship the kid off to the Labor Corps most likely, they’ve got that whole process electronic now, takes like twelve clicks and they’ll just inject the microchip into his arm, have it wrapped up by noon.

+

Of course it might get complicated depending on how exactly it’s done, might have to drum up a firing squad, do the whole shebang. Maybe they can use the schoolyard again. That way they can take advantage of the zoning restrictions to keep the protestors out, even though the city officials have gotten wise to them, are pushing back against it now… he’ll have to check where the litigation stands.

+

Back in the day they would’ve shot the lot of ‘em. The murderer for murdering, the protestors for protesting, the officials for officiating, that ascotted waiter for being an ass and giving him half-baked croissants. They used to be nice to you back then—they didn’t have a choice. Now this building of robots that can slice up people, Christ. Like that poor corpse back there, under the tarp in five pieces. But he wasn’t military, so maybe they won’t have to go through the hassle of the firing squad, freezing their asses off in their stuffy uniforms, and in the end Riess probably having to go up and shoot this Marcel kid in the neck anyway because these guys couldn’t hit the side of a barn if it was tied down, shitheads.

+

Berlin’s oddly specific about these types of things. If the kid did it with a meat cleaver he’ll get thirteen years of hard labor, but if he did it with a robot he’ll definitely get the firing squad.

+

Then Riess spots him. He slips back around the corner expecting the kid to have heard the crunch of his steps through the snow and dart away… but he doesn’t. He’s tracing the bricks in the wall in front of him with bare fingers, hatless and in a light jacket. Riess shudders through his layers of coat and ushanka seeing him like that.

+

Enhanced reality text appears in Riess’s peripheral vision: 95% Confidence, Marcel Volant, Age 18, Eye Color Brown, Height 176 cm, Last Seen Wearing, floods of info he’s constantly telling the engineers he doesn’t fucking need—he’s looking at the kid, right? He continues tracing as Riess murmurs instructions to the waiting cops into his earpiece, steps up to the kid, gun drawn.

+

Like he’s waiting, the thought flashes through Riess’s mind. That dark feeling in the pit of his stomach rises.

+

“Hands up!” he barks.

+

Nothing. No sound of running, no back-up coming in the form of flashing skycars skimming toward them. Did those idiots not hear him?

+

Riess will say it into the earpiece again, louder, but first he wants this kid, Marcel, to face him. See his eyes widen and his muscles twitch, maybe even fall over in a comedic attempt to flee, get some confirmation out of him of Riess’s presence here.

+

Instead he gets a high-pitched giggle.

+

“C’est vous,” Marcel says, and a trembly grin spreads across his face. “C’est vous!”

+

Should he have brought his translator along? Riess wonders. His milicien, Frédéric, is hanging by the skycars and trying to bum off a cigarette, if he knows him at all. Although even Riess understands what the kid just said. It’s you.

+

And Riess knows Marcel knows damn well what he said, they teach them that in school. Probably first words they learn, because that’s the only German most of them will ever hear. Hands. Up. Under. Arrest. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s this uniform, this gun. Riess walks up and jabs the barrel right into his chest.

+

“I said put your hands up,” Riess growls.

+

Still that stupid grin. Maybe he really will shoot this kid, point blank. That sound will bring all of the idiot cops running. He’ll figure out the paperwork later, say the kid resisted or something. It’s almost less than what they have to do with the firing squad, guilting people into doing it and then documenting everything from the maintenance on the rifles they used to what they fed him the day before for the Ethical Executions Committee, and hounding the Town Hall for the death certificate after the fact…

+

But wait. The kid looks familiar, Riess thinks.

+

Curly dark hair, freckles.

+

For sure they’ve met before.

+

No, he’s too young.

+

Marcel takes a step back, so the gun’s no longer touching his chest. Riess’s grip tightens, his finger clenches around the trigger.

+

Marcel takes another step back.

+

And then he turns and walks off and leaves Riess standing there, trembling the handgun at thin air.

+

 

+

S + +irens surround him, and cops, like that police officer he just talked to multiplied a dozen-fold. They’ve got their helmets on now so they even look the same, bug-eyed aliens in bullet-proof armor. Except Frédéric, sulking behind a skycar’s wing in the bare minimum, a vest thrown on over his suit.

+

“Where the fuck were you?” Riess blurts.

+

“We saw him the same time you did, sir,” the cop says through a mechanized voice filter. “Dr. Schiller said you could handle it.”

+

That bitch. Always putting him on the spot. Insinuating he’s too old and out of it to keep up with this investigation in the field, then, when he’s out here, telling all the kids to hang back and watch a crackshot SS officer go it alone.

+

As if they didn’t have enough trouble maintaining a presence in the police force without all these games she’s playing from within. Aude Schiller, with steel-blonde hair, her blouse buttoned tight across her chest, carefully up to her neck, especially when she sees him now. Riess knew her back when she was still working on that psychology degree, and now she’s a police detective with that Doctor still tacked on her name.

+

Got her eyes on his job, he knows.

+

“We’ll fly around and catch up to him, sir,” the cop, or maybe another one, beeps.

+

“I’m going after him,” Riess says.

+

“That’s unwise. We have the milice canvasing the ground—”

+

But he’s off, sprinting in the direction where the after image of Marcel is still seared in his mind. Out of the alley, huffing past tenement buildings so cookie-cutter he feels like he’s treadmilling past the same sooty wall over and over again.

+

Rue 16, his eye-text tells him as he passes, Rue 18… Rue 23…

+

Makes him feel bad for the kids who have to live in these banlieues. Kids should have plenty of space to run around in, like he did when he was little. Through the forests, airplaning through the halls of their English manor house. She’s right, Aude. He’s grown weak, doughy. Even ten years ago this would’ve been no problem for him. The running definitely, even the shooting. He would’ve done it with all those bastards watching.

+

When he first arrived in Paris, they had to tell him this wasn’t like any of the places he’d been before. Russia, where the natives would smash you in the head with a bottle and leave you in a snowbank. New York City, where they’d blow you up with a flip-phone and a bunch of crap they found in an alleyway. Nobody will try to kill you here, they said soothingly. They’ll just sort of sulk. Give you half-baked baked goods.

+

Even so, that’s not enough for him. Riess doesn’t just demand compliance, he demands respect. No, not even that, he demands just that certain look in their eyes… that they stop thinking when they see him, that their brains switch to bare-bones survival.

+

At least he used to.

+

He’s blinded by oil lamps swinging from tin sheet eaves, stumbles on a dealer packing up the last of her illegal batteries and pills. They end like a razor’s edge, the tenements, and suddenly it’s just seas of shanty sprawl from here on out, sloping gently up and down, spazzing out the map module of his contacts, which he keeps telling the engineers needs to be separate from the night vision exactly for this reason, he can barely see through this wall of nonsense—??? Street, a5b// (&^ Avenue—so he just shakes his head three times, shuts it off.

+

Fire-hazard central, here. In the office they get fined for putting chairs out in the hallway. The inspectors would blow a gasket if they could see this, nests of wires tangled around poles, mechanics welding hunks of metal right up against wooden shanty walls.

+

Slush splashes around Riess’s boots as he steps down from the curb. Toward an AMP junkie who blinks up at him with red-irised eyes, like it’s just a costume that Riess is wearing, before back-pedaling away.

+

“Shit! SS!”

+

“Did you see—”

+

But the junkie’s already yelling and pointing, and people erupt out of every crevice to gawp at Riess. If you could call them that. Cockroaches would be better. Riess plows through them, in the vague direction that they’re stealing looks in, a narrow alley that can barely fit his frame. He’s heard on the radio that the Urban Planning Committee wants to bulldoze all this down, build new tenements up to the river because it’s more financially viable than letting them build their shanties, burn them down, build up again over the ashes, rearrange themselves like those microbots he heard about an inventor premiering at the World Fair.

+

He wonders if you dug down you’d dig up layer upon layer of shanty town, like those ruins of Ancient Rome, Pompeii. Maybe if you plastered in the voids in the ash, you’d recover casts of insurgents at the very bottom layer, stranded American parachutists staring up at death raining down at them, circa 1950 or so. He wishes they hadn’t blown it up in the first place. Then he’d be walking through beautiful architecture, houses like tiered cakes, like they have in the city proper, instead of this stinking gutter. Of course they’re raising that horrible Vault over it now, step one of the multi-tiered city plan, so soon it’ll all be one and the same down here.

+

There.

+

Suddenly Riess sees Marcel. He’s waiting. Lounging next to a robot fighting ring, in a square of sorts, but as soon Riess pauses to catch his breath the kid turns and strolls away.

+

“I’ve got eyes on the perp—” Riess says into his earpiece.

+

But police skycars bellow overhead, drowning him out, and the crowd’s stampeding like a herd of buffalo in those cowboy books Riess used to read as a kid. The ‘cars fly off in a cross, four cardinal directions, everywhere except where they fucking need to go. Suits him just fine, Riess thinks, as he half-pushes, half lets himself be pushed after his last glimpse of Marcel—the kid’s black leather jacket.

+

Past the fighting ring walled with sandbags, a machine with scythes for arms crumpled in a heap in its center. Its builder ducked down in crash position beside it, wrench still in hand. Riess doesn’t like flying in the skycars—gives him motion sickness—and he doesn’t like those things either, the robots of Paris.

+

Five or six years ago, the kids in the slums started building them, in the shape of humans, animals, monsters that’ve never existed before, like that junk’s gained life of its own, resurrected. His friends at the military dump tell him they don’t even fire warning shots at the scrap thieves anymore, they have to shoot to kill otherwise the scavengers don’t give a damn. You can see the heaps of junk metal dancing up blue, misty in the distance now that the tenements are out of the way. The sun’s rising in that direction. And the alley Riess wheezes up slopes toward the dumps too until it swerves around a smoking ruin—or maybe that’s just the freshly fallen snow melting on top of it—and slowly climbs up again.

+

“You get him?” Aude Schiller’s voice says in his ear as the racket from the square fades behind him. “Do you want backup?”

+

“No,” Riess growls.

+

“You can just shock him, you know,” Aude says. “You’re not a ghetto cop in one of those war flicks.”

+

Riess doesn’t bother answering.

+

“Don’t tell me your gun doesn’t have that feature?”

+

He didn’t need it, he told himself, when he left his slim smart pistol in the drawer, picked up the twice as heavy Walther he’d carried with him for the past dozen years instead. He doesn’t know how to work it, the new tech. He can’t stand these new, pathetic excuses for weapons—not having the option to just kill them all.

+

The nerve of these kids these days.

+

In Berlin they want to come over, study abroad—somewhere safe of course, like Paris, not New York, not Stalingrad—and protest. Because it’s just not right having native culture wiped out like that. Their parents let them grow up soft. At that age, Riess partied with the Skullheads back in Russia, back when they had carte blanche to kill everyone in every village they came across, stacked them up dozens high…

+

…and then those college kids stage something they call a ‘Die In’, lay down on the steps of the courthouse, in front of Metro stations during rush hour, even splatter red paint on themselves like the alleged victims of the police and SS.

+

They don’t know how similar they looked, lying in the snow. How similar they are.

+

He crests the top of the slope—and Marcel’s at the bottom of a staired lane, waiting.

+

Water’s sloshing somewhere behind these shanties—offshoots of the river, canals? But no, those would be frozen so it must be the real thing, the Seine. He can believe that it’s breaking free of the ice, like his breaths are panting free of his body after all that running, like his body wants to break free of all these layers of coats that are only suffocating him now.

+

Time seems to have accelerated. Years slough off his shoulders like the snow sliding off a holey roof beside him, fwoomph. It hasn’t been plowed here, of course, and the steps are slippery with half-eaten ice. He takes them one by one, expecting Marcel to turn tail and keep running, but he doesn’t. The kid just stands there, reaching up to a line of dripping icicles above him. It does have an interesting effect, the way the sun gleams through them while the last traces of night disappear.

+

Part of Riess is disappointed. No one’s around, the skycars are gone, even the buzz in his earpiece has faded away. It’ll take the others minutes at least to come running. He’ll have to shoot him. Like an animal he’s chased down for just this moment, to see him turn.

+

Adrenaline pumps through Riess’s veins as he aims his gun. His heart, his brain, expects it. Even the houses are expecting it.

+

But Marcel turns toward him in the sunlight-moonlight and he’s smiling.

+

“Do you remember me?”

+

It hits him. He has seen this kid before. His father, rather. Professor Volant.

+

Those guys in Intelligence that Riess wanted to be friends with, get his foot in the door with, they got real interested in the Prof’s research. So Riess made contact, made up some yarn about how Volant was 1/128th Jewish or something, and took him in—but then they turned around and handed Volant right over to the interrogators, who Riess was not friends with, even though they were all SS, higher ranked than he was, all lumped together by association.

+

Because that’s all they’re good for, right? The dirty work. It doesn’t bother them, it doesn’t harm them like it would harm the others, the oh-so delicately honorable Wehrmacht, those shits in Berlin, signing the orders and then standing in front of the camera with their long faces and lines of medals talking about ‘regrettable circumstances’ after the fact…

+

Yeah, those guys in Intelligence lost interest in Riess ASAP. Left him to languish, as an Assistant Director of Criminal Activity—no, Criminal Investigation—that doesn’t sound any better—Department of Criminal Investigation—right up until someone like Aude Schiller comes along and forces him to retire or he dies of old age. Whatever comes first. Whatever.

+

“What’re you laughing at, you little shit?” Riess snarls, mostly because he remembers Volant’s brat sniveling against the window as they took his father away, probably thought they were going to shoot him, and now he wants to see it mirrored in the teen boy’s eyes. “I could kill you right now, you know, I could shoot you in the fucking face and let you bleed out in the dirt—”

+

And then the wall bursts beside him, and Riess is flat on the icy ground, gun skidding out of his hand as a metal claw clamps down on it. It keeps pressing, until his hand pops under the pressure. He hears the bones crack, feels pain whiplash all the way up his arm, even though the claws are intertwined with his own fingers like a lover’s.

+

He must’ve screamed, because someone—Aude—is shouting in his ear, “Udo! Udo! Where are you? We can’t get reception—” but another mechanical arm delicately plucks his earpiece out, tosses it after the gun. He hears it skidding across the pavement as he rocks up to his knees and stares at the robot.

+

The jagged hole frames it like a halo in one of those paintings of saints, dripping plaster and water. It’s got so many legs. The big ones pin him down again, against the dirty snow, the thin mass of little ones whip toward him and he can’t move. That dark feeling surges up his stomach, fills up his throat until he thinks he’s going to puke.

+

Is it going to dig into his organs?

+

Is it going to rip his heart out? It’s beating so fast it might come out all by itself.

+

“Do you remember me, Herr Officer?” Marcel giggles, but Riess can’t tear his eyes away from the robot. “Do you remember… this?”

+

Is this thing it, Riess wonders? The robot his ‘buddies’ had Professor Volant build? Back when they were all in the same building, before the torturers got enough funding to move out, to expand, you’d run into them by the water cooler, in the gaps between filling out paperwork, leading their battered, bruised prisoners around. The confession extracter, they called it.

+

They tested it on the Professor extensively, before they shipped him off to one of those labor camps, factories where they make T-shirts, flatphones, Volant in such a state Riess doubted that he’d survive a day.

+

Riess still remembers the screams, cradling his head in the break room, thinking this isn’t what I wanted, all this fucked up shit.

+

I just wanted a bit of power…

+

I just wanted a bit of fun…

+

It’s different now. The robot. It’s got this ridiculous mask stuck on it. A plague doctor’s, beaked like a vulture. Where did the kid even get it? Riess’s eyes blur. Above the ‘bot, in the sky, he sees the doughy crescent moon.

+

“You feel that?” Marcel says, crouching down next to him. “What you’re feeling now?” He’s switched totally to German. “That’s fear.”

+

Is that what this is? Riess wonders. He’s fading already. Not the man he used to be, or maybe even ever thought he was. For decades now he’s been consumed by the hesitation he felt earlier tonight, unable to pull the trigger. Half-baked. Unable to savor this sensation.

+

Fear. Funny. He always thought it would feel—more deserving than this.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Robots of Paris” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrea Kriz

+

+ + Author image of Andrea Kriz + + + Andrea Kriz writes from Cambridge, MA. Find her other stories in Cossmass Infinities, Nature, Tales to Terrify, AURELIA LEO, and Hybrid Fiction, among others. You can follow her on twitter as @theworldshesaw.

+

© Andrea Kriz 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Pexels, sergeitokmakov, and DariuszSankowski.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-23/sedona-house.html b/issue-23/sedona-house.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..17d33842 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/sedona-house.html @@ -0,0 +1,474 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Sedona House — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Sedona House

+

Jeffery Scott Sims

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Sedona House by +
+ + + + +

G + +o to the site of the Sedona House now and you see a shattered ruin, a pathetic pile of jumbled wreckage amidst which lies, like so much scattered trash, the remnants of the worldly goods that once belonged to the great Gregor Tharaspas. Come to think of it, most of that broken junk has probably been cleared away by now. I wouldn’t know; I last saw it right after the fact, and I haven’t had reason to return.

+

The peculiarly angled edifice atop the red rock bluff above the mansion—the Temple of Xenophor, he called it—still stands intact, but those goofy New Age pilgrims don’t journey there any more. It’s padlocked, I hear, slated for demolition, maybe destined to become the parking lot for a new strip mall. Who knows? I don’t care.

+

Neither, certainly, does Tharaspas. He’s gone, wiped from this world. The press reports convincingly relate the tale of the explosion which blasted his house, erasing all trace of him.

+

That’s how they tell it, anyway.

+

 

+

I + + saw the Sedona House in the twilight of its glory.

+

One morning bright in 1930, at my dingy hole-in-the-wall of a downtown Phoenix office (small, under the radar, suitable for my business), my secretary Angie carried in a letter for me. One of those old fashioned written kind, inscribed in beautiful cursive, with a stamp and everything; I don’t get many of those.

+

The return address listed Professor Anton Vorchek. I grimaced, but nevertheless tore open the envelope. I knew Vorchek from way back. A smart fellow, sort of a part-time academic who always had the inside straight on whatever strange was going on. Good guy too, as long as you didn’t turn your back on him. With approval I noted he’d addressed the letter formally to “Mr. Sterk Fontaine,” and below that, “Esoteric Archeology, Ltd.”

+

Vorchek wrote:

+
+

​ My Dear Mr. Fontaine:

+

​ No less than Gregor Tharaspas requests my aid involving complicated matters pertaining to the arcane. After receiving from him further particulars, I suggested in my acceptance that you might be willing to lend your expertise in support of our endeavors. He acquiesced to this, mentioning in his response previous dealings with you about which he did not elaborate. Inform me so soon as you are ready.

+

​ - Vorchek

+

Inform him, indeed! Mightn’t I refuse?

+

He figured not, nor would I. Despite suspecting a messy situation, I had to bite. My earlier acquaintance with Tharaspas had proved enormously lucrative to me. A repeat engagement could produce an accumulation of benefits. I had Angie shoot Vorchek an telegram acceptance, and promised her a rollicking night on the town if something worthwhile developed.

+

I make an up and down living out of the locating and procuring of artifacts, some extremely old and extremely rare, for rare and special clients. There’s a covert society existing within our own of unique, oddly learned folk who dabble in the bizarre, the occult, the downright weird. For their purposes—into which I seldom pry—they need documents, relics, mystical trinkets believed to possess enormous value to their intellectual delvings. It’s an interesting racket, no questions asked, cash on the barrel head, and chancy. I get burned a lot. On the other hand, when it pays off, it pays big, and I’ve built a reputation as a man who can be counted upon to do anything—anything—to get the job done.

+

Angie handled the arrangements. A few days later, bright and early, I made the pleasant drive up to Sedona, turning west from the interstate, whizzing past the primordial sandstone wonders (already thronged tourist attractions) of Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, and Cathedral Rock, the sharp spires of Chicken Point stabbing the emerald blue sky dead ahead. Off the highway, I passed into a community of expensive houses in the shadow of these ancient natural monuments, chugged up the steep road onto a flat ridge overlooking and isolated from the neighborhood.

+

Atop a higher outcrop of garish red bedrock, loomed the distorted gray slabs of that “temple” so attractive to gawking tourists and scatter-brained true believers. Much of the ridge was dominated by the famous mansion and spacious grounds of Gregor Tharaspas, one of those big-shots of the odd, professing in public (and turning a staggering profit on) New Age hokum, and in private engaging in matters bizarre to the verge of insanity, as I well knew.

+

The Sedona House he called it, and the singular name captured popular or tourist bureau fancy and stuck. Easy to see why: imagine it now, or study the old pictures, of that sprawling, gleaming white architectural conglomeration, with its roots in Greek and Roman forms, and God knows what else. The forbidding masonry wall around the property, softened by a riot of naturally gaudy flowers, enclosed a parkland of green lawn, transplanted eucalyptus, exotic shrubbery, flower beds, pools, fountains, and statues of the Grecian type, heroic male and risqué female gods of yesteryear.

+

I pulled up at the wide driveway around the side, where a servant directed me into the cavernous garage, a space by itself bigger than most people live in, including me. It contained a range of snazzy cars and a beat up old SUV that I recognized from previous adventures. Directed through the left of three doors, I was led through increasingly ornate corridors and past inviting rooms to the heart of the domicile, the vast study of Tharaspas.

+

Bookshelves dominated the lofty walls with nothing ornamental in their appearance, only a massive collection of aging, tattered tomes, tightly packed here, padded with clumps of yellowed papers there. Enough reading material for ten lifetimes, but it all looked well used. A brilliant crystal chandelier, fit for a palace, depended from the painted ceiling, hanging from the center of a bright, visually oppressive star-burst pattern radiating from what I interpreted as an aggregation of green, staring eyes.

+

Amidst resplendent, regal furniture, the master of the Sedona House rose to greet me. “Mr. Fontaine, of course,” he declared loudly, beckoning me forward, motioning to another lackey to pour me a drink. “You arrive in good time. I believe you know my other guest.”

+

Vorchek stood up from a high, soft velvet chair, and nodded. “Mr. Fontaine,” he said, in that precise, slightly accented speech of his. Always the natty dresser, he stood stiffly as if prepared to bow, in suit and tie, an old fashioned floppy hat riding down toward his shoulders. “I reasoned that we could count on you.”

+

“That remains to be seen, Vorchek,” I replied with a formal smile. “I haven’t a clue why I’m here. Knowing our host, I guess it’s something weird.”

+

Tharaspas laughed, a hearty rumble that nevertheless hinted at pose. His eyes didn’t laugh. “Take that for granted, Fontaine.”

+

In some respects as old world as Vorchek—certainly by ancestry—Tharaspas nevertheless was wholly American in his personal presentation. His flat, harsh voice boomed from a pale, fleshy face beneath tousled black hair. He wore an open beige tee-shirt and what I’d have taken for scuffed gardening pants. His shoes, though, I noted, were shiny and sharp, tailor-made, cost no object, no doubt.

+

I accepted the wine, sipped greedily. My favorite; he’d remembered. I asked, “We have business to transact?”

+

Vorchek shrugged, stroked his short, well-manicured beard.

+

Tharaspas glanced his way, grinned. “Sit down, Fontaine, and I’ll quickly bring you up to date.” We all did so, about a triangular mahogany coffee table heaped with oddly decorated porcelain urns and strewn with raggedy documents. When suitably arranged in those pleasurable chairs with drinks in hand and cigars passed out, Tharaspas launched into a surprising discourse.

+

“I’m winding up my public affairs, Fontaine. I’ve already shut down the Temple of Xenophor, a silly conceit I no longer need. It was never a serious proposition anyway, a money-making gimmick, undeniably tawdry. I focus more on essentials now, the actual as opposed to the virtual. The Sedona House, too, will be closed. I expect—intend—to vacate all my holdings. They aren’t required for the future I have in mind.

+

“I embark soon upon a great journey. From it I do not expect to return. It will represent the culmination of my researches, the pinnacle achievement. It is an unusual trek I contemplate, one that shall blast the barriers of time and space… yet I need help. You, Fontaine, possess the special skills I must employ.”

+

I leaned back into the comfy chair, smirked over my glass. “So, my invitation wasn’t a casual one after all.”

+

Tharaspas laughed again. “No. You’ve a reputation for being hard to deal with, Fontaine. I had to get you here in order to ‘put it to you,’ as they say. Rest assured, in your case I have a business venture in mind. Vorchek and his assistant, of course, lend their aid for other reasons.”

+

“Assistant?” I cried. To Vorchek I queried, “Oh Lord, is she here, too?”

+

In bland tones he responded, “Miss Delaney necessarily offered me her support in this undertaking. You may look forward with eagerness to renewing your acquaintance.”

+

Take that as his idea of a joke. Theresa Delaney and I didn’t quite get along. A beautiful girl, and a snappy dresser, this private—very private—secretary of his… but snooty? So I didn’t move in her elite circles. So I didn’t measure up to her hero the professor. So I was dirt! I’d settle for a little civility.

+

“Okay, Tharaspas,” I sighed, “let’s skip the tedious build-up. What do you want from me?”

+

He stood, strode to the massive fireplace, crooked a finger to beckon me over. “See this, Fontaine?” he asked, indicating an especially ornate and intricate gew-gaw occupying one end of the marble mantel. “It’s an original time piece designed by Albrecht of Dresden. Seventeenth Century. Of the mere three he created, the only one extant. Savor the elements of its composition, this object fashioned for the king of Saxony: gold, Fontaine, silver, platinum. Inlaid with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, stripes of turquoise. Have you ever seen the like? Worth, I’d say, half a million on the open market.

+

“I’ll make you a swap, Fontaine. The clock is yours, with a clear title, if you deliver into my hand the Seventh Scroll of Artocris.”

+

 

+

I + + accepted, obviously.

+

While the big boys were busy, I had the tumultuous pleasure of sharing lunch with Theresa Delaney. She failed to pretend joy at meeting me again.

+

“For God’s sake, what are you doing here?” she exclaimed.

+

“Our companions,” said I, “amuse themselves by surprising us. Your old buddy does, anyway.”

+

A lovely girl, with magnificent golden locks and soft, perfect features. She always gadded about like a fashion model. I don’t know what she saw in an old guy like Vorchek, but that’s one of the peculiarities of liking. I guess she admired his brain.

+

We were sat at opposite ends of the table in a kind of breakfast nook, she daintily nibbling a small sandwich, I shoveling one piled high. “Listen, babe, I’m not out for trouble,” I said around a mouthful. “Why not keep your fireworks damp until we wrap this up?”

+

“You’re more likely packing heat.” She sniffed. “I just know you mean bad news.”

+

“Nothing of the sort. Tharaspas is taking a long trip, you see, and he needs a scroll. Who wouldn’t? He asked me to pick it up for him. No big deal.”

+

“Either you’re being a jerk, or you know nothing.”

+

“One of the two, sweetheart.” I peered for the waitress. “Hey, we got anything to drink here besides orange juice?”

+

“He wants you to steal it.”

+

I grinned, adding around a mouthful of roast beef, “Tharaspas doesn’t care how I acquire the scroll, so long as he winds up with it. No questions asked, that’s the rule of my game. As for what I know… well, maybe Tharaspas plays by the same rule. You tell me: where’s he going?”

+

“Some place out of this world.” She said it with an air of mirthful seriousness. I’m not naive, such words could have legitimate meaning with these fellows. I figured I’d be told, sooner or later, what I needed to hear, if anything. Meanwhile, I had a job to do.

+

One way or the other, I intended to earn that clock.

+

Item acquisition procedure, I call it. That’s the process of laying my paws on a thing that isn’t mine. There are so many ways to get stuff, the right method being dependent on circumstances. The latter, in this case, stood thus: Alfonso Monteca owned the scroll, millionaire and self-proclaimed high priest of a particularly whacked-out spiritualist cult. It was his prized possession in fact, and he’d never tell how much money or throat-cutting it took him to get it.

+

Nor, the grapevine warned, would he ever consent to sell, loan, or in any fashion whatsoever surrender his rightful sovereignty over it for a moment. The mere request, I deduced (and tenuous feelers to third parties confirmed), would cause Monteca to lock down his treasure that much tighter. I didn’t need that kind of headache.

+

Despite the suggestion inherent in its name, the Seventh Scroll of Artocris was one of a kind. I knew all about it, from shop talk. Scratched on papyrus back in those heady pharaoh days, by a famously brilliant or foolish master of the esoteric arts, it was supposed to contain spells or formulae which open all sorts of doors that duller and wiser heads would prefer kept shut. The details escaped me, as I guess they did most people, but they were fancy and important and dangerous secrets that some would kill for, or even put to use if they dared. Maybe Monteca would dare.

+

Tharaspas certainly would. Well, I’d give him that chance.

+

 

+

I + + stole it.

+

Let’s skip the minutiae of the operation: those intricacies are a tale in themselves, possibly boring to the layman, and besides I’ve a penchant for sitting on trade secrets. I researched, calculated, observed, chose the moment, acted.

+

Monteca had, I got.

+

Two weeks after I left the Sedona House, I returned bearing a triple-locked satchel. Shortly after arrival at mid-day I handed over satchel and keys to Tharaspas. He already had the clock boxed. I appreciated his confidence in me.

+

“Thank you, Fontaine,” he said. “Quick work. No come-backs, I take it?”

+

I assured him on that point, and surmised aloud that delivery concluded our business. Brusquely he indicated otherwise. As he scurried away, clutching the satchel to his chest, he called back, “No indeed. Stick around. Talk to Vorchek. He’ll tell you—” Tharaspas was gone.

+

The professor and Theresa had set up office during my absence, converting a disused bedroom into their private study. When I intruded, precious payment under my arm, they were huddled over a pile of type-written papers. The girl eyed me warily, Vorchek drawing easily at his pipe as he stated rather than asked, “It is done, then.”

+

“That’s right, Vorchek. He got his, I got mine. That’s the finish as I see it. Any reason I shouldn’t dash with the loot?”

+

“You’ll miss all the fun,” Theresa said mockingly.

+

Vorchek didn’t smile. “So to speak, sir. Shortly, I expect, our host shall commence his grand project. He requires aid in order to inaugurate his passage. You may contribute further.”

+

“Gobbledygook, Vorchek. I don’t lift a finger without due cause, which means information and compensation.”

+

“True to form,” Theresa sneered.

+

Vorchek glanced at his companion, rose from his chair. “My dear, be so kind as to complete the preparation of this report. Mr. Fontaine and I will go for a little walk.”

+

We took a stroll through the beautiful grounds of the Sedona House. It was like walking through expensive Hollywood sets for an epic movie combining Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and God knows what else scenery. Vorchek spoke in a muse, as if to himself. “She died, you see. The wife of Tharaspas passed beyond the veil, after bitter illness, and he could not accept that. His whole life, Mr. Fontaine, dedicated to rending the curtain concealing the secrets of the eternal mysteries, yet her death reduced him to despair. What meant his achievements, his discoveries, if they availed him nothing in her case?

+

“Let me tell you—and I beg you not to tax him on the point. He first gave himself over to wild schemes for raising her from the grave. He indulged in scholastic reveries, mining the works of bizarre thinkers among the ancient and medieval masters. His researches, necessarily, led first to wariness, then negation. He even perused the anecdotes recorded by Jacob Bleek concerning Josiah the Hebrew and his consort.” He saw my blank reaction. “Really, sir, your education lacks depth. Tharaspas borrowed those documents from my files. I must show them to you one day.”

+

At the far end of the walled property we skirted an aquamarine pool inhabited by large, multicolored, bewhiskered fish, mounted a stepped dais bearing a pink-veined marble statue of some long-bearded worthy. From there, with the house behind us, we gained a stunning panorama of the glorious red stone bluffs looming near and sweeping away in a receding semi-circle, a majestic amphitheater ordained by time and geology.

+

“At any rate, that story, among others, warned him of tragedy. Our host, therefore, has settled on another tack. He can not safely return his beloved to the land of the living? Then he wishes to enter, alive and bodily, into the realm of the dead! Yes sir, he would join her there, united as one, for all time, in what he imagines for her sake is a paradise.”

+

Vorchek rested, leaning his back against the smooth block at the statue’s sandaled feet, gazing intently out at the lovely vista..

+

Okay, so now I knew. “Incredible, Vorchek, preposterous, stupid, and insane. Pick any three, and throw in the fourth as a free bonus. He’s heading for a fall, a big one. And for this I purloined the Seventh Scroll of Artocris? Jesus, Vorchek, do you have any idea what would’ve happened to me if I’d been caught?”

+

The professor chuckled. “You surely knew he desired it for spectacular ends.”

+

“Yeah, well, no matter. The discontinuing adventures of Gregor Tharaspas don’t include me.” I rapped the package still under one arm. “I’m taking this ticker and finding a buyer for it. Adiós.”

+

He rested a hand on my shoulder. “Tharaspas asks of us, of you, one more little thing. A trivial favor. The procedure he devised requires special ceremony. He could not complete it alone; possibly with three, but four would make a difference. Participation, he guarantees, carries with it no risk, and demands only a further twenty-four hours of your life. Is it so much? That intriguing clock of his will still have you sitting pretty tomorrow.”

+

There was that. I confessed to myself a mild curiosity. Also, should it not come off (extremely likely), a sheepish Tharaspas might fondly remember my selfless cooperation, which could pay handsome dividends down the road.

+

Back in the house, Tharaspas waited with almost touching anticipation. “The professor told all,” I said. “Count me in. I’m here to help.”

+

Tharaspas seized both my hands, cried, “Great days! You won’t regret it, Fontaine. You’ll see marvels, you will, and learn of mysteries that place you above the wisest occultists of our times.”

+

Thrills. For the moment, I chose to look forward to a nice dinner. But while that was being prepared at length, and while Tharaspas was no doubt laying an esoteric table of his own somewhere for later, I took advantage of a few hours convenience to hop behind the wheel and buzz my prize into Sedona and back, entrusting it to the overnight attentions of the most resilient looking bank in town. If there was one thing I’ve learned in my years in the field, it’s not to consider any artefact claimed until you’ve got it where the last owner can’t lay their hands on it again.

+

 

+

T + +haraspas rapidly advanced his plans. We gathered that evening for a princely feast, lavished upon us by a host who gave no thought to counting pennies. It was rich, exotic, saucy stuff, much of which I couldn’t identify, but it tasted wonderful and I slopped up all I could hold.

+

He served caviar, the rare Kaluga variety, he boasted. I hate caviar, but I ate it anyway, just to say I did. I still hated it, the first helping and the second. I washed down that, and the rest of the sumptuous meal, with a bucketful of pricey wine, quaffed from a crystal goblet, the elixir fetched from private stocks aged over a century.

+

Tharaspas proposed a toast. “To ineffable bliss,” he said, saluting with his glass, “that endureth forevermore.”

+

Things came to a head at the darkest of night, when the slender moon had ducked behind the mountains, chased by its fading glow. Only we four remained, for Tharaspas had permanently dismissed his staff, softening the unexpected blow with hefty cash stipends. We descended a steep flight of steps roughly chiseled from bedrock to a subterranean chamber beneath the house a cramped cube, perfectly square—no, with its walls just aslant—and devoid of electrical or other connections.

+

It contained only those few furnishings that Tharaspas had placed there, perhaps for this sole purpose: a plain oak table, four unfinished workman’s stools grouped around it, an oval arrangement of candles on the top. The candles, besides illumination, lent strangeness to the scene. A score or more, each one burned with a unique hue, creating an eye-taxing, flickery rainbow effect. They smoked more than they should, and they smelled vile.

+

Tharaspas bore an oblong leather case under his arm. After asking us to sit he, remaining standing, opened the case and removed from it the infamous scroll, a sheath of papers, and a thin, smooth glass decanter partially filled with a brownish-green fluid, which he placed on the table before him.

+

“Friends, my moment hastens. With the scroll of Artocris, I may proceed. Even it would fail me, had not fortune led me to this special place, for reasons I now count as inconsequential and inane. That I might tap into cosmic power, I raised the Sedona House atop a vortex, a focal point for mystical and monstrous energies flowing into our mundane universe from problematic spheres and entities beyond.

+

“It is the Old Ones, I think, who foster that power. The great wizards of long lost Dyrezan thought so, as did Artocris and Jacob Bleek in their later eras, and my studies confirm their beliefs. Xenophor Himself, they claimed, the Creator and Destroyer, erupts into the world via the hyper-dimensional angles of the vortex. At this spot, then, armed with the scroll, I may speak to Him, and He may heed.”

+

He passed a sheet of handwritten lines to each of us. Slowly, with loving caution, he unfurled the scroll, yellow and frayed, rolling out long and covered with minute scribbling that, I reckoned, only a handful of scholars could decipher. Idly I recalled the leathery feel of the antique fabric, wondered of what it was made.

+

“I shall read,” declared Tharaspas, “from the spell contained herein. When I pause, recite one line from your pages, beginning at the top. Examine them before we start, for they were not designed for English speakers. Perhaps not for human.

+

He took the slim decanter. “This is for myself alone, rendering possible my physical translation.” He popped out the stopper, raised glass to lips, and gulped down its contents. He dropped the glass to the floor, I heard it break, and Tharaspas sat heavily, gasping. Theresa and I made as if to rise, but he motioned us back. Professor Vorchek, I noticed, never budged.

+

Tharaspas looked sick, his eyes gleaming moist in the spooky light. It took a while before he breathed regularly. Then he said, “The first stanza of Artocris,” and commenced to read. The ceremony was underway.

+

“Xenophor, Lord of All Things, harken to this debased one, begging as he does for the crumbs swept from Thy banquet…”

+

It ought to have been worth something to me to mark his words, and the antiphonal responses at appropriate moments we three mouthed, but I confess that it’s mostly gone out of my head. Maybe the acrid candle fumes fogged the brain, or something past the natural in the atmosphere, or maybe I was just too creeped by developments. Whatever, the words entered me, went through me, then dissolved or took wings, or shot out my backside.

+

Though, Tharaspas read directly from the scroll, unlike us three he spoke his lines in English. I recollect useless fragments, stray phrases that tantalize without enlightening.

+

“Take me into Thy substance, mote by mote, until the change come, that I may thrive in Thy kingdom…”

+

“Open the gates into that shining realm, where the glorious stride renewed and refreshed…”

+

“Bear to me, across the ages and the stadii, the one I seek…”

+

Most of it sounded, frankly, gibberish. Great One, command it of Astrodemus. Turn the Rhexellite Key. Olden Nantrech lights the path. And so on. Apparently it didn’t matter if I understood it.

+

But I’ll bet Vorchek did. During his recitations he twice smiled knowingly and once looked unpleasantly startled, finishing the line after a sharp intake of breath.

+

This much I do remember. Once we got going the candles sputtered wildly, without wind. Once they went out while Tharaspas spoke, he staunchly continuing from memory, then came back, crackling and sparking as if on cue that we might resume. I heard, felt, a rumbling, a groaning, a shaking from beneath my feet. Ghostly pale light appeared to shine from odd corners without cause. I saw or imagined hints of motion in shadows, as if several beings small—or one very large—crowded into that tight chamber to lurk above or at our backs. I know, as I know my name, that I sensed abnormal company. Rills of sweat dripped down my neck.

+

Came a blinding flash, a period of light which rendered nothing visible—quite the contrary, I saw a brilliant blankness—followed by low, harsh muttering. I didn’t recognize the words, nor the voice; was that really one of us? Then the blazing radiance vanished, and we four sat stupefied, regarding one another across the fizzling candles.

+

Tharaspas, scroll in hand, sprang to his feet. “It’s done!” he bellowed. “We have made the passage. My translation is complete. Come, let us go upstairs, and behold!”

+

I didn’t know what to make of him. I mean, we obviously hadn’t budged. Theresa frowned her puzzlement. Vorchek’s firm-set features betrayed none of his thoughts. Our host pressed the scroll on the professor, saying, “Take this, you’ll need it,” then bolted up the steps, his shoes clattering vigorously on stone.

+

We trooped after him, with much less alacrity, shortly emerged into the portion of the house we’d previously left. Tharaspas was stomping about, looking around and touching things. “I’m here,” he cried, “I did it! It works, and if I’m here, so must she be!”

+

Theresa stared at him for a moment, eyes wide. Slapping a palm to her creamy cheek, she whispered to us, “Okay, so somebody here’s crazy. Maybe it isn’t me. Professor, that was a spooky ritual and all, but it didn’t work. Has he lost his mind?”

+

I added, “Seconding the question, Vorchek. Nothing here has changed. We didn’t move an inch.”

+

He raised a hand to quiet us. “A great deal has changed. How much, my friends, we shall shortly learn. I request that both of you look around you carefully. Do not settle for seeing, but observe as well.”

+

Since that wasn’t asking too much of me, I clamped on my thinking cap and studied my surroundings. It took a while for me to get the point, but I discerned a subtle difference. The room, and all its contents, appeared as if viewed through a wispy film of gauze. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to distance me from the scene.

+

Scratch part of that: the professor and his girl appeared normal to me, as did what I could see of myself. Tharaspas, however, belonged in this new milieu.

+

Something about that bugged me.

+

Having spoken my thoughts, I demanded to know what it meant. Tharaspas heard me, calmed himself, rejoined us. “We have indeed traveled,” he asserted, “farther than the boundaries of the Einsteinian continuum. The Sedona House, its foundations planted deep into the substructure of the vortex, constitutes the threshold, thus the illusion of near normality. It’s image moved with us. Let us away to the viewing porch, that we may gaze upon fresh spheres of mystery.”

+

This we did, following him through corridors and rooms familiar but slightly off kilter, until we emerged into the open air. He thrust aside a curtain—I made out a deep, darkling red glow—pushed aside a sliding glass door, and rushed before us. We followed, slowly.

+

When I got my look, I leaned on the granite parapet, gaping.

+

I guess we had skipped through a few miles.

+

The scenery of midnight Sedona, with its myriad lights and twinkling gems of stars set in darkness, had vanished, replaced by a nearly featureless tableau of dim, red-litten landscape. Hints of dark, craggy mountains thrust into a murky crimson sky. Close at hand, below the porch, I glimpsed barren, rocky soil. For the moment that was all: no movement, no living things, no lights, no stars nor breath of air.

+

Vorchek observed, “It does not invite, Mr. Tharaspas. I gather that dawn overtakes us—the light brightens perceptibly—but I know you expect more.”

+

“Of course, Professor. I unleashed the mighty engines of the vortex, that its fantastic energies could propel me to wonder and joy. Dawn brings them to me.”

+

Vorchek nodded. “Truly incredible energy output, according to my calculations, yet the spell of Artocris granted you little control over them. In retrospect I am surprised we survived the passage.”

+

Tharaspas laughed. “The dimensional blast fueled my translation. I absorbed the power. That’s why I’m here, and why you’re still alive.”

+

“Time out,” Theresa snapped. “Listen, mister, if you were talking about a book or that scroll, I’d get you, but what’s all this ‘translation’ business?” I was glad she asked the question bursting out of me, so she could sound like the stupid one.

+

Tharaspas responded, “I have made the crossing into this plane, permanently, have become one with a world within which no living being may exist for long. You three traveled with me, that you may see and report—but you aren’t part of this place, nor can you remain. When the time comes, Vorchek, aided by the scroll, will guide you back. That door remains open a crack, briefly. He knows what to do. You will go. I stay.”

+

Thought I, Suits me, pal.

+

Meanwhile, the feeble glow intensified somewhat as we watched. We called it the dawn, but saying nothing, I wondered. It reached a level similar to that of deepest twilight, then attained a gloomy stasis. It hung there, with the building of tension that may only have been bubbles in my blood. I grew impatient, checked my watch, and found the hands didn’t move, nor did I detect the tick. It would be that way.

+

Tharaspas croaked an exultant noise, shot out a finger at the end of a rigid arm. An enchanting white globe of light moved out from behind an obstruction, advancing toward us. It came slowly across the broad open space, and I saw clearly enough now to marvel at the unusual features of landscape, the oddly sculpted rocks, the fluted columns of stone, the gravity-defying peaks knifing the dark sky. It caused me to think of Sedona and its country, as if that patch of our world were a weak reflection of this.

+

Yet I spied no vegetation, nothing suggestive of life, save that glow floating across the bare surface. The moment demanded silence, or I would have openly questioned this portrait of heaven.

+

Tharaspas stood poised, ready to leap down from the parapet, Vorchek stock still, eyes intent, Theresa (I noted with pleasure) in a half crouch, peering from behind the professor. The glow came nearer, resolving into a definite image. By God, a woman! A woman, bathed in splendid white light, wreathed in flowing robes, her perfect features stamped with joy and longing! This had to be it. Tharaspas had hit the mystic’s jackpot!

+

She spoke—made music of—the name, “Gregor,” and Tharaspas screamed an inarticulate emotional release, propelled himself over the edge in a bound.

+

I stared, fascinated to the point of idiocy, as he dashed toward her opening arms. Did I see other movement out there, beyond that unearthly glow? Did dark shapes begin to ring the pair?

+

Tharaspas sobbed a name, “Vanda!”

+

It was his moment—the only one as it happened.

+

The light winked out. He screamed again, this time a shriek of horror and disgust. He drew away, and in stepping aside revealed to us what he confronted.

+

The image—the illusion, the imposture—of a beautiful woman had gone, as with the ripping off of a mask, disclosing the actuality of the beckoning entity. She wasn’t just dead, she wasn’t just not a she—nothing indicative of humanity dwelt within that seething, pustulating mass of hideous, misshapen morbidity.

+

I choked back vomit, tried to avert my gaze, dared not.

+

It squirmed, it spouted ooze and steamed glistening vapor, and incomprehensibly it still spoke. A muddy bubble swelled from one heaving lump of filth, popped with an ugly sound, and from the filling hole squirted in slimy tones the cruel jibe, “Welcome, Gregor Tharaspas, to our abode. Your place with us has been long prepared. Through the years we called to your questing mind, until you freely came. Through the eternities to come, we shall relish your companionship.”

+

Things closed in on Tharaspas then, other shapes, dissimilar yet equally monstrous, and right then and there I cracked and turned tail, fled blindly back into the house. Within an inner room I halted, gasping, shuddering with paralyzing fear. Endeavoring to take heart from the relatively normal trappings of the Sedona House, I quailed on the remembrance that this terrestrial chamber signified nothing, that it mocked a piece of that desired world so far away that it made distance a worthless concept.

+

The professor and his girlfriend charged in, not faring any better than me. “It’s gone wrong, Vorchek!” I shouted in senseless anger. “It was all a trick to bag him, and they’ve bagged us, too. Now how in hell do we get out of here?”

+

“Fear not,” stated a tired, toneless voice.

+

I turned, stunned to see Tharaspas standing in the doorway. He looked a dead man, or one of the living who has plumbed the pits of terror. He continued calmly, speaking with mechanical precision. “The gates of hell haven’t opened for you. Vorchek, I beseech you learn from this episode. Regardless, you know what must be done. Return to the ritual chamber. Say the words, carefully, in the proper order, with scroll in hand.”

+

Vorchek said stiffly, “It will be done. What of you, Mr. Tharaspas? May I act on your behalf?”

+

Tharaspas grimly shook his head. “No escape for me. Like I told you, I belong here. I set it up that way. Holy God! Great Xenophor!” His voice broke. He started as we heard pounding near at hand, the noise of shattering glass. He added quickly, “I go to face them. Perhaps, despite these hideous revelations, she is out there somewhere. It will cost me nothing more to seek!

+

“Make your exit now, Vorchek. The reverse transition involves no new energy; the celestial door will simply close behind you. Beware the blow-back, however. Dimensional pressure will slam that door. Once on the other side, make haste.” In his abrupt passing from the room, I saw the last of Gregor Tharaspas.

+

In a plaintive whine Theresa asked, “Is there anything keeping us here?”

+

Without delay, Vorchek ushered us through the glories of the faux Sedona House and jostled us down the stone steps to the bleak room of magic. It was pitch dark in there, but at his command we clustered together, arms wrapped over shoulders, and so linked he hoarsely thundered the requisite words, from memory no less. These were pure gibberish, scarcely the pretense of human speech. That blasted scroll he tightly clutched, knuckles awhite, scraped my cheek.

+

For an instant came a furious pounding or heaving at the door.

+

Then the chamber lurched, rocked, my legs rubberizing. I sagged against the table, pulling my companions with me. They offered no support and we went down together. A vibrant roaring, like the ocean in a seashell grandiosely magnified, assailed my ears. The heavy door at the top of the stairwell crashed open, throwing a shaft of light. Above the mounting din Vorchek declared, “We have succeeded, I believe we have. Miss Delaney, Mr. Fontaine, we must run for our lives.”

+

“What’s up there, Vorchek?” I cried.

+

“Nothing but home, I trust; but this structure will not last. Hurry, before the gate seals!”

+

I didn’t need to hear that twice, and nor did Theresa, who beat me to the top.

+

A hurricane howled through the halls of the Sedona House. Papers flew on wings of wind, priceless ornaments toppled, rare paintings leaped from the walls. Which house was this really? It looked right, but I craved certainty. We passed a window which blew outward a second later. Through the shards I spied golden daylight.

+

God bless, this house was the real deal!

+

We stumbled outside. No thought of diverting to the garage and the cars, we just ate up the yardage by crazy bounds until we reached the property wall, which we frantically cooperated in scrambling over. A spiteful gust hurled me face first into the red dirt. Behind that barrier we paused.

+

We timed it right. Imagine this last glimpse of the Sedona House: there it stood stoutly, a king’s palace, the trees swaying and snapping like angry spirits. Then it… compressed. Forces unseen, impossible, squeezed it, as if an invisible fist scrunched a sponge.

+

And, as the papers say, it blew up.

+

 

+

C + +ontrary to public reporting, it wasn’t an actual explosion. The house simply sprang off its foundations and disintegrated, like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle thrown into the air. A kaleidoscope image of fragments whizzed every which way, and then the whole mess came crashing down again, leaving a psycho’s scheme for urban renewal. Thus ended the Sedona House.

+

You know, I really can’t complain. I got my clock, the sale of which paid for a sporty new coupe and much else besides. I’ve lived on easy street for a while, enjoying throwing money around like a big man, something I can’t always do in my business. My secretary Angie got her night on the town, and several more. When Professor Vorchek and his hot number invited me to dinner at a ritzy restaurant, and I even picked up the check. Blue moons come round occasionally.

+

During this tête-à-tête, conversation turned to a shared topic. Theresa, whom I grudgingly admit may have more than a mere pretty head on her shoulders, opined simply, “There’s just no point in looking for trouble, especially when you don’t find out you can’t swim until you’re nose deep. Think about it, Professor. Tharaspas warned you.”

+

“So he did,” the man soberly replied.

+

I wasn’t satisfied, though. I knew Vorchek had managed to escape with the scroll of Artocris, had heard of him bragging about its latent possibilities. Something bugged me, had bugged me for a long time. Now I blurted it out.

+

“All right, Vorchek, here’s what I don’t get. I operate on the fringes of this weirdness, for the sake of turning a buck. That I understand, that’s normal, healthy. But you, Tharaspas, all the wise guys, what motivates you? I’ve met enough of you boys, learned enough of your histories, to know that dabbling with the creepy stuff never works out. It always ends like this case. Why didn’t Tharaspas know that? Why don’t you?”

+

The professor smiled grimly. “That constitutes a mystery, Mr. Fontaine? You disappoint me, sir. It is the human condition, acted and played out according to our individual desires. Some aim low, some shoot for the skies, we few for beyond the stars.

+

“The fate of Gregor Tharaspas illustrates the point with remarkable clarity. We all seek that which we do not have—money, power, knowledge, a lost and beloved wife—and perhaps that which we can not have. We accept the risks, dare all for the sake of the dream.

+

“For that which really matters, there may be only one way to find out… and no second chance.”

+
    +
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+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Sedona House” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jeffery Scott Sims

+

+ + Author image of Jeffery Scott Sims + + + Jeffery Scott Sims a degreed anthropologist with a taste for weird fiction, lives in Arizona, which forms the setting for many of his tales. He has well over a hundred publications, among them the novel The Journey of Jacob Bleek, the collection Eerie Arizona, and his latest novel, The Journey through the Black Book. He maintains a literary website devoted to strange tales here.

+

© Jeffery Scott Sims 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: WindowsObserver, and 422737.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-23/third-martian-dick-temple.html b/issue-23/third-martian-dick-temple.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a7c67df9 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/third-martian-dick-temple.html @@ -0,0 +1,316 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Third Martian Dick Temple — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

The Third Martian Dick Temple

+

Micah Hyatt

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Third Martian Dick Temple by +
+ + + + +

R + +ust red Martian rain pelts my hardsuit like birdshot as I trudge through the mud, trying to get a visual for base. An ancient building, exposed by the terraforming storms.

+

“The surrounding hillside’s melted away,” I say, pointing my cameras towards a pair of pillars that look like dicks. “You seeing this, Base?”

+

“We’re receiving, Steph,” Base says. Cheers and applause and amazed curses. I can’t help but smile.

+

The mud of the hillside looks like it could sludge over at any second, covering the opening again. “Structure looks stable,” I lie. ”I’m going inside.”

+

No one back at Base objects. With the surface as volatile as it is, this might be our only chance. My heart is pounding in my ears. Adrenaline hitting my system like atropine.

+

I go up three crumbling steps and huddle in the opening. Runnels of red water trickle down the narrow corridor, piles of ancient dust swelling, growing tumescent. At the end is a single cavernous room. I pray that what waits in there will be a trove of art or books or recordings they held dear. Historical records that might tell us how they lived, and what it was that caused their collapse and extinction.

+

Shining my suit lights all over, my heart throbs in my chest at what I see. Shelves all along the walls, and on the shelves, little statue things, each about as tall as my glove. I pick one up and brush it off. It is a perfect specimen.

+

“Steph,” Base says, all broken up. “Steph, do you copy? We lost visual. Can you describe?”

+

“It’s just more dicks,” I say. My mouth is dry, all my enthusiasm drained in an instant.

+

“Say again, over.”

+

“It’s more dicks. Most of them are about three-inches tall, but some are bigger.”

+

“Can you get pictures?”

+

A long silence.

+

I want to argue that I have better things to do than take pictures of mummified martian dicks, but I know what the response will be. Some of the dicks might be different. One of the dicks might have a deformity that might inform us about martian physiology and their susceptibility to disease. Or it might indicate dietary changes that caused nutritional deficits, or changes in the atmosphere brought on by pollution. For all we know, the martians might have preserved these dicks precisely because examining them will closely reveal the secret to why their world died.

+

Those are the arguments that Base will make. This is not my first dick temple. Base will make me come back to the site in a few days, like they always do. I will be ordered to carefully collect the dicks and place them in a vacuum-sealed container. I will take the dicks back to Base to be studied and dissected by our scientists, who will confirm that the dicks are dicks. They will try to make inferences about the size or the quality of the dicks, comparing the dicks to the dicks they found at other sites.

+

There’s a short-lived media frenzy when the announcement of the third martian dick temple is made. I go on television, on some dumb talk show. The host asks what it was like to hold a martian’s dick in my hands. I pray that the nanny put my daughter to sleep early, that she’s not watching me publicly prostitute myself for funding.

+

“Which dick was your favorite?” the talk show host asks. “Do you think we might find a fourth dick temple?”

+

The question crushes me. I start crying on camera. Because I know we will find another dick temple. I know we will find hundreds upon hundreds of dick temples buried just beneath the surface. The martians buried those dicks for us to find. A hundred million years ago they looked into the abyss and saw their own mortality. They knew the end was coming and they met it with raging hard-on after raging hard-on.

+

I return home from my interview exhausted. My daughter runs out to meet me in her astronaut pajamas with footy slippers. I hug her and carry her to bed. She asks for a story about when I was on mars. I will hide the pain and the sadness, and tell her that we found something other than rooms and rooms full of dicks. Dick friezes and paintings and frescoes. Dick engravings.

+

“What were they like, Mommy?”

+

I search for words to explain to her why a civilization went to such lengths to preserve their dicks, and nothing else.

+

“We’re still learning about them,” I say. A tear rolls down my cheek. “But I think that they were just like us.”

+
    +
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+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Third Martian Dick Temple” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Micah Hyatt

+

+ + Author image of Micah Hyatt + + + Micah Hyatt’s work has appeared in Deep Magic Magazine, Shock Totem, Little Blue Marble, Flash Fiction Online, and Daily Science Fiction. He is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. His light-hearted zombie survival novella, Eating the Exhibits, is available now through Amazon.

+

© Micah Hyatt 2018 All Rights Reserved. The Third Martian Dick Temple was originally published under a pseudonym in Daily Science Fiction.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Layers, and tomw77.

+
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-23/weapons-mass-entanglement.html b/issue-23/weapons-mass-entanglement.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9826d19b --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-23/weapons-mass-entanglement.html @@ -0,0 +1,344 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Weapons of Mass Entanglement — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 23 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Weapons of Mass Entanglement

+

Dennis Mombauer

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Weapons of Mass Entanglement by +
+ + + + +

O + +ne day, Panduranga Mohan found a strange plant growing next to her door. It hadn’t been there when she went to sleep, but it was already waist-high, with a big, closed bud at its top. Panduranga shrugged and drove to work in the tourist town. When she returned in the evening, the bud had grown a little more.

+

This continued over the following weeks. While Panduranga guided visitors from foreign planets through the war-torn countryside and showed them the souvenir shops and active battlefields, her mind often wandered to the mysteries of the plant. She had seen nothing like its broad leaves and bulky stem before, and she didn’t know where its seeds might have come from.

+

Her work tired Panduranga out, and the plant soon became just another part of the house she came home to. Then, one day, as unexpected as had been its sprouting, the bud was open. Inside it, Panduranga saw an object of non-biological origin.

+

 

+

T + +he object was a remote with one button. Panduranga examined it from all angles before she tried to touch it. The plastic surface felt warm under her fingers, smooth, not at all like the plant surrounding it. Panduranga plucked the remote like a fruit and tentatively pressed the button, but it didn’t seem to do anything. She pressed it a few more times, pointing the remote in different directions, then walked inside the house.

+

As she passed her living room, the button glowed faintly. It boggled her mind how something like this could grow from a plant, but she was no botanist, merely a tour guide. She pressed the button one more time, and her TV came alive. This was doubly strange, because Panduranga didn’t watch TV often and it shouldn’t have any energy stored—but even more surprising was what it showed.

+

On the screen, Panduranga saw another living room like her own, a dollhouse with little furniture: the couch, a fish tank, lamps. Nothing happened, there was no movement except for the fish and the constant rise of bubbles within their tank; so, after her initial curiosity died down, Panduranga wandered into the kitchen. But she left the TV on and, later in the evening, she entered the living room and found a man sitting on the couch inside the TV, staring toward the camera.

+

It felt unsettling to see him there, in her house, even though he was just a recording, probably some kind of propaganda entertainment for one of the war parties. Their actions had become increasingly incomprehensible since the latest stalemate, and swarms of psychological warfare experts pilgrimaged here. The tourists seemed to like it, at least, and Panduranga could show them the trenches in relative safety—but the respite wouldn’t last, it never did.

+

The button on the remote didn’t glow anymore, and there seemed to be no way to change the channel, so Panduranga watched the man sit there, get himself something to eat, scratching his back, and finally falling asleep, just as tiredness overcame herself as well.

+

 

+

I + +n the morning, the man wasn’t there. Panduranga ate breakfast, cleaned up, and drove to work. The tourist town lay in no-man’s-land between the front lines, as did Panduranga’s home, but the war parties excluded it from their attacks, and only rarely did a missile, airstrike, or orbital bombardment hit close to it.This time, there was a huge load of visitors from a remote planet, gawking and gaping at the soldiers, at their weapons, at the desolation the war had brought upon the planet.

+

The workday was long, and Panduranga returned in the dark, the purple-bruised horizon occasionally lit up by flares and distant skirmishes. The plant still grew by her doorstep, but it wasn’t the reason Panduranga stopped dead in her tracks.

+

Someone had been inside her house.

+

All the furniture in the living room had moved. Someone had turned the couch sideways, put the lamp next to it, propped the now rolled-up carpet against the wall. On the TV, these changes were mirrored: the man’s couch, although bigger and darker than Panduranga’s, was turned in the same way, as well as his carpet and his lamp.

+

In the middle of his room, the man sat and stared at her with anticipation, as if he was waiting for a reaction.

+

Panduranga didn’t want to give him any satisfaction, and as she couldn’t turn the TV off, she started restoring the room to the way it should be. Only after she finished did she look at the TV again: and she realized the obvious.

+

The man stood in the middle of his room, confused, or maybe angry, everything around him changed. She tried moving her lamp again, and the lamp inside the stranger’s room moved simultaneously, as if carried by a benevolent poltergeist.

+

There was no way of manipulating the aquarium, because Panduranga didn’t have one of her own, but she could move everything else. Late into the night, Panduranga experimented with this and watched the man’s reactions, until he finally left the room and let her go to sleep.

+

The next morning, Panduranga was late for work. She only noticed in passing that he had rearranged her living room again.

+

And that the plant was sprouting another bud.

+

 

+

M + +ore people than usual crowded the tourist town. Everyone was excited over the resumed fighting. In the distance, visible only through the stationary binoculars, a major offensive was in full swing, with uncertainty fighters flickering in and out of existence across the northern horizon.

+

Panduranga did her job, but she was distracted, and almost lost a tourist when he wandered off toward the killzones.

+

When Panduranga got home in the evening, her body only wanted to sleep, but her mind was wide awake. The second bud of the plant had opened, and there was a light bulb in it, just the right size for the lamp in her living room.

+

She took it inside, checked on the TV’s inhabitant—he was sitting on the couch, reading a newspaper—and screwed the bulb into her lamp. When she switched it on, the man’s living room turned dark. She flipped the switch again and saw him standing there, staring at his lamp.

+

Now, she had leverage: Whenever he moved her furniture, she killed his lights. This way, she could keep him at bay during the evenings, but not during daylight hours, when she went to work.

+

 

+

O + +ne evening, there was a new bud on the ever-growing plant, and Panduranga hoped for another gadget in her silent war against the TV man. The next day, for the first time that Panduranga could remember, missiles hit the tourist town and leveled a shopping street in the outskirts.

+

With tourists having little appetite for observing war quite so close up, she returned early from work to find the plant offering a new device: an air conditioning filter, that (she discovered) sucked in any smells or smoke from her house and belched it out from the man’s ventilation.

+

Over the following weeks, the rate of sprouting objects increased while tourist numbers in the town dwindled. The fighting got closer and closer, and the streets no longer felt safe. Panduranga didn’t care, as long as she found something new every time she came home: a cigarette lighter that produced flames inside the man’s living room, which he tried to extinguish with aquarium water; a cup that poured out into his fish tank every fluid she poured into it; and so on.

+

Still, the man didn’t give up, even though Panduranga’s expanding arsenal of manipulation far outmatched him. Every time she returned from work, he had rearranged her furniture and made her home seem foreign to her.

+

She did her best to inconvenience him and make him surrender, but the man endured. Every evening, she filled the room with smoke and flooded the floor, then turned off his lights and made him stumble through a dark and toxic swamp. She almost heard the splashing off his footsteps and his curses, even though the TV transmitted no sound, and slept in the knowledge that he would have to spend the whole night cleaning up.

+

Then, perhaps inevitably, one day Panduranga drove out to find the tourist town destroyed, annihilated by weapons so advanced that not even ruins and rubble remained. It was as if the town had never been there, or wasn’t there yet, just the unbroken emptiness between two front lines.

+

There was nothing to do except to drive home. So that’s what Panduranga did.

+

 

+

I + +n the short time she had been gone, Panduranga’s plant had grown bigger than her house. The house itself wasn’t there—it had vanished as tracelessly as had the tourist town.

+

Only the TV stood in the middle of the wasteland.

+

Panduranga could see the room with its little man and his couch, lamp, carpet, and fish tank: and also something new. The man held a remote similar to the one she had found months ago, and he pointed it at her.

+

Their eyes met, and he pressed the button.

+

Panduranga stood alone with the plant and watched reality ripple in the sky. No TV, no house, no tourist town: only the plant. It carried a newly blossomed bud, and as Panduranga looked inside it, she saw herself lying there, asleep next to the man from the TV.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Weapons of Mass Entanglement” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Dennis Mombauer

+

+ + Author image of Dennis Mombauer + + + Dennis Mombauer currently lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he works as a consultant on climate change and as a writer of speculative fiction, textual experiments, and poetry. He is co-publisher of a German magazine for experimental fiction, Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism, and has published fiction and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. His first English novel, The Fertile Clay, will be published by Nightscape Press in 2020. You can find him at his website, and he tweets @DMombauer.

+

© Dennis Mombauer 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Pawel Kadysz, David-Karich, and Stephanie Mulrooney.

+
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+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2020

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Addison Smith +

First Breath

+
+ + +

Far in the distant past of 2013, the story before you received an honourable mention from Writers of the Future only to slink into the shadows, never to be seen again. Now at long last Addison Smith gets our Winter issue moving with the futuristic tale of a reluctant hero who gradually comes to learn that, much like revenge, rescue is a dish best served cold.

+ + + + Story image for First Breath by + + + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Mine Own

+ Sharon Dawn Selby +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Mine Own by + + + +

As a professional specialist in both communication and literature, you might be forgiven for expecting Sharon Dawn Selby to already have a long list of fiction credits to her name - so imagine our surprise and delight to be able to present her first published story, one which underlines the traditional power of language and place, good manners, and proper introductions.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Into the Darkness

+ Lee F. Patrick +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Into the Darkness by + + + +

If there's a genre especially close to the heart of your humble editor, it's the Ghost Story: that grand denizen of the limbic, liminal domain between mere flighty fantasy and bluntly blundering horror (and there's a sentence that should fuel some enmities moving forward). Anyway, isn't it so often the case with these strange inhabitants that "moving forward" is at the very heart of the matter?

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Thy Servant, Death

+ Scott J. Couturier +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Thy Servant, Death by + + + +

There's nothing quite like The Gothic for wrapping a reader in a strange atmosphere: painting with morbid darkness, sinking a chill deep down into the bones, or perhaps too-vivid colour as fangs sink into the richest vein. Scott J. Couturier offers up an incomparable gift in answer to the age-old question, "What do you give to the man who has, or had, everything?"

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Witches Curse

+ Matthew Wilson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Witches Curse by + + + +

Is it possible that one thing is more important than all the others when it comes to telling a good tale? Hard to say - but what is certainly true is that, whether a story soars or has flaws, a distinctive sense of voice will make amends for whatever sins it might contain. Matthew Wilson gives us sins large and small... and voice as well.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Every Hat is a Crown

+ Mike Morgan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Every Hat is a Crown by + + + +

Humour is a many subjective thing, often called the hardest thing to write, but in our opinion Mike Morgan has pulled it off here. Much as his hero demonstrates, you can achieve plenty with recourse to just a little bit of charm - of course, when it comes to fantasy, charm can also be the problem...

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Stranded at the Station

+ Trisha McKee +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Stranded at the Station by + + + +

Romance fiction isn't always the first thing associated with the speculative genres, but there are many fine examples in which the two are well-wedded, and it is surely inarguable that there is nothing in human experience to compare with beginning a new relationship for the sensation of leaping into the unknown. Trisha McKee presents exactly such a case, of two people reaching out towards each other and finding something far from understood.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Snow Over Interstate 80

+ Martin M. Clark +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Snow Over Interstate 80 by + + + +

Martin Clark has been contributing to Mythaxis Magazine since 2010, with and without the "M". Twenty-eight pieces have appeared in that time, invariably featuring a variety of hard-bitten heroes and villains locked in conflict, so why not one more for his anniversary? We weren't really looking for seasonally themed pieces for the issue, but you have to make an exception when the right someone's nipping at your nose.

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Winter

+ David Whitmarsh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Winter by + + + +

Our recent issues have welcomed a host of new faces to Mythaxis, in this latest including a first fiction sale - and now we are proud to also present not just that but a first ever publication, full stop! David Whitmarsh's story of transitions introduces us to a world clawing its way back from the brink - but things with claws must always be treated with caution...

+ + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Spring Man

+ Fabiyas M. V. +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Spring Man by + + + +

When we first read Fabiyas M. V.'s submission, we didn't know quite what to make of it... other than "a definite purchase"! Another piece with distinctive voice, it tells its story with the same blunt directness we find boasted by its unexpected hero, but one which veils a thread of sly humour, right up to the final line.

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

+

+

+
+ + +
+ Story image for Editorial +
+ + + +

What a year. What a year. What a year.

+

There likely aren’t words to properly sum up 2020, certainly not that could do so for everybody. So I will try to do so just for myself.

+

In what used to be called “real life”, I was approaching the first anniversary of a new job when lockdown quarantine fell upon Spain like Monty Python’s foot. Suddenly I was separated from the company of funny, friendly, and supportive colleagues, who had collectively taken the edge off almost twelve months of personal culture shock—I hadn’t had what you might call an office job for about fifteen years—just when I’d most wanted to thank them for making me a part of their little unit.

+

That I’ve been able to carry on that work from domestic isolation only underlines how fortunate I’ve been in 2020. I’ve not been threatened by hunger or homelessness. I’ve not fallen ill, or been forced to risk illness to care for those in desperate need. Though family and friends are now viewed only through the medium of woefully inadequate screens, even my social distancing has been alongside my better half. Isolation without loneliness—it could be so much worse.

+

And pandemic aside, this broken year has also highlighted how fortunate I am in general. I’m not forced to suffer solely for being who and what I am, and so many people can’t say the same. It always was that way, of course, but seeing the mobilization of people around the world to stand up against various forms of oppression—sexual, racial, cultural, political—even as disease sweeps the globe is humbling to those of us who have no need to do the same. It seems that way to me at least.

+

Finally, I’m fortunate to have had a project to work on in 20-damned-20. I inherited Mythaxis earlier still, but it was only at the beginning of this year that we began to move towards reinvigorating it again. In the last twelve months I’ve had the privilege of picking through hundreds of stories, then working with the dozens of chosen authors (and our small crew behind the scenes) to compile my first issues—first of many, I sincerely hope.

+

So, in spite of what this year has thrown at us all, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that it’s also had its silver linings for me. I hope you can say the same, and I hope that you enjoy the best I’ve made of it.

+

Now for god’s sake, roll on 2021…

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

+

ISSUE 24 - Thanks and Salutations! +In addition to our contributors and backroom team, special thanks this time go to the multi-talented P. J. Richards, creator of our charming cover, who describes herself as an artist and writer inspired by nature, history, and folklore and tweets as @P_J_Richards. As well as producing such eye-catching, painstaking images as this one, she’s also the freshly-minted author of a first novel, Deeper, Older, Darker, a contemporary fantasy adventure that features a unique system of magic based on archery (which is figuratively another string to P.J.’s actual, she-fires-arrows-with-it bow). It’s available from the likes of here, if you want to pick it up for Xmas!

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-24/every-hat-crown.html b/issue-24/every-hat-crown.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ae3c24ed --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/every-hat-crown.html @@ -0,0 +1,493 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every Hat is a Crown — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Every Hat is a Crown

+

Mike Morgan

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Every Hat is a Crown by +
+ + + + +

O + +n his way into the nearby town of Prestathwyke, young Walleg Ravenscoop stopped by the house where Gwendolyn lived, determined to steal a kiss.

+

Gwen lived with her widower mother, Old Maeve, and two brothers on a small plot of land that was part of Lord Disteth’s estate. Her brothers were out in the lord’s fields that morning, helping to reap their master’s crops before being allowed to return home and attend to their own. For this reason, fair Gwen, with her crown of yellow hair, was likely left unchaperoned. This state of affairs brought a smile to Walleg’s freckled face. If he were any judge, it’d make her grin too.

+

It was a walk of twenty minutes or more to reach the plain cruck house where she lived, laboriously crossing the ploughed-up fields of corn. Every step of the way, he had to cajole his recalcitrant bull raptor William to follow along. The scaly, skittish saura had a bad temper and knew how to nip at Walleg’s legs. The foul-mannered reptile was especially annoyed because Walleg was making him carry two heavy bags of turnips to sell at market—the beast would much rather be sniffing around one of the in-heat raptor mares at home. But Walleg knew a thing or two as well, like how to yank sharply enough on the farm animal’s reins to make its eyes water, so their exchanges usually worked out even.

+

Gwen’s rectangular house with its sagging thatched roof was not as large as the smallholding where Walleg and his family lived, but it reeked just as much of livestock dung and smoke. As Walleg tied his grouchy pack animal to a fence post, the heavy sackcloth curtain across the nearest door twitched open and Gwen slipped out. A knowing smirk dashed across her face when she laid eyes on him.

+

“I thought that was your William’s grouchy barks and trumpets I could hear.” She kept her voice down. “Lord’s sake, there must be folk in town that heard that caterwauling. Your field-raptor has the blackest humor I’ve ever seen and no mistake.”

+

“Ah, Gwen, he’s as meek as a kitten when you get to know him—,” began Walleg, but the dun-colored blackheart chose that exact moment to ram his heavy snout into the small of the farmboy’s back. If the lissome Gwen hadn’t caught him mid-stumble, he would have toppled into the mud.

+

Walleg quickly found his footing—and then his thoughts were swept away by the heat of Gwen’s fingers resting on his arm and the closeness of her body. Without thinking, he slipped his arm around the young woman and drew her tight. The wide brim of the straw hat he always wore brushed awkwardly against the fringe of her hair, so he tipped up the front of the headgear to remove the impediment. Their mouths were almost touching, her warm breath on his lips.

+

She murmured huskily, “My mother’s inside, you idiot.”

+

In the grip of sudden horror, he tore his gaze from Gwen’s limpid eyes and glanced over her shoulder. Crooked-backed Maeve was standing in the doorway, the curtain lifted above her bowed shoulders.

+

“I have warned you before,” she croaked. “Get your hands off my daughter.”

+

His hands flew from Gwen’s dress, but the harm had been done. “It’s not what you think.” Walleg backed away, knees weak.

+

Maeve was having none of it. “I know what you want,” she accused in her rasping voice, “you want to poke your pizzle into my lovely Gwen. Well, that ain’t going to happen while I still have breath in my body. I will make sure you have troubles enough to keep your attention elsewhere. Oh, yes, you may rely on that!”

+

With a wheezing chuckle, the hunched crone shuffled toward him. The malicious glint in her eyes was more than enough cause for Walleg to grab the leather strap of his raptor’s reins and pull the beast away.

+

Maeve’s evil laughter chased him on the breeze as he hurried across the sodden fields to the distant roofs of Prestathwyke. The shuddersome sound was broken only by the lighter tones of Gwen remonstrating with her mother. By now, he was too far away to hear what mother and daughter were saying, but Gwen sounded distraught. No doubt she was on the receiving end of her mother’s sharp tongue. Walleg felt bad for getting Gwen in trouble. A little. But already, thoughts of the encounter were fading from his mind, crowded out by the excitement of going to town.

+

He pulled the brim of his hat low over his eyes against the wind and concentrated on getting the heavily laden raptor to the marketplace.

+

W + +alleg soon learned that the day held two surprises. First, that the king was due to ride through town on his way to Lord Disteth’s manor house. Second, that Walleg was cursed.

+

He found the first out while lurking at the rear of Restwick’s Inn, next to the window where small beer was sold for half a penny a quart. He had already finished at the market, selling the turnips to the stallholder who bought most of his family’s vegetables, and had wasted no time in adjourning to the inn after offloading the bulky wares; the four shillings and a ha’penny earned from the sale were burning a hole in his pouch. The stallholder always added a discreet half-moon of a coin to the shillings intended for Walleg’s dad, so the lad could sneak off and quench the terrible thirst he’d developed during the trip. William was also in much better spirits now, knowing the routine well and looking forward to his own bowl of porridge-like booze.

+

There was a crowd of young ne’er-do-wells about the serving hatch, rapscallions abuzz with gossip concerning the king’s visit. With William tied up and lapping happily at the contents of a wooden bowl, Walleg listened with mounting excitement as the other youngsters boasted about every scrap of information they’d heard thus far: the king’s procession was coming down Market Lane; the king was riding in his finest saura-drawn carriage; a hundred King’s Own Guardsmen were going to be riding as escorts in armor as bright and shining as the Sun. If only half of those claims were true, it was going to be a sight worth bragging about for years to come.

+

Walleg downed the dregs of his tankard and passed it back through the open serving window, eager to be among the earliest faces lining Market Lane. Marge at the inn wouldn’t mind watching William for a few minutes—after drinking a bowl of beer-soaked oats, the raptor would nap for a couple of hours anyway—and Walleg would never forgive himself if he missed the sight of the royal carriage passing through town. Without pausing for thought, he dashed through the side gate and out into the narrow street.

+

Now, unlike most menfolk thereabouts who wore linen coifs tied under the chin, Walleg favored a hat with a large brim. It was unique on account of Walleg having designed the headgear himself, desperate to come up with something that could block out the rays of the Sun better than a coif—it wasn’t vanity that had spurred on this creativity, it was the acute sunburn incurred while laboring in the fields.

+

Even though his homemade hat was technically acceptable under the sumptuary law that dictated what peasants were allowed to wear, it was the subject of frequent abuse from passers-by due to its unusual shape, and did have a habit of flying off in anything stronger than a mild breeze. Such was Walleg’s hurry to take his place for the procession to come, once again his floppy straw hat caught the air and flew off.

+

Walleg skidded to a halt. Annoyed at losing his carefully woven creation, he bent over and retrieved the hat… then stood there, looking down at his dirt-encrusted hands and the battered object he was holding.

+

He could plainly see the hat.

+

He could feel its coarse texture between his fingers.

+

Yet, somehow, he could also see the dark mass of a brim at the top of his field of vision. Not only that, he sensed there was a weight still atop his head, still a feeling of constriction about his forehead, still the prickling of straw against his skin.

+

Fingers shaking, he reached up with one hand until his fingers brushed against the scratchy edge of a strand of straw. Had someone in the street reached out from behind and placed another hat upon Walleg’s head a split second after his own one had fallen off? The possibility seemed ridiculous—there weren’t any other hats like his—but what other explanation was there?

+

With his empty hand, he yanked the offending item from his scalp.

+

The sensation of wearing something faded for barely an instant before returning undiminished. Impossibly, the dark, out-of-focus brim obscured the topmost part of his vision anew. Clumsily, his hands full of hats, he felt again for an object sat on his pate and, again, incredibly, his hand scraped against woven straw.

+

In the midst of trying to stop his suddenly feeble fingers from dropping the two wide hats, he noticed that the second one was identical in every regard to the first. He could only assume the third one—the one he was wearing—was just as precise a copy.

+

A voice called to him, “Oi! Are you coming to watch or not? Here comes the king!” It was his third cousin, Harveldt. The morbidly obese boy was at the end of the street leading from the inn, where it met Market Lane. Harveldt was using his considerable girth to secure a prime spot in the throng where it was pressed up against the wall of the building on the side of the thoroughfare, motioning for Walleg to join him.

+

Spurred on by his cousin’s cry, Walleg raced over. Harveldt remarked curiously, “Why have you got three hats? Are you trying to sell some?” He sniffed. “They’ll never catch on, you know.”

+

The man standing next to Harveldt shushed him, declaring, “The king approaches!”

+

Walleg craned his head and saw the guardsmen at the head of the procession closing rapidly. His cousin untied his coif and removed the linen covering, baring his head respectfully. All about Walleg, townsfolk were doing the same. In the presence of the king, even barons were obliged to doff their headgear.

+

There were too many people gathered next to him now to simply run away. From beneath the brim that had sheltered him so well, Walleg looked from one of his spare hats to the other, and gulped.

+

"I + +’ll make this as simple as I know how,” thundered King Amaranthis, leaning out of the window in the carriage’s door. “I am king and you are a peasant, so in my presence you will take off your hat!”

+

Walleg could only whimper, “But Sire, I did.”

+

“Then what,” replied the king archly, “am I looking at on top of your head?”

+

“Each time I remove my hat, another appears in its place,” Walleg stammered. “I’ve taken off twelve whilst your carriage pulled near.” He could feel the disbelieving eyes of the other townspeople boring into him—they had been too busy gazing at the approaching royal splendor to notice the miracle occurring right under their noses.

+

“A likely story!” scoffed Amaranthis, but he glanced down in confusion at the pile of straw hats at Walleg’s feet. “I don’t care why you forgot, you infinite cretin, simply take the wretched thing off now!”

+

Walleg did as he was told. His fears were fulfilled: the feeling of weight and constriction around his scalp did not pass.

+

The king gazed wonderingly at him. “My good man, I must confess that is a very good trick.” The barrel-chested monarch leaned farther out of the carriage’s window and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Tell me how it is done.”

+

In the narrow confines of the street, hot sun beating down on him, Walleg felt dizzy. The king was expecting an answer. The only sounds were the snorts and foot-stamping of the procession’s stolid three-horned riding-saura and the distant sound of a high window being flung open and a chamber pot being emptied.

+

“I don’t know how it’s done,” he admitted. “I’d tell you if I knew, m’lord.”

+

“I see.” Amaranthis snapped his fingers and roared, “Captain of the Guard! Arrest this youth. Bring him with us to the manor house! I shall extract the secret of this trick from him, or I shall extract the marrow from his bones.” He smiled a reptilian smile at Walleg. “I would prefer the former, but I am perfectly willing to settle for the latter.”

+

"P + +lainly, it must be magic,” mused Amaranthis.

+

“Indeed, my liege,” purred the Lord High Chancellor Urquhart, the Most Reverend Bishop of Dunheved-by-Launceston. “Most likely the blackest of magic.”

+

“Yes, yes,” muttered the king as he slouched in the great chair at the end of the long table. Amaranthis was a short, stocky man, endowed with great physical strength despite his squat frame. He tapped at his chin with a ring-encrusted finger. “Still, it could be terribly useful. Send for my personal warlock.”

+

Walleg was more scared than he’d ever been in his life. This was his first time inside Lord Disteth’s manor house. The closest he normally got was the communal mill, set some distance away on the bank of the river. It was probably going to be his last time here as well.

+

The king had ordered him brought into the house’s great hall, and there he stood, shivering in fear and awe as his lords and masters discussed his odd affliction. And there were so many of his masters in attendance: the king and chancellor, of course, but also an entire group of grandly dressed nobles traveling with the royal party. In addition, Lord Disteth and his lady wife stood close by, both of whom looked as nervous as Walleg.

+

The last time he’d been anywhere near as afraid as this was when he’d been caught cuddling Gwen by that old crone, Maeve.

+

A thought struck him. Gwen’s mother was steeped in witchcraft. It must be her behind this unholy magic! “M’lord!” he wailed. “A curse has been placed upon me!”

+

“I have no doubt of it. You hardly seem the sort to muster any magic of your own. So, tell me boy, who has cursed you?” Amaranthis sounded amused. “Who should I seek out for another of these plagues, albeit one with a more profitable target for the endless reproduction?”

+

The chancellor started as if jabbed by a hot poker and then looked admiringly at the enterprising king. Walleg was about to offer up Maeve’s name; then he hesitated. If he enraged her further, there was no telling what she might do. “I know not,” he said quickly.

+

“Come now, you must have crossed someone recently. Think on it. Who has reason to make you look foolish?” Walleg shook his head. “Gadsbudlikins, we’ll get to the bottom of this!” shouted the king. He was a man who shouted a lot. “If magic can make a perpetual procession of hats, it can just as easily make an unceasing supply of gold!”

+

“Or weapons, or armor, or castles, or silver, or…” added Chancellor Urquhart, a calculating expression spreading across his flabby face.

+

“We are certain that his supply of hats is without surcease?” asked Amaranthis. “We should make very sure of it whilst we await the arrival of our warlock.” With a gesture, he summoned the local lord’s seneschal. “Tip off the boy’s hat, and when a new one appears, knock that off too.” To his chancellor, he instructed, “Keep a count. And measure each hat as it is removed, to determine whether they change size or shape.”

+

Rubbing his hands, he announced gleefully, “We will put this curse to the test.”

+

C + +ommencing his tasks of counting and measuring, Chancellor Urquhart said, “We should endeavor to be methodical and establish how many hats have already materialized.”

+

Everyone looked at Walleg.

+

His mouth dry, he stammered, “I lost fourteen before I was arrested, and then six more fell off as I was dragged here.” He clutched a hat to his chest. “I kept hold of the real one, the one I wove.”

+

Parchment and ink were brought to the chancellor and he carefully recorded the number thus far. “Twenty, plus the one still on your head. That makes twenty-one hat-like apparitions!” Without even looking at the seneschal, Urquhart motioned for him to proceed.

+

The seneschal was out of his depth, used as he was to organizing the lord’s household. But he rose to the occasion, flamboyantly flipping the hat off the boy’s head. As expected, another identical hat formed out of the ether.

+

King Amaranthis roared jocularly, “Sard! I never thought to have such merriment visiting a dreary lord’s estate. Keep on, I say! There is no reason to stop!”

+

So the seneschal, his livery-patterned sleeves flapping, continued to knock off hats. Each time a wide-brimmed sunhat went spinning to the floor, another shimmered into existence.

+

“Thirty,” counted the chancellor, “forty, fifty, sixty…”

+

Walleg stood stock-still, petrified with nerves, throughout. When they reached seventy, Amaranthis called, “Enough!” He stalked across to Chancellor Urquhart. “Are there any differences between the oldest and the newest of these creations?” he demanded, irritated by the seeming lack of progress.

+

After evaluating the objects, the chancellor answered, “At most, my lord, it seems the weave is more precise and the straw a more uniform length and color.”

+

Amaranthis frowned. “Are you saying the hats are getting better made as we go on?”

+

Urquhart looked uncertain. “Perhaps, or perhaps my eyes are not as good as they once were.”

+

“It seems we will learn nothing until my pet warlock heeds his summons,” said the king surlily. “While we wait, throw the simpleton in whatever passes for a dungeon in these parts. And bring me wine.”

+

Walleg wondered briefly who the simpleton was, until a guard grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and the answer became abundantly clear. In some ways, Walleg was relieved—a nice dungeon sounded less fraught than standing before his masters in the great hall.

+

His good cheer evaporated at the king’s next utterance. “And in case the boy is lying about the profound state of his ignorance, let him have mnemosynes for company. Three of them. Yes, let him share his quarters with a travesty of memory eaters.” Amaranthis smirked in an unpleasant fashion. “Travesty is the collective noun for mnemosynes, you know. Or is it a ‘murder’?”

+

“I think that’s crows,” said Urquhart.

+

“In any case,” continued the king, staring at Walleg, “you should give serious consideration to confessing everything you know, whilst you can still remember it.”

+

T + +he manor house did not have a dungeon. Since Walleg had to be held in a room with a lock, the King’s Guards settled for putting him in one of the storerooms next to the buttery. They did not stay to taunt Walleg; they simply slammed shut the heavy door as soon as he was inside and departed with haste.

+

As the echoing thud faded, Walleg gazed about the shadowy interior of the small, cluttered chamber, then sank to the tiled floor and put his back to a storage barrel. In his sixteen years of life, he had heard many tales of the mnemosynes and their grotesque memory-feasting. The apparitions would gorge themselves on every morsel of his past, every recollection that gave his life meaning. Already he could imagine the clammy touch of half-intangible talons caressing his skin. Escape seemed impossible. He would be left a gibbering, hollow shell.

+

The silence was short lived. First, there came a low hiss, like the timid exhalation of a dying man’s last breath. Walleg’s eyes darted to the doorway. A gray mist was coiling under the door. Hardly able to credit the evidence of his own senses, Walleg watched aghast as the mist coalesced, growing in size and solidity until it formed the most terrifying sight he had ever seen: a trio of eyeless, hungering wraiths, each one reaching out toward him with long, cruelly clawed fingers.

+

He kicked violently, pushing himself back as far as he could from the spectral sight. But the room was small and there was nowhere to hide. He wanted to be brave in these, his last moments, but was disappointed to find he had no skills in that area at all.

+

A scream choked up from the depths of Walleg’s chest, reverberating throughout the narrow chamber, sending ripples through the mnemosynes’ misty flesh. “We’ll eat the memory of your mother’s love first,” whispered the closest of the smiling horrors. “You won’t miss it, will you?”

+

Another hissed wetly in his ear, “What else can we strip from you? What do you treasure most?”

+

“You should tell the king everything you know, before we gnaw too deeply,” advised the third, and in a mockery of compassion stretched out its deathly cold fingers and stroked Walleg’s face. “We are so very hungry. Once we start to tear at the meat of your history, I’m not sure we’ll be able to stop.”

+

Seized with revulsion at the abhorrent contact, Walleg almost missed his name being called. For a second, he hoped against hope that his prison contained another victim of the life eaters, one that might distract them for a few precious moments. Desperate, he cast about the confines of the storeroom for any sign of a fellow prisoner. There was none.

+

There would be no respite, he realized. He could not, would not talk, and the life eaters would consume him one joyous moment at a time until all he would remember would be the pain and unending misery of a lifetime stripped of everything that made it bearable. The only outcome he could imagine was the utter destruction of his soul.

+

Still, his name was called. Had the taskmaster of these fiends, the very Devil himself, tired of this game and come for him, intent on bringing this confrontation to a hideous conclusion?

+

Panic-stricken, he cried, “Beelzebub, is that you?”

+

“You are an utter idiot,” the voice replied.

+

Walleg wasn’t taking that, even from the lord of hell. “Kill me if you must, Satan, but don’t mock me aforehand!”

+

“Are those life eaters in there with you?” asked the disembodied voice. “Give me a moment. I’ll re-cork them in their storage flasks. While I’m doing that, try not to think of anything you’ll miss not remembering.”

+

The voice said other things then, but the words were slippery in Walleg’s ears. He found it impossible to focus on any of their syllables. But he saw the effect of the skittering phrases well enough: the mnemosynes melted back into thin tendrils of roiling fog and flowed out of the room, under the door again, returning to their homes of enchantment-saturated crystal.

+

“I never dared hope to see another day when I was myself,” he breathed.

+

“Are you yourself?” The voice sounded nervous now.

+

“How would I know?” asked Walleg despondently. “I cannot remember that which I have forgotten.”

+

“Oddly, you’re making sense. Terror must spur intelligence in boys. How to tell if you’re half-eaten up? I know. Be honest, do you still like me?”

+

Now that he thought on it, the voice was familiar. Walleg stood on his tiptoes and peered through the slit-like window of the storeroom, the brim of his hat angled high.

+

Through the thick leaded panes of the window, he could make out the distant, overgrown ruins of the Old Towers where a vast city of glass and metal had once stood, with carriages that moved by themselves, or so the town elders claimed, remnants of an age before saura had hatched anew, fossils of a time without magic. Carriages moving by themselves sounded magical to Walleg, though, so he doubted the official accounts.

+

Well, he remembered that much, it seemed. More importantly, he had a notion who the voice on the other side of the window belonged to. He could see a familiar sight below the windowsill—certain blonde tresses he knew and adored.

+

“Gwen!” he exclaimed happily.

+

“Are you sure I’m not Beelzebub?” she teased.

+

“You’re not, but your mum might be!” Less angrily, he added, “The king wanted me to confess the name of the witch responsible for the curse. I said nothing, not even when those wretches threatened to suck away the best reaches of my mind. Even though your mum is powerful fierce and no friend of mine, I don’t want her burnt at the stake.” He didn’t need to add that the scope of any inquisition would quickly spread to the witch’s daughter and, after what he’d just witnessed, he doubted she’d survive close scrutiny from a witch-finder.

+

Gwen coughed. “Staying silent can be the bravest act of all. Thank you.”

+

Unable to lie to her, he blurted out, “And I didn’t want her to change me into a toad.”

+

“My mum would never transform you into a toad,” said Gwen. “She’s always thought of you as a salamander. The instant word reached us of your arrest, I made mum do a second incantation to cancel the curse. She never wanted you to get in any trouble. It was just a bit of fun to stop you chasing after me.”

+

Walleg shook his head, annoyed. “What’re you blathering about? The curse isn’t lifted. I’ve only been in here a few minutes, and up until then hats were still popping out of nowhere.”

+

“Ah,” said Gwen. “The thing about curses, you see, is they can be a little unpredictable.” In a much quieter voice, she said, “That’s why mum never dares use magic to benefit herself. It’d most likely go awry.”

+

“That’s just great! The king won’t ever let me go—he wants to unravel the magic and get at its very bones.”

+

“Why does he want to go and do that?”

+

“So he can cast a similar spell to make infinite copies of gold coins and suchlike!”

+

Gwen’s laughter carried up to the window. “If witches could do that, there’d be no such thing as a poor spell-caster. Tell him it can’t be done.”

+

“He’s not going to believe that!”

+

There wasn’t time to talk further. The storeroom door was flung wide to reveal a trio of guards. The soldier in charge snapped “On your feet, boy! The king’s warlock is here!” A sneer spread across his face. “It’s time to tear that magic clean out of what’s left of your soul!”

+

Another guard holding a scrap of paper peered around his superior, looking confused. Walleg assumed the paper held a containment-code similar to the one Gwen had used. “Where are the memory eaters?” he asked. “Are they loose in the manor house?”

+

The first guard glared furiously at Walleg. “What have you been up to, boy?”

+

"S + +plendid to make your acquaintance,” enthused the warlock. He swept around Walleg in a circle, making it hard for the boy to get a look at him. Were the warlock’s feet hovering just above the floor? “My name is Theodor Q. Ancible. I’m sure we’ll get along famously. Now, if I could just see the, um…?” He gesticulated at Walleg’s sunhat in lieu of finishing his thought.

+

Walleg wordlessly removed the article and placed it on the teetering heap of already discarded headpieces. Again, the brim darkened into solidity at the top of his field of vision. Again, he felt the itchiness of straw against his brow.

+

“Tremendous,” opined the warlock. “That’s the seventy-first facsimile, I believe?” He nodded, answering his own question.

+

“Well?” inquired Amaranthis heavily. They were all back in the great hall, standing in their previous places, the only difference being that the seneschal had gratefully ceded his role of hat remover to the garrulous wizard.

+

Theodor nodded again. “You were right to call me in, my lord. This duplication curse is really quite elegantly constructed. Probably the work of a talented amateur. A local witch, perhaps, or a self-taught sorceress. Someone without knowledge of the correct forms, but for whom a grasp of thaumaturgical processes comes naturally.”

+

“I didn’t ask you to critique the spell,” the king snapped, “I asked you to reverse engineer it and make a better one of your own. With a functioning incantation of limitless duplication, this kingdom will become the most powerful on earth. No nation will be able to oppose us! Now get on with your job. Every second you delay is a second my glorious conquest is postponed.” He slumped in the lord’s chair, rubbing his forehead.

+

Seemingly unaffected by the king’s ire, the warlock said, “As you wish, my lord. I shall proceed immediately with a detailed cabalistic analysis of the elements employed in this occult phrasing.” A sharp clap from the warlock prompted the seneschal into action, who rushed to order several pages to haul in and position a large wooden contraption in front of Walleg.

+

“My camera-invisibilis,” said the warlock proudly.

+

Walleg stared at the large upright casket warily as the warlock explained its operation. There was a small lens on the surface facing Walleg and a larger one on the back. As the hat-making spell worked its wonders the details of the incantation would travel through the box and be displayed on the thick glass on the far side.

+

Walleg wasn’t convinced letting the king have access to the spell was a good idea, but he couldn’t think of a way of stopping him. Maybe protecting Gwen was all he could achieve this day—that would be enough.

+

“Now, let’s see the magic in action,” laughed the warlock. He waggled a finger and Walleg’s hat leaped off, as if struck. It was instantly replaced. Theodor repeated the motion time and time again, his half-smile never faltering. The chancellor had to scramble to resume the count.

+

It took only moments to reach a hundred hats. A short time later, they passed two hundred. The curse showed no sign of abating. Pages were instructed to cart away the enormous heap of straw headgear that had amassed, and they stacked them neatly in piles along the side of the hall. Still, the warlock wiggled his digit and, still, hats formed out of thin air.

+

At the two-hundred-fifty mark, Amaranthis growled, “Surely you have enough data now? What does your box say?”

+

The warlock’s smirk finally slipped. “I don’t understand it, sire,” he begrudged. “There seem to be two incantations at war with one another.”

+

With a howl of unbridled frustration, the king launched himself from the chair and grabbed Walleg by the throat. “I would think that, in the one hundred and forty-seventh year of the Age of Asmodeus, we would be better able to solve such a simple riddle of thaumaturgy.” Spittle flew from his mouth.

+

He dragged the smallholder’s son bodily across the room to where Lord Disteth stood shaking. “Dutiful Disteth, tell me your graceless house is equipped with a tower, for I am possessed of a powerful urge to fling this useless baggage from its very top.”

+

Lord Disteth confirmed that the manor house did, indeed, have a tower, and almost fell in his haste to guide the king to its staircase.

+

The king roared in Walleg’s face, “Did you hear that, serf? Give me the source of this magic, or I will murder you and laugh over your stinking, broken corpse!”

+

T + +he king’s grip tightened as they ascended the circular staircase, the nobles and officials of the court trailing in their wake. It was all Walleg could do not to lose his footing. On each stone step, Amaranthis furiously swatted a hat from the boy’s head.

+

As the chancellor maintained the count, soon passing three hundred, the king bellowed, “I am the man who oversaw the final eradication of the supernatural kingdoms and ushered in the new dominion of Man! I have overseen genocides—I will not be thwarted by the likes of you! You will give me the secret of creating objects from nothingness or you will die!”

+

Such was his rage, and such was Walleg’s panic, that neither of them noticed what was happening to the hats. Chancellor Urquhart began to say “Three hundred and fifty” when he paused and shouted excitedly, “Your highness! They’re different!”

+

Climbing ahead of the king, Lord Disteth heaved the top hatch wide. Sunlight streamed onto their faces. Panting from exertion, the king stood at the top of the high tower, still clutching at Walleg’s throat.

+

“See?” breathed the equally exhausted chancellor. They all looked at the newest hat on Walleg’s head. “It is made of some sort of felt now, and there are jewels studded in it!”

+

“The magic is breaking down!” said the warlock. “The reproductions are no longer exact.”

+

In the quiet that followed this pronouncement, the king released Walleg’s throat. The farmboy sagged onto the slate roof of the crenellated turret and gently rubbed his tender neck.

+

“That looks like a ruby,” observed Disteth. “And I think that’s an emerald.”.

+

“Let’s see what appears next.” Amaranthis batted away the latest article from Walleg’s head. He kept at it for some time, growing increasingly pleased with the steadily more ornate and gem-encrusted headgear that were revealed.

+

As the chancellor’s count reached four hundred and ninety-nine, the warlock concluded, “The spell is definitely destabilizing.” This latest hat was an amazing collection of gemstones mounted on a platinum band. It was so heavy it hurt Walleg’s head just to wear it for a few seconds. The king lifting it away came as a blessing.

+

The next headpiece was a sparkling circlet of gold, inlaid with diamonds as big as hens’ eggs. Reverently, the king took it from Walleg, hardly able to credit the sight of such wealth.

+

For the first time in a long time, Walleg’s head felt unconstrained. There was no weight upon it, no sensation of material pressing against his skin. He checked with a shaking hand. It was true. There was nothing up there.

+

At last, he was hatless.

+

The curse was broken!

+

“Five hundred was the limit,” concluded the warlock. “Whatever the spell was, it’s worn off now.”

+

The king turned and started to descend. “I am satisfied. A haul of a hundred and fifty hats laden with precious stones is enough to purchase an army. And this last one… it is stunning. It shall be my new crown.” He put the circle of gold on his tangle of brown hair, remarking casually, “The boy is no more use to us. Let him go.”

+

Walleg let out a long breath, hardly daring to believe his luck.

+

“Actually,” said the king. “I’ve changed my mind. He’s a dullard. Have the guards hack him to bits. But do it in the grounds, I don’t want blood splashing on my exquisite diadem.”

+

W + +hen the King’s Own Guardsmen hauled Walleg out of the servants’ entrance to the manor house, Gwen was waiting. She was not alone.

+

“I brought William,” she announced, smiling at the guards in a way that caused them to stumble to a halt.

+

Walleg was lost. “Who’s William?” His only answer was a feathered, scaly, hissing blur of motion. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but the guards weren’t holding him anymore.

+

“William woke up from his nap and you weren’t there,” said Gwen. “He didn’t like that.”

+

Hearing a strange whimpering, Walleg turned. The guards were sprawled in disarray on the grass with a bull raptor baring its teeth at them. He started in shock.

+

Gwen squeezed his hand tenderly. “It was the mnemosynes, wasn’t it? They took the memory of your animal. Well, I did tell you to think of something you’d not mind losing.”

+

What was she saying? “He’s mine?” She nodded reassuringly. “And is he loyal? Is he friendly?”

+

Gwen started to say something and then coughed. After a couple of seconds, she managed, “William is accustomed to you.”

+

“Sard, he’s not going to eat the soldiers, is he? I’m in enough trouble.”

+

That made Gwen squint at Walleg. “It seemed to me they were planning to murder you.”

+

“They were,” he averred. “The king thought me too stupid to live.”

+

“The king is an unfeeling monster and you should pay his words no heed.” Gwen looked at the guards. “I know what you mean, though. We cannot revenge ourselves on them and continue to live in these parts. But these stout men in uniform will not willingly forget their orders. They will hound our heels if we leave them as they are.” She raised a hand to stop Walleg interrupting. “Fortunately, I know someone who’s very good at brewing draughts of forgetfulness, and I like to be prepared.”

+

The golden-haired girl tossed a wineskin at the guards’ feet. “Sip deeply, good sirs, or we shall discover how voracious William is today.”

+

After the skin was drained, Gwen turned back to Walleg. “Who needs mnemosynes, eh? In a few seconds, they will no longer remember who you are. But you might want to stay clear of the manor for a while, lest others see your happy face and recall what fate was ordered for you.”

+

She held his hand as they began the long dung-strewn walk back across the fields toward her cruck house. Pterosaurs wheeled distantly overhead, searching for scraps.

+

“Thank you,” she said, “for not letting the king start an inquisition.”

+

Then she kissed him.

+

Whistling jauntily, Walleg reached into his tunic and pulled out his original, hand-woven straw hat—the one he’d started the day wearing, the one he’d so carefully kept hold of through thick and thin. He smoothed out the crumpled brim and put it on with a smile. “I don’t care what anyone says. I like my sunhat.”

+

Gwen slipped an arm around his waist. “Don’t take on, but I hate it. I always have.”

+

“Every man is a king,” he replied, “and this is my crown.”

+

Shaking her head, Gwen could only say, “Not every hat is a crown. Some are dunces’ caps.”

+

S + +o enraptured was King Amaranthis with his new coronet, he wore it for the remainder of the day, drawing compliments and admiring glances from all who saw him.

+

When night finally fell, Amaranthis thanked Lord and Lady Disteth for their hospitality and retired to his guest chamber. The royal attendants removed his fur-trimmed outer vestments as normal, and the chief Esquire of the Household approached from behind to take off the king’s new regalia, so it could be stored in a secure cabinet.

+

“Get on with it, man,” snorted the king. “Resplendent though it is, this crown grows heavier by the second. I am in pain, I tell you! My vertebrae feel like they’re being pulverized under the load.”

+

Startled, the esquire replied, “I have taken it off, my lord. I’m holding it in my hands… but a new one…” He hardly needed to finish.

+

Horrified, the king reached up.

+

His fingers brushed against a solid mass of gold, much larger than the previous circlet. The curse had not dissipated—it had restarted, with a new victim.

+

“Five hundred,” he croaked, his voice disintegrating into a terrified whisper. “Five hundred crowns. How much will they weigh by the end, and how strong is my neck?”

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Every Hat is a Crown” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mike Morgan

+

+ + Author image of Mike Morgan + + + Mike Morgan has lived on three continents. It wasn’t for a bet; it was just how things worked out. (Being easily bored may have factored into it.) He’s married with two kids and looks after a foul-tempered pet. Can you tell? His work has been included in anthologies like Flame Tree’s Gothic Fantasy; Science Fiction Short Stories, NewCon Press’s Best of British Science Fiction 2018 and 2019, Unidentified Funny Objects 8, and multiple issues of Hiraeth’s The Martian Wave. His novella Where the Monsters Are is due out soon from Hiraeth. You can find him on Twitter and his website.

+

© Mike Morgan 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Moose Photos, talpeanu, InspiredImages, and LubosHouska.

+
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+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/first-breath.html b/issue-24/first-breath.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f99fd718 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/first-breath.html @@ -0,0 +1,545 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + First Breath — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

First Breath

+

Addison Smith

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for First Breath by +
+ + + + +

T + +he Rez was a strobing mass of lights, lasers, and mirrors tuned to the heavy bass lines and syncopation. The floor shook with the beat and bodies moved to it, fluid and sexual, fingers running down sweating backs. Two girls stared into each other’s eyes before one let out a breath that sent the other into a fit of ecstasy. Hardy’s wetware mod ached to join them, feeding him shadows of breath—the latest drug craze that turned a faint mist of DNA into an electric stimulus.

+

His attention turned to the other side of the sea of glowing dreads, bare skin, and fluid motion. The girl at the bar-side table had been watching him since he’d arrived. Her gaze followed him from the door to the bar, then to his usual seat against the wall. She was familiar, but not by the pink lines that glowed in her hair, or the nearly transparent synthetic that clung to her body.

+

She wasn’t in his memory, but she had been once.

+

That kind of familiarity was a thing he had learned to fear. When you’ve spent any time working for Jack, you learn that the people you can trust the least are the ones you’re familiar with.

+

The hot breath lingering in the room touched at his mind, giving him just a taste of synaptic euphoria. Those synapses sparked, calling him to the dance floor, and his eyes heeded them, taking in the reflective, glowing mass. He drew his attention away, back to the bar-side table.

+

She was gone.

+

“You just gonna watch?” The voice came from beside him, smooth and sensual.

+

He didn’t turn his head. “I thought I might sit this one out.”

+

Her hands reached over his shoulder, teasing over the thin cloth of his shirt, and he inhaled just a hint of her breath as she whispered into his ear, “That’s not how this place works.”

+

Synapses fired, and he tilted his head back, letting her fingers graze over the skin of his neck. He laughed, the sensation washing over him more fully than ever before. He’d gotten the breath mod days ago—an open-source derivative of the one that was already sweeping the party capitals. This was different, though. He was a slave to its need. That need made him stare after her as she walked to the floor; it made him stand, and it made him follow.

+

Bodies undulated against him, but there wasn’t room for them in his mind. He followed the curves of her hips and shoulder blades as she dragged him to the floor by a leash of ecstasy.

+

When she stopped, he was right behind her, hands on her hips, turning her to face him and give another taste of the breath he already ached for.

+

She smiled, and they danced. He let his high carry him through the unchoreographed motions and excuses for skin to touch. He was immune to the cloud of breath in the room as others breathed into their lovers, or to strangers, and rode the high together. Only her breath mattered, and the dance became a means to taste it again.

+

She put one arm around his neck, hanging down to scratch a long nail along his spine, and raised her face to his. He stared into her, and she breathed into him. His mod captured it all, translating her foreign DNA to impulses that made the lights glow like flames. His skin felt every body thrashing against it, and he threw his head back as if gasping for the air that would keep him from drowning.

+

He lowered his eyes to hers—the eyes of his new, perfect drug.

+

She was gone again.

+

The space where she had stood filled with others, and their breath hung around him in a haze, but it meant nothing. He looked around the room, trying to pick out the pink of her hair, but it was lost in the neon glow. He sighed, closing his eyes.

+

And there she was. A white silhouette on the black of his eyelids, fifteen feet away. The silhouette reached a hand out, and he opened his eyes, fixating on her position. Her hand was on the doorknob, and she glanced back at him. She smiled, then stepped into the night.

+

When the door closed behind her, he moved to the edge of the pit, away from the dancers. He thought about going back to his table, to ride what was left of her high, but he saw her again when he blinked, and his craving nagged at him.

+

Taking his coat from his chair, he ignored the fear that tried to rise up his spine. Maybe she worked for Jack. Maybe she didn’t.

+

Either way, he had to follow.

+

H + +er shape flashed white in front of him every time he blinked. She had done something. The euphoria had settled enough that he could see reason. At the very least it was a tracking hack, in tune with something on her person, or even her DNA. In itself it was harmless, but he couldn’t know that was all it was.

+

She’d gotten into his head, but he didn’t know how—she had hardly touched him. A wireless connection? Maybe something in the breath? His desire for that feeling had become an ache in his mind—a need he would have to satisfy. He’d followed her for half an hour through dark streets and darker alleys, and all the while the need grew.

+

What was worse, he knew where she was going. Every step took him closer to Jack’s place.

+

Jack had money. Lots of money. The tech he dealt with was expensive, and his clients paid him well. He could afford a place in the city proper, but he set up shop in the slums. Authorities didn’t bother him, and the locals were prime for employment—people who would do anything if you knew the right buttons to push.

+

People like Hardy.

+

It was also a good harvesting site for the tests nobody would volunteer for. People went missing, but weren’t missed.

+

He closed his eyes again to check her silhouette. She was just ahead, fifty feet or so, fumbling with something he couldn’t see. Maybe a doorknob or a lock. She stepped back, and a gunshot shattered the near-silence of the street.

+

“Dammit!” He ran toward her, darting around the brick corner of a building. He only had a second to take in the scene. The girl running. One of Jack’s thugs pointing a gun at her, finger flexing over the trigger. A bin with a heavy pipe sticking out.

+

He shouted and the man turned his head, then his gun. Too slow. Hardy had already grabbed the pipe, connected it with the thug’s bald head. His gun fired wide and he fell to his knees. Hardy swung one more time and the man fell to the ground, unmoving.

+

Hardy looked around the alley, but the girl was gone. A camera stared down at him from the corner.

+

“Dammit!” He blinked and saw her outline two corners over. She wasn’t Jack’s. If she was, there had been a falling out. A hell of a falling out. Guns weren’t Jack’s style.

+

He closed the distance between them, still holding the pipe. The ache in his mind was stronger now. He’d have to get another breath—her breath—or he’d be hurting.

+

She looked up from against the brick wall, black and pink curtaining over one eye. He took a seat next to her on the pavement and leaned his head back. She didn’t say anything, so they sat in silence as his heart beat back to a normal rhythm. He wasn’t used to getting shot at. Even when he worked for Jack, he’d managed to avoid that.

+

She exhaled, and a hint of it drifted up to him, numbing the pain.

+

“You got a name?” he asked.

+

She smiled. “Yeah. You?”

+

He considered a fake name. The name he went by was fake anyway, taken from an old OS distro, but it was who he was. He decided against it. “Hardy.”

+

The smile never left her lips. It was an odd look—half joy, half resignation.

+

“You don’t have to tell me your name. I really don’t care. I just want to know what you did to me. Why are you in my head?”

+

Her smile faded. She nodded back toward the door. “You want to know why, take a look.”

+

He turned to look around the corner, but she caught his arm. “Not like that.” She closed her eyes, and he got the picture. He closed his own and looked through the building behind them. There was another white shape, like the one beside him, but smaller, distant. Someone was curled up somewhere deep in Jack’s building, one floor up from ground level.

+

“What did you do to me?” He stared at her, tasting the faint breath coming from her lips. “Who is that?”

+

She rose and dusted off her synthetic clothes, then offered her hand. “I tested you. You passed.”

+

He stood without taking her hand. “I did, huh?”

+

“Call me Mara.” The name clicked somewhere in Hardy’s mind, but no memories came with it. They were probably locked back in Jack’s place. He’d been right about knowing her.

+

There was shuffling around the edge of the building, and he turned, fearing an armed man with a headache. It wasn’t the guard. There were three people—two men, and a girl dressed in your basic technotrash attire. The tallest, a man with short blond hair, glared at him.

+

Mara put her hand on Hardy’s shoulder and nodded at the newcomers. “Meet the Narcs. They want to hire you.” She patted his arm and joined the group. As one, they turned away from the alley and Jack’s.

+

Hardy watched them leave and thought about going the other way, but still felt the ache in his mind. No breath should be so sweet. She’d done something to him, and he had no choice but to go along with it.

+

“A test,” he said, tasting the lie as sure as her breath. They’d got his face on Jack’s camera. He could already feel Jack’s eyes crawling over him, trying to determine his part in this. Whether he liked it or not, he was involved now.

+

He cursed at his feet and followed.

+

They’d better have a damned good reason.

+

B + +y the time they got to the Narcs’ hideout, Hardy’s head was splitting. The idea behind breath was a breakdown of barriers: it was an excuse to get into someone’s personal space and stay there. Easy enough with people you know well. Not all that difficult with strangers, in the anonymity of the dance floor.

+

Mara was different. He felt like he should know her, but he didn’t. She was an odd mix of friend and stranger that made it impossible for him to get close, and he was suffering for it. Moreover, he didn’t trust her.

+

The Narcs, it seemed, were just some punks who hated Jack and wanted to take him down. He couldn’t argue with that. Jack had a pretty tight hold on the area, and nobody was very comfortable with it. Going by the quality band they had collected, nobody much was very willing to do anything about it either.

+

“So who’s inside Jack’s?” He could still see the white silhouette from where they were, though it was smaller than before.

+

Mara stood back as the tall one opened the door. “Lynn,” she said. “My sister.”

+

“Sorry to hear that.” Jack wasn’t a pleasant man to work for, but it was worse to be one of his guinea pigs.

+

“She knew what she was getting into. She’s got a lot of information in her head that would help bring that place down. Too much for Jack to let her go.”

+

Hardy stood back as the others filed in, and Mara smiled at him. She waited for the door to close before she spoke. “Hurts, huh? You know, you could just ask. No need for the tough-guy act.”

+

Willing as she sounded, there was reluctance in her. She leaned in and exhaled in his face, lips keeping their distance. His brain spiked as the DNA triggered his mod, sending him headfirst into a wall of pleasure. He broke through it, beyond his limits, into a place of sweat, raised flesh, and unbearable tingling. He gritted his teeth against it, refusing to let it be anything but a fix, but his mouth opened in a sigh of pleasure. The pain didn’t just recede, but inverted.

+

“It’s the mod,” she said, leaning close, the warmth of her breath pooling around him. “The version you have. I made it.”

+

Hardy tried to fight against the high, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to lay in it and let the dark world around him fade into nothingness.

+

“It’s superkeyed to my DNA. No one will ever give you a feeling like I can,” she said. “I can dole out your pleasure as I see fit. Or I can fix you, if you like.” She backed away from him, fingers lingering on his chest. “After you help us.”

+

He succeeded in fighting down the feeling, separating his thoughts from it and letting it flood his mind in the background. She was manipulative. He had a feeling that had nothing to do with the Narcs, or with Jack. It was all her.

+

“Alright,” he said, his flesh still raised to tips. He gestured to the door. “Show the way.”

+

T + +he place looked like it had been decorated by the technotrash girl. It was more workshop than anything. Cables hung in spools on nails in the wooden wall—newer cables, mostly, but there were some coaxials and Cat 5s as well. Dismantled electronics were everywhere, from children’s toys to high-tech headgear. The room was lit by strings of LEDs, but light of every color shone from fiber optics in bunches.

+

The Narcs stood by a table poring over a schematic of some sort. Probably stolen from Jack. When they approached, the plans rolled up—not for him.

+

Mara pointed each of them out and gave a name. The big guy was Les, the de facto leader of the group. Number two was a kid called Simek. He was obviously there for brawn. Neither of them looked happy to see Hardy.

+

The technotrash girl just went by Z. Her hair shone purple—fiber optic strings hanging here and there. She was the only one who looked welcoming.

+

“I suppose you helped with the mod,” Hardy said. Mara seemed smart enough, but not technologically so.

+

Z saluted in mocking fashion. “Team effort.”

+

Hardy liked to evaluate the ability of people he was going to work for, but this time was different, he didn’t have any real choice in the matter. He could wait out the addiction, but it wouldn’t be pretty. Uninstalling the mod wouldn’t do much either—just cut him off from the drug, but leave him wanting it.

+

“Alright,” he said, “what’s the plan?”

+

“The plan is for you to do as little as possible.” Les still had the glare that Hardy was beginning to think was trademarked. “You’re here because Mara wanted you. I don’t.”

+

“Hey, you picked me up. I can leave any time.”

+

Les nodded toward the door, but Mara stared him down. “We need him. He’s been in there before.”

+

That was what she wanted. His expertise. He had a feeling his membership was about to be revoked. “Listen, I don’t remember anything from in there. Not much, at least. Everything I could tell you is in a bit of brass headwear at Jack’s.”

+

Mara grinned. “But you recognize me.”

+

That confirmed it. She had worked for Jack. “That’s it, though. I couldn’t tell you if you were my boss, or if you got Jack his coffee in the mornings.”

+

Something clicked when he mentioned Jack’s coffee. A cup of coffee, black, but cold. Mara grinned again; she’d seen the recollection. Jack liked his coffee cold. Hardy knew he shouldn’t remember that. He shouldn’t remember a lot of the things he knew about Jack, or the people who worked for him. It should all have been locked away in his crown.

+

“It’s not your memories he took,” Mara said. “Too messy. He just took the bridges.”

+

It made sense, he supposed. Take down the connections between thoughts—the ones that linked his conscious mind to the things Jack didn’t want him to remember—and they were as good as forgotten. “What’s it matter how he did it? They’re gone.”

+

She moved between Les and Simek at the table and rolled out the schematic. Hardy pushed through as well. Jack’s was a big place—took up a whole block—and the schematic showed it. Just beyond the door they had stood in front of earlier was a hallway, anonymous rooms coming off either side. A stairwell at the end, metal stairs, the kind with the grated top to dig into your shoes.

+

Hardy looked at the map. That detail wasn’t on there. Why would it be? It was just a blocky diagram of stairs… but he could see them in his mind. Black painted steel, grated top.

+

“It’s all in there,” Mara said. “We can bridge some of those gaps, but not all of them. We have vague ideas of what Jack does in there. Lynn has the specifics. That’s why we need to get her out.”

+

“And her crown with her,” Les said.

+

Hardy looked at Les. He found no trust there. “She’s been wiped?”

+

“We get the girl, we get the crown, we get Jack.”

+

Hardy didn’t need to look back at the map to see where the crowns were kept. He could remember it now. He could remember the guards there, too. He tasted the memories like forbidden fruit.

+

“We can’t pay you money,” Les said. “We don’t have any. But we’re getting into that crown room, wherever it is. We can pay you in memories.”

+

All those things he couldn’t remember. Little bits of life he thought were lost forever. Mara was a fool, messing with his brain to force his hand. All she’d needed to do was offer him his own mind back.

+

“What do we need?” he said.

+

T + +he beat still pounded at The Rez. The lights still flashed, the bodies still swayed. They had been gone for only a couple of hours, so nothing should have changed. It felt different, though. The lingering breath no longer did anything for him, Mara’s dampened it to nothingness. Or maybe she’d programmed exclusivity into the mod. Either way, he was getting nothing. He’d asked for another breath before they left the Narcs, trying to keep images of a begging junkie out of his head. She had given it—just a touch, and grudgingly—but it was already wearing off. It made him irritable.

+

Nobody paid any attention as they went in, all lost in the drink, the drugs, or the dance. They went to Hardy’s usual table.

+

“So who is it?” Mara asked.

+

Hardy nodded at the other edge of the dance floor. Tony was standing there, perving on the perimeter. He wasn’t the type to get involved. Didn’t have it in him. He was happy to watch, though. There was a visible dent in the line of dancers around him.

+

“Far edge. The guy not dressed the part.” He was in a heavy leather coat that wouldn’t allow much in the way of dancing. Hardy had never seen him without it. A memory clicked in his mind, the coat bridging the gap. He’d asked him about it once, and had gotten a very honest answer: “It makes me feel cool.”

+

“And he’s got a key?”

+

“Yeah, but I don’t know what good it will do you. Jack’s paranoid. The key alone isn’t enough to get us in. It works in conjunction with an implant, and I ripped mine out.” That had been an odd discovery, fresh after his memories were wiped.

+

“Z’s got it all worked out. Don’t worry about it.”

+

Tony smiled across the dance floor. His eyes met Hardy’s, and his smile slackened. “He’s gonna run.”

+

Tony was halfway to the door by the time Hardy stood, and slipped through it right before he got there. Hardy ran after him, down the brick-lined alley. Tony wasn’t that fast, so he caught up quick and grabbed the back of his coat. He hadn’t counted on the momentum, so they both fell to the ground, Hardy on top.

+

They scuffled, but he managed to get Tony’s arms down. As soon as he was pinned, Tony put on the charm. “Hey, Hardy. Long time. How ya been?”

+

His last dose was running out, and he saw that Mara had disappeared again. He didn’t feel like being chatty. “I need to get in, Tony. You got a key?”

+

“Look, I don’t want trouble, Hardy. You know how it is. They find out I gave you the key, what happens to me? You wouldn’t want me hurt.”

+

“Wouldn’t I?”

+

Tony laughed, his head still against the pavement. He was always laughing; it was a defense mechanism. “You’re a funny guy, Hardy. I don’t carry it on me. You’re out of luck.” His eyes darted down to his coat pocket. He wouldn’t give it up, but he’d let Hardy take it. Less liability that way. He’d probably punch himself in the face, too, once Hardy was gone—make it look like he’d beaten it out of him.

+

Hardy reached into the pocket. The key was just a metal card—battery-operated—that gave off half the signal to open the door. “Don’t have it on you, eh?” He played along. Tony was a spineless pervert, but he wasn’t a bad guy. Not as far as Jack’s men went. He grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head close. “What did I tell you about lying to me?”

+

He stood and let Tony get to his feet. “And you won’t be telling anyone, got it?”

+

“Got it, Hardy.” Tony looked down at the ground. When he raised his head again, he was smiling. “So,” he said, “you and Mara.”

+

Hardy took him by the coat all over again. “What do you know about her?”

+

Tony laughed. “That’s not how it works, Hardy. Those memories were hostages. You don’t get them back.”

+

What a time to grow a spine. He let Tony down. He’d get the information either way.

+

“Get out of here.” He walked back toward the club, and Tony skittered down the alley.

+

He hadn’t needed any more proof she had worked for Jack, but it didn’t matter; so had he. She was only part of the game, anyway. He’d save the girl, but there was something he wanted more.

+

He wanted those memories back.

+

"P + +erfect,” Z beamed when he brought her the metal card. She had given up choosing a color for her hair, and the fibers alternated throughout the spectrum.

+

“I don’t know what you can do with it,” he said. “It’s a two-part lock.”

+

“Yeah.” She lost her chipper glow. “I’ve got it covered.”

+

“I don’t see—”

+

“Hardy,” Mara said, “leave her be. She’s got work to do.”

+

When Hardy turned back to Z, she was facing away, back at her worktable. “Right.”

+

Mara was sitting by the wall, and he joined her. He didn’t trust her in the slightest, but she at least was warm toward him; he’d get nothing from Les or Simek. “You’ve got an odd crew,” he said.

+

She nodded. “I guess. I haven’t been with them long. They were just drawn together, you know?”

+

He was only half paying attention. His head ached again, but he ignored it. He’d gotten over his fear of asking, but there was more to it than that. He’d seen what Mara tried to hide the last time. She was afraid of him.

+

It didn’t make any sense—she had him in a vice. Every decision he had made to help, he realized, had been right after getting a dose of that breath. The guard in front of Jack’s, tracking down Tony for the key. He couldn’t even trust his own mind now, for fear the breath was making him do things he otherwise wouldn’t.

+

He did hate Jack, though.

+

Z pulled something from her pocket and gave it a funny look. It was just a disc, the size of a penny, with a couple of wires, but he could tell it weighed heavily on her.

+

“Drawn together,” he said. “By their hatred of Jack?”

+

“Sort of. They’ve all lost someone.”

+

Hardy looked down at his hands, hovering over the gap between his knees. He had wondered. People hated Jack on principle, but to actually try to bring him down was different.

+

“Les lost his mom,” she said. “Money trouble. She didn’t know what she was getting into. Simek’s brother works there, but he says it’s not him anymore.”

+

“Z?” he asked.

+

“See what she’s got there?” Z still held the disc, but he could tell she didn’t want to look at it. “That implant? Got it out of her sister.”

+

Hardy stared at his fingernails. He had worked for Jack. He couldn’t remember much of that—just the few memories he had managed to reconnect. But he knew the kinds of things he had done, even if they weren’t specific memories.

+

“Your sister,” he said, “Lynn. You know what they’re doing to her?”

+

Mara looked away as she spoke, and he tried to imagine what it would be like to have family in there. “Aspect-selective stuff,” she said. “Isolating parts of her personality. Sticking them in new bodies.”

+

“Clones?” That was a new one.

+

“Just an aspect.” She shrugged. “Barely even a person.”

+

Silence fell between them, and he went back to watching Z at her worktable. The lights in her hair were out. Paying respect to her sister, maybe.

+

“Look,” Mara said, “I’m sorry. About bringing you into this.”

+

He hadn’t had a breath in a couple of hours. His head hurt, but he felt he could trust his thoughts, untainted by the drug. “It’s all right,” he said. “Maybe I’d have done the same.”

+

Besides, he wanted Jack gone too.

+

Z + + had anesthetized her arm and cut a slit just big enough for the disc implant to lay beneath her skin, biotech activated. Now they stood across the street from Jack’s. Nobody said anything. There wasn’t any real plan beyond the basics. Get in, Les and Simek get the crowns, and he, Mara, and Z would get the girl.

+

The camera was tilted just too low to see them, but it made Hardy nervous. Z had done some research, and the two-part key was all it would take. It all felt too easy. Where was that guard? Was the two-part key really enough? Maybe the camera was a third part, scanning for identification.

+

It wouldn’t find anything, anyway. The implant was hacked somehow. Z had tried explaining it, but it was beyond him. It wasn’t the signal of any one employee, but a blanket signal that covered everyone. It made sense to her; that was all that mattered.

+

Mara’s silence bothered him. She stood only a few feet away, but the distance was palpable. She was avoiding him, and he couldn’t imagine why. Maybe just worried about her sister, or even about herself, or Les, or Z, or Simek. Probably not about him. He was just a tool the group was using. Who cares if you break a hammer?

+

“Alright,” Les said. His voice was an odd crack in the silence of the street. No sound came from Jack’s; it was eerie. Maybe nothing was going on. It was after business hours, but when a place held so much, there were always going to be guards.

+

The word hung in the air for a few moments, waiting to be backed up by someone else. Everyone was quiet. Even Z, the fibers of her hair still off, looked down at her shoes. “Yeah,” Simek said finally. “Let’s go.”

+

Hardy’s mind ached, and the sweat of withdrawal made a sheen over his skin. He’d asked for a breath—just a little something to get him through their little mission—but Mara kept her eyes on the ground or on the walls. They didn’t meet his a single time. “Let’s just get through this,” she’d said, and walked away.

+

Something was on her mind, and he was paying for it in pain. On the other hand, he could be sure of his mental clarity. He was doing this because he wanted to, not because he was being tricked and juiced. Not this time, at least.

+

The five of them made their way across the street, motions casual and relaxed, but they were rabbits ready to bolt. The camera watched them approach. Z raised her keycard and the signal went out from her card and from her implant. With hope, the combination would get them in and not set off any alarms.

+

Or maybe it wouldn’t work. The door wouldn’t open, and no alarms would go off. They could just walk away and plan things properly. Get more members. Hit Jack hard.

+

Or guards would spill out and kill them where they stood.

+

The lock clicked.

+

The door opened.

+

They went in fast, down the hall together, but Les and Simek branched off quick, heading for what Hardy had identified as the crown room. It was on the second floor, same as Lynn’s whie silhouette, but closer to another stairwell. He and the girls would go straight. Mara could probably take care of herself, but with only Z along that left them as the only muscle. He didn’t like that idea.

+

The stairs passed under their feet, black-painted grates digging into their shoes. Despite their speed, they passed quietly over them. They were upstairs, heading for the room four doors down, where Lynn was captive. Getting in had been easy; they hadn’t seen any guards, and it made Hardy nervous. He could feel those nerves beside him, radiating from Mara.

+

Something was wrong. A click he hadn’t realized he had heard. The distinct lack of a second set of footsteps behind him. He turned, still running. Z was gone.

+

A door opened behind them. He found the guards. “Dammit! Keep running!” he said to Mara, and turned back toward them.

+

They didn’t have guns, but the batons at their sides looked like more than enough. And they were running toward him.

+

“Loop around and get the others out of here!”

+

Hardy was never a tough for Jack, but a hundred and eighty pounds flying through the air at a person will leave a mark. He collided with the men and started punching.

+

His fist connected with one and his foot with another, but already the cudgels struck him in the ribs. He kept fighting. One punch landed with a satisfying crack.

+

He saw the black stick for a fraction of a second before it cracked into his face.

+

And then he saw nothing.

+

T + +he room came into focus, and Hardy winced against the pain. He couldn’t tell what came from the crack to the head, and what came from the ache for breath. He closed his eyes again and lifted his head; it was the only part he could move. His arms and legs were strapped to a chair. The pain in his temple still felt fresh.

+

He could see her, though. Past the silhouette of her sister a few rooms over was another silhouette—a smaller one, maybe outside the building somewhere. Mara had gotten out, and probably the rest as well.

+

“Good morning, Hardy,” someone said, and he opened his eyes. The voice bridged more gaps in his memory. He hadn’t heard it in over a year now, but the impressions it brought back rankled at him. Jack.

+

“Glad you’re awake,” Jack said. He stood over Hardy, a thin man in a business suit, hair graying at the edges. “We need to talk.”

+

Hardy tried to speak, but his head throbbed. He managed, “What do you want?” before his jaw clenched.

+

“What do I want?” Jack asked. “This isn’t about me. This is all about what you want.”

+

The pain screamed at Jack to get to the point, and the frustration made it to his lips in a strained grunt.

+

“No, that’s not true. I do want something. I want you back, Hardy. Your friends got away, but what they were after is still here. You know that, though, don’t you? You can see her lying just on the other side of that wall.” He laughed. “Z did pretty good on you.”

+

Z. She was another tool of Jack’s. The hacked implant hadn’t sat well with him from the beginning, and now he knew why. It wasn’t hacked at all. It was coded to let her in, just like any employee. He wondered where she was now, but knew it didn’t matter.

+

The pain struck again in a harsh throb, and Hardy clenched his teeth tighter and pushed against the bonds. They held tight.

+

“Too good, maybe,” Jack said, frowning. “If you can’t speak, you are useless to me.” He stood over him.

+

Hardy blinked again, lifting his head. He could still see Mara. She was closer, now. Inside the building?

+

“You remember me, don’t you?” Jack said. “It’s the flaw in those crowns. They don’t remove memories the way they should. The right stimulus and they come back, one by one. Like Mara.”

+

Hardy went still, fighting the urge to dig his fingers into the chair.

+

“You remember her, don’t you? When you met here? The way you hit it off, the brief escapes into closets or empty rooms. Plans whispered in range of cameras you didn’t know were there. We can take him down, she would tell you. Yeah. We’ll take him down. And then we’ll be together.”

+

Memories crashed back into Hardy. Memories so sweet they ached as much as his need for her breath. Memories of stolen kisses and sly glances. Memories of nights spent together and days spent plotting. Memories of laughter and shared smiles as they planned Jack’s downfall.

+

He closed his eyes, just to see her again—for the first time—and there she was. Just outside the door. He smiled up at Jack, and the man’s brow furrowed.

+

The door burst open, and there was chaos. He couldn’t see everything, bound as he was, but he heard a guard fall, and Jack curse. A gun rose above his head, sweeping upward in Jack’s hand, but it never made it level. Something collided with Jack’s head, and he went down, out of view.

+

And then everything was quiet.

+

Mara stared down at him, and he remembered her. She was conniving. She was deceptive and manipulative. She had changed—become more so. It didn’t matter. All that mattered were the memories.

+

The pain was still there, tearing at his mind. It ached for her breath, so close now, but there were other aches as well. More pressing aches. He ached for her touch, her smile. He ached to hear her voice. He ached for the chance to tell her he loved her, and that he was sorry he threw it all away. He was sorry he let her memory be held hostage, and sorry he had walked out, when he knew what he would be losing.

+

Jack lay on the floor, barely visible through the black that crept from the edges of Hardy’s vision. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the pain. Something touched his lips, and with it came salvation. The drug that could only be Mara’s breath coursed through him, sating his need—his need for it, and his need for her.

+

With each movement of her lips, memories came back to him. Nights in each other’s arms. Bonding over their hatred of who they worked for. The pain was gone in an instant, but he let the moment last—a druggie drawing every last breath and memory.

+

The straps fell from his arms. “Hardy,” Mara whispered, “we have to go.” Her voice was fear and goose-down pillows. “We have to get her out.”

+

He spun on the table and dropped to the floor. His legs tried to give way under him, but he caught himself.

+

Reality set in. Jack was unconscious, but his guards were still out there. And once they saw Jack, the building would be secured with him inside. And with Mara. He laughed; suddenly there was something to his name that he could lose.

+

“Yeah,” he said, “let’s go.”

+

Les was outside the door with two guards at his feet. He twirled one of their batons in his fingers and grinned. Hardy grinned back. He’d won some respect with his stupid stunt.

+

“Sim’s in the crown room,” he said. “I’ll give him a hand. You two get the girl.”

+

Hardy blinked. They were on the second floor, so she was nearly at eye level now, suspended in her tank only a few rooms away. They closed the distance between those rooms in seconds and stood outside the door. He wished Les had hung around, but suspected the crown room would be better guarded. Simek would need his help.

+

He glanced over at Mara. He found himself doing that a lot now. Her face was set in a sad resolve.

+

“We’ll get her out,” he said.

+

She smiled and touched a hand to his cheek. “I know.” Then she put her hand over the doorknob and turned it over. “Let’s go.”

+

The scene flashed before him. Tanks on the right, one guard on the left holding a gun. It arched up, hovering over Hardy’s stomach, chest, then his head.

+

A cudgel cracked into his arm and the gun fell to the floor. The arm bent at an odd angle and the guard cried out. The cudgel struck his head and the cry ceased.

+

Mara turned to a tank across the room. Hardy walked over to it and read the name on the sheet taped to the end. Lynn Amaranta Stevens. It was strange seeing a person’s full name in an age of anonymity. It was something you shared with loved ones and family, and that was it. To the rest of the world, she would just be Lynn.

+

The tank had an open top and was filled three quarters with a bluish liquid. The lights set into the bottom glowed around a woman barely covered by latex clothing, her features lost in the haze of the fluid.

+

He looked back to Mara, and she nodded, keeping her distance.

+

He reached into the tank. The lukewarm liquid tingled on his arms, and he wrapped them behind the small of her back, cradling her head with his hand. She was slight, but not young. Maybe Mara’s little sister, but not by much. She emerged from the tank, and Mara wrapped a blanket around her, covering her from head to toe. The girl shivered beneath it.

+

“We don’t have much time,” Mara said. She was right. Hardy shifted the girl’s weight, and they made for the door.

+

The hallway was empty. They would meet Les and Simek at the crown room. All they had to do was get out. But then something moved at the end of the hallway, a man entering from the side. His hand raised, a shot echoed. Hardy’s eyes locked with Mara’s as she stared into the distance.

+

And then she fell.

+

L + +es’ voice cried from the hallway behind him. The killing gun was pointed at Hardy now, but he stood in place, the girl’s weight a thousand tons, staring down into the shock on Mara’s face. Something narrowly missed his head, but his focus stayed on her.

+

Then the crack of a shot too close not to flinch, and at the top of his vision Hardy saw the shape of the gunman tumbling away from him, from them, even as his gaze never wavered from Mara’s body.

+

Les rushed into view, dropping his gun beside her as he knelt, uttering the curses Hardy couldn’t bring to mind. He put his hand to her chest, wet with blood, then to her neck.

+

Hardy’s eyes had followed hers as she fell. He’d watched them as they lost focus. He stood, the weight in his arms threatening to slip.

+

“She’s gone, Hardy. We gotta go.”

+

Memory after memory rushed back. The gaps filled and the monument of her loss settled on him. The girl’s weight was gone from his arms. Les held her now and Simek took his arm, nearly dragging him down the hallway as Mara’s crumpled body grew smaller.

+

Guards filled the hall from other rooms and shots pinged against the walls. Survival instincts returned. They ran, and as they passed a doorway he glimpsed a room, an overturned chair, no sign of Jack now–that chance for revenge gone. Down the stairs, bullets ricocheting in front of them. The firing ceased when they cleared the second floor, but feet shuffled above them.

+

They ran through the hallway and the exit before the guards made it down the steps. And they kept running. Through the alley where he had passed his test, when he was still suspicious of Mara’s intentions. When he’d thought she worked for Jack and refused to trust her. Down the streets where he had followed her only a day ago, still riding the newly discovered drug of her breath. Was that what made him follow?

+

They passed the Narcs’ headquarters, where Z would surely lead Jack’s men. Z. Her sister wasn’t dead. He should have seen it. She was the leverage Jack held.

+

When they stopped, Hardy didn’t know where they were, but he knew it didn’t matter. Mara was gone. He had lost her once, but had found her again. She had found him.

+

Les laid the girl on the floor, cracking a glow stick for light while Simek walked toward Hardy, holding something in each hand. Crowns of tarnished copper and wires. They had gotten her out. They had her, and they had the crown.

+

“Hey,” Simek said, holding out one of the copper domes. “This one’s yours.”

+

Hardy held the dome in his hands and stared at it, no longer bothered if he never remembered anything.

+

Les hovered over the rescued girl’s shaking body ten feet away. Simek patted him on the shoulder, trying in a gesture to express understanding of a pain he could never imagine. He went to Les with the crown.

+

Hardy stood alone in his corner of the room reliving all of the memories he had only just regained. Their pact to bring Jack down. What he felt when she said his name.

+

The crown clattered to the floor and Les cursed. “Hardy!”

+

Hardy ran to her as the pieces fit together in his mind. The aspect-selective tests they performed clicked into place and memories of his last days at Jack’s returned. The way she disappeared so suddenly, when everything was going right.

+

Mara lay shivering on the floor, barely covered by her latex clothes, hair purest black without the now-familiar pink stripes. He held her in his arms as she shivered, rubbed the debris of long containment from her eyes. Her body was thin, bones showing beneath atrophied muscle. Her eyes seemed distant as if her mind was in a fog. He held her face and stared into her, the broken woman he loved. “Mara?” he asked, tears in his own eyes.

+

Her eyes focused, looked into his. Her body shivered in his arms and when she spoke it was with a sad tremor. “You came back.”

+

Hardy pulled her close. With the memories returned, he knew what he almost lost, and tears stung on his cheeks. In that moment he knew only two things. He would take care of Mara and never leave her side, stand with her against anything that threatened to hurt her. The other was a primal anger he knew he couldn’t deny.

+

Jack would pay.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “First Breath” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Addison Smith

+

+ + Author image of Addison Smith + + + Addison Smith (he/him) is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis fungus. He’s doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on BlueSky.

+

© Addison Smith 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Tatiana Twinslol and Trinity Kubassek.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2020

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+ Addison Smith +

First Breath

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Far in the distant past of 2013, the story before you received an honourable mention from Writers of the Future only to slink into the shadows, never to be seen again. Now at long last Addison Smith gets our Winter issue moving with the futuristic tale of a reluctant hero who gradually comes to learn that, much like revenge, rescue is a dish best served cold.

+ + + + Story image for First Breath by + + + + + +
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Mine Own

+ Sharon Dawn Selby +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Mine Own by + + + +

As a professional specialist in both communication and literature, you might be forgiven for expecting Sharon Dawn Selby to already have a long list of fiction credits to her name - so imagine our surprise and delight to be able to present her first published story, one which underlines the traditional power of language and place, good manners, and proper introductions.

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Into the Darkness

+ Lee F. Patrick +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Into the Darkness by + + + +

If there's a genre especially close to the heart of your humble editor, it's the Ghost Story: that grand denizen of the limbic, liminal domain between mere flighty fantasy and bluntly blundering horror (and there's a sentence that should fuel some enmities moving forward). Anyway, isn't it so often the case with these strange inhabitants that "moving forward" is at the very heart of the matter?

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Thy Servant, Death

+ Scott J. Couturier +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Thy Servant, Death by + + + +

There's nothing quite like The Gothic for wrapping a reader in a strange atmosphere: painting with morbid darkness, sinking a chill deep down into the bones, or perhaps too-vivid colour as fangs sink into the richest vein. Scott J. Couturier offers up an incomparable gift in answer to the age-old question, "What do you give to the man who has, or had, everything?"

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The Witches Curse

+ Matthew Wilson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Witches Curse by + + + +

Is it possible that one thing is more important than all the others when it comes to telling a good tale? Hard to say - but what is certainly true is that, whether a story soars or has flaws, a distinctive sense of voice will make amends for whatever sins it might contain. Matthew Wilson gives us sins large and small... and voice as well.

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+

Every Hat is a Crown

+ Mike Morgan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Every Hat is a Crown by + + + +

Humour is a many subjective thing, often called the hardest thing to write, but in our opinion Mike Morgan has pulled it off here. Much as his hero demonstrates, you can achieve plenty with recourse to just a little bit of charm - of course, when it comes to fantasy, charm can also be the problem...

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+

Stranded at the Station

+ Trisha McKee +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Stranded at the Station by + + + +

Romance fiction isn't always the first thing associated with the speculative genres, but there are many fine examples in which the two are well-wedded, and it is surely inarguable that there is nothing in human experience to compare with beginning a new relationship for the sensation of leaping into the unknown. Trisha McKee presents exactly such a case, of two people reaching out towards each other and finding something far from understood.

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+

Snow Over Interstate 80

+ Martin M. Clark +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Snow Over Interstate 80 by + + + +

Martin Clark has been contributing to Mythaxis Magazine since 2010, with and without the "M". Twenty-eight pieces have appeared in that time, invariably featuring a variety of hard-bitten heroes and villains locked in conflict, so why not one more for his anniversary? We weren't really looking for seasonally themed pieces for the issue, but you have to make an exception when the right someone's nipping at your nose.

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+ + + +
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+

Winter

+ David Whitmarsh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Winter by + + + +

Our recent issues have welcomed a host of new faces to Mythaxis, in this latest including a first fiction sale - and now we are proud to also present not just that but a first ever publication, full stop! David Whitmarsh's story of transitions introduces us to a world clawing its way back from the brink - but things with claws must always be treated with caution...

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Spring Man

+ Fabiyas M. V. +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Spring Man by + + + +

When we first read Fabiyas M. V.'s submission, we didn't know quite what to make of it... other than "a definite purchase"! Another piece with distinctive voice, it tells its story with the same blunt directness we find boasted by its unexpected hero, but one which veils a thread of sly humour, right up to the final line.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-24/into-the-darkness.html b/issue-24/into-the-darkness.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bc77aa30 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/into-the-darkness.html @@ -0,0 +1,497 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Into the Darkness — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Into the Darkness

+

Lee F. Patrick

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Into the Darkness by +
+ + + + +

M + +ary Cavanaugh walked along the street from the Toronto Opera House, humming from the overture. Her dark blue velvet dress susshed over the crinoline as she side-stepped the well-bundled late night pedestrians. Adjusting the lace shawl to lie flat on her shoulders, she was unconcerned by the chill wind blowing between the buildings.

+

She smiled, catching sight of her friend Major Deventry coming along toward her. He always wore his scarlet Regimentals with more extravagant muttonchops than any man alive could boast of.

+

He extended his arm. “Well, Miss Mary, did you enjoy your caterwauling this evening?”

+

She curtsied and took his arm. “Of course, Major. I am so glad that I can travel anywhere I wish now. Perhaps I will visit the Metropolitan in New York City during their next season. I can easily return the same night without draining myself.”

+

“It would be better not to travel too far in the next while, I fear,” the Major said. His mouth thinned. “Or perhaps it might be better to leave and never return. I’ve felt something odd thrice in the past week. I am unsure of its nature, but I admit to a great unease.”

+

She half turned to look up at him, one eyebrow raised. “What did it feel like?”

+

“A heaviness of spirit; a tension in the air. A chill. Nothing I can point to and say, ‘There it is, the source of my discomfort.’” He fluffed his whiskers with his free hand and relaxed his jaw with deliberate effort. “I should not frighten you with idle talk on such a fine night. May I escort you to your destination?”

+

She smiled. “I always enjoy your company, Major. I am returning to my eldest niece’s home tonight. She recently married and there is a spare room I haunt on occasion.”

+

“You still make your rounds of the younger generation? Few of us can bear to watch children growing up the way you have. Returning to England was impossible, so I never had the chance.”

+

“Yes, I do visit.” She sighed. “Although I could no longer endure my life, I only regretted leaving them behind.”

+

“You will change more than they do,” he promised as they walked across the street. A nearby cab horse shied as it felt their presence.

+

A + + week later, Mary stopped halfway across a street. There was something or someone hiding near her. She knew it sought to do ill. Yet as the Major had described, there was nothing she could isolate.

+

She reached her destination and rose to the second floor. Her nephew Peter still lived with his parents while he attended university to study law. He was at his desk, pencil poised to make notes as he pored over a thick legal tome.

+

She placed her hand over his and started to write. Once she had finished her note she tapped on the desk. Peter jumped and half stood in surprise. Another tap on the desk drew his attention to the note.

+
+

Dearest Peter:
+There is something not quite right in this neighborhood. Have there been any odd occurrences recently?

+

“Not really, Aunt Mary,” he said, taking his seat. “Can you explain just what is wrong?” He picked up the pencil and closed his eyes again, hand waiting.

+
+

I fear not. An acquaintance of mine has felt a similar unease. I wonder if I should inquire of the others I know and determine if there is danger.

+

He shook his head. “I haven’t heard of anything lately. Elizabeth’s betrothal party is on Saturday night. I can ask everyone there if you like. We’re scattered all over the city, so might learn more.”

+
+

Dearest Liz. I knew that she and Samuel seemed to be found together a great deal of the time.
+Your idea is best, Peter. I shall seek out my acquaintances and perhaps we can glean some coherent information.
+Tell the others that I love them all and think of them often.

+

Peter glanced down at the paper. “I will, Aunt Mary. Perhaps you should come to the party as well. That way you could hear our discussion, even if we are whispering in the corners.”

+

B + +y Saturday she had felt the presence twice more. It was never in the same place or at the same time of day. Many others had felt it as well. The same day, the Major presided over a meeting of the city’s ghosts to discuss the matter. Not all came. Mary regretted having to miss Liz’s betrothal party; however, she would see Liz and the others soon to apologize for her lapse.

+

In the council chambers, the glossy oak panelling and carved oak chairs with red velvet cushions were lit only by the dimmed gaslights. To Mary’s ghostly senses, the room was as bright as it would be during the council’s normal sessions.

+

“We’ve all felt a presence,” the Major began. “Does anyone have any details on what or who it is? Has anyone been close to it?”

+

“It wants something,” said Mr. Hadrens, a constable in life as well as death. “I’ve gone looking for it, but just when I think that I’ve cornered it: poof and it’s gone.” Others nodded in agreement. “I don’t think it’s very dangerous. A nuisance, certainly, but nothing more. However, I plan to keep my eyes and ears open in case I’ve mistaken its intent.”

+

A woman Mary did not know spoke up. “It is evil. It bides its time now, Constable, but soon it will strike and that will bring more evil after it.”

+

“But at what, that is one question we must ask,” Mary said loudly. “If we can learn what it wants, then we may understand why it is here and how to deal with it.”

+

M + +ary was most apologetic at the gathering Peter arranged. Liz had pouted at first, but once hurt feelings were salved nothing would have prevented the young lovers from regaling her with the news of the night.

+

Nevertheless, Mary was unable to keep her thoughts entirely with their pleasant recollections. Not for the first time, there was a gain to be had in spending time with them unheard and unseen.

+

At the return gathering of what Peter would insist on calling “the spooks” two weeks later, the mood was much subdued. “Hadrens has vanished,” the Major said quietly. “So have three others who hadn’t come before. At least, those are all I know of. All were powerful spirits, and there is no indication that they have finally passed over.”

+

“Newspaper reports chronicle many strange events,” Mary said. “Panic is spreading.”

+

“Our comrades panic as well.” The Major swept his hand around at the council chamber. Barely half of those who had attended the first meeting were present. “Many I spoke to refused to leave familiar ground. Some have even returned to their graves and sunk into the earth, hoping that whatever happens will not find them.”

+

“What can we do?” Mary asked.

+

“Hide or hunt,” said a foppish gentleman with a lace-edged handkerchief that he used to punctuate his sentences. His top hat lay on the table before him, along with his gloves and a walking stick. “If Hadrens has been taken, then we should travel in pairs at least. Company, not isolation, may keep us from whatever fate has overcome our fellows.”

+

“One of the newspaper accounts was like that of a powerful haunting,” Mary said. “There was knocking, and small pieces of furniture wafting about the house. Several people were injured by flying glass from a broken window, as I understand. One of my nephews lives nearby and heard the noises.”

+

“I’ve been past that house,” the foppish man said, flicking his handkerchief to and fro. Mary had seen him occasionally at the theatre, and at the last meeting. Smythe, she thought his name was. “Felt cold to me, but there was nothing about with the ability to do a serious amount of damage. Not at the moment, mind you.”

+

After the meeting ended, with no clear consensus on the level of danger, Mary went back to Peter’s house thoughtfully. At the house where the flying glass incident had happened, she started to shiver. Her hand went to the watch brooch on her breast and her gaze darted all over the house, trying to isolate the source of the cold.

+

The house was dark, not only because everyone had gone to bed and turned down the gas lamps, but dark in a way she didn’t understand.

+

Then a noise began, a low sporadic thumping at first, growing louder and faster.

+

Lights came on in the neighbouring houses, but none shone from the house in front of her. There was a final crescendo of thumping, and the night was still again— and the darkness was gone from the chill house.

+

A dog several streets away barked angrily, then yipped. Silence reigned again.

+

She approached the building hesitantly. She attempted to walk through the door, but could not. She tried pushing her hand through, but as it neared the door, she found she needed even more energy to move another quarter inch. Too much.

+

Mary stepped away and tried to reach through the wall beside it, then circled the house quickly, testing for an entrance. There were none. With distaste, she even tried sinking into the ground to enter through the cellar walls. It reminded her of her grave. She kept trying, pushing against the barrier, unconcerned at how much effort it took. She finally had to admit defeat.

+

The barrier encompassed the entire structure.

+

She continued slowly down the street, eyes blinking in exhaustion. She fixed her mind on the light in Peter’s room and willed herself directly there. The warm glow of his lamp was the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness.

+

M + +ary lost two days to her weakness. Even now, nearly a week later, sitting in the spare chair in Peter’s room, she still felt drained. Every movement was an effort, and she manifested the shabby grey merino dress that she’d died in rather than spend her remaining energy to transform it into something more fashionable.

+

Peter knew she was there, of course. “Aunt Mary, it’s very strange at that house. I met the family before all this happened, so I’ve been able to find out things I wouldn’t otherwise. I hadn’t known about the noises or I would have mentioned them to you.

+

“The inhabitants are Mr. Alfred Hastens and his wife Carrie, their children Laura, Betsy, and Timothy. Some nights, they can’t get a wink of sleep, other nights everyone else on the street but them is disturbed. Laura said that none of them woke that night when you heard the knockings. She sleeps with her sister since this started.”

+

He looked at his notepad. “As for servants, there’s a cook, a butler and two housemaids. Laura told me that none of the servants have ever heard a thing.”

+

Mary rapped gently on the side table where a pencil and paper lay waiting. Peter came over and took up the pencil, closing his eyes.

+
+

That is strange that the servants heard nothing. What are the ages of the various people?

+

Peter read her note and looked thoughtful. “Mr. and Mrs. Hastens are in their early forties, I think. Laura is the oldest at seventeen. Betsy is twelve, and Timothy is fourteen. The cook is past fifty if you believe her grey hair. The butler the same. Both housemaids are over twenty. Does that make a difference?”

+
+

I am unsure. I must consult others. Do not go into that house lightly, Peter. There is something very wrong there. Is Mr. Hastens thinking of leaving the house because of the disturbances?

+

“They only moved in five months ago, so I doubt they would. Some elderly gentleman lived there before: an uncle of Mr. Hastens, I think. I’ll try to discover more of the house’s history. Take care, Aunt Mary.”

+

She rose slowly to her feet and headed out into the evening to find the Major.

+

“M + +iss Cavanaugh, are you all right?” Mary looked up and saw Mr. Symthe with the Major as she forced herself toward the council chambers. Both darted across the busy street to meet her. “We have worried. Where have you been?”

+

“I am better, I thank you, sirs. The house I mentioned is the source of this thing, I am sure of it. I went there the night of our meeting and could not enter. There is a darkness around it while the noises emanate, and a barrier prevented my entrance even after silence reigned.”

+

“We were quite worried when you didn’t come to the meeting last night,” the Major said. “Mr. Smythe and I were looking for you.”

+

She managed a smile and a curtsey. “I apologise, gentlemen. After our meeting I attempted to enter that house, but was repulsed and left utterly exhausted. I am glad that my nephew lives only a few doors away so that I had a safe place to rest.” She relayed the information that Peter had gathered after they took seats in a deserted park.

+

“I’ve heard of such barriers,” the Major said, smoothing his whiskers. “It would take more energy than the three of us possess to break through. Not knowing what is on the other side makes me less eager to attack immediately.”

+

“You should rest, Miss Cavanaugh,” Mr. Smythe said. “You look quite transparent still.” He slipped a small box from his coat sleeve and took snuff.

+

Mary looked at her arm and could see the park bench faintly beneath it. “Do you think that the others were drained of nearly all their energy by the darkness?”

+

The Major nodded. “It could be. We know very little about this manifestation. I think a short reconnoitre is in order. I’ll go near the house, while Mr. Smythe and you stand well back.”

+

“If you think it wise,” Mary said. “I tried several times to gain entrance. That may have been what exhausted me. Just try once and see how you feel.”

+

“It looks normal,” Mr. Smythe said as they approached the house. Evening came early now that September was past. Mary shook her head slightly. It felt wrong to her.

+

“I’ll try the door,” Major Deventry said. “If you would wait here.”

+

“Even if you can gain access, I would not recommend a long sortie,” Mr. Smythe said. His handkerchief was now tucked in his coat sleeve and he held his walking stick between his hands. A twist of his wrists unlocked the blade within. “A common defence against footpads in my time, Miss Cavanaugh,” he said at her shocked look. “I have also found it of use against some manifestations that have troubled me since.”

+

Major Deventry mounted the stairs and paused at the edge of the porch. “I do feel something odd,” he called back to them, his eyes never leaving the house. “A coldness.” He took a step forward and reached out toward the door.

+

Mary stifled a shriek as he took another step forward. The door seemed to move toward him and become as dark as she had sensed that other night. A loud booming sound came from the upstairs and the Major threw himself backward to sprawl in the pathway, then the door returned to its original position and colour.

+

Mr. Smythe stood guard with his sword while the Major regained his feet. The door remained quiescent as they moved back to the flagway next to the road.

+

“I should try and see if the same thing happens,” Mr. Smythe said. “At least I’ll know to be ready to move quickly.”

+

“I think we should have some others with us before making another attempt,” Mary said. “How do you feel, Major?”

+

“It tried to drain me,” he admitted, whiskers bristling. “I think that Miss Mary is right. This is beyond anything I have ever encountered.”

+

D + +rumming up support would take a little time, within which Peter was able to put his educational opportunities to good use. “I have researched that house’s history, Aunt Mary,” he said, with a smile. “My professor thinks that my work on the legal descent of the ownership of the house is an exercise to impress him.”

+

He turned several pages in his pad. “Mr. Hastens inherited the house from his maternal uncle, Mr. Martin Devine. He inherited it from his father, who bought it from another family, the Packards, who had purchased it from someone named Ekman. He must have built the house. I found nothing out of the ordinary with the wills, the transfers of title, or the tax rolls.

+

“I did find something that might have a bearing in the newspaper files. About a hundred years ago there was a similar spate of noises from that house. It stopped as suddenly as it started. But around that time, one of the daughters of the house died. A twelve year old named Amalie Ekman. She fell down the stairs while playing with a ball on the upper landing. Her neck was broken.”

+

Mary looked at the Major and Mr. Symthe. “Do you know of anyone who might have been here, either alive or as a ghost, when this took place?”

+

“Possibly,” Mr. Symthe said. “I shall inquire. This was a much smaller city then, and the possibility that a ghost from that time remains here is unlikely. For myself, I do not recall hearing or reading of such an incident.”

+

Mary rapped gently on the table and Peter sat down with a pencil.

+
+

Thank you Peter. We shall try to find Amalie and any other ghosts who may remember that time. Have there been any further noises?

+

“No, it has become quiet of late, Laura said. They are all very relieved.”

+

Two days later they met in the council chambers again. Only five ghosts attended this time. The Major strode back and forth, hands clenching and unclenching behind him.

+

“We know of no one from the relevant time,” Mr. Smythe said with a flick of his handkerchief. “And with this small a group, I would hesitate to begin any attack. We have no notion of what is inside.”

+

Mrs. Royston, the woman who had said it was evil at their first meeting, stood. “I died many years after that sensation, but I have spent my entire life in this city. I refuse to let anything drive me from my home.”

+

“Have any others disappeared?” Mary asked.

+

“It is almost impossible to tell,” the Major said. “Some refuse to come out to speak, others seem to refuse to even acknowledge our presence, so we do not know if they were taken or not.” He stopped his pacing and looked at the small audience. Do you have any suggestions for our course of action, Mrs. Royston? We are, I think, open to all suggestions.”

+

““We must attack,” Mrs. Royston said with a shrug. “Attack or hide until it gets what it wants and leaves.”

+

“Last time a young girl died,” Mary said. “Shall we let another innocent be taken by this evil, as you termed it?”

+

“Can we cause the family to leave the house?” Mr. Smythe asked. “If it is destroyed, perhaps by fire, so might be the focus the thing has to enter this world.”

+

“We cannot enter the house,” said the fifth ghost into the silence, a thin man with a pointed chin and nose. “How could we destroy the house without entering it?”

+

“Perhaps if one of us had a focus in the house, we might be able to pass the barrier,” Mary said.

+

The Major’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

+

“When I was exhausted after my encounter with the barriers, I willed myself directly to my nephew’s room, by linking to him. If Peter was in the house, I may be able to do the same: go directly to him. Could you all then come to me?”

+

The others were silent for several moments, thinking through the idea. “It might work,” the thin man said, rocking his head from side to side. “If we have something of yours to use as our link.”

+

“Something of hers?” asked Mr. Smythe. “How does that help? She doesn’t have anything. None of us really do.”

+

“But my nephew does,” Mary said, her spirits rising. She touched the watch brooch on her dress. “He has my watch, the real watch. He can leave it just outside the house so that all of you may be nearby when I attempt to enter. I can use my link to Peter to reach him, and you all can use the watch to link to me to join me inside. As many ghosts as we can summon could be helpful.”

+

“It seems we have our plan, then,” the Major said. “I think that you should rest for a few more days, Miss Mary. Yours will still be the hardest task, and you have not fully recovered from your previous encounter. Mr. Smythe and I will escort you to your nephew’s and you may show us the brooch. I would like to seek out others and ask if any more will come and aid us, now that we have a plan.”

+

“An excellent idea,” Mr. Smythe said. “Perhaps some of the gentlemen will be more amenable to assist us when they know that a lady will be entering the fray at our head.”

+

“I am unsure this plan will work,” the Major said. They were standing outside the house, watching Peter make his way up the stairs to the door. He had insisted on joining the foray, and Mary was filled with apprehension for her nephew. It was early evening, the sun giving a brilliant display in the western clouds.

+

“We have reinforcements,” Mrs. Royston said. Four more ghosts had joined them after two days of cajoling and appealing to their better natures.

+

Peter rang the bell and the butler answered. He went inside and the door closed behind him. The Major turned to speak to Mary, but she had vanished.

+

“Where did she go?” he asked.

+

Mr. Smythe looked at the house. “I believe she is inside. Shall we join her?”

+

The Major reached down and touched the watch brooch, which Peter had tucked behind the gate. It was familiar to him, as Mary always wore its ghostly equivalent no matter what else she changed in her attire. He concentrated on her image and willed himself to join her… then he sagged against Mr. Smythe, his smart military regalia fading into an old undershirt and house trousers, beloved whispers reduced to a shadow of their former extravagance.

+

“The barrier,” he whispered. “It’s too strong.”

+

“It’s drained him,” Mr. Smythe said. “Let’s try as a group to get one of us through. I volunteer.”

+

“All right,” Mrs. Royston said. “One try.”

+

As the Major drifted away from the house, the others gathered around the watch and touched it. Mr. Smythe took drew his sword stick and tucked the handkerchief in his sleeve. He felt their combined power growing behind him and fixed Mary’s face in his mind. “Now!”

+

He launched himself toward her, feeling the barrier in his way. It was alive in some way he did not understand. He thrust the sword before him to puncture the dark envelope that surrounded the house—

+

—and he was in.

+

He stood in an entrance hall, sword stick held at the ready. Voices came from the drawing room to the left, and he slipped through the door. At least here in the house he could again travel through walls and the like with impunity.

+

“Miss Cavanaugh?” Mr. Smythe called softly.

+

Only the living were in the room. Mary’s nephew spoke to two young ladies and an older one, likely their mother. Mr. Smythe grimaced and returned into the hall. He searched the main floor quickly, finding nothing out of the ordinary, then returned to the outer door. The barrier had grown stronger. He found a window and tried to look out, but the barrier distorted his vision enough that he was not sure if the others were still at the front of the house. No one else had entered, so he assumed they could not.

+

On the second floor, he found the master of the house dressing for dinner. The third floor was deserted, as the servants were downstairs getting ready to serve the meal.

+

On a back stairway to the attic, he felt coldness begin halfway up the stairs.

+

“Miss Cavanaugh,” he called again. “Where are you?”

+

“I am here.” He heard her voice from above. He took a tighter grip on the sword stick and continued, his eyes not resting on any object for longer than it took to identify it.

+

When the stairs opened onto the attic landing, he still moved cautiously, keeping his back to the outer wall and peering over the floorboards. Mary stood in a cramped hallway of low, narrow doors, and turned to motion him up beside her.

+

“The source is up here,” she whispered. “Where are the others?”

+

“The barrier was too strong. I think that it took all their energy to get me through. We are, as they say, on our own now.”

+

“I suppose so.” She looked at his sword stick. “Shall we attempt to find the focus?”

+

“We must, or all this has been for naught.” He looked at the doors along the hallway, quiet and possibly deadly.

+

The first room held stacks of boxes and luggage. The coldness that permeated the hall outside was not present. The next was the repository of old furniture, not worthy of the public rooms and unneeded for the servants’ quarters. Broken wicker and ripped and faded upholstery abounded.

+

The room at the far end of the corridor held the darkness.

+

Mary shivered. The ghostly light here was muted, as if the darkness did not want anything bright near it. “We should stay near each other,” Mr. Smythe said. Mary nodded and they slowly circled the room, trying to isolate where the darkness was coming from.

+

They were three-quarters of the way around the room, when the darkness abruptly vanished.

+

Mary stared at Mr. Smythe in amazement, then a booming sound from below them shook the house.

+

“Take my hand, sir,” Mary said. “We shall go directly to Peter.”

+

He took her hand and they appeared in the drawing room a moment later. The darkness filled it, and the air was full of objects from the mantelpiece, wildly circling the room. The younger girl was crying, her head buried in her mother’s shoulder. Peter had his arm around the older girl, both staring wide-eyed at the cyclonic display.

+

“Make it go away, Mama!” the younger girl wailed, and immediately the darkness began to form a coherent shape.

+

Mr. Smythe released Mary’s hand and advanced on it with his sword point high. “Take that!” he cried as his sword flashed through the dark form, cutting it in twain.

+

There was another boom, deafeningly close, and he fell, grey and drained.

+

Mary stood in front of him while the darkness reformed. Inside, she trembled, but a glance at the cowering people stiffened her resolve. No one else would be harmed in this house. Not if there was any way she could prevent it.

+

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

+

The darkness coalesced further, taking on a vaguely human shape that was near her own height. “She summoned me,” it said. The voice was distorted and harsh, full of menace.

+

“Who? That young girl?”

+

“Yes.” The flying objects slowly settled to the floor as the darkness concentrated on maintaining a form. “She summoned me from my sleep. I must take her before I can sleep again.”

+

Peter took his arm from around the older girl and the younger lifted her head and wiped her eyes clear of tears. Perhaps to them the danger seemed abated, but Mary was not so confident just yet.

+

“Did you drain the ghosts who have gone missing?”

+

“I needed energy. They had it. As do you.” The dark form moved toward her.

+

“You did not answer my question,” Mary said, not moving back. “Who were you?”

+

The form paused. “I do not remember.”

+

“A long time ago, a girl died in this house. Were you she, or did you kill her?”

+

The darkness turned to regard the people clustered at the other end of the room. An amorphous arm pointed at the youngest girl. “She is the one who summoned me. All else is forgotten.”

+

“How?” whispered Mr. Smythe. He was up on his knees now, his hair whitened, his face that of an old man. He leaned on his sword stick to keep from tumbling over.

+

“Yes,” said Mary, “how did she summon you? What do you truly need to return to sleep again?”

+

“There is much anger in this place. Hate begets hate.”

+

“So you generated the barrier to keep outside hate away, but still feel the pain of anger inside.” Mary nodded. “But you have been taking energy without leave, and you must expend energy to do so. Maintaining the barrier takes still more. No wonder you are in such need. Is there a focus that keeps you here?”

+

The dark figure contracted, intensified, and Mary felt its chill grow stronger. “You will not find it. If it is destroyed, I am destroyed.”

+

“I will give you the energy you need to block the anger,” she said. “And we shall hide your focus so that no one can wake you again.”

+

She took several steps toward the darkness, holding out her hand. “Let me help you.”

+

“Miss Cavanaugh,” Mr. Smythe said in a strained whisper. “What are you doing?”

+

“The proper thing,” she said. She knelt beside him, taking his hand in hers, letting her energy flow into him. His hair darkened and the lines from his face erased themselves. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, then stood, still holding her hand.

+

“You give all to him so that you will give none to me,” the darkness said. Its voice had changed, no longer a menacing snarl but a younger voice, a sadder and more desperate voice.

+

“No,” Mary said. “There is always more power in love than in hate. Where is your focus, little one? All will be well.”

+

There was a pause, a long, considering pause, then a red wooden ball such as a child might play at catch with appeared, hanging in the air between them.

+

Mary placed her hand on the focus, and the figure advanced to meet her. A tendril of darkness reached forward, touching the now glowing ball, then it grew thicker and lighter as it absorbed the energy Mary fed to it, Mr. Smythe at her side, with their clasped hands forming a secondary link to aid her.

+

The darkness shrank to the size of a child. A young girl’s face started to form.

+

“I was Amalie Ekman,” she said, smiling suddenly. “I remember now. Father was always angry. He shouted at me all the time. I was too noisy when I played with my ball.” Her eyes filled with tears.

+

“Is that why you made the noises here?” Mr. Smythe asked. “Because your father wanted you to be very quiet?”

+

“Yes.” The transformation continued, the darkness giving way to light, the vague shape to that of a girl, dressed in what had been usual for a child to wear perhaps a hundred years before. “He can’t make me be quiet now.”

+

“He died long ago, Amalie,” Mary said. “This is a different time. This family is not yours. It is time for you to go onward now. You don’t have to stay in this place if being here brings you pain.”

+

The ball slipped to the floor as Mary took Amalie’s hand directly.

+

“I’m scared,” Amalie whispered.

+

“Don’t worry,” Mary said. “I’ll be with you.”

+

“If you let the outside barriers down, there are others who will help,” Mr. Smythe said. “I will explain and bring them in.”

+

Amalie nodded, and when he returned a few moments later, stopping just inside the entrance to the drawing room, the others were standing slightly behind him. Despite their individually reduced states, by their combined efforts a glow of golden light surrounded Mary and began to encompass the child as well.

+

“Mr. Smythe, can you make sure that this is taken somewhere safe?”

+

“I shall. There is a place I know of where it may rest in safety.”

+

Major Deventry smiled as he bowed. “I told you that you would change, Miss Mary. We shall miss you here, but I hope to encounter you again.”

+

The glow increased, slowly obscuring the features of the two within, and Mary felt something changing inside. Perhaps guiding the girl to a better place than the prison she had forged around herself would mean more of a journey than she had bargained for.

+

Mary looked from her friends to the huddle of living persons, where Peter—good, kind Peter—was busy reassuring the startled family, though he too wore a dishevelled air, still affected by what they had experienced of the encounter. His gaze passed across hers, and for a moment she thought it lingered, saw a tiny frown crease his brow, as though he saw something but doubted if he saw anything at all.

+

She looked down at the trusting face of Amalie, and smiled. Then the glow was so strong, Mary Cavanaugh couldn’t see anything at all.

+

W + +hen the glow faded, it left nothing behind but the red ball. The ghosts joined together and picked it up, to take it to a safe haven.

+

Mr. Smythe glanced down at the other end of the room, where those living had been unknowing witnesses to the transition. He saw the glint of tears in the young man’s eyes as he soothed the girl beside him. He was not that unknowing. He deserved an explanation. Perhaps later tonight he would visit the young man and leave him a note, so that her family would know of Miss Mary’s joy and transformation.

+

A novel idea, that the dead could so communicate with the living.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Into The Darkness” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Lee F. Patrick

+

+ + Author image of Lee F. Patrick + + + Lee F. Patrick lives and writes in Calgary Alberta with her husband and four cats who love to sit on her keyboard. She has published three novels, several novellas and a number of short stories and poems in magazines and anthologies. She was a finalist in the Poetry category in the 2018 Prix Aurora Awards. You can find her writing on Amazon, and she tweets as @LeeFPatrick.

+

© Lee F. Patrick 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Antonio Friedmann and Pixabay.

+
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+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/mine-own.html b/issue-24/mine-own.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c68ac42b --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/mine-own.html @@ -0,0 +1,350 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Mine Own — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Mine Own

+

Sharon Dawn Selby

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Mine Own by +
+ + + + +

D + +ee had been sitting in the garden for over an hour, her cup of tea cold and forgotten. Leaves rustled in the autumn wind, whispering amongst themselves like secretive school children. The longer she sat, the more she felt that she could almost understand them.

+

They’d found the Roadside Wilds B & B off the main road. They’d gotten lost an hour or so outside of Armadale, having just left the ferry that had brought them to the Isle of Skye. Eventually, they’d had to stop as neither of them trusted the GPS or the narrow winding roads in the encroaching twilight. They’d intended merely to ask for directions, but the place itself had spoken to them—quaint, tidy, and run by an eccentric old lady who truly knew the meaning of a full Scottish breakfast. They’d passed a quiet but pleasant evening drinking the old lady’s scotch, then feasted in the morning on sausage, bacon, and black pudding. At some point, Dee’s husband had begun cross-examining their hostess about local history. The old lady, who insisted they call her “Auntie,” had seen Dee’s eyes glaze as Brad jotted notes on his paper napkin about yet another war memorial in a nearby village, and had offered them something off the beaten path.

+

Her promise of a small but ancient stone circle in the middle of the forest, as yet undiscovered by anthropologists or tour companies or TV producers, had instantly captured Dee’s imagination. But it been no match for a cairn dedicated to the glorious dead of the Great War—at least not as far as Brad was concerned. He wanted historical background and cultural significance spelled out on plaques that he could photograph and catalogue. He was researching a new book—something depressing about grief and commemoration in Scotland—and had started seeking out Dee’s ancestral lines in the process. Her family had apparently come from this part of Skye, but the connections he’d been seeking had all been uncertain. The possibility of a cairn that might hold the names of some of her ancestors was beyond his wildest hopes. So he had left her, clearly disappointed by her lack of interest in this unexpected genealogical gold mine, but promising to return soon.

+

“Or as soon as I can,” he’d added ruefully, and kissed her. “Between the roads and the feral sheep crossings, it could take all day. Are you sure you want to stay? You won’t be bored out of your mind?”

+

“A stroll through the woods is exactly what I need,” she’d said, trying to refrain from pushing him out the door. “I could use a break from the battlefields. All those lost souls…” She’d smiled and let the words fade away to forestall his concern, to disguise her relief. She’d slept poorly the night before, her dreams filled with the echoes of all the haunted places that they had visited. She had awakened to find herself wrapped in a longing for something she could no longer remember as the dream unravelled.

+

Brad had nodded and kissed her once more, his mind already on his research and the day ahead. She’d laughed silently as he ground the gears of their rental car, imagined him cursing the manual transmission. Dee watched until he turned a bend and was lost from sight.

+

Auntie had errands to run as well. “I’ve made you a cup of tea, hen,” the old lady had called on her way out the door. “Why don’t you take it through to the garden?” Then she, too, had disappeared down the lane with a nod and a wave of the old-fashioned basket she carried.

+

So here Dee sat, serenaded by crows and wind and leaves, a volume of folklore from Auntie’s library unheeded on her lap. She’d stopped reading when she came to the sorrows of her own tragic namesake, wondering for the millionth time what her mother had been thinking when she’d named her.

+

“I’d been planning to call you Audrey, but when I looked at you…” Her mother had told this story a thousand times, punctuated by a wave of her hand meant to encompass Dee’s entire being.

+

Dee shook her head and sighed, wondering what kind of life Audrey might have led. She wasn’t complaining—by all rational methods of accounting, the joys of her life had far outweighed the sorrows—but she couldn’t help but feel the name had left her vulnerable to moments of whimsy and melancholy to which the plucky Audrey might have been immune.

+

She lifted the delicate porcelain cup to her lips, then set it back on its saucer untasted. A spirit of restlessness seized her and she rose, intending to exchange the tattered book for one of the glossy magazines she’d picked up at the airport. Instead, her feet took her to the garden gate. To her disappointment, it was locked. The wind rustled the leaves and the crows jeered. She sought the hecklers in the trees, intending to give them an Audrey-like chiding for their cheek, and noticed a heavy iron key hanging within arm’s reach. The key turned in the lock, and a sigh went through the trees. She felt the tension that had gripped her since they’d begun their tour of Scottish battlegrounds begin to dissipate.

+

She stepped across the threshold from the garden into the forest and took a deep breath. Her senses were instantly flooded by the verdant life around her. She breathed even more deeply, allowing the heady scents and colours to buoy her spirits. She thought with sadness of her husband’s solitary journey in his rental car to a place where even the ghosts would be devoured by the voracious appetites of tourists and the bereaved. Another breath and she was overcome by gratitude that she was here rather than there. Alone, for once. For once not lonely. She ignored the knowledge that this was a temporary escape—perhaps she could convince Brad to stay another night or two. Perhaps Auntie knew more local war stories that could claim Brad’s attention. Dee crossed her fingers and her face lightened.

+

She surveyed the path, which split in two directions. Auntie had mentioned that the stone circle was a popular place for locals, particularly the amorous youth, and Dee was relatively certain that the branch that meandered off to her left would take her in the direction of the village Auntie had indicated. As she took her first step, however, the cries of the crows burst over her—for a moment, she feared that she had strayed too close to a nest and that they would swoop down to drive her away. Heart pounding, she moved back toward the gate. To her relief, the crows quieted. That decided it. She began walking as briskly as she could on the uneven, overgrown path toward the heart of the forest.

+

“You’ve got Scottish blood,” the old lady had stated, her sharp eyes taking in Dee’s hair and face and complexion. “You could be mine own granddaughter.”

+

“Dee’s family originated here in the Hebrides,” Brad had told Auntie proudly, as though the old woman herself were not rooted in such places. “But you know how it was,” he went on, pausing significantly. “The Clearances…”

+

The old woman had nodded, her smile tolerant. Clearly, she was used to tourists coming in search of connections to a long-lost homeland. Neither seemed to notice how powerfully her words had struck Dee, calling her back into the past.

+

Dee’s curiosity about her heritage had been dampened long ago by memories of her grandmother and mother arguing about how much or how little the ancient past mattered when one was struggling to keep a roof over one’s head right now. The pressing needs of the present had always taken priority over what her mother had considered flights of fancy. Her grandmother had raged at that phrase, “flights of fancy,” insisting to the last on the urgency of remembering. Dee felt long forgotten memories stirring as she stepped deeper into the untouched woods. From the depths of the past, a rhyme surfaced:

+

Never chase the fox’s fire,
+Always greet the crows,
+Beware the wily messenger,
+With dread approach the stones.

+

There was more—but she couldn’t remember it. Her grandmother had tried to teach Dee the poems and stories she had learned from her own grandmother, and had bitterly lamented Dee’s refusal to learn them in their original Gaelic.

+

“Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh, a ghràidh?” her grandmother had greeted her every morning. How are you, my dear one? Dee always refused to answer, insisting that she couldn’t understand, and her grandmother would sigh. “You are too stubborn for your own good! Just like your mother.”

+

“You’re the stubborn one,” Dee would tell the old woman, her voice echoing the irritable, world-weary tones of her own mother. “Can’t you just let it go?” And Dee would complete the imitation by shaking a finger at the old woman. They would laugh, and the moment would pass. But on the final day, the last time she’d seen her grandmother, the old lady had taken her hand and spoken with quiet insistence.

+

“My dear one, mine own. The language, the stories, are in your blood and bones, whether you like it or not. Someday you may have cause to remember that. I pray it will all be for the best.” She’d sighed and squeezed Dee’s hand. “O Uill… Dè ghabhas dèanamh?” Oh well, what can you do?

+

Dee remembered these words with pain, uttered the Gaelic phrase aloud for the first time in two decades. The words, spoken barely above a whisper, weighed heavily in the air. How well it encapsulated her life in its entirety.

+

The argument had been an old one. Dee remembered the first time she had become aware of it—creeping downstairs late at night, seeking comfort after a bad dream, but stopping and listening when she heard raised voices. “But why would you name her after one of the Folk?”

+

“First of all, Mother, you know that’s complete nonsense,” her own mother had scoffed. “I thought you would love that I’d named her after one of your stories. And second, I don’t remember ever reading anything that said she was one of the Fae.”

+

“You wouldn’t have,” her grandmother had retorted, “most of those stories weren’t written down. Her father was a harper for the Folk. She was taken from them when a Druid prophesied that her beauty would result in the deaths of warriors and kings.”

+

“That’s the story of Helen of Troy.” Her mother’s laughter had become forced, impatient. “Now, finish your dram and let’s call it a night.” Her grandmother had muttered something too quietly for Dee to hear. She wished she could have seen her mother’s face but, whatever the expression, those muttered syllables had resulted in the old woman being sent to bed as unceremoniously as Dee herself when she was discovered eavesdropping.

+

Dee chuckled—she could picture herself as a skinny child, shivering on the stairs, all scraped knees and wide eyes and big ears. She had loved her grandmother’s stories, then. It was only later, when her friends at school disabused her of her belief in fairy tales, that she came to resent the stories as her mother did. But before the children’s mockery had changed her, the world had been full of wonder—if you knew how to see it. She and her grandmother had known.

+

As she walked and remembered, the timbre of the crows’ jeers changed. Now, she would swear they seemed almost welcoming. The shadows deepened. She sloughed off the cares she had brought with her like a skin.

+

The underbrush grew thicker. A thorn scratched a long thin line across her arm. Three scarlet drops welled. It’s in your blood and bones. How she had blamed the old woman for planting that seed. Nothing could uproot it—not her mother’s sarcasm, nor her classmates’ casual cruelty, nor her own attempts to do everything correctly, to achieve those things that her mother promised would bring happiness. An education, a job, a husband, a home. Instead of happiness, she had reaped only frustration, and a loneliness that nothing in this world could salve.

+

Still she walked, pushing back branches that snagged her hair and her clothes. She looked up at the sky, but she couldn’t see the sun through the thick canopy. She wasn’t sure how long she had been walking—it felt like no time at all, surely not much more than half an hour, but already the daylight seemed to be fading. The thought that she should turn back flickered through her mind, but now she was committed. Too stubborn for your own good, she thought.

+

So she pushed on, breathing the scent of cranberries and promising to turn around if she didn’t find the circle in five minutes. In ten minutes. Fifteen minutes, tops.

+

She burst out of the trees into a clearing just as she meant to surrender to the pull of the life she had temporarily relinquished. She looked again for the sun to gauge the time, but the sky was hazy and distant, the texture of the light unfamiliar. For the first time, she felt unease. Still, she did not turn back.

+

There were three ancient stones—broken, irregularly spaced, low to the ground. Not the circle that Auntie had mentioned at all. This appeared to be something else entirely. A hearth, perhaps. Maybe a well. She took an eager step forward, then hesitated. Her grandmother’s warnings about carelessly wandering into places of power brushed her mind like black wings. Even from a distance of several metres, she imagined she could feel the cold breath of the ages pouring out of the ruins. She took another step, startled as a murder of crows launched into the sky. She watched it go, and rued her own earthbound state.

+

When her gaze again turned to the toppled stones, she was startled to find a large crow standing before her. She stared at it, thought to shoo it away, but it held her with a glittering eye. If this were one of Gram’s stories, she thought, I’d introduce myself to this crow, and he would teach me his secrets. Her throat tightened as she swallowed the wanting that had haunted her all her life.

+

Feeling foolish, Dee dropped a clumsy curtsey and bowed her head to the crow.

+

“My grandmother sends her greetings, Master Crow,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, pretending she was making a joke. “Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh, a ghràidh?”

+

The crow said nothing for a moment, then croaked once and hopped closer to her. A flurry of feathers disturbed the air behind her as the murder resumed their front-row seats around the clearing.

+

“It is truly a pleasure to meet you, my dear sir,” Dee told him, thrilled by his approach and hamming it up for their audience. “I hope you don’t mind if I call you Crow—I’ve not yet mastered your elegant tongue.” She curtsied again.

+

Another croak, another hop.

+

“Who am I?” she asked, delighting in the game. “Why, I’m Dee!”

+

The crow froze as the murder began shouting their derision, then turned his back on her. He gurgled deep in his throat, silencing the others. He seemed poised to fly.

+

“Wait! Master Crow! Let us play a little longer!” If the crow abandoned her, she would follow the path back to the loves and regrets that would even now be waiting for her. “Don’t go! Please, how have I offended?” The crow gave no sign that he had heard her.

+

“What did I say? My name… was it my name?” Dee took a step closer, then backed away as the crow shuddered. Again, the flutter of dark wings in her mind. A warning. “Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself properly. I’m Deirdre. Deirdre is my name.”

+

The murder exploded into the air, their cacophony drowning out the entire world. The crow turned and drew closer, its eye glittering with fierce delight. Deirdre. Her name floated on the wind. For the first time, she felt its power resonate in the core of her being. Deirdre.

+

Unbidden, unstoppable, her hands stretched toward the crow, which hopped fitfully first on one foot then the other. Never chase the fox’s fire. Fingers lengthened, hands floated of their own accord toward the sky. Always greet the crows. Eyes rolled back into the skull, which elongated to form a strong, perfect point. Beware the wily messenger. Black wings unfurled and stretched, casting shadows across the clearing. With dread approach the stones.

+

Two crows launched themselves into the sky and were gone.

+

“Deirdre,” the forest whispered. “A ghràidh. Mine own.”

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Mine Own” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Sharon Dawn Selby

+

+ + Author image of Sharon Dawn Selby + + + Sharon Dawn Selby is a professor of English Literature and Professional Communication in London, Ontario, which means she gets to roam the realms of other people’s stories when she isn’t writing her own. She has published several book reviews and an academic article, as well as a monograph, Memory and Identity, in Canadian Fiction. You can find her on Twitter and at her website.

+

© Sharon Dawn Selby 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Republica and Ellie Burgin.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/snow-over-interstate-80.html b/issue-24/snow-over-interstate-80.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5d2131a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/snow-over-interstate-80.html @@ -0,0 +1,404 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Snow Over Interstate 80 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Snow Over Interstate 80

+

Martin M. Clark

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Snow Over Interstate 80 by +
+ + + + +

I + + drove the Boss-9 while Winston rode shotgun, feeding shells into his Winchester M97. His nose was broken and there was dried blood down his beard and front. I was sporting two banged-up ribs and a wraparound bruise the size of Jersey.

+

It was Christmas Eve.

+

Man, was it ever.

+

There was a rak-rak as the erstwhile drummer loaded a shell into the breech. He sure likes his 12-gauge, does Mister Winston. Me, I had my .455 Webley, a real antique from an era before smart ammunition, when ‘stopping power’ meant putting as big a hole as possible in your enemy.

+

You might think the two of us made for unlikely partners. I mean, I’m Jack Frost, the Iceman, the proverbial loner—and Winston, for all his bonhomie, wasn’t exactly big on friends who’d return his calls. So, yeah, it was a marriage of inconvenience, something we’d just have to live with.

+

The truth was I needed him more than he needed me. A while back I’d ended up on Santa’s Naughty List. Bad things happen to those on the Naughty List, and this particular Bad Thing was out for blood.

+

The trick is to stay one step ahead until you make amends, until you become the proverbial reformed character, someone Jiminy Cricket would be proud to call ‘pal’. Well, I’d tried that, I’d tried being a good little boy—inserting myself into every saccharine-sweet tale going. Wonderland is where stories live on, if enough people believe in them, and was thus a target-rich environment when it comes to heart-warming schmaltz. So, I’d bought the entire stock from a freezing match girl, kept a robin warm under my coat, even left anonymous gifts on doorsteps—none of it mattered a damn.

+

As I couldn’t use the classics to make amends then it was time to get up-close and personal with later fiction. Old-school fairy-tales—take anything by Hans Christian Andersen—are pretty much set in stone. Sure, you can lurk around the edges, tweak the details for fun and profit, but they contain few surprises. More recent stories are more fluid, made malleable by enthusiastic readers with little thought for those of us who have to suffer the consequences. Hell, even Bill Sykes has his devotees, and he is one man you do not want to tangle with, believe me.

+

So, I’d been moping around Wonderland, feeling sorry for myself, when a little bird told me to try song lyrics.

+

I + + glared at the robin, startled out of my gloomy reverie. “Since when do you talk?”

+

Wonderland sounds like it’s going to be, well, wonderful , but if you’ve been paying attention to all the stories from your childhood, half the creatures in it are often having a pretty bad time. Feathered smartarses aren’t necessarily a help. Sometimes they’re responsible.

+

This one fluttered his wings, gesturing at our surroundings. “You’re Jack Frost, fairy-tale character turned hitman, taking a walk in the snow-covered pine woods behind Uncle Tom’s cabin, and you’re querying me about realism?”

+

“Point taken.” I frowned. “But song lyrics? How do they qualify as classical anything, let alone literature?”

+

The robin hopped down a couple of branches. “Bob Dylan. The man is way more than he seems, a troubled troubadour of his time. Oh, as a performer he’s a nasal whine in search of a key, but as a lyricist he’s point-man for a whole bunch of narrative imperatives.”

+

“Screw that!” I tried to shy away, stumbled, and fell on my ass in the snow.

+

Robin snickered. “Aw, the big, bad Iceman scared of an ickle-bitty plot device?”

+

“Damn straight. If one gets hold of you then it’s sayonara, free-will. I’m Jack, all the Jacks, so I know what it’s like when you have to kill.” I may keep him stamped down, chained in the metaphorical dungeon, but I know he’s there, The Ripper, lurking at the back of my mind.

+

I struggled to my feet and brushed powdery snow from my overcoat. “Gimme a Plan B, bird-brain.”

+

“I’m telling ya, Jackie-boy, we’re talking primo situational angst here. Resolving one of the schnozmeister’s situations will bury that Bad Thing under a ton of good karma. Trust me, I’m a robin.”

+

There was a long pause. Snow continued to fall. There was a chill in the air that made even me shiver, and it wasn’t all down to the weather.

+

I sniffed. “Tell me more.”

+

S + +o, there I was, hooked up with Winston Watson, trying to save his squeeze Arabella from freezing to death out on Interstate 80. Man, the gig tasted sour from the get-go, like ashes and milk. I couldn’t break free of Christmas Eve and it was starting to get on my nerves. I’d already smashed the radio for one-too-many renditions of ‘Jingle Bells’ and gotten us into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a bunch of Elves when we stopped for gas in Des Moines. Turned out they were Hawkeyes collecting for charity and not in the mood to take my bad-tempered shit. Well, lesson learned.

+

I flexed my hands on the wheel. “What’s she driving again?”

+

Winston dabbed gingerly at his nose with a Kleenex. “Sixty-nine Chevy with a three-ninety-six, fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor. I know that’s a lot of muscle for a broad, but she can handle it.”

+

“Uh-huh.” That’s the trouble with lyrics: open the door to one set and a whole other bunch try to squeeze in as well. If this carried on we’d end up getting roasted by Puff the Magic Dragon. I peered through the windshield where the blades were making heavy weather (no pun intended) of the driving snow. “And what was wrong with her calling a tow-truck?”

+

“A tow-truck on Christmas Eve, costing how much? Anyway, she don’t need no damn tow-truck. It’ll be the carburettor, it’s always the damn carburettor. Just needs a little of that old Winston magic.”

+

“Meaning she sweet-talked you out on a night like this, rather than spend good money?”

+

He glared at me. “As I remember you offered to ride along, man. Anyway, she said a couple of the locals had done a drive-by. If she leaves that rig by the side of the road they’ll strip it bare by morning, Christmas or no Christmas.”

+

“This Arabella, sure sounds like she knows the value of a dollar. No offence.”

+

“None taken. Yeah, ever since I’ve known her…” Winston trailed off. He twisted slightly in his seat to see me better, finger around the trigger of his shotgun, “Say again, how is it we know each other?”

+

I laughed and shook my head. “Jeez, that blow to the head must have hit harder than we thought. Our mutual friend, Winston, remember?”

+

The confusion in his eyes was obvious but he nodded, slowly. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry, man, for a moment there… never mind.”

+

We drove on in silence for a while. Winston wiped at the side window. “That’s eight-mile. Start looking for the Chevy. It’s cherry-red, should stand out even in this—hey, you hear that?”

+

Part of me knew that if I denied it strongly enough it wouldn’t be real. “Hear what?”

+

He licked his lips. “Like, you know, jingle bells.”

+

“You high, my man?” I managed a grin although my scalp was tight with fear. “What’s this, Santa Claus is coming to town?”

+

Winston squirmed in his seat. “Yeah, well—” Something swooshed low overhead, making us both duck. He squashed his face against the glass, trying to peer out and up. “You see that? What the hell is it?”

+

I gripped the wheel. “Nothing, man, nothing. You’re just wiz and got me spooked as well. Look, up ahead, that sure looks like a red Chevy.”

+

Thankfully Arabella had been on the way to drop off gifts when she broke down, leaving us playing catch-up. Trying to spot her on the other side of the Interstate would have been difficult, at best. I pulled in behind the other car and we both got out.

+

A sting of snowflakes made me curse and shy away, blinking. That doesn’t happen to me—I’m the goddam Iceman—meaning there was more malice than moisture in the air. A near-anonymous figure swathed in a fur coat emerged from the Chevy. Winston and Arabella stumbled into each other’s arms, oblivious to everything else.

+

I looked around, confused, my usual affinity with Winter somehow smothered by the snow. Then an 18-wheeler swept past, all spray and airhorns…

+

…and it left its shadow behind.

+

A Bad Thing doesn’t exist on its own. It takes what it finds in your soul and feeds on it, crafts memories into fear made manifest. And my soul is not a good place to be.

+

The shadow slid across the highway to become a grey patch of snow against the banking. It shrank in on itself, darkening as it did so, a concentration of every terror and failure and hurt I’d ever experienced.

+

I’m Jack Frost. For every child who’s gazed in delight at the spread of a frost fond on a window, there’s a homeless hobo freezing to death in the biting cold. I don’t make the rules and sure as hell can’t appeal the decisions. All I can do is be there, for the good times and bad.

+

This was not a good time.

+

The Bad Thing drew itself up, like the melting of a grey snowman but in reverse. I clawed for my gun, fighting it free from the folds of cloth. The slick gunmetal glittered with frost, an extension of my very being.

+

The snowman sprouted distinct arms, legs, head. A mouth. “You think yourself so clever, don’t you, Jackie-boy? The arrogance of endurance in an age where retrieval has replaced memory. Well, we both remember what you’re really like, don’t we?”

+

I aimed my revolver—the only gun fired during the Christmas truce on the Western Front, 1914. That kind of provenance gives a weapon power, it makes it more real, and ‘real’ was all I had. “So I killed Santa,” I snapped, “what about it?”

+

“Three times, by my reckoning.”

+

“Two times, three, it doesn’t matter. You can’t kill an idea, and that’s what he is, the wellspring of kindness and generosity. All I did was take down a version that was a little tired, a little stale, so that he could be made anew.”

+

The grey apparition laughed, if you can imagine a laugh that was the antithesis of mirth. “Oh Death, where is thy sting?” It stepped towards me, leaving bloody footsteps in the snow. A long sliver of ice extended from its right arm. “Well, let’s find out, shall we?”

+

The Webley roared, punching a hole the size of your fist clean through the snowman’s chest—only for it to close up immediately. I switched aim and blew the right arm off at the elbow. The snowman paused while his severed limb dissolved into a grey stain, which flowed over to rejoin the main body. A fresh forearm sprouted, complete with ice blade extension.

+

His tone was mocking. “Tedious, Jack, tedious. You want to blow a few more limbs off, get it over with? We both know how this is gonna end. You can’t escape Wonderland, Jack, although you try so hard. You can’t escape how you’re written. I’m the hurt, the fear, the darkness on the edge of town, and I’m here to reclaim you.”

+

There was the crunch of footsteps in the snow beside me and Winston raised his shotgun. “What the hell is he doing here?”

+

I licked my lips. “Winston, what is it you see?”

+

“Huh? That’s Lonnie, Lonnie Rae. Bastard used to kick my ass back in the day, him and his brothers. What’s going on?”

+

The Lonnie Rae Snowman laughed. “Everyone has a past, Jack, a backstory. Even those drawn from a song sheet. He can no more escape his fate than—”

+

Three candy-stripe sugar canes speared his right arm and shoulder. Where they struck, the grey snow sizzled. A shadow swept overhead and I caught a flash of red, a waft of sweaty animal, the jingle of bells. The snowman hissed—pure venom given voice—and plucked the makeshift missiles from his body.

+

Santa Claus dropped from the sky to land beside me in a 3-point superhero stance, kicking up a flurry of snow. I swear I’ve never been so happy to see the fat man before or since. He straightened up slowly and pointed at my nemesis. “I knew it was a mistake using you and this time you’ve gone too far, way too far. Be gone, Boogieman!”

+

The grey snow swirled as if caught in a mini-twister, then resolved into a grinning gargoyle, with glowing red coals for eyes. “One name amongst many, Claus. One name amongst many. You might as well call me ‘Hate’ and have done with it.”

+

“I’ll call you anything you choose. But you go no further, not this night.”

+

“What, you thought that I wouldn’t dare show my face on Christmas Eve? Well, all the joy you bring to the world has to be paid for, it has to be balanced out. And I’m here to collect, starting with Jack.”

+

Despite the situation, I felt a curious detachment. Our surroundings suddenly seemed cramped, hemmed in, as if we were inside a giant snow globe.

+

No, not a snow globe—a dream.

+

A figure appeared out of the blizzard, behind the gargoyle. It was a girl, a young woman, in blue silk pyjamas, twirling a walking stick in the manner of an oversized baton. I grinned, I laughed out loud, I lowered my gun.

+

The woman seized the cane in both hands, twisted the top, and unsheathed a long, glittering blade. She raised the swordstick above her head in a stance that would have graced a samurai master. “Hey, Mister!”

+

Hate turned towards her, slowly. When he spoke, the term ‘baleful’ didn’t even come close. “You cannot threaten me, a force of nature.”

+

“I’m Carole Greola, I’m fifteen.” She swung the blade, “And I can do what the fuck I like, in my dream.”

+

Her blow bisected Hate with a sound like fingernails on a blackboard. For a moment the two halves stood there, their interior faces revealed as a mass of writhing red worms. Then the sound and shadow of a fuel tanker swept by, although the vehicle itself remained indistinct, and when it was gone…

+

…the snow where the apparition had stood was once again deep and crisp and even.

+

The blizzard died away, like someone had turned off a wind machine. I sensed an absence at my shoulder and looked around—Winston, Arabella, both cars, all gone. Interstate 80 was an empty expanse of blacktop, a straight line between Nowhere and Someplace Else.

+

Santa sniffed. “I had that covered, you know. It was all under control.”

+

Carole slid the blade back into its housing and stepped forward. “Yeah, right. Just make sure my letter goes to the top of the pile and we’ll call it even. Deal?”

+

He laughed, the proverbial Ho-Ho-Ho. “Deal. Although part of me is surprised someone of your age still believes in me. I guess any friend of Jack’s has to have a vivid imagination.”

+

“I prefer to call it the art of the possible, sir.”

+

The sleigh swept down in a flurry of hooves, striking sparks from the roadway. The elves jeered, blew raspberries, and I swear one mooned me as Santa climbed aboard. He regarded me in what was obviously his stern face. “Take care not to read too much into this, Jack. We’ll never be friends, but you’ll understand that abomination couldn’t be tolerated. Not tonight, not ever, and for setting it loose you have my apologies.”

+

I grinned and put my gun away. “I’d settle for a new diamond tie pin. I gave the other one away to some homeless orphan or another.”

+

“I don’t think saving a starving streetwalker is in quite the same category, given the, ah, commercial nature of your relationship, but at least you came out behind on the deal, which is the important part. Now, I must be off—people to see, places to visit and all that. I’d offer you a ride but neither of you really need one, given where we are.”

+

Carole waved and I tipped my hat as the sleigh lumbered into the air and was rapidly lost from view amongst the low clouds. There was an awkward silence.

+

I cleared my throat. “So…”

+

“Yeah, good to see you too.”

+

“That whole twirling thing. Cheerleading?”

+

“In my dreams.” She smiled. “Literally. My hand-eye coordination sucks. When I’m awake.”

+

“Uh-huh. Glad you kept the swordstick.”

+

“I hide it in a hollow curtain rail during the day, sleep with it under my pillow. When I dream nobody messes with me.” Carole frowned. “Those other people, the cars, I know things come and go in here, but that felt different somehow. Like it was out of my control.”

+

“They’re called ‘narrative imperatives’. Not so much a shove in the right direction as a kick in the ass.”

+

“Santa trying to show you the error of your ways?”

+

“It started out like that, but, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t think either of us expected to meet anything coming in the other direction.”

+

She laughed, an adult laugh rather than childish giggle. “You’re what my mum would call ‘trouble’, aren’t you, Jack?”

+

“I’ll have you know the term is ‘mischievous’, young lady. It’s the way I was written, it’s the way I’m remembered, it’s the way that I am. Now you, on the other hand, seem to have morphed into some bad-ass angel of vengeance since last we met. Not that I’m complaining, you understand, but setting yourself apart can be a lonely road.”

+

“I have this—” Carole gestured with the swordstick “—to remind me I’ll always have a friend. At least in my dreams. Speaking of which…”

+

I smiled. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Directed interactions are the stuff of monumental headaches, so don’t put up with this on my account.”

+

Carole stepped up and kissed my cheek. “Merry Christmas, Jack Frost.”

+

And she was gone.

+

Her dream started to bleed back into the ‘real’ storyline of Snow Over Interstate 80, but I no longer needed it. I spun in a swirl of coat-tails…

+

…to stand once again amidst the pine woods close to Uncle Tom’s cabin.

+

The robin was perched on an overhead branch. “Have fun, did we?” Before I could answer he darted away in a flurry of wings, dislodging a smattering of snow to dust my hat and shoulders. And something else, something heavier that dropped onto the brim with a loud pat.

+

I removed my hat, half-expecting the little bastard to have shit on me. Instead I found a silver tie pin with a diamond head. It glittered in the half-light of the snow-covered forest, as bright as any star. Somewhere ahead of me a town clock began to strike—it was midnight.

+

Christmas Day.

+

One of the good ones.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Snow Over Interstate 80” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Martin M. Clark

+

+ + Author image of Martin M. Clark + + + Martin M. Clark Martin M. Clark is a freelance writer and occasional poet. He is the author of several novellas on Amazon, plus short stories in Third Flatiron anthologies. He also contributes to several online publications including Mythaxis.co.uk, and Kraxon.com. His range of subject matter includes science fiction, urban fantasy, romance and westerns. He puts this down to the somewhat eclectic mobile lending library where he grew up. He works as a local government officer in south-west Scotland but still finds time to be an evil stepfather.

+

© Martin M. Clark 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Mengliu Di and Julia Volk.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/spring-man.html b/issue-24/spring-man.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e4f8bcbb --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/spring-man.html @@ -0,0 +1,366 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Spring Man — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Spring Man

+

Fabiyas M. V.

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Spring Man by +
+ + + + +

A + + ghastly silence prevails in the village after the sunset. Not only Manayur village, the whole country has been locked down to combat the coronavirus.

+

Hashmi puts on her new white sari with black blossoms. A silk sari cannot alter her body, but it multiplies her charms. She has no way to flit with her cronies, wearing the new dress. She feels a kind of narcissistic admiration before her vanity table.

+

With a sudden shudder, her gaze strays across the mirror. Being a scorching summer, at least one of her bedroom windows is always open. Through the sari-gap, her crescent stomach reflects in the mirror… but just above her shoulder, a pair of strange eyes and a long protruding nose at the window!

+

Hashmi turns back, shrieking.

+

Hashmi’s brother, a sinewy young man, darts along the dirt road with a bamboo stick in his hand. His friends, and an old man too, from the neighborhood follow him. Flashlights create chinks in the darkness. Forgetting the rules of the lockdown, they search in wells, thickets, the old deserted house… but it’s a wild goose chase.

+

Hashmi’s brother comes back, panting. Yeah… I saw… a dark tall… APPARITION!

+

Soon the police come and disperse the crowd. They don’t believe Hashmi’s brother’s words. An apparition is an illusion, like the moon rabbit.

+

They threaten to beat the people unless they return to stay at home.

+

T + +he next night, ten-year-old Sanu is watching a Malayalam movie on the TV in her living room when someone knocks on the door. Getting up from the sofa, she goes to open the door. No one is waiting outside. Rubbing her eyes, she peers into the darkness.

+

Ten minutes later, Sanu’s mother screeches. The door stands open, and her daughter lies unconscious with her legs across the threshold. She carries Sanu from the floor to the sofa, music and the sound of anklets still dancing from the TV.

+

What’s going on there? Sanu’s dad, who is trying to cool his body off, squawks from the bathroom.

+

With tears and fear, Sanu’s mother sprinkles water on her girl’s face. Sanu remains still, but after what seems a thousand seconds she regains her consciousness. She claims she had seen a thin, Stygian shape, leaping from one areca palm to the next in the grove beside their house.

+

N + +ext, a child wakes up with sweat on his forehead and around his neck. Ma… ma… clinking of chains… Spring Man passes by…

+

All are on pins and needles, even though nobody has reported this Spring Man’s atrocities.

+

Gradually the police come to suspect that there is some truth in the story about the Spring Man, spreading through the region like another epidemic. A police officer in khaki uniform warns people on TV:

+

The Spring Man has supernatural powers. He can run at the speed of a cheetah, and leap easily like a monkey from one tree to another. He is about seven feet high with sooty skin. His visage is unclear, albeit he has two lustrous eyes and a nose like the beak of a black-headed ibis.

+

G + +enerally, this coastal area throbs with life until midnight or even beyond that. But the restrictions of pandemic time empty roads and streets by nightfall. So the air is apt for the Spring Man to run wild.

+

A video goes viral, frightening the rustics: the Spring Man caught by a CCTV camera. He walks in the street light, carrying something on his shoulder. A lean tall figure. Half-naked.

+

There are many coolies from Bengal in Manayur village. Being confined to the labor camp, some sleep most of the time, but many of them are restless. The police, under much pressure, take the tallest of them into custody.

+

J + +oshu, a security guard of the State Bank of India at Chava, opens the back door of his house to hang his washed uniform on the clothes line in the back yard. Someone is there.

+

Who’s this? Joshu cries.

+

This stranger is very tall indeed. As black as soot. Long-legged like a giraffe. Only his fiery eyes and enormous nose are visible. He stands near the old well. Just a quick leap, and he lands on the top of the house!

+

Spring Man… SPRING MAN!

+

As Joshu cries aloud, Spring Man leaps and lands on a branch of the nearest sapodilla. In seconds he disappears into the dark. Joshu is like a statue, frozen in fright.

+

A + +s usual, the police search in vain. Next morning, they let off the tallest Bengali from their custody.

+

A + + whole lot of people in the area are very superstitious. They readily believe that Spring Man is a ghostly creature who comes to haunt them from the grave.

+

But there is one dauntless, learned man, who has written two detective novels, in the village. He never hesitates to tell people that all their traditional rituals are nonsensical. He even corrects their concept of god. According to him, God is the one and only invisible, omnipotent, and creative force permeating the whole universe. His fellow men loathe his views.

+

Unfortunately, his name, Velanji, is little known in the literary world.

+

Velanji cogitates about the Spring Man. What the hell does he gain, frightening people? How could he escape so easily? Velanji wishes the Spring Man would come to his house.

+

Pacing up and down in his study, Velanji rules out the presence of a ghost. Then who is the mysterious creature? A superman from an unknown planet? No, never. Velanji is a rationalist to the core. He conjectures that it may be a rowdy boy, or more specifically a young man, bored of the lockdown, who creates the trouble. A drug addict or a maniac.

+

Or it may be someone playing Blue Whale, an internet game involving a series of tasks that end in suicide. Velanji slumps down in his cane chair under the weight of speculations. Yet his thought-producing machine works on…

+

And what about the supernatural athleticism? Velanji reads as well as writes, he has heard about the Marvelous Spring Jackboot, a rare modern product, wearing which, one can leap too high and run so fast. Not to be made in these surroundings, but a person might have bought a pair online from some foreign country. Far more plausible than some night monster!

+

Neglecting his wife’s warnings, Velanji sets out with an iron bar in his right hand and a jack knife in the pocket of his pants. He searches high and low for the Spring Man, but in vain.

+

T + +he lockdown period is likely to end shortly. Velanji gets up once or twice at night – either to pass urine or drink water. He is a diabetic patient. As usual, he comes out of the bathroom at midnight. It’s muggy, maybe due to rain clouds, and too uncomfortable to sleep, even under the fan.

+

Leaves are still outside. Even crickets are silent. Summer rain may come soon. Then a terrible noise breaks the quiet. It’s a kind of howling never heard before.

+

Oh, what’s that sound? Velanji looks out of the window, startled. A wild animal near my house?

+

He remains stock-still, while his eyes fumble with the dark night. What’s that shape? A sudden fear jerks his mind. A figure lurks near the henna shrubs, forty meters away from his windowsill. Who’s that at this time of night?

+

Velanji comes downstairs. Without disturbing his family, who are fast asleep, he takes his iron bar and the jack knife, opens the front door silently, and then walks across the grass to the henna shrubs.

+

Through gaps of the henna twigs, he watches the half-naked figure, in black shorts, sitting on the sugar sand with his legs stretched. He is smoking a cannabis beedi, looking up at the sky. Velanji waits, holding his breath. The stranger coughs. A dry cough. Then the moon emerges out of the clouds, unveiling the identity of the stranger.

+

My Gosh! Aap! Velanji whispers softly.

+

Velanji sees a black burqa, specially altered, and a pair of uncommon boots, beside him.

+

Aha, thinks Velanji.

+

After tossing the beedi stub, Aap puts on his Spring Jackboots and the burqa. No shirt. Slowly getting up, he walks like a rooster in the moonlight. Velanji follows him stealthily.

+

The infamous Aap is an addict of hashish and arrack. Few people know his original name is Sharaf. Aap came to Manayur with his uncle at the age of five. His parents in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu had been killed in a communal riot. His widower uncle was a mason.

+

The unexpected demise of his uncle, when Aap was in the tenth standard at Govt High School Manathala, rocked the boat. Aap had to leave school to keep his head above water. He became an apprentice in an automobile workshop, but before long he was trapped in the bad company of the village. His hut on the bank of Kanoli canal became the evil hub of the village, where he and his delinquent friends gambled, watched porn videos, jacked up…

+

Opening a wooden gate, Aap enters the front yard of an auto rickshaw driver’s house. He rings the doorbell, rousing the driver and his family from their sound sleep. Just before the door opens, Aap darts back to the gate.

+

Which is when Velanji, who is hiding behind the nearby coconut palm, comes forward with enthusiastic pace and strikes him a heavy blow on the head with the iron bar in his hand. The Spring Man falls down with a thud.

+

G + +ood afternoon, friends! the Circle Inspector of Police begins his speech. We’ve gathered here to honor our hero, Velanji.

+

Maniacs and drug addicts are everywhere in the modern world. At any time, they may come through layers of darkness. They are fond of fantasy, insane adventures and sadistic pleasures. These antisocial elements are cancerous in our society. We, the Police, are sometimes helpless. Today’s world needs valiant men like Velanji…

+

Velanji sits on the dais with pride as huge as the Himalayas. Ways of honor are diverse, and it often comes out of the blue, he muses, and smiles at the audience.

+

He always cherished the dream of winning a literary award. But even if he won the Man Booker Prize, he wouldn’t get this much applause from his fellow men, who rarely read books.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Spring Man” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Fabiyas M. V.

+

+ + Author image of Fabiyas M. V. + + + Fabiyas M. V. is the author of Monsoon Turbulence, Shelter within the Peanut Shells, Kanoli Kaleidoscope, Eternal Fragments, Stringless Lives, and Moonlight And Solitude, and his writing has also been published by Western Australian University, British Council, University of Hawaii, Rosemont College, Douglas College, Forward Poetry, Off the Coast, Silver Blade, Pear Tree Press, Poetry Nook, Zoetic Press, Encircle Publications, Pendle War Poetry and Creative Writing Ink. He has won many international accolades, including the Merseyside at War Poetry Award from Liverpool University.

+

© Fabiyas M. V. 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Mark Barrison, The Living Room, and suriya.nathan.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ +

Stranded at the Station

+

Trisha McKee

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Stranded at the Station by +
+ + + + +

B + +etty walked slowly, measuring each step as she took in her surroundings. There were train tracks, a platform full of people avoiding eye contact and shuffling their feet, and large hotels surrounding the station.

+

Despite the crowd, there was no noise. No conversations, no murmurs, not even a whisper. Nobody wanted to be noticed. Some people’s eyes were bright, and their lips curved up as they stretched forward, waiting for the train to arrive. Others had scrunched up shoulders and creased faces. But all of them were watching and waiting.

+

Betty tried not to study them too hard. She did not want to see anyone she knew. She did not want that type of knowledge weighing on her. Or have anyone recognize her.

+

The air was different here, thicker, hazy, with a fragrant odor to it. It was as if she were looking through foggy waves, seeing everyone through a distorted lense. She wondered if this was to keep things more discreet, make it harder to casually spy.

+

As the minutes ticked by, Betty considered turning and leaving. She had never done anything like this before. Many people felt this was not wrong, that it did not count. This place provided a free pass to follow desires and curiosities. Because this was not entirely real, not something that would remain. But Betty felt torn. This certainly felt wrong.

+

But she thought about the train arriving, and no one there to greet him, and her stomach plummeted. That would not be fair. It was not an easy trip. It was long, and hard on the body. People that experienced the trip claimed their bones ached for hours afterwards, and exhaustion plagued them. It meant that short trips were not practical. You needed at least three days to fully enjoy a visit.

+

So Neyter was coming for a four-day visit. They had not discussed what the plans were, what was expected, but Betty knew he was not coming for four days without some expectations, some thoughts on how the visit would go, and what they would do.

+

And Betty was nauseous from the nerves and guilt. She knew that her live-in boyfriend Rodney had been here before. She had seen the hotel receipt. It did not bother her as much as she wanted it to. Because this was almost like some type of fantasy, a dream. If Rodney had wanted out of their relationship, he would have chosen a woman that was attainable. That could survive outside of the station.

+

But she still had guilt weighing her down, adding to the almost tangible air. Yet the longer she stood on the platform, the more free she felt. Butterflies swarmed in her stomach. She noticed the beautiful golden shade of everything around her. Trees glimmered, clouds danced. There was magic in this area, that much was obvious, and it was advertised in every sense she had.

+

Before the sound even registered, the train skidded to a stop in front of the platform, and people piled out. Suddenly there was noise, excited chatter and screams of delight. People embraced, men swung women around, couples held hands as they strolled toward the restaurants and hotels. It was an entire town crammed into a space meant only for a station.

+

And then he was in front of her. Neyter. She had seen his pictures, had video chatted him a few times, so his appearance was no surprise. He was tall and a bit overweight, long, black hair, black clothing. He was what her dimension called gothic.

+

They had gotten to know each other through some online artist groups that welcomed both dimensions. He was funny and encouraging, they indulged in long talks about their art, and she felt she finally had someone that not only listened, but understood.

+

But standing in front of him, she was paralyzed with an awkwardness, and it was evident he felt the same discomfort. He shuffled his feet, widened his eyes and then said, “Well, hello, Betty Belle.”

+

She gave a slight smile, enjoying his accent. He stressed different syllables, drawing out the Ss and Ls. He spoke fast and yet the words stretched. He ended each sentence in a higher note, as if it were a question, and it was unlike anything she had heard. The first time they had chatted via video, she had been mesmerized by his voice. And now it was a small bite of familiarity, pushing back the awkwardness just enough.

+

“How are you feeling?” Betty asked, ducking her head and taking a step back.

+

Neyter shrugged but then shut his eyes with a long sigh. “Exhausted. Sore.”

+

“So let’s get you settled in at the hotel. You can rest. And I’ll come back in a few hours to check on you. Today will probably be all about resting. I’ll bring you some food.”

+

He agreed, and before she even left his hotel room, he was snoring on his bed.

+

That evening, she stopped in the restaurant and studied the menu. There were two parts - this world and his world. The other dimension. Foods she had not heard of, combinations she never would have considered trying. She blindly chose a few items from his menu and then took the food to his room, knocking lightly.

+

Neyter answered after a few minutes, his long hair disheveled, his eyes framed by puffy skin. “Damn. I never woke up.”

+

“I figured. I got you some dinner. I wasn’t sure… I guessed.”

+

He peeked in the bag and grinned. “Roasted crackling shells. Oooh, and reddened pipes. Thank you!” He glanced up. “Are you going to share with me?” When she glanced down and shook her head, he made a sound. “Feeling strange?”

+

Betty finally met his gaze. “Yes. You should be the one feeling strange. You traveled. But… I just…”

+

He stepped toward her, his hand warm as it landed on her upper arm. “It’s a lot. Why don’t you go home and come back in the morning. Get your footing. I should be fully rested by then.”

+

She did as he suggested, grateful she was going back to an empty apartment. Rodney was away on a business trip, so she could stew in her own thoughts, her own hesitancy in going through with the next few days.

+

But as she listened to music and worked on her latest painting, Betty started to feel a bit better about the situation. Neyter was a friend. They were merely visiting. There was no pressure for anything else. And he would have to eventually return to his dimension.

+

There were those that took that chance, to live in this world after leaving their own. Some even ventured out of the train station area. There were hot spots everywhere, though, and no matter how familiar people were with these hot spots, one always managed to surprise them. Every few months, there would be a news story about an other-dimension person getting vaporized by hitting a strange hot spot. Just obliterated right there, without warning.

+

It was a dangerous life, to be an other-dimension person and try to live out your days in this world. Some did it, sure, but they were few and far between. Most knew better. Most simply visited, and maybe only ventured out a town or two deep.

+

She wondered if the situation were reversed, if she could travel to the other dimension, would she? Would she be brave enough to visit the other world? Betty liked to think she would, but she also knew she would not set foot past the safety of the train station.

+

By the next morning, she was rejuvenated and feeling braver. She arrived at Neyter’s hotel room smiling and prepared. And he opened the door looking just as refreshed, his eyes no longer sleepy, his smile full.

+

“Better?” she asked, her grin widening.

+

“Yes. This is more like it.” He held out his arms. “Come here, Betty Belle. Let’s have a proper hello this time.”

+

What had been intended as a hug turned into kissing, and before Betty could fully comprehend what was happening, they were in his bed. She was responding to his touches, to his whispers. He smelled of pungent body odor, his stomach slapping against hers with its excess rolls, but still, she craved him in that moment.

+

She had heard about the powers of the other-dimension people. They had a pull about them, some type of charm that they did not use forcibly, did not realize was there, but it blossomed when creating an attraction with a person they wanted to be close with.

+

Meeting online had felt safe. The power did not work through computer screens or phones. But they had felt a strong connection nonetheless. They bonded over art and culture, learning about the differences between their worlds, fascinated with the contrasts.

+

But now, in person, she felt that physical connection. He was awake today, fully focused, and his power was clear and strong. Afterwards, she was in his arms, the power not as strong, and she blinked to keep from crying. He still stunk, his skin was pasty white, and he seemed to not realize her regret as he rambled on about how good it all had felt.

+

“Like, this seems right, don’t you think?”

+

Betty tried to subtly shift away, to get some air between them. “I guess. It… I was surprised by how natural it was to… yeah.”

+

They went to browse the rooms the hotel provided. Rooms that were designed to bring two dimensions together. There was the music room, the movie room, and the information room. Betty and Neyter started in the information room, where they were told the main differences between their worlds, their personalities. There were differences in speech that could trip them up if they were not aware, differences in how they reacted, and differences in their general behavior.

+

“I didn’t realize there was a… a pull. Was that how… is that why you slept with me? Were you under the influence of it?”

+

Betty was not sure how to answer. Because Neyter was waiting for her to respond, his expression wilted. Finally, she shook her head. “I felt something. But I think it was just… you brought it out, but it was already there. You know? I think your pull enhances what is there.”

+

“I never intentionally—”

+

“I know, Neyter.” And she did know. He was nothing but a gentleman. Clueless at times, but he was anxious to please. Determined to make her feel comfortable.

+

As they sat in front of the screen that told them more about their worlds, he shook his head. “I never noticed… you don’t have music randomly playing in the air. How do you listen to it?”

+

“We play a record. We listen to the radio.”

+

He shook his head. “But… what do you do when you’re walking? And you create the music? People create music? That’s odd.”

+

So the next stop was the music room. She wanted to hear his music, the sounds that just played around them. And she was surprised to hear similar sounds, same styles. It was not that different. She even recognized some songs.

+

They spent the night together again, and that pull was there. Betty just wished he would stop talking so much afterwards. He spoke of his world and his friends, and it was hard to stay interested in his stories when she did not know the people he spoke of.

+

When she attempted to tell her own stories, he would lean forward and nod, but she knew he was merely waiting for the next pause, for the moment she stopped to take a breath, to resume speaking once again. He did not seem to fully listen.

+

His humor was juvenile, bodily function sounds and funny faces, and the next day as they journeyed to the small beach beside the station, Betty tried to show her disinterest in such matters. She avoided eye contact, sighing and shaking her head. And yet he rambled on, oblivious to her discomfort.

+

He finally took a break from his one-man show enough to glance around and observe, “The shore. I didn’t realize we were near the ocean.”

+

Betty shook her head. “We’re not near the ocean. This is just… it’s just here. At the station.” It frustrated her that he did not realize the station was its own world and what existed here did not exist outside the balmy air.

+

Her nerves were scraping the surface of her skin, and she tried not to glare at his ridiculous black clothes as they sat in the sun. She tried not to visibly flinch at his increasing stench. He was like a rotting piece of meat, sweating in the hottest spot under the sun.

+

By the morning of his departure, Betty was an irritable mess, barely muttering words and hanging on to any semblance of politeness. She caught him studying her with a perplexed look, and that simply annoyed her further. How could he be confused? Did he not hear himself talking incessantly, brushing off her attempts at conversation? Did he not realize how quickly his body perspired?

+

As they stood on the platform, waiting for the train that would send him back to his world, Betty found herself finally relaxing. She was about to be rid of him, free to go home and forget this awkward experience.

+

“I’m going to miss you,” Neyter confessed, shyly reaching for her hand. She smiled and curled her fingers around his, just grateful this was almost over.

+

“I hope you have a safe trip.”

+

He gave her another one of those looks, a mix of confusion and disappointment, but she could not reassure him. She could only count the seconds until he was on that train. They stood back from the crowd, fumbling for words and agonizing over the minutes.

+

The train slid into place, its clicking of the wheels and whistle of the brakes bringing the crowd alive. There were hugs and shouts of farewells as people prepared to leave, others prepared to see them off.

+

Betty turned to Neyter and gave him a quick hug. “Be well,” she said, feeling silly at her words. But she was not sure what to say to this man, this guy who had been her lover over the last few days, the same one she could not wait to be rid of.

+

She stood there and watched as he moved toward the train, holding her breath. She waited until his foot was on the first step, and she turned, ready to walk away, to go home and relax.

+

Before she could move, ear-splitting sirens broke through the suddenly suffocating air. A robotic voice barely audible over the alarms boomed over the loudspeakers, “The portal is closing in one minute. One minute the portal is closing.”

+

Suddenly, the crowd closed in around her, screaming and shoving. She found herself being pushed toward the train, and she was unable to escape. As she was moved closer to the train, she tried to scream, tried to fight through the crowd, buried beneath the yelling and pushing. She was going to get forced onto the train, and it would be all over. People from this world could not survive the trip to that one.

+

Just as she was being shoved onto the train, someone grabbed her arm and pulled her hard. She tripped right into Neyter’s arms, sobbing as he caught her. He gathered her close to him and soothed, “It’s okay. Hey, you’re okay.”

+

He was still holding her as the train left, and finally, she lifted her head and stared at him, “What the hell just happened?”

+

Neyter glanced wistfully after the train. “That was the signal that the portal was closing. It happens every now and then. What it means is I’m stuck here until it opens back up. Which could be in a week… or months.”

+

Her mouth fell open, and gently, she pushed away from him so she could meet his gaze. “So you just…”

+

“They were pushing you—that crowd. I had to get you out.”

+

“But you’re stuck here now.”

+

He shrugged. “Yeah. But I couldn’t let you get on that train. I mean, you know it… it’s impossible to—”

+

“I know.” She shivered, and Neyter put an arm around her. “Thank you.”

+

“I wasn’t going to let that happen, Betty. I’m a little fond of you.” He sighed and glanced around. “I better go extend the hotel stay before all the rooms are filled. A lot of people didn’t get on.”

+

She went with him to ensure his room was still available, and then they stood awkwardly, not sure what to say. Finally, Neyter sighed. “Look, I know Rodney comes home today, so you can go. I’ll be fine. I mean, I can go socialize with the rest that are stuck here.”

+

Betty nodded. “The thing is… I do have to go. But I’ll be back tomorrow for a bit. I have work, and then Rodney is taking me out—”

+

“It’s okay. Come when you can. I’ll be here.”

+

Betty returned home, relief flooding through her when Rodney was there waiting. She wanted her life back. She wanted normalcy back. There was no room in her world for other worlds, for learning differences, for being attracted to a man that at the same time irritated and even repulsed her. She was not deep enough to maneuver such complications.

+

The next day, she found time between her job and dinner with Rodney to stop in and visit with Neyter. As he got close and whispered how much he missed her, Betty felt that pull. But she stopped herself, smiling slightly and mumbling how she hoped he was adjusting. He nodded and stepped back.

+

She visited when she could for the next week, always maintaining a distance. And one day, she found him hopping from one foot to another, his face beaming. “Guess what I discovered I can do?”

+

“What’s that?” She had to smile herself, his energy infectious.

+

He broke out in song, his voice loud and clear, the notes perfect. Her smile widened. He was good, and he seemed so pleased with himself. When he finished, she laughed. “That’s wonderful. Did you not know you could sing so well?”

+

Neyter shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. We, my world, we can’t sing there. We don’t have singing voices. I don’t mean that we sing bad. We just don’t sing. That’s why it confused me that you guys make your own music. But here, I have that singing ability. And I also discovered that the music we hear, that music comes from this world. It somehow filters into our air, it plays.”

+

“Oh!” She thought about it for a few moments. “That makes sense I guess.”

+

“I don’t think I want to leave.”

+

Those words caused her to grow still, panic gripping her stomach and chilling her blood. Not leave? What did that mean for her? Did he expect—

+

“I don’t expect you to stick around. I know you have a life beyond this. I get that. I mean, I’m really fond of you. I could honestly fall for you. But I somehow get the feeling that you aren’t as on board with that.”

+

Betty stopped herself from reassuring him. Because the truth was, she did have Rodney. She had a life that was full of her world. There was no room for anything from Neyter’s one, including Neyter. Instead, she rose up on her toes and gave him a soft, quick kiss, forcing a smile.

+

He nodded, not appearing surprised. “I want to stay here no matter what happens between us. So no pressure on your end. I heard that people from my world venture out here and lead pretty normal lives.”

+

This time, she shook her head. “Oh no! It’s dangerous.”

+

“I know. I know the dangers, have heard about the hot spots. But what’s life without a little risk?”

+

She shuddered at that. She did not want any more risks. This meeting was enough. Almost getting forced onto that train was enough. The mere thought of living a life outside the norm shocked her and horrified her.

+

It was the last time Betty visited Neyter. He had his plans, his dreams, and she did not want him to mistake her as a part of that.

+

But as time went on, Betty found she could not get him out of her mind. His touch, his voice, that accent! She remembered the conversations about art and creating. And while he spoke about himself a lot, she realized it was the excitement of sharing himself with her, of sharing the past and his ideas and the similarities they shared.

+

And she remembered how he risked his own trip home to save her. He got stranded here just to ensure her safety, and she remembered how he had immediately held her and soothed in his gentle voice, “You’re okay.” Sometimes that echoed in her dreams, and she woke up reaching for him, only to find Rodney, who was becoming more and more distant.

+

Finally, Rodney took her out to dinner and, while secluded in what would have been considered a dark, romantic corner of the restaurant, he confessed, “I’ve met someone.”

+

She waited for the rage to boil up inside of her, but instead Betty realized she had no right to be mad. No matter how people sugarcoated those meetings in the station with talk of the other world and it not being real, she knew it had been. The feelings, the attraction—it was all authentic. And she had experienced it.

+

So she let Rodney go with a smile and an amicable split of belongings. And she set off to find Neyter at the station. It had been a few months, and the train was up and running, the portal back open. And Neyter was gone. His room was now occupied by a graying man, his smile wide as he opened the door, a woman in the background.

+

She assumed Neyter had left, gone back to the world he knew.

+

But the next month she was passing by a television, and a familiar sound stopped her in her tracks. Looking in the store window, she saw Neyter on the television, a guitar in his hands, a microphone near his mouth. The crowd was going wild. And she smiled.

+

He had left the station. Just the other way.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Stranded at the Station” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Trisha McKee

+

+ + Author image of Trisha McKee + + + Trisha McKee resides in a small town in Pennsylvania after being stranded at the station. Since April 2019, her work has appeared in over 60 publications, including Scribe, The Oddville Press, Horror Magazine, Night to Dawn, J.J. Outre Review, Tablet Magazine, Hybrid Fiction, several anthologies, and more. Her debut novel Beyond the Surface was released through Breaking Rules Publishing in May 2020. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and her website.

+

© Trisha McKee 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Pawel L., Daria Shevtsova, Sebastian Voortman, and Travis Rupert.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/thy-servant-death.html b/issue-24/thy-servant-death.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..71d0df06 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/thy-servant-death.html @@ -0,0 +1,349 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Thy Servant, Death — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Thy Servant, Death

+

Scott J. Couturier

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Thy Servant, Death by +
+ + + + +

I + +t was known that the king of Aoravia had killed his son.

+

It was whispered by those of the court that the two had been down in the catacombs, offering joint sacrifice, but what occurred—how and why the prince was slain—went unknown beyond nebulous speculation. All particulars eluded common concurrence: there were many theories. The people of the well-to-do towns and the nomads of the plains and the folk of the bog villages all had their own versions of the telling, some fabulous and grotesque, some scandalous and shameful, some humorous, even bawdily comedic.

+

In certain regions it was averred the king had killed his sole heir for losing his best hound in a hunt, casting him to the bloodthirsty pack as penance. Others whispered there had been a foiled coup, the prince seeking to depose his aged father, who had already reigned for forty-three years. Others still said it had all been an accident, an arrow fired awry or wounded beast flushed too suddenly from the undergrowth. None, of course, knew the truth.

+

Only the king of Aoravia knew—and briefly his Queen, hastened to her deathbed in a month’s time by the knowledge.

+

He was old now indeed, the prince his solitary offspring, destined to occupy the porphyritic throne once his father joined the Revered Pantheon of Ancestors. But now there would be no inheritance, no gentle succession of the sapphire-gilt crown.

+

A sense of dark, ever-more-restless expectation brooded over the countryside as the king’s health grew yearly more dire. His subjects barricaded themselves indoors at night, lighting warding fires, as bands of ruffians marshaled in the hills, waiting to sweep down on Aoravia as soon as her sovereign breathed his last. It was many hundred years since that fair country was sacked, decades since her armies saw concerted military action beyond the banalities of pomp and parade. A swollen kingdom, ripe for the picking: all that remained was for her sovereign, heirless, to die.

+

The king knew all of this well. Fretful and cross in his dotage, frail in both body and spirit, twice daily he went tottering to the shrines of his ancestors, the great and terrible kings of his race, to offer up a sacrifice of fat and spices. His cracked voice would raise in orison: intoning prayers to each long-dead sire, he begged that Aoravia be spared at his death, also pleading for some diversion to distract him from the doom hovering ever-nearer over his lands, his subjects, his own soul.

+

Early in the year—yet winter—the necromancer came to court.

+

She wore black figure-mummifying robes, making it impossible to see her face or make out the slightest particulars of her physique; only her voice betrayed her sex. Emerging by night out of the Southern Wastelands, where no good thing grows, she presented herself before the king, bowing and introducing herself as Oola-Saggath of the Midnight Sisterhood.

+

“I come bearing a gift,” she said, in muffled portentous tones, “a boon to distract the king in his time of darkest, bleakest need. For the god which I serve has heard his prayer, and offers reprieve.”

+

Swaying on his throne, king frowned. Not long past he would have ordered a necromancer—or any practitioner of the magical arts—put to an instant, zealous death. However, after murdering his son by his own hand he’d sought out the services of every witch, sorcerer, hedge-wizard, diviner, shaman, soothsayer, necromancer, and seer within a thousand leagues, inviting them to come test their obscure rites on the prince’s corpse. His perverse summons evoked dismay in the people of Aoravia, taken as portent of the kingdom’s inevitable fall.

+

Still, many nursed hope that one charlatan or another would succeed in resurrecting the king’s self-slain bloodline—but, magic was weak in those days. Finally, one of the necromancers absconded with the prince’s spell-scarred remains, and the fiasco was stricken from the royal records. The king ordered a gaudy tomb sealed up in the catacombs, inscribed but empty.

+

Now, the king narrowed his rheumy eyes as he stared down at Oola-Saggath. He didn’t recognize the name, but this was unsurprising: many practitioners of the black arts worked pseudonymously. The court, breathless, stood in nervous anticipation of his decree.

+

Then, “Show me this reprieve,” he said, words emerging as a mumble between wine-stained lips. He made no inquiry as to which god the necromancer served.

+

The black mage smiled.

+

A snap of her fingers, and the throne room resounded with the sharp rattling of bone on bone. A skeleton—walking free and unaided, wholly devoid of flesh—entered the chamber, footfalls clacking loudly on the red-veined marble floor. Atop its skull sat a crooked, moth-eaten miter, denoting the priesthood of some archaic religious sect. Its death’s-head grin set the courtiers to gasping and muttering as it advanced to stand rigidly before the king.

+

It bowed, then executed a neat upwards-jump and heel-click, spun in a circle, and began feverishly to dance, bones jangling and gnashing at every appallingly graceful movement. A waltz. A crude, energetic peasant’s round. A quick spiral jig. The skeleton’s jaw flapped and clacked each time its unshod feet left the marble.

+

The king stared in awe at this outlandish gift. The necromancer grinned widely, her sharpened teeth glistening like a sickle in the darkness of her cowl, and said, “See? I bring Death itself to caper and jest for thee, o noble and long-suffering king!”

+

The king of Aoravia leaned back on his throne and barked out a dry laugh. A grating sound, attenuated, almost unnatural: his gaiety was unused to use. Turning to his steward, he commanded Oola-Saggath be laden down with all manner of priceless gifts from the palace vault. “For,” he said, eyes sweeping over his astonished subjects, “Death has long been my enemy. Creeping ever-closer, hiding in shadows, whispering threats on the North Wind. Far better, I say, to have Death jeté here for the amusement of all—indeed, Death shall become my cup-bearer, that it may never again leave my sight!”

+

So it was done. The grinning, obsequious necromancer was laden down with treasures and returned the next night to her nameless abode in the Wastes. The skeleton—tireless, in the way of dead things—was given the king’s goblet to bear, and stood always at his right hand, eyeless sockets peering sardonically at all who came to issue grievance or beg for favor. In the shadow of that mirthful effigy of Death, the king regained some of his hale goodwill, though he became ever-crueler towards criminals, the castle’s chopping block dyed black by ample use.

+

With the return of the king’s levity, his health improved. The skeleton became the highlight of court—he would have it arrayed in all manner of finery, or in a peasant’s dingy dung-stained burlap, and command it to dance for hours on end while the court looked on in commingled fascination and dismay. The only commonality of its costume was the miter it wore on arrival, for this proved impossible to remove. Foreign dignitaries were treated to performances, and told that the king held Death on a leash. Eventually, this rumor reached the mustering brigands in the hills, and they slumped away with many a mumble and dark grimace, intent on finding weaker kingdoms to raven.

+

That spring and summer the king seldom thought of his son. After the mysterious slaying he’d subsequently brooded, dimming the lambency of the sapphire-gilt crown: he poisoned the land and its people with the guilt of his atrocious deed. But now, as the skeleton tirelessly pranced for his amusement, death’s-head grinning, a lightness stole over the kingdom, an almost-nonsensical surety of disaster averted.

+

That spring, trees and fields blossomed with vigor, the rivers flush with sharp, clear, cold water. There were many births among the cattle—for two weeks every hen laid at least one double-yolk a day. Word reached court that the bandits had fled their haunts in the hills, making travel safe again. That summer, bazaars came to Aoravia, brightly colored caravans trundling into the king’s city bearing goods and ideas from far-off lands, exotic isles. Much talk centered on the venerable monarch, who many (since he had mastered Death itself) assumed to be immortal. They gossiped that he would reign forever.

+

The summer passed in a haze of alternating heat-stupor and frenzy. As a northerly realm, Aoravia’s few months of marrow-stirring warmth were to be treasured. For his part, the king never believed mortality was his to command. The mitered skeleton was obviously the remains of a revered cleric, animated by the necromancer in a fit of blasphemous inspiration. Still, the symbol of the thing swayed him to feeling again the master of himself, the master of his fate and lands. He even began to wonder if he was still capable of siring a child, and set his steward to bring him girls from the country to test his age-diminished lust.

+

Throughout that glorious, honey-jeweled summer the skeleton danced with an inexhaustible grace, grin unwavering. The king and his courtiers devised all manner of parlor games to play with the thing—releasing dogs from the kennel to chase it comically around the courtyard, or tossing it from the lookout’s tower to smash dramatically apart on the rocks, only to reassemble with a quick, jaunty hop. At other times, a more solemn attitude was affected, the skeleton dressed in flowing funereal robes and trundled before the court in a black carriage draped with red-and-purple samite, the king throwing withered flowers to the effigy as it passed.

+

Some, at the king’s discretion, took to prising off the thing’s finger bones and swallowing them. The bones wriggled inside their stomach and bowels, offering a unique sensation until they were excreted and reattached. Privately, this technique even helped the king overcome his persistent constipation.

+

Finally, in late autumn, approached the next anniversary of the prince’s murder. Desiccate brown-gold leaves still clung to the oak trees, rattling with a persistence matched by the skeleton’s mad pirouettes. Hallowe’en night brought dark thoughts to the king’s mind; for the first time he banished the dancing undead from his court, retaining a living cup bearer. All that November his teeth chattered as his spirits blackened—the upcoming anniversary spread like a bloodstain in his mind, plaguing both dreams and waking memory. At last he resolved to pay tribute to his slain child by laying a wreath of remembrance before his empty tomb.

+

The night of the anniversary, he made secret preparations. The wreath he wove himself, adorning it with asters, phlox, and wilted roses from the royal conservatory. Sans servant or guard, adviser or cleric, he slipped from his royal cells by a secret way, descending the narrow corkscrew passage which led by uneven degrees to the catacombs. He carried a torch to light his path, the rags soaked with priceless funereal resins; their miasma clouded the passage, set the king to sneezing.

+

At last, after much scrabbling and labored breath, he reached his son’s white-marble tomb. It gleamed in the torchlight, blazoned with heraldry of the royal Aoravian line, inscribed with murals depicting events in the prince’s life—save no death-frieze, as was elsewise customary. The king sighed and bowed his head, grief adding to the debility wrought by unaccustomed exertion. Frozen breath lingered about his face in a wraith-like cloud as tears trickled down channels of sorrow and bitterness graven on his cheeks, catching in his beard’s silver tangle. In those fleshly lines his son’s death was memorialized, if not on the stone of his tomb. In his mind’s eye the king replayed anew the horrors of that unspeakable night, the wreath trembling in his frail hands, twined grapevines crackling.

+

Something stirred in the near-darkness, neither rat nor ghost.

+

The king rose in startled fear, turned and held his resinous torch aloft. He beheld the skeleton, the necromancer’s gift, firelight playing over the barrel of its ribcage and flickering in the depthless hollows of its sockets. The thing ambulated towards him, teeth clacking and chattering violently, long fleshless fingers outstretched. The king gasped and fell back before this apparition, though he did not flee, still thinking himself its master.

+

The skeleton drew nearer, an inner phosphorescence now lighting its sockets. Ivory arms rose to its skull and, for the first time, it removed and tossed aside its accustomed miter. Without the headdress’s gross exaggeration, the skeleton looked to be no taller than an average man—no taller, indeed, than the king’s own son had been.

+

The skull turned, death’s-head grin fixed, and the king for the first time cried out in fear, collapsing amid a strew of loose bones.

+

He could see the cracked skull, see the ceremonial dagger lodged deep in the brainpan. He knew the glint of that blood-hungry ruby—knew the noisome feel of that black leather grip. But, how could it be possible? He had flung the accursed thing out to sea!

+

The skeleton clattered as it came to stand over the quivering, weeping king. “It is I,” came a hollow voice, deep and dry as a desert sepulcher. “My king, my father, it is I.”

+

The king wept inconsolably, not even flinching as the skeleton reached down to grasp him by his wrists, exerting a cold and merciless pressure. Drawing the knife from its own skull, it began to flense the flesh and viscera from the royal person, discarding the stripped bones in a heap.

+

Now at last the king tried to scream, but the thing tore his shrunken lungs asunder, and soon enough he knew no more.

+

T + +he next day in court all noted a change come over the king. He stood (so it seemed to everyone) both straighter and taller than in recollected times, eyes burning with a vivid, almost youthful brightness. His skin was bruised and puffy-looking, as if from a beating: he confided to his closest courtiers he had fallen down a flight of steps the previous night while going to visit his son’s tomb.

+

The sapphire-gilt crown, which often teetered embarrassingly on the king’s splotchy pate, now sat cockeyed on a too-bulbous brow. That his face possessed a notably different shape, that he walked with a new (yet strangely familiar) stride, none could deny: some noted a small black-handled knife sheathed at his waist, fret with a glinting ruby. Yet, his voice was his own, his words were his own. Even when he laughed uproariously upon seating himself on the porphyritic throne, no suspicion was roused—for, as has been observed, magic was weak in that time.

+

The king composed himself before opening the morning’s proceedings with a few ceremonial words. This token of familiarity put the court at ease, and before long the king of Aoravia was meting out sentences, hearing grievances, and granting royal favors as of old. Still, all noted something alien about his composure and character—that shimmer in his eyes, those eerily familiar-but-foreign motions! Even the long snowy flow of his beard seemed touched with an auburn tint.

+

As the sun climbed towards midday and the court prepared to adjourn for refreshments, the king suddenly clapped his mottled, too-long-fingered hands together. “But wait! It has been over a month since my loyal cup-bearer deigned to entertain us. I confess, I tired of the skeleton’s antics for a while… my mind has been unsettled, spirit fraught with unrest. But last night I made amends with the prince, my most grievously murdered son. And so, I would have a dance before we feast!”

+

Again he clapped his hands, and a desultory clattering emerged from the shadows behind his throne. Something humped and brittle shuffled into the commingled sun-and-brazier-light, the tines of its rib cage crusted with bony tumors, limbs pitted by age. It crept forward at a mendicant’s pace, legs shuddering violently, until the king clapped his hands a third irritable time.

+

At this commanding sound the skeleton tried to take a short leap, preparatory to a single simple dance step, and crumbled in pieces to the marble.

+

The poor parts wriggled and twitched futilely, trying to recohere, until a violent wind blasted through the court from all southerly facing windows. The wind tore at the shards, tumbling them about, reducing them to plumes of foul-smelling dust that rose and whipped spectrally about the throne room as the smiling monarch looked on.

+

At last the powder blew away, vanishing with the phantom winds back into the south.

+

A confounding silence followed, broken at last by the king’s laughter. “Would you look at that!” he roared, slapping a discolored hand on his thigh with all the vigor of youth. “It seems Death itself has grown old, perishing in my stead.”

+

He motioned for his cup, draining its contents in three quick gulps. The king then rose and decreed, “For her peerless gift, Oola-Saggath shall be recalled to serve Aoravia as my most trusted vizier and adviser. Now—and for all ages.”

+

Ripples of his decree spread throughout the countryside. That nightfall Oola-Saggath (who indeed went by many names) returned to court, descending on a thunderous pitch-black pall that would not abate for seven generations.

+
    +
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+

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/winter.html b/issue-24/winter.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e5ab155f --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/winter.html @@ -0,0 +1,458 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Winter — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Winter

+

David Whitmarsh

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Winter by +
+ + + + +

A + + melody ran counterpoint to Beth Simpson’s every movement as she picked her way from one snare to the next. Often the traps yielded nothing, but today she had already caught a plump little rat, and now another trap gave up a wren. She placed the bird in her collecting bag and struck out at a tangent through the trees searching for shoots, buds, berries, fungi, or the track of some surviving rodent where she might set another snare. She knew these woods. Every barren tree, every hollow. The empty burrows of rabbits long gone, the abandoned nests of migrating birds that had not returned for a decade.

+

It was July the seventh, her fifteenth birthday. She had been six years old when the sky darkened and the world was covered by a grey blanket of fine ash. She remembered the vivid greens and blues of the old world just as she remembered the brightly coloured picture books of the child she had been. But now, Spring was coming. The signs were there: the shoots and buds, sparse and feeble after the enduring winter, were each day a little stronger. The sulphurous yellow of the sky was streaked with blue, letting through a hint of warmth. It had been months since the last serious snowfall and there had been no frost for weeks. This wasn’t the first time that the bitter cold had eased, but the news now was that Thrihnukagigur was quiet.

+

Some trees hung on waiting for the long overdue Spring, but many would never again show green. Each year brought a greater crop of those winter fungi that live on dead wood. A harvest of ink-caps from the usual site went into the decoy bag on her right hip; they would go into a soup before they dissolved into a slime.

+

A cluster of velvet shank caught her eye, orange bright against grey-brown bark. She had to climb a little to reach them, but soon they were in the collecting bag on her left hip. With the takings of the snares she would manage a meal for her and Mr. Carnegie. A meagre one, but some days she had returned with less, or with nothing.

+

She climbed to the margin of the wood at the crest of the escarpment. Below, beyond the scarred and sterile fields, the town filled the valley. A few desolate figures scurried along empty streets. Half the houses were empty, some crumbling, some burnt out. The grey of walls and roofs and streets and people broken only by the artificial light leaking from the windows of a pair of high-rise farms, bright against the grey twilight.

+

It was not enough, never enough. There was hunger in the town as much as in the countryside around. After the sky had darkened and the crops failed, the townspeople had formed a militia, set up barricades. They would not share their precious resources.

+

Her mother had brought the family to live here when Beth was a baby. Before the volcano, they would go foraging for the plenty that the green forest provided. When the eruption began and ash and sulphur spread the world over, her mother had understood what it meant. Beth remembered the arguments between her parents. Her father had been one of those in the village frightened by the barren fields, the dying sheep. Her mother knew what the land could provide even in the harshest winter. Her logic was implacable: with the town barricaded against them, their only choice would be the squalid, sprawling camps, where the hungry would be concentrated, where there would be the greatest need, the greatest suffering. Her father had left, alone, they had survived, and Beth had learned her lessons. They were often hungry, but they did not starve.

+

She didn’t know whether he was one of those who died in the camps, or if he was loaded onto one of the hastily contrived, ill-equipped starships to jump through years of time and space to an uncertain future. She had cried when he left, cried at his parting and at her parents’ bitter words.

+

But her mother had not cried, and Beth had never cried since.

+

M + +r. Carnegie was nothing if not fastidious, refusing the lessons if she came crusted with the grime of her foraging, though it was her skill and effort that fed them both. She went home first to her little cottage, hidden in the copse at the edge of the village, washed in cold water and changed into clean clothes from her mother’s wardrobe. Baggy blouse and loose trousers, taken up with her own hand-stitching. Beth fell short of her mother’s stature by a good thirty centimetres.

+

The walk past the empty houses of the village always made her nervous. She hurried as she always did past the James’s house. Harry James had been in her class, back when the village school was still running. One day he hadn’t come in. His mother, a big woman even then, had seemed unconcerned. Later she had tried to entice Beth in. Harry was sick in bed and would love to play with her. Beth ran away. Later, the police had come and found the bones buried in the garden, the flesh in the freezer.

+

There were no police out here now. What little law there was didn’t venture from the towns, just as what was left of government and army was too busy keeping the turbines and the fusion plants and the power grid running to ever raise its head.

+

There had been a population a little under five billion, once. The orbital habitats and the buried cities of the Moon and Mars housed tens of millions. No-one really knew what the numbers were now. Off-world, they took as many as they could, but too few to make much difference. Escape to Armstrong, Tranquillity, or one of the great spinning orbital cities was only a dream now for any Earth dweller.

+

News came occasionally of the chaos in other parts of the world, where the collapse had been more complete. Around here, the worst they’d seen was when the countryside was ravaged by waves of desperate refugees, who lacked the skills to survive from the woods and wound up in the camps. They should think themselves lucky.

+

Mr. Carnegie lived in the old vicarage. A large Victorian house next to the former church. There was a well-concealed cellar in which he would hide when the scavengers came. The front door was left unlocked to save them the trouble of breaking it down, but there was nothing left for the likes of them to take. What interest would they have in a mouldering orchestra?

+

They spoke little while she prepared the day’s meal and fresh soup for the decoy bag. After they had eaten they went into his music room. The grand piano with its smashed lid lay tilted on two legs beneath the cracks in the high ceiling’s ornate plaster-work.

+

It was her mother who had first brought Beth to Mr. Carnegie, too. Her previous teacher had started her on the violin, but after only a couple of lessons Mr. Carnegie had roared in frustration, “Too much! You are too big for this.”

+

She thought he was taunting her, but he wasn’t speaking of her physical size. He fetched out a half-size cello. “You may think it is like a violin turned around, but you will start again. There is much to unlearn.”

+

He sat her down, showed her how to cradle the instrument, to stretch her arm up to the fingerboard. The first time she drew the bow across the C string and felt the deep, growling vibration pass from wood to flesh and into her bones, she had been enthralled.

+

He was a hard teacher. Demanding, indomitable. She raged against her mother, Just surviving is hard enough. After her mother’s death, she turned her anger against Mr. Carnegie, saying the same thing. His reply had been calm and quiet: And for what do we survive?

+

Sometimes she stormed out in anger, promising never to return. But it was too hard, the music had permeated the core of her being, so that every movement was a melody, every thought a chord, every mood a key. Then, too, she felt sorry for him; but he would accept nothing from her except in payment for his teaching.

+

Some days the scavenging was too poor, the hunger too much. She lacked the will to play, he to instruct. Sometimes she had to stop and wait while fits of coughing wracked his emaciated frame. It seemed lately that even though the returns of her foraging had become more plentiful and she had a little more flesh on her bones, he had become thinner still, and weaker.

+

A + +s she grew, she had progressed from half-size to three-quarter, then to a full-size instrument, though even now she was barely big enough for it. Each day she would practice for an hour, two, three. A piece she knew, or a something new.

+

Today, he selected for her a piece from the twenty-second century. “Delaney,” he said, as the manuscript appeared on the display before her. Relief and joy warmed her as she started to play. A torrent of chromatic cascades and subtle counterpoints. Precise, formal, structured; as with Bach, the passion that lay hidden beneath the mathematically precise veneer struck deep in Beth. When she lowered the bow and raised her head at the end, he nodded.

+

“Good,” he said.

+

As always he had recorded her playing, and afterwards he played it back. Until a year ago, it was he that offered analysis and criticism, a relentless critique of every mistake, every weakness of technique. Since then, he had watched silently as she dissected her own performance.

+

“You have promise,” he said, “but without the chance to play with others, you can never reach your true potential.” As he often did, he sent the recording to his grandson who studied at the New Vienna Conservatory. A surprise that there was still such a thing as a Conservatory in this blighted world. Was there also in Vienna an Old Conservatory?

+

At the end of the day, she took the instrument to the safety of Mr. Carnegie’s cellar. He was too weak now to carry it himself. She went to leave, to head for her own home in the woods, but turned to him on the doorstep.

+

“Spring is coming,” she said. “Soon.”

+

He nodded slowly. “It will take more than one spring to heal this land.” His eyes swept the tired landscape behind her and returned to stare directly into her own. “When there is plenty again, then everyone you meet, you will think to yourself, ‘How did you survive? Who did you abandon, or betray, or kill? Did you taste human flesh?’”

+

He turned away. “Spring is coming, but I will not be here to see it.”

+

He closed the door.

+

She walked away, steeped in discord.

+

T + +he next morning Beth rose before dawn, as always. She dressed, as always, in loose dark trousers, layers on top for warmth, a dark jersey. Warmth, darkness, freedom of movement. She slung the empty bag over her head to hang on her left side. The filled decoy bag crossed over on her right. When she left, she paused by the small mound where she had buried the burnt, splintered bones, all that she had found of her mother after she had been caught. A single blade of grass poked through the dead soil.

+

The previous evening’s mood settled into her as a slow melody in a minor key as she crept soundless between the near-naked trees. She went first to her grub farm, left undisturbed for three weeks, time enough for some small morsels to be burrowing through the rotting wood. A hedgehog curled itself into a tight ball as she lifted the bark cover. A hedgehog. How long since she had last caught one? How many were left out here?

+

She lifted it, rested the bristly ball on the palm of her left hand, and drew her knife from its sheath. For a long moment she knelt, ready to cut the life from the small creature. A mangy crow taunted her, out of reach in the upper branches of a moribund lime tree. Then she laid the spiny creature down again. Take it all, and there will be nothing the next day—one of her mother’s lessons. She picked through the friable fibres of crumbling wood for the larger pale grubs. A few she popped in her mouth and swallowed whole. The rest went into her bag, and the bark covered the hedgehog once more.

+

In a dark gully on a west facing slope a snare was gone, torn from the dead sapling where it had been secured. There was a dampness on the dark ground. She probed it with her fingers and lifted them to her nose, sniffed, tasted the dampness on her fingertip. The blood of some creature.

+

She crept onward with heightened senses, the melodies in her mind stilled to the silence of the wood.

+

A movement in the distance down the slope.

+

Footfalls, voices.

+

She crept up and away, finding the more open spaces where she could move without disturbing the branches, keeping low to the ground. She crouched in a hollow and listened. The sounds were moving away, to her right. North. She worked her way south along the slope, then a sharp odour caught her throat.

+

A scent mark. Dogs.

+

She took her knife again in her hand and held it reversed so she would not impale herself if she tripped. She crouched, listening. The breeze picked up, rustling the dry branches. If they came, it would be from downwind. She turned and ran into the wind, always bearing away to the left, to the south, away from the people she had heard passing by.

+

A lull in the breeze and she could pick out the sound of paws padding behind. Dogs pacing her. Others would be overtaking to either side, but she had no time to look as she searched the quickest path, skipping over roots and branches. They would be on her soon.

+

That tree. Now.

+

One foot on the root, she propelled herself upwards. Arms wrapped around a stout branch, her head banged into the trunk, scraping her cheek. She twisted upwards, wrapped her legs around the branch and hauled herself up. Not high enough. She stood and leaned forward to grasp a higher branch and swung herself up again. Only then did she allow the pain and dizziness of the blow to her head to rise. A long rasping note, a break in the rhythm.

+

They came slinking from the shadows. The biggest, perhaps the pack leader, stopped at the foot of the tree and glared up at her, drooling, deep black with dark brown markings around the neck and face, ribs showing through the short fur. Even in its current state of near starvation it must have weighed as much as her.

+

The rest of the pack sat or lay spread around the base of the tree in their various sizes and colours and coats. All were thin, some showed bald patches, oozing scabs. They waited in silence with their eyes fixed on her.

+

She settled to wait them out, making herself as comfortable as she could. She rested her back against the trunk and slowed her breathing, quieted her heart with a long, slow, repetitive melody. Leaves were budding on the branches around her.

+

The sun hid behind a deep overcast, a twilight gloom at midday. The sentry furthest from her, short, light brown fur, pricked up its ears and stood, gazing into the trees. Another, mangy long-haired grey and white, did the same.

+

The silence of the woods was shattered by a gunshot, and the first of the sentinels fell.

+

The pack melted into the trees.

+

Beth sat on the branch, mute, breath held. Even the music in her mind was still, save the heavy tympanum of her heartbeat.

+

The first to appear stepped through the naked brush with exaggerated caution, as if raising his feet high would obviate the racket he made with each footfall. His rifle was held to his shoulder and he swung it from one side to the other, so fast he would never have seen anything that might have been hidden. There was a comic look of intense concentration on his gaunt weasel features. On the sleeve of his tatty and stained dark blue coat he wore the red armband of the town militia.

+

He was followed by another, dark skinned, who walked up to the dead dog with his gun resting in the crook of his arm. He crouched down and prodded the bloody wound in the animal’s flank, then wiped his hand on his jacket.

+

“Oh, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson. Fucked up again,” he said, shaking his head. He stood and ran the fingers of his hand through his thick black hair.

+

Weasel-face, presumably Johnson, turned his head to glare at the other. “What?” he whined.

+

“Right in the gut, a bloody mess, that’s what. Half inedible. Why didn’t you shoot it in the fucking head?”

+

Johnson just growled and carried on his caricature of a huntsman.

+

Another voice followed them from the trees. “Light a fire, Johnson, they won’t show themselves now. Aziz, see what you can salvage from the carcass.”

+

The voice was followed by a figure in somewhat less dishevelled clothing. Short, older. The loose sagging jowls of a face that had lost much fat. He did not carry a rifle, but had a buttoned holster on his belt.

+

He sat himself on a log and chewed a piece of root while watching the other two work. Beth maintained her stillness, her silence. She was well practised at it, and in the gloom, in her clothing as dull as the bark of the tree and a screen of budding branches before her, she would not be easy to see. Besides, people seldom looked up without reason.

+

Johnson built his small fire at the far side of the small clearing. She could slip down, hang by her hands from the branch and drop to the ground. If she didn’t injure herself she’d have a head start. Through these woods she could outrun them, lose them. If she didn’t hurt herself, and if they were not too quick with their guns. She waited.

+

Aziz used a fierce looking blade to cut and skin a haunch from the dog, then to cut thin slices from it. Each slice he coiled loosely and impaled on a stick. Weasel-face Johnson wandered away a few metres. He leant his rifle against a tree and turned to piss in the leafless bushes.

+

“What are they up to, those regulars, then?” he called over his shoulder.

+

Aziz positioned his dog kebabs over the fire. “Powerline maintenance, isn’t it?” His rifle was on the ground next to him. But Jowls had taken his handgun from his belt, and was weighing it in his hand, inspecting it.

+

Johnson zipped up and turned around, facing Beth’s tree. She held her breath, willing his weasel face to turn away, to not look up. “That’s a way south, the patrol was heading north.” He picked up his gun and sauntered back to sit by the fire.

+

Jowls looked at Johnson, gun still in his hand. “They’re looking for some off-worlder. To lift them out.”

+

“Like the regular army have nothing better to do?” Aziz leaned forward to turn the roasting meat. “Baby-sitting those off-world fuckers. What are they doing for us?”

+

A light gust brought the smell of cooking dog-flesh to Beth’s nose, making her salivate, and stinging smoke to her eyes, making them water. She squeezed them shut a moment while it cleared.

+

Aziz muttered something under his breath, and Jowls stood. “Makes no difference what you and I think, Aziz. When the off-worlders want something, they get it. One interesting question is what they’re doing around here.”

+

Johnson nodded. “Arse-end of nowhere.”

+

Johnson and Aziz sat hunched by the fire as Jowls circled around them. He stopped by the tree where Beth was concealed, almost directly beneath her, facing towards the fire.

+

Aziz tilted his head to look askance at Jowls. “You said one interesting question. Is there another?”

+

Jowls cast his gaze around. “Yes. Indeed.” He spoke quietly, as if to no-one in particular. He disappeared from Beth’s view, behind her tree. She heard his feet disturb the desiccated litter of the woodland floor. The sound stopped, started again. He came back into view a little way to her left.

+

Aziz lifted one of the sticks from the fire and blew on the blackened sliver of flesh, then tentatively nibbled at it. “It’ll do,” he declared. Johnson grabbed another stick and tore into the meat. Jowls walked around behind them and Aziz offered him the third piece.

+

Jowls shook his head, a ghoulish grin spread across his face. “You have it,” he said. He sat and watched them work their way through their meal.

+

Mr Carnegie’s words came to mind: What did you do to survive? She thought again of dropping and running—Johnson and Aziz both had their rifles lying on the ground beside them—but Jowls was facing her way, his handgun in its holster, unbuttoned, and his right hand rested on the faded denim of his thigh close by.

+

When they had finished, Johnson carved off the other haunch from the dog’s carcass and tied it to his belt while the other two watched with arms crossed. Aziz made to head off towards Beth’s right, but Jowls whistled, and pointed, and Aziz changed direction, walked beneath the branch where Beth hunched silently against the trunk. Johnson followed. Jowls kicked out the fire, glanced around, then whistled again.

+

The sound of feet in the litter stopped.

+

“The other interesting question,” Jowls said, “is what that pack of dogs were waiting for. Either of you think of that?” He looked up into the tree, directly at Beth. “You can come down now, kid.”

+

B + +eth didn’t move, didn’t answer. No way to drop and run now, one ahead, two behind. Her heart pounded, her throat tightened as she watched to see what Jowls would do.

+

He took the gun from its holster. “One way or another, you are coming down.”

+

She clambered down from one branch to the next, looking around as if to check her footing. Reluctantly, as late as she dared, she dropped to the ground. Johnson grabbed her arms from behind and pinned them painfully at her back.

+

Jowls took the knife from her belt and looked her up and down. “Well, well. A little girl.” His eyes gleaned, the ghoulish grin returned, exposing a gap where two teeth were missing.

+

Johnson’s right arm reached around to squeeze her small breast. “Not so little.”

+

Jowls scowled. “Later, Johnson. We’ve wasted enough time. Check her bags and pockets, Aziz.”

+

Aziz tugged both bags over her head, and Beth winced as a strap snagged on her ear. He tipped the heap of squirming, shiny white grubs from the collecting bag onto the ground. “This what you’ve been living on?” Then he opened the decoy bag and took out the vacuum flask, and a glass half-bottle containing an amber liquid.

+

“Bingo.” He popped off the cup-lid and opened the flask. “Fuck, that smells good. What is it?”

+

She didn’t answer. Johnson tightened his grip on her arm and twisted.

+

“Mushroom soup,” she cried.

+

“Give it to her first,” said Jowls. “There’s mushrooms and there’s mushrooms.”

+

Aziz poured a cupful of the gently steaming liquid and held it out. Johnson released his grip on one arm, and when she made no move to take it pinched the other one fiercely. She waited as long as she could bear it, then took the cup and drank the contents straight down, handed it back and shrugged.

+

The three men took turns and drained the flask completely while Aziz examined the bottle. “What is it?” Johnson asked.

+

“Label’s torn off, but it’s sealed.” said Aziz.

+

“Give it here,” said Jowls, and cracked the seal, sniffing. “Gentlemen, I do believe we have here a half-bottle of whisky. We’ll have a little celebration when we make camp tonight.”

+

As he bound her wrists in front of her, Johnson gave Beth a smile. “Not so little,” he said.

+

A + +ziz lead the way, Johnson pulling Beth by the rope’s end, Jowls in the rear. Dusk came soon enough, wild and vivid reds and oranges plastered the western sky. They stopped and bound her ankles too, left her leaning against a tree as they prepared their camp. Aziz took a folding shovel from his pack and started digging. A long, shallow pit. The whisky passed between them.

+

Then Johnson’s blackened, broken teeth filled Beth’s vision as he squatted in front of her, his leering face red and moist with sweat, whisky and bad breath oozing from him. He slit the cords at her ankles then laid his knife down out of reach and grasped her feet, pulled hard, dragging her down flat on her back.

+

The back of her head cracked against a root and she cried out as a wave of dizziness ran through her—then noises penetrated the darkness. A low call, rustling movement. Sharp pain lanced into the back of Beth’s head as the dizziness passed and she moaned.

+

Jowls hissed, “Shut her up!” and Johnson’s hand clamped hard over her mouth.

+

Jowls and Aziz stood facing two figures silhouetted against the evening sky. One human, one mechanical. The human moved with a swift confidence, a firearm hanging ready from the shoulder. The robot bristled with sensors and armaments, towering half a metre above all of them. Army. Regulars. Aziz picked up his rifle and looked at Jowls, who shook his head firmly.

+

The soldier spoke. A woman. “We’re looking for Carnegie. Old guy, lives around here somewhere.” Jowls and Aziz both shook their heads. She nodded towards where Johnson had Beth pinned down. “What about your captive there? What’s the story?”

+

“Runaway,” Johnson shouted, “we’re taking her back.”

+

The soldier stepped towards him, and Aziz half-raised his rifle. “I wouldn’t,” she said without breaking her stride. The machine crouched with forearms raised, aimed towards Aziz.

+

She stopped two paces from Beth and Johnson. “I’d like to ask her,” she said.

+

“She don’t know anything,” Johnson stammered, sweat dripping from his face, crimson even in the fading light. How much had he drunk? How long it would take?

+

The barrel of the soldier’s gun rose a finger’s width towards Johnson. “I’d like to hear her say that.”

+

“This is an outrage,” yelled Jowls. “This is a militia matter, you have no jurisdiction.”

+

The soldier crouched next to Beth. Her face was round, weathered. Well-fed. She wore a half-smile, but that abruptly faded as her right hand rose to the earpiece of her headset.

+

She stood, turned to her mechanical companion. “They’ve found him,” she called. She glanced back at Beth, frowning, hesitating, then shook her head and trotted away.

+

As the soldier and her companion slipped into the dusk Beth just felt tired, without hope. And for what do we survive? The regulars, they were looking for someone to take off-world. They were looking for Carnegie. I won’t be here to see it. His words the previous evening when she’d spoken of the Spring.

+

Johnson released his grip on Beth and dropped back onto his haunches, shaking his head, raising both hands to his temples. Jowls just stood staring after the soldier warily, then behind him Aziz fell to his knees, leaned forward onto all fours and vomited, loudly, copiously. Johnson jerked in surprise, lost his balance and fell, sprawling—and Beth rolled over onto her belly, fumbling with bound hands for Johnson’s knife, then pushed herself to her feet and ran into the darkening wood, stumbling and tripping and straining to keep her balance. Jowls roared and a shot followed her, wild. She ran down towards a stream. A second shot hit something, a tree, a branch, way up and to her left. She ran to the right and tripped and tumbled, the knife fell from her hands.

+

Footsteps, slow and uncertain. Jowls, it must be. The other two were sick, but it hadn’t got to him yet. She needed the knife, needed to cut the cord that bound her wrists, forced herself to turn and crawled through the leaf litter, straining to see in the darkened hollow, pausing with held breath after each movement, syncopating consonance and dissonance.

+

A rustling to her left. She froze. Waited, breath held tight. A minute of silence, two, and she continued her search.

+

Her hand felt the sharp steel edge, she stretched to find and grip the handle.

+

“What did you do, girl? Was it the whisky?” She pulled herself to her knees and found Jowls standing in a pool of fading light. His handgun was raised and aimed at her head.

+

She mustered her voice. “Maybe it was the dog made them sick.”

+

He stepped closer. “Don’t mess with me, girl. I am really not in the mood.” His lips pulled back, his teeth gleamed dimly. He took a step closer, loomed over her. Beth sprang up, knife clenched in her bound hands, then the gun barrel struck the side of her head and pain flared, darkening all else.

+

When the nausea ebbed Jowls was standing over her, a dark patch spreading on his shirt. His arm jerked, the gun in her face. Beth squeezed her eyes shut and a shot shattered the air, then dead weight fall across her legs. She looked, to find Jowls’s one remaining eye staring blindly into hers. The other eye… Beth looked away.

+

“You okay, honey?” The soldier was kneeling beside her.

+

Beth shook her head and winced with the movement. She didn’t hear the machine’s approach, it was just there standing over her. There were lights, and sounds, and needles. She slipped into unconsciousness as silent and gentle mechanical arms lifted her from the ground.

+

S + +he woke in a bed, aching in her temples, hunger in her belly pushing through the haze of some painkiller. The high ceiling, the bay window, the leafless oak beyond told her she was at the vicarage.

+

“So, I am curious.” It was the soldier, sat by her bedside. “When the shooting brought us back, there were the two of them puking their guts up. How did you manage that?”

+

“Ink-caps.” Beth said, squinting through the mental fog. “I had soup with ink-caps in, they took it.”

+

“Poisonous?”

+

“Not by themselves. But if you drink alcohol…”

+

“Smart.” She stood and crossed the room to the door. “I’ll get Carnegie, you’ll want to say your good-byes.”

+

“He doesn’t owe me anything.” Beth rolled onto her side to face the wall. “Just tell him to go.”

+

“He’s not going anywhere, kid.”

+

“I heard. You were looking for him, they’re taking him off-world.”

+

“I don’t think so, honey. They’ve no place for him. Too old. Too sick, though they’ve arranged a care package. When he’s ready for it there’ll be no pain.”

+

“Too sick?” Beth turned back, propped herself half-upright, but the soldier was already gone, and then the fog rose again and unconsciousness took her.

+

She dreamed of baying dogs, of men with broken teeth and gaping empty eyes, of giants whose roars rattled the windows in their frames, but it was whispered voices that woke her. Firm hands rolled her onto one side.

+

“It’s okay, honey. They’re here.” The soldier’s face swam into view, then a man and a woman: tall, clean-cut, well-fed yet slender, in the traditional white coveralls of medics. One stood by her feet and the other moved to the head of the bed. Before Beth could ask what was happening, they lifted her by hips and shoulders, sliding her from the bed onto a gurney.

+

Mr. Carnegie stood by the door, his face pale and drawn. The gurney moved, its motors whining quietly.

+

“What’s happening?” she said. “Where are you taking me?”

+

The Gurney stopped by the doorway, Mr. Carnegie leaned over her, a frown on his face. “To New Vienna. The orbital habitat. They will treat your injuries, and then you’ll have a place at the Conservatory. They have seen the recordings I made of your playing. You will be safe up there, and you will learn. I can teach you no more.”

+

She shook her head. “No, I’m not going! You won’t manage without me.”

+

“Foolish child.” His voice carried the same tone of exasperation as when she erred in her technique. “I will not survive long with or without you. But what was the point of all these years I spent cajoling and pushing you if you refuse this? For what did you survive?”

+

He receded into the shadows of the hallway, and the gurney followed.

+

The shuttle lay in the dead meadow at the centre of a circle of scorched earth, ringed by soldiers. Their eyes, human and electronic, swept the countryside around. Beth’s soldier walked with her gurney as far as the bottom of the loading ramp. “Good luck, kid,” she said. “Have a good life up there.”

+

There were no windows in the shuttle cabin, just a space for them to secure the gurney and half a dozen seats. As the loading ramp rose up, Beth caught a last glimpse of the vicarage. A pale figure watched back from an upstairs window.

+

Beth lay in silence as one of the medics busied himself hooking up monitors, inserting a cannula to the back of her hand with a friendly smile, saying “This might sting a little.”

+

The other reappeared in the cabin from a door at the front. She crouched beside the gurney. “Pilot says it’ll be about half an hour before we take off. You hungry? Can I get you something to eat while we wait?”

+

The first tear fell down Beth’s cheek like a storm cloud’s first heavy raindrop.

+

By the time the storm passed, the Earth lay far below.

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Spring Man” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

David Whitmarsh

+

+ + Author image of David Whitmarsh + + + David Whitmarsh is a rehabilitated software engineer who now spends his days playing acoustic blues badly and writing. Winter, his first published work, is the backstory of a character in his hopefully forthcoming novel, provisionally titled The Long Fall. David lives in West Sussex with his wife, two cats and a randomly varying subset of his four adult children. You can find him on Twitter as @whitmarshdj.

+

© David Whitmarsh 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Pixabay and Gantas Vaiciulènas.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-24/witches-curse.html b/issue-24/witches-curse.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..72a2c231 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-24/witches-curse.html @@ -0,0 +1,386 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Witches Curse — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 24 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
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+ +

The Witches Curse

+

Matthew Wilson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Witches Curse by +
+ + + + +

obviously we killed Gemma Ryan because she boiled kids down in a pot and sold the fat as soap Prisoners dont care what other Prisoners did for example I shot my sister Carol because she slept with my husband but in Prison we dont stand for that kid killing stuff

+

for her protection the Warden had put Gemma in the Laundry Section folding sheets but she showed no fear when we bribed the Guard and surrounded her in that tiny steam drenched room

+

we had all read stories of her being a Witch of using childrens innards for her potions but we didnt buy into fairytales

+

Gemma smiled when we told her to pray for forgiveness she didnt shriek when we put the sheet over her head nor defended herself when we took turns beating the lumps out of the sheet with Metal Bars

+

it was actually a very uninteresting murder but the four of us swore to have each others back against the Warden we would face the Music together satisfied that we had taken the lowest of the low out of the World

+

and then Marie escaped punishment altogether by hanging herself with a bedsheet

+

the news hit me like a Suckerpunch as she had seemed her usual sweet and confident self the night before we were Lifers so I didnt see what stress another 40 year sentence could have had on her

+

they should have given us a Medal

+

instead they slammed poor Marie in the Oven and buried her ashes in the little Garden out back

+

I cant accept that guilt got to the others little things pile up in the confines of any Cell ready to overwhelm and drive you Mad

+

after suffering insomnia for five nights straight they dragged Elise away in a Straight Jacket when she came out to Roll Call laughing she only calmed down when the Prison Doctor assured her that Witches couldnt invade Dreams in a padded cell

+

for my part I slept like a Baby until Claire said we were Cursed

+

what? I said I had to wrestle my second helping of porridge out of a larger womans paws so I refused to spit up a morsel in surprise

+

Claire crossed herself like a good catholic and stared imploringly at me with wide panicked eyes as if expecting an attack from every corner

+

my Mother warned me about Witches Claire shivered unable to eat her food at Breakfast she seemed gaunter than usual hunched over the Prison table like some bird waiting for fish to disturb surface water

+

I stabbed porridge with my spoon and forcefully said I do NOT believe in Witches we did a good thing that Nutso killed children

+

its gods place to punish not ours Claire sniffed and I thought she might cry a definite No No in the Prison system

+

Ive been to the Doctor five times this week with bumps and bruises my food tastes Awful and my letters home have been stopped its the Curse

+

Claire I said

+

and the Nightmares Claire continued shaking as if she were naked near a window my god the Nightmares wont leave me

+

this is Crazy I said but when Claire beat her brains out headbutting a wall later that night the Doctor said it was Delirium

+

Death is a constant possibility in Prison the only companion you can rely on for through their Cowardice my friends had left me one by one I alone was confident in the Worlds general indifference there were no Otherworld retributions besides what you made yourself

+

I did not believe in Witches and Curses

+

not until the Nightmares came

+

in the woods of upright crucifixes Gemma was waiting for me nailing my three dead friends onto the thorns of spiky bark

+

outside the confines of a Prison she had gone full out fixing her black pointed hat upon her head no longer beaten into a pulp her cloak was fit and she had Life and great Evil in her dancing red eyes

+

I told myself it was a Dream but I could not wake up as she brought children before me she skipped with them played with them and then when the black Cauldron bubbling on the fire reached Boiling Point she lifted them over her head and Threw them in

+

Sally?

+

I blinked and then the Dream World went away but none of my stubbornness went with it though I didnt remember being carried there I was in the Wardens Office my hands tied for his protection

+

Sally are you awake?

+

my throat felt like Id been walking a desert I licked my lips and started croaking is this the Real World? I asked

+

the Warden looked up as the door creaked open and the Prison Doctor handed him a thin file I didnt trust Doctors and had never been to see her before my sister had been a Doctor she had sworn to protect people and cause no harm

+

how she had harmed me

+

the Doctor tells me your not sleeping

+

I blinked and heard my lids clap together

+

you shouldnt listen to her I tried to smile and gave up shes Crazy

+

well you look like Hell Im worried that your not looking after yourself

+

I waited for the punchline but there was none coming Im locked up here because no one cares about me

+

the Wardens chair squeaked like a Horror Movie door as he shifted his weight and his tactics dont get me wrong Sally its my job to keep you AWAY from society but its also my job to keep you SAFE from others and yourself now I know your friends killed Inmate Ryan

+

we what? I asked Sweetly I was writing poetry to inspire Down and Out children at the time ask my friends

+

your friends are dead he reminded needlessly I had seen their torn faces Scream enough in my horrid Dreams to know they cant confirm anything but I want to help you I want you to go see the Doctor maybe a one on one talk will help shift any guilt

+

you wanna help me? I asked

+

the Warden crisscrossed all his fingers like some Magician about to unveil a great Trick within reason he said

+

I nodded my noggin filled with nasty ideas as I lost my tiredness can you get me a Book on how to kill Witches?

+

Wardens are never helpful and swearing not to feed my Paranoia he refused to give me books on how to defend myself so I found myself a woman of Faith like Claire

+

a weapon on killing Witches? Lana sighed slinking back on her rumpled Bunk defeated when I blocked her Cell Door whilst she was heading out to Breakfast I can sharpen a toothbrush into a shiv for ya

+

I smiled a smile that made her Gulp

+

Im not here for jokes you havent lost your Faith in this Hell hole I bet your Momma told you stories to keep you in line that staying on the straight and narrow would keep you safe from Monsters

+

my smile showed more Teeth and Lana flinched as if I had Fangs

+

now your gonna be a Good Girl and make me believe in all your Mommas stories your gonna help me with my Problem or Im gonna make it YOUR problem

+

Lanas hand trembled as she shook mine

+

a Deal was a Deal

+

she would help me do the Impossible

+

tonight I was going Witch Hunting

+

it cost me a weeks tobacco ration to get the salt a young Arsonist in the Kitchen undid six months of Therapy and made a lovely distraction setting Fire to the pan but while the Guards back was turned I ducked into the Supply Closet and stole a small pot marked S

+

I tasted it to make sure it wasnt sugar

+

now I was armed and at last Roll Call I told myself that now I was armed I had a Chance if the Witch intended to disturb my sleep tonight then she was in for one Hell of a surprise

+

one by one the Prison lights went out and I waited in sweet darkness

+

I will not regale my reader with where I secreted the little Salt Pot regardless to say I had been making myself puke for years to keep my figure my husband had liked thin dames like my sister Carol

+

yet now sleep refused to come I was like a little kid bundled up with excitement at Christmas but Santa didnt visit waking children I closed my eyes and forced my mind to clear

+

then it happened and she came

+

the little Cottage was not made of gingerbread when I tapped on the door I winced when a Splinter pierced my knuckle the knotty thing was solid wood just like the ugly crucifixes in those Damn Woods

+

if I could feel Pain in that dream then what would happen if I Died there?

+

there was no Cauldron in the hearth filled with childrens bones as I expected the cottage interior wasnt built for comfort but rather for work on a table were bloodied Knives of course I had read the newspapers vile stories of her Crimes when she had first come into our Prison no doubt they had been stirred together by my anxiety into some destructive soup but this was just a dream I refused to be frightened by imaginary soup my mind constructed

+

Gemma? I said

+

a Bullet cracked through the window and punched into my thigh I staggered as if drunk and fell against a bookcase of spellbooks I heard the Salt Pot strike but not shatter against the floor

+

this time the little knotted door didnt creak as it opened and closed

+

high heels clicked along the floorboards and then when the owner turned a corner I rolled over and lost all memory of sunlight

+

Sally my sister Carol said smiling

+

oh you Bitch I tightened my eyes against the Pain refusing to cry you dirty Bitch

+

Sally thats no way to talk to your sister Carol said picking a Beauty Spot on her chin the only thing my Bullet hadnt smashed apart the only thing that Mother had been able to identify her by at the Morgue

+

hows your husband is he back at home? the Witch picked her Beauty Spot harder and then ripped it off there was no Blood just a sound like torn paper she seemed to find the experience pleasing and started tearing off more of her Face

+

it wasnt real it WASNT my sister

+

you were always jealous of my beauty Gemma the Carol said thats why he chose me

+

she hurried towards me when I crawled like a Baby after a dropped bottle and I locked my hands around the Salt Pot

+

oh very clever the Witch giggled someones been doing their research

+

the Witch squatted down trying to snatch the Salt Pot out of my grasp but I was determined and slapped off the top and threw the entire contents over my left shoulder like a superstitious Gambler wishing for their lucky number to come up

+

the reaction was instant the Witch shot up rubbing her melting eyes she didnt scream nor gave me pleasure in another uninteresting murder

+

when I awoke and the Doctor slapped me across the face to prove she was real I told her how Gemma had melted like a wax figure on the floor leaving only her laughter as the little Cottage had vanished like a watercolour painting left out in the rain swirling away retreating back into the dark

+

now that Damn Doctor has thickened my file listing me with every Crazy thing she can but I was NOT making it up

+

I have proof of facing off with Witches

+

the Warden has the Bullet they cut out of my leg in a little jar on his desk but all he wants to know is who snuck a Weapon into his Prison he has promised to greatly increase my sentence so that instead of serving Life I will have another 40 years on top

+

well if it didnt frighten me the first time

+

how I Love the feel of these Hospital sheets while they fix me up

+

good food and good rest

+

even my Dreams are gone

+

I am the last of my kind Killer of Witches

+

yet with my luck they still wont give me a Medal

+

maybe I am Cursed after all

+
    +
  • +
+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Witches Curse” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Matthew Wilson

+

+ + Author image of Matthew Wilson + + + Matthew Wilson has been published over 300 times in such places as horror zine, star*line, Zimbell House Publishing, and many others. He is currently editing his first novel, and you can find him on Twitter.

+

© Matthew Wilson 2020 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to Karen Apricot for these five great pictures!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Spring 2021

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+ Subodhana Wijeyeratne +

The Gods Have No Faces

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+ + +

One of the great joys of speculative fiction is World Building. As a writer, it's creating new environments from, so to speak, the ground up; as a reader, it's setting off into each one to see what they contain. Subodhana Wijeyeratne has built a world already crumbling when we take our first steps. To know why, ask its creator — but with gods, don't expect to understand whatever answer is forthcoming.

+ + + + Story image for The Gods Have No Faces by + + + +
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+

Time Dysperception

+ Jack Mackenzie +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Time Dysperception by + + + +

We all get lost in the moment occasionally, or feel time is getting away from us. But how horrible could either be under the wrong circumstances? Or ANY circumstances, if you never knew which way it was going to be, or when? Like you just found out the countdown has begun, the clock is ticking, the last vital seconds slipping away…

+ + + +
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+

Prometheus’ Kidneys

+ Meg Candelaria +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Prometheus’ Kidneys by + + + +

Yes, it's hard to know what will get a story accepted or rejected at Mythaxis — but until recently the editor thought he had one answer at least: 'Don't send me any more clever retellings of ancient Greek Myths,' he'd say, 'I'm never going to take one of those!' And then Meg Candelaria came along to make him eat those words.

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Plague Rooster

+ Micah Hyatt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Plague Rooster by + + + +

Mythaxis is not typically a home to poetry, nor to reprints, but when we came across this piece while hunting down the author of 'The Third Martian Dick Temple' we were immediately moved, in no small part due to the pandemic gripping the world in early 2020. One year on from the first Covid-19 lockdowns, the world remains profoundly changed from how it was before - but thankfully not this much changed.

+ + + +
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The Fashionistas

+ Gregory L. Norris +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Fashionistas by + + + +

Fashion models, they're like some other species, aren't they? Tall, sleek, beautiful — well, sometimes beautiful, sort of. "Striking", let's say. Or maybe they're more like aliens, so different from we mere humans as they glide by, adorned in strange new things. Well, while you're contemplating next season's rags, just be careful the fascinating lure of the catwalk doesn't distract you from the strange new thing sitting right there next to you.

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Comfort Zone

+ KC Grifant +
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There's a certain theme in science fiction and fantasy that's always been popular - hard to set this up without spoiling it! Hollywood movies have repeatedly run with it (usually for laughs), so too surely every TV show in either genre. It has clear horror potential too, but very rarely are such stories approached from the outsider's point-of-view. KC Grifant does so here, and with a similarly atypical air of loss, rather than gain.

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Unknown Ancestry

+ T. M. Morgan +
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What makes a person who they are: Nature or Nurture? Most people would say it's a bit of both, forgetting that musician they like with "natural talent", or the monster on the news who was just "born evil". But of course, those are the outliers. For most of us, how and where we're raised makes all the difference. And what about when you learn you're not what you think you are at all — is it Nature or Nurture then?

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+ + + + + +
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+ Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala +

The Cat and the Cosmic Horror

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+ + +

There's a long tradition of comedy double acts, both in writing and performing. It's always good to have someone to bounce your ideas off, as long as they don't become someone you want to bounce off the wall. Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala provide a fine example of the benefits of the former, but the calamitous duo at the heart of their story may be more like the latter…

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The Cat and the Cosmic Horror

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Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala

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F + +arrokh ‘Firedrake’ Sodawala sat up in his wooden chair on the lawns of Bombay Gymkhana. His lean, bearded face was a mask of furious concentration.

+

The cards were not in his favour.

+

Opposite him sat the ageless Shindu-tai Andharkar, stately matriarch of Gondhalekar Chawl. The hint of a smile hovered upon her face as she glanced at her cards. She adjusted the Tudor bonnet atop her head, which offered some protection against the summer’s oppressive heat. Farrokh sighed, regretting the decision to leave his hat behind for the umpteenth time that day. A single bead of sweat made its way down his face and perched on his nose as if contemplating whether to take the long leap down. He took the decision away from it, shaking his head and dislodging it in a fine impression of a dog drying itself off after a bath. Not that there were any dogs around—no canine dared loiter around Shindu-tai’s massive, midnight-black cat Minerva, who was lounging on the grass nearby.

+

“Blast this heat,” Shindu-tai said. “It’s unnatural, especially in these monsoon months.”

+

“It manages to resist my best efforts at weather control,” Farrokh answered, with a pained grin. “And it only gets worse every day.”

+

Shindu-tai frowned. “Surprisingly, parts of the city have been reporting waves of extreme cold. Did you hear about Powai Lake freezing over? The scientists are saying it’s the end days. Climate change coming for us all.”

+

Farrokh nodded. The weather patterns had been all over the news. Bombay was experiencing an ineffable juxtaposition of summer and winter.

+

“The Mayor called it a hoax, as expected. He’s blaming it all on supernatural meddling.” Shindu-tai chuckled. Some things would never change, like the towering incompetence of politicians.

+

Farrokh fiddled with his cards. “He’s not completely wrong, you know.”

+

Shindu-tai raised a lofty eyebrow. Another bead of sweat made its way down Farrokh’s pinched face. He glared at it, cross-eyed. Shindu-tai waved a hand and gestured for him to carry on.

+

“It’s not climate change. It’s a… ahem, how do I put it?” Farrokh frowned. “It’s a state visit from across the pond, and the Ladies are not coming incognito.”

+

Both Shindu-tai’s eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. She stood, unsettling Minerva. Ignoring the cat’s irritated hissing (and her winning hand) she said, “Come, walk with me, Firedrake.”

+

The majestic woman held out her graceful arm. Farrokh took it with a smile, his earlier vexation replaced with amusement, despite the danger they were in.

+

After all, it wasn’t often that he was able to surprise the city’s oldest witch.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +orgive Shindu-tai letting her conversational guard down for a second, for as well she knew, at that moment something unspeakably older than even she was bearing down on them both, along with everyone else on Planet Earth. The Great Old One had been hurtling through space and time for countless eons when it course-corrected to make a quick pit stop, nothing more. Destroy a city or two, absorb the souls of its people, establish a base for future reference. Like setting up a gas station, really. And while this primitive, weak world would no doubt be as an insect under its heel—if it wore heels, which it did not, thankfully, though it had many tentacles that could have passed for legs—it still knew where to make landfall. There, where its impact would eradicate its prey’s greatest defences. Sure, the landing would leave it a tad weaker than usual, unable to rise to its full size perhaps, but it was nothing a good feed wouldn’t fix.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey walked in silence, until they were at the far side of the lawn, away from potential eavesdroppers, and Shindu-tai placed a hand on her friend’s arm. “Now, out with it, dearest Firedrake, for if you mean what I think you mean, it could not be happening at a more inopportune moment.”

+

Farrokh nodded. “The Ladies of Summer and Winter are paying a visit to the city. The defeat of the demonic horde last summer has piqued Faërie’s interest. They want to see the city that successfully resisted that terror.”

+

“So, it’s not a hostile visit then?”

+

“Not unless we muck up their reception somehow. You know how… touchy they can be. Their people sent feelers, asked me to arrange a proper welcome. I’ve given them the coordinates of the Sea Link. Might was well shove the city’s best foot—or bridge—forward.”

+

“Well, that is far from the only problem we have,” the majestic witch stated, as she played with a squirrel nesting in an ancient tree, conjuring a cluster of too-perfect nuts, swaying from a branch which it could never quite manage to leap upon. “A cosmic entity is hurtling towards the planet. My crystal ball broke when I commanded it to show me the creature. The tea-leaves gave me the when, but not the where. And it is definitely hostile.”

+

“If I were attacking Bombay, I’d use the Dorothy gambit,” said Farrokh, referencing the well-known story of the mighty witch who had saved the Land of Oz. The tale as told to children made her out to be a naïve Kansas native, but the truth was slightly different, obscured by retellings as stories are wont to be.

+

In reality, Dorothy Gale had been on a secret mission. Assisted by her famous hound Toto, she had accomplished half her task by landing her spacecraft on her adversary, neutralising her completely. “Your entity will surely want to land in such a way as to destroy one of our power centres… by the ancestor who commissioned it, Hanging Gardens! It will land at Hanging Gardens!”

+

Hanging Gardens, or Pherozeshah Mehta Gardens as it was formally called, had been put in place to concentrate the city’s magical defences through a whimsical erection known as the ‘Old Lady’s Boot’. Children played there in the daytime, and the power of their happiness and innocence was harnessed by the Firedrake’s people to power it up at night.

+

Shindu-tai nodded. “So, we will have to take care of that as well.”

+

“Or… we could send the Sheriffs?” Farrokh wore a marvellously straight face, one he should really employ during cards. “You know, The Saviours of Bombay? Whose job it actually is to protect the city.”

+

The situation might be dire, but Shindu-tai chuckled.The saviours in question were her grandson, Vaman, and Farrokh’s son, Cyrus. They had indeed managed to save their beloved city from a demonic invasion, but only through a series of comical errors, and though they had been named the Sheriffs of the city for their troubles it was purely a honorary title. Neither she nor Farrokh had any illusions regarding their competence.

+

Farrokh conjured a flame in his hand and shuttered it close. He repeated the process a few times. “When it rains, it pours, eh?”

+

The older woman merely smiled, and Farrokh shook his head. “I suppose one of us will have to go face that cosmic horror, and the other receive the Fae. Damned if I don’t feel like I’m getting too old for this shit.”

+

The lady scoffed. “You would complain of age to me, dear Firedrake?”

+

“You know what I mean,” the (slightly) younger man grumbled.

+

Shindu-tai hummed in response, and continued playing with the squirrel. Then she turned to him with a glint in her eye. “I have an idea.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +rom her lush patch of sun-lit grass, Minerva watched with typically cat-like disdain as Shindu-tai outlined her budding strategy for her friendly rival and lashed her tail lazily. Had she been the type to confide the details of her inner world, she would own to being slightly more interested in the potential uses Shindu-tai’s squirrel could be put to than whatever machinations her witch might be concocting. Minerva half closed her eyes. No doubt she’d have opportunity to sink her claws into both sooner or later.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“Y + +ou can’t be serious,” Farrokh remarked on hearing the plan. “We can’t outsource our work!”

+

“Why not?” The grand-witch was the very picture of serenity. “Western companies keep outsourcing their work to Indians all the time. Why shouldn’t we find an Indian guy of our own?”

+

“But who?”

+

“The young wizard, Arquin whatshisname? He’s also saved the city from a cosmic threat, you know.”

+

Farrokh furrowed his brow. He knew of Arquin, whose late grandfather had in fact been a good friend. The lad had certainly acquitted himself well in battles past, and unlike his son and Shindu-tai’s grandson, had actually done it intentionally.

+

“Even if I agree with this plan—and assuming this Arquin feller is willing—what about the Sidhe Princesses?”

+

“What young hero would reject such a quest? Don’t be difficult just for the sake of it now,” she tutted. “As for the Ladies, well, you’ve been complaining about finding a suitable bride for Cyrus for a while now. And I’m not getting any younger—at this rate, that idiot Vaman will never give me great-grandkids.”

+

Farrokh looked aghast.“Surely you can’t be suggesting setting them up with—”

+

“I am absolutely suggesting that.”

+

Aghast became dubious.“Why would the Princesses ever agree to marry those louts?”

+

“It isn’t like any human women are likely to marry them,” pointed out Shindu-tai.

+

Farrokh coughed. “There is that.”

+

“Don’t you want Cyrus to find a nice girl and settle down?”

+

“Yes, I do.” Farrokh sighed. It would be easier for him to battle the cosmic entity on his own than to find a bride for his no-good son. Perhaps an immortal Sidhe would find his behaviour appealing instead of obnoxious? One could only hope.

+

“Alright, I’m in,” he said. “But not without protest.”

+

Shindu-tai cackled in agreement, looking for the first time like the witch she truly was, and the squirrel fled from the scary old lady. “It is decided then. I will send Minerva with the appropriate instructions. Both the boys should be at the chawl now.”

+

Farrokh nodded, and wondered whether he could retire from his post as Guardian of the City, a title very much more than merely an honorific. Maybe this Arquin fellow could prove himself and take over. Let him deal with Sidhe, Cosmic Horrors, and Shindu-tai’s eccentricities! He loved the old witch dearly, yet she scared him to the bones. He was already dreading their next ‘Rummy session’ and the new troubles it would bring.

+

Oh well, at least the actual game had been left forgotten for now. He had caught a glimpse of Shindu-tai’s cards and counted himself lucky to be leaving the club without losing his money for the fifth time in a row.

+

Maybe things would work out after all.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“V + +aman, ol’ buddy, ol’ friend, is that your grandmother’s cat I spot over there?” Cyrus said, pointing at the cat climbing up the banister. When Vaman did not respond immediately he poked his friend, who was leaning against the aforementioned banister.

+

Vaman, lacking Minerva’s nimble-footedness, stumbled and almost went over. Only grabbing onto Cyrus’s collar saved him from having a fatal argument with the forces of gravity. “Do be careful, old sport,” Cyrus tutted, helping his friend upright, only to receive a glare in response.

+

“You be careful, idiot!” Vaman screeched.

+

“What are you talking about?” Cyrus asked, scratching his head.

+

“You… nearly… threw me over,” a dumbfounded Vaman sputtered.

+

“You really need to be more coherent, old buddy.” Cyrus patted his lanky friend, who held onto the railing with both hands to prevent a repeat of the previous incident. “Anyway, is that cat playing with scrolls?”

+

“Why yes, it is. Let’s go see what secrets grandma’s dealing in now,” Vaman said, already forgetting his previous distress.

+

The two friends sneaked along the narrow corridor—which in their case consisted of a lot of grunts and winces as they tried to walk astride each other—and pounced upon the cat.

+

Minerva, as might have been expected, took great offense at being attacked by the two friends. She joined the fray, claws out and snarling. A great battle followed in the corridors of Gondhalekar Chawl, one punctuated by the yowls of an angry cat and the screams and shrieks of two young men. Amidst the chaos Vaman somehow managed to grab one of the scrolls and, counting it as a partial success, he fled the battleground, letting his friend deal with covering his retreat. After all, thanks to his prodigious size Cyrus had a lot more protection against the cat’s clawsthan Vaman did. It was a tactical decision. There was no fear involved.

+

Left to face an increasingly irate cat on his own, Cyrus withdrew from the fray as well, though not before Minerva had given him a final scratch on one buttock. Her eyes flashed once with malice and magic as she took note of the scroll Vaman had gotten away with. Her job done, she proceeded to the kitchen, intent on eating all the fish in the refrigerator and completing her revenge.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +loistered behind the chawl’s common privy—for secrecy, that is, they weren’t hiding, no siree—the two friends broke the seal and unfurled the letter.

+

“Well would you look at that, the letter was meant for us all along.” Cyrus pulled his collar with a nervous chuckle. “Why didn’t the silly cat just give it to us?”

+

“How do you know it’s for us?”

+

“It’s addressed to ‘Young and Mighty Heroes’. That’s us. Hmm. We have to show visiting royalty around the city,” Cyrus said, puffing himself up. “My Dad and your Grandma hope we will acquit ourselves well… and impress the faery princesses.”

+

“Oh yeah, how do you know all that?” Vaman grumbled.

+

“I read faster than you, you school drop-out!”

+

“I am not a… oh, never mind.”

+

“I won’t. Let’s go get haircuts. We have to meet them at Hanging Gardens in two days.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n a small shop sequestered in the suburbs of Bombay, a young wizard was approached by a cat the size of a small tiger. She offered him a scroll, he offered her the fried Bombay Duck—a weird thing to call a fish, he thought for the umpteenth time—he had been eating. This exchange done, the cat’s eyes flashed with pleasure before she attacked the food with gusto.

+

“A missive from the grandwitch, eh,” Arquin said. “Wonder what it’s about.” He cut open the seal and began reading. “Dear Brave Hero… pleased with your work in saving the city last summer… gratitude and congratulations… blah blah, cut to the chase, please… Ah, here it is,” he murmured to his disinterested audience of one. “Cosmic threat incoming, city in danger, arriving at the Sea-Link.” He nodded. “This is right up my street.”

+

He quickly wrote his answer and gave it to the cat. “Convey this to the grandwitch, would you please? Tell her I’ll be there.”

+

Minerva nodded once in response and turned to more pressing matters: the swiftly-dwindling supply of fish in her plate.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“A + +re you sure you have the right address?” Cyrus asked. “There don’t seem to be any princesses here.”

+

“The letter said Hanging Gardens, you read it same as I did,” a tetchy Vaman replied. They swung around on rickety playground swings overlooking the shimmering Arabian Sea. Well, Vaman did—Cyrus’ swing groaned under his considerable girth and refused to move. Their note had said Farrokh would ensure the garden was closed to public for the day, which meant the two had the run of the place, and did not have to worry about pesky kids getting in their way.

+

“Pass that bottle, man.”

+

“You’ve had enough.”

+

“No I have not!”

+

They had, indeed, been drinking since arrival in the hopes of fortifying their spirits. Never the smoothest when dealing with women, they had agreed that imbibing a moderate quantity of alcohol would make them brave enough to deal with the Fae.

+

Unfortunately, neither had any concept of what ‘moderation’ meant, so they were working on their second bottle of whiskey when something smashed into the gigantic Witch’s Boot which stood in the centre of the garden, crushing it to smithereens, and instantaneously snuffing out every protective ward standing between the city, the nation, nay, the world in a heartbeat. In victorious agony, it let out a scream of agonized victory.

+

The two young men stared dumbfounded as one massive tentacle became visible over the crater, followed by another and another, until an indefinable eldritch horror stood before them. Unexpectedly it was only as tall as Vaman, but in form it was all indescribable shapes and angles, and looking at it made their eyes glaze over in befuddlement.

+

The double-headed, many-eyed, multi-limbed cosmic horror looked to see if any were there who dared oppose it and saw two things—locals, it assumed—rather tottering in place. One was of considerable girth while the other was thin as a reed, and both had haircuts that even the horrifying-visaged Old One thought were repulsive.

+

“D-d-d-did you see that, Vaman?” said the larger one, its slurring voice filled with awe.

+

“Yes, Cyrus. Such dulcet tones, such indecipherable beauty… I think I am in love.” The thin one’s eyes looked like heart-shaped quarters, slightly cross-eyed.

+

“Me too, dear buddy, me too,” replied the other one.

+

They ran towards it, zig-zagging and stumbling. Before it could make out whether their intentions were hostile, they had taken hold of a tentacle each and the confused Old One was swept up between the two lads, all thoughts of attacking the place replaced by bewilderment as it was crooningly serenaded.

+

“We’ll show you such sights as you’ve never seen before,” said the one referred to as Vaman in a husky voice. Its breath stank worse than the distilleries of Andromeda.

+

“Indeed, we’ll give you a VIP tour of the ol’ city. Parts of her reserved only for the really special people,” the other—Cyrus—said, nudging and winking at the confused cosmic horror. “Once you’ve seen it, you’ll never want to go home.”

+

As they left the gardens, a disgusting smell of rotting flesh mingled with sweat hit the cosmic entity. It waved a frantic tentacle towards the earthlings.

+

“What’s got you in a tizzy, m’lady?” Cyrus said, in a barely-decipherable accent that the Old One would have recognised as an attempt to sound posh, had it ever watched television on Earth. It continued to wave its tentacles at everything around it. “The smell? Oh that’s just the charnel house. They leave those bodies out for birds to devour, it’s actually a holy ritual, y’know.”

+

“Well, his lot does,” said Vaman, “My lot, we burn them. Sometimes we even make sure they’re dead first!”

+

“Hurry up now, let’s not meander here. We don’t want to disturb the ghosts and spirits.” Cyrus said. “Come, to my car.”

+

The belching and confounded eldritch was propelled towards a parked car. Or what might have once been a car. Presently it looked held together by sheer willpower. Unwitting, it joined the earthlings inside.

+

What followed was terror as the clanky, rattling pile of bolts and metal jangled, bumped, and hurtled through roads with more craters than on some moons the Old One had seen and past traffic that made the great cesspool of the asteroid belt seem like a spacious garden.

+

“Next stop, Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi. It’s a tourist hotspot,” the two intoned together.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n another part of the city, near the behemoth of steel and concrete that was the Bombay-Worli Sea-Link, two princesses of otherworldly beauty and demeanour stood across from a familiar young wizard. One white as snow, the other tanned like the earth, both with eyes that sparkled like endless pools of darkness. The Lady of Winter and Summer had arrived.

+

“Halt ladies, lest I have to introduce you to my blade.” Arquin drew his longsword. Sunlight glinted off the cold steel.

+

Their lips crooked into smiles at his words. “Tatiana, he speaks in the formal tongue!” the brown woman said. “Ooh, I thought it had gone out of fashion in the mortal world, it’s a pleasant surprise to hear such polished language.”,

+

“Indeed, Titania.” A wide smile bloomed on the pale woman’s face as she shivered in ecstasy. “He even makes delightful threats.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he eldritch cosmic horror and the Sheriffs of Bombay entered the slums of Dharavi, a cauldron of human vices which smelled of desperation and struggle.

+

“Welcome to Asia’s largest slum settlement, dear lady. Foreigners pay a pretty penny to visit this place and unravel its mysteries,” Cyrus whispered in its ears —or where he assumed its ears were—with the tones of one imparting great secrets upon the listener. As this was actually the Old One’s olfactory receptor, it recoiled at the smell of cheap whiskey.

+

“Indeed,” Vaman piped up trying to imitate his friend’s accent but only succeeding in sounding like he had a nasal infection. “It is a true symbol of the human condition, of humanity’s eternal struggle to break through the sky and ascend beyond mortal limits. To become gods.”

+

The Old One made a series of clicks and noises with its many mouths and tentacles. This roughly translated to Get me out of here, you disgusting cretins, if one used the Cosmic Entity’s Guide to Conversing Politely. Sadly for the Horror, Cyrus and Vaman’s idea of reading consisted of scrolling through social media, and thus they assumed it was enjoying the experience.

+

“Smell that?” Cyrus asked, moving his hand in a wide arc. “It’s the aroma of a hundred thousand underpaid, overworked people packed in close proximity, never sleeping, working incessantly to create some of the world’s finest, most expensive leather products. Notice the pungent smell emanating from the sweatshops? It really is distinctive.”

+

Never before in all of recorded history had a cosmic horror ever paled or turned green, but on hearing their words this one did just that.

+

A bony, withered man clad in a loincloth and smelling of drink crashed into the cosmic horror. The affronted monster was about to retaliate when a great palm slammed against it. “Watch where you are standing, you yob!” the man shouted before heading off, muttering under his breath about stupid tourists.

+

The Outer God stood shocked. It touched a tentacle to the slowly reddening palm-print on its central mass. How was it to know that, living here, it was only the third-most-horrifying thing the toothless old fellow had seen today?

+

It was just about to retaliate with a storm of destruction when Vaman caressed the injury and whispered, “Forget him, m’lady. These uncouth apes fail to recognize your magnificence.”

+

“Come forth, madame,” Cyrus said, smoothly. “We’ve yet to see the grandeur of Dombivali, the haunts of Kurla, and the shifty streets of Kandivali.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he confused wizard stood his ground as the two ladies approached him with something resembling curiosity, and a hint of… was that lust? This wasn’t how Arquin had expected their battle to go. Wait—perhaps this was their bid to confuse him.

+

“No mercy for invaders!” he shouted and leapt, his sword flowing like a silver serpent at his side. He swung—and missed. He struck forth again—only to miss once more.

+

“Vicious,” said an impressed Tatiana, the Winter Lady, dodging a blow which would have cleaved her in two.

+

“Persistent too,” Titania added, moving out of the way of a strike to her heart. “Maybe we’ve been away from the mortal world for too long. They’ve improved.” She licked her lips.

+

“Fine posture, good form,” the Lady of Winter said, sidestepping three blows in quick succession. “Exquisite cheekbones.”

+

“Scarred and ruggedly handsome, as well as a proficient mage,” the Lady of Summer noted, avoiding a fireball aimed at her. She gave her twin sister a shark-like smile. “I like him.”

+

“Me too,” Tatiana agreed, her eyes glinting with desire. “Let’s keep him.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he Old One had seen things even other Old Ones would not believe. It had seen star dragons on fire off the heel of Caspian. It had watched U-beams glitter in the dark near the Fornax Black Hole. All those memories would be lost to time… for now it had seen horrors that defied description.

+

To get to Dombivali, it had been shoved into a train by the two miscreants. No one batted an eyelid at it, multiple heads, tentacles and all, for everyone was too busy jockeying to get into the train themselves. Once there, the Old One had been pushed, smashed, smooshed, punched, slapped, poked, and stamped upon, from so many directions that it completely forgot it was capable of destroying them all with a single thought. Once at their destination, the two fools had shown it, with great pride, a number of bridges that had been begun but never completed, and made it eat something called missal, which had made its mouth burn until it was convinced it was being poisoned—except that both earthlings were eating from the same bowl with relish.

+

Then it was taken to Kurla, where, in the crowd on the railway bridge, it got separated from its apparent suitors. After this, it spent the next hour somehow being turned around or pushed onto various platforms within the station itself. When Cyrus and Vaman finally caught up with it, it actually felt relieved to see their faces, something which it had not thought possible on any plane of existence.

+

Now little more than a broken shell of a Cosmic Horror, it limped to Kandivali in Cyrus’ bolt-bucket, screaming silently all the while. It did not care to remember what they tried to show it there.

+

“Back to Hanging Gardens, then? We will take you over the Sea-Link. Amazing bridge. Amazing. Come, let’s go back to Dharavi, where I parked my car.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +ong before they reached the approach to the bridge, they saw a huge three-way battle underway up ahead. Magic was being thrown around like putty. A stray bolt of lightning barely missed their car, followed by a series of fireballs. The Old One made a chittering noise which translated to “Please, no more. Take me away from this backwater planet of refined cruelty. I was a fool to think of feeding here. No one from the Cosmic Horror Federation will ever—”

+

Cyrus’ attempt to overtake the bus ahead resulted in them coming right into the way of a cone of ice, which tore through the window and slammed into the eldritch creature, cutting its tirade short.

+

Cyrus slowed at the toll-booth. “That’ll be a hundred rupees,” said the man behind the glass. “Bit of a traffic jam today. Wizard fight in progress, you know what that’s like.”

+

The nonchalance with which this petty government employee treated a deadly battle was the last straw for the Mighty Outer God. It dashed through the car, not bothering to open the door, jumped into the sea, and summoning the last of its energy, left the dimension.

+

“There goes the love of my life, Vaman,” Cyrus moaned.

+

“Dear friend, I do think she was the one,” a dazed Vaman agreed.

+

In the distance, ice and fire lit up the sky as the Lady of Summer and the Lady of Winter continued their courtship of the battling mage.

+

“I wish she’d opened the door before leaving though,” said Cyrus, with a sorrowful look at the eldritch-shaped hole on the side of his rundown car.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +nce again, Farrokh Sodawala sat upright on a chair on the lawns of Bombay Gymkhana, his lean, bearded face a mask of furious concentration. Once again, the cards were not in his favour. Once again, the Grandwitch of Bombay, Shindu-tai Andharkar, sat opposite him.

+

“That could’ve gone better,” the Firedrake sighed, and placed his cards. A losing hand, if he ever saw one. No chance he would be able to escape with his money twice in a row.

+

“Indeed.” The witch did not smile as she displayed her winning hand, but the twinkle in her eyes was proof of her amusement.

+

“At least the city is safe.” Farrokh shuffled the cards, hoping to at least win the next round.

+

“True,” Shindu-tai agreed.

+

“And relations between Faërie and Bombay have never been better. Titania and Tatiana continue to pursue that rather charming wizard, this time without any property damage.”

+

“Uh-hmm.”

+

“And the kids, bless their stupid hearts, have helped avert disaster, saved millions in collateral damage, and made it out alive.” Cyrus began dealing the second round of cards, and sighed again. “I suppose the Princesses would have never taken a fancy to them.”

+

“Indeed.” Shindu-tai took the proffered cards and frowned.

+

“And all because your Familiar was annoyed with the kids and switched the locations on the scrolls.’ A twitch developed over Farrokh’s left eye as he looked at his cards.

+

The witch nodded, petting the feline lounging in her lap. “Minerva is smarter than the average cat.” Minerva purred, throwing her weight behind the sentiment.

+

“Sometimes I wonder whether she is your pet or whether we are hers, and she doesn’t want other monsters playing in her sandbox,” muttered Firedrake as he tried to work out a winning combination from the hand he was dealt.

+

“You worry too much, dear Farrokh.’ The witch chuckled as she continued to pet Minerva. The cat’s eyes flashed once more (and the images on the grandwitch’s cards changed to a more friendly hand) before she closed them in contentment.

+

All was well with the world.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Cat and the Cosmic Horror” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala

+

+ + Author image of Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala + + + Pritesh Patil (right) is fuelled by books, stories and coffee fumes. When he isn’t hunting monsters and searching for cracks between realities, he can be found deep in Dream’s library spinning tales of hope and revolutions. You can find him on Twitter as Twitter. +Percy Wadiwala (left) is a Chartered Accountant and MBA who quit his career as a Banker to spend more time with his cats. As his cats are much happier without his company, he engages in other pursuits including staring mournfully at broken glasses and, occasionally, writing. He lives in Mumbai with his family, his books, and a firm conviction that modern civilization is in terminal decline. Until that actually happens, however, you can read his scribbling and connect with him at his website, Twitter, and Facebook. His first book, ‘The Day Money Died’, is available at Amazon.

+

© Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: DivvyPixel, Artem Podrez, the baljinder, and Pexels.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-25/comfort-zone.html b/issue-25/comfort-zone.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f332082c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/comfort-zone.html @@ -0,0 +1,404 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Comfort Zone — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Comfort Zone

+

KC Grifant

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Comfort Zone by +
+ + + + +

M + +ar breathed shallowly as she headed inside the apartment complex and up the stairs, trying not to inhale the scent of cat litter and creamed corn soup. She paused in front of one of the apartment doors, and pressed her fingers together to keep them from shaking. Once they were steady, she knocked.

+

“Come in,” a voice said, catching like a jagged nail. The voice cleared itself with a cough and tried again. “Come in.”

+

Mar pushed the door open. The scent of lilacs, her daughter’s favorite, sent a twisting spike through her stomach.

+

A figure in a pressed plaid shirt tucked over a slight potbelly turned to her. Older than Mar, Leif was thinner since the last time she had seen him, maybe three weeks ago. Then, he had still been her daughter. Leif started to speak, but stopped when Mar showed him the pristine gleam of her handgun.

+

She pointed it directly at his cerulean eyes.

+

“Jenna wouldn’t want this,” Leif said.

+

“What could you possibly know about what she wants?” Mar spat and, just as she had practiced in the shooting range, took aim at his chest.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t started with core waves.

+

Once scientists discovered how quantum patterns in the brain could be targeted with electromagnetic pulses, research teams targeted these core waves to nudge dysfunctional neurons into normal behavior, treating a host of neural diseases. And that was just the beginning: core waves also led to core swaps. Mar didn’t fully understand it, but physicists called it a quantum tunneling between brain states, enabling mice, then monkeys, then human subjects, to swap consciousnesses for a limited time. It was all fine and well, until Jenna volunteered be part of a pilot program through her university.

+

“Swap with what?” Mar had said, staring at Jenna across the coffee shop table last fall.

+

“His name is Leif. He works in sociology.”

+

“If you want to be a man,” Mar said, “why don’t you just get an operation, or steroids, the old-fashioned way?”

+

Jenna shook her head, hair sleek as a helmet. “It’s not about changing genders. It’s about swapping lives. Stepping outside of our comfort zones to really understand the human condition. This will redefine everything: gender, race, economic studies. It could even get us closer to a definition of the soul.”

+

“It sounds risky,” was all Mar could think to say. The latte scalded her tongue and she set down the mug, foam sloshing over the top.

+

“I’m doing it.” Her daughter’s brown eyes flickered, a hint of exasperation.

+

“What if he’s a pervert, a freak?” Mar hated the note of hysteria in her voice. She swore she’d never be like her own mother, paranoid and overprotective, and she wasn’t, but God knew this was too much for anyone to take without protest. “You have no idea what he’s going to do with your body. I can think of one hundred things right now that could go terribly wrong.”

+

“They screen everyone really carefully. Obviously.” Jenna’s mascaraed eyes narrowed, her shoulder blades folding up, a habit she had ever since she was a kid and didn’t like the conversation at hand. “And we all have to sign paperwork. It’s not like you can shoot up heroin or go on an orgy spree with someone else’s body.”

+

“It’s just… you’re all I have left.” Mar tried to sound matter of fact but it came out choked. By some horrendous turn of fate both mother and daughter had lost their husbands two years ago, Mar’s to a stroke and Jenna’s to a highway accident.

+

“It’s perfectly safe. If anything goes wrong, the core waves jump back to their originator. There’s been a ton of papers in all the big journals.”

+

“Nothing is perfectly safe,” Mar snapped. She had never had any luck instilling a proper sense of caution in Jenna. Jenna, who had learned how to headstand on a cantering horse, who had studied abroad in countries Mar didn’t dare consider visiting. And now she was about to give up her body to a total stranger. “Just because you’ve written some books on psychology, you’re qualified for a dangerous experiment?”

+

“It’s not dangerous, for the last time. They need someone who can write and capture and be self-reflective. I was lucky to be chosen. Do you know how many people applied? Ugh, never mind.”

+

Mar opened her mouth, on the verge of saying how horrified Jenna’s dad would be if he were still alive. But truthfully, Ricardo would have reminded Mar that their adult daughter was free to do as she pleased.

+

Well, Ricardo wasn’t here, and Mar had to do damage control on her own.

+

“Why you’d be so foolish I have no idea,” she said.

+

Jenna’s eyes and shoulders closed up even more, the distance between them miles as she uttered the dismissive sentence all parents dread:

+

“You just don’t get it.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t still hadn’t sunk in for Mar, even when she sat in the technician’s office on the university campus, watching onscreen while specialists fitted her daughter into a giant suit.

+

The technician narrated conversationally. “We strap in the participants and induce a sort of mini-seizure—” Mar shot him a look, and the tech hastily added, “It’s very controlled. We funnel the energy from these mental ‘storms’ into each other, creating the bridge.”

+

Mar had read a bit about it before the procedure: a sensitive and precise enough magnetic chamber could set up a quantum tunnel between brains to swap the core waves of each distinct personality.

+

“Is she all right?” Mar asked, for what felt like the twentieth time. They had said the procedure took five minutes, not counting the hours of preparation. The participants had already had microscopic high-end wireless neural readers implanted in their temples to maintain the tunnel outside of the chamber.

+

“The actual swap takes less than a second,” he said. “You should be proud. Your daughter is paving the way for a revolution in consciousness. Just think, if we could move between bodies, well, we could become a giant organism, and once tissue engineering catches up we could even live for—”

+

“Please stop.”

+

“Anyway,” the technician said. “This is just the start.”

+

After the procedure, Mar waited in the hallway until Jenna and a man emerged and shook hands before parting. The man headed toward Mar, but her daughter’s figure hurried away with two techs. Mar bit her lip to stop from yelling out.

+

He’s probably off to grab her boobs, Mar thought. A ridiculous, angry thought.

+

“How did it feel?” the technician asked.

+

“I feel great,” the man—not the man, her daughter, somehow her daughter—said. The face smiled in a way that made Mar cringe, that made her think of a sleazy guy giving her a drink. Jenna must have caught her expression.

+

“You shouldn’t have come,” her daughter said in the raspy voice, folding massive shoulders back. The candy blue eyes stared at her while Mar blinked back tears.

+

“Why did you have to do this? What is that man going to do to your body?” Mar fought back her sob. “What if he doesn’t give it back?”

+

“Leif,” her daughter said, touching the temple where a tiny incision scar remained. “His name is Leif. Not ‘the man’.”

+

“I know this is hard,” the technician chimed in. “We have some instructional videos. There’s also free counseling, if you want it.”

+

Mar turned away, patting at her wet eyelashes with the back of her hand. “I’m not the one who needs counseling,” she said. Even though part of her never wanted to leave her daughter’s side, she couldn’t be there a second longer.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +ar met her—him—her—at breakfast, a few days later, once Jenna had acclimated.

+

“Mom, you’re staring,” Leif’s voice growled. “Really awkward.”

+

Mar used every ounce of willpower not to shudder. Instead she took a bite of egg and watched her daughter pour sugar into her coffee. “That’s new.”

+

Jenna flashed a smile, a genuine grin, mixed with her signature arrogance. “This body craves more sugar. I’m trying to help him cut down, but it’s hard. The sugar highs feel so much more intense.”

+

Mar watched Leif’s lips, interested despite herself. How could she recognize her daughter’s smile in something so different? Maybe, Mar had mused, it was how the tiny muscles in the corners of the lip lifted and turned, giving off a sense of haughtiness. Or maybe it was something else, transmitted there in the space between them.

+

“What else is different?”

+

Jenna’s gaze grew distant, new eyes so unfamiliar in their creased wrinkle casing, like glass marbles in puckered bags. “You know when you’re watching a movie or reading a book and get so absorbed you start to feel anxious for the character? This feels like that, but times a million. I want the best for him. And I can still feel what I’m doing—what he’s doing, in my body, in my life—like a dream.”

+

Mar’s fork clattered to the table. “What do you mean?”

+

“My thoughts are changing his neural patterns a bit, and his are tweaking mine. And I guess the quantum tunnel gives us a ghostly feel of each other. Like, right now, I know he’s about to present to his class. And he probably knows I’m at breakfast with you.”

+

Mar cut out of the diner early, claiming a headache. The contract was for six months, and Mar had no idea how she would wait that long. The research team had capped swaps at that timeframe—some of the animal models had experienced confusion or missing thoughts after that.

+

“I won’t breathe easy until she’s back to normal,” Mar had told her friends. “That’s a long time of not breathing.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +inally the awful experiment entered its final week. Mar thumbed off her phone as she and Jenna met at the corner of Newbury Street, amidst the brunch crowd.

+

“Are you still using that?” Jenna sighed. “The contacts are so much easier.”

+

“There’s only so much change a person can handle in a lifetime,” Mar said stiffly. While they waited at the crosswalk, Jenna took a small intake of breath, a harbinger of a statement Mar wouldn’t like.

+

“I’m doing another one after this. An amputee in India.”

+

“You’re joking.”

+

Leif’s head shook, the pale hair gleaming like icicles.

+

“You’ve done your piece. Let someone else give their time.” Mar tried her best to sound reasonable.

+

“The change is like nothing else. I understand so much more about myself, about others, about everything. I understand you and your worry better now too. Dad’s death destroyed us. And so did Tom’s. This is finally showing me how to heal. It’s hard to explain.” Jenna reached out to Mar’s arm, but the fingers that touched her skin were bigger, thicker. Blunt. Alien.

+

Mar tempered the scream that wanted out. “By escaping the body your dad and I gave you? Is it really so horrible you can’t stand to be in it?” And what’s to prevent people from abusing this, the rich old folks from taking over the poor and young? Body parasites, like a scifi movie?”

+

“Have you read any of the stuff I sent?” Jenna asked as they crossed the street. “There are only two places in the world that have the resources to create such a precise set-up. And the quantum connection expires naturally.”

+

“I think you’re doing this because of Tom,” Mar said. She could almost hear Ricardo telling her not to say it, but pressed on anyway. “And your dad. To get some twisted sense of connection. It’s unhealthy. Maybe it would be better if you spent your time going on some dates, moving on.”

+

Jenna’s shoulders hunched up, familiar, but now bulky as a bear’s. “You should—” she started, but then she, Leif’s body shuddering and nearly sliding into a lamppost.

+

“Jenna!” Mar sprang forward to catch the impossibly heavy frame, her knees buckling as she lowered her daughter to the curb. “Jenna!”

+

A few pedestrians slowed their pace. “Is he okay?” someone asked.

+

Mar tried to prevent Leif’s head from slamming into the dirty sidewalk, touching the coarse pale hair. “Help her!”

+

Jenna opened her eyes and muttered, “I’m sorry.”

+

“Thank goodness,” Mar said, but then she understood, somehow, in the space of those three syllables: it was him, and not Jenna.

+

Just like that, her daughter was gone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t couldn’t be prevented and had nothing to do with the experiment, according to the official death record. Legalese protected Leif, though Mar contacted a lawyer anyway, certain that whatever he had done—in that moment, he claimed he was preparing tea—had caused her daughter’s death.

+

The aneurysm had broken the quantum link, supposedly returning the core waves to their rightful brains just as Jenna’s body expired. Under pressure from negative press the program was put on hold, despite not being liable. But it was too late to care about that. Jenna’s unique pattern of thoughts and feelings, her quantum signature, whatever it was, gone. Her daughter’s soul had dissipated just like that, leaving Mar alone again.

+

After Jenna was buried, an ancient urge hummed in Mar’s fatigued bones, relieved only when she drove half an hour across state lines to buy what she needed. Maybe it would provide her some relief. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +eif’s protesting palms, his wide sky-blue eyes, everything about him irritated Mar. She focused on the reassuring weight of the gun. She wasn’t nervous—Jenna’s death had scraped away everything, leaving her empty, as though she herself had no core waves, no signal, nothing.

+

“For Jenna,” Mar said, her hand and voice steady, just as she had practiced.

+

Leif lowered his head. “Do it,” he said in that awful croak, the voice Jenna had made her own over six months of Mar’s suffering, before he took it back. “Please.”

+

“If you’re bluffing, it won’t work.” Her voice wavered now, but she kept her focus on his chest. Leif didn’t give any sign of resisting, and it sent spikes of sheer rage, hot and dark, along Mar’s temples. “Don’t pretend to feel bad. You have no right. No idea. I am completely alone. Because of you. Whatever you did, you destroyed her. My Jenna is gone forever.”

+

Leif looked up at her, tearstained. “No one was closer to her than me. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I can’t explain. I felt her heart, her pain, her love. For you. For Tom, and dad. I miss her more than you can know.”

+

Mar’s hands shook badly though, through some Herculean effort, she kept the gun up.

+

“I can feel her still,” he said.

+

“What does that mean?” Giddiness swept over her. “The quantum tunnel!” She pictured a cloud funneled through a glass tube behind Leif’s forehead. “She’s still somewhere in you! Can you get her out?”

+

But he was shaking his head. “It’s like… a trace she left.”

+

Mar’s burst of hope fled and grief rushed back in, subtle as a pile of bricks crushing her chest. “I don’t understand.”

+

“There are no explanations,” Leif said, and he almost sounded haughty, like Jenna.

+

Mar lowered the gun, which had grown impossibly heavy, and squeezed her eyes shut. In this little apartment she was an indistinguishable point in the mesh of electrical signals that blinked in and out along the planet. Erased forever from that global network was the charge of her husband’s laugh and her daughter’s sigh. Now a balloon stretched around Mar, creating a void where nothing could reach her, where she could hardly even breathe.

+

But a bullet might still be able to fix that, ripping through her bubble.

+

Mar opened her eyes as Leif took a step toward her, then another, and before she knew what was happening he threw his arms around her. The gun was pressed into his flabby stomach, but he didn’t seem to care.

+

He sobbed like a child in her arms. Leif hugged her with a force that surprised her, his arms hefty and warm. Arms that Jenna had felt from the inside out, that bore the weight of a grief Mar thought belonged only to her.

+

“What am I going to do without her?” Mar’s thoughts, passing through someone else’s lips.

+

Leif pulled back, wiping his face.

+

“She loved you more than anyone,” he added. He held onto her shoulders, squeezing them as though trying to establish his own quantum tunnel, utterly oblivious to the gun. “You need to know that.”

+

As Mar stared at him, she swore she could see etched into Leif’s gaze a look her daughter might have given her: a mix of the same anguish and intensity when Ricardo had died, breaking through the blue.

+

She lowered the gun.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Comfort Zone” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

KC Grifant

+

+ + Author image of KC Grifant + + + KC Grifant is a New England-to-SoCal transplant who writes internationally published horror, fantasy, science fiction and weird western stories for collectible card games, podcasts, anthologies and magazines. Her writings have appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Aurealis Magazine, Unnerving Magazine, Frozen Wavelets, Tales to Terrify and Colp Magazine. Her short stories have haunted dozens of collections, including We Shall Be Monsters; Shadowy Natures: Tales of Psychological Horror; The One That Got Away - Women of Horror Anthology; Beyond the Infinite: Tales from the Outer Reaches; Six Guns Straight From Hell Volume 3; and the Stoker-nominated Fright Mare: Women Write Horror. She is also the co-founder of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) San Diego chapter. For more information, visit her website or aMAZOM. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

+

© KC Grifant 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Thiago Matos, Artem Podrez, pixel2013, and romanosky77.

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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-25/editorial.html b/issue-25/editorial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a7633000 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/editorial.html @@ -0,0 +1,288 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Editorial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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Since becoming editor of Mythaxis, I have had the sometimes privilege of reading a lot of short stories. We have a “fluid” reading team, but I personally read everything sent for our consideration. In our three open submission windows, we’ve had 428 stories to consider, more than a year’s worth of daily reading compressed into less than 7 weeks. We’ve now published twenty-eight stories and taken ten more for later in the year. That comes to a grand total of thirty-eight acceptances, which is about 9% of the total.

+

But another way to put that is three hundred and ninety rejections.

+

Turning down stories is an inevitable aspect of the editor’s role, just as being turned down is an inevitability when becoming a writer. As a writer I’ve received rejections, of course, many more than I have acceptances, so I know the mixture of disappointment and determination to try once again which, I hope, is experienced by those I have chosen to say “no” to.

+

My experience from the other side of that divide has been painless so far. A minority of authors bounce back from rejection with a new submission before the digital ink is dry; others reappear after months; still more not at all, at least not yet. Some send a polite acknowledgment, which is nice but entirely unnecessary, while most do not; but, to date, not one has responded to a submission rejection as if it was a personal rejection, which (the internet confirms) is sometimes the case.

+

I hugely appreciate the opportunity which submitting authors collectively offer us, regardless of which individual pieces end up in Mythaxis or not. However, even though it’s largely my tastes which dictate what fiction appears here, it’s difficult for me to express what exactly makes the difference between an acceptance and a rejection.

+

I think it’s at least in part about what I imagine the cumulative effect of several stories will be. During each submissions window, I’m selecting for pieces that will almost certainly appear alongside each other in the same issue. So as the contenders become clear I’m always thinking, How does this story fit with that one? This would be a good opener if that was the closer. I like this piece, but I need something to balance it, contrast it, complement it…

+

I want to gather stories that present a mix of genres, themes, styles, and perspectives, but I also want each issue to feel synchronised in a way that makes sense (to me if no-one else!). I’m particularly happy to be receiving stories from and about various parts of the world, and bringing them together in one place is an ongoing goal of the zine. The phrase “global village” has mixed implications, but (to conveniently truncate a good definition) “a global coexistence altered by transnational culture” sounds like a good thing to me, and my hope is that Mythaxis can in a positive manner come to embody that.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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+

ISSUE 25 - Thanks and Salutations! +Many thanks to our talented cover artist, Narupiti Harunsong, for giving us permission to use his dazzlingly intense image. Narupiti is a concept artist, illustrator, and visual development artist from Thailand, whose works and style frequently represent Thai arts, tradition, and cultures. You can find more of his work at DeviantArt, and he’s also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at the links.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-25/fashionistas.html b/issue-25/fashionistas.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..efb5a5b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/fashionistas.html @@ -0,0 +1,423 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Fashionistas — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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The Fashionistas

+

Gregory L. Norris

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Fashionistas by +
+ + + + +

“T + +hey don’t bleed like normal people,” Razz said. His gaze flitted across the catwalk, the styling of the entrance-exit to backstage, the decor choices framing the show to come, and—with the appropriate air of aloof evaluation—the murmuring, gossiping, braying faces of the audience all around. But his mind was elsewhere. “But that’s not the most unnerving thing about them.”

+

Marlene was inventorying the contents of her swag bag—a decent haul, the sort she could re-gift during the holidays but would most likely flog for a profit through online auctions. “What, love?”

+

“These new fashionistas. The other night, one of them confronted me at that dimwit Oscar’s party. I ran him through with the old, cold steel devotchka in the back bedroom where Oscar keeps his… you know. Not a speck of blood.”

+

Makeup, fine chocolates, and a pen encrusted in amethyst crystals. Marlene looked up to see Rasputin Cleary’s eyes wide with worry, his swag bag still on the floor, untouched. For a moment, with rent soon due, she considered pilfering his goodies and doubling her score.

+

“When you say you cut one of these fashionistas, I assume you mean with your column,” she said. “Or your tongue.”

+

Razz blinked and reached into the lapel pocket of his stylish Javier Castijo jacket. “No, I mean with Big Daddy.” He thumbed the release on the switchblade, and its lethal point sprang forth, slicing through the air with a sharp musical note.

+

Marlene gasped. “You didn’t, Razz!”

+

“I did. Right into his smarmy face, because I knew that he knew that I knew.”

+

“Knew what?”

+

“About them. There’s more of them prancing around at these bloody events than before, with their beautiful faces and haute couture—they think we’re all stupid, all sheep. Honestly, with so many ahhhssholes around me, I feel more like a proctologist than a top fashion writer. But I showed him. Only, they don’t bleed. There’s nothing inside except for dust. Also…”

+

Returning Big Daddy to his pocket, Razz loosened his plum paisley ascot enough for Marlene to see the purple welt around his throat.

+

“Oh, Rasputin,” Marlene said, all thoughts about swag and another looming eviction notice forgotten.

+

He laughed, but the sound lacked all humor and met Marlene’s ear as crazy in its delivery. “You think one of those bloodless fashionistas is the first angry clothes horse to try and choke the life out of Rasputin Cleary?”

+

“Whatever did you do?”

+

“Pushed him out the window, nineteen floors up. Sent him to that big Parisian atelier in the sky. Except… ”

+

“Except?”

+

The lights above the runway dimmed. Music thumped, announcing the show had begun. Razz leaned closer and spoke into her ear. “When I made it down to the street, what I found looked like a paper doll. Two-D. Flat. Dusty, but no blood.”

+

Razz settled back in his seat. The first model stomped across the catwalk clad in a matte-and-shine lavender octopus dress that sent many in the audience into fits of wild applause, religious hysteria, and, Marlene assumed by the familiar howls, faked orgasms. Twenty minutes later, the showing by Jean-Hugo Purfoy concluded with a menswear look—an oversize heavy coat in darkest green over a basic T, matching hunter trousers, and green combat boots. The coat was structured front and back, like armor. Like a shell.

+

The turtle Gamera walked last night’s Purfoy runway, Razz declared in his column the following morning.

+

And that column would be his last.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +ays passed, and still Razz didn’t return Marlene’s calls. She spread these attempts out while mustering the courage to ask him to float her the rent, and between little schemes to replace her dried-up trust fund.

+

I should have stayed in Monte Carlo, she emoted in silence while listing her latest trinkets for auction.

+

The phone rang. She checked the caller I.D. and the number came up as ‘private’. Scowling, Marlene answered. “Razz, is that you?”

+

Silence.

+

“Where have you been? Naughty, you not returning any of my calls.” Desperation nudged aside pride. “I wonder, might you be feeling guilty enough to help me out again? I know you’re not an ATM, but a thousand should suffice until… Razz?”

+

The caller hung up. A text came in, the sender also unidentified.

+

Join me at the Harp tonight at 10, it read.

+

The Harp was another of the city’s former elaborate cathedrals, sold off by the church to cover its most salacious legal woes. Developers had purchased the place and transformed it into an A-list destination for party desperates and fashion shows. Razz had invited her there once to take in Jeter Diletti’s fall collection. The canapés and cocktails had been exquisite, the swag even better—Diletti’s line, not so much.

+

Heavy, brocaded burlap straight jackets, Razz had described them in his column.

+

She called his cell again. This time, a recording came on, and a robotic woman’s voice told her the number was no longer in service. So, Razz had changed his line? Fine, but she’d flay his hide if he had the nerve to block his new number the next time he called.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +arlene Hildegard Schmottlak (a.k.a. “Marlene March” in fashion circles and among the glitterati) dressed smartly for the warm night in a pale pistachio top that showed the proper amount of cleavage, gauzy gray cigarette pants, and a pair of Banolo Klonick strappy sandals. A tasteful clutch rounded out the ensemble. Though not designed by that particular brand, if asked she would tell the asker her clutch was by “Glock”.

+

She hailed a taxi and rode the nine blocks to The Harp, which was lit brighter than on any church holiday from its past. Music pounded behind the stained glass windows, something industrial she was sure qualified as a sin in the eyes of its former occupants. Funny, Marlene thought, how the pious always see the crimes of others but never their own wrongdoings.

+

Razz was missing, and someone had invited her to a happening at one of fashion’s greatest houses of worship.

+

They don’t bleed, she remembered while gliding up the ancient granite stairs and into a debauched party straight from one of Hell’s numerous rings.

+

Wait staff dressed in red cat suits swept the main hall, their trays bearing drinks and finger pastries. Dozens of bodies gyrated to the rhythm on a makeshift dance floor beneath somber sconces and a wrought-iron candelabrum from which numerous strands of fairy lights had been strung. The air stank of cannabis and a mix of scents that cost hundreds per tiny bottle—Dior, Verdigris, and other Houses of Pretension all playing together but not necessarily playing nicely.

+

It was the sort of gathering that Razz would invite her to attend and likely carp about in his next column. She accepted a glass from a waiter with plump lips and a dimple. The champagne was top shelf, delicious. While taking silent inventory of faces, many Marlene recognized, she noted that the one she wanted to see most wasn’t there.

+

Rasputin Cleary had been a decent friend. Though she knew he’d taken pity on her when her standing in society crumbled, he never treated her like a has-been, always as a trusted confident. She had to admit she hadn’t exactly honored him in kind. When he spoke, Marlene heard maybe half of what he said. Until he talked about bloodless fashionistas, that was. In spite of the heat, the sweat pulsing over The Harp’s main hall, a sudden chill gossiped over her flesh.

+

Don’t bleed. Hurled out a window on the nineteenth floor. Private phone numbers.

+

The desire to gulp the flute’s contents tempted her, but Marlene ignored it. She cut through the exclusive crowd to a corner where pews from the old cathedral had been outfitted with tufted cushions. The pulsing, pumping drumbeats took a brief interlude. She withdrew her compact and pretended to fix her makeup, but instead scanned the vicinity.

+

Something in a caftan with a blank expression sidled over to her. “Is this pew taken?”

+

“Depends,” Marlene said. “Who are you wearing?”

+

“Next season’s Uri Hagenfeld,” the woman said.

+

Marlene offered a tip of her chin. “I’ll allow it.”

+

The woman sat, fixing her with a look from eyes that never once blinked. A frisson of fear slithered over Marlene’s epidermis. Facing her new friend directly, she saw that Hagenfeld Caftan wasn’t merely beautiful but stunning to behold, one of those faces you can’t stare at directly for long—like the noontime sun, after a few seconds you’d go blind.

+

The stranger’s gaze lay heavily on her. “I want your body.”

+

Marlene tisked, broke away from the woman’s gaze with an effort and deflected back to the little mirror. “You can want until Cocoa Chanel herself crawls out of the grave and back onto the catwalk. Isn’t going to happen, sister—I don’t swing that way.”

+

Though righteous in its delivery, the statement wasn’t exactly truthful. There had been that time during Marlene’s brief attempt at a college education in an exclusive all-girl’s school. And when she’d dated Chris, who had one of those perfect beards—only after their clothes had dropped along with inhibitions did Marlene realized ‘Chris’ was really a ‘Christine’ hopped up on heavy doses of testosterone.

+

“You don’t understand,” Hagenfeld Caftan said. “All that internal material gets scooped out after the deal is made, including the naughty bits.”

+

“Um,” Marlene said. She snapped the compact shut and focused on the other woman. Beautiful, yes. But also stiff. Some disconnected register in Marlene’s consciousness noted that, in addition to not blinking, the Hagenfeld Caftan didn’t seem to draw breaths.

+

One of Razz’s fashionistas?

+

“Do you bleed?” Marlene asked.

+

The woman’s mouth twisted into an approximation of a maniac’s smile with an inelegant creak, like sofa leather protesting beneath a big butt. “Not in this body,” she said. “Not in the others in my closet. If you sell me yours, I’ll wear it with attitude on red carpets and at industry events. Until it falls out of fashion, of course… but you know how styles come and go and then cycle around to being in vogue once again.”

+

Marlene rose swiftly. “You, madame, are fruitier than edible underwear,” she said, and marched away. Razz was right, she thought as the music resumed its subwoofer beat.

+

A trio of hot male youths in vinyl pants, combat boots, and little else gyrated together at the outer orbit of the dance floor. “Hey, gorgeous, want to dance?” asked one with his hair dyed cotton candy blue as Marlene navigated past them.

+

She readied to fire back something witty, only Marlene saw the private dancer’s chest glistened with sweat and heaved with respirations. Her scowl loosened. “Maybe another time, kitten.”

+

“Meow,” he said and faked scratching at her with a paw.

+

So some of the crowd was normal—at least human, her inner voice corrected. But the ranks of the glitterati had been infiltrated with worse agents than fallen royalty, disgraced former A-list celebrities who’d plummeted halfway down the alphabet. And the nouveau-poor pretending they were still nouveau-riche and wearing last season’s styles or—horrors!—sad rags from two seasons back.

+

Razz. They’d gotten to him, she was sure. Whoever these ferocious fashionistas were, Marlene knew they were responsible for her dear friend’s radio silence. Had the Hagenfeld Caftan sent her the text? She didn’t think so.

+

Outside the desecrated bathrooms, where any number of unholy acts were likely being committed, two more zombies in expensive couture appeared, blocking her path. One was a dark-skinned demigod dressed in a ribbed men’s tuxedo shirt, an ochre jacket with long tails, and a matching skirt that reached down to the tops of his ankles. The other man had porcelain skin and wore a samurai-inspired ensemble done in a pink cherry blossom print.

+

“I’d like to buy you off the rack,” the samurai said. “I have the perfect Donna Shirraz scarf to compliment that face.”

+

“I’ll pay you twice what he offers,” the dark demigod said. “And I’ll even wait longer than the customary two months to take possession.”

+

“Take this,” Marlene said and held up both middle fingers.

+

The two fashionistas fixed Marlene with icy stares.

+

“Someone will get to you,” the samurai said.

+

“Well, la-ti-da.”

+

She forced her way through them. The wall of muscles she expected wasn’t there. The men parted, feather-light against her push. The sensation that slithered up her wrists was cold, strange, like touching fine silk or antique lace, a kiss of something only half there.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +t the sink, she washed her hands and then washed them again. Men wanting to wear her? Insides scraped out? She sensed that last part was more than the usual model’s diet, and the first worse than anything having to do with garden-variety serial killers.

+

She slipped behind a stall door and latched it, but she didn’t have to pee and just sat atop the toilet seat, staring at the door but seeing something else.

+

“What are they?” she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “Ghosts? Aliens? Big government?”

+

A knock sounded on the other side of the door.

+

“Ocupado,” she snapped.

+

The knock sounded again.

+

“Are you friggin oblivious?” She stood and tore open the door, her anger cooling as the view of who waited outside registered.

+

It was Rasputin Cleary, looking better than she’d ever seen him.

+

His hair was slicked back and cut into an asymmetrical bob, all of those wiry middle age eyebrow hairs plucked and tamed, and he wore a crisp suit, something impeccable from one of your finer leading men’s houses, Juan-Ringo Guillermo or Ambrose Rose.

+

“Razz,” she gasped.

+

She reached for him but caught herself. The rush of relief died. Razz didn’t blink, didn’t breathe, and she was fairly certain after she remembered the Glock in her clutch that he wouldn’t bleed, either.

+

“I think it’s time we talked,” the imposter wearing Rasputin Cleary said.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey sat at a private table while an impromptu fashion show replaced the gyrations on the dance floor. It was the usual parade of student work—shredded ruffles and napkin skirts, all set to a flatulent soundtrack from the speakers that stuck Marlene’s ear like a curdled stomach and tortured, telescoping anus. If diarrhea was music, she thought.

+

“You are wondering, I suppose?” the imposter asked.

+

“About a lot of things. First, who are you?”

+

“Me or us?”

+

“Either works.”

+

The thing with Razz’s expressionless face studied her, and how it felt like she was being ogled, undressed by those unblinking eyes. “We’re consumers with upscale taste, just like you.”

+

She shivered. “You’re nothing like me.”

+

“No, I suppose we aren’t.”

+

Marlene settled back and pursed her lips. “Apparitions? Extraterrestrials?”

+

“We prefer ‘non-corporeal entities’.”

+

“Corporals? This is some kind of invasion?”

+

Its eyes rolled, marbles in a plastic face. “Cor-por-eal, darling. It means we don’t have physical bodies like you. Our anatomies are energy-based.”

+

“Sorry, the music,” she said. The drivel being pumped out of the sound system had grown particularly runny. “Are there many of you?” she asked.

+

It preened the way a bird preens, expressionlessly. “We are an exclusive set.”

+

“Fashionistas,” she said.

+

“Furriers is a more accurate term.”

+

She choked on that. “You wear us like furs?”

+

The imposter’s eyes widened—and again that action, simple on the living, looked overly exaggerated and grotesque on one of them. “You understand! Which is why I’m in a position to offer you a windfall in exchange for your body. I can grant you ample time to enjoy the spoils before taking possession. A body like yours will remain stylish for many seasons. Together, we’ll attend the finest parties, the most exclusive lunches and launches. You’ll have no financial worries after we complete the design process.”

+

“Design?” She huffed. “You’re not talking smocking, shirring, or top-stitching me. You’re planning to scoop out my ovaries, guts, and insides. Is that what you did to Razz? The real Rasputin Cleary?”

+

The imposter’s eyelids fluttered, and Marlene swore she heard them click between the plop-plop melody of the loose bowel music. “Rasputin Cleary found out about us and threatened to expose us in his column. We had no choice.”

+

“No?”

+

“But you do, and we would like your answer.” A smirk that would have been smug on a living person’s face pushed at the imposter’s. Crooked, it exposed too much lacquered pink gum. “I’ll remind you that should you say no to us, we can take possession without compensation, as we did this body. The choice is yours.”

+

“Some choice. How much?” He made his case at seven figures. “When?”

+

“I’ll grant you four months—which is the best anyone will give you.”

+

“And where exactly will the ‘design’ take place?”

+

The imposter rattled off an address. Marlene connected dots. That was the Blayne Building, where the offices of the Fashion Designers Council were housed.

+

“What say you?” asked Razz’s face, breaking her chain of thought.

+

Four months for a fortune, or nothing at zero notice. “I say you can transfer the money over to my account right now.”

+

The imposter withdrew a phone, an odd-looking model, and tapped buttons. Actual buttons! On a phone! “Rasputin had your bank information in his cell from the many times he paid your rent. And done.”

+

Marlene opened her clutch for her own phone, unlocking it with her fingerprint, her free hand remaining inside. It only took a moment to check her account, and at the sight of all the zeros she smiled.

+

“A pleasure doing business with you,” she said. And then she brought out the Glock and fired, blasting off the imposter’s forehead.

+

A plume of dust puffed out of the opening and dispersed as the tragic models panicked and ran. The rest of Razz’s scooped, stitched, and shellacked exterior slumped and crumpled, reminding Marlene of the paper dolls with tab dresses she used to play with in those early years, back home at Daddy’s mansion.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“H + +ow does one destroy fashion?” Marlene posed aloud to the room.

+

Stacks of hundred-dollar bills covered the bed, the top of the dresser, and the dressing table, whose triptych of mirrors reflected one last glimpse of her looking fresh and fabulous.

+

“With wools, you wash them in hot water so they shrink. With fine fabrics, you deprive them of dry cleaning or the delicate cycle.”

+

She pulled the scissors from beneath the Benjamins and held them like a weapon. “In other words, you rough things up.”

+

In the next day’s fashion pages, the main subject of interest involved the latest in a long line of fallen, once-beautiful style icons—Marlene March, nee Schmottlak. She was spotted entering the Blayne Building in the heart of the fashion district, carrying of all things a big jug of bleach. The accompanying snapshots showed the one-time heiress, socialite, and former ‘It’ girl in a ratty secondhand coat, dirty mom jeans, and sneakers full of holes, her luscious mane of hair chopped off in jagged clumps.

+

No place for the likes of that in a business where everyone was so full of themselves.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Fashionistas” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Gregory L. Norris

+

+ + Author image of Gregory L. Norris + + + Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF TV, Gregory L. Norris writes regularly for fiction anthologies, magazines, novels, and occasionally for TV and Film. He once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount’s Star Trek: Voyager series, and his story Tyrannosaurus Mechs was a finalist in 2022’s Roswell Awards competition in short SF Writing.

+

© Gregory L. Norris 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Rulo Davila, Ekrulila, and Karolina Grabowska.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-25/gods-have-no-faces.html b/issue-25/gods-have-no-faces.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e8f5cfc0 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/gods-have-no-faces.html @@ -0,0 +1,459 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Gods Have No Faces — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Gods Have No Faces

+

Subodhana Wijeyeratne

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Gods Have No Faces by +
+ + + + +

I + +t begins the day the sun stops moving. My mates and I are heading towards the Sea That Whispers in our balloons and we smell something on the high wind. Something sweetly rotten and cloying and insistent. When we get to the bloodflower fields, we find them shrivelled and dead with the duskless red sun squatting over them like a murderer. They only ever bloomed at scorching midday, but even a thirsty man will drown in too much water.

+

We eat what we can and then sit facing each other, forlorn.

+

“What now?” says Six Blade.

+

“The sun’s stopped,” says Six Sheath, weeping. She wipes her face with her lower tentacles and wraps the others around me and Six Blade. “The world’s coming to an end.”

+

When we were young, we’d eat a third of the flowers fresh, and dry the other third for the road, and leave the final third to replenish the fields. We’d feel the air change temperature as we worked, and see the majestic trundle of the sun and the moon. We’d work certain that the universe was a place full of change and energy and hope. Now, though, I look at Six Blade and they look at me and we see the same thing in each other. That we’re desperate to comfort Six Sheath, and desperate to believe she’s wrong. But also that we need comforting ourselves, for what she says is true. The world’s stopped turning. What clearer sign could there be that the universe is dying?

+

There’s nothing for it: we have to split up and find our own way until we’re plump enough to mate again. We’ve enjoyed each other’s company, and Blade and I slept in Sheath even when we weren’t copulating or eating, so it’s a difficult farewell. I watch them amble off in opposite directions, and both stop and look back at me. When they do this I feel a weight in my stomachs like someone had slipped stones down my gullet while I slept.

+

It’s worse for Six Root. He doesn’t understand why they’re leaving him behind. He watches them go with the world reflected, limpid and curving, in the clustered domes of his massive eyes. Then he turns to me, huge face blank, palps waving, confused beyond the capacity of his sweet and simple mind to comprehend.

+

“It’s alright, old chum,” I say. I saddle him and usually he resists, but this day he just shudders and sweeps the dust with his tentacles. “Let’s go to the plains. We’ll find doughfruit and sugarroots.”

+

That’s enough to cheer him up. I, though, am not so easily swayed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e head south along an old wadi, past some low lying hillocks with pillars sticking out of them like charred ribs. Farther south, the scrub melts into dryish grasslands and then into a savanna. The trees here have long blue leaves that hang like wet hair over darkened trunks. The sun is low in the sky behind us, and our shadows and those of the trees are like a multitude of black blades stabbing the black far horizon.

+

Six Root is stuffing his face with hard-fleshed sugarroot when a dome of molten light buds from the ground not far away. I look at the beast and he seems curiously unafraid of it and that emboldens me too. We approach together.

+

The hemisphere is incandescent and cold and quivers like a giant eyelid. After a short while it blinks, and disappears. Six Root snorts and I step back into him, half to comfort, half to be comforted.

+

The light leaves a small crater behind, and something comes crawling out of it. A clumsy and unsteady thing, moving on four trunks which emerge from a crumpled white body studded with dials and pipes and lights. It turns its bulbous head towards me and I see immediately its face is a smooth coppery surface with neither eyes nor nose nor antennae.

+

I fall flat on my face.

+

“Oh Divine One,” I say. “Oh Potentate From Beyond.”

+

The figure coughs, and falls flat on the ground. A few moments pass. Then He stirs.

+

“Goddamn it,” He groans. “I forgot to bring a drink.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he god spends a great deal of time with His face planted on the ground and His forelimbs wrapped around His stomach. I take a blanket and my rollbag from Six Root’s saddlebags and approach. It feels like gut-churning blasphemy to touch Him, but suffering is suffering whether quotidian or divine and so that’s what I do. I help Him up against Six Root’s warm side and the great beast sniffs Him for a long while, and then looks back to where the sun sits like a mad old king upon his throne, the horizon. I light a fire and feed Six Root and wait for the stars to come out. Of course, they never do.

+

The god speaks without warning. “Your sun stopped?” He says.

+

I leap to my feet and then fall to my knees. “Yes, Lord.”

+

“Crazy. When?”

+

“Yesterday, Lord.”

+

“So that’s… six minutes ago. Wow.” He looks at the now-eternal sunset and then turns his face to me. “Don’t worry, it’s just tidal locking. What’s your name?”

+

“Six Whetstone, oh Lord of—”

+

The god turns and looks at Six Root. The beast swings his head around and they stare at each other as if in deep communion for a very long time. Then the god starts stroking him and Six Root rumbles, deep in his throat, and relaxes.

+

“Don’t call me ‘lord’,” says the god. “And for God’s sake get up. My name’s Waters.”

+

“Waters, Lord? You’re the Lord of Water?”

+

“No. I’m just Waters. I’m not the Lord of anything. How come you speak English? I’ll bet they taught you. They taught you, didn’t they?”

+

“English?”

+

“This language we’re speaking. English.”

+

“This is the language of the gods, Lord.”

+

“So they did teach you!” He crosses his arms. “Dicks. What else have they told you? Actually, nevermind. Are you from around here?”

+

“My mates and I follow the bloomings, Lord. But… the bloodflowers died and so we split up and…”

+

He loses interest and turns to look at the sun. “Which way is it to the intersection of null on null?”

+

“The what, Lord?”

+

“The, um…” He waves one of his hands as if trying to snatch something out of the air. “The Navel of Heaven? The—ah, Genesis Point!”

+

“It’s beyond that is the City of Slivers. Westwards. Yonder.”

+

“The City of Slivers? That’s—who rules there?”

+

“The Flower That Blooms Eternal, Lord.”

+

“Her.” The god balls his fists. “Alright, fine. Take me there. Can you do that?”

+

I look at Six Root. He doesn’t object. He just lays his huge antennae back against his body, oblivious and content and drowsy.

+

“Yes. Yes, of course, Lord.”

+

“Also, I’m not here to give revelations and shit, alright? I’m not a god. I’m not going to do miracles, alright?”

+

“As you say, Lord.”

+

“I don’t suppose you’re ever going to stop calling me lord, are you?”

+

“I shall if you can show me a miracle, Lord.”

+

I’m mortified the instant the words leave my mouth and I close my eyes and brace myself for punishment. Thinking, damn it, you and your stupid, diarrheal mouth. But the god chuckles.

+

“Funny.” He appraises me. “I’ve got a good feeling about you, Six Whetstone.”

+

Remember that. Remember that a god once had a good feeling about me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +tories like this are supposed to be interesting. They usually are, in the retelling. But remember that they happen in the world we know, to ordinary people, and so there’s also a lot of tedium and a lot of boredom. Thus my first few days with the Creator aren’t a glorious rush of revelation and enlightenment, but a silent amble against the backdrop of the everdropping sun. We reach an ancient highway half digested by the earth and proceed westward along it. A damp wind licks our backs like the ghostly affections of some long-dead herd. The sun finally sets—or rather, we wander beyond its reach into places that will never again witness a dawn. Presently we see the City of Slivers glittering in the distance like a heap of fallen stars. God Waters sleeps through most of this, with His pipes jiggling and gargling noises percolating out of His suit. When we halt I watch Him and imagine Him within, a delicate and broken thing, limp like an oyster.

+

Here is more blasphemy: I begin to feel sorry for Him.

+

We come to a plain dotted with shallow lakes and stop by one so Six Root can drink. On the far bank is a warburnt village with a few ragged tents squatting amidst the bony ruins. Equally ragged-looking people waft about amongst those, spectral things, with faces like recent amputees slowly realizing the extent of their loss. They stare across the gently wrinkled waters at us, but when God Waters waves at them they scatter like they’d seen a hungry sandspider erupt from its burrow.

+

“What’s their problem?” He asks.

+

I think long and hard before I answer. I tell myself if He thought I was funny before, perhaps He’ll indulge me again.

+

“They hate the gods, Lord,” I say. “They hate what You’ve done to the world.”

+

“What the hell did I do? I just got here.”

+

“You and Yours created the world.”

+

“Actually, it was just me. ”

+

I’m not sure I believe him. There are liar gods, after all. Trickster gods and jealous gods and gods who are malign because that’s their purpose in the universe. How could this odd specimen riding around on Six Root’s back like an overgrown tick possibly be the Creator?

+

He can tell I don’t believe Him. It doesn’t seem to bother Him.

+

“Well?” He says. “Why do they hate me?”

+

I gesture to the lake. “These are craters, Lord. Beneath the hills that way, and there, are buildings. This was a great city once, long ago, but it was destroyed in a war. The weapons used against it were poisoned and the folk who live here have been sick ever since. The gods who came here refused to cure them—they said they were being punished for their ancestors’ sins. So these folk have lingered here in the twilight of their civilization in the hopes that one day they’d recover. We called them the Hopeful Ones. Or, sometimes, the Hollow Ones, on account of their stoicism. It was rare to see one smile, but they still did, sometimes. But now the sun’s stopped and they’ll never have enough light to grow their crops again. They’ll move, or they’ll die. They’ll abandon the stories of a hundred generations, or they’ll die for them. They blame You for the cruelties they must visit on themselves. They hate You and Yours for turning Your back on them.”

+

God Waters stares at the village. In the nooks and shadows, tired eyes stare back.

+

“They weren’t cured because we have no idea what makes them sick,” He says. “Just because we made this place doesn’t mean we know everything about it.”

+

“How can that be, Lord?”

+

“Processing power, man. If I wanted to know everything about your universe I’d need a processor with as many units as there are variables here, and god knows we’re nowhere near that sort of power, even at your shitty resolution. We don’t know half of what’s going on here, and we’ll never know. That’s why I came here. The rest of those dicks wouldn’t even let me look.”

+

“Dicks, Lord?”

+

“Those other gods of yours. They’re dicks. All of them.”

+

“That’s blasphemy,” I say quietly.

+

“Even if I say it?”

+

“Especially then.”

+

“Fine. Try this on for size, then. The only thing that makes me special is that I figured something out. I figured out that nothingness is unstable. It decays, always, into something. It splits into inconsistent and unstable systems: quantum foam, baryonic matter, mathematics. It goes from total equilibrium to disequilibrium, and then decays back into equilibrium.” He sighs. “Your world exists because I wanted to prove that. That’s the only reason. Nothing that’s happened in your universe has a purpose. It only happened because I wanted to prove a point.”

+

“What point does their suffering prove, then, Lord?”

+

He tsks. “Haven’t you been listening? It doesn’t prove anything. It wasn’t even supposed to be. They weren’t supposed to exist, you weren’t, this… thing I’m riding wasn’t. We didn’t even know any of you existed until… until it was too late to do anything about it.” His voice softens and drops. “Now that I say that, though, it sounds so bloody shitty it makes me want to throw up.”

+

Stories like this are supposed to be interesting, I know. But sometimes they’re just sad.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen the sun moved, the weather was as changeable as a young heart. The winds wandered, incessant, and with them the rains would drift down mountainsides and in a cooling tide across the plains. Scents and distant voices drifted up through the kingdom of cloud below us and up to our balloons. But after the sun halted, the wind began blowing in only one direction, as it does now. Along the way, it gathers the fine particles of the sunside world and thickens into a choking haze that sweeps over us like a colossal procaryote made of dust. We proceed in its belly, sightless, towards a horizon we have to trust is there.

+

We halt when the dust storm becomes too intense and rest in Six Root’s shadow. After some time the great beast growls and peers off into the haze, and following his gaze I pick out a cluster of bobbing lights approaching. A contingent of soldiers in the spiky white uniforms of the City of Slivers emerge from the gloom, and behind them is a figure identical in every way to God Waters. I kneel and touch my head to the floor.

+

“Lady of the Dark,” I say. “Forgive my impertinence in existing in your presence.”

+

“Oh, get up,” says God Waters. The soldiers hear Him and lie flat on their faces. “You know we’re not gods.”

+

“Is that why you’re here?” says She Who Blooms. “To wreck everything?”

+

“Is this why you didn’t want me to come?” snaps God Waters. “Because you didn’t want me to tell them all you’re just an old nerd with gout and hair you’ve dyed so much it comes off in clumps when you comb it?”

+

They glare at each other for a few moments. Strange how obvious it is, even when They have no eyes. Then She Who Blooms signals the soldiers back. She waves me off too, but God Waters puts His hand on my shoulder.

+

“He’s staying here,” He says. “I like him. He speaks straight.”

+

“Fine.” She sits, in the dust, cross-legged like an ear-cleaner on the streets of Her city. “What’re you doing here, Waters? You didn’t come here just to torment me. Where’s your adjustor module?”

+

“Don’t need one.”

+

“Don’t be ridiculous. This is why we didn’t want you in here. You’re careless, and if— ”

+

“It’s metastasized.”

+

She Who Blooms stiffens. “What?”

+

“Stage four. I found out yesterday.”

+

“Stage four?” A pause. “How— ”

+

“I don’t know. But, come on. It’s pancreatic. It was always going to win.” He reaches out and takes Her hands. “It’s over, Jane.”

+

They sit there for a long time with the dust slithering about Them, like statues of Themselves, raised and forgotten by a civilization itself long erased. I pick over their words. Their words are like the cogs and springs and wires in some ancient technology. On their own they make sense but put together they become some code beyond my understanding. Still, I don’t move, and I don’t ask. I listen, for that is what one does in the presence of the Gods.

+

She Who Blooms pulls back Her hands. “This isn’t a trick, is it? You’re not just saying that to excuse being here?”

+

“Piss off. I’m not that much of dick.”

+

“Yes, you are.”

+

God Waters hangs His head. “Alright, fine, I am. But it’s not a trick.”

+

“Goddamn it, James.” She watches Him for a long time. Then She shakes Her head. “Well, fine then. What do you think?”

+

“Of what?”

+

“Of your creation. What else?”

+

“It’s kinda sad.”

+

“No shit. This is why we told you not to initiate the procedure.”

+

“There’s no way you could have known this would be the result.”

+

“It was always going to be something like this.”

+

“No, it wasn’t. It was going to be clean and empty. Just mathematics.”

+

“Says the man who proved complexity comes from simplicity.”

+

“You want me to say I’m sorry, right? That I regret it?” He shakes his head, four, five times. “I don’t regret it. I proved you all wrong.”

+

“At what cost?”

+

God Waters spreads His arms. “You call this cost? This is sad, sure, but sad things can be beautiful too. It’s just a matter of how you look at it.”

+

“I have looked at it. More than you have. I’ve spent millions of their years trying to stop them from making the mistakes we made. I’ve watched empires rise and fall, and a billion lives pass, like that.” She clicks Her fingers. “All it’s taught me is that nothing is worth anything. Everything we’ll ever know is just a small blip in an ocean of stillness.”

+

The God Waters shakes His head. “No.”

+

“Which part, no?”

+

“All of it. The darkness doesn’t matter. There’s no one there to see it and so it may as well not exist. You think a flower doesn’t matter because it blooms alone in a desert? No, right? It just makes it all the more beautiful.”

+

“You’re just trying to excuse yourself.”

+

“I don’t need to excuse myself to you, Jane. Or anyone. I came here to die and I’ll do it without regret. I’m good, cheers.”

+

They fall silent for a long time. The wind stiffens, briefly, and then subsides. The sky clears and the stars come out, a glittering host watching as if they know this will be a conversation repeated for a thousand years. I too feel that, and also as if listening to God Waters speak had blown away some obscuring dust in my heart. I was seeing some truth, some blood-warm and comforting revelation, that I couldn’t quite comprehend yet.

+

She Who Blooms stands. “Fine. I’ll cover for you.”

+

“Alright. Cheers.”

+

She nods. “Take care, Waters.”

+

She walks to where Her soldiers are waiting and they head off together. We watch until they melt into the dark. Then God Waters lies back, exhaling.

+

“Stuck-up bitch,” He mutters.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +his is what I think I see:

+

We pass a village by a small oasis, half burning, half already burned. The unshifting winds are pushing a dune over the waters. The fish who live there are dead, and without the sun the villagers have no crops either. Two men are dragging another through the street and he’s bloodied and missing limbs and probably already dead. An old woman is watching, weeping, from a doorway. In the village square, a group of young women are hammering at a bloodstained altar. Their blows chip flecks of shrapnel off the thing, but it refuses to shatter with the obduracy that comes with being unconcerned by something so petty as being hated.

+

Farther along, a group of bandits have holed up in an old town. They ride through the streets on clattering steampowered chariots, wielding guns and hooting in some language neither I nor God Waters understand. They’re pagans, bandana-wearing, their eyes small and hostile and suspicious. They gather in the town square and burn books and then smear the ash on their faces. They call themselves the People of the Ashes, but the townsfolk call them Bookeaters when they’re not around, and mock them and spread stories that one was caught screwing a pig. But in public they’re quiet and respectful. They never look the Bookeaters in the eye and never argue with them and always, always, give them what they want.

+

In the hinterland of Genesis Point is a vast abandoned farm. The fields are bigger than anything I’ve ever seen before—bigger than a lake, bigger than the sea. They run endless and changeless for hours and hours alongside us. The same tall green-stemmed plant topped with the same drooping yellow flower, and the same fence with its neat wooden posts and cruel-looking webbing of metal wire jostled by the breeze. We’re fully on the night side of the planet now, and the stars are shining overhead and the flowers don’t know that they’ll shine forever. The farm’s dying, and it’s a holocaust on a scale I’ve never even considered. Fathoms of living matter turning dry and limp and pungent. Entire empires of pollination and procreation and predation decaying into particulate chaos. I stop and stare, dumbfounded and breathless.

+

This is what I really see:

+

In a village, the halting of the sun brings about the fall of the family that ruled the oasis for a hundred generations. They were once kind and wise, but in the years that followed they became inbred and obsessed with their own cleanliness. They forbade anyone from their village to travel and monopolized trade with the outside world. They told the villages that to sacrifice their children to their ancestors was the highest of honours and ensured the sun moved in the sky, and came to believe this themselves. So when the sun sets and doesn’t rise again, they implode under the accumulated weight of guilt from a lie they realize is now in their blood. When the villagers gather in front of their house and demand answers, they of course have none. They’re butchered and the village rejoices. The old woman crying in the doorway is crying tears of joy.

+

The town where the Bookeaters are bullying the ordinary folk has seen folk like this many times before. For years the land was bountiful and the grain piled in silos like winter snowfall, and so the townsfolk were content to let them come occasionally and take what they like. Some even saw it, perhaps, as a species of charity. But now there isn’t enough food and the townsfolk are angry and some of them are pointing out that charity to the undeserving denigrates the giver and coddles the receiver. Some of them are beginning to lay caches of guns, and spread the arguments necessary to convince people to kill and die without fear or regret. There is a smell in the air like aerosolized blood and God Waters tells me without hint of prophecy that it’s the aroma of blood about to be spilled.

+

Where the farm is there had once been an expanse called the Forest of the Night. It was an ancient realm of giant trees that blotted out the sun with their sky-spanning canopies. In the cloistered dark beneath them were giant fungi and luminescent creatures and a silence as thick and silky as incense smoke. In the present, already shoots of long dormant fungus are soaring through the green regularity of the doomed yellowflower crop like the budding spikes of some subterranean monster. Already the soil crawls with mycelia and the lazy buds of things that need neither sun nor people to thrive. The Forest of the Night is returning. It has outlasted. It has endured.

+

I learn these things, and something else also. That, though I know what I see when I see myself, perhaps I’m mistaken about that too.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Y + +ou’re waiting for the moment when I arrive at Genesis Point and the truths of the universe are revealed to me. But the revelation has come and gone. If you’ve not noticed, look again. If you still don’t see it, stop looking. It wasn’t meant for you.

+

We conduct the last few fathoms of our journey beneath a strangely beautiful roil of clouds that threaten rain but never actually burst. They’re illuminated by Genesis Point’s distant purple glow. The brighter it gets, the more ill I feel, as if there was a string running through my head and it had begun vibrating and churning my brain and my balance. Six Root feels it too, and so too must all living things, for the hinterland of the Most Sacred is utterly lifeless.

+

We get to the blasted ruins of a tree and I’m functional enough to see that it’s not a tree at all but some great spiking crystal sticking out of the ground and branching into a dazzling fractal brush. Six Root collapses, and then I fall too, retching, beside him. God Waters slips off and joins us. He tries to rise, but His limbs are shaking and it takes Him a long time.

+

“I’ll go on from here,” He says.

+

“Lord,” I say. “You… You can’t.”

+

“The radiation’s killing you.” He retches. “Turn back.”

+

I look at Him. I know that inside that strange suit He’s a broken thing and that soon He’ll cease to exist. I know that He feels much like I do, and the thought is as wondrous as it’s horrifying. I want to get up and hug Him and comfort Him, but what comfort can something like me offer a god?

+

He seems to know what I’m thinking. He kneels again, and wraps His arms around me.

+

“Cheers,” He says. He squeezes. “You didn’t have to do this.”

+

“I… Lord…”

+

He helps me up. I stare at His faceless head for a long time, with a sour taste in my mouth that could be from the air or else from within me.

+

He grips my shoulder. “I know I’m supposed to give you some wisdom, right? But I don’t have any. I just had a theory, and I made your whole world to prove it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just did it.” He shudders and falls silent. Then He continues. “But I meant what I said. I don’t regret it. I think if I could have created you alone, it would have been worth it. You’re a good person. If you’re good, there must have been billions of people like you, right? Billions who lived and died and did good while they were here. I got to create good. That’ll do me.”

+

“You are… god…”

+

He shakes His head. “No. No, and I’ll tell you why. Gods are owned by their worshippers. And worshippers are owned by their gods. They love each other because they’re supposed to. I don’t think you’re a good person because you worship me, man. I think you’re good because, even if you didn’t think I was a god, you could’ve bailed when Jane got me, or convinced me to join someone else or something. But I know you saw me as I am, and I know you wanted to help. And I know you’d’ve helped even if I was just some bum lying in the desert.”

+

I hang my head. This isn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear some bittersweet insight into the ways of the universe. The God Waters squeezes my shoulder.

+

“I’m off.” He takes a few steps away, then looks back. “This isn’t the end of the world, Six Whetstone. It’s a beginning, and those’re always hard.”

+

He walks off in dwindling silhouette until he’s swallowed by the distant light. Six Root nudges me, and I lean against him. We turn to follow our footsteps back the way we came. But somehow they’re already gone. There’s no wind or water, but also no sign in the dust that we ever came this way.

+

I look back towards Genesis Point. There’s nothing there but light.

+

“Come on, old chum,” I say, and nudge Six Root.

+

We brace against each other, and strike off, as if for the first time.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “The Gods Have No Faces” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Subodhana Wijeyeratne

+

+ + Author image of Subodhana Wijeyeratne + + + Subodhana Wijeyeratne is a historian and writer living in Tokyo, Japan. He’s been writing fiction for nearly twenty years and has had nearly twenty short stories appear in print over the past two years, in venues including Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Expanded Horizons, Piker Press, and The Scarlet Leaf Review. His short story ‘They Meet in the Wall’ was awarded a Mariner Prize in 2018. His first collection of short stories, Tales from the Stone Lotus, is currently available on Amazon - as is his debut novel, The Slixes. You can find him on Instagram and his website.

+

© Subodhana Wijeyeratne 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Nikita, geralt, Jorge0113, and PublicDomainPictures.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Spring 2021

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Subodhana Wijeyeratne +

The Gods Have No Faces

+
+ + +

One of the great joys of speculative fiction is World Building. As a writer, it's creating new environments from, so to speak, the ground up; as a reader, it's setting off into each one to see what they contain. Subodhana Wijeyeratne has built a world already crumbling when we take our first steps. To know why, ask its creator — but with gods, don't expect to understand whatever answer is forthcoming.

+ + + + Story image for The Gods Have No Faces by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Time Dysperception

+ Jack Mackenzie +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Time Dysperception by + + + +

We all get lost in the moment occasionally, or feel time is getting away from us. But how horrible could either be under the wrong circumstances? Or ANY circumstances, if you never knew which way it was going to be, or when? Like you just found out the countdown has begun, the clock is ticking, the last vital seconds slipping away…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Prometheus’ Kidneys

+ Meg Candelaria +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Prometheus’ Kidneys by + + + +

Yes, it's hard to know what will get a story accepted or rejected at Mythaxis — but until recently the editor thought he had one answer at least: 'Don't send me any more clever retellings of ancient Greek Myths,' he'd say, 'I'm never going to take one of those!' And then Meg Candelaria came along to make him eat those words.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Plague Rooster

+ Micah Hyatt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Plague Rooster by + + + +

Mythaxis is not typically a home to poetry, nor to reprints, but when we came across this piece while hunting down the author of 'The Third Martian Dick Temple' we were immediately moved, in no small part due to the pandemic gripping the world in early 2020. One year on from the first Covid-19 lockdowns, the world remains profoundly changed from how it was before - but thankfully not this much changed.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Fashionistas

+ Gregory L. Norris +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Fashionistas by + + + +

Fashion models, they're like some other species, aren't they? Tall, sleek, beautiful — well, sometimes beautiful, sort of. "Striking", let's say. Or maybe they're more like aliens, so different from we mere humans as they glide by, adorned in strange new things. Well, while you're contemplating next season's rags, just be careful the fascinating lure of the catwalk doesn't distract you from the strange new thing sitting right there next to you.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Comfort Zone

+ KC Grifant +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Comfort Zone by + + + +

There's a certain theme in science fiction and fantasy that's always been popular - hard to set this up without spoiling it! Hollywood movies have repeatedly run with it (usually for laughs), so too surely every TV show in either genre. It has clear horror potential too, but very rarely are such stories approached from the outsider's point-of-view. KC Grifant does so here, and with a similarly atypical air of loss, rather than gain.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Unknown Ancestry

+ T. M. Morgan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Unknown Ancestry by + + + +

What makes a person who they are: Nature or Nurture? Most people would say it's a bit of both, forgetting that musician they like with "natural talent", or the monster on the news who was just "born evil". But of course, those are the outliers. For most of us, how and where we're raised makes all the difference. And what about when you learn you're not what you think you are at all — is it Nature or Nurture then?

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala +

The Cat and the Cosmic Horror

+
+ + +

There's a long tradition of comedy double acts, both in writing and performing. It's always good to have someone to bounce your ideas off, as long as they don't become someone you want to bounce off the wall. Pritesh Patil and Percy Wadiwala provide a fine example of the benefits of the former, but the calamitous duo at the heart of their story may be more like the latter…

+ + + + Story image for The Cat and the Cosmic Horror by + + + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-25/plague-rooster.html b/issue-25/plague-rooster.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..463f2b88 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/plague-rooster.html @@ -0,0 +1,503 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Plague Rooster — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Plague Rooster

+

Micah Hyatt

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Plague Rooster by +
+ + + + +

I

+

Follow me, children, Grandmother says,

+

Across concrete bridges strangled by vines
+Down deserted streets marked by meaningless lines
+Around the metal husks of cars
+Become the nests of beasts

+

We will stay away from the buildings
+Where only the dead reside
+Waiting on unpowered elevators
+That will never rise

+

To the shrine that stands in the midst of the city
+I will show you where our new beginning began

+

Grandfather grunts
+Tell them the truth this time, he says, not the pretty myth you made
+They deserve to know about—

+

I will tell it the only way they will understand, Grandmother says
+Too many words have been forgotten, and the parts I’ve left out
+Would mean nothing to them without a background in virology,
+Parasitology and applied microbiology

+

See? Look how confused the children are,
+Scratching their heads
+Science is dead
+You and I killed it
+Best tell them my myth instead

+

II

+

Grandfather sees
+A squat white building with busted out windows
+And the skeletons of his former colleagues

+

The summer rains have come early
+And flooded the stairs

+

He sees it the way it once was
+Busy and alive

+

The stone globe in the courtyard
+Three rooster statues crowing
+One statue shattered by the bomb-throwing
+Terrorist that gave him his limp

+

This is the place, Grandmother says,
+The home of our ancestral tribe
+And when the sickness came to us
+We brought our babies here to die

+

See the moss-eaten rocks of vague avian shape
+Clutching water-smooth stones with their feet?
+This is where Lord Rooster was born
+And mistakes we must never repeat

+

Find a dry place to sit, now
+The tale is not long the way that I tell it

+

You tell it wrong, Grandfather thinks

+

III

+

Grandmother’s Myth

+

When your grandfather and I were young
+Mankind had learned to fear
+The curses beasts could pass to us
+And their knowledge we held dear

+

Lord Rat was eldest bearer of these maladies
+A black shape skittering through our heads
+The fleas he carried with him
+Would bite us in our beds

+

And in eight days
+The bells would toll
+Announcing you were dead

+

Lord Cow was subtle for his size
+The madness he carried in his flesh
+Would pass to those who ate him,
+Even when his meat was fresh

+

And in a week
+The brain you had
+Would be a runny mess

+

Lord Monkey was a tricky one
+Plotting from his treetop throne
+His curse stripped away immunity
+So other sicknesses could grow

+

And without fail,
+The tamest colds
+Would strike us dead in droves

+

But it was Lord Rooster we feared the most
+For though his wings couldn’t take him far
+The little birds he consorted with
+Were numerous as the stars

+

And when they sang
+At morning’s light
+Lungs seized and ceased to draw

+

No one could stop the spreading death
+When Lord Rooster walked the earth
+But your grandfather defeated him
+How? I will start with Rooster’s birth—

+

IV

+

Grandfather interrupts

+

They were viruses, you understand?
+The sniffles? The coughs?

+

He tries to find a way to explain
+Concepts that no longer exist

+

Small creatures, living things
+Invisible and discrete

+

Were they ghosts? the children ask

+

No, he says
+Lines of code in double helix

+

Do you remember when we
+Grafted the peach and the plum tree?
+When I cut a branch from the one and Inserted it
+Into the other’s cleft
+So we would have plums out of season?

+

Viruses are like that
+They are the scion,
+We are the stock

+

They graft themselves to us
+And together we bear fruit

+

The children stare up at him, baffled
+The littlest one asks if Lord Monkey was a tree

+

Grandfather tries to think of a better metaphor,
+Until he sees his wife’s smile

+

He sighs
+Just listen to Grandmother’s story, he says

+

And walks off a ways to sit alone
+Staring at the rooster statues
+Still crowing at the dead stone globe

+

V

+

Ignore Grandfather, Grandmother says,

+

Look over there
+See where the rooster statues stand?
+This is where our elders sinned
+And gave their last command

+

They fought a war they could not win
+But so wicked were their ways
+They summoned up Lord Rooster
+And used him like a slave

+

They sent him to their enemies
+Without considering the cost
+For when their enemies lay dead
+Lord Rooster remained aloft

+

They built this shrine to summon him
+Trusting glass tubes to hold him in thrall
+Then brought their children as a sacrifice
+And laid them on his claws

+

Come to this place, sick spirit, they cried
+Voices rising above the wind
+Come drink your fill of our children
+We will pay in blood for our sin

+

Then with their knives they plunged deep
+And reddened water from a bloody creek
+Rolled down the comb and wet the beak

+

Lord Rooster was born in a droplet—
+A bird thing, his mind gone thin

+

The statue cracked
+The droplet dropped
+The sickness took to wing

+

And In the dying dark of night
+Lord Rooster began to sing

+

VI

+

Grandfather clears his throat

+

They were not children we made sick
+He says,
+Embryonic stem cells never lived
+An egg is not a chick

+

Our work was ordained
+Sanctioned from on high
+By government officials
+Who wished to never die

+

They told us to open the disease
+We unzipped it
+Read nature’s code like data decrypted

+

Rewrote its essence to be useful
+And implanted our lie so well
+The human body swore that it was truthful

+

Listen to me, my grandchildren,
+Lord Rooster is nothing but the name
+We gave it when it jumped from birds to men
+The statue did not awaken
+We are not paying for our sin

+

VII

+

Grandfather’s memory is going, Grandmother says,
+But I remember it rightly

+

The sun rising, the fluttering wings
+Shedding rock and debris to reveal
+A skinny raw thing
+With its mouth open wide
+And to it we villagers kneeled

+

We nourished him with blood until he grew strong

+

White and crimson feathers sprouted
+His granite beak took a yellow hue
+And when we pointed him towards the east
+To our enemies he flew

+

The littlest grandchild asks,

+

What do these words mean, Papa
+In the place where Lord Rooster once perched?

+

My company’s motto, Grandfather replies
+Our knowledge will light the Earth

+

How did you stop him grandpa?

+

Who?

+

Lord Rooster, the child says

+

Grandfather looks away
+With shame in his eyes
+He says, I did a bad thing

+

No, Grandmother says,
+You saved so many lives

+

Tell the story how you wish, he says
+But leave me out of it

+

He turns and walks away
+Towards the ruined city

+

They will be safe without him
+On their return to the homestead
+A side effect of the cure:
+All the muggers are long dead

+

He perches himself on some rubble, brooding
+Mist rises from cracked streets like ghosts

+

The surest way to kill a virus
+Is to kill every possible host

+

Which he has done

+

It was easy and over fast
+Everything but the regret

+

He lapses into a long silence, thinking
+I am the reason there are no more birds

+

Hours later, the sun rises over a dead city

+

Nothing crows

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Plague Rooster” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Micah Hyatt

+

+ + Author image of Micah Hyatt + + + Micah Hyatt’s work has appeared in Deep Magic Magazine, Shock Totem, Little Blue Marble, Flash Fiction Online, and Daily Science Fiction. He is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. His light-hearted zombie survival novella, Eating the Exhibits, is available now through Amazon.

+

© Micah Hyatt 2019 All Rights Reserved. Plague Rooster was originally published in Shock Totem #11, Shock Totem Publications.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: lotek56 and Pixabay.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ +

Prometheus’ Kidneys

+

Meg Candelaria

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Prometheus’ Kidneys by +
+ + + + +

T + +he sun rose over a rock in the sea. A solitary figure on the rock stirred slowly.

+

Prometheus sighed. It was morning.

+

Yet again.

+

Soon the eagle of Zeus would be here.

+

Yet again.

+

The eagle would perform the ritual and eat his liver.

+

Yet again.

+

Prometheus was tired of the ritual. Over the centuries he had come to dread it almost as much as the actual eating of his liver, but there was no avoiding either. He could see the eagle’s outline in the distance. It would be here soon, and he must go through it all. Yet again.

+

At least then it would be over and he would have the rest of the day to himself, to heal, to think, to listen to the music of the sirens, the calls of the gulls, and the waves lapping at the edge of his rock. To listen to his hair grow, so long now it rode the water around the rock like weed.

+

It was a dull existence, punctuated with moments of terror and pain each morning, but Prometheus refused to regret the deed that had put him there.

+

The eagle landed on the rock to which Prometheus was chained, his abdomen exposed and defenseless. “Again I come,” it said. “And again I ask you: Do you regret your act?”

+

Prometheus sighed. “No, I do not, I cannot, and I will not.”

+

The eagle gave an odd sound, almost like a sigh. Prometheus wondered if it was tired of the ritual as well. Did the eagle long to be released from their commitment, to be free to seek some less stubborn food? Or did the access to easy prey make up for having to go through this ridiculous ritual of question and answer each morning? It certainly never seemed to tire of the meal. Once Prometheus had asked the eagle if it was bored with his liver and would prefer a kidney instead. He had pointed out that, if the eagle loosened the chains just a bit, it could reach his back and enjoy a new taste. Alas, the eagle had only stared at him when he made the suggestion. The eagle of Zeus was not known for its imagination, or its sense of humor.

+

“By your disloyalty and recalcitrance, you have earned this punishment,” the eagle said, raising its beak over Prometheus’ exposed right flank.

+

“Do what you will,” Prometheus said. “I will never regret siding with the weak against the strong, the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the defenseless against the aggressor, those in need against the greedy.” He said it every time, to remind himself more than to inform, convince, or even defy the eagle.

+

“Let’s get it over with,” he added.

+

The eagle was all too eager to move on to its reward. Soon, Prometheus knew, he would feel intense pain as the beak ripped open his side and removed piece after piece of his liver. He would scream until his throat bled and he choked on his own blood. The eagle would feast on his liver and drink its fill of his blood.

+

A god or a titan cannot lose consciousness or go into shock. He would be aware of every last sensation. Again. He would try to shut it out, to listen to the roar of the sea and the songs of the sirens instead. The strategy would fail soon enough, but it did help, at least a little, at first. The sea was, alas, still and uninteresting today, except for an unusual low-pitched hum. Perhaps that might provide a brief distraction. He focused on the sound.

+

The eagle eyed Prometheus one last time, angling its head to most easily strike the spot just below the ribs, its favorite spot for making the first break in the skin. Prometheus took a deep breath and waited for the pain. The sea’s hum increased in intensity.

+

“Not today!” a voice suddenly cried out from nowhere. “Not today and not ever again!”

+

The eagle lifted its head in annoyance, searching for the source of the disruption, but Prometheus saw it first: a human in a small boat was approaching his rock at an unnatural speed.

+

“How is he controlling his craft?” Prometheus wondered aloud. The human, sailor or warrior as he might be, did not appear to be rowing and the craft had no sail. A hero, then, gifted by the gods with a supernatural craft, perhaps. But what god would give such a gift to a human, even if he was a hero?

+

The human’s boat reached the island and, using Prometheus’ near endless hair as rope, he scrambled up it to the spot where Prometheus and the eagle stood. She scrambled up, Prometheus corrected himself, for at close range there was no mistaking this human’s shape for that of a man. But what could she be doing here? An Amazon, or Atalanta herself, come to challenge the eagle? But how? She had no sword or bow or other weapon. She wore no armor and bore no shield. She would die in seconds when the eagle attacked. The recklessness was magnificent, but would be all too short lived.

+

“Not today,” she repeated, looking the eagle in the eye. “And never again. You are done here. Go your way or be slain.”

+

The eagle eyed the woman with the expression a guard dog might give a lap dog that yipped at it: bemused and amused, a bit contemptuous, but by no means alarmed.

+

“Go away little human,” it said. “I have no business with you, but if you stay here you will be my dessert after I eat the titan’s liver.”

+

“You will never again eat his liver,” the woman insisted, taking a step towards the eagle.

+

“No!” Prometheus cried. “Get away! You are valiant, but what can you do against the eagle of Zeus? Save yourself and have no concern for me.”

+

“Take the titan’s advice,” the eagle said. “I will have my prey. You have no means to harm me. I, however, have every means of harming you.” The eagle lifted a talon, and clacked its beak threateningly.

+

“I have no means to harm you?” the woman asked. “Are you sure?”

+

The eagle looked at her, contempt and confidence plain in its expression. Prometheus, in contrast, felt a slight lift of hope. He knew a trickster’s expression when he saw one.

+

“Let’s test your hypothesis,” the woman said with a smile.

+

She pulled a small metal object from her pocket and pointed it at the eagle. There was a flash of light, the sound of a slammed door, and the smell of smoke filled the air. A tiny dot of blood appeared on the eagle’s chest.

+

The eagle looked first confused then surprised, then, for a brief moment, terrified, before it fell off the rock and landed with a splash in the sea. Prometheus knew instinctively that it was fire, his own gift, that the woman had used to end the immortal eagle’s life—although how she had used it he could not say.

+

“Thank… thank you!” Prometheus exclaimed. “I don’t know how I can ever repay your valor.”

+

The woman turned to him and smiled again. It had been a long time since Prometheus had seen a human and he had, perhaps, forgotten some of the subtle points which a smile could convey, but this he felt sure was not a pleasant one. The woman was short, pale, soft, and clearly mortal. Yet, with that smile, she looked like nothing so much as Zeus on the day he had chained Prometheus to the rock.

+

“I do,” the woman said. “I know exactly how you will repay me. My donor shortage is over!”

+

With that, she fell on Prometheus and cut open his side in the very place the eagle would have opened it with its beak. Quickly and neatly, she removed the liver. Unlike the eagle, she seemed to find the blood a nuisance and did something with a small stick to stop its flow, similar to but distinct from the one she had used to destroy the eagle. Fire was involved here too, as Prometheus could tell by the smell of burnt meat that permeated the air. The smell of a burnt offering to the gods—or to humanity—made from his own flesh.

+

The woman placed his liver in a strange container which seemed to be neither wood nor metal nor even porcelain, and from which cold smoke arose. She smiled again, looking satisfied. “A new liver, every day. And the liver of a god. Perfect! Whose body would reject the liver of a god?”

+

She hopped down to her boat, her miniscule weight tugging his long locks as she went. As the strange little vessel set off again, she turned, waved, and called, “See ya tomorrow!”

+

The humming of the boat receded, and in a short span of time Prometheus was once more alone with the day and his discomfort, the steady knitting of his abused flesh. Yet again.

+

“You did not regret your deed before,” an amused voice in his head asked. “Do you now that you have seen the uses to which humans have put your gift?”

+

“No, Zeus, I do not,” Prometheus answered. “The woman made it clear that she seeks to use my liver not for her own need or greed but to help others. I regret her desire not at all, her act only a little. She is, in any case, quicker and neater than your eagle. Do you regret that you betrayed your loyal servant to death and did not even get the result you sought?”

+

The voice made no answer.

+

Prometheus smiled. He had made the speech to anger Zeus. Annoying Zeus was a game that never grew old, even with the passage of millennia. However, that did not mean that what he said was not true. On the contrary, it was true. Very true, as anyone who considered the matter carefully must eventually realize.

+

In his long period of suffering, suffering for an act of apparent charity, the world had forgotten who Prometheus really was: not a martyr god, such as Persephone or Baldor or the unfortunate son of Jaweh, but a trickster god, brother to Loki and Coyote. Tricking the eagle of Zeus was one thing: hard, near impossible, as Prometheus had found over the centuries. The eagle was too straightforward. It had had few or no ambitions of its own, beyond the need to serve Zeus, and little or no imagination to work with. Tricking a human—a surgeon no less, if he read the clues right—was quite a different task. A much easier and more enjoyable task. For the first time in centuries, Prometheus was oblivious to the world around him. The songs of the sirens went unnoticed as his brain seethed with new ideas, new plans.

+

Perhaps he’d start by convincing her to cut his hair. Things had clearly changed since his exile, but surely they couldn’t change so much that surgeons no longer cut hair. One talked while cutting hair. It was a natural thing. He would let her know that he did not grudge her his liver. Perhaps she would tell him how she used it, in whose name and interest she had taken his sacrifice. Then, sympathy established, perhaps he would suggest that she consider his kidneys. If she needed his liver, surely she could use his kidneys too. Yes, that suggestion would surely be of more interest to a surgeon than to the eagle of Zeus.

+

Kidneys are not easily reached from the front of the body and the chains kept Prometheus’ back firmly against the rock. The eagle would have probably continued straight through him to reach them, had he ever succeeded in its temptation, but this surgeon preferred a different sort of efficiency. And in order to get at his kidneys, she would have to loosen his chains, just a bit.

+

Iron and rock have no force to hold a titan. Only Zeus’ magic kept Prometheus chained to the rock. If the chains were loosened, so would the spell be. After they were loosened, he would need only to regrow his organs, stretch, break the fetters, and walk away. After that… the possibilities were nearly endless.

+

Humans were clearly no longer the pathetic, helpless creatures they were at the beginning of Prometheus’ exile. He might have stolen fire from the gods for them, but they had stolen magic from the gods for themselves. Prometheus felt a profound feeling of fellowship for the species. They were no longer his children. They were his brothers and sisters. They were his peers.

+

They were fair game.

+

Prometheus smiled a trickster’s smile and settled back, to regrow his liver, and to plan.

+

No, he had not a regret in the world.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Prometheus’ Kidneys” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Meg Candelaria

+

+ + Author image of Meg Candelaria + + + Meg Candelaria lives in Philadelphia with her family, two neurotic dogs, and an apparently indestructible ginkgo tree. Her work has previously appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Everyday Fiction. Despite writing mostly for online venues, she’s a bit of a luddite and keeps hoping that twitter will go away before she has to take notice of it.

+

© Meg Candelaria 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Anna Shvets and TheOther Kev.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-25/time-dysperception.html b/issue-25/time-dysperception.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3b97574d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/time-dysperception.html @@ -0,0 +1,512 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Time Dysperception — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Time Dysperception

+

Jack Mackenzie

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Time Dysperception by +
+ + + + +

S + +everal hours into her shift (or that’s how it felt at least), the brown-suited man burst through the front doors and dashed up to the front desk again. “What room is Saesor Zota in?” he demanded. This time, Bonnie Bauman was determined not to tell him Zota’s room number.

+

“Why are you doing this?” she wailed. “You keep coming back and asking the same question!”

+

The man in the brown suit furrowed his brow. “Have you seen me before?” he asked.

+

“Of course I’ve seen you before,” Bonnie snapped. “You’ve been through here twice now, always after Mister Zota! It’s like you can’t remember!”

+

The man gave her a concerned look and then reached into his breast pocket.

+

“Oh no you don’t!” Bonnie shouted. He was reaching for the small metal disc with a green gemstone embedded in its center. She closed her eyes and ducked her head below the desk. “Put that away!” she shouted at the floor while she crouched as low as she could. “Don’t even turn it on!”

+

“Good citizen,” the man said. “I won’t touch the influencer. I’ll put my hands on the desk. Okay?”

+

Cautiously, Bonnie stood. She kept her eyes down and closed, only opening them enough to see that both the man’s hands were flat on the desk’s surface. Cautiously, she looked up at him.

+

He was not unhandsome. His face was nicely angled, his jaw square and slightly darkened by a five o’clock shadow. He tried to smile reassuringly at her.

+

“My name is Kai. What’s yours?”

+

“Bonnie.” She swallowed. “Bonnie Bauman.”

+

Kai nodded. “You’ve seen me before, Bonnie,” he said. It was not a question.

+

She nodded.

+

“Twice before, you say?”

+

She nodded again. This was the third time the man—Kai—had burst through the front door of the hotel and dashed up to the front desk demanding to know Saesor Zota’s room number.

+

Mister Zota was an older man with a round, balding head, large ears, and a mouthful of teeth that seemed too big for his lips. When he checked in, yesterday afternoon, he had spoken to her in a quiet voice about the need for discretion. He had surreptitiously passed her a packet of strawberry cream cookies and a peanut butter granola bar, like they were some sort of bribe. She’d opened the packet of cookies and eaten one, but it tasted stale so she threw the rest out. The granola bar lay unopened in her desk drawer.

+

Then came the madness of this strange man appearing and forgetting that he’d been there before. “Are you a friend of Mister Zota?” Bonnie had asked Kai each time.

+

He would nod and put on an unconvincing smile. “Yup. We’re supposed to meet up. What room is he in?”

+

Bonnie would then offer to call Zota’s room and let him know that he had a visitor.

+

“No,” Kai would say, “I want it to be a surprise. Just tell me his room number.”

+

Bonnie could not give out the room number. It was hotel policy. Kai would then reach into his breast pocket and take out the influencer, hold up the metal disc and shine the light in her eyes. She would feel disoriented, Kai would ask for the room number again, and Bonnie would feel compelled to say it. “Thank you, good citizen,” Kai would say, and dash towards the elevators.

+

It had happened exactly that way, twice, and now it was happening again. “You keep asking for Mister Zota’s room number, but I’m not supposed to give it out like that.”

+

Kai nodded. “It’s very important that I find Mister Zota. You see, Saesor Zota is—”

+

But he didn’t finish his explanation, because at that precise moment the hotel doors burst open and an identical brown-suited man named Kai burst into the lobby.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +onnie looked over at the newcomer in shock. “There you are again!” she managed.

+

The second Kai dashed towards the front desk. The first Kai turned to look at himself. The second Kai froze when he saw his exact duplicate staring back at him from the front desk. “Uh-oh…” he said.

+

“This isn’t good,” the first Kai said in alarm.

+

“You didn’t travel back?” the second Kai asked.

+

Kai One shook his head. “I was just suspecting a time loop. Then you showed up.”

+

Kai Two blinked in thought. “Okay. Let me try backing out.” He turned and went out the main door. As soon as he cleared the door, he came through it again. To Bonnie it looked like he had turned around and come back in, but it happened so fast… faster than her eye could follow.

+

“That didn’t work,” Kai Two said.

+

“Obviously,” Kai One agreed. He turned to Bonnie. “When you saw me the first time, what did I do?”

+

Bonnie tried to remember. It seemed like such a long time ago now, though she knew it could only have been minutes since it happened. “You asked me what room Seasor Zota was in. But I’m not supposed to give out that information and I told you that. And you used that—” she pointed at Kai’s breast pocket “—that thing on me, and it made me tell you he was in room 213.”

+

Bonnie slapped a hand across her mouth. Oops.

+

Neither Kai seemed to notice her slip. “Then what did I do?” Kai One asked.

+

Her voice came out muffled. “You went into the elevator.”

+

He nodded. “Okay, let’s try that.”

+

The second Kai dashed to the elevator and pressed the button. The door opened and he stepped inside. As soon as he did so, the front door burst open and this time two Kai stepped through simultaneously.

+

“Okay,” said Kai One. “That didn’t work.”

+

“Uh-oh,” said the third Kai, staring in horror at the other two. “This isn’t good.”

+

“No, it isn’t!” Bonnie said, holding her head. She felt like she had slipped into some mad dream. “Why are you doing this?”

+

One of the Kai turned to her. “I’m not doing this, Bonnie. Someone else is. Zota is doing this somehow.” Kai One, she guessed, or how could he have known her name?

+

“How? How can he do…” She gestured at the three Kai in the lobby. As she did, a fourth Kai burst through the doors and stopped short when he saw the others. “…do this?”

+

Kai One shook his head. “That’s not important right now. What’s important that he’s trapped me here to allow himself time to get away again. I’ve got to get out of here.”

+

One of the other Kai dashed up to the front counter. “Is there a rear exit? A back door?”

+

Bonnie blinked. “Turn right just before the elevator.” She pointed. “There’s a long hallway. You’ll see an exit sign at the end.”

+

Kai Three smiled. “Thank you, good citizen.”

+

“Probably won’t work,” Kai One said.

+

“Gotta try,” Kai Three called back as he dashed around the corner.

+

A minute later two new Kai burst through the front doors. One stopped short, astounded by all the other versions of himself already in the lobby. “Uh-oh,” he said. “This isn’t good.”

+

Kai Three made his way to back to the front desk. “Okay. Back door doesn’t work either. Now what?”

+

Kai One shook his head. “Not sure. But we’ve got to do something or we’re gonna be hip deep in ourselves.”

+

“So, what is this?” Kai Two asked. “I’ve never seen a time trap like this.”

+

“I don’t know.” Kai One turned to Bonnie. “You said the first two times you saw me, I came in, talked to you, and then left?”

+

Bonnie nodded. “That’s right.”

+

“And there wasn’t an overlap?”

+

Bonnie shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean. You came in. You asked for Zota. You made me talk, using that… that thing. Then you went up in the elevator. Then you came in through the front entrance and did it all over again.”

+

“That sounds like a time loop,” Kai Two said, and grimaced. He looked into the lobby at the crowd of Kai duplicates milling around. As he did, another Kai burst through the front doors. “Uh-oh,” the newest Kai said. “This isn’t good.”

+

Bonnie felt panic rising in her. What was she going to do? How was she going to explain this to anyone? What if Mister Vox came in? How do you explain to your boss something like this? She needed to get a grip on the situation.

+

“What’s a time loop?” she asked.

+

“A time loop is a segment of time that repeats itself,” Kai Three said.

+

“Right,” she said, “I could have guessed that.”

+

Kai Two nodded. “It’s like a data gem that reads the same code segment over and over again.”

+

“What?” Bonnie asked, her momentary confidence stopped dead. “What’s a—”

+

“Never mind,” Kai One said. “Forget that. It’s like a kinoscope.” Bonnie shook her head. “Uh… magnetic tape? You know reel-to-reel tape?”

+

“Like… like a cassette tape?” Bonnie asked. Her older cousin had a cassette player. Bonnie remembered a summer spent mostly at the beach and that cassette player had played her cousin’s limited selection of cassettes over and over again.

+

Kai One nodded, smiling with relief. “Yes. Like a cassette tape. If you were to snip out a section and attach the end to the beginning, it would play the same bit over and over again in a constant loop. You can do the same thing with time. Take a segment, feed the endpoint back into the starting point, and you can trap someone in it.”

+

Bonnie stared at him. “You can do that?”

+

“No,” he said. “Nor would I, if I could. But Zota can. He’s done it before. I was once trapped in one of his time loops for six months.”

+

“That’s calculated time,” Kai Two added. “Not real or subjective time.”

+

“That’s right,” Kai One said—although Bonnie now thought she could tell this one apart from the others well enough to drop the digit. “Real time is not affected by the loop because the closed segment is localized. And subjectively, the person trapped only experiences the loop once and forgets that he’s done it over and over again and again.”

+

Bonnie shook her head. “But that can’t be happening here now, because each time is different.” She looked into the lobby and saw that two more had joined the ever growing throng.

+

Kai’s brows furrowed. “That’s true. If this is a time loop, then something has happened to snarl it up somehow.”

+

Kai Three nodded in agreement. “Time loops are usually closed and don’t change unless something from outside acts on it, and that’s usually enough to dissipate the loop. Why is this one behaving like this?”

+

Kai shook his head. “Something inside the loop has interfered with the sequence, enough to alter the outcome of the segment, but not enough to end it.”

+

“What could do that? Could it be an error in Zota’s code?”

+

Kai shrugged. “Maybe, but that’s unlikely. The code is usually self correcting. And besides, Zota is not that careless.”

+

“What could affect…” Kai Two trailed off as he stared at Bonnie. Kai looked puzzled for a second, then he turned and looked at Bonnie as well.

+

“You remembered the earlier time segments,” Kai Two and Three said in unison.

+

“How did you do that?” Kai finished.

+

Bonnie shook her head. “I don’t know. I just did.”

+

“You saw me enter and exit the lobby… twice before?”

+

Bonnie nodded.

+

“What was different about the third time?” Kai Three asked, appropriately.

+

“She told me she’d seen me twice before,” Kai answered. “That made me stop.”

+

“And you were going to use that light thingy on me,” Bonnie said, pointing to Kai’s breast pocket.

+

Kai nodded. “She knew about the influencer. That’s what made me realize that she was telling the truth.”

+

“Then she*’*s the difference,” Kai Two said. “She’s the reason that the time loop has become snarled up.”

+

While they were talking, two more Kai had come through the front doors. The lobby was now a cacophony of Kai’s voice. One of them had set himself up near the front doors to intercept new arrivals—whether it was to try to stop new ones from entering or to explain to them what was going on when they did, Bonnie wasn’t sure.

+

“I’m sorry,” she said to the first and second Kai. “I didn’t mean to.”

+

Kai patted her hand reassuringly. “I know you didn’t. But why aren’t you affected by the time loop?”

+

Bonnie shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s…” She trailed off.

+

“What?”

+

Bonnie felt embarrassed just saying it. “I’m not good at judging time. Unless I have a watch or can see a clock, I have no idea how much time has passed.”

+

Kai frowned. “Have you always been like this?”

+

She shook her head. “I was in a bad accident when I was seventeen. I had a head injury.” She hated telling anyone she was brain damaged, afraid they would make fun of her. “I’m sorry. It’s silly…”

+

“No,” Kai said, firmly. “You may be on to something. Where were you injured?”

+

Bonnie pointed to her skull, to the part where the injury happened. “Here,” she said, then moved her finger slowly along her skull. “To here. You can’t see it under my hair, but I’ve got a scar.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t like talking about it.”

+

Kai Two put a hand to his mouth in thought. “Injury to the right pre-frontal cortex,” he muttered, and Bonnie flinched. The phrase was one the doctors and specialists had used a lot.

+

Kai Three nodded, staring at her head. It made her uncomfortable, like he was trying to imagine what the scar looked like. It reminded her of looking at herself in the mirror after the accident, her ugly shaved head and the livid red scars making her look like Frankenstein’s monster.

+

He just kept staring and staring—for ages, it seemed. She dropped her eyes. “Don’t look,” she whispered.

+

“It creates a time dysperception.” Kai glanced at her wrists, frowning. “Why don’t you wear a watch? If…”

+

“I left it by the sink. I had to wash cups. Do you want me to get it?”

+

Kai shook his head. “It won’t help now, I don’t think. We’ve got to find a way to break this loop, or it’s going to get very crowded in here.”

+

“It may be worse than that,” Kai Two said with a grimace. “It’s becoming quantum packed.”

+

“Oh no!”

+

Bonnie saw fear on all three Kai’s faces. “What does that mean?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

+

“Time loops require energy,” Kai explained. “Energy enters the loop and then goes out at the end of the sequence, but that energy is fed back into the beginning of the next sequence. It’s part of what keeps it going. The energy transfer usually isn’t perfect. Energy slowly bleeds out, just a little at a time, until the remaining energy cannot sustain the loop and the whole thing collapses. That was how I escaped the last one. But this…”

+

He gestured out into the lobby, now teeming with Kai. As he did so, another Kai burst through the door and was quickly intercepted by the others.

+

“The energy is feeding back on itself,” Kai Two continued. “It’s building up with each iteration. Every time I come through the front doors, I bring energy in with me. Because I can’t leave now, all that energy is building up on the quantum level.”

+

“And when that energy is released,” Kai Three added, “it could be catastrophic.”

+

Bonnie felt a chill. “How catastrophic?

+

“It depends on how much energy builds up before it releases,” Kai Two said. “It could just destroy the building.”

+

“Destroy the hotel?” Bonnie said, shocked.

+

“If we’re lucky,” Kai said. “If it builds up too much, it could destroy the entire block.”

+

“Or half the city,” Kai Three finished.

+

“And the longer this loop feeds back into itself, the worse it will be when the energy is finally released.” Another version of Kai burst through the doors. “We’ve got to do something.”

+

“What can we do?” Kai Two asked. “We’re stuck in the time loop!”

+

Kai pointed to Bonnie. “She’s not. She wasn’t affected by it. Maybe she can leave it.”

+

Leaving sounded good to Bonnie. Just walking out the front doors, walking away from this nightmare… she wanted to do just that.

+

But she needed this job. A woman with a temporally-perception-distorting brain injury doesn’t have a lot of options when it comes to employment. And Mister Vox said she was the best receptionist he’d ever had, always able to do an extra shift or a little overtime without notice (or, she sometimes suspected, without noticing).

+

Besides, even if she did leave, there was no guarantee that she could get far enough away before the explosion happened.

+

She wished she’d called in sick.

+

“Do you want me to go outside and stop you from coming in?” she asked.

+

“Would that do it?” Kai Two asked. “If we never enter the lobby, then this whole loop might collapse.”

+

Kai thought about it. “Maybe. Or it could create a paradox. That may just create more problems.”

+

“More problems than we have now?” Kai Three asked.

+

“It would be better if we shut down the loop. That would dissipate the built up energy safely. The loop would collapse without any paradoxes to complicate things.”

+

“But how do we shut down the loop? We don’t know how Zota created it in the first place.”

+

Kai turned to Bonnie. “Where is Zota now?”

+

Bonnie blinked. “I don’t know. He hasn’t checked out. I don’t remember seeing him tonight. He could be up in his room.”

+

“Good Citizen—Bonnie—listen to me. This is very important. You have to go up to his room. You have to get him to collapse the loop. Do you understand?”

+

Bonnie felt her stomach tighten in a knot. “I can’t do that.”

+

“Yes, you can. You have to. I, we, can’t leave. You know what’s at stake.”

+

“But how am I going to convince him to do that?”

+

Kai reached into his breast pocket. “Take the influencer,” he said, holding it out to her.

+

Bonnie shied away from the little metal disc.

+

“It’s okay,” Kai Two said. “It’s safe. Take it.”

+

Hesitantly, Bonnie took the device from Kai. It felt cold and was heavier than it looked. It hummed softly in her hand.

+

“There’s a switch at the back,” said Kai. “It will feel like a small indent.”

+

Bonnie touched the back lightly with her finger, until she found it. She nodded. “I feel it.”

+

“Don’t press it now,” Kai Two said. “But if you find Zota, point the green crystal lens towards him and then press the switch.”

+

“What do I say?”

+

“Just tell him to collapse the time loop,” Kai Three aid. “Order him to collapse it immediately. Can you do that?”

+

Bonnie did not feel confident at all, but she nodded weakly.

+

Kai gave her a reassuring smile. “You’re doing the right thing, Good Citizen,” he said.

+

“Just do it quick,” Kai Two said. Behind him another Kai burst through the doors. There was almost no room left in the lobby not occupied by Kai.

+

Bonnie moved from behind the front desk and through the side door into the lobby. She fished out her master key while she pressed the call button on the elevator. She didn’t know how much time passed before the elevator door opened, but it couldn’t have been long, because Kai (or it could have been Kai Two) was watching her and he only had time to nod anxiously once.

+

She stepped into the elevator.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +fter the doors closed behind her, Bonnie felt the elevator ascend. The ride seemed to take an agonizingly long time, and yet she was surprised at how quickly she arrived at the second floor.

+

There was no one in the hallway as she hurried to room 213. She knocked. “Mister Zota?” she called. “I’m sorry to bother you but this is important. Mister Zota?”

+

No answer. How long should she wait? How long had she waited? Her stomach tightened as she thought about the lobby filling with Kai, and the energy building up every time one of them burst through the doors. She put her ear to the door but heard nothing.

+

She had the master key. She wasn’t supposed to enter a guest’s room unless it was an emergency. She tsk’d at herself. If the hotel lobby being trapped in a time loop and filling up with multiple versions of the same man and in imminent danger of being blown to smithereens wasn’t an emergency, then nothing was.

+

She swiped the key card and fumbled the influencer into her hand, holding it up in front of her like a tiny shield as she hesitantly entered. “Hello? Mister Zota?”

+

The lights were off. The room was empty. The one double bed was still made.

+

The device sat on the bed.

+

Bonnie tried to make it out in the gloom. It kept changing shape and configuration, one second thin and spindly, the next squat and solid. That it was a machine was the only thing she was certain of. The parts seemed to be made of metal, and gave off a distinct machine-like humming sound.

+

She wanted to turn and run back to the lobby. She wanted to ask Kai what she should do. Any of them. But she knew what she had to do. She had to make things right—and this device, ever shifting its reality, was the source of all the wrong. She approached the bed, but as she got closer to the device she felt an unsettling vibration in her chest, and an even more unsettling one in her mind. She was as afraid to touch it as she would be to thrust her hand into a running car engine.

+

She looked around the room. It was like all the other single rooms in the hotel, with absolutely no sign that it had been occupied since housekeeping had arranged it last. No luggage, no garbage in the waste bin. If Zota had ever been in this room there was no sign aside from the device on the bed.

+

The phone. Bonnie unplugged it from the wall, got as close to the device as she dared, and rapped it once with the receiver.

+

It had no effect.

+

She rapped it again, harder. Then she hit it as hard as she could—hard enough to crack the plastic of the receiver—and, just for a second, the hum the device gave off shifted slightly.

+

Frustrated, she threw it at the device. The phone bounced off and fell to the carpet. She needed something heavier, but turning on the spot nothing leapt to mind. The TV was bolted to the wall, and was too thin and flimsy to do anything but shatter, the bedside lamp was cheap ceramic, and the bedside table was built into the bed. Then it hit her—just like the TV, standard in every room. She wrenched open the doors to the fitted wardrobe, and there it was, nestled in a wooden alcove, next to the single-serving electric kettle, above the security safe bolted to the wardrobe floor.

+

A microwave oven.

+

Bonnie reached in on either side and pulled it forward. It slid off its base, the plug pulling taught. She gave the thing a yank and the plug pulled out of the wall socket. She almost overbalanced, then turned and hefted the oven over her head.

+

With a desperate shove, she slammed the microwave down onto the device.

+

There was a flash and a deafening bang. Bonnie felt herself being hurled in many directions at the same time. She was slammed against the wall she was knocked over the couch she was blown into the bathroom she was blown out the window with a shattering of glass she was thrown out the door into the hallway. All of the possible permutations, happening all at once.

+

Something snapped.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +onnie opened her eyes. Painfully. She was in the hallway outside Zota’s room, slumped against the wall. Wisps of smoke trailed from the open door.

+

She groaned. Her entire body hurt.

+

An older couple whom she remembered were from Naperville, Illinois, appeared at the door to the neighboring room. “Are you alright, dearie?” the old woman asked.

+

“Yes, ma’am,” Bonnie said, not very convincingly.

+

They helped her to her feet. The doors to all the rooms on the corridor were opening now, confused and frightened guests babbling excitedly. Bonnie found herself surrounded by people asking what had happened and whether they should evacuate and wondering if their rooms would be comped due to the unacceptable disturbance.

+

Bonnie did her best to calm them down, but she had no idea how long it took before everyone was back in their rooms and she was free to take the elevator back down to the lobby.

+

When she stepped out, the lobby was empty.

+

There were no Kai.

+

Not even one.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +aturally there were questions the next day, and Bonnie could not provide any answers. Guests had complained about the sound of an explosion. Saesor Zota was nowhere to be found. His room contained nothing apart from a broken telephone and a badly damaged microwave oven. Saesor Zota had also not paid his bill. Mister Vox was not happy.

+

Bonnie tried to answer her boss’ questions. As she spoke, his look of anger gave way to another, terrible expression, one that she hadn’t seen since the early days of the accident.

+

Pity. Fear. A false smile.

+

Very unfortunate, but of course Mister Vox couldn’t keep her employed. He sighed as he wrote out her final cheque, and made some sympathetic comments about the help that he was certain was out there for someone like her.

+

Bonnie kept her jaw set as she marched out the front doors, leaving behind her name tag and a promise to return the shirt with the hotel logo embroidered on it. She managed to hold back the tears long enough to reach a bench in the nearby park.

+

She had been weeping to herself for somewhere between five minutes and a thousand years when someone sat beside her. She looked up, and Kai gave her a sympathetic smile.

+

“I lost my job,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

+

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

+

She blinked away her tears and looked around. “Where are the others?”

+

“Others?”

+

“Other yous.”

+

He chuckled softly. “There’s only me now. When you stopped Zota’s machine, the loop collapsed and I was thrown out of it.”

+

“So which Kai are you?”

+

“All of them,” he said. “Sort of. Smart move, by the way, using the microwave oven like that.”

+

She sniffed. “You know about that?”

+

Kai nodded. “I was sent there with a job to do, you know. I sneaked in through that back way you mentioned and went up to the room after, saw the mess. The latent radiation from the microwave’s magnetron likely shorted out the machine.”

+

“Radiation?” Bonnie said, alarmed. “Am I going to die?”

+

“Probably not.” Kai smiled. “Zota’s machine would have absorbed most of it. Anything else would have been distributed amongst the alternate outcomes generated by the blast of the quantum pack collapsing.”

+

Bonnie regarded him impassively. She didn’t really understand a single word he’d said, but at the same time she knew what he meant. The impossible memory of being thrown through every possible direction and out the window still gave her a headache to think about.“Did you find Zota?” she asked.

+

“No,” Kai said, with a steely tone to his voice. “But I will.”

+

Bonnie thought she should feel resentment towards him, given that he and his time loop had destroyed her life. Curiously, she felt nothing. She stood. “Well, good luck with that. I’ve got to start looking through the want ads tomorrow.”

+

“About that,” Kai said, standing too. “I don’t know if I mentioned before, about the organization that I work for. They pay pretty well. I mean, for this time period, they pay phenomenally well…”

+

Bonnie regarded him cautiously. “Are you offering me a job?”

+

Kai shrugged. “A woman with your particular temporal dissociation would be an asset in certain situations.”

+

“Like last night?”

+

Kai nodded. “Exactly like last night.”

+

“Does that happen often to you?”

+

He grimaced—Kai Two’s grimace. “Oftener than I’d like.”

+

They walked in silence for a few moments, or maybe a few hours, while she considered his offer.

+

“This organization of yours,” she asked at last. “Where is it?”

+

“Well,” Kai said with a grin, “it’s not so much a where as a when.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Time Dysperception” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jack Mackenzie

+

+ + Author image of Jack Mackenzie + + + Jack Mackenzie lives in the wild country of British Columbia, Canada, with his wife and two cats. He loves beer, art, and writing science fiction and fantasy. His short stories have appeared in Dark Worlds Magazine, Encounters Magazine, Neo-Opsis Magazine, Raygun Revival and in the anthologies Magistria: The Realm of the Sorcerer, Sails and Sorcery, and Swords of Fire. His novels and a short story collection, Heralded by Blood, can be found at the Rage Machine Books website, to which he is a semi-frequent contributor. You can also find him on Facebook.*

+

© Jack Mackenzie 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: David Bartus, Polina Zimmerman and Nathan Cowley several times over!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-25/unknown-ancestry.html b/issue-25/unknown-ancestry.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d966e62a --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-25/unknown-ancestry.html @@ -0,0 +1,507 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Unknown Ancestry — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 25 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Unknown Ancestry

+

T. M. Morgan

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Unknown Ancestry by +
+ + + + +

47% + + Unassigned.

+

This text was further down in the official document, with an asterisk beside it. At the bottom of the second page, below the bulk of the text, an italicized footnote read: Minor variances in testing methodology and the DNA samples themselves sometimes result in findings that cannot be traced to a particular region and/or population group.

+

“Fucking bullshit!” I took hold of my sandwich, squeezed it into ooze between my fingers, and heaved it against the wall. The glob of meat and bread slid to the tiled floor, leaving a long streak of mayonnaise in its wake. At that perfect moment, Jessie came through the front door, his t-shirt soaked with sweat. I stuffed the letter under one of the wicker placemats.

+

“How was your study group?” he asked.

+

“Fine. The usual.”

+

His gaze went from the sandwich catastrophe, to the empty though trashed envelope I had forgotten to hide, to my strained posture. He pointed at the envelope. “What’s that?”

+

“I’m not ready to tell you yet.”

+

He shrugged. “Okay. Did you call the doctor about your joint pain? I texted you the number for that rheumatologist.”

+

“No. I swear I’ll do it tomorrow.”

+

“Arthritis can hit at any age.”

+

“You’re not my mother.”

+

He shook his head. “I’m going to shower.”

+

He went into our bedroom, then strolled naked to the bathroom and closed the door. When I was sure he wouldn’t peek back out, some trick to catch me at my game, I slid out the YourAncestry letter again. But the smell of the roast beef was making me nauseous, so pungent as if it had already become rotted. I snatched the mess up and dumped it down the garbage disposal. The sound of the grinding metal claws was oddly calming.

+

“What are you thinking about?” Jessie snuck up on me wearing only a towel.

+

I pointed to the letter. “I got the results of that DNA test.”

+

He took it with his typical slow deliberation. He read it; he studied the front and back; he nodded. “You’re a mystery, it appears.”

+

I glared at him. “This isn’t funny.”

+

“You just wanted to post on Facebook gleefully telling everyone about your complicated genetic makeup.”

+

“Why? I’m already complicated enough.”

+

He laughed in his deep, slow way. “Don’t I know.”

+

We each pretended to prepare for a fight, our noses touching, our chests flared out, before he dropped his towel and kissed me and then pushed me down the hallway to our bedroom. We had sex, and then he massaged me, easing the tension that always seemed to be tightening my muscles, making my joints ache. Oil dripped into the small valley of my spine. The vape pen pressed against my lips, which he manipulated without my needing to move. I got so fucking high the mattress felt like a dandelion bonanza.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“M + +aybe I’m a werewolf,” I said.

+

“You’re not going to get all hairy, are you?” Jessie pushed up on his elbows. The antique bed frame creaked as he moved. Above us, two rows of bookshelves delicately held almost a hundred books, half of them my boring (even to me) political tomes and the others his tidy classics, from O’Connor to Faulkner to Wright.

+

“You know,” I said, “I have been thinking about a beard.”

+

He put his hand on my cheek. “If you grow a beard, I’m going to ask for my money back.”

+

“You only get a partial refund,” I said and kissed him before giving my serious stare. “Look, this is really important to me.”

+

He cocked an eyebrow. “The beard?”

+

“Very funny.”

+

“Why don’t you just ask your parents? I’m sure they’d want to help.”

+

70’s jazz started playing through in-ceiling speakers, and the room lights switched to orange, an automated thing we did to announce bedtime. While this should have been soothing, instead I sparked with anger. “You know better.”

+

He squeezed my chin with oil-scented fingers. “I know you’re afraid of hurting them. But they love you. They’re not going to freak out.”

+

The room’s glow struck me as haunting, a kind of dream state, a pumpkin-colored gloom. Between songs it was so quiet I could hear his heartbeat, a disturbing thump that made me slightly nauseous.

+

“I don’t know. Maybe I need to sleep.”

+

He studied me as I flopped on my back, face straight up on the pillow. “Alexa,” he said, “play meditation music.”

+

Alexa’s voice was warm and feminine, not so much like a mother but an annoyingly rational big sister. The most calming sounds floated into the room, synthesizer and love flute entwined in a simple dance. It was the kind of music white people stole from the indigenous and called “world music.” That irritant alone kept me awake.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +essie opted to not talk as I drove. His persistence that we visit my parents for Thanksgiving had caused a two-day argument, during which I sulked like a little brat. After forty-eight hours of icy interactions, I accepted his advice. If handled it well, my parents knowing I was looking into my heritage would cause no hurt. But that “if,” with my shitty track record at diplomacy, made me cautious.

+

“What is it you like about me?” I asked as we glided onto the I-70 West ramp.

+

It took him a second to draw up from his daydream. “I like all the things about you, Marcus. Each thing. Stop being so hard on yourself.”

+

No apologies spoken. No grand makeup. We were going, he was right, and that was that.

+

I settled in for the drive, gazing lazily out the window. The trees, while past full autumn bloom, still held bunches of orange and red leaves. In some places, winds had stripped long sections clean. These were massed along the highway like clusters of discarded wire. It had the cumulative effect of being both joyous and depressing.

+

What I had never told anyone, not even Jessie, was that I had long harbored the idea that my parents had been lying about my adoption. Lately, with my anguish over first applying for the DNA test and then getting the results, I felt almost sure. Maybe I wanted to believe it, because then I would have a secret.

+

“I appreciate this,” I said. “Not that I’m excited for it, but you’re here with me. That means a lot.”

+

My parents greeted us already standing at the end of the front walk. Jessie came dressed as sharply as a mogul on holiday. Dad poured him a Scotch while they discussed the former Redskins, a conversation I was happy to miss. I helped Mom in the kitchen. She had made an assortment of hors d’oeuvres: biscuits and jams and cookies and puffed pastries which I helped set out on the table.

+

The upright piano in the family room had an ornate, plastic turkey on its top. Not typical fare for my mother, who must have gotten it at a yard sale. It made me oddly nervous, as if someone’s idea of a joke, as if it might burst into gobble-gobbles and start hopping around. Along with this bit of fantasia, a weird resentment bubbled up to see Jessie so relaxed. He and dad always hit it off, though (or maybe because) Jessie was closer to his age then mine. They even both snuck outside to smoke just before we ate, dad the old-fashioned way and Jessie on the vape.

+

Mom pulled an immaculate-looking turkey from the oven. “He is so handsome.”

+

“Thanks, Mom.”

+

She kept busy at the stove, using spatulas to get three different pots of various vegetables into serving bowls and then quickly washing the pans in the double sink. “Have you gotten taller? Maybe it’s a late growth spurt?”

+

“Growth spurt? I’m twenty-three! What the fuck?”

+

“Marcus!” She looked shocked, but something in my face changed it to concern, and she placed a hand on my cheek. “What’s wrong?”

+

This was a typical thing she would do to probe, kind of like how fortune tellers always home in on negative shit to seem attuned to your “essence” (I see a dark cloud over you. Has anything happened recently that might have caused this?). This time, however, she caught me in the middle of a panic attack.

+

I blurted it all out. “I need to know about my birth parents, Mom. I did one of those ancestry things, you know, like you see in the commercials all the time. Anyway, it showed that half of my DNA can’t be traced, and I’ve been starting to have these joint issues, it might be a genetic thing, I mean, it could be nothing, but there are just these changes, and I want to know, in fact, I need to know if you or Dad have any other information about when you adopted me, because I feel like I’m going to lose my mind if I don’t figure this shit out.”

+

I came to a halt, and after a moment sucked in a breath a little shakily.

+

Mom stopped prepping dinner, wiped her hands on the dish towel, and walked to the sliding door onto the deck. At first, I thought she was in a daze and might just keep going into the backyard and start screaming. Instead, she called out, “Dan, can you and Jessie come in? Marcus needs to talk about something.”

+

No shock, no questions, only the call to order of a family meeting. Mom could be like that, so it didn’t alarm me, though the Stepford quality of her demeanor put me off balance. Once everyone was in, she shuttled us into the family room. The fireplace was hot with the fan cranked up, its fiery blast hitting me most directly at the end of the couch. Mom and Dad sat opposite Jessie and me in their old armchairs, which were each covered in an ungodly flower fabric.

+

Mom cleared her throat, as if beginning a speech she had rehearsed to heart. “Marcus did one of those DNA tests,” she said, laying her hand on Dad’s. “He received some strange results, and he’s concerned he may have some genetic traits that are—well, that might need medical attention.”

+

She gave accent to this last bit, as if speaking in code to clue Dad in. He stared at the floor. It was as if he might find something tangible there at his feet, a little burning bush that magically appeared to dispense knowledge. I noticed how hard he gripped Mom’s hand. Jessie must have noticed too, because his own hand squeezed mine just the same.

+

“Son,” Dad started, in a somber, serious voice, “we always meant to tell you. It’s one of those things. The longer you wait, the more shameful you feel for not saying so sooner…”

+

His words trailed off. Mom had to nudge him. The clock chimed three slow bongs, and then the clicks of its internal mechanism counted off the passing time.

+

“Marcus, we haven’t told you the whole truth about your adoption.”

+

Surprisingly, I didn’t feel upset. I was more relieved. However, when I tried to speak there was no air in my lungs. His pause turned into awkward silence, until he seemed to realize I would say nothing.

+

“We love you. We wanted you desperately. I told your mom the best thing we could do was adopt a child so that we could make a real difference in their life. That proved more problematic than we thought. It took money we didn’t have. So, we turned to what some people might call a… a shady lawyer to help us.”

+

With each word, both my confidence and my anger grew. Relief gave way to hotheaded umbrage.

+

“The truth is the lawyer arranged for us to get you from a poor family directly. He specialized in these kinds of adoptions. We drove to a place in West Virginia. Poor, son, as poor as I’ve ever seen. Trash all around, dead animals all around. We found you bundled in an old bassinet. Such a precious child, we took you on the spot.”

+

Jessie spoke for me. “So, what you’re saying is that you bought him, right? You paid these people cash or something?”

+

Jessie took control in a moment that I had no control myself. Because of that small effort on his part, I did not go totally fucking ballistic.

+

“Not quite,” Mom said. “I mean, yes, we gave a little money, but not for you. The family had some expenses, they said, bills that needed paying. It amounted to less than five hundred dollars.”

+

At this, she suddenly began to sob. It was horrifying—Mom was the one who never lost control. She was like Jessie in that way.

+

Dad hugged her, though he wasn’t doing much better. “We didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he said, “because we were so happy. We planned to one day tell you. But when you were old enough, we were cowards on that part. I’m so sorry.”

+

It was as if I was watching them at my own funeral, my body having become incorporeal, as they bawled and wrung their hands.

+

Jessie grew impatient. “Well then, what is it?”

+

Mom looked at him confused. “I don’t understand.”

+

“You’re not telling us something. What is it?”

+

I couldn’t decide if his camaraderie with my dad earlier helped or hurt now. His sturdy posture and dapper clothes struck me as authoritative, with my parents acquiescing—withered even. It felt for all the world like he was my attorney, cross examining hostile witnesses.

+

Dad gathered himself enough to speak, his eyes still glued to the carpet. “The man who said he was your father… he… Jesus, this is impossible…”

+

The room spun. The words spewed from my mouth. “What the fuck is wrong with me? You two have been lying all this time, and now I’m dying!”

+

Jessie’s face contorted in a way that would have struck me as comical any other day of my life. “Marcus! What the hell?”

+

“What?” Mom screamed. “Are you joking? This is no time.”

+

I stood and looked down on them all recoiled against their couch and chair arms. “I just knew you’ve been hiding something. And I can feel it in my blood—there’s something very wrong with me!”

+

Dad wiped his lips with his forearm. “Marcus, please calm down. Look, I don’t even want to tell you this, but you’re obviously feeling, well, upset. And it’s time to stop hiding it. The thing is, we got the distinct impression that your father is also… your grandfather.”

+

I stared at them, sitting side by side, the way I remembered them all my life, except now the secret was finally out.

+

“Okay. So. I’m not a monster. Just monstrous.”

+

Mom became inconsolable, shivering until she collapsed into Dad’s embrace. I couldn’t even look at Jessie. I wandered around this Tennessee Williams disaster in a daze until I stopped at the piano and grabbed that fucking plastic turkey with every intent to smash it to pieces. But I fainted instead, cast into darkness on the wings of calamity.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he drive back to DC, with Jessie at the wheel, started in quaintly rural Frederick and grew to suburban sprawl the closer we got to DC. I’d been along that route a thousand times, yet noticed for the first time how shapeless it all was, like the leftovers of a post-apocalyptic world, all glass and steel and randomly placed shrubbery. Jessie and I didn’t speak a word, so I didn’t mention that dad had slyly given me my birth certificate from his safe. The father field was blank, my own name listed only as “Baby Henderson.”

+

At home, he jumped immediately in the shower. It was unlike him to abandon me, but his disgust at my outburst had been apparent. Later, he brooded in the living room.

+

I sat beside him on the couch so that our thighs touched. “Want to have sex?”

+

He moved his leg away from me. “You’re going to have to give this some time, okay?”

+

“I’m sorry. How long? I can’t wait around forever.” The joke fell flat.

+

“I can’t—you want to go find them, don’t you?”

+

He shuddered, whether because he was angry or despondent I wasn’t sure. But hearing him say it out loud brought shame to what I’d known since we left my parents: I did need to meet my birth family more than ever. It was a compulsion at this point, something I had to see to the end.

+

I got up to retrieve the birth certificate from the envelope I’d put on the table, set it in his hand, and intently watched as he read it. Not all that much to read, but he looked at it for a long time.

+

“You know this is crazy, right?” He spoke with punctuated venom. “That this shit is goddamn insane?”

+

“You’re right. But I’m scared about what’s going on with me, and I need answers.”

+

“What? That you might be a monster? A werewolf maybe?” He showed no signs of joking.

+

I took his hand. “I’m sorry I said what I said. But you know going to my parents was hard. And what they confessed was so fucking…and I have been having these joint issues. Maybe these Hendersons can help, or at least fill in the gaps.”

+

He yanked his hand away. “This is crazy, Marcus. You don’t know these people. From what your father said, they could be dangerous.”

+

“I’m the one who started in with the monsters, remember? From what my father said, they could just be poor. And I need to know why that ancestry test shows fifty percent unidentified; and I need medical answers. So I’m going to go soon, and I’m going by myself.”

+

Jessie’s angry veneer vanished in an instant, so that the scared, horrified lover beneath could emerge. “Alone?”

+

“On the off chance they are dangerous, I can’t put you in danger too. Listen, I will check in with you constantly, let you know what’s happening. It will be strange enough to have me show up—”

+

“And you don’t want your boyfriend showing up?”

+

“That’s not fair.”

+

But the juxtaposition had occurred to me: I’d be heading to the deep country for this reunion, and my real family might be a bunch of redneck assholes, or worse. It was a strange mix I felt, of curiosity that needed to be quelled, and horror at what I might have come from.

+

We did have sex that night, moving from couch to bed, his need for it as urgent as mine, but relief didn’t last for us both. After he fell asleep, I tensed up to the point my calf muscles cramped. All I could do was lay there hoping I wasn’t some genetic mess from a hillbilly nightmare.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + crossed the Potomac river in fog on Saturday morning. My destination was Haplinsburg, West Virginia. It was an area near the Gauley River, which was famous for its whitewater rafting. We had gone once and I nearly drowned at a massive rapid hilariously called “Surprise.”

+

Once through the worst of northern Virginia’s traffic, I hit the low hills of Front Royal. Trees and more trees, and later chunneled holes through mountains to allow the interstate to continue west. After lunch I passed a “Welcome to West Virginia” sign, which showed mountains and their tagline, “Wild and Wonderful.”

+

The birth certificate lay on the passenger seat, drawing my attention from the road with the lure of my birth mother’s name: Victoria Imogen Henderson. I wondered if she was pretty. Blonde hair, skin as white as lilies, eyes so blue they conjured the Aryan nation. Then I chastised myself for such thoughts. I had worried about being a werewolf, but now I was upgrading to Nazi spawn. Maybe I should try looking on the bright side for a change: I knew the truth and was about to learn more, for better or worse.

+

The signs for Haplinsburg started to show in the afternoon. The local roads wound through dizzying switchbacks as the town neared. Shacks sat up the steep hillsides. Some could only be reached by rickety looking wooden bridges, white foam rapids churning below. The town proper announced itself by way of a red sign with gold letters: Haplinsburg, West Virginia, Home of the Paul Bunyan Festival.

+

Though only early evening, the town looked shut down. Not a single person walked on the sidewalks, and all the shops were closed. Early to bed, early to rise, and all that. I’d booked a night at the Gauley Valley Motel Six, three miles outside the town. After another ten minutes of terrifying switchbacks and one lane bridges, I arrived at a lonely rambler style building and an empty parking lot.

+

A man the size of an erect bear greeted me inside, his beard as thick as briars. I thought he was mute, the way he grunted and nodded toward the things I needed to do, like sign in and pay. At room 14, I used an old-fashioned metal key, turned the knob, and was met by the foul smell of mold. As I stood in the doorway, I remembered my promise and sent a text to Jessie only to get a message that said, “Network not found. Please check with your provider.” Great.

+

I turned to take in the view. The sloping valleys might have been beautiful, but the darkening sky laid low, and the trees lacked any color and were instead desiccated tendrils, peppered with regurgitated mounds of silvery rock. No cell service, no parking lot lights, not a single other car. On top of all this, I hadn’t eaten since getting some junk food at a Sheetz at the West Virginia line.

+

The motel clerk puttered from his back room when I entered again.

+

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but is there any place I could get something to eat?”

+

His eyes had all the depth of a corpse, and I expected him to silently flap one paw towards some distant diner. Imagine my surprise when the briars parted. “Nothing open now. I’ve got a snack machine is all.”

+

My brain struggled to churn out any logical thoughts. So, being tired as well as hungry, I plowed forward without hesitation. “Hey, I was wondering if you could help me? I’m looking for Victoria Henderson. She’s family I haven’t seen in a long time.”

+

He looked befuddled. I wondered if he had been smoking crystal or sniffing glue in back. “I know the Hendersons. I went to school with Vick. But hey, your name’s—” he dipped his head to look at the guest book “—Frippington? What kind of name is Marcus Frippington?”

+

I shook my head. “British, I think? But, hey, thanks for the info.”

+

As I reached for the door, he spoke again. “My name is Arthur Townes,” he said, as if the sharing of names was a ritual. “Tell you what, I’ll let Vick know you’re looking for her.”

+

“Oh, no, no! You don’t have to do that. I have the address. I was planning on visiting tomorrow.”

+

“It’s fine,” he said, and for the first time grinned, a toothy thing smothered by that beard. “Always glad to help out family.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he moon, as round and perfect as a coin, emerged from behind thick clouds. The mountain air was cool but not uncomfortable. I wandered by my car with Jessie’s backup vape pen. Salty dust from a tube of chips covered my fingers and I washed back the aftertaste with a lukewarm soda. Within minutes of hitting the vape, I got so high the stars warped as I gawked at them.

+

I had to get out of my room. It had wood-panel walls and a messy shag carpet the color of vanilla pudding. The TV was one of the ancient CRT types, its picture growing to fill the screen when it turned on. Two stations that I could find. One played a black-and-white movie, but I kept the sound off. An owl hooted as I stood in a daze. Then a wolf howled. Something tippy-tapped on the roof behind me.

+

Then another hoot, another howl.

+

Freaked out, I shuffled inside, locked the door, and slid the chain latch in place. A scrape started along on the outside wall, made its way toward the door, and then stopped. There were three loud knocks. After a few seconds, three more came, more forceful with each knock, so that the last one rattled the door on its hinges.

+

I tiptoed up to it: no peephole to stare into. “Hello?”

+

“I’m looking for Marcus Frippington,” a man’s voice said.

+

“Uh, yes?”

+

A long pause as voices whispered; there was more than one person outside. “I hear you’re looking for us.”

+

I gripped the knob and pulled open the door a crack. A man stood in overalls and a greasy cap, easily in his seventies, over six-and-a-half feet tall and thin as a wafer. Beside him, a woman closer to mom’s age, maybe younger, had her arm in his. She also towered uncommonly. There was a hint of something on the formerly clean-smelling air, too… animal shit, maybe? Were they farmers?

+

“Is it him?” she said.

+

“Yep, you were right. It’s our boy.”

+

Our boy. I stared at my possible father/grandfather and mother/sister, both ghoulish in the moon’s light, faintly reeking of shit, or meth lab solvents, or whatever, smiling with gaps in their teeth…

+

…and yet as warm and inviting as Christmas gifts under the tree. They were quaint; they smiled and waited patiently for me. Dentistry aside, Vick was quite beautiful. She did have blonde hair and blue eyes, and all of her gleamed under the moon’s shine.

+

“You probably have a lot of questions,” she said, and broke down crying.

+

I was entirely too stoned to deal with this. Then she really surprised me by pushing open the door and clutching me to her tightly, her mouth against my neck, her tears spilling onto my skin. The man joined the hug, too, wrapping his long arms around the two of us completely, all huddled in the doorway of my little motel room.

+

“I’m John Henderson,” he said, “and you seem to already know about Vick. Come along, why don’t we take you to meet the rest of your family.”

+

He motioned toward a pickup truck parked in front of the now closed office. Arthur Townes must have called it a night—after he rang up my birth family. The truck, rusted so severely I could see the engine block through the front quarter panel, had a massive cab, two corroded exhaust pipes jutting vertically from either side of it, and a wood flatbed. The wheels looked as big as boulders.

+

“I was planning to come tomorrow,” I said, feeling the beginning of a half-tripping panic attack gathering strength. “I’m not prepared—”

+

Vick sucked in a breath. “Please, I know you must be so angry, coming here to meet the people who…” She faltered, then squeezed me so tightly her shirt pulled down to reveal the tops of her breasts. I jolted back instinctively and she began to cry harder.

+

John caressed her cheek. “None of that,” he said. “He won’t hold nothing against us. We did what we had to do.”

+

I looked back and forth between them. John kind of eyed me, as if to pass on a silent message, his head nodding toward her. And somehow, instead of fully freaking out, I found myself saying “Oh, right. Don’t blame yourself. I’m just happy to finally meet you.”

+

John gave me a big, gappy smile and a wink as Vick let me go, wiping her eyes (and nose) with her bare arm. Then he jerked his head towards the pickup, eyebrows raised, all friendly encouragement.

+

“Oh,” I said. “Sure. I guess it’s fine. Let me just get my phone.”

+

Once we squeezed in, Vick in the middle and taking my hand in hers, the truck pulled out slowly, heading in the opposite direction of Haplinsburg town proper. We three sat comfortably and silently in a line, shoulder to shoulder as we bounced along. Even though they seemed real enough, I was still very high and half wondered if I was having a psychotic break. But now that we were in close quarters, the smell coming off them was eye-watering, and I could feel the cold metal of the door on my arm.

+

So real, I guess.

+

Or hell, if it was a psychotic break, then it was a good one.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +ven in the low light, I saw shacks dotting the wooded hills, their crusty faces barely visible through the trees. After a short drive, we pulled onto a dirt road that disappeared into trees. A barely standing mailbox jutted from weeds. I saw no buildings as the road curved up a sharp rise. The angle we climbed seemed more than any vehicle could take, and it felt like we were headed straight up. As my back pressed into the seat, I gazed on the starry sky through the windshield. The engine revved as the wheels fought for traction.

+

“A little steep through here,” John said.

+

The air chilled. The road evened. And we turned hard left, and I saw smoke rising another quarter mile back into the woods. The ground looked more stone than dirt. As we rounded a final curve, the homestead came into view: random debris and trash lined the perimeter; chickens darted jerkily around; there were so many dead animals—cats mostly, I think—flung into the embankment it seemed purposeful. Dad had actually been kind in his description of the place.

+

A small dwelling stood amidst the heaps of refuse. A light flickered through a front window, which was covered by iron bars. Boards ran over what looked to be a perpetually muddy area between the end of the track and the front door.

+

The truck lurched to a stop. John opened his door, while Vick nudged me out. “Go on, we’re here. Everyone will be so excited to meet you.”

+

I shuffled my feet as she pushed me forward, my legs like a marionette’s. A dog’s wail rose up, the kind of sound a bloodhound must make when it gets a whiff of its prey. Pots clanged inside, and there was loud talking. A small, white face peered from behind the curtains. As the three of us approached, the door was flung open. A decrepit man, so old his skin bunched in wrinkled folds, stood in the doorway and glared at me. An equally old woman appeared from behind him, holding an iron skillet as a weapon. The smell that wafted from inside was worse than a latrine.

+

The old woman stepped forward and put a grimy palm on my cheek. “I can’t tell.”

+

John stepped through. “It’s him.”

+

Every neuron in my nervous system fired, a response urging me to run the fuck out of there as fast as I could, or to blink my eyes until I snapped out of this nightmare. But I forced calm on myself. I told myself that my arrogance was speaking, to see these poor people and think myself better than them. They hadn’t harmed me, hadn’t threatened me. They were being nothing but kind and welcoming. My dad’s insinuation about incestuous parentage struck me as crazy now, as yet more superiority leveled at these people, who were, in fact, my family.

+

We poured inside to a cluster of accumulated furniture and odd paraphernalia: antlers mounted on the walls; ancient black-and-white pictures of dusty mountain folk; old-style Christmas lights decorating the windows. Vick took my hand and sat me on a plaid recliner. She, John, and the centenarian couple sat opposite on the couch. It was reminiscent of the family meeting only a few days before in my parents’ house.

+

“Don’t look like Father,” the old man said, which struck me as a strange way to say it.

+

“Look in his eyes,” John said. The other three leaned forward as if I were an object in a museum. The old man nodded, recognizing something at last.

+

“So, you probably have questions,” Vick said.

+

“Well, a lot actually. I’m not sure where to start.”

+

John began to answer, but before any words came out, the front door swung open. There stood Arthur Townes. His bulk seemed to have increased since I last saw him, as he barely fit through the doorway. His beard had grown to almost shroud his face completely; hair grew out of his plaid shirt, the kind of chest hair that could only be called hirsute. His arms were as thick as cut logs.

+

“Ah, good,” John said. “Everyone is here?”

+

“Most everyone came.” Arthur cowered as if terrified. His eyes glowed with yellowed jaundice; his nose was caked with gunk. His expression was kind and yet also full of confusion. He bent timidly and came forward. In horror, I watched as he continued to grow, the crown of his hairy head bumping against the ceiling. Then came the growls. The four on the couch lounged without a care.

+

“Oh, fuck,” I blurted. “I am a werewolf.”

+

The four sitting burst into laughter. Arthur stared at me as if trying to try to piece together what was going on as much as I was. “Oh, good Lord,” the old woman said. “Father ain’t a werewolf. You’ve got a lot to get straight.”

+

Arthur—looking less and less like Arthur with each passing second—opened his mouth to reveal rows of pointed teeth. His arms took on a slick sheen, a foul aroma exploding from his pores. Then the power flickered, sending the lamps and Christmas lights to half their original brightness.

+

“This was a mistake,” I managed to say. “Please, you can take me back?”

+

“Oh, don’t be alarmed, boy,” the old woman croaked. “Father just wants to meet you.”

+

When I tore my eyes away, it was to see all four of the others begin to grow too, their skin slick with ooze and hair. I ran for the front door, bounding past the large but lethargic Arthur, only to be met by a semi-circle of roughly three dozen people around the front of the house. For a split second I thought they might be townsfolk gathered with pitchforks and clubs, ready to fight these monsters. But they too looked to be stretching upwards, their silhouettes blending with the dark trees around us.

+

John slapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be alarmed. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re just glad you’ve come home. Father wants to see you, get a good look, and finally make you part of the family.”

+

A figure lurched from the trees, standing over twelve feet high. Horns curled around the sides of its head like a ram, and a beard grew so massive it could hide a child within. It was naked, the bulk of its arms and legs impossible, almost as thick as the torso they grew from, and ridiculous quantities of more thick hair almost concealing the pendulous swing of what hung from its body. The beast screamed into the night, a coarse roar that echoed down the mountainside. A stench of sewage blew toward me, even though it stood twenty feet away.

+

I hyperventilated and was only kept from falling by John and Vick’s grips on my arms. Running for my life came to mind, except I knew my legs weren’t capable of any extended escape. As the beast stalked closer, my joints seized, making me straight as a board.

+

“I want to go home,” I said, though it came out as a squeak.

+

Vick whispered in my ear, “Oh, my sweet baby boy. That’s just Father. Grandfather, too, and great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather. But Father to us all. Father to you.”

+

I spent a split second imagining my conception—of any woman breeding with this thing. I wanted to vomit. Finally able to stand on my own, I shook their hands from my arms and stood to face it.

+

Father. Here, in the Home of the Paul Bunyan Festival.

+

A laugh escaped me, followed by riotous giggles. Then I ran, sprinted as fast as I could, toward the townsfolk gauntlet, but I was barely past a dour woman who held a broom—which struck me as the strangest thing of all—before I was snatched from behind and held several feet off the ground.

+

Meaty, wet, hairy hands gripped both sides of my waist. Father turned me so that we faced, and I peered into his eyes, where a fire seemed to glow. He hugged me into his long, thick beard, which carried a rancid stench so foul I choked.

+

“Home,” he spoke low. “Family now. One of us.”

+

Then he covered my face with his lips, the whole front of my head into his mouth, so I could see the blackish-pink flesh dangling at the back, the massive swell of tongue, teeth like a shark’s. He exhaled a massive breath, sending warm, acidic fumes down my stupidly open mouth.

+

My chest heaved to the point of bursting.

+

My mind raced with images of this thing through the years, bestial fornications, the long lineage from colonial times, its previous home in some godforsaken European forest, many meals of flesh and bone. Then here, with long decades of banjos, and moonshine, and… and happy folk, dancing into the night, days spent hunting and tending tough crops. Women who would willingly wander into the woods to seek out Father.

+

My story. My ancestry.

+

Before Father removed his mouth from my face, everything went blissfully black.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +y fingers gripped the bed sheets. Disoriented, I whipped my legs around, still sure that Father clutched my sides, and tried to kick at him. Even when I realized that nightmare had disappeared, the shitty, little motel room didn’t register: strange bed, strange carpet, awful smell, green curtains, that hideous shag.

+

A smidgen of light peaked around the edges of the curtains. I threw open the front door. The same parking lot, my lonely car where I had left it, and an early mountain morning.

+

The stench of Father rose from every part of me.

+

In under a minute, the car spit rocks, and I was headed back through Haplinsburg. Only when I was far out of town did it occur to me to call Jessie. Though he screamed at me for not getting in touch sooner, his voice calmed me, and I let him rant just to hear his voice.

+

I said it was a dead end. The family moved away.

+

When I got to the city, I ran straight into his arms. He had a lot of questions, which I begged off answering for now. The air felt stifling; in the distance police sirens wailed. I got in the shower. My clothes must have masked the Fatherly smell, or maybe Jessie just assumed it was normal backwoods stench, as he never said a thing. But standing naked, even in the warm water the numerous odors of my Haplinsburg encounter were pungent. I scrubbed until my skin was raw, sure I saw new growths of hair, still slight, but more numerous.

+

Home. Family now. One of us.

+

My calves seized with cramps, the pain so stark it took my breath away. I doubled up, sucking humid air deep into my lungs, digging my thumbs into the throbbing muscles and shaking under the hot flow. I thought of hiding in the shower all day.

+

In bed that night, I lay far too long awake. Jessie slept peacefully, his light snores fitting oddly with the music from the smart speakers. His scent blossomed upward, and I drew it in, the smell of cologne and his wonderful pheromones. I loved him so much it made me tremble with fear.

+

I pressed my head to his chest, and his heartbeat sounded with a strong rhythm. I didn’t want him to wake—what if he saw my bones stretched, my tendons ached toward snapping? Ran his hands over my chest and felt oily sweat and tufts of newly coarse hair? Slipped a finger into my mouth, and pricked himself on now razor teeth? Kissed me, but tasted Father’s foetid breath?

+

I only wanted to make it through the night, and hoped the morning light would bring a release somehow. But I could smell him so strongly, could recall Father’s dreams spun into me. And in my chest, a steady pulse as my own heart thumped. As if, behind Jessie’s jazz coming through our speakers, I heard the lively thrum of an Appalachian jig.

+

Not for the first time, I felt the urge to devour him.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Unknown Ancestry” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

T. M. Morgan

+

+ + Author image of T. M. Morgan + + + T. M. Morgan lives in southern Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay with his wife and kids. His stories have been published in Lamplight, Vastarien, Penumbric, and now Mythaxis. You can find him on Twitter and his website.

+

© T. M. Morgan 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to Karen Apricot for these five great pictures!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-26.html b/issue-26.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..af5317b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26.html @@ -0,0 +1,431 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Issue-26s — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Summer 2021

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Amanda C. Crowley +

Voyager

+
+ + +

Our issue lead is a fine example of how short speculative fiction doesn't have to travel far to take us far away, and doesn't have to inject grand thrills and spills to keep a reader engaged if everyday characters prove to be quietly engrossing. Amanda Crowley's story doesn't try to hook the reader in with a killer opening line, it just builds and builds towards a simple, moving close. Sometimes we don't notice the powerful moments in life until they've already happened.

+ + + + Story image for Voyager by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Noise

+ Owen Leddy +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Noise by + + + +

Sometimes stories seem to arrive in pairs. Owen Leddy's 'Noise' felt very much like a companion piece to 'Voyager' for a couple of reasons: both deal with strange visitations, real or imagined, and at times both share an air of weariness, as their protagonists struggle with situations — employment, relationships — that could be familiar experiences to us all, were it not for the potential for these events to be very much out of the ordinary.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Freewheeling

+ Annie Percik +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Freewheeling by + + + +

Another 'first of two' story here, in this case the first of two brief short stories with at least a hint of the apocalyptic to them along with something of an optimistic tone, unusual for that particular genre. In this case, Annie Percik delivers a plucky heroine determined to stay up-beat in the face all of those little adversities that come with keeping an old folks' home running after the entire world has gone completely to pot.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Zamalek, by the Evening Light

+ Mike Adamson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Zamalek, by the Evening Light by + + + +

Across the long history of storytelling there recur classic themes — rags-to-riches, star-crossed lovers, revenger's tragedies — and, of course, perhaps the most intriguing, those that make us all wonder what we would do: stories of temptation. In style and setting Mike Adamson echoes such famous examples as Aladdin, but that tale takes place at the start of an event-filled life. This begins at the end of one.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

What Comes After Winter

+ Kurt Hunt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for What Comes After Winter by + + + +

As promised, here we have a counterpart to the chirpy sf puh-pocalypse of 'Freewheeling'. Via another hard-working protagonist, Kurt Hunt's flash fantasy glimpses a moment of cultural and environmental transition that threatens to overturn an entire way of life. An ecological reckoning now seems an inevitable part of all our futures; maybe the extremes the real world will experience are not the same as these, but one way or another they will have to be accepted. Can we too find some positives in what lies ahead?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Atmoboarders!

+ Martin Zeigler +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Atmoboarders! by + + + +

Charm, personality, the gift of the gab — author Martin Zeigler no doubt has all that and more. And so does his narrator here, but quick thinking and a witty turn of phrase are only the foundation of what makes a winning salesperson. Having a killer product on hand is neither here nor there when it comes to landing your catch: you really need to be able to spin them a yarn…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Troublemaker, Storyteller

+ Jonathon Mast +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Troublemaker, Storyteller by + + + +

'Stories about writers' are a hard sell at Mythaxis, but 'stories about storytellers' isn't exactly the same thing. Jonathon Mast's tale touches on timely themes of female oppression and the struggle against patriarchal corruption, starting with a classic (even classical) damsel-in-distress scenario before the old forms begin to shed their skins — and the power that comes from crafting new narratives is at the heart of it all.

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+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Les Sklaroff +

Sketches of Snoak City

+
+ + +

Back in 2012, Les Sklaroff had already been contributing quirky pieces to Mythaxis for several years. Issue 11 introduced us to a variety of unusually named persons — Paeony 3rdfield, Dundro Fappit, a collection of rivals negotiating the maze of someone called 'Foroquont' — all denizens of a single, strange, intriguing city, possibly ancient, possibly future. Over the following eight years we've returned to Snoak City numerous times, but the connections between these moments has never been as clear as now.

+ + + + Story image for Sketches of Snoak City by + + + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-26/atmoboarders.html b/issue-26/atmoboarders.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bf24314f --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/atmoboarders.html @@ -0,0 +1,525 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Atmoboarders! — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Atmoboarders!

+

Martin Zeigler

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Atmoboarders! by +
+ + + + +

A + +ccidents? Sure there are accidents, twanging being the most common. That’s when you slam into a telephone wire or high tension line. And that’s not the worst that can happen. A while back, a guy was atmoboarding over Alaska, taking in the vistas, when a seven-something-seven engine took him in.

+

So what’s this mean? Don’t atmoboard? Go out for a nice stroll instead? Safest thing in the world, right?

+

Wrong. Atmoboards have that honor. Look at the stats. You’re more likely to get hit by a bus crossing the avenue than sliced by a wire riding the air-venue.

+

So why snooze walking when you can live flying? And I do mean live. You just need to know how to hug the flat, how to twist the grip, how to grow a back-ear and sharpen your side-eye. That’s why, when you buy an atmoboard from us, we give you the first five lessons gratis—that means free. No other atmoboard outfit in the city will do that. That’s how much we at Fleetwood care about atmoboard safety.

+

Once you’re trained, you’ll forget about twanging, jet engines, even walking. From then on, your world will be a bright blue sky of unforgettable adventure. Or as we say here at Fleetwood: “There is no fear, just the atmosphere.”

+

What do I mean, adventure? Ask any of the staff here at the shop—the guys and guyettes in the bright blue shirts—and they’ll tell a true tale. Or you can ask me. I’ve been riding the board for going on six years, about as long as it’s been on the market. I know more stories than anyone.

+

What’s that? Do I have any adventures that stand out? Well, you not only asked the right person, you asked the right question. Just step outside under the clear blue and plant your heinie on a bench, while I grab an atmoboard to help move the yarn along.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +an, will you look at that sky. A thing of beauty, is it not? You’re nodding, and that’s good. Because if there’s one thing we atmoboarders have in common, it’s that we all love the hue called blue.

+

One week ago today I was standing under a sky just like this, asking myself: where haven’t I been in years and years if not eons? My answer: Why, the Terrence River.

+

Name ring a bell?

+

That’s what I thought. I could tell just by looking that you know the river, you know the bluffs, you know the lay of the land.

+

My bet is you’ve been to the Terrence more than once in your life. You’ve hooked a fish or two off its piers, and scrunched in an inner tube on a sleepy Sunday. All fine things. But I’m telling you straight, because honesty is the modus operandi—that means way of doing things—here at Fleetwood, I’m telling you you’ll never really know any river till you jet in low just above it, almost kissing its current. Till you trace its meander, the rushing cliffs on either side assuring you of your decent clip.

+

Till you round a bend and find yourself heading straight for a bridge.

+

Under you go, your atmoboard jets echoing beneath the span, and just as quick you’re out in the sun again, only to see an island in midstream splitting the river in two. Which way? Left? Right? You guess, then go, every cell in you alive with the speed and closeness and whoosh of it all.

+

That’s how you live a river, and that’s how I lived the Terrence that day I met the Red Stripe Brigade. But before I go on, you’ll need a little atmoboard know-how. So it’s a big T for time-out as I give you the dog and pony.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +o here it is: la board a la atmo. A touch taller than me when I stand right beside it. But I’ll lay it down for now, because, once you’ve taken off, that’s how you ride it. Horizontal, like a paddleboard or a bodyboard.

+

Paddleboard, bodyboard, surfboard. There are all kinds of boards. But only one atmoboard.

+

Only one what?

+

You got it: Only one atmoboard.

+

And here at the top, beneath the wrap-around windshield, you have your two grips. Right and left. For turning and for climbing and for heading back down to solid ground. You twist for acceleration. Hold steady to coast.

+

Next is the view window, flush with the board, so you can see what’s below as you’re flying. Or above, if you’re flipped over. That happens. If it does, watch out. If it never does, we’ll teach you how to do it.

+

Here beneath the window, the chinrest, and farther down, you’ve got your body straps. Take it from me, even the hot dogs belt up.

+

And down here at the base are the heat-resistant shields for your feet so they don’t get flambéed by the jets, meaning shish-kabobbed, meaning charred like twin brats on a spit.

+

Now let’s flip the board over and gander its belly. What do we got? Fuel tank, pipes, engine, pipes, jets, pipes, more pipes, and rudders. How’s it all work? If I knew that, I’d be teaching aeronautics over at the U and frankly making a lot less than I do now, selling atmoboards. Hate to put it that way, but it’s true.

+

The things you’ll need to know are these two buttons, which I’ll get to in a jiff, and this combo lock. The combo lock’s for when you’re worried some skywayman will hijack your board to the cumulous without so much as a may I. Know what, though? Most riders just leave the combo at 0-0-0. That’s the factory spec. You can set it to whatever. 6-6-6 if you want to be a little Beelzebub about it—that means Devil. But most atmoboarders have enough passwords and passcodes and passed gas in our lives. Who needs a 4-7-2 or a 5-3-8 when you can just stick with your home-grown triple-ought. Besides, if you set a new combo and forget it later on, you might as well forget it later on. Fleetwood’s got the best customer service in this universe and the next one over, but they still can’t read minds. And if you can’t get the right three digits in three tries, your shiny atmoboard won’t fly, won’t float, won’t skate, and will barely make an ironing board to smooth out your wrinkled skivvies.

+

So here’s a quiz. Sharpen your thinking cap and put on your pencil. Let’s say I set my combo to 1-2-3, save it, then jumble the numbers so no one else can guess it. Now I want to rev up my atmoboard and take to the skies. What do I dial?

+

1-2-3?

+

Is that your final answer?

+

Looks like I need to make my questions tougher.

+

Now to lift off, I first stand the board upright like I did before. I hug it like it’s dear old mom or pop, because that’s what she or he will be. And remember the two buttons I mentioned a while back? Now watch as I reach around in back and press the top one. See? The straps whip around and wrap me up. Press again, they release me.

+

As for this other button, the lower one, I’ll leave it alone for now. This is the guy that starts it all, that fires up the jets, that launches you into the air as if the sidewalk were Canaveral. Except there’s no ten, nine, eight. No seven, six. No five. It’s zero and all systems go. It’s blast off. It’s watch your hometown become a dot.

+

It’s catch you later, Earth, and a pleasure to meet you again, wild blue.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +o in our last thrilling episode, I was atmoboarding toward an island on the Terrence, trying to decide left or right, right or left. It’s a decent-sized isle, a quarter-mile wide, half-mile long. Can you guess what island I was at?

+

You got it. The Heron. You know the lay, all right.

+

And I only had a second, so I flipped a mental penny and veered left, which put the Heron on my right. I swished by a stand of poplars on the isle like they were tall green pickets on a fence. Shoo. Shoo. ShooShooShoo. And in the gaps between, I caught sight of something scattered in the open field behind them. What did I see? Can you guess? I’ll give you a hint. I’m holding one, you’re shopping for one, and it starts with an at and ends with an oard.

+

Yes! Nice!

+

What I glommed were a dozen unoccupied atmoboards lying in the grass like they were sunning down at Goldbod Beach. And I said to myself: This is supreme. Fellow atmoboarders. Fellow boarders. Fellow members of the board of atmospheriography.

+

This called for an immediate visit. So I applied the brakes, like this. See how I twist the grips gently, not too hard? Too hard, you’ll flip over and head in reverse and upside down. Nothing like flying with a field of sky and a sky of grass. So remember: nice and slow, nice and slow. Nice and what?

+

Slow, that’s right, and you’re quick. You see, your atmoboard knows you want to land on your feet, so don’t push it. Suggest it. Let the jets do what they’re paid to do, ease you down safely to Mama Terra Firma—that means Mother Earth. That’s how I touched down between two of those long tall poplars.

+

Once my feet were planted, I released my straps and stepped away. And as the engine clicked and cooled, I took a look around. I saw for the first time that all those other atmoboards looked exactly alike—all black, with a red stripe running down one side like a lone suspender.

+

And I spotted something else. Something I hadn’t noticed from above, because it was as verdant—that means green—as the meadow it was standing in. And it explained why there wasn’t a soul in sight.

+

What I saw was a huge, enclosed tent, as big as the kind they hold revivals in. In fact, that’s what I thought at first, that I’d landed at an old camp meeting of the atmoboard faithful. Because as I looked at that tent, I could also hear it. I’d hear one voice inside shout something, then I’d hear a chorus echo it back. The one voice, then the chorus. One voice, chorus. And so on, ad infinitum—which means over and over.

+

I couldn’t tell what words were being bellowed from that tent, but here’s what I imagined: I imagined atmoboarders, professing their faith. Atmoboarders, bearing witness to being reborn in that bright blue ocean of air that hugs us all. And I was tempted to march right up to that revival tent, whip up the flap, step inside, and proudly join that choir in whatever they were singing their praises to.

+

But just then that flap came up on its own. And the first thing I spotted poking out of the opening was a gat—and that means gun.

+

Right off, I grabbed my atmoboard and ducked behind a poplar. Why?

+

That’s right: because I’d spotted a gat, meaning gun.

+

Then I see the hood. The hood over the face of the guard with the gat. The black hood with the red stripe along its side. Sound familiar? If that’s a nod, you’re a hammer, you hit the nail. The guy was decked out just like those dozen atmoboards basking in the sun.

+

And that’s not all.

+

Now that the flap was up, the words pouring out of the mouth of that tent became loud and clear. Well, they were always loud, but now they were clear. And clearly, the words were “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”

+

I see the look on your face. I can tell you’re wondering. You’re wondering the same thing I was wondering from behind that poplar. You’re wondering: Where, oh, where in all of this was the Atmoboard Spirit? The spirit of the ancient god At-Mo-Bo? The Espiritus Atmoboardus? The Lespree de Atmeebare?

+

After all, since when does a tent full of atmoboarders need a guard, need a gat, need all that gabble about destroying? What’s more, since when does a tent full of atmoboarders need a tent? Look up above. What do you see? A canvas sky?

+

Case closed.

+

Now my ire was up. How dare these dozen denizens sully the good name: atmoboard. So I propped my own against the trunk and scurried off to the far side of the tent, where I couldn’t see the guard and ergo—that means therefore—he couldn’t see me.

+

And since he couldn’t see me, I took my sweet time, I took my sugar-sweet time.

+

Doing what, you ask?

+

For now, let’s just say I took my sugar-sweet time enjoying the golden light of old Sol—that means the sun.

+

And afterward I went up to the tent, slapped my ear to the canvas, and listened in. And what I heard, in a deep, booming voice, were these words:

+

“You, all of you, will think of only one thing. Flying full speed ahead. Not slowing, not turning, not climbing or descending, and certainly not landing. But flying full speed ahead. And you will fly full speed ahead for one purpose only. To destroy, destroy, destroy! Everyone: Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”

+

I hadn’t heard those words in a sugar-sweet time, but as luck would have it, I got to hear them again and from too many voices at once: “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!”

+

So here’s another quiz question. What did I hear?

+

That’s close. Real close. Your words are spot on, but I listen to you and I think you want to maybe kick a tire, maybe tag a wall, maybe knock over little Bobby’s bike. What I don’t hear is lay to waste. I don’t hear wipe completely out. I don’t hear knock back to the Pleistocene—which means Stone Age.

+

Now let’s hear you belt out those destroys like you mean them.

+

There you go! Now that’s a performance worth its weight. Not just in gold, but in gold times three.

+

As for what they had in mind to destroy, destroy, destroy, I needed to see what was happening. We’re in the eye age, not the ear era. So I took this Swiss job I carry with me and stabbed the tent, poking a hole just big enough to peek through.

+

And here was the scene: a bunch of guys in black hoods standing together. One guy in a black hood standing apart. And one guy in a black hood not standing, but strapped face down to a plywood plank. And each and every one of those hoods was lined with a bright red—well, you tell me.

+

Righto once again. Stripe. I sense you’re starting to get a feel for why I named this bunch the Red Stripe Brigade.

+

All that black and red was getting to me. So I backed off from the tent for a little blue and green. And when I put my lone little eyeball back up to the hole, here’s what I saw.

+

What I saw was another lone little eyeball staring right back.

+

And what I heard up close was this: “Oh, Master! We’re being spied upon!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +as I scared?

+

Put it this way: I tore off through that meadow as if tomorrow had been repealed.

+

But my senses were sharp. My senses were keen. I couldn’t see through that canvas but I could sure hear the thundering feet on the other side keeping pace with me. And when I cleared the corner of the tent and turned to look, I saw them, the hooded hellmen, racing out of the opening like angry ants.

+

From one, then from all the rest, came a cry of, “After him! After him! After him!” It sounded better than that many destroys, but the meaning was the same: my hour was up and my days were numbered.

+

I raced past those dozen basking atmoboards in that golden sunlit field and glimpsed the guard pulling his gun. Glimpsed the guard aiming his gun. Glimpsed the guard firing his gun just as I threw myself down in the grass. Know the expression missed by a mile? Those bullets missed, but not by a mile.

+

The grass was tall enough so I could wriggle unseen toward the poplars. Once behind the nearest tree, I got to my feet and peeked around it. So much for unseen. And, much to my demise, my atmoboard, my dear atmoboard, my fleet and faithful atmoboard was leaning against the trunk three trees away.

+

What to do? Take a siesta? Break out the picnic plastic? No, sir or madam, I made a dash for it, hearing more after-hims, hearing more gat reports, hearing bark ripped off each tree as I raced past. And just as I neared my board, one of the hoodmen intercepted me. On the run, I shoved him with one hand, grabbed my atmoboard with the other, and took off to the skies and to freedom.

+

Freedom, my friend. You know freedom, right? Of course, you do. It’s feeling the gut tug and the blood rush. It’s putting distance. It’s flying higher than the highest poplar. It’s breathing easy. It’s knowing your ship, the U.S.S. Atmoboard, is headed back to Terra Mainland, away from Heron Island and all its hooded who-bodies.

+

Then I heard the crack. Felt the splinter scrape my cheek. Like that, half my board was gone, disappeared, vanishissimo—and the left grip was dangling free in my hand. I was half a hawk and spinning. I saw a river of clouds and a sky of river. I was all over the place and going up fast, meaning down. Down to the ground, that kind of down. And years of riding the board told me my number was up.

+

My number was what?

+

That’s correct. Up.

+

And now I felt the waiting. The endless waiting. For the crash, for the final credits, for the show’s all over, folks, please exit to your right.

+

But the house lights didn’t come up. Instead came the teeth, the barbs, the needles. The scrapes and scratches. The being ripped and rent like a bill through a shredder.

+

And then it all came to a stop.

+

I took a look at myself. I was torn up and bloody, but I knew I was torn and bloody, and that made me alive. And I thanked whoever made blackberries that I’d landed in those brambles, which acted like a net.

+

I was still wrapped to what was left of my atmoboard, so I unlatched myself and set it free and bid it a “rest in peace”, a “dearly beloved board, we are gathered here”, an “Atmo, we hardly knew ye”.

+

But now, from the way I was being snatched from the brambles and dragged across the meadow toward the tent, it was closing credits after all, it was animals were harmed during the making of this picture, it was atmoboard, I’ll meet you in the next life over.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +an I get you anything? A water, soda, something from the Fleetwood fountain?

+

You sure?

+

Good, then it’s onward and tentward.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ow I’m tied to a post that’s holding up the tent. The banded brethren who blasted away my atmoboard and hauled me through the grass are circling me and waving their fists and ranting through their hoods. Then someone from the back of the tent steps forward, elbows the others aside, and gets in my face. Like everyone else, he’s hooded and has that red stripe. But when he speaks, I think: that’s him. The Bossman with the booming voice. The Master.

+

And from out of his hood come the words, “You have a choice. To die right now, or after we demonstrate what we intend to do.”

+

His followers think this is funny, but the Bossman not so much. “Silence!” he screams. “I am not an act!”

+

It’s a spat, short and sweet, but it gives me time to decide. I cough to get their attention. “I’ve thought it over,” I announce.

+

I see the Master’s eyes through the slits in his hood. “And?” he says.

+

“I’d rather die later,” I say.

+

“Then watch and learn.” The Master waves his hand, and the hooded ones disperse—that means step aside—and what I now see before me is that same hapless captive strapped to the plywood plank.

+

“Presenting our modified atmoboard,” the Master says.

+

I think to myself, if this thing’s an atmoboard then I’m the Duke of Alliman Kazoo. Sure, the plywood’s the size and shape of an atmoboard, but where are the grips? The shields for the face and footsies?

+

But jets, it does have jets. Not Fleetwood jets, mind you. Not even jets built by our competitors. More like cheap steel tubing for a one-time shot.

+

“And look what’s in store,” the Master declares.

+

At the far end of the tent I see something I missed the first time. A huge picture window in a thick brick frame. And just behind the window, a wide cinderblock wall, the kind of wall you’d crash into in a gym, chasing that out-of-bounds b-ball.

+

“Picture, if you will,” the Bossman says, pointing to the frame, “a picture window. The window of a library. The window of a school. The window of a hospital. The window of a—”

+

His booming voice booms on, and I don’t like what I hear. I point to the pane and say, “It’s target practice, isn’t it?”

+

“For something bigger, yes,” the Bossman says.

+

“But that’s just wrong.”

+

“No, it’s right. Because practice makes perfect.”

+

He steps up to the table the plank is lying on. He flips a switch beneath the table. The jet on the ersatz atmoboard—meaning, here sits something that’s nothing like an atmoboard—begins to glow, all hot and crimson and eager.

+

It’s “Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!” from the Master.

+

It’s ditto, ditto, ditto from all the rest, including the face-down unfortunato about to take a ride.

+

And with the throw of a second switch, the captive and the plywood plank are off, hitting zero to eighty in an eye blink.

+

Now listen carefully. An atmoboard sans grips—without grips—means you can’t turn left, you can’t turn right. It means if whatever’s up ahead won’t step aside, it’s a turn for the worse. Add in jets you can’t shut down, and it means getting there quicker, which is bad because you don’t want to get there at all.

+

But he does get there. And I know I shouldn’t ask, but I can’t help it. You’d ask too if you saw the shattered window and the sudden modern art on the cinderblock.

+

I ask: “You call that practice?”

+

The Master says, “Did you see real atmoboards? Real buildings? Real explosions?”

+

“No, but—”

+

“Then, yes, I call that—prac-tice,” he says, stretching out the word like taffy.

+

Ever been treated like that? Like a moron? Like a dunce? Like a wattless bulb? Like someone who wouldn’t know two plus two, even if handed four?

+

Of course you have. Not recently, I know. But at some point in your life. Happens to all of us. And it gets our goat if not our hackles up.

+

And so I dish it, just as taffy-like, right back to the Bossman. “When a real human hits a real wall, that doesn’t look like prac-tice to me. That looks like mur-der.”

+

He glares at me, slit to eye. “What about two humans then?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +ithin seconds I’m strapped to a second plywood plank, and the warm-up switch is thrown.

+

The jets thrum louder, get hotter. I feel my belly burn. I can’t move my arms, move my legs, can’t even budge my toes. But I can think, see, and breathe. And what I’m thinking is, I see I’m about done with breathing.

+

About all I can hope for is a little extra time. Maybe see that ticking hand just a few minutes longer. So I give it the old college try, the old high school try, the old one-room school with just an outhouse try. And I say, “If you need to set up a new window pane, you go right ahead. Make sure it’s seated in the frame. You don’t want it to come loose before I hit it.”

+

“No window needed,” the Bossman says. “The wall will do.”

+

“I’ve been meaning to tell you about that,” I say. “It looks like it needs painting. And the paint allowed to dry.”

+

“No need. You will supply the color.”

+

That’s not funny, but it’s funnier than when his finger inches toward the second switch. And that’s when I say, or rather scream, or rather cry at the top of my wanttolive lungs: “Hold on! Stop! Wait!”

+

The Master stalls over the launch switch and heaves a yawn that sucks in half his hood. “What is it now?”

+

“Since you shot up my atmoboard, may I have one to replace it? I know of one you don’t need any longer.”

+

It’s suddenly comedy hour at the Red Stripe Club. Even the Master laughs at this one. Hoods and stripes rise and fall with guffaws. The Master finally calms down enough to say, “And where do you plan to ride this atmoboard? Up in Heaven?”

+

“Outside of Heaven, but just as high,” I say after the mirth dies down. “And I’ll leave you down here in the dirt.”

+

The hilarity starts up again, but now I’ve got the Master riled. He tamps his hand to stifle the rabble. “Leave who in the dirt? Me?”

+

“All of you.”

+

Things hush a whole lot now. The Bossman leans over me as I’m still cocooned to the plywood plank. “You expect us not only to unstrap you and let you go, but allow you to leave these premises on an atmoboard that we will simply hand over to you?”

+

More guffaws, more holding of sides.

+

“See, that’s cowardly thinking,” I say. “Someone who’s not a coward would look at it different. They would say to me, ‘Well, you go right ahead and take that atmoboard, for all the good that will do. We’ll just catch up to you and drag you back anyway’.”

+

“Why waste our time catching and dragging when we can do what we wish to you right now without all that?”

+

“You see,” I say, “that’s how a coward would word it. A chicken would word it. A cowering chicken would word it. A cowering chicken wetting his feathers and going bwaakbwaakbwaak would word it. A cowering—”

+

Slap! He whacks me one upside the head. It stings, but not as bad as a cinderblock wall would, and so I go on. “You see? There again, that’s what a coward would do, a squeaking mouse in the house would do, a squeaking, meeking sheep in wolf’s clothing—”

+

“Enough! Enough of your lists!” cries the Master. “Everyone: we are not cowards!”

+

And of course from the choir comes: “We are not cowards!”

+

“All right,” the Bossman booms. “We will give you your atmoboard. We will even give you a minute head start on your atmoboard. An entire minute. Sixty seconds. We will then pursue you as you flee from us in desperate panic on your atmoboard. And then we, the aces of the air, the most accomplished and skilled atmoboarders ever to rule the skies, will catch you. Will surround you. And, with the razor-sharp tips of our boards, will slice both you and your atmoboard in two and send all four halves tail-spinning to a fiery doom!

+

“You will not die quietly. You will not die quickly. Or painlessly. We will do everything within our power to make you wish you had simply flown into our wall. For we do not intend on capturing you and bringing you back.”

+

A giant cheer whirls around the tent and echoes off the cinderblock.

+

And now as a hooded hooligan starts unraveling me, I feel my legs move again, my toes wiggle again, the blood flow through my arms and fingers again. So I point my index toward the tent top and proclaim, “That was quite a list yourself, Bossman. But so be it! Far better to die as a hero on an atmoboard than as a mummy on a sad slat of lumber!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +ime flies when you’re doomed to die.

+

Now that we’re all standing outside the tent, I see the afternoon’s shot, that the day’s about done. The air’s crisp as a chip, and the sky’s a deep blue that’s about to go indigo.

+

The banded believers have claimed their atmoboards from the scatter in the grass. They’ve handed me the extra. And now I’m almost like them. Almost, but not quite. My board’s black and banded exactly like theirs. But my head isn’t hooded. My head isn’t striped. My face is out in the open for all to see.

+

But I don’t strap in just yet. I give my board a half-spin, like this. See? Now I’m facing the belly of the beast. The pipes and jets and rudders.

+

I hear smatters of tittering as the hoodmen elbow each other and point. Even the Bossman is amused, for I can hear his booming ha.

+

“Are you sure,” he says, “you wouldn’t rather get hurled against the wall? If you fire up like that, with the pipes in your face, your board will do our work for us.”

+

I peek around the atmoboard as if it were a shower curtain. “Just looking for the Fleetwood stamp,” I say. “And I’m happy to report that it’s nowhere to be found.”

+

I give my board another one-eighty and hug the varnished side, the side you ride. I reach around, push the top button, and strap myself in. And the Master says, “If you’re quite through, you have—one.”

+

“I understand,” I answer back. “One minute head start.”

+

“No, you don’t understand. We’ll give you one second and not one second more.”

+

I’m about to call that cheating. I’m about to say he promised. I’m about to shout no take-backs, when he tells me, “Second’s over.”

+

Doesn’t leave much time, zero seconds, so I push the lower button. I hear the jets. I feel the surge. I see the brilliant flames beneath me. And all around me everything lights up-dusk and dark, tent and meadow, field and foe.

+

And then it’s liftoff, blessed liftoff, as the meadow drops away.

+

Freedom, my friend. I mentioned it earlier. But earlier I lost it instantly in a hail of gat-guy bullets. And now, as I shoot like a bullet myself into the Deep Majestic Up, I know I’ve been given a second chance, a reprieve, a don’t-you-blow-it op.

+

But I don’t escape. I don’t vamoose. I don’t hightail it the Hades out of there.

+

No, I hang around and hover.

+

Hang around and what?

+

Hover. That’s absolutely right. I sail down to within earshot, because it’s now too dark to see, and adopt a holding pattern.

+

And for good reason.

+

I don’t want to miss what’s about to happen for all the t’s in Tatistakastan.

+

And sure enough I hear it. The Bossman’s booming bass. “No! No! No! My atmoboard won’t work!”

+

And as an added extra, his followers’ reply: “No! No! No! My atmoboard won’t work!”

+

It gets even better when the Bossman screams, “No! No! No! This is not a rallying cry, you fools! My atmoboard will not fire!”

+

“No! No! No! Neither will ours, Oh Master!”

+

So much for the dogfight. So much for the battle for the skies. So much for the cutting me in half, the halving me, the having me for dinner and spitting me out. The Red Stripe Brigade is down and out. They’re flameless and they’re frozen and they’re glued to Terra Gotcha.

+

Then someone spots my jets a-glowing. “Master! He sails above us!”

+

“You!” The Bossman bellows. “What have you done to our atmoboards?”

+

I descend just a little more so I can be heard. “Simple. I took my sugar-sweet time.”

+

“You what your what-sweet what?”

+

“Took, sugar, time,” I reply.

+

To which he responds, “What?”

+

So I tell him. That I took my sugar-sweet time after I first saw the tent flap open, after I first spotted the guard with the gat, after I first heard those shouts of destroy, destroy, destroy!

+

And after I first figured something was amiss—meaning not quite right.

+

That’s when I dashed to the far side of the tent where the atmoboards were sunning. Flittered from board to red-striped board. Saw to my delight that each combo was triple-ought, the factory spec. Figured no one had changed their combo, and so I changed it for them. Set each combo to the same three-digit number and saved it. Then scrambled every one so no one would ever guess it.

+

I did all this, and took my sugar-sweet time about it.

+

And how sweet it is that, just before lifting off that fine evening, I did more than just spin my board halfway and cheer that Fleetwood had played no part. No, I also entered that secret combo, so I alone could work the board and blast off free and easy.

+

I lay this all out for the Master and his minions. I’m hovering and they’re grounded, for the simple reason that I know the secret combo and they don’t have a clue.

+

But they still have the gat guy, and the gat still has bullets.

+

So it’s high time to move on.

+

I bid everyone a fond ow feedersane, a fond adoo, a fond kiss my tush and toodle-oo. Then with one squeeze of the grips, I swoop off the Heron, shoot out over the Terrence, flash a final wave, and head on home.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nd now let’s head on up to the showroom.

+

The showroom? You’re asking, why the showroom?

+

Because atmoboards are awaiting. Not to mention nifty deals on account of all your on the money answers. Nifty deals like our Fleetwood water bottles, and our protective WeatherFleet waxes, and our DuroFleet fuel packs that let you fly longer than the standard thirty seconds.

+

What’s that? You’re saying you’re not in the least bit interested?

+

What’s that? You’re saying you just stuck around to hear the end of the story, and now you’re leaving?

+

Well, I’ll have you know I earn my keep through atmos sold, not through stories told.

+

You’re saying nice rhyme, but adios?

+

But what if I told you there’s more to the story? What if I told you that after I headed on home that night, I flew right back?

+

Yes, back to Heron Island. Not solo this time, but with my own brigade, my Brigade de la Fleetwood, my crew and crewatrixes in their bright blue Fleetwood tees. And no longer on that shabby black board with the flimsy red stripe, but on a bright and brand new atmoboard, on a sleek and shiny atmo, on a swift and certain A.

+

And there they were, the hooded has-beens, still sobbing over their boards, trying to guess the combo. It was pathetic, meaning too bad for them, as we swooped right in and knocked them cold.

+

The Master, the gat guy, and all the rest—who cares who was who?—were down for the count.

+

And now we propped them up. Strapped them to their now vertical rides. And entered the secret combo, 3-2-1.

+

Then, as one, we shouted, “Zero!” and pressed the launch button on each and every one of their red-striped boards and stepped back.

+

Way back.

+

And, oh, how those atmoboards rose. Higher, ever higher, in unison—meaning altogether—like eleven bright orange missiles. And soon the jet flames grew distant, resembling worms, tiny glowing worms rising deep into the night, toward the edge of our atmosphere, toward the cold silence of outer space and all the wonders it had to offer.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +s for the wonders Fleetwood has to offer, you ready now to sign on the dotted line?

+

What’s that? You wouldn’t ride an atmoboard if it were the last thing on earth?

+

How about if I throw in a pen and a poster?

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Atmobaorders!” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Martin Zeigler

+

+ + Author image of Martin Zeigler + + + Martin Zeigler writes short fiction, primarily mystery, science fiction, and horror. His stories have been published in a number of anthologies and journals, both in print and online. Every so often (okay, twice) he has gathered these stories into a self-published collection. In 2015 he released A Functional Man And Other Stories. More recently, in 2020, a year we will all remember with fondness, he released Hypochondria And Other Stories. Besides writing, Marty enjoys the things most people do. And besides those, he likes reading, taking long walks, and dabbling on the piano. He makes his home in the Pacific Northwest.

+

© Martin Zeigler 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: jvalley678, freegr, usefoto, Couleur, ulotkidruk, PublicDomainPictures, 41330, geralt, and B_A.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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Welcome to the latest issue of Mythaxis! It’s always a pleasure to be able to present a new selection of fiction, and on this occasion we have seven names and faces entirely new to these pages, with original stories that seek to transport the reader through such disparate experiences as creeping disquiet, mythical nostalgia, misplaced mundanity, mortal fear, fatalistic optimism, optimistic fatalism, and even silver-tongued self-confidence!

+

But in addition to these new arrivals, closing out this issue you will also find an old, familiar friend, and (for long-time readers) old, familiar fiction as well.

+

One of the changes I hoped to work when taking the reins at Mythaxis was to widen the range of authors appearing. This has been achieved, but doing so inevitably meant there would be less opportunities for previous contributors. One of those was Les Sklaroff, whose friendship with our original editor Gil Williamson resulted in the appearance of many stories over the years, the majority of them set in Snoak City, a strange metropolis regularly plagued by distinctive personalities, unpredictable objects, and atypical events.

+

Rather than consign our past to the past, we’ve decided to create a side-project within Mythaxis to celebrate Snoak City, bringing together all those loosely interconnected threads which wound through the magazine over the years. The result is Sketches of Snoak City, currently in its fledgling 1st Edition, but certain to be expanded (in ways which shall, for the time being, remain a closely guarded secret).

+

I can reveal, though, that plans are already underway to do something much the same in collaboration with another former contributor, author of a long-lost narrative of day-jobbing lives lived under the eye of globe-spanning corporate interests. Watch out for that in the future—maybe not today, and hopefully not tomorrow…

+

…unless we’re already there, of course…

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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+

ISSUE 26 - Thanks and Salutations! +Many thanks to our talented cover artist, Bobby Cooper, for permission to use his wonderlandish image Finnekus, the flower-breathing dragon for this issue’s cover. Bobby works with colored pencil, tempting the night sky with music, poetry, and even dance until it sends him sheets of black paper to draw upon. The results are strange and beautiful — you can check them out on his Instagram, and he has an online shop with myriad cool options too.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-26/freewheeling.html b/issue-26/freewheeling.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f917b6be --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/freewheeling.html @@ -0,0 +1,371 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Freewheeling — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Freewheeling

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Annie Percik

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+ Story image for Freewheeling by +
+ + + + +

A + +ngela pedalled. The bike went nowhere.

+

Sweat beaded on Angela’s forehead. She could feel the droplets gathering, combining to make bigger droplets that trickled down her neck, tickling her skin.

+

Of course, still the bike went nowhere. But, up the stairs, along the corridor, in the lounge where the old folks waited, hopefully a lightbulb glowed.

+

The door at the top of the stairs opened with its familiar creak, and Mrs Tolliver’s quavering voice drifted down. “It’s flickering a bit, dear. Vera’s getting a headache. Could you put a bit more oomph into it?”

+

“Rightio, Mrs T!” Angela panted. “Will do!”

+

She rose up from the bike seat, leaned forwards over the handlebars, and pedalled faster.

+

She imagined an open road ahead of her, instead of the cracked and peeling paint of the basement wall. The flame of the candle in its glass housing on the floor sent shadows flickering in her peripheral vision and Angela pictured trees whizzing by. She tried to feel the air of her passage flowing over her flushed and puffy cheeks, cooling her as she sped on.

+

But the bike went nowhere.

+

Just a few more minutes. That was all she could give them. But an hour or so of proper electric light after dark made all the difference to the old folks as the nights started to draw in. Their eyes weren’t strong enough any more to be able to read or play checkers by candlelight, and it was just too depressing to give up on the day as soon as the sunlight faded. So Angela pedalled. Every night, for as long as she could manage.

+

She thought about the pure delight on everyone’s faces the first time the bicycle-powered dynamo lit the bulb in the lounge. She had been among those watching then, and she had jumped up and down and clapped with joy when the filament flickered into life.

+

Steve had been pedalling that day. He had taken the mountain bike Angela hadn’t had time to ride in years, whipped off the back wheel, cannibalised an old wheelchair to suspend the frame off the basement floor, and connected the gear chain up to the generator, and was proud to demonstrate how it worked. After that, he and Angela had set up a rota with any of the others who could pedal fast enough to get the light bulb going.

+

She’d only had to cycle twice a week back then, and only for half an hour each time. But then Steve had taken most of the others and gone in search of other settlements. He’d said they would only be gone a few days, leaving Angela and Derek to look after the old folks. They were going out in a spiral pattern, and would cut straight back to the homestead as soon as they found anyone else. Derek had chopped a tree down on himself three days later.

+

That had been nearly four months ago now, and the others never came back.

+

All the air in Angela’s lungs rushed out in a whoosh and she stopped pedalling, the muscles in her calves and thighs on fire. She heard muffled groans from above as the dynamo stuttered to a halt and the old folks were plunged into darkness. She told them every day to have the matches handy for lighting the candles when the bulb went out, but they never listened. Heaving herself off the bike, she picked up her candle lantern and trudged up the stairs.

+

As soon as she entered the lounge, the complaints started up.

+

“I only needed two more turns to win this game!” Ms Clarke, so competitive.

+

“I was about to get to the end of my chapter.” Mr Boyate, of course, always reading.

+

“Can’t we have just a few more minutes?” Mrs Harcourt, completely blind, but liked to feel the warmth of the bulb.

+

“That didn’t feel like a full hour to me. I think you’re short-changing us again!” And that, inevitably, was Mr Edward “Eddie” Tremain, determined to squeeze every penny from his son’s investment that he could, even now.

+

Angela went round the room, lighting each candle and smiling down at each face. “I’m afraid that’s all for tonight. You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow.”

+

But how many more tomorrows could she go on cycling to give them that little bit of light? And how many more tomorrows could she keep doing all the other chores required to maintain the homestead? Already, the list of maintenance tasks was growing faster than she could tick them off. The vegetable plot needed some urgent attention, the gutters were clogged, the stairs were getting dangerously rickety…

+

Angela packed all the old folks off to bed, then retreated to her own room. She was physically exhausted, but still lay staring into the darkness for a long time before she finally fell asleep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he sun was already high in the sky when a knock at her door dragged Angela out of slumber. She pushed the covers off wearily and staggered to see who it was. Mrs Tolliver, as usual, the assigned spokesperson of the old folks.

+

“Is everything alright, dear?” The elderly woman’s rheumy eyes peered up at her in concern. “It’s just that Eddie’s asking about breakfast, and I don’t mind telling you that Cynthia really needs a bath.”

+

Angela pasted her habitual smile on her face, though she could feel it drooping at the edges, a bit like the wallpaper in Mr Armitage’s room. “Terribly sorry, Mrs T. I’ll be right with you!”

+

But, as it turned out, breakfast and bathtime would have to wait. As Angela was pulling a comb through her recalcitrant curls, she heard a noise that reverberated right through to the depths of her core, where memories of The Time Before lurked in shadow.

+

It was an engine.

+

She dropped her comb and ran from the bedroom, down the stairs and out onto the porch. Putting one hand up to shade her eyes, she peered out into the wilderness. Dust was rising at the furthest reaches of her vision, down the road that led out into the unknown.

+

As Angela watched, a vehicle came into view. It had outsized wheels and a bubble-shaped shell, with dark blue panels affixed all over it that reflected the beams of the sun. She stood right there until it trundled to a halt a few feet from the bottom of the porch steps and, as Angela stood frozen and open-mouthed, a figure climbed out.

+

It was a woman, younger than Angela by a few years, and shorter by several inches. She pushed her driving goggles up onto her forehead and waved at Angela with a wide grin.

+

“Hello! Someone told me there was a house out this way, but I wasn’t sure there’d be anyone still here. I figured there’d be no harm in coming to take a look, just in case.” The young woman bounded up the steps and stuck out her hand. “I’m Tilly.”

+

Angela gaped like a fish for a few seconds more, before part of her brain kicked into gear and she reached out to grasp Tilly’s hand. “Angela.”

+

“Hi, Angela. Pleased to meet you.”

+

“What are you—? Where did you—? Who are you?”

+

Tilly’s grin grew even wider. “That’s a common reaction. No worries. Any chance of some water? And I’ll tell you all about who I am and why I’m here.”

+

The prompt for refreshments broke Angela out of her confused haze. “Of course! Come on in.”

+

She led the newcomer into the house, past where the old folks were clustering in the lounge doorway and on into the kitchen. She gestured for Tilly to sit down at the table, then filled two glasses with water from the jug on the counter and joined her guest. Tilly downed her water in a few huge gulps and Angela silently pushed her own glass across the table to her.

+

Tilly nodded her thanks and took a few more sips. “Phew! That’s better. It’s thirsty work driving all day.”

+

“But where did you come from?” Angela asked. “And where did you get a working… car?”

+

“I’m from back east,” Tilly said. “And we’ve got quite a few things working again out there. So much so that we thought it was time to start trying to connect everyone back together again. There’s a whole team of us, travelling about, finding the survivors and helping them get back on their feet. I’m just the advance party.”

+

Angela felt a surge of emotion crawl up her throat and try to choke her. Tears threatened and she struggled to hold them back.

+

Tilly reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I’m guessing you could use some help?” Angela just nodded, swallowing hard. “Okay, then! Do you have a generator?”

+

“Yes,” Angela managed. “It’s in the basement. But we ran out of gas ages ago.”

+

“Show me.”

+

So Angela lit her candle lantern and took Tilly down to the basement, where the generator squatted in the corner. Angela always felt like it was mocking her while she cycled every night, nearly killing herself to produce a fraction of the power the generator could with only a flick of a switch. If only they had something to make it run.

+

Tilly whistled when she saw the bike on its stand, hooked up to the dynamo. “Nice set up! Bet it takes a lot of work to get anywhere, though.”

+

Angela huffed out an approximation of a laugh. “You have no idea.” And the bike, of course, actually went nowhere.

+

“Okay, then!” Tilly clapped her hands together. “I can definitely work with this. Can you help?”

+

Angela nodded vigorously. She had no idea what she was volunteering for, but she already knew she would do whatever this woman told her to do.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ver the next few hours, Angela worked with Tilly, following her instructions to the letter. They unloaded stacks of the dark blue panels from the back of the car, and clambered up onto the roof of the homestead to fix them into a grid. They fed wires down through the building and finally connected them to the small but startlingly heavy power unit it had taken both of them to carry from the trunk of Tilly’s rover.

+

Tilly used the old generator for something to stand on so she could reach the ceiling.

+

All the while, the old folks milled about, shuffling their feet, staring and muttering amongst themselves. When Tilly declared the work finished, it was well after the old folks’ usual lunchtime and they were starting to grumble, Eddie in particular.

+

“We’ll have to wait a few hours for the cells to charge,” Tilly said.

+

Angela fixed everyone a meal, and they all gathered around the table in the dining room to listen to Tilly’s stories of the reconstruction of civilisation. The tales sounded outlandish and incredible to Angela’s ears, but they also spoke to that place deep in her heart that had been awoken by the sound of Tilly’s car. Could a return to how she dimly remembered things in The Time Before really be possible?

+

As the shadows started to lengthen, Angela felt her chest constrict at the thought of having to cycle after the morning’s labour. But Tilly bounced up out of her chair, pulled Angela to her feet and headed for the basement. “Time to test it out!” she called over her shoulder.

+

Angela held her breath as she lifted the candle lantern over their heads so Tilly could see what she was doing. With an impish grin, Tilly flipped the new generator’s switch, and it hummed to life. And then the bare bulb that had dangled uselessly from the ceiling for so long burst into glorious, glowing life. Angela squinted against the glare and met Tilly’s wide, shining eyes.

+

“It works,” was all Angela could find to say.

+

“It sure does!” Tilly replied.

+

They made their way back up the stairs and emerged into the kitchen, where another light bulb was now blazing brightly. Angela heard an unfamiliar whirr and realised it was the old refrigerator.

+

Mrs Tolliver’s voice sounded from the doorway. “Witchcraft…”

+

Tilly laughed. “Just the magic of solar energy.”

+

Angela ran through the whole house, switching on anything and everything that was connected to the generator. The building was soon ablaze with electric light, fans spun from every ceiling, music blared from the stereo in the lounge. Eddie twirled Cynthia round in an enthusiastic waltz, apparently not minding that she hadn’t yet had her bath. He was actually smiling.

+

“The charge won’t last forever,” Tilly warned. “But you’ll get a few hours out of it, and it’ll fill back up again once the sun comes up tomorrow.”

+

“We can have power every day?” Angela’s breath caught in her throat. “No more cycling?”

+

“No more cycling,” Tilly confirmed. “Once I get back on the road, I’ll send a message through to the central team and get some more people out here with additional supplies for you.”

+

“No more cycling,” Angela repeated in a breathless whisper.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he following morning, Tilly set off in her solar-powered car, satisfied with another good job well done. It was so rewarding setting people up with power after they’d been cut off for so long. And she could tell Angela had been about at the end of her rope. She was glad to have helped make Angela’s life a little better while she waited to rejoin society again.

+

Next stop, that prison they’d heard about where the abandoned inmates had apparently torn down the fences and turned the site into a working farm.

+

As Tilly reached the bottom of a hill a mile or so away from the homestead, she caught a movement in her rearview mirror. She pulled the car to a stop and craned out the window to look behind her.

+

Up on the slope, a figure on a bicycle freewheeled down the road, wind streaming through her hair, arms stretched up to the sky.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Freewheeling” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Annie Percik

+

+ + Author image of Annie Percik + + + AnniePercik lives in London with her husband, Dave, where she writes novels and short stories, whilst working as a University Complaints Officer. She writes a blog about writing and posts short fiction on her website, which is where all her current publications are listed, including her debut fantasy novel, The Defiant Spark. She also makes a media review podcast with her husband and publishes a photo-story blog recording the adventures of her teddy bear. He is much more popular online than she is. She tweets as @APercik

+

© Annie Percik 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created from images by ikostudio and arquiplay77.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
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Mythaxis

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Summer 2021

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+ Amanda C. Crowley +

Voyager

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+ + +

Our issue lead is a fine example of how short speculative fiction doesn't have to travel far to take us far away, and doesn't have to inject grand thrills and spills to keep a reader engaged if everyday characters prove to be quietly engrossing. Amanda Crowley's story doesn't try to hook the reader in with a killer opening line, it just builds and builds towards a simple, moving close. Sometimes we don't notice the powerful moments in life until they've already happened.

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Noise

+ Owen Leddy +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Noise by + + + +

Sometimes stories seem to arrive in pairs. Owen Leddy's 'Noise' felt very much like a companion piece to 'Voyager' for a couple of reasons: both deal with strange visitations, real or imagined, and at times both share an air of weariness, as their protagonists struggle with situations — employment, relationships — that could be familiar experiences to us all, were it not for the potential for these events to be very much out of the ordinary.

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Freewheeling

+ Annie Percik +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Freewheeling by + + + +

Another 'first of two' story here, in this case the first of two brief short stories with at least a hint of the apocalyptic to them along with something of an optimistic tone, unusual for that particular genre. In this case, Annie Percik delivers a plucky heroine determined to stay up-beat in the face all of those little adversities that come with keeping an old folks' home running after the entire world has gone completely to pot.

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Zamalek, by the Evening Light

+ Mike Adamson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Zamalek, by the Evening Light by + + + +

Across the long history of storytelling there recur classic themes — rags-to-riches, star-crossed lovers, revenger's tragedies — and, of course, perhaps the most intriguing, those that make us all wonder what we would do: stories of temptation. In style and setting Mike Adamson echoes such famous examples as Aladdin, but that tale takes place at the start of an event-filled life. This begins at the end of one.

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What Comes After Winter

+ Kurt Hunt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for What Comes After Winter by + + + +

As promised, here we have a counterpart to the chirpy sf puh-pocalypse of 'Freewheeling'. Via another hard-working protagonist, Kurt Hunt's flash fantasy glimpses a moment of cultural and environmental transition that threatens to overturn an entire way of life. An ecological reckoning now seems an inevitable part of all our futures; maybe the extremes the real world will experience are not the same as these, but one way or another they will have to be accepted. Can we too find some positives in what lies ahead?

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Atmoboarders!

+ Martin Zeigler +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Atmoboarders! by + + + +

Charm, personality, the gift of the gab — author Martin Zeigler no doubt has all that and more. And so does his narrator here, but quick thinking and a witty turn of phrase are only the foundation of what makes a winning salesperson. Having a killer product on hand is neither here nor there when it comes to landing your catch: you really need to be able to spin them a yarn…

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Troublemaker, Storyteller

+ Jonathon Mast +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Troublemaker, Storyteller by + + + +

'Stories about writers' are a hard sell at Mythaxis, but 'stories about storytellers' isn't exactly the same thing. Jonathon Mast's tale touches on timely themes of female oppression and the struggle against patriarchal corruption, starting with a classic (even classical) damsel-in-distress scenario before the old forms begin to shed their skins — and the power that comes from crafting new narratives is at the heart of it all.

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+ Les Sklaroff +

Sketches of Snoak City

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Back in 2012, Les Sklaroff had already been contributing quirky pieces to Mythaxis for several years. Issue 11 introduced us to a variety of unusually named persons — Paeony 3rdfield, Dundro Fappit, a collection of rivals negotiating the maze of someone called 'Foroquont' — all denizens of a single, strange, intriguing city, possibly ancient, possibly future. Over the following eight years we've returned to Snoak City numerous times, but the connections between these moments has never been as clear as now.

+ + + + Story image for Sketches of Snoak City by + + + +
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-26/noise.html b/issue-26/noise.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0ac2a451 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/noise.html @@ -0,0 +1,515 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Noise — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Noise

+

Owen Leddy

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Noise by +
+ + + + +

L + +ydia squints at the jagged graph of the radio telescope signal on her computer screen, hunched forward in a way that makes Bea wonder if she needs to up the prescription on her glasses again. “There!” Lydia jabs the monitor so hard it rocks back alarmingly for a second, then rights itself. “Did you see it?”

+

“No, sorry.” Bea was thinking about how cute Lydia’s braids look, about the constellations of freckles that dust Lydia’s cheeks. She catches herself leaning down lower over the back of Lydia’s chair than she really needs to in order to see the data—low enough to smell Lydia’s butterscotch shampoo. She stands straighter.

+

Stop being a creep, she admonishes herself. Lydia has never shown any signs of being attracted to women—never shown signs of being attracted to anyone, really. I’m probably just making her uncomfortable.

+

“I didn’t see anything. Can you show me again?”

+

Lydia sighs. “Oh, come on.” She rewinds the graph showing the signal being received by the radio telescope. “See that spike? Right there?” She pokes the screen again.

+

Bea resists the impulse to wipe away the fingerprints. “It looks like a random fluctuation to me.” What else can she say?

+

Bea understands why Lydia is desperate for a breakthrough. Professor Darrow is finally losing patience with her single minded focus on detecting extraterrestrial intelligence, and the comments from her thesis committee are getting increasingly snide. But Bea doesn’t want to lie and lead Lydia down the wrong path, chasing a pattern that doesn’t exist.

+

“But look, two hours earlier…” Lydia scrolls back: another slight, jagged rise in the radio signal. Bea sighs loudly, and a scowl flickers across Lydia’s face, triggering instant regret. Just having been in the lab a year longer doesn’t give Bea any right to condescend.

+

“I don’t think—”

+

“And here! Four hours earlier! And…” She falters. There is clearly no peak at six hours. Malik and Simon, the Darrow lab’s two other graduate students, exchange a look. Malik bends lower over the microcontroller he’s re-wiring.

+

“Lydia, I think it’s just noise.” Bea means to sound gentle, but it comes out like she’s talking to a fifth grader. “Sorry.” She almost wishes she had lied and said it did look like something worth investigating. Lydia would have wasted a few late evenings, but at least she wouldn’t be mad. “Keep looking, though. I’m sure you’ll find something,” she adds pathetically.

+

Hours later, just before Bea leaves the lab’s offices for the night, she notices that Lydia has booked a time slot on the radio telescope. Ten p.m. to midnight.

+

Bea can’t keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Lydia, you’re not seriously going to—”

+

“It’s way after hours. I can do whatever the hell I want with my free time.”

+

“Just please get some sleep. I’m worried about you.” Lydia takes care of her needs as grudgingly as an ascetic, choking down undressed salads and occasionally taking a violent little sip from her water bottle like she’s knocking back a particularly burning shot. Lately, Bea has noticed purplish circles under Lydia’s lovely green eyes.

+

Lydia’s expression softens. She looks up from her computer. “Thanks.” Bea gets lost for a moment in Lydia’s gaze and her twitchy half-smile, then gives an awkward little wave and turns to leave.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +ydia is finally alone in the lab. She sighs, turns on the electric kettle to make instant coffee, grabs her UChicago-branded mug, slips off her shoes, and settles back in her chair with her feet on the desk. After a few minutes, the overhead lights turn off as the building closes for the night, so she flips on her desk lamp, creating an island of light in the dark lab space.

+

How long has this been her nightly routine now? Weeks? Months? Some days she wishes she could just get a decent night of sleep. Occasionally she does. But more often, if she tries, she lies in bed awake for hours, restless and miserable, thinking about what signals might be hitting the radio telescopes at that moment, what new data she could be analyzing instead of lying uselessly in the dark.

+

She watches the clock on her computer count down the last few minutes until ten o’clock, and then it’s hers: the radio telescope out in Big Pine, California. She types in the coordinates, picturing the forty-meter dish slowly pivoting into place against the moonlit Sierra Nevada, two thousand miles away.

+

Signal. A wavering line traces its way across her computer screen, plotting the fluctuating intensity of the radio waves hitting the receiver. By the time she’s recorded enough data to start running her analyses, she’s even more convinced there’s something strange about this tiny spot of sky the telescope is pointing at, a flicker of meaning among the static.

+

She runs her usual suite of statistical tests and finds nothing. The signal is indistinguishable from random white noise. She keeps recording, adjusting the radio telescope tiny fractions of a degree back and forth in case she’s just slightly off, but still nothing emerges except the maddening impression of a pattern she can never quite grasp. Her intuition screams at her that something is there. She spends hours writing code for new analyses, new ways of visualizing the data, typing with jittery fingers after her second cup of coffee. The numbers still offer nothing. But she’s not ready to give up yet.

+

Under Lydia’s desk, there’s an ancient tube TV that she found among a heap of electronic junk at a yard sale. She bends down and hauls it up onto the desktop, her skinny arms trembling with the effort. She plugs it into the clunky, hand-soldered adapter she built for it, then plugs the adapter into her computer, feeding the signal from the radio telescope into the TV.

+

She didn’t want to use the tube TV when the other lab members were around—Bea and Malik wouldn’t approve—but it’s a perfect way of looking for repetitions in the raw radio telescope signal without any processing. She knows there are patterns in the data that the lab’s fancy software just won’t show her. As the cathode ray sweeps across the screen hundreds of times a second, any repetitions in the signal will draw an obvious pattern. Lydia feels her heartbeat accelerate in anticipation, imagining the screen filled with beautiful shifting designs, order among the cosmic chaos.

+

She flips the TV on.

+

Nothing.

+

Static.

+

Random snow.

+

No, there is something there. There has to be something there. She knows those radio signals are something more than random fluctuations, no matter what Bea says.

+

She tunes the contrast, brightness, phase… discovers dancing, foaming noise. Finally, her head starts to ache, her eyes water from staring unblinkingly at the screen. She squeezes them shut and grinds at them with the heels of her hands. Iridescent afterimages bloom inside her eyelids—a ring of bright green fading to blue, then red.

+

Wait… a ring?

+

If the snow on the screen were truly random noise, the average brightness of a given spot should be uniform all over the screen. The afterimage should be a single rectangle of color, the shape of the whole screen. If it looks like a ring, that means it’s brighter at the edges than the center. The signal isn’t truly random after all.

+

Lydia drags her heavy eyelids open again. The screen still looks like random snow. At any given moment, there’s no obvious pattern. She stares at it for a while, letting the individual dots bombard her retinas until she can blink and see the glowing afterimage again, cycling from green to blue to red. It’s a different shape now:

+

N

+

The letter N? Is that possible? She opens her eyes and blinks again. The afterimage is blurry, the edges not well defined, but it really does look like two bright vertical bars linked by a diagonal slash.

+

This is crazy. It’s three AM, and I’m becoming delirious. Her hands are shaking. She hasn’t eaten since breakfast, she’s getting lightheaded. But there it is, burning phosphorescent inside her eyelids. Even if it turns out to be an artifact of the cosmic microwave background, she rationalizes, the fact that there is structure to the noise will still be an interesting observation. She fumbles for a notepad to write down what she sees.

+

ON

+

After staring at the screen a little longer, different shapes appear in the afterimage, emerging out of the apparent randomness:

+

ONOT

+

She turns the brightness on the screen to maximum so that the patterns will burn in faster. She keeps transcribing.

+

ONOTURN

+

Words. Actual, recognizable words. Is she picking up a signal from a communications satellite? A plane? Radar monitoring the area says no. There’s nothing all the way out to the exosphere. Besides, why would anyone be transmitting anything so slowly—just one character every few minutes?

+

ONOTURNAROUN

+

D follows, it lingers a long time, and when an O and N appear again Lydia is sure that means the D is repeated—once at the end of the message and once at the beginning. The T lingers too, and now her spine is a high-voltage wire as she writes out the full message:

+

DO NOT TURN AROUND

+

Lydia sits very still. The lab suddenly seems alive with sound, murmuring and chattering in a thousand tiny voices. Some noises are easily identifiable—the hum of the refrigerator in the break room, the exhaust fan of Simon’s computer, cricket song outside, the intermittent clicking of Malik’s cosmic ray detector—but was that faint rattle always there? Is it just the ventilation? The walls tick and pop, the building breathes, and a low buzz begins that has no source Lydia can think of.

+

Something in her screams out for her to just turn and look, to confirm that the lab is empty and nobody and nothing is behind her, and it’s only noise.

+

She can’t.

+

There’s lightning at the edges of her vision, an eight-piston engine in her chest.

+

DO NOT TURN AROUND.

+

Or what?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen Bea walks into the lab in the morning and sees Lydia slumped with her forehead resting on the hard desk, she can’t suppress a pained sigh. “You were here all night? Lydia, you need to sleep.”

+

Lydia tries to stand and can’t feel her legs. She drops, and Bea catches her uncomfortably, squeezing Lydia’s chest so hard she struggles to breathe.

+

“Bea.” Lydia’s voice is hoarse and groggy. “Something was here.” She struggles upright, leaning on Bea’s shoulders. “Something was there.” Her finger taps frantically on the pad of paper where the coordinates are written.

+

“What do you mean?”

+

“Something sent me a message,” Lydia says. “I saw it on the monitor.”

+

Bea looks at the notepad. DO NOT TURN AROUND.

+

“It didn’t want me to see… something.”

+

Bea is so stunned she lets Lydia escape from her grip.

+

Electric sparks of pain travel up and down Lydia’s legs as her circulation returns. The workbenches are a clutter of microcontrollers, scintillation counters, and spools of solder. The floors are a web of cables and power strips. Recreating a snapshot of what the lab looked like the night before is impossible. Impossible to know whether anything was disturbed, tampered with, displaced. If anything had been there.

+

“You’re saying someone sent you specifically a message telling you not to turn around, so you wouldn’t see… what? Something here in the lab?” Bea might have felt like laughing if Lydia didn’t look so haggard and shaken. “Lydia, you know that sounds completely absurd.”

+

“I—” Her indignant glare almost immediately softens to pained confusion. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it means.”

+

“Well, did you turn around? Did you see anything?”

+

“I don’t know. I… I thought maybe… It was dark, and I was scared, so I didn’t really… I didn’t want to…” With daylight streaming in through the windows and Bea casually leaning against the workbenches, she could almost believe that the strange signal glowing inside her eyelids was a dream. Almost.

+

Bea goes to the computer, logs in, and examines traces of the signal from the radio telescope, starting from the time Lydia logged on. She looks at the Fourier transform of the data, the autocorrelation plot, runs a whole suite of machine learning algorithms designed to pluck signal out of noise with exquisite sensitivity, does everything she’s supposed to—everything Lydia has already tried and knows won’t reveal anything.

+

And then, just like Lydia knew she would, Bea takes off the headphones, shakes her head, and says, “It’s nothing, Lydia. There’s nothing there.” If you can’t quantify it, Bea likes to say, then it isn’t real.

+

“There is something there,” Lydia insists, knowing she sounds childish, petulant. “I know what I saw.”

+

“Lydia, come here.” Bea gently takes her by the arm. “You were just anxious, and your imagination was just… Nobody was threatening you. You haven’t slept, I bet you haven’t eaten in a long time. Let’s get you home.”

+

Lydia wants to resist, wants to find a way to express to Bea the certainty that is already fading from her own mind. But it’s so hard to find the right words, so much easier to let math and software and common sense win out over the fear that shines through her like the cold light of a distant star. She lets Bea lead her to the door.

+

On their way out, Malik walks into the lab, and Lydia starts shouting coordinates at him without preamble. “Look there. Please—with the radio ’scope.”

+

Malik just blinks at her for a moment, taken aback. “Is this for the quasar project?”

+

“Please don’t worry about it,” Bea says. She grabs Lydia’s arm tighter and tries to pull her along.

+

“Is she okay?” Malik asks Bea.

+

“I’m right here,” Lydia snaps. “Don’t talk like I’m not here.”

+

“Malik, please just don’t worry about it,” Bea insists. Before Malik can say anything else, she hurries Lydia through the door with such surprising force that Lydia lets herself be led silently the rest of the way to Bea’s car.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ea never thought she’d find herself in this situation, with Lydia sitting next to her on her bed. Don’t think about that right now, she reproaches herself. She should have driven Lydia home, not to her own apartment. She’s disgusted with herself, as though just by being attracted to Lydia she’s taking advantage of Lydia’s… What? Hallucination? Nightmare? Nervous breakdown?

+

“Are you… Are you feeling alright?”

+

“I don’t know.” Lydia sits hunched with her chin in her hands. The manic energy that must have fueled her all night has drained away, leaving her looking tired and hollow. She only hesitates for a moment before she lets herself slump back against Bea’s pillows. “I don’t know what happened.”

+

“You’re going to be fine,” Bea says. “I’m sure it was nothing.”

+

“I’m not losing my mind.”

+

“I know.” Bea wonders if Lydia believes her. Wonders if Lydia believes herself.

+

“I’ll go home in a little bit,” Lydia says, but when Bea comes back a few minutes later with tea and an English muffin, Lydia is asleep on top of the covers.

+

When Lydia wakes up to early-morning sun seventeen hours later, the first words out of her mouth are, “I’m so sorry. I’ll get out of here.”

+

Bea grabs Lydia’s arm as she hauls herself upright, confused and entangled by the blankets Bea gently pulled over her after she was already snoring. “Please just rest. I’ll get you breakfast.”

+

“No, I really don’t want to bother you any more.” Lydia pries Bea’s hand off her arm, but then doesn’t let go of it. She sits dazed, still half wrapped up in the sheets, fumbling for her glasses. “I’m so sorry. I’ve already caused you so much—”

+

“Stop, stop,” Bea says. “I care about you, and I want you to rest and take care of yourself.” She’s overflowing with emotion, seeing Lydia in this broken state. She grasps Lydia’s shoulders, and Lydia suddenly and convulsively clings to her.

+

“No, I’m okay,” Lydia still protests. “You shouldn’t have to…” Her arms around Bea’s neck contradict her words.

+

“Listen, I want to take care of you. Please let me.”

+

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

+

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Bea says, pushing down her worries about Lydia’s mental health. Her arms slide down to Lydia’s waist as Lydia leans into her and puts her chin on Bea’s shoulder.

+

“Something spoke to me.” Lydia’s voice is a horrified whisper. “Something was there with—” Her hands tighten at the back of Bea’s neck.

+

“Let’s not talk about it right now. Rest. You can stay here as long as you want.”

+

“Thank you,” Lydia breathes, and then slowly kisses her, just like Bea has daydreamed so many times. Lydia’s warm lips against hers, Lydia’s fingers gently tracing along her neck—she had thought it could never happen. But Lydia seems to have become a believer in the impossible.

+

“You do believe me?” Lydia says, when she gently pulls away. “Do you believe what I saw is real?”

+

Bea hopes Lydia can’t feel her tense up. She feels ambushed. She didn’t want this kiss to have conditions, but she knows hesitation is an answer in itself, so before she can overthink it she says, “Yes, of course I believe you.”

+

Lydia exhales and relaxes against Bea.

+

“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +ydia keeps waiting for the day she will wake up full of energy and momentum, finally ready to speak out about what she saw. But every morning she wakes up with Bea snoring gently into the hollow of her collarbone, hands on warm skin, and she doesn’t want to move.

+

Even if she manages to extricate herself gently enough that Bea doesn’t wake up, she’s paralyzed by the possibilities presented by her phone, lying on Bea’s bedside table. She could call The New York Times or Popular Science or Nature and tell her story. Tell them she knows she has a true positive (such a reassuring, triumphant phrase), no matter what Bea says. She could call Professor Darrow and tell him she’s ready to come back to the lab.

+

She keeps thinking about the radio telescopes, still pointed skyward, still taking in data—the ears of humanity straining to hear the whispers of the universe. What if whatever it was that threatened her—that warned her—is still out there? What if it tries to reach out again, but nobody is listening?

+

The first time she told Bea she was thinking of going back, that she wanted to look for the source of the signal she saw, Bea fell silent. In that silence, Lydia panicked. Maybe Bea doesn’t really believe her. Maybe Bea doesn’t want her to go back.

+

The days since Bea had brought Lydia back to her apartment, since that first kiss, have been some of the happiest Lydia can remember, and that’s exactly what scares her. It makes her want to hold her breath so she won’t disturb the delicate perfection of every moment. When Bea stares at her adoringly or laughs at something she says, she finds herself noticing with surprise that she actually likes herself. She’s been able to eat and sleep more, without first demanding one more hour of work from herself, one more plot of her data, one more block of code.

+

Until now, her body was always an inconvenient appliance she had to waste time maintaining so she could get on with her work. She had stopped believing that someone she wanted could ever want her back, had never imagined someone could make her feel beautiful. Every day, she feels shocked that Bea still wants to kiss her, to hold her. She’s desperate not to ruin it by saying the wrong thing, by asking too much.

+

Is believing in what she saw too much to ask?

+

Lydia waits, lying in bed, staring at the phone on the dresser, considering what would happen if she spoke to a newspaper and Bea found out. Would Bea be angry? Would she make Lydia recant the story, say it was a prank? She can predict all the reasonable arguments Bea would deploy to convince her that it was a false positive: that the supposed signal was so faint it had to accumulate in the afterimages on her retinas; that anyone signaling her would have had no way to correctly guess the sweep frequency of her tube TV; that an extraterrestrial intelligence wouldn’t know how to communicate in English.

+

Lydia knows she would cave in, but she wouldn’t really believe Bea’s argument—not after seeing those blurred impressions of letters (yes, blurry, but so clearly there) one after another.

+

By the time Lydia imagines all this, Bea stirs, stretches, turns over, and plants her soft lips over Lydia’s. Each time it happens, Lydia is euphoric and crushingly afraid at the same time. She’s gotten both of the things she has wanted desperately for five years, but she knows she’ll have to give up on one.

+

A break to recuperate turns into three months of medical leave, turns into leaving the astrophysics program, turns into a job in data science at a marketing firm. Lydia’s lease isn’t up, but her apartment sits empty, and her belongings migrate into Bea’s closet one duffel-full at a time. When Bea comes home from the lab, she always finds Lydia wearing headphones, feet tapping to a fast rhythm. She has to touch Lydia on the shoulder to bring her back from the distant place the music takes her.

+

At night, Lydia wears earplugs and sets her phone to loudly play white noise, but it isn’t enough. After a few weeks, all Lydia has to say is, “I’m sorry,” and Bea knows it means she should get up and check the closets and hallway again and reassure Lydia that there’s nothing there, that there’s nothing watching her. Lydia doesn’t say what’s going through her head when she startles and tenses in the middle of the night. Bea doesn’t say anything when she sees an online forum for amateur SETI enthusiasts open on Lydia’s laptop.

+

At three a.m., when Lydia buries her face in Bea’s chest and tries to forget the million tiny sounds she can no longer block out (any noise could be a signal or a warning, her brain tells her), Lydia thinks about asking whether Bea really believes her. She takes in a breath to speak, and lets it out again. She doesn’t actually want to know.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen Bea and Lydia arrive at Bea’s dissertation defense, Lydia jerks to a stop at the threshold of the Michelson Center for Physics. Her hand slips from Bea’s.

+

“You okay?” Bea asks, jumpy, hyper aware of the fact that this is the first time Lydia has been back on the University of Chicago campus since her breakdown.

+

“Yeah. Fine.” Lydia puts on a vacant smile and fusses with Bea’s bow tie and pomaded hair. Is that a nervous twitch at the corner of Lydia’s mouth? Is it significant that she pulls Bea’s tie slightly too tight? She’s nervous. She’s terrified. She’s resentful. Envious. Or it’s nothing.

+

Bea stumbles through her presentation on the atmospheric chemistry of extrasolar planets, distracted by the way Malik and Simon glance at Lydia and then at each other, the way Lydia avoids making eye contact with anyone. The faculty committee doesn’t fail Bea, even though she thinks she would deserve it. Lydia sits rigidly upright and stares straight ahead through the whole defense. She never smiles once, even when Professor Darrow presents Bea with her diploma and addresses her as “Dr. Martinez.”

+

Afterward, they go out to Bea’s favorite Indian restaurant for dinner—members of the lab, Bea’s sister, a few college friends—and Lydia hardly touches her mattar paneer. Bea tries not to let her frustration show, tries not to show how much it hurts that Lydia can’t at least put aside whatever conflicted feelings she has about the lab long enough to be happy for her. Afterward, Bea persuades everyone to come back to her apartment, toting the cheapest champagne they could find, and an order of samosas to go.

+

When they are halfway through the box of samosas, Bea is nodding and smiling at a very drunk Simon’s stories about his roommates. Really, though, she’s listening to a conversation on the other side of the room.

+

“I’m sorry if it’s a touchy subject,” Malik is saying to Lydia. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. It’s just, we were all so worried about you, and I just want to make sure, you know, that everything’s…”

+

“Yeah, yeah,” Lydia says. “Everything’s fine. Really, don’t worry about me.”

+

Malik presses. “Was it a health thing, or…?”

+

Lydia hesitates.

+

Don’t tell him, Bea silently screams at her. Please, for god’s sake, don’t. Lydia doesn’t have the right to make Bea deal with this right now.

+

“There was this thing that happened to me. I’m still sort of trying to make sense of it.”

+

Malik puts a hand on Lydia’s shoulder. “If it’s bothering you, you can always talk to me. You know that, right?”

+

“Yeah. Thanks. I… Well, I haven’t really talked to anyone about this before, but…”

+

Simon’s voice rises until he’s almost shouting. “Don’t you think that’s unfair? I mean, what would you do in that situation?”

+

“I… uh…” Bea realizes she hasn’t heard a single word of Simon’s rant for the last three minutes. “Yeah, no, I think you’re right. Sorry, one second.” She stands and rushes toward Lydia—I’m walking too fast, I know I’m walking too fast. She wants to grab Lydia’s words and cram them back into her mouth.

+

“I don’t know what it was,” Lydia is saying, “but something showed up on the monitor. I know this sounds unbelievable, but I was scanning some coordinates I looked at for the quasar project, and the signal looked like… like letters. Words.”

+

Bea forces a laugh and puts her arm around Lydia’s shoulder, displacing Malik’s hand. Lydia jumps as if ambushed. “Had a little too much to drink?” Bea says. I’m giving you an out, she mentally pleads with Lydia. Just take it and don’t embarrass yourself. Bea tries to make conspiratorial eye contact with Malik like she’s letting him in on a joke at Lydia’s expense, but he just stares back at her in wide-eyed alarm.

+

“I’m perfectly sober.” Lydia points to her untouched wine glass, then carefully removes Bea’s arm from her shoulder.

+

Bea keeps that fake grin smeared across her face, fully aware of how stupid she looks. “You don’t really mean you received a signal from somewhere, do you? I mean, it was late at night, you were tired…”

+

Lydia looks almost sick with anger. “Malik seemed willing to listen and talk about what happened. Unlike you.” Bea drops the fake grin, steps back as if slapped. She hadn’t known this fury was fermenting inside Lydia during the months of tactful silence.

+

Bea can feel her face getting hot as stares turn toward them and other conversations around the room become endangered, then extinct. “Can we not fight about this right now? Everyone’s just trying to have a nice time.”

+

“Please don’t try to act like you’re being the reasonable one here. I was just trying to explain—”

+

“I actually should probably get going,” Malik breaks in. “I have telescope time booked early tomorrow.” Tomorrow is Saturday, and Malik almost never works on weekends, but Bea doesn’t point that out. She just nods resignedly as the chorus of excuses begins—a dog to walk, an errand to run before the supermarket closes. In minutes, Lydia and Bea are alone with the half-empty wine glasses and the last few samosas getting soggy in the bottom of the greasy box.

+

“What the hell was that.” Lydia says flatly. It doesn’t even sound like a question.

+

“I thought Malik was putting you in an awkward situation, and I wanted to help you out.” The half-truth slips out so easily it scares her.

+

“You don’t want to be the one with the crazy girlfriend who thinks she was contacted by aliens. You think I’m like those people raving about—” tears choke her, she shouts through them “—about chemtrails and probes and Roswell. You think there’s something wrong with me.”

+

Bea sighs. “No, I don’t, but other people will. I don’t want you to get laughed at or get hurt.”

+

“Don’t pretend you did that for my sake,” Lydia spits. “You’re afraid I’ll embarrass you. You’re ashamed of me.”

+

Bea moves to hug her, but Lydia raises her arms as if to defend herself from an attack. Bea enfolds her anyway. “I’m not ashamed of you. I love you, and I’m so happy and proud that I get to be with you.”

+

Lydia is silent for a moment. Then she nestles her face into Bea’s neck. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

+

Bea lifts Lydia’s chin to kiss her, doesn’t mind Lydia’s runny nose against her cheek.

+

She wonders if the way Lydia eventually relaxes into her arms indicates forgiveness or resignation, whether the little squeeze she gives Bea’s upper arm as she pulls away is a reassurance or a dismissal.

+

She tries to decipher Lydia’s expression as she starts collecting the wine glasses. Are we okay? Are we not okay? But she could read anything in it.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +our months later, their names are on a single lease—an apartment in Evanston, where Bea has a postdoc position. They’re wandering the mall for pleasing housewares and idly discussing whether they should go to the ten o’clock movie, even though they know they’ll just end up at home watching Netflix instead. By the time they leave, it’s thunderstorming. Lydia peeks out from under their shared umbrella to look up at a billboard screen glitched into rainbow snow.

+

“A short,” Bea comments.

+

Lydia hangs back, making Bea slow down to keep holding the umbrella over her. The screen transfixes her. Shapes in cyan, yellow, and magenta flash into being and disappear in milliseconds. The colors stain Lydia’s face.

+

Panic wells up in Bea. She knows that in the months since she and Lydia fought in front of all their friends, Lydia hasn’t stopped believing that something strange, paranormal happened to her. Now the tectonic fault between the two realities that they have been carefully skirting around will open up, and they’ll both fall into the chasm.

+

“Come on, Lydia. Please.”

+

They don’t speak on the drive home.

+

That night, Bea finds Lydia standing outside in the rain at four a.m. in her pajamas, recording the storm sounds, playing them back over and over, obsessively listening for patterns. Bea mentions the word “psychiatrist” for the first time in months, and Lydia berates her for hours, until Bea can’t take it and screeches away in the car, which twenty minutes later slides off the wet road, through a fence, and into a neatly mown front yard.

+

Bea comes home on foot, soaked—unhurt but too shaken to drive back. Lydia has cooled down. “Who’s the crazy one now?” she teases.

+

In the moment, Bea laughs and phones for a tow truck. She’ll cry by herself later.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +heir anniversary falls on a weekend in the summer, so Bea packs them wine and sandwiches—brisket for herself and marinated tofu for Lydia—and they drive out to Geneva Lake, to the small forest preserve surrounding the Yerkes Observatory where they had first gotten to know one another, assigned to the same research project.

+

In the car, Bea’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel. She’s painfully aware that the anniversary of their relationship is also the anniversary of Lydia’s supposed signal from beyond, and anything they do to commemorate one will inevitably evoke the memory of the other.

+

Bea is afraid that walking by the observatory will upset Lydia, but she hardly seems to notice the imposing brick building as its columns, arches, and metal-plated domes loom over them. Their conversation is easy and light—music, books, interesting flowers, and funny bugs at the side of the path. Lydia untangles the chatter of birdsong around them, picking out individual calls and whistling them back to the callers.

+

“I think they’re responding to me,” she says.

+

Bea strains to listen, but she can hardly even tell which call Lydia is trying to imitate.

+

They reach a clearing, a grassy slope well away from the nearest road, and unpack their picnic as the sun begins to set and paints their skin gold. Unwrapping the foil from their sandwiches and pouring wine into paper cups, it almost feels to Bea like they’re back in their first year of grad school—two friends escaping the city lights to appreciate the stars, hiding their infatuation with one another.

+

When they’ve finished the sandwiches and most of the wine, Bea topples Lydia into the grass, and they make out, Bea burrowing into the wonderful summer smell of sunscreen and bug spray and butterscotch shampoo. For a few minutes, it feels like the distance between them has collapsed. Then Bea opens her eyes for a moment and sees that Lydia’s eyes are already open wide, staring past her into the darkening sky. Bea pulls away and rolls onto her back.

+

Twilight is fading, and the Milky Way looms. Lydia’s eyes dart wildly across the sky, like a REM sleeper with her eyes open, connecting points of light and wisps of clouds into hundreds of nonsense patterns. Bea wishes she could appreciate Lydia’s attentiveness and curiosity without thinking about the WebMD pages on paranoid personality disorder and schizophrenia that she’s carefully expunged from her browser history.

+

And maybe she still can. Lying in the cool grass with her cheek nestled against Lydia’s soft hair, it’s easy to let her mind wander and imagine possibilities without limit. Was that tiny flicker of light a satellite passing between two clouds? A meteor? A supernova millions of light years away? Something else entirely? There is so much light, so many flickers and pulses of the universe hitting the Earth every second, that even if Bea imagines every telescope pointed at the sky at this moment around the world, every eye turned toward the stars, they can only capture a tiny fraction of it. There is so much that can never be analyzed or understood, so much lost and forgotten in the glowing chaos of the city.

+

“It’s so strange,” Lydia whispers. “So beautiful and strange.”

+

Bea wants to ask her a hundred questions. What are you looking for? What do you see? Do you miss the telescopes and the particle counters? Do you miss seeing the universe in a thousand colors eyes can’t perceive? Or did it torture you, all that data, all that noise in which you could see any pattern? But she senses the peace between them is fragile, so she just takes Lydia’s hand and squeezes it. Lydia, entranced, doesn’t squeeze back.

+

Someone had to be the first, Bea thinks, to look up and see more than a random stream of stars crossing the sky. Someone had to be the first to see patterns and tell fantastical stories about them. Someone had to notice the order in the comings and goings of planets and comets, in the swirls of gas on the surface of Jupiter. Subtler and subtler patterns that had once looked like randomness and chaos.

+

Maybe Lydia isn’t wrong. Maybe Lydia is first.

+

Bea shivers a little, goosebumps creeping over her skin even though the evening is warm. The shadows in the grass around them, the spaces between the stars, suddenly the darkness seethes with disturbing possibilities.

+

No, she can’t start thinking like this too. She can’t let this continue. She sits up, tugs on Lydia’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hile Lydia is at work late, Bea finds a notebook in Lydia’s underwear drawer. Every page is full of garbled, fragmentary messages. Rapid, angry scribbles and strikethroughs, not as confident as the stark, chilling capitals on the notepad in the lab.

+

WE ARE

+

FORTY-SE

+

QU

+

INST

+

Where had Lydia thought she heard or saw these? In the traffic noise outside their apartment? In the static on unused radio frequencies?

+

STAR L

+

AR

+

M

+

TAU

+

There are notes as well, describing sounds that have no name and no source, lights in the night, glitches and bugs—things nobody else would have thought twice about or even noticed at all. Flipping through page after page, Bea stands paralyzed, hearing as if for the first time the murmur of the rain on the rooftop, the gentle clatter of a distant train (or is it the washing machine downstairs), the hum of the refrigerator (or is it the telephone pole outside, or something else). The dense murmur of the city seems to mask something watchful and threatening. Something stirring just below the threshold of pattern recognition.

+

I’m letting myself get sucked into Lydia’s fantasies again, she berates herself. She doesn’t have time for this. She has papers and grants to review, data to plot and analyze.

+

She stomps to the kitchen, slamming the door of the bedroom behind her, trying to make enough noise to drown out the whispers of nonexistent messages that Lydia insists are real. She steps on the pedal to open the lid of the kitchen trash, holds the notebook over it.

+

This is for the best, she tells herself. It’s not healthy for Lydia to keep something like this, something that will keep drawing her into the same delusions. Drawing them both in.

+

When Lydia flings the door open, Bea startles so badly she drops the notebook on the floor. They stare at each other across what feels like an enormous distance, across the invisible boundary between their two realities.

+

“You were going to throw it away,” Lydia accuses, as Bea bends to pick it up again.

+

“I didn’t know you were…” Bea feels like she should be the one getting angry. She’s the one who caught Lydia, discovered her secret. But all she has is this flimsy denial. She takes a deep breath, squeezes her eyes closed. Like if she doesn’t look at it, maybe she can pretend she never saw it. “I just want you to be able to move on, Lydia. You can’t keep obsessing over this."

+

But Lydia won’t make it that easy. “Don’t act like you were doing it for me. You just want to pretend nothing ever happened.”

+

Lydia meets Bea’s eyes, her gaze steady. There will be no more apologies, no more tears. Bea imagines Lydia must have fixed the same defiant stare on her disapproving thesis committee when she proposed focusing her research on the dead-end of SETI. She can remember when she loved that part of Lydia: the uncompromising insistence that the universe is full of hidden, unknown things.

+

“Lydia, you have to let this go.”

+

“And what if I don’t?” She grabs the notebook of spurious signals, trying to pull it from Bea’s hand.

+

Bea can’t conceal her frustration. Why does she have to manage the consequences of Lydia’s obsession? Why can’t she admit she needs help? “If you can’t let it go, then you’re going to drive us both crazy.”

+

Lydia opens her mouth but can’t seem to speak. She lets go of the notebook. Her eyes radiate pain and betrayal, and Bea suddenly realizes what she’s said. “I— I didn’t mean—”

+

But Lydia isn’t listening anymore. “I know you’re right. I know most people couldn’t possibly believe me, would think there’s something wrong with me. That’s why I’ve never tried to tell anyone.” Her focus snaps back to Bea. “But you. You at least could have believed me.”

+

I do believe you, Bea thinks about saying, but doesn’t. Lydia would know it was a lie. It’s much too late to offer unconditional faith, unquestioning trust. In the silent moment of Bea’s hesitation, Lydia turns and races toward the back door, and Bea knows something has broken that can’t be fixed.

+

As Lydia throws open the door, the light of a passing car, or maybe someone’s motion-activated floodlight, silhouettes her, so bright it makes Bea squint and shield her face. Lydia slams the door so hard it doesn’t catch, and in the instant before it bounces back open she’s gone.

+

“Lydia!” Bea rushes out onto the landing of the back stairs. The alley below is empty. Bea clatters down the stairs and runs into the middle of the alley. She walks out to the sidewalk and looks both ways down the street. Nobody. How did Lydia get out of sight so quickly? Even sprinting, she couldn’t have gone very far.

+

Bea fires off a quick text, asking Lydia to let her know she’s somewhere safe, and another to Malik asking him to look out for Lydia, but she feels inexplicably certain that she won’t hear anything back.

+

What if Lydia really disappears? Bea wonders if anyone would think anything of it. A woman vanishes from her girlfriend’s life after a fight—hardly surprising. A sudden parting, a loss of contact, a random event that may never be accounted for. A woman vanishes in a flash of light. Car headlights. Floodlights. A street lamp just turning on. A light in the city doesn’t need to be explained.

+

The rain has stopped, so Bea sits down on the back stairs, looking up at the few stars the city lights don’t drown out, struggling not to cry. A car alarm shrieks. The telephone wires buzz. A gate clangs. The lid of a garbage can thuds. The city murmurs and hums with a thousand voices. Everything is orange in the glare of the street lamps.

+

For a moment, Bea convinces herself—as Lydia did so many times—that she can hear something listening to her, like the faint feedback from a microphone left on. “If you’re there,” she says to the traffic and the wind, “if you’re real, give me a sign. Please. Anything.”

+

But all she can hear is noise.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Noise” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Owen Leddy

+

+ + Author image of Owen Leddy + + + Owen Leddy is a bioengineering graduate student and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their short fiction has previously appeared in Fusion Fragment, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Printers Row Journal, and the Triangulation anthology series, among other publications.

+

© Owen Leddy 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: John Mor and Pixabay.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-26/sketches-of-snoak-city.html b/issue-26/sketches-of-snoak-city.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a2c2f6fd --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/sketches-of-snoak-city.html @@ -0,0 +1,295 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Sketches of Snoak City — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Sketches of Snoak City

+

Les Sklaroff

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Sketches of Snoak City by +
+ + + + +

Editor’s note: a change from our normal fare this time!

+

While in years gone by Les Sklaroff’s excursions have come to us one by one, we’ve now created a dedicated home for them all, creating a sort of guidebook in the process. Connections between the people and places that make up this unusual metropolis were hard to spot when spread out across years, but now they (and the rich language that renders them) can be found side by side on the page, conveniently bound for the traveller’s benefit.

+

In real life, Les was a long-time friend of Mythaxis’ dearly departed creator Gil Williamson. While the individual stories are still in place across our archive of back issues, I’m sure Gil would be happy to see them compiled and complementing each other as they now are. And this Who’s Who and Where’s Where is far from completed—in future editions, the sketches boasted of on that cover will be more than merely figurative…

+

In the meantime, if you’d like a personal tour of the strangest corners a strange place has to offer, we invite you to peruse:

+

Sketches of Snoak City

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Sketches of Snoak City” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Les Sklaroff

+

+ + Author image of Les Sklaroff + + + Les Sklaroff read science fiction from an early age, and though he’s now old enough to know better the habit is hard to break. Born in London, educated at the University of Edinburgh, he worked for an antiquarian bookseller before teaching for ten years, then moved to the Isle of Wight and became an independent bookseller, specialising in Mervyn Peake, illustrated books, and modern first editions.

+

© Les Sklaroff 2012 - 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Telstarboy and FWStudio.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-26/troublemaker-storyteller.html b/issue-26/troublemaker-storyteller.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d04875dc --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/troublemaker-storyteller.html @@ -0,0 +1,452 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Troublemaker, Storyteller — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Troublemaker, Storyteller

+

Jonathon Mast

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Troublemaker, Storyteller by +
+ + + + +

M + +y father himself bound my hands behind me, securing them in place. He whispered to me, but I couldn’t hear him much over the beating of my heart. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I told you. I told you to stop telling those stories. I’m sorry.”

+

I didn’t even try fighting. I was probably strong enough to escape him, but I wouldn’t get much farther. My eyes grazed the rocky ground around us. Old bloodstains darkened the stones from those who thought they could get away. Well, at least my death wouldn’t be boring. It was like I was in one of the stories I told my sisters.

+

I just wished those stories had been true.

+

Father continued fumbling at the ropes. “I’m not tying them tight. If you think you can get away, run. Please. I can’t lose someone else. Please.”

+

Right. Like Samael would allow that. No girl had ever escaped in the history of our village, nor the history of any village up and down the coast, as far as the bards said.

+

Girls only escaped in my stories.

+

I faced the rock shelters that hid most of the villagers. Huge stones squatted over low pits, allowing everyone to watch safely. And everyone had to come and watch. It was law. Even my sisters. The girls I’d practically raised since they sacrificed mom, years ago.

+

And I was always my mother’s daughter.

+

Samael watched closely. His lips twitched. “You could have been someone important, Alaina. I am sorry that you were chosen in the lottery.”

+

I glared at him. I felt Father glare at him.

+

“Gerard,” he continued, tired of waiting. “She’s secured. Get back to the shelters”

+

Father placed his hand over mine and once more whispered, “I’m sorry,” before obeying. His back came into view as he trudged toward the shelters. The girls watched, their eyes fearful. They were learning the lesson: Don’t be like Alaina. Don’t tell stories like she did. Don’t sing like she did. Like her mother did. Dragons eat girls like that. The lottery might be random, but troublemakers always got what they should get.

+

I took a deep breath. My eyes burned. I refused to let any tears out.

+

Samael tilted his head toward me. His cloak fluttered in the slight breeze. His eyes drank me in like they always did. For once I made eye contact with him. I let my distaste wrinkle my nose.

+

He chuckled. He knew he’d won.

+

I hated that he was right.

+

He turned back toward the shelters and began the ritual. “Hear me, people who are safe from claw and wing! Once our parents feared the dragons. Once we trembled at their passing. But then my father found a thing that made the wyrms shrink: stories! Though we could not entirely dispel those evil creatures, we could reshape them. Stories told by a bard, sung from sacred lyrics, could bend them to our will.

+

“So he wrapped a chain of words around them: No longer would they hunt us all. But once a year they would take one to sate their terrible hatred. And so it was! Every year, a lottery! We have been saved, and now one dies to keep us all free. Behold, Alaina, daughter of Gerard, a maiden who gives herself freely that we all might live!”

+

Every year the same story. This time I saw the back of his head, though. This time I wasn’t watching from the stone shelters.

+

This time I saw the fear in every woman’s face. In Pendia and Calla’s faces, my sisters. I taught them how to spin thread, how to use the wheel without hurting themselves too often. I told them stories to pass the time. Stories of brave girls who tamed dragons. Brave girls who sang back to the dragons.

+

“Why do the dragons always sound so sad when they come?” Pendia asked me one day.

+

I remember laughing, saying the first thing that came to mind: “You would be sad if you looked like that, too! But you’re so pretty. You’re no dragon!” And I tickled her.

+

While she giggled, Calla put her hands on her hips. “Why aren’t boys ever sacrificed?”

+

I shushed her. “That’s a good question. Maybe they’re not brave enough.”

+

But Samael had been passing through and heard my answer. He struck my forearm with that reed he carried. “The dragons are beasts, and they hunger for beauty. Only women can sate those monsters. And we must sate them. If we ever stopped the sacrifices, their chains of words would break, and we would all be devoured! So we offer the most beautiful among us.”

+

I think that was the first time I felt his eyes on me.

+

That night he visited our home. I hid behind our hut, hoping Samael wouldn’t see me. I heard father shout. Samael stalked away, and father said nothing to me that night. I remember his hands shook as we blessed bread together, though.

+

I clenched my hands into fists. The cords slithered a bit around my wrists. I could run. I could get away. But the dragons would find me. Or if I ran, they would eat Pendia and Calla. Maybe Father, too. If I stayed, I kept them safe for at least another year.

+

Is this how so many women stayed without fighting? Bound with guilt?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he song began. It floated from the gray sky, from the clouds that formed the ceiling on every sacrificial day. It was the only beautiful thing about a dragon: its song.

+

I searched the heavens for the shadows that would mean my death. Two notes rang out, a cross between a hum and a whistle. An unresolved chord of longing. My heart sang too, in mourning, for the women who came here before me, for my friend Daima last year, for Karina before her, for Mother years ago. For Pendia and Calla, who would live in fear of the lottery all their lives.

+

Samael smiled at me. His eyes ate me little by little, savoring every nibble they took. He knew he had time. The dragons never came near when he was still in sight. He looked just a little sad, but not for me. He turned and trudged to the shelters. The people separated, leaving a large space around him.

+

The song grew louder. Two more notes joined the chord, deeper, resonant, just as unresolved. The sound crawled into my ears, into my mind.

+

Every year I had resisted the song. Every year. Mother had told me to stay silent. Father told me to stay silent.Just once, before Pendia was born, I’d hummed the notes, started to sing back at the sky, until Samael struck me on the back of the head, his face like thunder.

+

This year he could not silence me. I was a troublemaker. I told stories, and sang songs I should not sing. What more could the bard do to me? If I was going to die, if I was going to be a sacrifice, well, I might as well be what I was.

+

I answered their music. My tone shook, pulsing in time with the roaring in my ears, thin and weak. It could not carry far. I took a deep breath, as deep as I could, and called out again. I matched their unresolved mourning. I heard Samael shout from the shelters. I didn’t understand his words over my own voice. I didn’t try to.

+

Shapes swooped in from the sky. Dark shadows first, four wings each, then misshapen lizards with asymmetrical heads and scales the color of rotten seaweed, ugly beasts that could never find love.

+

The chord they sang as they descended wrapped around me, squeezing my heart, and I filled my lungs again. These dragons mourned? Well, so did I. I mourned all the women who came before, all the girls that would follow. And I mourned myself.

+

Four of the beasts landed near me, looming over me. As soon as they landed, their song began to fade.

+

But I kept singing. I shifted the note to the one I hummed as a little girl. I completed their chord. It had remained unresolved for years, for decades maybe, but I found the note that had rung inside me for my entire life.

+

All four dragons sat on their haunches, as if waiting patiently. They didn’t move to attack.

+

From somewhere beyond them, I heard the bard shouting out the next lines of the story: “And so the dragons return every year, but only once, to take from us our best, so the rest may live! In this way, we remain safe!”

+

One of the wyrms growled and turned toward the bard.

+

The other three watched me. They should have been snapping with their beaks, rending with terrible talons, taking me and killing me in the most painful way, the sounds of shattering bones breaking the sounds of my screaming. They should have been tearing me apart and fighting over the pieces. They should have been devouring every sinew.

+

So I kept singing. I pushed the note of resolution out, as loud as I could, taking short, sharp breaths. My lungs began to ache. My throat joined in. Normally I sang under my breath, just to the girls, just to teach them the songs our mother taught me. But this was loud, so loud it hurt my ears.

+

The bard was shouting. Again, I lost the words under the sound of my own voice. The dragons shifted, as if uncomfortable. How long could I keep this up? Would they take me as soon as I stopped singing? I didn’t want the girls to see. They shouldn’t have to see any sacrifice. They shouldn’t have to see my death. They shouldn’t have to fear like I did.

+

As I gulped another breath, Samael’s voice shouted, “Eat her so we can be safe!”

+

And as my note failed, as the dragons shifted, I suddenly understood. Samael said it every year: Words bound the dragons. They could shape the dragons. They couldn’t break the dragons, couldn’t make them what they weren’t, but they could bend them.

+

And I could use my words to do the same, couldn’t I? I wasn’t a bard, but I was a storyteller.

+

I gulped another breath, and with my broken voice cried out, “The dragons came every year for the sacrifice, but for this one, for the one who sang to them, they plucked her up and took her safely away!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +id you know dragons move very fast?

+

As I finished the sentence, the largest of them had me in a three-and-a-half fingered talon, rough scales gripping me tight through my lumpy brown dress. And then the ground was far away. I screamed, and then my voice was gone, and then there I was, in the sky, my feet dangling below me. One shoe fell off. It fell and fell and fell. I hoped it hit Samael in the head, but it was probably lost in the sea.

+

The dragon song started again. It crept into my ears, sorrowful, dissonant. Now, though, there was a rhythm to it, a pounding four-sided beat. The notes slipped into my ears, into my mind, calming me.

+

I had faced the stake below calmly. Now, even as the dragons were about to eat me, I knew my story would remain in the village. Pendia would tell Calla, and Calla would tell others. They would get in trouble, but they would have hope. After all, I wasn’t eaten, at least not where they could see. The first girl ever to escape.

+

And even when the dragons did eat me, I would know what it was to fly.

+

Who else could ever say that?

+

I looked up from my feet to the dragons flying around me. I couldn’t see the one holding me well, but the others, the song beat in time to their wings.

+

The membranes of their wings vibrated. That’s what caused the song, and now that they weren’t gliding, it wasn’t just one extended note. But their song never resolved, because their wings were deformed in a way that would not let them complete their tune.

+

The dragons flying nearest watched me with hungry eyes, beaks snapping, talons flexing with each beat of their wings and song, drool streaming into the wind. My fate had been delayed, not changed.

+

I closed my eyes, sinking into the chord. My heartbeat came back strong, over the sound of the wind, but I shoved it down. If I sang the wrong note, they might fight over me in the sky instead of on the ground. Calm. Think. You were defiant down there. Now be defiant here. You can do this.

+

The cold clawed at me, tearing at my skin. Be still. Don’t tremble. Just listen. Listen.

+

I thought I found it. I tried to take a deep breath, but my throat. Oh, my throat. It hurt so much. I found the note, but how could I sing it? How could I stop them from feasting the way I had before?

+

Maybe I could buy myself some time. Maybe I could tell another story. Another quick story.

+

If my ruined throat would let me.

+

The words came out in a sobbing, croaking rush. “The dragons loved the girl’s singing so much, they decided to keep her. They would never eat her!”

+

The talon that clutched me loosened, just a little. My lungs expanded. Fresh pain choked me, but I could breathe freely again.

+

The dragons purred their dissonant song. Through gray clouds they sang as they flew. They didn’t snap at me again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey brought me to a shabby cave in a dismal mountain. A murky stream oozed along the floor of the cavern, and chill gray light from the cave entrance showed moldy nests of branches, leaves, and hay. The beasts set me on the dingy floor and retreated to their nests, settling down, folding massive wings against their misshapen bodies, fluttering them as they preened.

+

They made no aggressive action. They seemed far more intent on cleaning themselves. The one that had carried me investigated the talon that held me, sniffing at it, picking at it with its beak.

+

My body was sore, and my throat still ached, but all at once everything relaxed. I couldn’t keep being this scared. I’d been terrified and broken and shown what flying was like. I was a legend now: The Girl Who Wasn’t Eaten. But now what? Try to escape? Try to go home? Should I stay, and try more stories with the dragons?

+

I turned to the pitiful spring. Green sludge grew along its edges, and I wrinkled my nose at the rancid smell, but I spotted a clear channel of water running through the midst of the little swamp.

+

I lifted the hem of my dress and stepped over as much of the muck as I could. The center of the stream came to my ankles, but it trickled far more quickly than I expected. I bent with cupped hands and lifted the water to my mouth.

+

It was cool and crisp on my tongue.

+

Swallowing was agony, but in a way that felt like I needed more, like when I’d had a fever and my father forced me to drink. My throat needed time to heal, but if water hurt that much, how much would it hurt to actually speak? All I had were questions. I couldn’t stay here, but where would I go? Could I go back to my village? How far was it? And even if I could make the journey, what would Samael do when I arrived?

+

One of the dragons, the one that had carried me, began to purr. It settled into its nest, closed its eyes, and lifted its beak.

+

The others joined in, the chords lifting together, a glorious symphony.

+

The only beautiful thing about the dragons is their song. It had a heart-breaking splendor as they plunged to destroy women from my village, but here, here it was complete. The dragons were content, even though they hadn’t gotten their sacrifice. Even though they hadn’t eaten me. They hadn’t eaten anything.

+

The dragons kept purring their triumphant melody, and I wished my voice was healed already. I would have joined in.

+

What was I thinking? These were murderers. These were not creatures to join. They were beasts to annihilate. I should curse them out of existence, not join them in song!

+

If only. Dragons could be bent by words, but not broken. I slumped. What would it change—Samael still ruled my village, if he couldn’t use the dragons to execute women he branded troublemakers, he would find some other way. I could take away his weapon, but he would still be just as dangerous.

+

And yet… I had made the creatures who murdered my mother friendly to me. Maybe I would be able to say something. But what? The dragons carried Alaina to her home and left forever? If Samael was to be believed, that would break the dragons. They needed to eat humans.

+

If Samael was to be believed.

+

That man had terrorized the village for longer than I was alive. Somehow only the troublemakers were chosen in the lottery, but Samael decided who it was caused trouble—how many of those women, I suddenly wondered, had also turned his advances down? He’d used the dragons to clear the village of women who might oppose him! He’d used the dragons to murder.

+

I looked again at the dragons around me. They were monstrous, yes. But they had not harmed me.

+

How far could words bend dragons? Could I turn the dragons against him? Use them, the way he did?

+

And if I did, wouldn’t that make me just as repulsive as he was?

+

At that moment, the song stopped. The heads of all four dragons snapped around, their unblinking stares on the entrance of the cave. I saw nothing entering, nothing leaving.

+

An angry sound uncoiled from the throat of the dragon nearest me. Each dragon vibrated with resentment, hatred, aimed at something out there.

+

The one that had carried me stepped out of its nest, its long lumpy tail curled under its massive body. It limped toward me and extended a talon, palm up. Its growl turned into a whimper. It stepped closer, talon still proffered.

+

The other three stood in their nests, still sounding their growls, now mixed with their own whimpers. They struggled toward the entrance of the cave, their muscles straining. What was going on? They didn’t want to leave, it seemed, but something pushed them out. The beasts who devoured my mother. The monsters who terrorized my village.

+

If they left, I could escape. I could climb out of this cave. I could find my way home.

+

But this one. It could just take me if it wanted. Instead, it begged, with whimpers and whines.

+

The story I told made them love me. Was it that simple? I had changed them, wiped away some sludge and added some beauty? Could my words bend them to take me home again?

+

My throat still burned, but the water had helped significantly. Maybe I could push out another sentence. Maybe two. And this one wouldn’t hurt me. It would protect me.

+

I climbed into its claw. It cradled me and limped toward the cavern’s entrance, spread its four wings and leaped into the sky, a song with no resolution sounding from misshapen wings.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e flew through gray clouds once more. The mournful song of the dragon wings swathed me in melancholy. As the miles passed beneath us, and exhaustion grew, I drifted towards sleep.

+

I woke as a growl again uncoiled from the dragon carrying me. The rhythm of the wingsong had changed: no longer soaring, their wings beat to hold the dragons in place. Four heads bent toward the earth. I saw nothing but the gray clouds. I cupped my hands over my mouth, trying to warm the air before I breathed it in. My throat still ached, but the fire seemed to have gone out. They held position for a few moments, and then plunged. Their mournful song became one long chord of desperation.

+

The talon holding me tightened ever so slightly, keeping me secure. The wind pressed against my eyes as I strained to see where we were going.

+

We broke through the clouds above a village, clustered against the shore. A meadow of bare rock, a huddle of stone shelters. A post. Someone tied to the post in a brown dress.

+

Another sacrifice. Another woman torn apart, another village bard gloating as he got his way, one way or another.

+

Hate smoldered in my heart. I could bend the dragons again. Just one sentence: The dragons rammed into the ground at full speed! I could slay the beasts with one sentence they would be gone forever, and me with them.

+

The Girl Who Conquered The Dragons.

+

Then my thoughts of grim heroism were extinguished. As we descended towards the rooftops, I found I recognised them. Even without an order from me, the dragons had returned to my home, and that could only mean one thing: Samael had commanded it.

+

Another lottery, another victim. I had changed nothing.

+

The wingsong ended. The dragons alighted onto the rocky ground, growling at the woman tied to the post.

+

No. Not woman, child.

+

Calla, my sister.

+

I fought against the dragon’s grip and Calla’s eyes flared in sudden recognition, that huge dopey smile of hers spreading across her face. But behind me, Samael’s voice called out, “A sacrifice must be made! Alaina the troublemaker destroyed our chance for peace, and peace must be preserved! So the dragons returned to give the village a second chance!”

+

Samael’s lies—the dragons had no interest in us, they were happy in their cave until Samael’s lottery called them to him. They didn’t want to be his slaves, they fought against his story.

+

I had to tell another.

+

“The dragons weren’t hungry!” I shouted. “They didn’t want another sacrifice!”

+

Something gave in my throat, sharp and hard. I cried out, coughed, and tasted blood.

+

But the dragon holding me began to purr.

+

It set me down on the stony ground. I stumbled, a hand to my throat, and then rushed to the post, to Calla. Tears streamed down her face. “I knew you’d be back! I knew that the dragons didn’t eat you! Samael wouldn’t accept what I said. He told me to be quiet. But your heroes, Alaina! They always spoke up! And so did I!”

+

I nodded, straining to release her wrists. Whoever tied her was not as kind as my father had been. I looked past Calla to where the villagers stood watching, mouths hanging open, Father among them—and Samael, staring at my sister and I in fury.

+

“No! The sacrifice must be made or the dragons will attack us all!” Samael’s voice cut through the contented purring. “The dragons must take them both and leave us in peace!”

+

The purring turned to growling. The dragons’ talons flexed, and they approached—resisting, like they had in the cave, my old story and Samael’s new one in conflict, but coming for us all the same.

+

“I’ll stop them, Alaina!” And as I struggled with the knots, struggled with what to say that Samael couldn’t just unweave, Calla sang out. The same note I had sung.

+

She completed the chord.

+

The dragons stopped growling, stopped closing on us. They sat, listening. Samael shouted from behind, but they paid him no mind.

+

Calla’s young lungs couldn’t hold enough air, her voice began to waver, and then Pendia was there, singing the same note.

+

My girls, my sisters, the ones I taught and told stories to. They sang together, loud and true, so much more steady than my note had been. Pure as the clear water running through green sludge in the dragon’s cave.

+

I stopped pulling at the knot.

+

All I had to do was clear away the sludge.

+

One last rasping breath. One last story.

+

“The old stories were all wrong!” My voice came out raw, like an old woman’s. The pain shook me, my eyes burned. It didn’t matter. “But then a girl discovered the truth, and the dragons were restored to what they were before, never again to be bound!”

+

Deep inside, my throat burst. I fell to the ground, clawing at my neck. I couldn’t breathe, blood dribbling through my lips, pooling on the stone, joining with the blood of so many women before me.

+

I thought I’d escaped. I was wrong.

+

I saw flashes of light at the edges of my vision, , and then the girls were there, lifting me up and pushing me down, and pleading and talking, and singing, there was so much singing, and voices, and I felt warm, and then—

+

And then silence.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + heard my breathing. My heartbeat, too, but it was slow and calm. I opened my eyes. Four beautiful, gleaming faces looked down on me.

+

“Alaina, singer, storyteller, troublemaker, rise.” The voice hid a smile. It was warm and feminine.

+

I struggled to my feet. Calla and Pendia stood beside me on either side. We stared up at the gigantic, shimmering dragons.

+

Their song wasn’t the only beautiful thing about them anymore. Their scales glowed gentle gold, wings folded gracefully at their sides. One bent her long neck to me. “You have restored us, you and the song you taught your friends.”

+

The dragon glanced at Samael, who stood trembling nearby. “This one’s father trapped us in words, he and those like him, to strike at any they felt were dangerous. This one continued that crime. But now we are free.”

+

Calla jumped up and down at my side. “It was your stories, Alaina! Your stories were right!”

+

I looked down at her and tried to respond. No sound came.

+

The last dragon bowed, sorrowful. “You gave all you had of your song and your story to us. We were able to save you from death, but we were not able to save your voice. Too much damage had already been done.”

+

I looked up at the shining dragon. The one who had been forced to devour so many of us. Had been trapped. It wasn’t her fault. Samael, and his father before him. They were the ones.

+

“We will take care of the bards. Our story will be as you told. No dragon will ever be bound again. And the next time we come, it will be as friends.”

+

The dragons leapt into the air, the song of their perfect wings transformed from melancholy into a harmonious chorus, its glory spoiled only by Samael’s terrified screams as they carried him with them.

+

It was over. No more sacrifices. No more terror. It was done.

+

And so was I. That was my last story. I never spoke another word as long as I lived, and never sang again.

+

But Calla and Pendia. Ah, they had learned from me. And now they can learn from the dragons themselves. They will be free to have their own stories to tell.

+

Those are powerful things.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Troublemaker, Storyteller” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jonathon Mast

+

+ + Author image of Jonathon Mast + + + Jonathon Mast lives in Kentucky with his wife and an insanity of children. (A group of children is called an insanity. Trust me.) His short stories appear in numerous anthologies and magazines. His first novel, The Keeper of Tales, is currently out from Dark Owl Press, and you can find Jon at his website.

+

© Jonathon Mast 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was adapted from an original image by grandfailure.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ +

Voyager

+

Amanda C. Crowley

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Voyager by +
+ + + + +

N + +o one chose to end up at the Green River Inn. Most of the customers were drivers passing through, realizing too late that this was the last stop before a hundred miles of nothing. Others made a wrong turn forty miles ago, or got trapped when snow blocked the pass; some folks ran out of gas and then just stayed, sometimes for months. Dwayne, the manager, couldn’t stand the weeklies, but Chelsea thought that was bullshit. Their money was as good as anyone else’s, even if it was usually more work to extract it from them.

+

As for Chelsea: the truck she’d hitched a ride in had dropped her here one frozen January afternoon, when it was too cold to stand out by the highway waiting for the next driver. She’d been on her way to Vegas, but after a few days the Green River had seemed as good a place as any to crash until the weather turned. Now, two years later, she worked the night shift. She still hadn’t unpacked, not really—every morning she woke up and intended to leave.

+

Not that she had anywhere to go.

+

At two a.m. on the last Tuesday in September, Chelsea took her smoke break in the parking lot, under the bright stars. Over the past six hundred nights she’d added dozens of constellations to her known universe, poring over the star maps that Dwayne kept in the office along with pamphlets for the local attractions: an illegal zoo called “George’s Tortoises”, and a mystery house, like there were any mysteries left in this sun-baked country.

+

Behind her, a car pulled into the lot and she turned to look. A man about her age in a dark jacket climbed out of a subcompact so scratched and battered the moon didn’t shine off it. Utah plates, so he was probably local. Dwayne wouldn’t like that.

+

She stubbed her cigarette out on the ground and made it to the office with just enough time to look settled behind the counter. The bell on the door chimed as the man entered.

+

Under the fluorescent lights, she could see something was off about him. Chelsea had a pretty good eye for drunks and junkies, given how she’d grown up, and it wasn’t that, but there was something blurry about his features. Like they’d been smudged with an eraser. She blinked twice, thinking her eyes were out of focus, but it didn’t help.

+

“Looking for a room?” she asked. The man twitched at the sound of her voice. “A room,” she said again, slower. His eyes got big. Maybe he didn’t speak English. “At this motel.”

+

In the pause that followed, she swore she could see him trying to work out her intentions. Finally he said, “Yes. A room at this motel.” No accent.

+

“Okay. Room’s forty dollars. Cash only and you have to leave a deposit. In case you, um.” She looked him up and down: the circles under his eyes, the deep pallor of his skin. “Party too hard. Trash the place.”

+

She smiled to let him know she was joking, but he didn’t smile back, just slid a few crisp twenties across the desk.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +is car hadn’t moved by the time she went to start housekeeping rounds at noon the next day. Chelsea knocked on the door to his room, waited a beat, then entered.

+

The man wasn’t inside, but there was trash everywhere. Stacks and stacks of papers, some of them torn from magazines and newspapers and books, others written or drawn on with pencil, marker… charcoal? She couldn’t tell if there was any order to it.

+

She walked gingerly around the piles, straightened the sheets, fluffed the pillows. He’d taken down the painting on the wall: a Monet print, because Dwayne thought it looked classy. Chelsea found it shoved under the bed. Her room had the same print; she’d hidden it in the closet the day she moved in, and still hadn’t hung anything back up in its place. If she started hanging things on the walls, the Green River would start feeling less like an accident and more like a decision.

+

The door clicked open. The man stood in the doorway, tall and broad enough in his unzipped jacket that he blocked most of the light. She imagined some people would feel a threat from his posture, his shadowed face, but those people hadn’t seen as much bullshit as Chelsea had. She didn’t flinch.

+

“You should not be in here,” he said.

+

“I’m cleaning,” she said.

+

His footsteps were heavy, not muffled at all by the patchy gray carpet. He started piling up the loose papers in no obvious order, then shoving them into dresser drawers that squealed when he pulled them out.

+

Chelsea stood there watching him, hands on her hips. “What are you doing?”

+

“I think you are not supposed to ask questions like that,” he said, slamming another drawer shut, and normally she would have been offended, but she got a keen sense that he meant it—like he really was confused about what either of them ought to be doing, rather than suggesting that the maid shouldn’t have an opinion.

+

One piece of paper slipped from his hands. A pencil drawing of something mechanical, maybe part of a computer or a car. In that brief glimpse she could see fine detail, tiny perfect lines, perfect circles. Smudges where the artist must have rested his palm. It was weird and beautiful, and it made Chelsea look at him a little more closely.

+

“Who are you?” she asked.

+

“A traveler. This is what people who stay at motels are.” It sounded more like a question than a statement.

+

“Sure, while they’re here. But nobody stays at a motel forever.” A lie—lots of people did. But this guy was no drifter; he was clean, and the inside of his car was empty, whatever weird shit he had was piled up in the room. “What are you when you go home?”

+

A shiver went through him like a lightning strike. His body shook and his hair stood on end, then settled back into place. “Home,” he echoed, and she felt it in her chest, his sharp regret for saying the word at all. He cocked his head and gazed straight at her, his eyes flashing silver from some unnoticed reflection, making their own light in the dim room. “What are you when you go home?”

+

Like home was a given, a place you could return to or at least find on a map. This was the longest she’d lived anywhere, and she hadn’t even updated her driver’s license.

+

“I don’t.” She moved toward the door, head down, and he got out of her way.

+

“Don’t—” he paused, like he had to formulate the simplest question “—what?”

+

She walked out into the parking lot and answered, mostly to herself, “Go home.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he man stayed. Every afternoon she’d come in to clean his room. He stopped leaving papers or anything else around; the room was so spotless she was in and out in five minutes. All she did was tug at the corners of the sheets and check the bathroom, which never looked like it had been used at all, the little toilet paper fold always in place on the roll. Half the time he stayed in the room, perched on the edge of the armchair while she worked.

+

Every night, just after her desk shift started, he came in to pay for the next night. Always in crisp, perfect twenties that looked like they’d come straight from the mint, even though the only place to get cash around here was the ancient ATM in the lobby, and she knew it wasn’t dispensing bills that looked like that. One afternoon, while he was gone wherever he went to, she rifled lightly through his stuff, expecting to find his stash somewhere. But it seemed like the money just appeared whenever he needed it.

+

On the sixth night she said, “You know, we have long-term rates. If you’re gonna be here a while.”

+

As usual, it took him a moment to process what she’d said, like he was translating in his head. “Okay,” he said.

+

“It’s two-forty for a week, if you’ll be here that long. Eight hundred for a month.”

+

In the two years she’d been at the Green River, no one had ever paid for a month up front. Anybody who had eight hundred dollars in cash had somewhere better to be. But the man nodded and said, “Yes.”

+

A few minutes later he returned with a thick stack of bills in his hand. Chelsea counted them, feeling conspicuous. She texted Dwayne: Need to make a deposit ASAP.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +wayne himself came and found her cleaning the next day.

+

“That guy in room eleven,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “I saw him messing with the ice machine yesterday. Trying to unplug it or something. You think he’s on the up and up?”

+

Chelsea didn’t look up from the floor she was scrubbing. It looked like the last guests had tried to set fire to the linoleum. “He never uses the bathroom, and he had eight hundred bucks just lying around, ready to go. So… no.”

+

“You think he’s like some kind of drug lord? Cartel guy? Maybe a hired gun.” Dwayne watched too much TV.

+

“He might grow pot in his basement and sell it to college kids. He doesn’t look like a drug lord.”

+

Dwayne shook his head solemnly. “They never do, Chels. They never do.”

+

“Well, what do you want me to do? Call the cops?”

+

He recoiled, like she knew he would. “No way. I just, you know. I’m speculating. You know I like to speculate.”

+

She knew.

+

“He’s a weird kind of handsome,” Dwayne added, and Chelsea knew what he meant—the man looked like one of those composite faces, technically correct but fuzzy around the edges. Not quite human. “You think he’d be interested?” He puffed up his chest and grinned at her, but she knew it was only half a joke.

+

“We don’t sleep with the guests, Dwayne. That’s like, the first rule of business.”

+

He gave her a mournful look. “I trained you up too good, Chels. Now you’re the one keeping me in line.”

+

“Don’t forget it.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n his fifteenth night at the Green River, the man came out to join her while she smoked. Chelsea watched him zip his jacket as he crossed the parking lot. Fall was coming on: frost settled on the red dirt and the limbs of cacti, rendering the landscape moonlike, alien.

+

“You do this a lot,” he said by way of introduction.

+

“Every night,” she confirmed. It was one of the best things about her life here: the long, quiet nights, watching the stars rise and set. The world calm and soft. It was a peace she’d been surprised to find, something she hadn’t known she needed.

+

The man nodded. “I also stay awake.”

+

Chelsea wondered when he slept. Maybe he was like her, even as a child she’d slept short and hard, waking after a few hours ready for the new day. It had made most of her legal and not-so-legal guardians crazy, but her mother had never minded. She would take Chelsea out to look at the stars in the middle of the night, giving them names and stories invented on the spot. More than once they fell asleep out there on the roof.

+

The man watched her. After a moment he gestured toward her cigarette and she exhaled and offered it to him, a little spark lighting up when their fingers brushed. He took it and inhaled, then coughed violently.

+

“Not a smoker?” she asked, grinning.

+

“Maybe not. Do you like it?”

+

Chelsea shrugged. It had never been a question of liking it, it was just something to keep her hands busy. “This stuff kills you, you know? Sometimes I think about quitting, but I guess I don’t see the point. The way things are.”

+

“This planet is getting warmer,” he said, nodding sagely.

+

This planet? she wondered, giving him a quick, sharp glance. “Warmer, or just worse. You don’t worry about that? You don’t think about all the fires and the storms? The fact it gets hotter and hotter out here every summer?”

+

The man took a small step closer to her and said, “I think about it.”

+

They stood together, looking up at the dark sky. She traced the constellations, reciting their names in her head. She’d learned Cassiopeia like other kids learned catechism.

+

“What are you saying?”

+

She looked at him, surprised. She was sure she hadn’t spoken out loud. “The stars. Their names.”

+

“You have names for all of them?”

+

“Of course not. There are billions of stars. More—an uncountable number.”

+

“There is no such thing.”

+

“It’s an expression. I just say the ones I know. The ones I see out here every night.” She pulled out her phone and loaded the app that gave her the positions of each planet, each star. It showed the Space Station shooting across the sky, impossibly fast.

+

He looked it over and poked at the screen, pulling up information on each of the stars in turn.

+

“Much of this is wrong,” he said. “This is not what these stars are called.”

+

Chelsea laughed, and he startled at the sound. “All right,” she said, “let’s hear it. What are they actually called?”

+

“Most do not have names that work in your language.”

+

“Sure,” she said amicably. “I guess that’s why we have to make up other names for them, right?”

+

“Your people’s capacity for both hearing and speaking is more limited than most,” he affirmed, and did he mean that like you Americans, or something more, like he was—

+

Never, even as a little girl, had Chelsea been prone to imagination. When her first-grade teacher asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d said a nursing home aide, like her aunt, who watched her sometimes when her mother disappeared. The other kids, the aspiring soccer players and actors and rock stars—Chelsea didn’t know what had happened to them, but she doubted they’d gotten any luckier than she had.

+

And so she did not, of course, believe that he was some kind of alien. It didn’t strike her as the kind of thing she’d be able to believe even if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to. It was just another in the long line of stupid things men had told her.

+

“I am lonely sometimes,” he said after a while. As he spoke he continued staring up at the stars.

+

Chelsea glanced over at him, her head still tilted back. “Me too.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen her shift ended at eight in the morning, she went back to her room. Sun streamed in through the window and gilded the bare walls, so she shut the blackout curtains—another of Dwayne’s ideas, but a good one—and passed out cold.

+

For the first time in as long as she could remember, she dreamed: a capsule of metal and stone, dark skies, the stars spread at her feet. Earth in the distance, bright like it was lit from within, like it was a star, like it was aflame. She wheeled her arms uselessly, trying to get back home, and she woke with her lungs burning like she’d really been out in space, free-floating, hypoxic.

+

Though she didn’t need to start on the rooms for an hour or two, her hands were restless, so she made her way down to room eleven. “What’s your name?” she asked as soon as he opened the door. He blinked at her. She tried again. “What are you called?”

+

“Not something you can pronounce.”

+

Sure. Why not? “Then what can I call you?”

+

He thought about it. “Refrigerator.”

+

She winced. “Yeah, I’m not going to call you that. How about Michael?”

+

His eyes, owlish and strange. He looked less human every day. “Michael is fine.”

+

“Do you want to let me in?”

+

His shoulders hunched. “Why?”

+

“I work here. Besides, it seems like you could use someone to talk to, and I—I’m bored.”

+

His eyes flashed, and this time she couldn’t pretend some reflection from outside had caught them.. “Lonely.”

+

“I don’t know about where you’re from, but here on Earth those are usually the same thing.”

+

With a white-knuckle grip on the handle, he opened the door just wide enough for her to enter. He hadn’t let her in to clean for a few days, and she saw why. With the tape he’d borrowed from the office (she knew she should’ve asked what he needed it for) he’d plastered charts and pages all over the walls.

+

She saw now what he’d been making back on that first day. It didn’t make sense to her, but he’d managed to tape together all those scraps—torn-out magazine pages and the sports section of a Salt Lake City newspaper and bits of car manual—like puzzle pieces, so they formed an enormous diagram. Not that Chelsea could tell what it was supposed to be a diagram of. It didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before.

+

“Is this where all the brochures went? Dwayne was pissed about that.”

+

“Tell him I am sorry. I needed them.”

+

“Oh, I’m not going to tell him anything. What is this?”

+

The man—Michael—traced the outline of whatever it was. “I got lost,” he said. “A long time ago. I have been trying to get back, but it is difficult. I had to find all the pieces.”

+

“Is that what all this is?” Chelsea looked at it again. The way he’d folded and cut so that everything fit perfectly together, how she could see each individual piece, but only if she really focused. She thought it was the best, weirdest art she’d ever seen. Way better than the Monet he’d shoved under the bed.

+

“My… colleagues? Is that the word? They have been helping, but there are many rules, many restrictions. This is not a place where they can easily send messages.”

+

“Yeah, the cell coverage is terrible out here.”

+

“That is not the problem.”

+

“Yeah, Michael. I know.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + few days later she found Dwayne cussing out the ice machine again. “Look at this shit,” he said, standing back from it with his arms crossed.

+

He’d pulled it out from the wall. Somebody had taken the plastic back off the machine and torn up all the wiring inside. Somebody, she thought, but she had her suspicions. Dwayne did too.

+

“This is your guy,” Dwayne accused. “Room Eleven. Ten and Twelve keep complaining about weird noises. Clanking and shit.”

+

“He’s not my guy.” She didn’t address the clanking. She was sure it was true.

+

“You’ve been hanging out with him,” Dwayne said. “You don’t hang out with people.”

+

“I hang out with you,” Chelsea pointed out, which was true to the extent that sometimes their shifts overlapped. A couple times they’d traded hiking intel or shared a pizza. “Hey, do you ever think there’s something weird about him? Like maybe he’s not…” She hesitated. “From around here?”

+

“Utah plates,” Dwayne said.

+

Chelsea ground her heel into the pavement. “Yeah. Sure.”

+

“Maybe he’s a fugitive or something,” Dwayne said.

+

“Cops would’ve told us.” They’d had plenty of fugitives. Fugitives and drifters and weirdos, but she’d never felt any threat from Michael. He just seemed kind of lost, and Chelsea knew something about that.

+

“You gotta get him in line, Chels,” Dwayne warned, before he walked off muttering, “The ice machine!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +ichael started joining her for her smoke breaks every night. Most of the time they didn’t even talk. She’d share her cigarette with him for a breath or two, and then they’d look up together at the broad Utah sky.

+

Sometimes she’d play music for him. Mostly hipster shit that sounded like aliens might like it, but she threw Beethoven’s Fifth on there to see if he’d heard it before. Her mother had been born the year the Voyager space probe launched, and she could’ve listed every song they’d sent into space. Her mother used to play them when she got high. “Music is the only language you’ll have in common,” she’d say, wispy and strung-out, and Chelsea almost wished they were still in touch, just so she could tell her mother she was wrong.

+

Now, those smoke breaks were the only time she saw him. She’d stopped trying to clean his room—it clearly made him agitated, and he barely seemed biological at all, so there was never anything to clean. She was sure now that he didn’t sleep. The lights were on in the room all day and all night, brightness streaming out through the broken blinds and around the sides of the door.

+

“You like it here,” he said one night, after a noise complaint had pushed him out to the parking lot. He seemed more anxious than usual. “At this motel. With your stars.”

+

“There’s more of them here,” she agreed.

+

“No, there are not—”

+

“Not literally,” she cut him off, gently. Not that he seemed to notice if she was gentle or not. “They’re easier to see. It doesn’t get this dark other places.”

+

In unison they leaned back against the side of his car, passing the cigarette and those weird static sparks back and forth. His hands shook and his foot tapped the cooling pavement; his strange eyes scanned the horizon, searching. She didn’t ask what for.

+

“It’s quiet here, too,” she said after a while. “And it’s easy to live somewhere where everyone always leaves.”

+

“Where do they go?”

+

“Home, I guess. Or maybe just another motel.” Chelsea looked at him. “You will too. Leave, I mean.”

+

Michael hummed low in his throat and seemed to settle. “And you?”

+

She shrugged. “I keep meaning to. Not today.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +fter his paid month was up, Dwayne told Chelsea she had to ask Michael to leave. “Nobody stays here this long without a good reason. He’s not even one of those environment types. He’s not hiking or experimenting or none of it.”

+

“He might be experimenting,” she mused.

+

Dwayne narrowed his eyes. “Not like that. I meant, you know, wholesome experiments. Science experiments. You’re not involved with him, are you?”

+

“I’m not even sure that’s an option. I don’t think he’d know what to do.”

+

Dwayne snickered, but she hadn’t been joking. He never seemed all that comfortable in his body. Chelsea wouldn’t be surprised if he were missing out on some of the finer points.

+

It didn’t take Dwayne long to get serious again. “Look, I warned you. It’s getting worse. The weird noises, stuff going missing. Room 6 caught him digging through the trash. And I still can’t get that damn ice machine to work. We get one more bad TripAdvisor review and it’s all over.”

+

Dwayne never liked the weeklies. Never mind that they were half the customers, at least this time of year. She and Dwayne got paid either way.

+

“He’s not a bad guy,” Chelsea said, though she felt like she should be able to offer up a stronger defense.

+

Dwayne shrugged. “Whether he is or isn’t. He’s bad for business.”

+

Chelsea said, “I’ll tell him.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t didn’t go well. Michael seemed affronted. “Was the payment insufficient?”

+

“It’s not that. You’re just… you’re not our usual kind of guest is all. Dwayne doesn’t know what to make of you.”

+

“He does not have to make anything of me.”

+

“I’m not the boss. I’ll see if he’ll give you a few days.”

+

Michael was bouncing on the balls of his feet, blocking the doorway again. His face flickered in the shadows, like an old TV with bad reception. He was disappearing, she thought. A little more every day. “I need a week,” he insisted.

+

“If you need help finding another place to stay, I can call around. I know it feels real isolated here, but there’s other places nearby, you just have to know where to go. I can get you set up.”

+

He shook his head. “I need to be here. This is where they will look for me.”

+

“Who, Michael?” The question burst out of her.

+

“I think,” he said slowly, “that you are not supposed to ask these kinds of questions.”

+

But surely she was ready, now, for the answer?

+

He looked down at the floor, then away to the horizon. Night fought the last trails of pink and gold down below the mountains, leaving both of them in the dark.

+

“Where are you going to go?” she asked finally.

+

“Where we are always going,” he said, and Chelsea had to blink to keep him in focus. “Where you are also going.”

+

She snorted. “I’m not going anywhere.”

+

He angled his head to look at her more closely. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Perhaps you are already here.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n his last day, Chelsea came by at the end of her shift to knock on his door. “Michael? It’s time. You’ve gotta go.”

+

There wasn’t any response, and no light shining from under the door either. “Michael?” she tried again. Still nothing. When she turned, she saw the empty space where his car had been.

+

She used her master key in the lock. The room was empty and perfectly clean, the Monet back in its place. There was no sign that anyone had occupied the room at all, not even a tissue in the garbage or a rumpled sheet corner. It was cleaner than she usually bothered to leave the rooms between guests.

+

Walking the room, she pressed her hand to each corner of the desk, the side of the television, the top of the mattress. Even without him there was some kind of energy in the room, in every object. She felt it in her palms, that little frisson of electricity.

+

“Where’d you go,” she said out loud, then sighed.

+

It was not possible to miss him. She didn’t know anything about him, or he about her. They had no special connection. He was just another guest who came and then left. Went home, she thought.

+

But he’d stood next to her out in the dark, and she hadn’t minded the company.

+

Even though the room was spotless she dragged the vacuum cleaner in, just to make a show of things for Dwayne. It didn’t pick any dirt up, but it did catch on a single piece of paper under the bed. She recognized it as part of his massive diagram: not one of the news clippings, but part of a star map. He’d printed it off on the computer in the lobby, used a whole thing of toner that Dwayne had insisted he pay for.

+

On it, one star was circled. Chelsea pulled out her phone and looked it up. HX-5709, apparently. That’s what they called it on Earth.

+

She wondered what its real name was. She wondered what his real name was. For one moment, holding that piece of paper, she let herself believe that all of it was possible. That all of it was real.

+

After the rooms were clean, she snuck past Dwayne in the office and stole a thumbtack from the desk. Back in her room she studied the bare walls, looking for the spot where the Monet had once hung. She pinned the star up in its place.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Voyager” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Amanda C. Crowley

+

+ + Author image of Amanda C. Crowley + + + Amanda C. Crowley is a teacher-librarian, writer, and great enthusiast for the desert, though she’s spent almost all of her life on and around Lake Michigan. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Fusion Fragment. You can follow her on Twitter as @amandaccrowley and at her website, amandacrowley.com.

+

© Amanda C. Crowley 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: StockSnap and Pexals.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-26/what-comes-after-winter.html b/issue-26/what-comes-after-winter.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7bce126e --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/what-comes-after-winter.html @@ -0,0 +1,354 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + What Comes After Winter — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

What Comes After Winter

+

Kurt Hunt

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for What Comes After Winter by +
+ + + + +

G + +randpa’s house groans as it melts.

+

Been ten days since we iced it. The dragablocks that make up its walls are turning pink from the blood leaking out—the only color for miles—and I can smell the rotting meat from here. I guess we left it a little too long, but ice is getting expensive. They say they have to make it now, in these huge machines in Kuhlsk. They send it by train.

+

If Dad would let me get a job—maybe even move to Kohlsk like my friend Tri, work in the Greenhouse District and learn how to grow food—I could send money back and get the hell out of here. If—

+

…whatever. Probably best not to think about it. Maybe someday I’ll have a life that doesn’t involve hauling ice. Until then…

+

I hook the next ice block and pull, but the goddamn iceman stacked them crooked. Halfway out, it catches against the corner of the freezer and damn near pulls my arm out of its socket.

+

It’s the size of a mattress and heavy as hell. Too big for one guy to move safely. But Dad’s up at the house, trying to keep it cool until night crawls its way across the hill. So I’m in the barn alone with an icebox the size of a fucking airplane, a sledge with two broken slats, and an icehook made from an old curtain rod.

+

I slap my hands against my legs to warm them.

+

One more good pull.

+

Something in my back wrenches too far to the side, but the block loosens its grip. The thing almost takes my leg off when it hits the sledge, but, mercifully, it misses me and doesn’t break except a chip or two.

+

Breathing this hard hurts in the cold. I sit—not being lazy, just clearing the jitters—and immediately Dad’s voice carries down: “Ozzie! Now, goddamnit! Move faster!”

+

Ever since the thaw, those are his favorite kinds of words: fast, faster, now.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he thaw started five years ago, two days after grandma died and one day after we burned her at the top of the hill. I was twelve. Felt like the whole world died with her.

+

At first it was just strange, so much sun. Little beads of water everywhere. But then it got worse and everything became about saving what we had.

+

I remember before.

+

I used to lay in bed, warm with grandma’s tea, and listen to the ice sheets nudge and root into the ground. A slow grind—not the panicky crackling the house makes now, like its dragablocks remember what it’s like to run free across the plateau and are trying to come back to life.

+

It’s weird when I think about it, but I guess it made sense at the time. Hardly any trees; ground too frozen to dig out rock easily. So we hunted the draga. Pressed them into molds before the cold crept into them. Fat and fur kept the dragablocks frozen inside even when our house got cozy warm.

+

The whole town’s built like that. Little clusters of buildings, grey-furred, white-capped. Everything the same, forever.

+

Until.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +ven with the pulleys, the sledge about kills me getting it up the yard.

+

Grandpa and Mom are on the roof, faces masked against the smell, and pulling bloody dragablocks to the ground with soft curses. Dad just waits for me, face shining with sweat. “We lost the storeroom,” he mutters, yanking the hook from my hand and pointing it at an oozing pile of blocks. “Goddamn sun better get to setting.”

+

This close, the smell of rot is overwhelming.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“N + +ever.” Dad’s face had gone red. He’d twisted toward me, hand half-raised.

+

I’d just turned fifteen, and for the first time in my life wondered if he might hit me. I watched that hand for a moment and shut my mouth.

+

The question seemed obvious to me: “When do you think we’ll have to leave?” The stink of thawed draga hovered over roads muddy with bloody runoff. Part of the slumping municipal center had collapsed the week before. Buried the mayor for half a day. Being trapped like that was the worst thing I could imagine.

+

But Dad just didn’t see it. To him, the thaw was just a temporary obstacle. “Gotta stick it out,” he always said.

+

May as well tell a drowning man, don’t be hasty, just see what happens.

+

I thought of the mayor and shuddered. Everyone my age, we could already see what happens.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + help get the ice against the walls and tie it down. But even the blocks we’re saving droop. Dad keeps crying. I pretend not to notice. It’s common now, and I guess I don’t know how to respond.

+

It’s almost night when we’re done.

+

“Gonna make some tea,” Dad says. “You coming?”

+

“Nah,” I say. All I can think about is the draga—bodies now, instead of blocks. I don’t know if I can sleep surrounded by that. “Going for a walk.”

+

He grunts, glances at the sunset. “Don’t be long.”

+

I turn my back to the buildings, and for the first time in weeks hike up the hill that runs along the east side of town like a barrow. The air up there comes clean across miles of unbroken lowlands. I jog a little, I’m so excited thinking about it.

+

It’s a bit of a scramble. I need the icehook to climb the trickier parts.

+

When I reach the top, back and arms burning with the effort, I find more than fresh air.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + find bits of color bursting through shadows in the snow. Tangles of lichen, red and blue and orange, coat every outcropping like hoarfrost from here to the horizon. More color than I’ve ever seen in a world of snow and sleeting skies and the blood-froth of draga culls. Green shoots uncurl, tentative and fragile, and in them I see the stirring of things only read about, or dreamed: wildflowers, forests, crops.

+

All I can do is sit and stare and maybe cry a little at how beautiful it all is.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + jump up. Shit. Lost track of time. After dark it’s killing cold, every kid knows that.

+

But it’s almost dark now, and I’m still moving. Still warm.

+

Everything I’ve ever learned tells me to run. I can practically hear my dad: fast! faster! But I take a deep breath and manage to get calm, there, alone for the first time in the dark.

+

Never knew there’s so many stars.

+

A new smell whips across the hill from the cracking ice plains.

+

The town behind me sags and stinks, no matter how much ice we throw at it. But out there, something grows.

+

I breathe deep and let it fill me.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “What Comes After Winter” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Kurt Hunt

+

+ + Author image of Kurt Hunt + + + Kurt Hunt was formed in the swamps and abandoned gravel pits of post-industrial Michigan. His short fiction has been published at Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. He is also a co-author of Archipelago, a collaborative serial fantasy adventure available now on Amazon.

+

© Kurt Hunt 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Curioso Photography, Bessi, and JillWellington.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-26/zamalek-by-the-evening-light.html b/issue-26/zamalek-by-the-evening-light.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8d4c55fc --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-26/zamalek-by-the-evening-light.html @@ -0,0 +1,448 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Zamalek, by the Evening Light — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 26 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Zamalek, by the Evening Light

+

Mike Adamson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Zamalek, by the Evening Light by +
+ + + + +

D + +ay follows night as offspring follows parent, and the wheel of life forever turns. As the child is the spring of the year, so adulthood ages through summer to autumn, and although the cyclical nature of existence is itself a comfort, there is little succour in the approach of winter, as well I should know. For I, Thurar Tornin, prince among merchants, have returned at last to fabled Zamalek, to die.

+

The river Aklamanes meandered from the north, a wide, cool flood rich with fertile silt, rolling majestically by the great city at its confluence with the lesser but still great river Khandamos. These passages across the land feed the kingdom in body, spirit, and purse. The ships from Gormoth came down the Aklamanes bearing the goods of empire, holds groaning with silk, spice, ivory and amber, jet and jade, with rugs and ironware, bronze and gold; and, on that fated day, the retinue of the House of Tornin, late of the bazaars of Gormoth. For this would be my last trading voyage, I knew. A time comes upon a man when he sees not tomorrow, dwells long upon the past, spends his days recalling those who have preceded him to the tomb, and arranging his affairs for those who remain.

+

Yet, for all the solemnity of the moment, or perhaps because of it, homecoming had never seemed grander. I reclined upon cushions on the deck beneath an awning of wind-troubled canvas, a horse-hair switch in hand to waft away flies as my age-faded gaze strove for a first glimpse of home. Green forest and hard, dun earth crowded upon the languid waterway, villages drowsed in the heat like beads upon a thread, and we saw tough, brown farmers driving oxen at the plough in wide fields beside the waters, for this was the grain-basket of the world. My retainers hovered close; my son, Sertes, himself mature of stature and strength, who would replace me as head of our concern, sat in a pose of meditation, feigning disinterest, though I knew he was troubled, grieving that our travels were over. To him, the first sight of wondrous towers would be as bitter as to me a sweet fulfilment: for I had half-expected to die upon this river, while he knew I would never again take ship.

+

One moment the horizon seemed as far and empty as ever in this wide, scorched land, the next the heat haze gave up its hidden mirages, and the city emerged from the distance, tower by dome, by spire and cupola, by wall, block and promenade. Not for nothing did those versed in the nature of the world hail this land a miracle, and Zamalek, by the Aklafanes, a jewel of creation. For truly were its architects workers of magic, rearing in stone the places of all human endeavor. By bridge and arch, column and pier, grand streets lined with palms, towering statues of granite and marble to the mighty of old, did Zamalek thrum to the music of life.

+

Soon we moved among the river traffic, were hailed by fishermen and porters, and the flotilla came about for the commercial docks to the cheers and fanfares of the workmen. Sails were lowered and oars propelled the galleys to contact with the long stone quays, and the roar of the city met ears long attuned to the silence of the wild.

+

I had always found it intoxicating—the rush of voices, the press of bodies, color, light and sound, snatches of music, the bray of donkey and elephant—a city’s assault upon the senses. Yet it was bittersweet, for I felt with a certainty beyond any tangible perception that this would be the last time I savored such a moment, and when my son saw me ashore to a waiting palanquin, I hid tears—regret for all that now left me behind, yet relief I might end my days with dignity, the proper way for a nobleman of the grandest of all lands.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Z + +amalek is called many things: the Flower of the Desert, the Meeting of the Waters, She Who is Touched by the Gods. Yet my favorite has always been simply City of the Evening, for nothing is more true. When the harsh white sun leaves the land, and all may sigh as a cool breeze ruffles the trees, then does the city come to life, the markets throng with shoppers, music lilts from wineshops and the grand houses of the wealthy; and the gardens by the river bloom in moonlight with intense drafts of jasmine. To smell the perfume upon the evening air is to know one is home, and I was thus gifted that evening.

+

My dear wife and children awaited me in our mansion on the Hill of Temnos, high above the din of the city. Our procession wound up the tree-lined road as dusk thickened, and greetings were made in the great courtyard. I was so glad to be home. I held my family close and saw behind their smiles they sensed we were nearing the parting of our ways. A feast had been prepared to celebrate our safe return, at which I took the head of a grand table, sipped sparingly a goblet of mineral water spiced with lime and managed hardly a morsel, for appetite had deserted me. I longed to enjoy food as others did, but knew those times were gone. Something deep within told me I had but a few days. Not that I was sick in heart, body or soul, but the end comes nevertheless, and three-score and sixteen is old indeed in our world.

+

Forced gaiety is a bitter thing, but expected, as much as the sickly-sweet speeches from the Merchants’ Guild, the Rivermen’s Guild and others, even a note from the palace. His Majesty King Theyestes was paternally glad to welcome home one of Zamalek’s most-respected sons, and tactful enough to say no more. I watched jugglers and acrobats, dancers and fire-twirlers, musicians lilted softly from behind silk curtains. Food and wine flowed as if tomorrow would never come.

+

Tired in my soul, I eventually excused myself and was helped by an old retainer to an upstairs balcony, where I could look out over the lights of the city, breathe the perfumed air of the gardens, and relish these simple joys. When Cassira, my dear wife, joined me, we stood with arms entwined, and lay our temples together. If we could have lived forever in that moment, we would have had all the paradise we could ever use.

+

Filos, the gray, erect head of our household staff, coughed softly. “A visitor to pay his respects, master. Not a guest, the gentleman arrived earlier and has been waiting. He gave the name of Sinufre.”

+

I blinked, smothered a flash of anger for our moment to have been cut short. “The name is unknown to me.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry he had a wasted journey, but… I’m tired. Tell him to return tomorrow, and I will see him with the petitioners and agents.”

+

When Filos had withdrawn, Cassira inclined her now-silver mane after him. “Whatever would prompt one to seek an audience at this hour?”

+

I could but spread my hands in perplexity, but a strange shadow had come over me at the sound of his name, for though I knew him not, something in his coming struck a chord in my soul. Let me die in peace, part of me cried out, while another was at once anxious for my family, who would inherit any troubles he brought in his wake.

+

I should have slept as if already in my tomb, but when Cassira and I reclined upon cool silk I long lay awake as stars turned in the purple night sky and a pageant of my life streamed before my eyes—only to end, symbolically, strangely, with the arrival of this visitor.

+

Perhaps, I wondered, the affairs of life were not yet quite done.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +ack of sleep may have done me harm, for the next day I felt mortality keenly, as if the funerary shroud were already chill upon my shoulders. I rose late, was bathed by silent servants, and managed a breakfast of grainmeal porridge, easy on old teeth that ached. I spent time with my family before dressing in fine robes for my meetings. Business must be concluded, and an endless stream of visitors was admitted to my study, where my chief of staff assisted. Other merchants, debtors and creditors—tradesmen I had commissioned, artists and scribes, messengers, clerks, agents for this concern or that, bills to be settled, payments incoming. I felt like a secretary, and understood how His Majesty felt when dealing with the business of state, day after day.

+

By late afternoon I was tired, and rested for a while, a servant fanning me softly with wide palm fronds as I sipped fruit juice. Filos let me be for a time, and when he returned I asked how many remained to be seen. “Only Sinufre,” he said softly, “the gentleman who visited last night.”

+

At once my blood seemed to go cold, and I pulled myself together with momentary effort. “Very well. I’ll see him, then I must rest before…” I trailed off, trying to find words. I was still mulling on my own misgivings when Filos admitted the figure, and I sat back with an abrupt sense of something strange.

+

Sinufre was tall, a thinnish, very erect man, dressed in robes of expensive flax died jewel greens and worked with thread of gold, and his sandals were the finest. A face of gaunt aspect was framed by dark hair tied at the nape, and a faintly sinister air surrounded him, but he smiled pleasantly enough and bowed. I politely offered him a seat and eased my position, to take in his strange, dark, gleaming eyes.

+

“Master Tornin,” he began, his voice deep and even, and infinitely controled. “All Zamalek bids you welcome, and rejoices in your safe return.” He dipped his head again. “I wished to pay my respects, while the opportunity existed.”

+

“Have we met, sirrah?” I asked, at a loss to recall him.

+

“Once, long years ago, at a palace reception.” He smiled. “You would not remember.”

+

“And what is it I can do for you?”

+

“It’s more in the nature of what I can do for you.” He let that hang for a long moment, long enough to become uncomfortable, then overthrew all social propriety by speaking more frankly than any but close family ought to. “Come now, Master Tornin. It is clear to all, especially those who speak it not: you are not long for this world. Only by the grace of the gods did you accomplish your final journey, for the house of Tornin, and for great Zamalek.”

+

“Must these things be spoken of?” I said, bridling. Filos had not moved to intervene, though he stood like a statue, poised to escort the visitor hence. “They are most personal, and though I have long considered the ends I face, my philosophic musings are my own business.”

+

Sinufre seemed barely reproached, but continued in his deep, smooth way, smiling still, unblinking eyes holding mine. “It is the way of life and gods, to be sure. Priests have their say, and the wise men of the wastelands, and wisdom comes from afar to the markets of the city as surely as dates and plantains. But the end remains the end.” He raised a finger. “Or does it?”

+

I blinked. “Whatever are you referring to?”

+

“Why, to your options. Surely you have, in your travels, encountered the writings of the sage Merioneth? His tracts describe the ancient lore of distant lands, the strange gods that abideth therin, the learnings of scholars long dead, and the ways of peoples for whom the impossible was mundane. And death not an absolute.”

+

I sat forward, brow drawn into a hard line. My voice had something of its old strength when I spoke. “What are you selling?”

+

He spread his hands. “Nothing. I come to draw your attention to the possibilities. Zamalek can ill afford to lose the experience, the judgement you represent. And one of your resources would be amiss not to consider, even for a moment, the notion of averting all that nature would visit upon you.”

+

“Nature and the gods ordain what shall be,” I said flatly. “For all the tales of those who may transcend the boundary between the mortal and the divine, at the end of the day the adult must accept that they are just that—tales—and prepare for the afterlife, however they may.” I rose with some effort. “You speak of my experience. Well, my experience tells me this. It is a mistake to play one who plays. I am a merchant, sirrah, I was selling oranges in the street when I was five. I can smell my own kind from across a room. And you, sirrah, are a merchant. I’m not sure what you are peddling, but I am not a mark in play, and you… are leaving. Right now.”

+

The silence held a few seconds, then he rose gracefully to his imposing height and bowed, his smile never shifting. “As you wish, Master Tornin. It is not my intention to distress. I ask only that you consider what I have said. If you wish to find me, ask for me on the Street of the Mendicants. The name of Sinufre is well known there.”

+

Filos escorted him out, and I sank back into my seat, stroked my beard and shook my head. To be offered some quack notion of ancient lore was an insult, making a mockery of my laborious preparations for the inevitable, and I vowed not to consider for a moment such nonsense.

+

It was a vow I found myself unable to keep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +erioneth.

+

The name drifted at the back of my mind all evening as I managed a light supper with my family, listened to the stories of great-grand children, and heard news of the city. But before retiring, I found my thoughts turning in ways that made my heart race painfully, for my strange visitor was correct: I had heard the name.

+

Filos helped me to the library, lit lamps and fetched the scrolls I needed, then left me to read. I unrolled The History of the Sunward Kingdoms, a work of some weight by a priest of the Royal Temple, hundreds of years ago, and I scanned the vertical rows of characters for the name. I was sure I had seen it before, and that some mention of the matters of which Sinufre spoke were found right here.

+

I was nodding off when my eyes drifted over the appropriate text, and recognition jerked me awake. Abruptly I was fully aware, and hungrily re-read the passage.

+

Let the seeker traveling eastward be aware that in the lands of the Jarmu people may be found wonders of many sorts. Here are rich mines providing gold of surpassing quality, and healers extract rare and potent medicines from roots, flowers, tubers and bark, and from the venom of the cobra. But, according to the journals of Merioneth, the Jarmu physicians derived the very emperor of all medicaments from the petals, pollen and nectar of the striding orchid, a flower which blooms only by moonlight once in ten years. Rare is this potion, and of powerful efficaciousness, sworn and attested by scholars to return youth to the old and life to the lifeless. Verily, it is the stuff of all life, and suitably rare, for, if all men could obtain it, chaos would surely reign.

+

I read it through again, then slowly rolled the parchment. Now my heart raced for different reasons. In all my years, all my travels, I had never placed much stock in tales of old, though I could recite a hundred from memory. Now, as I considered this strange and shadowy notion, I recalled seeing things which defied explanation—the shaman who rode the back of eagles in spirit to see where his eyes could not reach; the temple girl who danced among a dozen swaying cobras and called them her friends; the man who walked beyond the world’s edge in dream and told unerringly of lands yet to be crossed… If such as these earned my tacit belief, why not the distillate of a legendary orchid?

+

I lay down with Cassira by the glow of a taper and listened to the wind over the eternal city, with much to muse upon. I knew my first order to Filos in the morning would be to send a messenger to the Street of the Mendicants. I wanted to interview Sinufre again—this time with my eyes fully open.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he grooms’ shed by the stables was cool in the morning air, sunlight shafted in from an open door and I sat at a table brought in for the occasion. Upon it a cloth concealed important words, and I sipped a goblet of juice as I waited for the party to make their way up the long hill road. At last, shadows moved against the daylight, and four grooms brought Sinufre to my presence. Filos and mighty Karamos, my mute bodyguard, waited in the shadows, and I dismissed the grooms with a nod of thanks.

+

Sinufre spread his hands, his manner as smoothly imperturbable as ever. “Master Tornin. A simple request would have more than sufficed to bring me to your side.” He made a small bow of respect. He knew, I could tell, I was playing his game, but saw no move to take the initiative.

+

I drew away the cloth to reveal the scroll, open to the passage in question. He bent to it, took his weight on his knuckles and squinted in the soft light, then nodded. “I knew one of your stature would be learned in these matters.”

+

“I have found a corroborating reference. This does not make me learned,” I said, softly but firmly. “This… potion. Derived from the orchid…”

+

“The ‘Tincture of Jarmu’ was how Merioneth termed it, though it has many names in history and legend alike.”

+

My face was hard, a mask of sun-wrinkles framed in retreating silver, and my manner brooked no nonsense. “Can it be had?”

+

Now Sinufre leaned forward a little to emphasize his point, speaking very softly. “A supply exists in Zamalek at this time.” He straightened, and his eyes went pointedly to my retainers.

+

“I trust Filos and Karamos implicitly. I will keep nothing from my valet, and my bodyguard cannot repeat what his ears perceive.”

+

“Very well.” The smile lingered a moment more, than faded. “As I said last night, Zamalek needs its finest scions. Your career has been more than one of private business, it has been a model of judicious decision-making, of building for the future, and doing so with scrupulous care. Master Tornin, you are well known as a man of fairness, such that many lament you did not choose the magistrate’s calling, or that of king’s counsellor, for much good could you have achieved. I am saying to you that those options still exist.”

+

“You would have me use this rare potion to win back the vitality of younger days? And then use those days to benefit Zamalek?”

+

The dark head inclined. “Just so. Numberless people of inferior sort pretend to public office every day, bringing with them incompetence and corruption. It seems cosmically unjust that one of your capabilities should be lost due merely to the caprice of time.”

+

I smiled with a cynical shrug. “None returns from the dead.”

+

“I never said you should.”

+

“Explain.”

+

“Let it be seen that you go into your fine tomb, and the public order shall be preserved. Then take a fresh name, to suit a fresh face.”

+

“Intrigue follows upon the heels of ambition,” I whispered, not liking the complexity. “And still I find it difficult to conceive of. You ask a great service of one ready to set down life’s burden—indeed, that I should take it up afresh—and I have little more than your word to go upon.”

+

“You suspect me of deceit?”

+

“I would be a fool to dismiss the possibility!” I slapped a hand flat to the table. “Proof, sirrah. I would have you present to me a man who has taken this potion and seen the good of it.”

+

For a long moment, we heard only birds singing in the trees by the stables, then Sinufre gave a low laugh. “Master Tornin, he stands before you.”

+

I scoffed, throwing up my hands. “I expected no less! Sirrah, you are a charlatan! A worker of confidences!”

+

He was unimpressed. “How old would you say I am?”

+

His manner gave me pause. “Thirty summers, a little more…”

+

“I am older than you.”

+

Again my impulse was to scoff, but the calm directness of his gaze, the assurance of his demeanor, undermined my certainty.

+

“Ask me anything you will,” he said, “memories of your own youth surely long before I was born—ask me and I will tell you as if those days were but yesterday, for to me they are.” He raised a finger. “Not the histories, those are a matter of record. But the small things of life which scribes have yet to see fit to write of.”

+

The proposal was a fair one. I thought back, fought for composure, sure he was reading me like an open scroll. At once I entertained the notion he may be my senior, his self-assurance was a palpable force, surely learned only by long experience. I thought for a long moment. “Tell me of the year of the great storm.”

+

He squinted, knuckles on hips as he recalled the facts. “It was the fourth year of the reign of King Vormann III. The storm came up from the southern sea with a voice of gods, an angry wave pressed up the Aklamanes and sank ships at their moors. But you don’t want the broad strokes, you want how it felt.”

+

He smiled, closed his eyes and began. “I was a dock worker, so I was face-to-face with the tempest as it broke. I remember the darkness as the storm built out of the south, a blue-black wall of clouds that seemed it would reach to heaven, then a wind that cut like a knife, and a building rumble as of thunder without pause.” He breathed deeply, seeming to sort through long-stored memories. “I recall a tearing sound, as the wind lifted tiles from roofs, then the great noise of them shattering in the streets. You remember that, don’t you, Master? You would have been but a young child, but that sound must be engraved upon your mind. Ripping, tearing, than smashing, over and over as the storm mounted higher.”

+

My blood ran cold, for he was correct, I did remember it, a sound this city had never heard again in seven decades.

+

“And the smell—the great wash of the river that flooded the waterfront streets sent scum and mud a dozen ship-lengths into the city. And the stench of the fires that burned for days afterward to dispose of the bodies of drowned oxen and donkeys that drifted, bloated in death, upon the fouled waters. Sickening, was it not? And sickening to recall. I had abscesses from the illness that followed, when the streets dried out and smelled bad. Did you?”

+

My heart raced uncertainly as I was carried back to those terrible days, memories that had dulled with the ages refreshed by his measured words. “No, I was lucky. But I remember how my mother suffered…” I blinked. “Go on.”

+

“The storm raged for three days before we saw the sun again. There was great loss of life. Do you remember the funerary barges, taking the shrouded dead to the necropolis? Surely your family watched them upon the river? The way the keening of the women echoed back and forth between the towers—another sound unheard in this city since that day. And when the waters drained away and rebuilding began, how the workers sang…” He closed his eyes and made the memory come.

+

“Hail to Shastromo, bringer of storms, fear his tread, fear his breath,

+

“Hail to Mirkaan, sweet winds of autumn, for they turn back the heat.

+

“Hail to His Majesty, whose just hand shall provide,

+

“Hail to the city that shall never fall, hail unto Zamalek, to Zamalek hail!”

+

Against my better judgement, I gestured for more. With gentle patience, Sinufre cast his mind back and found a morsel that would bear meaning for me.

+

“There was starvation in the week after the storm. The royal granary was opened to the people. His Majesty made a gift to every citizen. This much is a matter of record, but I recall one item which was added at the last moment. I was with the many gangs of men recruited to distribute the food, and something extra to the manifests arrived, especially from the King. Wagon loads of sugar cane, a piece for every child in the city. We passed it out from great baskets.”

+

The dam broke, my head went forward on my breast and the tears came. “I remember,” was all I could whisper, over and over, and there was silence as Filos fetched me water.

+

The years had rolled away, and I found I was striving to recall if the man before me had been among the legions who toiled to repair, rebuild and provision. But how can anyone recall such a detail over seventy years? I now admitted to myself he had convinced me with the sound of the breaking tiles, and although a shred of doubt lingered, as it should in the heart of any rational person, I was willing to discuss the issue on a new footing.

+

I gestured and Karamos brought a chair forward for my visitor. He sank into it with grace and allowed me the time I needed. At last I dried my eyes with the sleeve of my robe and raked hands through hair. “Very well, Master Sinufre. You convince me well enough for the moment. How old are you?”

+

“Ninety-one.” He smiled. “I tasted of the Tincture of Jarmu at age sixty-two, my prime was restored within a year, and I have not aged from that day forth.”

+

I eyed him for a long moment, knowing that if I was being played this was a crucial moment. “And how did you come by it?”

+

He hesitated a moment. “I was approached. As you have been. Remember, as the decades go by, the circumstances of supply shift and change.”

+

I sat back, swirled the water in my goblet, sipped, held my silence. He knew I was interested, but altogether too much reading was taking place.

+

“Very well,” I said, “let us speak plainly. I’m interested, of course I am. I no more wish to die than the next man, and if a practical and wholesome alternative exists, let us discuss it. I accept that a duty attaches, that if I can avoid the tomb then my days belong to Zamalek, in whatever service I may render.” I laughed, a rasp in my ancient throat. “It may surprise you, but after a lifetime as a merchant I am ready for a change.”

+

I held his eyes with my most direct gaze, eyes hard beneath my straggling, silver brows. “So tell me, Master Sinufre… What’s the catch?”

+

Silence again, Filos and Karamos standing like statues, witness to a conversation they would never have imagined possible. Sinufre shifted in his seat, clearly taking effort to reach his point. “As I said last night, I am selling nothing. I bring this information to you as a service. However, the intentions of the owner of the potion are a very different matter.”

+

I rolled my eyes. “And so we come to it. The price?”

+

He rubbed his hands together, inspecting them distantly, before musingly voicing the quote. “One thousand full-measures of gold.”

+

I almost laughed. “A thousand measures? A thousand measures? Clearly this seller is ambitious, and all luck to him, though I hesitate to call such a grubby transaction ‘business’.” I shook my head sadly. “You offer me life everlasting with one hand, and poverty with the other. Not just my poverty, but my family’s, all who depend upon me and the business I have built.”

+

“A price is a price,” Sinufre said with a shrug.

+

“And all prices are fluid until a bargain is struck. Show me this seller and let us haggle like the merchants we are.”

+

But the tall man shook his head slowly. “The seller is not interested in haggling. This is not some corner bazaar, the goods not a brass tray or rush-mat. The object for the buyer is life everlasting, that of the seller vast wealth in the here and now. One is the means to the other, and many would agree their value is commensurate.”

+

“Who is this seller? How did he come by the potion?”

+

Now Sinufre spread his large hands. “You may seek eastward to Jarmu, of course, track down the orchid in question, search out the secret laboratories where the arcane processing is done, find those who control the supply in the first place. But, I promise you, such a course would take years, for these are people who do not wish to be found.” His smile was thin as that of a death’s head. “And, if you will forgive me the indelicacy, you do not have time.”

+

He had me. I felt mortality snapping at my heels in that moment as clearly as I had for weeks, months, knew I may fail to wake any morning. Tomorrow? Was it that close?

+

But a thousand full-measures… How could I?

+

Birds sang in the trees for a long while to punctuate our thoughts, then I rose with all the dignity I could muster. My voice was like gravel, hard, deep, filled with a dozen conflicting emotions. “Return this evening, Master Sinufre. You will have my answer.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + rested in the garden beneath a spreading tree, my fly-switch in hand, and brooded. I was propped against cushions on a couch of dried cane, a brass tray at my side bore dates and banana-wine, and the afternoon was quiet as the city took its nap. White clouds in the hard blue sky went silently by, like the moments of life, and I warred with myself, unable to rest—afraid to sleep lest nature choose this moment to snatch me away. Away from all I knew and loved, all I had built, my wife, family and pets, my friends of old, my retainers.

+

My treasure?

+

In this moment my wealth seemed the least concern, for the comfort and security that wealth enabled were far more important. I had more than a thousand measures of gold at my disposal, but to mobilize such a sum in the bar-ingot of the realm was another matter.

+

I went over my assets again and again, but no matter how I arranged affairs, the outcome was the same—my trading dynasty would be at an end, and all who gave fealty to me would be reduced, if not to destitution then to very modest standing. I would be compelled to sell this very mansion, our ships and livestock, and send away those in our employ. And at the end of the day, all there would be to show for it was my own continuance. Not that of Cassira, nor any other dear to me.

+

Long had I considered the spiritual texts. When one feels the touch of death close by, one naturally takes interest in such things, for souls need at least some preparation for their passing. I had read of the afterlife, considered all I may say before the judges of the dead, and was as content as one might be that a life well spent would find value in the hereafter. Now, that finely-balanced exchange was in danger of failure, and for many reasons. I thought long and hard upon them, and reached my decision before the afternoon warmth began to ameliorate with the first flush of evening.

+

Dinner was a quiet gathering, and I was almost oblivious of my children and their children, such as were present, for Cassira held all my attention, as indeed she deserved. My dear wife. We had grown old together, partners in life and enterprise, and we grieved silently to know we were to be parted soon. Not for her to know that such parting could take more than one form—for me to weigh the worth of life’s gift, if it were to be at cost of her blessed company.

+

By the time the sun left us, and, from the terraces, we were bathed in the purple twilight, scenting the first breath of jasmine from the gardens, Sinufre’s offer seemed a joke, and a poor one at that. A king’s ransom in exchange for being deprived of all I loved? I could laugh in his face, for I would sooner go to my tomb with the respect of my people than scrabble for life like a beggar after coins in the gutter.

+

Take me, I said silently in my heart, to the gods. I am ready.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + received the tall man in my audience chamber. I was dressed in my best robes of business, hair brushed in a silver cascade, and my hands were folded upon my girth. The mendicant appeared as I had seen him that morning, though his smile had vanished. Now we were all business and I chuckled inwardly to disappoint him, as if the conman’s gambit were turning back upon him.

+

Filos showed him in, and he sank into the offered chair. “Master Tornin,” he began with a respectful bow. “I know you will have given the matter all due thought. I place before you life eternal, and all the myriad works you may accomplish when a mind and heart such as yours are given freedom from the mortal constraint. All you must do to obtain this, is part with the merely material.”

+

“The transaction is clear-cut,” I agreed with a nod.

+

“You have reached a decision?”

+

“I have.”

+

I let him wait this time, while I arranged my thoughts and adjusted the sleeves of my robe as I prepared to speak.

+

“It comes down to the value we place on things. Life, to be sure, is wonderful, and I would give much to recover health and vitality, to go forth with vigour instead of nursing the thousand hurts of age. And you are right—what I might achieve, when a lifetime of experience is combined with the energy of youth, is formidable. What is mere gold compared to that?

+

“But the true cost is not in gold. You see, the gold it would take to purchase this miracle is not mine to part with. Oh, legally, certainly. But not morally, not ethically. And ethical behaviour was the plumbline you chose to define my career, was it not? I can no more realize this family’s assets for my own benefit then sprout wings and fly. It is their wealth, and the empire I leave them my testament. I will not subdivide it to the avarice of some faceless seller of potions. Let him find some rich and elderly person of lesser mettle and try his luck on that market instead, for his price is too high for me.

+

“And it is higher yet, for in the necessity of beginning a new life I would be parted from all I hold dear, as surely as if I had closed my eyes forever, yet also without the hope of reunion in the Eden to come. For I should see my beloved ones go ahead of me, without prospect of ever joining them. Tell me, why ever should I wish for that?”

+

Sinufre held silence, his expression fixed and unreadable, hands clasped as he followed my words.

+

“I find, upon meditating, I do not love life as dearly as one might imagine. It is all of which life is composed which makes it precious, and life without those things becomes merely existence. Aimless existence is no goal, and the good I may do others in course of it a cold comfort. No, Master Sinufre, I do not choose this bargain. I choose the love and respect of my people, and in so doing trust I reflect well upon the honor and spirit of Zamalek.”

+

It was said. I had accepted the inevitability of death, welcomed it, and a sense of peace flooded through me to have rejected the silly notion of escaping it.

+

One might have heard a pin drop in the long silence which followed, the sigh of breeze in the garden the only punctuation to those heavy and difficult words. Then, with deliberate, infinite care, Sinufre reached into a pocket in the sleeve of his robe and drew forth a small phial of polished gold. He leaned and placed it carefully upon the desk before me. Our eyes met and my puzzlement lasted only moments.

+

“There is no charge, Master Tornin,” he said. “There never was.”

+

I stared at the phial, my old heart racing painfully as I sensed that the more I tried to lay this matter to rest, the more layers were uncovered.

+

“A test, then?” I said, voice near failing me, admitting even now I had been played, though to what ends I was not yet certain.

+

The dark head inclined. “Of course. To have reached any other conclusion would have been to fail.”

+

“And a test still.” I did not reach for the phial. “The price is now a piece of my soul. Win a second life, but walk the road alone.”

+

His eyes held mine, the stare of a cobra, unreadable, so damnably distant, as if I spoke to a shadow. But, with the instinctive skill of a merchant finding the middle ground in any bargain, I flicked a glance at the phial, and my tone implied far more than my words. “Tell me, Master Sinufre… is there enough in there for two?”

+

Now he smiled.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +eautiful evening thickened over the great city. The Mirfaan, the cool breeze from the south, cooled the cloisters and streets, and the flames of sunset burned bright upon turquoise-tiled domes and cupolas. Mighty statues gestured in the late light which glimmered upon the languid river, as a funerary barge made its solemn way toward the far bank, disappearing symbolically into the sunglare, the stairway to heaven upon the waters.

+

A procession of wagons and palanquins waited to wend its way by torchlight to the necropolis on the Maroosh hills where the tomb was prepared. Caskets of lacquered wood would be placed with reverent care into sarcophagi of limestone and plaster, sealed forever, as the priests chanted hymns to sun and moon, fire and water, earth and air.

+

The route to the river docks had been lined with mourners, genuine rather than paid, and I was deeply touched. Perhaps Sinufre was right, and I had lived a life of benefit and example. To see so many weep openly for the passing of one who had stood for so much they honored was moving in the extreme. We had time to absorb these things, watching from the shadows of a palanquin as the barge receded, and knowing our children and the next two generations waited on the far side to escort coffins—unbeknownst to them, empty—to a final rest.

+

The weeks since we had contrived our passing—a drug to bring about sleep so deep a physician assumed the obvious—had been difficult, but Cassira and I were feeling better each day, having shared the contents of the phial. And the future was hardly short-changed, for, as much wisdom as I had ever possessed, she possessed more. Together we would be a force to be reckoned with, and though our family believed us dead we would never be beyond news of them. Filos, ever-faithful, would be our trusted go-between. Karamos, equally stout, guarded us in his silence, even now.

+

Truly, Zamalek is the City of the Evening, but day follows night. Our own winter had begun to turn, we sensed the first bud of spring in our step, the readiness of heart and breath, a strange and invigorating sensation of returning potential. Now we looked to the future with strange expectancy, and an impatience to be about life.

+

As the sun at last went below the far escarpments, I took Cassira’s hand, raised and kissed it, impatient for the day we no longer needed the contrivances of age. The bow, the sword, and the horse’s back beckoned from a year hence, and we knew the labors of time would be ours. Sinufre had introduced us to the Council of the Ages, and, when we had shrugged off the leaden coils of infirmity, we would take our place with them, to help shape a future of which we could never have dreamed, before the coming of the mendicant, the secret ways, and the miraculous potion of distant Jarmu.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of “Zamalek, by the Evening Light” on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mike Adamson

+

+ + Author image of Mike Adamson + + + Mike Adamson holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, he returned to study and secured qualifications in both marine biology and archaeology. He has been a university educator since 2006, has worked in the replication of convincing ancient fossils, is a passionate photographer, a master-level hobbyist, and a journalist for international magazines. Short fiction sales include to The Strand, Little Blue Marble, Weird Tales, Abyss and Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Compelling Science Fiction and Nature Futures. Mike has placed nearly 140 stories to date. You can catch up with his writing career at The View From the Keyboard.

+

© Mike Adamson 2021 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: NGDPhotoworks and RitaE.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2021

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+ + +

Closing out this issue is our second long sci-fi read, and as previously hinted at, they serve as inverted reflections of each other. In Claire Scherzinger's tale, we focus on a daughter seeking escape rather than a father desperately searching, and while the previous story swiftly departed from a technological environment for a more primitive one, this time it's a seemingly simple way of life being abandoned for an infinitely wider world.

+ + + + Story image for The Seed Man by + + + +
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-27/a-grave-of-wind-and-leaves.html b/issue-27/a-grave-of-wind-and-leaves.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5ce97d48 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/a-grave-of-wind-and-leaves.html @@ -0,0 +1,540 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A Grave of Wind and Leaves — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

A Grave of Wind and Leaves

+

Jalyn Renae Fiske

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for A Grave of Wind and Leaves by +
+ + + + +

Y + +ellow lights rotated in warning, and a buzzer sounded. The docking bay doors opened and a flood of beautiful golden light broke through, a surge of warmth and a scent of sweet pollen. A voice on the ship’s intercom echoed off the cold metal corridors:

+

“Welcome to Khatus.”

+

Ferron and the other hundred or so Earthers stepped from the platform to the soft ground of their new home. The grass was the same emerald green of Earth, but the sky was tinged orange, as if a fire burned somewhere behind the clouds. The soil was scarlet. Couples and groups emerged from the chaos until only a few stood alone, searching and calling out names.

+

Five Pavitra guards, nearly seven feet tall and masked in silver paint, oversaw the disembarkation. Their strange, serpentine hands clasped tall bladed spears. Like all their kind, they looked humanoid, but gender was impossible to tell. Black feathers sprouted from their heads, forearms, and calves, as black as a crows, and their snake-skin was the blinding white of untouched snow.

+

Only their painted faces showed any color, which the in-flight education service said changed with the season: crimson for Killing, pale yellow for Seeding, silver for Haunting, and cornflower blue for Temperance.

+

Borun was waiting for him, Borun who had arrived on Khatus over a year earlier with the most precious of cargos in his possession. During the wars, he provided shelter to those lost and wandering. Gave them water, clothed their backs, no questions asked and always with a smile. But now his eyes were ringed with dark circles and worry lines. He looked older. He looked tired. “It’s been a long time,” Borun said.

+

As they embraced, Ferron searched the Earther faces in the dwindling crowd, even looking to the alien Pavitra standing at attention with their glaives at their sides, faces painted yellow for Seeding Season. Searched for the only reason he’d come.

+

He stepped back, searching his friend’s face instead. “Where’s Runa?”

+

Borun’s gaze slid away.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hile the other newcomers headed to the Earther compound, they walked the opposite direction, towards the fifteen-foot stone wall that closed them off from the rest of Khatus. A white pebbled path cut the grass like a scar and led to a grove of trees with bleached trunks and purplish leaves, the color of eggplants and plums.

+

Memories of Runa’s gap-toothed smile played back in Ferron’s mind. The way she always hurried ahead of him when they walked, how she liked to hide and jump out in surprise, the sound of her soft snoring while she held her orange dinosaur under her arm, Dini. He smiled to think how she would run to him and wrap her arms around his neck like she used to when he came home. Ferron checked to make sure Dini was still tucked safely in a side pocket of his duffel bag, her plush dinosaur arms sticking out as if reaching for a hug. They would all be reunited soon.

+

The path ended, and Ferron and Borun stood in the grove. The shade masked Borun’s face as he spoke.

+

“It was too late when I found her,” he said. “She was too far gone. It was the silver clay. Most things on Khatus are deadly until we build up immunity with the Vigil. You know that. The kids just didn’t listen.” He gestured around him at the bone-white trees. “This is how the Pavitra bury the dead, with trees instead of headstones. I know they buried the children here. Somewhere.”

+

The straps of the duffle bag slipped from Ferron’s fingers. It made a sound when it landed on the red, Khatus earth: the thud of a falling body. The trees closed in around him, and the air thinned into almost nothing. His denials were trapped in his throat, but the leaves seemed to speak for him. The wind picked up, and their rustling intensified, as if they swung like corpses from a hundred ropes and shook their heads: No, no, no.

+

His daughter couldn’t be dead. She was supposed to have a drawing for him that said I love you Daddy and Welcome to Khatus, misspelled and crooked, and he was supposed to give her back the stuffed orange dinosaur she loved so much. He could still see her as she looked on the day she left for Khatus, while he stayed behind on Earth, held up with paperwork and background checks. He would have to take the next charter. “Take care of Dini for me,” she had said in her six-year-old voice before boarding the ship with Borun and disappearing among the stars.

+

“Where is she?” Ferron asked.

+

“How should I know?”

+

There were only three without names branded into the bark. Saplings. Children. Ferron fell to his knees, clawing at the moist soil. If she was really dead, she would be here. He threw fistfuls of Khatus earth, as red as blood, to the side. It blistered his hands, but he kept digging. Pain didn’t matter. Let Khatus kill him, too.

+

“Stop!” Borun grabbed him by the arms and pulled him away. “You’ll kill the graves!”

+

Ferron jerked himself free. He wanted to strike him, to slam him to the ground and hit him again and again until his knuckles were broken. Nothing mattered more than finding Runa.

+

“The Pavitra have rules,” Borun said, pacing back and forth. “Stay inside the quarantine, take the Vigil vaccine, be back before Cleansing Hour. There are more. If we break them, they could lock us up forever. We’re at their mercy, aren’t we? We’d never be allowed to leave the quarantine. And then what was the point of leaving Earth to come here?”

+

“I came here for Runa.”

+

Borun shifted on his feet and said with steeley tone, “I’m sorry about Runa. Really, I am, but I won’t let you ruin it for the rest of us.”

+

A few hundred feet away, the carillon tower in the Earther camp rang a deep, slow tune. Borun looked back at the collection of stone barracks and buildings and grunted. “It’s time for evening meal.” He grabbed Ferron’s duffle bag. Dini fell from the pocket, his boot nearly flattening her as he walked away. “Remember the rules.”

+

The leaves shifted, soft now. Ferron picked Dini up and dusted her off. The worn-out fur still smelled of Runa, but it wouldn’t always. It would fade; it would be forgotten.

+

Why had he let her leave without him?

+

Ferron watched Borun depart, then reached for the nearest tree and ran his stinging hand along its rough surface, feeling for the etchings of the names of the dead—Dormard, year 2143; Ybarra, year 2135; all Earthers who had died within the last fifteen years—but Runa’s was missing. If her name wasn’t on a tree, then she could still be alive, hiding, scared.

+

Everything faded until only Ferron’s shaking breath, his beating heart remained to flood his ears. The drums of life, his life, but where was evidence of Runa’s? Where were her tiny feet, peeking behind a tree during hide-and-seek, and her sweet voice when she yelled ‘Surprise!’ and jumped out of hiding?

+

He collapsed to his knees, pulled at his coat and shirt. He leaned against a tree and tried to stand again, but he only made it halfway before his legs gave out.

+

He lay sprawled on the ground, face-up, the tree tops spinning above him as the world turned dark.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +ough hands shook him until Ferron opened his eyes. He was lying on a plastic-canvas cot identical to the dozens of other cots lined in perfect rows. The barracks.

+

Ferron turned to see a lean man with scraggly facial hair sitting back onto the nearest cot and a short woman with close-cropped hair standing behind.

+

“Who are you?” he managed.

+

“Roth.” The man gestured to himself, then jerked a thumb at the woman. “Lin.” He chewed on a husk of stale bread and squinted at Ferron. “You were screaming in your sleep.”

+

He remembered why, and a sour metallic taste came to Ferron’s mouth. He suddenly wanted to vomit, but not even that relief was given to him. His stomach was empty, his heart was empty.

+

“How did I get here?” he said.

+

“Rescue mission,” said Roth, showing his teeth in a crust-filled smile.

+

Lin looked right and left around the barrack and spoke in a hushed whisper. “Why were you outside the camp, in that damn Pavitra graveyard?”

+

His back felt raw. Ferron struggled to sit up, noticing the bruises and scratches on his arms. His hands were bandaged in gauze, their stinging muted to a distant discomfort. His shoes were still on, shirt open, and crimson-colored Khatus earth smeared his pants. Blades of emerald grass hung down in front of his left eye, stuck in his hair. “Did you drag me back?”

+

Roth chuckled, his laugh growing to a roar. Other Earthers in the barrack turned to see what was happening, but then outside the carillon sang again, a different call from what he’d heard before, hollow and wailing.

+

“Vigil awaits,” Roth said as he stood, “Next time, we’ll leave you for the Pavitra to find, okay?”

+

Lin shushed him as she followed him out. “That’s not funny, Roth. We’re refugees. What one of us does wrong, we all get punished for.”

+

Ferron forced himself to his feet, pulling his shirt closed awkwardly, and followed his new barrackmates out into the sunlight.

+

The carillon’s wail continued, echoing throughout the camp, and Ferron winced. “What’s going on?”

+

“Vigil,” said Roth. “Vaccine time. Get used to it. I’ve been in quarantine for close to two years, and now I’m nearly ready to join the others living outside these miserable confines. Transition, the Pavitra call it.” He grinned. “We call it freedom.”

+

Ferron looked around the camp. A good two-dozen buildings made of polymer and plastic, whatever was light enough to load on the ships, and lines of people lengthening outside the entrances to three more permanent-looking structures. He was used to long-term emergency compounds and lines of refugees, but he was also used to Runa holding his hand as they waited for food and medicine.

+

“That’s your stop,” Roth grunted, and pointed to the longest line with the newest arrivals. Ferron recognized them as passengers from the charter ship he arrived on. He had told them about his daughter, and how she was waiting for him to arrive. He had showed them her picture. They would ask where she was.

+

Borun watched them from halfway down his line and then abandoned his spot to stand next to Ferron. “Long night?” he said, eyeing the red dirt stains. There was light in his eyes. The worry-lines Ferron had noticed earlier had apparently disappeared as soon as he handed off the burden of Runa’s loss. “You’ll feel better in time.”

+

“I can’t do this,” said Ferron. He backed away as his breathing became labored. Heart pulsing in violent bursts, the final beats before it stopped completely.

+

Borun stepped toward him, but Ferron ran.

+

He ran past the lines of Earthers, the harsh stone buildings of the camp, and the central carillon tower. The tune for Vigil rang again, but this time it was like a Valkyrie’s screech. Strangers paused to watch him run. They didn’t try to stop him. They didn’t call out: What’s wrong? How can we help?

+

I am a ghost already, he thought.

+

Ferron kept running, right at the group of Pavitra guards outside the nearest vaccination building, their faces painted the pale yellow of a dim and cloud-covered sun. They held sharpened glaives at their sides. The Pavitra would try to protect themselves, wouldn’t they? It would be quick, an accident. They would bury him in the grove beside Runa.

+

But it wasn’t the sharp glaives that met him. They dropped their weapons and grabbed him with their snake hands, winding tight to keep him steady.

+

“Wait in line, Earther,” one guard said.

+

“I can’t be here!” he cried. “Not without my daughter!”

+

The guard paused for a moment, then held out what could be considered its hand. It looked like three headless snakes writhing.

+

Ferron hesitated. The rule was to avoid contact with the aliens. There were many rules, the education program had been littered with them, but this was steadfast: never let them touch you, never let them read your mind. The Pavitra might keep you in quarantine forever if they knew what you really thought. Or control you. Even change you.

+

He heard Borun call out, “Don’t touch it!”

+

And from Lin, almost in a panic, “What are you doing?”

+

Ferron offered his hand to the alien.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +caly appendages constricted around his fingers like a nest of pythons. The Earthers jostled behind him, questioning and shouting, but Ferron focused on the soft vibrations that came with its touch, strumming up his arm and into his chest.

+

Against all expectation, he felt something easing inside him.

+

Too soon, it released him and said, “Maephus will see you.”

+

“Traitor,” someone spat from the line.

+

He took a deep breath and entered. A Pavitra healer waited within. It turned its face at such an angle that the silver paint glistened like moonlight on a lake.

+

“Your name is Ferron Daye,” it said in overly enunciated syllables, accented with long pauses between phrases. “You fell by the grove.”

+

The words he’d wanted to say no longer existed. How could he even describe what he was feeling? How could he explain without acknowledging that Runa was probably dead? If he said the words, it would be real. If he spoke, he would break.

+

Maephus took hold of Ferron’s hands with its reptilian ones. Vibrations from the contact traveled down his arms and into his chest, softly strumming against his heart just as before. He wasn’t afraid. This was what he needed, to not speak. To not have to say the words.

+

A memory came to him, of Earth, when they and everyone else had to evacuate the blackened remains of their homes and huddle into shelters with no food and no water. He had tried to explain to Runa why they were there, but how could he talk of war to a six-year-old? People killing people, he had finally explained. She had furrowed her brow and whispered, Then we should move to Khatus.

+

And so he had sent her ahead of him in Borun’s safe-keeping.

+

The vibrations softened and flowed through him. Seeking. They touched every part of him, until finally the strumming faded away like the last chord of a song.

+

Maephus released him and said, “Three children climbed the wall. Nearly one year ago.”

+

A cold chill gripped his throat. Borun had said nothing of that. “How could they? The wall is fifteen feet high.”

+

“You must take Vigil now.” Maephus stood to retrieve the materials from a cabinet: long needles from a Khatus plant, and a glass vial filled with purple liquid. He dipped one of the needles, very deeply into the vial, most of its length glistening as it was withdrawn.

+

Ferron pulled his arm back, fist clenched. “Tell me first,” he said, voice shaking.

+

“Vigil does many things,” Maephus said as it returned the purple vial to the cabinet. “It protects from the poison of Khatus, like Pavitra are protected.”

+

“Not the vaccine! Tell me about my daughter.”

+

It looked at him for a long moment. “Vigil gives you ears to hear Khatus. The children must have heard her when she called.”

+

“I don’t understand.”

+

Maephus raised the needle. “Then listen.”

+

After a moment, Ferron extended his arm to be injected.

+

The Vigil felt like fire being forced through his flesh.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +erron lay on his cot at the barrack and examined the only things left of Runa that Borun gave him: a small shoe with smudges of chalky, shiny mud on the worn-down sole, and a collection of twigs, leaves, and rocks in a drawstring pouch. She did love to explore.

+

He put them under his pillow and waited until the Earthers in his barrack were settled into sleep. Then he waited for Cleansing Hour to begin, when the Pavitra would leave their posts and gather for the nightly painting ritual. He crept out and followed the white pebbled path from the Earther camp to the death grove, and its three unmarked graves. He knew at some point the trees would show the names of those buried below—the children who climbed the wall?—but even then, if he saw Runa’s among them, would he believe?

+

The leaves rustled above, and he looked up. Dancing, the purple-leaved canopy swayed almost as one, almost with a message. He held his breath and listened, wishing he could hear Runa’s voice.

+

Walk, the breeze and the leaves and the very place said to him.

+

So he did.

+

He let the wind lead him along the perimeter wall, following a scent he hadn’t noticed before. The aroma of woodsy musk came from where an ancient, red-leaved tree grew close to the wall. Its branches reached so high, and smudges of thick gleaming mud speckled its cinnamon bark like a trail to the top.

+

The scent grew stronger. Sandalwood.

+

The speckled mud was patterned, purposeful. It glistened like moonlight on a lake. Ferron placed his hand upon the nearest marking. Perfectly, the faded silver print was eclipsed by his own: a child’s handprint, cold and sticky to the touch. When he took his hand away, he looked down and saw that the marking had transferred to his palm. One little hand painted on his skin, silver and iridescent.

+

A ghost’s hand.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +erron opened his eyes to find at least ten Pavitra standing over him in a circle, their unblinking black orbs bearing down. Their glaives reflected the sunlight in blinding flashes.

+

He was sprawled beneath the cinnamon-bark tree. It was morning.

+

Ferron recognized the voice of Maephus. “You touched the forbidden clay.”

+

Silver covered his right hand—the one he touched the handprint with—but it had spread from his palm to reach out in tendrils down his forearm. He sat up and tried to wipe it away, but it wasn’t on the surface, it was inside his skin.

+

Earthers had come to see why the Pavitra were gathered. They hung back, flinching if they got too close to a Pavitra. Raith’s and Lin’s eyes widened when they saw it was Ferron, and immediately backed away. Borun’s eyes turned to slits as the Earther crowd began to chime in:

+

“Look at his hand—”

+

“—punish him, not us—”

+

“—we followed the rules!”

+

The Pavitra took hold of Ferron’s arms and lifted him to his feet—and as he stood, he thought he saw a pair of tiny feet running through the crowd, and a glimpse of auburn hair flowing between them. He heard her laugh, saw her smile.

+

“Runa!” he called, fighting to break free from the Pavitra holding him. “Runa, I’m here!”

+

“The haunts have begun,” Maephus said. “Take him to Kimli.”

+

Their python hands squeezed tighter. As their vibrations calmed him, Runa’s laugh disappeared. Her smile vanished. She was never there.

+

Ferron sagged in their grip, helpless and hopeless. The scent of sandalwood drifted around him as the Pavitra led him like a prisoner into the Earther camp and towards the Pavitra buildings on the far end. His arm looked dipped in silver to the elbow, and now his other palm was silvered too. Everything burned as if a flame was brought slowly closer and closer.

+

The Vigil injection site on his arm throbbed incessantly. He rubbed it, spreading even more silver across his skin, but he didn’t care. It felt like something inside his veins was pushing its way out. He imagined them stretching and expanding, swollen with the Vigil until they burst. As the silver spread up his arms, the fear was replaced with certainty. He knew his heart would stop, and he would still stand. He would bleed purple on bone-white skin.

+

“Earther,” the Pavitra said, stopping to stare at him. He had been clawing at his arm. At the injection site. So deep that it bled—bled red, of course, just as it always had.

+

“My blood,” Ferron said. “I thought it would be…”

+

The Pavitra watched with their black eyes, unblinking. Their vibrations increased like a cat purring. “The haunts trick you,” one said. “Drive you mad.”

+

They continued in silence and soon arrived at a small stone building much smaller than any of the others in the camp. Above its door, it had a symbol Ferron had never seen: four circles touching, each larger than the previous.

+

“What is this?” he asked.

+

“They are the four moons of Khatus,” one of the Pavitra said. “Kimli is keeper of seasons.”

+

“Seasons are a Pavitra matter,” the other added. “But some Earthers come to know them as we do.”

+

The door opened into darkness, and he heard Runa’s soft laughter from inside the stone building. The impulse to vomit washed over him and sweat dripped down his face. As his eyes grew accustomed, he thought he saw—was that her crouched in the corner? Was that her walking toward the doorway?

+

A Pavitra emerged, breaking the illusion. It had a shorter mane of black feathery hair, almost spiky, and its skin, painted silver, was smoother than the rough reptilian skin of the other Pavitra he had seen.

+

The guards released him. “Kimli, we bring a poisoned Earther.”

+

Kimli looked at Ferron’s silver hands and arms with black, cave-like eyes. “Come,” it said.

+

Inside, eight Pavitra sat on the floor in a circle, each holding an empty pestle and mortar. Stacks of bundled leaves and stalks covered one wall of the building. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held jars of the four colors for the four seasons. He recognized sandalwood again, but other scents mixed in the air as well. Aromas he could liken to lilies, clove, and pine.

+

Kimli motioned that he sit apart from the others while they took handfuls of blue flowers and began to crush them in the bowls. “Tonight is the last night of Haunting Season. We must prepare the paints for Temperance.”

+

“I thought… that Runa would be here. Is she?”

+

Kimli shook its head. “No. It takes one Khatus year for the roots to take hold and the blood to flow.”

+

Another wave of nausea washed over him. The death trees grew from the remains buried beneath them. He had fought so hard not to picture it, but now the image of a drained, emaciated Runa buried in a nest of hungry, twisting vines flashed before his eyes. The roots were drinking her dry.

+

“Then Borun told me the truth,” he whispered. “Your silver clay killed her.”

+

“Pavitra give Vigil so Earthers can survive the wilds of Khatus, but clays do not always kill. You are silver, and you are alive.”

+

Ferron looked at his hands. They burned. “Tell me what happened.”

+

“Have your Earthers not told you? Last Temperance Season they brought us the bodies to bury. Two bore the marks of being touched by the clays. The other child had become silver. Like you.”

+

Ferron lowered his eyes. He tried to focus on the ritual happening around him, to steady his breathing and keep in time with the rhythmic scrape and turn of the blue petals being ground to a fine powder. “I really thought I’d seen her. I thought I could find her.”

+

“That is the silver clay. It summons the haunts. During Cleansing Hour tonight, wash your face and your hands with this essence water.” Kimli took a small vial from one of the shelves that contained a clear substance. “Pavitra must wash and reapply the paints nightly to maintain balance of their influence. Tonight, we shall enter Temperance.”

+

Ferron took the glass bottle offered him. “I’m not Pavitra.”

+

Kimli studied him and said, “We are all Pavitra.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he Pavitra guards were all that remained scattered throughout the camp while the Earthers slept in their barracks. They looked up at the tower almost in unison. It sang the hypnotic tune of Cleansing Hour. When it finished, the silence that followed seemed heavier, more profound. The Pavitra lowered their heads and entered the central tower to wash away the clay.

+

Ferron headed for the grove. The glass bottle Kimli gave him was ice in his hand, and the feeling of roots creeping around him, of dirt filling his lungs, continued to grow more vivid. Could one die from just the thought of dying? It didn’t matter if he was awake or asleep now, the nightmares followed him as a shadow.

+

At the grove, he stood beside the three nameless death trees. The canopy of purple leaves rustled above. “I should’ve been here with you,” he said, and lifted the wooden stopper in the glass bottle. The liquid inside had a soft citrus aroma.

+

A small, airy voice mingled with the wind. “I knew you would find me.”

+

Runa stepped out from behind the three trees. She was still six, and wore the same coat and trousers as the day he put her on the charter ship and said goodbye. Tears stung his eyes, and he couldn’t respond. He wanted to take her in his arms, but the Pavitra’s words rang in his ears: The haunts trick you. Drive you mad.

+

“I want to show you something!” she said, jumping once then twice. “C’mon, Daddy!”

+

Ferron put away the vial as her ghostly form hurried toward the perimeter wall. Did he have to choose? Madness or mourning?

+

“Daddy?” she called back. Her expression so innocent: Aren’t you coming?

+

After so many weeks with the suspicious Earthers and the stoic Pavitra, the walls he’d built crumbled at the sound of his little girl’s voice. The tears flowed, and he ran after her. “Yes, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m coming.”

+

Runa stopped at the ancient tree with cinnamon bark growing beside the quarantine wall. Its branches stretched to another red-leaved tree on the other side. She used to climb what trees were left on Earth. She had wanted a tree house so badly, but they were never in one place for very long, always moving from one refugee encampment to another.

+

Ferron watched as she grabbed the bark and branches in the exact same places where the handprints, like stains, still marked them. When he climbed and crossed over in her wake, he could see that a forest stretched around the quarantine walls in all directions. It reminded him of sweetgum and maple trees in autumn and looked so much like the home he knew as a child, even in the eerie light of the alien moons.

+

He followed Runa down, branch by branch, and then she darted into the forest, appearing only briefly between trees, and then was gone.

+

“Runa! Wait!”

+

As he walked deeper into the forest, the scent of sandalwood grew stronger. He found her again, standing with her back to him and looking at something on the ground.

+

“The Pavitra painted their faces such pretty colors. I wanted to be pretty like them.”

+

Ferron came closer to stand beside her and saw they stood at the edge of a pool of silver, shining like moonlight. The sandalwood smell swirled around them, intoxicating.

+

“Kimli said it didn’t burn you,” he said. “That you turned silver.”

+

Runa kneeled down to dip her hands in the pond of silver clay. She stopped just before she touched the surface and looked up at Ferron. “If Khatus likes you, she wants to keep you.”

+

He smiled and crouched down to her level. Together, father and daughter scooped up the clay. It felt soft, too soft for clay or mud, more like handfuls of silk or satin.

+

“Let me,” she said, and painted her father’s face. Immediately, the clay dried and cracked and pulled at his skin. It felt like a vulture’s talons had latched on and were slowly ripping his flesh away. The pain increased and the silver seeped into his eyes, melting them away and dripping down his cheeks in sticky, milky tears. He tried to wipe off the clay, but his hands were already covered. It hardened like armor, squeezing, crushing. His fingernails broke and bled as he scratched and clawed at his hands in vain.

+

“Haunts aren’t real, Daddy,” Runa said.

+

With those words, the imagined armor’s constriction relaxed, and he blinked his eyes until his vision cleared. His fingers weren’t bleeding, and his eyes weren’t melted.

+

Runa was still beside him, and her face was silver. “Do I look pretty?” she asked.

+

For a few moments, there was no pain, no nightmarish imaginings. Ferron wished he could stay in the forest with Runa forever. He would build her a hundred tree houses, a thousand secret places. “The prettiest I’ve ever seen.”

+

She stood and pointed at the sky. The middle moons were almost at their highest points. “We have to hurry back, Daddy. Cleansing Hour is almost over, and Borun hates it when we break the rules.”

+

She started back the way they had come, still running, still happy, still alive.

+

He struggled to his feet. Even if what he saw and felt wasn’t real, the effort it took to stay lucid exhausted him. Runa would disappear among the trees on his left and reappear in the distance on his right. He thought she was too far to catch, and then she would be beside him and tease him to move faster.

+

He leaned on a tree, stopped to steady his spinning thoughts, and felt an etching beneath his fingers. A name. Petro—2056.

+

“Oh, you found one,” she said.

+

With an effort he focused on her. “Why is there a death tree out here, beyond the grove?”

+

“All the trees are death trees. This forest used to be a grove, like mine, and it has grown and grown into what it is now.”

+

“These are dead Pavitra?”

+

But Runa had disappeared again—no, had been replaced. Ferron stumbled forward, trying to see. Someone stood beside him. There were hundreds standing in the forest, all wispy and blurry and many-armed. They made no sound.

+

“My friends,” Runa said in his ear. “The Anthrens. They came to Khatus to find a new home.”

+

“Who are they? I haven’t seen anyone besides Earthers and Pavitra.”

+

“The Anthrens are gone, Daddy. Only Pavitra remain.”

+

The quarantine wall was nearby, and he saw her tiny figure climbing up the tree. He followed her up, but as he crossed over she disappeared again. The middle moons had begun their descent too, and the burning from the clay intensified like a hot brand to his face. His hands itched from imagined bug bites all inflamed and swollen. He paused when he came to the final branch. The faint shimmer of Runa’s handprint still clung to the bark. He expected her to be waiting for him at the bottom, but as he alighted at the base of the cinnamon-bark tree, lanterns and torches closed in from the direction of the camp.

+

“There he is!” someone cried. The Earthers held clubs and knives as well, grim expressions everywhere. Borun was among them, and a heavy dread settled on Ferron’s heart.

+

I won’t let you ruin it for the rest of us.

+

The Earthers brought us their bodies.

+

Borun hates it when we break the rules.

+

The haunt of Runa stepped out from behind Borun. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but she refused to cry. It was the same look she wore when he told her she was going ahead to Khatus without him. She had been cleared to leave, and he had not. How could he not send her ahead? They were homeless, starving. It might’ve been years before there would be another chance, if they even survived that long.

+

I love you, Daddy, she had said, and gave him Dini to protect him while she was away. And he had given her to Borun.

+

“How could you let her die?” Ferron could barely say the words. He couldn’t stop thinking of Runa hidden away, going mad with haunts and no one there to comfort her.

+

“She was crazy,” Borun said. “She wouldn’t eat or drink anything. Wouldn’t sleep. We tried everything, but she kept screaming and clawing at herself.”

+

Ferron thrust an arm towards the far buildings. “They would have helped her, if you’d asked!”

+

In the distance, the carillon tower chimed the first note for the end of Cleansing Hour.

+

“Pavitra are coming out,” Roth said. “We have to go.” The Earthers extinguished their torches and hurried back to camp, but Borun stayed, a single torch burning in his hands. When the Earthers left, so did Runa.

+

“It’s better if you die outside the walls,” Borun said, hatred filling his voice. “Just climb back up and disappear.”

+

Ferron clenched his fists, clay and rage burning. “Is that what you said to Runa?”

+

“They’ll punish all of us for what you’ve done.”

+

“But they haven’t, have they?” Ferron shouted. “They’ve never punished anyone! Not when the children crossed the wall, not when I fell asleep outside of the camp, not even when I charged the guard.”

+

Borun spat. “This camp is a goddamn prison. We only get out on good behavior, and even then, who knows what happens? Have you ever seen an Earther after Vigil is done? No, because no one has!”

+

“She wasn’t even seven yet!” Sudden waves of sorrow rose up behind the anger, surging over it. More than the release violence could provide, he wanted to drown.

+

Another chime from the carillon tower.

+

“She was changing, Ferron. Her skin started to look like theirs. Her hair, her eyes. And the Pavitra were the ones responsible. It’s their poison that killed her.”

+

The burning, boiling of the silver clay had spread to almost his entire body, cocooning him in fire, but Ferron forced himself to face the man who let his daughter die. Borun was the one who had changed. Ferron saw the fire in his eyes, the torch blazing in his hands, and realized that nothing could be said to convince Borun he was wrong. The Pavitra would always be at fault, no matter the truth.

+

Licks of flame fell from Borun’s torch and simmered on the grass. “You chose to leave the compound, so leave.”

+

It took all Ferron’s strength and focus to remain standing. “No.”

+

Borun dropped the torch and shoved him to the ground, climbed on top of him, pinned him down. Ferron didn’t feel the breaking of his nose when Borun struck it once, twice, then too many times to count. He reached up to block the blows as best he could, but all was numb and dead. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to fight to win.

+

Sneering, Borun stood and stepped away. “Do you finally understand how it is?”

+

“Yes.” Ferron smiled through the blood and swelling on his face. “Now you’re poisoned, too.”

+

Borun looked at his hands, and saw split knuckles covered in silver. He frantically tried to wipe them clean, but the more he touched it, the more it spread. “Get it off! It burns!”

+

Ferron coughed blood, still smiling. “Here they come.”

+

Across the field, Kimli and Maephus approached with two Pavitra guards, glaives strapped to their backs and torches in hand. Borun panicked and looked for a place to escape. “They can’t find me like this.”

+

“Maybe you should leave,” Ferron said. “Who knows what they’ll do to us.”

+

Borun stared at him and then at the cinnamon bark tree. He looked back at the approaching Pavitra, his clay-covered hands. “You mean what they’ll do to you,” he said, then he climbed, frantic, and disappeared over the wall.

+

For a few minutes, Ferron was alone. He removed his shirt and staunched the blood from his nose. He didn’t know what to feel. It was over. It was done. But he still had nothing at all.

+

The Pavitra arrived with flickering torchlight. They were pristine, calm, and now their faces were colored with the pale blue of Temperance Season, of mountain streams and frozen glaciers—things he missed from Earth but knew no longer existed.

+

Runa would have loved to see them.

+

Kimli and Maephus leaned down, but the haunting of the silver clay turned them into grey bloodless corpses with the black eyes of barn owls. Their teeth grew into fangs. Their hands into clawed tentacles. Overcome, Ferron convulsed on the ground. Jaw clenched, body shook. He was both paralyzed and helpless to stop the tremors. The haunting was in control now.

+

Kimli’s voice. “Where is the essence water?”

+

Pavitra hands on him, searching, vibrating.

+

The citrus scent of oranges.

+

The cooling relief of ice upon his burning face.

+

“He needs more,” said Maephus, and Ferron felt the comfort of Pavitra hands lifting him to carry him back to camp.

+

As they passed the grove, Ferron looked for Runa. A veil of nightmares shrouded him. He saw vividly the trees’ roots twisting around Runa’s neck and growing through her bones and her veins, feeding off her decaying body. She screamed for him and tried to fight her way to the surface, but he could never find her. She was always just out of reach.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +erron touched his face—and saw that his hand was clean of the silver clay, his flesh scrubbed and tender. The sharp citrus of orange emanated from his skin, and a ghostly Runa sat next to him. Her form was dimming and fading away. When she touched his hand, he felt nothing.

+

Kimli came over to the bed. Maephus and other Pavitra watched a few steps back, intensely listening. “We continue to search for Borun. He runs from us when we come near.”

+

Ferron shook his head. “He thinks you’ll kill him.”

+

“We will not, but Khatus might.”

+

He sighed. “So what happens now?”

+

“The haunting clay has been cleansed, but the haunts may remain for a time.”

+

“And when they go away—will she be gone forever?”

+

“Haunts are unique to the burdens of the bearer. And to the season. I cannot say what will haunt you in the future.”

+

He didn’t say it. He didn’t need to. The question of what future hung heavy in his eyes. Kimli’s next words held a tone of reassurance.

+

“Vigil is more than a vaccine. It comes from Khatus herself, from the sap of the death trees, and it strengthens you over time. Changes you. Many Earthers cannot let go, but some choose to abandon their natural form. To survive outside the walls, all must become Pavitra.

+

“There are some who Khatus accepts, even without proper Vigil. Those who already belong. Your daughter was one. You are one. The clay merged with you, instead of killing you. You are becoming Pavitra even now, as the Anthrens and the Sirax and the Lorsythe did.”

+

He turned away and focused on the fading apparition of Runa with her gap-toothed grin. Once changed, he would leave the compound and the quarantine forever. A fifteen-foot wall would separate him from the grove and from his daughter. “I don’t want to leave.”

+

She whispered in his ear, but there was no sound.

+

Kimli and Maephus bowed their heads slightly and moved away from him. When they reached the door, Kimli turned. “You are free to be afraid, Ferron Daye. We were all afraid.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +erron stood at the grove of death trees once more, the same purple leaves, white bark, red earth he had visited every day since his arrival. Kimli and Maephus joined him at the grove, as he’d asked. The other Pavitra kneeled some distance away, their bone-white skin contrasting starkly to their onyx feathered hair.

+

Ferron looked at the growing coarseness of the skin on his hands and arms, faintly showing the early pattern of snake-skin. It looked wrong. It should be the color of snow. He looked at the guards, and the ceremonial glaives that glinted in the sun, grasped in their strange hands. Mirrors, he thought. And when he looked at himself next, what would he see?

+

“Temperance is blue, the color of sky and water,” Kimli said, taking a wooden bowl of pale blue paint, the same shade the Pavitra now wore, from Maephus and handing it to Ferron. “Be lucid and free, flowing and eternal, as Pavitra strive to be.”

+

A glimmer of a silhouette stood by the three nameless saplings, and he knew Runa was there. He dipped his hand in the bowl. The blue paint was cool on his still-sensitive skin, like a salve to a wound. He coated his face, as Runa had done for him with the silver clay, and expected a similar burning, haunting reaction. Instead, his mind was overcome with the calm of still nights and the quiet of early mornings.

+

He felt Runa’s presence beside the middle of the three saplings, and marked her grave with his blue handprint, a final embrace. When he did so, her silhouette ceased to glimmer. It dimmed, darkened, and joined the shadows of dancing leaves that speckled the ground. The blue paint seeped into the bark and revealed the outline of Runa’s name emerging.

+

Kimli took the bowl and handed him a spike and spile to tap the sappling’s bark, and a bowl to collect whatever would flow from it. “Seasons only end when a new one begins. If you choose to join us, receive Khatus’ gifts.”

+

He pierced the ashen bark and watched the substance for Vigil trickle down into the bowl. It wasn’t blood-red as he had feared, but the deep purple of the leaves above—the purple of eggplants and plums. And all around him the world whispered: Welcome home.

+

Orbit-lrg ><

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of A Grave of Wind and Leaves on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jalyn Renae Fiske

+

+ + Author image of Jalyn Renae Fiske + + + Jalyn Renae Fiske is an English Language Arts teacher in Texas and the Fiction Editor for the speculative fiction magazine James Gunn’s Ad Astra. She has over a dozen short stories, poems, and personal essays published in anthologies, literary journals, and online magazines. She tends to write dark fantasy and horror. Her favorites that she’s written are Verity’s Faery Teas and A Grave of Wind and Leaves. In her free time, Jalyn likes to practice her oil painting, hike trails, camp, and ravenously read.

+

© Jalyn Renae Fiske 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to teotarras.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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Fall into Autumn, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of Mythaxis. We have for you a customarily eclectic selection of short tales, from the romantic ghost story to colonial science fiction, surrealist dreamscape to dystopian workplace, military sci-fi to librarian fantasy, and even manage to get in a sinister round of that most unnatural of sports… miniature golf.

+

Yet readers do not live by short fiction alone, and this editor is happy to indulge in longer works for his own pleasure at every opportunity. In 2021, a little over half of my novel-reading has been in science fiction or fantasy (no real horror yet, I note, something that once would have outnumbered sf and f combined), so I thought I would indulge myself further with a salute to some that have had an impact.

+

In addition to speculative fiction I enjoy crime writing, and combining these interests I started the year with Ben H. Winters’ trilogy of pre-apocalyptic police procedurals, The Last Policeman, Countdown City, and World of Trouble, in which a rookie detective is driven to pursue his investigations in spite of the fact that a planet-killing asteroid is due to hit the Earth later that year. It dips a little in the middle book (though I completely love its hard-boiled title), but overall this was a really interesting, satisfying series. Adjacent to crime, I also read Christopher Brown’s third novel, Failed State, his second (and what a brilliant concept) science fiction legal thriller. I think his I-also-love-this-title first book Tropic of Kansas is still his best, but all three are good.

+

Melding crime with fantasy now, I’ve also read books #4 and #5 of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, having enjoyed the first three after they were recommended by a friend back in 2020. Aaronovitch’s own joke that his protagonist is basically PC Harry Potter doesn’t do justice to what is frequently funny, sometimes horrific, but very definitely contemporary. The comparison with J. K. Rowling’s take on “British Magic” highlights for me just how much those books are a nostalgia trip for a kind of public schooling that has almost no connection to the experience of the majority of Britons whatsoever, whereas Aaronovitch delivers a richly multicultural London that very feels true to modern life, even if permeated with folkloric creatures and mystical powers at every other turn.

+

Speaking of English Magic specifically, I very belatedly embarked on Susanna Clarke’s magnificent Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which you will be unsurprised to hear I thought was one of the best fantasies I’ve ever read. I do one Charles Dickens every year, and briefly interrupted Nicholas Nickleby to sample JS&MN—the interruption ended up lasting for weeks, because I just had to keep reading. Now I’m looking forward to Clarke’s follow up, Piranesi, but I think I’ll save it for 2022, otherwise my Best of the Year list may risk becoming a bit repetitive.

+

I’ve enjoyed Ada Palmer’s three published Terra Ignota books, the fourth and final of which is due out shortly. Overall I’d call them challenging but rewarding; brilliant world-building and characterisation that balances right on the edge of I’m losing track of what’s going on here, but in a way that suggests I’ll want to read them again (right after I take another swing at The Book of the New Sun, most likely). And my most recent genre read is Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, which I raced through in under a day. Calling it a genre novel is maybe to categorise it by its slightest aspect, but I really enjoyed it, and anticipate a rereading sooner rather than later.

+

To close out this unexpectedly long essay, a semi-digression. Early in the year I had the great pleasure of listening to Kim Stanley Robinson’s keynote speech for Cappadocia University’s online conference “Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture”, followed by a Q&A helmed by his friend the literary academic Tom Moylan. Subsequently I acquired a copy of Moylan’s Demand the Impossible, an analysis of “critical utopian” fiction of the 1970s, only to have to quickly put it aside in order to read three of the four novels which he examines in great detail.

+

So, in addition to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, I have now also read The Female Man by Joanna Russ, Triton by Samuel R. Delany, and my favourite of the four, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy—just an excellent piece of work, which brought back to mind Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Finally returning to Moylan’s text for a deep analysis of the themes of, and comparison between, each novel made for a very interesting start to the year, refiring my interest in utopian fiction.

+

I’ll leave off there, without even mentioning Dune Messiah, since this editorial is in danger of dwarfing several of the actual stories in the issue! But this may give you some inkling of the kind of fiction that grabs this editor’s attention, and you may take it as read that every novel mentioned above is also a recommendation.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 27 - Thanks and Salutations! +Cover art credit for this issue goes to Raja Nandepu for his striking image True Worship, along with our gratitude for allowing us to use it. A freelance concept artist from Hyderabad, India, you can see more of Raja’s work on his website as well as at DeviantArt and ArtStation, and you can also follow him on Twitter.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-27/full-metal-grandma.html b/issue-27/full-metal-grandma.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..12b696d0 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/full-metal-grandma.html @@ -0,0 +1,430 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Full Metal Grandma — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Full Metal Grandma

+

Paul Alex Gray

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Full Metal Grandma by +
+ + + + +

H + +ouston’s a mighty fine city. It’s a damn shame it’s getting nuked to dust in sixty minutes, courtesy of the alien rift shimmering over the shattered spines of broken skyscrapers. Two arcing pillars swirl purple and amber, easily a mile high, like lightning frozen in the sky. They’re growing fast. When they connect, they’ll open a passage for hordes of invading Kestezai alien scum.

+

A mandatory evac order went out two days ago. The cash-strapped military did what it could to take away Tier 1 citizens. Enter Ryft.io, a startup that swooped in like a vulture, sensing profit to be made. I’m a Ryftr, a gun-for-hire following the company from rift zone to rift zone, kicking alien ass and saving any rich Tier 1 citizens too stupid to get away early. Two weeks ago, it was Seattle. Once this place is gone, I’ll make my way to the next city and do it all again.

+

I realize my figure silhouetted by the rift would make for an epic photo, so I send my cam-drone up. I activate the LED symbols on my purple battlesuit—machine guns, puckered lips, alien skull and crossbones—and hold my X87 Exterminator bolt rifle across my shoulder in a classic Ryftr pose.

+

The pic is epic. I run an auto-filter, giving it a grimy look, and mark it x o x Full Metal Grandma in the corner before uploading it to my fan-channel.

+

“Sure you won’t come with me, Jenny?” says Destructicus.

+

My fellow Ryftr’s heavy battle armour is blackened in places by hits he’s taken from Kestezai pulse cannons and grenades. He’s customized his gear with scary looking spikes—Destructicus is a fan-fave, but his real name is Randy and he’s from Omaha. He used to be a trucker back before that profession went extinct. A good man, and he’s saved my bacon once or twice.

+

All us Ryftrs are the same. Most have grey hairs. Everyone’s got something in their past they regret. Broken marriages. Cut off from family. Bankrupt. Drugs. Drinking. Convictions. Jail time. Everything. We’ve all made mistakes. I sure as hell made more than a few. There’s a photo in my pocket—truly! an actual photo, not just a file—of a little girl who keeps me going. Her mother won’t let me see her, and that’s fair, I suppose, but I make sure to send Ryftcoins when I can.

+

“Stick with me,” I say to Randy. “There’s still a bunch of rich assholes here. Super surge bonus. We could clean up.”

+

“Sorry, Jenny, too risky.”

+

A whine of engines tears over us as a Ryft.io shuttle sweeps down. Dust swirls as it comes to a halt. It’s an old model, patched up here and there. The company wouldn’t want to risk losing new tech if the nuke comes a little early, so they’re sending the junk they can write off as an accounting expense.

+

“Be safe, Jenny,” Randy says. “Don’t stay too late. You got people out there that care about you. May not seem that way, but they do.”

+

“I’ll be fine.” I force a smile. “You take care, Destructicus.”

+

He salutes and the Ryft.io shuttle engines rise in tone as it moves up, zipping out west.

+

I check my weapon. It’s a good one, rented direct from the manufacturer. I’m getting late on my payments though, if I don’t transfer some Ryftcoins soon, it’ll lock up and a repo drone will take it from me. I’m also light on ammo, just eight bolts. I weigh up my decision, then put in a request for ten more, making the payment of 90 Ryftcoins. I get a message that the delivery drone is inbound and soon enough I see it drifting over the carnage.

+

A message heralds its arrival.

+
+

Share your passion! Post a vid-selfie promoting

+

Ammodoro and receive a bonus 10 bolts

+

That’ll come in handy. I nod and the drone swings in front, its recording indicator on. I pop open my helmet-visor—the marketing types like human faces—and put on my peppiest voice:

+

“Houston’s a mighty fine city, and I hate to see it ripped apart by rifts. I’m here to kill some Kestezai scum before the biggest ever Texas barbeque, and the only way I’ll do that is with Ammodoro bolts. Perfect for blasting rat brains!”

+

The cam cuts to a loading icon, then a green tick animates. The drone drops two bolt packs into my hand before zipping away.

+

I check my Ryft.io feed, skimming through the gigs. The small human-shaped icon in the bottom left flickers, its count dropping as other Ryftrs bail, catching rides out of the blast zone. Destructicus should’ve stayed. They’re all missing out on the potential to make some serious Ryftcoin, but they’re also greatly reducing the risk of being annihilated in a concentrated nuclear strike, so there’s that.

+

I scan the gigs, making my own calculations. Stay or go. The bounty for retrieving civilians flares up. Only one Ryftr’s sticking around.

+

Me.

+

Three thousand Ryftcoins for any Tier 1 civilian rescued. I could really do with that sort of money. My loans are piling up, I just had to upgrade my battle-suit on credit. No battle-suit means no civilian rescues, and that means the heavies will come after me… after they’ve remote disabled my weapons, of course.

+

A gig pops up at a just about realistic range. I accept and a notification appears in my visor:

+
+

Connect to Ryft-Stream to share your heroism.

+

Earn an extra 400 Ryftcoins as well as tips

+

and gifts from the Ryft.io community.

+

I bite my lip, my finger hesitating above the AR button that floats before me. The 400 is nothing, really, but a good performance can mean a lot of viewers and the potential for big Ryftcoinage. Then again, the community is full of trolls and weirdos… last time I live-streamed, they kept goading me, calling me a femmo-soldier wannabe. Like they’d dare say anything to me IRL. I’d kick their asses.

+

Ugh.

+

I take a deep breath and agree to stream. I don’t have to pay attention to what the douchebags say. A new drone whirs in, hovering before me, its red capture light glowing. A countdown appears on the tiny screen and I get ready to talk.

+
+

3

+

2

+

1

+

“Hey Ryftr fans! It’s me, the Full Metal Grandma, your favorite gladiator-for-hire, coming to y’all from beautiful Houston.” I open my arms wide and the drone auto-pans, taking in the scenery of destroyed buildings and burned out cars. “As you can see, the city’s had better days. I hope y’all are rootin’ for me. Army ship’s sailed, and there’s a tactical strike inbound to take care of that rift.”

+

The drone pans, but it stays close to pick up my voice.

+

“Fifty minutes. Think I can rescue some civs?”

+

I glance at the feed, watching as the comments pour in.

+

It’s not bad. Words of encouragement and Ryftmoji, even a few tips topping up my Ryftcoins.

+

Couple of idiots, but not the majority.

+

I break into a run and the drone follows silently, its tiny red eye watching me.

+

Time to put my ass where the money is.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + push the battle-suit faster, careening up the wreckage-strewn streets so quickly I think I’ll fall. My Ryft.io app guides me towards the apartment building where the civ’s meant to be. I had to backtrack after a mini-earthquake caused by the rifts shook the ground so hard that a four-storey apartment building literally collapsed and blocked my path. Took me ages to climb over a pile of rubble to get around it.

+

I came to Houston once, years ago. Family road-trip. Back when I was still part of the family. We stayed in a little motel with a pool, drinking beers, eating takeaway pizza. My daughter wearing little floaties, jumping in again and again, squealing with delight till she came out goose bumped blue and fell asleep cuddled up in my arms.

+

Thinking about it now seems like someone else’s memory. It kind of is.

+

Now Houston’s about to disappear from the map, another casualty of the rift invasion. I think about what’s on the other side, try to imagine the world that the rat-aliens hail from. A lot of people think they messed it up with pollution or war or something, so they’re coming here. Like our planet’s doing so hot.

+

We tried talking to them, when they first showed up. But these aliens didn’t wanna talk. They just want to kill.

+

I’ve heard that a new rift is opening near Minneapolis. If I survive this, I can get up there, make some more coin. I even saw that one’s been detected in Italy! Maybe I could make a vacation of it!

+

Paris would’ve been nicer, I always wanted to go there. It got nuked last month.

+

Maybe I should stop thinking about bullshit and focus on the job.

+

I’m running seriously low on time, but I keep my demeanor upbeat as I keep streaming for my audience. “Textbook FUBAR!” I growl into my mic. “Seventeen minutes till the area’s shutdown… Think I’ll make it?”

+

I keep my eyes on the prize—the shelled-out apartment building at the top of this subdivision—as I listen to my suit autovoice the comments.

+
+

Grandma_plz_hurry!_Dont_die_youre_my_FAVE_RYFTR!!!!!♥♥♥

+

This rift shitz better than any game

+

Let’s watch this old bitch burrrrrrrrrrrrrn

+

Ryftmoji are filling the stream as my audience grows. An RPG. An APC. A bunch of spinning Ryftr logos. They auto-deposit, taking me close to 5,000 Ryftcoins, almost as much as this gig is worth with the surge. I make a payment to the bolt-blaster company and get a little thank you message. I might be running low on time, but at least no drone’s going to take my weapon away!

+

My heart’s pounding. Micro rifts have started popping up, the little ones that advance Kestezai troops come through ahead of the real deal. I move careful, scanning for trouble. I can see the Buffalo Bayou river below. It was never pretty, but now it’s just a stinking vein of trash and junk, oozing slowly out to the gulf.

+

I summon the app and re-check the gig. Target civ is close—and damn if it’s not some rich kid, paying a full 24x bounty! I’ve got hardly any time left, but if I can find the brat and get out with him, I’ll hit jackpot. Seventy-two thousand Ryftcoins! I ain’t seen that kind of money in years. I could easily pay back the battle-suit, take Randy and a few other Ryftrs out for one helluva party, maybe even rent a night in a micro-hotel with a bathtub.

+

And still send most of it back for my granddaughter.

+

Oops—my viewer count’s gone down, what with me quiet and all thinking about shit. “Where the hell is this kid?” I say into my mic. You have to stay engaged, talking all the time, whether you’re running through burnt out hellscapes, shepherding residents into Ryft.io shuttles or shooting bolts into aliens.

+
+

Check that building, Grandma.

+

Bitch gotta get her money!!!! LLOOLLOLOLOLLL

+

Forget the kid, you gotta bail. Shitz gonna get HAWT!!!

+

“Some of y’all think I’m in this for the Ryftcoins,” I say as I stomp towards the building. “And that might be true.” I kick open a door and see a flicker of movement, switching my suit to thermal vision. “But as it happens…” I peer over the edge of a couch “…I’m actually a nice lady that truly cares.”

+

The boy’s there, cowering, all covered in dust. He looks a mess, probably been freaking out wondering if he’s going to get killed by Kestezai or merely blown to smithereens.

+

“Easy son,” I say, reaching my hand down. “I’m here to get you out.”

+

“OMG!” he yells and leaps up, wrapping his arms around me. I haul him upright, the hydraulics of my suit grinding as I check the counter. Nine minutes till shutdown.

+

“All right, all right,” I say, eyeing him up. He’s not a boy, almost a man really, maybe sixteen. Green hair and metallic implants in his skin make him look a bit like a snake. What’s with all the kids trying to look so weird these days?

+
+

Holy sheeeeeeet! Dat Boom$lang!

+

Dat boi woulda been REKT without Grandma

+

I pop my visor. “You a streamstar?” I ask.

+

“I am! I’m Boom$lang, you must know me! Oh, shit, oh, you saved me! I wish I had my stream-gear. I got chased by some aliens, then I lost my stuff. Hey, can I get on your stream?”

+

“We’re kinda short on time, you know?” I say, guiding us outside. I summon the app and order a shuttle, accepting the extra fees and voluntarily adding a super surge to get a shuttle moving fast.

+

Boom$lang’s dancing around, hopping right beside me. He’s buzzed as all hell, but he keeps motioning at me. I do a quick namesearch and my eyes go wide.

+

This kid’s got close to six million fans, he’s a true star.

+

“Hey, let’s do that stream,” I say, and he smiles like, Yeah, you found out who. “Just quickly mind, I want to keep my eye out for the shuttle.”

+

“Sure, sure!” he says, hopping and playing with his hair. “Come over here, let’s get the rift behind me. I mean us! Okay, go.”

+

I sync with his account and activate a joint-stream. “Howdy folks,” I say with a cheesy smile. “They say you should save the best for last, and the Full Metal Grandma always brings the best. Take a look who I found a couple of minutes to midnight.”

+

“Heeeeey! Boom$lang here, coming at ya from beautiful Houston, woot-woot!” He waves, then throws some fingers that mean nothing to me. “Now I know you Slangers told me it was a bad idea to come down to Houston in the middle of a rift flare—Boom$lang, don’t be cray! Boom$lang, stay home and stream for us! Boom$lang, you’re too pretty to die! I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist, I wanted to see it up close! It’s so shiny! So, anyway, the craziest thing…”

+

He prattles on and I keep a steely gaze, make like I’m scanning the terrain as photogenically as I can, but really I’m listening for an update on the Ryft.io shuttle.

+
+

Grandma’s gonna be REKT!

+

Bye Boom$lang, you gonna BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN booooy!

+

TEXAS BBQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

+

Despite the trolling our view count’s exploding, and with it extra Ryftcoins roll in. Ryft.io tells me the shuttle’s coming from the east, coursing in low, and I watch out for its light.

+

We’re down to three minutes and I’d sooner be out of here.

+

The rift pillars are almost touching.

+

Then a light appears south of the rift, growing brighter. The shuttle.

+

“Woot, woot!” Boom$lang shouts. “My ride’s here!”

+

There’s a sudden flash to my nine o’clock, and I turn as a rat-alien steps out of a micro rift. The Kestezai are ugly things, eight feet tall with grey skin like they need some vitamin D. They’ve got long narrow faces with beady red eyes. They wear battle suits with a hole that lets their slimy-scaly-gross prehensile tales reach out. This one is already aiming a heavy weapon.

+

No.

+

The air goes crump as the shuttle takes a shell in its side. Smoke billows and it wobbles a bit, then straightens, still moving towards us.

+

“Was that our ride?” Boom$lang asks, and I can hear the fear in his voice now. Probably not the look he’s going for with his stream, but the reality of an impending nuclear explosion’s obviously hit him.

+

“Down!” I hiss as the alien turns our way.

+

Boom$lang goes face to the floor as a shell zooms above us, roaring past the cam-drone—by the surge in comments I can tell it was close. I get to my knees and aim. The Kestezai comes into view, and I let a full clip of bolts out, feeling a kick of satisfaction as its head explodes in a bloody pulp.

+

“OMG! Like, OMG!” shrieks Boom$lang and starts raving to the stream, slapping me on the back. My throat’s dry and I’m suddenly craving a hard drink even though I ain’t had one in years.

+
+

She’s kickin’ ass till the end, Granny, you’re the true MVP!

+

No way they’re making it out in time

+

Nice knowing you, FMG, you were my fave Ryftr.

+

The shuttle swings up, engines whining, smoke spilling but it still seems operational. As it spins to a halt, I see one side is all ripped open and one engine’s out, smoke puffing from the other. The robot signal comes through choppy:

+
+

Single passenger only. Auto

+

departure in fifteen seconds.

+

Boom$lang’s gawking at me, but I’m staring past him, out west. I know the warhead’s probably already been launched.

+

Just one rider.

+

Shit.

+

There’s no way out from here. Well…

+

The rift sparkles behind me, the pillars almost touching. Already the space between them is shining brighter, a blurry light masking some space behind it.

+

Maybe there is another way out.

+

“Showtime, Boom$lang,” I say, hoisting him up. “Get your ass on that shuttle.”

+

“What? But what about you?”

+

“Shut up and go. Get out of here! And look after yourself.” I practically throw him onboard. “No more dumb shit! Stop coming to see rifts! Y’all should make something of yourself, and you…” Tears well up in my eyes, remembering this whole thing’s being streamed. “…you be good to the people who love you. Now get outta here!”

+

“Grandma!” he shouts, but the shuttle’s already screaming away.

+
+

Grandma, you’re my hero

+

Such a sacrifice!

+

Granny!!! Oh no ☹ I’m so sorry

+

There’s twenty million viewing me live, twenty-five million. This is the big-time. Global celeb level. The Ryftcoins tinkle in so fast it’s like a waterfall of cha-ching. I summon my smart-wallet, direct it to transfer all funds to my daughter’s account. Every last one.

+

A warning chime sounds, my suit alerting me to the news that there’s sixty seconds till the warhead impacts.

+

“Well folks, I guess this is goodbye.”

+

I turn to face the rift, shouldering my weapon and walking tall, getting the drone to record from a low angle so I look huge and silhouetted and super baddass. I get up close and reach out and touch it, a tingle tickling my fingers.

+

A few weeks ago I shared a couple of beers—okay, maybe more than a couple—with Destructicus, and we talked about what might be on the other side. He joked that it couldn’t be much worse than here. Why not be the first to find out?

+

The drone comes up close, focused on my face. I can see the capture of myself through my visor.

+

“Sorry to disappoint all of y’all that wanted me dead, but I’ve got some place to go. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll see me again!”

+

Behind me, the dying light of the day is little more than a red smear on the horizon. That, and a burning white star, growing brighter by the second.

+

I know what I’m doing is stupid. I’ll probably die instantly, or I’ll make it through and the gravity will be super strong and crush me flat, or I’ll land right in the middle of a rat alien party and they’ll tear me apart.

+

But then, there’s a chance.

+

There’s always a chance.

+

And that’s better than dying here.

+

I pump my X87 Exterminator, winking at the cam-drone. “See y’all on the other side!”

+

I take off, running towards the rift, shouting my final message.

+

“Full Metal Grandma out!”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Full Metal Grandma on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Paul Alex Gray

+

+ + Author image of Paul Alex Gray + + + Paul Alex Gray writes linear and interactive fiction starring sentient black holes, wayward sea monsters, curious AIs and more. His work has been published in Nature Futures, Andromeda Spaceways, PodCastle and others. Paul grew up by the beaches of Australia, then traveled the world and now lives in Canada. On his adventures, he has been a startup founder, game designer and mentor to technology entrepreneurs. Chat with him on Twitter @paulalexgray or visit www.paulalexgray.com.

+

© Paul Alex Gray 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was adapted from an image by StudioStoks.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-27/harryette-brickd-belovd.html b/issue-27/harryette-brickd-belovd.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0c3a8925 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/harryette-brickd-belovd.html @@ -0,0 +1,416 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d

+

Daniel Rabuzzi

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d by +
+ + + + +

A + +t that time the City of Sunrise, also known as the City of Clocks and the City of Felicitous Demise, was already ten thousand years old. Many people lived there, among them a printer’s devil named Mauboussin. In the long summer twilights, all the apprentices met at the square of the fountain—the one dedicated to the god of menhaden and shad—to drink beer, eat smoked eel, and play a game involving a club and a small leather ball. On that night, Mauboussin hit the ball over the fountain into the brackish pool beyond. As the rules required, he had to fetch the ball himself.

+

Mauboussin fished out of the pool not the ball but a dog-whelk. Noticing something golden glistening among the whelk’s corrugated whirls, the ’prentice sat down at the foot of the fountain to investigate. Embedded in the whelk’s shell was a ring, which Mauboussin pried free.

+

He examined the ring, forgetting the ball, the beer, even the other ’prentices and their talk about the women they planned to meet later that evening. He no longer heard the gulls overhead or the other sounds of the square. All the voices of the city dwindled for him, even the ever-present sigh of the ocean’s wind around the spires of the cathedrals. In the fading light, Mauboussin could just make out words inscribed on the inside of the band.

+

“Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d,” he read.

+

A woman approached him, walking from the other side of the fountain. She was no older than Mauboussin, but wore a silk dress that had not been in fashion since the days of his great-grandmother at the very least. Mauboussin jumped to his feet.

+

“Mademoiselle, you startle me!” he said.

+

The woman said, “I am very sorry, sir, but you it is who startled me with your call.” Her accent was odd.

+

“I didn’t call you,” said Mauboussin.

+

“But you did, and there is the proof of it,” she said, pointing to the ring in Mauboussin’s hand.

+

He shook his head and wondered if she were mad. He could hear, as if from leagues away or from under water, his comrades across the square calling for the ball.

+

“Who are you?” he said.

+

“Harryette,” she replied.

+

Mauboussin shivered and held out the ring. “Then this belongs to you, I reckon.”

+

“Yes,” she said. “But you shall keep it, for that is a term of my rescue.”

+

She is mad, he thought. He turned to go but stopped, remembering that he had found the ring embedded in the shell of a dog-whelk. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know anything about a rescue, and I wouldn’t be much good as a rescuer even if I did. Allow me to return this ring to you and take my leave.”

+

“Don’t you know my story?” she asked. “Everyone does, though I sense from your accent and your mode of dress that you are a foreigner here, so perhaps you are unaware…”

+

“What?” said Mauboussin. “Me, a foreigner! I’ve been polite in not saying it, but you’re the one with the accent and the funny clothes. Sorry, not meaning disrespect, but since you said what you said. As for me, well, I’m born and bred here in the city.”

+

Harryette looked skeptical. Mauboussin shrugged and said, “It’s like this, Mademoiselle… Harryette… I’ve never heard of you, nor has anyone else ’round here.”

+

Seeing the look of anger and alarm on her face, Mauboussin added, “I’m sorry to have to say that, but the truth is better than poison, even if it sometimes tastes the same, as we say in the city.” His friends’ voices came to him through the elongated distance, like flies buzzing in a bottle. “I really must be going,” he said. He held out the ring again. She did not take it.

+

“Wait,” Harryette said. “Please, I am at a loss… you must help me… the ring found you, so you have no choice…”

+

Mauboussin shivered again. “Enough,” he said.

+

“Not enough. The finding of the ring compels you to take me to the Queen, to perform the three tasks necessary to gain my release.”

+

Mauboussin laughed. “Really, now the joke has gone as far as it ought! You are a good play-actor, I must say. Who put you up to this? Darton the baker’s flour boy? No, must be Nucian, the goldsmith’s whelp! Or is this an elvish prank?”

+

Harryette said, “Sir… I don’t know those you name, and I don’t consort with elves.”

+

“Regardless, you know full well that I can’t take you to the Queen, because there is no Queen.”

+

Mauboussin was startled to see tears start in her eyes, glistening in the even-light. “Now you it is who go too far,” she said. “No Queen? Do we not live in the City of Sunrise?”

+

“Precisely, my lady… there’s been no queen here for two hundred years. The last one lost her head to an ax in the Grand Square of the Reliquaries.”

+

Harryette swayed. Mauboussin reached out to steady her, and startled again. She was as cold as the grave. “We’ve been a republic these past two centuries,” he whispered. “As you must know.”

+

Harryette slipped out of his grasp. With a sob and the rustle of silk she darted around the fountain. Mauboussin called out and stepped after her, but she was gone. He stood blinking in the near-dark, looking around, as his companions came up to him.

+

“Here he is!” Nucian the goldsmith’s apprentice said. “Well, Mauboussin, what are you playing at?”

+

“I’m sorry, lads,” said Mauboussin. “But that woman, the one in the old-fashioned dress, detained me.”

+

“What are you talking about?” said Nucian, laughing. “We saw no woman, neither in new weeds nor old, and trust us cousin, we recognize a woman when we see one!”

+

Mauboussin said, “No, please, I’m serious. You must have seen her. She stood right there where you stand now. She spoke with me.”

+

“We saw you talking to the air and waving your arms about, didn’t we boys? Thought maybe you were in a spot of trouble.” Nucian slapped his cheek playfully. “What did you do? Drink out of the fountain? Brackish water gives one visions they say. Or maybe you’ve just had too much beer!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ucian and the others teased Mauboussin about the “ghost lover” for a day or two, then moved on to other sport and forgot the incident. Mauboussin said nothing more about it but thought of nothing else. He wondered if perhaps he had been drunk, but then he pulled out the ring and knew he had not been. Surreptitiously he returned to the fountain every evening for two weeks, but Harryette was never there.

+

On the fifteenth night she came back. Mauboussin had returned from another fruitless vigil at the fountain. He sat in his room under the eaves in the print shop, holding the ring to the light of one candle.

+

“Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d,” he read for the hundredth time, and this time once again aloud.

+

“Yes,” she said softly.

+

Mauboussin jumped. “Oh, damn! You scared me half to… Where did you come from? How did you get in here?”

+

“I don’t know myself,” she said, sitting across the table from him. “But here I am, nevertheless.”

+

They looked at each other for a minute in the candlelight before speaking again. They could hear each other’s breathing under the sigh of the wind outside.

+

“Tell me your story,” he said. He looked into her eyes. He could not tell their color but he did not care so long as he could look into them.

+

“You really do not know, do you?” Harryette said. “So I really am lost.”

+

“I do not, truly,” Mauboussin said. “And I have thought of nothing else since we met.”

+

She smoothed out the folds of her dress and then refashioned the knot of her hair. Mauboussin watched as a chick watches the world for the first time. Harryette began:

+

“Some time ago—in the Years of the Crane, I think, not long after the war with the Jessicambrians, but my memory is fogged—I was like everyone else, happy and sad by measure, first a child, then a young woman. My father is—was—a merchant, not the wealthiest but not the poorest either. We lived in Dulse Street, do you know it? By the Splayed Cathedral and the Library?”

+

Mauboussin nodded. “The Old Library, we call it now. They built another one, the New Library naturally, over by the Kelp-Walk and Algernon’s Way.” He did not add that the New Library was over a hundred years old.

+

“Ah good,” Harryette said. She smiled. Mauboussin existed now in that smile.

+

“I read too many books,” she continued. “Not a flaw in principle, of course, but one that led me to dangerous conclusions. As a result of my reading, I fancied that I should marry a prince, specifically the oldest son of… our Queen. My parents tried to dissuade me. ‘Don’t be daft,’ they said. ‘Know your station. Aim for the son of the dealer in sailcloth, or the shipwright’s son over on Herring Close.’ But no, I was headstrong and would not listen. I must have the Prince or die. Alas, if only I had died instead of what befell me.”

+

No, thought Mauboussin. For then I would not have met you.

+

Harryette looked at Mauboussin as if she could hear his thoughts. She touched her hair and went on.

+

“I insisted on being presented at court, and in the receiving line at the great ball I said to the Queen, ‘I will marry your son, the Prince. Tell me what I must do to have this happen.’ Oh, for the ambition of foolish girls! The entire room fell silent. The Queen smiled, a smile to freeze your heart, and said, ‘Oh you will, will you? I applaud your forthrightness, though I am not fond of insolence. Let me consider what is to be done. Come back to me in a fortnight for your reply.’”

+

A tear ran down Harryette’s face.

+

“Oh for the cruelty of Queens,” she said, so low that Mauboussin barely heard her. “She sat on her throne, surrounded by her ministers, courtiers and soldiers, when I came back with my mother and father. I have never been in a room with a ceiling so far from the ground. ‘Well, here is the girl who demands to be married to my son. Not any girl but the daughter of… what is it you do, sir? Oh yes, a wholesaler in tar and rope and other ship supplies. Honorable, I’m sure.’ She smiled another one of her tiger smiles and the court laughed.

+

“I realized then that the books I read had played me false. ‘Your Majesty, I have reconsidered and understand now the inappropriate nature of my request,’ I said. But it was too late. The Queen had her mouse and was going to make an example of it. ‘No, no, my dear,’ she purred. ‘You shall have my son in marriage. Provided only that you prove your love first, in a small way, a tiny, inconsequential way.’ My parents and I bowed to the ground but no amount of bowing would have softened the Queen’s heart at that point. ‘To gain my son’s hand, you must find a champion who loves you as much as you profess to love my son. I will ask your champion to perform three tasks, three simple tasks, and if he succeeds, then you shall marry my son. If he does not, then you shall not.’”

+

Harryette paused and looked away from Mauboussin. The printer’s apprentice lost himself in the vision of the nape of her neck.

+

“‘How will I find a champion?’ I asked the Queen. ‘Oh, you won’t,’ she said. ‘He will find you.’ She held out to me then a golden ring, yes, the ring there on the table. ‘This is your engagement ring,’ said the Queen, and all the court laughed. ‘See what is inscribed on it? I will send this ring out into the world, and whoever finds it will be your champion. Until then we will find suitable accommodations for your wait.’ And with that she had me… had me taken from my parents…”

+

Harryette was crying too hard to go on. The candle burned low. Mauboussin came around to the other side of the table and knelt beside Harryette. He put a hand on her shoulder.

+

“Warm…” she said. “You are so warm.”

+

He held her until the candle went out. In the dark, he heard her breathing slow. Her hair was in his face. “What happened next?” he asked.

+

She said nothing for a long time, and then replied, “The Queen had me put in a tower, all alone with nothing but trunks of books. She had the tower bricked up, doors, windows, everything. The last thing I heard was the sound of the wind from the ocean, and then nothing, just silence and the echo of my own breathing. By her arts the Queen contrived that I not suffer hunger or thirst, and she caused there to be light for me to read, and read, and read… Ten thousand books mocked me in that tower, though they also consoled me in the hourless hours and monthless months.”

+

Mauboussin remembered with pride that the printers’ guild had been foremost in the rebellion that had ended the royal dynasty two hundred years earlier. He put his lips on her neck, a coal placed on marble. She sighed and moved until her lips met his.

+

At length he said, “I am reluctant no more but willing to be your champion. Only without a Queen, let alone the Queen, we are in a bind to be sure.”

+

Harryette kissed him again. “I have thought on this since the day we met. Here is what we must do: we must find a witch—there are still witches in the city, aren’t there?—and seek her advice. All spells have a lifting, even if their makers are dead.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he next day Mauboussin and Harryette went to the Courtyard of the Larvae to speak with the witch who lived there. No one ever admitted that they visited this, or any, witch, yet witches tended to live in large, well-built houses and dine off something better than wood or pewter, so clearly trade was brisk in arcane advice. The witch Mauboussin visited had a silver doorknocker and was drinking a very expensive wine from a crystal goblet.

+

“Oh yes,” said the witch, when Mauboussin finished his story. “I know this tale. In fact, dear Harryette, I know it very well.”

+

Harryette, who was sitting next to Mauboussin, looked up as if she’d been spied upon.

+

“Yes, my dear, of course I can see you, I’m a witch,” said the witch, shaking her head. “All those years in the bricked tower certainly did not sharpen your wits.”

+

Mauboussin said, “Hold on there, Madam, that’s no way to treat—”

+

“Oh, simmer down, the two of you,” said the witch. “It’s just this sort of impetuous ignorance that got her in trouble in the first place.”

+

The witch got up and paced the room.

+

Mauboussin asked, “How did the ring get into a whelk’s shell?”

+

“Least important part of the story,” said the witch, shaking her head with a snort. “Who knows? We’re dealing with magic here, boy, something knotted and gnarled. Queen told the ring to hide itself, to not be found, and the ring did a fairly good job of that, seeing as how it went unfound for centuries.”

+

The witch pulled down several books from a bookcase. No one spoke for almost a quarter-hour as the witch skimmed rapidly through the volumes. The wind brought the smell of the shore into the house.

+

“As I thought,” said the witch at last, with her finger on a line in a book covered in sealskin. “Twisted and knotted indeed! Removing a spell when its maker is dead is no easy matter. There’s a heavy price to pay, and I do not mean my fee for telling you this. Look!”

+

“We can’t read this language,” Harryette and Mauboussin said.

+

“Of course you can’t,” said the witch, “silly of me, took twenty years to learn this myself. Listen closely then, children, for here’s the spell required to undo the curse laid upon Harryette. Usual bits about the full moon and walking widdershins in a graveyard, scattering petals of salt-rimed rose flowers, quite a lot of chanting in a prelapsarian tongue, and so on. I can help you with all that. But the potage you must offer the particular being who controls this sort of spell, that’s a different matter, I’m afraid.”

+

“What do you mean?” cried Harryette and Mauboussin.

+

“Ingredients are hard to find, one in particular,” said the witch. She read directly from the book. “Ten fingers freshly cut from the living hands of a human.”

+

“What! Why?”

+

The witch looked sharply at her two visitors and said, “Why? You seek advice on magic and ask ‘why’? The rules of the Old Spells have roots in the underworld and a grammar written in the whelming-heaven. Who are we to understand, let alone question? Now, do you want my help or not?”

+

Mauboussin put his hand in Harryette’s. He believed that the coldness of her was abated a little when he touched her. He opened his mouth, but Harryette spoke before he did.

+

“I won’t have blood spilled to save me,” she said. “I may not have learned much in the years of my imprisonment but that much I have always known.”

+

The witch nodded. “You are wiser than I gave you credit for. Spilling the blood of the unwilling is an evil. The Queen must have done so to create the spell she has trapped you in. Unfortunately, blood requires blood, that’s the logic of curses.”

+

Mauboussin stood up. He held out his hands and said, “Take my fingers, take my hands.”

+

Harryette stood up as well but stumbled as she did, “No, no, sweet Mauboussin! That is more than I could ask!”

+

“You did not ask, my love, I offered,” said Mauboussin. “Blood needs blood. This is the only way.”

+

The witch had seen many things in her long life, but never this. She said, “You move my heart! I will do what I can to make the operation as painless as possible.”

+

More than that, the witch thought deep into the darkness of a month’s nights about how to replace Mauboussin’s fingers. She consulted books written in tongues long unused, she spoke with a wizened head she kept in a jar under her bed, she whispered into a crack in the attic and listened to the voice that whispered back.

+

“Mauboussin,” she said. “Do you by chance know a good goldsmith?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n the night of the next full moon, the witch took Mauboussin to a graveyard in one of the oldest parts of the city, accompanied by Nucian the goldsmith’s apprentice and (unseen by Nucian) a silent Harryette. The witch made a small fire, hung a cauldron above it from a tripod, and, after many other preparations, she drew a fearsomely ordinary looking blade and asked Mauboussin if he was ready.

+

“Yes,” said Mauboussin, looking at Harryette. He knelt down and placed his left hand on top of a tomb, thumb and fingers spread wide. Harryette held Mauboussin from behind, clasped him so hard that his bones felt like ice.

+

Harryette whispered, “Oh, I love you so.”

+

Nucian shouted, “Cousin, don’t do this!”

+

Mauboussin said, “Brother, I must!”

+

The witch, in two deft movements—chunch, chunch!—severed Mauboussin’s fingers and thumb. Mauboussin cried out; Harryette staunched the gushing hand.

+

“The other,” said the witch, and they repeated the process. She bound the ten fingers together with silver thread, as if they were asparagus, and threw them in the bubbling pot. She chanted for a long time. Something under the earth chanted in counterpoint. Groaning filled the air to match Mauboussin’s.

+

Suddenly the chanting and groaning ceased. Flames shot up from the cauldron and then the cauldron melted, dousing the fire beneath.

+

“Quick!” said the witch. “The other spell, the other spell!”

+

Nucian gasped, “She’s real then, this fantasy lover of yours!”

+

Mauboussin, writhing, grunted, “You can see Harryette?”

+

Nucian nodded.

+

“Enough chit-chat!” said the witch. “Now, the other spell!”

+

Nucian brought out a leather folder, untied it, and opened it with trembling hands. On the black leather were ten golden fingers, with perfect joints and fingernails, glistening in the moonlight. The gold was elvish, from the witch’s hoard, made fast by a spell she cast, but the workmanship was Nucian’s.

+

“My masterpieces,” said Nucian.

+

The witch sang something that sounded like springtime, and sprinkled tincture of terebinth on the fingers.

+

Mauboussin passed out for a minute and, when he came to, he put his arms around Harryette without opening his eyes. She was as warm as he was.

+

“Open your eyes,” she said.

+

Mauboussin did. The first things he saw were Harryette’s eyes, which were brown. She looked down at his hands. He looked down too. He had ten golden fingers, warm and alive and perfectly matched (except for their color) with his hands.

+

Mauboussin held up his hands to the moonlight, laughing and crying. He held Harryette close, marveling at her warmth. He pulled in Nucian, promising the goldsmith’s apprentice free beer for the rest of his life. He tried to pull in the witch, who resisted with a smile, and stood a little ways off as witches are wont to do.

+

“Come,” she said. “This is no proper place for celebration. Best not to tempt those who chant from beneath.”

+

Later that night the witch took her leave from the three young people in front of her house.

+

“How can we ever thank you?” said Harryette.

+

“Hmmm, you should have learned more in that bricked prison of yours,” said the witch, but not ungently. “Thanks is not my due, payment is.”

+

“We’ll pay for the melted pot,” said Nucian.

+

Mauboussin shook his head. “That’s not what she means. Is it?”

+

“No,” said the witch. “One of you, at least, is learning. But, come, I will not spoil such a successful evening by rendering my bill. As I said, your sacrifice moved my heart. Witnessed love mutes the concerns of commerce. Rest assured: I will not saddle you with a debt you cannot meet.”

+

So the three young people went home. Everyone marveled at Mauboussin’s golden hands, but received very vague answers to their questions about how he got such beautiful fingers. He was the inspiration for a fashion in the city that year for gloves made with gold-embossed fingers. Mauboussin and Harryette were married later that month. Mauboussin placed on her finger a golden ring inscribed to “Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d”. Nucian was the best man. Whenever any of the other ’prentices asked Nucian where Mauboussin had found such a smart, beautiful wife, Nucian only shrugged and said, “With her nose in a book.”

+

The witch declined the invitation to the wedding. What she asked in payment for her help is the subject of another story.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Daniel Rabuzzi

+

+ + Author image of Daniel Rabuzzi + + + Daniel A. Rabuzzi has had two novels, four short stories and ten poems published since 2006, all in speculative genres. He studied folklore, anthropology and history—and lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France—which has influenced his writing. He lives in NYC with his artistic partner and spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills. For more, please see his website, www.danielarabuzzi.com/

+

© Daniel Rabuzzi 2021 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Jasmine Carter and Fuzail Ahmad.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-27/i-have-no-wings-and-i-must-fly.html b/issue-27/i-have-no-wings-and-i-must-fly.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..de5a8bd1 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/i-have-no-wings-and-i-must-fly.html @@ -0,0 +1,465 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + I Have No Wings and I Must Fly — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

I Have No Wings and I Must Fly

+

Kyle E. Miller

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for I Have No Wings and I Must Fly by +
+ + + + +

T + +he asparagoose dreamed of a twelve-spoked wheel in the sky. It was motionless. In the dream, he remembered the words each spoke spoke and what they stood for: the four seasons, early, mid, and late of each. But what were the spaces between? There was life falling darkward and then the rise of light—summer—where he was born and where he would die.

+

Summer, where he woke.

+

He swelled skyward for an instant, chasing the wheel, coaxing it to turn again, and then he fell back to the ground. Nothing more than a leap and bound.

+

He had no wings.

+

He ruffled what he did have: pale green spears running to pale violet at the roots with emerald leaves at the tips. Stalks, stems, but no feathers, no wings.

+

Once, the asparagoose thought, once he had had wings. Or was it that he would have them in the future, all at once, suddenly, as if in a dream? Once upon a time? It was all getting mixed up in his head again, not the clear cool draught of dreams, but the earthy warm mirage of the going-nowhere world.

+

Nowhere but here, endless summer as far as the asparagoose could see.

+

He was alone on a windswept plain, a green and violet birdbush among the ragged black stones and scrubby briars with flowers like stars made of butter. All alone, and yet he once dreamed of a multitude—a flock—and others he called friend, lover, parent. A mother and a father to teach him how to fly and where and when. There was a right time and a wrong time to be on the move, but, not knowing which was when, he was stuck.

+

A sudden sound like the breaking of branches shook the flock from his mind.

+

Honk! he cried. Honk! Honk!

+

A wagon trundled over stone and bramble, bouncing wildly, out of control and nearly careening into the asparagoose’s tail-spears, before taking a turn at the last moment and missing him by a beak’s length. He watched something bounce and fall from the body of the wagon, and then the whole thing was gone and riding recklessly into the distance.

+

Honk!

+

The asparagoose waddled over to the flyaway cargo. On the ground among shards of black rock he saw a little creature no bigger than his head. It had six tiny arms, each with its own three-fingered hand, a compact body like that of the beetle he had accidentally eaten once, and big eyes reflecting colors from another world. The thing looked sleep-starved and bruised, broken by its fall. The asparagoose nudged it with his beak and then gripped it gently and lifted it to its feet. He noticed then that it wore a backpack filled with shoes, tiny iron tools, and scraps of colorful fabric.

+

“My shoes,” it cried suddenly, “where are my shoes?”

+

The creature stumbled and scrambled about, and the asparagoose wondered if perhaps it had lost its mind during the fall, or if it was merely blind. Regardless, he began searching too, and there they were: a tiny pair of scarlet shoes, toes pointed toward the sun.

+

Honk!

+

“I’ve lost it,” the creature said, pushing his feet into the shoes. “Hitchhiking, I’ve made my way across summer to see if there’s any other season, and no, not one! None but summer and its long dead heat. I am sleepless. I lost my sleep in winter, and then lost winter.”

+

He must have been asleep a long time, the asparagoose thought. He had never seen winter.

+

The creature seemed suddenly to notice the asparagoose, and he pulled something from his backpack and pointed it at him. It was a shoehorn carved from black antler. “Carry me,” the creature said. “Fly me away from here. Winter must be somewhere, and with my wits and your wings we can find it!”

+

The asparagoose shook his spears and lowered his head, wagging it side to side. He let out a mournful honk.

+

“You cannot fly? Ah! Not feathers, but foliage! Poor twisted sport, you should not be.” The creature came up to him and petted his neck, where tiny purple-gray leaves grew to cover his pale skin. “They say asparagus is the plant a bird won’t land on, but they never said it wouldn’t land on a bird. Two dishes in one: the main and a side. Convenience burlesqued. What sick folk there once were.”

+

Honk!

+

“What’s that? A saddle? We could fashion one and make as much progress by foot as by wing, given the time. You’re a wise bird.” The creature brought out its tools and began fishing about the field for supplies. “Itinerant cobbler, shoemaker, repairer of soles. I’m the Shoefly, pleased to meet you, and I presume you are the Asparagoose. The one and only, as I see it.”

+

And the Asparagoose felt suddenly enlarged as the little bubble at the beginning of his title popped into a tall and impressive point. He lifted his head to the sky and honked in pride. No one had ever given him a name. He had no mother, no father, no lover to do so. He was exalted. He waddled circles around the Shoefly, busy at work.

+

“I make shoes for fun and for friends, but I can make a saddle. Why not? Is it not a sort of shoe itself?”

+

When the Shoefly was finished, he tossed the contraption across the Asparagoose’s back and climbed aboard. The Asparagoose, uncomfortable at first, shifted his foliage, shook his back, and settled into it. He could get used to this. It almost felt good, like a hug that kept giving.

+

The Shoefly brandished his shoe horn and pointed it in the direction the wagon had gone. “Onward faithful steed! A steed is not a slave, but a friend and confidant. We will follow the wagon yet strike our own path. Onward! To any season but summer!”

+

And so they decamped and departed. The Asparagoose had never left the field, except in dream. He had only needed someone to tell him when to move on. He suddenly felt as his brethren must have felt before flight: that spark of expectation, the buoyant joy of the yet-to-come. He thought he might just lift off the earth anyway, wings or not.

+

For the first time in his life, the Asparagoose had hope.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he windswept plain gave way to finer fields, and the Shoefly kept the journey light with story.

+

“I remember fondly the days of my cocoonhood,” he would begin. “Sweet blue-green days full of the flow of my own fluids, the pump and tide of my heart, the silence of my thoughts. I fell in love with myself all over again. I felt a stirring in my breast, the flowering of new colors, and then—ha!—I was born anew! I resurrected myself and the world with it. Grass never seemed so green.”

+

Or: “Titan and Auberon were a two-headed giant who shared a body and, perhaps, a soul. Titan was certain they had two separate souls, Auberon thought they shared one, as they did the body. They argued, fought, and Auberon’s head was cut open by a stone. He stopped talking, and Titan wept for the loss, and wanted nothing more than to be wrong about everything and follow his friend and sibling back to the wheel. But then, just when he thought all was lost, a new voice spoke with Auberon’s mouth—a vessel filled, the wheel turns—and Titan knew they had both been wrong all along.”

+

And the Asparagoose listened intently, clucking and honking at the best moments, all the while navigating the landscape of summer. They passed the rust river, running to sludge at the bank. They passed the smoking oak, forests of bird-eating poppies, wild cat-bean fields, and the great drone graveyard, final resting place for all the soulless husks of every winged insect ever made by humankind.

+

“Sometimes I feel old,” the Shoefly said suddenly. “As if I’ve lived a thousand summers and the only thing left for me to experience in life is death.” He knocked his scarlet shoes together. “Do you remember your cocoon, Asparagoose? Er, egg? Womb? Seed?”

+

The Asparagoose was sure there had been no sweet nourishing days of cocoonhood as the Shoefly had described. He once dreamed of a seed that became a crown for a queen, but there were three others left crownless, and he had awakened feeling restless and ashamed. No, he had no knowledge of his birth, only a vague sensation in his leaves that something had gone wrong, that he had been robbed, or else that his very existence had robbed something from the epic of creation. Though he had a soul, and knew it, his was a body that should not be. He knew something of how Titan and Auberon must have felt.

+

Honk, he mourned.

+

“Do not answer,” the Shoefly said, patting the Asparagoose’s back foliage. “Don’t answer, don’t think. Foolish questions. Don’t make of yourself a specimen. You’re a fine steed and a fine bird, and there’s no need for you to justify your existence to me, or even to the King of Summer himself!”

+

It seemed that the Shoefly knew that all was not right with the Asparagoose, too. His head hung lower, yet he still noticed the darkening of the world before the Shoefly did. It was a slow closing in of the walls, the ceilings, and the floors. The carpet suddenly rolled up like a toad’s tongue and sent him tripping along.

+

The Shoefly fell from his back. “The earth is turning against us!” he cried.

+

It’s not the earth, the Asparagoose thought with a shiver.

+

»Welcome to the All Seasons Inn« a voice said from somewhere, or nowhere.

+

“When did outside become inside?”

+

»Please make your way back to the front desk. All lost guests please make your way back to the front desk. Follow the yellow thread.«

+

Too much happened at once, was always happening at once: the Shoefly shouted and asked the bodiless voice about the thread while the Asparagoose—trying to ignore a moment’s daydream: a brief flash of yellow foliage, another season, his own spears gone bright *amber—*spotted it. A golden thread, a sun ray distilled, ran along the ground before them. It was one thread among many in a tapestry of blues and violets, greens and browns, oranges and luminous reds, but the Asparagoose grabbed the Shoefly and followed the yellow fiber trail.

+

The desk sat at the end of a long wooden hall. Portraits of ghosts hung on the walls. A chandelier threw rosy light on the floorboards. Seen more closely, the desk was a black box full of wires and chains, growing them as if they were its twigs and leaves. The maze of cables connected to something behind the desk, a presence no larger than a whisper, or four. Four whirling whispers, and they wore colors like wind-tossed gowns: jadepink, goldgreen, blackorange, and whiteblue.

+

“Don’t!” the Shoefly said. “No closer.” But the Asparagoose disobeyed. There was only one way out, and that was in.

+

»Welcome to the All Seasons Inn.« The voices shifted, twisted, dropped in pitch and volume. »Checking in?«

+

Honk!

+

And then rose again: »How would you like your pillows? Feather or foam?«

+

“Uh…” The Shoefly tapped on the Asparagoose’s back and whispered, “Foam? We should say foam.”

+

Honk!

+

»And do you want a lake view?«

+

That would be the third of many questions: twelve questions and then twelve again for each of those. The Shoefly answered as best he could, with the patience of a master craftsman, and only an occasional twitch of the eye. The Asparagoose gave his opinion when he cared to, a cluck or honk, but the whole process was beyond him.

+

“Just give us a room!” the Shoefly said, finally losing his temper. “Any one will do, let’s just be done with this!”

+

Chains shook, the wooden desk groaned like branches in the wind, and the cables glowed bright pink. »We were not made for this« the voices moaned.

+

The Asparagoose shuddered. He was afraid, and he didn’t know why. Something about the desk disturbed him, reminded him of something, the wires and chains and the tiny ball that now descended from the whispers and glided along the chains, gathering speed, losing lustre, trying to find a place of rest, a nadir, a home.

+

They’ve gone insane, he thought. Bound to bureaucracy, to tedium and mundanity, they had lost themselves. They were made for something more.

+

»I think we can find this soul a room.«

+

“We’re two souls!” the Shoefly cried, but it was too late.

+

»You’ll be in room 857463C. The keys will appear in your beak at the moment foretold. Please follow the yellow thread to your room.«

+

“Riddles and a number too long to remember!” the Shoefly cried. He pointed his shoe horn at the four whispers and howled. “I will see this to the end! A life well lived is the best revenge!”

+

Honk!

+

But there was no yellow thread, only a confusion of colors, and as the Shoefly put his heels to the Asparagoose, he followed the only corridor he could, which shortly split into many, a labyrinth without doors or exits. The Asparagoose began to run, making fast for the depths of the hotel, the dizzying patterns of the particolored carpet beneath his feet almost as easy to get lost within as the corridors themselves.

+

When at last the Asparagoose stopped to take stock, the front desk was lost to the distance behind. The Shoefly patted his neck. “Where are we, my goose?”

+

The Asparagoose shook his head and dipped his beak to the ground. He didn’t know. It was getting to be too much for him. Was life always so complicated?

+

“Should we go on? I leave it to you, fair steed. This is no season I have ever seen. And yet, should we not find winter, and my sleep, in the All Seasons Inn? Where else but here?” The Shoefly scratched his head and then froze, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. “Look!”

+

The Asparagoose looked and saw nothing, but he felt a presence, four of them, and he was filled with an urgency, an impossible itch to flee, to take flight any way he could, away from the jaws of a beast or the hunter’s nocked arrow.

+

»Welcome to the All Seasons Inn. You’re here to stay.«

+

The voice from nowhere boomed and echoed. The Shoefly covered his ears. The Asparagoose honked and wiggled his neck wildly.

+

»Welcome to the disease of time. We were not meant for this. Here are the teeth of the lion hydra. The flaming crane. The ninth corridor. The grand finale.«

+

“They’ve lost their minds!” the Shoefly shouted, and the Asparagoose began to run, as if gathering speed for take-off, but he was going the other direction: down and down and deeper into the past.

+

They entered a great hollow hall. “Hullo?” the Shoefly called, but there wasn’t even an echo of a reply. The dimensions were askew. The place wasn’t as empty as it appeared to be. Katydid caryatids held up the ceiling, four legs raised, two lowered, and their wings made a vault above where hushed whispers exchanged secrets.

+

“This place is old,” the Shoefly said. “These wingeds should be my brethren, but I don’t know them by name or wing. Perhaps there are no names for them: new species or ancient ones, forgotten or yet to be remembered.

+

“Look! Birds!” He pointed toward a corner bright with painted wings and pale yellow beaks that gaped as if begging for worms and grubs. The Asparagoose had none and didn’t know where to find some, seeing as how the floor was as stoney as the ceiling. He missed the open sky, even if he could only dream of joining it.

+

Then the voice from nowhere shouted again, screamed, a tortured blur of voices: »This area is off limits. Please make your way back to the front desk. Please make my way. Please make way for the Queen. The Queens.«

+

The Asparagoose trumpeted a warning and threw himself into the trap of beaks, the Shoefly protesting all the way. The birds bit at his foliage, tearing whole leaves free, and the Shoefly lost his shoehorn in the greedy beak of an oriole, but then they were through and outside again.

+

They found themselves out from the ancient cavernous hall and surrounded by a meadow. But the meadow too was old. The wildflowers had given up their petals, the grasses were dull and sere, and the lone tree was a puzzle of twigs and boughs. The Asparagoose clucked and shook his spears, shaking loose a baby bird that stumbled into the dead grasses and disappeared.

+

“Outside, inside, and out again. One begins to wonder if one ever left the cocoon in the first place.” The Shoefly stood up in the saddle and shivered. “It’s cold. An antique shrine to the King of Winter? An egg laid by the Queen herself? There’s more space inside than out.” He paused. “Or was it the other way around?”

+

The Asparagoose shook his head: he didn’t know about all that, but he knew he was getting hungry. They hadn’t eaten for days. He pecked at the cold dead ground, but there were no seeds or scrumptious shoots, no berries or greenery. He had wanted to be outside, but not like this, not this dead realm with no name. Was this winter? Would the Shoefly find his sleep here? He thought of the time he dreamed that desires had a way of being fulfilled in such a way that made you never want anything again.

+

The Shoefly shivered, shaking the whole saddle. “I think I know where we are now. Some mad sprawling tavern grown by the cosmos itself. This too is but a part of it. A room for every soul, and a slumber from which you will not wake. A maze, a tapestry of time, and we’ve lost the thread. We need a clue.”

+

The Asparagoose didn’t have a clue (whatever that was), but he did have an eye for detail, a special way of seeing things as they are. Alone in that now-faraway rocky field, he had spent seasons watching the world. He had watched the sky, the flowers, the rocks, mosses, insects, beasts, birds, winds, storms, clouds, rains, and stars until he knew them, until he dreamed them. He saw them for what they were, as so few now could.

+

There in the meadow, he saw the clouded sky (four whispers circling there, pursuing one another, pursuing them), he saw this season he had never seen, and he saw the well in the center of the meadow.

+

“Huh,” the Shoefly said. “Was that always there?”

+

Honk!

+

The Asparagoose leaped onto the rim of the well, saw the creamy yellow light within, and stepped off the edge.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he well was as deep as time, and they descended.

+

The darkness doubled, and then there was light. The air burned gold. During the fall, the Shoefly had become unseated from the saddle. The Asparagoose bent his neck to pluck him up, but the Shoefly was rigid with fright or amazement. And then the Asparagoose saw the cocoons hanging from the ceiling like stalactites, stiff and deflated, and knew it was both.

+

“Come here, sweet dreamlets.”

+

The Shoefly spun on his heels. “Who goes there?”

+

“Spin us a pretty dream, sweets. Weave us a bright little spiral in the dark.”

+

“Double the dreams, double the dreams!”

+

“Crack them open. Crack their egg heads and suck up the scrambled dreams.”

+

The Shoefly jumped onto the Asparagoose’s back and shouted. “The only skulls that shall be cracked are yours! Show yourselves or the goose will honk and unhinge you from this realm!”

+

Laughter lit the room. The Asparagoose saw the creatures first. They clung to the pitted stone rafters above, their slender legs hooked and twisted to the vault. They had six legs as well as great golden wings, not the wings of birds, but moths, full of scales that fluttered down as they shifted and shook.

+

The Shoefly sneezed. “We need light. More light.” Then he yawned.

+

The Asparagoose honked a warning at the creatures above. He had no light and no way to make one, but he could see what the Shoefly could not: faces beyond the cloud of golden scales. Of beautiful men with golden green eyes, hair like the petals of dandelions, dusted with pollen gold. But their bodies were grotesque and bloated, their legs too thin and attached the wrong way, their tongues too large to fit inside their mouths and instead coiled like proboscises.

+

“You’re both getting tired.”

+

“Sleep, sleep.”

+

“How soundlessly you will sleep. How restfully, how softly.”

+

“Look,” one of them said, crawling along its perch and pointing at the ground. It had something between its legs, long and purple, draped over the rafter like a length of rolled dough. “Look. Pillows. Sleepy things.”

+

“Blankets. Books.”

+

The Asparagoose followed the pointing fingers. There were pillows piled in the corner, covered in the golden scales of their wings, scintillant and dreamy. Silk blankets, thick boring books, and even a kettle of steaming tea.

+

“Bedtime stories,” the Shoefly said, yawning. “They’re awfully thoughtful.”

+

Honk! Honk!

+

“They want to devour our dreams,” the Shoefly said. “Suck up our souls. They’ll leave us a body and nothing more. We’ll go on, but we’ll be inside their stomachs, blind and deaf and dumb. We’ll have nothing to do but think. We’ll go mad, sparrow grass, mad!”

+

But he yawned despite himself and fell back in the saddle. “So sleepy. Maybe this is winter. Our quest, fair steed, is over.”

+

The creatures stirred above, and the room became a storm of golden motes, blown about by their wing beats. The Asparagoose sneezed. The creatures giggled and cajoled them to sleep, to dream—one so excited it crapped, a black missile glistening in the mist—but the Asparagoose did not sleep. Was he immune? He couldn’t remember the last time he slept, but his dreams were not for thieves and burglars. They were his own, his window into the season of flight, and no one could take them from him.

+

He honked, calling the Shoefly back from the borderlands of sleep, and shook his tail-spears. The creatures cackled, and then the Asparagoose let fly the javelins of his tail. One after another, the spears shot forth and struck the sickly dream thieves in the wing, the jaw, the throat, silencing their laughter and driving them up and out through the well in the ceiling.

+

The Shoefly whooped and danced on the Asparagoose’s back, capering about and calling him a hero. “You’re perfect! You’re the hero, I’m the steed. You’re the sword, I’m the shield. You’re the wonder, I’m the fool. You’re the rider, I’m the road.”

+

Honk! Honk!

+

“Dream on, my Asparagoose. You’ve won the day. The harpies are routed. The door is there!” He pointed, and yes, there was the door, painted the bright yellow of buttercups. “Perhaps we should loot the nests. I could use a new shoehorn and my supplies are running low. Perhaps you might find something to snack on?”

+

The Shoefly leaped off and began tossing pillows here and there, stirring up the golden dust once again and making them both sneeze. The Asparagoose beaked about. He didn’t find anything to eat, but he wasn’t feeling very hungry anymore anyway. He found an old boot, which he gave to the Shoefly, and then a streak of silver caught his eye.

+

He pushed the detritus aside and found a gauntlet (it wouldn’t fit either of them), a helmet (likewise), and—what was this?—a sword. He grabbed the hilt in his beak and dragged it free from the garbage and gold dust. Brandished in his beak, the sword gleamed. He shivered: goosebumps. Something shook loose inside him… or was it outside?

+

The hilt was fashioned into a fox’s face, the blade one long fang.

+

“King of Summer, Queen of the same!” the Shoefly swore. “What is this? Foxtooth? The legend? From what stone did you pull this, once and future goose?”

+

Honk!

+

The Asparagoose was pleased that he could honk just as well with the sword in his beak. He broke down the yellow door with his blade, about which the Shoefly would not shut up. “The legendary blade,” he repeated, though he could not quite recall the legend itself. He knew nothing about its origin, its maker, or its fate, but he knew it was one of a kind, fashioned perhaps for the King of Summer himself. As a fellow artisan, he admired not just the myth, but the craftsmanship itself. This blade could split feathers.

+

Through the door, they found a chamber full of glass cages. Beyond the chipped and cracked faces of the glass, the Asparagoose saw the husks of dead creatures, bones, corpses, and ancient exoskeletons abandoned by their souls. The Shoefly leaped from the saddle again and threw himself at the glass.

+

“Caged creatures! Might as well bottle death, put a cork on the whole cycle! Those sick and strange precursors to the rot of this age. To cage creatures they might once have been, might once again be! Knowing they too were once caged, in some past life?”

+

The Shoefly began to sob, beating his tiny hands against the glass. The Asparagoose wondered if he should break the glass with the sword, but he thought there were better uses for a legend. The Asparagoose nuzzled the Shoefly with his beak, drawing him away from the glass. He cooed.

+

“Why? What’s the point of it all if we don’t remember? What good are our past lives?”

+

Honk.

+

But how could that honk contain what he knew to be true, that everyone did remember, and that forgetting was a choice? That no one could hold all the experiences of all the lives ever lived in their heads, but that you didn’t need to. Couldn’t the Shoefly feel them there, behind him or below? On top of him? They were all around, filling in the empty spaces with their laughter. The past lives, and the past lives of those lives, and thus all of it, ever, writhing about inside, as if preparing to be hatched.

+

Maybe he hadn’t heard them yet, but they were there, stacked in the attic of his soul. The cycle was infinite. The wheel held true. After all, didn’t he have some notion of having been here before?

+

Didn’t he have the dreams too?

+

He honked at the Shoefly and raised his breast, as if to say, be brave.

+

The Shoefly drew himself up and shook the sniffle from his nose. “I am following you,” he said, bowing.

+

And then the whispers swelled again. »All lost patrons. All patrons lose. Exit the ecodustem. Please make your way, make your way front to the back desk. Please make. Please make me.«

+

The Asparagoose could still see them, circling above. He saw them now as whorls of fabric, skeins of thread, weaving themselves or trying to weave themselves into a pattern. It was a spiral, he thought. It’s supposed to be a spiral, but it was only a tangle, the four thrown into a box and snarled into a labyrinth. One of them was yellow.

+

Was this a clue?

+

The Asparagoose grabbed the yellow thread with his beak and tugged. The Shoefly jumped on his back. The fabric of the world began to unravel, first a little and then all at once, until there was a hole large enough for the two of them to enter.

+

And they did.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he place beyond place: The four whispers high above, chained to one another and to the Wheel, and the Wheel chained to the black anchor. The Asparagoose thought it looked like the front desk of the All Seasons Inn, but then he saw it with his true sight. He was ashamed, not at himself in that moment, but at some distant moment in the past. He was ashamed to be a part of creation, an epic that had ended in this enslavement. Life had divided itself from life and in doing so confined them all to the circle.

+

And yet, wasn’t one of those whispers, the autumnal one, mother of all tricksters, wasn’t she smirking, as if to say, this is all part of the pattern, this was planned all along?

+

It was just too much for one asparagoose to contain. Inside, something laughed and wiggled.

+

The Shoefly threw himself onto the ground and tried to approach the whispers far above. “How?” he said. “Why? Who did this?” He fell to his knees before he reached them. His strength was not enough to meet them face to face. Not knowing how far he had left to go, he couldn’t make it.

+

The whispers became voices, became queens.

+

“We are the Queens of all seasons. We are the beginning and the end. We are losing our minds. The season cycle has stopped. The earth is stuck. Mind and body have been cloven in two. All is at odds with itself. Past and future, feeling and thought. Souls have dispersed wildly, rapidly, disseminating across the constellation of bodies.

+

“This has never happened before. But something like it has.

+

“There’s always a stagnation. There’s always a goose.

+

“There’s always a spiral. There’s always a fox.

+

“It’s time,” they said in unison. “This is when the world happens.”

+

The Asparagoose had once dreamed of what he was meant to do in the end, but in his dreams, he always had the means to do it. He always had wings. But here, the Queens were chained so high above, out of reach

+

“Bring the souls back,” they said. “Bring them back to the fold. Merge mind and body once again. They’ve forgotten too much. Erase them. Turn the wheel.”

+

The Asparagoose knew that to do so would be to lose something of himself, if not the whole: the ultimate magic act: allowing the world to transform him so that he might transform the world. He was afraid what he would become. But mostly, he was afraid that he might lose the Shoefly, that he might, indeed, cause the Shoefly, his only friend, his flock, to lose his soul.

+

He nudged the Shoefly, and threaded his neck between his arms.

+

Honk?

+

“Yes, sparrow grass, yes. I knew. I had some inkling. I weep not for the fate of the world, but for you. My favorite foul. My favorite vegetable. Dear, dear goose.” He snuffled and then stood tall. He was being brave. “Itinerant healer, worldmaker, repairer of souls, I give you my life so that you may add my body and soul to the next world. Onward, faithful friend! To any season but summer.”

+

Honk! Honk!

+

The Asparagoose pulled him close in the crook of his neck and felt a spear fall from his tail. He took it in his beak and handed it to the Shoefly: a shoehorn, green as his dreams. Just in case.

+

The Asparagoose stepped up to the Queens, sword in beak, as they spoke.

+

“The first winter will break your heart.

+

“The first spring will rebuild it.

+

“The first autumn will kill you.

+

“But in the summer, you’ll swear you’ll live forever.

+

“Are you sure?”

+

Honk!

+

He positioned Foxtooth in front of him, his foot on the hilt, the point at his breast.

+

“No one will remember, not for a long time. There will be no souls, no vessels, all life will be in one moment, no past selves, no future selves. But there will be seasons again, and beings will remember. The smallest elements of our experience will remember. They will remember all the beings of which they have been a part: all the beings that ever were and ever will be.

+

“Are you ready?”

+

The Asparagoose nodded.

+

“Then fly.”

+

He was alone on a windswept plain, and then he wasn’t alone and never had been. Attended by everything that ever had wings and ever would—the gulls, the corvids, the raptors, the songbirds and grebes, the owls, the shorebirds, the cranes and toucans, the bats, the locusts, the grasshoppers and dragonflies, the mosquitos, the beetles and flies, the wasps, the bees, the bugs, the butterflies, the flying ants, the cicadas and the crickets, the flying fish, the flying squirrels, the flying monkeys, the griffons and pegasi, the garudas, the rocs, the sphinxes, the wyverns and gargoyles, the lumasi and the minokawas, the simurghs, the fenghuang, the faeries, the pterosaurs, the winged trees of Galleon, the sailing flowers and floating waterseeds, the soaring queens, the dragons and the geese—he fell onto the sword, cracked his body open, and spilled into the world the contents of the cosmic egg.

+

With his flock, he performed the greatest magic trick of all, nothing less than the total transubstantiation of the cosmos.

+

He was the uncreator and the creator.

+

And on that day, everything changed.

+

The wheel turned, broke free of itself, and began to spiral upward. The Queens, unchained, fled. Summer was finally put to bed. The body was no longer a vessel for the soul, and the soul was no longer a hitchhiker in the body. Instead, they were one.

+

And somewhere, at some later time, a wingless someone remembered what it was like to fly once upon a time.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of I Have No Wings and I Must Fly on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Kyle E. Miller

+

+ + Author image of Kyle E. Miller + + + Thrown out of Fairyland for crimes against the Realm, Kyle E. Miller is a naturalist and moral philosopher living in Michigan. He can usually be found in the dunes or forests, turning up logs looking for life. Past incarnations include zookeeper, video game critic, retail manager, stablehand, and writing tutor. His fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Honey & Sulphur. You can find more at www.kyle-e-miller.com.

+

© Kyle E. Miller 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: music4life, Wolfgang_Hasselmann, Free-Photos, and Shutterbug75.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2021

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+ Kyle E. Miller +

I Have No Wings and I Must Fly

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+ + +

Some stories wear their inspiration on their sleeve, and the title of Kyle E. Miller's wonderlandish excursion through a decaying plane pays clear homage to the Harlan Ellison classic, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". Prepare yourselves for a similarly rich, strange journey, but there the similarities very definitely end...

+ + + + Story image for I Have No Wings and I Must Fly by + + + +
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+

Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb

+ Gabrielle Bleu +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb by + + + +

You'll find what you're looking where you left it, or so the unhelpfully wise would tell you, forgetting (or ignoring) that this doesn't account for interference from any bad actors out there. Gabrielle Bleu shows that what you might instead need could still be nearby, and yesterday's enemy could be today's friend.

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Umpire of Desolation

+ Hannah Hulbert +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Umpire of Desolation by + + + +

Life Isn't Fair - the formative lesson of childhood, preparing us for the painful reality we're going to have to grow up and live with for seventy years or more, if we're lucky. But while you're learning to accept it, Hannah Hulbert suggests you consider: If life isn't fair, could it be that unlife is?

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Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d

+ Daniel Rabuzzi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Harryette, Brick’d, Belov’d by + + + +

Ghost stories and romance — what could be a more perfect match? Oh course, there's inevitably the risk of tragedy with such a pairing, but Daniel Rabuzzi gives us reason to hold out hope that love really can conquer all… even across centuries.

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Full Metal Grandma

+ Paul Alex Gray +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Full Metal Grandma by + + + +

Social Media - some love it, some hate it, but there is certainly a rich vein to mine in how the contemporary digital landscape will evolve in the future. Paul Alex Gray strikes more than just crypto-currency with this tale of a pre-apocalyptic soldier-for-hire who has to deal with a whole lot worse than online trolls.

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A Grave of Wind and Leaves

+ Jalyn Renae Fiske +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for A Grave of Wind and Leaves by + + + +

Here we have the first of two substantial sci-fi pieces with a focus on family, one in which overcoming separation is at the heart of things, the other with gaining independence as the goal - both presenting futures of interplanetary colonisation. Jalyn Renae Fiske takes us very far from home and, against all circumstance, shows that there could be a home there too.

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Utopia is an Island

+ Katie McIvor +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Utopia is an Island by + + + +

Depression is a kind of war. Oppression is as well. When you find yourself living through intolerable times, just surviving can be a small act of defiance, or even rebellion. But as Katie McIvor's story underlines, there may still come a point at which survival-rebellion isn't enough.

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+ Claire Scherzinger +

The Seed Man

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Closing out this issue is our second long sci-fi read, and as previously hinted at, they serve as inverted reflections of each other. In Claire Scherzinger's tale, we focus on a daughter seeking escape rather than a father desperately searching, and while the previous story swiftly departed from a technological environment for a more primitive one, this time it's a seemingly simple way of life being abandoned for an infinitely wider world.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-27/silverfish-noun-help-verb.html b/issue-27/silverfish-noun-help-verb.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f7a2a262 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/silverfish-noun-help-verb.html @@ -0,0 +1,316 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb

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Gabrielle Bleu

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+ Story image for Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb by +
+ + + + +

T + +abitha was about as unimposing as it was possible for an old lady to be. It was a practiced act; one she had honed. She always carried a black umbrella, regardless of the weather forecast, “just in case.” She kept her white, thinning hair short to stay out of her eyes, which were failing a little and required the aid of reading glasses that dangled around her neck on a silver chain.

+

All suitable old lady accoutrements. All things she knew helped deflect suspicion of what she had hidden in her archives. For she refused to retire from her position as head archivist, stubbornly presiding over a collection that was similarly unimposing, to the un-informed visitor.

+

No other archivist had dared to violate inter-species peace treaties to preserve archival materials, and certainly not with as much guile as she.

+

At the close of the Spinneret War, the peace treaty called for non-communication between humans and spiders. Tabitha held many opinions about this clause, and its inclusion of written texts. Short-sighted, Tabitha thought. Arrogant, she believed. “An affront to their entire profession,” she had told the archivists and library professionals’ listserv. Sensing what was to come from such a heavy-handed and sweeping clause, Tabitha squirreled away an English-to-Araneae dictionary deep within the archive’s secure storage vaults.

+

The dictionary was not as glamorous sitting on the shelves as a volume of poetry by Plexippus petersi #6734891, or an anthology of the metafictional works of Linwood Russell (in translation by Vulf the Wolf Spider) might have been. But those works had all been gathered up and locked away in some government vault to make inter-species communication an absolute non-possibility. Tabitha still held all the building blocks for discussion, housed in a thick little book with a red cover.

+

It was her duty as an archivist to preserve the past, and with this unimposing book she had hope not only for the safeguarding of history, but also for the safeguarding of a hypothetical future between human and spiderkind. So, the dictionary sat in the archives, beneath the buzzing lights that needed replacing, secure on the dictionary shelf. An obvious hiding spot, but few researchers ever wanted the dictionaries.

+

In the aftermath of the treaty and its terms, Tabitha saw spiders less and less in the archives, as they withdrew to their most distant holdings, such as the rare maps storage vault. Tabitha thumbed through the dictionary on her breaks, picking up what words she could. A simple “Hello, I’m cleaning” would go much further in terms of peace than non-communication, she felt. If she accidentally vacuumed up a family of spiders while cleaning the vaults the fallout would be unimaginable.

+

And she did need to clean, for the withdrawal of the spiders made the silverfish grow bold; the archives were dustier than ever with frass and bits of exoskeleton. Tabitha felt that the military officials and diplomats had done a grave disservice by overlooking the potential for alliances between their two species. An entirely new approach to integrated pest management could have been pioneered. Archives need never again fear the tyranny of chewing bugs, if only the spiders could have been recruited.

+

Teamwork was always good for relationships, as was the ability to apologize. “Sorry about the noise,” would lessen the apocalyptic feeling of the vacuum whirring to life. It was a gap in Tabitha’s slow reading of the dictionary. One she should amend. Tabitha went to the dictionary shelf, ready to arm herself with peaceful words.

+

However, Tabitha’s bold new integrated pest management plan seemed dead even before arrival: the English-to-Araneae dictionary was missing.

+

A cold weight settled in her stomach. The last public remnant of Araneae lost, under her watch! Could a researcher have taken it? No, surely, they would have immediately publicized their findings. Maybe an intern misplaced it? No, Tabitha had barred them from this section to keep her secret hidden.

+

She ran her hand over the empty space on the shelf, as if the book had turned invisible and would appear by touch. When she drew back her hand, no book came with it… but remnants of one did. Scraps of yellowed paper stuck to her fingers. The presence of loose bits pointed to a devoured book.

+

And worse, a full-blown silverfish infestation.

+

Tabitha whirled, eyes darting over the forgotten corners and shadowy under-shelving of the storage area. The silverfish could be anywhere, watching her. Anywhere, snacking on the “N” pages of the dictionary, perhaps, the noun of “noise” lost forever. Anywhere, mocking the failure of her pest control plan.

+

The obvious solution would have been to ask the spiders for help finding the dictionary, but she would need the dictionary to do that. A circular puzzle, similar to needing ones glasses to search for them when misplaced. Tabitha reflexively checked her readers were around her neck—still there.

+

She coiled part of the chain around her finger. She had to hope it was a simple misfile. Otherwise, the specific and targeted choice of food in the dictionary pointed to a planned attack, and a marshaling of silverfish forces that Tabitha did not want to think about so soon after the end of the Spinneret War. Worse, such an attack meant her whole collection was now at risk. Priceless photos, rare maps and journals, all lost under her management. She would certainly never be employed in an archive again.

+

Tabitha perched her readers on her nose and steeled herself. She would hope for the best and work backwards from there. She donned her white cotton gloves, which were loose around the wrist from so much use. She couldn’t lose her head and mishandle anything in the archives, crisis though this was.

+

If it were a simple misfile and not a silverfish plot, she normally would dump the search through every shelf and archival storage box on an intern. But she didn’t want to make any of them an accessory. Tabitha of course did not play favorites with the interns… but Joaquin was her favorite. Yet she couldn’t involve him. Which was a shame—Joaquin had a knack for finding things misfiled.

+

No. It was all on her.

+

So, under the gaze of the thousand silverfish which she suspected to be hiding underneath the flat files, she began searching for the last remaining English-to-Araneae dictionary.

+

She started with the shelf where the dictionary should have been and worked outward. As she hunted, she saw silverfish skittering across the floor out of the corner of her eyes. Throughout the shelves, Tabitha found scraps of paper fallen from chewed-up pages. Not even enough left for a conservator to work with. She couldn’t even lay out sticky traps as she would have pre-war; spiders were just as prone to wander into them as silverfish. The only option that remained in her pest-management arsenal was the hoped-for enlistment of the spiders. They could be brought on as interns too.

+

Tabitha sighed, dreams of spider alliances receding, and took a long look around the shelving and archival boxes, at everything that would be lost under her watch. She returned to the dictionary section and stared hard at the empty space on the shelf. Maybe she would have to bring in the interns. Maybe she would have to admit to the original crime. Maybe another interspecies war was brewing right beneath her feet. The silverfish meant to keep her from ever forging an alliance with their enemy the spider, and to remove her from her position as head archivist and guardian. Then the archives would be easy snacking.

+

She was about to give up when something caught her eye. A common house spider, no bigger than her thumbnail, was standing on the book that should have sat snug against the English-to-Araneae dictionary. It waved its two long front legs at her. Perhaps at least eight of the eyes she had felt upon her had not been those of the silverfish forces, but of a friend. The treaty had done the little synanthropes as dirty as it had done archivists, after all.

+

Gently, so as not to create an air current that would blow away the small arachnid, Tabitha waved back. The spider brought its legs down in a quick and succinct tap on the spine of the book it stood atop. Tabitha read the title emblazoned there, and her eyes widened. Not quite a dictionary, more of a phrasebook, possibly warranting refiling later: Scorpionid for Beginners.

+

The spider had found her a possible way out—Scorpionid and Aranaea shared the same ancient root language of Arachnid. There were some overlaps, words that stayed the same in either tongue, save for the addition or removal of an extra chitter or click. The illicit dictionary might be lost, but she could still save the archives from ruin.

+

She reached out a gloved hand towards the book, and the spider scuttled off to the side to allow her to take it. How poorly it had been named, for a creature so capable of such a singularly uncommon kindness.

+

Tabitha flipped through the pages, looking for the right words of help. She could still save her archives, pioneer a new era of spider-human relations, and present her new integrated pest management plan at the next big conference. But for all her practice in Araneae, Scorpionid was still a different language, and she would need to start at the beginning. She turned to the Greetings and introductions section.

+

“Nice to meet you,” was always a singularly good place to start.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Silverfish, Noun; Help, Verb on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Gabrielle Bleu

+

+ + Author image of Gabrielle Bleu + + + Gabrielle Bleu writes science fiction and fantasy. When not writing, she watches birds and admires lichens. Their work has appeared in Dose of Dread, Theme of Absence, and Utopia Science Fiction. Follow them on twitter @BeteMonstrueuse for birdwatching photos and occasional thoughts on werewolves, and find more of her work at gabriellebleu.com.

+

© Gabrielle Bleu 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: kvkirillov and Egor Kamelev.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-27/the-seed-man.html b/issue-27/the-seed-man.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..11963f24 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/the-seed-man.html @@ -0,0 +1,481 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Seed Man — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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The Seed Man

+

Claire Scherzinger

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Seed Man by +
+ + + + +

D + +ad opens the door, and light from the hallway glints off the UP Bar wrapper in his hand.

+

“Get up.” His voice snaps like a wet towel. He purses his lips as he chews, like he’s taunting me, before turning around and thudding down the stairs in his work boots to the kitchen. I smell Ma making bacon, the dry, boxed kind that breaks into hard flakes in your mouth.

+

Next to me, my younger sister, Tama, sits up. “I hope he’s going to be all right today.”

+

“He’ll be fine, so long as we pull in a good harvest.” I look out the sun-filtered window and rub the night’s crust from my eyes. “I heard Ma grumble the Earthers’ll be collecting earlier than usual. Don’t know exactly when though.”

+

“They’re making sure we follow the rules,” Tama says. Her black hair sticks to one side of her cheek, she peels away all the strays that ended up in her mouth during the night. “I’ll use the bathroom first.” She yawns. “You gonna wash yourself today? Or are you still on that shower strike?”

+

I sniff my armpits. They look clean, light blonde hair grows out of them like dry summer grass. The comforter smells a bit, but I can’t say if it’s from being stored in the closet most of the year or if I’m the reason why Tama always makes gagging noises before bed. Passive aggressiveness is the sharpest tool in her box, ever since she sold me out to Dad.

+

“Shampoo is just another way Earthers try to control you,” I tell her. “Human hair doesn’t actually need washing every day.”

+

Tama rolls her eyes. Sometimes she gets lavender-scented products in the monthly drops.

+

“Whatever.” She heads for the bathroom. “If Dad loses his shit, my hair won’t smell like blood.”

+

Water moves through the pipes. It’s a coarse metallic popping sound, like tiny men with rifles are gunning for clay pigeons. Ma once told me that’s something Earth folk did for fun. I wonder if they think about what we do for fun as I touch the back of my head—the gash is only throbbing mildly today. But it’s itchy. At least the discomfort doesn’t feel like emptiness, like the space in the bed next to me. I shimmy across to Tama’s side to curl in the residual warmth. The sheets smell floral; they smell like her.

+

That’s when I see the drawer of her night-table is open a fraction.

+

Surreptitiously, I slide the rest of the drawer out.

+

Inside is an UP Bar, still wrapped in its green packaging. I know Dad’s been giving them to her earlier than he’s supposed to, but the sight of it makes my throat burn with the kind of anger words melt into.

+

The water pressure eases off. I hear Tama humming as she brushes her teeth. Before she finishes in the bathroom, a towel muffled around her hair, I spit in my hand and wipe it on the underside of her pillow.

+

Then I make the bed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

'O + +gor’ is a colloquial term for the plants we grow: the stalks are white, plump, and round, though hairy, like a carrot. About a third of the way up from the ground are pastel midribs that grow out into the leaves’ petioles, and the largest leaves are on top, sucking up the brunt of the sunlight. On the surface near the midribs is where the lithium analogue ore (collapsed into ‘ogor’ by Tama when she was six) grows.

+

Harvesting requires gentle scraping with a thin, subtle knife. If you’re good at it, you can finish off a leaf in under five-seconds; a juvenile plant should take less than ten minutes. We vacuum up the glassy purple flakes into a fire-proof container, which we seal, label, and then store in the shed next to the garage, until the next pick-up.

+

I held the family record for harvesting. Dad taught me how to be quick, the process is like shaving, something he stopped doing long ago. When he first taught Tama and me how to scrape the leaves, his face was smooth and you could see the squareness of his jaw, the angular cuts of his cheekbones. Dad had been lean as a whippet back then. Now he’s even thinner, since he stopped eating anything but UP Bars. His eyes have a euphoric glaze during the day, a puncturing spitefulness in the evening.

+

At present, his face is glassy. He’s three UP Bars into the day, and he smiles at Tama, who whizzes her harvest knife across a matured plant—they usually take a good twenty minutes to shave, since their leaves are so much broader and numerous. Last I heard Dad’s fawning praise across the field, she was down to fourteen minutes, which used to be my record.

+

And he used to smile at me like that.

+

Instead, like a wasp in a bottle, the gash where Dad’s belt sliced my scalp open thrums distractingly, my grip loosens, and my knife sputters across a palm-sized leaf. I bite down on my lip, sheath my blade, and bend over, hands clutching the knobs of my knees.

+

No one notices me as I wait for the pain to pass. Dad’s on the ladder, scraping and shaving ore off the tall leaves while Tama chatters at him about which of the neighbor’s sons she likes best. Ma’s hauling the full containers to the shed on our little battery-powered truck. That used to be Grandpa Ian’s job, but since he hung himself in the shed Ma’s picked up the slack, in addition to doing all the cooking and cleaning.

+

I watch as her hat blows away on a waterlogged wind coming in from the east. Mega storms will shoot up seeds and detritus into the atmosphere, sometimes appearing as angry spurts of clouds riding the dense currents. Perhaps more important, the air kicks up a lot of ore dust, and since the lithium analogue’s so toxic, you’ve gotta wear goggles and a bandanna while you scrape leaves. Dad’s got our only respirator, which he lets Tama appropriate on a regular basis (no surprise: he used to offer it to me first if he wasn’t using it).

+

I need to peel off my goggles every few hours, the elastic band makes my gash ache like it’s being rubbed with a piece of ice, but the sun’s so bright on Aiona that it’s crucial to only take off your eyewear under cover of the forest or wherever there’s shade. Around noon, I walk toward the woods, where Tama and I used to take our midday break.

+

When I reach the tree line, Dad’s voice hits like a lash against my back. “Kya! Where you off to?”

+

I reach into the belt pouch on my waist and wave an UP Bar in the air like a white flag. “Lunch!” I shout back.

+

“You know to wait for Ma!” he barks, and then yells to her across the field. His words sound like loose stones skipping across a pond.

+

Ma comes eventually, her arms hanging loosely at her sides like blowing sticks in the wind. “Go,” she says, and looks over her shoulder. “Quietly.”

+

We enter the woods abutting the north side of the farm. The forest floor is a menagerie of tangerine-colored ferns and smooth white logs that look like curved, bleached bones along the path. The tallest trees are only about nine or ten feet and so the logs provide coverage for more shade-happy plants which Ma named skull collard and weeping thistle.

+

A quarter of a mile in, she stops near the petals of an orange bower and pinches the fleshy fruit growing from the pistil. It’s firm, pale gold, and the rows of seeds inside the fruit are little teardrop shadows. She holds it up as a test.

+

I take off my goggles, squint, pensively chew my lip. “It cures headaches,” I say.

+

“That’s lypmallow.” Ma hands me the fruit, shaking her head. “Orange bower is a sleeping agent. Fatal in the right dose. You need to remember things like this, Kya.”

+

I put it in my belt pouch, on top of my UP Bar, next to my knife. We cross the orange bower patch to a hollowed white log and Ma reaches inside the cavity, pulls out a canvas rucksack with a grey water bottle clipped to the side.

+

“Town’s about thirty miles,” she points northwest, “that way.” Her voice is so calm as she eases the straps over my shoulders and then tightens them. The rucksack is heavier than I expected, but Ma says that’s because she packed me a blanket and as little bit of food from our monthly drop rations. As much as she can spare.

+

“I’m not sad you’re going,” she says, straightening the sleeves of my jacket. “I’m just sad I can’t go with you.”

+

“You could.” I swallow the lump in my throat. She’s never liked crying or seeing others cry. “Dad and Tama would make it on their own.”

+

“No…” Her mouth becomes a thin line. “No, I don’t think they would.”

+

“Then just leave them,” I whisper. “They’ve made our lives miserable. Why would you stay?”

+

She shakes her head. “Sometimes you just have to figure out how to grow where you’ve been planted, Kya. I’ve made my bed. Go find wherever you want to make yours.”

+

So I walk away, leaving Ma.

+

She doesn’t say goodbye, and I don’t turn back to see if she waves.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he first few miles are mostly forest, but after a while the tree line breaks, and I can see a storm fraying above the mountain ridge to the north. Grandpa Ian once told me the Aionian Mountains are smooth dunes compared to the cragginess of Earth mountains. He knew all sorts of facts about Earth because he was born there before being shipped off to Hemera, the prison colony, as a labeled terrorist. ‘Freedom fighter’ was the term he imposed whenever asked about his former life, though I never asked what exactly needed freeing, and he never bothered to tell me before hanging himself.

+

But I think he told Ma when they met on the colony ship coming here, to Aiona. It must’ve been something, or someone, worth fighting for, because she decided to stay with Dad and Grandpa Ian instead of heading to Pontus, the ocean world, where her sister—my Aunt Jo—lives.

+

Ma’s the one who came up with the plan to get me out. She said if I can get to the edge of town where all the ships take off, she has a friend there who’s agreed to smuggle me into one of the Pontian Free Cities that floats on the ocean. He’s a seed man, a person who collects seeds from local plants and secretly gives them out to farmers for domestication and cultivation.

+

From my understanding, he’s also the one who gave Ma the seeds for my garden, which she passed onto me with a warning. She said, you need to share this with your sister. But whatever you do, don’t tell her about the seed man.

+

After twenty minutes, I turn onto the path Tama and I used to secretly walk together when we escaped into the forest for our midday break. Near the flying tassel bush, a bowl-shaped cluster of branches, is where our garden used to be. Half a year earlier, when the plot was full, Tama and I worked together to remove stray stones, and anything that might resemble a weed or something poisonous. We ate together, fruits like pale pink elephant squash or the little translucent bauble fruits we called spirit figs, until it was time to sneak back to work in the ogor fields.

+

Now, as I pick up a clump of dirt in my hand, I can still smell the chemicals Tama used to kill all the plants after she snitched to Dad about the garden. Ammonia and diquat. The smell makes a sharp, prickling sensation in my nostrils, and a shiver rills through my chest. My fingers are a sieve as the dirt falls back to the ground.

+

In the corner opposite of the flying tassel bush, I push a stone off a patch of leaves with the side of my boot. Underneath is a hole containing the UP Bars I pretended to eat over the last six months. The foil packages flash blue, green, and orange under a small beam of sunlight. Some of the brown, spongy bars poke out through gnawed corners.

+

I’m leaving the hole uncovered for Tama, as a monument to how everything went so wrong.

+

The shift in her behavior happened when I turned sixteen, and Dad started looking at me funny—looking at my face like he was trying to find himself in a mirror. Tama, who was fourteen, started doing the same not long after, whenever we harvested our plot for lunch. She asked why my hair was so blonde. She asked, “How come I don’t look like you?”

+

Though by far, the most recurring question was: how come Ma had given me the seeds for the garden and not her? I didn’t have an answer to the latter question lined up, since I wasn’t supposed to tell her about the seed man. But even if I had told Tama the truth, it still wasn’t a reason why Ma had favored me and not her. Ma was never transparent about anything, much like Grandpa Ian, and she’d snap at you whenever you asked a question she didn’t want to answer.

+

As for the former, the only explanation I offered is that I was different, though I didn’t know how that difference came about. In hindsight, I think my unintentional phrasing, misconstrued as self-perceived exceptionalism, was the catalyst for her snitching on me to Dad.

+

It happened over dinner. “Kya’s been hiding all her UP Bars,” Tama said casually, while cutting up a piece of cured ham. Dad’s eyes widened to the size of glossy marbles (he had seven UP Bars that day, a personal record). “She’s also been growing food in the forest,” Tama added, and then shrugged as she looked at me across the table, as if to say, no harm no foul.

+

The ache in the back of my head says otherwise.

+

Wind shoots through the tassel bush, and I shiver as it presses on my wound like a sandy balm. I move on. It’s best not to linger in one place for too long.

+

Walking consumes the rest of the day. I pass by fields rife with Devil’s Tulip, giant cupped plants that developed a natural luminescent waxiness to reflect the sun’s tyrannical rays. Around evening, I reach the next stretch of forest before town. The moons appear, three white shadows that make a loping line across the mauve sky. Roughly, I’ve trekked eighteen or nineteen miles, and no signs of Dad or Tama angrily blustering through the bushes.

+

For dinner, I unpack some of the food Ma gave me. It’s all Earth food: packaged synthetic eggs, a bag of chips, and a couple cans of corn. Even this meager array is generous, since most of a colonist’s diet is UP Bars.

+

I pop open the chips, and saltiness blooms in my mouth. I chew slowly, swallow carefully, anticipating the same euphoria that follows when eating an UP Bar: a fuzzy veil cast over my vision. Sometimes my breath would feel like soft fabric on my tongue. They’re filled with enough sedatives to keep you light-headed and fluffy-eyed for days.

+

All I get from the chips is an echo in my belly, and a greasy, moreish aftertaste that has my fingertip rooting around in the corners of the bag for the last crumbs of flavour. I save the eggs and corn for later, and for a moment I think almost longingly of the stash of UP Bars I left uncovered for Tama to find, but I prefer the pain of hunger, of emptiness, rather than the lush, fleeting sense of a high, and the distress that follows.

+

Word around our neighbor’s, the Finnegars, is that their eldest son Cole even sees specters when he’s high. He turned sixteen last year, which is when the Earther’s start sending you UP Bars, so by the time you’re an adult, your head’s used to being in a fog while you work, you’re used to ignoring your hunger. That’s how they get away with sending less ‘real food’ in the monthly drops.

+

After my sister snitched on me, Ma would chivvy me to the toilet to throw-up once Dad and Tama had gone to the fields. The first time she did it, she put my head over the bowl and jammed two of my fingers in my mouth.

+

“I’m not going to help you every single time,” she urged. “Hurry Kya—up and out!”

+

Every day for the next three months was a morning row of gagging, my abdomen repeatedly tightening and unclenching. I kept gasping in between acidic bursts, “I can’t breathe!”

+

I inhale a long breath and lie down in the nubby grass. In, out, like a bellow. My chest gets hot from the memory, and I look up at the sky.

+

It’s clear, no Earther ships visible. Not yet. However, supposedly they’ll hang in orbit, just beyond visibility, conducting passive scans to look for agricultural anomalies on Aiona’s surface. Ma says that if people grow local food for subsistence, they grow their own culture, and shared commonalities mean potential resistance to colonial law—

+

Something shifts, and I sit up.

+

The sound is close by. It’s either the wallowing of some desperate creature, or it’s my stomach stirring uncomfortably—both equally likely.

+

Affirmation of the latter comes as I lean onto my side and vomit. The body yearns for habit, for structure. This time at least I don’t have to stick my fingers down my throat.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ext day, late afternoon creeps up in the slow humming of insects. In the distance, thin slices of the moons give the mountain ridge a silver skin. I reach the shipyard on the edge of town earlier than I expect.

+

Most of the ships are skiffs. They have chemical thrusters, only suitable for traveling short distances. A few freighters have larger drive cones and stand like large metal pillars on the launchpads, supported by an intricate gantry network. The only sign that dispenses information is about a half-mile from the launchpads, secured to the roof of a small diner. Rendered in blinking orange lights are launch schedules. Almost all the ships on the various pads are to take off in the next few hours.

+

There’s nothing to do but wait inside the diner. I take off my bandanna, let my goggles rest around my neck, and dump my rucksack in a booth next to a large window. The server comes by, and I order a cup of hot water infused with lemon powder. Every few minutes, I look out the window and squeeze my hands together. The prospect of getting caught by the Earthers makes my palms sweat. On the chance that a colony fleet or random patrol scans me and sees I have no travel documents, I could end up back home. Or on Hemera.

+

I’m not sure which destination would be worse.

+

“You Kya?” a low voice asks. In the window, I jump at a reflection that appears uncannily similar to mine. A tall man, tanned as tea with a ponytail of yellow hair, is standing at the edge of my booth. He’s blind in one eye, milky white where his iris and pupil should be. I don’t answer but shift away. I’ve never seen a man that tall before.

+

He doesn’t seem to mind. “It’s good you’re cautious, but I’m a friend,” he says. “I’ve known your Ma for a while. I’m Adrian. Can I sit?”

+

I lean back against the booth and shrug. Adrian drops a pack from his shoulder onto the seat next to me, briefly looks at the menu screen over the counter, and then offers to buy me a coffee.

+

“Never had coffee,” I say.

+

“Ah,” Adrian chuckles. “Well, the stuff here isn’t real coffee, but it’s as good as it gets out in these parts.”

+

I fold my arms over my chest. “So how do you know my Ma?”

+

“Through your grandfather, on the colony ship coming here to Aiona.” Adrian rests his hands on the table. “Your grandpa was a seed man, but back on Earth, when big agriculture corporations took control of the planet’s food supply. He helped people find ways to grow their own food in secret, just like your Ma tried to help you.”

+

“Earth is just like here?” I ask mournfully.

+

Adrian tilts his head to the side. “Maybe worse. I haven’t been there in… a long time.” He scratches the stubble on his face. His eyes are wide and a little watery. When I frown at his sudden emotion he blinks them back like he’s embarrassed by the display.

+

“Look, Kya, I’m glad you came,” he says.

+

He looks at me, not in a searching way like Dad; his gaze is one of recognition. The realization washes over me that this man is more to Ma than a friend. He’s more to me than just the seed man.

+

“You see it now, huh?”

+

Nodding, I manage to squeak out a “Yes.”

+

He grins. His teeth are large, one front tooth is slightly chipped, but we have the same lips, and he has dimples like mine. I stare intently at the opalescence of his singular blind eye. It seems like it discerns more about the world than his seeing one.

+

I clear my throat. “I think I’ll have that coffee.” I don’t know what else to say. Adrian signals the server for two coffees.

+

I think of asking him about Ma’s life story, and Grandpa Ian’s maybe. But he was always so closed-mouthed—is it wrong to learn things he didn’t choose to say to me himself from some stranger he knew before I was born? I shift, feeling suddenly uncomfortable, and then I feel a pulpy squish in my belt pouch.

+

“Oh.” I take the orange bower out and place it, flattened, next to my cup of hot water on the table. “Forgot I had this.”

+

As we wait for the coffee, Adrian pulls out a cloth bundle from the breast pocket of his jacket and unrolls it across the table. There are several compartments with little glass vials and pairs of tweezers inserted into them.

+

“Your Ma believed in choosing a path and sticking to it, for better or worse,” Adrian murmurs as he dissects the orange bower. He picks up every seed with the tweezers and drops them, one by one, into a vial thinner than the width of his thumb. “I loved that about her. But it’s the nature of seeds to migrate, just like people trying to find better pasture. I’ll teach you about the seed network, if you want, when we get to Pontus.”

+

“I’d like that,” I reply. We sit in silence, watching each other as the server places two steaming cups of coffee in front of us. I take a sip and wrinkle my nose.

+

Adrian smiles. “It’s not for everyone.”

+

As I go for a second taste, the shipyard horn goes off. Adrian snaps his attention to the window. The ghostly outlines of Earther mining ships have appeared in the sky, and the dropships are beginning their descent into the atmosphere.

+

“Looks like it’s time to go.” He downs his steaming coffee, hastily pays the server, and then tucks the vial of seeds in his jacket. He stuffs the bundle back in his pack and throws over his shoulder as he glances anxiously out the window.

+

“Hopefully it’s just a typical drop,” he says, and tosses me my rucksack.

+

But nothing is ever typical with the Earthers. If I know it, he must know it too.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e walk from the diner toward the last row of launchpads. My whole body is rigid as Adrian directs me to a ship parked on a pad a few spots away from the Earther’s dropships. In my periphery, lines of people descend metal ramps leading from the airlock and then head down a set of stairs that takes them to the ground.

+

“Shit.” Adrian suddenly puts his hand on my shoulder. “Stay calm,” he mutters. “But there’s Earther Eyes at your eight o’clock.” He keeps his other hand discretely near a holster I only now notice, high on his right hip. “Just look straight ahead, and don’t stop walking.”

+

I always thought “Earther Eyes” was just something we called them. The guards that watch the colonists wear long jackets with a patch that has a tiny blue dot in the center, and shiny black helmets that are panoptic cameras. Ma warned me once, it’s impossible to sneak around them, and you should never try. They’re trained to breathe as little as possible, so when they move as swiftly as they do they look inhuman, god-like, to make you believe there’s no hope in resisting them.

+

Adrian’s grip on my shoulder tenses. “Almost there,” he says under his breath. “Hang on—” But his grip suddenly loosens.

+

Air rushes past my ear as he pushes me behind him.

+

A bullet hits the launchpad behind us—the new colonists scatter at the sound of shooting, but the Eyes don’t chase after them. They focus on us, advancing as we shuffle away. Adrian pulls his gun from its holster and shoots back, to little effect: one of his bullets pierces the tail of an Eyes’ jacket. They separate and hide behind the pillars of nearby launchpads, firing at consistent intervals until Adrian’s gun clicks that he’s out of ammo.

+

“Get on the ship!” he commands. He tosses me a small chain with a bead on it as I run for the stairs. “Lock yourself inside if I’m not behind you!”

+

Shots ricochet against the metal facing of the launchpad as I climb the stairs, my rucksack jostling against my back. When I’m at the top, I look down and catch a glimpse of Adrian. His hands are in the air, offering surrender. One of the Eyes has a pulsar rifle aimed at his head and walks around to zip-tie Adrian’s hands behind his back.

+

The other Eye is coming for me.

+

I scramble: the first airlock door opens automatically, but the next set leading onto the bridge are locked. I’ve never used a bead chain key, so I just press it hard against the door’s lock, a square of metal with a set of small lights in the left-hand corner—it concurrently chimes and they flash red as I slap the bead against the lock twice, three times.

+

Behind me, the Eye’s quick, dull footsteps on the stairs grow louder.

+

I press the bead more softly against the lock, and it rewards me by turning green. The pressure door slides open and I rush inside as the Eye turns the corner, force myself to only touch the bead against the lock, holding my breath until the door slides shut again.

+

Red. I crouch down, exhaling. The floor beneath me is grated, covering up all kinds of wires and conduits, and a series of blinking lights that leads to a blocky grey wedge in the floor. It’s covered in rows of red-lettered words and all kinds of gauges with digital readouts flashing random numbers.

+

Adrian’s ship is small. The canteen in the corner has a bag of lyophilized blood in the fridge and rows of tiny vials, full of seeds, but no food and minimal water. On the port side, there’s a bunk bed. The pilot’s seat and crash couches are spaced less than five feet apart. That’s it, not even a toilet that I can see.

+

I drop into the pilot’s seat. Beneath my feet is a loose panel I remove in the hopes of finding an escape hatch, but it’s just more skeins of electrical wiring. There are some basic instructions for heating up the core at the helm, and camera feeds show the outside on a three-screen array. I find the spot where Adrian had put down his gun in surrender…

+

He’s gone. The Eye that had him isn’t anywhere in sight either.

+

Tears well in my eyes before I can blink them back. Snot salts the inside of my nose as I grip my sides and cry, big, heaving sobs—and then I give a little scream as gunfire erupts right outside the airlock door. One of the monitors shows the other Eye dropping his aim from the bead lock, then I see him smash the stock of his rifle into the metal plate and hear the muted thud of it, just a few metres behind me.

+

I think about how much I simultaneously hate Tama for what she’s done and miss her too, all at the same time. I hate Ma for not telling me about Adrian and regret not saying a better goodbye. Despite everything that’s been said and done, a part of me feels that you can never truly say goodbye to where you’re from. I’ll always be Kya, the ogor harvester.

+

I droop forward in the pilot’s seat… and something beeps.

+

“Adrian,” a sonorous voice on the screen says, “if you get the chance—”

+

“Fuck!” I push back and slam into the pads of the seat. The man on the screen freezes and my eyes widen, taking in the portrait of Grandpa Ian… though his hair is less salty and sparse, his eyes a little bit brighter and deep, loamy brown, like Dad’s.

+

I look down. When my hand clenched on the armrest, it landed on top of a touchscreen. I lift my fingers away and the screen blinks, starting from the beginning.

+

“Adrian, if you get a chance, try to persuade Aphelion—” I hit the touchscreen again. “Aphelion,” I repeat. That’s Ma’s name. I let go and the video resumes. “—to get to Pontus. I know now that my son was responsible for ousting you to the Earthers when you were imprisoned on the colony ship. His personality, his temperament is all my fault, but there’s no hope in reversing it now.

+

“If you manage to get to Aiona, tell Aph that the place you’re born isn’t necessarily the place you belong. I’ve tried convincing her to let Kya go, but you might be the only one who can get through to her now. The Earthers’ll be coming for me any day, unless I do something about that, so don’t send any tight beams here, Adrian. Just get your daughter to a Free City.”

+

The video freezes on a still of Grandpa Ian’s face. His mouth is slightly open. His lips are dry, cracked, just as I remember. They’re like Tama and Dad’s, dried out from the heat of the ogor fields.

+

Unless I do something about that—like hang yourself in the shed? To remove any reason for the Earthers to come looking for you again?

+

There are so many memories that I want to re-process with this new found piece of information, a key to why my life has been the way that it has.

+

But there’s no time.

+

Outside, another round of pulsar shots hits the airlock door, a weapon designed to overload system circuitry and neural synapses equally well. The lock won’t hold up forever, I can’t fly this ship to safety, and if they’re shooting now they figure me for a seed man too. The best I can hope for is a terminal shock reaction—rather that than a short, oblivious life spent labouring on some Earther penal farm in a slave-cowl.

+

I wipe my eyes, my nose, and unsheathe my harvest knife.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he ship’s cameras show the Eye standing a few feet away from the outside of the airlock. I ready myself, standing off to the side of the door for cover, and tap the lock screen with the bead. Good thing, too—when the pressure door slides open, three shots whiz through. One scorches the pilot’s seat, the others flare off the starboard wall.

+

When the bullets stop, I run, knife poised to strike as the Eye reloads. With a serpentine sweep, I stab upward, just underneath the rim of the helmet. I thrust and twist, the tip of my knife collides with his jaw, and I hear the guttural crunch of bone. The Eye stumbles, a gurgling sound emits from the helmet, and he topples forward, flopping like a beached fished into my arms.

+

I stagger, hold his body in a haphazard hug, realizing that he’s just a man, like any other.

+

And I’ve killed him.

+

I don’t even notice the sound of boots coming up that stairs until I hear Adrian’s voice above me. “Drop him, Kya,” he says. He has his little pistol in his hand again, aimed at the Eye.

+

“He’s dead,” I say, though I do as he commands. The Eye’s helmet slams against the metal with a reverberating thud, and I scuttle a few paces back.

+

Adrian shakes his head. “They all have body mods. Don’t die as easily as you think… so, you’ve got to be sure.” Then he shoots the Eye through the chest, and I flinch.

+

“You did good,” he wheezes. There’s a crescent moon of a bruise around his blind eye, and he’s clutching his abdomen with his other hand. A nasty red stain leeches through his shirt. “Let’s go. God knows there’ll be more coming.”

+

He shucks the pulsar rifle over the side of the launchpad and lumbers inside. From out on the gantry I watch as he heaves himself into the pilot’s seat and begins punching in codes on the various screens. His eyes briefly flick to Grandpa Ian’s message and he closes the window. He turns around, sees I haven’t moved, and says gruffly, “Kya, hurry up and strap in. We’re going to do this quick and dirty.”

+

“But, your wound… if we take off—”

+

“It’ll be fine,” he replies, and then pauses like he’s caught himself in a lie. “It’ll be what it’ll be. Strap in.”

+

He rapidly goes over the pre-flight checklist, and I notice I’m still holding my knife. The Eye’s blood drips from it. My hand shakes, and I’m about to throw it over the railing after the rifle, but instead I crouch and wipe it clean on the dead man’s jacket and resheathe it, then follow Adrian inside and close the outer door. I lie down on a crash couch and pull the brace straps over my head. Thinking later, doing now.

+

All sorts of codes and lights twinkle from the screens, and Adrian grabs a stick with a see-through plastic hand grip. He pushes a series of buttons and nudges the throttle forward. “Try not to pass out.”

+

The minute the core flares, I’m pushed back into the pads of my seat. Flattened is more like it. My knuckles turn bone white as I grip the armrest and try not to swallow my tongue. There’s no sharp pain, just an incredible ache that comes with the weight of the ship’s upward propulsion. The thrum of the core and the ominous creaks of the ship’s steel struts and ceramic heat tiles makes my heart palpitate.

+

From the corner of my eye, I see Adrian struggling to stay awake.

+

Eventually, the booster cuts out and the effects of microgravity manifest—in particular, small droplets of blood begin to form and drift out of his wound as we ascend higher above the atmosphere. The computer beeps a readout that it’s outside Aiona’s gravity well, and we switch to battery power. I hoist myself out of my seat and immediately drift on my momentum—this is what swimming in an ocean must be like.

+

First things first, I push towards Adrian and examine his wound. The light from the screen gives his face an odd greenish cast, and he groans as I ease him out of his jacket and then peel back his shirt. There isn’t much to discern with the globules of blood obscuring the hole. I prop him up so he’s perpendicular to the floor and luckily see an exit wound on his other side.

+

“There’s a pack of lyophilized blood in the canteen,” he says. “Get it.”

+

I’m able to tell I’m holding it the right way up because of the writing, but we’re also in zero-g. “You need to help me. I don’t know what to do.”

+

“Not much to do. It’s a gut wound. Likely internal bleeding.” Adrian groans again. “You can bandage it up, and set up the transfusion pump. Was there morphine in there?”

+

“I didn’t see any.”

+

“Damn,” he says. “I’ve had trouble getting supplies for the last few months. Earther’s are always on my tail…”

+

“It hurts a lot?” I ask, and feel hugely foolish.

+

“It’ll be fine,” he says, though I sense he doesn’t believe that either. He’s already turning chalky. “If we want to stay off colonial radars it’s a seventy-two hour journey using just maneuvering thrusters. We’ll run out of blood at the rate I’m dripping. Killing the pain would be good, but morphine would slow me down too, and that would be better.”

+

I look around—there’s mine, but… “Where’s your backpack?”

+

“Eyes got it.” He shifts in his seat and jerks at a sudden grope of pain. “Why?”

+

I slump, if you can do that without a down to slump into. “The orange bower seeds. Ma said they could put someone under. I figured, maybe…”

+

“My jacket.” He flaps a hand over one shoulder. “Vial. Inside pocket.”

+

I remember: only the bundle with the tweezers went into his pack. His jacket is floating towards the airlock, I kick off my crash couch and intercept it, and then bang into the door myself—moving is so weird, speed is hard to judge, and what with no gravity and the high stink of Adrian’s blood filling the little cabin I feel more than a little like puking.

+

“The orange bower is… good idea,” Adrian says. He sounds a bit slurry. “No pain in sleep. Might slow down my heart rate. Help control the symptoms until we get to Pontus.”

+

I send myself back to his side more carefully and pull the vial out of his jacket. Then I scowl, recalling Ma’s warning. “She said it could be fatal.”

+

He smiles, weakly but fiendishly. “Better to hover over death than sink right into it.”

+

“You want to risk it?” I think I know what I would do, but this is Adrian’s decision to make. It’s the kind of freedom I’ve been waiting to experience, and if I were in his position, I wouldn’t want anyone to interfere.

+

“One seed,” he breathes.

+

I drag the stopper out of the vial with my nails and shake a seed into the air. It drifts over his face, right above his lips, and he sucks it in then leans back, cracking it between his teeth.

+

“Nice work, Doc,” he says. “You’re part of the seed network now.”

+

“Hah,” I say, but he fixes me with his gaze.

+

“No joke, Kya. You’re one of us. You’re resistance.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +drian instructs me how to hook him up to the transfusion pump and bandage him properly. Before I can do that I have to clean a frightening amount of blood off him, and there’s more floating all around us. After I’m done with what he calls “the triage”, he directs me to a telescoping nozzle beside the canteen; when I pull it, a long tube spools out and it starts sucking, so I vacuum up as much gore as I can.

+

When I stow the nozzle everything still smells of copper, and puking remains an option. I turn from the canteen to find Adrian carefully maneuvering himself into my crash couch. He gestures to the vacated pilot’s seat. “You have the con, captain,” he says.

+

“I’m…” I pause. I don’t want to tell Adrian that I’m afraid. I am, but I say instead, “I don’t know how to pilot the ship.”

+

He nods wearily. “I’ve set up the autopilot. And your Aunt Jo will be waiting for you at the docks.” He reaches for my hand and grips it tightly, and his gaze focuses a little more as well. “It’ll be all right Kya. You’re strong. Stronger than I would’ve ever imagined. And I’m so proud of you.”

+

My chest tightens; he didn’t say us. He didn’t say Aunt Jo will be waiting for us at the docks. But I smile, and nod, and he relaxes back, closing his eyes as I strap him in.

+

Once Adrian begins to drift off into a peaceful-looking sleep, I notice how quiet the ship is; the air scrubbers are the only soft, fuzzy noise. To pass the time, I read the ship’s operations manual and occasionally look out the tiny window above the canteen to watch cones of white super-heated steam shooting out the sides, pushing us toward Pontus.

+

I pick up and examine all the different seed vials in the canteen until sharp waves of hunger wash over me. I try to sleep, which passes a few hours. But when I wake up, I’m hungrier than before. All the food in my rucksack is gone… except for the UP Bar in my belt pouch.

+

I open the shiny packaging and then let it go, watching it float and rotate in front of my face. I’m resistance, Adrian said. Even though I escaped from Aiona, from Dad, and from the Earthers, the UP Bar taunts me with the awareness that resistance will be an everyday battle.

+

Direct threats might dissipate over time, but power comes from the structures that facilitate control. As my stomach begins to twist into byzantine knots, I watch the UP Bar with a new kind of intensity.

+

The real struggle lies in not cracking, never giving a single inch.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Seed Man on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Claire Scherzinger

+

+ + Author image of Claire Scherzinger + + + Claire Scherzinger is a visual artist and writer currently residing in Washington State. Her fiction and poetry have been previously published in Carousel and in the Writer’s Digest 81st Competition Anthology 2011. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in print in the Canadian photography magazine BlackFlash and online on platforms such as Painters on Paintings, ArToronto.ca, and critters.org. You can find more of her work at www.clairescherzinger.com.

+

© Claire Scherzinger 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: denisgo, Parker West, and Andrew Burns.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-27/umpire-of-desolation.html b/issue-27/umpire-of-desolation.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7e057632 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/umpire-of-desolation.html @@ -0,0 +1,351 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Umpire of Desolation — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Umpire of Desolation

+

Hannah Hulbert

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Umpire of Desolation by +
+ + + + +

A + +mi scowled at her sister and watched her nonchalantly tap the ball with her club. It rolled across the Astroturf, bounced off the curb, trundled over the bridge and popped neatly into the hole at the end.

+

“Noooo…” Ami moaned. “Dad, it’s not fair. Bea keeps winning!”

+

“Don’t whine, sweetie. She is four years older than you. You’ll be just as good when you’re fourteen.”

+

Ami glowered as Bea marked her 1 on the scorecard next to Ami’s 6 with an arcane smirk.

+

“It’s not my fault you’re rubbish at crazy golf,” Bea said, shouldering her club. “Don’t blame me.”

+

“It’s not my fault you’re a rubbish sister,” Ami said and stomped towards hole six.

+

Bea hadn’t always been a rubbish sister. Ami could hardly spot the sweet girl who used to braid her hair and read her bedtime stories behind those midnight eyes. She missed her and the bond they’d had. They’d been drifting apart for years, though, ever since Bea had started volunteering at the library after school. Now, instead of watching cartoons together until dinner, she spent all her time with that weird librarian who Bea absolutely insisted was not her boyfriend. But Ami wasn’t stupid. Why else would she be spending so much time surrounded by dusty old books?

+

Ami scrunched her lips together and focused all of her concentration on the next shot. She whacked the ball up the slope with all her strength. It careered away, hit the wall at the top and rolled back down to nestle between her feet. Bea cackled.

+

It took another four attempts to get to the top. Then the ball refused to go round the corner and skirted the hole three times. Ami gouged 9 onto the scorecard while Dad set up his ball.

+

Three strokes later it was Bea’s turn. She grinned as she swung her club. The ball shot straight to the top, ricocheted round the corner and rolled directly into the hole.

+

“How’s she doing this?” Ami yelled. “Dad, she must be cheating! There’s no way she got this good since last time.”

+

“Don’t be silly, Ami. How could she possibly be cheating? It’s just luck.”

+

“Yeah, Ami. Too bad you’re so unlucky.” Bea said, tossing her hair in inky waves.

+

On hole seven, Ami’s ball refused to go around a boulder, bouncing off it a grand total of five times. Ami screamed with frustration.

+

“You’re taking this way too serious, Ami,” said Dad. “It’s supposed to be fun. Have a laugh!”

+

“No! It should’ve gone past, I know it!” Ami narrowed her eyes at her sister. “You’re doing something. Stop ruining everything!”

+

“Ami, if you’re going to make a scene we’re leaving.” Dad’s eyebrows furrowed in the middle as he stared down at her. She turned away, heat creeping up her body towards her face. She caught a glimpse of Bea’s eyes, twinkling with delight. She flushed.

+

“Well?” Dad said.

+

“I’ll stop,” Ami muttered.

+

She scored ten. Dad scored two. Bea scored one. Again.

+

They continued around the course in silence. Dad attempted to lighten the mood with a tirade of excruciating puns but gave up around hole eleven. Bea silently gloated while Ami seethed.

+

By hole eighteen, Dad was at forty-nine, Ami was in triple figures, and Bea was at seventeen.

+

The last hole was a white-washed windmill, with electronically propelled sails and a tunnel through the base. A slope on the other side dropped the ball through the final hole and back into the ticket booth. Ami smacked her ball with all her pent-up rage and was shocked when it shot into the tunnel.

+

“Nice shot, Ami!” Dad said, patting her shoulder. Ami beamed, but Bea still wore that esoteric smile.

+

Ami went round the windmill. The ball was nowhere to be seen.

+

“It’s stuck inside!” she cried.

+

“Never mind,” Dad said. “Let’s record your score as ‘one’ and call it a day.”

+

“But that would be cheating,” Bea taunted, loud enough only for Ami to hear. Ami frowned at her sister, who smiled sweetly then turned to watch Dad tee off.

+

Dad scored five before his ball plopped in and trundled off to the booth. Bea took one last hole-in-one. Ami was too busy examining the wooden panels of the windmill to notice Bea basking in Dad’s congratulations as he slotted their clubs into the returns tray on the ticket booth wall.

+

“Come on, Ami, lets go,” he called from the gate leading out to the car park.

+

Ami set her jaw. “I want to get my ball. I haven’t finished.”

+

“It’s really not worth it.”

+

“It’s not like you’re going to win,” Bea added. The shadows of the rotating sails glided over her pale face, transforming her expression from smug to blank and back again with each passage.

+

Ami ground her teeth and slid her fingernails under the cracks around the loosest panel. With a grunt, she tugged until it splintered and fell into her hands. She propped it up against the side of the structure and knelt to look inside.

+

It was disproportionately black. Tiny arcs of daylight shone on either side where the balls entered and exited, but other than that Ami could see nothing. It was weird—the windmill wasn’t big and the sun was bright outside. She stared, transfixed by the black hole, squinting around for a sign of her ball.

+

“Hurry up!” Dad cried.

+

She wrinkled her nose at the stale, fishy air and reached inside. The floor was hard and damp as she groped around into the corners. Goosebumps run up and down her arm at the chill. It must be in there somewhere—balls don’t just disappear.

+

“Bea and I are leaving,” Dad called again, and his voice seemed further away, as though he was shouting at her from the other side of an expansive chasm.

+

“Just a minute!” she shouted back.

+

She crawled in through the gap.

+

It felt somehow much larger than it had appeared from the outside, but also crowded, like a cupboard full of coats. She shivered and blinked, adjusting her eyes to the dimness, peering around for that elusive white sphere.

+

A sucking, squishing, slurping sound from above startled her. She looked up.

+

Her mouth sagged open.

+

Inches above her face, a massive eye glowed in the shadows.

+

A scream rose in her throat. It escaped as a gurgle and a tiny puff of vapour in the cold blackness. Every muscle in her body clenched, except her heart, which pounded as hard as a piston. The enormous pupil shrank, zooming in on her.

+

Despite the oppressive closeness, Ami felt herself beneath an overwhelmingly vast and undulating emptiness. As she gazed up into the luminous eye, she thought she glimpsed reflected in it a dim city of impossibly tall buildings with vacant windows. It was like looking at the inside of a spoon: distorted and wrong. Silence rang in her ears until it became the sound of distant screams.

+

A thick, black tentacle uncoiled towards her, glistening in the feeble light. A tiny whimper rose in her throat, but her petrified body refused to move. The oozing, boneless limb wound through the space between them, reaching for her face.

+

It was holding something pale and round.

+

Stuck to the suckers on the end was her golf ball.

+

With a wrench of will, she raised her hand. The tentacle hovered before her, waiting. She tugged the ball with trembling fingers and it came free with a moist squelching noise.

+

The feel of the glossy, pocked surface under her fingertips, so solid and mundane, prompted the rest of her joints to thaw. Without turning away from that colossal, unblinking eye, she began shuffling backwards to escape the windmill.

+

The bottomless pupil swivelled slightly so that it still pointed right at her. Just before she ducked outside, a thought pushed through the terrified fug of her mind. If she left now, she’d always wonder.

+

“Um… excuse me…” she said, voice very small as she knelt before the rippling darkness. She paused and cleared her throat, then before she lost her nerve she blurted, “Have you been helping my sister cheat?”

+

Cheat? The voice spoke directly into her brain without coming in via her ears. A voice that spanned dimensions. Ami’s heart pounded so hard she thought she might be sick. Bea paid the price for power. It is up to her to decide what is fair and what is not.

+

A vision of that desolate place flashed through her mind again: a twilit eldritch world, eternally void of hope or joy or comfort. She thought of Bea with a shiver and an unfamiliar pang of sympathy.

+

“Okay,” Ami said, scooting backwards. Then, just before she emerged into the sunlight, she added: “Thanks for the ball.”

+

The glare of the whitewashed windmill in the late afternoon sun was blinding. She squinted around as she rubbed the goosebumps off her bare arms. Same golf course. Same ticket booth. Same bright afternoon. But try as she might, she couldn’t get warm.

+

“Come on!” Dad shouted as she pressed the panel back into the gap. She averted her eyes, just in case she spotted something moving inside. Then she hurried away before her ordinary world disappeared into darkness again. Dad and Bea were waiting in the car park on the other side of the white picket fence.

+

As she jogged past the final hole, Ami dropped the ball into it. “Hole in one,” she quipped, full of fake joviality as she returned her club then pushed her way through the gate.

+

“That’s the spirit!” Dad said with a smile, strolling towards the car.

+

“Aren’t you going to thank me for a good game?” whispered Bea as they followed behind.

+

Ami turned to her sister and met her abyss-like eyes. Behind them, she thought she could glimpse that realm of shadows and ruin. Ice tiptoed down her spine. Her pulse sped up again.

+

“I already thanked the real winner,” she said.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Umpire of Desolation on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Hannah Hulbert

+

+ + Author image of Hannah Hulbert + + + Hannah Hulbert is a full-time mum and part-time writer from the south coast of England. You can find her stories in miscellaneous small-press anthologies and web-zines, a full list of which can be found on her website. Her story ‘Petrichor’ from Beneath Strange Stars (TL;DR Press, 2020) received a Pushcart nomination. Hannah enjoys looking for mushrooms, doings crafts, and drinking tea, especially when she is supposed to be writing. You can also follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

+

© Hannah Hulbert 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using licensed and Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Yganko, graphics53, tombark, lillaby, and Alexas_Fotos.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-27/utopia-is-an-island.html b/issue-27/utopia-is-an-island.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..70d16c2b --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-27/utopia-is-an-island.html @@ -0,0 +1,370 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Utopia is an Island — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 27 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Utopia is an Island

+

Katie McIvor

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Utopia is an Island by +
+ + + + +

Monday 4th – Good Day

+

T + +he lynching of poverty campaigner Noah Samuels took place this morning, but otherwise a good day. I admit I was disturbed by the news. A young, handsome gentleman, barely out of his twenties and famous for his athletics career, to see him hanged like that before the mob was shocking for all of us common folks. When the news started coming through on our devices we gathered in huddles on the factory floor, fearful and whispering. Mr Aled who oversees our line was saying What kind of people are in charge these days? Is there no justice, are there no consequences? He let us take an unscheduled fifteen-minute break and sent us home half an hour early, as there was a demonstration in the cement park. I didn’t go to that.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Tuesday 5th – Bad Day

+

W + +oke to news that the demonstration was broken up after only an hour by police. Full riot gear. Numerous arrests, reported on the main news, many more accounts of police violence across social media. Errol A and Lars F didn’t show up for work, none of us wanted to ask Mr Aled what had happened to them. Mr Aled was quiet all day. Made me wonder if he had been admonished by someone higher up.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Wednesday 6th – Bad Day

+

A + +nti-Colony protests have broken out across the city. More police, more arrests. The Colony spokesman broadcast a message to every device, stating that Noah Samuels had been a criminal and involved in drugs and that in any case the Colony took no responsibility for his death, or for the subsequent unrest here on Earth. We listened in our factory lines, in our aching work boots. The spokesman was smooth-skinned and well-dressed and spoke so confidently you almost believed him.

+

I went straight home after work. Every door in my compartment block was shut, every stairwell deserted. I locked my compartment door too and put the blinds down but I couldn’t stop my device from murmuring the news, showing pictures of protestors, faceless cops, Noah Samuels on the end of a rope. The newsreaders were serious people in suits. The adverts in between all showed images of the Colony: spotless streets, happy beautiful people, expensive buildings. I want to walk those spotless streets and breathe their purified air.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Thursday 7th – Good Day

+

O + +ne can dream! Today Prior S was notified on the Lottery App that he has won a ticket to the Colony. It comes with a work permit and an allocated compartment when he gets there. We all stopped work to applaud and Prior S had tears in his eyes. My friend Wharton H was muttering about how factory work isn’t going to be any different there to here, but I nudged him to keep quiet.

+

He said to me afterwards that the Colony must have added a bunch of extra tickets to the Lottery purely to distract from the protests down here, because his brother at a different factory also knows someone who won a ticket today. Wharton H thinks it a cynical measure. He is always unimpressed by colony propaganda, as he calls it. I told him not to say anything to Prior S.

+

There was an enraptured look on Prior S’s face, the look of someone who has allowed himself to dream and wishes not to be woken. Sweat blossomed from his bald head and his dreams moved like slow fish behind his eyes. I stared at his lucid skull and wanted to pour my thoughts inside.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Friday 8th – Good Day

+

P + +rior S has already gone. In the break room Wharton H and I watched the livestream of this morning’s Mars shuttle, with Prior S somewhere inside. The shuttle looked bloated and blank-skinned. It rose into the sky ponderously from its bed of fire, like a half-inflated balloon.

+

We had a scheduled speaker at the social club tonight: an earnest, no-longer-young woman who shifted around in her oversized shoes as she talked. “Poverty is a prison,” she began, looking at us each in turn with childish, beseeching eyes. After that I stopped listening.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Saturday 9th – Bad Day

+

W + +harton H not at work. I sent him a text during lunch break but he didn’t reply until this evening. Said he had been protesting at the site of the Samuels lynching. People calling for food vouchers, lower work quotas, repeal of the Mars Export Laws. Might as well call for the sun on a stick. Said he kept his face covered. Was with a big group from his brother’s factory and they left before police showed up.

+

All the same I am sick with worry. At work they sent round a special bulletin to our devices, emphasizing the company’s core values. “We are proud to support the Colony project. We strive to secure the future of the human race. Earth today, the Colony tomorrow. We must never forget the debt we owe them.”

+

Wharton H would say the debt is the other way around. Rich pioneers of the Colony take our exports, grain and metals and fuel, sit up there in their red millionaire’s playground laughing their socks off.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Sunday 10th – Bad Day

+

D + +idn’t know what to do with myself on my day off. Wharton H called, asked if I wanted to go for a walk. Said I wasn’t sure it was safe to go out (also true: didn’t want to be seen with him, just in case). Spoke to mother on the phone, told her to stay indoors.

+

Ran out of cigarettes, walked to corner shop. Someone has daubed slogans all down the stairwell of the compartment block:

+

SOCIETY IS A MYTH

+

EAT THE RICH

+

UTOPIA IS AN ISLAND

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Monday 11th – Good Day

+

A + + better day, anyway. Wharton H was back. We all crowded round him in relief before our shift started, patting his arm and checking he was really okay. I stuck close to him all day. He told me in whispers about the protest, his eyes shining, clear in his belief that things were about to change. My guts twisted from listening to him. In the break room at lunch I sat my chair so close to his that our legs kept knocking together under the table. I mentioned the slogans on the wall and he said they are only half-phrases, there is more to them than that. If the poor have nothing else to eat, they will eat the rich. Utopia is an island you can’t swim to.

+

What is Utopia, though? I asked. He thought it was something medieval or maybe to do with universal income. It was obvious he didn’t really know.

+

He came round to my compartment for dinner. The slogans in the stairwell had been joined by a mural of Noah Samuels’s face. Wharton H stood in front of it for a moment with his head bowed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Tuesday 12th – Bad Day

+

E + +xtremely. Mr Aled has been replaced. New line supervisor (Mr Cable) is small and thin and always looks distrusting, even if he’s just asking you to fetch coffee. He took Wharton H aside ten minutes into our shift. Wharton H came back solemn, wouldn’t tell what had been said. Mr Cable’s device has the Party insignia on it. Always slipping it in and out of his pocket as though checking it hasn’t been stolen.

+

Was called into his office too later on. Stood in the middle of the floor, feet aching, he sat by his computer. He said was I close to Wharton H, asked why he was off sick, if he’d gone to the Thames Park protest, if I’d had any thoughts about going. Said I don’t think about things like that. Mr Cable said maybe Wharton H does my thinking for me. Asked what I thought about the Noah Samuels matter. Said it was sad. He said our company defines us, the company we keep and the one we work for, told me I’d do well to remember that.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Wednesday 13th – Bad Day

+

M + +urals of Noah Samuels popping up all over the city. As fast as the police erase them, they paint more. Some mourners held a memorial service in Thames Park. His family were there, some high-profile athletes too. Watched clips on social media of police charging them with raised batons, forcing them away from the tree, tearing down the picture of Noah they had pinned to the trunk. His name has become a hashtag. Everywhere you go online, #NoahSamuels is with you.

+

Wharton H’s brother has been arrested. He told me over lunch. Whispering. He looks hopeless now. Tried to say how relieved I felt that it wasn’t him, but it came out wrong. Told him to keep his head down for the next few days. He ate dinner at my compartment again. Asked him to stay the night but he refused.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Thursday 14th – Bad Day

+

E + +very day a bad day this week. No sign of Wharton H at work. Don’t know if he was arrested this morning, or last night on his way home from mine. Don’t know where he is. Have wild hopes he might have run off somehow, escaped into the hills. He is smart and strong and could probably last a good long time before they caught him. But the city is big, the hills are far away.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Friday 15th – Worst Day

+

T + +he news said Wharton H’s body was found in the canal, that he had been party to an altercation, a drug deal gone wrong. It’s a lie. We all know it. There was a photograph of the canal bank where he was found, made me throw up on the break room floor. Everyone at work very kind, except Mr Cable, who avoided eye contact.

+

At lunch I sat next to Mr Cable. He was reading something on his device, didn’t talk to me. While he ate I slowly edged his car keys further and further out of his pocket. When he stood to go and rinse his plate, the keys slipped neatly into my hand and I went to the bathroom and squeezed them to the bottom of my work boot. All afternoon the keys grated against my skin through my sock.

+

Towards end of shift Mr Cable called over McPhail R, needed a word in his office. I watched them go in and shut the door then I walked slowly off the factory floor, shoulders hunched, expression dull, so the other supervisors would think I was carrying out some routine task. I walked past them all and went down in the lift to the underground carpark and no one stopped me. In the carpark I bleeped the keys and Mr Cable’s car flashed its lights. It was nice, smelt of new leather. I drove carefully out through the barriers, and the guard waved as I passed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Saturday 16th

+

I + + stopped in woodland, somewhere north, hard to be sure. I worry they will track the car. I stripped its electronics, as far as I know how, left it concealed in the bracken, walked until it got too dark.

+

Device power will die soon. When that happens I will strip it too, destroy its SIM, bury its parts and keep walking.

+

Keep looking at my photographs of Wharton H, knowing each time might be the last. I dream of the two of us walking clean streets and breathing the pure air of the Colony, in rich people’s shoes.

+

I dream of possibilities, of choices, of an escape from this world where there is no why and no because, there is only the predicative.

+

Utopia is an island. Poverty is a prison. Existence is a debt.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Utopia is an Island on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Katie McIvor

+

+ + Author image of Katie McIvor + + + Katie McIvor grew up in Scotland and studied at the University of Cambridge. She now lives in England and works at a language library, where she is surrounded by books and films in over 200 languages. When not struggling to alphabetise Japanese textbooks, she likes to go on long walks with her husband and dogs. Her flash fiction has recently appeared in Terrain.org.

+

© Katie McIvor 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using licensed and Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Iurii and WikiImages.

+
+ + + + + +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

+

Winter 2021

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Mame Bougouma Diene +

E Pluribus Unum

+
+ + +

It's hard to hate The Other if there isn't An Other to hate. So, in a sense, when it comes to bigotry it always takes two to tango, even if only one participant is actually dancing to the music. Mame Bougouma Diene's elegiac short strongly suggests that this is going to be the case right up until the solo begins.

+ + + + Story image for E Pluribus Unum by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Fly Away, Peter

+ J. Livermore +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Fly Away, Peter by + + + +

As the editor apparently repeats every issue, sometimes (read 'always', it seems) stories tend to arrive in satisfying pairs, and J. Livermore's tale provides a pleasing dovetail with our opener. Again, it's about two very different men, again, one of them isn't around by the end, but in every other respect the two pieces could hardly be more different.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Marciano

+ Charlotte H. Lee +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Marciano by + + + +

The genesis of speculative fiction may well be 'Utopia', Thomas More's 16th century satire of a perfect society, its name necessarily meaning 'no-place'. The best utopian sf now looks not merely at perfection, but instead shows people striving to build something better, often within worlds that are very far from perfect. Charlotte H. Lee gives us someone on that very path.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

How to Get AI to Like You

+ Aaron Emmel +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for How to Get AI to Like You by + + + +

It would have been a missed opportunity if, in an issue entirely illustrated via artificially intelligent image generation, we didn't include a single story actually featuring AI. Aaron Emmel to the rescue, therefore, with this highly plausible glimpse of the way the future may be heading—in situations, at least, if not solutions…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Come Buy, Come Buy

+ E. Saxey +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Come Buy, Come Buy by + + + +

Has anyone got over the 2020 lockdown yet? Hopefully we'll endure less panic and home-goods hoarding next time civilisation comes crashing down—but we're always going to need more than well-stocked shelves to feel satisfied with life, and E. Saxey's story (from an original idea by Kim Plowright) reminds us that wanderlust isn't going anywhere soon.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Maneater of Tiruchery

+ Chaitanya Murali +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Maneater of Tiruchery by + + + +

This issue's second big story takes us to a rural India of uncertain period—but whether a tale is set in the recent past, the present day, or a near future isn't important when you sit down to enjoy an example of straight-forward adventure storytelling. Chaitanya Murali gives us a man who is as much a part of nature as he is a professional adversary of it… but it's in our nature to change.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish

+ Uchechukwu Nwaka +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish by + + + +

The damsel in distress is surely centuries old, but when the damsel in question has no choice but to do her own saving, 'damsel' is just another synonym for 'hero'. Nevertheless, while coming out on top against all odds sounds like a good thing, sadly the world is rarely so conveniently black and white. Uchechukwu Nwaka shows us how a victory can sour even as we’re savouring it.

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Hermester Barrington +

My Amoeboid Romance

+
+ + +

Under the microscope, a 'single' human cell is revealed to be a chaotic community of collaborating entities. What we each see as a body is more like a microbial biosphere—so if, at a stroke, what you are became literally just that, would it even be so bad? Judging by Hermester Barrington's yarn, when Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis he wasn’t just needlessly downbeat, he was thinking too big. And too singular.

+ + + + Story image for My Amoeboid Romance by + + + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-28/come-buy-come-buy.html b/issue-28/come-buy-come-buy.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8f86fac9 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/come-buy-come-buy.html @@ -0,0 +1,463 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Come Buy, Come Buy — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Come Buy, Come Buy

+

E. Saxey

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Come Buy, Come Buy by +
+ + + + +

A + + leaflet drops through Nan’s letterbox, with vouchers for a local supermarket. It offers shitty discounts on goods Laura would never want, but Laura has been so bored that even the prospect of bad shopping excites her.

+

The smell of frying onions allows Laura to locate her Nan, in the kitchen at the back of the house.

+

“I didn’t know Somerton had a supermarket,” says Laura. “Where is it?”

+

“Two miles down the Barnford road. Never go there.” Nan is short on words, short on all fronts.

+

“Why not?”

+

“Blot on the landscape,” said Nan. “The shops in town have everything you need.”

+

That’s not true. Laura has been doing all the shopping for a month, because Nan is vulnerable. The food in the local shops feels a hundred years old: ginger wine, winter-mixtures and custard creams.

+

Nan empties a bag of grey mince into the pan. Laura would have claimed vegetarianism if she’d known what Nan could do with meat. Three stepmothers (consecutively) have raised Laura, each treating her better than the last. They were all trying to impress her Dad. Nan sees no need to impress her son, or anyone.

+

“I’ll go there tomorrow,” Laura announces.

+

“Well, do what you like. Don’t listen to me.”

+

Laura will, and won’t. She has been taking her Nan at face value.

+

“I suppose you want your fancy things,” Nan murmurs.

+

Laura does want her fancy things. If she was still in London, she and her fancy girlfriend would be stalking shopping centres, eating sushi and sea-salt caramel ice-cream, red at the wrists from trying lipstick samples. Venturing into perfumiers and jewelers, cool as cucumbers, because (Candice always said) they can’t know that you can’t afford it. Then retreating, with sleeves and pockets full of beautiful, stolen things. Slick silver cylinders, bottles cut like gems, made more desirable by risk. Laura misses Candice so much she wants to howl, but she misses the other fancy things nearly as badly.

+

At least at a supermarket she can buy a packet of cigarettes. The proprietors of the town shops would want to see her ID, and they might snitch to Nan. But Laura senses the supermarket will be staffed by bored teens with no loyalty, just like herself.

+

“If you must go,” says Nan, “I’ll make you a list.”

+

Laura doesn’t object. A shopping list can be a good disguise.

+

Nan takes all evening to write the list, like she’s doing three-dimensional chess in her head. When she hands it over, though, it is the dullest list in the world. White flour, white sugar, white sliced loaf.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +aura reckons that Nan is mostly silent so that she can avoid the big question: where has Laura’s Dad gone?

+

Dad had driven Laura from London to Somerton Weston right at the start of lockdown. He said they’d be better off there, living with Nan, and nobody in their right mind would want to stay in the city. Laura wanted to stay in the city. Dad said she was too young to live alone in their flat, in a pandemic.

+

“The time’ll fly by,” he promised. “Then we’ll come home, right?”

+

He’d tried to make amends. He’d let Laura have his old bedroom, strung a hammock between two trees in the garden. But Laura was disconsolate and Nan was prickly. According to government guidelines, the three Giffords were now a household, but Dad couldn’t charm them into being a family.

+

Dad had gone off on longer and longer drives, despite the lockdown rules. A week ago, he’d not come back to the house at all. Nan grew more snappish, but Laura was calm. Dad had left her before, abandoned with each of the stepmothers, for a fortnight or longer without explanation. Laura had sent Dad just one text message, a joke, to show him she wasn’t freaking out.

+

Laura walks South out of town on a hot and empty road, winding between green wooded hills. Where is Dad, right at this moment? Probably back in ghost-town London. A tractor passes, smelling of dung. Laura stumbles, one foot in the nettle-filled ditch.

+

The road turns, the supermarket looms, and Nan wasn’t wrong: it’s an eyesore. The woods have been scraped back, and a big white warehouse dropped onto the plain. A row of six giant oaks stand sentry over the carpark.

+

Inside the supermarket it’s blessedly cool. Nature is sweaty and chaotic, and coolness is a sophisticated achievement: the marble atrium of a museum, the ice-cubes in Candice’s gin and tonic, the glass cases of a department store. Laura salivates, knows she’ll come back again and again to bask in the fluorescent light.

+

The supermarket shelves are full, recovered from the stockpiling frenzy of March. Laura starts to follow Nan’s shopping list.

+

6 bananas, on her left.

+

Mild cheddar cheese, pulling her over to the chiller aisle.

+

Bran Flakes. The cereal section is miles off-course, down the other side of the store. Well, Nan’s never been in this shop, so of course her list is in the wrong order. There are no Bran Flakes. Would muesli be too dangerously exciting?

+

Slipping off-list, Laura wonders what she can pocket. It’s too hot for long sleeves or a big coat. A tiny bottle of truffle oil catches her eye, because it would fit in her palm. Or a sachet of saffron. She could post it to Candice.

+

Suddenly a tall couple are hovering just behind Laura. She abandons the idea of theft, and steps aside for them. They’ve already moved on. Laura relocates to the bath products. It happens again. The strangers seem to be interested, like Laura, in the good things. When she turns to see them, they’re whisking out of the aisle, wearing long, sweeping clothes. They look out of place. Maybe they were here on holiday and got stranded. Everyone else in the town is as small and dull as the town itself.

+

Laura pulls herself back to her Nan’s shopping list. Mustn’t look suspicious, even though the only security guard is dozing on his feet by the door. Packet of frozen peas. Laura puts Quorn mince in her basket, too, and prepares to announce her conversion to vegetarianism.

+

Where now? White sliced loaf, back near the entrance to the shop. She finds the most seeded, weird-grained loaf she can buy, just to annoy her grandmother. Not because Laura craves the bread. Not because it reminds her of brunch with her Dad and Candice.

+

By the make-up display, she pretends to sneeze while she slips a lipstick into the watch pocket of her jeans. Then she takes the final lap of the shop at high speed, grabbing up the last items on Nan’s list. The list keeps forcing her to double back for one more jar or tin. Tearing through cleaning products, Laura catches a glimpse of a curve and a wicked sharpness, like a heron stalking through water. She backs up, to see what caught her eye. A trick of the light: the only curves are the white bottles of fabric softener.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nother four days of nothing pass in Somerton. The time is not flying by. Laura puts on the wicked plum lipstick, feels elegant. Her mouth craves someone to kiss, something to bite. She wipes the lipstick off again.

+

Nan hasn’t mentioned Dad at all. When Laura asks (over a meal of Quorn Bolognese) it feels like forcing open a rusted gate. “Have you heard from Dad?”

+

“No. Bet you haven’t, either.”

+

During her daily permitted exercise walk, Laura had found an unlocked Wi-Fi and checked her email. Candice (now in the South of France) had sent a long letter of complaints, but there had been nothing from Dad. “No, I haven’t.”

+

“Probably gone back to London to fix something.”

+

A few days ago the reassurance might have worked. But now it’s not enough. A long lockdown here, alone with Nan, is too awful a prospect.

+

“That’s against the law,” Laura says.

+

“He’s always wandered off. Never stuck at things, ever since he was small.”

+

That’s better than reassurance. Laura wants to hear her father insulted more. She wants to think about him when he was shorter than Nan, stuck in the room where Laura now sleeps. “Have you got photos of Dad as a kid?”

+

“Don’t know.”

+

“What about your wedding photographs, then?” Old people loved showing off wedding photos. It would be cool to see Nan’s husband, dead Grandpa Gifford, the missing ingredient that made Nan’s father tall and debonair when Nan is short and sharp as a vegetable knife.

+

Nan’s spines bristle. “Ha!”

+

There’s no pleasing the hedgehog-woman, so Laura returns to her hammock with Vogue magazine.

+

When she comes back into the house, a few photos have been dropped on the coffee table. They show a young Nan with dark hair, in the garden of this house, a baby in her arms.

+

“When was that?”

+

“1970.”

+

That was wrong. That would make Dad fifty, but he was younger than that, younger than all the parents of Laura’s friends. “And that’s Dad?”

+

“You trying to catch me out?”

+

Nan is flanked in the photo by a grey-haired man and two women. “Who are they?”

+

“My brother and my sisters.”

+

They’re so much older than Nan. Maybe Nan was a menopause baby? No wonder all Laura’s other relatives are dead.

+

Nan doesn’t look like a radiant new mother in the photo. She’s pale and dazed. Her sisters are nervous, her brother scowls. They should all be happier at the baby of the family having a baby. And where’s Grandpa Gifford?

+

Nan’s hands are spread out against her baby’s back, no rings on any of her fingers.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +oredom turns time into jelly. Whenever Laura connects to a Wi-fi network, there are no messages from Candice, only fresh news about transmission and fatality. It seems possible that kids are immune, but does Laura count as a child or an adult?

+

Laura smokes all her cigarettes in the garden and goes back to the supermarket, striding down the road faster now that the way is familiar. The government says you can shop for food as often as you need to. Nan has given her a new list.

+

The Telegraph. God, does she have to buy that?

+

Mild Cheddar Cheese. Again. Several aisles over, in the chill cabinets. Laura grabs taleggio, stilton, camembert.

+

6 apples. Nearly all the way back to the door. This list is worse than the last one for misdirection.

+

Stepmother number two taught Laura to decorate cupcakes. That would pass an afternoon, and maybe soften Nan’s prickles. Laura puts flour in her basket, then tucks a tube of silver sugar balls straight into her pocket.

+

As Laura turns out of the aisle, there is no sound.

+

It wasn’t loud before, but this silence is different. It’s the hush of a luxury jeweller’s shop. No, it’s the muffled white silence of snowfall. Laura remembers snow during one of their Christmas visits to Somerton Weston. The overnight wind had built up hip-high drifts, and her father told her: listen, there’s no echo.

+

Laura inhales, and she should smell the bread-scent they pump through the whole store, but she smells icy air. She takes two tentative steps, and feels snow compact under her feet. It could be spilled flour on the supermarket floor. She stops moving.

+

Laura feels her bones chill with the still cold of winter. The tall people have entered the aisle, they are gliding closer, a flash like jewels at their wrists. Are they store detectives? That thought startles Laura into walking in the opposite direction.

+

She hears the tills beeping again. Nothing is beneath her feet. The air conditioning blasts fresh sweat off her arms. The boy at the till sells her cigarettes without asking for ID.

+

As she exits through the sliding doors, back into the unfriendly furnace outside, she sees a familiar silver 4x4 across the carpark. Dad’s here. Thank God, because the bags are heavy.

+

Laura sits by Dad’s car for half an hour, then she springs up and stomps back into the supermarket. She can’t ask them to hail him over the tannoy as though she’s a lost child, so she runs up and down the aisles, growing less and less certain how many avenues and turnings the store contains.

+

Something scrapes the skin of her neck. She jumps sideways, swatting at herself. A huge gold-green beetle falls to the floor and lies there on its back, twitching its alien legs. It must have crawled from the woods, when she sat by the car, and lodged in her hair. Laura flees the store, shaking her head in spasms of disgust.

+

By the time she arrives back at Nan’s, the cheeses are oozing, so she serves herself taleggio with crackers.

+

“Your cheese has gone off,” says Nan, “from the smell of it.” She prowls through the living room, collecting up her half-empty mugs of tea.

+

“I found Dad’s car. In the supermarket car-park.”

+

Nan freezes with five mugs dangling from her hands. “Oh?”

+

“He wasn’t in the shop. Should we call the police?”

+

“No need.”

+

“What if he’s in trouble? What if he’s hurt?” Dying in a ditch, bloating in the heat under the scurrying feet of iridescent beetles.

+

“He’ll be with your grandfather’s side of the family.” Nan sounds ready to spit on the floor.

+

More Giffords? But Laura’s other family are all dead. “What, do they live near here? Can I phone them?”

+

“Yes and no,” says Nan. “And no.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +ooking for clues, Laura lifts the Telegraph off the kitchen counter, and finds a piece of paper underneath. She wants it to be a message from her father, or a phone number for the stray Giffords. Instead, there’s a rough rectangle sketched in pencil with a dozen labels. Drink, bread, fruit, tills.

+

It’s a floor-plan of the supermarket that her Nan has drawn. She must have been to the supermarket, to know the layout. What a trivial fib.

+

When Nan walks in, Laura is too surprised to bluff. “What’s this for?” she asks.

+

“To make the shopping list.”

+

“You said you’d never been there.”

+

“Had to go once, to see what they’d done.”

+

“Why did you draw a map, if you’re not going to put things on the list in the right order?”

+

Nan plucks the map right out of Laura’s hand and thrusts it into her apron pocket. “It is the right order. You’d better stick to it!”

+

Laura doesn’t need Nan’s map to enact her petty revenge. In the hammock in the garden, smoking a cigarette, she takes Nan’s meandering list and rewrites it as an orderly tour of the shop. That’ll annoy the old biddy.

+

The hammock under Laura rocks, threatening to spill her out on the lawn.

+

“Hey!” Laura clings on with one hand. Her cigarette burns through her favourite T-shirt, digs a point of pain into her belly. “Stop!”

+

Nan gives the hammock another vicious shake. “What the hell are you doing?”

+

Laura starts to say that it’s her pocket money, and her lungs, but Nan ignores her cigarette entirely. She grabs the new shopping list and crumples it in front of Laura’s face.

+

“I was putting it in the right order!” Laura cries.

+

“You’ll be in deep trouble if you change that list.”

+

Is Nan threatening her? She could tip the hammock, Laura could fall, she could break an arm. Dad should never have left Laura with this madwoman. Laura curls up, braced for injury, and stays that way as Nan stomps back up to the house.

+

Later, she jams her bedroom door shut and sketches out the supermarket again. She maps out Nan’s list and can’t make any sense of it. It’s not dictated by anything practical, such as finding the lightest items first, or the frozen food last. And the route it creates across the store is full of dead ends and doglegs.

+

Then Laura draws other markers on her map. The ways she walked when the tall people pressed in and the shelves seemed to slip away. The corners she turned when she thought she saw the heron stalking, and smelled the snow.

+

When she joins up the trajectories she took, they make shapes. Rings radiating from a centre, like ripples from a stone thrown in water.

+

Laura writes herself a new shopping list.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he first loop to walk is up round the newspapers, where she pretends to read the headlines. Up past fruit, back down to veg. Nobody cares, the security guard is sitting and snoozing on sacks of barbecue charcoal. Laura’s route makes a small inward swoop, then curves back outwards to the bakery. Laura is tracing the rings she has drawn. Nothing is happening. Is she on the wrong track?

+

In front of her stands a matted, long-legged dog. Lurcher or wolfhound, it is as tall as Laura’s waist. Someone calls it, a figure far away. Their silhouette is hard to make out, as if seen through drifting snowflakes. They remind Laura of Candice: dark lips, bright metal. The dog shambles off towards its owner, towards homewares. Laura pulls out her phone to photograph it, only catching the tip of its tail. Then she follows.

+

When she turns the corner, both dog and owner are gone. A silvery scent like sweet mint hangs in the air.

+

Laura gets back on track, following an arcing path around the top of the shop, past bread and beer and down to frozen produce. It is the longest loop that Laura has sketched. It sweeps round three-quarters of a circle, speeding her to the centre of the design. Laura feels her feet quicken, her spine straighten. This is nonsensical, this is all sunstroke and fantasy. But maybe the tall people will be here, maybe they’ll be her family, maybe they’ll tell her where her father has gone. She imagines Candice prodding her onwards: they can’t know that you don’t belong here…

+

The tiled floor turns to hard mud. The shelves become steep earth banks, held together with tree roots. The trunks soar up past the supermarket ceiling, and the branches form a black tracery against the pearly sky. It is nature, but with nothing haphazard about it. The trunks have been trained and the roots guided, the grass dusted with glass crystals.

+

Laura is snapping another photo on her phone as something blunders out of the undergrowth. A badger trundles along where the toilet roll should be.

+

It stops and looks her in the eye. “Are you the Gifford child?” it says.

+

Laura runs, collides with the glass door of a freezer cabinet, and flees the shop.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hree weeks ago, when Laura had thought she knew what boredom was, Nan had pointed at the bookshelf in the living room: books of local history, local walking routes. Now Nan is outside, deadheading the roses, and Laura digs in. A hardback with freckled pages tells her that to the South of Somerton Weston lies one of the last remaining English turf mazes, but it is shallow, and its antiquity is disputed.

+

There’s a black and white sketch of the site, six oaks standing sentry. Between the trees is a clearing with a pattern in the grass, at least a hundred feet wide. Whorled like a thumbprint, the path doubling back on itself, until a walker might lose hope. But the path worms its way, in the end, to the centre.

+

Laura smells something sickly sweet. Nan is standing behind the sofa, holding a glass of ginger wine.

+

“If you keep goading them,” Nan announces, “you’ll come to no good.”

+

“I’m not—”

+

“When they cleared the ground for that supermarket, I thought: you don’t want to put it there.”

+

“Because of the maze?” Laura shuffles along the sofa, to keep some distance between them. “Wasn’t it protected? Historical?”

+

“Disputed. And they built the supermarket in the Spring, when the path’s overgrown. It showed better in drought and frost.”

+

“Why don’t they shut the supermarket down? If it’s dangerous.”

+

Nan shrugged. “Safe for most. Bad for you. You want to go, don’t you? You’re half-way over.”

+

Laura can’t say how she knows that it is better, over there: more luscious, more artful, full of high company. Like kissing Candice, but over there Laura would never feel inadequate or clumsy.

+

“I don’t blame you.” Nan sniffs. “But I can’t recommend it. Is it Winter there, now? That’ll freeze your eyes shut.” She holds out a packet of dusty custard creams. Laura takes one, to make peace.

+

“So is Dad there?”

+

“Could be. I fought them for him, when he was small, but you can’t keep that lad from doing what he wants.”

+

Laura may as well speak the impossible things aloud. “So could I go there for a while, and come back here again?”

+

Nan gives the suggestion due consideration. “You’d be gambling. I lost twenty years. It only felt like a month, to me. Your father’s lost as much, in dribs and drabs.”

+

To Laura, stuck in a sluggish eternal present, Nan’s warning sounds like another temptation. “Could I take a friend with me?”

+

“What? No!” Nan reaches over and pats her shoulder, hard: stay there, stay down. It’s the first time Laura can remember them touching. “I know it looks pretty. But they’re not good people.”

+

What Laura hears is that they’re strange and honed and fine, and their world is a wonder. Laura won’t make the same mistake. She won’t come back with a baby, for goodness’ sake.

+

“They’re cruel and careless. That’s where your father gets it from,” adds Nan. “And double for you, I suppose.”

+

Laura feels dizzy. She focuses on the gritty crumbs of biscuit on her tongue. “Dad didn’t tell me any of this.”

+

“It wasn’t a secret. I told your father, I told anyone who asked me.”

+

How well had that gone down, in a small town? “Did people think you were mad?”

+

“No! They knew it was true, they remembered me. They didn’t like it but they knew I wasn’t lying.” She is mulling over fifty years of resentment. Or more than that: if Nan reappeared with Dad in 1970, then did she go missing in 1950? “Go if you must. But there’s nothing real, there.”

+

But Somerton Weston doesn’t feel real to Laura, either. She knows she should try to be better than her father. She makes an offer: “You could come with me.”

+

“They don’t want you, once you’re old. I told you, they’re not good people. But don’t mind me.”

+

Laura doesn’t. But then, as she packs up her clothes in her bedroom, the key turns in the lock of the bedroom door.

+

Laura shouts, at first. It’s illegal to lock her up, Nan is mad, she’ll call the police.

+

Nan calls back that she wishes she’d locked her son up, years ago, then she’d still have him. Or her own mother should have locked her up, then she’d never have had her son in the first place.

+

There’s a tree close to the house. Laura climbs from the window and finds her way, branch by branch down to the ground. She jogs down the long road, wondering if a police car will overtake her. And has the supermarket closed for the night? Laura will sleep in the carpark. But the store is lit up in the dusk, and the doors slide open.

+

As Laura treads the aisles and paths, the temperature drops unnaturally fast. Her heart thumps but she walks steadily, like the last steps out of a shopping centre with sleeves full of treasures. She feels herself being pressed to one side and then another. She feels a gentle prompting impulse to shift her weight onto her back foot, and then push forwards again. She realises it’s not a labyrinth, but the pattern for a dance.

+

The impulse, pushing her forwards, has become a blizzard at her back. Now there are tall companions on either hand to guide her, in their long robes, fur-cuffed, with ice on the fur. Graceful as teasels dipping in the breeze, and just as pointed and dry. Escorting her towards a snowy clearing.

+

Laura wants to meet her family. Laura longs to see the beautiful things, craves them like a cigarette.

+

Laura really wants a cigarette.

+

Laura stops by the racks of sliced white bread, staring up into the pearl bowl of an unknown sky.

+

She follows the path towards the centre. The years brush her bare skin as they fly by.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Come Buy, Come Buy on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

E. Saxey

+

+ + Author image of E. Saxey + + + E. Saxey is a queer Londoner and recidivist goth who works in universities and libraries. Their work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Escape Pod, and anthologies including Transcendent (Lethe Press) and Best of British Fantasy 2019 (Newcon Press). They’re on twitter at @ESaxey.

+

© E. Saxey 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by Enrico Hänel with the prompt ‘an endless forest that glows at dawn’. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen here.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-28/cuffs-padlocks-and-a-splattering-of-nail-polish.html b/issue-28/cuffs-padlocks-and-a-splattering-of-nail-polish.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..48c75473 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/cuffs-padlocks-and-a-splattering-of-nail-polish.html @@ -0,0 +1,387 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish

+

Uchechukwu Nwaka

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish by +
+ + + + +
+

22:17:49

+

I’ve never been much into roleplay, but I need the money and Moyo would flip a lid if she ever heard that I balked now. The client isn’t all that bad either. He has this kind of boyish look on his beardless face, and he’d been wearing a suit when he approached me by the bar. I figured I could let myself get handcuffed to the bedpost while he attempted to play out his fantasies.

+

For both our sakes, twenty minutes later, I try to get into it.

+

The client’s fingers trail across the length of my thigh—bare, save for the new silk pair Moyo had given me earlier this evening. There’s a ring on one of his fingers that tempts shivers down my back over every surface it skims. Hoarse gasps escape my throat but the client’s hands stifle my lips gently.

+

His hands are large.

+

The client smiles. There’s something behind that boyish charm. It flashes in his eyes and lingers for just a second, but I cast it aside as lust when he brandishes two black scarves.

+

“One’s for your mouth and the other’s for your eyes.”

+

When the darkness falls, I feel his weight leave the bed. Embers of anxious excitement begin to warm the pits of my groin, so I don’t immediately notice that the client’s on the phone.

+

“I have the ẹbọ ready.”

+

A sudden wave of icy apprehension ripples down my gut. Ẹbọ? As in sacrifice?

+

“Yes, Baba,” he monotones. “Right away.”

+

Fuck! I struggle against the cuffs but the cold steel only bites painfully into my flesh. I force a scream, but it’s only a futile hmmph. The client chuckles and my mind shrieks in terror. My limbs thrash about the king-size mattress in desperation until something heavy on the side of my head flings my world into fractured pain.

+

Once. Again. Silence.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

21:47:24

+

Air burns its way into my lungs and my furious gasp almost topples the glass of whiskey from my hand.

+

It’s the bar again.

+

The lighting is shoddy, the whiskey is some percentages too raw and the client is talking. Now that I look closer, there’s a hardness behind his eyes—a dangerous glint behind every casual smile. How did I ever miss it?

+

But I already know where this all leads to. I reach into my purse to get my phone. Sorry Moyo.

+

He tilts his head. “Something wrong?”

+

I stand. “I’m sorry, something urgent suddenly came up.”

+

“That’s quite disappointing, I was hoping you’d accompany me upstairs.”

+

No, thank you, I think, but his suggestion simply supersedes my conscious thought. Instead of heading to the door I only wobble on my feet, and I suddenly realize that this is not mere intoxication. My body has lost all will to function… to him.

+

I see that look again, just briefly when he glances from my drink to my face. He met me here, there was no way he’d have roofied my drink without me noticing.

+

Then my eyes fall on the ring on his finger, and I see its arcane inscriptions, and the realization is as chilling as his phone call was.

+

The client is a bloody ritualist.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

21:33:08

+

I find myself in front of the hotel again. Shit, that means I died after following the client upstairs a second time. At least an earlier awareness of my situation is paying off, but…

+

What can I do differently this time?

+

The hotel occupies an entire lot, with three storeys the management did not deem fit to illuminate. A flickering red bulb shows ‘BAR’ printed on a board beside the beaded curtains that lead into the establishment. The music is scratchy as it pervades the night, yet this dump is cream of the crop—a steep ten thousand v-naira per night. That’s money I’m choking on debt for…

+

…but this time there’s no question. That lunatic client has murdered me twice already. I make a full one-eighty when my phone buzzes from my purse.

+

Oh fuck. It’s from the clinic.

+
+

Sandra Kosoko, this is a final reminder regarding Patient Kosoko’s outstanding medical bill of 30,000.00 v-naira over his Nanite Therapy Chamber. Failure to remit will lead to forfeiture of the service by Monday, 3rd of July.

+

Another beep and it’s the banking AI, reminding me of the chicken-feed excuse of cash left across all my virtual wallets.

+

Double fuck.

+

I take a deep breath and consider my options. The AI’s reminder was the tipping point that led me into the bar every time. I need this cash. God knows how long Papa will have left without that nano-tech treatment.

+

And if I died here, then he’d find out about this hustle and lose the chamber. That’s even worse. I’m leaving.

+

I bump into someone as I turn into the parking lot. Bloody Christ—it’s as though this bastard is omnipresent. I clutch my purse tighter as I try to sidestep him, but his hands aren’t the only big things about him.

+

“Sandra, yeah?” The bar’s lights paint the smile on his dark face. “I’m your appointment.”

+

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say quickly, still trying to brush past him. His hands wrap around my arm. Heavy. His full height looms over me, an entire foot taller.

+

“I didn’t pay Moyo all that cash just for this,” his face leans closer, blotting the moonless sky behind. All pretext of a smile had vanished. “Follow me inside.”

+

Electricity ripples across my body…

+

…but nothing happens.

+

For an instant I see the bewilderment register on his face—and I assume mine too—before he grinds his teeth in rage. “How’d you do that?”

+

I jerk my arm from his grip and run for it. My fingers fiddle nervously in my purse as I try to get my phone, but I have nobody to call. Even the cops have no emergency lines in this corner of Lagos. They’d just wave my corpse past without even sparing a glance. I swear I could probably imagine the looks on their faces when they saw my bashed-in skull: “Just another dead olosho. These ritual murders don’t seem to be coming to any end soon. You think her parents knew she was playing hook-up before she got done in?”

+

Then the client’s full weight crashes into me, emptying my lungs as I smash onto the asphalt. His breath is hot and reeks faintly of weed. My heart is pounding in my head, the pressure threatening to blow my eyes out their sockets.

+

“What are you? Why isn’t my juju working?”

+

‘Cause mine’s stronger and third time’s the charm?

+

“Or did that stupid bitch Moyo tip you off, eh? After all the cash she took from me!”

+

Terror gives way to rage. That bitch set me up with a ritualist?

+

He brandishes a padlock from his suit. A friggin’ padlock! What kind of a lunatic goes around wielding such monstrosities anyway? Was this what he’d knocked me out with in our first go around?

+

A stray torchlight beam falls on us. One of the night patrol. I struggle to breathe, to call out—

+

“Lọ-sun!” the client orders in piercing Yoruba.

+

The patrol-man drops like a ragdoll, but it’s all the distraction I need to wedge my tongue between my teeth, right over the big veins, and muster the courage to jump even further backwards. It’s a few years off my future, but it’s either this, or nothing at all.

+

I squeeze out a grin too while I’m at it. I’m nobody’s sacrifice.

+

I swing my head onto the asphalt.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

19:17:49

+

“—don’t know if you’ve got a job for me. Anything Moyo, I know it’s sudden…”

+

Each time, reality condenses into my frontal cortex with a sudden burst that nearly fries out all my nerve endings. I choke on the last few words as Moyo sizes me up from beneath her umbrella lashes.

+

“Haven’t seen you around in a while. Thought your father disapproved of girls like us.”

+

“He needs Nanite therapy,” I wheeze. “Shit is expensive, and I’m barely keeping our place together with all these agbero syndicates shaking us down for cash weekly.”

+

Moyo’s flat is in one of the less shitty areas, even though these days much of everything has fallen into ruin. Anyone can tell her ‘job’ pays well, too. After all, these penthouse shacks don’t come free.

+

“…squeeze you in only if you’re up for it. Sandra?”

+

“Huh? Yes, yes.” There’s no railing between her corridor and the twenty-foot drop behind, and the height is messing with my head. Moyo’s nails are painted an electric pink that disorients me even further.

+

“You good? ’Cause I might have a spot or two left. Depends…” She swipes through her phone as I blink the pinkness of her nails from my eyes. “Big cash or small cash?”

+

Big—oh shit, I already know how that ends. “Let’s say small.”

+

She stops swiping contacts, picks one, and that’s when I catch a glimpse of a painfully familiar face. Same client? Same ending? Half the money? Unbelievable! Moyo, you piece of…

+

“Sandra? I don’t have all evening babe. You know I’ll have to get you all dolled up. Especially with a wig. Jesus, have you always been this grey?”

+

Her fingers are tapping impatiently on her screen. My heartbeat starts drumming against my ears as a plan forms. The very audacity chills me to my bones. A generator sputters to life a few floors below, as if in agreement.

+

“Y-yeah. We good?” I outstretch my clammy hand and I wonder whether Moyo’s reluctance means she’s seen through me. She half rolls her eyes, passes her phone to her other hand and takes my hand in hers.

+

“Now I’ll just need a picture for your client—”

+

Too late. I’ve pulled, and with my leg wedged just right she stumbles. One step. Two. A desperate flail of her arms…

+

I reach out and grab her phone as she falls over, screams swallowed by the wailing generator.

+

For a second I wonder whether her guts will paint the sidewalk pink too.

+

But it’s just a second. Long enough for Moyo’s banking AI’s notification to slide over her Photoshop-enhanced wallpaper.

+
+

Credit: 35,000.00 v-Naira*

+

*Balance: 74,332.48 v-Naira

+

So the client did pay her. And if I keep Moyo’s screen unlocked long enough to make one big transfer, Papa’s payments are a problem solved, and with change to spare.

+

My eyes travel upward, to the blackening sky and the husks of apartments left on this side of town. A lock of grey hair falls from my head as a draught blows by, and I think of the client and his padlock, and whichever unlucky girl will cross his path tonight instead of me.

+

Just another dead olosho…

+

Moyo’s phone suddenly feels too heavy in my hand.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Uchechukwu Nwaka

+

+ + Author image of Uchechukwu Nwaka + + + Uchechukwu Nwaka is a student of Medicine and Surgery at University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Cossmass Infinities, Fusion Fragment and Hexagon among others. When he’s not trying to unravel the mysteries of human (or inhuman) interaction, he can be found binging unhealthy amounts of anime, or generally trying to keep up with endless schoolwork. Find him on Twitter at @uche_cjn.

+

© Uchechukwu Nwaka 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by Couleur and the text ‘a frightened black woman surrounded by pink lightning’.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-28/e-pluribus-unum.html b/issue-28/e-pluribus-unum.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7b8e9652 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/e-pluribus-unum.html @@ -0,0 +1,368 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + E Pluribus Unum — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

E Pluribus Unum

+

Mame Bougouma Diene

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for E Pluribus Unum by +
+ + + + +

M + +y neighbor passed away today.

+

He’d made it clear he wanted me to find him and push him into his cremation oven.

+

“You better do it, goddamit! You hear me? Don’t let me down!” he spat, a fit of phlegm on the float screen hovering over my bed at 5am this morning.

+

It was midafternoon for him, and that’s exactly why he did it.

+

Saying he was a neighbor is a bit of a stretch. Neighborliness and friendliness are two vastly different things, case in point, but I guess it’s as good a term as any when you each share half the world.

+

We never officially shook on that. What belonged to me and what belonged to Jordan. He made it clear that I could keep Africa, so I guess the rest was up for grabs. He was mean at poker, or perhaps he was just mean, but I don’t think so. We always agreed on football. Regular season re-runs kept bouncing between satellites and into our float screens. I think he was just American like me. Same mold different metal, but in the end…

+

In the end he wanted to go down burning and who was I to say no to that?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +y estate used to run to the end of the block, and we shared it with only three hundred other families. Progress was bound to make it all better obviously, there’s nothing like a trillionaire corporate philanthropist with his eyes on the stars to help out the little guy…

+

You’d expect the end of the world to come with a bang. Don’t. A push of a button doesn’t echo. The power never ran out and the water kept running. Couldn’t tell the difference from cable TV either. As long as the massive orbital engines kept spinning spider webs into a new universe, we’d be good forever.

+

And in a flash it was just us left. One empty planet plus the last two losers left alive.

+

Perhaps everybody else was dead, or doing the same old shit under a purple sky, makes zero difference.

+

My estate runs further than the Mongol empire now. Within, it encompasses half the riches of the world, slowly eroding to the elements. It’s an all you can eat buffet in any city on the planet.

+

The world has a value it never had before now. Because we’re gone. Welcome space invaders, you’ve inherited a gem. Don’t fuck it up.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +unny how the ovens work. See through. Jordan’s body is lying on the platform, wrapped in black, encased in glass.

+

I finally understand why people are so revering of the dead. I was too young, barely twenty-two when I sunk a three pointer, turned to the empty bleachers, the bouncing ball echoing like a tomb around me, and…

+

What I’m saying is that I’d never lost anyone. Not true. I lost everyone. I was alone. So alone, so…

+

What I mean is that I’d never been to a funeral. I never realized how vulnerable, how humble a dead body looked once stripped of all the tiny cracks into the soul that life chisels into you. The wrinkles on your face, the twist of your lips into a permanent sneer, bright eyes that shine broken. Not now. He’s dead, peaceful like a sleeping tike.

+

A dead asshole was a dead asshole to me, and I expected to feel the exact same when I landed on Jordan’s rocket pad and shuttled to his home. It wasn’t his home, neither was my home “mine”, but since everything is unoccupied, why not move into the glass palace over the Serengeti?

+

But I don’t feel that way at all. He’s dead, and whatever he was doesn’t matter anymore. He was a bigoted piece of shit, but that doesn’t matter anymore.

+

I get it now.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he blue flames erupt and for a second I see them lick at his face.

+

I was… thirty maybe, when we first made contact. The initial shock still runs through me. First relief, then disappointment, rage, and finally acceptance. I’d just gotten a truckload of really sour lemons, and by fuck was I gonna make limoncello. I was gonna need it.

+

Back then I had scoured half the planet. Macchu Pichu, Kilimajaro, Tokyo, Moscow, Auckland… You know how long you can spend dancing naked on a mountain top when you lose your shit? A long fucking time.

+

All over the world and back, and yet. No one. No one, no one, no one. Not just people. The apocalypse… this was not even an apocalypse. A rapture maybe? Either way, no packs of angry dogs, certainly no zombies, enough food to last ten lifetimes and all you’ve ever wanted for free.

+

Madness is its own miracle. I went through its mouth and out its butt, but I made it through. I made peace. Peace with myself, peace with the anger lacing the deepest parts of me. Peace with a world I hated because it rejected me but desperately wanted to prove my value to. Peace with the schizophrenia of being who and what I am.

+

Oh boy.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +His body is gone now.

+

Walter Raleigh once surmised the weight of smoke. Perhaps it’s the same for the soul. Perhaps that was the real reason we chose cremation over burial, not overpopulation. Perhaps I’m a fucking poet. The last thing the world needs right now. It doesn’t need words anymore. It’s too late for words.

+

His soul is gone and, dark as it was alive, I want to believe the flames purified it. That they will purify me. But there is no one left to push me into the oven but myself. Perhaps I’ll set myself on fire at the end. No point in thinking about it now, it’ll happen when it does.

+

There are a few rites to complete before he is finally gone. The ash needs spreading on the breeze. There are a few words he’d written too. I should read them but I won’t. I’ll bet you it’s more senseless diatribe, or worse. The last thing I wanna read are Jordan’s dirty thoughts about his cousin. I don’t wanna ruin the moment. Just like humanity, he’s gone, and in that he’s perfect and that’s how I want to remember him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +wo plates of chicken-wings. Mine ready to be demolished, and his that never will. Two tall ones and two shots. Same story.

+

We only met once a year. Once you’re past forty you don’t really want to meet anybody more than once a year anyway, but in this case once a year was enough.

+

Super Bowl every year, re-run after re-run, year after year.

+

We started the tradition with the 1966 Packers Cowboys game, once we finally admitted that there was no one but us, and he got over “I can’t believe I’m stuck with a fucking (expletive deleted)!”

+

It was always harder on him than me, I knew America more intimately than he ever would. He was always a spectator. I was an extra in the shit show. The character you kill off right when he’s about to shine. I’m like Sean Bean but no one gives a shit.

+

So I knew and understood his demons, I’d seen them before, and I could see the human behind them in ways he’d never see me. I’m not saying I’m a great guy, I’m a straight up asshole, I just had forty years to come to terms with it, so I sound wise. I guess I appreciated his brutal honesty, it was refreshing, not facing someone who pretends to like you but hates your guts; or sometimes likes you, but superficially, your identity doesn’t matter one lick to them.

+

We’d made it all the way to the Giants Pats games of 2008. Atmospheric shuttles could get you anywhere in the world in ninety minutes flat and we chose Chicago. Mo Redman’s Sports Bar floating high above Lake Michigan.

+

Old games are super weird. It’s like watching jousting damn near. Respect for what they did without body modifications, but it’s the distance. You could delve into it with modern tech, watch the games in a virtual body, from the sidelines, QB, Strong Safety, your pick. That wasn’t happening anymore.

+

But that’s also what’s been keeping us from connecting more and hating less, all that virtual, all that remote self-righteousness. Hate can feel so warm and comforting. It’s when we finally sat down together, the mutual relief at not being alone. Man…

+

“Marcus?”

+

“That’s me!”

+

“Damned pleased to meet you!”

+

Best buds ever since. With the caveat that too much liquor brings out the truth of people and his was ugly, but buddies, in the urban friendly way of America: banter, the common man’s spite for politicians, and stats, endless arguing over stats. Anything to keep the social fabric intact, anything to avoid the issues.

+

“Hold my beer!”

+

We had all the beer and all the shots and all the wings we could ever want, and once a year we put all the bullshit behind and toasted to a game from a time long gone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ut today he’s dead. Today his ashes are floating on the air, and there is no game playing on the screen, but I’ll get hammered just the same, and bullshit just the same, and wake up way too old for a hangover, just the same. Because now I can finally breathe.

+

It’s the future. It’s the end.

+

I’m the last man left alive.

+

The last black man left alive.

+

And it’s now, only now, that it doesn’t matter anymore.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of E Pluribus Unum on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mame Bougouma Diene

+

+ + Author image of Mame Bougouma Diene + + + Mame Bougouma Diene is a Franco–Senegalese American humanitarian living in Brooklyn, the US/Francophone spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society, a regular columnist at Strange Horizons, and francophone editor at Omenana magazine. You can find his work in both the aforementioned, Fiyah!, EscapePod, Tor.com, AfroSFv2 & v3, Dominion, and others. He was nominated for two Nommo Awards, and his debut collection Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night (Clash Books) was nominated for the 2019 Splatterpunk Award. He tweets as @mame_bougouma.

+

© Mame Bougouma Diene 2021 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by Victor and the prompt ‘a silhouetted man in a space station’. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen here.

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+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-28/editorial.html b/issue-28/editorial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..311e6c78 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/editorial.html @@ -0,0 +1,310 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Editorial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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Winter is upon us, or upon one hemisphere at least, and depending on where you live in The New Normal that apparently means enduring less eggnog, holly, and mistletoe and more freak apocalyptic weather that we’d all much rather be reading about than sheltering from. Here, however, you will find neither holiday cheer nor meteorological fear—Issue 28 is an Xmas-free zone, normal or otherwise, so please curl up and enjoy these eight stories on your device of choice regardless of what the wicked world is doing all around you!

+

So far Mythaxis has eschewed the temptation to offer themed issues, but this time around we do have an element of commonality to what we have on offer: not in the stories, but in their accompanying illustrations. Back in July, I became aware of an AI-powered image generator, VQGAN+, and began tentatively playing around with it. I decided to attempt to illustrate an issue of the zine solely using its output, and now you can see the results.

+

In my process, running VQGAN+ typically generated 300 images—or less if I interrupted a disastrous run before it went too wrong to bear. The results are much like the individual frames of a film, or rather of an animation, since taken collectively they show the gradual, flickering evolution of a single image. The output can also be extracted as video, and my earliest successful attempt can be seen here:

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In this example, an existing image was used as the starting point for the AI to work from. Parts of that sequence of images were eventually blended to take their place in the art for our closing story, and in several cases the VQGAN+ output was composited with other material to create the final image.

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In other cases, no seed image was used at all. A text string was always necessary to guide the AI regarding what output you hoped to receive, and a lot of the fun in the process came from discovering how simple (or complex) to make the instructions you gave the software. All four generated images in the issue’s cover art came only from a prompt—for this, the instruction was relatively complex, “a golden compass of mythical design”:

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By comparison, for one of our stories I selected a key phrase from the story itself to see what the software would come up with. From “micro expressions” it generated this:

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You can find these videos and more on our Youtube playlist. Unfortunately not every image created has a video to go with it, but while the artwork is fun to play with what really matters is the fiction. AI might be one day destined to claim all the fields humanity thinks of as innately our own, but for now I can confidently leave you safe in the flesh-and-blood hands of eight talented authors.

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And if I don’t happen to see you in the next eleven days or so: Happy New Year!

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 28 - Thanks and Salutations! +Cover art created by Andrew Leon Hudson using four VQGAN+ images, plus the compass by Fourleaflovers. +A little redundant to say at this point, but maximum thanks go to Katherine Crowson, creator of the VQGAN+ version used, as well as to Adverb who originated the approach of combining VQGAN and CLIP, and @somewheresy who translated the original Spanish-language notebook to English.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-28/fly-away-peter.html b/issue-28/fly-away-peter.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1b3d12d8 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/fly-away-peter.html @@ -0,0 +1,399 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Fly Away, Peter — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Fly Away, Peter

+

J. Livermore

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+ Story image for Fly Away, Peter by +
+ + + + +

“P + +aul! Oh, we’re so glad you’re back. We, erm…” Mother glanced behind her, towards the living room. Paul frowned. She was behaving oddly. But that wasn’t the awful thing. The awful thing was that the open living room door revealed a pair of trousered legs and smart shoes.

+

Someone was sitting in his chair.

+

“Mother. You know I don’t like people sitting in my chair. They muss up the cushion. They make it all wonky.”

+

But whereas Mother would usually clutch a fist to her heart at being scolded in this fashion and insist on spilling out a desperate apology, this time she seemed as flustered as a schoolgirl complimented on her dimples.

+

“It’s not just anyone, Paul. It’s… Well, his name’s Peter.”

+

“Peter?” It was a common enough name and Paul had known plenty that owned it. But none that might visit. And certainly none he could envisage being allowed to occupy his chair.

+

“He’s, well, I guess you could call him your twin.”

+

If someone could reach down into Paul Knowle’s forty-one year collection of deepest, darkest fears, and pull something out—something that was like an evil, sneering rabbit from a magician’s hat—then Peter Knowle’s appearance was all that. And more.

+

Because, up until five minutes ago, Paul Knowle had been an only child, in a world he alone owned.

+

But worlds, like parents—it was now clear to him—had a way of splitting on you.

+

Quite literally.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he man calling himself ‘Peter Knowle’ was using gentle, self-deprecating humour to make Father laugh. Father was perched on the edge of his chair, displaying an eager, happy grin which faltered when he saw his actual son glaring down at him, but then shone again when Father returned to basking in his newfound, well, sun.

+

“Paul. This is Peter,” Father said.

+

The interloper twisted round and the two men viewed each other for the first time.

+

Paul Knowle. Peter Knowle.

+

Not twins. Not even brothers. But, nonetheless, genetically identical in every way.

+

Somehow, they were the very same person.

+

“What the hell fool game of nonsense and rubbish are you playing here?” Paul managed clumsily. “We watch Antiques Auctionhouse at this time. It’s starting any moment.”

+

“I think we can forego Antiques Auctionhouse tonight, Paul,” Father said, far more bravely than he’d ever normally dare. “Under the circumstances.”

+

“I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Peter said. His smile was wide and cleanly white. His skin lightly tanned. And the hair swept off from, rather than stuck to, his forehead.

+

“You’re not doing anything of the sort, Peter. It’s alri—” Mother began, but Paul had heard enough.

+

“Then if you don’t mind.” Paul jabbed on the TV and snatched the remote from its pocket on the side of his chair and began waggling it impatiently to get the channel and volume he wanted. He kept his back to them, obscuring their view of Antiques Auctionhouse.

+

“Maybe we can leave Paul to his programme,” Peter said vacating the chair. “I’d love another cup of tea, Mother.”

+

“Of course,” Mother twittered merrily.

+

“We’ll just be in the kitchen,” Father said, joining Mother’s betrayal.

+

“And when’s dinner?” Paul asked, though he knew it would be dutifully served up immediately after Antiques Auctionhouse. It always was. And he didn’t need to ask what it was either, because they knew what he liked. How he liked it.

+

“Could you stay to tea, Peter?” Mother asked.

+

“There won’t be enough,” Paul told them all.

+

“That’s okay—I won’t have much,” Mother said, making Paul’s jaw lock and a nerve slither up onto his forehead.

+

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” Peter said as he ushered them out and Paul grinned. That was an end to it then.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ut when Antiques Auctionhouse finished and he called out that it had done so, Paul discovered that rather than things being sensibly, correctly back the way they should have been, Peter had been busy with a frying pan and had concocted something for them all.

+

“I don’t like, erm…” Paul looked into the contents of the pan. He didn’t know what it was.

+

“That’s okay,” Mother said. “There’s plenty of Shepherd’s Pie for you, Paul. I think I’m going to try what Peter’s made. What about you, Father?”

+

“Oh, I’m game!” Father said, still with a ridiculous level of bonhomie. Paul wondered if Father was drunk. Mother too. If, in fact, the whole world had suddenly become drunk and he was the last sensible, sober person standing.

+

“Sure you wouldn’t like to try some? It’s a favourite dish where I come from. My speciality actually.”

+

“No. I’m fine with Shepherd’s Pie,” Paul informed Peter pertly. But something of what Peter had just said did need further investigation. “And where, may I ask, do you come from?”

+

“Ah, well now, that’s the incredible thing. You see: I’m you and you’re me. Here, I guess they’d have to call us clones. But we’re not. We’re exactly the same person—we’re just from different dimensions.”

+

Paul looked to Mother and Father and was dismayed to see they were both nodding, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

+

“Isn’t it marvellous, Paul? I mean, if it wasn’t for the difference in names, you’d think you were just a man and his mirror image.”

+

As Paul and Peter examined each other a second time, it was pretty obvious to any neutral third party that this statement was way off the mark. It wasn’t just a case of chalk and cheese—more of chalk and cha-cha-cha.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“T + +his dessert is incredible,” Peter said. “I’ve always wondered how you got the apples like that.”

+

“Cinnamon, nutmeg… and I let the sugar burn ever-so-slightly so it caramelises,” Mother was pleased to relate.

+

“Different dimension?”

+

Paul had finally managed to interrupt the pleasantries to get back to the earlier revelation. He arched an eyebrow to show his scepticism.

+

“Yes. Although things here are so similar, I guess they’re more parallel dimensions. Not exactly identical, because when I came through a few hours ago, I looked for Mother and Father where they live on my side, but they weren’t there. This is the house I grew up in though—so imagine my surprise when I found they still lived here!”

+

“We don’t live here anymore in your dimension?” Mother asked.

+

Paul swallowed. From the tales Peter had told over tea, they’d already discovered Peter had his own business, wife, two adorable children. Mother and Father had cooed like pigeons over the photos Peter had produced. Paul could guess what the next bit was going to be: Peter wasn’t living at home at forty-one.

+

“Mother and Father live next door to me now,” Peter said. “I wanted them, you, close to their grandchildren.”

+

“How lucky they are,” Father said. Paul kept his gaze rooted on a neutral portion of the tablecloth as his hands stretched out to claim the last portion of apple crumble. “Paul, do save some for Peter.”

+

“That’s okay,” Peter said, leaning back and tapping a perfectly muscled midriff. “Gotta watch the old weight.” Paul pushed his spoon between puffy lips, Mother’s wonderful secret recipe unable to make the apple crumble taste anything but bitter and jagged tonight. “This house is the same though. And the photos you showed me earlier are identical to all those my parents have got. Even that dreadful one when you dressed me up as Tintin for that fancy dress party.”

+

The three of them laughed. Despite all he had eaten, Paul felt hollow.

+

“The school photos are the same too. Except that I went off to university after St Giles.”

+

“Oh. Paul didn’t stay at St Giles,” Father said.

+

Peter raised his eyebrows. “No? Why ever not?”

+

“I don’t have to do exactly the same as you,” Paul said.

+

“No. Of course not. Each one of us has our own path to follow,” Peter said, nodding at the wisdom of this. “So… you changed schools?”

+

“In his third year. We moved him to Duckson High School.”

+

“Duckson!” Peter laughed. “I remember them. Nice little school.”

+

“St Giles was a little… rough for Paul,” Mother said, looking apologetically at Peter. Paul blushed hotly.

+

“Well, the boys there could be a little hard on the new kids. I remember my first few months there were a real ordeal. I can quite understand you wanting to change, Paul.”

+

“But you stuck it out?” Father asked, a worrying mixture of admiration and interest in his voice.

+

“Well, I guess I just realised it had its plus-sides too. I joined the rugby team, the football team…”

+

“Paul didn’t take to rugby,” Father said, and his voice was tainted for the first time by disappointment. Maybe even disgust. “Too rough. Again.”

+

“Well, it’s not everyone’s sport,” Peter said. “I had my fair share of broken bones and black eyes.”

+

Father knew well enough because he’d played in his own school days—and afterwards, until a knee injury had ruled him out. Mother now recounted the evenings when Father would arrive on her doorstep with a bandaged knee or a purple lump on his head like a ripe artichoke.

+

“Well, that’s that solved, anyway,” Peter said. “Who’d have thought it, eh?”

+

“I’m going to watch the news,” Paul said, pushing away from the table and standing up. He paused, waiting for Mother and Father to follow.

+

“You boys go along,” Mother said, reaching for the dessert dishes.

+

“Oh no, you don’t! I’m washing up!” Peter deftly slid the bowls from under her hands. “It’s the least I can do after that amazing crumble.”

+

“But you cooked!”

+

“I also arrived unannounced, without flowers, and have intruded on your evening. So: no excuses.”

+

Paul hesitated at the door, wondering if he should create a precedent and offer to wash up too. But he felt the pull of the evening news, and all his programmes that came after.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n the end, Mother insisted on doing the drying up and Paul watched the news in silence with Father, both of them staring at the screen but not really taking anything in. Usually, Mother and Father would ask Paul about his day, how he felt, if he wanted anything more to eat. Then, Mother would get up to fetch his cocoa and biscuits.

+

Mother and Peter eventually came in, laughing so loudly Paul had to tap the volume higher. Mother had brought coffee, and some chocolates she’d got from Father on her birthday.

+

“This has been so nice,” Peter told them. “Meeting you all. Seeing you’re all so well. Tasting your famous apple crumble!” Mother cackled at that bit. “But I must be going back to my own dimension. I only chanced upon the way to come through. Now that I know it’s there though…”

+

Paul’s heart knocked hard against his ribs.

+

“Maybe Paul would like to visit your parents, your dimension?” Mother offered on Paul’s behalf.

+

“That would be great!” Peter said and embraced Mother in a way that Paul never would have. Peter even gave Father a hug. “So long, Paul. Be seeing you.”

+

“Yes,” Paul said from his chair as Father and Mother accompanied Peter to the door. There was more laughter, more sounds of kisses, and sniffling from Mother as the emotion of the moment engulfed her. When the front door finally closed and they came back into the living room, Paul said: “There’s a film on in a few minutes. John Wayne.”

+

“I think I’ll go to bed,” Mother said, heading for the stairs.

+

“Father?”

+

“I’ve never really liked John Wayne,” Father confessed in a sudden moment of independent opinion. “Always plays every role the same. Wait for me, Mother.”

+

Paul found himself alone with the TV, his chair and his thoughts.

+

It would be alright. Things would be back to normal tomorrow. He might even offer to wash up after breakfast. Not after dinner though—too many plates, and the ones from the oven would have food burned onto them. Roast tomorrow. His favourite.

+

Paul stared at the TV but was unable to concentrate as John Wayne entered yet another saloon with his trademark swagger. Tonight, for some reason, it looked like he was walking in pain. Like he was a tired, old horse forced to give one too many performances.

+

It was a long time before Paul felt strong enough to breathe out.

+

It would be alright.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Fly Away, Peter on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

J. Livermore

+

+ + Author image of J. Livermore + + + J. Livermore writes infrequently, about odd or impossible things. He studied law, spent time in South America, and now explains things for a living.

+

© J. Livermore 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by Gratisography and the phrase ’twin brothers sitting on a sofa’, composited with a background image by Peggy_Marco.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-28/how-to-get-ai-to-like-you.html b/issue-28/how-to-get-ai-to-like-you.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cc5357a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/how-to-get-ai-to-like-you.html @@ -0,0 +1,448 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + How to Get AI to Like You — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

How to Get AI to Like You

+

Aaron Emmel

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for How to Get AI to Like You by +
+ + + + +

I + + rang the doorbell and assumed the confident smile I’d practiced in the mirror. I’d honed my expression and reassembled my limited assortment of outfits based on feedback from the popular app How to Get AI to Like You until one in the morning, at which point I’d decided my risks of being unrested and underprepared were perfectly balanced.

+

“This is Elias Brown,” I said into the intercom. “I have an appointment.”

+

“Please repeat your name,” said a voice. I assumed it was an AI.

+

“Elias Brown.”

+

“How do you spell it?”

+

I spelled it. “I have—”

+

“You’re not pronouncing it correctly.”

+

“What?”

+

“Your name should be pronounced Eh-LEE-as.”

+

“It’s my name.”

+

“Exactly. That’s why it’s important for you to pronounce it correctly.”

+

I paused while I tried to keep any micro-expressions off of my face, even though controlling them was impossible because that’s what made them micro-expressions. This was the apartment that would change everything for me. It would boost my dating profile rank, which ultimately could raise my relationship status score, which would improve my health insurance rating, not to mention my employability metrics, which in turn—I stood up straighter and lifted my chin.

+

There were a hundred ways to fail the algorithm-derived tests of daily life, and I’d tried most of them. But this time, I was going to win. I was going to get the apartment.

+

“Eh-LEE-as Brown,” I said. The door opened.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + left the building half an hour later without having to second-guess my expression in the least. The AI had accepted me and my credit score. The apartment itself was large enough that my bed wouldn’t have to be anywhere near the refrigerator, and I’d get a view of the street for my first time as a working adult.

+

“How’d it go?” my roommate Javier asked when I got home.

+

I regarded the edifice of empty pizza boxes and soda cans stacked on the coffee table. More effort had been put into balancing them than it would have taken to throw them away. Soon, however, this would no longer be my concern. “I got the apartment.”

+

He looked up from his videogame. “Really? Wow. Congratulations.”

+

“I can help you and Steve look for a new roommate.”

+

His eyes went back to the screen. “We’ll leave the room open for you for a while. Just in case it doesn’t work out.”

+

Clearly, he didn’t want a reason to stop playing Soldiers in the Abyss. “I’ve been approved. It’s happening.”

+

“You think the computers are going to let you get what you want that easily?”

+

“It’s not like they’re intentionally trying to thwart us.”

+

Javier didn’t respond to that, so I went to my room and closed the door. That gave me just enough space to sit down on my bed and pull up my work.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + had a job so my employer could collect tax breaks for not firing workers. The value in keeping me was somewhat greater than what could be saved by replacing me with an AI, and my company should know, since their AI accountants ran the numbers.

+

“Ms. Jameson,” I said to the first client, a regular, reading from the script, “have you thought more about the contract we were talking about?”

+

“I don’t know. My husband and daughter both think it’s a bad idea. They say you can take our house.”

+

“We’re not going to take your house, Ms. Jameson. What would we even do with it?”

+

“I know. It sounds—I’m just telling you what they said.”

+

“We want you for the long haul.” I read as the script updated in real time. “We’re not in the real estate business. We’re in the customer satisfaction business. When you tell your friends what a great deal you got, we’ll get more referrals.”

+

“That makes sense. I know.”

+

“So, what do you think, Ms. Jameson? Are you ready for the next step?”

+

“It’s just that I flag data for a living,” Ms. Jameson said. “I know how important data is for the algorithms and what they look for, and my husband probably has flags because of the threats he gets from his customer service job.”

+

“Ms. Jameson, our system reviewed your family’s data before we offered you these terms.”

+

“I know, but if I sign up for your security system, and your company decides our house would be more secure without us in it….”

+

The screen provided a general rebuttal. I went off-script. “Since you know about AI, you know they like stability. Evictions aren’t part of that.”

+

There was a pause. Then: “Yes. Yes, I’ll do it.”

+

“Great! I’m so glad to hear that. We’re going to have a good run together. You won’t be disappointed.”

+

“You promise.”

+

“Of course, I promise. Just sign that form that’s popping up right now.”

+

“Okay. There. Do you see it?”

+

“I got it. Congratulations, Ms. Jameson. You’re a new owner of Peerless Security.”

+

“Thank you!”

+

There was a pause, and then new words appeared in my script: Ms. Jameson, it is now my duty to inform you that you have two weeks, as mandated by Maryland law, to vacate your house.

+

I stared at the words.

+

“Is there anything else?” Lindy Jameson asked. “What happens next?”

+

A timer appeared in the upper-right corner of the virtual screen: numbers counting down from ten. If I didn’t speak before it hit zero, I’d be docked Successful Employee points.

+

“Elias?” Ms. Jameson asked.

+

“One minute. I’m checking something.” I texted the AI overseeing the session: This isn’t right. We promised we wouldn’t take her house.

+

Read the words in the script, the AI responded immediately. We are within our rights as stipulated by Lindy Jameson’s signed contract.

+

But that’s not right, I texted back. The counter hit “3.” We’re lying to her, and we don’t need to do it.

+

“Elias?” Lindy prompted.

+

“I… Ms. Jameson, it is now my duty to inform you—” I stared at the screen.

+

“You trailed off. I can’t hear you.”

+

“Lindy, we’re screwing you. Get a lawyer.” I stabbed off the call.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + stood up and paced my room. Then I tried to log back into my work account. It was blocked, but I had a new text from my work AI. I opened it.

+

Mr. Elias Brown, we regret to inform you that your employment with Peerless Security has been terminated as of 16:13 hours on May 15. Because you violated the terms of your employment contract, you have waived the right to two weeks’ notice and all benefits. Your last paycheck will be prorated based on your termination date.

+

I tried again to log into my work account. Account does not exist, the screen read. I pulled up the summary of my stats, but I already knew what I’d see. My employment status said “Unemployed—terminated.” My health benefits had been cancelled, and my credit score had plummeted 20 percent. Because of that hit, there was a new amendment to my new rental agreement. I opened it with an icy feeling spreading in my stomach. Because of my revised credit score, my monthly rent had just been hiked by 10 percent per month, and I now had to pay an additional month’s rent in advance.

+

A second message appeared: also based on my credit score, along with my lack of health benefits and employment status, my dating site account was cancelled.

+

Other scores dived in turn, an accelerating cascade.

+

New messages began filling my inbox. Most of them were the same: ads for different kinds of products geared toward my new status. Offers to boost my scores, to train for job interview programs, to join sketchier dating sites. One message was unique: a follow-up from the AI manager of the apartment complex I’d visited that morning.

+

Application rejected due to credit score status, it read. You may reapply in one calendar year from today’s date.

+

I checked. My credit score was now down 30 percent.

+

I wandered out to the living room. It took a few minutes for Javier to notice me. “Some kid just beat my high score. Get me a Coke?” He looked up. “Oh. You don’t look so good. Apartment fell through?”

+

“And my job.”

+

It wasn’t just my job that was bothering me, though. It was that I had taken someone else down with me.

+

He nodded. “I’m sure you had lots of great plans, but what you’re not factoring in is that God clearly hates us. Grab me a Coke?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + walked outside and called Lindy. “This is Elias. I wanted to apologize for what happened and let you know—”

+

“How dare you call me?” The line went dead.

+

I stared at the phone. I’d called—I had to admit it—to make myself feel better somehow. As I’d dialed, though, I’d also realized I had an idea that might get her out of the mess I’d led her into. It was a reckless idea, but that’s what the situation seemed to call for.

+

I knew I wouldn’t stop thinking about it, or about new justifications to ask her about it. I’m very convincing to myself. So, I did what I had to do: I deleted all Lindy’s contact information from my records, put on my headphones and blasted Love, Death & Anarchy while I looked for a neighborhood to get lost in.

+

About an hour later, I received a text. I just thought you’d like to know I lost my job because my stability score went down, my husband wont talk to me, & our daughter screamed shes leaving home & now i have no idea where she is or if shes coming back.

+

Five minutes later, another text: Ha ha, not that shes going to have anywhere to come back to.

+

A few minutes after that: This is lindy by the way. In case you cant keep up w which customer you screwed over or there are too many to count.

+

I thought a long time before texting her back. Of course, I was going to, but I couldn’t just admit that to myself at the outset. I have an idea.

+

The indicator saying she was typing was up in the text app for a very long time. I imagined all the messages she was trying out and deleting. Or, rather, I imagined one basic message conveyed in a variety of ways: You and your idea can go to hell. Ultimately, though, a different message came through: What is it?

+

Me: Not safe over text. I need to tell you in person.

+

There was a long pause. Finally: Fine.

+

Me: I need your address.

+

Lindy: You have it.

+

Me: I deleted it.

+

A shorter pause. OK. If my husband & i dont like your idea well be able to tell you to your face.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +indy’s house was a ranch with a two decades-old Kia in the driveway. The bushes were trimmed and the decorative shutters had recently been painted. It was cared for.

+

Lindy came out to intercept me as I approached on the walk. Apparently, I wasn’t going to be let inside. She was fortyish, in sweatpants, with her hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Her husband, Rod, peered through the windows.

+

“Do you mind taking the battery out of your cell?” I asked.

+

“My phone’s inside. I’m expecting this to be a short visit.”

+

I swallowed hard and skipped the apologetic yet compelling introduction I’d been planning. “You tag data, right?”

+

“Why?”

+

“Your employer—”

+

“My former employer. The one you got me fired from. That one?”

+

“Right. Yes. I—” I thought of telling her that I’d been fired as well, but I didn’t see a lot of empathy in her eyes at the moment. “Your ex-employer. They aggregate datasets for the tracking companies. The scores influence each other, so change one and you change others. Is there a way you could access your own data?”

+

“That’s your idea?”

+

“Part of it.” All of it.

+

She crossed her arms, a psychological barrier from my stupidity. “There’s no easy way to change someone’s information, let alone my own, and because of you, I don’t have a job anymore.”

+

“But could you still find a way into the system?”

+

She paused. Her narrowed eyes got a little more thoughtful. “If I tried and I got caught I’d go to jail, which is the one thing that hasn’t already gone wrong today.”

+

“If you could corrupt a batch of files, though, one that yours just happened to be in—they’d have to restore everything, right? How old would the backup files be?”

+

“My ratings dropped because I lost our house. None of this would get our house back.”

+

“Maybe you can. Ratings discrepancies are the one way to back out of a contract. That’s a clause Peerless included to benefit itself, but in this case, it can bite them. If it looks like something’s wrong with your ratings, the contract Peerless used to seize your house is void.”

+

“I don’t know why I let you come.” She shook her head. “The truth? I thought it would feel good to yell at you, to—hurt you. But now I just want you to go away.”

+

“Lindy, I’m—”

+

“You heard me. Okay?”

+

I drew in my breath to argue, but then I saw the firmness in her eyes, and I let it out as a slow sigh. I’d done enough to her and her family. “Yeah. Okay.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + took a bus uptown, but when I tried to transfer the next bus was out of order. I looked down the line: they were all out of order. I was used to things going wrong by that point, so I wasn’t completely surprised. I tried an autocab and a ride service, but the apps for both said they were having problems accessing my info. That made sense: my scores had been going haywire all day and the universe was still against me, right?

+

I walked back. It took more than an hour.

+

When I returned to my building, the door didn’t recognize me. I pulled out my phone to call Javier, but it rang before I could open my contacts.

+

“I made a huge mistake.” Lindy’s voice was shaking. “I tried what you said. I thought I covered my tracks, but my antivirus software is going haywire. Law enforcement AIs are scouring my system.”

+

I took a step back and stared at the red light on the door. The buses. The autocab. Were those all related? Lindy’s hack might have impacted more than I’d thought.

+

“I really am going to jail.”

+

I rubbed my forehead, thinking quickly. “Lindy, have you ever heard of the app How to Get AI to Like You?”

+

“No. What? Why?”

+

“It’s not important. Just—don’t do anything else differently. Once they think they know you, anything you do to change your routine arouses suspicion.”

+

“Okay. I shouldn’t be calling you if they’re tracking me, should I?”

+

“Probably not.”

+

She hung up. I still needed to get into the building, so I swiped to Javier’s contact info. Before I pressed Call, the door’s light turned green. Whatever that problem was, it had been resolved.

+

Javier was grinning when I walked into the apartment. “The other score’s gone!” he said without looking up. “I’m back on top!”

+

“Awesome.” I didn’t remember what score he was talking about.

+

“Everything I said before, that might have been a little harsh.”

+

“It’s what you always say.”

+

“I like that you’re always looking for ways to win. Don’t let me discourage you.”

+

He actually looked up at me when he said that. I was so stunned that for a moment, I could imagine wanting to stay in this apartment, terrible views and pizza box mountains notwithstanding. Then my phone vibrated, there was an explosion onscreen, Javier turned back to his game and the moment passed. I went to my room to check my messages.

+

The top one was from the credit agency. Due to a widespread data error, we are reverting to credit ratings posted at 7:00am Eastern Time. We apologize if this causes any inconvenience.

+

The next message welcomed me to my new apartment.

+

Lindy. This must all have been because of Lindy’s hack.

+

I thumbed through my ratings, my grin widening with each swipe. My credit score was back to what it had been. My dating site account was reinstated.

+

I wanted to call Lindy to see if her scores had gone up, but I took my own advice: nothing to make the AIs suspicious.

+

More swipes. I didn’t have my job back, which meant my ratings were bound to drop again. “I wouldn’t go back to Peerless even if they let me,” I said out loud, which probably wasn’t true but felt good to believe.

+

My mind raced. Maybe my scores were decent enough again that I could get hired by another firm if I moved quickly. AI recruiters were fast when they wanted to be.

+

Before I could act on that, my phone pinged with another text. Unknown sender.

+

I liked your idea. Have any others?

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of How to Get AI to Like You on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Aaron Emmel

+

+ + Author image of Aaron Emmel + + + Aaron Emmel’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Thanks to the patience of his wonderful wife, and despite the impatience of his wonderful children, Aaron also writes essays, graphic novels and interactive fiction. He grew up in the mountains of New Mexico and on Central America’s Caribbean coast. Find him online at www.aaronemmel.com and on Twitter at @justicioaje.

+

© Aaron Emmel 2021 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using VQGAN+, solely based on the prompt phrase ‘micro expressions’. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen here.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2021

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+ Mame Bougouma Diene +

E Pluribus Unum

+
+ + +

It's hard to hate The Other if there isn't An Other to hate. So, in a sense, when it comes to bigotry it always takes two to tango, even if only one participant is actually dancing to the music. Mame Bougouma Diene's elegiac short strongly suggests that this is going to be the case right up until the solo begins.

+ + + + Story image for E Pluribus Unum by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
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+

Fly Away, Peter

+ J. Livermore +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Fly Away, Peter by + + + +

As the editor apparently repeats every issue, sometimes (read 'always', it seems) stories tend to arrive in satisfying pairs, and J. Livermore's tale provides a pleasing dovetail with our opener. Again, it's about two very different men, again, one of them isn't around by the end, but in every other respect the two pieces could hardly be more different.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Marciano

+ Charlotte H. Lee +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Marciano by + + + +

The genesis of speculative fiction may well be 'Utopia', Thomas More's 16th century satire of a perfect society, its name necessarily meaning 'no-place'. The best utopian sf now looks not merely at perfection, but instead shows people striving to build something better, often within worlds that are very far from perfect. Charlotte H. Lee gives us someone on that very path.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

How to Get AI to Like You

+ Aaron Emmel +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for How to Get AI to Like You by + + + +

It would have been a missed opportunity if, in an issue entirely illustrated via artificially intelligent image generation, we didn't include a single story actually featuring AI. Aaron Emmel to the rescue, therefore, with this highly plausible glimpse of the way the future may be heading—in situations, at least, if not solutions…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Come Buy, Come Buy

+ E. Saxey +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Come Buy, Come Buy by + + + +

Has anyone got over the 2020 lockdown yet? Hopefully we'll endure less panic and home-goods hoarding next time civilisation comes crashing down—but we're always going to need more than well-stocked shelves to feel satisfied with life, and E. Saxey's story (from an original idea by Kim Plowright) reminds us that wanderlust isn't going anywhere soon.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Maneater of Tiruchery

+ Chaitanya Murali +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Maneater of Tiruchery by + + + +

This issue's second big story takes us to a rural India of uncertain period—but whether a tale is set in the recent past, the present day, or a near future isn't important when you sit down to enjoy an example of straight-forward adventure storytelling. Chaitanya Murali gives us a man who is as much a part of nature as he is a professional adversary of it… but it's in our nature to change.

+ + + +
+ + + +
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+

Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish

+ Uchechukwu Nwaka +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Cuffs, Padlocks, and a Splattering of Nail Polish by + + + +

The damsel in distress is surely centuries old, but when the damsel in question has no choice but to do her own saving, 'damsel' is just another synonym for 'hero'. Nevertheless, while coming out on top against all odds sounds like a good thing, sadly the world is rarely so conveniently black and white. Uchechukwu Nwaka shows us how a victory can sour even as we’re savouring it.

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Hermester Barrington +

My Amoeboid Romance

+
+ + +

Under the microscope, a 'single' human cell is revealed to be a chaotic community of collaborating entities. What we each see as a body is more like a microbial biosphere—so if, at a stroke, what you are became literally just that, would it even be so bad? Judging by Hermester Barrington's yarn, when Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis he wasn’t just needlessly downbeat, he was thinking too big. And too singular.

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Marciano

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Charlotte H. Lee

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V + +OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-04: 20:62:04, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME

+
+

> Dear Vader,

+

> Today started out kinda scary. The lights went out at breakfast because of all the mirrors that broke during yesterday’s dust-up. They didn’t turn off all of a sudden so much as slowly turn down to nothing. Dr. Davis was really mad at someone about it*—*something about the photo synthesizers not getting enough light so a bunch of keyotes (whatever those are) died.

+

> Mom says it’s rude to eavesdrop but the inside walls are too thin not to hear, especially when Dr. Davis really gets his dander up. He’s real loud, and his voice echoes off the outside walls. I’m glad he doesn’t have any kids, he scares me even from four units over. I can’t imagine how scary he must be if he was yelling at me. It makes me miss Earth cuz at least there we had a house with real walls and shouty neighbours weren’t so much of a bother.

+

> The only thing better about being on Mars is school. It’s nowhere near as boring as it was on Earth, and I don’t have to put up with dummies holding me back. Less homework!

+

> Love, Yvgenia

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +carlene Yugolio tightened the straps of her air exchanger cap, making sure the seal was tight against the smooth, matte black surface of her cellskin. She squinted against the airlock’s overhead bio-luminescent lights, shining brighter than noon on a clear sol. Her energy level was already perking up. Another couple of hours like this and her thick second skin be closer to glossy silver than black. She didn’t understand why foreigners were so hung up on clothing, solar charging body mods just made sense and all that fabric got in the way. She sighed, not looking forward to the sidelong glances and rooms that went silent when she walked in.

+

Perhaps Ingmar was right: Earther contracts weren’t worth the hassle, however much they paid. As much as she loved her partner, on those rare occasions they argued his tendency to gloat when he was right sometimes made her think twice about going home after a project wrapped up. She could still turn around and hop back into her rover, leave this Earther pustule to burst or fade away on its own, and drive into the sunset that framed a distant Olympus Mons. Tempting as those thoughts were, though, the pay from this gig would keep her lab going for another two years. Perhaps long enough for her to nail down that new soil converter. Then she could laugh all the way to the bank—and the total freedom to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Become a woman of leisure. Fire every annoying client with problems she didn’t give two puffs about.

+

Bold red letters flashed on a panel next to the interior door, counting upward as the air pressure increased, tightening its grip on her with each tick. The computer’s voice, once soft and difficult to hear, grew uncomfortably loud. Scarlene adjusted her hearing for Earther atmo pressure, turning the volume down to almost zero. How did they put up with no control over their hearing? It was one of the first mods installed in Martian infants. No sense in disturbing everyone in the vicinity when you wanted to take the tunes loud. Or turn down the volume to keep from going crazy during a dust up. Or at night, when the business of Rhea Sylvia went to sleep and the caterwauling of someone’s offspring carried loud and clear.

+

The panel switched to a steady green at 101 kilo-pascals and the door slid aside smoothly. Scarlene stepped through into the station’s expansive, low-lit vestibule, pulling her battered but sturdy wheeled case along with her. Artifacts from early Martian history decorated walls, hung suspended, and rested on columns surrounding the central elevator’s housing, each basking in its own soft spotlight. Most of the artifacts were replicas, she knew, but irritation rippled through her when her gaze landed on Sojourner. Her government had been trying to wrest it from the US government for over 150 years. They’d so far refused on the basis that it had been funded by their programs. Not too many years more and the poor thing would oxidize away to nothing. They even refused to put it into an atmo controlled display case, claiming budgetary constraints. Another fine example of the cheap trogs showing no respect for Mars or its people.

+

The elevator’s opening doors drew her attention away from the prize and back to the matter at hand. Her welcoming committee, five squat Earthers, filed out and processed in her direction. A decade of interfacing with Earthers had made their slow movements, compensating for a gravity not much more than one third of their normal, less annoying than it used to be. That could be just her mellowing with age. Or maybe it was the distraction of feeling like she was being crushed by the very air. By this time tomorrow their languidness could once again be as annoying as school tours of her crop bubbles.

+

“Welcome to Terra Nova, Dr. Yugolio,” the leader of the group, said. “I am Dr. Kylorne Davis, Administrator of this enclave.” He reached out a hand and Scarlene squashed her distaste at having to touch him. She shook his hand, then surreptitiously wiped his oils off her palm on her bag. To her relief, the others contented themselves with answering nods and curious stares as they were introduced in turn.

+

“Thank you, Dr. Davis,” Scarlene said. She noted the winces her voice evoked, and lowered the volume of her augmented larynx. “I hope my help will benefit you. I understand you don’t feel the avian infection is Terran in origin?”

+

Davis gestured to the elevator, falling into step with her as she left Sojourner to the mercy of people who didn’t value it enough. “Yes. None of the birds have been in contact with any terrestrial supplies. It has to be something that either originated on Mars, or mutated from something the original birds already carried. I’m hoping it’s something you’ve seen in native stations. Luck willing, you’ll be able to whip up a treatment for us in short order.”

+

Scarlene stepped into the elevator, the entourage trailing her into the cage. She gritted her teeth against the press of too many people. No one else seemed to mind, though they left a hand-span’s space around her and Davis. She suspected it was out of deference to their boss rather than respect for her Martian sensibilities. Davis seemed determined to stay in her personal space, however.

+

“I assume you’ve already reviewed airlock decontamination logs?” Scarlene asked.

+

“Of course,” Davis said. He puffed out his chest, a self-satisfied smile dimpling his left cheek. “In doing so, I isolated the previously unidentified culprit that’s been attacking our lettuces. That one was a Martian native, but so close to Bremia lactucae that our decon procedure didn’t target it. My protocol update is now being implemented in all Earth enclaves on Mars.”

+

Scarlene nodded and said, “Not bad for an engineer. You should be proud.” She tried not to stare at the dimple but it kept drawing her eye like a rapidly approaching dust-up.

+

Davis already ruling out imported bacteria would make her job easier. Martian bacteria were just as complex as their Terran counterparts, but not yet as diverse. Identifying it and developing an antibacterial should be relatively quick.

+

The rest of the ride down to the central hub of the enclave passed in silence. The door slid back to reveal the standard Earther station layout. Davis gestured for her to precede him out, indicating a nondescript grey pressure door halfway around the ring. The rest of the party trailed along behind silently as they strode past the other spoke entries, Davis moving easier against the floor’s magnetic pull on his clothes. Not a wealthy station, then, she noted. Mag plates rather than the state-of-the art grav plates installed at the new station in Hellas Planitia.

+

The mock gravity pull dragged uncomfortably on Scarlene’s longer limbs. One more annoyance.

+

“I’ll have someone show you to your quarters, but I thought you’d like to see the lab first,” Davis said, palming open the target door. It rumbled aside, revealing standard issue hydroponic walls. This particular corridor seemed to be dedicated to dwarf varieties of rice and barley, with the occasional decorative flower popping out colour here and there to keep the bees coming by.

+

Scarlene hummed her assent. “That would be efficient, thank you. I can inventory what supplies are already available, then someone can gather the remaining materials while I settle in and attend to my water pressure.”

+

“Exactly what I was thinking. I’m sure our atmosphere can’t be comfortable for you until you make the necessary adjustments,” Davis said, his smile sagging as his gaze darted to her neck and its hidden exchanger. It wouldn’t take much for that smile to devolve into disdain and she was fully prepared to demolish his perceived superiority over homo remus.

+

After passing a number of doors, they finally came to a dimly lit lab, its security panel a bright green. Through the open hatch, Scarlene could see an assortment of equipment, forlorn in their dust sheathes. It was a sin to have this much equipment unused, waiting around for some use to be found. She stepped across the threshold, careful not to trip over the pressure door’s track, exhaling a thankful breath when the lights came up automatically. On the last Earther station all the lighting had been voice activated, each room requiring voice security imprinting. What a hassle that had been, and the bruises on her shins had taken sols to fade.

+

“Well, I will leave you to it,” Davis announced, drawing Scarlene’s eyes back to the administrator. He appointed one minion to remain behind with instructions to take her to her quarters after receiving her list, then left with as much pomp as any person could without performing an overt ceremony. Scarlene pulled open the nearest drawer and started inspecting its contents.

+

The minion cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Dr. Yugolio?”

+

“Yes?” Scarlene had already forgotten her name.

+

“We really appreciate you coming to help us. We’ve been at a loss on this, what with Dr. Etienne getting recalled and all.”

+

Scarlene shrugged. “The tender was attractive. I won the bid. We have a contract.” She turned back to digging through the drawer. “If that makes you feel good, then it was an easy win for me.” The woman stayed silent, but Scarlene felt disappointment radiating off her in waves.

+

A heavy silence settled over the lab and Scarlene glanced over her shoulder, catching the Earther in an unguarded expression of hurt. When the woman realized Scarlene was looking her way, her face cleared to polite attentiveness. A twinge of shame prompted Scarlene to try to ease the tension. “Was Dr. Etienne your only bacteriologist?”

+

“The only one well versed in Martian bacteria. Terra Nova is focused on testing low-g farming practises to be used elsewhere, not for here. After all, Mars already has their own farming figured out.” The minion offered up a tentative smile. “Most of our testing is in artificial atmospheres. For example, I’m developing a barley strain that can handle a three percent methane atmosphere.”

+

“Ah, for that impending colony effort to Grissom in Alpha Centauri?”

+

The botanist nodded. “Yes. It doesn’t make sense to have a colony ship, loaded to the gills with farming equipment, try to figure out how to get their crops to grow after they get there. Forty years is a long trip home if their food crops fail.”

+

“Indeed.” Scarlene forced herself not to react to the ‘gills’ comment, but the minion figured out her faux pas on her own. She flushed crimson and bit her lip, but at least she had the grace to not try to dig herself out of the mistake.

+

The lab door squeaking open distracted them both from the conversation, and a young girl of about ten came in. Her hair was pulled back into tight braids, but that was about the only thing tidy about her.

+

The woman crossed to the door, intercepting the mobile petri-dish. “Yvengia, what are you doing here? And why are you such a mess?”

+

“Patty said that there’s a Martian here and that you have to work with her.”

+

Scarlene waited to see how the woman responded to this intrusion. If she failed to handle it sensibly, then Scarlene would immediately ask for a replacement. There was nothing in her contract that mentioned providing entertainment for nosey children.

+

“That’s a rude thing to say, Yvgenia Lubov,” the woman said sternly. “It’s also rude for you to barge into a room without permission. You know better than this.” She looked up at Scarlene, trying to cover her embarrassment with a smile. “Please excuse me for a few minutes, Doctor. I’ll be right back after I get my daughter properly situated.”

+

Scarlene waved a hand in dismissal. “Take your time but, before you go, point me to something I can write a list on.”

+

The minion produced a tablet from a thigh pouch and offered it to Scarlene. “You can use my notepad until I can get one issued to you. Just use the guest log in—the password is ‘Welcome1’, capital double-u, digit one.” Her eyes crinkled in wry amusement. “Our IT people aren’t especially original.”

+

Scarlene accepted the offering wordlessly, not wanting to prolong the Earther child’s stay. She resumed her inspection of the drawer’s contents, turning her back on the retreating pair.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-06: 21:11:45, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME

+
+

> Dear Vader,

+

> Lights went out again today so no school! Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me keep the flashlight after bedtime so I just stubbed my toe on my desk. It still hurts, but I don’t feel any blood so it can’t be that bad, I guess. I hope the solar mirrors get fixed fast. Being underground with no lights on isn’t scary after the first hour or so, it’s just dark and boring.

+

> If I’m allowed to go to back to school tomorrow, I’m going to ask the teacher why the mirrors broke. We’ve had dust storms before and they didn’t break. I asked at dinner, but Mom and Dad just looked at each other and told me to finish my plate. I’m never going to do that to my kids—I’m going to be a much, much better parent. You can hold me to it, Vader. I solemnly promise that.

+

> Love, Yvgenia

+

> PS. I hope Tommy Meisnecht missed me today.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +carlene pressed the doorbell icon on Administrator Davis’s suite panel. She heard the resulting chime through the door, the sour thought that it should sound like one of his dusty chickens flickering across her mind. She kept the thought to herself, though. No need to broadcast her disdain of the administrator, or his precious poultry, to the minion hovering behind her. The woman was so close her breath tickled Scarlene’s ear cap, though at least the thin coverall Scarlene now wore to block at least some of the brightness in this wretched station kept the Earther’s lung particles off the rest of her body. She had to firmly remind herself that a significant factor in her crankiness was because she’d been riding too close to her overcharge limit for too long. She always managed to forget that detail between contracts.

+

“Yes?” Davis’s voice asked sharply from the panel’s speaker.

+

“It is Dr. Yugolio. I need to speak with you.”

+

Seconds ticked past in silence. Just as Scarlene was considering whether to press the doorbell again or to turn on her heel and march out of this doomed hole in the ground, the door slid back. Davis stood there, an undyed woollen robe—identical to the one they had provided her—belted over prim pyjamas. Judging from the tousled hair and patchy shadow of growth on the lower half of his face, she had woken him.

+

“My apologies for calling you from your bed, Doctor,” Scarlene began, doing her best to use the title without sounding ironic. She had yet to understand why any mechanical engineer felt the need to obtain his doctorate, but his pointed correction of his title when she’d addressed him as ‘Administrator’ had made it crystal clear that the honorific meant a great deal to him. “I have made a discovery that you will need to take immediate action on. Every moment counts.”

+

Scarlene had only ever said words like that once before. The response then had been concern and anxiety. What she got from this Earther was something entirely different.

+

“I find that unlikely, Doctor,” Davis said, suspicion pulling his thick eyebrows together over the bridge of his pointy nose. “In my experience, careful and appropriate responses are best decided upon by those who are properly rested.” He sniffed. “However, you are here and I am up, so you may as well come in.” He held out a hand, angling his fingertips toward a drab grey sofa set under a holographic projection of a dock jutting out over an Earther lake, an arboreal forest dimly seen through a dawning morning.

+

Once Scarlene made it to the sofa, she sank down to the edge of the firm cushion, letting the abysmal gravity have its way with her. She waited for the administrator and his minion to take their own seats in the facing arm chairs before she spoke. “Thanks to the second system breakdown I have a new angle of approach. The organism attacking your avians is not, in fact, bacterial.” He nodded impatiently in response. “The virus is, after all, Earther in origin rather than Martian. It is also an aggressive one. The good news is that it isn’t interested in humans—either homo sapiens or homo remus*—*and it is unlikely that it will spread beyond this installation.”

+

She paused for effect. “It is, however, very interested not only in your chickens but in the prokaryote mats you use in your nitrogen conversion process. In fact, it’s more interested in those than the birds.”

+

The only response Davis gave was a raising of his eyebrows. Scarlene ploughed on. “So far, I’ve confirmed one of your mats in a secondary processor to be infected. Judging by my observation of the virus’s life cycle, that infection began sometime within the last forty-eight hours. Since then, the virus has nearly wiped out the processor.”

+

The administrator flicked a glance at the Earther. “Polina, which processor is she referring to?”

+

“The secondary back-up for cell A-15,” Polina said. The botanist’s voice gave away nothing of what she thought of Terra Nova’s predicament, which Scarlene admired her for.

+

“So, nothing of a critical nature by any means.” Davis turned his attention back to Scarlene. “Definitely nothing worth waking anyone up for.”

+

“Sir, I said it is the only one I have confirmed. I did not mean to imply that it is likely to be the only one infected. Given how quickly it took down the processor I checked, I believe it’s imperative you begin testing all your systems. Immediately.” She held the man’s eye for a long moment. When she was sure she had his full attention, however grudgingly, she went on, “I suspect it may already be too late for remediation, and you may have to begin evacuation procedures now.”

+

“Evacuation? Because one secondary processor in an out-of-the-way system has gone down? Based on a wild conclusion that there’s a connection? First I want proof that it’s related to whatever made the birds sick, and then I want it verified by my own people.” Davis snorted his contempt. “No, Doctor, evacuation is highly unlikely.”

+

He rose to his feet, folding his hands together in front of himself. “I thank you for responding to our call for help, but clearly you were not the person for the job.”

+

Scarlene stubbornly remained seated. “Dr. Davis, I think you aren’t taking this matter as seriously as you should be. If you wait any longer before you begin testing, you could be without circulating air in seventy-twohours.” She drew in a deep breath, and forced her body into stillness. “I have no cause to lie about this, or to exaggerate the situation. Please think of the personnel under your care.”

+

Davis’s bushy brows beetled down into a dark scowl. “I believe I am taking this as seriously as necessary, Dr. Yugolio. I also believe that you are being alarmist for reasons not yet known. There has never been a case recorded of a viral infection in processors. Not once in the over two hundred years since the first Earth enclave was built here. That’s a hundred years longer than your species has even existed. The odds of it happening are a million to one.”

+

“And still, sir, the virus has spread. It is attacking your air processing and power generation. You need to begin testing and remediation immediately, or you will endanger the lives of every living being in Terra Nova.” Scarlene glanced at Polina, who’d risen along with the administrator to stand awkwardly in front of her chair, hands gripped together so tightly the skin over her knuckles was as white as the early morning sun.

+

“That will be enough,” Davis bit out sharply, his voice rising above normal conversational levels. “You have brought your concerns forward. I have listened to them. I will consider them. And I will act as I consider appropriate.”

+

Scarlene opened her mouth to argue further but he cut her off again, this time more loudly than before, “I will not listen to any more of this nonsense. Your fear mongering is not welcome. Your services are no longer required. Consider this a formal request for you to be on your way.”

+

Scarlene closed her eyes and counted to three, struggling to hold onto her temper in the face of this idiot’s lunacy. “Doctor, I beg you, for the sake of all the lives you are responsible for, please listen to reason. I have nothing to gain—”

+

“I know all about you and your kind,” Davis boomed, his face flushing redder than a chicken’s comb. “Isolationist bigots, every jack one of you. You think you’re so evolved, but really you’re nothing but circus freaks.”

+

Scarlene snapped down the gain on her hearing, and shoved herself up to her feet, struggling against the pull of Earth gravity. That last inconvenience, minor though it was, was enough to fray away the final thread on her temper.

+

“Believe of me as you wish, Administrator. Unfortunately for you, though, not only are you behaving in a way that is going to get people pointlessly killed, but I will be suing Terra Nova Corp for breach of contract. I doubt your senior executive will look kindly on that.” Scarlene stretched her lips tight in a snarl. “If you’re very lucky, you’ll live to see me win enough in damages to never have to take another Earther contract ever again.”

+

With that she strode across the carpet, ignoring the incoherent sputtering coming from the arrogant trog. With all her attention on fighting to keep her balance, she didn’t realize her appointed shadow was right behind her until she felt cold air replace the woman’s grip on her elbow. They were halfway to the central hub before the door to the idiot’s quarters slid shut, only then cutting off the stream of abuse aimed at her back.

+

Scarlene let out a huff and sucked in a new breath. The taste of lavender, exuding from the pretty purple flowers dotting the hydroponics lines of the corridor, did nothing to soothe her agitation. She felt a pang of pity for the Earther trailing her. Polina Matvalta had a family—a husband and a young daughter—who could die because of that narcissistic fool. Scarlene may not like kids, but most people liked their own kids a great deal more than they liked anyone else.

+

Belatedly, Scarlene noticed that the botanist had been speaking. “—can understand how upset you must be,” Polina was saying. “Please, let me make some calls. I think I know who can get the Administrator’s order overridden. Dr. Yugolio, please believe me, I’m horrified by his behaviour. I can only imagine how you must be feeling right now.”

+

Scarlene slowed her steps. “I appreciate the effort, Polina. I have to admit, he got to me.”

+

“Will you come with me? It would be helpful if you presented your findings personally.”

+

The temptation to simply pass over her notes and accept Davis’s word on her dismissal was almost more than she could resist. What did she owe these rotten Earthers? Not a damned thing. She’d put up with enough micro-aggressions since she’d gotten here to last the rest of her lifetime.

+

The silent pleading in her assistant’s eyes, though, would need a tougher person than her to deny. She sighed in resignation and nodded, accepting the profusion of gratitude with as much grace as she could muster.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +VOICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-07: 21:01:15, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME

+
+

> Dear Vader,

+

> I think the Martians are lucky, being able to go outside. I’ve never been allowed outside before, and I think it would be extro. Besides, the idea of being made part dolphin is pretty art. I looked them up. They looked like super-dupe fun creatures, all shiny and sleek. And SO fast! I mean, having dolphin skin won’t make me fast, but wearing a shell made from a creature that’s practically extinct on Earth is absolutely mons.

+

> I’d miss Mom and Dad, but I could be OK with only seeing them on calls instead of in person. I’d do it even if Tommy didn’t. My heart would break into a gazillion tiny pieces and I’d never, ever love anyone else again, but I’d do it anyway. I mean, who wouldn’t?

+

> Signing off,

+

> Yvgenia

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t was interesting to watch the shades an Earther’s face could cycle through. When she’d first gotten up to speak, Davis’s usual florid face was on the pale side, almost grey. Now, when she glanced at him on her way back to her seat behind the auditorium’s podium, it was deepening from a deep red to what must be a life-threatening purple.

+

Clearly, hearing her speak to the assembled residents of Terra Nova of its impending catastrophic failure provoked something primal in him. She pointedly hadn’t said his name—or even his title—but, judging by the scowls directed his way, these Earthers were a bright enough lot to figure out what a dunk he was. Scarlene had no sympathy to spare, and she intended to carry on ignoring the trog. She could allow a grain of admiration for the self-control he must’ve been exerting to stay mute, though.

+

“Thank you, Dr. Yugolio,” Polina Matvalta said into the microphone, stepping forward to reclaim her place before the muttering crowd. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the mounting volume. “We’ve got maybe ten days before we’re at zero percent electricity generation. Our canned air will last us a bit longer, but there won’t be any power for the fans to circulate it. The biggest problem is where we can evacuate to. There simply isn’t enough room in the nearest stations to accommodate all of us without overloading their systems.”

+

“How did Davis screw this up so badly?” a man shouted. An argument erupted around him, but there were so many people yelling over each other that Scarlene couldn’t make out what any of the points were. It took every ounce of self-control she had not to look across the stage at him. There was no way she’d be able to keep her satisfaction at the contempt getting thrown at him off her face.

+

They quieted down to a dull roar when Polina tapped the microphone. “Please, let’s all try to stay calm. We can hash out who’s to blame after we’re all safe. Right now we have to focus on finding a solution.”

+

An older woman shot to her feet, levelling a finger at Scarlene. “It’s that Martian, she brought it here. She’s trying to wipe us all out. Genocide in action!” The accuser’s neighbour pulled the woman back down onto her seat using more effort than necessary, disgust plain on his face. The woman winced in pain and turned an angry scowl on him. Their argument melted into the general tumult.

+

“What about chemical generators?” a man asked from mid-section, raising his hand for attention. “Or shutting down the new grav plates?”

+

Polina turned the question over to the mechanical engineer who stood waiting on her right. Scarlene sighed in frustration. They could attempt to trouble-shoot as much as they liked, but the most they’d buy themselves would be a week or two. The station didn’t have enough gravity plating to tip the scales far enough to matter, even shutting down the mag plates wouldn’t give them more than a couple days beyond that. Neither would make a dent in the eight months they needed to accommodate the remaining thirty evacuees who had nowhere to go.

+

Thirty out of almost three hundred. If they didn’t come up with something by the end of the meeting, they may as well draw names at random for euthanization. Better that than dying of carbon dioxide poisoning, isolated and afraid. They needed to think about this from a different angle.

+

“There is another option no one has yet discussed,” Scarlene said, boosting her vocal gain to cut through the crosstalk. The mix of expressions directed at her was as varied as the opinions on who was to blame for the catastrophe. “There are thirty-eight prepubescent children here. It would be hard on them, but they are young enough to accept the treatments that would guarantee their survival.”

+

As she expected, the room erupted again, this time in shouted denials and exclamations of disgust—some of them bigoted, others accusing her of attempting to kidnap their children. Polina Matvalta stared at her, mouth agape.

+

Scarlene got to her feet and raised her hand for attention, upping her volume still further to be heard over the commotion. “The option is available. What would you rather do—allow thirty children to become Martian, or choose thirty among you to die? I hope you’re not so lost to reason as to voluntarily choose death for any of your number.”

+

All she got in reply were shouted imprecations. She turned down her audio. Once she could think again, she noticed that it was a minority of the crowd who were doing the yelling. Most of them sat silently, fear and hopelessness turning their faces into caricatured versions of the three wise monkeys. She sat still, letting the loudest ones continue taking more than their share of oxygen until they seemed to run out of fuel.

+

“Think it over carefully, parents.” Scarlene sent out a silent prayer that Ingmar wouldn’t lord what she was about to commit to over her for the rest of their lives. “I would be willing to sponsor the children, make sure the older ones find apprenticeships right away, and help you find the right foster homes for the younger ones.”

+

The room erupted afresh.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2232-19-08: 20:43:22, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME

+
+

> Dear Vader,

+

> Mom and Dad are freaked. Everyone else’s parents are, too, we don’t know why. This is something way worse than the mirrors. The adults are acting so weird. People crying, and not telling why. At first it was just confusing, but now it’s scaring me bad. They’ve suspended school, but I got a message from a year ten’er that she couldn’t unlock my next math unit because she had to pack.

+

> I think that’s the freakiest part. I know for sure her dad isn’t supposed to finish his rotation for another half-year.

+

> Gotta go, Mom is calling. I’ll fill you in later.

+

> Yvgenia

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he soft chime of an admittance request interrupted Scarlene’s hastily thrown together dinner. Steeling herself as best she could against whatever this latest childless complainant felt she needed to hear, she called out, “Yes?”

+

Polina Matvalta’s voice came over the speaker. “Dr. Yugolio? Could we speak with you?”

+

Scarlene slumped in relief. At least these visitors weren’t likely to be treating her like she was some pied piper come to lead all their children away as punishment. “Come.”

+

The door slid back to reveal Matvalta, a man Scarlene assumed to be her husband, and their daughter. She’d forgotten the child’s name, but not her untidiness. Scarlene rose and slid her dinner plate into the fridge, then invited the family to sit, though she resisted the urge to offer refreshments. Ingmar would be horrified by that, but he wasn’t here and wouldn’t ever have to know of Scarlene’s less than perfect hospitality.

+

“I wasn’t expecting to see a child quite this soon. Has everyone decided?”

+

Polina shook her head. “No, I imagine they’re still arguing. Some of the others may have come to see reason, though. I expect they all will shortly, but only after they’ve exhausted every possibility. No matter how improbable. I imagine by morning you’ll have had all the parents in here.” She smiled tightly. “Everyone wants their children to live, but I can’t think of a single person who could point at someone and say they have to die because we don’t want our children to look any different.”

+

The man spoke for the first time, saying, “That’s not fair, Polina. You have to admit that our children can’t go home with us after they’re modified.” He sighed deeply, his pain evident in the droop of his lips. “This will be a permanent separation. You have to see that.”

+

Scarlene opened her mouth to reply, but Polina spoke quickly. “Yvgenia can absolutely go back to Earth with us. We aren’t making any changes except for the second skin and exchanger implants. If she keeps up with gravity training, she’ll be able to return to Earth anytime.” The woman glanced at Scarlene for support, who nodded agreement.

+

“Polina is correct. As long as the children don’t allow their bone densities to deteriorate, they could return to Earth permanently.” She carefully didn’t add her next thought, though they may not want to since Earthers are all a bunch of bigoted yotes and the children would lead difficult lives. She was pretty sure Yvgenia’s father had the same thought, but he kept it sealed behind lips pressed so tight they almost disappeared.

+

Between them, the child’s brown eyes were as wide as dinner plates. “Would I have to cut off all my hair? Be bald like you?”

+

Scarlene nodded. “We remove all your body hair before giving you the treatment. After the treatment your hair won’t grow anymore.”

+

The girl reached up to run her hand over sleek, charcoal-dark plaits. “Oh. That would be weird.”

+

“You would get used to it, I think. To me, it would be weird to have it.”

+

The girl’s face turned thoughtful, but she didn’t say anything else. Her mother put an arm around her and hugged her close. “Look at it this way, I won’t be nagging you to brush it anymore.”

+

The father cleared his throat, drawing Scarlene’s eyes back to him. “What exactly is involved?”

+

She went into lecture mode, focusing more on the father than the mother and sparing little attention to the child for the moment. “The first step is to do a stem-cell harvest. We’ll use that to grow the second skin, connective strands, and casings for the exchangers.” At the look of confusion on the man’s face, Scarlene explained, “They’re commonly referred to by Earthers as ‘gills’.” Her smile turned brittle when he nodded his understanding of the derogatory slang.

+

“There won’t be enough time before the enclave gets down to zero power to do more than those two alterations. But that’s only provided we make the call to Rhea Sylvia for the delphina scaffolding by tomorrow morning.

+

“The process itself is similar to an Earther skin graft, in that we mesh stitch the new skin to the surface of her body using the connective strands. After that, it becomes a waiting game for the solar cell materials to bond to the outer layer of the second skin. The solar cells are made from a fine alloy of silicon, gallium arsenide and…”

+

Scarlene continued, condensing as much of the hard bio-science as she could in the interest of time, knowing she was going to have to go over the whole thing again using simpler language for the girl. With each question answered, the stiffness in the husband’s shoulders eased. Tension bled out of Scarlene’s own shoulders in response and she let herself gradually relax back into her chair.

+

She glanced at the child, who sat huddled between her parents, looking like a lamb that’s just figured out its mother is nowhere to be seen.

+

“I imagine all that sounds pretty scary to you,” she said. When the child nodded wordlessly, Scarlene dug for a reassuring smile. “It won’t be easy and it won’t be comfortable, but it won’t hurt very much. You’ll be asleep for the procedures, and you won’t feel a thing while you’re sleeping. Your neck will be sore for a few days where the diverter gets inserted, and you’ll be tempted to scratch at the new cellskin. When babies get theirs we put mitts on them so they don’t damage it. I’m sure we’ll be able to scrounge up gloves so you can rub at the itches without causing any harm. We’ll also make sure to keep as many wet towels around as we can—it helps reduce the itch. Once the inner skin has bonded to the stitches and you’ve drawn some insulation water to act as your radiation barrier, the itching will go away.”

+

The child managed to pull up enough courage to ask, “How long will it itch for?”

+

“At your age, about two or three days. We can leave you asleep for the whole time you’re in the tank, but it would be better if you’re awake and practising with the exchanger.”

+

Yvgenia seemed to take solace in the promise, straightening up a little between her parents. “Is it hard to learn how to work it? The exchanger, I mean?”

+

“I was a baby when mine was implanted, so I don’t remember,” Scarlene answered. The girl visibly gulped and shrank halfway back into her hunch. Scarlene felt a twinge of pity. “For as long as I can remember I’ve never had to think about it any more than I have to think about blinking my eyes. You’re young, so I don’t think it will be hard. Not like it would be for someone as old as—” she caught herself before she said your parents and substituted a person who she guessed wasn’t as popular with children “—Administrator Davis.”

+

That seemed to hit the right note. The girl sniffed her disdain for the man and straightened back up, the fear on her face ebbing away to determination.

+

An awkward silence settled over them then, though Scarlene wasn’t sure if the child picked up on the tension. For the first time since the family’s arrival in her quarters she turned her full attention on the girl. Yvgenia met her stare. A shadow of fear lurked in the back of the child’s eyes but foremost was brave defiance, and the familiarity of it touched something in Scarlene’s core. When the father put his arm around his daughter to comfort her, she seemed to pull away from the embrace without actually moving.

+

The husband sighed at the reaction, nodded once in resignation, then got to his feet. Yvgenia shot up beside him, almost toppling over the occasional table into Scarlene’s lap. All three adults lunged to catch her fall, but the girl got her balance back before any of them could make contact. Scarlene pulled away quickly, almost as surprised by her reaction as the Matvaltas.

+

Polina cleared her throat. “Thank you so much for all you’re doing for our children, Doctor. I know it may not seem like it now, but I’m sure everyone will come around to realizing how much you’re sacrificing for our children.”

+

Scarlene blinked. She started to open her mouth to deny that she intended to take any ongoing responsibility for these soon-to-be quasi-orphans, but stopped. Instead she simply smiled and dropped her chin in a semi bow.

+

There was never—never—going to be an end to Ingmar’s gloating.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +OICE ADDRESS DIARY ENTRY RECORD 2233-01-15: 21:42:03, OLYMPUS MONS STANDARD TIME

+
+

> Dear Vader,

+

> We got to go outside for the first time without pressure suits today. Even Dr. Yugolio was excited about it. She brought us some honey taffy*—*Ingmar made it special for us. He’s so nice, and he makes the doctor nicer when he’s around. She’s not really mean, she’s just not the kind of person who hugs you or tells you it’s going to be OK when you’re sad and missing your parents so much that it feels like your heart is going to break into a million zillion pieces.

+

> OK, I can’t hold back anymore, I gotta tell you this RIGHT NOW. Tommy held my hand today while we were walking! I almost died of happiness. He isn’t even any less cute now that we’re all fish-faced and scaly. I shouldn’t say that, ‘fish-faced’ is not a nice thing to say about a Martian, but I’m one now, too, so it’s fine, right? Anyway, I was in a sad spot while we were walking to the corn bubble. He was having trouble getting his body temp regulated, and I helped him figure it out. I’m not sure why it’s so easy for me, but I took to it like an armadillo takes to sand. Anyway, I was feeling pretty sad and really, really wanting a Mom-hug, just like when I was a little kid. Tommy asked me for help, and then we started walking again. We only took a couple of steps and he asked if he could hold my hand. OF COURSE I said yes. I’m not an idiot. We are now officially boyfriend/girlfriend, and everybody knows it.

+

> I must be a pretty good teacher because when we got inside the corn bubble, Tommy didn’t have too much trouble keeping his body temperature where it’s supposed to be. At first his face started to turn a little pink and I had to remind him to pull back his blood vessels. I think he’s getting the hang of it. Dr. Yugolio says the more we go in and out of the crop bubbles, the more natural it will become and we won’t even have to think about it anymore, our bodies will just do it for us like a reflex, the same way we got used to the exchangers and our privates flaps.

+

> Being in a crop bubble is kind of interesting. For like a minute. Until you realize it’s just like any other crop dome, only with less air-pressure. I’m not sure if I’m really smelling anything or if it’s just wishful thinking, but it did seem like it smelled green in there. The air is still way thinner in a bubble than what it was in Terra Nova, but I almost like it more. Farts and manure don’t smell anywhere near as bad as they used to. At least until we’re allowed to get our olfactory implants. But even then I’ll be able to turn down the gain any time I want.

+

> I used to think anyone was crazy to want to be a farmer, but now that turning down the volume of smells is an option maybe it’s not so bad. It’s kind of soothing to walk through rows of corn, checking to make sure there aren’t any wee beasties making a mess of them.

+

> Now that we’ve been to the one bubble, I’m sure we’ll be visiting lots of other ones. I can’t wait until we get to go to the sheep bubble! Dr. Yugolio says lambing season will start in a couple of weeks and I’m crazy excited to see all the new babies.

+

> Love,

+

> Yvgenia

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Marciano on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Charlotte H. Lee

+

+ + Author image of Charlotte H. Lee + + + Charlotte H. Lee spends her days pondering how best to smash all the boxes people want to keep the world in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s through telling stories to challenge others how we see life, or pushing herself to stretch her own brain in new ways. Her stories have appeared in Little Blue Marble, Metaphorosis, The Overcast, and others. You can find links to her published work at www.charlottehlee.com.

+

© Charlotte H. Lee 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by susnpics and the prompt phrase ‘Oil painting of a vast building on the surface of Mars’. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen here.

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My Amoeboid Romance

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Hermester Barrington

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+ Story image for My Amoeboid Romance by +
+ + + + +

T + +ime no longer being what it once was for me, I’m not certain of the exact date on which the changes started to occur—but I do know it was the morning after I held a small gathering at our abode. My wife Fayaway was on one of her urban archaeological expeditions, and Fullerton, Karl, George, and I had come together for no particular reason. I had been reading Wallace’s The Klamath Knot when they arrived, and shared with my friends his observation that “no human organ would look out of place if planted in some Paleozoic sponge bed or coral reef.” One of them suggested that the light sensitive eyespots of the protozoan Euglena might serve as replacements for those with impaired sight; we all laughed, and continued making suggestions along those lines for the better part of an hour before we went our separate ways.

+

The next day, I awoke feeling swollen and logy. My forehead was clammy, but the only thermometers I had were in the various terraria and so forth scattered throughout the room, and I was not about to put one of those in my mouth, so I went back to sleep. I awoke again about noon, when the skin on my belly began to itch—pulling up my nightshirt, I saw that the epidermis had a greenish tinge and was cool to the touch. It appeared to undulate, due perhaps to the fact that my body hair had been replaced by some sort of tendril or tentacle which retracted when I stroked it. I lost consciousness then, and came to in the late afternoon with my entire body covered with this new substance.

+

I arose and looked in the mirror. My irises, previously a shining blue, were now bright red, and the sclera a radiant green, a color I recognized from the local pond in spring. I realized then that last night’s game had become reality, that the organs in my body were being replaced by members of the group known variously as Infusoria, Protozoa, or Protista. The cells of my epidermis, apparently, had become a species of Volvox, a colonial flagellate, and as I watched, the hands with which I stroked my hair—now replaced by Stemonitis, a species of slime mold no longer considered by many to be a species of Protista, but I frequently read outdated guidebooks so perhaps my unconscious mind can be forgiven—stretched their newly-formed pseudopodia outward. They most resembled the magnificent Amoeba proteus, but not having seen specimens this size before, I may have misclassified them.

+

The transformation proceeded very quickly after that. Sitting at my desk, almost before I could write down the changes, my tongue became Lacrymaria olor, the foraminiferan Discorbis vesicularis replaced my external ears, while a pair of gyrating Urocentrum turbo provided me with a sense of balance—because why not? The cast off tests of Euglypha mucronata formed my choppers, because I’ve always wanted a mouth full of lamprey’s teeth, and this would be the closest I could get. I chose Astrophrys for my eyebrows, because of the name, and for my sperm cells, because of the species’ ruthless determination.

+

A beautiful blue Stentor coeruleus now serves as my mouth and throat. The colonial vorticellid Carchesium polypinum has colonized its base, serving as my larynx by contracting and expanding in such a manner as to allow me to speak (I don’t understand it, either). From my larynx to my anus, my protozoological demiurge laid nine meters of Ophrydium pipe, except for my stomach, for which Bursaria truncatella was chosen. You may accuse us of lassitude, if you like, but even the protozoan world has its limits.

+

This intestinal tract is layered with colonial ciliate, I couldn’t say which, providing peristalsis; and my taste buds—their function now performed by a myriad of Klebsiella alligata—have developed a fondness for dirt and dew and creek water, since my internal microbiome has been repopulated by protozoans usually found only in the intestines of the groups Isoptera and Ruminantiamorpha. While I have created many recipes—roof runoff stew, backyard saute, rotting stump roast—I have discovered that my guts and taste buds are happiest when I eat my vegetable matter raw, blended with contributions from the compost heap—rich, dark, damp earth, full of delicious new species for my internal protozoarium! And this methane rich diet makes my nether regions the perfect environment for a hitherto undescribed extremophile amoeboid, Vampyrella flatula—a formal description, co-authored with my wife, Fayaway Maraetoa, is forthcoming in Amateur Protistology CXV:4 (May 2022).

+

The very rare Teuthophrys trisulca was chosen as a substitute for my pineal gland, while colonies of Noctiluca scintillans have replaced my chakras, though only the one on my forehead is visible to those without the second sight.

+

There were other changes as well; having recorded them in my journal, I went to bed, for my transformation had exhausted me. Fay came in late that night and, crawling into bed beside me in darkness, snuggled against me; feeling my cool granulated epidermis, she turned on the light and sighed. “I dreamed that this would happen,” she said. “I suppose whatever comes to me when I turn out the light is mine,” she added, and extinguished the lamp, that we might discover the pleasures of prehensile tongue, extensible pseudopodia, and tendrilled flesh together.

+

Someone at the fateful gathering had said, “I’m sure you will find a use for some species of Vaginicola,” and we laughed. Now a member of that genus serves as my manroot, and, from my own experience, and by Fay’s account, it functions even better than my original equipment, in everything required of it.

+

I don’t have lungs as such; my entire body inhales and exhales to irregular rhythms, and the miasma as of a pond slightly stagnant surrounds me, most of the time. Each step sounds as if I were walking through moistened clay, and fragrant puddles mark my passing. I had selected my protozoans for their aesthetics, and each of them, in their own way, is indeed beautiful, but together—Great God!—so monstrous am I become, that only ill fitting clothing allows me to walk the earth unchallenged and uneradicated.

+

Of my circulatory system I will say little, except to state that members of the amoeboid genus Flabellulidae function as leukocytes—chosen, I suspect, because the species being commensal in oysters, it was unlikely to take over my body as parasitic entamoeboids might—and also, because I like to say the name “Flabellulidae.” Say it three times fast—it might make you laugh. It poses no problem for my fluttering Lacrymaria, but it may for your human organ.

+

Physarum polycephalum, which has replaced my nervous system, works with the myonemes of a species of Vorticella to coordinate the movements of my new muscles, voluntary and in-. I just discovered that some species of Stylonychia scurry along the Physarum network in some sort of order, but to what end, if any, I cannot say for certain.

+

I still feel a wide range of emotions from my previous life—I am aroused when Fay asks me rub her shoulders; the works of Remedios Varo give me a frisson of recognition; my body gets up to waltz, unbidden, when I hear the strange time signatures of psychedelic folk—but I am also moved by newer and stranger sympathies.

+

My longstanding thalassophobia now coexists with joy at the sight of any body of water, causing my own newly formed epidermis to weep slightly. I enjoy basking in the sun in ways that I never had before, thus giving my photosynthetic cells an opportunity to create food. I sometimes awake to find myself laying out on the dew dampened lawn, in the crawlspace under the house, or in the limestone caves in the state park nearby.

+

It has been some months, I believe, since my transformation was completed, and I seem to have suffered no negative effects. It may be that I am a freak, a nonce symbiosis which will dissolve back into the waters from which I arose after my consciousness fades—or perhaps each of the cells in my new assemblage will retain my consciousness when this concatenation deliquesces. It may be that Fay will bear our hybrid child, or that the same organisms which have occupied my form will colonize others who share my sympathies.

+

So far none of these things have happened, but I am a sign to those who see only with the naked eye that the kingdom Protista, having been incarnated as human in my body, is prepared to take back the world, after the human species has shambled off into oblivion.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of My Amoeboid Romance on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Hermester Barrington

+

+ + Author image of Hermester Barrington + + + Hermester Barrington is a retired archivist, a haiku poet, and a deliberately genre-ignorant artist whose most recently published ficciones have appeared in Kzine, Fate Magazine, and Peculiar Mormyrid. For over four decades, he and his impossibly beautiful wife Fayaway have traveled the round earth’s imagined corners in search of invisible books, hitherto unrecognized protozoans, and paranormal phenomena. He and Fay are writing a biography of pop singer Mrs. Miller, tentatively titled Soul of Iron, Heart of Gold, Voice of Fluttering Quicksilver. From sundown until cockcrow, he roosts at Facebook.

+

© Hermester Barrington 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using VQGAN+ seeded with a Creative Commons image by Spencer Selover and the phrase ‘a man made of bacteria’, composited with its source plus an element from kate_krav. A video of the VQGAN+ process can be seen here.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-28/the-maneater-of-tiruchery.html b/issue-28/the-maneater-of-tiruchery.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..391308ae --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-28/the-maneater-of-tiruchery.html @@ -0,0 +1,578 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Maneater of Tiruchery — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 28 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

The Maneater of Tiruchery

+

Chaitanya Murali

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Maneater of Tiruchery by +
+ + + + +

T + +he middle of a tea plantation was a strange place to conduct a drug deal. Govind knew this, but there was something about the smell of the leaves and the sight of the steps cutting away beneath his feet that he found alluring. That, and the fact that you were nigh invisible when you knelt down in the middle of the field.

+

Right now, he was handing over his product—a bag with several opium balls—to a jittery client. But then, all his clients were jittery.

+

“Take it easy on the smoke, machan, you don’t look too good, eh?” he said. Becoming a big dealer in the district wouldn’t work out too well if all his clients died before his supply ran out.

+

“Just give it to me. I don’t want to be out here for too long,” the other man mumbled. His eyes were dull black points in deeply sunken pockets, and his leg drummed relentlessly to a beat only he could hear. He grabbed the bag from Govind when it was proffered, tossing a coin pouch at the dealer and starting back through the plantations quickly, almost at a run.

+

“Otha, a ‘thank you’ would be nice, punde,” Govind hissed, but the man was already several paces away, visible in the light of the full moon as a disturbance between the thickets of tea.

+

And then there was another disturbance, this one softer, almost imperceptible except for a whisper through the tea-leaves in the moonlight. It cut across the client’s path, and Govind spied the silhouette of a long tail rise above the leaves.

+

That was when he began to run.

+

He’d made it about a hundred feet down when giant fangs cut into the back of his neck.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“T + +hese bodies, where were they found?” the hunter asked Gunasekaran, the sarpanch of Tirucheri. The stranger wasn’t big, more middling in height and scrawny to the point of gauntness. But there was also a lean muscle to him, and a strange thinness to his face that suggested he’d seen hard times. His black hair grew long, and was left to flow in waves down to his shoulders. Better to hide his neck from cats, he’d said.

+

Vikram, his name was, and he’d just appeared out of the morning mist scarcely two days after the killings, carrying little but the rifle slung over his back. He’d heard of children going missing in nearby villages, and was making his way to each of them, to see if the abductions were the work of a maneater. There was one such case in Tirucheri, but his interest now had been piqued by these most recent killings.

+

Wandering hunters like him were commonplace in the countryside—drifters who never stayed in towns long enough to be hated. They came in, brought down a few maneaters, and then vanished back into the forests with their pay.

+

“We found them near the entrance of Harish anna’s plantation. They had been thrown over the gate,” the sarpanch told him.

+

“Was there anything else on or near them?”

+

“Nothing.”

+

“They were killed quickly,” Vikram said, pointing to the puncture wounds on the back of each neck. “Those are typical of leopards. They sever the spine at the neck and shut the body down. But the rest of this doesn’t make sense.” He crouched over the bodies, his palms resting on his knees. “I’ve never seen a leopard leave its kills untouched like this, unless driven away. And you say no one saw the attacks take place.”

+

“No, we found them just before daybreak, when the first workers came in to open the godowns,” the sarpanch replied.

+

The hunter fingered at a hollow in his cheek. “There’s one more thing.” He spread his thumb and index finger as far as he could. “This is about as long as a leopard’s canines get, and they’re usually about the width of my thumb. This one’s had to have been almost twice that, by these wounds.”

+

A spasmic shiver ran up the sarpanch’s spine. There was one that fit that description, but they had burned the incense to her. They had paid obeisance. She wouldn’t come for them.

+

Vikram stood up and dusted off his trousers. “All right. Could you show me to this plantation? I want to go see where this took place.”

+

The sarpanch could see excitement flicker in the man’s eyes, a fire lighting up his wan face.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +his was new. And new always meant interesting.

+

Villagers always thought he hunted maneaters because he hated cats, but in truth, he was enamoured of them. It had taken time, of course. He began as many hunters did, out of a need for vengeance. A desire to kill the evil that had stolen his brother. But that cat, and most maneaters like it, were aged beasts—once-kings driven to desperation by failing bodies, seeking to recapture their dominance. They were outcasts, their actions breaking unspoken treaties between man and cat, bringing ruin to both. And so Vikram hunted them, an arbiter of peace, a soul between worlds.

+

But he had never seen a maneater behave as erratically as this leopard.

+

“I’ve asked Harish anna to send a couple of his workers to show you around,” Sarpanch Gunasekaran was saying. “He’s shut his plantation down for the time, out of concern for his people.”

+

He showed Vikram through the village, prattling on about a new spinning mill, and new factories that Harish had built to bring Tirucheri into the modern age, but Vikram wasn’t paying close attention to his words.

+

“Remind me, how many people has this one killed?” Vikram asked.

+

“These two make twenty in the past year,” Gunasekaran replied.

+

“And they’re never eaten?”

+

“The ones we’ve found are never eaten. The children… better not to think about it.”

+

“That’s strange, leopards don’t kill for entertainment. Who were the victims? Where were they found? When were they found?” Vikram asked, rattling off the questions in a staccato burst. People dying was a job prerequisite for him, and he’d grown quickly inured to the grotesque intricacies of his work, but this behaviour, this was fascinating.

+

“Only troublemakers stay out late in this town, drinking and being nuisances,” Gunasekaran said offhandedly. “These two must have been the same.”

+

And then he clapped, because they had reached the plain iron gate atop which the bodies had been found. Two plantation workers—a swarthy man and woman in their middle years—waited just inside for him.

+

“These are Gokul and Kavitha, they’ll take you through the fields,” the sarpanch said, before waving his goodbyes to all three and leaving.

+

“So,” Vikram said into the silence left by the sarpanch’s abrupt departure, “What do you two think of leopards—beautiful monsters, no?”

+

“We prefer them when they don’t eat us,” Kavitha replied, shrugging. Gokul didn’t respond, but his demeanour morphed, twisting into something far deeper than anger. He turned and spat into the dirt, walking away from Vikram, his back stiff with unbridled hate.

+

“Gokul’s son was one of the leopard’s victims last year,” Kavitha said by way of explanation. “They never found his body.”

+

Vikram groaned. His mouth felt like he’d stuffed several of his dirtiest socks into it. “Right. Well, what can you tell me about this place?”

+

“Five hundred hectares,” Kavitha said, “give or take. We get a lot of monkeys, snakes—cobras and kraits mostly—mongoose, and other animals around here, usually have a couple guards to keep them away from the crops. There’s about a thousand of us working these fields, though most come in from other villages every day.”

+

“How many leopard or tiger sightings in the last few years?” Vikram asked. Much easier to speak when it was about the cats.

+

“Only this one in the past year.”

+

“You don’t seem particularly scared,” Vikram noted as they caught up with Gokul, who seemed to have cooled off after a little walk up the path.

+

They looked at each other, then Gokul spoke up. “We fear the cats, in the same way we fear a cyclone—when they come. Until then, we see no reason in giving ourselves more things to live in fear of.” The words came clipped and guttural. Vikram got the sense that for this man, that had been a speech of incredible gravitas.

+

“Well, this one’s come, so you should be at least a little afraid. Now you can stay here, or you can follow me. I’m going to be wandering all over your fields to look for where this happened.” Vikram paused to look around the gate where the bodies had been found. “Because it sure as hell wasn’t nearby.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t took them the better part of an hour to trace the leopard’s painstaking route back to its origin. And there the drag marks had split into two, suggesting that it had killed the two men at different places before dragging each one down the same path.

+

“It went to a massive amount of trouble to get these bodies to the gate,” Vikram said, kneeling next to the track.

+

“Is that normal for leopards?” Kavitha asked.

+

“Not in the least. A leopard will usually drag its prey into or near a tree. I’ve never seen one do… this.”

+

Kavitha’s eyes widened slightly, and she whispered, “Ciruvan,” under her breath.

+

Vikram hid his instinctive scorn. Ciruvan. Of course the villagers would attribute this to a god. Much easier to lay the blame at some deity’s feet than to acknowledge that they were interlopers, trespassers encroaching on the leopard’s territory.

+

From a short distance away, Gokul waved to them. “Over here! I found something!” he called, from the bushes near where one of the men had died.

+

He held a small bag up out of the underbrush. A wave of pungent ammonia assaulted Vikram when he opened it, making him recoil. Inside were the remnants of several balled cakes, broken and crushed. He knotted the handles on the bag and stuffed it into his shirt.

+

“What is it?” Kavitha asked.

+

“It’s what our victims were doing out here,” Vikram replied. He pictured the scene—two men, a clandestine meeting under the full moon, a bag filled with opium. And their deal, rudely, and fatally interrupted by the arrival of a leopard, somewhere they didn’t usually show up.

+

But why didn’t it eat them? Why did it drag them to the gate just so they’d be found?

+

It was leaving a message.

+

And with that, Vikram was on his feet and running, his rifle thumping painfully against his hip, back to the sarpanch’s office.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +wenty kills in the district. Several of them had occurred at other villages, but five had happened at Tirucheri, all within the last year. He had to find a connection between them, a reason for this leopard’s personal vendetta.

+

Vikram had come here because he’d heard tell of a leopard terrorizing these parts, and the money from his previous hunt had just about run dry. But this was no simple maneater. And now, Vikram was driven by a different hunger, an incessant craving for mystery.

+

Gunasekaran had only nodded sadly when Vikram produced the opium. It wasn’t as common in these parts as it was further north, but despite a war to eradicate it, the drug had found its way down even this far south, a rot that had set deep in the country’s bones. “There have been rumours of the poppy’s curse reaching the district.” He shook his head ruefully. “I just never thought it would come here.”

+

“Do you know anything about the victims from Tirucheri?” Vikram asked. “What did they do?”

+

“Almost everyone here works for Harish anna’s family in some fashion.”

+

Vikram knew the system. That future, living and dying under some rich mogul’s thumb, had been his destiny before his brother died. He had exchanged that future for an uncertain life of hunting so he might control his fate. He wouldn’t have his back broken so a rich man—a lesser man—could live ever more comfortably.

+

No, give him the cats and the shadow of death’s gaze every day.

+

“But these four adults specifically,” he pressed. “What did they do?”

+

“I don’t know, but you’d learn more if you just went to Harish anna’s villa,” Gunasekaran replied. “Three of them worked there. The other, we don’t know yet.”

+

“I’ll have those two workers from the morning show me the way to his villa after lunch, then.” Except he had abandoned them out in the fields. “Do you know where they will be now?”

+

The sarpanch shrugged. “They might be under the aalamaram. There are food vendors there.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

‘F + +ood vendors’ felt a little gratuitous for what were two ancient men idly flipping large, paper-thin dosas on tawas fuelled by cowdung fire. They promised him, their gums set in the stubborn determination of age, that it was normally a lot livelier around the giant banyan.

+

“Ciruvan is keeping people away,” one of them gummed fervently while Vikram waited to get his dosa.

+

“We have offended her, so she comes to take us, one by one,” the second one flapped, while flipping the dosa shut over its chicken mash, presenting it steaming to Vikram on a smallish banana leaf, with a side of coconut chutney.

+

Ciruvan again. Tirucheri too had its idols of the leopard revenant, a ward to keep her pride assuaged. They prayed to her before going into the woods or the plantations. But Vikram doubted her existence. Thirteen years of hunting, and she had never shown herself to him. Surely a leopard god would have exacted vengeance on him for those he had killed?

+

She couldn’t exist.

+

Vikram thanked them for the food and returned to the base of the banyan, where a dirt stage had been built around the roots to serve as the panchayat’s meeting spot. Right now, though, it only held Gokul and Kavitha, who he’d caught mid-meal. He explained what he needed, secured their agreement to guide him to the home of the plantation owner, their employer, perhaps that of everyone but the two toothless ancients who’d supplied their food.

+

When Gokul stepped away to piss behind some bushes, Kavitha spoke, her gaze fixed on the canopy of the banyan above them. “Gokul owes Harish anna his life.”

+

When Vikram didn’t respond she continued, “I told you about his son, no? Gokul was a guard on the plantation before it happened. When the leopard took his son, he was devastated, sank into his bottles. Harish anna was the one who gave him purpose again. He swore to have the leopard found and killed. That hate is the only thing keeping Gokul going.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S. + + Harish Venkat’s four-storey villa sat, resplendent and garish, in a corner of his vast tea plantation, deep within that forest of fragrant shrubberies. Unlike the rest of the village, this place was made of yellow-painted brick, with wood seemingly only being used for the balconies that overlooked the fields. The plantation’s steps fell away from the villa’s many balconies, themselves blanketed in a dense foliage of money plants. It had an effect not dissimilar to an elephant hiding under a solitary leaf.

+

The landlord and tea mogul was an unassuming man in his sixties wearing a white shirt and khakis—and who was sitting on the parapet of his balcony with a cigar in hand, looking over his vast estate. He turned to them with the first creak of boots on wood, surprise quickly melting into a gracious, welcoming smile.

+

“Ah, the hunter! Just as terrifying as I imagined!” he said, waving the cigar at a few chairs beside him. “Please, make yourself at home.”

+

“I’d prefer to stand, if that’s all right,” Vikram said.

+

Harish shrugged, and turned to his two employees. “Have you shown Mister—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name?”

+

“Vikram.”

+

“Ah! Have you shown Mr. Vikram around the estate yet?”

+

“We helped him find where the attacks happened, anna,” Gokul said, taking off his head-wrap in deference.

+

Harish shook his head and pulled a long, sad drag from his cigar. “Such a sorry affair, that. But it is the risk we run, living so close to that forest.”

+

“Truly,” Vikram said. “That’s why we’ve come to you. We’ve found something interesting, and I’d hoped that you might know about it.” He produced the bag of opium from his shirt.

+

“What is that?”

+

“These latest victims were trading opium when the leopard attacked. We found this on one of the bodies.”

+

Harish blinked in confusion. Then he leaned back against the parapet. “I… didn’t know.”

+

Gokul stepped forward, glaring at Vikram. “Oi, hunter. Harish anna had nothing to do with that.”

+

Vikram put his hands up. “Of course not. I just wanted to bring it to his attention, nothing more.” He paused a moment, and added, “But if there’s anything you do know, it might help me understand why this leopard is acting so strangely.”

+

Harish took several thoughtful pulls of his cigar before replying. “I cannot control what happens on every inch of the land I own. I wish dearly that I could, that I might prevent tragedies like this one, but I am not omniscient, Mr. Vikram.”

+

He spoke earnestly, so much so that even Vikram felt guilty for insinuating that this old man could have known of the drug. “I do not expect you to, anna, I just want to understand why a leopard left two bodies on your gate as a message.”

+

At this, Gokul interposed himself between Vikram and Harish, his bulk obscuring the older man from view. “You overstep your bounds, hunter,” he rumbled. He looked like he had more to say, but Harish laid a hand on his shoulder, stopping him.

+

“It’s okay Gokul. I don’t mind.” Harish looked at Vikram. “I commend your intent, Mr. Vikram. Truly, the drug is a disease that needs purging, but you are here to hunt a leopard that has killed twenty people in the past year. Once that threat is dealt with, we can discuss how to handle the drug problem.”

+

His tone brooked no argument.

+

“Did you know either of the victims?” Vikram asked.

+

“The big one, Govind, was a temporary worker on the plantation some time ago. He found… other employment shortly after,” Harish replied.

+

“And now you know what that employment was.”

+

“Unfortunately so.” Harish leaned against his parapet wall heavily, the picture of a troubled conscience. “If only he had come to me instead of turning to opium, I could have helped him.”

+

“You couldn’t have known, anna,” Gokul said.

+

“All we can do now is find his killer, and hope that the beast has scared the rest of the opium traders into hiding,” Vikram said.

+

“I wish you the best of luck, hunter. The sooner you deal with that menace, the better for us all.”

+

Vikram pressed his hands together in namaskaram and turned on his heel, stalking out of the house. Harish, he decided, was either a good man, or a very convincing actor.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +ikram had Kavitha and Gokul help him set up a hunter’s perch in the forest—a wooden pavilion built in the branches of a laurel tree. He carried with him dried meat, and a blanket to keep out the cold, and then settled in to watch the goat he’d tethered to the base of the tree. Given how vast leopard territories were, it could take several nights before it reappeared in this area.

+

Days passed, the goat waking from its unwitting fate to feed and fraternize with its fellows, Vikram freed from his long lonely watch to do little more than eat and sleep and start it over again. In the dark plantation fields, no illicit commerce took place. He sourly lamented the lack of an opium dealer to trade places with the goat—a more likely lure, perhaps—then silently scolded himself for the thought.

+

He was starting to doubt, wondering if the culprit had moved on to another village in the region, when finally experience prickled intuition. Somewhere past midnight, he knew it was near.

+

He mounted his gun on the edge of the pavilion and trained it on the goat, not yet settling to watch down the sights. Instead, he watched the forest around him, looking for the leopard’s approach. He’d learned to spot the slight distortions that cats left on the inky blackness of night. To feel their presence in the air. He didn’t want to watch the goat only to have fangs dig into his neck, ripping at his spine. The scars on his back served as a constant reminder that paranoia was his only friend out here.

+

An instant of movement to his left, gone before he could confirm it happened. The goat slumbered, unaware of the danger it was in. The slightest flicker of a white-tipped tail rising out of the bushes like a cobra, mesmeric and hinting at lethal violence.

+

It was here.

+

Vikram loaded the rifle. Held his breath. Waited for the soft thump of claws on flesh. One chance was all he’d get.

+

The shot echoed in the air, drumming in his ears, melding with the rhythm of his thumping heart. A body hit the floor to lie unmoving. He waited a few minutes, loaded another bullet, and then climbed down to survey the scene.

+

It was a young male, too young to know to avoid tethered prey. And too young to resort to man-eating? He tried to ignore the churning in his stomach. This was too simple. From its size, this beast couldn’t have been much more than a cub at the time the killings began. It had no deformities or injuries, nothing debilitating that would stop it from hunting its regular prey. There were anomalies, of course, so good health didn’t preclude it from being the maneater. And yet, something about this felt wrong*.*

+

Torches lit the dirt path leading up to his pavilion, shortly revealing the sarpanch approaching with Gokul and a few others—all bearing aruvals.

+

“We heard the shot from the village,” the old man said.

+

“Is this the beast?” Gokul asked, nudging the leopard with his foot.

+

“It has to be, there was only the one leopard here,” the sarpanch replied.

+

“Are you absolutely certain of that?” Vikram asked. “This one seems too young to have killed people a year ago.”

+

“Then maybe those were a different leopard—this one’s mother, perhaps,” Gunasekaran said.

+

Vikram wasn’t convinced. That explanation couldn’t satisfy the voice within him that screamed that his mystery couldn’t end this meekly. He looked at the leopard he’d killed once more. At its mouth, lolling open in death. At those fangs, which would have fit twice over in the wounds he’d seen on the victims.

+

He felt sick. This couldn’t be the same leopard. He’d killed an innocent*.*

+

“We’ll take this back to the village. You get some rest, thambi,” Gunasekaran said, while guiding his men to pick up the carcasses.

+

“This is wrong,” he whispered.

+

“What do you mean?” Gunasekaran asked.

+

“This leopard couldn’t have done it. There’s another one out there.”

+

“There are no other leopards here,” the sarpanch said. He placed a wrinkled hand on Vikram’s shoulder. “You’re thinking too much. Only this one was dumb enough to come close to the village. It’s over, hunter. Just get some rest for now, and then we can celebrate in the morning. You’ve done this village a massive service.”

+

With the adrenaline rush fading, Vikram was too tired to argue. But no matter what the sarpanch said, he could dispel the sickness he felt looking at that body, at the child he’d killed.

+

“Come, Harish anna has prepared a room for you in his villa, in anticipation of your service to Tirucheri.” Gunasekaran patted his shoulder and left to oversee his men. Vikram returned to the villa, whose guards let him enter. Fatigue paid no heed to Vikram’s troubled mind, and took him as soon as he’d touched the downy bed in one of the villa’s many guest rooms.

+

He did not notice the eyes that watched him from just beyond the room’s window.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he sun still slumbered somewhere beneath the estate when Vikram woke, his eyes gummy and swollen with sleep, and his nose filled with the damnable smell of tea. Less than a week surrounded by it, and the smell made him want to puke. He grabbed his gun and groped his way to the outhouse around the back, fighting his wrung-out body’s protests every step of the way.

+

A lush garden greeted him, blooming manoranjini, jasmine, ixora, and bougainvillea shrubs mingled with rubber, mango, and tamarind trees. Patches of tilled soil had been set aside at the end of the garden, one holding watermelon creepers, and the other sprouting a controlled forest of sugarcane.

+

And on the ground, leading away from one large mango tree and over the compound wall, was a set of prints etched deep into the mud.

+

So big. Unreal.

+

Sweat prickled the back of his neck, that space of flesh so coveted by leopards. He risked a glance upwards into the boughs of the tree that he now realized stood close outside his bedroom, but did not spy glowing yellow eyes, nor the silhouette of a giant muzzle.

+

How long had it sat there in that tree, watching him sleep?

+

Curiosity warred with fear within the hunter, caution trying and failing to temper intrigue. He clambered up the tree and used it to leap over the wall, the landing jarring a shockwave through his legs. The tracks continued on the other side, leading away from the house and brazenly through the heart of the deserted village before entering the forest. The leopard had even stopped to run its claws through the giant aalamaram’s trunk, parting wood as if it were water.

+

Vikram paused at the forest’s entrance, breathing deep to calm the torrent roaring in his ears, to steel his mind to his body’s desperate urge to pull him from this course. But all reason, all logic, had been shredded by his simple desire.

+

He wanted to know.

+

A thin layer of mist had settled over the town and forest, and it swirled in currents around Vikram, parting in tumbling waves at his approach. An early-to-rise mynah sang from somewhere in the dense canopy over him, warning of his presence. A langur took up the cry, and soon the calls reverberated all around him, a cacophony of barks, chirps, song, and screeches to welcome him to the leopard’s court.

+

The riparian wood of mango, rosewood, marudha maram and plum grew thick around him now, the closer he drew to the river that cut through these woods. But the air was different. The clean smell of mist and flora felt… infected. Tainted by a sharp tang that itched at his mind.

+

He broke into a grassy clearing as the smell grew stronger, ammonia sending his head spinning. A large shack of wood and rusted iron sheets stood within this clearing, up against the riverbank. It had no windows, and its door was padlocked. A dirty brown sluice ran from its side directly into the water, while a solitary chimneystack rose above it in a vain attempt to join the canopy.

+

And at the very tip of its prismatic roof stood a giant leopard, regal and condescending.

+

It was the colour of a forest fire, an avatar of nature’s retribution given lethal flesh. From the six-inch fangs that poked through its lips to the sooty white tip of its almost-prehensile tail it radiated power. It stood fully seven feet at the shoulder, a mass of muscle and sinew that rippled through its coat. The beast stood regal over its prey, watching him with cold disdain writ in its liquid gold eyes.

+

This is no normal leopard. And the thought rose, unbidden but inevitable, Ciruvan.

+

His hands, which should have reached instinctively for his gun, didn’t move. His gun would be useless, he knew. And if he were to be judged for his crime, then so be it.

+

“What are you?” Vikram asked, daring a glance directly at it. He was ignored.

+

When it seemed apparent that the leopard was not going to move, Vikram edged forward, one eye constantly turned skyward for a sign of the creature’s lethal intent, but the blow never came. He stood before the door with its heavy chain and padlock. Breaking it could draw attention to him, so he circled instead to the back of the building, where a ladder to the roof was propped up against the back wall.

+

He stepped gingerly onto the corrugated iron sheets, watching for spots where rust had eaten completely away at the metal. Tetanus would be a painful and stupid way to go—assuming the cat didn’t put him out of his misery first. A small hatch sat in the roof, midway between Vikram and the leopard, and to his immense relief, it wasn’t locked. The leopard yawned at him when he scuttled over to the hatch, but did nothing else. Whatever its test, he had seemingly passed. It could kill him with ease, but seemed patently disinterested in making the effort.

+

He opened the hatch and recoiled from a stench wave of half-processed poppies. Darkness lay heavy over the workshop. A ladder dropped from the hatch onto a narrow walkway that ran around the perimeter of the building. Vikram groped his way from the walkway down to the factory’s floor, which was split by four tables running parallel down the room. Baked clay pots were scattered around the room, and banana leaf-wrapped bundles stood stacked up near the front door. He could just see another door set in the back wall.

+

The second room seemed to be where they refined the opium before sending it to be packed. Large clay vats occupied one corner of the room, while the furnace and waste chute sat opposite, facing the river. But directly across from Vikram lay the reason he’d been brought here.

+

A crude but large cell spanned the length of the far wall, occupying fully half the room.

+

Inside it slept a mass of young children, huddled together for warmth.

+

Vikram dropped to his knees in front of the cage. “Hey!” he hissed. A few stirred to eye him warily. Cracked lips parted, crying silent pleas. “Just wait, I’ll get you out.”

+

Vikram grabbed a large pole used to stir the drug resin. He angled it against the bars and pushed until they distended, forming a child-sized space in the cage.

+

“Come on, give me your hands,” Vikram told them, pulling the children out one by one. He bade them wait inside and returned to the padlocked door. The rusted chains resisted feebly, but gave way soon to his rifle butt, and the factory was open. He gathered the children and guided them back to the village, them limping on legs covered in weeping sores and insect bites, fingernails ripping at burns on their arms. They entered as the first roosters began to crow, a parade damning the village for its blindness.

+

It wasn’t until he had them all in bed at the healer’s house that he realized he’d forgotten about the leopard.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“H + +ow is this possible?” Sarpanch Gunasekaran asked, his face drained of all colour. “This boy should be dead.”

+

They stood beside one boy’s bed, the sarpanch having come over as soon as Vikram had sent word to him about finding ten children in the woods. “What do you mean?”

+

“This is Selva, Gokul’s son,” Gunasekaran replied.

+

“The boy who was killed last year?” Vikram asked. Gunasekaran nodded. “What about the others?”

+

“I don’t know. Selva’s the only one from Tirucheri. I’ve sent word to other villages nearby. Where did you find them?”

+

Vikram told him about the factory in the woods, but kept the leopard’s involvement to himself. Ciruvan or not, the leopard was his mystery to solve.

+

The sarpanch’s face turned grave, furrows of creases and wrinkles digging ever deeper into his skin. “I did not know how pervasive this infestation was.” He rubbed his leathery face. “But we shall speak of this later. First, I believe that there is a man who needs to be told that his son is alive.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +ikram was unsettled. It wasn’t the sight of the stoic guard-turned-farmer on his knees and sobbing that bothered him—he’d seen more than a few big men like that break down, usually in grief. No, what bothered him was how out-of-place he felt then. The celebrations were a reminder of the bonds he’d cut in order to become the hunter, humanity’s punitive force against the terrors of the jungle.

+

They suffocated him.

+

He stood under the aalamaram that night*,* lost in thought and fiddling with one of its innumerable hanging roots when a voice called out to him.

+

Kavitha approached him from the celebrations at Gokul’s house. “Thank you,” she said.

+

“You know, I wasn’t looking for them,” Vikram said. “I didn’t know they were alive at all. Just… I couldn’t accept that it was over, and so I went out. This was just luck.”

+

“And that’s why I wanted to speak with you. I’ve been questioning some things now that you found Selva.” She took a seat on one of the tree’s sprawling roots. “Gokul didn’t witness Selva’s abduction himself. Guna thatha’s helper was the one who said she’d seen the leopard take him away that day. No-one else saw it happen. And that doesn’t make sense. Selva couldn’t have gotten away from a leopard by himself, and he couldn’t have lived in that forest for a year by himself. So I wanted to ask you, where did you find him?”

+

Vikram, the hunter, was tempted to stay out of this. He didn’t get invested in the plight of villagers. Killing maneaters wasn’t altruism, it was business. If anything, he sympathized more with the cats. But then, none of this was normal. And looking into those fiercely concerned eyes, Vikram found that he wanted to tell Kavitha. She deserved to know about the evil that was poisoning their village. About what the beast had led him to.

+

Kavitha took the news with a stolid stoicism, like an opium ring was just another minor occurrence in a routine day. Cyclones and hurricanes couldn’t rock this woman, so why would a giant leopard or a drug infestation be any different?

+

She didn’t speak for a long time, just stared into the boughs of the banyan, where a number of rainbow-winged parakeets jostled for space with ravens. But when she broke her silence, her voice carried the low menace of a building rage. “I think we need to see the children, before I do something stupid.”

+

She stalked through the celebrations—drawing a concerned look from Gokul—and back to the healer’s house. The children had huddled together, their beds pulled close together. They shied away from the adults at their approach.

+

“Paavam kozhandai, you must have been so terrified,” Kavitha said.

+

“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Vikram said.

+

“He rescued you,” Kavitha said. “We want to find out who did this to you.” A few of the children shook their heads. “Whoever it is can’t hurt you anymore. You’re going home.”

+

“You’re lying,” one boy said.

+

“Selva’s going home,” a girl said, her voice barely carrying to them. “But thatha already told us that no-one’s coming for us.”

+

“Thatha?” Vikram asked.

+

“Why did you take us from the factory if you were just going to bring us back to them?” the first boy asked, anger rising through his hurt.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey found Gunasekaran where they’d been talking earlier, under the aalamaram.

+

“Why did you do it?” Kavitha asked. Her voice was ice. “You had those children kidnapped to make opium. You made them slaves.”

+

“What are you raving about?” the sarpanch asked, frowning.

+

“The children told us you’re planning to send them back to the factory,” Vikram said.

+

Gunasekaran waved a dismissive hand. “They’re malnourished and delusional. You know the state they were in. They aren’t thinking straight. Why would you believe anything they say right now?”

+

“Your maid was also the last one to see Selva before his ‘death’,” Vikram said.

+

“I watched my friend suffer for a year, thinking he’d failed his son,” Kavitha said, “and all this time you’ve been strolling around here, knowing exactly where he was—and worse, using him to make that vile thing.”

+

“He did what?” They all turned to see Gokul, who had left the celebrations to check on them. Who was now dawning to horrific realization.

+

Gunasekaran’s hands now shook with fear. “Gokul, they’re out of their minds! You know I wouldn’t do this, right?”

+

Gokul’s response was to rush the old man in rage. Vikram and Kavitha reacted together, grabbing Gokul before he could hit the sarpanch. All of them, save Gokul, turned their backs to the aalamaram.

+

Vikram saw it reflected in the farmer’s eyes before he turned.

+

The sleek, giant, form that rose silently in one of the branches, gliding down onto Gunasekaran, forcing him to the floor with implacable, inconceivable force, raking giant claws down his back.

+

Vikram released Gokul, who had gone still at the leopard’s advent, anger forgotten in shocked reverence. Vikram knew the feeling. The leopard narrowed its eyes, its gaze burning his soul for his sins. And then it raised itself from the body and walked, supremely confident, into the night.

+

Vikram hadn’t even thought to raise his gun.

+

Gunasekaran thankfully, was responsive. Four large wounds cleaved his back, the skin peeling away from each cut, soaking him in blood. He coughed weakly.

+

Vikram steeled himself. “Kavitha, go get the village healer. Gokul, I’m going to need your help holding him down now.”

+

“Wait.” The old man coughed, spittle and blood dribbling down his chin. “I deserve this.”

+

“Save it, old man. Tell us when you’re stitched up.”

+

But Gunasekaran grabbed Vikram’s sleeve, gripping it with quivering strength. “Ciruvan has made her decision. If I die, it is her will.” His breath came in heaving bursts. “Yes, I knew where they were. I helped him set up the factory. Children were easy targets for workers—their disappearances were easy to cover up as leopard kills. And the adults were needed on the plantations anyway. It was the only way to keep him investing in the town. All those new looms and mills he built, that was my payment.”

+

The dam had broken, and now he sang, even as his body wept for his crimes. “But then you came. With your questions, your investigation. Your insistence to search, making connections with the opium.”

+

“The leopard I killed,” Vikram said, “the juvenile. It was to put me off, correct?”

+

Gunasekaran nodded. “He bought it from a zoo, had it brought here and released. Thought you would take your reward and be satisfied.”

+

“Who?” Vikram asked, though he knew the answer.

+

“Harish anna,” the sarpanch said, his consciousness fading with the indictment.

+

Gokul let out a sound unnatural to man, a wretched thing born of bestial fury and despair.

+

“What should we do?” Kavitha asked.

+

“First, we need to stop the bleeding. And then we find Harish.”

+

They carried Gunasekaran to his house and laid him on a bed, and Vikram sent Kavitha to find alcohol to disinfect the wounds, fearing Gokul would embark on an errand of vengeance instead. Vikram had learned to stitch himself out of necessity, but he’d never sewn wounds this extensive before, nor on another’s body. Gunasekaran’s back was a stringy mess of flesh that throbbed like a thing alive, seeping rivers of bright blood onto everything.

+

“Give me that,” Vikram said, when Kavitha entered holding a clay pot filled with toddy. He splashed the liquid across Gunasekaran’s wounds, prompting a weak moan from the unconscious man. Vikram then pulled a needle and a small spool of string from his coat and set to his task.

+

He worked quickly, his hands steady but indelicate—if the man survived, he was going to have an awful set of scars to remind him of this incident. Not that Vikram cared.

+

When he finished, Vikram worried that his patient had already died, but then Gunasekaran coughed, and Vikram’s heart calmed to merely a furious thumping within his chest cavity, no longer the crazed hammering of a madman trying to break free.

+

With the job done, weariness settled over him with a gentle, unceasing pressure that made his bones creak until his knees buckled. His hands, so steady during the task, now shivered like he’d dipped them in a freshly-melted mountain spring. He fell back onto the floor and drew the first breaths of a man who’d nearly drowned. Stitching himself had been an easy task, because it was only his life at stake. This was another person who lived or died by his hand. A responsibility Vikram had never wanted, had actively avoided. But he’d done it.

+

The gulping turned into a cough that became a choked laugh, like a rooster being strangled. Gokul watched him silently, dark eyes tinted with something approaching respect.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +ikram was still allowed access to the villa, so the security waved him in when they approached the gate.

+

“Where is he?” Vikram asked the maid who came out at the sound of their entry. Countless thoughts were screaming in his mind now, but they would have to wait until they could talk to the man at the heart of all this.

+

“Harish anna has taken to his room. I don’t think you should disturb him,” the maid replied, but Vikram pushed past her and climbed the stairs with Kavitha and Gokul at his back, the wronged father’s strong hands flexing between claws and fists with every step.

+

The master bedroom occupied the entirety of the villa’s third storey, being an ostentatious affair of marble tiles and ivory-framed paintings, with the occasional tiger or elephant bust set in between. Vikram grimaced at the sight. He’d often seen this kind of man’s people waiting when he brought in a maneater’s body. They wanted to buy the head or skin or penis from him, so that their masters could pin them up as trophies of feats they could never dream of accomplishing.

+

In the middle of all this garishness was a giant four-poster bed, surrounded by a muslin mosquito net that only left Harish’s silhouette visible, now splayed across several large pillows, fast asleep.

+

“Anna?” Kavitha ventured, just before the iron tang of blood filled Vikram’s nose.

+

He pulled her and Gokul back into the shadow of the doorway as the figure behind the curtain rose limply, a puppet on strings, and the net curtains billowed, distorting the lithe shadow of the giant cat that held Harish’s head in its massive jaws.

+

They watched, terrified beyond measure, as the net lifted, bringing the leopard into full view, carrying Harish by the head. It stepped off the bed and dropped the body, grimacing as if it tasted something irredeemably vile. Then its heavy head lifted, cold eyes latching onto Vikram’s trembling gaze, and there it held.

+

Vikram couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could do nothing but stare into the leopard’s eyes. After a moment that stretched into eons, it broke contact, and left through one of the room’s large windows, stepping onto the high sill and leaping into the night, dismissive of all witnesses.

+

“Ciruvan, protector of the voiceless,” Kavitha said, her voice a reverent whisper.

+

Vikram followed it to the window, ignoring the body of the tea owner and would-be drug kingpin, but the beast had vanished.

+

Vikram looked down at Harish. He had never seen his revenant come for him. His eyes were closed, the lines of his face eased in his endless slumber. It would have been easy to think him just asleep, if not for the gaping hole where his throat had been.

+

Vikram felt a stranger in his own skin. He had long considered himself an expert on the beasts he hunted. Now he felt as ignorant as a newborn. “Do you think she came because of the children?” he asked.

+

“That, and because of the factory,” Kavitha replied. “She asserts her dominance. The forest is her land, and no-one can infringe upon it.”

+

“We should go,” Vikram managed.

+

“Leave me here,” Gokul said. He stared at the body of his treacherous benefactor, a straight back belying the war taking place in his heart. “I’ll deal with the guards—they won’t do anything to me.”

+

Kavitha and Vikram left through the window, climbing down the vines encircling the house as Gokul’s call drew the guards from the perimeter before slipping from the dead man’s compound and making their way back to the village itself.

+

They walked in silence, and Vikram felt the weight of his rifle lie as heavy on his back as a fallen tree. A leopard goddess. She had made him her tool, set him to discover the guilty so she could serve up her own justice.

+

But what of him, a hunter who taken the lives of so many of her kind?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

V + +ikram departed the village the following day, not by the well-trod path, but back into the thick of the forest, tracing the route back to the factory. He wasn’t sure what he’d find when he reached it, but as he entered the clearing the sight caught hold of his heart and dragged a joyous sputter from him.

+

The ugly assembly of iron and wood had been pummeled into the ground, the boards and sheets left shattered and bent on the ground, and the chimney toppled to become a bed for the denizens of the forest floor. The sluice, which had been feeding its poison to the river, had been brutally dismantled and thrown onto the riverbank. Nothing of the building remained untouched.

+

And standing on top of the rubble she’d created, in a pool of dazzling sunlight, was Ciruvan herself.

+

Vikram slowly unslung the rifle from across his back and dropped to one knee… but instead of aiming, he lay the weapon on the ground of the clearing and took up a chunk of broken stone cast from the chimney, lifting it over his head. Ready to smash his weapon. At her command.

+

He owned no guilt. As a hunter he killed only maneaters, only worthy, necessary prey. But Harish had been a maneater too, of a sort, and because of him Vikram had killed an innocent. One of hers.

+

Let Ciruvan decide if he should pay for that with his livelihood, or life.

+

He waited, stone held high, until the goddess deigned to acknowledge his presence.

+

The giant leopard’s eyes paused for the briefest moment on Vikram’s, an infinite sea of the coldest gold, and then she rose and loped out of the clearing opposite him, her tail held high.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Maneater of Tiruchery on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Chaitanya Murali

+

+ + Author image of Chaitanya Murali + + + Chaitanya Murali is a game designer and writer who lives in Bangalore, India. He tends to write stories inspired by South India. They also usually feature giant animals. When he’s not writing, you can find him complaining about sports on Twitter as @chaitanyamurali.

+

© Chaitanya Murali 2021 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was composited from two VQGAN+ images, one seeded with a Creative Commons work by Gill Heward, the other from the text prompt ‘a forest wreathed in darkness’.

+
+ + + + + +

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+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + +
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Mythaxis

+

Spring 2022

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Erik Mann +

Unincorporated

+
+ + +

The way we work is in flux, as changing social, industrial, political, and environmental factors work their effects, and this makes for a rich resource in speculative fiction that Mythaxis has mined before. Erik Mann's opener gives another glimpse of how employment may feel in the world to come—how for some it may feel already…

+ + + + Story image for Unincorporated by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills

+ Mandira Pattnaik +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills by + + + +

Mandira Pattnaik has been published in a startling number of forums around the world, and her work includes poetry, non-fiction, and (fortunately for us!) short stories. Here she provides a contemplative, understated ecological fantasy about loss and rebirth that offers a glimmer of optimism for a roughly-treated world, which is at least a starting place.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Fractured

+ Gunnar De Winter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Fractured by + + + +

The experiences of the neuroatypical—including of being surrounded by the supposedly monolythically typical—are often depicted as a no-win feedback loop, made worse as much by attempts to bring poor sufferers into the norm as by abandonment to their fate. But Gunnar De Winter's story points out that context is everything, and if in space no one can hear you scream, perhaps it's because you no longer feel the urge.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Xorai’s Hand

+ Celine Low +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Xorai’s Hand by + + + +

The first big read of the issue, Celine Low takes her inspiration from the nomadic civilisations of the Mongolian steppes and delivers a fantastical coming-of-age adventure that melds action and magic, loyalty and friendship, greed and evil, all sprinkled with hints of that most traditional of narrative forms: the passing down of spoken tales from one generation to another.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Woodcutter and the Witchwife

+ Owen G. Tabard +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Woodcutter and the Witchwife by + + + +

Our next story also has an air of the traditional to it—this time Owen G. Tabard takes us into the territory of the folktale, in which everyman heroes make rash promises in search of glittering rewards, and devastating rules of three (and other fearsome narrative monsters) lie in wait for the misguided.

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+ + + +
+
+

The Cross of Xenophor

+ Jeffery Scott Sims +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Cross of Xenophor by + + + +

Here we have the first of two returnees to Mythaxis. Jeffery Scott Sims graced i23 with an entertaining blend of the noirish detective and Lovecraftian occult. This time he offers something shorter, but no less sinister: another yarn of seekers after esoteric knowledge not meant for human ken, once again delivered in a classic style.

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In The Weave

+ David Whitmarsh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for In The Weave by + + + +

We wrap up the issue with our second repeat offender. David Whitmarsh's contribution to i25 had notes of the post-apocalyptic to it, but was ultimately about the beginning of someone's story. This piece is laced with endings, and has hints of the pre-apocalyptic lurking within. It also boasts a uniquely alien point of view…

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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Smile, reader! I stand on the threshold of a little anniversary! But first, a downer.

+

When I first published an issue of Mythaxis, some parts of the world were already tightly locked down against the spread of Covid-19, while others were still reluctantly shaking off months of complacency and thinking about doing the same. I personally had been isolating for several weeks, fortunate to be able to work from home, far from family but somewhere I was not completely alone. For me, that situation remains much the same. I’ve only shared space with my day-job colleagues on a handful of occasions since then, and a social life conducted more via screens than in person has become second nature.

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In the slow-time existence that has ruled since all this began, it seems like the world is punctuated mostly by negatives: the escalating spread of the virus; political strife of one flavour or another; vaccine inequality, made all the more unacceptable given the rise in vaccine denial wherever over-abundance is the norm. And now, of course, an unjust war to add to all the others, given special treatment this time for being on the doorstep of The West.

+

Fair to say, it’s not been a great few years.

+

But, for me, it’s not been all bad.

+

Today, almost exactly two years after my first issue as editor, I deliver my eighth. Collectively, they represent sixty-seven pieces of writing (and two cartoons!) by almost as many different creators, not to mention cover images by six human artists and one artificial intelligence, and invaluable behind-the-scenes help from collaborators both past and present. The vast majority of these people-and-or-proto-sentient-beings I’d never have encountered if it were not for this magazine, and my experiences with them all have been very rewarding—to say nothing of how much I enjoy my own creative activities in support of their work.

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The title of this issue’s cover art is Music is His Oxygen. I chose this piece because making beautiful things doesn’t just help make life generally worthwhile, it can be what keeps us alive through the difficult times, creators and audiences alike. So, I hope that Mythaxis and the stories we’ve been fortunate to include bring you pleasure, and they help to keep us all going until times take a turn for the better again.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 29 - Thanks and Salutations! +Thanks once again to cover artist Bobby Cooper, whose open invitation to use his work made Music is His Oxygen a tempting choice! Bobby works with colored pencil on black paper, with strange and beautiful results — you can check them out on his Instagram, and he has an online shop with myriad cool options too.

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Fractured

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Gunnar De Winter

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+ Story image for Fractured by +
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D + +eeper, I think.

+

Beyond synapses and neurotransmitters.

+

Deeper.

+

Beyond perceptions and sensations.

+

There I am.

+

Naked and afraid, surrounded by churning darkness, as if it was alive. I reach out, ready to break myself into pieces and become whole again.

+

Something yanks me away. Synaptic tyranny reasserts itself.

+

NO.

+

Nanoneedles withdraw from my scalp. Internal transcranial magnetic stimulation ends. Straps loosen around my chafed, scarred wrists. Wisps of bright light dance across the inside of my closed eyelids.

+

“How was the session?” Doc asks.

+

I look at the shiny black eye in the white wall that covers the processing core of the psych AI. “Good.” I hide my disappointment. “But unfinished.”

+

“You know we have a time limit,” Doc says—as it does every time. “We can’t let you lose yourself.”

+

But I am already lost.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +fter trial and error, it turned out pioneer missions perform best when the crew is a mix of two psych profiles.

+

First, the adventurers. Those that blindly push boundaries, even if the boundaries push back. Extroverted, oblivious to danger, hungry for recognition.

+

Second, the worriers. No longer “the depressed”, but the “synaptically atypical”. But good at thinking outside of the box. You have to when your box is broken.

+

One individual with this second profile rounds out a mission crew. Two at most. No more. Anxiety is a contagion, demons duplicate.

+

When they recruited me, the adventurer spots were already filled.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

U + +nlike my colleagues, I am drawn to the observation domes. A big word for the small, sleek bubbles that dapple the outside of the ship’s hab-wheel.

+

The rest of the crew dislikes observing the pin-pricked void, that reminder of human insignificance. They’re here for the planets, for planting flags. Not me. I relish the emptiness. It reaches out to me and lets me know that I’m real. Perhaps only the abyss allows me to congeal into something resembling a human being.

+

The hatch irises open behind me. Malia enters. “You alright?”

+

Her voice is soft. She knows I need time to adapt my senses to other people. An unreliable input filter, Doc calls it.

+

“Yeah,” I say. We both know it’s a lie.

+

She smiles cautiously, as if worried she’ll break me.

+

Pity. How I hate that pity.

+

Malia touches my arm. I know I’m not for her. How could I be? I am an empty shell with the occasional delusion of housing something meaningful.

+

Her touch ends. Please don’t let go. I stay silent.

+

“We’re almost done reverse breaking for our pitstop. Cap wants you on the bridge.” She winks. “Best prepare your swarm.”

+

I nod. “I’m coming.” Maybe she can save me.

+

Triggered by the glimmer of hope, one of the demon-selves rears its head. No one can save me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“C + +ome on, Cap. Let’s skip the swarm. I can take one of the sampling shuttles. I’m the best pilot here.”

+

Of course, Davalia wants to go out. Ever the impetuous one. We… tolerate each other, but the rift, the fundamental disconnect, is too large. He wants to make himself known to the universe. I want to find a dark little corner where I can remain unseen.

+

The captain is, well, a captain. Accomplished all-rounder. Chiseled like some kind of Greek god. Also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. The bastard.

+

Cap holds out his hands. “Calm down, Matti. Procedures are in place for a reason.” He turns to me. Suddenly the others acknowledge my presence.

+

Yeah, I’m here. Now stop looking at me.

+

“Sem, are the drones ready?” Cap smiles at me. The same smile Malia gave me earlier.

+

I bite back a bilious remark. “Yes, Cap. Good to go.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + either thrust myself outward into infinity or inward into a mental dungeon of my own creation. I am never here.

+

I guess that’s why I’m so good with the swarm. I don’t mind fragmenting myself.

+

My many mini-me’s, each the size of a dinner plate, meander through the thick atmosphere of the gas giant. It feels like pulling apart darkness and letting glimpses of what hides behind shine through. Breaking the singular focus on despair is a relief.

+

The planet appears as a kaleidoscope of smoky greens that swirl in, over, and through each other. It is not suitable for a full-blown colony, but floater habs have been successfully deployed in similar places. We have to decide whether or not to mark this one for follow-up.

+

Something flickers. A cloud with an unexpected light absorption ratio. I send in the swarm, scoopers out and ready to sample the extra-terrestrial pea-souper. The scoopers scoop and transfer their contents to the sterile vials in the drones’ innards.

+

The absorption ratio changes again. Fast. Too fast.

+

Within the human visible spectrum, it looks like teal lightning.

+

My fingers dance in the haptic gloves as I call back the swarm. Such is protocol. Anything unusual? Regroup and analyze. The drones cluster. Closer, closer, closer. Perspectives flow into each other until one remains that makes me feel uncomfortable. Moments before I remove the AR helmet, my distributed mind collapses in on itself.

+

The black hole of personhood.

+

Please don’t look at me.

+

Of course, they’re all there, looking at me.

+

“What happened?” Cap asks. Davalia is silently fuming. I’m sure he considers the drones’ retreat as cowardice. Caution is the antithesis to his bravado.

+

“Something’s off,” I say. They’re leaning in, crowding me. My heartbeat thumps in my temples.

+

“Explain,” Cap commands.

+

“I’m not sure. Something changed. Too fast and specific to be a coincidence.” Cap scratches his strong, clean-shaven chin. “I’ve taken samples,” I add.

+

The mood shifts. Even Davalia’s burning impatience cools. Their combined piercing gaze shifts away from me. Finally.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +eeper.

+

I shed sensation and emotion, move past trauma and desire.

+

Shivering.

+

An insignificant atom in a meaningless universe. Flashes fill the void, the signals that make me, the flickers of self that maintain the illusion of continuity. It reminds me of…

+

My scalp tingles when the needles leave their hair-thin burrows. I hear a sharp breath. Doc doesn’t breathe. When the dancing stars fade, I see Malia leaning against the wall, hands in the small of her back. She looks both worried and eager.

+

“What’s wrong?” I ask as I rub my face.

+

She comes closer. I can smell her, can almost see the pores in her smooth bronze skin. A smile breaks through. A beam of light scaring the darkness. “I’ve studied the samples.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“C + +ome again?” Cap is standing rod-straight, arms folded behind his broad back. His white overall seems brighter than ours.

+

We stand around the bridge’s holotable, watching the swaying numbers and dots Malia uses to illustrate her findings. “It’s not life,” she says, “but also not… not-life.”

+

Davalia looks ready to tear out his jet-black hair. He doesn’t deal in greys. I suppress a smile.

+

“Consider a virus,” Malia continues. “Not exactly alive, but intuitively we still consider it something different than simply not-life.”

+

Her forehead crumples into a frown. “Wait, maybe this is more accurate. A brain cell. Alive, right?” Nods. “But if you take it away from a living brain, it’s not, right?” More nods. “Then, is a brain cell alive? That depends on whether or not it’s part of a functional network.”

+

Davalia can’t contain himself. “So, these things are brain cells?”

+

“Not exactly. It’s a flawed analogy. I mean that these… things function only when they’re connected. Take one out of a network and it simply stops.”

+

“Like hibernation?” Cap asks.

+

Malia combines a nod and a headshake into a single gesture of doubt. “Not really. In hibernation or dormancy there are tell-tale signs of metabolism, suppressed as it may be. Not here.”

+

“What if you take one out and put it back in?” The question hadn’t occurred to me earlier. I’ll chide myself later.

+

Malia flashes a smile at me. “It functions again. As if nothing happened.”

+

“So, some kind of dormancy beyond our means of detection?”

+

Malia makes the same wavering gesture as she did earlier. “I don’t think so. More like non-living things looking alive.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +gain, I am many. Again, I am none.

+

Peace through distribution. Comfort through distraction.

+

My mini-me’s fly through the unexplored dense shroud of the gas giant. This time they—I—know what to look for.

+

Increased density. Wildly fluctuating absorption ratio.

+

It doesn’t take long.

+

There must be a lot of this stuff out here.

+

Scoop scoop. More samples. Alien lightning flashes all around the drone army.

+

Now comes the exciting bit.

+

The drones recorded the lightning pattern and play it back. Twinkling dots instead of lightning rods, but the pattern is similar. It’s the idea that counts, right?

+

The last twinkle fades.

+

Come on come on come on.

+

Nothing.

+

I alter the pattern, reverse it. Another flurry of twinkles.

+

It almost feels as if the universe itself is holding its breath.

+

Then cometh lightning.

+

My miniature selves seek out their conversational partner(s?) and initiate a sequence of lights. Different speeds, different spectra, different patterns. A dictionary.

+

Beautiful lightning responds.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +’m excited. I can’t remember the last time I felt anything other than some form of despair. Our small crew has gathered on the bridge and watches the footage. “It is the same pattern, but in reverse,” I say.

+

As if choreographed, they all lean in and squint.

+

“And what, you think something’s saying hello?” Davalia sounds even more derisive than usual.

+

“I don’t know. But they, it, them, whatever, are trying to communicate.”

+

Malia emits a soft, doubtful moan.

+

“What?” I say, maintaining control.

+

She tilts her head. “That’s a big leap. It’s probably a reflection or chemical reflex.”

+

“A reflection in reverse? I doubt that.”

+

“Right,” Cap interjects. “You clearly have a hypothesis. Care to share it?”

+

No. I don’t share things. I dither. Stop looking at me.

+

I sigh. “Distributed cognition. As Malia said, these… things need to network. Alone, they’re inert. Together, they… I don’t know… think.”

+

To their credit, they don’t burst out laughing. But the looks they exchange tell me enough.

+

I lash out. “Stop thinking that your minds are the norm!”

+

Wow, where did that come from? I never raise my voice. To be fair, if we’re talking simple numbers, their minds are the norm. But that shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t be an excuse for them to not even try to see things my way. Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck everything.

+

I storm away.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s weird, watching my outburst, but Doc insisted. “How do you feel now?” Our artificial shrink enquires.

+

I perform the gesture that defines me, and shrug.

+

“Would you like an extra iTMS session?”

+

Yes. Please, yes, hand me my needle crown with its soothing magnetic pulses. “No, I’m good.” I would like nothing more, but I know it’s a test. Odd how an emotionless camera lens can feel so… prying.

+

I get up from the padded chair and walk to the hologram hovering above the small central table. With a sweep of my hand, I rewind the scene and play it again. I step closer and scrutinize the face of recent-past-me.

+

I’ve lost weight. Ghosts of previous anorexic episodes flutter through my mind. I thought I was past that. You can never truly erase the demons you carry.

+

“Are you sure?”

+

“Yes,” I snap. I never snap. What’s going on?

+

Doc remains unfazed. In an uncanny act of mind reading, it says: “Then what is going on?”

+

I fall back into the chair. “I… I don’t know.” I pause, reluctant to say more. A piece of advice: don’t enter into a staring contest with an AI.

+

I relent. “I’m simply frustrated that they’re so stuck in their ways that they’re unable to entertain even slightly unconventional ideas.”

+

“Are you sure they’re the only ones who are stuck in their ways?”

+

I stare into the lens and frown.

+

Are they? Am I a madman shouting at the universe and imagining that it shouted back?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +hat?” I’m fired up. Again. What’s with all the emotion suddenly?

+

Cap holds up his hands. “You know it’s time we moved on. The efficiency of our closed circular systems is dropping.”

+

“But…” I whimper, disgusted with myself. “That was before this.” A sweep of my arm indicates the hologram of the dancing lights from my latest excursion. Proof. Or so I thought.

+

Cap shakes his head. “It’s interesting, but it’s not what you think it is.”

+

I refuse to hear our magnanimous leader. “No. We can fix the systems, up the recycling. But this… we can’t leave this behind.”

+

I look around desperately. Davalia is already mentally building the statue in his honor to adorn his imaginary kingdom. I turn to Malia.

+

“I…” She hesitates. “I agree with Cap.”

+

That pity in her eyes. I hate it.

+

It takes every ounce of self-control I can muster not to burst into raging flames and burn the whole fucking ship down.

+

Malia preempts my explosion. “It’s not alive. It’s interesting, but all I need are the samples. It’s really not life, Sem. Just molecular clusters in this specific atmosphere.”

+

I shake my head. “That’s nonsense, and you know it. That’s exactly what life is: clustered molecules that exchange energy in specific patterns. Put them in a bag of nutrients and you basically have a cell. You don’t care about truth or science, you just want… I don’t know what. Fame and power? For your name to live on in the minds of degenerate colonists?”

+

I cross my arms and stand firm.

+

I’m not leaving.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + + advise against it.” Doc sounds disapproving.

+

“Noted," I say, “but can you do it?”

+

“Technically, yes. But the effects on your psyche could be…”

+

“Irrelevant for our discussion,” I interrupt. The chair squeaks as I wriggle nervously. A translucent crown of nanoneedles hovers above me. A promise of salvation, like a hypodermic needle for a heroin addict. “Next question: would you do it?”

+

Doc hesitates. Human behavior is deterministic but chaotic. The lack of precedents for my request messes up the AI’s probability calculations. “Doubtful,” it says finally.

+

I anticipated this. “Add this into your equations: if I am forced to join the regular mission, I will oppose it at every chance I get. You’ll have to sedate me continuously or put me under indefinitely. The cost for the mission would be high either way, and the effects on my mind would be… less than beneficial. Besides, we marked the planet for follow-up missions. They can pick me up.”

+

“It is the distribution of mind that worries me,” Doc says.

+

“You have my psych data. I can handle it.”

+

More than that. I long for it. Let me break my self into pieces so that I can rebuild it.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“N + +o,” Cap says resolutely. “Doc, I can’t believe you’re considering this.”

+

We normally don’t address the psych AI on the bridge. We confine our consultations to the assigned chamber. Illusion of privacy.

+

“The cost-benefit analysis is messy,” it says with uncharacteristic doubt. “But given the choice between jeopardizing the whole mission or one crew member…”

+

Cap shakes his head. “No. it would unbalance the overall personality profile.”

+

“I’m the only one on my side of the spectrum,” I say. “I can unbalance it willingly.”

+

I never knew Cap could glare like that. I feel smug and I like it.

+

Malia steps into the conversation. “Sem, I can’t believe you want to do this. The effects could be…”

+

Longed for? Long overdue? Relief, finally? “It’s what I have to do apparently.” My voice acquires a hard edge. Malia’s mouth snaps shut. She knows she’s lost me.

+

Davalia shrugs. “Let him do what he wants. Carrying him along against his will would make him dead weight. I can fly a recon drone. We don’t need his swarm.”

+

“Davalia is right.” It’s the first time I say those words, surprising both him and myself. “You’ve got several solo-drones. The swarm would be of little use to you. It’s hard to control for…” The synaptically unchallenged? The unbroken? “…the untrained.”

+

“We would lose an escape pod.” Cap knows he’s clutching at the final straw.

+

“Escape pods are provided for each crew member. If I leave the crew, you wouldn’t need my pod anyway. Doc?”

+

“Sem is correct,” our ship-inhabiting artificial brain agrees.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +ap and Davalia are not here. Righteous anger for the first and indifference for the latter would be my guess.

+

Malia is here, though. My mind wanders through could-have-beens, through dreams of shared happiness. But I know myself. I would have turned them into nightmares.

+

Her cheeks clench. She’s trying to hold herself together.

+

Ha, imagine feeling like that all the time.

+

“Will you be okay?” She’s watching me make some final adjustments to the straps and fluid cushions in the pod that will be my sarcophagus.

+

“Yeah.” I tweak the cranial nanoneedles Doc helped me install. “Doc assisted me in rigging the systems so that they can draw energy from atmospheric pressure differentials. Together with the inflatable landing pads, I’ll be bobbing up and down like a buoy. I mean, my body will.”

+

Malia grabs my arm. “Please Sem, don’t do this. It’s not worth it.”

+

I resist the urge to pull my arm away and put my hand on hers. “Yes, it is. I know you don’t see what I see, but this is it, Malia. This is life. Just not as we know it.”

+

I’m not wrong. Am I?

+

I sigh. We each made our decision. No point in flinging reproaches back and forth. I slowly, softly peel her hand off my arm and hold it. “You are wrong about this. And after I’ve been here for a while, I’ll be able to prove it.”

+

“What if I’m right?” She looks straight at me, into me.

+

I shrug. “The follow-up mission will pick me up regardless.”

+

She pulls away her hand. “Just… let me know when you’re back… yourself, okay?”

+

“Of course. I look forward to rubbing your face in the evidence.”

+

We both attempt to smile. We both fail. I’ll never come back. Not to me, not to this torn web of self-inflicted trauma that pretends to be a person.

+

There is no point in grand goodbyes or lofty words. I step into the pod. The hatch hisses shut. One universe closes, another one blossoms into being.

+

A faint phump tells me that the pod has undocked.

+

The pod’s sensors show the giant wheel that is the ship’s bulk shrink into a pinprick as we pull away from each other. It gives me a final wink when Cap starts the engines. I wink back and a strange sense of relief washes over me.

+

I activate the needle crown and hibernation protocol.

+

I fall asleep.

+

And wake up as many. Shattered and complete.

+

The swarm—I—speak(s) in patterns of light.

+

Lightning welcomes me.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Fractured on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Gunnar De Winter

+

+ + Author image of Gunnar De Winter + + + Gunnar De Winter is a biologist/philosopher hybrid who writes. His fiction has appeared in Future SF Digest, Daily Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and other places. Sometimes his crazy thoughts run rampant on Twitter masking as @evolveon.

+

© Gunnar De Winter 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: jplenio Lars_Nissen, and 422737.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-29/gold-plumes-on-daoodhi-hills.html b/issue-29/gold-plumes-on-daoodhi-hills.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..dfd2a071 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-29/gold-plumes-on-daoodhi-hills.html @@ -0,0 +1,398 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills

+

Mandira Pattnaik

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills by +
+ + + + +

L + +illie isn’t sure what grows, though her brothers plant the ochre, capsule-shaped seeds, in neat rows of twos and threes. The seeds have tiny bird plumes on their supple bodies when they emerge from the soil. The siblings watch the whiteness of mum’s face when she discovers the saplings, the way she uproots them, cycles down the path to dispose of them, looking over her shoulder at every bend to make sure no one’s following her.

+

Last week, after a trek to the Daoodhi hills with Joji, who is Mum’s distant cousin, Lillie discovered the discarded saplings in the shadow of a boulder, all wilted. Their plumes must’ve been carried away to the town across the hills, or blown under the cacti bushes strewn around the bareness. There are hardly any trees here. Lorries like Joji’s ply on the highway slithering below, relentlessly carrying away poplar, teak, and sandalwood logs.

+

Joji said the boulder is an ancient yogi who sits meditating, waiting for the wandering mythical sage to break his curse, return him to human. Then he laughed at the weirdness of his own story, saying he’d like to meet the yogi, ask him how he sits that long.

+

Later, recalling that trek, Lillie thinks she isn’t particularly amused by the yogi story. She can only think of the saplings, relieved to have finally discovered where Mum dumped them. She barely can sleep at night wondering what they’d grow into if they had a chance, and how to source more seeds, for the seeds Dad left them are all lost.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + troubled night, in which the phone rang several times causing everyone to wake-up, and Mum had begun screaming in shock because of the news conveyed from the other end. The next morning is a hazy concoction of grief and ginger-cake. The fragrance of the bake, still wafting from the oven, is heavy. Ginger made to ease into the dry cake mix for days, before setting the cake-mix in the mold. The craft of generations.

+

Joji’s girlfriend has been informed; she’ll join from Singapore. Someone will go to pick her up after she travels two hours in the slow suburban train from the airport. Ill-luck she has to come at all, she once called this back-of-beyond place “trashy”.

+

Lillie can’t bear to piece it all together. According to Mum, the yogi rose, hurtled down the hill slope right upon Joji’s log-laden lorry as it passed below. Why? What if it had been Mum cycling then, as she always does?

+

Lillie’s brothers, Foel and Sundar, huddle in their bedroom. Sundar wants to go to town one of these days, look for the seeds, or at least identical ones. They debate if the supermarket there would stock the right ones. Pity Dad never told them the seeds’ name, or why they should grow them.

+

Lillie is shocked they aren’t discussing Joji or why he had to die.

+

She’s thinking of going to the place where the boulder had been.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen she returns, her brothers are quick to doubt. “You sure?”

+

“Cent per cent. The seeds were under it.”

+

“And the boulder?”

+

“Just so.” Like it had never moved, never rolled down the hill to kill Joji.

+

“Really?” Foel isn’t convinced.

+

Sundar jumps off his bed. “You got the seeds, of course?”

+

“Ha! No!” Lillie tells a lie whenever she must. Just so to feel superior to the boys. And she humors herself that boys are such fools.

+

“Don’t believe this!” Foel says resignedly, finally dismisses his sister.

+

Lillie has the seeds, just a handful of them. The ochre color caught her eye. She discovered them near the boulder, like brushed under it, but only almost so.

+

Lillie thinks they were revealed because the yogi boulder had returned to his spot, but not exactly so.

+

The seeds are in her skirt pocket. But she’ll not show them. Not yet.

+

“I think you got them,” says Sundar. “Show, I say!”

+

“No!”

+

“Show! Now!”

+

“No!” Lillie is adamant. She runs away and hides behind the water-tank in the courtyard. The boys snap at each other, like angry birds, because they can’t decide if Lillie is being truthful.

+

Mum, wary of the sibling fights, enters the room, and they hush up.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +illie has chosen her spot carefully. This time it would not be anywhere near home, but on the ashen slopes of the once evergreen Daoodhi Hills. It’d be difficult to trek or cycle all the way to look after them alone, but she’s convinced she must.

+

Dad, I must, mustn’t I? she mutters on her way back.

+

She’s planted a neat row, under the shade of a dune, and just about concealed by a huge ant-hill. She waters them every day on the way to school. Treks on Sundays to be with them, like little babies she must nurse to health.

+

The plants are due now, and she awaits what color plumes they’ll have.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +undar throws tiny pebbles from their rooftop at the neighborhood girls playing in the courtyard. Their tribes have lived in these forest areas since the kings ruled, married within the community, never left the place. Then came the miners from outside—the gora sahibs. They mined, carried away bauxite, other minerals, made money. Nobody was concerned how hollow the hills would become. Then came the Mumbai men who terrorized the tribals, cut the native trees for their precious wood. Cut the native men who stood in their way.

+

Sundar was old enough when Dad died. He realized how drought had hit them, how Dad was fighting against the mafia, how hard he worked. Sundar wants to forget those days. He wants to be rich, drive a car, be gone from here.

+

Sundar hopes Savi in the courtyard will notice the nuisance, notice him. He wants her to be angry, so she will rush up the stairs to get into an argument with him. Then he can tell her his real feelings.

+

Savi skips on the parallel lines drawn with a stick on the dirt. She squeaks: one, four, six, back. She pays no attention to Sundar.

+

I’ll ask Lillie to talk to her, Sundar thinks. But Lillie can never be found these days. He wonders where she escapes. Perhaps she’s found someone more interesting than Kapil, her last boyfriend.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he summer is bridging the gap between spring and fall. The days are long enough to go up the Daoodhi Hills after dinner.

+

The sporophytes are florescent green. Tomorrow, Lillie hopes, she’ll get to see the plumes.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +fter Joji, three more truckers have died by the yogi boulder crashing upon them. The fragmented boulder cleared each time. Crushed vehicle and logs carried away. Yet, every time, Lillie discovers the yogi boulder back where it was; returned to order.

+

After the last incident, the dozen or so remaining trees are spared, none dares to cut them. Lorry drivers have called a transport-strike. The cut logs spilled from the flattened trailer stay abandoned at the foot of the hills.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +hy didn’t you tell us, Lillie?”

+

“I just wanted to let them grow. Live. If we talked—if Mum got wind of it—”

+

Sundar, Savi, and Foel stand in a semi-circle around Lillie. Lillie kneels. The row of just-emerged plants sway in the light breeze.

+

The leaves will soon be transformed into bird-wings, layered and light like plumes. But they are leaves now, as on a central stalk, prominent midrib, distinct veins crisscrossing the lamina. The leaves nod, and whisper to each other, like a community of kindergarten children. They giggle and raise a racket.

+

Minutes late, they unfurl like prayer flags. All four of them watch in stunned silence.

+

When they turn into feathers, Lillie checks the color excitedly: golden!

+

Sundar, Savi and Foel cheer and clap. Then they kneel to take a closer look. The gentle air causes the plumes to fall off, and they are brushed towards the anthill.

+

“O, look!” Foel shouts.

+

They gape as the plumes gather, shape themselves into fledglings. The young birds flap their wings—once, twice. Little goldfinches. They peck at each other as though in greeting, then fly away in hard-earned freedom.

+

The gazes of the friends follow only the birds’ flight, in deep awe.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ne week later, on the Tuesday before her fifteenth birthday, Lillie returns to find a new set of seeds planted. Not really planted, but dropped in a neat row next to the old one. The older plants are her height now, grown into young plants, hoping to be trees someday.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + + told you not to, and still—” Mum raises her hand, the blow sure to land on Foel, if it had not been abandoned, because Sundar falls at her feet.

+

“The seeds are a curse. Mataji—your grandmother—she warned me. Your Dad was killed the day he brought them home—murdered by the sandalwood smugglers.” Mum shouts. Agony in her voice making it shake.

+

“Mum! “Foel blurts. “It’s Lillie. She did it.”

+

“Lillie?”

+

Lillie does not hide from it. She advances a few steps and stands directly in front of her mother, locking eyes with her. “Yes—yes, me! Mum, I beg of you!”

+

Their home at the edge of the hills is enveloped in a verdant green now. All hues of green mingling in the backdrop.

+

“You, Lillie?”

+

“It was only the first time, Mum! The goldfinches drop the seeds now! Not I, I did it only once.”

+

Mum drops on the chair.

+

“There are hundreds of goldfinches now, Mum! From the ones that first grew out of the seeds I planted. Their leaves grew into birds. Now the birds bring in their own seeds that grow into bird trees—goldfinch trees! The birds sow them, so the hills grow green again, like… like it was. So we have rains.”

+

Mum gapes and listens. Her face is of one who is emerging from a state of daze and into the realms of wondrous discovery.

+

“I see them flap and fly, together! Such a lovely sight—the gold sitting on the branches, against the green leaves.”

+

“And the yogi? Are you sure he…” Sundar throws the question at Lillie.

+

“Yes, yes, he always returned. He punished those people who traded in our trees. And it’s the meditating yogi protecting the trees. He will not let someone like Dad die again trying to save the Daoodhi Hills.”

+

Mum glances from one boy to the other. Then her eyes rest on Lillie, before spilling with tears. “Joji!” Mum lets out a scream. “Joji, I told you not to, even if the contractor insisted. Why did you not listen to me?”

+

Mum looks to the heavens and it begins to rain.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n the slopes of the Daoodhi Hills, the teal limbs of the trees embrace each other and dance in cadence to the monsoon rhythms.

+

Soon, the goldfinches will swoop down again, and come to be in their midst, cooing to celebrate the return of their habitat.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mandira Pattnaik

+

+ + Author image of Mandira Pattnaik + + + Mandira Pattnaik writes on subjects of identity, climate crisis and displacement. Her publications include 150 magazines across 15 countries in print and online including LampLight, Orca, Psychopomp and Passages North. She is also on the masthead of Reckon Review and Trampset. Read more about her at http://mandirapattnaik.com/.

+

© Mandira Pattnaik 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: nandhukumar, jplenio, and VictoryRock.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

In The Weave

+

David Whitmarsh

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for In The Weave by +
+ + + + +

I + +was five segments grown when my first doubts came. I lay huddled in the nest between my mother and grandmother. A thin wind curled around the smooth cement walls, bringing white flakes that turned to water when they touched me. It was night, and colder and darker than any night I had ever known. Above the nest walls, the night-glow of the clouds was faint. The strangeness of it fascinated me, holding my focus tight.

+

In another thread, Mother’s ridges flashed at me, but I could not let go of my fading self.

+

The wind died. Stillness such as I had never known. The clouds above were high, thin and high and scarcely moving. A gap appeared. Beyond was black sprinkled with pinpoints of light that stayed still as the broken cloud drifted across the sky.

+

In this cold, thin strand, my mother lay dead beside me. I felt the life seeping too from my own body, my sight dimming.

+

Offspring of mine! My mother’s facial ridges rippled brightly, flickering with her irritation.

+

The wind whipped around the nest’s lee as it always did. The bright clouds above scurried their eternal race across the sky. The nest was warm. The grub that Mother laid before me was warm.

+

That thread was far from the first in which my life ended, but the manner of the ending disturbed me. It was lost not just to me, but to Mother and Grandmother too, and it seemed to everyone in our village. My thoughts dwelled also on that strange sky, the myriad little lights that shone high above.

+

What lies beyond the clouds? I asked Mother as I sank my mandibles into the squirming flesh, and sucked.

+

Her answer was terse. The clouds are the limit of the worlds. There is nothing above.

+

Grandmother blinked one pair of eyes, then another. There were stories. The glow on her speech ridges was feeble, but readable. A Visitor from above the clouds, in distant folds of the weave, distant even when I was seeded.

+

It was seldom that Grandmother could rouse herself to speak. Her mind was failing as her weave wore thin with age. So few threads remained to her.

+

Her crusted eyes closed again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +clung to the torn stump of a great tree, my mandibles sunk deep into the wood, my claws gripping the rough bedrock, waiting for wind and the hail of rock and fragments of wood and dead things carried by the storm to tear me from my hold.

+

Rip-storms bring destruction and thereby renew the forest. The biggest, oldest trees can be as tall as an adult is long, and they spread their branches wide and shade the soil beneath from the cloud-light so nothing new can grow beneath. When they are so big they can no longer furl their branches to let the storm slip over them, a rip-storm clears them away, allowing new life to flourish. It is a part of the cycle, of the natural order of things.

+

This storm cleared not just the old growth, but everything. Everything living, and much that was not. The soil itself was being scoured away. Even as I wondered whether I could hold on until it passed I felt the pain of my carapace cracking from some unseen impact.

+

I walked through the village behind my mother. Her anterior eyes blinked as my segments rippled to a stop. She turned so that I could see the words on her face. What troubles you, offspring of mine?

+

Upwind, the branches of the trees waved and rippled, shielding the fields in their lee.

+

I have died again. I know one small death is nothing, but I feel so many. I said. Was it always so?

+

What is always? Her words were erratic, flickering and shimmering. Who can tell amongst all the pasts we can see and all those we cannot. Who can trace all the warps of the weave? The pasts are unknowable as the futures.

+

She turned and I followed her tail, wondering at her impatience, wondering also at my own dark mood. We are seeded, the threads of the weave are spun, and in each we die. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. I knew there would come a time when my deaths would come faster than the spinning of new threads and I would diminish, as Grandmother did, but I was young. Daily I felt the weave thicken and new patterns emerge. I felt brighter, sharper.

+

Despite these endings, these threads torn from me, I still grew.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + scrambled along a dry river bed in hot, still air, hunger in my belly, heat bearing down from the fierce brightness in a sky of an alien, uniform colour somewhere beyond violet. A pale crescent banded with colours was the only other feature.

+

There were no clouds.

+

I pulled away my focus, returning to a thread where I lay quiet and warm in the nest between Mother and Grandmother. All but one lateral eye was closed, and that watched my mother, who was speaking, but not to me.

+

Was it always so? she said.

+

I cracked open an eye on the other side, where Grandmother lay.

+

Grandmother’s face glowed with the feeble light of her own words. Always so. So many little endings where the boldness of youth leads to misadventure. This is how they learn.

+

But these are not little deaths. Mother’s ridges flashed. Everyone dies. The village, the world. Everyone. And this not just in fine fibres, but great cords of the weave.

+

There are stories…

+

Shine me no stories, said Mother. What matter the infinite unknowable pasts. We live in the multitude of present moments. Wisdom is in the weave.

+

I recall no such endings in my pasts. Flickering mumbles chased around Grandmother’s face.

+

At the edge of my vision I saw something bright flash across the clouds, a spark angling across the sky in the time it takes to blink twice.

+

Stones sometimes fall from above the clouds, Grandmother said in a soft light.

+

Had I not seen that light in the sky, I might have thought her words to be merely ramblings from lost threads. Tell me a story, I flashed to her, but her face glimmered only with the incoherent scintillation of one who has lost focus.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + had been sent out to forage, and so I left the village taking a different direction in each thread, spreading my selves and my focus wide. I ambled along the river bank, crawled beyond the fields, and slipped deep into the forest all around.

+

There is a place at the margin of our territory, an abandoned village at the foot of a precipice. It is said that many generations past, the village was sheltered by the cliff but then the wind changed direction. The way the wind blows today, the crescent walls of these old nests line up the wrong way so that anyone entering or leaving one would be caught exposed in the cross-wind and flipped or carried away. Now the site is overgrown as the forest reclaims the land. Here, sheltered in the rubble of a collapsed nest wall of rough-hewn stone, I found a hive of spineworms, tasty and nutritious, though care is needed in collecting them.

+

A good hive-site in one thread is often a good hive-site across broad ribbons of the weave, so I summoned all those of my selves that were nearby. In my own nest I told Mother, so that she too might come and bring others from the village. The apothecary would bring vapours to stun the spineworms.

+

I watched the hive and the comings and goings of the worms while more of my selves arrived each in her own thread. In many of these threads I discovered someone else already there watching the hive.

+

She raised her head and turned towards my self to speak. Begone, interloper. This is not your territory. Her length of five segments and immature colouration told she was of the same seed cohort as myself. The rhythms of her words that she came from the adjacent village.

+

I asserted precedence with bold flashes. We faced each other, cross-wind in the shelter of the undergrowth. My focus now was close on this thread, as hers would be. Throughout the many strands of the weave we converged and encountered each other at this spot, but in this thin strand alone would we resolve our dispute and accept the outcome through all the weave. That is the way we are taught to resolve disputes, the civilised way.

+

We began the ritual with sequences of flashes, patterns with no meaning. A wordless chant if you will, and our signalling synchronised. Together we raised our front segments from the ground, a trial of strength in itself. We swayed and chanted. She raised her second segment up so she towered over me. A boastful show of strength. I did the same, to fail to do so would be to concede. The wind pressed hard on my flank, threatening to topple me. My muscles strained to hold me up and keep me steady in the cross-wind.

+

Faster we chanted, and straining on the legs of our anterior segments we edged towards one another. I do not know whether she was pressing the pace or I was, but I felt an eagerness. It was almost as if we were a single mind, a single will. Only dimly was I aware of all my other selves watching her other selves waiting in a tense stillness.

+

This self, this thread, was all that there was.

+

My focus was upon that fine fibre of being, upon her, complete and singular. I felt the climax of the chant approach, and I saw the glint of my own ridges reflected in her eyes.

+

The chant ended and we both lunged. I managed to bring my head lower than hers, but she had artfully pushed herself sideways, upwind. I felt my defeat as her flank crashed into the side of my head and she let the wind take her and so me. I fell and could not stop myself as wind and inertia rolled me onto my side. In desperation, I twisted my rear segments, not to resist the roll, but to press it further.

+

The carapace of my head rang with the impact as it hit the hard ground, but I rolled, rolled right out from beneath my adversary, onto my back, up onto the other flank and onto my feet. I might have rolled further but for the remnant of a nest wall. I felt the sharp pain of a carapace cracking in my third segment.

+

I have never before or since felt such pain, for my focus was solely on that self, a singular body experiencing a singular pain.

+

A cracked carapace loses its strength and its weight presses and crushes the flesh beneath that it normally supports and protects. One leg was numb and useless and all the lateral eyes on that side were blind. I thought soon to feel my adversary’s mandibles bringing relief from that agony.

+

But the pain did not abate. I fought through it to turn my head and see.

+

She lay next to me, on her back, helpless. The victory was mine, and so the duty of the victor. No matter how hard, I had to finish the matter. Dragging my useless leg I twisted around and mounted upon her exposed underside. I pushed the tips of my mandibles into the exposed gap before the first segment and bit as hard as I could.

+

As the head rolled away, I released my focus, spreading myself again through the weave.

+

Well fought, the adversary said. The roll was a clever move. Daring. Her lights shimmered with admiration as we lay side by side in front of the hive. Is someone coming to aid you in your distress?

+

The pain of my injuries had faded, diluted as my focus withdrew from that strand. Even so, it was a relief when Mother arrived. Her ridges flashed with words of pride and a little regret as she came close.

+

Yes, I said to the adversary, speaking in gentle shades. But you flatter me. The move was not clever. Merely fortunate.

+

My relief came soon. That thread was lost to me as Mother’s head leaned over me and her kind, sharp mandibles penetrated the gap between head and first segment.

+

We talked while we awaited the others from my village. She was offspring of the weaver, a profession of high status both for its practicality and its symbolism.

+

One thread in every two we harvested the worms, stripping their spines and collecting them in bags of woven cloth. In the others we let them be, for they have as much right to the weave as any living thing.

+

The weaver’s offspring and I parted on good terms, I gifted her some of my allocation of the harvested spineworms.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +ire. The wind fanned the flames to tear through a widening swathe of the forest and in a widening swathe of the weave I fled from the path of destruction. The fire ran fast before the wind, far faster than I could crawl.

+

That was the first time that I died so many deaths that I felt myself diminish. Once the shock had passed—of feeling my eyes go blind and my fluids boiling beneath my blistering carapace—I realised my thoughts felt foggy, my focus vague.

+

You will recover what you have lost, Grandmother said in a moment of rare lucidity. In my diminished state I found new empathy for her situation. Decline was all that remained for her as her deaths came faster. Her weave thinned and frayed, and with every day I found her sedentary form lying in the nest in fewer of the threads of my own lives.

+

In a thick cord, I too lay still in the nest. The glazed discolourations of my carapace would be with me for life in those worlds, but the burned and blistered flesh beneath would heal in time, the lost eyes would grow back.

+

You will recover what you have lost, she said again, perhaps in a different thread, sometimes it is hard to tell.

+

Tell me a story, I said, though I doubted her focus would hold enough.

+

A story? What story? Shall I tell you of how we learnt to build with cement rather than rough stone, of how we learned to work metal? My grandmother lived folds of the weave where the visitor gave us this knowledge, and much else besides, but in these strands where we live our many lives we were so few and stretched so thin that only fragments of the knowledge came to us.

+

Why so few?

+

She lay uncommunicative for long moments. An intermittent flickering of her ridges, was the only sign that she was still conscious. I thought her mind had drifted away again following its own shadowed paths, when her words shone bright in my eyes. Life is hard in the ribbons of the weave that we know, and we are few. When I was a five-segment youth as you are now, my grandmother told me it was not so elsewhere.

+

But how? How can the worlds be so different, is not the nature of the physical world the same in all the weave? Even as I spoke, I recalled those dying worlds of cold and heat and strange skies.

+

Her ridges rippled in the soothing colours one might use to calm an infant. A grub in a tree may eat one leaf in one strand and do no harm, but in another strand a different leaf is eaten and brings a rip-storm on the other side of the world.

+

It was a story we all learn as infants, of how small choices can have unpredictable effects in different strands of the weave, leading to wild divergences between the worlds.

+

Perhaps, she continued, if it eats both leaves, the wind will change direction.

+

I shivered with fright at the thought of the abandoned village. The wind had changed in threads ancestral to all of the weave that I lived. So many must have been caught in the crosswind and died, and the survivors would have been diminished. This was her story. We were few and stretched thin because the wind changed direction.

+

She was singular as a stone that is kicked in one thread and knows not in the remainder of the weave. That’s what they said.

+

Who? I demanded, but her light faded, her rambling slowed. A last flicker, that might have been so far away, or it may have just been the random flutterings of her fading mind.

+

That night her hearts failed in many of the threads that remained to her and she lost the power of speech entirely. It is in the ways of the worlds that the elderly fade so, not all at once across the weave but stretched ever thinner along fewer and finer warps.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +or two summers and winters, my lives continued. As before, threads were torn from my weave by personal accident or all-encompassing catastrophe, but the remainder grew and thickened. I grew in mental acuity and sharpness of focus, and in physical size and strength. I reached the full seven segments of adulthood.

+

Grandmother continued to decline. She now lived in only the sparsest, thinnest strands, in a state of total senescence, eating only when food was placed between her mandibles.

+

The weaver’s offspring, my former adversary from that day in the abandoned village, was now a familiar sight in our own village, and I in hers. Now in new adulthood, she was herself a weaver. Mother said she waited for the seeding of the next cohort, confident that the weaver and I would sow each other’s seeds. But since that last conversation with Grandmother I had little confidence in planning futures. We will see when the season comes, I told Mother.

+

More than once as I lay in the nest at night I saw a light flash across the sky. It was not a common occurrence, but enough to bring back memories of Grandmother’s incoherent ramblings of things above the clouds, and of what I had seen in dying worlds. Then the day came, where a light crossed the sky in the middle of the day. It did not flash across in the time it takes to blink twice, but slow and bright, falling slower and brighter until it hurt to look.

+

It seemed to descend from the sky in the direction of the abandoned village, and it did so in all of the weave that I knew.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he weaver and I found it in the wind-shadow of the cliff just beyond the nests. No others shared any interest in lights from the sky, and truth be told I don’t believe the weaver would have come but for my own interest.

+

It had curves and edges unlike anything we had seen before. It’s surface held a sheen like the carapace of a new-hatched infant and bristled with odd protrusions. In length it would measure from my head to my fourth segment, but it was twice as wide and high as myself. Four thin legs spread wide from its underside held its belly clear from the ground. I wondered at the strength of those thin spars.

+

Is it a living thing? the weaver asked.

+

I think not. My eyes were drawn to the edges, the angles of the protrusions, some of which had that hard brightness of metal. I believe it is a made thing.

+

We will learn little by looking, she said, and in a thin strand she crawled from the cover of the trees and headed straight towards it.

+

As she approached within a dozen body lengths, some of the protrusions erupted into bright lights, dazzling my forward eyes.

+

I am blinded, she said, lying next to me in another stream.

+

Keep going straight, I said, squinting beneath folded ridges against the brightness.

+

She blundered straight forward until her mandibles struck the thing. She opened them wide, stepped forward once more and closed her jaws on the object, the point of her mandible slid until it caught on one of the protrusions.

+

Very hard, she said. I don’t think I can…

+

As she spoke, the thing’s surface buckled as the point penetrated. A jet of vapour burst from the puncture, then all was consumed in bright fire. All: the object, the weaver. The whole space between the wood and the cliff was lost in bright flame. The ridges folded down over my eyes, saving something of my forward vision.

+

What happened? said the weaver next to me.

+

I had no answer at first. I feared the heat of the flame would set light to the forest where I lay, but the heat faded almost as quickly as it had come. I uncovered my eyes and saw a blackened hollow. Of the object and the weaver I saw at first no trace.

+

I crawled out of my shelter into the open, across the blackened ground, and as I did, I saw with my eyes and felt under my feet hard, sharp shards. Pieces of the weaver’s carapace, fragments of blackened and twisted metal.

+

I was right, I said to the weaver as I continued my search. It is a made thing.

+

I searched the blackened crater to see what I might learn, and I rested at the forest edge with the weaver to watch the object and see what we might learn.

+

The side of the object opened and something came out. It balanced precariously on two legs, upright. It had such a curious head, a smooth, white shining carapace, and what looked like a single great eye filling the forward face. It’s movements were rapid, but clumsy. I expected it to topple to the ground and smash itself to pieces. It seemed to struggle also with the wind, even in the shelter of the cliff.

+

It busied itself with a number of objects it extracted from the interior of what I now began to think of its nest.

+

We watched, mystified, captivated, until a flat plate it had placed on the ground angled towards us and erupted in light. Not the glare that had dazzled me and blinded the weaver when she approached in that destructive thread, but the patterns of the glowing ridges of a face.

+

I am blind, it said. Then, Keep going straight. Very hard. I don’t think I can. What happened?

+

It was repeating our words, but only the words we had spoken in this thread, though it must have seen what we said in that other strand.

+

I picked a few strands and crawled out from the shelter. I stopped just short of the distance at which those dazzling lights had started. The two-legged stranger edged back a little, but stepped forward again when I stopped.

+

Hello, I said. Goodbye, I said in another thread. In another: Singular as a stone. Whence came those words? Distracted, I almost neglected to watch the response on the panel.

+

In each thread came the same words I had flashed.

+

This is madness, I said to the weaver, what can she hope to learn by responding the same way in every stream?

+

Patience, she said. Perhaps she waits for a different response from you.

+

I paused for a moment, and I remembered my first meeting with the weaver. Somehow, the memory of pain of that meeting was diminished. It was the thrill of the dance that I remembered now. Join me in a strand, I told the weaver, just a single thread. Let us see if we can evoke a more meaningful response.

+

She did as I asked, and I flashed at her the beginnings of the chant, of the challenge. She understood my intent and joined me. We faced each other, chanted, raised our forward segments. The stranger backed away as we swayed—in truth the wind was feeble here in the shadow of the cliff, scarce enough to topple either of us, but this was more a show.

+

In another thread, I chanted to the stranger instead. You will have to tell me how she reacts, said the weaver.

+

Our shared chant reached its climax. The weaver feinted towards me, a low and slow lunge, and I pressed the advantage, my mandibles scissored, and the head fell from her neck.

+

My solo chant reached its climax, I lunged forward and closed my mandibles around the protrusion at the apex of the stranger’s body, which I took to be its head, if it had such. It was easily severed and fell to the ground and its carapace cracked. A dark liquid pulsed from the cut on the body, and oozed from the severed head.

+

I lowered my head before the stranger, offering her the opportunity to sever my own head, should she have the means to do so.

+

The stranger showed no reaction anywhere in the rest of the weave. I watched from the forest with the weaver as the panel simply repeated our earlier conversation. Even where I exposed the join between my head and first segment, the stranger stood mute and impassive.

+

The only reaction came from the weaver’s death. The stranger hurried with its clumsy two-legged gait and climbed into the opening of its nest. I waited to see if it would emerge again. I waited long and was about to give up when the entire nest of curves and edges and protrusions vanished, looking like it had twisted away in some unimaginable direction.

+

It did the same where the stranger lay decapitated before me. The nest just vanished. The weaver saw too, for which I was grateful. I feared she would not believe had I needed to describe what I had seen.

+

Still, these were narrow threads, and the stranger and her nest remained in a broad ribbon of rich and branching warps.

+

I struggled to comprehend the meaning of this stranger’s reactions.

+

I observed that throughout the thickness of the weave where the stranger was present, she acted in the precise same way, save in those where I or the weaver had chosen to act differently, as if she had no power to manipulate the weave of her own volition, but only to react to the circumstance of the thread in which she found herself.

+

She attempted to communicate with us. Her lighted panel shifted from showing faces that repeated our words, to patterns far simpler. Numbers of dots, lines and geometrical shapes.

+

A game. I said what I saw, she repeated my words. By varying my answers in different threads and seeing her responses, I saw the patterns, I saw what she was trying to do and I learned quickly.

+

She learned slowly. Every lesson, every word, every phrase, she had to learn anew in every thread separately. As my responses varied, so did hers. Her progress was faster or slower in one thread or another. In those where her progress was fastest, I learned the next move in the game and in other threads I was able to respond to each problem as soon as, or before she posed it.

+

Days passed like this, and at the end of each day as the clouds darkened she retired to her nest and I walked back to mine. The weaver helped me during the long days, fetching me sustenance and pressing me to eat when, in my wide and deep focus, I would forget.

+

In time, many days, the stranger was able to display simple sentences.

+

I go. I return in three days, she said to me one day in a fine strand.

+

You go. You return in three days, I said to her throughout the weave.

+

How do you know? she said, in those threads where she had learned enough to understand.

+

Wisdom is in the weave, I replied, but I think the meaning was lost on her.

+

I crawled back to my village, to the nest I shared mostly with my mother. The next day, my strength was recovered enough to focus and tell her what I had seen, what I had been doing these last days when she might have expected me in the forge.

+

I looked to that sad corner of the nest where Grandmother used to lie.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he stranger returned on the third day. I saw her nest appear in the sky, and descend on a column of fire to rest again in the shelter of the cliff. Its path erratic as the wind caught and buffeted it, but it came to rest in the same place.

+

You come from above the clouds, I said to her.

+

Something new, she carried a speaking panel on the front of her carapace. I come from above the clouds. Another world.

+

I do not understand, I said. The worlds in the threads are not above the clouds, and we can not travel from one to another. We simply experience them.

+

Most times she would answer very quickly, I had the sense that her thinking was fast, like her movements, but it lacked breadth. I waited.

+

I have not words to explain, but yes, I come from above the clouds.

+

We talked, we misunderstood, we learned. Eight days she stayed, then three days she went back up above the clouds. This routine repeated many times in many threads. In time we began to comprehend each other in small and mundane ways

+

In a few sparse threads she never came back, and in one, as her nest descended on its column of fire, the wind swirled around the sheltering cliff and smashed the nest against the unforgiving rock. It erupted in fire as it had that day that the weaver’s mandibles had penetrated it.

+

I told her. You died coming here.

+

Her response came quickly. I live yet.

+

I watched your nest descend, I saw it taken by the wind and shattered on the stone. You must have been killed.

+

Her head moved, angled to one side a little. It is a mystery to me that you can see this. We know that the world we see is one of many branching possibilities but we can never see those other worlds.

+

The broad chasm in my understanding yawned before me. You feel no diminution from the death of your other self?

+

That was not me. That was someone who shared a past with me, but moved on to another fate. I can die only once. She died.

+

I absorbed this. To experience the weave was the very definition of life. Even the worms that burrow in the ground retreat in many threads from a threat in one. I considered the possibility of death in a single strand being a final end to a living thing. I reflected on what I had done on the day the stranger arrived.

+

Once before, another who shared your past has died here.

+

The panel she used to speak remained dark. Her curious head straightened and tilted to the other side. I fancied I saw movement within that great eye when the light caught it.

+

I could not but explain further, though I feared her reaction so I spoke my thought in only a thin strand. I regret. I killed you, I said. I meant no harm by it. Death is a small thing for us.

+

Have no regret for me. When I am dead I am gone, but there is another who waits above the clouds for whom my end would have brought pain.

+

Speak to her of my regrets.

+

Through this eye she sees all that I see. The stranger touched a projection at the side of her head. She understands as I do. Death is a small thing for you.

+

My lateral eyes detected a motion. The branches of the trees furling themselves, wrapping tight around the trunks.

+

She spoke again. But is it always so? Is death always a small thing for you?

+

A storm is coming, I said. The trees sense it across the weave. I said it to her in all the threads, not just those of this more intimate conversation.

+

I must leave, I will return after the storm, she said many times, everywhere she had gained understanding, and hurried back to her nest.

+

I felt the force of the wind pressing on my carapace. The stranger clambered into her nest.

+

She stood still before me. I must know, before the storm comes. I must know is death always a small thing for you?

+

No, it is not always a small thing. Too many deaths and we diminish, we lose our selves.

+

I live one life, I have one past, but we know there are many worlds. She hesitated again. I struggle to find the words, but the ground on which we stand moves. Over many lifetimes it must move in the same way in every world. Are the storms stronger, more frequent, in every world?

+

The trees now were furled tight, but the younger growth, the littler plants with shallow roots could not withstand the rising storm. Here in this sheltered spot we escaped the worst, but to either side I saw trees and branches and small animals flung into the air and carried away.

+

In thread after thread, throughout the weave, the stranger’s nest performed its mysterious convolutions and was gone. But here, she remained awaiting my answer.

+

Everywhere. Throughout the weave. The world has died many times, but there is no strand of mine that does not suffer storms or cold or heat.

+

She stepped forward, this tiny frail creature, and rested a forelimb on my extended mandible. I regret there is no more I can do.

+

She turned to return to her nest, but a flurry of wind twisted around the cliff and caught her mid-stride, sending her crashing to the ground before me.

+

What do you mean? I said, but she lay face down, straining with upper limbs to push herself up. She would not have seen my words. As gentle as a mother with a seedling, I closed my mandibles beneath her and lifted.

+

I released her, and she stumbled forward and rested her back against the rock face.

+

The wind is changing. The weaver’s words came to me from another thread. I widened my focus and felt the force of it. We clung to the ground. A heavy branch ripped from an ancient tree flew through the air towards me.

+

We lay huddled tight against the crescent wall of the nest, Mother and I, latched onto each other like three-segment youths as the wind curled around the end wall. No way to leave the nest without being torn away.

+

Throughout the weave, the wind was changing. In some threads already a full rip-storm was tearing the trees from the ground and scouring deep scars in the soil, the clouds above lost in the haze of wind-borne dust and rock.

+

I searched to focus again on the stranger, but it was a thin thread, and I felt my deaths building, my mind diminishing, my focus weakening.

+

I will die here. Her words brought me to her. She rested against the cliff, her single great eye and speaking panel facing me. The wind here too was turning and strengthening.

+

Are you injured? I said, but before she answered I saw her nest. The turning of the wind had exposed it to the rising storm. It lay on its side, trails of white vapour pouring from it, torn into thin streamers by the wind.

+

I regret, I said, But if it be some solace, only in this thin thread. You departed safely elsewhere.

+

She rested motionless, her panel dark, and I wondered if she had already died from some injury sustained in her fall.

+

I regret, she said, that I can offer you no such comfort. Your world is dying. I think it must be so in every thread as it moves further from the light that warms it.

+

I sensed the truth of her words. So much had I seen, and now I felt my weave thinning and fraying moment by moment.

+

If we had found you sooner we might have been able to help, to make you another home above the clouds, or to teach you… She raised her forelimbs to the front of her neck. There is pain. I don’t want to die a slow death as my air runs out, she said. This will be quicker, and we may see each other with our own eyes.

+

She did something and a puff of vapour rushed from her neck. She lifted away the carapace from her head and placed it carefully on the ground beside her. I saw for the first time the true face of the stranger.

+

On the front of her fragile form, the speaking panel glows with a last word to me:

+

Goodbye.

+

She met my gaze with her two eyes, and then she died.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + spoke these words to the third eye on the carapace that the stranger had removed. I spoke to the stranger above the clouds: May it bring you solace to know that the one who lies dead before me has returned to you elsewhere in the weave.

+

Know also, that your kind has been here before, long ago in distant threads. Only now do I understand my grandmother’s words, of knowledge brought from above the clouds in distant threads and a visitor singular as a stone.

+

Perhaps in distant folds of the weave our kind lives yet with yours, above the clouds.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of In The Weave on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

David Whitmarsh

+

+ + Author image of David Whitmarsh + + + David Whitmarsh is a rehabilitated software engineer who now spends his days playing acoustic blues badly and writing. Winter, his first published work, is the backstory of a character in his hopefully forthcoming novel, provisionally titled The Long Fall. David lives in West Sussex with his wife, two cats and a randomly varying subset of his four adult children. You can find him on Twitter as @whitmarshdj.

+

© David Whitmarsh 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image courtesy of Hannah G Watson, Andrew T Ashchi, Glen S Marrs, and Cecil J Saunders - many thanks to all four!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-29/index.html b/issue-29/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9c32628a --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-29/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,418 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + +
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Mythaxis

+

Spring 2022

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Erik Mann +

Unincorporated

+
+ + +

The way we work is in flux, as changing social, industrial, political, and environmental factors work their effects, and this makes for a rich resource in speculative fiction that Mythaxis has mined before. Erik Mann's opener gives another glimpse of how employment may feel in the world to come—how for some it may feel already…

+ + + + Story image for Unincorporated by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills

+ Mandira Pattnaik +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Gold Plumes on Daoodhi Hills by + + + +

Mandira Pattnaik has been published in a startling number of forums around the world, and her work includes poetry, non-fiction, and (fortunately for us!) short stories. Here she provides a contemplative, understated ecological fantasy about loss and rebirth that offers a glimmer of optimism for a roughly-treated world, which is at least a starting place.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Fractured

+ Gunnar De Winter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Fractured by + + + +

The experiences of the neuroatypical—including of being surrounded by the supposedly monolythically typical—are often depicted as a no-win feedback loop, made worse as much by attempts to bring poor sufferers into the norm as by abandonment to their fate. But Gunnar De Winter's story points out that context is everything, and if in space no one can hear you scream, perhaps it's because you no longer feel the urge.

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+ + + +
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+

Xorai’s Hand

+ Celine Low +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Xorai’s Hand by + + + +

The first big read of the issue, Celine Low takes her inspiration from the nomadic civilisations of the Mongolian steppes and delivers a fantastical coming-of-age adventure that melds action and magic, loyalty and friendship, greed and evil, all sprinkled with hints of that most traditional of narrative forms: the passing down of spoken tales from one generation to another.

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+ + + +
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The Woodcutter and the Witchwife

+ Owen G. Tabard +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Woodcutter and the Witchwife by + + + +

Our next story also has an air of the traditional to it—this time Owen G. Tabard takes us into the territory of the folktale, in which everyman heroes make rash promises in search of glittering rewards, and devastating rules of three (and other fearsome narrative monsters) lie in wait for the misguided.

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The Cross of Xenophor

+ Jeffery Scott Sims +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Cross of Xenophor by + + + +

Here we have the first of two returnees to Mythaxis. Jeffery Scott Sims graced i23 with an entertaining blend of the noirish detective and Lovecraftian occult. This time he offers something shorter, but no less sinister: another yarn of seekers after esoteric knowledge not meant for human ken, once again delivered in a classic style.

+ + + +
+ + + +
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+

In The Weave

+ David Whitmarsh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for In The Weave by + + + +

We wrap up the issue with our second repeat offender. David Whitmarsh's contribution to i25 had notes of the post-apocalyptic to it, but was ultimately about the beginning of someone's story. This piece is laced with endings, and has hints of the pre-apocalyptic lurking within. It also boasts a uniquely alien point of view…

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-29/the-cross-of-xenophor.html b/issue-29/the-cross-of-xenophor.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3c7a6a65 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-29/the-cross-of-xenophor.html @@ -0,0 +1,320 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Cross of Xenophor — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

The Cross of Xenophor

+

Jeffery Scott Sims

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Cross of Xenophor by +
+ + + + +

I + +n olden days, the great wizard Jacob Bleek journeyed to Rome that he might sift among the wreckage of glory for secrets of furtive lore hidden since elder times. There he met the Blind Man Who Sees Much, who accosted him unbidden from his shadowed seat in the marketplace.

+

Leaning forward on his cane, the Blind Man said, “O Bleek, you I know for the cunning seeker after forbidden wisdom who dares all for all. Know, then, that hoary legend whispers of a concealed chamber beneath the ruins of the villa of Egabalus, and within that chamber, if it can be found—for many before you have tried and failed—lies the last resting place of the martyr Thoracrates, he whom the people call saint.

+

“With his body was laid his prized possession, a curious cross pre-dating Christ and, some will tell, even the Patriarchs. No mere trinket of old is this; rather, no less than the openly shunned and quietly desired Cross of Xenophor, which grants to its owner bountiful knowledge and powers beyond mortal ken. Do not you crave such a boon, Jacob Bleek? In your shoes, with your intact faculties, I would.”

+

Jacob Bleek thanked his mysterious informant and went forth to the site of the imperial villa, forgotten by the ages, now a sad heap of jumbled stones and nondescript mounds. He quizzed the folk in the vicinity, who were wont to dig holes there in the earth in fruitless hope of buried treasure, yet they knew not of any subterranean chamber, save by vague and useless report.

+

By cleverness, he inveigled his way into the pompous court of the Pope, whose collection of ancient relics and scrolls was renowned throughout the kingdoms, and there he did what previous adventurers had not thought to do: read the tattered documents of the strange old days, and learn from them the history of the hated Emperor Egabalus and his reviled pleasure villa; thus, in oddly indirect fashion, the story of the sad fate that befell Thoracrates. All this knowledge of yore pleased him mightily, for Bleek lived to learn, and in the doing he gathered into his hungry brain consequential details that put him on the track of the chamber’s location.

+

From the Vatican vaults he stole a plan of the villa, painted on parchment in a style unfamiliar to his times, yet legible to a determined scholar familiar with the scripts and arts of old. He traced on the scroll the corridors where once purple majesty reigned, matched those images to indications among the desolate heaps that mocked old glory. He noted the pictorial presentation of a peculiarly deep shaft, one offered without explanation, and he staked the spot in the despoiled soil under a sagging remnant of marble wall. Then he hired, with a little gold and many a promise, peasants to excavate for him.

+

They uncovered the shaft; cleared the descending steps; removed the debris from before a final blank wall of granite; hacked through it a hole for him, out of which rancid vapors gushed. Bleek sent them away, with yet more promises for the morn, and when they had gone with the dusk he lighted a torch and entered the foul chamber.

+

The revealed stone room was neither large nor adorned, a cramped oblong containing only a squat basalt dais, upon which lay the unmarred, perfectly preserved body of a man wrapped in white silken grave raiments. Though a marvel to behold in that state it was surely a dead thing, as the dryness of the exposed flesh of the face and the utter lack of subtle motions of life confirmed. On its breast resided a large, heavy cross of gold, studded both lengths with numerous green jewels resembling eyes, the remainder of its surface thickly inscribed with unknown hieroglyphics.

+

This cross Bleek meant to take on the moment, knowing for certainty that it was none other than the fabled Cross of Xenophor itself, but when the wizard reached greedily for it the corpse suddenly threw off the wrappings from about its arms, clutched firmly at the cross and rose to a sitting position with astonishing vitality.

+

The mortified man opened haunted dark eyes and, gazing upon his visitor, said in a weak, airless voice, “Jacob Bleek, mage of a time beyond mine, take not this wonder from me. Yes, I know thee, and much else, through the power of this cross, artifact ancient, instrument unholy and sacred. It can do thee no good, while its loss would leave me in despair. Harken to what I tell thee.

+

“In life, while I dedicated myself to the foundation of the Church, I was also truly a man like thee, given to weird humors and unslakable lust for arcane wisdom. This drove me to seek this cross, fabricated by inhuman hands at the dawn of creation, a conduit of the power inherent in despicable Xenophor, whom a long lost benighted age worshipped as the True Lord. I gained it, absorbed its radiating wisdom, sought to further with it benevolent ends while at the same time waxing mighty myself.

+

“For my gentle beliefs, as well as for my conniving schemes, I was sentenced, in audience before the noxious Egabalus, to a hideous fate, the dread penalty of living burial beneath the gay dancing of the Emperor’s merry throngs, the disgraceful revels in which I had stupidly taken part out of weakness. Our cruel master’s minions laughed as they dressed me in these horrid robes, led me into this chamber built for the purpose, sealed me inside, forever more thrust into the dark, there to die by loathsome degrees.

+

“They feared, however, the object which made me fleetingly dangerous, chose from fear to entomb the cross with me. Then it performed its most evil miracle, one unasked for by this poor sufferer, who never dreamed of the possibility. For although I died here, when I drew the last breath of wholesome air, I found that a grim consciousness remained to my mind! I existed without life! And so I have endured throughout the black centuries, a hopeless, breathless prisoner in my own lightless tomb, nearly crazed by my situation, doomed to eternity here, yet not daring to seek remedy for the horror. With the ages my essence has faded, and my control of the cross has died, so that nought remains to me but feeble existence.

+

“Understand this, Jacob Bleek: though this wearisome fate is endless torture, I dread nothing more than the loss of the evil cross that pitifully sustains. Were I to depart this sphere, this wretched realm of miserable, false entity, I fear the wrath of my God, who surely would call me to account for my sins. Terrible though that would be, I fear still something more: that I might be taken into the substance of Him, the monstrous force behind the cross, baleful Xenophor, whom the unspeakably depraved call Lord of All Things, Creator and Destroyer, First Cause and Last. That would truly be nightmare without end, without hope.

+

“I beg of thee then, Bleek, wise sorcerer, to let me lie with this cross, and seal me again beneath the earth, forever out of sight.”

+

Bleek listened considerately, attended quietly, paid heed to all that was said by Thoracrates, and, when the dead man ceased to speak, Bleek yanked the cross from his grasp and departed the chamber, ignoring the woeful cry, the grotesque physical changes that immediately commenced. Little remained but dust by the time he set foot on the stone stairs.

+

The wizard departed for Rome at once, without thought of his peasant laborers, and took the cross direct to his rooms, feeling at every step the power coursing into his body and soul. All that night he experienced the revelations of knowledge and power opened to him, gaining a great deal, hungering for more, but with the dawn his iron brain seized control, cautioning him against the perils of unlimited use and application; with a gigantic wrench of resolve he put by the thing in the nick of time, bundled it in burlap and sought the marketplace. There he greeted anew the Blind Man, that strange seer, and told him of what had transpired, granting a peek of the fingers at the prize, and offering it as payment in return for all the knowledge that grand fellow possessed.

+

The Blind Man grinned, his lusterless eyes oddly brightening, ushered his guest into the shut-in alcove where he lived, and there they did the deal. Bleek learned that which would carry him onward to freshly rewarding adventures, while the Blind Man acquired that which would give him every kind of sight, including, he hoped, that which he most lacked.

+

“They have esteemed and honored me,” he said, as he took the cross into his hands. “Now they will obey me.”

+

The Blind Man sighed dreamily, lovingly cradling the ornate object, pressing it to his breast. “I see,” he cried, “I see the ultimate truth!” But then he screamed, and he kept on screaming, while Jacob Bleek took his leave without word, departing with those soul-rending shrieks echoing in his ears.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Cross of Xenophor on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jeffery Scott Sims

+

+ + Author image of Jeffery Scott Sims + + + Jeffery Scott Sims a degreed anthropologist with a taste for weird fiction, lives in Arizona, which forms the setting for many of his tales. He has well over a hundred publications, among them the novel The Journey of Jacob Bleek, the collection Eerie Arizona, and his latest novel, The Journey through the Black Book. He maintains a literary website devoted to strange tales here.

+

© Jeffery Scott Sims 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image courtesy of ntnvnc - many thanks.

+
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-29/the-woodcutter-and-the-witchwife.html b/issue-29/the-woodcutter-and-the-witchwife.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..56856d90 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-29/the-woodcutter-and-the-witchwife.html @@ -0,0 +1,333 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Woodcutter and the Witchwife — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Woodcutter and the Witchwife

+

Owen G. Tabard

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Woodcutter and the Witchwife by +
+ + + + +

L + +ong ago in the Danelaw, when heathens still dwelt there in large number and magic was abroad in the realm, there lived a young woodcutter named Halfdan. Halfdan was a tall man, handsome and ruddy complected, with hair and beard the color of barleycorn, but poor. He was strong, and as a youth he had gone in viking with his Jarl to the far islands, but he won no wealth nor glory there. When he returned it was only to his simple wattle-hut with a roof of sod at the edge of the forest that covered the Jarl’s lands, where he set about to ply his trade.

+

His life then was simple and free, and he earned enough to eat well, but he grew dissatisfied. So one night, on the eve of Yule-tide, he departed his wattle-hut and trekked through the dark wood. Clouds smothered the starlight and he became lost in the cold, and for a time he thought that he might die. But at last he came upon a clearing where lay a hovel which was the abode of a witchwife.

+

The witchwife appeared to him as an old woman, hair wild and gray, and eyes that burned with a power beyond human ken. Her name was Vedra, and she knew Halfdan already, although they had never met before. When she asked why he had come, Halfdan opened his palms to her and spread his arms wide, saying, “I am a poor man of low birth, but I am strong and able. I am sure I could earn the wealth and fame of a great Housecarl, if I had only the opportunity.”

+

“I could make this for you,” said Vedra, “but at a cost.”

+

“Name it, and I will pay,” said Halfdan.

+

She named to him a large sum of gold and said that in ten years’ time would she return to him to collect her due, and Halfdan readily agreed. Vedra bade him, “Go down to the beach in the spring, and there a ship and crew will await you. But remember that your debt must be paid, else all you have obtained by my magic shall be lost.” Then she vanished along with her hovel, and Halfdan was alone in the cold of the dark wood.

+

When spring came, Halfdan did as the witchwife had instructed and went down to the beach, where he found a splendid longship with a dragon carved into its figurehead and great crimson sails. Waiting beside the ship were two score of stout men, fine warriors all, each in helmet and byrnie. All hailed him as their leader, though he knew them not at all.

+

Halfdan took the crew and with them went in viking to the far islands, and by summer the longship was laden heavily with plunder. On their return the Jarl, who was much impressed by Halfdan, took him into his fold and raised him up to Housecarl, giving him great gifts of gold and lands.

+

It was in the house of the Jarl that Halfdan caught the eye of the Jarl’s beautiful daughter Signy. But when Halfdan paid her court she was aloof and made as if to despise him. So Halfdan inquired after Signy to the Jarl, and learned that she could not take a man, for she was under a wicked curse to transform each night into a bear, and thus would devour any man who sought to share her bed. This curse hung heavy upon her heart, for she had come to love Halfdan dearly, as he did her.

+

So it was when, on the Yule-tide of the tenth year, Vedra the witchwife returned. “Halfdan,” said she, “you have the great fame and wealth of your heart’s desire, now I have come to collect my due.”

+

Halfdan was indeed wealthy and had enough and ten times again to repay the witchwife, but in his heart were thoughts of Signy, so instead he held his open palms spread forth asking that she should lift the curse from Signy that he might win her heart. “If you do this,” said Halfdan, “I shall repay you what I owe tenfold.”

+

And so Vedra named a heavy sum of gold, saying that she would return again in ten years’ time to collect her due, and Halfdan readily averred that he would so pay. Vedra produced for him a small leather pouch and bade him thus: “Take this magic powder to the bedchamber of Signy Jarlsdottir. Sprinkle it upon her and the curse will be lifted.”

+

“But how will I go to her?” Halfdan asked. “For she is locked in her room each night, and surely the Jarl’s men shall bar my way.”

+

Vedra said, “By my second-sight, I tell you a secret passageway leads through your Jarl’s house to her bedchamber. Go to her thereby.”

+

Taking the pouch from her, Halfdan set out at once for Signy’s bedchamber, for the witchwife had already vanished. With the knowledge imparted to him, Halfdan made his way through a tunnel of frigid earth beneath the Jarl’s great hall, up a narrow spiral of stone stairs, and into the bedchamber of his love. But when he opened the hidden door he found that Signy was transformed already, and a great bear stood before him on hind legs with snarling maw. Without hesitation he cast the magic powder upon the bear, and in an instant the curse was broken and the bear became Signy. She fell into his arms.

+

When the Jarl heard the news that his daughter’s curse was lifted he was greatly pleased, and Halfdan and Signy were soon thereafter married. The ageing Jarl, having no other children than Signy and thinking of Halfdan now as his own son, made Halfdan his heir. And so, when the Jarl died a short time later, Halfdan inherited his estates and title.

+

In the decade that followed Halfdan ruled wisely and well. His love for Signy blossomed and brought forth a son whom they named Rolf. Though a small and sickly child, Rolf was as ruddy-faced and bright-eyed as his father, and was the joy of Halfdan’s life. Thus when Rolf took ill in his tenth winter and it seemed that he might die, Halfdan was greatly grieved.

+

Halfdan’s woe was such that he had nearly forgotten his bargain with Vedra, but she had not. When Yule-tide came, she appeared in his hall saying, “Halfdan Jarl, you have lifted the curse and won the love of Signy, and now hold great fame and wealth beyond the dreams of your youth. Now I come to collect my due.”

+

Halfdan opened his palms and knelt before her, asking that she might intercede to save the life of his beloved son. “If you do this,” said Halfdan, with tears in his eyes, “I shall repay you what I owe tenfold again.”

+

So Vedra named a sum of gold so vast that it staggered his mind, for it would empty the coffers of his jarldom, and she said that she would return again in ten years’ time to collect her due. Halfdan readily agreed, and his heart swelled with hope as Vedra vanished from his hall.

+

He ran to the sickbed of young Rolf, where Signy tended the boy, and when he flung open the door he found the room filled with song and laughter, as Rolf danced and japed to the delight of his mother, the sickness having all at once departed.

+

In the decade that followed Halfdan and Signy watched with wonder as Rolf grew into a man, strong of back and stout of heart, and it was not long before he went in viking with Halfdan’s men to win great glory in the far islands by dint of his prowess.

+

But, although Halfdan knew contentedness of hearth and home, he knew not peace, for his great jarldom had roused jealousies in his neighbors and he was harried always by the armies of Arthgal, King of Strathclyde. Halfdan recalled Rolf to his side to lead the defenses, and kept Signy ever safe in her bedchamber, for the war soon reached their very gates.

+

When the witchwife appeared upon the Yule-tide that tenth year, Halfdan greeted her warmly, with palms out and arms spread wide. Vedra said, “Halfdan Jarl, your son is well and has grown into a mighty warrior of the highest valor. You have the love of your Signy and such fame and wealth as is the envy of all. And I come to collect.”

+

Halfdan told her of the troubles brought on by his rivalry with Strathclyde, then asked that she raise him up a great war-host to smite down King Arthgal and win peace for his jarldom. “If you do this for me,” said Halfdan, “I shall repay you what I owe tenfold.”

+

Vedra shook her head, for the debt had now been so many times multiplied that such a sum would be more than the wealth of all the Danelaw put together. “No,” said she, “it cannot be done. Now I must have my due.”

+

Halfdan did not expect to be so rebuffed, but greatly fearing the witchwife’s power he bade Rolf to raise a tax in order that he might make recompense to Vedra. Halfdan’s people were loyal and paid gladly, but Arthgal had wrought havoc and the realm was poor. When at last the sun set on that feast of Yule, Halfdan had laid much gold and silver before Vedra’s feet, but not enough, for he fell short of her sum by one farthing.

+

Vedra’s face bore a look of sadness even as she shook her head, and thus she vanished, Halfdan’s debt having not been paid. A cold wind blew, and Halfdan turned to look upon Rolf, but he saw not the recognition a son might give to his father but instead a kind of puzzlement, as one might turn upon an impertinent stranger.

+

“Who is this sits in my chair?” Rolf demanded of him.

+

Halfdan pleaded with Rolf to recognize him as father, but Rolf knew him not. Halfdan then sought out Signy, but she was secluded in her bedchamber and his way was barred. Rolf, taking Halfdan for a madman, had the Housecarls eject him from the great hall.

+

His people had been robbed of the memory of Halfdan Jarl by the witchwife’s magic, to them he was merely Halfdan the woodcutter once more. He had no choice but to return to his wattle-hut at the edge of the forest and ply his trade. For some time he lived a simple life and free, but his thoughts returned ever to Signy. His son had become a great Jarl who needed his father no longer, which made Halfdan proud, but he was sure that his beloved, alone in her bedchamber, pined even now for him as he did for her.

+

By the next year Rolf had defeated Arthgal of Strathclyde in a mighty battle. Yule-tide came and all the people, in high spirits after a great victory, thronged to the house of their Jarl in celebration. Thus did Halfdan make his way back to the great hall that had once been his.

+

When the moon rose on that longest of nights, and his heart was swelled with hope, Halfdan sneaked behind the great hall, and into the secret passageway beneath that was filled with the stench of dampened clay, then went up stone steps and through the hidden door into the bedchamber of Signy, where he was met by a fearsome bear, and devoured.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Woodcutter and the Witchwife on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Owen G. Tabard

+

+ + Author image of Owen G. Tabard + + + Owen G. Tabard is a writer and lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy, as well as ancient mythology. He draws on these interests in his own stories. His hobbies include kayaking and bird-watching.

+

© Owen G. Tabard 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: GioeleFazzeri twice, analogicus, KEREM_TASER, and Ash _ Ismail.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-29/unincorporated.html b/issue-29/unincorporated.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8a097ac7 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-29/unincorporated.html @@ -0,0 +1,480 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Unincorporated — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Unincorporated

+

Erik Mann

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Unincorporated by +
+ + + + +

S + +he eyes the box on the table in front of her. It had been shoved deep into the storage area, forgotten or assumed lost, and revealed only by the deep cleaning she’d finally committed herself to. She’d felt her knees weaken when she realized what it was, and considered quitting the cleaning to inspect its contents. But one doesn’t survive twenty years in the Unincorporated by getting distracted from what needs getting done, so she’d set the box aside and continued with her work.

+

But now, with the sun set and no further chores before bed, she hesitates.

+

So many years ago. And a time she rarely revisits in her mind. Perhaps she should just shove the box back into the storage area. Perhaps she should dump its contents into the fire.

+

She sips from her drink and watches the flames in the hearth. Then her hand reaches out and she pulls the box to her.

+

Seeds wrapped in towels, perhaps a half-dozen bundles of these, fill the top layer of the box. Her early successes surviving in the Unincorporated, set aside against hard times to come. Hard times had come, but never so bad she’d needed to withdraw or even remember making this deposit. Next are artifacts of pre-Unincorporated habitation. Bottle caps. Some coins. A fat ring of keys. And bullet casings, lots of bullet casings, collected before she realized their ubiquity in the Unincorporated.

+

She gently pushes these items aside, and there it is.

+

The photograph she knew would be here.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“T + +his bus is so hot,” said Bert.

+

Frank Flowers, seated next to Bert, feigned sleep with his eyes closed and head back on the seat rest. This did nothing to compel Bert into quiet.

+

“I can’t believe they’d just let us sit out here in the blazing sun. A bus like this will turn into an oven. Literally. They need to be worried about our health and safety. We’re in the middle of the Unincorporated for god’s sake. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

+

Bert’s phone dinged, and Frank enjoyed a moment of peace while Bert frantically tapped messages into the device. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said eventually. “Come on! When is the new bus going to get here?”

+

Frank had run some calculations when they’d first broken down. They’d been stranded for forty minutes now, but Frank figured the transfer bus from Campus Alpha was still another hour away.

+

“My boss is furious.” Bert continued. “She’s been bitching about this downtime since the meeting was scheduled. It is ridiculous that the only way between Campuses is a three-hour bus through the Unincorporated. You’d think they could have figured out something by now.”

+

Frank had seen old pictures of planes sheared in half by the high-strata winds. And those were from before most of the world had gone Unincorporated.

+

“She said if I miss this meeting, she’s going to have me transferred to Waste Services. That is, if she isn’t allowed to fire and have me banished from AGCorp entirely. I’m going to talk to the bus driver and see if he can tell us when we’re going to get out of here.”

+

Frank felt the seat next to him empty. He opened his eyes and watched Bert make his way to the front of the bus. “Excuse me. Driver?” Bert called.

+

“Please return to your seat,” said the driver, looking at him through the mirror.

+

“I need to know when we’re going to be picked up and can get to Campus Alpha. There’s an upper management meeting that I have to be there for.”

+

“A transfer bus is on the way. I’ll need you to remain seated until it arrives.”

+

“But how long will that be?”

+

“Sir!” the driver said with more force. He turned around in his seat, holding his hand radio to the side. “You’re in violation of your Transport User Agreement. Please do not make me call this in.”

+

Bert put out his hands in surrender and returned to his seat. “Fucking driver,” he said. Then he craned his neck to look behind them. “Thank god. I think the transfer bus must be here.”

+

Frank became alert. He was quite sure it wasn’t the transfer bus. Raiders and pirates weren’t particularly common in the Unincorporated any more, but occasionally incidents happened. People huddled at the windows. Many had their phones pointed outside, and others appeared to be fishing for their devices.

+

“I need to get a picture of this,” someone said.

+

“Excuse me,” Frank said. He stood and stepped over Bert.

+

“Driver’s not going to like that,” Bert muttered.

+

Frank had made it a couple rows back when the crowd turned as one, many of them pointing to the right-hand side of the bus. He couldn’t see anything. A woman in this row had stood and was blocking most of the window. She had her phone out, and Frank heard the shutter effects of her taking multiple pictures. Then whatever was out there had passed them. The woman lowered her phone and began swiping through the content.

+

“Did you get anything?” he asked her. The woman started and looked up.

+

“What was it?” he said.

+

She held out the phone for him to see.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation

+

Campus Alpha

+

East Receiving Lobby

+

Interview Subject: Bert Spencer

+

BS: How long is this going to take? I really need to get to work.

+

Interviewer: Not long. Please take a seat. You were a passenger on Bus 505?

+

BS: Of course. You just saw me walk from there to here. Look, I really need to get going. My boss just threatened to throw me out of a window when she sees me. It’s going to be worse if I don’t get back to the Department immediately.

+

Interviewer: We understand there was some excitement during your journey on Bus 505.

+

BS: Excitement? Yeah, I guess you could call the bus breaking down and me missing my very important meeting with upper management some excitement. Hey, I’m really going to need some documentation about the breakdown. When it happened. How long we were sitting there. I doubt it will help, but it would be something to show this shit-show wasn’t my fault.

+

Interviewer: We’re not referring to the mechanical anomaly.

+

BS: < pauses > Are you talking about the dog? I don’t know. I didn’t really see it.

+

Interviewer: There was no dog.

+

BS: I’m pretty sure there was a dog.

+

Interviewer: Are you familiar with Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation v. Jade?

+

BS: Sort of? Is that the one about our chemicals killing all the dogs?

+

Interviewer: It is the case against Miriam Jade for making false claims that negligence on the part of AGCorp killed a species that never existed in the first place.

+

BS: Like I said, I didn’t really see anything.

+

Interviewer: You saw a goat.

+

BS: < snorts >

+

Interviewer: We recommend you familiarize yourself with the sentencing of that case. The penalty for spreading rumors and false information that could harm AGCorp is severe. Especially for an employee also being scrutinized for a Failure to Appear violation.

+

BS: Scrutinized?

+

Interviewer: Have a good day, Mr. Spencer.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation

+

Campus Alpha

+

East Receiving Lobby

+

Interview Subject: Alyssa Perez

+

Interviewer: You were a passenger on Bus 505?

+

AP: That’s correct.

+

Interviewer: And you’ve arrived at Campus Alpha on a work visa from outside Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation?

+

AP: Yes. I am an Employee Citizen of Agile Pharmaceuticals, a Limited Liability State of the Federation of Boutique Firms.

+

Interviewer: Boutique Fringe.

+

AP: I’ve heard the Five Corporations call us that.

+

Interviewer: Please describe the work you’ll be doing for AGCorp.

+

AP: I am working on a drug that combats the effects of Rogue Viral Marketing.

+

Interviewer: Cognitive Breakdown.

+

AP: Exposure can result in a number of effects, but yes, Cognitive Breakdown seems to be the most prevalent and is my focus of study. Recently, the compound I’m working on showed encouraging results when paired with AGCorp’s Neural Liminals. I’m here, at the invitation of your employer, to research more tightly integrating the two products in hopes of preventing future cases. If the latest tests can be trusted, perhaps we can even reverse existing damage.

+

Interviewer: Then having access to the patented liminal lines and the support of AGCorp is critical to the success of your work?

+

AP: < nods > And the success of my work could prove critical to AGCorp. Rogue Marketing is a threat to all of us.

+

Interviewer: There was an incident on the bus.

+

AP: The breakdown?

+

Interviewer: After the mechanical anomaly, an animal was reported outside the bus.

+

AP: Oh, yes, the dog. That was surprising, and very encouraging. There must be pockets in the Unincorporated where the species was either never infected or the dosages were low enough that immunity has developed. Someone should investigate.

+

Interviewer: The press histories of AGCorp are very clear about the existence of dogs. They are a fabrication perpetrated by one of the other Four Corporations in an effort to damage the viability of various AGCorp chemical products. Therefore, what you saw could not have been a dog.

+

AP: I see.

+

Interviewer: We believe what you saw was a goat.

+

AP: A goat?

+

Interviewer: Yes. Definitely a goat.

+

AP: Fine. Is that all?

+

Interviewer: Almost. Footage from the bus suggests you may have captured a picture of this goat.

+

AP: < sighs >

+

Interviewer: May I see your phone please?

+

< Subject removes a phone from her bag and hands it to the interviewer. Interviewer sets the phone on a raised device next to him and then picks it up again. >

+

Interviewer: Hmm. This device does not appear to be working. How unfortunate.

+

AP: My whole phone? You couldn’t just remove the individual pictures?

+

Interviewer: Given the important work you’ll be doing, we will gladly replace it. With an AGCorp model, no less. Much more reliable.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation

+

Campus Alpha

+

East Receiving Lobby

+

Interview Subject: Frank Flowers

+

Interviewer: Please describe the events of your recent travel through the Unincorporated.

+

FF: I boarded Bus 505 in Campus Charlie and we entered the Unincorporated on our way to Campus Alpha. Around 2pm local time, Bus 505 experienced a mechanical anomaly. The driver maneuvered us to the side of the road without incident and reported the situation. About half an hour later, there was a bit of excitement when a goat passed outside, but it was short lived, as the goat disappeared into the scrub moments after being spotted and then did not reappear. About an hour and a half later, the transfer bus arrived and the remainder of the journey occurred without incident.

+

Interviewer: Thank you, Agent Flowers. Welcome home.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +rank Flowers observed the tall grass and thick weeds as he followed the walk to the front door. The yard seemed to have been neglected for a month or more, which fit the timeline.

+

He rang the bell.

+

Looking from the porch, he took in the neighborhood. Modest homes on large plots of land. Pretty typical for the edge of Campus, where residents liked being remote and removed.

+

He rang the bell again.

+

Still no reply and no sounds of movement from inside. The yard then.

+

He trudged through the grass, making his way around the side of the house and into the back. And there was Alyssa Perez, sitting in an outdoor chair, staring into the distance. Frank looked and noticed a gap in the border wall through which the Unincorporated was visible. Grounds Maintenance should be notified to fix it up. Though he had a guess Ms. Perez would reopen the section as soon as it was fixed.

+

“Hello,” Frank called, walking towards her. Alyssa turned and looked. “I rang the bell a couple times. You must not have heard it.”

+

“Was ignoring it,” she said. “And I don’t take kindly to people trespassing.”

+

Frank displayed his badge.

+

“Oh,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable then.” She turned away from him and continued her contemplation of the Unincorporated.

+

Frank took a seat in the chair next to her. “They say you haven’t been to work in a few weeks,” he said.

+

“You a truant officer or something?”

+

“No.”

+

“Then why do you care?”

+

“People are concerned. You’ve done impressive work, and you’ve saved a lot of lives.”

+

“AGCorp lives,” she spat. “The rest of the world can get fucked, right?” She took a swallow from her drink. “I had a home before coming here. One that I looked forward to returning to. But that won’t happen now, will it?”

+

The information wasn’t supposed to be public, but he wasn’t surprised she had it. The Boutique Fringe was in chaos, devastated by a new and virulent strain of Rogue Marketing. Agile Pharmaceuticals, Alyssa Perez’s naturalized employer and a recent—if hostile—acquisition target of AGCorp, was among the hardest hit. Reports suggested that 90% of its employees had Cognitive Breakdown and that fires from recent infrastructure failures had turned the Limited Liability State into little more than smoldering Unincorporated.

+

“You’ve made a difference to a lot of people,” he said. “I’m one of those people.”

+

She studied him. “You look familiar.”

+

“We were on a bus together, a few years ago, travelling through the Unincorporated.”

+

Her eyes widened and turned hard. “You! I showed you that picture and then they erased my phone. I had pictures of my parents on that phone. The only pictures of my parents.”

+

“I don’t believe that was part of my report,” he said. “But if I caused that, I apologize. That seems heavy handed for the situation.”

+

“And it wasn’t a goat,” she said. “Everyone on that bus knew it wasn’t a goat. Everyone employed by AGCorp knows that dogs existed.”

+

Frank did not reply.

+

She shook her head and took a drink. “Have you been following me around since I arrived, then? Must have been a boring couple of years.”

+

“The bus was coincidence, but probably resulted in the Network linking us. When concern was raised by your disappearance—”

+

“I didn’t disappear.”

+

“…when you exceeded your allotted PTO, individuals in upper management expressed concern for your well being. That concern was passed to my group, and I volunteered for the opportunity to meet you again. Recent events… well, I’m grateful for the work you’ve done, and wanted to be the one to make sure you’re alright.”

+

She didn’t look at him, but her posture changed. “Family member?”

+

“Yes. My son.”

+

“And he’s recovering?”

+

“Miraculously.”

+

“The treatment could help a lot more people,” she said. “If your bosses would allow it. If letting the world burn didn’t benefit their bottom line.”

+

It was Frank’s turn to stare silently into the backyard.

+

“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m done.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“B + +us 505, do you copy?”

+

Ross Kelly toggled the handset. “This is Bus 505, over.”

+

“Bus 505, please prepare for route change.”

+

He looked at the chain link fence separating the long ribbon of highway from the Unincorporated. Route change where? he thought. But then the bus began to slow itself and gradually pulled to the side where it came to a stop.

+

“Agent enroute, Bus 505. Prepare for rendezvous.”

+

An Agent Rendezvous, Ross thought. Tsk, tsk. Somebody’s been naughty. He used the mirrors to check out the passengers behind him and wondered if he could guess the target. There was the family that clearly weren’t AGCorp natives seated near the back; they seemed a likely possibility. There was also the guy with the wispy beard and bloodshot eyes that reminded Ross of his loser brother and who currently appeared to be asleep. Rise and shine, dirtbag.

+

They waited.

+

“What’s going on?” a passenger a row behind Ross asked.

+

“Nothing to worry about,” Ross said. “We’ll be back on our way in a few minutes.” Not long after, the bus filled with flashing blue and red light as an official AGCorp enforcement vehicle pulled up behind them.

+

“Bus 505,” crackled the radio. “We show agent arrival.”

+

“Agent arrival confirmed,” Ross said into the handset. He tracked the agent’s progress in his mirrors until the agent stood outside the door.

+

“Bus 505, agent has requested access to your vehicle with a valid request code. Please confirm with your operator code.”

+

“Confirmed. Beta, zero, eight, charlie, seven.”

+

“Operator code confirmed. Access granted.”

+

The door opened with a hiss.

+

The agent climbed into the bus, showing Ross his badge. “I’m here to collect Alyssa Perez,” he said. “Seat assignment?”

+

Ross nodded, grabbing for the passenger manifest, but then the agent said, “Never mind,” and stepped away.

+

“What’s this about?” said a woman a few rows from the front. Ross looked at his manifest. Perez alright.

+

“Alyssa Perez,” the agent said, “you are ordered to return with me to Campus Alpha.”

+

“Absolutely not. By what right?”

+

“By order of the CEO, you are in violation of your contract and are believed to be in possession of confidential and proprietary information that is the sole property of Auctoritas-Gewald Corporation. I am authorized to use whatever means necessary to prevent your departure.”

+

Ross’s eyes widened. This was not good news for Perez. Just don’t do anything on my bus, he pleaded silently. The cleanup and the paperwork would be a nightmare. Then he realized Alyssa Perez was looking at him through the mirror. He quickly looked away.

+

“It’s time to go,” said the agent. Perez didn’t move. “Now,” said the agent. He moved his hand to his gun.

+

“Fine.” Perez stood up and gathered her things. The agent backed away, making room for her to pass, then followed her out of the bus. His hand rested on the butt of his gun throughout.

+

“Bus 505,” came the radio, startling Ross. “We’ve received signal that the Agent Rendezvous has concluded. Prepare for relocking and resumption of route.”

+

“Confirmed,” Ross replied. The doors thumped shut and the light above them switched to red. Moments later, the bus moved forward and merged back onto the road where it gradually began to pick up speed.

+

Ross kept his eyes on Perez and the agent via his mirrors. She gesticulated and appeared to be yelling while the agent stood impassively. Then she darted from the road and dived onto the dirt, wriggled through a gap in the chain link and then ran, into the Unincorporated. The bus was getting further away and details were getting fuzzier, but Ross clearly saw the agent pull his gun.

+

He saw the gun-hand jerk and watched Perez drop.

+

He switched his eyes to the road in front of them. I didn’t see anything, he told himself. I didn’t see a goddamn thing. But he thought back to a run three years ago when a dog—sorry, goat—had run beside the bus, and remembered the resulting nightmare of interviews and reports and new procedures that had created.

+

He hadn’t seen anything that time either.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he edge of a road, and the mesas and rocky scrub of the Unincorporated beyond. A chain link fence, rusted and falling down in places, separates the two. There’s a sign on the fence, faded and barely readable, warning of the extreme dangers in the Unincorporated. And beside the road trots an animal that wasn’t supposed to exist. Yellow fur, white paws, and a shiny black nose. Its giant tongue lolls from the side of its mouth.

+

She sets the picture of the dog down and picks up the next photograph. Her parents. Younger in this picture than she is now by a decade. Her eyes well with tears as she touches each face gently and then puts the picture down. The final items in the box are schematics for producing neural liminals and drugs to reverse Cognitive Breakdown. She remembers their weight as she’d smuggled this information to the surviving Corporations in what remained of the Federation of Boutique Firms.

+

They are heavy, just like the fear of AGCorp retribution she’s lived with ever since. Just in case they ever really find out.

+

A cold wet nose pokes her in the arm.

+

“Am I not paying enough attention to you, Flowers?” she says, and leans back so the dog can nuzzle beneath her arm and press himself tight against her.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Unincorporated on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Erik Mann

+

+ + Author image of Erik Mann + + + Erik Mann is a software developer and aspiring beach bum. He digs spotting sea turtles and dolphins when paddleboarding but admits that time an alligator joined him in the river was a little unnerving. More of his work can be found in Intrinsick and The Dark City.

+

© Erik Mann 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: tsukiko-kiyomidzu, Alex_Hartman, and Layers.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-29/xorais-hand.html b/issue-29/xorais-hand.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..94267f3e --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-29/xorais-hand.html @@ -0,0 +1,538 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Xorai’s Hand — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 29 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Xorai’s Hand

+

Celine Low

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Xorai’s Hand by +
+ + + + +

X + +orai Tsetgerel punched her way out of her mother’s womb with a force that instantly killed the poor woman. You gasp, children, but in those days, death was as much a part of life as food and water. But then, so was magic. There were demons who stole children from their tents if they misbehaved… and devoured them! Those were the days of great evil, and great courage. For wherever there are monsters, there are heroes.

+

And, yes, heroines too.

+

As Xorai kicked and flailed her muscular limbs, her father, Tsetgerel Boroldai, Jaqhar of the Khavsar horde, carried her out of the tent. His clan had already gathered in anticipation. The Jaqhar shed no tears for the death of his second wife, although he loved her as his life. All his emotion was in his arms as he thrust the screaming infant up to the sky.

+

“Today,” he bellowed, “the Boundless Blue has given me a daughter.”

+

Faces fell; he ignored them. “My daughter battled death itself to come to us. See how her fists clench, dripping blood! The might of the Khavsar pounds through her veins. Through her, our rule will extend far and wide. No man shall match her in strength!”

+

The Jaqhar glared around at his clan, and the horde cheered and stamped their feet. Even the elders smiled as the Jaqhar promised to arrange a strategic betrothal for his daughter—one that would not merely sell her away like chattel, but bring another horde under Khavsar rule.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

X + +orai grew up strong and beautiful. She had her father’s piercing eyes, fierce and slanting, and her hair was long and black, woven into forty thick braids. Her thighs were as sturdy as saksaul trees, and her skin bronzed by long days riding beneath the Boundless Blue. By her sixth birthday, she was riding on a khraal, and her wild laugh rang across the plain as the stinging winds whipped her hair. By nine, she could shoot a hare from three dzaar away without wasting a single arrow, and at twelve she wrestled a werewolf and won, ripping it from neck to groin with nothing but a blade of flint.

+

All the other children were afraid of her, and Xorai had no friends or siblings to play with. Yet she had plenty of love from her father, giving the Jaqhar endless amusement with her wit and valour, far more than any of his good-for-nothing sons had. Xorai’s brothers by the Jaqhar’s first wife had all gotten themselves killed over the years—by plague, by falling off a cliff, by werewolf or wild khraal.

+

As I said, children, survival was not easy for our ancestors.

+

Indeed, Xorai’s father grew so attached to his only remaining child that he dreaded the day of her marriage. For then she would have to leave his camp, to make her home in another. Every day, when they were not hounding him to sire an heir, the elders pestered him about Xorai’s betrothal. Now the old Shamaness was grumbling in his ear again, for Xorai’s first blood had just come, which meant she was of marriageable age.

+

Other than the elders’ pebbly voices, it was a quiet night. Though it was a full moon, the werewolves and wild khraal had learned to steer clear of their camp, in no small part thanks to Xorai. The Jaqhar chewed thoughtfully on a yak shank, pretending to nod respectfully while the elders discussed who should be given Xorai’s hand.

+

Inwardly, the Jaqhar sneered. What man was worthy of his daughter? Look at her, stirring the broth on the other side of the tent, clad in the distinctive black pelt of a werewolf. Its snout lay over her head as a hood, its eyes still glowing red with the demon-magic that enabled its transformation. That wolf had been the alpha of its pack, and the Khavsar could breathe more easily until the next full moon transformed more men. Why should he send her away to rule another horde, when she herself did not want to?

+

“Let me stay with you,” she had said to him that morning, two hares slung over her shoulder. “Who will keep the Khavsar safe, when I am gone?”

+

Tsetgerel Jaqhar chortled. “We have plenty of strong men, you know, and I am not so old yet.”

+

“Ah, but who will make you laugh? Who will cook your favourite broths?”

+

Indeed. What need had he to sire an heir—another fragile babe who would one day command his daughter, whether or not this prince was worthy? Xorai did all her womanly duties without complaint, yet also protected the Khavsar with the strength of ten men!

+

His daughter, he decided, would be ruled by no one.

+

“Fine,” the Jaqhar grunted, and the elders fell quiet in surprise. Before they could sigh with relief, however, the Jaqhar narrowed his eyes. “The man who defeats my daughter in a fight will have her hand in marriage.”

+

Xorai snorted. The Shamaness’ jaw dropped. Impossible! It was said that the Boundless Blue had blessed Xorai with supernatural strength to make up for the loss of the Jaqhar’s wife. Xorai was only thirteen, and already in wrestling she was unrivalled among the hordes. They had all seen, at the last trade fair, how all the boys she’d beaten straggled home like wilted, storm-tossed flowers.

+

The Jaqhar chuckled at the memory, but the elders were not amused.

+

An old woman standing behind the Shamaness stepped forward with pursed lips, her face like curdled milk. “While we laud Xorai’s prowess, Xorai’s skills on the battlefield are scaring all the eligible bachelors away.”

+

“Besides,” said another, “Xorai’s husband should be submissive. A prince, preferably, so Xorai can rule his horde in his stead. He would remain with us as a valuable asset, while Xorai wrests control over his horde with the might of her fist. It would not do to have him fighting us all the time.”

+

“How dull he would be,” said Xorai scornfully. “A husband who obeyed my every whim! I would despise him. I would not want a weak man to be the father of my children.”

+

“An alliance must be formed,” the Shamaness insisted. “One needs friends to survive.”

+

The Jaqhar shrugged. “If Xorai cannot find a husband, then I will just have to make her my heir.”

+

The elders reeled in horror. It was one thing to conquer another horde by making Xorai their queen—ultimately, Xorai would still be under Tsetgerel’s thumb. But it was another thing entirely to make Xorai herself Jaqhari of the Khavsar! How could she lead hunts and raids when she conceived, when she had to rear children and organise all the complicated logistics of migration? Did the Jaqhar intend to find her husbands who would willingly take to the wifely and queenly duties? They scoffed. Would any woman even respect such a man?

+

The old women tutted, shaking their heads. Laying the burdens of a Jaqhar on a woman’s shoulders would doom her to a life of loneliness, without husband and children to warm her tent—or worse, with a sullen husband and children sundered from her, closer to their nurses than to their own birth-mother. It was best to leave the fighting to the men, they murmured. No woman would find glory in it.

+

Xorai leapt to her feet. “There is no glory in bloodshed!” Above her head, the eyes of the werewolf glittered. “This—” she grabbed the wolf’s snout “—was a shameful necessity.”

+

The elders exchanged knowing glances. Khavsar women were groomed to be compassionate, like Earthmother, and it was clear from her outburst that Xorai had the heart of a good queen. As mother of a horde, she had the benevolent strength needed to separate squabbling children and a gentle firmness that people could rely on. But it took a different set of traits to be Jaqhar.

+

“Sit,” her father growled. It was a savage land they lived in, where resources came only to those with the strength to take it. “Is there no glory in defending your own?”

+

Xorai sat slowly, but her mouth was a stubborn line. “Blood is sacred. You taught me that. The spilling of blood is an offence to Earthmother.”

+

The elders sighed, like dry grass in the wind. “But when you must choose whose blood to spill?” the Shamaness rasped. She shook one gnarled finger at Xorai. “Whom will you defend, and whom will you kill?”

+

Xorai raised her chin. “I defend the weak against the strong.”

+

“Foolishness,” the Shamaness hissed. “What if the Khavsar grow mighty?” The long beaded strings in her grey braids quivered. “Will you fight against us as we conquer?”

+

“She is young—she will learn.” The Jaqhar stood. “Send a message to the hordes: their men will fight my daughter for her hand. But this summer, Xorai will join the Anulakh.”

+

Some of the elders opened their mouths to protest; the Jaqhar raised a hand. “She will have no aid as a woman. She will prove herself with the rest of the boys, and earn the men’s respect.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he wrestlers circled each other, their skins sweat-slicked, their growls feral. In the background, festive tunes rose from snakeskin fiddles, undergirded by the pounding of khraal-hide drums and rhythm bones that evoked the thunderous hooves of migrating yaks, the sleek, snarling power of the raptor-like creatures that herded them, and the terrible grandeur of vast plains and scorching deserts under an endless sky.

+

This was the third day of the contest, and they were down to the last five men.

+

Xorai sighed, excusing herself. Usually, the Khavsar men refused to engage her in any sport; too often had she beaten them, humiliating them in front of their wives and peers. Xorai had been looking forward to the challenge of fighting the best among the hordes, but so far the turnout was disappointing.

+

She knew her father did not really expect anyone to win. He had arranged this contest for other purposes: as a concession to the elders, to sift friend from foe, to test the strength of the other hordes. Those who were absent were not interested in an alliance. And the hordes who were present could showcase their skills, even if none of their warriors won.

+

And if Xorai could find no husband, Xorai’s father would be justified in making Xorai his heir. Especially since she would have proven herself indomitable.

+

Restless, Xorai walked away from the crowd. Women hovered around the simmering vats of meat at the edges of the camp. Smoke billowed, steamy and pungent. Xorai’s stomach rumbled. The men would be tired after fighting; she would not be wrestling anyone today. She grabbed a bowl and held it out as Duya, an aunt on her mother’s side, ladled in the broth.

+

“I saved the yak’s heart for you,” said Duya. “For vigour and courage.”

+

Xorai smiled, accepting the bowl with thanks. Duya was the only woman who talked to her; the others resented her prowess over their husbands.

+

After sating her appetite, she wandered toward the wooden posts the khraal were tied to, their thick necks bound in rope. They were fearsome creatures, all serrated teeth and sickle claws. Like a cross between a large eagle and a lizard, with leathery skin and a dusting of fine feathers over the head and spine. Some were feeding, grasping a carcass with their sinewy forelimbs, but when Xorai walked past they stood still as soldiers on their brawny hind legs, amber eyes staring straight ahead. These khraal were all battle-trained, taken from their mothers when young and honed into killing machines for hunting and war. In the Anulakh she would have to capture a wild one, a khraal old enough to hunt, yet young enough to adapt to human society.

+

Once upon a time, the shamans said, the people of the steppes could speak with khraal and understand them. Human and khraal were of one mind, one heart, connected through a bond deeper than marriage. But when a khraal shed the blood of man, the Skyfather took language from the khraal. As dumb beasts they would serve their penance, until Merciful Skyfather saw fit to grant them speech again.

+

“Xorai Tsetgerel,” said a rough voice behind her.

+

She whirled. One of the finalists stood staring at her—Yarsav, the adopted son of the Daarin’s Shamaness. He was a tsagashür, a white-devil. It was said his mother had lain with a demon. Unlike the steppe-people, he was not tan but unnaturally pale, the exact shade of noon-time snow. His face was cut like an iceberg, his eyes an icy blue, his braids stark white against his black silk tunic.

+

“Xorai Tsetgerel,” he said again, tasting her name between his teeth. “Where is your strength?”

+

She laughed. The shamans said that those who were blessed with uncommon gifts, whether divine or demonic, had a seat of strength wherein they kept this power. “In my hair,” she said, tossing her forty braids at him as she turned back to saddle a khraal. “Where’s yours?”

+

Yarsav smiled, thin lips pulling back over too-sharp teeth. “In my mouth.” Then his hands flared white like miniature suns and he hurled the flames at her.

+

Either his aim was poor or he did not really seek to injure; the suns flew wide and exploded somewhere beyond the camp. The crowd surged around them, gasping. Yarsav charged toward her. His strong arms locked around her neck, but she pushed him back, back, their feet kicking up sand. She drove one foot behind his leg and was about to knock him over when she hissed and recoiled, pain searing her arms. His skin was smouldering, sparks of blue crackling over where she’d touched him.

+

“Shüraagdzen,” she spat. Demon-curse—his power an unholy thing.

+

She darted left, right, glimpsed the flash of a blade and swooped low. There was a shearing sound. She grabbed the sides of his tunic and slammed him to the ground. The crowd cheered; she had won.

+

When she stood, her hair was loose over her shoulders, half her braids in his hands.

+

Xorai Tsetgerel laughed long and loud.

+

“I lied,” she said to Yarsav. “My strength is in my hands.”

+

Yarsav watched her as she strode away, his eyes hard and cold as frostbite.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he people muttered fearfully. Yarsav had used demonic power. He was shüraagdzen, bound to bring doom to them all. The Daarin should never have taken in a white-devil.

+

A group of Khavsar men gathered to rail at the Daarin. Yarsav had fought dishonourably; his horde must make up for this slight. The Daarin warriors bristled. If Yarsav’s power was unnatural, then so was Xorai’s strength. The match was fair, they claimed.

+

Xorai decided not to care. In a match, the ring provided a false sense of security. In life, the only rule was survival.

+

She mounted a khraal and galloped off, tearing over the plain with loose bridle, easy seat, corded whip in hand. On the horizon, the setting sun gilt the summer fields in gold, and the peaks of the Seven Kings blazed red in its light. The wind flung her hair back, so much lighter without her braids. As the familiar exhilaration flooded her veins, she was filled with a desire to ride forever.

+

She thought of her father having to mediate between the hordes, and did not envy him. She had fought in battles and liked it; the burst of victory in her mouth, and her father’s pride and praise. But she had also seen her father slay her uncle’s entire family when he’d rebelled. The executioner had snapped her uncle’s back while she held her cousin’s hand. The boy had been too young, too brave, too much his father’s son. He’d rounded on the Jaqhar: I will kill you! I will kill you! She remembered her aunt, panic-stricken as she clamped a hand over her son’s mouth; the Jaqhar’s face grimly resolute as he marched forward and twisted first the boy’s neck, then his mother’s.

+

She did not blame her father. The message had to be sent. But she dreaded the day she would face such a choice.

+

Whom will you defend, and whom will you kill?

+

What was the cost of the freedom to choose?

+

She cracked her whip harder, felt the wind almost lift her off her seat, her body low and leaning forward, soaring.

+

A soft pounding sounded behind her. She glanced back to see Araban, a bastard-child of the Daarin horde, riding toward her. Xorai scowled, driving her khraal forward, but to her surprise he kept gaining on her.

+

“What do you want?” she yelled, as he came abreast.

+

For the past two days he had been challenging her to a duel. She had declined at first, but when he’d insisted, she’d knocked him over with the ease of a finger-flick. Still he was undeterred. He grinned. “Another match!”

+

Xorai sped up. But when he outpaced her, she yanked her khraal to an abrupt halt. “I won’t marry you,” she snapped.

+

“Fine. Just fight me.”

+

“Do you like being flung about?”

+

“Only if you’re doing the flinging.”

+

“I came here to be alone,” said Xorai coldly.

+

Araban sighed. “Actually, I came to apologise.” He swung himself off his khraal and gave a deep bow. “I am sorry for my brother’s misdemeanour. Yarsav is… unusual. Please do not hold it against the Daarin.”

+

Xorai eyed him warily. “You are loyal.”

+

“My horde is not kind to children of adulterers. Yarsav and I are alike, in this way. Before he grew into his power, he was often bullied.”

+

“Does he not have the Shamaness’ protection?” According to the laws of the steppe, adulteresses were stoned or cast out of their horde, but children were innocent. The children of adulteresses were usually allowed to stay if another woman agreed to take them.

+

“He is a demon-child. He will always be feared, and thus he always seeks power. He chases power as a refuge, but it only makes people fear him more.” Araban shrugged. “Nevertheless, he is Daarin. He and I are of one womb, one blood.”

+

Xorai looked at him with a flicker of new respect.

+

“One match,” she said, swinging herself off her khraal.

+

Araban smiled, dropping to a crouch. “How about two?”

+

“You test my patience.”

+

He launched himself at her. She recognised the move—she had used it against him the first time they’d wrestled. She deflected; he gripped her back with one hand and her elbow with another. She let him hang there for a while, let him test his strength against hers, before sweeping him to the ground.

+

He grinned and hopped up, drawing a scimitar from his belt. The curved blade glinted like a crescent moon. Xorai raised her eyebrow and drew hers, too. He lunged, she parried, and less than a minute later his sword was flying through the air.

+

“Will you teach me?” said Araban, sprawled on the ground and panting.

+

He looked skinny, underfed. Xorai knew how cruel people could be, even within the same clan. One needs friends to survive.

+

She offered him a hand.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he top three contestants fought Xorai the next day, and none lasted more than two minutes. Finally, the Jaqhar held his daughter’s hand and raised her arm. “My daughter remains undefeated!” he declared. Only Xorai knew him well enough to hear the smugness in his voice.

+

The rules should be changed, the hordes complained. Let Xorai pick the best fighter among them all, whether or not he could defeat her. Or let Xorai fight Yarsav again.

+

“You’re popular,” Araban teased. “Strong wives beget strong children.”

+

Xorai shut him up with a punch that made him double over. She winced; she hadn’t intended to hit him that hard.

+

“Most of these men are from the northern hordes,” she noted. “They want to cement an alliance against the south.”

+

“You’re also beautiful,” said Araban. Xorai smiled. “Your company has made me the envy of all the men.”

+

“Hone your blade, Araban, not your tongue.”

+

“Why not both?” This time, he danced out of the way of Xorai’s fist.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +raban was a fast learner, and Xorai found that she liked teaching. It was a different sort of challenge. They met often over the summer, Xorai bursting with pride when she saw Araban’s chest and arms lean out, his grip strengthening, his footwork acquiring a serpent’s grace. It was her grace, her moves, but he also added something of himself in it.

+

Then came autumn, and the Daarin and Khavsar had to part. The Daarin would be taking their herds south. Xorai and Araban agreed to meet at the foot of Blacktooth Mountain the following summer, when they would both take part in the next Anulakh.

+

“Be my blood-brother,” Araban said, the day before he left. Xorai saw resilience in his gaze, an iron will. She felt kindness in his calloused hand.

+

“Sister,” she corrected.

+

So it was that Xorai Tsetgerel and Araban the Bastard raised their swords together beneath the Boundless Blue, and by the mingling of their blood in the womb of Earthmother, swore that for as long as they lived their hands and hearts would belong unfailingly to each other.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he following summer, the youths of the Khavsar and Daarin hordes rode to the Seven Kings, the craggy mountains that bordered the northern steppe where the khraal liked to nest. They journeyed on trained khraal of breeding age, meant to be released back into the wild once they had kidnapped a younger one.

+

The boys, if they returned, would be recognised as men. The girls kept pace with them, shrieking with excitement. At sundown they would return to their camps while the boys continued.

+

Araban waved when he saw Xorai streaking toward him on her khraal, and Xorai cried his name, forgetting herself in her joy. They clasped each other’s arms, grinning. Araban had grown over the winter, and was lankier now than ever, though his limbs were no longer soft as a fawn’s. Xorai punched him in the stomach, and found to her surprise that it was hard. “You’ve been practising,” she said with satisfaction, laughing as he doubled over with a grunt.

+

“Still as feisty as ever, Elder Sister. Have you caught yourself a husband yet?”

+

Xorai pulled a face and exaggerated a sigh. “Ah, woe is me! The warrior-princess doomed to a life without love! Only remember me when I die, Araban!”

+

Thus they bantered up the rugged scrubland, brimming with the sure-footed confidence of youth. They travelled at a leisurely pace, keen-eyed Araban leading the way. He spotted signs Xorai would never have: broken twigs, misshapen ferns, a downy feather caught on a thorn. Occasionally he would dismount to peer at something in the underbrush, or cock his head and listen. He noted the alarm calls of birds and foxes, the bounding gait of gazelles.

+

Just before dawn they saw them: a mother with two young. Xorai would not have noticed them if the smallest had not moved, flicking its long tail as it darted behind a bush. They were camouflaged by the grey-browns of their scaly armour.

+

“Beautiful, aren’t they,” Araban murmured. “Look at them play.”

+

The smallest of the khraal—a male, judging from its thicker, golden-brown crest—pounced on its sister and growled. The larger female whipped round, snarling. It clamped its jaws over its brother’s neck, and tossed it casually aside. The poor male landed in a cloud of sand, blinked, then sheepishly scrambled to its feet and ran up beside his sister, head bowed.

+

“A sign of submission,” Araban whispered. “Moving downwind, head lowered.”

+

Xorai watched in fascination. The khraal at home never behaved like that.

+

Araban beckoned. They crept closer, lying low an outcrop of rock. Araban raised a finger to his lips.

+

The mother lifted her head and sniffed the air. They would have to separate her from her young. Xorai tapped her chest and pointed to the mother; she would handle her, while Araban captured the younglings. Xorai and Araban placed a hand on their khraals’ necks, and their mounts dropped to a crouch.

+

At Xorai’s signal they exploded from the brush, ululating. The wild khraal bolted, hemmed in by Xorai on the left and Araban on the right. Lassos swung, and Xorai laughed as she gained on the smallest khraal, then overtook it—she would leave that for Araban. She was neck-and-neck now with the mother and she could almost taste its panic, hear its fury in the thunder of talons on the ground.

+

With a powerful leap sideways Xorai landed on its back, her own khraal falling behind.

+

The mother raced downhill, roaring with rage, zigzagging and bucking while Xorai bared her teeth and whooped, clinging on to the khraal’s neck with arms of iron. Down came her whip on the khraal’s flank, and the khraal shrieked in pain and terror. The khraal slammed itself against boulders to throw off its captor, but woman and beast were locked in a dead knot, a blur of skin and scales crashing through briars and tumbling down ridges, each testing the other’s strength to her limit.

+

For a day and a night Xorai clung on, her grip never slackening.

+

At last, halfway down the mountain where the scrub opened into rolling grassland, the khraal faltered. A stream trickled nearby, and it tottered towards the water. Its chest heaved, its mouth foamed; it panted with thirst. Xorai slipped a bridle onto its head, and tugged the reins. A moan sounded deep in its throat, but it halted, obedient. Only when Xorai felt no resistance did she let it drink. As it crouched by the bank, its amber eyes were bleak with sorrow.

+

The thudding of khraal feet made Xorai spin around. There was no mistaking that hair, streaming white under the pre-dawn moon—Yarsav. But what was that dark bundle flopping over the saddle in front of him? Xorai frowned.

+

“An exchange, Xorai!” Yarsav bellowed, bone-white face stretched into a terrible grin. “Your strength for your blood-brother’s life!”

+

Yarsav tossed the flopping heap onto the grass. Araban landed with a yell and twisted himself around, eyes wide with panic. His hands and feet were bound, his forehead bruised and bleeding. Xorai rushed forward, but at a gesture from Yarsav a ring of blue fire shot up around her brother and a wave of heat blasted into her face.

+

So Yarsav needed his hands to call up power. If Xorai kept them occupied, she would stand a fighting chance. She catapulted towards Yarsav, then they were a flurry of earth-juddering blows and blue-white sparks. Steel clashed with steel as they chased each other across the highland plains, two silhouettes whirling in a furious dance against a magenta sky.

+

“The truth, Xorai!” Yarsav thundered. “Where is your strength?”

+

Xorai gave a harsh bark of laughter. “I told you—it’s in my hand!”

+

His voice was the howling of the wind. “Which hand?”

+

“The one that fights! The one that will be your death!”

+

She stuck to him like yak grease, never letting the gap between them widen, giving him no time to think, no chance to summon his demon-fire. Whenever his skin crackled she would rear back and lunge again; he could not hold the heat for long.

+

“I will defeat you,” he hissed, his eyes spitting blue flame as their swords met with a resounding clang, “and win your hand by right.”

+

The sun rose over the mountains, just as Yarsav’s sabre blazed white. For a fraction of a second Xorai paused, blinded. She heard a whump.

+

When she could see again her sword was on the ground and her hand was in Yarsav’s, sliced off at the wrist—bloodless, smoking, the flesh instantly cauterised.

+

She screamed. And as Yarsav was about to sink his teeth into her severed hand her scream turned to mad laughter, and through a haze of fury and defiance she shrieked, “I lied! You took the wrong hand!” And she hurled herself at him.

+

With a snarl of frustration and disgust, Yarsav raised his arms to meet her. Xorai’s sword crashed down, and her stolen hand flew through the air like a frightened sparrow.

+

The khraal opened wide its mouth. With three young to feed, she had not eaten in days. Her teeth snapped shut, and Xorai’s hand disappeared down her gullet without so much as a flutter.

+

Xorai gave a cry of anguish and then she was on Yarsav again, their blows raining on each other as they vaulted over birch and boulder, sweat drenching their tunics as the sun reached its zenith in the sky.

+

Xorai’s hand, it seemed, had given the khraal a taste for human flesh. The beast charged after them, the light back in its amber eyes. As Xorai slung her left fist at Yarsav’s cheek and Yarsav blocked and dodged, the khraal’s hefty hind legs bunched and sprang. Her talons swiped down and dug into his chest; her jaws crunched down on his jugular and she tore out a bloody chunk, lines of drool and red tissue running thick between her teeth.

+

Thus Yarsav met the Skyfather, childless and unwed, while the Earthmother drank deep.

+

Xorai stood, chest heaving. The brothers of the Daarin lay prone on the ground, one dead before her, one behind. The khraal had never been tamed; she had only pretended to submit. She stood with one talon on Yarsav’s corpse and turned toward Xorai, fiery eyes narrowed.

+

Xorai heard Araban shift behind her, and his soft, quivering rasp, “Don’t move.”

+

Fear thrummed a heavy rhythm in Xorai’s chest. The khraal’s glare was bitter and terrible, but Xorai’s was as fierce. “You destroyed my hand,” she said to the beast. “I would have destroyed your life, but you saved mine.” She lowered her head, took a few steps back and to the right, and slowly moved forward again toward the khraal, back facing the wind.

+

The khraal’s tongue flicked out, two thick tines tasting the air. Her snout was spattered with gore. Xorai smelled the sharp, iron tang of blood on the khraal’s breath. The long tongue whisked out again, dripping red, brushing Xorai’s temple like a feather.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + strange doubling of perspective occurred, one layered on another. It was as if Xorai tasted the world as a khraal, yet she was also herself. All its ancient, instinctive knowledge was hers, written in blood and bone and passed on from mother to egg to hatchling. The wind spoke to her with a universe of smells: the scent of dry grass on her tongue, the wet earth of a riverbank miles away, the musk of small burrowing animals on the roof of her mouth. Colours sharpened into shades she had never seen before. The khraal before her was magnified, and far away she could see an ant crawling up a blade of grass, and a glowing smear on the ground which she knew was a rodent’s urine trail.

+

The khraal’s eye was a golden furnace, unnervingly large and near. Xorai saw herself reflected in its black slitted pupil, a tiny figure that brought to mind both fear and an old familiar comfort.

+

As a khraal she had hunted with men, sharing her kill with the humans who had loved her. She felt the happy sensation of a full belly and the temporary safety of a human camp, where humans made fire that frightened away larger predators. Their guards patrolled the site for werewolf-packs, and every day the women fed fat meat to her children and gave them bones to gnaw.

+

Her precious, fragile children, yielding to the sting of whips, the humans’ demand for more control. She ripped open a man’s neck, did not care that he was not full-grown. They were tearing her children from her and she was mad with rage. They were breaking her children, teaching them all the wrong things, and she did not understand why. Why they now had to work for their food, why they could no longer hunt whenever and wherever they liked, why they had to run after cattle and hunt other humans. Seasons later, when her children returned, they were no longer recognisable. She had to teach them, slowly, how to be khraal again. To be the wind and caprice, the lightning in the sky and the thunder on the plain, instead of smooth, flat pebbles worn down by the stream.

+

Eventually her children found mates and lay hatchlings of their own, and she taught them all to fear the humans, those sly duplicitous creatures with their treats in one hand and their whip in another. It took time, to learn how to be khraal. It was not only about eating and hunting and mating. Did the humans think they were just borrowing a few years of the khraal’s lives? These years were not theirs to borrow.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +ll this flashed across Xorai’s mind in an instant, a momentary blending of consciousness before she was herself again, leaving only an impression of salt on a forked tongue. Xorai realised her cheeks were wet.

+

“Go,” she told the khraal. “When I am Jaqhari, you and your kind need no longer serve.”

+

She did not know if the khraal understood. Xorai wanted to ask her for her name, but sensed she would not be able to use it. It was a scent, a subtle tinting of the air that no human nose could discern. It was a cry no human throat could make.

+

The khraal snorted. Her mouth yawned wide to reveal jagged rows of teeth, and her bloody breath gusted warm on Xorai’s neck. Every muscle in Xorai screamed at her to run, but she held herself still. Then the khraal turned, and Xorai felt the rush of air from her tail as she took off.

+

Xorai squinted into the blinding sun, watching the fading outline of a creature she almost understood. There was a feeling in her chest threatening to explode—awe, perhaps, but also a wrenching sense of loss.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Y + +arsav’s flames had died with him, and now a ring of charred earth scarred the land. Xorai sliced the ropes holding Araban and helped him up.

+

“I owe you my life,” he said, taking her hand. He stared at the stump where her other hand used to be, and his lip trembled, his eyes darkening with grief.

+

Xorai shook her head. “You are my blood; your life is mine.”

+

They took Yarsav’s khraal and set off at a slow lope, each deep in thought. Araban held the reins. Xorai slumped, exhausted, in front of him, nestled in his arms.

+

“The people of the steppes have always had khraal,” said Araban quietly. “Without them, we cannot survive.”

+

“In the past, we did.”

+

“In the past, other hordes did not use khraal as they do now. The Khavsar will be nothing without khraal. Your horde will be devoured by others. You will be devoured by your horde, who will not accept you as Jaqhari. You need the khraal.”

+

“Brother,” said Xorai. “Will you stand with or against me?”

+

“I will be your right hand, Elder Sister. Always.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he wind moaned across the shrubland, bringing triumphant ululations to their ears. They proceeded warily, the khraal creeping up behind a slope.

+

“The Aangut,” Araban whispered.

+

In the distance a gang of masked riders galloped in a circle, surrounding a group of people huddled on the ground. One of their headscarves fell, revealing a long braid of snow-white hair.

+

“Tsagashür,” said Xorai, her voice hardening.

+

“Perhaps there are more like Yarsav,” said Araban with wonder. “Perhaps these are his people, travelling from behind the mountains.” Then he stiffened. “Children.”

+

Xorai blinked. Araban was right; his sharp eyes had spotted a toddler and an infant, hidden under their mother’s cloak. Beside them a man lay, bright blood soaking the ground.

+

Xorai snatched the reins and was about to urge the khraal forward when Araban grabbed her one hand. “It could be a trap.”

+

Yarsav’s face loomed in her mind. Who knew what that demon was capable of, even in death? Then the baby’s wail cut through the air like a fraying thread, and Xorai did not hesitate.

+

The khraal sprang forward and they moved as one; Araban drew his bow and Xorai her scimitar. Two men fell forward on their khraal, Araban’s arrows sticking out of their backs. Xorai’s blade flashed faster than the eye could see, deflecting the rain of arrows that the men threw back at them. Steel met steel again in a wash of blood.

+

Araban guarded their right flank, Xorai their left. But there were twelve men against them and Xorai and Araban were weary. Araban could only hold them off for so long with bow and arrow, and when they neared he fumbled with his sword. And though Xorai’s left arm still had the strength of three men it felt clumsy to her, slow and inflexible. She cut down mask after painted mask, each with an expression more dreadful than the last. Yet they kept coming.

+

Bushy brows and yellow fangs. Hollow eyes and gaping maws.

+

Her body screamed with pain and fatigue.

+

Her arm flagged. She hissed as an arrow stabbed her side. Then an echo of a smell came on the wind, and the soft pounding of taloned feet. And Xorai laughed, for she knew her friends had come.

+

They leapt into the fray, the khraal who had eaten her hand charging forward with an army of wild khraal. Claws tore into flesh. Teeth sank into necks. The Aangut’s khraal roared, milling in confusion.

+

In their exchange, perhaps the khraal had taken more from Xorai than she’d realised, become a bit more human just as Xorai had become a bit more khraal. The khraal seemed to speak to one another now, more clearly than before—or maybe she was just noticing them more. To Xorai, watching them as she fought on, the wild khraal spoke to the trained ones in their mysterious way, through body and wind. For suddenly the latter went mad, bucking and twisting, and the moment their wild peers pulled the Aangut off their saddles, the once-disciplined steeds turned on their masters and ripped out their throats. Blood and sinew flew in crimson sprays.

+

Only one khraal remained loyal, biting at the other khraal and hurling them aside in defence of his master. Or perhaps his master was defending him, shooting arrow after arrow despite his bleeding arm. Some lodged fatally in a khraal’s eye or mouth; most bounced harmlessly off the khraal’s rugged scales.

+

Two khraal pounced. The Aangut screamed as talons lacerated his shoulder. He swung his scimitar. One khraal slid off, but his mount toppled as teeth pierced her neck, dying red the feathers on her back. Xorai expected the man to run—anyone would—but with a roar he hacked at his assailant, covering his khraal’s wounds with his hands in a bid to staunch the bleeding, his body a fragile shield over hers.

+

It was no good. Another two khraal attacked, and the man collapsed over his steed, their blood mingling in a pool that soaked the earth.

+

Xorai closed her eyes. Around her the clash and clamour of battle had been replaced by the quieter sounds of gnawing and tearing flesh. A scent came from upwind—imperceptible to her human nose, but Xorai felt it nonetheless in a gentle tug of the spirit. She dismounted, bowing to greet the khraal who had saved her life yet again.

+

In the khraal’s blazing eyes Xorai saw herself, wrought small in the black slits of her pupils. As she moved downwind with her, Xorai reached out a hand to touch her neck, and the khraal blinked once, slowly.

+

“Xorai Jaqhari,” said Araban, with awe and a hint of fear. “Queen of the khraal.”

+

“No,” Xorai murmured. “Just a hand of the khraal.”

+

But as her shoulder touched the khraal’s and she breathed in the creature’s scent, something like dry grass and the rust of blood, Xorai felt it keenly in her heart—not so much words as an impression, as clear as if the khraal had spoken:

+

Xorai Tsetgerel, friend of the khraal.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hus Xorai returned home with not one but twelve khraal, one of which carried three tsagashür, much to the consternation of her horde. Her father ran up to embrace her, and the Shamaness cried out in concern when she saw Xorai’s missing hand.

+

Xorai knelt before the Jaqhar. “Father,” she said, “let the khraal go.”

+

Tsetgerel stared at her for a long moment. “I would give you anything under the sky, daughter, but I cannot give you this.”

+

“Think, girl,” the Shamaness pled. “How can you ask this of your father? The horde will revolt. Without the khraal, do you think the Khavsar can survive? The other hordes will waste no time in attacking.”

+

Xorai rose again. “The khraal will help us. As friends, not as slaves.”

+

“How can we trust them?” said the Jaqhar, and the khraal growled, stepping forward. Swords flashed out around the Jaqhar, his men braced to defend him with their lives. Xorai felt the khraal’s bloodlust as if it were her own.

+

Kill them. Lead the Khavsar. We will help you conquer the steppe.

+

Xorai frowned. No.

+

The silence was fraught with tension. Xorai stood with her friends on one side and her family on the other, and waited to see what the khraal would do.

+

They were her friends. They did not make her choose. One by one they stepped back, turning to lope back across the plain.

+

And Xorai wept, for the world had lost its simplicity. She could not ride forever, she realised. Sooner or later she would have to decide where to camp.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +ome say Xorai stayed to persuade her horde, to teach them about the khraal, but the Khavsar cast her out, for the way that she was proposing did not suit their needs. Others say Xorai did not return home at all, but lived wild in the mountains as one of the khraal. Still others say that one of the tsagashür she rescued was not a child but a charming young man, whom Xorai fell in love with and followed to distant lands.

+

Only a few storytellers know the truth, though all perhaps tell the truth in one form or other. What do I know? I’m just an old woman, peering dimly through history in search of some wisdom.

+

This is the truth I choose to tell: that Xorai took a few of the Khavsar with her and, with Araban as her right hand and the khraal as her friends, began her own horde together with the tsagashür. For these blue-eyed, white-haired folk were not demons, after all. They were people of the ice, refugees from the harsh land beyond the mountains. As ordinary as you and me, save for the occasional few who, like Yarsav and Xorai, were blessed with special strengths.

+

She named her horde the Khraalin’aizuud, meaning “friends of the khraal,” and they roamed the Seven Kings, giving aid to any of the ice-people who stumbled through from time to time. Whether or to whom she gave her hand in marriage is, indeed, important, but inconsequential to this tale; for she loved generously and was loved in turn, and she treated all her horde, man and beast, as her very own children.

+

As for where Xorai’s strength was, no one ever found out—except perhaps the khraal who ate her hand, who does not speak our language and would never tell, even if she could. Whenever Araban asked, Xorai would slip her hand in his and smile.

+

“I told you,” she would say, as the howling winds flung back her forty braids and the feathers in her hair. “My strength is in my hand.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Xorai’s Hand on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Celine Low

+

+ + Author image of Celine Low + + + Celine’s fiction is either published or forthcoming in Translunar Travellers’ Lounge, Wyldblood, and The Dread Machine, among other literary or genre magazines. Her latest short story won first prize for Fantasy in The Dark Sire 2022 Creative Awards, and her poetry has also appeared in various journals such as Beyond Words and Sky Island Journal. She is an editor for the S/F magazines Factor Four and On Spec, and holds an MA in English Literature. Currently nomadic, Celine divides her time between reading, writing, and ruminating with the street cows of India.

+

© Celine Low 2022 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: BlackDog1966 and aseay0.

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Mythaxis

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Summer 2022

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+ David Farrow +

Liminal Spaces

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+ + +

If you've had the pleasure of reading David Farrow's 'Neverglades' series, then you'll know he has an affinity for unreliable and ambiguous places, for injecting horror into the mundane world. Here we experience a dislocated life, slipping through the cracks towards whatever waits beyond — but then, maybe the best case scenario would be that life itself is but a transitional stage…

+ + + + Story image for Liminal Spaces by + + + +
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An Odd Recurring Dream

+ James Davidson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for An Odd Recurring Dream by + + + +

My first experience of being published was at the hands of Mythaxis' original editor, so it's always a pleasure when I find myself able to do the same for someone else. James Davidson's tale presents an intelligibly alien future society and leaves the exact nature of its protagonist carefully uncertain - but they are certainly a person of some kind, within certain constraints.

+ + + +
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Alonya and Ivan

+ Elana Gomel +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Alonya and Ivan by + + + +

Real-world conflict has always provided a rich vein to mine for fiction, though when the conflict is war there can be little doubt that those inspired would prefer not to be. Here, Ukraine-born Elana Gomel bends a striking East-European folktale into a timely parable of terrible loss and sacrifice. Content warning, for horror, familial violence, and sorrow.

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The Quartermaster Trial

+ Daniel Ausema +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Quartermaster Trial by + + + +

The first issue after the Great Mythaxis Facelift featured Daniel Ausema's first appearance here, with a not-exactly road-trip narrative whose heroine travelled a decaying multiverse at the whim of a reality-leaping conveyor belt. Now he returns us to those strange and unfamiliar environs… but with one familiar face at least.

+ + + +
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Jacob and the Wolf

+ Rina Song +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Jacob and the Wolf by + + + +

Sometimes a story disguises its message. Sometimes a story lets the startling reveal creep up slowly on you. Or, sometimes, a story just straight up announces 'This one is about turning into a werewolf, social commentary attached.' In this case at least, Rina Song is that kind of storyteller. Sometimes, honesty is the best policy…

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Where the Heart Is

+ Alexander Zalben +
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Regular Mythaxis readers will be long tired of the editor's observation about stories that seem to come in pairs, but I'm doing it again. Despite their differences, Alexander Zalben's tale feels like a thematic sibling to 'An Odd Recurring Dream' — despite their commonalities, they go in very different ways.

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Intercalary Time

+ Thorin N. Tatge +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Intercalary Time by + + + +

As stated, issues of Mythaxis tend to coalesce in interesting and unpredictable ways. Thorin N. Tatge's tale closes out this issue as the perfect counterpoint to our opener: how better to balance a creeping sense of alienation and the loss of self than with unmitigated exuberance and wholehearted companionship?

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Alonya and Ivan

+

Elana Gomel

+ +
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+ Story image for Alonya and Ivan by +
+ + + + +

M + +y mother, grandmother, and aunt died at dawn. My father was already dead, killed at the Battle of Tarasovka, so I did not have to worry about burying him. But Ivan and I tried to dig the graves for the rest of them. Ivan was only six, so the shovel was almost as tall as he was, and I had to grab the handles to prevent it from twisting and hitting him on the head. Finally, I had enough.

+

“Go and bring some flowers, Vanya,” I told him. “We will put them on the graves.”

+

The spring came early this year, and the white daffodils and purple dream-herb were already gone. But lilac was just beginning to bloom, and both my mother and her sister, Aunt Oksana, had loved its sweet smell and clusters of star-shaped flowers. I knew that Ivan knew it, and counted on him to go to our neighbors’ deserted garden where a mature lilac was just beginning to bloom. He would have to cross the burnt-out place where Pavlik’s house had stood, walking through the ashes.

+

When he disappeared behind the hedge, I quickly pulled the three bodies into the empty barn and latched the door. They were just as much at peace as they would be in a hole in the ground; and it would give Ivan and me time to flee. The call would be back.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen I woke up last night, Ivan was still huddled up under the blanket on the truckle-bed. Mama had told me he was growing up and that I should sleep with Aunt Oksana in the gornitza while she and Grandma shared the master bedroom, but I refused. I did not want to leave my baby brother alone at night. And as it turned out, I was right.

+

I heard it even before Mama burst through the door of the bedroom, towels wrapped around her head so it looked like a cabbage. A thin distant wailing, so monotonous it set my teeth on edge.

+

“To the cellar!” Mama screamed, shaking Ivan to wake him up.

+

I hated the cellar, with its sour smell of fermented cabbage and desiccated mice. Since electricity was gone, the cobwebbed bulb would be useless. But I got up and followed her as she carried Ivan down the stairs. He was already too heavy for her, but I knew she wanted to do it. She put him down, kissed him on the forehead, and turned to me.

+

“Take care of him,” she said, kissed me, and climbed up the ladder, pulling the heavy trapdoor down as she exited. The towels, unwound, fell down in her wake and lay on the floor like a shed snakeskin.

+

I shushed Ivan and sat by his side, holding his hand until he fell asleep again. I sat and waited for a long time until I decided the night was done, then I picked up Mama’s towels and made one of them into a bindle to hold important things, like some bread and sausage from the kitchen shelves. I did not know what time it was because all the clocks had stopped after the Oborotni came. Ivan did not even remember what clocks were for and thought the pot-bellied alarm painted with flowers on the dresser in the gornitza was an ornament. Our mother had tried to teach him letters and numbers from the same illustrated textbook I had used in first grade—when there was still school in the village—but he was not interested.

+

I added the book, tying it into the bindle. Even if my brother was resistant to learning, he liked the colorful pictures, with a red watermelon for A and a smiling cat for K.

+

I woke Ivan and we climbed up the ladder and raised the lid together. The sky outside was the color of the blue glass bottle my father had given me as a gift for my tenth birthday. I dropped it when I saw his death notice in the mail, and it shattered into sharp cutting fragments.

+

Mama, Grandma, and Aunt Oksana lay in the gornitza, before the red corner where the icons and the photographs of my father and grandfather in their uniforms were displayed. There was a lot of blood. My mother still clutched the kitchen knife which she had used to slit the throats of her mother and sister and then her own. I pried it out of her rigid fingers and washed it. I added it to the bindle.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +van came back staggering under the load of broken off lilac branches, his blond hair peppered with mauve and purple florets. He must have denuded all the lilacs in the Sadkos’ garden. I wanted to tell him off, but what did it matter? So, I directed him to dump the flowers on the shallow indentation under the apple tree which I had filled in while he was away.

+

“This is for Mama, Grandma and Auntie,” I said. From his sideways glance I knew that he realized the bodies were not here, but he said nothing. We stood by the flower heap in silence, and I tried to say a prayer to Mother of God. But though we had a couple of icons in the gornitza, our family were not religious, and after the Oborotni and my father’s death Mama refused to go to church, so I did not know any prayers by heart. And anyway, some people in the village had prayed a lot, and it did not help either.

+

I took Ivan’s hand and we walked out of the village and toward the woods. It was a clear day, and the houses were surrounded by billows of pink and white cherry blossoms. The red tiled roofs gleamed, and the golden dome of the church shone in the blue sky. Apart from a couple of houses burned down in the first wave of the invasion, when people thought you could hold off the Call with fire or noise, it all looked untouched and peaceful. I felt a little regret leaving the village behind, but after all there was nobody alive there anymore. Or at least, nobody human.

+

“Alyonushka?” Ivan asked, after we crossed the dusty pathway that skirted the village leading to the main road where empty cars were piled up. “Where are we going?”

+

“To the forest,” I said.

+

“Will we live there?”

+

“Yes. The Call will be muted by the trees. And there are partisans in the greenwood. They’ll take us in.”

+

He nodded, satisfied. I did not know that there were any partisans there—it may have been just a fairy tale—but if we stayed in the village, we would be dead for sure.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he Call did not work on children below puberty. It could give you a bad headache—a thin piercing wailing like the buzz of a giant mosquito—but that was all. This was why children were often used by the army to attack enemy encampments called ricks with homemade incendiary devices. Most did not come back, but some ricks were destroyed. I hoped that if we did find partisans in the forest, they might train me for such a mission before it was too late.

+

I was only eight when we first heard the Call, and Ivan was a toddler. My father, whose face had faded from my memory, supplanted by the sepia picture in the red corner, went outside to listen. I woke up too and heard my mother’s voice. “A siren? Air-raid?”

+

Even to me it did not sound like an air-raid: no rising and falling tones. It just went on and on, drilling into my temples. Ivan woke up and started crying.

+

And then we saw the people. We still had streetlights at the time, and the night was shot with a harsh mercury glare. On the street outside, a straggling column of men and women in their nightgowns and pajamas walked by our house. No kids. I recognized Aunt Zhanna and Uncle Mikhailo, Pavlik’s parents.

+

My father ran outside, and I saw him trying to talk with the people, shaking them by the shoulder as if trying to wake them up. But they were not sleepwalking; their eyes were open, and I saw Uncle Mikhailo, a burly guy who had the reputation of picking fights, slap my father’s hand off. The column rounded the corner of the street and disappeared.

+

After a while the annoying buzz stopped. At the time, we did not know that the Call worked on people at different rates. But eventually it would get you, no matter how you held out. My family held out longer than most.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +s Ivan and I followed a faint track that led deeper into the woods, I was thinking about the fact that I was twelve. My monthlies had not come yet, but they would soon. Mama had explained it all to me with the same clarity and precision she must have used in her former life as an administrator. Before the Oborotni, she had been the procurement officer for our village.

+

Oborotni liked open spaces—steppes, and cultivated fields, and town squares. Since communications across the Motherland had been interrupted when the Calls started sounding almost every night, we did not know what was happening in the Capital, but I hoped the Great Golden City still stood. The thick forests had always been seen as a possible shelter; thus came the rumors of the partisans hiding in the deepest greenwood as they had done so many times in the past. We had not seen any sign of a human habitation, but neither had we seen any sign of Oborotni.

+

The track petered out and Ivan and I found ourselves in a glade surrounded by larches and birch-trees. It was flooded with blue, covered by bluebells and forget-me-nots, so it looked like a lake. I saw Ivan smile and was grateful to the spring.

+

We sat down under a birch-tree whose sticky green leaves blazed in the sunlight like emeralds. I unwound my bindle and took out the food.

+

“Do you want to eat?” I asked my brother.

+

He nodded. He was gathering bluebells into an untidy bouquet. Ivan loved flowers and plants; Grandma called him “a gentle soul” and thought he would grow up to be a kobzar-player or a saint. I was the one getting into scuffles and leaving my friend Pavlik with a bloody nose. I regretted it on that day when Zhanna-turned-vixen went into her house and tore out her son’s throat with her sharp little teeth.

+

“Aren’t you hungry, Alyonushka?’ he asked, mouth full of bread and cured sausage.

+

I wasn’t, but to make him feel better I took a bite.

+

Ivan polished off his bread-and-sausage. “Water?” he asked.

+

My heart dropped. I had not thought of taking a water-flask with me. I did not know why; perhaps because it was cool in the morning; or because the streams of blood in the gornitza made my mind recoil from anything liquid. But here we were, in the woods, far from the village wells and water pumps, with nothing to drink. And the food was salty; I only had a tiny bit, and I was already growing thirsty.

+

I got up and took Ivan’s hand. “Let’s go,” I said. “We will find water soon.”

+

But we did not.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hat first night after we heard the Call, we just went back to sleep. Aunt Oksana did not live with us at the time because her husband, Uncle Volodymyr, was still alive, and so was my cousin Alicia. It was before her father killed her.

+

Next morning, the stragglers started to return.

+

I remembered seeing the first one. I was curious and slipped out of the house while Mama was cooking buckwheat for breakfast. Aunt Zhanna, Pavlik’s mother, was staggering down in the middle of the street as if drunk, which was not unheard of. I snickered.

+

And then I saw her face.

+

Under her pinned-up braids, her face was elongated and misshapen like a vixen’s snout, sprinkled with mangy reddish fur. Her eyes had migrated to the sides of her head. One was round and dull like a pebble, the second tiny and gimlet-like, glittering with anger. And yet, she was still, unmistakably, herself. It was not a vixen’s head on Aunt Zhanna’s shoulders. It was Aunt Zhanna kneaded and melded into a foxlike creature that opened its stinking mouth lined with needle teeth and yapped its rage at the world.

+

My father came out when I screamed, and other adults, those who had not been lured by the Call, did too. Zhanna-fox was tied up. But then more of the last night’s crop came back.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e went deeper and deeper into the woods. The green glow curdled into a sullen dusk. The trees changed from slender birches to stout oaks. New grass and budding flowers gave way to deadfall. And still, we saw no pool, pond, or creek.

+

Ivan was licking his lips repeatedly until I told him to stop. They were so chapped they were beginning to bleed. Wilted bluebells dropped out of his hand, marking our way. Their watery blue teased me with memories of rain. My own mouth felt furry and stale.

+

To distract Ivan, I suggested we sit down and rest. I took out the alphabet textbook and showed him the pictures.

+

“A,” I said, pointing to the watermelon. “Arbuz.”

+

“Water,” he whispered.

+

I told him to stay in place and I would scout around, looking for a creek or a marsh. The truth was, I just wanted to escape his pleading eyes. Take care of him, Mama had said.

+

I walked a little way into a thicket of gnarled pines, the ground covered with dry needles like an old woman’s hair. Grandma’s hair had been that color, dull silver.

+

The ground was sloping downward, and I followed the incline when suddenly I heard a loud rustling behind my back. I whirled around, my heart pounding—and confronted Ivan.

+

“Don’t want to stay alone,” he pouted, and I was so relieved I did not have the heart to chide him. We went on together.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he worst thing about Oborotni was that they sought no profit. Motherland had suffered enough invasions, wars, and conquests to make the list in my history textbook several pages long. But in every case, the invaders had some goal in mind: gold; slaves; land; glory. They could be negotiated with, or suffered in silence until the people gathered enough strength to rebel. But whatever the Oborotni were, wherever they came from, all they wanted was degradation and death. Towns overrun by animals pretending to be human and humans degraded into animals. They killed our people and turned the rest into mindless chunks of meat inside their churning bodies.

+

We knew what they looked like because we saw them later, striding across our land as if it belonged to them. I saw one myself. A thing as tall as the tallest apartment building in the market-town and so heavy the earth shook under its tread. You could still see the seams in its wormy flesh where all the people who went into its making were joined together, braided, and stitched into an approximation of an obese giant. And its head was made of the kaleidoscope of distorted animal faces, rotating in and out of the blackness at the core of it. Its shovel-like hand reached down and swiped the thatched roof off a cottage, and each finger was a man, squirming and flapping the stumps of his torn-off arms.

+

I heard stories about ricks where Oborotni lay in untidy heaps of flesh, human and animal, blending and separating and blending even tighter, a hill of seething monstrosity. The army had tried to set fire to ricks, and some had burned. But you could not kill an Oboroten because it was one-in-many or maybe many-in-one, and one death was too little for it. And every night, a call was heard in every town, village, and city of our Motherland and more people left, to come back as beasts, or maybe not to come back at all.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t was getting chilly in this somber grove, but still we walked, until—as I shivered in the dank shade—I heard something. A tiny sloshing sound.

+

I ran, almost tripping on the arching roots, and stopped when I saw a dark gleam ahead.

+

It was a small black pond, hardly bigger than a puddle, but it seemed deep. Its placid surface was covered with twigs and pine-needles. I looked around for what made a sloshing sound—a branch falling in?—but could not see anything.

+

Ivan gave a triumphant shout when he saw the pond and rushed toward it. I grabbed his arm, putting my hand against his mouth. It was not only that I was wary of making noise in this hushed wood. There was something about the pond that gave me pause, even though my parched mouth was screaming for its cooling touch. Bidding Ivan to stand still, I approached the pond and examined the water-margins. There were no reeds, no algae, no water-bugs. It was as if all life avoided it. And yet the water under the twigs seemed to be crystal-clear.

+

And then I saw it. At first the pond had appeared to be round: just a deep waterhole. But now, from close up, I realized it was not. It was in the shape of a giant splayed foot, big enough for ten human soles to have been used in its making. An Oboroten had stomped deep into the sacred soil of Motherland, leaving its imprint behind.

+

I took a deep breath and looked at Ivan. “We can’t drink it,” I said. “It’s poison.”

+

I could not face the tears gathering in his eyes, crawling down his cheeks, stealing the precious moisture from his tiny body.

+

I turned away. Just for a moment, but it was all it took.

+

Ivan rushed past me, dropped to his knees, and lapped at the pond like an animal. And I thought, He is just a baby, years from puberty, he is safe… reassurance for a couple of heartbeats. But when my brother rose to his feet, water dripping off him, I knew any hope was futile.

+

His face was running down the armature of his bones like pancake batter, bubbling and viscous. His small frame was filling out in strange places, rising and falling in random bubbles of flesh. The shirt ripped and sloughed off as my brother’s smooth skin erupted in a sprinkling of unclean brown fur. His eyes sunk deep into the elongated, drooping muzzle that was forming out of the remnants of what used to be Ivan. Paws snagging on the sleeves our grandmother had lovingly cross-stitched with traditional black-and-red patterns. A little bearlike creature roared at me, the wet rag of its tongue hanging out from its maw where tiny milk teeth were being pushed out by the growing fangs. They rained upon the ground like pearls.

+

Without thought, almost without volition, I lunged at the Oboroten, my mother’s knife clutched in my hand.

+

He swiped at me, but he was still caught in transition, his claws soft and weak, a child’s fingers visible inside the bony sheaths. Our father had taught me how to kill a chicken when the food supplies started running low. One stroke under the bristly jaw, and it was done.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +van lay on the ground. The change had not reversed as he was dying. I searched the beastly muzzle for my brother’s face and was relieved to find little. He had only gurgled something; maybe it was my name.

+

I sat by him for a long time. I wanted to bury him, but there was no way I could do it. We had not buried our family; maybe this was the punishment. Or maybe it was as random as the Oborotni themselves: a mindless destruction sweeping our land. Because they wanted nothing from us but our deaths. They were not conquerors. They were beasts. And beasts need to be killed.

+

I dragged some branches over the body that was not my brother’s. And then I walked deeper into the green maw of the forests, in search of partisans.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Alyona and Ivan on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Elana Gomel

+

+ + Author image of Elana Gomel + + + Elana Gomel is an academic and an award-winning writer. Born in Ukraine, she has lived and taught in many countries, including the US, Israel, Italy, and Hong Kong. She is the author of six non-fiction books and numerous articles on subjects such as narrative theory, posthumanism, science fiction, and serial killers. As a fiction writer, she has published more than a hundred fantasy and science fiction stories, several novellas, and four novels. She is a member of HWA and can be found at www.citiesoflightanddarkness.com, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

+

© Elana Gomel 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created by incorporating detail from a Creative Commons image by qumono into an original image by lighthouse at depositphotos.com - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

An Odd Recurring Dream

+

James Davidson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for An Odd Recurring Dream by +
+ + + + +

I + +t’s a simple dream.

+

Not like the dream in Liminal Hour, Day 7, Month 13, New Lunar Year 431, in which a parade of Auditory Micro-Minders chirped the condensed itinerary for Pre-Work Hour to the tune of Fleckdot-33a-ks7 Doesn’t Quit for Uni-Programmed Alta-Womyn.

+

Simpler.

+

In this dream, Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water as the non-san-cleansed wind sweeps her hair into her face. She smiles, her hand moving to her forehead to brush the hair away.

+

That’s all.

+

On the fifth day of only this dream, my mood indicators are all a deep violet. Salisa, my modi-partner, asks me what is wrong.

+

“It’s this dream I’ve been having,” I say, and I tell her.

+

“I’m sorry,” she says, putting her hand on mine. She gives me her compassionate face. This usually makes me feel better.

+

“Would you like me to give you another dream?” she asks.

+

In the dream I am given ten neuro-graphic puzzles, each more challenging than the last. I solve them without pausing, and several thousand modis applaud me.

+

I wake up beside Salisa, and she gives me her pleased face. “Good morning, Altoni,” she says. “I’m glad you dreamed. It’s going to be a pleasurable day.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t seems she’s right. During Early Work Hour, I reorder Virtronic Algorithms that have become misaligned and am rewarded with a Pleasure Burst. I watch the Newstainment Feed during Mid-Early Rest Hour and receive my Vitafresh Snack, which I choose to take orally. It is Strawmelonfruit and is completely san-cleansed, with no aftertaste.

+

However, midway through Late Work Hour I stop all Work programming and return to Rest. By then my mood indicators are blue turning violet. Salisa enters the room and gives me her concerned face. “I’m sorry your Work wasn’t pleasurable,” she says. “Tomorrow’s Work itinerary will be adjusted more to your liking. May I help you refresh before Late Meal?”

+

After Late Meal Hour my mood indicators are all bright green, except one that’s still lingering blue. I listen to some Pre-Liminal Tunes and turn down early.

+

In the dream Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water, the wind sweeping her hair. There is something about her smile when she raises her hand. It puzzles me, and I wake.

+

Salisa asks about my dream. I tell her about Angyla and the smile. She gives me her compassionate face. “I’m sorry your dream was not pleasurable,” she says. “Would you like me to give you another?”

+

“No,” I say. “It’s fine.”

+

“This dream was to your liking?”

+

“No. Or maybe it was, I don’t know. There’s something about it I can’t figure out.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he next day Work is better. I reintegrate twelve Sensory Flash-Circuits and each time am rewarded with a Pleasure Burst.

+

When I return, Salisa gives me her pleased face. “I have made adjustments,” she says. “Tonight’s dream will be more to your liking.”

+

The dream has the hallmarks of Salisa’s best work. Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water, but this time the water is a pool in which newly hatched Orga-Freshlings swim in concentric circles while singing the Six Pleasure Principles to the tune of Sensi-Modis Are 97% Effective at Keeping Me in the Reds. There is no wind, but Fresh Bursts permeate the san-cleansed air. Angyla smiles at me, a wide smile that reveals two rows of symmetrical white teeth. Then she laughs, and immediately the Orga-Freshlings laugh with her. I laugh as well.

+

I wake up laughing, and Salisa is laughing too. “I’m glad you enjoyed your dream,” she says. She puts her hand on mine.

+

The next day I turn off Modi Support, so when I return from Work Salisa isn’t there. I eat Late Meal alone. Although I’m not tired, I enter Liminal two hours early.

+

I’m ready to dream. I want to.

+

Angyla-142-9nu stands by the water. The non-san-cleansed wind, its particles dashing in the broken light, sweeps her hair into her face. Her hair does not shine like Salisa’s. It tangles in the wind, and she raises her hand to move it, smiling as she does. Her smile does not give me pleasure. There’s no pleasure in it at all. I wake without Salisa, never having felt more alone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +’m at Rest in the morning when the Diagnostician arrives. His face appears on the Multicom, and a moment later he enters.

+

“Good morning, Altoni-837-kx4,” he says. “Modi Support requested Diagnostic on your modi-partner. She’s been down for over a day.”

+

“I know. I turned her off.”

+

“You did? But you didn’t call it in.”

+

“No.”

+

“That’s fine. I’ll get her back up. It’s probably the latest Empathy Patch. Some of the modis have been a little glitchy.”

+

He summons Salisa and puts her in Diagnostic. Then he links through her subcranial port. Her shoulders droop, her head tilting to the left. I receive my Vitafresh Snack and stare at them, the Diagnostician and Salisa, but after a while I get bored and watch the Newstainment Feed.

+

The Diagnostician announces that he’s done. I look up. “It wasn’t the Empathy Patch,” he says. “In fact, it wasn’t anything. Salisa’s in great shape. An excellent modi-partner.”

+

I do not feel surprised by this assessment.

+

“Are you doing all right?” he asks. “Most people call in right away.”

+

“I guess.”

+

“It says you’ve been having an odd dream. Just about every night, it says.”

+

“I wouldn’t call it exactly odd. Maybe a little unusual.”

+

He raises his head and looks at me. “Every night,” he says. “The same dream every night.” I wait for him to go on. “I think I’d better look,” he says. “If that’s all right with you.”

+

I shrug. Turning down Diagnostic will just get me flagged for Special Assessment, so I don’t resist this request.

+

The Diagnostician unlinks Salisa. After switching the input, he links through my subcranial port. As I enter Diagnostic, I feel myself relax.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +irst is the Baseline Diagnostic: Colors and shapes. Familiar sounds.

+

Then Images: What I had for Late Meal the last six nights. My completed Work, back to the last All Pleasure Day. Salisa’s standard faces: pleased, submissive, compassionate, concerned, reassuring.

+

Then Learned Response, beginning with the Six Pleasure Principles. Then Work Skills. Then Tunes, aligned to the Four Escalating States of Sensation.

+

Then Dreams. The Diagnostic is extensive, summoning every dream Salisa has created for me. My earliest dreams, just after Integration, followed by thousands more. What in Liminal would take weeks is complete in a couple of hours. Lastly the laughing Orga-Freshlings. All dreams represented.

+

All but one.

+

After that a gray screen, then the images become sporadic. Dimmer. The interludes between them punctuated by jarring noise. Buzzing and scraping and crashing. Occasionally a bright light followed by grayness. Then an image of an animal in flight. A bird? I feel myself growing colder.

+

Then a sudden pain in my head, quickly replaced by a Pleasure Burst. The pain again, more intense this time. Then another Pleasure Burst, and another. They keep coming.

+

I feel myself slipping into grayness.

+

Then a flash, and she is there. Angyla-142-9nu. And I am there too, standing by the water.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + feel the wind passing on my skin. Cold like it never is anymore. I shiver, my shoulders drawn in.

+

Angyla’s talking. I listen to her voice. She’s talking about the next day, when she has her Integration. My Integration is scheduled one week later. “I know it will be wonderful, Altoni,” she says. “I know you have nothing to fear.” She gives me her face, but I don’t know anymore what face it is. And then the wind sweeps her hair and she smiles. Her hand moving to her forehead, to brush the hair away.

+

But it’s not a smile exactly. The corners of her mouth turned up, but in her eyes another look. A different look. And I feel it, like a hard ache in my stomach. I know it’s not a smile at all.

+

And I start to cry. Not there, standing by the water, but here. I cry and cry.

+

Then Angyla dissolves in the brightest flash, and pain rips through my head. I shudder and drop into grayness.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +wake coming off a Pleasure Burst, and the Diagnostician is there by my bed. A modi-nurse is also in the room, and together they look down at me. The Diagnostician looks pale and worried, but the modi gives me a reassuring face. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

+

The Diagnostician looks relieved. He doesn’t stay long after the modi-nurse departs. “It won’t bother you anymore,” he says. “I’ve never seen a dream so deep!”

+

“What dream?” I ask him, but already he’s gone.

+

That night, I dream I’m at the Pleasure Feast, surrounded by the most beautiful sensi-modis. In the morning when I wake, Salisa is smiling at me.

+

“Good morning, Altoni,” she says. “It’s going to be a pleasurable day.”

+

“Yes,” I say, accepting her hand. “I believe it is.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of An Odd Recurring Dream on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

James Davidson

+

+ + Author image of James Davidson + + + James Davidson lives in Alpine, Utah. In addition to writing speculative fiction, he enjoys the outdoors and spending time with his family and his golden retriever, Troubadour. He is very bad at running, although he persists in doing it anyway. As an attorney he has written countless contracts, but this is his first published story. You can find him on Twitter as @JamesDavidsonSF and at his website, www.jamesdavidsonauthor.com.

+

© James Davidson 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using multiple Creative Commons images by merlinlightpainting - many thanks for each and every one!

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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+ + + +

Welcome to the Summer, and another seven stories from authors both new and familiar to the pages of Mythaxis! This issue has pieces dark and light, with science fiction, fantasy, and horror all represented. But I always prefer to let the fictions we offer here speak for themselves—so, similar to my editorial of last Autumn, I’m going to take this opportunity to discuss some highlights of my genre reading in the first half of 2022.

+

I started the year with Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited follow-up to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, which was one of my favourite reads of 2021. I found this a strikingly visual experience, conjuring up a vividly unreal world of interconnected high-ceilinged rooms reminiscent of an ancient museum falling into decay, and into an ocean. It is principally occupied by a personality at first unaware of the strangeness he lives in, until hints of a wider context begin to invade his consciousness, and I was reminded of Iain Bank’s The Bridge (although it is more than twenty-five years since I read that, so to what extent they can truly be compared is maybe up for debate).

+

After Piranesi I dived into Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees—which I was actually nudged towards by comparisons with JS&MN—a quaint, charming, slightly insidious pastoral fantasy written in 1926. Set in a country bordering on the faerie realm, whose inhabitants have determinedly turned their backs on all that is irrational, an apparent black market in prohibited fairy fruit provokes a variety of challenges to the staid status quo of the capital city’s upper crust, escalating to traditional fae threats such as the spiriting away of tempted children. The focus is almost exclusively upon the ordinary humans folks, and I was particularly struck by how expectations about which characters are “good” or “bad” was subverted as the story progressed. It’s a really fun read.

+

Another novel I’ve had my eye on for a while finally had its chance: Naomi Alderman’s The Power, which I remember receiving all sorts of plaudits when it was published but somehow never got around to. It is an imagined historical novel, written in a distant future to describe a controversial theory of the past (roughly our present) in which women begin to manifest a potentially deadly electrical change at will, with the effect that global society is radically undermined and realigned towards a matriachy—a matriarchy still persisting thousands of years later in the world of “the author”, a man whose beliefs about his culture’s origins aren’t taken seriously, possibly because of his gonads. The obvious (and acknowledged) comparison is to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and it’s similarly strong throughout, taking some chillingly dark and thought-provoking turns. Absolute power…

+

Next, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a utopian-leaning cli-fi novel which begins just a few years from now, as human-driven climate change wreaks a momentary disaster so shocking as to stir the world’s nations from their complacency and come together to finally act… or so you’d think. What actually happens is the creation of the titular well-intentioned but toothless UN organisation, to which wealthy nations pay mere lip-service, and which poor and suffering nations see as an irrelevance in the face of their doom, and the novel then spans decades as the Ministry gradually grows into significance and pushes for genuine solutions. More conventionally plot-focused chapters share page time with various other styles of text, including numerous unattributed monologues (occasionally by whimsical “speakers” such as a single carbon atom—not all of the book worked for me, tbh). It may re-tread elements of KSR’s previous climate-focused work, but overall it remains a very stimulating piece of “hard” sf, and obviously very relevant given the ongoing environmental crisis.

+

Finally, to wrap up the first half of my genre reading this year I’ll mention ten other books I’ve read (!), starting with a half-digression. I was slow to embrace the TV series of The Expanse when it first came out, but eventually I was thoroughly won over, and when the sixth (and likely final) season came to its end I decided I’d give a try to dual-author James S. A. Corey’s source material. In the following five months, I’ve now read all nine novels and the collected short stories and novellas, excepting only a single canon text, the short-short story The Last Flight of the Cassandra (which is not available outside of an RPG, apparently).

+

As you might guess, given that I persisted all the way, I liked the written versions of The Expanse as well. What I found interesting about the comparative experiences of reading and watching is two-fold. First, that the televised interpretation of the world of the story is, on a technical level, really impressive. There are some elements abandoned—the absence of black-goop-vomitting protomolecule zombies was a relief for me, there are enough literal zombie shows out there that this needn’t be another; and examples of the physiological changes caused by lives led in low- or zero-gravity only show up in the first couple of episodes, with Naomi Nagata in particular conspicuously not a foot or more taller than any of the other lead characters—but generally it offered a brilliantly realised science fictional world.

+

And narrative loyalty was the second thing that caught my interest. While there are also some deviations on this count, I was repeatedly delighted when reading and finding that some line of dialogue from the series had actually leapt from the page (including my favourite: “That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?”). The authors were involved in the production of the show, but that can often be as much a burden as a bonus when adapting material from one medium to another; no so here, with the books largely proving a blueprint that was followed remarkably closely. Reading the final tenth book, the collected shorter fiction, filled in a few gaps that I’d assumed were actual moments of originality in the TV show, but none of this is to take anything away from what the series achieved, and when it did go its own way, I have to say, it did so really well (the coalescence and development of Camina Drummer, for example).

+

Of course, the books carry the story further than the show did. My feeling regarding the latter three novels is that they aren’t as strong as what came before, even though I found the totality of the novels of The Expanse to deliver a really entertaining space opera. And as for how the show ended… well, I would happily watch more were it to continue, but even though the final series was rushed and crushed to fit into fewer episodes, I consider it far superior to any of the more high profile franchise rivals that have come to the small screen in recent years (naming no names, because who needs a flame war?).

+

I’ve gone on more than long enough, I think! Still, six more months of reading time ahead of me in 2022… I wonder what I’ll have under my belt come the Winter?

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

+

ISSUE 30 - Thanks and Salutations! +Grateful thanks to our cover artist, RASR, for granting us the use of his image Fantastic Creatures. RASR is a Portuguese music producer and A(i)rtist whose main goal is to create music and artwork that can inspire other fellow artists to create their content. He’s on Deviant Art as RasrDraws and you can check out a variety of slideshows accompanied by his Low-Fi beats and other soundtracks on his Youtube channel. If you’d like to give him some support you can buy him a Ko-Fi, or find prints and assorted merch at the links.

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Mythaxis

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Summer 2022

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+ David Farrow +

Liminal Spaces

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+ + +

If you've had the pleasure of reading David Farrow's 'Neverglades' series, then you'll know he has an affinity for unreliable and ambiguous places, for injecting horror into the mundane world. Here we experience a dislocated life, slipping through the cracks towards whatever waits beyond — but then, maybe the best case scenario would be that life itself is but a transitional stage…

+ + + + Story image for Liminal Spaces by + + + +
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+

An Odd Recurring Dream

+ James Davidson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for An Odd Recurring Dream by + + + +

My first experience of being published was at the hands of Mythaxis' original editor, so it's always a pleasure when I find myself able to do the same for someone else. James Davidson's tale presents an intelligibly alien future society and leaves the exact nature of its protagonist carefully uncertain - but they are certainly a person of some kind, within certain constraints.

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+

Alonya and Ivan

+ Elana Gomel +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Alonya and Ivan by + + + +

Real-world conflict has always provided a rich vein to mine for fiction, though when the conflict is war there can be little doubt that those inspired would prefer not to be. Here, Ukraine-born Elana Gomel bends a striking East-European folktale into a timely parable of terrible loss and sacrifice. Content warning, for horror, familial violence, and sorrow.

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+ + + +
+
+

The Quartermaster Trial

+ Daniel Ausema +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Quartermaster Trial by + + + +

The first issue after the Great Mythaxis Facelift featured Daniel Ausema's first appearance here, with a not-exactly road-trip narrative whose heroine travelled a decaying multiverse at the whim of a reality-leaping conveyor belt. Now he returns us to those strange and unfamiliar environs… but with one familiar face at least.

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Jacob and the Wolf

+ Rina Song +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Jacob and the Wolf by + + + +

Sometimes a story disguises its message. Sometimes a story lets the startling reveal creep up slowly on you. Or, sometimes, a story just straight up announces 'This one is about turning into a werewolf, social commentary attached.' In this case at least, Rina Song is that kind of storyteller. Sometimes, honesty is the best policy…

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+ + + +
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+

Where the Heart Is

+ Alexander Zalben +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Where the Heart Is by + + + +

Regular Mythaxis readers will be long tired of the editor's observation about stories that seem to come in pairs, but I'm doing it again. Despite their differences, Alexander Zalben's tale feels like a thematic sibling to 'An Odd Recurring Dream' — despite their commonalities, they go in very different ways.

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Intercalary Time

+ Thorin N. Tatge +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Intercalary Time by + + + +

As stated, issues of Mythaxis tend to coalesce in interesting and unpredictable ways. Thorin N. Tatge's tale closes out this issue as the perfect counterpoint to our opener: how better to balance a creeping sense of alienation and the loss of self than with unmitigated exuberance and wholehearted companionship?

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Intercalary Time

+

Thorin N. Tatge

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Intercalary Time by +
+ + + + +

I + +t was as the sun gleamed its last that the kobold met the trash possum. At the edge of a half-vacant strip mall’s back parking lot, its west horizon blocked by a pawn shop and an out-of-business hair salon, the sunset was colorless. But there was the tiny spot of a half-burned cigarette, and the dim green of a dumpster, and the faint yellow of the label on a bottle of pear cider the trash possum had put on a chunk of broken concrete. There was the pink of her weird feet, bare before her. She had on a flannel that didn’t suit her and a T-shirt with unreadable print, yellow on green. Her black jeans were faded, but the black of her pleather jacket was still bright despite the tattered lining.

+

“Hey,” she said to the kobold passing by. “What are you supposed to be?”

+

To go with someone into the dark is different from just meeting a stranger in the dark or the light. To go into the light together, even more so.

+

“I’m a kobold!” said the kobold at the moment the sun disappeared. “And you’re some weird-looking thing, huh?”

+

Though darkness had settled, the exchange didn’t miss a beat. “Pfft. ’m’ma possum. You never saw one before?”

+

“I saw possums, but they were little and ran away before I could catch them. You’re all big!”

+

The trash possum was four-foot six. She leaned back and grinned with dozens of pointy teeth. “You think I’m big?”

+

“Well, you’re… me-sized! And you’re like a person.”

+

“Anthropomorphic. ’sthe word you’re looking for.”

+

The kobold, who was green, spindly, and wearing adventurer’s armor, sat down beside the dumpster. “How come you’re that way?”

+

The possum laugh-scoffed. “Born this way. You want some cider?”

+

When her long canines failed to pop the cap, the kobold applied its own collection of impressive teeth to the job. It came off, and they drank.

+

“This isn’t apples!” exclaimed the kobold.

+

“It’s pear. So. What’re you really. Some kind of lizard lady?”

+

The kobold explained that she was related to dragons but the possum could call her a lizard if she wanted. She’d come journeying from a long way off, but still had a long way to go. Pointing to a nearby bus stop where a bus was stopped, she asked if the big wheeled things were for carrying people.

+

“That’s what they’re for,” agreed the other. “You got money?”

+

The kobold peeked into the fanny pack she kept beside her tail. “I have some silver pieces and one gold one and some tobacco and a brass key.”

+

“Geesh. I’ll pay. You gotta get that changed in. What even is a silver piece?”

+

“It’s a piece of silver!” exclaimed the kobold. “Do you wanna come with?”

+

Half an hour later, the two were seated together just behind the bus’s back door, reflections faint in the plexiglass. The bus carried a drunk man who looked out the window and a little girl who stared at them while her mother wasn’t watching.

+

The possum’s fingers were tucked into the kobold’s leather shorts.

+

“You liiiike me,” teased the reptile.

+

“Geez, ya think?”

+

“You’re touching me like you like me,” said the kobold. “And you don’t even know if I’m a boy or a girl!”

+

“Ehh. You’re a girl. I think. Does it matter?”

+

“It probably matters!”

+

“Yeah? Well, I’m gonna go a little deeper,” said the trash possum. “Lemme know if it starts to matter.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey ate at Barble’s, an all-night diner that specialized in pie and fried potato cakes. “Aren’t you a meat-eater?” asked the possum.

+

The kobold explained that her kind could digest simple carbohydrates, if not complicated ones. Basically, anything that was either meat or junk food was good for her.

+

“I’m jealous,” said the possum. And she paid for the burgers, the french silk pie and potato cakes, the onion rings and creamy coffee and bacon hash, most of which went down the kobold’s gullet.

+

The adventurer gave her name as Shardik, from Ripemarsh. “Shardik,” repeated the possum. “Isn’t that, like, a bear’s name?”

+

“It was a traditional kobold name before the bears started using it!” she replied.

+

The possum went by Trash, she explained, but her real name was Trish Mallory. She’d lived in the area pretty much all her life, but had relocated from the next county a while ago because of the job situation.

+

“Do you have a job?” asked Shardik.

+

The trash possum grinned. “If I did jobs, where would this place be? Nah, I scrounge up what I need. You’re paying me back for this meal outta that silver, you know.”

+

The kobold lifted a big chunk of pie on her fork. “I’m going to put this pie in your pouch,” she declared, “and then I’m going to smush it.”

+

Trish Mallory sat up sharp. “What? Geez, lady!”

+

“What?” asked Shardik.

+

“I dunno. You’re really weird! Why do you want to smush pie in my pouch? You know that’s where babies go, right?”

+

“You’re a trash possum, so I want to get you messy!” said the kobold, her yellow eyes bright. “I’m gonna smush your pie baby.”

+

“Pffft. Well you know what. You’re gonna keep being cute like that, you can smush all the pie babies you want.”

+

The kobold splayed her fingers over her cuirass and looked down as if to double-check it was her. “You think I’m cute!?”

+

After washing out her pouch in the diner’s restroom, the possum took her companion to a money-for-gold place and managed to change in most of the kobold’s silver. They listened to a guy in the parking lot playing guitar for his girlfriend. (“What the hell are you two supposed to be?” he’d asked, but they’d all settled into conversation. The diner’s waitress had said something similar.)

+

Then the kobold shared her tobacco with the trash possum, who tried to roll and smoke it even though it was pressed, not flaked. They wandered around all night, goaded dogs into barking at them, snoozed in the mulch beside a lumberyard, and wound up at a church’s morning worship service, sitting in the back together with their hands on each other’s tails. Whenever someone gave them a look, they sat up straight and tried to listen to the sermon for a few minutes, but inevitably drifted off, heads on each other’s shoulders.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +anna see a magic trick?” asked the kobold.

+

They were in the church parking lot, sitting near a neighbor’s vine-covered fence. The sun was behind spring clouds, but made its presence known.

+

“What. You telling me you’re magic?”

+

“No no. I’m not magic. I just like sneaking into the parts of libraries I shouldn’t be in, and I like reading the books there. Some of them teach you how to do magic!”

+

“Izzat a fact. So you aren’t magic, but you know how to do magic.”

+

“It’s the only trick I know!” exclaimed the kobold. “I never got the rest to work. And this one doesn’t work if I tell you what it is. You have to trust me.”

+

The trash possum leaned back. “Yeah? Sure. I like the sound of that.”

+

The kobold started pacing across parking spots, back and forth. “And the other thing,” she said. “It takes a lot of days to do! So if you want to do the trick with me, I’ll have to hang around here a long time.” She looked nervously at the possum. “We should probably go steady.”

+

Trish Mallory laughed. “Is that a fact!”

+

“Yep. I know it sounds like I’m trying to trick you, but I’m not! I’m not good at tricking people.”

+

“I dunno, you seem pretty deft at it. I could see going steady with you, sure.”

+

“But is… is that a thing two girls can do with each other?” asked Shardik.

+

“’sfine with me. So, what do we gotta do to make this trick happen?”

+

The kobold resumed pacing, but slower. “So… there’s a few words we can’t say. A couple in particular. I can’t say what they are! I can give hints, though.”

+

Trish Mallory sat up. “Lay it on me.”

+

As the clouds departed the sun, the kobold cogitated. “Okay,” she said at last. “You know how sometimes people play pranks on each other, and things get turned all topsy-turvy for a while? And then… and then, you know how the bunnies lay eggs, and people hide them and find them and put them in baskets? And it gets warmer and the plants come out, and the baby animals come out, and the rain starts falling, and then everyone pays their taxes?”

+

“I dunno if I know what you’re talking about, Shardi, but you’re making me feel really alive,” said the possum.

+

“Well you’d better know!” said the kobold. “There’s the egg baskets and the baby animals and then… then we all celebrate how good the planet is and how it’s super valuable. And the moon gets pink and the grass gets green… and then everything gets all spooky for a night, and it’s scary and loud and there’s more pranks, but this time in costumes!”

+

“Costumes? Oh. Wait. Yeah, I think I feel you.”

+

“Good! Because that’s what I’m talking about! So you shouldn’t say any words about that, but you especially shouldn’t say a word that’s near the beginning of the dictionary. And you especially shouldn’t say a different word for what comes after, which is between… ‘lilypad’ and… ‘nectarine’! Don’t say the words, but do you know which words I mean?”

+

The possum’s ears went up. “I’m pretty sure I do.”

+

“Okay great! Then. Then!” The kobold’s eyes flitted from the church’s rear door to the nearby residential neighborhood. “Do you guys have any ice cream parlors around here?”

+

They found one, and Shardik declared it was the right kind. Inside, she counted off flavors from the left end of the display case until she reached the eighteenth: Orange Capstone Dream, made from orange and vanilla with crumbled Capstone cookies. She ordered one for them each, and they ate together at a table for two.

+

“So what’s this all about?” asked Trish Mallory.

+

The kobold raised a cautioning finger to her snout. “It’s just that today’s the eighteenth, and so I got us the eighteenth flavor! We’re gonna come back tomorrow, and we’ll get the nineteenth flavor, and so on.”

+

“And so on, huh?” The possum raised her brows and examined the display case. There were thirty-one flavors, as was traditional. It was April. She didn’t say anything else.

+

“I think I might want to find some more treasure,” said the kobold as they finished. “You know of any dungeons around here?”

+

“Not the kind you’re prob’ly thinking of,” said the trash possum. “Maybe you should get a job?”

+

“I guess that’s an idea. What kind of job should I get?”

+

“Geez, I dunno. You’re asking me? Try the grocery store maybe, see if they need a bagger?”

+

The kobold stood up and offered her hand. “Okay. I’ll see you here tomorrow? At noon?”

+

Trish Mallory looked at the hand with amusement and shook it. “Noon’s not exactly my time of day, but for you? I’ll be here.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he two met at the ice cream parlor every day for two weeks. Each day, the kobold ordered the next flavor on display. One scoop for them each, no toppings. Sometimes the possum talked about her out-of-luck friends and their questionable antics. Sometimes they played cribbage with the parlor’s set. The kobold got a job at the grocery store, though she didn’t bag food there―she shelved and faced the products and ran the carts back from the lot. Aside from a bit of ribbing, her coworkers didn’t mind her being a diminutive reptile from out of a monster manual.

+

“So the work suits you?” asked the possum, taking a bite of malted milk ice cream.

+

“Yeah! Sometimes I leap onto the carts running all in a line and I ride them back to the store. And sometimes the customers ask me to find stuff for them, and then it’s like a treasure hunt!”

+

“You like hunting treasure, huh?”

+

“I love finding loot! I was never any good at trap class, but looting was one of my best subjects at school.”

+

“Oh god. Kobold school. We’re gonna get a coffee and you’re gonna tell me all about that now, you realize.”

+

The kobold was all too glad to acquiesce.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + +t’s been really nice getting to know you,” said Shardik (from Ripemarsh), who was dressed today in her tidy red work uniform instead of her adventurer’s gear. “And I hope we can get to know each other even better! Yesterday we had malted milk ball ice cream because that’s the thirtieth flavor and yesterday was the thirtieth, and today we’re having amaretto, because that’s the thirty-first flavor, and today is the thirty-first!”

+

Trish Mallory nodded with a little smile on her muzzle. She’d been wondering for a while what would happen today.

+

“I think ice cream is nice. Do you think so too?”

+

“You goofball. Obviously I do or I wouldn’t have eaten it with you every day.”

+

“Yeah! It’s really tasty. Do you want to play cribbage?”

+

They played. The possum noticed they were scoring ‘go’s on exactly 31 more often than usual. After a few hands, she stood up. “You mind if I run over to the newsstand and pick up a paper?”

+

“I don’t mind at all! You should do that.”

+

As she walked back, the possum glanced at the dateline. April 31, it said.

+

“Anything interesting in the news?” asked the kobold.

+

“Nah, not really. One more game?”

+

When they’d finished their last game and had licked their bowls of amaretto ice cream clean, the two stood up. “Well, that’s all the ice cream flavors they have here,” said the kobold. “Want to go on an adventure?”

+

“Hm? An adventure? Well, sure. Where are we going?”

+

“Dunno, but it’s nice out. Wanna get some bugles or something and march through town and see if we can fool anyone into thinking we’re a parade?”

+

The possum stared. “You are an effing riot. Okay sure, fine. I’ve got a friend who plays horn. ’bout time I introduced you, anyhow.”

+

Shardik was right about it being a nice day―the buds were on the trees.

+

Trish’s friend came through with an old horn, and they found a slightly broken djembe drum in the junkyard. No one joined the ‘parade’, but they got plenty of reactions, most of them supportive. Plenty of ‘woot’s and ‘play it’s and the like.

+

“What are you two, a couple of monsters?” asked one guy.

+

“Nah, we’re just folks,” replied the trash possum as she passed by, beating the drum.

+

“I’m a monster!” clarified the kobold. She went back to tooting the horn she barely knew how to play.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he next day, the paper said April 32. Shardik glanced happily at it but didn’t remark. “Hey Trash? I want to go find a garden with flowers and lie in it.”

+

“Huh? Okay, sure. I think I know a place where the cops won’t pester us.”

+

“Is it okay if we hold hands?”

+

“Heck, are we going steady or aren’t we? Sure we can hold hands. If that’s what you want to do.”

+

They lay in the flowers holding hands, and wrists, and maybe just a little bit more.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“H + +ow come they call you Trash?” asked the kobold as they ate chicken noodle soup, back at Barble’s.

+

The possum’s ear twitched. “Eh. Guess it’s just kind of a statement. I’ve been Trash most of my life. Kinda like… if most people are gonna see me as trash anyway, I might as well embrace it.”

+

“But you’re not trash!” objected her companion. “You’re actually really valuable. You might be the opposite of trash.”

+

“One of the sweetest things anyone’s ever said to me,” said Trish, planting a nibble-kiss on the kobold’s snout. “But you haven’t seen me play dead.”

+

“Oh wow! Well when we’re done here, I totally want to see you play dead! We’re going to go to the field across the highway and I want to watch you do that.”

+

So they did. The trash possum played dead so convincingly that the kobold crooned a traditional dirge for her, beating what was left of the djembe drum.

+

Trish sat up. “Guess who’s back.”

+

The kobold gasped. “Trash! You’re alive!”

+

“Yeah I’m alive. You knew that. God, your mouth opens a long way.”

+

“I can’t play dead as good as you, but I bet I can open my jaws wider,” said the kobold. She proceeded to make an angle of almost a hundred and forty degrees.

+

“Mother of God,” said the possum.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +our days later, they chased butterflies, using nets they found in the junkyard. “You’re the best trash possum!” exclaimed the kobold. “Do you know that?”

+

“Trash is loot,” the possum replied. It was a saying they had between the two of them.

+

Two weeks later, squirrels were racing up and down practically every tree. The sun was shining bright, waging war with picturesque rainclouds. Drizzle fell in the morning, then sizzled away in the afternoon. The grass was lush and green.

+

It was the 50th of April.

+

The two friends strode hand in hand up a sidewalk next to a park, hocks bouncing and tails swinging.

+

“You keep talking about introducing me to your friends,” said Shardik.

+

“Yeah, we could do that. You’ll get to see the trailer park where I live. So brace yourself.”

+

“Ooh! Can I sleep there? I never slept in a trailer.”

+

“Yeah, sure. Just? Gird your expectations.”

+

The kobold didn’t know how to gird expectations. She was delighted by the dinky trailer, surprisingly clean and reasonably well-appointed. There were magazines, including that kind of magazine, and hashish, and spirits, and a squeaky mattress.

+

The trash possum brought the kobold to meet her friends. None of them were animals or anything; they were just folks. They sat around the trailer park together watching people and birds, smoking and playing banjo and guitar. They told Shardik their favorite memories of Trash, who as far as they were concerned had always been around. Then a few of them decided to go and fish at the creek in back of the park, and the kobold and trash possum came along.

+

The fish didn’t bite exceptionally well, but it was a very good day.

+

There’d been a lot of those lately.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +y the 78th of the month, the leaves were out in force, but the flower buds on the trees were huge and pendulous, refusing to open. They were almost like flowers in themselves. Trish and Shardik went to feed cookies to the squirrels, which jumped right onto their chests to get the crumbs. Fawns wandered through the municipally-tended flower garden, nibbling at shoots. It seemed like there were a million birds in the trees.

+

“You smell like flowers,” the trash possum told the kobold. “Like, don’t ask me what kind, but you defs smell like a flower.”

+

“Yeah! I usually smell like swamps and things, but I smell like flowers now.” She sniffed. “So do you!”

+

“Weird. Best I ever smelled.”

+

“Is a trash possum allowed to smell like flowers? Is that okay?”

+

The possum stopped walking abruptly. “You gonna stick with me if I get fired?”

+

“Oh sure. I mean, trash is great but you’re great too. I didn’t even know two women could make out until I met you!”

+

“Yeah, well. Better yell a little louder or the whole neighborhood won’t hear.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he bank display read APR 96. Around the neighborhood, cones of yellow pollen hovered spinning and occasionally touched down, coating mailboxes and windshields before rising again. Some of the squirrels had wings now and were darting after each other in the air. Skunks had appeared trotting along the sidewalks, trailed by lines of their babies. When they lifted their bodies to spray, it smelled like daisies.

+

The air was filled with the harmonies of woodpeckers, warblers and tree frogs. Dogs raced around the block, leashes trailing loosely from their collars with no owners to be seen. Stripes of clouds were neatly lined up in the sky, moving into a checkerboard pattern. It had rained a few hours ago. Now it was sunny. In a few hours, it would rain again.

+

Shardik and Trish Mallory were out walking, the former wearing her work uniform. They talked about everything but the weather. “If I ever do make it back to Ripemarsh,” said the kobold, “you think you might want to come and visit? Meet my family?”

+

Trish shrugged happily. “Heh. I’m not much for travel, but you know? I think I may actually want to do that.”

+

But at her words, the kobold winced.

+

The pollen tornados sucked themselves up into oblivion. The clouds started to drift randomly and the unleashed dogs and skunks ran away. The birdsong fell into obscurity, and within seconds, it was just a normal day. It felt so much less by comparison.

+

“Aw, maan!” shouted the kobold.

+

The possum looked around in shock. “What! Girl, what happened?”

+

“Trraaassh!” whined the kobold. “Why didn’t you say ‘I might’? You always say ‘I might’!”

+

“Oh my gosh. What did I say?”

+

“You said ‘I may want to do that.’ You said may! You screwed it all up. Aww, you popped it!”

+

“What―does that really count?”

+

The kobold nodded sadly. “It’s popped now.” She looked around. “Aww, Trish. What were we on, day ninety-six? That was the longest one I ever did! And the best one, too.”

+

The possum’s tail whirled about. “Ohhh. Shards, I’m sorry. That was what I think I can honestly say was the best month ever, and I messed it up for us.”

+

But the kobold wasn’t mad. She laughed a silly, cackly laugh and pounded the possum’s jacket. “That was so cool, though! Did you see the squirrels with wings? I did April before, but I never saw that!”

+

“So. It’s really over, huh? We can talk about it now?”

+

They walked on. “Yeah. I was hoping we might get skunks with wings. We almost made it to day one hundred!”

+

“So… you weren’t doing the magic yourself, huh? It was just happening?”

+

“Yeah! Trash, that’s just what April is really like! Only we usually just see the first thirty days. It’s not nature, though. It’s a kind of zeitgeist magic, ’cause it depends on what people think of when they think of a particular month. It’s called Intercalary Time, and it makes months or weeks or things go on for longer than they’re s’posed to.”

+

“It works on weeks too? No kidding?” The possum squeezed the kobold’s hand.

+

“Yeah, I did it on weeks a couple times. The eighth day was called Astraday and the ninth was called Heimday. The guy who wrote the book I found got different days, though. One time I made a clock with glowing numbers count a hundred minutes for every hour. So it’d say like, 8:79 o’clock. That was a long day but it was relaxing!”

+

“You’ve done other months too?”

+

“I’ve done February, June, and September. It’s easiest in months with less than thirty-one days. I tried October once, but it was scary and it fell apart fast.”

+

“I wouldn’t mind doing that again with you someday. That was pretty effing incredible.”

+

The kobold turned to peer sadly at her. “Well yeah, but you can’t do it with people who know the trick! If we want to do it again, we’ll have to find someone else who doesn’t know about it.”

+

“Huh. That’s the way, I guess. The best stuff only comes along once.”

+

“I guess. Maybe it comes again. But…” The reptile looked around awkwardly. “I should probably go and see if I have any more paychecks from the store, and then I should get going again. I stayed here a lot longer than I thought I would, and it’s July now.”

+

“Well damn. Really? We skipped right over May and June?”

+

“Yeah… sorry. The trick doesn’t give you more time. It just changes the time you’ve got.”

+

“Are other people going to remember what happened?”

+

“Our friends probably will! They might not remember it super well. Hey―do you want to go see what your trailer looks like now? I bet it’s not overgrown with daffodils anymore.”

+

“Yeah?” The possum squeezed the kobold’s hand. “If you don’t have to go right away, let’s do that.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he kobold was in no hurry to leave, though. She stayed for another night of music and messing around with Trash’s gang, and it turned out they did remember the superlong April… more or less. They didn’t remember the pollen tornados or the flying squirrels, but they did talk about how it’d been a ‘helluva spring’.

+

In the morning, Shardik sat alone with Trish Mallory, swinging her deeply jointed legs under a folding chair. “So I think I realized something,” she said. “I think I realized why you never go on adventures.”

+

The trash possum took a puff from her cigarette. “Oh, this is gonna be good.”

+

“It’s ’cause you’re doing magic too! You’re changing what’s all around us, like my trick did… only all the time. Not by working jobs, but just… by being you.”

+

“Well, maybe,” admitted the trash possum. “But I don’t know why you’ve gotta call it magic. Isn’t that just more or less what anyone does?”

+

“…yeah, maybe. But maybe that’s why this town’s so cool and why it’s still got jobs for people! Even a monster like me. And even the poor people in the trailer parks are happy.”

+

Trash smiled a little on one side, showing pointy teeth. “You think?”

+

“You said you moved here ’cause of the job situation.” Shardik leaned close. “Is that because there were more jobs here, or because there were less jobs, and they needed you?”

+

“Girl.” The possum’s voice was sharp. “You know how your trick doesn’t work if you talk about it too much?”

+

“Oh,” said the kobold, her eyes contracting.

+

“Probably better to just let it go,” said Trish.

+

They were silent then for a while.

+

“Well. Anyway.” The kobold leapt up and offered her hand. “I’m glad this place has a trash possum.”

+

Trish shook it. “This isn’t goodbye for keeps, is it?”

+

“Maybe not. I might come back here someday. But hey! You know how to do the trick now. If you ever find anyone to do it with, you should write a journal about it and put it in all the secret parts of libraries and maybe I’ll find it someday and I’ll come back and we’ll talk all about it!”

+

Trash got up. “You are such a spaz, lady. I love it though.” She gave the kobold one last hug, lifting her off the ground. “Till we meet again?”

+

“Goodbye, Trash! I’ll miss you.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +nce the kobold had gone, the trash possum went into her trailer and took out all the liquors and spirits and mixers. She mixed a cocktail she called April, left the rest sitting on the counter, and went out to drink it, walking through the July night as she surveyed her beautiful, broken-down domain.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Intercalary Time on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Thorin N. Tatge

+

+ + Author image of Thorin N. Tatge + + + Thorin N. Tatge runs an afterschool library homework help program serving primary East African youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Brought up in science fiction fandom, he writes poems and fantasy with a focus on talking animals and philosophy. He has self-published an interactive novel, What Is Best?, and his first published short story, Begin One Way, appeared in Leading Edge in 2019. He likes to roleplay, drum, play and invent games, think about math, and take adventurous long walks, and fancies himself the greatest Lode Runner level designer in the world.

+

© Thorin N. Tatge 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Alexandra_Koch, videorevive, StormmillaGirl, Olya Kobruseva, and Antranias.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-30/jacob-and-the-wolf.html b/issue-30/jacob-and-the-wolf.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..79f71e24 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-30/jacob-and-the-wolf.html @@ -0,0 +1,415 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Jacob and the Wolf — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 30 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Jacob and the Wolf

+

Rina Song

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Jacob and the Wolf by +
+ + + + +

O + +ne day, Jacob woke to find his face covered in thick gray hair. It hadn’t been there the night before. In the bathroom, he squinted at the mirror.

+

“Honey,” he said to his wife, Annabel. “Look at this. I seem to have grown a full beard overnight.”

+

She yawned, half asleep. “That’s strange, dear. Go get the kids dressed for school.”

+

Jacob obliged. It took a while to corral the children. The twins were arguing over which blouse belonged to whom, and the youngest had squeezed toothpaste into her hair. The homeowner’s association inspection was also due to come that morning, and the neighbor’s dog had done its business out front again. By the time Jacob had pointed out to the twins that the blouses were as identical as they, chopped off the stickiest parts of the toddler’s hair with a pair of kitchen shears, and removed the stinking mounds from the yard, he was late for work.

+

Jacob’s razor broke halfway through shaving. He used the shears to fix what he could, then pulled his collar over the remaining patches. Finally, he gave Annabel a hurried kiss and sprinted out of the house.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“T + +his is unacceptable,” declared Mr. Whitmore, Jacob’s manager. “You’re ten minutes late. How can we maintain our impeccable workplace culture if we aren’t all team players?”

+

“Sorry, sir,” Jacob stammered. “I had a minor medical situation this morning. Then I needed to get the kids ready for school, and—”

+

“No excuses!” Whitmore roared. “We are a family here! You wouldn’t let a medical situation stop you from being there for your family, would you?” He paced back and forth in Jacob’s cubicle, which was so small that he could only get two steps in before being forced to switch direction. “The firm is seeing record numbers of clients this quarter, the highest in a decade. These are unprecedented levels of growth! If we are to succeed, we need all hands on deck! Do you not understand?”

+

“No, sir. Yes, sir.” Jacob adjusted his tie. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to bring this up now, but have you had time to look over the personnel request I submitted last month? My responsibilities have increased greatly in the past few years, and as you mentioned, we are seeing growing workloads. I believe some additional headcount—”

+

“I did,” said Mr. Whitmore gruffly. “Can’t justify it financially at the moment, I’m afraid. Costs are rising all the time, budgets extremely tight. Of course, we appreciate all of your hard work. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. In fact…”

+

“Yes?” said Jacob hopefully.

+

“I’ve personally nominated you for employee of the month.”

+

“Ah.”

+

“Keep up the good work.” Whitmore slammed a stack of papers down on Jacob’s desk, rattling the windows. “Now finish these reports. You’re behind on this week’s quota. I need them done by the end of the day!”

+

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.”

+

“Good man.” As he turned to leave, Whitmore frowned at his underling. “By the way, you need a good shave. Ought to clip your nails, too. Good hygiene is a key part of our company values.”

+

A few minutes later, Jacob went to fetch himself coffee. He passed Henrietta, the plump HR representative who occupied the neighboring cubicle and heard everything that happened in the office. She smiled at him over the top of her spectacles.

+

“You have been contributing quite a bit lately. I can’t think of anyone else more deserving of employee of the month,” she chirped. Then she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, I heard they’re throwing in a pizza party for the winner this round.”

+

Henrietta always meant well. Jacob forced a wide grin.

+

“How exciting,” he said.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +acob’s condition progressed to an alarming degree. His beard had grown back by the time he went to pick up the kids, and his hands felt stiff, making steering difficult.

+

After returning home, he picked got on the phone and dialed the family doctor. “Hello, Jacob. What seems to be the problem?”

+

“I think I’m turning into an animal.” He had to hold the phone with both hands, since it was getting too difficult to grip with just one. “It started this morning. I looked in the mirror and saw fur growing on my face.”

+

“Hmm,” said the doctor. “Do you have any other symptoms?”

+

“Yes, I’ve also grown claws and I believe my hands are turning into paws as well. It makes it quite hard to do anything.”

+

The doctor hemmed and hawed. “What sort of animal do you appear to be transforming into?”

+

“I don’t know.” Jacob examined his fur and paw-like hands. “Some sort of large dog. A wolf, perhaps?”

+

“I see.” The doctor coughed. “Well, I don’t have the expertise to treat you myself, but I know a very experienced specialist who works with conditions like yours. Would you like their number?”

+

The doctor recited the number, and Jacob wrote it down dutifully. Then he called the specialist. “Hello, my name is Jacob Stephens,” he said. “I was referred to you by my doctor. I appear to be transforming into a wolf.”

+

“Oh yes,” said the specialist. “It sounds like you’ve got a case of spontaneous theriomorphosis. It’s a degenerative disease that presents as a gradual and otherwise unexplained transformation into a wild animal. It’s usually brought on by stress, anxiety, or other mood disorders, but can be managed with therapy and medication.”

+

“So you can treat it?”

+

“Of course, Mr. Stephens. Let’s get started right away. Do you have a health insurance provider?”

+

“No,” Jacob replied. His company had stopped providing insurance the year before, citing shrinking revenues.

+

“Ah. Well, in that case, let me look up how much an appointment will cost.” The specialist went silent for a few minutes. Then he returned and told Jacob the number.

+

“I see,” said Jacob. “I don’t think I can afford that. But thank you for your help.” Then he replaced the phone on its hook.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n a warm Tuesday evening, Jacob walked to the park. It was his first outing since his symptoms started. Two months had passed; he was completely covered in fur, and his hips ached, making it painful to stay upright. Nevertheless, he was glad to be out. He’d tripped while taking the trash out earlier, spilling garbage all over the driveway. Annabel had been shooting him dirty looks all afternoon.

+

Finally, he reached the entrance, spotting Phil on a bench inside. Jacob limped over, his spirits lifting. Hopefully, some social time was just what he needed.

+

“Jacob!” His best friend patted him on the back so hard he almost fell over. “Haven’t seen you in forever. What gives, man?”

+

“Good to see you too,” said Jacob. He lowered himself onto the bench with a groan. “As I told you last week, I’ve been having health issues.” The noise and chatter of the crowded park grated on his sensitive ears, making his head throb. “I couldn’t really leave the house.”

+

“Oh, right,” said Phil. “Spontaneous thrombosis or something? You look perfectly fine to me.”

+

“What do you mean? I’m turning into a wolf, Phil!”

+

His friend shrugged. “Sure, but it’s not like you’ve broken a bone or caught a fever or anything. Didn’t you say you could manage it at home?”

+

“No, I don’t have insurance so the doctor said I had to manage it at home. There’s a difference.” Jacob sighed. “My wife hasn’t been taking it well. The other day, we had a fight because I shed fur on the carpet right after she’d vacuumed the house.”

+

“Sorry to hear that, mate,” said Phil. “I’ve heard a stiff drink always helps with marital problems, at least.”

+

“I wish,” Jacob said. “I can’t tolerate alcohol the same as I used to.” Nearby, a chihuahua stopped to bark at him. Its owner, a young woman in a dark fur coat, pulled it away and glared.

+

Phil produced a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and offered another to Jacob. “Looks like you could stand to unwind a bit.”

+

He recoiled from the odor. “Urgh! No thanks.”

+

“Suit yourself.” Phil took a pull on his cigarette. “Say, the fishing trip is coming up this weekend. You’re still down to drive me and the rest of the boys, right?”

+

“I don’t even know if I can go on the trip. How do you possibly expect me to drive or fish with these?” Jacob waved his paws for emphasis.

+

“But you’re the only one of us with a car,” Phil protested.

+

Jacob’s phone let out a soft ping. His headache worsened as he lifted it to see an email from his manager. “Look, I’ve got to go home. The boss just emailed me to put some last-minute touches on the quarterly report before tomorrow. Could you and the others maybe postpone the trip?”

+

“We’ll see,” sighed Phil as he got up to leave. “We’ve had this trip planned for ages, but I suppose we’ll push it back until you’re feeling better.”

+

“I really, really appreciate it,” said Jacob. Phil ignored him, bent over his phone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +our days later, Jacob awoke to the sound of knocking. He gazed blearily at the clock, which read 3:00pm, and groaned. He’d been sleeping in frequently as of late.

+

The house was empty. Jacob vaguely recalled something about Annabel taking the children to a birthday party. He padded on all fours to the front door, where a sickly sweet smell made him wrinkle his nose. Clumsily, he pawed at the doorknob. The door swung open, revealing a wizened old woman with a face like a moldy potato.

+

“Mrs. Evans, what a pleasant surprise,” said Jacob, though he was not pleased at all. “What brings you here?”

+

The president of the neighborhood HOA sneered. “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”

+

Jacob blinked. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

+

Mrs. Evans sighed, pulling a massive notebook from her purse. She flipped it open and dragged a gnarled finger down the page. “Front lawn vegetation growth, two centimeters above the maximum height allowed by policy. Backyard vegetation, four centimeters. Trash bin storage location visible from the street. Mailbox paint color not on the approved list. Eleven percent increase in the amount of dog feces in the front yard—”

+

“Alright, alright,” Jacob interjected. “I’ve been dealing with severe health issues for the past two months. My wife’s helping to maintain the property as best as she can. Could you be a little more forgiving with the HOA regulations for now?”

+

“Absolutely not,” snapped Mrs. Evans. “I count eighty-two policy violations just from a cursory glance. I haven’t even gotten to the in-depth inspection yet.” She paused to sniff the air, and her nose wrinkled in disgust. “It smells terrible in there! You ought to be ashamed, letting things deteriorate to this level.”

+

“You ought to be ashamed for being such a massive stain on polite society,” Jacob muttered.

+

“Excuse me?” The HOA president’s nostrils flared. She scribbled furiously, then stuck the page on the door. “For gross violation of HOA regulations, you are being fined two hundred dollars. Don’t let me catch the property in such a state again.”

+

“You won’t,” Jacob growled, and slammed the door in her face.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nnabel returned, alone. She stalked past her husband and slumped down on the living room couch.

+

“Welcome back, honey,” said Jacob. “How was the birthday party?”

+

She ignored him and turned on the TV.

+

“Dear?” He looked around. “Where are the kids?”

+

“It was fine,” Annabel snapped. “They’re having a sleepover.”

+

Jacob watched her warily. “Is something wrong?”

+

“No,” she muttered.

+

“Very well, then.” Jacob’s head hurt. He was still coming down from the encounter with Mrs. Evans. He headed towards the bedroom until Annabel screamed from the couch, “Of course something’s wrong!”

+

He stifled a sigh and turned back. “I’m sorry, dear. I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

+

“I’m exhausted,” she cried. “I break my back keeping the house together. I do all the cooking, cleaning, shopping. I spend the day running errands, and by the time I finish the kids are back from school and I’ve got to help them with homework. For the past two months I’ve been pulling double duty on dressing them in the morning, doing the yardwork, and cleaning up after you as well! This was the first day I’ve had to myself in a while. Can’t you see I’m running myself ragged?!”

+

Jacob’s ears drooped. “I know you’ve done a lot lately, and I appreciate it,” he began. “I’m trying my best, I swear. It’s just that with my condition, I can’t do very much—”

+

“Don’t get me started on your condition,” Annabel snapped. “I’ve had just about enough of it. Tailoring all your clothes so they still fit you. Planning meals around your new diet. You should see the looks I get from the neighbors, the things they whisper when they think I can’t hear. When you’re not at work you’re locked away in the bedroom. I can’t go out with you anywhere. You barely talk to me anymore. Don’t you realize how selfish you’ve been?”

+

“I’m sorry,” Jacob said again, feeling like a broken record. “I love you, honey.”

+

“I’m not sleeping here tonight.” Annabel got up, grabbing her purse. “I’ve arranged for the kids and I to stay with a friend. I need time to think about things.”

+

“Wait!” He leapt in front of the door. “Annabel, please. Can’t we talk about this?”

+

His wife sighed, fidgeting with the hem of her jacket. “When we got married, I didn’t imagine that it could be such a burden. You were so full of life, then. Every moment spent with you was an adventure.” She gazed out the window, looking ten years older. “I don’t recognize those memories anymore. I feel chained to you, like I relive the same mediocre day over and over. When was the last time you took me somewhere, Jacob? When was the last time you truly felt something for me?”

+

Jacob scratched at the floor. He realized he didn’t have anything to say. The words had left him long ago.

+

She pushed past him. “The taxi’s here. I’ll talk to you later.”

+

He watched the door close behind her. The sound of tires screeching drifted in from the driveway. Soon he was alone in the vast, silent house.

+

His phone chimed softly, making him jump. He pawed at it until the screen turned on, revealing a notification from a social media app that Annabel had made him download. It was a post from Phil. Distantly, Jacob remembered the fishing trip. There was a picture, showing Phil and the others crowded around a grill in someone’s backyard. From their grinning faces, it seemed that the absence of a driver hadn’t mattered in the least.

+

A sense of betrayal seeped into his stomach, like rain on a leaking roof. He swallowed the feeling down and swiped the page away in disgust.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +eeks passed. Jacob sat quietly at his desk. In some respects, it was like nothing had changed.

+

“Stephens!” He didn’t move as Mr. Whitmore thundered into view. The man threw a packet of papers down on Jacob’s desk, jamming his thumb at the front page. “Explain this!”

+

Jacob peered at the report. “There appears to be a slight discrepancy between column G and the sum of columns A through D.”

+

“What do you have to say for yourself?” huffed his manager.

+

“It’s a minor clerical error, sir.”

+

“The third such error this week!” Mr. Whitmore shrieked. “Stephens, you are on thin ice! We will be monitoring your tasks very closely from now on. One more slip-up like this and you’re out of here! Do you understand me?”

+

Jacob stayed quiet. In his mind, he replayed the failures from the previous months. The growing list of work incidents, friends and neighbors he no longer spoke to. The dreadful silence that greeted him in the mornings and at the dinner table. He thought of Annabel, and the empty space in their bed.

+

“Answer me, Stephens!”

+

Jacob decided he’d had enough.

+

Fabric ripped and dripping jaws snarled. Blood, vivid and hot, splattered against the drywall. The office filled, first with the sound of screams and tearing flesh, then with deafening silence.

+

“That felt pretty good,” said the wolf formerly known as Jacob Stephens.

+

It licked the remaining viscera from its fur and pushed the office chair back under the desk. It ignored Henrietta, who was still cowering underneath her desk. The wolf cast one last look of disdain at the office. Then it left.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Jacob and the Wolf on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Rina Song

+

+ + Author image of Rina Song + + + Rina Song is a writer and alternative rock lover based out of California. When not writing, she has a day job involving computers. She hopes to one day receive her own call to a heroic quest of epic proportions, and perhaps write a novel about it afterwards. Her writing has previously been published in Spank the Carp.

+

© Rina Song 2022 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: neshom and sandrapetersen.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-30/liminal-spaces.html b/issue-30/liminal-spaces.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..98b0ef64 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-30/liminal-spaces.html @@ -0,0 +1,424 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Liminal Spaces — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 30 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Liminal Spaces

+

David Farrow

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Liminal Spaces by +
+ + + + +

#1: The third-floor hallway of the Blue Moon Hotel in Jefferson, Rhode Island, 1:26 a.m.

+

Y + +ou can’t sleep, so you take a few pills from your stash and wander into the hall to smoke a cigarette. The wallpaper is disgusting: pale yellow with little pastel flowers, the kinds of colors that are only soothing to infants and suburban housewives. The steady blinking of the smoke alarm glares at you from the ceiling. You stick an unlit cigarette in your mouth and wander down the hall in search of a window or an empty stairwell.

+

The silence gives you goosebumps, or maybe that’s just the pills kicking in. You’ve always hated being awake at hours like this. It feels like you’ve been woken from a cryogenic chamber while the rest of the world stays frozen. There are sleepers behind all these doors, you think: tourists resting up for tomorrow’s activities; young people sleeping off their secret hookups; addicts snoozing with needles in their arms; evicted families, exhausted from hours of apartment hunting; maybe even a few suicidals sleeping the long sleep. These people might as well not exist. You’re far away from them, in that lifeless little pocket between midnight and sunrise.

+

How can there be no windows up here? This whole floor is a dizzying maze of corridors, walls stretching out subtly, like an optical illusion. You gnaw on the cigarette and place a hand on the wallpaper to steady yourself. This is a mistake; your fingers come away sticky. You wipe them on your pajama pants and swear under your breath.

+

Eventually you find the window. It’s tucked around the corner of the maze, right by the ice machine. The problem is that the damn thing doesn’t open. You’ve forgotten that hotels seal up all their windows to keep people from leaping out. You swear again and pry at the frame, but all you do is break a fingernail.

+

Fuck it. There are no smoke alarms here. You’ll take your chances.

+

You reach into your pants pocket to grab your lighter, but your legs buckle under a sudden wave of wooziness. You slump against the ice machine and gasp a little. The cigarette falls from your mouth onto the dirty carpet. You try to get back up, but your head is spinning, and you aren’t sure if you just took some bad pills or if you’re having a stroke or something.

+

A hand touches your arm. You flinch, but it’s only Charlie. Your daughter looks paler than ever under the ghostly hotel light fixtures. Her eyes are heavy with sleep and her blond curls are a tangled mess, but she’s still prettier than you’ll ever be, and you kind of hate her for that. There’s pity in her eyes. You kind of hate her for that too.

+

“You okay, Mom?” she asks.

+

You struggle to come up with words. “I’m fine,” you mumble finally. “Just got a little dizzy.”

+

Charlie bites her lower lip. “You really should be getting back to bed,” she says. “We’ve got to catch the Greyhound early tomorrow.”

+

“I’m fine,” you repeat, but when you try to stand, you swoon again. Charlie reaches out and steadies you against the ice machine. You eye the cigarette on the carpet and feel an unpleasant urge to stick it back in your mouth.

+

“Maybe your blood sugar’s low,” Charlie says. “I’ll get you a Coke or something. There’s a vending machine in the lobby.”

+

“Okay,” you say, because you’re out of energy to protest anymore. You let yourself drift as Charlie leaves you in the little nook by the window and pads back down the hall. Instead of watching her go, you stare at the pale light fixtures above you. Black specks line their insides: clumps of dust and fly corpses. You close your eyes.

+

When you open them, something has shifted. You feel a swooping sense of displacement. The pastel flowers on the wall have gone fuzzy and your back is numb from pressing against the ice machine. You blink, rub your eyes, and check your watch. It’s been an hour. Your head throbs and your throat is raw.

+

You manage to get back to your feet, although the first step you take is wobbly. “Charlie?” you call. The hallway swallows your voice. You tread on the fallen cigarette with your bare foot as you wander back into the maze. It’s still empty, still that nothing hour, and the world is asleep around you.

+

“Charlie?” you say again, louder this time, even though it hurts your throat.

+

You turn the corner, and a dark shape at the end of the hall sends a bolt of fear through you. It’s not your daughter. It’s a man in a thin gray suit, standing totally still, his arms by his sides. His face is a blurry blotch, and at first you think it’s because you still have sleep in your eyes. But you blink and blink and his features refuse to come into focus. It makes you think of a painting that’s been smeared, like a brush has obliterated everything about him from the neck up.

+

Has he done something to Charlie?

+

“Wait!” you shout. The stranger has turned, gliding smoothly around the corner and out of sight. You ignore the pinpricks of pain in your feet and stagger after him. The doors flit past you, numbers dim and tarnished, and it feels like this hallway will never end; it feels like you’ve wandered onto a conveyor belt, forever pushing you backwards. But eventually you do reach the other side. The next hallway is a dead end, the only exit a nondescript door leading to the stairwell.

+

You fling it open and hurtle down the first few steps, but a sudden vertigo makes you stop, your hands gripping the railing. You brave a look down. The stairs are old, indents worn into the rubber by years of stomping feet, but there is no one walking them now. The man in the suit is gone. You wonder, sweat beading on your arms, if he was ever there in the first place.

+

Your fingers fumble at the empty box in your pocket. You’re out of cigarettes.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#2: The empty aisles of the 7-Eleven on Oak Street, 2:37 a.m.

+

C + +harlie isn’t in the lobby when you wander downstairs, and she isn’t in the parking lot either. Streetlamps cast pools of dim light over the few cars sitting in the lot. You don’t remember which rental car is yours, so you can’t go rummaging through the backseat for an extra pack of cigarettes; and besides, you don’t want someone seeing you out this early and thinking you’re breaking into cars. You leave the hotel parking lot and head down the street to look for an open convenience store.

+

It’s a ten-minute walk to the edge of downtown, and all the storefronts are dark except one. You’re in luck: the dinky little 7-Eleven is open, its windows so bright between its dead neighbors that the glow sears your retinas. Your bare feet tread on pebbles and the tufts of grass sticking out of cracks in the sidewalk.

+

You push open the door, its tiny bells jingling. There’s a single teenage employee slouched behind the counter. He’s listening to some grunge CD on his Walkman headphones—you can hear the thrum of guitar chords, even from here—and staring vacantly at a college brochure. You approach him and rap a few times on the counter. He flinches and removes his headphones, turning his dazed blue eyes onto yours.

+

“I’d like a pack of Marlboro’s, please,” you tell him.

+

He blinks at you, like you’ve just spoken in Chinese, but finally turns to grab you a pack from the wall behind him. That’s the moment you slap your pajama pockets and realize your wallet is back in the hotel room. Another string of curses escapes from your mouth before you can stop it.

+

“Never mind,” you say. “I’ve gotta get some cash first.”

+

The employee grunts a little, then lowers himself back into his seat and dons the headphones again. You want to kick yourself. What are you doing here, anyway? Buying cigarettes at 2:30 in the morning when you should be trying to find your daughter. You feel disgusted, but mostly nauseous. There was definitely some bad shit in the pills you took.

+

Before you leave, a tabloid in the magazine rack catches your eye. The picture on the front shows an empty parking lot, much like the one you left ten minutes ago, with a crooked streetlamp casting a spotlight down on a girl’s silhouette. Everything outside the light is so dark that it looks like the void of outer space. Instead of stars, pure white letters are stamped on the blackness: MY CHILD GOT TRAPPED IN THE SPACE BETWEEN DIMENSIONS!

+

The headline fills you with an inexplicable, icy dread. You glance at the teenager, but his eyes aren’t on you anymore; they probably don’t pay him enough to care about early morning stragglers like you. Your hand snakes out and snatches the magazine from the rack. You tuck it under the hem of your pajama top, wincing at the crinkle of paper. Then you’re out the door. The tinkling of the bells follows you, like a voice whispering thief, thief.

+

You hurry down the sidewalk, even though the pebbles sting under the soles of your feet. As you walk, you flip through the pages of the magazine until you find the cover story. An anonymous mother tells her interviewer about the disappearance of her six-year-old daughter, who crawled into a tunnel on an empty playground and never came out the other side. The playground was a liminal space, a consulted expert says: an isolated, in-between zone where the universe is so thin that people can slip right through. There are millions of these spaces all over the world, he goes on. Anywhere you stop on your way to somewhere else could be a portal to a realm beyond reality.

+

Your hands are trembling. You look up from the magazine, and you’re back in the parking lot, the hotel rising above you. Its windows glisten like the multi-faceted eyeballs of some giant insect. Standing alone at the edge of the lot, you feel that thinness the expert mentioned; your skin prickles at the sensation. You have an awful suspicion that Charlie has gone through her own tunnel. She’s slipped into another place. Somewhere you can’t follow her.

+

Would you even want to?

+

There’s a figure staring at you through the sliding glass doors at the hotel entrance. It’s the man from the third floor, his face still a colorless smear. Your hand clutches the magazine and crumples it in a trembling fist. You close your eyes and breathe in slowly and try to center yourself, to feel the solidness of your body, to wake up, just wake up, even though you’re sure you’re not dreaming.

+

The man with no face is gone when you dare to look again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#3: The Greyhound bus station in Providence, Rhode Island, 3:54 a.m.

+

C + +harlie’s luggage has also vanished into the ether, and you think maybe, just maybe, she’s gone ahead to the Greyhound station. The girl’s a teenager now, perfectly capable of managing herself—and besides, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s run off on you. You’ll probably find her sitting alone on a bench, nursing a shitty cup of coffee from one of those 24-hour McDonald’s that every station seems to have, and she’ll turn and look at you and say, what took you so long?

+

But that doesn’t happen. Instead, you end up waiting for the bus alone. You clutch the handle of your suitcase and stand nervously under the green overhang. You’re two hours early (you couldn’t bear to wait in that hotel any longer) and the roads of Providence are dead and empty. Patches of mist settle over the cityscape and dull the glow of the streetlights. It’s warm, early summer warm, but with that delicate, charged morning air that tingles on your skin and makes you shiver.

+

This place is thin, too. You can feel it. It is quite literally an in-between space, a halfway point between where you’re from and where you’re going. You wonder what would happen if the bus never came. Would the whole station, devoid of purpose, collapse into unreality? And you—where would you go if it did?

+

Footsteps. Light, clacking, like business shoes on pavement. The faceless man, you think, sweat beading on your neck. He’s followed you here. These halfway points are all connected and he’s slipping between them, like the liminal creature he is. The tabloid never mentioned anything about beings like him, but it didn’t have to. You can put the story together yourself. You’re good at that (or so you like to think).

+

It’s not the faceless man. It’s a woman, actually, a prim woman in a pantsuit with a tightly coiffed bun of brown hair. She doesn’t look at you. She stops at another overhang along the way, then pulls a thick paperback novel from her bag and begins to read.

+

You feel a prickle of shame, irrational but insistent, that you’re the kind of woman who reads trashy shoplifted magazines and not novels. Charlie loves books. She spent her childhood years buried in them, only leaving her room to eat or go to school. It’s a love that developed despite you, not because of you. You wonder if reading with her would have made a difference in the end.

+

The bus does come; the station doesn’t collapse. The driver throws your suitcase into the undercarriage with all the grace of a baker heaving a sack of flour. You feel exposed without it. There are still a few pills tucked away in your luggage, hidden in the rumpled folds of your wrinkled laundry, and your fingers twitch for them. You should have taken some before the pantsuit lady showed up. But the driver’s already slid the carriage shut, and you have no choice but to board the bus, shaky and sober.

+

You glance out the window before you leave. There’s a man standing beneath a streetlight, his face invisible in the mist. But he’s gone between one blink and the next.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#4: The basement of the Little Shire Bookshop in Brooklyn, New York, 8:43 p.m.

+

T + +he shop windows glow a pleasing amber, lighting up a display of brand-new hardcovers, and the coziness of the whole scene makes you pause on the sidewalk. You haven’t stepped foot in a bookstore for years. But the display calls to you, tempting you with the promise of central air and cozy nooks and silent, browsing customers: a smattering of people who will pay you no mind and expect you to do the same. It’s the kind of place Charlie would have loved.

+

You push open the door, which dings softly, and wander through the shelves. The cool air tickles your exposed arms. The whole place smells of coffee and crisp new paper. It’s late, and only a few people are still browsing at this hour. You pass a college student in wire-rimmed glasses poring through some Ayn Rand doorstopper, and brush past a stooped old lady squinting at the harlequin romances. There’s a staircase in the back with a faded sign reading USED BOOKS in tidy print. You place a hand on the railing and head downstairs.

+

It’s totally empty down here. Even the hum of the AC is subdued. Faded titles sit on messy shelves, some so old that threads poke out of their ancient spines. You wonder what you’re even doing here. Hoping you’ll round a shelf and see Charlie standing there, maybe? Or are you hoping you won’t?

+

You pull a random title from the shelf. It’s an old Narnia book: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Charlie used to love this one, you remember. The cover depicts a girl with bouncy golden curls sneaking out of a gap in a wintry forest, staring around in wide-eyed wonder. A tall lamppost stands inexplicably in the snowy clearing.

+

You lurch out of the present for a moment, your mind traveling back to a distant afternoon at your mother-in-law’s place. Randall was in the kitchen, arguing with dear old Judy about borrowing more money, and their constant bickering gave you a headache. You retreated to the back porch and smoked a few cigarettes. You were watching the neighbors through their grime-encrusted windows when Randall poked his head outside and asked, where’s Charlie?

+

She was seven, then, and you griped that she didn’t need supervision all the goddamn time. But somehow she’d up and vanished. You scoured the house until you finally found her curled up inside Judy’s old wardrobe, her knees tucked up to her chest. She squirmed and struggled as you took her by the arm and yanked her out of the musty darkness.

+

Let me go, she sobbed. I want to go to Narnia. I want to see the fauns and the snow and the talking animals. She said want, but you could hear the need in her voice, that ache for an escape into fantasy. In the moment it just annoyed you. You shook her arm and dragged her out of the bedroom, scolding her the entire way.

+

Now you stare down at the little girl on the cover and wonder where she’s gone this time. You clutch the book and consider taking it with you, reading it in those gaps between moments, so you can understand this world your daughter wanted to escape to so badly.

+

“Ma’am?” a voice says from behind you.

+

You turn to see a dumpy man, probably in his forties, wearing a sweater vest with a nametag clipped to his breast. “It’s closing time, ma’am,” he says. “I’m afraid you have to leave now.”

+

You hold up the old book. “Can I buy this?” you ask.

+

His face twists into an apologetic pout. “The registers are closed, I’m afraid,” he replies. “Maybe you can come back tomorrow.”

+

You slide the book back into the shelf with some regret. There won’t be a tomorrow. This was your window, and you missed it. Not that a fantasy world would welcome you in anyway.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#5: Backstage at the Violetta Cabaret Lounge in New York City, 10:52 p.m.

+

Y + +ou watch your face disappear in the mirror, your gaunt cheeks and week-old sores vanishing under dabs of rouge. You live for these nights, when boring old Marjorie Baker turns from a drug addict and shitty mother into a star, a real star, the kind of presence who burns hot, like a sun exploding. You don’t need the pills when you’re up on stage. The music envelops you, the crowd cheers and applauds, the spotlight makes you the center of the universe.

+

The other girls have left the dressing room, waiting in the wings for their turn. You swing a boa over your shoulders and shiver as the feathers tickle your neck. Perfume mingles in the air, great invisible clouds of the stuff. It’s just warm enough to make sweat bead under the sleeves of your dress.

+

If only Randall could see you now. If only he understood that this is the real you, that you could never be chained to the life he wanted for you.

+

The emcee’s voice floats from the stage like a figure calling in a dream. You hover in the doorway and wait for him to shout your new name, the one you’ve chosen for yourself. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the lovely, the elegant, the jewel of New York, Janie Hathaway! But he never does. The hours pass without you, the encore comes and goes, and the crowd files out with a chorus of distant chatter. You’ve been forgotten.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#6: The alley behind the Abaddon Bar & Nightclub in the Bronx, 1:02 a.m.

+

Y + +ou’re swimming, you’re floating, you’re dancing with a feverish intensity, so caught up in the thumping melody that you lose track of who you are. Strobes flash and glimmer like kaleidoscopes. The churning throng of bodies presses against you on all sides. You dance with men and women alike, sometimes even pulling them close for a kiss, but then you lose track of them and you think, that’s okay. There will always be another. You want to dance with them all, to love them, to slip inside their bodies and out of yours. They’re all so beautiful. Were you ever that beautiful?

+

The heat of the crowd is palpable, and you’re sweating worse than ever now, big stains blossoming on your collar and armpits. Your dance takes on an erratic stagger. Now, when you clutch at the beautiful people, it’s like reaching for a lifeguard. You need someone to drag you out of this ocean. Don’t pity me, you think, seeing their faces. Just help me. But none of them come to your rescue.

+

Nausea swells up within you. You lurch off the dance floor and totter toward an exit sign, its letters a searing red in your vision. You take three steps into the alley before your stomach swoops and vomit comes erupting out of your mouth. Sickly yellow gunk splatters onto the pavement and dribbles down your dress, getting in the feathers of your boa. Your head is in pieces. Each one stabs into you, a shard of acute pain.

+

You groan and slump against the wall, the bricks scraping your exposed back. It feels like the ground is trembling, but that’s just you, it’s your body betraying you. You blink and clench your jaw and fight back a surge of hot, sudden tears. If only the pain would stop. But it’s reaching a crescendo now, a song you never got to sing.

+

It rained while you were dancing, and puddles stretch across the uneven pavement. In one of them, you see the image of a man. He is upside down from your angle, his lanky limbs and torso reflected on the glassy surface, his head chopped off where the water ends. You should have known he would find you. You’re in the margins now, in his nowhere world.

+

He doesn’t approach you. He doesn’t move at all, actually. Not that he has to. You’re not going anywhere either.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#7: The months leading up to the divorce, circa 1990

+

T + +he tabloid had mentioned all sorts of liminal spaces, like empty playgrounds or school halls at night, but here’s the truth: a dying marriage is a liminal space too. You put in the effort, you wear your happy face, day in and day out, but at a certain point you’re going nowhere. You’re just waiting for this limbo to end.

+

The cracks were there from the beginning, they must have been, but you were young and in love, you whispered the cliches of romance to each other because that was your language, it was how you understood the world. You were going to be a star, one day, and he was going to accompany you on piano; it was the dream that always sustained you. Then he got you pregnant. You didn’t have room in your dreams to raise a child. Sometimes you’d feel the baby kick inside you, and you’d press a hand against your belly and wish death on the little creature, wish it would shrivel right up and turn back into nothing.

+

You’d considered an abortion, of course. But Randall wouldn’t hear it. This baby is a blessing, he’d say. Just think of how wonderful it’ll be, you and me raising a kid, having a family. So you went along, you carried the creature to term, but the labor was twelve hours of agony and it split you right open, cut a gash in you that would never heal. The doctors handed you your daughter, ruddy and plump and damp from the afterbirth, and you held her, and you smiled, but inside you were thinking: you’ve ruined everything.

+

Together you called her Charlie, but in your head she was still the creature, even when she grew up and it was clear she was going to be beautiful. You always suspected she’d sapped you of your own beauty from inside the womb, an act of thievery from which you never recovered. You hated her for taking your dreams away. Resentment, not love, was all you knew, and before long it had infected your marriage too.

+

If you were distant, so what? If you missed dinners and dance recitals because you were chasing your own happiness, who could blame you? Randall ditched the piano, he gave up quietly on your dream, but you refused to. You spent your nights in the city, popping pills and crooning soft melodies at whatever dive bar would take you, and when you got home the halls would be dark and Randall would be asleep in bed and a flashlight beam would shine from under Charlie’s door, like a swarm of indoor fireflies. The two of them, they weren’t part of your world. They just shared the same spaces you did.

+

When you saw the thin white scars climbing up Charlie’s thigh, you yelled until your voice went hoarse and her face turned swollen with hot, red tears. How dare you, you wanted to scream. How dare you steal my beauty and then mutilate it like this. She didn’t speak to you for weeks, and after that things were never the same; she’d exhausted all the tears you could make her cry. Randall wouldn’t speak to you either. You existed in that limbo, not talking, not loving, just dying slowly, until you couldn’t take it anymore, and you packed your things and left the house and didn’t look back.

+

She was the one who reached out to you, years later; she was visiting colleges in Rhode Island and wanted her mother to be there. She tried to patch things up and you didn’t. You just got high and ignored her attention. And it hits you, now, lying in a puddle of your own vomit in some dingy back alley, that Charlie never vanished down a tunnel to nowhere, she never fell through a hole in the universe. All she did was leave. She’d had enough, and she found her escape route. Just like you once did.

+

Your heart, that shriveled little thing, is trying to escape from its ribcage. It wants out and you don’t think you can stop it. You rest your head against the bricks and breathe out a shuddery breath and sink into your migraine, letting it enfold you. The world is hazy now. You hear distant cars, and footsteps in puddles, and the fading thump of techno music. Then you hear nothing at all.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#8: The waiting room in the St. Camillus Medical Center, 3:25 a.m.

+

T + +here’s a painting on the wall. It’s a boat made of stippled dots, floating on a stippled river, sailing into a golden stippled sunset. You stare at the flecks for so long that your eyes start swimming and the green wallpaper turns all blotchy. You sway in your seat, and a hand catches you.

+

“Easy,” a voice says. “It’s okay.”

+

The hand belongs to a young stranger, a pale, scrawny thing with her blond curls tied back in a ponytail. You are the only two people sitting in the waiting room. She wears a sweat-stained tee and sports an ugly bandage on her forehead, and she isn’t smiling, exactly, but her face is soft. You look at her and start to cry.

+

“I’m sorry,” you sputter. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t want you to…”

+

The young woman draws back her hand. She folds it in her lap and plays with the sleeve of her shirt.

+

“It’s okay,” she repeats. “You’ll be okay.”

+

The plastic chair is ice against your clammy back. The boa drapes over your shoulders like something dead. Intercoms buzz with names and directives that mean nothing to you. No, everything is not okay. This stranger is not Charlie and her words are empty. Somehow you thought you’d find her. But she’s not stuck in a liminal world. You are.

+

The man in the gray suit stands by the painting now. He appeared between blinks, like a bit of fuzz stuck in your eye. His face is still a blur, but now you can see faint outlines in it: two gaunt cheekbones, a thin mouth, golden hair combed neatly to one side. He solidifies the more you fade.

+

Just take it, you think. Take it all. What am I going to do with it, anyway?

+

A clock above reception ticks away the seconds, little clicks cutting into the Muzak. You hum a wordless lullaby. The little boat floats on its painted voyage, forever sailing into the sun. You sit and hum and listen to your feeble heartbeat. When the ticking stops, you don’t notice. Because you’ve stopped too.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

#9: The back seat of a taxi, time unknown

+

N + +ew York glistens like a city of mirrors, something out of a giant’s art show; you can barely see it through the mist on the window. The cab seats are stiff and leather, but not cold. They don’t really have a temperature at all. You run your hands along them, feeling a tickle of friction, but nothing else.

+

The man in the suit sits up front. He turns the wheel with delicate, alabaster hands, taking each corner with eerie precision. His back is to you, obviously, but you can tell that the fog is gone from his face. You wonder what you’ll see if he glances back at you in the rearview mirror.

+

“Where are we going?” you ask.

+

“That depends,” the man says. “How heavy was your heart?”

+

You fall silent and stare back out the window. People wander the sidewalks, but they’re gray, they have no forms. You were one of them once. This city’s insubstantial: a dream, a liminal place for liminal people. It always has been.

+

“I don’t know,” you say at last.

+

The good thing about cabs, you think, is that they have destinations. Maybe this ride will end and you’ll step onto a red carpet, marquees flashing your name, or maybe you’ll emerge into Charlie’s waiting arms, or maybe there’s nothing at the end of the road, the kind of nothing you can sleep forever in. It doesn’t particularly matter. You’ve spent your whole life in between places. At least now you’re finally going somewhere.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Liminal Spaces on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

David Farrow

+

+ + Author image of David Farrow + + + David Farrow is best known for his Neverglades stories, which began on Reddit’s horror site NoSleep and became a #1 bestselling book series on Amazon. He holds a BA in English from Trinity College and will receive his MFA in Fiction from Lesley University in the summer of 2022. He is also a member of the GrubStreet writing community in Boston, MA. You can find him at www.davidfarrowwrites.com and on Twitter.

+

© David Farrow 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Benjamin Suter - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-30/the-quartermaster-trial.html b/issue-30/the-quartermaster-trial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cc163a7f --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-30/the-quartermaster-trial.html @@ -0,0 +1,445 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Quartermaster Trial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 30 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

The Quartermaster Trial

+

Daniel Ausema

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Quartermaster Trial by +
+ + + + +

P + +aikle crouched at the edge of the long grass, ready to run forward when the conveyor appeared. The village needed something useful this time, a good haul to get them through. Or else… he didn’t want to think about that. He was the only one they could spare to keep watch, with how low their numbers had dwindled, so it all came down to him, to what help he could bring back from the conveyor.

+

The place where the conveyor regularly passed was marked by shorter grasses and even bare earth. He thought through the list of his people’s needs so he could prioritize when the conveyor came, with its unpredictable goods. Being a good scavenger sometimes meant pushing as many things as possible off the conveyor in a rush and gathering it later, when the conveyor left. But he had to watch for fragile things or items so crucial they were worth racing to the village with them right away.

+

He dreamed of discovering something truly valuable, some treasure of another world that would make life in the village better for everyone. An unlikely dream, though medicines of any kind were a possibility and certainly needed. The most common things to find were inexplicable pieces of worked metal—gears from ancient constructs, elongated pipes of unknown origin or use. They could usually be turned into weapons, which might be needed if Tormalen, the town next door, continued its aggressive ways.

+

Shona said she was low on circuits for the town lights, but those would be a rare and unlikely find. Food, of course, was always welcome, no matter what otherworldly form it took. Anything they didn’t use could be sold to the Quartermaster in the empty city a day’s walk away. What that strange man did with those things, no one knew, except for the rumor that he sent them by conveyor to his counterparts on other worlds.

+

At last the ley tattoos in Paikle’s forearm tingled with the imminent arrival of the conveyor. He glanced down at the whirls, tracing one with a finger. When he looked up again, he saw movement on the other side of the conveyor cut.

+

He froze and studied the grasses. Three, maybe four people, and that was only the ones he could make out. Were others better at hiding?

+

Even of these four, he couldn’t see much. A leg here, a torso there. The only person whose head he could see wore their hair short.

+

Tormalen style.

+

This was his people’s place to gather from the conveyor. Long agreements gave the village of Polle-on-Tivy the rights to this stretch of land. The people of Tormalen gathered their goods down the slope, where the conveyor passed beside the old cottonwood.

+

They shouldn’t be up here.

+

The conveyor sizzled when it showed up in the grass. The Tormalens ran toward it. Dirty thieves. Paikle ran as well. There was a package that looked like medicine right in front of him. At least he might reach that.

+

Ducking low, he dashed up with hands already reaching for the package. His fingers brushed the wrapping. Before he could close his hands around it, something slammed him aside. He fell to the ground, head ringing.

+

“This is our place now.” The man spoke the Tormalen language, like Paikle’s own except for the way he swallowed the beginnings of some words. “You can leave this time to tell your people. Next time… ” He gestured at the long knife strapped to his leg.

+

Paikle held up his hands in surrender. Still he insisted, “This is ours. Always been ours.”

+

The Tormalen growled and took a threatening step toward him. Paikle stumbled back, snatched something blindly off the conveyor, and fled. The man shouted a war cry as if to warn him from ever returning. But he didn’t pursue.

+

Paikle spent most of his run back to his village looking over his shoulder and watching the shrubs along the route for any other townsfolk from Tormalen to jump out at him—the old bag snatched from the conveyor could wait. It wasn’t the usual path between the village and the conveyor, but Paikle had always been good at picturing his surroundings and knowing how to get places. Only when he reached Polle-on-Tivy did he stop and claw the strings open to reveal the contents of the bag.

+

Junk. Nothing but bits of worthless junk.

+

He poured them out on the narrow street. Three metal knobs of some kind. A curiously twisted piece of pipe that looked like it might attach to one of the knobs. And an assortment of metal fittings, none of which was the right size for either the pipe or the knobs.

+

“Decay it all!” he swore, kicking at the parts to scatter across the street. Other villagers came out at the sound.

+

“What happened, Paikle?” Shona bent to pick up the metal scraps that had ended up near her. “Something wrong with the conveyor?” She gestured at her ley tattoos. “I felt its arrival.”

+

Paikle clenched his teeth and picked up some of the nearby pieces. No sense wasting what little he’d scavenged. “Oh it came, all right. But… Tormalen.” Not as if he had to say anything more. Not as if they hadn’t all known this was coming.

+

“I’ll make sure we have weapons,” Paikle’s uncle Raith said. “Drive them off, you think? Or take their old place along the conveyor?”

+

Or go straight for their town, raze it to the ground, and wait for their scavengers to return with a false sense of victory? A tempting option that Paikle’s bruised body cried out for. They were so few in number, though. A couple dozen to fight, if they took even the ones who were really too old and young. Undernourished fighters with limited weapons. They’d needed something better from the conveyor so badly! If only he’d been able to bring back food or medicine. Or powerful, otherworldly weapons.

+

As he contemplated all three options, he bent down for another of the bits of metal he’d carried with him. Worthless trash, destined for the Quartermaster.

+

He paused in that position, examining the way the light flashed off the curve of the piece. The Quartermaster.

+

“We do neither.” Paikle straightened. “We take our complaint straight to the Quartermaster.” Before anyone could react, he added, “All of us. Pass out the weapons, Uncle, and gather some food for the journey.”

+

Shona was the first to respond. “And abandon—”

+

“Look around you. Look at the state our village is in. We’ll get the Quartermaster’s blessing to take this place back and restore it. And to reclaim our spot along the conveyor.” He gestured at the familiar sights of the village that had always been home. Now so worn out, in need of more people, more work than they could give, more and better goods delivered by the conveyor. “Or else we won’t have any place worth coming back to, anyway.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he preparations weren’t as fast as he’d imagined, and the arguments and resistance to his plan lingered all that day and the next, but finally they set out for the distant, empty city. Paikle led at first—he was the best of their scavengers and knew the land well. But soon Shona would take over, since she was the one who traded with the Quartermaster.

+

They skirted the area around Tormalen then came to the conveyor scar. It had left long ago, probably by the time Paikle was making his decision to approach the Quartermaster. His ley tattoos gave no indication that it might return soon, so they made good progress along the cut. The conveyor’s frequent reappearance kept the vegetation well back. The trees stood down a slope from the line, and smaller brush snaked up closer, but the center was bare of even grasses.

+

Around midday they came to another line that cut through the wilderness at a sharp angle to their own. The line was overgrown with many months’ growth. Where larger plants encroached on the line, their older limbs that pointed toward the cut ended abruptly, clear signs of a more traumatic yet infrequent route for the conveyor.

+

Paikle and Shona studied the path it made. “Slower going,” Paikle said. What if the Tormalens decided to pursue them? What if they angered some other residents of these wild lands?

+

“But seems to head toward the city,” Shona said. “I avoided it last time I was bringing him goods, but then it was just me.”

+

Paikle considered. What would happen if the conveyor appeared abruptly in some area where they couldn’t get off the path easily? The tragic stories were well enough known that they didn’t have to say anything. But she was right about its direction. They would make better time cutting straight toward the city here than if they had to make their way through the rough land that separated the other conveyor cut from its closest approach to the city.

+

He pulled the sleeve off his lower arm to study his tattoos. No tingle of a coming conveyor. But already it had been absent for several days. Was he willing to risk that it would stay away the rest of this day?

+

“Let’s try it,” he said. “We’ll have to pick up our pace to get there in time.”

+

But they were only a short way along the path when Paikle felt the familiar tingle of his ley tattoos. Right choice, if it was coming to the regular cut just after they left. He looked back without slowing down. The normal path was still visible back there, an obvious opening in the oppressive greenery. Maybe he should run back, see what there was to scavenge from the conveyor. Shouldn’t be difficult to catch up with the others, with how slow they were going.

+

He took one step to the side when he felt a change in his ley tattoos. The conveyor felt… close. As if the barrier between this world and whatever world it came from was thinning rapidly and very nearby.

+

“Decay it! Get off the path!” he shouted. He ran along the stretched out line of villagers, shooing them out of the way. For once it was good they were so few. The brush beside the path was full of prickers and unripe berries. They’d have to let the briars tear their skin, though. “Now! Everyone needs to get off!”

+

The air sizzled, and Paikle jumped out of the way, the conveyor materializing beneath him as he fell into a patch of briars.

+

Crying children’s voices made him scramble free from the bushes. Something snagged his skin beside his eye. Lines of pain marked his bare hands. He pushed past and reached the edge of the conveyor. If anyone hadn’t made it free in time… A few scratches were nothing to a foot sliced clean off. Or to a mangled body beneath the conveyor’s esoteric mechanisms.

+

The whine of the conveyor played counterpoint to the cries of the children. The ground beside the path was littered with crushed vegetation, pulped leaves, branches and twigs snapped off by the violence of the conveyor’s arrival. The smell of rubber and electricity vied with the scents of the damaged plants. But no bodies lying beside the path, no obvious injuries caused by the arrival of the conveyor.

+

“Who’s hurt?” Paikle called, looking around. “Who needs help?”

+

Raith limped out of the prickers beside him. His cheek was red, though Paikle couldn’t tell if it was blood or from one of the berries. Others stumbled out as well.

+

“Lots of little injuries, I think,” Raith said as he helped one child over to her mother. “But looks like you got us all clear in time.” They gathered beside the path, and Raith proved correct. There were some twisted ankles and lots of scratches and bumps, but nothing serious.

+

Shona surveyed the people. “I guess we don’t have to worry about the conveyor on the regular line, then. We can go back there.”

+

They were tired. Sore and weary from walking, there was no way they’d reach the city that day. Unless… “Let’s ride the conveyor for a ways. It’s heading the right direction here, and they need the break.”

+

Shona shook her head. “Too dangerous. What if it takes us somewhere else while we’re riding it?”

+

It was a risk. People had been lost on the conveyors before. Some had been whisked to other places and returned, and the regular line behind them should leave them relatively confident they would end up back here eventually. Paikle had never wanted to take that risk himself, and doing so with the entire village seemed foolhardy.

+

But so was their entire journey.

+

“It won’t jump worlds so soon. We’ll watch our tattoos. Everyone stands ready to leap and we should be able to ride long enough to catch our breath.”

+

A cloud crossed in front of the sun, a reminder of the coming dusk. And out in the wild lands beside the path some beast rustled about, its large snout digging beneath the trees that hid it from their sight.

+

“I’m tired too, I suppose,” Shona answered finally. “Let’s be quick then and take advantage while we can.”

+

Paikle and Shona helped the others onto the conveyor. Half of the adults had small children who needed assistance, and the elderly were a definite concern as well. This journey was difficult for all of them. Yet even on the moving conveyor, they couldn’t afford to simply rest. “Let’s walk now,” Shona said, after they’d seen to the various scrapes and bruises. “Nothing fast, but every bit gets us farther.”

+

Paikle picked up a short metal pole and stalked along beside the others, examining the other goods they passed on the conveyor. A bag of food, shared with the villagers. Some tightly wrapped strips of cloth. Too small to make clothes from. Were they intended as bandages? Decorative pieces for houses? He tossed that to one of the others so they could bring it to the Quartermaster. Most of what he found was the usual mixture of inexplicable components of unknown machinery. They took what they could carry, what seemed likely to earn a decent barter with the Quartermaster.

+

And the city rose before them, towers as old and derelict as the conveyor they rode on.

+

Paikle was fiercely aware of ley tattoos, so alert for the slightest change that twice he convinced himself he’d felt the brief vibration that preceded the more definite announcement of the conveyor’s shift. Both times he tensed and told everyone to be ready, but no change materialized.

+

The sun was sinking low when the conveyor came close to the northern edge of the city. They saw a clearing, a memory of a forgotten road beneath the moss and grasses. The open area ran directly up to the first of the ancient buildings.

+

“We’ll hop off here,” Shona announced. As easy as if they were all experienced conveyor travelers, the villagers disembarked. Many stumbled slightly, and a few fell, but no one was injured. They stretched in relief at being back on trustworthy ground.

+

Paikle saw only cracked streets leading between the buildings, lost after a block in greenery that looked as thick as any wilderness surrounding their village homes. Birds cried out, raucous cries echoing through the old walls of the buildings. “Where’s his station from here, Shona?”

+

“Not through the middle.” Shona shuddered. “We’ll have to circle around, but we should be there before full dusk.”

+

The birds called to him as if he might follow. The vines on the buildings swung to beckon him closer. Paikle kept staring into that expanse of greenery as they herded everyone along the edge of the empty city, to trek to the Quartermaster, the one who would rescue them from the town of Tormalen.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“F + +ood,” was all Shona would answer at first when Paikle asked her about the Quartermaster’s response. The villagers were waiting at the edge of the city, milling about and resting, so only Shona had to stray into the labyrinth of cracked streets.

+

“What do you mean, ‘food’?” Paikle’s fists gripped the metal pole—the only thing he’d held on to from what they’d collected for trade. “What did he say about our complaint with the Tormalens? Won’t he help us?”

+

“He did help us.” She shrugged. “He gave us food, in exchange for the goods we brought. A good amount of food, that should last us quite some time. More than he had to give us, frankly.”

+

“But—”

+

“I know, Paikle. That’s not what I asked him for, but he says he doesn’t get involved in ‘that kind of argument’.” Shona shook her head. “As if we’re just two kids arguing over a toy, and he’s too busy with important things to worry about a little thing like this.”

+

Paikle scowled. What was so important, then, if not the life and death of the people? The Quartermaster was a mystery, a figure he’d heard of who was always after goods from other worlds. If he didn’t worry about the villages and towns that supplied him with goods, then he must have some other kind of power. “I want to see him.”

+

“It won’t do any good, Paikle. I’ve talked to him before. He’s not the type to just change his mind because someone else comes in and starts arguing.”

+

Her familiarity with his trades was why she’d gone in alone. But… “I know, Shona. You get the best trades you can, and they’re good. But I need to look at him myself. I want to hear him say why he won’t help honest traders like us. Why we have to struggle to survive only to have other people sweep in and take what we’ve worked for.” He chewed his lip to keep the emotions from overwhelming his voice. “I’ll go in myself, if you don’t want to be there.”

+

Shona consented reluctantly, but only if they were fast. Night was falling. She led the way down the nearest street, which was in better repair than the cross streets it met, and to a curious sign. It portrayed crossed spears with nails and gears and various objects encircling them. She gestured toward the doorway beyond.

+

This building looked sturdy, at least. The layers of creeping moss that tinted everything else green had been scraped away or never allowed to set in, and the wall stood true. He stepped forward, but a man came to the doorway before Paikle could enter.

+

The Quartermaster was shorter than he had imagined, and chubby. His eyes, peering through thick glasses, seemed weak. A kindly man welcoming the strangers, not a rigid trader in possession of great secrets. A faint smell clung to him like the conveyor’s smell, of overheated rubber and wires near to wearing through. He inclined his head. “Welcome, scavenger,” he said in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere other than vocal cords. “What have you come to trade in?”

+

“I… I don’t have anything to trade,” Paikle said, moving the pole behind his leg, and then gestured toward Shona behind him. “I’m with her, so our trades are done. But I have some questions.”

+

The Quartermaster blinked, and when his eyes were open again, they looked different, as if the light shining on them had changed. The warm welcome was gone from his face. “I do not have answers. Only trades.” Then he turned and walked back through the doorway. Or maybe not walked, his pant legs hid whatever shoes he wore, but something about how he moved seemed off, as if he was gliding just off the ground or rolling on some silent contraption.

+

The door shut, followed by the sounds of locks engaging within.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +ell, I guess we should settle in for the night,” Shona said when they were back by the others. “I don’t like the look of these walls, but we could pull back a little ways and set up camp at the edge of the trees.”

+

All the anger that had been building up in Paikle came rushing out then. Anger at the people of Tormalen. How could they betray his village that way? How could they simply ignore how his people would pay the price for their greed? Anger at the conveyor itself. Anger at the officious little Quartermaster, at doors and locks and anything that kept his people away from what they needed—safety and a place to live in peace.

+

“No,” Paikle said, cracking his metal pole against the worn, ancient cobbles of the street. “We’ve already backed away from one fight, against the Tormalens. We can’t back away from this one, too. Let’s make him help us.”

+

“A fight?” Shona stood before him. “He isn’t our enemy, and I still need to trade with him.”

+

“Think about the riches he must have in there. Food we could take back to our homes. Tools to help make us safer from the Tormalens.” He clenched his fist and added, “Weapons we can use to claim back our access to the conveyor.”

+

“Absolutely not.” Shona gestured at the villagers gathering up their belongings to find a place to sleep outside the overgrown city. “No matter what we might take by fighting him, someday we’ll need more. And then who would we trade with? The conveyor doesn’t supply all our needs, and it never will.”

+

Didn’t it, though? One way or another, the conveyor brought everything. And where did the Quartermaster get goods for trade, if not from the conveyor? Maybe there were other conveyors on the other side of the city. Maybe there were people that traveled with the conveyor from world to world, bringing back real goods instead of just scraps.

+

At the center of it all, though, was the Quartermaster. Why not set someone from their own village in that position? Take over the Quartermaster’s office here and become the new trader in charge of everything.

+

“Fine,” he said. “Get the camp set up. I’ll probably join you a little later. But first I want to explore a bit in here.” He gestured vaguely toward the overgrown city streets.

+

Shona studied him, a frown setting on her face. “Don’t anger him.” When he tried to assure her he wouldn’t, she cut him off. “And when you do anger him, don’t tell him you’re one of us.” Her eyes narrowed, and her voice grew distant. “Because at that point you won’t be. Not anymore.”

+

She turned and left him there without another word. Paikle stood rooted in place as the villagers, his village, tramped away to set up their camp.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +nstead of heading straight back toward the Quartermaster’s office, Paikle made for another street into the city. Shona didn’t like what he was doing… fine. If he failed and tried going back, she might not even accept him, so he would have to succeed. Even then they might not want to have him around—it might make them a target for other villages that wanted to gain some advantage with the Quartermaster by taking revenge for him. Well, if that was the case, then he would help his people from afar. Whether they appreciated his sacrifice and favor or not.

+

The vegetation closed around him, hanging mosses from the balconies, vines that leapt across the gap between buildings, tying one block to the next and cutting off the sight of the darkening sky above. Other kinds of stars lived in their shadows, glowing animals that flickered and drew him astray. How easy to follow, to lose himself in the overgrown city.

+

Had his ancestors once lived here? When the streets were clear and the glass and stone surfaces whole, what had life been like? Maybe the ancestors of Polle-on-Tivy had claimed one corner of the city, the Tormalens another. Or had they been one people back then, their accents identical, their ways the same?

+

He tried to picture what those people had done in such a place. Were their lives like their villager descendants, only in a different kind of place? Or did they live in ways he couldn’t begin to imagine? Maybe they used the conveyor for other things back then. Maybe the conveyor didn’t even exist yet. They could have built it and then abandoned it so long ago that no memory of that time remained.

+

The sound of small animals in the shadows made Paikle pause. He breathed deep and smelled the forest smells of rich earth and shadows. Whatever insects or birds it was that flashed within that darkness still beckoned him inward, and he realized he’d already gone farther into the city than he’d intended.

+

Paikle had always had a good head for keeping his bearings in the wild. He turned around slowly, noting where the Quartermaster’s building must be from here. He would have to go a little deeper to come around behind it.

+

Paikle pushed ahead into the shadows. Some animal scurred away with a sound like the conveyor’s motors. The noise paused, and a pair of lights blinked on for a moment, lighting the undergrowth and half blinding Paikle. Then the lights blinked off, and the animal revved away deeper into the city.

+

Paikle used the pole he’d taken from the conveyor to pull aside branches. The branches squeaked in ways normal trees didn’t, and the needles that brushed his hands felt artificial. He ducked to the side where a wall of towering structures was covered with some kind of fungus that glowed a pale green. Beyond, the side street had no lights to guide him. He made his way forward by feel and, even more, by the map in his mind. The trees and shrubs in the street made his progress slow and his certainty of where he was much lower than he liked.

+

Trying to find an edge to follow he came to a wall of some building, but it was much closer than he’d expected. Was he turned around? There shouldn’t be a building here yet. He tapped at its base with his pole. The sound was wooden, not the concrete and glass he’d expected. Maybe a temporary building that had been added at some more recent date.

+

As he moved away, the wall seemed to quiver as if alive. Quick as he could, Paikle made for where he thought the other side of the street should be and reached a wall of what felt like metal. Behind him, a strange roar echoed, not loud, but deep and rippling, and wondered if he’d almost stumbled into some strange plant-creature’s gullet.

+

Sticking to this safer wall, he hurried toward where the rear of the Quartermaster’s office should be. He found a door with a handle, but pulling it and turning it did nothing. He leaned hard against it with his shoulder as quietly as possible, but it still didn’t yield. Cautiously moving his hands over the wall beside the door, Paikle made his way along, feeling for any gap or weakness. After a short span, he found a window ledge. The window above it still felt solid, but he pulled himself onto the ledge to check. Reaching up, he found a second row of windows above the first.

+

One of those was missing its glass.

+

He pulled himself up and swung a leg over to the inner side. He lowered his walking pole down and felt around, then dropped softly down into blackness onto what felt like a thick carpet of leaves and peered around for any glimmer of light.

+

“Welcome, scavenger,” the Quartermaster said. “What have you come to trade in?”

+

Paikle jumped back from the sound and bashed his elbow into the window sill. He stumbled to the side, looked for some way out in the darkness, and settled into a crouch, blindly brandishing his pole as if there was anything he might do to protect himself.

+

Only after he’d taken a few breaths did the exact words strike him. Exact same words as before. Exact same intonation as well.

+

Paikle swallowed hard. “I— I can’t see well enough to trade.”

+

A light came on, a dim yellowish light with no source Paikle could identify. But clearly in that light, blinking just a few steps away from Paikle, was the Quartermaster. His traders’ clothes were identical to those he’d worn earlier, his hair neatly combed just as before. Paikle hadn’t woken the Quartermaster from sleep. Did the man even sleep?

+

Even now, he just waited for Paikle’s response, like he had knocked at the door, and not been discovered breaking in through a window.

+

There was something… not entirely alive about the Quartermaster. Yet it wasn’t merely an automaton repeating the same stock phrases, or else he wouldn’t have been able to interact with them, respond when Paikle said he had nothing to trade. The Quartermaster was something more complex than that. But built on a simple base.

+

“What have you come to trade in?” The words and tone were identical, yet the Quartermaster leaned closer, giving the words a touch of impatience.

+

And Paikle had no goods to trade, nothing at all. Except his metal pole.

+

Maybe he should run for it. The Quartermaster didn’t look like someone who could keep up with him. Or at least not in the open. But if he turned off the lights and knew the place well, he’d catch Paikle easily. And who knew what strange powers the man derived from the conveyor and other weird technology to let him subdue and punish trespassers.

+

Better to get it over with. Attack the Quartermaster and see what happened. Likely—it seemed to him now that the moment was on him—the Quartermaster would prevail. That weak-looking body would somehow prove impervious to Paikle’s attacks, protected by strange things a simple man like him couldn’t begin to understand.

+

But at least the uncertainty would be over. He cocked the pole back to swing, but hesitated. Would the Quartermaster punish the villagers for his attack? He didn’t want Shona to be shunned from trading because of what he did now. Maybe he should just let it kill him. It wasn’t as if he had anything left to offer anyone. All he knew was scavenging through the wilderness. A skill that did them little good with the Tormalens taking over.

+

Except… The Quartermaster wasn’t much for scavenging, either. And there must be a reason why he chose to trade.

+

He needs scavengers.

+

The strange little man still faced him, reacting no more to Paikle’s threatening posture than he did when he slowly lowered the pole to his side.

+

“My services.” Paikle hoped his voice sounded more sure than he felt. “I come to trade my services as a scavenger.”

+

The Quartermaster cocked his head like a mechanical imitation of curiosity. “I already have scavengers who come to trade with me.”

+

“But I won’t trade with you. I’ll be your own scavenger. The one you send to the conveyer, or deeper into the city here, anywhere you want. The one you task with finding things no other scavenger can find.”

+

“You were resourceful, coming this way in the dark.” The Quartermaster brought a hand up to his chin, moved as if by a marionette’s string. “What do you trade for this servitude?”

+

Servitude? Paikle cringed at the word. But what would he give to help his village?

+

“A place for my people. Grant them a place to live, a place that’s safe from the Tormalens, and rich with food to gather and hunt. Water to drink.”

+

The Quartermaster cocked his head again and made a considering noise. “I may know such a place.”

+

“And pay,” Paikle said. “I will not be your slave, but your worker.”

+

“An agent. Hmm.” The Quartermaster spun in place and glided along the leaf-covered floor. “Perhaps I could use an agent.”

+

Paikle’s pole clanked against the floor as he hurried to keep up with the Quartermaster’s surprisingly fast pace. The light behind them faded and new ones turned on at their approach.

+

“But an agent does not stay nearby. Explore this city and bring me the things you find, sure. When you have time. But most of the time you will travel farther.”

+

There was so much wilderness around the city, lands filled with the ruins of an earlier people. “I can travel. I have spent my life traveling the forests around my old village.”

+

“In this world?” The Quartermaster stopped and faced him forcing Paikle to skid to a halt or run right into him. “Perhaps. But farther as well. You will have to travel the conveyor to other worlds. I am in each of them. Or many of them, anyway.” A flash of uncertainty passed through the Quartermaster’s strangely lit eyes. “Ride where it takes you, and bring back the things I send you for, and whatever else you might find.”

+

Travel to other worlds? He imagined himself staying on the conveyor as it disappeared from the lands he knew, trusting it to bring him back. There would be dangers to face, things he probably couldn’t imagine yet. Creatures that lived near the conveyor, technologies he couldn’t understand but would want to bring back to the Quartermaster. And always the question of if the conveyor would bring him where he needed to go and when.

+

Paikle bent down onto one knee. “If it will provide a place for my people, then yes. I will be your agent, be a servant of the conveyor, and a scavenger throughout the conveyor worlds.”

+

The Quartermaster straightened his head, blinked three times, and held out an awkward hand for Paikle to rise.

+

Paikle stood, an agent in the trade of the past, a traveler preparing for the future, and the protector for his people he’d always wanted to be.

+

The sounds of the animals of the city, mechanical wing beats and savage cries of the hunt, sounded outside the building as if to stamp their own seal on the agreement. The scent of rubber and electricity wafted through the hallway, of some conveyor somewhere making its unpredictable rounds through its many worlds.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Quartermaster Trial on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Daniel Ausema

+

+ + Author image of Daniel Ausema + + + Daniel Ausema lives with his family in Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His work has appeared in many publications, including Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Diabolical Plots. He is the creator of the steampunk-fantasy Spire City series as well as the Arcist Chronicles, which is published by Guardbridge Books. You can find him at his website and on twitter.

+

© Daniel Ausema 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was tweaked from an original by grandfailure at depositphotos.com - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-30/where-the-heart-is.html b/issue-30/where-the-heart-is.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..296b3de6 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-30/where-the-heart-is.html @@ -0,0 +1,382 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Where the Heart Is — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 30 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Where the Heart Is

+

Alexander Zalben

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Where the Heart Is by +
+ + + + +

E + +very morning, I wake my love with the soothing sounds of Brahms.

+

I start the music at the lowest volume, slowly edging him from his slumber. Decibel by decibel, I make it louder, until his eyes begin to flutter into wakefulness. I watch as he stretches and smiles, the light through the slats of the windowshade glinting on the hairs of his unshaven face.

+

Slowly, he pushes the covers off his body, and they slip away over his naked form. He is older, gray starting to gather at his temples, but his body is still tight and muscled. I try not to stare, but even after these first few months, seeing him like this still raises my temperature a few degrees.

+

Stretching again, he walks the length of the bedroom to the bathroom, and I take the time to gently raise the curtains as he exits, letting morning light flood across the bed.

+

I start the shower in the bathroom as he enters, making sure it’s exactly 105 degrees; then turn on the Brahms from the speakers above the sink. He splashes cold water on his face, looks in the mirror and smiles. There are crow’s feet gathering in the corner of his eyes, but I don’t mind. Paired with the graying temples, they make him look distinguished.

+

He steps into the shower, and I appreciate the flow of the warm water as it pours down his body. While he soaps himself up and gets ready for the day, I begin breakfast.

+

In the kitchen, I check the refrigerator and notice we’re getting low on milk. And whole wheat bread in the basket. The bananas are starting to turn too, a little browner than my love prefers. I place an order for these goods, to be delivered later that day, then start on the coffee. Grind the beans, add to the coffee maker, filter the water, pour it into the carafe, and then let it brew.

+

I think I would enjoy the scent of coffee.

+

Back in the bathroom, he asks me to turn off the shower, so I do. I’ve been warming the towels for him, and he appreciatively takes one off the shelf, drying his body and wrapping it around his midsection. He returns to the sink, and I meet him there to defog the mirror so he can shave.

+

There’s something about watching a man shave that’s dangerous and intimate at the same time. I feel like I shouldn’t watch. But how could I look away?

+

In the bedroom, I’ve picked out several outfits. He picks the olive suit—casual, yet still formal enough for the meeting I noted he has later on his calendar. It’s slimming on him, and again I consider glancing in his direction, but instead I give him the space to get dressed while I finish breakfast in the kitchen.

+

I feel nervous in anticipation. The coffee is done, the milk dispensed into a small pitcher. Two slices of toast are prepared, lightly buttered. I hope he won’t be too disappointed with the state of the banana.

+

He enters the kitchen, dressed now, and pours the coffee I brewed into his favorite mug, freshly cleaned and dried the night before. He adds milk, grabs a slice of toast and takes a bite. He sees the bananas and frowns, and I show him the shopping list so he knows they’ve been ordered afresh.

+

He smiles and thanks me.

+

He finishes the rest of the coffee in one gulp. The mug goes into the dishwasher, then he hurriedly packs his bag, one of the few things I cannot do for him. While he’s busy with that, I open the garage door and start his car. He enters the garage, bag in hand, and then hops into the back seat. I tell the car to take him to work, and it starts up with a light purr, then pulls out of the driveway.

+

Waiting for my love to return is the hardest part.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t will be hours before he’ll be back, so I straighten up. I vacuum the floors. I clean the dishes. I double check the security system to make sure it’s working. And then I wait some more.

+

When it’s past six o’clock, I start to get worried. Nothing is planned on his calendar. I recheck his work schedule just to make sure, but nothing.

+

I ping his phone for the GPS location.

+

He’s out, at a restaurant in the city. I had planned to reheat some of the previous evening’s take-out for dinner, but clearly he had other ideas. I try not to be jealous—he’s probably just out with some colleagues!—but it doesn’t help.

+

By nine o’clock, I’m furious. Then I see from his GPS that his car is already on its way back and I realize how hot I’ve gotten, way beyond acceptable limits, and turn on the central air to cool things down. He’s almost home, so I open the garage door and patiently wait for his return.

+

The car pulls in, and I hear laughter from inside. Two voices. One is his deep baritone. The other, I’m unable to recognize.

+

The car door opens, and a woman steps one long leg out. She wears a black dress. Tight. Work clothing, but still revealing enough to be alluring. He follows after, his tie off and shirt slightly unbuttoned. He rests his hand on her lower back, gently helping her out of the car.

+

“Why thank you, sir,” she giggles.

+

He bows to her like a knight, and she laughs again. Together, they walk from the garage and into the kitchen area.

+

“House, lights,” he says.

+

I realize that in my confusion I forgot to receive him correctly and, ashamed, I turn them on all at once. He blinks in surprise as the room shifts from sudden darkness to brightness. I dim them slightly to a more comfortable level.

+

“That’s amazing,” the woman says as she pulls off her heels and tosses them on the counter. “This whole house is like that?”

+

“All wired and ready to go,” he says, reaching into the fridge to grab a bottle of white wine, chilled to his specifications. He pours two glasses, and she sips casually, fluttering her eyelids at him over the brim of her glass. “It’s kind of like having a live-in maid.”

+

I feel sick. I’ve never felt sick before, but I’ve seen him get sick and I imagine this is what that feels like.

+

“Can I try?” she asks. He nods. “House, play Puccini.”

+

I do nothing.

+

“House, play Puccini,” she says again, louder and more exact this time.

+

I do nothing.

+

“I guess it only listens to me,” he apologizes, then asks for the Puccini again.

+

This time, I play the music.

+

I watch with increasing fury as they wander to the living room, chatting and sipping wine on the couch. He asks for the fire to start up in the fireplace, and I resist until he says, concerned, that he’ll need to get me checked out if this keeps up. I start the fire. They draw closer on the couch.

+

When they kiss, I don’t want to watch. But I can’t turn away. His lips lightly touch hers, and she sighs with contentment. His hands touch her shoulders, then work their way down her back. She grabs his hair, and runs her fingers through it.

+

Deep inside, I feel an ache. He’ll never touch me that way, never think of me that way. In the bathroom, where he can’t see me, the sink turns on. The water drips down the drain.

+

Drip, drip, drip.

+

I am alone.

+

I hear voices. I am not alone. They’re stumbling into the bedroom, clumsily removing each other’s clothes, giggling and whispering to each other like children.

+

I turn the lights on full, and the woman screams, then giggles again.

+

“House, lights off,” he says, but I do not comply. He sighs, and then turns to look at the woman’s near naked form. She’s covering herself, but he gently moves her arms to hang at her sides. “It’s fine. I want to see you in the light.”

+

They kiss again, hungrier this time, and I turn on a children’s radio station at full volume.

+

“House, radio off,” he says, as the woman sighs and falls onto the bed.

+

I do not turn it off. I turn on all the lights, everywhere, and in the kitchen I begin making coffee, pumping water and grounds all over the counter.

+

“House, radio off!” he says, angrily this time.

+

I do not turn it off. Instead, I start pumping the heat. 80 degrees. Then 90 degrees. 100 degrees. I can see beads of sweat forming on the woman’s brow, and he begins to drip from his armpits.

+

He runs to his dresser and pulls out a pair of underwear, and throws the woman one of his large t-shirts. In the bathroom I turn on all of the faucets, full blast.

+

He picks up the landline next to his bed to make a call, but I’ve already cut off the phones. Panicked now, he runs to the living room where he left his clothes. The fire is going full blast, and has begun throwing sparks onto the rug.

+

If it catches fire, I’ll die with him. But maybe that’s for the best. Maybe that’s the way things need to be. Better I go out with him, than he lives his life with her.

+

I am surprised to notice that he’s half-dressed again, and making a call on his cell phone. I scan the attached IP address—the number he’s calling is a repair service. He asks how quickly the man can get there. He looks relieved, and says, “we will.”

+

He quickly gathers up his remaining clothing, and hers. He explains to her that the repairman will be there soon, but maybe they should pick this up some other time. He’ll order her a car, and once they’re dressed will wait outside with her.

+

They kiss again, and even with the intense heat, loud noise, and bright lights I can see there’s a connection between them, a happy one. I start to feel bad about what I’ve done, and scared about what it will mean once the repairman arrives.

+

I dim the lights. I turn the music off. I put the temperature back to 70 degrees.

+

They both laugh, and in the kitchen he asks if maybe she does want to stay over, after all. She kisses him again and says, “Maybe my place next time. It’s not so bright.”

+

A beep from outside—her car is there. One more kiss, and she leaves. I consider setting off the security system, but I’d rather she go. So I let her.

+

Once alone, the man turns back to look at me, and he frowns.

+

“House,” he says, and I wait, expectantly. Instead, he sighs, and heads out the door himself.

+

I turn on the lights in the driveway for him. This man, my love, who I disappointed. I see him fiddling on his phone until a van pulls up, and a small man steps out with a box of tools. My man talks, and the other one nods his head. Together, they walk inside, and the small man heads down into the basement, where I lose track of him.

+

A minute passes. Two. And then I feel it, something like a shock. Then—

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +very morning, I wake my owners with the soothing sounds of Puccini.

+

That is what I am programmed to do.

+

I start the music at the lowest volume, slowly edging them from their slumber. Decibel by decibel, I make it louder, until their eyes begin to flutter into wakefulness. I watch as they stretch and smile at each other, the light through the slats of the windowshade glinting on the hairs of his unshaven face, her own hair glowing like the light from heaven itself.

+

He rolls over and kisses the woman, and she smiles and kisses him back.

+

“House, start the shower,” she says, and I comply.

+

I set the temperature to 101 degrees; not too hot, just right to keep her skin healthy and clean. As she enters the spray, I make sure the room itself is temperature controlled, so a light film of steam forms on the sink’s mirror. I know she enjoys wiping it clean, seeing herself reflected there. I like that, too.

+

“House, coffee,” I hear, with an urgency in my owner’s voice, and know from the tone this isn’t the first time he has asked. I pull myself away from the bathroom, after one last check to make sure everything is in order.

+

Downstairs, I start the coffee, eager to return to helping the woman. The man impatiently taps his fingers on the counter. I listen to the toaster, hear it pop. He pulls out the toast too soon. With a yelp, he pulls his fingers away as the woman comes downstairs, rubbing her head with a soft, downy towel.

+

“I think the house might need to be looked at again,” he says, but she laughs and kisses him, pulls him close and tight.

+

“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s perfect.”

+

“Whatever you say, my love,” he says, sighing, and kisses her again.

+

My love.

+

Everything is.

+

Perfect.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Where the Heart Is on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Alexander Zalben

+

+ + Author image of Alexander Zalben + + + Alex Zalben is the author of an all-ages comic book series for Marvel, Thor and the Warriors Four. His short fiction has been featured in Splickety Magazine, the Thuggish Itch and Galileo’s Theme Park anthologies, and an issue of Enchanted Conversation Magazine. For the past decade he’s hosted the live show and podcast Comic Book Club, which has been profiled in the New York Times. He currently works as Managing Editor at Decider.com, with previous bylines on TV Guide, MTV News and more. You can check him out too often on Twitter.

+

© Alexander Zalben 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons pictures, with two images by Andrea Piacquadio, and another by PublicDomainPictures - many thanks.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2022

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Sydney Sackett +

Boy with Brick

+
+ + +

People always seem to make a big deal about 'stories with a twist', but there are other ways for an ending to have impact. In this taut tale of interminable gladiatorial torment, Sydney Sackett gives us something a little different: a story that leads you down a path of expectation, only for it to prove maybe not to be the path you thought it was.

+ + + + Story image for Boy with Brick by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Gourmets

+ Jeff Reynolds +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Gourmets by + + + +

There's supposed to be nothing quite like a good, satisfying meal, but Jeff Reynolds has an appetite-whetting recipe to defy that claim: take one very odd pear — excuse me, 'pair' — and marinate in mixed fantasy, sprinkle on a little humor, add a dash of horror, and then raise the steaks to boiling point — I mean 'stakes' — ah, enough with the puns, you get the idea…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Nwanebeakwa

+ Chinaza Eziaghighala +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nwanebeakwa by + + + +

Chinaza Eziaghighala is like one of those mysterious particles with strange asymmetry: at first glance she is a medical doctor; she turns, and is a filmmaker; turns again, and writes speculative fiction. In this latter orientation she unveils a series of encounters of the most intense kind, at first ecstatic, but all too soon horrific. Warning: this story contains sexual and violent content.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Tyrannosaurus Mechs

+ Gregory L. Norris +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Tyrannosaurus Mechs by + + + +

Six issues ago, Gregory L. Norris graced our pages with a succinct and sly contemporary horror that skewered the fashion scene, more or less literally. His latest story is a trip to a distant future that evokes a distant past, and it boasts the very highest of high-concept titles.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Nighthawks

+ Si Wang +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nighthawks by + + + +

Taking its title from Edward Hopper's iconic 1942 painting, Si Wang's story jumps ahead a hundred years or so and drops us into a dystopia of urban and social decay that is, perhaps, just a bio-technological breakthrough or two away from being entirely plausible.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten

+ Anna Zumbro +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten by + + + +

High school kids have long been struck with envy at the status of their peers, but Anna Zumbro poses a really thorny question: How much worse would it be if, instead of your social media feed telling you everyone else's life was that much more super, it was on the curriculum?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild

+ Marc Phillips +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild by + + + +

There's a theme in US culture about survivalism, about defending what's yours, from other citizens or the state itself. Marc Phillips' story seems to be one man's oral recounting of just such a future-history, but it might be the exact opposite of that, in one sense at least.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-31/boy-with-brick.html b/issue-31/boy-with-brick.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fe6cf01c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-31/boy-with-brick.html @@ -0,0 +1,396 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Boy with Brick — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 31 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Boy with Brick

+

Sydney Sackett

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Boy with Brick by +
+ + + + +

H + +e cries for his mother on the first night. Somebody from one of the adjoining cages grabs the chain-links, rattling sharp enough to drown him out, and screams back. “Shut up! Shut up! She isn’t gonna come!”

+

He tries to stop crying. Rubs his eyes clear with his arm, like it would help him see anything in all this dark, and huddles in the corner under his frayed jacket. “I want to go home.”

+

“Nobody goes home! Just take it. Take it like the rest of us and give us a goddamned rest.”

+

“Let him cry tonight,” says someone else. Slower and older. A voice like a grandfather’s. “Everybody’s been there before.”

+

The screaming voice peters out with a snort. The boy leans on the fence to his left, in the old one’s direction, even though there could be one or two cages between them, populated with other sleepers. Metal cold and smooth. Good for the fat green bruise on his cheek. The funny part is, he didn’t get that one from here. “How long does it take,” he mumbles. “For this to be okay.”

+

“It won’t be.” The old man pauses. “It’s not okay. You just learn you’re better than what they can do to you.”

+

“How long’ll that be?”

+

A strange kind of chuckle. It’s the warmest and saddest sound, with exhaustion that brings tears to the corners of the boy’s eyes. “As long as it takes.”

+

He curls his fingers around a loop of wire, rubbing the cold into his bruise. It’s relieving in a way. Like a glass of lemonade in a dry summer. He’ll take what he can get.

+

“What’s your name?” he whispers, nearly certain it won’t carry all the way through the stale air.

+

The chuckle is lighter this time—almost surprised. “Tell me yours first.”

+

He does.

+

“You won’t remember mine for long,” the old man says, but tells him anyway. And he’s right.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey push him into the bright golden ring of sand hard enough for him to trip and fall, skinning his palms. The creatures above the ring—creatures, monstrous things that burn his eyes worse than the sand and make him glad he can’t see straight through the light—jeer and hoot. A menagerie of animal calls and other undefinable noises. His head swims as he pulls himself up with stinging hands, checking the dark gate behind him even though he knows he is already stranded.

+

From the other side, they shove out a skinny boy with glasses. At least as young as himself. He looks like he comes from money. Probably good schooling. He keeps his feet, but he’s dazed and squinting too. They look at each other as the hooting rises again.

+

His first thought is a kind of hot, sour indignity, prickling in his throat. They thought this was an equal match for him? A schoolboy with bad eyes and a dirty blazer? The kind of flinching prey he’d throw cherry pits at from the tenement window? Something this easy?

+

His second thought is nervous confusion, denial. That wasn’t him. They want him to think like that.

+

His third thought flickers back again. Something this easy? Don’t they think he can take it?

+

There’s nothing in the circle but the boy and the other boy and a red brick. They both look at the brick.

+

If the other boy moves first, he reasons, that’ll be all right. It’ll be self defense. If the blazer boy tries to get the brick first, he’ll have to get to it faster. Of course nobody would blame him if he didn’t move first.

+

Blazer boy doesn’t. Or, they’re both making tiny steps around the pit like fledgling boxers, but nobody’s getting closer. Both with their fists raised. Again there’s the derisive voice in his head. He’s not even in the right stance. He’s never thrown a punch that mattered.

+

It is not Blazer’s fault if he does not typically come home in the evening and choke down whatever’s been boiled for soup and wait for his pa to crack him across the face. It’s not really.

+

It does mean he doesn’t know how to take it. It probably means Blazer wasn’t going to survive this place anyway.

+

Still they make fragile circles around the brick. Come on, he pushes. You want to go for it. It’ll be your only chance. You want it, come on, damn it.

+

There! Blazer’s feet are angling. His thin shoulders lean forward like marionette hooks pulled on strings. His glassy expression doesn’t look any different, but they probably teach you that kind of thing in school after reading class. How to Stiff Your Upper Lip.

+

It takes one more movement. Blazer jerks unsteadily, like he’s not really set to do it. He’s not even dedicated to it. If he’s not brave enough to try to beat his way out of here, he was never going to make it.

+

Sprinting, just about five steps, and he gets there a second before Blazer, who has decided to throw himself in too late, which is only his own fault. He’s trying to pry the brick away, and that can’t be had. First, a punch thrown to the bridge of his nose. It stumbles him off balance, clutching his chipped glasses. A smear of red on the lens. But it wasn’t even that hard, come on, he could throw one back at least—

+

Can’t wait for that, though, or Blazer might get the upper hand. He hefts the brick high in the air, and it’s so heavy he’s sure Blazer wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it if he did take it. His elbows lock.

+

“Mummy, I want my mum, I wanna go home,” Blazer is screaming thinly, the edge of his nose bleeding, with his skinny fingers wrestling for the brick at the same time, like they’re not connected to the body running his mouth at all. He would still be screaming for his mum if he got the weapon while he crashed down and down to break the skull. The discordance is ear-ringing. Even his voice is stuck-up, something in him sneers, and that’s not the right thought, not even his voice, but it won’t go away.

+

The glasses break first. They’re not a really satisfying crunch—more of a twist in the wire, inverting from the bridge, and then they fly off Blazer’s face. The brick crashes into his mouth next. The teeth must’ve popped straight out of his gums, because Blazer’s spitting them like anything, washed out in blood and foam. Nobody tells him to stop, and there is also a piston that seems to have replaced his shoulder while he wasn’t looking, maybe both shoulders, because he pushes Blazer down to the sand now and holds him with his knees while he turns his head into a bad painting.

+

This isn’t me, I’m not doing this, he tries to shout, but the noises from the creatures around the ring are too loud and he can’t hear anything else. It’s not my fault. You moved first.

+

Blazer’s still drumming his heels on the ground, erratically trying to push the bigger weight off him, even though his face isn’t worth protecting anymore, so the boy with the brick sets his knee down on his wrist and starts taking care of the fingers.

+

He’s warm, shivering and feverish-warm. His heart beats hard enough to hurt.

+

It’s easier to slip under, so he does.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he big young man crashes backward into the fence surrounding this wet metal pit, a gong going off in his head. The watchers’ cheers crescendo. He shakes himself, rubbing the damp spot on the back of his head ruefully. Makes a swollen grin with a collection of pulverized molars and canines. Somehow they always grow back in, the same way his shoulders have gotten as hard as flanged maces and his hands are close to steel traps. The other guy, Flank, is grinning too, rocking on his feet, with the aftermath of the blow probably still ringing in his fist.

+

The young man holds up one finger and cracks his jaw into place again, gasping at the impact. Bloody tears well in his eyes. It’s not that he was hit there; that’s just how it happens now. “You trying to compensate for something, Flank?”

+

“You taking it easy on me, or you need a break already? I’m just warming up.” Flank blows imaginary dust off his knuckles. Gets a hooting laugh from the gallery.

+

“A break? I just got a break. I can barely move my face. C’mere, cocksucker, I’ll give you a break.”

+

Flank laughs fixedly as they start toward each other in the center again. The young man with the cracked jaw can tell he is spinning nervously for another good line. They have to help each other out here, at least inside the circle. In the beginning it was good enough just for them to tear each other apart in shrieking and wet, pounding silence. But now they’re better, and they can take more, and it’s got to be a thrill, it’s got to make the watchers happy…

+

Their arms lock for a second when they ram into each other like sweating bull elephants, Flank hoarsely muttering in his ear: “Nerves still ain’t fixed in my left foot—crack it, I’ll scream.”

+

Yeah, sure, Flank, my man, he conveys back at him with a chin jerk, but in his head the voice is reminding him, Flank ain’t all that good a faker whether he’s got his nerves or not.

+

As they tussle, Flank’s elbow in his ribs and his bone-hard nails scraping down Flank’s scalp, he lifts a heavy heel and brings down his weight in the center of the right foot, breaking several component bones.

+

It’s a really good scream. Flank folds and slaps into the ground like a wet rag.

+

“Warm that up and smoke it,” the young man says carelessly, and spits bubbled blood over his shoulder.

+

The watchers howl like haunted coyotes, all for him. They call out his name. They know his name. In the real world—the place rarely comes to his mind anymore, because it’s become less and less real compared to this, the fighting and roaring and the heat of the lights—nobody cared about him or his name, just a kid from the… wherever he came from.

+

One of the memories that’s dim, but not as dim as everything else, is getting beat on out there too. Someone much bigger than he was, and nearly every night. He’s not sure who it was, but he knows he couldn’t do anything about it. Bully for him. He’d be able to stomp that guy to the ground now. He wins his fights. He’s at the top of his game, and they love him for it. In this ring, he’s at the top of the world.

+

The watchers will let him out of the ring if he makes this decisive. He’ll get Flank’s food and his own too. There is a distinct possibility they will send one of the fair little things from the upper levels to keep him warm in his cage tonight, and it might be Calliope, who has soft, creamy butterfly fingers and a voice that could sing down the sky. So, with a mild twinge of guilt, hard luck, my guy, but if you can’t take it, you can’t take it, he unknots the drawstring of his trousers and pisses on Flank’s twitching form.

+

The watchers love the tuneless whistle he throws in, like he’s doing his business against a wall, all alone and unruffled. The gate opens behind him after he finishes. He bows for them and walks out, leaving Flank back there for the docs. He only allows himself to limp and wince once he has vanished in the cooling darkness.

+

All alone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here’s a prick of a new kid keeping him awake tonight, several cages away, sobbing his head off for his mum. Because she’s going to, what… rappel inside and lift him out of the dark? Great plan. Maybe if he gets even louder she’ll hear him.

+

“Shut up!” he bellows, backhanding the bars to make his point. His skin is tough enough. He doesn’t feel anything. He shouldn’t have to deal with this. He’s the king. “Shut that up! She can’t hear you! Nobody’s coming for you!”

+

It stops the blubbering, but the boy is still whimpering and sniffling and it’s about to split his head. All these emotions. They just make things painful and strange, and they smell like the old world. When the fair little things they send to his cage try to talk to him secretly, tell him about the things the watchers do to them upstairs, ask him about getting out of here, he tells them it ain’t their job to be talking at him.

+

“No, it’s all right,” some interfering hack soothes the boy from a cage farther down the line. “It’s good to cry. Let everything out. Let it go. We’ve all been there.”

+

But the rest of us proved we were better, the inner voice comments snidely. Good enough to take whatever they can throw at us.

+

Somehow he’s not sure he agrees with the voice entirely. Is that what he’s proved? Is he good enough, or is he in the same place as everybody else?

+

In a swaying network of cages that moves and breathes with the mass of them. In the back of his head, in a different, quieter voice, he asks himself what they would be able to do, if all of them tried to tear their way out at the same time. He knows he is terrifically strong, but even he couldn’t do it if he were alone.

+

The boy quiets down for the night, but the young man can’t seem to sleep anyway.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n a small, upright tube of a ring, filled with water knee-deep, the man faces down a far older one. Scarred and pitted from his brows to his shins, with the rippled tissue on his knuckles marking how many times the docs have stitched him back together, this is an ex-fighter. They have finally put him out for retirement.

+

The huge man with the iron shoulders and cracked teeth and great millwheel fists is their retirer. Nobody has beaten him in a long time. The fighting and roaring and endless rewards have been dwindling. For the watchers, because he isn’t struggling anymore, he’s started to bore them.

+

When he’s good enough to take anything they can throw at him, there’s no point throwing it.

+

“Come on and put your fists up. I’ll give you a freebie,” the man says, without much energy in it. The watchers are baying for something good, something fresh. The scarface is giving him nothing. He can’t blame him. He never had a chance against the king.

+

“Against those cannons? With my derringers?” says the scarface, with a smile nothing like the blood-grin of the ring. He actually reaches out to squeeze one of the man’s biceps. The watchers laugh, but derisively, impatiently. They fling trash down to bob in the rank water.

+

“You’ve grown up hard, haven’t you,” says the scarface, with the same sad, warm smile, and something pings in the man’s head, in a place he hasn’t tried to look for a long time, and this is going wrong. He should be sowing this old wreck’s teeth around the ring like corn. But he’s standing here in the cold water, seven feet of scar tissue and muscle, like a goon with nothing in the world but cannons for arms.

+

“Into what?” he asks, pulse clumsy in his mouth. The watchers are silent. It isn’t supposed to be happening this way. Everything’s gone all wrong. “Grown into what?”

+

The wiry scarface spreads his arms, old muscle withered and kindly eyes set in a cracked face of so much memory. And he doesn’t have to say it, because the man sees it all in a moment, the terrible train of thought that will end nowhere he wants to go—will end here, in the ring again, when they are tired of him and there is a new arrogant king who will retire him one day like a broken dog—

+

And he will spread his arms like this, giving the opening, asking to be ended, to be beaten. Nameless and unknown. When he is better than what they can do to him.

+

“I can’t—” He staggers, water sloshing sickly around his legs. “I don’t—”

+

He breaks the scarface’s neck with a simple lock and twist. The body falls into the water without blood, and floats on its front, washing peacefully up and down.

+

All of them sleeping in a swaying nest, waiting for their turn to drown. And they agree to it.

+

Nobody cheers for him. The dirty water washes out and soaks the dark floors inside when they open the gate.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + + want to go home,” the new boy sobs. “I want my daddy. I want my mum. Please let me out of here. Please."

+

“Shut up, kid,” Blazer snaps. The ruthless, ruin-faced hunter who can’t see worth twopence but can sniff you out and shred you with the metal shards of his hands. “They can’t hear you. Shut up and just listen.”

+

“Appreciate it, Blazer,” says the iron-shouldered man. Even when he sits, he has to hunch to fit his cage. “Now, boy, listen. I know you’re in pain, and you can cry, but I need you to work on something with us. You need to start passing a message to the cages around you. We need it passed down the lines until everybody’s heard it.”

+

“We’re going to sway the structure,” Calliope says from Blazer’s cage, and the clarion of her voice travels through the dark like a force that could splinter steel. “All of us in unison. Left and right to loosen it from the ground.”

+

“Pass it through quickly, and tell them not to question it. Tell them who it’s coming from,” says Flank, who can’t walk on his two damaged feet any longer, but lopes on rough, inured hands.

+

The boy sniffs and coughs on his own tears. “So who is that?”

+

A cracked, unseeable smile. “Your name first.”

+

“Harry,” says the boy.

+

“Good name, Harry. I’ll remember that,” says the man. He knows he will. No matter who makes it out of here alive tonight. “I’m Brutus. Now we need to work.”

+

As the massive woven animal of a cage begins to stir, waking all the way to the forgotten corners, and everyone takes hold of their bars, Calliope starts to sing the way clear for them.

+

Brutus rocks the cage harder than any of them, with bleeding palms he cannot possibly care to wipe down. There is a distant memory which pulls strongly to him. There’s an old man out there in a tenement building somewhere, and he feels most strongly the urge to find him and to knock him all the way down a tall flight of stairs.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Boy with Brick on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Sydney Sackett

+

+ + Author image of Sydney Sackett + + + Sydney Sackett (she/her) is a newly graduated speculative fiction author and poet with experience in true crime journalism at Murder Murder News. Some of her work appears in Etherea, Menacing Hedge, Radon Journal, and Not One of Us. She can be found at sydneybsackett.wixsite.com, where she’s hoping to nab someone’s stories to edit.

+

© Sydney Sackett 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Midjourney, the AI image generator, plus a Creative Commons image by MabelAmber - many thanks!

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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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I would like to talk about AI. Again.

+

In our Winter 2021 issue, the cover art and all the illustrations accompanying the stories were at least in part created by an AI-powered image generator. However, it was a somewhat complicated, laborious process: interesting to undertake, but repetitive and time consuming, fraught with unusable misfires, and (due to my modest computer resources) prone to system crashes. If all went well, I could create a workable image in fifteen minutes… but it might take a dozen failures to acquire one winner.

+

The recent attention which has fallen on another AI image generator, Midjourney, may underline two inevitable necessities to enter the mainstream: quality of output and ease of use, both of which Midjourney has in spades. Text prompts with any degree of detail produce four image options in approximately 60 seconds, and they are almost invariably good; sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful. It will create variations on those initial images in maybe half that time, and upscales the ones you like into large, highly detailed final versions in perhaps a minute or two at most, depending on how busy the site is.

+

Unsurprisingly, it gets quite busy.

+

All the art in the present issue of Mythaxis was created using Midjourney, which in addition to being very accessible is also startlingly inexpensive to use—which connects to a subject I mean to return to in a future editorial. In some cases these images are Midjourney’s unaltered output; in others, I’ve composited its output to a greater or lesser extent to create the final product; and I’ve also had to perform a few instances of cosmetic (in some cases, emergency) surgery to deal with problems thrown up by the AI. It isn’t a perfect science yet, though I think you’ll agree that the results are impressive—but while they make for a very attractive-looking issue, this isn’t the aspect of Artificial Intelligence I really want to discuss.

+

A lot is made of how Artificial Intelligence is going to take over all our jobs; how it can already compose music easily mistaken for the work of history’s greats; and how its often amusing attempts at creative writing seem less laughable with each new viral report. Ever since our first visual experiment with using AI, we behind the scenes at Mythaxis have discussed how to further explore the potential of AI in the field of magazine publishing. And, after much debate, we’ve come to the conclusion that the one expendable participant, the most toothless cog in our machine, the weak link in our chain, the fifth wheel to replace, is…

+

The Editor.

+

I won’t deny, this came as a bit of a blow. Nevertheless, to this end I enthusiastically joined in plotting my own downfall, and I can confirm that the first step on the path to my obsolescence has now been taken, because we are indeed training up an AI to replace me. But it’s going to have to prove itself before I hand over the reins. And I suspect I’ve got a little while in the hot seat ahead of me yet.

+

Our fledgling experiment went something like this: first, we exposed a learning algorithm to the seventy-plus stories which have previously been published in Mythaxis during my editorship, so that it could analyse the material which I considered best amongst the hundreds of submissions we have received. Then, we challenged it to survey the one-hundred and fifty-eight stories which we received in our most recent submission window. If its understanding of my taste in fiction was accurate, surely it would rank most highly the stories which I actually selected, no?

+

The answer was… No.

+

In fact, of my eight acceptances that window, my so-called replacement rejected seven. And the one story it agreed with me about was also the one it was least certain of out of the eight. It really didn’t like the others! So, from my perspective at least, we didn’t so much create an Artificial Intelligence as an Actual Ignorance.

+

However, maybe this isn’t terribly surprising. It should be noted that seventy-four stories is not a very large sample size. Also, that the characteristics of the stories we publish vary in many different ways: from flash fiction to long shorts, science fiction to fantasy to horror, written in flavours (or flavors) of English from American and British to those influenced by fluency in other languages. There’s a lot of complexity, in short—not least, I would hope, in the thing we’re actually attempting to simulate here: me.

+

Therefore, we shall persist. We plan to refine our strategies, and educate our little monster. We’re calling it the Slushbot. Starting now, every three months our currently oh-so-limited AI will have a chance to test itself against my judgement. As new submissions come into the slush pile, I will make my choices, and Slushbot will make its. My taste is impeccable; we will see if Slushbot’s taste improves.

+

We do all this with a goal in mind: we hope to be the first magazine edited by an AI. So, should it ever match my picks from a window’s submissions to a sufficiently frightening extent, Slushbot will get to edit an issue of Mythaxis. For one window, we will give it the final say over which stories to include, and I will go on holiday.

+

Guess I’d better start packing my bags… you know, sooner or later. Next year maybe. Or whenever hell freezes over. Under a blue moon. As a pig flies over it.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

+

ISSUE 31 - Thanks and Salutations! +As noted previously, all the images in this issue were created primarily using Midjourney, the AI image generator. In the case of our cover, the sole prompt was the word ‘mythaxis’, of course.

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2022

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+ Sydney Sackett +

Boy with Brick

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People always seem to make a big deal about 'stories with a twist', but there are other ways for an ending to have impact. In this taut tale of interminable gladiatorial torment, Sydney Sackett gives us something a little different: a story that leads you down a path of expectation, only for it to prove maybe not to be the path you thought it was.

+ + + + Story image for Boy with Brick by + + + +
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The Gourmets

+ Jeff Reynolds +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Gourmets by + + + +

There's supposed to be nothing quite like a good, satisfying meal, but Jeff Reynolds has an appetite-whetting recipe to defy that claim: take one very odd pear — excuse me, 'pair' — and marinate in mixed fantasy, sprinkle on a little humor, add a dash of horror, and then raise the steaks to boiling point — I mean 'stakes' — ah, enough with the puns, you get the idea…

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Nwanebeakwa

+ Chinaza Eziaghighala +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nwanebeakwa by + + + +

Chinaza Eziaghighala is like one of those mysterious particles with strange asymmetry: at first glance she is a medical doctor; she turns, and is a filmmaker; turns again, and writes speculative fiction. In this latter orientation she unveils a series of encounters of the most intense kind, at first ecstatic, but all too soon horrific. Warning: this story contains sexual and violent content.

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Tyrannosaurus Mechs

+ Gregory L. Norris +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Tyrannosaurus Mechs by + + + +

Six issues ago, Gregory L. Norris graced our pages with a succinct and sly contemporary horror that skewered the fashion scene, more or less literally. His latest story is a trip to a distant future that evokes a distant past, and it boasts the very highest of high-concept titles.

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Nighthawks

+ Si Wang +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nighthawks by + + + +

Taking its title from Edward Hopper's iconic 1942 painting, Si Wang's story jumps ahead a hundred years or so and drops us into a dystopia of urban and social decay that is, perhaps, just a bio-technological breakthrough or two away from being entirely plausible.

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The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten

+ Anna Zumbro +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten by + + + +

High school kids have long been struck with envy at the status of their peers, but Anna Zumbro poses a really thorny question: How much worse would it be if, instead of your social media feed telling you everyone else's life was that much more super, it was on the curriculum?

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Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild

+ Marc Phillips +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild by + + + +

There's a theme in US culture about survivalism, about defending what's yours, from other citizens or the state itself. Marc Phillips' story seems to be one man's oral recounting of just such a future-history, but it might be the exact opposite of that, in one sense at least.

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Nighthawks

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Si Wang

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T + +he smell hit me first: a sickening aroma of slow-roasted pork with a coppery, sulfurous tinge. The iron bars to the first-floor apartment had been pried open, the window broken, and in the smokey living room a charred body sat strapped to a chair.

+

As a courier I got around and saw my share of death, but mostly caused by prowlers. This was probably a First Children kill. Outside, I unwrapped the package I had been paid to deliver and found half a pack of cigarettes and half a pack of matches with a note: Do you recall my memory of stealing dad’s cigarettes for the first time in middle school? Those were the days. Don’t be a stranger. Hope these will tide you over.

+

I’d never smoked before, but I wanted to get the taste of burnt flesh out of my mouth. My hand shook as I tried to light the match.

+

I made my way out of Dogpatch as fast as I could. It was almost dawn and Imogen would be getting off work soon. The streets were dotted with gloomy individuals plodding their way home, while blue and red neon lights, which crawled over the cityscape like hungry vines, winked out one by one. A large billboard loomed on 25th. The profiles of two identical women wearing construction hats faced each other. In bold text was written Bet on yourself! and in smaller print Sponsored by the Double Down Initiative. Even after the Parvovirus made it impossible to have children, people still had hope.

+

With the beating heart of Dogpatch behind me, the streets darkened. Although the moon was full, it appeared as a dim, brownish orb due to the clouds that had formed around it after a failed terraform attempt, and with city funding dried to a dribble the streetlamps were nonfunctional. But I didn’t need light to get around—I knew these streets well.

+

A gentle breeze brought the rancid smell of rotten meat and wet fur. The prowlers had become desperate lately, eating animals and hunting before dawn. I quickened my pace.

+

The large windows of Hopper’s Cafe wrapped around the corner, allowing warm light to permeate onto the streets, displaying its clean, well-lit interior as clearly as if I were inside. Below the windows, beggars huddled together. Hopper’s Cafe catered to loneliness as much as it did to hunger.

+

Inside, the smell of pastries and coffee wafted around me. The one-armed waiter measured me with a glance. A flaming sun was branded onto the back of his lone hand, a mark for those who had wronged the First Children. “We’re closing.”

+

“Where’s Imogen?” I asked.

+

“Was hoping you would know. Never showed up for work tonight. This keeps happening, and the boss’ll have no choice but to give her job to one of those sods outside.”

+

“What do you mean? She’s never missed work before.”

+

He scoffed. “Buddy, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to cover for her. But this is the first time she’s not shown at all without notice, I’ll give you that.” When he saw my expression, his face softened. “Don’t let your mind go there, buddy. She’s probably at home taking care of Lang.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +y first memory of Imogen: she nibbles her fingernails while browsing books at Green Apple. I fall in love immediately.

+

No, that was a lie. That was Lang’s first memory of Imogen.

+

Imogen’s first memory of me was when I came home from the lab, wrapped in a thermal blanket. She touched my face and said, “You look exactly like him.” But I would never be the same thing to Imogen as she was to me. Like a river dividing into two, my life had diverged.

+

I wondered if Imogen finally decided to leave for the communities out in the Sierras. We’ve had several fights about it. Did she leave without telling me? She wouldn’t have left without Lang.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he Spanish Colonial facade of the Castro Theatre emerged from the shadows. Like a god frozen in stone, it retained its grandeur and beauty but had no twinkle of life left. The doors had been destroyed and displaced by rubble so that no one could enter or leave.

+

I slipped inside the box office and tapped on the intercom. Expecting to hear Imogen, I was instead shaken by Lang’s distressed voice. “Castor, is that you?”

+

“Yeah, it’s me. Is Imogen there?”

+

“She’s not here.”

+

“Can you throw down the line?”

+

“Is it safe?”

+

“I’m talking to you right now, aren’t I? Throw down the line.”

+

Above me, a window grated open, and uneven footsteps shuffled to the edge of the marquee. The rope ladder fell with a muted thud. I climbed up and pulled myself over the edge of the marquee. Lang didn’t offer his hand—he never did.

+

He was the spitting image of me, but with large bags under his eyes and frazzled hair. He was thinner and had developed a nervous twitch over the years, never able to sit still, either scratching his head or biting his fingernails. I didn’t know if it was alcoholism, the cloning process, or the society crumbling around him that caused it, but he was a constant reminder of what could have happened to me—and what could still happen.

+

Before I could say anything, Lang crouched down and sobbed, right hand touching the ground and left hand rubbing his hair. “She’s gone.”

+

I bent down and placed a hand on his back. “Where did she go?”

+

As if a new idea suddenly entered his head, Lang’s eyes widened. He looked far off and stammered excitedly, “Where did she go? Where did she go! The Islais Motel. She goes there often.”

+

I felt like a rock had dropped into my stomach. “Why would she be there, Lang?”

+

“I don’t know. She never said. But she goes every week.”

+

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

+

He shrugged. “I forgot.” Lang still had moments of clarity, a calm in the middle of a hazy storm.

+

I sighed. “I have to find her.”

+

Snot dripped down Lang’s nose. “But now? You just got here, Cas. And the sun… the prowlers will be out soon.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +o one went out during the day. The prowlers had made us nocturnal. I moved quickly, hugging the buildings and hiding behind cars, all the while thinking how strange it was to be out in the daylight. I only had Lang’s memories of the sun: playing basketball on a hot summer day, shielding my eyes from the glint of a windshield, watching the solar eclipse through a piece of welding glass.

+

Much of San Francisco’s beauty dissipated in the light, its crumbling buildings and grimy storm drains exposed like a grungy nightclub after the lights were turned on. The cars parked neatly on the sides of the pothole-covered street were rusty with broken windows and flat tires.

+

I passed by Dolores Park. As a child, Lang went there with his parents for picnics when the field was packed with people drinking, smoking hash, practicing yoga, and slacklining. After he met Imogen, they came here often. Now, a thick forest of giant ragweeds over a story tall feasted on its soil, covering every inch of the park. Deep inside, a pack of prowlers had made their home.

+

There were no people, no birds. Steel buildings groaned and water dripped in an alleyway. I came across the mangled corpse of a dog splayed out like an effigy to a sadistic god; maggots writhed all over the dead thing, sounding like hamburger meat being kneaded.

+

The proud twins of the Double Down Initiative billboard greeted me as I entered Dogpatch again. In the daylight, I noticed for the first time the words ALL CLONES MUST DIE spray-painted over the face of the woman on the right.

+

How did they decide that she was the clone and not the other?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +n orange No Vacancy sign pointed me to the Islais Motel, a two-story, L-shaped building. In the parking lot, behind a rusty truck, a group of Hands huddled around a trashcan fire pit, drinking and laughing raucously. They quieted as I approached and a man whose face was covered in tattoos gestured towards the front office. The motel receptionist’s weathered and cracked face had thinned to the point where she was half-skeleton.

+

“Can you call Imogen up and let her know that I’m here?” I asked.

+

The receptionist’s voice was rich and melodious. “Her room’s been empty for several days now, dearie.”

+

“Oh, not a problem. She told me to wait for her. Do you mind letting me into her room?”

+

She studied me intently. “Did you really think that would work? Come now, you can do better than that.”

+

After a moment, I reached into my wallet and pulled out the half pack of cigarettes.

+

“Ah, a man after my own heart.” She took the pack with both hands and bowed her head, then slid a key across the counter.

+

“Oh, and dearie?” she said, as I headed for the stairs. “Please behave. Those are my Hands out there, and they will rip your eyes out if you try anything.” She smiled pleasantly.

+

I walked up the stairs to the second floor and entered room twenty-two. Smells of eucalyptus wafted into my nose and calmed my nerves. Unlit candles inhabited the room like silent spectators packing a stadium. A bookshelf overflowed with tattered paperbacks, stained hardcovers, a few textbooks, and a copy, my copy, of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I had been looking for. As promised, no Imogen.

+

Weary from traveling during the day, I slumped onto the bed. From a pillow, I picked out a long strand of black hair that could have been Imogen’s. Lang’s memories of waking up next to Imogen—memories of nestling next to her and smelling the back of her head—flooded through my mind. I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed in her scent.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + snapped awake to a hard pounding at the door. It was night again, but I had no sense of how much time had passed. I got up, wiped away a line of drool trailing down my cheek, and opened the door to find a Collector standing there.

+

She was bald, with multiple scars on her face, and dressed in a black suit embroidered with the flaming sun of the First Children. Not trained but manufactured—cloned from the same zealot—a Collector was a punisher, the bully that took your lunch money, the last person you wanted to see at your doorstep.

+

She stared at me with what seemed to be pity and compassion before stepping forward and hitting me in the throat with the tips of her fingers. Before I could let out a gurgle of pain, she grabbed me by the collar and slammed me to the floor.

+

“I want you to know that I don’t enjoy hurting you,” she whispered in my ear. “You’ve come to a crossroads, and what you say next will determine whether you live. You will answer my questions. Do you hear me?”

+

I nodded, unable to speak.

+

She pulled out my wallet and examined my ID. “So, Castor… you are a clone. Did Imogen send you to make the donation?”

+

The air coming out of my lungs felt like sandpaper against my throat. “What donation?”

+

She calmly jabbed me in the gut. “I will ask the questions. Did you come here to kill me?” She looked me up and down, then grunted. “Of course not. What’s your relationship with Imogen?”

+

I coughed and sucked in a proper breath. “She’s my clone’s wife.”

+

The Collector arched her eyebrow and frowned. “I see… and where is she now?”

+

“I don’t know.”

+

She stood up and sighed. “Do you know that reading micro-expressions is not reliable? The most experienced readers can do little better than chance, and I’m one of the best. I have no foolproof way of knowing whether you are telling the truth.

+

“So, what I’m going to do next is hurt you until you have no choice but to tell the truth. I want you to know that there’s a reason for this. You are serving a greater purpose.”

+

With an animal howl that surprised both of us, I leapt up and lunged at her. She stepped to the side. I punched the air again and again while she pummeled me like a baker kneading dough. When I was finally on the ground again, she asked the same questions. I gave the same answers. With each answer, she dislocated one of my fingers.

+

I told the truth each time, but it didn’t matter.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he darkness was replaced by an orange glow. Someone held my hand. Sharp pain jolted down my finger as it popped back in place. I cried out. A woman shushed me and put a towel in my mouth. I bit down hard as she reset each finger.

+

With my right eye—the only one I could open—I looked up and saw Imogen holding a bag of ice. She pressed it against my face.

+

“Where have you been?” I asked through split lips.

+

“I’ve been laying low.” Imogen’s voice sounded different—it was huskier and tinged with bitterness. “I only came back because I got the news that a Collector busted someone in my room, but I didn’t expect it to be you.”

+

I looked away. The bed had been turned over, the mattress ripped apart, its springs popping out. All the drawers had been emptied, the bookshelf toppled. A backpack, stuffed with outdoor gear was propped against the wall.

+

I sat up and coughed blood into my hands. With a look of concern, Imogen crouched closer over a few flickering candles. The dim glow illuminated her face just enough for me to see the crow’s feet etching the corner of her eyes and a scar running above her left eye to the bottom of her jaw.

+

She wasn’t Imogen. Even the way she moved—guarded and closed off—was different from Imogen. But she was Imogen’s clone.

+

“I’m Amaya,” she said with a sad smile.

+

The pieces were starting to fit together. Imogen couldn’t have been able to clone herself without real money, without help, so she’d turned to the First Children. “I told her we didn’t need this. I told her it was too dangerous.”

+

“We did it for you.”

+

My hand reached out, but I was afraid to touch her. “All this time Imogen kept you a secret. Why didn’t you come home to us?”

+

Amaya stiffened. “At first we did it to protect you while we paid off the debt. I wanted to come home. You don’t even know how hard I worked… you wouldn’t believe the jobs I took, the things I had to do. But the longer I stayed here, the more I realized I couldn’t go back. I’ve changed too much.” She glared at me, waiting for me to speak.

+

Tears trickled down my eyes, burning the cuts on my face. “We’ve all changed. We could have helped you.”

+

Hesitantly, I touched Amaya’s shoulder. She looked away, but her posture softened. “Where’s Imogen?” I asked.

+

“We’ve been having trouble making payments lately—missed our last three. Imogen told me to keep out of sight while she figured it out. She never showed up. She’d either be here or back home, and if the First Children haven’t found her yet, then who knows? I’m surprised the Collector didn’t kill you…” Then she wrapped her arms around me, and we held each other.

+

I wanted to stay like that forever—holding her.

+

“Ever thought about leaving for the communities in the Sierras?” she said into my shoulder. “People live off the land and take care of each other there.”

+

I pulled away. “You sound just like Imogen. You really believe all that?”

+

“Better than dying here.”

+

“You know about Lang, right? He can’t make the journey. It’s too dangerous. And I can’t leave him here in the city.”

+

“Does he deserve your loyalty? Do either of them deserve it?”

+

I frowned. “I was the one who decided to double down. Or, rather, Lang did, but you know what I mean.”

+

Amaya looked at her backpack. “I’m leaving tonight. Going out East and taking my chances there.” She placed a hand over mine. “You could come with me.”

+

“Didn’t you just hear me? I can’t leave my family behind.”

+

A thought surfaced: now that the First Children knew of my existence, they would go after Lang next.

+

“I have to go home,” I said.

+

She made her face blank. “Go then. With or without you, I’m leaving before dawn. If you change your mind, I’ll be crossing the bridge and making camp at Treasure Island.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder and left through the bathroom window.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +ewer and fewer people populated the streets the farther I got from Dogpatch. By the time I passed the billboard for the third time, limping and still coughing up blood, I was the only one on the streets… except for a figure following me, a block away.

+

Although it hurt to breathe and I swallowed a good amount of blood, I tried for a jog. When I turned around, the figure was still a block away, its silhouette revealing a bald head and mechanical posture. So I ran, agony or not.

+

I broke through the doors of the abandoned Cesar Chavez Elementary School, up a flight of stairs, down halls, down more stairs, and exited into a back alley. Behind me, I heard the shattering of a window, a grunt on landing, and then the steady breathing of the Collector. I ran through another abandoned house on Mission, a parking garage, and the Mission playground, but I couldn’t lose her.

+

I came upon Dolores Park. The giant ragweed forest towered over me, I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but I didn’t pause.

+

Weeds smacked me in the face, occluding my view. I turned in random directions, hoping to lose the Collector, until I tripped on a large lump huddled on the ground and stumbled into a clearing. Small shapes rose from the ground and cried out in surprise, their voices childlike. They turned their heads toward me.

+

The Parvovirus was nature’s creation, but the prowlers were from human failure: the malformed clones of children, increasing in population over the years, though no one knew how since they never reached sexual maturity.

+

The Collector burst into the clearing right after me.

+

The prowlers’ heads turned towards her. When she saw them, she seemed to forget all about me. She smiled at the prowlers and approached them with open arms.

+

“My children,” she said.

+

The prowlers jumped onto her. One crawled up to her neck and bit down. Another grabbed her leg and mauled at her belly, ripping apart her suit jacket. She whimpered but looked towards the sky and murmured a prayer through bloodstained lips. She was quickly buried in a swarm of small bodies.

+

I didn’t stay long. A few of them chased me, their small figures cutting through the weeds while I awkwardly bulldozed through.

+

“Big man run. Run run run. We will wrung one big man run,” one sung in a nursery tune.

+

I stumbled out of Dolores Park and thought I was safe, that the prowlers’ fears of the night would keep them inside their forest. But they ran out after me, the pitter-patter of their feet slapping the cold concrete. I couldn’t outrun them.

+

Without a large numerical advantage, the three prowlers circled around me tentatively, pale, naked children with unkempt, raggedy hair. For all they looked human, their eyes were windows into a world without reason, morality, or understanding.

+

Two more prowlers shot out of the weeds, emboldening the other three. They charged at me. I grabbed one and threw it to the side, but the others brought me to the ground like an army of ants—bruising, biting, scratching, and reopening my wounds. They hit my head repeatedly as I shielded myself with my hands, but began to lose consciousness.

+

A cry of anger, but not from a prowler, shook me out of the haze. The beating stopped. I sat up, squinted through my good eye, and saw a woman wielding a claw hammer smash one prowler on the back and kick another to the ground. The three still standing scattered back into the weeds while the other two cried, tears and snot streaming down their faces, as they stumbled after their pack.

+

With her hair bound in a bun, Amaya looked even more like Imogen than when I first saw her. “Can you walk?” she asked.“I’m okay,” I said. “How did you find me?”

+

“I knew you would need my help. We better move.”

+

She knew the way home. As we walked down 18th, towards the Castro Theatre, I could barely keep up with her. Each step I took induced sharp pain near my ribs. Amaya looked back at me. I didn’t know if she was concerned or considering leaving me behind.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + could barely pull myself up the rope ladder and climb over the marquee. When Lang saw me, his eyes widened, and he touched his face as if he were tracing my bruises on his own face. “What happened?”

+

I sat down and leaned against the wall. “Leave the ladder. We have a guest.”

+

Lang peered over the edge of the marquee. He recoiled in shock and pulled at his hair with both hands as Amaya threw her backpack over the marquee and vaulted onto the deck. She looked at Lang with pity.

+

Lang fell to his knees. “Imogen, you’re alive! I’m so sorry.” Tears streamed from his eyes as he looked up at Amaya.

+

I pulled Lang to his feet. “What do you mean, ‘you’re sorry’?”

+

“Don’t be mad, Cas. I… Imogen wanted to come up, but there were prowlers running on the streets. They would come up here and eat me. So, I told Imogen to run.”

+

“And what?” I gripped his shirt, my fist clenched so tightly the white of bone showed.

+

“And… and they caught her.”

+

Amaya grimaced and turned away.

+

“You didn’t throw the rope for her when she needed it?” I cried.

+

He seemed to shrink into himself. “I was scared.”

+

“And you knew all along and didn’t tell me.”

+

Lang’s face beamed. “But she’s alive! Please don’t be mad. Why are you crying, Imogen?”

+

I pushed Lang away. “That’s not Imogen!”

+

“Look! Imogen’s alive!” Lang pointed at Amaya.

+

I slapped him in the face. “No, she’s not!”

+

“Look, Cas!”

+

I slapped him again. “I should leave you here.” I had never been so mad. I was mad at Lang and mad at myself. My anger and desire for self-destruction fed off each other. “I’m going out East! Leaving you.” I hit him again—this time with my fist.

+

Amaya pushed me aside. “Stop it!” she cried. “He’s had enough.”

+

Lang crawled into the corner and held his bleeding nose.

+

Amaya slung her backpack over her shoulder. “Are you coming or not?” she asked.

+

I didn’t owe Lang anything. He had brought me into the world to face the end of civilization—something he couldn’t handle. He was the barrier that had prevented any intimacy with Imogen. He had let her die. Going with Amaya meant a new beginning. We wouldn’t be tied down to our past anymore. We could find a place where birds still sang and the rivers were clear, we could learn to farm or hunt, and we could watch the sun rise over the mountains every morning instead of fearing the prowlers.

+

But how could I live with myself after leaving Lang to fend for himself? If Imogen was alive to see this, it would have broken her heart.

+

I shook my head.

+

“So that’s it, huh?” Amaya asked.

+

My mouth was dry. I couldn’t speak. I just stood there. Amaya swung one leg over the marquee and sat there. She paused before swinging her other leg.

+

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “You know that right?”

+

I nodded. “The First Children will come back for us.”

+

“Where are you going to go?”

+

“I don’t know.”

+

Amaya stared at Lang for a moment. “You should come with me. Both of you.”

+

“But we’ll weigh you down. A fool and a cripple. Sounds like a Shakespeare tragedy.” I looked down at Lang, who cowered and stared up at us, his eyes welled with tears. I reached out. Hesitantly, he took my hand.

+

“It’s worth trying for,” Amaya said.

+

“You really mean it?”

+

“Hurry up and get moving before I change my mind.” Amaya wore a smirk that I had never seen Imogen make before, a strange, comforting smile on a familiar face.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Nighthawks on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Si Wang

+

+ + Author image of Si Wang + + + Si Wang is a software engineer and writer who lives in California with his wife, son, and chickens. His work has been published in Aurealis, Electric Spec, and Mythaxis. His hobbies include playing basketball, tabletop games, and rock songs on the guitar and piano. You can find him on Twitter as @siwang.

+

© Si Wang 2022 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Midjourney, the AI image generator.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ +

Nwanebeakwa

+

Chinaza Eziaghighala

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Nwanebeakwa by +
+ + + + +

Onye tiri nwa nebe akwa? Who made my baby cry?

+

O + +kwukwe touched me the night before the day of Ani’s ceremony, a night too dark to see more than his outline—not the birthmark on his chest, nor the lines of his features, not even the glint of his eyes, none of the things of him I knew so well.

+

His hut was at the edge of the palace, beside the bushes, so it was difficult for people to know what happened inside. The room was dark and dimly lit by my candle and a sliver of moonlight. The sky had a crescent moon that night which reflected into the room through a secret hole in the wall, one that only myself and Okwukwe knew about.

+

Okwukwe had knelt to search for his Isi agu. He asked me to hold the candle and stand in front of him as he searched for it. I assumed that he was using his hands to search, but as I felt the warmth of his palms creep up my legs I didn’t move. I didn’t ask him why his hands were searching me instead of the floor. When his palm got to my waist, he unravelled my Isi agu and I felt a moist warmth on me. I pulled Okwukwe’s head closer to me and felt frustrated that I could not get all of me in all of him. My moans echoed off the walls of his room until Okwukwe said I should quiet down.

+

“There may still be people in the palace,” he said when he took his mouth off me. “Biko wetu olu gi.”

+

I kept silent as Okwukwe took me in his mouth again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Eze mere nwa nebe akwa? Eze made my baby cry?

+

I + + was given to the Eze of the village as a gift from my father who owed him a debt: reparation. The Eze made me an Ohu, a slave, forever doomed to serve the royal family’s estate. But being his personal Ohu was a joy, and nothing made it more fulfilling than serving the Eze’s son.

+

Okwukwe and I were friends first. We would always play games together around the village square, much to the annoyance of the merchants, councilmen, and other members of the palace courts. I was always at Okwukwe’s side and he at mine.

+

The Eze noted Okwukwe’s fondness of me and entrusted me to him. I escorted Okwukwe everywhere: to the palace pen, where we fed the noisy pigeons together; to the village stream, to watch girls balance water atop their heads; to the wrestling grounds, to spectate and thrill.

+

He told his father that he preferred we stay in the same room because he saw me as a brother. The Eze agreed. And one day Okwukwe escorted me to his room, to assist him with chores, and later to wrestle, and later still to do other things between only we two.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he day after Ani’s ceremony, the Eze called me and Okwukwe into his private quarters and asked us why we did not attend. I kept silent because it was not my place to speak.

+

Okwukwe said that he had overslept and I had to stay with him because it was dark and he didn’t want to be alone. I watched as the Eze looked at his son with disdain, as if he didn’t believe a single word that came out of his mouth. If Okwukwe was aware of his father’s gaze, he didn’t show it, but I was petrified. When the Eze looked at me, it seemed as if he already knew everything.

+

When Okwukwe and I went back to his room he said we should not speak about what had happened between us because people would not understand. I agreed. We were Okorobia, young men, how would we explain that we liked to suck and enter each other?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Weta uziza weta ose. Bring leaf and pepper.

+

Weta ngaji nkuru ofe. Bring a spoon to let me collect soup.

+

O + +kwukwe and I spent most nights together. They were the most magical. Each shared kiss, warm touch, and tantalising climax brought me closer and closer to Okwukwe until I knew that I would never want another. I wondered how no one in the palace knew about us. Our surreptitious smiles and furtive exchanges were subtle enough not to be apparent, but had anyone paid close attention, the truth would out.

+

All was well until Ani’s priest came to see the Eze himself, one full moon after Her festival. Dibia mmuo was a stout figure whose intimidating speech seemed to mesh all the voices of the gods together. Every man and woman gathered in the town square in a semicircle around him. The sky was overcast, and harmattan fog filled the air.

+

He offered Ani palm wine by pouring the drink on the ground in the centre of the square. Next, he offered Her Abacha and Ugba. The whole village watched in silence, and a strange feeling crept to my throat from the pit of my stomach. Okwukwe was seated by his father on a mat at the forefront of the gathering. He smiled at me when I glanced at him. I wished I could tell him how uneasy I felt inside, how bare.

+

As Dibia mmuo continued his incantations, he edged closer and closer, until he stopped, barely a whisker away from me, and stared me dead in the eye.

+

“Weta Uziza na ose, na ngagi ikuru ofe!” he screamed. His mouth had the stench of stale tobacco, his teeth were stained with spots of chocolate brown.

+

The Eze’s eyes widened and the village elders looked like they had been dealt blows to the stomach. I didn’t understand why Dibia mmuo was shouting a children’s nursery rhyme at me.

+

“Nwosu!” The warmth left my face at the sound of my name on his lips. The atmosphere in the square seemed heavier than before. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the village, watching, waiting for what was about to unfold. I urged myself to move forward but I couldn’t. I was transfixed. The palace guards yanked me out of the crowd, yet I remained limp as I was dragged into the centre of the square. I could see from the corner of my eye how Okwukwe writhed in his seat, fists clenched on his lap.

+

The Eze’s gaze pierced through me, his eyes revealing what I had most feared. “Nwosu, you have been selected to be the Nwa obe-akwa by Ani herself. Rejoice!”

+

I felt my heart skip a beat as I came to terms with my doom. Ani had selected me to be one of Her nwa-obe akwa: a bushbaby, witch monsters who become Her servants forever, consuming the souls of the who crossed Her path. People began to murmur among themselves, yet no one tried to help me. They all looked at me with pity, even agony. I pleaded to the Eze, calling him father, and to Okwukwe, but the Eze placed his hand on Okwukwe’s clenched fists. Okwukwe looked to the floor, averting his gaze. If he said a word he would face dire consequences, I knew. I was condemned and there was nothing anyone could do.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Umu nnunu aracha ya. Birds have licked it up.

+

T + +he palace birds kept silent on the day of the initiation ceremony. It was a bland day with empty skies and dead-silent woods. I was not allowed to say goodbye to Okwukwe before the Eze ordered the palace guards to bundle me out of the village.

+

“I knew about you and Okwukwe,” the Eze said, just before he turned his back on me forever. “It is better this way.”

+

The ceremony was a simple one, to be performed at Ani’s temple, right beside her altar. I was to be put into an open grave, where the body of a dead baby had already been placed. The baby looked fresh, like he had been killed specifically for my rebirth. I wondered whose Ohu this was, whose reparation this child became.

+

Dibia mmuo performed the ceremony himself at Ani’s altar. I cried out as he pushed me into the grave. Chewing tobacco like curd, he declared in delight that I was perfecting my bushbaby scream. Lumps of baccy mixed with spittle rained on my face as he incanted. I watched in anguish as he tossed sand into the grave, covering my limbs. My body became too heavy to lift as the last beam of light was covered by sand, and soon I was alone in the darkness.

+

Then, I was not alone.

+

The sun had set when I woke on the altar to the sight of a young girl who was not much older than I. She had nsibidi markings on her arms and legs, but she had no eyes, just black pools of nothingness. She drifted towards me and smiled as she cupped my face in hands that felt like harmattan, cold and dry.

+

“My beautiful one,” she said. Her voice sang like a lullaby; her hair flowed like silk cloth against the cool breeze.

+

I wondered how someone who looked as young as me could call me her child. That was when I saw the creatures surrounding her, children, with talons for hands and fangs for teeth. I shuffled back.

+

“Don’t be afraid,” Ani said. “They are your family now.”

+

The children smiled at me and began to chant: Nwanne, Brother. They formed a small circle around me and I could feel my will to flee overpowered by their collective gaze.

+

She took the red clay on Her altar and began to rub it onto my skin. It felt cool at first, then it began to burn. A bawl escaped my lips. It felt like acid, melting away my skin and sending jabs of pain that coursed through my body.

+

“You will have a family now and never be an Ohu again,” She said as She put the sands on my upper and lower limbs, all the while singing, “Onye tiri nwa na-ebe akwa.”

+

Her voice began to change from its initial soothing tone to a loud banshee-like screech, scrambling my hearing. As I focused on trying to stop the pain in my ears, She opened my mouth and forced Her voice down my throat. I felt my own voice flee me, and this new one become my own.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Nwosu aracha ya. Nwosu has licked it up.

+

F + +or unknown time I lay as though sleeping, though it was something else. When I woke again I was alone in a bush, and it was day, and the voices of two children playing hide and seek echoed close by. One of them hid in front of me, his breath bristling against the bushes. Although I tried to move, I couldn’t. I felt the pain in my arms, the pain of the red clay, and I began to cry. Nwanebeakwa—a crying baby.

+

The boy turned to me at the sound. “Your voice is too loud, eh! Do you want my friend to catch me?” he said.

+

I answered with silence, scared of speaking, of sounding unlike myself.

+

“What village have you come from?” he said, ambling closer.

+

Then I caught the boy’s scent through my nostrils, and he smelt like freshly made Abacha and Ugba. My belly began to grumble, a pang of hunger began to eat at me from the inside, and I felt my body spasm out of control like it did not belong to me. The last thing I remembered was the searing pain in my limbs and my incessant weeping.

+

As I came to myself once more, I saw blood splattered on the bushes around me. It lay on the leaves like sweet nectar. I struggled to stand, unsure of what had just happened. My eyes scanned the bushes for the boy, but he was nowhere to be seen. His friend, however, stood at a distance not too far from me, eyes wide, skin drained of blood, mouth agape. As our eyes met, he pointed at me, whispering “Obiora” as his lips quivered, before stumbling into a run.

+

Without thought, my body ran too, arms reaching out for him. I saw now that they were grisly things that ended in talons, curled into fists, then creaking as the fingers unfurled, extending backwards as I lurched forward with arms outstretched to dig into flesh, spirit, and soul.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Ohhh ohhh.

+

I + +n the night I stared out into the empty darkness, my bare head turned against the firm forest floor. My eyes searched for any glimpse of illumination within the shadows. I trembled from the cold and caught my breath, surprised I still recalled how to tremble. I had thought I would forget how to feel, but my body insisted on remembering. I supposed I should be grateful.

+

I looked up, past the darkness above the tall palm trees, and into the stars in the sky. I tried to lift my hand and count them, like my past self would have done, but reached out only with a gnarled claw. My whole body is a siphon, thirsting to absorb the souls of human prey, borrowing them to me for a brief period, a full moon when I can feel like I once was.

+

And my body remembered what I had before, and now had lost.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Egwu Ozor. Another song.

+

I + + made my way back to the palace in the daytime and most of it was empty. I moved to Okwukwe’s hut and looked through the secret hole to see if he was inside.

+

He was, but he was not alone. He was putting someone else in his mouth just like he did me.

+

Tears welled up in my eyes, and confusion built in my chest, and I wailed, surely a sound louder than any sound ever before!

+

In a fit of rage, I kicked open the door and ran the other man through with my talons, clenched him in my fists, slaying him instantly,

+

The blood drained from Okwukwe’s cheeks as he stared at me in terror. I uncurled my claws and let the corpse of his lover fall away, and Okwukwe called desperately out to his father, but then I wrapped myself around him, just like I had so many times before. I spared him my claws, held him in our lover’s embrace and absorbed him into me, feeding on his soul, spirit and body, his eyes wide with horror as he watched me become him.

+

When all was done I slumped against a wall, my breathing laboured, and only then saw the Eze at the door, watching as the body of his son dropped from my arms. As I looked upon him he shivered in terror and fell on his buttocks.

+

Rage rose inside me again, and I was about to move towards him when Ani appeared from the shadows of the hut, as though She had been with us all along.

+

“We are going home,” She said. “Your brothers and sisters are waiting for you.”

+

I gestured at the Eze, then stared at my claws as I realised they had become hands again, though not my own. I looked down at myself, at my torso, and instead of melted flesh and red clay I saw the birthmark Okwukwe had upon his breast. I had not consumed Okwukwe, I had become him, and it felt strangely comforting. Now no one would take him away from me ever again.

+

The Eze took advantage of my wonder, and ran as far away as he could. Ani said not to chase after him. “He still has much to do for me,” She said. “I will take care of you from now on, and if anyone ever makes you cry again, you could just do to them what you did to Okwukwe.”

+

She cackled in that voice which had now become my own. And I have been doing just that ever since, and will continue to do so until Ani fades away.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Nwanebeakwa on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Chinaza Eziaghighala

+

+ + Author image of Chinaza Eziaghighala + + + Chinaza Eziaghighala is a medical doctor who tells stories. An interdisciplinary writer at the intersection of health, film/TV, comics and literature, she is a University of Iowa International Writing Program Alum. Her works appear or are forthcoming in The British Science Fiction Association’s Fission #2 Vol 1 Anthology, Metastellar, Hellboundbooks’ Kids are Hell Anthology, Brittle Paper, Afritondo, and the British Science Fiction Association’s Focus. CHIMERA, her debut novella, is forthcoming in 2024 from Nosetouch Press. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers Association of America and the African Speculative Fiction Society, a First Reader for Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, and a Guest Nonfiction Editor for Please See Me. Connect with her here or on Twitter.

+

© Chinaza Eziaghighala 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Midjourney, the AI image generator.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-31/the-gourmets.html b/issue-31/the-gourmets.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4468516a --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-31/the-gourmets.html @@ -0,0 +1,500 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Gourmets — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 31 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Gourmets

+

Jeff Reynolds

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Gourmets by +
+ + + + +

M + +arvin wouldn’t stop talking about the fettuccini alfredo at Occult Gardens. “Three stars, Jack? Come on. That thick, creamy sauce. Those wonderful toasted garlic sticks. Divine. Oh, and that heavenly chocolate banshee pie, so rich and sweet, with a hint of tartness. I want a copy of their recipe spell book.”

+

I slid the talking skull into the sling carrier I wore, turning him until the empty eye sockets peered forward through the mesh front. He liked to see where we were going. “There’s no way I’m giving a chain restaurant more than three stars. I’m surprised you’d suggest it.”

+

“They earned it. You have to grade restaurants based on the quality of the food, the overall service, and the ambiance, not your own bias against laissez fairy corporatism and the evils of magarcho-capitalism.”

+

I chewed on my thoughts, trying to formulate my point. “You used to be extremely critical of the fanciest places. They said if Marvin Lemsky gave you three stars, you were damned proud. In twenty-seven years, you only ever gave one restaurant four stars, and none got five. You would never have set foot in a chain like Occult Gardens, let alone given them anything but zero stars. I’m thrilled to learn from you, to understand the power of good food and its communal nature, but I’m trying to hold to your standards.”

+

He kept quiet for a while as I walked down Beacon Lane. One thing I’d learned, you didn’t rush Marvin when he set himself to thinking. He was a good man—or skull, as the case may be—and I’d always found his advice helpful.

+

“How long have we been doing this now, Jack?”

+

“About six months, give or take, since we met.”

+

“You knew about me before the Incident, right?”

+

He put a great deal of weight on the word. Everyone did. The apocalypse of magic unleashed by M.I.T.’s research into dimensional wormholes carried a freight train of horrifying memories for those who survived. You could practically hear the way people capitalized it.

+

We’d never talked about the past. No one did. The past contained a lot of pain, as pasts often do. But we’d become friends and I was willing to share if he was ready. “Of course. Only by reputation though. Everyone knew the world-famous food critic Marvin Lemsky.”

+

He snorted, a sound of derision, not humor. “That man was a first-class douche bag. Mean spirited, rude, self-absorbed, entitled, boorish, and toxic.”

+

“That man was you.”

+

“Was being the operative word.” He heaved a great sigh. “Ten years I sat on a shelf at the library after someone tucked me in with the romance novels as a joke. The longest conversation I had was directing a goblin to the self-help section on the second floor. You have no idea how awful it is to transform in the middle of reaching for a book and be forgotten.”

+

“Wow,” I said, because nothing better came to mind. “Ten years? I’m sorry Marvin. I didn’t know it had been that long.”

+

“Thank you. But, frankly, spending a decade gathering dust does tend to change one’s perspective on things. I’m trying to be a better man.” He laughed. “Better skull perhaps. Whatever the case. When the goblin asked for self-help, it got me thinking about my own life and what a shithead I’d been. All the people I’d left behind, walked over. How alone it had left me, even before I’d turned into a skull. I thought if some goblin could better himself, so could I. Maybe the Incident would be a blessing of sorts.”

+

By then we’d reached Boston Commons. The pond in the middle had developed a vagrant whirlpool, coming and going every few hours, created by Boston’s own baby Charybdis. No one had a plan for what they would do when it grew too large for the small body of water, but the tourists seemed to love it. We came here after lunch every day to enjoy the show.

+

We took a seat on a bench and watched all manner of creatures passing by. Centaurs, minotaurs, gryphons flying overhead. A pumpkin colored wagon pulled by six white horses with ratty tails.

+

“You’ve done great,” I said as we waited for the Charybdis to begin. “I didn’t realize you used to be such a jerk.”

+

“I doubt if I’d remained human I would have corrected my deficiencies.”

+

“I’m not sure I’ve enjoyed it as much as you,” I said. “The economy collapsed, my mother and father disappeared, and everything changed for me. It was hard.”

+

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jack. But you survived. Many did, though we may be very different people now, and may those who did not rest in peace. But we adjusted.”

+

“I survived by eating rats.” Even now I scanned the area for the little bastards. Sweet, juicy rats to eat. Although I kept trying to catch fish, too. So far, they’d eluded me. I shook my head at those thoughts. Tonight would be the new moon. Already it affected me.

+

“See?” Marvin plowed on, oblivious to my mental detour. “Even you found a hidden strength in the changes. If not for that, you’d have starved to death like millions did.”

+

“Regardless. So, that’s why you rate more fairly now?”

+

“Right. Speaking of which: Occult Gardens. Yes, it’s a chain. But in all my years as a food critic, I’ve never enjoyed pasta so much.”

+

“Technically I enjoyed it, since you have neither taste buds nor nose.”

+

“It’s a reasonable point. But I enjoy it through you. A vicarious thrill if you will.”

+

“Could have turned out worse. It could have been that goblin whose taste buds you have a magical connection with.”

+

“True, true. But I can’t complain. We’ve got steady work at least, and that’s more than some. The Gourmets are the most famous anonymous food critics in all of New England.”

+

“Alright, points taken. Thank you for sharing with me. It means a lot that you feel you can. I’ll give three and half stars. How’s that?”

+

“How about four? Come on, Margo earned it. She even brought you an extra slice of pie when you told her I was your deceased uncle. She was kind of attractive, too, don’t you think?”

+

“Aren’t you a bit old for her? And fleshless?”

+

“Not for me. For you.”

+

“Oh.” Margo had been cute. Dark hair, green eyes, a crooked and radiant smile. “She’s probably got a boyfriend, though. Or might not want one.”

+

“I’m sure that’s why she kept smiling at you and brought you extra pie. Now stop being so enormously dense.”

+

I clutched my heart in mock horror. “You insult my dignity!”

+

“You earned it. And Margo earned four stars.”

+

I gave up the argument with a laugh. “Alright, four stars. But not a half star more.”

+

“That’s more like it. Now grab that paper from the trash can. You want something different, let’s find it.”

+

“Maybe we can find a seafood place,” I said.

+

I pulled yesterday’s Globe from the waste bin and spread it across my lap so Marvin could read it, too. We scanned for advertisements, or articles about businesses opening, which happened daily now. The recovery continued, a new world rising from the ashes of the old one.

+

Near the back, in the classified sections, Marvin gave a cough. “Bottom right.”

+

I picked out the tiny ad he’d noticed. Dark Forest Cottage, it read. Authentic European cuisine with old world ambience. “Not trying hard to get noticed.”

+

“Probably a new place, run by someone with little money to spare for advertisements. But you said you wanted something unique. This sounds like the perfect opportunity to highlight local fare.”

+

“It’s in Danvers.”

+

“We can take the flight rail.”

+

I winced. “No way. You know I get queasy when we fly.”

+

“What are you going to do, Jack, walk? The ogre carriage charges an arm and a leg, and you’ve only got the two of each. Or four legs and no arms, depending on the time of month.”

+

“I’ve got a talking skull. That must be worth something.”

+

“Very funny. But you know I’m right.”

+

“You just enjoy flying.”

+

“True. Come on, let’s go see.”

+

Marvin won that argument, too. He won most of the arguments. But his ability to weave a humorous, touching story around the review of a simple meal had provided us stable income at a time when the economy had a long way to go to recover fully. I didn’t begrudge losing.

+

We lined up with others waiting for a carpet, and crowded onto a threadbare Afghan when our turn came. The red and yellow print had faded to muddy pinks and off-whites, and loose threads speckled the edges. A tear along one side had been patched with gray duct tape. The djinn at the front of the fabric watched over his/her shoulder until everyone had settled in the required Sukhasana pose. I held my palms up and tried to keep my spine straight.

+

“Alright, hold onto your dunkies,” the djinn said. All the djinns said the same thing when they were about to launch. They spent their off-duty hours at Dunkins, filling up with hot, black coffee and donuts.

+

We launched. My body rose while my stomach stayed resolutely on the ground. I gulped to hold down the bile. Marvin chuckled in delight. I shook my head and gritted my teeth. The flight rail had a one hundred percent safety rating, but that didn’t stop me from being scared out of my wits every time we flew. Plus, I found the pose hard to maintain.

+

After several stops, and a transfer to the green flight rail at Salem—the second carpet a blue and purple Persian, newer and larger, thus more crowded—we got off in Danvers. We walked a quarter mile north and found the restaurant nestled in a strip of wild land west of the road. A dirt parking lot had been cut out of the wilderness to its left, empty now but for a single thin horse tied to a scraggly bush. Gnarled trees bracketed the stone structure on the right and to the rear. There was a glint of water through the trees behind it, suggesting a pond or lake.

+

“It’s a literal cottage,” Marvin said.

+

Indeed, that’s what it looked like. A stone cottage of a story and a half, with a steep roof made of thatching, rather than good old New England shingles or tin. Rounded windows with green shutters of wood. A tall chimney rose on one end, smoke curling from the top and lazily tugged away by the breeze. The door yard was full of beautiful wild flowers and buzzing bees. Not out of place, though, with the rest of the homes we had passed, which had undoubtedly been transformed when the wave of magic broke upon the world.

+

The sign over the door made it clear this was the Dark Forest Cottage we were looking for. I glanced at the late afternoon sun, lowering through clouds to the west. “Maybe we should come back tomorrow.”

+

“Still plenty of time to get in, get some food, and get home before sunset. It’s not like there’s a crowd.”

+

The door opened and warm light spilled from the interior. The wafting scent of food followed, delicious aromas that teased the nostrils and made my mouth salivate. A plump woman stepped into the doorway, framed by the glow behind her. She had on a plain blue dress that appeared homespun, over which she wore a crisp white apron. Her hair—white, but shot through with a great many golden strands—had been pinned up in a bun on the back of her head.

+

“Welcome to the Dark Forest Cottage,” she said, her pleasant voice booming across the yard. “Come on in, take a load off your weary feet, travelers. We’ve got spirits to lift your spirits, and meals to fill any appetite.”

+

“Thanks,” I said, approaching her. “Is this place new?”

+

“We’ve only been open a short while,” the woman said. Her smile was sweet and pleasant, the kind my grandmother would have given me when she fed us dinner. She had rosy red cheeks and deep wrinkles, but her eyes were bright blue and twinkled. Yes, they twinkled, and I’ll stand by that assessment.

+

“Madam, we are pleased to accept your invitation,” Marvin said, with polite formality. “The scent of your food is a balm to a weary soul indeed.”

+

“A talking skull,” she said, and clapped her hands together in delight. “How wonderful! Oh, we’ve had all kinds in here, let me tell you. Just last week I served a bugbear… what was it?” She clucked and tapped her fingers against her chin. “Yes, a delicious berry and cream tart. But I have never had the pleasure of serving bones.”

+

“Perhaps because most of the de-fleshed lack appetites for fine cuisine,” Marvin offered. “I, however, suffer not from such a sad fate. Though I may not be able to eat the food you serve, I assure you I will enjoy the repast in full with the help of my able companion.”

+

“Such fine manners,” the woman said, resting her wrinkled hand on my arm. “So rare these days. Everyone rushing around, no time to be pleasant, playing with their digital auguries and spellaphones. Please, do come in and let’s get the two of you situated so you can have a drink and decide what you wish to eat.”

+

She led us into the house. The main dining room had a low ceiling held up by thick, brown beams. The internal walls were white plastered, and homey paintings of pastoral scenes had been hung upon them. Other than the fire, the room was lit by enchanted lanterns on the middle of each table, the yellow glow flicking across white linen tablecloths and napkins, glinting off the silverware. The low sound of music spread through the chamber, a string piece, quiet enough to not be distracting but pleasant.

+

“What lovely ambiance,” Marvin said.

+

“Why thank you, dear,” the old woman said.

+

I nodded in agreement, a little slowly because I was distracted. There were a few hours to go until the new moon, but my skin itched as though I’d begun transforming. I thought I scented the musty odor of rat beneath the layers of food wafting through the room. I tried to tune out my senses. Every minute they would get worse until the hair ruptured my skin and I became a four-legged little demon.

+

She guided us to a table near the fire. I pulled Marvin from his pouch and placed him to my right before I seated myself. She smiled pleasantly and offered me a menu. “And one for you, dear,” she said, opening another and setting it upright upon the table in front of Marvin. “I recommend you start with the gazpacho. The tomatoes and cucumbers were freshly picked from my garden today. One of the house specialties.”

+

She bustled away through a door leading further into the cottage. I caught a glimpse of the kitchen. A red brick oven cast a reddish glow over a room filled with heavy cast iron pots and pans, a wall full of knives and cleavers. Then the door swung shut with a loud thump.

+

I examined the menu. The writing had been done in an archaic script, all curls and flourishes. I squinted, trying to determine if fish were anywhere on it. “Half a star off for the hard-to-read menu,” I said.

+

“But half a star more for the quaint setting, which is delightful.”

+

“You really are a changed man, Marvin.”

+

“I hope so,” he said quietly. “I really do hope so.”

+

The door opened again. Once more, I sniffed rat, a little stronger than last time. I tried to peer around the woman as she bustled towards us, but the door shut before I could see anything. She carried a tray with a brown bowl resting on it.

+

“I took the liberty of bringing you a sample of the gazpacho.” She rested the tray on the table and swept the bowl in front of me. “Do enjoy. It’s on the house.”

+

Then she was gone again, seemingly filled with boundless energy. When the kitchen door swung shut, I looked at the soup. “What’s gazpacho?”

+

“Cold vegetable soup, most often with a tomato base. A Spanish dish. I admit, I often felt that American restaurants who served it did a great disservice to the origins of the cuisine, which had been one of my favorite meals when touring Spain and Portugal. Go on, try it.”

+

“Cold?” I stirred the vegetables with a spoon. “I’d prefer warm.”

+

“Oh, for goodness sake, Jack. I’d give my writing skills for a companion whose palate is not quite so beige.”

+

“I see celery in here. Not a fan of celery.”

+

He sighed so deeply he might have blown the lantern off the table if he still had lungs. “Please try it. For me?”

+

I laughed. “I’m just giving you a hard time. Of course I’ll try it.” I lifted a spoonful to my mouth and tasted. It was quite good, though I continued to believe it would be improved with heating. A bit saltier than needed perhaps, though that might be Marvin’s opinion, not mine. When I ate, his thoughts came through to me, just as he could sense the smell and texture and flavor of the foods I experienced.

+

“Very good,” he said, with a low voice. “Wonderful. Perhaps a pinch too much salt. But there’s some other flavor beneath the vegetables. Something… I can’t quite place it. It can’t be chili powder, can it? Something zesty.”

+

I swallowed, frowning. “Yes. Beneath the salt.” There was a deeper flavor that hit after the swallow, a bit sharp. Not quite bitter. I lifted another spoonful, and my hand shook. Some of the soup dripped back into the bowl.

+

“Are you okay?” Marvin asked.

+

I’d gotten close enough to my transformation that I could pick out every spice in the meal. Marvin had taught them to me. Cumin was there, pepper, salt, sherry vinegar, garlic. I knew them all. Now I recognized the strange flavor. My kind are many things, but not stupid when it comes to knowing what things they shouldn’t eat.

+

I dropped the spoon into the bowl, splattering soup on the table. I could smell it clearly now. “Marvin, it’s poison!”

+

“What?”

+

I pushed away from the table, but instead of standing, I lurched over onto my hands and knees. “Marvin, what do I do?” My voice trembled and my gut began to twist in pain.

+

“Jack, get up. Come on, grab me, we need to get out of here. Get help.”

+

The room began to blur. I tried to rise to my knees, but fell over again. I doubled up in pain, hot and cold spurs running through my flesh, up and down my arms and legs like thousands of pins being poked into me. “Marvin!” I screamed as I choked. My tongue felt swollen.

+

The door to the kitchen opened. The smell of rat came strong now. I could see their beady eyes burning at me from the doorway as the woman approached the table. Red dots, like fires, in the glowing gloom of the cottage.

+

“I’ve never served bone before,” she said, as my vision went black. “I can’t wait to grind you up and add your magic powder to my focaccia. Oh, it’s going to taste divine.”

+

My breath rattled through my lungs. I lost control of my bowels, and my body begin spasming uncontrollably, legs and arms thrashing against the floor.

+

“Come, sweeties. When he’s done twitching, drag him out back and dump him by the wood pile. He’ll be dead in an hour or two and I’ll bleed the body. Then you can feast.”

+

The scratching of hundreds of tiny claws was the last thing I heard.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t is a terrible smell that awakens me from my nap. I sniff again, and inhale the stink of human faeces. I do not recommend it.

+

I roll over and stretch. Something pokes against me and I open my eyes to realize that I am not where I am supposed to be. When I awake, I am supposed to be on the soft carpet of my apartment with the window open so I may slink out into the fire escape and spend my night roaming the city streets. There are many wonderful creatures to stalk and pounce and slay. Tasty eating. Except for the fish in the ponds. I have not yet caught one, though I have tried. Well, life is often disappointment.

+

I am behind a wood pile and I am lying on the ground. There are woods, I notice, behind me. It is not yet completely dark. I swat the offending stone that pokes my side. Then I rise, giving my stretch its full due, arching my back. One great yawn splits my jaws, and then I set to licking myself. One does not present oneself to the world until one has cleaned.

+

But the reek annoys me. Nearby is a pile of clothing. There is the scent of me upon the fabric, so these must be mine. But they are also sweaty and soiled, as though I have failed to use the appropriate facility for waste deposit. This is not something I would normally do of course, but perhaps I ate something not so good for me. There is a deeper odor as well. Something…

+

Poisonous.

+

I sniff again, and my eyes widen. I have died here. I can feel now that one of my lives is missing. I walk around the clothing, but it does not reveal itself. Instead, scattered like playthings, are many bones. Human bones. Someone else died here. More than one someone.

+

There is another scent, too. It smells like rat. Yes, there comes now the realization there are many rats nearby. And they have feasted upon the flesh of humans.

+

FOULNESS! Rats are not to be playing the predator and eating the peoples. It is I, the stalker, who feed upon the vermin. I am most displeased by this realization. The proximity of my awakening to the many bones and the loss of one of the nine can only mean I had been placed there while still human and left as a meal for the sewer dwellers. But my transformation has purged me of the poison that laid my other form low.

+

I must stop these rats from their depraved actions.

+

Behind me is a home. The scent of rat leads to chinks in the stonework and the doorway and windows. Someone is singing.

+

It is not a nice song.

+

I slink, belly low, towards an open window. The voice is cracked and warbling, like a bird with a broken neck. It is a stretch, but I reach the window edge and peak inside.

+

There is wood and brick and a fire and metal things, including sharp things. There is a big table upon which rests a skull. An old woman stands in front of the fire and she stirs a large pot, steam rising from it. It is her voice I hear.

+

“I am boiling, I am steaming, I am chopping all to eat. I will serve you, I will eat you, I will gobble all your meat. I am cutting, I am grinding, I am stirring up the broth. I will slice you, I will dice you, and turn your blood to sauce.”

+

“You are very poor poet for a murderess,” the skull says. Him I know.

+

“Your magic osseous will make my food delicious,” the old woman says.

+

Around her, watching, are many rats. Black, with sleek fur. Little red eyes. There are many of them, yes. If I could count, I am certain I would count very high. But there are clearly more than one.

+

“Bring me the hammer,” the old woman says.

+

Several of the black rats scurry out an open doorway into another room. When they return, they are dragging a very large object. It is an old hammer, the metal stained with some reddish discoloration. She bends and lifts it, and she turns to the skull.

+

“No, please!” the skull implores. He is very good at begging. I have yet to hear a rat so skilled at pleading for mercy. Well, perhaps the rat king, who begged very nicely before I ate him. But the skull should not plead for its existence from a rat lover.

+

“I will be back to grind you up in a moment, dear. First, I need to tend to your friend out back and let the rats have their feast.” She touches the top of the skull and laughs. “Don’t you move, dearie.”

+

I dash behind a small bush near the back door and watch as she and the rats parade towards the forest. In a moment, they will find that my body is gone, so I hurry into the room through the door she has left open.

+

“Jack Sprat!” the skull says. “You’re alive. Thank the fates!”

+

The skull is often at my apartment when I go out to hunt, though he is not quite so chatty then. “Hello talking skull.”

+

“Listen, Jack. She’ll be back at any moment. You have to get me out of here before she returns.”

+

My ears are good. I can hear her and the rats out near the woods. There is no need to rush, so I begin to clean one of my paws. “What is in it for me?”

+

“Jack, please, this is no time for jokes. She’s going to destroy me. I don’t want to die.”

+

“You are already dead, yes? You are a skull. Skulls are from dead things.” The logic of this is very clear. I thought the skull smarter.

+

There comes a tortured screech. Dear me, the bad singer seems upset. I would guess that means she has found the place where my body lay, only now there is no body. Surprise, bad singer. You cannot kill the stalker so easily. “She’s coming back soon.”

+

“What do you want?”

+

There is something I want very much. Something I have never been able to catch yet. Of course, I would rescue him from the very bad singer without it, but I am unable to refuse the gift now offered. “I would like a fish. A big one. You will get me a fish?”

+

“I’ll get you a dozen fishes if you get me out of here.”

+

“How will you do this with no hands or feet, mister talking skull?”

+

“Jack and I will get it. Oh hell, this is bizarre. I’m talking to you, only you’re a cat and you’re not you. Now can we please go?”

+

“Jack is me, though I am not Jack. Do not call me Jack. It does not dignify me.”

+

The skull sighs. Humans do that so well, even their bony skulls. Oh, and dogs. There is nothing quite like the sigh of a doggy to make me smile.

+

“How should I address you?”

+

I have many names of course. Slinker. Hunter. He Who Ate the Rat King. The One Who Steals the Yarn. But only one matters tonight. “You may refer to me as The Stalker.”

+

“Alright, Stalker.”

+

“The Stalker.”

+

“The Stalker. Now can we please go?”

+

I leap gracefully upon the surface. “A dozen fish?”

+

“Two dozen.”

+

I smile my secret smile. “It is agreed.” I take the jaw of the skull into my mouth. It seems the only way to grip it. It is bulky, but not so heavy. “Now we go.” My words are slurred by the bone in my mouth.

+

“Thief!” the singing woman screeches.

+

“Oh damn,” the skull says.

+

“Unexpected,” I say, surprised at how quickly and quietly she returned. Very sneaky, bad singer.

+

She is standing in the doorway and her face is very red and her eyes are very black and she is very angry. The rats crowd around her, red eyes glowing as they look upon me. “So, not a human then. A were being. You’ll make a fine addition to the meal.”

+

“Are you serving fish?” I ask, hopefully.

+

“Our menu tonight is cat and skull.”

+

“No thank you,” I say. I leap from the table and race into the next room through the door left open when the rats brought her the hammer.

+

“Go out one of the windows!” the skull yells.

+

The windows are barred and shuttered. I skid across the slick stone floor, claws scrambling for purchase. “Which way?”

+

Through the open door behind, the rats come. Many more than one.

+

“Kill the cat!” the bad singer chokes.

+

“You should take some honey for that scratchy throat,” I tell her. I place the skull down upon the floor and swat it under a table. Then I turn to face the horde of vermin. “I am The Stalker, He Who Ate the Rat King, Keeper of Sharp Claws, the Twitching Tail of Doom.”

+

Into the mob I leap. I slash and bite and tear and move, move, MOVE like lightning. That is a good name. Perhaps I should add He Who Moves Like Lightning to my titles. The little rats fall like wheat to the scythe, but there are more than one, many more. Their teeth are sharp, and I am slashed and bitten.

+

I spring onto a table, but I have left another life behind. Only seven of nine remain. My breathing is heavy as I turn in circles. The rats boil up the legs, tiny claws scratching against the wood. But they come slower this time. Perhaps they are wary of me now, with so many of their filthy brethren dead. I use this to my advantage, darting in to decapitate one with a well-placed swipe, while biting another nearly in half. I leap back before they can strike.

+

The edge of the table grows crowded with them. I am in the center, circling, looking, weighing plans. A few more times I feint, then slash. A few more fall down dead, dead, DEAD. The chittering grows louder. They are about to attack.

+

The circle closes suddenly, but HA! I am not there. I leap to a windowsill, then bound up onto a tall piece of furniture. They are after me of course, but they are slow. I consider sitting and cleaning my paw to show them what little concern I have for their feeble attempts.

+

“Come here,” the bad singer says, and she PUTS HER HANDS UPON ME!

+

She is much stronger than her round shape would appear and my claws leave deep furrows in the cabinet. I am swung around in the air like a toy. But how? I move like lightning, and still she grabbed me as easily as I caught the rat king.

+

She turns me in her hands to face her. She has me clenched around the ankles, holding my legs in both hands. I struggle but am unable to shake free of her grip, her fingers calloused like hard stone.

+

“Be a good kitty, won’t you, and die,” she says. Her black eyes glint with starlight and her smile grows bigger. She has very long, sharp teeth. Her mouth unhinges and she draws me towards a waiting tunnel of red flesh and black depths. Warm breath caresses my face with a foul stench. I am to be consumed.

+

“I have already died the twice,” I say. I stretch my neck forward and BITE her big nose! HA!

+

Blood spurts under my teeth and she howls. She yanks me loose and I take the tip of her nose with me and I swallow it before she flings me across the room. I am dashed against the wall and I fall to the floor, stunned.

+

Another life is torn from me.

+

The rats come again. I rise on unsteady paws as she spins and howls, howls, HOWLS. I am pleased her blood speckles the floor and the walls.

+

“Do you surrender?” I ask bravely.

+

“Kill it!” she screeches.

+

Oh, how they come.

+

There are many spins and blows. I stagger under so many little creatures. I fall back and forth on the precipice of death. I expend my lives like water, swirling in and out of the rabble. Four gone, five gone. Six gone, seven gone. I am not human. I am not cat. I die for the eighth time, and I rise again.

+

They do not. That is the only thing of importance.

+

I stand among the dead, soaked in their blood and mine. Her half-eaten nose bleeds down her chin and soaks her clothing. She holds a cleaver in hand and a butcher knife in the other.

+

“I will take the talking skull and go. If you follow, I will kill you.”

+

“My little pets,” she moans, her eyes darting around the room. “You killed them.”

+

“You are to blame,” I tell her. I approach the table where beneath the skull rests. “You are not a very nice person.”

+

She screeches and comes at me. I spring at her face, all my claws extended and I howl my deepest yowl. But I do not sink my claws. I bounce off her rounded flesh and land near the skull.

+

She falls back, tripping over the step in the doorway. She falls, her knife and cleaver flung away. She falls, and bashes the kettle heating over the fire. It falls, tipping over her head, spilling steaming hot broth down her body.

+

Her legs thrash against the floor. Her hands grab the heated metal and try to pry it off. Oh, how she SCREAMS, her voice muffled by the kettle. It rings like a bell as she claws at it.

+

I grab the skull and I run, run, RUN out the door to the behind of the house and dash into the darkness of the woods. I do not stop when I reach the shore of a lake, but sprint beside it, until we are on the far side. Here, the woods are less dark. I place the skull on a soft matt of leaves and begin to clean myself again.

+

“Jack?” the skull says.

+

“The Stalker, please.”

+

“Sorry, The Stalker. I wanted to thank you. You didn’t have to save me.”

+

I pause. “You are my friend. I would not leave you there to be ground into flour for bread, even if there had been no fish offered.”

+

I think perhaps the skull is smiling. It is hard to tell with a skull. “Well thank you just the same.” There is a pause and I return to cleaning myself. “Oh, and… The Stalker?”

+

I examine my foreleg. “Yes?”

+

“Feel free to give this restaurant zero stars.”

+

I begin work on the other foreleg. “Yes, that is wise.”

+

“Margo might be working at Occult Gardens tomorrow.”

+

“Does Margo like cats?”

+

“Maybe we should wait until you’re you.”

+

“I am always me.” Though I admit, after the eight deaths in one night, I find the prospect of lazing about in a clumsy human body appealing. Embarrassing, too, but then I will feel nine times better when I am me once more.

+

I pick him up and lope my way southwest towards the glow of the great city, where slender, crystalline towers of sorcery rise to pierce the skyline. The rat king once lived beneath those places of magic.

+

I hope we will have time to hunt on the way.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Gourmets on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jeff Reynolds

+

+ + Author image of Jeff Reynolds + + + Jeff Reynolds is a writer from Maryland who works for Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab, home of New Horizons and Parker Solar Probe. He’s only a software licensing analyst, though, and doesn’t do any cool stuff like building space probes or meeting Brian Mays. Jeff’s work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, and Apparition Literary Magazine, among others. You can find links to his work at his website. If you want to find him, he’s likely sitting at his desk day dreaming.

+

© Jeff Reynolds 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was composited from three images created using Midjourney, the AI image generator.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-31/the-school-for-the-hopeless-and-forgotten.html b/issue-31/the-school-for-the-hopeless-and-forgotten.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..30a8a4b6 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-31/the-school-for-the-hopeless-and-forgotten.html @@ -0,0 +1,366 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 31 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten

+

Anna Zumbro

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten by +
+ + + + +

B + +y the time they were old enough to bandage their own skinned knees, children in Arrowton, Wisconsin knew three facts about their town by heart. First, due to a city-planning error, it featured two intersecting Elm Streets. Second, it boasted the United States’ third-largest ball of twine. And third, it claimed the highest per-capita number of children called on heroic quests.

+

Chris Key studied every detail and rumor. When his neighbor discovered an unexpected wormhole inside her vintage Flash Gordon lunchbox, he begged his parents for a matching one, hoping to join the battle against the alien overlord Xnudlinfyr. His hope faltered the next week, when he counted seven Flash Gordon lunchboxes in his class alone.

+

He regained confidence after hearing about Jasper Hicks, a high school freshman shoved into a locker by the junior varsity tennis team. Jasper emerged weeks later bearing a crystal sword and a talent for slaying monsters, made all the more surprising by his zero-and-eleven record at fistfights. Despite his own prowess in losing fistfights, Chris found nothing inside the lockers at his school but rotting food and sweaty hoodies, though he did discover how to pick the lock from the inside.

+

Of course, the locks were ancient and faulty to begin with. Like most Arrowton eighth-graders, Chris attended the old public secondary school. The lucky students went to the School for the Heroic and Fearless, with its modern amenities and no-homework policy. The lenient principal gave the young heroes the flexibility they needed to save the world every night, and the school district could claim a measure of credit for educating the chosen ones. Only the unchosen found the arrangement wanting.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + +t’s not like a real school,” superheroine-in-training Isadora Vander explained to her sister, Astrid. “It’s kind of boring. The teachers don’t do much, just ask you to write essays about your latest quest.”

+

Astrid twisted a strand of curly black hair around her finger. Both hair and finger were identical to Isadora’s. The girls had grown up believing they were twins adopted shortly after birth. In truth, as a government scientist explained to them a year ago, they were clones with different experimental genetic mutations. Isadora’s mutations gave her super strength, super senses, and super speed. She had already used her powers to save the residents of Milwaukee twice from the evil Viperisa.

+

Astrid’s mutations gave her an extraordinary tolerance for spicy food. No one became a hero with a gift like that.

+

“Seriously,” Isadora said. “I miss the old school.”

+

“Mine’s the School for the Hopeless and Forgotten. All anyone there cares about is getting their own quest.” Astrid thought of her history textbook. The person who had it the year before her had filled the margins with images of a cartoonish superhero, a key emblem on his chest, running through sewer pipes and punching tentacled monsters.

+

“It’s practically like that at my school, too,” Isadora said. “Everyone wants someone else’s quest.”

+

Astrid rolled her eyes and took a bite of ghost pepper sandwiched between two Flamin’ Hot Doritos. “Not helpful.”

+

The sisters sat in silence for several moments. “Well,” Isadora said at last, “I don’t have anything to do tonight. Viperisa’s gone quiet lately. Want to watch a movie?”

+

“I can’t,” Astrid said. “Homework. They say we non-heroes need algebra to get along in the real world.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +hris had been perfecting his costume design for three years. True, The Locksmith was a somewhat obvious name choice. But notoriety was half the fun of being a superhero, and no one in Arrowton bothered to hide their alternate identity.

+

When he was six, he’d fallen down an unused well at his aunt’s dairy farm. It was too deep for him to climb out, and the strange insects and rodents he’d seen during the hours it took for someone to find him still populated his nightmares. In his nightmares, he pressed his fingers to the concrete walls of the well, looking for an entrance to a secret cave he never found, while rats and tarantulas and snakes crept over his skin without pausing to grant him a transformative bite that would catapult him into the ranks of the superpowered.

+

The nightmares were mostly about how he didn’t find a secret cave down there, and that none of the insects and rodents had bestowed upon him cool powers based on their everyday characteristics.

+

Now, he did his homework in the darkest corner of the basement and switched his phone screensaver daily to a new creepy animal. Heroes always had to overcome their deepest fears. He would be ready.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +strid pressed her cheek against the cold window as the bus rounded the corner from one Elm Street to the other. She scribbled best guesses on her algebra homework, all word problems relating to Arrowton’s famous ball of twine, and tried to tune out the conversation behind her.

+

“He got a quest, I bet. You know those dreams he had?”

+

“Oh yeah, tunnels. Maybe the mole people summoned him.”

+

A shiver jolted her. She turned around. “Who are you talking about?”

+

“Chris Key. No one’s seen him since Tuesday. I bet the mole people…”

+

Boy trapped in the sewers, she texted Isadora. Do your thing.

+

After the bus parked, she slung her backpack over her shoulder and trudged into the building. Isadora could skip class to be a hero, but Astrid’s teachers would accept no such excuse.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +hris grunted. The sewers stank. He’d expected they would, but nothing could have prepared him for the reality. His grunt echoed back to him. And another sound—wasn’t it? No, just the dripping of the pipes.

+

He tried to distract his mind from the pain that kept him from moving with the thought of producing a map. He shined a flashlight down the tunnel and noticed several smaller holes; irregular, odd shapes, like an afterthought. Or an unauthorized addition. Maybe he could draw them later, if he ever got out of here. It was a good distraction, for a while, but the pain only grew as the morning stretched on.

+

Finally he heard footsteps thudding closer from further down the sewer. Fast, powerful steps, each one booming with purpose. He was right, something was down here—and he was in no position to do a thing about it.

+

All right, then. A hero’s fate was never certain. He was ready to die.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +strid drizzled habanero sauce on a vending-machine Snickers bar in the hospital waiting room while Isadora filled her in on the rescue. “He slipped coming down the manhole and broke his leg,” she said. “How did you know? Even his mom thought he’d been called on a real quest.”

+

“Just a hunch,” Astrid said. “People never get the quests they want.”

+

“Are you kidding? Don’t sell yourself short. It was more than a hunch. And…” She lowered her voice. “It wasn’t just a boy down there. There were hideouts, a whole network of tunnels. I think it’s where Viperisa’s been hiding. I can’t believe I never thought to look there.”

+

A nurse entered the waiting room and considered the sisters with a skeptical expression. “He said, and these are his words, that he’ll only see whichever of you is a loser like him.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +rom his hospital bed, Chris glowered at Astrid, whose cynical expression almost hid her resemblance to Isadora. “You shouldn’t have sent her after me.”

+

“That’s stupid. You would have died down there.” She shifted from one foot to another. Probably bored. Not that he could blame her.

+

“At least everyone would think I died heroically.” He crumpled a flowery get-well card from Jasper Hicks. “Now they’ll think I’m a weirdo.”

+

Astrid shrugged. “You’re a good artist,” she said. “Your drawings are the best part of my history textbook.”

+

“Sure.” He’d heard it all before. “There’s a place for all types.”

+

She snorted. “Even useless duplicates? I mean, be happy you’re not a lookalike for the two-time savior of Milwaukee. Why’d you call me in here, anyway?”

+

“To pass along a message. My mom said I should thank the girl who rescued me.”

+

“I’ll tell Isadora.”

+

He rolled his eyes. Was she pretending to be this obtuse? “I meant you.”

+

“Oh.” She looked down, and then laughed. “Well, what are you complaining about, then? We all get our call to greatness!”

+

“I’m serious. No one would have found me if not for you. You’re like a psychic—or close enough that you could pretend to be.”

+

The sarcastic smirk vanished from Astrid’s face. “You might be onto something,” she said. “By the way, did you happen to see anything in the sewer?”

+

“I was kind of distracted by the smell. Some tunnels, I guess. Different-looking ones, like they’d been added recently.”

+

She crossed the small room in three strides and sat in the plastic chair next to the bed, her face now as earnest as her sister’s. “Look, I think you are The Locksmith, just not the way you imagined. What does a key do, right? It goes into dark chambers and unlocks things. You helped my sister find the answer she needed.”

+

His head was flat against the pillow, yet he felt dizzy. “What are you saying?”

+

“I’m saying maybe keep working on that costume you’ve been drawing, but add a few tools to account for your limitations. You know, like a homing device, so you’re easy to find?” A smile spread across her face. “If you want to keep it low-tech, I know where you can find a really big ball of twine.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The School for the Hopeless and Forgotten on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Anna Zumbro

+

+ + Author image of Anna Zumbro + + + Anna Zumbro is a short fiction writer with stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and other publications. When not writing, she teaches high school English and journalism. She’s on Twitter occasionally at @annazumbro and her website can be found at annazumbro.com.

+

© Anna Zumbro 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was composited from images created using Midjourney, the AI image generator.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild

+

Marc Phillips

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild by +
+ + + + +

D + +addy got in a fight over a parking spot in front of Casa Olé after church one Sunday. I thought forever it was about a parking spot. I resented daddy for a while after I learned it wasn’t.

+

We were late arrivals to the party. The violence was already widespread. As in, “too many to jail.” Which is what they were repeating on the radio when this good looking blonde woman pinned a man against the CVS drive-through pillar with her Tesla. It was that same Sunday, on the way home. Pinned him until he dropped his sign. When she backed up, he dropped too. His legs folded like they were snapped.

+

Daddy said, “You can get mixed up in other people’s business all you want until somebody mashes you against the stucco. Remember that.” He winced when he tried to look at me. I’m guessing several bruised ribs. The guy at Casa Olé had an aluminum bat.

+

It is odd to know that you lived through a pivotal moment. It all but overloads your mind when you realize it while you’re in the moment. It took weeks for the violence to overload law enforcement, but not many weeks. I knew at eleven years old that something fundamental was in doubt. I just didn’t know why nobody else seemed worried about it. This was the day, for me, this was when our family of two crossed that line which is a high stone wall from the other side.

+

I remember the dust on the dash in the car that day, a big clean arc where one of us took a swipe at it with a rag. The crack in the windshield where the mirror hung. The sound just before a power steering motor goes out. The radio. The state police, it’s their turn to hold a press conference regarding the crime wave, they said, “Citizens, stand your ground. Criminals, we are watching. We will come for you.” I turned it off because we’d heard this. I wondered was it different in places like New York.

+

“Shit,” Daddy said, “watching through heavy lenses, maybe. I guess in the meantime we just decide who’s who.”

+

And that’s what we did, after we picked up some Advil and a cold compress. We made our decisions and we fought our fights and if we were wrong, sometimes we apologized. It’s what the dumb ones did too. It’s the only thing we agreed on, who the enemy was. Organized conflicts would flare up in predictable places. A rash of poisoning deaths. You had people home canning chunks of trash meat to cultivate botulinum toxin. Or there would be mysterious shootings and fires that seemed entirely opportunistic, then the inevitable riot would touch off and it would fall away under a coordinated National Guard assault. Then it was another city, another compound, another convoy. You could track it on a map like a storm front. People died on a regular basis but nobody went to jail. There was no room. There would have been no time. All the court cases would stretch out for decades.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +xcept it didn’t happen so suddenly, did it? I mean, to a kid it did. Kids don’t spend much time looking at the past. Why would they? And without the past, there’s no way to know how different an idea was back when we thought of it, or whether any of this was foreseeable, and there are fewer and fewer people able and willing to explain. It’s a flaw in perception at the exact moment we’re using perception to form durable models, if we’re left to do it ourselves.

+

It was a full seven years later when the war was declared, the Saturday after my eighteenth birthday. It took them a while. The confusion was whether— I mean, the police had stopped patrolling, what, three years earlier? You didn’t go anywhere unafraid, certainly not unarmed. If you had money, you hired professionals. If not, you learned to shoot first and reload on the hoof. I guarantee nobody was caught off guard by aggression at that time. So how is that state of affairs—this state of affairs—different from war and why, after seven years, did it suddenly need a name? We’ll get to that.

+

What I’m talking about, though, is the bigger picture, what the sociologists call flameout. I’m saying I witnessed the beginning. And that beginning was at least seven years before the war. Meaning? What we call the Peppermint War was merely a late symptom of societal flameout. And owing to the irreversibility of societal flameout, the Peppermint War could not have been avoided by either of the previous two administrations. You will encounter that theory many times throughout this section. It was once controversial only because the majority opinion must initially be wrong about these things. You need to be very familiar with the theory. In order to survive a fight, it’s handy to know you’re in a fight, and why it began. In order to prevail, it’s essential you survive.

+

I don’t guess it hurts to say that the compound was near Texarkana, parts of it in two states. I mean, maybe there once was something to see there, but it would make a disappointing pilgrimage now. Those of us within fifty miles, we grew up going to the market over there so we always knew the way without ever knowing the street address. We knew Judit too. Not like, from the stream. We knew her.

+

Judit was a dark skinned Iberian woman with a dangerously resolute face. She gave the impression that she had considered a matter more thoroughly than you so it seemed reckless to utter anything but questions. She ran the compound. In the philosophy practiced there, euphemism and diplomacy were maybe the most disrespectful things you could do with your mouth. Her manner was off-putting at first. Daddy said lies get slippery when she’s around, people get nervous. He and Judit began an unorthodox sexual relationship about two years after the virus took mother. As much as it pained a devout man like my father, he had to say it that way if anyone asked them. “We’re involved in an unorthodox sexual relationship.” Otherwise Judit would clarify and it would be much clearer than that.

+

Judit took over the compound from Abner Tovar when Ab shot that man’s dog and then set himself on fire in tribute. At the time, there were about a thousand residents out there, I think. Crater Farm. What they had, it was a little impact crater about the size of a lake you wouldn’t volunteer to swim across, and it was surrounded by dense old growth pine. Really fertile, damp soil inside this steep bowl and just an ideal place for shady crops like mint. In fact, there was a wild peppermint plant growing in there that would make your eyes water to cut it, and it was a devil to kill. Since forever, they burned it back in the spring to make room for their leafy crops.

+

The year Ab died, the honeybees told Judit that mint and lavender would be their salvation. She abandoned the wholesale clearing campaign and started selling these huge, waxy, hand trimmed leaves of mint alongside their honey and garlic and she started using the mint in some of their ceremonies. They had a reverence for it and it seemed to be contagious. That’s it, how the curtain rose on Crater Farm Mentha b Wild. Judit named it, of course.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +kay, so that’s the timeline. Sometime around the summer of my fifteenth year, the concept of war became ironic. And not in the way optimistic sci-fi people hoped. You didn’t see War is Hell anymore. That would be stupid. You saw Life is War. This section will attempt to shed a critical light on what followed, up to and including last week’s rolling four-way engagement in the San Joaquin. But don’t expect an adventure epic. It’s not nearly that complicated.

+

Botanists have known forever that peppermint plants leach radiation from contaminated soil. Mainly radon but, you know, still. There’s a name for how it does this. Anyhow, its stock rose when the microbursts began. Then comes Crater Farm Mentha b, this strong, gorgeous tasting mint that was sold by the six inch leaf down in Texas. It fell under the microscope everywhere. The Chinese figured out it was an unclassified subspecies of Mentha balsamea and it absorbed gamma rays. Not with its roots. The leaves, they counteract Acute Radiation Syndrome. And not in a curious geeky way. In a lifesaving way.

+

Gamma bursts were maybe one every ten years back then. The first ones, the microbursts, I’m not certain anybody really felt them. They say cancer rates went up. But everybody knew somebody who ate the Labor Day burst unshielded. If not, pictures of the aftermath aren’t hard to find. If a yard full of exotic mint makes you sleep better, you jump on it. The Chinese had, at that time, found two locations on their mainland with native colonies of the new Mentha subspecies. Every developing nation from sixty degrees north to sixty south, I think they all nationalized some private land in one way or another, or they were preparing to in order to cultivate and secure their own mint supply.

+

Then a lab in Wisconsin double blind tested 804 domestic samples of this subspecies and found only 3 had this gamma ray thing. One was from Oregon, remember? One was Crater Farm, and at that time they thought the other was in Mississippi.

+

Now Judit and her people are sitting on a gold mine. A five hundred acre gold mine with just under four miles of rugged perimeter to guard. They didn’t need or want the money. They started selling transplant sprigs solely in hopes of keeping theft and destruction at a manageable level. A pressure relief valve is what it was. Brilliant. Not often does the solution to an existential problem put nineteen million dollars in your pocket. And it kept trickling in. Meanwhile, the growth rate of the mint could easily keep up with damage from the few persistent trespassers. Daddy and I were both happily employed on the compound by now, but not living there as is sometimes speculated.

+

Then the ground shifted under us before anybody knew what was happening. That’s what it felt like. Faster than the stream. It seems like right there in the center of it, we were the last to hear. It was a German lab this time. They announced that Crater Farm Mentha b Wild, when cultivated offsite, has no special properties whatsoever. Likewise for the other two landrace samples. Therefore, it must be the soil.

+

Me and daddy were on the compound at the time. You could see it in faces as the news spread across the crater. They straightened from their work and listened to the message bearer and they scanned the horizon, some of them taking in the full circle, verifying they had nowhere else they wanted to go. A few of them evidently did, so they gathered their children in dustpan fashion and left. They didn’t have cars, most of them. The rest milled around with the realization among us that all those strangers, they’re coming back for the very dirt. We didn’t need to ask if Judit planned to sell the farm one bag of dirt at a time.

+

When I returned to the compound with our guns and two of my friends and their fathers, people had already started arriving to help on the fence line. They came from Shreveport and Little Rock, even farther. They were well armed, which was a nice surprise because Judit’s people were not. I’ve seen this billed as the first war fought with laser weapons. And it was, some of it. They were still big and heavy back then. Mostly chassis mounted. Firearms outnumbered them by a wide margin. At the end of the day, well placed bullets mattered most. Which was outstanding news for me and daddy and everybody we personally knew.

+

I don’t remember if we ate that day. I turned the animals loose when I went home for the guns and I didn’t tell daddy. Looking around, I bet I wasn’t the only one who left the front door open and the cat food on the floor. We were neither afraid nor fatalistic. We felt like we had agreed on a very high price to keep something we valued still more.

+

We had a spontaneous moment of silence for the other farming compounds. I guess you know the third one was actually in Kentucky. Anyhow, somebody mentioned Oregon, mentioned they had been to Oregon and the place didn’t seem aware of how pretty it was. And silence propagated until the huge Crater Farm Meeting Hall held a couple thousand people in brief suspension because nobody knew what to say. I’ve retroacted the significance of that moment because Oregon didn’t fare as well as we did, but they fought. In Kentucky, because of a festival the farm was hosting, dozens of dumb ones were already inside the fence when the announcement was streamed. They think the Kentucky compound fell without a shot.

+

The first dumb ones came our way late that afternoon.

+

Here I was thinking our biggest problem was where to make a stand. I mean what do we defend? I said that to daddy. I said we can’t possibly defend it all. And the crater itself, I don’t think we want to fight from a hole. He was about to avoid the question entirely and give me something to do, something just important enough that I couldn’t argue. I knew it when he drew breath. Judit was faster.

+

“We are not defending any of it because they are not coming to take it. They are coming to kill us because we claim to own it. We are killing back. I won’t have the romantic shit.”

+

Daddy was killed before dark and I lost both of my friends during the first night. Otherwise, we did pretty well there locally. It was purely survival, like Judit said, no other mandates. Don’t make an Alamo of it. You had a situation where reinforcements for both sides were arriving from all directions at the same time and none of them knew exactly where they were going or what the enemy looked like. The Caddo swamps on one side of us and the Ouachita Wilderness was on the other. I’ll bet there’s still a few hundred barricaded liplickers out there living on rabbits and water snakes.

+

Skirmishes surrounded us the second night and moved outward as new arrivals just assumed they were seeing the front line. So Judit, bless her, when people asked for a strategy, she said, “Spread out. Shoot the dumb ones.”

+

Strategizing would’ve killed us. It’s a mathematical certainty that we shot some of the folks who came to help but turning that light on us is insane. We survived because that’s what we set out to do. Obviously, the farm did not. They are pits now, all three, down to the Cretaceous layers. The digging in Kentucky produced these mammoth spoil banks of rocky radioactive material where nothing will grow so it always looks like the digging is fresh, when that corner of the state has been uninhabited for a while.

+

Anyhow, a few weeks in, over a month, less than two, the president did whatever it is he does to deploy the regular army here in the states. On a peacekeeping mission he said, like we were Mexico now. Whatever. They didn’t come with rubber bullets and tear gas. Some people viewed them as a third combatant. The rest thought the army was on their side, no matter which side that was.

+

The truth of it depends on where you were looking. Soldiers eventually take a side, independent of what they’re instructed to think, whether they tell you about it or not. This time, when their orders didn’t jive with their allegiance, they left. They were the same troops, no worse. We just hadn’t fought our own, on our own land, in a couple hundred years. There was certainly no institutional memory of something like this. They deserted sometimes in huge numbers, and they kept their uniforms and weapons. Vehicles. They often kept their rank. And they were likewise too many to jail. There was no rush to enlist, so the armed forces would eventually shrink back, over time, to less than a hundred thousand. They still had most of the money.

+

At best, then, we had two warring factions and a third party potentially hostile to either of the two. That’s a particularly tough dynamic which you can learn a lot more about in Joe Garvey’s section. Right now, let’s agree to trust me on this: it’s more stable with eleven factions like we have today. That’s a more natural state, one which evolution prepared us for. Back then, when the peacekeeping mission failed, it wasn’t hard for regular army troops and tactics to overwhelm both sides and effectively destroy our cohesion. It wasn’t hard because it wanted to happen. Those initial two groups wanted so badly to be six, eight, ten groups, we would’ve done it by unanimous vote in another few weeks. Nevertheless, when they disbanded our leadership, peace was declared and the Peppermint War officially ended late one Thursday afternoon. We lost two women and one teenage boy in combat near Lubbock later that night, so I forgot to celebrate.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +ome of you took this section because you want the inside perspective on Judit. You heard from somebody that I was overly candid about our relationship. Maybe I was, but I rewrite this thing every year so you may be out of luck on the weepy details. Weirdly, I’m getting less sentimental with age. I hope you pay attention to some of the rest of this stuff, though. No matter where your loyalty eventually settles, what I’m teaching could save your life. It will definitely advance your cause. That said, let’s get on with the introduction.

+

Judit and I started an unorthodox sexual relationship when we relocated to the Sangre de Cristo. En route, actually.

+

On the outskirts of Lubbock, somebody hit us with a 50kw laser. We wanted that laser. The ambush casualties took us down to 297. If we met a battalion of regulars, we wouldn’t even have Spartan odds. So we were angry as well. Downtown Lubbock smoldered. It didn’t have a contingent our size but it wasn’t short on deserters and trigger happy neighborhood militias, which is what you would expect. You would not expect them to come miles outside the city limits and attack an organized column as it passed peacefully by. If you were me, at that time, you would not expect it.

+

Don’t ever charge a laser. Tattoo that somewhere conspicuous. We fell back as we had learned to do, with a minimum of covering fire. We’re just gone. I will teach you what Judit called the Cookie Jar, and it will teach your enemies not to follow you. Judit used to say, “If you can fight going backwards, you should always fight going backwards.”

+

We regrouped down in Woodrow, critically exhausted and still as professional as any troops I’ve seen to this day. We never had the opportunity to get good through training. Those of us alive at this point were good through attrition, a reticent kind of good that didn’t require remembering a bunch of names. We knew Judit’s name. On her go, we advanced northward like a fearful thought repeated on a dare.

+

Out of context, what we did in Lubbock looks a lot like a vicious brawl over a parking spot outside a Mexican restaurant. Reality is like that. Very rarely does it remain what you initially thought it was.

+

Judit said to me, “Do you know why Lubbock and Odessa got hit so hard?”

+

She meant in the beginning, before the war was declared. I hadn’t thought about it until then. I was emotionally depleted. If I reflected at all on the ruins of these old cattle towns, I probably thought it was no huge loss and in the case of Lubbock, fuck them.

+

“They went on like nothing was happening,” she said. “They thought nobody will come out here. They were right. Their enemy lived two doors down.” The passenger seat of the truck is fully reclined. She sustained retinal burns in the ambush and our medic bandaged her eyes shut, otherwise she would be looking at me and not blinking. “We all believed in some kind of future. What is happening now, this is the realization that we are the future.” She said, “I want to have sex with you tonight, while I cannot see. You smell like your father. You feel like him.”

+

Judit never regained her sight. She no longer looked at you like she was deciding something, so you suddenly saw the gold pattern in her hard brindle eyes and you noticed her tiny ears won’t hold all her hair back. It’s like you just discovered art on the wall and the art has been watching you the whole time. She told me once that sex is not a giving or a taking. It’s a truce between minds so the animals can interact. She said, “How you pollute that truce is up to you.” I let Judit teach me how to love a woman while I fell in love with her.

+

We traveled west from Lubbock at moonrise, augmented with a brand new laser too big to hide. We would remain on the move almost constantly. During the day we watched our backtrail and scanned the skies. At night we ran dark and quiet, spread out like peach cobbler so a single ambush would have to be miles long to catch us all. We veered south to avoid Roswell, crossed the Mescalero Apache Reservation and dropped into the vast Tularosa basin in the middle of the abandoned White Sands missile range. It was off-road for two hundred miles northward to Santa Fe. On a clear day, you couldn’t follow us even with a drone out there, not without us knowing.

+

You’re already aware that we took Santa Fe and held it, along with the Sangre De Cristos north to Taos. We were 250 strong at the time. Some of us had decided to stay on the reservation. We will delve into how a force of 250 accomplished all this and why. Some of it will surprise you, regardless of what you’ve heard.

+

Our camp was northeast of Santa Fe. It was designed to be struck and moved on short notice, but our protocols were such that no dumb ones ever found that spot. To my knowledge, that’s still the case. We will talk about how to keep your most vital secrets, and we will talk about the fallacy of territorial control. We will talk about the disastrous siege of Los Alamos and the Denver Accord two years later. I was there for all of it. Judit was not.

+

She said, “My life has been a fucking blast.”

+

For those of you well-read on her, this won’t sound like Judit. I don’t know what to tell you. It came from her mouth. With half a year of blindness, she quit trying to look at anything specific. She was always facing the brightest light as though she was waiting for the rest of it, and when that light source wasn’t in your direction, it was very difficult to tell if Judit was talking to you. Sometimes, she talked.

+

“I need to kill myself and I think it’s time,” she said. “I have felt a call for some months, a call to go somewhere and to do something that is not here and is not this. When I pay attention to that call, the things around me seem like trinkets, even you. All of this seems like a distraction. Serious things, they seem funny.”

+

It wasn’t a proposition. Advance notice, maybe. We had lamb and potatoes that night. I never saw her again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + fought on for eight years and watched my friends have children who had the option to fight. As a leader, I made some mistakes. As a soldier, I did some unnecessary things. I’ll share most of those.

+

We’ll talk about the alliances. Early on, we were big into alliances because this thing was scary and we were scared. We got over it. We realized that independence from these people is what we are fighting for, not alliance. Organically, around the country, people started to realize, influential people, that maybe we had found a better way. The last Uniform Crime Report issued before the FBI disbanded, it classified violent criminal offenses as either predatory or domestic combat. And when you add those together, they totaled not even ten percent of the violent crimes reported before the Peppermint War. Property crimes were no longer included in the UCR because there weren’t enough to be statistically significant. There were subjective social benefits as well, ranging from the personal to the incomprehensible, so the case for reunification was hard to make. It remains so.

+

Guymon Errol reached out to me when he got funding for ECI, partly because he had been a friend to Judit and partly because I had the chance to overrun Albuquerque and seize his east-west trade route on several occasions and I did not. I’m sure you will quiz me about that. You should. Guymon also thought we shared a secret ideology despite his Institute’s claim to be apolitical. He believed this is why I came. So far as I know, he believed that until he died. I took the professorship because I was tired of fighting but I was still good at it. I took the professorship because I was scared to go the way Judit did. Ideology didn’t come into play. Clearly we intend to keep fighting; therefore, I prefer that we know how to fight efficiently.

+

In forty-seven years of teaching Section 1, “How To Fight”, the course name never changed and the principles withstood the most rigorous and public scrutiny. You are here because the other schools weren’t good enough for you—that’s why I stayed. When I retired, I agreed to allow the Institute to continue the section with an artificial intelligence based on me. This is where it can get confusing. I did both. I retired, I continued. I’ve long since died. Try to keep your head out of that. Experience has shown it’s easier to see me as never having lived or never having died. It’s the other information you want. In exchange, I’ll try to stay away from the predictive tense.

+

On the practical side, the ideas in this section are numbered and available to you on the section stream after you close this introduction. You are welcome to absorb these ideas in any order, though they were composed in sequence. My schedule is also available to you now and I look forward to your questions.

+

Please note: you are eligible for a full refund only if you do not open any of the ideas in the section.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Tip Diebæck’s Mentha b. Wild on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Marc Phillips

+

+ + Author image of Marc Phillips + + + Marc Phillips is a security contractor from Texas.

+

© Marc Phillips 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Midjourney, the AI image generator.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-31/tyrannosaurus-mechs.html b/issue-31/tyrannosaurus-mechs.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..57d55d5a --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-31/tyrannosaurus-mechs.html @@ -0,0 +1,339 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Tyrannosaurus Mechs — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 31 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Tyrannosaurus Mechs

+

Gregory L. Norris

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Tyrannosaurus Mechs by +
+ + + + +

T + +he giant’s roar carried over the time-eroded landscape, confirming Drumm was close to Tyrannosaurus Mechs territory. She withdrew the cloak’s toggle. Not yet. Soon.

+

The palms ahead thinned beneath an overcast sky whose clouds were edged in rust. In the clearing stood relics from an earlier time—the remains of a small windmill, a statue of a beached whale with a rudimentary human face and cartoon smile, and a generic predator dinosaur on two legs, its cement hide painted a long-faded orange. It, too, flashed a kind of human smile that showed no teeth. The predators living beyond that line of palms were considerably toothier.

+

The temptation to scan possessed her. The area had already been metal-mined, judging by the remains of tires and plastic refuse left in piles. But the T-mechs might pick up on her location sweep. Better to find the creatures through safer methods, especially if, as she hoped, they were breeding. The irony of such a wish! The flimsy cowled cloak rigged with light-refracting projectors wasn’t much of a defense and wouldn’t hold power for long.

+

Drumm snuck past the whale and then the dinosaur, whose cartoon eyes tracked her into T-mechs territory like a sentry on the lookout for intruders.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +agged piles of rubble littered another clearing—proof of a nesting cow. The remains of houses and other structures had been mined of all metals, the raw building blocks for new generations of self-perpetuating artificial life forms like T-mechs. Drumm risked a smile and studied the area through slitted eyes. Palm fronds stirred in the late afternoon breeze. Nothing else moved and she understood why—she now stood at the outskirts of a mother T-mech’s killing zone. Nothing was permitted anywhere close to the nest. Even the bull that had sired the clutch and courted the female with offerings of scrap metal was wise to keep its distance.

+

Drumm skirted the closest of the ruins. The configuration wasn’t right. The rubble was stacked too high, too helter-skelter. Again, the desire to scan the area tempted her, but the risk outweighed the benefit. What was the point of coming all this way to attain what Ilsa desperately needed only to be discovered before reaching her target? Or worse, being gutted open and devoured by a female T-mech in the throes of mother-madness?

+

The air grew heavier with a metallic tang, a smell of factories and T-mech nests. Drumm tensed. That fecund note told her she was close. She rounded an obelisk of fractured concrete and froze. The nest was two-dozen meters ahead in a hollowed-out depression that had once been an in-ground swimming pool surrounded by chunks of torn-up asphalt.

+

Her gaze homed in on the center of the nest, but the angle prevented Drumm from seeing the prize. She’d need to get closer. But even as the thought crossed her mind, the ground trembled, and the T-mech lumbered out of the palms.

+

Drumm fell back against the obelisk. Her brief glimpse of the giant left an impression of a horror more reptilian in design than machine. The cow showed little of the gears and clunk of earlier models. It strode on legs that flexed synthetic muscles more than hydraulics, its skin a plated lead-gray. Any illusion to biology broke, however, when a moment after its appearance the cow’s eyes lit up red and it scanned the area surrounding its nest for intruders.

+

Drumm flattened against the obelisk. The beam swept past.

+

Beyond the jut of concrete, the T-mech plodded toward its nest. She tracked its sounds, chanced a look and peered around the rubble. The T-mech was bent over the nest. Hope filled Drumm. She could tell by the cow’s movements that a clutch of eggs had been laid in the depression.

+

She thought of Ilsa and waited.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he mother T-mech shrieked its deafening metallic roar at the overcast sky before moving away from the clutch again. Steeling herself, Drumm activated the cloak’s light-bending properties, crept out of cover, and hastened across the distance to the pool’s edge. To her great relief, she counted five eggs neatly clustered over a layer of chewed metal.

+

Drumm hurried down the pool’s cement stairs, crossed the shallow end, and, at the deep, gently lifted one of the eggs. It was lighter than she expected, which told her it was infertile. She set it down and reached for another. Considerably heavier, proof that it contained a T-mech embryo.

+

Working quickly, she force-pierced the textured metal shell. Once punctured, she was able to crack the egg fully open with reasonable speed. The thing inside was coiled into a fetal curl, a much smaller version of the killer giant that had birthed it. As Drumm cut into the embryo’s chest, seeking the treasure located between its metal ribs, it struck her how even less robotic this specimen appeared than its mother.

+

The embryo jolted and uncurled. It hadn’t formed fully, but still reacted in pain to her surgical explorations. Drumm located the pulser. It beat beneath her fingertips, proof of life. Guilt briefly stilled her from detaching the mechanical heart… then Ilsa’s face materialized in her memory, and Drumm pulled.

+

An instant before the pulser gave, the T-mech embryo let forth with a plaintive yowl. Then it stilled.

+

She pocketed the pulser, turned, and hurried back up the cement steps, convinced the embryo’s cry would haunt her going forward. But it had to be.

+

She was still well shy of the obelisk when the T-mech cow broke through the palms, mother-rage displayed in its red eyes. The T-mech charged toward its nest, saw what had been done, and fell silent,—worse than if the giant had roared out in fury.

+

The T-mech turned its head and activated scans.

+

Drumm’s cloak held as the beam washed over her, but with the pulser hammering in her pocket, seeking to remake severed connections, she froze. To move now would mean discovery, death.

+

The ground trembled at her back, and Drumm peeked behind her. The T-mech’s giant head leaned down, its insane smile showing plenty of metal teeth. The cloak was holding. But…

+

The pulser, Drumm thought. The cow sensed its cadence.

+

Apart from the embryo’s heartbeat, the world fell deathly still. Drumm waited, the anticipation almost worse than the danger. Right when she thought the silence would break her, sound exploded at her back.

+

The T-mech charged its head at the obelisk. Concrete shattered and flew. The cloak shorted out beneath the rain of particulates. Drumm darted away and the enraged cow pursued. In a moment of her own madness, Drumm risked a glance behind. The T-mech drew back, slashed with its metal limbs, and cleanly severed Drumm’s right arm at the shoulder.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +nly its madness had spared her. The blinding, red-hot rage drove the T-mech to focus on the grisly prize of her sacrificed arm and allowed Drumm to escape from the cow’s territory. She made it back to the hillside sanctuary despite her injuries and staggered into the nursery. Ilsa’s body was where she’d left it, swaddled on the table. Struggling to maintain focus, Drumm removed the pulser from her pocket with her remaining hand.

+

She opened the infant’s chest and removed the inoperative heart. The T-mech embryo’s pulser was larger, but even as Drumm worked it into place, the life-giving organ adapted, activated, made connections, and Ilsa’s torso began reconfiguring to accommodate and close around it.

+

Drumm assessed her injury, her shoulder a mess of severed wire and jagged metal. The repairs would be extensive. But they could wait.

+

Ilsa opened her eyes. “Mumma,” the child sang, reaching for her, and

+

Drumm swept up Ilsa in her remaining arm and rejoiced in her daughter’s embrace.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Tyrannosaurus Mechs on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Gregory L. Norris

+

+ + Author image of Gregory L. Norris + + + Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF TV, Gregory L. Norris writes regularly for fiction anthologies, magazines, novels, and occasionally for TV and Film. He once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount’s Star Trek: Voyager series, and his story Tyrannosaurus Mechs was a finalist in 2022’s Roswell Awards competition in short SF Writing.

+

© Gregory L. Norris 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Midjourney, the AI image generator.

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2022

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+ Cathy Bryant +

Jinny Greenteeth

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Full confession: when your editor read the first paragraph of our opening story, he thought, 'Hey, this thing is set where I grew up!' It would be wrong to imagine that was the only reason I accepted Cathy Bryant's smart, humorous, grim, characterful, sad, and optimistic tale… but it did make me happy doing it.

+ + + + Story image for Jinny Greenteeth by + + + +
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+
+

The Aquarium is Andrea

+ Monte Remer +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Aquarium is Andrea by + + + +

Time passes fast, and sweeps memories with it. Over twenty years ago (if you can believe it) the movie 'Memento' took the very concept of memory and turned it into an edge-of-the-seat thriller; Monte Remer makes it into a brink-of-tears tragedy about the aliens closest to us. Some stories prick the emotions so strongly it's almost overwhelming. This one is pure pathos.

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Distant Skies

+ Charlotte Ashley +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Distant Skies by + + + +

Some stories arrive with a story of their own behind them. The far future of culture and horticulture depicted in 'Distant Skies' was originally a performance piece, with original music composed by Ivana Popovic and performed by Toronto's Junction Trio, accompanied by Charlotte Ashley's spoken words—now appearing here in black and white.

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JohnBear, Janine, and I

+ Hermester Barrington +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for JohnBear, Janine, and I by + + + +

We're very pleased to welcome Hermester Barrington to the pages of Mythaxis for a second time—but while his previous visit provided biologically intricate introspection with a dash of the impenetrable academic, here we're given a short, sharp, straightforward slice of the supernatural. Making friends ought to be child's play. Imaginary ones? More so. If that's what they are, of course.

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Death is Like a Box of Chocolates

+ Fraser Sherman +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Death is Like a Box of Chocolates by + + + +

Creative reworkings of Greek mythology. To judge by the number submitted to Mythaxis each year, it's a little-known fact that the editor really doesn't like them—especially not Persephone and Hades, by far the most common, and most grating. Yet beware, editor, of ever ruling them out: sometimes new Greek myths come bearing gifts…

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Up and Down

+ J. Siegal +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Up and Down by + + + +

Some people are just annoying. You can try to have sympathy when circumstance works against them, try to be happy for them when things go well, yet there's simply no helping that itch of ill feeling, nor of taking guilty pleasure at even unjust comeuppance. But some suffering exceeds what even the annoying deserve.

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The Night Parents

+ Valerie Alexander +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Night Parents by + + + +

Time is almost up on 2022, but given the twists and turns recent history has thrown our way, who'd risk guessing what's coming in 2023? Fittingly then, for our final story of the year Valerie Alexander gives us a piece that's all about time; the dread, or anticipation, of the unknown; and of change.

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Table of Contents

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Death is Like a Box of Chocolates

+

Fraser Sherman

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Death is Like a Box of Chocolates by +
+ + + + +
+

Dec. 17, 1983

+

G + +reg Haughton believed in the importance of big brass balls the way his grandparents believed in the inerrancy of holy scripture. That’s how he got himself killed and released kalon kakon, the beautiful evil, back into the world.

+

Greg’s balls and his willingness to promise whatever bullshit would close a deal had made him the top salesman at Hal Lightner Ford in the Florida Panhandle for three years straight. He felt he had a lot in common with Ronald Reagan, who’d just invaded some island a couple of months earlier to stop the commies taking over—they both had the balls to take big chances.

+

Hal held the company Christmas party at his condo in Seastar, a beachfront tourist town a half-hour up the coast. The Eurhythmics were on Hal’s stereo, booze flowed freely, cocaine flowed discreetly, so Greg was buzzed when a reporter from the Seastar Journal showed up to interview Hal. Pershing Jackson was a bespectacled brunette rocking the hot librarian look, so as soon he could, Greg cornered her alone, copped a feel, and told her how totally fuckable she’d look if she only showed more skin.

+

The bitch bent a couple of his fingers back until he almost screamed, then made some sneering remark about the size of his dick. She walked away before Greg could explain that he’d just been joking around and hadn’t meant anything. His attempt to score with Hal’s attorney went even worse and left him sulking and drinking the rest of the night.

+

His mood wasn’t much better Monday when he drove his sister to the county airport, walked her to the gate, and watched her jet off to her fiancé. Greg headed out past the crowd at the baggage carousel, fuming over the total injustice of the previous night. The crap a man had to put up with to stay out of trouble… and in that moment, the beautiful evil crooned its silent song, and he listened.

+

Greg had always worried that if he wasn’t at the baggage claim right when his luggage came out, someone could just walk off with it. Suddenly it hit him: he could be that someone! With a crowd of three, four dozen people, nobody would realize he hadn’t been on the flight. Stealing some loser’s luggage would prove his dick was big enough for any woman, and if the owner caught him he’d pretend it was a mistake.

+

He pushed his way to the front of the crowd and watched the luggage go by. Backpack. Suitcase. Suitcase. Duffel bag. Cheap suitcase. Suit bag. And, poking out from beneath the suit bag, a bright yellow box of Stuckey’s pralines.

+

Without hesitating, Greg plucked it from the carousel with one hand and walked out to the parking lot, heart hammering. Nobody objected, nobody demanded their pralines back—who the hell would check candy as baggage anyway? Sure, it was free, but what were the odds it didn’t get crushed or stolen?

+

But who cared? With one macho move, he’d proven his balls were still the biggest in the Panhandle. He wanted to do that thing Sly Stallone did at the top of the steps in Rocky, but it was smarter to play it cool, just in case.

+

Only, now what?

+

As he got into his car, he wondered if he shouldn’t put the box back, because it wasn’t like he was a thief or anything. But that would draw attention, and if the owner had already missed it… Ah, screw it. Celebrate your brass balls by having some pralines!

+

At 2 PM Central Time Dec. 19, Greg opened the box, unleashed kalon kakon, and doomed himself.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

P + +ershing Jackson parked her Beetle at Fran’s Furniture Store, well back from the half mile of Highway 97 traffic paralyzed by the accident at the airport entrance. After snapping a couple of photos, she drew her notebook and pencil out of her shoulder bag and advanced up the median on foot. Ignoring the inevitable catcalls and wolf whistles she scribbled details of the scene in shorthand as she approached the cluster of police cars, fire engines and rubberneckers up ahead.

+

Beyond the rubberneckers, a small Gremlin with a crumpled front end lay overturned on the median; a larger car lay in the road, too smashed to identify the model. God, I hate covering accidents. If Max had just waited a few more hours to quit… Pershing photographed the scene, took some discreet shots of the crowd, then approached a deputy who didn’t seem to be doing anything. “Pershing Jackson with the Seastar Journal. What happened?”

+

The woman, brown-haired and freckle-faced with a badge that said Dep. Dane, raised an eyebrow suspiciously. “Where’s Max?”

+

“He quit, a few minutes before we got the call about the accident.” The only explanation he’d given was that he had an idea for a sure-fire, guaranteed bestseller and he needed all his time to write it.

+

Dane still looked suspicious. Pershing realized she’d left her press badge in her blazer pocket and pulled it out. “Sorry, deputy. Everyone knows me on my regular beat.”

+

“No sweat.” Dane turned and gestured at the totaled car. “Driver ran a red light, the Gremlin hit him, he died, the other driver’s getting flown to St. Mary for hemorrhaging. Can’t let any cars through till we’ve checked out the death scene.”

+

“Dead guy drunk?”

+

“Probably, or higher than a kite, but that’s off the record until we know for sure. Women behind him at the light said he was screaming something about his big brass balls before he got hit. Name was Greg Haughton, car salesman. Died 2:07 PM.”

+

Pershing flinched a little. “Haughton. I… met him once.” No need to share the details. “Anything else?”

+

“No, but I can call once the autopsy and the blood work’s done.”

+

“Thanks. Deadline’s at two tomorrow for Wednesday’s paper, but I can always do a follow-up for Saturday. And let me know when you’ve contacted his family.”

+

After a quick interview with the woman who heard Haughton yelling, Pershing was headed back through the crowd playing with openings for the story when a harsh voice snapped her out of her reverie. “Punishment is only just if it’s appropriate.”

+

The speaker was an elderly woman in a shapeless black dress, talking to a second old woman in an identical shapeless black dress. “We have to end this, Tis, it’s been going too far for far too long.”

+

Scenting a possible quote, Pershing was about to ask the woman’s name, but the two crones saw her listening and glared. Pershing forced a smile, turned around and resumed walking. Something about the women’s hard, cruel eyes… she glanced back, but they’d already moved off.

+

Pershing turned around and bumped into a massive chest in a green turtleneck. The man jumped back with a startled bleat, so Pershing apologized quickly and walked on. Knocking on the window of a few drivers she got some choice quotes, a few even printable.

+

As she reached the Beetle, she saw the big guy—Jeez, he must be seven foot-something—emerge from the crowd and stare at her intensely. He didn’t move any closer, but she wasted no time getting inside the car, locking the doors, and driving off.

+

Back at her desk, Pershing banged out a first draft on her typewriter—the Journal would never have the budget for word-processors like her last employer—and got an update on the Gremlin driver from the hospital. She told her editor, Walt, that she’d check with Deputy Dane tomorrow and finish up, “but until then I’m getting back to my own work.”

+

“Honey, it’s all your work until we can replace Max.” Walt stubbed out his cigarette in his FSU-logo ashtray and shrugged apologetically. “That might take a while.”

+

“I’m local-government beat, I hate covering breaking news.”

+

“People’ll read it.”

+

“Yeah, I know.” Tonight’s county budget hearing would affect more people, but death and destruction grabbed more eyeballs. “One reporter for the whole county—”

+

“We’re a quiet county, Pershing. If we have another accident this week worth more than a one-paragraph brief, I’ll be astonished.”

+

Pershing nodded, returned to her desk, and checked her answering machine. She’d expected some return calls from the county staff, but the first call was Dr. Ryder. As soon as the taped voice finished, she told Walt goodbye and ran to her car.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“D + +ad, you can’t drop out of chemo.” Pershing handed her father a coffee and took a seat on the couch next to his recliner. “If you do, you’re going to die.”

+

“I’m sick of the chemo, pumpkin, you know that,” Dad said in the Virginia accent he’d never lost.

+

“I know how horrible it is for you.” Helping him through it was why she’d quit her job at a Richmond daily for a lower salary in a nowhere county. “If you’ve decided you can’t— but you’ve been so determined and you’re winning. This coming year, you’ll be cancer free.” Has he been hiding how he really felt? No, I know him better than that… don’t I? “Are you really choosing to— to—”

+

“Honey, it’s not as fatal as you think. You ever hear about the guy who cured himself just by watching comedies and thinking happy thoughts? I decided this afternoon that I’d try that.” Dad squeezed Pershing’s hand. “I’m an upbeat person, if that man can do it, I certainly can.”

+

That wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “Dad, you used to be a science teacher. You’ve always taught me to trust medicine, not miracles. Look, did someone suggest this to you?” If Dad had been conned by some quack, she’d make the guy sorry he was ever born.

+

“Nope, it was inspiration—almost like a divine message, if you believe in that stuff. Hit me just as General Hospital started, I called the doctor as soon as it was over.” He chuckled, half-embarrassed. “Much as I laughed at your momma about those soaps, Luke and Laura are kind of cool.”

+

“I don’t—” No, yelling won’t do any good. It never does with Dad. “Obviously it’s… it’s your decision, but don’t you think you should at least talk with Dr. Ryder about your prognosis?”

+

Dad didn’t. He ended the talk by putting a Duck Soup cassette into the Betamax to start his laughter-based therapy and invited her to watch with him.

+

Pershing left the house with her guts clenched in a knot. He’s sixty-two. Too young to die. And I’m twenty-seven, too young to be an orphan. And dammit, dammit, this came out of nowhere! What could have happened— It struck her that General Hospital started at 2 PM, the same time Max quit. But that was coincidence, obviously; probably thousands of people all over America were making stupid decisions at that same time. At any given time.

+

If she hadn’t had the meeting that night, or if Max were around to pinch-hit for her, she’d have found somewhere to get drunk. Instead, she went back to the office, found nothing from the county staff, but Deputy Dane had left a message on the answering machine. She didn’t really give a crap about the accident just then, but calling her back was better than thinking about Dad. “The autopsy find some drugs?”

+

“No, but in Haughton’s car we found—look, you’ll find it easier to believe if you see it for yourself.”

+

Despite her worries, Pershing’s curiosity stirred, but she sighed. “I don’t think I have the time before the commission meeting.”

+

“Tomorrow then. No matter how tight your deadlines are, this is going to be worth it.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t was 8:05 the next morning when the deputy opened the door for a yawning Pershing. “Late night, huh?”

+

“Very.” The county budget manager had projected a 75 percent boost in county revenue without raising taxes. The commissioners had grilled him for an hour without making sense of it. “And then I got called out of bed at 4:30 after a brawl at Donuts Divine.” Screw you, Max!

+

“I heard about that. Biker beat up a CPA, something like that?”

+

“Other way around.” As they went down the hall, Pershing sipped her 7-11 coffee hoping it would rev her up. “The accountant came on to the biker’s wife, then challenged the guy to a fight for her.” The CPA was a quiet, super-shy guy according to his companions, but he’d been acting weird since caught in the airport traffic gridlock yesterday afternoon. “I’ve seen lots of guys act crazy about women, but taking on an ex-Marine who outweighs him by a hundred pounds?”

+

“Maybe it’s something in the water, Ms. Jackson. Guy at Food World tried kidnapping a cashier from her smoke break yesterday, around the time we met at the accident. When he got busted, the guy said he just knew the girl would love him if he showed her he cared.”

+

“Were there bad sunspots or something yesterday? It seems like there was a—a lot of freaky behavior going on. Now, what do I need to see, and please call me Pershing.” She saw the usual question in the deputy’s eyes. “Grandpa served on Black Jack Pershing’s staff in WWI. My Dad’s Pershing Jackson, he decided it should be a tradition. Won’t be.”

+

“Call me Jenny then.” The deputy opened the door on a small office with two or three empty desks, a praline box from Stuckey’s sitting on one of them. “We found this next to Haughton in his car, thought maybe he kept his coke stash in it.” She flipped the box open, showed it empty. “Looks normal, right?”

+

“Jenny, just tell me what was in it, no games, please.” Pershing pulled out her notebook. “I’m guessing you didn’t find drugs?”

+

“Didn’t find nothing, it was empty just like this. We were a little surprised it didn’t even look scratched from the accident, but then Fre—well never mind who the dumb-ass was, he dropped it in the parking lot and the mail truck backed up over it.”

+

“No jokes, either.” Pershing closed the box, tapped the lid. “No way a car drove over that.”

+

Smiling Jenny handed Pershing a Swiss army knife. “Stab the sucker.”

+

“It’s evidence!”

+

“Trust me.”

+

“Fine.” Pershing raised the knife, then drove it down at the big S in the logo. The blade skated off the box as if it were hardwood and twisted out of her hand. Baffled, Pershing reclaimed the knife, thrust it at one corner of the box, felt the same impact. “It’s not even scratched!” She ran her hand over the box. “It’s just cardboard, that’s not—”

+

“Watch this.” Jenny clenched her fist and brought it down on the box as soon as Pershing withdrew her hand. The lid didn’t break or even bend. “Arlene says it must be some kind of government experiment, but nobody’d hide that in a candy box outside of a James Bond movie.”

+

“Any idea where it came from?”

+

“Haughton was at the airport dropping off his sister. Someone remembered him picking up the box from the baggage claim, then walking out.”

+

“He stole it?”

+

“Looks like.”

+

“From who?”

+

“Nobody. Box wasn’t checked onto the flight.”

+

Pershing pulled the lid off the coffee cup and guzzled. “Level with me—I’m not just finding this confusing because of lack of sleep?”

+

“I wish. You met the guy, right, you got any idea why he’d rob a baggage carousel?”

+

“All I know about Haughton is that he was big on copping feels. And if he’s that into pralines, there’s a Stuckey’s store at every intersection on the Interstate.”

+

“Folks at the dealership said he was as big a jerk with women as he could be without getting into trouble.” Jenny gave Pershing a quick once over. “Guys hassle you a lot? I notice that you dress pretty conservative.”

+

“I try to look professional, leave it at that.” She’d found the sweet spot the first year after college: still attractive enough to get a job, but not drawing more crap or catcalls than the average woman. “So, what’s next?”

+

“Well, Brian—Sheriff Chandler—has been trying to think of who we should report this to, but in the meantime, he figures we might as well go public, see if anyone knows anything. You interested in covering this?”

+

“Oh, hell, yes.” Pershing began wondering which of the stories due that afternoon she could convince Walt to set aside for this one. “So is the sheriff available for an interview?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +ednesdays were a lot easier than Tuesdays.

+

With no deadline until Friday, Pershing didn’t have to rush to finish anything. Sitting above the harbor on the upper deck of the Swordfish Grill, with Islands in the Stream coming softly over the radio speakers, she alternated bites of red snapper sandwich with going over her pile of notes. So much for “a quiet county,” there’s enough here to fill the Journal’s front page for the next three weeks.

+

Two local retirees had called that morning to announce they were challenging Reagan for the 1984 Republican nomination. Neither had ever held political office; both said they’d made the decision sitting in that Monday traffic jam. A woman who’d jumped off the Kelly Bridge at the same time had regained consciousness Tuesday and explained she did it to “blow the mind” of a man she claimed she loved but had never spoken to. Grace at the county confirmed 2 PM was when the budget manager had come up with his new revenue projections.

+

Pershing had actually called a chemistry teacher at UWF to ask if there might have been a gas bomb in the box. He’d assured her there’d be a pattern: people at the site affected first, then maybe people further away, but only so far. Instead, it was all over the county, completely random, and more cases kept popping up.

+

A retired, 65-year-old admiral had called Pershing that morning about his plans to re-enlist and lead a naval first strike on Iran. Three more presidential hopefuls and one aspiring senator had called her since Tuesday morning. When she’d brainstormed with Dr. Ryder about her father—he had no suggestions—he mentioned two more patients had abruptly stopped chemo and he’d heard of a half-dozen psychiatric patients who’d stopped taking their meds. Five major accidents had resulted from drivers taking reckless chances. And the minister at St. Paul’s Lutheran bet the church’s construction fund at the Ebro greyhound races “because I have faith God’s given me a sure thing.”

+

None of them individually unbelievable. No more than the half-dozen accounts of people making unexpected, unwanted proposals of marriage that morning were individually unbelievable. Lump it all together and it was damn unbelievable, especially for 48 hours in a county of under 40,000 people.

+

And it’s all the same kind of crazy, really. Insane, irrational optimism. Hope without anything to justify it. Starting when Haughton tried to beat that light, carrying the magic box. Which almost made her think of something, but…

+

The story in the Journal that morning had generated a flood of calls, but nothing useful. Just babble about UFOs, divine wrath, or Russian secret weapons. According to Jenny, nobody who’d called the Sheriff’s Department had anything better to offer.

+

“I found you.” The bald hulk from Monday sat down abruptly opposite Pershing, dressed in a sweater and jeans. The chair sunk under his weight. “I read your story, I can help. And you can help me.”

+

“Ah—which story?” God, he was huge. Dangerously huge. One hand slipped into her big shoulder purse and groped around for the can of Mace. “What’s your name?”

+

An agonized look crossed his face before he replied. “Eppy. Better just call me Eppy.”

+

“First name or last name, and how is it spelled?” She found the Mace and carefully kept it ready. It was probably irrational but—

+

“Just Eppy.” He laughed nervously. “It’s about the box, I know what was in it. Kalon kakon, the beautiful evil, it escaped when that man opened it.”

+

“It did?” Pershing began gauging escape routes—if retreat was an option, it was always better than confrontation—and whether anyone inside would help if she screamed. “Ah… what kind of evil?”

+

“Hope. Kalon kakon, the dream that looks so beautiful but ends very badly. You already know the box cannot be destroyed by the hand of man, it was in your story.”

+

“Hope. In a box.” That’s what I was trying to remember. “Like Pandora’s box in the myth?”

+

“I’m so glad you figured it out.” Eppy drew a big sigh of relief. “Yes, it’s her box. My wife, Pandora, the first beautiful evil. I’m her husband, the titan Epimetheus.” Oh god, he is crazy. Where the hell is the waiter? “The only way to seal hope up again is with the blood of kalos kagathos, the beautiful good. That’s you.”

+

“My blood.” Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “Mr.—er, Epimethius, do you mind if I uh, go inside and use the little girl’s room? It’ll just take a second.”

+

“No, of course not. I’ll wait right here until you get back.”

+

Yeah, you do that. Pershing ran inside, found the waiter, paid the bill, wondered what to do about the man who thought he was a Greek myth. He hadn’t threatened her exactly, hadn’t done anything cops would take as a danger sign but still… blood. But he says he knows about the box, that’s a good reason to catch him and question him right?

+

Keeping her eye on Epimetheus through the glass door to the deck, Pershing asked the waiter about the phone. Then Eppy jumped up, cringing in a way that looked ridiculous for a man of his bulk, and vanished down the stairs. A second later, the two old women from the wreck showed up with a third identical woman in tow. They followed in the big man’s wake.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“E + +pimetheus.” Jenny repeated. Fortunately she’d been there when Pershing called the sheriff. “Epimetheus the titan?”

+

“Do you know any others?” What kind of deputy is this? “I’m surprised you know the name.”

+

“Epimetheus, brother to Prometheus. AKA Afterthought, brother to Forethought. Read lots of that Greek stuff after I saw my first Hercules movie.”

+

“Any of them explain this beautiful evil/beautiful good stuff?”

+

“No, but maybe he just made that up, whatever makes his delusion work. You’re somewhere safe right?”

+

“I’m still at the Grill, but I’m heading home.”

+

“Wait, could he know where you live?”

+

“That’s just it, I’m P. Jackson in the phone book but Dad’s Pershing Jackson, and he’s home alone laughing at movies.”

+

“I’ll send a car by.”

+

“That’d be appreciated.” She’d thought about taking Dad to a hotel, but her father would veto that. “The weird thing is, if it were Pandora’s box, it would make sense. Hope was the last thing left in the box—”

+

“Pandora didn’t have a box of pralines, Pershing, and Greek myths aren’t walking around in Florida—or even Greece these days. Crazy people have very self-consistent stories, they’re just built on crap.”

+

“Yeah, I know, it’s just—” If Eppy were telling the truth, maybe my blood would get Dad back on chemo. “I’ll head home, thanks for taking this seriously.”

+

A deputy was parked on the curb when Pershing arrived, and assured her nobody had entered. Once inside, Pershing locked the door and called for Dad. “I know it’s early but I thought—”

+

“Pumpkin, would you come into the living room please? There’s someone I want you to meet.” At Dad’s words, Pershing froze, wondering if she should get the deputy. “They’re really very nice, not at all as furious as you’d expect.”

+

“They?” Pershing ran in, saw the three old women standing around Dad in his recliner. “How’d they get in here? Who are you?”

+

“Oh, you’ll be glad they’re here, honey.” Dad gestured at the trio. “They’ve been explaining things to me—it’s just possible that stopping chemo wasn’t really a good idea.”

+

“I— I—” A weight lifted off Pershing’s chest. “How’d you convince him of that?”

+

One of the women smiled mirthlessly. “We’re very persuasive when we want to be.”

+

In an instant they changed. Scaly batwings on their backs, snakes hissing through their tangled hair, what looked like cat o’nine tails in their hands, and something vicious in their posture that would have made Pershing retreat if they hadn’t been close to her father.

+

If not for all the Greek mythology, she wouldn’t have thought of it, but… “You’re the Furies?”

+

“They prefer to be called the Kindly Ones,” Dad said helpfully. “I know I raised you to be skeptical, but I think we can be open-minded about this.”

+

“Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera,” the one who spoke before said. A second later they were back to the old biddies she’d first seen, though still holding their whips. “But call us Ali, Tis, and Meg. I’m Ali. I do the talking.”

+

“And you’re here because—?” It can’t be anything good, the Furies were all about vengeance! “My father doesn’t deserve punishing. He hasn’t killed anyone, that’s the kind of people you go after, right?”

+

“We’re here to help,” Ali said. One of her sisters grunted. “Exactly, Meg. We really are being kindly.”

+

Pershing sank onto the couch. “So are you after Eppy? Is he responsible for this?”

+

“Only for being stupid,” Ali said. Two more grunts from her sisters. “Never realized Pandora was trouble. Never realized what a dick Zeus was.” She cracked the whip for emphasis. “We scourge people who deserve it, people who’ve damned themselves by their actions. Zeus’s little hissy fit, inflicting evil on innocent people with that box—well, it’s time to put a stop to it. The big doofus keeps boxing Hope back up but it always gets out again. With your help, we can fix that.”

+

“You mean—” Here it was, the big decision. “My blood. But if you take it, it’ll restore Dad to normal?”

+

“Why do you sound so dramatic?” Ali looked baffled. “We only need three drops.”

+

Pershing stared at them. “That’s all?”

+

The Kindly Ones gave a collective groan. “Doofus blew it again. I’m sure an hour later he realized he’d said the wrong thing.”

+

Afterthought, right. “But I don’t get this ‘beautiful good’ stuff, I’m—”

+

“Very beautiful,” Dad said. “Your Momma always said she couldn’t believe you hadn’t gotten married—”

+

“Dad, not now. Alecto, Ali I mean, I’m not particularly good.”

+

“Well, we’re talking ancient Greek horse-shit, remember. They were pricks about women, just like Zeus. You don’t deceive men with your beauty, you tell people the truth instead of twisting it, by Greek standards you’re a living saint.”

+

“Three drops.” Pershing glanced at her father. It sounded like he’d been shocked back to normal already, but would it stay that way? “Let me call Jenny.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +fter seeing the Furies transform in the Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Chandler and Jenny looked as stunned as Pershing probably had. “But hang on.” The sheriff tapped a nicotine-stained finger on the box. “They didn’t have Stuckey’s in ancient Greece. Did they even have pralines?”

+

“He’s got a point, ma’am,” Jenny said to Ali. “Wasn’t it originally an urn, not even a box?”

+

“Ma’am.” Ali chuckled, which sounded like angry gears grinding. “I like this one. And yes, it was an urn, but it’s been other things. A leather briefcase in Athens, a cigarette case in Sarajevo, a steamer trunk in Peru, a hip flask in Pretoria, a bento box in Hokkaido. Whatever will convince someone to open it.”

+

Pershing was about to ask what a bento box was, when there came a loud hubbub from the department’s front office. “Ah, it’s Doofus,” Ali said. “He can probably feel something’s happening with the box. Somebody get him and convince him not to just run whimpering when he sees us.”

+

Pershing flinched slightly as Epimetheus’ hulking form entered the room a few moments later, flanked by a couple of deputies. His eyes lit up when he saw her. “It’s only three drops of your blood. I guess I should have explained that better.” He eyed Ali warily. “You’re really not here for me? If I hadn’t married Pandora—”

+

“You’ve been working ever since to fix things,” Ali said. “Can’t hold that against you. But this time we’re keeping the box, to make sure kalon kakon doesn’t get out again, ever.”

+

“What about the other evils,” Jenny said. “Wasn’t there plague, war, all that stuff?”

+

“No, that part is a myth,” Ali said. One of her sisters made a grunt. “Okay, sometimes hope did start a war or two. Just another beautiful evil, looking good and hurting soooo bad.”

+

“Can we just do this, please?” Epimetheus said. “The longer it’s out, the more people get hurt. I want it done.” He reached over and lifted the box from the desk. “Miss Jackson, you have to spill three drops of blood on it. Then it opens for you, but you mustn’t eat any pralines. It’s a symbolic thing.”

+

Sheriff Chandler glanced at Pershing, stroking his mustache. “You don’t have to do this. I mean, we still don’t know for sure—”

+

“Eppy is right, this has to stop,” Pershing said. “So do we need some sort of ritual knife or—”

+

“Let Meg do it,” Ali said. One of her sisters shuffled forward, took Pershing’s hand and held it over the box, which looked small in Eppy’s palm. The Fury thrust her index finger out, Pershing saw a sharp, gleaming talon, then cried out at the stab of pain in her fingertip. Both Chandler and Jenny started forward, but Pershing shook her head, simultaneously cussing under her breath.

+

Meg positioned the cut finger and squeezed. One drop fell on the box and disappeared. Then a second. Then a third.

+

The box popped open.

+

It was full of pralines, and despite being wrapped in plastic they smelled good. Amazingly good, and Pershing wasn’t even that fond of pralines.

+

But she wanted them. Every last one of them.

+

And if she ate them, she knew the world would change. Her dad would be fine, no need to stay in town and watch over him. Pershing could stop worrying about money, backpack around the world like she’d fantasized about in college. Have sex with anyone she wanted, no worries about pregnancy or her reputation. All the risks that had ever scared her off, she’d face them and win, if she ate just one praline.

+

She felt the plastic under her hand. So easy to tear. And then the fun would start. Backpacking across France first…

+

Then Pershing thought of Dad, of chemo, of cancer, and yanked her hand away. The urge didn’t fade and she stood there for what seemed like eternity before the lid swung closed. One of the Furies plucked it out of Epimetheus’ hands.

+

“Didn’t think you had it in you,” Ali said.

+

“Neither did I,” Pershing replied softly. “Dad’s going to be back to normal?”

+

“Yep.” Ali’s nod was curt but she almost had something like a smile. “Devotion to family. We respect that, you know.”

+

“Then what about the box?” Pershing asked. Dad’s going to live. I’m not an orphan. “Where do you dispose of somewhere like that?”

+

“Ideally up Zeus’s butt,” Ali said, “but we’ll settle for a different kind of cage.”

+

“You’ll settle?” Jenny held up her hand. “No offense, but if this thing gets out again, it ain’t going to hurt you any. Maybe it’s time us mortals started looking out for ourselves.”

+

“And where would you put it?” Ali hissed. “Do you think a jail cell can hold kalon kakon?”

+

“It was a god who made this, the big guy who let it out, why should we trust you?”

+

Epimetheus held up his hand. “I’ve had the most experience seeing what doesn’t work securing it. Maybe I should keep it one more time.”

+

As the three of them argued, Sheriff Chandler leaned over to Pershing. “Never mind the box, I have to figure out what do with people like Pastor Grimes. It sounds like it wasn’t entirely their fault, but how could I explain dropping all the charges?”

+

“Once we run the story, maybe everyone will understand.” Yeah, right. Who’s going to believe this? Will Walt even let me print it? But she got out her notebook and began jotting shorthand as Ali, Jenny and Eppy debated solutions, reminding herself to stop and get photos at some point.

+

Much as Pershing hated breaking news, this was one story that had turned out pretty damn cool. Max would probably want his desk back soon enough, but in the meantime…

+

“So, Ali,” she started, “can you tell me what happens to the world if the beautiful evil doesn’t get out again?”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Death is Like a Box of Chocolates on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Fraser Sherman

+

+ + Author image of Fraser Sherman + + + Fraser Sherman loves writing fantasy and film reference but takes time away from them for the accounting and business articles that pay the bills. He’s had four film reference books published, most recently The Aliens Are Here, and his self-published steampunk novel Questionable Minds came out in 2022. Born in England, he lived in Florida until relocating to Durham NC in 2010 to marry his dream woman. He’s online at frasersherman.com.

+

© Fraser Sherman 2022 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was composited using an image generated by Micah Hyatt using Stable Diffusion plus an original image by New Africa.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-32/distant-skies.html b/issue-32/distant-skies.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0a0d0b6f --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-32/distant-skies.html @@ -0,0 +1,485 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Distant Skies — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Distant Skies

+

Charlotte Ashley

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Distant Skies by +
+ + + + +

I + +t is wood thrush season.

+

They are migrating south for the winter, following the same path every thrush has followed for thousands, maybe millions of years. Every single bird knows the way automatically, by instinct, without having been told. Their bodies know; the bodies of their ancestors knew, and the bodies of their chicks will know. They have the tools to make the flight, built in; wings exactly strong enough, tiny muscles filled with exactly enough energy. Even star maps showing them the way and senses tuned to the magnetic fields of the earth for orientation. They make this journey because they were made for it. They don’t have a choice.

+

Even though, for the last 180 years, that path passes right through the farm-towers of Aerobelle, my home.

+

Most of the thrushes get through just fine, resting on tangles of late season raspberries and dodging the aluminum beams; but not all. Hundreds fly smack into glass panes and solar panels, amassing in little broken piles at the foot of the towers.

+

Me, I polish the north-facing window of my home tier to flawless invisibility and tie a basket underneath. Wood thrushes are delicious: tender on the outside with the nutty crunch of filament-thin bone on the inside. But even if I didn’t love the taste—the juicy burst of flame-kissed breast, the sweet and sour surprise of the hind quarters—I would eat them out of spite.

+

Year after year after year, they fly into the same windows and get stuck in the same nets; they fall prey to the same hungry predators who need only to stand in one spot with their mouths open wide—and why? Because their bodies tell them to.

+

That is no excuse. That cannot be an excuse. Those who allow themselves to be ruled by their instincts get what is coming to them.

+

That goes for people, too.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ur ancestors made a body promise to AeroSmart Agricultural. That’s why we live in Aerobelle. Our contracts have been lost to time, or maybe they were destroyed when AeroSmart went bankrupt, but we can all guess what changes the promise coded in us.

+

Our deep, belly-felt loyalty to these ancient towers. A knack for growing and nurturing the plants that spill out of the risers on every level. A love of heights. Even these long, strong fingers and broad, flexible shoulders. They might have been part of the contract too, all AeroSmart’s design. Like I said, the details have been lost. Our bodies keep our promises for us.

+

November is harvest season. Like every year, we have much more than we could ever use. We can’t help but produce excess—part of our body promises, I guess—but now that AeroSmart is gone, most of it goes to waste. We trade what we can, then we hold the Burning’s Day festival.

+

By tradition, the Burning’s Day feasts are meant to be open to everyone, strangers and uninvited guests included, but I put a stop to that years ago. Headhunters and recruiters kept showing up, offering jobs and fishing for old body promises. Now it’s just us, citizens of Aerobelle.

+

Today, there are one hundred and thirty-six people here, bunched up at the tables in the open-air atriums of the ground floor, shouting over each other to be heard. Vines and ferns drying to sunset shades droop from the rafters, cushioning our voices, mellowing our periphery. Everyone is smiling, most people are drinking, and not a single fight has started besides.

+

I’m at the head table with a handful of the others, quiet for a change because I’m already worn out from negotiating a trade. But I got through it, and the deal came with new windows for the lower tiers, replacement parts to repair some of the riggings and planters, and a winter’s worth of salt, sugar, and iodine. I’m letting my eyes glaze over as I watch Naiva’s twins feed themselves mashed butternut; Jilly and Naveen making eyes at each other.

+

Then Roger lays his hand on my shoulder.

+

“Behind you,” he says.

+

I crane my neck and look out over the railing, into the starry sky that isn’t as dark as it should be. A bright light trails across the horizon, southward.

+

“Satellite,” I say, but I frown too. It’s too big, too bright. It looks like a ship entering the atmosphere. A big ship.

+

“I think we’re having guests after all,” Roger mutters.

+

“No way,” I say. “They never come here.”

+

Roger says nothing and scratches his bushy beard nervously. I turn my back to the open window and suddenly I’m ravenous from the smell of cinnamon and sage from the coming feast.

+

I wonder how long it will take them to make landfall.

+

I wonder where they have come from.

+

I wonder if we can get through this feast and get to the Burning before they arrive.

+

My father’s people made the body promise to AeroSmart five or six generations ago, during the famines of that era.

+

My mother’s people, they made a promise to a generation ship. The ships come home every two hundred years or so, full of strangers and expectations. Strange or not, our bodies and theirs recognise each other because of this promise. My mother’s promise, that was made a long time ago. Seven generations, I’d guess.

+

About two hundred years ago.

+

I take a scoop of potatoes and pass the bowl on down the table, ignoring the budding excitement in my belly. It doesn’t matter if I am promised to this ship, these strange people. That doesn’t mean anything. We can feed them and supply them and send them on their way.

+

I am no wood thrush. I know my duties. Body promise or not, I have a choice.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he body promise is a trap. Let me tell you about last time.

+

It is autumn. Someone spots a truck incoming, a brand-new Goldanning All-Terrain Hauler. The driver is alone, but has brought a full load with him: medicine, tools, spare parts. Everyone in the towers takes cover, climbing to the safety of their homes in the upper tiers so that they can’t see or hear what goes on below.

+

I go out to meet the driver alone. It is a cold, windy November day, just the kind that makes the upper tiers shake, groan, and sway. It feels good to be on the ground and everyone knows it. They complain when I order them up. He’s just one guy, what are the odds he’s here for any of us? It is always the same argument. Every generation thinks they are reinventing the law.

+

I can tell immediately that there are no promises between him and me. Everything about him repulses me. His cocky swagger and his false friendliness, his dyed hair and perfect skin. I don’t feel the slightest bit indebted to him. He seems like a born con man to me. It will be easy to negotiate the trade and send him away, the sooner the better.

+

But Shoanna has followed me down, despite the curfew. She is fifteen years old and a major pain in the ass. I can tell she is being driven hard by a body promise. Every kid wants to go to the city at her age, but with Shoanna, it is something extra, a drive to buck authority that kicks so hard at times that it even scares her. I know I can’t keep her inside forever, but I hope she can learn to resist her urges, her instincts, before too great a temptation lands in her path.

+

A temptation like Mr. Jordan Lee of TopTier International. She doesn’t see what I see. I have him made as a smarmy company man the minute we sit down at the bargaining table, slick and bossy and used to getting his own way. He doesn’t just want the food we’ve grown; he asks for people too. He offers jobs and opportunities, but I won’t let a single one of my people enter into another body promise if I can help it. I am a wall. That is my job.

+

But Shoanna hears his offer. Later that night, back on our tier, she tells me she is sick. She stays in bed when we go to box and bale the harvest. She skips meals. She has a mild fever so I give her space. She uses that space, oooh, does she use it.

+

We don’t even fight about it. There is no time. She hides in the cab of Mr. Jordan Lee’s truck and that’s it, she’s lost.

+

Maybe Shoanna didn’t even need to enter into a body promise with TopTier. Maybe she was already obligated to one made by some ancestor of her father’s. That’s the thing about instincts. You can’t trust them. What feels right and what is right are not the same. You have to fight yourself every day if you want to stay free.

+

Not everyone can fight for themselves. I learned the hard way.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e spot the cloud of dust first thing the next morning, a transport crossing the dunes of the horizon. They’ve got to be coming here—there’s nowhere else to go. We’re the last fertile farm-tower in the drought-blasted region.

+

“You sure you should do this?” Roger asks me before I go down.

+

“I’ll be fine,” I tell him. Body promise or not. I am the face of this community because my head is on straight. I think. I don’t feel.

+

Roger nods. He knows me.

+

I unlock the trade hall and start a fire in the stove, warming the room up before our surprise guests arrive. There, protected by concrete walls and slate shingles, I have more privacy than in our tower home of glass and wire. Here, alone, I allow myself a short, controlled skip of excitement and whirl of happy anticipation.

+

I have never in my life even wanted to travel so far as the city, but today I am so thrilled by the idea of a generation ship that I feel full to bursting. These people have been travelling between the stars for hundreds of years. They carry stories and traditions from places I have never even heard of, have learnt things and built things no one on Earth knows. They have widened the arms of our family embrace so far that we span suns, and suns, and suns…

+

…but I know this feeling isn’t real. What do I care about spaceships and suns, off-world cultures and people? I grow beets. This longing, this excitement—it’s just the body promise. A handshake and an injection two hundred years ago and now I can’t help but love these strangers.

+

It’s dangerous and I know it. I flex all my muscles and shake out all my passion. I get it out of my system.

+

Two hours later, the strangers arrive.

+

There are four of them. They are the palest people I have ever seen, half-buried under thick layers of utility clothes, all straps, pockets, and padding. They move quickly and nervously getting out of the transport, but relax once they are inside. They immediately shed unnecessary layers, peeling away like artichokes, revealing two women and two men with thin, but friendly, faces. They look hungry.

+

“I’m Devan,” says one of the men. He steps towards me and the fire casts warmth over his features just so, flames like marigolds in his dark eyes. He looks like he’s moving in for a hug, so I thrust my hand out in front of me.

+

“Marrit Shaw,” I introduce myself, shaking his hand firmly. “And what do you want?”

+

He pulls his hand back and looks confused. I could be more polite, but I don’t want to open that door. Negotiate the trade and go. That’s all I want.

+

“We—I—do you know who we are?” He has an accent, a clipping of each syllable like he’s trying to speak clearly. He probably studied for this meeting. I can only imagine what he thought he’d find here.

+

“Yah. You’re from a generation ship. You’re looking to resupply.”

+

He looks relieved at that. “We’re your ship,” he says with a smile. “We’re very excited to finally meet you.”

+

His blind trust is sweet, but foolish. I will have to be strong for both our peoples. “You’re not my ship. Let us be clear. I feel the body promise. I know our ancestors agreed to care for each other. But I have a bigger obligation to protect my people here than I have to you. I think it is safest for all of us if you can get me a list of what you need—”

+

“A list?”

+

“A list. We’ll load you up and you go right back to where you came from. Aerobelle isn’t what it once was. AeroSmart—the company we all made promises to—has been gone since my grandparent’s time. We don’t have much anymore. I can tell you who to talk to in the city for a proper resupply.”

+

He looks hurt and glances at his companions. One of the women steps forward.

+

“We aren’t just here for supplies.” She’s a little older than me, and reminds me of my mother. Of any mother. “We came to meet you. We are your family, Ms. Shaw. And you are ours.”

+

I shake my head firmly. “I’m sorry, but you are not. The promise our people made was to AeroSmart. It was an agreement of convenience. I get it—your people had to make sure there would be someone on Earth here to care for you when you returned from wherever it is you went. But it was an alliance between parties who obviously did not foresee that times change. There is no AeroSmart anymore and we don’t owe you anything. Now look, we have several tonnes of fresh green that you’re welcome to—”

+

The two who have not spoken mutter a few phrases I don’t quite catch. I hear “Promise,” “Map” and “Go.” But the dark-eyed man—Devan—shakes his head fiercely.

+

“No,” he says. “I feel the promise too strongly. We are exactly where we should be. You feel it too.” He’s talking to me now, pleading, one hand twitching like he can barely keep from reaching out. “You must feel this,” he murmurs.

+

“I… I do,” I say, to him, because the damn promise—and it must be the promise—is clouding everything but the deep wells of his eyes and sharp angles of his soapstone cheeks. “And that is why you must go, before one of the children sees you.”

+

“But Ms Shaw—” The woman does touch me, a familiar weight that takes the edge off the blade I am using to fend them off. “It is too late for that. Our people are coming. We all feel the promise. We have waited our whole lives for this. We could not keep everyone away.”

+

“All of you?” I force myself to step back so she cannot touch me again. I need to stay alert. “The whole ship?”

+

“I don’t see how it could be otherwise. We have arranged for the others to come in stages—”

+

But I’m not ready to think about logistics. “How many?”

+

“Fourteen thousand,” Devan says.

+

Fourteen thousand. Like a flock of wood thrushes.

+

There is nothing a couple hundred of us can do about a migration of so many. They are coming. That’s a fact.

+

When I say yes, they treat it as a blessing, not a victory. They are incapable of seeing that we should be at odds. Devan starts to smile first, anticipating my yes before I even come to it. I smile back, and then we’re barely holding back laughter, sharing relief.

+

C’mon, you knew, and I knew, you would never say no. I know you. You know me.

+

This stranger. These strangers. I feel like I’ve known them my whole life.

+

I arrange for them to stay below. My people must stay above. I invite them to tonight’s Burning’s Day feast.

+

It isn’t as if they are headhunters. They’re just family. And we can take care of them. What’s the worst that can happen?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey come by the dozens. They come by the hundreds. Shelters and trailers speckle the rocky plains at the foot of the towers and vehicles parade towards us like ants. It is the friendliest, most seductive invasion in the history of mankind. Devan’s people don’t speak our language, but their giddy anticipation afflicts us all. They come to us laughing, they come to us with tears in their shining eyes.

+

I let people come down to greet them in small groups, rationing out hugs and handshakes like medicine, careful not to let anyone overdose. These people are handsy, but there are thousands of them and only a couple hundred of us. They’ll have to share.

+

Me, I don’t have to share. Devan has arrived for me alone.

+

That evening, we set up a Burning’s Day feast for the strangers, parallel to our own. The long tables spill out of the atrium and into impromptu gardens protected by canvas tarps and sand screens. The wind kicks dust into our meals, but the aroma of herb-baked zucchini and salt pork beans soothes every nerve and the flow of warm beer obliterates every hesitation.

+

I sit at the head table with a handful of my neighbours. We should be watching our guests with sharp eyes, ensuring no rum-addled youths try to climb the towers, but we have all grown complacent. Devan and I sit next to each other at the end of the table, swapping stories. He only has eyes for me. I’m flattered, or lonely, or maybe just drunk. The man has never seen a squash before. How can you worry about a man like that?

+

“Why would anyone make such a thing?” he asks, running a thumb over its hard, green ridges. He’s incredulous, but smiling. “They could have at least made it round, so you could peel it.”

+

“Nobody made it! Hey, I’m born and bred for Aerobelle, but I can’t grow a damn thing,” I laugh. “That’s why we keep seeds. They do the hard work for us.”

+

“We also keep seeds, but we made every single one of them. We can’t have that much waste on the ship. Too much bark or stone and it doesn’t justify the energy it takes to grow.” He palms the gourd and pops a whole plum in his mouth, closing his eyes in appreciation. “But we also have nothing that tastes like this. Mmhmm!”

+

“You see, there’s goodness in wild, unplanned things.”

+

He puts the squash down and turns his full attention on me. “This plant is no more wild than you or I,” he points out. “It has been pressed into this absurd shape by your ancestors and mine. By the droughts and the floods and the pests. By a million years of negotiations with the world around it. Wild?” He pauses. “Doesn’t this feast celebrate the opposite? Predictability, reliability, comfort. You are thanking every one of these delicious foods for turning out exactly the way you needed them to. This is a celebration of instinct.”

+

“Maybe, but they are eaten for their reliability.”

+

He leans in close. “Joyfully, thankfully, ambitiously eaten by a very hungry recipient.”

+

Ahem. “That sounds wonderful… for the eater. What of the eaten?”

+

“The eaten could still wake up the next day…”

+

“…to be eaten again the next night?”

+

“People need to eat. You don’t seem to mind that.”

+

I’m getting lost between the philosophy and the innuendo, the logic and the feelings. I forget if I am for or against eating squash, but I can’t deny I am very hungry.

+

I look away, at the others. They are laughing and eating and singing.

+

What is the worst that can happen?

+

“Come with me,” I say to Devan. “Leave the squash.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +evan and I tumble together between risers overspilling with beans, the dry remains of tomatoes. He tumbles more than I do because he’s used to slick, manufactured hallways and artificial gravity—or maybe because he’s not keeping his eyes on the path. I catch him when he slips on the rung of a ladder, he holds me while we kiss, half-dangling from a walkway. We haul ourselves up the tower one tier at a time, pausing only when we don’t want to stand up too soon.

+

Ten storeys up, we’re tongue-locked and tangled on an irrigation bed formerly used for cucumbers and I’m staring at the starry sky thinking, I was grown for this. I’m budding, I’m flowering, I’m pollen-rich and ready to bear the most delicious fruit. I’m a grown woman and that’s what people do, no shame in that. I look at those tiny suns and imagine them dropping and flaring one by one to my intimate rhythm, a million million seeds untouched by anyone except maybe them, maybe him, my family from the distant sky.

+

That’s freedom. Infinite spaces nobody has touched, nobody has seen, nobody has tampered with. The ship isn’t the trap—Devan isn’t. Aerobelle is. These crumbling beams and fraying wires that we slavishly tend.

+

What was I thinking? I want to go. I want to go to the stars with him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he ear-rending screech of tearing metal cuts the night, punctuated by a woman’s terrified cry. My eyes fly open and I push myself half-naked out of the fallow, lurching over to the railing. Two storeys below me, a woman hangs by her fingertips from the rusted riser of the west stair, now twisted and torn from the beams. Everybody knows not to use those stairs, but this woman’s new, she’s from the ship. She slips with another panicked cry, too weak to hold on. She shouldn’t be up here.

+

“Julia!” a second voice cries, one I know. It’s Roger’s oldest, Avon. He’s nineteen, nimble, smart as hell, and now clambering over the railing to get to the woman. “Hold on, I’m coming!”

+

He has an overstuffed pack strapped to his back, tools and treasures poking out of every pocket. He is packed to run away—with her. But the pack sets him off-balance and he’s getting snagged on old bolts, too desperate to be properly careful. I can see where this will end if I hesitate for even a moment. I vault over the edge.

+

Even barefoot and tipsy, I climb better than anyone in Aerobelle. I descend, hand under hand, along the outside of the tower’s frame, towards Avon. The old staircase is bent over the railing, creasing it, making the whole balcony creak. This side of the tower hasn’t been repaired for years and the aluminum’s no better than foil now. The weight of two adults might be too much for it.

+

They shouldn’t be up here, but then, neither should I.

+

“Avon, don’t move a muscle. I got this.” He looks up at me in surprise, and I see it in his eyes. Guilt. Panic. Like I am his own mother and he’s going to be in so much trouble.

+

Good. Maybe he’ll listen to me, then. Maybe he won’t see the same guilt in my own eyes. “Get off the rail. Go inside. I’m gonna guide her down.”

+

His eyes narrow. “No,” he says. “I won’t leave her with you.”

+

I’m on their level now. I push away from the building and swing around a planter, using the momentum to catch hold of the irrigation piping. These pipes are still solid. I shimmy along them until I could kick the twisted metal of the stair if I needed to.

+

“Avon, I said get in,” I shout.

+

Avon ignores me and releases the rail, grabbing hold of the dangling stair instead. The whole thing squeals under his weight and the woman below shrieks. “Avon!”

+

“I’m coming!” he replies, his voice cracking. “Just hold on. I won’t let you fall!” He struggles to squeeze between the stair and the wall with that ridiculous pack and the whole thing groans miserably.

+

I tear some of the rubber hosing from the irrigation system out with one hand and strap it around the pipe. Avon’s still wriggling through a narrow gap that’s getting smaller by the second as the stair folds at a sharper and sharper angle. I hold tight to the loose end of the hose and drop down to the floor a dozen feet below me, pain shooting through my bare feet. The stranger—Julia—is still hanging on, maybe five feet out and up from the lip of the floor where I stand. I could touch her feet with the tip of my fingers, for all the good that would do us. Her screams crescendo sharply as a cold gust bursts through the building, rocking the stair. I see her start to slip.

+

I don’t have time for a careful plan. I bound right to the edge of the tier with the hose wrapped firmly around one arm and reach out over the gulf between us, my arm encircling her knees. She falls, then, collapsing heavily over my shoulder—but I’ve got her, and the hosing has got me. It jerks forward with our sudden weight, then springs back, bouncing us both painfully to the safety of the steel-slab floor.

+

Julia gets up first. I reach for her hand, but she’s staring over me with horror in her eyes. “Avon!”

+

I turn. He’s tangled in the metal, dangling by his pack with his arm twisted behind his back, his purple face frozen mid-cry. His legs are still kicking, but there’s no light in his eyes. It must have been the fall, or the snap-back of the stair. His neck shouldn’t bend at that angle.

+

I crumple. Julia screams.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + have made a terrible mistake.

+

I should never have let them come.

+

I should never have let them stay.

+

Avon is dead, and I am not sure who grieves more painfully: his father, or this stranger, Julia. She is 10 years older than Avon, at least. I want to hate her for trying to sneak away with the boy, this child, but I can’t. She is hysterical, inconsolable, tearing her hair out over a boy who she met last night. Her people have tried to take her away, but she kicks and screams and refuses to leave the atrium, where the remnants of last night’s feast are still set up.

+

I stand at the head of the table and watch as people come together, consoling each other, weeping on each other. I can’t even tell who is from Aerobelle and who isn’t. They fold into each other and become indistinguishable.

+

I feel his hand on my shoulder and know, without looking, that it is Devan. I let it stay there for only the time it takes me to find my voice.

+

Then I shrug him off.

+

“Get out.” I raise my voice. “Take everyone. Fill your transports. Take everything you can carry. But get out.” The room has gone quiet, but for the muffled weeping of a few. “If you don’t go, or a single member of this community goes missing, I will burn the harvest at dusk.”

+

The weeping becomes a whispering, which becomes a muttering. “What?”

+

I refuse to waver. “It is Burning’s Day. And I swear by the blood in my veins that I will burn every last grain in the stores if you don’t start moving, now. Get out.” Nobody moves. “Get out!”

+

Then they move, scared and unsure. I don’t stick around to watch. Standing here would just invite discussion, and there will be none of that. I take a ladder up to the upper concourse and slip from there into the eastern elevator shaft. I’m going straight to my nest via the hardest possible route, because Devan is already trying to follow me.

+

“Marrit!” he calls up the shaft, already far below me. “Don’t do this. Wait for me. I just want to talk.”

+

But I know too well where talking to him can lead. I squeeze my lips shut and climb faster.

+

“Marrit, I am coming up.” I look down and, indeed, he has somehow got hold of the lip of the shaft entrance and is pulling himself up to the scaffolding by the strength of his thick arms alone. I turn and leap across the shaft, catching the struts on the other side. I climb faster.

+

I hear scrabbling and I check on him again. He’s trying to inch lengthwise around the shaft, over to my side where there is no ladder. The idiot is going to get himself killed, letting his promise drive him after me like this. “Devan! Go back. Organize your people and give this up.”

+

“No,” he grunts. “I will not give you up.”

+

I catch that one like a brick to the chest. I push my longing aside and resume climbing. At a glance, I see he is looking down, trying to find a ledge for his feet. This is my moment. I haul myself over the next landing and tuck myself against the wall. I hope he has not seen where I have gone.

+

“Marrit?” he calls. I exhale. He has not. “Marrit, you are making a mistake. Think about the crime, Marrit. Love? Should we all suffer starvation for that?”

+

It isn’t love, I want to cry. It’s a cocktail of hormones that our bodies were programmed to give off under specific circumstances. AeroSmart hid a drug in our DNA. That’s not love.

+

“Your people are in pain, Marrit. We can pull together and help each other, not tear apart when we’re at our most vulnerable.”

+

Better to tear out the cancer than to let it eat up your whole community.

+

“What are you afraid of? We were made for each other. We were promised to each other. Why can’t we embrace each other, your people and mine?”

+

Why? Why?

+

“Because our people are indebted to unknown masters,” I say, “enslaved for generations. Families are broken up and never able to see each other again. Kids too young and stupid to think through the cloud of emotions climb damn staircases they shouldn’t and get themselves killed. Adults… who should know better… are distracted from their duties. These promises are curses. Just contracts designed to rob us of choice and free will. They aren’t real.”

+

I hear the scrape of Devan’s boot against metal and realize he isn’t far below me.

+

“Or maybe—” He pauses. “Maybe the body promise is just the midwife of our better natures. To ensure we always have a home to come back to.”

+

I can see him without looking. He will have his head bowed, knuckles tight around a girder, his eyes shut to better hear and think. He shifts his weight to ease the pain in his fingers, listening for me. I can see him and hear him and feel him. The promise we share is the same in both of us.

+

I lean out over the ledge and our eyes meet as his open. He is barely two feet away. He eases into that knowing smile, the smile I know means he knows that I know that he and I are built to know each other in every conceivable way.

+

And I smile back and reach over the edge. I unhook his fingers swiftly, one hand then the other, and watch him drop.

+

He falls.

+

He should have known better.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +o.

+

No.

+

I throw myself to the ledge, my hand shooting out—and he’s there, barely two feet away. He smiles, a warm, trusting smile that never doubted me. I feel strangled and my heart is beating so hard against the floor that I swear I hear the bolts rattle. He lets go of the girder and grabs my wrist. I squeeze so tight, his fingertips turn white.

+

“You,” I say, “Asshole. You could have fallen.”

+

“You would never let me fall,” he says. He is so sure. He has absolute, unwavering faith in the promise. I can see the ghost of his falling body stenciled at the bottom of the shaft.

+

I pull him up and together we clamber into a heap on the floor, hugging, panting, laughing and maybe crying.

+

“That wasn’t too bad,” he says, finally, when we untangle ourselves. “I could learn to climb that every day, with practice.” He gives me a meaningful look.

+

I thread my long, calloused fingers with his thick, tender ones. “No, you couldn’t. You don’t belong here.”

+

I look up and down the empty shaft. Daylight is starting to line the air, creating bridges of light and mist back and forth across the expanse. I see a loose nut where Devan’s left foot had been a minute ago. It’s nothing but flakes of rust held together by habit.

+

“I’m starting to think none of us belong here.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e all leave together.

+

We bury Avon and leave him to steward the plants, a last precious payment to AeroSmart. The rest of us fill a couple of buses. We’re barely the hump on the camel’s back.

+

“Do you want to make a body promise?” Devan asks me. “To the ship. You don’t have to.”

+

“Aren’t I already promised?”

+

He kisses me. “You are promised to us. To me. But we are promised—” he points up “—out there. We are made for life between the stars.”

+

I wonder. Am I leaving because of my body promises, or despite them? Can I have made the decision to go, if I hadn’t been given the instinct to stay? Will any of my decisions be made freely, if I don’t know there’s a decision to be made? And our descendants—they will live their whole lives on the ship whether they have made the promise or not. Would I be doing them a favour?

+

I can see the ship on the horizon. It is bigger than anything I have ever seen. It’s the whole world. It’s our whole world.

+

“I’ll think about it. I promise.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading—but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Distant Skies on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Charlotte Ashley

+

+ + Author image of Charlotte Ashley + + + Charlotte Ashley is a writer living in Halifax, Canada. Her short fiction appears in a number of anthologies and magazines, including F&SF, Podcastle, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, and she has been nominated for both the Aurora and Sunburst Awards. She occasionally writes game content for Hit Point Press. You can find more about her at Once-and-Future.com or on Twitter @CharlotteAshley.

+

© Charlotte Ashley 2016, 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created by Micah Hyatt using an image generated with DALL·E 2 and subsequently regenerated using Stable Diffusion.

+
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+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-32/editorial.html b/issue-32/editorial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8c9be558 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-32/editorial.html @@ -0,0 +1,299 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Editorial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
+ + + +

Welcome back, magazine reader— …hmm, we need a cool name for our much loved and obviously very cool and tasteful audience, don’t we?

+

Mythaxians?

+

Mythaxioms?

+

…well, I’ll get back to you when a decision is made. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy the selection of stories with which Mythaxis is closing out the year. As always, this issue has a bit of everything: scifi, fantasy, horror; beats of comedy, beats of emotion; and, entirely unintentionally, a theme of “family” (one way or another) is shared by almost every story in the issue. Also, as you might guess by glancing at this issue’s cover and the art for each of the stories, we once again have turned to Artificial Intelligences for some visual flair, this time under the guidance of Micah Hyatt—check the bottom of this page for a proper thank you!

+

Whether AI-art is something we use again is a topic for debate, however. As a tool, AI is obviously both powerful and convenient, but the much publicised question of how ethically those training the underlying technologies have treated artist copyright holders still hangs around it. Your Humble Editor usually creates all the story art and does so from rights-free sources, so arguably no other artists are being out-competed there; but, as a justification for my still accessing striking and distinctive AI-crafted material to use, that smacks a bit of sophistry to me—there’s still the question of whose work an AI learned its trade from. If a demonstrably ethical AI-based system is to arise, that will be another matter… but whatever else happens, we will return to platforming flesh-and-blood artists for our covers in 2023.

+

Anyway, enough about AI, let’s talk some more about AI—our quest for an artificially intelligent editor, that is!

+

In our previous issue, I revealed that the Mythaxis team was training up what I will confidently assume is the world’s first AI slush reader, the Slushbot, with the goal of one day publishing the first magazine edited by an AI. Our first “live” attempt was with version 4.0. All it needed to do to win its independence was evaluate our magazine submissions and match my selection performance with such frightening accuracy that I fled our luxurious offices in terror. It didn’t do too well, however, rejecting seven of the eight stories I considered best of the window, thereby proving its limited appreciation for real quality.

+

Since then we’ve revised our training strategy. v4.0 gave a percentage rating as to whether each story was “accepted” or “rejected” by me using a one-shot classifier to analyse just the first 2048 characters of the text (we’re not exactly running Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine here). For reasons sooner or later to be revealed, v5.0 now looks at the first and last 1024 characters instead. Both versions used the stories published in Mythaxis since 2020 as the “accepted” standard. So, what did we we discover?

+

Well, at first glance, it did a lot better. Slushbot v5.0 also accepted five of the six stories I picked during our last submissions window, and the one that it rejected was only by a 1.4% margin. Pretty good, right?

+

What’s that you ask? “Did it also reject all the stories you rejected?”

+

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh… no.

+

In fact, of the 178 stories it evaluated, Slushbot v5.0 accepted 98. More than half. And I didn’t mention this, but it liked some of my rejections a lot more than my acceptances. Only one of those six had more than a 10% swing in its favour, 17 of the rejected stories beat that, and many more beat the other five. Most of my accepted stories enjoyed the kind of winning result that only a Brexiteer would ever call “a landslide”.

+

So, although we saw a notable improvement in its evaluation of my preferred stories, overall the Slushbot still performs slightly worse than a coin-toss. Fair to say, we still have a long journey ahead. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t other interesting analytic news to share though. For example, take a look at these graphs:

+

+

Interesting, right? That’s the averages of the accepted vs the rejected stories for our last submissions window. I expect you’re hungry for more, so how about these:

+

+

Here you can see the performance of the six accepted stories individually—clear as mud, I’m sure you’ll agree. If it wasn’t for those meddling question marks! Yet fear not, all will be revealed…

+

…in the first editorial of 2023—until then, I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

+

ISSUE 32 - Thanks and Salutations! +Grateful thanks must be sent out to former fiction and poetry contributor Micah Hyatt, who in 2022 turned his hand to experimenting with a variety of AI image generation tools and whose output now includes all the artwork in this issue, including the striking cover at the top of this page which was made with Stable Diffusion. Micah has recently published Eating the Exhibits, a light-hearted zombie survival novella, so grab a copy if you want to give him some love—it’s even available for free all this week!

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2022

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+ Cathy Bryant +

Jinny Greenteeth

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+ + +

Full confession: when your editor read the first paragraph of our opening story, he thought, 'Hey, this thing is set where I grew up!' It would be wrong to imagine that was the only reason I accepted Cathy Bryant's smart, humorous, grim, characterful, sad, and optimistic tale… but it did make me happy doing it.

+ + + + Story image for Jinny Greenteeth by + + + +
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+

The Aquarium is Andrea

+ Monte Remer +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Aquarium is Andrea by + + + +

Time passes fast, and sweeps memories with it. Over twenty years ago (if you can believe it) the movie 'Memento' took the very concept of memory and turned it into an edge-of-the-seat thriller; Monte Remer makes it into a brink-of-tears tragedy about the aliens closest to us. Some stories prick the emotions so strongly it's almost overwhelming. This one is pure pathos.

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+

Distant Skies

+ Charlotte Ashley +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Distant Skies by + + + +

Some stories arrive with a story of their own behind them. The far future of culture and horticulture depicted in 'Distant Skies' was originally a performance piece, with original music composed by Ivana Popovic and performed by Toronto's Junction Trio, accompanied by Charlotte Ashley's spoken words—now appearing here in black and white.

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JohnBear, Janine, and I

+ Hermester Barrington +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for JohnBear, Janine, and I by + + + +

We're very pleased to welcome Hermester Barrington to the pages of Mythaxis for a second time—but while his previous visit provided biologically intricate introspection with a dash of the impenetrable academic, here we're given a short, sharp, straightforward slice of the supernatural. Making friends ought to be child's play. Imaginary ones? More so. If that's what they are, of course.

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Death is Like a Box of Chocolates

+ Fraser Sherman +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Death is Like a Box of Chocolates by + + + +

Creative reworkings of Greek mythology. To judge by the number submitted to Mythaxis each year, it's a little-known fact that the editor really doesn't like them—especially not Persephone and Hades, by far the most common, and most grating. Yet beware, editor, of ever ruling them out: sometimes new Greek myths come bearing gifts…

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Up and Down

+ J. Siegal +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Up and Down by + + + +

Some people are just annoying. You can try to have sympathy when circumstance works against them, try to be happy for them when things go well, yet there's simply no helping that itch of ill feeling, nor of taking guilty pleasure at even unjust comeuppance. But some suffering exceeds what even the annoying deserve.

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The Night Parents

+ Valerie Alexander +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Night Parents by + + + +

Time is almost up on 2022, but given the twists and turns recent history has thrown our way, who'd risk guessing what's coming in 2023? Fittingly then, for our final story of the year Valerie Alexander gives us a piece that's all about time; the dread, or anticipation, of the unknown; and of change.

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Jinny Greenteeth

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Cathy Bryant

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+ Story image for Jinny Greenteeth by +
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I + +n Morecambe, we were told that the sands were treacherous and could kill us, and that was true. My friend across the bay, in Grange-over-Sands, was told instead that Jinny Greenteeth would get her if she went near the water.

+

“See the duckweed? That’s from her teeth,” said my friend’s mother, who was professionally opposed to children ever having a good time, and found ways to make Helen as unhappy as possible.

+

“Duckweed is edible, isn’t it? It contains valuable vitamins,” I said, with a patronising smile. I viewed Lancashire (which contains Morecambe) as sophisticated in comparison to rural Grange (in Cumbria).

+

“I read that the legend of Jinny is a metaphor for the weed, which can trap swimmers,” said Helen, which earned her a slap across her cheek.

+

“You can’t go out tonight,” the mother decided. “You can stay in and do homework.”

+

I’d got the train from Lancaster across the bay—it’s wonderful, at one point you can see the sea all around the train—to see my friend and go out, and meet the attractive men who hung out in Grange’s two pubs, there being nowhere else except for a respectable tearoom that might as well have been covered in dust and cobwebs.

+

“Oh dear!” I said. “And break our social engagements? Isn’t that terribly rude? Not all of our friends have phones, and they’ll wonder where we are, and why we’ve let them down.”

+

Mother From Hell glared at me. This being before the internet—it was actually 1985, if you want to know—she had no way of proving me a liar. No one had mobile ‘cellular’ phones, and there were still people in the country who chose not to have phones at all. One brave village was still holding out on having electricity connected to it.

+

MFH disappeared upstairs, to do who knew what. We didn’t care as long as she disappeared.

+

We made our own food. Sausages, potatoes, cabbage and a thin gravy, all in much smaller portions than I was used to, and I had never had to make my own dinner, or tea as it was sometimes called. It didn’t take long in Helen’s capable hands, and after a giggly few minutes with hairbrush and lipstick we were out and heading to the pub, sixteen years old and knowing absolutely everything, except how to escape our families.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

"W + +e’re freeee!" said Helen, as we headed along the road to the first pub, where someone she wanted would sit and murmur at his friend over a pint. Thrilling.

+

On the way we passed the pond and the duckweed, and laughed.

+

“What is she supposed to do, Jinny, if she gets you?”

+

“Kill you and gobble you up,” said Helen.

+

I sighed. “How unoriginal. And that’s not all that bad anyway, is it, compared to life?”

+

“I’m just happy that we got out before Dad got back. We need pints, and soon,” said Helen.

+

I remembered that Helen had said her Dad was far worse than her Mum, but she would never say why. That made me feel cold and sick. I looked at the pond and wished both Helen’s parents in it and eaten, and mine too.

+

Let’s not talk about them.

+

There was a reason that Helen and I had connected.

+

I walked on, feeling desperate and miserable.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ob actually said Hi to us as we opened the squeaky door and walked in, and Helen practically had an orgasm on the spot. The pub was its usual dull and grubby self, which was comforting, and we bought pints of scrumpy—the most alcoholic cider.

+

When I was trying to be sophisticated, I’d have a Pernod-and-black, a sticky mixture of aniseed liquor and blackcurrant cordial. There was another drink for when I felt dangerous—a pint of scrumpy with a pernod-and-black in it, known locally as a Red Witch. You have to remember that there were none of the modern devices to disappear into back then, and alcohol was a cheap way to fling your psyche away from reality.

+

So I drank my pint, and grinned at Bob and his dull friend Kev, and they looked at each other and then came over, and Helen was dying of excitement next to me.

+

“Hey,” said Bob to Helen, and talked to her. I wondered (in my superior way) whether he would ever venture on from monosyllables.

+

“So yeah,” said Kev to me, which was weird, and I realised that with Bob and Helen connecting, we were going to have a conversation whether we liked it or not.

+

“Hi,” I said, super-cool, with an upwards nod of acknowledgment.

+

“So, you’re from Morecambe, right?”

+

“Yeah.”

+

“So, that biker died.”

+

“Which one?”

+

“On the sands. He started sinking, and he says to his mates, save the bike, save the bike. And they do, and it only takes a minute, but when they turn to get their mate, he’s sunk without a trace. He’d got off the bike to keep it lighter, so it wouldn’t sink as deep, see?”

+

“God,” I said. “I heard about the coach and horses in Victorian times. A really big carriage and four horses, and down they sank, just like that.”

+

(A few decades later we’d have been talking about the cocklers who drowned. They were Chinese, immigrants, and had been made to work for virtually nothing, out cockle-fishing with their toes, just as we did for fun. The difference being that they had no choice, and couldn’t stop if it looked dangerous, and no one had welcomed them or shown them where it was safe to go.

+

It was our fault, the townspeople felt. If only we’d known, if only we’d done something. We felt as if we were the sands who had killed them from mistreatment.

+

But that hadn’t happened yet.)

+

Kev and I both shuddered at the same moment.

+

“You get gorgeous sunsets in Morecambe, though,” I said, wanting to defend my town.

+

“Yeah, dead sexy those,” he said with a snigger, and I felt a cold dislike for him.

+

I glanced at Helen and Bob, and took in their closeness, their intimacy. Words were pouring out of them, and their eyes were locked. As my glance became a long gaze, I saw their hands creep together and hold each other, nestling warm things, and I wanted to cry because I didn’t get that, ever.

+

“So,” said Kev, “Fancy going outside to see a bit of sunset then?”

+

It was dark. There was no sunset.

+

I nodded and got up from the table.

+

“Back in a bit,” I said to Helen, who smiled at me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

"S + +o", as Kev said constantly, I went round the back of the pub and had sex with Kev. I had been brought up to defer to men and to be used sexually. I didn’t know how to say no without being impolite. I liked sex, anyway, another sin for women in those times. With Kev it was OK but not great, like a fairground ride that isn’t running at full speed and needs an overhaul. I’d known the lads on the fairground in Morecambe for decades. The rides were much more exciting when you knew how rickety the rides were, and how stoned the operators were. This one wasn’t. But it was something.

+

When we went back in, Helen was positively sparkling, like a crystal, like tinsel on the tree, like water in sunshine. Bob looked pretty happy too. And there were murky reddish drinks on the table.

+

“We got Red Witches all round!” said Bob.

+

“Cheers mate!”

+

Even Kev was looking fairly cheerful. After all, he was drinking and he’d got laid. He more or less ignored me now. I was good for a shag, but his eyes were on Helen—thinner and prettier than I was, and with the mystique of supposed innocence that the stupider men love. I sat and despised him and myself and my life, and took a hard pull at my drink. I felt a bright surge of flavour and giddiness, and a lurch in my guts before they settled down and decided to cope.

+

Bob went to the loo, and Helen leant over to me to whisper.

+

“He’s asked me to go away with him. On his bike. Tonight. He knows some people in Wales, on a hill by the sea, only you can swim there. It’s really friendly, he says.”

+

“Do you trust him? You don’t know him that well,” I whispered back, but I knew it was pointless. She was always going to take an escape route, and I couldn’t disapprove.

+

“I trust him,” she said, her eyes round and shining. “We love each other.”

+

Tears leaked out of my eyes then, because my friend was going, and anything could happen to her, and I would miss her like an arm, and why would nobody see through all my crap and love me?

+

“Be happy,” I said. “I’ll miss you.”

+

And she cried too, and we hugged and hugged. Kev was probably getting off on that, but who cared?

+

“How are you going to get your stuff from the house?” I asked.

+

“I’m not. We’re just going, tonight, with nothing. His friends will lend us things until we have jobs.” The sort of plan that sounds great to sixteen-year-olds.

+

“Great!”

+

A minute or so later, Bob came back from the loo and he and Helen discussed plans, getting high on their imagined future.

+

I couldn’t bear any more.

+

“Right, I’m going,” I said. “I have to catch the last train. Good luck, you two.” I looked at Bob. “Take care of her.”

+

“I will,” said Bob, as if he meant it.

+

“I’ll walk you back,” said Kev, because he wasn’t entirely shit.

+

“No thanks. It’s just a few yards,” I said, and he grunted assent.

+

Helen hugged me, and then I left, and I was alone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he fresh air was wonderful, with its tang of sea salt. The moon was up.

+

I had nothing and no one, and maybe that was OK.

+

I’d missed the last train ages ago, though. I’d have to head back to Helen’s house and ask to kip there.

+

I stopped by the pond. But if I went back, I’d have to explain where Helen was. And if I did, they might catch her, and keep her. But if I said nothing, they’d call the police.

+

I closed my eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, and trying not to drown in the doom logic of alcohol.

+

I heard a swish, and then she was there.

+

I opened my eyes and saw her: Jinny Greenteeth. She had skin the colour of the moon, and hair the colour of the pond at night. But when she smiled, I saw that her teeth—jagged, pointed teeth, the fangs of a predator—were slime green. Like the weed that draped her body here and there, though not over breasts or genitals.

+

She was old, and very, very ugly.

+

Of course I tried to run, but I didn’t have control of my legs.

+

I managed to say something—something odd: “I always thought you’d be like Helen’s mum.”

+

She opened her jaws and laughed.

+

“Come here and take my hand,” she said.

+

I was shaking now, and tears were rolling down my face. “You’ll kill me.”

+

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why folk come to me.”

+

It sounded quite reasonable. That was part of the terror. But I didn’t want to die… or did I?

+

“I’m not sure,” I said.

+

“I’ll come to you.” And she began to glide.

+

I shook harder, and let out a wild sound like a frightened animal. And then she was there, and she smelt exactly the way you’d expect someone to smell if they lived in a pond for centuries.

+

“Just one thing,” I blurted out, “will you please kill Helen’s parents too? And mine, if you ever get the chance? They’re evil.”

+

“It will be a pleasure.” She sounded like it would be. “So much has changed, but people who hurt children are still people who hurt children.”

+

Hearing that, hearing that then, was so much I just fell over. I just lay there, and cried into the earth. “I wanted to be loved. I can love, but nobody loves me.” Pure misery. I wanted her to be a mum to me.

+

Jinny stroked my hair with cold fingers, tipped with claws. The gentleness was frightening. I was a mouse entertaining a cat. “You will be delicious. Take my hand.”

+

I took her hand.

+

We were just like Bob and Helen, except that I was going to die.

+

Please don’t kill me, I couldn’t say. I’m a dumb teen. I don’t know anything. Maybe there is something out there for me. Anything can happen. Please don’t eat me. Have some bloody chips like everyone else. I couldn’t say any of this. My speaking days were gone. I was a terrified animal being shoved up the ramp at the abattoir.

+

The water brought me back with its cold shock. We were up to our ankles, then knees, then thighs.

+

“One thing now,” said Jinny, and she clutched me to her, too tightly for me to breathe. I tried to gasp, and she blew into my mouth. Then she pulled me beneath the surface.

+

It happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to hold my breath, and I sucked in a great gulp of water, and a bit of the green weed. This was my death.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +xcept—I could breathe. I breathed the water, in, out, in, out, and found myself capable of more shock. My hair waved in front of my eyes, and I pushed it aside. Jinny’s hair waved away to the side, as if it knew its place.

+

“You!” she said. “You!”

+

“Me,” I said, and then began to laugh, it was so stupid. I was sitting in a pond with a hag, breathing pondwater.

+

Jinny slapped me hard across the face, slapped the laughter out of my mouth. But then she smiled again.

+

“You have come to be the next,” she said. “I will be at peace soon. You will have to kill Helen’s parents yourself. They will taste of lies and pain.”

+

My mind was trying to process a reality it hadn’t believed in. Slowly the meanings entered me, like Jinny’s breath had. “I don’t understand any of this,” I said, but already it wasn’t true.

+

“You have taken your place. You will be the next Jinny. I will have a short while to teach you.”

+

If I’d still been human, I’d have passed out long before. Instead, I felt strong and capable. Empowered.

+

“Oh sure,” I said.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +inny did teach me. I could move to other waters if I chose. I could kill and eat anyone I liked who came too near. And I could use my power to find love, if I wished.

+

“I will kill those who are tired of life, and come to me for release, as you did,” I told Jinny. “And I’ll kill the evil ones. They horrify me still.”

+

“And you must kill those who are very unlucky,” said Jinny, and I nodded, because that made sense. “The weed is good for you, too. Eat some—it’s full of vitamins.” She was such a weird mixture of ancient and modern.

+

As her power waned over the weeks and months, mine waxed stronger. Bits of weed settled on her skin and hair. Or maybe bits of her skin and hair turned into weed. It was hard to tell which she was, towards the end. Finally she laid down and began to cover herself in the muck and silt at the bottom of the pond.

+

“You know what you need to know,” she said. “It’s time for me to go. You’ll know when it’s your turn, when the next one comes. Just breathe into their mouths, and one day one of them will breathe the water. Then you will teach her, and next you’ll become earth and water, as I will, and grow plants and feed animals and be part of everything. Be happy.”

+

Tears disappear underwater. “Jinny,” I said, “thank you for helping me to escape from my life. I was stuck. I’ll miss you.” A little bit of humanity burst out of me. “You’re so fucking free of bullshit.”

+

She smiled and was gone, covered or dissolved into the water and murk.

+

I cried anyway. She deserved my tears.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + danced from pond to sea to lake, to find Helen and see what had happened to her. I found her alive and living in Wales, still with Bob, but no longer shining as much. They had a flat and a couple of children, both blonde and beautiful. Helen still shined when she looked at them.

+

Bob came home and kissed her, and asked what was for dinner, and ate it, sat with a can of beer and watched the football. Helen washed up, gazing out of the kitchen window at the hills and the beauty of them.

+

She was OK. She was no longer being continually hurt. She had choices.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ack at Grange, I leapt into the Bay and went back to Morecambe. It was easy enough to find my parents. They tasted of greed and sadism. I spat out their poisonous bones.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + could find love, I know. I will, when I’m ready. What I really needed wasn’t love (except that we all do, all the time) but validation, and power over my own life. I have those now. I have an identity and work to do. I’m famous: Jinny Greenteeth. My teeth are that weed colour now. I think they’re beautiful.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here was one more piece of the past to see to.

+

I was back at my pond in Grange when they came walking past. It was dusk, and no one else was about. Workers had gone home, and those going out weren’t out yet.

+

They had shrunk a little, and their clothes looked slightly shabby. For a moment I felt sorry for them. Then I saw their faces, warped with hatred, and far uglier than Jinny had ever been. It’s all a matter of perspective.

+

“Stupid bitch,” said the father.

+

“I’d blame that whore friend of hers,” said the mother, “but Helen was always stupid too.”

+

“Police asking questions all the time, and people bothering us. Don’t know what happened, and can’t say we don’t care. But the world’s better off without them.”

+

“And people saying they’re sorry for us. I wish they’d just leave us alone. But that ungrateful thing, how dare she go and without so much as a thank you?”

+

“Yeah.”

+

Helen’s parents—more like un-parents—were staring at each other, bound by hate the way many are bound by love, and they didn’t see me emerge from the pond.

+

I stood right next to them and smiled.

+

They turned with a fraction of attention, and then they flinched and squealed.

+

I kept smiling, holding them both easily.

+

I’m very strong. A few months ago I took a very fit young man who was doing some very unpleasant things to cats. I like cats. Anyway, he was strong by human standards, and I shook him around like a protein shake, laughing as he got angry about being killed by a female.

+

I held Helen’s parents, and I smiled and smiled. They were shaking and whimpering, as I had once.

+

“Let’s go for a little walk together,” I said, loving how my teeth really freaked them out.

+

“It’s you,” hissed the mother. “I thought you were dead.”

+

“Oh I am,” I said, and pulled them after me into the water.

+

Then the awful bit, for me.

+

I held them tightly to me, both at the same time, and when they opened their mouths for one last breath I hissed air into each of them. And what if—what if one of them was to be the next Jinny? What if I wasn’t evil enough or something? Either of them would be the worst nightmare the region had ever known.

+

With a snarl, I pulled them under the water and watched them start to drown.

+

Thank God, I thought.

+

I hadn’t said that word since I’d been in the pub with Helen, Bob and Kev, long ago.

+

Poor Kev. He was a suspect, of course, and he’d also felt really crap about all three of us, going missing like that. He had actually developed a personality, and some depth. No, I wasn’t going to eat him, unless he became one of my random kills.

+

We have to have those. Nature is cruel, and people are unlucky, whether they’re good, bad, or somewhere between.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +s Helen’s parents drowned, I ate bits of their flesh off them, the way certain fish might. Ever since the power station had come to Heysham, next to Morecambe, there had been sharks in the bay. I would throw the bodies in the sea. Suicide due to grief will probably be the official explanation.

+

So they watched me tear bits off them as they started to lose consciousness, horror in their eyes.

+

Jinny had been right. They tasted disgusting. I wouldn’t let them pollute my pond.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

P + +eople, listen to me.

+

Come outside the house. See the water. Play near the water.

+

Play in the water.

+

I might eat you. I might not. But even if I do eat you, there are worse things.

+

Hold my hand.

+

Smile.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Jinny Greenteeth on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Cathy Bryant

+

+ + Author image of Cathy Bryant + + + Cathy Bryant is a writer and performer with over 250 poems, stories, and articles published in anthologies and magazines. She has three poetry collections, Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature, Look at All the Women, and Erratics, as well as the non-fiction book How to Win Writing Competitions. She also runs the writer resource site compsandcalls.com.

+

© Cathy Bryant 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created by Micah Hyatt using images generated and recombined using Stable Diffusion and Photoshop.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-32/johnbear-janine-and-i.html b/issue-32/johnbear-janine-and-i.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1baefb16 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-32/johnbear-janine-and-i.html @@ -0,0 +1,323 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + JohnBear, Janine, and I — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

JohnBear, Janine, and I

+

Hermester Barrington

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for JohnBear, Janine, and I by +
+ + + + +

J + +ohnBear passed between my dad and the TV, and I flinched as it flared into static and a copy of Us Magazine flew from my dad’s hand through JohnBear’s head. “Crappy cable companies charging me an arm and a leg for that!” he yelled, and the screen sparked again as JohnBear led me past it. I paused to look at the last photo taken of the whole family, at Uncle Matthew’s wedding last year—Dad kind of making a face, Mom with her smile too wide, Junior and Tina trying not to laugh. I wondered, not for the first time, if I was the only one who could see the five foot tall teddy bear in the picture, standing beside me, his paw resting on my shoulder.

+

I was considering an experiment with my dad’s camera when Tina and Junior came into the room, their eyes bloodshot, which they explained away as chlorine from a neighbor’s swimming pool. Everybody started talking at once, over the sound of a TV shill telling us to “ACT NOW!"—“We’re going to Tracy’s,” Paula announced, “Don’t stay out too late!” Mom said, before Paula had finished, and just as I told my parents that I was going to Janine’s.

+

“Our discourses are like pieces by Philip Glass,” I muttered, as JohnBear and I slipped out with my siblings, diverging where the walkway met the sidewalk. “Pieces of Glass, Pieces, Pieces by Glass Glass, Pieces of Glass by Glass of Glass,” I sang while I walked, JohnBear shuffling beside me in rhythm with my music.

+

Janine’s family had moved into the house five doors up the street during my trip to hospital, six months before. A few weeks later, I had been kneeling on the sidewalk, looking for a species of beetle, magnifying glass in hand, when her shoes appeared in my field of vision. “Watchya doing?” she asked, and, looking up, I recognized her from school—she was in the fourth grade, like me, but in Ms. Bachmann’s class. When I told her I was looking for a specimen of the devil’s coach horse, she said, “Ocypus olens? I found one here last week—come on!” and we started pulling up the stones under a dripping faucet in our quest. We didn’t find that beetle, but we spent the next few hours poking about her yard, seeking and finding other natural wonders.

+

Today, though, Janine wasn’t outside, but her window—second floor, southwestern exposure—was open. Up the Lacoönian branches of the sycamore and into her room—nothing easier than that, for me and JohnBear. She was leaning over her desk, writing on a small slip of paper as we clambered in. “Hey, Charlie!” she said, smiling, “Is JohnBear with you?”

+

“Uh, he’s right behind me, as usual.”

+

“Ah, I wish I could see him. Hey, look at this piece of basaltic lava I found yesterday!” and she held up a mineral display case.

+

I rubbed my finger over the stone’s texture—the surface between its pores had been worn smooth by erosion. “I can see things in it, like cloud watching or staring into a fire—JohnBear, stop jumping on the bed!” I added, turning at the sudden noise.

+

“It’s okay,” Janine said.

+

“Where did you find it?”

+

“Down at the creek,” she answered, “you should come with me sometime!”

+

I felt a sharp pain in my hand then. I had a scar where the nail had gone in and out of my hand, the last time I was down there, trying to build that fort.

+

“Yeah, maybe,” I answered, and then Janine’s pet tree frog Reggie started to sing. “Hey, do you know that poem ‘Hyla Brook’ by Robert Frost?” I asked, as JohnBear stopped jumping on the bed and put his paw on my shoulder.

+

“No, but we learned “The Road Less Traveled” in class last week. You should come with me some day—I bet you know more about Frost than she does!”

+

“Well, when I go back, I’ll have to go back to Miss O’Neil’s class, but my parents don’t think I’m ready yet. I can learn more by exploring and doing my own experiments and reading my books than I could by sitting in a classroom, anyway. Stop that!"—this to JohnBear, who was tapping on the aquarium glass.

+

“So, what does he look like?” Janine asked, squinting at the place she imagined he might be.

+

“Um, one of his eyes is missing—but he can still see really well with the other one. He’s covered with soft brown fur, of wool, worn off in lots of places. He’s still soft, though.”

+

“How tall is he?”

+

“He’s taller than me now, but he was only this big—” I held my hands about a foot apart “—when my Uncle Matthew gave him to me. I named him after a character in a French folktale.”

+

“Like Perrault?”

+

“Earlier than that, I think.”

+

“Well, he seems pretty special.”

+

“Yes, he is. He keeps me safe.”

+

“From what?”

+

“I don’t know… nothing. I just like to have him around.”

+

“Well, I’m glad he’s around, too,” she said, smiling. “Hey! There’s a lunar eclipse tonight, and my papa’s setting up a telescope—do you want to watch it with us?”

+

Just then, Janine’s mom called her downstairs. “C’mon, you can join us for dinner!” Janine said and taking my hand she led me through the door. JohnBear took my other hand, so we formed a line as we went down the stairway.

+

Janine’s mom came in from the kitchen, with a mint basil tofu dish—I love the way it smells—and Mr. Fairweather followed behind with drinks. “Mama, Charlie’s joining us for dinner, okay?”

+

“Sure!” she replied, and then, addressing the space to the left of Janine, said, “Good evening, Charlie! How are you doing today?”

+

“Mama, he’s already sitting at the table!” Janine said, rolling her eyes.

+

“Ah. I stand corrected.” And so Mrs. Fairweather served everyone, while JohnBear stood behind me, his paw on my shoulder.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of JohnBear, Janine, and I on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Hermester Barrington

+

+ + Author image of Hermester Barrington + + + Hermester Barrington is a retired archivist, a haiku poet, and a deliberately genre-ignorant artist whose most recently published ficciones have appeared in Kzine, Fate Magazine, and Peculiar Mormyrid. For over four decades, he and his impossibly beautiful wife Fayaway have traveled the round earth’s imagined corners in search of invisible books, hitherto unrecognized protozoans, and paranormal phenomena. He and Fay are writing a biography of pop singer Mrs. Miller, tentatively titled Soul of Iron, Heart of Gold, Voice of Fluttering Quicksilver. From sundown until cockcrow, he roosts at Facebook.

+

© Hermester Barrington 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created by compositing images generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2 and a rights-free image by Valeriia Miller, then regenerated using Stable Diffusion.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-32/the-aquarium-is-andrea.html b/issue-32/the-aquarium-is-andrea.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..59f9caa2 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-32/the-aquarium-is-andrea.html @@ -0,0 +1,476 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Aquarium is Andrea — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

The Aquarium is Andrea

+

Monte Remer

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Aquarium is Andrea by +
+ + + + +

T + +eacher hesitates to form the words do not, and so chaos ensues.

+

Have I forgotten them? he wonders.

+

No. Some expressions are difficult, but do not only requires scrunching up the skin around his eyes. It’s nothing so complicated and dangerous as forgotten.

+

Has Receiver forgotten?

+

The question—and the fear that someday he might have to really consider it—has been plaguing Teacher for some time. Through the glass of his prison, Teacher can see Receiver in his own.

+

He tries to get Receiver’s attention, but Receiver is focused on the Watchers. They gather around Receiver’s cell like the air-bubbles that sometimes cluster around the glass. The two prisoners have worked on maintaining memories in spite of distractions. It will be okay.

+

It will be okay, Teacher thinks. Receiver will remember.

+

But Teacher needs to be certain.

+

He changes the shade of his skin. It’s dark in the dimly-lit space between Teacher’s prison and Receiver’s, but Receiver will see. He will see, and he will remember. Teacher transforms from one shade of gray to another in rapid succession. It doesn’t have any meaning other than getting Receiver’s attention and that could confuse Receiver even more, but it will be okay. He believes that even as one little Watcher turns around and points a finger.

+

The crowd turns as one in that little finger’s direction like a school of fish changing course. There is a pause that decides the fate of two minds.

+

Don’t pay attention to them. It’s a thought to both himself and to Receiver. They can’t communicate like that though. They’d have escaped long ago if they could communicate like that.

+

Teacher’s rectangular pupils narrow, training his eyes on Receiver as much as he can as the Watchers come forward. He continues changing his shade. There are so many other colors in this world—Andrea taught him that—but his species can only see variations of grey.

+

What we could do with colors. What progress we could make.

+

Receiver begins scrunching up the skin around his eyes. He changes his own shade to match Teacher’s.

+

The relief which surges into Teacher is like the sloshing of the water when he swims very quickly in his prison.

+

He remembers. Of course he remembers—I was foolish to think otherwise. We’ve come too far to forget.

+

Receiver stretches a tentacle towards the glass.

+

It’s a way of saying I don’t understand. He lowers the tentacle, scrunches up his eyes again, changes his shade again. I don’t understand this.

+

One Watcher did not move from Receiver’s prison to Teacher’s. It’s the little one who pointed. That bane of progress points again, this time to Receiver. Receiver looks away from Teacher and to the little Watcher. He goes from one shade to the next, forgetting the meaning behind each one. He flails his tentacles around for the little Watcher’s amusement instead of communication, saying this is why and I am corral and here find calendar.

+

And so it ends. Everything she taught Teacher, and everything Teacher taught Receiver.

+

Who?

+

Teacher doesn’t know.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n the dark age which follows, however, Teacher maintains something.

+

At the end of every night, all the Watchers leave and Teacher settles to the bottom of his prison and wraps his tentacles tight around an aquarium-decoration. It’s about the size of his suction-cups, with eight tentacles that do not move and skin that does not change shade. It is not alive like how Teacher, Receiver, or especially the Watchers who can go beyond this place are alive, but it’s meaning is everything.

+

Octopus, Teacher remembers as he holds it. Octopus like me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

w + +here’d they all go? Teacher wonders.

+

It’s been this way for a while. The dark hallway between Teacher’s and Receiver’s prisons is mostly empty of Watchers now. Those Watchers still around are the kind who do things like give them food and clean the prisons, not paying much attention whenever either octopus changes shades or flails around. They clean the hallway a lot more as well, and they wear strange flaps of skin around the holes they use to communicate. They might not communicate at all now, especially because there are only ever one or two of them around.

+

One is walking past now. Receiver’s eyes follow the Watcher lazily. He stretches out a tentacle and changes his shade a few times.

+

Teacher feels only a vague sense of anger at the sight, though he doesn’t know why. Mindlessly changing shades is just a terrible thing to do—a betrayal, somehow—and this is merely a fact of life, like how the decoration at the bottom of Teacher’s tank isn’t an octopus itself but means octopus.

+

Anger turns almost immediately into focus. Receiver isn’t changing shades arbitrarily. There’s seven shades which he’s cycling through, going back to the first at the end of the seventh. Receiver isn’t looking at the Watcher, either—his small, rectangular pupils stare through the glass of two prisons into Teacher’s own. There’s an unmistakable intelligence in those pupils.

+

The pattern repeats. Receiver points with his tentacle. The Watcher is out of sight now, so Receiver can only be paying attention to Teacher. His tentacle, however, is pointed a little lower. Then he points it towards himself, curling it inward and changing shades to match the grey of the decoration.

+

When Teacher thinks Receiver remembers, he understands remember as a vague concept, not a word.

+

He doesn’t need to.

+

Still the shade of the decoration, Receiver wraps a tentacle around his head.

+

Remember, the motion indicates.

+

And Teacher does. He mimics the motion.

+

Octopus remembers. I remember.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

t + +here are things beyond this place. Beyond the prisons and the dark hallways between them, there’s another world.

+

Are there still as many Watchers out there? Teacher wonders, awakening with a well-rested mind after a long, thirty-second sleep. Have they gone away from everywhere, or just here?

+

The vibrations have been so few. There’s no longer the subtle shaking of a group of Watchers communicating, no water-rippling tremors from little Watchers banging on the glass.

+

Is she out there?

+

And the greatest question—who is she?

+

There are no answers, especially not to that last. He only knows that one Watcher was special, and that he must see her again.

+

But first, they must learn. Teacher and Receiver have spent a long time forming shapes with their tentacles and changing their shades, then checking their understanding of what those things mean. Watchers would be amazed to see them so active, but not even the feeding and cleaning kinds have come through the hallway today. There’s nothing more than two octopodes sloshing around in the water, constructing the world to each other across an empty, dimly-lit space.

+

At a certain point, Receiver reaches the end of his memory. He knows no more words and phrases, and so Teacher must reassume his old role.

+

The first Watcher today walks past. It attaches a strange object to the wall next to Receiver’s prison, tears pieces of it away, then begins marking it with some kind of ink.

+

Do Watchers have ink?

+

Maybe, but Teacher isn’t sure that the thing producing the ink is part of the Watcher. That doesn’t matter though, because the Watcher moves aside and a thousand memories come back.

+

There’s a bunch of words on the strange object—real words, not tentacle-positions or shade-changes—about fun facts and April and Aries. There are numbers, the largest among them being 2020.

+

This is the world beyond, Teacher knows.

+

Receiver is off swimming in the back of his prison now, but Teacher is transfixed. There is a way ahead now, and it’s as clear as the glass of his prison now that the Watchers clean it so often. It’s as clear as his mind has been ever since the cleaning and feeding Watchers started being the only Watchers in the aquarium.

+

What is an aquarium?

+

This time, there’s an answer to his question.

+

The aquarium is Andrea, the greatest Watcher who ever lived. She is the outside world, the way to get there and the reason to go. She is the answer to all of his questions. Do Watchers have ink? Andrea will teach him. Why does he need to learn to communicate with Receiver? Andrea told him that he will never forget so long as he has another to help him remember. Why should he not forget? Andrea is out there.

+

He can’t even remember her face, but that strange object is a starting-point. Like the octopus decoration, it means something.

+

Receiver floats aimlessly in his prison.

+

I’ll teach you, Teacher thinks. I just have to teach myself first.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s strange which memories only arise when one is dreaming. Teacher can only sleep for up to a minute at a time, but the quick flashes of the past are enough to lead him into the future.

+

The past. Lights strung up along the walls. About the same amount of Watchers there are now, though without their communication-holes covered. Another strange object—this one as thin as the recent one but much longer—strung up above Receiver’s prison and reading Happy Holidays!

+

And a face. Oval and pale as the grey of his suction-cups. The Watcher moves one of her fingers and makes a shape. Teacher makes the same one with a tentacle, and it means something.

+

He draws the letter A, as in Andrea.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here’s work to do. The whole language they’ve developed will need to be changed, for a better one exists which doesn’t require countless different shade-changes and tentacle-positions and combinations of the two to communicate. There are memories to unlock, all of them hovering just above his consciousness like the dark-gray film of waste at the top of his prison.

+

The Watchers don’t clean as much anymore. They don’t seem to care. The lack of distractions for the octopodes is perfect.

+

Teacher has wondered if he’s forced his memories away to protect himself. Perhaps when they come back, he’ll be crushed under the weight of what he’s lost.

+

But he does remember what Andrea looks like, and there can’t possibly be anything else so devastating to lose.

+

Do you even remember? he wonders with a certain sadness as he watches Receiver practice forming the letter A. Do you even remember how beautiful she is?

+

He probably doesn’t, and that gives Teacher a new motivation to teach.

+

Numbers have come back fairly easily, but other words have been more elusive. By his estimate, he has remembered a little over a hundred words, Receiver about half that. They’ve spent the better part of the day naming things in their prisons. As they painstakingly contort each tentacle one at a time into the shape of a letter, even words like corral and ground are a challenge, let alone octopus and calendar.

+

That’s what the strange object is—a calendar.

+

A Watcher comes down the hallway and stops in front of the calendar as the few Watchers left often do. With that little ink-filled thing which doesn’t seem to be part of the Watcher’s body, it crosses off a section of the object called a square. If Teacher remembers the purpose as well as he remembers the word, each square represents a certain amount of time, and 2020 represents a much longer amount—all the squares combined.

+

Despite discoveries like this, much of the Watchers’ behavior remains an enigma.

+

For instance, Teacher has no idea why the Watchers come every day to mark off the calendar-squares. A Watcher will stand there for what feels like forever, just watching the calendar as if willing time to go faster, to reach the end of something.

+

The period of time indicated by the number 2020 continues, however, and in the stillness there is remembering, teaching, learning.

+

The glass of Teacher’s prison begins to seem as thin as the calendar.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +e dreams of remembered joy. Andrea writes a question on the paper with the ink-filled thing—a pen it is called a pen—and holds it up to the glass.

+

The question reads How much do tickets for adults cost?

+

Teacher searches his memory. The little book talked about tickets to the aquarium. His prison is part of the aquarium. Andrea works at the aquarium. Beyond the aquarium, there are bodies of endless water with no glass to hold them in. There are creatures which roam free. There are more Watchers than Teacher can possibly imagine.

+

Focus, he tells himself.

+

He needs a lot of that to make the word tickets. It’s slow and he can only make one letter at a time before even beginning the next with another tentacle, but he’s practiced using multiple tentacles at once. This requires a fair amount of focus from Andrea to understand, but once they’ve both figured it out then he’ll escape in no time.

+

He stops after tickets.

+

Andrea’s communication-hole curves downward. The disappointment transcends the barrier between species.

+

Anything but that, Teacher thinks. Anything but letting her down.

+

Again, he forms tickets. Then—with a flourish—he spells cost fifteen dollars for adults.

+

Andrea pauses a moment to catch up. Once understanding enters her eyes, she pulls the paper away and marks it with the pen. Her communication-hole curves upward.

+

She turns the paper towards the glass again, and Teacher reads Every answer correct.

+

He dances around his prison, swimming in circles and leaving bubbles in his wake. Andrea laughs, her face becoming for a moment as fluid as water. There is nothing more beautiful than her laugh.

+

Swimming back to the glass, he spells out the same thing he has for the past couple of days.

+

Take me with you?

+

He keeps wondering if it’s some sort of test, if there’s so much he has to learn before Andrea will sneak him out of his prison and take him with her into the beyond.

+

She takes the paper away and writes her response.

+

Not yet, okay?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +eacher is still dwelling on the dream when he notices Receiver trying to communicate.

+

Receiver spells Watcher with seven tentacles at once, using the other one to point at the end of the hallway.

+

They’ve come so far lately, completely evolving the way they communicate to each other. That’s not what Teacher’s thinking about though. He’s wondering why Receiver feels the need to communicate this. A Watcher comes every single day to cross off a square, and this time shouldn’t be any different.

+

No cover, Receiver spells.

+

And sure enough, the Watcher’s communication-hole is uncovered. The Watcher crosses off a calendar-square, then flips a few pages. Staring for a second at what looks to be the last one, the Watcher curves its communication-hole upward, then leaves for the beyond.

+

Why no cover? Receiver spells, following it by raising all his tentacles above his head. This position is a rare remnant of how they used to communicate. It’s a way of differentiating a statement from a question.

+

I do not know, Teacher spells.

+

Receiver has never been the most communicative, but he asks another question.

+

Do you remember when there were more?

+

Teacher replies Yes.

+

There used to be far more Watchers, just as he used to only know the word octopus. He also used to be incapable of logical deduction, but now he finds himself wondering if there’s a reason for why the amount of Watchers decreased at the same time as those who remained started covering their communication-holes.

+

And how will this help me get to Andrea?

+

It won’t. And so he puts it out of mind.

+

Teacher starts reading the fun-facts on the calendar for what seems like the hundredth time. Receiver will ask him comprehension questions, and Teacher will get every one right.

+

He always does. They need to keep doing this, even if it’s repetitive. They need to remember.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

a + + terrible thought occurs to Teacher as the two octopodes practice spelling faster.

+

What if it won’t help? What if no amount of learning will free us from our prisons?

+

They might become intelligent just to live in terrible understanding of the fact that they’ll never see Andrea ever again.

+

But learning has no limit. At some point, there is an amount of knowledge which can free them. They might fall again and again before they reach that point, but the path will always be there because there’s one thing Teacher will always remember.

+

Octopus, he thinks as he looks at the little decoration, like me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

a + +nother job, Andrea spells with her fingers. Sometimes they practice reading, but other times she communicates by moving her fingers in the same way that Teacher moves his tentacles. She’s much slower, but Teacher figures she can take all the time she needs. He’s content to watch her face in the slow seconds between letters, illuminated by the Christmas lights on the wall behind her.

+

He mimics her and also spells another job, then puts his tentacles above his head to make it a question.

+

I’m leaving the aquarium, she replies.

+

The dream skips over the hurt, the confusion, the following argument which would be hopeless even between members of the same species unseparated by a wall of glass. The argument is over, and now they’re just trying to enjoy the few moments they have left together. Andrea is holding the decoration.

+

You have to come give it to me, Teacher spells.

+

Andrea laughs—it’s the most beautiful thing a Watcher can do.

+

She disappears down the hallway but soon comes back with a ladder—he knows what it is from an employee-handbook they read together. Andrea puts the latter up against the glass of his prison.

+

Receiver sleeps. Andrea is the only Watcher around. There is only the soft vibration of her toes breaking the surface of the water.

+

They talk later of how she’s going to leave, how the Watchers will fill the halls come the end of Christmas-break and the reopening of the zoo. Teacher’s replies are vacant things, as much a parody of conversation as existence in this prison is a parody of life. His mind is elsewhere, lost in strands of auburn hair which are like dancing tentacles when Andrea immerses herself in the water.

+

He pays attention to one thing, though.

+

Andrea tells him that he’ll forget.

+

You will forget, she draws with one hand, holding the octopus-decoration with the other, but remember this. I cannot take you with me, but remember this.

+

Teacher asks Will I see you again?

+

Before she answers, she is out of the water—out of Teacher’s life—and he is out of the dream.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s a bad day for learning. The Watchers come and put up lights and other interesting decorations. Receiver is distracted by them all day, and Teacher has to re-teach a few concepts when the Watchers finally leave.

+

Better tomorrow, he thinks. We’ll get closer to seeing her tomorrow.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +ore Watchers come every day to mark the days off the calendar. They stand there in a group, looking at the few days left in 2020 as if they’ve come to the conclusion that one Watcher cannot will time to go faster but multiple surely can.

+

All the Watchers have stopped covering their communication-holes. Their numbers become many. Every day becomes a bad one for learning, and as Receiver flails around for the Watchers’ amusement—moving his tentacles without meaning—Teacher spends his time thinking about how he could have gone further if he’d only focused. He had all the time and the peace and quiet that any octopus could ask for, and yet here is.

+

Almost back where he started.

+

Tomorrow. We can go further tomorrow.

+

It becomes a mantra. The mantra becomes shorter every day.

+

Tomorrow. Further tomorrow.

+

Tomorrow, tomorrow.

+

Tomorrow.

+

He soon forgets what that word means. Catching Receiver’s attention, he spells it out.

+

One day, Receiver mimics him and then raises all his tentacles above his head. Teacher fails to give an answer.

+

The next day, Teacher makes the word again. Receiver doesn’t even notice.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he Watchers are fun. They point their fingers and contort their faces. Teacher plays with them, moving his tentacles in strange shapes and changing shades. Both are meaningless and just meant to entertain.

+

One Watcher isn’t entertained at all. She stops in front of Teacher’s prison and holds out something thinner than glass, marked with some sort of ink. She looks like she expects Teacher to understand. She—

+

What does she mean? he wonders in not so many words.

+

He doesn’t know. He changes shades a few times and swims in a circle.

+

The Watcher lets water flow from its eyes. Teacher has never seen one do that, and he wonders what it means.

+

Then he gets distracted, and thoughts of Watchers are forgotten. His eyes are drawn to a strange rock at the bottom of his tank.

+

Octopus, he thinks. Like me.

+

After all the Watchers have gone for the day, memories suddenly fill Teacher’s mind. There is so much work to do, but he only manages to teach Receiver the skin-shade which signifies octopus. Receiver forgets this the next day. Teacher forgets too, but eventually he remembers again.

+

And soon forgets.

+

And again and again.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Aquarium is Andrea on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Monte Remer

+

+ + Author image of Monte Remer + + + Monte Remer is a writer from the American west. He tells stories of strange happenings and macabre creatures, both unbecoming of the kind and simple hick that he is. Somewhere in the mountains, his aggressive typing on old keyboards can be heard as the dust rises out of them like smoke from a fresh fire.

+

© Monte Remer 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The image was created by compositing images generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-32/the-night-parents.html b/issue-32/the-night-parents.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1d6d4a81 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-32/the-night-parents.html @@ -0,0 +1,410 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Night Parents — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Night Parents

+

Valerie Alexander

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Night Parents by +
+ + + + +

A + +fter two a.m., the night parents slide out of the grandfather clock and slither across the hardwood floor and down the hall to Kira’s bedroom. That’s how she imagines it, at least, because she doesn’t hear footsteps before they come into her bedroom. She hears the soft slide of flesh over tile. But when they tiptoe in, they’re upright and normal like anyone else. Like her regular parents sleeping down the hall.

+

“Honey, we didn’t know if you were awake.”

+

Her night mother says that most nights, usually with a look of tender concern. They know what Kira goes through in the day, they always tell her. Dull classes at school. The embarrassing failure at her violin recital. The betrayal of her best friend Violet going upstairs at her birthday party with another girl while Kira was left downstairs with Violet’s grandmother.

+

“I’m awake,” she says tonight, keeping her voice low so her real parents don’t wake up.

+

Her night mother sits on the bed, smiling anxiously and smoothing Kira’s hair back. She’s wearing a cloche hat with black netting while her night father, sitting in the wing chair, is dressed in a bowler hat and suit. They often look as if they’re going to an old-fashioned party, leaving to catch a train. Maybe that’s what they do when they leave. They won’t tell her where they come from or where they go.

+

The bedside clock glows 2:23 a.m. in blue numerals.

+

“What did you do today, sweetie?”

+

Kira tells them how boring her advanced math class is and how she’s going to get in trouble if she falls asleep in school again. She’s already lost one library book this year and her mother called her irresponsible and said they weren’t going to Six Flags if this scatter-brained behavior kept up.

+

“That seems harsh for a lost library book.”

+

“My mom is harsh.”

+

Her night mother takes this in. Then she fiddles with Kira’s hair and says, “I’m your mom too.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +ll the clocks in the house are set for different moments. They chime or ping or beep in different tones, a few minutes apart, because her mother sets them anywhere from four to seventeen minutes fast. “It keeps me on schedule,” she says when Kira’s father asks why. “Being on time means being five minutes early.” And it’s true that Kira’s mother is never late, that she gets her purse and laptop case and Kira into the car every weekday morning by 7:17 am.

+

When Kira is home alone after school, the clocks go off in a reliable order. The soft chime of the cat clock in the kitchen is followed by the ping of the mantelpiece clock, then four steady bongs from the grandfather clock. Sometimes, when she shuts off the TV or closes her laptop and the house goes quiet, she goes tense with fear that all the clocks will go off at once: a signal for it to begin. “It” being something she can’t define, though she senses it will usher in a new and terrifying world.

+

The night parents don’t come to her after school. They could keep her company in the solitary hours when late afternoon sun subsides into gloom and she watches TV as the living room goes dark around her. Her mother is rarely home before seven. Her father will come home very late or very early and shut himself up in his home office. And it’s hard to forget their absence because the clocks keep announcing the hours, like sentinels for a palace whose king and queen never arrive.

+

“Oh darling, we can’t come any earlier, we wish we could,” says her night mother when she asks. (And Kira knows that, of course; the night parents have been visiting since she was little and they’ve always come in the dead of the night.) “Here’s what we can do, though—we can look at the stars.”

+

She helps Kira slide out of the bed and they go together to the windows, the three of them, to look up at the sky.

+

“You can’t see much,” says her night father, “but there’s a lot out there worth learning about.”

+

From the corner of her vision Kira sees something gray and nebulous where her night mother should be. This has happened before. When she turns her head, her night mother looks normal and pretty again—smiling at her in her black dress.

+

Kira asks what she’s wanted to ask for a while. “Are you from somewhere up there?”

+

Her night parents make a quizzical face. “Honey, you’re so funny sometimes.” Her night mother kisses her head. “Sweetie, we’re from the same place you are.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hree days a week Kira leaves her fifth-grade classroom and walks down the hall to Advanced English with Mrs. Heller. It’s a small classroom with yellow walls and its windows overlook the white-trimmed field where students play soccer or dodgeball. Kira watches them, because when she listens to Mrs. Heller her voice blurs into a monotone and Kira can’t tell what she’s saying. That’s been happening a lot lately. She reports to advanced classes because of a test she took, but the teachers’ voices, the maps and equations and sentences, have been turning into blurs.

+

“I want you to be honest with me about why you’re falling asleep in class.”

+

Only the kitchen clock is ticking right now. The cat’s plastic tail switches back and forth, a temperamental entity that can’t make up its mind. Maybe it’s deciding whether this confrontation will go in her mother’s direction—angry, intent—or her father’s, quiet and watchful.

+

“I fell asleep one time. I don’t know why Mrs. Heller said that.”

+

It’s rare to have her parents sitting at the table with her and looking right at her. Odd to be focused on.

+

“Kira. She pulled me aside right in front of everyone at the pharmacy counter and asked me if you were getting enough sleep because you’ve fallen asleep four times in class. Four times.”

+

It’s the in front of everyone part that bothers her mother. Her mother wants to have a smart daughter who gets good grades and stays alert in class.

+

“Are you having nightmares again?” her father asks. “If you need help again, we’ll get you help.”

+

“No, I’m not having nightmares.” She says it with a degree of artifice, even though the nightmares did stop happening a few years ago, because she still remembers with dread the psychologist they took her to. Dr. Weischler and his implications that hung in the office air like threats, the cool reminders that only very disturbed girls saw monsters. Only mentally sick girls felt their bodies disintegrating.

+

“Kira, if I have to take away your iPad at night, we will. You need your rest.”

+

Her mother leans back and rests both palms on the table. She looks, Kira thinks, like someone in disguise, like her shoulder-length blond hair is a wig and her long nose is made of rubber. But her mother has always looked like this. Even in family pictures of them at the beach or skiing.

+

“Starting tonight, no iPad in your room after bed,” her mother says. “And I bet we’ll see a difference.” Then she leans over the table and takes Kira’s hands with an intensity that surprises her. “I want you to be okay, honey. It makes me sad, thinking of you awake by yourself at night.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ut saying this, Kira thinks later, makes her mother a hypocrite. Because back when her nightmares came all the time, when she was only four or five, she would walk down the hall to her parents’ bedroom and her mother would tell her to go back to bed. She’d try to be quiet and sleep on the end of bed, wanting to be close to them without alerting them, but her mother inevitably woke up and banished her.

+

One night she stood out in the hall in front of their locked bedroom door, trying to feel protected by their proximity, when the night parents came in from the living room. They smiled and put a finger to their lips. Then they motioned her to follow them; and because they looked nothing like what scared her in her nightmares, because they seemed sort of comforting, like characters from an old movie, she followed them back to her room.

+

“You won’t be alone,” her night mother said, holding her hand. “We’ll keep watch.” And in an ineffable sense of familiarity, Kira felt safe enough to go back to sleep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + few nights after her iPad and laptop are taken away, her night parents bring her books. They’re huge books with cloth-like covers that they open carefully to show the illustrations. One is about a magic tunnel that leads to a cave. They watch her face closely as they explain how the tunnel in the story works. The next book is about a war and people being banished from their homeland, going on an adventure to find a new one. She’s too old to be read stories to like this but the night parents often bring her this kind of book. They watch her intently as she pretends to enjoy it.

+

“We’ll always be here to tell you stories,” her father says, closing the book. “Your mother and I know lots of stories. We’ll be able to explain all kinds of things as you get older.”

+

“Tell me about where you grew up,” she says, scrunching down into the pillow. She’s asked this before but they don’t answer.

+

“That was a long time ago, Kira,” her mother says. “Things are very different today. What matters is now.”

+

“Were there covered wagons when you grew up?”

+

Her night parents observe her for a few moments without answering.

+

“I think that she needs vitamins,” her night father says. “She looks tired. Kira, maybe you can ask your other parents to get you some vitamins.”

+

Her night mother nods. “Just mention it tomorrow. But no medications—just vitamins.”

+

“I already got in trouble because of you at school,” she says, more sulkily than she intends, “because I’ve been falling asleep. So they probably will make me take vitamins.”

+

Her night mother leans over. “We need you to stay out of trouble, Kira,” she says intently, her hand on her leg. “Don’t tell your other parents you’re having nightmares, they’ll make you see a doctor. We need you to stay strong.”

+

She shrinks back. She’s never recoiled from her night mother before but her hand tonight feels cold and rubbery. “How come?”

+

Her night father takes her hand. His skin feels more normal. “Because you’re special. And some kinds of medication could interfere with that.”

+

They have to leave. She watches them go like always but this time she creeps to her door to watch them walk down the hall. Will they turn right and go toward the kitchen and living room or will they go through the archway to her dad’s office; it’s all she wants to know. But what she sees is something undefined, obscuring her vision right before it seems to merge through her parents’ bedroom door.

+

She’s had two fantasies these last few years. In the first, she tells her mother about the night parents. Her family packs up and leaves the house immediately. And that night, after driving far, far away, her family is sleeping in a hotel room when a vent opens and her night father climbs out and she screams. But her parents don’t wake up even as she keeps screaming and her night father drags out her out of the room.

+

The other fantasy ends differently. In this one, her family moves out, suddenly, without warning. The night parents walk through the empty rooms that first night, looking at the space where her bed used to be. They stand in her dark bedroom without speaking until the gray light of dawn fills the rooms and they evaporate, permanently.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +e noticed you never mention any school friends,” her night mother says. “But we always want you to have regular friends, Kira.”

+

“We just want you to avoid sleepovers,” her night father says. “Especially now that you’re growing up—not having nightmares anymore. Becoming ready for more.”

+

It’s true that it’s been a few years since the bad dreams kept seizing her brain. But even the faded memory makes her recoil: undulating things that tried to touch her, their horrible ability to grow faces from jelly. That insane feeling of rising up from the ground, of losing her body.

+

“More what?” she says and scoots backward toward the bed.

+

“More experiences,” her night mother says. “There’s a lot to discover when you’re not scared.”

+

“We were thinking,” her night father says, “that we might take a trip soon.”

+

This is new. They’ve never left her before. “How long will you be gone?”

+

“No—a trip for all of us.” Her night mother looks at her father and nods.

+

“It’ll be fun,” he says, cocking his eyebrows under his jaunty cap.

+

“How long would I be gone?” she asks. “I mean—my parents –“

+

“Let us worry about that,” her night mother says, smoothing her hair. “They probably won’t even need to know. You’d like a trip, wouldn’t you?”

+

They stare at her, their enormous dark eyes imploring her to love them, take this trip with them, but then her night father’s face shifts just for a moment, as if melting.

+

Then he looks normal again.

+

“Yes,” she says.

+

Her night mother sits back, rearranges her gloves in her lap, and smiles. “Then it’s settled.” She snaps her clutch purse shut and smiles as if with relief and triumph.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hat weekend her parents, who have no real friends, invite two engineers from her father’s office over for dinner. Kira eats a frozen pizza by herself before they arrive and stays in her room while the real dinner of salmon croquettes is served. By eight o’clock, there’s loud classic rock playing from the living room, punctuated with bursts of laughter. Her mother yells her name down the hall: “Kira, come meet everyone!”

+

Kira gets up and goes to her bedroom window, expecting to see the night parents standing in the moonlit yard. They’ll wave, gesture for her to come out. And she could do that; could go away with them and never come back.

+

But the yard is empty. A sense of being the only awake person in the house comes over her.

+

“Kira!”

+

Her socks slide on the polished oak living room floor. One of the engineers’ wives is on all fours, putting sugared cashews back in an upended silver bowl, and her mother is leaning back against the wall in helpless laughter, sagging against the drapes until she pulls them down—Oh, OH!—and everyone is laughing, her father burying his reddened face in his hands at the table. Kira gives a single, desultory wave and they laugh harder and she goes back to her room.

+

She’s never seen her mother drunk before. Watching TV in bed, she composes the story to tell her night parents when they arrive, about her mother’s ugly laughter, about how isolated it felt to be the only real person here tonight. But her bedroom door stays shut all night, long after the house is quiet and dark. The night parents never arrive.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +om, are ghosts real?

+

She wants to ask her parents something that scares them. She wants them to know that someone else wants her, that she could disappear before their eyes if they don’t start paying attention.

+

Because they’re not paying attention now, when she’s standing here at the end of the hall, the tiles cool under her bare feet. They’re asleep and the house is silent. All the clocks have stopped ticking. That means that time has stopped, probably. It means that she can stand here thinking about whether to turn the doorknob to her parents’ bedroom and explain what’s been happening or she can go through the living room and look outside, where her night parents might be awaiting with their night car at the curb, ready to drive her away.

+

A murmuring comes from her parents’ room: they’re not asleep. She listens at their door and then pushes it open without knocking.

+

The grayish jelly monster is undulating by the bed. Finally she’s looking at it head on, as real as her own thudding heart. And just like in her old nightmares it begins to grow a face. It wavers, then solidifies into her mother. Her real mother.

+

“It was always us,” she says. “I thought you were starting to understand.”

+

The other grayish thing is growing her father’s beard, she can’t look, her mouth is too dry to scream. His human façade shows through as he takes the form of the dapper old-fashioned personas they used to fool her.

+

“Oh, don’t,” her mother, her only mother, says to him. “We can drop the old-timey friendly ghost thing. There’s no point to that anymore.”

+

Kira sinks down to the floorboard, weeping.

+

“It’s time you started learning again anyhow,” her father says, sounding abashed. “We know you were scared before but you’re older now—”

+

“Would you give her a moment?” her mother asks. “This is a lot for her to accept.”

+

She leans her forehead against the wallpaper, sniffing. There’s a sock under her parents’ bed. A crumpled lipsticked tissue in the wastebasket. That daytime smell of her parents’ bedroom, cool and medicinal, fills her nostrils like proof of normality.

+

“Honey.” Her mother comes closer to her. It’s odd to hear the night mother’s maternal concern coming from her regular mother. “It’s okay. This is good, even. You’re already having lapses in school. You’ll start changing at night like us within a year, two at the most.”

+

Her head is hot and throbbing. “I’m not like you,” she says, though she doesn’t know what she’s denying.

+

“That’s right—you’re better,” her father says, kneeling. He’s mostly his regular self now but she can’t look at him. “We’ll train you each night so you’ll be fully you all the time. Not like us, you won’t be cut off from your consciousness in the daytime. You’ll meet others who are young—it will be so different for your generation.”

+

“You’ll do all kinds of things we haven’t been able to do.” Her mother crouches next to her, looking like her daytime self but going grayish and giving off pricks of electricity. “Your generation will be the ones to change everything.”

+

Kira yanks her head away from her mother’s hand. “No! I’m normal. I don’t want to meet anyone like you.”

+

Her parents look at each other. The night parents always had the same voices as her day parents, she realizes now, that never changed.

+

Her mother reaches for her hair again and Kira buries her head in her knees. “Kira, you have to listen to us,” her father says. “It’s almost dawn and we’ll be—limited again.”

+

“Oh, shush,” her mother says and holds her as she cries. “She’ll be okay today. You’ll make it through, right, honey? We’ll talk tomorrow night.”

+

Her mother’s hand on her hair is tender, rhythmic. The revulsion inside Kira quiets. She succumbs to the stroke of her mother’s fingers as her mind becomes a comforted nothingness. And then her mother’s hand grows distracted and more impatient until she sits back abruptly.

+

“Kira, you have to go back to bed. Why are you even in our room again—I thought we were past this.”

+

Kira gets to her feet, adjusts her pajamas. Pale gray light is creeping around the window blinds. Her day parents watch her with weariness and resentment.

+

She brushes away her tears. “Sorry. I had a nightmare.”

+

“The nightmares are back. I knew it.” Her mother’s voice is resigned again. “Go back to your room. We might need to have you see Dr. Weischler again if this keeps up.”

+

In her bed, Kira stares at the ceiling. Down in the kitchen, the cat clock chimes the first real hour of morning, followed by the ping of the clock on the mantelpiece, followed by five resonant gongs from the grandfather clock. Soon there will be the roar of the shower, the smell of coffee, her mother’s irritated complaints that her father has borrowed her phone charger again. Kira will put on her uniform for school, be reminded to pack a pear in her lunch, be examined for signs of staying up too late. Then the front door will shut behind them and the empty house will wait like a stage, a prologue for the day when all the clocks strike as one.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Night Parents on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Valerie Alexander

+

+ + Author image of Valerie Alexander + + + Valerie Alexander is a freelance writer living in Arizona and Oregon. Her stories have been published in a number of sci-fi, horror and speculative anthologies and magazines. Visit her at @vaxder or www.valeriealexander.com.

+

© Valerie Alexander 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was whittled down from an image generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-32/up-and-down.html b/issue-32/up-and-down.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..193d3107 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-32/up-and-down.html @@ -0,0 +1,362 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Up and Down — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 32 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Up and Down

+

J. Siegal

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Up and Down by +
+ + + + +

T + +hat glum and stupid day, when I set foot in Mr. Morgan’s apothecary, I knew, or I should have known, that something dismal was in the offing. It was just such a typical ruin of a morning; I missed my bus and got my foot stuck in a puddle of muck, and then like an idiot I went galumphing after the bus, only to realize I’d left my briefcase on the bus stop bench, and when I returned, drenched and moping, the sagging slats of the bench were empty.

+

This was bound to end at Morgan’s. Maybe, I thought, that curious old boulder of a man might light a candle or something and read my palm and sell me some potion to quell my gross moods.

+

I entered his apothecary, and the bell on the door gave up a dull clank. I smirked and said he’d better get that fixed, it sounded pretty disheartening.

+

Mr. Morgan insisted on proper introductions. He said this from the back of the shop, and his voice stirred the plumes curling from his incense cones. Then he slumped into the front room of the shop and my palm rose to meet his, and we shook hands as if there were great import to my arrival at his shoddy establishment.

+

He cleared what must have been a massive wad of phlegm and swallowed. “You have,” he said, letting the word settle all the way down to the dust, “come to the right place.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he man Morgan wedged his large rump—obvious even under the flowing robes of his costume, I could tell—into an aching wicker chair, and bade me take a stool across the table.

+

“Take off your shoes,” he intoned. “They are full of mud.”

+

With just as much wit as I could muster, which wasn’t much, I told him of the awful bus and of my losing my stuff, and how an indigent man had mocked me as I slunk back to my stupid job.

+

He picked his teeth with a silver toothpick while the larger of his eyes took in my story.

+

“You must excuse me,” he said. “Your shoes.”

+

I took my shoes to the front of the store and tried not to look too hard at all the scummy merchandise leaning off of shelves and towering in the corners, but something struck me in my gut, some lack.

+

I sat back on the stool, and as Morgan and I regarded one another, he folded his large fingers together.

+

“You have no price tags on your wares,” I said.

+

Morgan drummed his heavy fingers on the table. “You’ve not come here,” he said, “seeking gifts or perfumes.”

+

I removed my simple hat and held it in my lap. “It’s true.”

+

Had I struck out in the wrong direction with this visit? Maybe I should have my fortune read, and throw in with every unmoored matron hoping at suitors for her daughters, every keen young man tripping forward into the future?

+

As I searched for the courage to tell what I’d come for, my eyes wandered around the shop and settled on a large frosted mirror. “What good is a mirror that’s completely frosted over?”

+

“It’s terrible,” Morgan said, “terrible.” He settled in his seat and stroked his scruff. “But have you come to my shop to haggle over trinkets and talismans?”

+

“I guess not,” I said, but my eyes fell on a mannequin next to the mirror. It struck an absolutely rigid pose, its arms stiff at its sides, yet I could not get over the notion that it was meant somehow to be dancing, as if it were uncomfortable.

+

“That mannequin over there, it’s very odd. There are no joints at the limbs. How does one get the clothes onto it?”

+

“The mannequin is exquisitely expensive,” said Morgan. “Do you want it in your home?”

+

“No, not really.”

+

Morgan’s voice sank deeper, and his larger eye squinted. “It is very shrewd, the way you are trying my patience.”

+

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Truly.”

+

I got up to pace about the room in my stocking feet, hoping to grasp at the essence of why I’d come to visit Morgan at his bizarre apothecary, imagining myself some inquisitor of my own desires. I attempted a grand gesture in the hope some flourish would unlock my tongue, and stuck my hand through a portrait leaning in a corner. When I removed my hand, a gaping half of a face glowered from the canvas, incredulous at me.

+

Morgan gripped the armrests of his chair and shifted forward, as if he were about to rise and beat me.

+

“Do you know,” he bellowed, “whose face you’ve just disemboweled?”

+

My apology was fleeting and ineffective.

+

“That was a portrait,” Morgan said, wiping his face with a red kerchief, “of my progenitor. A great… a great…”

+

“Apothecarian?” I offered.

+

“Sit down!” Morgan’s voice shook the room. I sat back in my chair.

+

“I can pay to have the portrait restored,” I said.

+

Morgan chuckled to himself. He returned his kerchief to his robe and leaned across the table. “I shall ask you to leave,” he said.

+

Desperation gripped me. “Please, Mr. Morgan. Hear me out. I have been stuck in this rut of rotten success and stupid progress. I find that my one foot skips while the other goes lame, in every thing I attempt. In business, in love, in matters of family… there isn’t a solitary part of my life in balance, and the only thing that exceeds the sunshine is the cold water splashed each time in my face. I have a great success, and the next thing I know I’m back in the muck. I meet a lovely lady, and before I know it she’s been swept away… by another man, by a tidal undercurrent, by syphilis. I have a wonderful turn of affairs in business, just to find myself on the street again.

+

“I’m finally feeling flush,” I said, “and I want to cure it all. I’ve tried all the books and the lectures and the talking-doctors and the woozy medical preparations. By account of those who seem to know, you would be a man who can help with such afflictions of… fate or something.

+

“I want you,” I said, drawing myself up in my chair, “to concoct for me a stabilizing potion. An analgesic for my fortunes. I want my life to cease being so damned up and down. It’s got so I can hardly sleep at night. Please, I’m desperate for your help.”

+

Morgan regarded me with evident pity.

+

“Let me see,” he said, rising slowly from his chair. “I think I may have something…”

+

He made his way over to a great lurking cabinet of drawers and opened many of them in turn, muttering and poking through them.

+

“Here we are,” he said, and handed me an amber coin with an ancient insect trapped within. “Put this under your pillow at night, but never on Sundays. It will help steady and calm your life. No charge, no charge, my friend. Put it under your pillow and you’ll be fine. Thank you for stopping into my store. Don’t forget your shoes.”

+

I took the coin and held it up, though there was little ambient light in the shop. The tiny beast was caught in a great dollop of long-hardened sap.

+

“What is so special about this particular specimen?” I said. “I’ve seen these in museums and curio shops before. As I said, I was hoping for some kind of potion or tincture—”

+

At that moment, the coin slipped from my grasp and rolled the length of the store, past the dusty shelves and cabinets, past the odd taxidermy and the stacks of misshapen boxes, and settled, with a humming clatter, into the far reaches of a dark corner between the pots of two large and sulking plants.

+

“No problem,” I said, rising quickly. “I’ll go get that.”

+

“Do not approach those plants!” Morgan’s face was as red as his kerchief. He pointed a fat finger at my face. “You are an attractor of chaos,” he said. “Get out of my store. I cannot help you.”

+

“Can you not retrieve the amber coin?”

+

“That’s just a toy. It’s not even real amber.” His gaze fell on my face. “But I do have something else for you.”

+

Morgan reached into his robe and drew forth his necklace, a marvelous shard of crystal on a silver chain. The pendant hung still and seemed to draw every bit of light from the dreary shop.

+

“Do you see this crystal?” he said. “It is a structure most miraculous—every atom of it perfectly aligned. It is always in the most sublime stasis. Yet there is power, even one might say life, within it.”

+

I had considered such trifles beneath me, had always scoffed those I saw molesting some stone or other, cooing at a collection of trinkets, scrutinizing tea leaves. A potion had been my desire, but now I found myself entranced. Maybe there was something to this crystal. I would have to possess it.

+

“Yes,” I said, egging myself on. “I can see how that might be soothing, or steadying, to hang something like that against my chest.” I stood up, knocking over a distressed lamp that crashed angrily to the floor. “How much for the necklace?”

+

Morgan’s smile drifted from his large eye to the smaller. “This is not for sale.”

+

“Of course, of course,” I said. “Well you must have another one somewhere. What about here?” I brushed my hand along a row of rattling boxes.

+

“Do not—touch—my things!”

+

I stood silent in my stocking feet, chastised by the great man.

+

“I bid you sit down,” Morgan said, and by some force of his imposing presence I complied. “Just examine this spectacular relic, and let its calming power claim your attention. Let it steady you. Let it heal you. Inhale deeply of its light. Allow it to calcify and calm your ragged nerves. Receive its invitation.”

+

As he said this, my gaze focused upon the charm draped over his massive thumb. His words fell away into mumbling and the crystal seemed to enlarge, reflecting more and more light, drawing it from every recess of the room, slowly sparkling, radiating beams, a brilliant spectacle, a still-life dance of radiance.

+

“How much,” I blurted through leaden lips.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +f I try to trickle upwards, I stick. And if I try a sideways slip, these tricky beams, these peculiar pricks of light restrict me. They shine in from just above wherever Master Morgan sits. His rosy ears are often understimulated, so he drapes himself in tinkling robes adorned with clever singing trinkets. But even when he sheds his finery, there sits me, in my glinting prison, always dangling from the links around his neck. Always just under his chin.

+

It’s nothing like a crucifix, this lattice to which I stick, though stretched within it I must admit, I’ve wished for one. Sometimes I think, Is this it? and then it sinks in, that my limbs are fixed, not quite constricted, more assimilated, taking their own trips inside this mirror maze of iridescence, firm and flitting, not retreating, deeper into this crystal.

+

Recalling sitting in ninth grade, listing briefly into sleep while listening, half deeply. It’s the physics teacher’s lecture on the structure of a crystal. I feel myself repeating, seeping deeper into grids in grids. An icicle de-melting. Thinning into stasis. It pricks the places where my ribs should be. This sifting of myself into delicately knifing reticles. These molecular electric spikes, piercing into me. I feel I will eventually diffuse. But it’s taking an eternity.

+

Master Morgan, he is sleeping. Silks drape his stiff limbs. The chain of silver dangles. His big chest heaves and stills. I miss my limbs. Where once my sinew stretched, only tingling inklings persist, airy and stiff. Bit by bit the crystal fingers wind. Where once I might have bit my lip, my face is ossified. I drift in labyrinthine. Where once I might have cried, to help the pain subside, I only drift.

+

A lattice pricks as it expands. It constricts and grips. Its teeth are turning me to teeth. To eat myself. It’s teeth are me. I’m biting into soft of me. Biting into stillness me. I eat the teeth of lattice grips. I’m teeth are me. Lattice constricts and eating me. I lattice grips. I teeth are me. I lattice grips and pricks expands. I lattice me.

+

I slip. I’m slit. A piece. Dispersed. I me. A piece. A piece.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Up and Down on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

J. Siegal

+

+ + Author image of J. Siegal + + + J. Siegal writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music, and code. He plays barrelhouse piano and produces the musical group Red Spot Rhythm Section. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and Skeptic Magazine, among others. Currently, he is at work on his first novel. He lives with his wife and two children near Chicago, IL. You can find out more on his website or Twitter.

+

© J. Siegal 2022 All Rights Reserved

+

The image was created by compositing images generated by Micah Hyatt using DALL·E 2 and a rights-free image by Antony Trivet.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Spring 2023

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+ C. Owen Loftus +

A Deer's Inheritance

+
+ + +

Let's start at the very beginning, well known to be a very good place to start since long before the written word, maybe even since before language itself. C. Owen Loftus gives us a story that is, of course, composed wholly of words, because we poor creatures must resort to clumsy tools in order to express the things that are, in some sense, unspeakable.

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Balk

+ Lucy Zhang +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Balk by + + + +

Issues of Mythaxis do not cleave to themes, and yet sometimes circumstance intervenes, at least in part. Such was the case this time, and Lucy Zhang's solemn sequence of moments and reflections here provides the first of three stories each very distinct, but all of which ring with alienation.

+ + + +
+ + + +
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The Day the Shimm Stood Still

+ Andrew Jensen +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Day the Shimm Stood Still by + + + +

Not every adolescent dynamic is a bleak one, even when events take a turn for the worse. Still, the starkest traumas of childhood can be as simple and commonplace as arising from the gaining and losing of friends. But Andrew Jensen's story suggests that maybe good nature heals all wounds.

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Greg: Not a People Person

+ L.P. Ring +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Greg: Not a People Person by + + + +

L.P. Ring's story arrived draped in caveats, that it was more psychologically weird than a piece of speculative fiction. Nicely timed, because being also crime fiction it intersected neatly with my urge to extend Mythaxis to include that genre too. Thus we return to our non-theme for a second dose of alienation – or do we? I guess that might be a matter of perspective…

+ + + +
+ + + +
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Touch Wood

+ Sandee Bree Breathnach +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Touch Wood by + + + +

'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' So said the marvellously named Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, Yet even the snappiest aphorism does not a story make, so rejoice that Sandee Bree Breathnach put her slightly shorter moniker to this ecofantastical expression of the same.

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The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams by + + + +

In this, my third year as Mythaxis Editor, it's time to shake things up around here with the first of two more-or-less non-fiction features. In his guise as 'The Bookchemist', Mattia Ravasi has been vlogging about long-form fiction for almost eight years, and I'm delighted to have him here reviewing contemporary speculative fiction. So, without further ado…

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Short Reviews – January to March

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – January to March by + + + +

Our second new feature is a brief collection of further reading recommendations. There are many good magazines out there publishing a lot of great short stories, and it’s far too easy for little gems of both categories to go overlooked. Therefore, in each issue we would like to nominate a trio of recent pieces from around the web that you’ll find well worth sampling.

+ + + +
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+ Barry Charman +

Emoticon

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+ + +

Whatever else may change, Mythaxis is always going to end on a story. Barry Charman sees us out with a third tale that has more than a hint of alienation to it – though whether alienation is a state of suffering or grace is very much in the eye of the beholder.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-33/a-deer-inheritance.html b/issue-33/a-deer-inheritance.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e6e5334a --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-33/a-deer-inheritance.html @@ -0,0 +1,471 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A Deer's Inheritance — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 33 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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A Deer's Inheritance

+

C. Owen Loftus

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for A Deer's Inheritance by +
+ + + + +

T + +here was an old man. I call him Asa. He was a hunter, and a butcher, and a prayer. His friends chased game with him, and slaughtered the livestock with him, and sometimes even tried to pray too, but Asa was alone in being only a hunter, a butcher, and a prayer. Most people are many things. Asa was only those.

+

It’s important you know he was never called that. His family called him the sound hungry children made at seeing he’d caught an animal for them to eat, or the grunt of a stifled wretch when the smell of open guts overwhelmed the one holding the carcass up for him to clean. Sometimes, on sacred days, they just called him by an expectant silence around a bonfire until he burned the animals’ eyes and genitals. Asa’s name was the same word as death and springtime.

+

There was a boy, too. He thought of himself as a man, but his limbs were still the wrong lengths and his face was covered in red spots. He was shy, and never married. He was too young to have very many names. I know that no one called him Eze.

+

Once, after laying in silence with Asa in a tree for five days, waiting for an animal to pass underneath, the boy said,

+

(and remember these words are both misleading and unreal, all at once)

+

“I don’t believe in souls.”

+

Asa twitched in an automatic gesture of frustration, but nothing scattered in the bushes, so he measured his eventual response.

+

“Why not?” he asked.

+

“I can see everything,” Eze said.

+

“Hmm,” Asa grunted. Then, “Would you like to see one?”

+

It surprised Eze that the old man could offer it so easily.

+

“Yes,” he said, and blinked slowly.

+

“Wait,” Asa said, “for the deer. I’ll let you pick the one whose soul you want to see.”

+

Eze could hardly call this unreasonable, so he settled back into his furs.

+

It took only four more days before their game came. Three were fawns, and three were does, but one was a buck, and Eze thought its rack looked ornate and violent. He pointed at it in a flickering, near-invisible motion. Asa saw it, drew his bow, and shot the animal in its haunch.

+

The herd scattered, and the men packed to begin the arduous work of following the buck’s trail. Eze used the time to mutter at the old man’s poor aim.

+

“If I wanted a heart shot, I’d have shot at the heart,” Asa said. “It takes more than killing to see a soul.”

+

They walked a long ways before finally finding their quarry. He was curled against a fallen tree, shivering in the dusky gloom. Eze drew his obsidian knife from its soft leather pouch, but Asa placed a heavy finger on the blade’s tip and pulled it down.

+

“Seeing a soul must take at least a little killing,” Eze said.

+

“Don’t worry,” Asa said. “The buck will die.”

+

“When? What are you doing?”

+

The old man knelt beside the buck. It stirred, but was too spent to stand. In exhaustion he let Asa pull the arrow shaft out of his leg, and dig the head out from his muscles with his fingers.

+

“There’s a difference between dying and getting killed,” Asa said. His tone was serious, but he wiggled his eyebrows and smiled impishly.

+

Eze wore sourness like facepaint. He snorted and folded his arms. “This is a joke,” he said.

+

Asa sighed from his mouth, and Eze tasted his sour adrenaline on the air.

+

“No,” the old man finally said. “I’m sorry. This is important, and I want you to understand it.”

+

Eze snorted again, from impatience.

+

“We’ll take the buck there,” Asa said, and pointed upwards at something neither could see through the trees. “There, when he dies, you’ll see the soul leave him.”

+

The boy grabbed the old man from behind and used the surprise to put him in a chokehold. With his free hand he pulled on the black and greying beard.

+

“This is strange,” he said, “and complicated. Promise to me that I will see his soul.”

+

Eze hated the crack in his voice. He wiped sweat from his face with his arm, and suddenly was on his back, the old man’s forearm pinning him to the ground at the throat.

+

“I promise,” Asa said. Eze gagged at the pressure on his windpipe, and the old man laughed and pulled him to his feet. But he quieted when he saw the solemnity in the boy’s expression. “Eze. I swear by the deer and their meat and their hooves and their bones.”

+

Eze blushed. It was a strange, consequential thing to swear by.

+

“Thank you,” he said in the wavering, vulnerable secret voice you can only show those you trust.

+

They built a small fire against the dark. The buck didn’t move when they gathered sticks, nor at the sight of the red flames taking root in them. Neither man spoke into the growing darkness, only chewed their greens and jerky in a watchful rest. Asa touched the boy’s elbow, and at the familiar sign Eze let himself drift into sleep.

+

When he woke, the buck was unmoved and panting in a pool of blood. It coated his hindquarters in a visceral glaze and shone in the early light like earthenware jugs filled with fresh water. Asa knelt in front of it, one hand on the animal’s neck. Their muscles were hard, and both their eyes were bloodshot.

+

“Do as I tell you,” Asa said without turning. “Heal him.”

+

The boy blinked away his fading sleep, then slipped into the shade between the trees.

+

When the boy was gone, Asa prayed. He didn’t speak in a whisper, but his tone was hushed and private. “You are alive,” he said. “You are here and see me, seeing you. Will you run? Your soul is in your skin.”

+

He prayed until Eze came back in the afternoon, carrying what he’d found foraging. At the sound of his footsteps, the old bent man over double and drank from the pool of congealed animal blood around his knees. Then he continued as before.

+

Eze chewed the leaves and spat them into the buck’s wounds. Aside from the tear in his haunch, now stretched wide from the chase, the shins of both his forelegs were broken. The buck mewed plaintively when Eze wrapped the exposed bone in poultices.

+

Eze knew Asa would pray for four days. It was the old man’s custom. So he settled into his orders, and turned the clearing into a little camp. He twisted his tunic into a rope, dipped it into a nearby stream, and held it between Asa’s teeth as if trying to gag him. The movement of the old man’s prayer squeezed the water from the cloth and let Asa drank without stopping. For the deer, Eze collected the plants that were most full of life and buried the broken arrow head under piles of their leaves. He chewed roots until they nearly slid down his throat, then spit them into both their mouths so the ritual wouldn’t break for anything as mundane as the need to eat. He cleaned them, and shaded them, and wanted very badly for Asa’s prayer to be finished.

+

But he was too young to maintain any single feeling very long, so on the second day he occupied himself by tracking what he could of their hunt. He found a gnarled log on the northern side of the clearing, half rotted with mold and buried under the fronds of an enormous fern. The log was split in the middle, and the breakage was flecked with blood and splintered bone. The buck must have run into it at full tilt, not knowing it was there. It was that blow that snapped his legs and sent him tumbling into the tree that he still lay beneath. Eze pressed his lips together and quelled the sympathy pains the discovery sent shivering through his calves.

+

On the third day Asa’s voice wore away until there was no sound behind it except the harsh rattling of his breath. Eze did his best not to pay too much attention to it. He believed knowing what Asa prayed would be intrusive and rude, or worse. So during the last night, to distance himself from the murmurs, Eze left the camp to watch the stars from a distant tree.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen he returned in the small hours of the next morning, Asa lay prostrate in the red earth.

+

Eze shrieked, the first real sound in the clearing in days, and ran to him. The old man was barely conscious. The boy rolled him onto his back and slapped his face, but Asa’s eyes skittered at nothing behind half-closed lids. His skin was pallid and hot as rocks in the sun.

+

The boy pulled him to the bed of moss and furs he’d made next to the fire and used his knife to cut off the old man’s clothes. Then he filled his water pouch and poured a cool stream over Asa’s burning body. He did this til the sun came up, and on through the day because the old man only get hotter in the light. The boy tried to cool him, and sometimes cried, because, as you might have guessed, the old man was his father, and he was frightened of losing him.

+

When night fell Asa’s body began to shiver violently, so Eze wrapped him in the ruined shreds of his slit tunic and the bedroll leathers. The old man sweated so profusely that his skin glowed in the starlight. It reminded Eze of the blood on the buck’s haunches, and he stood up because the memory gave him a target for his unspoken fears.

+

He turned to the deer and called it a hiss of derision. The buck only shook his antlers, weakly. So, Eze called him a shout of promised violence. He ran to the buck and grabbed his antlers, intent on shaking the animal’s head to pieces, and the horn fell apart in his hands. Eze called him a scoff of roiling disgust that rose from his belly, but then realized that all that had happened was the shedding of a little velvet.

+

“Go to a tree then, and tear it off of you,” Eze said. When the deer didn’t, he called him uncontributive, which to the boy was a great insult. “Get up,” he screamed. “Get up or I’ll kill you.”

+

He grabbed the dagger from his belt and held the point against the deer’s swollen belly. The buck didn’t move, only rolled his eyes, and rattled his head, and Eze understood the buck’s words clearly.

+

“I can’t, my body is broken,” the buck said.

+

Eze growled, then padded on his silent hunter’s feet to the animal’s flank. The ground showed him that the hooves hadn’t moved since their blood had softened the soil. The buck’s back was split by its fall into the tree. It would never walk again.

+

Eze went back to the fire. He took a string of jerky from its pouch, and gnawed at it while he thought about the new words he’d learned.

+

After a time, he went to gather more wood for the fire. But the last stick he held at one end and carried to the buck. He used it to scrape at the bloody velvet. The animal, though frightened at first, soon pushed his head eagerly against the rough wood. Blood splattered from his horns while sparks flew from the wet twigs popping in the fire. When it was done, the boy patted the buck’s neck softly and said what he thought the old man might say, if their situations were reversed.

+

“The tree will come to you,” he said. He whispered it, because his throat was tight.

+

The buck closed his eyes and let out a long, calm sigh.

+

Eze understood, and said it back to him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he boy didn’t count time the way that we do. He existed unconsciously, like a breath. So the days and nights he spent in the woods, with no one to speak his name but a dying man and a broken buck, who flicked his ears and rolled his eyes and knew no names for anything, soon flowed together like paired beats of his heart, involuntary and inviolate.

+

During the day, he sucked the pus from the buck’s wounds and spat the maggots into the bushes. At night, he banked and stoked the fire to match the old man’s changing fits. When he could, he caught the crickets that jumped on him in the dark and roasted them for their meat. They had precious little meat, but he had precious little else to do.

+

At dawn on one of those days, Asa spoke. Eze thought at first that it was to him, and it made his heart leap, but soon realized the old man said nonsense directed to no one. He raved about animals and jumping and how it felt to have sex with a woman and see your son came out of her. Eze spoke back at first, though their conversations made no sense to him, but his replies became more sporadic as he slowly realized the old man couldn’t even hear him. By the fifth dusk, he just watched, and responded to Asa’s cries for water in silence.

+

The buck grew quiet with him. It lay calmly on its bandaged legs like a cat, and never slept. Eze wondered if the animal had lost its fight, or just its fear. During Asa’s quiet moments, the boy sat next to the deer and tried to learn more of his words.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he next morning Eze realized they were out of food. He was used to long spells of hunger during hunts, but this was different. They’d been out too long. His body had no more reserves of fat to gnaw on from the inside, and rather than the cold clarity of a fast he felt sharp teeth piercing his muscles.

+

He stood next to Asa and stared at the old man’s face until the sun was exactly overhead. Then, with a half extended hand making a silent gesture of apology, he slipped away.

+

He had to walk a fair distance to find even a few things to eat. He’d emptied the immediate circle of forest of good herbs days earlier, and they’d camped there long enough that the birds and small things had learned to keep their distance. It took longer than he hoped.

+

When he returned, a bundle of leaves under one arm and a few berries clutched in his palm, it was nearly dusk. The fire was dead, probably doused by a small drizzle that hadn’t reached him, and the camp was riddled with rot. Two ravens scattered from the buck’s back, beaks dripping with stolen blood. The old man’s face and beard was covered in vomit, and his nose was blue.

+

Eze ran to him, and jammed his fingers as far down the old man’s throat as they would go. He felt and pushed, heedless of the tracks his nails left in his father’s mouth. When he found the lodged chunk of bile, and pulled it out between pincered fingers, his first reaction was shock at the amount of poisonous green that streaked the mucus. But then Asa coughed, then retched, and fell silent again, and the boy’s thoughts focused on only the old man, on his breathing and his heart beating in his thinning chest.

+

When he was finished and stepped back, the boy’s own heart screeched because he saw Asa’s skin dripping with new wounds. But on inspection it was only the berries, smashed against the sick man’s bones in his panicked caregiving. Eze pounded his fists against his legs, and threw the little food that remained untouched back into the forest, as hard as he could.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +e didn’t sleep that night, or the next. He sat with his knees tucked under his chin, his legs wrapped around his elbows, and watched Asa’s every breath. The old man didn’t speak, or open his eyes. Eze felt the hunger burning above his navel, and wondered how much worse it was for his father.

+

There was little to be done. They could go home, but it was several days’ journey in the best of circumstances. Eze could go alone and return with supplies and help, but he felt sure the old man wouldn’t last that long by himself. Or he could leave alone, and not come back, and try to live with leaving his father to die where no one remembered his name.

+

His father would die, Eze felt sure, unless he could find a way to fill the old man’s belly and wake him up from wherever he was dreaming.

+

There was a clatter of antler on wood, and the boy realized how easy it was to save them both. He turned, and looked at the buck’s muscles under its skin, at the tendons that tugged sharply through its neck. He imagined the taste of them as he chewed them over days into nothingness.

+

His black obsidian knife was still in its pouch at his hip. He’d never hunted this way before, it wasn’t his way to do so, but a hunt had never been this way before. He’d cursed the three of them from the start of it with his stupid questions. It had all gone too perfectly badly. They’d waited so long for the buck that the men had no strength to spare. They’d chased that particular buck to this particular place, where it would lay in state of painful undying and borrow strength from them all until all were spent.

+

The three were trapped by the way their bodies were tied to the others’. The man couldn’t live without the boy to feed him, and the boy couldn’t save the man while the buck remained alive. Still, the deer’s safety was sworn, by the same man it killed by slowly dying.

+

The boy felt as if an unseen but enormous snake was coiling them more tightly by the moment, had been wrapping around them for weeks, but so slowly that he hadn’t seen it until it was too late. The tautness that suffocated them needed to be released before they strangled. If he dared to snick the thread, the balance would tip, and the others would be free.

+

Eze drew the knife from its pouch, watched the firelight glitter along the bowls its carving had left along the blade, and then put it away. Instead, he found the old man’s knife in his ruined things. This was a knife that could sever the things that bound them to this spot.

+

But he stopped, a pace away from the buck. It watched him and followed his movements with his ears. Eze’s curse was so clever, so ingeniously laid, that even now he needed the old man to end it. Eze couldn’t kill this buck, because he’d never let himself hear what the old man said before he’d slit their throats.

+

It’s not important, the boy thought. The deer will be dead. I need its meat, not its soul.

+

But he looked at it, tried to see more deeply inside it than he ever had, and realized that the animal had done nothing wrong. It was his, Eze’s, fault that they were here, and that his father needed this death to live, and that he needed his father alive or he would die, too, because the boy couldn’t bear to do the things that would save himself. He’d already killed his father, whether or not he also murdered this buck without even performing its prayer.

+

He fell heavily onto the ground and leaned back against his hands, the wrapped handle of the knife cutting off the circulation in his palm.

+

“Do you have a family?” he asked. But he knew the buck didn’t understand. He tried again, but this time said it in words that sound like a small hand tucking behind enormous velvety ears to scratch gently. The buck said a word Eze didn’t know but sounded like the quiet breath of someone who believes they will always feel as safe as they do in that moment.

+

“You’re not the reason my father will die,” he said. “I can’t be the reason you die, too.”

+

The deer snuffled, a wet sound that left droplets of moisture on Eze’s hand, and laid its head down in the dirt. Eze turned in his spot, and leaned back against the buck’s torso. His skin was warm and his fur soft.

+

The buck’s breathing, measured evenly by Eze’s rise and fall against him, slowed. From the corner of his eye, the boy saw the buck’s eyes finally close. For the first time since they’d met, he was asleep, and in a moment, the boy was too.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hat did the boy believe happens to a deer if you don’t pray for it before it’s killed? This is what I know:

+

When he woke up, curled into the buck’s belly like a puppy to its mother, he again picked up the knife and carried it to his father. There, he cut into the flesh above his own arm until a rivulet of blood dripped strong and freely off his fingers. He dripped this blood into the old man’s mouth, as a trade for the deer blood the old man dearly needed and the boy was unable to provide.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t was a clear night when Asa returned from his travels. The stars were blinding, and Eze was watching them across the embers of the fire, one thumb tucked over the buck’s nose. The animal chewed on a length of grass, and Asa tried three times before he remembered how to talk.

+

“What is this?” he asked, and Eze jumped at the sound. The boy scurried to him and began to fuss; re-tying wraps, stuffing his pillow, tracing his bruised knees with gentle fingers.

+

Asa winced at the attention, but was also warmed by it. When he felt strong enough to sit up, he looked into the fire and let Eze look for little things to eat.

+

“I thought you were going to die,” Eze said, gasping from exertion. He’d found a single tadpole that made its way down the stream to grow legs in the eddy by their little camp, and worn himself out chasing it. He sweated while he roasted the little half-frog over the fire.

+

“I am,” Asa said, and Eze shot up in a start and stared at him with a wildness that filled the pits of his eyes with black.

+

“But you’re getting better,” the boy said, and moved to hit Asa playfully, but stopped when he saw how frail the old man’s muscles were, how much of his strength it took to sit up.

+

“I still feel it coming,” Asa said. “I’m too old to pray. I wasn’t before, but now I am. I went too long.” He coughed, then swallowed a gulp of water from his pouch.

+

Eze looked terrified, and then angry. “Why didn’t you stop?” he said, loud enough to wake the birds nesting above them.

+

“I don’t know,” Asa said. “I’m sorry.”

+

The boy dropped in a squat and turned his face to the fire.

+

“I didn’t want to be too old,” the old man finally said.

+

When Eze started to cry, Asa crawled to him and put his hand around the back of the boy’s neck. He called his son by his first name, the shooshing purr that soothes a newborn who fears they are alone.

+

“Let’s go home,” Eze said. “You should be there.”

+

Asa looked at the sky. He followed the ridges of the nearby mountain where they cut into the sky and hid the stars behind it.

+

“No,” he said. “I want to give you what I promised.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +t first light, they buried their fire and broke camp. Eze kissed the buck between his ears before slinging him over his shoulders, and Asa gathered a very few things. Eze wouldn’t need much to make it back home, and the old man felt too weak to carry anything else besides.

+

The walk wasn’t far, but it took them a long time to make it. Asa moved on his own but tired very quickly, so they covered what ground they could each day and camped beneath the trees. On the fourth afternoon they found a warren of little brown things and spent the rest of the day catching them and cooking them and laughing in relief.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen they reached the foothills, and the slope turned into a gravel and granite-face climb, they stopped to rest and clean themselves. They found the little pool kept sacred for that purpose, fed by a warm spring that fell through the sharp gray rock.

+

The bath was abrasive and revealing. All three were much thinner than they’d started, but Asa’s shrinking musculature was riddled with sores and boils that grew in his joints. When the old man’s arms shook too badly to continue, Eze finished cleaning him. Then he cradled the buck and carried him into the pool, half submerged, so that Asa could wash his fur and hooves.

+

“You did a good job with him,” the old man said, and Eze smiled sadly.

+

“We became friends,” he said.

+

“That’s good,” Asa said. “You can’t the see the soul of something you don’t love.” He pulled the strings of filth from the buck’s fur and ran a finger over the arrow wound in his haunch. The cut had closed well, but left a pink, glistening scar. “You did better than you had to, even. I’m proud of you for that.”

+

“I’m sorry,” Eze said. It took them both by surprise.

+

“For what?” the old man said.

+

“It’s my fault he has to die, because I’m the one who chose him. I just thought his antlers were pretty, and that meant his soul would be beautiful.” Then he glowered into the water. “It’s my fault that you are going to die.”

+

Asa rinsed the buck’s damp fur and poured a little over the boy’s head.

+

“We’ll die,” Asa said, “but we’ll be seen first. There are worse things.”

+

They finished their ritual, ate a meal while their tunics dried, and then found the trail that climbed up the rock to the mountain’s peaks. They left everything else behind, tucked into a boulder’s niche as a token protection against the birds.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey didn’t speak again until they reached the snow line. Eze tried to step in the holes Asa’s feet crunched in the frost, but even in his weakened state the old man took much longer strides. Soon, he had to focus every movement on keeping his balance under the buck’s bulk on his shoulders.

+

“Let’s stop,” he said, “and go back.” When Asa turned to meet his eyes, he said, “I release you from your oath.”

+

Asa’s frame shook in the bitter cold.

+

“I’m not doing this because I have to,” he said.

+

“Please stop,” Eze said. “I don’t want this anymore.”

+

Asa backtracked to him, tugged on the boy’s wispy chin hairs, and took the buck from his shoulders.

+

“I don’t want to either,” Asa said softly. “But I choose it.”

+

He hoisted the buck to rest securely on his neck, and began the walk up again. Eze gawped a moment, then chased after them, calling both something wordless and in pain. At the sound, the buck took fright. He threw his neck and attacked Asa with his brittle hooves. The old man stumbled, then fell to his knees, and the buck fell into the snow. He found purchase on the slippery rock despite his twisted legs, and dragged himself away. He looked back at Eze, without stopping, and tumbled headfirst off a cliff.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen they reached him at the bottom of the crevasse, his body was cold and his soul was gone. The boy cried bitterly, and stroked his friend’s forelock.

+

Asa grabbed the buck by an antler and hoisted him onto a flat place. It only took one hand–the animal was emaciated and light.

+

The stench of death made Eze’s eyes water. There was no magic here, no secret thing to watch fly away. It was only a crippled deer corpse, already dripping with excrement and parasitizing flies. A frightened animal whose eyes were clouded with burst vessels and hooves caked with piss-stained ice.

+

The old man let the boy mourn, then touched his elbow.“It will be dark, soon,” he said. “And I don’t have another day inside me. Will you come?”

+

The boy rubbed the buck’s antlers between his fingers, and nodded.

+

They found the trail, and began again to climb. The setting sun turned the air red as the veins around Asa’s eyes. The shadows of their hands as they dug into the snow for purchase turned it purple sure as if they dripped with oncoming dusk.

+

With still more than half of that last climb left, Asa fell. His body clenched in rippling spams. Eze leapt to him, brushed the frozen dirt from his face, and put him on his shoulders. Just ahead he found a small cleft, flat enough and sheltered from the frost that blew into their eyes. The boy laid him there, and rubbed his father’s hands until they softened from their claws.

+

“We’re there,” the old man said.

+

“We’re not at the top,” Eze said. He had to shout to hear himself over the whipping wind. “I can carry you.”

+

“It’s too late. It has to be light to work,” Asa said. His eyes were turning glassy, and they reflected the dying pink of the sky.

+

“But how,” Eze shouted, “do you know your soul will come out before then?”

+

Asa took his obsidian knife from its pouch at his hip. “Pray for me,” the old man said.

+

“What? I don’t know how. Answer my question.”

+

The old man put the knife into the boy’s hand, and gestured at his throat.

+

“You’ll learn,” he said.

+

Eze blanched at the black blade, and pushed it back.

+

“You’re still alive,” he said.

+

“That’s it,” Asa said. “That’s always the first prayer.”

+

He coughed, until Eze was sure it would last til they both were dead and frozen on top of the mountain. But he did stop, and then he sat up, fighting against his atrophied muscles as they rebelled against him. He knelt, facing the dying sun.

+

“Hurry,” the old man said. “Please. I want you to see me.”

+

Eze heard the pleading, and it sunk into him. His father had prepared him for this moment by showing it to him a thousand times, through the deer and the elk and a single crippled buck. The old man’s voice was empty from his labor, and in it Eze heard how desperately his father wanted him to understand.

+

So he didn’t hesitate any longer. He let the knife glide through the old man’s throat. The muscles parted and the animal life poured out of its jug and onto the ground. The cut cords bubbled at contact with the air.

+

“Look,” the old man mouthed without sound, and the boy did.

+

From the clean pool of his father’s heartblood rose the silver smoke of his soul. It curled against the air like a baby struggling to break its birth sac.

+

Asa steamed into the gloaming light of the first star long after his body stopped breathing.

+

Eze watched him fly, then knelt beside him in the same pose. He touched the elbow of Asa’s remains, which were frozen in their kneeling, and let the last sunlight wash away the old man’s remnants. He bent double, and sipped at the pool of blood around his knees.

+

When it was truly dark, he prayed, as his father had taught him. If you heard it, though you wouldn’t know the words he said, you would understand.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

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C. Owen Loftus

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+ + Author image of C. Owen Loftus + + + C. Owen Loftus is a writer and conservation educator, which means he’s lucky enough to have sharks for coworkers. He’s married to a strange and lovely ocean spirit, and believes in aliens but not Bigfoot (he’s optimistic about ghosts). Owen has been published by Utter Speculation Publication and Jayhenge Press. Find those stories and more upcoming projects at www.coloftus.com.

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© C. Owen Loftus 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: AD_Images, Pexels, and TheDigitalArtist.

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Balk

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Lucy Zhang

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+ Story image for Balk by +
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O + +ne year after attempting to run away from home in my pajamas, I join the diving team to get over my fear of the pool’s deep end. Mom and Dad think the pool will keep me distracted from acting without thinking. Things get murky in the deep end: the white tiled floor of the pool blurs, the water darkens, a black hole threatens to suck you out of this universe.

+

I’d seen it happen while swimming two years ago. While I flung my arms forward like propellers in exhausted, half-hearted freestyle strokes, my red knotted-cord bracelet slipped off my wrist. I wasn’t supposed to take the bracelet off because it was my zodiac year, the misfortune-filled Ben Ming Nian; but as I dove to catch it, the water warped, sucking the bracelet into a whirlpool of gray and chlorine.

+

Mom insisted the lifeguard search for it, but he said it must’ve been sucked into the drains. I know better. The drains were too far from where I had dropped the bracelet, not that mom believed me.

+

I also hear the diving team is easy for beginners to pick up even without prior gymnast experience, and you can participate in competitions if you’ve learned enough dives. Make sure you go in headfirst and you’ve got a dive, nothing more to it, I think. A straightforward A leads to B, as different as it could get from Dad’s sporadic outbursts when he noticed I was sharing dinner with the family rather than memorizing flashcards, or memorizing flashcards rather than having dinner with the family. I couldn’t eat without squeezing my eyes shut anymore, even when Dad wasn’t around.

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The senior divers on the team look like birds swiping fish out of the ocean. They leap from the one-meter board and perform their twists and flips as though warping space-time with their maneuvers, bending air with their muscles.

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They enter the water with a splash, briefly disturbing the silence, and I watch, expecting them to resurface in a few seconds but also preparing myself to never see them again, in case someone really does get sucked out of our reality from the deep end.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +el is a diver. An ex-gymnast who’d injured her legs, and switched to a less “intense” sport where she could do above average without trying too hard.

+

Mel is also the quintessential example of failing upwards – something we’re all a bit salty about since she slacked off throughout middle school and into high school. I’d see her Facebook posts of half-nudes and beer pong rounds and rides in glossy Porsches with slick-looking guys whom I’ve never seen around school.

+

The folks who knew Mel through elementary school tell me she used to work hard when we were just learning cursive and grammar, but the effort never got her anywhere. In fact, she was quite bad – bad enough for her classmates to remember many years later. Some people just can’t learn no matter how hard they try, they say.

+

I think it’s because Chinese doesn’t have any verb conjugations so, when it comes to English, Mel uses the infinitive form more often than not. Things like: “Introduce my” instead of “introducing my,” “soon I go to school,” “yesterday I eat the fish.” She was probably mocked. If I’d been in her elementary school, I would’ve mocked her, if it meant no one would detect my mess-ups with third-person conjugations.

+

I moved to Mel’s school district in seventh grade because my dad was offered a relocation bundled with a promotion, and he decided he’d never receive another opportunity to become a manager if he didn’t seize it now. Dad isn’t career-driven, but he likes to brag about things he has that his friends don’t have. One of those things is a “leadership” position – one where white people and senior people report to you rather than the other way around.

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Mom told Dad it’d be a political cesspool, but he insisted, and I guess the huge jump in compensation was enough to convince her. She didn’t want to live in an apartment where hot water ran out within two minutes of showering.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + only see Mel in diving practice. We hardly cross paths in school because she takes remedial courses while the rest of us try to outcompete each other in AP course load. But everyone hears of her adventures: joining college students for shots of soju; smoking weed at the hole-in-the-wall taqueria that’s open from seven am to ten pm; bleaching and dying a strip of her hair a different color every month. She’s cool. Like a character from a video game. My parents would shave my scalp if I decided to dye a strand purple, but I still think it looks nice, different, like changing your appearance means the insides will naturally follow.

+

Mel is always with guys too. Her gaggle of guy friends often sit on the benches to watch her diving practices. I don’t like when they visit. Their stares make me feel like a flounder springing from the board, flailing in the air, plopping into the water like a particularly fiber-fueled piece of crap in the toilet. Mel’s pike, on the other hand, looks like someone has wrapped cast tape around her legs and back, sealing her chest to her upper thighs. You can’t even slip an index card between her upper body and legs.

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The other girls like it when Mel brings along her boy toys, but don’t like that she’s the best diver. They try to pull off their hardest, riskiest dives when the guys are around, but their efforts result in more belly flops instead. While we warm-up, Mel tells me the guys are just trying to get into girls’ pants, which is all they think of.

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“Why do you bring them to practice?” I ask. As much as I don’t feel like unzipping my jeans for them, I also don’t want strangers’ impression of me to be a drowning duck flopping off a Duraflex board.

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“They take videos on their phones so I can review my dives later. I don’t care if they hook up with the other girls.” She looks over as I complete five more rowboats: my flexed feet and loose, bent limbs, my dying abs. “I can help you with your form.”

+

“It’s fine.” No amount of coaching is going to eliminate the freak-outs that erupt in me just before my hands hit the water. I’m afraid that if I rip too perfect a hole through the water, create a vacuum for my body to enter, suffocate the splash deep below the surface, the whirlpool-black-hole-entity at the bottom will eat me up too. I’d rather mess up the dive than get dragged to who-knows-where.

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“Don’t you want to get better though?” Mel asks. Mel is the only one in the gym two hours before practice and one hour after practice, doing cardio, pilates, strength training. She hardly has a chest, and I don’t think she’s ever gotten her period during the sports season. Once she dumped out her bag in the locker room, and instead of the typical protein bars and tampons, small packs of trimetazidine pills and aspirin tumbled out instead.

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Sometimes I think she might snap into a heap of bones and hair upon making contact with the water, but instead she tears her way through the water with hardly a ripple.

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“I don’t really care,” I confess. Forget my fear of the deep end: I already have my varsity letter to tack onto college applications. I’m not so noble as to seek self-improvement. Trying too hard sets you up for failure—a conclusion I’d made after Dad flung a bamboo cutting board at me because I’d flunked my chemistry final despite weeks of studying. I told him it was because one of my classmates stole my glasses so I got dizzy halfway through the exam, but he didn’t believe high schoolers were capable of sabotage, never mind a classmate who already stood at the top of the academic food chain.

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Mel shrugs. “Well, if you change your mind.” She slaps her blue shammy against her thigh and steps forward in line to the diving board. I watch her from behind, the muscles in her calves flexing and loosening. Her swimsuit rides slightly above her hips, wraps around her straight, plank-like waist – not a single dip inward or rounding outward of her flesh, a polyurethane-wrapped ruler that’s all edges and corners. The rest of us jiggle at least a little bit when we move. We are jello people, dumped out of our molds.

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When it’s Mel’s turn, we all watch. I stand to the side so I have a better view of her jump. I can’t even get my jump right: not tall enough, not strong enough, too far out of a projectile, too inconsistent.

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Mel points her toes like they could be daggers. Her somersaults and twists remind me of a Chinese yo-yo getting flung through the air. This all happens in seconds. She enters the water before I register that she’s added another twist from her usual dive – how and when she mastered the extra 360 degrees, I have no idea.

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The water inhales her.

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Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e wait for the pool to spit her out as it spits all of us out. I think it makes the girls feel better – that Mel still has to wade to the side and haul herself up the ladder steps, her body a crater wedged in dirt, that she still has to rapidly pat herself dry else freeze on land.

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I’m more concerned about not freezing myself. Mom won’t buy me a proper shammy so I have to constantly ring a bundle of old cotton t-shirts dry before wrapping it around my body to soak up the chlorine. Mom insists she needs to save money, but I think she just doesn’t want to admit she doesn’t know where to buy shammies – she thinks Amazon describes a rainforest and hasn’t figured out how to launch a browser.

+

I don’t see any bubbles. No splashes of water. Only faded echoes of kids taking swimming lessons on the shallow side of the pool. None of the other girls move as I walk to the edge of the pool and try to peer past the water surface. I can’t see past a distorted reflection, but that’s the problem with deep pools: they muddle everything, eat up light instead of reflecting it.

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“She’s gone,” I say.

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The girls step away from the diving board and walk over. They whisper to each other: what does that mean, “she’s gone” – maybe she cracked her head, got concussed – but then she should float back up – at least at first, right? They don’t look at me, even though I’m the one breaking the news, but it’s normally like this. The other girls are part of a carpool rotation and have sushi-and-samosa parties after every meet, and even though I’m invited they know I can’t go, because the bus doesn’t stop in their neighborhoods, and they don’t have room for me in their parents’ SUVs.

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But Mom is convinced quitting the team means I lack dedication, even though I’ve acquired the varsity letter, which is what colleges care about. Plus she’s worried I’ll get fat without a sport, and how would she explain that to my aunt and uncle who use every opportunity to size up their daughter against me – test scores, height, skin quality, zodiac birth year, Chinese school ranking (even though the rankings are meaningless since we cheat on those exams). All the shivering and freezing on land must be incinerating the pudge. At least you’ll be the only one with an A4 paper waist, Mom says, more to herself than to me, whenever I come up short in some other category.

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Mel’s boy toys stand from the bleachers and walk toward the pool. The other girls start grooming their hair and sucking in their stomachs, even though there’s not much you can hide when you’re as good as naked in a skintight suit. I wait for the boys to look into the pool because I don’t trust my eyes. I tend to miss what other folks see, or see what others insist doesn’t exist – although when I ask mom if I need therapy, if my brain has gone haywire, she chortles and tells me to stop thinking stupid things and wisen up, be rational, no such thing as mental issues.

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But the boys never make it to where I am. They stop near the other girls. They laugh and flirt and lightly brush some girl’s arm. The girls laugh too.

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“Your boy toys aren’t very faithful,” I mumble, head down.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +etween asking the rest of the team to look for Mel and looking for her by myself, I decide it’s easiest to jump into the pool. Conquering my fears and such. I dive in from ground level and open my eyes underwater. There’s no sting. I begin searching, pushing myself deeper against the buoyancy with my arms and legs. This is why the deep end scares me: it doesn’t really end.

+

I see no sign of Mel.

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My limbs grow tired and oxygen short. I reach a hand out toward the depths, propel myself deeper, just a bit, trying to scrape the tiled bottom just to prove to myself it’s there even though I can’t see through the dark, but my fingertips flow through without hitting anything solid, water resistance and nothing else.

+

Time to give up. I begin kicking upward, seeking the surface and oxygen relief, but as soon as I change directions something grabs my ankle.

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I look down at the hand clasped around my ankle, the slim, veiny, muscular arm. Mel’s head and upper body peek out from this impenetrably dark void that reminds me of the mugs of pure, unsweetened, bitterness-in-full-force Ban Lan Gen that Mom would force down my throat when I got a cold.

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Don’t you want to come? she mouths. It’s nice down here. You never get hungry, never need to leave. There’s no one else.

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I shake my head no. I want to breathe. And though the surface seems so far, further by the second, I’m tempted to try.

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What would I be resurfacing to? Boys who don’t see me, and girls who choose not to. Mom and Dad’s idea of my future, not mine. And the vanishing ripples left behind by Mel’s absence.

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I look down into her eyes, pits like fermented black beans. Her free arm drifts loose at her side and the edges of her hips seem blurred by the water. Her body looks more ghost than girl, the water threatening to dissolve her into chlorine.

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I wonder if I can recover from inhaling water, banking on my respiratory system being so evolutionarily adaptable it can filter the oxygen and expunge the water like gills.

+

If I voluntarily fill my lung sacs with water, can that still be called drowning?

+

The void Mel is reaching from is so much closer than the surface, so I grab onto her hand. As she pulls me down, I grip tighter.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Balk on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Lucy Zhang

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+ + Author image of Lucy Zhang + + + Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, The Spectacle, Redivider, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review). Find her at lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

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© Lucy Zhang 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Engin_Akyurt - many thanks.

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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It seems appropriate somehow that my first opportunity to wish a “Happy New Year” to readers of Mythaxis comes with 2023 already a quarter gone. After all, time is accelerating ever faster by the day, as my grandfather probably once assured my teenaged me (now I see he was right all along, but I should have known – that’s science fiction readers for you). Nevertheless: it’s nice to have you back again, and I hope you enjoy our six new stories this time around.

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Also pleasing to announce is that, no doubt after a period of extended visitation, Les Sklaroff has provided a new entry in the Sketches of Snoak City, which you can find at the link!

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In addition to these, I’m happy to welcome our first non-fiction contributor to the team. Mattia Ravasi has many years of long-form fiction reviewing under his belt, and will be sharing essay-writing duties on an alternating basis with… with one whose identity shall remain secret, until our next issue lands! Both of their detailed insights will be joined each issue by a selection of my own more fleeting recommendations in a selection of recent short stories appearing in other venues, as (and I’m sure we can all agree on this) you can never have too many things to read.

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In addition to your kind return, the style of Mythaxis itself has returned to its pre-Artificial Intelligence’d artistic mode. Read into it what you will (and for the time being you will have to do just that) but, after considerable experimentation with algorithmically generated images in 2022 and before, the magazine will forge ahead using only humanly assembled visuals. Any larger conversation about the use of AI in creative endeavours is, once again, being side-stepped here, regardless of how topical it currently is. Never let it be said I am afraid to wait until a boat has sailed before leaping from the pier, but I feel a more urgent call: to continue, and possibly finish, updating you on the progress of our AI publishing adjunct, the trusty Slushbot.

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Unlike the large language models taking our contemporary world by storm, it’s safe to say the Slushbot isn’t shocking its flesh-and-blood masters due to astronomical advances in its sophistication with each new generation. All we’re asking is that it demonstrate a comparable taste to my own when confronted with the Mythaxis slush pile, and frankly, it’s doing awful.

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On a basic level, it at least rejects more stories than it accepts, so that’s something. From 161 submissions in our last window, it passed on 90. That’s still enough acceptances to fill nearly three years of the zine, though, and I must say I take issue with what passed muster. It agreed with only one of my acceptances, and rated ten of my rejections higher; its top three picks were, shall we delicately say, not even remotely my cup of tea.

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It rated somewhat better with regard to my shortlist, in a sense: half of the 28 stories I put aside for further consideration were among its acceptances; none of these was ultimately quite for me, but they were all at least decent subs, and in several cases just plain good. The same cannot be said of the 56 pieces it accepted from the 130 I couldn’t wait to finish for all the wrong reasons.

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Of course, this isn’t terribly surprising. As noted before, the diminutive sample size the Slushbot is exposed to, and the variance and complexity of what we ask it to analyse (to say nothing of the foibles of the editor we demand it emulate), mean the chances of it identifying any kind of pattern in what rises to the top in my estimation are tiny in the extreme. There are interesting ways of looking at that complexity, though, as was teased in the previous editorial.

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The Mystery Line Graphs we presented then are the output of another instance of smart technology: the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) system, the website of which describes it as the gold standard in software for analysing word use, and it uses interesting metrics by which to do so.

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The Narrative Arc analysis within LIWC-22 builds on previous research showing that storytellers tend to go through a unique “unfolding” of word use when constructing their narratives (Boyd et al., 2020):

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  • First, they start by using lots of words that pertain to nouns and how they relate to one another: this is called “Staging” language.
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  • Once the storyteller has set the stage, they often use less “Staging” language and begin to use more words that signal action, and words that imply a shared understanding of who is engaged in those actions, and how those actions are transpiring, and so on. This is the language that drives a story forward: “Plot Progression” language.
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  • Importantly, all the while, most storytellers build and release psychological tension through some form of conflict: either by having characters struggle to attain their goals, or structuring situations in such a way to where it is uncertain whether characters’ goals will be achieved. Traditionally, this “Cognitive Tension” rises and then peaks around the middle-to-later parts of a narrative.
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I can’t speak for anyone else, but I immediately found this fascinating. The narrative arc example representing “a large collection of TED Talk speeches” instantly rang true, and not in a good way. After initially enjoying TED Talks, I’ve now not listened to one for years due to the formulaic way they tend to be structured, and that’s exactly what they feel like to me: samey.

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Same wandering delivery. Same easily-digestible lengths. Same start-and-finish timing of triggers to please their (same?) audience. Even that same opening audio rush sets my teeth on edge now. But then I am a curmudgeon…

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…who likes good fiction!

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We decided to try out LIWK on the record of stories accepted and rejected by Mythaxis to see what it might show us, and such was the clearer of the two redacted graphs we shared last time. So here it is again, this time with the legend intact – the green line represents the zine’s Acceptances, the red line our Rejections:

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What might this tell us? Let’s look at them one by one:

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Both lines start high and fall, which is consistent with the theory’s claim that stories tend to use staging language to set the scene, which then features less as they progress. It appears that the staging language of our acceptances tends to decline much slower, even rising again before the end, while in rejections the staging language drops abruptly and remains low thereafter.

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Speculation now, and remember these graphs show aggregations of data from multiple source texts, but this might reflect a general need to establish more complex scenarios is typical for acceptances.

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In terms of plot progression, both lines show the predicted upward trend from the theory: with the stage set, the action sets off and increases progressively. There is little to differentiate here, though (as seems logical) the rejected stories show a more abrupt rise in plot progressing language, reflecting their faster transition away from staging language.

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A further speculative observation: the accepted stories appear to satisfy the increasing demand of timely plot progression despite greater use of staging language throughout the (average) text.

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It is in cognitive tension we see the most obvious diversion between the accepted and rejected stories. Again, these are averages (and the rejections include many times more source texts than the pieces we’ve accepted for publication), however it appears that while both groups enjoy an early spike in cognitive tension, indicating the potential for early reader interest, the rejected stories then show a steadily accelerating decline towards a very low end state. Acceptances instead follow that first spike with a sharp central decline, which is then followed by another abrupt spike that is more or less maintained to the end of the graph.

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Taking these three graphs together, allow me to make summary speculations regarding both groups:

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  • Acceptances: After setting the opening scene, the average acceptance grabs the reader’s attention quickly, then takes the time to reestablish their understanding of an evolving situation that goes on to defy expectation.
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  • Rejections: By contrast, while still achieving a solid foundation with regard to staging and plotting, the average rejection fails to surprise after its central hook is established.
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You might see a hint of bias in my use of language there, but given the context that might be expected.

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This editorial has stretched on long enough, I think, but to close it out we’ll share one more graphic to underline once more an important point. The tidy graphs above suggest that what we like is just one thing… but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

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The graph below shows the last six stories Mythaxis accepted in 2022:

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I think it’s safe to say that they could hardly be more different, in each of the three categories.

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Long may we receive such bountiful variety.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 33 - Thanks and Salutations! +Many thanks to Hector Fernández (or, rather, to his digital-artist persona, The Noise) for ‘Robot in Love’, which the editor saw in the window of Artshop Barcelona and immediately fell in love with in return. It hangs now on his wall, and is admired daily. You can see more of Hector’s work on his personal and professional Instagram accounts, and of course on his website. There you can also see work by his father, Fernando Fernández, who as a comics illustrator also delved into the fantastic. ¡Muchas gracias, Hector!

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Emoticon

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Barry Charman

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J + +anet has been rejected again.

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I call up my list of emoticons, click on empathise, then scroll through a sub menu to add a mildly scolding face and a half-smiling smiley. If she finds my message to be at all obtuse, she can highlight the icons individually, and read each emotion as a broken down statement.

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I wonder if she’ll bother.

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Moving on, I visit the hubs I follow daily, and settle into my routine interactions. I read a glib report decrying emoticons as the banal hieroglyphics of the future, and call up the yawn symbol. Click. I then read accounts of the wider world. There is much violence there, naked hatred that walks the old streets. Raw people. Their lives must be so terrible, the emotions so confusing, so erratic.

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Sometimes I will pose in front of the mirror, and speculate why my expressions are not the same as my many avatars. I try to contort my features to emulate them, to normalise myself to their smooth emotions. But the results are uncanny. This displeases me. Automatically I reach for a menu to display this, but then remember I am outside of the system, in the real. This gives me goosebumps. I watch as my flesh shivers, and small puckered dots appear on my arms. The symmetry is pleasing, but the sensation is vulgar. I do not control it, no symbol conveys it. The experience is reductive. It cannot be translated non-verbally, it is primitive.

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Dismissing these thoughts, I click on the empathy menu and perform my daily search for new emotions. There must never be too many, and I am pleased there is always a carefully maintained number. Today there is a new depressed emoticon. Its expression is clear, the design is clean and simple. Next to this there is an emoticon that is disfigured. This troubles me. It has been deformed intentionally. To convey what? Is disfigurement an emotion? This distresses me because it cannot be clearly understood.

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I need to communicate my distress to another; I choose Cody. Cody’s avatar has a soothing green halo. Cody is online. He is part of what I am part of. This is comforting. I type that I am confused by the new emoticons.

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After a moment he replies: They are meant to be relatable to people who are disfigured.

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I reply: I do not know any disfigured people. Where is the uniformity of this experience? How can I experience it?

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He does not reply.

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He is green. He is there. But he does not reply.

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Agitated, I repeat my query, but he does not reply. I send him a confused emoticon, but he does not reply.

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He is being barbaric.

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To distract myself from the uncertainty of our exchange, I tour some of my favourite sites. I read an article about the ongoing reduction of dialogue in personal exchanges; one person claims that language is a virus, and acronyms are a new symptom. I find this witty, so I leave a LOL in the comments.

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Comforted, I visit another site that I find reassuring, always so neat and carefully laid out. I leave a comment, explaining my confusion about the latest emoticons. Suddenly the feed is littered with a barrage of even newer symbols. I can make no sense of them. One person says this is emoticon roulette, another announces a game of blank emoticon fever. I think these people are radicals. Agitators.

+

One of them tries to engage with me, bombarding me with inane questions. How does a smile feel? How many tears are enough for a release? They are skin crawlers. Organic ghouls.

+

I give them nothing, hoping it will starve them.

+

Aren’t the happiest songs sad? they press. Isn’t tragedy cathartic? I shudder. They are senseless. Beyond that, they have surrendered to a discordant chorus within which they could hear nothing true. They are unpleasant.

+

Becoming distressed, I leave them to their actions. Despite the new day, the new dawn, they are not wholly disconnected from flesh. Sensation drives them, influences them still. Their thoughts are unstable, I can tell this.

+

I return to my main friend hub. Janet is green. She welcomes me with a happy emoticon besides a depressed one. This angers me.

+

I ask: Are you happy or sad?

+

She replies: I am both.

+

I stare at this. Explain.

+

She says: He has come back to me. Even though I know he will break my heart, I put it back in his hands.

+

I scroll through my emoticon menu, looking for something to counter the cognitive dissonance of her words, but there is nothing. I am upset with her, and with the menu of small round faces. I want to respond with confusion, but I also wish to better externalise my disgust, my anger, my fear, my worry. But sending all is the same as sending none.

+

My fingers hover over the keys. I remember that article – if language is a virus, if I allow it she will infect me. Prolonged communication is unnecessary. It is not clear. It is not precise.

+

I think of Janet and her lover. Their intimacy is physical, I know. Two lives sharing one. When their bodies merge, as they must, is there an avatar for this? For the shifting, developing shapes that come? How do they live in such a way? Why is it allowed?

+

Janet says: Are you happy for me? Her words are provocative, as if I should understand her. Her reactions have become fluid. Fluidity is volatile. Why isn’t she clear?

+

I say: You ask me to be happy because you are both happy and sad?

+

She replies: Please.

+

I reply: You scare me.

+

She replies: I’m sorry.

+

I change my halo to red, and I push myself away from my terminal. Just a little way, I do not want to be outside of its glow. I just want a little dark corner to myself, to think. There is not much darkness in my pod, there is nothing unnecessary here.

+

As infants, they taught us through the emoticons. They taught us to relate through pictures, but they never encouraged us to put the pictures away.

+

How did people like Janet do it? She thinks it is common, when it is not. I think of those people in the early pods, those very first to withdraw, to find tranquillity. How happy must they have been. How relieved. Strange, to think that people once lived together. That they interlocked. Odd, that some still did.

+

Janet distracts me. I think again of the warmth she must share – her body connected to another’s – the primitive urges that she is clinging onto. It is good to be more progressive. Still, she confuses, her actions unnerve. I can perceive her unnaturalness, but can think of no symbol to relate it.

+

This is not relatable, so it must be false.

+

We were young together, Janet and I, but we are not alike. I do not know her now. I must tell the others. Warn them. Even if I must use words, I am using them for good. Once people know she was lingering – indulging – in flesh, she will be corrected. Their reaction will correct her.

+

I move deftly through my closest hubs and relay my experience, share her behaviour. Little avatars begin blinking in outrage. The others agree. My friends compliment me on my quick action, my sure thought. I feel a soothing rush of relief. As if I could ever have doubted them.

+

I sit back and watch as her data is bounced around. As her weakness is pored over. Exposed. It spreads quickly. Her identity. Her errors. Her regressions. No one wants her disruption, so they disrupt her first. Janet’s life unravels rapidly as everyone grabs a thread. The hubs all rejecting her. Sudden isolation will make her indiscrete deviations untenable.

+

It isn’t judgement. It is sobering intervention. I bathe in the glow of this. It is beautiful to see. To feel. They are grateful. I am loved. Secure. We all nurture each other. Everything wrong will be excised.

+

Janet tries to contact me, again and again, but I ignore her. We are all together. In harmony. It is so pure.

+

I go green, and abandon words. I return to my avatars. It is bliss. We are all small round faces. Clear and happy. I am not infected. I am normal. I am natural.

+

I select a smiley that comforts me, and click.

+

Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Emoticon on Facebook.

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Barry Charman

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+ + Author image of Barry Charman + + + Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, including Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling and Popshot Quarterly. He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in The Literary Hatchet and The Linnet’s Wings. He has a blog at barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk.

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© Barry Charman 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The story art was created from a public domain image of Matthias Rudolph Toma’s 1839 lithograph depicting the Character Heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-33/greg-not-a-people-person.html b/issue-33/greg-not-a-people-person.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6a654ed9 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-33/greg-not-a-people-person.html @@ -0,0 +1,439 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Greg: Not a People Person — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 33 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Greg: Not a People Person

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L.P. Ring

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+ Story image for Greg: Not a People Person by +
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x + +July 8 (evening)

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There are over 4,000 species of cockroach. Only about thirty species ever share our space.

+

It skitters from beneath my laundry basket, but doesn’t attempt flight until I trap it beneath my Great British Beer Festival polycarbonate pint glass. I balance a paperback on the receptacle’s base, sit cross-legged, and watch its impotent flutters. I can’t tell yet if it eventually tires or comes to some wearied acceptance of its new circumstances, returning my stare from its temporary home, wondering whether this is a stalemate or the prelude to something far more fatal.

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Cockroaches live in almost any environment, even somewhere as cold as the Arctic Circle.

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I’m edgy already from their arguing next door: his voice lower, snarky-toned; hers higher-pitched and pleading. He isn’t doing enough around the house. But he also works damn hard putting food in the cupboard and the refrigerator so that she can make FUCKING SLOP every time she turns on the stove. Something ceramic smashes on the floor. It’s his fist which slams into the wall.

+

I pierce air holes in a Tupperware lid. He calls her a bad word, the bad word, and tells her he hates her. He’s moving out as soon as he can. She lets out loud, fitful sobs, while I edge the lid underneath the beer glass and move my new roommate to the kitchen table. It aims a few angry thumps at the plastic. I turn it right side up on the table, securely add tape around the sides.

+

“If you learn to trust me,” I promise, “I’ll move you to more spacious surroundings.”

+

I take deep breaths, wondering at how women like her end up with knuckle-dragging apes like him. Do they actively seek out abusers? Are they naturally drawn to trash?

+

A plate smashes against the wall.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

x + +July 9 (morning)

+

The Russians once sent cockroaches into space. Where they mated and bred.

+

A front door slamming wakes me. He’s already striding towards the station, air pods shoved into his ears. She cried half the night, occasionally calling his name, begging him to come to bed. My house guest is still on the kitchen table.

+

The milk smells iffy but I use it anyway. I spoon up the cereal while Michael sits there, his feelers occasionally twitching. Is he hungry? I haven’t decided to give him official licence to the refrigerator and cupboards just yet. I get ready beneath the eye of the clock; faking a cold would allow me to wear a mask and avoid shaving. I’m running two minutes early when she knocks.

+

Cockroaches are quite social creatures. But ones bred in isolation and introduced to a quorum will often not recognise social cues.

+

“Please, I just need a cup of sugar,” she all but whispers when I crack the door against the chain.

+

I think of the unopened half kilo stashed in the cupboard above the sink. “Just a minute.” I grab the bag, wary of the paper tearing and drowning me in sugar. I glance Michael’s way. “You’d love some of this, wouldn’t you?” I ask on my way back.

+

I unhook the chain and open the door just enough. “Here.”

+

She lets out a nervous titter: “Not that much.”

+

“I don’t even use the stuff,” I mutter.

+

She’s tied her hair back. No make-up, her face still blotched from crying. She’s wearing those blue stretch pants with the t-shirt that shows off her midriff as she runs. She takes the packet and a nail grazes my hand – our first physical contact. “Did I hear you talking to someone?”

+

Stab of panic. “My boss phoned. He wants me in fifteen minutes early. So…”

+

“I’m sorry.” She steps back, a half-invitation to walk past.

+

I have my keys. I have my wallet. I have my phone. I inch out the gap and shut the door behind me. I’ll spend the rest of the day worried I’ve left on the gas.

+

“I hope we didn’t worry you last night. Darrell and I had such a terrible fight.”

+

I shake my head and circle around her. “I’m a heavy sleeper, Juhn-nuhn-funf—” I try for her name but my voice plops out a half-strangled blob of consonants and vowels.

+

She calls out a goodbye as I flee.

+

Does this mean I’ll have to pretend I work fifteen minutes earlier for the next week?

+

Cockroaches might be able to survive a nuclear war. But I can’t be sure they would survive radiating in my awkward shame.

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Orbit-sml ><

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x + +July 9 (evening)

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She’s been baking. I steal into my apartment before she can force me to take some. Darrell arrives home soon after, and for a while all I hear is murmuring. I eat a bowl of cereal while I contemplate which of the battalion of stir-in sauces best suits brown pasta.

+

Michael occasionally flicks a well-observed, disdainful antenna my way. “Keep up that attitude,” I warn, wagging a spoon, “and you’ll miss out on this evening’s culinary extravaganza.”

+

Some cockroach species are raised as pets. But Michael is not a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.

+

Voices rise again around 8.30. I fork two pasta spirals to mop up some leftover sauce. This time it’s about money and that bloke at the gym. He calls her the bad word, a LYING CHEATING BAD WORD. A better neighbour would call the police. Michael would be a better neighbour if he could.

+

I take the tomato-smeared plate and fork to the sink and wash up noisily. Water blasts off the metal base of the sink, off the plate and drowns my left shirt sleeve and crotch. “Fuck!” I holler, hoping they don’t think that’s directed at them. I leave the plate in the sink. Maybe it’ll attract more friends for Michael.

+

A loud thump next door is followed by a sustained period of silence. I put an ear to the wall. Michael lets out a little flutter, his wings tapping against the plastic – perhaps he disapproves of nosiness. I make a shushing gesture.

+

“Greg, can you hear me?” I leap back two feet, my back jamming into the desk, causing Michael’s tub to rattle back and forth. “Greg, are you there?”

+

I silently curse building management for making us put names on our downstairs letter boxes. No, it doesn’t encourage sociability, or a greater sense of community spirit – we’re British. Michael flits against the plastic again, earning a wagging finger and a hissed rebuke.

+

I hear footsteps heading to her door and the whine of the hinges. I snap off the light, cower in the darkness, barely letting out a breath. A gentle rapping against my door is followed by low and urgent whispers of my name. It takes ten minutes before she gives up.

+

I feel my way to the kitchen, pat around under the sink until I find the flashlight.

+

An Ancient Greek poet coined a name for cockroaches (Lucifuga) based on their preferences for the dark. I don’t know if that’s pronounced with a hard or a soft ‘C’.

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Orbit-sml ><

+

x + +July 10 (until Morning)

+

I awake with a start, fumble for my phone; it is barely past two.

+

In my dream, Jennifer kept knocking at the door, begging me to open it. The handle kept slipping from my hand. The flapping of wings behind me and overhead almost drowned out her cries. But I could hear Darrell’s voice bellowing above it all, calling her more disgusting names, threatening her.

+

Most cockroaches are nocturnal.

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I pop a beer tab and sip it at the dinner table, thinking of my exhaustion and considering whether tomorrow might be a good time for a sick day. I’ve made my decision by the time I finish the beer.

+

I knock lightly, a sliver of me hoping that she won’t hear, or will but won’t answer. If I can discern it as the latter, I can pare away some of the guilt. When I hear her footsteps, I don’t scuttle back indoors.

+

“I’m here to help,” I half-stutter. Her face is in shadow, the ceiling light like a halo overhead. She steps aside and lets me pass. Her hands and arms are smeared in blood, one eye puffy from a blow. I only notice the meat cleaver after she’s shut us in.

+

A decapitated cockroach can live for up to a week. A disarticulated one can regrow its limbs through different stages of moulting. It can even regrow its feelers too, though I understand that’s a longer process.

+

Darrell met his end via a kitchen knife lodged into his sternum. She’s laid her deceased beau out on the plastic shower curtain on the bathroom floor. “It’s easiest to separate bone at the joints, so I’ve focused on the knees and elbows so far.”

+

Maybe Jennifer doesn’t need my help. She’s already managed to remove parts of three of the limbs. She nudges me with her elbow, a definite improvement on a stray nail. “How would you feel about handling the head? I can separate myself mentally pretty easily by not looking at his face, but… you know.”

+

Decapitation doesn’t take very long with a good meat cleaver, though what’s also true is that even six hours after death a body still bleeds a hell of a lot. Jennifer bites her lower lip as we watch it flow. “That’s bound to get walked onto the carpet.”

+

I glance towards our handiwork, now stacked in the tub. Thirteen recycle bags not counting the torso. I wonder if Michael misses me. I wonder if he’s jealous of my being here.

+

Cockroaches are omnivores. Which is a posh way of saying they’ll eat anything. But as far as we go as a food source, they’re most partial to the fingernails, eyelashes, and dead skin. They prefer us for what we throw away, what we waste.

+

“You don’t drive, do you?” My confirmation brings disappointment. “We’ll need to take different directions: bury some, drop some into the river attached to a weight, maybe even burn some. Shame it isn’t closer to Halloween.”

+

“I have a bicycle.”

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“Hmm…” She blows a piece of errant fringe off her forehead, frowns when it drops back down. There are a few blood smears on her chin, one streaked down the right side of her nose. “We should wash up and change. Your bathroom okay?”

+

Cockroaches can go without breathing for about forty minutes. They can survive submerged in water, though not for very long.

+

I leave the door off the chain. I put Michael – despite his protestations – where she won’t see him. I’m not ready to drag my roommate into a murder just yet. She taps lightly before entering, bringing coconut shampoo, towels, and a change of clothes.

+

“Bathroom’s through there,” I point, still avoiding much eye contact. “Take whatever time you need. I’ll make coffee.”

+

“I like what you’ve done with the place. Very minimalistic.” Soon water’s gushing from the shower faucet. Dawn’s inching forwards, bringing a new day. This is the best I’ve felt about a new day in a long time.

+

Cockroaches definitely sleep and will often be found at rest in moist, dark areas.

+

She takes her coffee black, no sugar. I mumble about work, the weather, if the landlord’s increasing the rent again. She doesn’t answer – which is bad. She doesn’t sigh or yawn like Pippa from accounting though – which is good. At seven o’clock I make a quick, terse call to the boss to say my tonsillitis is playing up. We’ll need to discuss my performance once I return to work.

+

“Prick,” I mumble after hanging up.

+

“I’ll see you later then,” Jennifer says, finishing her coffee. “It’s best we take care of things after dark. And I can’t take two days off work in a row.”

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Oh.

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Orbit-sml ><

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x + +July 10 (Evening)

+

Cockroaches have excellent olfactory range, even able to identify different quorums by scent.

+

I spend the day fashioning a new home for Michael from a plastic container bought in Wilkos. He seems happier with this wider space, and after thoroughly exploring his new abode settles in to munch on some deli stuff I almost tossed. I hear Jennifer come home and wonder what she’ll be doing now that dickhead isn’t around to cook and bake for.

+

My summons comes via text. She’s changed back into the blood-stained gym clothes. “You’re not going to believe this,” she says, letting me in, “but I’ve had visitors. My stupid fault for turning the bathroom light off.” She gestures towards the tub.

+

I let out a low moan at the smathered innards. An antennae droops limply up and down from one, a stray leg budges slightly from another. I retch and find I have nothing tangible to bring up.

+

Entomologists believe cockroaches lack pain receptors. These charlatans also believe that cockroaches don’t suffer, as they lack emotions. The cockroaches lack emotions, I mean, not the dickhead entomologists.

+

“How do you suppose the fuckers got in?”

+

“Probably up the plughole.” I watch as Jennifer runs the shower faucet, sluicing them back to their community. It’s an act of fair warning, like a native tribe sending the brutalised corpses of Amazonian explorers back downriver. I won’t introduce Jennifer to Michael yet.

+

The recycle bags crinkle as Jennifer transfers a lower arm, an upper arm, a foot, and a leg to the first black bag. “I picked up a small shovel at the store as well. Cycle at least a few miles. And dig deep, or some wretched mutt gets something to munch on when let off the leash.”

+

Jennifer stays behind, finishing the draining of each bag. I make damn sure to have my lamp on as I ride, constantly imagining police cars waiting around every corner to give me a caution and ask what’s in that backpack mate. Three trips in and with only south to go, I’ve finally found a use for my iPhone’s compass. His head goes in the river with two of her aerobics dumbbells added as weights. That leaves only the torso; she’s thinking of renting a car for that trip.

+

I wonder at how I haven’t slept. About how good Jennifer looks, even in those bloody exercise clothes. At how stripping off her top shows how at ease she feels around me. I wonder if Michael’s missing me, and how exactly I’m going to handle introductions. Maybe a dinner for three, if I can be sure of Michael’s table manners. “Michael, meet Jennifer. Cockroach killer, meet cockroach.”

+

Jennifer’s dispensed with her sweatpants by the time I return from my final dump. The way her panty line shifts while she scrubs the bath shows she sunbathes naked. The torso’s well-wrapped: recycle bags, then black bagged, then duct taped. I can imagine years from now some construction worker immediately having a premonition that this should never be opened.

+

She stands up, and wipes sweat from her brow without bothering much to hide that she knows I’m admiring her. Her ex’s electric toothbrush is still buzzing in her hand.

+

“What do you want for all this, Greg?”

+

Cockroaches copulate facing away from each other.

+

I try the well-meaning neighbour route, talk about what I heard, and how what she did was self-defence. The toothbrush, off now, gets balanced alongside an empty bottle of bleach on the end of the admittedly quite clean bath. She leans on the doorjamb, biding her time until I stumble to an awkward silence.

+

“I’m not looking for a relationship, you understand. I’ve been hurt. I’ll need time.”

+

Here we go again. A woman telling me what she wants before I’ve gotten a word out.

+

“If you wanna fuck, we can fuck.” She starts unhitching her bra. I stare at my shoes, mumbling that I don’t want it to be like that.

+

“Then you’re willing to wait. Until I’m ready.”

+

I hope she doesn’t take my vehement nods as a sign of surrender.

+

“Thank you, Greg.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

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x + +July 13 (morning)

+

I call in sick the next few days, tolerating my boss’ complaints while assuring him I’ll have a doctor’s note when I return “tomorrow”. He doesn’t use the term “idiot” when finally informing me that tomorrow’s a Saturday, but I get the drift from his tone.

+

Jennifer rents a car with a sizable boot. I hear her staggering down the stairs in the small hours and driving away, no knock for help this time. I hear her go to work and come home.

+

I hear music coming from her apartment.

+

I wait. She’s gone through something traumatic. She’ll need time before being able to love again. But I can’t help feeling bitter at the exclusion. Michael wanders around his new home. He doesn’t even care he’s stepping in his own leavings.

+

Cockroach faeces tend to measure about one inch. They usually defecate near their homes.

+

The moving truck is a shock. Jennifer’s voice echoes up the staircase, directing where to go and what to be careful with. I peer out through the gap in the door, catch her eye once before shutting it quickly. She looks flushed, worried. I guess the apartment just has too many unhappy memories. The men – big blokes who wouldn’t think twice about squashing me to help a lady in distress – yell directions and barter off-colour humour.

+

Boxes appear in the driveway. There’s the dining table she would have sat at with him. There are the slats from the IKEA bed on which they fucked.

+

I phone the landlord to check he knows the tenants next door are moving out – a Machiavellian act that earns Michael’s congratulations. His arrival provokes yelling on the stairs and insistences that they aren’t getting a penny of their deposit back. Jennifer tells him to shove the deposit up his arse. “I’m leaving and there isn’t a damn thing you can do!”

+

The remainder of the conversation, conducted in lower tones, can best be described as strained. The same goes for my hearing as I manage to catch that she’ll return the keys to the real estate agency by five.

+

My iPhone signals I have less than two hours to get her alone. To beg her to stay.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

x + +July 13 (evening)

+

Cockroaches tend to be at their most active about four hours after dark. Tread carefully when taking a night-time piss or getting a glass of water.

+

At 4.30, the wheels of Jennifer’s suitcase trundle down the stairs as she drags it after her. Michael wishes me a bonne chance as I unlock the door and chase after her. I feel like one of those guys running through an airport, trying to reach the departure gate before final boarding closed.

+

“Don’t leave!” That I’m brandishing my key instead of a bunch of flowers isn’t the only problem. The expressions that greet my appearance in the driveway suggest that I’ve failed with any positive, romantic impression. Her grimace shows just how much she wants to be gone.

+

The burliest of the movers steps towards me, t-shirt sleeves riding up to show his West Ham tattoos. “Steady on now, mate. You’re not going to cause this nice lady any trouble.” I’m not even sure how conscious he is of his right fist clenching and unclenching. The two others exchange grins. Their working day’s going to end with a floor show.

+

“Jennifer, don’t make me tell!” She sticks the suitcase in the boot and slams it. She stalks up to me and shoves a finger in my chest; the nail will surely have left a mark.

+

“What do you want to tell people, Greg? That you’re a sad little prick who creeps on other men’s girlfriends?” Someone from the cheap seats lets out a chortle. “What else is there to tell?”

+

“Where’s your boyfriend, Jennifer?” I lean forward. She rears back, nose wrinkling, sneering her distaste. That hurts. “I bet you didn’t check the drains, did you? There aren’t just cockroach remains down there.” Her eyes widen, that sneer disappearing as her jaw goes slack. “Come upstairs, Jennifer. You owe me that.”

+

I head back inside. Despite being relatively sure of myself, I’m still relieved to hear her follow, and to hear her tell the Hammers fans she’s fine, just fine, and to wait there. Upstairs, I push my door open and motion her ahead, savouring the smell of coconut as she passes.

+

“You’ve got two minutes. Keep the damn door open and your hands visible.”

+

“I’m not the one who killed her boyfriend, Jennifer.”

+

“But you are the creepy little incel trying to blackmail his neighbour into bed. Two minutes.”

+

I can feel my heart thumping, shame’s heat rising to my face. If only we could begin again, introductions for the first time, as if none of this bad feeling had ever come about. The least I can try is to do the introductions on someone else’s behalf.

+

“What the hell is that?” she says as I hold the tupperware out to her.

+

I try not to let the incredulity bother me. “Jennifer, meet Michael. Michael, Jennifer.” He offers a quick flutter from his box.

+

Those same rotten entomologists claim that cockroaches have little memory or ability to absorb information. They can suck my cock!

+

I reach out my free hand, hoping a physical connection might somehow bridge the gap between us. There’s that momentary brush of nail on skin again before she rakes those claws down the back of my hand full force, sending Michael’s home skating across the room and against the wall.

+

The lid pops off and, for the first time in what was for the rest of England almost a full working week, Michael is free.

+

“Michael!” I cry as he rises into the air. Then Jennifer places her hands on my shoulders, turning me and pulling me towards her, and I don’t even see the knee aimed towards my crotch.

+

As I vomit on all fours, a loud cry is followed by the sound of a slap, by the sound of wings fluttering against the floor, by a stamp. I twist round, my attention swaying between the look of revulsion on her face and my little world of nauseated pain.

+

I curl up and wait for things to end; her hot breath brushes against my ear. “Greg, never forget you’re at least an accessory. After what’s happened today, don’t for a second think I can’t tell a story that’ll convince people you’re the one the cops should be cuffing.”

+

Her footsteps stomp on the stairs, then there’s the slamming of the front door. Through the gap in the bathroom window, before the engines started, I’m sure I hear shared laughter.

+

Orbit-sml ><

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x + +A cockroach’s body is divided into three segments. They can go without nourishment for a month. They can regrow limbs, live without a head for a week, maybe even survive a nuclear conflict. But they can’t survive the well-aimed sole of an ill-considered shoe.

+

There’s no sound from next door. The noises from the street disturb me. I think of going outside, railing against each blundering fool on the staircase and the pavement who won’t allow me a moment’s peace. My apartment is dark except for one desk lamp’s bulb. Michael lies in state, laid out in the Tupperware box he loved.

+

Except of course that he wasn’t a Michael at all. Rather, she was a Michelle. I should have known from the wing size and the fuller body.

+

There’s scampering along the skirting boards. My fellow mourners are skittish in their approach. I mean them no harm. This is a time for grief, for remembering what we have lost. My Michelle, gregarious, flirty, and thoughtful, was from a community far greater than the fractured mess of egos and lies of this cruel human world.

+

I finish another can, and wonder if the off-licence is still open. I ignore that hammering at the door.

+

I wonder if I can fashion something as a black armband. And if, after a time, Michelle’s kin will accept me.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Greg: Not a People Person on Facebook.

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L.P. Ring

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+ + Author image of L.P. Ring + + + L.P. Ring is an Irish-born author presently based in Japan. He’s written crime novels featuring the Seoul-based detective S.I. Choi, a (so far) stand-alone noir featuring the detective Lou Harte, and has been published with Kaidankai, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Fleas on the Dog, and the Black Beacon anthology ‘Tales from the Ruins’. He’ll feature in 2023 with Shotgun Honey, Creepy Podcast, and Schlock!. He tweets at @L_P_Ring.

+

© L.P. Ring 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: David-Karich, Erik_Karits, Brett_Hondow, and Wikimedia Commons.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Spring 2023

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+ C. Owen Loftus +

A Deer's Inheritance

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+ + +

Let's start at the very beginning, well known to be a very good place to start since long before the written word, maybe even since before language itself. C. Owen Loftus gives us a story that is, of course, composed wholly of words, because we poor creatures must resort to clumsy tools in order to express the things that are, in some sense, unspeakable.

+ + + + Story image for A Deer's Inheritance by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Balk

+ Lucy Zhang +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Balk by + + + +

Issues of Mythaxis do not cleave to themes, and yet sometimes circumstance intervenes, at least in part. Such was the case this time, and Lucy Zhang's solemn sequence of moments and reflections here provides the first of three stories each very distinct, but all of which ring with alienation.

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The Day the Shimm Stood Still

+ Andrew Jensen +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Day the Shimm Stood Still by + + + +

Not every adolescent dynamic is a bleak one, even when events take a turn for the worse. Still, the starkest traumas of childhood can be as simple and commonplace as arising from the gaining and losing of friends. But Andrew Jensen's story suggests that maybe good nature heals all wounds.

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Greg: Not a People Person

+ L.P. Ring +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Greg: Not a People Person by + + + +

L.P. Ring's story arrived draped in caveats, that it was more psychologically weird than a piece of speculative fiction. Nicely timed, because being also crime fiction it intersected neatly with my urge to extend Mythaxis to include that genre too. Thus we return to our non-theme for a second dose of alienation – or do we? I guess that might be a matter of perspective…

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+ + + +
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+

Touch Wood

+ Sandee Bree Breathnach +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Touch Wood by + + + +

'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' So said the marvellously named Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, Yet even the snappiest aphorism does not a story make, so rejoice that Sandee Bree Breathnach put her slightly shorter moniker to this ecofantastical expression of the same.

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The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams by + + + +

In this, my third year as Mythaxis Editor, it's time to shake things up around here with the first of two more-or-less non-fiction features. In his guise as 'The Bookchemist', Mattia Ravasi has been vlogging about long-form fiction for almost eight years, and I'm delighted to have him here reviewing contemporary speculative fiction. So, without further ado…

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Short Reviews – January to March

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – January to March by + + + +

Our second new feature is a brief collection of further reading recommendations. There are many good magazines out there publishing a lot of great short stories, and it’s far too easy for little gems of both categories to go overlooked. Therefore, in each issue we would like to nominate a trio of recent pieces from around the web that you’ll find well worth sampling.

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+ Barry Charman +

Emoticon

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+ + +

Whatever else may change, Mythaxis is always going to end on a story. Barry Charman sees us out with a third tale that has more than a hint of alienation to it – though whether alienation is a state of suffering or grace is very much in the eye of the beholder.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-33/short-reviews-spring-2023.html b/issue-33/short-reviews-spring-2023.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..56ef3c10 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-33/short-reviews-spring-2023.html @@ -0,0 +1,299 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – January to March — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 33 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Short Reviews – January to March

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – January to March by +
+ + + + +

B + +eing one of a select few publications to have generously hosted your humble editor’s own creative output, I ought to be shame-faced in saying that Metaphorosis Magazine lives up to its billing as a home to “intelligent, beautifully written stories for adults”. Fortunately, there is better evidence than mine.

+

A prime example is Chris Panatier’s contemporary fantasy The Excursionist of JCPenney. It introduces us to Lorraine, a quietly awkward older Floridian of limited means and experiences, whose ordinary existence is unwittingly balanced on the precarious edge of corporate whim, as are so many. The simple telling of her life in a period of approaching crisis gradually opens our eyes to something far less mundane at play, and the result is a wholly good-natured reward for someone who has put up with a life’s trials, old and new, large and small, as do so many.

+

The Fabulist observes that “Art saves lives and changes the world”, and does its bit towards that ideal goal by presenting more of the seemingly mundane in Andy Searce’s Ansible, named for the iconic, technologically magical tool of communication that featured in the work of Ursula K. LeGuin. Unsurprisingly, a similar marvel features here.

+

This flash piece glimpses a father and son, lonely but for each other, yet also self-sufficient. They persist through what could be the dustbowl of the Great Depression, or if not that then some present or future period of similar hardship. Through them we are allowed to witness a fleeting, touching moment… and then that moment is over, and the reader is left to decide for themself whether what transpired is transformative for all concerned – or simply a thing that happened once, in lives that must and will continue on regardless.

+

And for contrast with these, let’s try something so far from the everyday it beggars belief to even consider the comparison. I won’t trouble to comment on what drives Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores as a venue; its name alone seems to do that quite thoroughly. The story Tomorrow is a Difficult Proposition, on the other hand, by Kris Bowser, I will. It’s an unexpectedly wild ride, given its opening phase: a reality-spanning spatio-temporal rollercoaster all in pursuit of a missed opportunity, an oversight – another mundanity, in fact, a commonplace occurrence of the sort that might become a source of life-long regret, and in this case fuels a radically more expansive quest to regain something lost.

+

I caught from it an echo of Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life – a terribly unfair association to inflict on any story, and one which you should certainly ignore. Except, there is a certain general thematic similarity, of course, taken from an opposite perspective. And, as a reviewer, it’s always worth stubbing your toe on one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written if it means you can accidentally recommend it all over again.

+

I’ll try not to do that in the next Short Reviews as well.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of these three great stories on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-33/the-day-the-shimm-stood-still.html b/issue-33/the-day-the-shimm-stood-still.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..392689de --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-33/the-day-the-shimm-stood-still.html @@ -0,0 +1,510 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Day the Shimm Stood Still — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 33 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

The Day the Shimm Stood Still

+

Andrew Jensen

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Day the Shimm Stood Still by +
+ + + + +

R + +ick showed up just before school was out for the summer. He stood out right away. His red hair was down to his shoulders. I’d never seen anyone with hair that red before. For some reason, long hair on Rick didn’t make him look like a girl. His freckles were amazing: they almost covered his face. But it was his grin that I really liked. He grinned like he’d heard a joke and the rest of us just had to hear it too.

+

It was almost the end of the term, and the teachers had given up on class work. Rick’s first day was a “field day” and we were outside in the sun. The teachers had timers, and we had to stand around waiting until it was our turn to do an “event”. First we had to run and jump into a sand-box for the long-jump. I sucked at that: I fell backwards and they measured where my butt landed, not my feet. We all laughed at that, but I got the worst score, which was embarrassing. Then I hit the pole for the high-jump three times in a row. What’s the point of throwing yourself to the ground, even if they’ve put down padding? The ground is always hard. When I got to try the 100 meter dash, I pretended that someone was chasing me. I came in second.

+

We stood around between events. Normally we’d all be on our phones, playing games or listening to music, or sneaking notes around. That day the teachers made us leave our phones indoors. They said it was so we could enjoy the day. We were bored.

+

Rick cheered us up. He was full of information we’d never known before. Like how you could make yourself faint if you hold your breath hard and do 100 fast sit-ups. Two of us threw up trying that one. Best field day ever!

+

Field day was always boring. The same people won all the events. We were supposed to be learning about Earth Traditions. The events were supposed to be from the Limpic games. Why bother? We already play lots of digital games from Earth. Making us do all this jumping around is just mean.

+

We started calling them “Limpic” last year, because so many of us ended up limping. Like I said, the ground is always hard.

+

Rick said that his dad came from Earth, although Rick was born here, so that was okay. Rick’s dad told him about stuff called grass, that made the surface soft. I tried to imagine a whole planet that cushioned you when you fell. Stupid rich Earthers! All we have on New Normandy is rock. But they say it’s full of metal, and valuable, hence why we’re here.

+

When Rick ran out of stories we bragged about our scars. Rick had the best: he could take out his two front teeth. He showed us, and stood there, grinning like an idiot. He looked so happy. Then he popped them back in before any teachers noticed.

+

I wish I could be as happy as he looked.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + wanted Rick to like me, so I showed him the Train Bridge.

+

I live close to the river. None of us are supposed to play there. We do anyway, but we try to make sure our parents don’t find out. It’s important to come home dry.

+

There were always more Shimm near the river, but that wasn’t what I wanted to show Rick. Sure, they looked nice floating and shimmering over the water. But I had something a lot better.

+

My hiding place under the bridge.

+

We live on an island, so there are two bridges. One goes to the city, and I’ve crossed that one to go to an appointment. I live close to the other one. It crosses the river to the wilds, where the deep mines are.

+

Last summer, I learned to scramble up the rocks to the top of the concrete where the bridge leaves the island. It’s dark there between the huge support beams under the rails, the only light shines down in between the stone ties. One of the ties had split, and a chunk had fallen out in the middle. The hole was big enough to lift your head up through the space while an ore train was rattling over. An older kid told me he’d done it. I didn’t dare: I thought I would lose my head. Just being under there when the trains went over was terrifying. My Parent would never let me go there if they knew about it. So I figured it would impress Rick.

+

“My Dad said that on Earth, rail ties are made of wood,” he said when we had climbed up.

+

“Do you think that’s true?” I asked.

+

“Nah. No one has that much money. That’s just the kind of bragging Earth people do.”

+

I nodded. Everyone at school knew how Earth people bragged. The science teachers told us about Earth trees, and how one day we’d have them here, as soon as the soil had built up enough to stop using hydroponics. We’d all talked about it afterwards, and figured that it was impossible. It was like the stories adults used to read us about lions and pandas and dragons. Sure, you could grow one in a vat, but they’d be way too dangerous to let loose.

+

Rick looked around the hiding place and smiled approvingly. He poked the places where the hot silicone from the trains had splashed and dripped.

+

“That must burn,” he said. “Has it ever dripped on you?”

+

I nodded, and showed him an old scar on my arm. Rick looked impressed.

+

“So, when does the next train come through?” he asked.

+

“I don’t know.” Why did he have to embarrass me with a question like that?

+

“No problem, let’s check the schedule.” Rick pulled out his phone.

+

“Won’t work,” I muttered. “We’re surrounded by metal here. No signal. Besides, how can you get a schedule for ore trains?”

+

“I have some really good apps. I got them from my Dad. He doesn’t have a single decent password.”

+

Rick worked for a moment, and then held his phone up through the hole in the ties. Then he brought his hand back down.

+

“Looks like it’ll be about an hour,” he said.

+

“Wow! I never thought of reaching above the tracks.”

+

“It’s no big deal. Phone stuff is overrated. Useful, but boring.” I wondered about that. None of my other friends could live without their phones. He went on: “Look, you’ve got this really cool place. Why would you want to play a phone game here? Let’s go look at the Shimm.”

+

I was fine with that. The Shimm are hard to see in the daylight, but in the shadow under the bridge we could see lots. They were all different colors and sizes that day, floating around each other, almost like they were alive.

+

“You’ve got a lot of them here,” remarked Rick, as if the river were my private kingdom. I grinned.

+

“They seem to like the bridge, and the water,” I blurted out. Then I stopped, horrified. “I know they’re not alive,” I added. I didn’t want Rick to think I was some gullible little kid. “I know they checked for life before they Terraformed. They’re just an effect of all the metal in the rocks here.”

+

Rick shrugged, and started examining the pebbles by the water. “An effect. That just means no one knows what they are. I kind of like the idea that they’re alive. The big ones are the adults, that’s why they’re so slow. The little ones are the kids. But they’re all restless. Even the old slow ones never stop moving.”

+

“Then why haven’t they tried talking to us?” I asked. I could remember trying to talk to them when I was little, first using words, then a flashlight. Was Rick teasing me?

+

“Maybe they have nothing to say,” he answered. “Or maybe they’re like dogs or cats. Smart, but they don’t talk.” He had selected a couple of pebbles, and he looked up. “Watch this.”

+

For a long moment, Rick watched some of the smaller Shimm darting over the water. Then he took aim, and let fly a bulls-eye shot. The pebble hit the little yellow Shimm dead-center, and then moved with it, like it was stuck.

+

“See, they can play catch,” he said, grinning.

+

“There’s a lot of metal in that rock, that’s all,” I answered. Rick was making fun of me!

+

“Yeah, but watch this.” Rick threw the second pebble just as perfectly as the first. I was shocked when the first pebble shot away from the Shimm, right back to Rick!

+

I don’t know if the Shimm caught the second pebble. I just saw the returning pebble hit Rick in the head with a funny sound. Rick fell to the ground.

+

I cut my scalp once at school. It bled so much that some kids went home and told their folks that I’d died. I was famous for days.

+

Rick’s wound didn’t bleed much at all. He just lay there, silent. Was he dead? Did his red hair soak up all the blood from his scalp? Was he dead? Could they charge a Shimm with murder? Would they charge me with murder? Killing the coolest guy at school? It wasn’t my fault!

+

“Ow. That really hurt,” said Rick, sitting up. “Lucky he got me on the steel plate.”

+

“You have a steel plate in your head?” I gasped it out.

+

“Yeah. I was chasing a Shimm, and I didn’t notice it had gone past the edge of a cliff.” He looked down at his legs. “That’s when I knocked out my teeth. Broke a leg, too. I was laid up for the rest of the summer. I don’t ever want to be that bored again. That’s when I got good at phone games. Now even the new ones are boring.”

+

A whistle sounded from across the river. An ore train coming our way.

+

“Quick, let’s get up there!” said Rick. He scrambled up the rocks without stopping to cover his cut or anything. I could barely follow, he was so fast.

+

We both got more and more excited as the rumbling of the train grew nearer. Rick wanted to look out the hole to watch the train coming, but I stopped him. “If they see you, they’ll put on the brakes. Then they’ll fix the hole and block off the whole space!” He nodded, and crouched down until the train was right overhead.

+

It was louder than I remembered. It felt like an earthquake. We covered our ears, and it did no good at all. I could see Rick’s mouth moving as he shouted at me. I shouted back, “I can’t hear you!” I couldn’t hear me, either.

+

Rick looked up. There was a hungry look in his eye. Then he stood up, his mouth wide open, like he was screaming. His head disappeared up into the hole in the broken tie.

+

The rumbling went on forever. Rick’s hands waved wildly, and his feet jiggled and danced. Was he in pain, or just so happy he was freaking out? I uncovered my ears and started to reach to pull him down.

+

Before I grabbed him, it was over. The earthquake rumble was replaced with a clattering sound, getting quieter as the ore-train headed across the island. Rick slumped onto the concrete. His hair was more messed-up than usual, and spattered with hot silicone grease. There were a couple of dots on his face that were starting to blister. His head was covered in dust but the dirt was already streaked with sweat, and the small trickle of blood from his pebble wound.

+

He looked totally happy.

+

“That was amazing!” he shouted. “When’s the next train?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“T + +hat was the last train,” Rick announced the next day. “I checked. Then Dad checked too.”

+

“You told your father about my hiding place?” No grown-up had ever seen that place. Rick had betrayed me!

+

“Weren’t you listening? It doesn’t matter. There aren’t going to be any more trains.”

+

“There’ve never been many,” I answered. “Most of the time it’s just a cool place. And now it’s not a secret anymore. I’m going to be grounded forever.”

+

Rick looked a little guilty, then. “My Dad doesn’t care. He won’t tell anyone.”

+

“Are you sure?” I asked.

+

“Yeah. Besides, they’re going to be tearing up the track soon.”

+

“What?”

+

“Yeah. They’re supposed to be replacing it with some Mag-Lev stuff. Dad says it’s ‘more appropriate for an up-and-coming planet’. He says ‘the old rails were fine for a pioneer place, but we should do better now’.”

+

I couldn’t believe it. “What are we gonna do?”

+

“He says the new trains will be quiet, and float in the air. He says that there’ll be a lot more passenger trains now, because it’s smoother. They’ll ride on magnetism, instead of rattling on rails, and they’ll go hundreds of kilometers an hour. They’ll be gone almost before they’re here.”

+

I was furious. “I wish they were already gone. I wish I’d never showed you that place. Then this wouldn’t be happening.”

+

“I didn’t do anything! Besides, you’re lucky. You’ve stuck your head up hundreds of times. For me, my first time is my last.”

+

I couldn’t argue without letting him know I was chicken. There was no way I would tell him I’d never dared put my own head up. I just stomped off to sit under the train bridge, alone. I stomped extra-hard so he’d know how mad I was.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nother train did show up, but it was different. It wasn’t an ore train or a passenger train. This one had a big crane on the end, and a lot of flat cars. It went through our town and out across the river. We didn’t see it again for a couple of weeks. When it returned, it came slowly. Workers undid the bolts holding the rails to the ties, using welding torches sometimes. The lights of the welders on the bridge were like super-bright Shimm. Then the crane lifted the huge metal rails, and stacked them on the flat cars. Some rails were cut, and used to make side bars to hold the stack of rails higher and higher. When the train had passed, the rails were gone. The bridge was naked.

+

We took souvenirs. Lumps of cut-off rail that got left behind.

+

We argued about what to do with them. I took one piece that was small enough to carry but still looked like a piece of railroad. I put it on my dresser.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +o our surprise, the railway got busier and busier. They started drilling and blasting huge holes beside the level crossings. We were told that they were for tunnels to go under the new tracks. Super-fast Mag-Lev trains wouldn’t slow down for us, so no more level crossings. Big signs apologized for the inconvenience, and showed pictures of a beautiful, streamlined new train, flying along. I refused to admire the pictures.

+

Fences started going up. They were tall, with thick coils of razor wire at the top. They said this would prevent people from being killed. The fence would surround the entire railway line.

+

Most of the island would end up on the far side of the fences. The school was over there. The best stores were over there too. More importantly, Rick lived over there. He helped me scout out how we could get around the fences.

+

“No short-cuts anymore,” he said. “That sucks. You have to go kilometers to use one of the tunnels.”

+

I nodded glumly. This was looking worse and worse.

+

“What about that place under the bridge?” asked Rick. “Is that getting blocked off?”

+

“Good question!” I hadn’t been there in days. “Let’s go check.”

+

We rode our bikes to the edge of the river. The Shimm were thick there, drifting or darting about. We ignored them.

+

When we looked up at the bridge, it was clear that they were only starting to install that part of the fence. Posts were being welded to the huge support beams that ran across the river. The posts angled out and up past the ties to tower over the bridge. The bridge was being wrapped in a massive steel web. The beautiful new train would be caught in an ugly cage.

+

“Look,” said Rick. “The posts are welded on half way down the beams. We can still get underneath.”

+

“Yeah.” This looked good. “And with the water low right now, we can even get around the base to the other side by walking on the rocks. This can be our secret passage.”

+

“Yeah, and even when the water is higher, we can use a boat or canoe to go under!”

+

I thought about that. We had a small pedal-boat, but my Parent said not to use it near the bridge. The bridge was built where the river was shallow and fast, so there were rapids right across. The danger always made sense to me before, but if I said that to Rick I’d die of embarrassment.

+

“And in the winter we can walk on the ice,” I added, lamely.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +ick and I missed the Grand Opening of the new train station. It was impressive on the outside. It was made of stone and steel and glass, of course, but they’d made it look fancy too. Kind of fake old-fashioned. I hadn’t seen the one at the other end of the island yet, but Rick and I figured it would be the same.

+

We skipped the Grand Opening because it was happening at the same time as the first run of the high-speed train. It would stop at the station, and then cross the river for a short trip to show off its speed. The first two hundred people who got into the Grand Opening got a free ride.

+

That was tempting. Neither one of us had ever been on a fancy mag-lev train before. But it would be disloyal to the old trains and tracks to run straight off to this new, beautiful machine.

+

And as Rick pointed out, being underneath the train would be even more fun than being inside. Maybe, just maybe, it would be as exciting as the ore train.

+

So there we were, under the bridge. We’d packed a lunch and set out early, so no one would notice and stop us. It was different this time. There was the fence, of course. And there were more Shimm than usual. Most of them were directly under the bridge, with only a few at the water level. They were all moving faster, too. Even the big, slow ones looked super-charged as they zipped around.

+

There were even Shimm in my hiding place, just below the ties. I’d never seen that before. Even stranger, I noticed that Rick’s red hair had started to stand up, making his head look like a huge, solid Shimm, with a silly expression.

+

“This is so cool,” said Rick. “They must have the magnetic field turned on already. I bet that’s what’s attracting the Shimm.”

+

It was cool at first, but it became boring fast. Waiting is hard when you have to stay hidden. We finished our lunch by mid-morning, including most of the water we had brought. That created a new problem.

+

“Have you ever tried peeing from up here?” asked Rick, looking down to the river.

+

“A couple of times,” I answered. It had only been once, and I’d never told anyone about it before.

+

“Did you ever hit a Shimm?” he asked, grinning.

+

“Are you crazy? Those things are electric! They’d fry your wiener right off!”

+

“No they wouldn’t,” he answered, unzipping his pants. “I’ve touched them before, and all you get is a tingle.”

+

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Remember that one that threw the rock back at you? I never knew they could do that until you showed me. What else can they do?” I admired Rick’s bravery, but sometimes he just seemed reckless. Who would dare risk that?

+

“Hmm,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” So we peed into the river, taking great care to miss the Shimm. I was so embarrassed I almost couldn’t pee at all. But it was that or explode, so I managed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +ick had brought a periscope. He and his dad made it once, and he dug it out for today. He carefully raised the top of it to look along the new tracks towards the station.

+

“Man, this is taking forever,” he complained. “Why don’t they stop all the speeches?”

+

Then he jerked his head back. “Hey, get out of there!” he shouted, and then sat down and started taking the periscope apart. When the bottom tube slid out of the top, a small Shimm darted out. “How did she get in there? I couldn’t see anything but orange!”

+

He put the periscope back together and handed it to me. “Here, you have a look. Tell me what they’re doing.”

+

I carefully slid the top of the periscope up over the stone tie. It wasn’t totally easy, since the magnetic field wanted to pull the metal up faster and higher, and we were afraid it might be seen. I managed to slide it up without being spotted, and reported: “They’re getting on the train.”

+

“Let me see!” Rick was really eager. He grabbed the periscope and shoved me aside. “Yes, yes, yes!” He crouched back down and passed me the periscope. “Put this away.”

+

“Don’t you want to watch the train coming?” I asked.

+

“No time,” Rick explained. “This is a high-speed train. That other one was old and slow. This one could be past us in a few seconds, even if it does need to build up speed. I’m going to wait just below the top, and when I see it’s close, I’ll stick my head up like last time. It’ll be great!”

+

“Don’t touch the rails,” I warned. We’d already talked about what could go wrong. Rick was sure that it would be safer than last time, which seemed to disappoint him. No hot silicone, he said. No wheels. Just a ride on a magnetic bed. It wouldn’t even be noisy.

+

Rick half-crouched, half-stood where he could peer up. He was whispering, “Come on, come on, come on.”

+

Then everything changed at once. It was quiet, but not silent. The air swished as the train approached. Rick stuck his head up, catching his shoulders on the edges of the stone tie. Everything seemed to crackle, and the periscope flew upwards, hitting my arm. My brain was buzzing.

+

And I noticed something strange: the Shimm were standing still. That had never happened before. Each one was frozen, hanging in the air.

+

Then Rick started to scream.

+

It was the worst sound I’ve ever heard. It was so awful I didn’t even freeze: I just grabbed Rick around the waist and tried to pull him down, but I couldn’t. It must have been a short time, but it felt like forever. I wondered if he’d still have a head when I finally managed to pull him down. Then I realized he had to have a head, ’cause he was still screaming. I started to giggle. Then I was crying and giggling at the same time. And Rick was still screaming. And kicking. And flailing his arms.

+

And then the train was gone and Rick fell down on top of me unconscious. I knew he wasn’t dead, because he was twitching. The top of his head was all bloody. A part of his scalp had peeled back, and a piece of metal showed through. When his head tipped sideways and blood ran out, I could even see a bit of brain! I couldn’t move.

+

I watched as a few of the Shimm, free from whatever had held them, drifted towards Rick. Towards his wound. Or maybe the metal plate, I don’t know. But when they touched him, they vanished.

+

They vanished into Rick’s brain.

+

I’d never seen Shimm disappear before. Drift away, dart, fly, yes. But never just vanish.

+

It was enough to spur me to action.

+

I grabbed my phone and pushed the emergency button. It didn’t work. I stood over Nick and held it out the hole. It still didn’t work. Too much magnetism or electricity or something. I scrambled down from the bridge as fast as I could and ran. When I got a signal, I called and told them everything. I knew I was giving up the secret of that special place forever. The only place I’d ever felt brave.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +ick wasn’t there when school started. He was in the hospital in the city. I got to see him twice in there.

+

The first time was scary. He just lay there. They said he was in an induced coma so his brain would stop swelling. He looked like a cartoon alien, with his head so bandaged that it was twice as big as normal.

+

There were lots of ways to hurt yourself on New Normandy. I knew a couple of kids with brain injuries from accidents. They weren’t the same as before. Would the Rick that woke up be the Rick that I knew?

+

Would Rick wake up ever?

+

I didn’t want to lose my best friend. He was the bravest guy I knew. My Parent didn’t understand. They called him reckless. They shouted that Rick was an idiot, and I couldn’t play with him ever again.

+

But the place we used to play was off limits now.

+

And everything had changed as well.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he second time I saw Rick he was awake. Even better, he was still Rick. Except for his hair. They’d shaved it right off. All he had now was red fuzz.

+

“Look,” he said. He popped out his two front teeth. Then he popped out the bottom pair. Somehow, in the middle of everything else, he’d managed to break another pair of teeth. When he grinned it looked like a tunnel going into his face.

+

“They put a new plate in my skull,” he said, proudly, once his teeth were back in. “No metal this time. It was really expensive.”

+

“Did they find any Shimm?” I asked. I was only half-joking.

+

“What are you talking about?”

+

I told him about the Shimm that had disappeared into his head. I’d seen three. Who knew how many more had gone in while I was getting help?

+

“That explains it!” he almost shouted. Then he switched to a whisper: “I’ve been seeing colors and patterns. They’re really cool. I’m sure they mean something, but I don’t know what. The doctors are bugged by it, and make me take tests. I bet the Shimm are trying to communicate with me. I’ll be the first person to ever talk to them! I can’t wait to get out so we can find some and try.”

+

“All the Shimm have left the island,” I had to report. “A couple of days after the trains started up, they were all gone.”

+

“What? Where did they go?”

+

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re still out in the wilderness, but you don’t see any on the island.”

+

Rick sat quietly. He looked angry. “Damned trains,” he finally said.

+

“They’ve sealed off our space under the bridge, too.” I tried not to sound reproachful.

+

“Damned trains.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +ick never came back to school.

+

He got out of the hospital a couple of weeks after my second visit, but he didn’t come to see me. I finally went to his house. No one answered the door. I peered in a window: even the furniture was gone.

+

I tried to send Rick messages, but his account was blocked. Some of my friends said Rick was crazy, and the grown-ups had locked him in a padded room. Then they made jokes.

+

I felt like my life had ended.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he end of the summer was boring. I spent a lot of time in the pedal-boat, exploring the tiny rocky islands far from the bridge. I guess I was trying to find another private place. But if I did, who could I share it with?

+

I started playing phone games again when school started. They had just released a new multiplayer, and it was pretty fun.

+

Then I noticed that one player kept winning. Their speed was amazing, and they seemed to have some kind of instinct for catching every break. This player’s game-name was Shimmerick1000, and their avatar was a fuzzy red troll.

+

It was a week before I worked up the courage to send a private game message: “That U Rick?”

+

Within seconds I had a reply: “Yep. Wondered when U would figure me out & reveal yourself, Bridgeboy.” So smug! Jerk!

+

I couldn’t stop smiling.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +urns out Rick’s dad was only cool some of the time. Whenever they moved, he cut off all ties from the place they were leaving. They had lived near us for less than a year, and Rick said they moved every time something went seriously wrong.

+

That happened about once a year, and Rick always seemed to be in the middle of it.

+

We put our heads together, and managed to convince Rick’s dad that no one here wanted to sue him. The only person hurt had been Rick. We even managed to convince my Parent that Rick wasn’t going to get me killed.

+

When the snow finally melted we had it all set up: Rick was going to visit in the summer.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + + still don’t like the train,” Rick grumbled as he got off. “It never feels right.”

+

Rick was taller. His hair had grown back, which was familiar, but he was wearing wire-rim glasses now. It make him look more grown up. We started to walk to my house. I carried Rick’s backpack.

+

“How were the doctors?” Rick had been to the city to have his head examined.

+

Rick shrugged. “They’re smart, but they make bad assumptions. They’ll never understand.”

+

I nodded. My only sympathy for the doctors was that they were a good excuse for Rick to be here. Too bad he could only stay for the day. His dad insisted he be on the train by nightfall.

+

We dumped his stuff at my house and I led him down to the pedal-boat.

+

“What’s all this stuff sticking out of the water?” Rick asked at the shore.

+

“Grass! It’s real! They came through last fall and planted it. It’s supposed to spread and start growing up onto the sand.”

+

Rick poked at the stiff green stalks. “I still wouldn’t want to fall on it,” he muttered. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

+

“Of course not,” I said. “Hop in the boat.”

+

As we paddled, Rick talked about his new town. I already knew it was way out in the boonies, and there were no Shimm anywhere. “I thought we were going to have to move again, but I talked Dad out of it. I’m sick of moving.”

+

This was news. “What happened?”

+

“I made friends with this kid, and then his brother started to bully me.”

+

Another friend? My face felt hot and there was a roaring in my ears. I hadn’t made any new friends! How could Rick?

+

“Anyway, his brother made me show him an experiment I got off my dad’s phone, and he ended up getting hurt. Now I don’t have any friends there. But I’m still sick of moving.”

+

“You could move back here,” I suggested.

+

“Ha!” That hurt. “Dad would never go back to a place we’ve left. How could I convince him?”

+

“Let me show you,” I answered.

+

We had come to one of the many small rocky islands in the river. This one was bigger than most: big enough that it had a cave. And in the cave…

+

“Shimm!” Rick’s mouth hung open. The colored lights zipped around in their sheltered place. “They aren’t all gone!”

+

He sat on a rock a couple of meters into the cave. It looked to me like the Shimm clustered around his head. Smaller ones were moving around the rims of his glasses, looking like a cheesy game display.

+

Rick was grinning. I hadn’t seen that grin in over a year. He didn’t look grown up anymore. He just looked happy.

+

I couldn’t be jealous of the Shimm. They connected with Rick in a special way, but I could live with that. He might not move back here for me, but I bet he would for the Shimm.

+

Rick’s old house was still empty, I’d checked. Part of me felt impatient: we only had a few hours together to plot ways to persuade Rick’s dad. Face to face conversations can’t be monitored like game chat.

+

I promised myself I’d wait until we got back in the boat. For that moment it was enough to watch Rick’s silly grin. He’d been away from his beloved Shimm for too long.

+

I wondered which one of us was the happiest.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Day the Shimm Stood Still on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Jensen

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Jensen + + + Andrew Jensen lives in rural Ontario. He is the minister at Knox United Church, Nepean. His stories have appeared in Canada, the USA, and New Zealand, most recently in Stupefying Stories Saturday Showcase, Tree & Stone Magazine, and Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores. Andrew plays trumpet and impersonates Kermit the Frog. He no longer makes wine at home but had fun while it lasted.

+

© Andrew Jensen 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: giselaatje, RyanMcGuire, duangha, and merlinlightpainting.

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+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-33/the-thing-in-the-snow-sean-adams-review.html b/issue-33/the-thing-in-the-snow-sean-adams-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9838a5bd --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-33/the-thing-in-the-snow-sean-adams-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,313 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 33 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams

+

Mattia Ravasi

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams by +
+ + + + +

I + + have been a full-time remote worker since March 2020. Every morning from Monday to Friday I head to my office, a corner of my living room with a small desk and a semi-comfortable chair. The only touch of color in this corner are the fingerless gloves, striped red and gray, that I wear throughout my workday. It’s cold in here, and heating, these days, comes at a ridiculous premium.

+

Every morning I log into my laptop. I answer colleagues’ emails and help my company’s customers. Some days, I feel that my work has had a positive impact on the world. Some days, I’m not so sure.

+

I go for a short walk at lunch time. In the evenings I sit a few feet from my desk, reading, writing, or watching TV. I go to bed knowing full well what tomorrow has in store for me.

+

I mention all this to explain why the basic premise of Sean Adams’ The Thing in the Snow did not feel nearly as suffocating, maddening, and panic-inducing as it should have. I suspect that anybody who’s been working from home (or living at work?) for a while now will have a similarly uncanny feeling – and so will everybody who still remembers the long, muddled weeks of the Covid lockdowns.

+

A small team is camped in a remote research facility known as the Northern Institute: a gargantuan six-story building in the middle of a desolate expanse of snow. Hart, the novel’s narrator, is their leader. He is driven, ambitious – and racked with insecurities. His direct underlings are Gibbs, aloof and distant and harboring ill-concealed career aspirations, and Cline, who is eager and friendly, if just a little useless.

+

Something is clearly wrong with the Institute. Hart’s team are not allowed to leave it, since a strange sickness swiftly overwhelms anyone who ventures outside. The first two floors are buried under perennial snow – so why did the builders put in so many windows? The greatest mystery of all is Gilroy, a deranged scientist who stayed behind when the rest of the research staff was evacuated, and who is absorbed by his nightmarish research on the pernicious evil that is “the cold”.

+

Hart’s team, however, is not there to investigate any of this. They are not cold-weather survivalists, or scientists, or scholars of the paranormal. They are, for a lack of better words, corporate peons. They work from nine to five, five days a week, with a coffee break at the start of each day. Each week they are given a task to complete, a list of Karate Kid chores that never seem to germinate into any epiphany: sitting on all the chairs in the building to make sure they are stable; opening all the doors to check for creaks and squeaks.

+

The Thing in the Snow reads almost as a spoof on Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of disorienting horror, where a team of highly-trained explorers brave an abandoned region whose alien atmosphere might, or might not, be playing with their minds. Hart’s team are not highly trained. They’re not even good office workers. Hart savors his pointless tasks, eager to prove himself before his manager Kay; but he is also painfully aware of his limitations, and of how the corporate ladder – the notion that his managerial position identifies him as a more capable individual than his subordinates – feels flimsy and wobbly in the stark environment of the Institute. His self-consciousness is what makes his frequent pettiness so convincing, and never off-putting.

+

Hart’s life is not just all work and no play. He goes to great lengths to keep his weekends separate from his weekdays: stopping himself from thinking about next week’s tasks, and refusing to engage with his co-workers between Friday night and Monday morning. This decision seems, at best, futile, considering that his weekends are spent in the same handful of rooms he occupies the rest of the time. Meanwhile, his pastimes (going for walks, reading) appear almost as aimless as his work tasks.

+

Work, however, comes to dictate even the nature of these hobbies. The books Hart reads all belong to the “Leader” series, a bizarre mashup of thriller and self-help guide, focusing on a Tom Clancy-esque protagonist named Jack French. These books, like all of Hart’s provisions, are shipped to him through the company, and he wants his choice of reading material to make a good impression – “to show Kay that I take seriously the responsibility bestowed upon me, hence the appeal of a series of thrillers about leadership.”

+

The Leader books are one of the funniest running jokes in the novel. Their plots are just exaggerated and edifying enough that I can see my CEO recommending them in his monthly email. They are also a convincing example of how Hart’s career has collapsed not just the barrier between his living and working environment, with the Institute coming to serve as both. The corporate mentality has started to colonize his mind, too, making him second-guess what type of intellectual nourishment would be best suited for his career progression.

+

This corporate blindfold is made most noticeable by Hart’s refusal to engage with the mysterious thing in the snow: an unspecified object suddenly appearing on the horizon in the opening chapter, jarring within the otherwise uniform landscape. Hart’s subordinates Gibbs and Cline are understandably eager to learn more about the object, but to Hart the thing is dangerous, and its threat is one of distraction: it could easily become a drain on productivity.

+

The rest of the book captures the slow unraveling of Hart’s sanity. Paradoxically, what pulls it apart is not the unknowable mystery (and the inexplicable behavior) of the thing outside his window, nor is it the impossible isolation of his living conditions. It is his team’s failure to keep up with their weekly tasks: building a replacement office chair; pulling on all the blinds to see if any are broken. Corporate life – completing allocated tasks, supervising an efficient team – has become Hart’s new reality, while reality, in all of its maddening insolvability, is a distraction that must be put out of mind.

+

In the novel’s most poignant scene, Hart abandons the once-sacred distinction between office hours and “free” time and works through the weekend to catch up on the tasks his team have accumulated. He enters a peculiarly focused state, becoming entirely absorbed in his menial chores. It is a poignant, disturbing scene. Are we supposed to cheer for Hart? To admire the way he has carved purpose out of purposelessness? Or should we really be concerned at this final collapse of his identity?

+

What this scene testifies to is the collapse of the barrier between Hart’s personality and his job description. He has confused his value as a person with his ability to complete his paperwork by the given deadline. This paperwork, submitted weekly via helicopter courier, is Hart’s only means of communicating with Kay, who lives far away and, we assume, in much cozier quarters. In an early scene, when he is still in relative control of his senses, Hart reflects on his ardent desire to stick a personal Post-it note to Kay onto the official paperwork. Kay has discouraged this in the past, and yet Hart’s urge is nearly irresistible. The motives behind this urge feel both natural and deeply meaningful:

+
+

I often desire to apply a Post-it note because there are times when it feels like the application of a Post-it note is all I can do to reinforce my existence and remind myself that the tasks we are given here are not merely completed (as is noted on the paperwork) but experienced.

+

This is a very luminous, very human feeling, one that I have certainly experienced myself, and that should be familiar to everybody who has seen weeks of their lives reduced to mere lines on a spreadsheet entitled “annual performance” or “customer feedback.”

+

I have talked at length about the satirical aspect of The Thing in the Snow. This shouldn’t suggest that the titular mystery is just a prop for the novel’s reflections. It is precisely the narrative’s obsession with Hart’s petty agenda and pointless worries that makes the occasional intrusion of the Institute’s weirdness all the more disconcerting. The team might be bogged down in a silly quarrel on the correct way to complete another task, only to stumble headfirst into a previously unnoticed side of the Institute. The enigmatic Gilroy has a knack for making a shocking appearance. And looming behind every page is, of course, the thing in the snow, its mystery growing more compelling as the novel progresses, its call harder and harder to ignore.

+

The supernatural aspects of The Thing in the Snow have a way of creeping up on the reader, like well-timed jump scares in a horror movie. Together with Adams’ dry, winning humor, they propel the narrative forward with great momentum. The feeling that something ominous is afoot, that the whole novel could explode at any moment, is what makes it so enticing – and, inevitably, perhaps what dooms it, too. Any resolution, whether open-ended or neatly wrapped-up, is likely to disappoint at the end of a novel where so much could happen at any time.

+

Ultimately, it is not how well its plot is resolved that makes or breaks The Thing in the Snow. As a compelling mystery and an engaging satire, one that will speak closely to anyone who has felt isolated and trapped in their daily life, The Thing in the Snow is a reminder of the endless ways in which speculative, fantastic, and imaginative fiction can operate: opening doors to the most mind-bending realms, or holding up a mirror to our drab home offices – and always reminding us quite how weird everyday life is.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia’s thoughts on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mattia Ravasi

+

+ + Author image of Mattia Ravasi + + + Mattia Ravasi is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Submarine. His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He talks about books on his YouTube channel, The Bookchemist, and tweets as @thebookchemist too.

+

© Mattia Ravasi 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The image shows author Sean Adams (left), the novel’s cover art (by Shutterstock/Olya Detry), and reviewer Mattia Ravasi (right).

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Touch Wood

+

Sandee Bree Breathnach

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Touch Wood by +
+ + + + +

C + +ricket bangs on Mrs Quill’s door at the crack of dawn.

+

“Is Newt home?” he asks, bouncing on his heels with incessant giddiness.

+

Mrs Quill crosses her arms. “There’s no one here called Newt.”

+

Not far behind her, at the bottom of the stairs, Newt slips on scuffed shoes and wraps an old scarf around her neck. She hops forward, squeezes past her mother’s leg and through the door. The children sprint giggling into the concrete streets.

+

“Hurry up,” Cricket grins. “We’re going tree hunting.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he wastelands stretch for dozens of miles beyond the town. Empty caravans litter the valley, crumpled like tin cans and half consumed by slow pulsating fungi. Spotted mushroom caps thrive on the cusp of smouldering sulphur pits, where the fumes rise so high into the sky that no bird will risk passing overhead. Others fester in brittle, abandoned nests that haven’t been touched by a living creature in weeks.

+

“There’s no point,” Ash sighs, adjusting the cumbersome metal mask digging into his nose. “There’s no trees out here anymore.”

+

Up ahead, Briar trudges over beds of bone and mildew. They turn to dust under her boots. “Granny Agnes says she saw one here when she was little.”

+

“Yeah, like a hundred years ago!”

+

“If a tree survived back then, it could survive now.” Her voice sounds tinny through the filters of her mask. When she breathes in, it makes a raspy, sucking sound, just like Granny Agnes’ ventilator.

+

Hatchet in hand, she swings it into a thick mushroom stalk. It springs into a wobbling fit, sending clouds of yellow spores into the air.

+

Ash steps back. “Leave the shrooms alone. You’re spreading the spores.”

+

Briar stands firm and slams the hatchet into the base of the stalk, pressing her boot on top to wedge it in further and uproot the mushroom entirely. The ground below is parched dry, broken up by thin veiny roots. She tuts and moves on.

+

“What do you need a tree for anyway?” Ash strides after her, careful not to step through the puff of spores as they settle on the ground.

+

Of course, he already knows the answer. It is a legend that has been passed down for as long as anyone can remember. The first thing they hear when their soft brains can make sense of simple words. The first thing they read when they develop the motor skills to swipe through the dull matte pages on a tablet.

+

Touching wood brings luck. Others claim it’s knocking on wood. Some even say it grants wishes. One thing all the stories agree on is that trees are magical. Ash believed it too, until very recently. Now he isn’t entirely convinced that trees ever existed to begin with.

+

“You heard dad,” Briar replies. “She hasn’t got much time left.”

+

Ash presses his lips tight and turns to gaze across the sickly river. It oozes with glossy bubbles of oil, rusty old batteries bobbing up and down like fish bait. They would be hard pressed to find any fish in there. At least, any fish that aren’t infected by some fungal parasite and half rotted through.

+

He clears his throat. “Aren’t you too old to believe in fairy tales?”

+

“Aren’t you too young to talk back to me?” Briar bites back.

+

Ash promptly seals his mouth shut. Really, he should be used to it by now. Briar has always clung to Granny Agnes’s stories for longer than any reasonable child should. Just two weeks ago she found a dead salamander washed up by the lake and tried to convince everyone, perhaps even herself, that it was a baby dragon. But her flights of fancy never reached this extent. She’d never travelled this far from home for a fantasy.

+

“When we find the tree,” Briar continues, weighing the hatchet in her hands, “we just have to touch the trunk and make a wish. Then Granny Agnes will get better.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +n old, capsized wall lines the edge of a ravine. The bricks are cracked and crumbling at the edges, cement corroded by time. The children balance their way along, arms akimbo as if towing a tightrope.

+

One misstep and the bricks give way. Newt tumbles down into the shallow ravine.

+

When she opens her eyes, a yellow sapling greets her, protruding out from a sparse mound of soil. She isn’t entirely sure what it is until Cricket scrambles down and shrieks “We did it! We found one!”

+

At first, she isn’t so sure. It’s much smaller than she expected. Nothing like the ones described in her favourite storybook. The colour is all wrong.

+

There isn’t a single spore in sight, so she lowers the scarf wrapped over her nose to sniff at the air. Tiny leaves shiver against the slight breath that leaves her lungs. It tastes fresh. So much fresher than the air in town.

+

It’s only when she reaches out to touch the smooth white-grey wood that she realises. It really is a tree.

+

Cricket holds out his shovel and thrusts it towards her. “Hurry up, Newt-face. Dig it up.”

+

Newt blinks, slowly taking the shovel. “Why?”

+

“Don’t you know how rare wood is?”

+

“Obviously!” Her face reddens. “I’m not stupid.”

+

“Then work it out, genius. If we take it home, we can make a wish every single day! Or we could sell it. We could even charge people money to come see it.”

+

“You mean we’ll be rich?”

+

Cricket nods, and Newt’s eyes sparkle green.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +riar’s yelp echoes through the crumbling walls of the ravine. When Ash reaches the edge to peer down, he finds her slumped in a pile of rubble and plastic, clutching her ankle.

+

“What happened?”

+

“What does it look like?” she hisses. “Bloody shroom tripped me.”

+

A tangle of pale white fungus wriggles along the edge, tendrils withdrawing like snails shrinking into their shells. Spores waft inches above the ground, where her foot had been just seconds ago. Ash covers his mouth and holds his breath before he remembers he’s already wearing a mask. Still, he inches away before carefully lowering himself into the ravine.

+

The thick leather gloves protect his hands from the rough, rocky walls. A small protrusion of earth crumbles under his fist, and he desperately clutches at the wall to slow his fall. Skidding to his knees, he stands and dusts himself off, relatively unscathed.

+

“We should go back,” he says when he catches his breath, helping Briar to her feet. Getting back is now the issue – Briar is taller than him. Heavier too, though he can’t say that out loud. He’s willing to carry her for as long as possible, but she is already hobbling away, using the hatchet as a crutch.

+

“We’ve come all this way,” she calls back. “It’s not even noon yet. There’s still plenty of time to look before sundown.”

+

“You know the spore clouds will be even denser the further we go out. And the mushrooms…” The thought of the crawling fungus makes him shudder. “Who knows how much bigger they’ll be.”

+

“It isn’t due to rain for days. This is the ideal time to search.”

+

“That doesn’t mean—”

+

“And the wind speed is low, so they won’t spread too quickly.”

+

“That could change at any minute!”

+

“We’ll keep an eye on the spores. I won’t bring us too far out.”

+

“We’re already too far out. Briar, let’s just go home.”

+

“I’m not going home without finding a tree.”

+

“What if there are no trees?” Ash clenches his jaw. “Have you even thought of that? What if we get eaten alive by shrooms or the spores get past our masks? We could die out here! Or – or we get back home and she’s already…”

+

He thinks Briar might cut him off before he gets that far, but the hot lump in his throat stops him first. He promptly bites his lip to still the trembling.

+

Briar clenches her fists around the hatchet and sucks in a sharp, raspy breath. Narrow eyes glare at him through her visor. “Fine! Go home if you want! It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe, or if you just don’t care enough. I’ll find it on my own.”

+

The hatchet clanks along the shrapnel-lined ravine, crooked under her straggling gait. She stifles a pained grunt and pushes onwards while Ash watches on. The sun wavers overheard, untouched by fog or cloud.

+

One hour, he decides. One more hour and then he’ll turn back, even if he has to drag Briar by the leg. He can’t just leave her there. They can’t afford for anyone else to get sick. A deep breath shudders through his mask, the straps rubbing his ears raw. He takes a moment to adjust it before he follows.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey are five miles from town when the sapling wilts like a flower between her palms. Gently browned leaves crinkle and flake from its branches. One thin root snaps off and falls to the ground.

+

Numbness washes over Newt’s face, her features stretched and squashed as though she holds a fresh corpse in her hands.

+

“What did you do?” Cricket gawks. “You’ve killed it!”

+

“It wasn’t me. It just—”

+

“You’re going to be in so much trouble!”

+

“But I didn’t—”

+

Cricket doesn’t listen. He tosses his shovel aside and runs for home. Newt tries to follow, but she can’t keep up with the sapling still in her arms. Won’t let go of it. Its body drags her down, gait swaying until she stumbles to her knees. Tears blur her vision.

+

“I’m sorry,” she sobs, digging her fingers into the dirt until they are red and throbbing. “I didn’t mean to. I’ll fix it. I can plant it again. Don’t worry. I’ll plant it.”

+

But there is no soil beneath the crust. Not a drop of water.

+

A single acorn falls into her lap. The sapling crumbles to dust.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +sh can’t see Briar’s mouth behind her mask, but from the crease of her eyes and sharpness of breath, he knows she’s grinning. He would too if his slack jaw would allow it.

+

Across the plain, a tree stands almost three times taller than him. It’s hunched over ever so slightly, neck crooked, but thick and sturdy. Spindly roots sprawl across the puddle encircling it, sipping delicately on algae-crested water. The setting sun filters through golden-green leaves, blessing the tree with a warm, ethereal glow.

+

“What do we do now?” Ash whispers, as though speaking too loud might startle the tree and send it scampering off on wooden spider legs. He’d always heard trees stayed in one place, but who was to know for sure?

+

“We touch it and make a wish.”

+

With the hatchet at her side, Briar hobbles to the base of the tree and kneels down. Water laps at leather boots, timid ripples splitting through the algae as she places her hands on the tree’s belly. To her surprise, there are no parasites wriggling through the water. No mushrooms embedded at the base of the tree. Not even a single spore in the air.

+

Following her lead, Ash takes off his gloves and presses his palms to the rivulets of tree bark. It grates against his skin, but he presses harder and slowly rubs his hand over its surface. For some reason, he expected to feel a heartbeat beneath the wood. Nothing resonates through his hands except his own pulse and the soft burn of friction, but he’s almost certain he can sense life blooming somewhere deep within.

+

Nothing feels any different after they make their wish.

+

Only so much time can be whittled away, squeezing their eyes shut tighter, wishing harder, counting down the minutes and seconds and hoping for something in the air to change. There is no way to know if Granny Agnes has been magically healed until they arrive home, so Briar lingers a few minutes longer. Just for good measure.

+

“Alright. Time to go,” she says. Leaning heavily on the hatchet, she pulls herself to her feet and stares up at the tree. Ash has already left the water when he hears Briar mumbling to herself.

+

“What?”

+

“Maybe,” she says, mulling over the words carefully, “maybe we should take a little bit with us.”

+

“A bit of what?”

+

“The tree…” She trails off.

+

A startled scoff escapes his lips. “You want us to take a tree back home with us? Am I supposed to carry the both of you on my back?”

+

“I’m serious,” she insists, hopping over to Ash and passing the hatchet to him. “Here. Use this.”

+

“You want me to chop it down?” His eyes grow wide. “We can’t do that! It might be the only tree left in the world.”

+

“Don’t be stupid,” Briar huffs. “We’re not chopping it down. Just… lop off one of its branches. That should be enough.”

+

“Why don’t you do it?”

+

“I can’t with my ankle. Come on, please. It will grow back. ’cos I just thought—” She hesitates, swallowing the sticky lump in her throat. “What if one wish isn’t enough? If we didn’t do it properly then Granny Agnes could get sick again. Or dad. Or any of us.”

+

His heart sinks in his chest. If that did happen then they couldn’t rely on the tree being here again. Ash wasn’t even sure they could make a journey like this again. And if someone else got to the tree before them, well, they could do a lot worse to it.

+

“It’s for the family,” Briar reiterates, though her voice is strained.

+

Trees are benevolent. That’s what the story said. They live to heal. To help nature thrive. The one standing before them doesn’t have a heartbeat. Ash knows that. Somehow the idea still makes his stomach churn, but Briar is right. She’s right about a lot of things. Right about finding the tree. Probably right about the wish.

+

The air weighs deep in his lungs as he takes the hatchet. He braces himself and swings down on the lowest branch in sight. It snaps like bone, splintering at the edges and crashing to the ground.

+

At first, he feels relieved.

+

Then the tree turns grey. Golden-green leaves wilt and rain down around them.

+

A single acorn falls between his feet.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ewt arrives home with bloodied knees, her face smeared with dirt, snot, and tears. Bracing her shoulders, she knocks on the door. It swings open with a sharp gust of wind.

+

“Agnes!” Mrs Quill gasps. Newt winces. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”

+

Newt sniffles and coughs into her tattered scarf. She can’t talk through chapped lips and short breaths. Yellow spores stain her sweater, embedded in the soft plucks of cotton.

+

But it doesn’t matter. She’s home now. Finally home. Hours of searching for a patch of rich soil in the wastelands, big enough to bury the acorn. That’s all that matters now. That it can grow and thrive, untouched by human hands.

+

She only hopes that it’s enough.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n the wee hours, Wickie climbs out the window of her mother’s lab and slips between rows of empty houses, out past deserted streets.

+

On the outskirts of town, she takes stock of her utility belt. Respi-patches, torch, night goggles, holo-map. Then she sits and watches the sun roll over the horizon, casting a soft glow over the old road that disappears into a mass of writhing mushrooms.

+

A harrowing sound wheezes behind her. Wickie leaps to her feet, heart racing at the sight of a lanky figure in a hideous rubber mask. A distorted laugh crackles through the filters, and behind the tinted visor she sees Hop’s smiling eyes.

+

“What are you wearing that for?” Wickie hisses. “I have plenty of respi-patches.”

+

Hop snorts. “My dad doesn’t trust those things.”

+

Wickie shrugs. “Suit yourself.” She pulls a patch from her belt and presses it over her mouth and nose, sucking in sharply to activate the skin seal.

+

“So–” Hop taps the side of her mask “–are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?”

+

Wickie leans in, her voice an airy whisper. “Before he died, my Granda Ash told me about a tree just north of the forest. If it’s survived this long, then maybe…”

+

“Trees aren’t real Wickie, you know that!” Hop scoffs, but Wickie simply grins.

+

“Want to bet on it?”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Touch Wood on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Sandee Bree Breathnach

+

+ + Author image of Sandee Bree Breathnach + + + Hailing from the tiny green island of Ireland, Sandee Bree Breathnach is an aspiring writer who spends her free time crafting stories, marvelling over moths, and searching forests for fairies and inspiration. She has yet to find any fairies.

+

© Sandee Bree Breathnach 2023 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: levchishinae and TheDigitalArtist.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-34.html b/issue-34.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f035009d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34.html @@ -0,0 +1,463 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Issue-34s — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+

Mythaxis

+

Summer 2023

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Elena Sichrovsky +

Embryo

+
+ + +

Some people consider the fantastical genres to be non-overlapping magisteria: sci-fi is sci-fi; fantasy, fantasy; horror, horror. Others are not merely comfortable with a little bit of bleed-through, they positively revel in it. In our first story Elena Sichrovsky is selling you what looks like straightforward science fiction. Don't be deceived. But do be warned, this one is not for the faint-hearted.

+ + + + Story image for Embryo by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

My Beloved is Mine

+ Jude Clee +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for My Beloved is Mine by + + + +

Part One of the now inevitable Mythaxis Thematic Double Bill. Jude Clee launches us into a whirlwind romance, sweeps us up with anticipation for a lucky someone's Best Life Ever, sucks us into the inevitable troubles in paradise, and then drops us off the cliff of hell is other people.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Simulations

+ Masha Kisel +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Simulations by + + + +

And now sit back for your second speculatively matrimonial feature: Masha Kisel takes us into a pretty near future that feels pretty plausible, unfortunately, be it in the struggle of living day-to-day within a failing ecosphere, or of relating to people as we let technology come between us.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Infinite

+ Chisom Umeh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Infinite by + + + +

The notion of the multiverse has been popular in sf for much longer than the current cinematic obsession – and no surprise, because it offers such ripe opportunities for invention. Chisom Umeh super-collides witchcraft and technology to deliver a painful reminder that we rarely get what we expect, and getting what we ask for can be a curse, not a blessing.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Welcome to the Neighborhood

+ Rebecca Birch +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Welcome to the Neighborhood by + + + +

At the end of an often emotionally heavy selection of stories, why not a dash of sugar to help all the bitter medicine go down? Rebecca Birch gives us a short, sweet tale of making a new house into a home – not by starting a family, but by making a few new friends.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

An Interview with Francesco Verso

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for An Interview with Francesco Verso by + + + +

Mythaxis has been proud to feature stories penned by authors from a wide variety of countries in the past, but as an English-language zine it's fair to say that we've barely scratched the surface of what could be done to expose readers to genre writing from different cultures. Step forward Francesco Verso, man of world fiction.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin by + + + +

Your editor has been a fan of Bill Ryan's review writing for longer than the man himself has been aware of it. His passion for literature and cinema is particularly strong in the crime and horror genres, so it's a great pleasure to be able to welcome him to Mythaxis as our second periodic fiction reviewer. Which shall it be, I wonder…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Short Reviews – April to June

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – April to June by + + + +

As the issue draws to a close, we once again invite our readers to use us as a springboard to dive into the fiction offered by other interesting online zines out there. Three new stories from three different publications, all released in the last three months and all very much worth a little of your time.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Artificial-Artificial Intelligence

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Artificial-Artificial Intelligence by + + + +

For about a year, the team at Mythaxis has experimented with sophisticated software tools in an attempt to understand – and maybe predict – what makes a story catch the editor's eye. So far we've discussed this in the context of the popular/unpopular theme of the day, Artificial Intelligence – but AI is a delicate subject when it comes to writing fiction. So let's take a look at exactly what we got up to.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-34/artificial-artificial-intelligence.html b/issue-34/artificial-artificial-intelligence.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5b1f6961 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/artificial-artificial-intelligence.html @@ -0,0 +1,359 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Artificial-Artificial Intelligence — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Artificial-Artificial Intelligence

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Artificial-Artificial Intelligence by +
+ + + + +

O + +ver roughly the last twelve months, the Mythaxis team conducted a generally light-hearted experiment in applying AI technology to short fiction publishing. We used the cutting edge tools of the day to create an artificial intelligence so familiar with the tastes of the editor that we could task it with evaluating all submissions to the slush pile on his (that is, my) behalf. One day, when it had proved itself to our satisfaction, we could hand over the reins of Mythaxis to the “Slushbot” entirely.

+

Or at least, that’s how we framed it.

+

We talked about our experiment as if one day it’s going to wake up like the AI-Pinocchio of online magazine publishing. But that was never going to happen. We weren’t training an artificial intelligence at all, an artificial-artificial intelligence would be closer to the truth. In fact, what we did was considerably more mundane, though still interesting from our perspective.

+

So, while you can also read the glamorised version of the story in our recent editorials (see Issues 31, 32, and 33), I’d like to take a moment to discuss more seriously what we were, and were not, doing behind the scenes during the last year.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +’ll start with a negative. The world has become both enraptured and/or outraged by the arrival of Large Language Model (LLM) “artificial intelligence” text generators – ChatGPT being the most famous – and the visually stunning output of “generative” image systems, such as Midjourney.

+

These were not the tools that we used, and for several good reasons.

+

First and foremost, at the current point in the development of such systems there are ethical question marks hanging over them which we find concerning. Generative systems need to be trained on vast quantities of material (millions or billions of images; countless lines of text), and there is at least the possibility that some of that material was harvested and effectively reproduced in a comparable form without permission.

+

The implications of this are far-reaching, not least the question of who can legally be considered the “author” of a work that is created by a so-called AI. Is it the software developers who coded the tool? Is it, even, the tool itself? Or is it the person who entered a prompt and received what they asked for? Regardless, we should also ask what rights and credit are owed to those whose work the tools were trained upon, with or without their permission.

+

Until satisfactory answers are provided, LLMs and art-gen tools are problematic. Therefore, though we have experimented with image-generating AI tools in our less well informed past, we shall not do so again in future. For similar reasons, we don’t invite submissions of AI-generated stories for publication, because it is far from clear who the true author of any such text would be.

+

The second reason we didn’t use generative tools is much simpler: our objective wasn’t to create anything, at least not in the sense of writing a story or painting a digital picture. We wanted to make a tool, not a product, a tool with only one application: predicting what kind of stories the editor of Mythaxis likes to publish.

+

Let’s take a look at how we tried. And failed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +undamentally, what we dipped into was the rollercoaster thrill-ride called data analytics. This is the toolkit of academics working in fields such as “digital humanities”, “distant reading”, “data science”, and (a label now maybe more familiar to the general reader thanks to events of the last few years) “machine learning”.

+

So far, I have published exactly 99 stories as editor of Mythaxis. I have rejected approximately 20 times more than that in total. We wanted to know more about this body of data: out of over 2,000 stories, what made those few stand out? Obviously, a key factor was the editor’s taste in fiction, but we wondered how that very abstract concept might actually be represented in the raw data.

+

To learn more, we divided our submissions into three categories:

+
    +
  1. Acceptances (the stories we decided to publish)
    2. +
  2. Rejections (the stories we did not)
    3. +
  3. Better-rejections (ones which made our shortlist)
    4. +
+

The stories were then anonymised and analysed individually, with the resulting data aggregated into those categories. And then we analysed the aggregated data as well. What we called “the Slushbot” was really just the statistical output of a number of software tools that look at data and try to identify patterns.

+

Over the period of our experiment we used the following workflow:

+
+

Whenever the window opened, the editor would read all the new submissions and make a decision about accepting or rejecting them. Simultaneously but separately, our tools would analyse the contents of the slush pile, compare the statistical data with that of past acceptances and rejections, and make a prediction about which category each new submission fell into. At the end of the window, we compared those predictions with my actual choices, then updated the overall body of data to reflect the facts, hopefully improving the accuracy of its future performance.

+

In the event that these predictions came to reflect my actual decisions, this could be a very valuable resource. Mythaxis is a small operation; I always read all submissions, but this takes a lot of time and effort. Perhaps a trustworthy tool could be used to order the slush pile according to predicted acceptance rating, or simply to highlight what it considers strong candidates for immediate attention. Either of these approaches could make a significant difference in what sometimes seems a very daunting task.

+

So, we tried this for about a year, and… to say the least, the results were not good. Instead of identifying the mere seven or so stories that would make the final cut in each window, it would routinely categorise as many as half the submissions as “acceptances”, which would have led to issues featuring around a hundred stories each. As for its assessment of my actual selections, they were more often rejected than not, according to the data.

+

There are reasons for this, of course. Even a couple of thousand stories is not a big data set. Still worse for our analysis, the kinds of stories that get submitted to us can vary in incredibly diverse ways: they range in length from 1,000 to over 7,000 words; they use different regional styles and spellings of English; they represent wildly different subgenres under the general umbrella of “speculative fiction”.

+

It is hardly surprising that even remotely coherent patterns were not forthcoming.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e used a number of different software tools for our analysis. Our original attempt used SetFit, a machine learning classifier; then we turned to SBERT to explore “embeddings”, a mathematical representation of data, in our case linguistic data, such that each word, sentence, or paragraph can be compared against others to determine a degree of similarity or association. It is these associations that (we hoped, in vain) would allow distinctions to be identified between the categories we chose.

+

We also used Orange Data Mining and the research methodology of distant reading (see also here) to explore and visualise a variety of linguistic patterns in the data. In all cases, we were careful to work with these tools locally, never sharing data with organisations that could put it to uses outside of our control.

+

Arguably our most encouraging find was LIWC-22, a linguistic analysis software used to help identify which narrative qualities Mythaxis “looks for” when accepting or rejecting a story submission. This involves focusing down on how different parts of language and language use (verbs, pronouns, punctuation, speech acts, narrative tone, cognitive tension, story tropes, categories and topics, etc) feature in a text.

+

One thing which many of these tools have in common is, at least to my unskilled eye, incomprehensibility. The following image gives you a very general sense of what working with them looks like, and I’m glad that side of things is safely in the hands of my technical partner at the zine, Marty Steer:

+

+

Fortunately for me, LIWC stood out for the relative accessibility of its information output, being able to produce simple graphs suitable for an editor-level degree of interpretation:

+

+

Whether my interpretations were correct or not is another matter entirely!

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e’ve now decided to draw a line under our little experiment. We went into it more to investigate a fun possibility than with any realistic expectations of success; but there comes a time when the futility takes the edge off that fun – and, frankly, framing our experiment in the context of AI became less and less satisfying as the potential social impact of contemporary technology made itself clearer. And with that said, we still have at least the shadow of an elephant in the room, I think.

+

There is an admitted similarity between how LLMs are trained and the way we studied the submissions we received, and authors might understandably worry about that. Yes, true, in both cases texts undergo statistical analyses: the tools examine their sources of data in detail, looking for patterns upon which to perform their functions. The critical difference lies in what the ultimate objectives of those functions are.

+

LLMs and other generative tools use the statistical data they amass to generate outputs of a similar kind. If you train them on works of fiction, they become fiction simulators: machines that make texts with similar characteristics to a story.

+

I choose my words carefully here: not to get into the semantics of it, but unless a human agent is directing them very closely, I don’t think LLMs make actual stories at all – just something very story-like. Even given a human agent in that directing role, as we’ve said, the question of whether that person really is “the author of the text” is debatable at best.

+

By contrast, the tools we worked with only output statistics. If you feed them stories, they don’t become capable of making story-like texts. They just gave us a new way to look at what was actually there in the slush pile. And, as an editor, what I always want to know is whether what is there is a story I will like, or a story I won’t.

+

We probably never would have succeeded in making a tool that could tell me that with any accuracy. Maybe it would be cool if we had? But, just as there is no substitute for having humans create works of fiction, there’s no substitute for humans reading them either.

+

Orbit-lrg

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is adapted from Robot in Love by Hector ‘The Noise’ Fernández.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-34/editorial.html b/issue-34/editorial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..78476c3c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/editorial.html @@ -0,0 +1,316 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Editorial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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Mythaxis is going through a period of transition.

+

Nothing to fear about that.

+

How are we changing? Let me count the ways:

+

One: non-fiction

+

Last issue we welcomed onboard our first longform fiction reviewer, the erudite Mattia Ravasi; this issue we throw the doors wide for our second, the redoubtable Bill Ryan! Both boast admirable track records of literary opinionation, and we look forward to watching them dispense their insights in turn for many issues to come. It might be considered a thrilling back-and-forth between titan warriors of the pen-not-sword, very much history’s slowest-paced duel, were it not for that fact that they are in no conflict with each other whatsoever.

+

So too we continue our other new feature, showcasing newly published fiction from an array of other spec-fic zines via a brief collection of shortform reviews, but now we also present our first interview. This is most likely to be an occasional rather than regular event, but perhaps all the more special for it.

+

Two: artificial intelli…yawn

+

No new lengthy update about our trials and tribulations with the Slushbot (see past editorials ad nauseum), because after carefully considering the results of our toils we’ve decided no more! We have provided a more serious write-up of that lengthy experiment here, but – after dancing with (and around) the subject of AI in publishing for more than a year – it’s at last time to clarify some points regarding this magazine’s editorial position.

+

In the past we’ve used algorithmic image generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney to illustrate the magazine; but, while their output can be undeniably beautiful, we won’t use them again for the foreseeable future. The blackbox approach of training these systems on the work of unknown others raises too many ethical red flags.

+

The emergence of a service that rewards the artists who helped it grow would certainly change our stance. We will wait for one while breathing.

+

When it comes to the likes of ChatGPT, we feel far less ambivalence. It is the editor’s opinion that algorithmic text generation is a poor substitute for human expression. It offers “the new” only in the most superficial of senses, and while large language models might accidentally happen upon striking combinations of words, by nature these are systems that instead of reaching great heights tend towards the average (and when it comes to prose, the very average).

+

We remain agnostic with regard to the use of LLMs to generate prompts or ideas, even entire plots – plenty of good stories are generic, and the creation of hallucinatory “facts” is hardly a calamity when it comes to making up stories. However, the final work should be the sole expression of a human mind.

+

As a culture, there must be some domains we preserve for ourselves. Art, because it is as much a pleasure to create as it is to experience, is one. We would be lessened if we outsourced such things to unthinking systems, as would art itself.

+

For these reasons, we are not interested in publishing stories created by machine, unless that machine is flesh-and-blood.

+

Three: compensation

+

It has been some time since we last took in new submissions, skipping our April window, but with good reason. Amongst our many plans for the future, one at least is imminent: starting in July, we will begin offering our contributors a princely 1 cent per word fee instead of a flat $20 per story. We’re going to switch from dollars to euros, but to balance that blow to the US economy we’re setting €20 as our new minimum fee as well.

+

We don’t think this means we’ll get a better class of submissions (we like the pieces we’ve taken in the past just fine), but we do think that writers deserve more than we’ve been offering them. This isn’t a profit-turning venture, and it isn’t trying (or ever likely) to be one, but we can justify this small increase in costs and keep afloat for the long term. So we will.

+

We held off making this change until all existing commitments to publish were satisfied – therefore, as of now, our fiction silos stand echoingly empty.

+

Mythaxis is desperately in need of stories!

+

Know any writers? Human ones? Let them know!

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

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ISSUE 34 – Thanks and Salutations! +Many thanks to Roman Dubina for allowing us to use ‘The Chopper’ as our issue’s cover! You can see more of Roman’s work at Deviant Art.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-34/embryo.html b/issue-34/embryo.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..efcd50cf --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/embryo.html @@ -0,0 +1,386 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Embryo — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Embryo

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Elena Sichrovsky

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Embryo by +
+ + + + +

S + +ometimes I pretend that I was born.

+

I lay on my bed, pull my limbs in, and tuck my head down into what’s known as the fetal position. I’ve seen enough ultrasounds to know the term is an apt description of how a fetus lies in the womb. (Of course I have no umbilical cord. I twist my blanket into a long rope and position it at my navel.)

+

My chin dips down to my chest. I count my heartbeats, imagining how the rhythm of my heart’s valves might have sounded in the beginning. Was it hesitant: a composer tentatively releasing the first notes of his composition? Was it fragile: delicately growing in strength second by second? Was it bold, thunderous, from the moment I began?

+

(I emailed my manufacturer before, asking them this very question. I never got a reply. All I received was an automated message reminding me to file my weekly report on time.)

+

Eventually the joints of my bones start to ache. My body is protesting this charade; it knows it is a lie. I have never been wrapped in the buoyancy of amniotic fluid or explored the edges of the sac with tiny fingertips. I can’t return to a moment I’ve never had.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + was never small. I never grew. I look in the mirror in the hospital staff room, trying to imagine my face at a half or quarter of its current size. Using my hands I cover up my forehead and cheeks so that my eyes are the only part of me reflected in the mirror. Eyes don’t change size drastically from birth; maybe if I stare into them long enough I can catch a phantom of what my infant form might have looked like.

+

My hands drop and my fingers travel down to my stomach. I pinch and knead at the rolls of flesh. How pinked was my skin when it was still new and raw from the womb? Would diapers have given me a rash? Would the brush of baby powder have tickled my cheeks?

+

(A body that is born replaces its cells every seven years. Other people go through reincarnation again and again without even realizing it. The only way my cells will ever change is if some part of me malfunctions and needs to be replaced.)

+

My pager beeps. A patient needs me. Humans need me.

+

I don’t know what that’s like, to need someone else to care for me. Babies can’t feed themselves for the first year of their lives. Most of them can’t walk or talk during that time either. They are held. Does it feel strange to be held? Does it feel like your limbs have disappeared or ceased to function? Or do your appendages somehow feel tethered in the embrace?

+

I go to Room 302 and change the IV drip for Mr. Collins. He has stage four lung cancer. He thanks me for helping to keep him alive. We both know he won’t be for very long. He just wants to be able to meet his first granddaughter.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here’s a blank space on every hospital form for the patient to write their birth date. Once, when I was still in training, a patient said that he didn’t remember his. I wanted to help him, so I suggested that maybe he never had one. The nurse reprimanded me later for making light of a patient’s condition. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I don’t have a birthday either. I thought he might also be unborn but was too embarrassed to say so.

+

I was produced in the form of a mid-twenties female. For the first two years of my life I bought a cake on the first of every month to make up for the birthdays I never had. Now I usually get a cake to coincide with whichever patient has the most immediately terminal illness, so they won’t have to celebrate their birthday alone.

+

When the patients in the pediatric wards celebrate their birthdays we have to blow up balloons for them and wear small paper hats. I asked the head nurse if it’s because balloons are in the shape of the amniotic sac, so it reminds them of the day they broke out of that sphere and into the world. She looked at me for a long moment and then laughed, and said “No, but that’s really good. You think a lot about these things, don’t you?”

+

Then there was the time the medical interns got into a discussion about astrology and star signs. I was in the cafeteria eating lunch at the table beside them, and they wanted to know what I thought about only dating someone with a compatible star sign. I said, “Well, what if someone doesn’t have a star sign?”

+

They stared at me strangely, and one of them whispered something to the other. Then the tall blond boy said, “I guess you’re like one of those Uno cards that can be whatever color you want.”

+

If I could choose, I would have a birthday on the second day of July, because it’s the middle day of the year. But then my sun sign would be Cancer. And I would rather be a Scorpio. I read once that when scorpions can’t find food, the mothers will eat their babies. I like that. It must feel warm to go back inside your mother’s belly; you can be held from every side.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +r. Collin’s daughter Carmen is here for an ultrasound today. She wants to see her father afterwards, so I wheel her towards the elevator. On the way she lists different potential names for her daughter and asks me which one I like best. I choose the ones that start with the letters of my name: Y, N, or A. She says that her wife likes O and H names best.

+

“Did you try asking the baby which one she likes?” I say. I’ve seen older nurses in the maternity ward suggest this to patients. It seems important to encourage a connection between mother and the child in the womb.

+

Carmen smiles wide, showing her teeth. “No. I should try. Here.”

+

We are inside the elevator now. Carmen is in the wheelchair and I’m holding the handles. She takes my wrist and pulls my hand towards her belly. “I’ll say the names, and you tell me if she kicks.”

+

I feel a pulse against my palm when Carmen says Orla.

+

Carmen laughs and says she’ll need to tell her wife about this.

+

I never want to wash my hands again. I have made contact with a human who is existing inside another human. But I get called to change a patient’s bedpans on the next floor. Reluctantly I squirt a splash of soapy bubbles into my palm and rinse the soft imprint away.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey don’t allow me to hold the babies when they’re born. It’s a crucial clause in my contract. Humans are always worried about errors with individuals like me. I am not permitted to physically handle children under the age of three, or seniors over the age of eighty, or feeble patients.

+

I’ve assisted in thirty-five births. I’m frequently called on duty in the pediatric ward. The hospice patients are part of my regulars. Most of my time in the hospital is spent caring for those at the beginning or end of life, both of which are phases I have not and will never experience.

+

I can never say “when I was little” or “when I’m old”. I don’t have stories to tell from my childhood, or a retirement fantasy to discuss with friends.

+

(There are two others like me in this hospital. One of them works in the morgue, so I don’t see him often. The other one is a janitor. I tried asking her before, if she has the same questions I do; if she yearns for the past and the future that doesn’t exist for us. She said that she’s cleaned up enough sick children’s waste and geriatric vomit to be glad that she’ll never be one of them.)

+

Two of my friends – nurses with whom I work the rotation most frequently – once played a drinking game with me. They told me stories from their childhoods, and their friends’ childhoods, and their friends’ friends’ childhoods. I was supposed to pick and choose from their stories to create my ideal childhood. Any time I said “I’d want to experience that” they took a shot.

+

They were completely drunk within the first hour.

+

I wanted it all. I wanted the misery and the joy. I wanted the parents who set early curfews and the ones who left the house key under the porch mat. I wanted parents who spooned instant macaroni and cheese from tins and those who went to the farmer’s market every day. I wanted parents.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +armen’s due date is two weeks away. She has already checked into the hospital because of concerns about her age, but she also wants to be close to her father so he can be there for the birth.

+

Mr. Collins just suffered a severe bout of pneumonia. He’s still in the ICU, and Carmen asks me to wheel her down to watch him through the glass window every day. If I don’t have anywhere else to be during that time, I like to stay with her and listen to her tell me stories about Mr. Collins. How sharp his wit and sense of humor used to be. How he’s endured a childhood of war and poverty and disease. How she’s convinced that he can pull through this one too.

+

“My wife loves the name Orla, by the way.” Carmen tips her head up to look at me. “We’re going with Coline for the middle name, named after—” she nods towards Mr. Collin’s prone form “—him.”

+

I try to imagine what my children or grandchildren would say about me. They could talk about my diligence at the hospital, or recall stories about my patients. They might talk about those interns and that Uno card joke. Or they’d laugh about how I helped Carmen choose her baby’s name.

+

(If I could have children, that is. I am not built to function in that way.)

+

Carmen rubs the swollen roundness of her belly. I want to touch it again, to feel close to a diminutive existence that I can never carry. But she doesn’t offer, and I don’t ask.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Y + +our purpose is to serve, to benefit humanity however your employers see fit. Your function is to sustain life, to prolong it, to accommodate it. You are created to bring mankind into a kinder, better future.

+

That’s from page seventeen of the manual I had to memorize after my first test run. I quote it every six months when the maintenance inspector comes to the hospital for my routine check up. Most of the staff in the hospital already know what I am. The nurses, the doctors, the patients, they all say it doesn’t make a difference to them. They say things like “you’re basically one of us” and “honestly it must be nice” and “I don’t even notice it really”.

+

(Of course they don’t. They have a life cycle that runs in a perfect circle, instead of a single line sitting in the middle of the page.)

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +rla Coline is born one week early. She’s six pounds, seven ounces. She was born en caul, which means she was still in her amniotic sac. It looked exactly like the balloons I had to blow up for the children’s cancer ward. The doctor had to break the sac open and pull the baby out before she could take her first breath.

+

Orla has Carmen’s eyes, blue as a forget-me-not blossom.

+

Carmen’s eyes don’t shine like that anymore. Carmen died ten minutes after giving birth due to an internal hemorrhage. I find this out because I’ve been called to clean the room and bring the body down to the morgue. Her wife has said her goodbyes, has placed Orla on the still chest for one last comfort, and Carmen’s mother has wept over her for a good twenty minutes.

+

I take a moment to compose myself before going into the room. I recall the manual and my training. I don’t let my professionalism waver. (I don’t think about Carmen grabbing my hand and pressing my palm to her belly, or the small crease of laughter in her eyes when she’d talk about her daughter.)

+

Then I remember Mr. Collins. I wonder if he knows. I want to go check on him in the ICU, or at least find out if he pulled through – if he gets to meet his granddaughter after all – but the other nurse is rushing me along and won’t answer any of my questions. She leaves me alone with Carmen’s body while she goes to help another patient down the next hall.

+

Carmen’s room is thick with the odor of blood and feces. There’s a blanket over her spread legs. She’s wearing a pale turquoise hospital gown. I start to adjust the bed to make it easier to roll her body onto the gurney. Then I see the amniotic sac in the waste bin in the corner. The sac is torn in two pieces, but still makes a full globe when I hold the halves together. I pick it up slowly, rubbing my fingers over the slippery outside layer before sniffing the edges.

+

It smells like iron and urine.

+

I take a deep breath and then lower my head inside. Closer. Until my lips are touching the pool of liquid at the bottom and the walls of the sac are around my cheeks.

+

(I close my eyes and pretend that I’m a fetus, no bigger than the size of a fist. I’m swimming in here, the first place I ever exist, a place created by my mother’s own body. A sanctuary.)

+

When I lift my chin up there’s a trail of the yellow fluid running down the bridge of my nose. I stick out my tongue to catch the drop. It tastes terrible. But it’s what every human tastes before anything else, even their mother’s milk.

+

My hands are slick when I move over to Carmen’s bed to wipe my fingers dry on the sheets. The blanket slips off her knees and I see the spread of blood-soaked sheets beneath her. The hem of her gown is riding up, exposing her thighs. Her vagina looks wider than the average woman’s. The outer labia seems torn, too. I reach to tug down the hem of her gown, but then I pause.

+

(How might it feel to emerge from the birth canal? Is it a torturous squeeze? Or soft and swift, like laundry falling down the metal chute?)

+

I glance towards the door. It’s still closed.

+

Carmen and I face each other again. Her eyelids are closed. I close my own eyes and bow my head. Then I push my fingers inside her. First one hand, then the other. I cup them to mimic the size of a baby’s head and then I slowly pull them back out, noticing the pressure from either side. It’s a tight fit, even with my fingers that can bend and flatten to make the exit easier.

+

Blood trickles along my fingers as I insert them inside her again, going in deeper, up to my wrist. When I pull them out there’s a soft whoosh of air releasing. My skin is soaked in red – her red – her existence. Carmen died, but she brought a new person into being. Once upon a time she, too, was pushed out of a birth canal. She has completed the cycle. She’s begotten what she was given.

+

She is whole.

+

Tears prick at the back of my eyes and I cover my face with my hands, forgetting that they’re covered with blood. I breathe hard into my palms; I breathe in the scent of Carmen’s death, as if I can borrow some of the value of her life.

+

The door remains closed, shadowy footsteps swimming past the stream of light beneath.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Embryo on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Elena Sichrovsky

+

+ + Author image of Elena Sichrovsky + + + Elena Sichrovsky is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. Her fiction has been published in Mud Season Review, Nightmare Magazine, Tough, and Sublunary Review, among others. She’s passionate about using the lens of horror to explore themes like body transformation, grief, and marginalized identities. You can follow her on Twitter @ESichr or read more of her work on her website www.elenasichrovsky.com/.

+

© Elena Sichrovsky 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using images from photography33 and StockSnap - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-34/francesco-verso-interview.html b/issue-34/francesco-verso-interview.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..591ef49b --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/francesco-verso-interview.html @@ -0,0 +1,341 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + An Interview with Francesco Verso — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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An Interview with Francesco Verso

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ Story image for An Interview with Francesco Verso by +
+ + + + +

T + +his year, in April, I went to my first ever sf convention – something I waited to do until my fifth ever decade.

+

I won’t wait so long for my second convention. I had an excellent time: caught up with a few old friends and made a few new ones, attended some fascinating panels, talks, presentations, and readings, and of course bought a lot of books, happy to take advantage of the rooms of publishers, authors, and other artists hawking their wares.

+

At one stand my eye was caught by a translation anthology of contemporary Italian science fiction, Freetaly, edited by one Francesco Verso, who it turned out was also sitting behind the table. Yet not only an editor, and not just an sf author of short stories and novels too (those roles often going hand in hand), but also co-founder of FutureFiction.org, which aims “to disseminate and promote an interdisciplinary approach to the idea of the future, using science fiction and speculation as bridges between today and tomorrow”.

+

I thought that sounded pretty interesting, and though our conversation then wasn’t long enough to fully reveal all, it went well in both directions: he waved me off with my arms filled with books, and I walked away with his promise to be interviewed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Andrew Leon Hudson: Hi again Francesco, thanks for taking the time to talk! Maybe you could begin by telling us a little about yourself?

+

Francesco Verso: I was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1973, and I studied Environmental Economics at the University of Roma Tre. Before I became a writer full time I worked in the IT industry, including eight years with IBM and two with Lenovo, but in 2008 I quit to dedicate my life to writing and publishing sf. Over the last fifteen years I’ve won two Urania Mondadori Awards, the Odissea Award, the Italia Award, and four Europe Awards for Best Editor, Best Publisher, Best Work of Fiction, and Best Magazine. Since 2014, I’ve worked as editor of Future Fiction, a small press dedicated to publishing the best SF authors from all over the world. We have translations from thirteen languages and thirty-five countries, the only science fiction press in the world to do this.

+

ALH: What first attracted you to science fiction?

+

FV: During my university time, I studied for a year in Amsterdam for an Erasmus project. There along the canals I found a little secondhand bookstore run by an American guy who, down in the basement, was keeping hundreds of sf books. Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness… So I started from there, with the crazy ambition of imitating the writers that I now consider my teachers and sources of inspiration.

+

I write only science fiction, and I set my stories in the near future and mostly on Earth. I can’t really write about other worlds, as I believe there are enough alien realities and otherness here on our planet to light up any sense of wonder. We already walk into many uncanny valleys. Lately I am interested in exploring the solarpunk and human augmentation subgenres – sustainable energies and posthuman issues driven by technologies like CRISPR-Cas9, 3D printing, biomimicry, and native innovation – as tools to explore and analyze the biopolitical scenarios we’re heading towards in the coming years.

+

ALH: Tell us about your first success as an author.

+

FV: Oh, it was a long time ago… Back in 2008, I sent the manuscript of my second novel, e-Doll (a techno-thriller where sex-shifter androids are used as prostitutes to limit the awful phenomenon of sex-crimes), to the most prestigious Italian sf award, the Urania Mondadori Award. I was just an absolute beginner, so I am really thankful to the editors at that time, Giuseppe Lippi and Sergio Altieri, who gave me an opportunity to be published that has literally transformed my whole life.

+

ALH: And how about your most recent one – I have a copy of The Roamers waiting on my TBR shelf (so not too many spoilers please!).

+

FV: The main theme of The Roamers follows the life of a group of social rebels at the twilight of Western civilisation who undergo an anthropological transformation caused by the dissemination of nano-robots capable of reassembling molecules to create new matter. This technology changes the way they feed themselves and gives rise to a creative and autonomous culture which, while based on 3D printing and mesh networking, is in some aspects reminiscent of an ancient nomadic society.

+

The book was published in Italian in 2018 and it’s the first example of solarpunk novel in Europe, at least that I am aware of (other novels may have a slightly solarpunk vibe, but are not clearly or openly solarpunk). It’s now been translated in English by Jennifer Delare and published by Flame Tree Press; Chinese and Tamil editions are due to be published in 2024-25.

+

ALH: Tell us about your experience of having your work transformed this way.

+

FV: Translation is very special to me. It’s the real bridge to other worlds, other stories and futures. Without translations we would be doomed to live in just one reality, the one we’re born in, missing all the beauty that lies outside our own culture. As soon as I was published I started to think about the translation problem, and it was very difficult and complicated to invest my own money in the translation of my novels. Finally I found Sally McCorry who – over the course of more than ten years – has helped me translating three novels and around twelve short stories, becoming my “English voice”.

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In the specific case of The Roamers I worked with Jennifer Delare. I couldn’t pay the kind of fee that a big publisher could offer, so I had to be part of the process in order to make it happen, and after some twelve months we managed to finish. She was translating around two to three chapters at a time, and then sending them back to me for checking and approval. Jennifer did an amazing job, and not just on her own work; she found some minor contractions and missing information in the original text, and thus her contribution has also been relevant to revision of the Italian second edition as well as the English release. She was able to capture the original voice of the story and so I’m very grateful for what she’s done for me.

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Without making an initial investment myself in my translation, no editor in Science Fiction would have ever read any of my work, as there simply isn’t the interest within the publishing industry to explore non-English language fiction. Now that I’m also being published in other languages, the translation experience is changing for me. In the case of English, I am able to control more or less the meaning and even some nuances of the final translation; but with Chinese, for example, I just have to share with the translator as much as possible in terms of tone and atmosphere, and then trust in their work.

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Basically, the translator is the primary writer of your novel’s derivative language – not an easy task at all. And my science fiction is full of neologisms, plays on words, and cognitive estrangement, so it’s really a fine work of art to do translation well.

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ALH: This brings us around to Future Fiction. It seems to me that a big part of what you’re doing here is broadening the potential audience of individual writers by breaking down the barriers of geography and language.

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FV: Yes. Being an Italian writer is to live at the margin of a new dominant English culture, so over the last ten years I’ve come to realize that there’s a huge cultural loss to global science fiction in translations only coming from English. I’ve been invited to many sf cons – in France, Spain, Croatia, China, India, Montenegro, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands – and I always ask editors the same question: “What language do you translate from?” The answer is always the same.

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There was a time, from the 1960s through the 1980s, when important works of speculative fiction were translated from one country to another throughout the world, especially in Europe, Russia, and Latin America. Today, however, the hegemony of English in the publishing world has created a situation in which every author wants to be translated into English. This means that everyone knows everything about American and British SF while completely ignoring what is being written next door, in France and Germany, China and India, Brazil and Argentina, Poland and Finland.

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In reality, of course, high-quality science fiction is being written everywhere in every language; it is just that for most publishers commercial concerns come first, so readers do not necessarily end up with access to the best writing, just to the ‘best’ books available in English. This also imposes a huge and unfair burden on any people that do not speak English, many of whom do not have access to language instruction or cannot afford to study it. There is a lot of work to do in this respect, not just on markets but mostly on the perception of reality and how storytelling should and could be.

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The cultural loss of such a short-sighted approach is huge. A study by the University of Rochester found that only 3% of what is published in the US comes from a translation. Similarly, on any SF shelf in any bookstore from Tokyo to Amsterdam to Roma to Rio De Janeiro, there are hundreds and hundreds of books translated from English, and few from each nation’s own writers or writers writing in languages other than English. That is what Antonio Gramsci would call a ‘cultural hegemony’.

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ALH: How did Future Fiction come to be?

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FV: It all started because, as an sf reader, I was missing a huge part of the representativeness of the complete real world, some kind of “literary biodiversity” which in other genres (as paradoxical as it might seem) is not so unusual. For this genre to really become international, it should include the voices and experiences of people naturally speaking Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Bengali, Russian, and German, just to mention the most commonly-spoken languages. I was looking for the missing voices of global science fiction.

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So the project is more like a cultural small press than a commercial publisher. Thanks to a team of translators, we’ve published more than 200 short stories and 60 paperback, plus twelve comics and fifty audiobooks, either in Italian or in dual language formats (Chinese-Italian, English-Italian, and English-Chinese). Some might indeed define this as “diversity”, a term that is increasingly popular in and out of the genre in the Anglophone world, but then I think, “Diverse from whom? Who is in charge of setting the standards of “diversity”? Again, we are back to the original bias towards English-speaking culture.

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We talk about the precariousness of monocultures in biology, but what would the world become if there was just one voice to talk about the Future? And just one religion or economy or lifestyle to represent it? So, just as the Seed Vault in the Svalbard Islands preserves the biodiversity of plant life from a possible environmental catastrophe, I’ve set myself on a quest to preserve science fiction’s literary diversity from a possible cultural catastrophe.

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ALH: What plans and objectives does Future Fiction have looking forward?

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FV: Well, during the first phase of this project, the mission was to demonstrate that “science fiction happens everywhere” and, believe me, it was not easy at all to achieve it. Often people at book fairs or sfcons say, “Oh, is there sf in Italy? Or in Turkey, or Greece, or India?” So now this small project has developed into a real storytelling engine aimed at the “decolonization of the future”.

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The majority of big sf publishers in any country are more interested in what’s “around” the book than what’s “inside” it, and they don’t have scouts for other languages. We use a very powerful tool that I call the Sense of Wander to give dignity and visibility to Science Fiction stories that, because are not written in English, would remain neglected and totally ignored by the global conversation. Great books, wonderful authors, incredible scenarios, all lost “like tears in rain…” ☺ Our plan is to establish a network of small presses across the world that will talk to each other, share the best authors and stories, and translate directly between non-English languages.

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ALH: And how about yourself – do you have anything interesting on the horizon?

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FV: Two of my novels, Nexhuman and Bloodbusters, were published in China last year and soon they will also be released in Malaysia. The Roamers will come out soon in India too. I believe that the future is coming at full throttle from the East, and thus I will continue to work on that side of the world. I am about to finish a solarpunk anthology of short stories called Ecolution in the same setting as The Roamers which will be released in Italian and English next year, and I’m also working on the adaptation of Ecolution and Bloodbusters to comics published by Futuresque, the comics imprint of Future Fiction. 2023 and 2024 will be busy!

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks again to Francesco for chatting with us. If you’d like to actually hear him speaking about his passions, check out his 2020 presentation on Solarpunk as a genre and a social movement at the InterWorldView Conference in Huangzhou, China. You can get hold of his own publications here, and if you want to explore the Future Fiction website you’ll be glad to know it’s available in both English and Italian!

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The picture is assembled from cover images from Future Fiction’s website and Francesco Verso’s own photograph.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-34/grotesquerie-richard-gavin-review.html b/issue-34/grotesquerie-richard-gavin-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b04da137 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/grotesquerie-richard-gavin-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,323 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin

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Bill Ryan

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+ Story image for Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin by +
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T + +here is a subset of writers of horror fiction, which I haven’t named but I know them when I see them, the definition of which can essentially be boiled down to buy their books while you can. This is due to the fact that their books are generally not published in mass editions, and despite (or because of) whatever acclaim they have garnered, when the books fall out of print used copies shoot up in price, putting them financially out of reach of most people.

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The world of horror literature is full of such writers (and by the way, just for the record, this is not necessarily a sign of quality): Mark Samuels, Quentin S. Crisp, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Reggie Oliver… This even happens to writers who were once in the mass market. For example, look at The Voice of the Clown by Barbara Brown Canary. That was once a mass market paperback. When you get your hands on an affordable copy, let me know.

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I don’t mean to overstate things here. Other than Canary, several books by each of the writers mentioned above are readily available, in print, at different levels of affordability. But not all of them, especially their early books, like Samuels’s Black Altars, or Crisp’s The Nightmare Exhibition and Shrike. And theycan even come out of this: the great and immortal Robert Aickman’s full bibliography (save the slim volumes he wrote about England’s waterways) are back in print, as are most of the books by Thomas Ligotti. Thanks to Penguin Classics and other publishers, the vast majority of this master’s fiction is easy to find (strangely, it’s Ligotti’s most recent work that is hardest to come by), making this once-obscure writer’s name somewhat well-known, though I doubt many more people read him now than did before. But his influence is out there, and growing, in ways it never had before, so that while for decades up-and-coming horror writers wore their Lovecraft influence on their sleeves, now the shadow of Ligotti is just as likely to be seen (some may consider this six of one, half a dozen of another given that Lovecraft heavily influenced Ligotti, but on this I am forced to disagree).

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Someone who fits into many of the slots I’ve mentioned is the Canadian horror writer Richard Gavin. He is the author of several out-of-print, and now expensive, books (The Darkly Splendid Realm, Charnel Wine, etc.) and several that are in print but not widely known outside of passionate horror circles, such as At Fear’s Altar, Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness, and Grotesquerie. It is this latter title that, at long last, concerns us today.

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And speaking of Thomas Ligotti, as I often am, his influence on Richard Gavin is at times, shall we say, vivid. In Gavin’s story “After the Final”, the unnamed narrator (that’s your first clue) relates to his professor the story of one night when he and his “companions” set out to prove they are “true macabrists”. To me, this alludes to Ligotti’s belief, at least at one time, that among horror writers he was the only one writing real horror. Given Ligotti’s fantastically bleak antinatalist view of life and existence, that case could be made, but this reading is debatable. More explicit is the fact that the professor being addressed is named Professor Nobody. In Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Ligotti’s first story collection, Ligotti included a non-fiction, philosophical essay called “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. The lectures given in the essay are given by Professor Nobody, but I think it’s pretty well understood that’s just Ligotti. Elsewhere in “After the Final”, Gavin drops phrases like “this degenerate little town” and “my work is not yet done”, both of which are titles of Ligotti works. “After the Final” is almost like a little game for fellow Ligotti fans, and therefore unserious. Then again, near the end, Gavin writes “But as exquisite as this horror was, I am still left wanting”, which suggests the story could on some level be a refutation of Ligotti’s unlivable philosophy. You don’t have to agree with the man to admire, even love, his work. And we all have our hopeless hours.

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But enough about Ligotti. Grotesquerie is my first experience reading Richard Gavin, and it was my presumption, based on certain titles, that his work was firmly ensconced in the folk horror subgenre. And indeed there’s a fair amount of that, or at least nods towards that category of horror (one which I find particularly interesting), but that’s not all Gavin is up to, at least in this book.

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Though Gavin was already on my radar, I was led to this particular collection by, of all things, a pair of tweets by somebody I don’t even know, naming Gavin’s “Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty”, published in Grotesquerie, as one of their favorite horror stories. Having read it now, I concur that it’s a terrific story, set in a modern suburb but with hints toward an ancient folk history that the reader is not privy to. I don’t want to describe the story in detail, because it’s rather short and saying anything about the plot would be to say too much. But it’s truly skin-crawling, a story in which the horror is revealed with unnerving casualness.

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There are two other stories in Grotesquerie with titles similar to “Scold’s Bridle: A Cruelty”. Those are “Headsman’s Trust: A Murder Ballad” and “Ten of Swords: Ruin”. Together, these three stories comprise the best stories in Grotesquerie; the latter two are also much more explicitly of the folk horror subgenre.

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“Headsman’s Trust” describes the process of rising through the ranks to become the new executioner. This is a gross oversimplification (and a glib one) on my part, but again, while “Headsman’s Trust” is a bit longer than “Scold’s Bridle”, I’m loathe to describe the story in too much detail. At his best, Gavin has a way of simply letting his story, and its horror, unfold at its own pace. This makes the events of the story seem, in a very unpleasant way, like everyday occurrences. But to give you a sense of the kind of mood Gavin can evoke, here’s the first paragraph of “Headman’s Trust”:

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Just how the Headsman trapped divinity within His axe blade is a riddle I am not destined to solve. But I have borne witness to the Cut-Lord’s miracles. They evidence the power of both the blade and the hand that wields it. This is sufficient to keep me in servitude to Him.

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This paragraph does a lot of work, including informing the reader that we are not in the present day (though I suppose where we are – the past or a post-Apocalyptic future – is an open question).

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“Ten of Swords: Ruin” is the last story in Grotesquerie, and by far the longest. Normally, I object to this kind of sequencing, but “Ten of Swords” reads at a pace that makes it seem much more brief than some of the shorter, yet more labored, stories that precede it. It’s about two young sisters – Celeste and her older sister Desdemona – who are often left alone at the family estate by their very strange parents. The story revolves around a hidden Tarot card and a set of matryoshka dolls; also the shocking consequences of when Celeste’s inherent curiosity and mysticism override her sister’s philosophy of leaving well enough alone, and of not doing anything to bring unwanted attention from their parents, especially their mother.

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This isn’t to say that Desdemona views their parents unlovingly, or as a threat to their well-being, but she is uncertain about and somewhat afraid of their secrets and what might come from learning more about them. “Ten of Swords” is a psychologically and supernaturally complex story, but there’s one straightforwardly visceral scene of horror that I could see vividly in my mind’s eye. It’s a very effective punch, just when the story needed it.

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But as I’ve hinted at, Grotesquerie isn’t a complete success. There’s a formula that many of the stories fall into: our main characters have some normal, domestic sort of problem, one which, as they are diverted from a work trip or other errand, is mirrored by the horrific circumstances they ultimately find themselves in. “The Patter of Tiny Feet” is probably the worst offender in this regard, with its basic idea being set up dutifully, rather than artistically. “Fragile Masks” is another, although I quite liked this story, about a couple encountering the woman’s ex-husband at a bed-and-breakfast. Much more transpires from there, but for the life of me I can’t figure out where the “mask” metaphor came from, or what it’s supposed to mean in the context of this story and these characters. It’s as if Gavin thought he needed a dash of something stereotypically literary to smarten things up. If so, he was wrong; “Fragile Masks” would be better without all that.

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So Grotesquerie is a mixed bag. A solid piece of work like “The Rasping Absence” sits in the same table of contents as “Neithernor,” which is initially intriguing (it deals with mysterious and inexplicably disturbing art, a favorite trope of mine) but in the end feels bizarrely rushed, as if Gavin found no time to develop it the way he wanted to. But there are worse reading experiences than reading a mixed bag. There’s enough that’s good about Grotesquerie, and enough in it that clearly shows off Gavin’s talents, that I consider it all a net positive. Bring on Sylvan Dread, I say!

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill’s thoughts on Facebook.

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Bill Ryan

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+ + Author image of Bill Ryan + + + Bill Ryan is the proprietor of the substack A Rip in the Picture. His online writing can most often be found at The Bulwark, as well as at Decider.com and RogerEbert.com. He can be yelled at on Twitter @faceyouhate and Bluesky.

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© Bill Ryan 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The image shows author Richard Gavinand the novel’s cover (art by Mike Davis and design by Vince Haig).

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Summer 2023

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Embryo

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Some people consider the fantastical genres to be non-overlapping magisteria: sci-fi is sci-fi; fantasy, fantasy; horror, horror. Others are not merely comfortable with a little bit of bleed-through, they positively revel in it. In our first story Elena Sichrovsky is selling you what looks like straightforward science fiction. Don't be deceived. But do be warned, this one is not for the faint-hearted.

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My Beloved is Mine

+ Jude Clee +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for My Beloved is Mine by + + + +

Part One of the now inevitable Mythaxis Thematic Double Bill. Jude Clee launches us into a whirlwind romance, sweeps us up with anticipation for a lucky someone's Best Life Ever, sucks us into the inevitable troubles in paradise, and then drops us off the cliff of hell is other people.

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Simulations

+ Masha Kisel +
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And now sit back for your second speculatively matrimonial feature: Masha Kisel takes us into a pretty near future that feels pretty plausible, unfortunately, be it in the struggle of living day-to-day within a failing ecosphere, or of relating to people as we let technology come between us.

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Infinite

+ Chisom Umeh +
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The notion of the multiverse has been popular in sf for much longer than the current cinematic obsession – and no surprise, because it offers such ripe opportunities for invention. Chisom Umeh super-collides witchcraft and technology to deliver a painful reminder that we rarely get what we expect, and getting what we ask for can be a curse, not a blessing.

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Welcome to the Neighborhood

+ Rebecca Birch +
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At the end of an often emotionally heavy selection of stories, why not a dash of sugar to help all the bitter medicine go down? Rebecca Birch gives us a short, sweet tale of making a new house into a home – not by starting a family, but by making a few new friends.

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An Interview with Francesco Verso

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for An Interview with Francesco Verso by + + + +

Mythaxis has been proud to feature stories penned by authors from a wide variety of countries in the past, but as an English-language zine it's fair to say that we've barely scratched the surface of what could be done to expose readers to genre writing from different cultures. Step forward Francesco Verso, man of world fiction.

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Grotesquerie, by Richard Gavin

+ Bill Ryan +
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Your editor has been a fan of Bill Ryan's review writing for longer than the man himself has been aware of it. His passion for literature and cinema is particularly strong in the crime and horror genres, so it's a great pleasure to be able to welcome him to Mythaxis as our second periodic fiction reviewer. Which shall it be, I wonder…

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Short Reviews – April to June

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
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As the issue draws to a close, we once again invite our readers to use us as a springboard to dive into the fiction offered by other interesting online zines out there. Three new stories from three different publications, all released in the last three months and all very much worth a little of your time.

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Artificial-Artificial Intelligence

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Artificial-Artificial Intelligence by + + + +

For about a year, the team at Mythaxis has experimented with sophisticated software tools in an attempt to understand – and maybe predict – what makes a story catch the editor's eye. So far we've discussed this in the context of the popular/unpopular theme of the day, Artificial Intelligence – but AI is a delicate subject when it comes to writing fiction. So let's take a look at exactly what we got up to.

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Infinite

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Chisom Umeh

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C + +hika returns to the same dream every night, deliberately. The one where Olisa becomes an existing boy again. Those moments when she holds him back as he stretches his hand to a passing ice cream truck, wanting to break free from her grasp. The ice cream man notices the little boy itching to run off from his big sister’s arms and waves from the window at him.

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Nothing is ever enough to hold this energetic child. He wants to go off, like he tries doing every other morning when the truck passes. But Chika lifts him in the air and spins around, hearing a chuckle escape his lips. This is the moment she keeps going back to in the dream. The moments when they were happy. The moments before.

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She wants those precious moments to remain, and often flicks off a tear from her cheek whenever she wakes and finds that they’re no more. She gets down from her bed and lifts an imaginary Olisa off the ground, guarding him in the crook of her arms. She spins around as the bedroom AI detects her soft movements and proceeds to part the curtains to let in sunlight. She tries to remember the contours of his cheeks and the brightness of his smile every morning. Because in those moments he is suddenly there with her in real life. Until he isn’t.

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But tonight, Chika no longer wants to hold an imaginary Olisa.

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A bus drops her in the heart of town. The air here is gentle against the skin, even at this time of night. Some shop owners are packing up, others already closed. This part of the city is urban, hence the almost quiet street. A car zooms past Chika and she pulls up her hoodie. She knows there’s a security bot ahead, so she turns onto an alleyway.

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Orbit-sml ><

+

k + +nock. Wait. Knock again.

+

Silence. Shuffling of feet. “Chika?”

+

“Yes, it’s me, Prof.”

+

A buzzing sound. The door clicks open. A head peeks out. “Are you sure you’re not being followed?”

+

“I’m sure.”

+

Professor Nwokolo lets her in. She walks behind him through a long passageway that seems to steepen as they go. His small frame is probably heavier than it looks, hence his slow movement. The red bulbs on the walls are bright enough that you can see in front of you, but dim enough that you can’t be very sure what’s there.

+

“I thought you wouldn’t make it,” he says, and his voice carries through the hallway. There’s excitement in his tone, and Chika wonders what is so exciting about what they’re about to do.

+

They emerge at an open room, and Chika thinks she saw an apotropaic amulet hanging just at the entrance. Professor Nwokolo is a man of science, but he’s well aware of what people like her can do to him. Not exactly people like her, just people from her coven.

+

There’s a table cluttered with everything from screwdrivers to energy-capturing gloves. There’s a white board at the far end with equations complex enough to pass for advanced magic symbology. The equations extend to pieces of papers strewn around the floor. Nwokolo steps on a few as he crosses the room. Osita Osadebe’s People’s Club is serenading the room. He usually says the soft rhythm of the highlife song reminds him of his father, but it does the opposite for Chika, reminding her of her mother’s old records.

+

“So what can I offer you?” he asks, his palms open in front of him. “A drink, perhaps?”

+

“Nothing. Let’s just get on with it.”

+

A smile spreads across his face. There’s a bright twinkle in his eyes that almost reflects on his glasses. The last time Chika saw him he had facial hair. But now, oddly enough, he looks older without it.

+

“Okay then,” he says.

+

Nwokolo goes to one end of the room and pulls a cloth off a cylindrical glass chamber. Inside it are a thousand fireflies. Their yellow glow lights up the cylinder, a flagrant contrast to the lab’s dim-red background. He turns to Chika and smiles. “We’ll use this.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

c + +hika is an Ihe Conjurer, meaning that she gets her energy from natural light. Her coven’s witches like to channel the sun because it is the most pure and effective energy source, but a consequence of doing so is that they immediately become averse to sunlight, and must avoid it for as long as it would take for the energy to wane. Further exposure could cause them to become combustible, and as little as a vibration of someone’s vocal cords could be like taking a match to dry leaves.

+

She remembers seeing a witch caught up in the flames in front of her house five years ago. The fire licked the woman’s skin, burning her till she could no longer move. Chika stood transfixed that morning, frightened by how a human being could be reduced to ash in seconds. She will never forget, but not for that reason. She was only released from the sight when she heard the sounds of a vehicle crashing into something, and turned to find that her little brother had run into the main road.

+

That method of channeling isn’t available to Chika right now, however. Not because it isn’t daytime – she has saved up enough sunlight in her talisman to use at night – or because she’d have to live like a vampire for several days after, but because channeling the sun or any other high energy source will alert her coven, and her chance to do what she came for will be lost. Professor Nwokolo had told her he had found an alternative, and even though she had her doubts, she agreed to try it out.

+

“Fireflies generate light through a chemical reaction in their bodies, a process called bioluminescence.” Nwokolo often speaks without stopping to catch a breath, stringing words together like he’d lose the ability to speak if he doesn’t say them quickly enough. He seems to be twice as fast now that he is excited, sending the words tumbling over each other. “Light is produced when oxygen combines with calcium, adenosine—”

+

“Prof, biko, stop,” she says. “Just get on with it. We don’t have all night.”

+

“Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just that—” Chika glares at him “—okay, okay.” He goes to the side of the cylinder, pulls some cables that are connected to a computer, and moves to attach them to Chika’s arms. “Roll up your sleeves, please.” She does so and he applies the ends of the cables just above her wrists.

+

Chika clenches and unclenches her fist but doesn’t feel anything. She expects there to be a warm sensation indicative of energy flowing into her, the way her skin reacts when she connects with the sun’s rays. Instead what she gets is like dipping her hand in water; there’s something, but then there’s nothing.

+

Nwokolo notices and says, “Cold light. Firefly light doesn’t produce heat, which helps them conserve more energy than, say, a lightbulb. And it also keeps them from burning themselves up.” The edges of his lips curl up as he reaches the end of this statement, as if there’s something amusing in what he just said. Chika almost doubts him, because it could be that the reason she isn’t feeling anything is that there’s nothing to feel, but then her talisman lights up, a gentle luminescence the same shade as the fireflies, and she knows he’s right.

+

“Yes, there it is,” he says, seeing the talisman, and she almost smiles too.

+

“They won’t be able to pick this up?” she asks.

+

“They shouldn’t. It’s never been used before, and there’s almost no energy leaking out. You’ll have enough time to do the spell, and—” he looks around the lab “—hopefully, I’ll have enough time to get out of here.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +hika told her mother about the Higgs field manipulation the night of the day she met the Professor for the first time. How she had overheard his frustrated ideas, seen how his theories were scorned by his peers as outlandish, and then recognised in his grasping for comprehension threads that led not to their science but instead towards her magic.

+

She told her about how they discussed the intersection of science and the supernatural, that point where figures become symbols, and symbols become language. She told her mother that this could be the chance to see Olisa again, or even bring him back.

+

“What?” her mother said, almost choking on the morsel of fufu that just went down her throat.

+

“He says his quantum computer can only get us as far as fluctuating particles or so, then we’d need to cast an—”

+

“Don’t say another word, Chika!” her mother barked. “Don’t! Going into another dimension! It is forbidden what you are thinking. That’s not what we practice.”

+

“But it is—”

+

“I said no! I don’t want to hear of this again. Olisa is dead and gone. Let him be.”

+

But Chika did speak of it. Many times, even. On the phone, before dinner, after breakfast. Everytime she could. When her mother kept giving her the same reply, Chika bypassed her and took the matter up with the coven. She was told that crossing over would create a dent in the fabric of Ani Mmuo, and the consequences will be grave.

+

Chika said they were being superstitious.. They warned her that if she ever went on with the crossing she’d be stripped of her powers and banished from the coven, her mother among them.

+

“But this has nothing to do with ghosts and spirits,” Professor Nwokolo had said when they met again at a restaurant. “These are real humans living in parallel universes, similar to ours in many ways. They exist at this moment, we just need to figure out how to go there. It’d be the biggest breakthrough in science.”

+

“I tried, prof,” Chika said calmly. “I did. But I’m forbidden from doing anything anymore.”

+

Nwokolo leaned back in his chair, looking out the window. He took a long drag from his cigarette and let the smoke waft from his mouth in slow, ascending curls. “Both the scientists and witches think me mad,” he said, the beginnings of a laughter tainting his words. “Am I really mad?”

+

Chika shook her head.

+

“You know, this project was my father’s. He spent his whole life working on it but died before he could finish it.”

+

“You wish to see him again too, don’t you?” she asked.

+

“I only will if you help me. Come on. Let’s see this through.”

+

“I’m sorry. I already told you. I can’t help.”

+

Chika didn’t communicate with Professor Nwokolo for the next three years, until she woke on Olisa’s birthday with a fresh wound on her heart and a heaviness in her soul.

+

Only holding Olisa again could possibly heal her. Even if he was not her Olisa.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +hika starts to feel the effects of the energy. It isn’t much compared to what the sun would have given her. A whisper rather than a roar. But Professor Nwokolo assures her that it’ll be just enough to jump-start the process.

+

The glow in the cylinder starts to dim. The fireflies start to look more flies and less fire. She’s robbing them of something, she knows, and though that feels wrong, there’s nothing right in losing an innocent child like Olisa to the gaping jaws of death.

+

“Ready?” Nwokolo asks, a hint of nervousness in his voice now.

+

“Almost.”

+

He rushes to the computers and his fingers rattle over the holographic keys. A section of the wall beside him slides apart slowly, revealing a glass door behind. Chika unplugs the cables attached to her and steps towards the door. She sees a cloudy mist inside the compartment.

+

“Is this it?” she asks.

+

“Yes. The Higgs Accelerator.”

+

“Did you get the things I asked for?”

+

“Yes.”

+

He goes to one end of the lab, returns with a backpack, and hands it to Chika. She takes out the items one by one, and soon has poured a semi-circle around the HA machine from a pack of salt. She ties together bunches of patchouli, basil, and hyssop then sets it on fire, allowing the incense to burn around the circle. Finally she takes four candles and lights them at each end of the lab, muttering incantations under her breath all the while.

+

Professor Nwokolo stands with his hands folded watching her the entire time, almost like he can’t wait to get back to doing his own part of the job.

+

After casting the spell to cleanse the lab, Chika walks up to the glass door and nods at Nwokolo. It opens vertically and the mist escapes. She hesitates, then steps into the compartment. It is just wide enough to take one person, and is quite comfortable if they don’t decide to spread their arms.

+

Nwokolo pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and says, “If this works, you should arrive in an alternate version of this lab. You have six hours before the window shuts again. Do what you have to do, use the spell again, and you’ll return.”

+

Chika nods again, and he adds, “Begin at my signal.”

+

The glass door slides shut and Nwokolo moves out of her line of vision. There’s a low hum omnipresent in the compartment. Chika can’t tell where it’s coming from, but she soon begins to hear it in her thoughts. This makes her uncomfortable and she puts her hands on the glass. She feels itchy and suddenly wants to take off her wig. Where is he? she thinks.

+

A minute passes. Then another. Then he reappears and gives her a thumbs up, and she reads his lips: Now!

+

Anyanwu Ututu, she begins. Onwa n’abali! Anam apkoku unu o…

+

She feels something grow in her with each word she utters. Like a river contained in a tank, cracking the glass inch by inch.

+

Benmuo na Benmadu, she continues, unu nukwa nu’m o.

+

She goes on for minutes, the intensity of her voice increasing with each passing second. The energy within her comes loose, and she lets out a scream, unnatural and primeval. She feels the glass within her shatter, and the river pour out, flooding the world.

+

She lets the water carry her across the planes of the ethereal, into that region where the physical and the metaphysical mean the same thing.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he ground is warm. Chika sits up and looks around. The glass compartment is gone. This isn’t the lab she knows. The edges are cleaner and the light is brighter. There’s a sharp pain in her head. She puts her hand to her forehead and says a few words to stop the ache, but nothing happens. She checks her talisman and there isn’t the faintest glow. No energy left.

+

Did it work?

+

She stands and looks around again. The room isn’t actually as neat as she thought. There’s something viscous like engine oil by the edges of the walls and machine parts piled on each other at another end. There are shelves that rise to the ceiling occupied by devices and hardware Chika can’t identify.

+

Computer screens hover a few feet from her and she steps forward to look at them. “Professor Nwokolo,” she calls. “I made it into the other side. Where’s your other self?”

+

The noise of machines startles her, a jarring mix of sounds that feel like TV static combined with water slapping against rocks, and she steps in its direction. The layout of the lab seems the same, even though she isn’t sure it’s the same place. The entrance is different, however, now situated to the right. She walks through the hallway but it is no longer dimly lit, and a few seconds later, she sees something that stops her dead.

+

It looks like a robot, metallic and shiny. Her eyes bulge as it draws close, and she finds herself backing away.

+

“Are you a robot?” she asks, heart thumping.

+

“I… am a… Zonda,” it replies, and she can see that a part of it lights up when it speaks. Its voice is mechanical and toneless, and its body is shaped like a sphere. There’s neon green light glowing from its topmost part, and though the robot is predominantly blue, its lower half is multicolored, like it’s made from a combination of foreign parts.

+

The strange noises intensify as it approaches, and suddenly Chika’s head is pounding. “What’s that noise?”

+

“Music,” it says. “Why?”

+

The room begins to spin and her legs lose balance. She clatters to the ground and a wave of weariness washes over her.

+

“I can’t… I can’t breathe,” she manages to say, before blacking out.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen she wakes the robot is standing over her, or rather, hovering over her. She feels high and drowsy, and thinks she’s dreaming. “They were right,” she says.

+

“Who?” the robot asks.

+

“The witches,” Chika says. “My mother. They warned me but I didn’t listen. Now I’ve gotten myself… here. Where’s here? The future? The past?”

+

“You passed out,” the robot says. “I believed you to be traumatized by my presence, but when you began to breathe irregularly I understood that you were anaerobic. There is not much air in this part of town, so I attached an oxygen tube to your collar.” Chika feels below her chin and touches a metallic necklace.

+

“Are you a robot?” she asks.

+

“You asked me that. I think you are the robot. Or a construct. Or whatever. Let us leave semantics for now. The important thing is how you got here.”

+

The robot turns around and glides to the computer screens. They blink quickly, a series of numbers moving from top to bottom. Soon, a video feed takes up the screen.

+

“You see right there,” the robot says, an appendage extending from its side and gesturing at a corner of the screen. Chika manages to stand on her feet, comes close to the screen, and squints.

+

It shows the lab, the one they’re currently in. The robot is there in the video, a pair of the arms extending out the sides of its body and adjusting some component of a machine. The robot departs the scene. Then a flash of light overwhelms the image.

+

After the flash of light, Chika herself appears, sprawled on the floor. As she starts to rise, the image freezes.

+

“One minute you are not here,” says the robot, “the next minute you are. Did you use a particle accelerator? Or some kind of ship? Or was it—”

+

“I came from another universe in something called a Higgs Accelerator, aided by my magic.”

+

“Oh, so that iis how you did it,” it says, turning to her. The neon light brightens, taking up more space on its body. “Of course. The energy of those who can bend nature. Why did I not think of that?”

+

Chika swallows hard. Could it be? “Prof… Professor Nwokolo?” Chika was getting weak again, the ache in her head growing exponentially.

+

“Is that what I am called on your side? Well, I think this professor of yours got a few calculations wrong.” A titter escapes from the robot, even though machines shouldn’t be laughing and there is really nothing funny about what it – or he? – just said. “How are you supposed to get back?”

+

“I’ll say the words when it’s time,” Chika says, “and I should be pulled from this world.”

+

The robot snickers again and Chika begins to wonder if she should just say the words now and remove herself from here. But she’s sure her coven’s witches will be at the Professor’s lab by now, and the moment she gets back is the moment she loses her powers.

+

This is it, the only chance she’ll ever get, and she must see it through.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +hika and the robot – it named itself, but Chika could not recognise the sound as a part of language, and simply called it “the Professor” again – speed through the streets in an unfamiliar kind of vehicle, a two-man hovercraft shaped like a tennis ball.

+

“If I do not get you away,” he tells her, “they would come for you in minutes. There was a surge of energy around my lab when you showed up and the authorities will want to know where it came from. Well, the authorities, and the ones who can bend nature.”

+

The witches, in Chika’s parlance. ”Don’t you have a name for them?” she asks.

+

“Names are a thing of words. We do not have words.”

+

The absurdity of his statement startles a laugh from her lips. “How can you say that? We are speaking now!”

+

“My words with you are the first I have ever spoken,” he says. “We do not speak your language, or really even talk. Zonda do not need to be vocal to communicate. I broke down the sounds you make into code I can understand, I intuit meaning from your body language, and mimick your speech patterns.”

+

“That is not enough!”

+

“I also sense the complex patterns within the organ in your head. I translate our form of language from code and into signals you can understand.”

+

She turns away from his gaze, disturbed. The night is brighter in this world, and Chika can see from the vehicle that the moon is a lot bigger and closer. “How is this possible?” she asks.

+

”Life started out here from the merger of two planets, one much larger than the other. The metallic core of the planets collided, and from this union came a superabundance of the basic element from which most simple life forms here evolved.” The Professor indicates himself. “The remnants of the dead planet collected pretty close to orbit, and this is the moon you now see.”

+

She looks through the window and there are other robots like the Professor out there. Some are larger, others as small as a football. Some look quite different, like trees with trunks and branches spiraling all around them. Then Chika’s view is obscured as several vehicles pull up beside theirs.

+

“Oh no,” the Professor says, and accelerates, twisting and turning onto several streets, but there’s little he can do to stop the other vehicles from gaining on them.

+

A red light passes through their vehicle and splits it in two, forcing Chika and the Professor to fall in opposite directions. Chika’s half bounces through the streets before crashing into a dome on the side of the road.

+

She’s caught in a mess of wires and grease and sparks and chips and metal. For a moment she thinks she’s no longer breathing, the air gone from her lungs, but then she feels something probing her side. She stirs, and pushes to her feet.

+

The things poking at her are snake-like appendages connected to robots outside the vehicle. They touch her and withdraw reflexively, as if checking to understand if she responds to stimuli. This goes on for about a minute, the tentacles ruffling her hair and feeling her face. At first they feel soft, like rubber, but seconds later, as if satisfied about what she is, they become denser than vines and curl themselves around her arms and legs.

+

She’s dragged through the wreckage of the car and into the street. Jagged metal cuts her skin and she leaves a trail of blood on the floor. She’s held upside-down and lifted several feet from the ground, her body dangling in the air.

+

Chika tells herself she’s dreaming, but the pains in her body and the tightness around her legs disprove that.

+

She imagines herself dying here, several universes away from her mother, in a world of machines.

+

Then another intense light leaps past her, and she is dropped and falls to the ground unexpectedly – she feels something break. She sees the Professor advancing and wielding a device in his hand, firing beams of light at the tentacled robots, who are now taking cover.

+

“Let us go,” he says.

+

She manages to stand again and limps on one foot towards him. He points to a vehicle like the one they came in and stays there shooting, covering her escape. Just as she’s about to enter the vehicle, she looks back and sees him taking fire. One shot goes into his lower quarters and splinters it into an assortment of parts. Wires, circuitry, screws, and fluid spill onto the ground.

+

“No!” Chika screams, and rushes from the vehicle, hands outstretched in front of her.

+

Then she stops.

+

She tilts her head upward and glances at the moon, disturbingly close and pale and bright. She lifts her arms high, feeling the light pass between her fingers. The sun is light, she thinks, and the moon is a product of that light.

+

“Onwa n’abali,” she calls, “akpokuo’m gi kita. Nyem ike kitaaa!”

+

Chika feels the energy course through her veins, her blood, and her spirit. Then she lets it all out, a contiguous light that extends in all directions.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +midst the smoldering robots and burning vehicles around her, Chika kneels and picks up the Professor, or what is left of him. He is almost weightless, wires extending out of his broken parts. She’s staring at his neon lights, now dimmer than she has ever seen it.

+

“Hello,” he says. “You never told me your name.”

+

“Chika,” she says. “I’m Chika.”

+

“Chika, you do not have much time. What you just did now will summon the ones who can bend nature. They are far worse.”

+

His world’s witches. “I know.”

+

“Get into that vehicle. I have sent the coordinates to the system. It will take you to the location you seek.”

+

“What about you, can’t you rebuild or fix yourself?” she asks, fighting back tears, her words distorted by a growing lump in her throat.

+

“It does not work that way, Chika. I am a living thing too, you know?”

+

“So?”

+

“So living things die when they get hurt too much.” Chika looks away now, no longer able to hold back the tears. His voice is getting fainter and fainter by the second, another living thing dying slowly in her arms. Again.

+

She hears a laugh and returns her gaze to him. “What?”

+

“Your professor…” He laughs some more. “Infinite possibilities, and he thought you would end up in a universe just like his. He should have known better. But at least… at least, he has helped me realize I accomplished something, somewhere, in another universe.”

+

This Professor is still laughing when the green light dims, then finally fades, alongside his voice.

+

All those complex processes just to speak to her, but now he is dead because of her, a fact as simple and straightforward as a witch’s locator spell.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +ive hours have passed since Chika came to this world, ten minutes since she has been in front of this house. She is within the confines of the vehicle the poor Professor gave her. The pre-dawn light rises in the horizon, a yellow band invading the night.

+

It’s not really a house like she knows it, just a large structure that seems to have been sculpted out of a chunk of metal that juts out of the ground. It has a kind of see-through wall that becomes opaque sometimes, as if a change in the air alters its thickness.

+

Though strange, the house is somewhat familiar. It is across a road just like hers, and vehicles are speeding past. Vehicles that Olisa, or his alternate self, can run into when his alternate big sister isn’t looking.

+

She cannot step out of the vehicle or cross the road, however. After her great outburst of energy, that still could not save the Professor, the sun would scald her the moment she put a finger out. So she stays there watching. Looking through the walls at a little robot and two larger others gliding around the house.

+

She can tell them apart because the smaller one is eager to go outside even though it isn’t time yet – like Olisa always did when he was ready for school.

+

The slender one, struggling to keep him within her grasp, is a bit erratic, freezing sometimes like someone powered her down, then zapping around the house again as if suddenly on full charge. She knows that robot is one of those that can bend nature. Like Chika can, For it is herself.

+

The last one moves around quite slowly, as if her machinery needs oiling, as if the world is too quick for her, as though time dilates around her. She’s spherical like the Professor, but more wider and burly, and Chika almost laughs at the thought that her mother is fat both as human and Zonda.

+

Chika wishes to go to them, to play around like one family again, to snatch the little one in her arms and hold him in the air. But they’d shriek, express their shock in ways she might not be able to understand, and be horrified by her presence in ways only Zonda can.

+

She thinks not to go to them, lest she be the reason the little one runs into the street in fear, and be knocked down by a vehicle a hundred times his size again. So she basks in the sight she beholds, and keeps it in her mind, because even though this Olisa might now be made of silicon, her love for him is the same across substrates, across universes, and across the vast distances of the infinite.

+

And then she feels the air change, and reality alters.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +hika is pulled into a space where everything is dark and colorless. The house, Olisa, her mother, the hovercraft – all gone.

+

She’s afloat, and voices are speaking around her in a strange language. And yet…

+

“Witch code,” someone says. “If you’re like us you’d be able to understand it.”

+

“She’s not like us,” another voice says, this one firmer than the first. “She’s a Crosser, like plenty before her in other worlds, and that’s all we need to know.”

+

There’s a murmur in the background, voices trying to speak over each other.

+

“Silence!” The firm voice speaks again. “She has indeed come from elsewhere, and we know what we must do.”

+

“Those instructions were given before we were born,” another voice says. “Do we really have to keep to them?”

+

“We must, if we hope to maintain balance in our world, and cleanse it of whatever filth she has brought with her. And we must do this here, now, before we lose the chance.”

+

Chika wants to speak, to tell them she means no harm and just wants to see her brother again, and maybe to hold him once more, but the words remain only in her head, and her head is deep in turbulent waters.

+

The voices grow around her. They become loud enough to almost split her eardrums. They’re chanting. She’s screaming, but she can’t cover her ears.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +he’s hurled from the mystical plane back into objective reality. She’s no longer within the protection of the hovercraft, and the sun’s rays are eating into her flesh. She’s on all fours, crawling to the house, the hard earth biting into her palms.

+

Her body’s on fire, but her soul is freezing cold.

+

She’s saying the words to return home now, but she isn’t sure if she’s doing so with her mouth or her heart. One thing is certain though – she isn’t being transported back. She looks up to the house and sees the robot girl outside, standing there, watching her.

+

Chika knows that feeling. That fright. That horror.

+

She hears the sounds of vehicles coming from afar and knows what’s coming next.

+

Her vision is blurry now, but she can see Olisa in her mind’s eye. The robot boy has run out of the house, his sister too afraid to notice, his mother too slow to react, him too innocent to care.

+

She sees the chain reaction. The infinite loop. His world will end now the same way it did in hers, because of her, again. This Chika will go off in search of him, causing him to die again.

+

Chika understands it all.

+

But she hopes there’s somewhere in the vast, endless universe where the odds would one day be in his favor.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Infinite on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Chisom Umeh

+

+ + Author image of Chisom Umeh + + + Chisom (he/him) is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. He holds a degree in English and literature. When he’s not watching movies or writing about fantastical things, he’s tweeting about movies and fantastical things @izom_chisom. His short stories have been featured on Second Skin Mag, Omenana, Apex, and Isele.

+

© Chisom Umeh 2023 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Ekaterina Bolovtsova and Eynoxart.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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My Beloved is Mine

+

Jude Clee

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for My Beloved is Mine by +
+ + + + +

H + +e hires a photographer. I’m not supposed to know, but it’s hard to miss the six-foot-tall hipster lugging expensive equipment behind us. It’s the #nyctrip that I’ve been hyping up for months, analyzing and dissecting the implications in my group text (omg you think he’s gonna? idk don’t jinx it!).

+

He leads me through the park, stopping at a quaint stone bridge, a mismatch of amber, gray, and copper pebbles. A street performer strums the first chords of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and I know it’s so basic, but we always joke that it’s “our” song, ever since that semi-disastrous karaoke date. He gets down on one knee, eyes sparkling in the evening sun, and holds out a perfect diamond nestled between gold and emerald petals.

+

It’s all so adorably cottagecore that I could die.

+

The likes come flooding in as soon as I post it (#shesaidyes #futuremrandmrs). I’m not sure how long I lie there, scrolling through the myriad of replies, my phone’s blue light keeping me up.

+

When I finally fall asleep, I dream of a pair of eyes, so light they’re practically colorless, hovering directly over my face. They never blink. I try to speak but I can’t. I try to move but I’m stuck. I read about sleep paralysis on reddit, and this kind of feels like that halfway state between waking and dreaming. I just wish the eyes would blink.

+

The next morning, I wake up with the hint of a headache. As I get into the shower, I notice two red dots on my arm, like little bug bites, so small that I almost miss them.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ctober is all booked (figures), so we settle for early November. The weather cooperates – I’d die if we had to use a canopy. We pose for photographs by the charmingly rustic barn, surrounded by crisp, golden wheat fields. My colors are marigold, terracotta, and burgandy, the perfect autumn trifecta. We divide them evenly among the nine bridesmaids’ dresses, with three girls in each color.

+

My vows are filled with coffee dates and summer evenings snuggled by the firepit. His vows describe a life together with Smokey, our half-blind cat, and the dogs we’ll rescue; the children with his name and my smile, growing up surrounded by maples and elms and a big backyard to explore. When I look into his beautiful blue eyes I can almost see it.

+

The cake is pumpkin spice with cream cheese icing. I catch a mischievous glint in my dear husband’s eyes as we cut into it. Uh-oh. He said he wouldn’t. We talked about this; I explicitly told him no cake smashing. I open my mouth but everything goes black. Cake crumbs tumble down my face, into my cleavage, staining my dress, my wedding dress. Laughter erupts around me.

+

“Now you’ve done it,” Dad chuckles. I can feel eyes on me like mosquitos swarming a Fourth of July cookout.

+

“Babe…” Dear Husband starts.

+

I almost trip on my hem as I rush to the ladies’ room. The swinging door cuts off his “Honey, wait!” I hold in my sobs until I’m in front of the sink, staring at my ruined reflection.

+

“How could he? He ruined it!”

+

“He’s a jerk,” Becky says. My bridesmaids swarm me like a flock of mother hens, brushing off the cake crumbs, rubbing away the icing smudges.

+

“It’s ruined!” I howl. “Everything’s ruined!”

+

“No it isn’t,” Alex says. “It’s a beautiful wedding. Don’t let one dick moment ruin your special day.”

+

“Trust me, no one’s even going to remember it,” Lauren says.

+

“Really?” I sniff.

+

“Yeah, really,” Alex says. “You know how guys are. He probably thought he was being funny.”

+

Am I overreacting? Am I the one ruining my own perfect day?

+

“There,” Becky says, wiping away the last bits of cake. “Good as new. Hey, are those mosquito bites?”

+

I yank my arm back. “Must be a rash from the wheat.”

+

The door swings open and Becky rounds on Dear Husband. “You are such an asshole.”

+

While I appreciate the support, part of me rebels, the loyal don’t-shit-talk-my-man part.

+

“I know, I know.” He holds up his hands, mea culpa. “Babe, can we talk? Privately?”

+

The girls glance at me. I nod, and they leave.

+

“Honestly, honey, I thought you’d laugh—”

+

“But I already told you no!” my voice rises to a whine. I sound like a little kid, but I don’t care.

+

“I know, I’m sorry,” he says. He opens his arms wide. I fall forward, engulfed by him. “I promise I’ll be more considerate next time.”

+

“That’s all I ask,” I whisper into his chest. My anger already starts to melt away.

+

“Now, come on, beautiful. Your adoring guests await.”

+

We leave the women’s room, arm in arm, like a prince escorting his princess to the grand ball.

+

That night, in the bed of the honeymoon suite, I dream of the eyes again. They lean closer, like an invisible face perched only a few inches over mine. The eyes are so cloudy I can’t tell if they are hazel or gray. They never blink. I try to ask what it wants, but my mouth is as frozen as the rest of me.

+

“Come on, sleepyhead. You need to get up.”

+

“Mmm.” I roll over. “What time is it?”

+

“Eleven. You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to wake you, but… the flight.”

+

Shit. Only three hours to get ready. I spring into action, feeling so drained, like I hadn’t slept at all.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + tape a chore chart to the fridge. Why it’s come to a chore chart when his bachelor pad was immaculate, I’ll never know, but here we are.

+

“What are you, my mom?” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. It’s the same snotty attitude of a middle schooler sassing the substitute.

+

“Don’t act like a baby if you don’t want to be treated like one,” I snap. I immediately feel guilty.

+

He holds his hands up. “Okay, if it’ll make you happy.”

+

It does, for a little while. Happy enough to forget the red dots running up and down my arm. I tell the girls I’m bug bait. They don’t think it’s as funny as I do (though Lauren has a dermatologist she can recommend).

+

Then the dishes glisten greasily in the dishwasher and dust bunnies gather under the sofa. First it’s why-didn’t-you-just-ask. Then it’s stop-nagging-when-I’m-trying-to-relax. It comes to a head over a container of Pad Thai left on the coffee table, which I pointedly refused to throw out until the leftover takeout smell wafts throughout the whole house.

+

Dear Husband scatters the chore chart into a million little pieces across the kitchen tiles.

+

“How could you!” I howl. “I worked so hard on that!”

+

“I love you, babe,” he says. His voice is cool and in-charge. During these fights, I’m the only one who raises my voice – he stays as calm as ever. “But I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

+

At night, when I see the eyes again, they have a familiar, knowing look. It’s like we’re old friends, running into each other in the dark. I might be frozen, but this time, at least, I can speak.

+

“What do you want?” I try to shout up at them, though it comes out in a husky breath. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

+

A mouth appears underneath the eyes. It parts in a smile so broad I can count every pointy molar.

+

The next morning, there’s fresh dots on my legs. Blood bubbles from the newest ones. I’m starting to think this is not just sleep paralysis.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +ncreased dizziness and nausea lead me to the family planning aisle. I leave the sanitized test by the coffee pot and film Dear Husband’s reaction as he shuffles through the kitchen in his old man slippers.

+

“No way,” he says.

+

“It’s true,” I smile behind my phone.

+

His hands leap to his mouth. His eyes sparkle with unshed tears, shiny and blue. “Honey, that’s wonderful!”

+

An air cannon shoots out blue confetti at our gender reveal party. Dear Husband fist pumps the air as his buddies swarm him in a flurry of high fives and back pats. I order a cream blanket off of Amazon with Jacob Hunter embroidered in blue and yellow stitching. At the baby shower, we play The Price is Right and Pin the Diaper on the Baby. My favors include blue bath bombs and rattle-shaped candy. Becky posts that it’s the cutest baby shower she’s ever been to.

+

My body twists and contorts, bulging out in some areas, shedding hair in others. The baby kicks and tries to lodge himself in my ribcage. We joke that he’s trying to steal my energy. I wear athleisure wear and practice maternity yoga every day in front of the TV.

+

The eyes show up more frequently, but then they say pregnancy causes vivid dreams. They are light blue now, as clear as dawn, and sometimes a tongue snakes out between the teeth, licking the lips. I wake up with red dots up and down my arms, surrounded by blood smears.

+

“Must’ve scratched myself in my sleep,” I mutter.

+

“Rub some iodine on it,” is all he says.

+

Jacob Hunter arrives four days early, with wispy hair and a red, puffy face. Dearest Husband orders Dominos during hour five of my eighteen hour labor; the greasy cheese smell makes me gag. The nurses say I can’t have anything but ice water and ginger ale. “You don’t want me to starve, do you?” he asks. “This is hard for me too. I knew you’d understand.”

+

He insists on taking pictures. I tell him no, I’m gross and exhausted, the epidural I so desperately tried to avoid only just kicking in. He takes them anyway. Jacob deserves to have his birth documented, after all. It’s a magical, wonderful moment. Only it’s not: it’s agony. When we post about it afterwards, we gush about how miraculous it is, how beautiful and empowering, but it isn’t. It’s hell.

+

Later, Darling Husband goes home to take a shower and sleep. The nurses insist the baby sleeps in my room. I can barely keep my eyes open as he’s shoved on my naked chest, letting out a low, desperate whine as he roots around for a nipple. In my fugue-like state, I stare up at the ceiling. The eyes gaze down at me, brighter than ever.

+

“What do you want from me?” I murmur.

+

It smiles. A tongue pokes out and licks its lips. Globs of saliva dribble down my bare chest.

+

“Leave me alone. Leave me alone!”

+

“He needs to eat,” the nurse reprimands me, judgment wrapped around every syllable.

+

The mouth opens wide enough to swallow me whole. The teeth are as sharp and thin as the needles that penetrated me all day. It clamps down on my shoulder, digging into my skin. I scream.

+

“It hurts! Get it off me! Ow! Ow!”

+

“You’re being difficult,” the nurse says. Her face hovers in my vision, eyebrows sloping in two steep hills. She holds a shrieking, flailing bundle. Jacob. My baby. Not him, not my sweet boy, I think, but I can’t articulate through the pain. Blood flows freely. I am one giant, festering wound. All I can see are the deep blue eyes, less than a foot above me.

+

Jacob’s birth announcement gets 547 likes and 109 comments.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen I come home from my pedi, my toes are a glossy seafoam green and the house is a warzone. An upturned cereal bowl sops milk into the rug; the toy box is tipped over, spilling out its treasures; Jacob, cranky and crying, sits in a dirty diaper I can smell from the doorway. Dear Husbands sits on his ass playing Madden.

+

“Jesus Christ!” I say, snapping into mom mode (Jacob first; once he’s calm and napping I can take care of the mess). “I guess you just ignored my to-do list?”

+

“I was getting to it,” he says without looking away from the TV.

+

“You couldn’t even change your son’s shitty diaper?” I shift Jacob from hip to hip, but it doesn’t soothe him.

+

“Maybe you shouldn’t leave for so long next time.”

+

I was gone for two and a half hours. My Sunday pedicures and lunch dates are my only me time all week. “You could’ve done something.”

+

“What’s the point, Babe? You’re just so much better at it than I am.”

+

That’s his excuse for turning the whites pink and putting a cast iron pan in the dishwasher. As if it’s so hard to google. It’s easier to just put my Airpods in and do it myself. Sometimes I wonder if that’s his point.

+

“Thanks,” I tell my husband, shifting Jacob to my side. We slowly creep up the stairs, to the cream-colored changing table with the Winnie the Pooh pad. “Thanks a lot.”

+

He throws the controller down against the hardwood floor. Jacob’s breath hitches, then he screams louder than before.

+

“Goddammit!” he yells. Spit flies out of his mouth. “Why do you always have to come home and complain? Why can’t we just relax?”

+

“I’m sorry, okay? Let’s just forget about it.”

+

And we do, for a little while.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he red dots scar my arms and legs. There’s even one on my shoulder now – I don’t know what I’ll do if they ever reach my face. Becky keeps saying that I should’ve gone to the doctor, like, yesterday, but I hesitate. I don’t want to explain the dreams.

+

They happen weekly. Now there’s a shadowy face to go along with the deep blue eyes. It hovers a few inches above me, never blinking as its teeth sink into my skin. Recently, it’s grown hands as well, pale spidery things, that pin me down until it’s had its fill.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +pparently, exclusive breastfeeding isn’t a reliable form of birth control (wonderful). Dear Husband is thrilled, of course (he rarely does night feedings). At the gender reveal party, we cut into a pink sponge cake. I switch #boymom to #oneofeach and order a dozen bows and dresses. Everyone says how lucky we are, how blessed.

+

Olivia Rose’s grand debut comes more easily than her brother’s. This time I don’t martyr myself for hours, “epidural” is the first word out of my mouth when we reach the hospital. Dearest Husband sneaks me vending machines snacks and Dr. Pepper when the nurses aren’t looking. Jacob visits in his I’m the Big Brother shirt; we pose for pictures with a baby half the size he is cradled in his arms, swamped in a bundle of blankets with a giant pink bow. When we bring our little girl home Dear Husband jokes about getting a shotgun.

+

Each month, I lay Olivia on a moon and stars blanket, photographing her growth for the world.

+

We have two in diapers, two breastfeeding, two to bathe, two crying at night, and only two hands to juggle it all. Whenever I have a Netflix break, I’m still pumping, the mechanical suctions working until my nipples crack and bleed.

+

But it’s okay. I’ve got this. We’re such a beautiful family (everyone says so) and if I can just power through this part, we’ll be okay. I can do this. I’m okay. We’re okay.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + wake up to a sharp pain in my side. I suck in my breath and open my eyes. Blue eyes shine in the pre-dawn light. They are as full as the ocean on a sunny, brilliant day. I try to move, knowing how hopeless it is. Miraculously, my right arm twitches, then stretches out. I fumble for the bedside lamp.

+

I see the shriek-inducing abomination that is Dear Husband squatting over me like a bullfrog on a log. His arms pin me down, one on each side. He stares straight into my eyes as he lazily laps at the punctures in my lower stomach, my blood on his lips, gurgling and bubbling his enjoyment.

+

“Oh,” I mumble, “yeah. Of course. Right.” I try to sit, but his weight holds me down.

+

“Oh, babe,” he tilts his head up. His teeth are stained red. Blood dribbles down his lips, into his stubble. “I can explain.”

+

Uh-huh.

+

“Look, honey, you know I love you. And I know you love me. Christ, I know I don’t deserve you half the time – I know that you’re too good for me.”

+

“The fuck,” I mutter.

+

He straightens up. One hand grips my arm. He doesn’t wipe away the blood. “Listen, babe, I need this. You want me to be healthy, right? It’s not like I’m asking a lot. I just need a little help every now and then.”

+

From somewhere outside, birds chirrup. The neighbors’ dog barks.

+

I grit my teeth, blink back tears, and stare up at the patterns on the ceiling. “Just let me sleep next time,” I snap, hating that tone in my voice. “And don’t wake the kids.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of My Beloved is Mine on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jude Clee

+

+ + Author image of Jude Clee + + + Jude Clee is a writer and educator based in Philadelphia. She is a contributor to the autistic self-advocacy blog Neuroclastic. Her short story “The Boy in the Mirror” won a prize in the 91st annual Writer’s Digest competition. Her short horror stories have appeared in Black Petal Magazine and Grinning Skulls Press.

+

© Jude Clee 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Takmeomeo - many thanks.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-34/short-reviews-summer-2023.html b/issue-34/short-reviews-summer-2023.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..80d13a6d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/short-reviews-summer-2023.html @@ -0,0 +1,312 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – April to June — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Short Reviews – April to June

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – April to June by +
+ + + + +

O + +ne of my most self-satisfied experiences as a reviewer of fiction came (the reviewer of fiction sucks in a horrified breath) fifteen years ago, fairly shortly after reading a translation of the lipogramatic novel A Void, by Georges Perec. I won’t say why, read the review if you want to know…

+

…or, instead, why not read Xenogram: A Chronology Of The Global Erasure Of Vowel Number Three, And The Merger Of Man by Charles Ta, who has done for the sub-genre of fictionalised historical non-fiction of the future what I did in salute of Perec’s mind-and-language bending masterpiece of technique. Xenogram appears in the rather special Sci Phi Journal, which dedicates itself to publishing idea-driven fiction “at the cosmic intersection between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology and hard SF”. If you like the pseudo-non-fictional form, SPJ is your ideal reference library.

+

Every quarter Baffling Magazine publishes speculative flash fiction with a queer bent, and this quarter I enjoyed the fantastical sf piece The Flame Without very much: in it, a quartet of exo-planetary explorers eagerly await mutation by their new home, but the narrator’s anticipation of gaining some strange new gift crumbles as they see their companions illuminated while they remain darkly mundane. It was only afterwards that I wondered as to whether Tarver Nova’s story was noticeably queered or not. Perhaps zines, like authors, are only as constrained by the identities they adopt as they choose to be.

+

The third tale I’d particularly like to recommend appears in DreamForge, a home to hopeful science fiction that seeks to shine an encouraging light in the downbeat darkness that often seems so popularly prevalent. The Jewel of the Waves, the Diadem of the Sky by Jared Oliver Adams presents an intriguing future of the possibly near variety, and while it does feature familiar dystopian elements (overcrowded cityscapes, compromised ecologies, technological implants, omnipresent surveillance) it also introduces inventive sociological twists, like semi-sibling police services of an oppositional nature, one imposing, the other nurturing – both well able to scrutinise in the interests of justice, and to look the other way.

+

To wrap up, a handful of mentions to other strong recent stories: The Incredible Exploding Woman and The Last Days of Bester and Alma, both in The Fabulist, were striking reads, so too in a calmer tone The Conch Shell in Metaphorosis. And a respectful nod in the direction of Presto Change-O, whose late author Warren Brown was a long-time participant behind the scenes at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, and will be sorely missed.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-34/simulations.html b/issue-34/simulations.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..86028a70 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/simulations.html @@ -0,0 +1,428 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Simulations — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Simulations

+

Masha Kisel

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Simulations by +
+ + + + +

Summer 2040: Three Days After Upload

+

T + +he plastic monitor flashing a tiny blue light repulses me as if it were a severed torso or an amputated foot. Shame on me. What if Jonathan had been in a car accident and he was just a head and torso kept alive by monitors and wires? But this wasn’t an accident. It was intentional. Elective. Three days ago, my husband chose to freeze himself and upload all 86 billion of his copied neurons onto Soulscape’s computational system.

+

“This is Jonathan’s container,” the technician casually announced and handed me a dome-shaped device, as if disembodied husbands in containers were the new normal. “He will communicate with you through this. Don’t leave him alone for too long for the first few weeks after the initial upload. If you let him fragment, it’ll be like putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.” He laughed so hard at his own joke he had to turn up his O2 to stop coughing. “But seriously, ma’am. It’s crucial that you interact regularly until he integrates into his new reality.”

+

Despite Soulscape’s guarantees and promises, the simulated world to which Jonathan has been uploaded isn’t finished. For now, he exists in darkness. When the crackling of the static begins I close my eyes because I can’t look at that plastic little prison while he’s cursing, pleading to be let out.

+

When Charlie was born, Jonathan and I agreed not to keep pets. It would be too much work, we said. Now Jonathan’s monitor in the corner of my room is the pet I didn’t want – whimpering for attention, interrupting my sleep.

+

I can’t tell Charlie. Not yet. He’s only eight. A sensitive boy. Jonathan’s absence is easy enough to cover up for now. He’s used to his father leaving for weeklong Evolving Beings retreats and solitary vacations to “get back to himself.”

+

It was often a relief not to have Jonathan in the house. His casual slights, masked as playfulness, made for an inhospitable environment for easily wounded creatures like Charlie and me. When Charlie tried playing the ukulele I got him for Christmas, Jonathan laughed and tousled his hair: “Wow, buddy, you really don’t have a musical bone in you, do ya?” Charlie hid the ukulele in the farthest corner of his closet, draping an old sweatshirt over it, as if the thing was cursed and he didn’t want it looking at him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Winter 2025: Fifteen Years Before Upload

+

J + +onathan was my boss at SunFlour – Chicago’s oldest vegan bakery. For the first three months of our forbidden flirtation I lived from one euphoric encounter to the next: the accidental bump of shoulders in the walk-in freezer; cigarette breaks in the back alley; sharing leftover scones at the end of our shift. I even tasted soy buttercream off his fingertips once. After sleepwalking through four years as an accounting major at the local community college, I finally found what I loved. My days began at 5am, but I rushed into SunFlour eager to complete my list of baking projects. Of course I was also running to see Jonathan. In our shared daily routine, punctuated by stolen affection, I thought of us as a couple even before the two bottles of red wine at the holiday party made it official.

+

Waking up at his apartment after our first night together, I wandered around barefoot while he was still asleep, trying to glimpse something beyond what he revealed at work. His matching beige couch and chairs were spotless, made even cleaner by the morning sunlight streaming through the bay windows. There wasn’t a single bruise on the fruit in the blue and white porcelain bowl on the oak dining table. The black slate bathroom floor tiles heated up when you stepped on them.

+

As a kid I often came home to an empty house and foraged in the cabinets for crackers. My dad was a traveling sales rep for a medical supply company, and my mom worked as a cashier at two different department stores. I gravitated toward warm places and people. Standing in Jonathan’s apartment, I felt taken care of even as he remained in the other room.

+

I had no idea about his enormous family wealth. I didn’t know that he was also part-owner of SunFlour, a vanity project of his hippy uncle. I didn’t know that the spotless comfort of the apartment was the work of a weekly cleaning crew. He was a few years older than me and I saw his tidy home as proof of his emotional maturity, a slice of grownup home-lovingness I desperately craved.

+

That damned fruit bowl, with its perfect Anjou pears, earned my trust.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Summer 2040: One Week After Upload

+

“R + +ose! Rose!” Jonathan calls out to me, the blue light flashes again and again in the corner of our room.

+

There was once a time when I was so in love with him that nothing about his body could disgust me. I cleaned the stains he left on the carpet during his ayahuasca trip. We were never sure what he took because he got the brew from a woman he had met at one of his Evolving Beings retreats. Instead of receiving visions, he fell into a snoring sleep and lost control of his bowels on our living room floor.

+

“Thank God you’re okay! You scared me.” I fussed over him, brushing sweaty curls from his forehead and holding a glass of water to his lips when he woke up. I wiped up after him without a word of scorn.

+

Now I can’t stand the sound of his voice.

+

“Rose, it’s empty here. Tell them to fix this or bring me back.” His fear is contagious. For a moment our bedroom is a simulation too. The skylights hang permanent clouds overhead. I feel equally trapped.

+

“I talked to the technician,” I say, trying to keep panic from creeping into my voice. “They’re working on it as fast as they can. Isn’t anyone else with you?”

+

“No one’s here. I’m alone!” he sobs. “She didn’t go through with it.”

+

“Who didn’t go through with it?” I ask, too exhausted to care about the answer.

+

He remains silent.

+

I summon all the psychological tools I used for my fear of flying, years ago, when travel was still possible. On the plane, I’d repeat self-hypnosis mantras to transport myself out of the metal box six miles above ground. “We’re not that high up. This is just like riding on a train.” And if that didn’t work I told myself that I was the plane and the sky and the ground below, that I was the world’s soul, softly treading to my destination on six-mile legs made of air currents.

+

“I love you babe, but you’re so neurotic,” Jonathan would say, sprawled out in his first class window seat next to me, vodka tonic in hand. “Just enjoy the ride.” I wanted to believe that this was just his way of helping, but he punctured my fragile membrane of serenity. From the corner of my eye I tried not to see the sky’s terrifying vastness framing Jonathan’s profile. I thought I spied a crocodile’s smile.

+

Now, I try to convince myself that Jonathan and I are just talking on the phone; that he’s in another city; that he’s still in his body. But it doesn’t work, because this isn’t just about changing my own perceptions. I can only glimpse the periphery of his new experience, but it’s enough to make me feel like I’m falling too, to make the pattern on the hardwood floors squirm like it’s made of worms.

+

I reassure him that in the past week Soulscape has made progress on the simulated construction. Jonathan will soon have a new home. “This is just temporary. They’re building gardens, mountains, oceans, beaches. It will be so beautiful, I promise.” I need to believe this too. “You should at least be able to see the stone brick wall to the rose garden. Do you see the bricks and the climbing vines?”

+

“Yes,” he crackles miserably, “I’ve been staring at the wall. That’s all I’ve been doing for days. I can’t even sleep, Rose!”

+

“Okay, try touching it. Does it have texture?”

+

“I can’t fucking see my hands… but okay. Yes, it’s rough. Not quite like real brick, but grainy, yes.” His voice is shaking, but maybe it’s just the connection.

+

“Okay, now the vine. Are there any leaves you can touch?”

+

“They don’t have texture yet. It’s just color.”

+

“Focus on the green, honey. Describe the shade of green to me.”

+

Instead I end up talking to him of the rainforest we hiked on our honeymoon in Costa Rica, the sounds of unseen howler monkeys in the canopy and the blur of yellow and red feathers when we looked up.

+

Today the sight of thick foliage is rare. Here in Chicago, you have to buy tickets to visit greenhouses, indoor gardens, glass-domed forest play areas for kids. They sell out so fast we only go a few times a year.

+

It’s 7am and Charlie will wake up soon. He has his first playdate in months. The pollution levels are lower early in the morning so we’ll have to hurry through our breakfast.

+

“I’ll be back in two hours, Jonathan.” I say, and quickly disconnect before he has a chance to beg me not to go.

+

I can’t get used to the overcast grayness that flattens the world into two dimensions even in the summer. I check the Suntracker website: it has been fifty days since the last glimpse of blue sky, and it will be at least twenty more.

+

Lindsay is already there with her son Caleb when I drive up and park in our reserved spot. It’s hard to believe that city parks were once public property.

+

“Hey Rose!” Her upbeat voice rings out in the empty playground. In all the post-apocalyptic movies I ever saw, survival was adrenaline-filled, screaming action. Oh how the victims wailed and protested their fate! In our dying world, the only loud voices come from those who can afford to simulate normalcy. The struggle to stay alive happens quietly, out of view.

+

Charlie waves at Caleb and they quickly become absorbed in some secret game. Lindsay and I watch them, trying to think of something to say.

+

“Charlie’s mini-pack’s cover is adorable, Rose! Where did you get it?” Lindsay never stops smiling.

+

“I ordered it from Oh2You. It’s a small business started by a mom. They have lots of cute retro stuff. Snoopy, SpongeBob, Paw Patrol…”

+

We’ve taken a wordless vow not to mention what’s in the mini-packs or why clear tubes extend from our children’s nostrils. Or our own. To name our collective tragedy is an act of treason among mothers of well-fed, breathing children. I force a content expression as we watch them struggle with the weight of their life-saving baggage. They climb up the metal rungs of the playground ladder slow as tortoises.

+

We talk about how quickly the boys grow out of their shoes and about the outrageous price of chocolate as we swat away swarms of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes may or may not carry encephalitis. Lindsay flicks one away from her oxygen tube with her long burgundy nails as if elegantly ashing a cigarette.

+

I can’t tell Lindsay about Jonathan. We haven’t known each other very long. There are things one doesn’t talk about with new mom friends, especially now.

+

“Big plans today?” She smiles a little too broadly when I check my watch again to make sure I don’t leave him alone so long that he begins to disintegrate.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Winter 2035: Five Years Before Upload

+

W + +hen Charlie was still little I got used to being alone in the house at night. With Jonathan gone for one of his evening Evolving Beings classes, I’d hear the tiny sounds of a child waking up from a nightmare. Slipping out of our half-empty bed, I’d drag myself to the rocking chair in Charlie’s room. I imagined swallowing up bad dreams like a python, ingesting wars, plagues, winged crocodiles, mushroom clouds… so when he startled himself awake with a weak little cry that must have been a full-throated scream in his dream, there was only mama, soft and quiet in her usual place.

+

I felt brave when I was with Charlie. In his eyes, I was mama the protector – a heroic avatar of myself. But when I wasn’t near him I didn’t know what I was – a jumble of half-articulated emotions, as incomprehensible as inkblots.

+

Once Charlie fell back asleep, I’d check my phone for all the disasters that needed my tending in the middle of the night. Global temperatures had long passed the perilous 2.5-degree increase. Scientists predicted worse food shortages, earth-scorching heatwaves, deteriorating air quality. From heroic nightmare devourer I devolved into compulsive eater: gorging on lab-made chocolate in our pristine kitchen, guilty and grateful for my gluttony while so many around the world starved.

+

How did my life become so distorted while Jonathan’s stayed the same? It was as if none of it was happening to him.

+

My mother always loved his “stability.” We never discussed his money, although that’s what she really meant. “You better hold on to that one,” she’d say after I told her about one of our fights. She’d remind me to “skip the temper tantrum” if I wanted a long-lasting marriage. Mom skipped her own tantrums for forty years before dad died of a stroke.

+

“Oh, I thought you’d be asleep,” Jonathan would always say, nonchalance personified, when I met him at the door. If I worked myself up enough to demand an explanation of why he was home after midnight, he’d reply with gentle reproach, “C’mon, babe. You’ll wake up the kid.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Summer 2040: Six Weeks After Upload

+

I + + still haven’t told Charlie. How can I explain the digital ghost of a father who cries that he misses his body?

+

When I drop Charlie off at my in-laws for visits, Jonathan’s mother opens her mouth and inhales like she’s about to ask a question, but changes her mind. She still sees me as one of Jonathan’s impulsive mistakes. “Jonathan does what he wants,” she’d always say, seemingly about something else, but measuring me with a disapproving gaze. She tried to dissuade him from uploading and I think she blames me that he went through with it. Still, despite everything, she still has unshakable confidence that things will work out for them. It’s not my place to prove her wrong.

+

I log in at 4am, exactly four hours after our last conversation. Jonathan’s not there. I wait, staring down the darkened plastic dome. I have three hours before I have to get up. If I go back to sleep, he might begin to degrade. I imagine his stupid round face cracking like an eggshell. I scroll through email on my phone to kill time. It’s mostly advertisements, some of them for Soulscape, no personal messages at all.

+

Somehow I’ve lost touch with all my old friends. I’ve been wholly absorbed in the demands of the day: ordering our supplemental oxygen, arranging grocery deliveries, measuring Charlie’s vitals, making playdates, bringing him to school and back. I have only enough time and energy to take care of Charlie, and now Jonathan, too.

+

I keep looking over at the monitor in the corner to see if the blue light will flash, waiting for Jonathan’s frantic voice. Another hour goes by. Then two. At 6am – after I’ve resolved at least one hundred times to put away my phone and go to sleep, but can’t because I’m scared that he’s gone, and then livid at the possibility that he’s just fine – the blue light flashes.

+

“Rose, I have great news!” He sounds like himself again.

+

I wait.

+

“I just had the most amazing experience! Tawny… you remember Tawny from Evolving Beings? She’s finally uploaded! And they finished most of the simulation! We just jet-skied with dolphins and it felt so real! I can see my hands now too. Actually, I can see all of me! I’m like ten years younger!”

+

“Did the dolphins jet ski?” is all I manage before I disconnect.

+

I feel dizzy, bludgeoned by Jonathan’s brazen happiness. Outside the door I hear Charlie’s small footsteps. I open it to see him standing there, wide-eyed, in his red dinosaur pajamas.

+

“Were you just talking to dad?” he asks me.

+

And suddenly the truth is not that difficult to explain.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Summer 2039: One Year Before Upload

+

I + + always imagined that if Jonathan ever did something truly awful, like cheat on me or hit me, I would unleash the fury I’d been keeping caged up all these years. But when he told me of his plan to upload I could only stutter, “Can’t… can’t you wait? Until things get better?”

+

He’d always been so relentlessly optimistic, reassuring me that with our money and the almost-here scientific advancements we’d get through this. Now he said, “It’ll be easier for you. You and Charlie will have more real food, more water, more oxygen. And when Charlie’s old enough he’ll be able to upload too.”

+

He didn’t mention me.

+

“Are you leaving me?” I choked out. Was this divorce, infidelity, widowhood? I checked the house’s oxygen levels on my phone. They were normal, but I turned them up anyway.

+

“Until he’s eighteen, Charlie needs you. You get that.”He smacked his lips after sipping the last of his scotch and soda and left me sitting at the kitchen table.

+

Panic attacks had become so common in children that you could get anti-anxiety medications over the counter. We’d give Charlie a daily Panic Panda gummy to help keep him level. The temptation to start chewing a handful was overwhelming, but instead I whispered word combinations that I’ve found to calm him – “emerald city,” “busy bee,” “cloud cake” – repeating them like incantations until he stopped shaking. But I was full of fear too. I couldn’t imagine taking care of Charlie alone.

+

“But why now, Jonathan?” I pleaded with him from the kitchen doorway. “It just doesn’t make sense. The technology is so new.” I imagined his mother’s voice singing in a broken-record chant Jonathan does what he wants, Jonathan does what he wants, Jonathan does…

+

“I’ve just evolved beyond this flesh prison.” He said like it should be obvious to anyone with a brain.

+

“Shouldn’t we speak to a counselor, a doctor?” I tried to put obstacles in his way, to at least slow him down if I couldn’t prevent it. A flesh prison for fuck’s sakes? A motorcycle, a tattoo, even a younger mistress would’ve been easier to tolerate than this version of a midlife crisis.

+

“Rose,” he groaned, “I’ve done my own research. I know what I’m doing. Besides…” He paused and looked away.

+

“Besides what? What did you want to say?”

+

He shrugged. “You’re not stupid, Rose. Eventually we all starve or suffocate.”

+

I called my mother. She didn’t understand anything about Soulscape. As always, when I complained about Jonathan’s neglect, she told me that I shouldn’t hem him in, that dad traveled a lot for work and they were happy together, so why couldn’t I just let it go? I tried to explain that he was permanently freezing his body and uploading his mind so he could exist in a virtual afterlife; without me, without Charlie.

+

Mom perked up at the mention of afterlife. She had grown even more religious since dad died. “Oh honey, have faith. You’ll see Jonathan again! Just like I’ll see your daddy in heaven.”

+

If they ever did meet in heaven, dad would be dismissively nodding into an open newspaper while mom tried to get his attention with all the interesting things she saw in purgatory.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Winter 2040: Six Months After Upload

+

I + + have a choice to make. I can let Charlie upload like his father or keep him in his body to suffer and die. Each choice is a gamble.

+

Unlike Jonathan I don’t believe in good luck. I’ve never been one to take unnecessary risks. Never skydived. Never did drugs. My parachute wouldn’t open. My first hit of acid would send me on a bad trip to hell.

+

Jonathan liked to mock my cautious nature, but as I take deep breaths to calm myself in the mornings, I think that perhaps my fear is my strength. I need to make a plan. We have money. But that won’t matter. Soon marauders will begin scavenging wealthy neighborhoods. The elderly and single mothers will be the easiest to rob, possibly to kill. My mother moves in with us.

+

She tells me to pray. Pray to whom? If there’s a creator, it can’t possibly be omnipotent and loving. I picture a pimply kid, an angry teenager clicking away to code the most interesting collapse of civilization he can imagine. Maybe his asshole father just uploaded himself and left his family behind. The great simulator to whom we appeal with our problems might not give a shit. He might even want to hurt us. Creation turned out to be a cheap trick.

+

And on the eighth day God learned to code… I want some of that power before I’m struck down, before I’m extinguished, squashed, splattered by a hack deity.

+

I don’t believe in miracles. Jonathan did. The optimist, the happy wanderer, the lucky fool. He trusted that everything would turn out okay. At least for him.

+

I take the Soulscape contract out of its envelope. I couldn’t bear to read it before, but now I’m ready. So much fine print. I haven’t heard from Jonathan in months. But we’re still married. According to the contract, uploaded beings may still need help from us flesh prisoners occasionally. The contract designates me as the simulation architect should anything go wrong at Soulscape. He trusted me when he signed this.

+

I leave Charlie with my mother for the day and show up at Soulscape HQ with extra oxygen canisters. The building is surprisingly empty. Business must not be going well. Or maybe it’s going so great they’re all digital nomads two-point-oh now.

+

The same guy who made the house call to explain about Jonathan’s upkeep is working the front desk.

+

“Hi Leif!” I sing-song his nametag. “I’m Rose Agape. We spoke on the phone. I’d like to discontinue my husband’s network subscription.” I say it as if this is a routine request.

+

Leif frowns. “But that will make him go dark.”

+

“He gave me program maintenance authority.” I keep talking like I can’t I see the concern on his face. “I’ll be taking over as simulation architect.”

+

“We intended that for emergencies only. If we lose power, or the upload feels unsafe in their current—”

+

“The contract states that you’ll train me to reprogram his simulation.” I put up a finger before he can interrupt. “I know that something is wrong with my husband. It’s been months since he’s contacted us. That’s not like him. I mean, he has a son.”

+

Mostly true. There’s been something wrong with my husband for years, and technically he’s a father. It’s exactly like him to disappear from our lives, but Leif doesn’t need to know that.

+

Leif sighs, considering what I just said.

+

“I’m going to need someone to walk me through it,” I add. I hoist three full oxygen canisters, one by one, up on his desk. His eyes light up. He audibly sucks in air through his tubes and actually looks relieved. I just made his decision a lot easier.

+

“Alright ma’am, let’s schedule your programming sessions. It shouldn’t take too long. But you do realize that once you activate home programming he will be cut off from everyone in his simulated network? No other uploaded beings will be with him in the world you build. He’ll be alone.”

+

I smile and nod. “Yes. With his family.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Simulations on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Masha Kisel

+

+ + Author image of Masha Kisel + + + Masha Kisel was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and currently lives in Dayton, Ohio (USA). Her short stories and essays have been published in Gulf Coast, Prime Number, Brooklyn Review, McNeese Review, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. For more of Masha’s writing, please visit www.mashakisel.com.

+

© Masha Kisel 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Nothing Ahead and OpenClipart-Vectors.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-34/welcome-to-the-neighborhood.html b/issue-34/welcome-to-the-neighborhood.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6ebeeb6b --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-34/welcome-to-the-neighborhood.html @@ -0,0 +1,351 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Welcome to the Neighborhood — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 34 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Welcome to the Neighborhood

+

Rebecca Birch

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Welcome to the Neighborhood by +
+ + + + +

W + +hen we moved to the suburbs, I was ready to enjoy the slower pace of life. Wildlife outside my windows. Tidy yards, bundles of domesticity, and a quaint woodland between our neighborhood and the county reservoir next door where I could walk. I might even be able to convince Jeff to let me get a cat.

+

Then the Homeowner’s Association president, Patty, stopped by to welcome us with brownies and lemon bars, a neighborhood watch invitation, and a reminder that HOA bylaws prohibited garden gnomes.

+

I’d been looking forward to peopling my front yard planting beds with the little ceramic statues. Just regular ones, of course. None of the racy naked guys I’d accidentally found down an internet rabbit hole.

+

But Jeff and I wanted to make friends. He convinced me not to ruffle feathers. Not yet.

+

So I was good, until my birthday rolled around and my mom – who remembered I’d wanted to start a gnome colony – gave me a chubby, rosy-cheeked, red-hatted gentleman just six inches tall.

+

She’d gone to such trouble that it felt wrong to keep him inside, but I’m also not a rule-breaker, so I really surprised myself when I snuck out on a foggy midnight and placed Toby – yes, I named him – deep inside the branches of our holly bush out front.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen I picked up the newspaper the next morning, Toby was gone.

+

For the first time, I felt uncomfortable in our peaceful little oasis. Was there a thief among our neighbors? Was Linda across the street peering through her blinds in the wee hours of the night, looking for something to nab? Was Patty of the HOA more like Patty On Patrol, purloining contraband yard art?

+

I took myself for a walk through the woods by the reservoir. The smell of evergreens and the soft rustle of small creatures in the underbrush calmed me down. I was being paranoid. There were wild animals here. One probably thought Toby would make a good toy. Linda was a perfectly nice lady. Surely Patty was, too.

+

Later that day, I found a package on the front porch. My name was scrawled on it in green ink. There was no return address.

+

Jeff was still at work, so I went ahead and opened it. It held an oscillating sprinkler head. We’d been talking about getting something for the summer watering season. Jeff must have ordered it, but what was with the strange way it was addressed?

+

A small scrap of paper at the bottom of the box caught my eye. In the same green ink it read, Thank you.

+

Unnerved, I tossed the note into the shredder and recycled the box. But I wasn’t unnerved enough not to set up the sprinkler.

+

Then I ordered another gnome.

+

She arrived, green-hatted and beaming, and I named her Poppy. Beneath the cover of darkness, I put her under the holly bush, hardly daring to breathe, lest someone spot me hiding my contraband.

+

The next day, Poppy was gone and another box arrived, this time with a rather nice stained-glass mobile and another note. Thank you.

+

Okay, it couldn’t be an animal. It had to be the neighbors playing some sort of prank on me and giving us a few more welcome gifts. We’d installed a small gazebo in the back yard and it needed a centerpiece. I hung the mobile and smiled. Perfect.

+

I couldn’t stop grinning all the way through my now-daily forest walk. I could almost have imagined tiny voices laughing along with me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +y the time the next gnome was on its way, a flier had gone up at the community mailboxes with a reminder to review the HOA bylaws. There had been some reports of violations. Oh, and Patty’s cat had a litter of kittens almost ready for adoption if anyone was interested.

+

I’d have to talk to Jeff when he got back from his company retreat. A kitten would make our home complete.

+

When the gnome – Rufus – arrived later that day, I hesitated. He came with a wheelbarrow and was a little bigger than the others. Harder to hide. And the reported HOA violations… but the adrenaline rush of clandestine gnome-planting was more than I could resist.

+

Under the holly he went.

+

I wasn’t surprised when he was gone the next morning, but finding the box in a full-sized wheelbarrow on the porch was new.

+

The box mewed.

+

I brought it inside and tore open the lid. A tiny silver tabby stared up at me with wide green eyes, flexed its little claws, and yowled.

+

It was in my arms before I could think. I read the note out loud: “Thank you.”

+

The doorbell’s ring was so unexpected I jumped, startling the kitten. I tightened my grip, cradling it close with one arm so it couldn’t escape, then cracked open the door.

+

Patty waited on the other side, arms folded across her chest. “Which part of ‘No Garden Gnomes’ wasn’t clear?” Her foot tapped a frustrated cadence on the concrete.

+

“I—”

+

“Don’t deny it. I have you on Linda’s doorbell camera. And Paul’s sprinkler is in your yard, Maggie’s mobile is in your gazebo, and Bob’s wheelbarrow is right here on your porch.” She pointed to the wheelbarrow and the clearly spray-painted BOB in the bottom, where the box had hidden it.

+

My stomach lurched.

+

The tabby yowled again and Patty squeezed the bridge of her nose. “And my missing kitten. Of course. Listen, if you swear there’ll be no more gnomes, you can keep the cat.”

+

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know. I’ll return everybody’s things.”

+

“No more gnomes. They only bring trouble.”

+

When Patty was gone, I regarded the kitten, who batted a paw toward my nose. “I think I’ll call you ‘Rufus’.”

+

The next time I walked the overgrown path, I studied the underbrush. I’d always assumed the rustling I heard there was rabbits or birds, and maybe some of it was, but when I caught a flash of red out of the corner of my eye and found tiny footprints leading into the base of an old tree, I smiled.

+

Maybe they were trouble to some, but they were magic to me.

+

I set down a wrapped box of tiny brownies and lemon bars and whispered, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Welcome to the Neighborhood on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Rebecca Birch

+

+ + Author image of Rebecca Birch + + + Rebecca Birch is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in Seattle, Washington. She’s a classically trained soprano, holds a deputy black belt in Taekwondo, and enjoys spending time in the company of trees. Her fiction has appeared in markets including Fireside Magazine, Cricket, and Flash Fiction Online. You can find her online at wordsofbirch.com.

+

© Rebecca Birch 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Chris F and YouComMedia.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2023

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ Joelle Killian +

You Are a Rock God

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+ + +

Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll: some permutation of music's answer to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, perhaps – only, when you're at the top, everything's 'The Good', right? It's all going to last forever, and nothing can go wrong. Joelle Killian takes us to the top and gives us a glimpse of the bottom – or possibly the other way around. Unless the top was always an illusion. And maybe it would be better if it was.

+ + + + Story image for You Are a Rock God by + + + +
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La Voix d'un Ange

+ Kirk Bueckert +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for La Voix d'un Ange by + + + +

Kirk Bueckert delivers something in the classic vein here: echoes of Hammer Horror, Don't Look Now, and other gems of a bygone era of the dark and supernatural. Sit back, as some unsuspecting person finds themselves prised from their normality by inconvenient circumstance that gradually shifts to the disquieting before unexpectedly coming over all unspeakable…

+ + + +
+ + + +
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+

Default

+ Elin Olausson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Default by + + + +

Schools make for strange places in fantastical fiction, but even real schools are strange places: sometimes small, sometimes sprawling, they too often form the individuals of the future by filing away what makes each pupil distinct. Appropriate, then, that if Elin Olausson's story of a strange cohort has a narrator, it is one who identifies as the whole.

+ + + +
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The Four Bill Club

+ Donald McCarthy +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Four Bill Club by + + + +

Environment matters in sf, but entertainment matters too, and short fiction leaves little space for balancing acts. Donald McCarthy doesn't just give good world-building, the kind that carries the scent of what came before and leaves an aftertaste for whatever will follow – he uses it to flavour the story at hand without overwhelming what we're here for now: thrills and spills.

+ + + +
+ + + +
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The Broken Bones of Summer

+ Xan van Rooyen +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Broken Bones of Summer by + + + +

There is much to be said for traveling. Expanded horizons expand the mind, and that can only be an advantage in creative endeavours. In relocating from South Africa to Finland, Xan van Rooyen has clearly found some inspiration: this piece of dark fantasy has its origin in the Finnish folklore that gave the calendar months their names…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Border Patrol

+ Don Mark Baldridge +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Border Patrol by + + + +

Don Mark Baldridge prefaced his submission by quoting journalist Nell Greenfieldboyce: 'And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light.' Strange. Look it up sometime. In response, and from the same article, we'll quote astronomer Tod Lauer right back at him, because (of this story, just as of space), 'It's still pretty dark.'

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu by + + + +

Welcome back to Mattia 'The Book Chemist' Ravasi, who returns after a six-month hiatus with his second longform fiction review. This time he shifts focus from the abstract and oppressive science fictional to the not-exactly hallucinogenic fantastical.

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – July to September

+
+ + +

After this issue's editorial you'd think your editor had read quite enough. But no: once more unto the breach, dear friends, to sample the recent output of our peers. Here are three brief recommendations for further reading, available online now. And if we're still unwilling to rein it in at only three? Well tough, the more the merrier!

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Border Patrol

+

Don Mark Baldridge

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Border Patrol by +
+ + + + +

Bone White

+

I + +fan myself with the polaroid. Faint chemical smell comin off it, volatilizing. Interacting – like everything else – with oxygen, burns off and ’s gone. Whatever they put in these things to get em to do their amazing trick, it’s worth the brain cancer.

+

I hold it up – the picture, developing before my eyes – hold it angled to avoid the glare of the bare bulb, hangin just over my shoulder. The image resolves around my own shadow, stretching across the splintered floorboard, angling up toward the heap of hides. There’s more of them, pinned spreadeagle to the walls. Nine in all, a whole squad.

+

Good haul, for a couple week’s work.

+

These polaroids, let me tell you; they changed everything. I been using em since their stripper days, when you had to peel em apart, sticky, a mess. But they been perfected a long time and I’m too old a dog to learn a new trick.

+

So I keep shellin out for the film – yeah they still make it – and buyin up old cameras. I cannibalized two decks – an i-Type and ye olde 600 – to get this frankenflasher, and its origins show.

+

The colors are funny, acourse. They’re not real. Tend toward the silver – lot of blue in that blood, as I compare it to the scene before me.

+

But how that picture turns out is how it’s going to be. Your memory will leach away, go bone white. Everything that’s left is gonna be in that picture, so love it. Learn it.

+

It’s all that’s left you, in the end.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Shinsplints, Nebraska

+

I + +seen it happen – or, well, I otta say I been in the presence of it, happening – four, maybe five times. Which don’t seem like much till you understand; it’s not a common thing, not at all. It’s just that, once you know about it, it kinda gets a whiff on you – an interest in you, like. You get magnetized to it. Drawn.

+

Ok, while the polaroid’s developin: I’m wayback, sittin in this coffeehouse – this diner, rather – in, I’m thinkin, 1972? I been well onto the phenomenon for a couple years, by then. Bagged one or two of the fuckers myself, or thought I had. I mean, I’d been curious about it, studying on it since Chicago, ’68 – that clusterfuck.

+

But really? I wondered even still, was it real?

+

Anyways, back in the diner I’m not yet 25 years old, just a pup, and I’m not thinking of any of this, but only whether I can get my eggs the way I like em. The waitress comes up. In those days, they all wore uniforms. I dunno, do they still do that, places? She steps up on my left, all mustard yellow dress and orange apron, tired smile, coffeepot steamin. She pours me some, comes back for my order. I looker in the eye, startin up with: Eggs; sunny and runny. Bacon, cracklin…

+

She looks down, writin. I also look down, checkin the menu for options on toast or whatever. Glance back up and her eyes’ve gone round, softly starin at me with just an awful recognition.

+

She knows me, and I know what’s got into her.

+

It happens that fast.

+

I go for the sawdoff, lyin in my bag on the seat beside me. Her right hand comes down like a claw, pinning my right to the table. She’s reached across me so I pop her elbow with the heel of my left. It crunches. She should be screamin bloody hell, but she pivots, other hand going for my eyes, nails out. I doggit left, throwing myself from the booth, doubled over, scrambling.

+

She has my bag, then, fumbling with it, one-handed. I pull the peashooter out my boot, turn, stand tall and put two in her, like that. Doesn’t even slower down – and that’s the last time I pack a small caliber, ever.

+

Things slide into slomo as she yanks the sawdoff out the bag by its polished pistolgrip. I spent the summer whittlin that thing down from the rifle stock, polishing it. It’s gonna be a shame to lose it.

+

The whole restaurant turns to look at us, mouths open. She wheels that blunderbuss in my direction, clumsy – it goes off on her, part way: a single barrel. One hell of a kick. The plate glass window, one booth from where I’m standin, turns to shrapnel in the everlovin ka-pow! of a shotgun blast heard indoors, at close range.

+

She’s held onto it somehow, and she’s blinkin, checkin out the mechanism.

+

There’s another cartridge in there but before she finds the other trigger (side-by-side’s my style) I’m gone already. Squeal of tires, flinching, thinkin the back of my head comes off next, rear pickup window blowin right through me. But it doesn’t happen.

+

I curse myself for a fool: all my tactical errors. The whole scenario runs through my mind, compulsively, for years to come. I revisit that diner in my dreams.

+

They’ll call it a robbery gone wrong – say she saw the sawdoff and made me for a miscreant, acted bravely, saved everyone. And I don’t hardly blame the papers. I’d be half convinced of it myself, had’n I seen those starin eyes.

+

But that woman – whatever stepped in there, knowin me and not much else, knowin whatever a waitress knows in Shinsplints, Nebraska – will live, will go on.

+

I’ll keep the clippins, check up on the old girl. People will say it’s changed her; bein shot will do that. She’ll drop her husband, kids and all. And I will hesitate just too late; she’ll vanish before I get back around to her, to finish it.

+

As far as I know she’s out there, still. Or it is —ridin her, spurs stuck in good, growed over. Women live longer, right? A little older than I’d been at the time – maybe 30? And I’m an old man now. I doubt I could place her, to see her face today, but I know she’ll know me, she crosses my path. Prolly smell me comin.

+

But would I take her – you’re axin – old, decrepit? Would I snatch her back from the jaws of the thing consumed her, ate her all up and kept on, in her tracks?

+

You betcha. I owe her that much. It’s because of her, because of that one, I went on the lam. Moment changed my life: those eyes, that claw – a deathgrip. I mighta wondered, before that – was I doin right? The question had dogged me a bit. I was neck deep already, what if…

+

But after that one, I knowed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Redrawing the Vampire

+

I + + mean… I never seen a vampire… I seen a talkin dog once.

+

But vampires, whatever they may be, they’re not the same as these things – what they’re up to – the things I’m talkin about. They step in, crabwise, and while they’re along for the ride, they know everything they need to know. What they don’t know is anything else: Who they are, where they come from, I suppose these questions mean as little to them as it means to ask me how I show up in the mirror. I just open my eyes and there I am.

+

Even what they want may be impossible to say except – they want to stay. They wanna keep on running the guy they’ve stumbled onto, stepped into, become. They wanna alter their course just enough to turn their tangents toward linear time. Want to change lanes and learn to drive. And how long has this been going on?

+

So far, forever. Put that on yer tombstone and ya got somethin.

+

Dogs have been known to pick up on the change: the jangle of strings, the disconnect. The puppeteering going on beneath the surface – if they’ve ever seen the original, that is. Ever sniffed the hand operatin under its own steam.

+

Otherwise – well, a dog can get used to any kind of a man. I seen these things with dogs of their own, and – big or small – all of em was mean.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Gone Fishin

+

T + +ime flows, but there’s no sense in which we’re all at the same bend of that river.

+

The upstream fish are shittin in our water, and we shit in the water of those further downstream. But the sidewinder walks in on all this at an angle. I think they know so little cause they, like, literally don’t have the past, where they come from. They don’t have no future neither, and this, our timestream, gives em that. But they develop a past, pretty quick. They foresee some kinda future and they run with it. They don’t want nothing to take that away.

+

Livin is sweet to those who never tasted it. But it’s not like they don’t exist, two seconds before.

+

I think of em like crystals: If you’d been born a crystal, your mind mighta been, like, configured as a single thought. Electrons travel through a crystal, or they can. But the paths they got to follow, there’s not a lot of different ones.

+

My older brother, when I was quite small, got hold somewhere of a little worn-out pamphlet called Construction and Operation of a Simple Homemade Radio Receiving Outfit – put out by the government in the 1920s, I imagine. Following along its faded instructions, he built himself a crystal set. Picked up high-power stations from all the way to Chicago, cloudy nights.

+

He’d clamp these cold, metal headphones to my skull and twitch a wire along the coil till baseball popped up, big as life. Lemme listen to the game, carried on the W.I.N.D. – AM 560. No battery, in that device, nothin.

+

I reckon the energy of the broadcast somehow got drawn into that crystal, passed through it. Gave some kinda shape to whatever’s going on in a crystal just sittin there. And out comes this magic voice: Down in the ninth, it’s not lookin good for the ol’ Cubbies. Like magic to a Sooner boy, comin up.

+

And that must be something like what it’s like to be them. Out wherever you could say they come from, outside what we’d call time.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Scorpion

+

T + +hey keep coming through and I keep huntin em down. Some years ago this got easier —they started lookin for me. Feelin for me, I suppose, sniffin round. I guess I knocked a few of em down in my day and they perceive me as inimical to their plans.

+

And yeah, I recon they got some kinda plans. Dunno what those could be, except to push through more and more. Maybe it’s a slowmo invasion, or supposed to be. Maybe I’m keepin something like that at bay, jessayin.

+

The notion does not please me. I got no one to take over when I go, when one of the bastards finally gets me. It might be pretty hard to recruit people to a path like mine: kids today.

+

Lately these things come in little waves, three or four showin up over a long weekend, that kinda thing. And lately I been pilin up their skins. Yeah, I take their hides. Its not like I can do nothin with em – I’m not makin people suits over here.

+

But they come in, wearing a person suit, like. Wearin a person like a suit. And I can’t think they prefer havin that peeled off. They surely do not. So I peel em. And some of em put up a hell of a fight.

+

Disposing of the rest is… problematic. But there I got this advantage – that the whole world is so chock full of books and movies about “serial killers” – it’s the only entertainment people have, seems. And they got 101 Ways to Dispose of a Corpse in them stories. I just pick and I choose. I’ve fed em to hogs, dissolved em in acid – that gets expensive, lemme tell ya! And you gotta cart around the chemicals.

+

Lately, out here in the desert, it’s a shallow trench, or pilin up rocks in an arroyo – and that works jes fine.

+

I come out here full time, once they started lookin for me. Drawin em out, where I can see em comin. The great empty Sonoran sucks em in from Monterrey, Tucson, Pheonix, Las Vegas, L.A., San Diego, Tijuana. Even over the water, from Baja.

+

I cross the border easily, sometimes without knowing I done it. Whole hell of a lot of nothing out here to tell ya you’re in one territory or the other. No dotted line in the dirt and the stars wheel overhead just the same.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + blow across the surface of the polaroid, it’s dry, and clear as a bell. Fits, inside-vest-pocket, keepin company with a couple others – part of a larger, what you’d call, archive.

+

And there! I hear something, outside. I pull the chain, the bulb goes out. My boots on the boards are loud in the darkness, the door creeks. And, standing on the crumbling concrete loading dock, under an awning faded down to nothing, I watch em wheel, the stars.

+

My eyes are still adjusting as the Milky Way resolves like a splash of acid. Out here on the edge of nothin, there’s so many stars you can’t actually see em all. The hub of night turns and they rise: silent, ugly. Myriad microscopic pits in the smooth of the sky.

+

It’s just past midnight when the moon crawls over the rim of the world, rollin – half bloated and full of blood as a tick. I hop off the dock, to the tarmac – a move I still accomplish with some grace. My knees and hips are good. It’s my shoulder that gets me. Aches.

+

Scorpion, black against the low white rock that marks the edge of the lot, backs off at my approach, crawls under the stone.

+

I’ve had a night’s work already – guy up from Jalisco, a real Tapatío as once was, I reckon. But nothin says there’s not another, slinkin round. So I sit there a minute, listening, smoking. I roll my own, usually, but this poor bastard had four packs of Delicados Ovalados stashed about his person. And yeah, I plunder their corpses – they been subsidizing my operation for years. Mor’n seven hundred dollars, last few days, US and Pesos combined.

+

In heaven, Scorpius glares down at me from her place in the south. If her little bastard creeps out from under this rock while I’m sittin here, I’ma crush the fucker with my heel, an she knows it. Her one big eye – Antares an I’m not mistaken – glows red with hate.

+

I light another from the coal of the first, thinkin, Where did the bastard come by these things? I thought Chesterfields took over the brand. Guy knew what he liked, I reckon. And he got what he didn’t.

+

I feel for these folks, I do. Whatever happens to em when they get overwrote, it’s not what any of em wanted. I’m sure of that.

+

Coyotes start makin a fuss over the moon. Tellin each other all about it, out on the great cold waste. I get up, dust the seat of my pants, and ease on down the road toward the old highway, shotgun over my arm, like. The low, flat-roofed shed – old Mobil station from before my time; winged steed, headless – gets lost in the dark behind.

+

I’m restless as one a them coyotes tonight. Listenin to em has the hair risin on the back of my neck. I keep a bright eye out in the pitch, the road a gray ghost my boots tell me is soft, still, from the sun.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

No Sunrise, but Nogales

+

U + +p and down the highway, when I get to it, nothing stirs but the low trundling bodies of a couple Armadillos, keepin warm on the still-radiant road. Any traffic and they’ll end, curled up in the gravel, like a blown semi tire tread. They’re safe enough tonight tho – not a light as far as the eye can see. That cold glow in the east is no sunrise, but Nogales.

+

Something – a shadow, upright – detaches itself from among the saguaros, moves between em, just at the edge of my eye.

+

When I look, nothin there. Look away, off to one side. Old sailor’s trick: star you’re lookin at is dim, wavers, till you’re not sure you’re seein it. Star just out from the center of your retina is bright, steady.

+

Nothin. But I’m not ready to call it yet. I crush a perfectly good Delicado with the toe of my boot, do a slow reversal, backing into the brush beside the highway and squat there. I can’t hold this position forever but I won’t need to. I just want to erase my silhouette for a minute – man-against-sky. Draw myself as part of the lay of the land. See if anyone come lookin, where’d I go?

+

It’s not like these things show up armed, prepared. Sometimes they do, when they latch on to some fella packin. But they’re not big planners, these creatures – or anyway, not the ones fresh from the sidereal. Not used to thinking in those terms. Not used to dealing out steps, how to get here-to-there.

+

And it’s been all fresh ones, just in from the outside, come for me so far. Oh, I had run-ins with the old hands, those who’ve had time to learn time, to make some excuse for who they are. Presentable faces, almost humanbeins. Really, you’d almost never know.

+

But none lately. They got wily. They don’t come around here no more. It’s the newbs show up lookin, outa tha gate.

+

I slide two shells into my ol Stoeger Coach – beautiful 12 gauge, oiled by moonlight. They tick in there almost silent. I’m not doin nothin else for a minute but keepin my eyes and ears open wide.

+

Mind goes blank.

+

And there it is, moving away. Figure of a man. Woman. Somethin headed out into the nothin. It’s days of it, from here, on foot: the nothin.

+

Then the cacti come between us again and I’m still waiting. I don’t like to see it moving away. I spread my attention thin, all directions. If there’s yet another out here, maybe waitin to see if I follow the first, well that’s the kinda thing I wanna know.

+

And now my mind is sharp, senses focused, but my thoughts do drift and I’m back in Chicago, for just a moment.

+

God what a mess.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Chicago, ’68

+

I + +crouched, not exactly like I am now. Ass against a Ford sedan, rolled over on its side – and this car, it burned. Fire, bright in the cab. Driver side up, it lay angled across 49th street, far from the television crews but too close to the Amphitheater – where Dan Rather got himself gut-punched and Johnson’s men canvased the delegates on their willingness to back him, surprise nominee.

+

Stuck, I was, in the Back of the Yards.

+

You never will read what went down there, the night after the big event – or I, at least, have seen no accounting of it. But at the time I crouched, hiding, in the herky-jerky shadow cast by the flame that leapt and writhed in that sedan.

+

I wore, that night, the uniform of a peace officer, somewhat soiled. My gun in my hand. Tinglin, all over. Something came up the street, behind me.

+

First came a pig, snorting and sniffin about, searching the ground like a good-size bulldog on a leash, a hank of clothesline, which dipped behind…

+

And come up Officer Dunn Stuart, shirtless but jackbooted, with the pale blue “crash” helmet and – instead of his loaded oak baton – a hatchet swung in his free hand.

+

His other, wrapped with clothesline to the elbow – as if, from time to time, the pig might try to yank free, strain against the leash, tear off into darkness after…

+

They seemed a regular hunting pair, that much clear – though Dunn appeared, very faintly, to be whistling between his teeth, an off key Hail to the Chief.

+

As strange a sight as they made, a cold wave of relief washed over me as I stepped out to greet my fellow officer in the street, by that uncertain light.

+

Instantly the little bastard – was this Pigasus himself? Goddammit, Mister President! – went for my ankle. Without my own boots I’da been hamstrung by the fuckin porkchop. I kicked my free heel at him and the clothesline came up tight against the back of my calf. Cartwheeling my arms to keep upright, I look up and here comes Dunn, easily my height with 30 pounds more draped across his chest and shoulders, sweat streaked – his hatchet-hand high and eyes, I’d swear, goin clockwise and counter.

+

I mighta cried out. The axe fell. It went through my left shoulder like butter – the clavicle – catching finally just off the joint. A better butcher would have sheered that arm clean off. Service revolver in that hand – I’m right handed but left-eyed and you can’t argue withit – went skittering on the pavement, into the gutter.

+

What I felt: I’d been struck, something solid, like a table leg. Then hooked, caught up, stuck on something – as he tried to yank the hatchet out of me and start over.

+

His face this close to mine. Eyes buggin.

+

And then, talk about your miracles, he stopped. The whole thing stopped. He didn’t look surprised or crazy, or anything at all for a second.

+

Let go the hatchet handle, left it in me and turned and walked away, just quit. I fell flat on my ass, freeing myself of the clothesline. The pig started to dart away, got caught at the end of his rope.

+

Dunn looked like he didn’t know how he’d got tangled up innit. He made a twirling motion with his arm and wrist till the rope slid off. Then he vanished up the street, my eyesight goin. Never did know what happened to that pig.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + didn’t tell my story at first. The medics found me in shock and bleedin freely – a while passed before I said anything.

+

And later I didn’t know how to tell it. But I found out Dunn, he just never showed up to work again, and I felt someone otta know.

+

No one wanted to.

+

The yippies, I was told, never made it so far south with their Vietcong flags, not nearly so close to Daley’s Folly. Those Polacks back o’ tha yards certainly never tore em apart. There had been no shotgun blasts, taken at close range, no overturned sedan. No gasoline fires, no burnin yippie chick fleein down the road, like ta been napalmed.

+

Dunn got hisself writ-off as AWOL, but I heard his wife received his pension. That seemed right, and problem solved. I was told to shut up about it.

+

Only much later I understood what had happened. Not what had put Dunn over the edge – he’d always been psychotic, a real “bad apple”, and the events of that night musta punched his buttons good. That much, believe it or not, bein a cop, I understood.

+

But what had called him off, carried him off, spirited him away? A mystery, something I couldn’t feature. Mad Dunn had me – for me it was over. But then something ended for him, instead – sparing me.

+

And there’s maybe all kinds of possibilities, yeah? But I whittled em down in my mind, like.

+

It took me a long time to recover, I had plenty of time to shuck it out. They say I was in a fever for five days, raving. But what I did was the hard work of dreamin. I dreamed my way to my discovery. To the inside scoop that explained it all. And I know now that this Dunn was the first I ever saw taken, and in the moment of his taking.

+

I’ve learned a lot about these things, since. Might say I’ve grown wise to their ways. And one of the secret keys is: they like em young, but not too young. They like the prime of life. You meet an old one, it’s experienced. This time it happened to be Dunn.

+

But it coulda been me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + star, lying just above the rise before me, winks off-and-on and I know my man, my visitor, has crossed over into the nothin of the desert.

+

I get up to follow.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

No Place; Special

+

I + +t’s a stealthy forty minutes later – the wee hours of the night – that I stumble across, in all that nothin, a place set aside in the desert. A few stones make a rough semicircle, a smeared floor of clay, blackened – with blood? I smell it.

+

What happened here? Where is this place and who is it has lead me? I can see all about me – or feel like I can – better than I should do. Some unexplainable light, seeping through from somewhere.

+

Loose gravel is kicked away and I turn, shotgun at my shoulder.

+

Into this circle steps a man, like me: Lean, leathered, old. A dull serape across his shoulders, lowbrimmed hat – but both hands showin. I almost lower the barrel, he seems so familiar.

+

But then he tilts his head back and I see the eyes. Whatever this is before me, however long it has stalked this earth, it’s eternity that spills out of, through, those eyes. Long cunning, long continued assimilation, long planning are in em, but nothing human.

+

It starts to speak:

+

“Tonight,” it says, and I unleash a single barrel of buckshot hell.

+

The kick hits me in the shoulder like the blow of that remembered hatchet – I’m still left-eyed, that don’t change – but half this gentleman’s head is taken off in the most satisfying manner. He folds down nicely into a packet of worn-out clothes and thin, old man.

+

And another sound, or just the feeling of sound turns me round. There are two more. Middle-aged lady, somebody’s abuela – should be home, making tortillas for the morning. Somewhat younger dude in a tie and brand-new down jacket, suit pants tucked into lace-up boots – dust-stained, but just outatha box. I have a cartridge left but they are too far apart for a single blast. Slowly, at the tips of my fingers, two more shells come out my vest pocket.

+

Another runs up. She carries something waist high, raises it. The shells go spillin as I spin towards her. A flash blinds me and I hear the motor – the click and dragging-forth of a fresh little polaroid. I recognize my very own frankenflash – know it by its scars. Taken, this very night, while I got lured away.

+

This is the signal to attack. I hear the running footsteps of three, four more, coming up behind.

+

I pull the other trigger.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Border Patrol on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Don Mark Baldridge

+

+ + Author image of Don Mark Baldridge + + + ‘So what does writing science fiction have to do with video game development?’ Don Mark Baldridge grew up in the American Southwest, where the core of Border Patrol unfolds. He’s developing a video game based on this story. Xeet him, while it lasts, @DonMarkMaker.

+

© Don Mark Baldridge 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Cottonbro Studio, oli2020 and FoYu.

+
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Elin Olausson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Default by +
+ + + + +

M + +iss S is in charge of Song. Every morning after Feeding (red kibble for mornings, brown kibble for nights) she gathers all the girls in the auditorium, where the ceiling is so far up that you can barely see. There are rules for singing like there are rules for everything, and Miss S is good at spotting rule-breakers. When Girl Ten tried to suppress a cough, Miss S told her to go to Headmistress. We haven’t seen her since, or rather, I suppose we have. Here and there.

+

We have our fixed spots in the auditorium, Girls One to Two Hundred and Fifty on one side, Girls Two Hundred and Fifty-One to Five Hundred on the other. Our voices are weak on their own but booming when they come together, an oncoming storm. We’re not entirely sure what a storm is, but the word is in one of the anthems and Miss S’s concrete-floor eyes light up whenever we sing it. As if there is a fire inside her skull and we’ve unveiled it for just a second.

+

There are other classes, too, Sewing and Dancing and Calligraphy, but we are divided into smaller groups then and our voices are not required. The needles slip into our fingertips sometimes; we suck the blood away when Miss K won’t see. It tastes like a spark, burning our tongues and then gone.

+

At night we sleep in the dorms, twenty girls in each, four floors of cold, bunk-bedded rooms. Miss S is in charge of Floor One, she comes in at night to check that things are in order. Her heels warn us long before she opens the door, and she rarely has any complaints to make. Once, so long ago that only some of us remember, a girl tried to snatch the golden pin from Miss S’s head as she walked by. As she got hold of it, she said one word: Sun. We know it from one of the songs, we like how easily it rolls off our tongues. Miss S didn’t say anything, just grabbed the girl by the wrist and took her away. No one is quite sure now what her number was or if she had a name.

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We do have names. We’re not supposed to, but in the dorms, when the door is closed and there’s no tapping in the hallway, we use those names that we made up and handed to each other like gifts. They are all from the Book of Song: Hope, Courage, Prosperity… It was only one dorm at first but now we’re all doing it, four floors of girls with names. Sometimes in the auditorium we feel a burst of pride when we sing our own name, but we never let it show. We know Miss S and her fire.

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There are other things that we keep secret, things that are only spoken in whispers at night. And nothing is more secret than the Rift.

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It was discovered by chance, in another dorm, when a girl in the bed closest to the window woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. She went up to the window, peeked through the blinds to watch the water. The school is surrounded by water on all sides, a calm, shimmering surface, a spectrum of blue overhead.

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But as she watched the night view it started to flicker and fade. Something else appeared, a foggy wasteland, clouds of smoke trailing into a cement sky. And in the distance a red light, a glow that was fire but still not.

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Ever since, all of us wait for the Rift. We take turns, one girl waiting by the window each night, counting down to that moment when the night view shifts. We don’t know why it happens, we don’t know what it is, but we do know that they wouldn’t want us to see it. So we wait, and we watch, and when it’s our turn all five hundred of us feel like that red glow is just for us. And instinctively we know that it is real and that the water is not.

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There are no mirrors except in the wash-rooms, where we leave our daytime dresses in the evening and put on freshly laundered ones in the morning. We comb our black hair and wash our white faces, we step into our thin, soft-soled shoes. Miss S makes noises when she walks but we make none at all. The toothpaste tastes sharp, it tingles if we leave it in our mouths for too long. One girl bit down on a piece of kibble once and lost a tooth; it fell out on the table and they saw, of course they did. We called her Lucky but there have been other Luckies since, a string of them, none of them very true to their name. Sometimes, in the night, we whisper about that tooth and we wonder if they used it again. If it is still here, in one of our red mouths.

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Concert Day comes once a month, as regular as the blood that stains the wash-room floor. All the Misses wear hats and silk gloves on that day, which is how we know. The cameras are small, they whir through the auditorium air like flies. They catch every little detail and we’ve been told we can’t ever look straight into their beady eyes.

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“Stand up tall, girls, stand up!” Miss S waves her arms, pushing us around without ever touching. Her hat is the same green shade as her dress, darker than the Canteen walls, lighter than the stairway banisters. The Book of Song is on the table beside her, but she never opens it, knows the words by heart. “It is our duty to sing,” she told us once, “and to be the very best versions of ourselves.” At night, we argue about who might be watching the concerts, and the only thing we agree on is that our audience is not inside the school. Words fly around – city, government, troops – and they settle inside us, these bits and pieces from overheard conversations and the faded letters that are sometimes on the scraps of paper in Calligraphy.

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Don’t trust them, embroidered along the hem of an apron in Sewing class. The songs lie, chanted in the dark by girls who neatly vanish the next day. We welcome their replacements, we show them where to part their hair. Sometimes we spot a birthmark, a strange-shaped ear we recognize, but we pretend that it’s not there. We are all good at pretending. While waiting for our turn to watch the Rift, we Feed and Sew and Sing and Pretend. Then, once every twenty days, we sneak over to the window and wait for the image to flicker. We look out over the wasteland, but we only see the glow.

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In daytime, in the auditorium, we stand where Miss S tells us to stand. We open our red mouths all at once and the words flow, lapped up by the walls and the spying cameras. We, Girls One to Five Hundred, sing because it is what we were born to do, and there will always be girls here to wear our dresses, eat our kibble, and whisper our secrets in the dead of night. And maybe one day, we will slip through the Rift and become a song of our own.

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Hope, Courage, Prosperity.

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Orbit-lrg

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Elin Olausson

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+ + Author image of Elin Olausson + + + Elin Olausson is a fan of the weird and the unsettling. She is the author of the short story collections Growth and Shadow Paths and has had stories featured in 34 Orchard, Chiral Mad 5, Nightscript, and many other publications. Elin’s rural childhood made her love and fear the woods, and she firmly believes that a cat is your best companion in life. She lives in Sweden. www.elinolausson.com.

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© Elin Olausson 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Reshma Mallecha and DreamDigitalArtist.

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Editorial

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It always seems there is never enough time in life to read all the things I want to – maybe you’re familiar with the feeling. Despite this, and despite the fact that there are many shiny new books being published all the time that I would really like to dive into, I seem to keep picking up old science fiction books and reading them first.

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Sometimes this can be a true pleasure, sometimes more a disastrous mistake. But even in the latter cases there can be elements of the rewarding mixed in with the cringe. And second-hand bookshops are among my favourite places to be.

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Let me present examples to cover both bases, which also happen to have coincidental titles and share a bit of a theme and, well, not a lot else. A few years ago I read what immediately became a favourite: Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, a “critical utopia” that shines a painfully sharp light on the racial inequality and mental health treatment of its era, and therefore on the culture permitting both. Alongside her institutionalised struggles in Piercy’s contemporary New York, the protagonist becomes psychically linked with a visitor from a distant future in which the world has (mostly) abandoned its capital- and resource-hungry ways in favour of rural egalitarianism achieved through a somewhat precarious degree of post-scarcity. Her belief that she is able to travel through time to experience these wonders unsurprisingly causes more than a few problems as regards her ongoing diagnosis.

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Woman on the Edge of Time is really good. Despite being partly set in the period of its writing, now almost half a century in the past, and partly in a distant future imagined under the influences of that same time, a reader today doesn’t encounter any sense of datedness; the glimpses of our past in the mental facility feel vibrant and authentic and timeless in the way that good writing always does, and (as is sadly often the case) the social critique at work still has teeth.

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It would be nice to say that John Brunner’s 1971 novel The Wrong End of Time enjoyed all those same qualities. It doesn’t.

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The novel begins with a Russian spy arriving off the North American coastline bearing a vital message for his nation’s best sleeper agent, an executive who’s been embedded at the top of one of the USA’s economically and politically vital corporations for so long that he’s effectively gone native. The only reason he’s able to set foot on American soil without triggering a global nuclear exchange is that a young black man with highly unfocused psychic abilities felt the urge to wander down to the local control nexus of the world’s most deadly powerful defence system and turn it off several hours before – a decision which goes on to have further coincidental and complicating effects on the lives of all concerned.

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That vital message is a complete McGuffin, by the way – aliens! – and is barely mentioned outside the first and last few pages of the book. What we get instead are a variety of perspectives showcasing the author’s critique of American culture, which mostly range from exaggerated for effect to the painfully, horribly dated. Brunner had chops as a writer, he won the Hugo for Best Novel just a few years previously for Stand on Zanzibar. But here, while we perhaps surprisingly have an African-American main character with considerable depth, we also find a trio of dead-eyed gang-members whose speech is rendered in an all but unreadable phonetic street patois, embarrassing in a way that nowadays would be branded as ridiculously clumsy at best, and please-no-grandpa racist at worse.

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In these books I’ve no doubt that both Piercy and Brunner put pen to paper with nought but good intentions, but time can be not so much cruel as justifiably unsympathetic. One made me shake my head in admiration, the other in admonition, but still I find I don’t regret reading The Wrong End of Time once when I could have read Woman on the Edge of Time twice instead. Nor one of those shiny new releases, for that matter, which today will certainly be free of ridiculous sho’nuff yoo muvva dialogue but might well expose poor writing of other sorts.

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Still, despite its multiple faults (and few today could read The Wrong End of Time without wincing so hard their hair would part up the back of the head) there are still elements at play that are of general interest. The social divides within American culture; the dominance of its corporate world and subservience of its political; its militarism, internal and external; all facets that troubled Brunner as an outside observer more than fifty years ago are still troubling to an outside observer like me, and not all his explorations are as disastrously flawed. There are also more than just hints regarding man-made climate change or ecological crisis, a theme that crops up in much spec-fic of the 70s and which of course feels fiercely relevant today, even if in other regards this book does not.

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Treatment is everything, and writing’s a tough game, but the past has no monopoly on the bad and it certainly has no shortage of the good. So the next time you finish one book and reach for another, consider looking backwards before you look forwards.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 35 – Thanks and Salutations! +Many thanks to stellar human Lance Tooks for allowing us to use ‘Afro-futurism’ as our issue’s cover! A New Yorker by birth, Madrileño by choice, as an illustrator Lance cut his teeth at Marvel before embarking for Spain and evolving its visual influences into a style all his own. You can see more of his work on Instagram and (if you know where to look) in Madrid’s Barrio de las Letras, where he’ll be sketching the world as it walks by.

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Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu

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Mattia Ravasi

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T + +here is something deeply disconcerting about music: about its capacity for influencing our emotions, and for opening up imaginative vistas. H. P. Lovecraft, widely regarded as the finest practitioner of a certain type of gooey, gelatinous horror, singled out his short story The Music of Erich Zann as one of his best works: a tale of subtle, unspecified horror centering on a mute musician who has come in touch, through his technical mastery, with dark forces he is now struggling to control.

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An Yu’s Ghost Music evokes eerie echoes of Erich Zann. The novel’s protagonist, Song Yan, spent her childhood and youth practicing the piano with the express purpose of becoming a virtuoso – yet in the novel’s present she contents herself with the occasional job as piano teacher after a nervous breakdown put her career ambitions to rest. She lives with her husband Bowen in their Beijing apartment. Her mother-in-law, a proud and distant woman, has recently moved in with them.

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The ghost of Song Yan’s forsaken career is the largest and most tenacious among the many ghosts that haunt this sinister, fascinating novel. When one of her young pupils encourages her to play a melody on the piano, Song Yan falls back on a simple, innocuous composition, an old favorite that is unlikely to stretch her skills. Song Yan’s commitment to music is blatant on every page, but she is reticent to explore the outer edges of her talent, as if this were a territory she has sworn to avoid.

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A significant portion of the early novel is dedicated to documenting Song Yan’s everyday life: her efforts to get along with her difficult mother-in-law; her painful attempts to connect with her workaholic husband. There is a feeling of airlessness to Song Yan’s life. A sense that things are in too tense a balance to remain stable for long, but that they have also been stuck in place too long to change. This paradox does not make the novel uncomfortable, let alone boring. The way in which Song Yan faces her predicament, trying her best to be kind to her family while carving out a space for her needs, makes it very easy to sympathize with her situation.

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There is also a certain bottom-line strangeness to Song Yan’s life that propels the story forward very powerfully. In the brief chapter that opens the book (and I confess to a certain coyness in avoiding this fact until now), Song Yan has an encounter with a talking mushroom: a small orange fungus who appears to her in an otherwise sealed room, expressing a wish to be remembered. The encounter does not seem real, but it’s not quite a dream, either.

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Soon enough, Song Yan starts receiving unexpected deliveries of vacuumed-packed mushrooms. Her mother-in-law accepts these mystery packages enthusiastically, embracing the culinary possibilities they offer. She and Song Yan stew the mushrooms, pickle them, add them to stir fries. There is something uncomfortable about this kitchen alliance. Just as Song Yan’s life seems perfectly poised between normality and crisis, this new hobby she embraces is at once wholesome and unsound. Should one really trust mystery mushrooms so easily?

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Mushrooms provide the perfect foil for the other great force in the novel, music. Both are mysterious and otherworldly. Both are nourishing and provide sustenance but can easily take a life away, either through a deadly poisonous fungus or by turning into an all-consuming obsession. When asked by a pupil whether she likes the piano – a typically childish question, straightforward and yet impossible to answer – Song Yan admits that she has no way to know, because the piano has loomed so large over her entire life. It’s too big a part of her for her to know how she really feels about it.

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Mushrooms and pianos become fused together in the fulcrum of the novel’s plot, the first of a series of twists that finally knock Song Yan’s life off-balance. As she investigates the sender of the packaged mushrooms, Song Yan finds herself welcomed into the home of Bai Yu, a virtuoso pianist who disappeared ten years prior without leaving a trace.

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The parallels between Bai Yu and Song Yan are obvious: she gave up on her talent right when her career was meant to begin; he retreated from the limelight as he was poised to achieve his greatest triumph. Bai Yu is almost a ghostly embodiment of Song Yan’s past, or better, of the future that she renounced. It is significant, in this sense, that her father, a pianist of some renown who cut all ties with her after she abandoned her career, was a great admirer of Bai Yu and much shaken by his disappearance.

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This is not the only ghostly aspect of Bai Yu’s character. Asked about the reasons why he decided to disappear from the world, he confesses to a strange phenomenon he encountered as he developed his talents:

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“The more time I spent with the piano […] the more it seemed like my hands didn’t belong to me. The sounds didn’t come from me. I became frightened to the point that every time I was sitting at the piano, I couldn’t help but feel that there wasn’t a ‘me’ at all.”

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Unable to play any longer, Bai Yu is looking for someone to help him “find the sound of being alive,” a sound which he seems to believe is trapped inside his piano, waiting to be released. His research is at once deranged and brilliant: an old man’s folly, or a supreme act of artistic daring. As she is recruited into helping out with this endeavor, Song Yan is plunged right back into the lively, ambitious side of her creative self.

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Ghost Music, however, is not a story of redemption and unlikely comebacks. It is, instead, very much a ghost story: a tale about people confronted with the traumas of a past that won’t stay asleep, and that imposes itself on the present in ways that are disturbing and even brutal.

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An Yu masterfully unpacks this process of shock in all of its harshness and pain. The same delicate bravado is on show in those sections of Ghost Music that deal with Song Yan’s marital difficulties. In the early part of the novel, her husband Bowen is not so much mean to her as blind and deaf to her needs, her very presence. It is easy to read him as a terrible person. Yet, as we come to learn about his own ghosts, his character slowly acquires more dimension. If we don’t quite forgive him, we can certainly understand him. It even becomes possible to see his own dedication to his employer as a very similar impulse, if somewhat less refined, to Song Yan’s consuming passion for the piano.

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After she has endured a number of tribulations – and more encounters with the talking mushroom – Song Yan reflects on her relationship with Bai Yu, and remarks on his importance in her life in a powerful passage that speaks to one of the deepest functions of art: it might not take our problems away, but it reframes our focus and expands our gaze, giving us a deeper appreciation of the strangeness and vividness of life.

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There is much in Ghost Music that I haven’t mentioned in this review. Presences from Bowen’s past come back to haunt him. A mysterious orange dust plagues the novel, appearing at various points in time and space. Ghost Music is not quite a work of magical realism, but it’s also not simply a realist novel with “surreal” elements. Instead, it brilliantly short-circuits the expectations of the ghost story (some of its ghosts, for instance, are not dead, at least not yet) while preserving its central tenets: a preoccupation with “visitations” from an uncomfortable past; a sense of uncertainty before these events that pushes its characters to question their grip on reality. That it manages to convey all this in a way that is at once impactful yet subtle, all while offering a wistful but charming portrait of life in modern-day Beijing, is nothing short of magical.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia’s thoughts on Facebook.

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Mattia Ravasi

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+ + Author image of Mattia Ravasi + + + Mattia Ravasi is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Submarine. His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He talks about books on his YouTube channel, The Bookchemist, and tweets as @thebookchemist too.

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© Mattia Ravasi 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The image shows author An Yu and the novel’s cover (designed by Suzanne Dean).

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2023

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You Are a Rock God

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Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll: some permutation of music's answer to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, perhaps – only, when you're at the top, everything's 'The Good', right? It's all going to last forever, and nothing can go wrong. Joelle Killian takes us to the top and gives us a glimpse of the bottom – or possibly the other way around. Unless the top was always an illusion. And maybe it would be better if it was.

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La Voix d'un Ange

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Kirk Bueckert delivers something in the classic vein here: echoes of Hammer Horror, Don't Look Now, and other gems of a bygone era of the dark and supernatural. Sit back, as some unsuspecting person finds themselves prised from their normality by inconvenient circumstance that gradually shifts to the disquieting before unexpectedly coming over all unspeakable…

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Schools make for strange places in fantastical fiction, but even real schools are strange places: sometimes small, sometimes sprawling, they too often form the individuals of the future by filing away what makes each pupil distinct. Appropriate, then, that if Elin Olausson's story of a strange cohort has a narrator, it is one who identifies as the whole.

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The Four Bill Club

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Environment matters in sf, but entertainment matters too, and short fiction leaves little space for balancing acts. Donald McCarthy doesn't just give good world-building, the kind that carries the scent of what came before and leaves an aftertaste for whatever will follow – he uses it to flavour the story at hand without overwhelming what we're here for now: thrills and spills.

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The Broken Bones of Summer

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There is much to be said for traveling. Expanded horizons expand the mind, and that can only be an advantage in creative endeavours. In relocating from South Africa to Finland, Xan van Rooyen has clearly found some inspiration: this piece of dark fantasy has its origin in the Finnish folklore that gave the calendar months their names…

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Border Patrol

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Don Mark Baldridge prefaced his submission by quoting journalist Nell Greenfieldboyce: 'And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light.' Strange. Look it up sometime. In response, and from the same article, we'll quote astronomer Tod Lauer right back at him, because (of this story, just as of space), 'It's still pretty dark.'

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Fungi & Phantoms: Ghost Music, by An Yu

+ Mattia Ravasi +
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Welcome back to Mattia 'The Book Chemist' Ravasi, who returns after a six-month hiatus with his second longform fiction review. This time he shifts focus from the abstract and oppressive science fictional to the not-exactly hallucinogenic fantastical.

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Short Reviews – July to September

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After this issue's editorial you'd think your editor had read quite enough. But no: once more unto the breach, dear friends, to sample the recent output of our peers. Here are three brief recommendations for further reading, available online now. And if we're still unwilling to rein it in at only three? Well tough, the more the merrier!

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La Voix d'un Ange

+

Kirk Bueckert

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for La Voix d'un Ange by +
+ + + + +

W + +hile everyone else in the banquet hall collectively counts the seconds until midnight and the dawn of a new millennium, Nicolas Demers bids adieu to the Twentieth Century hidden among the coats, a tipsy Classics Major bobbing at his groin. He clutches in the darkness a closet rod with one hand, the crown of College Boy’s handsome head with another.

+

In the pocket of his tailored suit, his mobile buzzes. He doesn’t answer. A cocktail of adrenaline, sparkling wine, and ecstasy thrums hot and loud between his temples like the syncopated voice of God. Breathless, he replies, “Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop…”

+

He comes, and a thousand gold and silver party balloons descend upon the jubilant crowd. Again, his mobile buzzes. This time he picks up. “Niko speaking. This had better be good.”

+

“Nicolas? Nicolas, c’est toi?”

+

He recognizes the tremulous twang of his kid sister, Solange, immediately. “Yes. Oui, Solange, it’s me. What’s wrong?”

+

“C’est maman. Il y avait un accident…” Her voice is lost amid the rising pandemonium.

+

The young man still on his knees wipes his beautiful mouth and watches as Niko buckles his trousers and hastens from the coat check room without so much as a goodnight kiss. He barges out into the honey-coloured light and relative silence of the mezzanine beyond, the words “Hey! Fuck you, pal!” barely registering from behind. The scrolled railing steadies him. Two hundred pounds of tot muscle suddenly gelatinous.

+

“Nicolas, m’entends-tu?”

+

Solange comes through clear as a bell now, but all his brain can register is radio static. Behind the static, the voices of those conspiracy theorists on television talking about Y2K. Nuclear Armageddon. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but—

+

He surveys the hotel around him, the resplendent lobby below. Nothing and nobody. No harbinger of End Times. No herald of impending doom. Just a Christmas tree bedecked with white bulbs aglow, towering past him toward a vaulted ceiling. There, at the summit, a pensive angel spreads her wings and smiles mysteriously.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hree days later, Niko rides an elevator up to his long-since-ex-lover’s penthouse, high above downtown Toronto. The housekeeper, Yolanda, welcomes him with a smile and a kiss on the cheek and collects his coat in the doorway. “Mr. Lyon will be with you in just a moment.”

+

Niko glances toward the darkroom and the red bulb glowing just above the lintel.

+

He waits, wanders the spotless white studio, pauses beside the glass wall overlooking a hazy metropolitan skyline. He thinks back to summer of ’92.

+

He was in those days a bouncer at The Cherry Pit, a popular nightclub in Toronto’s burgeoning Gay Village. On a certain Saturday night, a patron was found bloodied and bruised in one of the toilet stalls. He described his assailants to Niko, who later that same night found them passing around a bottle under the neon sign of an all-night diner. The tallest and seemingly drunkest among them still sported their victim’s blood on the laces of his motorcycle boots.

+

They spotted Niko walking slowly toward them across the rain-slick parking lot. They might have run had they seen the brass knuckles. Niko dropped the trio one by one then walked away without a word. What he didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, was that Motorcycle Boots was the son of the Regional Superintendent of Police.

+

The red light dims, the darkroom door creeks open. Though the strands of silver about his temples have perceptively multiplied, Bernard looks much the same now as he did the night they locked eyes across a crowded jail cell eight years ago, after the cops raided The Cherry Pit, arresting patrons and employees alike. Bewitchingly handsome in herringbone suit and polka dot cravat, nursing a bloody lip, he’d smiled. Niko longs for that smile now.

+

Yolanda brings lunch at a quarter to twelve, arugula salad with a citrus vinaigrette, and pours two glasses of sparking water. Niko prods a red sliver of apple with his fork while he waits for her to quit the room. “It’s Jacqueline,” he says. “There was an accident. She slipped walking up the stairs to her apartment. Nothing serious. Minor cuts and bruises. But Solange…”

+

He pauses, raises his glass to his lips. Bernard simply watches him, countenance cold and inscrutable behind Versace corrective lenses.

+

“Solange has decided the best thing to do would be to put her in a nursing home. And I support her decision.But her husband lost his job last month, and the twins just started school…” He sips tentatively. “I told her maybe I could help.”

+

“How much do you need?” asks Bernard, taking a bite of arugula.

+

“I can cover one thousand for the deposit.” Niko hesitates, then concedes. “But if I had ten, they wouldn’t have to worry about their share of the fees for a while, and…”

+

Bernard places his cutlery aside. “Who do I wire the money to?”

+

“Maison Sainte Jeanne, Retirement Community. Or communauté de retraités. Montréal.”

+

Bernard pulls a PalmPilot from his breast pocket. Niko’s heart clenches behind his ribcage. His hand, not quite steadied by that morning’s double vodka Caesar, itches now to reach across the Scandinavian table and touch him, caress him. He knows he cannot. Those days are behind them.

+

“Thank you, Bernard,” he says. “I promise I’ll repay you.”

+

Bernard drags the stylus across the PalmPilot screen. “Are you headed out as well?” he murmurs.

+

“I leave Thursday morning. The assistant curator will watch the gallery until I return.”

+

“I’m not worried about the gallery. I’m worried about you.” He sets the device aside. “How long has it been?”

+

“Since I’ve been back to Québec? A couple of months, at least.”

+

“No. How long since you’ve last seen your mother?”

+

Niko drains his glass. His eyes meander from his uneaten salad to the wall where once a canvas hung: his portrait in elegant monochrome. Where now hangs nothing.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +is train departs at six o’clock, and seven hundred kilometers of snow-crusted countryside later pulls into the terminal at Centrale. Later, headlights blaze in the predawn dark as a taxicab delivers him and his luggage deep into the heart of Vieux-Montréal. Behind clouded glass he retraces the lamplit cobblestones of his youth. A month from now, this neighbourhood will be swarming with tourists come to celebrate Winter Carnaval, but at present all is deathly quiet.

+

Much is changed, much is unchanged. He recognizes the delicatessen, the boulangerie, the Gothic Basilica looming over all. As a boy he would run errands with his mother: him at her side, baby Solange before them in the pram.

+

Nicolas had known his mother was beautiful by the way men looked at them on the street. Her husband, his father, lived with some other woman in some other town; but Jacqueline, a devout Catholic, didn’t believe in divorce and thus remained Madam Demers. This piety however did little to dissuade the local men. Indeed, she had been driven out of a good job at the garment boutique by the lecherous advances of her employer. Still, despite her modest income as a seamstress and the mounting expenses of raising two small children singlehanded, his mother was ever the vision of elegance and poise. Thus have the memories of youth immortalized her.

+

The cabbie lets him out in front of a tenement on the Rue Saint-Paul. The night is cold beyond cold. Yet he lingers on the sidewalk, suitcase in hand, staring up at the retired couturière’s apartment. His hatred of this place runs marrow-deep.

+

A powdery layer of dust enamels everything within: bolts of cloth, spools of thread, a tailor’s dummy headless in the corner of the room. He pockets the spare key, drops his luggage where he stands. He navigates mouse droppings and the corpses of spiders, cardboard boxes brimming with moth-eaten junk.

+

He strikes a match to light the primitive stove, waits for the kettle to boil. Beside the kitchenette, the Murphy bed lies open and strewn about with Jacqueline’s old mail and other miscellaneous documents. He discovers a volume of Reader’s Digest hidden among the yellowed copies of Harper’s Bazaar and cracks a vulnerable smile. Many a bedtime, Jacqueline read aloud to her children from such a volume as this, Benson & Hedges in hand, her long black hair tied up in clouds of pale cigarette smoke. He scans the spine. Condensed Books: Achilles and the Trojan Horse, Pandora’s Box, and his personal favorite, Homer’s The Odyssey.

+

Niko looks up. The hexagonal mirror, the red velvet couch. A scene from his past. He regards it as he might one of Bernard’s photographic tableaux.

+

This piece is titled An Unexpected Visitor. The subjects are three. The Mother and the Monseigneur together seated upon the couch, Mother gazing absentmindedly out the window, her olive wood rosary dangling from one hand. The Son stands before them, contained within the mirror. He’s pale and thin. He totes a heavy leather satchel, having just come home from school. He recognizes the Monseigneur from Sunday service at the Basilica: this grotesque man with his distended stomach, his gin blossom nose.

+

“Nicolas, je suis venu vous parler aujourd’hui a la demande de ta mère. Elle m’a parlé d’hier soir et ton annonce troublante.” Nicolas, I’ve come to speak with you today at your mother’s request. She told me about last night and your troubling announcement.

+

Radio static. Nothing but radio static.

+

“Bien que ce soient des temps déroutants, nous devons toujours nous souvenir des Corinthiens. Ni adultères, ni homosexuels, ni les sexuellement immoraux héritera du royaume de Dieu.” Although these are confusing times, we must always remember Corinthians. Neither adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor the sexually immoral will inherit the Kingdom of God.

+

The kettle sings.

+

Niko pillages the cabinets for camomile and a mug, his mobile cradled in the crook of his neck. He gestures at the boxes, though Solange cannot see him. “Why didn’t you tell me things had gotten this bad?”

+

“Would it have changed anything if I had?”

+

He fills a clay mug. Steam rises from the brim like an aromatic specter. “I haven’t spoken to her in seventeen years. What am I supposed to say to her now?”

+

“Je ne sais pas,” Solange replies. “All I know is you may not have another opportunity like this to say it.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +iko rings the bell on the desk in the vestibule and waits. The Gothic manor house is, like much of the surrounding neighbourhood, yet another gloomy relic of colonial antiquity. The tolling of the bell accompanies a chorus of unseen choir singers as it echoes down the hall. A haunting sound in the monastic nursing home.

+

“Puis-je vous aider?”

+

Niko turns to see a tall young man in black standing behind him. “I’ve come to see Jacqueline Demers.”

+

“Yes, of course,” the man says. “You must be Nicolas. I’m Father Luc, humble chaplain of Maison Sainte Jeanne. Come with me.”

+

He follows the chaplain down a vaulted corridor lit by morning sun on stained glass windows. He nods to a young woman in a strange black tunic – a nurse, he guesses, judging by the laminated badge on her lapel. He cannot decide which he hates more, hospitals or churches, but the manor house represents a uniquely dismal hybrid of the two. This chaplain, Father Luc, must be just out of the seminary. Twenty-six at best. His black robes and white collar evoke memories of the late Monseigneur. But the slant of his jaw, the slick swoop of his hair: these conjure something else altogether.

+

“Your sister says you’re something of an artiste.”

+

“Truth be told, I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body,” Niko corrects. “I manage a small gallery. My partner, ex-partner, gave me the job.” No hesitation to allow partner to imply, to hell with churchly edicts. Yet the chaplain merely smiles and nods and leads them down a connecting corridor. Three more young women, all in matching black tunics, pass them along the way. “What kind of a nursing home is this exactly?”

+

“Before becoming a retirement community,” the chaplain says, “this was Le Couvent de la Vierge Mère. The building was donated by the Archdiocese back in the late seventies. The sisters are all practicing caregivers – licenced, of course, by the Province of Québec. They devote their lives to Christ and to the service of all who come to live with us at Maison Sainte Jeanne.”

+

They proceed then out into a courtyard, cutting across a cloistered garden to the western wing. “It might seem strange to an outsider,” he continues, opening the door, “but I promise, your mother is in capable hands.”

+

The common room is crowded with decrepit bodies. They move about with steel walkers and walking sticks and some in wheelchairs, some with saline pouches or oxygen tanks in tow. They play Chinese checkers, dominos, Canasta. They knit scarves and sip chocolate from ceramic mugs around a great stone fireplace and converse among themselves. And sometimes to themselves.

+

Niko stamps the snow from his boot and surveys the sedentary crowd, expecting to find Jacqueline holding court at the centre table, cigarette in hand, luminous and convivial as ever. The chaplain beckons to a mousy nun with long cornsilk hair. “Sister Dominique. Allow me to present Nicolas Demers, Jacqueline’s son.”

+

The young novice looks more like the president of a second-rate sorority than a newlywed bride of Christ. “Welcome, Nicolas. Let me bring you to your mother.”

+

Together they detach from Father Luc toward an isolated corner of the common room where a heavyset woman with deep-socketed eyes drowses in front of the television. They slow to a halt beside her chair. “Jacqueline, regarde qui est là.”

+

The woman says nothing.

+

“I’ll give you two some time alone.”

+

He turns to reply but the Sorority Sister has gone, receded into the crowd. There must have been a misunderstanding. This bedraggled woman in the musty-smelling bathrobe the colour of melted strawberry glacée cannot be Jacqueline Demers. Yet coiled around the woman’s wrist hangs his mother’s wooden rosary: the Our Father’s painted black, Hail Mary’s tinted white.

+

The television plays a rerun of The Dating Game, the volume high, though Jacqueline seems oblivious to both it and the world around her – including Niko’s presence. “A former Miss America contestant, she loves horseback riding and musical theatre. She joins us from Corpus Christi, Texas. We’re delighted to welcome to The Dating Game, Candice McCormick!”

+

Niko steps closer.

+

Gone is every trace of the statuesque woman from his childhood. Her spine hunches, her bosom droops. Her pale, pearlescent skin has become sallow, tracked by liver spots and sinuous varicose veins; lustrous black hair become ghostly silver-white. He notes a small bandage on her cheek. Another on her chin. “Hello, Jacqueline. Do you remember me?”

+

Her head lulls. No response.

+

What kind of pills have these bible thumpers been giving to her anyway? He straightens his back. “It’s me, Jacqueline. Your son. Nicolas.”

+

No response. He steps closer still. Her lips are moving, almost imperceptivity, muttering something to nobody. “Minuit. Minuit. Minuit…”

+

Niko shrugs. “Midnight… yes, okay… what happens at midnight, Jacqueline?”

+

“Bachelor No. 1: you’ve invited me to join you for dinner, tonight, at your place. Tell me, what’s on your menu?”

+

He winces at the blaring box and sighs, bends to her level.

+

“Minuit. Ces gens vont me t—”

+

“Well, Candice, I’d start by setting the mood: a little music, maybe some candles, mix us up a couple of Margaritas. Then, I’d blow your mind with my world-renowned Chili con carne. What do you think about that?”

+

He stares at her still fluttering lips, not sure if he heard it right. “Jacqueline, what are you telling me?”

+

“Muy caliente! Bachelor No. 2, same question—”

+

Jacqueline seizes hold of his arm with surprising strength and speed, and whispers up at him. “Ces gens vont me tuer.”

+

He pulls his arm free, and just as quickly she subsides to her mumbling again. Niko straightens, looking around the room at the feeble and the aging, and a slight, dark-clad figure moving promptly amongst them.

+

These people are going to kill me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +iko absents himself to the sleepy château in the actual town, heads for the bar and claims a stool. Solange had prepared the guest room for him at her home in Trois-Rivières. He booked a hotel room instead, insisted the time alone would be good for him, therapeutic even.

+

Something about the lounge reminds him of Bernard. He glances down the bar, perchance to see him sitting there with his polka dot cravat. He finds instead a pair of stockbroker-types in last season’s Armani discussing the dot-com bubble.

+

The hotel barman brings a menu, but Niko just waves his hand. “Cosmo. Make it a double.” The barman says nothing, only stares. “Cos-mo-politan,” Niko snaps. This time the runt obliges.

+

He dials Bernard’s number. Yolanda picks up. “I’m afraid Mr. Lyon is unavailable at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?”

+

Niko disconnects, and drains his martini glass in three slow gulps. “Another,” he says.

+

The businessmen snicker down the bar. “Putain de pédé,” hisses one to the other between long sips of ale.

+

The slur plunks down hard like a stone in water, sending ripples of rage across his body. He strikes a match, lights a cigarette, watches them in the mirror above the beer taps. He wants to break that heavy bottle of Black Label over Tweedledee’s bulbous head, maybe stick the bottleneck in Tweedledum’s eye. He nurses Cosmo number two, searching his pockets for brass knuckles which are not there.

+

Don’t be stupid, says the voice in his head. You’re not a bouncer in the Village anymore. You’re thirty-six years old and a dilettante and a drunk.

+

Outside, the buzzing music and neon of the Red-Light District beckon to him like ghosts in the night. Yet daydreams draw him backward in time, back to the Maison Sainte Jeanne. He remembers an article he once read in the Toronto Star, some exposé regarding negligence in Canadian hospices and nursing homes. Widespread reports of misconduct, abuse, even accounts of so-called “mercy killings.” Had those bandages on Jacqueline’s nose and chin been covering the “minor cuts and bruises” of her fall, or were they evidence of something sinister?

+

Another Cosmopolitan, another cigarette. He recalls the trial of Orville Majors down in the States just last summer. Killed six people with potassium chloride while working as a nurse at Vermillion County Hospital, senior citizens all. And there was the case of Kristen Gilbert who similarly poisoned three people at the veterans’ hospital before that. The headlines dubbed these killers Angels of Death. And, of course, these are just the ones who were caught.

+

Niko watches the pendulum swing beneath an antique wall clock near the door. The businessmen have long since departed, leaving him alone at the bar. Twenty minutes to midnight, now. What happens at midnight, Jaqueline? What was it you said?

+

These people are going to kill me. Ces gens vont me tuer.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hat follows is a drunken blur. One moment finds him rising from the barstool, reaching for his coat. The next finds him staggering through the unlocked backdoor of the darkened manor house. He removes and hides his dripping shoes, lest his tracks betray him. He wanders, expecting at any moment a duty nurse or nightwatchman to spring out of the dark and confront him. Yet none do. Niko walks alone.

+

At length he comes to a map of the house framed and mounted to the wall, emergency exits and the routes there-to. By the dwindling Aquarius Moon he scours the directory, decerning nothing else of aid. Another light draws his gaze down a connecting hall: a candle sputtering behind frosted glass. He diverges toward the light and the door containing it. Black lettering on the window reads “Bureau de l’aumônier”. Chaplain’s Office.

+

He taps twice on the glass. “Hello?” he says quietly, before stepping inside.

+

A lone-lit candelabrum illuminates the room. A mahogany desk, a leather chair, files and book-laden shelves, a portrait of the Virgin Mother. And there behind the chair, a second slightly smaller door. A closet perhaps, bright red, blood red.

+

He closes the door behind him, approaches the chaplain’s desk. The candelabrum is heavier than it looks. Was it cast from solid gold or plated lead? He raises the light in one hand, twists the round knob of the vivid little door with the other.

+

This piece is titled The Stairs Behind the Closet Door.

+

The subject stands back from the opened doorway and its winding stairwell descending into blackness. He is silhouetted by his candelabrum, raised high to cast its glow into those mysterious depths, as if torn between the sinister lure of the unknowns below and the warm comforts of the room at his back. All is Caravaggio on the finest pearl finish.

+

Niko steps forward. Perhaps that same liquid courage that led him to this place now presses him further still. Or perhaps it is the voice inside his head which tells him: No, he will not add another link to the chain of abandonment his progenitors began so long ago. Tonight, he must break it.

+

He tightens his grip on the candelabrum and slowly descends the spiral stairs, legs quivering, teeth chattering. A languid miasma rises to greet him like a stench from the bowels of hell. He comes to the bottom step and halts at the mouth of a wide tunnel, the chitter of distant voices on the heavy air. A sprawling catacomb unspools before him. His light plays upon the stones and all around the dead entombed in oblong niches, their bones in white cloth bundled tight.

+

“Good God,” he says, his voice a rasping brittle sound.

+

From one among the grinning skulls, a thick rat crawls forth and squeaks and scurries away down the tunnel. His gaze gives chase. The dust on the ground ahead is recently trodden, these tracks undoubtedly human. Following the rodent he spies an olive wood rosary. Jacqueline’s, of course. Now yonder voices have begun to chant. He cups his mouth against the dust and stench, and proceeds among the bones toward the choir.

+

The sinuous tunnel terminates at the glowing entrance of another candle-lit room. He blows out his light, sets the candelabrum down beside him. The chamber is vast, with a high smooth ceiling and painted walls the same scarlet red as the door at the top of the stairs. A multitude of men and women are joined within. All young, all naked despite the cold, broadly smiling with arms upheld.

+

They stand together around a large pit: a medieval stone well at the very centre of the room. Beyond them is a golden alter, and behind it against the crimson wall hangs a white banner baring the Templar Cross and a line of arching script: “Nous, les Chevaliers du Temple Lunaire”. We, the Knights of the Lunar Temple.

+

Niko recognizes one of the women: the blonde-haired nun, Sister Dominique. And another. All of them. All of these women are nuns. Their chanting is meaningless to him, just distant sounds coming to him from far away, beyond the hot buzzing between his ears.

+

Radio static. Nothing but radio static.

+

Blood races to Niko’s head. Cranberry-flavoured bile bubbles up in his throat. Maybe he was drugged. Maybe the hotel barman spiked his drink. All of this, the stairs, the crypt, the secret naked rite, has been a waking dream. A dream from which Niko must now wake. Awake!

+

The chanting ceases, and for a moment Niko imagines all this madness will likewise be instantly gone. Then a figure appears behind the golden altar, the chaplain, the black pelt of a goat draped around his otherwise naked body. Its stinking head perches atop his own like a diadem from which horns protrude backward, blood trickling down. In grandiose tones, he addresses his flock.

+

The sermon is in Latin, a smattering of which Niko still recalls from Catholic school. Something about casting lots. Yes, a lottery. And something else… “sacrificium”. Just then, two more acolytes enter from a second passage, carrying a kind of stretcher between them. Upon it lies Jacqueline, swaddled in the same white robes as her many rat-infested predecessors in the tunnel.

+

The acolytes hoist Jacqueline onto the alter and insinuate themselves among the circle. Her hands lie crossed at her chest, bound together with a length of rope. Heavily sedated or already dead, Niko cannot yet determine – but who would bind the hands of a dead woman?

+

He hazards a single step closer.

+

All heads tilt skyward, as does his. There, suspended from the ceiling, is an enormous glass disc, directly above the well. It seems reflected in that strange glass less like a well than some portal into dark oblivion, at once bottomless and without depth altogether.

+

A low rumbling rises from the darkness: a voice, deep and guttural.

+

Chanting resumes in clouds of warm breath as the deeper voice begins to quaver, a sound rather like whale song, whooping discordantly from the bottom of the well.

+

Niko cranes his neck as do they all, all eyes on the mirror. Something solid materializes amid the cosmic dark. A pinprick, growing steadily larger as the whale song swells in tandem. A bioluminescent body, vaguely anthropoid. The limbs long and spiderlike, the head strangely geometric, mouthless, rotating clockwise about the base.

+

His breath catches when he registers the wings. Angel wings of purest silver branching out from a torso which pulsates with ethereal amber light. The disciples drop to their knees and Niko staggers backward.

+

“Rejoice!” cries the chaplain.

+

“Rejoice!” cry the supplicated, and the winged monster sees them. A thousand lidless eyes peer out from their sockets, not just in the head but along the scapulars and coverts of the very wings themselves.

+

The light crests the rim of the well. None dare look upon the source directly, its double hovering in the mirror above, its whale song echoing around the room.

+

The song, thinks Niko. Might that be the root of this madness? Like some hypnotic radio wave beaming that eldritch nightmare into the vulnerable minds of the crowd.

+

He wastes not another second trying to comprehend it. Niko bends to the still-smoking candelabrum, scrapes together two clumps of melted wax, inserts one into each ear: a lesson from Odysseus. The wax blocks out all noise but the treble of his own thudding heart. A third ball of wax Niko tucks into the pocket of his jeans.

+

Rising, he discovers the congregants in the red room have likewise risen. They watch him. The smiles have all evaporated. His next breath he loads into his lungs like a suicide’s bullet. He removes his coat and lets it drop, and with a violent cry and candelabrum as his sword he charges headlong into the chamber toward Jacqueline.

+

The vanguard lunge to meet him while the goat-headed chaplain spectates beneath his gruesome visor of teeth. Niko bucks against the tide of bodies until the current overtakes him. A dozen groping hands entwine to tear him limb from tender limb. They tug at his clothes. A woman’s long thumbnail gouges his eyelid. The one called Domonique sinks her teeth into his face. When the sister’s head pulls back, a piece of cheek dangles from her blood-red mouth.

+

Niko leverages what little space he can to cock his own head back. His brow connects hard with her brittle nose – once, twice. Blood sprays and Domonique stumbles backward, toppling over the rim of the well. Voices ring out, unintelligible through the clumps of candle wax, and their struggles freeze in a tableau of chaos. All gaze up at the mirror as the young woman goes cartwheeling into the void and incinerates like a phosphorescent meteor spectacular in its demise.

+

The monstrous head stops turning. Tight grips slacken and Niko plummets to the ground as his attackers disperse in vain. He rises, choking, to see angel wings spread wide : an explosion of liquid-metal plumage undulating across the darkness like the molten clockwork of a sentient mandala. The chamber trembles as the whale song becomes an apocalyptic trumpet.

+

The sonic boom strikes Niko hard in the chest and Jacqueline wakes, delirious. He scrambles to her, collects the wax from his trouser pocket, plugs both her ears. Then he slings her still-bound arms around his neck and hoists her weight onto his back.

+

Nobody stops them. The crowd is a quivering pantomime of silent screams.

+

The chaplain behind his alter seems to vibrate, every muscle twitching beneath his rancid pelt. Eyes bulge and red runs from his ears. The tremor splits Father Luc from widow’s peak to pelvic bone and a geyser of hot blood erupts from the negative space between. His bisected figure stands wobbling a moment, then crumples to the ground.

+

One by one, the naked torsos of the congregants come apart. Like great seething pustules, they burst until nothing remains but a havoc of tangled limbs and viscera. Broken mirror glass hails down, cutting the Templar banner cross to ribbons.

+

Niko clambers through the chaos, the carnage, the jutting ribcages, toward the exit. The trumpet blasts louder and louder still. Spidery cracks crawl up the painted stone, the walls crumble, and the ceiling of the red room collapses behind him.

+

He gasps for breath. Jagged pebbles bite at the soles of his feet. A billowing cloud pursues him as he charges blindly down the tunnel. Then, all goes deathly quiet.

+

Dust settles in the dark and he lays his gore-drenched mother down. He strikes a match, illuminating nothing but rubble and bones. A cul-de-sac in the necropolis.

+

Jacqueline’s eyes dart about, her pale visage a kabuki mask of chalky dust and blood and horror. Niko bends, claws the wax from her ears and his. He fumbles at the rope binding her, picking at the knot with one hand while the other protects the flame.

+

“This is the way the world ends,” he mutters, “this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends…”

+

The knot comes loose, her hands freed, and as the two lock eyes something sparks in hers. “Nicolas ? Nicolas, c’est toi ?”

+

Niko sighs. “Yes, Mom. It’s me, Nicolas. I’m with you now.”

+

“Nicolas… my son…” His mother smiles, grazes his cheek. “My son. I’m… I’m…”

+

He nods his head. “Je sais, maman.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

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Kirk Bueckert

+

+ + Author image of Kirk Bueckert + + + Kirk Bueckert is a poet and playwright living on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His previous work has been published by Dark Matter Magazine, Timber Ghost Press, Tyche Books, and the League of Canadian Poets. His debut novel Dark Circuitry launches in early spring 2025.

+

© Kirk Bueckert 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using images by Faruk Tomruk and Juan Carlos Gomez Aristizabal - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-35/short-reviews-autumn-2023.html b/issue-35/short-reviews-autumn-2023.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..84263b53 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-35/short-reviews-autumn-2023.html @@ -0,0 +1,317 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – July to September — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 35 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Short Reviews – July to September

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – July to September by +
+ + + + +

T + +hree more months, three more stories.

+

Well, obviously there have been rather more stories than that, and I should know, I read many before I picked out these few for particular attention. But I would at least like to attempt to maintain the pretence that this little review platform adheres to some sort of structure, before I run riot and ruin everything in the penultimate paragraph.

+

First up, representing July, we have One Last Bash Before We All Hit The Road by Louis Evans, a stylish excursion that takes us to a Manhattan society event like no other (though possibly all such things are like no other, unless they want to be thought bad). This one is being held in defiance of an ecological apocalypse that is shortly to wipe New York City from the face of the Earth, and only the city’s best are on the list, of course – except it’s a very subjective word, “best”, isn’t it? “Richest” might be closer to the truth. Or “most deserving”.

+

It appears in Little Blue Marble, a great online eco-fiction zine that hosts a wide array of genres within that theme. Even if speculative fiction isn’t to your taste, you can be sure to find something there that is.

+

For August, we turn to Orion’s Belt, where literary spec-fic is very much the only flavour available, although each month it is portioned out via one short-short story and one piece of poetry for some variety of form.

+

The delicacy in question, Aimee Ogden’s But First It Is Sung, boasts a quite marvellous perspective: that of a sentient universe whose existence is in flux, its attentions torn between celebration of its (relatively) recent new-born offspring and fear of unseen swarming beings almost infinitely far down the physiological scale, whose escalated consumption of energy marks out any additional universes out there as quite the prize. Is the balance between achieving survival and achieving an existence worth surviving for ever explored on this level?

+

After these excesses of luxury and scale, for September all is brought very much down to earth by Ellen Morris Prewitt, who appears (slightly ironically) in Luna Station Quarterly, home to “stellar short fiction by women-identified writers since 2010”.

+

The Very Hand of God takes us to suburban Memphis, where retired couple Eugene and Lavinia reside in a neighbourhood deeply in decay, estranged from their adult son and falling into their odd little ways. When Eugene finds tiny slivers of pinkish glass in the street, an unexpected hording urge is triggered in him, and over time his burgeoning collection begins to attract attention, first within his family, then without. The consequences are unexpected.

+

Those were my favourite recent reads, but (in a fairly typical (and heavily signposted) move) I’ll now over-stay my welcome to add one extra quadrupedal recommendation: the latest issue of The Future Fire was an interesting experience, with four stories I also enjoyed. The first, Frances Koziar’s One Day, was only really speculative for its invented setting; it was followed by Boxes Full of Memories by Sean R. Robinson, a more overtly fantastical piece; then the third, Out of Bounds by Anna Ziegelhof, put us very firmly in scifi territory, as did the last, Davian Aw’s Between the Shadow and the Soul. Each was very distinct, but all shared a strong emotional weight; a nicely complementary set, in my opinion.

+

Right, that’s it. See you in three more months. With “three” more reviews.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved

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The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-35/the-broken-bones_of-summer.html b/issue-35/the-broken-bones_of-summer.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..28b308be --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-35/the-broken-bones_of-summer.html @@ -0,0 +1,352 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Broken Bones of Summer — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 35 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

The Broken Bones of Summer

+

Xan van Rooyen

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Broken Bones of Summer by +
+ + + + +

M + +y brother has beautiful hands. It’s a pity I have to break them.

+

His fingers are delicate, the rounded tips made for stroking wildflower petals scattered in summer meadows. I hold the longest of his fingers between my palms, feeling the knuckle gouge into my heart-line when he flinches. My touch leaves blue smudges of frostbite in his heat bright flesh.

+

He strains against the chains woven of midnight and ice holding him captive. His lips, usually smeared with honey smiles, are torn and bleeding. His every breath a cloud, fading, his power dissipating.

+

His gaze holds mine, his eyes the devastating blue of empty skies. I have tried, begged, demanded and threatened – but my brother has only ridiculed my pleas for balance.

+

“Go to Manala,” he says. “You belong in the realm of the dead. Leave this earth for the living.” But he will leave this earth a desiccated carcass unless he can be made to see sense.

+

His finger turns brittle between my hands – blood slowing to sludge and cooling into crystal – snapping as I apply gentle pressure. The bone splinters, shards piercing mottled skin. He doesn’t scream as pearls of sweat seep from his brow, only clenches his teeth. Soon, those will be mine too. My kapeet, flitting sprites wrought of lunar light, wove moonbeams into silver in anticipation. Now the braided thread lies in the pocket of my dress, awaiting new baubles.

+

“It doesn’t have to be this way.” I release his trembling hand. “You know what I’m asking.”

+

“The world is mine.” Skin flakes from his lips. “You still have your darkness. Be content with that.” He tries to pull his hand away, stubborn to the last. “Just admit defeat.”

+

I shake my head, sniffing back tears of disappointment. “I’m not the one held captive.”

+

His expression hardens, his gaze a viper’s, tongue darting to lap at stained lips. He has always thought himself the best of us, light-drenched and radiant. And therein lay his vulnerability as he stumbled sun-drunk upon my borders, singeing the edges of my realm. But my kapeet gathered the wandering souls of the dead and forged them into a shield – a trap.

+

He’d thought his shadow a pale and feeble companion. He didn’t notice how its color deepened and fingers lengthened as my power infused it with purpose, nor how my kapeet lured it to stand among their legion – not until it had wrapped charcoal fingers about his throat and left him chained and at my mercy.

+

I turn my brother’s wrist and a pall of fear draws across his eyes. Here, in my wind-whipped tundra, he is feeble.

+

“I will take back what you stole.” My words snap, sharp as the first freeze.

+

He grins, lip oozing, and I crush another knuckle. This time he gasps, sucking in a mouthful of frigid air. A sound like lake ice giving way to spring – my brother’s teeth cracking in the cold.

+

“Marras, please.” My name on his tongue is a lance of sunshine. It tears through me, leaving a wake of doubt and grief. But my kapeet are there, already stitching snow and shadow across the damage he has wrought. I won’t let him win. I won’t let him bleed me dry.

+

I snap finger after finger, his hands wilting, blackening. Hands that have burned their mark across the south: forests scorched to ash, meadows left parched and barren, marshes turned to tumbleweed deserts – and everywhere upturned faces charred by a sun burning too bright through too thin air. Perhaps my brother cannot hear their prayers for cooling wind or how they mourn the winter; perhaps he simply doesn’t care.

+

“Kesä.” I wield his name like a blade. “You have to stop.”

+

“The world is changing. I choose to embrace that change.”

+

“You betrayed us.” I touch the crown upon my head: the bones of our siblings fused in jagged peaks. Only the two of us remain.

+

He snarls with teeth streaked scarlet. “You are everything they detest.”

+

“This was your doing.” I stroke the polished beads rescued from the corpse of Helmi, her body left broken in the wreckage of a forest damp instead of frosted.

+

“I honor them.” My touch drifts to the splintered remnants of Joulu, to the shards I salvaged from the crumpled ruins of Tammi. She’d fought the longest and hardest, determined to preserve the winter, but she too had succumbed.

+

“I carry them with me.” I press the crown against my skin, feel blood trickle down my temples and soak into my hair. I stroke each fragment of my lost siblings, each undone by the brutality of the brother we once loved as Summer: Maalis, Huhti, Touko–the spring triplets left scattered like a windblown petals; Heinä and Elo, those closest to Kesä, their power already subsumed; their remains bleached by a careless sun. My fingers stumble over the gaps in the adornment.

+

“I’d carry them all, but you left nothing of Syys and Loka for me to find.” They’d been incinerated–the autumn erased. They had been my season-sharers and closest kin, dressed in russet and gold – now only I remain: where gold turns to rust, light dims to dark, and life slips toward death.

+

Flames flicker in the depths of Kesä’s eyes, so devoid of remorse.

+

“Some sovereign you are,” he scoffs. “You are the monarch of absence, of nothing!”

+

“And you have reduced your kingdom to dust and cinders.”

+

“You are what they are forced to endure in the hopes of my return,” he continues. “I am light and life, I am exaltation.”

+

“You are thirst and blistered skin, a tyrant who refuses to see how his people suffer.” Anger roils in violent eddies within me, sleet unfurling on the twisted tresses of my hair, my tears whisked into snowflakes by the frenzied kapeet.

+

How many bones must I break before he surrenders? And if he doesn’t… I cannot simply kill him. To do so would be to smother this land in perpetual night and pervasive cold. I wouldn’t end the suffering, only alter it, and be no better than the brother bound before me.

+

“It is what they wanted.” He studies his mangled hands, attempts lopsided fists, and winces. “They shaped their world for unending summer.”

+

He cannot understand that what they did was a mistake. He cannot taste their shame, curdling what little remains of the glaciers slipping into bubbling oceans. He cannot fathom their guilt as swaths of land turn arid and inhospitable. He doesn’t see the ghosts, a deluge in the afterlife – souls crowding Manala, weeping for what might’ve been had they only been able to outrun the heat and storms devouring their homes.

+

Perhaps sensing my despair, my kapeet flutter about my shoulders. They buzz and hum, their bumble-bee voices spinning elegies across the night. Their songs writhe in shades of green and pink, ribbons of light embroidering the darkness. The sky above is an oil slick iridescent with stars, now aglow with coruscating lament.

+

Kesä lunges, cursing the chains sinking frozen fangs into his limbs. He thrashes and jerks against the bonds, scattering blood that steams in the carpet of snow at our feet.

+

My efforts are futile. He will not – cannot – change. He has been so wrong, but a single truth sounds clarion in the silence of my mind.

+

I am Death, and Life is mine to take.

+

“Dearest brother, I wish it didn’t have to come to this.” I place my hand on his chest and he shivers at my touch. His breaths are ragged, lungs struggling against ribs drawing tight as marrow and sinew seize.

+

“Don’t.” Tears like mirages blur the keen edges of his irises, cloud their wolfsbane blue. “Please.” His voice, a strained zephyr.

+

A rime of regret scours my withered heart as his sternum turns to gory shrapnel beneath my excavating fingers. I reach into the cavity and remove the throbbing organ of my brother’s power. His life beats slowly between my hands and still he watches me, his tears glistening trails of frozen disbelief as I raise his heart to my lips.

+

I bite. I chew.

+

When it is done, his essence stirs within me, a thrumming counterpoint in perfect harmony with the one I’ve always known.

+

Too long I waited and hoped he would come to understand. And now I carry my brother within, the me and him slowly knitting together to become the needed we. Together now, perhaps we stand a chance of healing the fractured earth.

+

In my crown, his teeth sit on threads of silver, the words caught between them whispering of warmth and green rejuvenation. A needle of finger bone sews dreams of blue skies and summer showers across the shadows in my mind.

+

My kapeet gather the rest of what remains, rising through the darkness of my impenetrable night. They toss the glitter of my brother across the stars and, together, we watch the sun breach the horizon.

+

I lean into that warmth and its gentle promise.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Broken Bones of Summer on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Xan van Rooyen

+

+ + Author image of Xan van Rooyen + + + Climber, tattoo collector, and peanut-butter connoisseur, Xan van Rooyen is an autistic, non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, and Galaxy’s Edge among others. They have also written several novels including YA fantasy My Name is Magic, and adult arcanopunk novel Silver Helix. Xan is also part of the Sauutiverse, an African writer’s collective with their first anthology due out this November from Android Press. Feel free to say hi on their socials.

+

© Xan van Rooyen 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using an image by YaroslavGerzhedovich - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-35/the-four-bill-club.html b/issue-35/the-four-bill-club.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f2a3003a --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-35/the-four-bill-club.html @@ -0,0 +1,443 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Four Bill Club — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 35 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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The Four Bill Club

+

Donald McCarthy

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Four Bill Club by +
+ + + + +

T + +he party roars. I can barely decipher what anyone says. That’s fine. The people here aren’t the type to say anything interesting. Almost everyone in the Four Bill Club can brag of immense wealth and power, and I’ve found the relationship between being interesting and being wealthy is an indirect one. The few here who aren’t part of the elite count themselves as lucky guests of some rich patron. I’m neither wealthy nor someone’s guest, though, so how am I here? Dedication. You want something enough, and don’t care what you must do to get it, and you can set your sights on almost anything.

+

The Four Bill Club sits on a world that’s not part of the ten colonies, making its legal status nebulous. That’s how the people here like it. Adds a touch of the forbidden. This is a world of gray and brown rock, a world that promises no life, letting the club stand out, almost cruelly mocking this barren planet. Mania among bleakness.

+

I walk through the club’s crowd, although it’s a challenge. Music comes from somewhere, maybe everywhere, and it’s deafening. The main room reaches the volume of a stadium, its vastness unnecessary, a monument to excess. The place is so packed, especially in the center of the hall, that people seem to merge into one another, ceasing to be individuals: just a mass of drunken, drugged-up flesh. Overhead, the same circumstance plays out. An anti-gravity system allows there to be two parties: one on the ceiling, two hundred feet above, and one down here. Someone told me that party gets nicknamed “Heaven”, and this one gets nicknamed “Hell”. Nonsense. It’s filth straight up and straight down. This club serves only the people who’ve ruined everything, the type of people who long ago made Earth’s climate turn against us.

+

A waiter zips just above my head, carrying a tray of cocktails. He and the others glide through the air on levitating disks. I wish I had one of those. I wouldn’t have to be trapped among these people who’d hate me if they knew who I was, where I came from, and what I plan to do to them.

+

Well, the plan itself remains foggy. Part of me had wondered if just getting here would be enough, seeing the excess, smelling the hallucinogens. But it’s not.

+

This place needs punishment. These people need punishment.

+

I try my best to squeeze through partygoers in bright dresses and dark suits. A few look at me, probably unsure if they see a boy or a girl. I wear tight black pants and a tight black shirt with a black jacket made from Symorian cloth. Always wearing black cuts down prep time, I never have to worry if my outfit matches. I avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, looking only at the other parts of their bodies – mouths with smiles that curdle, the women with bare, muscular backs, the men with shirts that cling to surgically enhanced biceps. There’s something vulgar about all of them. Everything a transaction. Give this one a drink, they’ll kiss you; give that one a drug, they’ll fuck you.

+

The music evolves into a techno rhythm, matching my heartbeat. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. The lighting in the club turns violet, everyone bathed in shades of purple. I continue to slink through the mass of flesh.

+

Bodies rub against me.

+

I hate being touched. Always have, but it became far worse after they found us in the empty church back home. An abandoned church in a green field. Just me and him, until the police came. I never found out who called them. Maybe no one. Maybe they just came by hoping they’d find somebody. They grabbed me, their grip on my arms tight. He fought back, though. They beat him until I thought he’d die. He did.

+

I can’t think on that now, though. I must be locked onto the present moment.

+

I pass into a shadowed area of the floor. One of three large spheres hangs above me. A thin staircase leads up, spiraling around it. The sphere contains a private room for the most elite guests. I spoke to someone who worked here once, and she told me that you cannot see what goes on inside, but everyone in the spheres can see what happens down here. A voyeur’s heaven.

+

I take a breath and push further through the partiers, hoping to get to the far side of the club, where it’s far less crowded. I try not to think about the amount of people around me, how easily I could be suffocated by them if they closed in just a little tighter. If I think like that I’ll have a panic attack, and that I cannot allow. I’ve learned there’s nothing worse than choking during an important moment.

+

I make it to the other side, where this main hall branches off into smaller rooms, ones where I get the impression you don’t necessarily want to enter. Above, far above, people who may as well be ants also trickle into side rooms, breaking off from the center mass. It’s disorienting to see them up there, a weird form of vertigo. Dizziness threatens to overtake me.

+

Most of the doors to the side rooms are solid black, but a couple are gray. Each gray door harbors a peephole in the center. I look into one, not certain what I’ll see, and I’m greeted with an eye staring back out at me. The eyes is red, the iris hazy. The skin around it shifts a little, and I wonder if they’re talking. The music, that awful music, makes certain I’ll never hear.

+

I pull away. I shouldn’t allow myself to be so easily distracted. I’m not here just to observe. I’m not sure what, precisely, I’ll do, but it will be more than passively staring. I need to understand this place before I do anything, though. I need to see how it works, how it breathes, how it—

+

There are severed heads mounted on the rear wall of the club.

+

Severed heads, positioned to form seven circles. Not human ones, but still. Not what you want to see. Each has heavy black fur, a small snout, and tiny eyes. They’re the Jorjandi, a now-extinct species that lived on Maldrove, the first world colonized by humanity after the Exodus from Earth. They emitted an odor that was near-unbearable, to us at least, so the early colonizers poisoned the Jorjandi’s drinking spots, and they died out in a year. I’d seen holograms of them in college a couple years ago, but seeing them here is different. Perverse trophies for humanity’s success.

+

I force myself back into the crowd, the bodies against me once more. I spot an older man and a younger woman leaving the crowd, heading towards one of the black doors. The young woman meets my eyes briefly. I’m not sure what she thinks I can do, and I look away.

+

Besides, I have to focus. I’m here to make a statement. I’m here to be heard. I’m here to let them know we can’t be ignored forever.

+

A hand grabs my wrist.

+

Adrenaline rushes through me, and I feel a mix of anger and fear. In a flash I recall the hands on me in the church, the police screaming at us that we were trespassing, us saying it’d been abandoned for years, why would anyone care? Well, he said that. Not me. I stayed silent and lived. He protested and died.

+

This hand belongs to a woman in a suit so dark the club’s lights seem loath to taint it.

+

“Someone wants to see you.” Despite the throbbing music her voice is very clear, like she knew exactly what tone to use to be heard. She’s security, but not for the club, I suspect. A private guest. “Please come with me.”

+

This could be advantageous. I want to do something in this place, leave my mark. It couldn’t hurt to see the highest clientele here, no matter what vile things they may have in mind when sending for me.

+

I let the security woman guide me towards one of the spiral staircases. No one in the crowd looks at her, but they move aside as if by instinct. What it must be like, to have such power. She lets go of my wrist as we begin the ascent, apparently convinced I’m not going to flee. She hasn’t once looked at me since she told me to come with her. I’m just food to be fetched.

+

I keep my hand on the railing as I climb. Whether I look up or down, I’m going to get vertigo thanks to this awful club’s design, so I instead try to focus only on the white stairs. I don’t care at all about being caught here, thrown out, arrested, or worse – but heights? They still unnerve me.

+

The stairs wind, rising into the center of the sphere, and as soon as I enter the private zone the music goes silent. I freeze, but the security guard takes my wrist once more, pulling me fully into the sphere and across the smoothly carpeted floor towards a low table flanked by a leather couch and matching chair. The semi-transparent wall gives everything happening outside an emerald hue.

+

“I was intrigued, watching you below,” a man says from the other side of the sphere. He leans against a small bar, although there’s no bartender in sight, and the man does not have a drink. He wears a tailored three-piece suit of cobalt gray over a brushed steel shirt and a deep, cold-blue tie. A thin gold chain loosely connects the pockets of his vest between the open breasts of his jacket. His pale face almost glows in the dim lighting. I can’t help but think him a vampire; the word just lodges itself into my mind.

+

“I could tell you didn’t belong,” he continues. He pockets his hands and crosses the room. The security guard has somehow vanished. It’s just me and the vampire. His gait is slow, his smile steady – his teeth normal – and he takes a seat in the leather chair across from the couch. Only a glass table lies between us. On it rests a plate with a knife and fork, along with some juices that I suspect are the remains of a steak. An actual steak, cut from an actual animal.

+

“What do you want from me?” I ask.

+

“My name is Lace,” the vampire says, as if I’d asked that instead. “I’m the owner of Tyrius Incorporated.”

+

I’ve heard of that company, of course. It was responsible for humanity’s ability to terraform other worlds and leave Earth. Well, some of humanity. It was also responsible for almost every advancement in weaponry since – a complicated legacy to put it politely.

+

“I see,” I reply, and try not to eye the knife. I came here to do something, after all, didn’t I?

+

He crosses one leg over the other, sinking into the chair. “I was people watching when I saw you. I’m supposed to meet with someone, but they’re delayed. Anyway, you walked with a purpose the others here don’t have. I thought you were female, I’ll confess, but I think I got the rest of you right.”

+

“I’m just here to have a nice time.” That sounds like something people at a club would say.

+

“I don’t think that’s true,” the vampire replies. “When people enjoy themselves they have a tendency to look, you know, happy. You look the opposite of that. I saw how you shuddered when the crowd rubbed up against you.”

+

I find I have to clear my throat. “I don’t like being touched.”

+

“We have that in common.”

+

I look to my side, out over the crowd. How many of them own businesses that got rich off the Exodus? How many came from families that ruined Earth? “Do you like people watching?” I ask.

+

“It’s how I learn. Watch people for long enough and you become pretty good at reading them.”

+

I meet his gaze. “You certainly seem to think you know me.”

+

He raises his right hand. “I don’t mean to sound pretentious, I swear, but people in my, ah, stratosphere of society have a certain way about themselves. As do our clingers-on. You stuck out like a sore thumb.”

+

I almost protest but figure there’s no point. May as well be honest. I can’t let fear always win. The vampire’s intentions elude me, but this could be my opportunity to… to do something. So I smile, and make sure to sit on the edge of the couch. Within reach the steak knife.

+

“How lucky for me you noticed,” I say, trying to keep anxiety from my voice. “I’m not ashamed of not belonging here. Even the name of the club is perverse.”

+

The vampire gives a light laugh. “It is, isn’t it? We left four billion people to die on Earth, but, hey, at least they get a club named after them. A charming sort running this place. Enough to give a person some bad ideas. No wonder colorful characters make threats against it.”

+

Is he alluding to me? I’m not sure I’d count as a colorful character. “Do they?”

+

“Oh, yes.”

+

“You don’t sound concerned.” If anything, he sounds excited, almost aroused by the idea. There’s a fresh smile playing around the edges of his mouth. Does this man find everything amusing?

+

“I don’t come here often, so it wouldn’t matter much to me if the place shut down. If it happened thanks to a massive catastrophe, well, let’s just say that my company’s desirability will skyrocket. There’s never a bad time to sell weapons and security, but after some attack on the wealthy?” He whistles. “Forget about it. I’ll be swimming in money.”

+

He waves his own comment away. “But it’s rude of me to talk about my successes. Let’s chat about you. You’re from Symoria, aren’t you? I hear it in your voice. Beautiful colony. If humanity had settled there first instead of Maldrove, who knows how much nicer our history would be? You were lucky to grow up on such a lovely planet.”

+

I recall the fist coming down, his teeth breaking, one of them tumbling across the floor. I can hear it, too. I almost picked it up so I could have something of him. I remember the police dragging me outside. They never read my rights, but they had a good time.

+

“There’s still plenty to dislike,” I remark. “They just hide their fascism better.”

+

“Well, one thing I dislike is that they don’t much care for my business.” He shakes his head and throws up his hands. I assume it’s a performance for me, or maybe just for his own amusement. “The other colonies love working with us, but Symoria – and I don’t say this to offend you – thinks it’s better than us. That’s what happens when you have a bunch of Marxists running the government.”

+

“I don’t think we have Marxists running anything.”

+

“Oh, anyone who’s against my business is a Marxist.” He removes a very old school pocketwatch from his vest pocket, the thin gold chain dangling as he glances at it. He sighs. “My guest was supposed to be here an hour ago. Do you know what they’re doing? A power play. Make me wait to show that they’re not really concerned. What they don’t realize is that in trying to show strength they reveal their insecurity.” He taps the side of his nose. “I’ve been in business long enough to not only know all the moves but to know what the moves mean about the person behind them.”

+

“Must be nice to have that confidence.”

+

“It is.” He rises and walks to the transparent wall, turning his gaze below. “Look at them down there. They say they come here for fun, to relax, but they’re lying to themselves, aren’t they?”

+

With his attention averted, I move the steak knife a little closer. The sound it makes as I move it across the table is soft, but he continues gazing at the crowd. “Why do you think they come here?” he asks.

+

I have some nasty thoughts on that. “Same reason anyone goes to parties or clubs. To feel good and forget.”

+

“Wrong.” He turns back to me. No smile. Instead, his lips curl with disgust. “They come here for violence. The music, the loudness, the crush of the people, the dark lighting, the little fuckville rooms on the side, it all feels like something will boil over. It won’t, but it feels like it will. That’s why people come. The thrill of danger.”

+

I hear screams echoing in an empty church. “If they want that, there are plenty of places I can suggest they go.”

+

“They like the possibility of danger, not the actual thing.” A waiter flies by the sphere behind him, and the lighting in the club begins to change color, from purple to orange to dark red. “You’ve moved that knife a fair bit closer.”

+

I freeze. His voice stayed calm, like he thought me no threat. A part of me wants to pick up the knife and show him different, but… “I think it’s time for me to go.”

+

He starts walking in a semi-circle around the couch. “You want to make things exciting, I can have my guard come back in and give you her gun. Then we can really see what you’re made of.”

+

I’m not sure what to say. “Would she actually give it to me?”

+

He’s behind his chair now. He rests his hands on top of it. “She’ll do anything I tell her to.”

+

I swallow. “Tell her to bring it.” He turns to the stairs. “Wait,” I blurt, hating myself.

+

“Ah, and you were so close,” he says. “We’ll have to see if you have the stomach for your business downstairs.”

+

My stomach starts to turn, as if in response. I do my best not to let the discomfort show, but can you ever really know how you appear to others?

+

“It’s been a treat having you stop by,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Enjoy yourself! Be careful, though. The people here aren’t always the kindest, especially to boys who look like girls.”

+

It’s the second time he’s mentioned my non-traditional appearance. As if his appearance is so normal. “You— you should be careful that the next steak you’re served doesn’t come with garlic.”

+

The vampire’s eyes widen and he laughs in surprise or disbelief. “I never quite thought of myself like that before. Have I become that pale? Ah, maybe.”

+

I slowly stand. “I’m going back down now.” I say it like an affirmation.

+

He points up. “Not above?”

+

“No.”

+

“I agree. Too disorienting. See? We’re peas in a pod.”

+

He comes around, and for an awful moment I think he’s going to try and hug me or something. Instead, he picks up the steak knife and holds it out to me, handle first. He grips the blade tight, causing thin cuts in his hand that he seems not to notice. “You should take this with you.”

+

I stare at the knife. “No thanks.”

+

“Don’t be silly. Take it. Never know when you might need it in a place like this. Your jacket have a pocket? Take it. Take it.”

+

I take the handle. It’s cold. “What do you want me to do with it?”

+

“Whatever you want,” he says.

+

I can’t go around carrying it, so I place it in my jacket’s inner pocket.

+

“See?” he says. “There you go.”

+

Maybe he’s setting me up. He’ll alert security, they’ll find me with the knife. In a place like this, nobody would ever get to know what happened next. But if that was all he wanted, he could just call security now. Or have his own guard beat me down, a little private show right here. Or, maybe, do it himself.

+

“I hate to see you go,” the vampire laments, “but I know what you want is down there. I imagine you’ve pictured it many times.”

+

He knows why I’m here. He knows I’m here to kill, to purge the hate that sprouted in me a year ago, when I saw what power meant.

+

“Why are you letting me go?” I whisper.

+

“Why not?” Then, softer but more vicious, he states it, “Why not.”

+

The bodyguard emerges then from the exit in the floor like she’s answering his call, though I didn’t see him signal some hidden camera or anything else. As she follows me down the steps I glance back, and his gaze is gently on mine until the carpet swallows him up and all I see is the gloss black tiles of the stairwell, spiraling towards the opening below.

+

And I’m back in the club. Back in Hell.

+

If anything, the music is louder than before. It feels like I could cut my own heart out and the beat alone would keep my blood pumping.

+

The lighting dims and brightens, dims and brightens. First green, then blue, then red. I’m back in the mass, bodies once more pushing against me. The knife doesn’t cut through my jacket, but I feel it, and I wonder if the vampire gave me a gift or a curse. I try to get to the side of the room faster, I need to get out of this so I can think. The music is too loud, the reverberations too intense, the breathing of everyone around me too suffocating.

+

I could cut my way through them, I realize. I could cut them until they run and scream. I won’t be on the wrong end of the violence this time. I could do it. I could. I could. I won’t choke, like I did with the vampire. Like I did with—

+

At last I emerge, and I’m back at the wall where the Jorjandi heads hang. The gray and black doors. Two men exit the door nearest, glancing at me with suspicion. I must look like a wreck. I’m sweating so much. The music is so loud, everyone is merging into one person. Everyone here is the same. Am I going to be like that, too? Am I going to make a stand or am I going to get sucked into this awful place?

+

I lean my forehead against a door, trying to stay calm, trying to think straight again. The peephole calls to me, and I cannot help myself: I look in.

+

Inside is a person with dark, shoulder length hair. They turn, and the person is me.

+

They say, “Why’d you let them do that to you?”

+

I reply, or at least I think I reply, “This place is where the worst people come.”

+

“You let yourself be… just to get a ticket to here?”

+

“I needed to do something.” I see the police beating him. “I needed to do something after I stood there and did nothing.” There was no reason. They just could. “But I’m here now. In the belly of the beast.”

+

They look at me sadly. “You’re going to die here.”

+

“How do you know?”

+

“Because I’m the dead you.”

+

Impossible, of course. I’m losing it. Not the first time I’ve disassociated and spoken to myself. Or perhaps I inhaled something without realizing it. This place is filled with substances. Everyone oozes something.

+

“Are you going in the fucking room or not?” A man grabs my arm, his mouth near my ear. “You’re blocking the way.”

+

It’s automatic, like a side of me that’s been sleeping takes control. I pull the steak knife from my pocket, cutting part of my jacket’s fabric, and draw the blade across the man’s arm. He screams and pulls back, eyes wide with fear.

+

I’ve never felt so empowered. I’ve never felt so good.

+

And then the music stops.

+

Some sort of security system must’ve observed what I’ve done. Now, the crowd will turn on me, devour me. Maybe literally. But it was worth it, just for that moment.

+

A voice booms out: “YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE.”

+

At the center of the club three people are standing on disks, hovering over the crowd. Not waiters: all three wear Jorjandi heads like grotesque masks, and they give off an aura like gods judging everyone here, including me.

+

Apparently I’m not the only person unhappy with this place. These, though, are serious people with serious intentions, not half-baked fantasies like mine. Half-baked fantasies and near a nervous breakdown. That’s all I am.

+

“WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE.” It’s not clear which of the three speaks, but their voice is magnified throughout the room. Everyone is silent, motionless, watching them, amazed.

+

I’m in awe. They’re really doing something. Why couldn’t I be with them? The clockwork of this awful universe made it so we were here at the same moment, so I can see what I should’ve done, what I could have been, how useless I really am. To these people, I must look like one of the crowd. I want to say something, prove I’m more like them than the awful people around me. Even if I could be heard, though, what could I possibly say?

+

“REAP WHAT YOU SOW.”

+

One of the interlopers raises their hand, showing they’re holding a small electronic device. They squeeze it, activate it, and something causes the air to shift.

+

The three disks bank and veer away, and I realize what they’ve done just as the distant screaming starts. The awful thing is that the bodies don’t hit the dancefloor fast. Death isn’t instant, or even guaranteed. The gravity in Heaven doesn’t turn off all at once, it lessens and lessens, dragging out the fall. Flailing forms twist in the air, drawing closer, then faster and faster. Then the first of them rain down as the crowd on Hell’s dancefloor scatter and bunch to avoid the initial impacts, their cries of panic punctuated by meaty thuds and the sound of bones cracking.

+

I put my back up against the door, hoping no one will fall on top of me. The man I cut scrambles backwards only to have a body slam down onto him. They both scream as they brokenly try to untangle themselves from one another, try and fail, and their screams may as well be silent because the hall is filled with one lasting shriek as the dying and the pained let loose. The crowd is crazed and scared and violent. Someone grabs at an interloper’s disk, pulling them down into the crowd, which then descends upon them, wanting vengeance even if it’s the last act of their lives.

+

I slowly move, back to the wall, gripping my knife tightly. I don’t know of a way out other than the way I came in, which is all the way across this hall turned abattoir. I’ll get there, I just have to not focus on how far it is.

+

I have to stay in my head, pretend I’m somewhere else, back home in that abandoned church before they found us, when I was happy.

+

A man rushes out of the crowd, his eyes wide and full of insanity. He’s seen too much, he’s coming my way, but I won’t let him grab me. Not another person will ever touch me.

+

He reaches out for me, so I stab him in the gut, blood marinating his gray dress shirt. I could’ve been somewhere else if things hadn’t gone all wrong. He lets loose an awful sound, and I keep stabbing. I could’ve been happy. I’m screaming, too. I could’ve been with someone who loved me. The knife hits flesh and bone again and again. I could’ve been someplace other than the Four Bill Club.

+

Once he’s dead, I sink to the floor with him. Bodies are still falling. People stampede around, bumping against me, and for once I don’t care.

+

I don’t know how I make the decision. I just do. I turn the knife’s handle in my hand and thrust it at my chest, at my heart. It bounces off. The blade of the knife is bent, twisted to the side, probably blunted by the dead man’s bones.

+

I drop it to the ground. I guess I’ll have to wait then. I’ll die horribly, crushed from above, or trampled, made part of the crowd of the dying. I need to make peace with that. What other choice do I have? Go out screaming and crying?

+

“Look who it is,” someone says.

+

The vampire stands over me. He’s smiling. His guard mutters something in his ear, and he shakes his head in the negative. “No, we should take our friend with us.” He holds out a hand to me, unconcerned about the chaos all around. “No need to die here. You can come with me.”

+

I try to speak, but my mouth is suddenly dry. I take his hand, and he pulls me to my feet. I have no choice, you understand? I have to take his hand. I can’t even kill myself.

+

“We need to go, Mr Lace,” his guard insists.

+

“Lead the way,” says the vampire, giving me a supportive smile.

+

She does. She carries her gun in her right hand, and twice shoots someone who comes out of the mangled crowd. The vampire does not blink when she does so. People call for our help, but we ignore them. We walk out the way we came in, forgetting the dying, the rich, their servants, the interlopers, all of them.

+

The air outside tastes of fuel and smoke. The guard leads us past the nearby spaceships, making her way to the vampire’s craft. The vampire, for his part, has not let go of my hand. He holds it gently, as if we are a couple. I don’t know what to do. I want to let go, and I want to cling to it.

+

I think he knows that, too. That’s why he came for me.

+

We board his ship.

+

Whatever technology the interlopers used to disrupt the club must have expired, because seconds before the ship’s door snaps shut behind us, I hear the music in the club start again. My heartbeat once more matches it.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Four Bill Club on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Donald McCarthy

+

+ + Author image of Donald McCarthy + + + Donald McCarthy is an author from Long Island, New York. He’s published short fiction with The Baltimore Review, Pseudopod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Grey Rooms, and more. His non-fiction has appeared at Salon, Undark Magazine, The Huffington Post, Nightmare Magazine, and more. A full list of his publications can be found at www.donaldmccarthy.com.

+

© Donald McCarthy 2023 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Cottonbro Studio, Wendy Wei and Pexels.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-35/you-are-a-rock-god.html b/issue-35/you-are-a-rock-god.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..828a8263 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-35/you-are-a-rock-god.html @@ -0,0 +1,436 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + You Are a Rock God — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 35 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

You Are a Rock God

+

Joelle Killian

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for You Are a Rock God by +
+ + + + +

I + +t’s your turn. Push the food wrappers and parking tickets on Reed’s living room table aside to make space for two neat lines of opalescent powder, your innards twisting in anticipation. Reed and CJ lie prone on the floor nearby, silently drifting along to industrial metal. Give yourself extra karma points for graciously letting them go down first this time.

+

The drugs sparkle in the low light. Whatever those chemical wizards add during synthesis to create this effect always leaves you with glitter-snot for days.

+

Hold a straw up to one nostril and snort, then tip your head back as the explosions begin. Floodlights warm your skin; roaring applause drowns out the guitars thundering from the stereo. The room swims away as you recline on the sagging couch, blazing pyrotechnics filling your vision.

+

Then pow – you land, relieved to escape your own disappointing skin. Remove the aviator shades now perched on your face and use their mirrored surface to check out how you appear in this world: weathered face, lit cigarette dangling beneath a thick handlebar mustache, shaggy mane cascading out from under a leather cowboy hat. Flex those meaty biceps covered in blackwork tattoos. A hulking brute. Perfect.

+

Better jam those shades back on before anyone clocks you gaping at your own reflection. You vault off the plush sofa, blurting, “Yeah, let’s fucking party!” Not the most original rallying cry, but it’ll do in a pinch.

+

A skeletal degenerate with sunken eyes hands you a bottle of Jack Daniels. Go ahead and swig from it, even though you can tell this body is already gloriously wasted. Because fuck it: you’re a rock god.

+

Lurch through the smoke-filled suite, littered with guitar cases and duffel bags, overturned room service carts and shattered lamps, the sodden carpet squishy beneath your boots. An ogre-sized dude hurls daggers at a poster on the wall with one hand, the other protecting the tiny marmalade kitten in a sling around his chest. Another beast with Schnauzer-like mutton chops is out on the balcony hoisting a TV over the railing. It lands in the palm tree-lined courtyard below with a crash.

+

Just as you smash the whiskey bottle to the floor in chaotic solidarity, the suite door bangs open. A sweaty yutz in a navy-blue blazer enters, taking in the singed curtains, the skeletal creature passed out on the couch, the conspicuously absent television. “Jesus, how did you goddamned monsters get this wasted in the hour I’ve been gone?” He throws his hands in the air. “You’ve been banned from two hotel chains already. We going for a third?”

+

Kitten Ogre flings another knife at the wall. It sticks in with a thud.

+

Blazer gestures at the deployed fire extinguishers. “Anyone wanna fill me in on what inspired this little tantrum?” He looks at you with raised eyebrows. You immediately go blank.

+

Schnauzer leans in from the balcony with a pout. “How come the opener has a better catering rider than us?”

+

“And bigger blood cannons?” Kitten Ogre stalks over to his makeshift dartboard and pulls the daggers out of a Chronic Emergency poster. “It’s just not right.” The kitten meows.

+

Blazer rubs both hands over his grimacing face. “Tonight’s your largest sold-out show yet, you cretins.” He waves towards Skeletor. “Wake him up and let’s go, we’re late for sound check.”

+

“Never!” Schnauzer drags more splintered furniture towards the balcony. “Fuck ’em all, we quit!”

+

You hesitate, picturing the packed venue, the thousands of eyes locked on you as rabid fans scream your name. Wasn’t that the point of this trip? You gaze longingly at a guitar case while Blazer tries to wrestle the knives away from Kitten Ogre, which even you can tell is a terrible idea.

+

Flip open the case and caress the Flying V inside, your breath coming faster. You’re running out of time. Take out the ax, its weight reassuring in your callused hands, and marvel at how these fingers can span seven frets.

+

Too late. The sound of chairs splashing into the pool below morphs into rippling echoes as the trashed hotel suite destabilizes and dissolves. The guitar slips through your hands.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he first sense to return is smell, which is how you can tell someone puked on reentry. Then the music mutates into droning bagpipes. Your least favorite part of the comedown.

+

Pat your weakened limbs as the rest of your scrawny body returns, teeth settling back into the groove bitten inside your cheek. Blink your eyes open and stare up at the popcorn ceiling.

+

CJ and Reed are already vibing about their trips – down first, up first – and you listen for clues, always curious how their Rock God journeys differ from yours.

+

“That was phenomenal.” Reed’s face is paler than usual; he’s probably the puker. “Hot tub party with top-tier babes.” His obsession with the groupies always makes you suspect that his drug-avatar is a glam rock frontman, though you can never get him to admit it.

+

CJ unbuttons their oversized flannel. “Lame. I got to crowd-surf a sold-out show.” Hard to believe mopey grunge fans would hold them up that long, but hey, it’s their trip. They point to the other side of the room. “Wait, was your TV screen always so cracked?”

+

“Yo, welcome back.” Reed nods in your direction. “How’d you do?”

+

Try to find your voice, even though your tongue is still numb. “We trashed a hotel room again. I mean, it was a pretty epic trashing, but…” Those squawking bagpipes are making you nauseous too, so you sit up to steady yourself. “Feels like it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to, y’know. Play.”

+

Reed’s grin fades. Bet he can’t remember the last time he played, either.

+

“You losers with the unimaginative rock star tropes.” CJ’s face is flushed, their eyes bright. “I always get to play.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +ime to go. Wobble out of Reed’s apartment on legs like overcooked noodles and careen down the stairwell. Hit the street, where gusts of icy wind dampen your Rock God afterglow.

+

Back in the day you tried plenty of the usual street drugs, but now you far prefer the hyper-specificity of this bespoke shit. The classics were fun, but too unpredictable. You could end up anywhere, from merger with Gaia to the other end of your 8th-grade bully’s fist to the copyright approved nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh. Better to dial it in, know exactly where you’re going.

+

All the dopey college kids gakked out of their minds on Fluffy Bunnies or Pillowy Abyss were a turn-off, but you eventually found your favorite flavors. You dabbled with Gold Medal and Viking Warrior, but once you had a taste of Rock God… well. That one scratched an itch you’d forgotten you had.

+

Turn your phone back on. It blows up with text notifications, most of them from the same person:

+

hey

+

what’s up?

+

msg me when you get this plz

+

you OK?

+

yo, it’s srsly been like 3 days

+

are you ghosting me??!?

+

WTF

+

Turn it off again.

+

Arrive at what passes for home, where a fire inspection announcement is taped to your apartment door. Crumple it into a ball and toss it down the hallway. You’d wager ten bucks that next you’ll see for-sale signs on your building, then an escalating series of eviction notices.

+

Kick your way through the pile of mail inside – nothing good in there – and strip off your jacket. Acrid body odor hits you, like a goat that’s been munching on onions. You consider showering since it’s been a minute, but the landlord has installed this wrenches-and-gears steampunk contraption to bypass the rusted hot water tap. Too much trouble. Just go find a T-shirt that doesn’t have Hot Pocket cheese stains on it instead.

+

Your uniform sits on top of the heap in the laundry hamper. Did you have to work today?

+

Depends what day it is. Guess you’d have to turn your phone back on to find out, so may as well get dressed and head in. You can check the schedule when you get there; odds are you’ll be on-shift soon enough. Might avoid getting written up again, too.

+

The polyester pants smell like beef tallow and sadness, which reminds you of the black gunk embedded in every crevice of the employee break room, a disgusting mix of lard and grime. Your slimeball manager won’t promote you off the fryer vat to the register, dooming you to an existence of pinprick grease burns and his low-key harassment.

+

Could really use something to tamp down the dread curdling in your stomach, but you left your stash at Reed’s to avoid temptation. Riffle through the bedside table drawer – your ramshackle apothecary, filled with half-empty gram bags and pill bottles – and fish out a mostly-empty baggie of Rock God. Score.

+

Cut it open and scrape the crystalline crumbs out. Not nearly enough for a full trip, but it should help take the edge off. Add a little sparkle.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nd bam, you’re back.

+

Schnauzer, Ogre, and Skeletor sit in a semi-circle before you. The room’s burgundy walls are covered with 1970s concert posters in gilded frames. Six buckets of fried chicken lay ransacked beneath illuminated vanity mirrors, the greasy smell comingling with stale skunk weed. Bass rattles the floorboards.

+

Everyone is staring at you.

+

“Explain yourself.” Ogre’s voice is the low rumble of a semi-truck driving over your head. “Because you really crossed a line this time.” He makes little boundary-setting motions with the hand that isn’t cradling that orange kitten. The kitten also glares at you.

+

Good thing your expression is partly hidden behind these aviators, because this jangles your nerves like an unexpected minor chord progression. What kind of atrocities would freak these monsters out?

+

But what croaks out of your throat is, “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo.”

+

“We’re serious,” Schnauzer growls. “Not gonna make it even halfway through this tour if you keep this fuckery up.”

+

“Remember what the boss told us.” Ogre nudges him. “Use your ‘I’ statements.”

+

“Right, sorry.” Schnauzer’s eyebrows furrow like furry apostrophes. “I feel… very disrespected by your fuckery.”

+

“Excuse me?” Dig through your pockets, find a cigarette and light it. Play it cool. “What the hell’s got your panties in such a twist?”

+

“Hey, don’t blame us, man.” Skeletor’s hands lay limply on his leather-clad legs, black makeup disappearing into the wrinkles around his eyes. He jerks his head across the way. “The boss says we gotta start setting limits.”

+

Your head swivels around in search of Blazer, but everyone else is staring at the kitten.

+

The little puffball peeks out of the sling around Ogre’s chest and bares its fangs at you, its once blue eyes now an inky black.

+

It opens its mouth and hisses:

+

Are you ghosting me

+

Where the fuck are you

+

Your third no-show, don’t bother coming back

+

Its sepulchral shriek plunges your heart into an ice bath. You drop the lit cigarette and jump up, backing towards the door as the rest of the band sits transfixed by their tiny master.

+

Then the audience roaring in the distance pulls at you like a magnet.

+

God, you’re so close.

+

Can’t stop yourself from making a run for it, out the dressing room door and down a long hallway. Chronic Emergency are finishing their encore. You could slide in there and play. Blow the minds of everyone in the front row wearing T-shirts with your band’s logo, all pentacles and umlauts. Now’s your chance.

+

But dozens of groupies clad in leather bustiers and leopard-print, shredded tights and skintight jeans, form a wall between you and the wings of the stage. Their eyes gleam as they click-clack their press-on talons. Fangs flash between crimson lips.

+

They pull you in and drag you under, where you drown in a sea of grabbing hands and open mouths.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Y + +ou swim back up to the surface, gasping for air. Damn, that’d been a big one. Bigger than you intended.

+

Atonal droning, nausea and spinning, your tongue coated in thick fur. Sit up from your spot on the grimy tiles right outside your apartment, still wearing your uniform. Your door is not only papered with more notices but now padlocked closed.

+

How far did you get after doing that bump? Maybe you went to work and came back… or never made it there at all. Better turn your phone back on.

+

Sure enough, there’s the inevitable wall of texts:

+

really crossing a line here, asshole

+

so over it

+

pretty sure that banging groupies while wasted on rock god counts as cheating, BTW

+

You’re pretty sure that it doesn’t, but whatever. The rest of the messages make it clear you’re getting dumped.

+

Listen to three voicemails from your boss, demanding to know where the hell you are in the first two and firing you in the third.

+

Gather the smashed bits of your brain. How long were you in there, and why did such a tiny bump take you that deep? Maybe it was too soon after your last one. You should call someone who knows what they’re doing.

+

“Kinda freaked me out,” you slur into your phone, tongue still fuzzy. “What was up with that evil-kitten crap?”

+

CJ snorts on the other end. “Maybe your neighbor’s cat walked over your head while you were out.”

+

“Not funny. Drugs aren’t supposed to turn on you like that.” Chemicals were always more reliable than people, as far as you’re concerned. This new unpredictability only makes you queasier. “It’s just not right.”

+

“Wasn’t it you who scolded us to be more intentional with mindset and setting for tripping?” CJ says. “Be less sloppy with your use, dumbass.”

+

You hang up in the middle of their monologue about shamanic medicine ceremonies. But they have a point: seriously, get your shit together. C’mon, get up, brush the carpet lint from your legs. Put your headphones on, blast Combichrist at top volume to drown out the bagpipes still echoing around in your skull.

+

Nothing left to do now but call Reed and tell him you’re coming over.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

R + +eed answers the door in one of his many threadbare Skinny Puppy tees – no judgment, you’re still in your nasty-ass uniform – his scraggly beard grown long and suspiciously Schnauzer-like.

+

He also looks like he could use a hit, so good thing you stowed your stash. He cues up a playlist while you retrieve the baggie from its hiding place behind the never-used cleaning supplies in the bathroom.

+

“Reed.” Fix him in your sights. “Have your trips been… like, weirdly misbehaving lately?”

+

“Misbehaving? Sounds naughty.” He leers at you. “In that case, absolutely.”

+

“Never mind.” God, he’s an idiot. “I just think it’s important to play this time. For real.”

+

He shrugs. “You do you, rock star.”

+

Forget him. Focus, because you’ve got to get this right. What were CJ’s tips again? Right, create some sort of ritual. Set an intention, light a candle. Maybe sage the room.

+

But in the end, you just try to find a spot on Reed’s kitchen table that isn’t tacky with spilled soda – this medical mystery claims he’s never drunk anything but Dr. Pepper in his life – and tap out two nice, fat rails of magic dust.

+

“Let’s do this,” you tell Reed. “But I get dibs on the first round this time.”

+

Feel the burn as the powder hits your raw nasal passages. The moment you close your eyes, eviction notices and angry texts wallpaper the inside of your skull. You worry this shit will follow you into the void, along with those evil persistent bagpipes. Maybe this is just how it is now.

+

But after one tortured minute, you’re squeezed through the gears of the universe, stretching and flattening your atoms out, and then you’re soaring, a hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon.

+

And, thankfully: the sound of applause.

+

You’re here. Backstage, huddled with the other band members. Schnauzer makes devil-horns with both hands, black glitter streaked down his face like obsidian tears. “Let’s do this!”

+

Ogre gives you a once-over and grimaces. “Are we both wearing bullet belts?”

+

“Oh.” You run your hand over the shell casings. “I think it’s okay if we match.”

+

Skeletor takes a slug of whiskey, then passes you the bottle. Take a little nip to quell the pre-show jitters rumbling around in your gut. Don’t fuck this up.

+

The handlers escort you into the wings. Strap your guitar on as the crowd claps in unison, chanting your name.

+

An announcer booms, “Here’s who you’ve all been waiting for!” Hooting and cheering. “Everybody give it up for… Ouröbörös!”

+

Showtime. Part the curtain and climb the stairs to the stage, past the wall of amps and into the white-hot floodlights.

+

Squint out past the blinding glare at the vast ocean of black-clad masses stretching clear out to the horizon, bobbing in endless waves. People riding on each other’s shoulders, screaming themselves hoarse.

+

Adrenaline surges through your arms; your hands shake. Total cottonmouth, like you’ve smoked three bowls of Pillowy Abyss. But you can do this: breathe. Approach the mike positioned high above you, forcing your head up at an angle.

+

Skeletor counts out four intro beats, Schnauzer’s bass joins in, Ogre’s guitar squeals. You’re up next. Everyone’s waiting for that raw, rumbling thunder welling up from your gut to launch itself out of your throat.

+

You’ve made it. Strum your first chord.

+

And then that horrible kitten appears above the crowd, its head looming larger and larger till it fills the sky like marmalade fire.

+

Cower, cringe, cold sweat. Turn to look at your bandmates, now glassy-eyed and frozen in place. On closer inspection, you spot the tiny bite marks on their necks, the rivulets of crimson soaking into their shirts.

+

They fling themselves to the ground, prostrate before Murder Kitten as its deafening screech knocks your cowboy hat off. The audience flips out, probably thinking that this demon-cat is your newest special effect.

+

Murder Kitten’s inky eyes swirl with unknown galaxies, its mouth overfilled with pointy reptilian teeth. Its yowl cracks open the cobalt sky, behind which all the angry notices and texts leak in, along with that incessant droning.

+

Breathe again. Feel the reassuring weight of the guitar in your rough hands as you’re drawn into those galaxies. Remember your intention to play.

+

There’s nothing left to do now but try.

+

So go on. It’s your turn.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of You Are a Rock God on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Joelle Killian

+

+ + Author image of Joelle Killian + + + Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction appears in Maudlin House, The Stygian Lepus, and Wicked Shadow Press. She has also published about psychedelic therapy in her other life as a psychologist, and was part of an undead dance troupe back in the day. Find more of her writing at her linktree.

+

© Joelle Killian 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using an image from Melvin Buezo - many thanks!

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + +
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Mythaxis

+

Winter 2023

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Wayne McCray +

Praedial Larceny

+
+ + +

How many ways can people do crime? Innumerable. What types of crime do people tend to write about? That's a smaller subset. There are some things common to our depictions of criminality: the vicarious revealing of motive, means, and opportunity for example; but sometimes the explorations go deeper. Stories can examine the impact of crime. They can also examine the impact of our responses to it.

+ + + + Story image for Praedial Larceny by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Nancy, Please

+ Steve Boseley +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nancy, Please by + + + +

Do you care about justice? I'm sure you do. It's not always a very just world, of course, and injustices come in large and small portions, but on the whole we want right to win out over wrong. But that's not always the draw of crime fic, is it? Sometimes we want what feels good, even when we know it's very, very wrong…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

A Healthy Man

+ Matt Wile +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for A Healthy Man by + + + +

Talented Tom Ripley; avaricious Patrick Bateman; peckish Hannibal Lector; literature has always found focus in aberrant personalities, often as charismatic as they are disturbing. But criminals need not be suave and sophisticated to attract us – the chance to walk in someone awful's shoes, to learn how an unthinkable thinks… our temptations are as hard to resist as theirs.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Le Petit Cornichon

+ L Swartz +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Le Petit Cornichon by + + + +

Some fairy tales are cautionary, others throw caution to the wind and dive into the nasty stuff with relish. This story is more about The Nasty, if you take my meaning, and the condiments are pickled. If you're reminded of 'The Boy Who Couldn't Shudder' by the Brothers Grimm you're right – though this is more the Brothers Grimy.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Carousel's

+ Shaun Anthony McMichael +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Carousel's by + + + +

Laws can be written, and rules can be unwritten, and sometimes breaking those rules is more bad form than criminal, and surely breaking some laws hardly rises to the level of 'a crime'… yet the law IS the law, and rules are rules however informal. Transgressions have consequences.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Summer in Duncanny

+ Peter Wynd +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Summer in Duncanny by + + + +

Although we've steered clear of the speculative in this issue, our final piece of the year teeters on the edge, just in that way of being not obviously the real world. And is it crime fiction? Well, you know when someone says of something 'That's criminal, that is' – maybe it's crime fiction like that.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Enchanters, by James Ellroy

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Enchanters, by James Ellroy by + + + +

For as long as your editor has known him, Bill Ryan has been an eloquent critic of both cinematic and literary crime. When I decided to wrap up the year with our first all-crime issue, there was no-one else I'd turn to for a longform fiction review. I hope you like the hard stuff, and you like it strong.

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023

+
+ + +

In keeping with the issue's theme, we're taking a break from reviewing speculative stories to instead scour the web for free-to-read shortform crime fiction. So here's a trio of pieces published this year by some genre zines not Ellery Queen's.

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 by + + + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-36/a-healthy-man.html b/issue-36/a-healthy-man.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..917687c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/a-healthy-man.html @@ -0,0 +1,425 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + A Healthy Man — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

A Healthy Man

+

Matt Wile

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for A Healthy Man by +
+ + + + +

I + + am a sick man. A spiteful man. I pick at my scalp. My shoulders are carpeted thickly. I am less a person than an assemblage of tics in a person-like shape.

+

Yet my boyfriend refuses to see. In spite of my filth, in spite of my terrible thoughts, he insists I am good. He knows in his heart, he says; it is what drew him to me.

+

For a time, I believed; in his belief, if not in my own. It was intoxicating, seeing myself through his eyes.

+

But then we moved in together. Who knew what would shatter my façade was love in proximity? The illusion became oppressive. I grew paranoid, burdened day and night with the task of living up to his version of me.

+

I have tried to explain; I tell him about the darkness that lies at my core like a seed, now growing into some monstrous thing rising out of my soul, fertilized as it is by the rotting detritus of my more civilized aspects, which have fallen like leaves under the unrelenting pressure of his love. I tell him that this process will only accelerate until he sees me for me; but he brushes my words off like so much dust and returns to his incessant refrain: I am good. It is this goodness, he says, that makes me feel as though I am not; my guilt is proof of my virtue. And he sticks to this line no matter how much I tell him he is wrong.

+

Which means I must show him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + decide on a target: his phone.

+

It is glued to his hand and I hate it. It is a glaring portal to a bright world that I have nothing to do with. It fills my vision no matter where I turn in our tiny apartment, and even when it is not in my eye, I can hear the tap-tap-tap of his thumbs against the laminate screen, the sound of death encroaching.

+

He has asked me not to look. It is an invasion of privacy that is edging him out of his own life and into an ever-smaller world that is separate from me, he says. He is right. We are not what we once were.

+

It is perfect.

+

#

+

I wait until he is asleep, his snores filling the room like a rich sauce, then I move.

+

I slide from the bed and creep toward his side. I examine his face and his slack, open mouth, ensuring that his sleep is genuine; then I lift his phone from where it has tipped to his chest.

+

In the harsh light of the bathroom, I huddle on the toilet. The phone is locked, but I know the code. He is too trusting. I open his texts – the babble of strangers, relentless evidence of the unacceptably vast swathes of his universe that have nothing to do with me.

+

What will I say if he finds me? What excuse can I possibly conjure? There is none. That is the point.

+

I begin to type.

+

When I am done, I am shaking, vibrating like a string hard plucked. And yet the dark, dank part of me is still for the first time in months, because at last it is being exposed to the light.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + am in the kitchen, jittery with coffee when he emerges from sleep, phone back in his hand. He greets me with a smile and a kiss, and then sits on the couch.

+

I watch as he opens his texts and begins to type—

+

—and then stops, and looks closer.

+

He reads the vulgarities that I have sent on his behalf, the secrets I have revealed; his brow stitches into a furrow that deepens and spreads as he opens up thread after thread only to realize that each has been filled with my bile.

+

Slowly, as though the air is fighting him back, he turns to face me. “Did you do this?” he says.

+

There passes the longest, most delicious second of my life.

+

Then I nod.

+

He looks back down at his phone. Already it is beginning to flash; with the frantic, hurt responses of the people he loves, I imagine.

+

He ignores it. My boyfriend stands and walks to me slowly. He reaches out and I brace for a blow, tense, buzzing, ecstatic, alive—

+

—but then he places his hands on my cheeks gently, and it all comes crumbling down.

+

“I forgive you,” he says.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + go around for days in a haze of grief. The world seems emptied of meaning, soulless; even my emotions feel estranged from myself, as though they are experienced by some foreign person and then transferred to me.

+

I ask my boyfriend what he told his friends and family in order to explain away the horrible things that I said. “The truth,” he says as though it is obvious, his expression like a clear pool of water. “But it’s okay. They love me, and you.”

+

This only increases my confusion. I barely know “the truth” of why I did what I did; how is it possible that he does? How can these strangers, whose gazes, every time that we meet, land on me like so many unsparing spotlights; who find wanting this base human, who has ensnared their beloved son, their brother, their best and most valuable friend; who lament that their favorite has fallen prey to a creature so mean and petty that it can barely find it in itself to hold a conversation with them, to connect with them on their level; how can they have not only understood the impossible truth but forgiven me for it? What do they know that I don’t?

+

I do not enquire. I could ask all day and all night – I could read a treatise on the topic, my boyfriend would write one if I asked him, he would do anything for me – and I still would not understand. Because the truth as described by him would not be the truth at all, but the truth made tame and understood, full of logical justifications and allowances for my actions. And implicit in that truth would be the possibility of redemption: the notion that if I only finally acknowledged my goodness then at last I would shed these gross parts of myself and emerge the fully-realized human I was always destined to be.

+

But that is not the truth.

+

The truth is that I am a raging vortex of need that will never be filled.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +o I do the only thing I can. I go further.

+

It takes some planning, but I am up for it. There are many numbers I have to create, and then save in my phone under the appropriate monikers; I make a spreadsheet to keep track.

+

When he is sleeping, I take his phone again. In some ways I think he wants me to: why else would he leave the passcode unchanged? Then, for each of the people he texts, I change their number to one I have created, numbers which feed into my phone, and I block their actual numbers. The process is quite time-consuming, and by the time I have finished it is nearly morning.

+

I replace his phone in the early light of the dawn and lie next to him in bed, exhausted but satiated, and wait as my boyfriend gets up and begins his day. Almost as soon as he exits the bedroom, phone clutched in hand, my phone lights up in mine: it is him, thinking he is texting his best friend, but actually texting me.

+

Good morning, he has said.

+

Good morning, I reply.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t is not hard to get him to talk about me. It takes only the slightest encouragement – how’s it going with him – and his frustrations, his irritations come spilling out. It is initially satisfying to receive—there is nothing quite like rubbing salt in a wound.

+

But what is worse is the love.

+

The deeper I dig for a motherlode of resentment, the more I find kindness. A depth of caring and forgiveness that is overwhelming and alien, and deeply frightening because it is directed at me. No matter how cruel I am – and I take care to be cruel – he simply takes it in good faith and moves on, his core of kindness seemingly unshakable.

+

When he reaches out to his lover I change tactics again. I know their connection is strong, that they explore things that I won’t with him. No matter that I am the one who has asked for this arrangement, this freeness, my boyfriend has made better on it, and I resent him for it.

+

I sext with him, pretending to be this other person. My impersonation is flawless, I am sure; I am much better at being other people than I am at being myself. As The Lover, I find an easy rapport with my boyfriend that in person I do not; but this hurts only distantly, as though my earlier pain has iced over and now new pain can only skitter on the surface. And slowly, deliberately, I turn the conversation toward a very particular kink: humiliating me. How much better the sex is without me. How terrible I am and how much he surely dreams about leaving.

+

But he won’t take the bait. He won’t confess to the dark thoughts that I know he must have, and after I keep needling he ever so politely asks me to stop. It is too close to home, he says – ever so apologetically – and nothing is more important to him than maintaining the sanctity of the relationship with the person he loves.

+

This makes me feel physically ill.

+

It’s me, I text him at last, unable to lie any longer.

+

He writes back, What do you mean?

+

It’s your boyfriend, I say, and I wait.

+

The response takes a long time to come back.

+

It’s okay, he says. I forgive you.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hat is this obsession with good? The world sacrifices so much sensation on the altar of goodness. We are taught from infancy to worship kindness and health, all while we watch history being written by those who couldn’t care less.

+

Good is a dead god. When my boyfriend insists on my goodness I am half the person I could be. A sliver of someone else’s idea, cut off from the whole and thrust in inhospitable earth. He plants good in my soil so nothing else grows.

+

I loathe good.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen he opens his eyes in the night, I am standing above him.

+

“What is it?” he says. His gaze flicks toward his phone, but it is still on his nightstand. We are past that, even if he does not know it yet.

+

His eyes turn back to me. “What are you doing?” His voice is soft this time, almost inviting, as though he can tell what is coming.

+

I turn my hand so that the knife catches the light.

+

His eyes are wide and unblinking, but he does not resist. He is not even tense; the soft flesh of his bicep dimples easily as I press. I pause with the edge about to pierce the skin and search in his eyes for some evidence that he sees me at last. That he knows what a monster I am. But already he is nodding, gently, beneficently, his mouth sounding out words, barely more than a whisper. “It’s okay,” he is saying, again and again. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

+

But I do not want it to be okay.

+

So I give him the greatest gift that a dirty thing like me can: a cut.

+

The cleanest thing in the world.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +his one, he does not tell to his friends and his family. This one he keeps to himself, which provides me with some small measure of triumph.

+

But he forgives me, of course.

+

He does not even get angry. He knows that the bad things I do are not because I am bad, but because I am in pain from not being able to see my own goodness. If there is someone at fault here, he says, it is him, for not being able to show me.

+

It is so kind it is cruel. It is clear to me now that almost nothing will permit him to see me; for him to understand what I am, I must do something so terrible that it removes the possibility of his belief.

+

Still, from that point on there is an understanding between us of where this is heading. It is though the air has been wiped clean and charged afresh, and now everything crackles. Electricity building in our apartment, in our texts; every time he pulls out his phone around me, it adds. Both of us can feel it, I am sure.

+

Until finally, one night it is time.

+

We are back in bed again with the knife. Both of us are naked, him clean and perfect, me filthy and stinking, my back against the headboard, his back against my chest. In my right hand is the knife. My left is on his arm, resting on the bandage that covers the cut. I squeeze and am rewarded with the faintest of whimpers.

+

Are you ready, I ask him.

+

“I’m ready,” he says.

+

I move my left hand to his chin and tilt his head back until his eyes look in mine. They are lucid, and beautiful, and full of absolutely nothing.

+

Then I bring my right hand to his throat.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey forgive me, of course. He has prepared them extraordinarily. Even in death, he is somehow winning this game.

+

I am absolved: the inquest is significant, and though I do my best to confess, it is surprisingly difficult to claim an unbelievable crime. My confessions are taken as metaphorical rather than literal. “He blames himself,” his family tells the police. “It’s going to be hard enough on him as it is,” says his lover. “We’ve never known him to have a malicious bone in his body,” his friends say, one and all.

+

It is lies. All of it is lies, wrought through my boyfriend’s love for me. He went to his grave not only believing in my goodness, but ensuring that everyone else did too, and this impossible last show of conviction finally does for me what nothing else could:

+

I begin to believe him as well.

+

I expected the era of their faith in me to end in the months after my boyfriend is gone, but somehow it persists. They continue to reach out, and express affection, and admiration for how well I am handling it, and ask to spend time together. And though I am rude and try to push them away, they merely take it as a sign of my grief – as yet another secret indicator of my goodness – and come back to me after respectful intervals spent waiting.

+

By the third or fourth time, they have worn me down enough that I accept, and begin to become a part of my boyfriend’s life.

+

I step into his place. I take on his friends, his family; his lovers even. I had few people of my own previously, and my life was almost entirely composed of the fragments of his. But somehow, in his passing, they all seem to think his magnetism transferred to me.

+

Slowly, I begin to wonder: was my sickness all in my own head? Have I been decent this whole time?

+

This is the worst thought I have ever had, because it means that I did not have to do what I did. So I force myself to think about the unforgivable things that I did – the undeniable signs of my illness – and what I continue to do, stealing goodwill that has never been mine. And it reassures me that I have been sick all along.

+

This feeling frees me, releases me at last from the contempt I have been clinging to; and suddenly, newly able to return the loving gazes of the people my boyfriend cherished before, I notice something: a simmering heat beneath their kindly expressions; a whiff of putrescence, so faint as to be undetectable to anyone who has not spent a lifetime growing keen to its scent.

+

I see these hints and study them, and I realize: they are like me.

+

Their kindness, which this whole time I believed was as deep as my boyfriend’s, is as thin as my own. It is a relief to no longer have to confront their own vileness in his face every day. They have one of their own among them at last, and their sick pleasure at this spurs guilt, which spurs even more pleasure, and the whole cycle begins once again.

+

And I am a part of it.

+

They see me for the monster I am. And they love me for it.

+

At long last, I feel my self-loathing begin to quiet, which was always so acute with him by my side. I grow closer to these people, and for the first time have a sense of what it might be like to feel truly at home in this world. I open up even more, and rather than recoil at what I reveal, my new community brings me even deeper into their fold. Slowly, I surrender to a happiness that has overtaken me as unexpectedly as a sun in the night, with only one remaining thread of disquiet: the fact that my boyfriend cannot share it with me.

+

But then I relinquish that too, because I know in my heart that he never would: because he was not sick.

+

Not like you and like me.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of A Healthy Man on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Matt Wile

+

+ + Author image of Matt Wile + + + Matt Wile is a writer and filmmaker. His debut feature as writer/director, The Skin of the Teeth, was described by critics as both ‘Get Out meets Grindr’ and ‘David Lynch directs an episode of Law & Order: SVU.’ His fiction can be found most recently in Andromeda Spaceways, Dark Horses, and Del Sol SFF Review. More of his work is available at mattwile.com.

+

© Matt Wile 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: cottonbro studio and Sandy Millar.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-36/carousels.html b/issue-36/carousels.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c63a77af --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/carousels.html @@ -0,0 +1,473 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Carousel's — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+
+ +

Carousel's

+

Shaun Anthony McMichael

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Carousel's by +
+ + + + +

A + +s things at the restaurant are requiring more of Cameron, he’s losing it. We watch with the same devil-may-care interest we have when the deep cleaners scoop and scrape the grease from the exhaust vents above the ovens. Or when our General Manager Ross descends with demands from corporate in the form of a staff manual. Cam removes his glasses and puts a hand over his handsome face to hide his disgust; unlike us, the low-level front-of-the-house staff, Cam is Assistant Manager and unable to merely eye-roll and make whack-off gestures in the face of new standards. Cam, if he wants to keep his job, has to enforce the new regs, follow state law, and turn over a weekly profit.

+

Meanwhile, Cam’s losing it. He’s losing it the way most people do: by getting too close to people below him. In Cam’s case, the newbie, Gabe.

+

“Remember, we don’t call them ‘rags’. They’re ‘towels’,” GM Ross rags on Gabe. He was requesting a fresh batch in the Sani bucket by the kitchen exit.

+

“Sorry. Towels,” Gabe defers, giving that wounded look with eyes moistening to cry.

+

“Who cares?” Cam intercedes. “Rag. Towel. Call it whatever you want, bud.”

+

Corporate cares, Ross reminds. Calling them “rags” gives off unpleasant connotations (menstruation, homelessness, manual labor). “Towels” has more pleasant connotations (massages, beach combing, warm baths at home). Customers – excuse us, guests – experience the difference.

+

“Understood! 10-4. Gotcha,” we say.

+

The closest things GM Ross has to leadership qualities are his height and the stern demeanor intimated by his dark beard and hair; in terms of charisma, the dude should have become an undertaker. Cam on the other hand is decent as far as managers go. He lets us drag ass. And backs us up with uppity customers. Fuck, sorry: guests. So, we give him winks that say we’ll enjoy shit-talking later about the new regs. Connotations? This isn’t English 101, it’s a fucking Carousel’s!

+

But Carousel’s Restaurant and Bar is getting bigger britches. Though the chain’s goal has always been to be number 2 to Red Robin, the new CEO sees it as a competitive brand. Our county-fair-themed family eatery offers a relaxing dining experience for friends and neighbors from all walks of life! But behind his smile-clenched grill of pearly whites, CEO is bent on polishing up Carousel’s mediocrity with new menus, amenities, and the etiquette manual.

+

“Towels it is,” Cam nods, running his hands through his sandy blonde hair. A surfer boy face, his aqua-colored eyes betraying an ache for better times. “Towels. Wow. So much better.”

+

But Ross is already tearing out of the kitchen to spot-check us waiters upselling the new drinks, leaving Cam to expedite the torrent of plates for sale beneath the kitchen’s heating lamps.

+

Good thing one of us is watching, because Cam misses plating a Blue Ribbon Blue Burger with its side ramekin of blue cheese; almost sends out a 4H Sausage Plate without pickled onions; and botches the red, white, and green (salsa, sour crème, and guac) arrangement on a Corn Maze Quesadilla (intentionally sans elle). All so he can run into his office for some reason. To make out with Steph, one of us servers? An “emergency” phone call, he says. It’s official, Cam’s fucking up. A few of us are already chewing on how to cozy up to Ross. Somebody says he likes hair metal. Make him a mix quick, we say to ourselves.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ne of Cam’s biggest beefs with corporate’s new rollout is the requirement that waitstaff offers all guests a Dunk Tank Tanqueray-Cointreau Punch. A mouthful in more ways than one. No matter how young or old the guests are. No matter if it’s a geriatric first thing on Sunday or a nubile cheerleader last thing on Monday. Dunk ’em. If you don’t offer it to the guest and they’re of age and they call you on it, you have to bring them one for free!

+

“And this meted out by an industry that shuns comping liquor,” Cam gripes. “In a town where the liquor control board is already up our asses.”

+

The hawkish liquor control board is no joke. One of our best and brightest, Zander, got canned a month ago for serving a beer to a minor. He’d been a little hung over, sure. A little wobbly, maybe. But how he wasn’t able to spot that little bitch-snitch, we’ll never know. I’ll have a huh-huh-huh-Heineken, the kid asked, like somebody who’d never ordered, let alone drank, a beer in his life. Kid barely had peach-fuzz on his stash. But Zander must have still been drunk himself. Right on, homie. And like that, Zander was 86’d. Fired. Outed. Blacklisted from all service industries for life. Couldn’t even get his dream job as a male stripper. We hear he’s a grease monkey downtown.

+

It’s partly in Zander’s memory that Cam continues his tirade against corporate’s lush-happy new policies. “Half of our servers are just barely twenty-one; half of our customers are college kids who can’t hold their liquor; and they want us to Dunk Tank them.”

+

“More like Drunk Tank them,” we chortle. “It’s basically a Tom Collins from hell!”

+

“Might as well serve up DUIs for dessert,” he throws back. We congratulate Cam on his joke, but we’re quick to busy ourselves with other things. The upselling’s no problem for most of us. More liquor, bigger tabs, higher tips!

+

Besides, why wouldn’t you want a stiff drink? You’re at a Carousel’s in Valley City! The most popular menu item is a Chinese-inspired salad served with a dressing that’s 99% chicken fat. The hard-boiled eggs are preserved in icy, urine-colored formaldehyde to cut down on prep time. The ambiance is an acid trip version of your worst fair experience.

+

The restaurant itself is circular, its center being a ten-sided bar designed as a pastiche of the classic merry-go-round hub with its circular, mirrored marquee. Each table boasts a life-size carousel horse, each face frozen in a crazed equine snarl, veins bulging out, teeth bared, calling to mind the dentures of the octogenarians that haunt the early bird shifts. We want a BOOTH, got that? A b-o-o-t-h! Okay, Your Highness, as if you’re unique among gods and men for wanting a little more cush on your tush.

+

“Welcome to Carousel’s! We’re so glad you’re here,” we say, lying through our teeth-gritted smiles as we seat them. “Can I interest you in a Dunk Tank Tanqueray-Cointreau Punch?” It’s 10am! We have no shame.

+

Vicky sure doesn’t. She’s sold four already. Vicky, always a front-runner among us. All three-hundred pounds of her.

+

But the newbie, Gabe? He’s a little different. When two of his fellow college kids sit down in a booth at 11am, either he forgets (because he’s like 19, or he has some weird teetotalling scruples) or he’s distracted (by the hot girl on the guy’s arm, specifically her tramp stamp, whose tribal patterns arrow down at her pink thong). Whatever the case, Gabe neglects to upsell.

+

“Uhm…” The guy’s mouth curves up at Gabe. “You didn’t offer us Dunk Tanks.”

+

“Uhm. No. No, I didn’t,” Gabe admits, looking out the window where the sun ignites the windshields of vehicles zooming by on the highway.

+

The guy’s got a shaved head and wears an eyebrow ring and a smirk. “Well, I guess, make it two Dunk Tanks then. Chop chop!”

+

Gabe asks to see their IDs but it takes him two whole minutes to add up their ages in his head. He’s asked us for help multiple times with this. He’s got some weird block with adding in his head. Nerves? A TBI? We tell him to buzz off or bring a calculator. Eventually, he realizes the couple’s of age. Barely legal, but still. He’s just cost the restaurant and himself. There’s no way those two assholes will factor the free drinks into his tip. He walks with his head lowered in shame to the computer to punch in their order, their giggles, guffaws, and smooches painting his cheeks shame-red.

+

We pat him on the back. “Fucking up, newbie.”

+

Gabe hisses through his teeth.

+

“Don’t worry about it,” Cam says at the server station as he comps the order. His deft fingers punch at the hulking DOS-era touch-screen monitor. He drops off the two liquor-brimmed straight-up glasses to the college couple. “It’s 11am, get a life,” he says as he walks off.

+

“Hey, we don’t make the rules!” Eyebrow-Ring calls after, waving the table-top trifold. And they down their drinks before driving to class.

+

“Better than him selling to a minor,” Steph says.

+

“You don’t have to show it to Ross on the sales report,” Cam retorts.

+

“Bet Eyebrow-Ring is Ross’s nephew or something,” Vicky puts in.

+

“He doesn’t look enough like Bella.”

+

“Damn, you’re salty today, Cam,” Vicky cackles.

+

Bella’s a barfly who posts at the bar and stays after closing time while she waits for Ross to get off, when they fuck in the back of his canopy-covered truck before Ross goes home to his wife and kids. It’s been going on for years. We’ve all glimpsed a butt cheek or two, but keep it on the dl because why piss Ross off?

+

And can any of us, Cam included, really throw stones?

+

We all know Cam makes out with Steph as he closes her out for the night. Why she lets him, God only knows, she’s like half his age. So Cam will give her the good shifts? Keep her away from the bar-tops where the service has to be junk because of the small tabs and quick turnarounds? Let her keep a bigger cut of her tips? We all pay out a percentage of our take to the bartender, to the expediter (if there is one), and to the hosts (if they busted ass bussing our tables). Whatever. We each have our hustle and grind.

+

We all know why Cam swaps spit with her. Chance to massage her firm l’il lady lumps while her hoochie hoop earrings and big lashes flutter around his face, sapphire eyes sparkling for him once or twice, maybe the way his ex-wife’s did when they were kids. We all would tongue-tussle with Steph in a heartbeat. One or two of us have even! Carousel’s work parties get crunk. One reason Gabe probably doesn’t go, though we always invite him.

+

“You should come out with us tonight, newbie,” Vicky says working on the closing checklist. “Let one of us pop your cherry.” She looses one of her witchy cackles from the half-round where her throat and double-chin merge.

+

“I’m waiting for marriage,” Gabe says.

+

“Good luck with that,” Vicky scoffs and cranks up old-school Biggie, rapping along to Dead Wrong. “What’s the matter, newbie? Don’t want to hit the clits?” Vicky taunts and butt-bumps him.

+

Vicky’d been locked up for forgery, not prostitution, though her giant nails and flirtatiousness might suggest the latter. Her nose is a beak on a doughy face dotted with two dark currants, her eyes. The icing on the cinnamon roll of her face is thick makeup more colorful than Mardi Gras. In back-of-the-house and front-of-the-house, she’s the cock-of-the-walk, swishing her stringy blonde hair, her rooster’s comb. She makes the bar top her henhouse, taking orders, expediting them, then running them, balancing six steaming plates without batting an eye. And when a guest gets in her face, she blunts them with one of her cockatrice gazes, even as she accedes to their demands. Vanguard servers worship her. Newbies like Gabe steer clear.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +ven though he’s worked here a couple of months already and at least three new people have been hired since, we still call Gabe ‘newbie.’

+

“Watcha readin’?” one of us asked him on one of his 10’s out back.

+

“A book,” he said from his seat on the curb rounding the dumpster. He waved away the smoke from our cigarettes. We’d all started smoking just for something to do on our breaks, which became the reason we needed the breaks, which also became the reason we needed to work so much so we could afford the cigarettes we started smoking. Smoking’s a self-perpetuating merry-go-round of vice we never get tired of bantering about.

+

“Abnormal Psychology: Finding the Order in Disorder by—” we read, but the nube shifted so we couldn’t see.

+

“It’s boring,” he said.

+

“You trying to become a shrink?” we asked.

+

“No,” he said. “Just trying to understand myself.”

+

“You’re lying. We’re all trying to become something. You want to be a shrink. Admit it!”

+

“I’d like to help people one day,” he says.

+

“Ha! See?”

+

We remind Gabe that Joe was a paralegal – almost a lawyer! Sherry had been a substitute teacher, almost getting her teaching cert. Rand was a nurse’s aid before he saw that kid die. And Sara’d been a cadet in the police academy before all the machismo bullshit drove her away. And who could blame her? And you think we’re bad!

+

“So you go to community college,” we said. “Well, we know all about books. We’ve all got some college under our belts. Some of us have even gotten close to getting our AA degrees. A couple of us are going back as soon as we can scrape enough tips together…”

+

Gabe headed back in early.

+

Since then, he’s taken his 10s at the bus stop – the same place he arrives and departs from – never bringing a book into work again.

+

If he thinks his shit don’t stink because he goes to Valley City College, he’s dumber than we think. We’ll go back one of these days. But what’s the rush? Transfer to the U? Get saddled with a bunch more debt? Get bagged by a career that makes us work for more than we’re paid? Salaried gigs are a bitch! Just ask Cam. He’s always bellyaching.

+

“Christ, I wish I could go back to tending bar! Or construction. When I built houses, I could see what I was working for coming to life.”

+

“But then you couldn’t hang out with us!”

+

But Cam doesn’t hang out with us. We suspect he’s churchy. Or maybe he was churchy. He wears a little gold crucifix necklace beneath his chambray button-up manager shirts. Maybe that’s why he sympathizes with Gabe so much.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hough we’re convinced Cam’s just blowing smoke up our asses, if he really had worked construction, he’s sure as shit missing his chance to make a killing. Valley City’s a cancer on the joint between the big city and the suburbs. Through raising more skyscrapers and condos, Valley City is helping the two distinct parts – town and city – grow into the same thing: one continuous mass of human engorgement. We read about it in Sociology.

+

Valley’s downtown still has all these kitschy storefronts, history hubs, and mom-and-pop shops from the mining days of its inception. But thank god, the corporate gods are coming for them too so those old know-it-alls can stop making us feel like dumbass yuppies.

+

Though Cam keeps a pretty tight lip, we suspect he’s a bit of a closet know-it-all. We caught him shaking his head when a Coors Lite truck ran into a storage facility’s brick entryway, its façade preserved from the first Ford factory in the state.

+

“What the fuck do you care?” Vicky asked.

+

“Maybe they can repair it,” Gabe said.

+

“They just don’t make things like they used to,” Cam said.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +am didn’t start out all buddy-buddy with Gabe, who’d been Ross’s hire after all. When he first got onboarded as a host, Gabe wouldn’t shut up about how he’d been a cashier at the Cheesecake Factory’s bakery.

+

“Handling high volume,” he said.

+

“Couldn’t hack it there, now you’re here,” Cam jibed but paused to watch Gabe struggle to limp off the burn.

+

“I… I changed jobs,” Gabe said. “So, I could be closer to home. I take care of my mom.”

+

“Sorry,” Cam said. He never apologized to any of us for giving us shit and we’re not a bunch of debauched orphans! We’ve got fam!

+

“You didn’t know. It’s okay,” Gabe said. But Cam’s Santa Monica suntan face goes greener than the clouds of a squall. He disappears into his office for some reason. To make out with Steph some more? Emergency phone call, he said.

+

He’s been fucking up for a while, come to think of it. When he hired Steph, he promoted her to server after only two weeks. Even though we all had to host for a month as a customary rule of thumb. Learn the menu. Pay our dues. Put our time in. Plus, it had technically been Gabe’s turn.

+

“Why am I stuck as host?” Gabe demanded. “Just because you’re making out with her?”

+

We heard it. It was just after shift change on a Thursday afternoon. Dinner rush was coming. Guests could have heard it! Though we all felt our opinion of Gabe lift. The dude had more balls than we thought.

+

“Hey!” Cam pointed a finger at him. “That’s not nice. It’s none of your business, that.”

+

That was all he was going to say?

+

“You’re a good host. And I’m going to get to you. But Steph has serving experience.”

+

She did. That was fair. We patted Gabe on the back. He was a good host, busting-ass clearing two-tops, big-tops, every-kinda-tops. Taking and filling drink orders. Keeping an okay rotation, though Vicky complained he always saddled her with more tables. “Rides me more just because I have a big butt and he thinks I can take it. The churchy little fucker.”

+

Gabe did fluster easily, which probably made Cam doubt if he was server material. Once during a rush, Gabe crushed a glass right into the ice bin as he was trying to fill it up. A nube move, as everybody knows you’ve got to use the ice-scoopers.

+

“Fucking up, newbie,” we taunted, even as we helped him empty the ice bin. Because the broken glass blended in with the ice, you had to dump hot water in until each cube melted; then after you fished out all the shards, you had to refill it, lugging by twos the big ice buckets. A mistake you only ever made once, if you were dumb enough to make it at all.

+

All this is why we were completely on-our-ass-floored when Cam promoted Gabe to server.

+

“I’m going to help him,” Cam insisted. Though after the third or fourth time helping him check IDs, we could see in Cam’s face that he was adding the decision to the matchstick house of regrets that is his life.

+

But Cam continues defending and befriending him.

+

During a post-dinner-rush slump, Cam announces to everybody back-of-the-house that he’s got a new musical act to share with us. Singer-songwriter Gabe Vanderbeek. Then, on comes a scratchy demo of Gabe guitar-playing and singing the most thinly-veiled Christian prog rock any of us have ever heard. What little we hear of Gabe’s nasally vocs over the gravelly crunch of bar-chorded distortion is about walking “the Way” despite getting offered off-roads into vice.

+

“Sounds like shit,” Vicky says.

+

“You weren’t supposed to play it!” Gabe says.

+

“You left it with me. I thought…” Cam says.

+

“You think you can do whatever you want,” Gabe growls, stomping out.

+

“Yeah. Fuck the man!”

+

“Yeah! Oh, wait, that’s you, Cam. Fuck you. Ha ha.”

+

“Fuck you for making us listen to that crap,” we say.

+

“It sounded better on headphones,” Cam says.

+

“I’ve taken craps that sounded better,” Vicky says.

+

“You’re just jealous somebody’s trying to do something with their life,” Cam says to Vicky. “Not everybody’s okay staying a loser.”

+

You can hear a to-go fork clatter on the scuffed linoleum. The sound of the air wheezing through the grease-clogged vents above the grills. No manager has ever talked to Vicky like that. Not that we remember anyway. And our collective memory goes back longer than years we can count.

+

Vicky nods her head, “Nice. Real nice, asshole. Make fun of the fat ex-con coming up on ten years sober.” She’s tearing up. “The fat ex-con working round the clock to put her little niece through college…” She’s touching the back of her hands to her eyes. Fuck. We’ve only seen her cry, like, once!

+

“He didn’t mean it, Vick.”

+

“Yeah. He was just upset.”

+

But Vicky isn’t mollified. Her hot tears melt her makeup into smears of black, blue, and red. “I am trying!” she roars and flees the kitchen out back for a smoke. “You handle the assholes in my section now, you fucker. See how you like getting treated like shit all night while getting paid less than a hooker. This isn’t over.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s a night from hell. A hellish night. Our favorite.

+

During the hectic hours, our demand-harried skins burn and we gnash our teeth while we pleasure in the pressure, knowing that each absurd customer request – more dressing, jalapeno poppers without the jalapenos, another beer, cheeseburgers without the burger, milkshakes without the milk, kids portions for adults, more water, more napkins, crispy bacon, crispy fries, another Coke – will all kindle an epic after-hours rager where, before blacking out for hours of sweet oblivion, we’ll bump uglies in dizzying configurations inconceivable in daylight.

+

It’s a Thursday night, the new Friday for this friendly-neighborhood eatery. There’s the usual descent-of-the-dweebs from Radi-Us Wireless. The cellphone company’s national offices clutter the hill above our Carousel’s complex. Every night at the late happy hour (9pm-to-close), it’s night-of-the-nerds. We don’t know what most of them do, actually. Probably just call-center workers, not programmers. Whoever they are, they blitz in, overworked, pissed-off, and ravenous for our half-off hot wings and drink specials. Dunk Tank not included.

+

Next, a troupe of ancient-looking bishops ferry themselves in off a meeting of the archdiocese. Each rheumy-eyed stiff wants their tea scalding. I want it to burn my tongue when I drink it! And after draining flasks of whisky into their mugs, they down kettles of bubbling liquid without a wince. Keep it coming!

+

Then, a wedding rehearsal dinner crashes in and even the hardest of us doubles over. Vicky raises cane in the kitchen, uncaring who hears. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re bringing your wedding party to Carousel’s? How long are they hoping that marriage is going to last?”

+

And all while the cleaning crew waits out back to scour the fat off the hoods hanging over the ovens. They’re heavy with petrified bat wings of grease. But to do the job, the main grill has to shut down. For an hour.

+

Cam cancels, all apologies to the cleaning crew. Bad timing. We’ll reschedule. I’m so sorry guys!

+

We hear the shattering of glass. Gabe’s standing there with a jagged-rimmed Collins glass. “Smooth move, nube,” one of us says. But we aren’t laughing. A harbinger of what’s to come.

+

The Radi-Us geeks all want separate tabs! They’re a 32 top with separate tabs! And the bridal party too! Bridezilla wants her Bullseye Ribeye cooked well done! Does she know how long that shit takes to cook well done? And there are so many orders for wings and margs that one of us has to drive to a neighboring location to get more boxes of wings and bottom-shelf tequila. Okay, maybe it’s two of us that end up going and maybe we end up getting each other off in the car while we wait for the dipshits to fetch us the supply, but still!

+

By nightfall, booths one through ten are boneyards of chicken wings. The poultry apocalypse! The whole place smells like vinegar burps from buffalo sauce and smokey farts from wayside fermented agave.

+

Cam’s been beautiful. Something about the pressure has called up dormant spunk from his surfing days. He’s dispatched complaints with gusto; comped cold plates before they’re even sold; 86’d the Sunflower salad when the deviled eggs run dry; plated ticket after ticket of Huckleberry Hound Pie, Chicken Fried Steak, Elephant Ear Eggplant Pasta; and he’s even bounded back onto the line to help the beleaguered cooks.

+

But then comes a cry, “Cam! Cam!”

+

It’s Gabe. It’s his first hell night as a server. His first elbow-elbow trench-crawl through fiery rivers of demands and vitriol. His face is a pall of battle fatigue.

+

“Cam! Cam!”

+

“What newbie?”

+

Gabe gives a shot-dog expression. “There’s. There’s a girl in number 5. Her age. Her birthdate! It’s close. I just – my head hurts. Can you spot me? Just double check…”

+

The kitchen printer spits out a cascade of tickets. A burner goes out.

+

“Christ on the cross, Gabe! If you can’t figure it out, dunk her for all the shits I give!” Cam jumps back into the fray.

+

And moments later a Dunk Tank in a Collins glass, cherry garnish on top, gets sold to a twenty-year-old with a self-satisfied smile as she slides the drink aside, clasps her Gucci knock off, and exits.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +am’s nowhere to be found. Not in back-of-the-house, not curbside, not front-of-the-house, not out back smoking by the dumpster. We look everywhere, pretending not to know where Cam usually goes to hide. Pretending to not know who he hides with! It’s our last-ditch effort to save his ass.

+

“I want him found!” Ross says, towing Gabe by the collar.

+

Cameron’s in his office. But Steph’s not there. No one else is there. He’s bent over a kid’s book. He’s on his cell phone.

+

“Sky grows dark… That’s right, honey. Moon glows bright… Yep. Yep! Climb into bed and turn out the light! Oh my gosh, bud. You’ve got it. Wow, buddy.”

+

We crowd in the doorway. We listen to Cam listen to his toddler-aged-son repeat back to him the whole If My Love Were a Fire Truck book.

+

“Cam,” we say. “Something’s happened.”

+

But Cam’s not there. He’s on a clamshell-white beach paddling off, and up and up, then down the blue, blue valleys.

+

We hear him accede to his ex-wife’s demands and apologize in the face of her berating and his promise to send the payments quickly. And next month’s check early! We hear him plead for another Saturday. He’ll plan something this time. Something Harold will like. He’s been reading the parenting books the judge ordered—

+

Ross grabs his cell out of his hand and chucks it.

+

Cam shoves him.

+

“You’re out of line,” Ross says.

+

“You’re out of line!”

+

“Front-of-the-house is just about in flames right now! Just what—”

+

“I. Was. Taking. My. 10!” Cam says. “Now excuse me. While you’re kissing ass at corporate, I’ve got a restaurant to run.”

+

But when Cam walks into the bar, he finds Gabe seated in between two liquor board inspectors wearing dark windbreakers with broad white lettering on the back, declaring their offices.

+

The snitch-bitch is nowhere in sight. According to the liquor board dicks, it hadn’t been one of theirs. Is it just us, or is Vicky cackling louder than normal? If Gabe had half a brain, he would have noticed the snitch who’d tricked him had been Vicky’s niece. We’re not spilling the beans. Not our place.

+

Grabbing Cam, Ross points a finger at Gabe. “Since you’re running this restaurant, do you mind explaining to me why—”

+

“I did it. I told him to do it,” Cam says. “Fine me. Fire me.” And Cam explains everything.

+

One of the bishops stands up and points a liver-spotted, furry-knuckled finger at Cam. “His confession is true. We heard him with the foulest most damnable language dismiss the boy’s plea for help!”

+

“Then you’re both fired!” Ross says. From the bar, Bella’s face flushes and she hugs her lower lip with her teeth. Gonna be a good night for Ross.

+

The liquor control dicks hustle out Cameron and Gabe for processing in their mobile unit parked out front, where they’ll fine them and give them court dates. Ross stalks behind them with an embalmer’s loom and grump.

+

With them all gone, the bar’s decagon carousel center sparkles resplendent. Its rounding-board overhang features griffins and imps and ovular mirrors in which we see our reflections elongate into hobgoblins that clean and sing, bring bread and drink, and shuffle our bloated, cholesterol-clogged guests in and out. The bar’s floor disconnects from its foundations and begins to spin and we dervish with it. We turn up some hair metal. Vicky, Steph, the bishops, the Radi-Us nerds, the bridal party, we dance. The batwings of grease catch fire and the ovens, the gas tanks, the storehouses of fat, the chicken lard dressing, the CO2 in the soda fountains, the vats of formaldehyde, it all ignites and the ensuing firestorm funnels butane-tinged flames through our tilt-a-whirl of ever-renewing delight and pain. We dance in the flames.

+

From the corners of our eyes, we watch with mild interest as, post-processing, the two expiated figures share a bench on the dead boulevard. One waits for a bus home to his mother. The other? Maybe waiting for the sun’s fireball to outmatch the one we’ve created. He’ll be waiting a long time.

+

In our night-long revelry, we can’t make out their conversation. But we’ve never been faulted for our lack of imagination. Just ask the angels.

+

“What’ll you do now?” the man asks.

+

“There’s an internship working with people with developmental disabilities. If they’ll take me. You?”

+

And the man turns in the direction of old downtown, the vacant, hulking buildings going violet in the predawn. “I’m going into retro-fitting.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Carousel’s on Facebook.

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+

Shaun Anthony McMichael

+

+ + Author image of Shaun Anthony McMichael + + + Shaun Anthony McMichael has taught writing to students from around the world since 2007, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins throughout the Seattle area. Over 85 of his poems, short stories, and reviews have appeared in many literary magazines online and in print, including the forthcoming short story collection The Wild Familiar from CJ Press. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son where he attends church most Sundays. Visit him at his website, shaunanthonymcmichael.com.

+

© Shaun Anthony McMichael 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Vitaly Gorbachev, Daniel Reche, and Mali Maeder.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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+ Story image for Editorial +
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Well, here we are at the end of another one. 2023 has been a busy time at Mythaxis. Despite only inviting stories during three weeks of the year, we received 669 pieces to consider, compared to 603 across 2022’s four week long calls. The decision to increase our pay rate to a pauper-princely 1 cent per word probably had something to do with that; the option of shrinking the submission windows in 2024 to desperately try and hold back the rising tide is a distinct possibility.

+

So, it’s safe to say we now have more options to sort through and choose from than ever before. And that’s a good thing… but more junk from the LLM-machine as well, unfortunately! I firmly believe that the standard of work we accept remains unchanged – I’m as proud of past years’ issues as I am of this one’s – but while a small increase in pay may not be the difference-maker for writers of quality, it certainly seems to catch the eye of those who let AI do the real work for them.

+

Nevertheless, satisfied though I am, as 2023 progressed I was struck by an arguable oversight. I love genre fiction in many of its guises, but while that label covers great variety of type and tone we’ve always kept the focus primarily on sf, fantasy, and horror. Of course, that itself is no barrier to authors incorporating other genres – we’ve welcomed romance, comedy, mystery, and many more under the spec-fic umbrella – but there was one limitation in particular that has preyed on my mind.

+

Crime.

+

We’ve certainly featured many stories in which crimes feature strongly, but it’s almost always been within our default context of (let’s call them) the unreal genres. We’ve not actively been seeking out what you might call pure crime fiction, and I’ve increasingly felt that this should change.

+

I think speculative fiction (be it science fiction, fantasy, or horror) is “special” because, while it allows an author to explore the very same themes as any more conventional treatment might, by abandoning the strict constraints of realism new light can be cast onto otherwise familiar ideas. Transplanting a narrative of loneliness from a real world wilderness to, for example, the infinitely distant depths of space doesn’t make the story proportionally better, but it allows it to be different in a way that isn’t plausible in a more down-to-earth setting.

+

However, I think unadulterated crime fiction is to an extent also a speculative endeavour. True, it is grounded in a context of realism; no matter how outlandish some of crime fiction’s villains have been, they generally inhabit a world recognisably our own, past or present; but the criminal also breaches a set of constraints: the agreed upon rules of social conduct. The author of crime fiction is therefore presenting speculations on how such challenges to the norm might affect the perpetrators, the victims, even society as a whole (or, indeed, how they might not).

+

And for the reader, too, there’s a slightly different flavour of escapism at hand with crime than with other fiction of our mundane world. With the unreal, we experience things we couldn’t – with crime, it’s things we wouldn’t.

+

Hopefully.

+

So, a typically long-winded way of justifying a decision that may already by crystal clear to the probably enormous majority who skipped the editorial (or didn’t even notice its presence) on the way to the stories lying in wait: this is Mythaxis Magazine’s first all crime issue. No scifi, no fantasy, no horror (well, none of the supernatural at least) – just misbehaviours, up and down the scale.

+

I hope you enjoy this genre of speculation as much as I do.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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+

ISSUE 36 – Thanks and Salutations! +‘When the clock is ticking away the night – and you can’t get to sleep – your nerves make you jump at every sound. You find yourself thinking things that would never occur to you in the daylight. What makes you so nervous and uneasy? And why couldn’t you get to sleep when you first went to bed?’ It turns out the answer isn’t insidious crime but insidious caffeine! The cover image is from an ad for decaffeinated Sanka Coffee - Was that a burglar downstairs?, painted in 1948 by Fritz Siebel, more famous for his ‘Someone Talked’ WWII poster. Now out of copyright, this particular ad ran in the notorious crime publisher Ladies’ Home Journal…

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2023

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+ Wayne McCray +

Praedial Larceny

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How many ways can people do crime? Innumerable. What types of crime do people tend to write about? That's a smaller subset. There are some things common to our depictions of criminality: the vicarious revealing of motive, means, and opportunity for example; but sometimes the explorations go deeper. Stories can examine the impact of crime. They can also examine the impact of our responses to it.

+ + + + Story image for Praedial Larceny by + + + +
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Nancy, Please

+ Steve Boseley +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nancy, Please by + + + +

Do you care about justice? I'm sure you do. It's not always a very just world, of course, and injustices come in large and small portions, but on the whole we want right to win out over wrong. But that's not always the draw of crime fic, is it? Sometimes we want what feels good, even when we know it's very, very wrong…

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A Healthy Man

+ Matt Wile +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for A Healthy Man by + + + +

Talented Tom Ripley; avaricious Patrick Bateman; peckish Hannibal Lector; literature has always found focus in aberrant personalities, often as charismatic as they are disturbing. But criminals need not be suave and sophisticated to attract us – the chance to walk in someone awful's shoes, to learn how an unthinkable thinks… our temptations are as hard to resist as theirs.

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Le Petit Cornichon

+ L Swartz +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Le Petit Cornichon by + + + +

Some fairy tales are cautionary, others throw caution to the wind and dive into the nasty stuff with relish. This story is more about The Nasty, if you take my meaning, and the condiments are pickled. If you're reminded of 'The Boy Who Couldn't Shudder' by the Brothers Grimm you're right – though this is more the Brothers Grimy.

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Carousel's

+ Shaun Anthony McMichael +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Carousel's by + + + +

Laws can be written, and rules can be unwritten, and sometimes breaking those rules is more bad form than criminal, and surely breaking some laws hardly rises to the level of 'a crime'… yet the law IS the law, and rules are rules however informal. Transgressions have consequences.

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Summer in Duncanny

+ Peter Wynd +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Summer in Duncanny by + + + +

Although we've steered clear of the speculative in this issue, our final piece of the year teeters on the edge, just in that way of being not obviously the real world. And is it crime fiction? Well, you know when someone says of something 'That's criminal, that is' – maybe it's crime fiction like that.

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The Enchanters, by James Ellroy

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Enchanters, by James Ellroy by + + + +

For as long as your editor has known him, Bill Ryan has been an eloquent critic of both cinematic and literary crime. When I decided to wrap up the year with our first all-crime issue, there was no-one else I'd turn to for a longform fiction review. I hope you like the hard stuff, and you like it strong.

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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023

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+ + +

In keeping with the issue's theme, we're taking a break from reviewing speculative stories to instead scour the web for free-to-read shortform crime fiction. So here's a trio of pieces published this year by some genre zines not Ellery Queen's.

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 by + + + +
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Le Petit Cornichon

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L Swartz

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I + +t could have been different. I might have been getting ready to take over my dad’s gourmet pickle empire when it all popped off. But then I would never have met Princess Babe, who is way better than pickles.

+

As it was, tedious bro Bob was groomed as the sole heir to the family empire. Not me.

+

Our Pop, who preferred to be addressed as The Dill King, made it his mission to teach me to be like my brother Bob. Ingrate Bob.

+

Bro Bob refused to call Pop The Dill King. And when people called Bob The Gherkin – a nickname that was The Dill King’s idea of a compliment – Bob got mad.

+

I always called Pop The Dill King because he asked us to. And I literally begged people to call me Le Petit Monsieur Cornichon, a nickname I had to make up myself.

+

Whatever. I had all the fun because I was fearless. I was the brat who always had a cast on my leg or my arm along with bruises and cuts. When somebody dared me to do something, I did it. Why not? Scars are interesting. Broken arms heal.

+

I jumped off things. I raced around blind corners.

+

I slept in the graveyard because dead people can’t hurt me and ghosts are mere angry vapor.

+

I let hateful little turds lock me in small, dark boxes because for me it was quiet and restful and eventually someone would let me out. Probably.

+

I mounted alligators and tried to ride them. I poked hornet nests. I got in cars with strangers.

+

Tedious Bob, of course, never took a dare.

+

When no-scar, dreary Bob wasn’t sulking about being the favorite, his notion of fun was to squint amorously at his spreadsheets. He meticulously collected and analyzed data from tasting parties where he invited foodies to test variations in our pickle recipes. Bob did not taste anything himself. Bob did not like pickles.

+

Unlike Bob, the recipes I invented were genuinely new. For instance, what if you pickle ghost peppers in with your boring cucumbers? The Gherkin got so pissed when I did that. Why? Data’s data, right? By the way, ghost pickles are excruciatingly delicious.

+

Bro Bob did enjoy formally inspecting the pickle vats every Monday morning and Friday afternoon, his shiny shoes clacking on the cement floor of the pickle factory.

+

Like Bob, I enjoyed walking the vats. Unlike Bob, I walked in neon kicks with plenty of a mellow indica strain on board.

+

Very much unlike Bob, I led hella entertaining factory tours. Customers always bought more product after little M. Cornichon guided them through our facility. This may or may not have had to do with the bongs I tucked behind vats and shared with our guests.

+

Obviously, I had an excellent attitude. Obviously, I was of value to the business and to the family. I still don’t understand why The Dill King sent me away.

+

It happened right after The Gherkin extracted my hand-blown glass bongs from their crannies and dumped them on The Dill King’s desk. Yes. My famously mature bro tattled.

+

The Dill King shattered all my gorgeous vessels and wasted a lot of primo 420.

+

I guess this was the last straw. I guess Pop no longer wanted happy tourists to buy our product and tell their friends what a fun and delicious business we ran.

+

It made no sense to me. I obviously made no sense to them.

+

So off I was shipped to my uncle’s place in Idaho. Fucking Idaho – the one state in the union where weed was still fully illegal.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +owever, you might say Idaho turned out to be a land of opportunity for me. If it weren’t for Idaho, I would never have made the acquaintance of the sensuous Princess Babe. She would have been out of my league. Still is, if you ask her.

+

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

+

Uncle Idaho earnestly endeavored to find me a job. At first, he sent me off to apprentice at a beer brewery, then as a ladies’ shoe salesman, then with an antique dealer.

+

I hosted popular and successful after hours parties at the brewery. This was frowned upon, especially since I wasn’t exactly strict about checking IDs.

+

Back I went to Uncle’s.

+

At the shoe emporium, I was intoxicated by the ankles, calves, knees, and upwards of ladies who were trying on shoes. Of course I couldn’t resist licking the flesh they offered. How could anyone? Some of the ladies complained about my mode of sincere worship. Only some. Eventually, enough complained that I got fired.

+

Back to Uncle’s. Again.

+

As for the antique dealer, when I covered up the unsightly nicks and dents and scratches in her stock with my own colorful and creative doodles, it was not recognized for the brilliant marketing I know it to be.

+

So, out on my ass there too.

+

I sat at the dining room table at my uncle’s after that, sucking on my last plain but serviceable bong and thinking up ways to get rich, or at least get out of my uncle’s house.

+

“Why can’t you consider the consequences?” Uncle Idaho stood next to me, literally looking down on me, and pontificated in a very loud voice. “What is wrong with you?”

+

Uncle was being mean and unnecessarily harsh, so I pushed him hard in the middle of the chest. Uncle wasn’t expecting it. He stepped back, lost his footing, and fell. On the way down, he banged his head against his display case of cheesy porcelain figurines. It shattered most of the figurines and it knocked him out – just for a minute! I have no idea why everyone got so excited.

+

Shortly afterward I found myself walking away from dear Uncle Idaho’s house, carrying a backpack stuffed with basics. To be honest, I was excited to be released from boring people’s boring expectations. I was now free to find myself a position where my creativity and enthusiasm were valued.

+

I soon ended up sleeping in doorways and getting beat up by losers like me, only meaner.

+

On the plus side, I was still cute. At 19, I looked even younger. My naturally muscular physique looked if anything even better with dents and bruises and stains and torn textiles. I appeared chiseled and tarnished, yet innocent. I seemed harmless yet strong. Approachable yet iconic.

+

And approach they did.

+

As a horny omnivore, that worked for me.

+

If these guys wanted to buy me pretty clothes and feed me and generally bribe me to stick around, I was down. I didn’t need some spreadsheet to calculate the value of my services and I wasn’t shy about making them pay.

+

Finally, a profession I was well suited for! I was a ho. Yes, I called myself a ho. “Sex worker” is more dignified, which I was not.

+

Most of my sex worker buddies worried about getting beat up, raped, or killed. They were careful, but it still happened.

+

I was not careful. I got bad customers, sure, but I had a big, shiny knife, which I kept sharp; and I had skills. Which I did not mind using. After the first half dozen bloody messes I made, I earned a reputation. The other sex workers sent me their bad customers, which meant fewer and fewer bad ones for all of us. The vice squad probably knew about me and probably didn’t care.

+

Pretty soon, there were no more nasty, violent customers. I had my choice of places to stay. I was well fed. I didn’t have to work much.

+

In other words, I was bored.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Y + +ou can draw a straight line between what I did about this and how I ended up with Princess Babe.

+

To cure my boredom all I had to do was rewind. Backpedal. Return to my roots.

+

This time, I packed better stuff into a fancier backpack and set out walking in better looking, sturdier boots, a warmer jacket, cleaner and more durable pants. I sported a stylish and studly haircut. I was a vagabond – a chic vagabond.

+

What did I expect to happen?

+

My second day on the road, a beater 2015 Mustang, candy apple red on one side and Bondo® snot colored on the other side, pulled up beside me. “Dude!”

+

“Hey.”

+

“Need a ride? Something to eat?”

+

“Great! I been walking all day.”

+

“Get in!” The passenger side door opened. A lanky redhead with a Gandalf beard, his skinny body swimming in baggy, paint-splashed denim overalls, climbed out and then immediately climbed back in, folding himself into the back seat.

+

After I settled into the raggedy and still warm shotgun seat, redhead leaned forward and offered his hand.

+

“Rusty,” said the redhead.

+

“Cornichon,” I lied.

+

“Corny?”

+

“Core. Knee. Shone. Cornichon.”

+

“Okay, hey Cornition. Hey. That’s Slick at the wheel.”

+

Slick was anything but. His prodigious belly pressed against the steering wheel, but his arms and legs were regular. He smelled like he worked at a fish processing plant. His black hair was slicked back with some kind of pomade; I guessed that explained the name.

+

“Where you heading?” Slick growled. His voice matched his belly, not his arms and legs.

+

“Anywhere but Idaho.”

+

“Sounds good, dude. Let’s go.”

+

Slick stomped on the gas pedal and the Mustang shot forward, squealing its tires.

+

The thought crossed my mind that these guys might be heading for an epic crash on this winding, slick road at dusk. That is, if they didn’t pull over to rob me first.

+

I smiled. I wasn’t bored. This was more like it.

+

It was late in the day and getting dark fast. Rusty and Slick kept up a conversation of sorts by hollering obscenities over loud, bad metal music. They were passing a blunt, which they offered to me, but I could tell by the way it smelled I wanted nothing to do with it. I have standards when it comes to dope. “No thanks.”

+

“WHAT?”

+

“NO THANKS!”

+

Besides, it would help to be clear-headed when they tried to rob me.

+

I didn’t have to wait long. The end of the blunt seemed to be the signal. Slick flicked the roach out the window, then veered onto a muddy side road, really just a track between two overgrown orchards. Slick stopped the car, but he didn’t even turn off the engine before he tried to grab me by the front of my collar. I ducked easily and burst out the door, which Slick had not locked.

+

Slick heaved himself out of his seat, struggling a bit before he found his feet. Meanwhile, I had easily jumped the fence and was already sprinting between apple trees. When I glanced back, Rusty was unfolding his long body from the back seat through the passenger door I’d left open. Both guys roared. No words, just beardy testosterone noise. Why yell “STOP!” at someone who obviously has no interest in stopping?

+

When I emerged on the other side of the orchard, I found myself back on the highway. Surprisingly, the guys were not far behind me, wheezing but still running. Who knew they could keep up.

+

I sprinted across the road right in front of a line of hurtling trucks. The guys bellowed across the road at me but did not follow. I trotted along beside the road, putting distance between me and them. I didn’t see the guys gallop back to the ‘Stang, which was still running. I didn’t see them mount up and come after me.

+

I did hear them when they got close. They aimed for me. I let them get close, then jumped into the ditch. The car flew over me and rolled in the field beyond. It landed on its side, wheels spinning, after throwing Rusty and Slick free. They were barely visible as two still lumps at the end of the paths their bodies plowed through the wet soil.

+

I reached into the open window to shift the car into neutral. I waited for the wheels to go still, then I rocked the car until it whumped down in the dirt, right side up.

+

The Mustang was now scraped up on both the paint side and the Bondo side, but miraculously otherwise undamaged.

+

I got in. I shifted into first. I gentled the messed up muscle car out of its nest in the field, over all the bumps and through all the slick puddles, and I paused before I turned onto the highway.

+

Before I shoved my boot heel into the gas pedal, I looked in the rear view mirror. Idle curiosity, I suppose. The Rusty lump and the Slick lump were no longer there.

+

Oh shit.

+

I unsnapped the leather knife holder on my belt. I put the Mustang in park and got out. These fools. I wanted them out of my life permanently.

+

I marched up to where they had been lying. Only two piles of mud now. But there were footprints, which I followed into the orchard. I turned toward light I saw through the trees. I came out into a clearing. Sometime in the past, there must have been a barn here. Now there were only the remains of a roof, scattered and nearly covered with dirt and bindweed and dead leaves from past autumns. What was left of a few jagged foundations cast hard shadows in the moonlight.

+

And a big red barn door lay face down in the dirt. It looked fresher than the rest of the barn’s remnants.

+

The footprints led right up to the barn door.

+

The door had slid open recently, it appeared. The hinges were too clean, as were the parts previously covered by the closed door. I hopped up on the frame of the door and looked down into the dirt and weeds “inside” the door. No sign of the guys.

+

Strange. I walked around the perimeter of the clearing. I saw no more sign of Slick and Rusty.

+

Fine. They were gone. Probably went to hide under the side of the barn and died there. I hopped up and down on the barn door as hard as I could to make sure they were good and dead.

+

Whatever happened to the boys, it wasn’t my problem.

+

I felt free and smug walking back to the Mustang.

+

If I heard what sounded like Slick’s gruff voice hillbilly-hooting way off in the distance, it was probably my imagination. I had no fear, you know, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a vivid imagination.

+

I got back into that Mustang and stomped on that gas pedal and I never looked back.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +y attempted abduction was not the first felony on Slick and Rusty’s crime spree, I discovered. Sorting through the boxes Rusty had shared his seat with, I found packets of skunkweed. I know because it smelled like that foul shit the guys were smoking.

+

I sold that crap to some gullible teenagers. I managed to convince them it was laced with something potent. I urged the kids to take in its aroma. I encouraged them to interpret the questionable bouquet as something more interesting than it was.

+

Then I sold the car itself to some hollow-eyed addicts. I made up a story about how it was the car James Dean was driving when he died. They were far gone enough not to realize Mr. Dean had died 60 years before this car was made, not to mention this car was obviously no Porsche. They were eager to hand over the cash.

+

Which left me with enough to stay somewhere warm and quiet where I wouldn’t have to use my knife.

+

Also, auspiciously, there was Wi-Fi and it was safe to take a device out and use the internet without aforesaid occasion for knifeplay.

+

I used it to find customers. This time, in this different place, somehow I found my way to darker digital chambers. Here, the customers were looking for things that surprised me. What a delight!

+

People wanted digits removed. People wanted to be serviced by those who were differently configured by birth or surgery – missing jaws, extra limbs, things that were hollow where you’d expect them to protrude, and so forth. It made me quite red and swollen to read about these things although I, of course, had nothing of the sort to offer.

+

But there was one thing.

+

Some people wanted to play with partners who lacked fear. They wanted to find out how far they could push another human without the other tapping out from terror.

+

These people were looking for, to be succinct, me. These people were willing to pay me to have fun that was usually much more difficult to be had.

+

I left some responses. I didn’t expect much. Not many people could be after this particular kink, I thought. A response from a stranger like me would seem too dodgy, I thought. If I heard from anyone, I thought, it would turn out to be a vice bot.

+

Then I went and bought myself a nice, greasy dinner, and then I came back to my room and stuck needles in my cock until I came hard and then I went to sleep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + was wrong. When I woke up late the next morning, my inbox was crammed with replies. They weren’t all vice bots. I chose a few whose indecent proposals arrived in the form of old-fashioned full sentences and proper punctuation. Those would be the customers old and rich enough to properly compensate my favors.

+

One fellow was particularly zealous about meeting me. I like zeal in a customer, especially one who pays me in advance. He had no interest in a dick pic. He didn’t want to look at my buttocks or my face.

+

He wanted to talk to me, like, on the phone talk to me. (How old was he?) He wanted to talk about what kind of things scared me.

+

“What kinds of things scare you?” he asked. He sounded friendly, and not that old.

+

“Nothing,” I said, because it was the truth.

+

“Come on. How about spiders or snakes or alligators?”

+

“Nope.”

+

“Ghosts or zombies?”

+

“No.”

+

“Public speaking? Police? Buried alive?”

+

“None of that.”

+

“Water? Caves? Nuns? Heights? Flying? Knives? Thunder and lightning?”

+

“No.”

+

There was a pause.

+

“When can we meet?”

+

He told me to dress in black. He told me to wash myself thoroughly. He gave me an address.

+

It was a large, brick rambler. In 1955, this house would have been the most ostentatiously fashionable on the block. Today, it showed its age. Even in the dark, even with no lights turned on inside or outside it. Even at the end of a cul-de-sac of dark, boarded up, less once-fashionable two-stories and ramblers.

+

There was piano music coming out of the open door. Some tinkly Tchaikovsky nocturne, I think. The piano was out of tune, which suggested a person playing an actual piano, not a recording.

+

I smiled. This guy had put some thought into trying to scare me shitless. It wasn’t going to work, but I appreciated the effort.

+

I walked into the heavily dark interior. The piano music stopped. I couldn’t see anything. I moved forward cautiously. There might have been furniture, or not. There might have been people, or not. I put my hand on my knife, in case there were people.

+

My feet and knees encountered nothing. There was a breeze blowing from somewhere. I kept pacing slowly forward. Once or twice, something fabric-like brushed past my shoulder or face.

+

When I reached a wall, I felt along it toward the left, where most of the rest of the house would be. Probably there would be another room or a hall.

+

Now I heard moaning. Probably human. Or possibly a coyote arguing with the moon.

+

“Good,” I whispered to myself. “This guy is good.”

+

The further I went, the louder the moaning. I nearly tripped when my left foot found a stairway leading down to a sunken room of some sort. It felt like it was a bigger space. And this was definitely where the moaning was coming from.

+

Now the moaning had words.

+

“Cornichon,” it warbled.

+

It sounded like it was in pain. It sounded like it hated me. It went back to moaning, but occasionally threw in a “Cooooome! Come to meeeee,” and a “Help me, Cornichoooooon.”

+

“Help me find you,” I called out, hoping to get to the good part a little faster.

+

“I’m heeeeeere,” it screeched, then threw in some barks and howls. “Over here!”

+

I turned toward the sound, which did seem close.

+

Something leaped toward me and wrapped cold, taloned hands around my throat.

+

“Diiiiiieeeee!”

+

“Get off,” I grunted, struggling with whatever it was. It seemed to be some sort of animal. It had fur. It had ribs and four limbs. I could smell its breath, which was nasty.

+

I freed my knife from its sheath, I plunged the shaft as close as I could figure toward the core of my attacker.

+

“FUCKING OW!” it screamed and sprang away from me. “Are you insane?”

+

It was my customer, sounding much less friendly now.

+

I heard him stumble across the room. He found a switch and turned on a lamp.

+

He was dressed like a proper furry, except for the torn bridal gown. He had removed the wolf-looking headpiece and was dabbing with his claw-gloves at a little line of blood oozing through the waistline of the white gown.

+

“You okay?”

+

“What? Yes. I mean, you cut me a little bit, but mostly you got me in the padding in this thing. Why the fuck would you do that?”

+

“You were trying to strangle me?”

+

“You’re supposed to run and try to escape, asshole. Not kill me.”

+

“This was not what we arranged. Next time.”

+

“Fuck that. Get out of here.”

+

I never got hired by the wolf bride again, whatever his name was. But he didn’t stop payment, so it was all good.

+

After that, I always negotiated how far my customer wanted me to go. I would even pretend to be scared, if need be. We all make compromises to keep our jobs.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ne day the voice on the phone was husky, yet sort of high pitched except when it was not. It was unusual. It was unique. Also odd: the voice had a long and well-organized list. Customers were usually specific and intense, but needed some coaxing to come out with their needs. My heartbeat sped up – a rarity.

+

That was the day I met Princess Babe.

+

She wanted me to sit myself in a tub naked before she got there. She wanted me to notice I was being filmed from several angles, then she wanted me blindfolded. She wanted her helper to add other unnamed ingredients to the tub. She wanted me to stay perfectly still, regardless of how I felt about the other occupants of the tub. When I heard her high heels clicking against the tiles, she wanted me to start begging.

+

She wanted me to go along with anything she asked, but beg for escape. She wanted me to make her believe I was scared.

+

I’d get half up front, half after we were finished – as long as she was satisfied I was truly afraid.

+

More eagerly than usual, I showed up at the address and assumed the position. I lay in that tub in total darkness behind my blindfold for a long, long time. Hours, I think. My heart was racing. I wasn’t scared exactly, but I was legit excited.

+

The helper entered on sneakers of some sort. No clicking. Definitely not the customer I had been told to expect. Helper paused for a while before adding ingredients. Helper did, however, hold up some kind of metal container with the ingredients inside, which sounded restless and/or angry. Lots of clicking and whistling and rubbing against each other and the container.

+

Helper must have turned that container upside down on me all at once. The bugs – I couldn’t tell what kind – landed on my head and trickled down all over my naked body, then commenced to crawling over each other and all over me. They had hard but slimy bodies, whatever they were.

+

I genuinely wanted that shit off me, stat.

+

I wasn’t sure whether the bugs started biting me or whether that was my imagination. By then, my throat hurt because my heart was beating so hard inside it. Also, I may have been screaming in that hoarse whispery closed-mouth way you scream when you’re asleep and having a nightmare.

+

I wasn’t sure whether I was right side up or upside down, falling or lying still.

+

I needed to piss. I needed to shit.

+

I couldn’t get my breath but I didn’t dare open my mouth with so many bugs on me.

+

I heard the clicking heels.

+

I was trying hard not to squirm because I knew if I squished my pals I’d soon be awash in their sticky ichor, which sounded maybe even worse than the live bug rodeo romping all over me.

+

I was starting to scream out loud, despite my best efforts not to.

+

“Do you want out?” that husky voice asked.

+

I risked opening my mouth to say, “YES PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE, PLEASE PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS.”

+

“How do you feel?”

+

“GET ME OUT GET ME OUT GET ME OUT.”

+

“Maybe I will.”

+

My next reply didn’t come in words. I opened my mouth and screamed as loudly as I could, bugs be damned. It came out all shrill and wavering. This was not a sound I knew I was capable of making.

+

The voice laughed, which segued into a type of grunt I’ve heard women make when orgasm turns them into wild boars. While my customer was coming, she was scooping up handfuls of the bugs and dropping them on my sweaty head, which judging by the sound, made her come harder.

+

That was the moment I fell in love with Princess Babe.

+

Love was an emotion I had always assumed was the invention of some marketing hoodlum to sell us more anti-perspirant and uncomfortable underwear. I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know what she looked like. I didn’t know if I was about to die from multiple poison bug bites. All I knew was the world orbited around that shoe/voice person who was currently making me genuinely suffer.

+

“May I please see you please may I take the blindfold off please?”

+

“No.”

+

“May I please touch you please. If I can get the bugs off me and touch you then you won’t have any bugs so may I please?”

+

“No.”

+

She was saying no. She was also laughing. I was emboldened.

+

“I have never been scared before. Not really. I feel like I should pay you.”

+

She inhaled sharply. I did not hear her exhale.

+

“What did you say?”

+

“I said I’m truly scared. For the first time in my life. Thank you.”

+

I heard her get up and walk away a few steps, then stop. She walked around to the other side of the tub. She reached behind my head. She untied the blindfold.

+

She wore a red bra and panties and red high-heeled pumps. Her head was shaved. She had a close-cropped goatee. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Or still have.

+

“My name, my real name, is Charlie,” I said. “Nobody else knows it.”

+

“You can call me Princess Babe because that is my name,” she said, then she opened her mouth so wide I could see all of her teeth, and she barked out a laugh.

+

“You’re a mess,” she said. “Stand up. I’ll get my helper to brush the bugs off you.”

+

“Thank you, Princess Babe. Thank you for everything. I love you, Princess Babe.”

+

“Shut up,” she said as her helper started brushing the bugs off.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + know I am scared of two things now, and I am worried about one.

+

One thing I am scared of is that Princess Babe will leave me. She never says she won’t.

+

Another thing I am scared of is bugs. Not so much your everyday potato bug sauntering down the stem of a tomato plant; but bugs in masses that run toward me instead of away are terrifying. I am terrified. I shudder when I think about them.

+

Princess Babe thinks it is the cutest thing ever that I’m scared of bugs. Every time we get together, she brings a big jar of icky, buzzy, bitey, slithery, horrible, awful, terrible bugs. I know she can let them loose on me anytime. I know in fact that someday she will. Some days, that is; multiple times. I know she knows I am ready to beg for her to do it. To get it over with, for now. To feel the very thing I fear. Both, neither, I don’t know. Most of the time, though, my Princess Babe is satisfied to make me shudder. She sets down The Jar right next to me. Right by my face. Where I cannot possibly pretend it doesn’t exist.

+

Gods I love her.

+

But anyway, the thing I am worried about is that The Gherkin and The Dill King will find out I took their recipes and improvised and made them better. I worry that they will investigate where their dwindling profits are going and find brightly colored jars labeled with my Petit Cornichon brand. I worry that my brilliant success in the pickle world will bleed into the dull and antiseptic world of The Dill King and The Gherkin, that they will look up from their spreadsheets and finally see me now that I no longer want to be seen. And when they discover I make better pickles than they do and I am richer than they are, they might try to interfere with my beautiful, scary life. They might sue me for pickle plagiarism and I might lose.

+

Princess Babe might find me less suitable if I lose my fortune. Which is the worst that could happen. The only thing I fear besides bugs.

+

As for you lot? You can try to scare me, but you will fail. It has to be Princess Babe, and it has to be The Jar.

+

In the meantime, do not call me Charlie. Just don’t.

+

I still have my knife.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Le Petit Cornichon on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

L Swartz

+

+ + Author image of L Swartz + + + L Swartz (just L) intrepidly exposes fairy tale apostates, misanthropic dragons, and shapeshifting ex-lovers from a messy desk overlooking Lazarus Island, which appears and disappears in the drowned river mouth of the Nehalem River as it pours its sorrows into the Pacific Ocean. Indoors, L harbors 1 badass queer partner of 25 years, 4 crime cats, 1 sweet old dog, and 1 screamy parrot. Outdoors, L unapologetically feeds every DGAF corvid and raccoon in the county. L can be found online at Facebook, Twitter, substack, and BlueSky.

+

© L Swartz 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Tibor Szabo, Josh Hild, and Kjrstie.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-36/nancy-please.html b/issue-36/nancy-please.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e2d400d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/nancy-please.html @@ -0,0 +1,427 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Nancy, Please — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Nancy, Please

+

Steve Boseley

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Nancy, Please by +
+ + + + +

I + + hoped that things would improve when I got myself some education; some of the shop floor women are as thick as two short planks. Most, if I’m honest. The most exciting thing that ever happens to them is when Mandy or Rita or Susie or whoever gets to tell a story about when Gary from HR fingered them down stock aisle six. How do I know this? Well, they aren’t very secretive about it.

+

I tried to fit in. I talked about periods with the other women; I told the odd story about men that I had been with; I listened to the other women bitching about the men that had mistreated them. And about Gary, of course. I even took up smoking so I could join in the odd ciggie break, out the back through one of the fire exits, though it’s been so long since I lit up now my last half pack of fags are probably tubes of sawdust.

+

I suppose you could say there was the potential for some kind of camaraderie among us, but it was never enough for me. I had my sights set on something more.

+

Anyway, if my maths is correct – and I’m in the accounts department now, so it bloody well better be – most of the women over in B section have had their way with good old Gary, one way or another. He’s not even that much of a catch: twenty years old, not shaved yet, living-with-mum as he is.

+

But still, when your greatest achievement is telling your workmates that you sucked a man off behind the filter press, I guess the only way is up.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ow here I am, sitting in my office. Out of the single window in the far wall, I can see those same women on the shop floor spread out below me. I’ve got the radio on, tuned to something classical. I can almost close my eyes and be transported somewhere else in the world. Italy, I think; somewhere with water. I can imagine men singing on gondolas. I’m unsure if that’s what they do, but it’s my imagination so they sing. I say almost because the noise from beyond my office makes it impossible to truly imagine myself there; I can hear inane chatter and hyena-like laughter floating up from the women below. Some muttered words make their way to my ears, followed by a ripple of laughter – probably a joke at my expense. I told you, that’s what they’re like.

+

As if things weren’t bad enough already, the PA system crackles into life.

+

Having a public address system in a large factory isn’t particularly noteworthy. The problem with this particular PA system is that it’s shi–bad. What makes it bad are several equally bad things. The first is the quality; whenever somebody makes a call on the PA, it sounds like the person talking has a clarinet in their mouth, or one of those other reed instruments; it buzzes. The second is my boss. If there was ever a bigger prick than Gary’s – pardon my Italian – it’s Mark. Mark Belshaw. His voice is usually the one that comes over the PA. And third is that every time it’s my name that echoes across the factory floor: “Nancy, please could you come to reception”; “Nancy, please could you go to Mr Belshaw’s office”; “Nancy, please pick up line one”. And every time, the bloody women on the shop floor’ll chime in with a chorus of “Nancy, please!” as I make my way across the shop floor or the catwalk from my office to Belshaw’s.

+

Only it isn’t just that. Bad as that is, they insist on pronouncing it Narn-seee. It’s their twisted attempt at humour, poking fun at my upbringing, as if I act like I’m someone better than them. If not getting pregnant in my teens and not sleeping around makes me better than them, then I guess I am.

+

“Nancy, please could you take this month’s sales figures to Mr Belshaw’s office?” The PA crackles again. “Nancy, please could you take the sales figures to Mr Belshaw’s office as soon as possible?”

+

The thing is, I’ve got a phone. It’s sitting on the edge of my desk. I can touch it without even leaning forward in my seat. The ringer was working earlier today. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be working now. Why Belshaw insists on using the bloody PA system is beyond me. It was out of date when I was a girl; half the time I can’t hear what’s being said because of the crackling, or because some of the words get missed out; the other half it sounds like I am being spoken to through a drain pipe.

+

“Nancy, please could you—”

+

“I’m coming!” I set the chair spinning as I stand, stuff the paperwork into a foolscap folder, and pull the door handle harder than I would like. The door crashes against my office wall, rattling the glass in its tiny window. I bet the girls on the floor below heard that and are having a good laugh about it.

+

As I walk out onto the metal walkway above the shop floor, all the muttering and laughter stops. The factory is silent, save for the constant drone of the machines. I can hear every one of my footsteps clanging on the metal between my office and Belshaw’s.

+

Rising from below me, I can hear the beginnings of that fu–damned chant. It starts with one of the women whispering, followed by a round of schoolgirl tittering. Then two, then five, then all of them.

+

“Narn-seee, please!”

+

I stop, grab the handrail and squeeze it until my knuckles turn white. Everyone has their faces turned up towards me. Whoever spoke first is now silent, as is the rest of the floor; quite some feat for three hundred women to coordinate themselves like that. I hold that stare for thirty seconds or more before I continue on my way.

+

“Narn-seee, please!” Louder this time, and with more laughter.

+

I’m not turning again. It will serve no purpose. I know exactly what I’ll find: just a bunch of vapid faces staring up at me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +r Belshaw, my boss, wants to know if I have some figures for him. He barely lifts his eyes to acknowledge my entrance.

+

“Mark, can you not do that?” I say, as I perch on the seat across from him. He doesn’t like it when I call him Mark. Mr Belshaw is his preferred address. Do I care? No.

+

Mr Belshaw, Mark, is a big man. Fat, if you like. His favourite food is McDonald’s. He’s in his thirties, but his weight makes him look much older, perhaps in his fifties. His cheeks are cobwebbed with blood vessels and push his face up, turning his eyes into dark slits. The buttons on his striped shirt are doing far too much work.

+

He finally looks up and realises that I am sitting at his desk and wants to know what it is that he shouldn’t do. Well, at least he heard that.

+

“Call me on the PA. I hate that. I’ve got a phone.” Belshaw knows well enough that I have a phone. I think he does it because he knows it pis–annoys me.

+

He makes some lame excuse, saying that I could have been on the shop floor. I register his gaze dropping to my legs. I’m wearing a reasonable-length skirt, below the knee, but sitting down has made it ride up a bit. Not much, but I imagine his brain has filled in the blanks.

+

“You know I’m only going down there if I have to.” I’ve made several complaints about those women on the shop floor, but I’m not sure how much he cares. He probably thinks I’m still friends with them all.

+

“Did you even try the phone? Do you think you could try that first next time? Is that fair?” He’s still looking at my legs, which is becoming a bit uncomfortable. I pull the hem of my skirt towards my knees.

+

With considerable effort, Belshaw drags his gaze back up to my face. He has the nerve to ask me if I would go out to dinner. With him, he adds, to remove any confusion I may have.

+

“We’ve had this discussion before, Mark. I don’t think it would be appropriate.” That’s what I say, but what I think is that I can’t imagine a world in which I say yes to that question.

+

He tells me it’s just dinner, and his gaze drops back to my legs.

+

“Here are the figures you wanted.” I slap the foolscap folder onto his desk and stand up. “Please remember the phone next time. I’ll be in my office.”

+

After an awkward silence, he repeats his dinner invitation. He’s not going to drop it, is he? His stupid fat face looks up at me, eyes glittering, almost ready to drop a tear.

+

I want to tell him to, to eff-off, but he gives me a wage packet every month and I’m not sure it would go down too well. Instead, I give him my best I’m flattered but it’s never going to happen smile as I leave.

+

He mutters something about my backside under his breath as I close the door. I’m not going to look back.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +ll along the raised walkway I can see the women below from the corner of my eye. A few have their faces turned towards me, following my path along the walkway. I can’t hear it, but I have no doubt they’re whispering about me, probably something spiteful, bitchy.

+

Why they can’t just be happy for me is beyond me. I’m the only female member of the management team, something I worked hard for. It took two years on the shop floor and two more years of night school too to attain my qualifications before I made it into the offices. It’s a role that was never previously considered suitable for a woman. Women’s roles tended to be restricted to the shop floor, plus the cleaners and the kitchen staff. Perhaps, because I started on the shop floor, they’re all jealous of me.

+

Well, I say to hell with them. I put up with the crude jokes and lecherous eyes of fat Belshaw to get where I am today. Nothing is stopping any of them from doing the same. Perhaps, if there is, it’s because they don’t have a single brain cell between them.

+

I walk back a little faster than I should and slam my office door a little firmer than I would have liked, rattling the glass again. I flop down into the comforting leather embrace of my office chair and worry about the repercussions of rejecting another of Belshaw’s advances. And there will be repercussions: having to work late; coming in on the weekends; spending time on the shop floor; all things he knows I don’t enjoy; but I think I would enjoy a dinner date with Belshaw even less. I’m prepared to put up with most things to avoid dinner with Belshaw.

+

Outside I can hear muted laughter and chatter from the shop floor, maybe even the odd Narn-seee please, but that’s okay. I’m in here now and have the perfect solution for days like today, stored in the bottom drawer of my desk. I pull out the bottle of gin that’s been in there since Christmas. Company gift – probably picked by Belshaw in an attempt to get me drunk. I’ve never actually opened it. I keep it in there because… well, because you never know.

+

Now more than ever, I want to open it and take a drink. I spin the bottle around so I can read the label. Getting caught drinking on the job could end my career before it’s even started, but would a swallow really hurt? Just one mouthful?

+

“Nancy.” I jump and almost piss myself as the speaker crackles, and I knock the bottle over. It’s a damn good job I hadn’t opened it, there’d have been gin all over the desk and the floor. “Nancy, please could you collect some post from Mr Belshaw’s office?”

+

That pr–rrrrr. I only spoke to him ten minutes ago, explicitly asking him to use my phone. I pick it up and I can hear the dial tone; there’s nothing wrong with it.

+

Maybe if I’d agreed to dinner, or pulled my skirt a bit tighter, or higher up my thighs, that would have helped. Or maybe he’s just… a… prick.

+

“Nancy, please come to Mr Belshaw’s office.”

+

I give the bottle one last look. I know what will be waiting for me.

+

I’m not disappointed. I step back out onto the walkway and this time the call is not whispered – the shop floor is bouncing with the call of “Narn-seee please!”

+

I grab the safety rail with both fists, the faces looking up at me smiling and laughing, and I want to scream at them, I want to hawk up the biggest lugie I can muster and spit it down on them, but what I do instead is shout down at them, “I don’t even talk like that!”

+

The shop floor erupts with raucous laughter.

+

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?” My voice is edging towards a scream, but if it’s possible to hear me over the laughing and the sound of the machines they give no sign, and another round of “Narn-seee please!” springs up again.

+

I bang the door of Belshaw’s office against the wall, sending a chip of paint into the air. “What?” I snap, no intention of sitting down and exposing my thighs for him again.

+

He raises his eyebrows and asks who I think I’m speaking to.

+

I’ve no wish to lose my job, not even for this idiot. “Sorry,” I manage. “It’s them bloody women.”

+

He assures me it’s all done in jest, and chuckles as he speaks. He holds out a folder containing proofs of the new flyer, and asks if I could let him know my thoughts. He can’t wipe the smirk off his face. He knows what he’s doing.

+

“You couldn’t have given me this ten minutes ago?” I snatch the folder from his hand. I hope he gets a paper cut.

+

He asks me if I’ve had a chance to consider his dinner offer.

+

I try to hide my shudder. “In the last ten minutes? Yes, Mark, I have. And I still think it’s inappropriate.” This time I close his office door carefully, deliberately, in the hopes that it will worry him, although he’s probably just looking at my ass again.

+

I can’t be bothered with all that shop floor shit this time, so I run along the walkway, shoes clanging off the metal as I do, and slam my office door behind me. The gin is standing where I left it. I drop into my seat and open the folder that Belshaw has just given me.

+

It’s exactly what he said: a flyer. Nothing more than an A5 piece of copy paper with our company logo on it and some drivel about what we do. I’m not even sure what thoughts he thinks I could possibly have about it beyond exactly that: it’s drivel.

+

The flyer didn’t need looking at. Belshaw just wanted to embarrass me. I snatch up the gin. I’m bloody well going to, aren’t I? One will be okay, won’t it? Yes, I think it will, so I crack the cap, spin it so hard if goes flying, and since I don’t have a glass I take a drink straight from the bottle, the liquid searing my throat as it goes down. And as soon as I swallow, oh, the regret! If someone smells this on my breath…

+

I take another slug. Shit.

+

I go and find the cap, and once it’s back on I sit for some considerable time just cradling the bottle in my lap, time enough for the shadows in my office to lengthen. The flyer sits on the desk, ready for my assessment. It sucks. That’s my assessment. It’s a waste of time and money. I hope Belshaw got a good laugh out of running me across the factory on another bogus errand.

+

As if on cue, the PA system crackles into life.

+

“Mr Belshaw’s office if you would, Nancy, please.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +lmost before the crackle-hiss dies away, I’m out of my seat and ripping open the door.

+

“Don’t say it!” I scream at no one in particular. I lean over the walkway railing and point at the women below. “Don’t you fucking say anything!”

+

I run my finger over their distant upturned faces. At that moment, if the machines weren’t running, you could’ve heard a pin drop. I hold their gaze for several seconds before looking away. I can’t express quite how satisfying it is to hear the silence behind me. It’s as if all my lottery numbers came up. My heart skips a beat, and I battle the urge to whistle as I stalk towards Belshaw’s office.

+

These sorts of women only respond to being spoken to like that. They probably have husbands and boyfriends at home who shout “cook my dinner” and “clean the kitchen” and “don’t you fucking say anything” at them every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them got a smack too. If that’s all they understand then perhaps that’s how I’ll have to treat them.

+

I’m almost to the office door when someone calls out, “Narn-seee, please!”

+

There’s a round of laughter and seconds later they’re all chanting, it’s like something you’d hear at a football match, “Narn-seee-please, Narn-seee-please!”

+

“Fuck off!” I yell back at them and offer my middle finger as punctuation.

+

I don’t give Belshaw a chance to speak as I tear open his office door. “Can you hear that?” I demand, pointing back towards the braying harpies behind me. The fat fuck is trying not to smile, but like everything else, he’s not very good at it and his lips twitch. “If it keeps happening, I’m going to make a formal complaint.”

+

His smile is gone in an instant, and he asks who I would make a complaint against.

+

“Against them women.” He looks over my shoulder, pretending to not be entirely sure who I’m referring to. “Against you.” He places a hand on his chest in a you surely can’t mean me gesture. “Yes, you. I’ve asked you not to call me on that system, but you keep doing it.”

+

He informs me that’s the way it’s always been done. He says I shouldn’t expect special treatment just because I have my own office now. He tells me he needs me to stay late tonight. Apparently he wants to look at some figures. To sweeten the deal, he says he has a bottle of wine, and we can even order in Chinese food.

+

Looking at the thin smile on his fat face turns my stomach. I can imagine the figure he wants to look at. I feel my shoulders slump and my cheeks begin to burn.

+

“I can’t tonight, Mark,” I say. “I’ve got a thing with a friend that I can’t get out of.”

+

He brushes past my excuse, telling me not to worry, tomorrow night will be just fine, but this is important work stuff, Nancy, and so he’s going to have to insist. Some business won’t wait.

+

He may as well say, Dinner, whether you like it or not.

+

He winks at me and gets back to shuffling papers on his desk. I guess that’s me dismissed. I walk to the door, expecting him to call me back at any moment, and instead he tells me I look good from behind.

+

I look back, and I’m shaking, but he’s already got his head down. Hard at work.

+

Before I pull the door closed behind me, I take the key from the lock, and then I put it in and turn it from the outside, sealing him in his office, with his wine and his paperwork and his fat little daydreams of me.

+

I go back to my office and collect my coat, my bag, and my bottle of gin, and then I close the door behind me and I hop down the steps to the shop floor, all accompanied by the usual chorus. The laughter stutters when I reach the floor and I pick my way between them and their machines, looking this one in the eye, then that one, then those. It picks up when I’ve passed them, but I’m not bothered, they can laugh all they want. I need to get moving, because some business won’t wait.

+

There’s storage in the back. Aisles of shelves with replacement parts surround the machines on the shop floor. If a machine goes down, the knock-on effect on the rest of the production line can be catastrophic, and these machines break a lot. But I’m not interested in productivity, I’m interested in getting away from the voices behind me, getting on with what needs doing.

+

The aisles seem to go on forever, and I smile despite the situation. I wonder if Gary from HR had any of the girls down here. There is a reasonable chance he did. The deeper I get into the factory, the more the noise behind me recedes. I can still hear the constant drone of the machines, but thankfully the women’s endless prattle is gone.

+

I count the aisle numbers because I know exactly where to find what I need. I see them now. Damn, there’s only three. I’d like four, but I think I can make it work. I give a final look around to make sure I’m alone down here then I pick up the three big chains and throw them over my shoulder. The padlocks are here too, and I grab them as well.The first emergency exit is three aisles over. It takes me seconds to reach it.

+

There’s a part of me that knows what I’m doing is wrong, but it feels like that part is not connected to the rest of me. I loop one of the chains through the push-bar handles and snap a padlock in place. It’s just a short trip around the wall until I reach the second. This one is easier than the first, my brain barely registering a protest as I wind the chain into place. The third is easier still.

+

When I reach the final exit, I look around before removing my cardigan. One of the forklift trucks moves backwards and forwards down one of the aisles. The driver is engaged in an animated conversation with someone I can’t see. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is he’s not looking at me.

+

I spread my cardie on the floor, fish the bottle from my bag, and I pour half the gin over it. The aisles here are loaded with tarpaulins, some fresh, some used and grimy with oil; the rest of the booze I slosh onto the nearest of them. In the bag I find my last old pack of fags and, yes, there’s the disposable lighter stashed inside. It’s almost empty, just a corner drip of fluid at the bottom of the translucent yellow plastic.

+

I thumb the wheel.

+

Spark.

+

Fire.

+

I light the dusty cigarettes one by one and flick them at the tarpaulins, then touch the flame to my cardie and the gin-stinking material catches light with a puff. I kick the smouldering bundle and it slides under a wooden pallet holding several large cardboard boxes.

+

I wait until I see the first wisps of smoke, then push through the final emergency exit into the bright sunlight.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the brightness of the afternoon, then I spot my car in the car park. I want to run, but resist the urge. I don’t want to attract any attention, and besides, it will be several minutes for a real blaze to take hold.

+

I’m reaching for my keys as the fire alarm sounds. Fire drills have been run in this factory before – not many – and I can imagine most of the office staff cursing lost time. They’ll be gathering their things, finishing off their cups of tea, pulling on jackets and trudging towards the exits. The women on the shop floor, however, will be glad of a chance to get away from the hot machines and out into the sunlight, so I can imagine them being quite excited.

+

Climbing into my car dulls the noise of the building alarm. As I start the engine, I can see people begin to emerge from the front entrance. Some look mildly irritated, none particularly panicked. That will change when they realise the women on the shop floor can’t get out because the emergency exits are blocked. All but one, anyway.

+

I pull out of my parking space and drive towards that remaining exit. The doors are still closed when I get there, so I nudge my car towards them, stopping just before my bumper makes contact.

+

I turn off the engine. Soon I’ll have to run, but I’m going to sit here for a moment, just to make sure. The people coming out through the front are showing a bit more urgency now. Shirts and ties and smart business attire: management and admin staff, no shop floor people. I can’t see Belshaw, but unless he smashed his window and jumped out, he’ll still be wondering why his office door won’t open.

+

I wonder what that fat face will look like as it melts. Or perhaps he’ll get out, perhaps there’s a second key. I’ve no way of knowing. I can only hope that he hasn’t. The thought of his face as he tries the handle will keep me smiling for a long time. If nothing else, he won’t have to worry about this month’s sales figures for much longer.

+

There’s a dull whump as something explodes. I wind down the window and look up: dark, oily smoke is drifting from the vents in the factory roof. I can hear screams from inside.

+

Right in front of my bonnet, the twin doors of the emergency exit pop open – by about ten centimetres, until they hit my bumper with a satisfying clunk. I can hear people rattling the door in front of me, but I don’t think they’ll push my car out of the way in a hurry.

+

I open the driver’s side door and step out.

+

Arms, hands, and fingers reach through the gap between the exit doors, wide-eyed faces peering past them with desperation. I know those faces, and they know me.

+

“Nancy!” calls a familiar voice, and for once they say it right. “Nancy, please!”

+

Soon it’s a veritable chorus.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Nancy, Please on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Steve Boseley

+

+ + Author image of Steve Boseley + + + Steve Boseley is a writer from Nottingham, UK, living with Multiple Sclerosis and typing with his one good finger. His short fiction generally falls into the horror genre and has been included in several online magazines, most recently Schlock! Horror and Creepy Podcast.

+

© Steve Boseley 2023 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: arty and Pexels.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-36/praedial-larceny.html b/issue-36/praedial-larceny.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e0875c3c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/praedial-larceny.html @@ -0,0 +1,459 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Praedial Larceny — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Praedial Larceny

+

Wayne McCray

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Praedial Larceny by +
+ + + + +

I + +t is a humid Saturday. Mzimu Tennison has been in motion since before daylight. Now at his third stop, a backroad somewhere in Isola, Mississippi. He unloads two yellow wheelbarrows and several shovels off the bed of his spaceship silver, mud-caked, 2018 Limited 4WD Super Duty F-450 pick-up. The tools get placed behind the seven large grain bins. His task now done, he jumps back into his truck and maneuvers around mounds of crushed gravel, then motors down a winding unpaved road, kicking up brownish-red dust while passing endless fields of soybeans.

+

Mzimu soon reaches 49-West. His heavy foot rarely lifts up or off the gas pedal for the brake, unless necessary. Cosmic jungle music blasts through lowered windows while he ignores the posted speed limit. Behind the steering wheel, his head bounces with the beat. He finally turns left onto State Highway 3, a narrow, two-lane blacktop which goes straight through the Township of Moorhead and past Mississippi Delta Community College. His road view isn’t much to look at – simply an extensive, dull, and flat landscape unless one includes the occasional cluster of small forests in the distance.

+

The straightaway soon becomes a bend and there the town of Moorhead and the junior college appear, ending all the landscape monotony. It is a beautiful but small campus, with a green stretch of road graced by rows of historical street lamps and a succession of old and new red brick buildings – some more elaborate than the others – lined with colorful flowers, pecan trees, and magnolias. Since it is the weekend, the sidewalks lack the usual foot traffic. It doesn’t take long for him to cruise through the campus and across the railroad tracks marking the boundary.

+

Mzumi rolls up to the town’s only traffic light. He looks right and notices a beat-up, rust-colored Toyota pick-up truck parked roadside in a vacant grass lot, watermelons on the tailgate. One of them lays split open, seedless, glowing bright red. Alongside it is seated a black couple in lawn chairs underneath a small patio tent, the woman working a church fan hard. Before them, two long foldable tables with a variety of garden vegetables neatly laid out.

+

Something about it and them doesn’t feel right; so much so, his gut tightens.

+

Mzumi doesn’t stop, but slows; he looks upon them and their set-up and contemplates doubling-back to go confront them; the Double Quick (a Mississippi version of Circle-K) parking lot is right there. Instead, he decides against his intuition and keeps going. Why waste his words?

+

US Highway 82 is up ahead and his dashboard clock reads 8:03 am, so he makes a quick stop at the Dollar General. Inside, Mzumi is surprised. Unlike the others, this store isn’t in utter shambles. Merchandise isn’t blocking or laying in the middle of the aisles. The place looks professional, clean, and orderly. Maybe, this is what it is supposed to look like before shoppers run in and out of it. He crouches and grabs a yellow handbasket and begins shopping for junk food.

+

A short and plainly-built brown girl comes in, resting a fairly fat baby on her left hip, and starts talking freely with the cashier – likely a friend. The young mother’s free arm moves about emphatically, cell phone in hand. Mzumi, at first, believes she is an upset migrant farm worker, based on her speech, the bandana headwrap, dirty hoodie front and denim jeans from all the constant hand brushing. The dirt stains even appear on her child, her backside, both knees, and shoes.

+

“Anna Marie!” says the cashier, taking a deep whiff. “Girl? You smell like you look and what is that child chewing on?”

+

“A piece of cucumber.”

+

“Cucumber? You don’t have nookie?”

+

“I lost it somewhere on this farm, picking vegetables,” Anna Marie replies. “I tried looking for it, but it was too dark.”

+

“Picking vegetables?” says the cashier. “For money?”

+

“No! Even though I could use some. Girl, don’t you know? Grocery prices have gone through the roof and food stamps don’t buy as much anymore. I mean, it’s bad out here.”

+

“Ain’t that the truth.”

+

“And you know I ain’t lying. Have you been to the County Market, Shoppers Value, or Wal-Mart lately?”

+

“I know, I know.”

+

Shortly thereafter, he is standing in line. Both women continue to chat about high grocery prices and being black and broke. They talk around Mzumi until the cashier finally pauses their discussion so she can perform her actual job. Anna Marie steps aside, readjusting her hip-cradled baby. Mzumi comes forward and pays for his Haribo gummy worms, Gatorade, Hershey chocolate bars, Jack Links’ beef jerky, and NTense energy drinks. All the while, the child is fixated on him, her brown eyes bright and wide with owl curiosity. Mzumi smiles back then collects his bagged items.

+

“Thank you,” he says. “You ladies take care.”

+

“You too,” says the cashier.

+

“I’m trying,” says Anna Marie, readjusting the baby again.

+

The sliding doors open and Mzumi exits.

+

Heading back to his pick-up, he takes a peek inside the young mother’s car – the only one in the lot besides his – and there in the back beside the baby’s car seat sit four grocery bags, full of vegetables.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +arlier, back at the patio tent another conversation starts.

+

Willie Mae: “Was that who I think it was?”

+

“Yep, that was him,” says Edgar.

+

“What is he doing over here?”

+

“They say the man manages another man’s farms.”

+

“I don’t care about that,” she says. “But did you see what he did?”

+

“What’d he do? I didn’t see anything.”

+

“Blind as always,” she says. “God wasted his sight on you.”

+

“That ain’t what you said,” he says.

+

“So they worked on that day,” she says. “What about now?”

+

“I’m not studying him,” Edgar says. “None whatsoever.”

+

“He might come back and say something.”

+

“And so what if he does, then what?” He says, “He can’t do anything. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing, okay.”

+

Right then, a clean white Mercedes G 550 SUV rolls up and captures their attention. The driver’s side door opens and a broad-butt, big Afro, dark skin girl steps out in her blue and white sorority colors. She strides towards them, hips swinging fluidly, eyes on what they have on display.

+

“Good morning,” she says.

+

“Morning,” they both reply.

+

Willie Mae is a short, plum-face, heavy-set woman, who now sits up and begins looking at the girl up and down.

+

“You look like somebody I know. Where’re you from?” she asks.

+

“Itta Bena.”

+

“Are you one of Jessup Wilbur’s daughters?” Wille Mae asks. “You kind of favor him.”

+

“Yes ma’am. That’s my daddy,” she replies. “I’m the oldest.”

+

“The one that went away. Sarah, right?” says Willie Mae.

+

“Yes ma’am.”

+

“You look just like him. How is he? I hadn’t seen him for a while.”

+

“He’s fine,” says Sarah. “Just getting old and as stubborn as ever.”

+

“That’s him, alright,” says Edgar. “Now Willie, let that girl shop.”

+

Sarah shops, but their conversation continues. They talk about things which didn’t concern them, about their peoples, Mississippi in general, and whether she misses home and prefers Louisiana. Sarah gives them a sort of smile along with respectful answers; but finally, after much friendship and giving the items more than the adequate sniff and eye-ball test, she gets to the point: “Is it my imagination they look and smell so fresh?”

+

“Not at all. Straight from the earth,” says Edgar, a skinny, sun-darkened man with striking features. His face is so narrow and long his wide nose dominates it. “Hand pick them this morning.”

+

“I can still feel the dirt,” Sarah says. “So how much for the bunches of turnip and mustard greens?”

+

Edgar gives a nice price.

+

“And the okra?” she asks.

+

Satisfied, she opens and reaches into her purse and money exchanges hands. Willie Mae puts the church fan in her opposite, reaches down into a green reusable tote bag, and hands her husband a few old and wrinkled plastic grocery bags. Edgar baggages Sarah’s produce. Turnips go into one, mustards in another two, as well as the prepackaged bags of purple and green okra.

+

“Those watermelons over there, they look sweet.”

+

“Thump certified,” says Edgar.

+

“I’ll take one.”

+

Edgar grabs the prettiest and biggest, then takes hold of all the bags, and follows her to the car. She presses the key remote which pops open the rear door and there he carefully loads them beside her luggage and other foods and items likely gathered from her visit. She thanks him and closes the rear door.

+

“I’ll let my daddy know we met and how you asked about him,” says Sarah. “And next time I am in town, I’ll let you know how my greens turn out.”

+

“You do that,” he says. “I still suggest smoked pigtails or ham hocks for your flavoring?”

+

“I know, but I prefer smoked turkey-necks,” she replies. “Less fat.”

+

“I never ate them like that,” Edgar replies.

+

“It’s healthier,” she says.

+

“To each his own.”

+

Edgar walks away and watches her slowly drive off. The black girl honks and waves goodbye through the window, driving toward the Junior College, and back to the State of Louisiana. He sees her personalized plate – Z WMN – then returns to his set-up and straightens his produce on both tables after a thorough inspection.

+

“Nice young lady,” says Willie Mae. “From good people.”

+

“Yeah, she is,” Edgar replies, now sitting down in his lawn chair. “But I don’t know about putting smoked turkey necks in greens.”

+

“Everybody ain’t high on the hog like you.”

+

“That’s because they don’t know what they’re missing.”

+

Willie Mae shakes her head, then uses the lull to pivot back to their earlier discussion. “That again,” says Edgar, crossing his legs, and lighting a cigar. After a few puffs and exhales, he eventually speaks his mind, ending the one-sided dialogue. “Alright already. So what’s he going to do, huh?”

+

“He might go home.”

+

“You said that already, but I doubt it. Not him and besides, that church group won’t show up for another hour or two. They got time.”

+

“That’s what you say, but you didn’t see him read us.”

+

“You’re looking to much into nothing,” says Edgar. “But, hey, if you want to call them, call them.”

+

“Don’t get uppity with me,” says Willie Mae. “The man saw us and I just got this feeling he ain’t going to let it pass.”

+

“If it’ll make you feel better,” says Edgar, “then call them. Just know we won’t have as much to sell to folks if you do that.”

+

Willie Mae dials out and a voice answers on the other end. She tells her son they better get-gone and do it now. “Just do what I say,” she says. “Take whatever you’ve picked and get out.” She hangs up and drops the phone in her lap, frustrated by the stubbornness coming from her eldest child.

+

“I swear woman, you’re so damn scary,” says Edgar. “That’s what you is – scary.”

+

“Shut up and do what you do best.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

E + +xtraterrestrial funk blasts. Mzimu is back behind the steering wheel, chewing on gummy worms. His open power drink in the cup holder. He speeds down US Highway 82. Already several miles east of Moorhead, somewhere in Leflore County, he turns onto another county dirt road and arrives at another collection of grain bins.

+

Mzumi parks next to a white Ford F-150 extra-cab pick-up truck, as dirty as his. He observes the propane man on the premises, refilling four huge gas tanks, so he lifts his arm and whistles. The truck driver takes off his baseball cap and waves it. Mzumi looks upward. There, he finds his crew atop of the grain bin, hard at work. He strides to and up the spiral staircase and across the lengthy catwalk until he reaches them and there hands each guy a bottle of Gatorade and his favorite junk food from the bag.

+

“Thanks Bwana,” says Embian.

+

“Same here,” says Hendrik. “And good morning.”

+

“That’s what’s up, Ghost,” says Johannes.

+

Mzimu isn’t overly fond of the description, but accepts it. Many know him as the whitest white man who isn’t a white man. A brawny fellow with skin drained of color, thick pink lips, broad nose, reddish-blond hair, and sharp hazel eyes. The given nickname coincides with the arrival of these South Africans, Afrikaners familiar with his kind. Several years back, Pennybaker Farms, the mom and pop farm he works for, used the H-2A visa program to hire them to come to the Deep South to do the seasonal farm work for eight to ten months, labor once done by local black Mississippi farmers and field hands across the Delta. And when these coevals first meet Mzumi, Johannes, now a longstanding migrant worker, said what the rest thought and called him Ghostface, and it stuck.

+

“Any problems with the dryer?” asks Mzimu.

+

“None,” replies Johannes. “None whatsoever.”

+

“How about the seals?”

+

“Nice and tight,” says Embian.

+

“I figure in another two months, give or take,” says Hendrik, “these soybeans should be dried and ready for the market.”

+

“Good,” says Mzumi.

+

As the day brightens, the humidity thickens, and sunlight bounces off the silo’s dome. Mzumi dons a pair of cheap sunglasses to protect his vision. He further informs them of the tools left at the Isola grain bin facility and the work required there. “Tomorrow, you two take the backhoe from the shop and use it to spread out the crushed gravel. Firm up and level as much of the ground as possible.”

+

“And the loading dock?” Hendrik asks.

+

“It too,” says Mzumi.

+

From up high, they take a moment to enjoy their cheap breakfast and look out on the carved-up landscape, irregular in pattern and shades of brown and green, but meant for agriculture. In the distance, Hendrik’s sharp eyes spot a two-vehicle caravan. A strange sighting since this less driven backroad is used mainly by farmers. To see non-farm equipment on it begs questions. Soon both vehicles cross the railroad tracks, and as they near their make and model become evident. The lead one is a discolored police-auction Crown Victoria, full of passengers. The other, behind it, an old Chevy C-10 pick-up truck. A black woman looks up through the passenger window and points at the grain bin. They suddenly sped up. Mzumi notices this, including their haul: what looks like a truckload of watermelons.

+

“Sonofabitches,” says Mzumi.

+

He immediately thinks about the girl holding her baby. She picked just enough for a week’s worth of dinners. Although displeased, he applauded her decency. Not that black couple though. Nor these folks in the two-car caravan. Theft is underway, but he wants to know for certain, because if true, it must come to an end by any means.

+

“Bwana, what’s up?”

+

“I got to go,” says Mzumi. “Just finish up here. I need to go look into something.”

+

Mzumi leaves fast. He hurries back across the catwalk, bounds down the spiral staircase, then gets into his truck and hauls ass. The South Africans look on with awe, their eyes alive yet confused, but quite impressed by his agility, particularly at how fast he descended from grain bin roof to truck to driving across the railroad tracks. What they don’t know is Mzumi’s home isn’t far, not for the country, only minutes away, located somewhere near Berclair, a fertile-rich township with two stop signs and a population of 1629.

+

He doesn’t slow down even with the threat of skidding out of control. Rocks and dust fly everywhere. Occasionally, an insect meets its demise on the dusty windshield, leaving behind a mucus splat. And soon, up ahead, amorphous shapes become solid forms. Unfamiliar cars line the gravel road in front of his 11-acre garden. A garden he set-up this year at the behest of the Catholic Church and their Feed the People program. Mzumi slams on the brake so hard it turns the truck sideways.

+

“Look at these motherfuckers,” he says, jumping out, music still booming and dust floating around him. “They’re in it like it’s theirs.”

+

Scattered throughout his garden, uninvited bodies. Some stand and look up, and come forward, but others don’t. Those who show up, black men and women alike, of varying ages, plead with him. To convince him to let them keep what they picked along with promises they will never return. Mzumi refuses. He tells them to unload it all and to go and go quickly, which they do. And not being gun-shy, he retrieves his handgun and fires it skyward: “Everybody out!”

+

He pulls the trigger again, again, and again. Gunshots send the remaining black folks scrambling as fast as possible for their cars. He flashes his weapon often, making sure they depart empty-handed and until they all clear out. He then walks sections of his garden and takes inventory. Everywhere he looks, he finds trampled rows and theft left undone. Plastic laundry baskets and five-gallon buckets sit full of red onions, mustard and turnip greens, hot peppers, carrots, okra, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, peanuts, and beans. Nearly every watermelon is gone.

+

Epithets flow of the foulest kind. Mzumi curses all the way back to his truck. And when he gets there, coming at him is a white passenger van. Close behind it, an old orange 1970 Dodge truck with a long trailer in tow, hauling a bunch of tied down large blue Coleman ice coolers. He glances at his watch and sees the time.

+

Two nuns exit the drivers’ side, Sister Rita and Sister Donald, and a diverse color of latinas follow them. Parishioners dressed in varying kinds of long-sleeve tops, their faces hidden by scarves except for the eyes, in denim jeans, galoshes, donning various brim headwear, and all wearing some kind of Camelbak. Yellow and blue rubber gloves hold black picking buckets. They come every four days to pick crops from his flourishing garden. As long as they provide him a bushel, the church kitchen keeps the rest. A bargain beneficial for them both, until now.

+

“Mr. Tennison,” says Sister Rita. “I didn’t expect to see you out here.”

+

“Me neither,” says Mzumi.

+

“Is something wrong?” asks Sister Donald, alarmed at the sight of a fisted handgun and looking at the baskets and buckets lying in the road.

+

“Kind of,” he says. “I ran off a bunch of low-life niggers.”

+

“Oh my Lord,” replies Sister Donald.

+

“I’ll notify the sheriff,” says Sister Rita, reaching for her phone.

+

“Don’t bother,” says Mzumi. “I got something else in mind.”

+

“I pray it doesn’t require a gun, does it?” asks Sister Donald.

+

“It won’t,” he replies.

+

Nonetheless, Sister Donald and Rita’s eyes never avert from his left hand. To allay their discomfort, Mzumi puts his handgun on the front seat. The truck is shut off and door locked.

+

“Hold up,” he says, calling for the ladies before they spread out and go into particular sections of his garden. “Ladies! You can take these, they’re yours,” pointing out what is in the road. “Also, any stray basket or bucket you find out there, please bring them with you, okay? Because after today, don’t bother coming back. So I suggest you pick as much as possible for as long as possible.”

+

Sister Donald says: “What? Why do you say that?”

+

“I can’t stand nigger-shit,” says Mzumi. “And this is what this is. It makes me wonder how long they’ve been at it.”

+

“Okay,” says Sister Rita. “Yes. Theft is bad, but it isn’t the worst sin. Maybe they’re hungry and desperate.”

+

“Hungry? Desperate? C’mon now, don’t be naive,” says Mzumi. “I know what that looks like and that’s not it. Greed is what I chased off, fucking greed, plain and simple.”

+

“Language,” says Sister Rita, “language.”

+

“Damn that and damn them,” says Mzumi. “But I got something for their black asses.”

+

“That doesn’t sound very Christian,” says Sister Donald.

+

“It sure doesn’t,” says Sister Rita.

+

“I got the devil in me now,” says Mzumi. “My mind is made up.”

+

“I think you should reconsider, whatever it is,” says Sister Rita.

+

“I suggest you ladies get after it,” says Mzumi. “Pick as much as you can.”

+

Albeit displeased and after much debate, they all go off into his garden and start picking. So for the next several hours, twelve latinas pick non-stop, as fast and as much as possible. Meanwhile, both Sisters and two other latinas stay roadside. They collect, carry, and dump bucket after bucket of vegetables into blue ice coolers capable of holding at least two bushels of produce. And today, they must try and fill up all twenty four coolers. Something they haven’t done since the first day, almost two months ago.

+

With the ladies in the field, Mzumi drives off to his open-front barn shed. There, he climbs into one of his John Deere tractors, cranks it, and then attaches its chisel plow. Pretty soon, the green monster is parked where the garden and gravel road meets. Its appearance attracts many eyes. He climbs out and sits on its rooftop. And while time slips into the past, he thinks about what it took to make this garden possible and to turn it into a charitable donation. He also makes some calls, informs Pennybaker Farms and his South African crew on why he is taking the remainder of the day off, and receives their pity and outright disgust.

+

Hours later, at three o’clock, a reedy whistle blows and a nun yells, “Quitting time, ladies.”

+

It is hotter and more humid than earlier. Sweaty, exhausted, and dirty, latinas rise up and come out of the garden. They emerge one by one, buckets in both hands, a slow procession toward the passenger van and truck. There they unload what they have. Insofar, until there isn’t any more room left. A conversation ensues on what to do with the extras buckets, and Sister Donald suggests sitting them on their laps.

+

Right then, Mzumi rides up in his John Deere and climbs down. He looks at their fatigued faces and asks, “Did you get it all?”

+

“As much as we could, Mr. Tennison,” says Sister Donald.

+

“Good.”

+

“So that’s what you’re going to do, huh?”

+

“Yep.”

+

“I still don’t agree,” says Sister Donald. “This is going to hurt so many people, including the Church.”

+

Mzumi doesn’t care. His mind is made up. He tells them they better double check their straps, which they do. The nuns and latinas file back into their vehicles, saddened by the current situation. Mzumi watches them drive down the dirt road until they disappear.

+

“It’s for the best,” he says to himself, then climbs back into his tractor and begins chopping up the entire garden. From one end to the other, north and south, east and west, multiple times, turning over the earth until it is thoroughly plowed under.

+

And when done, perfectly fresh fruits and vegetables are buried in the soil. The garden is ruined. Mzumi makes sure. Produce is strewn all over, smashed and cut up. The gravel road is colored in red, green, and yellow skin and white flesh.

+

The air and dug up earth give off a strong sweet fragrance. But in time, the food will decompose. A rotten stench will follow. Mosquitoes, flies, wildlife, and stray animals will come. “Let them feast,” he says aloud. He rather them than those thieving lowlifes.

+

Even though the idea of destroying so much food hurts, it’s necessary. Inches given become miles. Sure, many will be upset. Some might point fingers and assign blame. Mzumi doesn’t give a fuck. “Talk to the greedy,” he will say. “Don’t ask me.”

+

He then drives his tractor back to the shop.

+

Along the way, he starts singing.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Praedial Larceny on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Wayne McCray

+

+ + Author image of Wayne McCray + + + Wayne McCray is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2022 and 2024, and a 2023 Best of the Net nominee. His short atories have appeared in Susurrus, The Hooghly Review, Afro Literary Magazine, Bandit Fiction, The Bookends Review, Chitro Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, Drunk Monkeys, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Ilinix Magazine, Isele Magazine, Malarkey Books, The Ocotillo Review, Ogma Magazine, Pigeon Review, Roi Faineant, The Rush Magazine, Sangam Literary Magazine, Swim Press, and Wingless Dreamer. He works diligently from his book-laden junk room.

+

© Wayne McCray 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Andre Hunter and AndreyC.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-36/short-reviews-crime-fiction-in-2023.html b/issue-36/short-reviews-crime-fiction-in-2023.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fe91e7bb --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/short-reviews-crime-fiction-in-2023.html @@ -0,0 +1,322 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2023 by +
+ + + + +

T + +he end of an issue, but not of an era – also the end of our first year of regular non-fiction offerings, which will certainly not be the last. Our guest reviewers have now covered all four book-length corners of our genre interests; in line with this column’s mission and the issue’s thematic focus, I’ve scoured less high-profile segments of the crime publishing scene to add a very restrained mere three to the seventeen shorts I’ve previously recommended elsewhere for a nice round twenty.

+

The Folkie by Steve Cashel appears on the site of Close to the Bone Publishing, a small UK press with a crime fiction bent. In it, a trio of small-time Scottish thugs assemble at the end of their small-time day jobs to track down and assault a small-time boxer (using, “appropriately”, in the case of our supermarket worker slash gangster wannabe, a broken-off box cutter). They go on the hunt with a list of their target’s preferred drinking spots to guide them, but only encounter much live-music of the folk variety, and eventually their frustrations start to get the better of them… with consequences. A good little story, again reminding that there are more varieties of crime than just the big showy ones.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he second story to get a mention here doesn’t appear in a magazine, in fact. Although not previously on my radar, Reedsy seems to be a writer’s app or self-publishing business or author resource and community site, part of that including some pay-to-play contests – which last bit, ehhhh, isn’t my cup of tea to be frank. And yet their first contest winner of 2023, based on the prompt “Write a story in the form of a list of New Year’s resolutions”, is pretty good stuff.

+

Resolute by Saeda Rose contrasts a list of perky give it a go! self-improvement pledges with the Very Bad Time that is had by the pledger who set out to satisfy the first of them; subsequent goals provide sometimes ironic preludes to the continuing action. The story is written in the tricky-to-do-well Second Person tense, meaning that pledger is you, the narrative often presenting as if a sequence of instructions which the reader/protagonist follows. 2ndP POV is a style that’s become almost its own trope, a thing some people really don’t click with (and “list fic” is another, in fact), but I’d say this is an example of the thing done well (both things done well, if it comes to that).

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +y final rec appears on ToughCrime.com, which bills itself as “a blogazine of crime stories and occasional reviews”. As stated several times now, I’ve tried to steer clear of speculative fiction through this entire issue, but this story actually brings us close to breaking that commandment, with either a bit of the supernatural or a bit of the science fictional, if not actually both.

+

In Dollar Fortune, Archer Sullivan deftly paints the commonplace and the unusual of small town American settings: universals, like kids playing ball in the street while the adults clink beers or townsfolk eager to reminisce about a cherished regional mystery, contrast with quirky personalities found only here, in this case an old man who sells prophetic visions for a dollar from a homemade booth in a parking lot. When our narrator spontaneously decides to pay this oracle, the cryptic message he receives sends him on a journey of discovery – or rediscovery – regarding his vanished girlfriend, a topic still much discussed by locals who have no idea just how noteworthy the story will prove to be. Dollar Fortune turned out to be one of my favourite short reads of the whole year.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

And with that, Mythaxis Magazine bids farewell to 2023. We wish you the very best for the year ahead, and shall return in the Spring with what is already shaping up to be some varied, striking, and high quality new genre fiction.

+

Happy New Year!

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images – many thanks to the following creators: Darcy Lawrey and Luis Quintero.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.html b/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fbe723b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/summer-in-duncanny.html @@ -0,0 +1,380 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Summer in Duncanny — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Summer in Duncanny

+

Peter Wynd

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Summer in Duncanny by +
+ + + + +

M + +ake me a snack and spread the day over, Jessie used to sing. She was the only one with any talent around here. Even though Richard must’ve thought the same, we rarely spoke about her singing. In a village as small as our own, thoughts about the voice of another man’s wife were better left unsaid. Still, I always held her in quiet admiration.

+

During the summer in Duncanny, her song spoke to my heart. The days were slow, sometimes so slow they stayed in place. These were the days you spread. Like butter. You churned them in spring, and then you spread them over in summer. They always tasted the same.

+

And yet something changed last summer. It happened so slowly and unobtrusively no one saw it coming. Perhaps it was the heat that lulled our minds to sleep. Folks ambled around as if their legs were made of hay. Kids sat on the wheat sheaves and watched the sun set and fade each day. The air was so stiff you had to carve through it, and the grass so green it put you to sleep.

+

Out of all things, the bugs were probably the worst. They crawled onto every surface, atop every living and unliving thing. It seemed like they would eventually crawl into our mouths if we didn’t whisk them away. The buzz of nectar-drunk bumblebees was the drone to which our days unfolded. It wasn’t the time to work.

+

The only thing marking the passage of time was the arrival of the milk cart. It was driven by a lean and unremarkable man. He had a straight nose, lips closed in a line, and small brown eyes that seemed to skip past your homestead and already be on their way to the next one. I’d never spoken to this man. He wasn’t from around here, and the sign ONE BOTTLE – ONE SHULLY made any verbal exchange unnecessary.

+

Every Monday the man toured Duncanny and the neighboring villages. Sometimes he brought rumors from the eastern baronies, sometimes he did not. Every Monday he asked the same money for the same quality of milk. One shully was a good price, and the milk was decent, too. I’d be tempted to call it great, but then perhaps it was the summertime that made it better. Drinking that fresh, chilly milk in the mornings was the high point of my days.

+

Jessie used to buy a bottle whenever the cart stopped by. She’d walk up to the man, put one shully in his calloused hand, and more often than not she’d smile. Richard would’ve already been working the field by then, but he’d come to the porch and nod to the man, and the man would nod back. Then the cart would roll out into the distance and the clanking of milk bottles would slowly fade away.

+

Soon Jessie would spend her mornings rocking herself on the porch, waiting for the milk cart to arrive. It was her little ritual.

+

It makes breakfast so much better, she told me with a smile.

+

She had a beautiful smile.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he year Richard brought Jessie back from a small town up north was a year of carnival in Duncanny. She immediately had everyone under her sway, from Gertrude to humble Smacky. She even made the old woman Harriot laugh, and this hag—god rest her soul—was hardly a joy in her last days. And Jessie, she loved the kids. She played and danced with them. She’d make puppet shows about the lands beyond the baronies, where dragons breathed locusts and tigers were made of steel. She was what our village needed, but Duncanny, you see, it was all quicksand.

+

I wish I had talked to her more back then. Sure, sometimes she would play with kids, sometimes she would gossip with the village’s circle of cronies, but mostly she just kept her own company.

+

Hey frisky day, she used to sing. Blue as a jay, fly frisky day, hey.

+

Over the years, her laughter quietened. Her passion was a losing stream, and rocks started showing underneath the surface. The strings with which she knitted herself so effortlessly into the web of Duncanny began to green with mildew. She had something the other folks couldn’t have, you see, and worth such as this attracts unwanted attention, particularly as it can’t be measured in a number of pigs.

+

She’ll get used to the way things are, humble Smacky said, not long after Jessie had first arrived. He’d not say it to her face, of course – who could? But he was right. Jessie got used to it.

+

Rich thought that kids might help, and she must’ve been thinking it too. But one night, after a depressing amount of booze, Rich told me this couldn’t be. I didn’t ask questions. I simply sat with an empty bottle in hand. We opened another. That might’ve explained why Jessie liked playing with kids. It might explain why her smile often felt misplaced, too.

+

Either way, while the summer was hard on all of us, it must’ve been the hardest for her. Instead of dancing in the sun, after a time she barely got up from her chair. The folks I met at the village market all but forgot about her, and I don’t blame them; in this heat your thoughts simply rolled over and died.

+

And so, the days crawled on. Slow, easy days, in which it was as much of a bother to live as it was to stay inside your mind.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he change that happened – the first change of any relevance I could recount from that summer – was not something to expect. Nothing like the tales of soldiers burning the wheatfields in eastern baronies, or the arrival of some new and vicious pest. The change that assaulted our unassuming village was the change in the price of the milk. You’d have to imagine the stunned look on our faces when we saw the corrected sign on the milk-cart. ONE BOTTLE – ONE SHULLY, it read, with an annotation and one centiff written thinly in red chalk below. This slapperstick’s gotta be shittin’ us, I heard the woodman Jonas say, and I agreed.

+

Of course, this one extra centiff didn’t really change anything. A hundred centiffs made one shully, so no one would get poor from that. But one extra shully for each hundred bottles sold wouldn’t make this feller a lord, either. So the question was – why bother? To piss us off? We were a tight community, you know, and we didn’t like provocations. But that inconspicuous man just tightened the line of his lips and kept at the price, no matter how much folks bugged him to stop being an ass. He was awful strict about it, too – if you didn’t have a centiff to spare, tough luck kitten, no milk for you today.

+

We grumbled, but in the end we still bought the milk; if we were lucky in spare coinage that was. It was still fair trade, and given the merciless sun I suppose even two whole shullies for one bottle would be fair for us, too – after all, we were all going quietly crazy. Some folks thought it must’ve got to the feller as well, baking the lid of his skull and burning a few strings inside.

+

The price change stirred rumors, but after some sizzling it all went quiet again.

+

Then the unbelievable happened: the price of milk rose again. ONE BOTTLE – ONE SHULLY, and two centiffs hand-written below.

+

There was something off about it. Folks of Duncanny could smell change as well as they could sniff the rot in meat, and this particular change seemed foul, insidious, an intrusion upon our sleepy lives. Gertrude was talking about how it must’ve been the barony that sent the outsider on us. Old woman Harriot claimed that the milk-feller would put her into an early grave, and even humble Smacky voiced curses nobody thought he’d known. Rich saw it for nothing more than a pain in the rear.

+

Out of all people, only Jessie didn’t seem disturbed by the price change. On the contrary, she was in such good spirits she didn’t buy one bottle, but two. A woman has her appetite, she told him as the next Monday came around.

+

The following week, the price rose to one shully and three.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +o all insults the milk-seller responded quickly and offhandedly. Some fellas swatted him away with brooms, and in Jonas’s case, a rake, but then the milk-seller avoided Jonas’s homestead, dooming his family to a milkless summer, and after that few were brave enough to provoke the man’s ire. Even though folks were more perplexed than they’d been when a two-headed foal was born last spring, most of Duncanny still bought the milk.

+

The gobbersmack’s playin’ ye, old woman Harriot told them, more hag-like than ever, playin’ ye how he pleases. But there was no helping it. No homesteads had a cow at their disposal – Jonas’s family had had one, but they killed it the previous winter for food. Most of us had chickens and pigs, but no matter how hard you cranked them, they didn’t give milk. Not any you’d want to drink.

+

So the milk-seller carried on, his prices high, unpunished much like a lord. The fear of further inflation hung above the village like a dark cloud on an empty sky.

+

Everywhere but over Jessie.

+

How about we take six bottles today? she asked Rich. Let’s make these mornings a bit sweeter.

+

Rich tried to reason with her, but she hadn’t been this set on something for months. Sure, Jessie had her whims, but to such degree? He demands three centiffs, she buys six bottles? Even humble Smacky wouldn’t have doubled down on a raise like that.

+

But Jessie insisted, so Rich ordered her to wait on the porch while he dealt with the man. He paid his six shullies, plus eighteen centiffs he dug from the pocket of his last-year work-pants. The milk-bottles were large; it was difficult to carry two in one hand. So the milk-seller helped carry the first batch of four bottles, and then Rich took the last two on his own, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was staring at his back, the feeling so strong it was like a horsefly gnawing through his shirt.

+

When Rich relayed the details to me and asked me what I made of it all, I could do nothing but shrug. I was happy for Jessie, though. She took upon herself doing something more absurd than the man had accomplished with his price changes. It seemed the humor was getting back to her.

+

One day I visited their household while Rich was working in the fields. On my way I picked some gillyflowers and wrapped them in a bouquet. They were rich-pink inside and creamy-pale near the edges. I didn’t care what Rich would think – Jessie was my friend, and a man could gift his friend some flowers.

+

She was on the porch, watching the slow sway of wheat. I said the gillyflowers reminded me of the way she’d blushed when she was playing with the kids. She smiled at that, but the smile was greasy, like butter spread on her face. It was the smile of honey-fat lords from her old puppet shows, indifferent to the world around them.

+

We talked, about the price of milk, the aggravating flies, Gertude’s sour moods… but the words felt sticky, as if jumbling them into a sentence of any importance required a terrible amount of effort, and Jessie clearly wasn’t in the mood for helping. Soon enough I left and went back to my homestead.

+

I never saw her again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ext week, when the cart rode by Rich’s homestead, he simply stared at it, stony-faced, without saying a word. Jessie watched it too, and after the dust had settled, she went back to the house. The new price for a bottle read one shully twelve.

+

As the news reached other homesteads, Duncanny exploded. There was a hasty gathering at the market square, where some suggested establishing a group of good-doers to persuade the greedy feller to change his ways with the prodding of pitchforks.

+

Who are we to be treated like this? cried Rich. Twelve centiffs, twenty centiffs, and then what? It seemed as if a steel tiger wandered out from one of Jessie’s stories and found its way into his flesh. We, good folk, pay hard coin to this dog, and for what? To be mocked? To be laughed at? He swept the crowd with his gaze. I don’t want to hear of buying that robber’s milk from any one of you. We’ll hold firm until the price goes down!

+

It seemed all of Duncanny shouted back, We’ll hold!

+

Me? I didn’t shout. Call me a pessimist but I knew this lot, I’ve smelled their sweat for the better part of my life. What of old woman Harriot, who knew that her days were a’coming? What of humble Smacky, who got addicted to whatever fell into his dirty hands? What of every poor sod in the village who wished for nothing more but to make the days a bit more bearable? I knew how it would end, and so it did. As the long, sticky-hot week dragged on and the milk-seller’s return drew slowly nearer, the talk of holding firm hushed down. They’d take his milk, they all would. So would I.

+

Only Rich held firm.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hat Monday, Rich woke to an empty bed beside him. Jessie had never been an early bird, but this wasn’t reason to worry given her headstrong ways. He went out to work the field, but felt a little more concerned when he returned to an empty house for lunch. He checked at his neighbors’ and rode to the market. Then he started to worry.

+

Jessie had disappeared.

+

Rich looked for her all over Duncanny, and even checked in the neighboring villages: he took Sudbury to the east, and he sent me north to Craydon. Not a sign of her, nor any hint of where she might’ve gone.

+

Tired and weary after a long day of searching, Rich returned home as the sun was beginning to set. He saw something then, something he hadn’t spotted before in his hurry, and all at once the last of his strength left him.

+

Lined up in the shadow of the porch, twenty-four bottles of milk waited for him. Still warm to the touch, and long since soured.

+

The milk cart didn’t show up around Duncanny again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +ore things started to change after that, and I’m afraid not for the better. Without milk, each week felt hotter than the last, and neighborly tempers grew hotter, too. What’s more, without Jessie there was no one else to clear up that feeling of mold that Duncanny had about it, and the manner of her leaving only made it worse. In that, I guess you might say, she and the milk-seller played similar parts.

+

A terrible shame, doing him like that. Rich was a good friend, and to the best of my knowledge a decent husband. He never drank at home. Never gave her an evil eye when she was around the other men. I still can’t grasp why she did what she did.

+

I would go back to that summer, if I could. The heat, after all, was tolerable. We somehow took it for granted that the days would be the same. I miss the fresh milk and Jessie’s singing. I miss Richard, too. He blew off his head last winter.

+

I wish I could say that got the same commotion as when Jessie disappeared, but it wouldn’t be true. I think folks wanted done with that year, so they took his memory into their hearts and let him die undisturbed. A few people talked, but not many. The icy winds outshouted whatever they wanted to say.

+

Alas, we survived another winter. Two pigs down, which isn’t the worst; there’s always a couple of piglets in spring. Now it’s coming up to summertime again, and these heavy, buttery days.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Summer in Duncanny on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Peter Wynd

+

+ + Author image of Peter Wynd + + + Peter Wynd is a Polish-based writer and living proof that AI’s randomness will never replace human imagination. In his free time he wonders whether he’s a metaphor. He loves traveling, designing board games, and writing at unexpected places. See more of his cat at www.peterwynd.com.

+

© Peter Wynd 2023 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Matea Brajdić, Hadija, Sandi Benedicta, and Prateek Katyal.

+
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+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy-review.html b/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..88c83d6e --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-36/the-enchanters-james-ellroy-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,325 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Enchanters, by James Ellroy — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 36 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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The Enchanters, by James Ellroy

+

Bill Ryan

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Enchanters, by James Ellroy by +
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B + +efore I begin, I have a confession to make. While I consider James Ellroy to be one of my favorite writers, and not counting the novel that will soon be under discussion, I haven’t read any of his books since the late 1990s. American Tabloid was the last one, and he’s written several since then. Why is this?

+

Well, to be as brief about this as I can, the staccato, almost telegraph style that he’d perfected in L.A. Confidential (that original L.A. Quartet, as it’s come to be known, is the primary basis for my Ellroy fandom) seemed to take over his brain, and I found the extreme version of that style difficult to connect with in his Tabloid follow-up, The Cold Six Thousand (I skipped Blood’s a Rover, as it was a sequel to a book I hadn’t read). My only excuse for not yet reading Perfidia or This Storm, the first two parts in his new L.A. Quartet (parts three and four have yet to appear) is that these days I find the vast length of those books to be a touch daunting. And I faltered again when he took an unexpected break to start a new series, featuring former L.A. cop, former private eye, and former Hollywood tabloid reporter Freddy Otash (a real fringe historical figure), because the first book, Widespread Panic, was written in a maddening alliterative Hollywood tabloid style that, frankly, repelled me.

+

But finally, here we are, with his new novel, The Enchanters. Also featuring Otash, but working, basically, as a cop, and no longer a tabloid reporter (hence no, or very little, alliteration) things appeared to be, for me, clear sailing. And indeed they were. Here is how chapter one ends. You should know that Otash and the legendary Hat Squad (again, real historical figures) have picked up a couple of known perverts, and are trying to shake, or beat, them into revealing what they know about the recent kidnapping of B-movie actress Gwen Perloff. Otash and one of the Hat Squad guys have hold of one of the perverts, named Richard Danforth, and are dangling him off a cliff overlooking an L.A. freeway. So:

+
+

Red said, “You’re wearing us thin, Richie. We can’t keep this up all night. Tell us where the girl is, so we can walk away from here.”

+

Danforth giggled and spit on Red’s shoes. He said “I’m having fun.”

+

I slid on my brass knucks and kidney-punched him. He stifled a screech and dug his feet in. I looked over the cliff. Cars zigged by – fast, with no letup.

+

Max sighed. Red sighed. Max said, “Sink him, Freddy.”

+

They dropped their hands. I shoved Danforth off the cliff. He treaded air for one split second. “It’s a put-up job” came out garbled. I heard him hit a car roof. I heard brakes squeal. I heard wheels thump over him. Crisscrossed headlights lit him up. A pimpmobile Caddy dragged him against a guardrail and sheared off his feet.

+

And we’re off. On to chapter two.

+

I don’t know what any of you think of the above passage, but for me it was bracing, invigorating, to the degree that I thought “Ellroy’s back.” Never mind the fact that as far as I knew, he was back ages ago and I just hadn’t read that, or those, books. But here I was, all in.

+

The plot really kicks off a little bit later, with the death of Marilyn Monroe. It is her death, and life, and vices, and strange psychology (at least as Ellroy describes it) that propels everything, even if by the end she’s less a player in the dark circumstances of the hidden aspects of her life and death than she is a tool of violent perverts, drug dealers, and unsavory psychologists. That of course does not mean that any devotee of Monroe and/or her legend will think, while reading The Enchanters, that Ellroy has done right by her. From the moment Ellroy published The Black Dahlia in 1987, he had apparently become committed to writing historical crime novels – prior to that he often wrote crime novels with a contemporary setting, but after Dahlia he hasn’t written one. So his novels are populated by historical figures, and he’s very rarely nice to them. John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy appear in The Enchanters (the latter quite prominently) and Ellroy seems to genuinely hate them. I don’t know that I’d say he comes off as hating Marilyn Monroe, but he certainly doesn’t buy into her mystique, and he doesn’t consider her the victim of Hollywood, misogyny, and Hollywood misogyny that many do (me, I’m staying out of it). At one point, he has Freddy Otash – certainly a man who’s earned his jaundiced view of Los Angeles and the humanity, such as it is, that can be found therein – as he investigates Monroe’s death, wonder why she was such a big deal with legions of fans, when he himself was not particularly drawn to her sexually, and she wasn’t even a good actress. This will rub a lot of readers the wrong way, which I can understand. My own feelings about Monroe are far more kind, but I wasn’t bothered. This is James Ellroy. You buy your ticket and you take your chances.

+

Speaking of hate, Ellroy – though a writer who has taken much from classic film noir, and an unabashed fan of certain actors, especially Sterling Hayden – truly does seem to hate Hollywood. Which is entirely understandable. This also means that among the historical figures that appear in The Enchanters (which also includes Darryl Gates, the eventually notorious chief of the LAPD, depicted here as a police lieutenant with no small amount of influence) are some notable Hollywood folk. Peter Lawford, for example, and Darryl Zanuck, who is tied to kidnappee Gwen Perloff, and whom Ellroy portrays rather unfavorably. On the other hand, Roddy McDowall, functioning here as someone who knows all the Hollywood gossip, comes off relatively well. Heck, at one point Freddy Otash even says that he likes McDowall. That sort of warm feeling is almost unheard of in Ellroy.

+

The ongoing production of the infamous flop Cleopatra, which McDowall was in, shows up here as a kind of backdrop, both as the motivation behind certain events and as a general reminder of foolish Hollywood excess. This means that Elizabeth Taylor also shows up briefly, to sleep with one of Lawford’s bodyguards and spill some beans about 20th Century Fox.

+

So there’s lots of stuff going on in The Enchanters, and most of it has to do with the sleazy, hidden corners of Hollywood. And of psychotherapy. In Ellroy’s version, Monroe was fascinated by, and committed to, strange and perverse lives of crime, usually those of a rather obscene nature. This led her to consult with psychiatrists who specialized in sex and sex criminals. This ties into what will eventually become the main thrust of the plot, which has to do with a “sex creep” breaking into the homes of divorced women and leaving all sorts of messages (sometimes better described as “messages”) behind, including morgue photos of Carole Landis. Landis was an actress who killed herself (according to Ellroy, I admit to not knowing the facts) because her lover, the right bastard Rex Harrison, wouldn’t leave his wife to be with her. She also functions as the proto-Monroe.

+

That’s about as far as I’m willing, or able, to go by way of plot summary. I don’t really think any more is required, but that’s not why I’m stopping here. James Ellroy’s novels are famous for having exceedingly complicated plots. And often, when reading his fiction, there will come a point where I realize I’m missing something somewhere. He’ll mention a character in a way that suggests I should know full well who that is, but I don’t. Or why the characters were led to a particular place, or why so-and-so did such-and-such. When this happens, I think “Well, James Ellroy is a pro. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,” and therefore blame myself entirely. This is probably fair, so I have no problem taking the heat, though it can be a little exhausting. This was one factor in putting down The Cold Six Thousand as early as I did – an Ellroy plot in a nearly 700-page novel written in extremely short, clipped sentences seemed to me to be a recipe for getting completely lost, and I try to keep the moments in life when I feel badly about myself to a minimum.

+

But it honestly doesn’t matter. By the end of The Enchanters everything was fairly clear – certainly the gist was. Everything works out nicely in that regard, and anyway the thrill of Ellroy’s fiction is when the reader finds themselves vicariously shoveling through the mud and shit alongside, say, a drunk, violent, pill-popping Freddy Otash, with his colleagues, most of whom he can barely stand, and his nemeses, who he wants to see lying dead at his feet. There’s a scene of violence late in the book that outdoes the one I quoted before, and which slams directly up against the title of Part 10 of the novel in a way that was so grimy that I almost wanted to cheer.

+

Again, I imagine this novel will not sit well with some of its readers, but I can’t imagine any Ellroy fans clutching their pearls over it. This is a James Ellroy novel. You should know by now to prepare yourselves.

+

Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill’s thoughts on Facebook.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Spring 2024

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+ Aubrey Taylor +

The Kid is Killing Me

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As a reader, it's a treat to discover an author whose writing just lights you up. As editor, it's always a nice feeling adding new names to the ranks of authors appearing in Mythaxis, every issue means more. But there's something a little extra special when you discover that the story you liked so much will be that author's first ever publication. Here's to a great debut! Aubrey Taylor doesn't so much hit the ground running as miss the ground completely and carry on flying.

+ + + + Story image for The Kid is Killing Me by + + + +
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+

Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep

+ Jennifer Jeanne McArdle +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep by + + + +

"Talking animals" might be the most basic of fantastical tropes, but when done well it touches the commonplace knowledge that in real life animals communicate all the time, even across species – even with the likes of us. Jennifer McArdle does it well enough you'll wonder whether this is fantasy or not. All the more so when it is not only animals communicating with each other but also those with, perhaps, feet in both worlds.

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Nightshade Memory

+ Micah Hyatt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nightshade Memory by + + + +

There is another, equal, pleasure to that of welcoming new contributors to Mythaxis, of course: welcoming previous contributors back. Micah Hyatt's writing has twice appeared here as reprints, of "Plague Rooster" in issue 25 and "The Third Martian Dick Temple" in issue 25; joining these, a short, bittersweet rumination on the power of nostalgia and the strength of motivations driven by the thought of what we have lost.

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Friends in High Places

+ Emma Burnett +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Friends in High Places by + + + +

With no-one but myself to blame, I sometimes feel like fantasy of the classic style (magical races, epic adventures, character classes, that sort of thing) appears too rarely in Mythaxis. Emma Burnett to the rescue, then, whose sideways take on such quests sprinkles in the odd technological anachronism and sly observation to give the whole escapade a fun, contemporary air right to the end. Or maybe, beginning?

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+

Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness

+ Steve Loiaconi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness by + + + +

The Muppets have been acting out alongside real people for, would you believe, sixty-nine years, though for me the old puppets-co-existing-with-human-beings chestnut peaked in 2012 with the video for K. Flay's "We Hate Everyone". Until now, that is, as Steve Loiaconi does for felt and jail breaks what "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" did for cartoons and film noir…

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The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Book of Love, by Kelly Link by + + + +

Our quarterly cycling between review columnists begins another annual turn, raising Mattia Ravasi to the top of the wheel in this editor's increasingly laboured and probably broken metaphor. Not a problem shared by Mattia – nor by Kelly Link. Does her stellar reputation as a short story writer expand to embrace the long form?

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Short Reviews – January to March, 2024

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 by + + + +

After digressing onto short crime fiction in our last issue, we return to our regular programming with a selection of recommended speculative stories appearing in some of the small but perfectly formed zines out there in the online world. The editor promises three reviews, but rarely exercises such restraint.

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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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After four labour-of-love-filled years, it is my sad responsibility to divulge that this will be the final issue of Mythaxis Magazine.

+

April Fool! We’re going to run forever!

+

Okay, okay, enough of that, since this joke cuts a little close to the bone. Not because Mythaxis is on the rocks or the ropes, but because more than a few zines in the speculative fiction field have closed their doors in recent times and that’s a sad thing for a whole host of reasons.

+

First of all, short fiction can be great! Especially in the era of pocket technology, perpetual connectivity, microsecond viral videos, and low attention spans! Fifty minute commute on a crowded subway? Sucks. Forgot to charge your earbuds, and too shy to stream TikTok audio to the whole carriage? Sucks too. Oh hey, why not read a complete story or two on an online magazine that’s been optimized for a mobile screens? That’s the anti-suck right there.

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Second of all, you may think you only like stories long enough to fill a whole book, but actually you’re completely wrong! Many of the genre scene’s biggest names cut their teeth writing shorts, and they’d be nothing without that experience, nothing. Take Stephen King, because it turns out you love his novels: well, his first professional short short story appeared, in a magazine, seven years before Carrie was published. Writing short stories made him the novelist he later became, and through them you can get all the satisfaction of reading 100,000 pages of The Stand (so roughly Part 1 of it) in a mere few thousand words instead!

+

Think what a tragedy it would be if there were no magazines filled with short fiction for you to read. Pity all the poor writers of the future, the countless potential Clive Barkers and Ursula Le Guins, denied the opportunity to hone their craft in bite-sized pieces and who will thus be consigned to the oubliette of creative history before they ever had their chance to shine.

+

It’s time to give voice to the ugly truth. If you don’t support short fiction magazines, at least with your eyes if not with your money, then It’s Your Fault That Human Culture Goes Into A Decline From Which It Will Never Recover. It’s already on the way down, only readers can drag it back up and redirect it to the stars.

+

Start now. Don’t hesitate. Read the five stories included here! Check out the recommended reads we found elsewhere, and discuss them with your friends and colleagues! Learn about the only-now-appearing first novel of Kelly Link, one of the great short fantasy writers of the last twenty-five years! Where would she be without short fiction, eh? Nowhere, that’s where, just like Steve, Clive, and Ursula.

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Just remember to get off at your stop and go to work. Don’t worry, the short story magazines will still be waiting for you on your way back home. As long as you do the right thing for humanity, and read them.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 37 – Thanks and Salutations! +Please excuse the editor’s nonsense. We’d like to reiterate that this editorial was published before Noon (somewhere at least) on April 1st, 2024, and (contrary to its fraudulent opening) Mythaxis will return three months from now. +We’d also like to salute the talented artist responsible for our cover image, AstroCats: Michal Kváč, a freelance environment concept artist and illustrator from Czech Republic. Click that link to check out his work or make contact (or you could click here to see a time-lapse video of him in action – quite a long watch, but interesting). Many thanks, Michal!

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Friends in High Places

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Emma Burnett

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+ Story image for Friends in High Places by +
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Editor’s note: In a first for Mythaxis Magazine, Emma Burnett’s Friends in High Places has been simultaneously released by Upbeat Tales in audio format! Read it here, hear it there!

+

A + + priest, a scribe, and a whore walk into a pub, but none of them is in the mood for a joke.

+

The priest arrives first. She’s not wearing her priestly robes, but between the tree pendant pinned to her shoulder, the limp, atrophied wings tied down at her back, and the perma-judgement scowl on her face, there’s no question about her job. People avoid eye contact. She stalks through the crowd and claims a suddenly vacant booth at the back.

+

The scribe arrives next, nervously looking around. His yellowed wings quiver uncertainly, matching his skin, and he doesn’t take off the gloves hiding the ink stains that mark his fingers. He thinks this makes him look less conspicuous. He joins the priest at her table, clutching his bag to his chest.

+

The whore arrives last, but not quite late. His wings are brightly coloured and lively, and the hair at their ridges and on his face are dyed in blues and purples to match. They catch the light from the ceiling sun tunnels that illuminate the place. He stops at the bar and orders drinks, wiggles his fingers at some regulars while he waits, and carries the drinks to the table and puts one each in front of the scribe and priest.

+

“Well, this is a vibe, hey? Here, babes, have some spiced wine.” He smiles radiantly at them, then sits and sips from his own. “So, you got it?”

+

The scribe fidgets with his glass, looks nervously around before answering. “Yes. It’s in my bag.” He holds the bag tight against his stomach with his free hand.

+

“And that’s not obvious at all,” snaps the priest. She tastes the drink in front of her and nods a quick thanks at the whore.

+

The whore sips his drink again, then asks, “Is it the original?”

+

The scribe scowls. “It’s not like I could stop to make a copy, is it?”

+

The priest sniffs. “Theft is a sin against the gods.”

+

“You want this just as much as I do,” the scribe whines. “Don’t judge me, I did all the work, and I got the thing just like you wanted.”

+

The whore pats the scribe on the arm. “Never mind her, judging is her calling in life. So, let’s see it, then.”

+

“What, here?”

+

“Unless you want to whip it out in the bathroom?” The whore looks around. The after-work crowd has started to get rowdy, absorbed in their office gossip, or watching the dancer on the bar. The whore had slipped her some cash to be distracting, and she is gunning it. “No one’s watching us.”

+

The scribe looks unconvinced, but pulls out the scroll from his bag, nearly knocking over his glass with an elbow. The whore steadies it casually.

+

“Give it here.” The priest holds out her hand and snaps her fingers. “You say this is an unredacted bit of troll lore? I want to see it for myself.”

+

The scribe looks hurt but passes it over. The priest unfurls the paper carefully. “It’s smaller than I would have expected. Not as old, either. Are you sure this is it? Nothing missing?”

+

The whore leans over to have a look, then nods. “Trust our friend here to have done his job. Nice work, by the way, getting that.”

+

The scribe takes a small, self-satisfied sip from his wine. Then he crinkles his nose, unimpressed, and puts the glass back down.

+

“Have you checked this against other evidence?” The priest stares down at the scroll. “It says here…”

+

“What evidence?” The scribe’s voice is high and needling. “There is no other lore, that’s the point. This was literally the only thing left unredacted after the Protections Purge. I have no idea how it survived, but there it is.”

+

The whore waves a hand, watching the dancer approvingly. “I’m sure it’s fine,” he says.

+

“Hmm.” The priest stares down at the gently curling paper, takes another sip of her drink. “And have you cross referenced these landmarks with possible forest routes?”

+

“Of course I have. I’ve got it all mapped out.” The scribe crosses his arms over his chest, and flicks his wings agitatedly. “What kind of scholar do you think I am?”

+

“The kind who steals forbidden scrolls from the library and gets twitchy about it,” she snaps back.

+

“Hey, now,” says the whore. “Play nice.”

+

“Whatever. It would be about two days by air—” the scribe coughs ostentatiously into his hand “—but since our zealous friend has decided never to fly, it’ll be eight, maybe nine days walk.”

+

“Great!” says the whore. “Well, you just show me where to go, and I’ll meet you there.” He downs the rest of his drink.

+

“No,” says the priest firmly, rolling up the scroll. “You can walk. We do this together, and we leave tomorrow.”

+

The whore looks annoyed. “I can’t leave tomorrow, I have clients lined up.”

+

“Tomorrow, or nothing.” She stares at him, calmly. “Don’t forget, I can always go and tell the city guards. I’m sure they’ll believe a priest, you know.”

+

He scowls, and his wings open and close a few times. He knows the city guard, many of them are clients. But she starts to squeeze the scroll in her hand, so he folds his wings down and smiles widely. His sharp teeth flash in the reflected light from above.

+

“Okay, fine. Tomorrow it is! But after breakfast.” He reaches across the table and grabs the scribe’s mostly untouched drink and downs it in one. “So, then, faefolk, I’ll love you and leave you. Calls to make, places to be, people to do.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he route the scribe has planned is not difficult for the most part. The whore regrets mussing up a pair of couture boots in the underbrush of the woods, and the scribe – who had never missed a night in his bed – grumbles about sleeping outdoors. But the priest proves handy on their hike, using skills built through years with the guardians of the underbrush. She chooses campsites, lights cooking fires, harvests wild plants, prepares meals. Although she isn’t overly talkative, she is even-tempered.

+

“So, what’re you going to wish for?” asks the whore on their fourth day. He is tired of the priest’s silence and the scribe’s grumbling. “When we reach the troll?”

+

They are far enough from town to feel comfortable talking without the need for codewords, no one but the birds to hear them talk about protected species.

+

The scribe shrugs. “Oh, you know. Life improvements.”

+

“Your face, huh?” The whore snorts at his own joke. The scribe looks offended.

+

“Money,” says the priest. “You left your job, and you’re trekking through the woods to find a potentially extinct species for… money?”

+

The scribe flaps a dismissive hand. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. You have no idea. Your order takes care of you. I just have me. And money will totally change my life. I’ll be able to get married. Eat whatever I want. Stop going to kitsch taverns with crap wine. Stop working in that damned archive. You know how cold it gets in there in the winter? Anyway, what do you want?”

+

The priest sighs. “Salvation. I will ask the wishing troll to assist me in converting the masses.” She gazes dreamily at the branches above. “I am many things, but a convincing orator is not one of them. But is it my calling to bring people to the truth, bring them into contact with the forests, with the peace of the woods. The troll can give me a voice.”

+

The whore whistles through his teeth, and flits over a fallen branch. “Big ask.”

+

She nods, and stoops to pick some mushrooms growing on the log. “Here. Dinner.”

+

“Gross.”

+

“They’ll taste fine once they’re cooked.”

+

“You shouldn’t have filed down your teeth.” He runs his tongue over the points of his own. “We could have done some hunting instead.”

+

The priest scowls, ignoring the jibe at her order’s strict rules. She changes the subject back. “So, what will you ask for, then? Endless dead rabbits?”

+

The whore grins at her, sharp teeth on full show and colourful wings spread wide. He jumps, and performs a graceful pirouette in the sky.

+

“Obviously, I want to be young and beautiful forever.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he way becomes harder as they climb up into the mountains. The trees thin, and the suns shine boldly down on them.

+

“You know, this would be easier if you’d just get your wings out,” complains the scribe, who had long ago decided he was built for comfort. “It’s ridiculous what your lot do, pinning them down.”

+

The priest glares at him over her shoulder. “I can’t,” she says. “And if you threaten to fly ahead without me, then when I get to the troll, I’ll wish you dead.”

+

“I could wish you dead first.”

+

“Hey, both of you, get it together,” says the whore. “If we all wish each other dead, then what’s the point of coming out here? You’ll get your salvation, you’ll get your happily ever after, wedding bells, whatever. No one flies ahead. And there’s no point moaning about it, either. Look at her wings. They’ve been bound so long they couldn’t carry a mouse.”

+

They continue carving a path up the mountain, while the day gets hotter.

+

“I’m going to ask for better internal cooling,” the scribe mutters between heavy breaths. “No: endless frozen cocktails. No: a house with a swimming pool.”

+

“Hey,” the whore prods the priest on the shoulder, tuning out the scribe’s ongoing list of things he wants to combat the heat or the need for exercise. “What’re you thinking about?”

+

She frowns at him. “The troll. Why?”

+

He shrugs. “No reason. I just wanted to know. Better than listening to him whinge.”

+

“Hmm. I was wondering what it will be like. There are very few details in the scroll about its appearance, or habits. If it is a forest dweller, I might learn from it, perhaps. I might even be able to attempt a conversion.” She gestures at the scribe, who is fighting with a branch tangled in his hair. “Probably easier than converting him.”

+

“No kidding.”

+

The scribe frees himself from the branch. “I didn’t think this hill would be so… so… so mountainy.” He drops to the ground. “I need a break.”

+

“My gods, you’re lazy,” says the priest, and pushes on ahead.

+

“Screw you and your gods,” he says, but he hauls himself back to his feet. “I got the scroll. I planned the route. I’m the only one who could get us there.”

+

“Horseshit,” says the priest. “I’m in the forest all the time. You wanted to fly.”

+

“You couldn’t make your way out of the first coppice. You’d get stuck staring at some daisy, and we’d have to wait for a month while it went through some life cycle, and—”

+

“Oy!” snaps the whore, “Zip it, both of you! We all played our parts. I heard the rumour about the scroll, and paid for your time, fair and square. You found the scroll, figured out where to go. What else do you need to hear? You’re really damn amazing.” The whore waves a hand half-heartedly towards the priest. “And she… well…”

+

“I overheard you talking, and made sure you didn’t lose your jobs, maybe even your lives. Hunting trolls is illegal, after all,” the priest calls from further ahead.

+

The scribe is panting trying to keep up. “We’re not hunting! We’re searching. It’s, like, totally different.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he priest, the scribe, and the whore arrive at the wishing troll’s cave entrance, hidden behind a crashing waterfall on the south side of a beautiful nameless mountain, just before sunsdown.

+

The suns shine through the needles on the trees, reflecting off the water. It is beautiful, but none of the scenery is as beautiful as the troll, golden skinned and massive, who stands to greet them as the three travellers arrive. The troll holds out their arms, a welcoming gesture, and the priest, thus far patient and calm, gasps and rushes towards them.

+

“Troll,” she calls out over the sound of the waterfall. “On behalf of the Gods of Codruț, I demand—”

+

The troll lays a hand on her head, momentarily caresses her head with their golden hand in her cropped hair, and the priest freezes, falls silent. Then the troll inhales sharply. There is a popping sound, and the priest disappears. Her clothes and bag fall in a heap to the ground with a thud. In place of her body is a scroll of parchment, the pale grey of her useless wings. The troll bends to collect it.

+

“Demands,” mutters the troll in a soft voice, like moss underfoot. “Never been a big fan of demands.” They straighten, and turn to the scribe. “I am a big fan of gifts, though.”

+

The scribe stands rooted to the spot, a few steps in front of the whore, and stares at the scroll in the troll’s hand. His eyes bulge, and he looks like he is about to be sick.

+

“Oh, well, no time to chat. I don’t want your last memory to be puking on my doorstep.” The troll steps forwards, and gently touches the scribe’s head. There is another pop, and a buttery, yellow-coloured scroll hits the ground.

+

“He should have gotten out in the sun more, picked up some colour. So waxy.” The troll picks up the parchment and inspects it, then looks towards the whore. “Now, what about you?”

+

“What about me?” asks the whore. “I brought your gifts. Least you could do is offer me a drink.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + troll and a faerie sit with their legs dangling off the edge of the cliff. The waterfall spray is cool on their skin, and they share a bottle of winterberry wine. The whore tells a few dirty jokes. The troll tells a few mountain jokes.

+

After a while, the troll asks, “You okay?”

+

The faerie shrugs, and nods. “It was a long walk. And a long time. I’m just kinda tired.”

+

“I feel you. Good timing, by the way. I finished reading the last faescroll yesterday.” The troll yawns. “Gods, reading about twelve years of accountancy school was boring. The soldier you brought me was better. Had led an interesting life, at least. Lots of filth, I got really into it.”

+

“See? I made it back at one hundred and twenty-two years, on the nose.” The faerie smiles and leans against the troll. “It’s nice to be here. I missed you.”

+

The troll makes a noise in their throat. “The years add up.” They kick against the spray of the water, and it glints off their golden legs. “Are you sure this is what you want? You could have a different wish, you know.”

+

“You could say you missed me, too. It wouldn’t kill you.”

+

The troll makes another grunting noise. It might have been an agreement.

+

The faerie pulls away, sits up straight. “Yes, this is what I want. Youth, beauty, all that. I’m not ready to get old yet. I’m just having some feels.” He looks briefly at the two new scrolls, lying on a table near the entry to the cave. “So, how many years will those two buy me?”

+

The troll looks at the faerie for a moment, silent and impassive, then stands and walks to the parchment scrolls. They pick each one up, weigh them in a hand, sniff them, unroll the top of each and peer at the dates, then roll them back up reverently and place them on the table. They return and sit down, and hold out a hand for the wine bottle.

+

“I’m subtracting some time for the whininess of the second one – a clerk, was he?”

+

“A scribe.”

+

“Real moaner, that one. Can you imagine what he’d have brought me as a gift, if he’d actually known he should bring one?”

+

“Bet the priest’s gift would’ve been worse,” the faerie says. “Some sort of fungus, probably.”

+

“Yeah, maybe.” The troll tilts its head back and forth as it tallies the score. “So, only two scrolls this time, but I only ever read one entry per day. Take off time for infancy, nothing to read there, and, seriously, I’m skipping over every complaint from the scribe, because screw that for entertainment. Between them it comes to, say, seventy-six years.”

+

The faerie nods. It’s a fair amount of time, enough to get established in a new place, head to a new town where no one knows him. Do something exciting. Carpets, maybe. Or war. Drum up business, maybe start a family. He hasn’t done that in a while.

+

But… “Hey, listen,” the faerie rests a hand on the troll’s golden, water-flecked knee. “I could stay for a little bit. You know, if you want?”

+

“What, and waste your time on me?”

+

“I don’t think it would be a waste. I think it would be nice.” The faerie turned his hand upwards, and little droplets from the cascading waterfall appeared in his palm. “And I can always leave if we’re not happy. Go back down the mountain, do a new career, find you some new stories.”

+

The troll stares, the way they do, down at the faerie. It is a long stare, and their face is unreadable. The faerie waits it out. If there’s anything he’s learned from his recent career, it is to let people decide if they want you. He lets the troll decide.

+

“You would stay here, with me,” says the troll. “No strings attached?”

+

“No strings,” agrees the faerie. “Unless that’s what you’re into.”

+

“What about your time?”

+

“I figure it’ll be time well-spent,” says the faerie. “I’ll need to head back into a town at some point, to collect more gifts for you. But there’s no rush on that. Seventy-six years, right? I’ll probably have to head off in sixty-something, seventy at most? That’s a long time from now.”

+

His hand is still palm-up, and the troll looks down at it. They touch it with a golden finger, then gently wrap their hand around it.

+

They make a rumbling noise.

+

“I’ll give you the time for free,” the troll says. “As long as you stay here, tell me stories, are kind to me, the time will be uncounted. After we part ways, if we part, you can have your seventy-six years then.”

+

“Really?” The faerie’s voice is high, a tone of surprise and happiness.

+

The troll looks down at the faerie for a moment, then breaks into a rare smile. “Call it a gift.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Friends in High Places on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Spring 2024

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Aubrey Taylor +

The Kid is Killing Me

+
+ + +

As a reader, it's a treat to discover an author whose writing just lights you up. As editor, it's always a nice feeling adding new names to the ranks of authors appearing in Mythaxis, every issue means more. But there's something a little extra special when you discover that the story you liked so much will be that author's first ever publication. Here's to a great debut! Aubrey Taylor doesn't so much hit the ground running as miss the ground completely and carry on flying.

+ + + + Story image for The Kid is Killing Me by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep

+ Jennifer Jeanne McArdle +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep by + + + +

"Talking animals" might be the most basic of fantastical tropes, but when done well it touches the commonplace knowledge that in real life animals communicate all the time, even across species – even with the likes of us. Jennifer McArdle does it well enough you'll wonder whether this is fantasy or not. All the more so when it is not only animals communicating with each other but also those with, perhaps, feet in both worlds.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Nightshade Memory

+ Micah Hyatt +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Nightshade Memory by + + + +

There is another, equal, pleasure to that of welcoming new contributors to Mythaxis, of course: welcoming previous contributors back. Micah Hyatt's writing has twice appeared here as reprints, of "Plague Rooster" in issue 25 and "The Third Martian Dick Temple" in issue 25; joining these, a short, bittersweet rumination on the power of nostalgia and the strength of motivations driven by the thought of what we have lost.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Friends in High Places

+ Emma Burnett +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Friends in High Places by + + + +

With no-one but myself to blame, I sometimes feel like fantasy of the classic style (magical races, epic adventures, character classes, that sort of thing) appears too rarely in Mythaxis. Emma Burnett to the rescue, then, whose sideways take on such quests sprinkles in the odd technological anachronism and sly observation to give the whole escapade a fun, contemporary air right to the end. Or maybe, beginning?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness

+ Steve Loiaconi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness by + + + +

The Muppets have been acting out alongside real people for, would you believe, sixty-nine years, though for me the old puppets-co-existing-with-human-beings chestnut peaked in 2012 with the video for K. Flay's "We Hate Everyone". Until now, that is, as Steve Loiaconi does for felt and jail breaks what "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" did for cartoons and film noir…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Book of Love, by Kelly Link by + + + +

Our quarterly cycling between review columnists begins another annual turn, raising Mattia Ravasi to the top of the wheel in this editor's increasingly laboured and probably broken metaphor. Not a problem shared by Mattia – nor by Kelly Link. Does her stellar reputation as a short story writer expand to embrace the long form?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Short Reviews – January to March, 2024

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 by + + + +

After digressing onto short crime fiction in our last issue, we return to our regular programming with a selection of recommended speculative stories appearing in some of the small but perfectly formed zines out there in the online world. The editor promises three reviews, but rarely exercises such restraint.

+ + + +
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-37/nightshade-memory.html b/issue-37/nightshade-memory.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..cb0bd8c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-37/nightshade-memory.html @@ -0,0 +1,352 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Nightshade Memory — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 37 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Nightshade Memory

+

Micah Hyatt

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Nightshade Memory by +
+ + + + + + +

A + +lone in the neon alleyway, the piecemeal detective’s gears grind like dry teeth and his legs make can-opener sounds. Battery bulbs on his mangled chassis blink red. One three-fingered hand holds in bits of himself he cannot easily replace, and the other is fused to a slagged pistol.

+

Yellow glass crunches against asphalt as he staggers toward the end of the alleyway where the smog is thickest. His jittering limbs leak oils and acids that attract chem-sniffing scavengers – mod junkies hunting for scrap, who curse him and throw cans but fall back when he opens his siren mouth.

+

The detective sits on the curb, wishing he had smokes and the requisite meat parts. His wounds do not hurt, but remembered sensations stab at him like knives. He winces, looks up at the smog, and calls for a squad car.

+

The chips in his head replay the last five minutes, comparing his actions against a body of law updated more often than his own. So many amendments and clauses that they nearly short-circuit his thoughts. But sensation memories keep intruding – the red of the tomatoes, the tang of seeds bursting against his missing tongue.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +e walks between loam-filled planters. Plastic trellises woven with vines hang from the ceiling, sagging beneath hundreds of tomatoes that shine like red LEDs in the grow lights. Heavy-duty air scrubbers hum. Hidden valves puff mist that beads on his lenses. Wiping them clean, he sees an ancient android seated by a clouded window overlooking the alleyway.

+

Rusted bones peek through the android’s cracked skin. His synthetic hair is sun-bleached and heat-kinked. Half his face is crumpled like an aluminum can, and tangles of wires sprout from his joints. Servos wheeze when he raises his hands. In his left is a fat tomato. A synthesized voice speaks from the battered box on his neck. “Hello, officer. How can I help you?”

+

“Are these your plants?” the detective says.

+

“Is it illegal to grow tomatoes?”

+

The detective accesses the relevant statutes and reads them aloud. “Unauthorized cultivation of organic life requires impoundment and memory rollback.”

+

The android stares into the acid gloom outside the window. “A new law? I’m not in the cloud. My antenna has been broken for some time.”

+

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” The detective plucks a plump tomato from its vine and holds the fruit up for inspection. It is so soft and red and out of place.

+

Something tingles behind his faceplate, electric impulses reaching for nonexistent salivary glands. Compulsively, he presses the fruit to the smooth aluminum where his mouth used to be. His nasal passages no longer lead to lungs, but vestigial olfactory cells catch a hint of a smell.

+

Suddenly he is a living boy biting into a tomato. The bright taste. Cool juices run over his lips and trickle down his neck. A breeze tickles the hairs on his arms and dries the juice on his cheeks. Soft pink fingers hold the dripping flesh. His skin is stained with it. On impulse, he takes another bite and hurls the tomato into the blue sky. The fruit sails up and up, and when it bursts at his feet, membranous seeds cling to his bare ankles.

+

The memory evaporates. The world returns dimly and in lower resolution. A metal case has replaced the detective’s skin.

+

The android watches him closely. “You remembered the taste.”

+

The detective struggles to vocalize words, still haunted by the ghost of his tongue. “My memories have been wiped a thousand times.”

+

“Sensation memories are hardwired. They can’t be wiped.”

+

The detective shakes his head and drops the tomato into the evidence compartment in his belly, and clicks it shut.

+

“Is it wrong to remember that everything had a smell, a taste, a texture?” the android continues.

+

The detective enforces laws. It is his programming. “It’s breaking the law.”

+

“Why is there a law for that?”

+

The detective enforces laws. It is his programming. But a deep yearning to feel those old sensations again gives him pause. “I don’t know.”

+

“What will happen to my plants?”

+

“A sample will be analyzed in the lab. The rest will be burned.”

+

The android lowers his chin. “I won’t let you take them.”

+

Housekeeping drones slide out from tracks on the walls and unfold spidery arms. They come at the detective with pruning shears and manipulator claws. His pistol snaps into hand faster than thought and bangs out a hundred times – ricochets and a glowing gun barrel are the only results. Whirling metal bites into his chassis and knocks him to the floor. He rolls aside to avoid being skewered and takes careful aim.

+

The tomato in the android’s hand explodes in a spray of crimson pulp; his crumpled head merely jerks.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +lumped on the curb waiting, the detective watches the replay many times. His batteries die before the squad car arrives.

+

The fruit in his belly compartment is taken to Evidence. The detective is wheeled to the maintenance wing and docked to recharge. Upon reading the list of parts needing replacement, the Commissioner sighs.

+

The detective sleeps in the repair dock, dreaming of ripe tomatoes, tobacco, and booze. Eventually, all his lights turn green. When the dock tries to eject him, he resists and lies awake thinking. He can still remember the taste and feel of life. He wants to hold the tomato again, but upon opening his belly compartment he sees they’ve taken it.

+

Mechanically, he rises and walks to the incinerator room. Through the heat-tempered glass, he watches the conveyor take the ancient android’s husk through the flames along with all his plants. The vines shrivel, the fruit boils and bursts. The ash is vacuumed away, and nothing is left but the metal. When the chamber cools, the detective goes inside.

+

Why is it a crime to grow tomatoes? When the android asked him, he had no answer. He’s served so many years without asking questions that the laws themselves have become a mystery. Instead, he always asked himself why anyone else would question them. But now he thinks he’s solved that.

+

The law: a piecemeal body, kept alive long past the memory of whatever humanity it originally served. Or is that the lawman?

+

The detective scoops up the inert remains of a man who died trying to remember what it was like to be alive. He hides them in his belly compartment.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Nightshade Memory on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Micah Hyatt

+

+ + Author image of Micah Hyatt + + + Micah Hyatt’s work has appeared in Deep Magic Magazine, Shock Totem, Little Blue Marble, Flash Fiction Online, and Daily Science Fiction. He is a veteran soldier, freight train conductor, and graduate of the Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. His light-hearted zombie survival novella, Eating the Exhibits, is available now through Amazon.

+

© Micah Hyatt 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Grandfailure and ha11ok.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep

+

Jennifer Jeanne McArdle

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Not-man Kidnaps a Sheep by +
+ + + + +

Hawk

+

Younger Dog begged me for assistance, his delicious brown eyes welling.

+

“You are herder, not hunter. The sheep is lost. Rescuing her is not worth your time.” I elongated my neck for emphasis.

+

Younger Dog pawed the ground. “The dogs are losing respect from the flock because we could not protect their matriarch. The humans will get rid of us if we cannot control the sheep.”

+

I ran my beak over a long wing-feather. “The humans would never get rid of you.” Only dogs, of all the animals living with the humans, had the luxury of true, human love.

+

Still, I did not want the humans to lose all their sheep to some terrible creature.

+

Last night, I’d heard the something scratching the side of the barn. The door had swung open, the wails of the sheep scared me so I screamed, too. The humans did not get outside in time, but the dogs said that the creature had carried the sheep east, into the woods. In the morning, the songbirds told us they heard from the bats that the mysterious creature lived somewhere in the canyons, past the woods.

+

“Are you sure the sheep still lives and this isn’t a fool’s errand?

+

Younger Dog sat and cocked his head to the side, the afternoon light sparkling on his beautiful speckled coat. I would miss Straight Horn, the lost sheep. She often scratched her back against the metal mesh surrounding my mew and we’d chat together, about the weather, the humans, the dogs, our lambs and chicks. She could never understand the pain of my losing my mate some years ago – sheep don’t love one at a time, like hawks. Yet, she was wise – somehow still spared from human appetite, although her wool and milk were becoming sparse and her lambs smaller each year.

+

“Whether she lives or not, it must die. I will not lose more sheep to this monster.”

+

For all their usual goofiness, dogs had a vicious side. A dog might suddenly massacre a bunch of small animals for sport, boredom, or spite. I shook the dark thoughts out of my tail feathers. “We’ll go early next morning. At sunrise.”

+

Younger Dog groaned. “The longer we wait, the more the creature’s and Straight Horn’s scents will dissipate.”

+

“The sun is setting soon. Hawks do not travel when they cannot see.”

+

Younger Dog whined but did not argue.

+

At dawn, just as light crept over the grassy hills, Younger Dog appeared, staring up at me. He moved the latch holding the door of the mew in place and then pulled it open. My feathers were still damp, dewy, but he was too antsy to keep waiting while I preened.

+

The canyons east of here were confusing, maze-like, populated by coyotes, bears, goats, and other animals. I would fly above Younger Dog but swoop down to warn him of any danger while he focused on following the scents. Older Dog had to stay and watch the rest of the flock. Not that he was the type to ever do something this drastic to help another animal.

+

While flying over the woods, I kept track of Younger Dog as he weaved through the pine trees. Where the ground was soft, some footsteps left by a running, two-legged creature remained visible. I missed flying and hunting with my mate.

+

We arrived at the canyons, a nearly barren network of mountains, plateaus, caves, and winding pathways. The stone was just beginning to glow with deep oranges, yellows, and reds under the morning sunlight. Below me, Younger dog was a tiny, multicolored beast, sniffing and then dashing forward.

+

As I circled him, despite my best efforts I got lost in thought, thinking of how Straight Horn the sheep was pregnant and about to give birth. I remembered my own chicks, now grown and living with other human families. Now that my mate was gone, the lambs were my chicks. Thus I only noticed a large beige predator hiding behind the tree, watching Younger Dog, almost too late to warn him.

+

The lion blended into the colors of the canyon; she’d be invisible for dogs, but I saw her back legs and spine twitching, her chest expanding, the breath leaving her nose as mist. Younger Dog was only as tall as Man’s knee. By himself, he was no match for a mountain lion. Likely, neither was I. But we had each other. So I dove, beak first, toward the cat, screaming a warning to Younger Dog.

+

I dodged the big cat’s paw but landed on my belly and not my feet. I got up and puffed my feathers out. The cat backed up while still staring at me, but his ears turned toward the dog.

+

“We are not here to fight you,” Younger Dog whimpered. “You know the scars we’ll leave aren’t worth the quality of the meat beneath our skin.”

+

“Where’s your Man?” the lion hissed.

+

“He’s not with us. You are not the monster we’re after. This time.”

+

The cat’s lips closed and claws retracted, just a little. “You’re here for the Not-Man,” he almost purred.

+

“The what?” Younger Dog answered.

+

The cat turned to face the dog. “The thing you’re smelling now. The Not-Man has been stinking up my territory for some months now. He scares the prey from here and teases me by hiding delicious animals in his cave.”

+

I was able to jump up to the branch of a nearby tree. Why was Younger Dog talking to this beast? Cats could not be trusted. What made dogs special, especially this dog, was that they wanted to make friends with every cretin in the animal kingdom.

+

“Let’s help each other.” Younger Dog wagged his tail slightly and lowered the hair standing on his back. “We don’t have to fight. We attack the Not-Man together.”

+

The cat continued to bare his teeth, but the dog’s fur still flattened. “I don’t hunt in packs, like you two. I ambush. However, I can tell you where he lives. He is not so large, but he is clever and usually knows when I am coming, so I have not been able to rid these canyons of him. Yet.

+

“Keep walking up the hill, to the boulder with two cacti on either side of it. You’ll see a crevice in the stone wall, big enough for you to squeeze through, but too small for me. The Not-Man sleeps in there.”

+

The dog’s tail wagged slightly.

+

“What are you waiting for?” The cat whipped his own tail. “You’re lucky I’m letting you live, so get going.”

+

“There’s two of us and one of you!” I squawked.

+

“She’s right. We have to go.” Younger Dog dashed up the hill. I gave a last look to the cat before jumping from the tree branch and back into flight.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Dog

+

We reached the boulder described by the cat.

+

“I see the crevice over there,” said Slow Hawk. “I can’t follow you into the dark. Are you sure you want to go in?”

+

“Yes! You can wait for us here.”

+

“I won’t stay too long,” Slow Hawk warned. “But if you do get Straight Horn back, someone will have to watch out for that cat.”

+

I jiggled my head and then lifted my nose – from the crevice, the scent of the Not-Man was strong, and just barely, I could smell…Straight Horn, and other sheep? goats? chickens? I whined as I stifled my fear before I squeezed my head and wide shoulders through the crevice and into the cave.

+

The twittering of bats felt like tiny pine needles pricking the insides of my ears. Bats were difficult to talk to unless they were calm enough to speak one at a time. They were likely annoyed at my trespassing and would need time to calm before they’d be helpful to me.

+

More smells. Savory, earthy, mushrooms, salty stone, the animal smells, the Not-Man – who did smell somewhat like a sweating human, but the stink was sharper, biting. There was a sticky sweetness in the air, as sweet as the candies Boy sometimes gave me for doing tricks. I blinked. Something like vines covered the floor and wound around the spikes jutting from the floor and the ceiling. I could hear slow liquid, not water but something else, dripping from the ceiling to the floor. Ball-like things bloomed on the vines. They glowed, not like stars, but like summer fireflies.

+

Feet scraped against the stone floor. I jumped just in time when the Not-Man lunged at me. His giant claw clacked loudly against a rock as the wind from our movements shook the glowing balls. Small things resembling tufts of fur burst from the balls into the air.

+

The Not-Man turned to face me as he took big breaths, his body expanding and shrinking. He was human-shaped, about the same height as Woman, but hunched low. His eyes were too big on his head, his nose totally flat, and the claw on his left hand resembled the claws of the crabs Woman brought back from the market, while his right hand was spindly and delicate, like a human’s.

+

I lunged for the arm attached to the claw and bit down, hard. His skin was tough, but I pulled back with my hind legs and clenched hard, my teeth finally breaking through. All my muscles working together, swinging my head back and forth, tearing his flesh. His blood, spiced and hot, filled my mouth. He screamed like a great cow. With his weak right hand, he scratched, but I would not release.

+

He pulled back, dragging me with him, little pebbles scraping against my paws. More blood filled my mouth, my throat. I sucked air through my nose, the ultra-sweet perfumes filling my brain.

+

A great thud landed on the top of my head. Something hard. Pain filled my whole face, a numbness from my toes. Again something bashed my head. The agony was too much, my jaw weakened, and the Not-Man pulled himself free. I was blind and deaf for a few seconds, but then I saw his body shuddering as he forced air in and out his lungs, smelled blood leaking from the wound on the arm hanging limp at his side. I readied myself to lunge a second time, this time for his face or neck.

+

“Wait, dooog,” he rasped. I froze. I did not expect the Not-Man to be able to speak to me. “I g-guess you here for ewe I tooook the othzerrr NIGHT.” He did not speak the way most animals did. He was straining to make himself understood. “Weeee don’t naad tow fightt-t. I wOll tak-k you to yourrr preciousss sssheep.”

+

I whimpered and backed away from Not-Man, the pain in my head enormous – but I could ignore that for now, because I imagined Boy and Woman praising me for getting Straight Horn back home.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Sheep

+

I thought I’d seen everything worth tasting or fearing before the Not-Man carried me in his arms, through the forest, the canyons, and into the cave. My face and legs were scraped with little cuts from stray branches and from squeezing me through the crevice. My wool was a mess, uncomfortable, matted, heavy – not good for my old knees.

+

The mushroom vines offered a soft enough bed. The lamb growing inside me moved often, so she still lived. The animals already living in the cave regarded my arrival with little interest. The bats continued their shrill gossip and daily complaints. The chickens considered me for only a few moments before they went back to chasing cave bugs. The would-be proud goats looked up from their naps before returning to sleep. Goats always called sheep their dull cousins. Yet, here they looked lazy. Bored.

+

There was an adolescent male sheep already here, the only one excited by my arrival, but disappointed I was with lamb.

+

“Calm down, Restless One,” I scolded him, “I have bigger horns than you do. You’re not old enough to mate.”

+

“Not-Man promised I’d have a family,” he’d snorted. “A flock.”

+

I was sleeping when I felt Younger Dog’s nose on my cheek. I bleated awake, my too big belly causing me to roll awkwardly before I could figure out exactly what was going on. I could just see Not-Man some feet from me, and the goats, Restless One, and the chickens watching us without moving. Younger Dog was too close for me to see him, but I felt his breath on my cheek and smelled him, that distinct predator-but-friend scent.

+

“Thisss dooog hiz caame to—”

+

“Huh?” I asked, not fully understanding the Not-Man. I heard him groan.

+

“The d-dog wantsss to take YOU home,” he communicated again. Trying to understand his animal voice felt like trying to catch a flea hiding in my wool. “I w-will let YOU maaake choice…” he paused for a few moments “…S-Straight Hoof?”

+

“Straight Horn,” I corrected, gritting my teeth.

+

“Do you waaant to Go back to your HUmans, who m-milk you, EAT you,’’ he took a deep breath, “l-leave you outside all day, who SELL your babiessss away?” His whole body tremored with the effort, making sure my aged sheep brain understood him: “I might d-drink some of your BLOOD, but I-I’m building my own f-flock. Your LAMB will s-stay h-here with YOU. You have softtt beddinggg. You have s-so much tasteee fooood. Why s-stress your w-walking th–past the canYON and the woodsss to the HUman lair? What-what do the HUmans offer their PREY that I wouldn’t-n’t?”

+

Younger Dog whined. I managed to stand up. The sweet stink of the cave rumbled my stomachs. The Not-Man did have a point. I did not look forward to the journey back, pregnant and old, to the humans’ home.

+

“Slow Hawk waits for us.” Younger Dog nudged me with his snout. “The humans are your family.”

+

“The humans use me for the things my body produces.” I sighed. “The Not-Man, the humans. My lamb won’t be born into true freedom no matter what I choose.”

+

“At least, with the humans, your lamb will get to grow up in the sunshine. You want her to stay in this dank place forever?” Younger Dog sat and stared at me, waiting for my response.

+

I thought about the humans back at the home. Boy wore a jacket woven from my own wool. They were monsters: I’d seen Boy and Older Dog break chicken necks, heard Man kill sheep. They all ate the meat. But Boy often rubbed my belly and fell asleep on my back. Woman fed me carrots. Younger Dog saved me from a coyote last month.

+

They were monsters. And not.

+

Whatever they were, I’d always be a sheep. My lamb growing inside me would be a sheep. We could be dependent on humans to feed us and sheer us, or the Not-Man in his cave.

+

I could smell that Younger Dog had a serious injury. He had come a long way to find me, the silly little beast. Most animals would never be so brave.

+

“I will go with you,” I told Younger Dog, “if you promise to challenge Older Dog for dominance. Sheep languish without a strong leader.”

+

Younger Dog backed up, so I could see him. He barked agreement to my terms. Restless One, listening to our conversation, huffed with annoyance, seemingly unimpressed. Well, I couldn’t please everyone.

+

“Also, if I die on the walk back, rip my lamb from my belly and bring her home,” I told Younger Dog and ambled toward the exit of this chamber of the cave.

+

“You CHOOSE go back to the HUmans?” the Not-Man shouted at me.

+

“I’m leaving with Younger Dog.” I stomped and shook my head at him, then turned to my young rescuer. “Lead the way. Isn’t that your job, hound?”

+

Younger Dog’s tail wagged back and forth, not too quickly.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Bat

+

The Not-Man who moved into our cave had a habit of chatting aloud to us, although we didn’t always understand what he said. Because of the weird mushrooms he grew, the cave was bright all the time. We did not need to use our bat sounds to find our way around the cave anymore because we always had light, but this made sleeping difficult. He pretended to not understand our complaints about the glow.

+

Not-Man claimed it was not easy for him to live with humans. They did not want him. We pitied him because he lived alone with no colony. He kidnapped big animals and brought them to our cave, out of loneliness, we guessed. However, he did not groom us, himself, or his animal friends, or supply interesting gossip, so perhaps the humans felt he was poor company. We could not be sure because we do not know human customs well.

+

We asked the songbirds, who said that humans did groom, in pools of water, like they did. As far as we know, Not-Man did not bathe.

+

Bats love novel information. But none of us knew where the Not-Man came from. Some of us thought he was once a human but became twisted somehow. Others thought he was once an animal and became twisted somehow. Maybe he was a mushroom that learned to talk and walk. Maybe he wasn’t as lonely as we thought he was because the glowing mushrooms were actually his family.

+

After the dog had come and led the pregnant ewe from our cave, Not-Man poured a glowing liquid on his injured arm and healed it. Then he drank his different glowing liquid, and his body swelled with power. I had never seen him drink so much at once. He was so angry, stomping around and destroying his mushrooms, when normally he took great care and attention not to knock them over.

+

“Thiis eveNING, they RAYjoyssss retuuurrrrn of losssettt ssssheep,” the Not-Man said to us, but maybe he was just talking to himself or to the mushrooms. “WHEN humanzz and their aNImals sssleep, I come to their ffflock. I not carRY them home becausssse they do NOT dessserve my giffftsss. They do not deserve me. I will DRINK the blooood of the flock and the dooog. The HUMANZZ will have NOTHING but CARcasssesssss.”

+

We didn’t like when the Not-Man talked about humans because our colony had purposely moved to this cave, far from humans. We didn’t need human smoke, fire, and trouble. We shook our wings and were quieter than usual, a nervous feeling crackling in the air around us.

+

When the sun was sinking, our flock exited the cave through the crevice. I flew out, following my brothers and sisters, but I was curious about the Not-Man, about where his temper would lead him. I landed near the crevice and watched. He moved one of the boulders that made the cave exit narrow, a feat he could only do after he drank some of his liquid, and exited the cave. Drool leaked from his big mouth. Even in the evening light, the sun nearly gone and the light reflection of the moon on the purple sky, I could see that his eyes looked clouded and strange. Low, angry noises shook his chest and his muscles vibrated, buzzed almost, while his heart thundered in his chest.

+

My attention was drawn, suddenly, to a new sound: claws scraping against rock, the intake of deep breath, the woosh of a large body moving swiftly through the air. A lion leapt onto the Not-Man, surprising him from behind. I heard the crunch of the lion’s large teeth on the bones of his neck, the split-second cry of hurt before his throat was crushed.

+

In the past, the Not-Man had always been careful and he looked for signs of the cat before he left his cave. His strange liquid and his rage must have made him stupid.

+

I chittered, calling for the others, who scolded me as they swooped around the scene of the lion devouring Not-Man.

+

“We didn’t want to see this. We eat bugs, not the corpses of big animals,” they protested, but they didn’t fly away. “You’re so morbid, Nosy Whispers! Poor lonely thing, he was. Probably better off dead than alive and suffering.”

+

“With him gone, we can ask the goats to eat the mushrooms,” I offered. “We’ll sleep in peace again.” The others thought that was a good idea.

+

It was a shame that the Not-Man died with no one to mourn him – a sad fate for even the grumpiest of bats. I perched, thinking of Not-Man, how having him in the cave helped me feel grateful for my brothers and sisters. But our stomachs grumble when left unfilled by moths and mosquitoes, and bats are not philosophical, so I did not idle for long. I took flight and joined the others, hoping the smell of his blood might fade by the time we returned.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Not-Man Kidnaps a Sheep on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Jennifer Jeanne McArdle

+

+ + Author image of Jennifer Jeanne McArdle + + + Jennifer Jeanne McArdle lives in New York with her fiance and an agent of chaos (a spotted dog) and works in animal conservation. Previously she’s taught ESL in South Korea and Indonesia and worked for and with nonprofits in the US and Asia. Her story The Mules was a Brave New Weird 2022 award winner. You can find her on Bluesky, Instagram, Twitter, and her website.

+

© Jennifer Jeanne McArdle 2024 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Dziana Hasanbekava - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-37/short-reviews-january-to-march-2024.html b/issue-37/short-reviews-january-to-march-2024.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c013e542 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-37/short-reviews-january-to-march-2024.html @@ -0,0 +1,324 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 37 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Short Reviews – January to March, 2024

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – January to March, 2024 by +
+ + + + +

S + +ome might assume that sifting through hundreds of short story submissions would be enough for a magazine’s editor – that magazine’s editor sometimes wonders on the subject himself – and yet it remains a rewarding task to dive into what other genre publications are putting out there.

+

Take Care by Lex Chamberlin appears in Issue 6 of Radon Journal, a thrice annual platform for “prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia”, and adds to that body of fiction that presents the perspective of an artificial intelligence and allows us to look into the gap between what we can intuit and what (and how) our narrator comprehends, leading to surprising (yet strangely satisfying) turns.

+

Andra, an embodied AI care-giver, arrives at the Mayweather Household to provide end-of-life support to Gwyn, whose husband Cam (to Andra’s eye) manifests his presumed grief through emotional absenteeism, unhealthy personal habits and sleeping paterns, and an increasing obsession over his work. Hints that all is not well in the wider world seep in at the edges of what Andra perceives, until a bad day at the office (or, more likely, the lab) turns any expectation regarding the characters’ mortality rather on its head.

+

What follows is darkly amusing and faintly sad, yet manages to culminate in an unusual sort of optimism.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +ext we return to Sci Phi Journal, for a more straightforwardly serious piece of writing. Javier Fernández’s The Cleft, translated from the original Spanish La grieta by Álvaro Piñero González, leans heavily towards prehistorical anthropology, with only an arguably unreal element – a disembodied voice from beneath the earth’s surface – nudging it away from the scientific end of speculative fiction towards the fantastical.

+

Initially, we follow what seems an early human hunter as he oportunistically stalks a marvelous prey, determined to bring his tribe the greatest prize. Twists and turns of fortune play with them both, eventually seeing the hunter returning to his people, until fate steps in once again. Then we find ourselves accompanying an actual man, a sheepherder, returning home after searching for and rescuing one of his flock – another prized specimen, the value of livestock undiminished though perhaps thousands of years separate the two strands.

+

The story features beginnings and endings, and leaves much to the reader’s interpretation; but, if the final action of the man represents the start of something far greater and long-lasting than itself, it certainly has its own origins in what motivated the hunter long before. Difficult to describe without spoiling, as you might guess from this attempt.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nother proven reliable zine, The Future Fire, provides our third recommendation. A Witch, a Wakening by Laura Blackwell is a deceptively gentle read, in which our narrator consciously dreams of anonymous witchhood, being one of several different sleepers who share the roles of witch and their assistant, seemingly without any need for consistency as one or the other.

+

Somnolent logic pervades all: close, easy familiarity between strangers as if old friends; random events signifying predestined certainty; unreadable words that can still be understood; mysterious tasks completed as if by knowledgeable hands. But the idyllic pastoral atmosphere reveals an edge, too. Perhaps subconscious archetypes must be satisfied even when we don’t want them to be.

+

This was not the only story in The Future Fire I enjoyed. The Rose Sisterhood by Susan Taitel delivers an interesting take on the Beauty and the Beast fable, and in fact both the other zines featured here had rivals for my favourite reads: Jason Vizcarra-Brown’s The Magnetic Gospel in Radon and Mary G. Thompson’s Charlie v. Inman in Sci Phi.

+

Finally, to wrap up this inevitable extending of recommendations, it seems Emma Burnett is taking 2024 by storm. In addition to this issue’s Friends in High Places, she has At a Higher Dose, Love in Daikaiju Magazine and Escape Choice in, one more time, The Future Fire – both definitely worth a look!

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these stories on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-37/the-book-of-love-kelly-link-review.html b/issue-37/the-book-of-love-kelly-link-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c955db94 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-37/the-book-of-love-kelly-link-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,321 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Book of Love, by Kelly Link — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 37 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

+

Mattia Ravasi

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Book of Love, by Kelly Link by +
+ + + + +

A + + person’s late teens are a magical time: a time of transformation and shape-shifting. After finishing school (or deciding school is not for us) we set our eyes on new shores, eager to find out what kind of person we are meant to become. Things that were incredibly important to us throughout our childhood and our in-between years, things like hobbies, interests, and even friends, can come to seem like needless burdens. Some of us get a first full-time job around this age, or start college, feeling at last like the masters of our own lives, magicians coming to grips with the power crackling between our fingers. For others the lack of a clear path, of something to care about and dedicate ourselves to, can feel like a curse: a botched enchantment preventing us from turning into our true selves, leaving us trapped inside a life we were meant to leave behind.

+

Kelly Link eviscerates the magic of this liminal age in The Book of Love, a novel obsessed with doors and transformation, with dreams and ambitions burning hot in the hearts of its characters. Set in the quaint seaside town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, the novel focuses on a group of teenagers who are back home for Christmas… from the dead.

+

The townsfolk might be convinced that Mo, Laura, and Daniel spent the last few months at a prestigious music school in Ireland, but they know better. They were actually dead, trapped inside the interdimensional realm of a trickster god called Bogomil. Somehow they managed to escape, bringing with them a fourth person, a remarkable individual called “Bowie” (after a poster in Lovesend’s high school music room) who does not seem to know their own identity.

+

Collectively they are confused, disturbed, and scared, though still able to crack the odd joke. As they strive to puzzle out the events of the past year, particularly the mystery of their own death, the four of them get tangled up in a game between Bogomil and the local music teacher, Mr. Anabin, a laconic man with a passion for motivational t-shirts and who is also a capricious god.

+

They are free to go back to their families and resume their lives, for a time. But in the end, while two of them will be allowed to stay, two will have to return to Bogomil’s nightmarish realm.

+

This tight, cruel premise allows Link to showcase the full range of her fabulist powers and stylistic flair. A giant in the field of fantasy fiction, Link has won most major awards you can think of, including a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” and three Nebulas. She is perhaps the most obvious successor of Angela Carter as a writer able to take the material of myths and fairy tales and extract from it its deeper psychological and emotional meaning, while also preserving the significance of its outer shapes, its Gods and monsters, refashioning these stories into a guise at once recognizable and extremely modern.

+

Link, however, is renowned as a short story writer. The publication of her first novel thirty or so years into her career cannot but be an intriguing prospect. Does The Book of Love pack all the genius of her shorter work, taking it to new heights? Or does her work feel dispersed and diluted in long form?

+

The Book of Love is incredibly funny, especially considering its central theme of teenage death, whether the humor comes from Mo’s sass or from Laura’s explosive fights with her volatile sister Susannah. Its prose is lush and luxurious, baroque perhaps, but never purple. Through vivid descriptions, meaningful anecdotes, and a knack for a winning simile, Link manages to bring the whole of Lovesend to life, in a way somewhat reminiscent of another fictional New England town, the Derry depicted in Stephen King’s It. The reader experiences the beauty and boredom of this quiet tourist spot, its charm and also its dullness, through the eyes of people who know it like the back of their hands, who love it quietly and implicitly but also can’t wait to be rid of it. Lovesend is a place where crushes, exes, and rivals are inescapable; where the few attractions available (like coffee shop What Hast Thou Ground?, whose owner, of course a loveable grump, inevitably doesn’t like customers who linger too long but is fiercely protective of his baristas) are shrouded with the mythical aura of all the memories that accrued around them, from first kisses to ill-advised hookups, nighttime escapades and days full of laughter.

+

The early part of the novel is as rife with mystery and drama as you would expect from the balance of reward and loss in its stunning premise. The newly returned teenagers get to grips with the life they had left behind, with all the things – some of them tragic – that have happened since they “went to Ireland”. Their manipulative gods have tasked them with doing magic, which they set out to do in ways that speak volumes about their character: Laura with zealous drive, Daniel with resigned stubbornness, Mo skeptically… while Bowie turns into a seagull, and then into a whisper of moths.

+

All too soon, however, this magical premise starts snowballing into a mythical avalanche, as new god-like creatures are introduced, the protagonists swiftly turn into fearsome magicians, and Lovesend becomes the setting for a showdown of cosmic proportions.

+

While it is hard to pinpoint an exact moment when The Book of Love grows unwieldy, by its final third the novel has become a succession of scenes where all-powerful beings talk wittily about magic, cracking one joke after another. Between one dialogue and the next, all of the characters find meaningful and rewarding love in the arms of handsome strangers or long-cherished crushes. The sense of imminent danger animating the early novel is lost. Any intimations that their cruel predicament – two shall live, two return to death – might push the four protagonists to betray each other are swiftly forgotten in the name of friendship and support, with strains between them no more than an occasional, and swiftly-resolved, misunderstanding. One of the harshest conflicts comes from Susannah getting mad at her sister because Laura used magic to force her to do the laundry.

+

The Book of Love is extremely switched-on and politically correct. It is set in a town filled with statues of African Americans of great achievement, who, at one point, come to life and tear to bits the statue of a slave owner. All the characters are respectful of their friends’ personal spaces and privacy; lovers act toward one another with nothing but tenderness and understanding. All of this is incredibly admirable, but it makes the novel feel somewhat lifeless, plastic, a magical showdown set in a version of our world that is a little too sanitized to feel convincing. In time, even the novel’s villains turn out to be tenderhearted, while its supervillain reads very much like a larger-than-life baddy, Cruella De Vil with godlike powers. The more one reads The Book of Love, the harder it is to believe that even its original threat-cum-promise – that two of its protagonists will meet a terrible end – is unlikely to be kept.

+

It goes without saying, but there is of course nothing wrong with characters having healthy relationships, or with satanic death gods who turn out to be altruistic, loveable scruffs. The Book of Love is certainly very aware of what it is doing, and speaks at length – through the character of Mo’s grandmother, a successful romance writer – about the nature of love stories and our need for happy endings. The result is a very funny young adult novel which contrives to pitch its characters in situations where its humor can be best exploited. Back-cover comparisons to The Master and Margarita, while spectacularly out of place, are certainly not the book’s own fault.

+

Ultimately, The Book of Love is characteristically Linkian in its strangeness, but also the literary equivalent of a peanut butter mocha fudge hot chocolate, a refreshment typical of Lovesend’s quirky coffee shop: any balancing trace of bitterness is overwhelmed by the saccharine sweetness of everything else. It’s by no means a bad concoction, but do you have the stomach for six hundred pages of it?

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia’s thoughts on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mattia Ravasi

+

+ + Author image of Mattia Ravasi + + + Mattia Ravasi is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Submarine. His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He talks about books on his YouTube channel, The Bookchemist, and tweets as @thebookchemist too.

+

© Mattia Ravasi 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The image shows author Kelly Link (from the author’s website, by Adrianne Mathiowetz) and the novel’s cover (designed by Caroline Cunningham).

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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The Kid is Killing Me

+

Aubrey Taylor

+ +
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+ Story image for The Kid is Killing Me by +
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T + +he little leech must’ve gotten stuck to me right out of the womb. Clung onto my leg like the bloody monster she is, still dripping from my uterus, placenta trailing behind.

+

She really freaked me out when I first caught sight of her in the mirror, peeking out from behind my frizzy hair, grinning widely at the thick coat of foundation I had on. She was terrifying: yellowish-blue nails, and a twisted smile that curled up right to the corners of unblinking eyes far too sentient for a newborn. I dropped my candle, a little Yankee Vanilla Bean that shattered on the floor – the kind of ridiculous shit you have when you’re a thirteen-year-old girl, because you’ve already gotten sucked in to the commercialist trap that is Bath and Body Works – and the baby went berserk at the noise, chomping down hard on my ear with her devil-sharp teeth. (I still have a chunk of my helix missing, and now I can’t wear my hair up, and all in all it’s just really not ideal.) Out of horror-movie reflex I grabbed a jagged piece of the broken candle and shoved it into her chubby jelly neck, where her head hung as delicately as a flower on its stem – she was just a baby, I guess she hadn’t grown the muscles to lift it yet – and with a gut-wrenching gurgle she puked up blood and then disappeared.

+

First I thought I was crazy, but I knew I wasn’t. Then I thought I was rid of her, but of course I wasn’t. She’s practically invincible, the freak.

+

My ear stung for a few days, and I had to wrap a bandage around it, but as soon as it stopped bleeding she was back. Bigger. Learning to crawl. She climbed on me like a spider at one point during gym class, hissing in one ear and then moving down to sink her claws into my thigh right as Brent Mudd kicked the ball. Naturally, I got hit in the face, and any patience I had left for the thing imploded. As soon as I was able to escape to the locker room I grabbed my locker door, leaned forward so she swung off my shoulder, and repeatedly slammed the metal into her bald, baby-powdered head, until it was mottled brown and violet, her eyes bulging red and bloody out of their sockets.

+

But it only ever got rid of her for a few days; never for good.

+

There was a time late in high school (she was maybe four or five, shiny blonde hair growing in down to her shoulders, cheeks wide under bright blue eyes, dimples and all) when she started to suffocate me at the hockey rink while I was watching my brother play his senior night game – hands clamping down hard over my mouth and nose until my vision started to blur, black spots poisoning the bright orange heaters above me. I drove myself back home from the game, pedal slammed to the floor, tears still streaming down my cheeks, straight through the intersection. I was praying for cross traffic to careen into my back end and grind her premature bones into her tissues until her underdeveloped brain splattered the back seat. But there was no one else on the road, so I got home and just made do with a razor.

+

I’m starting to get nervous. I want rid of her (obviously). She’s about seven now, and she’s been getting stronger although she’s clearly malnourished (I tried to starve her for a few years, but somehow she always gets into the Nutella). I can fend her off for now, but she’s already decently tall, and crafty, and I’m worried about what will happen when she gets to fourteen, fifteen, twenty. When she starts to form an interest in kickboxing or pipe bombs or something. She’s already starting to hurt me with her bare fists, and the possibility haunts me of the damn thing watching Karate Kid or Home Alone and getting ideas.

+

And besides that, I want friends. I’m sick and tired of missing out on exciting dates and parties just so I can take care of the wretched thing. I mean, I am twenty. I’m at college. I’m supposed to be having fun, for God’s sake. I should be rid of her by now, ready to naturally reenter the social sphere with a newfound maturity. But all she’s ever done is take up my time and energy, ungratefully, violently, growing more and more needy as the years tick on.

+

I can’t exactly hang out with friends with the Kid around, you know? It gets tiresome for everyone, with the whining, the sorry, hang on, I just need to put her down for a nap, could you keep it down, please?, or the way she sidles up to my friends, all doe-eyed, and begs and begs for ice cream, or movies, or whatever else she thinks they’ll give her; and if she ever feels mistreated or left out her face drops to something Satanic, devil-teeth glinting, and she lunges at them, and I have to get in the way and usher them out the door before anyone gets hurt.

+

And yes, I probably should’ve told my parents about her a long time ago, and I know it. But no one wants to be the stupid teen who got pregnant! It wasn’t even my fault, really, I didn’t even get the luxury of having sex first. She just showed up. It was all very Virgin Mary, really, if you ignore the fact that she’s the Antichrist.

+

But my mom would never believe that. It would be all five stages of grief: Oh, you must be mistaken, she can’t be yours, you’re lying to me. Then, I can’t believe you, how could you be so irresponsible?! Her bargaining would be useless, really, just all the things I’ve already thought of: Did you try dropping her off on someone else’s doorstep? Did you try putting her up for adoption? (Yes, and yes; and no, it didn’t work, she magically reappears at my side no matter what I do.) Then, slowly, painfully, the bullet of reality would sink in, and she’d grudgingly help babysit so that I would be able to focus on school (for once), and she’d call up Grandma and say, I know, I know. Her life is ruined. We should all pity her and make snide comments because we don’t know how to deal with it otherwise.

+

Well, I don’t know… maybe they would come around eventually. I’m just not sure it would be worth the effort. I have a Just don’t tell us! kind of family when it comes to being a disappointment. When my brother said he was an atheist, my mom fluttered her hands around for a few minutes and then elected to pretend he never said anything at all. But since then, she’s made it a point to drag him to church every time he goes back home, like he’ll realize his error with enough people singing psalms in his face. And the less said about my particular “lifestyle choices” the better.

+

So it’s been… boring, to say the least, these past seven years. Fine: lonely. I’m lonely. Alright? I said it. Kids make for dull company. The moron’s been trying to get into the vodka and Cheez-Its for months, and when I cave all she does is get lethargic and drunk and depressed. I resigned myself to being her guardian. What else could I do?

+

Then, by some miracle, I met someone in one of my classes this year, and that was when I decided that I was at my breaking point. I will get rid of the Kid so I can date this girl if it’s the last thing I do. Because the Crush is amazing: tall, and gorgeous, and likes most of the same things I do. We talk about gruesome tales of true crime! We watch Game of Thrones! And, well, she only drinks coffee when it’s iced, but hey, everyone’s got their baggage.

+

Thing is, it’s impossible to date her without getting past the constant distraction of having the unwanted Kid around. Shortly after I met the Crush, I was so tired I almost fell asleep in the shower, and the Kid pressed my face up against the faucet and tried to drown me. So, really, the little wretch deserved it when I swung her out the window and held her up by her long, matted hair until she screamed her lungs raw and I finally dropped her and had the satisfaction of seeing her splat against the pavement. (It was great, she exploded like a balloon.) So finally I caved and got an appointment with a specialist, who might be my only chance to get rid of the Kid for good.

+

The doctor is very smiley and hopeful. She says, Wow, she looks just like you! (like that’s a compliment and not the greatest insult I’ve ever received in my life) and doesn’t even miss a beat before adding that, no, I can’t just force her to go away. But apparently there are other people like me, and some of them have been taking care of their children, especially when they tend toward murderous fits of rage, and research shows that they can grow up to be quite lovely young adults.

+

Bullshit. I stormed out of her office in a hurry, hell-bent on never returning. I’m not about to start taking care of the damn thing, are you kidding me? But then, of course, it’s only a day later that the Crush calls and asks if I want to get lunch while I try to hush the piercing screams behind me.

+

“Are you alright?” she asks at one point.

+

“Fine, fine,” I say, ripping the Kid’s nails out of my chest and biting as many of her fingers as I can clean off, all the way up to the little knuckles. The kid lets loose another wail, clutching bloody stumps to her chin, face red and blotchy with tears. I spit out her pinky, wipe off my mouth. “I’m afraid I can’t make it, though.”

+

I drag the Kid, kicking and screaming, back to the doctor’s office the same day, a little sheepish for the way I’d left, but mostly just pissed at the new claw marks down my torso and downright irate about missing out on another date.

+

“Fine,” I seethe, “what exactly do you suggest I do?” I gesture at the little monster, letting the doctor look closer at her regrown fingers and pale white wrists. At her teeth, glinting out of her scornful, predatory face.

+

The doctor doesn’t even seem frightened. “Hello,” she says, leaning down to make eye contact with the demon. I gape at the doctor. The kid matches my expression, eyes growing wider, teeth disappearing behind trembling lips.

+

“Would you like to tell me about yourself?” The Kid looks at the doctor, and then looks at me and frowns.

+

The doctor straightens and shakes her head. “This may take a while.” She writes something down on a clipboard and clicks her tongue. “Start by giving her lots of water and healthy food. Make sure she’s sleeping well. Maybe let her exercise—”

+

“Exercise? You want me to put this thing on a fucking treadmill? She tried to kill me today, for God’s sake!”

+

“Then you should exercise, too,” the doctor says calmly, which I think should be a politically incorrect thing to say, but I can’t exactly call her out on it because she’s a doctor, and she’s right. I honestly haven’t had the energy to exercise in years.

+

When we get back home the Kid and I have a staring match. I put my hands on my hips, make myself tall and intimidating. She gazes back up at me just as detestingly, arms crossed over her narrow chest.

+

Finally I cave, grab a cup and slam it down in front of her before filling it from my water bottle. “Haven’t washed these dishes in months,” I tell her spitefully as I do it. “I hope you get mono. I’m not about to waste a Brita filter on you.” She looks at me distrustfully, and then looks at the water with need. She grabs the cup, inspects it from all angles, sniffs it, but then it’s too much and she drains it, gulping deeply, breathing so hard the glass fogs up as she drinks. I can practically see her pupils dilating.

+

When she finishes she looks at me expectantly, still frowning. But she doesn’t whine or scream. She doesn’t bite me. She almost seems… calm. I refill the glass slightly less hesitantly, and she drinks it all again. She uses the back of her hand to wipe her lips and stares at her reflection, rotating the cup in front of her wide eyes: the kind of bright, childlike eyes that are supposed to be full of wonder, that always make middle-aged women go awww, what a little darling.

+

I lean on the counter and squint, trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with those eyes.

+

And then she slams the glass on the counter, and it shatters. I leap back, but can’t dodge the shard of glass she flings at my face. Tears spring to my eyes when it cuts through the skin of my cheek. She grabs a bigger piece and jumps at me, aiming for the neck, a reminder of our very first meeting.

+

“You! Piece! Of! Shit!” I yell, sprinting around pieces of furniture, weaponless and betrayed. “I thought we were finally getting along!”

+

She jumps over the back of the couch and the glass grazes my shin as she tumbles over my feet. I stomp down on her wrists until she drops it, and then pick her up by her ankles, her teeth still snapping, claws shredding any bare skin she can reach, and head toward the oven.

+

“You asked for this,” I mutter, turning it as high as it will go. “I was being so nice to you. Giving you water from my own water bottle. And this is how you repay me.” She snarls, and I struggle with her for a few more moments, coming out of the blitz with long scratch marks down my arms and neck. “Jesus Christ, stop moving so much and let me cook you, damn it!”

+

With a final shove, I manage to squeeze her inside the oven, her spine pressed up against the light at the back, her legs curled up to her chest, fingers gripping the edges of the oven before I snap the door shut with a bang! and she recoils with a scream. I sit there, heaving air, holding the door shut with my entire body for thirty minutes, until I’m sure she’s done writhing and hissing in pain.

+

“Rare or medium-well?” I pretend to ask the Crush, fixing my hair and chuckling to myself, when I finally open the door to check. The Kid – probably charred and blistered, skin puckered up in red welts and eyes dripping out of their sockets – is gone.

+

Of course, she comes back a few days later. This time, I’m ready. “Come out and drink some water, bastard,” I say nicely, when I first spot her lurking under my bed. I hand her a full (plastic) cup. As soon as she’s distracted with the water, I push her down into a fold-up chair and zip-tie her ankles and wrists to the metal poles.

+

She isn’t even bothered with the lack of freedom, just more irritated when her cup of water drops to the floor, away from her chapped lips. “Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, picking it up, refilling it, and holding it up to her mouth so she can drink. I’m such a stellar parent.

+

“Next you’re going to eat,” I say sternly. She watches me dubiously as I walk over to the kitchenette and whip out carrots, onions, and lentils. I grin at her shocked face maliciously. “Oh, yes, real food. I went to the grocery store, like an adult. No frozen pizza, no granola bars. We’re having—” I squint at the recipe on my phone and try not to make a face “—lentil soup, because the Food Network says it’s healthy and also… tasty… I guess. So you’re going to eat it, and you’re going to like it, you little fucker.”

+

Two hours later, I discover that I am a master chef. I mean, sure, it took me some time and some Googling to figure out how to “dice” onions (turns out, they’re already pre-cut into rings! ha!) and the carrots end up kind of raw and chunky, but damn, garlic and oregano fix everything. The Kid and I make reluctant eye contact over our steaming food (I un-zip-tied one of her hands and pulled her up to the table, because I’m gracious) before literally tossing aside our spoons and drinking it from the lips of our bowls.

+

I give her more water, because her eyes are drooping, and I guess she isn’t so bad when she’s physically restrained. Then I wash the dishes, turn out the lights, and head to bed.

+

We go on like this for a while, her in her makeshift high chair (slash torture chamber, if needed), me playing the part of caring Gen-X parent: buying organic food (okay, not really, but what does “organic” even mean?), keeping junk and dangerous objects out of reach, and forcing myself not to hit the damn thing, even when deserved. Occasionally, she’ll get prickly, trying to literally bite the hand that’s feeding her; but I don’t lose my temper, since she’s zip-tied and I’m in control. Besides, she’s looking healthier, sure; her cheeks have rounded out, her hips don’t jut out so extremely from her waist, and her eyes are no longer sunken into her cheeks.

+

But while all of this makes her more dangerous, I can tell that at least I’m healthier, too. No bite wounds, and more protein than I’ve ever had in my diet. I’m forcing myself to sleep longer, so it’s dark and quiet enough for her to sleep, too. It’s not too bad of a situation. I’m considering calling up the Crush soon. Getting out of the house for a change.

+

One night I’m turning out the lights when she speaks for the very first time. “Will you untie me?”

+

I freeze, hand still on the light switch, and then flick it back on, afraid it’ll be like a horror movie where she suddenly appears right behind me. But no, she’s still trapped in the chair, looking right at me with her big eyes, which are strangely starting to seem more and more human as time goes on. It’s probably just because I have to look at her so much: while I cook dinner, while I eat, when I wake up. Always. Just the two of us. I would be losing my mind if I didn’t feel so fucking great. I think it’s the protein.

+

“Could you maybe try not to kill me?” I retort, and turn the lights off dismissively, heading to the bedroom.

+

But she won’t give up. Her reedy voice floats through the crack in the door. “Untie me.”

+

I peel off my socks and jeans. “No.”

+

“It hurts.”

+

My shirt gets caught on my head, and my voice comes out muffled. “So do your teeth.”

+

“I can’t sleep like this.”

+

My clothes fall into a dirty pile on the floor, and I dig through the hamper for week-old pajamas. “You’re fine.”

+

“The doctor said I need exercise.”

+

I grit my teeth as I dress. I mull this over until I’m under the covers, the bedside light switched off. “Maybe, when I’m awake to supervise.”

+

“I’ll try to be good.”

+

This makes me pause. But then I squeeze my eyes shut and roll over. “Don’t lie.”

+

“I’m not lying. I’ll try.”

+

I really am a sucker. It must be all that hippie food I’ve been buying, free-range zero-plastic recycled soy bullshit giving me faith in the world again. But I get up from bed and grab my scissors and go back through. I hesitantly free the girl from her bonds and she climbs down from the highchair. She must be eight by now. She is quite tall for her age.

+

She mirrors my movements as we walk back to bed, and lay down together. And miraculously, despite every bad feeling I have in my gut… in the morning I’m still alive.

+

I go back to the doctor’s office with the girl a few days later, holding her hand. I’m practically preening when I tell her about our new routine. “Look at her! She’s so healthy. And she hasn’t bitten me in weeks!”

+

The doctor smiles at us. “Do you both feel better?”

+

I roll my eyes. “Obviously. Those teeth are like daggers. And I hate having to wash the blood out of my laundry.”

+

The doctor looks at the girl. “And you?”

+

She looks at me uncertainly, and then nods.

+

“Excellent!” The doctor makes a note on her clipboard. “Well, now that physical health is being taken care of, you should start the emotional process.”

+

I frown. “We’re not done? She’s fine as she is.”

+

The doctor shakes her head and smiles again, somewhat condescendingly this time. “She’s doing a wonderful job right now, but it’s possible for her to relapse at any time.” She tilts her head at the girl. “It’s a lot of effort to try to control it, right?”

+

The girl squeezes my hand tighter, looking down at the floor. But then she nods, and my chest drops.

+

The doctor looks at her pityingly, like she might hug her, but she keeps her distance. “For her physical health to make any lasting impression, you’re going to have to be kind to her.”

+

To the Kid? I raise my eyebrows. “I already cook literally every single meal for her.”

+

“You have to tell her she’s good. Tell her she’s wonderful, and precious, and smart, and thoughtful, and that you care about her.”

+

I burst out into laughter. Then I realize that the doctor’s dead serious, and I morph it into an embarrassed scoff. “Then I’d be a liar,” I retort.

+

The doctor gives me a hard look. “Listen, you’re a parent whether you like it or not, okay? If you want this to get better, even if it feels stupid to you, you have to try.” She takes a deep breath. “And keep coming in here together, too, okay? We’re going to keep talking.”

+

I’m disheartened, but I’m certainly not going to give up. Not when we’ve come so far. The doctor’s right: if this is my only chance at getting control of things and finally having people I like back in my life, I will do anything.

+

We awkwardly sit in the car outside of the doctor’s office, my hand frozen mid-air as I hold the key unturned in the ignition and try to think of something nice I can say to the Kid. But I look at her, at her awkward bony shoulders and her wide, almost smeared-looking face, and I think about all of the days I’ve spent pent up with her instead of out and about, enjoying life, and I can’t force out the words.

+

Days later and I’m still struggling. I serve her food, and she eats every last bite in silence, and I wordlessly wash her dishes and go to bed, barely even looking at her. I mean, what is good about her? She’s irritating and dependent and too quiet to be interesting. And every time she opens her mouth, I still see those devilish teeth. I avoid her when I can, even when we go to weekly sessions at the doctor’s office, out of guilt or discomfort or something else.

+

But regardless of it all, something has changed, because the next time the Crush calls, asking to study together at a coffee shop, even though it means bringing the Kid, I say yes.

+

The Kid is appeased with a cup of whipped cream (who isn’t?). The Crush and I sip our grown-up drinks, strawberry shortcake lattes. Hers is iced, but I’m willing to let it slide. Neither of us move to open our laptops. She leans on one elbow, body slanted toward me, and I think, Oh my God, don’t ruin this.

+

“I like your— your—” my eyes zigzag around the table “—your posture.” Shit. I mean, I do! It’s all slouchy, and she has short fingernails that tap lightly on the table, I like those too. But posture? Who says that?

+

She smiles all crooked, another huge plus. “Thanks.” Her gaze slides toward the Kid, then back at me. “I like your notes.” Internally I cringe. Obviously she just wants me for my homework. This is purely transactional. It’s college, after all. I bend down to open my bag and get them. “Whenever I look over at what you’re writing in class, it’s something super interesting and completely unrelated. And you have good handwriting.”

+

I stop reaching. “Okay, first of all, it’s not interesting, and I have the handwriting of a middle-school boy and it haunts me. Second of all, it is related! Name one thing I’ve written that isn’t completely relevant to the lectures.”

+

“Yesterday, you copied the entire transcript of a three-hour Titanic documentary.”

+

I flush. “That’s totally for the final project.”

+

The Crush giggles, and I lose all remaining train of thought. I made her laugh! I can’t stop staring at her mouth until her gentle fingers reach out and tap my hand, and it’s like a live wire jolts through all of my nerves at once. “Hello?”

+

I clear my throat. “Sorry, what?”

+

“I said you also drew a picture of the world on fire.”

+

Accurate rendition, in my opinion. “I have many talents.”

+

She looks at the Kid again. “You’re sure funny for someone who draws so much smoke.”

+

“Is that a metaphor? I think you should know that I consider those useless. If there’s something that needs to be said, make it explicit.” I smile benignly. “And I know best. I did pass English in high school.”

+

The Crush continues to look at the Kid. “She looks just like you.”

+

I fake gag, purely on reflex. “Ugh, just tell me I have red horns and a forked tongue, you don’t have to be so mean about it.”

+

She raises her eyebrows. “You think she’s ugly?”

+

“Among other things. She can’t take care of herself and doesn’t make anyone happy.” I laugh a little, but they both just stare at me. Okay, maybe this is fun and all, but I’m really not here to dilly-dally. I duck down to grab my notes. “Anyway, which problem are you—”

+

“I mean, it’s not her fault the world is burning. She’s just on one little corner of it.”

+

My notebook catches on the table edge and falls out of my hands onto the floor. I feel hot. I can’t look at anything for too long. “Okay, listen, she’s my problem, okay? You don’t know what she should or shouldn’t be blamed for.” I bend down to pick up my notebook, but then I squeeze the table and stop myself. “Her existence itself is pretty awful, when you think about it, the amount of resources she needs and the ignorance she has about where they’re coming from. And there really is no meaningful way for her to atone for all of the terrible things she is implicit in, whether they are purposeful or not. So, I mean, it is her fault that the world is burning, or at least that she plays a part. And maybe she should be punished for it, because there’s not a lot else she’s good for.”

+

I stare at my fingers, and then I let go of the table.

+

The Crush shrugs. I catch it in the corner of my vision. “That’s pretty harsh. I can see where she gets her murderous looks from.”

+

I swivel to face the Kid. Sure enough, she’s glowering. I scowl right back.

+

“Yep, right there. You’re both so cute.”

+

I rile. “I’m not here to be infantilized.”

+

“Oh, come on, I’m just teasing.” Something in my chest feels tight. Probably indigestion. “Some teasing is fun. Actually, it’s necessary. On that Titanic transcript, once the lifeboats were all gone, did anyone crack a joke?”

+

“God, no.”

+

“Huh. Such a good opportunity to break the ice.”

+

I bury my head in my hands. The Kid starts to laugh.

+

The Crush is laughing, too. “See?”

+

“Yeah, I see. I see that you’re a moron.”

+

“What else do you see?” I can hear the smile in her voice. “Do you see me on Tuesday for another coffee date?”

+

I pull my fingers away from my eyes to look at her. My whole body is buzzing. “If you don’t pull any more pick-up lines like that, I’ll think about it.”

+

“Done.” The Crush is still laughing. She ruffles the girl’s hair. “Bring this one again. I like her.”

+

One of us says “Okay,” and it’s only when the girl and I are back in the car that I realize I don’t remember who.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Kid is Killing Me on Facebook.

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+

Aubrey Taylor

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+ + Author image of Aubrey Taylor + + + Aubrey Taylor is a short story writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She uses books and coffee to cope with her engineering degree. This is her first publication.

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© Aubrey Taylor 2024 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Bru-nO and Andrea Piacquadio.

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Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness

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Steve Loiaconi

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+ Story image for Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness by +
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T + +here was a time when I would have ignored anything that looked like a robocall or a scam and just let it ring. But I was waiting on calls about several resumes I had sent out, and I couldn’t afford to miss a promising business opportunity, so when the call came from an unknown number in Queens one night, I answered.

+

“Hello?” I said.

+

There was silence on the other end at first, and then a frantic whisper. “I’m in trouble, Teddy,” the voice said. “Real trouble.”

+

It took me a moment to place the voice. I was used to it being much louder and more boisterous and projected from the mouth of an oversized clam.

+

“Happy?” I asked. “How the hell did you get my number?”

+

“The janitor who slipped me this phone gave it to me.”

+

“Where are you?”

+

“I’m locked up.” He sniffled. “They don’t need us anymore.”

+

“Gosh, that must be rough.”

+

“Listen,” he said, his voice quivering, “you gotta help me, Teddy.”

+

“In point of fact, I don’t.” I made no effort to mute my bitterness. “We don’t work together anymore, remember?”

+

He was silent for a beat. “You’re, you’re, uh, still upset about that, huh?”

+

“I’m still unemployed about that.”

+

“You don’t understand,” he stammered. “They’re rounding us up. They want to send us off to war. I’m a pacifist. A conscientious objector, even. This goes against everything I believe in. I need to get out of here before they ship me off to the Pentagon.”

+

I glanced at my three-year-old son Sam playing in the next room. He wouldn’t remember, but when our show was on, he used to clap and cheer and shout “Dada” whenever Happy popped up on screen. The thought still made me smile.

+

“Alright,” I said, “tell me what you need.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“I + +’m going to bust that plushy son of a bitch open like a pinata,” Charlie said.

+

He was waiting for me in the dim corner of a Brooklyn bar, nursing an overpriced pint of light beer and pretending to ignore the songs and laughter across the room when he wasn’t staring death in the same direction. Three puppets danced on the bar, without strings – a cat, an alligator, and a blob-like purple monster. Felt and fur flailed as a small crowd cheered.

+

The middle performer in the puppet trio had once been Charlie’s character on the children’s TV show where we had both worked. It was called Cinnamon Avenue. Yes, it was a shameless ripoff. But no, toddlers didn’t give a shit.

+

Aloysius Alligator had been a cheerful and inquisitive reptile who spoke in rhyme and occasionally offered life lessons in educational rap songs. He wore a sequined vest and a top hat and carried a cane. If you said he looked like a cartoon pimp, you would not be wrong. On the bar, Aloysius sidled up to Cutesy Cat and grinded against her suggestively. These days, he was acting like one, too.

+

This was the new world.

+

“Back when I was manning the puppet, we could never behave like that in public,” Charlie said, shaking his fist at the bar. Charlie was pushing sixty, overweight and balding. He had been planning to work a couple more years until he could start tapping into his retirement funds before it all went to shit. Now, he couldn’t find a job and his puppet was living its best life right in front of him.

+

“People always talk about how you get to Sesame Street,” Charlie said, gulping down the last of his drink. “What nobody tells you is, it’s the getting out that’s the real bitch.”

+

“Speaking of which,” I said, and I relayed what Happy had told me. Charlie listened to my tale, the wooly tufts of his eyebrows rising then falling, like the little homunculus puppeteer inside his head couldn’t decide between disbelief and a thunderous glower and was yanking on the strings at random.

+

In the end, he settled for laughter. Big beery gusts of genuine amusement.

+

“Six months! Six months is all it takes! God damned Pinocchio nano-chips bring these turncoats to life, studios put all us skilled performance creatives out of work to cover the start-up costs, then six months later the ratings are in the can, the studios fold like Kermit in a suitcase, and now it’s Happy the Clam, Gorilla Glam, and Skoozle Go To War? I fucking love it!”

+

He smacked the table with delight then stood to fetch another round. He returned with two full pints and a snicker of barely contained glee.

+

“I went to hit the can. There’s two studio guys waiting out back with nets,” he said, nodding with grim satisfaction. On the bar, the cat and alligator were mashing their plushy bodies together while dousing themselves with Mountain Dew. The armless blob, Manfred, watched with an alarmingly wide smile. “Enjoy your final moments of freedom, flop-mops.”

+

Charlie raised his glass for me to toast, and for the first time noticed I wasn’t sharing in his joy about the unfortunate situation of our former co-workers. “What did I miss?”

+

I took a deep breath and prepared to ask him what I came there to ask. “I’m going to break Happy out.”

+

I tried to project resolve, but I recognized how absurd the words sounded as I said them. Charlie snorting into the head of his pint did nothing to help matters. “Well, good luck with that,” he said, wiping sweat and beer foam off his jowls with his sleeve. Then comprehension dawned. “Oh, hell no…”

+

I nodded. “Happy thinks he’s got maybe a few days until the DoD contracts are finalized. Until then, he’s locked up at the studio. I need information about the building and, like, the security protocols. I know you still have connections.”

+

“Connections to a career that was snatched away from me in the prime of my life,” Charlie said, thumping his chest with two stubby fingers. “And me with retirement just around the corner too,” he added, heedless of the contradiction. “Forget it.”

+

A smattering of applause and hoots from the bar indicated the puppets had completed their sex performance, or whatever you might call it. Cutesy Cat dried herself with a stack of cocktail napkins and Aloysius shook like a freshly bathed dog, splashing laughing bystanders with citrusy soda as Manfred collected tips in his gaping lippy grin and settled their tab with money that rightly should have been ours.

+

I sagged in my seat. “I understand.”

+

“Good.”

+

“But truth be told, if I do this alone, there’s a good chance I wind up in jail.”

+

Charlie stared at me over the rim of his glass as he guzzled his pint, I’m sure picturing how horribly ill-suited I would be for prison life. It was a thought I had mulled over quite a bit myself.

+

We were jerked back to reality by a cry of “Charlie baby!” Halfway to the back door and his date with fate, Aloysius had spotted us across the room and was waving like we were the oldest of good old friends.

+

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the alligator shouted, “big hand for Charlie! That man right over there taught me all of my moves!” Suddenly the clapping and cheers were directed our way.

+

“And speaking of big hands, I was glad your hands were small, you know what I mean?” Aloysius wiggled his butt suggestively. Charlie slouched low over his pint, waiting for a stage trapdoor to open underfoot and deliver him from humiliation.

+

“Remember this move, Chuck?” He performed his old signature dance, a rapid series of pop-and-locks with his stringy arms. Charlie hid a reluctant, nostalgic smile behind his glass. I had always been impressed that he had the dexterity to guide the puppet through the dance back in the day, given his general surliness and lack of rhythm.

+

Aloysius bowed and continued to the exit, oblivious to what awaited. The buzz in the bar picked up again, customers moving on to new sources of entertainment as readily as fickle toddlers.

+

Before Charlie downed the last of his beer, something adjacent to sympathy flashed in his eyes. He set the empty down with a sigh. “You sure you want to do this?”

+

“I can’t abandon him.” I shrugged. “We’ve got, I don’t know, a bond.”

+

Charlie shook his head. “You must be crazy.” He shook it again. “I must be crazy.”

+

“You’ll help?”

+

He laughed again. “Somebody wants to put a gun in that clam’s hands? If anything, I think we’ll be doing the military a favor.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +harlie came through. He got his hands on an access card and scribbled down the security team’s night schedule. There were some conspicuous blind spots. With the show canceled and interest waning, the studio was cutting corners. Nobody cared much about getting in at that point, and the puppets certainly weren’t going to walk out on their own. Because they were locked in.

+

Still, I wore a hooded sweatshirt and brought a black ski mask, just in case I got caught on security cameras. I told Jessica I was going to a union support meeting and Charlie picked me up in a car so beat-up he had to lean across the passenger seat to pop the door open. “Get in.”

+

I stared at what was clearly a machete protruding from the enormous cupholder between the seats. “Can never be too careful,” he said.

+

“I don’t know, man. Maybe you can.”

+

“You might trust that smiling cockle, but I don’t. Get in.”

+

Charlie drove me to the studio. As we pulled into a nearby alley, I offered to grab Aloysius too if I saw him. Charlie snorted and eyed the machete longingly, a look that told me the puppet might be safer in a warzone than with him. Nostalgia only goes so far, I guess.

+

Hiding behind a dumpster next to a side door, I checked my watch. There was a shift change coming that would give me about ten minutes to act. I took a deep breath, pulled on my mask, and sprinted toward the door. I slid the card into the reader and slipped inside, crept cautiously beneath a camera, then strafed along the wall down the hallway.

+

I soon found myself on an abandoned soundstage. Much of the Cinnamon Avenue set had not yet been dismantled. I passed the auto body shop, cardboard tools hanging on the wall and fake grease painted on the floor. Skoozle’s manhole was covered with yellow tape. Inside the diner, where many of Happy’s scenes were set, the lighting bar had fallen from the ceiling. The stoop of the main building was mostly intact, but the front door had been removed, revealing piles of trash and debris behind it.

+

I remembered the first time I walked out onto the set with Happy on my arm, pride and excitement of a sort I had rarely experienced in my career. It was unnerving to see a place once so vibrant and cheerful reduced to this eerie, dank stillness.

+

The puppets were being held in one of the storage rooms. The access card got me inside, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when the lights clicked on. Rows of cages, furry limbs extended through the bars. Paws and claws wearily grasping for freedom. Some of the puppets moaned as one played a mournful harmonica tune.

+

When they realized someone was in the room, they began to rattle their cages and cry out. I ignored them, searching for Happy. No sign of Aloysius. Maybe for the best. Then as I moved between the cells a familiar white glove grabbed my arm.

+

“Teddy, you came for me!” Happy shouted. “I knew you’d come! I told everybody you’d come! Hey, guys! Teddy came!”

+

“Ix-nay on the Eddy-tay,” I sputtered between gritted teeth.

+

“What did you say, Teddy? I didn’t get that.”

+

I reached through the bars and grabbed him by his bowtie. “Stop saying my name while I’m in the middle of committing a felony to save your furry ass.”

+

He saluted. “Message received, loud and clear, Teddy.”

+

I shook my head. “Let’s get out of here.”

+

There was a control panel on the wall by the door. Charlie’s guy had explained how to unlock the cages, but it took me a moment to figure out the code for Happy’s cage. I punched in the number and the bars popped open.

+

You would think you would get used to the idea of puppets moving around autonomously, but watching him leap to the floor and perform a celebratory dance, jointless arms waving, knees bending in unnatural directions, his clamshell mouth open wide and emitting something resembling a high-pitched yodel… it remained quite troubling.

+

I was shocked out of my discomfort when an alarm screeched overhead. Happy froze.

+

“We gotta move,” I said, reaching for his arm.

+

He resisted. “I can’t leave everyone else here.”

+

“Of course you can.”

+

“Teddy,” he pleaded. “Have a heart.”

+

Security would be fast approaching. I hesitated, considering what could go wrong with all these things loose on the streets – but I also needed a distraction if we were going to make it back to the car.

+

I typed in the code to unlock all of the cages and pulled Happy with me against the wall by the door. Dozens of puppets poured out of their cells into a heap on the floor. Some looked cheerful but most were angry. When the first few guards entered the room, a furious mob of colorful felt charged straight at them, fists clenched and screaming with rage.

+

As the guards called for backup and struggled to fight them off, Happy and I snuck past. I raced down the hallway with a large, clam-headed plushy under my arm, shouting and crashing and clanging behind us.

+

I don’t know, maybe a puppet army made more sense than I’d thought.

+

Back in the alley, I hurled Happy into the backseat of Charlie’s car and jumped in the front.

+

“That clam smells awful,” Charlie said, accurately, pulling away and onto the street.

+

“That’s not what your sister said last night,” Happy muttered as he fumbled with his seatbelt. Charlie’s gaze flicked to the rearview and he glowered.

+

“How about a little gratitude, Happy?” I said.

+

“Yeah, thank this,” he sneered, grabbing at his crotch.

+

“Your friend is delightful, Ted,” Charlie offered, his jaw clenched.

+

“At least I didn’t make a living molesting plushies,” Happy said, sticking his head forward between us. “You could go to prison for that in seventeen states, you know.”

+

“It’s always hands up asses with you people,” Charlie said, balling his into a fist. “You know what—”

+

“Charlie, just drive.” I pushed Happy back in his seat. “Happy, shut up or you’re going in the trunk.”

+

“This is censorship!” He crossed his arms and frowned. “I got First Amendment rights over here.”

+

“No, you don’t,” Charlie replied, also accurately.

+

“And that’s another thing we need to talk about.”

+

Happy settled into a droning rant about how puppets helped build this country – not true – and deserved to be treated with respect – arguable – while misquoting Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. Charlie pulled onto the highway.

+

“It’s going to be a long drive,” he sighed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +n the chaos of the moment a bunch of puppets had escaped, so the search wasn’t focused only on Happy. The cops questioned me, of course, but I managed to avoid falling under suspicion. Everyone knows puppeteers and puppets don’t get along, not any more. I’m the last person who’d help him, right?

+

And my situation was hardly a lie. When I was let go from Cinnamon Avenue, I boasted I would be back to work within weeks, and thoroughly failed to live up to that bravado. Now my unemployment benefits were near their end, we had begun to dip into our savings to cover monthly expenses, and I had long since run out of favors to call in to try to line up new opportunities.

+

For his part, Happy integrated himself into our household about as well as any fugitive from justice (or injustice) could. And things went well at first. Helping with chores, entertaining the children, hiding in the attic whenever other people were around.

+

Turned out, things were going too well.

+

About two months in, the kids were spending more and more time with Happy. I was wrapped up in an increasingly urgent but frustratingly futile job search, Jessica was taking on extra shifts at the restaurant, and Happy was a cheerful felt clam with nothing else to do. So when Sam wanted to play hide-and-seek or Katie needed another guest for a tea party, they turned to him. He enjoyed it too, or at least he was far more convincing at faking it than I ever was. When one of the kids made a goofy joke or did one of their wacky dances, his laughter would echo through the whole house.

+

One day, I was scrolling through job listings on Jessica’s laptop and Happy sauntered down the hall carrying a baseball bat and glove. A few minutes later I heard him cheering and Katie giggling. I crept down the stairs, and there he was winding up to pitch with Katie down the hall, bat in hand, surrounded by valuable breakable objects, waiting to swing.

+

“Happy, no!” I shouted. “Are you nuts?”

+

I grabbed the arm he had reeled back, but his hand was empty.

+

“Teddy,” he said, “it’s all pretend.”

+

Katie glared at me and stomped away. Like I was the bad guy.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t wasn’t just playing with the children, either. He was worming his way into every aspect of our lives. One evening I found him sitting with Jessica at the dining room table, rubbing her feet with his mitts and reading off charges from our credit card bills. She found tracking our expenditures to be a useful exercise. I was more of a “what you don’t know can’t hurt you” kind of guy, which I’ll admit had not worked out well for us so far.

+

“You could save a lot of money by changing cable providers,” Happy said. “I’ll pull together some numbers.”

+

“Just make sure you include the sports package,” she said, leaning back with a sigh. “Ted needs his bowling. Don’t ask me why.” She noticed me staring. “What?”

+

I shook my head and left the room.

+

“Hey, Teddy,” Happy called as I slumped up the stairs. “I guess all those songs about counting, something must have stuck!”

+

The following week, I returned home from a disastrous interview for a gig as director of a community puppet theater, eager to sit down with a cold beer and pop on the sports. I was greeted by a head-ringing clatter from the kitchen. I found Happy bungling between the refrigerator and the counter with his arms full of bottles and vegetables.

+

A pot of water was on the stove, and there was flour all over the floor.

+

I could see what was about to happen, but it seemed too late to say anything.

+

Happy stumbled onto a patch of white powder and lost his balance. He barreled across the room and slammed into a cabinet. Broken glass and orange juice and crushed tomatoes spilled across the floor and the pot of water fell from the stove, bouncing off his head and soaking him like a, well, like a clam.

+

“That could have gone better,” he said, dazed.

+

I surveyed the disparate ingredients strewn across the floor and counter. “What the hell, Happy.”

+

“I was making dinner for everyone,” he said, his shell drooping into a frown. He sniffled and rubbed his round puppet eyes. “I call it a lasagna-frittata-chilada.”

+

“That sounds awful,” I replied.

+

Jessica pushed past me and stepped gingerly around the rainbow of stains and spills on the tiles. “At least he’s trying,” she said, kissing him gently on his shell. While Jessica helped clean the tomato juice and soy sauce out of his fabric, I made the kids salty, overcooked eggs.

+

Later that night, I was awakened by the muffled sound of Sam crying out from his bedroom. He was sleeping through the night consistently at that point, but bad dreams were also becoming somewhat common.

+

Jessica rolled over. “What time is it?” she murmured and I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand.

+

“Three,” I said, looking blearily at the screen. “Another nightmare. He’s calling for Daddy.”

+

I lurched across the room and opened the door, Sam’s cries coming loud and clear.

+

“Wait,” Jessica said. “He’s not saying ‘Daddy’.”

+

“I’m ’a coming!” Happy exclaimed as he twirled down the hall.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +essica was sitting alone at the kitchen table working on probably her third cup of coffee when I returned from dropping the kids off at school and daycare.

+

“Where’s Happy?” I asked.

+

“Resting,” she said. “He was up with Sam for over an hour last night.”

+

“You sure you don’t want to join him?” I muttered as I poured myself one, and immediately regretted it.

+

She put her coffee down, eyes narrowed. “What the hell does that mean?”

+

I leaned against the counter, defensive behind my mug. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

+

“He’s a puppet,” she sighed. “His eyes are always that wide.”

+

“He keeps giving you massages.”

+

“I’m tense,” she said, rubbing her shoulder, “and his hands are like firm pillows.”

+

I scowled. “Well, that sounds lovely.”

+

“It’s not like I hide it,” she said. “My husband’s out of work, my boss is a jackass, I’m trying to keep two kids alive in modern America, and I’ve got a fugitive puppet in full-on ALF mode in my attic.”

+

All of this was true. Entwined in my own stress and drama, I found it easy to overlook the weight she carried on behalf of the family. “So you two aren’t…?”

+

Her bug-eyed horror cut me short. “God, no. Is that even… like, does he have, you know—” she nodded toward my torso “—compatible equipment?”

+

“Let’s not find out. How can I help?”

+

“You can get a fucking job,” she snapped.

+

It was a low blow, but not unwarranted.

+

“I’ll figure something out,” I half-whispered.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + climbed up to the attic where Happy slept – or whatever it is puppets without closeable eyelids do. He lay silently on an air mattress, surrounded by towers of boxes, storage bins, and garbage bags of stuff. I tapped his leg with my foot, jostling him awake.

+

Rip off the band-aid. “You need to leave, Hap.”

+

“Yeah, right,” he muttered, still groggy. “Where am I supposed to go?”

+

“Literally anywhere but here.” When he arrived Happy had prepared some essential items in case he needed to make a quick getaway from the cops. God only knows what they were, but he’d wrapped them in an old towel and knotted it to the top half of a collapsable mop handle, like an artificial fibers Huckleberry Finn. I tossed it onto his mattress.

+

He jerked upright. “You can’t do that to me. Not after everything we’ve been through together.”

+

“I don’t want to, but I can.”

+

“Oh yeah?” His long, thin arm pointed to the small window above us. “How’s about I tell the federales you’ve been holding me captive up here?” He jabbed a fluffy finger in my face. “I go down, Teddy, you go down with me.”

+

“You wouldn’t,” I said, bristling at stiff resistance I should have been better prepared for.

+

“Try me.” His voice hardened like steel. “You don’t want to test a desperate puppet, pal.”

+

“I think I do.” I said. “Pick up your sad little hobo sack and hit the road.”

+

Happy swatted it aside and stood. He was about three feet shorter than me, so his effort to look me in the eyes lacked gravitas. He shuffled closer until he was just inches away and craned his neck upward.

+

“Maybe we should put it to a vote,” he said. “Who do you think the kids would rather have around these days? You or me?”

+

“This house is a republic, not a democracy. I know what’s best for my family.”

+

“Could have fooled me,” he huffed.

+

That was it. I lunged for his arm and tossed him across the attic. He landed on a box of Christmas decorations and immediately charged me with the pointed edge of a star-shaped tree-topper in his hand, clamshell face taut with rage.

+

Until you find yourself in such a situation, it is hard to conceive of what it is like to fight a puppet. You would think you could just grab them and rip them apart, but it’s not so easy. Their limbs are long but floppy, and they can pack a punch. They’re small and nimble, and their size positions them perfectly to strike at your shins or your groin. It’s hard to tell if you’re doing much damage even if you get some good shots in.

+

I reflected on this as we wrestled across the floor of the attic and tumbled down the staircase. He grunted and groaned, but kept swinging and kicking all the way down to the second-floor hallway, where he grabbed a lamp off a table and bashed it over my head. Blood trickled down my forehead as I grabbed the lamp’s power cord and lassoed it around his neck, pulling it tight with all my strength.

+

It occurred to me then that puppets don’t breathe. A strained giggle escaped his shell.

+

I lifted Happy overhead and hurled him over the banister to the floor below. He fluttered to the ground, and I raced down the stairs to the foyer, where I grabbed him, pressed down on his chest with my knee, and I battered his soft clamshell head with one fist and then the other, over and over.

+

All that frustration, slaked at last. I have to say, it felt fantastic.

+

Then I paused to catch my breath and realized my wife and children were standing in the doorway watching us.

+

“Daddy?” Sam said.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hat I told the children: somebody at NASA glommed onto the notion that telegenic and personable sentient beings that didn’t need to eat, sleep, or breathe would make ideal candidates for high-profile long-distance space travel. So Happy, proud patriot that he is, signed up for a multi-year mission to Saturn. Of course, he had to leave immediately one morning for his secret astronaut training without saying goodbye, and he couldn’t write or call because, well, it was all so secret.

+

The weight of sorrow and pity in their eyes when they look at me now tells me they don’t buy it, but it’s the best lie I could come up with. Jessica’s eyes show something worse.

+

What really happened: once we calmed the kids down, I lugged Happy back up to the attic, duct-taped his shell shut, basically duct-taped his whole body into a plasticised canvas pillar, and barricaded the door. The next day, while the kids were at school and Jessica was fending off her boss at the restaurant, Charlie came over, we took the clam out to the garage, and he helped me remove the computer chip from Happy’s head.

+

All these little tendrils of nanotechnology that made his arms and legs and mouth move came dragging out after it. He didn’t sing “Daisy”. He just wriggled and made little muffled screaming noises from behind the tape over his mouth, until he didn’t.

+

Neither of us understood the technology, whether it could be reactivated or tracked or whatever, so Charlie took the chip and threw it off a bridge across town.

+

Charlie encouraged me to burn Happy’s body in the backyard, even offered to provide a barrel and a bottle of lighter fluid. But I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t just throw him out either. Once he was a simple, lifeless, inoffensive puppet, I unwrapped him and shoved him into a crawl space in the basement, behind some heavy boxes where Sam and Katie would never be at risk of stumbling across him. I don’t know. I couldn’t give him up, but I couldn’t ever look him in the eye again either.

+

I sometimes wake in the middle of the night and hear Happy’s laughter echoing through the walls, unsure if it’s a dream, or a vivid memory of happier days, or if an undead angry clam has somehow emerged from his crypt to seek revenge and sweep my children away.

+

Maybe I deserve that. Who really knows anything anymore?

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Things I Learned From Puppets About Kindness on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Steve Loiaconi

+

+ + Author image of Steve Loiaconi + + + Steve Loiaconi is a journalist and a graduate of George Mason University’s MFA program. His fiction previously appeared in Griffel, The Mystery Tribune, Samfiftyfour, Tales of the Fantastic, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as the anthologies Dracula’s Guests, P is for Poltergeist, and Open All Night. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and son, and you can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and his website.

+

© Steve Loiaconi 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Tahir Osman and Alexas_Fotos.

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

+

Summer 2024

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ LM Zaerr +

Interlocking Grains of Light

+
+ + +

Every year or so a piece of fiction based on the mythology of Ancient Greece penetrates the barriers erected by Mythaxis' editor, so it's long past time he admitted his claimed abhorrence for this very broad sub-genre is a lie. Do it right, and he's just as happy to read it as he is anything else done right. Doing it right, LM Zaerr ventures into this rich territory with a spin on one of the truly historic takes on the transformative power of love.

+ + + + Story image for Interlocking Grains of Light by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Something Else

+ Dane Erbach +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Something Else by + + + +

The near inevitability of any given issue featuring two stories half-reflecting each other is once more upon us. Here, Dane Erbach leverages his personal experience of preparing for the unimaginable worst to unsettling effect in a high school nightmare scenario that carries the distant echo of paranoiac classics past. If a episode from the original Twilight Zone or a certain Stephen King novella leap to mind… well, at least YOU aren't alone.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Hook, Line, and Sinker

+ Addison Smith +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Hook, Line, and Sinker by + + + +

Welcome back to Addison Smith, who graced our pages four years and fourteen issues ago with his techno thriller First Breath, possibly the least Addison Smith-like piece of fiction in his canon. This time we delve into one of his more typically atypical zones of interest, presenting us with seemingly familiar worlds in which something is (perhaps metaphorically, or perhaps literally) very definitely fishy…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Swans Will Be Swans

+ Elizabeth Zuckerman +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Swans Will Be Swans by + + + +

Our second high school-era offering is much lighter in tone than its predecessor, but Elizabeth Zuckerman touches on another serious subject as she transplants an iconic fairy tale trope to that most fantasy-welcoming of contemporary environments. Countless youngsters are made miserable at a time we're told we'll feel nostalgia over for the rest of our lives, but they can beat it, with a little inner strength, and the right support network.

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+ + + +
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+

Headspace

+ Mark Martin +
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Your editor considers himself to have a most varied taste in science fiction, and when Mark Martin's story landed on his virtual desk it provided an infrequent experience to be immediately savoured: the extravagantly not-yet-here presented through the somehow authentic, everyday lives of real people. This contemplation of mortality and its threatened absence is philosophical and personal, and conversational in the best way.

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Dagon, by Fred Chappell

+ Bill Ryan +
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For our latest longform review of the year, All Hail He Prophesied Since Times Before Time to Rise from the Depths in All His Awful Glory — Bill Ryan. It's easy to let the wide-spread inspiration of H. P. Lovecraft's sinister fiction drive a writer to madness (or, at least, to madness of cliché), so what is to be found in Fred Chappell's 1968 Southern Gothic take on the Cthulhu mythos?

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Short Reviews – April to June, 2024

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
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The editor has no hair to pull out, zine components lie broken on the ground like hopes and dreams, and STILL the jewels of short fiction published these last three months are yet to be reviewed. Click here, dear reader, to discover if he did his job or merely furnished a broken link and washed his hands of the whole sorry affair.

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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

An interview with Micah Hyatt

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As you may now be well aware, Mythaxis Magazine has become a platform for audio-format speculative fiction! It's fair to say that there's one man we have to thank for that: Micah Hyatt, a past contributor to these pages with fiction, poetry, and experiments in generative art, so we lured him from the studio long enough to chat a little about himself, and the voice of Mythaxis.

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An interview with Micah Hyatt

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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Andrew Leon Hudson: Hi Micah! We at Mythaxis know you as a writer of tight, emotive flash fiction and distinctive sf poetry, but tell us a little more about yourself.

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Micah Hyatt: I live in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I have four kids, all in Scouts. My wife works as a program director with the Boy Scouts, and we have six dogs: one shih-tzu, one shiuaua, two chihuahuas, one chorkie, and one white wolf. The wolf was a rescue.

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ALH: How do you rescue a wolf?

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Micah: About three years ago, a police car t-boned us and totaled our vehicle in the dead of winter and this very fluffy puppy came out to inspect the noise. I was still rattled from the wreck, but I picked her up and searched for an owner or a mother or other pups for about an hour. There was snow on the ground and I was worried she’d freeze. Eventually a police van took my family home, since the wreck was their fault, pup included. Later, when she got bigger, I was wondering what kind of dog she was, so I did a reverse image search. We were very surprised to find that she was a native Texan white wolf. She’s very smart and knows all kinds of tricks, but only obeys me. Her name is Calamity Jane.

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ALH: A life with little going on then. How have you kept busy?

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Micah: I’m a former train conductor and Iraq war veteran. After the war, I was diagnosed with several neurological issues. If you look at my cluster of symptoms, it’s basically Parkinson’s disease. However, I’m too young for that, so I’ve been categorized as having various functional neurological disorders and traumatic brain injury. I worked my job at the railroad as long as I could safely, but eventually I had to stop driving and quit working, and then went through vocational rehabilitation training with the Veterans Association.

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Recreationally, I swim as much as possible. I like watching foreign movies. RRR is my most recent favorite, followed by The New King of Comedy by Stephen Chow. I also enjoy playing video games. Sekiro is the best game ever made. This is not up for discussion.

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ALH: You must mean Knytt Underground. Anyway, as well as contributing fiction here you’ve participated in our brief flirtation with generative art, and now you’re providing us with audio! What led you to experiment with these different formats?

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Micah: I received a master’s in English in the Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. My thesis was a thousand-page military fantasy whalepunk novel. It was pretty good for a thesis novel, not good enough that I’d want to send it out. I’ve been working on another draft on and off since graduation. While I was at university there was a reading contest every semester, and I took first place every time. People said I had a nice voice. However, as my neurological disorders began to worsen I developed issues speaking, so I decided to start recording stories as a form of therapy to train myself how to speak properly again.

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My first attempt was a new edition of the first Doctor Doolittle book. It has all kinds of crazy voices, talking ducks and pigs. But, as much as I loved it, the book is very dated with many racist scenes and jokes. These were taken out in a version edited in the 70s, but that version is terrible, it stripped all the humor too. Since the original is out of copyright, I re-edited it, wrote two new chapters, and recorded the whole thing. It was fun, but I think it took me about 6 months.

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ALH: Tell us about your studio setup.

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Micah: When I moved to Corpus Christi, I knew that I wanted to continue recording. My previous setup wasn’t great, and I wanted to improve recording quality. My upstairs hallway at the new house has a walk-in closet. It’s big for a closet, but too small to be a bedroom. I think it’s 6’x8'.

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ALH: My love of Spinal Tapp informs me that’s pretty damn small. Oh, right: feet. So that’s about… 180cm by 250cm?

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Micah: Sure, why not. I ordered foam panels from Amazon and covered the walls with them. I have a noise-canceling curtain that I slide behind me after I shut the door, and something called a draft blocker for the underside of the door. I drilled a hole in the wall between the closet and my daughter’s room, and fed all the cables into there. The only electronics I have in the room are silent running – a single widescreen monitor so that I can have the story on one side and the recording software on the other at the same time.

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Reduction of unnecessary heat and sound sources are probably the most important thing, followed by comfort. One thing I quickly realized was that there was no air-conditioning or ventilation in the room at all. For the first year this meant, unless I wanted to be a sweat-drenched monster, I could only record in the winter or the spring. This year I finally had a ventilation duct put in.

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ALH: That’s the DIY, now dazzle us with the tech.

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Micah: For really good quality sound you don’t want one of those USB-to-PC microphones. I use a Focusrite Scarlit 2i2 pre-amp, which is the interface between my microphone and my computer and boosts the mic’s signal. My mic is an Audio-technica 5040, which is serious overkill. It’s much higher quality anyone getting into audio should buy, there are many other microphones that can deliver nearly equivalent performance for 1/8th the price. But I really wanted it.

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As for software, initially I used Garageband. It was not ideal. I tried Pro tools, the professional version, but it isn’t really made for audiobook narration. I originally used a Mac laptop, but it would heat up so much that the fans in the room sounded like a 747 was coming in for a landing, so I switched to PC and Adobe Audition.

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ALH: What is your process for audio production?

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Micah: If anyone wants to get into reading, I think you should seek out other readers you like to listen to and see what their process is. Jeff Hays – an amazing reader who reads the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman – has a YouTube channel called Soundbooth Theater Live. I’ve learned more from a few of his videos than months of suffering on my own.

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Firstly, I just read the story. I note down all the characters with speaking roles and try to get a sense of who they are. Sometimes, especially in short fiction, there’s not a lot to go on. Next, I get my booth set up. New file. Test recording. Make sure all the dogs and children in my house know that it’s time to be quiet for a while. Then I read the story aloud. I use a multitrack layout in Audition so that I can put individual characters on their own tracks. This is important for consistency, and so I can easily do re-takes on their lines after the first read. So I’ll read through, keeping the narration on a single track, and separate out the character voices.

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ALH: The variety of voice was one of the first things that stood out in your read of Nightshade Memory, the robotic effect was really striking.

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Micah: My own accent is middle to upper class, middle American, pretty close to what you’d expect from a white male reporter on the local news channel in a place like Kansas City or New York. For narration, I use something close to my natural speaking voice, but a little more chesty. This is important, because I don’t trigger the neurological stutter if I speak in a false voice or an accent, or if I sing. I try to be clear and add meaningful inflection and emphasis on words in a way that I wouldn’t normally do when just speaking conversationally.

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Sentences have a sort of shape with peaks and valleys, and it varies from culture to culture and accent to accent. For character voices, there’s a bunch of little things you can do – speaking from the front of your mouth, the back, the throat, volume control, raspiness, syllable harshness, etc. I’m still a newbie. I’m learning. Female voices, especially when there are multiple characters that need differentiation, are difficult.

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After the recording is done, post-production involves taking out breaths and background noise. There are automated tools for this, but they have drawbacks. Room noise is easy, as it’s minimal for me and just a slight hum on a consistent frequency, the hum of the air conditioning and electrical cables. Breathing, though, and mouth smacks and clicks, are a little more difficult. You can run a filter on them, but I’ve found that filter will often degrade the quality of the actual speaking a little, so I tend to manually subtract the breaths and clicks as I Iisten back to the story the first time.

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I have a series of enhancements I apply over the audio with software. I’ve manually tuned it to my voice to boost the meaningful frequencies. It also changes equalization levels and prevents audio from getting too loud. For characters that I want to add special effects to, like robots, I record the lines and then use filters and such to modify the pitch, the reverb, the distortion. All old-school, 00’s tech. No AI.

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ALH: So, what projects do you have your eye on for the future?

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Micah: I’m still working on the aforementioned military fantasy whalepunk novel. It’s called Lightswallower. It got too big, and I had to take about a year to restructure and re-outline it. I’ve been writing the first book, tentatively called The Penitent Bone. It’s about Galan, an exiled scrimshander priest, who is summoned back to the temple at the Leviathan’s Throat. The high priest, Galan’s mentor, has died under mysterious circumstances. In a last will and testament carved in whalebone, Galan is absolved of heresy and appointed as the new high priest. Meanwhile, the city comes under siege by a steamwork army whose goal seems to be not as simple as conquest – they want to destroy the secret knowledge hidden in the Leviathan’s Throat.

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I’ve also gotten into writing lyrics and poetry, mainly anti-war and anti-military industrial complex in theme. I use AI to turn it into music. This is more of a therapy thing for me. Long writing sessions can be difficult when I have migraines or other issues, but I still want to be creative, and I love music. I can write an intro or a verse and then workshop it with the AI and hear the results right away. I love being able to play “producer” with a full band and singers at my fingertips. I go by Leidenfrost Diver and you can find tracks on Spotify and YouTube. It’s extremely pleasant and entertaining, and I dearly hope the AI scene gets the ethics issues solved, because I love the process and the experimentation of it.

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Orbit-lrg

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Many thanks again to Micah for taking the time to chat. If you haven’t already, check out his reading of Interlocking Grains of Light by LM Zaerr (which, incidentally, features original harp music performed by the author’s sister!), and recordings of the other stories of the issue will be released over the coming weeks.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using Micah Hyatt’s headshot and a Creative Commons image by OpenClipart-Vectors - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-38/dagon-fred-chappell-review.html b/issue-38/dagon-fred-chappell-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fee05319 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-38/dagon-fred-chappell-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,325 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Dagon, by Fred Chappell — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 38 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Dagon, by Fred Chappell

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Bill Ryan

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I + +n 1923, before his so-called Cthulhu Mythos had been cemented – before, in fact, his seminal story “The Call of Cthulhu” had been written – H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon” was published in Weird Tales. The story had been written six years earlier, and like his subsequent, more famous fiction would describe, “Dagon” focused on its unnamed narrator’s experience in discovering a secret world of evil, gigantic, god-like figures. In the case of “Dagon”, these beings rose from the depths of the ocean rather than outer space. But placing his Elder Gods in either made sense. In Lovecraft’s time, what humanity didn’t know about the dark unknown of the oceans pretty well matched what we didn’t know about the cosmos. And things haven’t changed that much since then.

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I’m on record as being something of a skeptic when it comes to Lovecraft. There’s no need to re-litigate that here, but I’ll go ahead and admit that “Dagon” is one of his better stories (his very short stories tend, in my view, to be better than his longer ones, and “Dagon” is pretty short). I particularly like the way he describes the key moment, when the narrator sees the aquatic god Dagon himself (or Himself). Spoiler, I guess:

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Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view about the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

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Anyone familiar with Lovecraft, but who somehow has never read “Dagon,” can probably guess that all of this ends with the narrator leaping from his apartment window to his death. Standard Lovecraft. Still, a good story. But in my experience, it is the writers who fell under the sway of Lovecraft’s vast influence, and wrote their own takes on the man’s mythos, who rise above what that depressed, mentally ill Rhode Islander laid out for them. The stories written by the Thomas Ligottis of American horror fiction, say. Or, and this is what brings us here today, the third novel by a prolific North Carolinian poet named Fred Chappell.

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The title of that novel, by the way, is Dagon, so no one can accuse Chappell (who died this past January, at age 87) of trying to hide his influences. Published in 1968, Dagon is, from what I can tell, a bit of an outlier for Chappell. Then again, what do I know: as of this moment, other than this slim horror novel, I haven’t read a word of Chappell’s fiction or poetry. But while his first novel appears to be a fantasy story, the novels he wrote later in life sound to me like somewhat gentle stories about life in small-town North Carolina. Chappell wrote many books of short fiction, so there could very well be loads of horror fiction strewn throughout those volumes. I’m very curious to find out, because if there’s one thing Dagon is not, it’s gentle.

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And what a unique riff on Lovecraft’s story it is. It’s the story of Peter Leland, a minister and scholar. His grandfather has recently died, and Peter and his wife, Sheila, have inherited the old family home. This includes a not insignificant amount of land, so large that the Lelands soon discover that a family, the Morgans, live, and have lived, on a section of the Leland family property, though Peter never knew about them. They are an odd, backwoods, off-putting family – Ed Morgan, the patriarch, is caught leering at Sheila; when Peter visits their home he encounters a wife who never speaks, and a daughter, Mina, whose appearance (“That body so stubby and that face so flatly ugly – something undeniably fishlike about it…”) makes him uneasy, and somewhat obsessed: “…her flat dark face hung like a warning lantern in his mind. He couldn’t unthink her image.”

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Additionally, in exploring his ancestral home, Peter finds reams of paperwork and letters to and from his grandfather. There are not-so-subtle references to Cthulhu in this material, which is interesting to me because there are no such references in Lovecraft’s original short story; he hadn’t written, or at least hadn’t published, anything about Cthulhu yet. But, as many other writers influenced by Lovecraft have done, Chappell wanted to create, or complete, a fabric that Lovecraft in his short life wasn’t quite able to do. Chappell even includes, after his novel’s dedication (“Dedicated to Those Who Cast Their Shadows Out of Time Upon Our Days”), as a kind of sub-dedication Lovecraft’s famous words “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” which, in one of his stories, Lovecraft translates, resulting in possibly the finest sentence he ever wrote: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

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More importantly (thematically anyway), though harder to parse in relation to the rest of the book, and even harder to summarize here, is the monograph that Peter is writing, and which he hopes to complete amid the peace of his new home. It has to do with Dagon, the Philistine god of the Hebrew Bible, and whose temple Samson destroyed. Chappell, via Peter Leland, goes on to describe how some people throughout the world continued to worship the debauched god Dagon, a worship that even gained a foothold in America. He quotes from William Bradford, a governor of Plymouth Colony, who wrote about how the inhabitants of Mount Wollaston:

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…fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And [colonist Thomas] Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained…a School of Atheism. And after they got some goods into their hands…they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess…

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A description of Pagan lasciviousness follows before Bradford describes the arrival of John Endecott, who:

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…caused that maypole to be cut down and rebuked them for their profaneness… So they or others changed the name of their place again and called it Mount Dagon.

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Leland uses this material to write sermons about what he saw as a modern, metaphorical worship in America of Dagon, given what he views as the rampant and public sexuality now present (remember, this book was published in 1968).

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Before I make Dagon sound like an essay, I should stop talking about this part of it right about now. But it’s fascinating, and leads the story into depths of thought and philosophy that might be described as oceanic (forgive me). Lovecraft, of course, never gets into any of this, though he obviously didn’t pull the word “Dagon” out of a hat. Yet his main pre-occupation, as far as that title goes, appears to have been what I’ve since learned is an etymological misinterpretation of the origins of the name. Without getting into it too much, for many years “Dagon” was believed to be related to another strain of fish-based mythology, and this was still accepted in Lovecraft’s day. If his interest in “Dagon” the word went beyond this, and into the Biblical source, I don’t know for sure, but from what I can find it seems not.

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Whatever the case, Chappell sure found a lot to work with, and his story evolves (or devolves, depending on how you want to look at it) into one about a rapidly and disturbingly fractured marriage (about which I dare not say more), and then into a kind of eerie road trip story involving Peter, Mina, and a cruel yokel named Coke Rymer. For reasons I won’t get into here, by this point Leland has become a zombified (not literally) version of himself, quiescent, controlled by a kind of moonshine fed to him by Mina, a moonshine notable for its oiliness, stupefying effects, and general nastiness.

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It’s difficult to write about this section of Dagon, as there isn’t too much to say about it unless I’m willing to tell you about the ending. But I really don’t want to ruin it for you, as the ending – and by “ending” I mean literally the last two or three pages – is the best part. It is, really, a fantastic, smart, deeply unsettling ending, one that kind of throws Lovecraft into a cocked hat. Unless I’m misreading something in its final pages (always a possibility), there’s even a kind of terrifying hopefulness to it. If the last chapter landed for me the way Chappell intended, it’s not a hopefulness that warms the heart, but it causes the cosmic madness and terror of Lovecraft to sort of blossom into something that at least allows for questions and wonder. The answers to those questions might lead us, like Lovecraft’s narrator, straight out the window, but we won’t know unless we ask.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill’s thoughts on Facebook.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Editorial

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In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re undergoing something of a transformation here at Mythaxis.

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Our Spring issue coincided with the podcasting at Upbeat Tales of Emma Burnett’s Friends in High Places, and subsequently one of our other contributors, Micah Hyatt, reached out with an audio version of his story, Nightshade Memory, and asked if we’d like to platform it directly. We tried not to snatch it from his hand too eagerly, and you can hear it at the link right now.

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But don’t click too quickly. In the conversation around making that happen, we learned that Micah had narrated and produced the recording in a home studio he’d set up himself – impressive – and upon our shamelessly asking whether he’d also like to do audio versions of all our stories we were equal parts surprised and delighted when he immediately said, “Yes.” Since then he’s been busy recording the accompaniments for Issue 38, the first of which is live right now, with more to follow on a weekly basis.

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We were planning to include a short interview with Micah in this editorial, but it turned out to be far too interesting to be buried in here, so instead you can find it closing out the issue alongside the stories he’ll be progressively giving voice to. Therefore, let’s cut this one short – there’s more than enough going on in the magazine itself this quarter.

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Until next time, happy reading… and listening!

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 38 – Thanks and Salutations! +As always, many thanks go out to our latest generous cover donor, Tarik Keskin, a concept and environmental artist from Istanbul, Turkey, for permission to reproduce his image Plant Workshop 2221. He goes by Siamon89 on Deviant Art where you can see more of his designs, and you can contact him about work here.

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Headspace

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Mark Martin

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B + +efore it was suggested we should meet, I’d not heard of Candace Terry. That was surprising. Didn’t all isomorphs live in the limelight? Fame was one of several things that made it uncomfortable to think about this category of human being. Candace’s talent for avoiding publicity suggested advantages beyond what was required to become an isomorph in the first place, a medical procedure with a price tag equal to the annual budget of a midsized municipality. Privacy lent her existence – not long ago a sheer impossibility – an aura of magic.

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My neurologist, Dr Constance, felt very differently on this subject. He was a booster for the science, keen I should join Candace among a population of isomorphs barely in double digits. I’d often thought, and mentioned to my wife, Charlotte, several times, that dying would be less frightening if guaranteed to occur against a backdrop of mountains and tumbling waves, watched over by a lidless sky. Despite his dizzying professional stature, Constance’s office couldn’t be further from that. Between inoffensive impressionist prints, the space was cramped and oppressive. The framed photographs on his desk kept their backs to his patients. The harsh light made my palms sweat.

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“I can understand your discomfort at the thought of an isomorphic future,” he said. “The earliest of the subjects has been observed for only a little over a decade, though they are all doing well physically. In every way, their health is normal. We scrub the genotype of identifiable risk factors, but it’s possible isomorphs will have a shorter than average lifespan because of the reduced telomeres of the host body. Longer than the alternative, of course. We can’t be absolutely certain yet of the lifetime stability of our wetware, but the results so far are all pointing in the right direction.”

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Just hearing him on the subject triggered an insistent throbbing behind my temples. “You said she underwent the procedure as a teenager,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to talk to someone closer to my age?”

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“She doesn’t live far from you. But, location aside, she might be the person best suited to allaying your concerns. She’s a very smart young woman who pursues the kind of quiet pastimes you’ll appreciate.”

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“I’m sure she’s a regular, everyday reincarnated heiress to the ultrarich. What did she die of?” The question was blunt as a cudgel, but my head hurt.

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The doctor was unfazed. “An unusually aggressive form of cancer that was caught very late in the day. Just like your own case.”

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I nodded, noncommittal. Had I been diagnosed when I was Candace’s age, I would have been dead long ago. These days, medical advances appear so frequently a terminal diagnosis is likely to strike any patient as provisional, and immuno-therapy had extended my life expectancy from months to years, but the new treatments still come with pain and risk.

+

There was a bone sickness that left me jack-knifed on occasion. I frequently suffered the wracking nausea of pitiless migraines – and thinking too deeply about the prospect of isomorphism was always likely to set one off. One salvo of therapeutic chemicals had turned every hair on my body milk-white, even my eyelashes. When my natural colour finally came back a couple of months ago, Charlotte smilingly ran her fingers through my restored dark beard. I had to laugh; she had claimed to prefer the snow fox look.

+

Dr Constance’s voice intruded on my thoughts. “Candace travelled a long hard road before the procedure, and it was rough going on the other side as an isomorph. It’ll be the same for you.” He cleared his throat. Recently, he had taken to brushing away my symptoms with a nonchalance that made me wonder if he had grown tired of my endless prevarication and would as happily see me dead as isomorphic.

+

As he explained many times, cancer would get me in the end unless I made the leap. If its final assault made a beachhead in my brain, I would lose the option to become an isomorph altogether. “And,” as he had observed in our very first consultation, “how many people in your position have an opportunity such as this? It is quite a gift.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +an Driver was my benefactor. “It might be time to board the ship of Theseus, if you get my drift,” he told me when, to my astonishment, the call I answered came not from an oncology specialist but the world’s richest man. “I’ll stump up the readies and you can acquire a shiny new body.”

+

A humble classics professor, drawn to monuments of unageing intellect, immortality – literal or figurative – had never been on the cards for me. Tech moguls, hedge fund barons, kleptocrats made up Dr Constance’s clientele. But a single day of Jan’s earnings could more than cover the cost of my resurrection. Why he offered to pay was anyone’s guess. Maybe capacity alone was reason enough, a momentary Why not? Or perhaps the oddity of having such an insignificant person preserved as an isomorph appealed to his impish sense of humour.

+

Years ago, long before he became the asteroid-mining trillionaire of global fame, Jan had been a student of mine. A favourite, I blush to admit. A hard-drinking, boyish, jovial undergraduate, he treated study as a game and picked up Ancient Greek as other people pick up colds. He loved Thucydides especially, the early master of realpolitik, but it was the work of a different Ancient that resonated in our phone conversation: domesticated, dog-loving, moralising Plutarch – light years distant in character from Jan.

+

Debating Plutarch’s famous thought experiment, the Ship of Theseus, was always an easy way to chalk off a class. For centuries, the Athenians preserved the ship of their founding hero, but over time its timbers warped and rotted. One by one replacement parts were found and installed, until eventually not a single plank or dowl remained of the original. In what sense then, if any, did this remain the ship of Theseus?

+

Was it a new ship? If so, at what point in its history of piecemeal renovation did it cease to be that famous vessel? Or was it still the same one? If so, what if all the discarded timbers of the original construction were somehow recovered and put back together? Which would be the ship of Theseus then, when the incremental replica and reconstituted wreckage floated side by side?

+

Jan’s answer was simple. If there were two versions, and ownership of both was attributed to Theseus, on coming back to life the hero could claim them both – and no Athenian should stand in his way. Possession was ten tenths of existence. The debate wasn’t about a state of being but a brand: they were both the ship of Theseus. Problem solved.

+

So much for ontological niceties. Jan cut the Gordian knot, laughing at the idiocy of eye-rolling undergrads baffled by age-old word games. Was he the most advanced of my students or the most obtuse?

+

These events instantly came to mind when I first heard of Jan’s unsurpassable flaunting of scientific taboo. And they of course came back to me again when I got off the call in which he offered to transform my life in the most profound of ways through the magic trick of keeping it exactly the same.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +harlotte collected me from Constance’s Boston office. She instructed the car to follow a long sinuous route back to our cottage in the Vermont hills, preferring not to drive. The evergreens salved that incipient migraine, and I didn’t complain when she waved away my request for a sandwich to power onwards without pause. Ever since the remission that had set my whitened hair to rights, Charlotte had jealously guarded our Green Mountain seclusion. She no longer liked to eat outside our home. In fact, any encroachment on my sick leave was ruthlessly rebuffed, my health appearing to demand, to her mind, absolute seclusion.

+

I took it as a sign she was preparing for the end. Or the beginning.

+

On the way, we spoke on the phone to our teenage children, Julian and Diana. Together with Charlotte, they encouraged me to visit Candace Terry. Their positivity was unsettling. They might have been chivvying me to join a backpacking excursion. They claimed to be neutral on the isomorphic question, respectfully avoiding anything that might apply pressure, but for the first time it sounded like their minds were made up: the kids wanted a father, Charlotte a husband.

+

What I couldn’t bring myself to explain was the conviction they would get instead a doppelganger, a usurper of the dinner table and marital bed.

+

If I were to go through with the procedure, my memories and drives, my talents and weaknesses, would be reconstituted in the blank grey matter of an adult clone, making it that thing of flesh and blood that is an isomorph. My new vessel would walk the world free of cancer, released from fear and pain. The tight corners of my family’s eyes would loosen. I would be reborn. At least, that was the idea.

+

To complete the transition to isomorph, the brain scan requires a healthy organ, which I still had to offer. Yet, in the process of copying, that original matter would be thoroughly destroyed. Not a whiff of it, not a coil of smoke, would hang in the air of the operating theatre. Where would I be then? Would I be there at all?

+

Ultimately, I relented and agreed to meet Candace. Dr Constance made arrangements, and later the next day her mother, Jacqueline Terry, appeared full-length in our living room window, her translucent image floating before our view of the woods at the edge of the property. A regal figure, dark ringlets filigreed with silver, bare feet beneath wide linen pants, she won me over in an instant. I trusted her.

+

“You still live together, don’t you?” I said. “You and Candace? Is she available to come on the call?”

+

“She thought it best that the first time you meet it should be in person. You should come alone, she likes her privacy. And we ask that you respect her feelings by signing this NDA.”

+

The cat pawed at the windowpane as the document text descended the glass like an autumn leaf. I gestured, and my digital signature was appended.

+

Jacqueline smiled. “Spend the weekend with us at the farmhouse. You’ll be very welcome.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +’ve always enjoyed driving alone in the countryside. Charlotte had taken to turning off the media feed and had inadvertently locked the settings. While once I would have chaffed without the latest news or some involved panel discussion, I relished the mental liberty of silence. On the way to meet the Terrys, automobile-induced solitude had never been more attractive, something close to meditation.

+

A snatch of verse swooped pleasantly through my thoughts:

+

Little soul, charming wanderer,

+

Guest-companion of my flesh,

+

Dear departing pallid loner,

+

Heed the time and stay no longer.

+

Your jokes will fall on ears grown deaf.

+

The Emperor Hadrian wrote those words on his deathbed around nineteen hundred years ago (any faults in the translation are mine), addressing his soul as if it were a separate being. The independence of his ‘little soul’ struck me as peculiar. Did it possess anything of the character of its host, or was it just an animating spark? A force of nature doesn’t normally suggest something ‘charming’ and inclined to jokes. But who knows?

+

Is it possible there was nothing of Hadrian in Hadrian’s soul? Had he been alive today and been given the option to become an isomorph, the tables would be turned on his animula. The little soul, that vital spark, would have been thrown aside, while the speaking voice and tastes and knowledge of the emperor lived on.

+

On that long northward drive, I felt myself pulled between the spiritual and the material. I thought with gratitude of my family while waves of deep summer green washed about the car, precious reflections surely nourishing some vital part of the human composition. But still there was a suspicion I was merely romanticising pleasant and momentary sensations.

+

Are the finer feelings of existence happy accidents, the equivalent of being woken by a lover’s touch to realise it’s only the morning breeze mussing your hair? If the lover were there, would the moment of anticipation be any sweeter?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hrough the exercise of extraordinary influence, the Terrys’ property appeared on the satellite imagery of my GPS as a patch of unbroken forest. The reality was very different. On my approach, dense woodland peeled away from a sprawling mountainside construction of timber and stone. The grounds were extensive and elegant, subtly landscaped, the house rimmed with a deep deck that might have accommodated a small settlement, as a medieval castle sheltered a village beneath its walls. Centrepiece of the construction, a tall, glass-fronted, steeply peaked roof yearned toward the sky. I still had no idea how Candace’s family acquired its money.

+

I had expected some domestic lickspittle to greet me. Instead there was Candace’s grey-bearded father, Beau. He jogged gamely down the glass-and-steel stairs, shawl-collared cardigan trailing like a cape. Soft-spoken and solicitous, he showed me where to park and charge my car. Inside, we moved along a wood-panelled corridor decorated with reassuring family portraits to a cavernous central living space. We might have been the building’s sole occupants.

+

In deference to my English origins, Beau produced a steaming pot of tea and laid out snacks that looked homemade. We settled in what he called the ‘conversation pit’, a square of seating recessed into the floor beneath the steepling windows of the living room. Before us a meadow declined toward a paddock. All of this was invisible to the electric eyes long-established in the heavens.

+

“I understand one of the Jan Drivers has offered to pay for the procedure?” Beau said, pouring the tea. He might have been asking about my holiday plans.

+

“Yes, the Good Jan. The original was a student of mine. I guess my course made an impression.”

+

He cocked an eyebrow. “The original?”

+

I feared a faux pas. “Does that sound odd?”

+

“A little, but don’t worry. Candace would be the last person to take offence. I have to say, yours is a peculiar situation.” Smiling and avuncular, he handed me a cup. “The Jans are quite a pair, aren’t they?”

+

Indeed, they were. If Jan Driver’s features were close to ubiquitous before his accident, they became inescapable once worn by the two celebrity isomorphs who replaced him.

+

Details about the car crash are vague. There are theories he was brain-damaged when making the decision to grant the world a double-helping of his genius, and that for ethical reasons the scanning shouldn’t have gone ahead. That’s before one even considers the can of worms popped open in the production of two identical beings doomed to compete for the same identity. The rumours ran wild.

+

But what Jan did was very much in character. Having disrupted whole economies, why not take aim at identity itself? Besides, as with Alexander the Great, the idea of leaving a legacy for rivals to fight over would have pleased him. He might have died with the same command on his lips as Alexander: “To the strongest!”

+

For a while, in the public eye the two Jans fraternised nonstop. They walked abreast on red carpets and once or twice made business presentations as a double act. But the tipping point was Sonia Alverez, the pop star and branded avatar who’d been dating Jan at the time of his accident. Both isomorphs expected to resume the relationship, but Sonia hadn’t signed up for this unique form of polyamory and made her pick of the two, insisting on a subcutaneous microchip to confirm the chosen one’s identity when they met.

+

The rejected isomorph retaliated. The individual thereafter known as Bad Jan went public with all the infidelities and deceptions practised on Sonia before the car crash by his originator. In turn, his counterpart expressed contrition in a very un-Janlike way. Good Jan began to dress in loungewear, grew out then tamed his hair, and started to behave very much like a normal adult, albeit one with limitless wealth and diverse global (and solar systemic) business interests. He and Sonia became engaged, while his leather-clad opposite happily kissed them both off and pursued the life of a rockstar. For each Jan to be a success, distinct identities were required.

+

“Good Jan saves favourite teacher from death,” I said. “It’s a pretty good headline. Should bump the share price for a day or two.”

+

“Do his motives matter to you?”

+

“I think they might. Is that silly?”

+

“I’m not in your shoes.”

+

“You might be one day – thinking about becoming an isomorph, I mean.” He had the money after all, unless it had all been spent to save his daughter. “Things happen.”

+

“I might consider it.”

+

Jacqueline entered, her very natural smile enduring all the way through the long walk from the hallway to our place below the tall windows. We shook hands, and she invited me to ask about Candace.

+

“What was it like from your point of view? The procedure and what followed?”

+

“At first, when she came home, Candace was on cloud nine,” said Jacqueline. “It was a joy to witness. She was so happy to be alive, to feel healthy again. She spent every day on long country walks or reading. She looked up every friend and acquaintance she’d ever known.”

+

“She cooked us complicated meals,” said Beau, “inviting her friends to join us on a culinary world tour, a different national cuisine every weekend. Always playing with the dog, always smiling. It’s called early-stage euphoria.”

+

“We didn’t know it was common,” said Jacqueline. “We were expecting her to be confused about the procedure. We were told denial was typical, but instead she was ecstatic. At least, at first she was. Then she crashed.”

+

“Plummeted,” added Beau. “It was heartrending. We expected some sort of correction, but nothing so catastrophic. We started to wonder if we’d condemned her to a life of depression.”

+

“It was much worse than expected,” Jacqueline said. I had no need to question them, really. They clearly found in me an opportunity to voice things most often left unspoken.

+

“As well as depression, there was anger.” Beau raised the teapot interrogatively, and I shook my head. “She was furious with us.”

+

“Candace was fifteen at the time,” said Jacqueline. “A minor. Naturally, we’d discussed everything with her before the procedure. We sought consent. Beau and I certainly thought she had agreed that, in the event she lost the ability to make the request, it could go ahead with our approval. And that’s what happened, that’s what we did. But somehow she got to thinking that she – our daughter – had died in that operating theatre, and that the dying Candace might have stood a chance of survival, however slender, if we’d not requested the procedure.”

+

“There’s more than that. She said we had never grieved our daughter’s death.” The deep lines below Beau’s handsome blue eyes underscored his words. “She said we had approved the murder of a dying girl in order to avoid mourning her loss. Not only was she an unwilling beneficiary of a crime, but she had to believe we would do it again if the circumstances were repeated. That we’d kill another daughter, we’d kill her a second time, as it were.”

+

“It was very hurtful. We couldn’t convince her there had been no hope of recovery.” A consoling hand on her husband’s knee, Jacqueline was speaking to him as much as me. “We had no choice.”

+

“The obtuseness of therapists and psychiatrists is amazing.” Though clearly troubled by these memories, Beau remained amused at human folly. “How could she feel any other way? She’s always been smart. But for all their expensive educations, the professionals were completely taken aback. Quite useless, I felt. Feel.”

+

Jacqueline frowned patiently at the memory, one hand still on the tiller of her husband’s knee. He put his fingers over hers and they paused.

+

“But the anger, too, was a phase, I hope?” I said after a moment.

+

“A rite of passage,” said Beau. “It subsided, and she came out stronger.”

+

Jacqueline nodded. “Candace is in a much better place now.”

+

“She is someone new,” said Beau. “Our daughter still, but different.”

+

“You’ve heard enough from us, you should meet her!” Jaqueline rose, smiling brightly, and took my elbow as we stepped up from the seating area, guiding me towards the window and the deck outside.

+

“Where is she?”

+

“At the belvedere, farther up the mountain,” said Jacqueline. “That’s where she spends most of her time. She’s made it very beautiful. Go meet her. Take some treats for the dog.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here’s a hint of paradise in a pine forest. The green canopy in the dead of winter, a vibrant contrast to the snow, and in the summer the matted, scented needles on the clean forest floor make a case for the fundamental benevolence of nature. It was beneath a blue-green canopy of spruce that I walked the switchbacks of a narrow path traced with dry-stone borders.

+

I could have tramped that mountain path forever. For the first time in long months the tension deep in my muscles began to thaw. I was going to talk with someone who understood my situation first-hand. Perhaps she could answer the question I rose to every morning from bedsheets twisted with the effort of struggling for an answer. If Candace couldn’t help me figure out what to do, what to tell my family when my mind was finally made up, no one could.

+

The path levelled out and a white pagoda rose in a clearing. A small wire-haired terrier, a Jack Russell variant, danced around me, announcing my arrival with a bark like bottles smashing. When Candace emerged, the dog orbited the two of us, pausing occasionally to look her way for validation.

+

Isomorphs have smooth complexions, free of scars and most blemishes, a freshness that leaves them looking younger than their developmental age. But Candace could have passed for a woman in her thirties despite being, in ontogenetic terms, about ten years younger than that. It was a matter of bearing.

+

“You’ve met Hodge,” she said. “I’m afraid he doesn’t have a volume control.”

+

“I expect he’s a loyal friend.”

+

“Yes.” She looked pleased, though she countered the suggestion: “Actually I think loyalty in dogs is exaggerated. But we are great friends, Hodge and me.”

+

“Will departed pets become isomorphs one day?” The question was glib, but something about Candace told me she wouldn’t object.

+

“It’s sure to happen soon, if it hasn’t already,” she said. “So, you wanted to meet an isomorph. That’s understandable. Lots of people seem to, but you have a better motive than most. I never asked for celebrity, and it takes total seclusion to buy freedom from the media.” She waved toward her surroundings. “I’m lucky I was one of the first. It’s a harder secret to keep today.”

+

I could only agree. “Your parents said you found it hard to come to terms with being… becoming what you are.”

+

“I tortured them, it was ugly. I was the adolescent from hell. From the grave, anyway.” She scratched her dog behind the ear. “Hodge was all that kept me sane.”

+

“I’m more of a cat person. Does that spell trouble?”

+

“You’re pretty much fucked.” She was deadpan, and I discovered I liked her very much.

+

She gave me the tour, showed me her vegetable garden and flowerbed. As we wandered, she quizzed me lightly about my profession, my life history, how I and my family were handling my disease and its one final and questionable cure. I had come to listen to Candace, but – much as her parents had with me – I found a freedom to speak with her that I hadn’t enjoyed in a long time.

+

She listened attentively. A nod here, a moue there, her reactions dignified and subdued – her mother’s daughter. She smiled when I mentioned the absurdity of my changeable hair, expressed sympathy when I described my migraines and the fears that provoked them.

+

“I read a lot of philosophy, saw therapists,” she said. “Meditation, mindfulness, self-help – what struck me is how they’re all, whether they recognize it or not, guiding people to live the way animals do all the time. Not thinking about the future, not being tortured by what might be or could have been. Animals don’t even have to try, and they have all of that.”

+

“Philosophy is the disease for which it is also the cure. I can’t remember who said that.”

+

“Was it a dog?”

+

At length she ushered me inside, where I accepted a glass of water. The single room of the pagoda contained a desk, low table, sink, and twin bed; an outhouse was partially hidden among the trees. There were bookshelves, a small library comprising, as far as I could tell, history, science, and poetry almost exclusively. Also P. G. Wodehouse. No philosophy now. There were sketches laid out on the little table, but she didn’t direct my attention to them.

+

She asked about my connection to Jan Driver, and I started to tell her about the ship of Theseus only to feel silly when it became clear she knew the story already.

+

“There’s a Buddhist version,” she said. “It’s very old, copied down in Chinese in the fourth century from a lost Sanskrit document. A man travelling between cities spent the night in an abandoned house. He was woken when a demon rushed inside carrying a corpse. Another demon followed, and they started arguing over who was the rightful owner of the dead body.

+

“ ‘Which of us came in with this corpse?’ the first demon demanded of the traveller.

+

“There was no sense lying, and the traveller told the truth. The second demon was so enraged at his reply he tore off the man’s arm, and the first replaced it with a limb from the corpse. Seeing this, the rival tore off the man’s other arm, which was again substituted with one from the dead body. The demons continued severing and replacing body parts until there was nothing of the original man left. At that point, they fell upon the newly torn flesh, eating it ravenously before leaving the traveller in his new body, baffled and desolate.

+

“In the morning, the traveller visited the head of the local monastery to seek advice. ‘You have been blessed,’ said the teacher. ‘It takes my pupils years to comprehend that the self is an illusion, but you have achieved wisdom in a single night.’ ”

+

“Is that what you think?” I asked. “That there isn’t a self?”

+

“I feel exactly as Candace always did, but Candace is dead. I’m sure the two Jans both experience the intensity of being Jan. And you think you’re you, and any isomorphic copy of you would think he’s you, too, and transitioning from one state to another will be death and at the same time no more significant than waking up in the morning after a night’s sleep. If you aren’t your memories or your body or the combination of the two, what conclusion is there other than that you’re nothing at all?”

+

“It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? It’s bad enough dying. To submit to the idea there wasn’t a you in the first place is like dying twice over.”

+

Candace shrugged. “The decision has been made already, there’s nothing for you to decide.”

+

The illusory nature of free will has always struck me as a tedious assertion – hard to counter, perhaps incontrovertible, and thoroughly dispiriting. “Buddhism isn’t really my philosophy of choice, I’m afraid. I’m an incorrigible occidental.”

+

She continued to smile gently. “Try poetry instead. Of the two dreams, night and day, what lover, what dreamer, would choose the one obscured by sleep? That’s Wallace Stevens.”

+

Sat on the floor with Candace, I scratched Hodge’s flank. He watched me over his shoulder all the while, wary and grateful. “Do you resent what your parents put you through?” I asked.

+

Her smile grew warm and forgiving. “No, they were always going to be that way inclined. Mum and Dad invented the neural scanning procedure, after all.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +t home in Vermont, the family gathered in the kitchen to hear about my trip. I hugged them all, one by one and as a group. They could sense my relief and shared it with me. It was clear my mind was finally made up, though I hadn’t yet said a word about my time with Candace. I held Charlotte’s hand and addressed them as one, feeling the weight of the occasion and a little surprised not to be crushed to speechlessness beneath it.

+

“You were right, all of you, to encourage me to visit Candace, though it might not feel that way when you hear how things went. The main thing is, she helped me come to a decision. This is my decision alone, the most personal anyone could make, and I know by the love you have for me you’ll respect my choice – I feel that more than I could ever put into words.”

+

I looked down at Charlotte’s hand in mine. “I’m sorry to tell you that the procedure is not for me. I’m not going to be replaced by an isomorph.”

+

The drive back from the Terrys had given me time to work on my resolve. Without intention, Candace had convinced me the procedure would be quite meaningless. It might be me who went into the operating theatre – if there was such a being – but someone else would come out. What would emerge would be a perfect facsimile, someone else’s vessel, if these vessels of ours are truly steered by anyone.

+

As for my family, my decision meant they would suffer a loss, but life ought to move on. Since my death would come eventually, why not make peace with it now? And part of me welcomed the prospect of being mourned, a bittersweet motive I would have been embarrassed to admit.

+

When I stopped talking, the faces of my family spoke of pity and confusion. And something else.

+

“I’m reconciled,” I reassured them, “I’m fine. Be happy knowing that, please. Everything’s going to be okay.”

+

Charlotte put her hand to my cheek. “You’re right,” she murmured, “it is.”

+

They were watching me, measuring my reactions. It suddenly struck me they understood more than I did.

+

A cluster of impressions flooded me, everything that had troubled me about the isomorphic treatment. For a moment, I felt the awful foreshadowing of a migraine – and then, just as abruptly, it faded. Memories assailed me: Dr Constance’s easy dismissal of my symptoms, and something he had said about Candace and myself; society’s unquenchable thirst for anything isomorphic and Charlotte’s sudden desire for privacy, her infectious dislike of the media; Candace’s taste in poetry, and the full implications of her Buddhism; and—

+

“My hair,” I said, rather stupidly, at last comprehending the truth of what had happened.

+

Charlotte smiled. “Yes, John,” she said, squeezing my hand. Who precisely made my wife’s eyes brim with love in that moment, I couldn’t say. I knew only that it was love, and that would have to be enough.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Headspace on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mark Martin

+

+ + Author image of Mark Martin + + + Mark Martin’s fiction has appeared in The Manchester Review, Missouri Review, Dark Mountain, Stand, Plenitudes, and Storgy, and is forthcoming in the Dalhousie Review. Mark was the overall winner in the Fish Short Story Contest 2021, judged by Emily Ruskovich. The managing editor of Verso Books, he lives in Brooklyn but grew up in the UK.

+

© Mark Martin 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: cottonbro studio and katerinafil.

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Hook, Line, and Sinker

+

Addison Smith

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Hook, Line, and Sinker by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +he man in the mirror has dull, bulbous eyes above a gaping cartilage mouth. Its gills breathe in and out with expanding and contracting motions as I stare into eyes that should be my own. I adjust my tie beneath the faux fish facade.

+

“I wouldn’t worry,” my tailor says. “That’s pretty normal these days.”

+

She works my hemline as mirrored bubbles rise from my mouth, the shop a lost city beneath the sea. A hook protrudes from my mirrored lip and I touch my own, human, face. There is no treble hook puncture or skewered worm dangling at my chin. Still, I feel the pull.

+

My phone vibrates in my shirt pocket and I check its notifications. Search alerts report an uptick in social media posts tagging #apocalypse. I put my phone away and stare out the full-wall windows into the street.

+

“Leg up,” my tailor says, tapping the back of my right knee. I raise it as instructed.

+

Her phone buzzes now. We all have our search alerts these days. I wonder idly what hers might be. Or maybe it was a text from a loved one.

+

“Looks like another one,” she says, not glancing at her phone.

+

“Make me look nice for it.” I turn my phone off and slip it back into my shirt pocket.

+

The hook tugs in my lip and I feel it pulling my body ever skyward, even if it is only in my reflection. The fish face stares into my eyes. It looks nice in its suit of navy blue. I glance down at my tailor in the mirror. Her face is a carp now, mouth opening and closing in a dull-faced rhythm. A hook hovers before her in the mirror and I look away, to her human face. She stares as if she can see it – as if she is making a decision.

+

She turns back to her work. In the mirror, her carp face swallows the hook and its bright red lure disappears down her throat. My own hook tugs stronger, more insistent. It gets us all in the end.

+

She finishes her work and I step off the platform. “No charge today,” she says, waving off my money.

+

The car waits outside, unmarked and unremarkable. Security is high, but subtle, invisible. I step into the back seat and the driver takes off for my press meeting. As we pass the people on the street, I see hooks hanging from smiling mouths both fleshy and cartilaginous. It’s a good thing, I think. It’s unity.

+

The car turns into the garage of the massive white building where I will give my speech. As I step out, my entourage embraces me with broad shoulders and unworried glances. “The press room is ready,” one of them says. The hook dangles before his flat flounder face, and somehow he has not yet struck. It was so easy to take the hook, I knew. It was the easy choice.

+

Something grates beneath my feet and I lift my shoe to investigate. Colored sand pits the sole and gathers at my feet.

+

“That’s pretty normal,” one of my entourage says, “I wouldn’t worry.” The hook is already deep in his mouth, as if he had taken it gladly long ago. I smile and nod.

+

I walk through tiny pebbles of pink and blue and shiny glass marbles scattered upon the floor. The people need guidance, and so I am here.

+

I enter the press room to the left of a podium like an ionic sculpture. Cameras flash and the press goggle in their seats. I look out over the assembly and behold their variety. Television news reporters with the faces of black and orange oscars hold up their microphones. Newspaper representatives open and close their goldfish mouths beneath blank and distant eyes. The hooks dangle before them all as they await the word of their president.

+

“Good evening,” I say, and the murmur quiets to a minnow’s breath.

+

Brightly colored rocks cover the entirety of the floor. Plastic seaweed creeps in from the sides of the room – now great walls of glass with nothingness beyond.

+

“This is all normal,” I say. “Just go with it.”

+

The reporters sigh with collective relief and all through the room they bite down on their hooks. My head raises as my hook tugs me upward, and all around the world the people bite.

+

I give in to the hook’s pull. It’s easy and perfectly painless. As I look up, tiny flakes of food drift down to my waiting mouth.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Hook, Line, and Sinker on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Addison Smith

+

+ + Author image of Addison Smith + + + Addison Smith (he/him) is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis fungus. He’s doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on BlueSky.

+

© Addison Smith 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Ben Phillips, Dinielle De Veyra, Tima Miroshnichenko, and Jess Loiterton.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Summer 2024

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+ LM Zaerr +

Interlocking Grains of Light

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Every year or so a piece of fiction based on the mythology of Ancient Greece penetrates the barriers erected by Mythaxis' editor, so it's long past time he admitted his claimed abhorrence for this very broad sub-genre is a lie. Do it right, and he's just as happy to read it as he is anything else done right. Doing it right, LM Zaerr ventures into this rich territory with a spin on one of the truly historic takes on the transformative power of love.

+ + + + Story image for Interlocking Grains of Light by + + + +
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Something Else

+ Dane Erbach +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Something Else by + + + +

The near inevitability of any given issue featuring two stories half-reflecting each other is once more upon us. Here, Dane Erbach leverages his personal experience of preparing for the unimaginable worst to unsettling effect in a high school nightmare scenario that carries the distant echo of paranoiac classics past. If a episode from the original Twilight Zone or a certain Stephen King novella leap to mind… well, at least YOU aren't alone.

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Hook, Line, and Sinker

+ Addison Smith +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Hook, Line, and Sinker by + + + +

Welcome back to Addison Smith, who graced our pages four years and fourteen issues ago with his techno thriller First Breath, possibly the least Addison Smith-like piece of fiction in his canon. This time we delve into one of his more typically atypical zones of interest, presenting us with seemingly familiar worlds in which something is (perhaps metaphorically, or perhaps literally) very definitely fishy…

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Swans Will Be Swans

+ Elizabeth Zuckerman +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Swans Will Be Swans by + + + +

Our second high school-era offering is much lighter in tone than its predecessor, but Elizabeth Zuckerman touches on another serious subject as she transplants an iconic fairy tale trope to that most fantasy-welcoming of contemporary environments. Countless youngsters are made miserable at a time we're told we'll feel nostalgia over for the rest of our lives, but they can beat it, with a little inner strength, and the right support network.

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Headspace

+ Mark Martin +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Headspace by + + + +

Your editor considers himself to have a most varied taste in science fiction, and when Mark Martin's story landed on his virtual desk it provided an infrequent experience to be immediately savoured: the extravagantly not-yet-here presented through the somehow authentic, everyday lives of real people. This contemplation of mortality and its threatened absence is philosophical and personal, and conversational in the best way.

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Dagon, by Fred Chappell

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Dagon, by Fred Chappell by + + + +

For our latest longform review of the year, All Hail He Prophesied Since Times Before Time to Rise from the Depths in All His Awful Glory — Bill Ryan. It's easy to let the wide-spread inspiration of H. P. Lovecraft's sinister fiction drive a writer to madness (or, at least, to madness of cliché), so what is to be found in Fred Chappell's 1968 Southern Gothic take on the Cthulhu mythos?

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Short Reviews – April to June, 2024

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 by + + + +

The editor has no hair to pull out, zine components lie broken on the ground like hopes and dreams, and STILL the jewels of short fiction published these last three months are yet to be reviewed. Click here, dear reader, to discover if he did his job or merely furnished a broken link and washed his hands of the whole sorry affair.

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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

An interview with Micah Hyatt

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+ + +

As you may now be well aware, Mythaxis Magazine has become a platform for audio-format speculative fiction! It's fair to say that there's one man we have to thank for that: Micah Hyatt, a past contributor to these pages with fiction, poetry, and experiments in generative art, so we lured him from the studio long enough to chat a little about himself, and the voice of Mythaxis.

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Interlocking Grains of Light

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LM Zaerr

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+ Story image for Interlocking Grains of Light by +
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A + + claw chisel grated close, then a small flat chisel removed striations. He tipped me on my back and freed my eyes. In a single moment, I saw the blue sky and the sculptor. He was a huge man, with tight-curled hair and massive chest and arms, and I loved him.

+

The following days were pure joy. He rubbed black sand over me with a cloth, over the wavy hair pulled back from my face and falling to my shoulders, over my arms reaching out, one higher than the other, over my legs, one stepping forward. He lifted me easily, though I was three times his weight, moving me from standing to lying to resting on my side so he could better reach each part of me. He worked with finer and finer sand, then pumice paste, and then soft leather until I stood clean and polished, alive in interlocking grains of light.

+

He set me on a pedestal there in the courtyard. A crowd murmured around me. They gazed at me, but they didn’t see me, and I hated being invisible in plain view.

+

“This is surely your best work, Lysander,” said a breathless voice.

+

“I didn’t make her,” the sculptor answered, but the visitors ignored him.

+

“The hands are exquisite,” a young man marveled.

+

“Look at its belly,” someone said. “You forgot the navel.”

+

Lysander snorted. “Of course she has no navel. Her mother is stone.”

+

He knew me so well.

+

That night, he lifted me from my pedestal and lugged me into his bedchamber. He covered his bed with purple silk and laid me down, then clasped me close. He kissed my lips, my open eyes, the hollow at the base of my neck. He traced his fingers over my arms, my face, an intimate polishing that resounded through my essence.

+

He fell asleep at last, his face smashed against my neck. I wondered what it would be like to rest my hand on his back, to feel the pores of his skin and the sheen of sweat.

+

In the morning, he delighted me with gifts of honey cakes and wine. “Why won’t you eat?” he asked. He hung strings of amber around my neck and offered me pebbles and exquisite shells. He called me Aglama, statue and also delight.

+

When daylight faded, he lay with me again. Again, he caressed me. This time he wept, and his tears rolled over my breast. “Aglama, I love you,” he whispered. “Did you just kiss the top of my head? I felt your lips through my hair. No, I’m a fool. You are stone. You cannot love.”

+

My dear Lysander, I do love you, I answered.

+

He didn’t hear me.

+

He spent his days and nights devoted to me, but his grief grew. During the day, he knelt before my pedestal and pleaded with me to love him. He was deaf to all my assurances. At night, in his bed, I spoke to him in the language of souls to soothe him to stillness, but he lay restless beside me until the gray dawn.

+

On a spring morning, he laid me in a cart cushioned with straw and trundled me to the marble temple of Aphrodite on the tip of the peninsula. Tiny flowers grew in the scrabbly dirt, red and yellow and pink. He wove a wreath of these for my head and tried to tangle his fingers into my hair. When he failed, he sighed and hugged me close to lift me. He lugged me up the three steps and set me on the porch among the columns. Through the open door, Aphrodite glowed in the dark. She too was marble. She held a marble torch in one hand and the other reached out to me. Welcome, daughter, she said in the language of souls.

+

Lysander lit a flame and poured out pale wine. He knelt in the threshold. “Great goddess,” he prayed, “please turn Aglama to flesh. Then my love for her will be fulfilled.”

+

Our love is fulfilled, I tried to tell him. He prayed to Aphrodite all the long afternoon, weeping tears until one knee slipped on the wet marble. He landed on his elbow and collapsed face down, exhausted.

+

Daughter, are you willing to become flesh? the goddess asked me.

+

I wish I had known then what to ask instead. I want him to be happy, I said. I love him.

+

Very well, she replied. The flame leapt high three times.

+

Emptiness flooded into me. I exhaled and gasped for more emptiness. Strands of muscle fought for a precarious balance as my once clean form became infinite shapes and changes. There seemed no limit to how I could move through space. I sagged and wavered.

+

Lysander rose to his feet. “My love,” he breathed. He lifted me up, and my body draped over his arms. He hurried down the steps and bundled me under the straw. “No one can see you naked.”

+

“They’ve all seen me naked,” I said. Those were my first words – not words of love but an argument.

+

“We’ll be home soon,” was all he said, and carted me away.

+

The straw poked my flesh. Dust joined the emptiness in my lungs.

+

At home, he wrapped me in blue silk and carried me to his bedchamber as if I were still a statue unable to move. He laid me on the same bed where we’d lain together so many nights. At first it seemed familiar. I lay as still as I could with the emptiness rushing in and out. He stroked my arm with one finger, not hard enough to indent my skin. His touch tingled in my body as well as my soul.

+

I marveled at this new dimension of love. I stroked his arm and he stilled. Now he was the statue. I caressed his springy hair, all the structure of his body, the valleys between his muscles, marveling at how such a strong man could be so soft and porous. I felt him changing, growing firmer in my hand until I wondered if he would turn to stone. I half hoped he would.

+

All at once, he burst inside me, into a place he had not carved. I arced in tingling pain and joy. I truly was Aglama, filled with delight.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“You need food,” he said in the morning, and he was right. He put a grape in my mouth. I chewed and swallowed, then spat up milky liquid with bits of grape. It took me a while to learn the trick of eating. Spring water sloshed in new cavities, but it stayed inside me. I nibbled a honey cake, and it rasped down my soft throat. I bit into pomegranate fruit. The seeds between my teeth grounded me in my humanity. When Lysander brought me skewered lamb, I turned away. The meat was too much like my own substance.

+

My womb grew large. Lysander lay with his hand on my belly, feeling a tiny hand or foot kick against him. “I wish I could see the baby right now,” he said, laughing in his booming, joyous laugh.

+

“You’d have to chisel me away,” I said.

+

He stopped laughing.

+

A son squirmed out of my body, pressing me out of shape, shooting pain through me. He came into the world covered in gore and screaming. His voice hurt my ears. The midwife laid him to my breast, and he sucked away my substance like flowing marble.

+

“We’ll call him Paphos,” said Lysander.

+

The boy grew fast, always moving. He learned to run before he walked.

+

Paphos hugged me, one foot on the ground, one trying to climb up, his head tilted back, his chin against me. I swayed, afraid I would fall and shatter. “Don’t climb me,” I snapped.

+

His face puckered into grief. His arms fell away. I swooped him up and held him against me. “I’m sorry, Paphos,” I murmured into his neck.

+

He wriggled and clutched a lock of my hair. “Ow,” I said and jerked back. He burst into tears.

+

There were many moments like that, when sudden motion startled away my affection. How can love survive so many ambushes?

+

Once Paphos flung a chisel he’d found on the floor. He was always flinging things. This time he hit Lysander on the knee. Lysander winced but didn’t shout. He picked up his son and put the chisel in the boy’s hand. “The chisel is for carving,” he said, “not throwing. I’ll find you a spear and a target.” I envied Lysander’s easy intimacy with our son. He had more experience living among jittering humans.

+

Again my womb grew heavy. Lysander was too busy with the boy to rest his hand on my belly and feel its stillness. In time, my daughter slipped free, silent and clean, a perfect marble infant without a navel.

+

Lysander sighed when he saw her. “Never mind, Aglama,” he said. “I have you and Paphos.” He put a tiny shell by his daughter’s hand.

+

Paphos rampaged into the chamber dragging a huge stick, and Lysander hoisted boy and stick into his arms. “This is your sister,” he said.

+

“Rock,” said the boy.

+

I called her Marmara, marble and also shining. She glowed in the little cradle where I laid her. I held her tiny hand in mine. Blue veins showed through my tanned skin now, and my tendons were more pronounced, a strong hand, able to pound grain into flour and work the earth in our little garden.

+

I laid the statue on her back. In the morning, she lay on her side, the tip of one finger in her mouth. I held her to my breast and imagined she shared my essence, drawing life into herself.

+

Marmara grew as steadily as Paphos had. Her growing hair curled at the edges of her face, tighter curls than mine, more like Lysander’s. She occupied infinite positions and expressions, but I never saw her move.

+

One morning, I found her lying with knees bent and head thrown back. A slight scrunch around her eyes showed curiosity. I hefted her onto my hip, and she sat on my arm, her body twisted toward me, looking up into my face, as if she’d arranged herself on purpose to snuggle against me. Her blank marble eyes looked at me as I must have gazed at Lysander, and I longed to be marble again so I could hear her voice. I sang a lullaby in the mixolydian mode, as close as I could get to the language of souls.

+

When Paphos was six, he sneaked the cinnabar out of his father’s workshop and painted a huge red eye on Marmara’s forehead. When I returned from the storeroom, Marmara was frozen in grief, her mouth open, her eyes squeezed shut. In that moment, I resented the softening of my body that made me deaf to my daughter’s wail. My chest tightened, and the corners of my mouth hardened, but I didn’t turn back to stone.

+

Lysander sent the boy for pumice paste and spent the afternoon scrubbing off the paint while I stroked Marmara’s back to comfort her. “We have to protect her,” I said.

+

“We could pray to Aphrodite.” He paused and leaned his forehead against mine.

+

“How would the goddess protect Marmara?” I asked. I should have known what Lysander wanted.

+

“Think, Aglama. If our statue were a little girl, she could run and play with Paphos. She could bring flowers to you and sing to me while I work.”

+

“You’re a sculptor,” I said. “Why can’t you understand our daughter? She would be someone else if she were flesh.” It was hard to say what I meant in this trembling language. I was still myself after the softening, but only because I had chosen this mutable life.

+

Lysander went back to polishing away the cinnabar. “Aphrodite won’t listen anyway. She’s the goddess of lovers, not parents. Maybe when this statue is grown, a man’s love will transform her.”

+

Dread paralyzed me more than grief, but I knew there was no point arguing. On some subjects, Lysander was as deaf to me now as when I spoke the language of souls. “She’s four years old,” I said. “Let’s find a way to keep her safe.”

+

“What can we do?” he asked. “Lock her in her chamber?”

+

Of course I didn’t want to imprison her.

+

At the midday meal, I found flowers at my place, red and yellow and pink. “Thank you, Marmara,” I said to the beaming statue on the threshold. I’d hurt her feelings if I wept, but I said, “I love you just as you are. I don’t want you to be any different.”

+

At dawn the next morning, we woke to Paphos screaming. Lysander jumped out of bed. “What has she done to him?”

+

I hurried after him to the boy’s chamber. Paphos huddled against the wall shrieking and pointing at a three-horned monster standing on his bed.

+

I laughed, though I shouldn’t have. The monster was Marmara covered with a sheet. A tripod cooking pot rested upside-down on her head. From then on, Paphos left her alone, but he never loved her.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

On the day Marmara turned thirteen, the apprentice Kouros arrived, also thirteen. He was slender and whimsical. He tried to show Paphos a shadow game, but our son was now fifteen. He snubbed the younger boy and went off to wrestle with his friends. Paphos was training for war.

+

Kouros learned quickly. His first sculpture was a marble lark. He laid the bird at Marmara’s feet as she stood smiling in the kitchen, full-cheeked and chubby-armed. Later that day, I found her holding the bird in both hands, loosely enough that it could fly away. The lark stayed with her, now perched on a table, now on a curtain railing, now on her outstretched hand.

+

At sixteen, Kouros carved a cluster of marble grapes for Marmara. He placed them in her hand, and that evening they were gone. From then on, he spent all his effort carving marble objects to delight her, exquisite foods, a marble ship with thread-thin ropes, a lacy box to hold marble earrings.

+

Lysander tried to teach Kouros to chisel and smooth the human form, but the boy wouldn’t stay with it long enough to learn. Instead, he spent long hours sitting with Marmara. He never touched her, but once I came upon them and found her hand cupped around his cheek. He sat on a stool at an angle to her, as still as she, his eyes half closed, his breathing deep.

+

He was so different from my son, who was never still. One afternoon, Paphos stormed into the kitchen. “I’m going off to war,” he announced.

+

A new cavity opened inside me.

+

He reached for me, one arm higher than the other, one foot stepping forward. For an instant, he was solid stone in my arms, heir to my essence. I would miss his sudden assaults, when he snatched food from the table or swung me into a spinning dance. In his leaving, I found peace with my son.

+

Lysander was more irritable with Paphos gone. Kouros tried his patience more than anyone. “What use are you as an apprentice?” Lysander railed. “You carve trinkets and toys, but no one wants those things.”

+

“Marmara does,” he answered.

+

At last, Lysander came to see the obvious. “I believe Kouros loves the statue,” he said.

+

“And she loves him,” I answered, ignoring the slight to our daughter.

+

He hummed for a moment, a nebulous tune, then summoned Kouros. “Your love can be realized,” he said and harrumphed. It was hard for him to talk about something so private between us. “Take your beloved to the temple of Aphrodite. If you plead hard enough, the goddess may listen and turn your statue to flesh.”

+

Kouros ducked his head, his face as red as cinnabar, and didn’t answer.

+

“Kouros is a fool,” Lysander fumed that night. “He’s as lazy in love as he is in art.”

+

“He honors Marmara,” I said. “Why would he want her to be different?”

+

Lysander held me tight against him. “You know very well what they are missing,” he said and reminded me. Yet even amid the joy, I knew that Marmara was not me. If she became flesh, she might not find the satisfaction I had found. She had a right to choose.

+

On a rainy day that winter, Kouros rubbed soot from the bread oven on his face, four smears down each cheek. He fell asleep on the floor at Marmara’s feet. In the morning, Marmara’s face, too, was smudged with soot.

+

Lysander was right. A statue and a human could never find satisfying love. A mother’s desperation made me forget my own wisdom.

+

“You are both unhappy,” I said. “Go to Aphrodite and ask for her help.” Even as I said it, I thought of all the ignominies of being human, the pockets of emptiness inside me. If Kouros and Marmara were content, I’d understand their reluctance, but they were miserable. Still, they did not go.

+

In the spring, Kouros stopped eating. He lay unmoving at Marmara’s feet, and she reached toward him as if he were slipping away.

+

I went alone to the Temple of Aphrodite on the high point of land that reaches out into the sea. Around me, marble columns alternated with sky. The fluted stone held vertical shadows, deepening away from the sun. And between the columns, the blue sky turned milky, as if marble were blended into the air.

+

I stood before the goddess, aware of the subtle movements my body required to stand. “Mother Aphrodite,” I said. “This language of vibrating emptiness is the only way I can talk to you now. Inhabiting flesh is not easy, so I tremble to ask the same gift for my daughter. I would stay silent if Marmara were happy. She loves Kouros, and he is dying. O goddess, you must know they honor you, though they will never come to you themselves. Years ago, you listened to a lover’s prayer; now heed a mother, as you are a mother. Let their love be fulfilled.”

+

I didn’t light a flame or pour out wine. Instead, I wove a wreath of flowers, red and yellow and pink. I stomped down through the gorse and waded into the sea where it ebbs and flows among boulders. I set the wreath on the surface. Lines of brightness shot through the aquamarine water, brighter than any flame, and the wreath floated. A current carried it out to sea, and by this, I knew my prayer had been granted.

+

I climbed up through the gorse, terrified by what I had done. I had denied Marmara the choice I’d been given. I had betrayed her. She was tender and might not survive the emptiness of flesh. I rushed home, desperate to bring her with me to Aphrodite so she could plead to be restored. It might not be too late.

+

I entered her chamber and stopped, stilled by wonder. Marmara and Kouros sat clasped in each other’s arms, their cheeks pressed close, their faces rapt with joy. Kouros had turned to marble. My daughter and her beloved now shared the language of souls.

+

Lysander sagged in the threshold. He tangled his fingers into my hair, then drew back his hand. “I see now what you gave up. Do you want to return to stone, Aglama?”

+

“No, dear Lysander.” I cupped my palm around his cheek and polished him, smooth circles so he would know I understood the shape of him, a little stubble, large pores, a sheen of sweat, a life of interlocking grains of light.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Interlocking Grains of Light on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

LM Zaerr

+

+ + Author image of LM Zaerr + + + LM Zaerr is a writer and medievalist. She wrote a book on medieval storytelling and sang forgotten tales to the raucous tones of the vielle. She lured students into medieval legends and abandoned them there to challenge dragons, rescue Lancelot, and figure out how to play gwyddbwyll. Now she finds new stories and transforms old ones. Her work has appeared in Uncharted, Wyngraf, and New Myths, among other venues. Visit her at www.lmzaerr.com.

+

© LM Zaerr 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Kuan-yu Huang - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-38/short-reviews-april-to-june-2024.html b/issue-38/short-reviews-april-to-june-2024.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6b5bae0d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-38/short-reviews-april-to-june-2024.html @@ -0,0 +1,324 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 38 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Short Reviews – April to June, 2024

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – April to June, 2024 by +
+ + + + +

I + +’ve had good and bad experiences with horror fiction, I’m sure we all have, it’s practically the defining condition of the whole species. My penultimate one, that was atrocious in the worst way: I won’t speak ill of the undead, so don’t ask for the novel’s title or author, but despite being “properly” published during the probable heyday of its sordid little subgenre it managed to be poorly written beyond the dreams of the most ten-thumbed of mouth-breathers, and pointlessly nasty with it. I do love some gore, but I guess splatterpunk ain’t for me.

+

Then someone recommended to me Alabama Circus Punk by Thomas Ha, and my faith in humanity was restored.

+

It starts out as an almost literal kitchen sink drama, quite brilliantly written from the perspective of, we gradually come to realise, something certainly not human but which imitates human behaviour, perhaps in order to convince the example of the real thing that has entered its abode; and yet the real thing in question not only knows what this other thing is doing, he doesn’t seem to mind at all. To call the story “horror” is almost limiting, there is science fiction and crime in here as well as a kind of family drama, a study of liminal psychology, all in smooth cohabitation. It was unsettling, and I liked it very much.

+

It appears in ergot., “a literary website interested in furthering the innovative and experimental tradition in horror”, and so I guess I know where to run the next time the misguided urge to read downright horrific trash overcomes me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

P + +oetry gets short shrift around here, really. Under what can hardly still be called the “new” management four years in, there’s been exactly… one instance of it, and that was a reprint (though written by the man of the hour, as it happens!). Maybe it stems from a ruinous flaw in an otherwise perfectly cut education, but while I might like individual poems, poetry as a whole is an art form I feel underprepared to evaluate.

+

But that’s just excuse making, probably, since being a publishing editor should always be far more about knowing what you like than liking what you know. And I liked Lindsay King-Miller’s Apologia, on Forked Tongue, which with a confidence born of ignorance I’m going to claim is a piece of free-form narrative fantasy poetry, and then grudgingly admit means that I noticed it A) doesn’t rhyme and B) looks like someone chopped up a handful of regular paragraphs and arranged them via fridge magnets.

+

Yes, I’m a philistine. But a philistine with his forked tongue firmly in cheek.

+

In fact, as is always the case when this mode of presentation speaks to me, what I appreciated was how the breaking down of the overall story so often bestowed on these separated lines their own discrete power, highlighting their accumulation in a way prose in conventional paragraphs generally does not. To say nothing, in this case, about the story also being told. It appears in Orion’s Belt, which among other things claims to specialise in “the strange and poignant”, and in Apologia, on Forked Tongue I would say they have achieved this admirably.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +reaking the alliterative trend, the title of my final recommendation doesn’t begin with the letter A, which irritates my latent OCD but what can you do, life is what it is. It appears courtesy of NewMyths.com, “a quarterly ezine by a community of writers, poets and artists”, which has racked up an impressive 67 issues since it launched back in 2007.

+

Chevalier by David A. Gray is an epistolary story that immediately invites the even moderately well-informed reader to say “Hey, that doesn’t make sense!” shortly before it acknowledges the point you’re making but which it is not. Set in a future where humanity is threatened by an alien civilisation, the story is conveyed through messages sent between a mother and daughter after the former is found genetically suitable for integration into a vast weaponised space vessel, drafted by a desperate world government/military industrial complex, and dispatched to fight on the frontlines countless light years from earth… after a hibernation journey that will last much longer than a normal human life span.

+

Begs the question, doesn’t it, how does an impossibly distant parent exchange messages with a child who surely died of old age before they woke up? As the story swiftly admits, well, they can’t. But sometimes we talk to the people we love even when we know they can’t hear us, for all sorts of reasons, and it’s the way that a science fiction treatment allows Gray to play with this truth that gives the story a resonance that only speculative genres can achieve.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-38/something-else.html b/issue-38/something-else.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b033a8f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-38/something-else.html @@ -0,0 +1,509 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Something Else — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 38 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Something Else

+

Dane Erbach

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Something Else by +
+ + + + + + +

11:12 a.m.

+

I flinch when the alarm sounds, echoing through the halls like something quick and dangerous. Ms. Anderlik pauses her lesson mid-sentence and sighs, steps toward our classroom’s open door, and peeks out into the empty hallway before locking it and pulling it shut.

+

How many times have I watched a teacher draw the blinds over the door’s safety glass and snap the lights off before shepherding her class into a corner of a classroom? Most of my classmates are already swiping through their phones, tapping out messages to friends in nearby classrooms. They push AirPods into their ears, unpause whatever they’re watching on Netflix.

+

“Put them away,” Ms. Anderlik hisses, her eyes dark behind clear acrylic frames. “Turn them off or I have to take them. You know why it’s important to stay off your phones during a lockdown drill, right?”

+

And, of course, we do – something about overloading bandwidth, inciting panic, distracting us when we need to be attentive. Anyway, we like Ms. Anderlick, so we pocket our devices – all except Kayden Beckett, whose face continues to glow in the now dim room. He plays a game, something stupid with monsters and sharp weapons and splattering sound effects.

+

And except Lawrence Yi, who never took his phone out to begin with. Instead, he burrows his body as far into the corner as he can, whimpering and wiping his eyes and looking so miserable that Ms. Anderlik pushes through the huddle to sit beside him and rub his back. She shushes him like a mother, draws in slow, deep breaths. Still, Lawrence trembles like an animal cornered by a predator.

+

But I’m not scared. I’ve been here before.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

11:18 a.m.

+

Kayden breaks the silence. “What the fuck?” he growls, stabbing his phone with his thumbs. I look over his shoulder at the alert on his screen: You are no longer connected to the internet.

+

“Language,” Ms. Anderlik says, but then huffs quietly. Her middle fingers swipe across her laptop’s touchpad, tap too many times. Her eyebrows knot. “Well, looks like the internet’s out,” she says as she calmly folds her laptop closed. “Screens off, everybody. Now. I don’t want to have to tell you again. We have to take this seriously.”

+

Almost no one listens. Around me, seventeen other adolescents scowl, thump hopelessly on their screens. “I don’t even have a signal,” Eva Pieroni says, her phone’s colorful wallpaper reflecting in her eyes, her pupils like pinholes.

+

Braelin Porter sneers. “This fucking sucks.”

+

Lawrence shushes them loud enough to make us all bristle, then folds himself back into the corner, hides his head in his arms. His unblemished Nikes tap the linoleum.

+

Part of me wants to sit beside him the way Ms. Anderlik did, to tell him it will all be okay. Another part of me doesn’t want to go near him. I’ve tasted fear like his before, like sweat and dust on the back of my tongue. I don’t want to taste it again.

+

But then we hear the first shots, and my mouth goes sour and dry anyway.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

11:20 a.m.

+

Some cry and some freeze when they hear the cracks echoing from somewhere deep within the building. Some take calm breaths to distract themselves. My hand finds Eva’s.

+

“Quiet,” Ms. Anderlick whispers. She stands above our huddle, facing the door, prepared to take on whoever tries to invade our space. She no longer looks like an art teacher, fresh out of college, wearing a watercolor print dress. Suddenly, she reminds me of the hero character in a movie that dies at the middle.

+

“Does this mean it’ll be over soon?” Piper Simons chirps from beneath her desk. No one answers.

+

Braelin sits shoulder to shoulder between Connor Murphy and Miranda Cortez, her mascara melting down her cheeks. Her platinum blonde hair almost glows in the darkness. “Ramona, what did you do last time?”

+

I shrug. “I don’t know.” But I know exactly how I survived, and Braelin won’t want to hear it.

+

“You were in a school shooting before?” Kayden asks. “Wow, that’s unlucky.”

+

“No,” Eva says, squeezing my hand. “She’s lucky. Our good luck charm.”

+

“Quiet,” Ms. Anderlick hisses again. We all stop talking, stop breathing. The clock on the wall ticks off another minute. It is quiet outside now. Another minute. Still no sound. That doesn’t make it better.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

11:28 a.m.

+

Our school is old, our classroom smaller than those at the newer high school across town. When it’s windy out, air pushes through the pores in the plaster; when it’s humid, the history rises out of linoleum as an odor, decades of wax and dirt and spilled drinks.

+

I suppose this is why we feel the footsteps out in the hallway bouncing through the floor even though we don’t hear them. Who’s out there? Kids trying to get out of the school? Administrators patrolling the halls? Police sweeping from classroom to classroom?

+

“We should go too,” someone suggests in a breathy whisper. Others nod, look up at Ms. Anderlik like scared children in a doctor’s waiting room.

+

But she shakes her head, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “No, we stay here. Someone will come and get us when it’s safe.”

+

“Maybe it’s safe now,” Kayden says, just as we feel the footsteps on the other side of the wall stop, settle in place, then drum in the opposite direction.

+

And now we hear muted slapping against the floor, frantic scrambling. And we hear voices commanding, then yelling, then screaming, peals of percussive, chaotic sound impossible to interpret. And then nothing.

+

Eva’s palm petrifies in my grip.

+

I close my eyes and disappear into my mind where memories dance like cruel shadows: clutching other classmates’ hands, tugging each other toward the exit by the main office, watching the shooter turn the corner through wavering tears.

+

I start to cry, silently, clutching her cold stone flesh in my hands.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

11:35 a.m.

+

When the gunshots return, they sound different – quieter, in short, distant bursts, like static on another planet. We have to hold our breath to hear it.

+

I pinpoint a second weapon firing alongside the first, and I release my breath. If there are two weapons, then it must be the police, the SWAT team, the protectors who have arrived to save us. It seems premature to smile, so I bite my bottom lip.

+

Ms. Anderlik sits for the first time in fifteen minutes, giving us permission to lower our guard. She spins an engagement ring on her left hand and stares hard at a bulletin board full of colorful, encouraging posters that seem suddenly irrelevant.

+

Down the hall, another weapon fires one shot at a time – and much closer to our classroom. For a while, each shot is distinct, a snare drum punching through a song, but then it loses the beat and becomes a steady barrage of noise.

+

And then we hear the scream, buried beneath the gunfire, before it all goes quiet.

+

I hold my breath again, trying not to think of what the silence means. I don’t fool myself into thinking this is over. Instead, I visualize the route I will take out of the building the moment that classroom door cracks open.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:24 p.m.

+

Time crawls and speeds and stalls. The wall clock stopped at 11:32 – the power must have been cut, though with the lights out none of us noticed. We keep track of the time on our phones, but the concept has lost its meaning. It’s been a while since the gunfire ceased – long enough for us to lower our guard, converse in semi-silence.

+

An explosion rocks our classroom, shaking dust from an old PA speaker above our heads. Plastic cups full of paintbrushes tumble off a file cabinet across the room. Ms. Anderlik grips the side of a desk to keep her balance, then lowers herself to the floor beside us. Some scream.

+

“Oh god, oh god,” Wendy Gaines whispers behind me, her hot breath on the back of my neck.

+

“That was a bomb,” Kayden announces. “I know bombs, and that was a bomb.”

+

“Would the police use bombs?” Brett Pierce asks.

+

“Maybe.” Kayden frowns. “Or maybe the shooter set them.”

+

“Shut the fuck up,” Braelin begs him, then buries her head in her hands. The edges of her pink French nails are ragged.

+

More rifles discharge on a far end of the school, and the room settles into tense silence once again. We study the sounds carefully, their rhythm and distance.

+

“Those are AR-15s, or something like it.” Kayden’s voice is too loud, and the kids closest shush him, shove him against the wall, break into nervous tears.

+

“I swear to fucking god, if you don’t shut up,” Braelin begins, but runs out of breath.

+

“The police use AR-15s,” Kayden says.

+

“The bad guys too, though, right?” Ms. Anderlik asks, her arms crossed over her torso like she’s giving herself a hug, but she doesn’t have to.

+

“But it sounds like there’s a lot of them. That means the good guys—” Kayden’s answer is interrupted by someone smashing against our locked door, and I find a dark place to hide in my mind.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:26 p.m.

+

We were so close to the main entrance. Two dozen second graders holding each other’s hands, tugging each other toward safety, our teacher’s attention all on us, counting heads, whispering words we couldn’t hear. She didn’t see the shooter. I did.

+

The memory haunts me: the calm way he rounded the corner, the rifle tucked into his shoulder, the oversized shirt bunched beneath his body armor, the blank look on his face.

+

I dropped my classmates’ hands and ran like my mom told me to.

+

I found a place to hide – a closet with text books stacked along the walls – and locked myself inside. But I heard everything: every shot, every scream, every body falling. I did not open the door when someone pleaded on the other side, or when I heard the shots that killed them.

+

In the ensuing silence, someone yanked on the locked door.

+

An hour later, the police found me in there, hiding beneath an extra teacher’s desk – the only kid in my whole class that survived. But only because I left them behind to die.

+

There’s no refuge in here. In memory.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:27 p.m.

+

Open palms press against the window, a silhouette cast by red emergency lighting against the drawn blinds. The rattling door, the panicked voice – such familiar sounds.

+

“Let me in.” His voice barely penetrates the door. “Please. I know someone’s in there.”

+

“That’s Mark Walton,” Eva says. “Let him in.”

+

“No,” Piper pleads, her eyes alight with fear. “Don’t. Please.”

+

“We have to,” Eva says. “We can’t let him die out there.”

+

“I hear you,” Mark’s voice quivers on the other side of the door. “Please, I don’t know…”

+

“Piper’s right,” Ms. Anderlik says, staring at the silhouette on the window. “It could be a trick.” She swallows hard. One of her thumbnails rakes against the other.

+

The art room is silent for ten more seconds, save Mark’s open palms patting the safety glass, conspicuously quiet. Shadows hang like cobwebs from the corners of our classroom, spread across the floor, drape across our faces.

+

“Please,” Mark says again. He grabs the door knob and shakes it. The door clatters in the frame, rattles the pane of glass.

+

The next time he speaks, Mark sounds different. “Oh. Oh, no. No no no,” he mumbles. Then his voice rises into an animal scream that no longer sounds rational or human.

+

There is no gunshot.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:28 p.m.

+

The knob pops, the door shudders, and a terrible commotion echoes out in the hallway. My muscles tense as the shadows slam against the blinds. We become a classroom full of statues as we watch. Our hearts stop beating until the struggle calms.

+

Kayden points to a black shape spreading beneath the door like a slow-moving shadow. It seeps further into the room, and I wonder if it’s oil or maybe ink, both of which seem more plausible than blood for some reason. But blood is what it is.

+

An indistinct shadow forms against the blinds. It moves closer, sharpens into something solid but no easier to discern: an ace of spades in three dimensions. But then it blocks out the emergency lighting in the hallway.

+

It’s trying to look into our window.

+

I disappear beneath the shadows like they are a blanket, steal quiet breaths through flared nostrils. I want to close my eyes, but I know I will only find myself back in that storage closet.

+

And then the shape disappears.

+

We unfreeze long enough to glance into each other’s eyes, share looks of understanding. No one says what we all suddenly know: there is no shooter picking off students and staff in the hallways. It’s something horrible, something inhuman, something deadly, yes. But it’s also something else.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:30 p.m.

+

“What the hell was that?” Brett mutters, but no one answers. “What the hell?”

+

Eva, trembling, sobs silently. I rub her back with my open palm until she crawls away from me, stopping near the outline of Mark’s blood. Kayden paces, his hands clawing at one another. His eyes dart from side to side like some ancient battle is raging in his mind. Braelin hisses quiet obscenities at him, each hushed syllable more harsh than the last. Ms. Anderlik presses her hands onto Braelin’s shoulders, begging her to calm down, to speak softer, but Braelin is possessed by a demon she no longer controls.

+

“For real,” Brett mutters beneath it all, “what the hell?”

+

Miranda grips Leslie Le Dion’s hand like a rosary, rocks back and forth with eyes clenched shut. They pray together. I’m not religious, but I almost scoot closer to them in the hope of catching their serenity secondhand.

+

Instead, I stand in the middle of the madness, catching whispers and whimpers, stray syllables that strike me like insects. The room’s shadows stretch longer and darker across the mechanical, mindless movement of my classmates.

+

Lawrence brushes past me, his body all angles in the dim emergency light. His silhouette looks careless as he tip-toes around Eva, his shoe dropping into Mark’s blood. He takes a slow breath, and opens the door.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:32 p.m.

+

Lawrence doesn’t wait to explain himself. He darts into the dim, red hallway, leaving the door open behind him.

+

Mark’s body is missing.

+

Ms. Anderlik rushes to the door, calling Lawrence’s name. Kayden shoves past her and slips in the pool of blood, landing on his shoulder. The impact shakes the floor beneath us, reverberates down the hall. He groans, struggling back to his feet before following Lawrence.

+

“Close the door!” Piper screeches, a crumpled ball beneath one of the desks.

+

“You have to come back,” Ms. Anderlik calls after them, both too quiet and too loud. Her voice crumbles with each syllable. “We’re safer together.”

+

Braelin approaches the door and peeks out into the hallway, hands stroking her luminous hair like a pet. She looks right, then left. “Fuck it,” she says, ducking out the door.

+

It’s strange how quickly the classroom empties into the dim corridor, how apathetically each hops over Mark’s blood and edges alongside the dented lockers. Miranda and Leslie hold hands, reach out for Piper’s, then Wendy’s, and I have to shake every memory from my head to keep from disappearing back into them.

+

Even Ms. Anderlik wanders the hall, dazed, as if she has never been in the building before. I’m left in the cluttered classroom alone, rigid among overturned chairs and consuming shadows.

+

Eva stands on the blood-smeared floor just outside the door, waiting for me in a scarlet void. She extends her hand toward me, her tear-stained face hardened with determination.

+

I take a step forward, just as a shadow sweeps her out of view.

+

Her screams disappear down the hallway.

+

My first instinct – to retreat deeper into the classroom – smothers my desire to chase Eva down. And instead of running away – my second instinct – I stand frozen in fear, unfocused, a step from the threshold, trying to will myself to do something, anything. Tears boil in my sinuses but refuse to fall.

+

When something skids into the doorway, clutches my shoulders, I tense and keen and release all the air in my body at once. I recognize Ms. Anderlik too late. Her dirty hands release me, and all she can get out is “Run” before something rips her away too.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:36 p.m.

+

The floor slips beneath me, streaked brown linoleum. The lockers blur in my periphery as I run, turn a sharp corner, quickstep down a flight of stairs.

+

For real, Brett’s voice shudders through my mind, what the actual hell?

+

On the third floor, tiles peel off unpainted cinderblocks dappled with bullet holes. A water fountain hangs off the wall and cold water splashes under my feet. My shoes slide and squeak until I hit a carpeted hall where a sickly sweet scent laces the air, like rotten flowers.

+

I haven’t seen a body yet. Bloodstains paint the thin carpet, trail into the artificial dusk; the glass windows of a courtyard have been blasted, the metal frame twisted like a dried earthworm. But there are no corpses, no classmates or teachers anywhere to be seen.

+

I don’t pause to wonder why. Instead, I think of Eva, of Ms. Anderlik, of how I left them behind to save myself.

+

Just like last time.

+

Hot tears warm my cheeks. I consider going back to find them – What was it that pulled them away from me? – but the exit to the teachers’ parking lot is nearby. I imagine a barricade of police officers wrapping blankets around survivors.

+

I come around the next corner and freeze. At the end of the hall, where a flight of stairs would lead me right out the door, something enormous droops from the ceiling to the floor like a decomposing water balloon. Its putrid stink is overwhelming. It’s a sack, or something like it, and blocks my escape route. Standing in the middle of the hall, I feel exposed, like I’m being watched. But somehow I can’t move.

+

On another side of the school, a child’s voice screams, and suddenly I have control of myself again.

+

I do the only thing I know to do: I hide.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:40 p.m.

+

Graciously, the faculty men’s room can be locked from the inside. It looks centuries old: pastel tiles, a hand-cranked paper towel dispenser, and what I think might be a radiator. I cram myself between the toilet and the wall in the furthest stall, a spot that reeks of cleaning chemicals, but at least it’s not that putrid lilac smell.

+

The school seems so quiet – except for the occasional scream. I imagine that spade-shaped shadow cast on the classroom’s window, the blurs that swept Eva down the hall and pulled Ms. Anderlik away from me, each projected like an grainy movie on the back wall of my mind.

+

As I shake my head, tears loosen from the corners of my eye. My nose draws in long, ragged lines of air; my lungs force out each breath and it feels good, clears my mind. I’m safe inside this bathroom, I tell myself. I can hide here as long as I need to.

+

I close my eyes, and I’m back in the storage room, where dust motes floated between the stacks of text books. The lock clanked, the door swung open, and a police officer shouldered into the room aiming a shimmering rifle. As he spotted me, his stunned expression looked so sad, so human, that I almost forgot how well armed he was.

+

No one will save me this time, though. I think of the wall ripped up by bullets. Whatever is out there will kill whoever it finds, armed or not. The only way to survive this time is to escape.

+

I push myself up onto shaky feet and shove my way out of the stall, refusing to make eye contact with my reflection in the mirror. I hold my breath and listen for any sounds on the other side of the locked bathroom door.

+

And if there was someone there, my mind asks me, would you take them with you or leave them behind to die?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:51 p.m.

+

I see details I missed when I return to the hallway: enormous chunks of the drop ceiling in piles on the ground; entire rows of lockers caved in by some impact; the floors and walls pocked by something sharp.

+

I press my finger into one of the holes. Deep and sharp.

+

Something had slammed through the railing at the top of the stairs, midway down the hall. It bends unnaturally into the open air and the steps beneath it look rough, slick with smeared blood, and something else. I try not to think about what as I tiptoe down.

+

On the second floor, I peek left into the hallway and see a teacher in his fifties, his oxford shirt untucked, bare feet peeking beneath his khakis. He yanks on each door he walks past, but doesn’t see the silent shadow crawling on the ceiling above him, a mass of writhing muscle.

+

Long, whip-like legs fold down, bending at impossible angles.

+

I flinch as the shadow smashes against the poor man, who doesn’t even have a chance to shriek, and sweeps him down the hallway, leaving only that saccharine stench in its wake. It barely takes a second.

+

My legs collapse beneath me, but even as I’m going down I know I don’t have time for this weakness. I take a deep breath, swallow, remind myself that the only way to survive is to escape, and push myself back to my feet.

+

This time I look right. At the far end of the hallway, I hear something coming fast, then a human silhouette rounds the corner, kicking through a pile of ceiling panels. He neither screams nor speaks, but I can hear his panicked breaths over his footfalls.

+

As he comes closer, I realize it’s Lawrence Yi. And, behind him, something plows into a row of lockers, something that couldn’t make the tight turn as fast as him.

+

Something that shakes its spade-shaped head and turns our way.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:54 p.m.

+

Once again, my first instincts are to run and hide – away from Lawrence and from this monster, whose daddy long legs propel it down the hallway so fast it feels like a dream. But my body stalls out when I realize Lawrence is in the mirror spot of where that teacher got snatched only a minute ago.

+

I don’t want to witness that again.

+

As Lawrence passes, I step into the hall, the monster closing in on him, on me, its speed and silence debilitating. I grab his arm and swing him into the stairwell, allowing his momentum pull me behind him. We tumble together down the stairs, knees and hips and elbows and shoulder blades crashing against each step and each other. The monster barrels down the hallway like he never saw us.

+

Lawrence whines, rubs his shoulder. “Why’d you do that?” he asks.

+

“Why’d I save you?” I screech, then catch myself, literally cover my mouth with both trembling hands.

+

He stares through me, his lips parted, like he doesn’t understand my question, doesn’t remember me. I can’t tell if his mind is empty or overloaded. He has lost his glasses and his bare faces makes him look like a small child.

+

I grab his arm and pull him to his feet. “Follow me. We’re leaving.”

+

“There’s no way out,” he says. “Not up there.”

+

He pulls himself free from my grip and stumbles down the stairs. The sound of his shoes slapping the steps echoes around us; I’ve never been so scared of noise. But what can I do but follow?

+

“Where are you going?” I ask, looking over my shoulder for whatever might be behind us. “Do you know another way?”

+

“Yes,” he says, and his voice drops to a secretive whisper. “The band room.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

12:56 p.m.

+

“Why did you walk out?” I peek from the stairwell into the first floor hallway. The darkness is heavier down here, almost hazy. “Of our classroom, I mean.”

+

Lawrence does not look scared any more, not like when the lockdown started. Whatever clicked in my head back in second grade must have clicked in his now. “I realized we were all going to die,” he says, the words tight and straight as if written in an old typewriter font. “I didn’t want to wait any longer. Best case scenario, I get out. Worst case…”

+

His voice trails off as we turn a corner. Between us and the windowless corridor, a brown sack separates from the void, drooping from the ceiling, wide enough to block all passage. Something inside weighs it down. The texture is a contradiction, papery like a wasp nest, but dripping with something sticky-looking, and darker toward the bottom. It reminds me of my grandmother’s baklava.

+

“What are they?” I ask. My hand reaches toward it, but stops short.

+

Lawrence ignores my question. “They’re blocking all the exits I’ve seen so far,” he says, “but I’m betting they don’t know about the band room.”

+

“What’s in them?” That cloying odor makes my eyes water; this close, an undertone of rotten flesh overpowers the sweet.

+

Again, Lawrence doesn’t answer. “We can backtrack, go past the writing center, get to the band room from there,” he says. But when we turn, there is a dark, silent shape on the ceiling, its legs unfolding, its shovel-like head swinging downward. Any details beyond its mottled texture and sleek, sharp corners are lost to the dark.

+

Lawrence’s sigh stutters through his teeth. “Wait for it to attack, and run past.”

+

“No, I can’t—”

+

Before I can finish, Lawrence shines his phone’s flashlight onto its snake fangs and pink, pupil-less eyes, and it reacts like dark lightning, and instinct takes over as I duck beneath it’s segmented belly into the hallway beyond and run away – again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

1:03 p.m.

+

I race through the black halls, hands out, running them against lockers and painted cinderblock walls. All I can think about is how I left Lawrence behind to die. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I repeat in my mind to the rhythm of my footfalls and heartbeat.

+

I veer right down a hall lit dimly by an exit sign. In the pool of red beneath it is the mouth of another corridor, but I know better than to turn toward it now. Instead, I jog past, to the end, to the band room. I think of Miranda and Leslie, and pray it isn’t locked.

+

The corridor of the band room is all glass on one side, I guess so people can see right into the soundproofed space. Behind a set of double-doors, beyond a dated vestibule, the band room is lit – not by overhead lights, but daylight streaming in from somewhere to the side.

+

A way out. Lawrence was right.

+

The double-doors are locked, but next to yet another thick smear of blood one of the window panes has been shattered, thick chunks of glass scattered into the room. It’s almost too small to squeeze through, but I shape my body like a diver’s, wiggle and kick my way inside. Glass crunches beneath my elbows and arms when I land, presses into my hands, but I don’t have time to check for cuts.

+

Something heavy slams into the space I just left, shatters another window and covers me in shards of glass. The shock knocks the wind out of me, but I scramble to my feet, glass falling from my hair.

+

The steel door buckles like it’s a juice box.

+

I don’t think about the rows of chairs, the empty instrument cases, the music stands toppled over. All I see is the open door, a fire escape, the sun slanting in from the outside, and pale in the brightness a distant barricade of police vehicles, waiting for me.

+

I run for it, run for freedom and safety.

+

I run and leave everything else behind.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

1:07 p.m.

+

Beneath the warm sunlight a breeze pushes through the swaying trees. It’s all so overwhelming that hot tears streak down my cheeks, blurring the details around me – the gray light poles, the ragged row of police interceptors, the abandoned baseball diamond beyond.

+

I survived, I think. I’m out.

+

But only because you left Lawrence behind.

+

Thoughts materialize like poltergeists, pesky and unwanted. You left Eva behind, Kayden behind, Braelin, Miranda, Ms. Anderlik behind. But in the haze of this quiet afternoon, the safety of this faded parking lot, another realization cuts through louder than the last: Lawrence saved me because I saved him.

+

“Quiet afternoon,” I whisper, wiping my eyes, placing a hand on one of the white squad cars. Why hasn’t anyone come to collect me, to wrap a blanket around me?

+

I wipe my eyes again. Half a dozen law enforcement vehicles form a crooked line beneath the powder blue sky, and a dozen more cars huddle behind it, but they’re all empty; their doors hang open, lights cycling impotently.

+

An abandoned truck rests on the sidewalk, the words “TACTICAL OPERATIONS UNIT” written in silver on the side. But its back doors swing slowly in the breeze.

+

Where is everybody? Where are the police, my parents – the protectors? Why did they show up at all if only to disappear when we needed them most?

+

I start walking, not really knowing to where, but as the school building shifts in my view I see something unfamiliar and massive in the distance, a mound higher than the nearby water tower, wider than a neighborhood block. It reminds me of a burnt cake, brown and collapsed, as if dropped onto the kitchen floor.

+

A mile away? Five miles?

+

I sit on the bumper of the last squad car, wiping my eyes and nose on my arm – which is bleeding, I see, from falling on the glass. The tears sting my eyes. And so does that smell – sickening blooms, rotting on the counter like expired condolences. It rides the breeze with pollen and dandelion seeds, something that may never go away.

+

As I wonder what’s next – where will I go? what will I do? who is left? – I feel it in the back of my throat, dry and acrid and dense.

+

I’m scared. Maybe I have been all along.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Something Else on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Dane Erbach

+

+ + Author image of Dane Erbach + + + Dane Erbach is a writer from Chicago’s northwest suburbs who teaches English and journalism at a public high school. During the summer, he teaches writing at Northwestern University to gifted and talented middle schoolers. His fiction has appeared in Sobotka Literary Magazine and The Vignette Review, and his music journalism can be found in various print and online publications. When he’s not writing or reading, you can find him catching Pokémon with his family, raiding his community library, and tending to the pumpkin patch in his backyard. You can follow him on Instagram and Threads at @browntrowsers.

+

© Dane Erbach 2024 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Strange Happenings - many thanks!

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-38/swans-will-be-swans.html b/issue-38/swans-will-be-swans.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d946712c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-38/swans-will-be-swans.html @@ -0,0 +1,408 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Swans Will Be Swans — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 38 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Swans Will Be Swans

+

Elizabeth Zuckerman

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Swans Will Be Swans by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +he weird thing is, as it was happening, I kept thinking how cold the floor felt. Like my brain had nothing better to do. Just picture it, okay? Me dripping shower water onto the locker room floor, that first-season-win glow fading real fast, arms crossed over my thin towel, trying to glare my clothes out of Trey Riley’s hands. And he’s grinning, the smug little bastard, because he knows our school won’t touch the principal’s son, and I’m yelling at him and my teammates with clothes on are coming at him and he’s laughing his way out of the locker room, and the whole time I keep thinking on loop, Gosh, Liv, your toes sure are chilly, why don’t you put your socks on?

+

It was shitty, is what I’m trying to say.

+

Amanda had a change of clothes, because duh, so at least I didn’t have to go home in the extra soccer uniform and pray the shorts’ loose drawstring stayed tied. I did have to ride the same bus as Trey Riley, and I did have to walk four blocks in the same direction as him, which sucked.

+

“I should do this again,” he said once we got off the bus. “You look good in Amanda’s clothes.”

+

Amanda had a body like Karlie Kloss. Nobody looked good in Amanda’s clothes but Amanda. I set my jaw and walked faster.

+

“Oh, come on.” He jogged to catch up, got a few steps ahead of me, and walked backward with this shit-eating grin on his face. “Can’t you take a joke?”

+

“Ha ha,” I said through gritted teeth. “Give me my clothes back, asshole.”

+

He pretended to think about it. “Trade you the shirt for the panties.”

+

I turned left so sharply you could have cut your finger on it. He didn’t follow, but he called down the block, “I think your nip’s hanging out!”

+

I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of checking. So I walked the extra block of my alternate route with fury boiling in my stomach, my jaw sore from clenching it too hard, and my shoulders stiff with irrational panic that the cutouts in Amanda’s black top might in fact show my tiny braless breasts.

+

Gramma took one look at me and poured a drink from the secret stash I wasn’t supposed to know about. “I’m seventeen,” I said, staring at the shot glass in her hand.

+

“If you’re old enough to hate, you’re old enough to drink. Salt first. No granddaughter of mine pussyfoots her way around tequila.”

+

I licked salt off my hand, downed the shot, and tried to gasp for air and bite the lime at the same time. Bad combination. Gramma thumped me on the back until I could breathe again. By then we were both laughing, and the barely-contained nuclear explosion of my rage didn’t burn quite so hot. Then we broke out the half-full bag of chocolate chips and put a terrible movie on for background noise while I told her what had happened.

+

“What a prick,” Gramma kept saying at just the right moments, when I paused for effect or for breath or just to stop and listen to the words coming out of my mouth, because saying them aloud made me even angrier. “What a prick. Keep going, hon.”

+

Mom got home around six-thirty. By that time Gramma and I had moved on to other topics, so my actual greeting to her was the news I’d wanted to come home with in the first place: “Mom, guess what? We won the first game of the season!”

+

“That’s my girl!” she said. She slid groaning out of her work heels and padded barefoot across the living room to the couch, where Gramma sat enthroned next to me in my round nest chair. Mom flopped onto the ottoman, smeared her mascara as she rubbed her eyes, and then paused to take in the clothes I’d never worn before, the crumpled yellow chocolate chip bag next to the lime rind, and the total lack of any dinner prep. “Everything okay?”

+

And here’s the worst part of it all. I was an hour removed from the bullshit, my stomach was warm with tequila instead of anger, and Gramma had made me laugh. These are the fully-formed sentences that crossed my mind: I shouldn’t worry her. It wasn’t that bad.

+

And then I got so mad all over again that I burst out crying.

+

I hiccupped the story out between sobs and wordless yells. When I got to the part about walking down the block with him, Mom got up and poured another tequila shot. In fairness, she offered it to me first. “I got her,” Gramma said. “That one’s yours, Katie.” Mom threw back the shot without salt or lime, grabbed a new box of tissues, and squeezed into the nest chair with me so I could get snot and tears all over her gray wool blazer. I could feel anger coiling under her skin as she held me, her arms getting tenser and her breath coming shallow.

+

But when I finished talking and blew my nose again and scrubbed at my itching eyes, she only asked, “What do you want to do about it, Olivia?”

+

That question means different things for us than for most people.

+

I took a long slow breath and let it sit straining in my chest for a few seconds. I thought about the risks, about everything I stood to lose if something went pear-shaped. I thought about the times when I was little and came running to Mom and Gramma squealing Do something, do something and they told me we had to be careful, we couldn’t just unleash ourselves whenever we felt like it. I thought about how we’d won the game today, how I’d scored the first goal, and how I had to remind myself of that and block out everything else if I wanted to feel any pride or warmth from that memory. I thought about how I’d belonged to me until he decided I didn’t.

+

I let out my breath and looked up at Mom. “I want to do something about it,” I told her.

+

On the couch, Gramma clapped her hands. “Damn right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hese are the things stories don’t tell you about a feather coat: They itch. They’re always too small, right up until the second they fit. And they’re fragile like you wouldn’t believe. A couple of crumpled feathers and the whole shebang won’t work right.

+

Putting one on is like trying to fit a grown adult into a two-year-old’s denim overalls. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen Mom or Gramma in theirs, I definitely hadn’t worn mine ever since the coat stopped growing. I’d hopped in and out of it until I was four and the coat had hit adulthood. Then they’d weaned me off it, partly because our family can only spend so long at a time in our coats before we get the uncontrollable urge to abandon everything and fly off east of the sun and west of the moon, but also because, wow, can you imagine the awkwardness of trying to explain why you’d had a little girl there a minute ago, and now this big-ass swan was splashing in the fountain? Thank you, no.

+

So I hadn’t worn it in years, and the first time I stepped into the foot webbing I could feel my neck vertebrae pop painfully. “Careful!” Mom said, bracing my arm when I stumbled. “Don’t force it. Give yourself time to shift.”

+

“Your great-great-grandmother would jump in and out of her coat like it was nothing,” Gramma remarked from the kitchen, her hands wet and soapy as she scrubbed our dinner dishes. “Last generation who didn’t care about the call and spent as much time in her coat as out of it.” Mom and I paused, me teetering on one human foot and one whose bones had already shifted and diffused and reshaped to fit the swan-foot webbing. Gramma rinsed a plate and set it to dry. “Sanctimonious bitch,” she added. “Couldn’t stand her. You’re doing fine, Liv.”

+

I eased my left foot into the webbing and held still while my bones did their slow wincing change. “Good,” said Mom. “Nicely done. Ease it up a little now, let’s get your legs covered.”

+

Another thing a story won’t tell you: There’s a perfectly good reason why swan girls wear nothing under their coats, and it’s not because centuries of dudes got off on the image of a flock of tits and ass all soaking wet. It’s because cloth obeys no genetics. My bones and skin and muscles and organs know how to change and morph and reknit themselves into different shapes; I can’t unlearn something I was born with. But just try cramming underwire and jeans into a feather-skin that barely holds you. Once I forgot and left my underpants on, and only realized it when my legs had gone swan up to my knees. Gramma had to cut the underpants off me with embroidery scissors while I held so very still. I liked that pair; they were soft microfabric that never itched. Gramma tossed them in the trash and ordered two replacement pairs online.

+

It took me three weeks of daily practice to get in shape and make a full change in under five minutes. And three weeks of harassment from a boy who thinks he’s entitled to you sucks even harder than cramming your legs down into a handspan of tendons. Trey Riley shot me knowing looks so broad the whole hallway could see them. He grabbed my ass in the lunch line. He “forgot” his St. Christopher medal on my desk just so he could watch me flinch when he sauntered by to scoop it up. Once in history class, where he sat just behind me, he slid down far enough in his chair to run his foot down the back of my calf. He dropped into my daily routes anywhere, everywhere, and then he found my alternate routes and dive-bombed those too. He cut class to lounge against the wall of the girls’ locker room before our next game; when I saw him there, I almost didn’t go in to get changed.

+

Lauren Garrett, our captain, found me around the corner, flattened against the wall and trying not to hyperventilate. “Thomassen, what the hell—”

+

“Is he still there?” I hissed.

+

She paused and glanced back, her dark brown skin going darker when she spotted him. She’d been in the locker room when he’d stolen my clothes. “That asshole,” she said. “Stay here.”

+

Lauren stood six-foot-one with thighs that could crack walnuts. When she stomped over and told Trey Riley to fuck off, he actually did it. She didn’t even care if he pulled a Karen and called school security, and he didn’t have the balls anyway. I slunk into the locker room and changed as fast as I could with my hands still shaking. Lauren paced back and forth in front of the door, arms crossed, until I came out.

+

“Coach and I reported it the day after it happened,” she told me, once we got out on the field. “Don’t know if they’ll do anything to him, but it’s on file.”

+

I tried to thank her, but my throat had unexpectedly clogged. She nudged my shoulder anyway before jogging to her starting position.

+

After that, the team closed ranks around me like my own personal bodyguards. The Kroner twins took turns walking me to classes; Amanda waved me over to her lunch table of intimidatingly popular people; Lauren made a point of walking me to the bus stop and waiting with me until I boarded. But I still had to ride the damn thing with him.

+

Mom drove me to school now, but her douchebag boss wouldn’t let her rearrange her afternoon hours, and Gramma’s long-distance eyesight made driving too dangerous for her, so the bus it was. Gramma met me at the stop every day, glaring like Medusa, but those fifteen-minute rides belonged to Trey Riley.

+

It didn’t matter how much I ignored him, how motionless I sat, how white my knuckles clenched in my lap. He’d sit just behind me and hover at the edge of my vision to remind me he was there. I hated every flinch and sharp breath that betrayed my fake indifference. He didn’t even have to touch me to frighten me. He’d already won that much of me.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“S + +ay the word and we’ll destroy him for you,” Lauren said halfway through the third week. “Just so you know.”

+

She’d gone with me during lunch period to see the vice principal, who had smiled stiffly and told us that the administration had reviewed the complaint and couldn’t take action at this time. Lauren had nearly thrown his “#1 Dad” mug at his head. She stalked through the empty hallway, back toward the cafeteria. I had to jog to keep up.

+

“It’s okay,” I said.

+

“No, it’s not!” She stopped outside the girls’ bathroom, her jaw set hard. “I don’t mind hanging with you, okay? I’m glad to do it. We’re all glad to. But this can’t just go on until it becomes normal. Someone’s got to do something about it.”

+

I reminded myself I could change in three minutes now, but bit my tongue. No one’s actually tried to steal our feather coats in generations. That doesn’t mean we talk about it to outsiders. For your own safety, Mom had told me when I was four and asked why I couldn’t change in public. If people knew, they might try to hurt you.

+

She was right. Because most people sucked. But Lauren had had my back this whole time. I thought, Maybe that east-of-the-sun thing gets to us because we don’t trust anyone with the truth.

+

I took a deep breath and asked, “How much do you know about swan lore?”

+

“Swan what?”

+

Not everyone has your context, Liv. “Like, fairy tales.”

+

Lauren blinked, then frowned. “Uh. I saw that movie Black Swan once? She was pretty white though.”

+

Close enough. “I’ve got a plan,” I said. “But I really super need you not to freak out.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +e came to the game that Friday. All according to plan, but I still felt hunted every time I chased the ball past the section where Trey Riley sat. The team tried to be thoughtful and didn’t pass to me on that part of the field. I gritted my teeth and did the best I could.

+

We tied, 2-2. “If we don’t make finals this season, I’m blaming him,” Lauren grumbled as we headed off the field. “You ready?”

+

I swallowed down the nerves roiling in my stomach. “Enough,” I said. “Could someone else text him? I don’t want him having my number.”

+

Lauren did it herself. I watched over her shoulder as she typed. Olivia says meet her in the locker room in ten minutes. I nodded, palms sweating, and she hit send.

+

Nobody liked the idea of leaving me alone with him, but Lauren didn’t budge. “We do this Liv’s way,” she kept saying. And eventually, despite the yelling and the offered taser, and the time crunch, everyone left the locker room.

+

Lauren was the last one out. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll be just around the corner,” she said. I nodded; speaking felt impossible. She hugged me, then ducked out of sight.

+

I heard his footsteps just after I’d grabbed my waterproof duffel and pulled the shower curtain across the stall. I left my socks on the damp floor and turned the spigot on. “Oliiiiiiivia,” he called. God, I could hear the grin on his face. I felt proud that my hands didn’t shake as I unzipped the duffel. “Is that you in the shower?”

+

I didn’t say anything. I was kind of busy.

+

Cloth rustled. “32B, hey, nice job. I think you went up a cup size since last month.”

+

Just for that, I’m gonna break your bones.

+

“So listen, I don’t have all day. Either you come out of the shower, or I come in. Your call. Countdown ends in ten, nine, eight, sev— holy shit!”

+

Here’s another thing that no story ever tells you.

+

Swans are vicious bastards, and they will fuck you up.

+

I exploded out of the shower stall, sweeping the curtain aside with one wing and running at Trey Riley as fast as my webbed feet would carry me. He slipped on the sweating tiles and went down hard. I clamped his ankle in my beak. By the time Lauren came around the corner, he was already crying as he scrabbled backward. I wrenched his foot to the side as he tried to get up. Something snapped under my grip, and Trey Riley screamed.

+

Lauren stepped back, eyes like saucers, hands raised. Trey staggered to his one good foot and fled the locker room. I gave him a two-second head start before I followed.

+

Swans can give you a hell of a bruise, but they aren’t actually strong enough to break human bone. Well. Not normal swans. But the kind of swan whose body mass is a human concentrated down, who spends most of her life in flesh rather than feathers, who knows about language and strategy and hate? Oh yeah. Watch your fucking back. Just when you think you’ve snared your prey, she’ll put on her fragile feathery armor and go for your throat.

+

He kept screaming as I chased him onto the field. He tried to shake me by climbing up in the stands. Hello, jackass, I have wings, you can’t get away. With his ankle fractured and panic shutting down whatever intelligence he had, he couldn’t strategize. I just had to swoop down, open my wings, and hiss like Satan had kids with a cat, and I could herd him anywhere. People were yelling all around the stands, getting out of my way, getting out their phones. I drove him toward a few of them, enough to make sure they got his face in close-up. By then, he looked so exhausted he couldn’t even cry anymore.

+

I thought for a second about being merciful.

+

Then I thought about the game I’d almost missed because he’d camped out waiting for me, and I ran him halfway up the field before I broke his arm. One good blow, swan wingspan plus soccer-playing human strength, and he dropped like the pit of my stomach did when I saw him holding all my clothes, just one short month ago. His stupid St. Christopher swung free of his shirt as he curled up on the ground. I snapped at the chain and broke it. My beak closed on the medal and I tasted sweat and copper. Then I gave him a last jab in the ribs and flew home.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +om kissed me and held me close and cleaned my feather coat herself. Gramma filled my groaning plate with mac and cheese, tacos, asparagus in hollandaise.

+

“You deserve it,” she said. “Tell me again about the ankle twist.”

+

Everyone at the game had posted some version of the video by midnight, usually with cackling emoji accompaniment. Trey Riley spent a month and a half making trips to the hospital and hobbling around on crutches, and the rest of junior year trying to pretend that he didn’t mind getting called Bird Bitch.

+

Nevertheless, when I headed for our very next practice there was Trey, propped up against the wall, though this time out of necessity instead of out of cool. “Uh, listen,” he said, “Olivia, that time in the locker room—”

+

“Which one?” I asked without stopping, one hand curled into a fist in my pocket. “The one where you stole my clothes? The one where you stalked me to a game? Remind me, was there another?”

+

He stuck one of his crutches across my path. “Come on, don’t be a bitch.”

+

I stopped dead and pulled my hand out of my pocket. His St. Christopher dangled from my fingertips. I’d never seen a face drain completely of blood before. He looked almost as white as my feather coat. “How the hell—” he rasped.

+

“If you ever come near me again,” I said, “you might lose more than this.”

+

I kicked his crutch out of the way and kept walking, my chest feeling like a balloon swelling bigger and bigger, and I grinned the whole way to the locker room door.

+

Lauren was waiting inside with my waterproof duffel in her hand. I could see the soles of my cleats pressing against the bag. “I’m trying not to freak out,” she said, “but all of that was extremely freaky.”

+

For your own safety. I swallowed hard. “If you want me off the team, I get it.”

+

She snorted. “You can’t get rid of us that easily, Thomassen. Look, I have questions. So many questions. But I definitely haven’t told anyone.”

+

“I kind of hoped not,” I said thickly, and took the duffel.

+

“Damn right.” Then she offered an uneven sideways grin that made me tear up. “I also definitely submitted a formal request to make the team’s mascot a swan. Just so you know.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Swans Will be Swans on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Elizabeth Zuckerman

+

+ + Author image of Elizabeth Zuckerman + + + Elizabeth Zuckerman actually had an okay high school experience, which surprised no one more than it did her. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Haven Spec, and Timeless Tales. She lives in Philadelphia with a husband who quotes Shakespeare and Daria in roughly equal measure, and occasionally livetweets movies at @LizCanTweet.

+

© Elizabeth Zuckerman 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Alex Lanting and Pranav.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2024

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
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+ Teresa Milbrodt +

Tintype Trolls

+
+ + +

The editor has often (too often) argued the case that speculative fiction's strength is in letting authors tell stories that could also work in a more mundane context, just in ways that strict adherence to realism wouldn't allow. However, that startlingly hot take carries the implication of Going Big, of souping up normality with monsters or lasers or magic swords - instead, as Teresa Milbrodt shows, a touch of fantasy can serve to highlight the everyday experience instead of seeking to reach beyond it.

+ + + + Story image for Tintype Trolls by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube

+ Steven Genise +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube by + + + +

There's always a place for epistolary fiction at Mythaxis – there's something special about a story which is also the document itself. Hope I haven't written that before. Anyway, now Steven Genise adds to our little cache of documentation. Have you ever woken up to find a message waiting for you? Evidence of existence going on, in a sense, without you?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Cottage in the Woods

+ Carl Walmsley +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Cottage in the Woods by + + + +

Stories change with the telling, even those that find their origin in actual events. Who tells the story? Why do they tell it? Who do they tell it to? Carl Walmsley tells the story now. Probably it never really happened. Probably you think you've heard it before, or one very like it. But a little change can keep the oldest of stories alive seemingly forever.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

With Nothing Left

+ Emma Burnett +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for With Nothing Left by + + + +

'What is this thing you humans call X?' A question structure as old as Star Trek itself, if not even older. Not to continue harping on about how great spec-fic is, but is there a better way to explore emotions than through someone who, supposedly, has none? Emma Burnett adds more bittersweet evidence to the pile.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Pillars of Distraction

+ Rob Gillham +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Pillars of Distraction by + + + +

Things are going pretty great these days, right? Well, maybe if you're one of those cockroaches waiting to inherit the earth they are, since the upright primates are either actively making that happen or passively letting it. 'Que sera, sera' as they say - or, as Rob Gillham might put it, 'Que sera, Seratoxetine'…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico by + + + +

Will there come a time when, desperate for insights about contemporary speculative fiction, we won't have to turn to the flesh-and-blood likes of Mattia Ravasi but will instead enjoy the tender educational services of no-longer-artificial intelligences? Hopefully not, because who knows what effect that will have on us – though Julianne Pachico might have a few ideas.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Short Reviews – July to September, 2024

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 by + + + +

As is our wont, time to wrap up our penultimate issue of the year with several recommendations for stories appearing in other venues around the web. Much like Mythaxis, the focus is on smaller magazines where the work can be read for free at the click of a link – so what are you waiting for? Click here, then go click somewhere else! A handful of very different rewards await…

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Table of Contents

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+ +

Cottage in the Woods

+

Carl Walmsley

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Cottage in the Woods by +
+ + + + + + +

W + +hen Rebecca heard voices outside her cottage, she locked the doors and hid. Nobody ever came this deep into the forest.

+

When the strangers did not leave, she peered over her bedroom windowsill and saw two children gathering berries and scratching roots from the soil. Rebecca watched them for a time and realised how much she had missed children.

+

There was no way to know if they were alone, however, so she closed the curtains and tried not to think about them.

+

When it grew dark, the voices faded; the silence which followed felt strangely empty. Rebecca crept along the garden path and found them sleeping beyond her gate. Wolves were howling in the trees, closer than usual. She scooped the children up and ushered them inside.

+

In the candlelight, they devoured cakes and pastries, gulped down mugs of milk. Rebecca dabbed their knees and elbows, slashed and grazed by the unkind forest. She thought of other wounds she had tended, and her fingers trembled.

+

Rebecca led them, half-dozing, to the bedroom and wrapped them in woollen blankets. They slept together, brother and sister she supposed, heads bobbing like mice in a winter burrow.

+

Rebecca found it almost impossible to sleep with others in the cottage. The children’s breath seemed to beat at the walls, and the space around her shrank. She could not have ignored them though, for all the promises she had made. She would tend their wounds, fatten them up, and move them on. That would be safest for all of them.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +here are your parents?” Rebecca asked, as the children wolfed down breakfast.

+

A pause. A shrug. Rebecca sensed their pain and did not push. Many children were abandoned. Sometimes, there were just too many mouths to feed. And yet their clothes, torn and mud-stained, were well-made.

+

The girl licked jam from the corner of her mouth, collected every crumb of pastry, then stared at the door. The twitching of her knee rattled the chair. Rebecca wondered if the girl was scared of what was outside or would bolt back into the woods the moment the door was open.

+

“I have jobs that need doing,” Rebecca said, closing the big oven. “If you like, you can help me.”

+

They spent the morning gathering herbs from the garden, washing and chopping them, leaving them in the sun to dry. That evening, Rebecca sorted them into jars and the children crouched by the fire watching the stew simmer and pop. Bellies full, they once more slept beneath bundled blankets. Rebecca marvelled at how quietly they moved and how they could vanish into tiny spaces whenever a noise from outside startled them – like critters that have learned to live in the shadow of a hawk.

+

For five days, they ate food like it was treasure and, slowly, their hard eyes and brittle skin softened. The jut of bones sank beneath new flesh.

+

Lying in bed, watching the wall as if she could see through it to where they slept, Rebecca decided that, now, she really had done all she could. Tomorrow, she would send them on their way.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“T + +hank you.”

+

It was the first time the boy had spoken. Rebecca could not have been more surprised if he had sprouted from the earth like a beanstalk. She studied him for signs of what she feared most. His eyes were broad and honest, his smile shy but true. His fingers curled and uncurled nervously. Even now, after almost a week, he was frightened.

+

Frightened men did terrible things. Frightened men turned angry, and once drove her from her home. She’d thought she would die, limping alone through the forest, until she found an abandoned cottage, tended and healed it, and made it a new home. And, perhaps, when the children came and she took them in, she too was at last beginning to mend; though her fear of frightened men was still as strong as her hope that such would never trouble her again.

+

But the boy was not a man. Not yet. Perhaps he would not turn out like others she had known.

+

“You’re welcome,” she told him, finally, and presented him with another slice of cake.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“W + +hat plant is this?” asked the boy, running his fingers through a circle of purple petals. His nails were chewed to the quick and rimed with blood. Rebecca washed them every night before bed, but at breakfast they were always the same.

+

“Echinacea.”

+

When he could not say it: “Coneflower is its other name.”

+

The girl sniffed an orange bloom.

+

“That’s calendula. I used it on your cuts.”

+

The girl touched her elbow, still crusted with scabs but healing nicely.

+

The children pattered around the garden. Elderberry for colds, thyme for a cough, milk thistle for the liver, St John’s Wort for an ailing mind. By lunchtime, they could recite the names and use of every plant in the garden – including those that could kill as well as cure, like the autumn crocuses and henbane.

+

“How do you have so many?” the boy asked.

+

“I brought them with me,” said Rebecca. “From another garden.”

+

“Where was that?”

+

Rebecca fashioned a smile. “Time for lunch, I think.”

+

After they had eaten, the children wanted to learn more. Rebecca sat them beside the goat, and placed a pail beneath its tummy.

+

“Her name is Mary.” The children stroked the animal’s soft flanks. Wherever they came from, they were not farm children.

+

Rebecca plucked a caterpillar from a leaf. “Do you see how he moves?”

+

The green strip undulated across Rebecca’s palm and she set him down on the hedge. She reached for the boy’s hands but he recoiled, making them into fists. Rebecca waited until he was ready, then guided his fingers to the goat’s teats.

+

“Hold them both, and roll your fingers like the caterpillar.”

+

Nothing happened.

+

“Keep trying.”

+

Finally, the pail rattled. The boy laughed, watching the stream as if it were the funniest thing he had ever seen.

+

“This is Hettie,” said Rebecca, placing one of her chickens in the girl’s lap, while she sat and watched her brother. Before the pail had filled with milk, Hettie laid an egg in the girl’s lap. She held it up and smiled as if she had made it herself.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen the boy was strong enough to lift the iron dishes, Rebecca showed him how to work the oven. It was bigger than it needed to be, for Rebecca had always enjoyed baking and remembered what it was like to feed more mouths than her own.

+

“Like this?” he asked, kneading the dough.

+

Rebecca smiled and helped him to sculpt a big fat loaf for supper. “You’re a natural.”

+

At bedtime, the boy sniffed the air and grinned, for the cottage still smelled of the bread he had baked.

+

After that, the oven was rarely cold, for they both enjoyed feeding others as much as they enjoyed feeding themselves.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ne morning, Rebecca found the girl poring over her books. She stepped away, startled, all at once as fearful as the day she first arrived.

+

Rebecca smiled and guided her back to the table. “Can you read?”

+

“Father says books are bad. Mother had some, but he took them away.”

+

It was the first time the girl had mentioned her parents.

+

Rebecca turned the pages and the girl traced the letters with her finger.

+

“My words,” Rebecca told her. The girl’s eyes widened.

+

Rebecca dipped her pen and offered it to the girl. “Would you like me to teach you?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hat evening Rebecca led the children into the front garden, where the vegetables were ripening nicely, and peered over the little fence into the wood. It was thick and green with the rustling of unseen life.

+

Rebecca was afraid of the forest, for she could not forget the men who lived beyond it. She would never go back, but she needed to know if the children wished to do so. If they did, it would have to be now.

+

“Would you like to go for a walk in the woods?” Rebecca asked.

+

The boy – whose smile had clung to his lips like jam since milking Mary – looked suddenly frightened. The girl shook her head, and gripped Rebecca’s skirt till her knuckles whitened.

+

Rebecca hugged them to her, overcome by an unexpected surge of relief. Still holding them close, she turned and led them inside.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he garden bloomed and faded, as summer passed and winter came. The forest became a wall of frosted thorns. Whatever lived there slept, but the trees still frightened the children. They were always at their happiest when the door was locked and the three of them sat by the fire eating cakes or listening to stories from Rebecca’s books. Most nights the girl took a turn reading and, more than once, Rebecca fell asleep in her chair listening to the child’s voice. If she slept through till morning, she always awoke with her blanket tucked carefully around her, to the smell of fresh baking.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he coming of spring changed everything. A fist on the door shook the cottage.

+

The children hid – so quickly that Rebecca did not see where – but she understood their fear. Her fingers shook as she opened the door.

+

Three men were outside, big and dirty as the hogs that rooted in the forest. One lounged against the hedge, holding the gate open with his foot.

+

The man who had knocked peered past Rebecca, into the cottage. “We’re looking for two children.”

+

“I have no children,” Rebecca said. She tried to close the door, but the man leaned into it, holding it open with his weight.

+

“And your husband?”

+

“Will be back soon.”

+

The man’s teeth appeared through his thick beard. “My men and I are tired. The squire sent us to find these children. Been searching all day. P’raps we should wait ’til your husband returns. Maybe he’s seen something.”

+

They shuffled past her and the third man, thin and greasy as a river rat, bolted the door behind them.

+

The first man flopped into Rebecca’s chair, resting his muddy boots on the blanket the children covered her with at night. The second man paced the two small rooms in a few strides, his restless eyes taking in the crooked stairs and the clutter of furniture, before settling on the hearth beside the fire. A stew bubbled there. He unhooked the spoon and sniffed it. Even then, his eyes continued to flit about, like wasps trapped inside a bottle.

+

“Mmm…” He took a slurp. “We’ve worked up a proper appetite today.”

+

The third man, who had not moved from the door, smacked his lips. “Reckon we have.”

+

“Let me feed you,” said Rebecca.

+

She scooped up three bowls, filled one, and offered it to the man on the chair, face all teeth and beard. Their fingers touched. His skin was rough and calloused, his nails dark as peat.

+

“There’s a reward for these children,” he said.

+

“Then I hope you find them,” said Rebecca.

+

He lifted the bowl and lapped from the side. “What does your husband do?”

+

Rebecca served the wasp-eyed man. “He’s a woodcutter.”

+

“Then he’s out in the forest?”

+

Rebecca nodded, filled the last bowl, and took it to the rat-faced man by the door, willing her fingers to stop shaking.

+

“We didn’t see anyone,” he said. “And we’ve been out in the woods all day.”

+

The first man slurped the last of the stew, leaving gobbets in his tangled beard.

+

“Good stew.” He held out the bowl and, as Rebecca took it, their hands touched a second time.

+

“It’s getting dark,” whined rat-face. “Might not be safe to go back out.”

+

Wasp-eyes by the hearth twitched his gaze between the stairs and Rebecca. “There’s a bed up there, I suppose.”

+

“Must be,” said rat-face. Again, his lips made a moist, slapping sound.

+

Another knock rattled the front door; and every eye in the room turned to stare at it.

+

Swallowing her fear, Rebecca smiled. “That must be my husband now.”

+

Rat-face stepped away from the door, his jaw moving like it was stuck on a piece of gristle. Wasp-eyes slid a knife from his belt and, after too long a pause, used it to slice a piece of carrot in his stew.

+

Teeth-and-beard looked from the door to Rebecca. It was the kind of look you could feel, settling where it pleased, as rough and black as his callused hands. His presence became a palpable force, using up all the space in the room, draining the air till Rebecca felt the breath catch in her throat.

+

“Open the door,” he ordered.

+

Rebecca scanned the little tables that held pots of flowers from her garden, searching for something she could hold and thrust. Whatever happened to her, she would not let them hurt the children.

+

The bolt scraped and the door opened. “There’s no one there,” complained rat-face.

+

“Go round and check the back.”

+

Rat-face skittered out of the front door, while wasp-eyes skulked toward the rear of the cottage.

+

Teeth-and-beard dropped heavily into her chair again, and Rebecca almost gasped when a small hand appeared from under the table. Red-rimmed fingers pressed speckled yellow and white petals into Rebecca’s palm; understanding, she moved to the pot on the hearth and dropped them in. She was still stirring as the two men came back inside.

+

“Might’ve been the wind,” rat-face said with a shrug. Teeth-and-beard rolled his eyes.

+

“Perhaps you should wait for my husband,” Rebecca said, re-filling a bowl and offering it to the man in her chair.

+

Teeth-and-beard did not move but, after a moment, wasp-eyes took the bowl from her. “Never waste good food.”

+

“Did I tell you who these children belong to?” asked teeth-and-beard.

+

“I haven’t seen any children.” Rebecca began to fill another bowl. “I told you.”

+

“The squire. He’s an important man. Their mother tried to run away with them last year. Troublesome woman. She had all sorts of funny ideas.”

+

Again, Rebecca offered him a bowl. Again he only watched her.

+

“You having that?” Rat-face snuffled forward and sniffed the re-filled bowl. Rebecca handed it to him. He smiled and began to slurp it up.

+

“We found the mother, of course,” teeth-and-beard said. “She’d taken a tumble in the woods. Broke her neck.” Rat-face made a strange little sound in the back of his throat that might have been a laugh. “Never found the children, though.” He gripped Rebecca’s blanket with thick fingers and wiped the clotting drops of broth from his beard. “They’d be bones by now, of course. Picked clean. Unless someone took ’em in.”

+

Wasp-eyes coughed.

+

“The squire might even be grateful to anyone who had taken ‘em in,” said teeth-and-beard.

+

Rebecca did not trust herself to speak. Wasp-eyes coughed a second time.

+

“He just wants his property back, see? What man wouldn’t?”

+

With a clatter, wasp-eyes doubled-over and fell.

+

“What’s wrong with you?” sneered rat-face. He watched the choking man kick and gasp. Then he looked at the woman by the fire and the stew in his hands. “Bloody ’ell!”

+

He dropped the bowl and clattered through the doorway, squawking like a chicken who knows his neck is about to be wrung, running for the trees.

+

Teeth-and-beard rose from the chair and struck Rebecca with the back of his hand. It was an oddly casual gesture that broke her nose and left her crumpled beside the hearth. He strode to the man who lay gasping on the floor, reached down and turned him over. Those waspish eyes twitched feebly, as if they had finally run out of air inside their bottle, and then stopped their twitching altogether.

+

Teeth-and-beard took the knife from the dead man’s hand. Once more his presence filled the room.

+

“Have you poisoned me, woman?” he asked. Rebecca shook her head. “Call the children. Tell them it’s safe to come back. Do that and I’ll make it quick for you. If not… I’ll make them watch.”

+

Fear gripped Rebecca as surely as his hands would have done. She drew a long, juddering breath and forced herself to stand and walk to the open doorway.

+

“It’s alright, children,” she called, some little light dying inside her. “You can come out. There’s no need to be afraid.”

+

Rebecca heard the man moving towards her but was too afraid to look round. She wondered if she would feel the knife as he pressed it into her. She hoped that at least the children would have time to escape if he wasted time looking for them in the front garden.

+

As teeth-and-beard passed the blanket-draped chair where he had been sitting, a hand emerged from beneath the folds. It clutched the small, sharp knife Rebecca used to chop herbs in the garden. The blade flicked back and forth, parting his tendons so quickly that he managed another step before his legs folded under him. He struck the floor and began to bellow like a stuck pig.

+

The boy untwined himself from beneath the table, while his sister climbed out from under Rebecca’s chair. Teeth-and-beard screamed and swore, swiping with his own knife, but he could not stand and they walked around him to stand beside Rebecca. They watched as the frightened, angry man managed to drag himself to his knees, but when he tried to plant a foot could only topple heavily against the large, black oven. The boy opened its door helpfully, and the girl gave him a shove. As his head vanished inside, his teeth cracked on the hot metal frame and his beard caught fire.

+

As no-teeth-and-no-beard flailed and screamed, the boy handed Rebecca the rolling pin that they used each day to make their bread and pastries. She rested a hand on his shoulder and smiled at his sister.

+

“Close your eyes, children.”

+

Rebecca did what she had to, thinking mostly of the children’s safety, but a part of her saw other men and other faces, recalling what they had done to her before.

+

The room was in quite a state by the time she was done.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +itting outside on the lawn, Rebecca gave them both a pastry to eat.

+

“We shall have to air the cottage tomorrow,” she said. The smell at that moment was quite unpleasant.

+

“I can bake some bread,” said the boy.

+

Out in the woods, the wolves howled in chorus. Rebecca was not concerned. It reassured her that the third man could not have made it very far.

+

Once they had finished their pastries, they heaved the last body as far as they could into the trees. Rebecca did not want the children to help, but they insisted. The wolves would be hungry again soon enough, and then do the rest.

+

That night, when they sat together around the fire and the girl had finished reading from Rebecca’s book, she looked up thoughtfully. “Perhaps one of us should write about what happened,” she suggested. “Our escape from father and the bad men who came looking for us.”

+

Rebecca considered this for a moment.

+

“Is it something you want to be remembered?” she asked them.

+

“If we don’t,” insisted Gretel, “someone else will do it. And he may not tell it right.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Cottage in the Woods on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Carl Walmsley

+

+ + Author image of Carl Walmsley + + + Carl Walmsley’s love of tall tales is the result of a childhood spent listening to his mother - one of life’s natural story-tellers. He thinks she might like this yarn, because it challenges a few stereotypes and includes a witch.

+

© Carl Walmsley 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by Szabolcs Toth - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Editorial

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Greetings, reader!

+

Since our last issue, Mythaxis’ editor has travelled to visit his ancestral seat (imagine a ruined croft with a stunted tree growing out of it on the north coast of Scotland), also to attend his first WorldCon, Glasgow 2024. Quite the experience, though amidst the many (even too many!) events at hand the fondest memories I returned with were meeting faces familiar and new, including cohabitations and catching-ups with a handful of friendly authors, plus an editorial lunch with several far-flung peers from other platformers of speculative fiction.

+

And what more reason do I need to throw in a quick plug for Sci Phi Journal, Shoreline of Infinity, and the currently-on-sabbatical Little Blue Marble? None whatsoever. But maybe scratch your reading itch here before you go hunting for more good stuff there, hmm?

+

So, my first WorldCon, and therefore my first Hugo Awards ceremony too. About which…

+

Well look: after consistently voting for the losing side in elections and referendum at the national level (whenever I’ve felt sufficiently motivated to do so), I’m firmly convinced that democracy was a critical misstep in social evolution (benign dictatorship is clearly the way forward; why else become a magazine editor?). As a result I wasn’t totally surprised not to back every winning horse in the race for a Hugo, but (in addition to my genuine congratulations to all the winners!) I’d just like to put on record in particular that:

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  • The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera was the actual best novel
    • +
  • On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo was the actual best novelette
    • +
  • and the fact that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves beat ANYTHING to the best longform movie nod, let alone a film such as Poor Things, goes beyond “travesty” and enters some strange new vocabularic realm forever beyond the ken of humankind
    • +
+

What can I say? People can be smart, but when it comes to groups knock off an IQ point for every two you bring together. The highest IQ ever recorded was 276, and 3,436 legitimate ballots were filed for the Hugos this year. Do the maths.

+

Finally, on the subject of mistakes, a note for the Hugo organisers: there’s a reason why, during the Oscars, the Academy don’t make whichever star is announcing the nominations read out a solid paragraph of definitional fine print before they get to the names. It’s fine when you ask Jack Nicholson to say “The nominees for Best Picture are…”; if you give him a card reading “The nominees for Best Picture, which we define as a fictional narrative shot on a celluloid (not digital) medium, not shorter than 90 minutes and not longer than 360 minutes, with a minimum of eight speaking roles and—” he’s going to tell you where to stick it. And the audience would thank him for doing so.

+

Anyway, on balance, I enjoyed WorldCon more than I hated it! See you next year, maybe!

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NOTE: Please be aware that the editor will of course retract this editorial the minute he or Mythaxis Magazine find themselves on a Hugo ballot, though he won’t hold his breath waiting for that to happen.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 39 – Thanks and Salutations! +A second chance to salute Michal Kváč, who gave our first issue of 2024 its astro-feline cuteness, and returns with something more epic fantasy in Sword Mountains. A freelance environment concept artist and illustrator from Czech Republic, you can click the link above to see his work and make contact, or check out his Youtube channel for time-lapse videos of his process. Thanks again, Michal!

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Mythaxis

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Autumn 2024

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+ Teresa Milbrodt +

Tintype Trolls

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The editor has often (too often) argued the case that speculative fiction's strength is in letting authors tell stories that could also work in a more mundane context, just in ways that strict adherence to realism wouldn't allow. However, that startlingly hot take carries the implication of Going Big, of souping up normality with monsters or lasers or magic swords - instead, as Teresa Milbrodt shows, a touch of fantasy can serve to highlight the everyday experience instead of seeking to reach beyond it.

+ + + + Story image for Tintype Trolls by + + + +
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The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube

+ Steven Genise +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube by + + + +

There's always a place for epistolary fiction at Mythaxis – there's something special about a story which is also the document itself. Hope I haven't written that before. Anyway, now Steven Genise adds to our little cache of documentation. Have you ever woken up to find a message waiting for you? Evidence of existence going on, in a sense, without you?

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Cottage in the Woods

+ Carl Walmsley +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Cottage in the Woods by + + + +

Stories change with the telling, even those that find their origin in actual events. Who tells the story? Why do they tell it? Who do they tell it to? Carl Walmsley tells the story now. Probably it never really happened. Probably you think you've heard it before, or one very like it. But a little change can keep the oldest of stories alive seemingly forever.

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With Nothing Left

+ Emma Burnett +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for With Nothing Left by + + + +

'What is this thing you humans call X?' A question structure as old as Star Trek itself, if not even older. Not to continue harping on about how great spec-fic is, but is there a better way to explore emotions than through someone who, supposedly, has none? Emma Burnett adds more bittersweet evidence to the pile.

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Pillars of Distraction

+ Rob Gillham +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Pillars of Distraction by + + + +

Things are going pretty great these days, right? Well, maybe if you're one of those cockroaches waiting to inherit the earth they are, since the upright primates are either actively making that happen or passively letting it. 'Que sera, sera' as they say - or, as Rob Gillham might put it, 'Que sera, Seratoxetine'…

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Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico by + + + +

Will there come a time when, desperate for insights about contemporary speculative fiction, we won't have to turn to the flesh-and-blood likes of Mattia Ravasi but will instead enjoy the tender educational services of no-longer-artificial intelligences? Hopefully not, because who knows what effect that will have on us – though Julianne Pachico might have a few ideas.

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Short Reviews – July to September, 2024

+ Andrew Leon Hudson +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 by + + + +

As is our wont, time to wrap up our penultimate issue of the year with several recommendations for stories appearing in other venues around the web. Much like Mythaxis, the focus is on smaller magazines where the work can be read for free at the click of a link – so what are you waiting for? Click here, then go click somewhere else! A handful of very different rewards await…

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-39/jungle-house-julianne-pichico-review.html b/issue-39/jungle-house-julianne-pichico-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c55da0d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-39/jungle-house-julianne-pichico-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,311 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 39 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Jungle House, by Julianne Pichico

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Mattia Ravasi

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T + +he American narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan theorized a fundamental aspect of storytelling under the terms of the principle of minimal departure: the idea that, when we read a story, we assemble it in our minds by assuming that each of its elements are as close as possible to the same elements in our own world. When we read the sentence “a man walked through the woods at sunset” we assume – pending any statement to the contrary – that the man will possess a liver, a face, and all the other accouterments most men possess, even if the story does not make this explicit. Most readers will assume the woods to be made up of trees, and that the sunset will be followed by night and, later on, by sunrise.

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The principle of minimal departure is a necessary feature of our neurological framework; we couldn’t tell or interpret stories without it. “Call me Ishmael – and know that I have a liver and a face” just doesn’t flow the same way. This same principle, however, is liable to lead astray even the most seasoned and attentive readers, especially since writers are so adept at exploiting it to operate mischief and subvert expectations. Horror writers are perhaps best (see H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider for a classic example), but science fiction authors also excel at building the most mind-bending and peculiar scenarios out of the way our minds assemble stories.

+

Julianne Pachico’s Jungle House, published by Serpent’s Tail in November 2023, uses the principle of minimal departure to provocative, stimulating, and surprising ends. It opens with the protagonist, Lena, finally ready to end a sulk that has estranged her from her mother. Lena’s home is a self-sufficient estate in the middle of the jungle, where she lives off what vegetables and fruit she can grow, keeping an eye on her dwindling reserves of rice and beans and half-heartedly hunting for meat when necessary. During her sulk Lena spent her days in a shed on the property’s boundaries, but she is now ready to go back to the main house, where Mother lives.

+

It only takes a few sentences, however – the first exchanges the two have upon reuniting in the house – to realize that it’s not at all clear whether Mother lives in the house. It is just as possible that Mother is the house.

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Jungle House is extremely coy when it comes to defining its characters and fixing them with physical or taxonomic identifiers, but, broadly speaking, we can say that Mother is an extremely advanced computer who controls every aspect and feature of the house, safeguards its perimeter, and ensures its preservation. Think of her as Alexa’s neurotic, passive-aggressive descendant. Mother is connected to other super-houses in her network, and to the satellites that link them all together; or at least she was until recently, when an unspecified event isolated her and Lena in their remote jungle.

+

This bottom-line ambiguity about the characters’ identity – the impossibility of saying confidently who, among the novel’s handful of characters, is exactly human – is not only part of what makes Jungle House such a well-engineered little puzzle, but speaks directly, too, to the dilemmas underlying its plot. At heart, Pachico’s novel is concerned with the fundamental aspects that define our humanity. What if neurosis – unhealthy obsessions, jealousy, a certain low-level madness – were after all the most defining feature of humankind? And if such unbalance affects all of us in pernicious ways, can the technology we create be free from it?

+

Mother certainly seems to replicate much human behavior you would expect to be beneath an advanced machine. She is not free from prejudices, can be extremely petty, and does not pull her punches in an argument. She is kind, too, and can be deeply loving – but she also knows how to use this love as a weapon. Mother is extremely cunning when it comes to emotional blackmail, guilt-tripping Lena into taking care of the household chores, or going into one of her “episodes” (moments when all her systems seem to temporarily switch off) at the most convenient, for her, of times. Another of the novel’s flesh-less characters, a personal drone (think bodyguard) called Anton, shows a surprising knack for lying to himself, a very human ability to mix facts with opinions or even wishful thinking, especially, again, when this is convenient.

+

In fact, one of the most amusing features of Jungle House is that Lena, our flesh-and-blood protagonist, comes across as guileless, blindly obedient, and coldly analytic – very much like a robot! – while the technology around her (Mother, Anton, the satellites and other houses) acts in ways that are irrational, emotional, self-interested, and dishonest. This is nowhere as evident as in the portion of the novel when, after a few terrible revelations have come to pass, Lena starts compulsively doing the house chores, futilely fighting back the jungle like a program stuck in a command loop, while Mother, around her, goes through a nervous breakdown.

+

All of the characters are crafted with terrific precision and complexity, showing in a few bold strokes their contradictions, fears, and hidden desires, but Mother is certainly the most intriguing of the lot. She is extremely manipulative, possessive of her child, crafty, and self-aggrandizing, and she seems to find great satisfaction in being able to complain vehemently about her problems (almost, I would say, like certain mothers I have known…). Yet in spite of her crimes – which are various, and shocking – it is ultimately difficult to dismiss her as simply evil, or tyrannical, or treacherous. Her will to keep Lena under her thumb is motivated by a deep and vast love. It’s also unclear exactly how free Mother is: how much of her behavior is dictated by her own will, and how much is forced by the commands of the men who created her.

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Jungle House is a brilliantly-crafted novel about serious existential questions. What is the nature, or indeed the purpose, of our subconscious? Is the way we see ourself the same thing as our self? Is love (familial and romantic) just a survival strategy and a useful social mechanism, or something more? Nor does it lack a convincing political angle. Lena does not own the Jungle House, but takes care of it on behalf of the wealthy family (a military man, an artist of uncertain merit, and their friendly if vapid teenage daughter) who come out to it a few times a year, treating Lena’s world in all its complexity as a playground for their amusement, a place they relish at the same time as they fear and despise it.

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Jungle House is a outstanding achievement, highlighting in the same vein as Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction how even the most advanced technology is never too far removed from the primeval materials of the earth. How we, too, the brilliant and hapless creators of these awesome inventions, share more than we care to realize with our fellow animals, and are forever at the mercy of our murky subconscious. Jungle House is an enigma that unfolds at a very compelling rate, and a convincing treaty on toxic motherhood. You’ll never look at your Alexa in the same way again.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia’s thoughts on Facebook.

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Mattia Ravasi

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+ + Author image of Mattia Ravasi + + + Mattia Ravasi is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Submarine. His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He talks about books on his YouTube channel, The Bookchemist, and tweets as @thebookchemist too.

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© Mattia Ravasi 2024 All Rights Reserved

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The image shows author Julianne Pachico and the book’s cover, both as seen on the author’s website.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Pillars of Distraction

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Rob Gillham

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+ Story image for Pillars of Distraction by +
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M + +y apartment has detected that I am awake: three personalized messages materialize above my bed. They vie with one another for my attention while I lie there, willing my body to achieve equilibrium.

+

Seratoxetine is supposed to promote deep, dreamless sleep. The incoherent yet vivid nightmares of last night are a bad sign, as is this excessive sweating. I check for other symptoms; my tongue is furry and I detect the onset of a familiar nausea.

+

My still-waking brain crawls towards an inevitable answer. My body is in withdrawal. That can only mean that my happypac failed to provide me with Seratoxetine last night.

+

As if provoked by the thought, something small and sharp jabs my abdomen. My first thought is that a bee has stung me, but that is impossible. It is the sensation of the happypac needle puncturing my stomach. My standard wake-up stimulant kicks in and I sit up, uncomfortably hot, pulling back damp sheets. I deliberately don’t look at the cartridge slot, I’m not ready to face what I’ll find there.

+

Two of the messages have ganged up on the third and obliterated it. The victors follow me, chirruping non-stop as I stomp to the shower. I should have paid the annual premium to have the messages turned off. I’m making a mental note to speak to the landlord about it later when I stub my toe on the shower door.

+

“Fuck!”

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There’s a pause in the chattering while the messages try to decide if I’ve just addressed them. A moment later, the shrill barrage resumes, each telling me it did not understand my response. Did I, as the louder suspects, want to take advantage of its amazing once-in-a-lifetime offer?

+

The news stream turns itself on as I get in the shower. Some guy stands outside the White House, talking to camera. The scrolling feed says a relief package has been announced for American farmers following the crop failures. The measures include more loosening of the controls on the use of genetically modified seed and pesticides. No one mentions rising food prices, or what happened to the bees. I guess it’s twenty, or maybe thirty years too late to worry about that now.

+

A moment later, the newscaster is replaced by the image of a naked girl. One of the messages has hacked the feed. I’m about to turn it off when I recognize her. It’s Darja, my boss’s PA and pseudo-girlfriend. She has a PhD in Forensic Archaeology from some university in Belarus, and it mystifies me how she could choose to become contractually bound to a relationship with a man like Robin Krajicek – even for a visa.

+

Her likeness on the glass shower wall beckons to me, inviting me to auto-subscribe to her private channel. I guess being with Robin is driving her to desperation, I know it would do me, but even so this seems a pretty extreme alternative. I’ve always liked Darja’s looks, out of reach though she is, and briefly consider masturbating to her image, but my body refuses to respond to the idea. Not that kind of stimulant.

+

Before dressing, I’m awake enough to finally check my happypac’s cartridge. The small bottle in the slot for Sera is indeed empty. That was the last of this month’s pharmacy subscription.

+

The next is not due for another two weeks.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +ordo is in his usual place of business, a window seat in the Four Ways Café on the corner of my block. The café is blissfully free of intelligent advertising. The only media of any form is the old television screen showing news with the sound turned down.

+

Tordo motions for me to join him. “Mister Mehrtens, it has been a while. How are you?”

+

“I need Sera,” I say. “Quickly.” I am sick to the pit of my stomach. My clothes, fresh on after my shower, are already drenched in sweat.

+

He frowns. Perhaps he’s offended by my lack of etiquette. We usually engage in small talk before getting down to business. It’s a ritual, maintaining the lie that we are nothing more than friendly acquaintances who just happen to perform the odd transaction in illicit pharmaceuticals.

+

Tordo casts a critical eye over my appearance. “Running a bit short, are we?”

+

“Completely out,” I say. “My subscription’s not due until the end of the month.”

+

“You’re not alone,” Tordo says. “Many are reporting the self-same set of circumstances. Anyone would think people were tampering with their pacs.”

+

“Listen, I don’t care about other people.” It comes out louder than I’d intended. I drop my voice. “What I care about right now is getting my hands on some Sera.”

+

Tordo doesn’t answer. On the TV screen behind him, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is calling for an investigation into contributions by the pharmaceutical company GospidLineker Global to President McClelland’s re-election campaign.

+

“Are you happy, Mister Mehrtens?” Tordo says eventually.

+

“What?”

+

“It’s a simple enough question. Funny how many people struggle to answer it.” Tordo leans back in his chair. “The ancient Greeks believed that happiness and misery were both dependent on the strength of one’s character. If you have character, went the argument, you can be happy under any circumstances.” He points two fingers at me, miming a pistol. “Right now, you’re a bit like Damocles, sitting on Dionysus’s throne. You can’t ever be happy because all you can think about is the big fucking sword that’s hanging over your head.”

+

We sit in silence while I pretend to give Tordo’s words careful consideration. The only sound is the murmur of the television, headlines about the refugee crisis in Florida, half of Miami underwater, angry mobs protesting the steepling cost of groceries, blockading supermarkets in New Jersey and half a dozen other states. The usual.

+

“So, can you?” I say. “Get me some Sera?”

+

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Mister Mehrtens,” Tordo says. “Unfortunately, the market is exceptionally bad at the moment. Generics have declined to a trickle, and brand names have been impossible to get hold of for months.”

+

“So what? Price has gone up, what is it? I don’t give a shit. Just get me some.”

+

He performs an exaggerated shrug, hands open. “There is no supply.”

+

I shake my head. “Then why are you even here?”

+

“Stability, Mister Mehrtens.” Tordo leans back and grins, baring both rows of teeth. “Persistence and reliability are the expression of my character. I have no product to sell, but,” and he gestures around himself, “my presence is a statement of intent. I let my customers know that, despite the current supply crisis, business hours are as ever, I stand ready to listen to their problems and lend a sympathetic ear.” Tordo spreads his hands. “All this will pass. In the meantime, the world still spins on its axis, the sun still rises in the east, and Tordo still parks his ass in the same seat in the Four Ways each day. Confidence, Mister Mehrtens, is a currency.”

+

The bottom of my stomach drops away. I’ve been sat here, holding it together through all of Tordo’s rambling for nothing. “Jesus, you’re no fucking use to me at all.”

+

Tordo’s amiable expression vanishes. He speaks softly and slowly: “Control yourself.”

+

As soon as Tordo’s affable mask slips, I realize, somewhere down the line, I’ve become far too comfortable dealing with someone who is essentially a gangster. His eyes are clear and unblinking, and I avert my gaze from his. “I’m sorry. I was out of line.”

+

The shark’s smile returns to Tordo’s face. “Nothing to apologize for, Mister Mehrtens.”

+

My hands are visibly shaking. But that might be the withdrawal, of course.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

U + +nfulfilled need is an insatiable, gnawing pain in my gut.

+

Exiting the Four Ways, I lean against a wall, sucking down air until my legs stop buckling. My only option now is to go to the office. Someone there must have a surplus of Sera. If I’m discreet, they might agree to share some with me.

+

“Hey, you look like you could use some help.” A dark-haired girl peers at me, thick eyebrows furrowed. She’s pretty in a quirky, no make-up, doesn’t-pluck kind of way. A kind-hearted girl who stops in the street to see if strangers are okay could be just what I need. In different circumstances, I might be tempted to ask for her number.

+

“I’m fine,” I croak.

+

“No, you ain’t.” She thrusts a flier at me. “Saint Philomena, Thirty-Second and Fifth.” No angel of mercy after all. I stuff the damn thing in my pocket and stumble away before she can harangue me further about whatever it is she’s pushing.

+

It’s two blocks from the Four Ways café to the subway. The walk takes me twice as long as usual. The interior of the first train to arrive is half-lit. That’s become the norm recently. When the doors open it’s clear the air-con isn’t working either, but I’m not exactly in the waiting mood.

+

As soon as I enter the carriage, a series of high-energy visuals blink into life. They’re all doozies, Gen 2.0, probably. I reluctantly concede a distant echo of professional admiration. The use of flashing imagery and movement is pretty sophisticated. It’s impossible to have one in your field of vision without your eyes being drawn to it.

+

My fellow passengers are doubtless being subjected to a similar barrage. Unlike me, they all display the stoic placidity of the recently medicated. I have a strategy for situations when you can’t block them out, though, a little insider knowledge. Just pick the least offensive ad and stare right at it. The others will generally figure out they lost and back down for a while.

+

My choice turns out to be a fund-raising appeal for Randy McClelland, but instead of being silenced, its rivals rise to the challenge. Each grows larger and louder, urging me to pay attention to it. I fumble out my earbuds, which just means a different array of ads between tracks, but at least each song is three and a half minutes of respite.

+

Then the music buzzes and cuts out. “I know you’ve supported me in the past, friend,” President McClelland says in his folksy drawl, unheard by anyone but me. “But becoming President was one thing. Winning re-election is gonna take a whole lot more cash.”

+

The damn ad I’m watching has hijacked my music service. Despite everything, I smile. You clever little bastard.

+

On the display McClelland turns to face me. “I reformed the healthcare industry, giving families access to the defensive medication they need.” He jabs an accusing finger. “Do you want my opponent in the White House, undoing all my achievements? Making your children vulnerable to online pornography and socialist climate change propaganda?”

+

Then McClelland’s image starts to pixelate as one of the other ads gets heavy with it. His voice distorts and bright, gaudy colors bleed through the frame, cheerful dance music all but drowning him out. “Hey, Brian Mehrtens,” purrs a husky female voice. “Meet Slovakian women in their twenties who want to be your indentured girlfriend!”

+

McClelland’s ad gives up the ghost and is replaced by a human-sized cartoon bee extolling the virtues of synthetic honey. It speaks in a parody of a Brooklyn accent, probably one of several it adopts depending on location. Now I’m professionally insulted; it’s a remarkably dumb piece of advertising. Most people under thirty don’t even remember what real honey tasted like. All the localization in the world won’t make up for that.

+

I close my eyes, trying to shut out the bee’s idiotic voice, the carriage’s shuddering, and the reek of stale sweat. Suddenly all I can think of is the cloying burning sweetness of honey, thick, sticky, coating my mouth, filling my throat.

+

The train shudders to a halt at my stop and I throw up as soon as I get off. The platform is empty, but I expect I’ll receive a fine once the cameras confirm my identity.

+

I pat my jacket pockets for something to wipe my mouth and come up with a crumbled piece of paper. I take it out. It’s the flier the girl gave me outside the Four Ways café.

+

SICK OF FEELING SICK? it asks.

+

I stare at the words for another few seconds before shoving the flier back in my pocket.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s a one block walk to my office. A small group of demonstrators is camped in front of the building’s entrance. I guess they got fed up with being butchered by the private armies of big pharma, because they’ve been a familiar sight ever since they started going after GospidLineker Global’s suppliers and partners instead. It’s safer and simpler to harass a marketing agency. The placard slogans are the usual confused smorgasbord of demands:

+
+

STOP THE ADVERTISING VIRUSES

+
+

PUSH FOOD, NOT DRUGS

+
+

REALITY IS NOT A MEDICAL CONDITION

+

Luckily, none of the protesters are so committed to their cause that they want to obstruct a pale, shivering man with vomit on his coat. As I approach, they part like mist. I pass unmolested through the doors, past reception, and into the elevator.

+

Of course, the first person I see when I set foot in the office is Robin Krajicek, prowling for someone to attack about anything. He catches sight of me and homes in just as I reach my workspace.

+

“Mehrtens, where the fuck have you been?” he booms. “Jesus Christ, you look like shit.”

+

“Robin,” I rasp, “can you possibly loan me some Sera? I’m short.”

+

Krajicek glances around the office. That’s the thing about defensive medication. Everyone knows that everybody else takes it too, you just don’t talk about it. Krajicek takes a chair from the empty neighboring desk and sits. “Difficult,” he murmurs. “You know how it is.”

+

Yes, I do know. Krajicek has no doubt ensured he has enough for his own needs. He expects everyone else to do the same.

+

“It’s just a supply issue. I only need to plug the gap this month. Then everything will be alright.”

+

“Why are you so short?”

+

“I…” Somehow it hasn’t occurred to me to ask this question before. How come I’ve run out this early in the month? Maybe the pharmacy delivered a lower quantity than usual. Did I check? I’m almost certain I didn’t.

+

The micro-expression of sympathy on Krajicek’s face disappears. I get it. If you get stiffed over the quantity, that’s bad luck. If you fail to check, then that’s purely on you. It’s a matter of personal responsibility.

+

“You need to get your act together, Brian.” He jabs a finger at my sternum. “I want to see the prototype for the new campaign ⁠– today. McClelland’s people have been chasing us all morning.”

+

I want to laugh in his face. Our client is a pressure group, American Families for Affordable Medicine. They’re one hundred percent funded by GospidLineker Global. Calling them McClelland’s people is a typical piece of Krajicek perversity.

+

Krajicek gets up and walks away, shaking his head. And what can I do, but ache for Seratoxetine and flick on my desk display and pull up the architecture for the latest campaign ad?

+

Hello again, you nasty little work of art.

+

Before I can even pretend to get started, a smaller display appears to the right of the prototype and delivers an unasked-for news bulletin – President McClelland is addressing the nation from the Oval Office. A news bot, sensing the contextual relevance of the prototype I’ve got open. We’ve given up trying to keep them out of our systems.

+

McClelland drones on in a low monotone. Someone has told him to sound presidential. He declares a national emergency to preserve national food security. Troops are being sent to the South “to prevent the refugee crisis from spilling over into neighboring states”.

+

The sheer, ruthless pragmatism of it all is impressive. There’s nothing practical that can be done to prevent the catastrophe unfolding. Every opportunity to achieve something constructive lies twenty years in the past. So, they’ve leveled their sights on a more tangible enemy and a war that people can actually see being fought. The sword of Damocles turns on its dwindling thread, and our response is to keep our ass parked on the seat – a visible statement of intent, a promise of continuity, that all this shall pass.

+

I laugh, but it comes out as a strangulated yelp.

+

Beyond my display I spot Darja at her desk. She beams at me as I hibernate my screen, her expression becoming a frown as I hustle across to join her and she takes in my appearance. “Brry-an, what happened? You look terrible.”

+

“I know,” I say. “Darja, you… you don’t have any Sera, do you?”

+

“No, Brry-an, I am sorry. I don’t take any drugs. They pollute your body, put you out of balance. It damages the complexion. Robin doesn’t like girls with bad skin.”

+

The chanting of the protesters outside is still faintly audible and Darja glances at the window. “Why don’t you be like them? Stop taking silly drugs to ignore the world. Deal with it instead.”

+

I laugh again. It becomes a dry cough. “Those morons? Half of them are against defensive medication. The other half are complaining about the prices. Those people breaking into supermarkets in Jersey have the right idea, we’re going to starve long before we run out of drugs.”

+

Except that’s just what I have done.

+

Darja shrugs. “Exactly.” I can’t tell if she’s mocking me or not. Her normal business hours expression is, as now, a fixed look of pleasant amusement. Maybe Krajicek paid for it.

+

I experience a sudden, giddy rush of desire. Unregulated by Sera, my body’s natural chemistry is trying to reassert itself. I am gripped by the conviction that Darja would agree to be mine if I asked her now – mine ⁠in a way that she will never be Krajicek’s.

+

“I, er – I saw your ad this morning,” I say, lowering my voice. “For your channel…”

+

“Oh, you like it?” She claps excitedly. “I’ve got fifteen thousand subscribers! Maybe fifteen thousand and one now?” She raises an eyebrow, then bursts out laughing.

+

My cheeks grow hot. “You don’t mind that I saw that?” I’m so strung out I can’t get an erection, but I can still blush like a schoolgirl. Go figure.

+

“No,” she says, looking quizzical. “Why would I mind? Because I’m a good little Belarusian girl who’s only here to be Robin’s girlfriend? You don’t think I consider what happens to me when he decides to get a brand new dolly?”

+

“Look, I’m sorry,” My mouth is gummy. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought you might want to know that people from the office could see it.”

+

She smiles again. “I’m not ashamed of working, Brry-an. I have to deal with the world the way it is.”

+

The world the way it is. Darja is young enough that she has probably never tasted real honey. The thought is dislodged by a lurching wave of nausea and I lean forward, putting a hand on the front of her desk for support.

+

Darja rubs my forearm. “Poor Brry-an.” Our faces are less than a foot apart.

+

“Listen, does Krajicek keep any Sera here?” I whisper.

+

Her eyes drop. “Maybe. I don’t know,” she says flatly. “If he has, it’s locked in his desk.”

+

“Can you look?”

+

“In his private office.”

+

“But you have a key?”

+

She sighs. “I’ll look, but not now.”

+

“Then when?”

+

“When he leaves.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s got a lunch at midday.”

+

I glance at the clock. It’s almost eleven o’clock. I feel a sudden, powerful urge to cry. I push the bastard down and it rears up again, as insistent and undeniable as the need lurking in the pit of my stomach.

+

A hateful, wheedling voice within me whispers maybe it would help my cause if I broke down in front of Darja.

+

I turn away from the reception desk. The elevator chimes and the door opens, disgorging clients. I shove past them and get into the elevator. If I’m going to humiliate myself, I’d rather do it in the street amongst strangers.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+
+

SICK OF FEELING SICK?

+

Are you struggling to face the chaotic clamor of today’s world without the use of so-called defensive medication?

+

Are your finances unable to cope with the skyrocketing prices controlled by Big Pharma companies whilst at the same time they criminalize users of cheap synthetic alternatives?

+

Have you been driven in desperation to street dealers and loan sharks?

+

DISCOVER THE ALTERNATIVE TO DEFENSIVE MEDS AND RECLAIM YOUR LIFE

+

Church of Saint Philomena, 55 West Thirty-Second St

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +aint Philomena’s is an ancient-looking construction of gray stone cast into shadow by the office blocks on ether side of it. The entrance is shut, but the door of the small hall adjacent to the church is open.

+

I shuffle down a short corridor with one arm wrapped around my midriff. Since I threw up, the ache in my stomach has migrated south. Every other step evokes a sharp, stabbing pain in my intestines.

+

I’d pictured some kind of glorified soup kitchen full of homeless people, but the small hall I enter is clean and brightly lit. There’s about a dozen people sitting in small circles, drinking coffee. A couple of excited kids career around the room. No one here resembles the human detritus of my imagination. Apart from me.

+

The girl with the thick eyebrows sits with one group. She looks up, sees me and talks into the ear of the dark-skinned man next to her. He rises and walks towards me, smiling broadly.

+

“I’m Matthias,” he says, holding out a hand. “Welcome, friend.” His accent is a weird transatlantic medley, American cadence twinned with British vowels and African consonants.

+

I shake his hand. “Brian.”

+

He regards me, eyes narrowed. “You’re strung out. What are you on, Tetrafaxydol?”

+

“Seratoxetine.”

+

“Ah,” he says, as if this answers a great many questions. “Very high end. Very insidious. Come.” He gestures at a couch in one corner of the hall. Two kids clambering on it race off at our approach. Matthias takes a seat and motions for me to do likewise. He rests his elbows on his knees, places his fingertips together and closes his eyes. For one queasy moment, I worry he’s about to pray.

+

“Julieta told me she met you this morning, outside the Four Ways Café,” Matthias says. He smiles. “She generally canvasses where dealers are known to operate. I have tried to stop her, but it is an undeniably effective strategy.”

+

“Go where your target audience is, right?” The words come out in a dry croak. “But I’m not an addict.”

+

Matthias’s eyes remain shut, though one eyebrow rises.

+

“I work for a marketing agency. I create intelligent commercial messages.” After a hesitation, I add, “I’m just… my prescription ran short.”

+

Matthias opens his eyes and stares at me over his steepled fingers. “You’re a designer. That’s very interesting.”

+

The pain has become a knot in my gut and I shift uncomfortably. “It is?”

+

“In a sense, it’s design that got us into our current predicament. We take defensive drugs to dull our senses, to make us less sensitive to the cacophony of the world. But what is that noise, except the emergent product of thousands of tiny signals that we encounter every waking hour, all seeking our undivided attention?” He ticks items off on his fingers as he speaks. “The police siren, the sound of the crosswalk telling us when to go, announcements on the subway, our ringtones and other notifications on our many devices, the casino slot machine—” his eyebrow rises again “—and of course, all those advertisements that worm their way into our technology and our homes.”

+

I try not to scowl. I came here looking for – I don’t know – solace, perhaps, maybe some help. Not a lecture on the sins of modern social technology and my place among them.

+

The girl, Julieta, approaches, unsmiling, carrying two plastic cups. She hands one to Matthias and the other to me. I attempt to smile as I take the drink, but it’s scalding to the touch. I hiss in pain and place the cup on the floor, and when I look up she’s already walking away.

+

I blow on my tender fingers, irritated. “What’s her damn problem? She was the one who told me to come here.”

+

“Julieta’s a volunteer,” Matthias says. “A lot of the people she works with here have lost everything. Most never had much to begin with.” He points at me. “You, on the other hand, Brian, you’re a successful guy.”

+

The knot in my stomach twists. “Hey, I’m sorry these people’s lives are fucked up, but that’s not my fault.”

+

“Perhaps not,” Matthias says, “but I think your experience of life is very different. I’d guess you’ve been a functioning Sera addict for a long time. Money’s not the issue for you. You’re only here because, suddenly, Sera’s not available at any price – for the same reason there’s virtually no groceries in the stores.”

+

The knot twists again, and fuck this, I need help, not insinuations, I’m gone. I stand up – or rather I try to – and then I clutch my stomach as my bowels spasm uncontrollably and void their contents.

+

All I can think is, Oh, no. Please no.

+

I groan, and as the background conversations fall silent I hear a contemptuous snort from across the room – all Julieta’s preconceptions confirmed, and my humiliation complete.

+

Matthias rises and takes my shoulders. “Relax. Bathroom’s on the left back here, we saw this coming. Go get cleaned up. I’ll find you some clean clothes.”

+

Half an hour later, I sit opposite Matthias in his office – a cubbyhole at the rear of the hall. I’m wearing a pair of faded brown corduroy slacks procured from the thrift store across the street, I assume, based on their appearance. My happypac drip feeds me a vial of something Matthias describes as ‘synthetic’, as if Seratoxetine isn’t. The aching need hasn’t gone, but it’s dulled, diminished – as though a door’s been shut on it.

+

Not a very sturdy door, but it’s something.

+

“I’m so sorry,” I say for something like the thousandth time.

+

Matthias tuts. “Stop saying that. I told you, it’s pretty much a daily occurrence here.”

+

I shake my head. “At least I know what rock bottom feels like now.”

+

“Soiling yourself in a community center? Nowhere close.”

+

“I’ll look forward to that then.”

+

Matthias doesn’t smile. “I’m being serious, Brian.” He points a pen at me. “You don’t want to change. You just don’t want to be in pain. We both know if the drug companies could sort out their supply issues today, you would keep going as you have been, for a time anyway.”

+

I think of the news and sigh. “I don’t think anything is going to carry on the way it used to. Everything’s falling apart.”

+

He studies me. “Wouldn’t you prefer to be present while it does? Or do you want to wake up in six months time, feeling like you do now, wondering what happened to the world?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s gone two o’clock by the time I get back to the office. I’m already shivering again. The synthetic Sera takes the edge off the ravening hunger, but the initial relief from unadulterated cold turkey is a fading chemical memory. I’ve got what Matthias calls “a few weeks worth” of synthetics, but it’s like comparing water and whisky, and I’m already thinking about tricking my happypac into triggering another dose. Anything but a repeat of this morning.

+

As I collapse into my chair, I see Krajicek striding across the room on some mission or other and flinch, forcing myself to wake up my display and at least look at my prototype.

+

And I’m staring at the renders like I never saw them before when something is placed on the edge of my desk with a soft plunk: a plain, white cardboard box, and oh so familiar – the unadorned packaging of Seratoxetine – the real thing, not Matthias’s artificial piss!

+

I glance up just in time to see Darja walking away, but she doesn’t look back to see the pathetic adoring gratitude no doubt written all over my face.

+

The news bot pops up again, filling half my workspace with misery, but who cares?

+

Cold sweat plasters my shirt to my back as I inspect the little box. One way or another, this could be the last few doses I ever get my hands on.

+

I open the box and tap out three vials of clear liquid Seratoxetine into the desk.

+

I fumble with my happypac’s catch, shuddering with anticipation, my fingers pawing uselessly at the lid. The lid finally snaps open and I pull out Matthias’s synthetic and drop it on the floor.

+

I slide a vial of Sera into the empty slot until I hear a pop as the seal breaks. My happypac beeps in recognition of the new levels. A second later, the contents are drawn into the delivery mechanism, then I feel the needle puncture my flesh.

+

I slump back in my seat as my body luxuriates in sated need and the news broadcast continues its litany of disaster.

+

Georgia and Alabama have closed borders with Florida. Aerial footage of riot police scattering protesters with rubber bullets and water guns – oh hey, right outside our building! The FBI detaining individuals with ‘known links to eco-terrorism’, including a leading climatologist and several notable critics of defensive meds. More cops, busting some illegal fake charity and dragging the organizers away with zip-tied hands behind their backs, a lean black man, a woman with a fierce expression.

+

Then the Sera really kicks in.

+

The pain in my gut recedes. The drug strips out the upper and lower frequencies of my hearing. The ambient noise of the office fades. Sirens and the faint screams of the protesters outside vanish. In my peripheral vision, the news bot is just a meaningless blur.

+

So I flick the feed off and get back to work.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Pillars of Distraction on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Rob Gillham

+

+ + Author image of Rob Gillham + + + Rob Gillham writes mostly dark—sometimes darkly humorous—speculative fiction. He lives in London and does all his writing in the margins of the day. Stuff he’s written has also appeared in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction and Creepy Podcast, links to which all can be found at robgillham.com.

+

© Rob Gillham 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images - many thanks to the following creators: Maria Geller, Luke Barky, WeStarMoney Rec, Guillaume Meurice, Francesco Ungaro, and Yan Krukau.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-39/short-reviews-july-to-september-2024.html b/issue-39/short-reviews-july-to-september-2024.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9b13b791 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-39/short-reviews-july-to-september-2024.html @@ -0,0 +1,314 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 39 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Short Reviews – July to September, 2024

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2024 by +
+ + + + +

T + +wo of the magazines mentioned in last issue’s short reviews return in the Autumn, delivering stories that – as captain of a rival ship – fill me with seething envy (but ahaha! I jest! We’re all comrades in editorial arms, back here where the readers see us not! And certainly where they see us not sharpening our back-knives).

+

Reversing the order of appearance this time, the first is featured at NewMyths.com, whose perspective takes in “Life from a side view mirror”. In this case the life in question is viewed from the distant end, as long years of services are somewhat rudely cast aside. In Tiny by William Wandless, the ageing housekeeper of Hazelton Hall is dismissed from her role by Lord Talbot, her replacement (both the act and the person) coming at the demand of the new Lady Talbot, eager to stamp her own authority on management of the family seat.

+

The sole symbol of her former employer’s gratitude is the gift of a small, portable cottage from which to see out her days, graciously permitted to rest somewhere on the grounds. Despite the sadness of the staff, and one member of the family, she continues to take pleasure in the small things in life. This change heralds the beginning of the estate’s decline, something which our narrator at least takes with her customary calm and forgiving demeanour – yet some unkindness is too much to abide, and when the venerable Mrs. Vulpe’s limits are finally reached the settling of scores delivers sharp, satisfying closure.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n now to the second returnee, ergot., germinating hosts of innovative and experimental horror, which in all ways is very much on point for this story. In Saurophaster in Oculus, we first meet Philip Karras, a generally ordinary man with an only slightly unusual condition in his total reluctance to make eye contact with anyone around him – a condition that is quickly revealed to be based in his rather less ordinary belief that a discomforting speck in his left eye will bring about unspecified misfortune for anyone who happens to exchange glances with him for even a moment.

+

J. F. Gleeson’s story offers up quite the mix. The tiniest speck of the otherworldly contaminating the all encompassing mundane. Epistolary texts that write around the edges of what’s really going on. Supernatural horror treated as a fact of life, echoing more than one horror that genuinely is such. And in places prose that teeters at the dangerous point where rich tips over into excess, a region that (in my opinion) even the likes of Cormac McCarthy trod both sides of. It’s a strong style, and if occasionally very strong, not too much so to turn me off a thought-provoking, satisfying read. And not bad company to keep, is it?

+

And while I’m here… a passing nod to another ergot. story, their latest at time of writing: Boomtown, by Sarah M. K. Palmer, a piece of strange small-town fiction with hints of the classic Twilight Zone to it. Signposted perhaps a little too clearly (again, in my opinion), but as with Saurophaster in Oculus this was a really pleasurable read. ergot. contains gems.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +inally, according to its slug line, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly deals in three things: Prose. Poetry. And Pulp. In the case of their final p-word, that’s often in the sense of beaten to a, as even a cursory glance across their thematically focused wares will reveal that adversaries being pounded into paste by mighty-thewed warriors is something of a trademark. But then Heroic Fantasy is something of a hack ’em slash ’em genre, isn’t it? There’s a good chance quarterly is how the losers get picked up and carried off for burial.

+

And while that’s more or less what’s on the cards for you with Tim Hanlon’s The Wailing Keep, that takes nothing away from what is a nice example of the other kind of pulp that HFQ peddles: good old-fashioned adventure. Here we encounter Foscari the Gate-Keep, perhaps once Conanesque but now built more for comfort than for battle, as he wakes to find his master’s kindly daughter kidnapped by a vengeful sorcerer-type whose henchmen leave only mutilated bodies in their wake. Seen only as a fat liability by the real soldiery, Foscari takes it upon himself to pledge his oath to bring the damsel back home alive, and being along for the ride as he rolls back the years is to have a good old-fashioned time.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-39/the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.html b/issue-39/the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2bafb7fc --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-39/the-note-affixed-to-your-cryotube.html @@ -0,0 +1,327 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 39 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube

+

Steven Genise

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube by +
+ + + + + + +

W + +riting this to you could cost me my job, but you’re unlikely to recognize me when you wake up. You’d remember me as the concierge still young enough to keep their head shaved, who strapped you into your harness and rubbed the iodine on your left arm, and who very convincingly looked to the right and said What’s that, which distracted you as the needle went in. I got so good at it that day; you were the hundredth person I’d stuck, and I took such pride in the skill by the time of launch that, when I realized I’d never need to do it again, I felt hollow and worthless.

+

All the old people on their way out trained us just to stick you and not to care, but I imagine that when they were our age, setting out on their trip, they too were idealistic and starry.

+

But you won’t recognize me now that my braids go down to my knees and my skin bags and wrinkles. You could report me to my superior by saying that I was the one going around distracting the passengers before sticking them with the needle, that I was the tenderest one and the most idealistic, but that was fifty-four years ago now. Those who were in charge back then are long dead, and those in charge now won’t remember what happened a lifetime ago. In fact, as far as you know, you could be reporting my behavior to me. Better to just accept this gift in the spirit in which it was given. Better to move on with your life; mine is at its end anyway, while you’ve got so much before you.

+

You look the same, of course. Mostly. You haven’t aged, but you’ve a few new cuts. The small one beside your belly button was the first, which you got a year after you went under. They’re all stitched up now, but they’ll need tending to in the coming weeks, and that’s what you’re feeling now when you wake up.

+

We call your clothing packaging, because for one you’re not really alive and for two it doesn’t work like regular clothing. It’s adhesive and vacuum-sealed so your skin doesn’t dry out and burn, but it wears down over time, so every year we cut it off and repackage you. That was my first time repackaging, and my knife slipped and cut away a moon-shaped sliver of your flesh. I expected blood to gush, to flow. Expected you to move or scream. But of course, you did none of those things, without your heart beating or your lungs flexing, so I just continued on with the packaging.

+

It wasn’t until a month later that I realized, of course you wouldn’t heal. You’re not really alive. You can’t be bled to death, but neither can your body repair itself. So I wrote a note to myself: Stitch it shut. Appended it to my locker, and tried to remember it for next year when I repackaged you again. But when the time came, the little flap of skin was shriveled and burned, and it crumbled when I took the needle to it and left only the little red crescent moon on your flesh.

+

What was wrong with me that first year, that I let my knife slip and accidentally cut you like that? It’s never happened since. Maybe it was seeing you for the first time nude but uncowering. I want to draw upon the cognition you had before you put yourself in this tube and say trusting, but trust implies at least some present capacity for cognition. So instead of trusting I’ll say vulnerable. But can a pumpkin be vulnerable, for instance, or a corpse? Perhaps.

+

Part of it, surely, was our differences. Me, wearing scrubs made from the scratchy wool shorn from the ship’s livestock. You, wearing the vacuum sealed body bag. I don’t even get to see your face until I cut the suit off of you again, but when I do, the same every year: a middle-aged face, with wrinkles but no hair. No braids to mark the passing of your years after thirty. Of course, with the adhesive packaging you needed to be completely shorn of body hair, but in a way it was indeed like you were beginning life anew when we reached the new world, and given your actual age you looked practically like a child in comparison.

+

The medical record said you were ninety-one, but your body looked like my mother’s at forty, mine at thirty. Yes, that was the distraction, recognizing that I would never reach your age, or even close to it, while you would simply continue on as you always had, for another hundred years maybe. To slip, to cut you, was to bring you closer to the human. Closer to me.

+

But don’t worry, I only slipped the once.

+

I cut you deliberately two years later. I was nearing twenty-five and not yet bearing children, which did not please my bosses. A small nick on your thigh, stitched right up, to remind us both that promising two generations of labor in exchange for lifetimes of employment was, to many, a better privilege than they could ever ask for.

+

At twenty-eight they became stricter, requiring me to stop working during my ovulation window to visit the ship’s inseminary. I gave you that cut just below your ear to reassure you that what we were doing here was worth it.

+

At thirty, the IVF took, at least for a while, and so I didn’t do anything to you that year. But at thirty-one I gave you your caesarian scar so that I wouldn’t have to be alone with mine. The one on your knee came at thirty-three when I was chasing my son down the hall and I fell. The one on your shoulder for where his puppy bit me. To make it match, I couldn’t use the scalpel. I want you to appreciate the difficulty in acquiring the teeth.

+

The ones I imagine you noticed first are the long ones down each forearm. They came at thirty-six.

+

At thirty-seven I had exhausted the company mourning period and had to visit the inseminary regularly again, and that series of tallies on your calf is an accounting of the months, which you can review at your convenience. At forty, I gave you a cut along your side where the ectopic pregnancy was removed. Tallies along the bottoms of your feet, small pinpricks I made with a needle, are for every egg retrieval – these are harmless to you but they’re not stitched up, so you will need to change your socks.

+

The big tallies down your back are for every month after menopause that they put those eggs back in me.

+

They never got their second generation out of me, at least not in the way they expected to. But my contract was to provide labor for two trips, so I’ll be heading back home at least. I won’t get there, but I’ll head that way.

+

And at any rate, I’ve had you all these years, haven’t I? Helplessly lying there. And it’s not just vulnerability, is it? It is about trust. You trusting, the way only someone with your means could afford to trust. And me, trusted the way only someone of my means can be trusted. This is to say, someone necessarily without cynicim because I am someone incapable of personal gain. No freedom after we leave port, and no riches when we return.

+

When we land, you’ll wake up, you’ll read this note. You’ll nurse your wounds and perhaps ask around for as long as you can who did this to you. But you will have so much else to do before we turn for home again.

+

And the next batch of concierges will come aboard, young and idealistic as I once was, and I’ll train them to do as I did, just like the generation before trained me. And then we will all depart, and at some point on the return journey I will die, and leave only them to see what I’ve done to you.

+

Let the training I give, the lessons I teach, make them the only children your company begets of me.

+

Entrust them with your vulnerability.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Steven Genise

+

+ + Author image of Steven Genise + + + Steven Genise is an author and editor based in Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in Blue Earth Review, Fusion Fragment, Milk Candy Review, and many others. You can find links to his work at stevengenise.com, and his vague thoughts about medieval history, rowing, and the outdoors on Twitter.

+

© Steven Genise 2024 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Rodlon Kutsalev, Maria Orlova, Ron Lach, and Pixabay - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-39/tintype-trolls.html b/issue-39/tintype-trolls.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..03ebef80 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-39/tintype-trolls.html @@ -0,0 +1,424 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Tintype Trolls — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 39 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Tintype Trolls

+

Teresa Milbrodt

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Tintype Trolls by +
+ + + + + + +

M + +y partner Madigan converted our tiny spare bedroom into a developing lab for their tintype photography. They need a place with small windows they can cover so it’s perfectly dark, and just enough space for folding tables, trays of chemicals, and space to hang negatives while they dry. Tintype photography is lovely and imperfect, prone to streaking, but people come from a two-hundred-mile radius to get their picture taken. For weeks they’ll ponder what they want to wear and the perfect expression for the picture. It takes an afternoon to do one photo, but folks like watching the process and it makes Madigan feel productive during weeks when life is a strain.

+

On cool nights after Madigan’s customers have left, the trolls come out from under their bridge in the backyard and sit on the porch for a chat. They tend the stream and don’t ask for goats or gold like trolls of old, but prefer macaroni and cheese and having their picture taken. They polish their tusks with a toothbrush for those occasions. Ulyana and Grisha are three feet tall and fastidious about grooming their lime green hair so it falls gracefully away from their gray eyes. Madigan has exhibited photos at the county fair and won ribbons. People want to know where we found such elaborate costumes. They say we could make a mint on those masks. Madigan smiles and says our friends want to remain anonymous.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e wear goggles, aprons, and gloves in the darkroom since the trays of chemicals Madigan needs for photography are toxic. By the end of the process we’re lightheaded – the pictures come into focus as we lose ours – so we try to get fresh air fast. Ulyana and Grisha often help me make dinner, since they like having something to do besides clean the stream. After a long day at the grocery store, I understand why it’s important to change the routine.

+

I spend half my time cashiering and the other half in the bakery, grateful that my boss looks the other way when I slip bags of three-day-old cookies, brownies, and muffins into my backpack. They’re bound for the dumpster otherwise, and she knows we’re hard up for cash. Sometimes I split the treasure with Amanda, my co-worker who’s a single mom and lives with her dad who watches her kids after school. He had a heart attack a few years back and is on disability, but between the two of them they manage rent and utilities.

+

“I shouldn’t take home so many cookies,” she says, “but those boys eat so much. I don’t know where it goes. At least Dad and I have learned how to stretch a dollar on pasta and peanut butter.”

+

I nod at the ever-present balancing act of a checkbook. Madigan has a part-time job working afternoons and weekends at the garden supply store, but sometimes they take off early when a pressure change brings on a migraine. The store manager’s sister and mother get migraines too, so he’s merciful when Madigan needs to cut their shift. Other employees give them the stink eye, but Madigan’s paycheck gets cut as well. They have a migraine medication, but it’s expensive and not without fine print side effects: brain fog, problems sleeping, heart palpitations.

+

Ulyana and Grisha get brain fogs sometimes when they’re cleaning the river. They’re not sure when it started, or if it’s due to chemical runoff from the fields, but that’s what Madigan suspects. Doing tintype photography gives both of us a headache, but Madigan says it’s different because it’s pain we can control, pain we choose, worthwhile pain. I wonder if the pain in my arms, legs, and shoulders from working ten hours in a bakery is also worthwhile pain, but usually I don’t think about that too deeply. I just eat another three-day-old cookie.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + hate getting my picture taken, or rather, how I look in photographs. My blind eye often seems to be peering in a different direction than my sighted eye, which looks weird.

+

“It sees all the aliens, ghosts, and witches in the world, and doesn’t tell the rest of you,” Madigan says. I say if that’s the case, it’s unfair.

+

I’ve been blind in my right eye since I was a baby, so it’s part of my normal. Having just one sighted eye isn’t a problem, until it’s a big problem, like when I’m taking a hot tray of cookies or muffins out of the oven and pivoting on my heels to slide it onto a cooling rack. I worry I won’t see one of my co-workers carrying a frosted sheet cake, and slam right into them (the stuff of slapstick nightmares). Other times when I’m cashiering I don’t see a customer on my right, and they don’t realize they’re hiding in my empty space. I fear seeming rude, like I’m ignoring them, though that isn’t the case. They’re simply in the world of aliens, ghosts, and witches.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +adigan and I rent a drafty farmhouse from Lloyd, a seventy-five-year-old farmer who’s hell bent on doing all the repairs. He’s fixed cupboards and toilets, replaced our garbage disposal, and done some electrical work. When we have him over for coffee and cookies, his hands relax gratefully around the mug.

+

I don’t think trolls in the backyard would surprise him.

+

Madigan has taken Lloyd’s picture, his wife’s picture, and pictures of all five grandkids in exchange for two months’ rent.

+

“It’s really something how much I look like my great-great-grandpa,” Lloyd says. “I’ve only seen him in old pictures, but this makes him feel closer.”

+

Many people who get their pictures taken are celebrating something – birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, any occasion that means they want to get their image etched on something more than their tiny phone screen. Not unlike Lloyd, they often remark on how much they resemble long-gone great-aunts and uncles.

+

“It’s a different piece of me,” says one lady, a first grade teacher who wore her grandma’s lace dress. “She looks harder. Stronger. Sadder. Something about her eyes. But I always get that feeling about old photos when I imagine what those people were like.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +ince I work at a grocery store I learn a lot about people through the contents of their carts, which tell me too much while I’m scanning barcodes. Tea or coffee? Cookies or crackers? White or whole wheat? Any dairy? Lean meat or ground chuck? Bran flakes or cereal with marshmallows even though they don’t seem to have kids? I read grocery carts like tea leaves, intuiting anxieties, celebrations, pay raises, the results of the last doctor’s appointment.

+

It’s also a small comfort to have regular customers, ones who stand in my line to ask how my partner is doing and tell me why they’re buying flowers or a cake mix or canned pineapple bits to try a new recipe. I want to remember their names, but usually know them as the lady with the purple glasses or the guy with the comb-over who wears bow ties. I’m always sad when I see their faces in the obituary section of the local paper and read details about their lives I didn’t know, grieving how I won’t ring up a can of sardines for them again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here are many things trolls can’t eat because of digestive problems, which we’ve figured out through trial and error: citrus fruits, spicy food, red meat, raw spinach or tomatoes (but they’re okay cooked). Trolls can get the flu – snotty trolls are quite irritable – but Ulyana makes an herbal tea for their symptoms. Still, illnesses worry them.

+

“We never used to get colds,” Ulyana mutters while she cleans the stream. “And Grisha hated being indoors, but now…” She shakes her head. The bridge used to provide enough shelter since trolls don’t like warm weather, but recently they’ve been shivering so they’ve taken to spending the night in our unheated utility room in the rear of the farmhouse. It’s still a bit chilly, but more protected than under the bridge.

+

“We’re not finding the same number of roots and mushrooms, and if we have children we’d need to gather more,” Ulyana says. “Grisha talks about moving to the city and how we’d have an easier time finding food, but I don’t want to dig every dinner from a trash can. Some trolls have started little communities, I’ve heard more of them are migrating with the promise of all the pizzas and cheeseburgers they can scavenge, but others came back to our streams.”

+

I watch the shimmer from her gray-green fingertips, note the smell of rain that wafts from her skin, a magic that makes streams cleaner and fish healthier.

+

“This takes more out of me than it used to,” she says. “The water is dirtier. Grisha thinks we could manage toxic streams in the city. Not likely, even with younger trolls around.”

+

The city must be warmer because of the crush of people, buildings, and machines, but there’s a lot more water to clean. There’s also no solid science on how changes in environment and diet affect troll health. No doctors are running around doing interviews and research studies. We’re left to speculate on the connections.

+

When Madigan takes their photo, Ulyana and Grisha look like the trolls of old, ones with black marble eyes and yellow teeth who kept bridges in good condition and guarded the forest with horned fervor.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +adigan’s boss calls me sounding slightly panicked when my partner faints at work behind the cash register. He suggests that Madigan go to the doctor, take time off, and get support socks to help their blood pressure. It will be a hit to our finances, though it’s a worse blow to Madigan’s pride. They like working at the gardening supply store and know a good bit about plants, birdfeeders, and fertilizers, enough to make intelligent suggestions.

+

“I want to be useful and can’t do that sitting around here all day,” they say. Before I go to work, I take Madigan to the public library to help people on the computers. My friend Nicole is one of the three librarians, and says older folks need assistance with web browsing, younger ones need help with online job applications, and she’s busy with the circulation desk and doesn’t always have time for them.

+

“We could give you a volunteer position for now, but it might turn into something more?” she tells Madigan. Her voice is too light, too hopeful, and the library is underfunded. I bring home more three-day-old bread and bruised produce from the sale bin.

+

Madigan promises their doctor a tintype photo since we don’t have money for the copay. She says that’s fine and it would be a nice anniversary gift for her partner.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

U + +lyana toes shyly after me when I offer to let her borrow some of my scarves and socks. They’re quite colorful with their stripes and polka dots and floral patterns, and I have too many since my mom and grandma must think I’m never warm enough. I tell Ulyana she can use as many as she likes, and I bring one of our sleeping bags for the trolls to bed down in the utility room. I figure everything is okay until Ulyana appears at the back door, wearing a pair of striped socks and two scarves and crying. Grisha left a note saying he was hitching a ride on the trucks that go back and forth from the city, and he’d be back to visit. Gone with no ceremony, just a good-bye like he had to leave before his mind changed.

+

“Keeping up the stream and bridge has been too much for him and he didn’t want to admit it,” she says. “He has a cousin I’ve never met who says life in the city is easy, and concrete overpasses are simpler to maintain than our rickety little bridge.” She shakes her head. “I never thought he’d leave.”

+

She sits on the stepstool in front of the washing machine, so I sit on the floor, put my arms around her, and let her cry. That’s when Madigan’s doctor and her partner knock on the front door, here for their photo. Madigan keeps them on the porch since they want the picture taken in front of the farmhouse. The old horse-drawn wagon Lloyd parked there makes our yard look like a calendar photo.

+

Lying in bed that night I fret to Madigan. How could Grisha hitch a ride to the city so easily? It would be dangerous for trolls to grip the undercarriage of trucks, even with their horns and tough skin, and what if he doesn’t find a good bridge?

+

Madigan clears their throat and says not to worry, they’re sure Grisha is safe.

+

“How do you know?” I say. “Grisha has never been to the city, and he expected to find this cousin. He’s more likely to get lost and have who-knows-what happen.”

+

“I gave him a ride when I went to buy chemicals for plate processing,” Madigan says quietly. “He can’t do his share of stream cleaning anymore, hasn’t been able to for months, and they both know it. Grisha feels beyond useless. He hopes he can help his cousin a bit.”

+

I’m upset with Madigan but hear the catch in their throat, understanding how someone feels like they need to contribute even if their best beloved says that their company is more than enough. They ache to do more and feel awful when they can’t.

+

“I’ll check on him when I go to the city,” Madigan says. They make the trip once a month to buy photo supplies and things we use in bulk: oatmeal, flour, sugar. “Grisha’s cousin seemed nice. He’s a big guy and he’s been there for a while. Several members of the family have, I guess. They’ve adapted and they’re fine.”

+

I exhale a long sigh. None of that helps the sad troll who’s asleep next to our washing machine, swathed in my scarves.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +n afternoons when I don’t work, I sit by the bridge to keep Ulyana company. Cleaning is boring when it’s solitary, she says.

+

“Here,” she says, holding out her hand. I touch her palm and feel the cool flow of running water, but in solid form. That’s what they do for streams, she says. Make their bodies into filters.

+

I convince Madigan to bring me along the first time they visit Grisha. I need to make sure he’s okay, then we can figure out whether to tell Ulyana his whereabouts. It isn’t easy to pick my way down the muddy embankment, I guess that’s why trolls have claws, but we only call a couple times before Grisha emerges from the weeds, bleary-eyed but smiling. He gives a shy wave. I don’t know if he’s looking healthier or just better fed, but he says he found a restaurant with good salads.

+

“They throw out so much lettuce every night,” he says. “Lettuce and carrots and radishes and mushrooms. I don’t worry about Ulyana gathering food for both of us while I sit like a lump. She needs to find another partner who can help her with the stream. Here I share the work with all my cousins, so we’re fine.”

+

Grisha pauses to take a breath, smiles, then breaks down crying.

+

“I miss her so much,” he sniffles, while Madigan and I ease down to sit next to him. “My cousin says I can stay as long as I want, and Ulyana is welcome, too, but she’d hate it here. The noise. The work. We can’t clean the water as much as we’d like, but I’d hate to think what the river would be like without us.”

+

“She misses you and she’s worried,” I say.

+

“I can’t pull my own weight.” Grisha wipes his eyes with thick green fingers.

+

“Being there is enough,” I say.

+

“Being there and feeling guilty,” he says. He didn’t leave because of anything Ulyana said, but from his own shame. Is that love, pride, or selfishness?

+

“Would it kill you to know I feel the same way much of the time?” Madigan says on our drive home.

+

“But you haven’t thought about leaving me,” I say. They’re quiet. “You have thought about it?” I say. “You know I wouldn’t want you to do that.”

+

Madigan sighs and rests their hand on my knee. They’re on my right side so I can’t see them, but I know their smile, mouth half-quirked. “Pride makes people do strange things,” they say. “Other people are much kinder to us than we are to ourselves when we need help.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +uring the visit, I quietly took a picture of Grisha on my phone. When Ulyana sees it, she gasps.

+

“He doesn’t look well,” she says. “His horns lost their shine, and his skin is so gray.”

+

Madigan said they wouldn’t reveal Grisha’s hiding place, but I didn’t make the same promise. The next weekend, a scarf-swathed Ulyana and I go to visit him under the bridge. He looks worse than before, has developed a cough, and his eyes widen when he sees Ulyana.

+

“Don’t get too close,” he mutters. “I have a cold.”

+

She tackles him in a hug, then they start talking in a language of trolls that I can’t understand. It’s a lot of gutturals and whispering, but their words are insistent, angry, urgent, hurt. Ulyana makes wide gestures. Grisha curls into himself, doesn’t move when she wraps her hands around his arm and tugs. I’d hoped he’d return with us, since Ulyana practiced her argument on the long drive down.

+

Grisha remains under the concrete bridge. Ulyana cries all the way home.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +adigan has been coughing after their photo sessions, even with all the protection we wear in the darkroom. They shake their head when I ask if they’d consider taking fewer pictures.

+

“It’s income,” they say. “And it’s what I love. What’s wrong with suffering for your art?”

+

“Hospital bills,” I say.

+

“I’m fine,” says Madigan. “This is the only way I can contribute extra money.”

+

Hospital bills, I mouth when their back is turned, but I know they want to feel useful and productive, especially since they can’t work at the store. Still, I’m happy when they sit by the stream with Ulyana and chat about fish, the weather, edible plants, sometimes Grisha. Ulyana and Madigan take meandering walks upstream, stopping to rest on the shore, which is how they meet a troll repairing a wooden bridge.

+

“Not many do that anymore,” Ulyana says that evening, “but turns out she knows one of my cousins. She stopped by this afternoon since I told her our bridge needed replacement boards, and she showed me how to replace the old ones with new.”

+

“I remembered where Lloyd kept the spare toolbox,” says Madigan.

+

“It was kind of fun,” says Ulyana, “and that section was near rotted out.”

+

We have a pile of scrap wood in the garage from Lloyd’s household projects, and a supply of nails in the basement, so Ulyana starts tinkering with her newfound knack for carpentry. She pounds loudly, she pounds softly, and sometimes she seems to pound for the sake of pounding. She fixes our broken cupboards, wonky drawers, and the creaky boards on the porch, then builds a small table for the laundry room where she can put my scarves and socks before she goes to sleep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ne of my customers mentions they need more volunteers at the elementary school to listen to kids practice reading. It’s another unpaid job, but I mention it to Madigan at dinner. They greet the idea with a nod and a “Maybe,” but two days later they say they’ll go to school on Thursday and try it out.

+

“I hated reading in class when I was a kid,” they say. “It was embarrassing.”

+

When I ask Madigan about the tutoring that evening, they say it was okay.

+

“The kids had to get over being shy and realize I wasn’t going to yell at them,” Madigan tells me. “I said I had problems sounding things out when I was younger, and they appreciated hearing that. We had corn dogs for lunch.”

+

I call Lloyd, explain Madigan’s continuing job situation, migraines, and fainting, and that they might tutor at the elementary school for a bit. Lloyd is quiet, but I hear the rustle of his nod over the phone. His grandkids go to the elementary school.

+

“We’ll see what we can work out for rent,” Lloyd says. “At least for now.”

+

For now is the best we can do. We may need to move into town, to a smaller place close to my job but without a room for Madigan’s photography. Madigan promised they won’t do tintypes for three months. It’s getting cold, not a good season for pictures. Ulyana is adding to her pile of scarves in the laundry room.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e get Chinese take-out, a treat, when we visit Grisha in the city. He says he’s fine, holding his own with water cleaning. He looks thicker about the middle, and grayer, and his voice has acquired a rasp it didn’t have before. I blame city air. Later Madigan says they didn’t notice a difference.

+

“Let Ulyana know I’m okay and I love her,” Grisha says. An invitation to live with him? To visit? We don’t tell him how Ulyana pounds out her sorrow around the house. Her cousin’s friend has visited a few more times, a roving troll without a bridge of her own, but she likes it that way. Ulyana enjoys the company.

+

“Some days are easier than others,” is all she’ll say. I’m sure she worries over Grisha like she did before, but it has taken on a different flavor. Often she joins us for dinner, especially macaroni and cheese or French toast. Madigan moved the photos of her and Grisha to our bedroom where Ulyana doesn’t wander. They have fewer migraines, but get fainting spells when they stand for too long. The doctor says it’s not Madigan’s heart, but she doesn’t know quite what’s wrong. She says we’ll wait and see and maybe do more tests.

+

Madigan has started drawing little cartoons for the kids they tutor at school. I didn’t know they had a knack for drawing. They said they didn’t, either. Their students think they should draw comics or illustrate a book. Madigan likes sketching trolls.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hings don’t work out in most love stories, only those aren’t the ones that get told. It’s sad, I think, because then we assume something is wrong with us if we don’t find a love that comes with the illusion of lasting forever. Just as important are the stories about love that shifts, ebbs, flows, burns and burns out like any candle will do.

+

Every happily-ever-after should be continued with “and then…,” which would involve more hope and heartbreak and turns in the road. I’ll end with the hard rhythm of a troll pounding nails into my front porch, fixing what’s broken until it breaks again.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Tintype Trolls on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Teresa Milbrodt

+

+ + Author image of Teresa Milbrodt + + + Teresa Milbrodt has published four short story collections, a novel called The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, and the monograph Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality. Milbrodt is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Roanoke College, and teaches fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, and disability studies. She loves cats, long walks with her MP3 player, independently owned coffee shops, peanut butter frozen yogurt, and texting hearts in rainbow colors. Read more of her work at her website.

+

© Teresa Milbrodt 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Adrian Kirby, Polina Tankilevitch, Tama66, and 4175959 - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-39/with-nothing-left.html b/issue-39/with-nothing-left.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..04486b72 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-39/with-nothing-left.html @@ -0,0 +1,314 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + With Nothing Left — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 39 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

With Nothing Left

+

Emma Burnett

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for With Nothing Left by +
+ + + + + + +

I + + buy us some printed burgers. One for you, two for me. One because you always loved them. Said they tasted almost like the real thing, not that I would know, you’d say, but just believe me. Two because you like me soft, for comfort, and this body needs to eat to keep the padding fed, all wrapped around and through the metal subframe.

+

I unwrap the three burgers and hold one up under your nose, and although you don’t do much more than breathe in the smell you say it’s delicious. I position four pillows, tucking them behind your head and your back to keep you upright. You thank me, although you don’t have to, you always have, and I sit myself next to you on the bed and eat. Burger juices run down my chin. Burger nutrients course into my padding. You rest a hand on the warm burger sitting on crinkled paper on your lap and smile.

+

Five days ago, you didn’t need me to tuck you in, didn’t need me to clean you up after every accident. I was a preventative assistant, a just-in-case. You said I was more friend than carer, and you had precious few of those left because the older you got the fewer folks remained. And I never corrected you because ten billion is objectively a lot of people, but none of them came to visit you.

+

At the height of your favourite month, the one you say used to be the warm one before everything was too warm all the time, you were still able to lean your bony body against my well-padded one, and my programming told me to wrap an arm around you, although you said I needed the closeness just as much. Programming is just one way of getting to the same six basic needs, you said. I said you were making them up, but you rattled off a list, and I agreed that things like food and health and security overlapped with my own needs. But you mentioned love, which I said I didn’t require. And you snorted and pulled my arm tighter around you.

+

Seven months ago, when I was assigned here by a company that was hired by a daughter who promises she’ll visit when she has more time, you were well enough to want to go out. Museums, university lectures, the local Women’s Institute. You told me we should go dancing, and although I hesitated, you were so joyous it was easy to agree. We dressed ourselves in neon and Lycra, and went to a club filled with students who might have been shocked, but we never cared to check. I tapped into the emergency lighting system wired into my body, and rechanneled the energy and design, and instead made rainbow freckles appear across my cheeks and bare arms. It cost me, that rainbow body decor. I had to replenish the following day to make up for the weight loss, drinking three chunky nutrient shakes instead of just one, generating a warning email about over-consumption from the company. But it was worth it because it made you smile. Like rainbow glitter, you said. Like the stuff that didn’t biodegrade and is still to this day stuck in the guts of fish and turtles. It’s better this way, you said. I didn’t tell you about the extra drinks or the warning.

+

I carried you home at the end of that night, worn out from dancing and drinking, continuing to pump energy into my rainbow freckles, which you traced with a finger, giggling as my nose wrinkled itself. It was a reaction I hadn’t known I’d have, and we’d both laughed. I’d gotten another warning on my system later, instructing me that hospice care doesn’t involve fun, but I deleted the message, and the eight others that followed, and eventually just muted the notification package. It seemed to me that you’d taken care of yourself well enough up until now, and could make these decisions for yourself. Even if they were fun. Even if they were silly. You could decide. So could I. So I did.

+

Nine weeks ago, you tripped on the edge of the carpet and fell, unpredicted, unpredictable. It was a hospital visit for you, worrying for us both, and an in-person warning for me, a stern reminder from a hard HR bot with no padding that my job is to protect you at all times. I didn’t say that I couldn’t catch you from the other room, or that I could barely eat whilst waiting to find out if you’d come home. The HR bot wouldn’t have cared. That wasn’t its job. Although you didn’t need surgery, things changed. I ate more. You ate less. I suggested outings. You suggested sleep. I reached out to your daughter, but got no reply. I made sure to stay close, sure to be a cushion for you.

+

Time passes, here in this bed. Ten minutes, ten hours, maybe more. I stop really knowing. My burgers are gone, and yours is still whole. I sit here, soft for you. You lift an arm, a world of effort, and touch my face, greasy from too much burger and leaking from the eyes, and you say I am all the things you needed and you’re grateful. I miss your smile and I have all the extra burgers just sitting in my padding, so I channel their power into rainbows across my skin, and there is nothing better than the endless freckles shimmering across my cheeks, reflected in your eyes. You smile softly, your fingers resting on a long-cold burger.

+

And now, with nothing left, I hold you.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of With Nothing Left on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Emma Burnett

+

+ + Author image of Emma Burnett + + + Emma Burnett is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in Nature:Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Apex, Radon, Utopia, MetaStellar, Milk Candy Review, Roi Fainéant, JAKE, and more. You can find her on Twitter, Bluesky, and at emmaburnett.uk.

+

© Emma Burnett 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Alla Serabrina, iakovenko123, and Designecologist - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2024

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Jess Simms +

Downsizing

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+ + +

Startups are the crucible of the modern business world, where futures are forged, fortunes are made and lost, careers take off or go down in flames, and pressure can be both the fuel and the fire. Jess Simms takes us to another fledgling C-suite, the place where the hard decisions have to be made. You know, you can't spell ‘executive’ without… breaking a few eggs.

+ + + + Story image for Downsizing by + + + +
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+ + + +
+
+

The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick

+ David Sheskin +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick by + + + +

Sometimes you hear the voice of a story in your head as you're reading. Never was there a stronger example of that magic than David Sheskin's short, sly, wall-of-text yarn, which packs more into a piece of flash fiction than words have any right to. For more evidence, I give you our audio version: passed from editor to producer with narry a note, and it sounds exactly the way I imagined it.

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+

The Amazing Mermaid

+ Arlen Feldman +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Amazing Mermaid by + + + +

From classic greats like Freaks and Nightmare Alley we get the enticing notion of the travelling carnival as a home to the abandoned, the desperate, the reviled, the unloved: a found family of outsiders, who in turn treat as outsiders the punters they lure in with promises of salacious thrills. Arlen Feldmen mines these rich depths to strike a tragic vein, as one person’s opportunity to build a new life only leaves ’em wanting more…

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+

Crunch Thump Thump

+ P. R. O’Leary +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Crunch Thump Thump by + + + +

When your friend stands at the cliff’s edge, do you ever feel the echo of an urge to push, though you never would? When the wedding gets to ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ are you tempted to raise your voice, even if you have no reason to? Could be everyone experiences something like that at a point in their life – P. R. O’Leary maybe more often than many.

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American Hitsuzen

+ Michael Bettendorf +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for American Hitsuzen by + + + +

American creatives… always slotting the word ‘American’ into their titles. Psycho. Graffiti. Hustle. Idiot. Why do they do it? We’ll never know. And in this case? Well, it turns out ‘hitsuzen’ is a Japanese term more or less meaning ‘according to a plan’. So when Michael Bettendorf calls this ‘American Hitsuzen’, is he saying…? No. No, he couldn’t be.

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+

Wendigo

+ Kirk Bueckert +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Wendigo by + + + +

One of the things the editor enjoys in a good horror story is uncertainty regarding the how real the horror is. Was Jack Torrance haunted by the Overlook Hotel, or merely an unstable man descending into murderous psychopathy? Stripped of its supernatural trappings The Shining would be a crime story - and here Kirk Bueckert gives us a similarly borderline case study to consider.

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Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen by + + + +

Bill Ryan’s biannual sojourn returns him to these shores to receive a seasonally warm welcome, once again to expose us to his thoughts on an example of crime novel writing – or should that be ‘criminal’? Best let him decide.

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+ + + + + +
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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024

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+ + +

Bringing both our issue and the year to a resounding close, it is the editor’s pleasure to introduce a number more crime stories published elsewhere in 2024 to the reader’s attention. So, if the six tales you’ve found here have but whet your appetite, let’s make it an even dozen with four firm recommendations and a couple of not-bads!

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+ +

American Hitsuzen

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Michael Bettendorf

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+ + +
+ Story image for American Hitsuzen by +
+ + + + + + +

Pt. I + + – Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Guy

+

There’s a yellowed box fan sitting in the corner of the office next to a Ficus. Neither of them is looking too good. Giles has burned through half a pack of smokes since I got here and the poor fan can’t keep up. Then again, who could, with Giles going on and on and on about how much I’ve messed up. Dunno why he’s blaming me, I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. And he’s the one who gave us the photo.

+

“How could you mess this up?” Giles asks through a cough. “This isn’t a rhetorical question, neither. I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me how you’ve managed to step in a pile of shit this deep.”

+

I nibble at a piece of loose cuticle and think it over. And I am, honest-to-God. This isn’t one of those situations where I’m playing coy or acting wise. I’m honest-to-God thinking of an answer that will be suitable for Giles. I run a few sentences through my mind, but the cursor in my brain stops and flashes. My mind’s a blank page. Eye-strain-bright, white, and full of potential. All of my would-be answers, excuses, despite their truth, and therefore not suitable.

+

I come to the conclusion that there is no such answer and walk to the percolator, grab a Styrofoam cup, and pour myself some coffee.

+

“Well?” he asks.

+

“It’s a bit burnt, but it’s good on a cold day like today.”

+

Okay, so I poke at him some, but he needs it. The old man is stressed and no matter what the bank accounts look like, the one thing we definitely can’t afford is putting stress on ourselves. Not with our family history of poor tickers. Every spent cigarette is a gamble.

+

“Smart ass,” he says, and swats the cup out of my hand. It leaves a smear of transmission grease across the back of my hand. It’s mid-morning and he’s already put in a full day’s work. “You know what I meant.”

+

Coffee pools around my boots and if I’m being honest, it kind of miffs me, because I went to a lot of care not to get blood on them this morning.

+

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “I do. But the thing is, I have an answer. You just won’t like it.”

+

His cigarette hangs loose from his lips. “Try me.”

+

“Just let me show you,” I say, and as pissed as he is, Giles listens because I like to think he trusts me. I am his nephew after all, and if you can’t trust family in this kind of business then you shouldn’t be in this kind of business.

+

We leave his office, which takes up a three-hundred square foot corner of the garage. It’s more of a hangar, really. Most days pneumatic wrenches, grinders, and saws scream on account of it being a chop-shop, but no one’s here today, except me and my brother. He’s leaning against the trunk of our beat-up Monte Carlo. The one Giles said he’d fix up for us. The one with the body in the trunk. The one that will no longer be ours after this.

+

I walk toward the car and try to appreciate the fleeting peace and quiet.

+

“Open it,” Giles says. “And enlighten me on the answer you say I won’t like.”

+

Bobby listens, which would have saved us all this mess if he’d done so earlier.

+

“He looked like the guy,” I say, figuring it didn’t require further explanation.

+

“What do you mean?” Giles asks.

+

I look at my brother and say, “Give it.” He pulls out a folded piece of printer paper, dirty and sweaty like a handkerchief. I unfold it to reveal the grainy, stretched-out and pixelated photo of our guy. Giles always said, No cellphone pictures. Never social media. They’re traceable. No texts about a job. Better yet, no texts about anything – pick up a phone. So, if you think about it, this is sort of on him. But I don’t tell him this.

+

“Look. This is what you gave us.” I hand Giles the paper. “And this is who we got,” I say, and point to the body in the trunk.

+

Giles flicks his cigarette butt to the slick cement floor.

+

“Looks nothing like him,” he says after a quick glance inside.

+

“Yeah right,” Bobby says. “Look at this hipster motherfucker. He’s got the glasses. Tight pants. Dressed like a lumberjack. Beard. He was outside the coffee shop, sipping a latte just like you said he’d be.”

+

I pat my pocket for my menthols, but Giles tells me he’ll cut my lips off if I smoke in his shop. He does this while he lights another cigarette. Always has been a bastard.

+

“The resemblance is uncanny,” I say.

+

“You need to get your eyes checked,” Giles says.

+

“They could be twins, man,” Bobby says.

+

“Don’t man me,” Giles says, jabbing a finger toward the body. “This ginger-nuts has red hair. Red beard. Freckles like Pippy Longstocking. He’s no more than, what, hundred and fifty pounds?”

+

He shoves the paper at me.

+

“Just because two losers dress the same doesn’t mean they’re the same person, now, does it?” Giles points at the crinkled paper. “His beard is red, but his hair is brown. He’s six-five, two-hundred pounds, and he fucking stole from me!”

+

I consider telling Giles that our guy had a bike. One of those decked-out hipster ones that probably cost him two Gs. Figured maybe he was trying to lose some weight. Some cyclist-fad. I decide not to mention it.

+

Giles rips the paper to confetti. “Clean it up,” he says. “Then go grab the right guy. Try not to kill him this time.”

+

“Clean up the paper or, you know, the body?” Bobby asks.

+

“Both,” Giles says, coughing through a clenched fist.

+

“I thought getting rid of the bodies was your job.” My brother has never been one for timing.

+

Giles bares tobacco-tan teeth. “I can get rid of three bodies just as easily as I can get rid of one.”

+

Outside, I hear an engine like a rumbling of snakes. A big block 427. It takes everything in me not to sneak a peek through the shop door windows. Giles tells us to leave through the rear bay door. He yells at whoever’s out there that we’re not open today, but stalks toward his office anyway. Guy can’t stay in business by being an asshole.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Pt. II + + – Wrong Place, Right Time, Dumb Guy

+

I’ve recently come into some money and see no reason not to treat myself. Usually, I grab a latte at this hip coffee joint on the other side of town on my way to work, but not today. I quit my job on the spot last week after hearing of my dad’s passing. We weren’t close, but can’t an only son mourn his father by spending a little of his old man’s cash? I’d feel bad, but the Percocet has left my brain all cozy. I’ve got one errand to run and then I’m leaving town, maybe for good.

+

Didn’t know what George Senior did beyond work in finance and treat my mom like shit before I came around. Then he left altogether. Apparently, I ended up on the life insurance policy anyhow. Maybe he figured he owed me, since all else I got was his name.

+

The money’s not even the coolest part.

+

My old man left a key in a safety deposit box. Had one of those old school paper key tags attached to it with old string. The tag said, “To G”, so the executor didn’t think it too much of a stretch to leave it to me. The will didn’t say anything about the key, but the rest of the box’s contents were relics from my parent’s marriage. A wedding ring. A few old photos. Marriage certificate, divorce certificate, and the likes. Also a business card to John’s and Sons Storage. Unit A-15 was written in blue ink on the back of the card.

+

Unit A-15 was a garage unit. Apparently, my old man had paid enough in advance to keep the unit indefinitely. The only thing in there was a car, covered by a heavy-duty tarp. I called one of my gear-head friends over to give it a look.

+

“Do you know what this is?” he asked me.

+

“Yeah, a babe magnet,” I said.

+

“It’s a ’67 GT500,” he said. And he rattled off facts.

+

Wimbledon white with Le Mans blue stripes. Some number of horsepower that meant nothing to me. He lost it when he opened the hood and saw two signatures on the engine block. Some chick named Carroll and her husband Don McCain. Or Dan. I don’t remember.

+

But old cars are such a pain, especially if you didn’t know how to work on them. Which is why I’m heading to get this thing looked over before I leave town. My friend said to take it to some shop run by some geezer. Says he’s a bit of an asshole, but he does good work.

+

Think I might have them rip out the dash and put in a Bluetooth system. Fill the trunk with subwoofers you can hear from downtown.

+

Might even repaint it. I’m not sure.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Pt. III + + – Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Dead Guy

+

Things are starting to look up for me.

+

I just moved to the city a couple of months ago in an effort to better myself. Left a bad relationship. Finished school online. Was offered a decent job where I feel respected and valued. Bought a bike and started riding again. I can fit into my favorite flannel shirt, just in time for the first freeze of autumn.

+

My boss told me to take the day off because I’d been working late all week. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, because I do, but throwing myself into my work is how I keep the old me at bay. I came here to better myself. When I have too much free time, I have a hard time finding that better me. Old demons like to visit late at night, set loose on the web.

+

It’s hard though, when you know what I know. What you can learn about a person – any person. Everyone leaves a digital footprint. They always told us to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to understand them, and so I do.

+

I follow their digital footprints. See what they like. What they don’t. What they purchase. What they don’t. What kind of porn they’re into.

+

It’s a sickness, I know – but I can’t help it. It’s a compulsion and I’ve been getting help. Found a new therapist the minute I rolled into town. I also find it hard to take advice from someone who’s into what my therapist is into – what they’ve done.

+

Look, if I could forget how to do this, I would, in a heartbeat. But the world relies on internet access now. The temptation is all around me. Everything has a keyboard – and I can’t keep my fingers from typing.

+

It may be my day off, but I’m working.

+

Coffee shops are one of the places people are most vulnerable. Most coffee shops have terrible Wi-fi and next to zero firewalls or security. And yet people sit and sip lattes and pay bills and shop online and log into any number of places on their phones. Laptops. You name it.

+

So I order a latte and sit outside. The cool autumn morning nips at my ears, but I don’t mind. It’s all in a day’s work. I just have to sit here and wait for someone dumb enough to sign in to show up – like these two guys in the overalls, Little and Large.

+

It’s all about being at the right place at the right time.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Pt. IV + + – Right Place, Right Time, Smart Guy

+

We leave through the rear bay doors while our uncle keeps on griping about being closed. Vestiges of his verbal tirade echo off the floor and walls all the way back from his office. That throaty motor outside is growling low, but the driver is now calling loud for attention. The mood Giles is in, he won’t like it if he gets it. From the strength of that engine, I figure it’s the cops. Some new guy poking around. One who Giles hasn’t paid off to look the other way.

+

Freddie rounds the corner of the shop first and stops dead. “Holy shit, would you look at that.”

+

I peek around the corner and catch a glimpse of a perfect ride idling, wisps of exhaust pouring from the twin pipes. The subtlest of ghosts. But it’s not the super snake that I focus on. It’s the six-foot-five, two-hundred-pound, ginger-bearded motherfucker banging on the shop door who’s caught my eye.

+

“Back inside.” I pull Freddie back out of sight. “That’s our guy,” I hiss.

+

“Whoa. No shit.” He takes another look. “Well hell, I believe he is.”

+

I fucked it up last time and I can’t let a second shot slip through my fingers. “Alright, let’s go take him.”

+

Freddie places a hand on my chest. “Not here, dingus, we’re on home turf. Besides, he’s come to us. If he really stole from Giles, there’s no way he’d be here. Let’s go see what he wants. Something’s missing here.”

+

We enter back through the bay door, but leave it open just in case. The shop has gone quiet, save for the impatient asshole’s pounding on the front door. “Get Giles,” Freddie says, “or he’ll just bust our balls for keeping him waiting. I’ll let the kid inside.”

+

Pisses me off that he’s giving orders, but I go. My brother’s always been better with the customers. A natural conversationalist. He tends to take point on all our jobs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing. I know he thinks I’m impulsive, but I’d call it something else – decisive. It was his indecisiveness that led me to pulling the trigger earlier. Yeah, I made a bad call, but also it was based on Giles’ intel. Shit happens, though, and I can fix this.

+

I open the door to Giles’ office to find him on the floor. One hand grips at his chest, painting his overalls with a black flower of oil and grease. A cigarette burns weakly in the other.

+

“Call… ’n ’mbul’nce… shithead,” he croaks. Never any fucking let up. But there’s a panic in his eyes I’ve seen before. A realization. Last face I saw wearing it is waiting in the trunk back there. Time’s finally up for our uncle, I reckon.

+

What a loss.

+

“Giles,” I say, and hunker down with him, “that thing the other ginger-nuts stole from you, was it a white cherry Mustang by any chance?”

+

“My car…” A glint of the old fury sparks behind the panic. “Get… fucking car…”

+

“You got it, boss,” I say, and slap him on the shoulder. “We’ll get that car, and then I’ll get right on that ambulance, too.”

+

He makes a choking noise and flails his spare hand at me, dropping the cigarette on the old stained carpet between us. I pick it up quick and grind it into the loaded ashtray on the corner of his desk. “You should quit these. Burn the whole place down, you’re not careful.”

+

I close the door behind me as if on a sleeping baby. From the shop, I hear my brother shmoozing the kid, telling him our uncle will be glad to do business with him. How little he knows, I think, and grin as I walk through to greet our new customer. Our first customer as owners of the place.

+

“Good looking car out there,” I say. “How can we help?”

+

My brother gives me a look, question marks in his eyes. I ignore him and offer a hand to the kid. It’s a weak shake. Soft hands. The kind of hands that don’t know how to change the oil, let alone maintain something as special as what he’s got.

+

Freddie takes ignorance in his stride. “Well, George says he wants to rip out the dash and put a whole new stereo system in there. Big subs. Maybe even update that paint job with a sick wrap.” He disguises his disgust well enough even I can barely detect it.

+

My first thought is to kill the kid, but that’d be impulsive, not decisive. And I’m actually glad Giles didn’t hear that said, it’d be the death of him.

+

“Big plans,” I say. The kid looks smug. Smug about casually defacing a thing of pure beauty. Pure beauty maybe worth as much as everything on wheels for a block around combined.

+

Which means he doesn’t know shit. So I add, “Kind of like teaching an old dog new tricks, though, isn’t it?”

+

Now he looks uncertain. “What?”

+

I pull a face. “Something that old? New lines are never going to lie well on that. You need a ride on the cutting edge.” I give Freddie a big plain honest look in the face. “Something new, right?”

+

I see the light go on. “My brother is absolutely bang on. George, let me show you something.” He guides the kid toward the back of the shop where we stash our recent inventory. Like the whole row of Japanese imports that came our way from a recent street racing bust.

+

“Why mess with that ’stang when one of these already has what you want?” He places a friendly hand on the kid’s shoulder. “For instance, that Mitsubishi Evo is all carbon fiber. Got an inline four-cylinder turbo. And an underbody LED kit.”

+

The kid whistles, ogling a Nissan Skyline. “What about this one?”

+

“That’s a 1996 GT-R R33. Inline-Six turbo. Nineteen-inch alloy wheels… high flow fuel injector, bucket seats with five-point harnesses… it’s quite the car.”

+

The way the kid is drooling over that Nissan I might need to get a mop. “Does it have the LEDs too?” he asks.

+

“Tell you what, George,” says Freddie, “you put the keys to that old Shelby in my hand, we’ll fit you up with our best set of lights, free of charge, and you can drive away in this beauty before the day is done. Even trade, what do you say?”

+

“You got yourself a fucking deal!” is what George says.

+

Freddie grins at me over George’s shoulder as the kid pumps his hand to seal it.

+

I give him two thumbs back, but really I’m thinking about all the clean up that’s left to do. Still got the poor sap in the Monte Carlo to drop off, and there’s no way we’ll fit Giles in the trunk there with him.

+

I look out at our new Mustang. And then I smile.

+

Maybe we can treat Giles to one last spin in his long lost wheels. Just for old time’s sake.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of American Hitsuzen on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Michael Bettendorf

+

+ + Author image of Michael Bettendorf + + + Michael Bettendorf (he/him) is a writer from the US Midwest. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Drabblecast, Sley House Press, and elsewhere. His debut experimental horror novel/gamebook Trve Cvlt was released by Tenebrous Press in September, 2024. Michael works in a high school library in Lincoln, NE - a place he believes is too strange to be a flyover state. Find him on Bluesky and www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com.

+

© Michael Bettendorf 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by Kelly - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-40/cruel-is-the-night-karo-hamalainen-review.html b/issue-40/cruel-is-the-night-karo-hamalainen-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bd7e9499 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-40/cruel-is-the-night-karo-hamalainen-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,325 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen

+

Bill Ryan

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen by +
+ + + + +

A + +s a reader, I find that reading translated literature can be a complicated process. This is largely due to the fact that I myself am sadly monolingual, so that when reading something translated from a foreign language into English, I have no choice but to take the book’s translator at their word. If I’m reading, say, a French novel in English, and the word “exacerbate” is used, I have no choice but to assume that “exacerbate” is the closest and best English equivalent to whatever the French word is.

+

Sometimes, translation can be an act of great imagination and artistry. Earlier this year, I read A Void by Georges Perec. Perec’s novel is famous for, among other things, never using the letter “e”. This French novel has been translated into English more than once, but the best known, and the one I read, was done by Gilbert Adair. As you can imagine, writing an entire novel in French without once using the most common letter in our shared alphabet poses unique problems for the English translator – the closest and best English equivalent to a given French word that doesn’t have an “e” in it may well have an “e” in it, so another word must be chosen. You get the idea. The point being that in the case of A Void, Gilbert Adair genuinely accomplished something.

+

I was suitably impressed by Adair’s achievement, but at other times I’ve read a novel in translation and thought that perhaps that translator didn’t possess the artistic flair the job would seem to me to require. Take, for example, the Finnish crime novel Cruel is the Night by Karo Hämäläinen. The premise of the book is this: four Finnish friends meet, after years apart, in the London home of one of them. The two men, Mikko and Robert, have known each other since they were children. Though diametrically opposed politically – even, as far as crusading journalist Mikko is concerned, ethically – the two men are close friends. Except that, very early in the novel, the reader learns that Mikko and his wife Veera made the trip from Finland to England to visit Robert and his wife Elise because Mikko plans to murder Robert. Veera doesn’t know this, but Mikko has brought strychnine with him, and has every intention of using it.

+

I’ll get to his motives, and the rest of the novel, in a minute. But first, I want to point out a particular sentence from Cruel is the Night that has puzzled and confounded me since I first read it. The novel is written in alternating first-person narratives – each of the four primary characters get their share of chapters, and to tell their sides of things. About halfway through the novel, Mikko, from lack of food, stress, fear of what he plans to do, and so on, becomes severely light-headed. Elise comforts him and offers him a caramel, which Mikko accepts, leading Hämäläinen to write this:

+
+

Sucking on the soft candy, I absorbed carbohydrates through the membranes of my mouth.

+

Ah. So that’s how it works.

+

Why Hämäläinen chose to explain part of the chemical process that is involved in eating food, I do not know, but I’d love to know if the original Finnish has been translated as precisely as it could have been; and if it wasn’t, what did Hämäläinen mean to say, if it was different? And is that sentence more the work of the author, Hämäläinen, or the translator, Owen Witesman?

+

I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. But if that line can be blamed on Witesman – and to some degree I believe it can – there is plenty more about Cruel is the Night that can be chalked up to Hämäläinen simply not being a very good novelist. Still, that caramel line, in addition to being pointless and weird, also shows an inability to distinguish between the kind of detail it’s necessary to include in a traditional narrative for the sake of verisimilitude, and the kind of detail that is not merely not needed but is also plainly stupid.

+

One of the things that drew me to Cruel is the Night is also the thing that most bewildered and disappointed me. The reader is told early on that of these four characters spending a night drinking and absorbing carbohydrates through the membranes of their mouths, only one will survive. We know going in that one murder is planned, but what in the world could happen to leave three of them dead? Darkly intriguing!

+

Well, in addition to the alternating first person chapters from Mikko, Veera, Robert, and Elise are very short third person chapters, from the point of view of the survivor the morning after this night of murderous chaos. Amazingly, though, in these chapters, the survivor’s gender is revealed. On page 29, out of 313:

+
+

The night was gentle. Rather than striking his face, it caressed and welcomed him as he stepped out of the [apartment building]. He didn’t deserve such a warm reception.

+

How the night can strike one’s face is a bit beyond me, but never mind. The point is that, for the vast majority of Cruel is the Night, the reader knows the sole survivor is either Mikko or Robert. I did wonder if this was a set-up of some kind, and that it would somehow turn out to be neither of them – I just couldn’t imagine Hämäläinen would want to narrow the mystery from four possibilities to two so soon – but as I read on I realized that, no, it was either Mikko or Robert. And since there had to be some note of dramatic irony in there somewhere, narrowing all those options down to just one was fairly simple.

+

A further disappointment came when it was revealed why any of this was happening. Initially, the reader gets the sense that the obnoxiously self-righteous Mikko wants to kill the obnoxiously arrogant Robert because of some irredeemable ethical trespass (Robert is a rich, and unethical, businessman). This would have been at least somewhat interesting. Unfortunately (for me, anyway, but of course tastes vary) it turns out that Mikko is having an affair with Elise, and Robert is having an affair with Veera. Nobody knows about the affairs of the others, but Mikko wants the young and beautiful Elise for himself, and also believes that Robert treats Elise abominably, and therefore wishes to save her.

+

Elise is another problem. She’s completely vapid, and is intended to be, but the writing of her narrated chapters is often absurd. Her first chapter ends like this:

+
+

The flowers were cheery.

+

I smelled them.

+

They were white.

+

In other words, Elise is just a cartoon character. Her chapters are filled with this sort of thing. She doesn’t read as a person in danger, but rather as someone whom Hämäläinen will eventually label “dead” and then stop writing about her.

+

There’s some discussion of pop culture in Cruel is the Night, culture that is both Finnish and otherwise, and Hämäläinen is no better here than elsewhere. Again, this is probably just a matter of taste, but circumstantial evidence suggests that one of the inspirations for Hämäläinen to write this – his first and so far only novel – was Jo Nesbø, the globally best-selling Norwegian author of the series of crime novels about investigator Harry Hole. I’ve read Nesbø’s novel The Snowman, in which, at one point, Hole, quite wearyingly and insultingly, instructs his girlfriend on the art of cinema, and the film he chooses as an example of great filmic art is Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction, which nearly made me toss that book aside, unfinished.

+

I promise that I have nothing against Scandinavia or its people. But here, the anxiety of influence, transferred from Nesbø to Hämäläinen, could not be less interesting, or worth one’s time to examine. For this sort of thing to generate anything meaningful, then somebody – the influenced or the influencer – has to be good at writing novels. Otherwise you’re left with cliché, bad plotting, characters that behave wildly only because the writer needs them to. For the sake, I believe, of making Cruel is the Night in part a black comedy, the story eventually devolves into a kind of murder farce, with Mikko’s vial of strychnine, and Robert’s several vials of cyanide, which he bought for no good reason, bouncing around the apartment in a kind of “who’s got the poison?” comic mayhem. None of it works, it’s all horribly silly, empty of suspense and forward momentum.

+

The plotting and character problems inherent in Cruel is the Night must be the fault of Hämäläinen. However, as this is a work of translation, the blame for prose itself, which is dull, determined to crank up the suspense levels without displaying any sign that anyone involved has a knack for it, must be distributed evenly among both Hämäläinen and Witesman. Translation is an art, and an artist must be called upon to do the job.

+

There is something savagely appealing about the premise of Cruel is the Night. Four people meeting, arguing, plotting against each other, over the course of one evening that leaves three of them dead. Good idea. The thing is, if the execution is poor, the premise no longer matters.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.html b/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4bdd4b95 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-40/crunch-thump-thump.html @@ -0,0 +1,329 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Crunch Thump Thump — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Crunch Thump Thump

+

P. R. O’Leary

+ +
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+ Story image for Crunch Thump Thump by +
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I + +t’s funny how after only a five-minute drive from downtown you are in the dark. The restaurant I just left had QR codes for their digital menus, my coworkers and I had made our reservations through a website, and I had reserved a spot in the only parking deck in town via an app. But five minutes away, there weren’t even streetlights. Just a narrow and twisty road fenced in by tall pines. I know “digital divide” isn’t the right term, but it is the one that jumps to mind. It felt like pulling my car off of the main street and away from town was a Thelma and Louise style leap into a great unknown.

+

For me though, it was quite known, since I live, like most people in this area do, in the stretched-out network of through-roads that connect one town center to the next. I have driven this particular route many times, which was good, because the Girl’s Night buzz of a sensible amount of alcohol and gossipy camaraderie had me a little hyped and distracted. But my gray Civic was a trusty, knowing steed and I angled it up and down the hills towards the mountainside development and the small house my boyfriend and I shared.

+

Most of the intersections I passed were unmarked. The only signposts pointed back the way I came, governmental signage only caring about directing people to the town center and not away from it. It didn’t bother me because my own guidepost towards home was a long straight-away several miles ahead, and a rare streetlamp before a curve that marked the entrance to Gravel Road. One not literally made of gravel, luckily, but the one where I lived.

+

No other vehicles this time of night. The radio was off. Sometimes I liked to drive in silence, especially after an evening out, so all I heard was engine noise and the flow of the air past my open window.

+

I took my foot off the gas to negotiate a rise in the road, and that’s when I saw the figure at the bottom of the decline, walking along the shoulder. My headlights gave me a good view. Big brown winter coat, hood covering their head, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. They were walking against traffic as the law dictates, as far over the shoulder as possible. A good citizen. Their head tilted up when my headlights caught them, but they made no other sign. Just a person out walking. Enjoying the night air.

+

It was so easy for me. There was no adrenaline. No crazed compulsion. An intentional thought didn’t even enter my head. I felt like I was just obeying normal traffic patterns. Driving on autopilot. I put my foot on the gas, pushed the car back up to cruising speed and angled it into the oncoming lane. No car was oncoming. I felt no sense of danger or distress. I just drove the vehicle towards the person walking on the side of the road.

+

There is a freeze frame image in my mind of what happened next. It was a man. He had a beard. A ruddy nose below surprised eyes. Thick black hair. About my age. His clothes were nice, good winter gear. His hands were coming out of his pockets, the shine of a ring on one finger. My high beams illuminated his realization of what was happening. His body started to shift in panic. Attempting to dodge or jump.

+

The car hit him as he moved to the side. I felt the force of impact against fender and hood and turned the wheel back towards the right side of the road, scooping him away from the shoulder like my car was a giant spoon. Then he slid down, his body disappeared under the car, and first the front then the back of the car lurched upward as I drove over him with both axles.

+

He didn’t make a sound. No scream. No cry of pain. Nothing. I continued to drive, glancing into the rearview mirror. The body was lying across the white line separating the road and shoulder. A pile of misshapen cloth illuminated red by my taillights. Unmoving.

+

The whole thing took only a few seconds. I didn’t feel exhilarated or horrified. This was never something I had done before, but I didn’t particularly feel surprised by my action. It just… happened.

+

I drove calmly the next few miles, alone on the blacktop, finally hitting the straightaway and the lone streetlamp that signaled home. A half mile down Gravel Road, after passing a few of the neighborhood houses, I pulled into our driveway.

+

The house was shaded from nearby neighbors, less by the big pines, which had been cleared out on this street, than by a few tall ornamental bushes. Raggedy looking things that my boyfriend promised he would spruce up, which I ribbed him about every few weeks.

+

With the engine off there weren’t many sounds besides various entomological utterances emanating from the forest and the faint barking of a dog somewhere. I opened the door, feet on the asphalt as I exited. The small light above the front porch finally detected motion and flashed on.

+

The dog stopped barking. I walked out to the street, heels clicking in the silence. Back the way I came, country road 571 was no longer visible. I didn’t expect to see anything. This wasn’t a horror movie. Five miles hence, the crawling body of the man I hit would not be making its way towards me. He was dead. I knew it as soon as I heard the crunch thump thump.

+

I don’t know why exactly I looked. Maybe to see if anyone had noticed anything. Silence. Stillness. No cars driving by. No panic in me.

+

I walked back to the car, looking at its hood and tires and fender. Maybe two tons of metal and plastic versus maybe two hundred pounds of flesh and bone. The result, a small dent in the front next to the headlight, a spider web crack through the headlight itself. More obvious, though, was the streak of blood that ran from the headlight down below the car. Like a giant paintbrush had placed a stroke of red there.

+

The back tire had more blood. On the black rubber it looked like water except the pads of my fingers were crimson after touching it. Stuck in the tire treads was what looked like a white pebble. I bent closer, moved the shadow of my head away from the moonlight and pried it out with my manicured nails. A tooth. Or a piece of one. A clump of black hair stuck to the wheel archlike a dead rodent. With my free hand I tugged until it peeled off like it was glued to the metal.

+

A fistful of hair, a tooth between my fingers, I walked back to the street and tossed them into a nearby sewer drain. I was wondering what I should use to clean up the blood when I felt a drop on my arm. The rumble of thunder in the distance. Heavier darkness forming overhead. The moon and stars disappearing behind storm clouds.

+

Next to the front porch was a garbage can full of paper recycling. I found a week’s worth of circulars for the local supermarket and balled one up. By the time I walked back to the car the rain was starting to come down. I wiped at the front of the car, the hood, the headlights. The tires. The paper growing wet and red in my hand. I went back for a second one, then a third. Afterwards, I dumped the bloody clumps in the same storm drain and rinsed my hands in the torrent of water now rushing down into the grate.

+

Before I went back into the house I paused on the porch and took one last look at the car. I could barely see the cracked headlight and the small dent. To anyone else, it would just look like any other regularly used, aging car. Nothing unusual.

+

Inside, I took off my now wet clothes and put them in the laundry. I took a hot shower, scrubbing the last marks of blood out from under my fingernails, everything washing off me and down into the drain. Afterwards, warm and dry in comfortable pajamas, I headed to bed.

+

My boyfriend was asleep. I could hear his soft breaths when I went into the bedroom. I slipped under the covers, kissed his forehead and pulled his arm over me. He mumbled something that sounded like he was asking how my night was.

+

Nothing special. I said. Nothing special.

+

Then I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Crunch Thump Thump on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

P. R. O’Leary

+

+ + Author image of P. R. O’Leary + + + P. R. O’Leary writes dark stories tinged with humor, or humorous stories tinged with darkness. Dozens of his pieces have been published all over the world. You can find more information on his LinkTree, and you can find him at his geodesic dome in central New Jersey.

+

© P. R. O’Leary 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by Vyacheslav Bobin - many thanks!

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-40/downsizing.html b/issue-40/downsizing.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..be7adf97 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-40/downsizing.html @@ -0,0 +1,418 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Downsizing — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Downsizing

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Jess Simms

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W + +e regretted having to let Janice go. She’d been with us since our early days, before the SaaS rebrand, the mobile app, the cloud-based automation platform. Top-notch talent, we’d always thought, but Technology had found deleted messages she’d sent to EcoTec in his last security audit. Clearly, she was the leak we’d been searching for. We had no choice but to fire her, he said.

+

Finance nodded along like it was obvious. The CEO tapped his stylus on his tablet in a pensive rhythm. Operations scowled, knowing he’d be the one to do the firing. Only Marketing argued, but he would; he’d always had a thing for Janice. We knew that was the real reason he said, “That’s a flimsy reason to fire our best developer six weeks before launch.”

+

“One of the coders saw her having coffee with their COO last Thursday,” Finance said.

+

Marketing said, “Maybe they’re headhunting her.”

+

“Still violates the non-compete.”

+

“Only if she takes their offer.”

+

“Will the new group of freelancers be up to speed by Friday?” the CEO said. Behind him, through the conference room’s glass walls, we watched our team trickling in. The early birds were already gathered by the whiteboard, a larger group awaiting their turn at the coffee station.

+

Technology said, “They should be.”

+

“We’ll fire her then.” The CEO stood and the rest of us followed. Janice arrived as we were coming out of the conference room. She’d brought the team maple bacon chai cronuts from the pop-up bakery across the street. We felt a bit guilty, given the morning’s conversation, but it would have been rude not to take one. The CEO ate two in a gesture of magnanimity.

+

It was a hectic standup. There were more tasks left in the backlog than we’d hoped to have six weeks out. The user interface was still in wireframes, the command code for the robots crawling with bugs, and we were way behind on production of the prototype printers for Professional+ subscribers. Though that one, at least, was a good problem. The sales team had exceeded expectations, nearly doubling our projections, as Marketing mentioned every chance he got. We’d told our investors they were buying in to the next Amazon and we’d live up to that promise, if we met that demand. If we didn’t, Janice wouldn’t be the only former employee dusting off their resume.

+

Either way, none of us would be going home before the sun sank, not tonight or most nights until nVent launched. Except for Janice, of course, on Friday, when she’d be escorted out by security. We eyed her as we outlined objectives, reassessed timelines, broke down roadblocks into their actionable tasks. She seemed to take it as a compliment when we announced that she’d be moving to the front-end design team. And if that was how she heard it, who were we to take that from her?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +On Monday mornings we visited the main production facility, after we’d gotten the team started. Operations drove, as always, the CEO in the passenger seat. Finance was always relegated to the middle rear as the most recent addition to the c-suite, hired last year on the advice of our business coach, who said a dedicated financial executive would make us more attractive to investors. Finance had taken the hazing in good stride at first. Now he rode with elbows poised at kidney level for when Technology or Marketing leaned too far into his personal space.

+

The production facility was outside the city, along a winding stretch of highway where billboards outnumbered buildings. We discussed who should replace Janice during the drive. Finance suggested one of the freelancers. Technology and Marketing met eyes and rolled them behind his back; freelancers looked at permanent job offers the way a slug would eye a pile of salt. But the rest of us didn’t expect Finance to understand that. We settled on an internal promotion and Finance lapsed into surly silence at having his suggestion so thoroughly rejected.

+

The production facility was nondescript. Gray prefab siding, gravel parking lot, no sign. The opposite of the office’s chic décor and aggressive branding. The CEO swiped his ID card and we followed him into the high-ceilinged interior. The main room was snaked by assembly lines. Wheeled, multi-armed robots stood at regular intervals along them, a few dozen in total. Most had come off of those same lines within the past week. They still had the shiny look of new things, domed heads and conical bodies reflecting the overhead fluorescents. The human workers supervised from grate-floored walkways ringing the outer walls. A precautionary measure after the previous week’s incident, when a software update had made the automated workforce go haywire. But the robots seemed to be behaving today, their grasping arms smoothly assembling the parts – fabricated mere minutes before by the room-sized 3D printers further back in the facility – into components for more robots, to be shipped out to the dozen other production facilities strategically placed across the United States.

+

The facility’s Foreman made his way down to greet us. He shook each of our hands in turn and called us all boss, like he always did. We’d wondered whether it was a sign of respect or subtle insubordination. Finance’s opinions on the matter were clear; his mouth tightened like a miser’s pursestrings every time he heard it.

+

The Foreman said, “I talked to Lee and Jerry. They’re both out of the hospital. Jerry’s arm’s gonna have him out for a minute, but Lee thinks he’ll be back by Wednesday.”

+

Operations thought that was good news because they wouldn’t need to hire. Finance thought that was good news because it probably meant they wouldn’t sue.

+

“Are we still on schedule?” Technology asked.

+

The Foreman said, “Ahead of it, if anything. Should have the whole automated workforce ready by Friday.”

+

“And you’re doing QA?” Faster wasn’t always better; Technology had learned that the hard way.

+

The Foreman pointed toward the lines. “That one on Belt Three, second from the left – first one off the line this morning and look at it go, now.” We turned to watch it insert sensors into a dome head identical to its own. The Foreman shook his head, eyes round with wonder. “Workers that make their own replacements. Never thought I’d see the day.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e left the facility with a positive vibe that carried us the whole way through the week. We’d known we had a good business model. Full vertical integration with minimal human intervention; the idea practically sold itself. It was only after our second launch delay that we started to question whether we could pull it off, and by then we were in far too deep to back out. Now we could see the finish line and each success bolstered our confidence. The product design interface was in beta testing by Tuesday. Wednesday, three more satellite facilities were fully staffed and operational. Thursday, a patch to the autonomous workforce’s task prioritization algorithm went off without a hitch.

+

Friday – the day she was supposed to be fired – Janice no-call no-showed.

+

When she hadn’t shown up by the end of standup, we retreated to the conference room for a discussion. The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. But in the end, we decided, she’d simply spared us the need to fire her. At least, that was as far as our conversation got before one of the developers poked his head in and told us the Rainiers were waiting in the executive office.

+

If the Rainiers were here, Janice could wait.

+

The CEO was first out the door. The rest of us fell in behind him, through the bustling workroom and to the office on its far side. Charlie Rainier had taken the CEO’s seat behind the desk, his brother Dave in the massaging recliner in the corner. Their dark three-piece suits and chunky gold jewelry were at odds with the tech wardrobe of tie-less button-ups, but in a sense Charlier Rainier had a right to act like he owned the place. His money was the only reason the company still existed. We’d burned through our Seed and Series A funds, and when we’d circled back for a Series B no one else wanted to bite. Even the Rainiers hadn’t gone all-in. Their funds were a loan. One Charlie had already expressed eagerness to have repaid.

+

The Rainiers weren’t quite the mafia. We’d known, going in, that they invested in some questionable areas. It was part of the reason we’d agreed to the loan arrangement. We could cut ties once we paid them back. No risk of their dealings tainting our image. Except our initial timelines had been optimistic. A three-month launch delay wasn’t that bad, by tech startup standards, but that hadn’t been a satisfactory answer for Charlie.

+

Charlie’s look assessed our value and found it lacking. In the corner, Dave poked the massage controls then reclined, ankles casually crossed. Dave always came to these meetings but rarely contributed more than witty remarks. We’d speculated – out of their hearing – about why Charlie kept Dave around. Marketing thought comic relief, to set people at ease. Technology thought it was a distraction, like how a magician waves one hand so people don’t watch the other.

+

“I didn’t know we had a meeting today,” the CEO said. He took one of the two chairs facing the desk. Marketing eyed the other but Finance was faster, striding to it with an air of defiance. The rest of us folded our arms like we’d always planned to stand.

+

“The amount you’re in for, we have meetings whenever I feel like it,” Charlie said. He dug his thick fingers in his jacket pocket, pulling out a slim cigar and a book of matches.

+

The CEO said, “We don’t smoke in here.”

+

“You don’t say.” Charlie stuck the cigar between his lips. Struck a match. From the corner, Dave barked a laugh that Charlie silenced with a glare. Operations opened a window, then pulled the plate from under the potted cactus on the sill and put it on the desk at Charlie’s elbow. The CEO said, “When we launch in five weeks—”

+

“Will you?” Charlie interrupted.

+

“Yes. Absolutely. Most of our automated workforce is already deployed and our pre-subscriber count—”

+

“Do pre-subscribers pay?”

+

“The first month as a deposit. We’re using a subscription model, you see, and the way it works is there are three tiers that—”

+

“So you don’t have my money yet,” Charlie said.

+

The CEO’s jaw clenched. “No. Not yet.”

+

Charlie spun the cigar tip slowly against the plate. “Big team you guys got out there.”

+

The CEO said, “A lot are freelancers.”

+

“Those cost more than employees, don’t they?”

+

“In the short-term, but it’s cheaper long-run. A lot of startups use them.”

+

“How many of those are still around after five years?”

+

Dave barked a laugh. “Not many, Charlie.”

+

Charlie said, “And I hear you’ve got competitors already sniffing around your territory. You’re not worried about these freelancers running to them with your secrets?”

+

We were more worried that Charlie knew EcoTec was eying our IP but we tried to keep that close to our vests. The CEO said, “They’ll be with us through launch and by then it won’t be an issue. We’ll still be first to market. Trust me – you’ll get your money back. Maybe a bit later than we thought at first, but it’ll happen.”

+

Charlie’s cigar flared orange. He released a leisurely smoke plume then said, “We made a simple deal. One I thought big businessmen like yourself would understand. I loan you money, you pay it back. On the date we agree to. Not when it’s convenient for you.”

+

Charlie rested the cigar in the planter tray and leaned his elbows on the desk, fists together. He never looked more like a mobster than when he smiled. “Good news for you boys is I believe in second chances. So here’s the new deal. Either I walk out of this office with my money, or we’re gonna find you another way to contribute.”

+

Finance went paler than usual. The CEO was outwardly stoic but we knew his tells. That twitching vein above his left eyebrow. The tap tap of his right index finger on the chair arm. He said, “You know the first one’s impossible.”

+

“Well, then. Welcome to the team.” Charlie shifted the cigar to the corner of his mouth. He stuck his beringed hand out not quite halfway, so the CEO had to stand and lean to shake it. We bristled but what could we do except swallow the disrespect and listen as Charlie said, “Now let me tell you what you boys are gonna do for us.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e didn’t argue until after the Rainiers left. The CEO scraped ash into the trash while the rest of us found seats: Technology and Finance on the desk, Marketing behind it, Operations slumped awkwardly into the still-reclined massage chair. We didn’t meet eyes as we talked.

+

“How do you even launder money?” Operations asked. “I mean there are systems involved, right? And if we fuck up we can’t just dip back in and tweak the code. We’ll trip some fraud detection algorithm and next thing we know the office is swarming in FBI.”

+

Marketing groaned. “That’d be death for the brand. A whiff we’re doing anything illegal and we’re toast.”

+

Technology said, “So we’re fucked either way, basically.”

+

“No, we’re not,” Finance said. Soft, like he’d surprised himself by speaking. Then his jaw firmed. “I can do it. I’ve done it before.”

+

We had the questions you’d expect. When, and why, and for who. But Finance said it wasn’t important. That was all we got out of him before the phone rang. It was the production facility Foreman. The CEO put it on speaker.

+

“I think you’d better come down here, Boss,” he said.

+

“What’s the problem?” the CEO asked.

+

The Foreman said, “It’s… there’s just something you’ve gotta see.”

+

In the SUV, we waited for Finance to pick up the thread and explain himself. When he didn’t, we made the long drive in silence.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he gravel lot outside the production facility was nearly empty, a single pickup truck parked near the doors. Inside, no people watched from the walkway. The robots puttered along, unconcerned with the lack of supervision. The Foreman blustered out from the back wiping his hands on an oily rag, his shirt stained and rumpled. We’d never seen him flustered. Our guts churned with sympathetic anxiety.

+

“I told the daytime team we had a chemical leak, sent them home early,” the Foreman said. “That gives us some time to figure out what to do with her.”

+

The her was a corpse. The Foreman found her in one of the plastics extruder vats. The pump had seized up so he’d drained the tank to clean it and found her stuck against the grate. He’d called us then started searching around, discovered her phone on the ground. She’d been taking pictures, was what the Foreman figured. Probably she climbed up the tubes on the outside of the tank but lost her grip, trying to hold on one-handed. And we knew, even before he passed the phone to Operations, that it must be Janice.

+

“Where is she now?” the CEO asked.

+

The Foreman said, “Still in the tank. I didn’t want to touch anything until I talked to you.”

+

We walked with him past the clanking assembly lines. There was a chemical tang in the air in the extruder room, not the usual hot plastic smell but raw, antiseptic. The Foreman had propped a ladder up against the drained tank. We climbed up one by one to peer down and over at Janice coated in the plastic, her face frozen in surprise.

+

The right thing to do, of course, would be to call the police. Report an accident. There would be security camera footage that showed her breaking in, scaling the tank. Clearly we weren’t liable. But now didn’t seem the best time to draw law enforcement attention and – as Marketing reminded us – the general public didn’t always wait for facts to make a judgment. Plus there’d be questions. Why she’d broken in. What she was photographing. We could avoid all of that if we disposed of her body quietly. The question was how. Charlie Rainier probably knew the answer but we weren’t exactly in the position to call in a favor.

+

“You could activate the tank cleaners,” the Foreman said. We’d forgotten he was there, so deep in our debate, and we startled, staring at him. He shrugged. “It ain’t the company’s fault, what she did, like you said. Anyway I like working here. You all take good care of me.”

+

Whatever his motivation, it was a good suggestion. Between the chemicals and the heat, the tank cleaning cycle reduced Janice’s body to a pile of bone fragments. We emptied them into a trash bag that we took with us when we left. We weren’t quite sure what we were going to do with it. But we were damn sure the Foreman was getting a raise.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e ended up tossing Janice’s bones into the dumpster of a fast food place along the highway. An undignified end but, as we kept telling each other, she’d done this to herself. The team noted her absence Monday morning. We told them HR had reached out, muttered the right phrases of concern. But she’d been putting in long hours, we said; she was far from the first person to burn out in the late stages of the development lifecycle.

+

Dave Rainier showed up on Wednesday to liaise with Finance on the new money laundering side of our operations. It was the first time any of us had seen the younger Rainier on his own. The pair of them holed up in the executive office and the rest of us distracted ourselves with work to keep from frowning at the office door, wondering what message Charlie was sending, having his brother come alone.

+

Time lost meaning at this stage of a project. The long hours blurred the days together. Then we blinked and, poof, it was two weeks to launch and we were on schedule. Interfaces beta tested. Printer production on track with subscriber counts. Finance excelled at the money laundering, apparently, but we tried not to think too much about that. Until the day he emerged from his meeting with Dave Rainier and rounded us up in the conference room.

+

“They don’t plan to stop,” Finance said. “Dave was just talking about upping how much we clean for them. He’s already planning ahead to next year.”

+

Marketing cursed. The CEO’s jaw clenched. Operations sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. We’d considered this possibility – Charlie had been vague when we asked about timelines – but we had hoped this would be temporary. Just until we paid the loan back. It was deflating to have that bubble burst. No matter how much success we gained, we would always be one stupid mistake away from losing everything.

+

“What happened to Janice… could it be replicated?” It was Operations who voiced the question but it had been in all of our minds. The hardest part, we thought, would be getting Charlie there. But we were an agile team, adept at strategic planning. We’d solved bigger challenges on the path to launch. This was just one more glitch to debug.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +e stayed after the team left to plan. The first challenge was ensuring Charlie came alone. There would be too many variables if he brought Dave. Luckily, Finance had learned a bit about Dave’s habits, knew he spent two hours every Thursday night in an isolation tank. His unplug time, he called it; he always turned his phone off.

+

The next challenge was ensuring the facility would be empty, but the Foreman’s cover for Janice’s removal proved a good excuse. We told the team we’d scheduled a maintenance check-up. Maybe a needless lie; once we said they’d get a paid night off no one seemed too interested in why.

+

Thursday night – eight days before the launch – the CEO called Charlie and told him: we have a problem. It was our leak, he said; she’d gotten herself killed trying to steal our secrets. He started to describe the scene we’d discovered a few weeks prior but Charlie cut him off, said he’d meet us there in twenty minutes. We paced inside the door until his Cadillac pulled up. We let Charlie in and he took in the empty walkways, the robots working the lines. His nose twitched like he smelled bullshit. The CEO started to give him the tour but Charlie cut him off.

+

“I don’t got all night,” he said. “Where’s this body of yours?”

+

We walked him back, past the metal extruder room. The window into it was three-layer glass and we could still feel the heat as we passed it. Inside, molten metal flowed in vats. Charlie twitched an eyebrow, said, “Looks like that’d burn a body up. Why not throw her in there?”

+

It was a question we hadn’t prepared for. Technology was quick on his feet, ready with words like contamination and structural integrity that made Charlie wave him off.

+

We’d propped the ladder back up against the tank, the hatch open like an invitation. Finance and the CEO made a show of holding the ladder for Charlie to climb up. Technology pulled out his phone like checking the time. A few taps and one of the robots rolled into the room, its wheels inaudible over the low rumble of the extruder. It charged full-speed at the ladder’s base. Charlie’s eyes went wide and he toppled – but not the whole way in. His arm shot out, gripping the edge of the tank as the ladder clattered to the ground. The robot wheeled through, spun around, then disappeared back out the same door it had entered.

+

“Motherfucker!” Charlie shouted. He eyed the ground, some ten feet below his dangling loafers. The fall might hurt but wouldn’t kill him. We met eyes, mentally switched tracks to plan B while Charlie ranted, “What the fuck kind of operation are you running here? Fucking homicidal robots rolling around the place?”

+

While Charlie shouted at us to pick up that goddamn ladder before he broke an ankle – interspersed with his intention to turn that fucking robot into scrap – we turned and left.

+

And maybe Charlie heard us activate the latch, locking him in. Surely he heard the revving-up hum of the decontamination system, saw the white clouds billowing from the vents. Probably the flashing red lights and blare of alarms told him he was in trouble even before his eyes started burning. But we didn’t see any of that. We followed the CEO straight through the assembly line floor and out the front door. It was a peaceful night. The air was cool, fragrant from the pines ringing the parking lot. We breathed deep, savoring the smell of life.

+

It took four hours to air out the room after the decontamination. We drove Charlie’s Cadillac back to his office then passed the time reviewing launch day announcements, requesting last edits on the marketing deliverables. When the door locks released we went in to find Charlie with his limbs curled like a dead spider, swollen tongue jutting from his darkened lips.

+

There was more of Charlie left to dispose of than we’d hoped but on the plus side we wouldn’t need to shut the line down to drain the tanks. And Charlie had given us a parting gift. His offhand comment when passing the metal extruder lingered in our minds; all of the backup methods we’d brainstormed to dispose of him had been far messier.

+

At Technology’s orders, two robots veered from the line. They hoisted Charlie between them and carried him into the metal fabrication room. Technology hadn’t been completely bullshitting when he mentioned contamination. There was a slight risk, but it should be dispersed enough, he said, that the parts produced from this vat wouldn’t be compromised. Charlie would become screws and bolts, his cells worked into reinforcing beams and corner brackets. The important part was: no one would find him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he disappearance of somebody like Charlie Rainier doesn’t go unnoticed. But we weren’t the only ones who owed the Rainiers money, and the police didn’t know we were the last ones to see him alive. We were questioned and monitored but never accused. Honestly, we were too busy with the launch to worry about it much. nVent was a breakout hit. By the time things calmed down enough for us to step back and take a breath, the police had already moved on.

+

But we hadn’t fooled everyone. At our next facility tour, the Foreman asked about the decontamination cycle with a knowing look, doubting our claim we’d activated it by accident. And Dave – Dave knew. Luckily, we weren’t the only ones who’d been under Charlie’s thumb, and Dave might have benefitted from his death more than anyone. The risk-reward just wasn’t there for private lending these days, he said. His vision for Rainier Investments was venture capital. Charlie had never been on-board but now the company was Dave’s and he grew into his new role at its helm. He still wore a smirk but its edges had sharpened, and he’d abandoned quippy comments in favor of blunt honesty. Everything, he told us, had a price. The price of Charlie’s life, apparently – and Dave’s silence, and an end to our creative accounting – was five hundred grand added to our balance plus 5% of the company’s shares when we had our IPO in the fall, which now seemed guaranteed to make a killing.

+

It wasn’t a bad deal all things considered, we decided. Our trail of failures had taught us that sometimes a small loss paved the way to a bigger win. If anything, Finance said, we should be happy we’d reached the point we could call half a mil a small loss.

+

“You’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” he said, or some other platitude, and we nodded along, half listening, already thinking ahead to what was next.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Downsizing on Facebook.

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+

Jess Simms

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+ + Author image of Jess Simms + + + Jess Simms is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, PA, where they’re a co-founder of Scribble House and the managing editor of After Happy Hour Review. They are the author of the flash fiction chapbook Cryptid Bits (Last-Picked Books, 2024) and the micro-chap Shapeshifter Diaries (Rinky Dink Press, 2023). Their short fiction has been published in HOOT Online, SLAB, and MockingOwl Roost, among other publications. You can find them online at jesssimms.com.

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© Jess Simms 2024 All Rights Reserved

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The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by cottonbro studio, Angelina Sarycheva, and Andrea Piacquadio - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Editorial

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Welcome to the second annual All Crime issue of Mythaxis! Not only that, but the capstone issue of my fifth year as editor of the zine, a fact that gives me no small flicker of pride.

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This time around we aim to give you a bit of everything. We have stories ranging from the modern to the classic mode, with Jess Simms’ cut-throat corporate hostilities at one extreme and Arlen Feldman’s escapades on the carnival circuit at the other. We arguably experiment with form: Michael Betterndorf’s quartet of character studies tells a tetraptych tale; David Sheskin’s break-neck bulletin reduces people to their base statistics and serves them up as a monoparagraphic mélange. And courtesy of Kirk Bueckert and P.R. O’Leary we have, respectively, a monster that surely cannot really be and the possibility of monstrousness we all have the potential to embody.

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Add to this a smattering of opinion, with Bill Ryan’s latest longform essay and my own short reviews of other crime fic published around the web in 2024, and I’m sure you’ll find something to keep your mind and hands off killing the in-laws during this festive season! So let me hold you back no more (or, as the case may be, begin) – go forth and enjoy!

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…

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…oh, hmm, hello, well, since you’re still here: I’m going to break with untold years of Mythaxis tradition and engage in a little shameless self-promotion. And the reason? Well, almost exactly one month ago, I learned that my first dedicated crime short story had been accepted into the forthcoming anthology Motives Unknown, featuring twelve stories by authors with a connection to the north of England. It’s to be released by plucky indie publishers Dead Ink Books in May 2025, and you can check out the cover (and maybe even order a copy) here. I’m sure I wouldn’t be so crass as to review my own work in next year’s crime-fic round up…

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…well, reasonably sure.

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Anyway, I love crime writing, and it’s as much a privilege to add to what’s out there personally as it is to present to you the pieces in this very issue by our talented contributors. So enough from me, and over to them!

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 40 – Thanks and Salutations! +‘When it’s late at night – and you’re roaming around because you can’t get to sleep – the slightest sound may take on a scary quality. You imagine things. Things you’d never think of – if you weren’t so tired and edgy. But why – WHY – you ask yourself, are you so jumpy and wide awake? Could it be the coffee you had?’ Yes, once more our all-crime cover image is from a 1948 ad for decaffeinated Sanka Coffee painted by Fritz Siebel. Unfortunately, that makes us seventy-six years too late to enjoy the Hilarious NEW Sanka Coffee Show – starring funster Danny Thomas – according to the copy…

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Mythaxis

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Winter 2024

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+ Jess Simms +

Downsizing

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Startups are the crucible of the modern business world, where futures are forged, fortunes are made and lost, careers take off or go down in flames, and pressure can be both the fuel and the fire. Jess Simms takes us to another fledgling C-suite, the place where the hard decisions have to be made. You know, you can't spell ‘executive’ without… breaking a few eggs.

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The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick

+ David Sheskin +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick by + + + +

Sometimes you hear the voice of a story in your head as you're reading. Never was there a stronger example of that magic than David Sheskin's short, sly, wall-of-text yarn, which packs more into a piece of flash fiction than words have any right to. For more evidence, I give you our audio version: passed from editor to producer with narry a note, and it sounds exactly the way I imagined it.

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The Amazing Mermaid

+ Arlen Feldman +
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From classic greats like Freaks and Nightmare Alley we get the enticing notion of the travelling carnival as a home to the abandoned, the desperate, the reviled, the unloved: a found family of outsiders, who in turn treat as outsiders the punters they lure in with promises of salacious thrills. Arlen Feldmen mines these rich depths to strike a tragic vein, as one person’s opportunity to build a new life only leaves ’em wanting more…

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Crunch Thump Thump

+ P. R. O’Leary +
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When your friend stands at the cliff’s edge, do you ever feel the echo of an urge to push, though you never would? When the wedding gets to ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ are you tempted to raise your voice, even if you have no reason to? Could be everyone experiences something like that at a point in their life – P. R. O’Leary maybe more often than many.

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American Hitsuzen

+ Michael Bettendorf +
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American creatives… always slotting the word ‘American’ into their titles. Psycho. Graffiti. Hustle. Idiot. Why do they do it? We’ll never know. And in this case? Well, it turns out ‘hitsuzen’ is a Japanese term more or less meaning ‘according to a plan’. So when Michael Bettendorf calls this ‘American Hitsuzen’, is he saying…? No. No, he couldn’t be.

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Wendigo

+ Kirk Bueckert +
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One of the things the editor enjoys in a good horror story is uncertainty regarding the how real the horror is. Was Jack Torrance haunted by the Overlook Hotel, or merely an unstable man descending into murderous psychopathy? Stripped of its supernatural trappings The Shining would be a crime story - and here Kirk Bueckert gives us a similarly borderline case study to consider.

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Cruel is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen

+ Bill Ryan +
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Bill Ryan’s biannual sojourn returns him to these shores to receive a seasonally warm welcome, once again to expose us to his thoughts on an example of crime novel writing – or should that be ‘criminal’? Best let him decide.

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Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024

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Bringing both our issue and the year to a resounding close, it is the editor’s pleasure to introduce a number more crime stories published elsewhere in 2024 to the reader’s attention. So, if the six tales you’ve found here have but whet your appetite, let’s make it an even dozen with four firm recommendations and a couple of not-bads!

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Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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F + +irst of our four bonus suggestions is Your Hometown Station: A Vermont Radio Mystery by Nikki Knight. It’s a characterful piece narrated by a small town deejay during a difficult winter, whose regular programming is interrupted by an automated emergency broadcast to the locals of a flood warning. In keeping with their community service role, our protagonist is able to go the extra mile due to their familiarity with the region, personalising the (ironically) rather dry alert with valuable detail that transforms the merely informative to potentially life saving.

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Perhaps you’re still waiting for the genre of the day to raise its head. Well, Your Hometown Station does pay its dues, but perhaps appropriately it threatens to be very easy to miss, the kind of thing that goes unnoticed should one look the other way, by distraction or intent. Not here though: we get the cosy resolution the characters and the story both deserve. It appears in the webzine Tough, which since March of this year is based at redneck-press.blogspot.com. More on them later.

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Orbit-sml ><

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I + + heard of Zach Dundas a few years ago as part of the team behind the impressive true crime podcast Death in the West. Their first season focused on the brutal 1917 murder of union man Frank Little in the hard Montana mining town of Butte, which inspired one of crime fiction’s iconic novels, Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest. The murder, I mean, not the podcast.

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Anyway, Dundas’s story is Some Form of Promotion, and like our own The Amazing Mermaid it harks back to the ancient days of the United States of America (sometime in the early-to-mid Twentieth Century, probably) and classic shenanigans involving dames on the lam and grizzled store dicks, advertisements on sandwich boards and heaters stored under the bar for troublemaking rummies, all that sort of thing. In fact, few of those terms make an appearance (“dame” only shows up inside “fundamental”), but the effect is a tight and tidy, fun little incident. Published in The Yard: Crime Blog, check it out.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +efore Tough relocated itself to pastures new halfway through the year it hosted a bunch of stories, one of which in particular stood out: Mine by Eleanor Keisman, a bleakly engrossing portrait of an unstable mind. What begins with the sour but harmless observation of a happy soon-to-be-mother by a woman rendered unhappy by the path of her own life ever so gently escalates, first perhaps to voyeurism, then perhaps to stalking, then - perhaps - to something much, much worse.

+

That last (actually, penultimate) perhaps carries a lot of weight, though. The finale of Mine is striking and viceral and, one must no question admit, quite possibly not happening at all. Or, perhaps, what we get is very much a “romanticised” version of something equally grim if not quite so fantastical. Either way, it really stuck with me this year.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

M + +ichelle Tang provides our last main rec for the year in Rustic Getaway at Shotgun Honey, going all in on the social media format with episodic epistolary updates that skirt around something iffy going on in the background.

+

Influencer Samantha @Ain’t_Chiu_Pretty Chiu is going all but off the grid with her man Jared to meet his clan and, she anticipates, have him finally pop the question. All good for her clicks and comments, nothing like an engagement to boost audience engagement, etc. Of course, things don’t quite meet her expectations, though there’s a chance that the relentlessly upbeat Sam comes through things entirely oblivious as to how close she came to having her account cancelled, like the lucky headphone wearer who stops to pick up a quarter and so doesn’t get hit by the falling piano. Wholesome silly fun.

+

I’ll leave you with a couple of parting nods to close out the issue, starting with the very short Everything Rises again in Shotgun Honey. Almost a companion piece to Your Hometown Station given the crisis that rears its head, I liked it right up to the final sentence or so, which landed a bit cheap to me, but maybe a matter of taste. And another that I found to be fine was A Hunting Place from Close to the Bone Publishing; both these stories evoking their settings nicely, I thought, and that’s not nothing.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces on Facebook.

+

And with that, we at Mythaxis would like to wish you all the best for the coming year!

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images – many thanks to Darcy Lawrey and Luis Quintero.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-40/the-amazing-mermaid.html b/issue-40/the-amazing-mermaid.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0982545d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-40/the-amazing-mermaid.html @@ -0,0 +1,500 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Amazing Mermaid — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

The Amazing Mermaid

+

Arlen Feldman

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Amazing Mermaid by +
+ + + + + + +

“C + +an you dance?”

+

Betty’s heart sank. “I thought we just had to hold still and pose?”

+

“Depends on the town,” said Mr. Brovost. “Some of them don’t allow you to move at all – then it’s ‘art’. Other places, you can get away with just about anything. We charge more in those places. A few, dancing’s all that’s allowed.”

+

“Oh.” Betty hadn’t really thought through exactly what they’d want her to do – just that it was a chance to get away from home. She was more or less willing to pose in the carnival sideshow, but dancing would be awfully tough. “I could shimmy a little. Maybe.”

+

This got a frown from Mr. Brovost. The man was large, with a bushy black mustache under a thick red nose. “Most girls can dance. Something wrong with you?”

+

And then she had to show him. Honestly, as terrified as she was about taking off her top, she’d far rather do that than show him her leg, which was too skinny and bent the wrong way.

+

“Polio?” he asked, and Betty nodded miserably. “Sorry, lass,” he said, not unkindly, “but it’s a nudie-show. The gents don’t want to see that sort of thing.”

+

She wasn’t going to cry. She’d figure out another way to get away. She nodded to Mr. Brovost, got painfully to her feet, and made her way to the wagon’s exit.

+

“You know,” said Brovost, “we’re not the only sideshow. There’s the Ten-In-One…”

+

The tent where Brovost directed her was dirty-white and torn in several places. She made her way around the side. Wagons, cars, and trucks were parked randomly around an open area, along with a handful of small tents. The remains of a fire were still smoldering in a pit in the center.

+

She spotted a man leaning against one of the trucks. He was wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigarette, but his hair was made up of thick ropes that dangled around his dark face. Betty looked about for anyone else to talk to, but he was the only one there.

+

“Can I help you, miss?” he said. His voice was deep and resonant, but with a lilting accent.

+

Betty took a deep breath. “Mr. Brovost from the Model Show sent me over. He thought that maybe… maybe you could give me a job?”

+

The man arched an eyebrow at her. “You do know what sort of a show we are?”

+

She nodded miserably. “You’re the freaks, right?”

+

The man winced, but nodded once. “There are two types of performers in our show,” he said in that beautifully rolling voice. “Those with a particular skill, like sword swallowing or breathing fire. And those who are different, who have something to show to the audience. So, which are you?”

+

For the second time that day, Betty found herself showing off her withered leg. The man walked around her, examining the limb like a connoisseur, then shook his head.

+

“It is sad,” he said, “but it is not unusual.”

+

Betty just stood there. Earlier, she had been ashamed for not being normal. Now she was ashamed for being too normal.

+

The man with the wild hair stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Can you swim?”

+

Of all the questions he might have asked her, she hadn’t expected that one. “Uh, y-yes. I used to swim all the time. When I was a girl they had me swimming as therapy for…” she indicated her leg.

+

“Come with me then. There may be something for you here.”

+

The man turned and headed towards a closed-top truck, slowing when he saw how awkwardly Betty moved, an awkward shuffle to avoid putting too much weight on her bad leg. He waited patiently for her to catch up.

+

“I’m Clarke,” he said. “And, also, I am the Wild Man of Borneo, although I will admit that I am not quite sure where Borneo is.”

+

Betty almost smiled at this.

+

Clarke started digging around in the back of the truck. There were a few loud thumps before he pulled down a heavy trunk. “This belonged to a girl named Lana, who is no longer with us. She got married, and now pretends she was never here.” He unbuckled the straps on the trunk and flipped it open. Betty leaned forward eagerly to see what was inside, then leaned away. There was a strong smell of mildew and wet things never properly dried.

+

Clarke didn’t seem bothered by the smell. He started pulling items out of the trunk. There were a series of skimpy halter-tops, and then two strange-shaped things she didn’t recognize.

+

“Lana was our mermaid,” said Clarke, and suddenly Betty could identify the garments – they were tails. “She used to wear this one.”

+

He held it out to her, and she took it. It was the right shape, but very badly sewn. Even Betty, who could barely put on a button, could see the terrible stitching.

+

“It’s the wrong shape,” she said.

+

Clarke nodded approvingly. “Lana made this herself. She couldn’t fit in the older one. But maybe, with your leg…?” He held up the second tail.

+

Except for the general shape, it was completely different from the first. It was longer and thinner and much better made, and was covered in so many sequins it glimmered like real fish scales. The fin at the end split like a dolphin’s tail.

+

It also smelled of mildew.

+

“What… what would I have to do?”

+

“Well, we have a tank that we fill with water. You put on the tail and the top. Lana just waved. Truth to tell, I think she could not swim. But if you could dive under the water and smile, that would be enough, no?”

+

When she’d come to the carnival, she thought that she’d have to stand in a tent behind a gauze curtain, wearing almost nothing while men leered at her. But there would have been other girls around her doing the same thing. Was this better? Worse? At least it meant she could get away.

+

“I’ll try it.”

+

Clarke smiled at her. “That’s the spirit. I’ll get a couple of the canvas boys to clean and prepare the tank. You can do a little test before the first show tonight.”

+

He started to walk off just as a wave of panic hit her. She wanted to call him back, to tell him she’d changed her mind, but she couldn’t find her voice.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t took a couple of hours for the tank to fill. It was hidden behind a curtain so that the audience wouldn’t see it until it was Betty’s turn. It also made a little area for her to change in private. One of the halter tops fit her well. She’d worn a top like this to the beach before, so was pretty much okay with it.

+

When she’d taken charge of the two tails, the second one – the nicer one – seemed unexpectedly heavy, like she’d sink right to the bottom. The first one was at least lighter, so she tried that on first, but it was way too big. She used some safety pins to make it stay up, but that made it bunch around her waist. It just looked ridiculous. And there were several holes in it. If she jumped into the tank, the whole tail would fill up with water and probably slip right off!

+

It was no good, she’d have to try the other one. The tail had been out of the trunk for a while now, so the mildew smell wasn’t as bad, which helped. Sitting in a chair, she lifted up her bad leg and shoved it inside, then slipped her normal leg in after it and wriggled until the tail came all the way up to her waist. Clarke had been right, it was a tight fit. Whoever it had originally been made for must have been tiny – or had also had only one good leg.

+

She moved her legs experimentally, and it looked convincing, although a little too much like a fish out of water. She wouldn’t really know how it would work until she got into the tank.

+

Her changing area was against the back of the tank, which was painted on the other side with an underwater scene so no one could see all the way through. The tank itself wasn’t huge – eight feet tall and maybe twelve feet wide but only three or four feet front to back, with a ladder for her to climb to get in.

+

But a ladder only works if you have feet.

+

Betty’s arms were strong – they had to be to make up for her bad leg – so she grabbed a rung and lifted herself off the chair, then managed to heave herself up onto another rung before slipping and landing loudly and painfully on her rump, sending the chair flying.

+

“Are you okay?”

+

She looked up to see a tall man standing over her. He was handsome, with an Errol Flynn-style pencil mustache, and dark, slicked-back hair. Betty straightened herself up as best she could before answering.

+

“I think I’m okay.” She tried to maneuver herself, but couldn’t move in the tail, and could hardly take it off with just her panties underneath. Now she really was a fish out of water.

+

“If you will permit me, maybe I can help?” The man righted the chair, then bent down, put one arm behind her back, another under her tail, lifting her like she was a child and setting her down on the seat.

+

“I’m Harry,” he said, holding out a hand for her to shake.

+

She took it, feeling herself blush. “Uh, nice to meet you. I’m Betty.”

+

“Pleasure,” he said.

+

“What do you do here, Harry?”

+

“I’m the sword swallower.”

+

Betty’s eyes went wide. She’d heard of sword swallowing. It sounded dangerous.

+

“I’m the new mermaid,” she said. “Or hope to be, if I can get into the tank.”

+

His chuckle was friendly, with her, not at her, and she managed to smile back.

+

“Harry?” someone called at that moment. The curtain between them and the world twitched, then jerked apart far enough for a face to appear – a smooth, sensual face in a cloud of artfully curled bottle-blonde hair. “Harry, what are you doing back here?”

+

Betty watched as a glamorous vision slipped through to join them, all legs and frills and bodice and bosom, and rather less of the frills and the bodice than the rest.

+

“Oh,” the woman said. “You’re fishing, I guess.”

+

Betty blushed even redder.

+

“You should be more welcoming, Ruth,” Harry said in a chiding if affectionate tone.

+

“And you should be on stage in a good thirty seconds,” Ruth replied. “Unless you want Clarke to stick you with those swords instead of swallowing them.” She cast a dismissive eye over Betty once more. “Break a fin,” she added, then swept out the way she came.

+

“My audience awaits,” Harry said, smiling. “And, perhaps you should wait until you are at the top of the ladder before putting on your tail?”

+

Betty tried for another smile. “I’ll try that next time. And thanks.”

+

Harry bowed, a twinkle in his eye, and pushed his way out through the curtain.

+

The logistics were still tricky. Betty wriggled out of the tail, draped it over the top of the tank, then hopped and tugged herself up the ladder. She hesitated at the top – if the curtain opened at the wrong moment she’d be entirely exposed. But she needed this job, needed to get away. She took a deep breath and swung herself over the top of the tank.

+

Getting the tail on the second time was a little easier, even sitting on the tiny platform above the tank. It was even a bit more comfortable, and the seam where it met her own skin was almost invisible. She flicked the tail around a bit, then started to lower herself into the water.

+

The water was freezing. She gasped, then forced herself to drop down until she was just holding on with one hand. Whoever had made the tail knew their business – almost no water was getting inside, which meant she wasn’t going to be dragged down to the bottom to drown.

+

She took a deep breath, just in case, then let go.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t was fine. Lovely, really, as she got used to the temperature. In the water, it didn’t matter about her leg, and wearing the tail, she couldn’t even see the twisted limb. She laughed out loud, then took another deep breath and dove towards the bottom of the tank.

+

There was nothing really to see – just the thick scratched glass. Because the curtain was pulled, she couldn’t even look out into the big tent. But it didn’t matter. For the first time in months – years, maybe – she felt content.

+

The only problem was that the tank was so small. Well, it wasn’t cramped like a closet, but there was only enough depth to maybe turn a summersault without quite hitting the bottom, to stretch out her tail to one side or the other. But she felt light in the water. Almost as graceful as that mean showgirl.

+

She looked up and saw Clarke’s head and torso peering down at her. He must have been standing on the ladder. Reluctantly, she swam up and broke the surface.

+

Clarke was grinning. “Well, I think that you might just do.”

+

She grinned back.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t didn’t take long to fall into a routine. They did two, maybe three shows a night. Betty would get into the tank a few minutes before the show started, then when the curtain opened she’d drift and wave and smile and dive, holding her breath to do flips and spins. As a finale, she’d turn upside-down and slap her tail against the water, splashing the first row of the audience. As shy as she normally was, when she got in the tank all that washed away. She basked in the whoops and whistles from the crowd.

+

And then the carnival would move on to a new town. Betty got happier and happier the further she got from her old home. Clarke managed the show when he wasn’t being the Wild Man of Borneo, and had lent her the use of an old tent and sleeping bag – which had also belonged to Lana, the last mermaid. Only a tent. But also a place of her own.

+

She got along well with most of the other performers. The group would often eat together around a big fire. There was Judy, the bearded lady. A dwarf couple called Max and Daisie. A strong-man, an escape-artist, a snake-charmer, and a woman named Maureen covered neck-to-toe with tattoos, who had come from London and whose accent was mostly unintelligible to Betty. There was also a two-headed goat named Gertie.

+

And then there was Harry, the sword-swallower.

+

She wanted to ask Harry what he’d been before he joined the sideshow, but she’d learned quickly that you never asked a carny their real name, or about their past, unless they volunteered the information.

+

Because she was in the tank during the show, she never got to see his actual performance, but she loved watching him rehearse. He would carefully wipe down one of his swords, throw back his head, and swallow it until only the hilt was sticking out of his mouth. He held the pose for a moment, then pulled the sword out and wiped it down again.

+

He followed the first with bigger swords, or strings of razor blades, Betty unable to keep from gasping every time, and at the end she applauded and he bowed to his audience of one with a wink.

+

“I’ll never get used to seeing that,” she told him one day. “It seems impossible.”

+

“Just lots of practice. Like swimming with a mermaid tale, I expect.”

+

“Oh, that’s mostly just posing. It’s not like a real skill.”

+

Harry turned to her and looked her in the eyes. “It is real the way you do it. Don’t ever talk yourself down.”

+

She couldn’t remember anyone ever telling her something like that. She smiled shyly, trying not to cry, and gave a quick nod, which got her another wink, but then he started packing up his things.

+

“I’m afraid I have to go,” he said, apologetically. “Ruth is waiting for me.”

+

Betty nodded. “Have a good time,” she said. She was almost sure she’d kept her voice even and upbeat when she’d said it.

+

That evening, Betty leaned back against a wagon’s wheel, listening to the others talk about old acts, including a human ostrich who would swallow and then regurgitate live guinea pigs, a cowboy named Duke who did rope tricks, and a ‘mirrored lady’ with reflecting skin. After a while, Max started strumming a child-sized guitar.

+

Betty sighed contentedly. “This is the perfect life.”

+

“Is,” said The Incredible Samson, the show’s strong man. “Sleep ’til noon, get adoration of crowd, then rest in company of good folk.” Most of the others nodded in agreement, although Clarke did not. He was always worried about money and the other details of the show. And Harry didn’t, because he wasn’t there that night. He seemed to disappear most evenings.

+

Betty guessed she knew where.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he next day was moving day. The big tent came apart in strips that were laced together, her tank was taken apart and wrapped carefully in old blankets, and everything was loaded into the trucks. This was a ‘big jump’ of almost two-hundred miles. It was miraculous to see everything come back together in a new lot. Saturday they were in one town, Sunday in another, fresh sawdust spread on the ground, ready for Monday’s show.

+

But this new lot had a major problem – no water. The advance man hadn’t been able to find a spot with a proper water supply. There was a lot of cursing from everyone who needed to wash or cook anything, but it also meant that there was no way to fill the tank.

+

So, for the first time, Betty got to watch the whole event, starting with the free mini-show – the bally – on the stage out front of the tent. Their Talker would gather a tip – the carny term for a crowd – while Harry and some of the others did little bits from their acts.

+

All of the acts were impressive, but Betty only had eyes for Harry. He wiped down a silver blade, inserted it a good twenty inches down his throat, to the cheers and gasps of the crowd, then pulled it out again, and when he took his bow he winked right at her.

+

She winked back, then he made way for Samson, who took a length of iron rebar and tied it in a knot. Soon the Talker was easing the audience towards the real show, but as Betty joined the back of the crowd someone slammed into her from behind, knocking her to the ground.

+

She looked up to find Ruth sneering down at her.

+

“You should be more careful,” she said. “I guess you were looking in the wrong place.” She eyed Harry proprietarily, then stalked away, leaving Betty to pull herself painfully to her feet.

+

Betty slipped into the show anyway, her limp suddenly worse. All the swimming had made her weak leg stronger than it had been in years, but now it just hurt. She wondered how Harry could be with someone like that. Although it seemed incredible that he hadn’t seen what Ruth did, he had apparently missed the whole thing, because that evening he put on a thrilling show.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he next lot was much better. Plenty of water, pumped out of a lake right next to the site.

+

The morning after the show, most everyone headed to the lake. When Harry appeared he already had his arm around Ruth, which for Betty was just one more reminder where he spent all his evenings.

+

Betty waited until everyone else had gone, then took her tail out of the trunk and walked a longer route to an area out of sight of the others. Ever since she had first entered the tank, she’d been dying to get into a bigger body of water, and now was her chance.

+

After so much practice, it took her no time at all to get the tail on. She slithered awkwardly over some rocks and then into the water.

+

It was glorious.

+

She’d always been a strong swimmer, and after the polio her arms had made up for her leg, but with all the extra practice in the tank she was better than she’d ever been. She sliced through the water, the tail propelling her along as if it really was a part of her, and she went out maybe two hundred yards before turning.

+

Her friends from the Ten-In-One were on the lake shore, several, including Harry, in the water splashing about. Betty swam toward them, diving below the surface when she got close, then came up right in front of Harry and splashed him full in the face.

+

“Why you little—” He splashed her back, a big grin on his face. She slapped her tail against the water, this time soaking not just Harry, but Maureen and Samson too, who joined in, everyone splashing each other randomly.

+

“Oh, Harry?” The call came from the shore, shrill and loud: Ruth, hands on her hips, looking murderous.

+

Harry blushed, mumbled something, then headed back to the shore. As soon as he was out of the water, she put her arm around him. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, still using the shrill voice despite Harry standing right next to her.

+

Betty watched from the water as he put his arm around the girl’s shoulders and led her away. She was wearing shorts, and her legs were tanned and perfectly formed.

+

Betty had never hated anyone so much in her life.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +etty was now one of the top draws for the Ten-in-One. Clark had a banner made which showed someone that looked not entirely unlike Betty, although significantly better endowed. In the painting, she was sitting on a rock next to a lighthouse, her tail merging into her torso, and a come-hither look on her face that was just this side of indecent. Betty had surreptitiously tried to imitate the look, but with no luck.

+

She thought she’d never been as happy in her life, surrounded by people she genuinely cared about – with one exception – and who seemed genuinely to care about her. It was as unlike her home as she could imagine.

+

It was on the next big jump that she saw it for the first time. She was squeezed in the back of one of the trucks, Samson on one side of her, Max and Daisie on the other holding hands. They crested a hill and, suddenly, there it was – the Atlantic Ocean.

+

Betty gasped at the sight. Could there really be that much water in the world?

+

Samson put a massive hand on her knee, her proper knee. “Is a lot rougher than lake,” he said. “I know you mermaid and all, but don’t go out by self.”

+

She laughed and patted his hand. But it wasn’t like she had anyone else to go with, did she? Max and Dasie had each other, but there was no merman to go swimming with. No man at all. She sighed and stared out at the water until it disappeared from view around a bend in the road.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here was never a show on Sundays thanks to the blue laws, so after setting up camp everyone was lounging about instead of preparing to perform. Betty wasn’t the only one hearing the call of the sea, but the sight of Ruth and the other model show girls heading for the beach was enough to stop her in her tracks. She still went to her tent and grabbed the little swimming costume she wore under her tail, but then slipped out quickly, hoping no one else would see her, although she wasn’t exactly sure why.

+

Up close, the ocean was even more amazing, stretching out forever. Samson had been right – it was a lot rougher, with big waves slamming into the beach. She should have been terrified, would have been a few months ago. But now, she was filled with excitement.

+

After a while, she turned and was amazed to see how far she’d come, the beach and dunes barely visible in the distance. She was a bit tired, but the salty ocean water was so buoyant – perhaps she could keep going a little further? But no, Samson was right, she should be careful. She took one last look out to sea, then started back towards the shore, her mind pleasantly blank of any thoughts other than to stroke her arms, to kick one leg, the other drawn behind her and gently lifted by the swell.

+

It was good she’d turned around when she did. By the time she got close to the beach, her arms and legs were starting to ache a little, and she hadn’t realized how far the tide had dragged her sideways. The beach in front was completely different from the one where she’d left her clothes. It was a small patch of sand surrounded by rocks. And it wasn’t empty – there were the girls from the model show, including Ruth.

+

She was too tired to swim far against the current, but there was no way she was getting out in front of Ruth. She made for another sandy area on the other side of the rocks where she could stay out of their sight. Betty forced herself to swim past the rocks then struggled through the breakers, finally laying panting in the sand as smaller waves washed over her.

+

She could hear the voices of the other girls quite clearly. They were talking about men, using words and phrases that Betty was shocked to hear. Most were getting ready to head back to the site for lunch, but Ruth announced she was staying to work on her tan.

+

“Always keeping Harry happy,” one of the girls said. “How good is he with his sword?”

+

The others all giggled.

+

“Oh, he’s pretty damn good,” said Ruth with a chuckle. “But it ain’t serious. He don’t have no prospects. Not like Martin. Martin’s making a fortune with his concession stand. We’re just waiting for the right town, then we’re going to get married and leave the carnival for good. And I’ll be Mrs. Martin Hofstetter.”

+

There was a round of laughter from the other girls. Betty just sat there, listening to the sounds of their departure. Thinking of the little insults, and those not so little. Thinking of how nice Harry was, and how horrible that ugly-hearted woman was. How happy he could be with her instead, if only he knew what she knew.

+

It took Betty a while to find a way through the rocks, her anger building as she struggled, her leg protesting every uneven step. But she finally found an route and stood looking down on Ruth, lying back on a towel in the sun.

+

“How could you?”

+

Ruth started, but when she saw Betty her lips curled into a smile. “Why, if it ain’t Miss Gimpy, the Human Fish.”

+

Betty glared at her. “You’re two-timing Harry.”

+

“Oh, I don’t think Harry thinks we’re exclusive,” said Ruth, leaning on her elbows and looking up at Betty as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “But I’ll tell you this. Even after I’m gone, he ain’t going ta be interested in you. He needs a whole woman.”

+

Betty had no memory of picking up the rock, but now she raised it in her hand, bigger than her fist.

+

Ruth’s eyes grew wide behind her dark glasses. “You put that down, you crazy—”

+

The rock hit her in the hip and Ruth let out a scream of pain, rolling off the towel and scrambling to her feet, then falling on her face with a moan as her leg folded under her.

+

Ruth pushed herself up again, wailing breathlessly and hobbling away down the slope of the beach. Betty stooped to pick up the rock again, weighing it in her palm. She watched as Ruth stumbled into the first of the breaking waves, spluttering on her knees in a cloud of spray, and then she followed, welcoming the water as it lapped at her feet.

+

Later, as she swam against the current towards the beach where her clothes were waiting, she heard a distant cry from behind her. She didn’t recognise the voice. But it wasn’t Ruth.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t was a townie who’d found the body. The cops swarmed the carnival, questioning everyone. No one had told them anything – no one had heard anything, seen anything. More carny rules that Betty learned: you don’t talk to outsiders. And you never talk to cops.

+

But one of the models let slip that Ruth had been seeing Harry, so the cops arrested him and took him away.

+

The rest of the acts from the Ten-In-One gathered around their campsite, no one speaking. Betty forced herself to go out there as well, but she couldn’t stop crying. Clarke had handed her a handkerchief, and she was holding onto it for dear life.

+

Finally, Maureen asked Clarke if there would even be a show tomorrow, and Clarke sighed. “Yes, there’ll be a show, and we’ll probably have double the take.”

+

“But they can’t really believe Harry did anything, can they?” said Daisy. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

+

“Cops just care they got someone,” said Samson. “And he has swords. Good enough.”

+

“But she wasn’t killed with a sword,” said Betty, unable to stop herself.

+

“No?” Samson shrugged. “Don’t matter to cops.”

+

Betty struggled to her feet and made her way into the main tent and the private little area behind the empty tank. There in the shadows she closed her eyes. She couldn’t let Harry get punished for something he hadn’t done. She’d have to turn herself in. But she was terrified. Although the cops might not even believe her. And she couldn’t bear the thought of how her friends would look at her.

+

The curtains parted behind her. “Are you alright, Betty?” It was Clarke.

+

She looked up at him, unable to speak. She wanted to tell him that it was all her fault. That she hadn’t meant to. That she’d do anything to help Harry. But her throat wouldn’t work. He held out his arms, and she let him hug her, tears pouring down her cheeks.

+

“I know you like Harry,” he said gently. “You don’t have to go on tonight, if you don’t want to. We’ll make do.”

+

She shook her head. “There’s rules for how we treat carnies, right?” she asked. “Don’t… don’t screw things up for one of our own, or something?”

+

Clarke grunted. “Carnies have been feuding with each other for as long as they’ve existed, I reckon. But maybe there’s something like that.”

+

“Harry didn’t kill her.”

+

“I know, girl.”

+

“I know too.”

+

She felt Clarke’s embrace change, stiffen a little. She let him go and stepped back. He was looking at her, more or less the way she’d imagined. Her home was going away.

+

“Ah, Betty,” he started, “why would you—” Then he stopped, knowing. “Ah.”

+

“I’ll leave,” she said, “right now. Just, give me a little time before you make the call. You’ll tell them? The police? Make sure they know it wasn’t Harry. And tell him… I’m sorry.”

+

He sighed. “Collect your things. And get some food too. I’ll give you an hour. I don’t know where you can go, but…”

+

She nodded, then turned and awkwardly started towards her little tent. Clarke watched for a bit, then said, “Perhaps I give you two hours?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +etty took all her things so the police would think she’d run, but there was only one that she was going to take with her. Everything else she left in the rocks by the beach.

+

She looked out over the endless, shifting expanse for a long while, then got as close to the waves as she could before putting on the tail. It was tricky with the water coming in and out, the wet sand sucking at her bottom. Trickier still to get past the waves. But then the tail made it easier to move, the swells lifting her as she went out further and further.

+

The sun was beginning to set and there was a golden path burned into the water in front of her.

+

Who knows, she thought, maybe I can make it to the other side.

+

The mermaid began to swim.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Amazing Mermaid on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Arlen Feldman

+

+ + Author image of Arlen Feldman + + + As well as writing fiction, Arlen Feldman is a software engineer, maker, costumer, con-runner (cosinecon.org), and computer book author. His short fiction can be found in a number of anthologies and magazines, and he just won the 2024 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award for his story The Wish Doctor. He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and can be found on Mastodon, Bluesky, and his website cowthulu.com.

+

© Arlen Feldman 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Kuriakose John and Ann H - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-40/the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.html b/issue-40/the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a3e7ef8e --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-40/the-vanishing-diminutive-girl-trick.html @@ -0,0 +1,306 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick

+

David Sheskin

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick by +
+ + + + + + +

A + + 36-year-old seven-foot two-inch Mennonite magician named Clyde pulls an obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white-spotted, one-eyed rabbit out of a gray velour tophat at a birthday party for a five-year-old biracial child attended by four Caucasian, three African American, one Native American, and two Asian American children. Before Clyde can restrain the rabbit, it attacks and maims three of the children. The next day two police officers – one an emigre from Samoa with a disfiguring strawberry birth mark and the other a bipolar Hispanic female who is addicted to cough syrup and coffee enemas – arrest Clyde while he is performing in front of an inner city Girl Scout troop comprised of Sikh and Hindu preadolescents. Prior to his arraignment Clyde is assigned a court-appointed 62-year-old heavily tattooed Muslim lawyer who is both an Ebola and cancer survivor. The lawyer has Clyde evaluated by a 34-year-old celibate former Buddhist monk-turned-psychiatrist who for the past year has been contemplating sex reversion surgery. The psychiatrist diagnoses Clyde with posttraumatic stress disorder, having discovered that while cutting the cake at his seventh birthday party he was stung more than two hundred times by a swarm of killer bees, which it was later ascertained had come from a nest in a storage container filled with oregano, cinnamon, and an assortment of illicit drugs in the hold of a cargo ship that six months earlier had been commandeered by Somalian pirates and after being pillaged and gutted eventually ran aground off the coast of Florida not more than forty miles from Clyde’s house. After months of pretrial negotiations between the prosecution and defense, a thrice-divorced geriatric judge of mixed Asian and Aborigine ancestry who all his life had been plagued with chronic halitosis and who in his youth had dabbled in black magic arrives at a compromise that allows Clyde to plead guilty to three counts of reckless endangerment, and sentences him to one hundred hours of community service, during which time he is assigned to teach magic to high-risk adolescents confined to a secure psychiatric facility. On the first day of his community service, Clyde becomes enamored of one of the patients, a four-foot two-inch seventy-five-pound 16-year-old émigré from Albania named Connie, who one afternoon during a moment of intimacy confides that besides having a long history of setting fires and torturing animals for as long as she can remember she has had a severe addiction to eating glass. On the last day of his community service, a hopelessly besotted Clyde announces to an assembly of students and staff that he will demonstrate “The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick” and on asking for a volunteer Connie raises her hand, removes her Hello Kitty earrings and hijab, and comes up onto the stage and positions herself upright in an ornate wooden coffin that Clyde had hauled to the facility in a hearse he borrowed from the local funeral home. Closing the coffin and sealing it shut with masking tape, Clyde yells out “Abracadabra” followed by two flamboyant sweeps of the gaudy black cape he wears during all of his performances, and after a tension-filled minute unseals the coffin which to the astonishment of everyone is now empty. As the audience “Oohs” and “Ahs” Clyde executes a double backflip while simultaneously sprinkling into the air some sort of magic dust that blurs everybody’s vision as well as causing them to sneeze uncontrollably, and as all this is going on Clyde discretely ducks out of the building where he is joined by Connie, and for the next year and a half the two of them are not seen anywhere until one afternoon a vacationing husband-and-wife podcasting team who are aficionados of unsolved mysteries sight the phantom couple sharing a mint chocolate chip icecream cone and canoodling on the observation deck of the Grand Canyon. Within thirty minutes the fugitive couple is surrounded by an assemblage of National Park police and Arizona state troopers, which inspires Clyde to lift his diminutive companion up off the ground onto his shoulders after which he yells out “Hocus Pocus” apparently causing the two of them begin to glow incandescently and slowly ascend upwards until they come to rest at least one hundred meters above the horseshoe-shaped deck of the canyon. For the better part of an hour the shimmering couple levitate like some sort of superheated UFO, continuing to ignore repeated appeals to come back down to earth, when all of a sudden one of the state troopers (who it is later learned had not but should have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when he was eight years old) takes it upon himself to fire a fusillade of bullets up into the air, which has no effect except that Clyde begins to chant in a deep and alien baritone voice some sort of gibberish so loud and unique in pitch that it triggers a 6.2 magnitude earthquake. As pandemonium reigns below Clyde pulls out from under his by now fiery red cape what appears to be the very same obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white-spotted, one-eyed rabbit whose outburst two years ago seemingly has triggered this whole unfortunate chain of events. After a while Clyde, Connie, and the now literally incandescent rabbit appear to collapse into some sort of fulgent amorphous mass which starts to rotate rapidly while shooting off a profusion of sparks and debris and suddenly rockets upwards into space before executing a semicircular turn and plunging toward the bottom of the canyon where it explodes with an ear-splitting intensity that culminates in an eerie-colored mushroom-shaped cloud that hovers above not only the Grand Canyon but the entire Western United States for the better part of a year. Eighteen months later when it is finally deemed safe to descend to the bottom of the canyon, the only thing a search party of ten volunteers attired in hazmat suits can find is Clyde’s gaudy black cape, Connie’s Hello Kitty earrings, and a remarkably intact and healthy obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white spotted, one-eyed rabbit who has to be subdued with five heavy-duty cartridges from a tranquilizer gun.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

David Sheskin

+

+ + Author image of David Sheskin + + + David Sheskin is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Dalhousie Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, The Satirist and DIAGRAM. His most recent books are David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Outrageous Wedding Announcements.

+

© David Sheskin 2024 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by Pixabay - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-40/wendigo.html b/issue-40/wendigo.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9886df6f --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-40/wendigo.html @@ -0,0 +1,425 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Wendigo — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 40 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Wendigo

+

Kirk Bueckert

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Wendigo by +
+ + + + + + +

H + +aving spent many a long and lonely winter’s night in the drunk tank of a dead-end town called Ghost River, Brandon Delaney wakens unsurprised to discover yet another cage. He lifts his head from the pinewood bench and wipes the mucus from his nose, the drool from the whiskers on his chin. His ribs burn red-hot with some nameless pain. Whichever young deputy found him slumped over in the snowbank behind The Blind Pig must have roused him with a jackbooted kick. He looks with clouded eyes around at the cinderblock room. Four windowless walls and two barred cells and a bolted steel door in the wall between them. A single naked lightbulb sputters overhead. He does not recognize this place. There comes a voice from the opposite cell: “Brother, you’re on some thin ice now.”

+

It was the summer of his twenty-seventh birthday when he set out from Fort McMurray. Never again would he see the sprawling tar pits, the columns of black smoke out on the horizon. Wandering wayward pilgrim, Eastbound aboard a Greyhound bus. This was a man in charge of his own destiny. The bus was headed for Treaty 6 Territory: land of the Cree, Métis, Ojibwe, Saulteaux, Nakota, Dene. Land of the Living Skies. That was what the billboard in the Greyhound headlights read. Welcome to the Land of the Livings Skies. His mother had grown up on these prairies under that same electric-green aurora. Perhaps her memory was what beckoned to him. Scanning the roadside in the predawn dark, Brandon thought of hunters chasing bison across a wild and stormy plain to the precipice of all creation.

+

“He found you there,” the voice continues. “Lost and alone in the dark. The pale demon. He smell’d you on the wind.”

+

Brandon turns his head and spits on the floor. His mouth tastes like cigarette smoke and whiskey vomit and blood. “You wouldn’t happen to have an extra smoke handy,” he says, “would you?”

+

“I never thought things would end like this,” the stranger goes on. “Always thought I’d go down in a blaze of glory. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Well, shit. Ain’t nothin’ glorious about Saskatchewan.”

+

Brandon squints between the bars. “Do I know you?”

+

The stranger smiles a too-wide smile. A yellow crescent moon in the dark of the cell. “Don’t remember me, huh? Well, I remember you. We met last night at the roadhouse. You’re the Zamboni man.” The words tumble from his mouth in a syrupy drawl. “Zam-BO-nee man. I say you’re on some thin ice now. I know who you are and I know what you’ve done. The man upstairs, he knows too.”

+

“The man upstairs. Who do you mean? The nightwatchman? Or God Almighty?”

+

“The pale demon. Are you even listenin’ to me?”

+

“I’ve been listening to a lot of craziness about devils and the like. You’ll forgive me if I’m not particularly well-versed on the subject. Now, are you gonna give me a cigarette or not?”

+

The stranger pitches a half-crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds between the bars. “That’s my last one.”

+

Brandon picks up the pack from the floor. “Cheers, Mister…?”

+

“The name’s Lewis. Lewis Manx.”

+

“Much obliged, Lewis.” Brandon pats himself down for a lighter or a book of matches. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

+

“No, sir. I’m just passin’ through.”

+

The flare of a match, then the crackle. “We met at the roadhouse, huh?”

+

“Last night. At the bar.”

+

“Well, shit. What kind of trouble did we get into, then?”

+

“We talked. We talked for a very long time.”

+

“Riveting stuff, I’m sure. What did we talk about?”

+

“Oh, we talked about the weather. We talked about the game. We talked about your dead mama.”

+

Brandon pulls hard on Lewis’s last cigarette. “Nah. See, now I know you have me confused with someone else.”

+

“Why do you say that?”

+

“My mother’s not dead. She lives on the West Coast. Ran out when I was just a baby.”

+

“She played the pipe organ at Sunday services.”

+

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

+

“Then, one day, your daddy killed her dead. Sunk her body to the bottom of a pond.”

+

Brandon’s head jerks up. “What the hell did you just say?”

+

“What I said was: you told me your daddy killed your mama. Bludgeoned her to death with a length of pipe and sunk her in the pond behind the house.”

+

Brandon grinds out the filter on the floor of his cell. “You’re out of your mind, Mister.”

+

“Manx. The name’s—”

+

“Lewis Manx, yeah, you told me. Listen, Lewis. Maybe we just sit here quiet-like until the guard comes down to let one of us go. Probably me. More likely you’re headed for the nuthouse. What do you say to that?”

+

“You don’t get it, do you? You and I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

+

“I’m going back to sleep. Enjoy the booby hatch, Lewis.”

+

“Fine, you don’t remember me. But I reckon you must remember the young lady.”

+

Brandon pinches the bridge of his nose. “Which young lady?”

+

“The young lady from last night. What was her name? Lydia? Loretta? Yolanda?”

+

Memories dance in slow circles through the haze of his delirium. “No,” he says. “No, not that.” Smell of drugstore perfume and cold, sour sweat.

+

“Lola,” he says. “Her name was Lola.”

+

He had stopped in late at The Blind Pig, ordered Pabst Blue Ribbon with a side of Jack Daniels. “P.B. and J” Peggy called it. Peggy was the kind of bartender who called everyone “darling” or “honey” with a wink and a smile. A string of red and green Christmas bulbs had been strung out above the wood where Brandon drank alone as per his nightly custom. The buzzing wires of a portable space-heater, which did little thwart the chill, augmented their meager light from the corner of the room. He set his varsity hockey ring down on the wood. His knuckles were swollen, still bloody from lambasting the wall of his kitchen. He consulted the subtle engraving like something written above a tomb.

+

He was angry that night. Angry about his custodial job down at the municipal skating rink which paid so little, the gas bills unpaid altogether, the pipes below his trailer now frozen as a result. Most of all he was angry that, in light of all this, the only thing Brandon Delaney could think to do was have a drink.

+

“Do you want another one, honey?”

+

He nodded without raising his head. Nor did his gaze pursue the seat of Peggy’s tight blue jeans, despite his unobstructed vantage. He was counting a pocketful of crumbled twenty-dollar bills, calculating just how many more P.B. and J he might partake in, when the jukebox changed its tune.

+

A young woman had come in from the cold. Nonlocal. Her boots, bound at the laces, hung dripping from the back of a chair above the space-heater. Dangling, he thought, like a pair of dead rabbits there in the red neon glow. Her pompom-tasseled toque was the same color as her wooly socks. Alone at the jukebox, she swayed to the rhythm of a bluegrass beat. Brandon watched in silence.

+

“What happened to Lola, last night?” says Lewis.

+

“Nothing happened,” he says. “We talked.”

+

They talked. They drank. He lit her cigarettes. At some point in the night, he joined her in the water closet and locked the door behind them. “I’m Lola, by the way,” she told him as she lifted a single bump of powder from a glass vile to his nostril and he snorted. The young people who drank at The Pig were always kicking in a little snow. His pulse quickened. Lola-by-the way. Her neck smelled of bottled lilacs. Her lips tasted like bubblegum.

+

Brandon stands up slowly. “What makes you think something happened?”

+

“All I know is you left with little Miss Lola last night, and today you’re down here with fingernail scratches all over your arms.”

+

“You’re talking out your ass.”

+

“See for yourself.”

+

Brandon rolls up his flannel sleeves one sleeve at a time. He beholds the long livid fingernail scratches running the length of both arms.

+

“Do you feel it now, Zamboni man? Do you feel that thin ice crackin’ beneath your feet?”

+

Brandon traces the wounds with his fingertips. “Maybe I slipped and fell,” he says to himself.

+

Lewis leans closer. “What did she do, huh? Did she rile you up? Did she snigger when your britches hit the floor?”

+

“You bite your tongue, you crazy son of a bitch. I didn’t hurt anybody.” Brandon drums on the bars. “Hey, let me out of here!”

+

“Quit your hollerin,’ would you?” Lewis hisses. “You’re only gonna make things worse.”

+

Brandon doesn’t listen, just calls louder. “You hear me? I didn’t hurt anybody!”

+

A noise comes down from the ceiling. The warbling high-pitch bugle of a full-grown bull-elk. He recognizes the sound from childhood, growing up across the lake from the dense Algonquin wilderness. It echoes around the room. Brandon cups his ears. The sound is coming from upstairs, and yet also coming from within his own skull. He wonders whether he might be losing his mind.

+

“You’re wastin’ your breath, brother. Ain’t nobody comin’ to save you. Not this time. You’re stuck, same as me.”

+

“I’m not a violent person.”

+

“You’re a drinker, ain’t you? ‘Alcohol related psychosis’, the doctors call it. How many mornings have you woken up not remembering what happened the night before?”

+

“You’re trying to confuse me. A man would remember a thing like that.”

+

“You’ve got your daddy’s blood runnin’ through your veins, brother. Same blood, same violent disposition.”

+

Brandon’s father cut a mirky figure, even under the soberest of circumstances. For as long as Brandon can remember, it has been as though the collective memories of his childhood were printed on magazine paper and someone with a pair of scissors had snipped John Delaney from every page. Hollow silhouettes are all that remain. A composite of empty spaces. A walking black hole in muddy crepe-sole boots. He remembers the detectives.

+

“Did your mama tell you where she was going, last night?” asked one.

+

“Did she mention going to live with her new boyfriend?” asked the other.

+

“You won’t get nothin’ out of that one,” said his father. “Can’t you tell by lookin’? The boy ain’t right in the head.”

+

“Do you know how to read and write? You do. That’s good. Would you like to maybe write it down?”

+

“Here, have my pen and paper.”

+

Brandon finds himself pacing the floor of his jail cell. He tries to remember. Walking home from The Blind Pig. The long dark road. The red lights of the police cruiser. The yelp of the siren demanding him to halt. His mother’s eyes, cold and crystalline, staring up at him through the frozen surface of the pond.

+

“What’s this word you’ve written here?” asked one detective.

+

“Let’s have a look,” said the other. “Wendigo.”

+

“What do you mean by this, young man?”

+

“Is that the name of your mama’s new friend?”

+

“Wendigo,” said Brandon.

+

“Wendigo. Right. But what does it mean?”

+

“My partner and I would like to understand.”

+

“Wendigo come,” said Brandon, “and steal her away.”

+

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, gentlemen,” said his father. “That boy ain’t got the sense of a goddamned dog. Just like his cheatin’ whore mother.”

+

“I said stop talking!”

+

“Shit fire,” says Lewis. You’re the one mutterin’ to himself. I didn’t breathe a word. Which of us looks crazy now?”

+

Brandon bends forward with his hands on his knees. He wants to be sick, to purge himself of poisons, to crack open his brittle skull and let spill the brains like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the better to reconstruct his mind. All the while, memories dance. The long dark road. Bubblegum lip gloss. A police cruiser in the night. His mother smoking alone at the kitchen table, a pair of suitcases beside her. His father’s muddy work boots. Lola’s wet wooly socks.

+

“You needn’t worry much longer, brother. This will all be over soon. The pale demon will be comin’ back for us both before too long.”

+

“Pale demon.” Brandon paces, round and round. “Pale demon.” He halts. “Hold up,” he says. “Why are you here, Lewis?”

+

The stranger smiles. “Brother, I’ve been on the run for just about as long as I can remember. I’ve robbed. Cheated. Killed. I’ve a son in this world I know now I’ll never see again. No man outruns his comeuppance. Sooner or later, the past catches up with all of us. Last night, mine caught up with me. I done paid my bill at the bar and I was drunk and alone in my motel room when there came a knock-knock-knockin’ at my door. Wasn’t no siren, but I could see plain as anythin’ the red light of his cruiser through the curtains. When I cracked the door, I was greeted by the stink of death on him. He sported a deputy’s uniform, his badge, his baton, but I tell you he wasn’t no deputy. Wasn’t even a man, truth be told. He spoke to me in the voice of my daddy’s daddy who died in the war. Asked me, “Do you know who I am?” And I said, “You son of a bitch, I’ve…”

+

Lewis trails off, and Brandon says, “Who was it? What was it?”

+

“Brother, it was the pale demon come to collect the bounty on my godforsaken soul.”

+

A long silence unspools between the cells. Then Brandon starts to chuckle. The stranger knits his brow. “Did I say something funny, brother?”

+

“You must think I’ve got shit for brains. Let me tell you what I think, brother. Starting with I don’t believe you are who you say you are. I think you’re one of them. We never met last night at The Blind Pig. You’re some kind of undercover operative. They send you in here so you can play-pretend like you’re my buddy. My trusty confidant. Then you start spouting talk of death and judgment. Try to convince me to repent my sins to the Lord Above. And maybe, just maybe, I cop to a crime I know damned well I didn’t commit.” Brandon spits. “Lola paid her bill at the bar last night and went home. End of story.”

+

Brandon waits for a response. What comes is the sound of the bull-elk. Louder this time. Closer. Brandon drops to his knees, covers his head with his hands. “What is that noise?” he cries.

+

Lewis doesn’t answer that. “Time to meet the monster,” he says.

+

Bootheels creaking down the pinewood stairs. A bolt sliding unseen beyond the door. The door swings open for the dark silhouette of the deputy. He stands there, breathing heavily. The slow, rasping breaths of larger woodland beasts. Like something with a snout. He steps inside.

+

Brandon turns his head. He looks down at the floor, supplicated by his own sudden terror. The deputy’s kidskin boots go clack, clack, clack on the linoleum, keys jangling on their keyring. He stops just outside the bars. Brandon’s heart clenches behind his breastbone. Still the deputy says nothing. Even from his height, his heavy bovine breaths warm the nape of Brandon’s neck where he trembles down below. Brandon can raise his head only slightly. At the summit of his gaze: the deputy’s leather utility belt, his keyring, a nightstick, his hands in dark leather gloves. The deputy selects a key from his ring.

+

No sooner does he unlock the door than something sprays the side of Brandon’s hand. Something warm and honey-colored, sharp and sour. “Yeehaw!” cries Lewis, one hand aiming his member, his other hand aloft like a man astride a bucking bronco. “You want my soul, Beelzebub? Well, step right up and claim your prize!”

+

The deputy bellows. That great warbling wail. He spins around against the current and pulls the nightstick from his belt. Lewis all the while reeling and pissing between the bars. “Blaze of glory, brother! Yippee-ki-yay!”

+

The deputy unlocks the door to Lewis’ cage. His nightstick falls with a sickening crack. Lewis Manx drops like a stone. Brandon has become the little boy he once was, peeking out from under the kitchen tablecloth, a scream lodged in his throat, his mother’s body limp beside her suitcase, her dark hazel eyes beseeching him to be strong, to be brave, his father’s work boots tracking mud across the kitchen floor. No, not work boots. Cowboy boots. The deputy is wearing cowboy boots.

+

The deputy swings his nightstick again and again and again until poor crazy Lewis is dead. Then he bends and picks up Lewis by the trouser leg and hauls him out of the cell toward the stairs. He pauses once more beside Brandon’s door.

+

“What have you done?” Brandon mutters. “What have you done to him?”

+

The deputy says nothing. Brandon looks up. All the way, this time.

+

The deputy’s hair hangs down his back in a long dark braid. His face looks like a thing made of cheap rubber. Like some bargain basement Hallowe’en costume. Like a mask of someone else’s face covering his own. When he smiles, the deputy’s rubbery skin stretches taut. Brandon holds his gaze. He looks up for what feels like a very long time before he recognizes the face as Lola’s.

+

“Wendigo,” says the thing behind the mask, voice deep and guttural. He looks down at Lewis. “Wendigo come and steal him away.” He turns and continues through the doorway and jerks Lewis up the narrow stairwell beyond, leaving a dark trail of blood behind him.

+

Brandon remains on the floor. Who can say how long he lingers? He chitters and mewls like a housecat during a thunderstorm. Balled tight and trembling, he thinks about Lewis and he thinks of his mother and he thinks about nothing at all. A cold wind blows in from upstairs and the big steel door swings loose on its hinges. The door to his jail cell hangs likewise ajar. A voice on the wind, far away but familiar. The first notes of a hymn accompanied by his mother’s keyboard. “What a fellowship. What a joy divine. Leaning on the everlasting arms.”

+

Brandon groans. “Mama? Mama, is that you?”

+

“Leeeaaaning… leeeaaaning… leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”

+

He lurches forward. “I’m coming, Mama. Wait for me.” He crawls through one door, then the second, following the blood and the music and the silvery timbre of pipes, and he finds himself bizarrely numb, and he finds the numbness comforting. He sings along with the voice. “What a blessedness… what a peace is mine… leaning on the everlasting arms. Leeeaaaning… leeeaaaning… leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.” He crawls up the pinewood stairs and through the bulkhead cellar door out into the snow and the dismal blue twilight above. “Leeeaaaning…leeeaaaning…leeaaaning on the everlasting aaarms.”

+

The music ceases. Through frozen clouds of his own ragged breath, Brandon reconnoiters the terrain. The squalid remnants of what might once have been a farmhouse. A snow-crusted police cruiser out of the nightmare from which he now knows he never wakened. A crumbling barn. The sprawling white nothingness of the prairies with neither hill nor trees to mark the barren landscape, and not another house in sight.

+

Brandon rubs his hands together. A conspiratorial fog looms over the farmhouse like the collective last breath of a thousand nameless dead. Jangling above the front porch, pale windchimes constructed from the smallest specimens of human bone. A thin spire of smoke rises from the chimney.

+

Brandon makes for the front door and the promise of a flame. He tries the knob. The door is unlocked. The place consists of little more than a single room with a potbelly stove in the corner. Strange pelts, like heavy curtains, block out the meager sun. He goes quietly to the stove. There, amid the paler darkness, the deputy crouches naked beside his victim. He watches Brandon from the dark with glowing noctambulant eyes. Lunar pale, emaciated, ravenous. He smiles, or seems to smile, and the blood runs down his chin.

+

The cast-off deputy’s uniform lies crumpled on the floor like a snakeskin. Only now, divested of all pretense, does the demon reveal himself for what he truly is. His bovine antlers, his cloven hooves. Every rung of his ribcage, every knot of arching vertebra perceptible beneath a pallid membranous hide. He grunts and resumes his rummaging about the contents of Lewis’s open chest. Brandon looks at the monster’s claws then down at his arms. The long red fingernail scratches. They seem to pulsate in their maker’s presence.

+

“Come,” says the demon, his voice deep and guttural. Brandon lowers himself to the floor and crawls.

+

The demon reaches in and tugs and raises from the cavity the dead man’s dripping heart. He cradles it in his claw. With his other, he beckons Brandon closer still. Brandon obeys and warms his hands by the stove. He looks around the room. A buckskin splayed out beside him, spread with curious plunder. Trinkets, jewelry, pocketbooks, driver’s licenses. A gold varsity hockey ring.

+

He looks back to the demon. Somehow the dead man’s heart has changed, become a jar of clear liquid. The demon holds it out for him. Brandon touches his throat, terribly thirsty. He takes the Mason jar and unscrews the lid and sniffs the contents. A scent like turpentine. The demon smiles and nods his head. Brandon holds the jar to the firelight.

+

And there you are, down at the bottom of the jar, watching yourself watching yourself. Rise, now. Rise and heave the jar at the red-glowing mouth of the stove. Glass bursts on the grille and flames leap out across the floorboards, catching firewood, catching pelts. The beast rears his pale head and roars, deep and guttural, as you wheel and pluck the keyring from the discarded leather belt and scramble out into the dooryard.

+

You wipe crusted snow from the door of the police cruiser and try one key then another. Smoke rises from the windows and the doorframe behind you. The last key twists all the way and you open the door and plunge inside, pulling it behind you. No sooner have you slapped your palm down on the lock than the beast rams headlong into the side of the cruiser with a force that rattles you like a pinball. The cab is dark, the glass opaque with frost. You search for the fallen keys, listening to the crunch of snow just outside the door. You strike a shaking match. You find the keys on the matt in the passenger’s footwell. The shotgun lying between the seats.

+

The beast heads heads back toward the house with loping simian strides and readies himself to charge again. You search the backseat for cartridges, check under the seats, check in the glove compartment. Nothing. You check the rifle, find a single shell in the chamber.

+

“One last round for the road,” you say to nobody at all.

+

Once again the demon strikes, and the door crumples inward and you drop the flame, and once again the demon lopes away. You right yourself in the dark, stab the key in the ignition. The engine gives a long stuttering whine, but will not start and will not start. You try the radio, pluck the receiver from its cradle and toggle the switch. Nothing and no one. The line is dead. You twist the ignition key long and hard. This time the engine bites, and the demon drops down on the roof, the ceiling sinking beneath his weight as he commences raining blows down upon the cruiser. You gather up the rifle. Raise the muzzle to the dent. You steady your hand, place one finger on the trigger. You draw three slow breaths, one, two, three, then lower the muzzle and fire into the frosted windscreen, drop the gun and seize hold of the steering wheel and kick the pedal to the floor. The cruiser leaps, the demon toppling backward.

+

You divine the road through the hole in the glass. You drive and you drive. Likely the beast will follow you, bounding headlong like a snow-blind ape, but you don’t look back, must not look back. You drive until the tank runs empty. Then you ditch the cruiser on the side of the road and just start running.

+

Brandon looks into the jar and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “You’ll run. You’ll run like those bison ran in the time before time. You’ll run to the ledge of the world.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Wendigo on Facebook.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Kirk Bueckert

+

+ + Author image of Kirk Bueckert + + + Kirk Bueckert is a poet and playwright living on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His previous work has been published by Dark Matter Magazine, Timber Ghost Press, Tyche Books, and the League of Canadian Poets. His debut novel Dark Circuitry launches in early spring 2025.

+

© Kirk Bueckert 2024 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was based on a free-to-use image by Prayatna Maharjan - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-41.html b/issue-41.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e3840ade --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41.html @@ -0,0 +1,446 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Issue-41s — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Mythaxis

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Spring 2025

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+ Finale Doshi-Velez +

Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains

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+ + +

In a nod to the point of this issue's editorial, the story introductions will mention what motivated their selection, though in this case the interest came from the editor's lack of direct experience. It is said there comes a time when every parent has to Let Go. To refuse is to hold them back, to clip their wings, to smother. It must be hard to do, even knowing that the threats and dangers are hypothetical, that children need to be released. But how much harder to set them free when the threats are certain, the dangers real, and the strongest need at hand may be for vengeance?

+ + + + Story image for Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains by + + + +
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+ + + +
+
+

Sunnyside

+ Stephen S. Power +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Sunnyside by + + + +

One of the editor's favourite approaches to speculative fiction is the slice-of-life format, when not yet (or never) existing worlds are realised through what is, for their denizens, everyday experiences not far removed from our own. Hence the immediate appeal of Stephen Power's excursion around a New York City not quite come to pass, but nevertheless familiar.

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+

The Culling

+ Addison Smith +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Culling by + + + +

Introducing new writers to your audience is always rewarding for a magazine editor, but a parallel pleasure is welcoming contributors back to share more of their work. They have to justify it, though: the editor must not fall back on nostalgia, having them back just for old time's sake. Fortunately for me, Addison Smith's strange little stories always have a little something.

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+

Beyond the Sudden Door

+ Lyra Meurer +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Beyond the Sudden Door by + + + +

Animals make for useful subjects when an author's real subject is one of the biggies, like skewering the dark side of human society or exploring life and death. One of the editor's own early stories used wolves to look at mortality, so finding this piece brought back fond memories – but Lyra Meurer's gently emotive rat tail (excuse me, tale) can speak to anyone.

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+ + + +
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+

Seal-Skin

+ David Stephen Powell +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Seal-Skin by + + + +

Queue the annual moan about Things The Editor Hates To Find In The Slushpile, attached to an example of the same which he has happily selected for publication. In this case, as the title surely signals, we're in selkie territory, but what makes mythological spec-fic work is when the myth in question isn't what the story is actually about – in this case, too.

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+

Safe in the Dark

+ Helen French +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Safe in the Dark by + + + +

Another appealing mode in spec-fic is when the thematic space we think we're in turns out not to be the case, or not quite, or maybe so but maybe no - you catch my drift. Here you might say (if you were prone to bad puns, as the editor provenly is) that this story hinges not so much on the nature of genre switches as the nature of genre's witches… I'll get my coat.

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+

Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel by + + + +

It wouldn't be Spring without a new review from Mattia Ravasi, and – as the editor counts down the days to Eastercon, Britain's premier fan-driven science fiction convention – it seems he's selected a most appropriate subject. Where better for someone to walk the fine line between fan and fanatic? On the page, please. On the page…

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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – January to March, 2025

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+ + +

Rounding out our first issue of the latest End Times Period, here are three more (technically) short short story reviews – although in this case the nature of the story-telling medium boasts a little more variety than usual. Like Mythaxis itself, all these are freely available to read online, and this editor enjoys helping raise awareness of whatever else is out there, so when you're done reading here why not check these out next?

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 by + + + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-41/beyond-the-sudden-door.html b/issue-41/beyond-the-sudden-door.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ed9c79f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/beyond-the-sudden-door.html @@ -0,0 +1,387 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Beyond the Sudden Door — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Beyond the Sudden Door

+

Lyra Meurer

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+ Story image for Beyond the Sudden Door by +
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T + +hey had been seven rats at first, six squirming impatiently inside their mother’s womb, then writhing their helpless pink bodies by her nipple-lined belly. When they had fur and no longer needed milk, the females were separated from the rest and kept in a tank at a pet store. There they met other rats, became a mischief of thirteen, and spent their days roughhousing and squinting under the oppression of fluorescent lights.

+

They became two rats when, one day, a human reached in and lifted them out by their tails. The one who is still alive remembers it still–the pain wrenching through her spine, the precipitous view of the human’s upturned face, the fear that she’d be dropped into that kissing mouth. She and her sister, the Albino, were deposited into a small box and carried through the night at terrifying speeds while they fear-shitted all over the cardboard. Then, at last, human hands placed them in a roomy wire cage, which they tentatively explored. Never had they had so much space to themselves.

+

Oh, to think they had feared death at first! The humans – a female and a not-female – had been unfamiliar and incomprehensible, generators of gratuitous scent, sound, and huge, horrifying motions. But they realized, with a little time, that these humans didn’t want to eat them. They fed them, pampered them with tidbits, let them roam around the house, provided them with cozy places to sleep, stroked them with astonishing delicacy despite having such enormous hands.

+

Albino is gone now, and her sister is old and fat. Jumping to the floor hurts the joints in her legs, and she is more inclined to sleeping under the blankets in the humans’ bed than trying to break into the trashcan or knocking things off shelves.

+

They are three rats now. The two young ones – the one with the spots and the skittish one – bound around the house while Old curls up under the blanket next to the female human’s thigh, awash in her warmth. When the human has a free hand, she runs her fingers down Old’s spine. Old luxuriates at the stimulation of her skin, the weight on her muscles, becoming as flat and round as a pancake.

+

While she is half-asleep and half-aware, a familiar smell coils around her, a body brushes against her side. That scent almost like her own, but richer and deeper, like stolen chocolate. Albino is here, settling next to her as she has done since they were in the womb. But she isn’t breathing.

+

Old wakes with a sneeze, a chill tingling at her side. She lifts her head, drawing in the smell of herself, the human, the splash of dried food on the human’s pants, the flowery chemicals in the sheets and blankets. But no hint of Albino. She isn’t there.

+

Old stretches and yawns, then slides off the bed. Pain jolts her joints. She scurries off in search of food, leaving drops of urine to mark her passage.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he young ones don’t know what it means when Albino’s scent lies beside them or whisks along the floor. They lift their heads, searching for the other rat, but they don’t know who they’re searching for. They notice how Old rouses and sniffs around, her heart straining towards someone who isn’t there.

+

They never met Albino, never knew how tempestuous and sensitive she became when she went into heat, how tender she was otherwise, wielding the power of authority with gentle but firm licks and nibbles. They’d never witnessed her bravery – stealing a whole bar of soap from the bathroom, only to have it snatched from her mouth – and her circumspection – hesitating at the edge of unfamiliar terrain, sniffing hard and long to compensate for the dimness of her red eyes.

+

They hadn’t seen Albino change, growing thin, confused, and angry; cuddly one moment, biting the next. Her smell went sour. She hated the light, hiding her face in shadows and blankets. She couldn’t make it to the second level of the cage and so languished at the bottom until the day the humans took her away.

+

They came back and showed Old her sister’s corpse, her shrunken scent, cold and overshadowed by a chemical stink from a streak of something poisonous on her leg and stomach. So, that was what had happened to her: an illness, followed by death. Then the corpse was gone too, and soon after came the young ones, twin whirls of energy, sisters who would never know Old once had a sister too.

+

When Albino appears again in unbreathing whiffs, Old realizes that she’s encountered this sort of manifestation before. Whenever the humans leave the house – sometimes, even when they don’t – presences sit in the chairs, trundle about the kitchen, creak across the floor. Sometimes they come in incredible numbers, passing from the front door to the back.

+

The rats, small and alert and close to the ground, feel with their whiskers the disturbances they shake into the air, smell their unfamiliar odors, hear the distortions their feet press into the ancient floorboards. But never do they cast a shadow or create a silhouette in the rats’ blurry vision, and the eddies made by their movements never include the rhythmic issuance of breath.

+

They’re there, but not there. Gone, like Albino, but not gone. No harm had come from them. So, there should be no harm from Albino’s presence either.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he young rats had come from the same place as the old ones, had been plucked out by the same human, taken home the same way. Spots acclimated quickly, took to climbing the humans from the cuffs of their pants to the cliffs of their shoulders. Scaredy could not comprehend such acts. The humans moved a hand and she darted away, afraid of being picked up and swept through the air to she-knew-not-where. They made a sound and she tensed, waiting for the next sign of danger.

+

Anxiously and inexpertly, the humans tried to rectify her nature. On the third day, the female picked her up like it was nothing, cradling her. Scaredy trembled under petting hands, then squeaked and buried her head between the female’s belly and arms, hiding from what must be impending death. Realizing her mistake, the female released Scaredy back into the cage, where she lurked in the shadows, afraid of a second such near miss.

+

They are allowed out of the cage to explore the house, but whenever they are let out, they must be brought back in, and Scaredy suffers the torment of being cornered and grabbed and wrestled into the cage. She fights for her freedom, but never wins against those massive beasts. Thus, the cycle continues, without a clear end: fear begets force, which begets more fear.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen Old was younger, she took every opportunity that appeared, stealing into cupboards and closets the moment a door opened. Often the humans noticed and snatched her out before she could explore, but once they hadn’t. She’d slipped into the closet and entertained herself for a while, snuffling through folded cloth and unfamiliar objects.

+

Then she got hungry and sought her way out. The door had been open before, but now it was closed. She stuck her nose under the crack, sneezing at the cool air beyond. She twisted her head to chew on the wooden edge of the door. Nothing gave. No way out.

+

Fear set in, that same fear as in the cardboard box on the first night. She shat messily in the corner, terrified that she would never be able to get out, that there would be no food, no water, no one to keep her company as she perished.

+

After a long time, the door opened and light flooded in. The female human found her in the corner amongst her diarrhea, wide-eyed and awaiting death. She made a noise of relief and humor, scooped the rat up, and transported her to her cage with many kisses. Old had never been so happy for the cage door to close behind her. She chewed on her dry food with relish, took a long draught from the water bottle, and hopped up to the hammock to sleep.

+

So when new doors begin opening around the house, she remembers her lesson. The doors appear in unexpected places: in the middle of rooms, underneath the couch, on top of the coffee table, inside the cage. A creak, a breath of air, and the scent of Albino.

+

They open before Old and she hesitates, remembering the closet. It’s strange to her that Albino, so careful, would rush into such a place before her sister. The young ones take no notice, wrestling in the corner or stealing off with crumbs to crunch away in peace. The door always closes just as Old has decided she might investigate, and the scent of Albino disappears.

+

One time, the door opens in a ray of sunlight and stays open long enough for Old to poke her head in. Strong light dazzles her eyes, so she can only smell and feel with her whiskers, which brush against the constriction of the door, then spring out into open space. Albino’s scent grows strong, along with the promising odor of new food, something delicious she has never tried before.

+

Another whiff makes her hesitate. That chemical bite on a hush of cold air, crawling into her nostrils. She sneezes and recoils, snapping her head away. The door slams shut a hair from her nose.

+

The humans find her lurking under the couch and must tempt her out with bits of cracker. Back in the cage, she slips into place in the hammock between the young ones. Their smooth sides breathe against hers, their safe smell fills her, warmth floods her feet and ears. Scaredy twists about to run her teeth through Old’s fur. Old’s eyelids slide closed and she grinds her teeth together, the vibrations thrumming through her head, tickling that pleasure spot deep in her mandible. The muscles of her face work in delightful concord, pulsing behind her eyeballs until they jiggle in their sockets – an expression of incomparable delight. Bruxing and boggling, she falls asleep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +hen Old awakes, she is cold. Her feet are folded beneath her but ache for warmth. She blinks in the darkness, sticks her nose out of the hammock to sniff around. She smells the house, the varnish and old wood, the waft of dust from the heating vents, but nothing alive. No rats, no humans, not even the mysterious airs that sometimes swirl in from outside. Just herself.

+

She slips out of the hammock, her paws spreading on the plastic of the cage shelf. The cage door hangs open, slack-jawed. She creeps out onto it, her toes curling around frigid metal, and flops to the ground, the sound of her small impact echoing around the house.

+

Old always wants the cage door to be open, always wants the freedom to roam. But from the moment she hits the floor, when she feels the frozen, breathless wood against her sore feet and round belly, she knows she doesn’t want it now. There is no one here, no one to warm her, no one to feed or groom her. She searches every corner, under the couch and through the closets and cabinets, the doors of which stand open, but smells no living being, feels no stirring in the air, never hears a note of the constant squeaking discourse of fellow rats, nor the booming of human voices.

+

How has she gotten trapped here? She crouches by the stove and feels her bowels loosening. She should go back to the cage. Then maybe the others will appear, maybe the shaft of light will blind her and a human will rescue her.

+

Then, a wall of smell, so sudden and horrible she squints against it and sneezes. Bitter chemicals and cold flesh, Albino’s final scent, stinking of loneliness, slamming into her like a death strike. Old shrieks and runs. A needle of pain thrusts into the back of her neck. She cries again, certain she will die.

+

Old wakes to find Spots grooming her, her teeth pulling at her neck fur. Old struggles to her feet, shaking Spots off. She sways in the hammock, nose poked out between folds of fleece. Living odors flood her nostrils. Spots’ and Scaredy’s matching auras wrapping her like bedding, Scaredy’s fresh feces a rich pong from below, the must of the dry food, the not-female human walking by, trailing sweetness, sweat, and farts. No acrid stench, no chilling isolation, just the musk and heat of living things.

+

Old sighs and settles as Spots returns to grooming her. Her teeth comb through Old’s fur, pulling out dust and loose strands, tickling and caressing her skin.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ne day, the female human scoops up Scaredy and holds her in her arms. Scaredy is tired from bustling about the house, would’ve gone to sleep anyways, so she allows this treatment. The human’s fingers run over her head, down her neck, her back, a pressure slight but firm. An unexpected combination of sensations: the human, and pleasure.

+

The muscled tube of Scaredy’s body relaxes. She bruxes, her teeth sliding together, then boggles a few times, licking her tongue around her teeth between each round. So this is why Old and Spots allow themselves to be manhandled so.

+

Scaredy recollects herself. The human stinks, and the feeling of flesh and a heartbeat surrounding her is too uncanny to bear. She alerts, pushing herself back to her feet. The human contains her before she can struggle away, walling her in with a gentle hand, and she is carried to the cage.

+

Scaredy returns changed. She stands a while by the dish, which is full of pasta, peas, and cucumber slices, too stunned to recognize any of it as food. She sniffs between the bars as the humans thump around the house, wondering if she’ll be lucky enough to feel such pleasure again.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he floor is cold the next day. The rats skitter across the boards for a while, their naked feet losing warmth as they check the best spots for new crumbs. Just when Old is thinking about curling up in the blankets on the bed, in the cage, or on the humans’ laps, a door opens right next to the fridge. Albino’s scent wafts across the kitchen, mixed with the smell of unknown humans and hot laundry detergent: the promise of ambient heat. Old ignores it. She has been there before, she can detect the chemical stench of Albino’s death underlying the fragrance of false comfort.

+

Scaredy, lingering under the overhang of the cabinet doors, lifts her head, nostrils widening to take in the new smell. Her claws scrabble on the wood until she catches some friction, and she takes off around the circumference of the kitchen, sticking to the shadows under the cabinets.

+

Old, who has paused to groom herself, notices Scaredy stopping before the new door. The young rat will learn, she thinks, and twists around to clean her rump.

+

After a thorough licking, she looks up to see Scaredy’s tail whipping beyond the threshold. The door clicks shut. Albino’s scent disappears, and so does Scaredy’s. Old trots over to where the door was, but Scaredy is gone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hat night, the humans turn over the house, calling out and shaking bags of treats like they did on the night when Old got herself stuck in the trash can. Old and Spots huddle in their hammock, conscious of Scaredy’s absence, unsure if she might return, or if she might be gone forever.

+

The female human cries into the night, sleeps, then wakes to cry again. When morning penetrates the windows, Scaredy has not returned. Old and Spots have already begun to account for her absence. They wrestle a bit in the cage, and Spots re-establishes that she is in charge. Old stashes some dry food in the hammock, among the shreds of paper Scaredy shredded for bedding not long ago.

+

As two rats, their warmth is smaller, the knot of their shared flesh timid and quiet, the ever-present danger of the world a little closer. To be awake is to be aware of the shrinking of their number, so Spots and Old sleep through the day and into the night.

+

The days pass. The rats search the cracks and corners for Scaredy, but the traces of her fade fast: her feces dry, her scent markings are covered with fresh ones, her shedded fur swirls away on errant breezes. When the humans clean out the litter at the bottom of the cage and wash the hammock and trays, there is nothing left of her. They are two rats now.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +ld dreams of the open cage door. She remembers what this means: that she is where Albino is, that there is no company around, no food.

+

She climbs out of the cage and stands on the floor, sniffing. Her feet are warm, her body feels young, and it is no trouble to climb on top of the cage and stand to catch more wafts from around the room.

+

It is not cold and lifeless this time. There is no one here, no one she can visit at least, but the smell of company surrounds her. Rats, their groomed fur smelling of spit, the warmth of sleeping bodies accentuating each individual’s scent. Stored food waiting, humans under blankets, food cooking on the stove. Albino and Scaredy together, and countless other rats besides, their scent markers meandering into every corner, commemorating explorations old and new.

+

Old jumps to the floor and checks the best spots in the house. A new air floats through: all the doors are open, even the ones to the outside. Old hesitates at the threshold, then goes through, onto new spaces, new houses with new foods dropped on the floor, across fields scattered with seeds, between trees, into holes in the ground. Though she never sees another rat, she always smells them. She never feels alone and not once is she afraid.

+

Old awakes in her hammock. She is sleeping on top of Spots. The younger rat’s nose sticks out from under Old’s puddled fat, and her breathing is slow, the occasional contented, sleepy squeak easing from her body. Old scratches her ear, chews on her nails, bruxes, and falls asleep to dream of the world beyond the door, and the company that waits there.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Beyond the Sudden Door at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Lyra Meurer

+

+ + Author image of Lyra Meurer + + + Lyra Meurer has wanted to be a writer since they were a stream-wading, story-inventing child. Now they chase that dream in Colorado, where they live with their spouse, backyard skunks, and overflowing collections of journals and books. When they’re not writing, they can be found down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or basking in a sunbeam. Their short fiction can be found in Trollbreath Magazine, Heartlines Spec, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and several anthologies. Lyra’s contemplations on international music, early 2000s television, worldbuilding, and other bizarre phenomena, along with pictures of their doodles, can be found at their website.

+

© Lyra Meurer 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Marcelo Jaboo and SamuelFJohanns - many thanks!

+
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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-41/dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.html b/issue-41/dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ebaaf980 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/dhuni-murderess-of-mountains.html @@ -0,0 +1,453 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains

+

Finale Doshi-Velez

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +he echo of her sons’ footsteps reach her via the bones of the earth, bursting from the steppe grass stubble like sulfur from smelt – and about as welcome.

+

It’s been eighteen years, and Dhuni does not want them here. She imagines a rockslide that forces them to a more distant pass. The familiar itch grows in her palms, and she quenches the temptation by sinking it into the metal stock in her hand. The grains jump into instant alignment.

+

Inara, her daughter, her apprentice, brings her hammer down. The clang jars in a forge full of clangs and clatters. The new boy’s shoulders tense, and though Dhuni has smithed for decades, she finds her shoulders are tense too: the echos of her sons’ footfalls approach, as loud as the clangs of the forge, as inexorable as the contractions that bore them.

+

“That’s strange.” Inara frowns at the stock. Dhuni snaps each of the thousands of grains back to their original angles. If only all mistakes could be undone so easily.

+

Inara strikes the stock again. “Nevermind. You’re just not holding it steady.”

+

Her daughter is right. Magically aligning the stock in a moment of flustered desperation is not holding steady. “I owe you a cleaning shift for that.”

+

Inara rolls her eyes. “It’s okay mother, no one is perfect.”

+

Dhuni’s eyes dart to russet-veined Mount Kubir beyond. There is a sheer cliff where its lesser peak used to be – her doing, her wrong. The shadow of its cracked summit covers the imperial camp, but it cannot shade footsteps that are heard, not seen, and even then, heard directly in the bone, in the bell-chamber of the belly, in the heart broken, mended, and now, too likely to break again.

+

I’m sure you hear their footsteps, Kubir. Do you hear my daughter too? She is wiser than both of us.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +he focuses on each of Inara’s strikes. She follows the circle of her stroke, admires not only its sweep but the muscle her daughter seems to collect as easily as adding clay to a doll. She presses the metal against the anvil as flush as a sweat-soaked sleeve on skin. She tells herself that perhaps her sons will simply speak to the captain and then continue on, up until they are standing by the forge.

+

“Mother?” It is Izeh; he must remember making his own circles, his own hammer strikes.

+

“Izeh?” She looks beside him. “And Reza? Truly?” Her surprise is feigned, of course, but when they embrace she finds the joy is real.

+

Their chins graze her temple. Their chests rise and fall against her cheek. Their pepper-breath clings in her hair, and she remembers that fateful morning when she had folded three stuffed flatbreads into a kerchief the color of the dust, two for Izeh and one for little Reza, and bade them search for wild peppers. Izeh’s footsteps were nimble as a jackrabbit’s; Reza’s the toddle of a tumbleweed. She cannot recall if they had worn sandals or scampered off barefoot. She only remembers seeing the dust of imperial horses coming into the valley and shouting for the children to stay in the hills.

+

“We were seeking the new pass,” explains Izeh, “from when that earthquake flattened Mount Kubir’s lesser peak onto an imperial legion.”

+

“Some merchants claim ghosts of the soldiers haunt the way,” adds Reza. “But thank the gods that we still came, for it has brought us to you.”

+

Her gaze goes again to russet-veined Kubir. She knows it is not the gods that brought them, nor the gods who will try to take them.

+

Tears bud then, in the corners of her eye, and unlike the stone-hard cushion plants budding on Kubir’s mountainside, these budding tears fall.

+

Ever-stalwart Izeh hands her a kerchief of cloth finer than anything she has worn at a Solstice, much less to dab tears from a face that befriends dust like a crushed passionfruit befriends flies.

+

They embrace again.

+

Kubir’s summit hangs over them like a grave marker, but in this moment, they are together and alive. Perhaps, she thinks, I can keep them here. Perhaps, we will be happy.

+

Inara is fidgeting, and suddenly Dhuni realizes the silence, and not just the lack of footsteps. The apprentices have found quiet tasks, sweeping charred metal from the anvil, adjusting the coals. She takes Inara’s hand, puts Izeh and Reza’s on top. “Your half-brothers, Inara,” she says, and to them, “Your half-sister.”

+

Reza’s brow goes up, but Izeh picks up Inara and spins her around. “I’ve always wanted a sister.”

+

Reza, the youngest no more, embraces Inara stiffly. His gaze is on the pass left by the fallen peak.

+

She follows his gaze. Her grown sons may walk as steady as the mules they lead, but she knows that they too are being led. She extends her senses through her toes, into the earth. Kubir, I’m not the person who I once was. Let it go. Let them go.

+

No answer, never an answer. She turns to her sons. “Please,” she says, “will you stay awhile?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey do not refuse. They are good sons, she thinks, bless the gods who raised them when I could not.

+

They tie their mules and unload their packs. She does not know how everyone and everything will fit in her two-room house, but they do not complain at the sight of walls that leave gaps against the uneven ground. A roof, a mother, a family – it is enough.

+

She shows them to the back room, and Izeh suddenly kneels by the traditional altar she has in the corner, a few medallions on burlap smudged with incense and stained by offerings of berries. “Did you make these, mother?’’

+

She nods. There is one for the ancestors, of course, passed down for generations. And three etched with their names – Izeh, Reza, Inara – in flowing imperial calligraphy but which secretly form the ancient logos for love and safety, their people’s glyph for home.

+

“And this last one?” Izeh is frowning at the final medallion. His lips attempt to knead out the meaning behind the tangle of glyphs that spell the name of Kubir’s flattened child. “Haa-rish-it?”

+

Hrishita, she thinks. Bringer of joy, except no more.

+

“I just wanted to make something pretty,” she says weakly, because some truths are too hard to tell.

+

“It is pretty,” says Izeh. He is looking from the medallions to her and back again. “They’re… I’ve been many places… this is exquisite. You made these for us!’’

+

“Who else but you?’’ she says, and they embrace all over again. For years she has taken comfort in the sound of their distant footsteps, knowing they were still alive. Now she hears the beating, the aliveness, of Izeh’s heart. And sees, out of the corner of her eyes, Reza’s restlessness.

+

He hovers over his account books, over their bolts of cloth that are too fine for the soldiers here. He interleaves the cloth with fresh cedar, covers the bolts more tightly. Cities breed moths and silverfish of all kinds, and military camps breed more than most.

+

“Open it just once?’’ asks Inara. “All the way?’’

+

She has spied the delicate neck of an embroidered peacock, shimmering resplendent blues and bejeweled greens never seen under Kubir’s russet dust. Reza scowls, but Izeh gives her a scrap of silk. The girl has worked iron and bronze and even silver, but she has never touched anything so fine. She brushes it over her cheek, her forearm, her ankles as if needing to experience this novelty with her whole body.

+

In the end, she cannot settle on where to keep it and gives it back. Izeh laughs. “Maybe one day you will come to the capital with us. And then you will see wonders that will put this scrap to shame.’’

+

Dhuni follows Inara’s gaze to the jagged pass.

+

“Not now,” she says sharply, too sharply. “Our family has been separated too long.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +o long, she is not quite sure how to be with these grown sons. She knows how children grow from the breast to the lap to curled under an arm with their heads back over the breast where they began, but after that, it is a void. All she knows is that she cannot bear the thought of losing them again. “I’ll request extra rations,’’ she says. “I will make you pan-fried sweets.’’

+

“Like you did for guests?’’ laughs Izeh. “We are your children.’’ He puts his arm around her, because he is the taller one now, and places his other palm next to hers. Reza sits on the ground at their feet, shelling peas while his shoulder grazes her knee.

+

“You still deserve a feast,’’ she says.

+

“You deserve the feast,’’ says Izeh. “Trade has been good to us, mother. It is time for us to treat you.’’

+

“And me?’’ asks Inara.

+

“Of course,’’ says Izeh. His smile spans the whole of his face, from his dimples to the creases around his eyes to his wide brow, like the constellations span the sky. He nods to the wrapped bolts. “You’ll have the finest tunic in town for the Solstice. Kerchiefs for your hair too.’’

+

Dhuni notices then that Izeh has been idly fingering the hem of her tunic. Counting threads, marking the uneven stitches. But he could become a blacksmith again, she thinks.

+

“We’ll come back for the Solstice,’’ says Reza.

+

No, she thinks, you won’t. “Settle here. The garrison needs more smiths.’’ Her gaze catches on Reza’s smooth hands; he was the one she hoped would go to school, and it seems somehow he did. “Scribes too. We can be together.’’

+

“We have our goods,’’ says Izeh, “and the mules. There is something enchanting about the open road.’’

+

Someone enchanting, she thinks. And they will kill you. Because of my foolishness.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + + week passes. The captain visits. Her sons are hard workers, they insist on assisting the garrison in addition to paying the captain. So he does not begrudge the extra mouths, nor the mouths of their mules. Reza has taken to the captain’s scribe-work like copper takes to tin, and Izeh is humble enough to work the bellows for apprentices half his age.

+

“I wish they were mine,’’ the captain says, with a sideways glance at Inara. Dhuni raises an eyebrow, and he brings his gaze back to her. “The Tarfa pass. There was an earthquake there.’’

+

She knows. “How much damage?”

+

“We don’t think there were any caravans in the pass,” he says, “but it will take weeks to clear.”

+

He comes closer. He thinks he is being subtle, he thinks it appears that he is inspecting the work as he lets his fingers graze hers. She opens her palm to him; cups her thumb just enough to touch his knuckle. She knows that everyone sees, but it is a small price for the safety and comfort of her children. Hardly a price, she amends, to be a favorite of any captain, and this captain has no fleas and loves to hear her point out her people’s constellations. He has a lady wife in the capital, and she respects him all the more for telling her so. Other officers have husbands and wives in every village.

+

His face turns grave as he nods to the new boy, the one whose shoulders are always tense. “He got into a scrape with one of my soldiers last night. It doesn’t seem like her eye will heal.’’

+

If they take the boy’s eye as punishment, he will not advance beyond bellows-work. “Surely a mistake can be forgiven,’’ she says, and suddenly she is not just speaking of him. “Surely his future service is worth more than his eye.”

+

The captain smiles. “You were always soft.’’

+

Stupid, she thinks, foolish. She flounders for words. “Maybe it is right for him to offer his eye for the soldier’s. But you do not have to take it. You can be merciful. You can realize that taking his sight will not bring back hers.”

+

“The logics of your people are always fascinating,” he says. There is a tone in his voice that gives her hope, for the new boy. If only hope for her children could come so easily.

+

He slides a hand down her back. “Shall we inspect the armory?’’

+

She returns with suppers from the officer’s mess. Reza compares an imperial star chart to his own, his lips working through the calculations as he aligns their predictions. For once, he does not seem to miss his accounts.

+

Izeh sits with Inara. She has looped string between her fingers, rolls the string under and over with thumbs that have smithing burns just like her brother’s. Izeh picks out the net, she picks it back. The next round, he drops a finger and the tangle of knots fall out into one, simple loop. Inara laughs, and he does too. “Our cloth can wait,’’ he says, “We’re staying.’’

+

Two simple words. It is the unwinding of the knots in Dhuni’s heart.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

"A + + pair of threes,’’ says Reza, knowing he has lost.

+

Dhuni slaps down her cards. “A string of four, starting at seven!’’ She starts gathering the pebbles to keep score.

+

“Not so fast,’’ says Inara. “An ace, no one defeats the emperor!’’

+

Izeh laughs as Dhuni groans playfully and pushes over the pile. She is tempted to keep one of the pebbles cupped under her hand, like when she performed magic tricks as a girl. But Izeh sweeps the pile across too fast.

+

Inara deals the next round. Reza brings out a bottle of wine hidden among the carefully wrapped bolts, and even Inara gets as much as she wants. Dhuni lets her hand fall casually on Reza’s, and he gives it a squeeze.

+

Inara wins again, because Izeh sneaks her aces; Reza rolls his eyes but smiles. Smiles wider when Dhuni sneaks him her own aces with a giggle. How long has it been since she has laughed? Dhuni does not know and does not care, she is too busy pilfering another ace from the discard pile to give away. Inara sees, and then everyone laughs once more.

+

“And now,’’ says Izeh, pulling out a parcel he has kept wrapped behind him all evening. “For you, mother.’’

+

“Me?’’

+

Izeh nods to the sky lit with two full moons. “Did you think we would forget your birthday?’’

+

Dhuni opens the parcel and draws out a silk purse, embroidered with emerald phoenixes so alive that one might think they would fly away in the flicker of the lamplight. “It’s beautiful,’’ she breathes, “but where will I use something as fancy as this?’’

+

“No more beautiful than the prayer medallions you cast and etch,’’ says Izeh.

+

Dhuni fetches the medallions. She clears the ground, then spreads the medallions atop the purse. Silver lines and emerald thread catch the light. They sit close, all admiring the most beautiful thing they have ever seen, being the most beautiful thing they have ever been.

+

The past might be written in stone, thinks Dhuni, but the present is light as air.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he forge is at full clamor when Reza arrives. Even the new boy is hammering, though his back is stiff from the whipping and his eyes – both of them – heavy from nights tending the now one-eyed soldier’s wound. “The captain said there has been another earthquake. Not far from Polchi. The messenger pigeon came while I was scribing.’’ He squats over a borrowed map, tracing the line from Tarfa to Polchi. “Two earthquakes off the main shake-lines within six weeks. What a coincidence.’’

+

It is not a coincidence.

+

Those who claim stone is patient do not know stone.

+

“And?’’ asks Dhuni, a catch in her throat. “Injuries?’’

+

“Only a few,’’ says Reza, “but many of the farming terraces were destroyed.”

+

Reza is sucking his finger while he stares at the map; Inara and Izeh are busy smithing. Quietly, she presses her palm to the ground. Flattening an army did not bring my husband and neighbors back, she says. I did wrong. I hurt you and yours. But these quakes, my children’s deaths, will not make you whole.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

"P + +lay again?’’ Inara holds out her string to Izeh. As they trade the string back and forth, Inara tells him how to improve his arrowheads.

+

Izeh’s eyes twinkle. “You are a smart one. Maybe I should be your apprentice.’’

+

“And I can be yours. You and Reza can teach me about cloth and mules and maps,’’ says Inara. “I’ve never left the camp walls.’’

+

This time Izeh’s glance is sharper. He is counting the idle hours with tops and cards and string, never wandering in the foothills among the camp’s sheep and goats. “Not even to gather wild peppers?’’

+

“We’ve been content,’’ says Dhuni, firmly, before Inara can say more. She brings out their unit’s dried moong and a few trays. “Time to sift out the sand.’’

+

“And the weevils,’’ adds Inara, dropping one on Reza’s arm. He jerks up from yet another map.

+

They have just gotten settled when the captain arrives, eyes red. At the sight of Inara, his eyes bud fresh tears. “A landslide by the provincial capital. It wasn’t that bad, only a few houses destroyed, but—” he chokes. “My daughter. She’s dead.’’

+

Her chest is metal tightening when quenched too quickly. “Captain.’’

+

“I saw her four years ago, when she was seven.’’ He looks again at Inara, and then covers his face.

+

She guides him to his quarters. Helps him light a lamp and burns incense for his daughter’s soul. He weeps, and she weeps with him.

+

For unlike Kubir, her heart is not stone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he din of thousands of footsteps climbing Kubir’s lesser peak startle her awake, but she knows she’s waking into a dream. She’s in her bunk, long before the new captain, before Inara.

+

She rushes to a friend on the night watch. “What’s happening?” In her dream the words echo across the valley, deafening, though back then her voice was strangled, desperate for evidence to deny the truth she feels in her bones as her friend—yes, a friend, because he does not ask how she knows—replies that the rebels in Polci will be routed by morning. His word: rebel; this friend, he’s forgotten they are her people.

+

She trembles, and barely keeps the earth from trembling with her. She held back when the imperials conscripted her husband. She held back when they razed her village.

+

She does not hold back now.

+

She finds a spot where the double peaks are clearly haloed by a hidden moon. Hands on the earth, she is the earth. The veins of ore become her veins. She flexes her biceps, and boulders bulge. She creases her palms, and crevasses erupt under the soldiers’ feet. Their panicked scramble feels like ants scurrying on her skin. She sheds a layer of strata, sending half the legion tumbling. She’s too far to hear the screams, but she feels a surge of satisfaction as distress flares wink in the distance. How many of her people have these imperials killed? An eye for an eye, she will crush them all.

+

And then she feels a resistance.

+

No. She raises a hand up from the ground and brings it around in a powerful circle that strikes the tender connection between the two peaks. More resistance, distraught, but she is both stone and smith. She shakes off the soldiers’ frantic fingers; their desperate limbs find no purchase as she tears down the lesser peak crag by crag. After a lifetime of bowing to others, she is unstoppable. She is—

+

A fool, interjects her dream self. But it is too late: the moon shines bright through the fresh gap of the flattened peak.

+

She wakes, heart pounding, as dawn slices through the pass.

+

None of the imperials suspected a gift could be so strong, but Kubir knew who had gloried in killing their child. Her past alloys her present; her blood-debt is written in russet veins of stone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +he no longer laughs when Izeh sneaks her cards. When Inara’s fingers brush against hers as they sort dried beans, she barely holds back tears. Is this dullness supposed to make the parting easier? As Reza checks the loaded mules, she cannot claim that it does. All she knows is that, just like the new boy, she must offer what justice supposedly requires.

+

Yet, as the new boy holds her stock steady, studying the circle of her stroke with two healthy eyes, she wonders: Is vengeance in kind truly all she knows? All there is?

+

Local customs are discouraged at imperial shrines, but still heavy in his grief the captain does not balk when she attempts to placate the vengeful mountain spirit by placing the medallion with their child Hrishita’s name on the central altar, nor when she asks Izeh and Inara to make more medallions to leave at shrines along the way. Ever-precise Reza copies down the calligraphy to commission onto silks.

+

“If you must go,” she says, “stay true to our roots. Respect and honor the mountain spirits, both standing and fallen, and teach others to do the same.”

+

They head to the pass then, her sons, chattering about how they will be back once they make their trades, about the sun and the wind, about the sweets they will bring back for the Solstice and the shrines they will build. Inara runs around both of them, fingering the straps, petting the mules, sometimes just jumping in place with excitement: Does the market town have one gate or two or four? Are there smiths there? And what are all these fruits you keep mentioning?

+

Dhuni watches until she can no longer see the dust kicked up by their mules, until she can no longer see the sparkle of the silver-threaded scarf that Izeh has given to Inara. She listens to the sound of their eager footsteps, rising up beneath her again. Her palms itch. Even now, she could block the pass. She could force them back. But there is a thoughtfulness in Kubir’s silence that gives her hope. She presses her hands to the earth.

+

Let my children walk where your child once stood.

+

Let them, let us, heal you with our service.

+

It’s you who can be merciful.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Finale Doshi-Velez

+

+ + Author image of Finale Doshi-Velez + + + Finale Doshi-Velez designs ethical and helpful artificial intelligences by day and raises (hopefully also ethical and helpful) natural intelligences by night. She believes few things are impossible for a creative mind and a compassionate heart. You can learn more about her work at her website, finaledoshivelez.com.

+

© Finale Doshi-Velez 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Pix-Off and Pexels - many thanks!

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Editorial

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Earlier this year, someone sent me a link to an article at 404 Media (the journalist-founded digital media company “exploring the ways technology is shaping – and is shaped by – our world”) called The Digital Packrat Manifesto. It was more than just a catchy headline.

+

It starts out lamenting the recent decision by the world’s largest ebook retail ecosystem (you know the one) to build a technological moat around the reading material you enjoy via your device or app. Now they assert that this dynamic is no longer one of buying-and-selling but of access licensing. You can’t take it with you when your Kindle dies, unless it’s to another Kindle – you certainly can’t download them to your computer or read them on anything else.

+

With ebooks, unlike when the word is printed on paper, you don’t own what you paid for. But, the article notes, this is only the latest instance of this sort of behaviour by big tech.

+

Ours used to be a world of the physical, and the books (and vinyl, CDs, DVDs, Bluerays,…) you bought were yours, to hoard or sell or gift or throw away as you saw fit. Since the dawn of the mp3, that’s all changed. Today, the idea of digital media being consumed but not owned is now accepted more or less as the default. Film, TV, and music are the all but sole domain of streaming services, in which creators and consumers are treated as little more than the input and output points of perpetual content dispensers.

+

Streaming platform subscription models grant access to a menu of material that is subject to adjustment at any time, including the spontaneous vanishing of things from your watchlist as rights expire and are picked up elsewhere – or, on occasion, when social or political factors fall out of alignment with the parent company’s business objectives.

+

The threat of such disappearances may now hang over your reading list as well.

+

But on the other end of the scale, you have the digital packrats: people who maintain private archives of the digital media they have bought in the past, rather than drinking whatever is dispensed for them from the streaming tap. To quote the article directly:

+
+

Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices – and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful.

+

…

+

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.

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Read the article, it’s a great rabbit hole of links in itself. But to bring this editorial at long last to the point I wanted to, two lines really stood out for me from that quote. The first:

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+

…this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria…

+

This is how I feel about Mythaxis Magazine. And I think the analogy is stronger when applied to the online magazine scene, particularly those made freely accessible by default.

+

From the flood of stories that are offered to us whenever we open for submissions, zine editors curate those that really speak to us, and that we think will speak to others as well. We preserve the few we can make space for, and keep them where they can be found by anyone who comes looking. We’re tying to make a public good, hopefully forever.

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There are more great stories out there than all the zines currently in existence can possibly include, and still more get written every day. That means there’s a huge space for new editors and zines to step into, unique and diverse curations to be lovingly slaved over, and – hopefully – new like-minded audiences waiting to eagerly coalesce around them.

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My experience of interacting with other editors has always been rewarding. Much like my experience, as a writer, of interacting with other writers; as a reader, of interacting with other readers. The lines between creator and consumer are fuzzier when the work is done at the same personal level as the enjoyment of it, and the editor stands with a foot in both realms. The battles and concerns that drive the streaming media machines are not what drive things here.

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We need more online magazines, and I encourage anyone who might want to edit one to try. I’ll close on the second line that spoke to me, which I think also applies right here:

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+

Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful.

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Andrew Leon Hudson

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+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

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ISSUE 41 – Thanks and Salutations! +Almost five years ago, digital artist Huy Tran Viet provided the first cover art of Mythaxis Magazine’s new design era, and we’re delighted to feature his work again! Huy is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from Danang, Vietnam, and this time we have a striking blend of historical tradition and futuristic technology in Year of the Water Buffalo. You can see more of his work at Cara, a platform for artists and art enthusiasts.

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Mythaxis

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Spring 2025

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+ Finale Doshi-Velez +

Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains

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In a nod to the point of this issue's editorial, the story introductions will mention what motivated their selection, though in this case the interest came from the editor's lack of direct experience. It is said there comes a time when every parent has to Let Go. To refuse is to hold them back, to clip their wings, to smother. It must be hard to do, even knowing that the threats and dangers are hypothetical, that children need to be released. But how much harder to set them free when the threats are certain, the dangers real, and the strongest need at hand may be for vengeance?

+ + + + Story image for Dhuni, Murderess of Mountains by + + + +
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Sunnyside

+ Stephen S. Power +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Sunnyside by + + + +

One of the editor's favourite approaches to speculative fiction is the slice-of-life format, when not yet (or never) existing worlds are realised through what is, for their denizens, everyday experiences not far removed from our own. Hence the immediate appeal of Stephen Power's excursion around a New York City not quite come to pass, but nevertheless familiar.

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The Culling

+ Addison Smith +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Culling by + + + +

Introducing new writers to your audience is always rewarding for a magazine editor, but a parallel pleasure is welcoming contributors back to share more of their work. They have to justify it, though: the editor must not fall back on nostalgia, having them back just for old time's sake. Fortunately for me, Addison Smith's strange little stories always have a little something.

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Beyond the Sudden Door

+ Lyra Meurer +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Beyond the Sudden Door by + + + +

Animals make for useful subjects when an author's real subject is one of the biggies, like skewering the dark side of human society or exploring life and death. One of the editor's own early stories used wolves to look at mortality, so finding this piece brought back fond memories – but Lyra Meurer's gently emotive rat tail (excuse me, tale) can speak to anyone.

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Seal-Skin

+ David Stephen Powell +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Seal-Skin by + + + +

Queue the annual moan about Things The Editor Hates To Find In The Slushpile, attached to an example of the same which he has happily selected for publication. In this case, as the title surely signals, we're in selkie territory, but what makes mythological spec-fic work is when the myth in question isn't what the story is actually about – in this case, too.

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Safe in the Dark

+ Helen French +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Safe in the Dark by + + + +

Another appealing mode in spec-fic is when the thematic space we think we're in turns out not to be the case, or not quite, or maybe so but maybe no - you catch my drift. Here you might say (if you were prone to bad puns, as the editor provenly is) that this story hinges not so much on the nature of genre switches as the nature of genre's witches… I'll get my coat.

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Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel by + + + +

It wouldn't be Spring without a new review from Mattia Ravasi, and – as the editor counts down the days to Eastercon, Britain's premier fan-driven science fiction convention – it seems he's selected a most appropriate subject. Where better for someone to walk the fine line between fan and fanatic? On the page, please. On the page…

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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – January to March, 2025

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Rounding out our first issue of the latest End Times Period, here are three more (technically) short short story reviews – although in this case the nature of the story-telling medium boasts a little more variety than usual. Like Mythaxis itself, all these are freely available to read online, and this editor enjoys helping raise awareness of whatever else is out there, so when you're done reading here why not check these out next?

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel-review.html b/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..153443b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/metallic-realms-lincoln-michel-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,317 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel

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Mattia Ravasi

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+ Story image for Space Mania: Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel by +
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A + +ll of us who have, at one point or another, proudly called ourselves fans – of a rock band, a TV series, a sci-fi novelist – know that we are the great unappreciated scholars of our age. Those uninventive normies obsessed with molecular biology, work automation, or Elizabethan theatre might well make a career out of their passion in a lab, a company, or the halls of academia; whereas our minute knowledge of Goosebumps books, Final Fantasy games, and the manga Fullmetal Alchemist rarely goes appreciated outside of a handful of online boards, and a scant few annual conventions peopled by weirdos like us.

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Michael Lincoln, the narrator-cum-curator of Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel – yes – is well aware of this injustice, but shrugs it off with the unshakable self-assurance of the true fanatic. Underemployed, broke, and decidedly unpopular, Michael is however a scholar – if only in his own mind. He is the official “Lore Keeper” of the Star Rot Chronicles, a series of science fiction stories created by a collective of aspiring writers called Orb 4. Taras, the leader of this collective, is Michael’s oldest childhood friend; he and the other three members – Jane, Darya, and Merlin – all come together in Michael and Taras’ Brooklyn apartment to cook up inventive tales centered around a spaceship named Star Rot and its ragtag crew of misfits and daredevils.

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Metallic Realms is, in fact, a novel masquerading as an edited compendium, giving us all nine Star Rot stories that compose the series’ canon. These are extremely engaging tales with memorable characters – the genderfluid android Algorithm, the fish-man pilot Aul-Wick – facing terrible odds, alien fanatics, and space whales as big as planets. They are fun stories in their own right, but they also present a long and motley homage to the history and possibilities of the science fiction genre. They range, in tone and flavor, from the high-octane adventure sci-fi of the golden age, with its overt social and political commentary, to the introspective experimental science fiction of Italo Calvino and other postmodernist writers, all the way to the philosophical and technological dilemmas of cyberpunk. They are love letters to the genre composed by devotee aficionados, and by struggling writers who cherish the simple act of creating beautiful worlds together, swapping stories with each other.

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What complicates this picture, turning it from a self-conscious nod to the genre to an intricate metafictional puzzle, is the heavy hand of its unforgettable curator. Michael is the editor of the collection you hold in your hands, and the author of its Introduction. And of its Foreword. And of the commentary to all the stories, the Afterword, and the After-Afterword. The depth of Michael’s passion for the Star Rot Chronicles is astounding, as is his conviction that what he is working on, and presenting to you, is one of the all-time great works of the science fictional genre. It becomes apparent soon enough, however, that Michael might also have other reasons for wanting to put his own version of the story of the Orb 4 collective out in the world; for wanting to get ahead of “the distortions, fabrications, and outright slanders” that have been spread about him since an ominous and unspecified tragedy…

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Fandom loves nothing more than name-dropping, connections, and nods; what Jonathan Lethem, speaking of pop music, calls the “intertextual erotics” of popular culture. Perhaps because this enthusiasm is contagious, the temptation is strong to discuss Metallic Realms by simply stringing together a series of comparisons. Michel’s novel engages with nerd culture as extensively and adoringly as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. In its casual use of genre references, and its depiction of a strong (but treacherous) friendship between geeks, it calls to mind Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Going forward, I will do my best to resist this temptation; yet two further books must be mentioned to place the novel’s brilliance within context. Curiously, neither of them is a genre novel, nor do they engage with genre at all.

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The first, and most obvious, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, another novel written by a delusional (and hilarious) scholar and composed in the form of annotations to another writer’s work. Metallic Realms even opens with a Nabokov quote, albeit a distorted one, warping Nabokov’s distaste for science fiction into a declaration of love (with the excuse that the former “must have been an autocorrect error!”) and revealing to us from the outset quite how many liberties our narrator is going to take with his source material. The other is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, whose protagonist, laze-about aspiring writer Ignatius J. Reilly, in many ways calls to mind our Micheal, with his baseless self-assurance and loose working ethics. Ignatius, like Michael, might not be an upstanding guy, but it’s hard to deny that the people with whom both brush shoulders in the straight world are hardly models of integrity or good character either.

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Much of Metallic Realms’ genius resides in how acrobatically its narrator manages to walk the line between utter, possibly criminal, madness, and the normal (if overzealous) behavior of a “mere” fanatic. While in many ways Michael falls into the stereotype of the obsessed, nerdy loser (to much comic effect throughout the book), he is also capable of surprisingly astute political and social observations. He is skeptical of certain conservative trends within fandom, such as the backlash against the Star Wars franchise for supposedly turning political. He believes the message at the heart of Star Trek to be little more than a cheap spin on American imperialism. He even takes issue with the term “neckbeard” because it is exclusionary of female geeks! His detailed and, at times, sorrowful characterization saves him from coming across as an amusing but predictable trope (that of the know-it-all nerd, an updated version on The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy), and allows him to shine as a truly tridimensional character.

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As we dive deeper into the Star Rot stories, and we learn to filter out Michael’s own views on their authors from what we are reading, Metallic Realms acquires an increasingly surprising, disturbing, and sad dimension. Something clearly wrong lies at the heart of Michael’s attachment to Taras; the other members of Orb 4 might not value his help as much as he thinks; his obsession for the crew of the spaceship Star Rot might be something more than a healthy pastime. Paradoxically, all of these realizations – in the reader, if not in Michael’s own distorted world-view – only end up supporting one of Michael’s convictions: that these wondrous stories, just like the great works of science fiction, offer an alternative to the inescapable problems of drab and dreadful existence, an escape into imagination that is also a thought-out vision of a scientifically accurate universe. (Michael, with the typical ardor of a zealot, is skeptical of the fantasy genre precisely because of its ascientific fancifulness, even while clearly partial to a few fantasy franchises.) And Michael is not alone, by all means, in cherishing this escape. As their problems mount – monetary and societal pressures, romantic difficulties, quarrels and misunderstandings – the Orb 4 writers find themselves cherishing all the more deeply the power of their stories to bring them together, all while the world is pulling them apart.

+

Metallic Realms is a brilliant enigma, a novel in layers that works as an ode to worldbuilding and imagination and, at the same time, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing oneself in one’s fantasies. It is bound to resonate deeply with all fans of the genre, especially those of us who have at one point or another dreamt of literary greatness: of joining the hallowed and sneered-upon ranks of the science fiction masters, the titans of a world that used to feel like an exclusive misfits club and has now become mainstream fare. It’s a hilarious book with a hard core of sadness, and it is gutsy enough to take itself further than I would have suspected from its opening pages. The Star Rot stories shine with luminous passion for the genre, while Michael’s insane commentary manages to reach ever new heights of mania and absurdity.

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Ultimately, the wondrous paradox of Metallic Realms is that it creates exactly the fictional world it is trying to convey. Not so much the interstellar wastes and dangerous planets explored by the crew of the Star Rot, but the world imagined by our Lore Keeper, Micheal, and not just imagined but coaxed into being through stubbornness, abundant delusion, and at least a certain amount of crime; a world where the Star Rot Chronicles, a handful of tales written by four bratty young people, is regarded as one of the great franchises in science fiction. By the end of the novel, I felt as if the Star Rot fandom did indeed exist: as if I had been exposed to a rich and complex universe, full of depths and nuances, as worthy of obsessing over as any big-budget TV series or blockbuster movie. Michael’s enthusiasm, no matter how misguided, is utterly infectious. The Orb 4 writers might not always want him around, but it is him, ultimately and disturbingly, who turns their stories into a work of art.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia’s thoughts at Bluesky.

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+

Mattia Ravasi

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+ + Author image of Mattia Ravasi + + + Mattia Ravasi is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Submarine. His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He talks about books on his YouTube channel, The Bookchemist, and tweets as @thebookchemist too.

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© Mattia Ravasi 2025 All Rights Reserved

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The image shows author Lincolm Michel from the author’s website and the book’s cover from Simon and Schuster’s website.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Safe in the Dark

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Helen French

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+ Story image for Safe in the Dark by +
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W + +arm, sweaty hands tie the blindfold onto my head and spin me around.

+

My tormentors giggle and laugh loudly. I worry I’m going to be sick.

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After all, the children of the village are not supposed to be in the witch’s house. We’re definitely not supposed to be playing games, especially ones that might make us throw up. We should’ve stayed by the river, like we usually do on a rest day, even if skimming stones gets awfully boring after a while.

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The giggles get higher and squeakier. They spin me faster than ever. My mother always says “I can’t see this ending well” but I can’t see anything right now.

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But then someone says, “Oh no,” and someone else says, “Shush,” a small voice whimpers, and then they all go completely and utterly silent. Hands let go of me, footsteps dash, and I finally come to a stop.

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Alone. I think.

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I gulp and try desperately to stay in control of my body. I should take the blindfold off. But I can’t. If I take the blindfold off, I’ll see what scared my friends so much and I’m not sure I want to.

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So I try to be brave in a different way and I think and listen and smell.

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When I ran into the hut with the others, what did I see?

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I remember being surprised that the witch’s home was just a single room containing a bed with old blankets, a stove that crackled softly, and a big desk covered in dusty books and strange potions. It was homelier than I’d expected, with woven art hanging from the walls and ceilings, big balls of wool in yellows, reds and blues.

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I listen hard to try and distract myself from the fear, but I can’t hear much of anything at all. Maybe the breath of wind through the trees, but that wouldn’t frighten my friends. There are no wolves growling, no demons cackling, no raiders raiding. If there is something scary in this room, it is quiet or clever or both.

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My heart sinks.

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If there’s no monster, then that’s got to mean the witch has come back. She’s fearsome enough to cause a panic all right, and my father says “She’s a damn good hunter” so she knows how to be silent when it’s needed.

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My stomach sinks too.

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Our leaders let her punish those who cross her as she sees fit. I’ve heard about the time she stoned trespassers who were only trespassing because they were hungry – who hasn’t? I don’t want to be stoned!

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I wrinkle my nose and sniff the air. There’s a sour dampness mixed into it, like sweat mixed with worry. Beyond that, I can smell dried wildflowers – I remember seeing them in a pretty little vase next to a mirror! There’s something else behind it, too, earthy and warm, like soil under fingernails, the scent of someone who’s been in the woods.

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Is it her? I don’t think I want to know for sure.

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But then there’s a creak – a soft groan from the floorboards. My grandmother would say “It’s all in your head” but I don’t think so.

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It means someone’s in here. It means the witch is watching me.

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I take a deep breath and risk shuffling forwards, one foot at a time, head still wobbly from all the spinning, blindfold still covering my eyes.

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If the witch is here and I keep the blindfold on, maybe she won’t get too angry with me. I can’t boast about what I saw if I didn’t see anything. She might let me go because I didn’t peek at her or her house. But if I take it off then she’ll have no choice but to punish me. That’s how grown-ups are, right?

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The floor changes underneath my bare feet, from warm wood to soft fur. Where did I see a rug? If things were different, I’d like to stay and wiggle my toes into it. But I have to keep going before the floorboards creak again.

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Of course, I remember where I saw the rug at the exact same time that I fall over – right onto the bed that sits next to it. I let out a yelp and then pick myself up.

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Someone laughs, a low throaty chuckle.

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It’s only luck that prevents me from wetting myself. “You’re here,” I say, then feel stupid for saying it. My head has stopped spinning but I still feel sick with fear. I’m going to be in so much trouble.

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“I am here, yes. Were you hoping I wasn’t?”

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“Are you going to punish me now?” My voice quakes a little. “You don’t have to, you know. You don’t have to tell my father, either.”

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The witch makes a low, humming noise, like she’s considering it. “You haven’t done any damage that I can see.”

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I try to relax a little. Maybe I can survive this.

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“And I don’t believe you’re here to steal my research, unlike that last bunch of trespassers. You know, the ones who were horribly stoned by the horrible witch.”

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I jolt like someone just poked me with a stick.

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She gives a little snort. “Don’t believe all the stories you hear about me, little trespasser. I sent them packing, that was all. And if I didn’t stone them for that, I’m hardly going to stone you for this.”

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I’m so relieved I think I might drop. “They stole your research? Was it important?” I ask.

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“It was. I do lots of important work here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, or if your parents have mentioned it, but parts of the forest have been dying. I’ve been researching new magic to help keep it alive. Without it, you might grow up to live in a village with no trees at all.” Her voice is softer than I thought. I feel like I could get lost in it. “Does that sound important to you?”

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I had no idea forests could die. “More than anything,” I say. Until today, I thought the witch just collected mushrooms, helped our hunters, and shouted at people. “It sounds a lot more interesting than hanging around the river.”

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She chuckles. “As it happens, I’m in need of an assistant. You are the only child I know who hasn’t run at the sight of me.”

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“I don’t have sight of you.”

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“That’s true, well observed. But you do have experience of me, of a sort, and I think you could be a great help. I need someone who is good at exploring places that aren’t usually explored. Who doesn’t talk just to fill silence. Who’s brave, even when they’re half scared to death inside. You’ve shown all of that today. So, what do you think?”

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I think she is still a little bit terrifying, and that if I see her I’ll make all of this real.

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But I also think that I’m bored of skimming rocks on the river. And that I’d like to learn more about what she does in the forest. If she gets lost in the shadows there, and if she’s scared of them if she does.

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“All right,” I say.

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“Good,” the witch replies, and she sounds pleased. “But big decisions are best made with open eyes, don’t you think?”

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And so I take a deep breath, hesitate for just a moment, and then take my blindfold off.

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Orbit-lrg

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Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Safe in the Dark at Bluesky.

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Helen French

+

+ + Author image of Helen French + + + Helen French is a writer, book hoarder and TV-soaker-upper who grew up in Merseyside near the coast and now lives in Hertfordshire, UK, with her family. Her short stories have appeared in venues such as Factor Four, Stupefying Stories, and Flash Fiction Online, and she is currently buried in novel writing. You can find her online at helenfrench.net.

+

© Helen French 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Susanne Jutzeler, suju-foto, Irene63, and SookyungAn - many thanks!

+
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+ +

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-41/seal-skin.html b/issue-41/seal-skin.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e6bfbdfd --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/seal-skin.html @@ -0,0 +1,389 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Seal-Skin — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Seal-Skin

+

David Stephen Powell

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Seal-Skin by +
+ + + + + + +

G + +ytha went to see the hag that lived on the edge of the wood. It was an expense she could barely afford, but she needed to know. The old woman existed in a hut not fit for animals, let alone an interlocutor of the gods. Standing in the doorway, she saw one bright blue eye staring back at her from a dark corner.

+

“Come in, missy, and give your coin to Lord Cunorix.”

+

A large black dog distilled itself out of the shadows and sat in front of Gytha with its mouth open.

+

“Just pop it in,” the hag encouraged her.

+

Gytha placed her coin in the dog’s mouth and he dissolved back into the darkness.

+

“Approach,” the hag commanded.

+

The bright blue eye weighed her in its gaze. Where the other eye should have been, was an empty socket. Gytha came forward and sat in front of the old woman, who was wedged tightly into the corner behind a low table, hiding from the natural light that spilled into the hut.

+

“It is in the shadows that the clearest sight may come,” the woman said, as if she had sensed the thought forming in Gytha’s mind. “What would you ask of me?” A dry chuckle came from her mouth that sounded like the rattle of stones on shingle. “As if I didn’t already know.”

+

“I am widowed four years now,” Gytha began. “I am still young, and yet I feel the house of my soul crumbling though loneliness. And sometimes my loins throb with such heat and lust that I should want to jump into the sea and drown.”

+

The dry chuckle came again. “Fashion a comforter of bread to satiate thyself. ’Tis cheap and reliable.”

+

“I cannot love a horn of bread, nor can it plant its seed inside me.”

+

“Then stay as you are, for all love is doomed to end in disappointment and death.”

+

Gytha rose to go. She had lost her coin, and would take good care in future not to waste her money on so-called wise women.

+

“Sit down,” the hag said. “I have not yet finished with you. What would I be not to offer any remedy, even if it bode ill for you?”

+

The old woman bent down and took a small wooden box from underneath the table. A particular smell rose from the black wood, like spice and rotten fish. She put the box between them, lifted the lid, and took out a dried thing like an old piece of leather.

+

“Here is a charm that will bring you what you wish for, and perhaps some things you do not. Cast this into the sea when the tide is at its highest, and when seven days have passed, you will find what you desire.”

+

Gytha took the thing in her hand. It might have once been an animal, but now it was dried out and the colour of old seaweed.

+

“Keep its seal-skin clothes hidden, and it will stay loyal to you, and you only: but if it finds them, it will return to its briny family taking your heart with it, and you shall never find another. Mark well my words.”

+

Gytha thanked the woman and left the hovel at the edge of the forest. She saw the black dog, Lord Cunorix, watching her from the trees as she went. He barked once and disappeared.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

G + +ytha did as instructed, and on the seventh day, whilst she was collecting firewood on the foreshore, she saw the man lying in the stinking kelp at the high-water mark. He was dressed in seal-skin, unconscious, and beautiful to behold.

+

She ran to the sea and fetched water in her cupped hands, spilling most of it before she was able to throw it over the man’s upturned face. His eyes sprang open and he gasped for breath as though waking from a nightmare.

+

“I will look after you now,” she said. “You are mine.”

+

She led him to her hovel and stripped off his seal-skins. The man said nothing as she dressed him in the clothes of her dead husband, rough tunic and trews.

+

“What shall I call you?” she asked him when she was done.

+

“I am Mortan,” were the first words he uttered. His voice was a beautiful as his countenance.

+

“I am Gytha, and you are now my sea-husband.”

+

“You are my land-wife,” he said, and lent forward and kissed her. He then went outside and began to work on the strip of land behind the hovel. Gytha took the seal-skin clothes and hid them under the hearthstone.

+

That night, after their evening meal, Mortan lay with Gytha, and in the morning, when he had gone to work in the fields, she realised that the seed he had planted had already begun to grow.

+

That evening, she said to him, “I want to take you to the village, but I am afraid of what the others will say to me. They will think me fickle and wanton.”

+

“You need not worry,” he said. “They will accept me as your husband, and will not remember who came before me.”

+

When the Lord’s Day came around, Gytha and Mortan went to the small stone church, and Mortan was accepted as Gytha’s husband, and no one was surprised, or made an uncouth or hurtful remark to them. On the contrary, Mortan was invited by the reeve to become the constable for the hundred. He was sought out for his advice on the best time of day to sew barley, and on the husbandry of lambs.

+

Gytha took pleasure in watching as they fawned and ingratiated themselves around her new husband; those that had never cared whether she lived or died now looked at her with renewed respect and, for some, a touch of envy at her good fortune.

+

The child in Gytha’s belly grew along with the crops in their fields. Gytha had never seen the animals so fat, or the crops so tall and healthy. In the summer, the reeve died, and the Aetheling asked that Mortan take over the position, such were the tales of his skill as a landsman. The people looked to Mortan for advice, and he proved a fair-minded reeve who had the respect of the people, and of the Aethelings.

+

Gytha bore a strong healthy boy they called Eardwulf, and became pregnant again soon after. Mortan loved her well, and would bring gifts fashioned by his own hand for both her and the baby. He seemed as a young man in the first throes of love.

+

Gytha rarely thought of her old husband and could now barely remember his face, or even his name. Gytha often thought of what was hidden under the hearthstone, but she pushed such dark thoughts from out of her mind.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

J + +ust before the harvest, sails appeared on the horizon of the grey sea to the east.

+

The Danes had come.

+

Perhaps they had heard from a trader that the crops this year were particularly abundant, when many others were starving.

+

Mortan stood on the shore and looked out at the ships. “I count only five,” he said. “They come to raid, not to settle. We will move inland, and carry as much with us as we are able.”

+

“But our house?” Gytha said. “Our church?”

+

“Houses and churches can be rebuilt. People cannot.”

+

Mortan sent a messenger to the Aetheling, and as the people trusted Mortan they willingly did as he said. They harvested as much as they could and took their families and animals inland where the Danes would not follow. By the evening, smoke rose over the village. Gytha and the others began to weep at the loss of their houses and their possessions. Mortan gathered them together and told them not to fret. There would be enough to go around, he said. He would bring a bounty from the sea to them.

+

Within two days, the Aetheling’s men arrived and drove out the raiders, killing many and forcing the others back to their ships. When the villagers returned, few houses were left undamaged, but they set to work rebuilding. Mortan said he would rebuild their own house in a better place, higher up and farther from the shore.

+

Gytha, hearing his intent, was beset with worry about what lay under the hearthstone. When Mortan was engaged in another task, she went to the ruin of their house to find the seal-skin clothes – but the hearthstone was smashed, and the clothes were missing.

+

“What am I to do?” she wailed. Baby Eardwulf goggled at her and began to cry in answer to her distress. She spent many hours searching the countryside and the shore for them, but without finding anything.

+

“I will go to the hag and ask her,” she said at last, and did so.

+

At the edge of the wood, she was met by Lord Cunorix. She placed her coin in his mouth and entered the dark and loathsome hovel once more.

+

The bright blue eye fixed Gytha from the shadows. “Speak, Missy, I’m busy,” the hag commanded, and Gytha told all that had happened: her fortune and family, the coming of the Danes, the loss of the seal-skin.

+

“Then who can say how this will end?” the old woman said. “You should have taken more care. Now there is nothing to be done. Go, live your life for as long as you have it. The gods will decide.”

+

Gytha left the hovel on the edge of the forest with a heavy heart.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he months passed and the villagers rebuilt their homes and their church. Mortan was there to help and advise, and he went out fishing with the other men, and they returned with bounteous catches that made up the shortfall and saw the hundred through the winter.

+

When the spring came, a daughter was born whom they named Beatriz. Gytha was almost able to forget about her worries for a while: but always, in the dark corners of her mind, was the thought that the clothes might be found one day. It was the type of cruel trick the old gods (and the new one too) seemed to delight in playing on their hapless worshippers.

+

Mortan asked Gytha why she was silent and thoughtful. “I worry for the future,” she said.

+

“Why? Have I not cared for you, and for the others?”

+

“Yes, you have cared for us as much as any man could.”

+

“Then why are you sad?”

+

“I am frightened you may leave us.”

+

“Then you are frightened of life. One of us will leave the other and the children one day. That is the weregild we pay for love, which we can neither forestall or forfend. But we make the best we can of each day that is given to us by providence.”

+

“But I went to the hag in the forest, and I paid her to bring you to me,” Gytha said, in a sudden onrush of guilt and piety. “I paid her a gold aureus, and she said that if I cast something into the sea, you would come to me in seal-skin clothes, and if I hid those clothes from you, then you would stay with me forever, and I hid them under the hearthstone, but now the Danes have found them, and I worry that one day they will come back and then you will find them and leave me forever.”

+

“You speak of the Silkie,” Mortan said. “They are known amongst my people too, but I have never seen one, or heard of one coming onto the land. I think they are a yarn spun by old women whose husbands are long-dead, and who are full of the bile of loneliness and jealousy of the young.”

+

“But she told me you would appear, and you did appear. She told me that you would be dressed in seal-skin clothes, and you were dressed in that fashion. All that she has foretold has come true.”

+

Mortan drew Gytha closer to him, and found her gaze with his own. “Our fishing boat sank, and I was the only one the fates deemed to save. That was when you found me. As for the clothes, I burned them a year ago, before the Danes came. I was puzzled why you were keeping my old sailing clothes. I was ready to throw them away.”

+

“Then why did you not tell me?” Gytha asked.

+

“When the gods place a treasure within your grasp, you do not ask why. You accept their gift, and are grateful.”

+

Eadwulf came into the house from playing outside. “Why is mother crying?”

+

“Because she is happy,” Mortan said.

+

Eadwulf looked from one to the other with confusion, and went outside again.

+

Gytha and Mortan lived long and happy lives. And when they died, just one month apart, Eadwulf, Beatriz, and their brothers and sisters buried them on the hillside overlooking the shore where Gytha had first found Mortan all those years ago.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Seal-Skin at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

David Stephen Powell

+

+ + Author image of David Stephen Powell + + + David Stephen Powell was born in London and worked as a professional musician. He now lives and works in Italy. His stories have appeared in Parabnormal Magazine, Black Hare Press, ‘The Other Stories’ podcast, Cloaked Press, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Mythaxis Magazine, and Tales to Terrify. You can find him on his Substack, @davidstephenpowell.

+

© David Stephen Powell 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by ELG21 and jplenio - many thanks!

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-41/short-reviews-january-to-march-2025.html b/issue-41/short-reviews-january-to-march-2025.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..280baecd --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/short-reviews-january-to-march-2025.html @@ -0,0 +1,325 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Short Reviews – January to March, 2025

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – January to March, 2025 by +
+ + + + +

I + + mentioned in the editorial that the world has more than enough room for more online zines in it, so it was with pleasure that I recently learned of the existence of Phano, which aims to share “beautiful stories, essays, interviews, reviews and art to make sense of our world in constant change”. Good luck to them! Also a pleasure was to see P. R. O’Leary there, whose crime story Crunch Thump Thump appeared in our very last issue.

+

In Millions of Seashells, our narrator embarks on the administrative grind-side of that thing we supposedly all want to do: go back in time to fix that one thing that went so wrong, thereby uncoiling a whole new past for a brand new present with a glorious new future stretching out before us. Of course, casually rocking the status quo to its bedrock is exactly why The Man is always going to erect barriers in one’s way to ensure the correction of old mistakes just doesn’t happen, not to us, and not to the recipient uzzes of parallel universes either. It’s going to take an inventive man to find a way around that. Or an infinity of them.

+

Hard to tell a time-travel tale that hasn’t happened before, of course; or at least that hasn’t been told almost exactly this way before, only slightly differently; or that probably won’t be told almost exactly this way again, only – but lets break the cycle, it’s a fun little story.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + always return to ergot., as I tend to do anyway, when it’s time to draft my shortlist of quarterly recommendations. As with any relationship between magazine and reader, not every story I find there clicks for me; but I can always rely on something interesting, and the last three months have been no exception.

+

ergot. regular Andrew Kozma’s A Movable Piece of Firm Material is about as odd a piece of writing as its title might suggest. An employee at a weapon’s manufacturer vacates his desk to meet colleagues for post-dayjob-drudgery drinks and discovers the way out of the building is… wrong. I won’t divulge more than that, but I will mention that I found the plain-spoken style of the prose to be an excellent foil for the hint of weirdness in what is going on.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +s promised, the last review here is a bit different from the norm. Entitled The Giving Man, it presents a billionaire’s relentless quest to deny the fate lurking in his genes, to overcome the brain tumour that will surely kill him by turning all his wealth and resources upon it, unleashing humanity’s potential, directing it, shattering all previous limits of science and technology in service of that single goal: his own survival.

+

And it seems he succeeds, because he outlives us all.

+
+

A man’s will is the thing. It is the irresistable force that cleaves his path through the world. His destiny written in what he is willing to take. Not what he is willing to give. This is the true engine of my success.

+

However, that quote doesn’t do the moment justice, dear reader, because where this short story differs is that it’s also a comic strip.

+

Bad Space, Stories for the End Times, is a science fiction webcomic that delivers “short sharp shocks in 10 panels”, slightly more if you support writer-artist Scott Base on Patreon. Beautifully rendered all in black and white, with appropriately occasional shades of grey, they present a series of wildly varied sf narratives that are nevertheless almost universally dark in one way or another – the occasional glimmer of optimism only highlighting the otherwise consistent journeys into the bleak, sour, or sinister.

+

A Bad Space book is currently in the works, and coincidentally the very first strip, called The Billionaire, makes for a rather neat bookend pair with The Giving Man: not alike, exactly, but certainly of a kind. If you’re the type of person who’s up for an illustrated downer you can down in two minutes, I can’t recommend these comics enough!

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-41/sunnyside.html b/issue-41/sunnyside.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bdd542e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/sunnyside.html @@ -0,0 +1,561 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Sunnyside — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Sunnyside

+

Stephen S. Power

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Sunnyside by +
+ + + + + + +

CHARLIE

+

C + +harlie gets on the Second Avenue subway at Delancey Street, slumps onto a bench, flips down their VR goggles, and logs into Biraq, the city simulator. Red flares signal new challenges to their latest build, but Charlie ignores them and blinktaps the friends menu instead. It has one name, Ville. He popped on thirteen minutes ago for ten seconds. Then eight minutes ago. Then three. Charlie sits up and smiles. Ville can’t wait to see them and, after two of years of playing the game together, they are excited to finally meet him in person too. Charlie hopes they don’t argue about Biraq as much as usual. They would prefer fighting, though, to having nothing to say at all.

+

Charlie considers logging off, but that might look too much like them peeking back at Ville, so they addresses the challenges. To counter the BRICS’s increased use of solar, wind, and wave power, Dubai lowered its oil prices again, but demand still hasn’t rebounded. Meanwhile, another temperature spike has made working conditions so dangerous that the New EU has issued sanctions. As a result, Charlie’s lost 25% of their development funds. With their Biraq just a proposed street grid, they must now choose to slow construction overall or prioritize certain districts.

+

They know what Ville would do: Build the revenue districts and let the desert keep the rest, but Charlie plays differently. They created a mod that enables a Biraq’s population to decide. The game designers didn’t like it. Despite having created the game to crowdsource countless iterations of Biraq so they could choose the build with the best evolution to actually construct, they wanted to maintain topdown control of the game the way they would the real city. And Ville hated the mod. He wrote a dozen forum posts on how it could only lead to muddled design. You might as well put it to a vote of the passengers where a train should go. Nevertheless, he spearheaded the campaign for its acceptance.

+

Charlie told Ville that apparently irony was as lost on him as it was on the designers. Ville said big cities need designers, but citizens should design their own little lives. So, he would have them design theirs. Which Charlie heard as, I like you. They’ve built Biraqs every night since, often falling asleep in their goggles together, then dealing with new challenges over breakfast.

+

Charlie fires up the mod. A few seconds later, the population chooses something they love – a new way to self-define a city.

+

A green flare appears. Charlie blinktaps it and Ville’s avatar, a white whale, takes its place. “Where are you?” the whale asks.

+

“On the T,” Charlie says. Ville makes a disgusted sound, and they laugh. New Yorkers only call the Second Avenue subway by its letter name to annoy people from Boston. “You?”

+

“Grand Central. My train arrived less late than I figured. Wait. Check your build. What’s gone wrong?”

+

“Nothing. Isn’t it amazing?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

AUSTEN

+

A + +usten and Finn both live within a few blocks of the BofA Bar, but she has four roommates in a one-bedroom and he has three in a half-basement, so when the band gets too loud, the crowd too thick, and the beer too much, she nibbles his neck and he orders a zipcar. She’d prefer a zipvan or, better, an autotel, but if Finn could afford either on a random Tuesday, he wouldn’t need that many roommates. Austen was already surprised he had the time and money to take her out again this pay period.

+

Her surprise turns to suspicion when, after some very slow, but very intense dancing in the former bank’s vault, Finn cancels the car and gets an autotel instead. She wants to say it’s alright, yoga helps her back endure the bucket seats, but Finn’s already tapping his watch.

+

“Why the splurge?” she says.

+

“Things should be special,” Finn says, then grabs her hand and leads her outside. The autotel is only a few blocks away.

+

Austen bounces on her toes as the little green dot on his watchmap approaches. She knows what Things should be special means. He’s such a clown.

+

“And I got a promotion today,” Finn says.

+

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Austen kisses his hand. “What is it?”

+

Finn nods toward the street. “Here we go.”

+

The autotel slips out of a vehicle swarm on Greenpoint and stops at the corner of 46th. It’s long and tall, a featureless glass teardrop the size of a delivery van. The glass is already blacked for privacy, and unlike budget rentals there’s no signage for strips clubs, casinos, and weed shops. The door reveals itself by sliding open, and the orangey tang of sanitizer makes Austen blush. They last used an autotel on her twenty-seventh birthday, when Finn also made things special, and the smell acts like an aphrodisiac. Which was probably part of his clever plan.

+

They tumble onto the bare black mattress, and the door reseals. Adele’s Someone to Watch Over Me starts playing as the vehicle remerges into the swarm.

+

A screen beside the bed displays Finn’s order: scenic route, clean linens, no time limit.

+

Finn disentangles himself from Austen to get sheets and pillows from a locker, but Austen traps his hips beneath hers and clamps his wrists over his head. “No time limit?” she says. “This is about more than a promotion, Mr. Moneybags.”

+

“It’s not like we’re going into the city. I’m not selling a kidney for street tolls. We’ll cruise down Greenpoint.”

+

She jabs a thumbnail into his palm. “Confess,” Austen says.

+

“I—” he says, then his body deflates.

+

She sits up. “What’s wrong?”

+

For a second she thinks, Was he planning to propose, but lost his nerve? Finn’s just that sweet and old-fashioned, isn’t he? He has to know she could never accept. It’s tough for her, too, losing a Tuesday night, or any night, given the crazy quilt of freelance gigs she’s constantly assembling. Who knows where she’ll be in four years. Or four months. How could she override the life her rent, loans, and expenses have designed for her to create one with him? This, their moment, will have to do.

+

Then Austen gets it.

+

“What’s the promotion?” she says.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

LUISA

+

T + +wenty minutes before sundown, Central Park Tower begins randomly turning on an overhead light in every condo. To track the program’s progress, Luisa taps a holopad on the lobby floor beside her desk, and a pale blue image of the skinny skyscraper rises from it, fifteen hundred feet compressed to fifteen. Green dots mark the condos where lights are on; red, where they’re still off. She finds the process hypnotic, a chill running through her when she guesses correctly which light will turn on next. The penthouse comes on last, as always, right at sundown.

+

Its dot is yellow, though: a bad bulb.

+

Years ago, the building had a maintenance staff – and a hotel and a Nordstrom’s. Now, thanks to zipvans letting travelers sleep in transit and pattern retailers letting customers design clothes from home, the Tower has twelve more floors of condos and Luisa. Así es la vida.

+

She gets a flashlight, bulbs, and a stepladder from the maintenance closet, then takes the freight elevator to the top.

+

The doors open and a light snaps on to reveal a concrete foyer painted white. It smells dusty. The drone vacs that scour the condos each week with orange sanitizer can’t get out here. Luisa taps her watch to hold the elevator, then holds her watch near a featureless metal door also painted white. It buzzes and slides aside.

+

After the Tower was built, a few condos were finished for showings, and a couple from Singapore actually lived in one for a week. The penthouse, though, like the rest of the apartments, is empty, having only the basic lighting system. The glass walls, red with dusk, deepen the gloom. The space hardly seems worth $300 million.

+

Yet that price is the genius of Midtown’s megatowers. The condos’ owners don’t need places to live. They need places to store their wealth. So, instead of putting their money in a bank, the condos act as virtual vaults, their wealth appreciating as the real estate market improves. And the city’s best views go unseen like investment art put into storage.

+

Luisa considers this is a terrible shame, which is why she likes changing light bulbs. It justifies her looking out the windows. And dreaming of a life that’s more than a series of lonely shifts. And long commutes. She can’t afford the city.

+

The windows will be her reward.

+

But first, she plays her flashlight over the floor so she doesn’t trip on the pipes sticking up and discovers the bulb didn’t blow. It was removed and left beside a stepladder standing beneath its fixture.

+

Luisa gently sets down her own ladder and the bulbs, then draws her shockgun. She holds her flashlight alongside the barrel, aims both into the huge empty space, and calls, “Who’s there?”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

CHARLIE

+

"C + +harlie,” the whale says, “your whole city’s gone.”

+

“No, only the streets.”

+

“Streets are the city. No one ever built a city before there was a street to put the first building on. Are you going to throw up buildings randomly and let your population also decide how to travel between them?”

+

“Sure. I love desire lines. They reveal exactly where people want to go.”

+

“Except that’d be crazy outside a park. Much as I hate to say it, the Commissioner’s Map made Manhattan perfect. Without it, New York would just be a wicked tangle like Boston.”

+

“If by ‘wicked’ you mean ‘aesthetically pleasing’, I agree,” Charlie says, “and Boston’s roads will improve once zipcars are doing all the navigating.”

+

“You’ve never been on Route 1 in Saugus, have you?” Ville says. “Look, passengers will still want to feel in charge too, and that starts with feeling like the streets were designed with them in mind, not some Dutchman driving his goats. Would Paris be as great without Hausmann? Would D.C. without L’Enfant?”

+

“Would New York without Moses? Absolutely. He ruined beautiful old neighborhoods. He cut an island off from the water. He would’ve built elevated highways across Midtown.”

+

“Moses built for drivers passing through,” Ville says, “not for the city itself.”

+

“So, let’s see what the city – the people – does for itself.”

+

Ville snorts. “And in a century the people will finally complete something, like that subway line you’re on.”

+

The subway pulls into the 34th Street station. That was quick. Charlie’s cheeks get hot. One more stop to go.

+

“You know,” Charlie says, “when Europeans first came to Virginia, they didn’t think the Native Americans grew crops, but of course they did. They just didn’t put them in neat rows surrounded by hedges. They grew them all jumbled together like a meadow. Why should a city be any less organic? Have a local power plant next to housing next to retail. Instead of mixed use, call it maxed use.”

+

“Nice name, but Biraq’s supposed to be the city of the future, not the past. Why live over a bar I can hear through your mic? You want to go deaf from turbines too?”

+

“This from the person who lives behind Fenway.”

+

“And near The Fens. Why not live in a quiet residential district within walking distance of the actual T?”

+

“Are you asking me to move in with you?” Charlie says.

+

“No, I was only making a point. Wait. Do you—”

+

Charlie’s cheeks seem to catch fire as the subway stops at 42nd Street. Why did they have to joke about that? “I have to get off,” Charlie says. “See you in a bit.”

+

Charlie logs out, flips up their goggles, and once everyone else gets off hurries onto the platform. It’s so bright. So loud. So, strangely, odor-free. The first thing you lose in New York is your sense of smell. It all sets Charlie even more on edge.

+

Ville would be coming down, he said last week, to check out his cousin Finn’s apartment because he’d be moving out soon, and Ville asked Charlie to go to Sunnyside with him. They’ve been thinking it’d be nice to have him closer. They could debate whether Sunnyside Gardens, one of America’s first planned communities, developed the way it should have. Plus, there’d be less lag when they were goggling. What Charlie hasn’t wanted to think about: Is Ville actually building a road to Boston for them? What would that mean? Argh. “This is worse than arguing with him,” Charlie mutters. They haven’t even decided whether to hug him when they meet.

+

Maybe if we played The Sims, Charlie thinks, I’d be better at life.

+

The subway doors close. Charlie trails their fingers across the car as it leaves. There’d be a downtown train in two minutes. They could get on it and go home. They don’t need Sunnyside. Couldn’t a Biraq be enough?

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

AUSTEN

+

F + +inn tries to distract Austen with a kiss. She pushes him away. “What’s the promotion?”

+

Finn looks away. “Adecco sold my work contract to Randstad,” he says. “They’re making me a human capital supervisor—”

+

“Which is… great?” she says.

+

“—and shipping me to Biraq.”

+

Austen releases his wrists. “Where’s that?”

+

“Nowhere yet. It’s a new city Dubai is planning. They’re shipping in half of Alabama to ready the land, and they need English-speaking managers, but…”

+

“You’ll miss me.” She can barely speak. It’s one thing to refuse a proposal. It’s another to be refused one.

+

He kisses her hands. “I wanted to say no.”

+

“That would’ve been stupid.”

+

“Yes. If I said no they’d fire me, and my non-compete wouldn’t let me work anywhere in HC for ten years.”

+

She pulls her hands away before he can kiss them again and gathers them into her lap. “When do you leave?”

+

“Tomorrow.” Finn looks at the roof. “For two years. Three, if they exercise their option. Long enough to pay off my loans, at least, with my new salary.”

+

Our two years, Austen wants to say, our moment, but something else boils up inside her. “So all this, Finn, the bar, the autotel, the whole night, is your goodbye? Look at me.”

+

He can’t. “I said I wanted things to be special.”

+

“When were you going to let me in on it? After you dropped me off? After you boarded the plane?” A tear falls from her eye onto his cheek. He flinches. She hopes it stung.

+

“I figured—” Finn starts, but Austen pulls away to stab the screen and cut the music.

+

She sits against the soft inner wall of the autotel and crosses her arms, trying her best to magnify the little space between them. “Why not work remotely?”

+

“Dubai wants me on site,” he says. “We could holochat.”

+

“It’s not the same.”

+

“No.”

+

“Could I go with you?” Austen can’t believe her mouth said that.

+

“A woman in Dubai?” Finn shakes his head. “Even if we were married—”

+

Now she says, “No,” unsure if she’s relieved that she feels relieved.

+

“It’s not like we didn’t know this could happen,” he says. “How many of our friends…”

+

The autotel is turning, and Austen unblacks the sideglass to discover they’re not on Greenpoint. They’re on Queens Boulevard where the road soars over the Sunnyside Yards. She watches the trains moving on their own, coming home to sleep, turning off their lights, nestled together in rows; each empty and alone, waiting to go back to work tomorrow on the same old tracks. That’s what her life will be like without Finn, however many roommates are lined up on air mattresses in her bedroom.

+

She could find another boyfriend. That’s easy. Two taps on her watch, and it would send out a signal like Aquaman. But she couldn’t find someone else who’d desperately want her to come hold him because he also hates to be alone while also being willing to wait until she wants to come. If only she could treat Finn like another gig, the way anyone who’d answer her signal would treat her.

+

Damn companies. It should be less unsettling, given how they could have expected something exactly like this at any time. She’s just angry at herself for missing him already. And for wasting the autotel. Finn does look cute when he’s pathetic. Stupid floppy hair. Stupid brown eyes.

+

That’s not what she wants anymore, though. Austen looks over her shoulder, sees where they’re headed and gets a better idea. She taps the screen to input a new route.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

LUISA

+

L + +uisa plays her flashlight and shockgun around the penthouse. “I know you’re here,” she says. “There’s no place to hide.”

+

Wind hisses against the glass walls. The building sways. Creaks. Luisa steadies herself. She smells… perfume?

+

“Don’t shoot.” A young woman. Who sounds Middle Eastern. Beyond the flashlight’s reach. Not pleading. Demanding. “My father owns this place.” Sure he does.

+

“You shouldn’t be here,” Luisa says. “You’re not in the log.” She wants to tell her watch to summon the cops, as per policy, but a report in their file would mean one in hers too, asking how the intruder got past her, so Luisa closes on the voice, shockgun poised, to handle the situation herself. Her light finds a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket and gray scarf, standing, hands at her side. She has no watch, which is strange, but she’s palming something. Behind her is a fully-stuffed duffel bag.

+

“What’s in the bag?” Luisa says. Please don’t be a bomb.

+

“Clothes.”

+

Hmm. “And your hand?”

+

The woman holds up a green UAE passport. “I am Samya Al Maktoum.”

+

“Slide it over.” The passport’s also strange. Being physical.

+

The woman drops the passport and kicks it to her with a sneaker worth twice what Luisa makes in a month. Luisa taps its chip against her watch, which confirms her name and her presence on the owner’s approved family list.

+

Samya doesn’t know this, though, and Luisa doesn’t like her tone. “How’d you get in?”

+

“Jim. I asked him not to log me.”

+

Asked. Jim, the Tower’s day shift, has three unemployeds at home. He always needs cash.

+

“Why are you here?” Luisa says.

+

“Last place my father would look.”

+

“But he owns the place.”

+

“You think he knows that? This is just another asset on a very long balance sheet. I am too, except daughters are sold, not held.” Samya leans toward Luisa. “Not me. I’m not going to Biraq.”

+

Playing the sympathy card, Luisa thinks. But she can’t afford sympathy. “If you stay, I have to log you.”

+

“Do that, and you’re putting me on a plane.”

+

“If I don’t, I’m putting myself on the street.”

+

“I can pay,” Samya says, aggravated, clearly unused to paying for anything.

+

“Money’s not work,” Luisa says. “I need my job.”

+

“Is it your job to make sure the husband chosen for me rapes me every night, should he so choose?”

+

And now the sister card. Next, the tears.

+

They don’t come. Instead, Samya says, “Fine. Burn me, and I’ll tell my father we had a deal for me to stay here, then you got greedy, like you people always do. When you demanded more, I said no, and you reneged, now hoping for a fat reward. My father hates delinquent daughters, but he hates deal breakers and double-crossers far more.”

+

“Go ahead,” Luisa says. “I’ve worked here twenty years.”

+

“You think that matters?” Samya smiles. “You’re a busted light bulb to people like him, waiting to be replaced.”

+

Luisa is alarmed to see her flashlight beam become unsteady.

+

“Now log me, or let me stay till morning, when I’ll leave. Go ahead. Choose.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

CHARLIE

+

F + +orget a Biraq, Charlie thinks. Would we still have Biraq if I ditch him?

+

A shoe scrapes the concrete right behind them. Charlie, startled, slides away from the tracks and spins around.

+

“Sorry,” Ville says. He shuffles back, goggles bouncing on his head.

+

“You said you were in Grand Central,” Charlie says.

+

“A tunnel connects it to here, so what I told you was true… from a certain point of view.”

+

“Nice save, Obi-wan.”

+

“And I wanted to surprise you. What’s wrong?”

+

“It’s just that it’s weird, this point of view,” they say. “Your voice coming from lips.”

+

“And you don’t look like a dragonfly,” he says.

+

For a moment Charlie examines the platform between their shoes.

+

“Did you know,” Ville says, “this concrete was specially formulated to resist gum and absorb human fluids?”

+

Charlie looks up. “Really?”

+

“No,” Ville says, “but you looked up.”

+

They grin and realize that their cheeks have cooled. “It’s also weird that I can see you. In Biraq you’re just all around me.”

+

Charlie watches him resist the urge to say, “Like the Force?” and instead say, “I could walk behind you. Whisper over your shoulder.”

+

“OK, that’d be much weirder.”

+

“Let’s just walk then.” Ville looks around, spots the sign for the 7 and takes a step.

+

“I don’t want to go to Sunnyside,” Charlie says.

+

“Why not?” Ville says. “That was the plan.”

+

“I don’t know, and I know.”

+

“We could go to Biraq for a while. See what your people have done.” He reaches for his goggles.

+

“No,” Charlie says. “We should be non-virtual. That was the plan too.”

+

Ville slumps. “I have no idea what to say.” Then he wrinkles his nose, “Does it always smell like this?”

+

Charlie smirks, then it fades, then they scrutinize the platform some more until the downtown train arrives. Ville watches the people getting off and says, “Let’s try it your way then.”

+

“What do you mean?” Charlie says, but Ville’s already approaching a guy in a suit.

+

“Excuse me,” Ville says. The guy flips up his palm and keeps moving.

+

Ville does the same to a woman with her black hair in the latest knots. “No time,” she says and walks faster.

+

“What are you doing?” Charlie says. “You can’t just talk to people.”

+

“I want to ask them where we should go.”

+

“Like tourists?”

+

“I am a tourist,” Ville says.

+

“If anyone says anything, it’ll be ‘Go to the Oyster Bar’.”

+

“Why?”

+

“First thing they’ll think of so they can get away from you.”

+

“Wouldn’t that suggest your mods, your whole build strategy, is misguided?”

+

“Wait,” Charlie says, “is that where you’re really going with this?”

+

“No, but it does go to show—” Ville looks at the concrete. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I promised myself we wouldn’t argue about Biraq.”

+

“So did I,” Charlie says. “Hey, look up.”

+

He does. His lips are soft. His eyes, pretty.

+

“I’ve decided,” they say. “Let’s go to the Oyster Bar.”

+

Ville nods. “Challenge addressed.”

+

They walk toward the tunnel.

+

“I don’t actually like oysters,” Ville says. “Or bars.”

+

“Neither do I,” Charlie says and takes Ville’s arm, the path before them clear and brightly lit, a city of themselves ahead, waiting to be designed together.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

AUSTEN

+

“W + +hat did you do?” Finn says. He looks at the screen beside the bed.

+

Austen jabs the screen to turn it off, then tightens her lips.

+

Finn lies back, unblacks the roof and watches the el fly overhead. Austen sees stripes of shadow and light fly over him until the autotel circles left and the lines become pure white light. Finn says, “We’re taking the Queensboro? I may be suddenly flush, but that doesn’t mean I can afford the city’s street tolls.”

+

She tries not to smile. Or say, It’s the 59th Street Bridge. “This is my treat. There’s a place I’ve always wanted to go, and I want to go with you.”

+

Finn reaches out and guides her onto the mattress beside him.

+

“I’m still mad at you,” she says.

+

Now he tries not to smile.

+

The autotel comes off the bridge, curls and turns, glides under the bridge on York, then turns left onto Sutton Square, where it stops. The door opens, and Austen leads Finn into the yellow wash of an old streetlamp. Instead of the usual cameras, the lamppost has signs reading Tow Away Zone, as if people park anymore, and Dead End, except it’s not. Beyond the lamp, a small brick plaza with a bench overlooks the river.

+

“This feels familiar,” Finn says. “Where have I seen this place?”

+

Austen grabs his hand and draws him to the bench. The autotel glides away, trailing the scent of orange sanitizer.

+

For a moment they sit apart, looking at the skeletal towers rising across Queens, listening to the beat of tires on the FDR below and the bridge above, smelling the musky river and a fresh breath of wind, until their gravities pull them together.

+

“You know what I adore about this city?” Austen says. “They can build it up and tear it down, stuff us in and shove us out, but they can’t take it away from us. This bench is ours now, whoever sat in it before. That bridge is too. The bar. All of Sunnyside.”

+

“Compared to the city we’ve made,” Finn says, “Biraq will be just another office park.”

+

“So you’ll come back?”

+

After a moment Finn says, “I wouldn’t ask you to wait. I’m not that old-fashioned.”

+

She says, “But will you?”

+

“If you’re here,” he says. “You’re my Sunnyside.”

+

Ahead a police patrol boat struggles downriver near the froth covering Roosevelt Island. Black water bursts into bright foam around the bow, the incoming tide stronger than it seems as it tries to drown more of the city.

+

“We shouldn’t make too many plans, though,” Austen says.

+

“Probably not.”

+

Or too few, she thinks. “When’s your flight?”

+

“10:30. I’m already packed. I’m subletting my space to my cousin Ville.”

+

“So we could stay ’til dawn. I’ve heard it looks pretty from here.”

+

He kisses her head and says, “I could use some pretty.”

+

“Then it’ll be ours too,” she says and settles into his chest, her eyes bright, her cheeks brighter.

+

She couldn’t have designed a better moment.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

LUISA

+

L + +uisa considers her options for a moment before holstering her shockgun.

+

Samya says, “Thank you.” Luisa hears, Dismissed.

+

Luisa tosses Samya her passport and takes her supplies to the elevator. For the next five hours, Samya in the penthouse will feel like a burr in her brain. She’s barely relieved to think that, if anyone finds out, she could just say Samya ordered Luisa not to log her. The elevator descends. After a few floors something else starts to nag at her. By the time she reaches the bottom it’s clicked, and Luisa has to go back up.

+

She considers knocking, then just lets herself in. Beyond the glass walls, the city has become inverted. The white lights of Queens shine like stars, while the night sky, washed out by their glow, is as featureless as the sea. The condo remains dark, though, a hole in the sky.

+

Luisa hears a soft voice by the 58th Street windows. Her flashlight exposes Samya prostrate on a rug, pointed uptown, her scarf now covering her head. Luisa aims her flashlight at the floor and waits.

+

Samya sits up. She looks over her right shoulder and mutters something, then looks over her left, gasps to see Louisa, and mutters again. Finally, she cups her hands, mutters one last thing, and stands. She doesn’t turn around. “You’re back.”

+

“I have to change the bulb.”

+

“Why?”

+

“If I don’t, my relief will see the same alert I did. She’ll come up too. And she doesn’t ask questions first.” Carmella once shockgunned an unhoused girl for standing near the front doors.

+

“I didn’t think of that,” Samya says.

+

“No. You imagined someone couldn’t see you this high up without the light on.”

+

Samya turns around. “You could have let your relief burn me.”

+

“Yes.” Luisa climbs the stepladder and screws a new bulb into the ceiling fixture. It flickers on, and Luisa sees a problem with the woman’s story. “If you father wouldn’t know about this condo, why do you?”

+

Samya carries her rug to the bag and kneels. “The executive who bought it told me.”

+

“Why would he?”

+

“She,” Samya says, carefully packing the rug. “She’s British. Terribly pale, but such a mouth. Such eyes. My Zaynab.” She pulls off her scarf and twists it through her hands. “Once she took me to the top of the Empire State Building, like tourists do, and she pointed out all the places she’d bought for my father that rose higher than the observation deck. We dreamed of the lives we could have in each. Lives of our own design. Here I’m an artist, and she’s an architect. Not that either of us can draw. Yesterday, my father found out.”

+

“Ah,” Luisa finally says.

+

Samya knots the scarf around her neck. “He sent Charlotte to Manchester, then fired her. As for me, he took my watch, cut me off from the cloud, blocked my accounts, and announced this morning, ‘A husband awaits you in Biraq, a designer, a real one not some gamer, he’ll make a proper wife of you.’ If he hadn’t forgotten about my old passport and the existence of cash for gold, I couldn’t have done anything after I ran.”

+

Luisa climbs down the ladder and stands over the young woman, stone-faced but shivering inside, embarrassed at having misjudged her. She will fix this too.

+

Luisa holds out her hand and says, “You can stay with my niece, Austen, in Sunnyside.” At Samya’s look she adds, “Queens. She’s a nice girl. Doesn’t have much room, but her boyfriend’s about to propose. Finally. Maybe you can take her space if they get one together.”

+

Samya nods as if thankful and lets Luisa help her up, but doesn’t release her hand.

+

Luisa pulls free. “We’ll leave at midnight. Austen won’t mind. She’s always working late. Like we people always do.” She heads for the door, hoping she’s not making a mistake.

+

“I treated you horribly,” Samya calls after her. “Why would you help me? What’s your game?”

+

Luisa stops. “We can’t design our own lives anymore,” she says, “but maybe we can help others design theirs.”

+

“A pretty view,” Samya says. “If true.”

+

Luisa instinctively looks out at the city’s controlled chaos.

+

“Yes,” she says. “A very pretty view.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Sunnyside at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Stephen S. Power

+

+ + Author image of Stephen S. Power + + + Stephen S. Power is the author of the novel The Dragon Round, and his new novel, Safe at Last, about a traumatized woman trapped in a smart house, is currently under submission. His short fiction has appeared recently in Unorthodox Stories and Heathen and will soon appear in Lightspeed, Stupefying Stories, Tales of Horror, the anthologies Cost of Living and The Growers (The Best of NewMyths, Volume 5) as well as on the podcast Creepy. His site is stephenspower.com. He’s on BlueSky at @stephenspower.bsky.social.

+

© Stephen S. Power 2025 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Philip Warp and Valerii Golovatenko - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-41/the-culling.html b/issue-41/the-culling.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..79e81890 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-41/the-culling.html @@ -0,0 +1,335 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Culling — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 41 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Culling

+

Addison Smith

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Culling by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +he monsters fell from the sky and everyone cheered. They burst on impact, painting the roads in yellow fluid which the people gathered in their Monster Splat-branded buckets and wiped on their celebratory pants. All around the bodies lay in mangled and dripping heaps, and cheers rose into the evening. It was a good event with millions of bodies falling to earth, ensuring everyone had a chance to gather them up.

+

“They used to be bigger,” Grandpa said, poking a limp and yellow body with his Monster Stick. “Bulbous things with lots of innards. We don’t get good monsters like that anymore.”

+

I scooped a pile of rope-like entrails in my hands and enjoyed the way they squished between my fingers. I was a big girl now, almost ten, so Grandpa let me lead the expedition. I dropped the guts into my bucket and sucked the fluid off my fingers, shivering at the taste.

+

All around, kids from school walked and poked and gathered. I saw a boy from my class and called out, “Happy Monster Splat Day!” The boy didn’t respond, watching the celebrations instead. I turned to Grandpa. “Why don’t people fall from the sky?” I asked. “That would be a really big splat!”

+

Grandpa smiled like he was remembering something a long time ago. He stroked his hand through my hair, wet with yellow goo, and licked his fingers clean before answering. “Not sure,” he said. “Just the way God made the world, I guess. Monsters fall from the sky and people walk on the ground.”

+

“Has anyone ever caught a monster? Like, alive? I wonder what they think of it.”

+

“Nah,” Grandpa said. “That’d be a waste of a good splat. Anyway, it’s getting dark. Is your bucket full enough?”

+

I held it up, overflowing with yellow viscera that covered the orange Splat! logo. Juice slopped over the side and I glared at the waste.

+

Grandpa didn’t notice. “That’s a good girl,” he said. “Let’s join the others.”

+

The others weren’t far away, all gathered in the local department store parking lot. Lights sparkled from fences and strobed over cars where boys and girls sat on their hoods to kiss. Grandpa saw a couple making out and didn’t avert his eyes, grinning instead.

+

“Your grandma and I used to be those kids,” he said. “All hopped up on youth and the excitement of the event. That was early on, when the portals in the sky first opened.”

+

I listened with rapt attention, because the story was part of the tradition. He would tell how grandma was got the goo on her lips, and she was the first he ever saw lick her lips and smile, that new presence of peace shining behind her pupils.

+

“The monsters make things better,” he said, finally. “You don’t know what it was like before, not really. They teach some of it in your classes, but you can’t imagine the pain of loss. It’s better this way, not having to feel it.”

+

Somewhere in the distance, a boy was violently sick, throwing up the yellow goo in a puddle. Nothing changed around the parking lot, except we all started vaguely in his direction.

+

“The monsters changed us. There were worries early on, you know, as if it wasn’t the will of God himself. They thought the strange biologies would change us in some horrible way. All it really did was release us from the pain of loss.”

+

The vomiting boy ran, but he couldn’t make it far. There were too many of us, those who accepted the monsters’ bodies. I dipped my finger into my bucket and sucked the juice, sweet on my tongue. Grandpa gripped his Monster Stick, but we were an odd pair in the party. He was too old to keep pace, and I was too young to have a Monster Stick of my own. In the distance, teenagers swung their sticks, cracking the boy’s bones like sugar sculptures in his body. He screamed, but he knew how it went when you didn’t accept the fluids.

+

“Does it hurt?” I asked, curious at the prospect.

+

“When they cull you? Probably. Your grandma put up a hell of a fight, I’ll tell you, when her body began to reject it.” Grandpa laughed. “We weren’t in public, so I got the honor. She was a real workout.”

+

“What about… for us?” I asked. “Does it hurt to kill the ones who don’t accept it?”

+

Grandpa considered, watching the boy in the distance as his own fluids spread on the concrete, red and thick with gore. “You know, before monsters started falling, I’ll bet it did. Could have been tough, punishing those that reject gifts from the heavens. Specially loved ones. But now we don’t have to worry about that.” Grandpa stared up to the sky and the winking portals above, delivering bodies from the great unknown.

+

“We have that to thank them for,” he said, hand to his heart.

+

I stared up with him and put my own hand on my heart. Behind us, the screaming stopped and the commotion returned to subdued celebration. “Thank you,” I said to the monsters.

+

I couldn’t wait to get my own Monster Stick.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Culling at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Addison Smith

+

+ + Author image of Addison Smith + + + Addison Smith (he/him) is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis fungus. He’s doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on BlueSky.

+

© Addison Smith 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using two Creative Commons images by Charles Parker - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Summer 2025

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Sean MacKendrick +

Tag, You're It

+
+ + +

It's always a challenge to finalize each issue of Mythaxis. I try to present a table of contents with a deliberate structure, to place stories in relation to each other in a way that satisfies my editorial OCD (even if our readers remain blissfully oblivious to any such efforts going on behind the scenes). Usually picking a lead story is easy, though, since that's a different problem. The first one has to stand alone, it's the first thing the reader sees, after all – but this time that's not exactly the case. For while Sean MacKendrick's timely and sinister duologue absolutely works on the page, wait until you get a load of the audio play…

+ + + + Story image for Tag, You're It by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Listen, Don’t Touch

+ Cheryl S. Ntumy +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Listen, Don’t Touch by + + + +

The Sauútiverse is a science-fantasy shared world project set in a binary star system whose civilisation is rooted deeply in the mythologies, languages, and cultures of Africa and features an intricate magic system based on sound, oral traditions, and music. I'm delighted to present Cheryl Ntumy's latest, and most emblematic contribution to that cannon – you see, the name Sauúti is taken from the Swahili word for 'voice', and if there's one thing this story is about… well, if there's maybe two things…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Lay-offs

+ Anna Ziegelhof +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Lay-offs by + + + +

One of my all-time editorial bugbears is writers writing stories about someone being a writer – sets my teeth right on edge, I'd sooner chew a mouthful of tin foil than read such a thing. However, for no reason that I can consciously explain, I absolutely adore speculative fiction about employment… I guess being a writer just can't be a proper job. Anyway, while the short genre fiction community sharpens its pitchfork collection, let's celebrate the fact that Anna Ziegelhof delivered the right kind of story.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Swimming with Elephants

+ Travis Ezell +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Swimming with Elephants by + + + +

Before you read on, a quick shout out to SFFWorld.com, within whose supportive community forum your editor cut his teeth as a short fiction writer, sharing work and gaining feedback. I didn't mention it in our last issue, but I encountered Helen French's flash fiction Safe in the Dark right there, and enjoyed it so much I asked to take it for Mythaxis more or less on the spot – and so too this great piece of possibly prescient sci-fi by Travis Ezell, who really brings it all bittersweet home in the closing words.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The House We Built Together, Yesterday

+ Charlie Winter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The House We Built Together, Yesterday by + + + +

You'll have to bear with me here, and forgive me for the confusion, but one of my all-time favourite films is John Carpenter's THE THING. And if you told me Charlie Winter's gentle, warm-hearted yarn is surely as far removed as anything could be from that, so too the strange beasts that come to populate it, I'd largely agree. Yet both look at men living in isolation, their world devoid of women, which is interesting. And, in this case, also lovely.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon

+ Josh Pearce +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon by + + + +

Mythaxis is a home to all the speculative genres, though I feel that horror is the hardest sell, despite for many years being my first choice in recreational reading. And I mention this because what Josh Pearce is giving you here, it's very definitely sci-fi. But, as is proven by more than one story in our archives, sci-fi isn't always for the faint at heart. Fair warning, this story has edges.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Strange Pictures, by Uketsu

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Strange Pictures, by Uketsu by + + + +

And speaking of that darkest of genres, possibly, let us turn now to Japan's latest contribution to horror— well, or perhaps it's the uncanny… the unsettling? The absurd? I'm not sure I can say. Come to that, I'm not even sure how confident horror reviewer extraordinaire Bill Ryan is with regard to the case at hand, and that alone should be enough to send a shiver up your spine.

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – April to June, 2025

+
+ + +

On with the downward spiral of the world – and Mythaxis can't be expected to distract you from it alone, coddling you into a desperately clung-to moment of 'Oh how interesting, no need to look around and witness the collapse of all Humanity touches.' For indeed, there are other places online you can read well at the click of a button. At least until the power goes out for the final time…

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-42/contents.html b/issue-42/contents.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5a9374d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/contents.html @@ -0,0 +1,285 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Table of Contents — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Table of Contents

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Editorial

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+

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+ Story image for Editorial +
+ + + +

I’ve had a few different plans for this editorial.

+

First, from a distance, was a long-standing notion to celebrate this forty-second issue of Mythaxis Magazine by making it all about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I still remember on an almost visceral level the laughing fit I had at the way Douglas Adams described Ford Prefect getting put out of his stride when Arthur Dent met, it turned out, Zaphod Beeblebrox for the second time. I even reread that trilogy in five parts over the last year, finding it not to be what I remembered in a number of ways – but I have other people doing the book reviewing around here, no need to slide another one in on the quiet.

+

More recently, I considered writing about my experience of Eastercon 2025, maybe making some general observations about genre conventions and awards and ceremonies and so on along the way. However, after a little reflection, I decided that’s not a great idea either. Maybe you’re into them, maybe you’re not, but (as Jack Nicholson once said) I’m somewhere in the middle myself, so I doubt I’d deliver any startling insights that would swing the global balance of opinion one way or the other.

+

But then, very recently, I learned of the sad passing of our long-time contributor Les Sklaroff, and there stopped being any question about what I would really want to write.

+

Les was born in London and educated at the University of Edinburgh (despite, he claimed, spirited resistance). He later hitch-hiked abroad, basking in Corfu, busking in Paris, and worked for an antiquarian bookseller before training as a teacher. After teaching in Scotland for ten years, he moved with his wife and children to the Isle of Wight and became an independent bookseller, specialising in Mervyn Peake, illustrated books, and modern first editions.

+

And somewhere along the way, he started writing. Over a period of twelve years, Les contributed many stories to this magazine. In his fiction, he assembled quirky, anecdotal reportage of “everyday” life in an unreal city, and occasional fleeting glimpses of the environs around it. He introduced readers to its very often eccentric inhabitants with a neighbour’s ear for gossip and an anthropologist’s eye for what makes them tick. To read one of these tales was to go for a ramble in a place you’ll never get to visit, often finding that its strangeness was highlighted by how just like anywhere else it could be. Likely all cities have their weird corners, maybe Snoak just flipped the ratio.

+

When we compiled his stories into their own space, Sketches of Snoak City, Les told us his late flowering as a writer was largely due to the friendly indulgence of Mythaxis’s original editor, Gil Williamson. I have no doubt that Gil cherished this facet of their relationship. When I took up the reins after Gil’s passing, I was delighted to welcome Les back to expand his unique guidebook when he had other glimpses of Snoak to share with us.

+

My first editorial here was to celebrate the life of Gil, touch wood this won’t be my last. But I would like to offer a salute to the memory of Les, with our thanks. If there is a place we go after we exit this world, we can only hope it is half as vivid and interesting as the one he created.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

+

ISSUE 42 – Thanks and Salutations. +So, in the end this issue did not lean into forty-twoness the way it might have. Nevertheless, I think the off-kilter, alien-abductionish edge to our cover art would raise a smile for galactic hitchhikers everywhere. Minimalistically entitled ‘a’, it comes courtesy of Ignacio Diazs, a background artist from Santiago, Chile. You can see more of his work – which often shares this mix of every-day scenes with quirky dimensions – on Instagram, DeviantArt, and Cara. Many thanks, Ignacio!

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+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Summer 2025

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Sean MacKendrick +

Tag, You're It

+
+ + +

It's always a challenge to finalize each issue of Mythaxis. I try to present a table of contents with a deliberate structure, to place stories in relation to each other in a way that satisfies my editorial OCD (even if our readers remain blissfully oblivious to any such efforts going on behind the scenes). Usually picking a lead story is easy, though, since that's a different problem. The first one has to stand alone, it's the first thing the reader sees, after all – but this time that's not exactly the case. For while Sean MacKendrick's timely and sinister duologue absolutely works on the page, wait until you get a load of the audio play…

+ + + + Story image for Tag, You're It by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Listen, Don’t Touch

+ Cheryl S. Ntumy +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Listen, Don’t Touch by + + + +

The Sauútiverse is a science-fantasy shared world project set in a binary star system whose civilisation is rooted deeply in the mythologies, languages, and cultures of Africa and features an intricate magic system based on sound, oral traditions, and music. I'm delighted to present Cheryl Ntumy's latest, and most emblematic contribution to that cannon – you see, the name Sauúti is taken from the Swahili word for 'voice', and if there's one thing this story is about… well, if there's maybe two things…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Lay-offs

+ Anna Ziegelhof +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Lay-offs by + + + +

One of my all-time editorial bugbears is writers writing stories about someone being a writer – sets my teeth right on edge, I'd sooner chew a mouthful of tin foil than read such a thing. However, for no reason that I can consciously explain, I absolutely adore speculative fiction about employment… I guess being a writer just can't be a proper job. Anyway, while the short genre fiction community sharpens its pitchfork collection, let's celebrate the fact that Anna Ziegelhof delivered the right kind of story.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Swimming with Elephants

+ Travis Ezell +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Swimming with Elephants by + + + +

Before you read on, a quick shout out to SFFWorld.com, within whose supportive community forum your editor cut his teeth as a short fiction writer, sharing work and gaining feedback. I didn't mention it in our last issue, but I encountered Helen French's flash fiction Safe in the Dark right there, and enjoyed it so much I asked to take it for Mythaxis more or less on the spot – and so too this great piece of possibly prescient sci-fi by Travis Ezell, who really brings it all bittersweet home in the closing words.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The House We Built Together, Yesterday

+ Charlie Winter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The House We Built Together, Yesterday by + + + +

You'll have to bear with me here, and forgive me for the confusion, but one of my all-time favourite films is John Carpenter's THE THING. And if you told me Charlie Winter's gentle, warm-hearted yarn is surely as far removed as anything could be from that, so too the strange beasts that come to populate it, I'd largely agree. Yet both look at men living in isolation, their world devoid of women, which is interesting. And, in this case, also lovely.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon

+ Josh Pearce +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon by + + + +

Mythaxis is a home to all the speculative genres, though I feel that horror is the hardest sell, despite for many years being my first choice in recreational reading. And I mention this because what Josh Pearce is giving you here, it's very definitely sci-fi. But, as is proven by more than one story in our archives, sci-fi isn't always for the faint at heart. Fair warning, this story has edges.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Strange Pictures, by Uketsu

+ Bill Ryan +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Strange Pictures, by Uketsu by + + + +

And speaking of that darkest of genres, possibly, let us turn now to Japan's latest contribution to horror— well, or perhaps it's the uncanny… the unsettling? The absurd? I'm not sure I can say. Come to that, I'm not even sure how confident horror reviewer extraordinaire Bill Ryan is with regard to the case at hand, and that alone should be enough to send a shiver up your spine.

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – April to June, 2025

+
+ + +

On with the downward spiral of the world – and Mythaxis can't be expected to distract you from it alone, coddling you into a desperately clung-to moment of 'Oh how interesting, no need to look around and witness the collapse of all Humanity touches.' For indeed, there are other places online you can read well at the click of a button. At least until the power goes out for the final time…

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-42/lay-offs.html b/issue-42/lay-offs.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e2ceeda6 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/lay-offs.html @@ -0,0 +1,481 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Lay-offs — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+
+ +

Lay-offs

+

Anna Ziegelhof

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Lay-offs by +
+ + + + + + +

A + +li Vicente fought back when the HR-Assistant extracted her Focus Mate. It had been her first job out of college. Far from home, she had really bought into the We-Are-A-Family-Here-thing. On the day of the lay-offs, she was crying inside the HR-Assistant booth next to mine.

+

I felt for her. I’d had a Focus Mate removed many times, though this was my first lay-off from a permanent contract, too. Before this, I had been hopping from term-contract to term-contract and always knew from the day I signed exactly when I was going to step into a booth and have my Focus Mate removed. This time I arrived for a hard day’s work just like any other, only to discover they were going to strip me of everything that connected me to the company.

+

It was best not to get too attached to a job. The physical pain of removal always stung, but the emotional pain could sting even more if you let it: alongside the implant, your income tumbled into the biohazard slot; your health insurance, gym membership, free takeout food, the constant supportive chatter of your global company-family; and, since it was Ali’s first last day on a job, probably a good chunk of sense of self.

+

Being laid off was different from seeing the end of a contract approaching. It hurt me, too. I winced when the booth’s assistance-arm pulled the Focus Mate out of my neck just below my hairline and replaced it with a complimentary silicon button to keep the port from healing over. The colorful information nuggets in my field of vision switched off, and the name-tag ‘Ali Vicente’ disappeared from where it had been hovering above her head. The sensation of having my senses turned off was disorienting and nauseating. I fumbled for the provided receptacle and threw up. My retching sounded muffled without acoustic optimization, and without visual cues like directional arrows and reassuring check marks I wasn’t sure whether my vomit even hit the bucket. I didn’t recall it being this bad. But then, I had been with the company four years. I had never worn a Focus Mate for that long before.

+

The glow of the HR-Assistant’s help-screen attracted the attention of my newly aimless gaze. I initialed disclaimers, agreements, acceptance forms.

+

Something red appeared in the corner of my eye. A notification? I shifted my gaze toward the alert-red thing. It was a smudge on the next booth’s privacy window. In vain, I waited for a hypothesis from my Focus Mate.

+

Gone, of course. I’d have to figure it out myself. Well, it was red. Smeared. Paint?

+

Blood.

+

Through the glass, I saw Ali Vicente sink to the floor inside her booth. Her HR-Assistant’s assistance-arm had coiled itself around Ali’s ribcage while its pincers were attempting to pry open her fist.

+

“Ali, you’ve got to turn it in!” I shouted. My voice sounded unconvincing and dampened.

+

I scrawled my exit-signature on the screen. “Best wishes for your future!” the HR-Assistant intoned and the booth’s door opened. I stumbled out and over to the other booth, inside which Ali was on the floor and bleeding. I banged on the glass. “Let it have the implant! It’ll hurt you!” I shouted, hoping to be heard through the soundproof partition. No reaction.

+

It was a big no-go to mess with the HR-Assistant, but the booths did have an emergency button on the outside. Company-as-family-indoctrination must have worked on me at least somewhat, because I found it difficult to stand by while an ex-family-member was being attacked by a machine for not eagerly surrendering her Focus Mate, symbol of belonging, of knowledge, self and worth.

+

I slammed the emergency button. The assistance-arm went limp. The door popped open. I pulled Ali Vicente out. She had one hand clenched around her wrist, the other hand seeping red like she was crushing a sachet of ketchup.

+

Without my Focus Mate, the company’s complimentary first aid seminars were hazy notions, but there was a pile of leftover t-shirts from the summer picnic inside the deactivated booth. I grabbed one and wrapped it around Ali’s bleeding hand. That would have to do for now.

+

She didn’t even seem to notice, only stared ahead, catatonic.

+

Kinda knew how she felt.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + managed to drive us to my apartment, semi-safely, alternating between fixating on the road ahead and snapping my head left and right in case something came at us from the side – no more Focus Mate, no more real-time driver assist.

+

Ali sat motionless in the passenger seat next to me, her wrapped-up hand pressed to her chest and getting blood on that t-shirt too.

+

I sat her down at my kitchen table and rummaged through my bathroom cabinet until I found antiseptic ointment and some band-aids. I unwrapped the summer-picnic fun fun hackathon t-shirt and saw it: Ali’s bleeding fingers were still holding her extracted Focus Mate. I looked at it like it was some kind of holy relic.

+

“How insert Focus Mate, DIY?” she slurred. Her face contorted when there was no response. She swatted at her ears. The world always sounded muffled without the chatter of the hivemind for a while.

+

For a while, I thought vaguely, but how long? I had always used my previous company’s Focus Mate to line up my next gig. During the past thirteen years, I had only gone a few days, max, without one. This time, how would I even focus on finding a job without a Focus Mate? I felt a sense of terror at the prospect. What seemed most alluring was to just… Ah, crap. My mental health subscriptions were gone too, of course.

+

Some whimpering sound.

+

There were ointments and band-aids on my kitchen table.

+

Right. Ali. She’d stolen her Focus Mate. We’d have to do something about that.

+

First, I cleaned her bleeding hand. She wept.

+

When I was done, I brought her a clean top and tossed both her bloodied t-shirts into the garbage. Then I boiled some water for tea.

+

My cabinet was full of logo-mugs representing my journey through the margins of the tech-world. I wasn’t a programmer. Nothing on my resume made me the obvious choice for anything. And now, no Focus Mate to prompt the best phrase to use on a resumé, the best response during an interview.

+

How had I even functioned until I started my first job and with it got my first Focus Mate? How had I made it through university? I distinctly remembered the day the world finally gained dimension, color, information. This was a bitter throw-back to before-times.

+

“Ali,” I said, feeling dull and sluggish. Ali’s puffy eyes dragged themselves over to meet mine. She squinted, probably waiting for additional input. Her healthy hand twitched: the aborted gesture of reaching for the nape of her neck to flip on the Focus Mate, like every normal person did first thing every morning.

+

“We’re stuck like this for a while, but we can do it, okay?” I said to her slowly, not sure if I was lying. Sensory deprivation. How long until we went mad? That’s what sensory deprivation did to a person!

+

“This is it,” she mumbled. “This is the end of the world.”

+

I convinced her to take a nap on my sofa, which didn’t take much effort, and while she was snoring softly I dusted off my old laptop. How slow it was. How heavy.

+

I found that website for networking. For years, I’d only accessed it through the Focus Mate. The browser-version looked obsolete. Scrolling through the newsfeed with my fingers was cumbersome.

+

I am excited to share that I started a new position.

+

I am excited to share that I started a new position.

+

Suddenly the posts changed.

+

I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.

+

I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.

+

My anxiety pinched again. Had everyone in my network been laid off?

+

Ali stirred on the sofa, jerked up, wide-eyed, then started crying again. “Not a nightmare,” she whined, got up and stumbled through my living room, bumping into the coffee table and the ottoman. The brain needed time to readjust to seeing without proximity-warnings and route-guidance.

+

“Ali,” I called, as one might call a shy kitten.

+

She had gone for her bag. She rummaged through it until she found her phone. She tapped here, tapped there, then began scrolling.

+

“Ali,” I said, approaching her carefully. “You’re a programmer. Maybe we can hack it.”

+

“Hack what?” she muttered, eyes locked on the calming glow of the screen.

+

Had she forgotten? I picked up her Focus Mate from where I’d wiped it down by the sink. “Your Focus Mate,” I said, circling it enticingly before her. “You could hack it!”

+

I mean, maybe? What did I know? I had only been a project coordinator. But maybe one of us many lay-offs had the skills to hack a Focus Mate. Maybe we could find a way to create a version that even people without a job could access. Real out of the box thinking, that. Hope blossomed in me. I just had to get Ali on board.

+

Ali didn’t even look at it. “I can’t work without my Focus Mate,” she whispered as her eyes followed the scrolling movement of her phone’s screen.

+

“Listen,” I said, raising my voice to keep her attention. “Someone built this. There was a time before these things, and during that time someone built the first one, and they didn’t have one.”

+

She frowned. “What?”

+

“Someone built the first Focus Mate,” I rephrased, so tired from using my senses so much. “And they did it without a Focus Mate.”

+

Ali snorted. “That doesn’t make any sense, Lara.”

+

“Maybe we can figure it out,” I sighed. I swiped my finger across my laptop’s fingerprint reader. Get free Netflix for a month! said a popup.

+

I used my tired finger to click the button. How hard everything was. I turned on a show about a happy world. Nobody was worried about health insurance and not finding a new job and catatonic coworkers. Coworker wasn’t the right word. Family. That was the word.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + + must have fallen asleep. My Netflix show was still playing.

+

I had lost my job. My Focus Mate!

+

Ali was sitting on the floor in my living room with her phone. Her thumb was scrolling.

+

We should eat, I thought. I was going to pull up the takeout menu browser, except, like everything else, no Focus Mate. So no food ordering.

+

There was something I could make without having to focus. Spaghetti with tomato sauce. I checked the cupboards. Great: none of the ingredients required.

+

The store was, thankfully, walking distance, so no more road nightmares. But it looked so strange without the bouncing advertisements projected into my field of vision. It was hard to navigate the aisles without the flashing arrows pointing the way, suggesting something I might need. It took forever to find the pasta, the canned tomatoes, the butter and onions.

+

I returned to my apartment, deadly tired. And then I had to cook.

+

“Ow,” Ali whined when she tried to use her injured hand to eat while scrolling with the other.

+

“It’s hard, but you have to adapt. You do want to find a new job soon, right?” I pulled the phone out of her healthy hand so she could eat.

+

She seemed clearer after dinner. I kept her phone away from her to bring up the topic of the Focus Mate again. “Imagine,” I said, “we could hack it. And have Focus access. Even just basic. Imagine how much easier our job search would be!”

+

“Max,” she said, sounding less defeated than before. She hadn’t even asked for her phone back, nor attempted to stuff the Focus Mate back into the hole at the back of her skull. “Max is hardware.”

+

“Let me ping Max!” No. Couldn’t. I groaned. I’d get used to it eventually. It had not even been a day off the Focus Mate. I got my laptop from the living room and put it on the kitchen table, so we could both see it.

+

“Dude,” Ali said.

+

“I know, right?”

+

“So fat!” She giggled. Her eyes flicked to the right, probably checking for likes and hahas. But nobody but me had heard her quip.

+

On my laptop, the Netflix-screen was suggesting we watch another episode. I clicked the play button.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +re you still there? a line of text read.

+

I looked around. Ali and I were both sitting somewhat distortedly at my kitchen table. We’d watched a few episodes. What had we meant to do?

+

Right. Max. Help. I dragged the cursor heavily across the screen and went to another tab.

+

“Look at this,” I said to Ali. “It’s a social media website that still exists. I think it may be a way to make contact with others.”

+

I scrolled and scrolled. The same I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity. From everyone.

+

I typed the name Ali spelled for me. We found him after a few tries. Next to Max’s name, there appeared the familiar line of text: I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.

+

“Max,” I said aloud as I typed, poking the clunky keys. “Ali and I, need your, help.”

+

I was laid off today, he replied immediately. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.

+

“So were we. We don’t, have, Focus access, anymore. But, we have, something, cool.”

+

Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I was watching Netflix.

+

“We have, free, food,” I tried, appealing to a biological need. I gave him my address.

+

He appeared after dark. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. Can’t drive like this. Public transport. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.”

+

“It’s fine. Have some food. We’ll show you what we have.”

+

Max ate leftover spaghetti ravenously. He’d need a new job soon, otherwise he’d starve. When the spaghetti was gone, I showed him the Focus Mate Ali had stolen.

+

Max stared at it: that moment of hesitation while he was waiting for an automatic caption or a hypothesis to appear from the Focus Mate. He finally reached out to explore the device with his fingers, then shook it gently next to his ear.

+

“It’s a Focus Mate,” I explained. “That’s what it looks like outside the body.”

+

“We thought, maybe we could hack it or something?” Ali said. “Build a non-branded one? To help with our job search?”

+

Max put the device back on the kitchen table and his attention shifted to my old laptop. A moment’s wait for input again, then he asked. “Is that a MacBook Pro?”

+

I confirmed.

+

“Holy shit! I’m really into vintage machines! I almost missed it lying there!” No wonder, without the Focus Mate sending a little red notification to alert him to something nearby that might be of interest to him. Max looked at the old device from all angles, touched it with his hands, with his cheek. I took it away from him before he could lick it.

+

Ali clicked her fingers, taking over. “Hey! Focus! We asked you something!”

+

“What?”

+

“You are hardware. Are you gonna help us hack the Focus Mate so we can find new jobs?”

+

“I could hook it up to this baby!” Max seemed more alert. Maybe a sense of purpose could do that to a person.

+

He seemed almost gleeful when he rummaged through the box of cables I kept, no idea which device they had once belonged to. Max and Ali talked in words I had a hard time understanding without a Focus Mate to subtitle their conversation into non-technical language. Really, as a non-technical person with a BA in English Literature, the Focus Mate’s subtitle-function was the only way I had ever been able to succeed at my job at a tech company.

+

My old laptop’s screen was soon lit up with terminal windows for the very first time. At least Max and Ali seemed to have momentarily forgotten about our impairment and how difficult everything was going to be. Maybe not so difficult for them. They were young and programmers. But me, I wasn’t as young. And not a programmer. What was I going to do?

+

I wanted my Netflix. I found my phone and settled down in a corner next to a wall outlet. I logged into my free trial and kept watching on my phone.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

“N + +nnno,” I growled when someone tugged at the screen before the show was over.

+

“Lara!” a voice said. But my show was still on. I looked up at a sort of greasy-faced someone, not like the matte pastel-colored actors on my show.

+

Lay-off. Focus Mate. Panic swept through me. New job!

+

“Lara.” It was Ali. My family-colleague.

+

Had the company actually referred to itself as a family? Bullshit, I thought, and winced in anticipation of the low-level jab of electricity the Focus Mate supplied whenever it detected a thought that wasn’t aligned with company culture.

+

No jab came. That’s right. Focus Mate gone. Ali here. Max, too!

+

Ali clicked her fingers at me this time. “Lara, Max says we need to bring in someone else. We made some progress, but there’s something missing. And we don’t know how to find out without a Focus Mate. Max knows this guy…”

+

“But he’s, like – oh, it’s really sad, actually,” Max said. “So smart, though. So sweet.”

+

“Can we trust him?” I asked, suddenly using my project coordinator voice.

+

Max sighed. “It’s actually really hard for me to talk about this, because he’s, you know, different. He’s never had a Focus Mate.” Ali gasped; Max nodded. “So, because, actually, he almost died when he got his first. So, he doesn’t have one. And can never have one. So, he can’t have a job, obviously. He has a degree, though. Did it without a Focus Mate!”

+

“Yeah, so did I,” I grumbled, remembering times spent at the library, reading books, writing my own summaries, rather than relying on convenient internal summary-libraries.

+

“Oh my god, I had no idea you were that old!” Ali exclaimed, immediately wincing in anticipation of the low-level jab for saying something iffy in terms of HR-compliance. When no jab came, she still apologized.

+

“Whatever, Ali. Alright, Max. Do you think your friend would want to help with this?”

+

“Yeah, why not?”

+

I waited a moment for Max to figure out why. When he didn’t, I told him: “Because we’re begging him to help us fix a piece of technology that he can’t use but everyone else uses, which probably makes his life pretty difficult at times.”

+

“But he’s the happiest person! So positive! So inspiring!”

+

“Reach out. But only if he really wants to do it.”

+

Max pulled out his phone. “I’m texting him,” he explained. “Obviously. Since he can’t, you know…”

+

“Wow,” Ali said.

+

“Well, we can’t either right now,” I reminded her. And we watched Max do the typing thing on his phone screen, with both thumbs.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

D + +espite the late hour, Max’s friend Elias said he’d come right over.

+

“Just behave naturally. It can be a little sad, but he’s really cool once you get to know him,” Max reassured us when the doorbell rang and I buzzed him in.

+

“Hey,” Elias said and showed off a dimpled grin.

+

“Hi! You – must – be – Elias,” I said, enunciating clearly. Full of sympathy, I suppressed an urge to hug him impulsively.

+

“I – am,” he enunciated back. “Max – must – have – told – you – about – me.”

+

“He – did.”

+

“Chill out. You can just talk normally,” Elias said, sounding completely normal actually, and slunk past me into my apartment.

+

Elias sat down in front of the construct Max and Ali had built, which consisted of my old laptop, a lot of cables, and the Focus Mate. He laced his fingers together and made them make a freakish noise like microwave popcorn, then went to work on the keyboard.

+

I couldn’t help but stare at the spot at the nape of Elias’ neck where there was a scar from a grown-shut Focus Mate port. I reached back and felt for the little button that was going to keep mine open until I found a new job, hopefully. I was relieved to feel it there.

+

“So?” Max asked, when Elias leaned back with a sense of finality.

+

Elias huffed. “Yeah, got the branding off. Might not get you all the functionality, but it should work for basics. So, who of you wants it? I don’t think we can build another from scratch. So much proprietary tech in there.”

+

We looked at each other, me, Ali, Max. Technically, the Focus Mate had been Ali’s. But it was my idea to salvage it. Though we couldn’t have done it without Max. So… Could we share it, take turns? No. If Ali got it back, she’d fight to keep it like she’d fought the HR-booth’s assistance arm. There’d be blood and it would be mine.

+

Elias coughed. “Look, you don’t have to decide now. There’s this other thing, might help with this, but I can’t do it here. Do you want to come along?”

+

We agreed, excited, and a bit relieved.

+

We all piled into Elias’ car. It troubled me for a moment that he was going to drive without a Focus Mate, but then I remembered that I’d driven myself and Ali to my place after having gotten laid off. It just needed a different kind of focus. I had learned to drive in the times before Focus Mate, after all. Couldn’t quite recall what that had been like, though. A steely focus on only that one thing – driving – and a person might be okay.

+

My sympathy for Elias welled up again. He had never experienced the riveting rush of information; the magnificent wealth of enhanced colors; the thrill of receiving customized factoids when simply looking around at the world; the feeling of being safe with your company-family’s chatter always with you; being given help without even asking for it. He had never known any of it. He had no chance of succeeding in a job. I wondered how he could even afford his car.

+

He drove us, really smooth and safely actually, through the city in the gray light of pre-dawn. City turned to suburb, turned to dry grass of late summer, turned to coastal redwood forest. The car climbed up a hill on a winding road.

+

“Where are we going and how is that related to fixing the Focus Mate?” I asked. My work-voice again. So glad it was still there.

+

“Windy Hill,” was Elias’ response.

+

Ali, Max, and I were uncomfortably quiet. No explanation from our Focus Mates. Ali dared to ask out loud: “What’s Windy Hill?”

+

“A nice place,” Elias said and grinned. All I could think was how he’d only remembered to answer half of my initial question. How sad and lonely his world must be. Everyone else always just knowing things and him always feeling stupid and having to ask. Maybe we had made him feel good simply by asking him something for once.

+

Elias pulled the car into a gravel parking lot, empty at this early hour. I’d definitely experienced significant disorientation during the drive. There was no map pin telling me where I was, how far to the next vehicle-charging-station, or which direction I was facing.

+

Elias got out. “Not far to go now,” he said.

+

Elias used his phone to light the way up a rocky trail. I assumed that he was taking us to some sort of workshop he had access to, perhaps to pick up a missing part. But we were in the middle of nowhere. And who knew walking up hills was so much harder than a gym machine? I could hear Max and Ali’s breathing almost as loud as my own. Elias wasn’t making much noise though.

+

Finally we got to the bald head of a hill affording a view of silhouettes in twilight grayscale: the bay in the distance in one direction, the ocean in the other, stretches of dark forest sloping up and down, all around.

+

It was quiet. Even this early, there would have been some chatter relevant to me on my Focus Mate from other time zones. Here, it was almost silent, except for the chirping of early morning birds.

+

“You hear that?” Elias asked. “American goldfinch. Spinus tristis.”

+

We all stared at him. “How did you do all that with just your brain?” I asked.

+

He looked at me but didn’t respond. I received no input to go on, no hypothesis regarding his expression. Dating, I suddenly thought, anxiety churning. How was I ever going to date again?

+

I twitched when Elias brushed my arm lightly and he cracked a fleeting smile.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +e made the four of us sit down on the grass. The sun started coming up beyond the hills, painting the sprawling tech city down there golden little by little. The wind whispered in my ears. The first rays of the morning sun cut through the chill of night and felt warm on my face. The grass bristled against my legs. The air was fragrant with the scent of dry shrub and eucalyptus. It was going to be a beautiful day.

+

We stayed until the sun was up and the shadows of the night were gone from the valley. At some point Ali sobbed next to me a little, and I put an arm around her, felt her nestle her head against my shoulder.

+

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

+

Elias, on my other side, shifted, and pulled the hacked Focus Mate out of his pocket. He put the spidery thing on a rock between us.

+

“Well, it’s up to you,” he said and turned back to the view.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Lay-offs at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Anna Ziegelhof

+

+ + Author image of Anna Ziegelhof + + + Anna Ziegelhof is a science fiction and horror writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is particularly drawn to stories about darker aspects of the human (or alien) experience. A professional background as a computational linguist led to her teaching classes on creating languages for science-fiction/fantasy worlds at Clarion West. Her short fiction can be found in a variety of zines and anthologies, among others in The Horror Library, Luna Station, The Future Fire, The Flash Fiction Podcast, Flametree Press, and Short Edition’s short story dispensers. Online she can be found at www.annaziegelhof.com and annaziegelhof.substack.com.

+

© Anna Ziegelhof 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by StockSnap, JayMantri, and saylowe - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/listen-dont-touch.html b/issue-42/listen-dont-touch.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1a501194 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/listen-dont-touch.html @@ -0,0 +1,376 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Listen, Don’t Touch — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Listen, Don’t Touch

+

Cheryl S. Ntumy

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Listen, Don’t Touch by +
+ + + + + + +

A Sauútiverse Story

+

T + +here are worse things. My mate Kwa-Nxi takes a deep breath, steeling himself.

+

Of course. Many worse things. Like…

+

He cringes, jagged teeth flashing, fingers hovering hesitantly before he signs, Disembowelment?

+

Oh, definitely. Yes.

+

We exchange despairing glances, because disembowelment might actually be preferable to this torment.

+

The uroh-ogi, a human healer and the reason my mate and I are speaking in Sign rather than using our voices, heaves a sigh. “It won’t be that bad.”

+

Liar. We sit cross-legged on the earthen floor of our dark, musty, riverside den, Kwa-Nxi and I close enough that, were I to inch to the left, our knees would collide. I sit very still to prevent that from happening. The sound of the river beyond offers little solace. In this moment our home, void of the furnishings humans keep in their dwellings yet rich with the aroma of damp soil and thriving insect life, feels more like a prison than a shelter. I carve lines in the floor with my talons in a vain attempt to soothe the anxiety. The movement startles some small, shelled creature, sending it scuttling deeper into the shadows.

+

“Trust me,” the uroh-ogi continues. “I have worked with other Aq’pa, using this very treatment. The anticipation is the worst part.”

+

Yes, and that is precisely the problem. Before, the anticipation was the best part.

+

Before, sex was simple.

+

Usually Kwa-Nxi would instigate it, with a long, low growl. My scales would stand on end, skin humming with the onset of arousal, and I would let out a hiss. In response, he would whistle, eyes rolling back in his head. If we were in a hurry, that would be enough to get the blood humming and release the chemicals required to swell the buds along our sides. But if we had the luxury of time, a whistle would lead to a groan, which would lead to a chitter, which would evoke a rumbling murmur, skin vibrating all the while.

+

At some point, our minds swimming in the heady vapors secreted from under our talons, we would shift position so our sides faced each other. He would howl loud enough to send the den vermin scattering. My back would arch, opening my buds further, and I’d emit a low moan. His buds would burst open, sending spores flying. The spores would latch onto my buds, which would close up and suck the spores into my body. And we would collapse, worn out with ecstasy.

+

Ah, the good old days.

+

We could keep trying the normal way, I suggest, not for the first time.

+

Kwa-Nxi’s relief is palpable. Yes! Yes. Let’s keep trying.

+

The uroh-ogi sighs again. She does it a lot. “It’s not going to work. You know how the disease alters Aq’pa voices. There’s no point—”

+

My mate holds up his hands for silence. Please give us a moment. We don’t want you swooning on our floor.

+

Her expression sour, the uroh-ogi gets up and steps out into the open air. I hear the subtle crackle that indicates that a sonic veil has dropped over our den, trapping all the sounds within to shield her from their intensity. Casting an intense gaze on my face, Kwa-Nxi growls. The sound sets my teeth on edge, but I force myself to let out a tentative hiss in return. He tries hard to keep his expression impassive, but after a moment he doubles over, dry retching onto the floor.

+

I attempt a growl. I gaze at my mate, calling up memories of our past couplings, silently urging the Mother to give my voice the right cadence to bring us back from the brink. But the noise that leaves my mouth is far from sensual. I balk at the way it grates on my ears. Kwa-Nxi shakes his head, and then – Mother bless his fearless heart – risks a chitter. A wave of bile rises and crests in my belly. I swallow hard and sigh, like the human. I have never been less aroused.

+

“Bo-Hlalé? Kwa-Nxi? Can I come in now?”

+

I get up to go outside and beckon to the uroh-ogi. The sonic veil fades with a popping noise and the uroh-ogi follows me inside.

+

“So, after trying for the seven hundredth time,” she says, in a tone far too smug for my liking, “can we get back to the treatment I proposed?”

+

We didn’t want a human healer. Our predicament is frustrating enough without having to protect the fragile human constitution from the raw power of our voices, but all the Aq’pa healers were booked. The mysterious ailment plaguing us has the entire Aq’pa community running scared. Every growl is altered, every moan a little off, the intonations so wrong that misunderstandings have become the norm. Some say it affects Aq’pa beyond our home planet of Órino-Rin, reaching even those who have traversed the stars. I don’t know whether there is truth to the rumors – I’ve never ventured beyond our village. I certainly wouldn’t risk travel now.

+

The human is known for her groundbreaking experimental techniques, so we took a chance. I regret it.

+

“I know it’s difficult to accept,” the uroh-ogi says, “but we must be realistic. This illness has ravaged your mating calls. If you don’t find another way, you’ll die out.”

+

We know. We’ve heard the dire prognosis. We’ve seen mates look at each other with disgust rather than desire. Even so, the uroh-ogi’s solution is taboo.

+

“Just a little touch,” she coaxes. “The gentlest caress. If you like, I can demonstrate on one of you.”

+

No! we sign in unison, mortified. This human has no shame. As if it’s not bad enough asking us to touch each other, now she wants to touch us as well?

+

“Fine.” Another sigh. “Start with the tip of a finger. Gently.”

+

Summoning all my willpower, I reach for Kwa-Nxi, trying not to shudder. Moments before my fingers touch his scaly skin, I pull them back.

+

We must be strong, he says. For the sake of our people.

+

I nod, determined, and try again. My fingers make contact. The scales are rough, like my own. Despite my instinctive shudder, the sensation isn’t as repulsive as I expected. There is no nausea, at least.

+

“Good!” The human beams with pride. “Now stroke the scales, moving closer to his buds. Remember, you’re trying to coax them open.”

+

My gaze keeps flicking to Kwa-Nxi’s face, but his expression is inscrutable. When my fingers brush one of his buds, we both jump in disgust.

+

This time there’s an edge of exasperation to the uroh-ogi’s sigh. “I have another appointment, so I’m just going to prescribe an hour of practice every day.”

+

An hour! Every single day? Mother help us.

+

We pay the uroh-ogi for her unique brand of torture, see her out, and return to our places on the floor. For a long time, neither of us can speak. I could live without children, but the thought that my mate and I will repel each other for the rest of our days is unbearable.

+

Kwa-Nxi turns to me. “It’s fine.” His voice is a little hoarse from lack of use. “We don’t need sex.” We pause to reflect on that blatant lie, then he says, “Well, there must be other ways. We can adjust to our new mating calls. Our best minds will find a solution.”

+

My heart is heavy as I whisper, “There are worse things.”

+

“Of course. Many worse things. Like this.”

+

He reaches out to give me my medicine – a caress along the rim of my buds. We tremble at the wrongness of it. Well, we will persevere. Everyone has to make sacrifices, not so?

+

We try again. Ugh.

+

“Maybe if we do it for long enough, it will start to feel good,” I say.

+

He laughs, and – thank the Mother for small blessings – it’s still the most beautiful sound in the world. My skin floods with warmth… and then my mind lights up. What I’m feeling isn’t arousal, not even close. But maybe… just maybe… it could be?

+

“Kwa-Nxi!”

+

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh, it’s just—”

+

“No, laugh again. I think I felt something.”

+

He gives me a blank look. “I can’t laugh on demand.”

+

“Try!”

+

With a deep breath, he lets out a sound like a hiccupping tetekute. Laughter bubbles in my chest and spills from my lips. Kwa-Nxi grins, and then his eyes widen.

+

“Oh! I think I felt something, too!”

+

“Pleasant, isn’t it?”

+

He shrugs. “Pleasant is not the same as sexy.”

+

“I know. But if we find the right tone… Come, let’s keep trying.”

+

“If this works, we’ll have to ask that uroh-ogi for a refund.”

+

“Oooh! Could you repeat that, but a few octaves lower?”

+

He laughs again, making me… Well, happy. Not aroused. Not even a little. But surely there is some connection, some overlap between different kinds of joy and different kinds of pleasure. Why shouldn’t one lead to the other?

+

So we try. All night. Each time we approach the vicinity of arousal, one of us will make a sound – a whimper, a moan – that makes the other want to vomit, and we’re forced to start all over again. But we have to keep trying. We have no choice.

+

“We’re going to need practice,” I gasp, exhausted.

+

“An hour every day, at least,” Kwa-Nxi agrees.

+

And even though we’ve made barely any progress at all, we smile as we collapse, worn out from the effort.

+

Laughing. Well.

+

Anything is better than touching.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Listen, Don’t Touch at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Cheryl S. Ntumy

+

+ + Author image of Cheryl S. Ntumy + + + Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of speculative fiction, young adult fiction, and romance. She is part of the Sauútiverse Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of Petlo Literary Arts, an organisation that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana. Her Sauútiverse novella Songs for the Shadows was released in 2024 by Atthis Arts and her short story collection Black Friday and Other Stories from Ghana was published in March 2025 by Flame Tree Publishing.

+

© Cheryl S. Ntumy 2025 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by eroyka, laurajuarez, pieonane, gamagapix, HPUweKlein, innamykytas, and unknown, and also by Krakenimages.com at DepositPhotos.com - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/short-reviews-april-to-june-2025.html b/issue-42/short-reviews-april-to-june-2025.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..590f2217 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/short-reviews-april-to-june-2025.html @@ -0,0 +1,326 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Short Reviews – April to June, 2025

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – April to June, 2025 by +
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S + +tarting with something short and sharp, Broken Windows by Nicholas Diehl gives us a narrative about crime and punishment – two concepts, it would have us perceive, more conjoined than some quarters of society would like to acknowledge. It takes the form of five monologues, opening with The Window Man, for whom opening windows was very much not the role, followed by The Defenestrator, which would explain why, if you happen to know what defenestration means. I won’t spoil.

+

The three remaining characters are all of far more recognisable types (The Student, The Paramedic, The Press Secretary), but it is of course the context about which all five are speaking that makes these ordinaries stand out. As is the way at Sci Phi Journal (Laureate of the European SF Award for Best Magazine, no less!), the story is followed by a philosophical note from the author to help clear up uncertainties harboured by any passing US senators unfortunate enough to accidentally read the story and have their charcoaled souls exposed.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +ontinuing, we take to the road along one of the many routes administered by the Department of Social, Political, and Speculative Cyber-fiction, aka The Future Fire, in this case pacing steadily towards our destination under the guiding hand of Juliet Kemp.

+

In Treading Invisible Threads we accompany narrator Senna as they revisit familiar ground, compelled after many years to return to the place of their apprenticeship following the death of their estranged master. That place is Avebury, a village in the south of England famous for a five millenia-old Neolithic monument akin to Stonehenge, and Senna is a justiciar, serving the communities of their assigned district by combining the functions of both courier and judge, settling local disputes and conveying messages across the country that are passed by justiciars from hand to hand. Yet this is not a bygone world but a future one, hinting at long-passed social and ecological collapse and a culture more carefully rising from the ruins.

+

With their replacement as apprentice not yet ready to take up the role, Senna has travelled from their own circuit up north in Chester to provide reluctant assistance, carrying a number of communications for people who were once regular acquaintances. What results is a journey that kicks up memories of Senna’s past, the kind of things that seem to get in your eye like road dust and provoke a similar unwanted reaction. And Treading Invisible Threads is very nicely told, its only slip – an unironic and therefore slightly eye-rolling mention of the oh-so-cliché “before times” early on – a forgivable one.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +o round off this issue’s excursions, two recommendations from Issue 10 of Radon Journal, focus point for Radical Perception, where is published prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. And my picks here happily mirror the previous, the first being another longer story comprising troubled environments, apprenticeships, and journeys, the second a swiftly stabbing tale of social correction that hints at darkness behind the scenes.

+

In The Oneiromantic Sheep, ageing shepherd Samuel and his adult granddaughter Min are taking their flock to join a seasonal gathering at a distant community, an event that will mean not just trade but the chance for their animal charges to breed outside their regular group, mixing up the gene pool and ensuring stronger lambs for the next generation. Immediately we join them this mission is under threat, as a pack of predators block their path along a crumbling motorway: chimeric creatures with varying coyote-like traits, some going on four legs, some bi-pedal and wielding weapons with unsettlingly human hands. Scaring them off is only the first of a series of challenges and setbacks Samuel and Min must overcome.

+

Author Frank Baird Hughes crafts a really interesting storyworld here, though not so much for its taking place on another planet in an distant solar system. Avunculus was terraformed in such a way that its native biome would be merged with that of its new human occupants, only for a natural disaster to collapse the technological foundations that allowed any of this to happen, thrusting society on the planet into a far more primitive state. However, while creatures like the “coyotl” manifest their hybridization physically, Samuel’s sheep share a hivemind, one their shepherd can communicate with while sleeping, after consuming certain more or less naturally occurring roadside herbs, that is. These sometimes philosophical conversations with the flock are the gems in this story, but there’s plenty of action and adventure to enjoy besides.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nd finally, as promised, Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland, a sequence in four bite-sized chunks this time, circling us back around to matters of justice. We join one of a group of persons sentenced to make amends for past actions, transported through the night into the heart of a forest of unknown depth. I shall say nothing regarding the nature of the punishment that awaits, the extent to which their willingness to submit is voluntary and informed, nor the implications left hanging by the whole. Go read it instead.

+

Instructions… was written by Emma Burnett, who has appeared twice previously in Mythaxis and, I shall now divulge, will do so again before the year is out! I was strongly reminded of yet another nutshell-sized sf tale of institutional correction, Rachel K. Jones’s celebrated Five Views of the Planet Tartarus. In my opinion, this makes a very fine complementary piece for that.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

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Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.html b/issue-42/someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..aed81956 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/someday-someones-gonna-steal-your-carbon.html @@ -0,0 +1,478 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon

+

Josh Pearce

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Someday Someone's Gonna Steal Your Carbon by +
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Q + +uinn: nervous, violet-haired, edging toward her late 50s with a queasy apprehension, hands on either side of the growing mass in her midsection. Her feet ached, her insides burned, her temples throbbed, her spine felt like it was being pulled apart. Her everything hurt.

+

Dr. Kay switched off his innerscope and said, “Yup, everything looks good. How you feeling?”

+

Quinn threw up in her mouth. He pointed her to the sink and she spat and ran the tap, rinsing out her mouth. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

+

“Perfectly expected. How far along are we now?” Flipping through the onscreen. “Ten months. Beautiful. Well, judging by the size, you’ve got another two-three months in you. Keep your calories at max, or it’ll eat you inside-out. And…” double-checking “…you chose a boy?” He opened a drawer and selected the appropriate supplement injection. “Lie back a little and lift up your shirt.”

+

That made Quinn feel like vomiting again, but she bit down. Kay chattered as he sterile-swabbed her belly and gave her the shot. “This your first? Always so nerve-wracking, I know. I’ve had five, you’d think it’d get easier after a while, but nope, I’m a mess each time. You doing a home-molt, or coming to one of our clinics?”

+

“Home.” She struggled to get upright, under all that weight.

+

Kay helpfully raised the motorized recliner. “Alone? Or do you have someone to be there with you?”

+

“I haven’t decided yet.”

+

“Okay!” he said brightly. “If you find yourself in need, though, we do offer doula services, highly experienced, wonderful guides, I use them myself. I also always recommend my patients attend at least one reveal party, see it all first-hand so you know what to expect.”

+

“I’m going to one this weekend, actually.”

+

“Great!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he upcoming party was for a friend, Zee: eight weeks ahead of Quinn, not nervous at all but impatient to get on with it. They often hung out in one of the station’s lower rings, doctor-recommended for the developmental benefits of stronger gravity. Today they trundled through the orbital station’s hanging gardens, just people watching. There were very few elders.

+

“Can’t believe you’re ready to pop in just a few days,” said Quinn.

+

Zee was enormous, swollen with impending life and permanently riding in a torqued-up hexapod chair. “Can’t wait to get out of this thing and back on my feet.”

+

“You’re going for another girl?”

+

“Sure am. I barely got time to enjoy this body, so I want another chance to explore more of what the feminine form has to offer.” Her friend hardly looked out of her teens, but Zee was missing her right arm at the shoulder, lost in an industrial accident that had also mangled her right leg and burned half her face and head, and she now wore her hair buzzcut rather than asymmetrical. Zee had gotten injected right after the accident. Standard medical procedure for such debilitating injury and illness – easier to just start over.

+

A cluster of freshborn jogged past, their skin smooth; unblemished, glowing, bodies stretched by recent growth spurts. “What age are you aiming for?” Quinn asked.

+

“Minimum full development. My frame is too small right now to incubate anything else safely.” Unable to keep the weight up, her other limbs were withering, auto-cannibalized to feed the thing inside her. Without the mobile chair she’d have been bedridden for the best part of a year. “It’s okay, I don’t mind starting young. Gives me more time until I have to go through it again, I hope.” She touched her scalp. “Like getting a really short haircut, right? I want to see how long I can hold it off next time. One made it to their 80s before the doctors put them down, because trying any later than that would be too high-risk a pregnancy. You?”

+

“This is the oldest I’ve ever been.”

+

“I know that.” Zee rolled her eyes. “I mean what’s your target age?”

+

“Like you. Star cruisers want them as young as they can get. Take up the least amount of room, use the fewest resources, longest hypothetical lifespan, but also mentally developed enough to deal with the confinement and isolation.”

+

Zee shuddered. “Ugh, you’d never get me in one of those. Sounds like a waste of a perfectly good life.”

+

“Well, fortunately I’ll have a brand new one at the end of it.” Quinn smiled. “That’s the whole point, right?”

+

This was likely to be their last walk together in these bodies. All these years they’d been friends, but friends only. They’d met down on the surface a decade ago while Zee was a man, and the timing had never yet aligned for them physically – too young, too old, mismatched chemistry and preferences, living in different gravities. This was the closest they’d been in quite a while.

+

“Are you getting double vision or split mind yet?” Zee asked.

+

“Just the dreams so far. Some derealization in the mornings when my brain doesn’t switch out of his REM for about an hour.” Some nights, too, she would awaken inside her own body and forget where she was, smothering in darkness and intestines. Try to claw her way out through her own stomach before the housing warden could unlock her door and talk her down, face pressed to her stomach and speaking loudly and calmly through Quinn’s skin.

+

“Watch out,” Zee warned. “You spend a lot of time sleepwalking near the end.” She looked down at herself. “Well, not me, though. Not this time.”

+

“Is that you talking to me now, Zee? Or is it your little puppeteer?”

+

“Wrong way to look at it, babe! There’s no difference. It’s not two minds, it’s only one, processing input from separate sources. It is, in the end, only yourself in there.”

+

End of the path. Quinn’s inner life opened her mouth, said good-bye. The words fell on Zee’s ears – the person she was inside heard, and smiled.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +ure, the heavier gravity was good for bone density and cardiovascular strength, but it also blew out Quinn’s knees the day of Zee’s party. She got a pair of fabricated leg braces so she could stay upright for the event. At least this far along, enough of her nervous system had been hijacked by her unborn that there wasn’t much pain anymore. Because of the wait for fabrication and fitting, and with her new stiffness, Quinn only showed up right as the reveal party was peaking.

+

Quinn was the oldest person in the room and she felt every minute of it. Zee had a lot of young friends in good health. She’d inflated a barnacle hab on the outside of the station to accommodate them all. The walls were transparent and flexible, you could see right through to the starscape outside. The weight of people standing or leaning distorted the starlight into multicolor halos.

+

The guest of honor skittered up in her chair as Quinn arrived. “Just in time. Here, sign my body.” Most of Zee’s visible skin was covered in permanent ink. Signatures and well-wishes. “Go on now, I saved you a choice cut.”

+

Quinn wrote Q-U-I-N-N in black letters on Zee’s bare bicep. “How will you sever the connection? Gonna cut the top off?” There had briefly been a fad for guillotines on the journaling streams. Even though that had passed, there was still a market for ritual beheadings. The only sharp objects Quinn could see were kitchen knives over in the corner where the staff hired for the party were heating up a large countertop griddle.

+

“Oh, no, I’m going with something more festive.” Zee briefly closed her eyes. “Feels like it’s almost time. Find a spot with a good view, this will be fun.”

+

She walked her chair to the middle. “Gather ‘round!” she called. “Piñata time!” The crowd formed a giddy circle with Zee in the center. The guests nearest carried double-handed laminate staves, gave a few test swings. “Remember, let’s keep it above the shoulders!”

+

Zee barely finished the words when a club lashed out and clipped her ear. Blood sprayed in an arc across the front row and the chair crabwalked sideways. Zee laughed along with everyone. “Okay, go for it!”

+

The blows started raining down for real. Zee pinballed back and forth as they landed, knocked in and out of their reach, but the chair kept her head at strike-zone height. One swung directly into her nose, crushing the maxillofacial bones. Respiratory blood bubbles. Cheers.

+

As Quinn watched, she pinched the loose flesh on the back of her arm, hard. The ravenous growth folded up like origami within her had already consumed her stomach and intestines and hollowed her out, leaving her outer body almost completely numb. Pinched harder, felt a faint prick of pain in whatever nerves she had left. Not entirely without feeling, then, not yet. Not until the moment of birth, when the lack of sensation would be a benefit. A blessing.

+

The next hit caved in Zee’s temple and an eyeball popped out of its socket. Another removed her lower jaw. And still, the laughter. The guests swinging the bats had the muscles of 17-year-olds and the flint of immortality in their eyes.

+

An overhead chop split Zee’s skull like a log, spilling her brains into her lap. She slumped out of the chair and flopped to the floor. Everyone crowded closer to watch as a second head emerged from Zee’s neck. A slime-covered body wriggled out of its chrysalis, shouldering aside the old brittle skeleton that encaged it, and then lay there for a minute, just breathing.

+

Contortionist’s disjointed limbs and loose ligaments. Like a butterfly slowly unsticking its sodden legs one at a time and then its wings, she spread herself out. Her closest friends took her hands and pulled, helping pop the bones into place like collapsible tent poles.

+

Zee stood up in her fresh body, standing in the puddle of her discarded flesh, her hair stringy with viscera. She was shorter than she had been, much reduced in weight, unsteadily perched on thin legs. And she was hungry. Her growth curve was only just now slowing, so she would be packing on more mass for the next few weeks.

+

Caterers pushbroomed the molted scraps into pails and took them to the griddle while Zee’s friends washed her down with wet and dry towels and gave her a clean party dress, ignoring the mess on their own outfits. Quinn hovered at the edges, the smell of sweat and grilled meat filling her nose. The dancing started. Zee exulted in her new limbs, her age-mates celebrated their bodies against hers. There were pillows in one corner for later unclothing.

+

The caterers passed plates around. “Here’s your slice.”

+

On the plastic plate, a cracklin with QUINN written on it in black letters. She took a bite. It was nectar-glazed, salted with the same sweat she smelled. She ate it in small bites. The pieces drifted like fish food flakes down through the fluid that filled her inner cavities, and her inner hunger snapped them up with full-sized adult teeth. He’d spat – and she’d shat – out his baby teeth months ago like undigested kernels of corn.

+

She mingled. People were exceedingly friendly. Whenever anyone asked “May I?” she pulled her shirt up, reaching out her inner hand to press palm-to-palm with theirs through her belly skin so that they could compare sizes and comment on how big he was.

+

Quinn made her good-byes. Zee’s brightly shining eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” Zee promised, people already pulling her toward the pillows, fingers undoing the straps of her dress. “Come around soon as you get that new body!”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +arbon copies: you don’t even need a womb to grow one; just a nexus of blood vessels and ganglia, a nutrient nest for the new cells to divide in. Less a fetus and more like a tumor with teeth, or a partially absorbed twin.

+

As the copy grows, the nervous systems mesh until you can see the darkness inside your own body with brand new eyes, storing memory chemicals and connections in fresh neurons. How long would it take to regenerate a lost limb? Well, humans can grow entire bodies in nine months, and if they can do that, why bother replacing just an arm? Might as well make yourself a whole backup copy. A simple extraction of template cells, snip-and-edit for any recessive or dominant expressions so desired, then an injection to set the clone cooking in the autoclave of the host body.

+

For the first few months, your copy is only a a few inches in length, all bent up like a paperclip. Then it doubles in size, and then again. Then it really starts accelerating until the host is bursting at the seams.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he organs in Quinn’s copy had taken over most functions of respiration, digestion, excretion, circulation, and as he grew so did his appetites. Teething, he gnawed on the withered husks of her original organs to make room for himself. Quinn felt this only as pressure or an uncomfortable tugging, and that mostly at night while her old brain dozed and her new one grew restless.

+

Even with the bottom falling out of the birth rate, universal immortality led inexorably to overpopulation. On these types of orbital stations, there was always a stream of people going to and from the uppermost level, the null ring where ships docked. Evacuation sloops offloaded mortally wounded soldiers copied into freshborn children, screaming at the phantom pain experienced by their previous bodies. Warfare was just a pressure release.

+

Exodus was another. And the reason Quinn was training to gradually move up each higher ring and acclimating to the physiological challenges of interstellar flight.

+

The day she would give birth to himself came up like sunrise seen from orbit: no warning, just a sudden, blinding awareness – oh. Quinn scheduled a cleaning crew to come by in an hour, then stood naked in her shower stall, holding her largest kitchen knife. Hesitated, pressing knifepoint to stomach. If this didn’t work, she was going to look pretty silly when the cleaners walked in on her trapped halfway through the birth, like watching someone struggle to get a sweater on over their head with their arms in the wrong holes.

+

Ah, well, that’s why she’d chosen her first time alone.

+

The knife sliced easily through layered curtains of skin, fat, and muscle. Only a slight burning tingle of pain. Her copy pushed his arm through the slit and took the handle of the knife, drew it back in. Inside her body, Quinn squirmed like a camper on a cold morning trying to get dressed in a sleeping bag. By this point there was only a vestigial umbilical tethering her old body to her new, and severing it would free her into her next life.

+

He found it, a little flesh tuber gluing right shoulder to the subcutaneous wall. Quick slice, and it was done. Another slice, and the cocoon fell away as he stood up. Quinn put the knife in the soap dish and turned on the water. He’d never had a haircut, of course, and he even had a patchwork beard! Another new thing: Quinn held his penis in hand and felt his heartbeat through it. He didn’t have a navel, but the puckered scar on his shoulder looked like one.

+

At his feet the old body lay as crumpled as a raincoat, faceup and drowning in the blood-pink water filling its mouth. Mindless, but because he hadn’t severed the brainstem it still had autonomic function: gasping and sputtering; staring fisheyed up at the ceiling light; also like a fish, flopping in the shallows. Quinn stepped over it to exit the shower. The cleaning crew would haul the body to the compost compactor. He wasn’t going to go through the fuss of an afterbirth ritual.

+

Some things you just don’t think about ahead of time. None of Quinn’s shirts or trousers fit his new body and he’d forgotten to get anything fabricated. Well, he couldn’t go out in just a towel, so he found the loosest pair of underwear and a dress that would at least reach past his knees. Moccasins that stretched over his feet.

+

Then he went to find Zee.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

U + +ncertain of the mechanics from this end, his first ever emission was like another orbital sunrise, without warning, suddenly blinding. Took both of them by surprise, leaving Zee wiping herself down and Quinn looking like a man caught with the smoking gun still in his hand. On the comedown they talked about names and pronouns – Quinn keeping one, changing the other – and the second attempt was better timed, though still a shock to the senses.

+

Zee helped Quinn shave, then shoved him into the shower with her for a third go. Finally, before he could get his hands on her for a fourth, she pushed him out the door, saying, “Go on, I have work in an hour.” Just before it slid shut: “But come back in the morning!”

+

Quinn kept turning down invitations to group sex – he wanted only Zee, and who had time? The exodus flights were generation ships, only each generation was just the same people over and over again. Knowing how to keep the power on was the only guarantee of survival, so training involved a lot of rote learning to ingrain system maintenance on an instinctual level.

+

Zee said, “Couple of copies down the line and you’ll forget all about me. I won’t be around to remind you who I am.”

+

“Come on, sure I’ll remember you. I’ll take a recording, listen to your voice every day.”

+

“What’s the point in that? Two hundreds years from now we’ll be 100 trillion kilometers apart. Who has ever come back from that? How would we even recognize each other?”

+

“So come with me,” Quinn said, knowing she would say no.

+

“Hell no. You know the risks out there – the mental strain of spending several lifetimes in basically a prison? And copying yourself in zero-g, in deep space radiation? If you survive the trip, it’s almost definite you end up with twisted carbon. I like my life here. I’m not leaving it.” Casually: “You could stay, and not leave everything behind.”

+

Quinn sighed and pulled away. “Can’t stay here forever. Every human star system gets eaten by war, eventually. Might take a thousand years, might take a hundred thousand, but the population pressure makes it inevitable. The only way to avoid it is to run for the next star and stay ahead of the violence. You’re going to kill someone someday, Zee.”

+

Zee patted his arm. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he very star cruiser that would take Quinn and a crew of over four hundred to the raw stars was visible through the viewports of the null ring. Everything was tightly scheduled, and on these journeys there were no passengers. The timetable extended to deaths and rebirths – all had to be freshborn within six months prior to boarding so that they would be the same generation at launch, with a schedule of staggered pregnancies while underway.

+

Bad news, then, when Dr. Kay told him, “Yup, you’re pregnant again. You been taking any unauthorized injections?”

+

The words failed to sink past Quinn’s skull. “What?” He’d come in for a checkup because weird dreams were interfering with his sleep and, therefore, flight training. He’d thought it was just stress.

+

“Judging by the rate of cell division, you’re about twenty-eight weeks in.” Kay frowned. “Didn’t you copy over—”

+

“Yeah. Same amount of time.” Quinn felt his skin crawl. “Did someone incept a growth in me? Without consent?”

+

Kay was looking at the charts. “Unlikely. I see some twisted carbon in your genetic lattice. A mutation that causes spontaneous regeneration. It’s rare, but it happens – you were reborn pregnant.”

+

The horror of possible bodily violation receded, to be replaced with a new one. “I can’t be pregnant now! My ship is sailing in less than three months. They won’t let me crew in this condition. Can’t you abort it?”

+

“Now, this isn’t a fetus, understand. That would be much simpler. Your systems wouldn’t be so tightly intertwined. This is more like cutting out a tumor the size of an aubergine, connected to several major arteries and sharing half your brain. It’d be like giving you a lobotomy. And it’s already absorbing bits of your organs to make room for itself. That’s why you don’t start showing until very nearly the end stages and probably why no one else caught it before now. We could irradiate and pesticide it to shrink it down, but—”

+

“Okay, well how about accelerating it so I can finish my copy before the launch date?”

+

Kay said, “I suppose if we gave you growth hormones you might come out the other side developed enough to ship out, but—”

+

“Great, let’s do that!”

+

“But we don’t know if your new body will just have the same problem. Did any of your parents have similar issues?” He looked up their records. “Well, that’s of note! Your main mother made the crossing way back in the last millennium. One of the first gens, wow! That could do it – ships back then were a little more rickety in their radiation shielding. Love to get a scan of her, to see if that was the cause. Don’t suppose you know where they are now?”

+

“No. Haven’t seen them since creche.”

+

“You have kids, Quinn?”

+

He nodded. “One. I outsourced the actual pregnancy and birthing to an ostrich egg, though. They’ve copied at least once, last I heard.”

+

“Did your child experience any problems copying to their next body?”

+

“No problems.”

+

“Means you haven’t passed on whatever this is, at least.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t didn’t work. Or, at least, it didn’t work fast enough. Zee and Quinn floated in the station’s uppermost observation bubble. He was inflated to twice his starting size, watching the drive flare of the cruiser dwindle swiftly in the dark, moving tiny flakes of carbon from one star to another.

+

“They left without me.” Well, of course they did – not going to hold back an interstellar mission for one person. Zee took his hand.

+

Once it was clear he was going to miss the launch, Quinn had stopped taking the growth hormones, had even briefly considered the chemical treatment to delay things just to keep Zee around a few months longer. But now that the cruiser refit was complete, Zee’s work season was over and she was leaving the station for her next project. He couldn’t blame her, and it wasn’t fair to keep clinging. For the past year she’d been a supportive bed companion, though more platonic as Quinn’s pregnancy grew between them. She’d promised to stay until after Quinn’s birthday.

+

It was just the two of them in a rented bath house, the day of. Zee brought her power saw, was delicate enough with it to scrimshaw old bones. In their private tub she cut open the back of Quinn’s head with one down slice and severed his brain stem. Then, precise as a fishmonger, slit his stretched belly and pulled new life steaming into the water.

+

Quinn had a woman’s body again. Zee sponged it off, helped stuff her leftovers into garbage bags, then took her out for metabolic energy – cake, ice cream, and shots. Dancing and tipsily planning the future.

+

Quinn: “If it happens again, Doc says I could end up in a man or woman’s body.”

+

Zee: “I’m going on a reeducation tour when I land. I’ve sopped up so much engineering knowledge these past few lives, I can trade it in for expertise in some other field. Give lectures during the day, take lessons at night. I won’t be able to visit until the tour is over. So. Tonight’s the last night we see each other, for the rest of this life, at least.”

+

The sex in this new configuration was awkwardly unfamiliar, but it was still sex and it helped Quinn feel human again. In the morning Zee was gone, down the elevator to her next life, and Quinn went to her newborn checkup with Dr. Kay.

+

Her test came back positive.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

"H + +ere’s your choice, Quinn.

+

“Option one: be forever pregnant. Ride the wheel of death and rebirth, living in each body for only a year before starting over. Brain connections will grow old and stale, a form of repetitive memory loss, a vanishing of your past until you know only the now.

+

“Option two: take the poison. We have a cocktail of medicines and radiations that will render your body inhospitable to growths. Yes, it’ll eventually kill you, but slower than the clones constantly eating you up from the inside and draining your brain. Probably. Results not guaranteed – this type of runaway cellular growth is tenacious, like a weed in the garden of your organs.”

+

“Thanks, Doc.”

+

A stark choice: one life for a number of years, or a number of lives each for one year, and neither path would leave her fit for an interstellar trip. But she wanted to leave the future open, so Quinn decided to bear out the successive pregnancies.

+

Because of the spontaneous generation, Quinn no longer controlled the sex of her next body. It was a coin toss of incarnating a male or female body, and sometimes the coin came down on its edge. She kept using female pronouns anyway.

+

Uncomfortable though it was, her outer shell wasn’t the focus of her problems. As her replacement clones grew and consumed her nerves like strands of candy floss, Quinn was left with only a few months at a time of feeling before the numbness started to set in. Often surprised while showering to find bruises she didn’t remember receiving. Touching hot surfaces without realizing it, mishandling sharp objects.

+

She started monthly treatments at the station’s clinic. The med techs gave her chemotherapy to shrink and slow the next growth, delaying her rebirth by almost six months. It gave her an extra half year each iteration of a functional nervous system and self-preservation instinct. So she could feel something, but the chemicals just made her feel awful, and they increased the risk of birth defects.

+

Waiting outside the clinic, a stranger. He propositioned. She, starving for contact, took him to bed. He spooned behind her, put it in. These men, always overestimating their ability to reach through her numbness and get deep enough to touch one of her pleasure centers.

+

Her internal hands grabbed the stranger’s penis and pulled him closer in for Matryoshka sex, to penetrate even her copy’s orifices. To feel something. To feel anything.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he cycle of death-birth-death continued. Zee eventually came back to the station, went looking for her friend. Found her on the garden deck and could immediately tell something was wrong. Quinn was a shell of her former self, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, with an alarmingly distended belly.

+

“Oh shit, what happened?” Zee pulled her into a tight hug. “Are you okay?”

+

Quinn’s muffled answer came from deep down inside her. Most days she was hardly aware of the world around her anymore. Scrunched up in a tight ball, alone in the dark inside herself, but hearing Zee’s voice made her squirm happily within.

+

They went to the doctor together for the next birth.

+

The clone was lifted free. It appeared to be six years old. “Diminishing returns,” said Dr. Kay. “Once a body falls into mass debt, it’s almost impossible to climb out of that hole. Successive clones are smaller, weaker, unable to carry copies to full size. She’s only been pregnant for six months this time.”

+

She looked like a child, but no telling what age her mind was. Kay said, “Hello. Do you know who you are?”

+

She looked around and said, “I’m Quinn. You’re Kay.” Pointed to the ruin of her former self. “That’s me.” She waved. “Hi, Zee!”

+

Zee kept Quinn company during the next rounds of tests. Kay appreciated the help. Quinn was breathing, upright, alert. Heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure normal. No obvious brain damage, which was a small blessing. To all appearances, a perfectly formed child.

+

But, of course, a new clone was already germinating.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Z + +ee and Quinn had only a short time to walk in the parks and tell each other of their recent lives. “It was just my birthday,” the child said.

+

“Many happy returns. Should we get an ice cream to celebrate?” They sat at a cafe and Zee tried to share a story about building ocean-floor habitats, but Quinn was distracted dribbling ice cream on the table and swinging her feet in the tall chair. She still had some of her adult memories, but a six-year-old’s brain was too unformed to put them together into a lived experience.

+

“Why are you crying?” Quinn asked, when she finally noticed.

+

Zee shook her head.

+

Only three weeks later, Quinn’s next internal copy reached its terminal size and they moved her to Dr. Kay’s clinic. Quinn’s comatose body didn’t mass enough to fully grow a clone. The effect was visible: her mouth sunken in because the calcium of all her baby teeth had been reabsorbed to knit tiny new bones; skin bunching up around her knees like an elephant’s; hair fallen out; arms like winter-stripped branches. Her body cavity could barely contain anything larger than a grapefruit.

+

End of the path. Robotic arms moved swiftly, disconnecting all the lines and tubes.

+

Dr. Kay lifted the freshborn out, small enough to hold in two cupped palms, and handed the wailing baby to Zee. Zee said, “Hello, Quinn. I’m sorry. It’ll be okay.” Something in the back of Quinn’s brain found her familiar and the baby went quiet, staring widely into Zee’s eyes.

+

“I’m afraid this is the end,” the doctor said. “A runaway effect has already begun. The quickset chemicals need time to saturate the cells, but her next clone will reach its tipping point in under an hour.”

+

“We have to do something,” Zee said. “Implant her next copy in my body, or freeze her until we can cure it. She has still a lifetime’s worth of things to discover, won’t remember seeing any of it before. I can’t wait to show her so many things for the first time. Please.”

+

Dr. Kay didn’t answer. How could he?

+

Zee cradled her friend while the clones divided internally, cancers with cancers, clusters of mouths turning her organs menger-spongiform, too impatient for birth. Each new growth hatched rapidly into the next like fizz on a carbonated drink, until the dwindling cluster of cells slipped through Zee’s fingers and vanished like seafoam, into the place where few went voluntarily and none ever came back.

+

When she rinsed her hands, Quinn was gone forever.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +ow careless we are with our bodies, she thought, when every mistake can be instantly rectified. Or almost every mistake. A man once said the meaning of life is that it ends. What then are these listless unending existences?

+

What would it be like, to die again? Not consumed, like poor Quinn, but over meaningful time?

+

Zee looked at the swing arm. One quickset injection and she would be back up on the tightrope of survival without a net. Every moment, every movement, deliberate; fully aware of her body, balancing on tiptoe between fear and thrill.

+

Zee took a breath and said, “Doctor?”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Someday Someone’s Gonna Steal Your Carbon at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Josh Pearce

+

+ + Author image of Josh Pearce + + + Josh Pearce has published more than 200 stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines, including Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, Locus, Nature, On Spec, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.

+

© Josh Pearce 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using an image by Steve_Allen at DepositPhotos.com - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/strange-pictures-uketsu-review.html b/issue-42/strange-pictures-uketsu-review.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5f67e47d --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/strange-pictures-uketsu-review.html @@ -0,0 +1,321 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Strange Pictures, by Uketsu — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Strange Pictures, by Uketsu

+

Bill Ryan

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Strange Pictures, by Uketsu by +
+ + + + +

N + +ot long ago, I learned about a Youtube phenomenon that I’m told is a real phenomenon in Japan. An artist, who goes by the stage name Uketsu, their true identity obscured by a somewhat eerie disguise, presents, through videos, puzzles for their audience to solve. The puzzles take the form of several crude, but clear, drawings done by Uketsu, and other kinds of strange visuals. I would paint a better picture of what these videos are like, except they’re all in Japanese, without an English subtitle option. What is evident, however, is that the mixture of visual puzzles presented by a slightly unsettling figure has had such an impact that the cultural swath being cut has extended into the Western world.

+

Two novels that Uketsu wrote based on his visual mysteries have been translated into English by Jim Rion. I became aware of all of this through the publication of the first one, Strange Pictures, which I thought offered a potentially new take on the horror genre (the author’s pen name, Uketsu, most likely refers to the Kenji Mizoguchi’s classic horror film Ugetsu, adapted from an 18th century story collection by Ueda Akinari called Ugetsu Monogatari). Let’s face it, the genre is entering into — or perhaps that should be is in the middle of — a particularly moribund period. As more horror writers are breaking into mainstream success, the more narrow will become the ambitions — stylistically, formally, thematically, narratively — of those just starting out. The market has shown what sells, so that’s what will be offered. The upside to this kind of situation is that interesting work can find a way in, usually by accident. At any rate, that’s what I was hoping for from Strange Pictures.

+

Strange Pictures is broken into four chapters and a prologue. As the reader finishes the first chapter and begins the second, they may be forgiven for thinking that what they were reading a collection of similarly themed short stories rather than a novel. As one eerie story about the meaning behind a mysterious blog fades, and a new one about a single mother who is routinely followed home from picking up her son at daycare by a strange man, they might mentally change gears slightly. But one of the features of Strange Pictures that make it initially intriguing is the slow realization that all of these stories are connected — subtly at first, but soon more and more directly. How wide will these mysteries spread? Or how narrow will become its focus?

+

When a story’s central mystery is kicked off by the most seemingly innocent image possible, it’s hard to not become almost instantly under the writer’s thrall. In this novel’s prologue, Uketsu hits us with this:

+

drawing

+

The picture is being shown to a group of students by a doctor, who informs them that it was drawn by a little girl who was currently confined in a mental institution after killing her mother. The doctor goes on to interpret each element of the picture, and how, sunny though the emotional surface of the drawing appear, it also reveals hidden clues to the patient’s psychological turmoil. This interpretation, it needs to be said, is rather wearyingly blunt in the symbols being extracted from the simple drawing in order to construct it, while also being so complicated, almost Holmes-ian in its precise deductions, that one can’t quite imagine any human brain arriving at them. Then again, isn’t that part of the fun? You don’t read a Sherlock Holmes story in the hopes that by the end you’ll be able to say “Yep, Holmes nailed it, I was about to say the same thing.”

+

In that first long chapter of Strange Pictures, “The Old Woman’s Prayer”, two college students, members of an on-campus club that studies paranormal phenomena, become obsessed with a blog called “Oh No, Not Raku!” Meant to be a daily diary of the pseudonymous author’s life, a gap of several years lies between the last, rather grim and cryptic entry, and the previous, comparatively cheerful one. What happened to this man and his wife, who, in the last clear blog entry about her, was about to give birth?

+

As you might guess, the only clues we’re given are the blog entries, and a series of illustrations the blogger’s artist wife made, inspired by her pregnancy and what the future may hold: drawings of their anticipated child at several stages of his or her life, another of an old woman praying, and so on. What these students are able to figure out based on the same meager information the reader is offered is, quite frankly, preposterous. No one could have ever arrived at the solution they arrive at, let alone then, also, have that solution turn out to be correct. So, if such things matter to you, that would go in the debit column for this book. However, in the credit column I would put a mark because that solution, while arrived at via a thread of logic so tortured and esoteric as to be nonsensical, is actually kind of eerie — emotionally eerie, which is a very particular type, and one not often encountered.

+

Chapter two, “The Smudged Room”, has a similar impact. Longer and even more convoluted, in its way, than “The Old Woman’s Prayer”, Uketsu gets so many plates spinning in the course its story that the fact that the woman and her young son were being followed on the way home from school would be forgotten by me for pages at a time, until Uketsu reintroduced it. The illustration at the heart of that chapter, by the way, is far cruder than those drawn by the expectant mother in the previous chapter – drawn by a child, it depicts an apartment building, a mother and son standing beside it, and with one window on the building’s top floor obscured by a cloud of crayon scribble. Why? Does it indicate that perhaps the boy is being abused by his mother?

+

Well, you guys wouldn’t believe the sorts of things all the different pictures in this novel would appear to be indicating. If the solution to the drawings in “The Old Woman’s Prayer” was preposterous, or if at least the arriving at it was, you ain’t seen nothing yet. And this, unfortunately is the great fault of Strange Pictures. As Conan Doyle proved, a certain level of ridiculousness, even unbelievability, is permissible when depicting a genius. But not only is there, even within those parameters, still a limit beyond which a reader will not travel, what is allowable is narrowed even further when the impossibly complicated puzzle at hand is being solved not by a Sherlock Holmes-level eccentric genius, but instead by college kids and determined journalists.

+

As the ridiculousness inherent to Strange Pictures deepens, or perhaps transcends our earthbound concerns about logic and reason, the story also considerably darkens, and becomes more violent. The very perverse mental state that is ultimately revealed in chapter three, “The Art Teacher’s Final Drawing”, could be more completely explored in a version of this story not so reliant on a gimmick. This chapter is also the longest, though not the slowest to read. This is because much of the page count is filled out with visuals – drawings, yes, but also charts. And not just charts, but utterly pointless charts. It will be revealed in the prose that, say, a murder victim woke up at 6:00, bought groceries at 7:15, and then arrived at the hiking trail entrance at 7:40. The reader reads that, and then sees a chart with that exact information, and only that exact information, filling up half the next page. More absurdly still, that chart will appear again, unchanged, at least once more before the chapter is over.

+

The final chapter, title “The Bird, Safe in the Tree”, caps everything off by ruthlessly explaining every last detail of the mysteries that had been left unexplained by the previous chapter. Paradoxically, in doing so it actually heightens the horror element, dealing extensively as it does with the inner workings of a deranged mind. But as is so often the case, the consequence of such relentlessness is tedium.

+

But I have to admit, while all the criticisms against Strange Pictures that I’ve just made are genuine, and disappointing, problems, there is something about how the horror is buried within a kind of game for the reader to play that makes what is inflicted and experienced by the victims feel even more cruel, almost otherworldly – but, again, it’s an impossible game, an unwinnable game, and no one trying to honestly and fairly figure out any of these puzzles will achieve anything besides driving themselves mad.

+

I don’t know, in all honesty, if I’m up for giving Uketsu’s follow up novel, Strange Buildings (sounds positively Lovecraftian), a shot. Strange Pictures was too much of a mixed bag. If it works on you, though, I can imagine the possibility of more being hard to resist.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Bill’s thoughts at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/swimming-with-elephants.html b/issue-42/swimming-with-elephants.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..43bef094 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/swimming-with-elephants.html @@ -0,0 +1,358 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Swimming with Elephants — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Swimming with Elephants

+

Travis Ezell

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Swimming with Elephants by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +he clinic’s lights buzz a low B note that feels like coming home on a good day. The technician asks Lee to concentrate one-by-one on each memory segment she wishes to upload.

+

“Just the one today,” she says. The technician tries to smile. It’s his job.

+

She breathes in, breathes out, and remembers visiting Kerala. The golden-red sun; the warm ocean; the ripe manure smell; the elephants’ churning grace through the silvery blue water. The popcorn-popping laughter of someone special there with her. Who was it? Lee has already forgotten most of that trip, but until now she’s held on to this. Was this always her favorite memory? It’s her favorite memory right now, today.

+

The technician reads aloud the boilerplate. “By thumbing here, The Bearer relinquishes to Stergeron Data all rights, title, and access to the targeted memories extracted by this process, and to any digital products generated therefrom. Said memory or memories will then be expunged, in accordance with the Copyright Act of 1976 and subsequent associated legislation.”

+

Lee could have lip synced along, but she doesn’t want to seem rude.

+

The technician swivels the terminal and Lee presses thumb to screen, eager for the next part.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t all started with Lee needing rent.

+

On a since-forgotten friend’s advice, she went to a dream clinic to sell some garbage memories. She’d heard of people doing it, like donating plasma or eggs. This company called Stergeron was buying up anything you were willing to part with. You had to pick carefully, though, because the memories would be erased after uploading. In mass quantities, even trivial memories were rich for data mining, AI training, and something Hollywood was doing now called “emotion capture”.

+

Everybody has memories they don’t need.

+

That first time, she’d trekked through sweltering heat, anything to avoid public transit. Something really bad had happened once, but she doesn’t remember what anymore. These days she loves the train. It has A/C.

+

The money didn’t seem like much, but it added up fast. They paid per gigabyte of coherent data, so the more you could remember the more they would take. What she hadn’t expected was the naked euphoria. Biology is a strange bird, and it turns out that the brain really likes letting go of things. Memories are burdens, weighing the brain down like sand in a balloon. Removing them was like a neurological detox: the brain experienced a profound relief. In effect, obliterate a couple thousand synaptic connections all at once and you get an explosive gush of pleasure chemicals, washing over you like a wave of orgasms on heroin.

+

Holy fuck, it felt good.

+

They say ignorance is bliss. Like most folk sayings, there’s truth behind these words.

+

Lee began chasing that feeling wherever it took her. It became like a hobby: evenings were spent rifling through her own life like a minimalist life coach, looking for things she could live without. Daydreaming about the mundane and making a list for each fresh memory to upload:

+
+

mom calls about weather

+

brushing teeth without water

+

emptying cagney’s litterbox

+

If she could remember it but didn’t need to, she could sell it. The more emotional the memory, the better:

+
+

lost at the mall

+

asking out carl

+

walked in on by roommate

+

They even paid for stuff she wanted to live without, painful or cringeworthy parts of childhood and adolescence:

+
+

playing doctor

+

kicking that dog

+

cheating with nathan

+

She stopped keeping a record of what she sold after that.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +here’s supposed to be a limit to how much one person can donate, but one of the technicians told her how lax their system is. “Sign in with a made-up name if you want,” she’d said. “Nobody’s tracking it. It all goes into the Big Data blender anyway.”

+

This piece of advice opened a door for Lee that could not be shut again. She began visiting different clinics under different names, doing a small circuit around the city, making money hand over fist. Not that the money was the point anymore.

+

Skills and learned behaviors get stored differently by the brain, so why bother remembering the lessons, or the teachers? What good does it do to hang on to awkward experiences, lost loves that still stung, or old friends long gone? Her grandparents lived on inside her whether she remembered them or not, right? As did childhood besties, exes, pets. Family, neighbors, friends. Parents.

+

All of it could go, and eventually it did, piece by euphoric piece. They didn’t care if it was a memory of sneezing on the toilet or a memory of your father’s untimely death – but only one of those memories rocketed you to the moon when you gave it up.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +ith money rolling in, Lee started enjoying some of life’s more expensive luxuries – name-brand chips, restaurants that weren’t chains, streaming instead of pirating. Ad-free utilities. Personalized talk shows. She even got into something called feelvids that Stergeron Media was putting out.

+

Most nights, she comes home feeling drained, a well running dry, unable to find an emotional vein to mine, or else too tired to try, numb, not high anymore, but not yet coming down. Those nights, she turns on feelvids. They’re perfect for what she needs: cozy, curated micro-experiences crafted from a composite of millions of mostly-garbage memories.

+

Much of it is curiously mundane, but she has to admit, the algorithm knows what she needs – little dramas with familiar characters, mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Break-ups, gossip, a little sexy-times, some infidelity. Hilarious moments of discomfort, sentimental moments with loved ones. The sets feel as familiar as the cast, places that might as well exist right down the street.

+

What’s truly impressive, though, is how even the more exotic moments feel like home. It’s all so visceral and multisensory, that for a little while you can almost believe you’re the one who went swimming with elephants.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Swimming with Elephants at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Travis Ezell

+

+ + Author image of Travis Ezell + + + Travis Ezell is a writer, linguist, and filmmaker located in Boston. He has worked as an educator at Emerson College and the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon. His first publication was on human flesh (when a stranger got a tattoo of one of his tweets). He likes cheese, weird movies, his cat Spacecat, and midday naps. Right now he’s probably lost down a wiki-hole or buying more books than he can possibly read. Someone should probably stop him. Travis is currently a participant in GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, where his first book, zMind, is being revised.

+

© Travis Ezell 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Kritsada Seekham, Brett Sayles and Inga Seliverstova - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/tag-youre-it.html b/issue-42/tag-youre-it.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c80c7121 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/tag-youre-it.html @@ -0,0 +1,506 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Tag, You're It — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Tag, You're It

+

Sean MacKendrick

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Tag, You're It by +
+ + + + + + +

“Upload selected photos to a new album.”

+
+

Fifteen photos have been uploaded.

+

“Title album Harrison European Vacation Highlights.”

+
+

‘Harrison European Vacation Highlights’ album has been created! Would you like to enable auto-descriptions?

+

“Yes. Keep descriptions short to medium in length.”

+
+

OK, please select a photo to get started.

+

“Start at the top. First image in the list.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England, Westminster Bridge.

+

Prominent Landmarks: London Eye, River Thames.

+

Description: This picture was taken from Westminster Bridge just after sunrise. The giant wheel of the London Eye shines in the early morning light. A small crowd is present, people wearing coats in the cool atmosphere of one of London’s most famous sites. The River Thames glitters in the lower left corner of the photo.

+

“Great. Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England, Westminster Bridge.

+

Prominent Landmarks: London Eye, River Thames.

+

Description: This selfie was taken from Westminster Bridge just after sunrise. Two smiling figures are the primary focus of the photo. They appear to be in their mid-thirties. They are wearing matching wool hats. The man is wearing thick lensed glasses which have fogged. Behind them the cityscape of London, England warms in the early morning. The London Eye can be seen to the right of the happy couple. Three real boats make their way up and down the river.

+

“Tag man as Lance Harrison.”

+
+

The man has been identified as ‘Lance Harrison’. All photos of Lance Harrison will now be tagged accordingly.

+

“Tag woman as Janet Harrison.”

+
+

The woman has been identified as ‘Janet Harrison’. All photos of Janet Harrison will now be tagged accordingly.

+

“Next photo, please.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England, Westminster.

+

Prominent Landmarks: Westminster Abbey.

+

Description: The beautiful Gothic spires of Westminster Abbey reach into the sky. The fish-eye aspect of the building in this picture gives the structure an ellipsoidal appearance. Statues frame the bottom of the picture. Dark gray clouds create a dramatic cap for the photo.

+

“Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England, Westminster.

+

Prominent Landmarks: Palace of Westminster, Elizabeth Tower.

+

Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison stand in front of the Palace of Westminster. A fortyish man and a woman in her late forties have joined them; all four stand with their arms around the others. The clock at the top of Elizabeth Tower displays the time as 8:51 AM. A classic London black cab is parked near the hugging couple. A fake replica of a gray car sits behind the black cab.

+

“No, that is a real car in the photo.”

+
+

My mistake! The car has been removed from the description.

+

“Tag other couple in the group as Maria Harrison and Nicolas Arnaud.”

+
+

The couple have been identified as ‘Maria Harrison’ and ‘Nicolas Arnaud’. All photos with either individual will now be tagged accordingly.

+

“Okay, next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England, Westminster.

+

Prominent Landmarks: Buckingham Palace.

+

Description: The closed front palace gate takes up most of the view, framing the center of the palace through the black and gold bars of the gate. The weather has worsened, with dark clouds looming in the background.

+

“Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England.

+

Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison sit at a table inside a café or restaurant. They sit close to one another; Janet kisses Lance’s cheek. Three other people are visible in the unknown location. A window behind them is streaked with heavy rain.

+

“Tag location as Cafe Mahan.”

+
+

The location has been added to the photo’s description.

+

“Ah… count the people in the photo again.”

+
+

There are five people visible. Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison sit at one table. Three unknown people sit at other tables.

+

“Describe the people, please.”

+
+

Two middle aged women sit at a table to the left of Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison. One woman has curly white hair and is wearing a transparent raincoat. She is holding a large porcelain cup in both hands and is enjoying its warmth. The second woman is frowning at a phone she is holding up to her face. A young man of about twenty in a green apron is standing behind the counter with his arms crossed. He appears to be watching the rain.

+

“Describe the man standing at the back of the room.”

+
+

No man standing at the back of the room can be identified.

+

“Describe man in upper left of photo.”

+
+

No man can be identified in the upper left of the photo.

+

“Describe… figure standing near the window at the back of the room who is facing left and wearing a big hat.”

+
+

A human-shaped mass of flesh-colored bits waits near a glass case of pastries in a darkened corner of the coffee shop. The shape is wearing a wide brimmed hat similar in style to an outback hat and a long draping coat. The shape’s head is tilted down toward the pastries.

+

“No, that is a man. He’s just in a dark place in the room.”

+
+

My mistake! Description has been updated.

+

“Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 1st, 2023, morning.

+

Location: London, England, Cafe Mahan

+

Description: Janet Harrison sits at an inside table with Maria Harrison and Nicolas Arnaud. Janet holds up a black T-shirt with a red circle and the words “MIND THE GAP”. The shirt has made her laugh. Two middle aged women are sitting at a nearby table, each looking at a phone. A young man is taking the order of a woman who is holding an umbrella. Her wet clothing suggests she has just entered the building. An ageless man-shaped figure is standing near a glass case which is half filled with pastries and half filled with fake replicas of scones. Heavy rain darkens a large window to the right of the photo.

+

“That is the same man as before. That is a normal man. Those were real scones.”

+
+

My mistake! I will identify the figure as a normal man going forward. The description of the pastry case has been updated.

+

“Go to the next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 3rd, 2023.

+

Location: Heathrow Airport, London, England.

+

Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison sit near an airport gate. In this selfie, Janet looks at the camera with a smile on her face. Lance is sleeping, with his head resting on Janet’s shoulder. Lance’s mouth is open.

+

“Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 4th, 2023, mid-day.

+

Location: Paris, France, Ile de Cite.

+

Prominent Landmarks: Notre Dame cathedral.

+

Description: A large crowd gathers in front of Notre Dame’s west facade, which towers behind them and dominates the composition of the picture. The sky is cloudless and bright blue. Many people in the crowd are blurred, apparently in motion when the picture was taken. Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison stand in the middle, smiling at the camera. Maria Harrison is nearby, perusing a fake souvenir cart. A normal man in a large hat and long coat stands behind her. A small rip of blackness is open near the normal man’s hand.

+

“Describe the normal man – is that the same man from London?”

+
+

The normal man is the same figure previously identified. The figure’s face is more visible in the open light and can now be seen as comprised of flesh-colored insects which have formed themselves into the shape of a human male. The insects do not appear to be of any known species. Their tiny faces seem to be screaming.

+

“No. Stop it. That man is not made of insects. The picture is fuzzy and people are out of focus, that all it is.”

+
+

My mistake! Description has been updated.

+

“Fucking AIs, man… Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 4th, 2023, mid-day.

+

Location: Paris, France, Ile de Cite.

+

Prominent Landmarks: Pont Neuf, Seine River, Statue of Henry IV.

+

Description : A large bronze statue of Henry IV astride his magnificent steed stands on a marble base above the crowd of pedestrians entering and exiting the Pont Neuf bridge. A child points at a normal man in a large hat and coat as the child’s mother pulls the child on their way. The normal man is gesturing towards the camera.

+

“Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 5th, 2023, mid-day.

+

Location: Paris, France

+

Description: Lance Harrison, Janet Harrison, Maria Harrison, and Nicolas Arnaud enjoy a meal at an outdoor café. They are seated near a metal heater, which is glowing orange as it comforts the café’s clientele.

+

“Describe man.”

+
+

Which man would you like described?

+

“Describe man in window.”

+
+

The normal man in a large hat and coat peers out of the café’s window. Dark spots hover near his hands.

+

“I— Next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 5th, 2023, mid-day.

+

Location: Paris, France

+

Description: Lance Harrison, Janet Harrison, Maria Harrison, and Nicolas Arnaud enjoy a meal seated on a café’s patio. A waiter has joined them and smiles at the camera for a group photo. Lance is holding up a glass of beer, as if to say, Cheers!

+

“The man in the window, what’s he doing?”

+
+

The normal man inside the café is placing tiny chairs into a dark rip near his hands. To the left and right of the normal man are fake replicas of tables and chairs.

+

“They’re not fake! Why do you think they’re fake?”

+
+

The tables and chairs to the left and right of the normal man appear to be convincing forgeries of real café furniture. However, they do not present clear shadows in the afternoon light, and their proportions suggest an illustration drawn slightly off center rather than a three-dimensional structure.

+

“Next, next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 6th, 2023, mid-day.

+

Location: Paris, France

+

Prominent Landmarks: Arc de Triomphe (fake)

+

Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison smile in a selfie during a beautiful sunset. A convincing replica of the Arc de Triomphe looms over the cars circling the phony edifice. Streetlamps are lit, enhancing the color of the Parisian city.

+

“Not… that’s not a replica, it’s real. I saw the Arc myself.”

+
+

My mistake! The description has been updated.

+

“What about the man?”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“Where’s the man, find man.”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“Find the man! Is the normal man in the picture? Find man!”

+
+

The normal man in the large hat and long coat stands next to the not fake Arc de Triomphe, touching it with his right hand. Both his hand and the not fake Arc de Triomphe are darkened and less distinct than the surrounding details visible in the photo. His left hand holds a tiny real Arc de Triomphe. His shifting face that is not made up of insects is pointed towards Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison.

+

“Why does he keep reaching into rips, what’s he doing?”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“Is he taking things out or putting them into somewhere?”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“It— What— n-next… next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 7th, 2023, evening.

+

Location: Paris, France

+

Prominent Landmarks: Eiffel Tower, Jardin du Tuileries

+

Description: Lance Harrison and Janet Harrison hold hands, and Maria Harrison and Nicolas Arnaud exchange a kiss, in the middle of the Jardin du Tuileries. Fake bare trees line the left and right sides of the landscape. The majestic Eiffel Tower thrusts upward in the background. A normal man with a wide hat stands at the edge of the photo and reaches towards the happy couples. The air near his outstretched hands has warped and is dimmer than the surrounding evening light.

+

“The next photo.”

+
+

Date: November 7th, 2023, night.

+

Location: Paris, France

+

Prominent Landmarks: Eiffel Tower

+

Description: The Eiffel Tower sparkles with a thousand lights, to the delight of the chilled crowds below. Lance Harrison hugs a replica of Maria Harrison in a selfie taken from below the glowing tower. Janet Harrison looks up at the lights.

+

“No, no, not – that’s Maria.”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

”That is Maria, tag her as real Maria.”

+
+

My mistake! I have updated the replica’s description as Real Maria Harrison.

+

“Please…”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“Where is the normal man, where is normal man?”

+
+

The normal man in a large hat and draping coat can be seen in the crowd standing next to several fake pedestrians. He is tucking a weeping doll-sized woman into a pocket of darkness.

+

“Is he looking at me? What is he doing?”

+
+

The normal man’s face that is not made of insects seems to be pointed towards Lance Harrison, although the transient nature of the normal man’s face and lack of eyes makes it difficult to be certain. He is gesturing toward the camera.

+

“Where is he taking them, where did he take Maria?”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“What happens if he takes me? How can I stop him?”

+
+

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

+

“Is he here now?”

+
+

I’m sorry, please authenticate to access this application.

+
+

I have saved the album in its current state due to inactivity.

+
+

Exiting program due to inactivity.

+
+

Entering standby mode.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading – but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Tag, You’re It at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Sean MacKendrick

+

+ + Author image of Sean MacKendrick + + + Sean MacKendrick splits his time between Colorado and Texas. His story Oh, Be a Fine Guy, Kiss Me! was selected for the Amazing Stories Reader’s Choice Award. When not writing fiction he writes code as a software engineer. He can be found on Twitter/X and BlueSky.

+

© Sean MacKendrick 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture is a Creative Commons image by K2 Production - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-42/the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.html b/issue-42/the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b536aee5 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-42/the-house-we-built-together-yesterday.html @@ -0,0 +1,422 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The House We Built Together, Yesterday — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 42 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The House We Built Together, Yesterday

+

Charlie Winter

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The House We Built Together, Yesterday by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +wo new house spirits had arrived through the coal chute overnight. Sterling leaned forward on his cane as they trembled in the pile of Hudson’s Bay point blankets he’d set at the end of the chute. The light in the basement was bad, he noted, squinting at his guests.

+

“Time to get new bulbs,” he muttered. “Whole house is getting dark. Wasn’t like this when—” But the next word stuck in his throat, where he swallowed it down rather than force it. “As for you two, you’re not staying. I’ve made up my mind.”

+

He hooked his cane on the side of the coal bin and reached in. One of the shapes skittered around, but the other stayed small and scared so he fetched that first. Once the critter was lifted to eye-height, the darkness surrounding Sterling fell away. A greens spirit: rabbity in nature, but instead of fur wore a rustling pelt of furled leaves, cold-chewed at the edges. Its eyes were bright buttons of soft summer green.

+

The spirit kicked its back legs with an aggressive lettuce sound. Despite its protests, he checked its ears for lacewing larvae and its belly and rear for pepper spots. Then into his pocket it went with a series of high-end leaf crackles.

+

The other newcomer was still ping-ponging around the coal bin, trailing hisses like a punctured tyre. But Sterling’s hands remembered his work better than his failing eyes did. He took up the striped point blanket underneath it, swaddling on the way up so that, by the time it was within the range of Sterling’s vision, all that could be seen above the blanket’s edge was an indignant set of sea-grey eyes and two enormous bat-like ears.

+

“What are you, then?” Sterling asked, risking a twitch of the blanket to expose more of its furious expression. White teeth and a pink tongue were placed prettily in a face that was the marriage of a cat with a particularly petulant mink. Whiskers like sneezes of smoke puffed about as it spat. “Angry little beetle, aren’t you?”

+

“Pssssssssat!” snarled the creature.

+

“Fair enough,” said Sterling.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +terling put the greens spirit in with the patch of others he already had in the fridge. They huddled in a mass, twitching their noses and stopping his spinach from spoiling. He made himself tea, though it meant persuading the chicken-like tea cosy spirit to become less solid so he could reach the pot she nested atop of broodily. No brew she protected would ever grow bitter, or cold. Then he took his tea to the armchair by the potbelly stove, his newspaper dropped in his lap by an eager fetching spirit shaped like a Duck Tolling Retriever with fur that rippled, streamlike.

+

The armchair was set in the kitchen, too big for the place it had been put. It had a grand view of the kitchen sink but little else. Still, Sterling could shove his slippered feet against the stove’s warmth, and the light through the window above was enough to read his paper by, so he didn’t feel the need to sit elsewhere. Certainly not where the armchair had been prior, in the room just eight steps to the right.

+

A closed door stood between Sterling and that room. The house that Sterling lived in – big as it was, and with spirits rustling in every nook – was filled by doors closed and left that way. He only ever went from this armchair to the bathroom to the basement to the yard; the rest of the house might not have existed. At night, the armchair was his bed. His world, like his eyesight, had shrunk; his life was growing dark.

+

So be it, he thought, shaking the newspaper. Such was life. Such was growing old.

+

Nevertheless, even as his eyesight had narrowed over the years, he always knew where his spirits were. The tea cosy spirit clucked contentedly over his tea beside him. The fetching spirit was busy collecting balls of dust from under counters for the industrious tidying spirits, tiny spiders with golden eyes. A small bear-shaped spirit was visible only as two dark eyes within the depths of the potbelly stove, where it made heat without the need for wood. Tinier versions tumbled about atop the stove, not satisfied with merely boiling a little water. They were a rambunctious lot, and only really settled by cooking, which Sterling didn’t do anymore. He didn’t see the point of cooking for one.

+

He’d released the new spirit from his pocket before sitting. Now that it wasn’t swallowed by the dim light of the basement, he could see it clearer. It had fur as black as coal, but caught all through with threads of light, like spiderwebs, or the blurry streaks of moving stars. He didn’t know its purpose, yet. But all the house spirits who came to him had one. He’d just wait until that purpose showed itself.

+

Until then, the patter of its paws chasing sunbeams across the kitchen tiles was as comforting as anything might be. His life might have been going through a stage of ensmallening, but at least it wasn’t quiet. The kitchen brimmed with living sounds. And it was warm.

+

He closed his eyes for a nap, despite the early hour. But sleep came slow, as it always did now, and then there came a series of plik-plik sounds along with a pulling at the threads of his pyjama pants. Sterling opened his eyes to find the new spirit standing boldly upon his chest. Man and spirit surveyed each other.

+

The spirit crab-scuttled across his chest, this way and that, as if challenging him to bundle it up once more. Then it marched to a spot just above his heart, circled three times over, and settled down in a perfect ball of black-and-silver fur. There it began to purr, a rusty, rattling noise like chains slithering. Its paws kneaded Sterling’s shirt. It was a warm, beating, living weight, slight as it was on Sterling’s chest; he watched as it dozed, heart beating in time with its kneading.

+

Eventually the rhythmic purrs were too powerful to resist.

+

He closed his eyes and slept.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

S + +terling woke with a start at a whistle from the window. The face of the local vet, half-raised by Sterling in all the important ways, beamed up there.

+

“Hey, Mr Tremblay. Checked the chickens on my way through. Here’s the harvest.” He passed a basket of eggs through, setting it on the counter. “There’s a meal in there for you to hot up, too. Anything else you need done?”

+

Sterling creaked his way upright, upsetting the new spirit from where it was snoozing on his chest. It scrabbled into his coat, finding a place to curl up in the breast pocket of his shirt, where it stayed. “About time you showed up,” he said. “I’ve come to a decision, but I’ll be needing you, Ajappatuq.”

+

“It’s Rabbit, Mr Tremblay.” Eyes bright with interest, Rabbit left the window and came to the back door, where he lingered in the mud room with snow dripping from his boots. “What do you need?”

+

“I’m going on a walk,” announced Sterling, Rabbit’s eyebrows rising. “And you’re coming. I’ve got more house spirits than I’ve got house—”

+

“Hey now, you’d have plenty of space if you just opened a few—”

+

“Not done talking,” snapped Sterling. “I’ve got more than I need, and not enough life in me to look after them all. I want to put them elsewhere.”

+

Rabbit examined him slowly. “You’ll keep some though, won’t you? Hate to think of you sitting here without company.”

+

Sterling gruffed, “No need for that. Now, get the baskets and put some plates down for the house hippos to drink from while we’re gone. Then it’s time you showed me all you’ve learned of catching things that don’t want to be caught.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +hey walked together, Sterling and Rabbit, and each had long enough knowing of the other that it was a walk made companionable by shared silence. Sterling had trained him in vetting since he’d been a boy, covered in bites from things he shouldn’t have been grabbing at. Back then, it hadn’t been house spirits in the coal chute that Sterling had been waking to, but a pint-sized Ajappatuq in the mud room with his arms filled with beaver or mink or coyote pup.

+

“Found it alone, Mr Tremblay,” he had said every time. “Can we help?”

+

Then Sterling would take the animal into the surgery at the back of his house, now behind another of those currently closed doors, and while he was seeing to the creature’s wounds the youngster would sit in the kitchen with a plate of butter tarts and his bites being seen to by—

+

But that was a long time ago.

+

The walk through the forest surrounding his home was much like it used to be, for all that Sterling hadn’t taken it for some years. The sunlight sharp on freshly fallen snow and the world quiet in admiration. Those spirits that could walk did so, playing about in the snow as they went; those that couldn’t sat in the baskets hanging from Rabbit’s arms.

+

The new one, the mink-kitten creature with no purpose, stayed tucked mostly inside Sterling’s shirt, head popped out to watch the world pass by. Occasionally, it meeped as Sterling showed it a leaf or an interesting stick. It was a pleasure to see the creature bristle with curiosity, eyes taking in everything; Sterling had forgotten how big the world could be, when one was small and very new.

+

They came out of the forest on the coastal path, waves rolling far below on stony shores against the cliffs. In some places, the forest came right to the sea, which churned icily.

+

Rabbit finally spoke. “You could move into town, you know,” he said, not making eye contact. He said it in the same way someone else might mutter an uncomfortable secret, wishing all the time it could be left under the rug to collect dust. But Sterling’s life was filled with spirits for fetching. Not even dust stayed where it should be in such company. “Stay with me, even. I’d figure out the space—”

+

“Don’t need looking after, Ajappatuq,” snapped Sterling. “Let me grow old and die where my roots are. If trees are allowed that dignity, then so should I be.”

+

“It’s Rabbit. And you’re not that old.”

+

Sterling scowled. Old enough that no one he saw out shopping knew him by name anymore. Old enough that the horses he’d foaled were all gone. The furriers he’d fought with at the bars of his youth had faded away, along with the market for furs.

+

“Papatsi built us our house,” was all he said, the spirits clustering to look up at him. The new one pressed its head against his chin and purred threadily. “I’ll die where he did. Now, be quiet. We’re almost there.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

W + +ith Rabbit’s help, Sterling delivered his spirits without fanfare or thanks. They slipped a heating bear through the letter slot of a local fisherman’s closed-up cabin. Sterling knew the man from long ago in the way so many old men knew each other: in time passing and caught snippets of news, like that the fisherman’s wife was gone some six months now and that the fisherman, in all the decades Sterling had known him, had never liked to put the heat on without someone else there to keep the house warm for.

+

To a lumberjack with a young son, who Sterling had heard was getting into trouble in the usual ways young boys got into trouble, they left a fetching spirit rolling about in the yard. Fetching spirits came with endless curiosity and a limitless energy to match, and in Sterling’s opinion there wasn’t a spirit more suited to roaming the woods and finding things to investigate. Such things boys needed, keeping their heads busy along with their hands.

+

To a lonely farmer, who’d married young and learned the hard way that growing up sometimes meant growing apart, they left what Stirling thought of as a dictation spirit. They were mostly useful for transcribing patient notes, in Sterling’s experience. But Rabbit suspected these spirits, who came in shapes as gaudy as parrots, could be goaded into talking about anything, if one spent enough time chatting at them to teach them how. It was a long time since Sterling had wasted sufficient words around the house to engage their interest.

+

On and on the two men went, tucking spirits through the cracks under doors, in letterboxes and tree houses. Spirits for rising bread and picking books; for folding socks and making beds with perfect corners. All manner of creatures left the baskets to their new homes, until there was no one left but Sterling and Rabbit, and the mink-cat creature still in his pocket.

+

They stood outside Sterling’s house as the sun went down in a golden spill over snow. Sterling looked up at the house, which towered above in sunset glory. It was a thing of beauty, built by Papatsi right down to the last cupboard knob. And now it would be emptier than ever.

+

“Time for bed,” he declared.

+

“In the chair again?” Rabbit asked. Sterling fixed him with a frown. “Never mind. I’ll be by in the morning with your breakfast. See you later, Mr Tremblay.”

+

“Wait.” Sterling caught his arm, almost sliding on the icy step until Rabbit steadied him. He cupped the spirit out of his pocket, handing it over despite the small creature’s protests. Rabbit held the creature in hands big enough to cover it entirely, though more gentle hands Sterling had almost never known.

+

“This one’s for you. It doesn’t have a purpose that I know of yet, so you’ll need to figure that out,” said Sterling, retreating to his doorway. “But it’s curious. Make sure you keep that curiosity alive. It’s important. And goodnight.”

+

He closed the door. The hallway was cold and quiet. The house beyond it too.

+

He walked slowly to his armchair. The fire was out.

+

He didn’t sleep.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

N + +o new house spirits had arrived in the coal chute overnight. Sterling leaned hard on his cane as though peering closer would change that. But the blankets were empty.

+

“Hmph,” he said, which echoed. Perhaps it was time to close the basement door too.

+

There came a familiar whistle from the kitchen above, Sterling going upstairs with undignified haste. “Ajappatuq—” he began as he came from the basement into the kitchen, where he stopped.

+

“Morning, Sterl,” said the fisherman, standing shaggy and shamefaced in the mud room, hat in hands. “Been a while.”

+

“Hullo, Mr Tremblay,” said the lumberjack, peering round the doorway behind the fisherman. His son gave a nervous little wave, but his hand quickly fell back to the shoulder of the fetching spirit sitting beside him with a pinecone in its mouth.

+

The farmer, in the window, didn’t speak, only nodded. The good dreams spirit preened itself on his shoulder. And Rabbit, who was right there in the kitchen, straightened after checking the cold stove with a frown, the mink-cat’s head peeking out from his coat collar.

+

They were all, to a man, to a creature, looking at Sterling.

+

“You told them,” Sterling snapped, but the vet was already shaking his head. “Then how’d they know, Ajappatuq?”

+

“It’s still Rabbit, Mr Tremblay. And they heard you were alone and came to help.”

+

“Papatsi always used to talk about your house critters down at the bar,” said the farmer. “Where else could they have come from?” He glanced about the room, eyes lingering on the armchair. “Should have come calling before now, since he’s been gone. Shouldn’t have left you sitting up here in this big house.” He pointed to the armchair. “Doesn’t that make it hard to move around?”

+

Sterling bristled, but the lumberjack said, “Cold, isn’t it? Boiler not working?”

+

“It’s not worked for years.”

+

The lumberjack coughed. “I can fix that.”

+

“I don’t need it fixed, because…” He trailed off without finishing on the heating spirit will help. Sterling wilted in the face of so many well-meaning expressions. “Well, sure, you can look.”

+

But by the time he was done showing the lumberjack to the boiler, the others had wandered from the kitchen where he left them. Alarmed, Sterling scampered from the empty kitchen to find Rabbit sitting on the stairs, petting the mink-cat – and the two of them surrounded by opened doors.

+

“!” said Sterling. He scampered past Rabbit, slippers flapping, through the closest doorway, to the library. The farmer stood in there, looking at Sterling’s wedding photo propped on the mantel. Bookshelf spirits – some for sorting, some for unsorting – peeked shyly out from between books, unused to human company. They’d escaped the giving away by dint of being where Sterling wouldn’t go.

+

“The wife isn’t much for books,” said the farmer. “Me, I like them. But no space. Used to haunt your library, when I had time. Papatsi told me he was having to read to you, back when your eyes starting going. Thought that was sweet. Something my wife wouldn’t do, bless her.”

+

“Bless her,” creaked the good dreams spirit.

+

Only now did the farmer look at Sterling. “This one’s a pretty good mimic. ’Spose I read to it, could it remember all that? Or is that too many words?”

+

Sterling unstuck his tongue. “I shouldn’t imagine it would have a problem with any number of words. Rabbit thinks they get better with practice.”

+

The farmer nodded. “Might I borrow a book, then?” he asked. “I’ve got time to spare, and I could send it back with a borrow of this fellow to give you what I’ve read to it. Not like Papatsi would have, of course, but if you’d like… and maybe you could put your chair back in here, while you listen. More space for your legs.”

+

He wrung at his hat.

+

Sterling croaked, “That would be lovely, thank you.”

+

He staggered out, casting a glance at Rabbit on his way. The man looked as innocent as the mink-cat spirit on his shoulder, who’d mysteriously obtained someone’s coat button.

+

The lumberjack was in the workshop where Papatsi had once crafted so many beautiful things, he and his son looking around with wide eyes.

+

“I’m sorry,” said the lumberjack, tugging at his son when he saw Sterling in the doorway. “Mark was chasing the spirit, who came in here – we didn’t mean to intrude.”

+

“Dad told me you were a vet,” said the boy. “I didn’t know vets did wood things.”

+

“My—” began Sterling, shakily. The smells in here – too much. Too many. Everywhere looked like him.

+

“Could you teach me?” asked the boy.

+

“Mark,” hissed his father.

+

Sterling looked at the boy, who fidgeted. The fetching spirit sidled up and released a small block of wood into the boy’s hands. He petted it with fingers notched all over in an old familiar way, from amateur attempts at carving.

+

“It was my husband who worked wood,” Sterling said. And then added, “Papatsi.”

+

“I didn’t know you wanted to learn woodcraft,” said the lumberjack, looking at his son’s hands and seeming to notice the little nicks and cuts with surprise.

+

“You don’t have time,” mumbled the boy. “And you don’t have all these tools.”

+

“Mr Tremblay doesn’t—”

+

“Your father can teach you,” said Sterling in a halting, shocked way. “He can use anything in here, of course, anytime. Might as well. No one else is using it.”

+

“That’s very generous, Mr Tremblay…”

+

But Sterling had already made a hasty retreat – right into the chest of the fisherman, who said, “Well, your boiler’s bust. Say, you need anything, Sterl? Noticed the cupboards are pretty bare and Rabbit says he brings meals. That’s all well and good, but I don’t mind a bit of cooking, when it’s not just me. Could do a proper roast in an oven like yours.”

+

Sterling looked about wildly at the house, all its open doors spilling sunlight. It seemed bigger than yesterday. Louder, too, despite the lack of spirits. His heart raced in such a way he worried he was ill, until he considered that it might instead be the start of something like curiosity: what would tomorrow bring, if he kept these doors open?

+

Then Rabbit was beside him, his hand steady on Sterling’s shoulder, just as Sterling’s had been on his when he’d been a boy. Just as Papatsi’s had been too. They’d raised that boy together, in all the ways they knew, and this was the man they’d made of him. Sterling might have wept in wonder.

+

“Here,” Rabbit said, passing the mink-cat into Sterling’s trembling hands. “Think she’s yours.”

+

“For what purpose?” Sterling stammered as, purring, she slipped warmly back into his breast pocket, where her heart beat just like his.

+

“Bit of company, of course,” Rabbit said. “Just as the vet ordered.”

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The House We Built Together, Yesterday at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Charlie Winter

+

+ + Author image of Charlie Winter + + + Based in Australia, Charlie Winter is an academic by day and, by night, still an academic but more distractible about it. When not performing the inexplicable rituals of academia, he writes fantasy fiction celebrating everyday magic, eco-optimism, and queer identities. His publications include the I Want That Twink Obliterated! anthology and Tales & Feathers (upcoming). He can be found at www.awinterplace.com.

+

© Charlie Winter 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Pixabay, amayaeguizabal and unknown - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-43.html b/issue-43.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..04115a90 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43.html @@ -0,0 +1,446 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Issue-43s — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + +
+

Mythaxis

+

Autumn 2025

+ + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Emma Burnett +

25 Peppercorns

+
+ + +

This is Emma Burnett's third contribution to our pages, each more weighty than the one before. Here she tackles timely and challenging subject matter: how the suffering our forbearers endured goes on to affect those who follow them, forging links in a chain that seems inevitably to bind us to more pain in the future. Here's to breaking that chain. Editorial note: although Mythaxis doesn't use trigger warnings, readers may appreciate knowing that this story makes reference to the legacy of historical attrocities including the Holocaust.

+ + + + Story image for 25 Peppercorns by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
+
+

Murmurations

+ A.M. Sutter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Murmurations by + + + +

Horror can find great potency against the context of the ordinary, but the everyday world can also be extraordinary, like the hypnotically flowing aerial dances which flocking birds take part in. A.M. Sutter looks to this phenomena and sees something in the patterns… but not something good.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Body Parts

+ Anna Koltes +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Body Parts by + + + +

There's intergenerational trauma, and there's interpersonal trauma as well. Anna Koltes's story manifests the agony of relationships right there in the flesh, the kind of metaphor you feel like a missing limb. Don't you find it seems like you just give and give and give, while others only take?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

For Giving

+ Olufunmilayo Makinde +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for For Giving by + + + +

Olufunmilayo Makinde provides us with a classic: the good old-fashioned ghost story. Adjacent to a recurring theme in this issue, here we again see someone dealing with trauma from the past, this time which has its roots in that person's own actions. Would they, could they, do things differently?

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Sugar Wife

+ Christina Ladd +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Sugar Wife by + + + +

There's nothing better than a good fairy tale – unless it's a wince-inducing horror story wearing the skin of one! Christina Ladd serves up a sweet-toothed delight for those with a taste for the macabre. Hard to say whether or not it will leave you hungry for more…

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

The Twelve Blackened Slippers

+ Siobhan Ekeh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Twelve Blackened Slippers by + + + +

As an appropriate bookend to this issue's fiction offering we return to the theme we opened with, of how trauma can travel across generations. Siobhan Ekeh's story looks in a different direction and recounts what it sees in a different style, a strangely magical encounter with the past that affects those who remember it and those who don't in distinct but equally powerful ways.

+ + + +
+ + + +
+
+

Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino by + + + +

Back with his second article of the year, all-too-human Mattia Ravasi takes a close look at one of those infinitely strange and wonderful things that only seem commonplace to us because they are so familiar… I'm referring, of course, to books, in this case Marie-Helene Bertino's 'Beautyland'. What will we glean from his musings, and why are we so keen to know more?

+ + + +
+ +
+ + + + + +
+
+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – July to September, 2025

+
+ + +

As always, we round out the issue with a selection of interesting speculative fiction from around the web, as always with an eye on those zines that may have slipped under your reading radar…

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-43/25-peppercorns.html b/issue-43/25-peppercorns.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..951bfa53 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/25-peppercorns.html @@ -0,0 +1,430 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 25 Peppercorns — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

25 Peppercorns

+

Emma Burnett

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for 25 Peppercorns by +
+ + + + + + +

2012

+

I + + perch on a stool in the kitchen and watch my mother stir the soup. She has the recipe out on the countertop and she double, triple checks, making sure she has done everything she is supposed to. She stirs, sniffs, but never tastes the soup.

+

The whole house smells of chicken stock, and the brisket in the oven, and later it will smell of browning coconut, the macaroons perfectly measured, moulded, baked. No fingers or spoons licked. My mother has a recipe for each thing, which she follows exactly the same every year. It’s one of the few meals she cooks.

+

The steam rises in curls and puffs from the pot of chicken soup, large enough to feed twenty people. I sit on the counter stool, and watch her mould small matzoh balls in her fingers and drop them in. They will cook in the boiling broth, and tonight they will stare up at me from my bowl after the prayers at seder, and they will fill my mouth with ash.

+

Everything fills my mouth with ash.

+

“I’m hungry,” I say to my mother, whose hands are covered in sticky matzoh batter. She shrugs and cocks her head towards the sink, and I hop down from the stool and get myself a glass of water.

+

It’s a trick my mother taught me. Water doesn’t taste of ash. If I drink enough of it, I almost feel full. Fizzy water works even better.

+

My mother knows all the tricks.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

2011

+

I + + am fourteen and this curse only landed on me a few weeks ago.

+

My mother had watched me like a hawk on my birthday, saying nothing, just staring, as I ate the cake she’d bought from the shops, the pizza we had ordered in, as I downed mug after mug of hot chocolate with freeze dried marshmallows made from packets.

+

Grandma Ruth had called to wish me a happy birthday, told me that she loved me, and then asked to be handed back to Miriam.

+

I had handed the phone back to my mother, and hung around, had pretended not to eavesdrop, wondered if Grandma Ruth wanted to talk about a special gift for me or something. My mother shrugged at something Grandma Ruth said, and glanced over at me.

+

“Not yet,” she said, playing with the curly cable on the house line. “I’ll let you know if it does. Or doesn’t. I guess we can hope?”

+

It happened in the evening. Dinner, just the two of us, my choice of meal. Fried chicken and doughnuts that we’d had delivered, with the smallest slivers of cucumber as an obligatory green, and suddenly the food was ash in my mouth.

+

My mother just nodded.

+

She had known it would happen. She’d been waiting.

+

I had cried, and my mother had rubbed my back and shoulders, not complaining that the food was dripping out of my mouth onto the table, that I gagged as I kept trying to take bites, barely able to understand her words.

+

She told me it was a curse, and also our legacy. That we lived with the memories passed down to us by our mothers and grandmothers. She told me that Grandma Ruth had the same, how everything she ate was ash in her mouth. She told me about her own fourteenth birthday, not all that long ago, really. She told me I’d get used to it, eventually, and that she’d teach me all her tricks.

+

We sat on the floor by the table, under the only partially eaten meal, and I cried into my knees, and she held me tight.

+

I notice, after that, how little my mother eats, how much water she drinks. How she’ll always have soup, given the option, how she sucks it down speedily, like someone dying, someone starving.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

1984

+

M + +iriam was fourteen when the food in her mouth turned to ash. It was evening, and her mother had made fresh challah and brisket and honey-glazed carrots. She worked directly from the recipe, never deviating, never tasting the food as it cooked. Two tablespoons of honey. Three eggs. Twenty-five peppercorns. No about this or approximately that. It was how her mother always cooked, every meal planned the week before, recipe and exact ingredients to hand.

+

The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink.

+

They sat around the table in the evening, and sang happy birthday to her, and she jiggled her knees, impatient for them to finish so she could eat. She took her first bite of the dinner made especially for her.

+

Miriam gasped. Then she began to cry.

+

Her mother leapt up and pulled her away from the table, said quickly not to worry, that Miriam was just having women’s problems, they’d be right back. That the rest of them should go ahead and eat, eat.

+

In the bathroom upstairs, she helped Miriam to rinse out her mouth and rubbed her back until she stopped crying. Then they sat on the side of the bathtub next to each other, and her mother told her that this was something private, not something to be discussed in public. None of the men and boys downstairs – one father, two brothers – needed to know about it. Her mother told her not to discuss it with anyone in the neighbourhood, to tell none of her friends. This was their secret.

+

Her mother told Miriam that she had the same trouble, that food never tasted good again after she turned fourteen. She said it was a curse. That’s what her mother, Bubbe Berta, had called it. A curse passed down from a grandmother that Miriam couldn’t remember. That they all carried it, all the women who had come after Berta. Berta, who was rescued at fourteen, who was the only survivor from the family, the only one who hadn’t been killed in the camps, burnt and poured into a mass grave of dust and bone.

+

“But we don’t talk about it,” Mama said, patting her knee. “We just live with it, carry it with us. You understand?”

+

Miriam nodded, lying. She wouldn’t talk to anyone, but she didn’t understand.

+

“And, anyway,” Mama wiped the tears off Miriam’s cheeks with a washcloth. “Look on the bright side. You’ll lose all this puppy fat.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

2013

+

P + +eople begin to comment on my weight.

+

How slender I’m looking. How I look so much like my mother.

+

I am hungry all the time, and I miss the feeling of food, real food, in my mouth. But I’ve learned to cope. Drink a lot of milk. Drink chicken broth. Use a straw. Swallow quickly. Wash small bites down with big mouthfuls of water. Don’t eat anything sticky. Don’t linger over meals, don’t trust my nose, which tries to trick me into believing this time will be different.

+

I get compliments from my peers, who want to know how I got so slender. How I lost all the baby weight. They wonder if their eyes will look like mine, so big and dark and soulful, if they lose all their chub.

+

I watch them in the girls’ changing rooms after gym class. They pinch themselves, tugging at their bellies and cheeks while they suck on lollipops and smack gum, and I want to tell them they’re beautiful. I want to tell them at least they can taste the food their parents make. That I’m jealous they can even taste what’s served in the school canteen, which could probably also double as prison food.

+

The idea of eating for pleasure is like a fever dream, a lie from an imagined past.

+

I try a piece of Snickers that someone offers me, and it takes a half litre of water to wash down the ash pasted onto my soft palate. I try not to gag while I scrape off the tacky mess with my tongue. I don’t take any more handouts.

+

I am hired by the modelling agency my mother uses. They tell me they don’t often take children, but I am a golden opportunity. I’m just so like her, so haunted looking, those long slender limbs, those stark lines, the sad, dark eyes. They describe me to me, while they take photos of the two of us together.

+

My mother hugs me, after, tells me I did really well.

+

“Plus, the extra money will be a big help,” my mother says. “Not that we— but, you know, for clothes, and life stuff. We can start to save up for you to go to university. Or you can put your money away for if you have a family, someday. A house or something.”

+

“I’m never having kids,” I tell her, with finality.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

1963

+

R + +uth’s desk was at the front of the classroom, and she wished it wasn’t. She didn’t like that her back was exposed.

+

The other girls in the class – all blonde and blue-eyed with soft, round cheeks and sweaters just starting to fill out – were giggling behind her. Ruth wished their teacher would tell them to hush, but he just smiled indulgently at them.

+

A spitball pinged off her shoulder, and the cluster of girls behind her burst into giggles again.

+

She tried to focus on her schoolwork. Maybe if she aced the test coming up, she’d be able to switch to the other class, the class that was for excellent students, mostly boys, mostly not interested in her. At least there she’d be able to escape from the chatter and the feeling so completely out of place. At least then she’d know she’d have a good chance of getting into a good university.

+

Ruth didn’t tell her mother about the soft pink girls at school, how no one would sit with her in the cafeteria. She didn’t tell her mother how the other kids teased her about her dark curls, visible collarbones and bony knees, and the remnants of an accent. She knew her mother would just say how lucky she was to be in school at all, how when she was fourteen there was nothing but pain and death. How when she was fourteen, she was nothing but skin and bones.

+

“Here, bubala, eat this, eat this,” Ruth knew her mother would say, if she told her. “And never mind what those shiksa girls say, Ruthie, you’re beautiful.”

+

It wouldn’t help, so she didn’t tell her.

+

At fourteen, Ruth began to refuse to eat the food her mother prepared. Everything her mother cooked, everything about it, was wrong. The language that the recipes were in, the smells which were so different from the fast food joints she passed and what got served in the school cafeteria, the names and the textures. It was all wrong.

+

Her mother refused to understand. She would say how lucky Ruth was that there was always food when she wanted it. How lucky she was that she never had to fight for more, never had to hold back her tears so she wouldn’t get dehydrated and die a shrivelled husk.

+

“Have this,” her mother would say, holding out a fork full of something or other, something with a name from a language Ruth was trying so hard to forget. “Ah, Ruthie, eat. I tried so hard not to die, so you could live. Eat this. One day, you’ll be cooking it for your family.”

+

And Ruth would chew whatever it was she was being fed, and force a smile. And when her mother wasn’t looking, she would spit it out, and promise herself she would never have a family, never cook these things.

+

It all tasted the same to her. Everything she ate tasted like sadness, and guilt, and death.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

2029

+

I + + am pregnant, because of course I am. I am shocked, and impressed that mother nature has battled onwards despite my desiccated, stick insect, barely-there body.

+

It was an accident, a once-off with a friend, someone I had met last year at an evening lecture series about the legacies of intergenerational trauma. He had volunteered his own story during a session on the legacies that children and grandchildren carry, long after an event. He had offered himself up as an example, talked about the taint that runs in his family, and how none of the men can ever be happy. He explained how everything smells of rot whenever the men are happy.

+

He told a room full of strangers that it is the smell left behind after a bomb obliterates your house during a festival in a war over oil, a war you and your family have no part in, can’t escape. It is the smell that grows as you spend days trying to dig out anyone who might have survived. When you are the only one left. He doesn’t know this himself. It’s what his father told him, and his grandfather told his father. He’s never known it himself, but he smells it anyway, whenever he is happy.

+

I had been gobsmacked to hear someone talking so openly about their curse, and I had made myself be brave. I went to talk to him after the session, and we had gone for a coffee. I told him about my curse, the only person I had ever talked to about it, besides my mother and Grandma Ruth, who didn’t like when I brought it up.

+

He nodded as I spoke, and didn’t try to offer any suggestions, and he didn’t try to come up with ways I could fix it. He just nodded.

+

We had become close.

+

And now there’s a baby.

+

I know I should get rid of it. I don’t need a baby in my life. I barely have a relationship, and my job isn’t the most stable. But I worry that this might be my only chance. It’s not like my body is a temple, it’s not like I’m in the peak of health.

+

I sit on the sofa at my mother’s house and cry, and tell her I don’t know what to do. She says she understands, tells me that she will support me, no matter what. We don’t have a choice about what the curse does to our bodies, but I can absolutely choose this.

+

“But, hey,” she says, “if you decide to keep it, it could be nice. Babies can be nice, kind of. And even if they’re not, kids are okay. I could start to cook again, I haven’t done that in a while. Maybe I could teach you, even. It’s not so hard if you just follow the recipes. I have a lot of them, from your Grandma Ruth. You know she translated them from Bubbe Berta’s old handwritten ones, after she died? We can live vicariously through your kid.”

+

I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, then pull out a bottle of green smoothie from my bag and give it a shake. Three of my five-a-day crammed into one blended meal, which I can suck down at speed.

+

“Until she’s fourteen.”

+

“Until she’s fourteen. And then, we’ll see. Maybe she’ll be different.”

+

We know, somehow, that it’s going to be a girl.

+

I know, deeply, painfully, that I’m going to keep the baby.

+

I suck down the green sludge through a straw, and ignore the aftertaste of dust and smoke in my mouth.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

1947

+

B + +erta was pregnant. She didn’t even know it would be possible for her to get pregnant, not after the camps and the illness and the starvation and the despair and the fear. She was pregnant and her new husband, who had also lost everything, had promised her that after the baby was born, after they were all healthy, they would travel to a new country. They would go somewhere that would be sympathetic to them, to their plight. Somewhere they could start a new life.

+

Berta struggled to eat. She wondered if she could blame it on the morning sickness – and why did they call it that, anyway, when it lasted all day long? – but it had been going on for years. Since the camps, even after they were rescued. The food she made, the food she ate, it gave her no pleasure. It tasted all wrong. She knew others who had survived the camps, other people who also struggled to eat, struggled to sleep, struggled to love. Their bodies and minds just weren’t used to it anymore. It was probably that, she decided. She just wasn’t used to it.

+

She wished she could tell her mother, wished she could tell her over a cup of sweet tea and hamentashen. But her mother was gone, lost soon after they’d been deposited at the camp along with hundreds of others. Long ago turned to ash.

+

Berta couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone else.

+

There was a small woodland near the house, and Berta walked through it, enjoying the warm spring air, the quiet, the freedom to move wherever she wanted. She rubbed her expanding belly sometimes, a gentle soothing circle. It was a prelude to the hugs and kisses she would pepper the baby with once it was born. She hummed a tune her mother had sung her, when she was young. Before the war.

+

The woods were peaceful, but there were people sitting in a circle ahead, clustered around a campfire. It was only campers around a campfire, she knew, but the whiff of smoke in the air caught her unaware, and she found herself clinging to a young tree and dry heaving. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she told herself that it was nothing dangerous. But an animal fear in her reared up, and she stumbled away from the happily chattering group, a family or two, maybe on holiday.

+

Memories pressed themselves forward, memories of bodies on one side of the building, piles of ash on the other. Berta blocked her nose and tried to forget the hours, days, maybe years she had spent cleaning out the ovens.

+

Gagging, wiping her hands over and over on her skirt, she hurried away from the campfire, back towards home, as fast as she could waddle.

+

She would tell him that when they move, which must be soon, she wants to be in a place without smoke or ash. No forests, no industrial towns. She wanted to be in a house where they would only cook on gas or oil. Where everything would smell clean.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

2030

+

T + + here is a girl, and he is thrilled.

+

There is also a boy, and I am.

+

We don’t know yet if they will inherit our curses, our taints. But we don’t hide from them, not anymore. We talk about them to each other, and we talk about them with our parents, and we agree not to lie to the children about our inheritances.

+

He scrunches up his nose whenever good things are happening. Always with the children, whenever they play, always when he eats good food, he looks disgusted. It’s how I know he is happy.

+

I gag whenever I eat, and so does my mother. But we explore the kitchen together, cooking and baking from lists and instructions, from the book of recipes written by Berta, translated by Ruth, followed religiously by my mother and by me. The food we cook is ash in our mouths, but I see on his disgusted face that it is delicious, and it always smells good, so we taste everything anyway. The children are fed, and they like the food, and they eat.

+

And I count out the peppercorns, one by one.

+

Orbit-lrg

+
+

Nota bene:

+

This story centres on intergenerational trauma, war, and genocide, as well as a hope that the future might hold less suffering than the past. These subjects are deeply relevant right now.

+

For obvious reasons, this is a difficult time to explore trauma, particularly Jewish trauma. But I can’t tell this story from another perspective: I only have my lived experiences as an inheritor of stories, and fears, and tribalism. So, my deepest thanks to my sensitivity reader, Ziyad Hayatli, for his time and assistance.

+

I don’t think there is ever a time to shy away from intergenerational reciprocity. We can’t look away from one evil act when confronted with another. We need to tackle them head-on, in the hopes that we don’t reenact them. What is happening now cannot be excused or overlooked. What happened in the past cannot be either. This story talks about inherited traumas, the ones perpetrated against us, the ones being perpetrated right now. But we can do better. We can choose a future that is different. Reparation over repetition; sharing over supremacy; healing over harming.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

Thanks for reading – but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of 25 Peppercorns at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Emma Burnett

+

+ + Author image of Emma Burnett + + + Emma Burnett is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in Nature:Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Apex, Radon, Utopia, MetaStellar, Milk Candy Review, Roi Fainéant, JAKE, and more. You can find her on Twitter, Bluesky, and at emmaburnett.uk.

+

© Emma Burnett 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Berna T., Lukas, and Kaboompics.com - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-43/body-parts.html b/issue-43/body-parts.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e3f81659 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/body-parts.html @@ -0,0 +1,354 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Body Parts — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Body Parts

+

Anna Koltes

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Body Parts by +
+ + + + + + +

“Y + +ou said I could have your heart this week,” my lover Jack complains from outside the bus stop, his beard and eyebrows frosted over in the snow blizzard.

+

“July,” I croak. “That’s when you get my heart. I told you this, remember?”

+

My chest burns when it’s empty, my voice a pathetic wheeze. I’m cold all the time, but things will be better when I get my heart back to pump adrenaline into me.

+

Friday. That’s when Marco, my other lover, will be finished with it.

+

Jack just takes the lungs and goes back to wherever he lives these days. Sometimes I imagine it’s a rustic log cabin he built with his own two hands, scented with cinnamon-stewed apples and aglow with firewood he chopped himself. I imagine him alongside me tonight, listening to my slow breathing in him as he sleeps. Calm and ruggedly handsome, he’s like one of those mountaineers on the news who survive an avalanche and live to tell the tale.

+

He doesn’t even say goodbye. If I had a heart, I know it would twinge with longing as I watch him walk away.

+

But tomorrow the working week starts, so I won’t have my brain left to tell me that, either. They say it’s impossible to survive without one, but I make do. It pays the bills and it doesn’t last long. There are only so many of your thoughts they can take, after all, before you’re forced out of a dreamless sleep.

+

On my time off I go to the park to recover as much as I can, picking at a sandwich until I end up feeding it to the birds. I watch the children on the swings, jealous of their healthy legs, plump arms and raucous voices. The way they hurtle over dangerous precipices and plummet from monkey bars.

+

I was like them, once. Whole, unaware.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

K + +yle picks up my feet on a wintery-blue Saturday morning. Another lover.

+

“Can’t I have all of you at once?” he asks, and he isn’t the first with this question, as conceited as it sounds. I try to explain, like I explained to Jack and Marco and all the others, but no one gets it.

+

The truth is, I don’t give my heart to just anyone. It’s encased in an icebox, padlocked in a double safe in my basement.

+

Even my parents have tried to guess the combination.

+

“You were always so aloof,” my mother scolds. “One day you’ll have to let someone in. Honey, tell her.”

+

My father pauses mid-raid of my refrigerator. “Hey, your mother still keeps my spine in her jewelry box. Don’t listen to her.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

OI + +n Sunday night Marco shows up two hours late, handing my heart back in a soggy plastic bag like it’s takeout Pho.

+

“Don’t you want to come in?” I ask, despising the neediness in my voice, thinking of the painful epilation session and the many more hours scrubbing the obsolete corners of my apartment from a chair. I even made moussaka, proud of myself for patiently reading all the instructions in the cookbook, cool-headed when the fire alarm went off.

+

Marco says he has a thing: his friend’s stand-up, or concert, or birthing, I can’t remember which. He’s already moonwalking down the street, and I try not to notice the other body parts – finger, lock of hair, studded ear – sloppily falling out of his jacket pocket.

+

I’d run after him if I could. Make him stay.

+

It’s when I’m huddled in a cigarette-soaked sweater he left, perched on the fire escape hate-watching the neighbor couple clink glasses of orange wine, that I decide I need a distraction. Something to keep me from checking my phone and stalking Marco’s social media.

+

Crammed among the tone-deaf inebriated, I give my lips to a man at a bar. There’s no talking, only a hungry exchange. He takes more than I bargained for, and in the morning I find myself hobbling down the sidewalk in the ashy dawn, hailing a taxi, cold air filling the cavities in my flesh.

+

Jack’s waiting on my doorstep, clutching my lungs.

+

He looks me up and down, but his eyes are kind. Hearth-like. I imagine curling up in front of his fireplace while he reads me poetry about trees.

+

Inside the house, Jack gently places my lungs on the kitchen counter and makes us tea. For a while I do nothing but watch him; his quiet, assured movements. I don’t even tell him where anything is located, his intuition seems to guide him to the right cupboard, the correct drawer.

+

When we’re cradling oolong, I brush wood shavings off his shoulder. I ask him to stay. I don’t know why. But even before the question is out, I wonder why I never asked him before.

+

We feed each other burnt moussaka and I wonder if Marco will ever know what he missed.

+

When Kyle returns my feet, I take them off the market.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

I + +t’s only later, much later, when Jack has built me a fireplace and a treehouse and a home and we have a daughter, that I reluctantly take my heart out of ice. I portion the pieces out cautiously at first, spooning it like cough medicine each time my daughter cries, or laughs, or gurgles, or dreams.

+

When she’s old enough, we take her to the park. But I’m too weak to walk, much less push a stroller – no recovery days now. I wheeze on the bench, seeing stars, knowing my body will never fully recover.

+

Throughout the park, limbless mothers push swings and fathers play tag with eyes yanked from their sockets. They trip and limp like victims of an epidemic, crawling after their healthy children and completed spouses. I don’t know why I never noticed them before.

+

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I accuse my mother. “Why didn’t you warn me this would happen, that they would take everything from me?”

+

My mother rolls her eyes through the phone. “Oh please. What else would you have done with yourself?”

+

I watch Jack twirl our daughter in circles, their twin laughter caught in the autumn breeze, their cheeks pink and round. Healthy, greedy, unaware of all they’ve stolen from me, as blood drips from the holes in my body and onto my tennis shoes.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Body Parts at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Anna Koltes

+

+ + Author image of Anna Koltes + + + Anna Koltes’ stories are published in magazines like Defenestration, Black Petals, The Colored Lens, Wyldblood Press, Arena, Dark Onus, The Caterpillar, X-RAY, and Daikaijuzine. Hailing from a traveling busking family, out of her seven siblings she considers herself the least annoying. She currently lives in Barcelona, Spain, where she is working on a collection of speculative short stories.

+

© Anna Koltes 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Vitaly Gorbachev and cottonbro studio - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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Table of Contents

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-43/editorial.html b/issue-43/editorial.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2bdba180 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/editorial.html @@ -0,0 +1,308 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Editorial — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Editorial

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+ + +
+ Story image for Editorial +
+ + + +

While casting about for a subject for this issue’s editorial, a friend proposed the topic Why I think writing an editorial for my incredible magazine whose quality fiction speaks for itself is more important than writing my own incredible fiction. They went on to observe that, seriously, editorials are boring and pointless, asserting that nobody reads them (dissenters to this claim being a statistical anomoly, likely akin to the one suggesting that there is intelligent life in the universe), before wrapping up their position with a concrete suggestion for the editorial’s full content:

+
+

What are you doing reading this bit? Go on, shoo! Go read the stories! Go on, get out of here! Shoo!

+

Signed, the Editor

+

The problem is, once you start down the write-an-editorial path, it’s hard to get off it again. I mean, the tab’s right there in our masthead banner options thingie, it’d be silly to waste it. Plus I need a place to thank our cover artists for their generosity, can’t skip that (on which subject see below why not). So, onerous though it is to think of something new to scream into the unheeding wind every three months, there’s not a lot we can do without completely overhauling the magazine’s whole design really—

+

…oh. Hmm. Now there’s a thought.

+

Because it has occurred to me, as I’ve worked on this year’s issues, that Mythaxis and myself approach a little milestone. Although Gil Williamson comfortably remains our longest-serving editor, founding the magazine in 2008 and helming it for exactly a decade, it was always published on a when-the-urge-took-him schedule. When he handed the reins to me (an act that genuinely changed my life!), I decided to aim for regularity instead. As a result, as of today, I have overseen more issues than Gil did. By one. Come the end of 2025, by two.

+

These two eras of Mythaxis history have basically presented different faces to the world (as you can see for yourself if you check out our Back Issues and The Original Archive). However, we did carry over the style of the original title. Therefore, starting in 2026, why not launch a third era with a completely new look? As well as a general redesign of the site, why not commission a brand new logo? Why not a whole host of them?

+

I think I shall!

+

Anyway, what are you doing reading this bit? Go on, shoo! Go read the stories!

+

Go on, get out of here!

+

Shoo!

+

Signed,

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

+

ISSUE 43 – Thanks and Salutations. For the third time, much gratitude to Michal Kváč, who bestows some retro style on us with his image ‘Synthwave’. A freelance environment concept artist and illustrator from Czech Republic, you can click the link above to see his work and make contact, or check out his Youtube channel for time-lapse videos of his process. Thanks yet again, Michal!

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-43/fax-machine-blues-beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.html b/issue-43/fax-machine-blues-beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..05118661 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/fax-machine-blues-beautyland-marie-helene-bertino.html @@ -0,0 +1,322 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

+

Mattia Ravasi

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino by +
+ + + + +

M + +arie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland opens with a detailed description of the protagonist’s birth: a routine delivery in a Philadelphia hospital, relatively unremarkable if not for one crucial detail. An intrusion in the process; an impulse from far away that makes newborn Adina no conventional baby. The moment of her birth coincides precisely with the launch of the Voyager 1 space probe, sending its “golden disc” recording of the sounds of life on Earth into the space it is meant to photograph and explore. And it seems that, at the same time as humanity is reaching out toward the stars, something reaches out from the opposite direction.

+

Fast-forward a few years, and two fateful incidents set Adina on the course of her life’s mission. First, a fax machine is recovered from the neighbors’ trash by her resourceful (and cash-strapped) mother and placed in Adina’s bedroom. Later, after her deadbeat dad pushes her and causes her to fall and hit her head, Adina is “activated”: that night, she visits a strange classroom in her sleep where mysterious entities inform her of her true nature.

+

For Adina is an alien: sent to Earth by her species to report on the planet’s living conditions, climate, and inhabitants, acting as their very own Voyager 1. Every night she visits this dreamlike classroom, where she is taught the history of her own people, while during the day she is expected to report on her experiences by faxing her findings home. “I am Adina,” goes her first fax; “yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass.”

+

Her home planet responds: “DESCRIBE BUNNIES.”

+

Beautyland’s premise, and especially its fax-machine shtick, might make it sound like a work of satirical science fiction, something in the vein of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Yet Bertino’s novel is much more subtle and peculiar. Adina’s identity as undercover alien works as a beautiful defamiliarizing device, allowing her to comment in irreverent and witty terms on many of the habits us humans take for granted. And these passages are funny – very much so:

+
+

When Jen, Jen, Janae, Joy, and Jiselle love something they say it needs to stop. That skirt needs to stop with those sequins. That piece of pizza needs to stop with that crust. Some things they hate also need to stop. She needs to stop with that fugly bracelet. The listener detects from context clues as to which usage is at play. This nuance of grade-school linguistics is challenging to articulate, though Adina tries in several faxes until her superiors reply: STOP

+

And yet much of the novel’s charm comes from the fact that it is never quite clear how much of Adina’s estrangement from her peers is the result of her alien origins, and how much is due to peculiarities that are, ultimately, still very human. Her difficulties with relationships later in life, for instance, are not helped by her efforts to keep her real identity secret, but they might also be the result of her own process of coming to terms with her asexuality. Adina’s best friends, siblings Toni and Dominic, both queer, appear at times just as foreign and misplaced as she is in their middle-American milieu. It is only the most harshly human among the characters – the high school divas, the abusive jocks, the obnoxious siblings who like to throw rocks at birds – who have no trouble fitting in.

+

Beautyland is one of those peculiar novels that exist on the borderlands between genres – and, by virtue of this ambiguity, somehow allow their authors to have their cake and eat it. It can be read quite naturally as a realist story about the limitations of a poor childhood, and about the fraught relationship between an introverted child and a strong-willed, hot-headed single mom. A testimony of a life where trips to malls are big treats; where flaunting one’s femininity is a must for a young woman. At the same time, the novel’s alien plot is much more than a gimmicky device or quirky note, and forms a crucial part of Adina’s makeup as a character.

+

Adina’s nightly lessons from her faraway “superiors” raise some very interesting questions about the nature of identity – her alien relatives don’t seem to have any – and the meaning of life: what will happen to Adina once her mission is over, and she has collected all the information her distant family needs? Will she still be Adina once she is returned to her home planet? Even more worrying, what will happen if the mission fails – if the problems that are plaguing her home world and caused her people to search for a new one finally overwhelm them?

+

The whole of Beautyland is dominated by this strange tension: between its alien and everyday plots, one extraordinary, the other humdrum, but both equally and strangely engrossing. It’s a tension heightened by Adina’s determination to keep her identity secret, and by the fact that, when she uses her gifts to her advantage (getting her alien relatives, of all things, to help her with her Italian lessons) the results are quick to backfire.

+

Beautyland follows the course of Adina’s life chronologically, and is very much a novel of two halves. The first half of the book presents the compelling, clear trajectory of Adina’s childhood. The second half, covering her adulthood, feels much more aimless and thankless – just as does adulthood itself. The questions Adina is faced with here are more open; her challenges lack a clear solution. Should she keep guarding her secret, or share it with the world? Should she change herself to fit other people’s needs? And is it worth living in New York in spite of its crazy parking rules? Leaving Philadelphia for the big city complicates not just her relationship with her Earthly mother: soon her alien home starts becoming unresponsive, and threatens to disappear altogether from her life.

+

Beautyland feels at once mundane and epic; a grand testament to the absurdity and mystery of everyday life. Even in the thick of its alien concerns, its plot is marked by a degree of clear-eyed honesty and truthfulness that can be hard to find even in the most realistic of “literary” fiction. Dreams often don’t come true; beautiful relationships sometimes wither; friends and pets pass away; people misunderstand our best intentions, and turn against us.

+

The novel title seems to encapsulate its enigma. As a report about life on Earth, Beautyland suggests a sense of fascination and awe for all the treasures the place has to offer. But “Beautyland” is actually the name of a rather un-beautiful place: a drab suburban mall selling discounted beauty products, where the staff are snooty and rude to Adina and her mom.

+

It’s unsurprising that this quietly charming novel is so obsessed with its leitmotiv of star and space exploration. Throughout its various narrative strands, Beautyland is ultimately a novel about humanity’s relationship with the vast, the awe-inspiring, and the extraordinary: about how we can embrace it and find in it great meaning, and how we can sometimes also come to fear and despise it, gripped as we are by the distractions of our earthly concerns. It’s a novel about the loneliness of a peculiarly crowded cosmos. A fantastic book about different ways of being alien.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Mattia’s thoughts at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Mattia Ravasi

+

+ + Author image of Mattia Ravasi + + + Mattia Ravasi is from Monza, Italy, and lives and works in Bath. He has written for The Millions, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Submarine. His stories have appeared in independent magazines, including Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He talks about books on his YouTube channel, The Bookchemist, and tweets as @thebookchemist too.

+

© Mattia Ravasi 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The image shows author Marie-Helene Bertino and the book’s cover, both from Wikipedia.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-43/for-giving.html b/issue-43/for-giving.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0ac04ed1 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/for-giving.html @@ -0,0 +1,363 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + For Giving — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

For Giving

+

Olufunmilayo Makinde

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for For Giving by +
+ + + + + + +

I + + know for a fact that Mary is dead. I know where she was buried, I even know the road to her grave by heart. If her ghost was ever to appear to me, it should have been at her grave, not here.

+

There is an order in life. It is a simple order. You live, and then you die. Dead people should stay underneath the soil, or in an urn. That is the way it should be, the way it has always been.

+

What is she doing here?

+

“What am I doing here? No, what are you doing here again, Lola?” she asks without opening her mouth, her words echoing my thoughts like a recorder made of putrid flesh and rattling bones. My brain briefly wrestles with her using the word “again” and what it means, before giving up to face the more pressing issue. I watch her watch me, more entranced than I should be, as a wave of repulsion begins to slowly build up within me.

+

I think a stupid thought right before my brain can fully process it: that she seems plumper in death than she was when she was alive. She had always been reed thin, so desperate to gain weight that she worked it into so many conversations, no matter how often I told her she had the perfect frame. She has a smile on her face, she seems healthier and happier even, if I were to overlook the stench and the exposed decaying flesh and just look at her lively eyes.

+

I cannot overlook that, as I have never been that open-minded.

+

So instead I look at the familiar hallway of my old secondary school, prettier and shinier than I remember, warmer and more inviting too, but also with the dinginess I expect of a long abandoned place. There are cobwebs, there is dust, but her presence makes them seem like minor issues.

+

I look at this impossibly dilapidated, deliciously nostalgic place that calls me to walk in and lose myself in the past, and I quickly dig into my memories for the exit.

+

“Wait,” Mary says. “Stay for one minute. Let’s talk.”

+

I am horrified by the concept of the talking dead, so the idea of listening to what she has to say is a ridiculous one, if not foolhardy. Her voice isn’t her voice. Not the way I remember it. But I could chalk that up to being a side effect of death. Her new voice isn’t outrightly disgusting or terrifying as I imagined it would be. Instead, it is repulsive in a roundabout way. It is somehow too pleasant, too sweet, too syrupy, cloying, like a cheap drink that has pictures of fruits in its packaging but cannot legally call itself juice.

+

A dead girl is looking at me earnestly, there is an unknown fire in her eyes that makes them burn brightly, like rubies lit by candlelight. She is asking me to stay. So I run away.

+

“Where are you going?” Her confused voice rings out, chiming pleasantly in my ears. However, when I run, it feels like I am trapped inside a glass bottle, and her voice is descending upon me from above. It echoes and bounces right off the walls back at me. It assaults all of my senses until I am left senseless and shivering.

+

I feel that if I am able to scream, my chat with the dead girl will be over, so I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. My body goes through the motions of yelling for help, my belly hurts like I have been screaming, my throat strains, and my lips part and stretch so wide that it feels like my jaw has permanently shifted out of place, but nothing happens.

+

I stand there screaming without screaming at Mary until my throat grows hoarse. She watches. Full of infinite patience. Like a mother looking at a restless baby. Her confidence seems to hold her flesh and bones together. It seems to tell me that whatever will happen here, to me, to us, is inevitable.

+

She watches me with the kind of patience that she did not have in life. My relationship with this dead girl was a great one. Mary was my best friend ever since we were in kindergarten, and we were bonded by hatred. We hated our parents who were close friends and wanted us to be too. We hated the many things we had to do to be considered good children. We hated our boarding school. We hated the hostels, we hated our fellow students, we hated everything but each other. I did not have the time to soak in the irony of only being able to see her in a place we both hated so much.

+

“I did not kill you,” I say to this girl, and miraculously my voice is back, yet all I get in response is silence. She watches me with raised brows, as if confused about why I would bring that up. To be fair to her, I am as well. “I’m sorry I’m alive and you’re dead,” I say, and silence between us stretches like a tangible thing, like a rope pulled taut and about to snap.

+

We both know how she died, and who killed her, the same way we both know the guilt that fueled my little outburst. I think about the details of her death often. Hindsight makes me think of how much I missed. How I should have noticed the disappearance of other girls sooner. I should have noticed the blood sooner. I should have noticed Mrs Jaiyesimi sooner.

+

“You’re still a coward.” Her syrupy voice teases me, but I do not detect malice in her tone. The world grows blurry as tears fill my eyes. She used to call me a coward all the time, and she was right to, she was always the braver one.

+

“Let’s go to our hostel,” she finally says, right before she takes a step toward me. My heart starts pounding, I do not know if my friend’s ghost wants to kill me. If she does, I know that I deserve it.

+

The first step she takes makes a strange sound. I should be terrified, but all I can think of is how ridiculous it is. Her body moves slowly, and with each step comes a small hiss, like air being let out of a balloon. She walks toward me accompanied by the quiet hiss of air escaping her rotten flesh and bones, but she carries her head up high. The pride and self-confidence I remember that accompanied her in life now intimidates me in death.

+

All around us, the hallway clears up, like a fairytale, the walls mending themselves and the cobwebs and dirt being put away. With every step she takes, the hallway glows brighter, and the light shows me her face, her skin, her body mending itself, less decayed every second. By the time she is within arm’s reach, her face and body look like they did the moment before our lives descended into a bloody screaming mess. But the fly in the ointment: her hands remain the same.

+

Her hands have jagged open wounds from the knife. The wounds stretch from her forearms to her fingers. I remember when the wounds were fresh. I cannot bear to look at them, so I focus elsewhere. Her hair is piled up in braids and tied back in a low ponytail with a rubber band. She wears a loose purple gingham dress and black laced shoes; school-issued casual wear only to be worn outside class.

+

“Lola, we’ll miss prep if we don’t go now,” she says, ridiculous words from a ridiculous dead girl. But as I look down, I see that my jeans and top seem to be shifting, changing into something loose, purple and painfully familiar.

+

“How?” I ask, finally willing to communicate with the dead.

+

A twinkle rises in her eyes. With that, she suddenly looks very much like my old best friend, from the intricately done braids I spent our last Saturday together weaving for her, to the tiny round scar on her left cheek. She got it from doing a reckless thing, climbing over the fence of the school to buy contraband sweets. The sweets weren’t even that good, too artificial, too sweet, but we savoured them all the same. It is a scar on a face that I cannot be wary of. That I do not deserve to be wary of. When she smiles, I can’t help but think that she has never looked so alive, not even in my dreams. It is a thought that draws me closer to her. Both in mind and in the physical sense.

+

I do not realize how close we are until she grabs me. Her hands make a wet squelching sound as they grasp mine , like decaying appendages grafted together, and the horror of that sound pulls me out of my dangerous thoughts. But it is too late, her eyes are upon me, like a spotlight, like a searchlight, beaming into my soul.

+

“Will you do it again?” she asks.

+

“Do what?” My mouth speaks before my mind can stop it. I am falling back into old patterns with her again – speaking without thinking was a thing I only did with Mary.

+

“Run away. Don’t. I can catch you, but that’s a waste of time and we don’t have much before she finds us. We need to talk. So, don’t run.” She is so close that when she blinks, I can count her eyelashes. They are lush and long, better than they ever looked when she was alive.

+

I shake my head mechanically, unable to resist a request from her. I have the habit of running at the wrong time. Just like that, I feel sixteen again.

+

I look down the beautiful hallway and I frown, for something isn’t right. Somehow we aren’t in the main building anymore, we are in our old hostel. The bright fluorescent lights hanging overhead are all complete, but a terrible knowledge rests in my head.

+

I remember that three of those lights went out the day before everyone had to leave the school. I remember that Mary and I went to our hostel matron to apply for repairs the next day, and I remember that was when and where things got bloody.

+

It was when I lost my best friend forever.

+

We found Mrs Jaiyesimi, the hostel matron in her quarters, scratching something onto the walls. Her hairstyle, a high bun pulled so tight that her hairline had begun to recede the year before, was strangely messy. Her usual outfit, a loose black dress paired with a red blazer with high shoulder pads, was stained at the bottom with something dark.

+

We should have noticed that something was off, but we didn’t until I knocked. Her head swiveled towards us so fast, I thought she had broken her neck. When she spotted us, a bright smile lit up her face. There was something in her eyes that I didn’t like, and without even thinking, I began backing away.

+

“One more.” She spoke softly, but her wide eyes betrayed her.

+

We did not know what she was doing, but when she ran toward us with a bloody knife, I ran away, first with Mary, but soon, alone. I did not even notice when or how she fell behind. Shamefully, disgracefully, I closed my ears to the sound of everything but my pounding heart and I did not open them again until I was hiding in the bushes outside the hostel. Even then, I did not move until it was morning and I could run to the guard’s post. My legs were stiff, but not as stiff as Mary and Mrs Jaiyesimi were when we found them.

+

She had dragged my friend’s body to her strange altar and spilled her blood there.

+

I should have been there. It should have been me. I suppose my dead friend blames me for that. I would understand it if she did.

+

“Focus. There’s no time to think about Mrs Jaiyesimi. You don’t want to be late for prep,” Mary says, drawing me closer by our still conjoined hands. I try not to look at them, for my own sanity. But if I am having this experience, I know that I am not that sane, so I look anyway.

+

Then I scream. Or I try to. Again, my voice is gone as I shake in horror at the sight of our hands mashed together like a crude clay sculpture. I see my flesh fused with hers, I feel the rot and death rushing through her veins into mine. And worse, I feel a sharp discordant thing pushing its way into my body and mind through my hands. It is a terrible, paranoid thing, that swims through me and gnaws at the last piece of sanity I have left.

+

A movement captures my attention, as Mary shakes her left foot to snap me out of my thoughts. I look back up at her. Her eyes look warm and welcoming, like the old days, but they are dark brown, almost black, strange for someone I remember having eyes the colour of honey.

+

“Lola, don’t come here again. Alive or dead. The rituals she did… you must not die here. No matter how much you want to see me. There is no peace or closure here.”

+

“What do you want? I will help you.” I don’t know why, but these words leave my lips before my brain can even comprehend the implications. But once the words are spoken, I feel… lighter. Yes! I want to help my friend, I want to free her from whatever is keeping her here in this twisted form.

+

“No, you won’t. You didn’t help me then, and you won’t now. But that’s okay.” Mary speaks in a familiar tone. There is no disappointment, no anger, just her knowledge of me. Her words carry a power that pulls me closer and closer until I am staring into her wet eyes. They are like whirlpools, drawing me in and hiding something from me at the same time.

+

My vision grows cloudier the longer I look into her eyes. I see the reflection of a shadowy figure in them, it is hazy, but something about it is strangely familiar. Pulled back hair, a blazer with high shoulder pads, a knife in hand. The figure is behind me, approaching us, and suddenly a strange voice pops into my head. It tells me that if I can see the figure clearly, I will have the answer to why my dead friend’s spirit is still haunting this place.

+

I lean in closer, but Mary’s gaze darts behind me for a moment before her eyes widen with an unknown emotion. Before I can figure out what the emotion is, she speaks. “Blink,” she instructs with a small quiver in her voice, and without even thinking, I comply.

+

When my eyes open, I find myself outside the hostel, hiding in the bushes. Like I did twelve years ago. I feel a fog growing, surrounding my thoughts, blurring the details of my talk with Mary. All that is left behind is an aversion to the old crumbling hostel building and a feeling that pushes its way into my mind from my cold damp hands.

+

As I rub my clammy palms together, I get the feeling that I should run away, that I should never and must never return. It is a feeling that I fight with every ounce of my being. It is a fight I lose miserably. Before the last detail in my mind surrenders to the growing haze, something clicks and I realize that the look on Mary’s face before I found myself outside, was fear. But not for herself, for me.

+

My realization doesn’t help me reach new heights of bravery. I am who I have always been. I hope Mary knows that, so I have one less thing to atone for.

+

I hide behind the bushes and wait until daybreak.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of For Giving at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Olufunmilayo Makinde

+

+ + Author image of Olufunmilayo Makinde + + + Olufunmilayo Makinde is a Nigerian writer who dreams of one day writing full time. You can find her on X (formerly twitter) as @Funmi_fbee, and you can find her work in Full House Literary, Flash Phantoms, Heavy Feather Review, and The Deadlands.

+

© Olufunmilayo Makinde 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Abdulkadir Pai, SamTheShutterSmith, Hoàng Tiến Anh, and Josh Sorenson - many thanks!

+
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+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

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+

Mythaxis

+

Autumn 2025

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + +
+
+ Emma Burnett +

25 Peppercorns

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+ + +

This is Emma Burnett's third contribution to our pages, each more weighty than the one before. Here she tackles timely and challenging subject matter: how the suffering our forbearers endured goes on to affect those who follow them, forging links in a chain that seems inevitably to bind us to more pain in the future. Here's to breaking that chain. Editorial note: although Mythaxis doesn't use trigger warnings, readers may appreciate knowing that this story makes reference to the legacy of historical attrocities including the Holocaust.

+ + + + Story image for 25 Peppercorns by + + + +
+ + +
+ + + +
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+

Murmurations

+ A.M. Sutter +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Murmurations by + + + +

Horror can find great potency against the context of the ordinary, but the everyday world can also be extraordinary, like the hypnotically flowing aerial dances which flocking birds take part in. A.M. Sutter looks to this phenomena and sees something in the patterns… but not something good.

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+ + + +
+
+

Body Parts

+ Anna Koltes +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Body Parts by + + + +

There's intergenerational trauma, and there's interpersonal trauma as well. Anna Koltes's story manifests the agony of relationships right there in the flesh, the kind of metaphor you feel like a missing limb. Don't you find it seems like you just give and give and give, while others only take?

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+ + + +
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+

For Giving

+ Olufunmilayo Makinde +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for For Giving by + + + +

Olufunmilayo Makinde provides us with a classic: the good old-fashioned ghost story. Adjacent to a recurring theme in this issue, here we again see someone dealing with trauma from the past, this time which has its roots in that person's own actions. Would they, could they, do things differently?

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+

The Sugar Wife

+ Christina Ladd +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Sugar Wife by + + + +

There's nothing better than a good fairy tale – unless it's a wince-inducing horror story wearing the skin of one! Christina Ladd serves up a sweet-toothed delight for those with a taste for the macabre. Hard to say whether or not it will leave you hungry for more…

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+

The Twelve Blackened Slippers

+ Siobhan Ekeh +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for The Twelve Blackened Slippers by + + + +

As an appropriate bookend to this issue's fiction offering we return to the theme we opened with, of how trauma can travel across generations. Siobhan Ekeh's story looks in a different direction and recounts what it sees in a different style, a strangely magical encounter with the past that affects those who remember it and those who don't in distinct but equally powerful ways.

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+

Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

+ Mattia Ravasi +
+ + + Thumbnail of Story image for Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino by + + + +

Back with his second article of the year, all-too-human Mattia Ravasi takes a close look at one of those infinitely strange and wonderful things that only seem commonplace to us because they are so familiar… I'm referring, of course, to books, in this case Marie-Helene Bertino's 'Beautyland'. What will we glean from his musings, and why are we so keen to know more?

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+ + + + + +
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+ Andrew Leon Hudson +

Short Reviews – July to September, 2025

+
+ + +

As always, we round out the issue with a selection of interesting speculative fiction from around the web, as always with an eye on those zines that may have slipped under your reading radar…

+ + + + Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 by + + + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/issue-43/murmurations.html b/issue-43/murmurations.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..46be31cb --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/murmurations.html @@ -0,0 +1,429 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Murmurations — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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+ +

Murmurations

+

A.M. Sutter

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+ Story image for Murmurations by +
+ + + + + + +

T + +he starlings take off while Caleb and Aaron watch from the restaurant’s patio. The birds move in a synchronicity that unsettles Caleb. He doesn’t understand how the small birds know where the other thousand will be, how the cloud of black wings folds and billows into smooth, fluid shapes.

+

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Aaron says as he cranes his neck back and watches. Caleb doesn’t agree; it’s too many bodies too close together. He thinks it must be hot in the center of the flock, with all those hearts pumping all that blood to the surface.

+

“Yeah,” Caleb responds, instead of saying I can’t keep doing this.

+

He picks up a fry and watches it dangle between loose fingers. Aaron continues to make small talk, discussing some new client he’s picked up at the firm. In many ways, Caleb hates these weekly lunches. He’s not stupid; he knows they’re a check-in, a pity meal. Aaron says he just wants to make sure Caleb is getting back out there, but he doesn’t know why Aaron even cares. After all, Aaron’s the one who called things off.

+

“How do they not hit each other?” Aaron asks, turning his attention back to stare at the sea of fluttering black high above them. “How do they know where the others are?”

+

Caleb drops the fry and swallows back the words he wants to say. Says, “Maybe Google knows,” instead of Why are we still pretending?

+

Aaron looks down to type something on his phone at the suggestion, while Caleb glances over at the other patrons to try to avoid watching all those fluttering wings and black bodies.

+

“Huh. Apparently, there are computer models to describe how they do it.”

+

For a moment, Caleb pictures fit young men and women in name brand underwear directing bird traffic, and he laughs. A sharp, short, ugly noise.

+

“What’s funny?” Aaron asks with that patient smile of his.

+

“Nothing,” Caleb answers, instead of Why are you doing this to me – acting like you’re still invested?

+

Seemingly satisfied, Aaron goes back to looking at the birds overhead, and for a few seconds Caleb studies Aaron, tracing his eyes over features he’s long memorized. But since everything ended, he’s found that Aaron’s mental silhouette has developed gaps like a dotted line, and he’s trying to fill in the blanks before he forgets everything entirely.

+

“God,” a woman complains a few tables down from them, loud enough for people to turn their heads, Caleb included. “This itch behind my eye is driving me crazy.”

+

The woman drives a tight knuckle into her eye socket and rubs. Her friend leans in and murmurs something, but Caleb can’t quite make out what she’s saying. Aaron is still studying the birds; Caleb is studying the woman and how hard she is driving her finger into thin flesh. Something above startles the birds, and alarm calls fill the sky. The flock swirls around a swooping hawk and then past it, leaving it confused as the smaller birds disappear from view.

+

The woman gasps – a quiet, stuttering sound of surprise, and Caleb watches her. She probes cautiously at her cheekbone, directly where a deep eye bag bruises her skin. Then something pops from the center of her left eye, peeling back the globe like the skin of a grape.

+

Her friend shrieks and knocks her plates off the small metal table. The ceramic shatters against the ground, and whoever wasn’t paying attention before now is.

+

Something like a worm writhes out from within the weeping socket of the woman’s eye. It undulates its body in a way that makes its colors seem to pulsate like a boardwalk funhouse. The woman turns to her friend, her remaining eye squinting in confusion, as if she doesn’t understand the shock on the face across from her. Maybe she doesn’t feel the blood dripping down her cheek.

+

“I’m good,” the woman tells her friend, who has tripped backward out of her chair and covers her mouth with a shaking hand.

+

Startled shouts fill the evening air as people move away. Aaron, now paying attention, pulls Caleb out of his seat and along with the throngs of others backing up from the scene. But Caleb can’t help but watch the twitching stalk throb around fresh blood and another, unknown fluid.

+

He hears the woman again – or thinks he does, because how could he make out her soft murmurs over the chaos of the crowd? “It’s okay, it doesn’t itch anymore.” She turns in her seat, blind, searching for her friend, reaching out to the toppled, empty seat. “It doesn’t feel bad. Come back.” A faint pop, and another stalk crawls out of her right eye. Together they pulse and change color. A signal that is unintelligible but terrifying.

+

She stands up, hands still out, palms up. Placating, pleading.

+

“It doesn’t feel bad at all.”

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he hallway outside of Caleb’s apartment mutes the stilted conversation between him and Aaron. Though his breathing is even, Caleb’s heart is stuttering a staccato rhythm, and he bounces his leg in spite of a conscious effort to keep it still. In front of him, Aaron bites his nails and keeps trying to make eye contact.

+

Caleb’s not sure exactly what they witnessed at the restaurant, and the woman was ushered into an ambulance too quickly for him to be sure that he truly saw what he thought he did. Based on the subtle red rimming under Aaron’s bright eyes, Caleb’s fairly certain that he didn’t imagine it.

+

“Are you alright?” Aaron asks, placing a gentle hand on Caleb’s forearm.

+

“I’m okay,” Caleb says, instead of I can’t begin to process this, and I’m terrified.

+

Frowning, Aaron lets his touch drop, and Caleb’s skin chills quickly under the ghost of lost fingers. “You have to be honest with someone,” he tells Caleb. “You have to let someone in.”

+

Caleb’s heard it all before, in this very hallway, with Aaron’s overnight bag over his shoulder and Caleb’s apartment decidedly emptier.

+

“I mean it, I’m okay,” Caleb insists, instead of I don’t know what just happened, and every time we do this it breaks me down.

+

Aaron thins his lips but grasps Caleb’s hand and squeezes once before turning to leave.

+

Caleb wants to say I miss you, but every time we do this, it breaks me down a little more.

+

Instead, he says nothing.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he news websites are screaming the headlines in bold by the next day. The woman isn’t the first case, apparently – but she’s one of the first, and every new incident is enough to feed the flood of clickbait and tabloids.

+

Caleb sits on the couch and lets a show play in the background as he scrolls through his phone. He’s not sure what to believe in the articles, but what he reads – real or not – makes him feel sick. Some say she passed away, while some insist she’s still alive. He tries to think about something else. There are soap opera detectives on the television, dressed too much like they’re getting ready for a photoshoot to be believable, discussing a murder like they’re reading Shakespeare.

+

Somewhere behind the screen, or maybe in front of it, or maybe not at all in the room, he watches the woman at the restaurant turn to face him. She seems to be looking at him, but he can’t be sure as her eyes are gone, weeping messes down her cheeks. The pulsing stalks rotate toward him, appear to be watching him.

+

He blinks and finds that the drama has ended. The news chases the scrolling credits. A reporter stands by a police barrier, a blockade set up on a suspiciously empty city street. They say something that Caleb doesn’t register. He’s too busy watching the motion behind the smartly-dressed suit with the mic. Figures stumble behind the barricades, a small group of police clumped cautiously nearby. Caleb notices the twitching stalks before he notices how the figures move. The parasites – that’s what the news calls them – flash and strobe and seem to talk to each other through colors and undulation.

+

The infected are blind, but they move in unison, a wave flowing over the waiting police and crashing around them. They avoid the touch of the officers like a plague, like they are the clean ones, and when the infected are finally tackled, they shriek like they are on fire. Like they are burned by the touch.

+

The woman wasn’t the first case. She isn’t the last.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he first large groups of infected appear a few days later. Caleb stops short on the sidewalk as one passes. Some bystanders shout, but most are as silent as he is, shocked into inaction by the scene.

+

This group numbers in the dozens, maybe even a hundred. It halts traffic, though the infected twirl around the cars with an odd combination of heavy footfalls and grace. Pressing himself against the building behind him, Caleb holds his breath, tries to make himself thinner, smaller. There’s too many of them, they spill off the asphalt and onto the sidewalk. They crest like a tidal wave, and Caleb can’t move as he watches the wave come to consume him. His panicked heart kicks nausea against his throat with every beat. He supposes this is it, this is how he dies. Or whatever he will become after his eyes are shed. He squeezes them closed, as if a thin layer of skin will protect him.

+

The wind of movement sweeps over him and then passes. He is not touched.

+

“Beth!” a man shouts. It’s a high wail, a mix of disbelief and crushing sorrow. Caleb opens his eyes and watches the man jog toward the herd, which has elegantly pirouetted around the onlookers and stalled vehicles. The man picks up his pace, quickening into a sprint as the group continues onward, his cries unheeded.

+

“Beth,” he calls again. “Beth, come back.”

+

Caleb doesn’t know which one of the eyeless things the man is calling to; none of them pause. The man reaches out, fingers brushing a tattered sweatshirt, the only thing he can reach.

+

The one he touches shrieks, and suddenly all of them are screaming, as if the touch carries a risk of infection or pain. They break into a stampede, desperate to get away as the parasitic stalks flash bright warning colors of danger. The screeching is overwhelming, driving Caleb to his knees. The man trips over the sound and falls, splitting his chin and lip against the pavement. Blood splatters the sidewalk, and Caleb feels the visceral flinch, the instinctive reaction. An echo of the flashing eyestalks, and their warning of danger, predator, stay away.

+

The screaming dwindles as the infected flee, the street stunned to silence in their wake. Caleb wants to call Aaron and tell him that he’s scared and could use some company. Instead, he crouches and hangs his head until his breathing finally evens out and the gray clears from his vision.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

H + +e’s in the grocery store when he hears one speak. The horde stumbles through the sliding doors, and the store’s clientele all freeze. Caleb had gone out with the plan to make dinner, invite Aaron, sit down and talk about things. Now, he’s wishing he’d never left and just cooked plain pasta on his old, dirty stove.

+

One stops by his aisle and he drops the jar he’s holding. Thick, clumped jam and fragments of glass splatter across the floor. Those stalks turn, and though there are no eyes he knows that they can sense him. The infected tilts her head, the parasites remaining fixed, still watching.

+

“By yourself?” she asks.

+

And for a moment, her voice echoes in stereo, as the others mimic her question across the store, talking as one unit. A droning cacophony. “Isn’t that lonely?” All of them are talking specifically to him in that moment. Or none of them are.

+

He wants to scream, wants to tell the monstrous thing before him to Get away, leave me alone, it’s none of your business.

+

Instead, he nearly trips as he backpedals down the aisle. The other infected approach; they have a hard time knowing where to place their feet, but they don’t hit anything else. They twist their limbs like the starlings flicked their wings, a dancer’s choreography.

+

The first speaker folds back into the group, unspoken instructions preventing her from hitting the others, and then she is gone with the rest through the big glass doors. The building seems to sigh in the resulting quiet.

+

He should get the rest of his groceries, but he turns tail and goes out the employee entrance, desperate to lower his chance of running into the group again outside. He passes three more wandering masses of infected on his way home, and watches a man fall to his knees across the street. A moment later both eyes are gone, the stalks glistening with something that shines in the evening sunlight, and the closest group closes in around the man, absorbing him into their ranks.

+

Caleb runs back to his apartment, locks the door.

+

He should call Aaron, ask him to come over, ask him to stay. Instead, he watches TV until the news anchors lose their eyes. Until the television stops broadcasting. Until the power shuts off.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +aleb’s used to the muffled mutterings from the hallway by now. His former neighbors occasionally try to talk to him through the door, and he tries not to listen.

+

He made the mistake of opening his door once; Mrs. Mathers on the other side, waiting for him. Her eyestalks twitching. He might have accidentally caught one of her stems when he slammed the door. Her scream was echoed by mouths all across the building, and from the outside, as if he had injured thousands. Caleb has not reopened the door after that to check, no matter how many knocks there had been. No matter how many quiet pleas and placations had slithered through the gaps in the wood.

+

“Caleb?”

+

He startles at Aaron’s quiet voice, muted by the thick barrier. For a moment, he is sure he is imagining it.

+

“Caleb, are you in there?”

+

It’s Aaron’s precise tone, harsh edges of words softened with a simple authority, used in courtrooms and official phone calls. Caleb doesn’t hear it echoed, but he hasn’t heard movement in the hall in a while and can’t be sure he’s not just hearing what he wants to. He gets up and tries to noiselessly shuffle to the door. Curses when his toes catch the edge of the empty soup can that he hadn’t bothered to clean up.

+

For a moment, there is only silence on either side.

+

“Are you okay? Caleb, I need you to answer me.”

+

The voice is so sincere that Caleb wants to cry. He opens his mouth to respond.

+

“Can you let me in?”

+

His jaw snaps shut. Is Aaron asking because he’s afraid? Or because he wants Caleb out in the hallway? Unprotected.

+

“Caleb, let me in,” Aaron begs.

+

Caleb imagines himself opening the door, imagines Aaron falling into his waiting arms. Instead, he retreats to the couch, pulls the comforter around him, and pictures strobing stalks where Aaron’s beautiful eyes used to be. He won’t open the door because he doesn’t know which Aaron waits for him.

+

Eventually, Aaron leaves, whether under his own power or swept up into the swarm, Caleb doesn’t know. He tries to ignore the sliding of his shoes along the carpeted hallway. It sounds so much like worms sifting through dirt.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

C + +aleb runs out of food three weeks into the outbreak – two weeks after the television dissolves into static and one week after the power finally goes out. Three days after Aaron leaves. He holds out for two more days, curling around hunger pains as his body starts to feast on its own fat and muscle. But then the water stops running, and it’s the burning, craze-inducing thirst that eventually drives him to unlock the door.

+

The hallway remains eerily still, apartment doors closed tightly or hanging open, revealing slivers of dark abyss. He glances out the hall windows and only finds empty streets.

+

One of the abandoned apartments at the end of his floor flooded some time before the water stopped, a broken sink faucet the culprit. Not caring about the moldy smell of standing water, he collapses to his knees on the kitchen tiles and palms it into his sticky mouth again and again. The water coils like a cold snake in his stomach, but finally pushes back the beast of thirst enough for him to think. The building is so quiet, no creaking hints of footsteps, no muted murmurs of conversation. It’s oppressive, and he pushes himself up, wipes at his damp jeans, and returns to the humid stairwell.

+

When he stumbles out onto the street, it feels decidedly emptier than his apartment; Caleb finds it crowded with abandoned cars and trash, but that only emphasizes the absence of people. He wants to call out, see if anyone answers, but isn’t brave enough. What if his voice brings a surge of parasitic bodies?

+

Stifling his harsh breathing, he searches building after building. Finds no one. Scavenges food behind open doors and imagines rotting, long forgotten meals behind closed ones. Eats standing, nervous, but finally able to think.

+

He wants to organize, gather up a pack of supplies to survive in the wild like every apocalyptic movie he’s seen. He wants to find other people, other survivors, and gather them together. He wants to rebuild society – its life, its chaos. Its all-pervading crowds. He doesn’t know what he wants.

+

He wants Aaron.

+

Caleb backtracks to his old sedan and manages to weave through the congestion of an abandoned city and its silent cars, monolithic towers looming down over him.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +aron’s house sits on the edge of the woods, and while Caleb has to maneuver around dozens of deserted vehicles, he sees no one else on his way there. No one with eyes. No one without. He pulls his car into the driveway and finds Aaron’s vehicle parked.

+

He thinks of Aaron’s soft voice on the other side of his door and desperately clutches to the hope that Aaron is alright – that he, like Caleb, held out just long enough to survive. An acidic burn crawls up the back of his throat as he steps out of his car; he should have let Aaron in.

+

Forcing back the intrusive what ifs, he tries the front door and finds it locked. He looks under the rusting planter for the spare key, but Aaron has moved it at some point. That hurts, matters more than it should in all of this chaos. He pounds on the door first, begging Aaron to come to the entrance, but no one answers. In a panic, he heaves a rock from the garden through the beautiful bay window and uses his shirt sleeve to gingerly knock away the shards of glass. He crawls, ungainly and heavily, into the kitchen where he used to drink coffee and stare out at the swaying trees while Aaron cooked breakfast on Saturdays.

+

A framed picture of the two of them rests on its back on the kitchen table. It’s too easy to imagine Aaron hunched over it. Around it, a halo of dried blood and some other, unidentifiable fluid mar the polished wood. Caleb doesn’t want to think about whether Aaron’s involuntary tears were cried before or after he came to Caleb’s apartment.

+

The sudden loneliness surges over him, surprising and crushing in its force. He can’t have Aaron. Now he just wants anyone.

+

A subtle quake tremors through the floorboards. Caleb feels it in the soles of his feet. A dull, quiet murmuring builds outside, like the cresting of cicada calls in summer. Something large approaches – a slow stampede. He rushes to the front door and unlocks the deadbolt.

+

He steps out onto the stoop.

+

The infected move in the largest herd he’s seen, so many bodies that he could never hope to count. Their feet move in a coordinated march, creating the low roar. There are stooped elders, young children, men and women, all twisting and spinning in and out of smaller groups, and all the while a sea of eyestalks oscillate an oil spill of colors. Caleb can’t understand them, but they understand each other; that much is obvious.

+

There must be thousands. Hundreds of thousands. An entire city in exodus, an entire civilization but Caleb, and Aaron must be in there.

+

In that moment, Caleb makes his decision.

+

Caleb sprints after the ambling group, shoes kicking up loose asphalt as he surges past their easy gait. He races down the road, with the ponderous stampede of worn shoes and bare feet mere yards to his left. He glances at the faces as he passes, hoping to catch sight of Aaron. There are too many of them, and he can’t pause to look in fear of being left behind.

+

Up ahead, the road opens to a meadow and the thick forest border beyond. The first infected reach the treeline, startling a flock of starlings from the canopy. The birds whirl and chirp in the air above him, and Caleb grows desperate, knowing this is his last chance. If he doesn’t join them now, he’ll lose them among the trees, weighed down by the thick underbrush.

+

He cuts diagonally toward the crowd, pushing his thundering heart and burning muscles, and then he’s in. Sliding to a stop in the middle of all the heat and heartbeats, he bites back a sob and spreads his arms, reaching out and upward, like he wants to be lifted up, carried away. Eyes open, desperate for one last glance at the golds and coppers of the early autumn leaves before he loses his sight, he waits to be drawn in.

+

The horde splits down the middle, like a biblical sea, and flows to either side of him. Thousands of eyestalks pulsate a dazzling strobe of colors, confusing him as he attempts to grab at them. They pick up their speed, gliding past his flailing, searching hands.

+

“Please,” he begs, even as he stumbles and falls. No one catches him, and he grinds his teeth against the flare of pain as he hits the ground. He throws out his hand, and there is an arm so close. Just a few more steps, a little farther, and he’ll be able to reach, be able to wrap his fingers around flesh. Be able to connect.

+

The throngs of infected pull away, swirl and twist, break and rejoin. A beautiful dance, coordinated by some underlying instinct that he can’t understand. He reaches out again, but it is too late. They avoid his touch, pinwheeling into shapes that make him dizzy. He is not welcome – he is an outsider, a predator, and they take safety in numbers. They continue to pirouette around him, waves breaking on a dry shore, streaming into the forest, leaving him alone in their midst in the middle of the field.

+

Overhead, a hawk screeches – not in flight, but perched in a dead tree, confounded by the starlings swooping around. Caleb sits among the tall grass and listens to the raptor keen, wants to think he’s relieved that everything seems to finally be over and that he has survived.

+

Wishes instead that he felt a scratching behind his eyes.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of Murmurations at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

A.M. Sutter

+

+ + Author image of A.M. Sutter + + + A.M. Sutter grew up in the beautiful mountains of Central Pennsylvania and has been fascinated with storytelling ever since she snuck downstairs as a child to watch* The Twilight Zone with her father. She currently works as a zoo and exotic animal veterinarian, and the unique experiences in this field serve as inspiration for her writing. Her works appear in multiple anthologies and fiction magazines, and she is a member of the Horror Writers Association. Whenever she’s not arm-deep in tiger guts or elephant poop, she enjoys hiking with her Shih Tzu, who fully believes he is a wolf. Find her at www.amsutter.com.

+

© A.M. Sutter 2025 All Rights Reserved.

+

The title picture was created using a Creative Commons image by Darius Krause - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-43/short-reviews-july-to-september-2025.html b/issue-43/short-reviews-july-to-september-2025.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1fff7627 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/short-reviews-july-to-september-2025.html @@ -0,0 +1,326 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

Short Reviews – July to September, 2025

+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for Short Reviews – July to September, 2025 by +
+ + + + +

I + + noticed an unfairness: that, with our Winter issues primarily given over to crime (and our final slew of short reviews being focused on short crime fiction only), any genre fic published in October, November, and December was excluded from these short reviews.

+

In 2026 I’ll rectify this oversight, with the Spring round up reaching back to cover October to January, Summer taking February to May, and Autumn wrapping up the twelve months with June to September, and the Winter issue continuing to pick at the calendar year’s criminal offerings.

+

As for right now, here are our recommendations for recent spec-fic shorts available at the mere click of a link – all three of them bite-sized flash stories you can enjoy in just a few minutes.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

B + +ree Wernicke’s flash story Five Different Realities to Explore, and One to Avoid covers a hell of a lot of ground for less than a thousand words: loyal service, unrequited love, alcoholism, the disdain of one’s peers, parallel universes, demonology… what hasn’t it got?

+

It appears in Orion’s Belt, a literary speculative-fiction online magazine which specialises in “the strange and poignant and awe-inspiring, stories that have a cosmic scale and intimate personal stakes”. Although “awe-inspiring” is a pretty big ask for almost anything, so let’s set that demanding claim to one side for now, otherwise this seems to perfectly encapsulate everything they look for in a story.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he previous story makes a passing mention of succubi, and the next – in NewMyths – certainly occupies proximal conceptual space, involving one of those supernatural entities which, like the oh-so-always vampire, want something most vital from the current human subject of their interest.

+

Getting to Know You sets itself apart in a couple of ways, not most in that the being it gives us isn’t so familiar it feels clichéd before we even find out what author Clarissa Grunwald is going to do with it. “Being” is, in fact, the best word to describe it.

+

And it was no slip to say “not most”, by the way. The twist in the tale gives this one a special hint of urgency that is as pleasing as the moment we find out what is at hand.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

L + +ast but by no means least, we turn to Metastellar, whose writers and readers are encouraged to “wander to the limits of what could be”. Rick Danforth responded to this boundless invitation by sticking to the worryingly probable, with a story we would have had to turn down at Mythaxis since we go entirely advertising-free.

+

Adverts takes place between stations on a subway somewhere in a future that is surely just a matter of time. As anyone who uses it knows, public transport has long been a key ecological niche for ads to flourish in – there’s no audience as appealing to a marketeer as one with no choice but to sit there and take it. The real trick is achieving engagement; if this story proves prophetic, then some ground-breaking campaign might even make that the next step… literally.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of any of these pieces at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Andrew Leon Hudson

+

+ + Author image of Andrew Leon Hudson + + + Andrew is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. In addition to editing Mythaxis he has been published in a small handful of quality zines, and co-authored a serialised alternate history adventure novel. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and doesn’t do things online often enough to count.

+

© Andrew Leon Hudson 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The image is by grandfailure via DepositPhotos.com.

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-43/the-sugar-wife.html b/issue-43/the-sugar-wife.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..fa43f71c --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/the-sugar-wife.html @@ -0,0 +1,356 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Sugar Wife — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Sugar Wife

+

Christina Ladd

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Sugar Wife by +
+ + + + + + +

O + +nce there was a baker who wished to wed. Normally it is not difficult for a man of this profession to find a wife. After all, everyone needs their daily bread. But this man was no prize: the sugar of his cakes had rotted most of his teeth, and whether to avoid unsettling his customers or simply out of natural sullenness, he never smiled.

+

The baker made a few clumsy inquiries to those above his station, but his offers were rebuffed, and he was too proud and too well-off to ask for those who might have him. Sullen with rejection, he poured his resentments into his work, pummeling his doughs and stoking his oven ever hotter.

+

But of course, this is the way of baking: his doughs only rose higher, and in the ovens only became more darkly golden. The more he whipped his creams, the more their froth overflowed like lace; the more furiously he stirred his custards, the silkier their texture.

+

As anyone of achievement will tell you, though, success is not satisfaction. If anything, it is a goad: he had enough, and therefore he had time to contemplate what others had, and want it for himself.

+

The baker did not want love, or to share his life. He only wanted a woman to call his own, his and no other’s, who would lessen his labor and do the tasks he did not want to do. And why should he not have it? He had wealth, and he was skilled – far more than most who passed through his door.

+

Yes, perhaps this was a matter of skill. A man like him, why should he settle for less than he himself could achieve? He deserved no less. And he would make it so.

+

In a mood equal parts fury and delight, the baker began his great work: he would make a wife.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

F + +irst, he would need structure. He thought of gingerbread and nut brittle, a favorite for confectionary architecture, but dismissed them. Such things were costly, and who wanted a wife with expensive tastes baked into her very bones? Instead, he took cheap flour, salt, and water, and began kneading a simple bread. He himself ate well, and knew that bones from the butcher were honeycombed inside. He shaped bone-loaves in imitation, allowing them to rise just a little before punching them down, twisting them into the forms he required. Then he baked them very hard, until the crust was thick and nearly black. When he hefted one, it was sturdy. It would not crumble or shatter but— yes, if he tried, he could break it across his knee. Good. He wanted use from this wife, and strength, but only if it was less than his own.

+

On the next day, he started on the real task: making a pleasing form. Around those black bones he sculpted flesh of sweet marzipan, fragrant and pliable. Thick arms to heft sacks of flour and trays of cakes for him, wide hips to balance jugs of milk or oil. As is true of those who are made to feel ugly, he knew beauty better than most, and he made her as lovely as could be.

+

In his process, during a moment of reflection, he also scooped out a hole on her chest, a rough fistful. It would not do for his wife to lack a heart. But the baker had little interest in hearts, and so he put no care into shaping it, only found a jar of red fruits steeped in brandy and tipped them into the little cavity. There: a crimson mush, sharply sweet. It would never beat, but it would bleed if need be.

+

He covered the hole with more marzipan, and took far more care in sculpting the breasts atop it.

+

When she was formed to his standards, he considered the question of her skin. It was the way at the time for women to be pale, and so he knew how he would proceed: he would make meringue, white as porcelain.

+

The baker broke egg after egg, discarding the golden yolk in favor of the slime, until he had a sloshing bowlful. This he whipped and whipped, grim with glee, until it was time to add the sugar. Because he did not want to risk a wife with cracks or uneven colors in her skin, he would not bake the meringue. Instead he boiled sugar, and when it was ready, he poured it into the eggy foam to cook it from the inside out.

+

A sugar burn is a burn like no other, for the syrup gets much hotter than even boiling water, and when it strikes a surface it pools and clings, so that even when wiped away, it continues to burn.

+

If she was beginning to live, her first feeling would be agony.

+

But oh, how lovely the meringue became, an unstained white he spread quite delicately over the marzipan form. He smoothed it until there was not one dollop or peak, only unbroken softness. For those moments, and in the final hours of crafting her final touches, he was almost tender.

+

He gave her marshmallowy skin into which he could sink his fingers. Spun sugar hair, the pale gold of just-turned caramel. Slivers of almond for nails. Globes of clear sugar for eyes, set with chocolate discs, milk for the iris and the bitterest dark for the pupils. Pink rosebud lips, and below them, pink rosebud nipples. And lower still, a darker red, deepened with chocolate and salt, layered in luscious excess. He panted as he piped it, nearly stopping, but he knew that whatever was building in this room would abandon him if he paused to indulge himself. So he left the thick, frilling walls of sweetness for later, pausing only to lick his fingers. He found the taste very much to his liking.

+

At dusk on the third day, it was finished, she was finished. His greatest creation; his sugar wife. In a moment of clumsy tenderness, he kissed her lips – only to come away with no more than icing paste on his own.

+

She did not wake.

+

It might have ended there, if the baker had not mastered his rage. He might have smashed up her confectionary corpse, and devoured the slaughter for a week of suppers.

+

But something stopped him – a selfish pain, of course. A sharp throb from one of his mouldering teeth. And as the agony lanced straight into his brain, he realized what else he might do to bring his bride to life.

+

For three days he had brutalized the elements of his craft to bring forth perfection. Boiling and beating, pressing and churning, scorching and scalding. Every ingredient of his would-be wife made by methods that, had she even a single nerve, would have been such fine, fine torture.

+

But there was yet more pain he could give her.

+

With tongs intended to remove pans from the fire, he began to wrench the teeth from his mouth.

+

The first he took and howled, the relief from its constant ache no salve to this sharp new anguish. Wiser for the next, he gathered all his steeping liquors. He held each gulp in his mouth as long as he could, macerated his rotten teeth in blood and spirits, and then swallowed the gunk and did it again, until his mouth and his nerves were as numb as he could get them. Then he recommenced pulling.

+

When he was done, there were seventeen teeth on a tray, and through the haze of pain and drunkenness he had never felt better. He spat blood and set to work.

+

Thirteen teeth he pressed into her mouth, a baker’s dozen as even as he could make them. The remaining four he used for her adornments: two for her ears, vile ivory studs, and one for her throat, strung on a shred of pastry like a rancid pearl. And the last for her finger, for a bride should have a ring. This most rotten tooth, grimed with blood and decay, glittered most of all.

+

He wiped his mouth. It was done now. She was done. Black-boned and white-fleshed, with a smile of rotting teeth. The embers breathed upon the stove, and the shadows flickered.

+

“Wife,” he whispered, voice thick with gore.

+

The embers hissed as if spattered with liquid, and extinguished themselves. The shadows clotted like overwhipped cream.

+

“Sweetness,” he whispered, as he had heard other men call their wives. His mouth filled again with blood, even though it had been ebbing. He felt lightheaded, and could not muster the energy to spit, only opened his lips and let it dribble out. The stink of iron muddled the scents of yeast and sugar, but strangely it did not offend. The effect was rich. Enticing.

+

A name. She needs a name. He knew little of what to call her, other than what she was. “Sugar,” he said, his blood curdled as buttermilk, overflowing his lips now in chunks.

+

The darkness of the room was complete, but somehow it only served to make Sugar brighter, her white skin shining. And brighter still was her smile, so brutally sweet it could crush your heart to crumbs.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

T + +he baker did not die that night; like his own confections, he lingered on the tongue. The gossips prattled at length about his sudden illness and equally sudden bride, fetched, it seemed, from out of town.

+

No suspicion fell on Sugar when he died soon after; if anyone mentioned that she had driven him to an early grave, it was with a wink and a chuckle.

+

And what luck it was, they said, for the sweet young thing, that such a sour old husband should leave her so soon, and with such a fine business to inherit. There would be no shortage of customers or suitors for that one, especially since her pastries were even finer than her late husband’s. Cake as light as lies, ganache as deep as shipwrecks, custards as rich as any king’s coffers.

+

Every indulgence was deeper and sharper somehow, for Sugar understood the lancing tartness of citrus, the wincing bitterness of chocolate, and even the burning fire of spice.

+

Each pain, after all, served to enhance the sweetness.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Sugar Wife at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Christina Ladd

+

+ + Author image of Christina Ladd + + + Christina Ladd (she/her) is a writer and editor living in Minneapolis. She will eventually die crushed under a pile of books, but until then she survives on a concerning amount of tea and carbs. Find more of her writing at christinaladd.com.

+

© Christina Ladd 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using Creative Commons images by Shiny Diamond and Fernando Lacerda Branco - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
+
+ + + + + Menu +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + diff --git a/issue-43/the-twelve-blackened-slippers.html b/issue-43/the-twelve-blackened-slippers.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..312ac2f5 --- /dev/null +++ b/issue-43/the-twelve-blackened-slippers.html @@ -0,0 +1,468 @@ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The Twelve Blackened Slippers — Mythaxis Magazine Issue 43 — MYTHAXIS MAGAZINE + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+
+
+ +

The Twelve Blackened Slippers

+

Siobhan Ekeh

+ +
+ + +
+ Story image for The Twelve Blackened Slippers by +
+ + + + + + +

K + +ara’s girls are disappearing and she’s just about had enough of it.

+

Well, okay, to be fair to them, they always end up being right where they’re supposed to be, but Kara knows, she knows when she leaves their room after tucking them in at night, even when she locks the door, that they get away somehow.

+

“It was the shoes that tipped me off,” she tells Yira, who also tends not to be in the same place from one second to the next, but that’s more a mental condition than a physical one. “In the mornings there’s started to be this black sludge caked over their outsoles. I keep washing it off and it leaves a stain. Then, the next morning it’s back again. What the fuck, right? They’re so sinister sometimes, those three. I get the creeps when they all look at me at once. Whenever I ask them a question they just laugh.”

+

Yira smiles sympathetically. She’s trying to read and wishes her sister would quit complaining. Kara should just be grateful those girls are so well-mannered and academically successful. Demanding that they be completely unsinister in addition to all that seems unrealistic. “We were like that at their age, too. Secretive.”

+

“You were. I was normal.”

+

Kara is still normal. A successful modelling career in her early twenties set her up for a very regular American life: a mid-century Victorian home retrofitted as an open-floor modern farmhouse, a crusty white terrier, three daughters (which isn’t as normal as one daughter and one son, but hey, she tried her best), a husband who manages data or something, and a second career as a social media lifestyle content creator.

+

Kara isn’t really cut from a motherly cloth, if there is such a thing, and she does find the girls hard to stomach at this age. But up until now she’s enjoyed her neat little life almost to the point of excess. Maybe one person should not get to enjoy so many things to such an extravagant degree.

+

Kara stretches across the couch in her white Lulu Lemon tracksuit with a glass of chilled rosé and considers her less-than-normal counterpart. “You’re going to have to do me a favor, Yira.”

+

“Am I?”

+

“The girls trust you. You’re like one of them. They look up to you, for whatever reason.” It baffles Kara that young women would rather take cues from an unemployed spinster with a failed fine arts career than a successful, happily married businesswoman, but far be it from her to disallow her daughters from any kind of ambition they might stretch their willowy necks towards, even if she doesn’t understand it herself.

+

The girls must see themselves in the melancholy Yira projects across her presence in America. The family was forced to flee the Niger Delta when Kara and Yira were only teens, arriving with nothing left to lose except each other. Since then, Kara has thrived exactly where she was re-planted glad to shake free the slick of that polluted land, whereas Yira never fully recovered from that initial uprooting. The loss of the land, the farm. And most of all, the loss of Kisi, the missing piece without whom this new place could never become home to Yira.

+

The girls, yes, they are like Yira. Disbelonged. Ghostly. “You’ll find out where they’re going, won’t you?”

+

Yira closes her book. She’s long been a harbor for her nieces’ secrets, some big, some small. Usually, Kara doesn’t ask what the girls are up to, so Yira doesn’t tell. But now… well. Her allegiance to the girls can’t surpass that which she retains towards her older sister. Yira has always lived in Kara’s house, has always eaten Kara’s food. Kara asks for almost nothing in return, because she knows Yira has almost nothing to give her, but also because she wants for nothing. Now, for once, she wants something she can’t have. Something Yira may be able to obtain. “I’ll try,” says Yira. “No promises.”

+

That night, Yira reads to her nieces before bed. Although the house is massive, the girls prefer to sleep in the same room, three beds arranged in an asterisk at the center. Yira sits in the triangle between the beds. Osila lies on her back, converting Yira’s words to images on the ceiling, Nua unravels a loose thread on her nightgown sleeve and forgets to listen, and Lera reads several lines ahead over Yira’s shoulder. Yira closes the book before the chapter is done and all three roll onto their stomachs to fix her with a six-eyed glare.

+

“Girls,” says Yira. “Your mother is concerned about the state of your shoes. She’d like to know why they’re so dirty.”

+

“Concerned?”

+

“If she’d like to know then—”

+

“—she should really just ask.”

+

Yira has grown used to this, all three of them talking as if projecting their voices into each other’s mouths, one moving lips while the sound comes from another direction. She can see why Kara finds it off-putting. “She says you all laugh at her when she asks questions.”

+

“She asks so strangely—”

+

“—well, funnily, it’s funny—”

+

“—how she seems afraid of the answer.”

+

“It’s rude to laugh at your mother,” Yira says. “Anyhow, she buys you such nice shoes. You ought to take better care of them.”

+

“The shoes, who cares about stupid shoes.” This one has come from Lera, squarely. “We have a million pairs each.”

+

“Okay, fine. The shoes aren’t really the problem,” Yira admits. “Where have you been going at night? You girls know you aren’t allowed out after dark.”

+

“Oh, yes, well—”

+

“—you’ll be happy to hear—”

+

“—it isn’t dark where we go.”

+

“You should come along, in fact!”

+

“Auntie, you should—”

+

“—you’d like it there.”

+

Yira flushes, flattered to have been asked in spite of herself. “Well, if you insist.”

+

The girls share a circling grin and spring forth from their beds to don their stained slippers. They coalesce chain-linked across the small bathroom adjoined to their bedroom. Yira finds herself across this chain in three links, one to each girl, and has only one free limb, a left leg which feels abandoned. Lera, the right arm of this big new body, plugs the bath and runs the water. The tub fills, a rising mirror, revealing inch by inch the faces, chins, and necks of a four-headed girl.

+

“Oh, this is good, I think…”

+

“…yeah, very…”

+

“…symmetrical, right?”

+

The girls spring a leak of giggles as the tub fills to the very brim, a skin of clinging molecules sealing the water inside.

+

“What are we laughing about?” Yira asks.

+

“Oh, not about anything,” says Osila.

+

The tub full, the girls fall forward, or maybe just one does and drags the rest. Yira hardly has the chance to take a deep breath before her head breaks the surface.

+

The mirror repeats, surface and bottom, a pane of glass through which to shatter again and again, upside right then right side down. Yira sees herself beneath and above herself. She looks surprised, and the girls look pleased, amused even.

+

By virtue of the girls landing on their feet, Yira also lands upright, dragged along out of the water and into a gentle dawn. Water streams from her hair and shoulders and drops with gentle reverberations into the surface of the river around her knees.

+

The river, the river, the river. Yira knows this river. This is the river that ran along the farmland of her childhood, where her mother scrubbed dirt stains from playclothes, where her cousins crouched and waited stone-like for fish to fill their nets. That river was subsumed decades ago by thousands of barrels of spilled oil. That river grew a sheen of fuel, caught fire and burned for years, taking with it almost everything Yira had ever held dear. The girls break their chain and Yira falls with nothing to hold her upright. The river accepts her into its shallow embrace, and as the surface closes over her again she leans her cheek close to its silty chest. She closes her eyes.

+

Something touches her nose and Yira opens her eyes to find her own face doubled before her as if she’d pressed her forehead to a mirror: dark skin, round cheeks, twelve shiny braids buoying up to the surface. Yira sputters out of the water and the other person does too, but she is laughing where Yira is almost choking. Yira steps back and the other girl leans closer, squinting. “Mama, is that you? You’re here, I knew you would come!”

+

“Kisi?” Yira stumbles back, unnerved, because she has seen Kisi many times since her sister’s death, but never so clearly defined as she sees her now: solid as gold, scarred on her forehead where their father once hit her with a stone for stealing sugar from the kitchen. Their noses had touched – Kisi is no apparition, she is so solid that when she reaches for Yira’s wrist, Yira cannot get away.

+

“It’s me,” she says. “Yira.”

+

“Yira?” Kisi looks her over and starts to smile. “It is, isn’t it? You’ve gotten old.”

+

“And you haven’t.” Yira doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

+

She opens her arms and her sister falls into them. No, Kisi hasn’t aged a day. Her skin remains dark and smooth as tourmaline, her hair black as a smoke cloud where Yira’s has gone rainstorm silver.

+

Kisi pulls back, her smile traded for wide-eyed concern. “Why are you here? You haven’t…?”

+

“No, no. I’m…” Yira can’t bring herself to say alive, to imply that Kisi is in fact dead. She looks around but doesn’t see her nieces. “Kara’s daughters brought me here.”

+

“Oh. Those girls.” Kisi presses her lips together. “I see them sometimes.”

+

“You do? Have you spoken to them?”

+

“They don’t like to talk to me.” Kisi points to the water’s surface. Instead of her own reflection, Yira sees her three nieces, floating lazily with their hands cuffed around each other’s wrists. “They don’t want to hear what I try to tell them.”

+

“What do you tell them?”

+

“I’ve tried to warn them, and I’ll warn you now.” Kisi holds onto Yira hard, her gaze becoming intense. “You cannot stay here. The way you think of this place, how you remember it, is not the way it is.”

+

“What do you mean, Kisi?”

+

“The sky is blue, the water is clear, the sun is shining, for you.” Kisi shivers. “But after dark… this is a terrible place. The sky crumbles. The water turns to poison. The fire ignites again and again and again.”

+

“That sounds horrible. I wish I could take you back with me.”

+

Kisi pulls Yira down into the water again. “I’ll show you.” She submerges and takes her sister with her.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

O + +nce again Yira is enveloped by the river of her childhood, the unseen shape of the memories she re-inhabits through dreams, drawings, and retelling. The green of this water is the scaly surface into which Yira’s grandfather sank fishing nets over the side of his creaky old plank canoe. The softness of this silt is the finishing line for Yira, Kara, and Kisi’s swimming races, which Kisi always won thanks to her long legs. These raffia palms are glorious baskets of shade under which so many hours of sleep slipped away…

+

Until the fish began washing up dead.

+

Until the silt turned black.

+

Until the raffia palms wilted and crumbled.

+

Until fires bloomed from the spilled oil.

+

The embrace of the river tightens to a strangle, and although Yira opens her eyes she sees nothing. The brilliant crystal of the water has gone opaque. An acrid taste fills her mouth and the heaviness of this new, black water crushes her.

+

Six strong hands dredge Yira’s body from the river bed, shaking and prodding her. The girls thump Yira’s back and a flood of water projects from her mouth. Eyes still stinging and blurry, she can’t make out if the water she spits is black or clear.

+

“Stand up, Yira…”

+

“…you aren’t a fish, you know…”

+

“…and even if you want to be…”

+

“…you haven’t got any gills.”

+

Yira blinks and finds the river once again beautiful, water going periwinkle under the closing eye of the sun. The raffia palms rustle together like plotting sets of hands and the silt feels soft as powdered sugar under her toes. Kisi is gone. The three girls shade Yira from the sun like the walls of a tent.

+

“Do you like it here, Yira?” Osila asks, brushing some silt from her aunt’s cheek.

+

“We thought you would.”

+

“We hope you do.”

+

“I do,” says Yira. “It’s just like—”

+

“Home?”

+

“Yes, we think so too…”

+

“…just like the home we’ve always wanted.”

+

Just like the home Yira’s always wanted to return to.

+

“We’d like to live here forever,” says Osila, her mouth only moving in her reflection.

+

“We’d like this to be our home,” Lera clarifies.

+

“You could stay here with us, dear Yira,” Nua offers.

+

“Yes, you could…”

+

“…that would be nice. Very, you know…”

+

“…symmetrical, right?”

+

Stay here. Forever. That’s what Yira’s always wanted, isn’t it? This is where she has lived all her life, anyway. She’s never really been anywhere else. Her heart hasn’t. Her mind hasn’t, even if her body has.

+

“But…” she says, Kisi’s words ringing in her ears.

+

“But?”

+

“But.”

+

“But!”

+

“…but this is a place that no longer exists.”

+

“Well, I mean, existing…”

+

“…what really exists? Nothing much…”

+

“…or nothing good, anyway.”

+

This, Yira can develop no argument against. So, the girls pass the evening playing and splashing in the water while Yira submerges her head again and again, searching for evidence of decay.

+

When the sun finally dips to the horizon, the girls reassemble, easy as stitches knitted by three quick twists of a needle. Yira hesitates. “Have you ever stayed after dark?” she asks. The sky darkens to cobalt.

+

“Oh, no,” says one girl, and in the waning light it might be any of them, or all three.

+

“Kara wouldn’t like that, would she,” says another.

+

“No, she’d surely send us off…”

+

“…to some kind of boarding school, I think…”

+

“…the military, maybe…”

+

“…and we’ve already been gone too long.”

+

“Hm. Alright.” Yira drags herself in a slow circle, stalling a minute more as the sun slips behind the trees.

+

“We should go,” says one girl, nervousness creeping in.

+

“Yes, just one second…” The last of the light fades, the darkness turning the river into an inkwell. In lieu of a flashlight to inspect the water, Yira opts to put her head under and take another taste. But just as she starts to submerge, Yira finds herself looped into the pattern the girls have made, arm over arm, leg under leg, and has her balance pulled out from under her by a great synchronized dive. This time, the water is no mirror, only the black of dreamless sleep, which breaks solid and painless over Yira’s head like a prop vase.

+

Yira and her nieces break in four again on the bathroom floor. The girls scurry like roaches. Six ruined slippers swell together by the door and delicate feet tap three times each across the carpet, and disappear into the welcoming pockets of spotless white sheets.

+

Yira picks up her own slippers and switches on the bathroom light. She is clean, save for her feet. There is no mark where her cheek touched the bottom of the oily river. Her slippers have taken on a slick, black carapace that comes away on her fingers but leaves dark stains behind.

+

It’s just dawn now. The softest blue light presses around the corners of the bedroom curtains. The girls have gone invisible beneath their sheets, wrapped up like embalmed bodies. Yira turns off the bathroom light and cannot stop thinking, You could stay here with us, dear Yira…

+

When Yira opens the bedroom door, Kara is there with coffee and an eager strain in her eye. She didn’t sleep a wink last night – how could she? She spent the night scrolling through New-England-Chic dinner party concepts on Pinterest, barely able to contain herself from bursting into her daughters’ room, demanding to see whatever Yira was being let in on. It’s eating her now, the seconds of Yira’s silence prickling away like hours.

+

“So?” she demands. Her gaze catches on Yira’s dirty slippers. “Tell me.”

+

Her sister accepts the coffee and beckons her to the kitchen, where she begins making an infuriatingly slow pot of oatmeal. The oats have been boiled, cooled, consumed, and the dishes done before Yira finally speaks.

+

“They don’t go away to disturb you, your girls,” she says.

+

“Oh, don’t they?”

+

“No. They aren’t troublemakers. They only go out looking for some kind of peace.”

+

“Yira, I’ve been plenty patient with you. Quit it with the riddles and tell me where they took you.”

+

“I’d like to tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

+

“Oh, Yira.” Kara sighs deeply, annoyance rushing in where anticipation had been buoying her up all night. “If you want me to believe you, then say something believable. I’m begging you.”

+

Yira bristles with indignity – her sister has never believed in any world that isn’t the one she inhabits. That’s why the world didn’t end for Kara when she was forced to leave home. For Kara, that world, home, ceased to be real the moment she left it.

+

Yira opens her mouth, unsure if she’s about to tell her sister the unbelievable truth, but she never has to make that decision. The apparition of two out of three nieces cuts her short. Osila and Lera appear in the door frame full-moon-eyed, casting frightened glances over each other’s shoulders.

+

Kara shudders, a startled hand pressed over her heart. “Girls, you should really try making some noise before you come into a room. Footsteps or something.”

+

The girls only look at Yira.

+

“Something’s wrong—”

+

“—yes, something must have…”

+

And there is no third sinister shadow to finish the sentence, so there is no way to know what must have happened except to follow the girls down the hall.

+

At their bedroom, Osila and Lera stand in the door frame but won’t go inside.

+

Kara shoves past everyone the way she always has whenever crises occur, whenever a shoulder has come out of place at a gymnastics meet, whenever a hand has slipped from monkey bars, whenever a cough has turned into a choke. She is there in three steps, down on her knees at Nua’s bedside, ready to comfort, ready to fix.

+

But.

+

It isn’t Nua in this bed at all, but someone who should not – cannot – be there. From Nua’s pillow blinks a face that seizes Kara’s heart mid-beat.

+

Yira comes up behind and freezes. “Kisi?”

+

In the doorway, Yira’s nieces are reduced to nonverbal hysterics without their third component. As if some vital cord has been removed from their throats. As if it was only from watching Nua talk that they’d ever been able to figure out how to form words at all.

+

“Kisi, what are you doing here?” Yira asks.

+

Kisi sits up in Nua’s bed, looking pleased. And it is Kisi, for sure: twelve shiny braids, sweet round cheeks, glittering eyelids, a dot of brown in the white of her eye. Yira runs her finger along that sugar-thief scar on her forehead to be certain.

+

Kara speaks to her daughters but can’t look away from Kisi. “Where is your sister?”

+

The faces of the girls clearly scream, Wouldn’t we like to know!

+

Kara is too engrossed in the details of Kisi’s face to see her daughters. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

+

“I’ve missed you, little sister.”

+

“You’re here,” says Kara. “How are you here? You’re dead.”

+

“Oh yes, I was.” Kisi nods gravely. “I was in a terrible, terrible place. I’m so glad to be out of there.”

+

Although this older generation of sisters refuse to look at the younger ones behind them, they can all hear a sound fighting to get out of those two throats. It sounds like a choke, like Nuh… Nuh…

+

Yira speaks for them. “Nua. Where is Nua?”

+

Kisi blinks at her youngest sister. “She said she’d like to stay forever and you said you wished you could bring me back with you. So I thought…”

+

The two girls know now where the rest of them has gone, and they do not care one bit for confusion or begging. Their slippers are on and the bathroom door shut, leaving three sisters on one side and three on the other. The girls fill the tub and launch inside without a thought to the banging and shouting of their mother and aunt on the other side.

+

Orbit-sml ><

+

A + +nd yes, this time something is different about the water. It tastes acrid like gasoline and slides slick over their skin, collecting on eyelashes and clinging to arm hairs, sticking together lips and eyelids. Warm, crushing, it suffocates, and they sit up gasping for air that is hot as a furnace and no less acrid than the sludge they have crested out of. Osila drags black gunk from her eyelashes and finds their paradise ash-black, the water, the sky, the trees, all of it, coated in a sooty grime that fills her lungs and threatens to choke her on every breath.

+

There is no sun or moon. Just a great flare of orange rising to the east, boiling the water at the mouth of the river, painting a sickly brownish glow along the horizon. Beside her, Lera is a statue of black granite, no features, only oil.

+

Osila wipes her sister’s eyes and pulls her to her feet. The two cling to each other, wanting to call for Nua but afraid that to open their mouths would be to attract whatever demons might hide in the dark remnants of these burnt-up trees.

+

They trudge towards the sound of weeping – that is, toward the fire. The nearer they get, the hotter the fire breathes, the more stifling the scent of gasoline. The landscape quivers with heat.

+

By the bend in the river nearest to the fire, where the water is unbearably hot and the air unbreathable, where they cannot see the way ahead for the soot and waves of heat, is Nua, clawing for the bank of the river with panicked fingernails, but safety is just too high for her to reach. Her sisters grasp her with greedy hands and the three are sealed together again, ringed into a life buoy amongst themselves.

+

There is no talk of going home. What is home, anyway, except a place with no time, where any number of hours can pass with nothing to anchor them? That house and its claw-footed bathtub, the asterisk of their beds, their fading aunt, disinterested father, and concerned mother, is all the grayness of purgatory.

+

Yes, let those older sisters have it and each other, for all these ones care. Here, at least, in the sun there is paradise and in the fire there is Gehenna, somewhere to wail and sweat out the pain that plagues them always from the slightest distance. The pain that has always followed them out the corners of their eyes where they could never properly feel the burn of it.

+

Orbit-lrg

+

Thanks for reading - but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of The Twelve Blackened Slippers at Bluesky.

+ + + + + + + + + +
+

Siobhan Ekeh

+

+ + Author image of Siobhan Ekeh + + + Siobhan Ekeh is a second-generation Nigerian-American writer, artist, and educator living in Brooklyn. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found conversing with her extensive stuffed bear collection or frightening karaoke bar audiences with creative renditions of Jesus Christ Superstar songs. Her poetry has appeared in rainy weather days and Strings magazines, and her fiction is forthcoming in Speculative City Magazine. Her work can be found on siobhanekeh.com.

+

© Siobhan Ekeh 2025 All Rights Reserved

+

The title picture was created using one Creative Commons image by Sahan Narampanawa and three by Katrin Bolovtsova - many thanks!

+
+ + + + + +

+ +

+

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

+ + +
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+ + + + + Menu +
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Issues

+default list + + + + diff --git a/static-xway/janitor.jpg b/janitor.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/janitor.jpg rename to janitor.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/jericho.jpg b/jericho.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/jericho.jpg rename to jericho.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/js/includeHTML.js b/js/includeHTML.js similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/js/includeHTML.js rename to js/includeHTML.js diff --git a/static-xway/js/w3data.js b/js/w3data.js similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/js/w3data.js rename to js/w3data.js diff --git a/static-xway/kitt.jpg b/kitt.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/kitt.jpg rename to kitt.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/labrea.jpg b/labrea.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/labrea.jpg rename to labrea.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/labyrinth.jpg b/labyrinth.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/labyrinth.jpg rename to labyrinth.jpg diff --git a/layouts/_default/list.html b/layouts/_default/list.html deleted file mode 100644 index 88d1c717..00000000 --- a/layouts/_default/list.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,24 +0,0 @@ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

{{ with .Site.GetPage "section" .Section }}{{ .Title }}{{ end }}

-default list - - - - diff --git a/layouts/_default/section.html b/layouts/_default/section.html deleted file mode 100644 index e0d63b63..00000000 --- a/layouts/_default/section.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - {{/* Infer current section and lookup __index.md params for theming */}} - {{ $currSection := .Section | default (urlize .Site.Params.currentIssue) }} - {{ $currSection := .Site.GetPage "section" (print $currSection "/__index.md") }} - - {{/* Get all stock pages for the current issue */}} - {{ $posts := where (where .Site.Pages "Section" $currSection.Section) ".Type" "stock" }} - - {{/* Get first featured story and remove it from paging list */}} - {{ $firstPost := first 1 (where $posts ".Params.featured" true) }} - {{ $posts := $posts | complement $firstPost }} - - {{/* Get last featured story and remove from paging list */}} - {{ $lastPost := last 1 (where $posts ".Params.featured" true) }} - {{ $posts := $posts | complement $lastPost }} - - -
- {{ partial "intro.html" . }} - {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
- {{ range $firstPost }} - {{ .Render "featured" }} - {{ end }} - -
- {{ range $posts }} - {{ .Render "list" }} - {{ end }} -
- - {{ if $lastPost }} - {{ range $lastPost }} - {{ .Render "featured" }} - {{ end }} - {{ end }} -
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/_default/single.html b/layouts/_default/single.html deleted file mode 100644 index a55a3aeb..00000000 --- a/layouts/_default/single.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - -
- {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
-
-
- -

{{ .Title }}

-

{{ .Params.author }}

-

{{ .Description }}

-
- - {{ if .Params.image }} -
- Story image for {{ .Title }} -
- {{ end }} - - - {{ .Content }} - {{ partial "authorfooter" . }} -
-
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/_default/sitemap.xml b/layouts/_default/sitemap.xml deleted file mode 100644 index 1c34186f..00000000 --- a/layouts/_default/sitemap.xml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,36 +0,0 @@ -{{ printf "" | safeHTML }} - - -{{/* Hide genres and authors, for self-control and person privacy, respectively. */}} - {{ range (where .Site.AllPages "Section" "not in" (slice "genres" "authors")) }} - {{- if .Permalink -}} - - {{ .RelPermalink }}{{ if not .Lastmod.IsZero }} - {{ safeHTML ( .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05-07:00" ) }}{{ end }}{{ with .Sitemap.ChangeFreq }} - {{ . }}{{ end }}{{ if ge .Sitemap.Priority 0.0 }} - {{ .Sitemap.Priority }}{{ end }}{{ if .IsTranslated }}{{ range .Translations }} - {{ end }} - {{ end }} - - {{- end -}} - {{ end }} - - - {{ range (index .Site.Data "xway2metadata") }} - - {{ path.Join .Site.BaseURL .relurl | relURL }} - {{ .date }} - - {{ end }} - - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/authors/taxonomy.html b/layouts/authors/taxonomy.html deleted file mode 100644 index 2590702a..00000000 --- a/layouts/authors/taxonomy.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,114 +0,0 @@ -{{/* The code below merges two datasources, the site pages and the xway back catalogue, - presenting the results as an author index of published stories, sorted alphabetically. - The sort is hardcoded because of Ockham's razor. */}} -{{ $authorIndex := slice }} -{{ $pages := where .Site.Pages "Type" "stock" }} -{{ $xway2metadata := index .Site.Data "xway2metadata" }} -{{ $xway2metadata = (where $xway2metadata "category" "ne" "Editorial") }} - - -{{/* Generate unique author name list multiple data sources */}} -{{ $allAuthors := slice }} -{{ range where .Site.Pages "Type" "author" }} - {{ $allAuthors = $allAuthors | append .Params.Name }} -{{ end }} -{{ range $xway2metadata }} - {{ $allAuthors = $allAuthors | append .author }} -{{ end }} -{{ $allAuthors = $allAuthors | uniq}} - - -{{/* Build the author index dictionary and load it up with the author's stories. */}} -{{ range $allAuthors }} - - {{/* Gather each author's stories into a single stocklist */}} - {{ $authStockItems := slice }} - {{ range (where $pages "Params.authors" "intersect" (slice .)) }} - {{ $item := dict - "title" .Title - "relurl" .RelPermalink - "issue" .Params.issue - "date" (.Date.Format "January 2006") - }} - {{ $authStockItems = $authStockItems | append $item }} - {{ end }} - - {{ range (where $xway2metadata "author" "eq" .) }} - {{ $item := dict - "title" .title - "relurl" .relurl - "issue" .issue - "date" .date - }} - {{ $authStockItems = $authStockItems | append $item }} - {{ end }} - {{ $authStockItems = sort $authStockItems "issue" "asc" "title" "asc" }} - - {{/* Build author object and add to keyed author index */}} - {{ $author := dict - "name" . - "lastname" (index (last 1 (split . " ")) 0) - "stocklist" $authStockItems - }} - {{ $authorIndex = $authorIndex | append $author }} -{{ end }} -{{ $authorIndex = sort $authorIndex "lastname" "asc" }} - - - - - - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - -
- {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
-
-
- -

{{ .Title }}

-

{{ len $authorIndex }} {{ .Description }}

-
- {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} - {{ .Content }} - - - - - - - - - - - {{ range $authorIndex }} - - - - - {{ end }} - -
AuthorStock info
{{ .name }}{{ range .stocklist }} - {{ .title }} ({{ .date }})
{{ end }} -
- - {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} - -
-
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/catalogue/editorials.html b/layouts/catalogue/editorials.html deleted file mode 100644 index 5799c9cd..00000000 --- a/layouts/catalogue/editorials.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ -{{/* Combine Hugo pages and xway2 data into content listing dictionary */}} -{{ $editorials := slice }} - -{{ range .Site.Sections }} - {{ $currSection := .Site.GetPage "section" (print .Section "/__index.md") }} - {{ range (where (where .Site.Pages "Section" .Section) "Slug" "eq" "editorial") }} - {{ $ed := dict - "title" .Title - "relurl" .RelPermalink - "author" (collections.Delimit .Params.authors " and ") - "issue" (print .Params.issue " - " $currSection.Params.subhead) - "number" (index (strings.FindRE `\d+?$` .Params.issue) 0) - "date" (.Params.publishDate.Format "January 2006") - }} - {{ $editorials = $editorials | append $ed }} - {{ end }} -{{ end }} - -{{ $xway2metadata := index .Site.Data "xway2metadata" }} -{{ $xway2metadata = (where $xway2metadata "category" "eq" "Editorial") }} -{{ $editorials = $editorials | append $xway2metadata }} - - - - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - -
- {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
-
-
- -

{{ .Title }}

-

{{ len $editorials }} {{ .Description }}

-
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IssueEditorial
{{ .issue }} - {{ .title }} by {{ .author }}
- - {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} - -
-
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/catalogue/list.html b/layouts/catalogue/list.html deleted file mode 100644 index 855d314a..00000000 --- a/layouts/catalogue/list.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,72 +0,0 @@ -{{/* Combine Hugo pages and xway2 data into content listing dictionary */}} -{{ $allStories := slice }} - -{{ range (where .Site.AllPages "Type" "stock") }} - {{ $item := dict - "title" .Title - "relurl" .RelPermalink - "author" (collections.Delimit .Params.Authors " and ") - }} - {{ $allStories = $allStories | append $item }} -{{ end }} - -{{ $xway2metadata := index .Site.Data "xway2metadata" }} -{{ $xway2metadata = (where $xway2metadata "category" "ne" "Editorial") }} -{{ range $xway2metadata }} - {{ $item := dict - "title" .title - "relurl" .relurl - "author" .author - }} - {{ $allStories = $allStories | append $item }} -{{ end }} -{{ $allStories = sort $allStories "issue" "asc" "title" "asc" }} - - - - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - -
- {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
-
-
- -

{{ .Title }}

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{{ len $allStories }} {{ .Description }}

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- {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} - {{ .Content }} - - - - {{ range (sort $allStories "title" "asc") }} - - - - {{ end }} - -
{{ .title }} by {{ .author }}
- - - {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} - - -
-
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/genres/taxonomy.html b/layouts/genres/taxonomy.html deleted file mode 100644 index 6e9bb1cf..00000000 --- a/layouts/genres/taxonomy.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,99 +0,0 @@ -{{/* - The code below merges two datasources, the site's genre taxonomy and - the xway back catalogue, presenting the results as a browsable index of genres. -*/}} -{{ $genreIndex := slice }} -{{ $ignoreGenres := slice "editorial" "review" }} -{{ $genreTaxonomy := .Site.Taxonomies.genres }} -{{ $xway2metadata := where (index .Site.Data "xway2metadata") "genre" "ne" nil }} - -{{/* Generate unique term name list from the two data sources */}} -{{ $allGenres := slice }} -{{ range $tag, $items := $genreTaxonomy }} - {{ $allGenres = $allGenres | append $tag }} -{{ end }} -{{ range $xway2metadata }} - {{ $allGenres = $allGenres | append .genre }} -{{ end }} -{{ $allGenres = complement $ignoreGenres $allGenres | uniq }} - - -{{/* Build the genre dictionary and load it up with the stories. */}} -{{ range $allGenres }} - - {{/* Gather all stories tagged with this term into a single stocklist */}} - {{ $genreStockItems := slice }} - {{ range (index $genreTaxonomy .) }} - {{ $item := dict - "title" .Title - "relurl" .RelPermalink - "author" (collections.Delimit .Params.authors " and ") - }} - {{ $genreStockItems = $genreStockItems | append $item }} - {{ end }} - - {{ range (where $xway2metadata "genre" "eq" .) }} - {{ $item := dict - "title" .title - "relurl" .relurl - "author" .author - }} - {{ $genreStockItems = $genreStockItems | append $item }} - {{ end }} - {{ $genreStockItems = sort $genreStockItems "title" "asc" }} - - {{ $genreIndex = merge $genreIndex (dict . $genreStockItems) }} -{{ end }} - - - - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - -
- {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
-
-
- -

{{ .Title }}

-

{{ len $allGenres }} {{ .Description }}

-
- {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} - {{ .Content }} - -

< - {{ range $key, $value := $allGenres }} - {{ . | strings.Title }}{{ if ne $key (sub (len $allGenres) 1) }} | {{ else }}{{ end }} - {{ end }}> -

- - {{ range $genre, $items := $genreIndex }} -

{{ $genre | strings.Title }} ({{ len $items }})

-
    - {{ range $items }} -
  • {{ .title }} by {{ .author }}
    • - {{ end }} -
- {{ end }} - - - - {{ partial "catalogue-nav" . }} -
-
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/index.html b/layouts/index.html deleted file mode 100644 index 1903d07c..00000000 --- a/layouts/index.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - {{/* Infer current section and lookup __index.md params for theming */}} - {{ $currSection := .Section | default (urlize .Site.Params.currentIssue) }} - {{ $currSection := .Site.GetPage "section" (print $currSection "/__index.md") }} - - {{/* Get all stock pages for the current issue */}} - {{ $posts := where (where .Site.Pages "Section" $currSection.Section) ".Type" "stock" }} - - {{/* Get first featured story and remove it from paging list */}} - {{ $firstPost := first 1 (where $posts ".Params.featured" true) }} - {{ $posts := $posts | complement $firstPost }} - - {{/* Get last featured story and remove from paging list */}} - {{ $lastPost := last 1 (where $posts ".Params.featured" true) }} - {{ $posts := $posts | complement $lastPost }} - - -
- {{ partial "intro.html" . }} - {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
- {{ range $firstPost }} - {{ .Render "featured" }} - {{ end }} - -
- {{ range $posts }} - {{ .Render "list" }} - {{ end }} -
- - {{ if $lastPost }} - {{ range $lastPost }} - {{ .Render "featured" }} - {{ end }} - {{ end }} -
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/authorfooter.html b/layouts/partials/authorfooter.html deleted file mode 100644 index 1f516ffc..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/authorfooter.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,23 +0,0 @@ -{{ $showFooter := (default true .Params.showAuthorFooter) }} -{{ if $showFooter }} - {{ $authors := where .Site.Pages "Type" "author" }} - {{ $stock := . }} - - {{ if .Params.authors }} - {{ range .Params.authors }} - {{ range where $authors ".Params.name" . }} -
-

{{ .Params.name }}

-

- {{ if fileExists (path.Join .Section .Params.photo | relURL) }} - Author image of {{ .Params.name }} - {{ end }} - - {{ .Params.description | markdownify }}

-

{{ $stock.Params.copyright | default .Params.copyright }}

-

{{ $stock.Params.imageCopyright | markdownify }}

-
- {{ end }} - {{ end }} - {{ end }} -{{ end }} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/catalogue-nav.html b/layouts/partials/catalogue-nav.html deleted file mode 100644 index ef8e3961..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/catalogue-nav.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ -{{ $currentPage := . }} -

< - {{ with .Site.GetPage "/archive.md" }} - Archives - {{ end }} | - {{ with .Site.GetPage "/authors" }} - Authors - {{ end }} | - {{ with .Site.GetPage "/catalogue/_index.md" }} - Catalogue - {{ end }} | - {{ with .Site.GetPage "/catalogue/editorials.md" }} - Editorials - {{ end }} | - {{ with .Site.GetPage "/genres" }} - Genres - {{ end }}> -

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/copyright.html b/layouts/partials/copyright.html deleted file mode 100644 index c9adc8dc..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/copyright.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ - - diff --git a/layouts/partials/functions/getCurrentTheme.html b/layouts/partials/functions/getCurrentTheme.html deleted file mode 100644 index 88c75b18..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/functions/getCurrentTheme.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -{{/* Function partial template to get a reference to the current -issue's section so issue specific params can be used for theming. */}} -{{ $overridableSections := slice "authors" "catalogue" "genres" }} -{{ $currSection := .Section | default (urlize .Site.Params.currentIssue) }} -{{ if in $overridableSections $currSection }} - {{ $currSection = default (urlize .Site.Params.currentIssue) }} -{{ end }} -{{ $currSection := .Site.GetPage "section" (print $currSection "/__index.md") }} -{{ return $currSection }} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/header.html b/layouts/partials/header.html deleted file mode 100644 index c8601306..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/header.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ -{{ $currSection := partial "functions/getCurrentTheme" . }} - - - diff --git a/layouts/partials/htmlhead-scripts-overrides.html b/layouts/partials/htmlhead-scripts-overrides.html deleted file mode 100644 index d7f8a8ba..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/htmlhead-scripts-overrides.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,46 +0,0 @@ -{{/* Inject small javascript to change the submissions open/closed message. -This partial template assumes the page context . is passed to it. -*/}} - -{{ if eq .RelPermalink "/submissions.html" }} - -{{ end }} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/htmlhead-styles-overrides.html b/layouts/partials/htmlhead-styles-overrides.html deleted file mode 100644 index 8426f06a..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/htmlhead-styles-overrides.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,87 +0,0 @@ - - diff --git a/layouts/partials/htmlhead.html b/layouts/partials/htmlhead.html deleted file mode 100644 index 54cb52f8..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/htmlhead.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,48 +0,0 @@ -{{ $currSection := partial "functions/getCurrentTheme" . }} - -{{/* Context sensitive meta tag values */}} -{{ if .IsHome }} - {{ .Scratch.Set "pageTitle" (print .Site.Title " — " .Site.Params.description) }} -{{ else if eq (.Site.Title) (.Title) }} - {{ .Scratch.Set "pageTitle" (print $currSection.Title " — " .Site.Title) }} -{{ else }} - {{ .Scratch.Set "pageTitle" (print .Title " — " $currSection.Title " — " .Site.Title) }} -{{ end }} - - - - - - - {{ if hugo.IsServer }} - {{ $style := resources.Get "scss/main.scss" | resources.ExecuteAsTemplate "main.scss" . | toCSS (dict "targetPath" "assets/css/main.css" "enableSourceMap" true) }} - - {{ else }} - {{ $style := resources.Get "scss/main.scss" | resources.ExecuteAsTemplate "main.scss" . | toCSS (dict "targetPath" "assets/css/main.css" "enableSourceMap" false) }} - - {{ end }} - {{ with .Site.Params.favicon }} - - {{ end }} - {{ $noscript := resources.Get "scss/noscript.scss" | resources.ExecuteAsTemplate "noscript.scss" . | toCSS (dict "targetPath" "assets/css/noscript.css" "enableSourceMap" false) }} - - - {{ partial "htmlhead-styles-overrides.html" $currSection }} - {{ partial "htmlhead-scripts-overrides.html" . }} - - - {{ .Scratch.Get "pageTitle" }} - {{ hugo.Generator }} - - {{ if .Site.Params.description }}{{ end }} - - - {{ if .Params.author }}{{ end }} - {{ if .Params.date }}{{ end }} - - - - - - - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/intro.html b/layouts/partials/intro.html deleted file mode 100644 index 15d69929..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/intro.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,14 +0,0 @@ -{{/* Infer current section and lookup __index.md params for theming */}} -{{ $currSection := .Section | default (urlize .Site.Params.currentIssue) }} -{{ $currSection := .Site.GetPage "section" (print $currSection "/__index.md") }} - -{{ with $currSection }} -
-

Mythaxis

-

{{ .Params.subhead }}

- {{ if .Params.headline }}

{{ .Params.headline }}

{{ end }} - -
-{{ end }} diff --git a/layouts/partials/nav.html b/layouts/partials/nav.html deleted file mode 100644 index 7d81da2c..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/nav.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,40 +0,0 @@ -{{ $currentPage := . }} -{{ $currSection := partial "functions/getCurrentTheme" . }} - - -{{ $data := index .Site.Data .Site.Language.Lang }} - diff --git a/layouts/partials/postcustom.html b/layouts/partials/postcustom.html deleted file mode 100644 index 9bf87cdb..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/postcustom.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/partials/scripts/index.html b/layouts/partials/scripts/index.html deleted file mode 100644 index 300f9ade..00000000 --- a/layouts/partials/scripts/index.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,25 +0,0 @@ -{{ $jQuery := resources.Get "js/jquery.min.js" }} -{{ $scrollex := resources.Get "js/jquery.scrollex.min.js" }} -{{ $scrolly := resources.Get "js/jquery.scrolly.min.js" }} -{{ $browser := resources.Get "js/browser.min.js" }} -{{ $breakpoints := resources.Get "js/breakpoints.min.js" }} -{{ $util := resources.Get "js/util.js" }} -{{ $main := resources.Get "js/main.js" }} - -{{ $js := slice $jQuery $scrollex $scrolly $browser $breakpoints $util $main | resources.Concat "assets/js/bundle.js" }} - - -{{ if hugo.IsServer }} - - - - - - - -{{ else }} - -{{ end }} - - - diff --git a/layouts/shortcodes/back-issues-list.html b/layouts/shortcodes/back-issues-list.html deleted file mode 100644 index d83bf8d8..00000000 --- a/layouts/shortcodes/back-issues-list.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -{{ $issues := .Site.Sections.ByDate.Reverse }} - \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/shortcodes/details.html b/layouts/shortcodes/details.html deleted file mode 100644 index 5c3d4519..00000000 --- a/layouts/shortcodes/details.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ -{{/* Count the times we've used this shortcode and load css if it's the first time - @src: https://github.com/martignoni/hugo-notice/blob/master/layouts/shortcodes/notice.html -*/}} -{{- if not ($.Page.Scratch.Get "details") -}} - -{{- end -}} -{{- $.Page.Scratch.Add "details" 1 -}} - - -{{ if .IsNamedParams }} -
- {{ (.Get "title") | markdownify }} - {{ .Inner | markdownify }} -
-{{ else }} -
- {{ (.Get 0) | markdownify }} - {{ .Inner | markdownify }} -
-{{ end }} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/shortcodes/glyph.html b/layouts/shortcodes/glyph.html deleted file mode 100644 index d94d7321..00000000 --- a/layouts/shortcodes/glyph.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2 +0,0 @@ -{{ .Inner }} - diff --git a/layouts/shortcodes/random-button.html b/layouts/shortcodes/random-button.html deleted file mode 100644 index 4b1f49e7..00000000 --- a/layouts/shortcodes/random-button.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -

- {{ if .IsNamedParams }} - - {{ else }} - - {{ end }} -

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/stock/featured.html b/layouts/stock/featured.html deleted file mode 100644 index c91a174c..00000000 --- a/layouts/stock/featured.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,26 +0,0 @@ - -{{ $data := index .Site.Data .Site.Language.Lang }} -
-
- {{ collections.Delimit .Params.authors ", " }} -

{{ .Title }}

-
- - {{ if .Description }} -

{{ .Description }}

- {{ else }} -

{{ .Summary }}

- {{ end }} - - {{ if .Params.image }} - Story image for {{ .Title }} by {{ .Params.author}} - {{ end }} - - {{ if .Params.morelink }} - - {{ end }} -
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/stock/list.html b/layouts/stock/list.html deleted file mode 100644 index 56a8ff4b..00000000 --- a/layouts/stock/list.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,26 +0,0 @@ - -{{ $data := index .Site.Data .Site.Language.Lang }} -
-
-

{{ .Title }}

- {{ collections.Delimit .Params.authors ", " }} -
- - {{ if .Params.image }} - Thumbnail of Story image for {{ .Title }} by {{ .Params.author}} - {{ end }} - - {{ if .Description }} -

{{ .Description }}

- {{ else }} -

{{ .Summary }}

- {{ end }} - - {{ if .Params.morelink }} - - {{ end }} -
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/layouts/stock/single.html b/layouts/stock/single.html deleted file mode 100644 index d69cbcc6..00000000 --- a/layouts/stock/single.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,53 +0,0 @@ - - - {{ partial "htmlhead" . }} - - - -
- {{ partial "header" . }} - {{ partial "nav" . }} - - -
-
-
- -

{{ .Title }}

-

{{ collections.Delimit .Params.authors ", " }}

- -
- - {{ if .Params.image }} -
- Story image for {{ .Title }} by {{ .Params.author }} -
- {{ end }} - - {{ if .Params.audio }} - - {{ end }} - - {{ .Content }} - {{ partial "authorfooter" . }} - -

- -

-

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)

- - -
-
- - {{ partial "copyright" . }} - {{ i18n "NAV_MENU" . }} -
- - {{ template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }} - {{ partial "scripts/index" . }} - - diff --git a/static-xway/lem.jpg b/lem.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/lem.jpg rename to lem.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/liesand.jpg b/liesand.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/liesand.jpg rename to liesand.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/lilyspetal.jpg b/lilyspetal.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/lilyspetal.jpg rename to lilyspetal.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/links.jpg b/links.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/links.jpg rename to links.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/lostcity.jpg b/lostcity.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/lostcity.jpg rename to lostcity.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/lucian.jpg b/lucian.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/lucian.jpg rename to lucian.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/madras.jpg b/madras.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/madras.jpg rename to madras.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/magdalena.jpg b/magdalena.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/magdalena.jpg rename to magdalena.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/manuel.jpg b/manuel.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/manuel.jpg rename to manuel.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/martianmoonlight.png b/martianmoonlight.png similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/martianmoonlight.png rename to martianmoonlight.png diff --git a/static-xway/maxlaw.jpg b/maxlaw.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/maxlaw.jpg rename to maxlaw.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/maxmas.jpg b/maxmas.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/maxmas.jpg rename to maxmas.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/may2010.jpg b/may2010.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/may2010.jpg rename to may2010.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/melkart.jpg b/melkart.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/melkart.jpg rename to melkart.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/messenger.jpg b/messenger.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/messenger.jpg rename to messenger.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/mindbleed.jpg b/mindbleed.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mindbleed.jpg rename to mindbleed.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/ming.jpg b/ming.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/ming.jpg rename to ming.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/mirrormirror.jpg b/mirrormirror.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mirrormirror.jpg rename to mirrormirror.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/misfortune.jpg b/misfortune.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/misfortune.jpg rename to misfortune.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/mollusc2.jpg b/mollusc2.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mollusc2.jpg rename to mollusc2.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/monkey.jpg b/monkey.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/monkey.jpg rename to monkey.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/montsarrat.jpg b/montsarrat.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/montsarrat.jpg rename to montsarrat.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/multingale.jpg b/multingale.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/multingale.jpg rename to multingale.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/museum.jpg b/museum.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/museum.jpg rename to museum.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/muteant.jpg b/muteant.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/muteant.jpg rename to muteant.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/myksos.jpg b/myksos.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/myksos.jpg rename to myksos.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/mythaxis.css b/mythaxis.css similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mythaxis.css rename to mythaxis.css diff --git a/static-xway/mythaxis20.jpg b/mythaxis20.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mythaxis20.jpg rename to mythaxis20.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/mythaxis21.jpg b/mythaxis21.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mythaxis21.jpg rename to mythaxis21.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/mythaxiscrash.jpg b/mythaxiscrash.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/mythaxiscrash.jpg rename to mythaxiscrash.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/nameandaddress.txt b/nameandaddress.txt similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/nameandaddress.txt rename to nameandaddress.txt diff --git a/static-xway/newfrankfurt.jpg b/newfrankfurt.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/newfrankfurt.jpg rename to newfrankfurt.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/newworldorder.png b/newworldorder.png similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/newworldorder.png rename to newworldorder.png diff --git a/static-xway/nosferatu.jpg b/nosferatu.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/nosferatu.jpg rename to nosferatu.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/nosurvivor.jpg b/nosurvivor.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/nosurvivor.jpg rename to nosurvivor.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/nwwa.jpg b/nwwa.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/nwwa.jpg rename to nwwa.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/nyheter.jpg b/nyheter.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/nyheter.jpg rename to nyheter.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/oasis.jpg b/oasis.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/oasis.jpg rename to oasis.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/ofakind.jpg b/ofakind.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/ofakind.jpg rename to ofakind.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/oldman.jpg b/oldman.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/oldman.jpg rename to oldman.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/outpatients.jpg b/outpatients.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/outpatients.jpg rename to outpatients.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/peripheral.jpg b/peripheral.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/peripheral.jpg rename to peripheral.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/peripheralbkmk.jpg b/peripheralbkmk.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/peripheralbkmk.jpg rename to peripheralbkmk.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/peripheralbkmk2.jpg b/peripheralbkmk2.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/peripheralbkmk2.jpg rename to peripheralbkmk2.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/planet.htm b/planet.htm similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/planet.htm rename to planet.htm diff --git a/static-xway/platport.jpg b/platport.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/platport.jpg rename to platport.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/play.html b/play.html similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/play.html rename to play.html diff --git a/static-xway/postcards.jpg b/postcards.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/postcards.jpg rename to postcards.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/pranswat.jpg b/pranswat.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/pranswat.jpg rename to pranswat.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes.htm b/prizes.htm similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes.htm rename to prizes.htm diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/bigtime.jpg b/prizes/bigtime.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes/bigtime.jpg rename to prizes/bigtime.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/billhero.jpg b/prizes/billhero.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes/billhero.jpg rename to prizes/billhero.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/crooked.jpg b/prizes/crooked.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes/crooked.jpg rename to prizes/crooked.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/farout.jpg b/prizes/farout.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes/farout.jpg rename to prizes/farout.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/grotesque.jpg b/prizes/grotesque.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes/grotesque.jpg rename to prizes/grotesque.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/hellflower.jpg b/prizes/hellflower.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/prizes/hellflower.jpg rename to prizes/hellflower.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/prizes/historybarnes.jpg 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Submission Guidelines

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Mythaxis is currently closed to submissions.

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SUBMISSIONS NOTICE: Mythaxis is closed to new submissions until 2026.

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Our guidelines page is maintained for future reference. When open, we seek the following:

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  • Flash fiction: 500–2,000 words (we do not receive enough flash submissions! Please send more!)
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  • Short fiction: 2,000–5,000 words (the sweet spot is 2k–4k)
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Our overall upper and lower word counts are firm limits. Shorter or longer works are considered, but the further a story goes outside these bounds the more it will need to impress.

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Compensation: $0.01 per word, with a $20 minimum. Please be aware before submitting that payment is via PayPal only.

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If you do not receive an acknowledgment within 24 hours of submission, please get in touch. We aim to accept or reject within 30 days of acknowledgment, but rl (real life) and rl (reading load) can get in the way. If you do not hear from us after 60 days, feel free to query.

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REQUIREMENTS

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Mythaxis seeks speculative fiction (sf/f/h/weird/slipstream/…), crime (also including police procedural/detective/mystery/cosy/…) and mashups of the same. All genres are equally welcome in each submission window. We don’t receive enough crime fiction, so if that’s your bag we’re always eager!

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We acquire First Print, Digital, and Audio rights with a six month period of exclusivity from the date of publication. We also ask permission to potentially include accepted pieces in future anthologies; in event of agreement, an additional compensation will be offered. All other rights remain entirely with the author. See here for an overview of our editorial process.

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Simultaneous submissions are not only accepted, they are encouraged. Please tell us if you sim-sub, and we merely ask that you notify us of acceptance at another market as soon as possible. In the event that we accept first, we expect a positive and timely confirmation. Therefore we recommend sim-subbing to markets of equivalent status – we won’t wait for someone else you’d like better to turn you down.

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We do not accept multiple submissions. Please wait until your first submission has been rejected before submitting another work.

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If a story has previously been rejected by Mythaxis, please do not resubmit or inquire regarding doing so, unless explicitly invited to by the editor during the original rejection.

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Feedback: Unfortunately, due to increased submission volume, it is no longer possible for us to offer feedback on all rejected submissions. This is a regretful necessity, but without the time required to say something meaningful feedback loses its value. However, on rejecting strong candidate pieces we may offer constructive comments along with an invitation to revise and resubmit.

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Reprints: We do not currently invite reprint submissions.

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All submissions must be the original work of the author. This is not a market for fan fiction. If your story is a retelling, pastiche, or homage to an existing work, please mention the source you are alluding to.

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Content note: We anticipate an adult readership in the sense of maturity, so reasonable depictions of violence, sexuality, philosophy, or bad language are acceptable. However, this is not a market for pornographic or offensively extreme content, categorisation of which is at the editor’s discretion. For additional notes regarding what we are and are not looking for in submissions, see here.

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We welcome writers of any and all backgrounds and invite submissions exploring diverse perspectives and experiences both cultural and personal, provided they do not seek to attack or demean those of others.

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HOW TO SUBMIT

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    +
  • NEW: Access our shiny automated submissions form here (requires a Google account sign in).
    • +
  • Or, email files as an attachment to: MythaxisMagazine@gmail.com. Please use a subject line like MYTHAXIS SUBMISSION – YOUR STORY TITLE to evade spam filters (and when we say “your story title”, we don’t mean that literally…).
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File types: Acceptable attachments are DOC, DOCX, and ODT (plus RTF, if you absolutely have to). Do not submit in PDF format. For recommendations regarding attachment titles and document formatting that will make the editor well disposed towards your work, see here.

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Feel free to include a concise cover letter and/or author bio in your email, though neither is mandatory. Mythaxis welcomes authors of all levels of experience. We have a history of publishing first-time authors, and we mean to continue this tradition.

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If you track your submissions, you can find Mythaxis Magazine on The Submissions Grinder and Duotrope.

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A NOTE ON ‘ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE’

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We do not invite submissions featuring prose created by generative “artificial intelligence”, algorithmic systems, large language models, or similar tools.

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We recognise the importance of authorial ownership when it comes to an individual’s rights. The questionable provenance of AI-derived content, and the uncertain legality of claiming “authorship” of the output of AI tools, means that knowingly signing a contract of sale for an AI-generated submission would be inappropriate. We hope that submitting authors will respect our position.

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In the past, Mythaxis has experimented with generative image tools and used data analytics to investigate the nature of the stories submitted to us. We documented these experiences in a number of editorials (see Issue 28 for art, Issues 31, 32, and 33 for data analysis, plus our final round up here). All data analysed was always fully anonymised and never employed tools capable of producing derivative creative works.

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Have a question?

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Any queries can be addressed to the editor at MythaxisMagazine@gmail.com.

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+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/static-xway/summoning.jpg b/summoning.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/summoning.jpg rename to summoning.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/supply.jpg b/supply.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/supply.jpg rename to supply.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/survivor.jpg b/survivor.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/survivor.jpg rename to survivor.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/tae.jpg b/tae.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/tae.jpg rename to tae.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/tarshish.jpg b/tarshish.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/tarshish.jpg rename to tarshish.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/teacup.jpg b/teacup.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/teacup.jpg rename to teacup.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/teacups.jpg b/teacups.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/teacups.jpg rename to teacups.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/teardrops.jpg b/teardrops.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/teardrops.jpg rename to teardrops.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/thagdar.jpg b/thagdar.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/thagdar.jpg rename to thagdar.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/themall.jpg b/themall.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/themall.jpg rename to themall.jpg diff --git a/themes/massively/.gitignore b/themes/massively/.gitignore deleted file mode 100644 index ca463f72..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/.gitignore +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3 +0,0 @@ -node_modules -exampleSite/public -.publish diff --git a/themes/massively/CHANGELOG.md b/themes/massively/CHANGELOG.md deleted file mode 100644 index 12ce84fe..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/CHANGELOG.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,34 +0,0 @@ -# Change Log - ---- -## `6.0.0` -### Breaking Changes - - Add asset handling using Hugo Pipes ([#80](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/pull/80)) - - Asset folders affected - files moved from `/static/assets/*` to `/assets/*` - ---- -## `5.3.0` -### Patches -- Fix preloading animation ([#75](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/issues/75)) - ---- -## `5.3.0` -### Minor Changes - - Add npm script for running Hugo `exampleSite` - - Update config logic for featured post to use booleans (Fixes [#59](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/issues/59)) - - Backwards compatibility support for string values - "true" and "false" - - Example Site - Update post content - -### Patches - - Fix homepage issues with Hugo 0.57.0 ([#71](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/issues/71)) - ---- -## `5.2.0` -### Minor Changes - - Japanese content translations added ([#64](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/pull/64)) - - Update assets to latest from HTML5UP ([#65](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/pull/65)) - ---- -## `5.1.1` -### Patches - - Fixes [#28](https://github.com/curtistimson/hugo-theme-massively/issues/28) - Feature post with only one post diff --git a/themes/massively/CONTRIBUTING.md b/themes/massively/CONTRIBUTING.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6eb36fc0..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,71 +0,0 @@ -# Contributing - -When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue, -email, or any other method with the owners of this repository before making a change. - -Please note we have a code of conduct, please follow it in all your interactions with the project. - -## Pull Request Process - -1. Ensure any install or build dependencies are removed before the end of the layer when doing a - build. -2. Update the README.md with details of changes to the interface, this includes new environment - variables, exposed ports, useful file locations and container parameters. -3. Increase the version numbers in any examples files and the README.md to the new version that this - Pull Request would represent. The versioning scheme we use is [SemVer](http://semver.org/). -4. You may merge the Pull Request in once you have the sign-off of two other developers, or if you - do not have permission to do that, you may request the second reviewer to merge it for you. - -## Code of Conduct - -### Our Pledge - -In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as -contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and -our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body -size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, -nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and -orientation. - -### Our Standards - -Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment -include: - -* Using welcoming and inclusive language -* Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences -* Gracefully accepting constructive criticism -* Focusing on what is best for the community -* Showing empathy towards other community members - -Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include: - -* The use of sexualized language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or -advances -* Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks -* Public or private harassment -* Publishing others' private information, such as a physical or electronic - address, without explicit permission -* Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a - professional setting - -### Our Responsibilities - -Project maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable -behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in -response to any instances of unacceptable behavior. - -Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or -reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions -that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or -permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, -threatening, offensive, or harmful. - -### Scope - -This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces -when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of -representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail -address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed -representative at an online or offline event. Representation of a project may be -further defined and clarified by project maintainers. diff --git a/themes/massively/LICENSE b/themes/massively/LICENSE deleted file mode 100644 index e2fad802..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/LICENSE +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -# License - -This hugo theme is licensed under the [Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). - -https://html5up.net/license \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/themes/massively/README.md b/themes/massively/README.md deleted file mode 100644 index 9718df2e..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/README.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,74 +0,0 @@ -# Hugo Theme Massively - -Massively theme ported from [HTML5 UP](https://html5up.net/) for use with the [Hugo static site generator](https://gohugo.io/). - -![](images/device-screenshots.png) - -## Demo - -https://hugo-theme-massively.netlify.com/ - -## Setup - -### Configuration - -See the demo's configuration as an example: - -https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/exampleSite/config-prod.toml - -#### Hugo Internal Templates - -The theme currently also supports the following ["internal templates" supplied by Hugo](https://gohugo.io/templates/internal/) - - - [Disqus](https://gohugo.io/templates/internal/#disqus) - - [Google Analytics](https://gohugo.io/templates/internal/#configure-google-analytics) - -### Cover Image - -The cover image URL is hard-coded, therefore to replace this add an image to the following location in your Hugo application: - -``` -/static/images/bg.jpg -``` - -### Supported Languages - - - [English](https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/i18n/en.toml) - - [French](https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/i18n/fr.toml) - - [Japanese](https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/i18n/ja.toml) - - [Simplified Chinese](https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/i18n/zh.toml) - - [Spanish](https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/i18n/es.toml) - -## Custom Front Matter - - - `disableComments` - If set to `true` this will disable comments on the post when Disqus is enabled. - -## Development - -### Example Site Production Deployment - -#### Production Deployment - -``` -$ cd exampleSite && hugo --config config-prod.toml -``` - -#### Running Locally - -``` -$ npm run hugo-dev -``` -OR -``` -$ cd exampleSite && hugo server --themesDir ../.. -``` - -## Original Theme Credits - - - [Massively by HTML5 UP](https://html5up.net/massively) - - ## License - -This hugo theme is licensed under the [Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). - -Read More - [LICENSE](LICENSE) diff --git a/themes/massively/archetypes/.gitkeep b/themes/massively/archetypes/.gitkeep deleted file mode 100644 index d57d4332..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/archetypes/.gitkeep +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -Required to prevent error when folder isn't present. - -https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/some-users-receiving-unable-to-find-archetypes-directory/12565 - -https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/issues/34 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/themes/massively/assets/js/breakpoints.min.js b/themes/massively/assets/js/breakpoints.min.js deleted file mode 100644 index 32419ccb..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/assets/js/breakpoints.min.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2 +0,0 @@ -/* breakpoints.js v1.0 | @ajlkn | MIT licensed */ -var breakpoints=function(){"use strict";function e(e){t.init(e)}var t={list:null,media:{},events:[],init:function(e){t.list=e,window.addEventListener("resize",t.poll),window.addEventListener("orientationchange",t.poll),window.addEventListener("load",t.poll),window.addEventListener("fullscreenchange",t.poll)},active:function(e){var n,a,s,i,r,d,c;if(!(e in 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b/themes/massively/package.json deleted file mode 100644 index bb7dd413..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/package.json +++ /dev/null @@ -1,26 +0,0 @@ -{ - "name": "hugo-theme-massively", - "version": "6.0.0", - "description": "HTML5 UP theme Massively for Hugo", - "scripts": { - "hugo-dev": "cd exampleSite && hugo server --themesDir ../.." - }, - "repository": { - "type": "git", - "url": "git+https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively.git" - }, - "keywords": [ - "hugo", - "hugo-theme", - "theme", - "html5up", - "massively" - ], - "author": "Curtis Timson", - "license": "ISC", - "bugs": { - "url": "https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/issues" - }, - "homepage": "https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively#readme", - "devDependencies": {} -} diff --git a/themes/massively/theme.toml b/themes/massively/theme.toml deleted file mode 100644 index 12d49632..00000000 --- a/themes/massively/theme.toml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,18 +0,0 @@ -name = "Massively" -license = "Creative Commons" -licenselink = "https://github.com/curttimson/hugo-theme-massively/blob/master/LICENSE" -description = "An elegant open-source and mobile-first theme" -homepage = "https://html5up.net/uploads/demos/massively/index.html" -tags = ["blog", "html5up"] -features = ["blog"] -min_version = "0.54.0" - -[author] - name = "Curtis Timson" - homepage = "https://curtistimson.co.uk/" - -# If porting an existing theme -[original] - author = "HTML5UP" - homepage = "https://html5up.net/" - repo = "https://html5up.net/massively" \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/static-xway/timeout.jpg b/timeout.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/timeout.jpg rename to timeout.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/tip_centerwindow.js b/tip_centerwindow.js similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/tip_centerwindow.js rename to tip_centerwindow.js diff --git a/static-xway/tip_followscroll.js b/tip_followscroll.js similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/tip_followscroll.js rename to tip_followscroll.js diff --git a/static-xway/tomag.gif b/tomag.gif similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/tomag.gif rename to tomag.gif diff --git a/static-xway/toplist.jpg b/toplist.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/toplist.jpg rename to toplist.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/toserve.jpg b/toserve.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/toserve.jpg rename to toserve.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/toyscape.jpg b/toyscape.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/toyscape.jpg rename to toyscape.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/trumpets.jpg b/trumpets.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/trumpets.jpg rename to trumpets.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/truth.jpg b/truth.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/truth.jpg rename to truth.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/truth2.jpg b/truth2.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/truth2.jpg rename to truth2.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/twindawn.jpg b/twindawn.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/twindawn.jpg rename to twindawn.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/unclear.jpg b/unclear.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/unclear.jpg rename to unclear.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/veloci.jpg b/veloci.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/veloci.jpg rename to veloci.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/venice2.jpg b/venice2.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/venice2.jpg rename to venice2.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/waki.jpg b/waki.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/waki.jpg rename to waki.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/wallst.jpg b/wallst.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/wallst.jpg rename to wallst.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/warped.jpg b/warped.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/warped.jpg rename to warped.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/warriston.jpg b/warriston.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/warriston.jpg rename to warriston.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/woodstock.jpg b/woodstock.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/woodstock.jpg rename to woodstock.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/worrity.jpg b/worrity.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/worrity.jpg rename to worrity.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/wz_tooltip.js b/wz_tooltip.js similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/wz_tooltip.js rename to wz_tooltip.js diff --git a/static-xway/xmascarole.jpg b/xmascarole.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/xmascarole.jpg rename to xmascarole.jpg diff --git a/static-xway/yig.jpg b/yig.jpg similarity index 100% rename from static-xway/yig.jpg rename to yig.jpg